City Council - Regular Meeting

all right thank you good evening everyone thank you all so much for being here it is 6 02 p.m on tuesday july 28 2026 and i now call to order the 2187th meeting of the city of college place city council madam clerk will you please take roll call

yes commissioner cleve i mean council member cleveland i mean i'll take the promotion but uh present council member lopez present council member evan present Councilmember Sherman, present. Councilmember Boyle, present. Mayor Hernandez, present. And we do have a quorum. We do have two council members that have been excused tonight. It's Councilmember Green and Councilmember Stecklein.

All right, great. Thank you. Will 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. All right, thank you so much. All right, it's now time for public comment. And Council meetings are primarily structured to permit council members to arrive at the decisions necessary to govern the city. And I'm just going to read some quick, I know she's got no fancy. Meeting protocol for public comments. Written public comments may be provided by submitting comments to clerk at cpwa.us no later than 4 30 pm on the meeting date to be included in the record. If typewritten no less than 11 point font. verbal public comment may be made during the meeting in person at the meeting location provided at the beginning of each agenda any member of the public who desires to make a public comment at city council meeting by telephone or remote access shall provide at least 24-hour notice excluding weekends and holidays prior to the start of the meeting at which the member of the public wants to make a comment notify the clerk city clerk or designee in writing or by direct verbal communication of their desire to make a comment telephone comment you can call one six six nine nine hundred ninety one twenty eight entering the meeting id which is provided at the beginning of each agenda and to raise your hand star nine and star six to mute and unmute when comments are requested For virtual comment, join using a Zoom attendee link, which is provided at the beginning of each agenda and raise your hand when comments are requested. Once recognized, you will have five minutes to speak on a subject that is under the control of the council. So it's now time for public comment. Madam Clerk, did anyone submit a written comment in advance or request to speak via telephone or virtually on an item that is not on today's agenda?

I did have one comment come in. Okay. And they will be speaking later.

Yeah, that's okay. Okay. So if if anyone in person would like to speak regarding an item that is not on the agenda, please raise your hand. seeing none we're going to um move on actually did anyone in virtual attendance contact the city clerk to request to speak if anyone is on attendance and would like to speak please raise your hand using star nine all right then seeing that there is now we're going to move on to the consent agenda which consists of tonight's agendas for july 28 2026 city council regular meeting minutes july for july 14 2026 excusing the absence of council member green excusing the absence of council member steckline the February 2026 financials, the March 2026 financials, the reappointment of city council member Boyle to the Lodging Tax Advisory Commission, the reappointment of Ann Marie Bowman to the Lodging Tax Advisory Commission, and the reappointment of Groover Snell to the Lodging Tax Advisory Commission. Is there any item any member of the council would like removed from the agenda at this time? a motion to approve the consent agenda i'll make a motion to approve the consent agenda with my microphone on thank you we have a motion to accept the consent agenda we have a second council member cleveland all right all in favor say aye aye any opposed all right the eyes have it and the motion is passed We're going now to have presentations, and we do have a guest here. So Ms. Deb Flagan from Hayden Homes will present on giving us updates on the work of Hayden Homes and College Place. Welcome. And if you could just press the button, so you get a little green light. Perfect. There you go. It's all yours. DEB FLAGIN- Yes.

OK. And this too? Maybe. It's awesome. Okay. Good evening, mayor and city council members. I'm Deb Fleigen, and I am vice president with Hayden Homes. I have worked for Hayden Homes for 26 years this year, and I'm very, very proud of being able to work for the company. I think that I've gotten to know or at least meet a few of you over the many years that we've been building here in College Place and City and Walla Walla. I have served on the community council in regards to the housing piece and I think that that was the first time that I had met the mayor and had a similar very, very scaled down version of what I'm going to talk to you about today in regards to some housing related items here in the valley. I'm also serving on the Walla Walla Affordable Housing Committee, and I have been really honored to serve with the Blue Mountain Foundation on their Wellstone project in regards to housing affordability and some new funds that they have available for both College Place and for Walla Walla. Next slide, please. So just to give you a little bit of overview in regards to Hayden Homes, we are the largest private home builder in the Pacific Northwest. We build in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Western Montana. We specifically build and purposely build in rural communities. So we do not build in the metros. We build in College Place and Walla Walla. Those are the places that we love to build. And we do that because we want to focus on figuring out ways to provide housing for the workforce because we really feel like in order for small towns to survive and be able to build economic development, you have to have a workforce that can actually live and not just rent here but actually raise their family here so they stay. um we have built here in the valley since 1998 and we built uh just over um a thousand home a thousand homes so just under 1100 homes uh 360 of those have actually been built here in college place our business model is is that we look at the area medium income in every city that we build. We review it on a monthly basis, and then we work really hard to bring a house to market that meets the 100% of the area medium income. And then we go up from there, and that's to support the hardworking families that are in our communities. Um, There is two components of Hayden Homes. We have Hayden Homes, which is the community builder that built Homestead and is now building Harvey Ranch, where we have a model home and we're building communities. And then we also have Simplicity by Hayden Homes, which is our sister company, and we will build a home for you on your own land. And that's a semi-custom home that we will customize for you on your own land. In addition, we are doing many farmworker housing projects. We are the largest farmworker housing producer in the state of Washington. We've built over 12,000 beds, and that's mostly in the Chelan Tri-Cities area. And then lastly, we're doing many private public partnerships. We're doing a partnership right now at the city of Bandon down on the coast in Oregon. And that is with in combination with the school district and the city. And we are going to be building and it's on city land and we're going to be building about 56 homes there. And those will be deed restricted for city employees and for the teachers and staff that live in that community and also in the county. So it's a really neat program. Next slide. So many of you, I think I've met a couple of you at our First Story dedication. So thank you for coming to our First Story dedication. We're very proud of First Story. We have built 128 homes. These are Hayden Homes new homes in the communities that we build. And this is Hayden Homes nonprofit. We started this over 25 years ago and we offer a zero down 30 year no interest loan. And these are offered to individuals making 80% area medium income or below. 100% of these individuals are first time homebuyers and 80% of them are the first time in their families to ever own a home. So we're really proud of this program. Some of you may have heard recently that there was a recent agreement between Hayden Homes and First Story and the Washington AG's office. And that is we signed assurance of discontinuance. So I'm going to refer to that as an AOD here. But we signed that just in the last couple of weeks. um and um if you're not familiar with it um i would encourage you to go to hayden home's website under the give-as-you-go section there is information that is factual in regards to the aod that was signed but we have discontinued our covenant a charitable covenant on the homes So we will no longer be doing that. The first part of the year, Hayden Homes made the decision that we were not going to stop giving for our communities though. And we decided that we were going to create our own giving program. Next slide, please. And it's called the Give As You Go Fund. And so the Give As You Go Fund will be on every single home that Hayden Homes sells. It will be 100% company funded. And those dollars will be going back to First Story and also to the nonprofits in the counties that we build. So we're really proud of the fact that we will continue to be able to support the nonprofits here in College Place as well as Walla Walla. Next slide, please. So this is just kind of a little bit of a snapshot. And I think John is maybe here too. Oh, John, yes, sorry, sorry. John's here and that can add a little bit of color to this, but this is just a snapshot of the homes that we had built since 2014. As I had said that we had built 360 homes in College Place. I think John has even more information about that.

Yeah, sure. I have a little bit of dated from 2013 through 2025. That's. Our legacy system, I am able to to pull reports back that far and. That equated to 210 new single family homes in our community alone to the tune of from in terms of revenue that. That those projects brought into the city 2,634,000 dollars worth of revenue of that. Roughly 658,000 dollars went directly to current expense through the building permits. 700,000 dollars to our sewer funds. Nearly a 1M dollars to our water funds. And then all other permits, so your mechanical plumbing right away and development fee permits and whatnot to the tune of about 270,000 dollars. So. I bring that up just to point out that Hayden Homes is a significant partner in bringing homes to our community, but also it helps keep the lights on at the city. It helps us fund our water and sewer projects that are really expensive. And they, they also contribute because their projects they're bringing home to our community. So there's impacts, right? So 1 of those would be park impacts. So they, they dedicated veterans park and then developed that project that that park for. for not only their community but the community at large they contributed towards the college avenue cars project to the signal at whitman in college because their trips to their homestead development impacted that but it was you know 250 000 towards that project so they're a really vital partner and when hayden holmes decides to develop in our community they they do um So I really value them for that.

Thank you, John. John was instrumental in helping us with the standards for us to be able to build the Homestead Park. We were working really closely because those were brand new standards that were put into College Place at the time. And so I'm sure it was not a perfect conversation because we were going back and forth in regards to that. But every time that there's a couple of slides up here of kids playing in the park and it's just been a really wonderful addition. So thank you for that, John. Next slide, please. So I wanted just to show you, we call this the housing ladder. And I put this together during COVID. And I just think that it's really helpful when I'm talking to community leaders about housing. Because many times you get the word affordable housing thrown around, and it's really hard to differentiate in regards to what affordable housing is. And so we put this scope together so leaders could see that housing continuum is everything from unsheltered housing, or excuse me, from emergency shelter all the way to market rate. home ownership housing and everything in between. The items that are yellow to red, those are items that are typically subsidized or government type housing. The items that are in green are the multifamily market rate housing and then workforce ownership and market rate ownership. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Those are unsubsidized, and that's what we hope to be able to bring to College Place in the future. Next slide, please. So those two main areas here, the workforce ownership is oftentimes talked about as the middle market housing. And sometimes these are smaller homes and they're ranging between 80 and 100 to 110% area medium income. And that is basically your workforce that's working in your community. and i'll talk a little bit about um why we start and are really proud of building that because it's not easy to do that it's really it's it's right on the edge of being able to to make it work i will say that 26 years ago we were doing it 100 of the time in every single community that we built today we're only doing it 40 of the time in the cities that we're building next slide please So I just wanted to show you when we think of middle housing and what workforce housing looks like, these are an example of housing that we built and build today. They tend to be a little bit smaller. They are single family. Sometimes they can be detached, but most of the time they are, excuse me, sometimes they can be attached. but most of the time we build them detached. And these are ranging here from 800 square feet up to about 1,600 square feet. Next slide. And here's just another example of some of the housing that we're building here that hits that 110% as well. Next slide. So I'm down to my last two slides, I promise. But I wanted just to say that this is how we look at every single community. And we look at Walla Walla County as a county. And so that encompasses both College Place as well as Walla Walla. Knowing that College Place probably has a little bit less, the wages may be a little bit less than they are in Walla Walla. but we put them together in the county. What this is showing is that if you look at the income side, the HUD stats state that a family of four makes $102,000. And what that means is that if you go over to the left, that means that they can purchase a home for about $400,000. And that's based on a 5% down, 7% interest, and a 30-year mortgage. So what we're trying to do when we go into a community is make sure that we can build a house for $400,000 or less. and this kind of gives us that that analysis off to the right you can see that right now the median home price in walla walla is 427 000 which means that's the gap of what's actually being offered on the market and what's actually selling next slide so the last item here is is just an example of how we look at our costs and i think that this is something that's been really important as we've talked to community leaders of talking about the costs of housing and why it can be challenging to build houses at in this case 400 000 the way that we look at this is this is how we break down our costs and we learned this 25 years ago that if you want to build a $400,000 house, 50% of that is basically for your sticks, your bricks, and your labor. And that also includes any of the building permits and then also the impact fees as well. On the right-hand side, you'll see that on the land cost, you need your land cost to be about 20%. And this is really where the biggest bogey is and why it's so challenging to make this work is that land costs are getting, you know, they're much higher than that. So that means on a $400,000 house, you would have an $80,000 lot. And that's just not... available here in the valley. You're looking at something that's much closer to 120 or 140. And so then that leaves your indirect costs above that includes five to 6% for sales, 2% for marketing, for model homes, et cetera. Then you have your project manager warranty, your interest carry, et cetera. And then that leaves a 6% profit on each home that we sell. Um, and so I share this with you because I'm just, I talk about that costs matter and this is how we put together, um, how we can actually bring a home to market. Um, and I'll just leave with to saying that. you know your decisions in regards to the flexibility of being able to build different types of housing I think is probably the biggest thing that we've learned with cities that want to bring both workforce housing as well as higher end housing and the continuum having some flexibility to allow for smaller lots as well as mid-sized lots and larger lots it helps with the multi-generational and then also being able to do some smaller lots to be able to bring in some of the workforce housing

Any questions? All right. Thank you so very much. Council Member Cleveland, questions or comments?

I don't think I have any questions. Thank you for coming this evening.

Thank you, Michael. Council Member Lopez?

I think you answered it with my question was, how can we best support you? But I think you kind of alluded to that last little bit. If there's anything else you want to add, you can. But I just wanted to mention, I do know somebody that benefited from the first story and that was life changing for them. So thank you for doing that.

Thank you, Counselor.

Councilmember Evans. No questions. Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilmember Sherman. No question. Councilmember Boyle. No questions. I appreciated this though.

Thank you very much. Well, Ms. Flagan, thank you so much. This data, this information is really eye opening. So it's quite helpful to be able to see it in this kind of with the charts and the comparisons and the breakdown. So thank you so much for that. I think that's the most educational for us. well thank you for letting us build in your city um we appreciate it and look forward to being a partner in the future yeah we look forward to the new housing that will be coming up thank you so thank you all right i understand we have a member of um the community that would like to speak um regarding a public comment on this topic you will have um Yeah, you turn on the light. Okay. State your name and city of where you reside, and then you have five minutes.

Okay. My name is Steve Schulman. I reside in the county of Walla Walla. I'm a real estate broker in the county in Washington State, and I've got some documents I want to give you, but I'll give them to the clerk to pass out.

Yes, thank you.

The documents I gave you are documents that Deb was referring to with regard to the AG's settlement with Hayden Homes. So you can read for yourself what she was talking about. It also is the press release that the AG's office put out yesterday with regard to the settlement. I want to start by saying I'm an advocate of Hayden Homes. I own more than one. um as a broker i have represented sellers and buyers for the hayden home products i think there's a definite place for hayden homes it's enough it's it's hard to believe that a starter home anymore is 350 to 400 000 but that's the way it is um and hayden does provide that product they provide a pretty good product uh for the value and it gets people into homes that they would otherwise not be able to get into With regard to the documents you've got in front of you, I discovered that when Deb was referring to the first story and the giving of hayden to fund houses for those that can't afford them she didn't mention that a good portion of that money comes from people who buy hayden homes so what hayden does when they buy a plot of land and i'll use homestead development as an example of which i'm on the the board of directors for that development and happened since the board of of homeowners began about five years ago um hayden sub divides that plot of land and they put what they call a charitable covenant on every lot okay and that can't be removed unless hayden removes it or gives permission to have it removed and what that charitable covenant is is a is a document that says when you sell your house you're going to give our charity one-eighth of one percent of the sales price so if you sell your house uh councilman cleveland you if you owned a house and you sold it for four hundred thousand dollars you would be forced at close of escrow to give five hundred dollars to hayden home or first story their charity their kind of work together um which i don't think is a bad thing if you could opt out of doing it but hayden homes up until recently would not allow you to buy a house unless you agreed to that covenant okay so i found out about this in 1920 in 2023 when i was selling a client's house in homestead and i said what is this Charitable covenant and they didn't know anything about it. Well, I did some research on it and I found out about the 1 8th of 1%. And then I ultimately communicated that to the entire community. If they knew about the charitable covenant, some did, some did not. And then I went to Dennis Murphy, the CEO of Hayden homes. And I said, we need, I said, why do you do this? And they said, well, it's a good thing. And I said, well, it's not a good thing if they can't opt out of it. ultimately i met with uh mr murphy in the harvey ranch track in 2024 and we came to an agreement that some of if the homeowners wanted to get out of it and they filled out a specific form they could do that and 150 of the homeowners opted out of the charitable covenant um mr murphy told me that they would not remove any of these covenants unless people asked to have them removed and if they did they would have to do it at their expense past a certain date and it's 301 dollars to record a charitable covenant release but if hayden holmes removes it they can remove 150 of them with one document for 300 okay just real quick

I'll give you one more minute, but you do need to wrap it up because you have reached five minutes.

Okay. Bottom line is I went to the Attorney General's office. The Attorney General's office has investigated this for about two years, and they just concluded their investigation. They required the Hayden Homes to remove 7,627 charitable covenants, pay $1.6 million plus 12% interest for all the homeowners that bought these, these houses and pay $346,000 for the investigation. So while we glossed over this investigation, it's a big deal. What I'd like to compel the council to do is not approve plans until these charitable covenants are removed from the community of homestead in college place or any other charitable covenants i would like to see the council require that to be removed because under the agreement that they that they're agreeing to they will remove them but i don't think they should move forward because it affects the homeowners uh who have these charitable covenants uh recorded on their lots so while i believe that hayden homes has a real good place in this community i don't think that was a good thing and nor did the attorney general's office Thank you.

Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. Yes, Miss Fagan, you'd like to.

I would just say that it was it was if someone asked to have them removed, we would remove the covenant. So I would encourage you to go to our website. and read the facts and also read what the aod reads um it's very clear that we had a disagreement in regards to the fact that we believed that what we were doing was lawful and 100 of the dollars that were collected went back to charity 100 that's the findings of the of the attorney general With that being said, there are homeowners, me being one of them, that I'm very, very happy to pay the charitable fee. I know what it's doing for the communities. Mandating it and making it a requirement, I think is not the responsibility of this council. There are many people that wanna give charities to the way that they want to. and we will remove them we are removing them that is part of the mandate and so they will be removed and so i would just ask that you um allow it to to um to do what we've agreed to do with the um ag's office thank you thank you

All right, so we're going to move on to the next presentation. And Mr. Rickard, you have a presentation of the introduction to the draft of the 2026 Comprehensive Plan.

Um, thank you mayor. Um, I am going to be brief because I'm going to take up probably about 2 hours of your time at the next meeting. So, um, at the workshop, we got to bring our snacks in. Yeah, we've been put on the workshop at the workshop. So, I, you all have been provided with a copy of the draft plan. It's available to the public if they want to download it from, like, the meeting and whatnot. It's not out. We're not promoting it just yet because it is a draft still. And we haven't started the public. Draft portion review of it. I mean, we've had a lot of public engagement, the block party, various meetings, planning commission meetings, tag meetings, the climate group has met a number of times. So, the draft plan, it's, you know, we're in that mandated periodic update. It's due to be completed at the end of the year. So we don't. Run into compliance issues with the state, and they could withhold grant funds and things like that if we don't finish it up by the end of the year, but we will. um so it covers everything from land use housing uh capital facilities utilities transportation uh climate change and resiliency uh that was the the new requirement um in the plan there was extra funding for that and and and um we had a special climate plan advisory team that cpat work on that part of the plan and then there's three optional elements the economic development parks and recreation and then historic preservation And our historic preservation plan that was reviewed by our historic preservation commission section. So it's. It's a good read. There's some good maps in there. I really encourage you to take some time to go through it between now and the workshop. Mark it up. Let us, you know, that way we can have, because the workshop is intended to be really an open dialogue. We'll have our consultants here. They do a great job. They're going to go through this in great detail with us, but section by section, Councilman Sherman was part of part of that as well as Lopez was part of the the tag and green green. Yes, Jordan was. Anyhow, I'm getting my tag members mixed up, but anyhow. There's been a lot of engagement thus far developing this plan. So we hope that it goes smoothly during during the workshop planning commission. We had an in depth workshop with them last earlier this month and the schedule. We're still tweaking it a little bit. We were. i'm planning on a public hearing in august but i think we're going to bump that out to september um to give us a little bit more time to make any tweaks based on um the meeting that we have with you guys at the workshop so i think i'm getting close to my five minutes um any questions about your homework it was just a little light reading that i know we all read well i did

No questions, but I appreciate you providing us a copy for us to review. It ends up being a physical reminder.

Yes.

So thank you for that.

Absolutely.

Councilmember Lopez.

No questions. Look forward to going through it deeper. Thank you. Great.

Councilmember Evans. I unfortunately will not be at the workshop. So I read this in detail and I could tell the amount of work that went into it. So thank you. The only, and I know it sounds trite coming from me, but the one thing I did notice on page 85, there's a really neat visual kind of comparison of our current parks and hopes and dreams of parks. And one question or comment I just had was, you know, looking at the offerings for the soccer field or the softball baseball field, because one thing I consistently hear in the community is the need for a place to play soccer. And that's countywide. People are scrambling to even pay for access in Walla Walla. And I know in College Place, there's not really that opportunity, especially with the desire to grow maybe Parks and Rec's offerings. So I was just maybe going to comment on, I would love to see soccer fields. at some park at some point in the future.

Yeah, thank you for that comment. And I don't want to get into too much detail on that, but I believe one of our draft, and I think it's mentioned in the table here, if we get our UGA expansion on the north end up on Wallula, there's a park that would be up there, and there would be soccer fields on that particular

Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it. Councilmember Sherman?

No questions. This was a labor of love and it's really cool to see it put together. Thank you, John.

Councilmember Boyle?

No questions. This is really impressive and I appreciate that there's maps and pictures.

It's not all text. Really, but thank you because, you know, having those maps, I think that's quite helpful for us to be able to identify even for other things, you know, but to be able to use these as a reference where you've identified the streets and the types and all that. So thank you. And I know you're kind of dreading having to do that presentation, not because it's a bad thing for you, but you feel bad for the rest of us. But I think it'll be really important for us to understand what we're looking at for our future. So thank you.

No, it's really important. And I think it's great for you guys to be engaged and really understand what's in this thing so that we just don't put it on a shelf and forget about it. So thanks for putting the time in. Absolutely.

All right. Any other questions or comments, Councilmember?

I appreciate being informed and I don't mind going into depth on something that is so important. So don't feel too bad. It's kind of my job to be informed and do all this stuff. So.

But we still want snacks. I heard popcorn. All right, thank you, John. Thank you. Okay, we're next is a public hearing. We have one public hearing on the agenda tonight. Mr. Holden will present on the fiscal year 2027 to 2032 transportation improvement plan. Let me see. All right, I guess, Mike, you're sticking to our five-minute rule here today. All right, you're up. He gets a presentation first, and then we'll open the public hearing.

Again, thank you, Mayor, council members. It's that time of year again. I don't have a flashy handout like Mr. Rickard has. I'll keep it short and simple. Internally, we've been working really hard with our capital facility plan and transferring all that over to our transportation improvement plan. We have to do this every year. So the new one is 27 to 2032. Every year, Washington State Department of Transportation, the Federal Department of Highways, DOT, mandates that municipalities file a six-year transportation improvement plan with the state. And this is done through our online portal, Secure Access Washington, otherwise known as TIP. The TIP is a wish list that we, as internally the city and public works, that we different projects that we have intended to to better our community and if we don't have these projects listed on this transportation improvement plan they don't get the the grant funding so as we work through our caps capital facility plan to align with the transportation improvement plan we really kind of weeded some projects out we kind of prioritized and also we had changed to 2026 to 2027 so It is up on the city website in draft along with the resolution. That's all I have if you guys have any questions.

Councilmember Cleveland, any questions or comments?

No questions, but I'm always glad to see the improvements that are planned and the maintenance and all the like.

Councilmember Lopez?

Sorry, so just to clarify, this is a wish list of projects that could happen, they're not necessarily going to happen, but if they're not on here, they can't happen? Correct. Okay.

And they're broken into four different elements. We have the, you know, we have chip seal projects, we have street projects, pedestrian and safe walk projects, and then road resurfacing program. We just kind of, you know, every one of those has got 20 to 30 Potential projects that are down that we that we need to have done and, you know, just takes over a little bit of time and, you know, getting funding for those. But. Yeah, they're not on that list. They don't apply for grant funding.

Is there a total that this would cost or is that just kind of not possible to estimate? No.

We recognize what streets need to be resurfaced. We haven't been able to do our chip seal program for three years now. We had to move those allocations over to other higher priority projects. So we're doing our best to align things and prioritize. So thank you for the question.

Councilmember Evans. No questions. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Boyle.

No questions. Thanks.

I might come back to Councilmember Sherman. She did step out real quick. I failed to ask in the last topic if anyone wanted to speak regarding the comprehensive planned the draft um and she was checking with the guest if she's checking with the guests to see if it was something that they wanted to address um since they did have some email questions that were addressed answered but we weren't she wasn't sure if they she wanted they wanted to make a comment so um actually you know what they're still talking so i'll tell her if she has questions she can come back and ask you questions at a later time how about that All right, so let's see now, let me see, I'm trying to make sure I get this in order right. I will now, it is 6.46 PM and I will open the public comment hearing. Madam Clerk, did anyone submit a comment regarding this topic, the Transportation Improvement Plan in advance? didn't receive any for this topic okay if anyone in virtual or actual attendance would like to speak please raise your hand if you're attending by virtual star 9 will raise your hand actually if you're connected by telephone star 9 will raise your hand nobody okay is there any additional discussion Hearing none, is there a motion to close the hearing?

I'll make a motion to close the hearing.

All right, Councilmember Boyle made a motion. Is there a second? Second. Councilmember Evans makes a second. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all in favor of closing the public hearing say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? The ayes have it and the motion is passed.

With Heather absent, Actually, never mind, we're still good.

Yeah.

I just wanted to make sure.

Okay. All right, so we're on to our action items, which is the adoption of the fiscal year 2027 to 2032 transportation improvement improvement plan. Mr Holden, did you want to add any more presentation to that?

No, I can entertain any more questions that they may have something. to ask. Yeah.

Any other questions regarding this? I know. So we are on the action item to adopt the fiscal year 2027 to 2032 Transportation Improvement Plan. And I did explain to them why you had stepped away.

Okay. Just a quick clarification. So if something else comes up, can you add it to this? Or how does that work? Is it do we have to wait till 2032 now to make road improvements or no, we can add it?

Oh, okay. Yeah. Thank you.

Any additional discussion? Hearing none. Is there a motion for this?

Let me see what what is the actual motion?

The adoption of the 2027 2030 to transportation improvement plan?

make a motion to approve that. I do see the date update that needs to happen, but 2025, I think it says. On the resolution, yeah.

Thank you for that.

So I guess the motion to approve Resolution 26-011, Adopting the Physical Year 2027 to 2032 Transportation Improvement Plan.

I'll second. All right. Councilmember Boyle was a second. Any further discussion? All right. Hearing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Right, unanimous the ayes have it and the motion is passed. Thank you so much, Mr. Holden. I know you were kind of thrown into making that presentation. next time no vacation right it seems to happen every year in july at the end of the week he always schedules before it's due and mr andrews is on vacation next year the vacation request goes in early put yours in right he's pretty pretty clever at that all right we do not have any administrative reports on the agenda today So we're going to there are moving on to information report of which there are two in your packets, one from the police department, the monthly report and the Community Development Department's monthly report. If you have not read those, please make sure you do. And if you have any questions or comments, direct those to the department directors, please. So we are now to new and unfinished business. Does anyone have any other business for good of the order? um okay i have a quick question um mr rickard public hearing for our uga application um can you let council members know when that date and time is in case and let them know the process like they can come testify or give a little public comment see if they're interested

you okay yeah so the it's there is a public hearing scheduled before the board of county commissioners um on august 11th at 10 a.m and we have two applications pending we have our uga expansion application and then we have our uga swap application We have been told that we will have, as applicants, 15 minutes for each one to present our case, so to speak. We've requested additional time. We haven't heard back from them yet. The public will have three minutes. Individual members from the public will have three minutes to make comment on the applications. The hearing is to set the final docket. So it's not actually a hearing on our applications. It's a hearing on whether or not we actually get to have a hearing and present and to where we really, that's the time when we get into the nuts and bolts of why our application should be approved. So it's been a really frustrating journey. Um, it's been over a year in that course of a year. The 1st, 6 months of wax changed. And 1 of those wax is kind of 1 of the things they're hanging their hat on the, the. The consultant staff and staff report. But it changed after our application was already turned in after our application was submitted. But, you know, laws change, and they just didn't process our application in any timely manner. So there's that appearance of delay that, you know, it's just frustrating. That big change, and I can't remember if I've spoken to you about this before, but that big change was that the county has to consider all available UGA when reviewing urban growth boundary expansion applications. So we're allocated a certain number of population and the county is saying that, well, maybe you don't have the UGA for that, but the county overall UGA, including Burbank and Walla Walla's UGA can take that population that we're supposed to be planning for. So that's my major issue. But there's also other issues where their consultant has done their buildable lands analysis of the UGA and counters ours. And we haven't been able to have an opportunity to argue the differences. They've had requested some additional information like one of the considerations that the WACs require is what changes have you made to accommodate growth internally, zoning changes, things that allow for additional density to occur in your city. And we provided a memo addressing everything since 2018 that we've done over the last eight years. And then at a workshop earlier this month that the staff and consultant had with the Board of County Commissioners, The staff said that we had not provided that information, even though they'd requested it and the consultant. You know, didn't chime in and say, oh, no, actually, it's in, it's in the packet of information with the board of county commissioners had and the board of county commissioners who said they read the packet didn't bring it up that no, it's actually in there and yet. We're present in the room and we knew it was in the packet and but we couldn't speak, you know, so it's just this kind of goes. To the whole situation that we're in, where there's a lot of conversations going on, but we're not really allowed to be. You know, partake in those conversations and. And we don't, we haven't even had the opportunity to present at a public hearing. So, other than this preliminary docket situation that we're in preliminary and final docket and it's. It's extremely frustrating and it's not. It's not in line with the, the says that the counties are supposed to work collaboratively with the cities on. Projects and that just, you know, 6 months of silence is is not collaboration and they can blame that on their. Community development director at the time, you know, leadership issues, but the fact of the matter is, is that the buck stops with them. They're the decision makers. They're, they're the ones that need to make these legislative decisions. And if if. The writing on the wall is when they, when they, when, if they had chosen to. Acknowledge the planning commission's recommendation to put it on the final docket. They wouldn't have they don't have to schedule a public hearing, but because because they've chosen to schedule that public hearing what that tells me is that at least 2 of the 3 planning or county commissioners do not do not think that our application should be on the final docket. So. There are conversations happening without being fully educated on what our application is and giving us the opportunity to present that. I mean, I would encourage, I don't know how you draw straws on who gets to come or how that works with, you know, if all of you decided to come and speak because that, you know, you'd all be in the same room at the same time. I'm not sure how that works, but I encourage you to attend or listen online or... And encourage your neighbors.

the importance of either listening in or just speaking a quick three minutes on the importance of College Place being able to grow and control what our future looks like without having to bend towards the county's other interests and allow us to be able to have some some of that control and not just that the perhaps they need to take some extra considerations so that the biases that we believe are there or the mistakes that were made do not come off so strongly and they need to consider that as well and give us a chance to at least make our full presentation our full hearing where we're able to speak towards the application and not just them hearing incorrect statements or blurred lines that they've been hearing So if you can be there, please do or encourage your neighbors to be there. School district is also, there's a great interest from the school district that this passes. It's very important to them and their future. And we do have some land owners that this is impacting as well and their financial security if it doesn't get heard or if it's not considered or even expanded. So there's a lot at,

at risk here not just for the city but uh for the school district's future and for our citizens there's not only you know implications on housing um you know property to the north if it doesn't come into the uga it's going to be carved up into you know 1 to 3 acre size lots, and you know we'll miss an opportunity for affordable housing. You know it's lost opportunity. There's not a lot of land out there that's easily developed that's close and near near infrastructure and things like that. But the other part is economic development. There is some of it is commercial. we'd like to bring in, which would bring jobs to the community. And as the mayor mentioned, the school district, their new middle school site and 4-H site, they want to be in the city. Jim Fry is adamant about that.

So, and we've spoken about our economic, the importance of growing our economic development here in our city. We've already, you know, we see our budget. We know where our budget at is that if we don't grow, there's no way for us to grow our budget. And we're just going to be squeezed every year into trying to take care of the existing staff, the projects and maintaining, not just maintaining, but building our city and if we don't have the ability to make more money, revenue without taxing our citizens out of their homes and making it so expensive for them to use water or whatever, we're not gonna be able to take care of our city in the future. So, all right, thank you. Council Member Cleveland.

Have we been able to dialogue with any of the county commissioners directly on this issue? Have we made contact or been able to just open a dialogue?

I've given tours to two of the county commissioners of the applications. We've met with all three of them on separate occasions.

i've had phone calls yeah i mean i'm i'm working it every which way i can without crossing the line so thank you john yeah all right so august 11th at 10 a.m anything else anybody else have anything for good of the order all right uh don't forget we have well are we gonna have farmer's market this week do you think

yeah we are um of course it would be dependent on the air quality index if that's too high then we would be forced to cancel but we do have every intention of building the market what about movies in the park um the next movie in the park is not this saturday um let's see council member evan said the eighth it is the eighth yes all right and that's still going okay so go that's one i've never seen and that gives me a reason to get an extra even to go we did make a few changes um goat replaced um spongebob and encanto replaced legally blonde so we did keep grace okay which i'm very excited about

All right, there you go. All right. Just a quick reminder. Elections is coming up. Although none of us are on the ballot or anything here, but please don't forget to get your ballots delivered. There's a couple of county things on our ballots. I'm going to do a pitch and I encourage you to drop them off at the ballot boxes rather than in the host office because things are being delayed and. It's kind of they get challenged with depending on the timestamp. So I highly encourage you if you have not already submitted your balance to please do so at a ballot box.

And we have one here.

And we have one here next to our mailbox and our flag depository, right? Right over here and bill pay. You can drop our payments. Thank you. That's right. I appreciate you saying that. All right. So we are down to their closing items. And do we have a motion to conclude? I can keep talking if nobody has a motion.

A motion that we conclude.

We have a motion to conclude. We have a first and a second. Wow. I know, right? I swear I saw a blur. So there's no objection. The meeting is concluded at 7.04 p.m. Thanks, everyone.