Welcome everyone. I'd like to call to order the
February 20th regular City Council meeting and I ask
those who would like to join the Council and
myself in the Pledge of Allegiance to please stand.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United
States of America and to the Republic for which
it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty
and justice for all. I'd
like to note that Councilmember Martz has an excused absence this evening and will not
be joining us and Councilmember Bautiste will be standing in as Council President this evening.
The first item under special business is AB 7550 the Mayor's State of the City
Address. Just wanted to say a few words quickly that this is very dissimilar from
the State of the Union in that we do this at a business meeting so
there are no impromptu claps or boos, whichever, but you may feel free if you
wish to provide some feedback to me. I would love to hear by email your
thoughts and comments on what you've heard in the speech and what resonated. Thanks. So
I would like to welcome everybody this evening. Good evening to the residents, community members,
council members and city staff. I'm excited to be here this evening presenting a State
of the City message. I want to share with you some accomplishments from the past
year my vision for the future and highlight some upcoming activities of the city. My
primary objective this evening is that you take away a sense of optimism and enthusiasm
about our future because that's how I feel and that's why I'm so excited to
serve. We have numerous opportunities ahead of us, a firm commitment to get things done
well and a desire to try new things along the way. We live in
an amazing place. I know you value our natural setting and that it is essential
to our mountain town character. The Issaquah Alps, Lake Sammamish, Issaquah Creek and the surrounding
public lands in many ways define our community identity. We are in both an enviable
and a challenging position at the edge of the urban growth boundary. Our developing
urbanism will bring us more opportunities for jobs, entertainment, recreation and services, but
we also face issues of access, affordability, mobility and stewardship. Our unique topography
funnels traffic from within and outside of our city onto our congested roads
and that threatens to diminish our quality of life and limit our access
to amenities. This past year we started drafting our park strategic plan which will shape
the future preservation and enhancement of our parks, our open spaces and our trails. I
am proud of the community's energetic involvement in this planning effort. I look forward to
the public's and the council's review of the draft plan this spring and to see
the updated plan for future park and trail improvements on the valley floor. as the
character of Central Issaquah moves from suburban to urban over these next few decades. I
am very excited to start planning a new off-leash dog park in Issaquah and working
with residents to site and cooperatively operate this new amenity. In the very near term,
I will proudly participate in the opening of a new turf field at Central Park
and all the associated picnic, playground, and trail amenities. Going forward we will also
continue to work with our partners to preserve critical tracts of land, restore habitat, protect
water quality and improve access to the outdoors for all users. During this past year
the city purchased several Creekside properties and made improvements to several parks including Confluence and
Central Parks as well as completing the construction and opening of a new skate park
facility at State Route 900 and Newport Way adjacent to Tibbetts Park. We worked
with King County on an innovative trailhead access program and participated in King
County's land conservation initiative to identify high conservation value lands and trails for
preservation. We continue to serve as a proud founding member of the King
County City's Climate Collaboration or K4C. Through this collaboration we have established commitments
and actions to reduce climate impacts. This past year, our City Council also
adopted a sustainable building strategy designed to put Issaquah back at the forefront of
environmental sustainability innovation. At a time when our region is pressured by its popularity,
we believe we can provide a vibrant community and have a positive impact on
the economy, the environment, and the people who call Issaquah home. We are
indeed at a pivotal moment in time, attempting to carefully grow. We have a good
foundation of state, regional and local plans and practices that have envisioned growth. We are
also a community that is already fortunate to have a mix of services, the beauty
of the outdoors, employment opportunities and so much more. However, the pressure is on our
city and our region to continue to welcome and house new residents and so we
need to thoughtfully build upon that foundation That includes taking care not to displace
jobs or commercial spaces or retail amenities or natural gifts like our forested
hillsides or our existing neighborhood character. It also includes linking our transportation plans
and solutions to the type and size of development that will occur. Thoughtful growth requires
analyzing what we need and what we need to advocate for. Issaquah is a remarkable
and a great place today. We face challenges now and we will continue to evolve
and be different in the future, but we will remain focused on being a great
place. Our plans and actions show that we are changing from a small town to
a more urban city. In the past, our growth was due to annexations and development
of raw land. In the future, our growth will be redevelopment, adding density and moving
away from single story buildings and expansive surface parking lots to mid-sized and mid-rise buildings
that are designed for mixed use, and then onto possibly even taller buildings and structured
parking. this growth will be focused on the valley floor both north and south
of interstate 90. we will have new businesses employers services and residents ultimately we will
grow from a city of 37 000 to a city of 50 000 people and
we are not the only ones our region is expected to grow by 1.8 million
residents by the year 2050 that includes ongoing growth in all of istiklal's neighboring cities
As anticipated by the Growth Management Act and the City's plans, that growth is happening
now and it's occurring with greater speed than forecast forecasted. We are in rapid learning
mode as we now see clearly the challenges and take steps to modify our approach
to mitigating gross impacts The City recently imposed a moratorium on most types
of new development. That moratorium will soon end. The moratorium's pause gave us the
opportunity to create stronger requirements for better architectural fit creative and functional urban design,
additional affordable housing as our housing stock grows, planning for vertical mixed uses that allow
retail and commercial to be in the same building as residential, and planning for structured
or below-grade parking versus surface parking lots. Even with these adjustments, we need to
recognize that redevelopment will be disruptive at times. However, we are committed to meeting this
reality with a plan for good growth, including improving our communication with residents and implementing
a strategy of managing contractors and keeping them accountable with our expectations that they be
good neighbors. We are strategizing about how to preserve what we love about our unique
neighborhoods. Last year the Old Town sub area plans completion was delayed while we worked
on the moratorium. We are getting that project back on track so that we can
get the results we want and we need like future development that is compatible with
what exists now. Another critical area that requires attention is transportation. my top priority
is to make it easier for our residents to get around town this means we
will not prioritize getting pass-through traffic through our city over our own mobility needs or
over our goals to increase the number of options we have for how to get
around we need to better control pass-through traffic and better manage its impact on our
community despite that challenge there are many things to be excited about in the transportation
arena we are entering a phase where we will get ready for light rail this
phase includes learning from those cities that have already received light rail We're also making
progress on major projects that are either in design or construction. These include improvements
to Newport Way, the extension of Southeast 62nd Street from East Lake Sammamish Parkway
to Lake Drive and the Costco and Pickering areas, and the related reopening of
our beloved 4th Avenue Northwest undercrossing of I-90. In 2018, we're also adding new
resources to help us shape our transportation future. Those include a Transportation Advisory
Board and development of a Master Mobility Plan. I also expect that staff
and Council will collaborate this year on options for securing the funding we
absolutely need in order to build our mobility infrastructure, including sidewalks, multi-use trails,
intersection improvements, transit facilities, structured parking, refreshed pavement, and traffic calming elements in
neighborhoods experiencing issues with speeding. While our city is in good financial health,
demands for our services continue to grow. We need to continue to have discussions about
how we will provide for desired and expected service levels in the future. Those tough
conversations need to be about the prioritization of programs, services and projects, and the long-term
financial plan for each. Transportation is just one of several areas that are going to
require thoughtful financial commitment. Not too far out on our horizon, we will begin to
have a conversation about the long-term plan for our water system, how to ensure the
production of water and how to ensure the water is of the highest quality. This
may also require a significant new investment. Additionally, we will discuss how to improve the
effectiveness and delivery of our public services through consolidation, relocation, and/or enhancement of our facilities.
With these large conversations and significant decisions on the horizon, I'm excited to kick off
our city's strategic planning process this year, a first for our city. Our goal will
be to identify and affirm the vision for the city, establish community-based priorities, and create
a framework for decision making. We will aim to engage all corners of our community
in the dialogue. And at the end, we will have a measurable near-term action strategy
for how to move us to our desired future. I hope that all of you
will stay engaged and seek out ways to be involved in these strategic planning efforts.
In closing this State of the City Address, I want to share what an honor
it is to serve the community, my home. It is a joy and a huge
responsibility. During my tenure I have placed a priority on listening and making sure that
you feel heard. I will consider different opinions and voices. I will be open to
new and additional ways to share your thoughts. We're going to try some new things
such as a concept I call City Hall Outside. I'm eager to come to where
you are, not to force you to come to City Hall. We are also working
to increase transparency and responsiveness in all things we do. Examples of that will include
revamping our public notice process, televising and recording more board and commission meetings and adding
more interactive and self-service tools for you as a resident and a customer like the
ability to use credit card payments for services and have online access to your transactions
in the city change by its nature is new and different but we are working
hard to ensure it is also a net positive to you and our community thank
you for your attention this evening and for your ongoing engagement
Next item on our agenda this evening is audience comments. Audience members may address the
council at this time. There are some guidelines on how to do audience comments on
our agenda and if you've signed up to make comments this evening we'll be calling
you up first. After we've gone through the list of those that have signed up
I will check to see if there's anyone else in the audience that would like
to talk. When your name is called please come up to the lectern in the
microphone and state your name and address and relationship to the city. uh comments should
be limited to five minutes and if you have written comments or materials you'd like
to submit to the city clerk come on and bring them up there's also a
public hearing tonight regarding the first major amendment to the costco development agreement if you
would like to make comments on this top topic you will have an opportunity opportunity
to do so later on in the meeting Thank you very
much for coming tonight and taking the time to address
us during our meetings. It's very important for myself as
well as the entire council to hear your comments and
concerns. Has anyone signed up to speak this evening? Yes,
Deb Lawrence. Hi, my name is Deb Lawrence. I live
at 236 Southeast Bush Street in Issaquah in Old Town
and I am a property owner since early 1991.
My comments tonight are to, I'm wishing the city council
to, well, we have a safety situation in Old Town
with people trying, pedestrians trying to cross Second Avenue Southeast.
This road has gotten a lot of traffic on it
and traffic coming down the hill does not want to
stop or does not see pedestrians. and going in the
other direction. They're looking to go up the hill and no
one's looking out for pedestrians. I've gotten hit almost, almost gotten
hit four times in the crosswalk and I'm like, this is,
it was craziness because there's a lot of school children that have to
cross Second Avenue to get back and forth to their elementary school. There's
people that go to the community center that cross this roadway and to
the pool, to the downtown area. The walkability is horrible and it's dangerous
and it's very scary to cross Second Avenue Southeast. So I
have petitioned, walked around with a petition in
my area. I was able to contact out
of the roughly 167 occupied homes, I was
able to contact 120 of them. which is over
70%. And out of those, 92.5% signed the contract and
it was overwhelmingly positive. They thanked me for doing this.
They really want something done about the crosswalks. And our
proposal is we're requesting the city to install yellow flashing
pedestrian lights so people can get at the intersection of Bush
and 2nd Avenue Southwest so people can cross safely. And also the lights
will, when they turn on, vehicles will see the lights and know that
someone is wanting to cross the crosswalk. I did write a letter, have
a cover letter with the petitions and everyone's signature and the map of
the area. So and I also would like a response from the
city council. I like the response at I I know you can get
this accomplished and I would like to see it done. I would hate
to see some day here big crash and then see somebody out there
on the road and I think it's just inevitable that that will happen
unless something this crosswalk situation is corrected. Thank you Deb,
and if you just want to walk the materials up
here, we'll take them from you. Thank you very much.
Isha, is there another? Yes. Next we have Esperanza Borboa.
Hi, good evening. Thank you for the opportunity to be
able to speak on something that is, I think affects
everybody in the City of Issaquah, whether people use the
human services or not. I work for an organization, our address
is 123-920th Avenue NE in Bellevue, 98005. And you're probably wondering what
is somebody from Bellevue doing in Issaquah? We provide civil legal aid
to low-income individuals on the east side. We are the only civil
legal aid organization providing services to people all the way to Snoqualmie,
we're even down south as far as Auburn, up to Bothell, and
all this area. We have 27 clinics that we manage each month
in Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond and Issaquah. We have a clinic we do here
twice a month, a family law clinic and a general law clinic. We
also do Know Your Rights workshops and we've done those in the library.
We're actually going to be moving our clinic hopefully soon to the Senior
Center. Knock on wood if there's any wood on here. So The recent
needs assessment that you mentioned earlier sheds light on the increased need of
human services. With the ever-changing landscape in our immigration policies, ELAP is experiencing
a substantial increase in the need for legal assistance and education by your
residents. We have been contacted by students, families, teachers, providers about the fear
that resonates throughout the immigrant community. In addition, we're hearing from non-immigrants and
social service providers asking, what can we do? How can we support our
immigrant neighbors and not get in trouble? Issaquah has grown over the past
10 years. The demographic changes bring challenges that you struggle to address. We
can help. We currently provide, as I mentioned, the legal clinics. We communicate
and collaborate with agencies and organizations throughout Issaquah. and we target what
we do for the Know Your Rights workshops, we don't just show up and say,
"Oh, we're gonna do this workshop." We have a relationship with organizations here and find
out what is the need in this community. We did a landlord-tenant rights workshop at
the library not too long ago because that was the need. We're gonna do a
Wills and Estate workshop at the Senior Center because that's what they want. And we're
going to do a one on scams and identity theft because that is a need.
There's a lot of things that people need around legal issues that affect their lives
either through employment, through housing, healthcare. And we hope that we can count on your
support today to pass the increased funding for the Human Services Grant. This increases a
recognition of the growth and the unanticipated challenges facing the City of
Issaquah. Yes, the challenges are great. Together we can better meet the
challenges. And I want to thank you very much for the opportunity
again to speak. Thank you Esperanza. Next is Bruce Semple.
Thank you Mayor Pauley and Council Members. My name is Bruce Semple and
I live at 100 Timber Ridge Way North West and I'm a resident
of Issaquah. As you doubtless know the construction of the Timber Ridge Continuing
Care Retirement Community at Tallis is now complete and I'm pleased to report
that the resident community is now approaching 500 with 90% of the apartments
already committed, it's becoming a major force. We're a very active group, in spite of
our age, and we've now begun to reach out into our broader community to seek
ways to add value wherever we can. We all wish we could have been here
tonight to hear Mayor Pawley's State of the City, and for many to experience a
Council meeting for the first time. However, given the available space and in
clement weather, we only thought that those, we only brought those available of our hardiest
and most enthusiastic. Channel 21 will be well attended by those at home who could
not venture out tonight. I also speak out for our community in reminding the Council
that Timber Ridge and its residents are very concerned about the fate of the Tallis
Development Agreement and urge the Council to end it. By doing so and
authorising the replacement agreement, Timber Ridge residents and indeed all Tallis residents and the
general public will have a voice in any proposed changes to parcel 17B. Importantly,
it would provide a chance to work with the developer to identify a land
use plan that is agreeable and mutually beneficial to all interested parties. Thank you.
bruce i wonder if you could get your group to
raise their hand because i know you came with some
extras today awesome thank you so much but seven or
eight folks in the audience with bruce randy wood my
name is randy wood i live at 61 mount pilchuck
avenue northwest i've been a resident of issaquah for 40
plus years and a property owner in old town for
30 plus years I'm just here to say basically I want to thank the council
in the city for the work on the traffic calming project that's going on through
Old Town. I really appreciate it as the ability to try to have some sort
of situation that's safer for everybody around as you get the commuters heading in the
morning one direction and the evening the other direction and the high school kids zipping
through to get home with a thousand cars at the end of the school day
one of my concerns is that the items that are being used whether it's humps
bumps lumps cushions or whatever they choose to do seem to have some impact on
things but i'm concerned with the chicanes The chicanes are narrowing the roads down to
one lane, which is a good option for people to play chicken. Am I going
to go, or are you going to go, or who's going to go? And at
the same time, if you are going, for some of the youth, and I've been
associated with the school system here for a long time, it's pretty fun to zip
through there and see how we can do it in a rapid fashion. So that's
the main thing. The other piece would be the gathering of feedback, which I appreciate
the city is doing and asking for and has been handling. The ability to get
on the appropriate website to give the information to the city has created some sort
of issues at times for people to do so. and I would hope that maybe
there would be some sort of a mailing or something where there would be a
paper type deal so the people that live in Old Town could respond and send
it back in or drop it off at some location and they might get a
little more response to some of the issues that they're talking about. So again, I
thank you for working on things. I think the chicanes are a danger, but hopefully
it'll work out and everything will be better. Thank you. Thank you, Randy. Jerry Blackburn?
Good evening. My name is Jerry Blackburn. I live at 140 Rainier Boulevard South. Yes
to all the traffic stuff, thank you. But tonight I wanted to talk in favor
of the Human Services grants and the increases. It's even leery to think about them
as increases really when we talk about the significant growth that Issaquah is experiencing and
the social service struggles that ultimately come with those realities as we get bigger. You
know, not every population gets to thrive and is lucky as we are. And so
I think the heart of any community is really what they do for those who
don't have and can't speak up. And that's what those grants really allow a lot
of different organizations who are here tonight to do. I'm a representative of Friends of
Youth on the Program Manager for Substance Abuse and Prevention Services. We've been down the
street for the dawn, since the dawn of time, I think we're going
on 35 years or so, supporting the Issaquah community with mental health, substance use
disorder and homeless services and our commitment to continuing that is part of why
we engage these kinds of events and letting folks know that those services are
so needed and so appreciated. Every day we come into contact with individuals who
are having significant struggles just getting their basic needs met, struggling with mental
health conditions and substance use disorders that impede their capabilities of being productive
and it impacts our community in a really significant fashion. So the more
that we can do preventatively and to engage those communities to be healthy and well
really services us all. I look at the, I had the honor of being part
of the community needs assessment and some of the data that we were able to
mine and kind of explore was really amazing to me. You know, I look at
stuff like that all the time in my work, but to watch it reflect my
community, looking at our graduation rates and 15% fluctuations just
because of poverty. Not intelligence, lack of food, lack
of subsistence, impacting education and stuff. we can do better. And so
when I think about what we have the capacity to do with the social service
grants is impact our community so that everybody has that level of sustainability and productivity.
Our anxiety levels as we look at the Healthy You Survey are astronomical in comparison
to some communities, and it's systemic across grade levels. Eighth graders, tenth
graders, and twelfth graders reporting significant levels of anxiety in their day-to-day
activities. Like that's not developmental, if it's affecting every grade level it's systemic so what
can we do and how can we support those people obviously a lot of us
are aware of the current opiate crisis and we have individuals who are in our
downtown communities and and throughout the the Issacar region struggling significantly just to access healthcare.
And again, those are things that we can do better. Thinking about our homeless
populations and how we can support them and intervene and support them to access
services is all capable through those grants. So I wanted to express my gratitude
for the work that you're doing to make sure that those funds are available
for community resources and hopefully we can help a couple more people along the
way. So thanks for your time. Jerry. Bob Swanson.
Hello, my name is Bob Swanson. I live in 826 4th Avenue Northeast up in
the Iskwaw Highlands. First of all, I just want to thank the City Council and
the Mayor. Once again, you've heard me say before, it's the greatest city in the
country. I feel sorry for all those other cities. Mary Lou, I just appreciate your
vision. I think that Personally, I think I've already seen Bob. We're having a coffee
next week. Okay, well, then all right, but I do appreciate your vision I think
it's good and good job. That'd be awesome. All right, so I'm going here and
Okay, so I said this once before so one of the persons have seen this
yet, so that's good But one man can make a difference. It's I truly believe
this in my life. I don't know why this is Okay, hold on a second
one man can make a difference Believe it or not, there's a guy named Tank
Man or an unknown protester. He actually stopped four tanks at one time in Tenement
Square all by himself. One man inspired the whole entire world. This is on a
timer. Hold on. I don't know why it's on. Yeah. So these screens might... This
gentleman, I don't know if he's the one, actually took down the President of the
United States, Frank Willis. He was a security guard. He found tape on the front
door. He figured out, uh-oh, so he took the tape off. And what happened was
he came back later on in his rounds. He saw the tape on there again
a second time. Then he called the police. And five men were arrested that night.
And not too long later, a couple of years later, he took down the President
of the United States. One man made a difference. I personally think Nixon should have
gone to jail, but... That's just me. This man, Schindler's List,
Oscar Schindler, incredible person. had saved 1,200 Jews. Nobody was clapping for
him. He couldn't send any emails in. There was nobody there raising his hands, raising
things in support of him. He did it all by himself because he would have
been arrested, you know, and put in jail, probably killed maybe, if people would have
found out what he was doing. It estimated in the amount of money he used
back then was $1,200,000, close to there, which is a ton of money. back then
and today, it's even more. Now, some people may believe this gentleman is our superintendent,
but it is not for the schools. It looks incredibly like him, I don't know,
pretty funny. This is one man could have made a difference. His name is Don
Anderson, he's the mayor of Lakewood. When the train derailed, he was telling people, listen,
don't let that train go through there. We're gonna come here and there are gonna
be deaths. So the people here said the high-speed train's gonna kill somebody someday. It
was $181 million to save 10-minute commute going from Portland to Seattle. He was telling
everybody, listen, this is not right. We shouldn't do this. It's a waste of money.
It's going to be wasting people's lives. He knew the trains were not supposed to
go through that area because of speed and turns and so forth. He ended up
being right, but nobody listened. This gentleman here, John Pennington, he was the head of
Department of Emergency for Sonomish County. He wasn't necessarily the person in charge the entire
time. From 1936 or so all the way through, people were warning about the the
Homish slide that it was going to happen. It actually happened twice and then it
happened a third time. But what happened is, he said, it was considered very safe.
This was completely unforeseen slide. This came out of nowhere. That's not actually true. Scientists
and people were saying stuff for a long time. But the department continued to let
people build down there and, crazy, take the trees down off the hill. I don't
know why they did that. That was the dumbest thing ever. Anyway, so this man
could have made a difference. One man can make a difference. Emails versus 30
signed petitions, I don't know if you have to have emails, but I think 30
signed petition is pretty good. Signs held up versus one man standing up. It doesn't
matter one person or a hundred people standing up. Somebody, one man can still be
right. The reason why I'm doing this again, because I just, I wanted to do
this before, but my PowerPoint wouldn't work, so I make them into pictures now so
that it works. But now it's on a timer that keeps moving, so I just
can't win. But next time I do this, I guess it's gonna be in two
weeks. Two weeks from yesterday, I hope. By the way, I came yesterday. I didn't
know it was a, I forgot it was a city holiday, but I'm committed at
least. But next time I'm gonna get some people here and I'm gonna show you
people can hold signs up. I personally don't see much in signs, but I just
want you all to know, I know I keep talking about it, about this is
a terrible place to build a school. I still believe it. I've talked to Keith.
Keith and I have had some real good talks. He helped me understand about how
they're going to-- Boy, this is just not going to stop, is it? There we
go. and how they're, what they're gonna do to expand, but it is still going
to, you're gonna have one day, I promise you, there's gonna be people and ambulance
needs to get through from one direction to another. That is going to be clogged
up at the top of the hill at the light. I guarantee it. Ambulance aren't
gonna get through. People with women, children who are in their cars aren't gonna get
through. They don't have a light and they don't have a siren. Thank you very
much. - Thank you, Bob. - No one further has signed up to speak. Is
there anyone in the audience that would also like to address the
county? Come on forward to state your name, your address, and your
relationship with the city. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Nella
Cumming and I'm here representing Encompass. Encompass is an organization, our physical
address is in North Bend, 1407 Bolch Avenue, Northwest, Washington 98045.
I'm going to read this. It's not very exciting, but I want to stay on
task. So you'll thank me later for reading this because I will go all over.
So I'm here tonight representing Encompass where I serve as the executive director. Encompass is
a not-for-profit organization that serves infants, toddlers, and young children and their families in the
Snoqualmie Valley and in Issaquah. Last year, we served 1,500 children and their families through
a variety of early learning and pediatric therapy programs. Many of our programs, including early
intervention for infants and toddlers with developmental delays or disabilities, are offered in the
family's home. The number of children treated through in-home early intervention services in Issaquah
has increased 35% over last year. Early intervention therapy can, is proven to reduce
or eliminate the need for special education services when the children transition into public
school, increase the likelihood of school success and success in life.
Encompass also provides behavioral health interventions for very young children, including
parent-child interaction therapy, which is an evidence-based, short-time limited therapy for
children aged 2 to 7 with severe disruptive behavior. It is
also very effective for child abuse prevention. Due to the
increased need for those services in Issaquah, which have increased almost 40% over last
year based on calls to Encompass, we're bringing our mobile therapy unit, which is
a PCIT lab on wheels, to Issaquah once a week. We'll increase that to
twice a week once we get enough, you know, organized scheduled visits. The
staff who work with families in Issaquah continue to report an increased need
for services and also increased family stress mostly around financial issues, the high
cost of living, affordable housing, it's no surprise, add increased stress to our
families. They also see a report an increase in mental health needs among
our parents or need for mental health services among our parents.
The proposed Head Start funding target increase, which is Agenda Bill 7479 for
Human Services Grant Funding Cycle, represents an increase that is very needed given
the increase of needs for services. And I'm here, my comments tonight are
to encourage that that get approved. The City of Issaquah has supported our work
at Encompass on behalf of Issaquah residents for many years. And so on behalf of
Encompass and all other human services organizations that serving Issaquah residents, thank you so much
for your continued support of human services. Thank you, Nella.
Hi, my name is Rachel Krinsky and I'm the Executive Director at LifeWire and as
you can imagine I'm also here to support the increase in human services. LifeWire is
the largest organization in the state of Washington serving victims and survivors of domestic violence
and doing work to prevent domestic violence. Office location is confidential, but based in Bellevue,
and we serve many residents of Issaquah. And I want to thank the Council for
quite a few years of support. It's really been wonderful to be in partnership with
you. In 2017, we served 80 survivors from Issaquah with one-on-one direct advocacy services, which
was a 25% increase over 2016. Nine survivors and their children from Issaquah were helped
with emergency shelter to escape violent homes, and perhaps even more importantly, eight households stayed
housed in Issaquah who would have become homeless, but we were able to help them
maintain housing and find a safer path while staying in their homes in Issaquah. We
also served Issaquah residents on our 24-hour helpline and in support groups. And we too
do mobile work. And so although our office is in Bellevue, we work with folks
wherever they want to be seen and can be safe, including locations in Issaquah. We're
really proud to say and also dismayed to say that these numbers are
twice as large as we anticipated or contracted with you. As the population
changes in Issaquah and grows, the need for domestic violence services is increasing
and we anticipate continued growth. Switching hats. I am also co-chair of the
King County Alliance for Human Services and the Alliance wearing that hat. We would like
to thank you too. As many of you know, we've been talking to all the
cities in King County about a goal of reaching 6% of general revenue being used
for human services. And we know that Issaquah has been increasing. your commitment to
human services each biennium and I really encourage you on behalf
of both LifeWire and the coalition to continue doing so. Thank
you. Thank you, Rachel. Hi, good evening, Mayor and Council Members.
My name is Siri Blasner and I'm the Outcome and Evaluation
Analyst for HopeLink, a nonprofit agency. I am also in addition a member of the
board of the Eastside Human Services Forum. And I very much appreciate this opportunity to
speak with you tonight about the importance of human services. I think you'll hear many
of our comments to be similar to what you've already heard this evening. Hope Link
is a community action agency, multi-service. We provide services for over 64,000 low-income individuals and
families in King and Snohomish County. In Issaquah, we serve about 850 individuals each year,
the majority of these with basic needs services such as energy assistance or
financial crisis assistance, typically for housing expenses or transportation. In September of 2017,
HopeLink completed a similar needs assessment as Issaquah did, but for our service
area, and our key findings align very much with Issaquah and highlighted similar
themes. One of Hopelink's key findings included the increased cost for basic needs such
as housing and transportation having increased steadily over the last 20 years, while the
poverty rate has increased, noted in Issaquah's assessment as well. These additional costs are
more than double to triple the federal poverty level, putting extreme pressure on household
incomes. In addition, limited access to services due to a lack of local presence,
complicated eligibility processes, cultural or language barriers came out as key areas to address going
forward. I would like to thank you for your leadership to prioritize and address the
basic needs of some of Issaquah's most vulnerable residents in the 2019-2020 funding biennium.
Hope Link supports staff's recommendation for increased human service investments in the
upcoming two years. Please know your support makes a huge difference in
the lives of so many people in our community. Thank you. Hi,
I'm Corrie Walters, Executive Director for the Issaquah Food and Clothing Bank.
And first I'd like to thank City Council and the City of Issaquah for supporting
Human Services and being such great supporters of the food bank. We really appreciate it.
I'm here to also encourage you to support the 2019-2020 funding increase for the Human
Services. In the last grant cycle, the food bank has actually seen a
pretty big increase in our services. In particular, from 2015 to 2017, we saw
a 13% increase in services just for seniors. And when we added up all
of our output and touch points for our youth and senior programs, we saw
an increase of almost 90%. So our lunch for the break program, summer lunch,
grocery delivery program to homebound citizens, I mean our numbers have just skyrocketed in the
last two years, partially because we're filling that gap and that need. More people are
coming to us asking for support and services and more community support is showing up
at the food bank to help us meet that need. So we're doing a better
job. So thank you for your help in those areas. We had a Nourishing Network
meeting today and that's a group of local nonprofits that come together once a month
to talk about those needs and we talked about the community needs assessment and what
we see maybe lacking in our community currently and some of the things that were
brought up was, of course, affordable housing. Not having affordable housing makes it challenging for
people to live here. Affordable childcare was something we talked about for a
long time. A safe day and shelter, night shelters for people who are
homeless. We see a need for an increase in senior services and then just
general access to services that aren't here. Sound mental health, domestic violence services, programs that
maybe don't have brick and mortar here that serve our area but are may not
be as accessible because they have to our citizens have to go to Bellevue or
Renton or somewhere else to access those. So As our numbers have increased in
the last few years, we see that continuing in the future. I don't see
it getting smaller. So thank you for your support and I just encourage you
to support the increase in human service funds. Thank you. Thank you, Corrie. I
see Steve making his way up. Mary Pauley, Council. Steve Pereira, Old Town for
about 10 years. A couple of thoughts, a wish list that I would add
to Mayor Pauley's list was I'd like to see a position or some way of
designating who is responsible for the natural beauty in Issaquah. I know we have an
economic development director, I know we have growth and planning, but I don't, and this
would be an addition or maybe outside the natural green necklace beauty that maintains that.
I don't know how to do that, but I think that's something we need to
talk about, a way of maintaining that natural beauty or that's gonna be lost. One
thing, another thing I'd like to see is The packages, packets that came out with
City Council meetings be available more than the Friday before the next meeting. That's something
that isn't sustainable. Next issue, the Costco Development Agreement. No comments. There was, I think,
a plan in there to talk about it again in April for a public forum
meeting. So I'd like to see that happen. No comments at this time. Docket of
Comprehensive Plan Amendments. I know one of the things I had asked previously was that
One of and and there may be a difference between this and the plan for
the tree canopy I know I asked to that just be talked about last year
and PPC that didn't get to happen because it was enough staff staff or man
hours to make that happen. I don't see that in the current docket of comprehensive
plan items. I'd like to see that get added before we lose that 50% tree
canopy. Do we even have 50% tree canopy? I think we need to talk about
that before we lose that any further, if that's still a goal or if it's
not listed in the packet, is that just a bait and switch to make it
not happen? That concerns me. The other thing in the comprehensive plan docket was that
the Issaquah Treasurer's was gonna be pushed until 2019. I'd like to see a more
comprehensive list of what we have and what are Treasurer's identified before we lose any
of those maybe further growth and development. I don't know what those necessarily are, but
I think we need to document the further and not move that to 2019 to
make that happen sooner. Lastly, the Human Services grant, I already sent an email with
my input on that, so I won't belabor that further. Thanks for your time and
thanks for all of those who are doing good works. Thanks. Oh, and I just
like the, The one person can make a difference pitch the optimistic approach that I
think not just for you City Council But everybody might be listening to this or
might be present get out there and be involved make a difference. Thank you Thank
you Steve. Is there anyone else who would like to speak this evening? I think
we probably have a few more if you want to come over closer to the
podium. That would be great Dave David Kepler 255 Southeast Andrews quickly Second Avenue is
functioning more like an arterial now with with the signal and not the stop signs
and the concerns about the speeds there and pedestrian crossing of Second Avenue in the
area of Andrews and Bush is serious. Part of the problem by the Andrews one
at least is the way cars are parked there is very difficult for pedestrians to
be seen or pedestrians to see the oncoming cars, especially the northbound ones. You have
on your agenda tonight something about the good study that's going to be occurring with
Lake Sammamie State Park. City's paying, you know half the bills and so we want
to make sure we get our our property well that that enter ties with with
the state park and that's the Greenwood Trust property on the west and a property
that I don't know if any of you have ever been on but it is
pretty amazing the property you bought more recently on the east side of East Lake
Sammamish south of the Hans Jensen area. It is unbelievable property. It does have some
developable area, which I know you've talked about fire station or something like that. But
a whole bunch of it is wetland. And then the hillside, which is already in
a very strict conservation easement has unbelievable trees and the connection is not trails
and things we can do with that property and the underused hands Jensen
property are really really pretty exciting. So just think about make sure that
you get your property well studied. Hillside properties on the comp plan updates.
One of the things those properties are highly visible. They would have great views
out from them if they were developable, but they're hard to develop and they
haven't been developed. If they are developed, there's a lot of conflicts with streams,
ravines, interesting soils and the rest. So do your best to
figure out how to acquire some of those hillside properties that
will also be access, instead of building trailheads, they'll be access
points for our residents. And the whole business, again, on the
comp plan about what's going to happen when the train comes to light rail, comes
to Issaquah, the end of the line thing. I keep thinking about when I go
visit my daughter in Brooklyn, there's a huge yard there where all these dead subway
cars and all this stuff is there. And you do have to, you know, you're
talking about a maintenance area, you're going to be storing cars and that. Where do
you want all those cars at 5 in the morning? You want them in Issaquah
because we're going to have everybody from Sammamish, the Snoqualmie Valley, Maple Valley coming here.
So how are we going to deal with that is really important.
Maybe Fred Kemp's years ago discussion of pods is a quad press
I'm sure wrote about it. Maybe that's what's going to happen by
the time the train gets here. Thank you. Thank you, Dave.
Elizabeth Maupin, I moved to Issaquah when there were 3,000
residents. That gives you an idea how long I've been
here. And it has grown tremendously. In all the time
I've been here, I've found Issaquah to be a very
caring community. And up until now, people have been really
supportive of school levies, but this year they're kind of squeaking through.
I think there's something there that needs some attention. It might be
time to have a citizen group talking about and really
having eyes on the ground looking for some creative solutions
to designing and siting schools, looking at safety, closeness to
families, preserving our natural surroundings and beauty, and the historical
and cultural treasures, which it seems that the city hasn't
really prioritized. I'm still hurting that there were a bunch
of citizens who put tens of thousands of dollars into trying to hold
on to the gem that Providence Heights is and keep for the city
a place that we could have symphonies and museum, all kinds of wonderful
things, including some affordable housing we're kind of short on. One of the
things I'd like to say is that this city has both historical
cultural treasures in terms of buildings and it has historical
cultural treasures in terms of people. The people who've been
here a long time are the ones who've welcomed the
newcomers and a lot of the pressures of growth and
rising land costs are pushing out some of these people
who really are the culture. of Issaquah. I see that
the city owns some property that has houses on it, at
least one house down that way, close to the river. You're
going to tear it down eventually. But while it's standing, could
that be a place where we might offer some human
services right here in the community. If we force the people who are
on the edge in our community to leave the community to get resources,
we are depriving them of their social safety net. Particularly bothers me that
the young people have to go all the way up to Redmond. It's
not easily accessible. Transportation-wise, they get stranded up there. We need
some resources here. We're going to be a big town of 50,000. I
think it's about time we start looking at what we can provide locally
and not thinking that we're just a little teeny village of 3,000 and
everybody needs to go to the big cities for help. And I've heard
that there's a need in town for 24-hour access to case managers.
I know that there's a need for some day shelter for people other
than the library, someplace that they can get out of the rain to
at night. Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth. Is there anyone else that would
like to speak this evening? Second call for public comment. Last call for
public comment. Seeing none, that will close public comment.
Thank you to the more than 12 speakers tonight who spoke on a variety of
topics including the one of the items the council will be dealing with this evening.
We appreciate it very much. We'll now go to committee and regional reports and we'll
start with new council member Hunt. Thank you Madam Mayor. No report this evening. Thank
you. Council member Wray. Thank you, Mayor Paul Ace. So the Services and Safety
Committee met on February 13th. We had a very full agenda. We addressed Agenda Bill
7544, which was ARCH 2018 funding, and that will be moved to the March 5th
regular council meeting. We also addressed ARCH 2017 fall trust fund, also moving to the
March 5th meeting. We created, we visited, how appropriate we visited, we
visited creating the Visit Issaquah organization. This will be moved forward to the March
12th council work session for review and discussion of questions regarding governance, funding and
more information on tourism promotion areas. We'll then return it to the March 13th
Services and Safety Committee. We also addressed human services funding targets and that'll be
on today's agenda. There was plenty of comment on that. And we also talked about
police staffing resources and we moved that to today's regular meeting. There was an optional
expenditure for traffic enforcement and that's going to be brought forward as a separate agenda
bill and discussed at a future council work session and then return to services and
safety. I also, the next services and safety committee is March 13th at 6:30 right
here in council chambers. and the agenda has not yet been set. I had
the opportunity to attend the Sound Cities Association Public Issues Committee meeting as
an alternate for Council President Martz as he was ailing that day. A
couple of things of significant interest. One of the agenda items was the
King County Land Conservation Initiative and the County Executive has assembled an advisory
group to look at how to preserve open space in King County. They've
identified approximately 65,000 acres of land that they think is of high value and
worth preserving and an approximate value of $1.9 billion. That's with a B. They're
looking to bring forth a new conservation futures tax levy with an assessed value
at the statutory maximum of six and a quarter cents per thousand dollars of
assessed value. The next public, oh, also upcoming
events that might be of interest to the council. The Sound City Association Networking
Dinner featuring Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan is scheduled for Wednesday, February 28th at 5:30
p.m. at the Renton Pavilion. That might be of interest. The next SCA Public
Issues Committee meeting is March 14th, and I will be attending as Council President
Martz is, and he'd be out of the country. Finally, Eastside Fire and Rescue,
the Eastside Fire and Rescue Board met on February 8th. We elected new officers.
Alan Gotthold? - Atels. - Thank you. North Bend was elected our board chair and
Romero Valderrama from Sammamish was elected the vice chair. The board authorized the sale of
surplus equipment and passed a resolution in support of the merger of Fire District 10
and Fire District 27. The next EFRA board meeting is March 8th at four o'clock
and that concludes my report tonight. Thank you councilmember Ray councilmember Ramos, thank you. The
infrastructure committee met last week on the 15th and we had one action item which
is a be 7528 the are solid waste disposal contract with the city. So that
was discussed and it will be coming back to Council March 5th to make a
decision on that. The rest of the items were kind of informational and updates and
so forth. Of interest, update on the Squawk-Talos Community Connector project we're working with as
a pilot project with Metro to get some sort of transit access up Squawk and
Talos area. So they're looking for community input on that. So if you're interested in
transit in those areas, please look on the website. There's some stuff there for community
input as well. And then we talked a little bit about the complete streets policy
and there was some confusion in the past complete streets as the name has been
used for a couple different things and so we're trying to get that to where
it means one thing and not a couple different things so saying the past he
used to refer to where we did some improvements to repair or put new sidewalks
in and bike trust things to make a street you know whole well what we're
really looking at is a complete streets policy which we're trying to put into ordinance
and code that says this is how we build streets we have all those amenities
that we that we want and that would be then that policy code and not
an actual construction project those construction projects we will still do but we'll do them
now have their particular names to him so hopefully when you hear about complete streets
policy or ordinance that you look at how we as a city look at the
streets of how we want them long term in the future and it will guide
us in that sense so we'll work to get it that in. There was an
update on the old town coming traffic coming. project that is going on and there
was a again it's under way so that is coming in you know in as
it goes and it's not totally analyze it because the project the pilot produce on
over but overall it's been pretty well received and some folks comment on it as
well and overall so the other things interesting is there's been about a 5 to
8 mile an hour reduction of speed as we can see at this point in
time so that seems like it's having a good effects. And then we had brought
up the the city now has a lot of roundabouts we're probably having more as
we go in there and and we've seen that there's some issues on what's the
proper rules of the road on how people drive roundabouts and i've heard a lot
of different variations so we had a video from with explaining the rules of the
road how roundabouts work and so forth just kind of informational setting and then of
course we always have our project updates uh which had a great video on the
and there was a slide in here of your presentation the 62nd street construction project
if you haven't seen it go to our website it's a very fast play of
a minute or two or three minutes and it just has you know how everything's
happened over the last year and it's kind of cool to see things just kind
of rip through and happen it's kind of you know fast video versus slow motion
So that was the end of the infrastructure meeting. Then tomorrow I have a regional
transit committee meeting in King County Council Chambers. We'll be looking at a number of
issues. One of the issues I will be talking about is they're trying to bring
up ways to deal better parking at parking rights to have better access and utilization
so that people feel like they can find a parking spot. And so we'll be
talking about that as one of the items. Last week on the 14th, I was
at the Emergency Management Advisory Council workshop. Again, this is all municipalities and agencies in
king county trying to work together to be better prepared in the event of emergency
trying to get it to cross those lines and so when something happens we respond
in unison and not as individual entities so we're going to continue that work because
there's a lot of policy questions that'll we can work on to help improve that
and then lastly i was the east side transportation partnership on on the 9th of
February. And there was a change there in the membership of the Eastside Transportation
Partnership. Previously, it was the partnership Membership was from various agent municipalities and governmental groups
and there was a couple of I say affinity groups in there that had various
purposes of their own but they weren't governmental by design and we decided that we
want to keep that just the government agencies and not have those outside groups because
then it's and which ones are there and which ones aren't and it got a
little confusing so just change membership back to just writing members and that concludes my
report thank you council member ramos council member winterstein thank you madam mayor first i'll
mention the puget sound regional council's growth management policy board we have not met since
our last council meeting so i have nothing to report our next meeting is next
thursday on march 1st Last Friday on the 18th
of February, I did attend the last portion of the Chamber of Commerce's board
meeting. In this portion, the Chamber read us a letter that they said they would
be sending out, but I haven't received that yet. And in it, they stated their
positions on some of the remaining open items pertaining to the moratorium, as well as
their positions regarding some of the items relating to the end of the Highlands and
Talus development agreements. Deputy City Administrator or temporary City Administrator, I'm sorry.
Interim City Administrator. Interim, sorry, Emily. Emily Moon and I were there and we had
a conversation with the board afterwards. I think, I do hope to see the distribution
of that letter shortly. And as you and I discussed beforehand, another -- it's just
I view it as a constituent among us speaking and taking a position on matters
of importance to the Chamber. So I welcome the conversation. I think we're going to
continue having those conversations. And my last report will be on the Lodging Tax Advisory
Committee. Now we did not have a meeting recently, but in my capacity as chair
of the LTAC, as it's called, I was invited to attend a meeting last Wednesday,
February 14th, between Washington State Parks and a representative from the Association of Volleyball Professionals,
or AVP. the purpose was to discuss plans for the upcoming tournament coming to lake
sammamish state park this june for the fourth time in a row and also hear
about some of the advanced planning they're doing for the 2019 tournament the avp does
want to grow this tournament considerably and they are doing again they are doing some
advanced planning with state parks christopher wright from our development services was there also and
he will be processing their special event application. A big topic for everyone is getting
spectators and participants and just the general public in and out of the park efficiently
during the tournament time and to minimize the impact to our local streets. State Parks
can make and is talking about making some changes related to the processing of visitors
in and out of the park. and the possible use of off-site parking and a
shuttle bus was discussed. Making improvements in 2018 and advance for a larger tournament
in 2019 would be critical. And I think AVP is going to kind of
judge whether or not that's something they still want to do by how well
it goes in 2018. And by larger, they mean there will be international competitors
drawing potentially two to three times the crowd seen in 2017 and expanded television
coverage. There was a comment at this meeting made about LTAC maybe contributing to a
portion of the promotion of the event, but no formal request has been made and
the committee has not discussed it. If a formal request is made and LTAC chooses
to make funds available, it will come back to this council for approval of the
appropriation. And I'll keep you updated as this develops. That concludes my report. Thank you,
Councilmember Winterstein. Councilmember Goodman? Thank you, Madam Mayor. And in short, committee met February
8th and Councilmember Ray filled in for Council President March. Thank you very much. Here's
what happened in our meeting. We have a standing item at the beginning of
every one of our meetings since the moratorium was enacted about the status of the
moratorium. And there are two items left to be completed under the moratorium. One is
inclusionary zoning. The other one is district visioning. The visioning is currently before PP's Planning
Policy Commission and expected to be at Land and Shore in March. And...
We discussed the inclusionary zoning piece later on in our meeting, Agenda Bill 7507. The
committee recommended to the full council that it direct the administration to enter into a
contract with Eco Northwest to do a case study of the Atlas apartment buildings to
understand the implications of inclusionary zoning with the results of the study recommended to be
back, hopefully back to Land and Shore in April. And I believe that item is
going to be before the council on March 5th. Also on our agenda
was Agenda Bill 7511. And this was related to the CHIL sites or the safe
injection sites. And the committee recommended unanimously that the full council adopt the administration's recommendation
to prohibit the sites citywide. And I believe that's coming back to the full council
on March 5th as well. Agenda Bill 7543 was a comprehensive plan
docket for 2018, the proposed docket which is on tonight's regular agenda. And the committee
recommended adoption as that docket was presented with some minimal additional information on number 13
of that docket. Next was Agenda Bill 7524, Replacement Regulations
for the TALIS Development Agreement. The committee deliberated the outstanding issues
of the replacement regulations and unanimously recommended approval of the proposed
regulate of the The administration's proposed regulations for density, the FAR, and
structured parking, and also recommended adding language to clarify that reducing the
100-foot buffer only applies to certain existing conditions. The committee did
not make a recommendation regarding vesting. Council Member Winterstein requested a legal opinion. So
the agenda bills for both the Tallis and Issaquah Highlands replacement regulations for the
development agreements are returning to Land and Shore on March 1st for continued discussion.
We next talked about Agenda Bill 7524, which were the replacement regulations for Issaquah
Highlands development agreement. We took a fair amount of public comment on both
of the development agreement agenda bills, but due to the late hour, we
decided to not deliberate further and make recommendations on any of the outstanding
issues for the replacement regulations for the Issaquah Highlands Development Agreement. And the
final item on our agenda was 7326, Old Town Sub Area Plan. Again, it was
really late, so we punted this item to the March meeting. The next Land and
Shore meeting is March 1st. The agenda has not been set, and seeing Keith reminds
me I need to respond, tell you when I can meet to talk about that.
And also, Councilmember Ray reported on the Eastside Fire and Rescue Board meeting, and
I'm one of the regular directors this year, so I attended along with Councilmember
Ray. That's my report. Thank you, Councilmember Goodman. Councilmember Bautista. Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Last week, I attended my first meeting of the Puget Sound Regional Council Economic
Development District Board. This was a lot of new members and swearing in
of officers and a meet and greet and then two incredibly
interesting presentations. The first was all about technology and how quickly
things can move. and specifically about self-driving vehicles and how quickly that
that is looking to be coming in terms of the technology and
the impact that they were talking about the impact that would have
in terms of the climate, mobility, and interestingly enough, the land that's
being dedicated to parking structures at this point. Also another very interesting
presentation and economic development there's often talk about clustering and this was
a very specific conversation about the potential around clustering in the seattle
and larger area around the space industry so just a very interesting
meeting and looking forward to our next quarterly board meeting i also
attended the economic development council of seattle and king county they
They, it sounds, I was having a tough time. I was joining from afar
and they were having some technical difficulties. So from what I could understand by
having somebody hold up their cell phone while we were talking and being able
to participate that they will be moving forward with the reorganization that i spoke
about at our last council meeting the financial component that i talked about in
regard to this group is separate and that's something i'll be following up with
at a later date thank you that concludes my report thank you council president
batiste The next item for, oh and I wanted to thank you all for
your regional reports. A lot of good work going on out there and you spend
a lot of hours representing us, not just on this dais but out in the
community. So thank you. Next item on the agenda this evening is the Mayor's Report.
There will be an executive session held this evening to discuss acquisition of real estate
per RCW 42.30.110 . This item is expected to last 25 minutes. No
action is anticipated to follow an open session. On February 7th I
got to participate at the King County Climate Collaboration elected officials summit.
I attended with Councilmember Ramos and the committee had not met for a while. The
business of the day was reviewing the commitments to the group, an update on the
targets and progress, and a review of a draft resolution that I will be bringing
back to Council at a future date outlining support for various clean energy initiatives. On
February 7th I attended the Cascade Water Alliance annual board meeting. Board officers were elected
and other administrative items were reviewed and approved. On February 8th, I attended the Puget
Sound Regional Council's Transportation Policy Board meeting and that sub-meeting that was followed on
by the King County members of that subcommittee. The Transportation Policy Board discussed two
items of interest to Issaquah, which were the point system currently used to distribute
a portion of funding for transportation projects and Okay, bad grammar on my
part. So the first one was the point system. The proposal was approved to maintain
the current point system, but there were a lot of dissenting votes from cities or
counties with military facilities. since they are currently unable to access this funding pool. So
there will be a discussion in the spring on how best to incorporate military installations
into the project reprocess and area growth plans. And this will spill over into some
of the work that Councilmember Winterstein is doing on the PSRC Growth Management Policy Board.
Next meeting is March 8th and the major topics will include a summary of public
comments for the regional, the draft Regional Transportation Plan update and a discussion of greenhouse
gas targets. On February 8th I also attended the Eastside Fire and Rescue Board meeting
with Council Members Ray and Goodman and this year I will be participating as an
alternate when required. On February 14th I met the cities of Issaquah and Sammamish, held
a meeting of their executive leadership team, opening up a discussion on issues and ideas
that we'll be working on together. On February 7th I did a tour of the
YWCA Family Village site in Issaquah. I toured the facility and met with the
YWCA staff to discuss opportunities for engagement with the community. On February 15th I toured
Swedish Hospital with interim CEO Chris Bedoin and city staff to see the facility and
talk about development in the Highlands. On February 16th I was at Timber Ridge for
a community lunch and speaking at a and being the keynote speaker at an event
that they held that afternoon with representatives from the Issaquah Alps Trails Club and the
Mountains of Sound Greenway. We were reviewing the history of the TALIS Development Agreement and
its proposed expiration this month and what the future regulations and development plans look like.
I just wanted to provide a quick update on a couple of issues. Council Member
Goodman talked about the moratorium. There are two items that are still remaining to be
resolved. Inclusionary requirements. I think she did a good job covering that one and also
the visions, neighborhood descriptions, visions. The staff met with the Planning Policy Commission on the
15th and will be meeting again on the 22nd. The Planning Policy Commitment has made
a commitment to finish discussions by February 28th and return to the Land and Shore
Committee for the March meeting. The second item I wanted to talk about, community issue,
was the Cougar Mountain Bergsma update. I addressed this a couple of weeks ago in
the council meeting and so I just wanted to add today. There is no new
news in regards to the Bergsma from my comments on February 5th. We continue to
explore options and partnerships in regards to a potential acquisition of this property. This remains
a difficult topic for us to discuss publicly given the development application that's currently under
review. And that concludes the Mayor's report. We'll proceed to the next item which is
the consent calendar and have the payrolls and payables for February 20th been reviewed? They
have. They have. Thank you. I now ask the Clerk to read the consent calendar
into the record. The consent calendar was distributed to Council in advance for study. If
authorized, Council action will occur by single motion regarding the following items. Item A seeks
approval of the accounts, payables, and payroll of February 20th. Item B seeks approval of
the minutes of the City Council regular meeting of February 5th. item c ab7485 vacation
of a portion of northeast gilman boulevard seeks to approve resolution setting the
public hearing for march 19th if approved the resolution will be assigned number
2018-02 Item D, AB 7522, Creating the Visit Issaquah Organization, seeks referral to
various meetings. Item E, AB 7532, Lake Sammamish State Park EIS and
Development Agreement Project Schedule, seeks to proceed. Item F, AB 7540, Amendments
to IMC Chapter 3.32, Collection of Delinquent Local Improvement District Assessments, seeks
to adopt ordinance. If adopted, the ordinance will be assigned number 2826.
Item G, AB 7546, King County Conservation Futures Tax Levy 2019 Grant,
seeks to authorize submittal. Item H, AB 7553, Second Amendment to South
Cove Greenwood Point Assumption Interlocal Agreement with Bellevue. And item I, AB
7554, Ratification of Lake Washington Cedar Sammamish Watershed Chinook Salmon Conservation Plan
Update. Both items seek referral to Council Infrastructure Committee. This concludes the
reading. Thank you. A motion. I would move to approve all of
the items presented on the consent calendar. Second. It's been moved and
seconded to approve the consent calendar. All in favor? Aye. All opposed?
Approved unanimously. Next item on our agenda this evening is a public
hearing, AB 7533, the first major amendment to the Costco development agreement.
We'll be having keith niven our development services director do
a presentation for council thank you madam mayor city council
good evening keith niven director of development services and economic
development so tonight we have agenda bill 7552 which is
the proposed first major amendment for the costco development agreement
and tonight we're having a public hearing to take public
comment on that proposal Excuse me. This is all about
traffic and street improvements and part of the development agreement with Costco had
a transportation financing agreement which identified three projects that were going to be
built as part of the development agreement. The first project was improvements to
East Lake Sammamish Parkway. It was to add a lane in the
that's southbound direction, sorry, directionally challenged, bike lane, curb gutter, landscaping. That
project is complete. As has been mentioned earlier, the second project is
the extension of 62nd Street across Issaquah Creek to tie into Lake
Drive. That is under construction right now and is expected to be
completed by next year. and then the third project which is
the reason that we are talking about this this evening is
changes and improvements to the intersection of 12th avenue And I
think this is actually so it's Esther 900 here, but I think it might
be 56 here. So this is this is the Holiday Inn and the Tully's
and the Arco and the IHOP. The State Park is is whatever direction that
is. And so the Project which is identified, and I don't even know if you
can see that. If you can, great. The project was identified in the development agreement.
It had a price tab of approximately $3 million associated with it. And as we
entered into an agreement with State Parks to look at moving the entrance to
the State Park, which right now is off the map to the left, my
apologies, what we talked about was as that entrance moves closer and closer to
this intersection, it could change what this Project 3 might really want to be.
And so as we sat down and talked about that with Costco, we asked them
to delay the progress on this third transportation project until we understood the impacts of
potentially moving the entrance to the state park. What the development agreement says is
if any of those transportation projects were going to be delayed by more than a
year, that that was a major amendment that requires City Council approval. And that's why
we're here this evening is to start that process to see if the Council will
approve delaying this third project until we understand better what the impacts of potentially moving
the entrance to the state park. There were a couple questions that came
up about a missing exhibit in the attachment this evening. So
Costco is willing to have this conversation and allow the city
to work with state parks in looking at whether or not
this intersection, I'm going to orient you back over here at
12th Avenue, needs to change, but one of the things that they wanted
to ensure that if there was a change here, that it didn't negatively impact any
of the other intersections that are vital to their corporate campus. And that map
that's missing in the proposed amendment is being prepared by Costco's
transportation engineer right now. I gave you my version, which right
now, these are likely the intersections that will be covered. These are
the ones of concern to Costco that includes 62nd Street at East Lake Sammamish
Parkway. So there will be an exhibit. It will be in the packet by
the time it gets to Land and Shore. It just wasn't finished for this
evening. So that ends my presentation. I can answer questions or wait until we
get public comment at your discretion. So Keith, just to make sure it's clear, tonight
is a public hearing. There is a figure that will be available, that is not
available tonight, but will be available when this goes to Land and Shore. We'll have
question and answer with the Council and when that is complete we'll open the public
hearing, take testimony, close the public hearing and then there'll be a motion to move
this to committee. Correct and part of the reason why we sequenced it this way
is so that by the time we get to committee we can incorporate a conversation
of what public comment came up as it relates to this particular agenda bill. Thank
you. We'll go to questions. Council Member Goodman. don't have a question um but we
heard at infrastructure we had an update on the 67 62nd project infrastructure we heard
that um the schedule for completion and opening is at the end of this year
not next year so that's um that's a good news comment that i wanted to
make so people know that it's going to be open a little bit sooner than
next year that's the plan um but i didn't have a i didn't have a
question yet I don't know if that was appropriate. Okay. Questions? But it's
good news, so it's always appropriate. Questions? Seeing no questions, double checking. I
would like to open the public hearing at 8:28. And Tisha, do we
have anybody signed up to speak this evening? No. Looking into the audience,
which has diminished greatly, is there anyone that would like to speak during
the public hearing this evening on the Costco major amendment?
Oh. Okay. Continue. Thank you. A second call for anyone wishing to
speak this evening and a third call. So I misspoke earlier. We're
actually not closing. We're continuing the hearing. So is there a motion
to be made? I would move to continue the public hearing
to April 16th, 2018 and refer AB 7533 to the March 1st, 2018
Council Land and Shore Committee returning to the full Council on April 16th,
2018. Second. It's been moved and seconded to continue the public
hearing to April 16, 2018 and refer AB 7533 to the March
1st, 2018 Council Land and Shore Committee returning to the full Council
on April 16, 2018. Is there a discussion? There's no discussion. All
those in favor of continuing the hearing denote by saying aye. Aye.
Opposed? That passes unanimously. Next item is regular business.
The first item under regular business this evening is AB 7552,
police staffing resources and we will start with a staff presentation
from Chief Beerbaum. This item is coming out of the Council
Services and Safety Committee. good evening i am
chief scott barone with the isaac police department tonight i'm presenting on agenda bill
7552 related to the police staffing resources uh back in 2018 during the 2018
or during 2017 during the 2018 budget process the council authorized an addition of
three full-time employees to the police force from 37 to 40. During that same conversation,
the funding was not authorized. There was a request to bring it back at this
point in time to have further discussion about the funding for those resources and also
to address what the objectives and the outcomes were going to be used for those
employees. So tonight's presentation is to summarize what those objectives and outcomes would be and
also what the financial ask would be. So tonight the objectives
of this additional three, the funding for the three staffing totaling $263,000 would be to
maintain their current level of service of response to calls for service associated with our
growth in our community. Over the past few years, everything from a 5% increase of
calls for service per year. And let's clarify, a call for service is a
call to 911 or to our business line where our police officers respond either
to a commercial or a residential area to respond to a crime or to
a traffic issue or also to sometimes civil issues.
Additionally, the objectives of tonight's is to allocate our staffing to our high demand times,
and we'll talk further about that tonight, and redistribute our workload within our police force
to kind of increase our capacity across our department for specific areas such as traffic
and or other crime or directed patrol to address some of the needs of our
community. So what this means
is we are looking at adding two traffic officers to address our growing need for
our traffic. As heard earlier tonight in public comment, from everything from crosswalk to speeding
into neighborhoods to red light violations or blocking intersections, there's a concern throughout our community
about addressing that. These two of the three FTE would be used to address the
traffic issues. Of course, those would also be during the peak workload of the day.
Most of our traffic is, of course, during our commuting hours. That also coincides with
our highest demands for service. So we'll show here a little bit later in presentation,
but about 70% of our calls for service occur from about 9:00 a.m. till 9:00
p.m. at night. So being able to have our resources at the time when we
need them, we'll be able to hopefully address those community needs. Also, the other position
would be addressing an officer also assigned during those peak workloads. Specifically, we have a
significant amount of calls for service that are walk-in at our police station. So what's
happening is our officers are coming off the street, driving, responding to the police station,
addressing that community need, and then heading back out into the patrol district. We're losing
time on that response, but having an officer actually at the station, we can address
a lot of those and also address a lot of the phone call complaints as
well. To show you a little bit further, this is
our organizational chart broken down into our different divisions. The highlighted areas in the lower
left-hand part of the screen show where these new resources will be placed. Currently, our
traffic enforcement is under our patrol operations, and tonight, actually, two of my command staff
are here as well. Commander Paula Schwan, she is in charge of our patrol operations,
is here, and then our Commander Bob Porter, who's part of our support services overseeing
the jail and our records. But the patrol has our patrol, our 24-hour
coverage as well, broken down into four squads. So again, spreading out the 24/7 need
for police services, but then our high demands are during those daytime hours. The traffic
enforcement would be under that position. So we would then have three traffic officers. Currently
we have one. With the addition of this resource funding, we would then have three
total traffic officers. The other one that we were talking about
was a station officer, again, stationed within the police department to address
those percentage of calls that do walk into our lobby. This is
a, this graph is to show our intended implementation table. If authorized,
we could start moving on hiring these officers and trying to get
them up and running fully training. Where we sit right now,
is we have 37 funded positions. So if we look at the top line, Q1
of 2018, that is now. We have 31 operational staff. And again, that considers the
chief through a command staff down onto our officers that are patrolling the street. We
currently have four officers in training who are actually getting off of training right now
as we speak. And they're going to be coming online and being operational on their
own. We have two funded vacancies right now, which we are currently in the process
of looking at hiring a couple of officers as we speak. And then we have
three unfunded. Those are the ones that were added in the 2018 budget process for
a total of 40. What this shows is by the time of second quarter 2019,
our intended would have is we would have 40 operational sworn staff with all the
positions filled and everyone out of training. It does, as we can see is by
looking at this graph, it does show that it takes time to get staff up
and running. It takes approximately a year to get somebody up and running from the
time they're authorized to be hired up in time they're on their own. What
this also shows though is this is intended if, might not show well on the
screen there, but it does talk about, there's depending on some following factors. And that's
of course attrition, growth and injuries, retirements, or significant increase of demands for service due
to some of the regional influences. One of the issues that
we have with retirement is if we have an officer who gives us
even six months notice and says that they want to retire, we're six
months immediately behind on getting that somebody, that position replaced and filled with
an operational individual with that 12-month onboarding timeframe. Additionally, this is another graph
to kind of show what the timeline would be for getting those employees
fully operational. the top part of the graph shows when the funding would be
put in place one of the um One of the adjustments
to the agenda bill from when it went to services until it went to, it's
come back to you today, is the definition of the funds that are being requested.
During the 2018 budget process, funding was earmarked for the one-time costs such as the
equipment for the officers, the vehicles, and the training to get them up and running.
That, of course, was earmarked only with the authorization of the funding. So the additional
is the $263,000 for the salary and benefits for those positions. That is what
is specifically not authorized last year during the budget process. So the blue graph
on the top of this slide refers to when those expenditures would occur. The
one-time costs would start on the first quarter of this year with the background
investigations which include polygraph psychological medical testing for hiring police officers and then of
course the equipment uniform costs would be included during this time frame as well.
later in the year is when the Vehicles would be coming on board the ordering
time frame for that takes some several months for them to get ordered and fully
outfitted and operational for these positions as well and then the Academy costs for entry-level
would not actually be coming online until about August right now the wait time to
get an entry-level police officer and again entry-level police officer is bringing somebody from Who
has no police experience on board teaching them how to become a police officer and
then be able to serve their community A lateral officer is someone who has been
previously trained in a police department and is transferring to our department. So we just
have to get them up and running with our policies, procedures, our local codes and
laws. So entry level, bringing somebody on board currently to get them into the Washington
State Criminal Justice Training Academy, we have a wait time until August. That is due
to funding at the state level for classes at the Criminal Justice Training Academy.
To hire people for entry level, we have to bring them on board now before
they get hired by another agency as well, because it is a competitive market. So
we have some people that we are lining up to hire for these positions, and
we'd be bringing them online probably this spring to get them some pre-training prior to
getting them into the academy as well. But then the ongoing cost of the salary
and benefits would continue on into ongoing years.
The intent of this addition of the police resource and with the outcomes, of course,
we'd be looking at maintaining or decreasing our cost for service per patrol officer upon
full implementation of staffing. I'll show you graphs here momentarily that shows what we would
be looking at after these staff came online fully operational in 2019. We also want
to increase our resources available during our high demand times. We want to increase our
traffic enforcement and of course we want to increase our operational flexibility. Having our staff
at the right time gives us that flexibility to address those community needs.
Now a call for service again outlined at the beginning of the presentation is when
a police officer responds to a location to address an issue and it either comes
in through our business line or our 911. As we've seen over the last several
years, we've seen a steady increase of demands for service or calls for service. So
the last few years alone, we've seen a 5% of increase of calls for service
per year and already this year we're trending to on that same 5 to 6%
increase of calls for service in 2018. Calls for service per officer is what this
graph talks about and how that is formulated is if you refer back to our
organizational chart, we are taking the amount of officers that we have applied to patrol
and how they respond to these calls and dividing the total calls that our agency
responds to by those officers that normally respond to those calls for service. How this
is applied for is our patrol and our traffic. Because as I talked about earlier,
adding our two traffic officers, they will not only be increasing our traffic enforcement, but
they're also going to be assisting with collisions. We see about 900 collisions a year
in our city, and those officers would then help reduce those. By taking those collisions,
or by addressing those collisions, they're also increasing or taking those away from our current
patrol officers who respond to them, thereby freeing them up to provide other services for
the city. The blue line on the top is what our
current status is with 37 sworn staff. And that is if we get, that's our
current state of affairs. Scott, you have, it's a great presentation. It's lengthy. I'm going
to let Council ask some questions now as we go through just so we can
capture some. Absolutely. Thanks. I actually watched this a couple times already that you presented
at Services and Safety and it was a lot of additional information. I appreciate that.
So the way I understand it, before we get too far here, the way
I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that the proposal is
for three of those new officers would be traffic officers, right? Two of the
three funded positions would be traffic officers, yes. And doing traffic activities, traffic enforcement
activities, when they're not doing other activities. The one that you mentioned is support
for responding to collisions. Correct. So one of the things that I'm not clear on
is that the other patrol officers, I mean I personally have always understood that it's
all of the officers responsibility to do some sort of traffic enforcement. Correct. So where
do the other officers that are on patrol fit in with regard to traffic? Because
I haven't heard any of that. I've just heard that the two new officers would
be doing traffic enforcement when they're not doing something else. Correct. So we have a
total pie of calls for service. And that's what if we have on pace for
17,000 calls for service this year. What the traffic officers are doing are, if they
are taking those collisions, then they are taking some of that workload of those calls,
of those collisions, away from the patrol officers, thereby increasing our capacity to respond and
keeping our maintaining our overall level of service for calls for service. If you look
in 2017, our current, we're at about 902 calls for service per officer. By adding
in these two traffic officers and taking those collisions, By the time we get to
2019, we should be, if we're full, we should be, I'll have to show
with the cursor online. I apologize for those at home because you probably can't
see this. In 2017, we are... If we were fully staffed, we'd be close
to 800 calls for service per officer. That's under our current staffing model. By the
time these new positions would come online within their positions in traffic and the station
officer, we would be maintaining the calls for service at about the same number. So
the intent of this is to maintain our calls for service per officer. If you
increase calls for service per officer, then you reduce any of their proactivity. So it
just really switches, maintains to a reactive type police force. So we're not able to,
we're not going to be doing additional enforcement. They're just going to be going call
to call to call. But if we can plan out on the amount of calls
for service per officer, hopefully we can keep them at the status quo. our traffic
officers then could then of course focus on that increased traffic enforcement or our officers
could also address some of these other community needs from maintaining public trust being able
to respond to our calls for service and spend just a little bit of time
with our community members as our ability to spend time with our community members diminishes
then we start losing the the communication we start losing the trust with our community
we're not able to solve crimes as well something i didn't mention earlier as well
What we've seen in the last three years is our emergency response times have increased
by about a minute and a half, from three and a half minutes to five
minutes. So that's a, that's part of our calls for service, our officers being busy
and it's increasing our ability, or decreasing our ability to respond to those emergencies. So
I got all of that out of the presentation, but I'm still not hearing a
commitment that or Some sort of confirmation or assurance that the other
patrol officers are still involved in some sort of traffic enforcement because it
the data that I've That I had that I shared with you last
fall Shows that calls for service have increased I think since 20 between
2010 and 2016 increased About less than 20% but traffic citations decreased about
50% and so I have a concern that adding a traffic officer to the shift
and relieving the other patrol officers from what sounds like almost any traffic enforcement is
not going to make an appreciable gain in our traffic enforcement. So that's why I'm
asking the question about whether the other patrol officers are still going to be responsible
for some sort of-- because it seems to me, and I would think the community
would expect if there are police officers on the road, that we have-- or if
there's four or five out there, that more than just one have a focus at
some point on traffic enforcement. That's kind of the nature of my question. Sure. Yes.
Our patrol officers do actually do traffic enforcement throughout the, throughout their shift at when
they are available. If they're not responding to calls for service, they are looking for
opportunities to enforce traffic. If you look at some of that, I do, I know
that you did examine citations over the last several years. Here's what I'd like to
point out. This graph, as part of the presentation, talks about traffic stops. So a
traffic stop is how many times we've made contact with a driver, and it does
not always necessarily end up with a citation issued. It could be a warning, but
it also has presence of seeing high visibility patrols, high visibility traffic has an influence
on driver behavior. Ultimately, that's what we want to see is we want to change
in driver behavior. What you have seen since 2014 is there has been a slight
uptick in traffic stops. It does not necessarily equate to the citations, but what we
have done is over the last couple of years, we have increased our traffic stops
by a certain percentage. With this additional staffing, we would be looking at increasing it
around 30% of traffic stops. So that is going to have an effect on driver
behavior. So every time someone's driving down the road and if they see more traffic
stops, more traffic enforcement, a black and white patrol car with its lights flashing, you
are going to change or you're going to have an impact on driver's behavior. So
that's the intent of this. Thanks. Thank you. Is there any more questions right now
or do you want to keep moving through? Keep moving through. Thanks, Chief. So again,
this is calculated since we're talking about the traffic stops. This part
is calculated on the additional staff, the anticipated of the traffic officers
and the maintained calls for service with patrol being able to continue
to contribute towards traffic enforcement. Again, this is calculated by estimated at the
next 18 and 19 with the staff coming online as opposed as presented in the
table earlier talking about when they would become fully operational and when they're going to
be available to have an impact on traffic enforcement and also calls for service
And again, as we talked about the presentation of how our officers will be used,
it will increase our operational flexibility. Having the staff at the right time when the
high demands are is going to be able to hopefully reduce our calls for service
per officer, thereby increasing our capacity overall to address our community needs.
And this last slide of the presentation really is focusing on those costs. Again, the
one-time expenditures were captured in the 2018 budget. They were earmarked for this if this
came back to Council and was approved. The salary and benefits is what the new
ask would be, is the $263,000. That would be the authorized-- that would be the
ongoing costs for the three FTEs that are part of this conversation. The last conversation
about the-- expedited enforcement was talked about and safety and services and there was a
desire to bring it back to a council work session on March 12th for an
additional contracting for overtime and contracting traffic enforcement services and that will be coming back
to council on March 12th to the council work session Scott before you go to
questions there's just a couple things I would like you to clarify just maybe in
light of council member Goodman's question It is the role of each patrol officer
to do enforcement. Correct. It's not just the role of traffic enforcement
officers to do enforcement. Correct. Enforcement, if you're considering traffic stops, is
something that we tabulate and we can report back if council so
chooses to ask us. And you're presenting this proposal because you believe
that with the positions you're trying to fill now and the additional positions, on
the ground the citizens will notice and feel that there is an enforcement increase.
That is the intent of this presentation and of these objectives and outcomes. Thank
you. Questions? Council Member Ramos and then Council Member Winterstein. Just
one quick one to start. The requested expenditure, it says they're annual. according to your
chart it showed this going into like june of 19. so the 263 is that
just what's going to be required for 18 2018 or is that for this program
as a whole to get us through full funding including some of this rolling into
19. so the 2018 coverage will be 263 for this year and then each year
it would be incorporated onto the budget as moving forward thank you councilmember winterstein thank
you scott could you go back two slides it's outcome c And the numbers are
small, but I did want to point out a couple things. First, I want to
ask a question. I take it that for 2014, '15, '16, and maybe even '17,
those are actual numbers? Correct. Those are actual numbers. Those are updated to reflect. There's
a little bit of fluctuation between '14, 2014, and '17, but basically there was an
increase in traffic stops of about 500 over the span from '14 to '15 to
'16 to '17. you're forecasting traffic stops in this year to go up just a
slightly again to 3,800. But then the big jump happens. It's the second row from
the bottom, the right two columns from 4,800 to, excuse me, from 3,800 to 4,800.
Correct. That's more than three additional stops a day if I, you know, oversimplify things.
And I think It doesn't jump out at you at this slide
because the slope of that line is pretty low and all of
that type of stuff, but I think that is the significant outcome,
I believe, that you are using for justification of the funding for
these positions. And I do view that as a material increase. in
what has being requested and that there be more and visible traffic enforcement. So
I wanted to point that out that as a key bit of information that's
within this presentation. Thank you. Okay. Councilmember Goodman. Thank you. Thanks for pointing that
out. Councilmember Winterstein, I think the additional information that I would like to share
is that in 2010, the traffic citations alone were 5,310. And so citations are
a subset of traffic stops. So we are still far below the number that it
would take to get 5,310 traffic citations. And with the number of extra cars going
through our city in the last eight years, I think that is a significant fact
to know. But I do agree that this shows that we are attempting to make
significant progress in the other direction. And so I appreciate that. Thank you. Looking for
the question in there. We're in question and answer, but I'll forgive you this one
time. Any other questions before we go to a motion? Councilmember Wray. So just to
clarify, so because I think Councilmember Goodman brought up a good point. So if I
am one of your officers and I'm on the street and I have someone pulled
over and then there is a call for service that comes in, what's the impact
of that? It depends. It depends on the type of call for service. So if
it's an emergency call for service, such as like a crime of violence or where
there's someone in danger, most likely that person would be just getting a warning. The
officer would be responding to that call for service. If it's more of a property
crime or something of a lower priority call for service, they would finish that traffic
stop and then respond to the call for service. Thank you, Council Member Ray. that's
maramos um there's one more well you got that slide there too um just kind
of follow up on that question because this is the first time you really showed
traffic stops and stuff we talked about previously last year it was citations and during
that time where um the question is these are looking like traffic stops have continued
to go up but in that time citations have gone down. Is that correct? That's
what I remember from previous information. Yeah, there was the trending as Council Member Goodman
pointed out was that we had been reducing in our traffic citations and actually in
2016-2017 there was a slight increase in citations. I do not have the exact numbers
on me at this point in time but there was an increase in citations from
16 to 17. One follow-up. Flipping back to outcome A there, that chart, you
have two assumptions down the bottom, you know, assumption of a 5% increase. The other
assumption, assumption of no additional growth in population. I mean, that feels like a strange
assumption when we're just talking about going to 50,000 people. So I'm having a hard
time with that assumption on that chart. Fair enough. That is if we
do not have a significant growth in population, kind of what we are
anticipating. I guess we could restate that as outside of what the predicted
growth rate is. Can we add to that too for you, Council Member
Ramos? So you're saying you have... This is a project with growth would be
there, but not this is where we're in. If you have significant outside of what
the predicted growth is, then this is where this would be. Okay. I think in
response to council's concern during budget about whether or not we had sufficient resources, not
only for calls for service for traffic enforcement. I think the chief's proposal is covering
both where what we have grown to right now and increase enforcement and
if we are to add more citizens and residences over the next four
to five years, you know, 40 officers in 2019 may not be enough. So that's
what's not shown here. The increases you're seeing tonight do not deal with all of
the new people that might move in in the next couple of years. So there
could be an ask coming in the future again if we were to add four
or five thousand citizens, you might see an ask for an officer. And I didn't
want to tie the Chief's hands and say that in 2019 he wouldn't be asking
you because he might. It depends on population coming in. Thank you. Any more questions?
Councilmember Wray. So, Chief, can you talk briefly about how we get ahead of the
hiring curve for officers? I mean, clearly we've got nearly a nine-month lag from when
we're going to fund the position until someone is going to be available to serve
the community. So what's your thinking about how we get ahead of that hiring curve?
So the leg is about 12 months, actually. So what we have to do is
we have to be able to provide the capacity to be able to overhire and
prepare for those projected retirements. We do have a handful of officers who are going
to be eligible for retirement in the next three to five years, in two to
three years, actually. So those are the pieces that we're going to be, we need
to continue to examine and to provide the funding to be able to pay for
salaries for people in preparation for replacement for those positions. So we do have those
retirements coming. If they give me, again, said earlier, if they give me a six-month
warning, I'm six months behind. So to be able to have that continuous funding mechanism
and pipeline, so to speak, for to have those ongoing positions filled and to be
prepared for that growth. That's what we're going to have to focus on. Council Member
Ray, on Eastside Fire and Rescue, you may note during budget that they do actually
fund for it. Yeah. And so that's a proposal you may see coming in next
year's budget as well. Any more questions for the Chief? Yes, a couple. Okay. Council
Member, Council President Batiste. Thank you, Chief, for the presentation. Has there been
an effort by your group to try to, we talked a little bit about
this on in safety and services, but to try to bring together best practices
around what other cities and maybe across the country are doing in terms of
recruiting and analyzing that to see what might be effective? Yes, we are internally, we
are having those discussions with our human resources in time, our department as well. And
it's also a regional discussion too, about bringing good resources to the Puget Sound area.
So a lot of law enforcement agencies are having those ongoing conversations. But we are
looking at some of those and those are some of the things that we are
kind of developing to see if we can look at how we bring those in
or incorporate those in the future for our hiring practices and also some of our
maybe future budget requests. Thank you. Just going to check with Councilmember Hunt since she
hasn't got a chance to answer any questions. Okay. Then Councilmember Ramos, go ahead. So
in jeopardy here, I'll phrase this in the form of a question. So Trying to,
having been Eastside Fire and Rescue, one of the things they have been using,
and the question is are you thinking of doing this with your employees in
the future, is they were building incentives to give a one-year notice before retirement.
And so that would give you that year to be able to plan a little
bit. So people can retire any time, but there were incentives involved in trying to
get that year notice. And so just a question, are you thinking about maybe trying
to do that sometime in the future to help us with these kinds of things
so also you're not a year behind? - That's an interesting option and there are
a lot of options being discussed internally of how we can maintain competitive in this
market. - Are there any other questions? This came out of Services and Safety.
Would you like to make a motion? Actually, I'm going to go a little bit
off script and make two motions. Okay. First one, I'd like to move to authorize
funding for three police officer positions as proposed with salary and benefit funding to begin
April 1st, 2018 and direct finance director to include $263,000 in a subsequent 2018 budget
amendment utilizing the general fund. Second. Second. It's been moved and seconded to authorize
funding for the three police officer positions as proposed. I'm just going to ask the
Clerk if she'd like both motions at once or for us to deal with them
one at a time. That is your discretion, but there would be a second vote
if they're handled separately. Sure. I'd like to do them separately. Do you want to
actually put them both on the table or just want to talk through the first
one? Let's do a one at a time. Okay, here we go. So it's been
moved and seconded to authorize funding for the three police officer positions as proposed with
salary and benefits funding beginning April 1st, 2018 and direction to the finance director to
include $263,000 in a subsequent 2018 budget amendment utilizing the general fund. Discussion?
Councilmember Goodman. As I said earlier, thanks Chief for bringing this information.
It was more than we had during the budget period. I would,
I'm going to support this. I would request however that the administration,
police department, using whatever metrics reporting that you're going to use, would
come back to the council at a time of your choosing,
maybe not longer than a year, to let us know
how it's going and to see, to report back on
success, hopefully, and also request that maybe we use the
city's peak democracy to ask our community how they're feeling,
what, you know, in response to the program that you have
presented here to see what they're feeling out there, if they're feeling like
we've got more response, better response, different response, we can loop in the
citizens. Thank you. Anyone else for discussion? That's member Wray. I think that
we as a city have grown and we have seen a lot of things that
have changed as the city has grown. And one of the things that makes Esquipa
a pretty special place is the quality of our police officers and their engagement with
the community. That becomes progressively harder and harder to do as the workload increases. So
I'm very supportive of this from two reasons. One is I want to give the
officers time with the community to be guardians of the community and not simply warriors.
And I also want to provide the resources so that we can start to do
traffic enforcement at a level that seems appropriate and is appropriate to what we've heard
from the public as a high priority need. I support this. Thank you, Council Member
Ray. Council Member Hunt. Thank you. Member Boutouse. I also wish to speak
in favor of the motion. Being new to Council, I have familiarized myself
with some of the Council's prior deliberations and the analogy that resonated with
me is that to achieve the desired level of service, this is to
chase a moving target. and i think that we may not achieve the full
staffing right away there's a number of reasons some are predictable the 12 month
training and wait time but then there are also unpredictable factors such as injuries
and i think that authorizing and funding these three positions, however, will get us closer
to that moving target. And the moving target will continue to move as our population
grows and as our calls for service and as our needs for service grow. I
also thought it was important from the presentation as was touched upon that
traffic stops are expected to increase and potentially this could increase, this could
improve behavior. I think that it would be beneficial for us to think about
how we would actually expect that to show up in the statistics because an increase
or an improvement in behavior, which is ultimately what we want to see could
results in less violations and less need for traffic stops and less need
for citations. And so I just think that it's a complicated topic and
we need to think through what we actually want to see happen when
we're looking at the data. And then I also believe that as our
population is growing and this has come up that we will shortly be a city
of 50 000 people i think that as our population grows we should prepare for
that by growing our police force so i am in favor of this motion thank
you council member hunt councilmember batiste Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'll be supporting
this AB tonight. During, just to give a little bit of background, during
the budget session we had allocated funding for 37 FTEs and there were
some outstanding questions and some of those were surrounding traffic enforcement and just
some other information that was needed and I think that the chief and your
staff have done a great job bringing all of that information forward. I've gotten
a chance to go through that a few different times now and my questions
are answered and I also the Being able to focus in more
on what we're going to do with traffic is, I think, critically important. And
I'm seeing that in how this is presented. And also just, I think, important
to note that this is taking us to the level of service that the
chief and the police department have discerned that this is where we should be,
so this is right. at the level of service. I think in the future,
I'm very supportive of what we're going forward with right now tonight with the
additional three officers. But in the future, I'd like to have a conversation about
whether just maintaining the level of service is what is where we should be. I'd
like to have a conversation about that. And then would also really like to learn
more as the chief and your department are looking at what could potentially be done
in terms of best practices with recruiting and that kind of thing. So just a
focus in on the timeline of how long it takes to bring Police officers on
so I will definitely be in support of this this evening. Thank you other council
members Councilmember Ramos. Thank you. I just like to compliment council member rate. You said
that beautifully So I'll plus one years with just a couple little additions. I've personally
seen our community policing in action and living here in Old Town and I really
appreciate that it's very different than the policing I saw growing up in East Oakland
California and that means a lot to us and I hear our community wants this
I hear that over and over again they want it so I just have to
support that in the face of what I've heard for the last couple years so
thank you for the job you do thank you Thank You councilman Ramos councilmember Winchester
would you like to make a comment I am going to support
this. Chief, thank you to you and your staff for the job that you do.
I do like the numbers. I think it was well said earlier that this is
actually an environment that's in continuous flux. And I know that even how you measure
and capture and count has changed over time, making this difficult. But for me, it
does reduce down to really something very simple. We are a growing community
and we need to have the proper staffing to provide the services, whether
it be patrol, calls for service, traffic that you require. It's a logical
conclusion that we need additional staff because there's nothing happening necessarily with technology
that would bend that curve some other way so to me it's a
very simple thing i appreciate the additional information that you've provided i'm i
hopefully it'll result in as i see these numbers from actuals of 2014
uh Maybe when we're fully at 40 in 2019, we'll be close to those levels
of service, calls per service per officer again, and that'll be a better job experience,
which will help with retention and help overall with health and safety as well. So
I see nothing but positives in this. I think it's essential. And I do agree
with everything that's been said that this is what our community wants, but also without
thinking about it, our community has gotten used to. We do expect to have to
live in a safe community where the laws are respected and enforced. And I appreciate
all that you and your staff have done to see that that happens. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Winterson. If there's no more discussion, looking around. All those
in favor, actually I should probably read the motion again. The motion is
to authorize fundering for three police officer positions as proposed with
salary and benefits funding beginning April 1st, 2018 and direct the
finance director to include $263,000 in a subsequent 2018 budget amendment
utilizing the general fund. All those in favor say aye. Opposed?
- Passes unanimously. Is there an additional motion you'd like to make Council Member
Wray? - I'd also like to, I want to do a little preamble too.
Agenda Bill 7552 actually had two concepts in it. One was funding three positions
and one was enhanced traffic enforcement And so what I wanted to do is separate
those into two separate thoughts because I think they're completely separate. So that being said,
I'd like to move that we direct the administration to draft an agenda bill to
consider the expedited traffic enforcement option for referral to the March 12th, 2018 Council Work
Session for further discussion. Second. It's been moved and seconded to direct the administration to
draft an agenda bill to consider the expedited traffic enforcement option for referral to the
March 12, 2018 Council work session for further discussion. Would you like to have discussion?
Councilmember Wray, would you like to add some comments? Are we ready for the vote?
I think we're ready for the vote. I would agree. All those in favor of
the motion say aye. Opposed? Motion passes unanimously. Thank you, Chief. Thank
you. Next item on our agenda this evening is AB 7543, the
2018 docket of comprehensive plan amendments. This item came out of the
Council Land and Shore Committee. I'd like to invite policy planning manager
Trish Heinenen to make a presentation.
Okay,
from
the
beginning.
Here we are. The annual docket of amendments. Some of you have done this many,
many, many, many times. Some of you, this might be your very first comprehensive plan
docket. Welcome. This is pretty exciting. The state allows us to only change, amend the
comp plan once a year. So the city to achieve that is we make a
list and we approve the list in the beginning of the year and then those
are the only amendments that we work on throughout the year. If a new amendment
comes up in July, let's say, we have to put it on the next year's
agenda. And the purpose of that is so all the comprehensive plan... amendments that we
deal with in a year are all related to each other so that as they
say they're comprehensively looked at so that they affect each other the same way that
nothing pops up in the middle of the year that changes that may change the
focus of our year this is a summary of the night the 2018 amendments there
are 16 that we're proposing to at least begin this year. Some of them will
not be able to be finished this year because they're related to other planning projects
like the Shoreline Master Program, for example, probably won't be finished in time this year
to have the amendments, if we need any, go in the comp plan this year.
Because typically the public hearing is in September and then you all would start to
see it in October and November. And so if the amendments aren't done by September,
then they won't make it in for this year. But having said that, some of
the amendments are annual. For example, we update the population every year. We update the
Transportation Improvement Program every year. We do any rezones of land that we've either purchased
or we've acquired to a community facilities zone. Some of them, though, are new. Actually,
many of them are new this year. The Planning Policy Commission had some fun with
the list and added, I think, four. that are listed at the end and then
we took it to the the new mayor and she added a few and ppc
liked those as well so it's a big list this year i can't stand here
and guarantee that they will all be done when you see them proposal in october
and november we'll do the best that we can and would you want me to
go through the list generally or should i just take questions on if anyone has
Questions I know that Landon Shore had questions on one of them. Yeah, let me
ask the councilor. Would you like a brief introduction to each of the topics or
just to ask your questions on specific ones? Okay, so I'm seeing head nods for
just specific. Trish, I did want you to clarify one thing. While they are listed
up there as a series of topics, there isn't actually a policy statement that they
would be considering today. It's just these are a list of topics of what you're
going to look at. It's just a list, yes. Okay. Questions on the docket? Councilmember
Goodman. Yes. I hope I didn't miss this. I was kind of scanning some
of the things in my packet. At Land and Shore there was a request
for minimal new information on number 13? Correct. 13 was added by the Planning
Policy Commission, and if you look in the packet, there's more of a complete
comment that came up. it's here it says a policy regarding balancing new housing without
loss of commercial square footage and what planning policy commission was worried about was for
example when atlas came in with all housing they took out a commercial mall area
and so they were afraid that if we kept going that way what would happen
if we had so much housing that took over previously commercial uses our jobs um
our jobs balance might go down or we might start losing jobs more than we
would want to so they were just asking is there something like a no net
loss of jobs when a project comes in if it's taking out commercial land and
we said Well, we're not, we haven't ever heard of that. I mean, certainly we
had known that loss of landscaping on Gilman Boulevard. So, you know, and I'm, we
were the first and the only community I've ever known that's done that. And so
we thought we'd look into it because all of a sudden jobs are coming up
more in the central visions. Um, they're one of the comp plan requests is that
we put a jobs sort of a counter like we do for housing units for
the state target. So that's a new amendment is to do a jobs counter to
make sure that we're hitting that target. So we told PPC sure if that's an
issue, we'll look at to see if other jurisdictions have looked at this. Um, one
of the PPC members sent us some information this morning that she's starting to look
at some different places and she sent two examples of jurisdictions trying to figure out
how do you keep the commercial land when housing is going in. So That's sort
of what we would look at in this amendment. I have no idea what it
would look like once it came to you because we haven't started it, but that's
the concern that PPC was trying to... It was almost another way of requiring mixed
use in addition to the vertical mixed use requirement. It was along those lines. Thank
you, Trish. I want to expand on that a little bit because in typical zoning,
this isn't a concern. If you zone something residential, you build residential. If you zone
it commercial, you zone it... you build commercial. We have an interesting situation in our
central Istiqua plan that we don't necessarily have zoning. We have a lot of uses
in the same neighborhood. So you don't, so you do actually, I'd like to make
sure that you ask questions about this piece of it because this is very different
than managing traditional zoning. There are, you can have unintended consequences when you have all
uses available in an area. So I'm not sure how much that has been
explained to council so far. Councilmember Winterson. I asked the question at Landon
Shore of staff to give to come back with more information of that
would be compelling on why we would consider a comp plan update to
include such a policy. I'm not sure I've heard anything. I watched the
video. Right. That was just last week. Well, the 11th, when it first came.
Right. And again, we haven't done research on any. We have there are two pieces
that... So the, and on the 11th, excuse me, it came up because one of
the committee members was reviewing other comp plans and saw that Redmond had one. So
maybe we should have one. And that's still not good enough for me. Okay. And
the... I think that's a very significant position to take if
I really think about that. And I can imagine there could
be some real ramifications to what otherwise would, you know, to
plants. And that's what I'm looking for. Give me some reason why I think we
should, why we should maybe do this. Why, why, and I'm not interested in sending,
getting the staff spending time on something where we really have, we have no idea
if such a policy is needed or wanted for Issaquah. We don't really know the
implication. So I was looking for some information brought forward this evening where we could
get more of why we would, to go work on something like this. - So
Council Member Winterstein, thank you for asking the question. I wanna make sure tonight that
we, staff did not bring additional information tonight, but if there is a concern with
one of the items, it would be good to have a discussion on whether or
not the group here tonight wants that left on the docket or if you do
have uh expectations and information requests like council member winterstein made we could do those
in brief this evening but this will be going to land insure and we'll have
several opportunities to flesh out exactly what each of these updates would look like so
any more questions for trish councilmember hunt Thank you for the presentation.
I wondered if you could address where this amendment would go
in terms of there is some policy in the comprehensive plan
regarding jobs and regarding economic vitality. I wondered if you could
speak to what specifically this would add and how that would
fit in with the existing wording in the comprehensive plan regarding
economic vitality also with the visions the the work that is
going into the visions which I am familiar with and which
do include at least at there in draft form but do
include also provisions regarding supporting existing businesses and jobs good question
the I would envision that this would go in the land use element, but again,
we haven't started looking at any of it yet because it's just on the list.
It could also go in economic vitality to talk about how to not lose jobs
if housing is coming in. It has been mentioned at least in two of the
districts for Central Issaquah that they want a no net loss. Perhaps at the end
of all this, That's the only place we want such a policy or two zones
in central Issaquah because maybe it doesn't make sense in Old Town. Maybe it doesn't
make sense anywhere else. We just haven't, we heard the concern. We don't know how
big it is or how much sense it makes to try to have a policy
citywide. So other than knowing there would be two places it could go, land use
or economic vitality, we haven't started to research at all to even know what's under
all the rocks. So the question this evening will be whether or not you would
like to leave this on the docket or take it off. I think, Trish, what
you are hearing is that if it stays on the docket, that this particular item
may require some discussion at a work session or something else to really allow the
council members to weigh in on all of the different questions they have on this
one. Right. Any other questions? I just... councilmember ray that's so exciting so this is
really just a process and a clarification question this is a essentially your comprehensive plan
work plan for 2018. and beyond yes yeah and so every item that's up here
has an amendment to the comp plan is coming back to land and shore and
coming back to the council for final review and approval right so we do have
a chance on all of these items to shape and frame and direct
and guide and make appropriate. Yes. Head nods. Head nods. They're just hard
to hear on TV. And I guess the reason I'm asking that question
is if there's something there and there's a level of interest in this
topic, I'd like to see it at least cursorily explored and then come
back to the land and shore into the council
as it evolves. Good feedback. Any other questions? Thank you
Trish. Oh, sorry. Got a couple here. Council Member Batiste
and then Council Member Goodman. Question. Yeah. Trish, could you
just give me a little more information about under transportation
element number one, there was an ad for revising ST3
policies. Just a quick overview of That came from
Madam Mayor. Because some pieces have changed since that was written in the central plan
and in the transportation element, since the transportation element is always on the docket for
the transportation improvement program, she asked that we look at that and make that more
up to date, the ST3 piece. Okay. That makes sense. Thanks. Council Member Goodman. There
are no other questions. I was going to make a motion. Okay. Are there
any other questions? Councilmember Goodman. I would move to approve amendments, Amendment
Numbers 1 through 16 on the docket of proposed 2018 Comprehensive Plan
Amendments as presented. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Is there any
discussion? If there's no further discussion. Sorry, sorry, I missed one. Oh,
Councilmember Winterstein. Sorry. Yeah, I want to talk about amending the motion
because As I scan through all of these numbers of 16,
every one of them, there is quite a bit of substance behind.
There's familiarity, there is justification, And I mean, it's clear that whether it just be
routine or if it's new, that we're doing something that aligns with concepts that are
well understood and grasped by the community, by the council and by staff. But 13
is just out of the blue. And I like-- - Can I get you to
make the motion and see if we get a second and we'll get discussion. -
So I just want to explain why I'm making the motion. 'Cause nobody's considered it
yet. And so the topic is interesting, but I'd rather not have staff
work on it until there is the opportunity for us to understand it
better. So I would, I'd like to move to amend this motion to
change the, I'm looking what the... - The docket? - Yeah, the docket,
there is to postpone until 2019 docket item
number 13 as proposed. Just writing it down.
Make sure I have the motion right, correct.
It's moved to postpone to 2009 item number
13 on the docket. 19. 19. 19 on
the what? 2019. You just said 2009.
We're just correcting it. Sorry. 2019, item
number 13 on this docket. Is there
a second? No second? The motion fails.
Back to the original motion. Is there any discussion on the motion,
the original motion, which was to approve amendment numbers 1 through 16
on the docket, a proposed 2018 comprehensive plan amendments as presented? No
discussion? Mariah? I just wanted to point out that number 5, the
land use element, there's additional language that's been added. by the mayor
for policy direction that prioritizes acquisition of forested hillside lands and lands that enhance connections
to public lands. And I was happy to see that there and I wanted to
point that out. i think that wasn't me oh oh i thought it was
planning policy okay thank you that was you that's good okay all those in favor
of the vote uh so hang on i think i'm going to reread it favor
of approving amendment number 1 through 16 on the docket of proposed 2018 comprehensive plan
amendments as presented signify by saying aye aye aye opposed um the motion passes
five in favor and council member winterstein opposed next oh thank you trish
thank you next on the agenda is ab7479 2019 2020 human services grant
funding target this item is coming out of the council services and safety
committee and i would like to invite human services and social sustainability coordinator
martha sasarosi to make a presentation good evening thank you thank
Yes, so I am bringing Agenda Bill 7479 to Council to set a funding
target for Human Services grant funding for the next two years. We're talking about
2019 and 2020. I'll provide some background information and a brief overview of current
funding before speaking to the proposed funding targets. So first, I just want to
remind folks of the vision statement we have in our comprehensive plan in the
Human Services element. Essentially the human services element calls for the city to
support and coordinate with providers to meet the community's needs. And human services grants
are our primary means for doing so. As for
the Human Services grant funding process, the City is part of a 17-city
funding collaborative that uses a shared biannual application process. The Human Services Commission
reviews all applications for funding and makes recommendations to Council. Those recommendations are
reviewed as part of the annual budget process in the fall. We last
reviewed applications in 2016 for funding in 2017 and 2018. The application
period for 2019 and 2020 funding will open on March 5th,
so it's coming up shortly, and it will close on April
10th. The Human Services Commission anticipates beginning their review process in
May. In May, staff will also prepare an update for the
Services and Safety Committee of Council. For current funding, we're at
$371,500 per year. As explained in the exhibit that accompanies the agenda
bill, this amount reflects two components. So first there's a base per capita amount.
that reflects funding based on population. So the base per capita rate of $10
had been an informal target that the city had been working toward for some
time. It was able to achieve with the last funding cycle. And then the
second component, there are targeted allocations totaling $30,500 that reflect identified needs in
the community above and beyond basic needs that we anticipated funding in
the last cycle. And those targeted allocations reflected additional need for housing
and homeless services, including as one example, increased winter shelter capacity for
families. And when we look at total funding per capita for the city
in 2017 and compare it to total funding per capita in other east side cities,
you'll see that Issaquah's kind of in the middle, where comparable with Kirkland. And you'll
also see that there's a pretty significant range across these five cities on the east
side with Bellevue and Redmond kind of leading amongst the cities with $24 and $18
per capita respectively. And then
with this graph here, I just wanted to show the progression of that total
funding per capita for this city over the last few bienniums, working to get
towards that $10 per capita goal. And then the proposed funding target, so total
funding would get us to overall per capita of $12.92. And then you've also
got the overlay of those other Eastside cities for 2017.
So looking back, there was not a consistent process for determining
grant funding before the 2017-2018 funding cycle. There also wasn't a
target established in prior cycles before 2016. In 2015, staff support to
the Human Services Commission and for administration of the grants was increased and that year
we began working with the Commission to identify process improvements for the application and review
process. One of those improvements was to set a funding target at the outset of
the process. So ahead of the last application in February of
2016, staff went to council to set a funding target of $371,500
for that 2017-2018 funding cycle. And that year we received a
total of 75 applications requesting over $690,000 in funding. Working with
a target number helped the Commission to navigate the deliberation process
more efficiently as it considered all 75 of those applications.
For the 2019-2020 funding cycle, we're following a similar timeline and
process as the last cycle with some small adjustments and improvements.
We maintained the combination of a per capita base amount and targeted
allocations. We kept the $10 per capita rates and updated the targeted allocation
to reflect needs identified in the city's first community needs assessment, which was
completed in 2017. And I just wanted to speak to that briefly since
it is such a critical new input for our process. So
with the support and guidance of an 11-member advisory group, including some key
folks from Swedish, the school district, Schools Foundation, Friends of Youth, and other
service providers in the community, the needs assessment used quantitative data, qualitative information
from focus groups and key informant interviews, and existing regional assessments and reports
to identify key themes around community health and well-being. And as a
reminder, those four themes were disparities by race and ethnicity, sex and
income, particularly for measures of economic stability. There was behavioral health norms
and resources. barriers to accessing services and resources, and lack of stable
housing. The assessment also provided helpful guidance about particular service needs in the
community that would help address those issues and key themes, including services to
support employment and self-sufficiency, mental health and substance abuse prevention, as well as
dental and medical services for those on public insurance, service navigation including
language and cultural access, and housing stabilization and homelessness prevention services. So I've included
some data on this slide and we'll take a moment I suppose to just
call out a few things. You'll see here that the poverty rate increased doubled
from 3% to 6% from 2010 to 2015 and when we disaggregate the data
by race and gender we see even greater rates of increase for black
and African-American Hispanic Latino and for women residents in the community one of the most
striking data points from the assessment is that one in four Iskall school district seniors
have seriously considered suicide so thinking about access to mental health services in the community
for our youth and young adults we have a quote here from a focus group
Participants speaking to the barriers and added stress and anxiety that can come with trying
to seek services on the east side. And then just to speak a bit to
housing stability, one in five renters is severely cost burdened in this community, so they're
spending more than 50% of their income on housing. And that increased
spending on housing can then reduce money available to afford things
like medications and other services and basic needs. So the
needs assessment provided a key starting point for updating the targeted allocations
portion of the proposed funding target. We used information from the prior
application cycle to help estimate the funding gaps tied to unmet needs
in those four kind of service areas. And we also
use those applications, prior applications, to help consider potential service provider capacity. So even if
more dollars were available, two service providers in our community have the capacity to meet
need if the funding were available. And what do we fund them? across
the four major areas of need, $112,000 in additional targeted support was
identified for the population-based portion of the funding target. Again, we maintain
the $10 per capita rate and applied it to an estimate of
the 2019 population. So combining those two elements, we get a total
of $495,000 per year. And lastly, for welcome questions, I just wanted
to remind Council of the schedule and call out two touch points that we have
with Council this year. So we anticipate coming back to services and safety with an
update once you've received applications for funding. and as the Human Services Commission
is about to start their review process. And then again in
October, because this is a funding target, we'll actually just discuss
allocating these dollars as a part of the annual budget process
in the fall. So with that, I'd like to welcome questions.
Questions? Council Member Winterstein. Thank you, Martha. Can you
help me with the understanding the mechanics of how the funds
in the targeted allocation would work? So there is a, that
option B, which the administration is recommending is for a total
of $495,000, $112,000 of which is targeted. does that
mean the 495 is the commission would be looking at distribution through the
common application process or is there is there something outside their recommendation
from that common application process where these 112 would be an identification of services to
receive those funds would happen through a different process i'm trying to understand that sure
absolutely so it would all be through the same process and part of why we
like to set this funding target and any kind of priority areas of need or
services is so that we can communicate that in the city supplemental. So each of
those 17 cities that participate in the common application prepares city specific information that's provided
along with applications so that service providers can understand what that particular city, if there
are any specific criteria or areas of focus. And so that's when we'd be able
to relay that we are particularly looking to fund these areas. Okay, so through that
process, the applicant would perhaps highlight or call out and say, "We align with this
part of your special ask, Issaquah." And so as the commission considers all the applications,
there would be a pool of applicants that you could put into those
four categories, hopefully, and you would run a process that assures that
that additional funding does go to applicants within those categories? Yes,
so when applications are received, we, so staff do an initial sort
by the goal areas that we use to help kind of bucket
like programs. And so additionally, this cycle, programs and applications would be
flagged if they fall into one of these areas. So we would
understand as we're reviewing, okay, here are eight applications that are addressing the employment
economic stability service gap. Just one final related question. So how did you come
up with that number? You do mention in the packet, though, I appreciate how
last year we had a number, it was limited categories, I'll call it, where
we were looking for targeted funding, especially as it related to housing stability. How
did you come up with this 112? Yes, so we went back and
looked at kind of our best proxy for understanding the cost of unmet
need in the community. And so that those numbers come from the prior
application round. So we identified programs that are addressing these needs. And so
created a bucket of your employment programs, health programs and so on. And
of those applications, Tally the full requests or the total request what was actually
awarded and the remaining balance So what was the gap where we where we had
programs where we want to provide funding? But we weren't able to meet the full
request. You know, what what did that gap? Come to so we did that by
each bucket in total across the four areas of need that were
identified um the total gap was 134 000 in in change it's actually
a bit above the 112 000 but again there was some consideration to
is there truly service provider capacity um to to address needs at
this level. And also understanding that just because a program was awarded some funding, it
wouldn't have been necessarily awarded the full amount if we'd had the dollars. - I
actually have two small ones, but I'll wait to give others more questions. - I'll
come back to you. Council Member Ray. - So a couple of questions. First, so
the target we're setting is for two years. So it'll be 495. in two
consecutive years, so I can't do the math. 900 and change.
980? 990, thank you. It's good to have a team. Yes.
Okay. Yes, the applications we only receive once every two years.
So all the other cities are on biannual budgets. And the
application period is from March till April and what would happen
if the application period didn't start until April or
middle of March or very first of April. What would be the implications of that?
Well, all 17 cities have to be an agreement on the start and end dates
So those those dates are set there'll be funders workshops on March 7th and 8th
so that's when all the cities send staff to provide information to applicants about what
to Any changes from the prior application what each city has a few minutes to
elaborate on their supplemental? So it would be an opportunity for me to speak to
You know if we have priority services, we're looking to fund but yeah, it's not
it's not a flexible Process or timeline because it's shared by 17 cities So and
I'm gonna kind of pick up on council member winter Stein's line of questioning so
I've been doing some quick math here and I'm clearly not very good at it.
I've demonstrated that tonight. Anyway, so last cycle you had $690,000 of request and you
funded $371,000, which was a shortfall of $319,000. And so if I do the $690,000
and I apply the base of $383,000, that still leaves you a shortfall of $307,000.
So I can get to those numbers. I understand where those would come from. I
don't understand where... the 112 comes from and then i don't understand where because you
threw out a 134 number i don't understand where that comes from so i'm having
a hard time you know is that is 112 enough is it too much and
i i just don't know what the basis of that number is Sure. So the
134 number is the total funding gap for when we look at programs that in
the four areas of greatest need that were identified in the needs assessment. We look
at programs that were funded in those four areas in the last cycle.
very few of them were funded at the full request. So the Human Services Commission
had the difficult task of spreading the limited resources across a number of services and
programs. And so looking at those programs where the Commission had said, yes, this program's
helping to address a need we have, we just don't have enough to fund beyond
this level. Those programs calculated the total funding gap for them. So across the four
areas, not across all applications, but just the funded programs for
those four areas, the gap was $134,000. So then
that number was adjusted down to 112,000 as a targeted kind of
allocation amount based on consideration for program capacity and consideration for instances
where it was, it would have been unlikely that the city would
have fully funded the program, right? That initial assumption that was made
in calculating the total funding gap. Helping? If you then choosing to
move on and have some others ask questions and we'll come back so I I
know I'm waiting for Paul but I'll go to okay, a couple here Councilmember Ramos
fall by Councilmember hunt. Just a quick one because we're talking about funding here for
the next year's 2019 by annual budget correct. And so I just a question kind
of us. If we agree on this now, is that basically making that agreement for
our budget next year? It's basically ahead of time going to be set in our
budget. And so when we work on the budget the end of this year, that
number will be already in the budget and agreed to by us and not we
wouldn't be messing with it. Is that a firm agreement or is this a recommendation?
I think she has an answer for you. It's not. Yeah, I didn't. Yeah. That
would be the number that we would show in the proposed budget assuming that the
Human Services Commission feels like it's a suitable number to recommend to us. So and
that's been our past practice is Human Services Commission gets an idea from this conversation
about Target, what they have to work with and provided that they choose to allocate
all of it then that's what you will see in the proposed budget from the
Mayor's Office. so not approved up to that's correct so then council still has the
ability to modify so this is just our recommendation to ourselves to uh follow or
if we don't choose to follow our own recommendation it could be changed at the
time thank you uh council member hunt uh i have a question which i think
is very similar to council member winterstein's but maybe it's just me asking the question
my way for my understanding but Could this also be thought of as a
$13 per capita, which is approximately what it works out to? It sounds
like it isn't because it will be allocated differently based on the needs
for one portion. Is that right? Yes, I believe so. It is equivalent
to roughly a $13 per capita. I'll say we As I mentioned,
right, so we've been tackling some process improvements and thinking about how do we
improve our investments in human services and the providers who are helping to address
need in the community. So we're working to improve this target and our methodology
behind it as we go. part of the approach of having a per capita number
mixed with, added with a targeted is that the per capita really helps to understand,
okay, there's some basic needs we anticipate having in the community and as our population
grows, that kind of baseline need that we assume exists, that will grow too. And
then we also want to be responsive to needs that we're hearing from the
community. And that's where the targeted allocations, particularly based on the needs assessment, feel
like are intended to be a more kind of responsive and again targeted response
to address needs. Okay. um there is also the option which hasn't yet been discussed
which is the 15 per capita rate and so if if that were considered um
would then the targeted that there would again be a needs assessment and there would
again be a targeted portion of that or would it go through a different process
and would be allocated differently because it's based solely on the per capita rate
I anticipate that that allocation process would look slightly different. So the Human
Services Commission, whatever the funding target is set at, intends to use
the findings from the needs assessment to inform their funding recommendations to council
so whatever package or form this and whatever the number is that that
comes as a target they'll they'll use that needs assessment having the targeted
allocation does will introduce slightly different dynamic to their deliberation process
where they are more closely tracking how much funding is going to
each of those pots. Okay, I have two not heard from Councilmember
Goodman. So then I'm going to come back to Councilmember Winterson. Thank
you so much. I have two questions and I'm sorry if another
one comes up later. Seem to recall if it wasn't in
2017 it may have been in 2016 where we did have some of
this targeted allocation and it was used kind of on a one-off special
request for I believe winter shelter that was not part of the common
application process so in correctly so in 2014 awards were made for
2015-2016. Then in 2016 there were some kind of emergent requests and so
those were those came to Council outside of budget process for approval. So
we looked at those kind of additional requests that happened outside of the
typical process when we were establishing a target for 2017 and 2018. So
that's what constituted that kind of targeted allocation number of 30,500 that
we built into the target for 2017 and 2018. Okay, so you,
there was a even prior emergent request. that you used as your basis. I
did remember that. And so my question was going to be like, okay, so that
was great for our community to be able to respond that way, but that is
not, this isn't going to be set aside for a potential emergent. Do you plan
on allocating it through the, okay, thank you for that. And then my second question
is, can you give me an example of a, Well, you may
have answered it by my earlier question. I was going to ask for an example
of something that addresses housing stability, but this is going to be agencies and their
programs that come through the Common Application System, and you're going to categorize them if
they deal with housing stability. Could you just give us some examples of those? Sure.
provide funding to some programs that provide emergency financial assistance to
prevent eviction or foreclosure or provide financial assistance to help a
household move from homelessness to housing So there are several
financial assistance programs we support. There are housing navigation services
through shelters and housing programs through organizations like Congregations for
the Homeless and Sophia Way, Hope Link, also LifeWire supports
housing advocacy and support for their clients. Tenant landlord clinics.
- And just a simple request, if we approve this and we go forward from
here as if, you and i like you had in the data that we have
one in five renters as being housing burdened over 50 of their household income toward
rental and i don't know if that's something that's tracked by the service providers or
whatnot because that's what we identified in our community as a significant need to know
how well these programs are kind of addressing households in those conditions i think that
would be good to know that's member ray we're back to you thank you I'm
still struggling. So, and kind of the basis of my struggle is I
don't know if we're spending too much or too little on human services.
But what I did see is I saw a 33% increase in grants
between the two periods. And I did see a 350% increase in the
amount of the allocation for And I'm just trying to wrap my
brain around the idea that in 2017, 2018, we had a targeted population and
now we have a different set of things that we're targeting. So how can
I compare those apples to these giraffes and come up with a number. And I've
spent a fair amount of time going through the community needs assessment and it does
a really nice job of identifying the needs, but it doesn't denominate anything that I
can react to and say, yeah, we need to have $450,000 in grants to meet
our needs this year, or do we need $850,000 or do we need 300? I
just can't figure out the number. And I've not seen anything tonight where the other
stuff that I've, material I've gotten that says that's the number that gets us to
some outcome that is good for the community. And that's what I'm really struggling on.
So I don't know if it's too low. I don't know if it's too high.
I don't know if it's, you know, it's the Goldilocks thing is just right. But
I don't have any data that informs that for me. So I have a hard
time supporting this. So there's a question buried in there somewhere, which is, is there
some additional data that you can share with me to help me figure out what
what what Goldilocks would like? So I heard two other things too. So first I'd
like to say I share in the struggle of how do we apply dollar
amounts to needs that exist in the community? And you know the the targeted
allocation amount for 2017-2018 and then thinking about how does that compare to what
we're looking at for 2019 and 2020. So you know I see this as
as additive. So resources that additional targeted funding last time was targeted to
how around housing and homelessness that that carries through in the targeted allocations in this
this round right that's one of the major categories and we have kind of three
additional that were identified in the needs assessment so those are building on existing kind
of targeted need identified and so the needs assessment in a sense confirmed that existing
need that was identified. And then for overall funding level, yes, a significant increase
over power cycle. And I think we would see this as working to further
catch up to the need that exists in the community. So we don't think
we hit the mark. We don't think we got it just right last time,
and so we understand that there's more ground to make up in meeting need in
the community. And I cannot say that I'm certain that this, you know, $495,000 is
gonna hit right on the head, but that this definitely gets us closer to meeting
need in the community. So I'm sorry, it's a pretty unsatisfying answer. It's not a
satisfying one to give. I think what I'm hearing from Councilmember Ray is that it's
probably going to be hard to get him over the end line on this one
tonight, but that he probably has some good ideas on how the data could be
presented in the fall when it comes with budget to demonstrate to him what portion
of the need we're funding with the $495,000. So we will work on ideas with
Councilmember Ray to make sure that he gets that information. Council Member Batiste. So thank
you for the presentation Martha. In regard to the first time that
targeted funding came forward to the Council, it was surrounding homelessness and
housing instability and that information, was that coming back from the providers
and the organizations that we work with across the region saying we
were really struggling in this area? Yes, and we have
the benefit I say benefit. We had the knowledge of what the precise ask had
been outside of the regular funding cycle. So there was a specific ask around family
shelters. There were some smaller ask around utility assistance to make sure that the men's
winter shelter could stay open. And so we had, and there was another one for
our transitional housing program. So we could tally those additional asks to really understand, okay,
what's the dollar amount of additional assistance that was deemed such an important emergent need
that we needed to address it. And that was the foundation for that 30,500.
And then certainly we were hearing from community and providers that there's a need
around homelessness and housing stability. - And was that the first year as well,
I'm trying to remember back that Issaquah participated in the one night count for
homelessness? - 2016 was our first year participating. And
so in regard to the targeted amount that we're talking about now, if
I'm just trying to make sure that I'm understanding correctly, the needs assessment
gave it an even deeper dive in terms of we had heard
this about homelessness, but now it's been broken into these four categories.
They had all asked for certain amounts and so that $112,000 was
the difference between if they would have gotten the full funding because
they fell into those categories that had been determined to be of the highest
need, those four categories? Roughly, yes. Okay. That's where the total funding gap... It was
the 134, and there was some consideration given. Okay, I'm just trying to make sure
I'm understanding correctly. Thank you. Follow-up questions, except from Council Member Ray. Just kidding. Okay,
any more questions? Mariah, are you thinking? One more? No, I don't have a question.
No more questions, and we're ready for a motion. I would move
to approve the target funding level of $383,000 based on a
$10 per capita base plus $112,000 in targeted funding for a
total target of $495,000 for the 2019-2020 human services funding. Is
there a second? Second. Multiple seconds. It's been moved and seconded.
Is there any council discussion? Council Member Bautista and
then Council Member Ray and then Winsterstein. So again, thank you
Martha for the great presentation and just all of the information.
It was a few years sitting on the Human Services Commission
III to be specific and talking about getting to that $10
per capita, the struggle that we had just just getting over
that line to the $10 per capita. This commission does such
an amazing job in basically taking deep dives into everything
that's going on with the grants, reviewing the grants, and then also
working in coordination with all of the partner organizations and the nonprofits
to really understand what the needs are in terms of human services.
I would say that You know, actually I'm
just going to read from last year. There was
the last grant cycle was $371,500, which reflected the
$10 per capita plus the $30,500 in targeted funding.
The city awarded $371,500 in grants. but there was
a total of 696,232 in requests. And if you talk
to the nonprofit executive directors and get to know the
organizations the way the human services group and the commissions do,
they are always under asking. They are asking for the very bare minimum.
And so you can see the delta between those numbers and going through
the grant cycle can be just absolutely heartbreaking in terms of looking at
those deltas. So it It doesn't always, for me, come down to exact
metrics. It comes down to there's always a greater need in human services.
And so when I look at option B, which is the $10 per
capita plus the $112,000, to me that's really a a minimum of what
I would like to see funded. And I also just wanted to say
that it's so important that is a qua come through in terms of
human services funding, this is a regional effort. There are so many services that as
a smaller city of Issaquah that we don't have in our city. And we have
to support the regional effort in terms of human services. So this is something I
feel really passionate about. And in the future, I would like us to have a
conversation outside of this vote where we're looking at the target in the future when
we're looking forward is $10 per capita. where we would like to be and are
we feeling comfortable with, as we've talked about, this combination of the per capita and
the targeted amount. Thank you. - Thank you, Council Member Batiste. I believe it's Council
Member Ray next. - Yeah, I can't tell you how much I support the programs
that we're funding and how I think this is an amazingly great thing we're doing.
I just have an awfully difficult time getting behind the targets when I don't know
where they're coming from. And I think this is what we've talked about. And I
just wanna make sure, I mean, our job up here is to make sure that
we do the best that we can with the dollars that the City of Issaquah
citizens give us. And I just wanna make sure that this is the best use
of those dollars. So please, when you come back with the budget ask in October,
please be able to support the numbers and say this is how we got to
here and this is why we need that i need something that i can i
can refer back to that provides me a basis for saying this is the right
amount because we got nothing but lots of competing demands for our funds thank you
council member ray council member winterstein Martha it was really
good to see the community needs assessment and how it was
applied as a former member of the Human Services Commission we
wish we did the best that we could in allocating and
requesting funds on a per service basis without having real data
that described our community specifically. There's a lot of good regional data. There's data,
Bellevue does an update and others do as well. And we would kind of
extrapolate from that and we would use the applications themselves. It is moving to
me to see those results of the community needs assessment in those categories and
realize, okay, these are real measures of what's happening in Issaquah. So I like
the concept of targeted allocation. I may have called it waiting or something. I
mean, one of the possibilities we could be considering is just be at 10.
dollars per capita and just wait programs in this area in those
areas higher so they get because those were some of the greatest
needs but that mean that had crossed my mind but I do
I there are requests beyond what we can fund beyond what the
collection of cities can fund There's a little bit of a dynamic there. I recognize
that. But when you, I know you and your organization and many people who are
on the commission now are stacking together many years of looking at these applications, understanding
the needs in the community, understanding what kind of programs are working and what is
being most effective. So we're growing in our, competency to understand the need, understand and
affect good outcomes with smart, targeted dollars to the greatest needs. So that there's a,
it is probably more art than science because it is very difficult to measure these
outcomes. We are very dependent, but I also know this on, on the measures provided
by our service providers. But this is an industry that it's not rocket
science, it's harder than rocket science. It's very, very difficult when you have
to every two years kind of justify most of your existence. The ability
to forecast, the ability to have stability, to attract the kind of people
to your organization that can deliver these effectively, lots of challenges. that to
really make these work most effectively. So I appreciate what the
administration recommended. I think it does reflect the values of our
community, I think, and the growth in funding for these areas,
especially targeted per our community needs assessment, I think is a
good step forward of the whole process. Thank you. Thank you councilmember we're just
and councilmember Ramos. Thank you. I need to be honest and up front here that
I was on this commission for 10 years along with a couple other folks here.
So I know the inner workings of what that commission does and the quality of
work and having seen the numbers over 10 years of constantly seeing the request to
be two to three times the amount of funding that was available and starting back
when it was six dollars ahead and and uh dreaming someday that it might be
ten dollars a person. This is just really good to see. I do have a
lot of a good feel for where we've gotten to in this time. I like
the targeted set up that we can see that needs assessment that is ours and
no longer barring Bellevue's and saying well that's close enough. We actually have data that
is more related to our community as well as our neighbors. So that gives us
a little more hopefully efficiency the the target is very important because as
of people. The commissioners look and try to figure this out having a target they
can shoot for and really choose to go through the work that takes about 6
months to sort through all the applications make the best decisions and have a target
that they can really land on and make and pick the best providers that do
this work and know they can stick with that and then hopefully we'll stick with
our recommendation to ourselves in the future as well. So that's important because that's happening
now and they have to have something that they know they're working with so it
makes some sense. Otherwise you keep going back and forth and it doesn't work and
that happened once when we were on there. So having an established amount is really
important for them to do their work. and I'm glad we're where we are this
is our community values it is and a couple of interesting mentioned that it's just
like our policing issue earlier. These are the things our community values, it's a thing
that makes us what we are that everybody so proud of and and be a
part of and I see that I think we need to do this. And I'm
really I'm glad to see these numbers. I'm going to send some emails to some
previous commissioners that were on this commission years ago and they would be so impressed
to see what we're doing now. So thank you for your work and thank all
the commissioners. Thank you, Councilmember Ramos. Councilmember Hunt. I wish to speak in support of
the motion. I think that my support is mostly based on faith in the
commission. I have not served on the Human Services Commission, but very recently served
on the Planning Policy Commission. And I know that the commissions go into a
lot of detail, contacting experts, looking through applications, working with the different nonprofits and
and finding the information and so i do i do think that that
targeted allocation reflects all of that work i think um also that um
with council member ray i i think that there is some areas
where that information could be presented more clearly because I appreciate that it's very
difficult to put a dollar value on these services and I see that struggle
but at the end of the day we do need to make a decision
that has a dollar value attached to it and so I think that more
clearly explaining the the rationale would be useful and this
will come up again. And so I would like
to see a more straightforward presentation in terms of
how the targeted amount actually meshes with the needs
that are in the community needs assessment. I also
noted, and this came up in your presentation today, that
that a lot of the services are actually services to find wayfinding for
services that are not in Issaquah. And I think that makes sense for
our city, which is a relatively medium-sized city. I think that we should
take that into account though. I think that's a good strategy, but we
also should take into account that There are these needs that we are
not striving to fill but we are striving to have people Be able to get
to those surfaces outside of the city And so I think this this plan that's
laid forward is a good starting place To increase the services in Issaquah, and that's
why I'm supporting it. Thank you council member hunt council member Goodman. Thank you so
I'm a little bit torn because I do
agree with both Councilmember Ray and Councilmember Hunt.
I completely agree that we need to be
making decisions based on something and the idea
that the there will always be more requests than
there is money available. And so if we upped it to a million, then
we would get requests for a million, too. The need is out there, but
I do think that we have a responsibility to at least explain why we
come up with a certain amount. It needs to be based on something. It
has zero to do with how I feel about the Human Services Commission's work and
the staff's work in this area. It's exemplary. I'm very proud of it. And I
don't disagree with anything that's said about our value system, but I don't think that's
what I should base my decision on. And I'm also concerned about voting against and
I think what I would rather do is what Councilmember Hunt suggested,
and that is put folks on notice that I'm interested in seeing
more information about what the numbers are based on. There has to
be some something out there that can better inform us as to
why the numbers are recommended where they are. And then I think I'm much
more comfortable. But I will support, but I'll notice that I want more information
also at budget and then during the next two year cycle then hopefully
we'll be we won't have to have the conversation again because we will
have this information but but you know councilmember Ray is right that we
have based our decision from the beginning of time at least 20 years
on just this feels right and I I don't think that's a good
decision-making process but I will support this because I do want to support
the funding, but I think we need a better basis for our decision making. Thank
you. So noted that this question this evening has to do with approving a target.
And the question in the fall will have to do with approving the actual amount.
And that... heard loud and clear that in order to be prepared for the fall
we have to have some additional discussions and and show you more hard data on
why the target is the target so i appreciate all the work that staff did
and we'll make sure that that happens in the fall and if there's no more
comments um All those in favor of approving the target funding level of
$383,000 based upon a $10 per capita base plus $112,000 in targeted funding
for a total target of $495,000 for 2019-2020 Human Services funding signify by
saying aye. Opposed? Passes unanimously. Next order of business this evening is for
good of the order. Do any council members have anything for good of
the order? one small item if there's nothing uh i just wanted to announce that
the next council meeting is on monday march 4th at 7 p.m and several items
that will are proposed to be at that meeting one having to do with amending
the code and central standards prohibiting community health engagement locations and safe injection sites there
will be an ordinance proposed that evening The Regional Coalition for Housing 2018 work
program and administrative budget will be on, is proposed to be on that council
agenda for approval, as well as the Regional Coalition for Housing 2017 fall trust
fund for approval of a resolution. There will be a request for position reclassification
and budget development funding and that will be on there for authorization. Potentially seeing
the solid waste contract update. and proposal to adopt an ordinance amending our salary ordinance.
And that's sort of a look ahead of what's coming at the next council meeting.
No other for good of the order. We will be adjourning into executive session. As
earlier announced, there will be an executive session held this evening to
discuss property acquisition per RCW 42.30.110.1.1B. This item is expected to take
approximately 25 minutes. No action is anticipated to follow an open session.
We'll now recess into executive session at 10:20.
We are back in session. We are back in open
session at 11:27 p.m. There being no further meeting and
no further business, the meeting is adjourned. Okay, I'm tired.