The Council will meet in executive session for the purpose of receiving legal advice. Rachelle Hill, City Attorney’s Office
Outcomes. Well, 913 with its public hearing has been postponed to Tuesday, November 12th. We have do have an executive session tonight. So I will move that council enter into an executive session session for the purpose of receiving legal advice. If I can get a session moved and seconded. Per Section 2-34a of the Denver Revised Municipal Code, a two thirds affirmative vote is required to enter into executive session. Madam Secretary, roll call. Black CdeBaca I. Flinched. I heard it. I hands. High. Cashman. Kenny Ortega. Sandoval, I. Sawyer, I. Torres, I. Mr. President. Hi, Madam Secretary. Please. Because voting announced results. 12. Hours, 12 eyes council will now enter into executive session. When we return, then we will return to adjourn the meeting. Thank you. You know. Bank. And then their bank actually said, Yeah, the check is good and the person lost money that way. So that's a good warning. But the other the other one that I want to just play at the end of the refund from the company is that you may be told you're virus protection software. The company contract is being canceled. You are going to get a refund on this. And what they the caller will then see is that they have accidentally transferred too much into your account and will say, oh, no, I'm going to lose my job. But, you know, would you help me out here and we'll ask you to go get the balance so they'll say they've transferred more. So, for instance, if if you're getting to $200 or so, they'll say, well, actually, you know, I've I've transferred $10,000. Could you pay me 9800 back so that I don't lose my job? And again, that's you know, that's one that can easily in an urgent situation can can easily fox people. In Nigeria. You know the Nigerian prince I'm hoping he'll come over here some day. I'd like to meet him. The funniest thing was I did some research into that and I discovered that that's a really that's like a really old scam because I guess some of these have been circulating for hundreds of years. Right. And they had some letters about a Spanish prince. So a long time ago, it was a Spanish prince who was imprisoned. And you could help help help him regain his fortune by contributing to his his release. So, yeah, we'd all like to meet him, sir. Yes. I want to share with the community in terms of coming from a real estate perspective. If you know of anyone who's buying a home, you're they're getting scammed by wire fraud in terms of what they need to bring the closing. And you have scammers out there that has that will capture the home buyers email and send them an email saying that the title company is instructing you to wire your closing funds to this account. And it's not true. So I don't know if you've been seeing that, but in real estate, it's been that's one of the highest levels of scams right now is to wire fraud for a closing settlement. And so I encourage if you know of anybody who's look who's buying a house and at closing, call the title company themselves. They will tell you how much they need to bring to closing. And since I'm in real estate, I just got to say this. No, please do. I think these are great tips for. Working with senior homeowners that the scammers you will get mail. You get mail at your house and it looks like it's coming from your mortgage company, the graphics, the logo and what's been happening. They're seeing they know that you're paying a mortgage and they were saying, now your loan has been transferred. You pay us at this address. Please don't do that. Call your mortgage company to verify if your. Loan has been. Transferred. So it's it's incredible. It's a lot going on right now. There really is. And thank thank you. Great tips as well. You know, I don't know how much time we've got left. And I I apologize to folks who are watching on channel that I know we've been skipping around with lots of people adding to the discussion. But I think it is really important and I really appreciate it because I think it's only by hearing from other members of our own community that we really know what's happening in our neighborhood, that we really know what's happening in our city, and that we we work to best protect ourselves. So I'm I'm just going to finish up here by just just letting letting, you know, I guess, finally what what we can do for you. So we do have folks who we've I put some resources on the table here and we have folks who actually answered the phone. Real people, not a phone tree. Isn't that amazing? So we have real folks who are there to deal with your problems every day during the week. And if you have concerns that something's a fraud, then you can check it out with them. If you're sure that you've been defrauded, you can call them. Obviously, you can also call local law enforcement. Maybe sometimes you want to talk to somebody who's in the DA's office who's a fraud specialist. So we're there to do that sort of work for you. Also, we can sometimes get rapid solutions to situations. So I can I can promise that happens in every case. But I will tell you that when we look in, when we start looking into a situation, it's amazing to me that that will sometimes resolve things very swiftly because they know that we're looking at the situation. So, you know, we are super motivated to meet with the community. So for any of you who also are members of other groups and you would like to invite us to come work with your group and to come talk to your group. We love to do that. We really would love to do that as you can. You might not be able to see, but I think I've only got through about a quarter of my presentation this morning. But I think it's really more important, as I said, that we we talk we talk about things. But there is a lot more, I guess, where this came from. And it's sad, right? It's sad that there's so many different scams that we are we're needing to take more than than this time simply to get through the most frequent ones for people. So just once again, thank you to Councilwoman Gilmore. Thank you to all of you for coming out. I hope it's been something that's been useful to you and it's been a delight to be here. Thanks. Well, thank you, Jane. We really appreciate you being here. And Mr. Paul. Yes, I think you have a microphone right right there. I don't need my. Okay. I just like. Your office for putting this on quite as. Well. Oh, I. I think they still want you to use the microphone here so we can make sure that and that's always okay to repeat. I just want to thank you, Councilwoman and Gilmore, of you and for putting this on with Mrs. and White Vermont below 2020 because this is needed more of this is needed because it's all I mean you know, it's amazing. I was just listening this lady here talk about, you know, the game this man pulled and I asked, is he alive yet? She said the lady didn't have a gun. Well. Well, well, we definitely thank you, Mr. Poole, and thank you for everybody being here this morning. And I would be remiss if I did not sincerely thank my Bello 2020 and Montebello Walks and the Golden Age Club for getting you here and getting the word out. Mark Bello 2020, is a registered neighborhood organization and very active in the neighborhood. And I know that there's other groups out there as well that we just need to get this info out to the broader community. And then the Colorado Trust also provided our breakfast and refreshments this morning. And Montebello Walk is an organization that also is very active in the neighborhood and they get seniors out and keep you active. And so at the end of the day, when we start talking about what our next steps are, I what I got out of Jane's presentation is you need to verify if someone calls you and nothing is ever that urgent. And it's okay to take those folks information down and hang up the phone, don't give them any information and turn around and call the district attorney's office. Call our council office, call the non-emergency police number and start asking questions. And so verify, verify, verify. And this is the first of a series of Montebello Speaks speakers bureaus that we're going to be facilitating in the neighborhood. And so look for other topics that we're going to talk about. If you have ideas of topics that you would like to have an expert come in and share information and we want to keep this a conversation. So always back and forth. Because what you're asking today and the answers that are being recorded, this is going to go out on Channel eight and get out to the broader community. And so I thank you for being the leaders that you are in the my fellow community and District 11, and we will keep this going. So thank you. From the District 11 Council Office and Montebello Leadership Cabinet present. The second edition of Montebello Speaks in partnership with the Office of Financial Empowerment and the Denver Office on Aging. Good evening. I'm Stacey Gilmore, and I'm the councilwoman who represents District 11. And I'm honored to welcome you tonight to a Montebello Speaks Speakers Bureau event. We have been working for the last three years with community members in the Montebello neighborhood to talk about the effects of gentrification, involuntary displacement, what we really need to have in our neighborhoods to make sure that our seniors can age in place, that you have the financial planning and resources to make sure that you're able to transfer your asset on to your children so that we're looking at generational wealth building as well. And so thank you so much for being here tonight. And at our second event, we started these recorded events to make sure that we were getting the information out far and wide throughout the community. We know that sometimes you can't come to a neighborhood meeting and so we wanted to have these available on Channel eight. We're going to post them on YouTube and we would like you to share them with your friends and family and other folks as well, so that they've got this information. And so tonight, we're going to be talking about financial consumer protection. There's a lot of folks out there that are maybe not on the up and up. And so we want to make sure that you have the tools to make good decisions. And I would like to first thank the Montebello Leadership Cabinet. It's a group of registered neighborhood organization leaders, community leaders who have been so committed to this work. And when we sat down and started talking about our changing neighborhood, the top things that came up were affordable housing, allowing our seniors to age in place, but then financial empowerment and financial literacy. And so through your voice and your advocacy, we're able to do these events. I also want to thank the Office of Financial Empowerment and the Office on Aging. And we also have Perla Geisler, who is here tonight. And she brought out the Denver Connex mobile van, which is a brand new resource that's in partnership with the city and county of Denver and Mayor Hancock's office to make sure that you have the resources right in your own neighborhood. And so it's a mobile van, and it's for older adults. It provides resources and real time advice to you. And so hopefully we'll get a chance to, after this taping, go out and check out that resource as well. With the Montebello Leadership Cabinet. We are always trying to grow the membership because there are so many different topics and so many opportunities for people to learn more that we want to make sure that you get involved as well. And so if you are watching this on television, if you're here tonight, please get involved with Montebello Leadership Cabinet. You can contact me or any of my staff members. And with that, we're going to go ahead and get started. The presentation is Financial Consumer Protection and is presented by the Denver Office of Financial Empowerment. And the two gentlemen that are going to be with us here tonight are Alvin Tafoya. He's the program manager. And Ron O'Hara, the Consumer Financial Protection coordinator, again for the Office of Financial Empowerment. Here you go, Alvin. Thank you. How's everybody doing this evening? Doing good. I just want to go through a quick exercise just to kind of get a feel of the room and just to really engage you. How many of you receive some kind of banking credit score or loan training or class when you were in high school? Okay. Got one here. How about while you were in college? How many of you learned these about these things through your parents? Do they systematically teach you all that when you're grown up? We got a few more hands up. So basically the Office of Financial Empowerment really wants to take all the guesswork out of that. It shouldn't be an organic process in which you grow up. You start learning about banking and you start learning about checking. You start learning about how important your credit score is and how that could impact you financially. So. You know. So that's really what we're engaged in and what we do. We serve families, we serve individuals. We actually serve small businesses as well. We want to empower them to be able to make sound financial decisions so that they can become successful. And so with that, I'm going to go ahead and move forward with the presentation and give you a little bit of background about how we started and where we came from. So Mayor Michael Hancock supported us back in 2013, along with our council members. City council members supported us and they have been supporting us ever since. Basically what we have been able to do since then is grow our program from what it was to what it is today. Today we're serving about nine. We have nine coaching centers throughout the city and county of Denver. You can walk in or call them and set up an individual appointment. They'll provide you coaching sessions and teach you about all the banking type of products and how to get your arms around your finances. Some of the things that we do or we'll help people better understand their credit, will help them to reduce their debt. We'll also provide them small loans if they need to. And we're also working with other financial institutions, large banks and small credit unions to develop banking products that help support low to moderate income families. And so we're really working on helping individuals at any place in their life span to move forward and kind of discuss what you talked about, get to a place where you can do some wealth development and transfer wealth onto your family so that they can kind of go through this too gen process and move that forward. Like I said, Mary Hancock supported us back in 2013 along with city council. Ultimately, you know, our job is to work with residents economic mobility, stabilize families, individuals and small businesses. We forgot that in this PowerPoint, but I wanted to throw that out there. Develop solutions through programs, policies and practices to stabilize families and individuals. And so one of the things we worked on was Prop 111 to help reduce the amount that a lender's payday loan centers can charge an individual for a payday loan. And so today, because that law was passed, they can only charge up to 36%. And we still think that's a little bit high. But we're working on an alternative product so that we can work with individuals, which is ultimately the goal, to get them into banking products that they're eligible for. So you guys are probably the first to hear this in the community. We used to be the Office of Financial Empowerment, but now we're the Office of Financial Empowerment and Protection. And the reason why we moved to protection is because Ron's going to come up in a little bit and discuss the consumer fraud and protection division that we we're putting together right now. So you guys have actually kind of learned about it the first time we met with you. We're continuing to move that forward and we're going to roll that out here pretty soon. And so a little bit about the program, the ecosystem here, the five pillars of financial stability.