City Council - Regular Meeting

Meeting of 04/21/2026. Before asking the clerk to call the roll for tonight's meeting, I'd like to note that Council Member Pascal is absent from our study session and will be joining our regular meeting. Is there a motion to excuse Council Member Pascal?

So moved. Second.

Moved by Deputy Mayor Black, second by Councilmember Arnold, to excuse Councilmember Pascal from tonight's study session. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries, six zero. City clerk will you please call the roll

councilmember Tim Chisholm

here

councilmember Arnold here councilmember Prem

here

councilmember Falcone

here

deputy mayor black here mayor Curtis here and councilmember Pascal has been excused

Thank you. Our study session tonight is on two items. First, we'll hear an overview of prosecution services in Kirkland. Second, we will discuss a potential property acquisition. We expect to reconvene our meeting at 07:30. Hello, Judge Olson. Nice to see you. City manager.

All right. Thank you, Madam Mayor, Deputy Mayor, members of council. So you just did a while. Going say acknowledgement of our special guest, our Kirkland Municipal Court Judge John Olson here is here watching as well. But we have our Kirkland prosecutors here today to give you an overview. They work with our city attorneys. I'm going to turn over first to Darcy Eilers to say a few words, and then she's going to turn it over to our panel. But welcome, everybody. Good

evening, mayor, deputy mayor counsel. I am going to do just a quick intro slide to explain how the relationship between the city and Moverleigh and Roberts, our prosecutors. And rather than duplicate introductions, I'm gonna let Lynn introduce her team in just a minute. Otherwise, you'll hear it multiple times. So if we go to the quick next slide, I can just say, maybe? Oh, we went a little far.

Well, I can just jump in on

it and say the City of Kirkland contracts for prosecution services, and so we have contracted with Mowbrly and Roberts since 2006. Pursuant to our procurement process and code, we go out for a request for proposals every few years, and then we build into those contracts extensions, one year extension. So right now, the contract with Morillian Roberts goes until the end of or till September 2026 with one more opportunity for extension, and then we'll have to do a new request for proposals. But as I indicated, we've contracted with Mobilin Roberts since they've been the winning request for proposal since 2006. I think that I had the wrong year in the packet.

So that's 2006. February 2006 is the correct time. So I will turn it over to Lynn Mowberly, who's going to go over their sort of model and talk more about prosecution services. But the prosecutors do Moberlin Roberts reports with the city attorney, works with the city attorney's office, and then a lot with, you know, mostly day to day with KPD, so they'll talk a lot about that. Thank you all for being here.

I'm the Mowbrli of Mowbrli and Roberts. Unfortunately, my law partner, Sarah, couldn't be here this evening. She's actually pitching at another city council tonight, so it happened to be same night, so you got me. And she makes her apologies for not being able to be here as well. We do have the Moberly and Roberts team here.

We are all career prosecutors some of us a lot longer than others. So Sarah and I both started with the King County Prosecutor's Office some time ago. We started under the wonderful Norm Meiling and both of us started right out of law school in fact, did internships the summer before we graduated. We both ended up doing everything in the prosecutor's office that you could do, but we both ended up specializing in felony domestic violence and also mainstream violent crimes, where we did several murder trials and those kinds of things. I left after thirteen years from King County to open my own law firm to become a municipal prosecutor, because by the time I was up in management, I was in an office not trying cases.

And quite frankly, I wanted to get back in the courtroom. And rather than move around in the prosecutor's office from the managing attorney at the RJC, I decided to get into municipal prosecution on the East Side. So I have an office that does East Side cities. Sarah and I stayed in touch. We were good friends.

And she did so two or three years later, she decided to leave King County to do municipal prosecution solely for cities that are in the Northwest of King County Bothell Shoreline, Kenmore, those cities up there. There became a contract open that we both thought we might bid for, and being friends, it was going to be a little awkward. So we decided to join forces. In fact, both our fathers told us we should do that, and we did. And we created Moberly and Roberts.

Our office is here in Kirkland. Through this office, we prosecute all of the misdemeanor cases that do not go to King County for filing those would be all the felonies for the cities of Kirkland, Mercer Island, Windville, Hunts Point, Medina, Yarrow Point, and Clyde Hill. Obviously, Kirkland has the majority of the cases and the majority of the calendars, but we do do those other cities as well. All of those cities are out of the Kirkland Court, except for Mercer Island, which is held now in New Castle, because the Mercer Island building was shut down and is no longer to be. So Blakely handles that primarily, and it is currently held in the council chambers in the city of Newcastle.

These three wonderful people are our Kirkland Prosecution Team, as well as the other cities. They're all career prosecutors as well. Blakely, on the far left, is our managing attorney for the office. She's been with us since 2007. We hope she will never, ever not be with us. She's obviously very wonderful and special to us. She does a lot of the administrative type things. Sarah and I do as well. But certainly if something comes up on a daily basis that needs administrative type things, she can help with that. She plans the calendars.

She organizes who will be doing what calendars every month, and you'll hear more about that as we continue to talk. She also was a King County prosecutor before she came to work for us. We stole her away. Garrett Rutherford, he started with us in 2018. After law school, prosecuted for a couple of cities, Peelope and Sumner, including a couple other little ones where he would fill in.

And he has been with us for 2018. He takes the lead on community court, which he's absolutely wonderful in handling community court. He also takes the lead on infractions, which is lovely because none of us want to do them. They can be difficult. So it's wonderful to have Garrett working with us.

Anjali Tippernini thank you. She started with us right out of law school. We interviewed her, and she shone like a bright star, and we said we have to have her. So we scooped her up. She moved here from Arizona, and she has been with us since January 2024.

She already has tried multiple jury trial cases and handled some very complex motions, so she's just dove right in and thrown into court, and she is doing a wonderful job, and it just fits in with our firm wonderfully. We made a great hire on that. So with that, I am going to let each one of them address you. Blakely will go first. Angelie?

Oh, you're going to go first, then Blakely. I'm so sorry. We're going to talk about and then Garrett. We're going to talk about the flow of the calendars, what we do on a daily basis. And then we thought we might conclude I will conclude with a little bit of the trends and changes that we're seeing in the last couple of years and certainly open it up for questions and answers that you might have. Sounds good. All righty. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Okay.

I'm going to start off with just talking about the timeline for cases. So the first step in any case is filing a charge by our office. So there's three different ways that a case would come to us. The first way is that somebody is arrested and booked for a crime. Officers have discretion over who they arrest generally, but then there are some instances where there are automatic booking requirements, and that's something like a domestic violence charge or a DUI charge where they have priors or things of that nature.

So when someone is booked on the crime, we will see them the following day on our jail calendar. Monday through Thursday, our jail calendar is at one p. M, and on Friday, we have a jail calendar at 10:30 a. M. So we will review that case essentially the day after they're booked for charging and then arraign them on that jail calendar that day.

When we're reviewing the case for charging, we will also come up with what we call our proposed conditions of release that we'll bring to the court. That will include things like bail, if that's what we're planning to ask for, and other conditions. In domestic violence cases, a lot of the times, we'll ask for formal no contact orders. There will also be other conditions like general no contact conditions. So for example, in a theft case, we'll ask for no contact where that theft occurred at or trespass no contact where that trespass occurred at, things of that nature.

We have other conditions that we'll ask for, depending on the facts of the case or the person's history. Sometimes things of that nature will be like prohibition of firearms, an abstinence condition, if there were drugs or alcohol involved, anything that we think is appropriate, given what we have in front of us at that point. So that will all happen within essentially twenty four hours of them being booked, and then we'll see them on the jail calendar. The second way that we file cases is through direct files. So officers, when they don't arrest somebody, they can file the case directly with the court, and then we will get that report from them.

They give the person a citation, and then the person will get a court date in the mail. We will then review that citation and file a complaint, and then we will rein them out of custody, essentially. Usually, this only happens for more minor driving offenses, like driving with licenses suspended or things of nature. So that is the second way that we file cases. The third way, and that's how most of our cases get filed, is through investigations.

So officers will conduct an investigation, prepare a full report, and send it to our office, and then we will go through, review the report, and decide whether we think there's enough evidence to charge it. There's definitely times where we have to follow-up with the officers or follow-up with other witnesses or clarify things before we move forward with charging, but that's how most of our cases will get filed, and then they get a court date in the mail and then appear out of custody for an arraignment as well. So once the case is filed, there's different stages that it goes through, and the first one is arraignment, which I've kind of already talked about. But that's the first appearance of the defendant in our court. At the arraignment, the defendant will enter a plea.

90% of the time, it's a not guilty plea, and the case will proceed from there. There are times where people will plead guilty at arraignment. There are times that we'll make offers to resolve cases at arraignment. A really big example is when somebody is charged with driving with license suspended in the third degree. If they come to court for an arraignment and they're already relicensed or eligible to be relicensed, we will offer them an amendment to a traffic infraction.

It's a no valid operator's license infraction, so we will discuss that with any unrepresented defendant that comes to the court on arraignments and is already relicensed. So we resolve a lot of driving with license suspended thirds cases on that first day at arraignments, and then that case is just done, and we move on. Also at arraignments, the judge will determine if there's probable cause based on the affidavit that the officer submitted, and if the judge finds probable cause, then we proceed with asking for our proposed conditions of release, just like we would do on a jail calendar. So again, we could ask for bail even if they appear out of custody, or we will ask for the other conditions that we think are appropriate at that time, given all the information that we have. So the out of custody arraignments will take place on Tuesday mornings.

We usually have an 08:45 and a 09:45 calendar. The only or the other time we arraign people is obviously during a jail calendar, but most of the time we do it on a Tuesday morning, so those are, like, the direct file cases or the cases that come through our investigations that we ultimately charge. The next stage of a case would be a pretrial hearing, so we would schedule a pretrial hearing when they appear for arraignments. We have our pretrial hearings Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings. So at a pretrial hearing, we will track the open cases that we have scheduled on that calendar.

We'll make offers to defense counsel. We'll engage in plea negotiations. So when we engage in plea negotiations, there are a couple of factors that we'll consider to make an offer. Some of those factors are criminal history of the defendant, the facts of the case, the nature of the charge, and any mitigating factors we might have, usually provided by the defense counsel. So then we will use all of those factors to form an offer and give it to counsel on the first pretrial.

Some of the offers would potentially include jail time or sometimes community service, just depending on the history or the facts and what we think is appropriate. A lot of the offers will include some affirmative conditions that we think would be beneficial for the defendant to complete, so things like mental health treatment, substance use disorder treatment, anger management treatment, domestic violence treatment, driving courses, things like that, that we think would be a benefit to the defendant. So we'll make that offer at pretrial and then go from there. A lot of the cases at pretrial end up being continued to further negotiate with counsel. We have about 50 to 80 pre trial cases on every calendar that we have.

Again, we have two calendars, an 08:45 and a 09:45, so it's split up that way. So the main role prosecutor during the pretrial calendars is essentially to manage all of the cases and be ready to coordinate calling them all on the record. A lot of them get continued, like I said. Some of them will get set to trial. Some of them will get resolved at the pretrial, so they'll take plea deals and that kind of thing. So it's a lot of juggling. That's the main role of the prosecutor in coordinating. There's definitely sometimes where victims will come to the pretrial hearings. We'll have to talk to them. Obviously, defense attorneys will be there.

They'll want to talk to us, that kind of thing. So just keeping it running smoothly is our main role at the pretrial hearings. I'm going to talk a little bit about infractions also. So our infraction calendar is every Friday morning. Infractions are obviously traffic tickets.

We are responsible for cases where a defendant will hire an attorney when an officer is subpoenaed to come to court to testify about the traffic ticket or on collision cases, cases that involve a collision, we will appear for those cases, and they'll all be on Friday morning. Each calendar that we have on Friday morning is about 50 cases. The prosecutor handling it will prep it ahead of time and send offers to the defense counsel early in the week. Sometimes the offers will be to amend to a nonmoving violation. Sometimes it will be to mitigate the fine down.

Sometimes it will be an amendment after a driving course is completed or community service is completed. And that's just depending on, again, the facts of that infraction and what kind of history that they have. There are definitely times where we don't make an offer depending on what their history looks like. Another time we won't make an offer is if the driver has a commercial driver's license. There are federal laws that prohibit us from making offers from people that have commercial driver's license unless there's some evidentiary concern with the ticket or we have, you know, worries about being able to prove it, then we'll make an offer.

But most of the time, we won't make an offer on the CDL tickets or someone with terrible history. So most of them get resolved, but sometimes if there's no offer made or the offer is not accepted, we will have actual contested hearings for the infraction. Most of the time, how that goes is so the court rules say that the city can submit the report from the officer as our evidence for the hearing. So the judge will review the report and then determine if infraction is committed, and that's just by a preponderance of the evidence. There are times that an officer is subpoenaed.

Witnesses are subpoenaed for a collision case, so then we'll have an actual testimonial hearing. Each witness will give testimony, and then each counsel will make arguments, and then the judge will find it committed or not committed.

So Anjali kind of spoke about the beginning stages of the case and the pretrial and negotiations. Before we start, do you guys have questions?

Thank you. You caught Deputy Mayor does have a question. I missed it. Go ahead.

Only if it's in order, I can also wait until the end.

Well, now we've stopped, so go ahead.

Okay. Well, did have a question about charging decisions. Mhmm. I know from conversations with King County prosecution the PAO and on felony cases, their goal is to make charging decisions within thirty days. And they've been doing that apparently, successfully, despite many other jurisdictions not doing that. What's what's your goal as far as the time to make charging decisions after referral?

I would say we we have a turnaround. We try to do it within thirty days. On domestic violence cases and DUI cases, kinda pull those out of the stack because those are the more serious charges and try to turn those around as quickly as we can. I think our backlog right now is quite low. We're almost completely caught up. So right now, you know, the holidays come, sometimes it gets a little crazy around there, and we back up a little bit, more crime. And but right now, we're definitely turning them around in about thirty days. I know King County has really changed their policies, and that's great.

Yeah. Thank you for that. I mean, it's obviously, right? It's justice what is it? Justice delays, justice not served, or whatever, or the opposite of that. And for survivors and victims, knowing that these decisions are made quickly, at least knowing what the future holds. So I appreciate that. Thank you.

Anyone else? Okay, Blakely, go ahead.

And kind of to go with the charging aspect of it, all three of us do review cases for charging so we don't have necessarily one person that's assigned to just review the cases for those charging decisions. The jail calendars, who whoever is handling the jail calendar that day will make those decisions, but then we kind of divvy all of the cases up between all three of us to make those charging decisions and review the cases. That, Anjali kind of talked about the beginning of the process at pretrials with negotiations if we've kind of come to a standstill with negotiations, a defense attorney and their client decide not to take our offer then typically the case will get set to motions and or what we refer to as readiness. Readiness also can be called our jury call calendar, that's the calendar where we determine what cases will then get set for jury trial. Some of those cases, we're setting them to motions and trial, there's a lot of cases that don't actually get set on a motion calendar, but there are some case cases where a defense attorney will note a motion and so it will get set to a different hearing.

We have those hearings on Tuesday afternoons and it can be a wide variety of motions. In our memo we kind of laid out the options. It's what we refer to as a threefive hearing. It's the CRRLJ's 3.5, and that revolves around the admissibility of statements made by the defendant. It's the city's responsibility to ensure that any statement made by the defendant is admissible, so that's essentially a motion to bring.

There are times where defense counsel will stipulate to statements so we don't actually have to have a hearing, but if defense counsel does not stipulate to statements then we go forward with an evidentiary hearing and we will have the officer come in and testify and talk about the statements that the defendant made whether or not they were investigatory, post Miranda, there's different ways that they can be admissible or not and ultimately obviously the judge then makes a ruling on whether or not he believes the statements would be admissible. The next type of hearing is a 3.6 hearing, it's the CR RLJ3. Point six, and that is revolving around the suppression of evidence. These hearings do require under the court rules that briefing be submitted by defense counsel. The three six issues are issues that defense counsel brings up in regards to suppression of evidence, so they are required to submit briefing arguing the legal issues of why defense counsel believes that this evidence should be suppressed, and then the city is then required to respond to that briefing.

There is a briefing schedule typically laid out in our we call it pretrial order. Defense counsel has ten days prior to the hearing to file the briefing and then three days before the hearing the city is to respond so that the judge can review all the documents and the briefing before we have the hearing as The three six issues are typically probable cause the officer having probable cause to stop the defendant in a driving situation or contact them in other types of crimes to stop an arrest. With DUI cases there are times where we have a lot of argument surrounding the breath test and or refusal to take the breath test or refusal of the field sobriety test. Those are all issues that are brought up in III VI hearing. Obviously the prosecutors, once we receive the defense counsel briefing, we have to do our research, we thoroughly review the case again that we received from the officers, we do our legal research and then we respond in writing to that brief.

For these three six and all testimonial motions we do have the officers come in and testify at these hearings so we do a lot of prep on the front end with these hearings as well. We don't like to have a situation where we don't at least touch base with the officer before we put them on the stand to testify. In Kirkland there are quite a few newer officers that have not had the opportunity to testify so we do take the time to reach out to the officers in advance and just talk to them, ask them any questions that we have based on the research that we've done as well and helping us kind of fill in the gaps before we put them on the stand. Help them with the expectations of what types of questions that we are going to be asking, what types of questions defense counsel may ask just so that they're thoroughly prepared as well. Some of the hearings we do have civilian witnesses that may need to testify for these evidentiary hearings but more often than not it's just the officers that will testify.

The other motion that we deal with a lot is what is referred to as a Napstead motion. It's a motion to dismiss under CRRLJ 8.3. This is a defense motion to dismiss due to insufficient evidence establishing a prima facie case of the crime charged. With a Napstead motion, the defense counsel is essentially saying there are no disputed material facts, and even with all of these facts as they are laid out in the police report, the city would not be able to prove a prima facie case beyond a reasonable doubt. If there are any facts that are disputed, no matter how slight, then the Napstead motion would then fail and the case would not be dismissed because ultimately it's the trier of fact, it's the jury who would then make that decision.

So when cases are set for motions it is a lot of work for the prosecutor's office in preparing and writing briefs and preparing our officers. One of the other types of cases that we have on our Tuesday afternoon motion calendars are impound hearings. These are not criminal, they're civil, but the prosecutor is present for these as well primarily because officers are there to testify as to the validity of the impound. When someone's vehicle is towed they do have the opportunity to challenge the validity of the tow and then the cost of the tow as well. So we handle those.

We also handle animal control cases when animal is designated as potentially dangerous or dangerous if the owner of that animal wants to appeal that designation then that goes to the Kirkland Municipal Court and we address that as well. There was a point where we were having quite a few of those hearings but we haven't recently. So after a case is handled at motion then we have our readiness hearing to determine whether or not a case is gonna get confirmed for trial. These calendars are typically the second Wednesday of the month. In April it was April 8 which is the Wednesday before our jury week.

I know that you've heard from the court presentations as well, but in Kirkland we do just have one week a month that we have jury trials. On the readiness calendar is when three of us are really coordinating what cases that we can go forward on we contact all of our civilian witnesses before these hearings to make sure that they are available for trial during that week We also have more extensive conversations with them about what their testimony is gonna be, what they remember. Sometimes, you know, at this point, we realize that our witnesses may not remember as much as they did in the beginning, so then we have issues, potentially proof issues, with proving our cases beyond a reasonable doubt. So we do a lot more deeper I guess determination of are we going to be able to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt or should we negotiate a little bit more in order to get a resolution? At Readiness, so essentially cases can resolve, again if they haven't resolved at pretrial we can still resolve them at the readiness case or they get confirmed for trial or they get continued again.

One of the primary reasons a case gets continued at readiness is due to our witness availability. We obviously have to prove our case beyond a reasonable doubt and so we want to make sure that we have all of our witnesses available to come in and testify so that we can prove our cases. I reach out to the Kirkland officers in advance to make sure we have their schedule and know their availability, and if they're in training or if they're on vacation then that would be good cause for us to ask for a continuance. So that's how we, you know, when we kind of gauge what cases we're able to go forward on, which ones we're able to confirm or which we need to ask for a continuance continuance of. Defense counsel also a lot of time will ask for a continuance, they have witness issues or they want to provide us some additional information to continue to negotiate resolve the cases.

For jury week we have two or three trial spots that are available and we split the calendar up between the three of us. For May we have approximately 30 cases that are set to possibly go to trial, I think now maybe 33, so we divide those between the three of us so that we preparing, so we each have 10 to really prepare, we call our witnesses and do all of that. Our domestic violence cases we actually assign at arraignment so that we have some consistency with the prosecutor throughout the pendency of the case so that the victim knows which prosecutor they can contact and then the domestic violence advocate know that as well. With the domestic violence cases we work very closely with Ms. Dawson, the DV advocate, to really get a lot of information.

We use her as a great resource to communicate with the victims, get all the information that we need. She talks to them about what they're looking for in a resolution, so we work with her very closely on these cases. We have a monthly meeting with her prior to our readiness hearing to make sure we know what cases we're able to go forward on. Unfortunately our domestic violence cases are the most difficult cases to take from arraignment through resolution because we have a lot of victims who realize that who don't necessarily any longer want to participate prosecution. That maybe when they called the police they didn't realize that their partner was going to

be

arrested going through the court process, and so we lose contact with them and lose their willingness to participate. So unfortunately a lot of times because of that we have to dismiss our domestic violence cases at readiness because with the nature of domestic violence there is usually not another witness to the incident so we would need that victim to come and testify to be able to prove our case beyond a reasonable doubt. So without that victim we're not able to go forward. So unfortunately we at Readiness would then have to dismiss our DV cases as we would not be able to confirm for trial.

We could dismiss them without prejudice and we do, which means if the next week she's calling the police again, we can refile that case if we have enough speedy trial left, and we have done that. Sometimes it happens, okay that case is gone, and then it happens again. We will refile cases.

And we had a case where our advocate had lost contact with our victim for months, and then after we had dismissed the case, I think it was a couple months later, the victim had reached back out to the advocate. She had not been receiving the phone calls, I think her phone number had changed, she wasn't receiving the mail, so it wasn't her not wanting to be contacted, it was just that she just lost contact. So then we got some additional information as to some other circumstances and were able to file additional charges. That does happen.

Thank you, before you move on, Councilor Mayor Arnold has a question.

Yeah, the topic of speedy trial, I note in the memo that you do or have the slots for two to three trials a month. You mentioned you've got 33 cases on the calendar. What's the time frame and the outliers on how quickly things do proceed to trial?

That is a great question and sometimes it depends. At our pretrial calendars, when cases are continued, defendants will waive their right to a but speedy trial doesn't expire until the July. And so if it's not able to be confirmed for trial in May, then it will get set over for that.

And is there a standard that's for speedy when you say speedy trials, is there a standard that says?

It's it's in the court rules. I don't remember the exact number. Might be 3.3. It's ninety days if you're out of custody. It's ninety days from commencement dates. Commencement is usually starts at arraignment and then like Blake was talking about waiver, know, there's a motion to continue we'll ask them to waive Speedy to recommence at the next court date. It's gonna be ninety days from that next court date. But so Speedy trial by the court rule is ninety days from commencement date, whenever that commencement date is.

Okay. What's the what's the outlier of the longest wait between arraignment and when you've gone to trial?

That depends because a lot of times there's a lot of negotiations, and a lot of times defense counsel will continue a case at pretrial to negotiate. So are you talking about from the date of violation to when the arrest occurs or when the incident occurs to when it's taken to trial. That would typically depend on how negotiations are going if defense counsel asks for continuance and waive speedy trial. So we have some that are a year or more from data violation to trial, but we also have some that are two or three months. So it really just depends on the defendant and how quickly they want to move through the process.

We also have cases that it's called FTA failure to appear status. So a defendant will FTA a hearing warrant might be issued and then the case is just there until the defendant comes back to the jurisdiction of court, whether it's by serving the warrant and they get the warrant quashed or they pay the bail. So sometimes cases sit for quite some time because the defendant's just out of the jurisdiction of the court and we can't do anything.

And if they are in jail, that speedy trial is sixty days as opposed to ninety. So those cases take priority. If a trial we've only got the one week a month, so if there's somebody in jail, their SWEETY trial is going to be honored first, and the court, if there's not enough trial dates, is going to have to find good cause to put the out of custody over until the next month.

Okay, back to you. Oh, Deputy Mayor?

Thank you.

I think

this is the appropriate time to ask this question because we were talking a moment ago about our officer Kirkland officers as witnesses, and we do have Chief St. Jean here. It might be a question for him, and it might be a question shared by some of our members of our public. When it comes to we have a certain number of officers on duty during any what's the word I'm looking for? Shift.

Thank you. During any shift. If an officer on shift is scheduled to give testimony, how how is that managed? I assume you're going to confirm that we always have we're always fully staffed for each shift in in in the in the on the beats. Yeah.

Thank you for that question, Deputy Mayor. So we know when our officers are going to testify well in advance, so we're able to move other personnel around and make sure we have appropriate coverage on street at all times.

Thank you.

Anyone else? City Manager, I want to do a time check. How much time do we need for the second half?

Probably need about a little bit more than half an hour, probably about ten minutes.

Okay. So I wanted to make sure we have a chance to talk about community court as well. I was going to briefly just touch upon SOCs in general because that's our vehicle for community court. So SOCs stand for stipulated order of continuance. And basically what it is and how I always explain it to people I'm talking to is that it's a contract between the city and the defendant where from the defendant's perspective they're asked to do certain things.

And if they do those certain things they get the benefit of the bargain at the end of the SOC. So that's almost always a dismissal. Sometimes there's, you know, at the end of an SOC we might amend the charge to something else. But usually, it's a dismissal. And then in return, the benefit for the city is that they're waiving their right to a jury trial, waiving their right to hear and confront witnesses. They're stipulating to the admissibility of the police report. And then the police report is all the judge would review if the SOC is revoked. And then the judge different skill based on that. So that's why it's kind of a contract. They're usually, you know, the stipulated order of continuance, we say continuance, is we continue the case out.

Usually I would say the low end of an SOC is three months, the higher end is twenty four months or two years. But it does there's a little bit of variable. But those are the normal ranges. And so they're waiving that speedy trial as well and it will commence at the end of the SOC. Just like in plea deal, there will be conditions one might ask them to do based on the facts of the case, based on their history.

So it might be getting treatment for SUD mental health, substance use disorder, mental health, know potentially DV treatment, things like that. And you know so that that's what an SOC is in general. And then for community court that's that's our vehicle for doing community court. So the SOCs in community court look a little different. But they're still the same concept of you're continuing the case out. Our SOCs in community court are only about sixteen weeks. Community courts are a much shorter program. They come in every week. I guess going back to the beginning, community court started in March 2021. We launched it then.

In preparing launching for community court, had a lot of discussions about what type cases are eligible for community court. We have a list and I'm sorry we didn't get in the slide I should have but we have a list of potential eligible crimes and absolutely not eligible crimes. So those types of crimes are any of the driving crimes. We're not going to have DUIs or DLS3s in community court. DV cases that are intimate partner.

So in the statutes, DV relationships are defined as either intimate partner, which is a romantic relationship, or family or household members. So that could be siblings, roommates even, things of that nature. So we might consider family or household DV cases for community court, but that's on a case by case basis but intimate partner never. Animal cruelty is not eligible but the type of crimes that are eligible are things like theft, criminal trespass, possession of of a cold controlled substance. Those types of crimes we call them and we're trying to target I guess in general is crimes of need.

And that's what community court is working on, right? It's a different model, it's a therapeutic model. So and I know you've had a presentation I believe from Travis and I think Judge Olson did the presentation which is great. Travis is the community coordinator and he's a great resource. So and I'm sure he's walked you through the process but I'll walk you through it from the prosecutor's perspective. You know we are looking at cases for how to resolve them, right? Whether it's a plea offer or an SOC or community court. So we're looking for cases where they might have those needs, right? We might have someone with no history but they also don't need any resources. They're not going to be a good community court case because they don't need anything that's there.

But when we identify potential cases we'll refer them and we'll talk to the defender, sorry the public defender because it's almost always a public defender case. But we'll talk to the defense attorney and tell them hey let's refer them to community court. We'll set them to they're always Wednesdays at 01:30. We'll set them to community court to observe. They come to observe in person. If they're interested, they'll meet with Travis to do an assessment. And they're not committing to anything at this point. They're they're still all of their rights are preserved. If if they meet with Travis, Travis does the assessment. He'll send that to assessment to to Anjali and I who we do at community court together and to the defense attorney.

Anjali and I will talk about what that SOC is going to look like. Maybe they need substance use treatment, maybe they need mental health treatment, maybe they need both. Maybe they need help getting employment or work opportunities. Maybe they need help with education, right, looking at education opportunities. Housing is another big one. And we'll prepare an SOC based on the assessment as well as the police report based on what we see in their history and send it to defense and then they'll talk to their client. If they opt in, they want to join us, they'll sign the SOC. A judge will go through it. And then they're a participant. And so once you're in community court as a full participant, it's much more informal.

We refer to them all by first names. They refer to me by first name. We still refer to Judge Olson as Judge Olson. But everyone else is informal, know, the defense attorneys, the volunteers we have. And we just talk to them once a week. They all come once a week, and we ask them how their week's gone, what have they done. We give them goals to work towards every week or we try to give them goals to work towards every week of how are you going to knock out this SOC? How are you going to knock out these requirements? You need to get an SUD evaluation. How are going to do that? Where are going to go? Here are some resources. Here are people you can talk to. By next week I'd like you to have something scheduled or talk to two people. And we talk to them every week.

Sorry, I lost my train of thought for a it's only a sixteen week program, right? So it's ideally short, sweet, they get that done in sixteen weeks. Realistically a lot of our participants need more time and so we give them more time. We extended the SOC. There's a lot more leniency in community court as long as they show that they're putting an effort, that they're working on it. A lot of these individuals in our community court system need more help, right? So they need more help just navigating the basics of finding housing and the basics of getting a license. So we work on them with that. So if they're putting in the effort, if they're working, we'll work with them too. We're not at sixteen weeks, you didn't do it, you know, we're revoking.

Travis, I think Travis did recently start a life skills course. I'm sure he talked to you about that. That's another way that we can give them resources to help them. Just some numbers. So we started in March 2022. As of April 8, which is the last community court we had, we had 82 total graduates. And I think Travis gave you a different number, but that was a few months ago. We had just a graduate on the eighth as well. One of the things that's really rewarding about community court is that we do get to know these people. We talk to them.

Some of them we talk to them every day, every week for six months, right, because we've extended it that long. So we get to know them. We get to root for them. And when those individuals graduate, it's very satisfying. And a lot of them have a lot of nice, really nice things to say. So that's community court. So I don't know if there's any questions about that.

Any questions? I don't think so. Oh, ahead, Deputy Mayer.

Well, that's amazing. Thank you for that. I did have a question. So it sounds like defense attorney is involved up to and through the negotiation of the SOC.

And they're there the whole time. There's a defense attorney there. You know, we don't talk to any participant if their defense attorney is there. And they're almost always the public defenders, so Kara Starr is the one from SLS that does that. So she's there too and she's talking to them the same way Angeline and I are talking to them on the record.

Great, thank you.

Okay, go ahead.

Sorry, I need to be louder. I just had just a couple of just general questions on the prosecution side. So could you share just general outcomes in a given year, such as resolution rates or convictions, and kind of any performance indicators? And if you don't have that offhand, I mean, maybe offline,

but I'm just curious. We got a question today about that. Like how many cases pled out, how many did SOCs, how many dismissals were there. And that is something that we need to get the data from the court. And I had bothered them so many times in the last two weeks getting ready for this.

I knew that their person that does that was out today, so I wasn't able to get those answers. I can. We can get those answers. We talked about it. We think 90 to 95% of the cases resolve without going to jury trial, sometimes after motions but before jury trials.

We estimate about 25, probably a quarter of the cases go through an SOC. You don't usually get an SOC twice, so even if you had one in Issaquah and you do something similar in Kirkland, Kirkland will know by looking at the docket, hey, this person stole a bunch of stuff from Target and got an SOC. This time they're not going to get that deal. So I would say an average of 25% on SOCs. Dismissals are pretty rare unless it's a DB case.

And like Lee touched on, unfortunately, we don't always have a victim, and we can't go forward. So I hope that Yeah, that's helpful. Follow-up with that. Yeah. Get that information to Darcy.

And I did we did. I mean, we had some, like, very basic data, which maybe goes to a council member Arnold's question about the number of jury trials, 33, 50. That sounds like a lot. In 2025, there were 1,480 cases. That's the number you've seen in some of your other data. There were eight jury trials. In 2024, there were 1,256 cases that were criminal cases filed, and there were 10 jury trials. So most of them are resolved prior to trial. Just to give some context, that is data we have. Lynn's right.

We can get some more information from the court, pull some data. We can't necessarily get into granular data with the court data because they just show a dismissal rather than that one's an SOC and one might have been dismissed for some other reason. So it's without individual case file review, we can't get a lot of the some of the data that you that we might wanna see, but we can try and get some more information more details about you know how many you know some some more detailed information.

Okay. Yeah.

Sounds good.

And then in 2026 we've already had eight jury trials. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Too much for that statistic.

Yeah. A little busy.

So yeah. We've been busy.

I was just gonna talk a little bit real quickly about trends and changes, and then I'll wrap it up with another question that Mr. Had that was directed over to me earlier. The caseload is going up. As you can see, criminal traffic, which does include driving while license suspended from 2023, 2025, 126% increase. Non traffic, so that would be your thefts, your malicious mischiefs, your trespassing, those kind of criminal cases, including domestic violence, has gone up 40%, 76% in total filings, and then 47% in traffic fractions.

In domestic violence cases, up 17.8%. Those are the more complex and resource intensive cases, and DUIs are up 20%. And those many retain private counsel, so those are cases that often go to motions at least, and then sometimes go to trial. And they're kind of obviously more intensive cases as well. There are some questions about how do we deal with immigration.

I would say on every single defendant, when defense attorneys come to us, they bring mitigation information. They tell us about who their client is, what they've done in the past in their life, what they're doing now, what have they done since they got charged? Have they done affirmative things? Have they gone out and gotten an alcohol drug evaluation? Have they done the victim's panel?

Have they already done these things to show us they've learned their lesson, and they want to try to resolve the case? Some of them do it immediately before they've even had their arraignment by talking to their attorney. So we look at the person as a whole, and one of those things is, is there an immigration issue? And when defense attorneys come to us, just like we do every defendant, we're going to listen. What is the immigration issue?

But we have to factor that in as well of what is the prior criminal history and how bad was this case. So if they have an extensive criminal history and the facts in this case are bad, we can't treat them completely different than we would treat anybody else, but it's a factor that we are always going to keep in mind, just like all those other factors. So definitely immigration issues are a factor that we listen, we talk about, many attorneys go out and hire immigration counsel to determine, is this person going to get taken out of the country? Are

they going

to get deported? Are they not going to be able to go to Canada? If they have a DUI, they might not be able to go to Canada. That could be true with lots of individuals. So it depends. It's something we always will listen to and consider, but it's not the one factor we're going to make. Well, if there's an immigration issue, we're going to dismiss your case. We just can't do that. So we look at the history, history, we we look look at at the the facts, we look at the whole person, we look at what they've done, and then we make a decision on what kind of offer we can make. Hope that helps. Thank you.

Chancellor Ruprem Just one more logistical question. I was just curious, the services contracted, do we usually get is it based on billable hours? How does that work?

That's good question. It's a flat fee. Okay, got it. If there are extra hearings that happen, such as code enforcement or tow hearings or those animal cases, they're an hourly rate, which is significantly lower than if you went out and But hired a private it's a flat rate. Some weeks are a lot harder than others, but we're gonna make the same money.

And under our current contract, there's a 4% annual increase as the sort of flat cost of living increase All across the contract for the flat

right. Thank you. Thank you.

I'm sorry we've run out of time, so we have to wrap this up.

We want to stay. I know.

But thank you. I know you all have had long days, and we added to it, so we really appreciate you bringing tonight.

Thank you very much for having us. It's very nice to meet you all. If you ever have questions, let us know.

Maybe someday we'll come down and see you in action.

Should I just leave this up?

Yes, please.

Thank you again for having us. Thank you all.

As Yeah. Long as we're

not on the jury. I know.

A quick swap out to our next topic, which is Thank

you.

So having a study session discussion about a potential acquisition of the LDS Church that just recently came on the market. You'll hear more about that in the study session. There's also, just as a reminder, there's a business item for discussion, the council later under business, where we also have a short executive session to discuss what action the council may want to take. So I'm going start this off with Lynn Swogstra, our Parks and Community Services Director, but then she's going get some assistance from others as we talk through the various aspects of this. We're looking for council feedback and questions. And again, we'll be taking this up on our business as well. Lynn, take it away.

Thank you. Good evening, Madam Mayor and Deputy Mayor and City Council. We're here this evening to talk to you about the potential acquisition of the LDS Church at 132nd Street. We have three primary speakers this evening, that being me, Sarah Schellenbarger, our Recreation Manager and Kevin Pelstring, our Financial Planning Manager. We do, however, have Leanne Skipton and John Lloyd available to answer some questions.

The bad news is I have 22 slides for you this evening, sorry. The good news is we can run through a couple of those relatively expeditiously. So you can see our topics for the evening. It is a time sensitive acquisition. Thus, we're here before you this evening on that short timeline.

This is directly related to the 2022 PROs plan as well as growing demand for indoor recreation programs. Once we kind of talk about those subjects, then I'll have Kevin talk about financial options, at which point we will seek counsel direction. So a little bit about the property. As mentioned, it's on 132nd Street and the corner of 132nd Avenue, which we affectionately call 132nd Square. It is Kitty Corner from the 132nd Square Park.

The property is listed for sale at $7,300,000 It's 3.28 acres. It has two eleven parking stalls. The 15,000 square foot building is a masonry building, and it is in very good shape. It has a couple unique features to it that you might not expect to see in a church, one of those being a kitchen and another being a gym, and then it has lots of flexible meeting space. The parcel is zoned medium density residential.

There are no critical areas, and it is a flat parcel, which you will probably never hear me say again. This slide shows you the floor plan of the building, and what you see in the center is the gym and the chapel, and there's a dividing wall in between them, so you can actually open it up and have access to the whole thing. There's also dividing walls inside the gym itself. There's a hallway around the gym and the chapel, and then the entire perimeter of the building contains classrooms as well as the kitchen, and so you can see a couple photos there of different sized rooms as well as the kitchen in the bottom right corner. As mentioned, this is directly relevant to the 2022 Parks, Recreation and Open Space plan.

It is in one of our highest priority low service areas. As you can see, there is a lower median income. It has a high diversity index, and it has the highest excuse me, it has moderate risk on the social vulnerability scale. For these reasons, actually, the Kingsgate area has been one of our highest priorities for added programs and services, and it should be mentioned that this is one of the reasons why Kawaiiken Gym has also been a super high priority. So both that, of course, and the church sit in this area.

There's a second reason that this is really relevant to the PROs plan. There are three goals or objectives that specifically call out increasing space and programming in underserved areas of the city, and then there are three objectives that specifically call out adding smaller neighborhood recreation centers and specifically one in the Kingsgate area. On this next slide, you can see that the current two community centers essentially right now effectively serve the North and the South of the city, although NKCC is actually quite centrally located. Adding the new Kraken Iceplex and Kirkland Community Center brings service to the Southeast, and then adding this church location would bring service to the Northeast, effectively offering services to the quadrants of Kirkland in its entirety, which would make health, wellness and enrichment classes more available to the community. Sorry, that had a mind of its own, and it went to the next slide, but that's Parks and Community Services staff, in partnership with Council, has been working on achieving the goals and objectives outlined in the PROs plan for some time.

There are several projects currently in motion that are working on these high priorities. One of them is the Peter Kirk pool repairs and upgrades, along with the extended seasonal programming, would actually go a long way towards reducing the weightless and making swim lessons more available to the community. Obviously, the Kraken Iceplex and Kirkland Community Center, it will offer a 12,000 square foot community center that will have a cardio and weight room, a fitness room, a dividable multipurpose room with a corresponding service kitchen and a youth activity room. We'll actually talk a little bit more about that shortly. And then, NKCC repairs and improvements that were identified in the facility's assessment are scheduled to be essentially addressed in the facility sinking fund over the next six years.

And then, of course, property acquisitions that help offer park space for the Kirkland community. There are two other projects that have consideration. The first one is the Kamaikan Gym partnership with the Lake Washington School District, and then this would essentially allow us to maintain 20,000 square feet of gym space that could potentially be lost if the school district reverts to its standard sized gym of 12,000 square feet when they rebuild Kamiakin. The NKCC feasibility study for renovation and expansion is on the project list for completion when we have staff capacity and funding available. And then there are several other property acquisitions that are kind of in progress or under consideration, and then some grants have been applied for, but there is nothing firmed up yet.

Now I'm going to turn it over to our recreation manager to talk more about the recreation outlook.

Thanks, Lynn. So we heard about the church location and the configuration layout, and I want to talk a bit about how those make this building well suited to meet our community's recreation needs. So currently, we have demand for recreation programs across all age groups, and in particular for programs that have specific space needs. So the table that's on this slide shows our waitlist totals for indoor programs in 2025. You can get a sense types of programs.

The four areas with the highest demand are indoor camps, preschool activity classes, which includes movement and tumbling, preschool art and dance, and then arts combining adult art and 50 plus art. So as an example of a specific space need, preschool tumbling is one that really needs a dedicated room for all of the equipment that comes with that. The tumbling mats, all of the colorful accessories that you can

see in that

photo, balance beams, that kind of thing. In the movement room where these classes take place now at North Kirkland Community Center during a normal week, we have 13 classes of tumbling and six classes of other classes for young kids. And as you can see in the photos, it takes up a lot of room right now. We have closets in this particular room, and that equipment will not fit in them at all. As other examples of some programs that have specific space needs, art for preschoolers is one.

We need tables and chairs that are sized for small humans, and then for adult art, we really need dedicated drying rack space, easels, that kind of thing, just things that take up room. Other programs on this list that have unique space needs are youth and adult sports, we need gym space for that, music lessons, we have high waitlist for our piano classes and we need a piano to sit in a room to be able to offer those. At North Kirkland Community Center and Peter Kirk Community Center where these classes take place now, We're operating at capacity with really limited opportunity to expand. Next I want to take a quick pause to look at the Kraken Iceplex and Kirkland Community Center floor plan, which many community members may not have seen, and also because folks might be wondering how this facility can address those same program demands that I was just discussing. So this is the layout as envisioned by OPSIS architecture that was presented to the council in February.

As part of the partnership discussions, the Seattle Kraken requested that the community center space have a weight room, cardio room, and a fitness and wellness space. That's on the east side of the building. And so this was incorporated into the design given the consistency of those programs with community needs, in particular for fitness, dance, and activity classes. Other high priority areas for spaces in this site included programs with high wait lists, particularly youth programs like after school camp and summer day camps. And then additionally, the community was vocal about wanting community event space and rental space, meeting room space, so that's also factored in on the west side of the building with the multipurpose room and the activity room.

And then lastly, the floor plan was significantly shaped by the actual footprint available for this building. It's long and narrow, as you can see, and that required some additional emergency egress designs for the multiple stairways. So given the community needs and the design parameters, this space was designed for maximum flexibility in terms of what kinds of recreation programs could be offered in this space. It will absolutely help address those waitlists that were on the previous slide. Storage is a really hot commodity in all of our facilities, every single one, and we planned for ample storage in this one.

You can see the orange spaces attached to each of the activity rooms are all storage, and even so with those spaces it won't be practical to dedicate storage in such a flexible space to highly specific program needs like the tumbling mats or balance beams, large easels, drying racks, that kind of thing without compromising the flexibility that this was designed with. So this table shows that same wait list from before with the highest numbers for indoor programs from 2025, but added are a few more columns to help us compare how these different facilities help us meet community needs for recreation programs. So we've got some program examples and then also which facilities can accommodate the programs. So in the first column with the X's for the labeled Cracken Community Center, the Kirkland Icebox and Kirkland Community Center, about half of the programs on this list will be accommodated by that facility. They'd be well suited for it and that will go a long way to help meet the need for our rec programs.

And because these activity rooms were designed for that maximum flexibility, some programs with those dedicated space requirements just aren't going to be a good fit in that building. The Kamaikan gym project, which would maintain our existing gym space will help us be able to provide, continue to be able to provide the same level of service that we're providing for adult volleyball and youth sports. And then looking at the column for the church with all of the rooms of various sizes in that building, we would easily be able to accommodate 80% of the programs that are on this list of our highest waitlisted programs. We could very easily dedicate a room for tumbling with all that equipment, we could very easily dedicate a room with a piano for music lessons, there's enough space to have a dedicated room with all the preschool furniture that we would need for those classes, an art room with the drying racks and the easels, then lastly, we could easily accommodate the large programs that take place in the community center's multi purpose rooms in that big gym space and sanctuary space. Lastly, if a gym were to be built on the LDS Church property in the future, which Lynn will discuss in a few minutes, that would allow us to expand offerings for the remaining high demand gym based programs such as adult volleyball and youth basketball.

We'd be able to expand those offerings because we'd have greater access to the gym. We would still be dependent on Lake Washington School District's gym space for those large programs, but we would be able to provide programming every evening, every weekend, during the day, which we're unable to do right now. So that last column would give us the greatest ability to meet the community needs for all of these high demand indoor programs.

Lynn, before Council Member Thank Graham has a

you so much for this presentation. One question I had about this chart. So the waitlist total, are these courses that are being provided at the existing community centers that we have?

Correct, they are, Yes.

And then and are we, like, using these rooms all day long? Or how like, is it full capacity all day? Or is it usually these courses are offered in the evenings?

So, as an example, the tumbling classes that I mentioned, there's 13 classes during the week that are tumbling focused and six that are general movement, and those take place five days a week. I think it's every day except Thursday Sunday in that particular room. So the spaces are pretty full, and they're also geared towards that demographic. So, again, preschool tumbling, for example, a lot of our classes are in the morning or afternoon and then there's some after school kind of time frame and Saturday mornings. We don't have any in the evening because that won't work and we found a lot of folks aren't interested in coming out on Sundays for some of these classes, so we've maximized the times that are the highest demand by community members.

Okay, alright, thank you.

Okay, well, having heard an overview of community needs and how the various spaces under consideration could meet those needs, I want to talk a little bit about the Kamaikan gym as it pertains to the LDS Church acquisition. As you heard, both of these locations are in our most underserved area of the city, but it is unlikely that the city has the resources to proceed with both. So therefore, want to compare those just a little bit. As noted, the church contains a small gym. While it is not regulation size, it would work well for preschool sports, youth practice space and adult fitness classes.

The church contains roughly 22 classrooms of various sizes. This would allow some rooms to serve programs with custom needs, as you heard. The Kamiakin Gym is instrumental in helping us bring sports to both the youth and adults of the Kirkland community. The rough draft agreement that we have with the Lake Washington School District requests extra space in the gym with this partnership that would allow a slight expansion of our programs. Without partnership, it's likely that the school district would revert to its standard size gym of 12,000 square feet, which is a 40% reduction.

Having said that, we could partially mitigate that. So Kamaikan has been a high priority because of the potential loss of space, also its location. However, with the church, we could move preschool sports to the gym, which would relieve a little bit of pressure on the school gyms. The space would then be shuffled amongst the gyms that we have access to with the school district, and we would kind of strive to put the sports that have more of a regulation court requirement in the schools, whereas we could put the preschool sports in this gym. By moving preschool sports and practices to the church, we could partially mitigate the theoretical loss of the Kamiakin Gym space.

Now, that's just the extra 8,000 square feet. Conceivably, the city would still have access to 12,000 if that is what the school district built. Most importantly, though, I want to note that one factor here is opportunity for expansion. That's not to say that the city would do that immediately, but one thing the city is buying is opportunity. That's opportunity for a stand alone gym or even an aquatics center on-site. And this slide shows you a 35,000 square foot aquatics center or an 8,000 square foot gym sited at the church space, and you can see that both of those actually fit with no problem.

Hold on, Lynn. Councilor Timchison had a question.

Sorry to interrupt. Do you want to wait until the end?

No, go ahead. Since I stopped her.

A couple of questions. I wanted to confirm that a pool can be sited without destruction of the building. That looks possible.

Yes.

And second, the city of Kirkland youth basketball league currently uses the Kamaikan gym. So, I guess my question is, if the Kamaikan gym is reduced in size from its current size of 20,000 feet, I think they can play two basketball games there now. Is there other resources in the nearby vicinity where the Kirkland youth basketball league can move to?

We need to work with the school district to see what gyms are available without competing with other user groups and other reservations that the district has.

Well, would be, know, it's not a critical question as to whether or not to move forward, but that would be one of my questions is if we can maintain that basketball league. The basketball league originally I believe was run by the Boys and Girls Club and then city took it over.

We do have hundreds of kids in that basketball league, it is very popular and that would continue to be a high priority. If there were programs that needed to get canceled, if we have a loss of space, it's likely to be adult sports.

Good. That's fine. Get that.

Yeah.

Okay, thank you.

Dipy

Mayer. Really quick, just to follow-up on that. Lynn, theoretically, I think what you're saying, though, is you might be able to free up some bandwidth in the school available gyms by moving youth some some of the youngest programs to this gymnasium. Correct. So there is a possibility theoretically, not just of addressing the youth basketball league, but even the backlog of, say, adult volleyball, there's a chance we could actually see some greater some more availability in school gyms because is that true? Because we've moved young people to this gym? Or is

I doubt we have the opportunity to expand the adult leagues. Okay. Really, what we're looking at is mitigating the loss by moving some of the preschool sports over there.

Okay. All Thank you.

While I've thrown a lot of information at you, I'm going to throw a little bit more at you. Some folks might think it's a great idea for us to pursue all of these acquisitions that the city is considering, but we all know that resources are very limited. A point worth making is that the city will incur a substantial expense in 2027 to open the Kraken Iceplex and Kirkland Community Center, not for construction because the Seattle Kraken are building the facility, but to outfit the facility, so the FF and E, which is all onetime expenses, and then also the start up operations. There will be minimal revenue in 2027 because we would only be operating the facility for maybe a quarter of the year, so 2027 is looking to be a little bit of an expensive year. Opening a second community center at the same time would be extremely financially challenging, but there are several ways that the city could mitigate that potential challenge, and there's a couple listed here.

When the city is ready to open the church site, we could close NKCC and move its operations to the church, and analysis shows that all of NKCC programs could fit in the church site. NKCC could be renovated and then reopened in one or two years, therefore offsetting the cost of opening another facility at the same time. A couple other options we thought about would be limited opening of the site. For example, select registered programs only or rentals only. Just think about the school district as a model that I'm referring to, so we use the gyms at night, we send a recreation lead over there to open the gym and supervise the programs.

So in other words, it wouldn't be operating for five to seven days a week of service. It would be limited services. Another option is to lease the facility for a couple years, potentially use it as lay down space, temporary offices. There's a whole variety of other considerations. Leasing probably wouldn't be our first recommendation because, as you know, that comes with a lot of other challenges, including displacing someone at the end of the lease.

So now that I've discussed all the challenges, I want to mention one more thing before I turn it over to Kevin to talk about financial considerations. Legacies take time and money and sacrifice. If you were here today, Al Locke could probably tell us more about the sacrifices that were made to create the waterfront parks that make Kirkland what it is today. The city is stretching to add the Kraken Iceplex and Kirkland Community Center. We have to come up with a shorter name for that.

So the addition of the church site would be more than a stretch. It would require sacrifice. And to talk about those potential trade offs and sacrifices, I'm gonna turn it over to Kevin.

Thank you, Lynn.

Quite the introduction.

Right.

No pressure.

Yeah, no pressure. Hear are all the great things, and now we're gonna pay for it. Back to you, Kevin. So I have seven slides, not a lot of time, so I'll try and go through them relatively quickly. But, definitely, I'm looking for council's direction tonight to reprioritize some of these projects and potential strategies to help, staff develop a proposed funding strategy, that we can develop, after submitting the the letter of intent.

So here is a is a list of of projects that we've identified, that we could potentially reprioritize. The short of it is that we do believe that we could afford this, but it requires kind of some hard choices. So that's what we're trying to highlight tonight. So on this list, I'll go through pretty quickly, but, in the middle column there is the estimated transferable local funding through '26. So basically, what funding do we have this year that we can move to the Church property acquisition.

So first is the Rosehill property acquisition for $2,600,000 Council in February authorized the purchase of that. Staff technically believes technically we could revoke that agreement, though the recommendation is not to move away from that. But that is an option and we have about $2,600,000 for this. Next is the Neighborhood Land Acquisition Project. So that's basically the balance of impact fees at the end of this year, park impact fees.

So we believe that we'll end the year about $1,800,000 to maybe $2,500,000 depending on impact fee revenue this year. And that could be all utilized for this, though we are we do have some pending CFT grants that we would need matching funding for. So that's another consideration. Basically, using this balance does hamstring our ability to make other acquisitions over the next few years. And then there are three options here for the Peter Kirk pool, separated out a little bit differently than we did in the memo, but trying to make it clear that there are three distinct options here.

So the first is the, pool repairs, upgrades, AD enhancements, what we're calling the baseline investments and the bathhouse expansion. So the approximate total cost, and I've added 10% contingency on each of those because each of the Peter Kirk pool numbers because these are a year old estimates and only 30% design, so there's a lot of uncertainty there. But currently, we have about $3,670,000 of local funding that we could move around from that project. And the cost is $7,800,000 On the next slide, I'll go through what makes up the rest, but spoiler, it's some grants. And then the second piece is the waiting pool replacement, which would cost about $3,400,000 and then the main pool enclosure, which would be another $13,200,000 on top of that.

So those are all additive. The Kamaikan gym would cost $5,000,000 We do have about $515,000 grant for that, but couldn't transfer that to this project. And then there are three transportation projects, which I can go into in the next couple of slides. So just to refresh on what makes up the rest of that, yeah, Peter Kirk pool funding. So we have $3,000,000 in impact fees, 500,000 in REIT one, dollars 120,000 of Kirkland Parks Levy.

There's a $515,000 state grant, and we just secured the $2,500,000 allocation from the newly passed King County Parks Levy. And then in December, City Manager did discuss reallocating the bond issuance that was intended to repay the Houghton Village interfund loan, and I think we had kind of tentatively tagged about $5,000,000 for this project. So that makes up the rest of potential funding for that option. So I'll go through these relatively quickly, but to give you a little bit more background on these three transportation projects and why they've come up. So this first one is TRC 139, which is the intersection of Northeast 85th Street and 132nd Ave Northeast, dual left turn lane.

So it's widening 132nd Ave Northeast. You can see it in the bottom right of that map. And then providing a second southbound left turn lane. So this does abut Redmond City of Redmond, so it would require some right of way acquisition in Redmond. And we, up to this point, have not had the support of Redmond citizens or residents and the city of Redmond to make those acquisitions, which has made that project slow going.

And after the after some of the traffic changes from COVID, the current traffic study doesn't justify that need at this point, but we are there is a study right now to evaluate if the current traffic data to make sure that it to determine whether or not it supports that second turn lane. But there's about $1,200,000 available for N26 for this project. Next slide. The next is CRC 146. So this is Northeast 1 12th Street And 80th Ave Northeast and Juanita Drive.

So this was part of the original Juanita Drive project that we that council separated out in May 2023. So this is rechannelizing Northeast 112th Street and 80th Ave Northeast and adding an RRFB. There are some difficulties with this project, which is why it was kind of pulled out as, difficulty and challenges with private property and right of way acquisition at the intersection. And at the time, council and staff didn't want to delay the rest of the project. So the this number the cost of this project is likely to be higher now that it's been a few years.

And each year it gets delayed, it would cost more. One of the pros, for delaying this project further is just overall construction fatigue on the Juanita Drive corridor and commuters there may appreciate the reprieve from some of the traffic. And then finally, STC 111. So this is a street preservation scope from on 124th Ave, 132nd Street to 144th Street, adjacent to the Kingsgate Library. So there's a few of the, items there, that are a big part of this.

But, this was added to the CIP originally to apply for a federal grant, which was unsuccessful. And it is currently being built into the 2027 scope for the annual preservation project. So there is funding elsewhere for this. And it's been planned to basically repurpose that funding as part of the 2732 CIP process. Alright.

So finally, there's a couple of funding strategies. I touched on the bond issuance already, but here are some potential other things that we wanted to highlight as potential funding resources for the Church acquisition. The first is the bond issuance. So we do have, in the twenty fivetwenty six budget, debt service payments backed by REIT. Currently in the budget to repay the Houghton Village interfund loan.

So if, if and when that project or that, property is sold, that interfund loan could be or sorry, the, debt issuance could be repurposed for Peter Kirk Pool, Kamaican Jam or Church Property Acquisition or some combination of those. And current debt service rates, I just checked with our bond advisor, is right around where we budgeted. So that hasn't changed much, somewhat surprisingly. And then a couple interfund loans. I'll talk a little bit about REIT and impact fees on the next slide, but we think that by '29, we could pay back about $3,400,000 in impact fees and $3,000,000 in REIT.

Another option is that the Kamaikan JEM is something that we can pay over time. So we wouldn't have to take an interfund loan out. We could just pay that REIT over time through 2029. And then finally, just as a wouldn't recommend it necessarily, but the general capital contingency is a reserve currently through $26.4400000 in there, which is slightly under target, which is $4,500,000 that's getting repaid 3 and $50,000 each year for a loan that was taken out in twenty nineteen, twenty twenty for the Parks Maintenance Center. So that's another pot of money that's there.

And here, I just pulled out three potential funds that we could borrow from interfund loan and their kind of average cash balance over the last year. Those are net of outstanding interfund balances. So there's, I think, 3,850,000 in development services, 7,500,000 to equipment rental or fleet and then $600,000 of surface water that are outstanding that are all expected to be paid back this year as part of the Houghton Village and Fisk Property interfund loans. Next slide, finally.

The bond insurance for the Houghton Village, so that, we could use that only if Houghton Village gets sold this year, right?

Right. So we have to pay back the city manager can take this, but we do need to take back pay back the interfund loan this year and establish a way to do that. So if we are able to pay for repay the whole $15,000,000 then we can do that.

So

I know there were some questions about just capital funding projections, and we'll get into a lot more of the details as part of the 2732 CIP later this year. But just wanted to highlight impact fees and REIT. So impact fees are on the left. That's the park impact fees over the last ten or so years since 2016. As you can see, impact fees are incredibly variable and the vast majority of the revenue comes from large projects.

So this is a couple of years old, but I was looking at it today. I think 75% of the Park Impact fee revenue comes from about 5% of the transactions, the really large projects that we get all at once. So it's pretty difficult to accurately kind of project. So we are forecasting somewhere in the range of $1,200,000 to $2,900,000 in 2026, pending two large development projects, and they're timely The outlook beyond that is uncertain. There's a lot of kind of chatter from the development community.

That market is cooling, especially in some of the mega projects that have been bringing a lot of those impact fees over recent years. But we are pretty conservative about how we build that into the CIP. So in the six year CIP, but from 25,000,000 to 30,000,000 we built in $1,500,000 per year. And as other resources come in, we're able to recognize that and pour that into the Parkland acquisition project. But that's what that forecasted number is from 27 to 2,030.

And then for REITs, it's slightly more predictable. So through still pretty variable the last few years with the big fluctuations in the real estate market. But through Q1, REIT is trending about 15% below where it was in 2025. So it we're expecting that it'll land right around $11,000,000 which is what we budgeted. It was about $13,000,000 in 2025.

And that $11,000,000 budget in the CIP was based on analysis that we did as part of the twenty twenty three-twenty twenty eight CIP that basically determined that, that $11,000,000 is kind of the baseline churn from residential projects. So excluding some of those big mega projects that had driven the heights of 18,000,000 that we received in 2021. So like I said, we calculated we feel pretty confident that a $3,000,000 interfund loan from REE could be repaid between or by 2029, if not earlier. And that is on top of all the other known obligations and assumptions that we've built in. So we understanding that there will be some funding for the Kraken, the FF and E, all of the current CIP, that is on top of all of that based on current projections.

And I will pass it back to Lynn.

Well, this point, we're looking for council feedback.

Council, any feedback? Well,

I don't I think it's appropriate to give my feedback at another time.

I just want to emphasize for the study session that we're not asking counsel tonight to decide if you want to buy it, how you'd pay for it. We're just want to show you that there's a lot of different options that you would have. But the decision of actually how to pay for it would come back to you at a later date with a purchase and sale agreement should the council choose to proceed. So all these options are still available to you, and you have probably a couple weeks to a month to think about them.

Well, my feedback is this is an exciting opportunity. Sarah, I appreciate that the way you broke down the classes that we could fulfill with each of community centers. I think that's really important. I think that we have to be really aggressive when we have opportunities like this because we recognize that and we've done the PROPS plan, and we recognize that this is an underserved area and that we've needed to do this for quite a while. So I think this is an exciting opportunity.

One of the things I thought of when Lynn was showing the four quadrants is when we talk about emergency management and where we're going to shelter people if we have a crisis, an earthquake, something like that, this also provides us that opportunity because, similar to our fire stations needing to be on the East Side Of 405, this community center would also be on the East Side Of 405. So I I think this is a good thing for the city. I think it's a good thing for our recreation program. I'm optimistic in finding a short term use for it while we wait till we can fund the operations part, the facilities part. And I appreciate, Kevin, you coming up with a lot of things to pick and choose from as we figure out how to finance this.

So thank you. Deputy Mayor?

Thank you. And don't need to repeat anything the mayor just said. I did have a question. Using Lynn, you said at one point, said, you know, thinking about it through the school model, where we only are we're only programming it in the evening when it's not being used, in the school's case, by the school. Is that I'd like to you know, I know leasing is not our first choice, but it'd be interesting to think about if there's a way to combine leasing with evening programming so that we actually get a little we get the programming we're looking for, lease on a small scale in the evenings while we're also leasing it we're sort of figuring out some of the other challenges.

That would be interesting to see if that's a possibility.

Yeah,

I think, thank you so much for this presentation and providing all the different options for funding. I do think we need to kind of absorb it a little bit. So I'm glad we have two weeks. From my understanding, it appears like Chameikin gym. So I'm I'm very interested to kinda understand that a bit better.

And, you know, if if that's gonna cost $5,000,000 and ultimately, we're not gonna own that property, it's gonna be owned by the school district, that's an interesting factor to consider. And if there's a way to move those funds over to this property that we would actually ultimately own and have control over programming, and I do think that that's a big benefit. And if it's going to serve the same similar area as the Chameleon Gym, that's kind of a win win. So I am very interested to learn more about just how that funding mechanism would work. Work.

All right. I'm going to go ahead and wrap us up so we can break down this room. But thank you all. That will conclude our study session. We'll be back at 07:30 for our regular meeting.

All right. We are back in session following an overview of prosecution services and a discussion of a potential acquisition of church property. We're going to start tonight's meeting with honors and proclamations. Councilmember Tim Chisholm will be reading our Language Access Month proclamation this evening. And Councilmember Pascal will be doing the honors for Earth Month. City manager.

K. Thank you, madam mayor, deputy member, members of the council. We'll first be proclaiming April 2026 as language access month in Kirkland. Receiving the proclamation, we're delighted tonight to have Susan Prowse. She is an active member of the Kirkland community. She's a member of our Kirkland senior council, and she's a long time member of the National Federation of the Blind in Washington, which is an organization that works very diligently around the country to educate and provide access in braille. And I'd like to note that the recipient proclamation is written in braille. Welcome Susan.

Alright. Language access month, April 2026. Whereas language is a bridge to opportunity, civic participation, and equitable access to essential services for all residents and whereas the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects limited English proficiency Americans and longstanding federal guidance has helped to ensure equitable access to government services and federally funded programs for all Americans including LEP persons. And whereas Kirkland is home to a diverse population with speakers of many languages and over 13,000 people in Kirkland speak languages other than English including Spanish, Brazilian, Portuguese, Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic and Farsi, reflecting the rich cultural heritage that strengthens our community. Whereas, as part of the DIEB five year roadmap, the city of Kirkland has increased citywide language access and interpretation resources through standardized process and the creation of a city language access plan, including training to all departments on the use and whereas individuals with limited English proficiency face barriers to access vital information services and opportunities but equitable language access promotes dignity, safety, inclusion and belonging by ensuring that individuals have the opportunity to engage fully in civic life and access critical services such as health care, emergency response, education, and public safety.

And whereas language access month is an opportunity to raise awareness of language equity to celebrate the work of interpreters, translators, and advocates, and to reaffirm our city's commitment to linguistic inclusivity and equity for all. Now therefore, Mayor Kelly Curtis on behalf of the City Council proclaims April 2026 as language access month in Kirkland and encourages our community to celebrate the importance of language access, support efforts to enhance multilingual communication, and work towards a more inclusive, equitable future for everyone.

If you're wondering this is the proclamation in braille so Susan do you want to say a few words?

I'd like to thank Mayor Curtis and the members of the city council as well as the city manager and the people that work with you in in the manager's office for recognizing the importance of braille. As someone who has grown up blind and learned to read braille as a child, it became increasingly more important for me and my education in order to compete on equal access and equal levels with my sighted classmates. I those skills followed me into the workforce and into my everyday life where I use braille on a constant basis. It supplements a lot. Now that we are a society that is so dependent on technology, it does supplement the technology.

You don't have to turn on your computer and look for the right file, etcetera. You can just pick up a piece of paper, write a note, or go to your note file and find find what you need quickly. And especially if you're doing stuff like making a recipe or crafting and you need the instructions, you could just keep going back and reading the braille instead of having to keep going up and down on

the

computer. So it does help and the importance of braille in this state started back in about 1987 when we went to the state legislature to make it easier for blind kids in this state to have braille as part of their IEP. And we were one of the earliest states in the country to make it mandatory that if a parent requested it, the kids got it in their IEP. That bill became law in 1996. It takes a while sometimes.

And it's really helped a lot of kids around the state be better educated and prepared for their future, hopefully to go out and get jobs and contribute to the state in many facets including the state economy. So thank you. One of the things we do in conjunction, there's two groups, the National Federation of the Blind and an associate group called the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults. We have a reading contest every January. It's a national contest, and people from brand new braille learners to super advanced braille readers compete and for every minute you read you log it and it's a fun thing.

People communicate all over the country and challenge each other to become better readers.

We have

Alright. Alright. Now, we're gonna do our Earth Month proclamation. Councilor Pascal.

Alright. Well, the councilor is coming down. I wanna introduce our recipient which is Eva Otterson. She's one of our sustainability ambassadors and as many know, this is a development program for student leaders, teacher leaders, community leaders committing to advancing a sustainable future by aligning classroom and community relevance with real world impact. And Eva was a recent guest on the Citi's podcast, and we're delighted to have her back. So welcome, Eva.

Alright. Celebrating Earth Month, April 2026. Whereas the Kirkland City Council has set a goal to protect our natural environment through sustainable goals and practices, reducing carbon emissions, and equitably meeting the needs of all community members for a healthy environment and easy access to clean energy and clean water without compromising the needs of future generations. And whereas Earth Month is a reminder that individuals and communities can make a difference by reducing energy use, electrifying homes and businesses, producing renewable solar energy, and reducing consumption and waste to help mitigate the impacts of climate change and support a resilient environment for people, plants, and animals. And whereas environmental sustainability is also an equity issue as Washington Environmental Health Disparities Map indicators show that fossil fuel pollution and other toxic exposures impact vulnerable and socioeconomically challenged populations by increasing health risk factors.

And whereas, the Kirkland City Council has committed by prioritizing funding for sustainable for the sustainable strategic plan actions that advance equity, energy efficiency, public health, and a clean energy economy that supports a sustainable and resilient future. And whereas the city adopted development regulations that align with Washington state priorities and encourage a diversity of housing through well connected infill development, advancing a land use pattern that accommodates growth while promoting an equitable, welcoming, connected, and sustainable community, And whereas numerous city programs across departments work to protect the environment, including water supply, wastewater and stormwater systems, development services, the urban forest strategic management plan, special recycling events and waste reduction efforts, protection of streams, wetlands and lakes, and the Green Kirkland partnerships, natural parkland restoration efforts that support healthy ecosystems and biodiversity and more. And whereas, the city of Kirkland participates in regional environmental efforts such as the Lake Washington Cedar Sammamish Watershed Salmon Recovery Council, the Eastside Climate Partnership, and the King County Cities. There are so many big words here. It is crazy.

Oh my

god. It's

like a mouthful. King County Cities Climate Collaborative to reduce carbon emissions and footprints, diminish environmental impacts, and promote sustainable practices. Now therefore, mayor Kelly Curtis, on behalf of the city council, proclaims April 2026 at as Earth Month in Kirkland, Washington and calls upon all community members to take action to reduce their impact on the environment to achieve an equitable, sustainable, and resilient community. Take breath. Okay? You You wanna say a

few words?

Yeah. I'll just keep

it brief because we have

a long meeting, I'm sure. But I just like to I'm so grateful to live in such a great city that has always prioritized sustainability and continues to do so. This is the second time that this has happened, which is always an honor. So I'm so thankful, and this, sustainability ambassadors will continue to support your sustainability strategic plan and active transportation plan as much as we possibly can so thank you.

All right. We are now moving on to items from the audience. This is a time in our meeting when we normally hear from the public. Please limit your remarks to three minutes. We will provide up to a total of 45 for our items from the audience, with no more than six speakers on a subject regardless of their position.

To address the council during items from the audience periods, please sign up using the online public comment instruction link or the posted QR code in chambers. For those participating by phone, please dial 9 to be recognized to speak. Items from the audience is an important part of our business meeting, and we ask that everyone be treated with kindness and respect. Please do not clap or applaud or otherwise openly express your agreement or disagreement with the speaker. When that happens, even when supporting the speaker, it can be disruptive to our meeting and discourage others from sharing a different viewpoint.

We discourage people from using obscenities and using personal attacks against others, and we ask that you direct your comments to counsel, not to staff or audience members. In addition, because they can be disruptive, signs and placards are not allowed in counsel chambers during our meetings, regardless of content. Kirkland prides itself on being a respectful, welcoming community. We want everyone to feel welcome and feel like they belong in council chambers expressing their viewpoints. City Clerk, who do we have signed up to speak?

Thank you, Mayor. At this point, we have six guests wishing to speak. We'll take the first three in this order, all of them on-site: Stanley Ho, followed by Omid Rameshni and Maria Hudson.

Stanley, welcome.

Is it cool if I leave it here?

Yes. Alright.

Thank you. Mayor, council members, thank you for having me here today. My name is Stanley Ho and I'm a Kirkland resident. I submitted a seven tab evidentiary record for agenda item three a today, the prosecution services study session. I asked the counsel to note tab four.

In tab four, the city's contracted prosecution service declined to file a motion for order to show cause. The stated basis was that they could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had any criminal intent. Beyond a reasonable doubt is a standard for a criminal conviction, the standard for a motion for order to show cause is preponderance of the evidence. And the no contact order at issue is a knowing violation instrument in which specific criminal intent is not an element. Tonight's staff memo for the prosecution services study session describes the standards applied at charging and at trial.

The memo does not address the standard for filing a motion for order to show cause. I asked the council to direct the city attorney and the contracted prosecution service to each provide separate written responses on the record prior to the next regular council meeting on May 5. I am requesting explicit, unqualified and direct responses to the following three questions. First, under Washington law, what is the standard of proof for filing a motion for order to show cause? A, preponderance of the evidence or B, beyond a reasonable doubt?

Second question, what standard the TAP IV state was applied? A, preponderance of the evidence or B, beyond a reasonable doubt? Question three, last but not least, does the standard applied in Tab four conform to Washington law? Yes or no. Thank you.

Thank you. Next we have Ahmed. Did I pronounce it closely? Yeah, it's Ahmed. Ahmed.

And it means hope, which is lovely. I just wanted to say I'm Kirkland resident. I just became a citizen a while back, and I'm really excited because one of the things about being a citizen is, you know, the civic involvement and engagement. So it's my first council meeting. I didn't really come with anything in mind, and I was really glad to see the level of conversation.

I wanted to just, like, say how impressed I was in the council in the in the prosecutional session because the council did two things that I really appreciated. The first thing was that they were pushing for really clear timelines for the action, and I thought that was great. And I also thought it was great that they were really pushing for great procedure, and I really respected participate, and so I when I was reading the when I was hearing the responses, and I realized I'm addressing this as a counsel and and and I'm new to this, but, like, perhaps this is a question that I'm actually asking the counsel to pass on to the prosecution. And it was the the topic of immigration came up, and that was a a topic that's sensitive and interesting to me because of the time that we live in. And and basically, I was wondering if I could get a response to this question.

The the prosecution was talking about how immigration responses are considered when they're making charging decisions. And it talked about the differences potentially when there's an immigration status difference between two people. That really caught my interest because I was thinking about circumstances where a person who is a victim or somebody who is a survivor, I thought that was a great term, or a defendant, might have different immigration statuses. And what happens in those circumstances when, for example, the the person who is a survivor or a victim is actually has a weaker immigration status? And I wanted to understand that because I I didn't really understand what they were what they were saying.

And so I wanted the clarity on that one. And so I wanted to know is the analysis that it's symmetric in those circumstances or are there circumstances where one is privileged over the other? And I wanted to just understand that based on what they were saying because it wasn't clear. It's a very arcane matter, but I was just like maybe I should just Google it, but I was I just thought it was it was something of interest to me. But I just was very grateful to be here tonight and just to see your level of care and interest in in these sorts of matters.

They impact lives, and they really it's a part of what we do. I have the privilege of calling myself a failed law school dropout. It's like I had a dual degree, I dropped out of the law degree straight away. But I'm grateful that all of you have attention and focus for us all. Thank you.

Thank you very much. If you'd like to give your contact information to Emily in the back, then the city attorney can respond to your question. All right. Maria? Welcome.

Hi. I would like to turn this body's attention to the Bellevue Police Department exemption log for case 204175. There is one dated twelvetwelvetwenty three. It has my name on it because I was there. And then there is one dated fourthirtytwenty four.

So I'm glad that your city attorney is able to answer people because these same perpetrators attached to this case number were here at Juanita Beach. Your officers failed to investigate, and when they showed up, DARVO. They denied it was happening, they accused me of abusing my daughter, and they reversed the victim offender role for an African American family with a disabled child with the sex offenders, and that is very disturbing because Aaron's Law cites my daughter's demographics as the number one human trafficked child in King County. You guys are cited as other police departments for King County Special Assault Unit. To this day, your police department has refused to properly investigate the child sex trafficking crimes in its jurisdiction.

And additionally, pertaining to a Baymont perpetrator, I have not heard anything about that case being sent to the prosecutor's office as well. What is very disturbing is that your officers have shown up and implied that my daughter is consenting to child sex trafficking and vulnerable adult sex trafficking. They have showed up and they have blamed me as pathologically black. They have literally falsely accused me of abusing my daughter to conceal third party perpetrators. I want everyone to read Aaron's law curriculum.

Aaron is a white namesake, and what is housed in it is black demographics of sexual slavery resegregation that your officers have contributed to. Bellevue Police Department is investigating its officers presently for covering up child sex trafficking, for concealing literally racketeering evidence by not collecting it, and your officers engaged in the same. So I'm standing here demanding a criminal investigation into your officers because they concealed child sex trafficking. And additionally, at the Baymont, your officers told me that they were concerned about the safety of the perpetrator, not myself or my daughter. They falsely claimed that my daughter did not want to leave, and they lied to me earlier in the night and said that my daughter was alone.

Black parents don't want this to be a suburban sundown town. When you deliver safety, you need to deliver it to all people.

Thank you, Maria. All right, City Clerk?

Kim Faust and Joe Kunzler. Kim Faust is on-site. Joe Kunzler is virtual.

Welcome, Kim.

Hello. I'm Kim Faust.

I'm the co president of Main Street Property Group. Main Street's a local Kirkland based developer that has permitted and constructed thousands of housing units in Kirkland and the Puget Sound region. We are one of the few developers who permit and construct both mixed use and townhome developments. We do this because it allows us to be flexible. A product that works in one market might not work in another.

We found that the flexibility is key to encouraging housing protection. Today, Main Street is the only developer to receive design review and LSM approval for a housing project in the station area. We support the city's desire to modify the station area to catalyze development. Today, we are here to support the stationary ordinance proposed by staff and as approved by the Planning Commission. As a developer, typically restricting use types is not the best approach to increase housing production.

It also could be problematic with smaller lots getting those to redevelop over time with a prohibition of detached housing. Ultimately though, given the rest of the components in the ordinance, we urge you to support it. We have two projects in the station area currently. One, Slate Peak, which is a less than four acre site in Norcurk that we will need a development agreement to assist with both height and use modifications. This will produce approximately 170 multifamily units within the station area in the near term.

And then secondly, as I think most of you are aware, our Rosehill townhome project, the 89 unit project that has all entitlements except building permits, which actually we have now submitted. We're just waiting for the city to deem them complete. We support the extension of the approved projects for nine months, though we should not need that full amount of time to allow the vesting. Thank you for your consideration, and we urge you to support the ordinance.

Thank you, Kim. Next we have Joe Kunzler and he's virtual, correct?

Hi. Go

ahead. Joe

Kunzler. Thank thank you madam mayor. This is Joe Consort here. This is about your new Kirkland City Council procedures as you may have heard from my emails and Reddit. I've read them. I think they don't exactly hit the mark in my opinion, but they come close. Thank you for zooming in on the clock. Much appreciated. I have on Reddit, you know, what what was sadly omitted from by staff, which is as per Bellevue resolution ten fifty four four, that's one zero five four four, under c, rules of public participation, item four. Public comment shall be limited to matters relating to city of Bellevue government.

Public comment may not be used for for the purpose of assisting a campaign for election of any office to any any person to any office over the promotion of opposition to any ballot proposition except when the the council establishes a comment period. I wanna be clear in case the person I read it who asked, didn't get my response to his or her thoughtful or their thoughtful questions. That that ballot proposition is only when the matter is actually on the ballot. Afterward, you can comment all you want, but we don't really don't want as somebody who's filed arguably the highest number to the PDC about campaigning using public comment, we don't want public comment to become an inter tool in the endless escalating fighting over political speech. I mean, who the heck wants to come to a public comment period and listen to someone gush about your next state representative because she's a great moral leader?

With a minute twenty two left, I I do wanna stress as well that stopping the the hate of one regular commenter requires a guideline like this. This is a guideline that also is in Redmond and a lot of other places, like Sound Transit, and this has been tested in the in the King County courts, and King County judges have found that this guideline is reasonable. I think at a bare minimum, you have a responsibility as you ask for regional funds, state funds, and federal funds to protect the region from attacks, but that is my opinion. I certainly if I was upon those dice bravely, would not like it at all if someone had a concern about Kirkland but decided to take it to Bellevue. And I think it's safe to say, I don't wanna speak for anybody, but Bellevue, I'm sure, doesn't like the fact this regular commenter uses your podium to attack them.

And I think having that public comment shall be limited to items related to city of Kirkland government is a fair and reasonable guideline, and I ask that you please add that. I wanna thank you all for your public service. I I know you normally don't get a thank you, but I think you deserve it. It's hard being up there, being up to public attention. And with that, thank you and God bless America.

Thank you, Joe. And next we have our final guest is David Haynes, virtually.

David, go ahead.

Hi. Thank you, David Haynes. I just wanna thank the mayor and the Parks and Rec employees and the director for addressing that unsafe path near the baseball field in Juanita. And now I'd like to request that you do another great thing and filter out the debris in the volleyball court sand and maybe rinse some of it and put some of it back where it's been pushed out from the actual boundary. But it's still inside the perimeter because about a week and a half ago, some young lady had stepped on some nasty debris piercing the bottom of her foot.

And I think it originated from some guy coming in there and Roto tilling some of the sand. And I think he went too deep and scraped some I don't know if it's creosote, wood or what, but there needs to be like and there's something like plastic bottles and stuff. During the April 11 cleanup, there's not enough addressing that sand pit. And that's like one of the best assets. So hopefully, we can get that addressed soon. Thank you very much.

Thank you, David. Concludes our items from the audience. We are now going to move on to consent calendar. Before we have a motion, I'd like to ask Deputy Mayor Black to present the audit of accounts.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. We had of of of

Thank you, Deputy Mayor. Is there a motion Directors to approve the consent calendar? Of

So moved. Second.

It's been moved by Deputy Mayor Black, second by Councilmember Arnold. Are there any questions, comments, or corrections to the calendar? The question is on the motion to approve the consent calendar. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Calendar is approved, seven-zero. I'm shocked. We are now on to our business agenda. Our first item on our business agenda is potential action on a property acquisition.

Before we discuss this item further, we are going to go into executive session to discuss the potential acquisition of real property as authorized by RCW 4,200 thirty-one 100 ten-1B. We expect to reconvene our regular meeting at approximately, I would say, 08:30.

It's going say twenty minutes, think, twenty one.

I always think you're optimistic, but we will split the difference. No, 08:20. We'll be back at 08:20.

Thank you.

All right. We are back from an executive session to discuss the potential acquisition of real property. We will now discuss potential action on property acquisition. City manager.

Okay. Thank you, Madam Mayor. So we have a brief presentation on this. This was the subject of the study session. And now we're looking for council direction on whether you would like us to proceed with submitting a letter of intent. When the presentation made, we do have a small amendment we want to suggest to the resolution, which we'll talk about after when Zwogster makes the short presentation overview.

Thank you, City Manager. I do have a very short presentation this evening. It's not 22 slides, I promise. It is two slides. Earlier this evening, session, we presented to City Council on the possible acquisition of the LDS Church at 132nd Square, otherwise known as 132nd Street and 132nd Avenue. It's Kitty Corner from 132nd Square Park. That was presented earlier today, and the question to counsel now is, would you like to authorize the city manager to pursue the letter of intent?

Want see if we have any questions, and then if someone makes the motion, we can discuss the potential

Thank you. Council, any additional questions? Would anyone like to make a motion? Council Member Falcombe.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I just want to make sure I had the right resolution in front of me. I move that we adopt resolution R5731 authorizing the city manager to submit a letter of intent to purchase the real property located at 13220 Northeast 132nd Street.

Thank you. Second. Moved by councilmember Falcone, second by councilmember Prem to move forward resolution 5731. Is there any discussion? City manager.

Sorry. Thank you. Since we don't have a formal meeting, so to pull this up. But if you can go to your packets in section one, which is on line 25 of the resolution, it says the city manager or its designee is hereby authorized and directed to submit a letter of intent substantially similar to exhibit A. Our recommendation is to delete the word substantially and at the very end of the sentence add subject to market conditions. And that then provides the flexibility discussed.

Anyone like to move forward this amendment? Council Member Tim Chisholm.

I'll move forward the City Manager's amendment as stated.

Second. Moved by Council Member Tim Chisholm, seconded by Council Member Falcon to move forward the amendment to resolution five thousand seven thirty one. Any discussion, any questions on the amendment? All right, all those in favor of approving the amendment, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Amendment carries seven-zero. Are there any further discussion on Resolution five thousand seven thirty one? All in favor of Resolution 5,731 as amended, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Resolution carries seven zero. Is that it?

That is it. And should the city be the successful bidder, we'll return to council with the purchase and sale agreement as well as funding options for that.

Thank you, Lynn. Okay. Thank you.

City Manager?

I just want to maybe ask for a verbal motion to also submit a second letter outlining why the city thinks they're the preferred purchaser for this property. So maybe just a voice motion in action.

So moved. Thank you.

Second.

It's been moved by Councilmember Falcon, deputy mayor Black to include a second letter why we are the best potential purchaser for this property. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries, seven-zero.

Thank you.

Thank you. Alright, we are moving on to item nine B, which is the adoption of the Northeast eighty fifth Street Station area zoning code amendment, city manager.

Alright, Thank you, madam mayor. So we are, on this item, we are looking for action tonight, from the council. Here to give you a presentation on what is contained in the ordinance is our senior planner, Leandro Baker Lewis, and she's also joined by our director and deputy director of Planning and Building.

And Chair Rosman from the Planning Commission.

I apologize. Welcome Chair Rosman from the Planning Commission. My apologies.

All right, thank you. Good evening Mayor, Deputy Mayor and esteemed counsel. My name is Leandra and I'll be presenting tonight on the Planning Commission recommendations for the Northeast 85th Street station area activation zoning code changes, including ordinance 4,936, which you may consider for adoption. I have 10 slides for you tonight. The presentation has a straightforward agenda tonight.

It includes a quick walkthrough of the project scope, including why and how it was developed. We're going to go over what insights were gathered from the community and from the Planning Commission through the public hearing process. I'll provide an overview of the ordinance, including what changes are being recommended by Planning Commission as well as some information on what implications those changes might have for existing properties. We'll review some comments received from the community since the hearing, and I'll allow time for questions from the council before discussion and ordinance consideration. So over the next decades, Kirkland will grow.

We know this. Through many discussions and decisions, we've designated the Northeast 85th Street Station area as a primary location suitable for additional housing and employment growth. And over recent years, we've worked hard to codify zoning regulations for development that not only support impending regional transit investments but also help achieve the Station Area Plan's goals of sustainability, equity and economic vitality. Since those efforts, we have yet to see any significant development be initiated in the station area. Real estate market fluctuations, development costs and the evolution of commercial and retail landscapes are some of the main factors we think may be contributing to a lack of development in the station area.

But regardless, recognizing this trend, the City Council has committed to exploring ways to activate or catalyze the station area redevelopment. And on the City Work program, it is kind of outlined in a multipronged approach, where work being carried out by our economic development staff will couple work being done by planning and building staff, which we're here tonight to discuss, and that is the identification and adjustments of regulatory barriers that might exist for the zones. The Planning Commission has recommended a concentrated package of zoning code amendments that seek to facilitate development outcomes that we are looking for in the station area. Want to take a little time to discuss the public hearing. We held a public hearing on March 26.

The Planning Commission did, and they used that to form their recommendation. Leading up to the public hearing and at the public hearing, the Planning Commission considered public testimony from multiple people, including a representative that is actively working in the station area, Main Street Property Group. You heard from their representative Kim this evening. And similar to what you heard from her, Main Street had requests at the public hearing. One was to allow the Rosehill townhome project at the corner of Northeast 85th Street and 128th Avenue to continue as planned, exempting it from the proposed townhome ban and also to amend the language surrounding development agreements in the Station Area Code just to make it clear which properties are allowed to pursue development agreements.

Details of that request can be found in your packet on Page E235, and I will elaborate on those specific requests in the next slide. We were also fortunate to hear from some community members in support of townhome development in the station area, in support of Main Street's requested edits and in support of further incentivizing development in the station area. The Planning Commission considered these points and deliberated before forming their recommendation, and really some key themes coming out of that conversation were an agreement that it is really important to maintain our transparent and predictable reputation through the entire land use approval and development process and remain good partners with the developers who choose to build in Kirkland. The Planning Commission also expressed a strong interest in focusing on incentives for development rather than added restrictions just to make it easier to build the housing we know we need, Which brings us to the ordinance in question, Ordinance 4,936. So as your packet describes, there are three areas of the zoning ordinance that we're seeking to amend.

These are familiar topics for the Council, but the Planning Commission did have a couple of additional supplemental recommendations that respond to that public testimony I described, and those are highlighted on screen within the applicable categories. So starting with development agreements, language in the stationary zoning chapter surrounding development agreements has been updated to allow applicants the ability to propose taller buildings or specified uses that aren't normally permitted in exchange for additional public benefits. The Planning Commission also recommended an additional amendment to make sure that the same section was clear and really made explicit that the development agreements can apply to all parcels regardless of size. So that's the first Planning Commission initiated amendment to the ordinance or recommendation. Moving on to prohibited housing types.

In October, the Council indicated a preference for a townhome prohibition in the station area as a method for introducing a minimum density requirement, so we moved forward with this concept, and that's reflected in the draft ordinance as well. That applies to all zoning districts in the station area, so the neighborhood mixed use zone, the urban flex zone and the civic mixed use zone. I will note district within the station area currently only allows residential uses on floors above street level, which effectively already prohibits townhomes. But I just wanted to make that clear. The Planning Commission also is recommending an additional provision to allow projects with existing land use approvals to build townhomes if complete building permits for those structures are submitted within nine months of adoption of this ordinance, and that's in response to the requests from Main Street.

Finally, affordable housing amendments include extending the cutoff date for the Pioneer affordable housing provisions, which allow developments to use more flexible affordability level alternatives if they submit projects sooner rather than later. And that cutoff date, we are proposing to adjust from 2025, which is past, and adjusting that to end of year twenty twenty nine. Ordinance does retain the six twenty four unit cutoff that runs parallel to that date cutoff, so it will be whichever milestone or marker is achieved later to allow for added flexibility. Diving in just a little bit to those Planning Commission initiated amendments. So this slide details the first amendment initiated by the Planning Commission.

It's a relatively minor amendment to the development agreement section. By removing mention of the four acre sites, it reads more accurately that all projects may explore this option for a development agreement within the city or with excuse me, within the station area with City Council to unlock added height or prohibited uses. That one's pretty straightforward. As alluded to earlier, the second Planning Commission initiated amendment seeks to address the Rosehill townhome project and its its current status of in progress but not formally vested, meaning no complete building permits have been submitted, although we did hear tonight that they have been. So that is exciting.

The added language on screen allows townhomes to be proposed for any project in the neighborhood mixed use zone with prior design review board approval, which applies only to the Rosehill townhome development project, as long as permits are submitted within nine months of passage of this ordinance. And as I mentioned earlier, the ordinance also prohibits townhomes and single family homes in other areas of the station area, so the civic mixed use and urban flex zones. While that general prohibition for townhomes and single family homes will exist should you choose to adopt the ordinance, there is existing code language that applies to properties in these areas that currently have those housing types, so we wanted to take a second to just go over that. Properties with townhomes or single family homes will be allowed to continue to operate as normal, and they'll be deemed a legal nonconforming use. And we currently allow legal nonconformances to expand up to 50% without having to adhere to station area regulations.

So they get 10% by right, and then if they would like to expand their legal nonconformance past that 10%, we run it through some criteria, and it ultimately gets approval from the department director. If they were to propose or seek expansion beyond 50%, this can potentially be negotiated through a development agreement if the other development agreement changes in Ordinance 4,936 are adopted. Since the hearing, there have been very few comments submitted by the public, but the couple that we have received communicate both support and concern for the changes, with some appreciating the flexibilities granted and others more apprehensive about potential impacts on future development and to the neighborhood itself. I'm happy to answer any questions the Council might have before taking action on Ordinance 4,936.

Thank you. Council? Council Mayor Arnold?

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Leandra. Not a question, just a comment. I really appreciate the work of the Planning Commission here. Going back when you look at one of the first slides that talked about the specific changes that the commission recommended. I think they're really good changes and sort of thing we look for, for our Planning Commission on drilling the details and providing the creativity to achieve the objectives we're talking about.

And I also wanted to thank staff. I'd asked some questions behind the scenes on existing townhomes in the station area and was concerned about those in addition to the ones that had received some previous land use permits. There are some, but as Leandro has gone through, I was satisfied with their ability to continue. This includes some low income housing near Lake Washington High School that we've talked about previously, and you can see the flexibility that would be allowed going forward. I'm comfortable with that.

Thank you. And thank you for asking that question. Councillor Pascal, did I see you?

Yes. A question for Angela from the Planning Commission. One of the things that I've kind of expressed concern about when this has come up to counsel over the last so many months has been this minimum density requirement. I was wondering what the discussions were at the planning commission level around that? What were your feelings about that? Because while we want to encourage higher density development, it's kind of a mixed message between a requirement or a barrier and then incentivizing the land use that we want to see. I'd just be interested in the context.

Yeah, so we actually talked about that quite a bit, bit, and the general consensus from the Planning Commission was that we didn't really like prohibition, that we would much rather focus on incentives, but we had gotten pretty clear direction that it sounded like the interest was in prohibition, and so that was kind of where we shaped our discussion, but we talked quite a bit about how we would be very happy to talk more about incentives and less about outright not allowing townhomes. And we talked a bit about maybe there's like a line as to like where, you know, I think it's pretty clear that folks want more density like at the Lee Johnson and the Petco, but maybe as we move further toward Redmond, potentially, that's less important. But, you know, we were fine ish, but I think there was a lot of interest in more about let's talk about how can we incentivize the type of housing that we want rather than prohibit a specific type. And then the majority of our conversation was more focused on making sure that for a project that is already in the pipeline that we make sure to really make it clear that we aren't going to change things last minute on someone trying to build housing in Kirkland.

And that was more of our focus, was making sure that when somebody starts the process, they can trust that Kirkland is going to not change things on them last minute.

Okay. No, that's helpful. That's helpful context. And then I guess then just a follow-up with staff on the minimum density. From your kind of professional expertise, is that a regulation that you see quite commonly applied in other jurisdictions or is this something kind of a newer thing that we're seeing come out?

I will just mention that we did some initial research for neighboring and comparable cities and presented that back in October. For my recollection, different methods for minimum density are typically used for different cities. For example, I think Seattle has a minimum FAR. Would need help remembering what exactly Redmond also.

Oh, they

do as well. Okay, great. So I don't remember us finding another city that prohibited townhomes or lower density style housing as a method for minimum density. Anything to add?

Yeah, thanks. Councilmember Pascual. The only thing I would mention is that I think it's becoming increasingly popular actually. Not necessarily in the method that we're using here. This is I think a fairly modest approach to regulating density. I think the entire city of Bothell actually has density minimums or almost the entirety of Bothell. Think as cities realize that they have limited capacity for this higher density housing, they've been more interested in density minimums.

And then I'd just tag along to that and say that Kirkland has adopted some minimum density requirements in some of our medium density residential zones, so our methodology was looking in medium density residential zones where we had a density maximum that was number of units per acre and then we required those properties to build at least 80% of their maximum density. So there are zones in Kirkland where we have minimum density, not in the station area yet.

Okay, thank you. So

the Main Street site that we're talking about is on the South Side Of 85th between 128th and 132nd. Are you going up the hill, it's on the right?

I believe so.

Okay. And so with this ordinance, we would allow townhomes on the right side of the street but not directly across the street, is that correct?

Correct. Okay.

I guess I'd like to know your opinion on that and whether or not, I'm not going to amend the ordinance tonight, but in the long term planning, whether or not it makes more sense to prohibit townhomes between four zero five and one hundred twenty eight within the station area plan as opposed to between one hundred twenty eight and one hundred thirty second. On the opposite side of the street, from the current Main Street site, we have some relatively low value stuff there that's at relatively low heights. So, I'm wondering if it's been, Angela, if you want to answer this, if there's been any consideration to something like that, especially between one hundred twenty eighth and one hundred thirty second.

I mean, we didn't talk about that directly, but I think I can say that just as a general consensus for the Planning Commission, there wasn't a strong desire to have minimum densities, that it was more let's talk about how do we really encourage and incentivize, which is, I think we added an asterisk or something about I can't remember if that was planning work plan or this item. What is this item? Okay, specifically saying that we really want to focus on incentives. Like, we want to see the more higher density stuff, but we also want to see any stuff built, so that was more of our focus than really talking about whether or not there's a specific line. I will say, though, also that there are a number of sites, especially as you move east, that are smaller parcels, which unless they get combined together, will be really difficult to build as mixed use housing, just because a 10,000 square foot lot is really limited when it comes to mixed use.

So it would really require purchase in combination together to get anything to get built tall.

Okay, thank you.

Anyone else? So I appreciate this conversation. Alison or Adam or Leandra, so we are initiating the development agreement process. So if I have a parcel, I can do a development agreement and ask to do townhomes that are exclusive of what we're passing today. So the door is still open at some point if I'm willing to go through the development agreement process, correct?

Correct. Yes. So this doesn't close the door on minimum density forever. There's still opportunity. And I do hear your Chair Rosman on the complication with small parcel sizes, which we recognize that we've got a lot of property owners up there.

And I also hear the desire for incentives, and I agree. But when we created this stationary plan with a lot of outreach and community input and community engagement, And when we did the comp plan, we were very clear that the density that was coming to Kirkland was going to be focused in this area and our regional growth areas. And so I'm highly motivated to create a dense, walkable, livable neighborhood in the Staciate Area Plan. That's been our vision all along, and that's what I'm supporting when I support this ordinance. And I do recognize that there's a lot of uncertainty right now economically, but I think that we're taking the right steps.

And in particular, I do support this ordinance because I'm ready for that piece of property to be built on because we've all been driving back and forth across it for years, and I hope that they can break ground in 2026. That is my wish. So I will be supporting this ordinance as written. If that's no further discussion, I'd love to have a motion.

Thank you. Madam Mayor, I move ordinance O4936.

Second.

It's been moved by Council Member Arnold, second by council member Tim Chisholm to move forward ordinance forty nine thirty six. Any further discussion? Council member Pascal.

Yeah. I was saving discussion for after the motion was the ordinance was moved. But, yeah, I I kinda prepared some remarks because I wanted to really highlight my thoughts on this minimum density. But I first just wanna start off by saying that I propose that I support the proposed changes here largely. I think these are important to catalyze development in the area and deliver on the vision.

But I want to just kind of dwell on this minimum density requirement just because I want to kind of provide an alternative viewpoint. Certainly support the intent. We all want to see that this area develop in a way that makes the most of its proximity to high density high capacity transit. But I'm just questioning whether minimum density is the right tool to achieve it. And the reality is that the type of development we see, whether that's townhomes, mixed use development or higher density housing, is really largely the byproduct of the market conditions and regulatory framework that we put in place as an agency.

And property owners and developers will pursue what's financially feasible and what pencils out. And instead of limiting the certain types of development through minimum density thresholds, we should focusing on incentivizing the kinds of development we want to see. Higher density is our goal, then our policy should make those outcomes easier, not risk discouraging investment. And this isn't something that I just made up out of thin air. This isn't theoretical.

This is something that we heard specifically when we had the forum last year at Carillon Point on 85th Street with all the developers from the region. They expressed frustration with the mixed signals ascends. On one hand, we're saying we want to encourage development. We want you to come in and invest in our city. On the other hand, we're introducing additional requirements that can be seen as barriers.

It can be seen as what's the next barrier that Kirkland's going to put up that's going to stifle or reduce investment in this area. So we can say and we can argue this this is a seems like a minor thing, but it creates uncertainty. It raises questions for investors and property owners about whether we have a predictable regulatory framework. And when there's uncertainty, what happens? Projects get investments don't happen, things stay still, nothing gets developed.

So that's the risk that I am most concerned about. Because if our goal is to catalyze redevelopment that's incentivized, that's reduced barriers, that's make the regulatory framework more predictable. It's a well intentioned idea, but it causes increased friction. So that is why I don't support it, and I'll be the probably the sole vote against this ordinance today. If there is others that wanted to go along, I would make a motion to remove a remove the minimum density from this ordinance, and I would gladly vote for this. Thank you.

Thank you. Else? Councilor Falcombe?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'm listening intently to what folks are saying, and I have a similar lens to Council Member Pascal that I want to make sure that we can I've made comments in previous council meetings. I want to make sure that we're a predictable, reliable city to do business with and that we don't create unnecessary barriers. I also agree with the intent of the minimum density, and I'm not opposed to conversations about minimum density, but hearing the Planning Commission Chair's recap of the Planning Commission discussion on this and listening also to some of my colleagues, I would support potentially an amendment to strike this section of the ordinance.

Councilor Mayor Arnold?

When we first provided direction to the Planning Commission on this, it was a council retreat. We first discussed this two years ago. And part of the challenge that we're trying to deal with is with the townhomes, with the Main Street property, we were seeing the first development of the stationary and not meet our vision. And so what we said during that retreat and what we were trying to do with this ordinance is saying what changes do we need to both remove barriers and meet our vision. We want to do both because we don't want to remove barriers for development that doesn't meet our vision.

So what we have before us today is those requirements that say, yes, we want this vibrant, dense developments with more multifamily near high capacity transit. But if we are wrong and we're saying here that the restrictions that we have in place, we have put in the escape hatch that allows the flexibility through a development agreement. And if any developer ends up saying we don't want to build as dense as what you're requiring, ideally, I think we want that density and hopefully the market will support it. But if we're wrong, we have the ability to go do that. So I would not support removing the minimum density.

I think we have that we have an escape hatch for that because what really we want is more housing, more services near transit, and I think that's I think this ordinance gets us there. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember Tim Chisholm?

Thank you.

Council Member Pascal has some excellent points. I do support the ordinance as written. Council Member Pascal's points are well taken. I don't think this ordinance is necessarily narrowly tailored enough between one hundred twenty eighth and one hundred thirty second at the top of the hill where we go towards Redmond, where I think we're gonna get townhomes or nothing, probably. And so the development agreements maybe will be a mechanism that has to be used on some parts of this.

But I do view townhomes as highly problematic between January and 04/2005 in the section of the station area where we were talking about 20 storey buildings being there. If we get townhomes between 128th and 405, those will take up the land for the next fifty years. And I think that would be very unfortunate to have townhomes within that section of our city where we had planned for high density and high quality retail. And townhomes don't have the density to support the type of retail that we wanted. So I wish this was a little more narrowly tailored, but ultimately I'll be supporting the ordinance.

You. Councillor Pascal, before I go to you, is there anyone else? Have to wait after Okay. Go ahead, Councillor Pascal.

A quick question and then I want to talk about a potential motion. We heard a lot a few comments from my colleagues about a development agreement process for townhouse. Angela, maybe you could talk about like, do you see that as a feasible alternative? If you had a 10,000 square foot lot and you wanted and the highest and best use with townhomes, would it pencil out to go through the development agreement process? Mean, because that's it's an arduous process. It's uncertain to begin with.

I mean, it is it does add uncertainty. It does add time to the process. The smaller lots are really where it gets harder. If you're talking about a two acre site, it's not a big deal. I mean, it is a big deal, but it's less of a deal to do it, but like a 10,000 square foot lot is gonna get not that many townhomes, and if you add layers, it makes it a lot more difficult to move forward. I think if that were the case, odds are probably better that they would try and combine lots or, you know, it's hard to say for sure, but it definitely adds time, it adds cost, it adds uncertainty, especially for the smaller

Yeah, one of the questions I had for staff earlier in the day was how many properties were like under a half acre in the station area. And thank you for doing that calculation of the GIS staff, but oh, you have it here.

We loaded it up.

That's awesome. Almost half of the parcels are under a half an acre. So these are smaller parcels that some that are not directly on 85th that have difficult access where you're only going to see redevelopment if they're consolidated in some cases or it's going to be hard to do high density, more difficult to do. And so I'm concerned about those, the kind of unintended consequences. So that's thank you for that information. I would like to make an amendment to the ordinance to remove detached prohibiting the detached and attached dwelling units.

Was there a second?

Yeah, there was a second. Yeah,

I was just processing. So it's been moved by Councillor Pascal, seconded by Councillor Mary Falcone, but the reason I slowed down is I wanted someone to tell me where that was in the

Sections two through four, that's the only change that's made is to add those provisions. And so if you struck Sections two through four, that'd be the equivalent amendment.

It's been moved by Council Member Pascal, second by Council Member Falcone, to amend the ordinance by removing sections two, three, and four. Is that correct? Is there any discussion? Councilmember Arnold.

Just a point of clarification. Maybe staff could say, if this amendment was approved, what would be the changes to the station area that would

Move forward.

Remain in the ordinance?

Sure. So should the amendment move forward, I wanted to just go back. We would essentially be disregarding that middle purple column, and so development agreements would be expanded to allow for building heights and uses not usually permitted. We would clarify that all parcel sizes can apply for development agreements, and then we would extend the Pioneer provision cutoff date to 2029 end of year.

Anyone else? Councillor Falco?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Obviously, I'll be supporting this proposed amendment because I seconded it, but I wanted to clarify that I really also appreciate Councillor Tim Chisholm's comments, and my hope would be that would have a more tailored approach to this and a more and also consider some of the incentives that the Planning Commission wanted to discuss. I just feel like that's too complicated to make those amendments on the fly from the dais tonight. So my supporting this is not that I want to completely eliminate and not address this concern because I do really agree with the intent here, but to come back with a more thoughtful proposal on how we can actually achieve what the intent is without unintended consequences.

Councillor Meridenchison?

So somebody made has a motion been made and it was seconded and now we're doing discussion?

On the motion to remove sections two, three and four, which is the minimum density.

Well, how do my colleagues feel about deferring this to a future meeting? I mean, this is an extremely complex subject, we have differing opinions and I would have liked time to have evaluated these amendments and motions in a more thoughtful way.

Leander, how many times have we discussed this as a council?

We brought the minimum density idea to you in October. Prior to that, there was discussion mostly surrounding ways to activate the station area throughout 2025. And then more recently, in 2026, the council retreat, I believe, wasn't there, but I believe that was a main topic for narrowing down what those regulatory barriers might be and how to address them.

Okay, so we've been talking about this for a while.

I'm going go ahead and make a motion within this motion. I'm going to make a motion that these amendments be in writing, submitted by the next meeting, and that we evaluate the motions of the next meeting.

You have a motion on the table already for your amendment that needs to be resolved before you have further

Well, think he wants to make a motion to table this. And is he allowed to do that before we vote on the motion to strike?

You could have a motion to postpone in the middle of the current motion.

Okay, so would you start over and say that you want to table this to the next meeting?

Postpone, this is a motion to table or postpone this issue to the next meeting and request that there be time to for council members making amendments to this ordinance to put them in writing and time for evaluation of these amendments.

Has been moved by Councilmember Timches and seconded by Councilmember Falcone to table ordinance 4,936 to a future meeting.

You heard that the motion was to postpone to the next meeting.

Postpone Okay. To the next meeting, which is May Any discussion? Okay. The question is on the Tim Chisholm motion to postpone this to the May 5 meeting. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. All those opposed?

No. That

is me. I need a voice. So, City Clerk?

On the motion to postpone to the next meeting, Council Member Tim Chisholm?

Yes.

Council Member Arnold? No. Council Member Prem? Yes. Council Member Falcone?

Yes.

Council Member Pascal?

Yes.

Deputy Mayor Black? No. Mayor Curtis?

No. Okay, the motion carries for three. So, attorney, we do not need to address the amendment that's on the table. Not at this meeting. Thank you.

All

right, thank you everyone. We are closing item 9B.

Point of order, Madam Mayor. Can we get guidance from the parliamentarian city attorney? We what do we do with the underlying motion on the ordinance?

That's what I just asked.

Oh, sorry.

The both of those issues are postponed, but you'll pick this up at the amendment to the ordinance.

Okay. Wasn't clear to me that that was in the motion to postpone. I thought we I thought the motion was to postpone the amendment to the next meeting, and so I was unclear. But but we're postpone to keep it simple, we're postponing the amendment and the motion for the underling

Yes, postponing this. I heard that postponing the matter to the next meeting.

And your name that I'm throwing in your meeting.

Okay. All right. Thank you all. We are going to I think some of you were staying because we are moving on to 9C, which is adoption of the twenty twenty six, twenty twenty eight planning work program, city manager.

Okay. Thank you, Madamara. So we are looking for action on this tonight. This is planning work program for discussion, potential adoption. Here to give you that presentation is our planning and building deputy director, Allison Zike.

Thank you, city manager, and good evening, mayor, deputy mayor, and council members. Here tonight to request council action on the planning work program annual update, I have eight slides for you. So as a quick review, council, we started the planning work program update process this year at the city council meeting back in March, I believe, with a study session, and at that study session, Council affirmed a couple things that I wanted to briefly review. So the first was four priorities for this year's annual work program update, and that was to complete ongoing projects and those carryover projects from 2025, to focus on projects that would create more affordable housing faster, to focus on projects that might streamline development review, and then also to respond to new state mandates. The other thing that Council affirmed was a new concept in the planning work program and that is to identify policy levels for each of the line item tasks as a way to signal to both Council, Planning Commission, and the community and staff kind of the anticipated policy level, the amount of change that might tie to each of those policy levels, and then use that to also sort of indicate where those projects would start, whether we're starting with strong council direction or they're projects of low policy level where the work might happen primarily with the Planning Commission.

So, happy to answer questions about these, but I won't walk you through them again. So, at your March study session on the Planning Work Program update, staff had presented kind of a first take draft of what the twenty six to twenty eight Planning Work Program could look like and received some counsel direction on that first draft. So, what we heard at that meeting, and not all of these were majority or consensus, you didn't vote, so this is general direction. The first was that there were a few projects that might not be priorities for this year, 2026, and that was a project to look at house moving permits, increasing school capacity, the sign code update, and curb management, so we looked at kind of deprioritizing those. Council also asked us to look at ways to reserve staff capacity to begin work on implementation of State Senate Bill 6,026 if it were to pass.

It has now passed, and so you'll see that show up in the work program. We received some support from some council members for prioritizing a task to look at home occupation and neighborhood commercial allowances, so increasing flexibility for commercial uses in primarily residential areas. We received a range of feedback from council on the priority level for a new task that would look at consolidating and streamlining low density residential zones, and then also got a couple suggestions from council that perhaps an update of the sustainability strategic plan and the housing strategy plan could be deprioritized on the work program. So staff took that council direction, made some edits to the initial staff proposed work program, and then took it to Planning Commission to get their feedback and direction. And so Planning Commission then made a few adjustments that resulted in their recommendation to you tonight and that's included in your packet and I'll go over those briefly.

There were a couple projects for which Planning Commission just wanted us to make sure we had a feasible timeline projected in the work program, and one of those was for the ongoing task that we're already working on, looking at expanding housing opportunities on faith based properties. Planning Commission also suggested shortening the timeline for the short term rental policy task and sort of tightening the scope of that as well, so really limiting it to what our business licensing division needs to help with some monitoring and tracking of short term rentals, but not including kind of broader policy discussions on that. Planning Commission did add a task to look at middle housing, kind of an incremental middle housing optimization that I'm going to talk about a little bit more on the next slide. They took counsel's direction to really focus state legislative implementation this year on Senate Bill 6,026 and after seeing what did pass and was approved by the governor coming out of this year's legislative session, staff agrees that 6,026 is really what we need to focus on. I think a lot of the other projects, we have more time or they're not going to take as much staff work, so it could be rolled into more of a miscellaneous code amendment, so we agree with that one and you'll see that in the draft work program.

Planning Commission, again, it was suggested by some council members and got interest from some planning commissioners to add a task to potentially evaluate affordable housing requirements on a citywide basis rather than sort of project by project or zone by zone, and so you'll see that drafted into your work program. Planning Commission deprioritized or pushed out that project to look at consolidation of low density residential zones a little bit, so that's drafted as a 2027 start on the work program. Another just kind of reality check from Planning Commission that staff appreciates is how long is it going to take us to look at the implementation of the TOD bill? So we did end up building in a little more time, so a one year duration for staff and Planning Commission and Council's work on that implementation project, which would start in late twenty twenty seven, and then kind of partnered with Planning Commission's recommendation for a near term incremental look at optimizing middle housing. They adjusted the timing of a broader middle housing optimization task and pushed that out to 2028, thinking that there could be an incremental step in 2026 and then more middle housing optimization work would build on near term work starting in 2028.

I want to take a moment to talk a little bit more in detail about task number 15 in the draft work program, which is that near term kind of incremental look at middle housing optimization. And so, we talked about that a bit with council, as I mentioned. I think staff's understanding was that there was sort of a range of thought from the council initially on when the right time was for that and what that project might include or not include. So, at the study session with council, staff was asked to provide some examples or kind of a list of what some near term kind of smaller incremental code adjustments would be that could serve to optimize middle housing production in the city. So, staff went back to our desks, created a list of potential code adjustments that we think could streamline some of our middle housing production based on a lot of feedback that we've heard from the development community, also based on what we've witnessed and observed in our permit review, and so we took that to Planning Commission and they kind of iterated on that, resulting in this pretty detailed task description.

I believe Chair Rosman is here to elaborate if Council wishes, but what Planning Commission sought to do was really provide some clarity about what would be looked at in this task or could be looked at in this task and what would not be looked at with this sort of near term middle housing optimization task resulting in the description you see, and this is also included in your packet. Happy to answer questions about that if Council has any. Just wanted to note, staff has seen one public comment come in since the public hearing on the planning work program. That public comment was from the Master Builders Association asking Council to include that 2026 middle housing focused optimization task but change the task description to also note that near term code adjustments could include looking at adjustments to setback regulations for middle housing. So, that was the public comment received.

I think that came into Council today. With that, I'll note that I do have a potential Council Member amendment queued up if or when that Council Member decides to propose it. I have that on the following screen, but right now, I'll hand it back to the mayor for any questions or discussion.

Thank you. Council, questions and discussion on the planning work program? I can wait. Deputy Mayor?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I guess I'll go. And thank you, Allison, for the presentation. Can you go back to the slide on item, task item 15, yeah. So, and this is kind of a question for, it's question that really came up on this task when I was reading it, but there's a few tasks that have gotten more and more detailed since we last saw it.

And I want to understand, when we are describing this level of detail, what we're doing is describing topics that are for consideration. We are not prejudging that we are necessarily going to make that it's going make sense to make adjustments to floor air or lot coverage or square footage allowances for cottages. All of these are it's a menu of topics for our consideration. And I is that true? Is that how this is the planning department's work plan? Is that how the planning department views these menu items in where we've gone into real detail on some of these tasks?

Yeah, that's correct. So the way that we typically use this work program is looking at the description as a starting point. In some cases, we provide examples of what the code adjustments could include for both our benefit but also for Council Planning Commission and the community to get kind of a flavor of what this task would be looking at. But it's not binding us to an outcome.

Okay. And I think we maybe there's a couple more. I don't have them handy. I do, but I don't have them at the tip of my tongue. But there are a couple more that are similarly detailed.

And I want to I just want to be clear that, you know, these are topics that we're gonna be considering. And for my part, I'm gonna be very result oriented in whether we are going to achieve the vision we have, not just for housing, but for more housing units and more attainable housing units, including a greater mix of smaller housing types. So when we're looking at these topics, when the planning department comes back to us with recommendations on these, that's where I'm really going to be focused is what is this going to mean for getting a larger number an increased number of housing units built and ideally, a greater number and greater mix of smaller housing built. I've had conversations, and I'll just and then I'll wrap up. I've had conversations that have kind of been mixed with representatives of the building community, where they're pressing for these kind of changes, including the setbacks that Master Builders provided in their comments.

But it's a little bit of a mixed message as to whether it's about getting more units built or larger product built. And so I want to be very focused on how we're going to get more units built and a greater mix of smaller homes, more attainable homes. I'm interested in housing at every price point, but also it's very important to me that we're getting a greater mix of housing types. And so it's important for me that we're very clear when we adopt this that we're not prejudging any of these items. Thank you.

Thank you. I

was going to say can I add a quick note to that specifically to give a little more

Go ahead?

Okay. I would say specifically with this recommendation, the not is carrying the majority of this is we wanted to kind of give a framework of like what we wouldn't be talking about, and then the could include was a laundry list of, well, these are maybe topics we'll talk about. But it's more than not that was more of our discussion was like, we're not going to focus on those things right now because we think those are bigger changes. And so the focus was more on what we weren't going to talk about than necessarily where we would.

I appreciate that because it sets expectations for what is not going to be discussed. What's under that we will discuss could set expectations from some key stakeholders that those are going to be adjustments that are going to be made and I don't think that's we can prejudge that. And I realize, Madam Mayor, I had a comment about one of the task items. This is my so I can use my time on the floor. Item 21 was added.

What I was worried about with Item 21, one is just the workload. We're adding it to twenty twenty six. We've got a lot going on twenty twenty six. We've talked about reserving space for some really important work around state legislative implementation. Does the planning department think we have time for that?

And as part of the answer because it's described as a comprehensive evaluation. When I read a comprehensive evaluation, I'm like, I don't think we have time in the last seven months of of 2026 to do a comprehensive evaluation. Can you describe the intent of that one a little bit too? Together with whether we have the time, the planning department has the time and its work to do that 2026?

Yes. Thank you for the question, deputy mayor. I'll note that Planning Commission's recommendation did push that work out a little bit further into 2027, which I think staff agreed was probably a little bit more feasible.

Hold it, I misspoke. I'm about '20. I'm talking about '20.

Okay.

So Allison, take a second. This whole thing was about '20, the comprehensive evaluation of affordable housing requirements.

Okay.

Not about the low residential density.

Okay.

That's on me, my apologies.

All good.

So the same question but around comprehensive evaluation of affordable housing requirements.

Okay, we're testing pivot speed here.

Yeah.

It's a great question. So I think that, you know, for one, the timing of the work program is always approximate. I think that based on the tasks that Planning Commission has laid out, I do think we have some capacity to start looking at this in late twenty twenty six. I wouldn't promise you that we would be bringing you information in the 2026. I think it would probably be more likely that we start poking at it in 2026 and start talking about it with you in early twenty twenty seven. But if we're able to stay focused on the other tasks, I think that we can start making work on it.

One follow-up question on that. When we use the term comprehensive evaluation, I feel like when this has been described, it's been described as, hey, let's look

for

opportunities for standardization throughout the city. And so I feel like comprehensive actually means we're going to take a step back and look at the whole city. Comprehensive evaluation could mean we're going everything's on the table, we may take MEFT off the table, we may take inclusionary zoning off the table. I want to understand from you what the plan and the director, what your understanding of comprehensive evaluation is. Is it more geographically comprehensive? Or is it more topically comprehensive? One is a much bigger project than the other.

Yeah. Great question. And I'll start and have Adam weigh in as well. I'll note that this one has been identified as a high policy level, so I think one of our first touches with counsel would be doing some work to get the lay of the land for you, bringing that to you, kind of like we brought the state of the urban forest. Here's some data, so I think we'd lay out, here's the different affordable housing requirements that we have throughout the city, here's our track record, We now are doing more housing monitoring and kind of performance evaluation, so I think we'd bring you some data to kind of give you the lay of the land and then ask you some scoping questions about what do you want it to look like.

The context within which I recall this being brought up was looking at the past couple of amendments that Council has made to our affordable housing requirements, so with the Juanita Carr's specifically, I think when we started hearing a little bit this feedback from council about adopting an affordable housing requirement that had a little bit more flexibility than we had in other areas of the city. So I think that absent looking at this in the context of a specific project, our question for council would be what you wanted the outcome to be, or if you wanted to hold on this project until we're looking at a change to affordable housing requirements, and then kind of syncing up across the city. I'll stop there and see if Adam wants to elaborate on anything.

Yeah, thanks. I don't have a lot to add to that other than it is a potentially really hairy work program, right? I mean that's work project. It's infinitely complex and there is many different perspectives that folks have on what affordable housing requirements we should have in the city. So I agree that scoping it narrowly would be a way to actually get it done in set period of time.

That said, I think we see that there is potential to make the program better. We do have a little bit of a patchwork of inclusionary requirements across the city, right, especially with the newly adopted Bonita CARs, right, where there's pioneer provisions for those, there's pioneer provisions in the station area. We now have single family inclusionary zoning. We have sort of a disparate approach to requiring affordable housing in our single family zones versus our multi family zones. While the multi family zones are really the zones that naturally produce affordable housing and single family zones not so much. So there's some discrepancies that would be worth pursuing at some point in the future. Does it have to be done in 2027? Probably not, right?

Should And it

be narrowly scoped? Maybe. But, right, a more broadly scoped project could also be beneficial because there are some things to probably work out in the program. That's the only thing I would add.

Well, I think that's helpful. I mean, I've expressed in the past related to Lowe's the item 21 that I misspoke about, low residential or low density residential look and in connection with neighborhood centers, which is item 26, I think, is looking for those opportunities to simplify, to gain efficiency and sort of create greater predictability, both for our department and your senior planners, but also for the key stakeholders in the community, including housing producers. So I appreciate that. I think that you've heard remarks from members of the council that predictability is important, and I think that's true as a business person and someone who advises businesses, absolutely predictability. At the same time, when we're doing this work, we are reducing predictability.

We are not adding to predictability. So we have to be conscious of that, too. The more of these type of long standing regulations that and development allowances and development rights that we're opening up and rejiggering, the more we're introducing uncertainty. So I just want to be I'll be looking at it I'll be looking at this work through that lens as well. Thanks.

Thank you. Council Member Falcon.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. As has been said, a lot of these items are going to come back to counsel to get into kind of the nuances of actually what the scope will be, so I'll just keep my comments pretty brief and just highlight a couple of things. For item number 12, which is the home occupation and neighborhood commercial allowances, I agree with the language in there. I just want to share that I really would like us to have a lens of not just merely allowing, but really looking towards how we can incentivize and encourage neighborhood retail. I realize that some of that may or may not be appropriate for the planning work program and some of that may fall within the economic development managers' expertise, but I just want to make sure that those two conversations are not siloed and that we have that lens going into this conversation and that the departments are talking about how that can be beneficial to actually you know I can think of things that would be outside of planning work programs such as like grants and other things right to help incentivize small business development there.

So just want to mention that that I think that's a really important lens to this work. Wouldn't want us to just merely allow that now and then in May and come back and be like, oh shucks, we haven't seen any progress, so how can we incentivize it, right? I really want us to be forward thinking in that work that we're doing now. And then also thinking about item number 20, the evaluation of citywide affordable housing requirements. Oftentimes when we're talking about affordable housing requirements, we're also thinking about incentives with MFTE, as my council colleague has raised.

And so I assume this is conversation, if we're talking about affordable housing requirements, that we're also talking about incentives and MFTE, right, because the carrot and the stick here oftentimes go hand in hand. And so any significant adjustments to one, I would assume we were thinking at in context of the other as well. I know I asked this at the City Manager earlier, and his response was that it felt like it seemed like a logical aspect of this, even though it isn't clearly articulated in the description. Again, know we're going be talking about that more before it goes to the Planning Commission, but just wanted to mention that as a little brief highlight of two of the things that were really important to me that were not clearly called out in the descriptions. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilor Mayor Arnold.