City Council - Regular Meeting

So chief Bo's presentation mentions a transparency portal. I think that's where we can really be the shining star in the area. We should see the results of the security audits. We should see the results of the access audits. We should see when our information was sent to third party jurisdictions. All of that type of information will help ensure the transparency and help ensure that these systems are used appropriately. To quote one of my favorite philosophers, with great power comes great responsibility. Now is your opportunity to stand up for public for privacy and be the responsible advocate. Thank you.

Thank you. Next, I have Chuck Coleman.

Good evening, madam mayor, deputy mayor, city council, city manager, city staff, and public. For the record, Chuck Coleman, resident of Des Moines. We support the use of flock cameras as a proactive measure to help reduce crime in our community. Much like identification technology used at airports to safeguard travelers, these devices serve as valuable tools for law enforcement, providing critical information quickly and trend and enhancing public safety while respecting privacy guidelines. We also place our trust in law enforcement team and legal system to ensure these technologies are used responsibly and to protect against any misuses. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Iman Econ.

Hi. I've never been to one of these. My name is Iman Akong. I'm a neighbor here in Des Moines and, actually came to talk about the Roadhouse, which is a sound transit arts program. We are located, at the Angle Lake Light Rail Station, and we're funded by the city of SeaTac. We have free all ages live music that we put together every week. Tuesdays, we have a jazz jam. So it's a open jazz jam. If you wanna bring your voice, bring your instrument, you can join in, or you can just listen. But we also have world music every Saturday.

Aside from this Saturday, it's a special event. But every other Saturday or excuse me. Other than that, every Saturday, we have world music. So we have a band of a different genre that comes and performs. And I just wanna let everybody know about this program that Sound Transit puts together in in City Of CTAC.

We are kind of tucked away. We're right next to the elevators of the light rail station. So it's really tricky trying to get the word out about a free program that's grant funded because we're a small team working very small hours or a low amount of hours. So I just wanted to let people know about it, and we just hope that it brings everybody joy. And and and I have some flyers that may I okay. Awesome. So I'll send some this way.

There we go. And then I'll Thank

you so much. And, also, if you want to help support this, if you could just let maybe, you know, let your neighbor know, maybe bring a flyer to work, put it on in the lunchroom. That's what I've been kinda getting around, letting places know, talking to some of the apartment communities and some of the workplaces and just sharing the word because, you know, it we hope that it brings people together through the universal language of music. Thanks.

Thank you. Jerry B? No. Okay. Thank you.

We're on to regional committee reports. So we're currently running the committee of a whole, and so therefore, council members, also serve regionally on other committees. Do council members have any items that of interest to the public or to the council? Council member Harris.

Thank you. Forgive me. So I serve on the emergency management advisory committee. This was our first meeting of the year, and I just wanted to give another plug for Alert King County. Google it and sign up.

They got tens of thousands of sign ups at the last flood. The group has they have a center that operates all the time and over in Renton and coordinates activities of all responders in the area. They were fully engaged on Wednesday, our meeting, because they were monitoring the Seahawks parade. It's a million people. And whenever you have that large gathering, you know, you have to sort of have your eyes open, good or bad.

I wanted to, they will be sending out a survey to cities because a couple of the local mayors were concerned that, they posted evacuation notices a bit prematurely and we're working on the messaging. But flooding here is not like this thing where there's gonna be 11 feet, you know, this flash deal and people you're not likely to drown, but we're getting more and more of these events with two and three feet of water, and it blocks first responders, cars, trucks, and so forth. And it's difficult to come up with a message that says, please take this seriously. You may not necessarily die, but, you know, we have to actually get vehicles into neighborhoods and so on. And just one last thing.

The we're doing a lot of exercises regarding FIFA. There are concerns about cell phones. So many people coming in from other countries. Cell phones don't operate the same in all nations still. But the Seattle Police Department are going to be trying out they're gonna be fitting their body cameras with online real time translation services for about two dozen languages. So this will be an interesting beta test for Farsi and, you know, some of these languages. So that's it.

Council members, time notes.

Been around since 1984. They're one of the oldest oh, thank you. I can hear myself fine. Anyway, they've been around since 1984. They operate out of offices in Seattle, Grainger, Wenatchee, and in Tacoma.

They represent people all over the spectrum of immigrant rights from deportation hearings to people that simply have questions about that. I know I have used their services in my job as a public defender trying to make it get a determination about if a particular resolution of a case is going to affect my clients' rights in any way that they need to be particularly aware of, and they're very responsive and very and right on target with their with their advice. I really appreciate them. So it was very informative. If anybody's interested, Northwest Immigrant Immigrants Rights Project can be found online, and there is a lot of information out there about what they do.

And, frankly, they're there to help the people, including those people in Des Moines that have recently been arrested. They were residents of Des Moines, and they are available. And they know what they're doing. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm checking to see if, deputy mayor Oscar, did you have a report?

Mayor. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Okay. So I believe that leaves us to our city manager's report, and welcome.

Alright. Good evening, mayor and council. We have a couple items tonight. Our first one is, Samantha Lee, who's the president and CEO of, Seattle Southside Chamber of Commerce, who's gonna be doing a presentation. We scheduled this several months ago, so I'm glad, the day has arrived for her to be here. The city has been a member of this chamber for several years. And so as just part of our membership, we're just giving you an update as to, what the chamber has been up to. So I'll turn it over to Sammy.

Alright. Well, good evening, mayor and council members. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here today. My name is Samantha Lay. If we have not met, I am the president and CEO for the Seattle Southside Chamber of Commerce. And I'm joined today by members of my board and our government affairs leadership because the work is shared leadership. We're here to show how we support the business through action and how we can strengthen the partnership moving forward. Next slide, please. Our mission is simple. We unite businesses and families through strong advocacy and shared prosperity.

As the regional chamber for Southwest King County, we connect businesses to regional, state, and federal opportunities that strengthen our local economy. Regional positioning matters. It ensures businesses are not operating in isolation, but as a part of a coordinated ecosystem across five cities and thousands of employers. This is where leverage happens. Next slide, please.

In 2025 alone, we supported 3,396 businesses, engaged more than 10,000 part, participants, and served 694 members across South King County. That impact is powered by a lean, diversified $750,000 operating budget supported by membership, service contracts, events, and earned revenue. No single funding source drives our work. It is sustained by shared investment and accountability. And what matters most is delivery.

Our engagement is intentionally distributed across all five cities. In some communities, we provide contracted outreach and small business assistance beyond membership services to ensure equitable access to support those businesses that normally wouldn't have access to us. We show up through direct outreach, business roundtables, workforce initiatives, and advocacy representation and one on one assistance. Because we operate regionally, we bring infrastructure and relationships into each city, strengthening local businesses without requiring the sis the city to build that capacity on its own. This is the value of our chamber.

We multiply what's possible locally. I'd like to introduce Annie Tran, member of our board, to share about our community impact. Next slide, please.

Thank you so much, Sammy. So as you know, much of this work is surrounded around community impact, and it's about connection. And so through workforce initiatives such as the education and workforce summit, career fairs, the workforce discovery labs, the Seattle Southside Chamber strengthens the pipeline between students and employers. Through morning mixers, just like the one that was held today at the Seattle Southside Chamber, along with after hours mixers, ribbon cuttings. They create the visibility of real economic opportunity for many entrepreneurs.

The educational webinars, lunch and learns, small business resource fairs also bring lenders and agencies and business assistance providers into one accessible space, saving business owners time and lowering the barriers for being able to provide practical tools to help businesses navigate the often challenging landscape. So through moments, with the mentors, they also invest in professional development and strengthen business acumen for lots of entrepreneurs. As a port employee as well during my day job and a board member of the Seattle Southside Chamber, I've been able to witness events like the airport luncheon, which also connects small businesses to major regional economic drivers. And so as mentioned, at the core of this, the Seattle Southside Chamber are connectors and conveners of a lot of regional economic development partners and, city staff. And next, we have a short video that we'd like share with you that brings this work to life so you can see it for yourself.

Next slide, please. Well, next, we'll hand it off to Kevin.

First, I'm excited to get to talk to the Des Moines City Council. I mean, this is great. So I'm Kevin Dunn. I volunteer as a governmental affairs committee chair for the Southside Chamber of Commerce. Can go to the next slide. A couple initiatives we're we're really excited about. Number one is the small business roundtable. We did the first one here in Des Moines and went so well. We're gonna do two in Des Moines coming up, one in the spring, one in the fall, where we put out an open call to any business who wants to come. We had about 15 local business owners last fall come out, and it was outstanding.

In fact, input from those business owners in the community really informed our statewide agenda, and I'll get to that here in a couple of slides. So that's the number one thing that we're most excited about. The other thing we do is we put together a lot of fun events. I I like to have fun. I think everybody likes to have fun. In fact, that's where I met Catherine is at our legislative evening. We have more than a 100 people show up to talk to politicians. Can you imagine how exciting was that for people from the public? And the biggest, I think, victory we had, we've got an outstanding lobbyist, Carolyn Logue, that works for the Southside Chamber and in a bunch of other chambers as well, but she doesn't come free. So we had a huge breakfast, the biggest one we've ever had.

A 193 people showed up to our legislative breakfast in the middle of the floods. That was just an incredible victory for us. So that really funded our ability to make a difference down in Olympia. And for now, let me go to the next slide with Josh from Highland Community College.

Yeah. Thanks, Kevin. Josh Gersman. I'm the vice president for institutional advancement at Highland College in Des Moines, Washington, and I've been a member of this chamber for eight years. I know many of you in this room.

That video that you didn't get to see, if you think about look around the room, think about all the great leaders that are in this room, quadruple the size. We have about a 120 people on Highland College's campus, two years in a row for a day of leadership development and some great food. So that's the only thing that's missing from tonight's meeting that I can see. But when it comes to Highline College, much like Highline School District, we represent the broader, the broader community up to the Seattle line, down to the Pierce County line, and we count on our chambers of commerce to help us connect with the business community. A few years ago, when we were upgrading our business management program at Highland College, we contacted the chamber, and they helped us, conduct our first business roundtable where we brought about 30 business members from throughout that region to us to tell us what was going on in the state of business and how our educational programs could help develop the pipeline to that.

One of those members, Bob Livingston, he said that that was the first time in his twenty seven years at the time of working in professional banking that a higher education institution had invited him to participate in a to give feedback on what business needs, and that was because of our regional chamber, the Seattle Southside Chamber. So I just am here to talk about that strength of our of that region that we're in. We're proud to have Highland College here in Des Moines, but we represent the whole the region. We have the most diverse student, population, but those students aren't gonna get to go places in the workplace if we don't have the connections that we have. And, those priorities really recognize what we hear from our employers, the need for a strong business ecosystem, livable communities, and a workforce pipeline that works.

So I think I'm coming back to

Kevin. Next

slide, please. Thanks. Yeah.

So if you look at the slide, I'm telling you the four biggest things that the Des Moines business owners talk to us about. Number one was transportation and infrastructure, especially ferries and getting more buses to come down the hill, like, more often down the hill, and more stops up on Highway 99 because there's very few stops for people. Tourism was the second biggest one. Public safety and resilience was the third, and then small business relief and support was the fourth. And here's how we're able to make an impact. We actually have a big enough budget that we can contribute to having a lobbyist down in Olympia, and that makes a big difference. If you want, I can forward the first, 43 page report she had on bills down in Olympia. A lot of those bills died. The second report was only 37 pages long. I'm very excited.

Hopefully, the next report is 25 pages long because I only had a time to read those every Saturday morning. But it's very exciting to know that we're literally going from the mouth of business owners to our legislative committee, governmental affairs committee, to our lobbyists making a difference down in Olympia. So your voice matters, and we really appreciate the time so far. I think I'll turn it back over to Annie. Right? Or oh, to Josh again. You're joking. Sorry,

Josh. Okay.

And if we could advance a slide. And one more slide. Because we're gonna talk about, briefly here the importance of these strategic partnerships that we have. So Annie's gonna follow me. We know that the port is, essentially the largest employer in a region.

The chamber of commerce is one of those conduits to be able to get to the port to talk about workforce and pipeline needs. Highline College is the best place for higher education here in our community, but one of the things that we have that many of you might know about is we host the small business development center in Start Zone. And through support from the city, from our friends in Soundside Alliance and the Port Of Seattle and King County, those business, services are available to partner with the chamber to serve our small business community, whether you're an individual who's thinking about starting a business or you're a small business who's looking to grow, those resources are available, and you can access them through the Seattle Southside Chamber and then access them through Highland College. And that's where those strategic partnerships are so important. And with that, Annie, I'm gonna invite you to come back.

Thank you

again. So, as you know, regional partnerships allow cities like Des Moines to move faster and access these resources that would otherwise be very difficult to secure a loan, and I'll just shed some light on some of the ways that I've witnessed the Seattle Southside Chamber do that. For example, last year, the Seattle Southside Chamber was selected as one of the five regions nationwide, organizations to distribute the Comcast RISE grants, and they were able to distribute $5,000 to 100 small businesses in King County to support them in areas of technology, business coaching, media strategy, and creative production. Alongside that, as I mentioned, I'm with the Port Of Seattle. I've witnessed them be able to, support the Seattle Metro Chamber, which is the King County's ADO through the Community Business Connector program.

That was a program that King County and the Port co funded to support a business navigator program. And so they were one of the, sub group, chambers that also helped, initiate some workshops and support small business resource, fairs for South King County in particular. Also, through the economic development, city partnership grant, which I manage through the Port of Seattle, they are working currently with Normandy Park and the city of SeaTac on various projects such as supporting business mixers and also small business regional support systems and programs. So there's a lot that we can do together and more even so with the dollars that we amplify in the shared resource through different various funding buckets. Next, I will pass it to Scott.

Hey. My name is Scott Braden, a local business owner and serve on the board of directors for Seattle Southside Chamber of Commerce. I wanted to kinda give a little bit of a and if we go to the next slide, a little bit of a kinda user story as a small business owner in the area. When I opened my new business in Des Moines, I knew I needed a strong way to grow and truly extend my outreach into the community. Early on, I met with Sammy in the chamber to explore partnership opportunities.

Their support made an immediate impact for me and my business partner, especially when they backed my ribbon cutting. That event drove drew in people from across the region and gave us the visibility we needed in order to, pop up a brand new business and increase traffic. From there, I jumped in. I joined more than six mix and make mingles, which are some great opportunities for new business owners and and people to join in the community, where I connected with fellow business owners as well, and even began to support with their beverage program. We got involved in multiple events such as the leadership conference at Highland College, hosted chamber mixers at our cafe with raffles and fun activities, and welcomed the Success Foundation workforce discovery lab into our space.

Each experience deepened our root in the community. As a small business owner, time is one of the most valuable commodities I have, and the onboarding process was seamless. I was able to integrate my business into these events quickly, and and navigate them throughout the entire last year. The impact has been so positive for me, that I wanted to give back and serve on the board, and to help create the same opportunities, for others that were created for me and local businesses. Thanks. And I'll turn that back to Sammy.

Thank you so much. Next slide, please. I'd like to just take a moment to thank my board for joining us this evening and sharing how this work comes to life. As you can see on the screen here, you we are a very small but highly committed team delivering meaningful results across South In South King County. Every program, every roundtable, every piece of advocacy work that you've heard about tonight is powered by this team.

We are accessible, responsive, and ready to support businesses in Des Moines. Next slide, please. We are proud of the work that's already happening in Des Moines. We see strong entrepreneurs here, a growing workforce pipeline, and real opportunity with a community that cares. Our goal is alignment, alignment between the city, the business community, and regional partners.

We've also brought informational flyers this evening that outline our programs, ways the community can get involved, and how we support businesses at every stage. We encourage you to take one, and I'll also send a digital version to city leadership so it can be shared more broadly. We put we would welcome a follow-up conversation with city leadership to explore how we can deepen this partnership in a way that best serves the, Des Moines business community. Because when businesses thrive, family thrives. And when families thrive, cities thrive. Because together, we truly are stronger.

I hope to see

you at our roundtable scheduled in April or our business awards scheduled, February 24. Thank you so much for this time.

Thank you very much.

Alright. Thank you, Samantha. Our next item, is an update from the Citizens Advisory Board on the strategic plan public engagement that's happened over the last few months. So Colleen Gantz, who's a member of our CAB, is gonna do the first chunk of the conversation, and then I'll take the last few slides.

Good evening, mayor Grace Matsui, council members, city staff, and members of the public. I'm Colleen Gantz, and I'm an eight year resident of Des Moines. My day job is to be a community engagement specialist with PRR, which is a woman owned firm in Seattle. And then I volunteer as a member of the citizen advisory board here in Des Moines, which gives me great joy. So I'm gonna tell you a little story about the juxtaposition of those two roles that I play.

And we'll go to the next slide. So the citizen advisory board, as you can see, provides input to the city council, promotes civic participation, and strengthens communication between residents, businesses, and the city. We have 23 members who represent 10 different neighborhoods in our city, and we also have 11 at large members. And these people know their neighbors and are willing to get the word out on a variety of subjects. We have a senior committee. We have an arts committee, and we have a human services committee. Thank you so

much. We'll go

to the next slide. So we had fun assignment this fall and winter to support the city's strategic plan. How exciting. So we have a road map to future developments in our city. Our job was to raise awareness of the city's strategic plan effort, and we decided to have a goal of really reaching all of our neighbors and making sure that everyone had a voice.

So we went to an extra effort to reach people, and you'll hear about some of the places that we went in order to let people know that the city was developing a strategic plan and that they could participate in a variety of ways, including a survey. We we put on a training for our committee to learn the importance of community engagement. And my favorite quote is from Eddie on our committee who said, you know, I barely knew what a strategic plan was. It was a bunch of words. I now understand what it is, and I understand responsibility to reach out to my neighbors and friends in this community so that they have a way to participate.

I know what my role is. We were asked to participate in the focus groups to represent our neighborhoods. There were about five or so different focus groups that happened down at the beach Park. Many of you participated, not just the citizen advisory board. Also, I mentioned the diverse voices.

I was really proud of our citizen advisory group for engaging people far and wide, and you'll hear a little bit about that in a second. Finally, we held actually, the city put it on, and we participated in conjunction with your staff and your communications consultants to make sure that there was a good attendance at December in person town hall at the Des Moines Elementary School. Next slide, please. So as I've told the Citizen Advisory Board many times, this might be the last time I get to brag about it, but this seriously has been the most meaningful community engagement project that I've been involved in in my forty year career. To be able to have a committee made up of, our Des Moines neighbors that really goes out with their heart and soul to reach people has been very inspiring.

So you can see a table. We didn't get a lot of pictures of ourselves because we were too busy working. But we did have a nice table set up, and it was filled with lots of people at the holiday market right there. Another of the most inspiring days. If you ever get a chance to volunteer at the Des Moines Food Bank, I spent time there with Victoria, and several other of the members of our citizen advisory board went there to get the word out about the survey.

And that was the place where we were able to distribute the most in language flyers and surveys for people. And they just right there scanned the QR code and took the survey while they were waiting in line to get into the food bank. And amazing experience. Also, we went to the Des Moines libraries, both of them during story times and various times during the day to reach people. And then finally, at the holiday tree lighting, sitting out in the cool little table, making sure that people could take the survey, which was advertised through flyers, neighborhood briefings.

We all reached out to our neighbors in emails and neighborhood gatherings. We reached every single senior living facility here in our area. And then, yeah, sent the neighborhood emails. We'll go to the next slide. You have great we have great ways of advertising anything in this city, and we learned so much about how people receive their information, whether it's from the Waterloo blog, the peach jar, who knew?

This is a way that the schools get their information, and we had a couple of parents on our committee that wanted to make sure that every parent at our area schools knew about this effort and could participate. We have a wonderful city manager report. I'm sure many of you get that from Katherine Caffrey. Social media and then, as I mentioned, the multilingual cards were really effective. Next slide, please.

Also, I have to say that you can see in the picture there that one of our committee members is quite active and owns one of the area daycares here. And she specifically reached out to all of the other daycares in her network to make sure that parents had a chance to participate. And through all of that and the efforts of the whole citizen advisory board, we were able to reach about 3,000 people in our networks and exceeded the city's goal, of over a thousand people taking the survey, which is really remarkable. And so, not only grateful to the citizen advisory board, but to our own citizens as well and and noncitizens who were able to fill out the survey and come to the meeting and participate in our city's future. And for the next slide, I'll turn it over to our city manager, Katherine Caffrey.

Thank you, Colleen. It's really amazing how much, work and effort CAB put out into this, but they were energized every time we talked about, you know, another opportunity for them to be out in the community. So I'm gonna briefly touch on what some of the results are of what we've heard. The council, you will hear a lot more about this, and we'll go much more in-depth at the city council retreat coming up on February, but I wanted to give a little highlight. So, you were all at the town hall, so I don't need to tell you much about it.

But I was really pleased with the attendance and, honestly, just sort of the interest and participation and talking about the community's future. Next slide. So this I'm hitting now on some high level, highlights that kind of are conclusions that was made through the bulk of the community engagement effort. So these are highlights we heard not only from the town hall, but really the survey, the focus groups, sort of the employee survey, so all of those elements combined. So, the primary strengths we heard time and time again about Des Moines were really, which you just heard Colleen exhibiting this, is our committed and engaged community.

People had a lot of passion about the future of Des Moines and who really invested. We got a lot of comments on the location and city aesthetics. People love the waterfront. They love the natural beauty here. They really like the location being between Seattle and Tacoma, and proximity to the airport came up a lot, both good and bad. And this next one, I did not add this. This is truly what was found in some of the results. But there are a lot of positive comments about sort of the future of city staff and leadership. And, there was a question in the survey about do you feel optimistic or pessimistic about the future of Des Moines? And overall, people were really optimistic.

So that's wonderful to hear. And then, this last one, there were a lot of comments that sort of hit on this theme of organizational adaptability and resourcefulness. And so what I think that sort of indicates is that because this organization and this community has been resource constrained for a long time, especially amongst city staff, there was a lot of flexibility and a lot of, ability to think outside the box for how we can stretch resources, do more with less, all of that. So those are some of the main strengths we heard. Next slide.

And then for those of you that were at the town hall, you remember this was a live exercise we did where people on their smartphones could actually put in answers. Excuse me. And the sound, or the size, excuse me, of the text is how often that word was put in. So we asked questions about sort of the current state. What do you love about Des Moines now?

You can see that, obviously, a lot about waterfront location, community, the arena, the small town feel, came up. Next slide. Obviously, another big part of this whole exercise is really getting a good sense of what the challenges are that the community faces so that we can start making progress on addressing those. So I won't go over all of these, but I think you'll see some recurring themes we heard on challenges were things about economic development and the downtown and sort of what are we doing to bring businesses here. There was a lot of comments about our financial stability, and just the desire to sort of see the city have a stable revenue base.

There's a lot about the airport and quality of life, and just how that impacts us. And then sort of these next two, I think, go hand in hand. So there were concerns about how do we continue to meet the community's expectations and where are there areas where we're not meeting them right now with kinda coupled with the challenge we face of being resource constrained. We don't have a large workforce. We don't have any duplicate jobs.

And so kinda those two things together can be very challenging. And then finally, we also heard, again, such a love for the location and aesthetics of the community. So the challenge is how do we protect that while we deal with some of these other issues. Next slide. I won't go over all these either, but there are lots of opportunities. And these are the things that we will talk to the council about at the retreat that's coming up. So things like what do we do to increase recreation activities? How do we continue building on the relationships we're trying to build with the community? How do there was a lot of comments about transportation and mobility and and road areas where people, you know, thought traffic was bad. So how do we address some of those things?

Then, of course, downtown revitalization was probably the biggest issue we heard about, as a as a thing people really desired, the city to focus on. So, again, we'll go through all of these in a lot more detail, at the council retreat, but that is sort of a high level summary. Next slide. And then also part of the questions that were asked weren't just about the current state but also about the future state. So what are the hopes for the future of Des Moines?

And so, again, this is another word cloud, and you can see, by the size of the font how how much people really wanted this to be how they would describe Des Moines in the future. They wanted it to be safe, friendly, a place people wanna go. So that's that's exciting to see sort of that much positivity. Next slide. So as we wrap this up, where we are in the process is we've concluded several months of community engagement.

That's been really incredible. And, again, tremendous thank you to the CAB. I mean, those volunteers really went above and beyond to be at so many locations, so I'm incredibly appreciative of them. But where we are now is we concluded the public engagement component at the end of the year in 2025. Mid December, the executive team, sort of senior staff, met with Raftelis, which is the company that's helping us with our plan.

And we sort of, did some preliminary work on kind of what could some of these goals or priorities in the strategic plan be, sort of in preparation for the time that you all counsel will spend, in two weeks on this that you wouldn't start with a blank piece of paper. You'd have a little something to start with. But, we are excited to take this next step of really the council's workshop, which will really be when the plan starts coming to life. And then after that, in the spring, it will come before the city council for consideration and adoption. Next slide. So with that, that concludes Colleen and I's, presentation. We are happy to answer any questions about the work that was done or about what you just heard.

Counsel, any questions? Alright. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Alright. Our last item, and this one I don't have to talk in, so you will not have to have me pause and cough, is an update on the city's automated license plate reader system, and chief Beau will be leading that.

Alright. Good evening, y'all. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to come talk a little bit about automated license plate reader system here in our city, the history of how we got here and some things that are going on today, as well as some changes in response that we've made to some community concerns about our automated license plate reader system here in the city. So first of all, automated license plate reader is the the big global term. Here, we have a contract with a company called FLAC.

FLAC is the largest provider of automated license plate systems in the municipal world. They have about 5,000 communities that they serve in 49 states across the country. In addition to automated legislative leaders, they're actually a large global security company, and they have some other products that they do as well. Drones as first responders, gunshot detection, which is a noise, detection and coordination device, etcetera. So they're kind of a holistic company.

We only have automated license plate reader cameras from them. So as we're talking about FLAC, we're talking about a specific program or product within their their broader spectrum. I should clarify. The reason I bring that up is often people confuse the entire company, all of the things they do, as opposed to what we actually contract for. So a lot of times people look at things like, look at things like a patent, and they'll see it in this big global sense, not in the, reflection of the actual products we contract for and work with.

One of the things I wanna talk about with FLAC is a lot of people have come to see FLAC now and to talk about FLAC based on some recent publicity around the program. And there was a perception or at least some comments made about this was never done in a public forum as it came to be. So I wanna cover I went back and watched all of the history on this, including watching all the videos from the previous meetings and discussions that led to FLAC in our community. So the first public safety emergency management presentation that was done on this was done in June 2002. At that meeting, the chief at the time, chief Thomas, also talked about this in light of his highway safety transit plan.

So he had a plan that he was doing on the the entire response to crime on Pacific Highway, and this was brought up and brought before counsel, brought before public safety emergency management as part of building that plan. And then he brought specifically this component as a discussion item at the public safety emergency management meeting on June 2. On October 20, assistant chief Richards did a council presentation to the council as a whole on FLAC and their desire to implement a FLAC program here in the city. Again, public meeting, presentation. On November 3, the chief at the time, chief con Thomas went back to public safety emergency management and said that he was coming back one more time to have a discussion around this, that he intended to ask to put this contract into effect in the contract, and public safety emergency management approved him moving forward with discussion to the full council.

And on November 17, it was brought to the full council for review and approval, and the council approved the city engaging in a contract with FLAC. I also wanna talk a little bit. I just push you back to June 22. A couple things that came up at that was chief Thomas at the time also talked about his public outreach efforts, putting this up on social media. It was on Facebook, both on the city and on the police pages.

He discussed that he brought FLOC up among his police advisory commission. So I have a a group of community members, our representative that I meet with every month. He also had the same system in place. So through his advisory council he also brought this up with the advisory council and discussed and planned for the implementation, and he brought that up with the public safety emergency management committee that he had taken these precursor steps before bringing it to them as well. And then after the system was implemented, there was an update on the installation as well to the council, and that was chief Cooey at the time who was the acting chief after Thomas retired.

And he came back and updated the council on implementation, the delays in implementation, what cameras were active and weren't active, and there was another discussion before council. I also should say that I also brought this up with my public safety committee three times in the last six months as some of these discussions have come up. So it's been an ongoing discussion as well in that environment. With all of this in place, a contract was signed by the city manager at the time on November, approving 16 Falcon pole mounted cameras. There's some fees associated with the installation of that equipment in the city.

And then the app and search features, the cloud based storage and search features within the app portion of the system. Locations for FLOC. We're done with input from city staff and FLOC. They did an assessment of our traffic flow, worked with the city and identified locations that made the most sense, to implement FLAC to try to get get a broad spectrum coverage of vehicles, coming and going from our community. And the cameras were installed and fully operational in June 2023. They're installed in segments, some of them before that. But by June 2023, this system was fully operational. This system did amend to 15 from 16. There was one camera that they decided not to install after they actually broke it down. So as you look at that number and say 16, you say, well, chief, there's only 15.

The next slide's gonna tell you why. It's because they chose not to put one of them in. As of today, we have 15 devices. They're not a secret. They're published. They're online, readily available with where they are located. One of the things that the system does is constantly gives us feedback loop. Interestingly enough, as I was looking at this, the cameras communicate whether or not they're functioning properly, communicating properly, whether or not they are a properly functioning system at that moment in time. One of these on it says, boom. You got a problem. As soon as you have a problem, FLAC gets a notification. They notify us. In this case, it actually has to do with the solar panel. It's not getting good enough sun. But any issue with the system, we get a readout and and a response from FLoC.

So FLoC is, oh, you got a camera that's a problem. Current status is that's with FLoC support, and we were notified by email that there was an issue with the camera and the solar system. So there's a feedback loop on the cameras. They're not just a device sitting out there in the wind. There's a a twenty four seven feedback loop as well on the equipment.

So there really is two features of flock, and I'm just gonna 30,000 foot view here, and then we can dive into the details with somebody far more technically competent than me. But 30,000 foot, the first piece of flock is a proactive piece of flock. Basically, what flock is doing is as vehicles are driving by the cameras, cameras are focused on the back of the vehicle. It takes an image of the vehicle and does an an automatic read of the plate and then checks that license plate against a hot list. Is the vehicle stolen?

Is there a felony criminal warrant associated with the vehicle? Is it a silver alert, a missing person elderly, an AMBER alert, missing person young? So it looks at it as a hot list. It does not run the plate through departmental licensing. The name is not affiliated with it unless you meet one of the criterias for the hot list. So it's not a a departmental licensing run. It is a hot list run. If the plate doesn't have a hot list, there's no information on the plate. It just moves on. So we only get a hit when it's on the hot list, and then that gets pushed out to the officers working that day.

So if you're on shift that day, you get a a chime on your cell phone or on your CAD that says, a silver alert just entered your city. It's going northbound on on on South Highway. So the officers are working that day know that this event, this thing, this vehicle that we're looking for is in our city. Then the officers can respond and work the problem from there. Most often, pretty much all the time, that is just the first point of an investigation.

They still have to run the plate through DOL and through a bunch of other databases that we have. That's just the thing that will alert the officer to the issue that draws their attention to it. Couple things that come up a lot is this idea of facial recognition. I know I've sent, we have shown demos of the system here. Several community members have seen demos of the system. The system intentionally is designed to look at the back of a vehicle. So the images from a vehicle driving away from the camera. So that is the intent and the process of the video. It's not looking at the driver or the front of the vehicle. It's looking at the back of the vehicle driving away and looking for the rear license plate to do an a read of the rear license plate.

So this is kind of that proactive system. Right? We're looking for things coming into our community, and it's a force multiplier. So an officer can technically sit on the road and run every single license plate drive by. There's there's clear, not an issue that you can randomly run license plate is a lawful act or an act an officer can do.

What this does is automates that and feeds the officer information on, hey. Here's an issue in your community when we don't have enough officers to functionally do a run or a review of every vehicle going through our community. Next part of this is the investigative part. So after we have a crime, when we're investigating a crime, those images that are taken are stored on the cloud for thirty days. We have the ability to do an AI search of that video and or of that, still image for very specific things.

They're all listed up there. Those are the only searcher search pry things that we can search for. Plate, state, body type, make, color identifiers. After thirty days, the images are perched. So that is the length of time they're captured.

On the screen capture there, that is my best effort to use random red marker to blackout an image or or cross out an image there. The the case study that I used, as I said, I'm looking for the last twenty four hours, white pickup trucks in our community who have bumper stickers on the back or on the side, right, have markers or stickers on them. And what I found is that in the last twenty four hours, 28 vehicles had hit our cameras that met those search parameters. The reason that this is important is that police have done this exact same body of work for the last fifty years. We just haven't done it with the automation.

Historically, what we do is we get every single camera we can possibly get from any angle that has possibly captured any vehicle in our city, and we spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours trying to find every white vehicle with a bumper sticker that meets these search parameters, that's something that police have done forever. That is not a unique thing after a crime like a homicide or a major offense. That that is a very normal police activity. What this does is does that work in a very short period of time and frees up the officers now to follow-up on investigation from there and say, well, let's now look at what are these 28 vehicles. Are any of them involved?

That is that next investigative step. This is just that first clue that gets them started on an investigation. Audit tools. So every single thing in here is CJIS audited, CJIS compliance. CJIS is criminal justice information system.

Anytime we touch your information, there's legal standards that are set that we have to follow. Every single thing you do in here is track from an officer perspective that what I searched, who searched it, why I searched it, internal to our department, as well as anybody from the outside who looks at our data. Every search is captured. Every search to that level of detail is there, including, as many of you know, when I go in and do a test search to do a demo, it'll show in there, Ted did a demo on this date. This is exactly the parameters he put in.

This is the terminal he used. This is the reason he put in there. Everything is in there captured that I did that search on this date at this time for this reason. So that is what CJIS compliance looks like is that we have the ability to track that back end of what was looked at and why was it looked at in protection of your data. One thing I wanna talk about in here is the adaptation of FLoC since the University of Washington study.

So one thing about the University of Washington study is that they actually did that study using publicly disclosable data. Those are PDR requests they used to do the study, which interestingly is actually a testimony to the transparency of the data, the system, and the PDR component of it is that that's actually what they used to do the study. It also did point out some flaws with the way data was captured and the way data was retained. With that came the ability to turn off all national searching. And that is something that we did proactively here is we just turned off all national searching.

So anybody who is not a Washington state agency, who is not governed by keeping Washington Working Act, which is our legal standard here for information sharing, particularly with federal partners, does not have access to our data here in the city. They were all turned off and excluded under under the platform. And that occurred November when we put that in.

Prior to

the It was actually a couple days prior to the We knew that we had heard that this was brewing, so we just turned it off proactively. But we definitely have turned that off at this point. And, again, I know several of you have seen the system and have seen that that is actively turned off. IT. When we start talking about IT in government and particularly with data, we actually have industry standards that we have to follow.

They start with Chris who was here earlier. I think he's in the back. Chris sets the IT rules and guidelines for our city. The IT rules and guidelines also have to comply with access regulations, which are set by the FBI and the Washington State Patrol. So anytime that we are going out and grabbing data off of platforms that either the federal system or the Washington State system controls, we have to meet their security guidelines.

So not only we have to meet them, we get audited. We have been audited by both WSP and the feds in both cases showing we're a 100% CJRS compliant. So what this looks like, nobody can be in our building unless you're physically escorted by somebody who is CJRS compliant, approved, and background checked. And every computer in our building has a Duo mobile app, a two factor authentication app just to get onto a system. So you can't even be in there unless you've been background checked or you're escorted.

Once you get past that, now it's a two point authentication through our phone through we use Duo Mobile as the app we use. Once you get past that, you're logged into the system. You then have to log in to FLoC. FLoC then has six six digit random identifier. So you go to log in to FLoC, it pushes a six digit PIN to your phone.

So reason I bring this up is either one of those systems independently actually meets the CJIS requirements. We actually have both. So it's actually duplicate given that we have dual and six digit, which actually means both would meet the CJIS requirements on that. And like I said, more importantly, we've been audited and found 100% in compliance with our protection of people's data. I also wanna talk a little bit about the intentional by violation because I actually think that as we're having this discussion, the the biggest risk is actually an internal violator.

It's actually not the technology side because of the different layers in place on the security side. So we have to talk about what happens when you violate data. So when you violate data, the department loses our ability to access. Access will turn off our switch if we don't terminate or severely discipline the person. You also open up civil liability. There's several different layers of problem with violations, and and I just kinda talk about the different things that can happen up there. If you violate the city's IT policy, you can be fired. It's that simple. Right? If you're found violating criminal act, which is some of the ones that were mentioned today, you're stalking and act you'll be arrested and charged with a crime.

So, I mean, there's ramifications for these behaviors. Yes. There are probably examples that we can bring forward. There also are protocols in place for what those violations look like and what the ramifications are, including disciplinary action, termination, criminal arrest, or in some cases, the entire agency being removed from the system if we refuse to comply with the disciplinary action put forward by Washington State Patrol or the federal government. Oh, last thing.

Everything on the Flock system is actually fully encrypted as well, which is a key component of the data. The data is not stored on a local hard drive where somebody could hack into my local hard drive and look at pictures. It's a 100% cloud based and encrypted, which actually, again, an industry standard thing that once you encrypt the data without the encryption key, it is nearly impossible to recreate the data. Impact on crime. The first one, I'm gonna take lots of credit for, but I'm not gonna be inflammatory and claim that that's all flocked.

That's not a factual statement. One thing we do know is that we've had a 58% reduction in stolen vehicles in last twelve months in our city. As we look around, other cities have had good numbers. They have not had that good of a number. We have encouraged our officers whenever you get a stolen vehicle hit to make it a priority to go deal with it. The reason for that is that if people come to know if you drive through Des Moines in a stolen vehicle, there's a ramification, like you get arrested, you go to jail, that helps to discourage that behavior from people who are willing to do that behavior in our community. Half a year people say, well, it's your stolen car. One of my favorite responses. I actually agree. I don't believe every stolen car is a violent crime.

I'll just be totally frank with you. I will tell you almost every person who does violent crime does it in a stolen car. So while the stolen car in and of itself may not be a violent crime, it is certainly something that people who are up to no good utilize while being up to no good to help protect their identity. So I will not make a false accusation that it is a 100% stolen car equals violent criminal. I will say violent criminal equals stolen cars is probably pretty close to a 100% if you view it from that lens. So I went into our detective's office who said, hey. I gotta do this presentation. Flock stolen car only. What are you using it for? And they can just name cases.

It's something that your criminal investigation detectives regularly use and can isolate cases of violent crime, rape, robbery, assaults, homicides. They are using this tool regularly to help them solve violent crimes. It is not just a simplified tool of auto thefts. It is something that they use for complex investigations at the highest level, including violent crimes that are impacting our community. I do have a couple of recommendation, and I wanna I wanna hit home here a little bit that I am not a blind defender of this technology.

I'm not a blind defender of any technology. I have heard from people, the concerns about this. I've heard from several of you the concerns about this. The reason we turned off national search is because we had concerns. The reason we're doing regular audits is because we have concerns. The reason we made fact sure we had proper two factor is because we had heard had heard your concerns. We'd heard community concerns. In no way am I ignoring the community concern about this or being callous to the realities of that. I think one thing that is out there right now that is certainly relevant is the state is debating this issue. As I said, there are 5,000 of these systems in place just with this company nationwide.

As the state is wrestling with this, they're having discussions around data retention, public disclosure, camera placement. Several of the issues that have come up as concerns for our community are actively being discussed. And I certainly recommend I printed the most current version of the bill off today, and read it again. We're tracking and engaged in whether or not we need to continue to modify our program to make sure that we're compliant. We will remain compliant with all Washington state law.

It's a nonnegotiable. So we will absolutely be compliant with anything that comes out of house bill, 6,002. And then one of the things that's out there that we have access to and we worked on building and and certainly have the capability to turn on at any point in time is this idea of a transparency portal. Renton PD or Renton Washington PD has a really good transparency portal, and what it does is just gives you the overview. Here's our cameras. Here's where they're located. Here's who we share with. Here's who we don't share with. And then it has an instant tool down there where you push a button, get a spreadsheet that is made safe. They pull the plates, they get confidential data out of it.

You get a spreadsheet of every single person that looked at that data today. You can go on anytime you wanna look, and you can see who's looked at the data. It's not a none of this is a secret. All of it is available by public disclosure. What this does, it just takes away the need to go through public disclosure. You can push it. You'll get an Excel spreadsheet of every search of every data on our camera system that day. So, one of my recommendations is is really that we just speed that up and put this online and make this process something that our community can do. And, again, it lowers the anxiety a little bit to at least see, yes, your data was accessed. It was accessed by Seattle p PD in relation to criminal offense.

So that is a recommendation I have, to put out there for today. And with that, I'm open to questions. I will give the disclosure. I'm not the ultimate tech guy. Assistant chief Stanton here is far more techy than I. Obviously, we introduced separately the the the actual company executives for for the very fine tuned technical questions because I am I'm certainly not an expert on the actual inner workings of of their application. So with that, I'm available for questions.

Thank you, chief. Just a quick reminder, counsel. We have an appointment, for an executive session at 07:30. If more conversation is needed on the subject, we can do that after we return from our executive session. So who has questions? I saw council member Harris.

Hi. Thank you. So two things. You said something to the effect, only one of your works, that it only pings officers who are on duty. What if a detective is working one of these more highly energized things and he's at home at the weekend, but he's or she are really, you know, concerned about that?

Yeah. It's a great question. So it depends how they set it up. You can set it up two ways. One is to ping through your CAD, and one is to ping through your cell phone. So depending on which way it's set up, I theoretically, if you're at home monitoring your work phone like me, I would get it. If you're at home, like most people, they turn their work phone off. When they get home, you wouldn't. So it that would be the differentiation.

Okay. But that if that would be possible if detective had a interest in a key thing and, you know, however they say it, you know, something broke or whatever. And and okay. The other thing is

Well, real quick, I wanna make sure that I'm clear on that. The detective wouldn't be able to set, I wanna know about vehicle x and get notified at home. The detective would be notified there's a vehicle on the statewide hot list that has entered the city. It wouldn't be about the detect the detectives don't individually set an alert. The alert is sent to Washington State Patrol. It's put in the access database hot list. When the plates run, the access data hot list hits it. So it's not about an individual officer. The the officer is not an individual officer putting in a a plate of somebody they wanna track. It has to be a criminal investigation statewide hit return.

No. That that's where

I think

in that, basically, you know, guy goes off, you know, for at the weekend and then comes back on Monday and says, you know, hey. How come I didn't know about this thing that happened Saturday? Yeah. Good. And the other thing is you have a you still have the police advisory group that you meet with? I do. So just roughly speaking, how are there any people on your group who are really concerned or not thrilled about flock, or would you say that they are all

No. There's there's one member in the group that is deeply concerned about flock. She has been supportive of it based on trust in me and trust in the demo. I live demoed it for the adviser commission. I can't do it here because I can't do my fancy little red pen and block everybody's plates out. I did live demo it for him. And when I live demo it, it's what do you wanna know? It it's full open. And then I have one member of my commission that has a member in her community that has some concerns, and she is relaying from her social circle. She is very comfortable with it, but she has somebody in her community that is not, and she is relaying.

And her and I are communicating through her to another member of her community with questions. So, yes, I there are definitely people who have concerns about it without a doubt, but it is not universal or broad. And I I will say one of the things I've found is people who have concerns have found their anxiety lowers with information and with demo. And as you see it, it it gets a little bit less scary from that lens, but there's definitely people who have concerns.

My unasked for advice is that you should have somebody on that, if it's a private group, that absolutely despises it world without end. Thank you, sir.

Other questions? Council member Steinmetz.

Yeah. I'd like to just ask you a little bit about, you know, what is being read is the back of the car, including the license plate and identifiers. Correct? And is that any different than what we used to hear on crime shows a long time ago because I'm old, you know, called an APB, an all points bulletin. Same idea, isn't it? Same concept. Yes, sir. Okay. And you said police officers have been doing that for years? Yes. Has to the best of your knowledge, has Washington ever identified a strong privacy interest in that information on a public road?

There is there's a couple court rulings, and I I don't wanna step on Tim's toes here. But this has been reviewed by the courts couple times, and it is not there's not a privacy interest in your plate on a public roadway unless there's something no different than I believe that's been

the standard. Correct. And none of these cameras are in neighborhoods themselves or on major streets because we're tracking when people go on those streets. Correct?

Yes. The ones that are owned by the city. Private people have their own. Private vendors have their own systems, but none that the city owns, controls, or has data of.

There there's also been a lot of concerns about sharing Flock is a private entity, sharing the data with somebody else like Ring. K. Can you help us understand, can that data be shared and what the implication of that might be?

Kind of. And I'm I'm gonna admit that this is new technology that's just developing and is not currently available in our system. So I'm speaking more to the

You wanna call for help?

No. I actually I'm pretty comfortable with this. I've already had to answer this in a couple of emails to the community as well as council or city manager. So they are working on a platform that connects Ring and, again, doing a neighborhood canvas, which and I wanna be clear. This is something police officers do. I when I was a commander for the King County Major Crimes, we assigned a team of two people to every homicide investigation to walk within four blocks of the homicide and look for every single camera they could find and go knock on every door and ask for every single piece of footage they can get. That is in industry standard. Ring is one of those tools. We found every Ring camera knock on every door and ask people, hey. Can we have your Ring camera?

We had a homicide down the road. We just wanna see if there's anything of value on that. That is industry standard law enforcement practice. What the relationship between Flock and Ring is is Ring has said, hey. When the police are investigating a crime, is there a way to do that digital handshake where we reach out and say, hey. Anybody in this Ring network have information? The police are requesting if you want to share it because you own it. You can share that through Ring. The interesting thing about that is that it actually makes two things happen. One, every single person in the neighborhood is notified that there's a crime in the neighborhood, and the police are making this request of every single neighborhood, so there's no secret.

Everybody knows there's a crime. We're investigating. The other thing it does is actually makes the collection of data CJIS compliant. Because now if you put the data and the search and the collection of it into a single platform, then everybody has access to that data as well as public disclosure, defense attorneys for doing discovery purposes, etcetera. So it actually standardizes the collection of that data. The process of automating it is something that they're working on now. We don't have it now, so I'm speaking about a thing in the future that may occur, but that is something that they're looking at developing in the future.

But isn't the data that's collected is only the data that's made available by the private citizen in that point. And if they choose not to make it available, it's not collected. Isn't that correct?

That's a 100% correct. You own your own, your own footage from your own surveillance footage, be it, Ring or a store security camera, etcetera. The the private vendor owns that. Thank you. Yes, sir.

Councilmember Nutting.

Thank you, mayor. And thank you, chief, for the presentation. My my question revolves around the Renton Washington PD transparency portal.

And

am I correct that that's not gonna cost us anything to put that up there? It's just a click of the button?

It it is, all built out and ready to go. I just have to add it to our website. The the back end of

it is already already ready to go. So it's pretty simple to do.

We could do it within I'm going out of town for my daughter's soccer match this weekend. But by next week, I could get it done. I

guess just a statement, mayor, if I could, is that I would recommend that that's something that we do. Yes, sir.

Other questions? Deputy Mayor Oksager?

Sorry.

There we go.

With regard to the, Savannah Guthrie, her mother's abduction, there's been some, news out on the the in the public about whether or not, her the her mother actually had a subscription going. And that suddenly, the the Nest camera there was a Nest camera system. And that Google, which owns it, was then able to pull the information down through a backdoor system or something so that so that if you even the the concern is is that if you you don't even have the system activated, but it is installed, that it is it is actually recording. What and this this goes to the issue of the privates the private cameras, and then their accessibility to federal law enforcement. How much control, is there actually, once the system is installed to

be able

to turn it off to have any, control over it?

I just wanna clarify that we're we're we're talking specifically about the flock camera system.

I understand that. But the concern is is that are these systems hackable?

Okay.

So I I don't wanna speak about proprietary technology for which I don't control or have extreme knowledge of. I think that's a little bit of a risk to talk about a Google based system from my lens. One thing I I will say is that, the technology of having a camera system on your house is now an industry standard. And by that, I mean, almost everybody has one. What level of securities are in place are between you and your vendor for how you set that up.

Some people have very simple things with old VHS tapes that still exist. If you have one, please, pretty please, update it because the video is horrible every time we get it useless. But as far as what level of technology, do you use a a local hard drive? Do you use cloud based? Is it encrypted? Is it unencrypted? Those are things that are discussion between you and your vendor. I will well, transparency, my phone back there. I I have Ring on my house. I feel very comfortable with it. It's a matter of your preference with what your level of comfort is. But I I personally use Ring, and I don't have a problem with the technology.

I will go to councilmember Block. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Go ahead, deputy Mayor Oscar. I I didn't know you were

I'm sorry. Yes. So then the quest another question is, what control will we have over the system if the legislature comes down and sets a statewide standard?

So we always have the right to be more restrictive. We don't have the right to be less restrictive than a government body above us. So if the state says this is the max for whatever, we can't say, well, we don't agree with that. We wanna make it a little bigger. It's the max is a statewide regulation. So what we will find with this as they're doing public disclosure and retention, which are a couple of the big issues, we could be more restrictive. So if they say you can maintain record for twenty one days, theoretically, we could say, well, here in the city, we actually think fourteen days is the right number. We could be more restrictive on it. What we couldn't do is say, the state says the max is twenty one days, but we don't care. We're gonna keep it for thirty.

Okay. Thank you.

Yes,

sir. You. Council member Bloss.

Thank you, chief. We've received recently the city, public records request on the flock cameras. Can you share exactly what is given there? Is it, like, thousands of pictures of all the cars that went through this particular camera or just the license plates are in there, or can you share what's in there?

I am gonna have to pass a public disclosure question off to the city attorney because that's actually his, department.

Yeah. I don't think we've actually had request. We've had a lot of requests, but most of it's about the system. But, certainly, at this time, you know, we're required to maintain,

all the

records for thirty days. So if somebody requests something from there,

we would provide it. So could someone request every single car that passed through a camera in the last thirty days?

Theoretically, yes. But, I mean, now, one, you're gonna pay for that. And, two, you're talking about probably hundreds of thousands of cars. So if someone wants to pay to see cars drive by, we

can we can provide it. Right? The license plates numbers?

Yeah. So, I mean, they'd be the same if they just sat on the street. Right? But, yeah, that would be we would provide it, and they would pay for it. So I don't know that we've had specifically that request or what the, you know, what the motive behind it would be, but we have had a lot of requests about the the process and all that kind of stuff.

Thank you.

Councilmember Harris for your second time.

Thank you. Does the city track or have the ability to track what crimes are solved, at at least to some extent via flock?

We do have a we have a tracking of all the hits on there. That's a it's a instant demo as far as, like, there's been this many stolen vehicles. This camera, you can do it per camera. Like, this camera's got this many vehicles, this many silver alerts. So, yes, you can. What, the connective connectivity on the back end to say out of the 500 stolen vehicle hits, how many have actually resulted in a a location and arrest? I I would need to do a little bit of back end research to make the the connective tissue on the arrest versus I can tell you how many times it's alerted us. How many times we've had a successful apprehension, I'd I'd have to go back and work.

I just as long as it's not onerous, I think that would be an interesting like, in other words, if you recovered 50 vehicles or 50 reports and then you found out that x were, you know, there was a flock hit or something that aided the response. Thank you.

Yeah. Absolutely.

I'm gonna actually call for a pause right here because we do have to break for our executive session. But I would like to come back to this topic when we come back into our regular meeting. So at this time let's make sure I have it. We will go into executive session. The purpose of this executive session is to discuss pending litigation for RCW forty two point thirty point one one zero one I, twenty five minutes in estimation.

And then also for the purpose of real estate acquisition RCW forty two thirty one one zero one b dash five, I expect that we'll be back at five minutes for that. And so that'll mean we'll return at 08:05. Thank you. Thank you. No action was taken as a result of our executive session, and we're now returning to our presentation by chief Ted Beau.

I wanted to make sure we had some time in case we were cut off of any sort of questions that folks had remaining. I'll remind folks that we're not taking a formal action on this contract at this time. One of the prime reasons is because of the legislation that's working its way through the system now that will most likely change the conditions of retention, what crimes this could be used for that's making its way through the legislature right now. But council members, did you have any remaining questions about the system for cheap vote? Council member Vlas.

So next week, we'll probably have the dashboard up online, the new dashboard live by next week, you said? We're probably gonna have it live? Yeah. I think

I I will check-in with my boss, but I I think it's a pretty simple application. Let's do it. And what I'm feeling, at least the feeling I'm seeing from the head nods and the general consensus is that's something y'all would like us to try to get going. I will I'll work with Bonnie with the website and flock to get an application up.

Yeah. City manager, Caffrey, did you wanna comment on that?

Gonna tell him, yes. Proceed. Okay. Yes.

We will move forward

with that next week.

Thank you, boss.

Thank you. Any other wrap up questions for this item? Alright. Thank you very much. I appreciate your patience.

Thank you, ma'am.

Will the clerk please read the consent agenda?

Item one, approval of vouchers. Item two, approval of minutes. And that concludes the consent agenda, mayor.

Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as read? Council member Nutting.

So moved. Second.

Seconded by council member assignments. Do does any council member wish to pull an item? Alright. Seeing none, all those in favor of the consent agenda as read, please raise your right hand until I call your name. We'll go to deputy mayor Oksicker, council member Steinmetz, council member Harris, council member Desimone, council member Dunning, council member Bloss, and myself. Thank you very much.

Okay.

We are now gonna be moving into a public hearing. The purpose of this agenda item is for the city council to hold a public hearing on the first reading of the density bonus for religious properties ordinance. I will now open the public hearing. We'll begin with a staff presentation by community development director Rebecca Deming.

Rebecca, your mic is not on.

Thank you. Again, this is house bill thirteen seventy seven. It requires under the RCW to facilitate affordable housing development by providing a density bonus for properties owned by religious housing organizations. The notable requirements and as it is in the ordinance requires a 50% density bonus for affordable housing on properties owned or controlled by religious organizations. The affordable housing must be deed restricted for at least fifty years, and they must pay all fees and mitigation costs and required other charges. That's the basis of the ordinance. Our recommendation is to pass this ordinance to a second reading on March 12. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Council member Steinmetz.

Is this required to comply with the RCW as as passed or the

Yes.

But we don't really have any choice, do we?

We don't. In order to be in compliance with the law, this is a requirement. Yes.

And by a 50% bonus, it

basically 50% more housing than our whatever zone that they're in.

I gonna take a a quick pause here because I went out of order. I'm all discombobulated because of our midway break for this executive session. I I wanna make sure that there's a we observe our period of public comment portion of this public hearing. So if we're gonna go do that one just a second, was there anyone here? I don't see anyone who signed up specifically on the this issue, but is there anyone here who didn't sign up who wishes to speak?

A second call, is there anyone who didn't sign up to speak who wishes to speak? And third and final call, is there anyone who didn't sign up who wishes to speak? Thank you. Alright. Now I'll go back to council member Simons. Thank you. That was it.

I already did. Those were my questions.

Excellent. Other questions? Council member Harris.

Yeah. Without ratting anyone out, has has the city received any interest to date, about utilizing said new law?

No. We have not received any applications.

And just to be clear, this is any property owned by a religious organization, not necessarily land that one would associate with, you know, a steeple and so forth?

I believe there is some I think if they can control it or lease it, I don't think they necessarily have to own it, but there there's so so there is some flexibility in there. If there's if the if a religious organization has lee is has least control over it, there there may be an allowance for it as well.

Okay. Thank you.

Councilmember Netting.

Thank you, mayor, and thank you for the presentation. Is there, has there been any study done on do we know how many properties this is going to affect in our city?

We don't. I it would be hard to figure out which proper I mean, we can look up how many properties don't pay taxes and then try and look up their articles and see if they meet the RCWs. It would be very hard to know until someone came in with an application and look up if they met the requirements of a religious organization. I mean, we could find the easy ones, but it would be hard to find out if there's other ones out there.

Thank you.

Questions from anyone else before I circle back through? Okay. Council member Simons.

Just kinda to follow-up with council member Nutting's question. If we pass this in the next week, a religious organization leases a property. They get the density bonus to develop that what they want. So you can't predict what the future behavior will be. It all depends on the purse strings. And if they if the church wants to religious organization wants to spend that money developing low income housing. Right?

That's correct.

Thank you.

I have a question for you. In reading some of this ordinance, I wanna qualify and ask to make sure I'm reading this correctly that this applies to a permanent structure. That's correct. So only to permanent structures. That's correct. Okay. Thank you very much. If there are no other questions, I can close the public hearing. Is there a motion? Council member Nutting.

I move to pass draft ordinance two five dash one two five to a second reading on 03/12/2026.

Okay. Moved by council member Nutting and seconded by council member Bloss. Any further discussion? Not seeing any. All those in favor of passing draft ordinance 25 dash one two five to a second reading on 03/12/2026, please raise your right hand until I call your name.

I'll start with deputy mayor Oksager, deputy mayor no. Council member Simons, council member Harris, council member Desmoni, council member Nutting, council member Bloss, and myself is unanimous, and motion passes. Thank you. Alright. Now it is time for some new business, and I believe that Rebecca is staying here, director Deming, to talk to us about the planning commission appointments.

Thank you, mayor council. The council approved the ordinance in December, regarding amending them updating the municipal code to establish the planning commission. In January, the council approved the process for which the appointment will move forward. Each council member will provide their recommended seven commissioners, and the top seven will become the planning commission. If that takes a few rounds, we would go through that process.

The city received 15 qualified applicants, which have been provided to the council, and I also included a summary spreadsheet that that was prepared by staff in the packet. Each council member would state the recommended appointment. We put it up here to tally together the votes. And as I mentioned, if necessary, we could go through multiple rounds. That's all I have for presentation. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay. I appreciate the recap, and this is the selection process that we, in fact, decided that we would use. And so I'll emphasize that again that this was our choice to go through it like this. We do have a spreadsheet in front of us that will help us very much keep track of this process.

So what I'm going to recommend is that each council member go through and give us a vote of one for seven individuals out of the 15 applicants. And then when we go through, the tally will actually automatically magically in through the magic of Excel total for us. And if there are a need for a second round of voting because of ties, then we will go to that process. Does that make sense? Question?

Yeah. Is it possible that each council member gets a chance to at least explain what they are trying to accomplish with their voting and at least give a general any kind of statement that they want to do to explain why they're voting with the way they're voting?

Yes. As you begin your process of of putting up your votes, you're you're welcome to make a statement. Question?

Yes. I'm confused on how the statement would apply when we're discussing applicants without actually names.

Oh, I'm sorry. To be clear for the public, the the we have a schedule of the names here, but it's up to you whether or not you would like to to use those. We have up on the chart named everyone applicants one through 15. So it's up to you whether or not you would like to make a statement. Any other clarifying questions?

Yeah. So if it's alright with you, I'd like to start with write down the line with deputy mayor Oksager. And remember, you're giving us seven yay votes.

Yeah. If I could do this right. K. Number two. Number five.

Oh, let's slow down just to if you could slow down just to make sure that we are following along with you here. Okay.

You're not sure where to I heard you said seven.

Okay.

Number eight, number 10, number 11, and number 13.

Okay. Thank you. Council member Simons.

Thank you. I I just wanna say that, you know, it's great to have a lot of good applicants. I really think that was a wonderful pro I mean, more than double of the positions available in and of itself is a it's an extremely positive thing. And I think importantly, there are a lot of names that have not been part of the existing crowd, so to speak, or seem new to the process, wanting to get involved. And I think that's a good thing.

And that was a consideration. That was a big consideration in who I determined that I was going to vote for. I was looking to get a mix of people that have been involved. I was looking to get a mix of people that do understand the planning process and what the job might entail, but also incur having some people that weren't involved but seem to have a skill set, looking to get a people that brought something to the table in terms of representation in the community and things. So I tried to get a very good mix in the seven that I voted for.

I am supporting applicant number one, applicant number two, applicant number three, applicant number five, applicant number six, applicant number 10, and applicant number 12.

Thank you. Council member Harris.

Thank you. I will respectfully disagree with my colleague.

Would you mind making sure that your microphone is on? Thank you.

Thank you for the reminder. Yeah. I will respectfully disagree with my colleague. We had 15 applicants. Five currently seem to serve on the Citizens Advisory Board and two are former council members.

And so that in itself is not disqualifying, but I basically chose people who had not served or are not serving. I think people should serve out their current term on the CAB because you cannot serve on two things, and it seems to me that it puts you know, if you sign up to serve on something, you should, you know, serve that and then go on to something else. So that left eight people, and my and I wish we had more people to choose from who were wider representation of the city. But for what it's worth, number one, number two, number six, number nine, number 11, number 12, and number 13. I think that's seven.

Oops. That's seven.

Thank you. Councilmember Daszoni.

Thank you. Applicant two, applicant four, applicant five, applicant six, applicant seven, applicant 10, applicant 12.

Thank you. Council member Nutting.

Thank you, mayor. Applicant two, three, four, five, six, seven, and 10.

Councilmember Boss.

Applicant four, six, seven, ten, eleven, fourteen, and 15.

Thank you. I have applicants one, four, five, six, seven, eleven, and 14.

Think anyone higher than four. Right?

Applicant, seven. Seven. Seven. Seven.

And not four. Yeah. And then 3. And I think that might be it. Oh. Might we be doing one right now?

Mayor.

Hold on. Just one just one second. Was there a question, deputy mayor Oksager?

I was just saying as much as I love looking at your lovely faces, I couldn't see the matrix.

Oh, can we make sure that he's got it now? Okay. Great. So, would you like to guide us on how that shook out?

Yep. So with that, we have seven. There's no tie, so we don't need to go another round.

Okay. The the ties are accepted because they're all at the the fifth level. Right?

I'm sorry. They're all tied at five, so those Right. There's no tie at seven. So there's no the the lowest number is four, and there's no there's seven exactly at that level. The next one down would be three votes. Gotcha. And there's and so yeah. So with the four votes and up, there's seven people.

Okay.

So there's no need to go another round Mhmm. With these seven applicants, which is applicant two, applicant four, applicant five, applicant six, applicant seven, applicant 10, and applicant 11.

Thank you very much. Now one specific change that we had made, and I'm going to make the recommendation that we ask these folks to come back for their appointment. Most who were here have left. And so I'd like to push that selection and formal appointment out to our meeting that will next be March 12. And we'll have a chance to hear directly from them as well.

Alright. That sounds acceptable. Oh, I'm sorry. I do. But you'll have to highlight them for me because that was too many numbers for me to read out loud. Actually, can I ask you to to just oh?

Don't know what the asterisk might.

Okay. Gotcha. Is that correct?

211.

Okay. Great. So the request is for a reading of those names. Applicant two, Danielle Anderson. Applicant three, Rob Back. Applicant four, Tracy Buxton. What? Not the high just the asterisk. I'm sorry. You gave me I can read. Thank you. We'll try again. The asterisk and not the highlighting. Applicant two, Danielle Anderson. Applicant four, Tracy Buxton.

My apologies. Applicant five, Chuck Coleman. Applicant six, Michelle Curry. Applicant seven, Barton DeLacey. Applicant 10, Colleen Grants and applicant 11, Nicole Gunkel. Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you very much. And they'll be back to introduce themselves at the regular council meeting, which won't be until March 12. Let's see. Let's talk now about item number two of the establishment of our salary commission. And we have with us assistant city manager, Johnson Newton.

Good evening, council community and staff. My name is AJ Johnson Newton, and I am here to bring us home to discuss a salary commission. So next slide, please. So as I mentioned, tonight, we're here to discuss what a salary commission is and how it functions. We'll be asking counsel to let us know if they'd like to receive some additional information about a salary commission.

Or if the counsel's at the point where they'd like to commit to action, then we would need some specific directions so we could establish an ordinance. Next slide, please. So just a little background. On October 23, the council requested that staff return with information on council compensation and mechanics for any, potential adjustments to the current council compensation structure. And so I came back on November 13, and, we discussed with council that there is essentially two mechanisms that are allowed by law to adjust council compensation.

And so at that time, the council expressed interest in, further exploring the ordinance option. On December 4, council was provided salary data, and then we reviewed in-depth the ordinance model. And, at that same meeting, the council indicated interest in looking at the salary commission model. So this presentation is a continuation of that discussion. And so just a couple highlights.

Currently, the council's compensation structure has been in place since 1999 and is paid on a per meeting basis. The current amounts are $2.50 and $3.50 for the mayor, and it's capped at 40 meetings per per year. Next slide, please. So what is a salary commission? So unlike, the ordinance model that allows counsel to set their own pay by ordinance, the salary commission functions as an independent group to make that decision.

The commission, not the council, would establish the compensation. So, basically, in plain terms, if the council elects to establish a salary commission, the council no longer would set its own pay. The independent body would do that work. And then once that body makes the decision, within its legal authority, which is gonna be set by the ordinance and state law, the council can't modify it. However, the council does always have the option to disband the commission and set their pay by ordinance.

Next slide, please. So the scope of the work that the salary commission would do is that they would meet publicly and make decisions independently from the council. They would decide on the amount of the compensation for you guys. And then I think this is set in state law. Tim, correct me if I'm wrong. The increases, assuming that they did establish them as the commission, would go into effect the next regular payday. And if they, decided that they wanted to decrease the current pay, that that would start at the next term. And so one thing to keep in mind that the salary commission's authority is limited to setting compensation for you guys. They have no impact on, like, broader city policy or budget decisions. Next slide, please.

So if we were or if the council was to elect to form a commission, just wanted to clarify, like, the different roles. So the city council would decide, obviously, whether to use a salary commission. You'd have input on the framework, the size, term length, compensation, frequency of salary review, the eligibility requirements to be on the commission, and then you would need to direct staff to draft an ordinance if you choose to proceed. Our role as city staff would be to draft the ordinance that reflects your your direction, ensure that's consistent with state law, and then return the ordinance for your consideration. After the ordinance was adopted, we would solicit applications from members of the public to serve on the salary commission.

Next slide. So before asking for specific directions, excuse me, we thought it'd be helpful to sort of outline the policy decisions that would need to be addressed in the ordinance along with some examples of how those elements are typically structured. And so, just one quick note before I run through these. There are other other elements such as removal standards and the effective date, like I just mentioned, of the compensation decisions. Those would be governed by state law and would be incorporated into the ordinance.

So the things that you don't necessarily see here would be covered by state law, and legal would make sure that they were integrated in the ordinance. So things we'd be looking at is the commission size, which is your discretion or discretion. Excuse me. But it's typically three to five members, eligibility and conflict of interest requirements. So there are some state law minimums.

I believe it's city employees, immediate family, and city officials could not serve on the commission. I think that's I get them all too? Thank you. But you could choose to add, like, local requirements such as city residency or limits on serving on other city committees, the term length and staggering. So state law already limits participation on the commission to two terms, but counsel would determine if the terms are two, three, or four years.

Frequency, how often that you want them to look at the salary, for the counsel. So it could be annual, biannual, or every four years as an example. And then compensation, whether you would want to authorize compensation for serving on the salary commission. Next slide, please. So if council wants to draft wants to direct staff to move forward, a motion would be needed to direct legal to draft an ordinance based on, your direction. And so these would be the specific, questions that we would need answers to tonight so legal could go back and, draft an ordinance for future consideration. And at this point, I will pause my presentation and turn it over to counsel. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Counsel, do you have any questions? Questions only at this time. Okay. Let's talk about a motion, and then we can, well, it sounds like we need to some direction before we want the motion.

So there are about five bullet points there, and so I'd like to get some, framework knocked out here that we can agree on to move forward with. So the first is about how many members should be on the commission, and this I believe the the guidelines that we were given was somewhere between three and five. Council member Simmons.

I'd propose five. Not not four and a half.

But Point taken. Yes. Thank you. Council member Dasmoni. Five. I hear a five. Is that a five? Okay. It's not a high five. I think that is enough unless there is somebody who wants to make a case for three or four.

Sounds good? Okay. Should there be any eligibility rules beyond the state law? Councilmember Harris.

They should not serve on any other committees. And in fact, applicants who currently serve on a committee should be rejected. Any

others? Let's talk about more than one instead of doing more at one at a time. So I heard eligibility live in the city as part of the state, or is that a one that we have to add in?

I believe it should be a resident.

Yeah. So

But it's not required. Added to. Yeah. Yeah. So that needs to be a resident. How about, number of years they live in the city? Nope. Don't don't have an appetite for that. Those who are precluded from applying if they're sitting on another committee, what if in the case that someone is to would like to resign from that other committee before moving and applying to the salary commission? Council member Steinmetz.

Yeah. I I don't think they should be precluded. And I'm not even sure that just because they're on a different committee, I don't see this as being a very active committee. It's not we haven't talked about the frequency with which they're going to do this yet. But in until we get to that discussion, in my mind, it's not a frequent thing. Mhmm. And I would not want to see people that are otherwise involved, you know, be precluded because they wanna be on this. Mhmm. Just because they are involved in something doesn't mean they should be precluded in it.

Mhmm. We

can take that into consideration Mhmm. Once we look at the applicants. But to, you know, sort of start limiting the number of applicants already

Mhmm.

I think would be detrimental to the process, and I would like to see more people encouraged to apply who might have an interest in doing it. And so I would not be in favor of precluding people from applying.

And I heard one agreement, and then another had not Agree with. And that's an agreement as well. I wanna stop here and make sure we, get some feedback from deputy mayor Oksinger.

Thank you, mayor. I agree with council member Steinmetz.

Great. Thank you very much. So it sounds like there's enough to say. What about the can you serve on this simultaneously with another committee?

I I agree that's precluding people, and and I don't think we should do that particularly in light of my concept, which we'll discuss the frequency with which this commission might actually be meeting. We haven't figured that out yet.

Right. That's that's actually not on our bullet points, but if if we're okay with it, we can move right into that.

That's fine.

Okay.

Yeah. I I would like to see this meet every other year and that their recommendations come out before the budget is finalized. Therefore, it can be incorporated into the budget if there is any change. But I don't see any need for it to meet and make any decisions more frequently than biennial.

Councilmember Desmoni.

Those be on election years, or would they be on nonelection years?

I think that is up to us. Yes. Mhmm.

I I I mean, my recommendation would be on budget years.

The big budget years?

Yeah. Big

our we have biennial budgeting.

Mhmm. That

would be

That would be the even The even years. Even number years.

Okay.

Other comments about how often they might meet, how often they might make a recommendation? So it sounds like there's a proposal that they meet every other year on big budget year and early enough that the recommendation is going to be worked into the budget process. Okay? Any other framework on those first three bullet or first two bullet points plus the frequency? Oh, there's more. Council member assignments.

Yeah. And I think the frequency with which they meet should be up to them.

It's okay. Mhmm.

Three or four meetings before they get to a decision that can go into the budget fund, but their time frame is the budget backwards, and they they can figure that out. I don't wanna dictate to them that they only have one meeting to get it right now. Hey. Hey. Hey. That would Mhmm.

But perhaps a deadline.

But a deadline that they need the decision. And I'm not I would it be September?

Oh, that's

Isn't that too close?

I would I would encourage

refer to staff for that particular timing.

I would encourage us to do that much earlier in the spring, actually. But is there we're looking for a recommendation perhaps about that. Let's defer that and and hear if the staff would like to give us one around the timing of deadline of how early in the year you need it on even numbered years to make it feasible to work into the budget.

Yeah. I think our recommendation would be not to put in specific dates.

Okay.

Just state that it would be done before to be included in the budget.

Okay.

And then

that way we can we can have plenty of time to do that.

Great. Thank you very much. Let's go back to there already is a term length for commissioners. State law limits to two terms, but we can determine the length of the terms. Is that what we're asking? Oh, term length. Yes. Thank you. So it could be two, three, or four years. On your proposed framework, if it was two, they would only work on one set of recommendations, and then we would need a new set. So council member Netting.

My proposal is is four years and limited to two terms, and I think that makes sense with the biannual budget budgeting. There would be some background there that they could

figure it out.

Okay. Any any other oh, that's three with enough interest there. Any other proposals? So I heard four year term. Okay. How much how often should the how we determine that? Number four is in every big budget year. And should the salary commission members receive compensation? Compensation? And while I believe that these commission members are eligible, it seems to me it would be the only commission that was eligible for compensation.

Thoughts? Councilmember Bloss.

Yeah. I don't think I should be compensated for this.

Thank you. Councilmember Simots?

I I agree. It's a volunteer position. How we can see the

Okay. I see two other head nods. Wanna make sure you have a chance to weigh in, deputy mayor Oksicker.

Say no on the compensation.

Okay. Thank you. Are those all of the bullet points that we needed? Do we need a quick recap just to make sure we've we've gotten

it? Yes.

Thank you, ma'am.

Okay.

So I have five members, the local residency requirement.

Mhmm.

The term length would be four years, two cycles tied to the biennium budget, and that there wouldn't be necessarily a set date to have the rec or to have their determination done, but it would need to tie into the the biennium budget as a whole. Correct?

Alright. So instead of having to say all of that, there is a suggested motion. Councilmember Netting.

I move to direct excuse me. I move to direct staff to draft an ordinance establishing a salary commission pursuant of pursuant to RCW three five dot two one dot zero one five consistent with the framework discussed and return it to the city council for future consideration.

And second by council member assignments? Second. Thank you. Discussion. Council member Harris.

Thank you. I will just summarize what I said before. This is a colossal waste of time. We already have any number of committees and and our meetings do not go into the late night. They have been remarkably crisp.

And this is exactly the kind of decision that the council should be able to make for itself. We've demonstrated the ability to do that via this spreadsheet y thing. Whether the decisions are great or not is open to discussion, but we are able to make them. And I am sorry whenever a staff that is short handed and so forth has to do work that we lack the will to undertake ourselves. So I thank the staff for doing that stuff, but I will be voting no.

Okay. All those in favor, for the motion, please raise your right hand until I call your name. We'll start with deputy mayor Oksager. Council member assignments, council member Desmoni, council member Netting, council member Bloss, and myself, all opposed? Council member Harris, motion passes six one.

Let's talk about new agenda items for consideration. This is a time for proposing new business items for discussion on a future agenda. Any recommendation will simply need a hand raise from three council members. Do any council members have any new business they would like to propose? Council member Harris.

I would like to put on the agenda discussion of parking in the downtown area. I've received any number of interested comments from local business owners. There's not an agreement on what the solution is, but they seem to feel that it's something that the council should take up.

I wanna clarify. Do you mean amount of parking, pay for parking, or or can you give me a little more specific?

Not really. There's just a lot of concern over parking, and, you know, the people have very different concerns, but they all are concerned about having, spaces and how they're being utilized and, you know, having more flow. So.

Council member Simons.

Yeah. Assuming this is a committee of the whole kind of discussion point, that would seem to be the place to put that in, and I'd support the discussion.

I saw council member does money first.

I I actually will support the discussion. Mhmm. I think there are specific questions that are being asked of me as well. Especially, we did change some of the parking on Main Street

Right. Four

times. And we finally got it sorted out, but there's still some confusion. And there's also questions of why are we enforcing it when we don't have anyone to enforce it. Mhmm. So I do think it's worth a chat and discussion, especially going forward in our strategic planning session if we do plan to grow and expand what are our parking plans. I think I I would like to hear that as well.

Thank you. Three is enough to move on to that agenda item. Other new agenda items for consideration. Okay. Thank you. Let's move on to council member reports. Now it's time for council member reports, which are limited to four minutes, and we'll start with council member Desmone. Happy Valentine's Day. Councilmember Netting.

Nothing at this time, mayor. Thank you.

Councilmember Bloss.

I attended and participated in the chess tournament last weekend at the the Des Moines Theater. It was a nice event. About 30 players showed up from all over the region. I believe it's the first time that Des Moines has an official tournament, officiated by the US Chess Federation. There was a cash prize. So that's it's great to see that in the city. And, if you're interested in playing chess, check out the Des Moines Chess Club on their website or on Instagram. They meet twice a week.

Thank you very much. Council member assignments?

Yep. First thing is go see. Oh, thank you. And just to echo, happy Valentine's Day to all.

Thank you. Deputy mayor Oksager.

Thank you. I'll spare you all a hacking session.

Sounds good. Thank you. I wanted to just and I'm gonna try and do this as briefly as possible. I came out of some major workload projects over most of December and and January. So just within the last two weeks, I attended the Highline Forum, which is put on by the Port Of Seattle.

I believe that our council member Harris was present there as well. I attended an interview with Wesley Holmes and a new program that's called what's happening in Des Moines. Thank you very much for the invitation to come speak to the residents about that. Last night, I was at the North Hill Community Club answering questions primarily around all sorts of issues in the city, but we centered a lot about code enforcement. And I encourage folks to find the online reporting app or reporting page if they're not comfortable calling 911 for their issue around code enforcement.

It might be better to call the nonemergency number or to fill out a report online. And I wanna say thank you to our PD and our chief for getting back to those residents within twenty four hours. I really appreciate that. I went to the PIC meeting that that council member Steinmetz mentioned. And I think it's important to understand that regionally, we are well positioned.

I think that through much of the work that has been done by some of our previous council members, including former mayors Buxton, former mayor Mahoney, to be well heard and appreciated on those regional councils. And so it was more of an orientation to to association of Sound Association of Cities. Sound Cities Association. Thank you very much. But I know that they will be tackling some meaty topics in the next couple of months.

Today, and possibly why I'm so rummy, I did drive to Olympia at 06:00 this morning to attend Association of Washington Cities Mayors Exchange. And there was just some great information about many of the things that cities across the state are dealing with that are very similar and then some things that are not so similar. We heard from a town called Starbuck, Washington. It's a real place, and it has exactly a 147 residents. And so they are looking for one person to build one apartment building, and they're desperately trying to get maybe one big employer to come in and offer some jobs to the young people who live there.

So it gave me a perspective on some of the things that we're facing and also an appreciation for some of the things we're not facing, I would say. Coming up, I know that all of us have received some invitations to attend our both our thirtieth legislative district town hall, which is gonna be Saturday, February 21 at 10:30 in the morning at Federal Way High School, and also the thirty third legislative district town hall, which is going to be hosted here in Des Moines, Sunday, February 22 at 2PM at Highline College. That is a great way to interface with your legislators and to hear about some of the issues that they are debating and shaping in Olympia these days. Trying to speed through this. Next, we we have a bit of a break.

We don't have a council meeting, a regular council meeting until March 12, but we are going to be retreating to a council strategic planning workshop that'll be facilitating. And I've I I'm gonna call it charting our course, but we're gonna be so informed about all of that outreach that the Citizens Advisory Board did for us, hearing more about the formation of the strategic plan. We're gonna be talking about how it the nexus between our mission, vision to go with that as well. And it'll be an opportunity for us to really set some social norming around how we work together because I know as a team that if you boil it down, we are interested in some of the same things to make Des Moines a wonderful place to live for our residents. And that's happening on February.

That was a lot. But, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. We are going to offer our our motion to adjourn to council member Desmone.

Would you like to move? So moved.

Second for council member Nutting. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Thank you very much. We are adjourned.