2022 Budget

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.

Homeless community needs the ability to have a safe area during this covid pandemic. Places to stay 24/7 in safety.

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

Please expand public transportation. The increase in population and traffic make it a necessity. The more convenient the more usage.

Black parents against Racist CRT in our schools

https://www.facebook.com/officialbenshapiro/videos/411570040286578

Create a city based system for assisting the homeless

Create city-based services to assit homeless populations with things like Shelters, temporary housing and mental health services to better assist underserved and vulnerable populations.

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

Remove 4 way stops

Remove the 4 way stops in residential areas and provide a center cone to enable drivers to use the junction in a similar way to roundabouts. This would reduce pollution and noise avoiding unnecessary stops. If this concept is not understood please refer to google "mini roundabouts"

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.

More pickle Ball courts! There are so many new players, and empty tennis courts that can be converted! 🙏🏻

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

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.

Add safer bike trails in the northern part of the city

Biking on Timberline or Vine is dangerous, but it's the only way that neighborhoods in the northeast part of the city can access trails. Add bike paths that connect into the trail system.

Prioritize the citizen requested bike park in n. old town so all can access great mountain biking without driving. Other cities are leading.

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.

Create a Light Rail plan that can easily connect Fort Collins to other Urban Centers

Create a plan for lightrail that can connect into Denver's infrastructure (or even Cheyenne) to help alleviate traffic issues, but also better connect people who might not be able to make a trip to Fort Collins very easily. (Or vice versa)

Incentivize "Walkable/Bikeable" Communities / Economic areas

I'd like to see an effort to incentivize more local businesses to concentrate in areas similar to the Front Range Village shopping mall. Make them very easily accessed by bus/bike/etc. Create a place where businesses can help each other by encouraging foot traffic while reducing vehicle traffic by making goods and services more locally accessible

NoCo Market online

One of the neatest things that I saw develop during the pandemic was a Northern Colorado marketplace online where small businesses could post their information and residents could get a better sense of the locally owned businesses that they should be supporting. I would love to see Fort Collins spearhead a project that included Wellington, Laporte, Loveland, etc.; in association with all of the related Chambers of Commerce; that would create and manage a website through which local residents could find local shops selling whatever it is they're looking for. The website could give a brief description of what the shops carried with a link to their website or FB page. And it would be searchable... so if I was looking for locally made leather polish (which I know exists) I could find it through the website and either order online or drive to a local shop that sells the item I'm looking for. What a great way to support our local businesses. It would essentially be an online directory specific to us. I know things like Be Local have been tried, but they can't support themselves. But through support from the Municipalities and the Chambers, maybe we could make it happen. Franchises could be listed if they're locally owned, but no big box stores.

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

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.

We need to be more aggressive about water conservation.

The City has done a lot to get people to conserve water, but we could do more. We need more aggressive marketing/education to help people realize that they don't need to water their lawns nearly as often as they do, they don't need to flush their toilets every time they use the loo, etc. The Water tour that the City runs is fantastic! It would be great to find a way to do a similar "tour" for bicyclists. Educational signs could also be posted around camp grounds. And schools could have water experts come in to teach students about water in Northern Colorado.

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.