Five meetings, eleven recorded votes.

What this page is

Chapter 12 (Transcripts) holds the verbatim quotations and timecodes. This page does the bookkeeping: who voted which way, how the coalitions shifted, and which votes split the package versus which votes ratified it. Every roll call below is verified against either the CivicWeb voting-results PDF for that meeting, or, where the city did not publish results, against the whisper.cpp transcript at the cited timecode.

The naming convention separates two seats:

• The 2025 council (pre-November 2025 election) that adopted the FY 2026 budget on 21 October 2025 — Mayor Marsh + Olson, Foley, Malo, McFall, Samson, Light-Kovacs, Swanty.
• The 2026 council sworn in 2 December 2025 — Mayor McFall + Samson (MPT), Frahm, Middleton (Kalina), Cortez (Ezekiel “Zeke”), Light-Kovacs (Laura, W4), Rothberg (W2), Swanty (W1), Wyrick (Caitlin, W3).

Olson, Foley, and Malo are not on the 2026 council. That matters because the FY 2026 budget package — including the four new Loveland Police FTEs that became the standing enforcement capacity for Ord 6806 — was adopted on a consent-style 8-0 by the body that preceded the council that voted on Ord 6806 / 6807.

Speaker roster

The 2026 council divides 5-4 on the ordinance package. Throughout the rest of this page, the YES-on-6806 / YES-on-6807 majority of five (McFall, Samson, Frahm, Middleton, Cortez) is shorthanded “the five-vote majority," and the four members who voted against at least one ordinance (Light-Kovacs, Rothberg, Swanty, Wyrick) the “four-vote minority."

The 11 recorded votes, October 2025 — March 2026

click to enlarge

Reading the table by column: the five-vote majority holds across every ordinance in the Ord 6806 / 6807 package and across the BAA. The four-vote minority is internally inconsistent on Ord 6806 — Light-Kovacs flipped, the others did not — but consistent on Ord 6807 (only Frahm, Middleton, and Cortez voted no on the purchase, and all three voted yes on enforcement). The structural inversion is what made the package severable on the night of 6 January.

Vote 1 — 6 January 2026, the three roll calls of the same meeting

Three fixed YES votes (McFall, Samson, Light-Kovacs) carry both ordinances. Without them neither reaches 6-3. The Light-Kovacs compromise — the only motion the four-vote minority needed three more votes for — was the night’s decisive failure. With it bundled, the package was severable; it proceeded that way.

Vote 2 — 3 February 2026, the Light-Kovacs flip

Eight of nine members held their first-reading position. The single change in twenty-eight days was Light-Kovacs withdrawing the “begrudging” yes — consistent with the provider-letter contingency her compromise motion of 6 January had been written to enforce having gone unfulfilled. Bridge House had withdrawn on 23 January (seventeen days before the second reading); no replacement operator letter was on the record. Ord 6806 proceeded to passage 5-4.

Vote 3 — 24 March 2026, the post-collapse pivot

The councilmember who used the word “pivot” on the record (VTT 05:25:53) was articulating the dossier’s thesis without prompting: that direct city operation of homeless services “run[s] us down on our general fund.” That is not the framing of a council that intends to re-attempt a city-owned shelter; it is the framing of a council that has ratified the substitute path. The Ad Hoc Committee is the procedural vehicle that path needs.

Reading the coalition shifts

The four-vote minority was never internally unified on policy. On 6 January Light-Kovacs voted YES on both ordinances while moving to condition them. Rothberg, Swanty, and Wyrick voted NO on enforcement but YES on the purchase. The implicit four-minority position was: if the city is going to buy a shelter, an enforcement ordinance is acceptable; if it is not going to buy a shelter, the enforcement ordinance is not. The five-vote majority simply did not need that bargain.

When Bridge House withdrew (23 Jan), the conditional that the minority had voted on dissolved. Light-Kovacs flipped Ord 6806 because the operator-letter side of the trade had failed. The other three minority members did not flip because they had voted NO at first reading on the same logic.

By 24 March the five-vote majority had absorbed the entire four-vote minority on the Ad Hoc Committee question except for Cortez. Cortez had voted YES on Ord 6806 and NO on Ord 6807 — the most pro-enforcement, least pro-shelter position on the council. The committee is the city’s announced mechanism for exiting direct provision of services; from Cortez’s prior votes, the lone dissent is the position of someone who did not want the city re-entering that field at all, even through a committee.

The 2025 budget vote that pre-loaded the enforcement capacity

The 21 October 2025 budget passed 8-0 on the consent-style second reading. Olson, Foley, and Malo voted on that budget; none of them voted on Ord 6806 / 6807 ten weeks later. Two of the four new sworn LPD positions adopted in that budget became the standing capacity that Ord 6806 then made callable on encampment civil-abatement work without a 60-day shelter-and-storage precondition. The fourth position was a marijuana / alcohol / tobacco enforcement specialist tied to a 2027 retail-marijuana rollout — not anti-encampment work, and the dossier corrects its earlier draft framing on that point.

Either way, the staffing committed on 21 October 2025 — about $600,000 to $900,000 of recurring General Fund cost — pre-dates every public event later used in the ordinance debate: McFall’s November mayoral election, his December swearing-in, the public-rhetoric incident later cited at 9 December 2025 (the “Endless Summer Tanning” incident, referenced in council debate but not yet sourced in this dossier to a news or police-blotter record — flagged as a verification TODO), and the 6 January Ord 6806 / 6807 vote.

What the next page does

Chapter 14 — Followup covers the documented followups since first publication: Hurd identified, Scottsdale Museum Square outcome, the OpenGov transparency-portal gap, Thompson’s contract terms, Phase II of the E&Y audit, and the Frahm / The Group Inc recusal question.