2022 Budget

We need continuous air quality monitoring

Please consider funding, or seeking the funding, for continuous air quality monitoring, using Boulder AIR technology (bouldair.com). Boulder, Longmont and Broomfield have this; if they can do it, we can do it. It is badly needed to fill the gap in regulatory enforcement where the CDPHE has failed us. Thanks! Rick Casey

No funding for the racist 1619 Project and CRT. No funding tor "equity' in any form. No funding for anything labeled "sustainable".

Lower taxes across the board.

No funding for 1619/CRT or anything remotely related to them. Example below

Deep Equity teaches progressive ideology and is controversial among parents and taxpayers because it tells educators to “explicitly reject and resist any parents who disagree with it.” A Virginia teacher with an exemplary record was placed on administrative leave after questioning the school district’s equity training program. Shelly Norden, an English and journalism teacher in Fauquier County Public Schools, ran one of the top journalism programs in the state and won the Kettle Run High School’s 2016 “Teacher of the Year” award. But Norden says administrators target her for speaking out against an equity training program. “I’m not a rabble-rouser,” Norden, who is also a taxpayer in Fauquier County, told The Daily Wire in an interview. “But this wasn’t right, so I started speaking out against it.” The training program, called Deep Equity, was founded by Gary Howard, a white man who believes that white people “are collectively bound and unavoidably complicit in the arrangements of dominance that have systematically favored our racial group over others.”

food security.

How much food can we produce for ourselves locally as a community in case of other unforeseen disruptions in supplies and transportation thereof. Nature as we've been reminded on multiple fronts as of recent, bats last.

Change the snowplow priority to make sure that bike routes are plowed in the winter.

Unify our community by promoting the use of our common language, English, in all but emergency situations.

Save money and clarify communication by removing multilingual publications and meeting translation that only benefit a small minority while confusing and delaying everyone else. Instead, direct those in need to English learning resources or even fund English language instruction.

We need Environmental Preservation buildings codes.

I'm all for Historic Preservation. It's a great way to protect our local sense of place and identity. And it gives property owners access to significant tax credits, grants, and zero interest loans. BUT, there are a lot of properties that simply don't qualify, yet tearing them down and landfilling them isn't a particularly environmentally sustainable solution. We need a program that encourages building reuse (especially of buildings constructed of old growth timber and other substantive materials that are irreplaceable) whether or not the building qualifies for historic preservation status. The City's preservation office has a great cost calculator that helps property owners understand the 50 year costs of rehabilitating older windows and improving their R value vs. replacing them with newer windows (that will have a shorter lifespan and will lead to more waste overall). But even preservationists rarely use this tool, let alone environmentalists. We need to be helping people make better choices when purchasing an older building and thinking through how to adapt it for a new use or expand it for additional space. The more we can retain the buildings we already have, not only does that help to retain sense of place and all that good stuff, but it also conserves resources that have already (long ago) been harvested, processed and installed, but it keeps a lot of new resources from having to be harvested, processed, hauled and installed (often from places as far away as China!) which would go a long way towards reducing the City's carbon footprint.

Find creative solutions that provide increased density throughout town, not just downtown and around CSU.

We've been getting a lot of large scale apartments added to downtown and around CSU, but it would be great to find ways to encourage smaller projects that increase density, but that are owned locally. Many of these large apartment builders are from outside of Fort Collins. Encouraging smaller scale projects that could be owned by individuals or smaller locally owned companies might give us more incremental growth that helps retain a sense of place and our "small town charm" while still adding the housing that we desperately need. We also need to be better integrating small commercial centers throughout our neighborhoods so that neighbors can walk to, and meet up at, the neighborhood cafe/brewpub/etc. Corner stores would enable folks to walk or bike to grab a gallon of milk. Northeast and Southeast Fort Collins are food desserts, as well as "hang out with the neighbors" desserts. Small commercial developments could help tremendously in these areas. And Midtown is soooo centrally located, and yet so sprawling. It really needs to share more of the burden of housing our residents. Those funky backyards with spaces that residents never use could become flag lots for tiny homes. We've got to stop letting motor vehicles determine how we build our City and instead put the power in the hands of local residents to incrementally and creatively add spaces for housing, small businesses, and community interaction.

Create zoning rules and set aside land for tiny home communities + tiny homes as ADUs for infill along primary transit corridors

Train Overpasses & Quiet Zones along Timberline

Noting this has some Federal regulation, it's troublesome that so many neighborhoods were developed directly alongside train crossings. With added train noise only increasing (especially during Midnight-to-6am hours) and delays by the Federal Rail Authority, something needs to be done to alleviate these issues more quickly. This is especially true near Timberline & Vine, Timberline & College areas. I'd like to see increased budget put towards mirroring what surrounding communities like Timnath and Windsor provide residential areas with designated quiet zones for Trains or heavily prioritizing the implementation of overpasses at these crossings to alleviate the increasing noise pollution in residential areas that were approved by the city to be built by these tracks without any real strategy to lessen the impact of their proximity. Coupled with housing shortages and a vastly restricted housing market, most people are unable to be selective and are having little choice but to purchase/rent near these tracks due to lack of inventory. Thank you for your consideration of these ideas!

Education and licensing for wilderness access

Decrease the harmful effects of human activity on wilderness while raising money to sustain and conserve what we have.

Plant More Trees

I encourage City Council to increase the budget for the Forestry Department so more trees can be planted city-wide. The urban tree canopy contributes to our quality of life during the warmer months. Please consider offering the citizens a "treebate" program that provides a financial incentive for folks to plant trees on private property. This is done in Des Moines, IA apparently with great success.

Connect North East Fort Collins to trail network

Connect North East Fort Collins to bike lane + sidewalk network

+ Collaborate with Larimer County to augment safety along Country Club Road - a primary path to Tavelli Elementary School.

Break down natural areas/parks/other dept silos to deliver outdoor recreation plan desired by citizens that includes more nearby trail miles

We need "streetcar commercial districts"... even if our streetcar is no longer a city-wide form off transportation.

Not only should every resident live within walking or biking distance of a park, but they should also live within walking or biking distance of a gallon of milk. We need small, neighborhood level commercial areas where residents can gather together over coffee/tea/beer and get to know each other. We need places that are affordable for small business owners to get their start and they need to be easily accessible by walking, riding, or scootering for everyone, including moms with young kids on bikes. We can't just put our commercial centers along dangerous motorways. We need to be putting them at the smaller crossroads within our neighborhoods. And we seriously need to deal with the food desserts on the eastern edges of town.

Penalize conglomerates who hold commercial real estate vacant for longer than 2 years (esp. along College Ave).

We need to be supporting our local businesses more than we support businesses from outside our borders.

We've done a great job of rallying around our local businesses during the pandemic. Let's learn from that and find ways to support our local businesses with vigor and encouragement going forward. Let's help our local business owners buy the buildings their businesses reside in. Let's recognize the extent to which they often pay more sales tax per acre than our big box stores. And let's take note of how embedded they are in our community in ways that the big box stores often only pay lip service to.

Tell us how much of our tax money goes towards paying for parking that often sits vacant.

On our street, we have free parking that is cleaned, maintained, and in the winter sometimes cleared by the City. That's gotta be costing us something... but we think of it as free. It would be great to have a cost calculator so that we could look up how much that "free" parking is really costing us. That might help us, as residents, better decide if we want to keep that free parking, or if we'd rather have a parklet or other use for that space. It might also help us to recognize how much that parking is subsidized, and by looking on a map of where folks are living who have no "free" parking, we'll start to realize who the folks are who are subsidizing our ability to park in front of our house any time we want.

Historic Surveys need to be funded.

I know that Historic Preservation is often considered under livable neighborhoods, but historic surveys really should be considered as an economic (and cultural) item. We need to be proactive in getting historic surveys completed so that when new property owners or developers are looking to purchase and alter a property, they know well in advance what codes they're going to come up against. Not having these historic surveys done in advance adds a layer of confusion, lag-time, and uncertainty to our development process. When the varied group of developers, preservationists, DDA members, and real estate lawyers got together to revisit the historic preservation code, the one thing everyone agreed 100% on is that we absolutely must be getting these historic surveys done in advance of development pressure. But doing these surveys thoroughly and accurately takes time and funding. Please fund historic surveys!

The City should use the money it gets from the State Severance Tax and the Federal Mineral Leasing fund for regional air quality monitoring

The City should not put the money into the General Fund.

Recycle or reuse buildings rather than throwing them away.

I know we theoretically have a City rule whereby older buildings are supposed to be recycled, rather than thrown away. But based on the number of unsorted building bits that I frequently seen hauled away in trash dumpsters every time an Old Town house is razed, I don't think there's much to that rule. We need to consider adding a deconstruction rule like they have in Oregon (Portland?) now. They've been using the rule for years now and even expanded it because it's working so well. It doesn't make sense to throw away perfectly good material into an already overflowing landfill only to replace those goods with all new resources that need to be harvested, processed, hauled and installed when we could just reuse what we already have. And reusing a building without demolition or deconstruction is even better in terms of energy savings. How can we call ourselves a sustainable community when we're throwing such perfectly good resources away and replacing them with things hauled all the way in from China?!!!!

Air quality/climate change. Need to go beyond monitoring air quality. Need short and long term plan to combat these threats to life quality.

Air quality/climate change

Leverage things like "Trash Tag" to help incentivize citizens to keep areas clean.

Create programs to get equipment (vests, grabbers etc) and community events to clean areas/neighborhoods of trash that accumulates in them. Prizes for garbage removal, events, food trucks etc. can help encourage people to participate in keeping their communities more clean.

Make it easier to compost waste

Creating community compost piles, educating residents on best practices, and allowing residents to freely access the compost would both reduce waste and improve the environment.

The times I feel the least safe in Fort Collins is when I'm walking or biking and an angry motorist threatens me.

One of the scariest moments for my son when biking downtown was when he and his dad were bicycling over the sharrows on Mountain Avenue and an angry older woman in a car careened around them shouting at them to get off the road. I've taken the lane in preparation to get into the left hand turn lane in order to turn left, only to have an angry motorist zip left around me, shouting venom at me. (If I'd started getting left, I would have been run over.) And I can't tell you how many times I've gone to cross at an intersection as a pedestrian only to have a motorist either speed past me, as if they hadn't seen me, or pull right in front of me, stopping right in the crosswalk. If we truly want Fort Collins to be safe for residents, we have got to find a way to alert motorists that they are not the only people traveling around the City, nor do they need to "teach" anyone that they're wrong... especially when it's the motorist who is in the wrong. Why don't the police do anything about this dangerous behavior?!!! I've seen six cops come to talk to my neighbors across the street, spending hours mostly talking to each other on the sidewalk in front of the house. But I've never had a cop pull someone over in their vehicle after they threatened my life.