The Mayor's Mixtape
Mayor Heather Graham's weekly brief of current events related to the City of Pueblo.
The Mayor's Mixtape
The Mayor's Mixtape-Episode 6
This week's episode covers an exciting update about Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) funding, a legislative update regarding HB25-1147, clean up efforts across the City of Pueblo and a look into a typical week with Mayor of Pueblo Heather Graham. Have questions or want to suggest a topic? Email mayor@pueblo.us so you can have your questions answered on the podcast.
All right, welcome to Mayor's Mixtape, Episode 6. I am Haley Sue Robinson, Director of Public Affairs for the City of Pueblo.
Mayor Graham:City of Pueblo Mayor Heather Graham.
Brian McCain:Chief of Staff, Brian McCain.
Haley Sue Robinson:That's the man behind the microphone, or the voice that appears from nowhere?
Mayor Graham:Yes, the man behind the mic, yeah, exactly.
Haley Sue Robinson:Okay, so welcome to Episode 6. We are on BuzzSprout, Apple, Spotify, Youtube. We're also on local channel 17,. Wherever you get your podcasts. We actually hit over 65 downloads on last week's episode on just Buzzsprout. So, like, subscribe, share it with your friends. Also, if you'd like to submit a question or topic, you can email us, mayor@ pueblo. us, so that we know what you want to talk about or we can answer your burning questions. Okay so, mayor.
Haley Sue Robinson:I noticed that you're wearing teal today and I don't know why no one else is wearing teal, but I got the memo Right, so I thought that I was actually getting pretty close to teal, and then you reminded me that I have a teal suit, so I failed today you can go home and change, I'll allow that okay, okay, great, um.
Haley Sue Robinson:But the reason for teal is for sexual assault awareness month, and the police department put something out on their facebook page inviting folks to wear teal in solidarity for the month of April. So that's why you're wearing teal today.
Mayor Graham:Yeah, well, we will wear teal more often this month.
Haley Sue Robinson:Yeah throughout the month. It's also Child Abuse Prevention Month, and so we had folks last week at city council for some proclamations for that week of the young child is next week. So there's there's a few things that are going on in the community that we can support this month Absolutely. Yeah, awesome, okay. So you know, we didn't have a work session last night.
Mayor Graham:No, it's nice.
Haley Sue Robinson:Yeah, it was kind of interesting.
Haley Sue Robinson:Monday yes, However, you were still really busy last week. And last night yes, and last night, sure, of course. So, mayor, you met with six citizens last week and you had a variety of topics, which ranged from the airport economic development cleanup efforts. You also had a couple of media interviews and attended two community events with outside organizations. Is that like a typical week for you?
Mayor Graham:a pretty mild week.
Haley Sue Robinson:That's a slow week.
Mayor Graham:That's a slow week.
Haley Sue Robinson:Okay, okay.
Mayor Graham:So spring break, so it was slow.
Haley Sue Robinson:Oh sure. So there were a lot of organizations that maybe were off or we had folks that weren't in the office, type of thing, that's a slow week usually. You're always busy.
Mayor Graham:We take a lot of meetings, a lot of citizen meetings, a lot of meetings with outside entities. We've been doing our town halls during the week at night. Sure, President Aliff and I. We have another one this week on Thursday at Lamb Branch at 5:45, giving the community more information about the upcoming ballot measure 2A for the May 6th election.
Mayor Graham:Last night the chief and Carla Sikes were up testifying at the Capitol against House Bill 1147, so I don't even think they started testifying until after 9 o'clock
Haley Sue Robinson:it was definitely after 8.30, I think Wouldn't you let me know they were testifying?
Mayor Graham:Yeah, it was a late night they did an excellent job. Unfortunately, the bill passed 5-2. Okay, there was good testimony given by several chiefs and city attorney Sikes, so they were able to answer several questions and really tell a couple of stories on how this bill is going to hinder our ability to put people through municipal court.
Haley Sue Robinson:Okay, so now that it's passed, what does that mean?
Mayor Graham:It'll go to the Senate floor. Okay, so it passed that as Senate Judiciary and now it will go to all the senators to make a vote, and they haven't scheduled that, right, Brian?
Brian McCain:No, and I believe just a few texts going through this morning. I think the Republicans in the Senate they're going to put it on their kill list to try to stop it or draw out time on it. So they are opposed to it. But again, they're a minority and a majority.
Mayor Graham:Yeah, it's unfortunate there was. You know, I heard one of the senators last night who's carrying the bill. You know call it barbaric for municipalities to put people in jail, and maybe you know that senator needs to come to our community and see what's going on in our community with merchant theft and lower-level crimes. It's unfair. It's unfair for our community, who doesn't have the best representation carrying our voices, and that we have to go up there as a city and fight back on legislation that's being passed by people who are from our community.
Haley Sue Robinson:Wow, Okay. Any other legislative updates that we need to know about? Brian?
Brian McCain:That's it. Right now they're going into the long bill, which is the budget stuff, so you're going to see kind of a pause on everything else until they get through this, obviously, the failure to appear, fairness and transparency in municipal court and another municipal court bill. They're kind of a three-bill package and what we're going to do as a city is work to contact the governor's office, maybe ask him to veto the three bills as a package. There's some alternative bills out there that why not? Great, they're better than these that they're putting out. So right now it's just a politicking game.
Haley Sue Robinson:okay, so we kind of just wait and see for now. Yep, all right, um, let's, let's turn to some good news. Uh, you shared with us yesterday I say us um, here in the office you shared before we left work for the day, that you received some good news from the Department of Local Affairs.
Mayor Graham:Yeah, so DOLA. So the city, since I've been in office and even before I was in office, has had a good track record with receiving large grants from DOLA. So we got a million-dollar grant for the Riverwalk back in February of last year. In May of last year we traveled to Montrose and we were successful in receiving another million-dollar grant for our real-time crime center. So that same grant is going to become available in September so that the city can apply to and we wanted to focus our efforts with that million dollars on the shelter. So we're going to be applying for a million dollar grant in September for the shelter. Okay To add, you know, additional space. It's an infrastructure, it's an operational grant, so it has to be infrastructure based In order to successfully have a plan for that grant. We applied for a planning grant through DOLA to put a larger plan together for the shelter overall and we were successful and we received news last night that we received a $25,000 grant from DOLA to do planning for the shelter. So that's really exciting.
Haley Sue Robinson:That is great.
Mayor Graham:We know that there's upgrades that need to be made. We hear a lot of community members talk about the unhoused and the pets. They have a great pet facility at the Colorado Springs Rescue Mission.
Mayor Graham:Yeah, they really do, and so we'd like to try to mimic what they have in Colorado Springs, so that in the winter or when it's really hot, people have a place to go, that they can also store their pets so, and that it's safe. So that's something I know that we're going to be looking at when we try to apply for the grant.
Haley Sue Robinson:Great, so is this? This is separate from what we talked about last week. We had a question last week about tiny homes and you shared about the pallet shelter plan at the at the pueblo shelter.
Mayor Graham:This is separate yeah, totally, totally, separate, totally funding and like I said, the city has been very successful in dola grant and so um we hope to to obtain a large grant um at the end of the year for the shelter cool.
Haley Sue Robinson:So this 25, 000 kind of sets us up for that next step with uh DOLA, the Department of Local Affairs.
Mayor Graham:Yeah, absolutely. They like you to have a whole picture, an idea, specifics on what you're going to be asking for. And so, since we don't know specifics yet, and what that would look like. This will be a great opportunity to get someone to help us do a plan forward so we can apply for the grant.
Haley Sue Robinson:Great, and it's really good timing too with our RFP for the shelter and whoever's going to run the shelter next kind of gives them the opportunity for us to work alongside them.
Mayor Graham:Yep, we have an ordinance that will be on second final presentation on April 14th for the funding of the RFP. So I'm hoping to have council's support in order to pass the funding source for the RFP so that we can continue to operate the shelter and we don't have to close the shelter. I think that we have the support. The city council has been very supportive of everything the city is trying to do with the shelter, so this is just another area that we can move forward in with the grants that we've been able to receive.
Haley Sue Robinson:Great, that's fantastic, and, if I remember correctly, we should be able to potentially award the RFP by May.
Mayor Graham:Yeah, definitely. So once we have the funding, the RFP review process will start shortly after, and then you know, the board that's selecting the RFP will notify Great and we'll be well on our way.
Haley Sue Robinson:Okay, awesome, and then we'll be able to move forward. We'll be able to move forward Awesome. Thanks for sharing the good news in that update. Okay, um, so I wanted to talk about something that you're pretty passionate about um cleanup in pueblo. Um, you've championed this, you know, when you were on city council, and obviously it's been something that's been at the forefront while you've been mayor. Um, can you talk about, kind of the various departments that provide cleanup efforts in the city? I think one thing that we hear a lot is you know why aren't you cleaning up here or this property or this area, or like what team is doing this or what group effort is happening? So I thought maybe we could talk about the difference of the groups that we have here in the city.
Mayor Graham:Sure, so I think two years ago the city received a million dollars in ARPA that they dedicated to a project called Team Up to Clean Up. So this group is able to go out in clean areas and census track areas all over the city. So these are part-time employees that work under a coordinator. They're out there five days a week. They start about 7.30 in the morning and finish about 1.30 in the afternoon and they hit census track areas in the city. So you'll see them around. They have the bright green t-shirts on that say team up to clean up. So they do a lot of cleaning in bessemer, um, and on the east side, since those are census track areas, sure, um. So that's just one of our, one of our teams that we use. We have the city municipal court community service division, right, they do the graffiti removal and they've also helped coordinate and do additional cleanups. So when we have the really big cleanups, like on the fountain creek or certain areas of the city.
Mayor Graham:They're the ones that organize the cleanup. Okay, contacting all other departments and all other cleanup groups to come out, and that could be our public works department, our stormwater department, parks, the team to clean up, the municipal court team. It could be outside agencies like the railroad. So most of the time when you see us cleaning up and down the Fountain Creek or in the jungle where we cleaned not too long ago, those properties butt up to railroad and so we try to have a coordinated effort with the railroads in which they come in and also bring their cleanup crews so they burn some of the costs of the cleanup. It's a more timely cleanup because we have extra hands on deck. You see our team up to cleanup crew a lot under the bridges. You see our Team Up to Clean Up crew a lot under the bridges. 4th Street and 8th Street are really big problems for the city, high traffic areas.
Mayor Graham:High traffic areas, tons of trash, tons of illegal dumping, the fields out in the community, we see a ton of illegal dumping, and so they work together to go and clean up those areas as well.
Mayor Graham:And then we also have a partnership with Catholic Charities. So last year the city of Pueblo took $200,000 of that $1 million in ARPA funds and we provided that to Catholic Charities to have a charity works program. So they actually find unhoused individuals who want to come and work for a few hours a day. They take them out to help them clean up trash and then they're given gift cards, um, essentially as their pay. We've seen a lot of individuals who have gone from just cleaning up trash to now and um catholic charities other works programs and being placed in jobs and housing. So overall it's a community-led effort, not just the city but also Catholic Charities.
Mayor Graham:We also have the Downtown Association that I know partners with the high schools and you'll see the high schools downtown cleaning up trash. I think they're out every month right now. Yeah, I think they rotate through each of the schools, yeah, so we have a lot of cleanup going on. And then we also have code enforcement. Right, code enforcement is great. They do all of our abatements. So when it comes to code enforcement, that's going to be when you have a private property that you know has some junk in the yard or has stuff that they're not supposed to have, code enforcement goes out. They cite them, tell them which code that they're breaking at the city. If they don't have their property cleaned up, then we send an abatement crew out, we clean up their property for them and then we issue them a bill. If they don't pay their bill, we put a lien on their house. So you have different aspects. So code enforcement is really for private property. Team up to clean up is really the QTC areas, municipal court and Mike's team can pretty much go anywhere and they help schedule the larger cleanups. So you'll see them doing different cleanup aspects all over town. You have the Catholic Charity Works Program and I believe that they can go anywhere as well.
Mayor Graham:So we're spending a lot of time cleaning up the city and maintaining the cleanup that we do, really trying to redirect people who are coming out of the encampments to the shelter. We work really well with the DICE team. When we're going to clean up an encampment, you know now that the city has a shelter, we know how many beds are there, we know what kind of resources are being offered and so we can take individuals back and forth, we can point them in the right direction. So it's really a whole city project, city department, you know initiative. It kind of just depends on what part of town we're cleaning, kind of what the mess looks like, whether we have to have heavy equipment or not. So it's we've, we've. We've removed a lot of trash since I became the mayor.
Mayor Graham:A lot of trash.
Haley Sue Robinson:I think so, last week you were at a community event for a luncheon and you mentioned it was over 500 tons of trash just last year that was just Fountain Creek, that was just off of Fountain Creek, so that doesn't count anything else it doesn't.
Mayor Graham:And you know, every day we get a report from Team Up to Clean Up about where they go in the city. They take pictures. I know that you post them on our Facebook page a lot because I think it's important for people to see how their tax dollars are being spent. They're cleaning up shopping carts, needles, tires you see a lot of tires. Two weeks ago I had all of the teams working the Bessemer area. They went alley to alley. It's not the city's job to clean up the trash in the alley. It belongs to the owner of the property. Yeah, that's our property. It's citizens, yep, but the alleyways in Bessemer were pretty compacted with trash Lots of illegal dumping. So I sent the crew out. There was a burned down abandoned building excuse, excuse me, house on route that the city is currently working to tear down right now and I think the team up to clean up team found 1800 needles there, so lots of household waste just at that one just at that one house yeah, so it was.
Mayor Graham:It was a dumping ground for somebody. So, um, we're trying to get out there as much as we can. We don't have a ton of staff that's dedicated to it, but we have several different teams and several different avenues that we can take when it comes to cleaning up the city.
Haley Sue Robinson:yeah, so I I also saw last week. Uh, pueblo police department did a a nice highlight on code enforcement, kind of a before and after of what that looks like for private property. Um, I know, I can. I can say that I have received a notice from code enforcement before for some weeds. Uh, thankfully it wasn't a junk vehicle or anything but, um, just cleaned up in your alleyway.
Mayor Graham:was in my alleyway.
Haley Sue Robinson:Yep it was yeah, um, and so I think they give you like 10 days or something. It wasn't too terrible, but it is really interesting just to see how different each of the teams are and their different functions.
Mayor Graham:Right, and you know, if anybody has a bad area that's in their district where they leave, they can always contact us. We take tons of calls like that every day. My office kind of sends it out to all of the different groups to see hey, is this on anybody's radar? Is this city property? Is it private property? Can somebody go out and talk to the owner of this house who's making the complaint? And then we try to work as swiftly and as quickly as we can to get it cleaned up, whether it's private property or public property. Right, yeah, we want the city to be clean Because it's important it is.
Haley Sue Robinson:You know, and I know we also receive a lot of questions or a lot of complaints. Folks mention railroad property or state property. So I think it was important that you mentioned that we do have the ability to work with outside organizations or coordinate that kind of effort, because sometimes, although it's not our jurisdiction, to your point, it's our city. Well and we want it cleaned up. Right yeah, when folks are driving through Pueblo or, you know, getting off the interstate, or they see some area that really doesn't look good we want to address it.
Mayor Graham:Yeah, it's a safety concern too. You know, in the jungle some of the encampments were butted right up to the rail tracks. It's very dangerous for people to be living down there. Same thing at the Fountain Creek. So, you know, the railroad does it for safety as well as for just how it looks for the community, and so it's great that we have been able to reestablish those partnerships with the railroad. I don't think that's always been. We've had great communication with them. We have good communication now. When they need help, we help them. When we need help, they show up to help us. So it's great.
Haley Sue Robinson:Great, that's fantastic. I do know I wanted to bring it up because yesterday we had posted you had posted on your page and someone had asked about maybe employing the homeless, and so I was really glad that you talked about the Catholic Charities Works Program, and I think that's not even been in action for a full year yet.
Mayor Graham:No, not a full year. I think it was like maybe midsummer last year, yeah, that we started the program. Okay.
Haley Sue Robinson:Yeah, so that's fantastic. It's just been great to see all these different efforts and kind of understand what their function is within the city I guess. So thanks for explaining that. Sure, cool Okay, cool Okay. Anything else, it's a little bit of a light week because we didn't have council last night.
Mayor Graham:Yeah, no, I think that that's all we have today. Brian, do you have something exciting to share?
Brian McCain:I'm just going to say that we're going into summer, it's spring and there's going to be a lot of events in Pueblo. Yeah, a lot All the way through fall and everybody get ready.
Haley Sue Robinson:Yeah, I know we have. Actually, we have a couple events this week the Van Gogh shuttle, there's a ribbon cutting. On Friday, there's Arts Week.
Mayor Graham:Next weekend isn't there like a big concert series?
Haley Sue Robinson:in downtown.
Mayor Graham:Is that next week?
Brian McCain:Yeah, that's next Friday and Saturday the Steel City Music Festival.
Haley Sue Robinson:Yeah, Steel City Music Festival I went last year. That was fantastic. It's really cool. A bunch of different bands Kind of doesn't matter what kind of music you listen to. You can find whatever you're looking for.
Mayor Graham:And there's several different stages set up in downtown that people can.
Brian McCain:Yeah, I think there's four, so it's right downtown off of Union. I believe it's Presley's Gold Dust, maybe somewhere else. And it's a two-day festival. Go to the webpage. You can buy passes for both days. They have VIP packages. It's going to be pretty cool and hopefully a lot of people will show up.
Mayor Graham:Yeah, and hopefully we have good weather and that same weekend we'll have our second legislative breakfast as well.
Brian McCain:Legislative showdown breakfast
Mayor Graham:Legislative showdown 8 am at the convention center, so get your tickets from the chamber.
Brian McCain:It's a really good opportunity for the public to go engage with all their legislators, from the state level on all the way down to the local level.
Haley Sue Robinson:All in one room.
Brian McCain:Yeah, all in one room. You can ask questions, you could talk to them face to face, let them know your concerns, give them props where props are due and it's a good time.
Haley Sue Robinson:It's fantastic, okay, great. Well then, with that, I think we'll have any April Fool's jokes for us. Oh, april Fool's jokes, I don't know about that, maybe like a prank later, but I'm saving that for later in the day, maybe not for the podcast. Okay, okay, um. Well, that's all we have for today, but if you would like to suggest a topic or you have questions for Mayor Graham, feel free to submit them. Mayor@ Pueblo. us, you can email us. Make sure you like, subscribe, follow us on YouTube, apple, spotify, buzzsprout, check it out on Channel 17, locally, wherever you get your podcasts, and until next time, have a good week.