AS AMENDED, a bill for an ordinance amending Article V of Chapter 2 of the Revised Municipal Code pertaining to financial disclosure. Revises the Denver Revised Municipal Code regarding financial disclosure including eliminating the requirement that candidates for municipal office make financial disclosures, modifying the definition of “gift”, “immediate family” and “officer”, modifying the date for submitting the annual financial disclosure statement for city officers, requiring semi-annual gift disclosure reports by officers and annual gift disclosure reports by employees, modifying reportable gifts and increasing the reporting threshold from $25 to $50; making the financial and gift reports of officers publicly available online and the gift reports of employees publicly available on request, and modifying the remedies for violations of the ordinance. The Committee approved filing this bill at its meeting on 11-29-16. Amended 1-3-17 to remove the minimum $50 threshold for reporting gifts in the covered categories, resulting in the reporting of all gifts received in the designat
Nine eyes, two abstentions. Resolution 1324 has been adopted. Madam Secretary, if you could please put the next item up on our screens. Councilwoman Canete, you've called out comfortable 919 for a comment. Go ahead. Thank you, Mr. President. Council Bill 918 is a bill that originated with the clerk's office, and she had been working to really modernize some of our areas of code that do transparency and reporting. Two of the bills, one is on lobbyists. The one that I called out is on financial disclosures, where we as councilmembers and other city employees file if they've received gifts that relate to the work that we do with the city, and then also where we report on, you know, some of our own financial interests so that the public may know if we have interests in the things that we're legislating on. And, you know, I want to there's sometimes more is more. And so there's a couple of changes in this bill that I think are really good, which is that it will be more frequent reporting. So twice a year instead of once a year. So there's less of a time lag before the public is able to see the reports. And also the reports will be available online. So in this case, I think the bill represents more is more one council change that we made in committee to the bill, which is a little bit about less being more, is that we think that the gifts the city is most interested in, our public is most interested is seeing, is those that have any relationship to our duties here. So we narrowed the group of people. So, for example, I don't know that the public has a strong need to know if my neighbor gave me a sweater for Christmas. They have they do no business with the city. And it created confusion, the fact that there were no limits on who you reported. So we narrowed who you're reporting to. And I think that's good. At the same time, we raised the threshold from $20, $25 to $50 at in committee. At that time, I was supportive of that change. And it made a lot of sense because, you know, Councilman Brooks, for example, was recently ill and people gave him flowers that might have been valued at more than 25. And and again, to have, you know, hundreds of flower bouquets reported. And his financing report might not have been the best use of of transparency in terms of helping to understand the city. But as we've proceeded, this bill is moving forward, and I'm going to vote for it tonight. But there's a similar bill dealing with some other issues in the code that Councilman Flynn has been working on. This has been a great example of really doing work in committee where we talk about all the details. But what it means is we're going to discuss his bill again tomorrow. And depending on how his bill goes, I may suggest that because we've narrowed who we are reporting to, that we should really report any meals, tickets that we get from those covered individuals. So I, I very likely will be bringing an amendment forward on this bill, maybe with others, maybe co-sponsoring with Councilman Flynn. But I just wanted to let folks know because I always feel like it can be very surprising if you see nothing on first reading and then maybe have changes on second. So I want to let folks know that I wanted to wait and see how the committee conversation went tomorrow. But it's my belief that if we very much are narrowing who we're reporting on, that it's maybe important to report all of the things that we get, especially since we're reporting twice a year. The threshold used to be if you've done some things that you know, collectively result in a certain amount throughout the course of the year, now that we're reporting more frequently, it just makes sense to report more everything so that people can really see between a first half of the year and a second half of the year what it adds up to. So with that, it is just a heads up to the public and a heads up to my colleagues and fully supportive of this did not pull it out for a vote. But we'll see how committee goes. And we may want to, you know, make a reconciliation on on second reading. So thank you, Mr. President.