The City and County of Denver launched a website Thursday to collect community input on how to spend over $700 million in COVID-19 relief funds that will be invested in Denver over the next decade.

The website, www.risetogetherdenver.org, allows individuals to submit their feedback on investment possibilities in community, business and infrastructure.

Residents can rank the importance of investing in certain areas, provide additional investment suggestions, ask questions to be sent to city officials and engage in an open forum with other community members about what the city’s priorities should be.

“It is crucial for us to have residents at the table when we’re deciding how we should prioritize investments and specific resources that are going to make the most impact for people that were hit the hardest during the pandemic,” said Kiki Turner with the Denver Department of Finance.

The website also includes a sign up for four telephone town hall events between May 26 and June 6 where residents can talk about where they want the funds to go. The town halls will include live polling with questions similar to the website.

In addition to English, the website and telephone town halls will be provided in Spanish, Vietnamese and Amharic. Translation services for more languages, including French, Russian and Arabic, are available by contacting the city.

Later on, the website will feature video presentations from city officials as they go through the process of determining where the funds will go.

Denver Chief Financial Officer Brendan Hanlon called the website an effort to “meet people where they’re at.”

“This is something where folks can engage on any one subject individually or all of the subjects. They can take a survey, they can provide open-ended feedback,” Hanlon said. “We tried to create something that is as flexible as possible.”

The city is planning to launch a stimulus investment advisory committee that will review all of the feedback from the community, City Council, businesses and regional partners to create an investment strategy.

The initial public input phase is set to end on June 7. The committee will present its findings from the community feedback later that month.

Denver’s estimated $700 million in COVID-19 relief funding is expected to come from the federal government and local tax revenues.

Denver will be receiving $308 million of federal funding from the American Rescue Plan. Half of the money will be given to the city this month and the other half will be distributed in approximately one year. All of the funding must be spent by the end of 2024.

For the other $400 million, city officials are planning to propose a general obligation bond program that Denver voters would see on the ballot in November. If passed by voters, those funds would be available through 2031.

“We have a tremendous opportunity,” Hanlon said. “We want to make sure these investments are available to us over a long recovery period.”

COVID-19 relief funds can be used for public health expenditures, addressing negative economic impacts from the pandemic, replacing lost public sector revenue, paying essential workers and investing in water, sewer and broadband infrastructure.

The funds cannot be used for direct pension contributions, debt service payments or tax rate reductions, according to spending guidelines from the U.S. Treasury Department.