City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I have 6 p.m. on August 3rd. I'll call the meeting of the City Council to order. Would you all please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance? 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. Thank you. I note the absence of Councilmember Bruce McDougal, everybody else being present.

Mayor Walters.

Ms. Cleland McGrath.

I would like to excuse Mr. McDougal. Second.

What was that?

Mayor Walters.

Mr. McDougal.

I was able to join.

I rescind my slurs against Mr. McDougall's presence or absence. All council members are here. Thank you, council. We'll move on then to item three, which is announcements and committee reports. So starting with a couple of announcements, as I mentioned, I think last week, we expect to resume work on the 12th and commercial intersection. mid-August. That will include, as you see on the map there, work at 11th and Commercial. You can learn more at anacorteswa.gov slash projects, but we expect to resolve the bump that's near 11th Street, and we'll be installing new signaling equipment, which should substantially improve throughput in the intersection and add in some curbing. So there's probably a month or more of work left to be done there. The intersection will almost always not be closed for that work. Uh, cause it will largely happen off, off the pavement. All right. Uh, the library is having a couple of events that they want you to be aware of. First of all, teen trivia night, August 11th. There's also a presentation on AI made simple August 12th. And there is a break in children's programming from the 17th of August through September 13th. You can find more information at anacorteswa.gov slash library. Tomorrow, National Night Out returns to Storvick Park. The police department and a variety of its community partners present this event. 6 to 8 p.m., Storvick Park tomorrow. See you there. You know, I said that was tomorrow, but it actually said August 6th, so I need to adjust my calendar. I'm pretty hopeful that it is August 6th. But you might check it out on the website where I'm confident we'll have it correctly. Okay, we have one committee report and that's from the Public Works Committee. Council, who's got that report?

Mayor Walters.

Ms. Kalina McGrath.

thank you we uh had our meeting just uh at five o'clock today and so we it was a pretty late meeting we just kind of caught up on a couple of things uh one is that they appreciated all the work that was done the last time we had the consultants here about the wastewater treatment so that was good feedback for staff to have and the consultants the next workshop for staff is october 8th so we should get somewhat of an update after that meeting um we have been in the process of applying for a grant for a multimodal grant uh for safe routes to school which is kind of uh encompasses 22nd street between m avenue and j avenue so connecting approximately the middle school up to the pool, doing a multimodal trail, and then also doing some sidewalk improvements in that area on J, M, and L. So Safe Routes to School is going to actually come and visit the site. That's the next step in the application process, so that's a good sign. And we are applying for $1.2 million, and it's a zero match. So hopefully we get that. It's really an important area for the community. The Traffic Safety Committee had a meeting, which is internal departments. within the city to talk about some of the concerns that have been brought up either by staff or the public. A couple of highlights is that 4th and Q does not, there's a desire to possibly consider doing a four-way stop there. At this point, they're going to monitor that intersection and repaint some of the lines to better define that. It's a stop sign if you are going north-south, not east-west. Kingsway out in Skyline, there's been some concerns about speeding. It's a really wide road. There's no sidewalk, so there's a lot of pedestrians and dogs and bicycles on the road. So they're exploring options. First option would probably be with paint, maybe a center line of some sort, but that is still in discussion. And then one of the other items there was a number of them but we've had written comment about our avenue there is a crosswalk at approximately at 24th street and at that location when you hit that crosswalk it's where people accelerate into 35 miles per hour we're aware of that as that's probably going to be addressed and bumped down to 25 miles per hour so that inner so that crosswalk folks will be or vehicles will kind of maintain a maximum of 25 miles per hour so that will be coming to us in the near future there were a couple other ones that are still kind of being discussed but not probably moving forward immediately the last thing we talked a little bit about is that and I had to look it up the city and the wastewater treatment plant received the draft NPDES and You can ask me what that acronym is. It is National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. There you go. So there was a new draft that was presented to our wastewater treatment plant among all of the other wastewater treatment plants. that discharge into puget sound across the state or within the state it's pretty extensive it affects the nitrogen output we can the amount of nitrogen we can discharge with through the water so at this point we are having consultants do a technical memo in response and we've requested an additional 30 days we get 45 days for public comment We need a little bit more. We're hoping to receive that extended time. So what's going to be is it's probably going to accelerate the upgrade window for Needing to address nitrogen levels right now. We are meeting them and for the near future we should be okay even with the If I'm understanding correctly even at the the new changes, but it will not last forever and so we need to Make sure that we understand the impact it has So there you go, that's all we talked about today

Thank you, Ms. Killeen McGrath. Also, we have a correction. National Night Out is on August 4th, tomorrow. I was right. The slide was wrong. So we will get that corrected. Thank you. All right. Next up, we have public comment, unless there are other council meeting announcements. No? Okay. Next up is public comment. We have two people who are signed up so we'll take them first and then anybody else who would like to provide comment and First is Pat Gardner

Good evening, Mayor, council members, Pat Gardner, Anna Cordes. One brief thing. The art show this weekend was very successful from what I heard from a lot of vendors. I worked seven hours all three days. And the vendors, they were really crazy on Friday. It was a busy, busy day financially for them. But it was successful, at least from what I heard from all of them. And you'll probably get your report accordingly. Okay. About the e-bikes and e-vehicles and scooters and everything. Those things don't come cheap, do they? They cost a bit. I mean, I haven't looked at them and I don't have kids, so I don't know about all that. But I think parents If they can afford to pay for those scooters, bikes, vehicles, if they can afford that, they should be able to afford a fine. Don't slap the parents on the hand. They need to be fined if their child is found, or if they are found. you know, not following the rules and regulations. And it's still, I'm hearing from the paths in the parks, in the trails, about the e-vehicles and, of course, dogs, but the e-vehicles. But people need to be, it's hard to have all eyes to out there looking and enforcing the rules. I realize that. But if you do catch someone, don't just slap them on the hand. I know other cities are really getting strict because I've talked to somebody elsewhere. And they're going after the parents. You are responsible until your child is 18 years old, and you've got to pay that or have them take away the scooter or whatever. But anyway, thank you for hearing from me. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Gardner. Next up, Linda Martin.

Linda Martin, Anacortes Ward 3. I have some questions about the event center. And I thought, well, instead of just wondering, I thought I would just come to you about it. I have read your project pages. I brought them with me. And there just seems like a couple things that don't quite add up, so I'm just going to ask. But I guess before I ask, I want to say I don't think an event center is a bad idea. I think it might be a good idea. I think the location that you've got is a good location. And I do appreciate all the information on your webpage. I wanted to ask, first of all, it says in 2016, the city adopted its first tourism promotion strategic plan, which recognized the need to set aside a portion of annual lodging tax revenues and to plan to replace the transit shed. So my question, one question is, so did we? set aside lodging tax money for this project coming up. It didn't seem to me like we have, especially because later on in your writing, you talk about that we're not going to take any money out of the general fund. which in the writing sounds wonderful, but here's what just I'm wondering. So it's 8.4 million, it says. You've got grants for about one and a half million. That's good. So there's still seven million, although in the financial report it says it's eight million. So there's, you know, a little difference there somewhere. So we're planning on spending $8 million that we don't have. We're gonna borrow money, and that's my taxpayer money, to pay it back. And we're going to invest it in a property that we don't own. And I'm not sure about the building, but I don't think we own the building. And we're not going to be running the event center, so we're not going to get the results of the event center receipts, although I'm sure the idea is that we're going to attract more tourism and get money from that. And then we're going to... pay for this bond with lodging tax money that our many, many nonprofits have counted on for years. So are we really going to do that? Or it's just sounding a little bit more like another tax on us. So these are just questions, things that I'm wondering. Is it really the best timing right now? I don't know. Just wondering. Thanks.

Thank you, Ms. Martin. Is there anyone else who would like to contribute public comment at this point? I assume staff would tell me if there was somebody online.

No.

All right. Thank you. Let's move on then to the consent agenda, item five. There are three items on the consent agenda. Council.

Mayor Walters.

Ms. Hunt. I move to approve consent agenda items A through C. I have a motion and a second to approve all three items on the consent agenda. Hearing no request to remove any item on the Consent Agenda and with discussion not permitted on the Consent Agenda, we'll proceed to a vote. All those in favor of the Consent Agenda, all three items say aye.

Aye.

All those opposed say no. The ayes have it and the Consent Agenda is approved. We have two other items of business this evening. The first is contract award for the Ben Root Skate Park Restroom and Parking Lot Project. although this is the parking lot part of the project.

It is absolutely that, Mayor Walters. All right. Good evening. Go ahead. There it is. You know, I told John I didn't need his help tonight, and sure enough. But good evening, Mayor, Council, members of the audience. We are here tonight with a... asking for approval of a contract, and... Let me talk about that a little bit just to kind of remind you of where we were and how we got here. We are, in fact, phase two of our Ben Root Skate Park Improvement Project. And just to remind you, of where that is it's down there along our avenue not too far from what sounds like might be a reduced recommendation for reduced speed there's a lot of kids do use that crossing right there and as you can see on the design map here we've got a parking lot that is right down there at the south end We've got the spaces facing the action so parents can hang out in the car if there's younger people that need some car time or maybe just mom or dad or anybody who's bringing kids down there needs some car time. Quick history. I know you probably remember all this stuff, but... Yeah, so parking lot, bathroom. When we sold the R Avenue right away to MJB for a million bucks, we came up with some funding for this project. And you guys actually committed that funding to help us get this done. And the property, of course, did include the current side of the public restroom that serves the Tommy Thompson Parkway, and that turned out to be quite a little hurdle to get over because That was paid for with an RCO grant, and you can't mess with RCO projects without coming up with at least the same, if not better. MJB has plans to demo that current restroom here next month all of a sudden. And as I just mentioned, there was an RCO grant that funded the restroom. We made it through their process to approve a new restroom at the skate park that will serve both the trail and the skate park. So we're not losing any level of service there because the current restroom is doing that job now. So we're just gonna get it a little closer to the heart of the action. So you approved that sale. You approved some revenue that we could put towards this project. And what we did with that, we did a design contract with McKay Sposito. That was about $70,000 worth of work. An engineer's estimate came in at about 382. We were very happy to see the Colacurcio brothers come through with a $310,000 low bid. So that was nice to see. It's always great when it comes in a little lower. And we have had some real success working with those folks over the years. So that's also a good thing. The CXT unit that we're going to drop in, another 190 plus or minus so that gets us up to a total project cost of about five hundred and seventy thousand so we have stayed well below the million dollars that we acquired via the property sale that's the history that's the current situation and if there are any questions about any of that I would be very happy to answer them

Mayor Walters? Ms. Hunt, go ahead.

Bob, can you flip back to the second slide that shows the map, the plan?

Yeah. I think so. There we go.

There's so few slides, you can one at a time. Perfect. So it looks like you can get from the bike trail exactly right there.

You can get to the restroom. Yep.

I don't know what the layout is, but will there be an opportunity to possibly put some signage there? Because we're looking at some new signs we may need on the Thompson Trail.

You know how much we love a good sign installation in the Parks Department.

Yes, I do know that, actually. So I'm asking you.

So yeah, I mean, we can certainly look at whatever might be the most helpful to put there. And like the current connector to the skate park, it comes in perpendicular because we just figured that was the safest way to get people to slow down if they're gonna take a left or a right and come into the park.

Thank you. Mayor Walters.

Mr. Fantini.

I know it's not marked on here, but I'm assuming there's city code where some of the spots will be ADA compliant or handicapped, right?

Yeah, adjacent to that entry to the parking lot, right? Yeah. That hatched area?

Yeah, whatever our formula is, that's what it'll absolutely be.

Okay. I don't really see a reason to belabor this too much because we have gone over this many, many, many times. So unless anyone has any more to discuss, I move that we approve as presented. Second.

Motion and a second to approve the contract award to Colacurcio Brothers for the Ben Root Skate Park restroom and parking lot, but mostly parking lot project. Any further discussion? Hearing none, we'll proceed to the vote. All those in favor of approving the contract award say aye.

Aye.

All those opposed say no. The ayes have it, and the contract award is approved. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Vogts. All right, and our final item tonight, Ordinance 5034, a 2026 budget amendment that consolidates some accounting funds and establishes a construction fund. Our finance director, Mr. Steve Hoagland, will present this item.

Thank you, Mayor, members of the Council, members of the audience. We have a budget amendment for your review and consideration tonight. This ordinance is not a typical budget amendment. Normally, when we do a budget amendment, we're asking you to adjust the amount of approved expenditures for one of our accounting funds. So what I am requesting in this one is to actually eliminate three of our accounting funds and establish one new accounting fund. And I might start by Pointing out the name of this file probably could have been a little better. We're not collapsing any funds. We are consolidating funds. We don't have a collapse in process. But what's driving this is the desire to improve transparency and streamline some of our accounting and budgeting processes. So I put a couple of comments in here that came from the State Auditor's Office. So the State Auditor's Office, they published what's called the BARS Manual. BARS stands for Budgeting, Accounting, and Reporting Systems. And that's the guidance that they publish for all municipal entities for those elements, accounting, budgeting, and reporting. Section 3.115 of the BARS manual directs that only the minimum number of funds consistent with legal and operating requirements should be established, and also that local governments should periodically undertake a comprehensive evaluation of their fund structure to ensure that individual funds that became superfluous are eliminated from accounting reporting so what we're proposing here is we have three funds that rely almost primarily or almost exclusively on property tax revenues the other fund that relies heavily on property tax revenue is the current expense fund which we generally refer to as the general fund there's technical differences between those two terms but for the purposes of this conversation, I'm just going to use the general fund. So Fund 101 is the Parks and Recreation Fund, and that also has within that department structure within Fund 101, we use Department 410. Fund 102 is the Cemetery Fund, which contains Department 430. And then Fund 103 is the library containing Department 440. So what we are proposing is that these three funds would be eliminated out of the accounting system and all of the existing activity would be consolidated back into the general fund. This would create efficiencies not only in budgeting and reporting but in our accounting as well. If you just think about how we structure the revenue budget for each of these funds to get significant amounts of property tax. We don't know exactly what that dollar amount is going to be. We budget to the best of our ability, but we have to have some buffer in there so that the fund doesn't go into a negative position. So all three of those funds currently, I'm sorry, two out of those three funds currently are in a negative position. Council does not approve this ordinance, then we will come back with a budget amendment to budget operating transfers out of the general fund into these accounting funds to keep them financially solvent. And then I think it's kind of easy to visualize what that budgeting system would look like without those various funds. Council may remember going through the budget process and we have all these various funds that we go through. Those would still be there in nature. as departments within the general fund, we just wouldn't have the specific different accounting funds. So I'd like to pause right there, see if that makes sense to this point.

Mayor Walters?

Ms. Hunt?

Mr. Hoagland, for the members of the public, this will continue to be transparent because it will be just like the fire department and the police department's 310, the planning department. They're all in the general fund with their department code.

Exactly right. Yeah, so exactly like the police department, for example, general fund 001.310, the department number, parks would now be 001.410, cemetery 001.430, et cetera. Yep.

Mayor Walters.

Mr. Fantini.

I think this is really great. In my mind, this is one of the hardest things for me as a council member to understand so far has been the big swings of money when things are sitting in different funds. And being like, well, this is like this and it's going to move in six months and then it'll show this. And it sounds like kind of, you know, somebody earlier said to me, very wise, that this is kind of eliminating a lot of the noise and we're getting more to true operational costs of the city by kind of. putting all that stuff together. It's still going to be accounted for correctly and accounted for right. I think it's more than even transparency. It's ease of understanding what we're going to be looking at. And so I think this is really great, solid finance. So thank you to the mayor and the staff for bringing this forward.

That's a good way of putting it. It's transparent either way, but it's simpler this way.

Mr. Young. Thank you. Just sort of piggybacking on Ms. Hunt's line of explanation for clarity of where we're going you know as an organization the way I'm understanding it is by consolidating this into the general fund not only does it allow us to have clarity that we've always had but it'll also be just as clear what funds are used for but it also gives us use of those funds that may be in the individual pockets without such a a lot of hubble blue if I could say that you know in in you know in times now where we are where we're really looking at the efficiencies of how we're doing what we're doing and what we're spending on we will always have that this sort of out of the general fund allows us to have that clarity that precise clarity but a greater use of those funds that may have been sitting It's sort of like having, you know, three different savings account and you're going to each one of them trying to get money out, but you're the same person going to all three of those things. And, you know, so if you could move it to one, but yet allocate the line item showing precisely what it came and what it's for, it allows for greater efficiency and better time.

Yeah, and I actually really like that example. I use the example of personal budgeting all the time when I try to explain fund accounting. You have your general fund, which is kind of like your main operating fund where you pay your utilities and grocery bill out of, and maybe you have a Christmas fund set up, and different things like that where you're accumulating money for a specific reason, and there are times when it makes sense, and those times are generally when you have a restricted source of income. For example, real estate excise tax, we're required to maintain a separate fund for that money to go in that cannot, by state law, cannot go into the general fund. And there's a variety of examples like that, but this does really simplify exactly what you're describing. Thank you. Sorry, Mayor, if I could, I want to step back. Just momentarily, I said if this ordinance is not adopted, we'll have to come back with a budget amendment for an operating transfer. I do want to clarify the BARS manual allows for funds to be in a negative position, but only for a small period of time. I believe it's a maximum of 90 days. And so I want to clarify, we're not violating any statutes or principles, but we do need to take action.

We will definitely benefit from more simplicity in the budget, but whenever you go too far into the, well, it's akin to a personal checkbook type of thing, I recall that some people once said that balancing your own budget is to the city's budget as going to the grocery store is to landing on the moon. It's just a real order of magnitude difference in complexity. Council, do you have any other questions or anything you would like to do with this item?

I WANTED TO TOUCH ON THAT BEFORE WE MOVE ON. THE SECOND PART OF THIS ORDINANCE IS ESTABLISHING A CAPITAL CONSTRUCTION FUND. WE DON'T CURRENTLY HAVE ANY CAPITAL CONSTRUCTION FUNDS IN PLACE. THOSE ARE OPTIONAL. GENERALLY THOSE ARE SET UP WHEN YOU ARE ACCUMULATING RESOURCES FOR A BIG PROJECT THAT MIGHT TAKE A NUMBER OF YEARS TO COMPLETE. So what we have identified here is to set up a construction fund, and that's going to be identified as Fund 301. So the BARS manual directs that special revenue funds are 100 level, construction funds are 300 level. That's why the 301 designation fund 301 will house all of our future governmental capital projects so for example the event center that was talked about just earlier tonight that inflated our budget by over eight million dollars this year that would come out of the planning department budget would go into that capital projects fund and then likewise any of those other capital capital projects in the governmental funds The governmental funds being not utility funds would go into that capital projects fund, making it easier to identify what the operating budget is that you're looking at. And then especially I'm thinking once you have a few years of history, really easy to track what your budget is doing from year to year, because you're just going to be looking at the operations budget. So that's what I have in the ordinance, the magnitude of the numbers we're talking about right now. The general fund currently has 12.6 million in capital projects budgeted this year and an additional 700,000 in operating transfers that's coming out of my budget. So that's the general fund budget inflated by $13.3 million. OVER THE OPERATING BUDGET. FUND 101 IS A $2.1 MILLION BUDGET. SORRY, 101 IS PARKS AND REC. 2.1 MILLION. 102 IS THE CEMETERY FUND, 377,000. 103 IS THE LIBRARY, 1.5 MILLION. THAT ROUGHLY 4 MILLION IN BUDGET WOULD GET MOVED INTO THE $43.4 MILLION GENERAL FUND, BRINGING THAT UP TO ABOUT 47.5 MILLION.

Mayor Walters?

Ms. Hunt.

Mr. Hoagland, what about Parks Capital? What about 108?

So, yeah, good question. For the time being, Parks Capital is going to, going to stay. It's not part of this ordinance. I have talked briefly with the Mayor and Mr. Lunsford about that. So ultimately I would like to move that into the construction fund as well. There's a little more nuance to that because it does have a dedicated revenue source. We'll set up cash line within that fund 301 to capture those revenues and those will be identified as parks capital use only.

and then likewise the next step after that probably fiscal year 27 i'd like to do the same thing with fund 105 which is the city's road construction fund mayor walters ms malton i really i especially like this part of the ordinance because this ends up being really confusing for me and i think other people so i'll be glad to see this move forward

Mr. Hoagland, do you have any other presentation?

Sorry, Mayor. Yes. No, that's it for me. Thank you. Okay. Thank you.

Council, any other comments? Mayor. Ms. Cleland-McGrath.

Thank you. So just for clarification, you said that the construction fund is governmental funds, not utilities, right?

That's correct.

So I remember when we were doing the outfall project where it was $7 million in big chunks, and it really complicated the budget. So in this case, that project wouldn't be in construction fund 301 because it was a utility is that right that's exactly right so is there a similar construction fund we should be setting up just for to simplify it right sure this is very helpful for the for the governmental funds

That's a great question. Thank you for asking that. So GAAP, Governmentally Generally Accepted Accounting Principles directs that in utility enterprise funds that those capital projects should be budgeted within the utility fund and not in a separate construction fund. Yeah, so just kind of the nature of the beast when it comes to utilities.

And one more question, if that's okay. So I like where the construction fund 301 is going and the future kind of development of what types of projects would fall under that. What mechanism would it come to council then when we want to add, for example, the event center fund to it or some other, if we wanted to build a new, I mean, we're not going to, but build a new city hall, what's the mechanism to identify a project, I guess? Is it based on project or is it based on department or how does that get handled?

yeah it's based it's based on project and so it would work on the same process that we have in place now where it would work through the cfp process and then move into the operating budget or into the annual budget but instead of being in you know fund 001 general fund for like a new city hall it would go into that fund 301 but go through that same budget process yep

Mayor Walters.

Ms. Hunt.

Could we clarify, just in case anyone misunderstood, we're not building a new city hall next year.

Well, not yet. That requires money. This item is marked for public comment. I'll take comment from the public at this point. Any member of the public who would like to comment, raise your hand, come up to the podium. Seeing none, we'll move on. Council, Mr. Currier.

I move to approve ordinance 5034 to consolidate funds 101, 102, and 103 into the general fund and establish fund 301 for governmental construction projects. Second.

A motion and a second to approve the ordinance as presented. Further discussion? Hearing none, we'll call for the vote. This will be a roll call vote on the motion to approve the ordinance. Ms. Ransack, would you call the roll?

Mr. Fantini? Aye. Ms. Hunt? Aye. Mr. Currier? Yes. Mr. Young?

Aye.

Ms. Cleveland-McGrath?

Yes.

Ms. Moulton?

Yes.

Mr. McDougal? Yes. Mayor, the ayes are seven, the nays are zero.

Sounds like the ayes have it, and the ordinance is approved. Council, we also have a webpage describing all of the funds and how they all work. based on this ordinance. Now that it's approved, we will publish it, and we'll send it out to you so that you can take a look. It's going to be on the finance webpage associated with the other budget webpages. It might become useful as we get into the budget process. Thank you all. We will see you all next week.