City Council - Regular Meeting

If you'd like to speak to us, there's a sign-up sheet right over there by Abigail. You certainly don't have to speak, but this enables us to orderly receive public comment. Again, welcome. I'm going to call us to order for July 13th, 2026. First thing we're going to do is that person was a very good segue. We're going to silence our cell phones. Please join me in pledge of allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

Abigail, do we have any agenda additions or corrections?

No, Mayor, I don't think we do.

Now is the time for business from the audience. No person shall be disorderly, abusive, or disruptive during this time. There should be no audience demonstrations such as applause, cheering, displays, or signs. Such conduct may be cause for immediate termination of business from the audience by the mayor. No person shall address council without first being recognized by the mayor. Please state your full name for the record when it is your turn. So I'm not like PhD organizational manager. We have a number of folks. We're going to go through the list. First, we have Brad Perrin followed by Eric Stasek. And Jen, you've got the three minute going. Thank you.

Oh, there we go.

You're on. There you go.

I just want to thank Paul and Abigail for letting me be part of the agenda for next week. We have so many businesses in my buildings that want to speak. I thought I would split them up over this week and next or the next meeting. So I'm going to read half and then Eric's going to read half and then my other businesses are going to stay. My name is Bradford Perrone. I am the owner of the two largest, most historic buildings in the core of downtown Hood River. Together, these historic structures house more than 24 local businesses, the very heartbeat of our downtown economy. I'm here tonight on their behalf and on the behalf of the thousands of customers they serve. Right now, our historic core is facing a critical logistic crisis. The number one complaint of our customers, tenants, and delivery drivers is they cannot find parking. Instead, they are forced to continually circle the blocks, or worse, double park directly in the traffic lanes to drop off supplies, pick up orders, or make quick retail stops. This not only causes a dangerous situation for the ones double parking, but the heavy pedestrian traffic at the crosswalks on Oak Street. Drivers who dart around the double parked cars have to deal with obstructed sight lines, views of other cars and pedestrians. This is no longer A parking inconvenience has become a serious public safety hazard and a major traffic bottleneck. Furthermore, this crisis threatens the preservation of our downtown area. Our historic buildings are constructed more than a century ago, long before modern logistics existed. But by refusing to adapt our curb management to the 21st century, we are putting immense strain on our historic infrastructure. Businesses will be forced to find space elsewhere, causing the upper floors of the historic buildings to go dark. Protecting this historic fabric of downtown requires managing how the traffic interacts with it. And then he's going to finish the other half, so I didn't go over my three minutes.

My name is Eric Stasek, former owner of Remedy Cafe. Our businesses are not asking for a massive overhaul or expensive parking garages. We are asking for a simple, low-cost, common sense solution. The implementation of one dedicated 10-minute curbside loading zone. Short-term spaces encourage rapid turnover. They allow a delivery truck to unload safely or a local resident to quickly grab a pre-ordered item and then immediately vacate the space for the next customer. This keeps traffic moving, eliminates dangerous double parking, and directly boosts our local economy. Therefore, we are formally requesting that the City Council direct staff to convert just one strategic space into a 10-minute zone. The city already allows 10-minute zones in its downtown core, and even two right next to each other on the same corner of 2nd and Oak. This corner at 3rd Street and Cascade has far less need for two 10-minute zones next to each other, so eliminating one and relocating it to the 3rd Street block, which would be 3rd Street and Cascade, seems like a reasonable solution. It also provides the city with an additional paid spot on Oak Street, which will bring in far more parking revenue for the city. I am hoping you will support the request, which protects our safety, supports our local businesses, and preserves our historic downtown. Thank you.

Thank you. Is TNC a parking thing? Uber. Okay, so we're going to, I'm going to do some managing here. Next, we're going to go Marit on parking, and then Chanel Coates, are you on parking? No. Okay. Marit on parking, and then we're coming back to Jeanette.

Hello. Good evening. My name is Marit Knapp. I run a business on 3rd Street off of Oak. And I just wanted to quickly relay my experience. Most of us tenants have parking spots for the day-to-day use in the Columbia Street parking lot, which is several blocks away. But it is quite inconvenient when we're trying to load. I have a lot of different large sample items. And I know other business owners have lots of big boxes and different things that they're trying to get into their buildings. And right now the parking right out front of our businesses is usually occupied. And so there's really not a good way during standard business hours to get things in and out quickly. I've also observed a lot of delivery trucks looping our block, trying to find a safe spot to park. So I think this could be a nice solution for our customers and us business owners. just making delivery safer and better for everyone. Thank you.

Thank you, Mark. And next, Jeff Strong.

Hey, Jeff Strong. I am also in Brad Perrin's building and have been there for a while, 20 plus years, and have seen a lot of the changes. I hadn't even thought of a 10-minute space, but when Brad mentioned it, I thought, well, that's one of the easy solutions. Obviously, we know parking is an issue in our town, and it's grown as our town has gotten more and more popular. But even as I was walking down the hill here, I noticed, oh, there's a 10 minute parking spot. That's really nice for those people in there. And I would echo what Merit said is, you know, there is a lot of just people trying to find a spot to be able to jump in, do the thing. Remedy, I know that that's one of the key things is just finding a spot to park, to jump in, grab your thing and leave. I didn't realize how many spots there were inside the building of people that just, you know, you just need to drop off your person. And so they can do their thing downtown and maybe you come and pick them up. But the 10 minute parking spot was like, oh, this is such an easy solution to make that building even more user friendly. So thank you.

Thank you for coming. Next, we'll have Jeanette Skarda and then Chanel.

Hi, my name is Jeanette Skarda. I drive a taxi from Eddie Green. I've been here since 1989. I first want to address something that was brought up at the last meeting when you were told about a passenger who claims he was charged $50 for a two and a half mile ride. Outrageous. I drove the gentleman. Actually, it was a 15 mile round trip and like Uber, we charged for our time, which was 45 minutes for $50. The man knew the price, paid the price, said nothing to me about the price. He was disappointed that this man who was here with his wife on a six-day cruise along the Columbia River, for which he paid $20,000, he was very upset with me that I didn't give him a $5 senior citizen discount. And I think that's why he contacted you. But anyhow. um we give discounts when we need it we drive people from the warming shelter at no charge residents of the safe house wherever they need to go at reduced or more often no charge at all when a bartender needs help with a drunk we drive them home usually don't get paid for it but we get them off the streets because that's important to us one of you said at one point that you thought bringing an uber would help reduce the duis well According to the County Health Department in 2024 when Ubers were coming out of the woodwork, there were 208. Last year with no Ubers, there were 167. That's a 20% drop with just us taxis doing what we do. You've said we've made it clear that we don't want Uber. Actually, what we've said is we are opposed to the huge numbers like the 50 or 60 that was brought up at the last meeting. Uber is telling you themselves, they're telling you, they see large numbers of drivers doing a few rides. So what that is, is drivers passing through the gorge, log onto the app, maybe pick up a ride or two before they continue back out of town. Maybe what explains, this might explain in 2024, sir, Mayor Blackburn, when you said you repeatedly tried to get an Uber and couldn't and wanted to see one on every corner. Maybe you couldn't get one because there didn't just so happen to be an Uber passing through town who was also on the app. But you did have four local taxi companies with seven Hood River residents ready to drive. Did you contact any of us? Because I really bet you could have gotten one. The trend nationwide seems to be politicians are finally listening to and supporting their constituents instead of giving into the demands of these big money bullies. And I really hope you follow suit. We'd love it if you could limit the number of Ubers. Maybe help us get the word out that there is a local option. Maybe put more effort into supporting your own townspeople. than you are in championing this $151 billion multinational Uber corporation, which has told you it's not worth another $200 a year for them to be active in our town. It's not worth 200 bucks for them. Lastly, I hope none of you have those support local bumper stickers on your car, because if you can't actually support local, maybe get one that says, I support the $151 billion Uber corporation that is actively pushing my local townspeople out of business. And if you can't support local, then you need to just stay quiet and shame on each one of you who cannot do it. Thank you.

Chanel. That was new. Marta Verduzka.

Good afternoon. My name is Marta Ortega-Verdusco. I'm the Hood River Latino Networks Director for the Immigrant Help Center here in Hood River. And I stand before you today to address the critical issue that strikes in the heart of our community. The fear and disruption caused when immigration officials invade our neighborhoods. These actions create an atmosphere of terror, leaving families shattered and vulnerable. Imagine a hardworking family coming home from grocery shopping and they get attacked or stormed by immigration officials, take the father, leave the mom, and now have their children alone and mom has to figure it out all by herself. In an instant, her world is turned upside down. Children are left without their primary caregiver and families are torn apart, facing an uncertain future. This is not just a distant concern. This is happening here in Hood River. I want to emphasize that many cities across the state have already recognized the need for such support. They've established emergency funds to assist families in crisis, ensuring that their communities can weather these storms together. Hood River can and should follow this example. This is why I'm here, to urgently advocate for the establishment of an emergency fund specifically designated to support families in these crises. This fund will provide immediate relief to those who find themselves without a breadwinner, ensuring they have access to essentials like food, shelter, and legal assistance. By investing in this fund, we are not just offering financial support. We are affirming our commitment to human dignity and solidarity and justice for all. We are sending a clear message. Hood River stands with its most vulnerable residents. We will not follow fear to dictate our community's future. The need for this fund is pressing. We must prepare to support our community members when they face these unexpected and often devastated crisis. I urge each of you to reflect on the faces behind these stories. the children who are left without both parents, the families who are thrust into survival mode, and the community that must rally together in times of need. By approving this fund, you are taking a stand against fear and division, affirming that our city is a place of refugee for all. In closing, let us unite as a council and as a community to ensure that no family is left behind during emergencies. Together we can transform fear into hope and uncertainty into resilience. Thank you for your attention and your commitment to this vital initiative. Thank you.

Thank you, Marta. Tina Castaneres.

My name is Tina Castaneres. I want to first and foremost thank the city and the council and administrators for the excellent circular that got in everybody's mailbox. about sanctuary status, both languages and about know your rights. So thank you for doing that. I think it was a really great step. Secondly, I would like to echo what Martha just presented. I hadn't seen her comments before, but I hope an emergency fund can be set up by the council to do mutual aid and emergency work for families that are impacted by immigration enforcement. And lastly, I just want to encourage, though it's not on your agenda today, all the collaboration you can do around housing with the county. Housing to me is an emergency and all of these things are connected. When I think about immigrants, I think about how many of our immigrant population here and children of immigrants came here to do agricultural work. Many of the elders now are being aged out of their farm labor provided housing. There isn't affordable or low income housing for them in retirement. and many others. And I think in an era when we're going to see many cutbacks in staffing of non-governmental organizations, nonprofits, and elsewhere, there will be more and more people losing their public benefits who will be hard-pressed to continue to afford their housing. So everything progressively that can be done by city and in collaboration with county around housing will help immigrants, will help all of us as a community. Thanks for listening.

Thank you, Tina. Jen Hackett and then Amber.

Good evening. I'm just here to give you a little information about something some community members have been doing that hopefully we can partner with the city to do it more because right now it is just a number of volunteers and a volunteer coordinator who is really only paid a couple of hours a week. A number of months ago, we got together in the face of increased ice activity when people were scared to go out and get groceries or go to medical appointments. And at that time, the reaction was pretty just reactive if people needed groceries delivered or rides to medical appointments, people would kind of gather at the spur of the moment. And we decided to make that a little more official. And so a number of us have been working for a number of months to get kind of an official, a more organized thing. So now we have a list of volunteers who are ready and willing and able to deliver groceries, take people to medical appointments, take people to court appointments if they want. And we have a number that has been distributed to all of the community health organizations, to the medical providers, to Fish and Nextdoor, that people can call and reach our volunteer coordinator, who's Melissa Trejo, if they need such assistance. We are also working on a fund for people if they need help with groceries or, you know, gas or transportation. So, so far it's fairly small, but with the increasing ICE activity, we expect the demand to grow, and we would be more than happy to have your support and your partnership in that. Currently, we are being funded by Gorge Ecumenical Ministries, a number of the faith organizations, and then just random donations from people who want to help. We have fairly regular trainings for volunteers. So if anybody is interested, you can either contact Melissa or me or anybody. So just wanted to let you know all about that. And if you have questions at any time, let me know.

Thank you. Thank you, Jen. Amber.

Hi. My name is Amber Orion, and I actually wanted to comment on two quick things. One is at the beginning of this meeting, I think I might have missed the landing acknowledgement. I'm not sure if we did that or if I got distracted, but I don't think I remember hearing it.

We did not do that this evening.

Okay. I'd seen it on the agenda, and I wanted to comment on that as more of a I wanted to put a seed in the minds of the folks in the community, as well as on the council, doing a land acknowledgement followed by the Pledge of Allegiance feels very conflicting to me. And I really just want to name that it feels like saying a land acknowledgement, or even missing a land acknowledgement when it's on the agenda and something that should be done at the beginning of every conversation, and then following it with the Pledge of Allegiance, I feel like really does kind of it's kind of in the face of the point of the land acknowledgement. And so I'd love to ask for us to consider different ways to honor one another and the council going forward. And the second thing I wanted to do was echo Jen and Tina and Martha about the things that were said today about having funds approved to support the community and doing the work that is being done. There is an incredible community effort happening and we are watching the same things that are playing around the country nationally. They always come here. Every single thing that we have seen elsewhere comes here. And so I really just want to say, as we consider approving funds, or you all consider approving funds as a council for this, I want us to continue to ask the question, how can we show up every day being a sanctuary city in action in ways like having people kidnapped in our own front yard and their windows broken for no reason? That's a lot of violence happening in our communities that's going unchecked. Traffic is being stopped. Lots of things are happening where they're blocking people in and things are escalating. So I want to ask for us to continue to think about what things we can do proactively in order to protect each other in our community as these terrorists come into our community and create this harm. Thank you.

I think we have someone online, Anna Wyatt. Anna, are you with us? And we don't hear you yet. We would love to hear from you, Anna. In the meantime, Jeff Sacre, if you want to come. Followed by Heidi, if we don't get Anna.

After all these topics, I'm kind of afraid to bring it back to the 10-minute spot.

And I thought it was taller than that, actually.

Don't be afraid. I'm director's mortgage. I've been on the corner of Third and Cascade for 20 years now. Our windows look out on that corner, and we've seen more people almost die than... we can count. The 10 minute spot sounds like a great idea to us. People park right there at the end of that, behind the one parking spot we do have right there. They park behind that, which goes into the crosswalk. They park in front of the other car parking spot on the other side. They circle. They speed through that, big trucks are parked in that. I mean, I've been hit by a big truck in that crosswalk. It's a terrible spot. It's gotta be one of the 10 most dangerous corners in the city. We'd love to have a 10-minute spot. I think it would alleviate some of that. It's not gonna fix any of the big problems, but it would certainly be a start. In addition, parking sucks in this town, okay? I consider every other year moving out of downtown because of parking. Sorry, Brad. It's, we know it's kind of the thing we have to deal with, but it would sure be nice to be able to have a client stop, drop out something, run in, drop it in. Our clients hate to come to our office. That wasn't the case 10, 12 years ago. So it's changed dramatically over time. So anything, if you could at least give it some thought, that'd be much appreciated. Thank you. Heidi Miller.

My name is Heidi Miller and I work for Renew Progressive Medicine in Brad's building. And again, the 10 minute parking would be huge for us as well for the fact that we have multiple patients coming just to pick up prescriptions, test kits, multiple items like that from us. And that way they don't have to park two, three, four blocks away or come back another day when they're already down here or popping in or whatever from south of town and whatever. So it would be very beneficial for us as well.

Thank you. Anna, do we have you?

Hi there, can you hear me?

I hear you, great.

Oh, great, okay, hi. Hi, this is Anna Wyatt. I have a business called Wyatt Moon Mercantile in Brad's building as well, and so I'm here in support of the 10-minute parking zone. We have major, major double parking issues, and we do have a pickup service that when people order online, they can just run in and pick up from us. which would be amazing to have that 10 minute zone at the end of the street. But also for me personally, because I have two stores, so I transport a lot of merchandise back and forth. And so when I have to park, you know, many blocks away and hauling a carload of merchandise over there takes quite amount of work. And then I don't feel comfortable double parking because it really blocks up the traffic and And so I always park, you know, farther away so that we have those extra spaces for customers. And we definitely have, I don't know if Remedy Juice Bar jumped on or not, but they're next door and they have, you know, people coming and grabbing juices. So it'd be super convenient for, you know, everyone to have that space. So we have that safety issue of not blocking the street, especially during the summertime. I've seen a lot of... like near close calls of people hitting each other because of the double parking issue. So I'm just here in support of that.

Thank you, Anna. And then finally, Jeff Falkenberg.

So I'm Jeff Alkenberg, and I'm new to Hood River, been here for a few months, and I'm the new owner of Remedy. I've been operating it for just shy of two weeks now. And I can say that the number one problem that we face is parking. Coming into being a new shop owner, there's lots of ins and outs, but fresh deliveries of produce is the main thing that keeps my company going. And parking is definitely an issue, and a 10-minute parking would help with that. And I'd also just like to voice... support for what I'm hearing here about a public-private partnership with dealing with immigration enforcement.

Thank you all for coming. The way we do it is we take public comment, but these items are not all on the agenda tonight. So actually, immigration is on the agenda tonight later. I take no offense if you don't stay. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to give us your input. Next, we have a presentation by Hood River Adopt-A-Dog.

Good evening. Again, my name is Lorraine Lyons. For those of you who don't remember, I'm here tonight to present to you on behalf of the board of directors for Hood River Adopt-A-Dog. If you give me just a moment, and we'll share this presentation, I think.

Awesome.

Oh, thanks for moving me, Jan. I don't want to look at you while I do. All right. Thank you so much for giving us time on the agenda, especially with everything that is happening in our community that is so important. Certainly immigration is close to the ball of our hearts. So we're here tonight to talk about our ask, which is to request funding from the city of Hood River to help us to provide the essential animal sheltering that we work so hard to provide for our community. But before we get too heavy, the board wanted to share some of our success stories and some of our happy faces. This second slide is probably our biggest story of last year, you may be familiar with pops or Willie or blind Willie who is now famous on Instagram for Willie came to us severely injured. and with severe eye problems, and it didn't look good. We didn't think he would make it. As a result of some amazing people in Hood River who fostered him and nursed him, and helped us. We found an adoptive family who was able to take him to a canine ophthalmologist, and he actually had his eyes removed. So Astro, who is up behind him, the black and white one, is actually Willie's seeing eye dog. They go out on hikes and in the snow attached to each other and Pops just follows them along. So that was a pretty cool big story for us. We work in a business that is really hard and sad and dogs don't always come to us in the best condition. So we wanted to share a positive story with you before we kind of got into the meat of things today. And then Flynn was a long hauler. He was with us for a long, long time. And he ended up in a local home with a family and two wonderful sisters. Our why is because we think every dog deserves a second chance. And I think it's clear that our community expects it as well. We certainly see it every day with the phone calls and the donations, whether it's a dog bed or dog food for the community or at our events that we have a community that is very supportive of the services that we provide at the shelter. As I mentioned before, in public comment over and over this safety net that we provide for the county, the entire county of Hood River is under incredible financial strain. It's just tough to get a buck these days as everybody in front of you stands wanting money. We have had grants have decreased incredibly because there's just so much needed for human life today. So there's not as much available for us for dogs as there used to be. And people are just having a harder time being able to make donations because it's just less affordable to survive as we're all aware. We have operated for more than 10 years. I think we have proven that we are stewards of the community, that we work really hard to provide the services. The county operates no shelter. We, the 501c3, operate the shelter. And that is done all really with private funds. We'll talk about Hukari here in a moment. In 2025 last year, we took in about 115 dogs. Every single dog went home or found one. We are a no kill shelter. There is no euthanasia. And as I mentioned, we provide the services to the entire county. And yes, the city is definitely part of the county. as we've mentioned before, over 89% of our revenue is raised independently. So I'm joined here tonight by many of our board of directors who I will tell you all work full-time jobs, all have responsibilities and give hours and hours and hours to the community and to Hood River Adopt-A-Dog, not to mention our volunteers who come out some every day to walk dogs or do laundry or Scoop poop. I mean, whatever it takes to help us. But it's just not sustainable to keep coming to the community for the amount of money that we've been asking for. 83% of the funds that we raise go directly to frontline animal care. So we run a really, really lean ship. At Hood River Adopt-A-Dog, 49% of our funds come from just people in the community that are seeing us on Facebook or coming to our events, doing things like that. 21% is from fundraising. I don't know if anybody here on the council has ever put together a fundraiser. What is an undertaking? And it takes a lot of people. And we do it every day, all year long. I mean, this board does the work. So 21% of our funding comes from those people who give their time. We have a little bit of corporate giving. The government contracts is a little bit misleading. That's actually Hukari Fund grants. So they're not technically government contracts. And then 59% of our operational budget is spent on personnel. We can stretch some labor here, which I will show you in just a moment. I know that you all know the mission of Hood River, but I'm not sure that everybody in the audience knew the city of Hood River's mission. So I asked the board to put it in because I think it's really amazing. It's short, it's succinct, and I think it's a great mission to provide essential municipal services at the lowest possible cost to continually enhance the community's quality of life. And we think that we align perfectly with that message, with how hard we work. and what we offer to our community. So we appreciate that mission for sure. Obviously, we provide vital and safety net for animal control services in our community. As I just showed you, we run lean and mean and have become masters of requesting help from our community, and we get a lot of it. And if we have some sustainable funding that we can count on year over year, then we can continue operating. So every day at Hood River Adopt-A-Dog is you walk in at seven o'clock, you flip on the lights and you start cleaning. And you let dogs out and you feed them and you clean their bunks and you clean the bunkhouse. And then volunteers are ringing the bell and you're trying to get dogs out for walking. And our staff, we have two staff members here today, Isabel and Liz, who couldn't do it without them. They're amazing. They just keep it going. The phone rings nonstop. People stop by nonstop. It's just, it's an all day constant go. We train our volunteer walkers and we've extended our volunteer tasks to doing more duties inside of the shelter so that we could lean out our payroll even more. Every day we're screening fosters and adopters from all over the country. People, you know, inquire about our dogs from all over the place. We order, we manage all of the inventory for the county. And last year we started a can and bottle recycling program, which you may or may not have heard. Well, I know Abigail's heard of it, but she helps us. It's called Cans for Canines. So we collect cans from all over the community and we haul them into Clackamas to the bottling center and we raise money that way. And that has been a big help to us. We deal with email and phone all day long, voicemails. Tara from our board is here. She handles our social media, which has been huge and so helpful, which helps us get dogs to foster very quickly. We are open every single day, 365. And we are on call 24 hours a day because we have living, breathing canines that eat us. And we believe that we are an essential safety net. Shelter responsibilities versus animal control responsibilities. I just wanted to elaborate on that. um i think based on my conversations um in the past that animal control has a very vital part in the county for all of the things that they do but we're here to talk about what happens in the shelter and um And how and the services that we provide in the shelter. Because I think animal control is often thought of as, oh, a dog gets picked up. Well, then what happens after the dog gets picked up? There's a whole lot that goes on. So we accommodate the release. We provide foster homes. We transport dogs to all their appointments. We make appointments for our dogs. We treat their dogs. We examine the dogs when they come in. We microchip them. We arrange all their spay and neuters. We contact owners. Sometimes we get repeat offenders. We know who they are. We participate in adjudication and court appearance if necessary. And we always work toward, of course, the final outcome of adoption or reunification. So today we are asking the city of Hood River to invest in Hood River Adopt-A-Dog. We are your support to help ensure that every lost, abandoned, or vulnerable dog receives safe shelter, necessary medical care, and a path home whenever possible, and a second chance to adopt them. And with that, I'll leave you with some happy photos. That's Atlas. He was another long hauler. We found a marathoner who loved dog hair. Yes! That was a big win for us. And I think together we can continue providing the services. Thanks so much for your time.

Thank you. Shall we discuss it at this time? What's the plan, Abigail?

Thank you, Mayor. Hood River Adopt-A-Dog is not on your agenda as a council item. The animal control contract is on, which has a tangential relationship to this, if you wanted to discuss that. But Hood River Adopt-A-Dog was a presentation only for tonight.

Go ahead, Thomas.

Lorraine, can you maybe stay up here because I do have two questions for you. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for the information. It was really valuable. I actually didn't know that Hood River Dog-to-Dog didn't collect any of the fees. I thought that was, sorry, I said that wrong. The county does. I thought Hood River Adopt-A-Dog did. So you've attended a couple meetings and you've mentioned that Hood River Adopt-A-Dog is in a financial strain. So can you help us understand what is the actual funding gap? How much money is it that Hood River Adopt-A-Dog is asking the city of Hood River for?

We're asking for $50,000. $50,000. Okay.

Okay. And the $50,000 is on top of the $60,000 that the city is already giving twice a year, but that doesn't include any of our officers' time. So you're already receiving about $60,000 from the city.

We receive no money from the city.

Thank you for the question, Councillor. I believe you're referring to the contract that the city has with the county for animal control. That is, it's about $64,000 in a two-year period. So it's about $32,000. At this time, it's about $32,000. And that goes to the county.

That does not have a relationship with- Thank you. So the $50,000, what would be the contingency plan if the city was not able to do so? Is it a $50,000 on a yearly basis, every two years? Yes. How often would Hood River Adopt-A-Dog expect the city to help them with $50,000?

Well, it would be wonderful if it was annually. And I just want to clarify, Gladys, that the money that the city pays the county, Hood River Adopt-A-Dog does not get one penny of that. Any of it. Okay.

Yeah.

We are the only animal shelter that I am aware of nationally that pays for a city or county shelter operation. It's really backwards. It's unheard of.

I really appreciate the work that is being done. And I also appreciate you clarifying the grants piece because that was one of the other questions that I had is there are many national foundations that are really specific to animals and wondering if there has been any sort of connecting with those larger national funders.

One of our board members is a grant writer. I'll just tell you, there's so much competition for them. I mean, we reached out for a grant from Tito's Vodka recently because they love dogs. And I think we might get it. I mean, we are digging as hard as we can at every grant possible.

OK, thank you.

You're welcome.

Thank you for being here, Lorraine. If you run short on funding, it sounds like the shelter were closed. Would your services close? Would you move to a different model at that point? So in terms of, you know, what you do, I know there's a lot of fostering that happens, you know, just to kind of give the council kind of idea, you know, I know you have stories where there's dogs that are there for a long time, but I think your model is to kind of move them out and to volunteers and whatnot. So, you know, how much of your funding actually goes to, like, keeping the shelter open? How much is kind of distributing the dogs out to foster care? And, you know, what kind of models have you considered around that?

It's a moving target every day. No days. No day is the same. There is a minimum of three crisis a day in the animal dog business. Dogs have to be sheltered somewhere. Um, dogs have to be quarantined for a period of time until they're vaccinated and it's safe to bring them to other areas, even to go outside at the shelter. I mean, dogs are quarantined. Um, so there has to be a place for quarantine. So the county has, they need, they need, they have a shelter. The Hukaris provided a shelter. The county has a building. They need staff to deal with, um, long haulers, dogs that can't be around, other dogs, children, chickens, whatever it might be. So there's always going to be a need for shelter services. Our desire is to move as many dogs into foster as quickly as possible. But there's a lot of dogs that can't be. I mean, we've had a long hauler, Butch, who's now living in Stevenson with a dog trainer because he's just been in the shelter so long and he's just He just has issues, which she's been doing a great job with. But they'll always be in need for a shelter. I mean, that's just for the safety of the community. There will have to be a place to quarantine dogs and house long haulers.

And and in terms of. You know, similar to Council Rivera's questioning around, you know, the $50,000 funding, et cetera. You know, what's the current financial status? You know, how long are you able to operate? You know, what's the status of the Hukari Fund? And, you know, when are you running out of funding? I know it's sort of on a continual basis, but what's the status quo currently? And where do you see the trajectory going if you're not receiving any funding from the city or the county?

Talk about what I dream about every night, Doug. Yeah. I mean, we just keep getting more and more creative with solving our financial problems. The Hukari Fund will exhaust next year. I'm not quite sure when next year, but I think close to after our half a payment next year. And Sheriff English might be able to elaborate more on that. I don't have the exact date. there's no way to know what will happen because it really depends on fundraising efforts. You know, it's always a moving target. What would be helpful to our community is if we could get some funding, not just from the city of Hood River, but other entities that we could bring dogs from. I mean, if it was amenable to the county, we could take white salmon dogs and charge for it. But that hasn't it hasn't been amenable. And we also were under the impression that we couldn't do that. But since we've had some legal counsel, there's discussion to have. I mean, we could make this a very stable organization. And I received an email from the county today to start to talk about renegotiating our contract with the county too. So, I mean, I think collaboratively between the city and the county, we could actually probably get a reserve going. The goal would be to be able to have enough money to invest that we would form an endowment for the county. and for the county shelter. That was the original goal and mission of Hood River Adopt-A-Dog, was not to be every year, like, what's the next, how are we going to do it, right? And we thought that the Hukari Fund was an endowment. It's not an endowment. It's gone.

So it's safe to say that 15% bucket government contracts kind of is not around next year.

No, I mean, the Hukari Fund is done. We've been told by the county there is no, we have not been putting the budget beyond the Hukari Fund.

Thank you.

From where you said this question may be a little premature, but are you going to make an ask of the county similar to what you've asked of us?

Oh, we've already done that. The answer was no.

Yeah, that's clarifying. Thanks.

I think that as Abigail mentioned, this is tangential to a issue that we'll be discussing later. And so I really appreciate your time and being here. But I'd like to have some additional information before we like discuss this as the council if that's an option.

Any other questions, Amanda?

Yeah, just kind of along those lines. I super appreciate you being here and sharing all this. But I feel like right now more of my questions lie with the county and the, you know, control aspect of it. And so I don't have any further questions for you. Thank you.

Appreciate you all taking the time. Thank you. The dogs appreciate you.

Next, we have a public hearing on TNCs. Is that right, Abigail?

Yes, that's correct.

Great. I have a script and I will read it. I call to order a public hearing relating to Resolution 2026-16, a resolution revising the TNC Transportation Network Company corporate license and driver fees for the operating calendar year ending December 31, 2026. Let me begin with the description of tonight's hearing. First, staff will provide an overview of the updated TNC fee schedule. Then we will take public testimony. And finally, we will close the hearing, deliberate and render a decision on the proposed resolution. Final adoption may occur in the regular portion of tonight's meeting. That is tonight's procedural introduction. If anyone has any questions about the process as we go forward, please feel free to raise your hand and ask them during the public testimony portion of the hearing. A quorum of the council is present. Do any councillors have any conflicts of interest to disclose in this matter? Seeing none, let's hear from staff, please.

Great. So this resolution in front of you is a follow-up from the June 22nd meeting at which the TNC and the current TNC arrangements were discussed. Originally established in Resolution 2025-25 were the TNC fees. This resolution in front of you, 2026-16, looks to amend and revise those existing fees. Staff recommendation. based on the discussion from last City Council, was to revise the TNC license fees to an annual company fee of $100, revise the TNC driver permits to an annual driver fee of $50, and adopt the definition of a Hood River driver as a driver that conducts a majority of their trips originating in the City of Hood River and takes more than 10 trips per year originating in the City of Hood River. And finally, Maximum fees, combination of the license plus driver fees for any individual company would be a maximum of $800. Just as a reminder, annual fees for TNCs and for taxis run on a calendar year. So this proposed fee structure would be effective immediately and valid for operating licenses when expiration at the end of this calendar year on December 31st, 2026. Finally, the proposed ordinance makes no changes to the tax cap annual license or driver fees. Thank you.

Thank you, Chris. Do any counselors have questions of staff? Again, has anyone signed up to speak on this public hearing?

No, Your Honor.

Is there anyone in the audience who would like to testify on this matter? I will now close the public hearing and open counsel deliberation. I know that we've been working on this topic for a long time. We've come to the place where we sort of actually have a question to answer. If we are ready to decide, would anyone like to say anything or make a motion? Gladys.

I'd like to make a comment, and then if my peers don't have any other comments or questions, I'd be happy to make a motion. Earlier today, there was a comment by a community member, another driver, that talked about the shame that we're doing to bring a transportation network to this community. And I understand the reasoning behind that comment, but I also think it's really important for folks to understand that this is something that the council has been working on for years. This is something that the council has collaborated with every current transportation network that we have or local taxi company. We tried really hard to look for local solutions to this problem. And the data continued to tell us that there wasn't enough capacity with what we currently have right now. When you have a wedding that has 100 plus people that are coming, that capacity is not able to be filled by our current network that we have in place. So I just want to exhaust that this council has tried many different solutions for a number of years and has been incredible in collaborating through those partnerships with our local taxi companies i know that many has been here throughout this process as well as many other organizations so this is something that council has been working on for years and it really does it is to ensure that we do have a safe community overall so i i hear where your comment is coming from but i also don't think it's fair to to make that statement when, again, the council has tried really hard to look for local solutions and hasn't been able to. So I just wanted to make that comment. If there are no other questions or comments from any of my peers, I'd be also happy to make a motion.

I just wanted some clarification, maybe this was back in the do we have questions of staff, but. I am not an expert in how tnc operate we we've incorporated a definition of a hood river driver as somebody who makes 50% or more of their their like, so this is we're talking about. A CNC driver that the secrets of their work in. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Good river that those are the ones that would actually be subject to these fees and that the CAP for this these large tnc providers would be at $800 per year. HAB-Masyn Moyer- That can you know it sounds like anybody that drives through that is also a tnc provider, but maybe coming from a different location where they're based out of can do the work, while they're here right, so we have no way of of. HAB-Masyn Moyer- They we know that they've been vetted by their tnc that is employing them, but we have no way of really capturing any. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Statistics or anything on how like if they don't have if they have more than less than 50% of their rides in hood river we don't we don't really have any way of accounting for that as competition. for our local companies, is that correct?

So the ordinance, in addition to the licensing fees, I'm sorry, in addition to the ability to charge a licensing fee and includes all the insurance requirements, the background check requirements, whatnot, there is the ability for the city to audit. So it is self-reported from any of the TMCs, whether it be Uber or Lyft. If they're operating in the city, then we can request what drivers were in the city, how many trips they've taken, sort of all that information. Our ability to charge the fee on those drivers is limited to the definition that's set forth in the resolution.

So I feel like this is kind of a discussion thing for us council is what we're weighing here is the opportunity to have increased services within our community for the benefit of a safer community against you know, competition for our local businesses, which is, you know, we should try to support our local businesses. I think based on the work that's been done to date and what our conversations have been in the past, we think that providing the safety is more of a priority than ensuring that, you know, I think we're trying to do it in a manner that local businesses have equal footing as well. I guess what I'm wondering is if we adopt this resolution today, then track these, and have an understanding of how much this is impacting our local businesses and providing additional safety for our residents, if we need to adjust this down the road, we have that option by revisiting this ordinance or passing a new ordinance, is that, that's correct, right? How do we feel about that generally?

Thank you. As you mentioned, or maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, but this is a pilot project. We know that DUIs continue to happen and that We currently do not have the capacity with the drivers that we have now to be able to fill that need. So this is a pilot to see if this actually makes an impact. And we also know that the county is willing and able to adopt this as well. So it's not just going to be within the city. It's also going to be within the county and that we can absolutely make a suggestion of staff that they bring this back with six months or a year from now so that we can see some of these metrics that have been measured between implementation up until about a year from now.

I would also say that we collected a lot of information or tried to collect a lot of information for the demand and make data-driven decisions as we've gone throughout this entire process, that the data is not sufficient enough to say, One way or the other, do we have rides that are sufficient or not? When you speak to businesses in the community, which I've been speaking to many over the years that we've been discussing this with constituents, the perception is there's not enough available. And the perception also is, I think from a lot of people that I've spoken to, is that they will choose to use a local provider versus using Lyft or Uber if they're able to do that. I know we got testimony from Jason who operates a van in town here that he's confident that with the existence of TNCs that the service he provides and the people he speaks to and the kind of service that he provides, he's not concerned about losing any business because of that. Right. So I'm very sympathetic to the idea that, you know, bringing a different option in here that's of a corporate nature is is a difficult decision, but I think it's something we've grappled with over the last couple of years Since we don't have a lot of data that says one way or the other, I'm not trying to even bring DUIs into the discussion here. I think there's a lot of reasons why DUIs have decreased. I think there's a lot of reasons why they've increased in other years that have nothing to do with this. I think there is a correlation, but it's not the only correlation. Consistently, all the feedback I've received from the community is they don't feel there's enough ride, drunk or not, right? So the businesses that I've spoke to don't feel that there's enough of a need and so i feel like we've had those discussions in the past and that's that's the data that we have to go off of amanda

I'm kind of on the same lines with Anna. Like I definitely think this is something the town needs and I want to like at least try it and see see what happens. I did have a little bit of conversation with Maddie about around the fact like maybe there's certain things we could do to ensure that more drivers are local and not just coming here from portland to or you know like whatever first surrounding areas um i don't know maybe abigail has a better sense of like whether that's something you can restrict as a municipality i don't know um for the time being i'm okay with like let's do this today but again collect the data analyze it in six months or a year and see if we need to shift things and if we, in which ways we can shift things if we need to. So it's kind of where I'm at.

Business disruption is super painful and unpleasant. I used to run a newspaper delivery business and a lot of my customers don't read the newspaper on paper anymore. It's just things move ahead and the disruptions are very painful.

Ben. Yeah, it's also my hope that it's predominantly local drivers that are doing this. One of the things we haven't really talked about that is also kind of in the back of my mind is that this is maybe a way for people to earn a little bit of extra money in a town where housing is getting more and more expensive and a lot of things are getting more and more expensive. and it also i would say you know dovetails into our conversation about parking you know maybe with more people willing to or having the ability to have ride shares and being able to you know not have to drive into town necessarily perhaps that alleviates it maybe it doesn't but um you know it's something another ancillary benefit from this um yeah i mean i prefer to take Local taxis have taken local taxis in the past, but I hear it from a lot of people, too, that there's just not enough options.

We have a very long agenda. I feel like we're ready to vote, but Gladys, go ahead.

Yeah, last comment. Thank you. Thank you, Ben. I was going to mention that as well. And in the past, we did work with CAT to make sure that there were flyers with qr codes that had several different options so as we all think about how do we move this along and ensure that folks pick local options first i mean we can list them all out and then of course at the very bottom it's uh it's uber um i move that the city council adopt resolution 2026-16 revising the tnc annual license fee for the 2026 calendar year moved by rivera i'll second second by stepina discussion

All in favor?

Yes. Aye.

Any opposed? Chair votes aye. Motion passes. Thank you all. Thank you, Chris. That brings us to our consent agenda. We do have an OLCC permit application, so as is our convention, I will pull that off. I would entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda as revised. So moved. Moved by Stepina.

Second.

Second by Gakey. Discussion? All in favor? Yes. Aye. Opposed? Chair votes aye. Motion passes. Item two on the consent agenda. I would entertain a motion. So moved. Moved by Paulson.

Seconded.

Seconded by Cavallari. Discussion? Gladys.

I will abstain from OLCC permit applications. This is not a reflection of these establishments, businesses, or their owners, rather than I object the fact that we do not have enough transportation options for people who visit these establishments. As a result, they may end up getting behind the wheel and putting themselves and others at risk. I'd like to highlight the broader public health responsibility that this council holds. The recent adoption of the code allowing transportation networks is a step forward, but access and capacity remains limited, especially during late hours and in our upper valley. If we and our countywide partners are able to provide adequate transportation during late evenings and weekends, I will start approving OLCC applications.

Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Abstention?

Me. Yes.

Chair votes aye. Motion passes. Thank you. Next, we have downtown parking.

Thank you, Mayor. Online, I believe we have Rick Williams from Rick Williams Consulting to provide an overview of your items tonight. This is an update from the 2019 parking study that was conducted online. Seven years ago now, we put together a scope of work and summary based around some of the materials that you've been discussed, actually last at your May meeting. And Rick is here to present that scope, answer some questions. And I'm going to let him queue up and get his screen going. Whoa. HAB-Jacques Juilland, While we're here so scope is before you were asking for emotion to move on this some of the the time and the reason why it's here now is. HAB-Jacques Juilland, As part of the scope and I believe it's really outlined on page 42 is observations relating to peak our season, the peak hour and peak season is upon us and will. likely end as it does every year around September. So there is some needs to address this now while we're in peak season and to get our consultants out there to do some field observations and work during this seasonal window.

Thank you, Justin. Welcome, Rick.

Thank you. I'm not great at technologies. Can you see my screen?

I do. I see your screen and your face.

Well, thank you very much.

I see your screen.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's great to be back to Hood River and have an opportunity to work with you again. Dustin has asked us to put together an approach for a best practices review of your existing parking system and make recommendations to move forward. I think this was an opportune night to be able to present to you, to hear other folks during the public comment periods about their concerns about parking. And so it's our hope that through this process, we can address some of those questions, update the system, really target areas of concerns and make your system more efficient. My presentation is pretty short. I know you've seen the scope and I know that Dustin gave you an update piece showing the 31 strategies that were recommended in 2019 and the progress that's been made on them or hasn't been. or what still needs to be done. But I think this study really is to address that, that that has not been completed, but also to look at new opportunities and hear the community again and hear you again about how we can improve your system. There's four really topic areas for my presentation tonight. There's the project background, a real quick slide on what the study area is, key elements of the work tasks that are in the scope that we've presented you, and then just summarizing the targeted project outcomes, how we'd like to end up. And then we have question and answer time afterwards. So real quick on the project background, as you know, in 2019, we think a very comprehensive study of your parking system was conducted with a lot of data. We did parking utilization in the summer. We did parking utilization studies in the off-peak spring and took a lot of license plates. So we had a lot of data about how parking activity actually occurred on your streets. For instance, how long people stayed, how many employees might be parking on the street, occupancies every hour of the day over a 12-hour day. on two representative days in two different seasons each. And so we had a lot of data. We also had a great working ad hoc committee and we worked with city staff and we did a lot of public outreach and had listening sessions and really detailed work sessions with the ad hoc committee. That led to the adoption of 31 strategic parking management solutions. for how to manage your parking system in downtown Hood River. The little graphic on the right, I apologize, it's so small, but everything was calibrated against guiding principles that were developed in that public outreach and in those ad hoc work sessions. And so everything that we recommended tied to a goal or a desired outcome. And so that way we could track it over time to see how we're doing and if we're meeting the goals and objectives of the 2019 plan. So with all that data was also informed by seven very topics, specific and detailed parking white papers. We looked at everything from current demand to your projected demand in the future to fee and lieu programs, to your enforcement system, technology, very focused white papers that the ad hoc committee then held work sessions on for every one of those work topic papers, which then the outcome was the 31 strategies. So now jump forward. to 2020, the period between 2020 when the plan was formally adopted to today. We know a significant amount of development has occurred in the downtown. The dynamics of downtown have changed. Obviously, from listening to the public input, Hood River is unique. You guys get so much traffic and so much attention from people outside, inside Hood River and throughout the region. You're truly a destination city. And obviously over the last seven years, That's had impacts on your land uses and has had impacts on your parking system. And so what that calls for moving forward is what we're presenting to you tonight, is the opportunity to move forward with a new look at your parking system. But to maintain budget, what we're calling it is a best practices review. We're not going to collect any data this time, but we're going to spend a lot of time on your streets downtown. As parking professionals, our team, we've been in the business for 35 years, and we've done parking studies like this for over 40 cities in Oregon and 35 cities in Washington. But we want to get down on the street and look at your system, not only to update your inventory, but to look at how it's working, evaluate best practices in other cities, look at your utilization and be able to set the tone for what we observe as professionals to give to you, stakeholders, possibly another committee through interviews and workshops, the ability to take what we see and give it to you and have you react and put your own stamp on it through new issues, ideas, challenges, and opportunities within your system. The goal then is to create a new template of solutions, update the ones you have, remove the ones that you no longer need, and add new strategies that will address the new insights that we have from spending time in your downtown as professionals and the new insights and ideas that you have and stakeholders have about how to make parking better. In all of this we're looking at both the on and the off street system so it's not just the public supply that will be observing because in 2019 we also observed every one of your off street facilities, the private parking and the public parking. The project study area is the exact same study area we had in 2019 it's there in front of you. Generally, it's bound on the north by Industrial Street, on the south by State Street. West, you've got a jogging boundary line, but Wasco Street and 7th Street, and primarily front on the east. When we last left you, you had 674 on-street spaces. 448 of them were metered. for three hours, pay to park. The rest of them were a combination of things and things that might have been alluded to in the public discussion today. ADA stalls, bus stalls, reserve stalls, loading zones, etc. We want to recatalog all of those so that you'll have the same boundary, but a completely new supply inventory in GIS that'll load up into your system. And then when we left you, there were 780 off-street spaces on 35 sites. We want to see if all those sites are still there, and if they're still there, what they're doing and how they look, and any new sites that might have been added or repurposed or reformatted. And so we'll have all of that for you, but that's within the study area that we'll be focused on, and we'll focus all of our discussion on improvements within that study area.

Rick, I'm sorry to interrupt. Could you just click back to that slide? Yes. It doesn't feel right to me that one-third of our on-street spaces are not metered. That's just, as I walk down the street, it doesn't feel that that's true. You're quite confident that that 676 and 448 are correct?

Based on 2019. That's why we want to go.

You're the professional, 47 years, but it just feels like, really?

If I may, I believe at least some of those spots are on industrial and maybe on 7th.

So they're unmetered?

Yes.

Okay.

Those have a parking limit of, I think, 10 hours. And so those are in the core, but you might not think of them as technically downtime.

And not ADA and not bus and not reserved and not just unmetered. Okay. Thank you, Abigail. That feels better.

Well, what I like about your question is this is exactly the type of questions we want. What has changed and did we get it right the first time? But we want to start 2026 with a brand new inventory. Identify every stall, loading zone, bus zone, any stall on street by type of stall, and then give you an updated inventory that could likely change that number and possibly your perception. We want to start on the right foot. It's a great question. So there's basically four elements within the work scope. I know you have it. The first and foremost is the parking inventory update is to get right to the question that was just answered. We're going to relocate every on-street stall within that boundary by location, block face, and type of stall. So we're going to completely re-update that. What that does, and this is where we think we, again, by not collecting utilization data this time, is this is where we think we're going to save you money because we're going to spend first a lot of time on the street cataloging all of your parking inventory. So while we catalog, we can also watch and see. And again, this inventory update is not just the on street system it's what were again those 780 stalls and 35 off street parking sites. Then we're going to we're going to tally that up put it in and give that to you, but then we're going to come back in August and October. And we're going to do infield observations. We're going to focus specifically on how the system is operating every hour of the day with some of our senior staff. We have parking professionals on our senior staff. We have traffic engineers on our senior staff. And we're going to look at utilization qualitatively, your signage system, your striping, technologies. The safety, I heard some of that already in regards to the 10-minute stall. Safety issues, congestion issues, where constraints and surpluses are. So what this allows us to do is spend a lot of time out in the field. at a cost less than having a bunch of surveyors out there every hour on the hour having to take license plates like we did last time. If you find after this is all over that you would want to do an update of the utilization study, we're very capable of doing that. We're just trying to save you some money in this regard. While we're doing infield observations, we also want to do as we did in 2019, and where we learned so much was from your staff. Uh, we want to sit down and have interviews with your current operating staff and re acquaint ourselves with your policies, your code, the financial health of the system, current pricing, your permit systems, your technologies, and your enforcement. Um, We did that in a white paper last time and we learned so much. It gives you a really good existing conditions foundation from which to begin. And your staff are very valuable in that. So that completes task one. We then want to concurrently have what we call key issue identification. We want to get people involved. We want you involved. We want staff involved and we want downtown stakeholders involved much like we did last time. And simply sit down and reacquaint ourselves with the guiding principles. Are they still relevant and valid? Are there new goals and objectives that we want? We want to hear their ideas, their thoughts about what works, what doesn't work, what could improve the system or any new ideas that they may have. And so that's a key issue identification, but it's really a way to reacquaint ourselves with the guiding principles and make sure that the strategies that we're going to recommend at the end of the day, match your goals and objectives and desired outcomes. We also are going to do some peer city reviews. We've learned a lot. A lot of cities are in the same boat that you are particularly destination cities. We're working with cities like Leavenworth, Washington, Ashland, Oregon, Bozeman, Montana, Estes, Colorado, Estes Park, Colorado, on these same type of issues. And so it'll help us to hear what they're doing and what they're learning. And if they have new ideas that they can bring that we can learn from them and bring to you and throw that into the mix of things that everybody can discuss and chew on. And then finally, we're going to summarize and compile all of that into a new downtown parking plan update. Again, as I said, we want to go back and look at the 31 strategies that were identified in 2019, and we want to re-look at them, be critical, keep those that are working, add new ones, and refine existing strategies, and eliminate those that we believe are no longer necessary. We want to update your system to today. We want to reflect your goals and desires for today and the strategies and technologies and solutions that work today and learn from others. So we want to identify new issues related to policies, goals, code, technology, and supply management. As I said, we want to identify strategies that are working and those that are not. Propose new strategies that work. not only consider, but build upon what we did in 2019 or supplement what we did in 2019. You have a very strong base plan. And so we want to use that as our foundation. And the overall goal is to maximize your existing supply. Can we get more out of it? Can we manage it better? Can we get more turnover? Can we still meet our customer and our employee and our residential need? and maximizing the supply, identify any potential new supply or access needs like alternative modes, car share, new technologies, TNC, and then incorporate that all into a new plan for you. And I know I rushed through that, but we certainly take questions and answers now if you have them. Thank you.

Thank you, Rick. Les?

Thank you for being here, Mr. Williams. I have one question for you and then maybe the other one is for you, Dustin. Thank you for having focus groups on there. I was curious to know if in the focus groups, the interviews that will take place, will materials or questions that you ask, will they be in English and in Spanish? And the reason that I asked that is because I actually have family members that work downtown and Spanish is their primary language.

I'm sure we can do that. Absolutely. We've done it before and we can get it translated. It's doable. Definitely. Yes.

Perfect. Thank you. Equity is so important. Dustin, how are we going to communicate that this update will take place to the local businesses, to community members? How are we going to communicate that?

We'll work through, Rick, in your scope of work. RWC is charged with getting some of the outreach. It is not an outreach heavy. It's directed outreach to kind of particular interest parties, but that's listed within your scope and your task. We can also coordinate through our local channels, typical events that we advertise, webpage, news media.

Yeah, I think it's important to have business owners, right? But I also think it's important to have the utilizers themselves present if possible. So thank you.

Justin, I'm sorry. Remind us how we are or are not incorporating our sort of recent energetic discussion about the hotel voucher program.

Uh, that's in the short list of checklist items. There's a particular topic with that says, um, the use of on street passes parking management strategy is specifically use and under conditions that specifically listed, uh, loading valet and hospitality demands, best practices for hotels and impacts overnight, long-term uses two points specifically listed in your scope.

Thank you, Doug. Uh, Thank you for being here, Rick. Dustin, this is probably more a question for you. So, you know, there's definitely people I've talked to in the community like, oh, another parking study. Like, will you ever get anything shown about parking? I will say that it seems to me that, you know, part of the question is around that or like, what have you done with parking? It seems like this is going to address that. I also, and correct me if I'm wrong for the rest of the council, you know, I've been on council for four years now, planning commissioner, you know, before that. it does seem that the parking debate has ramped up quite significantly as uh things have grown in the last few years right so i was hoping getting to my question you know what was the genesis for this and once this is concluded what will be the amount of time before you can come to us and say Council, we got to do this, this and this and this. And, you know, maybe that's a work plan discussion as we go into the next biannual planning for that. But like, what do we expect? You know, when are you going to tell us like this is what you need to do and when you need to do it by?

Well, I think that's part of the study is what have you done and what works and what's not working? How has the world changed out there? You have a 70-unit hotel that's on board. You have a new off-street parking facility that has come online. You have a new potential development that has generated a lot of discussion. Fee and loo generated discussion. All those things have come together and created enough headwind. You, yourself as council, debated whether you were going to add structured parking or parking supply onto your work plan. That did not make it. It just kind of all adds to the... the tailwind that kind of warrants some of this. You've been providing an update on the 2019. Again, I think it's important to note we are not starting from scratch here. We're starting from 2019, 2020, observing what has changed out there, what technologies come online, what does the city look like now, both in utility and growth, and how are some of these things working and not. You've done some things that... hopefully we analyze, we'll prove, was this effective? Did it do enough? But for doing this, what had done something? How has the market responded? You have private property owners that are closing off their lots for off-street parking. Private property owners who are opening up their lots for off-street parking and kind of commodifying that. These are real-world changes within a pretty small geographic area downtown that I think are worth talking about. You're hearing it from the public. You're hearing it from merchants. It's good. And we recommended when you had your fee in lieu to put this into context and bring in professionals to discuss this, not just simply react to the reaction.

Thank you so much.

The 2019 study accounted for growth. What was significantly different in growth in between that study period and today?

In terms of growth?

That study period accounted for some measure of growth in between then and now.

Yeah, I think the biggest one is the growth of the hotel sector, activating four stories of building in tens of thousands of square feet that were mothballed for 50 years. That has been an immediate impact. The very big potential that 15% of the off-street parking accounted for in 2019 was about to be entitled or look for redevelopment. That was accounted for in 2019 to expect some of that to come online. That came online. So some of that being analyzed and saying, okay, we estimated for a 10% growth over a certain forecasted year. Some of that has materialized. Did those forecasts play out? Have they generated more traffic? Have they generated less traffic? That is part of this too.

And that delta in between projected and now is significant enough to warrant a new parking study.

Well, I don't think it's a new parking study.

Or a significant update and remeasuring.

And I would say even if there had been no physical growth, I think it's still worthwhile looking at just saying, listen, maybe we did not produce a 20-year forecast. We're not in the 20-year horizon. Are the circumstances out there? Are we seeing more traffic generated even without that physical growth? I think that's a worthwhile question. Or not traffic. Call it parking demand.

As I think about that, I realized this is a post-COVID, post-Zoom traffic update. Like 2019 was a pretty significant moment just before both those things happened. Wow. Yeah.

And then in the presentation it was mentioned what kinds of ideas, issues, challenges, et cetera, would be discussed. Would what comes out of this reinforce what was already explained or already assumed in the 2019 study?

Let me try that, Dustin. It's okay. I think there's new things happening all the time. We had talked about payment systems. We had talked about virtual permits. We had talked about fees in lieu. We didn't talk about quick stop parking. A lot of things have changed and that's what we want to get our minds around. We're learning a whole lot in terms of curb management now with technology. The question is, you know, I think we still, even in 2019, we were struggling with new technologies. Sometimes new technologies come with a cost as well. And it also comes with the need to manage that technology. But I, you know, I think that not only in Hood River, just from your public discussion today. And I want to roll forward real quickly. While that public discussion was happening, I created this slide. And there's all sorts of other topics we could do this on. I know app technology, seasonal pricing, variable pricing, new supply, virtual permits. But the whole idea of the 10-minute stop, this is just an example of programs that we developed in Portland, Tacoma, and Longview for just that very issue. In Longview, it was a different issue. They had a lot of residents parking downtown I mean, living downtown, but having to park in remote parking lots, and they had no way to bring in their groceries. Much like your 10-minute stop, it might be a different need. In Portland, it was for the post-COVID and still a huge increase in takeout businesses at restaurants. But I don't know if I'm perfectly answering your question, but I think a lot has changed since 2019, and there are a lot of new issues out there, The question is, are those new issues resonating with those who are using your system? So we can come back with ideas on new ways to manage your parking, but does it tailor well with your ability to support it? And does it tailor well with the issues that your user is bringing forward to you?

Yeah, yeah. City Council faces a number of issues all the time regarding all the issues City Council has to face. One of the last issues that you raised was maximizing existing supply, which is an assumption of use of our space. And assuming that use of space is to maximize our supply is an assumption that is included in your analysis. So is that highest and best use of our space to allocate for that maximizing of existing supply, or do we choose to allocate that space for other use? That's what I'm getting at in terms of, are we going to reinforce what is already assumed, or are we going to... allocate that for something else. That's what I'm getting at in terms of reinforcing the 2019 study or what's the scope of this going to be? I got it.

Yeah. The scope is not to reevaluate the on-street parking system as what else could it be. I think that's where we're kind of missing that question. So it is to evaluate this system as parking, what other, and this is the scope. It's not to reassess, does a public right-of-way become a higher and better use parking removed, park included. That's not the intent.

All right. Thanks. I just want to be clear about those assumptions.

We did nibble, though. We have, what, half a dozen or more parklets downtown. Those did not exist in 2019. That is a parking space that stopped being a parking space.

Thanks. I just want to be really clear about those assumptions when we're talking about these in the QA. Thanks.

The one other thing that did jump out, and I think that impacts and crosses over into our admin side is, and I wanted to just raise this for how much things have changed. Part of the study was to discuss the idea of removing coin devices. We've come a long way from Duncan and meter plugging. There was a big concern how we plug meters. We jumped from that you know, should we use coin operated devices to Calais machines immediately into the application? And now the new impact of the machine is now becoming somewhat obsolete and the app is becoming that. Does the app enable your users, your businesses, your customers to, how do they, are we, how do we maximize the use of this parking? in this supply and how has technology impacted that? Can you just plug the meter? Are we seeing longer tenures? Are we not seeing the turnover? Which is one of the goals of this is to turn parking to use this space to not have it be to have it be active for people and available. That's in your guiding principles. That's in this document. It's in the guiding principles from 2019. Has technology, lack of better term, disrupted that goal? Anna.

I have three questions. The first question I think is for both of you, Dustin and Mr. Williams, I think is the incorporation of public transportation from outside of the focus area going to be included in the study? That's one way to maximize parking is to provide an alternate access mode for people to get downtown, right? So I'm just curious.

And in 2019, we baselined it. And so my expectation would be, we would look at one, has transit service increased since then, and still continue that as a goal. We had the transit system participate in the ad hoc committee with us. But yeah, anytime that you can put more non-parking trips into your system. And it's not just transit, but biking as well, and car sharing to a certain degree. You can add capacity, access capacity, without adding parking. So absolutely, it's always a key fundamental, and that was a key guiding principle. The key is, can we improve and increase the service? So we want to evaluate that. Where have we come from since 2019 with that?

Um, We discussed this, trying to remember, I went back and rewatched it, but a while ago, the funds to pay for this updated study, was that coming from the parking and move funds? Is that correct, staff? That's correct. Okay. And I would like confirmation that that's an authorized use of those funds, because I still think that those funds were created to expand parking, not necessarily to fund more studies. And What I've heard from conversations from downtown business owners is, you know, again, like, is another or an updated study even going to do anything? You know, so my last question is for staff and for council is like, what are we going to do with this? Like, great, we're paying a consultant again to do give us information. But what is what is our plan? And what is staff's plan to do with the information that we obtained from this? Because clearly, We got a study in 2019 and things aren't improved, even though we've done some things. But yeah, what's our game plan?

I think implementation is proven somewhat successful. Have you had the discussion of but for the things that we've done? What would it be? So have things improved? We've seen redevelopment. I see some level of functionality. I see some transparency and decision-making when it comes to the businesses, the ability to use Fianlu, the ability to unlock some level of development, a low vacancy rate, an increased interest in historic structures. I think all those are successes. and the ability to have low vacancy and still attract visitors. I think that's all successful. But for some of that, we would still be having that discussion. And we may do all these things, and we may implement, and we may still have that discussion as a result of demand. So I think the statement that nothing has been accomplished, I think there's a number of successes out there that we can point to. number of things that we have done to improve the system, to allow people to use it, to increase accessibility, kind of stabilize management and revenue. This is, I think these are all successes, but for, we would probably be having more discussions that we had. And I don't expect to ever be there. Like, I would not stand up here and promise you that if you do all these things and it's great, we're not going to have a discussion in downtown River that the parking is challenged. I don't think I would not set that as my barometer for success as a staffer. You may have different opinions, but I don't I think there's an alternative and it's parking is not a problem and we don't have enough traffic.

I think an indication of success is we have a thriving, bustling, wonderful downtown. Gladys.

And I think the other big piece that we have discussed for a number of years is a parking garage. We know we need one. And that was part of the study in 2019. And As we look at interim fee and lieu and all that, how do we start funding a parking garage? Because we own property, we own lots where we can actually build, so we already have that. As we think about how to adjust these fees moving forward, then we have some sort of goal and a timeline of how can, if we adjust these fees and whatnot, how does that get us closer to a parking structure, which we know we do need.

Still on you, Anna.

Oh, those were my questions.

Oh, I was waiting for a third. Did I miss it?

I think it was, how are we paying for this and what are we going to do for it with it? And will public transportation be incorporated in it? So I hit my three.

Thank you. The suggested idea is that we would affirm this bid.

Yeah. Scope or adjustments? I guess this is the opportunity. Is the scope to what you anticipated There's a fee. We will act on this work if approved or just as needed.

Doug?

I would make a motion to approve the scope as drafted.

Moved by Doug.

I will second, but can we just make sure that it's also in Spanish?

Yeah, we're going to deliberate. So moved by Doug, second by Gladys. So there's a motion on the table, and just flesh that out a little bit. Say more about that, Gladys.

It's important that as we conduct any sort of focus groups that we have equitable options for those who are participating, and we know that Spanish is a predominant language here, and we know that we have a lot of Spanish-speaking staff that work downtown.

Good. Just to piggyback on that, too, if there is some sort of change order that has to come to adopt, you know, allocate additional funds or give more funds to proper translation. I think translation is relative. We want professional translation. If that can't be achieved with the scope, I would hope that you bring us a change in order to do so.

Other discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. Motion passes. Thank you, Rick.

Thank you very much. I appreciate your time.

Next, Ordinance 2096, a zone change. Still Dustin.

Thank you, Mayor. At your last meeting at the conclusion of the public hearing, you directed us to prepare an ordinance that is 2096. It's on tonight for our first reading. We're looking for a motion to read. Ordinance 2096, by title only. It's been up in advance, seven days in advance. We have the ordinance itself, a single-page recital, attachments, the map, and the findings of fact and conclusions of law, which were presented before you and adjusted based upon your public hearing and your input.

Abigail, help me keep in order here. We're doing a roll call in section nine. Are we voting now?

We'll do it under .

Looking for a motion to have it read. So we are making a motion now to move it to . Yes, .

Are there any questions before we go? Go for it.

Can we do two readings since we're all present? Oh, yes, we can. Thank you.

Okay. I make a motion to approve the first and second reading of ordinance 2096 along with suggested amendments.

Second by subpoena. And this kind of gets like, is that what we're supposed to do right there to move it to Jan later? Correct. You have moved it to Jen later. Thank you. Moved to Jen later. Any discussion on that? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Chair votes aye. Motion passes. Thank you. Bargain and sale deed.

Thank you, Mayor. I'm going to turn this over to Danny Farrans, your city attorney, to lead this conversation.

Hi, Danny.

Hi. Good evening. This is also a follow-up from your last meeting where we discussed the options for this strip of property next to the Horse Feathers Plate Hotel next to the second street stairs and um the concerns you expressed were you didn't want any structures built in this and there's also um this wasn't a huge issue for you but it was was an issue that there's a appears to be a stormwater line city stormwater line buried in part of the strip at least and so my recommendation is to uh convey convey the strip and it's illustrated on page uh It's 51 of the packet. You can see how it is a little 10 foot by 70 feet long on the east side of the stairs. And then there's an aerial photograph that also shows it on page 52. And what I would recommend is to convey the chunk, but reserve this easement and include a covenant of no construction of any structures on this strip of land. And that would preserve the, I'm not sure where the stormwater line is. It's apparently very, very deep and it's not clear exactly where, whether it aligns with this strip or not. But this would at least reserve to you whatever access you might be able to get through this strip. And it would kind of... eliminate this management problem of this single strip. So that's my recommendation.

Thank you, Dan. And I feel like we hashed this out pretty good at the prior meeting. I was not a huge supporter, but I take Dan's point that this resolves a management problem for us. So that's a good reason. The motion is on page 49, if we're ready for that.

It also leaves like no development rights to to Mr. Lindsay or any of his successors. They can't build anything on it. And there's a stormwater easement there that prevents anything from. being put on it, so. Thank you, Dan.

Anna, and then Claire.

Actually, Gladys, go ahead, because I was going to proceed with the motion if no one else had anything else to say.

Yeah, so I do have a question. I just want to make sure that I remember this discussion, but the next step is that you're going to prepare like a sale deed and that I want to make sure that It is recorded with the property title, so any future owner would also be owner of the 10 by 70?

Yes. It would be consolidated with the horse feathers property. Okay. We do that through a lot line adjustment.

I move that we direct staff to prepare a bargain and sale deed with covenant and reserved easement for the benefit of the city.

Moved by Anna.

Second.

Second by Amanda. Discussion? All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Nay. Let the record show Rivera voted nay. Chair votes aye. Motion passes.

I'll prepare something and have it for your next meeting.

Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Brings us to safety and housing bond.

Yes, thank you, Mayor and members of City Council. This is the first of three items tonight on a potential November ballot measure for bonding. I want to start with a brief history, and then this item is about giving you an update on our information and engagement campaign that we've been doing over the past three months. So as a reminder, considering forwarding a bond measure was identified as a critical work plan project for the City Council. Last February, or last fall, we began studying potential investment targets and had work sessions on public engagement that had informed our existing capital plans, which led into reviewing and ranking projects for bonding. We then put together some logical bond package options for the council to consider. And then the council authorized some preliminary polling, followed that up with some secondary polling limited just to housing and lease facility renovation. And then after receiving the results of that polling, City Council solidified on those as the top potential funding targets leading to March 9th that we created a budget and an approach for bond and engagement and informational activities. So I'm here to provide an update on how those have gone and then the next steps and it will be an item later tonight will be to work on finalizing budget titles and and then leading to a deadline to submit documents if we do forward a measure on August 14th. So getting into what we've been doing over the past three months. It's been a series of both virtual, electronic, in-person, paper, really every communication channel that we could do to get information out and to collect input back from the community. I'll start with the online survey. You have the results in your packet. We had that up from May 1st through July 2nd, advertised in multiple different venues, radio, including Radio Tierra, Bond webpage newsletter, email listserv, social media, and discussed during community meetings and presentations. The survey was available in both English and Spanish, and we had hard copies available in the lobby. Want to make a important note that online surveys are not necessarily representative of the voting electorate and really professional polling, which will be tonight's second item, is a much more representative look at how voters may actually vote in November. But the survey still gives a lot of, I'd say, qualitative and important information to kind of paint your perceptions of what the community is interested in. So most all who responded to the survey reported that they lived here or lived and worked here. I'd note that based on these answers versus what we're seeing in some of the polling, I suspect that quite a number of people probably when they said lived here may have lived in Hood River County. There was a little over 50% support for a bond measure of some sort, the housing police or housing and police with quite a number of people being not sure. And very few being an immediate no on both. So I think that pointed to that there's a lot of opportunity for education. And if there was one major takeaway I'd say that came through loud and clear is an interest in seeing two bonds separately. If you forward something for housing and police, at least the informal survey was very strong in what people checked, but also I'd say came through in all the written comments that people were very much wanting to see it as two separate issues and two separate measures. I would maybe even offer to say that if we did it combined, you would maybe create some energized opposition, just people being kind of turned off by that than being combined. You know, some of our polling has showed that the housing bond is slightly more popular than the police bond. But I thought it was interesting in the survey when we asked people, how much more per month are you willing to pay for a quality police station? How much are you willing to pay for housing investments? Over 75% of the respondents, even if they reported being against the police station kind of in concept, they were willing to say, well, yeah, I'd spend a little bit of money for a quality police station. So I thought that was quite an interesting response. And then we had a lot of input, and it's there in the bar graphs in the staff report about additional information that people want to see. And I'd say if there was two takeaways from the survey, it was one, people want to see two bonds, but two, there's just an enormous amount of opportunity for additional education on the alternatives that we've looked at, what we've tried already, what the problem is for both the police station renovation and a potential housing bond. So also over the past three months, we've given multiple community presentations to the Hood River School Board, the Urban Rural Advisory Committee, Downtown Business Association. We've held town halls here where we had a panelist interview about housing and also Police Station Open House. And then also Councilor Stepina covered for me at Rotary last week and gave a presentation there and maybe opine on how that went. and Chief Holstein and Lieutenant Shaley. You know, I'd say most of the input most of the it was mostly questions i'd say at all these public presentations rather than strong do this do this do that so i think that also speaks to how much uh how much opportunity there is to use this as a time to raise up these issues and get people's attention on these issues and do an education about all the things that we have already tried and alternatives that we've pursued Um, and then other than questions, I'd say just a reinforce enforcement that, uh, people cared about these issues and thought that they were important and of large community concern. Um, uh, I don't know if you want to add anything from, from rotary.

Yeah. I mean, just like, like you said, I think everybody thinks that these two particular issues are pretty strong issues that we should be discussing. Um, I think the, the. It's a lot easier to sort of explain the police station issue in that every photo that you see, the tours that were here, the discussions from the lieutenant and the chief, there's black mold down there. The fentanyl hood is this big and it's a dangerous workspace. There's not places for people to be interviewed. I think when people understand that that's what the ask is, It's pretty clear cut. I think affordable housing, there's a lot of people that are in favor of it, but there's a lot of people that want to understand the messaging and how it's delivered, right? And what are the key areas that we're going to hone in on? You know, I think Will's presentation is tremendous in terms of providing a lot of information. People had questions about a lot of the different slides in terms of the figures, but you know, how are we going to get around messaging? What are the areas that we're going to highlight from all those different areas is I think a lot of the feedback as well.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for coming. And then we also held a Latino-specific focus group facilitated by The Next Door to allow kind of a targeted space for folks who may not show up to Rotary or to a public meeting. And The Next Door does a great job facilitating these focus groups for us. And heard definitely challenges with finding affordable housing and all the problems that that causes when you have housing instability. But also, I think a key aspect of it that we got from that focus group was the other pressures that can lead to housing instability other than just the cost of housing. So people talked about being one medical bill away from losing their housing. And so it kind of speaks to some of those other social determinants of health that certainly housing is a big piece, but there's a lot of pressures on folks right now. And while there was certainly really strong support for that housing needs to be addressed and that housing is an issue and a problem that the city should be focusing on, there was also some mixed opinion about whether or not raising taxes was something that people were interested in supporting. And I think you see that too in all of the open-ended comments that a lot of concern about in this era. We're trying to address affordability, but there's also with this way of doing it, it's tax increase. Yeah, so I think those are, if I were to pull away my takeaways is, you know, folks want to see two bonds instead of one bond if we forward two issues that there's certainly concern about raising taxes. And I think that's with any bond measure, there's going to be a lot of folks who don't want to see any additional taxes. And, oh, and just that, yeah. This has really been a fun opportunity for me, who's been working on housing for all this time, that I'm getting a lot of folks who didn't know that we regulated short-term rentals, didn't know that we've implemented middle housing code. And this has kind of been, just as a side note, an opportunity to get people focused on these issues and kind of raise it to the top of the awareness level and have an opening to have a conversation. So those are my takeaways on the engagement to date. Next up, I have Ben Patikin from Patikin Research who has done professional polling. But before we hand it over to Ben, I wanted to see if questions, comments, anything on the engagement and outreach approach.

Thank you for all the time that you've spent on this, Will, and any other staff that have supported. I don't necessarily have like a question, but I'd say I have a comment based off of the information that you provided. So there were 178 responses in the survey, which is great. But when it comes down to it, we look at our population, a little over 8,000, that's about 2% of our population that responded. I had a chance to attend the town hall and there were a lot of questions around, Well, what is the city doing or what's the plan for 30% and below AMI? As Councillor Stepina mentioned, I think there's an opportunity for a lot of education, STR, all those pieces that come into play. So how are we going to take this information and kind of run with it to help as some of these being the foundational pieces for the education that is needed for our community or our constituents to know?

Oh yeah. Well, actually that's one of the most valuable pieces I think of this, of these last three months is hearing what, uh, where the gaps are in people's knowledge. And so, yeah, big, uh, A big component of what alternatives have you looked at? Say that's the number one thing that will be information that we'll be looking to focus on and push out between now and November is showing our work. How have we tried to address affordable housing before asking for a tax increase? What are all the other alternatives to remodeling the basement that we looked at before setting on that? And I think we have really great answers to those questions.

Thank you.

Let me just finish and then you can have the last little piece that I was also going to mention is storytelling. So I did see it as part of like the ballot piece or for what's coming next with the research group. But the importance of storytelling. And I know that we don't have individuals in Mariposa Village in quite yet. But if there are ways that we can tell those who are impacted and their stories, I think that can help. others in our community understand the challenges that most of us are facing.

Yeah, great point. And you're making me remind me that I did not mention the videos that we produced. And I just really wanted to thank Big River Community Land Trust board members, the school districts, some local business owners who all volunteered their time to kind of explain this. And and storytelling terms. I'd say one thing to kind of temper expectations going forward, and I'll get to this when we get into the ballot titles, is at least the creativity that we can do as a city is going to get severely limited once we finalize a ballot title. So we have really broad latitude in our communications while we're considering a bond measure. Once we forward a bond measure, at least on the city organizational side of things, we're going to get really boring and robotic sounding and it's going to be up to political action committees, the public, someone else to take the torch and run with it at that point.

And yeah, just something that piqued my interest for some context was, you know, what actions have been taken? That's certainly a lot of the questions, you know, I've fielded and were fielded at Rotary and some of the other presentations. You know, I think with the police station, I think the chief and the lieutenant did a really good job explaining what was looked at and just relative how small this ask is compared to some of the other asks. Even that, you know, the feasibility, the studies that were done for it and what would be good square footage for them. We're well below that, right? So I think people will respect that we're being good stewards and not spending hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars right out of the gate, that sort of thing. So I think that's pretty resounding. But what I think on the housing side is also really important to note is we have done so many different things that have not moved the needle. despite trying, spare land trusts in Mariposa Village, right? So I think as we start to consider what that measure looks like, you know, we have to have that context that we have been able to significantly move the needle in terms of the Oregon housing needs analysis for that 30 to 60 band with Mariposa Village. We're providing, you know, some good paths to homeownership and, you know, small affordable housing with the land trust model. That in addition to missing middle code changes, ADUs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the things that have been done, STRs, you know, those have been significant in terms of impact.

Yeah, another thing that I kind of saw in the comments was like, well, we have Mariposa Village now, like housing solved. And I think one of the things to mention, if it's not being mentioned already, is the massive wait list that immediately came about once the, you know, once units were available to rent. Like, I think there's this misconception of like, you know, we did this, like, it's done now. Problem is solved. And that's just not the case. The other thing that I would like to see in some of the communication, if it's not there, which it was in, I think, your presentation, but the AMI explanation, because I think there'd be a lot of people shocked in this town what the rates are. And I was looking at it and looking at my income and like, oh, if I was a single person, hopefully it doesn't happen. But if I were, it's like, oh, I don't necessarily think of myself as in the 80%, 70% AMI, but that's how absolutely insane things have changed in this town. And I think people would... I don't know, I think it would be kind of an epiphany to some of them because even though we've gone over this stuff, like seeing those numbers laid out, because a lot of times it's like, oh, a family of four. And I'm like, okay, like doing the math on that. I think some people would be really astounded to see that information and be like, well, you know, this isn't, I think sometimes people get hung up on low income housing and they think that, you know, it's not for them or that we're not addressing like the missing metal. And I think that if they see some of the numbers on these, it'd be like, oh, okay. Like it's gotten to the point where more people could qualify for this because we're becoming such a wealthier town.

Yeah. There's some, I don't have it on my fingertips, so I'm not going to quote it, but we have a statistic about the growth in the proportion of households that earn 200K and higher. And this is in real terms, adjusted for inflation has just skyrocketed over the past 10 years. And I'll grab that infographic and send it out.

Awesome. Thanks. Thanks for your work on this. Amin.

I'm just kind of jumping on that too. I think, you know, I saw like percentages of AMI, but I think when we do go forward with budgeting, it'd be really helpful to have what is our current AMI and then people can either do the math or we can make a chart or whatever. But yeah, I never, I never see that anywhere. I just see like the percentages. So just throwing that out there.

Yeah. I want to echo that in the town hall. I think it's really, there were folks that said, well, what is 30% AMI actually mean? Like as far as numbers wise. So as we continue to move forward, ensuring that there is as much information as plain language as possible, so that it is really accessible to anyone that's reading it. And just for numbers wise, so that folks have this information, there are over 700 individuals on the wait list for Mariposa Village, over 700 individuals. And we only have 129 units.

Ben and then Doug. Doug.

And I think we'll get into this during the next part of the discussion when we start talking about titles and things like that. But I think it's extremely important to be not overly prescriptive in terms of our approach to use specific language that's not saying shall but can. Because some of these types of initiatives that we're seeing, we don't want to pigeonhole ourselves into one or another. We do want to explain where there could be success and where there is the most opportunity for value. But I would hate for us to get to a point where Will says, well, we found out something we could do for zero to 30 and we can't do that because of the way we worded this or something like that. You know, we don't want to pigeonhole ourselves into something. I think that's clear from all this.

Great. So we do have two more items on the bond. If we, would you like me to have Ben Patikin go over the final results?

Looks like, yeah.

Yeah. So Ben, I'll give you the floor and you probably recognize Ben from the previous polling that we did last winter.

Well, thank you all for having me here. Let me share my screen and we can get rolling. Hey, hopefully everyone can see it.

Yes, we see it.

Excellent. All right. I'll just preface this by saying that, you know, these are pretty decent results. Some of the better ones that I've seen compared to all the money of the other jurisdictions that we're pulling in in Oregon right now.

Ben, I'm sorry to interrupt. Your audio is like sort of mediocre. Can you help us? Can you hear me better now?

That was not a big change. It was not a big change. Huh. Give me a second. Is it better without the video on?

We're going to try louder in the room. Stand by, Ben. Thank you.

Okay.

Keep talking.

I can keep talking as long as you would like me to.

Dustin, are you fiddling?

You want me to roll through the methodology while we're fiddling? Good.

That is good. That is better. Now I have to back off because now I'm really loud. Go ahead, Ben. Thank you.

All right. A really quick review of the methodology. We talked to 350 likely voters in the city of Hood River. All interviews were conducted by a telephone using professional interviewers. We used a voter file sample and set quotas and weights based on what we think a November 2026 electorate will look like. Interviews were conducted end of June, beginning of July. Margin of error is plus or minus 5.2 percentage points. I'll note that that's actually lower than what you would typically expect for a 350 sample, but because it's 350 out of, in terms of the number of registered voters in the city, something like high 5,000s, it's a very decent sample size. Throughout the report, we refer to younger and older voters. Younger is under age 50 and older is over age 50. In terms of demographics, just a quick note, you can see in the middle column right here what we think the likely November 26th voter electorate would look like. That's what we modeled. What we got back is on the right-hand side. So a little bit more democratic than what we were modeling originally, a little bit older, maybe a tad smidge more female, and then the numbers are pretty much right on par for race and ethnicity. The places that are just a little bit changed, honestly, based on what we're seeing in other portions of the state and country, it's not out of line with what we've been seeing elsewhere. I'm going to skip the key findings and just keep rolling through to a first look at just the housing bond. So on the left, we did a split sample for ballot language. The difference was, you know, looking at our 20-word question, on the left-hand side, we added in fund affordable housing for low-income households, seniors, veterans, people with disabilities. We basically outlined in the ballot language who would be eligible for housing. When we do that, we get to 57% support, 25% opposed, 19% undecided. The intensity of feeling on the yes side is outpaces by more than two to one. The intensity of opposition on the no. And that compares with split sample B where we do not outline who would be eligible for housing. Where we get to 49% yes, 29% no, 22% undecided. You were talking earlier about determining ballot language at the end of this meeting, I would definitely go with the ballot language on the left-hand side. That is far better testing. When you combine the two and just sort of look at the housing bond writ large based on the demographic profile of yes and no voters, you can get a sense of sort of the contours that are going on here, and they are very typical for any sort of tax. So not much of a difference based off of homeownership, not really that much based on gender right here, but there's a significant partisan divide. Democrats much more in favor of NAVs, other third parties, pretty divided, and then Republicans opposed. We're dealing with the tax, so that just makes sense. Looking at it based on educational attainment, there is a significant divide here. College-educated voters much more likely to be supported than non-college-educated voters who are divided. um there is a gap based on uh age where you have younger voters more likely to support than older voters i literally just finished up a focus group an hour ago where some of the younger folks were complaining about how hard it is to afford a home in today's world so this is sort of matches right into that um and some divides based off of age and uh educational attainment so older non-college educated voters very divided younger college educated voters very much in favor We asked an open-ended question after delivery of the bond language to get a sense of why people are voting yes and why people are voting no. And this, I think, is actually very interesting. Part of the reason, not just because of the difference in ballot language, but part of the reason why you're doing so much better with the housing bond, at least at this point in time, than I've seen in other jurisdictions, is because you're actually dealing with another cost of living focused pressure point for regular people. It's not, you're not just talking about taxes and police or taxes in schools. You're talking about taxes and housing, which is, you know, two different price points. So best reasons to support our housing is too expensive and it's unaffordable. It helps low income seniors, disabled families and homeless be able to afford a home. It boosts the economy. There's like direct line to one of the major conversation points going on nationally and locally right now with a yes vote. On the flip side, a no vote comes where we would expect. Best reason, taxes are already too high, no new taxes. Second one down, can't afford it, bad economy, fixed income, et cetera. So two sort of like linked points that are diverging right there. It's really, it's a fascinating data point. We asked a question, thinking about the housing bond we've been discussing, do you support or oppose restricting those who can take advantage of new construction funded by the bond to local workers and individuals with historic ties to the area? And in this, you actually have a plurality, 43% who support that restriction. Only 18% are opposed. 39% are undecided or just not sure, unable to weigh in. But the fact that you have that dynamic between support and oppose right here, I think is pretty compelling. I think it's just another data points pointing towards that split sample A ballot language that reads out who would be eligible for housing. We did ask a question trying to understand, well, how much more are you willing to pay in order to create said housing? What's interesting here is you have a majority actually who say, and this is, sorry, the blue line is all voters. The green are those who are sort of a target audience for any campaign. These are folks who start out either undecided or leaning yes. Looking at all voters, you have around half just under that. who are willing to weigh in at either $250 or more in terms of how much they're willing to spend. There's sort of a coalescing amongst that group between $5 and $10. But you do have like just over majority, 51% who either said, I don't want to spend more money. That's 30% of them. And then another one in five who said, I just don't know. All right, so now we're looking at the police bond. So the ballot language is bonds to renovate and expand public safety facility. Shall the city issue bonds, renovate and expand existing public safety facility to meet modern policing standards. This gets to 47% yes, 27% no, 27% undecided. The intensity of feeling is on the yes side, where you have 21% voting yes strongly, 13% voting no strongly. Yes is ahead by double digits, but this bond does not get to 50 plus one. You start out at 47. There is a significant chunk of the electorate who are undecided, who we need to educate. But overall, I mean, this is not a bad starting point, but certainly not as good as what we see for the housing bond. And I will note, these numbers will change if ballot language is different from what we have here. Just FYI, language really matters. So bear that in mind as you're thinking through these things. Looking at the contours based on the subgroups, there is a gap here. Men are more supportive of a police bond than women. You also have homeowners more supportive than renters. Looking at these numbers here, remember for the yes margin, yes minus no equals yes margin. And then you also continue to have sort of that dynamic based on partisanship with Democrats more supportive. And then any of these certainly much more undecided and then Republicans sort of leaning no, but not decisively. Looking at it by education and age, again, you have college educated voters who are more supportive. You have younger voters who are far more supportive than older voters. And then you have sort of the same dynamic developing when you look at age by education. So older non-college educated voters very divided, younger college educated voters very much in favor. For this one, we asked another open end, just again, trying to understand why are you voting yes? Why are you voting no? Top reasons to vote yes is actually an understanding of the challenges that your police facility faces. Having 26% of the yes votes say the facility is outdated, it needs renovation or upgrades is actually a level of awareness about facility condition that is higher than I would have expected. So that is nice to see. It's actually advantageous for you as you go out and ask to fix something that is broken. You also have 17% lining up behind public community safety. And then officer safety, cramped space, working conditions. Frankly, you could line that one up with the top one and get to 37%. Suffice to say, there is a large amount of awareness about the challenges your police officers face in the facility. Reasons to vote no are the same sort of standard. So taxes are already too high. They can't afford it. Or a belief that it's not needed, that police don't need this. We wanted to get a better sense of Which approach do voters prefer when you're thinking about the police facility? Do you just renovate the existing footprint or do you add additional space with a new wing to the building? When we provide that to voters, blue, those are the people who say they prefer statement one. So one in five voters, just under a quarter. say that they prefer, let's just renovate the existing footprint. And then you've got just over a third who say, no, let's do the full thing. Let's plan for the future and do the additional wing. You have 26% who just volunteered. No, I don't want to do that. And remember, this number is fairly similar to what we've been seeing in other volunteered numbers. It was around three in 10 voters who were just automatically a no for much of this. And then you have another 15% who are undecided. Honestly, based on this, I think you certainly have license to do the footprint. The question becomes whether or not you can go farther and get the new wing as well. All right, so here we get to the bond interplay. We asked a question that was fairly involved in terms of the coding. So we asked, it may be the case that both bond measures from Hood River could be on the ballot at the same time. If this were the case, which of the following best describes how you intend to vote? And you can see all the different codes here. So the first four, yes on both, yes on housing, no on police, no on housing, yes on police, and no on both, those were actually provided to voters. The remaining five, yes on housing, undecided on police, undecided on housing, yes on police, all the different iterations, those were volunteered. And you actually do have sizable numbers going in for those volunteer responses. When you tally everything up, and on the left-hand side, this is the housing bond. On the right-hand side, this is the police bond. You get to 55% who say that they would be supportive of a housing bond. And that actually outpaces where we started with them. The combined data for the housing bond in that initial ask was at 53%. So put them both on the ballot separately. Housing bond gets to 55. That's a little bit up of where we start. However, The police bond gets to only 45% of folks who are willing to support that independently. And that's actually a two point decline off of where we were when we were testing it by itself. So what we see here is, and I think this actually, I don't think this counter contradicts what was delivered earlier. I think it's just a little bit of added nuance. You can put both on the ballot, but when you do, what we see here is the housing bond passing and the police bond not. We also asked a question just for a combined bond. Let's just put them both together and deliver it to voters. This gets to 51%. The bond language is Pretty explanatory. Bonds renovating and expanding public safety facility fund affordable housing. That's the caption. The question, shall the city issue bonds renovating and expanding existing public safety facility and fund affordable housing while requiring public oversight? Again, 51 support, 28 opposed, 21 undecided. The intensity of feelings again on the yes side where you're at 25% yes strongly compared to 13% no strongly, almost double. Um, and he started with majority, uh, which is not something I've been able to say a lot lately on anything. Um, when you look at this subgroup analysis, it's, you know, there's a little bit of a difference here. Men slightly more supportive than women, not much of a difference based on home ownership status, uh, uh, Democrats, uh, more supportive than Republicans. Um, big gap again, based on educational attainment, similar dynamic to what we've seen previously, same thing for age. So let's look at how they all stack up together. So the initial bond vote on the housing bond at the top, the combined housing and police bond, and then the police bond by itself. So you get to 53 yes, 26 no for the housing bond, 51 to 28 for the combined one, which frankly is well within margin of error of a housing bond alone. And then 4727 for the police bond. All of these, comparably speaking again, do much better than where I was expecting and certainly better than what I've been seeing in other jurisdictions that are similar to yours. You have some good, I mean, you have pleasant choices in front of you compared to what I've had to do elsewhere. You can see how these all shake out based on partisanship. This is another way to take a look at this. The housing bond, these are Democrats, NAVs and Republicans. You can just see the movement here. The big difference from the housing and the combined bond for the police bond is that you have comparatively more NAVs, non-affiliated voters who are undecided on the police bond at 42% compared to 33 and 32 and the other two. And you have Republicans who are more supportive. All right, so messaging. Let's get to narrative. So housing bond messaging piece. So we tested these seven messages. We had a talk about unaffordability and then nostalgia. Things used to be more affordable here. You could raise a family. Just talking about how unaffordable it is in general and pointing to the city being ranked as one of the most unaffordable places to live in the state. Talking about commuters, how they have four or five of employees are commuting in. adding traffic to that conversation, talking specifically about some of the vocations that are impacted by this, police, ENT, healthcare, all these folks who are professionals who have to commute in. It would be nice if they could actually live here. Talking about schools and then being able to leverage matching funds from the state and the feds and nonprofit groups. When we provide those messages, three sort of come to the fore. Number one, talking about schools, making sure the families can afford to live here, that gets to 74% very convincing amongst all voters, 31% very convincing. And I will note, just as a reminder, sorry, number one, five-point scale, very convincing, somewhat convincing, not to, not at all, don't know, as a reason to support the housing bond. Getting to anything above 65 indicates that you have a very good message. You have a plethora of them based on these data, which is nice to see when you're thinking about narrative. But if you're going to pick three, knowing that you can't communicate all of these in a robust way, it would be talking about making sure families can afford to live here for schools, getting more for less in terms of matching funds, and then making sure that your professionals can actually live in the city as well. And you can see the numbers for targets on the right-hand side. Remember, these are people who are undecided at the get-go. They find these very compelling. Eight in 10 or more are saying these are very convincing reasons to vote yes. And you can see the change in that support for the housing bond over the course of study. It's a meaningful change. You go from 53 to 57. I mean, it's just within margin of error, but it's nice to see real movement here. Opposition holds steady at 27. So you're converting folks out of the undecided column. Suffice to say, the housing bond is a compelling proposal for your voters. The police bond. We talked about evidence storage and the challenges faced there. We talked about interview rooms and how it's sort of public places, whatever rooms available. How it's old and out of date. Seismic challenges of the building. ADA accessibility, the bathrooms, and then they're not being locked. So you're actually having an officer having to stand over somebody if they're being held in the facility and how that takes away from response times. The two best messages here are that latter one, no locks. So, you know, having a dedicated space for suspects or whatever, where you can place them without having an officer standing over them. It's a compelling reason for 71% of the electorate. And then ADA accessibility. This is not surprising. This is popping pretty much everywhere we look, regardless of the jurisdiction and what we're trying to bond for. And you do see movement here too. You go from 47% yes to 51% yes. So you get to a majority. You do see a rise in opposition, but getting to 51% is something that is pretty meaningful for me to see here. And then we finally asked a question again at the back to try and understand how are you going to vote if both of them were presented to you on the ballot at the same time. And you don't see any real movement here. You continue to see after all that messaging, the housing bond gets to the mid-50s and the police bond continuing in the mid to high 40s. It will be really tight if they're both on at the same time for the police bond. And that, I think, covers it. I know that was a lot of information. Will, I'll pass it back to you.

Thank you so much. What an interesting field you are an expert in.

Yeah, I don't have anything to add, but I don't know if you have any questions for Ben.

The qualitative, imprecise online amateur surveying that we did clearly convinced you, Will, that we should split them. This guy did not say that.

Actually, it would be good to kind of reconcile with Ben to get his opinion on this.

I don't think that they were mutually exclusive. I think, and Will, correct me if I'm wrong, but the way that the city worded that question was, what should we do? And the response was, well, we want to see both of them on the ballot, regardless of whether or not one passes or not. What my data says is, how will you vote? And it says the housing bond looks in better shape than a police bond.

Yeah.

And the combo looks in better shape than the police bond.

Yes. Yeah. So the two things that I'm seeing is, one, just reading well 14 pages of uh open-ended comments from folks and seeing the energy that's behind uh the their um the people who are for two bonds you know just reading like we're gonna make them mad and activated we're gonna turn those into i'm telling all my friends to vote no as well it seems like we're we're might be creating enemies. This is as a non-political professional, but from reading lots of comments, people who hold that opinion seem to hold it very strongly. And then also, and Ben, I really want to get your opinion on this. When he did his polling, it was the one sentence ballot title, but it won't just be the ballot title. It would be than a summary and explanatory statement. And we have very strong word, very tight word counts on that. So I think 10 words for the title, like 20 words for the summary, 175 words. I'll get into that later, but you'll see when we get into the ballot titles, we have a lot of really important things we wanna say that's gonna be in that voter pamphlet. and we're gonna have to cut out a whole lot of content if we mush these together. And so I did also see in the polling results that when we got specific about who we were gonna help and how we were gonna help them, that was useful in getting people to say yes. So there's kind of that, I'm not trying to play 3D chess here, but that second level of kind of my thoughts on it. I don't know, Ben, if you have any. You're the one who does this every day.

Yeah, a couple of things. So the folks who usually, you know, we do a lot of community surveys as well. And what the real difference between those two subsets, a scientific study like what I did and then a community survey like what you all did, is the type of respondent that you get back. Because you have to opt in yourself with a community survey, you're going to get more of the opinionated people. You're going to get some of the louder people who are more involved. It's just normal, and they're going to be more informed. With a scientific study like this, we're just randomly calling households and getting people to stay on the phone with us. And so it's a slightly different subset of people, more reflective, I think, of opinion. In terms of the intensity of feeling, well, I can't speak to that. I didn't see any of the responses. I'm sure there were folks who had a lot to say on this stuff. I just counsel caution on reading too much into that. Um, in terms of the ballot language, I will say there's, you know, we've done a number of different studies going back a long ways. Uh, most people, the things that you are, the reason why we set up our surveys the way we do with just the caption of the question and not the summary, um, is because we're guaranteed that most people, when they open their ballots are going to read at least the caption of the question. the numbers start dropping pretty significantly when you start asking folks whether or not they've read the summary statement. So, you know, it's important that we have as much good information in there as we can get, but it really is making sure that we set up the caption in question as well as we can based on the data that we have available to us, because we know that those are the two things most people are going to look at.

I would defer to Ben over my opinion. Any other questions for Ben before we get into ballot titles?

Can you help me understand? So I know that there has been some messaging on social media. Did this second part of the survey take place before or after some of these social media videos started appearing?

Ben, can you remind us the dates that the poll was taken?

Yeah. It was June 29 through July 1.

It would have been about right in the middle. Yeah. Carry on. Okay. Thank you, Ben.

Thank you all.

Okay. Tom Preston- Excellent okay so to the meat of what we need to do tonight. Tom Preston- Is. Tom Preston- One night, I do just want to recenter on the problems that we're intending to address just. Tom Preston- Not not just for Council before everyone watching and for this being recorded to kind of recenter and the why of what we're doing. talk about the key questions that we need to answer in order to finalize the ballot titles, and then just make sure we're all clear on next steps. So first is the condition of our police facility. Underneath our feet right now, it's in the basement of a masonry building that's 100 years old, and it's in a minimally converted fire engine bay. It was intended to be temporary when they moved in in 2011 while we looked for other options and continue to be down there today. So it's just generic office space. It doesn't have any of the functionalities of a police station. No ventilated evidence processing where they need to handle things like fentanyl, methamphetamine, gunpowder. It has no backup power, does not meet public safety seismic standards, no interview room or ability to take video and audio recordings other than maybe with a handheld device. We don't have professional meeting space or places to change clothes, shower. The vehicle entry is where fire engines would drive into and then underneath into the fire bay before they would exit onto Oak Street. So this is a driveway that was never intended for any vehicle to back out of. And we have our first responders on priority calls with lights and sirens backing up out of there. Parking is not covered, which is important during inclement weather. And we don't have any professional meeting space. Getting into those studies of alternatives, we have looked at multiple different options for the police station going back, actually documents all the way to 1996. We've been tackling this intermittently without coming to a conclusion that gets the police out of these substandard facilities. So our last effort, in 2019 through 2024. We looked at, toured other facilities to learn what a modern police station is. We looked at various site alternatives and even explored co-location opportunities with the county. None of those came to fruition. I think the top rated site was on the Columbia lot. You can imagine with all the parking discussions that we've had tonight, how popular that would be to take half of the Columbia lot for a police station. And similarly, nothing has moved forward with the new county courthouse as well. So that's why we switched focus to the current site. So the options, first is $6.7 million to renovate the basement to essentially what we should have built for the police department in 2011. It hits some of those real just basic functionalities of a police department and fits our current police department staff. The $8.7 million option adds a second floor addition to City Hall. And so what that does is it allows for expected staff growth over the next 20 years. So it allows us, the conference room is moved up for that second floor, which allows additional office space in the basement for an additional second detective and also a police captain in the future. It also provides an elevator and a, stairway built to current building standards. So it makes essentially the ADA improvements that the City Hall would have had to have if it was built today. Getting into housing unaffordability, just a few of the stats on housing production versus what is needed. This graph shows the dark bar the dark empty bar is our current deficit based on the oregon housing needs analysis and then the dotted line is the additional uh development over and above that deficit that we need over the next 10 years and then as uh best of my abilities i counted up all the in-process production and some of this is i'd say very long-term and speculative um just like uh pre-application conferences for future subdivisions that haven't even gotten approval yet. The big bar for the 30 to 60% of AMI, that's completely Mariposa Village. It's nothing else. And the reason why we're in such a deficit is because the private market has not been producing housing nearly to the extent that it's needed. We were getting new housing permits in about the 40 to 60 per year rate in the 2010s. And then since the pandemic, that's just fallen down to a trickle. And the one exception is the city-sponsored Mariposa Village, which is that green bar in 2025 when that was permitted. And the dotted line is our target of about 110 units per year that Hood River would need to produce in order to meet its proportional share of statewide housing production targets. So maybe not surprisingly, but as production has slowed, housing prices have gone up much faster than household income. The ratio of income or the ratio of housing home value to household income was about five to one in 2012, which was still pretty high. A three to one is a good rule of thumb for what's affordable for the average person. So if your household makes 100,000, maybe you'd be looking at a $300,000 house. We've climbed up to a 8.4 to one in 2024 with the median home value being $716,000 versus an $86,000 household income. Now, as housing prices increased, they were somewhat blunted by mortgage interest rates that were moving down towards zero. But then during the pandemic, so this graph shows what income the median household would need in order to purchase the median home in Hood River if they had 20% down and got a 30-year mortgage. The amount of income you needed shot up as interest rates shot up in 2022 And so while we've been dealing with housing as a key issue in Hood River for many years, it really has become just a yawning gap in the past three years. And then the so what of why does this matter to maybe folks who have bought their house back in the 1990s and are dealing with affordability issues of themselves today? So one is that four out of five Hood River workers live elsewhere and commute into town. That creates road congestion for everyone as a large workforce filters in and out, splinters the community as these folks work here, but they do not maybe connect and volunteer here and maybe not coach here. And it drives declining school enrollment. when people cannot form families here. Over the past 10 years, the population of zero to 17 year olds in Hood River County has dropped over 17%. That's the second highest in the state of Oregon over that time period and compares to a 6% decline statewide. For community safety perspective, one half of our police and fire staff not only live outside of the city, but live outside of Hood River County. It means they may be cut off from the city during inclement weather if I-84 gets shut down. And then just finally that 53% of renters are housing costs burdened. That's difficult on them, but it's also difficult for the local economy as they aren't able to fully participate in investing in education, goods and services. And then I have a full list of all the activities that we've done to address housing. I'm gonna skip over that. I think there's a problem with the PowerPoint. But just want to make sure that we're all kind of aware of how a housing bond could be used. It's pretty unique. It's pretty new to Oregon. Portland adopted theirs in 2016. Metro just a couple years later. And then Salem about a year or two ago. And we would be the first small rural Oregon city to take one on. So what it would allow us to do is acquire land, often at a better price than what the private market can do, because one, we can close quickly, pay cash. The seller may be motivated by a sense of public interest. civic responsibility to support housing. And we also have lower costs of borrowing. So we pay lower interest than other folks. Once we acquire land, we do a developer solicitation and selection. We list all of our goals and that's in conjunction with the community, just like we did for Mariposa Village. In that project, we wanted green building standards, new publicly accessible park, trail connections, and then also as much affordable housing as we could build. We were hoping to have some ownership components and a mixed income set of units. We were a very small minority of the funding for that project, about $1.7 million. Over $55 million of state and federal funds came in. And so the product that you see is really a function of what those state and federal dollars would fund, we would have much more ability to have local control over the next project where a bigger part of the capital stack with local funding. And then the developer moves on, gets all their funding and financing together. We close on the deal, construction begins. And I think Mariposa Village, even if the next project doesn't look like Mariposa Village, shows that Hood River can execute successfully a locally sponsored housing project. Getting into how much a bond could cost. So we have two clear options with the police department. We have the basement only at 6.7 million or the addition at 8.7. That would come to a tax impact of about $5.50 per month for the typical property owner. or for the basement or $7 per month for the larger project. And these are preliminary. When we completely finalize the bond titles, we'll update all of the assumptions behind these. And then for affordable housing, it's completely up to the council. There is no right, there's no objectively correct number to choose. As we've shown with Mariposa Village, we turned $1.7 million into 130 units and a spectacular project. With more money, we can do more and we can have more local control and we can reach different populations. And that's the give and take between then what the voters will accept and can afford. But I have two examples here. One is what the bond size would be if we chose the same rate that Metro voters chose or that Portland voters chose. And that would be a $4.9 million bond versus an $8.6 million bond. And then I have the average cost for the typical homeowner. So the key questions that we need to answer tonight, and thank you, this has been a very long conversation, I know. is what bond measure or measures to move forward. Is it gonna be a combined police and housing measure or two separate? Will it be one and not the other or nothing at all? And then we need to decide on the bond amounts, straightforward for police, not as straightforward for the housing bond. And then the housing bond additionally, we need to set our definition of affordability. For the housing bond in Portland, they chose 60% of area median income and less. Metro chose 80% of area median income and less. The state of Oregon's constitution allows the sponsoring jurisdiction to set any number that they want. Bond proceeds will only be able to be used to support housing affordable to incomes of that AMI level. But as we also know, these housing bonds will be a small proportion of the total funding mix. So this doesn't necessarily preclude mixed income developments and also common amenities like a community center, trails, parks, roadways, infrastructure, and things like that that are just part and parcel with the housing development. So with that, I'd say these are the must decides, and then you have draft ballot language in your packet, primarily modeled after Metro and Portland for the housing bond, and then modeled after some similar public safety facilities in some other cities for the police bond with our specific information inserted. So it's all up for debate and decision, but these are the bare minimum that we need to move forward.

Thank you, Will. Very well organized. Appreciate you. I can imagine an idea. Does somebody have an idea for how to shape this discussion?

Doug? I think what Will just had on the screen is probably the order.

Yeah.

I can probably remember it. But yeah, if we went, let's talk about one, let's talk about two, let's talk about three.

So I have a question about number three. To ensure that we're not being too rigid and can be flexible with the funding, given the comment that that individual gave around like 30% and below, How do we do that to ensure that it is broad and it can potentially support a variety, like the spectrum of AMI?

So it's 80% and below will include 30. So the higher you set it, the more inclusive it is also, but it probably becomes harder and harder to message. And I'd say, you know, the draft ballot language includes an oversight committee. And so we are going to, as I've been saying to people is, you know, ask what specifically are you going to do land trust? Are you going to do, you know, supportive or permanently supportive housing for very low income? all of that, like it was with, um, Mariposa villages, we, we set out the goals, but ultimately we were dictated by the market conditions and the developers that we, that we came to through an open and competitive process. So to a large, there's going to be, uh, so much that is going to be just time specific and making the best choice for the money that we have, given the goals that we have that, um, I would suggest maybe leaving it more open-ended and that gives us the flexibility to best leverage funds, make our best deals.

Well, I'm happy to just go through the three. So I would support having two separate measures and really honing in on the personal stories, you know, in the housing bond, having an individual who is housing challenged. And to Councillor Stepina's comment earlier, I didn't hear any of the messaging around the black mole down in our police department area. or water. So I think that there is some extra talking points that we can deliver so that folks can truly see the impacts of it. As far as the bond amount, I'd be open to the $8.7 million for the renovation and the city hall expansion. And also that we do have those additional $2 million to be able to leverage through the additional grant that was presented to us. As far as the housing bond for the housing bond, you know, I was looking at the amounts, right? And it's like less than a cup of coffee a month. And I know that at some point we all buy a cup of coffee. So I would be open to maybe having a discussion around additional funding so that it's closer to, I don't know, eight or $9 and that we go to 80% and below for AMI. Okay.

Thank you, Will. Spent a lot of time thinking about this and have received so much information from you and just couldn't say more about the job you're doing. So bond measures to forward, I think it's, I would like to further both of them. I think that two separate is how I'm leaning compared to combined. And that's mostly because about how do we get the message out? accurately. Like, as it was said earlier, there's a title, somebody reads that, somebody reads the caption, by the time we get down to the voters pamphlet, you know, so I think it needs to be succinct as much as it can be. And I think that's why I'm leaning to two separate ones. It'd be difficult to craft a meaningful message about two separate issues in that small of real estate. Bond amounts, I mean, in favor of the 8.7 million for the police bond, the housing bond. Will, were you able to get... Will and I talked earlier just to give everybody a visual of what does this look like? I think everybody thinks about this in terms of the typical monthly cost. It seemed like from the polling that we were starting to get less favorable as it got over $10. Similar to Councilor Rivera, I think that you know, eight to 10 million is digestible, you know, maybe making it, you know, $8 or something like that on average. You know, I don't think we should go for 2 million or something like that. I think we should, based on seeing this information, you know, I think we should discuss, you know, eight to 10 million.

Would there be any wisdom in doing an equal amount

Yeah, you know, Will and I were talking about that too. It's just like... 8.7 police, 8.7... Yeah, it's simple to think of it that way, right? I'd be in favor of something like that too. And it does show that we're thinking about capping these sorts of things and not just, you know, asking for all this money, right? I think it also displays that... you know, people can easily think about what the total is going to be without doing too much math. I think is, is, is a good, good check for that too. Um, similar to council Rivera, I think as we start talking about messaging, you know, um, expanding a police facility to meet modern standards sounds like a nice to have, right. Um, I think we have black mold. We have, um, unsafe driving conditions to get out of the building, unsafe conditions regarding things like the fentanyl hood. And I think the messaging is working. Everybody that I've seen that have seen the videos are like, oh my gosh. I did not know it was that bad. You know, that sort of thing. So I just, I think it's a degrading facility. I think our police have done a tremendous amount with what they've been given and it doesn't degrade their service, but it's a dismal place down there. And our messaging has to reflect that versus... hey, let's spruce it up a little bit. It could use, you know, it needs to be remodeled. And I think it needs to be remodeled in a way where we can have growth. And I think it also should be noted that if we're working on this facility, that if the police move out someday, there could be more offices for the city employees as well, right? Public works, we're out of space for everybody. How we define affordability. I agree with Councilor Rivera. I don't think we should be too restrictive. 30 to 60 is we've seen a bunch of growth because of Mariposa Village. I think that's great, but we probably shouldn't, you know, we should say something like 80% or lower. I think we would, 120% is what I would like. I don't think people would understand that as well because it's hard to put what area median income is relative to what people understand, you know, in terms of affordability and in a short, succinct way. So I would agree with something like 80% or below. I think that's all three of them.

Yeah, I think the data has worn out that we're going to have to do two separate bonds. I think we've pretty well established that. Also in favor for the 8.7 in part because it's like, You know, one, this is long overdue. I think we've done a decent job of communicating the length of time that this has been kind of, you know, not to disrespect past councils, but, you know, has been punted and just, you know, carried along here. It's also like, we know that costs of things go up and if we're going to have to eventually do this in the future, like spending an extra couple million dollars to get something that we actually truly need or will need to me is kind of a no-brainer personally. You know, in terms of the housing, you know, I am inclined to, I mean, certainly support 80, but I'm more inclined to say 120 just to have the wiggle room to you know to not limit our opportunities I understand the challenges of messaging that which is you know kind of why I brought that up earlier is that people don't don't realize what that is in this town and it's you know it's significant so but you know that's not something to get too hung up on yeah I just want to discuss that real quick with you so I'm totally sympathetic to that like

Just question that might make you think a little bit more about that. Will, like how hard would it be able to define those in language and say like 120, which is...

I have a table here. So for two people, 100% of AMI is $94,000. 120% is $112,000.

So what Ben's saying, I think when you see that, you're like, oh, that's not that. That's 120. I thought you're a millionaire or something like that. So with that context, I think it speaks volumes, right? So I'd be open to 120 if we could work that into the... the language without taking up too much real estate.

Yeah. And again, I think it also speaks to people, you know, the comments of, of that, that missing middle and, and, you know, the, the housing that they feel like is not feel like the housing that isn't, isn't being graded for, you know, not necessarily the like lower end. Um, and then let's see here.

Um,

Yeah, I guess that is, oh, in terms of the number, uh, for the housing bond, um, You know, I think I would be, I like Paul's idea of the 8.7, 8.7. Like that's again, you know, uh, it's the 8.7 is kind of in the wheelhouse of what we're looking at. Um, and I think that is easier for messaging as well in terms of keeping the numbers straight. So, yeah.

Mayor Mrakas, And i'm in line with everybody else on issue number one of keeping the the one measure measures separated. Mayor Mrakas, I think that that seems like a good idea i'm also aligned with going for the 8.7 million basis innovation and expansion, just because. Mayor Mrakas, It is long overdue and I wish we could do more for the police. where that takes care of our community and it's not just an investment in our lease, it's an investment in our community. So it really is, it's good for everybody. On the housing bond piece, I'm... I would go with the recommendation of whatever you guys want to do for the amount and the definition of affordability. I think it's pretty easy to, you know, in a sentence or two, you can say currently the AMI in Hood River is $94,000 or whatever it is. And then in order to qualify for the average cost of a home in Hood River right now, you would actually need to make this much more. So 120% of AMI means that you make this much money. And this is, you know, these are the people that would be able to qualify for housing that could be affordable. That was a very articulate, but I'm sure you could do it in a sentence or two, or at least our consultants that we pay could do that. So yeah, that's my...

I'm in close sync with what I've been hearing, except I actually have somewhat of a strong opinion that it would be inadvisable to go 120%. I think keeping it lower, I think the sympathy vote for somebody making $100,000 a year is less than the sympathy vote for an 80% AMI family.

Is it possible to phrase it like zero to 120% AMI as opposed to saying like up to 120% AMI? Because I think there's absolutely merit to what you all are saying, but having that range in there, it's like we could go up to that. We could go down to this. I mean, I don't know if- Emphasizing, right? Yeah. I know I'm putting more words in the reduced language that we have to talk about this, but-

Well, I'm thinking about things like land trust support, right? Do we know the last one that closed roughly what the AMI was for the people that bought it? If it was like 130 or something like that or 120? I don't know. I don't know the answer.

I don't know if you think the eligibility was up to 120. I don't know what the actual individual ended up being.

Okay, so they were a little under 120. So if we said 80, we couldn't do that again. So that to me is scary.

Yeah, I'm pretty much in line with everything. Two measures is good. 8.7, because if we're doing it, we might as well plan for the future and not just bare minimum of what we need now. And I think... I'd kind of be curious to know if there are any other towns with this horror of a police station. You toured other ones and everybody has state of the art, all the things. Are there any other towns like ours that have no locks and no you know ventilation system and all the things that we don't have so i don't know if that could be helpful in messaging but i i personally would be curious to know that um and i think yeah it's not about spruce up it's about safety and all health and yeah all the things so

I don't know if Neil knows of any, but I know we were looking at Tigard recently went for a new police station facility and they were unsuccessful, but we were looking at their bond video and we're saying, we're just trying to get to what they're trying to replace. Right. Yeah.

I think that's kind of powerful. The housing bond, I think I like the going, making them the same number just for simplicity. And it's kind of where we want to fall anyway, I think for the housing. Definition of affordability. I like having the flexibility of 120 if we can craft the wording correctly. I don't know if 100% is an option, too, because that might be more straightforward and less confusing. 120%, but I think the higher we can go, the better, as long as we can make it clear about what those numbers are.

I guess one thought I would maybe place, and I don't I mean, you know, your choice. The mayor's kind of along with the mayor. We did ballot test low income. So all of our polling was to support low income housing. And I know we get to define that under state law, but I'm just wondering if that would correspond with what the person answering the poll had in mind when they said, yes, I would support low income housing if they had up to 120% in their mind.

Doug and then Grant.

Thank you, Grant. Yeah, well, I think it's relative, right? So if I think back to like the yawning gap metric that we have, right? AMI doesn't mean purchasing power necessarily. It just means that's what people make here, right? And again, back to Councilor Mitchell's point, it's like, what is that? Speaks pretty, like speaks fines, right? So saying, you know, I don't know. Right, like what's low income, right? Like it's more like low options for housing or housing, know what i mean because that's what it's really that's really what we're talking about here um is even people that are making 120 have very little options and who these people are you know what band is a uh a dental assistant within you know i mean that sort of stuff is i think we'd be all surprised to be like oh well they're like 100 but we can't dentists aren't finding them or you know i'm just Not saying that's something we know, but like that's an example of the kind of thing we hear from all different types of employers that they're finding it very hard to employ people. And that's just not people that are in zero to 30 or 30 to 60. It's all across the board. So the most we could do, I think, is the best option.

Yeah.

Sure, thanks. It sounds like we are all generally in agreement that we're going to do two separate bonds so that people will have a vote on either one, whichever they wish to pass. And we are generally in agreement that we will do the 8.7 police bond, which will give future councils optionality in terms of how they structure, how the city will operate in the future, both in terms of addressing future city needs, police, whatever the city needs will be. The only thing we seem to be discussing is the level of AMI to provide flexibility with how this bond will be. Generally, I'm of the opinion that if we end up rearing the emotional perception of low income and how people perceive low income, Generally, that's my impression is that's sort of how people feel their own purchasing power or how people feel they're doing economically, socially, given a particular state in time. People's economic well-being, they may feel or see a slight steady state in their income, but their relative purchase power over time may be diminished. So they may feel, even though their purchasing power may increase, they may still feel emotionally lower income, even though their income may increase. So that may provide feedback on how people have answered that question with regard to the survey. So we, we may still answer and provide a set, set the gate at a hundred percent AMI and that emotionally may feel low income for people. Cause that, that, In my talking with people and understanding generally where people are generally at, people are still learning around 100%, still emotionally in the community, still feel like they're still struggling, struggling emotionally when they go to the grocery store or pay bills or that sort of thing, just as an anecdotal aside. So if we set the gate at 100% or so, it seems reasonable. Don't necessarily want to gate it too far or too high. That's where I sound like that or it seems like to me that.

Yeah, I mean, I was just going to say just humanizing number three. I mean, early on, we talked about do we use affordability versus attainability? You know, if we're saying, hey, if you make X amount of dollars, then this housing can be available to you as well. So definitely long-winded answer, how to shorten that and make it really sweet so that it fits on a ballot measure. Just humanizing that these numbers mean that you too can have housing at this level, like dignified housing, and that it's multiple levels. I mean, I know we don't have specific projects lined up already, but I mean, we can bring in Mariposa Village. We can also talk about the partnerships that have to be created and have been created for those that are 30%. I know that you and I chatted about this. MCAC is looking for actively in conversations for a year round shelter here. If that goes all through, then we could replicate the annex in addition to the Gloria Center. So I think just having folks understand that these partnerships are already taking place. They're just not necessarily right here in Hood River, but if we paint the picture, that might help with folks understanding what the attainability is for them.

I can see the language when, if we say 100% AMI, because I think you could, I mean, the lawyers will fight about it, but you could say for, for families of below median income, like that's a meaningful sentence, Doug.

Can you pull up the, the yawning gap? This is related to that. Exactly. So Um, and Jen, if you don't mind moving the, thank you. Um, so, so I think the two things that speak to me the most are, you know, you look at the median income relative to the income you need to buy a home and that's a huge gap, right? So, and then the other one is related not to, um, purchasing, but to renting is the the amount of people, regardless of AMI in our community that are rent burdened, which is 53%, I think it said. So 53% are paying over, I think it's 30%, but roughly a third, right? Those two things are the problem and why I think all bands of affordable housing are affected in that way, right? So yeah, if we have language in there around that, I think that that solves the misconception that 100 to 120 or anything that's above 50% or whatever somebody might think, that solves that sort of challenge or could.

I think we need to agree on a percent number tonight, right?

Right. I'm hearing broad consensus, so we'll see what we can set aside. 8.7 PD, 8.7 housing bond, two separate measures. I think that's pretty well settled, but yeah, it sounds like the outstanding is maybe the percentage.

What'd you say, Dennis?

We'll say.

So if any of us was choosing, how many would choose 120? There you go.

Thank you. I'll just real quickly hit next steps.

Yes, that's fine.

So I'm going to take all this work with bond council and Praxis folks, completely finalize the bond titles, get them cleared by legal, and then bring them back to you on July 27th. We can then enact authorizations, authorizing them, and we can send them off and be done. If we want to tweak them at all at that point, we will still have one more meeting to do so. So, I want you to know that because August 14th will be the absolute deadline to submit the bond documents to county officials. And for general awareness, in August, you're going to see all of our materials basically come down off of the webpage, and we're going to be scrubbing them for any sort of hint of advocacy. And it's going to be very plain Jane, very just fact-based with everything, all sources cited. We'll try to get the city materials back up in late August or September. But we'll kind of, us, we'll all kind of, all city staff will generally be on a neutral, just fact-based statement going forward. So just a lot of the production value that you've been getting used to over the past month, I just want to set expectations. That would be the way going forward. And then election day is November 3rd. Thank you. Daniel?

Regarding that, so this is sort of like the handoff that's like, council, now you have to do your work and get out into the community. So I would urge all of you to talk to community leaders and see if people are interested in PACs or those sorts of things to support these types of things. I know I've been having conversations with some people about that, but it's like rubber meets the road kind of time for us to...

Sell it.

Sell it. And obviously I think we all believe really strongly with the way we've been discussing that tonight, but look forward to that from everyone.

Amanda?

Will there be like some more clarity on what like exactly is fact and what you will be able to say? I mean, I guess it'll be obvious at some point, but for us going into that, like a police station or anything, you know, like what can you say versus we can say anything.

Yeah, it's in the scope of work for some political advocacy training for staff to make sure that we are fully in compliance with the Secretary of State. I'd say everything that we've been putting out, we've been citing sources, and I haven't been making anything up to date. It's all been facts. But I think it's more of a tone and approach. And I guess the Secretary of State, as I understand, are pretty big sticklers around really anything that has a whiff of advocacy, scrubbing that out.

Yeah.

All right. Can we keep moving on here?

Not to rush, but are we ready for the chief? Animal control. IGA. We're going to take a break. Sorry, chief.

How many minutes?

Four minutes.

Six.

All right, we're going to talk about the IGA. I kind of feel like the train's already left the station and we've stopped it, and it feels like we should have kind of been, it felt clunky, but we're going to roll with it. It really did.

Go, man.

The actual 125s on the packet has actually started the process of looking at the IGA. I did a cover sheet with the help of Abigail and Lieutenant Shaley. We're really going to look at as far as, we started this program in 1984 where the city actually adopted the county's ordinance to actually, so they could enforce, laws within the city as far as their animal control services over those years i started in 94 matt probably shortly after that um we they provided services through animal control always been one service officer for the whole hood of the county whether it's cascade logs or mount hood meadows so it's a one woman show i think it's always been a female too i don't think yeah yeah Our county. So we've had an IGA over the years. This is actually the first, just a caveat, first year that I've actually presented or even talked about the intergovernment agreement for a contract with Animal Patrol. So is good or bad, it happened. Several years ago, we'll actually put the IGA, as far as the funding for that, in my budget. I thought it was the most appropriate place to put. And so that happened when I think the last year your finance director kind of threw me a bone right as left. So So, for today, we're actually looking at what would that look like? It's almost a show and tell between Adopt-A-Dog, what Amanda does for services for us. We have this intergovernment agreement. It's a two-year contract right now. I would love to see that extend much longer, so... We're not here every two years looking at that. I think the contract we had for the last two years, the biggest fail, what I'm seeing is there was no escalators each year. I think we both realized that the cost should go up every year just because the cost of service happens. No matter what, when you see $32,000 and some change, that definitely is going to increase no matter what, just because over the years, we've been very fortunate that I think it just never got caught until we're like, oh, wow, there's no escalators for every year or that 3% or 3.5, whatever the cost of living should have increased every year and wages as they go up. So in that contract for us, they actually enforce animal control services. They also handle shelter care with no extra charge on our service fee for that. For her service. So they actually when we take an animal up there or Amanda takes an animal to the shelter. That's no extra fee for us. So it's just with our service contract for animal control services. It's all included. They handle all of the back end stuff. She'll probably explain to you a little bit about contacting owners, vaccination, that stuff that that handles between the county. We stay completely out of that. then they probably assist with adopt a dog that assists with that as well. It sounded like listening tonight. So they do all the enforcement as far as if someone gets a citation, Amanda goes to court or they do some kind of civil arrangement, you know, training, something like that. So they get all the fees, they handle all the licensing programs. It sounded like I listened to the budget this last year. You guys actually were fortunate enough to get a new program for that licensing, which will help the county overall. So yeah, That's kind of where we're at. I gave you three bullet points that kind of give your brains a little thought, like what would this IGA look like? My biggest concern for the city isn't animal control services. My biggest concern is animal control or animal shelter itself. If we don't have a place to take an animal, so I really, talking to Sheriff English, that that's the number one thing that I'm concerned about. No matter what happens tonight, the direction council wants to go, we need a place to bring animals, i.e. dogs, because that's what we have is a dog shelter. So that's my biggest concern was kind of the top of my list is what would that look like if adoptive dog leaves? What would the county look like if they had it? When I was a sheriff's deputy, we ran that program. We joke about it. We got like a small stipend on our days off to go up and give food and do the poop. So, you know, it's changed since then. So, so that's the old times. So that's kind of where I'm at. Amanda's here. I definitely want to Q and a answers questions and she'll probably give you a little information or back in what she's doing. So.

Thank you. Welcome.

Thank you. Amanda Cochrane- Good evening mayor and Council members, my name is amanda Cochrane green i'm the animal control deputy responsible for providing animal control services for this Community. Amanda Cochrane- there's a significant difference between the public perception of animal control and the reality of the job i'm not here simply to catch stray dogs. Animal control is a public safety function. It is law enforcement, code enforcement, emergency response, and public health. As the only animal control deputy assigned to this community, I am responsible for every animal related complaint that requires enforcement or intervention. That includes investigating reports of animal cruelty and neglect, enforcing state laws and municipal ordinances, issuing citations, serving court orders, executing search warrants when necessary, and working alongside law enforcement and prosecutors to ensure those laws are upheld. I respond to dangerous dog complaints, aggressive animals, stray livestock, creating traffic hazards, injured animals, nuisance complaints, and emergency calls. I recover deceased animals from the public roadways, impound stray and abandoned animals, and coordinate with the shelter and veterinary providers when necessary. I also manage the dog licensing program, maintain lost and found pet services, return animals whenever possible, and provide education to the public regarding local ordinances and responsible animal ownership. These services are not optional. They are expected by the public, required by law in many situations, and essential to protect the safety of this community. Animal control requires specialized training and knowledge of animal behavior, state statutes, evidence collection, disease prevention, shelter procedures, and safe capture techniques is not a responsibility that can simply be absorbed. Although field services are the most visible aspect of animal control, they represent only a portion of the responsibilities required to operate the program effectively. A significant amount of time is devoted to administrative duties, including preparing reports, documenting investigations, maintaining records, compiling and analyzing data, and managing the county's dog licensing program. These behind-the-scenes responsibilities are critical to ensuring legal compliance, fiscal accountability, accurate record keeping, and the efficient delivery of the services to the public. The success of the animal control program also depends on the support of numerous county departments. I rely on assistance of the Sheriff's Office Business Office, County Administration, Budget and Finance, and the Health Department, whose administrative and operational support is essential to the program's effectiveness. I am also grateful for the deputies and police officers who respond to animal-related incidents when I am off duty. Their partnership ensures that our community continues to receive timely assistance and that animal-related emergencies are addressed around the flock. There's one final point I want to make. While this job is rooted in law enforcement, public safety, and accountability, it also requires compassion. Every day I make difficult decisions involving injured animals, neglected animals, frightened families, victims of dog attacks, and owners facing circumstances they never expected. Compassion is not about avoiding enforcement. It is about exercising sound judgment, treating people with respect, treating animals humanely, and doing what is right even when the decisions are difficult. That balance between enforcing the law and serving the community is essential to this profession, and it is something I bring to every call I respond to. I take this responsibility seriously because every call represents someone in this community who needs assistance, whether that means protecting the public from a dangerous animal, investigating cruelty, reuniting a family with a lost pet, or making a difficult enforcement decision, my commitment to serve this community professionally, fairly, and with integrity. This contract is not paying for someone to catch loose pets. It is funding an essential public safety service performed by one trained professional who is dedicated and responsible for every aspect of animal control within this jurisdiction. The need for these services is not going to diminish. Public safety, enforcement, and accountability require a dedicated animal control deputy, and I stand prepared to continue providing those services to this community.

Thank you, Amanda.

Thank you.

What's next?

Thank you, Mayor. So we brought this to you today to ask questions. You have seen the current IGA and any direction you would like to give us as we negotiate with the county for a future IGA.

Chief, how did it work before there was a hookah ratio?

The county is always take care. This would be a great question. I'm going to wing it. You butt it in. So the sheriff's office is responsible for the animals. They have an agreement. That's their facility.

I'm sorry, chief. I can't have feedback from the audience. This is a very difficult conversation and moving your head around. It's very disruptive. Thank you.

So they, they, they, whether we, or they take it based on our IGA, we agree to take the dog when, when a man is not working because it's a 24 hour service we provide. It goes to the shelter. And then ultimately when we drop it off the shelter, It's the counties' services that were, at that point, they're providing to us to take over the dog.

So there was a building in 1998 or something?

When I started service, there was always a building up there. We always had to go to Odell.

Thank you. Anna.

I have a few general questions. The memo that we got said that revenue from fines are deposited in the Hood River County Dog Control Fund. I was wondering if the county could just confirm that that fund exists, and I'm curious how those proceeds are allocated. Yeah.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Matt English, Hood River County Sheriff. So the funds are part of the revenues that offset costs for our animal control program.

So that money goes into funding the position that is the animal control position. And as far as... I feel like my focus tonight is City Council Chambers, You know we're talking about the intergovernmental agreement between the city and the county to provide animal control services. City Council Chambers, And I wanted to understand, like how much of like so the money that we give goes to funding that position, the animal control officer position and then as far as. City Council Chambers, What that position. like what does that actually provide to city citizens? Because as a city citizen, we pay our city taxes and our county taxes. So we actually are paying for this twice. And so I'm just wanting to understand then what revenue is going to actually operating this shelter. Because when we're paying to have the animal control services taking care of for the city by the county, then is our money going to the shelter operations, which the county is only funding through its own agreement between the county and the shelter and adopted on because they're the ones that they're your kind of third party contractor that's operating the shelter. You guys aren't actually operating the shelters, that's correct?

That's correct. We own the building.

You own the building, but it's leased to Adopt-A-Dog?

Yeah, for $0, basically $1. Right.

And then you guys, under the IGA that the county has with Adopt-A-Dog, the shelter provider, services provider, the county is paying money directly to Adopt-A-Dog to operate that shelter, a small person?

Currently we are, yes.

Okay. And actually, I... You can Google and find the document. I looked at that, and I understand that in the past, the county has communicated to adopt a dog that they cannot contract directly with other entities but that's not actually what the contract says it says that that the county can't um the adopt a dog can't uh provide services to another public agency for a fee lower than that paid by the county so um one of the things that i want to understand is you know um maybe amanda you can answer this or sheriff english you could um how how much of your calls are actually um do you address in the city like the the memo also says that you um currently work a weekday schedule and is that like monday through friday nine to five like you know and and outside of those hours then is our our city police are driving out to odell are they're actually addressing calls but not enforcing anything because We don't have a city ordinance. We just have the county ordinance. So can you kind of help us understand a little bit of how much of your time are you actually providing services to the city? Because really, it sounds like the shelter services agreement between you and Adopt-A-Dog, they're the ones that are actually providing the services if you're off duty. And so I just would like to have a better way.

I think, well, that's a lot of things. So if hopefully if I miss something, let me know. But so kind of going back. So it's not just about again, like Amanda said, if you're looking for a dog catcher, then this is the wrong program. It's a lot larger encompassing program. So this is animal control that takes cooperation with multiple county departments. We're doing the licensing. The county administration has taken on the cost to do all of the hearings. So we have employed or contracted with an attorney to do all the hearings. It's not a moneymaker. So, you know, kind of as you asked about at the very beginning, the funds going in to offset costs, that just goes into one piece of the program. So essentially this year, just to give you kind of context, so just the animal control program or Amanda's program is about $120,000 cost. Historically, the city of Hood River accounts for anywhere between 33 to 39% of her workload. But again, we're talking about licensing. We're talking about hearing. We're talking about court time. The other thing that you're paying for is we take on all your liability because there are responsibilities. So there's a difference here. I feel like we're pitted against adopt-adopt. It's if this or that. They're different things, but it shouldn't be one or the other because they're both very important. But animal control is more out in the field. We're dealing with owners, we're educating, dealing with the vets, nuisance complaints. We have houses where Police officers are responding three, four, or five times maybe at night because dogs are barking and people can't sleep. Well, Amanda's doing all the follow-up on that the next day. I would expect the city police officers to take more calls than her because there's 168 hours in a week. It takes 4.2 people to cover 168 hours. She's one person working a 40-hour work week. So, a lot of the work that we're doing is during the work week because we're dealing with businesses, we're dealing with vets, we're dealing with things that are open during Monday through Friday. We don't want to work in the evenings where we're waking people up and things like that, but we are following up on those calls. ultimately the city may take a call like a police officer may take a call but that is routed to amanda for follow-up so she's doing that long term working with the folks to to basically um find a solution and sometimes those take months Some of the other things just that weren't covered. So the term a dog with stripes is basically a dog that is under court order. Thankfully, it doesn't happen a lot here, but when it does, it can be extremely expensive. And so we're taking that on. That's part of what you are paying for is we're taking that on, not charging back. Like a dog could spend three nights in the shelter or if they're under a court order, they could be there for months. And I've seen that. in my time, thankfully not very often, but it gets contentious. We're talking about legal battles. We're talking about attorney's fees for us to defend that on behalf of the city. So I think that's really important. to note as well. Again, not very often, but when it happens, it's really costly. In fact, we've had to take these things as far as the Oregon Supreme Court. There's a Supreme Court ruling on animal control out of Hood River County, and that was taken forward from the Sheriff's Office. What else did I miss? What did I miss?

I had another question for you. If You were talking about dogs with stripes and some of these other things. I know that in the county's current IGA with the adopted dog, there's a provision in there that says euthanasia is not allowed unless it's required. No dog in the legal custody of the county shall be euthanized unless it's recommended by a licensed vet or it's required by you. I'm just wondering if... if adopt-a-dog goes away and you don't have them running the shelter anymore, or if the shelter were to close, what's going to happen to animals in our community? And is the nature likely to be what will occur?

Yeah, I mean, it's not ideal, and hopefully that's not a scenario that we're dealing with. But I will tell you, I mean, I don't want to get too far in the weeds, but I did it before, like as far as the managing the shelters under the sheriff's control, but up to like 10 years ago, I employed kennel workers. And so that was that wasn't ideal. And that's why I had gone to the county administrator at the time and said, hey, what if we gave adopted dog full use of the building because they had use of two thirds of it. And in exchange, it was about an hour or so of work per day. It was going in to clean the kennels and make sure that the dogs in there had food or water. But it was finding a way to disposition them. And no, we weren't putting a bunch of dogs to sleep, but that's why it's ideal to have an adoption service. But we've done it before without. And Previously, it puts more load on the animal control deputy. And as you heard from what she presented tonight, her job's big. There's a lot to it. And she wears a ton of hats. And so it's one more thing. And that's what the issue was when we employed essentially kennel workers is it's one more thing she's managing now personnel and making sure that she's setting schedules and things like that so it wasn't ideal but it was it was done and before the shelter was built before the current shelter was open we contracted with vets and we had kennel space at multiple vets and ballet and we've done that as well

Thank you. A couple things, I guess. So if IGA goes forward a new one, can we not have language that says we cannot fund Hood River Adopt-A-Dog, or is that something that's going to stay?

It's not in there now, right?

So I don't think that's in there now. I think the language that Councilor Cavallari was referring to was in the lease between the county and Hood River Adopted Dog. We're not a party to that. So... But certainly if you want to give us some direction and things you'd like to see in the IGA, you can share that with us.

And I appreciate your, your looking at that and everything. I just don't, I don't know if that's legally defensible or anything like that. I think it's, I think I agree. It's, it doesn't seem like it's ironclad, but like, that's what we've been hearing is similar to the chief, you know, like, and I do think these things are mutually exclusive, but I, you know, I, I can't imagine, um, a scenario where there's animal control and no Hood River Adopt-a-Dog or there's Hood River Adopt-a-Dog and no animal control, right? So I think that that's what we have to build towards. And if there's direct funding that has to be discussed and everything, I don't want to be prevented from having that discussion because of something in an IGA. So that's number one. Number two, Sheriff Angus, are there plans after the Hukari Fund is exhausted to fund Hood River Adopt-a-Dog like you've been doing? Or is that...

So as like much or very similar to what the chief said, like the chief, this is the first time that she's been involved in the IGA that I'm not involved and haven't historically been involved in that. That's a totally separate. IGA it's with the government county government and with adopt a dog I don't have control over the Hukari fund it's not under the sheriff's office it's a separate fund that's managed by the county so I can't answer that question but I mean I know about it I know it's depleted but I don't know what the plan is so it's really the legislative body and I'm executive branch so yeah Allison can you speak to it yeah thank you

Appreciate that, Sheriff.

Good evening, happy to be here. Yes, so the Hukari Fund, the way it was established, it was a beneficiary fund, not set up as an endowment, but used for operations. And that has come down to its last $36,000. And so the anticipation is that a part of the budget process would be the consideration of a request from Hood River Adopt-A-Dog. They did put a request in for our budget process this year for $200,000 for that service. And as you all are aware, our county is going through a fiscal sustainability assessment and looking at the provision of essential services. I think what the sheriff described to you is there is a level of service that statutorily we would provide through this and Hood River adopted dog provide service over and above what is statutorily required. So I think it becomes a budget consideration for the future. And it will be factored in with all of the other essential services that the county will provide. or is able to provide in a sustainable manner in the future. So much to come at our July 20th meeting as we lay out the foundation of what is facing the county here in order to become sustainable and provide the services that we do.

I imagine it probably may or may not have, but I'll just ask the question, you know, is there ever been discussion of Oh, if we partnered with the city at the county to fund, would that be something that would make it easier for the county commissioners to think that it's less burdensome upon the county? Or have those types of discussions taken place?

I absolutely think that this example represents a longstanding partnership that the analysis that our consultants have done have said there are many other opportunities where the city and county can partner to be more efficient in our services. This is one great example that I think, yes, our commission would be welcoming of the partnership.

Thank you.

Thank you all so much for being here and for the services that you provide to our community. On page 128 of our packet, we have a letter from the Board of Commissioners, from our chair, Ms. Hewer, and one item that I brought up at our last meeting that just drew my attention was that the county has the resources and the capacity to provide those services around animal control. And I think what we're hearing in the situation that we're in right now is that that's not completely true. We have a stats page and I guess I just want to understand this piece. There's a table and it says deputies. So I'm assuming that means sheriff's officers. In the data page? Okay. And then when it says officers, I assume that means city officers. Yes. Okay. So when I look at the total number of calls between the animal control and deputy and the officers, I can't help but notice that there is a significant disparity. And then it seems that it is city officers that are going out for more calls for service versus the animal control calls.

This is the city's statistic.

Okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This has nothing to do with outside the city limits. Okay.

This is all calls for animals.

Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Understood. Thank you for clarifying that. So, I think that my concern is that, you know, I hear the county is in a budget deficit and trying to figure out ways that it's so important that we do partner as much as we possibly can. But, you know, the city is already paying up to 60-some thousand dollars in addition to our officers' time to go out and respond to the calls. And when I do the math, I mean, that's definitely over $20,000. And so I'm trying to understand there's $32,000 and then there's still our officers times for the calls that are being taken and that that is quite a significant amount.

I would, my recommendation, obviously, this is a partnership. It is an optional service for the city. And so in order to evaluate the service, I think if you were to go through the process to identify the cost, were you to stand up your own program, you're having access to an officer, the court system, the shelter, and all of the work for $32,000 a year. I would represent that our contract is not fully accounting for the escalation in cost of staff time, which is a significant issue for us, just representing what it costs to employ a good member of our force today. So I think that's a cost-benefit analysis the city needs to go through.

No, and I hear that. And again, completely open and appreciate the partnerships, right? It takes both entities, governing bodies to make sure that our constituents have the services that they need. But just based off of the information right now, I feel, based off of this information, that it seems like the city is providing a lot more than the county. And again, I do not understand your day-to-day operations. I would be completely open to going on a ride along with you to understand the whole process that you go through that isn't shown on, on paper here. I am just, I'm not sure if like you're fine. They're increasing on a, on a yearly basis, understanding that FTE will continue to go up. So can you maybe talk about those pieces? Like, Is that going up every year, the fees that you're charging, like your licensing fees, all of that?

First of all, I want to get back to the table real quick. This data here that you see for inside the city limits, that is just calls for service. That is someone calling non-emergency or emergency line saying, we have a dog problem. That's all these are. There's nothing outside that. I want to support her as far as when she says the back-end things, as far as is it licensed? Do we have to cite them? This is literally just when someone calls... The 911 dispatch center, whether it's emergency or non-emergency, that's what this data pulls from. Calls for service within the city limits. It doesn't say anything else after we get the dog. Before that, it's just someone's called up and said, hey, there's a problem with the dog. Or there's times where we'll arrest maybe someone and they'll have a dog. And if she's working... you know, we'll have them come pick it up. So I just want to clarify that real quick, just because she had mentioned earlier, there's definitely a lot of work outside that you can't see for just a call for service.

And I want to be really clear. My intention is not to dismiss any of the work that you're doing in any way, shape or form. I had an opportunity to go on a ride along with an officer. And so I'm just trying to understand like the process and just how much additional work, right? So In that somebody gets a call, it's still a city officer that is responding to the scene. And let's say it's a Friday, right? My understanding is that you're not there on Friday. So it's still a city officer that is responding to that call. And then what happens?

then it gets referred to us because they're not seeing that through. Because if there needs to be additional enforcement, if it's just a dog that needs to be picked up, then that dog gets picked up. And then Amanda dispositions that we do the county hold period, which is statutorily required under ORS 609. I want to back up before I get too far down this road and just address one thing you had asked to help for clarity. So Animal control is not a statutory mandate. It's not a statutory mandate of the sheriff. However, if a government entity chooses to have it, then you have to follow ORS 609. But to answer your question, so because it's not a mandatory service, it's a special revenue fund. This isn't a general fund service. So you asked about the revenues coming in. So those revenues help, um, to make the fund whole, because we, if we have a shortfall, then we've got to find out the general fund doesn't cover it because it's not a general fund program. So, um, it's a standalone program. So I wanted to make sure I addressed that because when you asked it earlier, I didn't. So, sorry. Um, so I, so you asked about disparity. So, um, In reality, and I mean this respectfully, the city is grossly undercharged for the amount of work that we do. It is this 32,000 accounts for less than, it's more like a quarter of just her program. And then when we're talking about the hearings officer, attorneys, things like that, the costs just go up. So it's really is a good deal. And I totally understand The point that's been brought up like, hey, people who live in the city pay taxes. But again, it's not a mandatory program. It's not something that the sheriff provides. It wasn't covered by the public safety levy, although I wanted it to be because I wanted to expand our services. Yeah, I wanted to have multiple animal control deputies to respond because there's a lot of calls.

Thank you. That was one of my questions as well. And I hear you, and I absolutely believe that services are being undervalued or undercharged. I know that Councilor Cavalieri and I had a chance to meet with county folks to talk about some other issues, and we're seeing that there is a disparity in what is being charged to the city. So I, yeah, completely honor that. I guess what my last question is, though, I would really be open to joining you a day and trying to understand how this all works because just based off of the data that's given to us, I am walking away feeling like the city is doing quite a bit and recognizing that this amount doesn't continue to go up year after year.

These stats don't capture the position. I'd be happy to take you on a ride along anytime. You let me know. I'll come pick you up here and we can go.

Tell me what you guys think of this. I think we want to keep having an IGA with the county on this topic. I heard the chief say that there hasn't been a COLA, whatever we call that, a CPI adjustment. I think we should approve this IGA with like a couple of year look back, like wrap in a CPI adjustment and give that bump at this point and then going forward.

They did put one in place recently. I think what I would request, or actually, I was on vacation, Lieutenant Shaley requested, is that I went to Matt and asked that can we look at a new IGA agreement and see what that looks like as far as numbers amount and do we as a city, that's why we're here today, do you want to see a little bit of different language in there or something like that and maybe make an agreement through governments and see this is the direction and come to a final conclusion on dollar amount. and is the language appropriate that the city and the county wishes to move forward with. Ultimately, it's the county commissioners and city council that will ultimately be signing their name on that. So that's where I see it. Today, I believe it's just a show and tell, get feedback, and then ultimately the county will provide the city with the language of a contract and dollar amount, and then we'll need to go from there.

Thank you, Chief. Amanda, and then Doug. I'm sorry, was there something? I didn't see.

I definitely agree that, yes, we need an IGA. We need animal control services. It's really important. But I still have this huge question about the adopted dog and the shelter and how all that's working. I you know, now I assume, you know, these things to being on the same agenda, we might have a little bit more connecting the two of them. And I understand that you guys, you know, are not the budget people. I'm still like really curious about what the plan is. And I may know the County maybe doesn't have a plan, but do you like, what if adopt a dog? Like, I mean, even the chief kind of put in our notes, like, what if there is no adopted dog? What is your plan for a shelter? And, you know, is it, somebody goes there once a day because I think that sounds like really horrible for animal well-being like um and I only say that because that's was offered up a little bit ago um that's how it like used to be and I don't know I'm just I feel like I'm needing more on that and I don't know if it comes tonight or shortly but Doug and then Anna

Yeah, and I mean, I don't want to convolute these two things. I think they're musically exclusive in terms of what we have to execute upon. But I think my direction to staff personally would be, I need to understand what this partnership would look like in order to fund the shelter with the county in addition to this IGA as well. And I don't want to shortchange the IGA and just focus on Hood River Adopt-A-Dog. I don't want to do the opposite either, which I think we would risk doing. So I don't want to... Disassociate the two, even though they are mutually exclusive executables right we need we need to have both, in my opinion.

So I think having listened to amanda's presentation about the work that she does and what the program really entails. it's helped me clearly understand that the city's contract with the county is for animal control services. The county's contract with Adopt-a-Dog is for shelter services. And so we're not, the city is not in privity of contract with Adopt-a-Dog. Adopt-a-Dog is saying they do need support and they also do support the city because they house animals that come from the city and they get calls directly from citizens, I know, for assistance with dogs that are found if we can't get ahold, you know, if City citizens don't get ahold of police officers or animal control on the weekends and in the evenings. But I think, you know, the question that's before us is, should the city enter into another contract with the county to provide animal control service? What I'm thinking, I'm hearing from you, Chief Woolsey is, Yes, that's something that we need. That because the city doesn't have its own ordinances of how animal control is managed, that our ordinance that we adopted in 1984, whatever it was, was that we would hand that over to the county and their handle. So we don't have to, our officers aren't doing the administrative paperwork. They're not doing the follow-up. They're not doing, they're handing it off to the county and the county is providing that service for city residents. add a value to us. As Allison mentioned, if we were to set up our own program within the city, that would be hugely expensive and require a lot of time. What I was trying to understand in coming into this and looking at this information today was, does it make sense for the city to contract directly with it, adopt a dog, to provide shelter services for us, but we don't do just shelter services. The animal control piece is greater than just shelter services. And that's a very important part too. So one of the things I personally would like to see in an NIGA is I heard Chief Olsi say, be nice if we could come to some kind of an agreement that is longer than two years. The escalation piece does make sense because I think that we should gain a value for this service. For what what you know the county is doing for for the city in this, but I also think that we should have you know potentially have some kind of language in there about. The shelter services and making sure that that's the adequately funded because does does this contract still hold the same value for us if the county doesn't have. the shelter services in place as well. That's the piece I think we need to figure out. And that's where my line of questioning was coming from. But I still think it's important that the shelter services aspect of it is super valuable to our community. And I think that there is a distinction a little bit, like you had mentioned earlier, it's a tangential relationship But it's still really important to our community to make sure adopt-a-dog survives. So does that help?

Sounds like you're a contract attorney. I think that's the biggest thing that I wanted to say for tonight. I hope we get feedback for some language. I mean, not every day do we have the sheriff and Allison here because they're ultimately the ones going to write the contract and then present it to us. That's what we requested a couple weeks ago. So I think it's important that you'd stay in what is some language they might want to hear. What is there some length of contract? That's something else that I would love to hear. Like, I agree that the two year turnaround is like a blink of an eye when it comes to local government. We should not be here every two years battling this out. So there's just a few tangible things I'd like to see come out of the night at first. Like you said, if there's language that you'd like to hear.

Mayor, if I can summarize in my notes here, I think I've heard a consensus for a longer contract. We all would agree with that. The two-year contract. was as alice and i were both new kind of in a placeholder knowing that we would need to take time for a more in-depth contract so definitely want something longer i've also heard a desire that we um recognize the cpi or you know um union negotiations that uh so that we're truly compensating the county uh appropriately and then third i think maybe just some language of what happens if there is not Hood River Adopt-A-Dog or another group that's providing service. So that could either be, we ask to reopen the IGA at that time, or we can have them figure out what that would look like if there was not another group providing shelter services. We could just put some language in there that addresses that possibility. Is that a correct summary or is there nuance there that I've missed?

Everybody okay with that? Okay, Amanda, Doug, Anna.

I am good with that, but I do lean towards like the reopening the IGA if the shelter service changes, because I feel like that's a huge piece and I would want to be able to revisit, not just like, oh, we figured this out and we have to be okay with that, so.

Well, I think to be wise with my budget, not to offend anyone here, that would be my concern. If adopt a dog goes away, Will the county come back and say, we need shelter service money to fund that? That would be my only, right now we pay and that's all covered. So I don't know if that IGA was written like that, but right now it's golden for us. No matter what overhead costs at the end of the day, we have a flat fee every year.

Then at the same time, adopt dogs coming and asking us for money anyway. So it's like, I don't know.

Doug. And on that topic too, you know, I just don't, I think that the other thing that's lost in the summary is no language, debatable or not, you know, I think like back to Anna's point, like it doesn't seem like there is like something in that IG and it says that we can't contract directly with Hood River Adopt-A-Dog, but I don't want anything in there that says that because as we enter discussions with a partnership with the county, you know, the county might decide we don't have the money. I'm fully sensitive to what's going on with the county. I don't want us to be not able to have a discussion about funding Hood River adopted dog directly, should that be the case. If there is a partnership that's reached and we can provide them funds that through the county IGA with the shelter can go directly to the shelter to help fund it, I think that's great. But if we get to the point where it's, well, the county can't fund them, do we want to contribute? I don't want to not have that option.

Anna, and then Gladys.

To that end, because the shelter services is something that is included in the services that were being provided by animal control now, I mean, should the city be participant in the shelter services agreement? And if we do that, maybe if we're not paying enough, if the city isn't contributing enough towards animal control services, maybe that should be separated. And that's how we contribute towards shelter services is that we're a party to that agreement. I don't know if it's just an idea. I don't know if that complicates things, but that does open up a direct avenue for the city to help provide some funding towards a service that we're using. And some revenue goes directly towards shelter, potentially. I don't know what you guys think about that.

Sorry, Gladys, and then Doug.

So I think it's really important that we're having this discussion. But at the same time, I want to recognize that a couple months back, we were talking about a work plan and that we were discussing items to talk to the county commissioners. And I think this would have been a great one for us as elected officials to have conversations with other elected officials. For me, it is so important to understand the process in order to be able to help with the policy component, because if I don't understand the operations, I feel like I can't give feedback with my peers on good policy to move forward. I agree with the points that are being brought up, but I think that We should absolutely, we should have had a conversation with our county commissioners ahead of this meeting to discuss this and completely open to partnerships. We need each other in order to be able to make this work. And agree, it needs to be longer than two years.

Yeah, and say it plainly, like I don't want Hood River adopted dog to go away. I don't want to have bare minimum shelters services or to go back to the way it was. I think they provide a valuable service to the community. I think this community, in terms of the amount of dogs that are here and the amount of people that adopt dogs from there and the expectations for animal care, there has to be some way to ensure that that happens. So again, my only concern is that gets lost in the mix. I really look forward to having conversations with our peers on the County Commission to

find out what the best vehicle is be it you know what anna just suggested or or something else um that should be the goal we should work backwards from that okay does does abigail have have the nuance that we wish her to have we got it i hope so believe so any final can i just ask allison when the county commissioners will be reviewing a draft iga or when you think this might be on your agenda

I think that we need to put the draft together with you. And I think we were waiting for the committee to understand that. And I think we've got a new deadline of the end of August. So I think it would be August.

So I guess I would say to my elected officials, you have time to talk to your colleagues at the Board of Commissioners if you wish. You could also send them a letter or some other communication if you wish to do that, or you can delegate staff to take your concerns forward. And then Alison, as the direct report of the Board of Commissioners and the sheriff as one of their colleagues, a fellow elected, can work on that piece. I mean, you've given us all a lot of information to take forward. So you can have those conversations directly or you can delegate that conversation for us. And then we can bring you something at our August meeting.

Okay. Thank you so much, you guys.

Thank you, and I want to thank you all for staying. It's been a very long meeting, and I'd hope to have you home by 10 p.m., but I very much appreciate you being here tonight.

Now, federal immigration.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. This is a topic we've talked about many times, or at least kind of a history of immigration enforcement has been discussed many times. But tonight, I wanted to bring you specifically the question of if you wanted to provide some financial support to nonprofits to support family members who have been impacted by immigration enforcement in our community. I also want to acknowledge behind me is our district attorney, Matt Ellis. I asked him to join us in case folks had questions about immigration enforcement and how his office would handle complaints or reports of uh a federal immigration officer um breaking state law or breaking local law so um he is available i can send bring him up for questions first if you'd like or we can start with the conversation about financial support what are you guys like i think what you just said you know they just like to hear it from you okay yield the floor thanks for being here da sure it's still early um

Just to reiterate, I think it's a conversation we had last year about, and I know Councilwoman Rivera had asked a few questions about what it looks like to how my office gets notified if there's ICE agents that are breaking the law in our community. And it's difficult, is the short answer to it. I don't get... Quite frequently, we'll hear about the secondhand either from social media or from Martha Ortega-Verdusco, who's also still here, with our close working relationship with the Hood River Latino Network. But essentially, any kind of prosecution that would happen with any kind of federal agent breaking the law has, evidentially, it's much more difficult because the feds don't have to cooperate with getting us evidence. All the evidence I would get would come from these guys or the sheriff's office. And quite frequently when I hear about things secondhand, I didn't hear about it because there's nothing that made it to my office officially. I might hear about it through citizens calling me or reaching out to me or hearing about it from somebody else. But it's really rare for me to get those types of reports. And Even then, if we did file a case, if there was some kind of assault or person crime against a member of our community by somebody who's acting as an ICE agent within their official capacity as that ICE agent, then the feds have the ability to remove, even after I charge it, to remove it to federal court and then I lose complete control of it. So I do really value our relationship with other community members. I think that there's been a level of trust that we've built, at least as a community. And I owe a lot of that to Martha back here. with the relationship that we've had with the Hood River Latino Network. We did have an incident where there was, I think some of the community members thought that there was ICE agents up by the courthouse. It was something completely different. I was able to go over there and say like, hey, this is a community safety issue that has nothing to do with ICE. And based on that, I think some of the people that were protesting were had that kind of trust with both us, with the sheriff's office, with Perturbo Latino, and I want you to know that we were telling the good truth. So is there any questions that you have for me for what I can do, what I can't do? Because I wish I could say I could do more. But unfortunately, I don't think much has changed since I spoke with you guys about this last time, last year, and it's fairly late. Thank you. Amanda?

Just to clarify, it just sounds like if there is something going on, it would need to be called to the police.

Yeah. So I think what that would look at, what it would look like is just report like any other crime would go to to whichever law enforcement agency would be handling that, whether it be police. the city police or the sheriff's office, and it would be investigated like any other crime. And what happens once they get a report, they send a referral to my office with what they have, with what they would refer the crime was, and then ultimately my office makes a decision if there is enough here to charge something out and what that would be under the ordering of criminal statutes. We're open to having those. It's difficult, I think, that other district attorney's offices in this state, they would probably prefer to have those conversations with law enforcement, what kind of evidence they could gather, what we could reasonably gather, and what kind of charges we could reasonably bring in those types of cases. I don't know anything that's happened, at least in Oregon, yet. I mean, the big example is the one in Minneapolis where the ice agent was charged with killing that person.

Thanks, man. I'm very interested in the conversation about funding support. Shall we move on to that topic? I feel like Gladys, you really opened this conversation last. couple of meetings ago since the budget about you specifically had talked about some of the follow-on suggestions from our town halls and focus groups with The Next Door about youth mental health and folks talked tonight about victim relief. And I believe The Next Door has a fund for victim relief. I personally donated to that. I've talked to Janet Hamada a little bit about that. Perhaps that would be a partner we would want to use at the city. Anyway, that's kind of, I think, where we are, right? Abigail, do you have a report to start us off?

That's right. In your packet was the executive summary from the listing sessions in town hall that we did. You have also received a more detailed report that had a lot more information, but one of the recommended next steps was address mental health and family stability. I think that is the particular one that Councilor Rivera had brought up last month and so wanted to bring that forward. So tonight I am just looking for direction of one, are you interested in providing financial support to a designated nonprofit? And if so, what recipient would you like? What would the amount be? And what would the purpose of that funding be? And then, you know, under the emergency declaration, I can just move that forward. But I would like your guidance on what you'd like to see.

Thank you. I have a lot of regard for the leadership. You've already thought this through. Where are you at now?

Yeah, and before I get started, I just want to thank you all for being here. I know it's been a long meeting, and so I really value that the four of you have stayed. So, yeah, I want to thank all of you for all the work that you've done. All of our community partners are amazing. organizers, folks of the rapid response. I also want to thank our police department. I had an opportunity to talk to a couple of the community health workers that have been responding to some of these incidents and there was a lot of praise to those individuals from your officers reminding them that you as local police do not work with ICE and just reiterating the importance of that. It helps build trust or continue building trust. What I love most about living here in the gorge is how we all come together in a time of need. And sometimes it feels like there are so many federal components that just make this work even more complicated. And specifically talking about immigration, we are now seeing individuals being killed and it's becoming more common. So just thank you all for the work that you do. this helps give me hope when I think that I personally am feeling a little helpless. So with that being said, I have had a chance to talk to many of you, to other constituents, to understand a little bit of like who is doing what and how you all work together to have access to those funds. And I would propose that we, support the next door with $20,000 for adult and youth mental health support. And that we do the same for the fund that was mentioned earlier today with gem through gem, the gorge mutual aid, and that we also give $20,000 for a total of $40,000. And, you know, we just had a conversation about animal control and, the amount of money that that we pay for that service and i think that forty thousand dollars when it's directly to support human lives and and ongoing support for should a devastating incident happen here locally like someone has a loss of life that we should be prepared for that thank you guys

Anna. I do not disagree. I think this is a very important cause and issue, and it's important in our community. We have a fiscal responsibility and a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that we have the money to do this. I'm curious where that money will come from, and what kind of precedent are we setting? when I think about our mission that Lorraine pointed to earlier of providing essential services at the least amount, least possible, lowest possible cost to enhance the quality of life for our citizens, I think this is a really, really important issue, but I'm not, like, we're not the federal government, we're not printing our own money. We can't just pull money out of nowhere. So do we have this $40,000? Is this something, I mean, I appreciate that the emergency declaration gives us the opportunity to shuffle some money around and delegate money, But if I remember correctly, we did pay for the four listening sessions in the town hall. We paid $39,700 to the next door for that. So we've already paid $40,000 for a value of something. And that was important. But, you know, where are we getting the money for this? And is this something that we can do? I mean, it is. really really important if there's other ways like individually like the mayor did that we can contribute towards things and I think we all have made those choices for ourselves and done that but as a as a city you know is this something that we can do even though I think we absolutely you know all of us should be contributing in some way and that's what makes this community great but I don't know if it's something that we can do as as a city

And then Amanda.

Can we do this as a city?

Legally, yes.

And you are able to do that and use the money through the emergency declaration?

Right. So the administration of it or the execution is pretty simple in that you identify who, you know, who the amount and what services you want to want those funds to provide.

And what line item will that come out of?

I think it's out of the general fund contingency.

General fund.

Microphone, please. Thank you, Chris.

So it'll come out of the general fund. The city is almost certainly will be operating in a deficit this fiscal year. It will increase our deficit by $40,000. Increased deficit ultimately just comes out of reserves.

Thank you. And good. Yeah. And on that point, why I asked the question. So I think as we get into budget discussions next year and we try to identify other funding sources, I personally do not like our mission statement at all. I don't feel beholden to it. I think we should update it. This is a crisis in our community that affects many of our community members. And I think it's our job to step up in this moment and figure out in the next budget cycle how we're not in this situation where we just want to give $40,000 to the community that desperately needs funding to be able to do these sorts of things. Other cities that we've talked to, speaking to Hillsborough and so on and so forth, they have a lot more money than us. I understand that. We're not looking to break the budget here, but I think that the amount that Council Rivera has proposed is something that we should do some homework on to figure out how to not be in that position again. We should be able to have these sorts of discretionary funds to use in a crisis in our community. So I don't want to say we can't afford it. We can't afford it in the current structure that we have. and we should work in the next budget cycle to understand how we can get better funding for things like the general fund and whatnot.

I just did a quick Google. Hillsborough's population is 111,000, so they're 15 times our size, Amanda. So that would be, if we wanted to, because I... Relative to like what they gave. Yeah, right, Amanda. Yeah.

Yeah, I think also like spending $40,000 to listen, and then say that's it. Okay, we heard you and we're not going to spend any money to help anybody I think that is doesn't really align with what I want to do and I think what we all probably want to do. and agree with Doug about figuring out how we have more money available in the future, but I'm definitely supportive of this. And I just have kind of questions of like, okay, $20,000 to Nextdoor, is that, are we allocating so much for mental health, so much for emergencies, so much for what your ideas around that is, and then they just hold onto it until they need it, or like, I don't know, I'm just, more details, please.

Yeah, that's a great question. So $20,000 would be allocated for the ongoing adult and youth mental health support services that the next door talked to us about doing and that in these listening sessions, most of the individuals stated that they were participating. we have three more years of this madness right that's not going to be enough to cover the next couple of years worth of adult and youth mental health support service that the next door is providing and then for the gorge mutual aid it's a bucket of money that has fewer restrictions than some other grants that even organizations are currently receiving now so it's It can help with, let's take recent incidents, right? There was a family member, a spouse got taken, a family is left on their own. super devastating, what are we gonna do for income? It's not meant to sustain everyone, but it's really for those really emergent needs that some other grants are more restricted and just don't have the availability of supporting someone with their groceries, their travel expenses that they're gonna have to go to and from. making sure that their kiddos, when they're going to these appointments with them out in Portland, that they have food and coloring books and all of those services that are needed to help give individuals just more dignified care through this process. $40,000 is, I know it's a lot of money, but folks, we're seeing that it's only worsening. um is the organization the same one that someone spoke about with the volunteers okay so then they have like a grant bucket or something yeah so the gorge mutual aid fund is directly through the gorge ecumenical ministries it's an organization that has been around the gorge for a number of years and during these times of needs they have put these funds so i absolutely trust it's a It's a great organization. Our coordinator for the mutual aid fund is actually here. So I don't know if you'd be open to it, but invite you to give any sort of additional information about the Gorge Mutual Aid. But two separate entities doing two separate pieces of work, really important. You know, I just really think about the comments in the listening session that took place around the kiddos that are really, really struggling. And I mean, my own lived experience, this is not the first time that I've experienced this in my life. And as an adult till this day, I see a forest service truck. I still till this day think that's the border patrol, because that's what I was told as a little girl, like La Migra's right there when it was really the forest service, that type of trauma just never goes away. Um, So I think that, well, yes, I'm asking for quite a bit of money, I don't think I feel certain in the next three years, those funds will be depleted quickly.

Anna. I really value and appreciate the work that The Next Door does in our community. This is the first time I've heard of the Gorge Mutual Aid Group. I'm so grateful that they are in our community and operating, and I welcome everybody to help support them. I'm wondering, from a legal perspective, if we're giving money to a church, is that going to be an issue for, you know, just for a government to do? And also, there are other really great organizations within our community, so if we start just, like... to saying we're going to give money to this particular organization because we're the city council we can we can do that even if we're operating in a deficit like um is that fair to these like safe space is an excellent um local resource that also provides mental health care for children and um people in our community so like there are are a lot of resources and that that i don't mean to undermine the value that the next door does um but i just think you know we should be careful in like, this is something that we're doing. And I think this is something that the mayor brought up before too, of like, are we now becoming a grant giving, you know, and then how do we, are we putting um guardrails on how that money is spent and all those kinds of things like how you know it's i don't i'm i'm worried that it's not as easy as we all want to do this because we want to support our community which i think we all do and there's a lot more complicated issues to just being able to hand out money to anybody that comes because we've also gotten a request tonight for $50,000 to support another very worthy entity in our community. So this is tough.

If we gave the same amount as Hillsboro, we would give like $13,000 if we did the same amount per capita, 13,000. Doug and Amanda.

I just have one really quick thing. I just want to point out that the emergency declaration, like really helps me focus. Like this is a on task thing. This isn't just like anybody who comes to ask for money.

We're not saying we're urgency declaration with you.

Right. Exactly.

I was going to make the same point. I think that these are extenuating circumstances. I'm not worried about saying precedent. I know we do.

And I feel the same in that way.

Yeah. Okay.

I just wanted, I hear where you're coming from, Councilor Cavallari, and Safe Space is really dedicated towards supporting youth who have encountered sexual violence, assaults, you know, all that. So I think each organization is really good at what they do. You know, the next door has been around for quite some time. If it was like, let's open it up to one community health or center for living completely open to that, the direction and the discussion is, you know, how much money, who are we going to give it to? What's the purpose for that? And so I feel like I've done my homework to figure out what would be the best direction, the two organizations that would put these dollars to good use just based off of my own personal experience of working with these individuals, these groups for a number of years. But if you all have a different recommendation for a different group, completely open to that. But this is something that came to us because our constituents continue to bring it up and that as elected officials, you know, we are for the people, by the people, and this has come up directly from them. So I feel like if we don't give out any money at all and that we heard folks and how much that they're struggling and that there's absolutely still no continued action from that, it's going to tarnish, diminish, create additional distrust with government and folks have already are losing faith in federal and even in state government. And so I really feel like, okay, we've gone through this work, you know, here's what we can do. It's not a lot. Here's what we can do to help support an extremely marginalized, vulnerable population in our community.

I want to support the choice Gladys made of organizations. I have a lot of respect for her perspective and her deliberation deciding on those two. I support funding those two organizations. I think I'm not quite at the $40,000 number. I'm at a lower number, but those two organizations I recommend.

Yeah, I agree with that as well. Curious, just, you know, Gladys, how did you arrive at $20,000, that sort of thing? I want to try to get to like, what we can do, what other people would support. I think Hillsboro, as an example, they gave an additional $200,000 to what I think was already something like $200,000 for those types of services. So they were drawing off the bucket and then increasing what the size of the bucket was for community organizations that were doing other things in the community already, similar to what the next door would do and so on and so forth. So yeah, relatively, yeah, it's not exactly easy to quantify, but like relative to that, I think it's a really good way for the mayor is talking about this relative to like what you're proposing. Can you just speak a little bit about that?

Yes, I will speak. And then again, Tita, Melissa, happy to invite any of you to come and talk about some of the additional resources that you're all seeing out in the community. So I... I've had an opportunity to work with these organizations for over 15 years. And as an operator myself, I understand the financial impacts in order to be able to run a listening session, a variety of series for mental health for adults and for youth, and they're expensive. So $20,000, quite frankly, might buy up to about four sessions, which is not a lot, right? Four sessions. And then the additional $20,000 for the Gorge Mutual Aid, like I mentioned, there are a lot of restrictions that even the next door is in right now as far as the additional resource that they can provide to those individuals that are in these situations. And so having it go through Gorge Mutual Aid, it makes for the funds to be a little less restrictive because then it can support ongoing needs that like I mentioned, in grants that a nonprofit is receiving, it is really restrictive on how you can use these dollars. And a lot of the time, it may include some sort of like incentive for folks, you know, some food and whatnot. But it's really all around the FTE of the staff that are conducting the sessions. So a lot of it is going there. And like I said, it's about, you know, four sessions that they're going to get, which is not a lot.

I'm in. So is this like group thing? Okay. So it's not like going to a therapist.

No.

So one-on-one therapy.

Yeah. No. Imagine like a grief group, right? Someone has just passed away. You sit in a room of peers that have experienced the same thing that you have. that creates a sense of community connection, right? All of that. So this would be conducted in a group setting with youth and with adults. And I want to mention, yeah, it's expensive. And we know that healthcare organizations across the state have lost federal funding. So I know that a lot of them are operating lean in a deficit as well. And yeah, it's expensive, but this will continue to happen. So those are just the pieces that I was able to find out. Again, any of our individuals that are here actually doing the work, I welcome any of you to come up to the dais and give any additional input that I might've missed.

I mean, I'll share a little bit of what... So we're collaborating with The Next Door, with Gorge Mutual Aid. It's part of the rapid response, all the collaboration of the Gorge Rapid Response work that we do. The Next Door does have their funds very restricted for a lot of medical or mental health services. Hood River Latino Network helps navigate the family members that are affected. We spend the whole day with them trying to figure out what's going to happen next. And I'm just going to give you the story of one that happened a couple, a few weeks ago. The parents were pulled over by, well, pulled over by ICE or corralled. They took the, they took the father, left the mom. Mom's undocumented, is now left to deal with both of her kids. She has now received her letter to self-deport. Now she's scared. She doesn't know what to do exactly. She has to plan how she's going to move back to wherever it is that she's going with her two kids. One of her kids doesn't want to eat. Her car's broken down. So we're navigating those systems. We're calling the next door, making sure that they've gotten whatever she can get from them. We're making sure Gorge Mutual Aid is providing food or companion meds. whatever it is that she's going to, and we're there 24 seven. So they can call the, they can call us anytime they need. So $20,000 is true is going to go by really, really quick because that's only one family that we've had to deal with for the last three weeks. And it's every day we're helping them communicate with her husband. Cause he's now in Texas. So she's trying to figure out when he's going to be gone. So it's just a big process. And until you've lived the experience or seen it directly, then it's hard to explain.

Thank you, Marta.

Glad to answer questions.

Four votes makes a yes, people.

I, while we were talking, I was brought up the presentation that I did for you back in December. So this might be a little out of date, but at that time, the city of Woodburn, which is a population of 26,000 had provided 30,000 to their affected businesses and families. Hillsborough had committed 200,000 and Washington County, which has a population of 700,000 had committed $250,000 to, yeah, to families and those impacted by ICE. So you see, there's a wide range.

Did you have a number in mind in comparison, Mayor Blackburn?

I was a little bit excited to beat Hillsborough and go 15,000.

So 15,000 total.

I just wanted to understand which per capita puts us ahead of Hillsborough. I mean, I could see 10 and 10. I'm sorry. Hello, Grant. Yes.

I had a number question, more of a clarifying question. This money or what we're talking about is designed to alleviate victims of what we're talking about to use as parlance crime, right? Specifically centered around ICE, since that's the topic we're talking about. Just victims of this particular parlance crime, ICE, right? No other type of crime.

Okay. That's what I think. That's how I see it, yeah.

This particular policy or direction does not strike anyone else as exclusionary to anyone else that might be, in our language, a victim of any other crime that might occur in our community.

The way I see it is we declared an emergency about the ICE action, and so this is funding our emergency.

I understand. I understand we declared an emergency around this particular issue. But would the logic not extend to anyone else that becomes a victim of something similar in the same type of language that we're using?

If we declared an emergency.

Gladys.

Yes to all of that. And I mean, the city supports MCAC with, you know, $30,000. We're supporting for animal services. You know, I think that... We do this for other entities, for other individuals in our community in different situations. We are responding to an emergency situation that has come up. And folks, I'm completely open to discussing what the amount looks like. I've selected two organizations. Again, you guys can all decide we're going to fund another organization for X amount. I'm completely open to that, but I think that we do have to help with some sort of financial support moving forward given with all the restrictions that there are and given that the situation just continues to escalate.

Ben. Thank you.

Just following on Grant, go ahead. Yeah, I just want to close out. The one thought I have about this is that we do choose to help in some respects. We help in some respects and we don't in others. And so having this discretion and choosing the victims that we help and those that we don't help, that's always been a pattern that's bothered me and not in this case. but in a number of historical things. And choosing to go down this route, not having fiscal instruments or any sort of way to fund this sort of thing or any of the other things as a structural component and making it a systematic policy and direction, especially as we face long-term structural issues that the city is going to be facing, it troubles me.

Thank you, I think we have to be so careful. I hear you and I appreciate that Grant. Ben.

I don't know what was the purpose of doing these listening sessions if not to have an action come out of them. It would feel to me even though they were very valuable, certainly to me as somebody who's not a part of that community and doesn't have to worry about these things. It was certainly valuable to hear that, but it would seem empty if there wasn't something attached to it. I think it was something that we discussed when we we did kind of some of those actions back in what it was like December when we you know declared a sanctuary city and that was meaningful to a lot of people but it was ultimately symbolic and a number of things that we we did were worthwhile but we're more on the symbolic side and I think this is a chance to Show up to a community that's for community that's going through a lot and It's something that we Committed to it's something that we heard loudly from our constituents that they wanted and You know, even though it's not the same community, I brought this up before, I do think, you know, the last time that a, you know, marginalized community was impacted by an overarching federal action, we didn't show up in the best way. In fact, we aided and abetted. And even though it's not the same community, I think there's, That kind of operates in the back of my mind in terms of- Japanese pen. Yes. Yeah. So we have an opportunity to do something this time. Yeah, it's not going to fix everything. Yeah, it's not a lot. But I would hate to have gone through all that and listened to these people and be like, all right, good job. We listened to you. and then didn't do anything about it. I totally understand and, frankly, share my counselor's concerns about money and about asks from the community, really do, especially because of the conversations that we've had about the long-term fiscal trends, you know, that we see. I don't think that this is so much of an ad hoc situation because we have the framework of an emergency declaration. So in terms of who we give it to, I'm going to defer to Gladys, who's part of that community or not, who's done a lot of the legwork. I trust her judgment and her connections. In terms of the dollar amount, that is a little bit more challenging for me. I'm not sure what the right call is on that. It is good to have other cities as a comparison. I love being able to do more than those cities. $40,000 gives me a little bit of pause. I would be maybe more inclined to do like 20 or something like that. 40 makes me a little bit nervous.

You want to make a motion for 10 and 10, Ben? Of course. I'm sorry. Sorry, go for it. Thank you.

I was going to quickly say, if we spent $40,000 to get here, I feel like committing another $40,000 to actually help the people that we are trying to help is fair. I feel like spending $40,000 to hear what the needs are and then giving less than that doesn't really feel in alignment for me.

I hear that, and I will vote against that, but I hear the point.

So in our, a meeting or two ago, I can't remember, I think I was a lot more conservative and I hear everyone's concerns around our budget, you know, completely do. I know that back in December, we were also thinking about, you know, we heard that WIC and SNAP was, there were going to be some impacts and we had asked about contingency funds and how do we have this bucket of money to pay potentially support our constituents and some of the challenges that they're facing in this federal administration. But after just chatting with folks and really seeing the operations cost to all of it, it just made it seem like, okay, if we, yeah, $10,000 would be great. It's something. It's better than absolutely nothing. But the impact, it impacts far less people. And so that's why I came to that.

And, you know, I mean, as it relates to the budget shortfall and everything that we have going on, I mean, relative, you know, since we're thinking about bonds and all this sort of stuff, I'm glad we've gone through a bond election strategy and all that sort of stuff. It'd be awesome to have a bond for $40,000 for this sort of thing because that would be distributed very minimally around property taxes or something like that. But it's like, you know, we just have to get creative as we go forward. and there's a lot of work for us to do. And I think we're up for the task, but I don't want to like short change this. I think this is something that we, we have to recognize as an emergency and we have to recognize that it's something we will have to, you know, add a little bit to the deficit to, to, to, to deal with, but we have to deal with it anyway. And this is not like night and day. Um, it's not a rounding error either, but, um, philosophically, it's like, I'm not like, trying to say that we've, we should just not consider the budget and these sorts of things. But I feel like this is a level of importance that we, I think, can feel good about making this decision, but also feel like we should have to deal with this later. And also don't want to shortchange all the money we've spent on staff time. I mean, John Potter, Abigail spent countless hours on us right um so. So the motion. John Potter, um i'd like for Council to repair to make emotion.

All right, I make a motion that we allocate $20,000 to the Next Door Inc. for the purposes of mental health services for youths and adults, and that we allocate $20,000 for the Gorge Mutual Aid to support in any of the other restrictions that other community partners may face.

Moved by Rivera, second by Stepina. Further discussion? I think this will be a split vote, so let's raise our hands. All in favor? One, two, three. Oh, it was not a split vote. The ayes have it. Yep, go forth.

Thank you, counsel. I will work with the leaders of both of those groups and report back to you when we have entered into an agreement with them on the distribution of these funds and when ask them for some reporting back on how the funds are used.

Thank you. And I also just wanted to make a final comment. The feedback that I'm getting on these mailers has been incredible. There's so much that we cannot do. There's things that we can do. And just giving folks information that's hanging in their fridge, I've heard nothing but positive feedback about this. So I just really want to thank you, Abigail, because I know that you have done a lot, a lot of work in the last couple months. I know you're busy. I know you have a you know, city to run and staff and whatnot, but I really appreciate you just taking the time to set the direction, not only for the city, but amongst the state on what communication tools should look like. So thank you for your leadership.

Thank you, counselor. And I want to give a special shout out to Jackie Vanderpoy and to round tree roofs who put that postcard together and the next door reviewed it multiple times for readability and for plain language. So it was a real team effort. Thank you.

Well done, everybody. Congratulations. Thank you Gladys. City Recorder.

Your Honor, I'd like to entertain a motion for the first and second final reading of Ordinance 2096 by title only.

Moved by Stepina. Second. Second by Rivera.

Councillor Stepina.

Aye.

Councillor Cavallari. Aye.

Aye.

Councillor Mitchell. Aye. Councillor Poulsen. Aye. Councillor Rivera. Yes. Councillor Gakey. Aye. Your Honor.

Aye.

Ordinance 2096, an ordinance amending the city's comprehensive land use plan and zoning map for property located at 3N10E26DA tax lot 3400 and 3300, commonly known as 1225 Wasco Street.

uh ordinance 2096 has passed its first and second reading by total only and will become law in 30 days i don't get this that is very awful that was fun city manager comments

I have many comments for you, but I will just simply say thank you for allowing me to attend the City Manager Conference last week in Ashland. I learned a lot. Look forward to sharing more information with you. And then also just to thank you for your efforts on the Panabaker case, which I was not there in person, but I got to stream, live stream, and I'm sure a couple of you were present and can share your experiences. impressions of that. But just to note that the decision will be expected in a couple months. And I will say many cities across the state and across the region are watching us carefully to see how that is decided.

Just in the moment, I'll comment on that. I was able to go with Dustin and Dan and watching those two professionals work. I just was like a kid in school. Like, I don't understand how things were happening, but these guys do. And this is so cool. It's the oldest courtroom in the West. It's like so badass. It's the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals of the USA. It's so badass. And I made myself a little AI bumper sticker because they kept reciting, citing these cases. And it said, New Orleans, Santa Monica, Hood River. Like we're in that conversation, like just intellectually super interesting. So, you know, like you said, we'll hear in a few months.

And I will mention that the arguments are available on YouTube. I'll find that link and send it out to all of you should you wish to review it or to watch it for the first time.

Committee reports, Anna.

Nothing from me.

Ben.

Nothing for me. Gladys. I will keep them super, super short because I know we've been here for a while. MCAC, continued conversations for year-round shelter, capital campaign coming soon, the Hood River County meeting. I would really encourage you all to watch the last one, especially the Tilly Baker study that they did. Thank you. Sorry. Yes, that one. Thank you to Will and your presentation of the mural. I know that you got a lot of questions and really thank you. That's another example of how Hood River continues to lead when it comes to housing specifically and strategies and highly encourage us to continue conversations around when we can meet with the county to talk about a housing strategy overall.

Doug. None. Grant. None. Amanda.

Nothing.

I have no additional comments. Council comments, Amanda?

Nothing.

Grant?

None. Doug? I love the air conditioning tonight. It was awesome. I've never been cold in here before. Me too. I was thinking the same thing. Like, oh my God, I'm cold. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm usually cooking up here. I really appreciate it.

I do want to highlight this because I thought it was really cool. So last week I had a chance to go on a ride-along, and I had a chance to go with Aaron Mason, and he informed me that he was eight shifts away from retiring, so I'm certain he has far less shifts now. I just want to acknowledge 25 years of service, retirement, you know, watching how he engages with community members of intoxicated or not, you know, a whole spectrum, uh, great work and just really want to thank him for 25 years of service to our city.

Ben.

Nothing for me. Okay. Do we in fact have an exec session? I will read the script. The City Council will now meet in executive session pursuant to ORS 192.661E to conduct deliberations with persons designated by the governing body to negotiate real property transactions. I saw Tricia Walker walk out earlier. Thank you, Tricia, for being here for a very long time, but the news media has left. No decision may be made nor final action taken in executive session. The executive session is anticipated to last 20 minutes. At the end of the executive session, the city council meeting will be adjourned and no action will be taken. We will now discontinue the live feed and recording.