City Council - Regular Meeting

Mayor Curtis, would you confirm your microphone's on?

I'd like to call to order this council meeting of June 16, 2026. Before I ask the clerk to call the roll for tonight's meeting, I'd like to note that Councilmember Paschal will be absent from our meeting tonight to celebrate his son's high school graduation. So congratulations, Grady. Is there a motion to excuse Councilmember Paschal?

So moved. Second.

All right. It's been moved by Councilmember Farrell-Cohn, second by Deputy Mayor Black. On the question, excuse Councillor Paschall. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries 6-0. City Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Yes, Council Member Tim Chisholm. Here. Council Member Arnold. Here. Council Member Prem. Here. Council Member Falcone. Here. Deputy Mayor Black. Here. Mayor Curtis.

Here. Our study session tonight is on two items. First, we will have a follow-up briefing from the Cascade Water Alliance on preliminary rates and Cascade supply plan. Second, the Council will consider alternative delivery for the Peter Kirk Pool project. We expect to reconvene our meeting at 7.30.

all right thank you madam mayor deputy mayor members of the council so Yeah, so we're excited. We have a special guest, our very first official visit from the new Chief Executive Officer of the Cascade Water Alliance. John Taylor is here, so welcome, John. And then also Andy Baker, who's the economist for Cascade Water Alliance. They're going to give you an overview of our projected rates and follow up on the discussion you had at the last council meeting. Grant Raup, our Senior Financial Analyst, is also here to give us some insight as to what it might mean for Kirkland rate payers. So with that, I will go ahead and kick it off to Mr. Taylor.

Got it. Good evening, council. Thanks for having me here. Thanks, Kurt, for the kind introduction. You are my official first city council briefing, so in this role, not in my career. I wish I could say that, but that is not the case. So thanks for having us. So John Taylor, new CEO. This is week three for me. I started on May 29th, just kind of getting my arms wrapped around the organization. And I think Saying that, that probably means that Andy's going to be doing the lion's share of the actual meaningful talking, but I will try to chime in where I can to be helpful. So, you know, we're here to do a couple of things tonight, but I think the big message that I want to deliver to all of you is, and Kurt and I had this conversation the other day, Cascade, and I particularly, am very committed to transparency. You are a rate payer. We want to be available to you to answer any questions that we can any time there are issues or concerns. So thanks for making the time available for us. And we look forward to just being here as much as you want us here to have dialogue about what we have planned, what's going on at Cascade. There's a lot of really big, ambitious things that are going to be unfolding over the next several years. And we want to be keeping you apprised of all of that as it goes along. So with that, I think we have a PowerPoint that we're going to be going through here as soon as it's up and running. There we go. Awesome. And, you know, you can go to the second slide. And that's just what we're going to be covering. And then this is our mission, which I'm not going to read to you because I don't read missions to people. But I think, again, I just want to emphasize we really are committed to transparency and we want to be available to you anytime we can. And so with that, I'm going to turn it over to Andy and let him do the lion's share of the presenting.

All right. Thank you, John. So I also will not read our mission off to you, but I'm going to dive right into first an overview of Cascade. We'll talk about our proposed 27 and 28 budget and rates, and then we'll continue to looking at a longer-term view of what the overall funding outlook looks like for supporting the program that you heard about a month ago. I don't read missions off, but I do like to start any financial overview by centering it on our fiscal policies. Cascades Code lays out three pillars, financial integrity and stability, rate equity, and efficiency and conservation. These policies recognize our unique structure. It's made up of members, not customers. We promote stability through our own budgeting, planning, and charge structure. I'll talk about all those fun topics. Our policies ensure equity amongst both members based on the differences in how they place demands on the system and between generations of customers through our growth-related charges and through use of debt for funding major projects. And they promote efficient budgeting and water conservation by aligning charges with peak season demands, which is our major cost driver. This slide presents our overall financial structure. It's shown for our proposed 2027 operating budget and revenues. Operating budget on the left, proposed revenues on the right. What I want to emphasize on this is that the majority of our costs are fixed. These are payments established by contract for water purchases, for repayment of debt service, for contracts for the operation of the Lake Taps Reservoir. We keep our administrative expenses low with a lean staffing model, and so our variable expenses are quite small overall. Our revenues are also majority fixed, with the exception of our regional capital facilities charges. I'm going to apologize in advance. There are a number of acronyms on here are a bit of a mouthful. Please feel free to call me on them. So with the exception of those charges and interest earnings, our budgeted revenues will be our actual revenues. This provides certainty to our members for your own budgeting rather than revenues that vary each year based on what actually happens over the course of each year. Through our financial structure, we provide certainty for your budgeting and then true things up based on actuals. little bit more about our financial structure we have four types of charges and the differences between these ways these are set up is to align the charges with the cost of providing the service so our administrative charges which are capped at nine percent and our conservation charges are allocated to our members based on the overall system size and we use again another cumbersome acronym, cascade equivalent residential units as a measure of that. Our demand share charges, which is the lion's share of our charges, are allocated out based on a rolling three-year average of actual demand history. So each member pays for their share based on how much of system demand they place on the overall system. Our regional capital facilities charges, I'm just going to say RCFCs from now on, are a pass through connection charge on growth. It's based on a proportional share of the cost of existing and future infrastructure. All right. Skipping ahead. So this slide shows the proposed Kirkland charges for 2027 and 2028. And then on the left, the current adopted charge levels. Our overall proposed cascade rate increase is 9.5% per year in both 2027 and 2028. For 2027-2028, the increases for Kirkland are lower than that, at 5.3% in 2027 and 8.2% in 2028. This is because Kirkland in the past three years has had lower peak season demand growth than other cities in our service area. And so its overall share of the pie has declined.

Question? Oh, yes.

Hi. Thank you for this presentation so far. One question I had was, and you may be getting to this later, but how much are we talking in dollar values?

That's a great question. So in dollar values for your budget, I have those listed at the top there, but that, unless you know the ins and outs, which Grant could probably explain more how big a piece of that of your overall budget. But I do have a, my next slide I think maybe speaks to what this means for how it passes through to customer bills. Yeah, exactly.

Okay, thank you.

Let me go ahead and then if it doesn't, if that doesn't address what you're asking, we'll dig into it. All right, so specifically because the overall total budget size and percentage changes don't always tell the whole story. And we get that, I wanted to have another slide that does speak to what these means in terms of the average cost of water. I wanna be clear, these are reflecting the cost of Cascades Wholesale Water. Your water utility provides distribution mains, storage reservoirs, pumps, operations and maintenance staff your own customer service and administrative costs that are all yours on on their additional I don't have any of that but Grant has all of it but for just the cascade piece of the pie those percentage increases that I showed translate to in 2027 an increase of 0.18 to dollars per CCF what the heck's a CCF these are an it is an industry standard unit of measuring water but it is not very intuitive so for reference a hundred cubic feet is approximately 750 gallons typical monthly household usage is is between five and eight CCF per month. But it varies on every every household is going to have different actual usage. So I don't know if you want to add anything specific.

Well, I could tell you that yes, the the water purchase is our biggest budget item.

It's about a third of the cost of our

budget in the water utility. As for a typical, I mean, we bill on a two-month basis, but on a typical monthly, because people kind of consume that a little bit better, for 2026, the average utility, water utility bill is going to be about $57. So about $19 of that is for the water purchase of that direct water purchase. And that is separate from our membership charges for Cascade. but as far as the increases that are proposed for 2728 by 2028 you're we're probably going to be charging and these are all preliminary numbers i should point out very preliminary numbers that we have done with our modeling with fcs uh we will be bringing back our uh preliminary uh rates in august august 5th i believe for uh your further review but Preliminarily, that will be about $1.75 extra by 2028 on that bill. Now, I think it's worth noting, and Andy, I'm sorry if you're going to get to this, that we did get a bigger projection from CWA on what our rates are going to be. So, while immediately we have some lower than expected percentages compared to what their overall increase is, due to the rolling three-year average on how it's based on our demand, In 29 and 30 Respectively, it's supposed to go up and forgive me if I'm remembering incorrectly, but I believe it's 11 and 12 percent more So while we have some immediate savings Comparatively to the overall increase The projection is further out that there would be a bigger increase I So I did, just so we have an idea of what that is, I did look out to 2035. Again, all preliminary numbers, et cetera. But because Cascade's overall increase, and again, If I'm wrong, through 2030 is 9.5%, and then until 2039 is 8.5%. I looked out to 2035 to see what the overall increase, just so we had an understanding of what that means for our customers. And ultimately, that 33% portion of the bill goes up to about 43%. So our biggest portion of our cost is increasing proportionally, because obviously 9.5% every year increases, followed by 8.5% increases on multiple years equals a large increase for us overall. With that being said, the 2035 projected costs will be about $93 a month. So again, from $57 a month to $93. And of that $36 increase, Water demand itself is about 60% of that increase, about $21. Sorry if my math isn't exactly right, but it is the biggest driving force of our cost increases.

The second half of my presentation is focused on the longer-term view, and it's exactly because of what Grant said, is that we are looking at a very significant undertaking, and so we want to be transparent about what our forecast is for the rates to deliver that.

Okay, thank you.

So need to see what you just said in a graph, a chart, visual.

So we had a lot of discussion about this and about whether we should bring it tonight, but I think it would have been a little bit cart before the horse before we bring the preliminary rates.

Exactly. Next presentation.

Yes, so there will be graphs. There was just a discussion about getting a little bit too ahead of ourselves when we're talking about the rates because, again, all these are preliminary and we didn't want to lose sight of the discussion of CWA's charges and budget.

Thank you. Deputy Mayor?

Actually, the mayor covered what I was going to cover, which only economists and financial analysts are safe doing math in public. Everyone else should not. Deputy city manager has confirmed that on many occasions. So, yeah, so seeing the math in a graph next time we talk about this topic would be super helpful, especially each year. Between now and that 2035 grant that you're focused on, it's seen visually. Thanks. How that's going up and what the percentages are.

Anyone else?

Go ahead. And to add mitigations as well and thoughts around how to reduce those rates. Yeah. Thank you.

Okay.

Back to you.

All right. Yeah. No, I mean, as we said, the point of us coming here is to address your questions. I'm happy to take the time needed to do that. All right, the last slide I have for you about the near-term view is on those, I said I wouldn't use it again, so I'll just say our CFCs. So this is the last component of our charges. And as I mentioned, this is a charge on growth that is based on a proportional share of both existing and future infrastructure costs. So this is the rate mechanism that ensures that the cost of infrastructure that we have to build in advance of to be able to serve that new growth to make it possible for it to come in doesn't fall entirely on existing rate payers. For 27 and 28, we're proposing to phase in the increases that are calculated for that so that it will arrive at the full calculated amount in 2029. So, we're trying to smooth that out a little bit rather than stepping up too significantly in 2027. All right, so that's our existing structure and near-term proposed rates. I'm going to segue to our capital funding plan, which is getting that longer-term view, which is, I think, really where a lot of the most important discussions are. So, what do I mean by capital funding plan? In broad strokes, it is intended to be our financial roadmap for phase one of the Cascade Supply Program. So, that was the transmission portion of what was laid out in the presentation that we gave last month. So delivering a water supply project of this magnitude is a generational undertaking, and we need a long-term roadmap to lay out the financial aspects of it in addition to all the work that the engineers and planners are doing. We are fortunately building from a strong foundation. We have a robust fiscal policy structure that's already in place and a stable financial track record and very strong bond ratings. This is the plan to go about building on that foundation. So, the roadmap will identify potential funding sources, define a strategy for how we plan that funding. It evaluates the rate and other financial impacts and ensures we're able to meet our fiscal policies, our bond covenants, legal requirements. Long-term financial forecasting has been a strength of Cascade, and we can't know the future, but the process of defining assumptions, looking forward, thinking about impacts over decades instead of just a few years helps us make better decisions. The plan also assesses risks and opportunities that are most relevant to this financial roadmap, and through that lays out and defines a rate and RCFC strategy. And overall, it's intended to provide a flexible framework for both the decisions we're making now and the decisions that we'll continue to make over the course of delivering this program. Many financial forecasts or plans use a deterministic approach with a single outcome. And for this, what we do know, we know enough to know that we have uncertainty across many different areas, uncertainty on things that really matter to the outcomes, enough that a simple deterministic approach isn't enough. So to address that, In the funding plan, we've gone through and conducted a comprehensive sensitivity analysis along each of those critical assumption areas. So this slide lays out the key areas of uncertainty that we evaluated in the course of this plan. To evaluate it, we have a financial forecasting model that includes not just what we're doing for this plan, but the totality of Cascade's financial outlook. It looks out to the end of the century. That doesn't mean we know what is going to be happening in 2100, but when we are delivering this, it looks at not just at the phase one piece of the pie, but also the steps that need to come after so that we don't end this first phase overburdened and not ready to continue what we need to do. And it also looks at all of our operating costs and not just the capital piece of the picture, both current and what we will bring online as we bring this infrastructure into service. obviously going out that far, uncertainty gets higher the longer you go, but we think that there's value in going through the process of laying out these assumptions, considering what could happen, even though we don't know what will happen. Our presentation to you all last month, you heard about cost. It's big numbers. For this sensitivity analysis, not taking at it from an engineering standpoint, but from a financial what-if standpoint, we looked at an even wider range of costs, so scenarios that evaluate what if it is at 100 percent of the construction cost that we, that you heard about. You all have seen other major capital programs around the region. at the very front end of something like this, we have to recognize the level of potential uncertainty. Schedule, also a major driver of what it means for rates, what it means for costs. It impacts costs directly with delays, but it also impacts when we go out for funding, how quickly we need to raise rates. We looked at What options are we considering? Are we funding this all from rate payers? Are we funding this from just issuing bonds? Or what other alternatives are out there? So we evaluated scenarios on what we can just control ourselves and also looking at major funding programs that are available both state and federally. We looked also at how our assumptions can affect outcomes that we end up getting so if we are pessimistic on the front end or conservative on the front end and then we get a lower cost what does that do long term and the reverse in addition we looked at economic factors that are entirely out of our control growth rates inflation interest rates that sort of thing for all of these we built scenarios that would give us rates that are enough to meet our fiscal policies be able to deliver this comply with bond covenants and I'm going to talk about every single one of those. No. This chart represents the rate paths for all of those different scenarios. The important thing to know is that these are not choices. These are what would need to happen if a set of scenarios occur. So we ran many different permutations of those considerations. The chart shows the this not in terms of percentage rate increases, but in terms of that cost of water, because over 15 years, we think that focusing on just the percentages, it's very hard to capture the cumulative impact of this. And we do want to be transparent about what it's going to take in terms of rates to deliver this. So, these aren't the yearly increases, but the total amount per 100 cubic feet per year increasing over time. So, first off, takeaways on this. We're looking at significant increases well above inflation. The dotted line at the bottom there is just the effect of inflation. And even the most optimistic scenario is evaluated. As you can see, if you look all the way to out in 2040, most of the scenarios have a relatively tight grouping in terms of the 2040 cost. In green is our recommended rate path based on this, which takes us to a moderately conservative end of that grouping. One other important finding that we had from going through this analysis is that Higher rate increases today lead to lower ultimate rates because they reduce the amount that we need to debt finance to be able to deliver this. Similar information presented a different way because everybody processes this sort of information differently. So, this slide shows the strategy from an annualized percentage standpoint. So, on the left is the 27-28 range. So the gray bars show the high and the low range on the early end of things. And then on the right is the long-term average. So we have a lot of uncertainty in the range of scenarios in the very near term. But fortunately, because it makes my job easier, in the longer term, there's a tighter grouping of where we need to go over time. And this is how we got to our recommended strategy. So the recommended strategy of starting with 9.5% rate increases and then reducing down over time, we believe puts Cascade on the right path to mitigate the uncertainty that we know exists in where we need it and what it will take long term. It's not, I want to be clear, it's not high enough to cover every possible outcome. We believe it's the right balance though of conservatism and risk that we ask our members and your rate payers to begin paying up front. So the specific recommendations that we have in this funding plan are, first, to aggressively pursue outside funding assistance, particularly through there is one federal program, yet another acronym, I apologize, Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act, or just WIFIA. It's a loan program. Securing WIFIA assistance for the construction portion of our program makes a meaningful difference in the rate path. can lower it just over 1 percent per year overall. And this is a program that is of regional importance that will enhance resiliency for hundreds of thousands of people. And so, we want to be doing everything we can to secure this outside funding assistance. Second set of recommendations is to take meaningful first steps to begin mitigating the risks and uncertainty that we know we have. So, this recommendation informed the proposed rates that I told you about earlier. And third is to ensure the plan fulfills that vision that I said of being a flexible tool. It's not enough to just make a plan once. It needs to be kept useful through consistent updates.

Deputy Mayor?

Yeah, thank you. Andy, yeah. So one thing that was in the materials that you provided us, but it's not up there, is $60 million in bond funding? Yes. So it's not up there. Does that mean- It's no longer part of the strategy?

So that is part of the plan. We were just trying to condense how much we presented. But yes, we are proposing an initial in 2026 $60 million bond. The exact sizing will depend on market conditions as we get closer to actually issuing that bond. But where we are today, which is the very front end of things, that is the amount that we're proposing.

And I want to just be clear about this. That is not just for the Cascade supply program. That is bond funding that will be available for other capital needs that Cascade may have. They would be minimal relative to the supply program, but I just want to be very transparent about that. It isn't just for the supply program.

Yeah, I think it would be helpful to understand what percentage of that is going to be deployed for the CSB and what, in the near term, That's what the allocation is going to be. So if you could provide that, then...

I don't have that percentage at my fingertip, but I can make sure... We can get it for you.

Okay. And then knowing how that's being allocated in the near term. And then what is the bond rating for Cascade?

We're currently AAA. AAA. Okay. And do we...

In Cascade's... What's the word, Mike? Financial management plan or what? Financial policies. What do you see as creating the most sensitivity with respect to that bond rating and the price of borrowed dollars?

Within our policies or just generally driving the rating?

Yeah, what's driving, yeah. And where's the most greatest sensitivity?

Let me...

Let me take a crack at answering that and tell me if I don't address your – Well, and especially to the extent it helps inform sort of policy decisions about whether rate payers are paying or whether we're borrowing additional dollars or how we're getting to the capital expenditures that Cascade needs to get to.

Absolutely. So bond ratings are made up of a number of input components. Many of them are down to just what the numbers work out to of – What is your overall size? What is the structure of the agency that is issuing the bond? And how is it going to look when you issue that? However, there are also components that look at the specifics of the agency that is issuing the bond. Cascade benefits from a somewhat unique structure. And I mentioned at the front end that we are not a standalone agency and you are all customers. Cascade is made up of its members, and that is written into its foundational, the founding agreements, and it is reflected in the way that our bonds are structured. And so, as a result, we are stronger because all of our members are strong. So, that has been a major indicator that has been recognized by the rating agencies, is the strength of our members makes, is part of what gives us that AAA rating. Mr. Okay, that's helpful, thanks.

Council Member Arnold.

Thank you. As the Deputy Mayor has brought up bonds, it made me think of several other regional conversations that are happening with long-term infrastructure and debt, including the length of bond terms. What does Cascade project as far as the length of the bond terms, and is any proposed legislation to allow things like 75-year bonds of benefit to cascade, if this was part of a legislative conversation?

That's a great question. So we have traditionally issued 30-year revenue bonds. The WIFIA loan program that I referenced provides for 35-year term. For us, we don't see at this time a need to issue significantly longer bonding than that. And the reason that it wouldn't significantly change how we are approaching the funding plan for this phase one is that we have a phase two and a phase three that will be coming after this. And so if we bond for too long of a period at the very front end, we will still be paying for this project when we are in

2080s and building building out our treatment plant and so this is it is something that we've considered but it's not something that we would are looking for at this time yeah councilmember Arnold if I may I think that one of the things that we need to be really mindful of is that tension between intergenerational equity and crushing future ratepayers and and reducing all of our flexibility so you know that's I think they've done a I've been, you know, had my arms around this for a little over two weeks, so I don't want to speak too forcefully, but based on the time that I've spent with the finance team and the team working on CSP, they've done a good job with that. I think the other point I want to make really quickly, if I may, is, and it's always hard to tell which regional projects people are alluding to when they make that observation, because there are a number of them that are, you know, and inflating in price. But, you know, from my last roost, and I probably should have just said this for those who don't know me, when I came in, I served for the last several years as the director of the Department of Natural Resources and Parks for King County, and then before that for several years was a department director. So I sort of worked for the poorest department in the county and the richest department in the county. And what was frustrating to me in my last birth was we were asking for significant rate increases For projects that candidly don't deliver any benefit to the rate payer, they were purely for regulatory compliance. That's why we're doing them. We're going to spend $3.5 billion as a county on a combined sewer overflow control facility in downtown Seattle that will operate 10 times a year. There's not a lot of value proposition there for the rate payer. I would argue this project, the value proposition is enormous. because it delivers a secure water supply for the fastest growing part of the county for the rest of the century. That's a pretty good deal for the rate increases that we're talking about, which isn't to minimize the cost or the complexity of the project, but the cities that are members of Cascade will have access to a water supply that Tacoma is willing to grant to cascade in perpetuity, basically a component of that, which is something that we can't get from Seattle because they justifiably are very concerned about growth pressure in the city of Seattle. So I just, I mean, with that kind of high-level filter, when we talk about this project, I would just keep that in mind. That's what you're getting, and that's not a minor thing to get. That's a pretty major accomplishment. It's one of the reasons why I was attracted to this gig and why I came over here. Thank you.

Anybody else? Okay. Go ahead, Andy.

All right. One more slide. So I said we want to be consistent about updating this. And so I wanted to give a little bit of a look ahead in terms of what we see coming. So this timeline, I have to say, is preliminary. There could and will be other things that come up that cause us to update our plan. These are the things that we see today. So we are looking forward to near-term having those proposed rates become not just proposed, but be adopted in Q3 of 2026, we are looking at that initial bond issuance and having the plan be adopted then. In 2028 and each biennium after that, we would be at a minimum on that sequence be updating the plan to reflect each biennium's updated budget and rates, rolling in whatever we do with future bonding, that sort of thing. 2029, 2030 is when we next see major changes in reducing the uncertainty that we have around most particularly cost and schedule. And that's because in 2029, 2030, we'll be into design far enough to instead of having a pre-planning cost projection, we'll have a design, we'll have it be at a design milestone where we will be able to have an actual formal cost estimate and a cost-loaded schedule to baseline everything against. So at that time, that'll be the first big trigger that lets us start to reduce that band of uncertainty around what cost will be. That's also the trigger we need to get to in order to apply for WIFIA funding for the construction portion of our project. And so that's the other big piece of... how much money we need, and where we're going to get it from. 2029, 2030 is going to be a busy time. The next after that is in 2032 is when we are currently anticipating going to construction. And you don't know what things will all truly cost at the beginning of construction, but you have a lot better idea. You don't really know what's going to cost until you get to the end of construction and it's all sorted out. But that'll be the next major milestone that we see at this point of when we would further reduce the uncertainty around cost and scheduling.

with that i would be happy to address any other questions you may have thank you council questions deputy mayor well thank you um i just thank you across the board for um the presentation um the last two presentations and the information you provided i don't know why my mic is so sensitive today i need to stop touching it clearly um I probably should know this, and this might be a question for the city manager more than it is. If Council Member Paschal is here, maybe the mayor knows this. If our former Mayor Penny Sweet were here, she would certainly know it. But can we, I actually would benefit from a quick reminder of how the governance of, how our membership flows up to governance of Cascade Water, and how does that differ from North Shore? if there are even analogs for each other.

Well, someone better than me can maybe denounce yours.

This is somewhat for maybe the benefit of the public.

It's our district with its own elected officials that selects an executive director.

Oh, sorry, I interrupted you.

No. So, so you select your cascade board voting member, avoiding the voting board member votes according to the bylaws of cascade. So the authority of the city council has is to pick that member.

Yeah.

Then that member has the responsibility to actually take the votes.

Yeah.

And then you also have any alternate.

Okay. And remind me what rises the level of a membership vote. Members of our public may be wondering, like we're having all this conversation and they may be wondering, what degree of control the city council actually has over some of the decisions.

Well, thank you, Jim, and so the cascade board votes on the cascade rates, which then comes to the city council. The city council makes a decision about your own water rates, which includes that cascade numbers Grant was talking about. So you get to vote on your rates, the city water rates, but you don't get to vote on Cascades rates, but your board member does.

Okay. And on a major capital project like the CSP, the.

So my, my thought on that, and again, I'll turn over is, you know, what the council has the opportunity to do is provide instruction to your board member. Right. However, that person is empowered to vote as a board member, not as a representative of the city, but by getting these kinds of briefings and having your own questions and concerns, you can ask your own staff to look into things. You can ask your board member to look into things. as the city of Kirkland, but in the end, the decision that they make is as a board member.

And of course, I remember many, many times over the course of the last seven years that Penny, as our representative, asked for support for votes that she took on many of these decisions that we're talking about now. So I just never had sort of a comprehensive rundown of exactly... We can bring that back to you.

How it all works, I mean.

The only thing that I would add, which, again, the board member represents the council. The board member has support of city staff. The only thing I would add, if you guys could talk about the weighted voting of the board members.

Sure. Go ahead and talk about weighted voting, and then I just want to very quickly touch on what I'm aware of from talking to board members about how they're wrestling with decision-making around this large capital project.

Go ahead. So Cascades governance and voting structure uses what's called a dual majority vote. So we have both. Each member has one vote. But additionally, members have a weight that is based on their demand shares, so that rolling average of demand. So that by that, we need to have both of those be achieved for votes. There's some matters that have, I won't get too more into the weeds.

Andy, do you want to talk about the weight? Because where Kirkland fits in the weighted vote? I don't know it off the top of my head.

I also don't know it off the top of my head. I apologize, but we can make sure we provide that.

Yeah, and again, we'll get it for you. Yeah, go ahead.

And then I just, as a friendly amendment, I just want to add that, you know, Cascade historically has had a fairly modest capital improvement program, so millions of dollars. This project takes it into a whole next level. And I think that in the past, correct me if I'm wrong, board authority for the CEO to make decisions has capped at $50,000? That is correct. So we're trying to figure out an oversight plan for the board to deal with moving this project forward with alacrity but with appropriate board oversight because when you're when you're signing work orders for five or six million dollars and there are components in there that may be hundreds of thousands of dollars you don't really want the board to have to wrestle with that all the time but you want them to be able to wrestle with it enough so that they feel comfortable with how decisions are being And for the uninitiated and for the public, something important to understand about Cascade Water Alliance is there are only 16, 17 full-time employees at the entire enterprise. So we really operate through contracts. So we have lots of, we have standing contracts that have operational staff who do work at Lake Taps. We have new contracts for this project for design and permitting that are going to have dozens of people working for us basically full-time, but they aren't cascade employees. And so I think your point is an excellent one, Deputy Mayor, which is the board's going to want to be able to understand how to manage that tension between appropriate flexibility for the contractors and appropriate oversight for the board so we know money's being spent wisely. And I'm very committed to that.

The only thing I would add is that this is a very timely topic. The board held a full workshop on board oversight for this program a couple months ago. It is something that the board has been putting a lot of work into and figuring out, as well as staff and the program team to developing that. And it is something that is going to, I'm confident, is going to be a continued topic as we transition into later phases of this program. What oversight looks like when you're in construction is going to look a lot different than where we are now in planning.

Council Mayor Arnold.

Thank you, and I appreciate you being here. I especially appreciate you sharing the candid discussion of things that are going into the future. If you could go back one slide. There are a number of points where you're going to be updating the funding plan in the next two years. Part of the regional conversations that John and I were alluding to is the fact that cities right now are looking at rates for sewer, rates for solid waste going into the 2030s that we know are increasing. We know Cascade is increasing. One of the things that is a challenge is the official increases are only for the next year. budget. Really appreciate the fact that you're willing to share the information with the best projections you have now to help in that decision making. And it's one of the things that we are grappling as elected officials to say, how can we help bend the curve on the trend when You've got increases approaching 9.5%. Other utilities are in double digits, and we're looking to see how do we keep things affordable overall. So I really appreciate the candid information sharing as we try to tackle that process. Thank you.

Thank you. Go ahead, Grant. Full credit to Gina. I saw her over there typing quickly. But our share is about 15%. Okay.

And I just wanted to thank Kirkland's leadership on the rate summit that occurred last fall. I know Kirkland was instrumental in making that that happened, Cascade was happy to participate in that and we very much, we're very aware that we are a piece of a broader picture and so we're equally committed to looking for ways to bend that curve long term.

Thank you for that. Anyone else? Thank you both. Thank you. For coming, we appreciate it. City Manager, are we gonna see them again anytime soon?

We probably will, yes.

I look forward to it. Thank you very much.

Especially in the context of our own rights. Thank you all. Thank you all. Thank you, gentlemen. All right, we're going to swap out and also conduct a sensitivity analysis on the Deputy Mayor's microphone.

Am I the only one that feels like it's particularly loud?

No, we're all very loud.

So our next topic is alternative delivery.

Thank you, Grant.

Are you and your team here? OK, phew. I was going to say, where did everybody go?

All right, so go ahead, city manager, you were introducing the next topic.

Yeah, so our next topic is a discussion of alternative delivery for the Peter Kirkpool project. As we covered in the memo, we have never done a project like this before, so we're looking for council's questions and feedback. The ask today is really that if there's no objection to take this to the state board, so I wanna explain what that means, and then explain the potential pros and cons of this method. and we have some special guests from the school district, Lake Washington School District, who have used this methodology multiple times, and so they've been advising us on this journey, but I'm gonna go ahead and start off with Julie Underwood, our Public Works Director, and she can introduce the team and the topic.

Council, I'm really excited to bring this topic to you. I introduced this topic in 2023 to our staff by holding a half-day workshop. That's where Laura came and really shared her journey working with the school district. And she has been my mentor in this whole process. So she has been incredible advisor. Obviously, we share the same interests. We're both public agencies. projects that we have to build on time, on budget. And then, of course, Laura has the extra, and Brian, have the extra pressure, right, of building in time for the next school season, or in some cases, building adjacent to a school building. So, I mean, she can explain to you all the challenges that she experiences, She gives me hope that there is another method, another tool we can put in our toolkit to deliver projects to our community faster and at lower costs. And something else I've learned in this journey, many times we've had to embarrassingly come back to you. ask for your grace, your funding. So I don't want to make this sound like this is a way to prevent risk. I mean, what I've learned is it's a way to manage risk in a more transparent way, in a more collaborative way. And I'm hoping Laura and Brian can share some of their examples of that, but So I planted the seed about three years ago, and it took really us, I think, coming to you. We think we have the right project. We think we have the right project manager for you to hopefully support us embarking on this new method of delivery. So I'm going to turn it over to Annika.

All right.

Turn on your microphone.

Thank you. All right. First, I want to introduce Stacy Schewel with Turner Townsend-Heary, and we'll get to who Turner Townsend-Heary is. And of course, you've met now Laura and Brian, and so we'll come back to them soon. So what we're talking about today is asking City Council to consider alternative delivery for a progressive design build for Peter Kirk Pool. and supporting our application to the Project Review Committee, PRC, which is due this week in order for us to present to that committee in July. So this is a reminder of the scope and schedule for the Peter Herkpool project. As a project manager, when you're handed a project, the first thing you do is you look at your scope, your schedule, your budget, and the risk, and you assess those factors together to see how you should best manage the project. When we look at the scope of the pool, a few things stand out. A significant amount of the work is deferred maintenance and more complicated than usual aquatic mechanical equipment. And it involves an existing facility and an aging facility and making old things compatible with new things. And then the schedule is another key consideration. This is a very limited construction window, right? We've got the closed season, which we'd much prefer to stay in that closed season for the work so we don't have to close the pool to that long wait list of community members using the pool for lessons. So if we think about what these risks are, when we think about where they are, they're not going to be best addressed in architectural design. They're all about constructability and resolving unknown existing conditions, integrating new work with old work or an aging facility, and sequencing the construction and managing a really tight site and schedule. I mentioned schedule earlier, but if you think about the site, we're right next to a parking garage and a library and a senior center and a park. There's very confined conditions that are going to make it very difficult for a contractor to do their work. So while architecture and engineering are super important and we need them on the team, what we really need is to be able to mitigate risk with a contractor on our team early. So there are several delivery methods that do this, well, a few. But after evaluating the project's needs, we really feel that progressive design build is the best way to approach the Peter Kirkpool project. So what is progressive design build? So this is just a very simple overview of design bid build on the left. The vast majority of the projects coming out of CIP are managed with design bid build. We're very familiar with this system. In this case, we have a scope and a budget, and we contract with a designer, which is, you know, for vertical projects, that's an architect. For horizontal projects, that's an engineer. We take the project to 100 percent design. We're trying to meet the owner's scope, right, and the budget, and mitigate project risk, all within the specifications and plan documents. And then we go to bid with it, and we've got construction cost estimates, and we have schedule estimates, and we kind of just hope that the contractor agrees. But we really do not know for sure what those costs are and know for sure what that schedule is until you get someone with boots on the ground who could tell you what those costs are. So with progressive design-build, it functions a little bit differently in that the owner contracts directly with a design-build team, which has an architect or engineer in any specialty Trades, like on a pool project, you'll probably have a pool specialty trade on that team, and there's one contract, and instead you're working together with the designer and the contractor, knowing all of the constraints that you have. You've got a contractor who can go analyze and look at existing conditions and progressively come towards a design, working together, knowing all of the constraints. So to explain that even better, I'm going to turn it over to Tracy here.

Tracy's over there. And I also get it often. Yeah, so as Annika mentioned, this is a complex project. There's a lot going on with it. It is.

I may not be close enough. Thank you.

So this is a complex project. There's a lot going on. And it can really benefit from the aspects of progressive design build. Annika was explaining early contractor involvement. So they are part of the team from the very onset of the project. So as you're determining exactly what needs to happen, the contractor is there to help with that. They can help inform the design early so that your design is as constructible as possible. You can have the contractor help evaluate existing conditions so that those designs also align with those existing conditions. And real-time cost validation. In design bid build, you do have a third-party estimator involved to do an engineer's estimate. Sometimes those are not extremely reliable. It's really great to have contractor input. They are in the market bidding projects day in, day out, and they have cost data readily available to them. So they have a really good pulse on what the costs are looking like right now and an understanding of the market. And so the cost information that you're getting early from that contractor who's involved is very reliable, or as reliable as it can be. And then transparency and owner control. So it's an open book process. As the designs are occurring and estimates are being produced, we have a ton of data that we're getting from the contractors so that we have a very good understanding about what's driving costs. And the city's really involved throughout with all the decisions and understanding what's occurring through the design process. So in addition, there's schedule advantages. So with design build, you can overlap your design and your construction. So while some things may need to be advancing with design, some things may be able to go out earlier, and you can get going with those things. A great example on this project is there's some things that may need to happen in order to pass health inspections next summer. That's totally something that could be done with Progressive Design Build. You can do the early GMP. You can have that design builder help to identify what work is feasible to occur on that timeline, and then contract for it early to have that performed. Oh, long lead items. This is a huge one. Design to build doesn't have a great method for understanding what your long lead items are and buying them early. Basically, when you bring on your builder after you've built a project, they say, okay, here's when we can start based on when we can procure these long lead things. In progressive design build, you can identify those long lead needs early and procure those also under early GMP packages. And I think that hits those points. OK, so it looks fairly complicated. Big picture, what I want you to take away from this is how Progressive Design Build works is you're bringing that team on very onset of the project. They're helping you to determine exactly what the scope of the project should be or can be. That's the validation period, kind of the light blue middle. period there. And that's where you're also getting a fairly good sense of what your cost is going to be. At the end of validation, the team has evaluated what is the scope, what is the schedule for the project, and you're setting a target budget. You're not signing a GMP. I think this is the key difference between bid-build. When you get your bid numbers from a bid-build project, that is your contract number, and you're signing a contract for that amount. There's change orders, and things happen after, but that's when your number is. At the end of validation, you as the owner have a very good idea about what the cost is, and your team is working to complete the design within that budget. You're not signing a GMP there, though. Good sense that that is a reasonable number, though, because the team has done enough due diligence during the validation period to say that, yes, you know, we believe that this is a reasonable budget for the project based on what we know. And then you're working forward with that as a target. So there may be ups and downs with various parts and pieces of the project. But for the most part, you can have a pretty high level of confidence that your ultimate GMP will be very close to the target that you're hitting at validation. Anything else you wanted to discuss on this one, Annika?

What does GMP stand for?

Guaranteed Max Price.

Thank you. Any time. The study session. Deputy Mayor, do you have a question?

I do. So, in the materials that we read, It was made clear. And a little bit of this might be for the public, but also just to sort of make sure I've got a clear understanding. Oh, before I proceed, I just want to say we have Annika here. I don't know if we've had a chance to congratulate you on delivering the Fire Prop 1 station construction and renovations, multiple fire stations. On time.

On time. Yes.

On time and under budget. So we have a superstar in front of us. So congratulations on that. Now I'm going to ask my question. So in the materials, we and our public are familiar with competitive bid process as a way to sort of ensure that taxpayer dollars are being spent well. This is different than that. This is an RFQ that was in the material, so a request for qualifications for the general contractor. I'd like to understand just a little bit qualitatively, no, yes, qualitatively, how that works for the public wanting to make sure that their tax dollars are being spent wisely when we're all kind of used to a competitive bid situation. And maybe... What are the standards that we use for a request for qualifications? I'm not sure everybody knows that. How do we ensure, and I don't, Julie, it may be a question for you. How do we ensure the qualifications of the general contractor that we hire for this progressive design building process?

Well, let's back up the track.

Okay.

Stacy is our owner's advisor. So one of the requirements is for, since we are not a certified agency, like Washington School District is and they can explain that a little bit more. We need to have an owner's advisor that walks us through this entire process. So we will lean heavily on Stacy to guide us in that process and help really I think kind of reduce our risk. Also when we do present at PRC, She has to be there. She has to really hold our hand through this process. And we want her there. We need her advice and her consultation. So I'm going to lean on her to help answer that question.

Yeah, so at the most basic level, there's RCW that governs use of design-build. The RFQ will absolutely meet the requirements of the RCW. That's basic. There's a lot of best practices that we follow in the industry and when we're delivering these projects. Design-Build Institute of America also has best practices that they recommend, and those are woven into what we do also. The qualifications are written to attract the best of the best. And in this market, they truly do. We see all of the key players show up to these procurements. So specifically to ask your question, what I think that I'm hearing is, how can we be sure that we're getting a great contractor and team based on qualifications? And so that comes down to what we're asking them to provide in that RFQ. And so we're looking for their experience using the delivery method. We're looking for their experience in the industry, their technical expertise. A whole array of background is what we look for from these teams at the RFQ stage. And there is a second step where then we're looking for their approach to delivering this project. So you're learning at the first stage Who do they propose to do this work and why are they qualified? And then how will they execute that work for you? What is their approach to doing the work? No design or anything like that. And then also per the RCW, there is a cost component. And typically that cost component is the general contractor's fee on the work. So the percent fee that will be applied to the ultimate cost of work. So it's not the actual, it's not the budget. but it is their profit on the work.

And so since it's the contractors who's actually helping us develop the budget, develop the forecasted cost, it's their qualifications that ensure that the number we ultimately get is a number we can trust and the public can trust. And in fact, based on what I've heard and read, we would expect it to be a better number in so many ways because of the type of project we're talking about here. Now, the timing of getting that number is gonna be later in the process than the city manager would be used to. So usually you'd have an engineer's estimate somewhere earlier in the process. You'd probably build that into your budget and your model for funding. So tell us about your comfort with, I mean, as far as you're concerned, you're gonna get the number soon enough to include it in the 27-28 budget.

That is the direction I provided the Public Works Director is excited about this opportunity.

Yes, I mean, that's part of the reason why I experiment with this is to see.

But yes, we need to know in order to make sure it's in the budget.

And you'll have a number validation that you can count on like you could count on an engineer's estimate. I would say maybe even a little more so. So you're not necessarily getting a number later. You're signing a contract to the number later.

Okay.

Well, actually, if you're comparing it to bid-build, you're still signing the contract about the same time.

Well, the fact the city manager is confident he's going to have the number soon enough gives me confidence.

I would say the cost estimates we have in the budget now are the same in either path, right? So we do our normal CIP projection of what we think it costs. The council sees that in the budget, the $11.2 million. We sort of hold, serve, and either way, what happens next is how that number gets refined, which is why I definitely want to hear from the school district on how they do it as well.

All right, well, that's helpful.

Thank you. We do think we'll know enough to build a budget around it.

Thank you. And again, Hanneke, great job.

If that's...

If that's an important milestone for the city, I'd recommend you add that into your RFQ and let the contracting community know that, that that's a milestone that is important to you, and so that when you're selecting, you can talk to them about how confident they might be in getting to that schedule. That is an opportunity you have to share that information ahead of time.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so we've talked about PRC, Project Review Committee, which operate under CPARB, which is Capital Projects Advisory Review Board, I think. So essentially, when the state enabled alternative delivery. They said, okay, we've got to have a way to make sure that we're managing this and having public agencies check in with us. We can't just let people go and use alternative delivery. So the PRC exists to be kind of that gatekeeper. You have to go to them in order to use Progressive Design Build, GCCM, Design Build as any public agency unless you have agency approval, which was alluded to. And their job is to basically evaluate, does the project qualify for the delivery method? And there's several things outlined in the RCW that tell you what it needs to be. And we'll get into that next slide, I think. Is it in the public's interest to use alternative delivery? And is the agency who's requesting ready? And do they have the expertise that they need to be successful? So it starts with an application. As Annika mentioned, that's due this week, 20th, Saturday. So we're actually going to try to get that in before the holiday. Should we receive approval to do so? And then a presentation to the committee in July. So this one is scheduled for July 23rd. And that's a pretty quick process. It's a one-hour meeting where we give overview of what the project is, qualifications. They do some Q&A, and then ultimately, actually, they give direction in that meeting as to whether they're approving or not. All right. So the PRC criteria, or I guess the appropriateness for this project, I will say that when I got the RFQ for our services, I'm like, oh, yes, yes. No question, this is a project that qualifies for use of progressive design build. It's complex. It's going to absolutely benefit from having contractor involved early to help with all of the logistics that Anika mentioned. In fact, I think it would be a really hard project to do using design bid build. anything else?

Yeah, I hit those bullets. First of all, I want to commend Julie for thinking about like alternative approaches and being creative to get projects done on time. Thinking outside of the box is awesome. So awesome job on that. And thank you for bringing this to us. So A couple of questions I had. I guess first question is, how much does it... Is there a charge to apply for this at all? Or is it free? No charge to the PRC. There's no charge to the PRC. Okay. Interesting. Okay. And then the second question I had was the estimated cost difference between running this project through the design-bid-build process versus the progressive design-build approach. Like... And maybe this is an extension of what Neil was asking, or sorry, Deputy Mayor was asking. The traditional process requires like the lowest responsive bid, right? And we're required to use that bid. In this process, I guess, in what time period would we know whether we are completely off? And then... can we then back up and say, all right, maybe we should do it the traditional way and go for the lowest bid? So what are your thoughts around that?

So I'll say the point you would know that you're off is that validation period, and that's very early on. So you bring the design builder on, and that's the first thing they do. And on a project of this scale, it's probably no more than two months. It's going to be quick. They're going to dive in, evaluate what's going on, say, okay, yeah, we think this can be done, or we think maybe not. I think if they think that it can't be done for the budget, Hard bidding the project wouldn't result in a number that fit the budget either because they're looking at the same project. If the same project is being bid, you probably still have a budget problem. Usually what you have to look at at that point is scope. And you can still do that in the design-build process. We say, okay, so you think that what we're asking for is too much. What could we get for the number that we have? And that's still a path that is fully available to you in progressive design-build.

Got it. Okay.

Thank you. I'm hoping Laura can give an example too of like when you were able to work with, you know, a design build team and there is some money on the table and kind of how that actually works too. Not that I'm implying that in this case, but that's an appeal to me as well as for us to look into alternative delivery. Okay.

Sure. I can share that we have a very fixed budget on our projects, but what we're always looking for is enrichments in part of that, because the list is long. The list is always long. We want more than what we typically can afford. And so our alternative delivery partners have been able to provide us with enrichment opportunities in our projects without increasing our budget. And part of it is because of this process of which they are working together with industry professionals and experts in their trades. And they're actually able to look at our standards and our processes and say, hey, if we could consider this type of innovation, you might be able to save X amount of dollars. And so we're having conversations with engineers, sub-consultants, trade partners early on to say, where is it that we're not looking that we can find places of value? And how do we align that with your goals as a school district? I don't know if Brian wants to add.

Yeah. I would also add that you can lock into GMP along that scale wherever you want. If your budget is locked, you can lock in very early and then it fluctuates depending on the scope. So you can fluctuate scope instead of budget. What we've been able to do with our partners is really avoid the iteration of design and estimate and design and estimate that we do with some of our GCCM projects. because the contractor's there to advise, but they gotta get a set of plans, and then they price it out, and then the owner revises, and so there's a bit of challenge in the schedule. So the progressive design build can shrink that schedule, and when it's complex like a pool, that's where you can streamline your project. They also negotiate with the sub, so if they know who the right sub is, and they have experience with them and they know that they work well together and can do it quickly, they can negotiate with the sub. There's also the benefit of underutilized business enterprise and meeting some of those goals and participation requirements because they are negotiating with UBE that they've used before as subcontractors.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Well, thank you to our guests all for being here today. We appreciate your support on this. I have a few questions that may be for Brian and Laura, maybe a little bit Stacey as well. You've done a really good job talking about the benefits of a progressive design bill. Can you talk a little bit more about the downsides and some of the cons, maybe in your experience? That's my first question. I'll just run down my few questions. You can answer them whatever order works for you. The second is, you talked about obviously it being a pool, and I know that you've done some renovations on Juanita High School pool. Did you use this type of bid process for that? And if so, how did that go? And then my third question is, how attractive is this is this contract modeling to contractors? Like, I know, obviously, I have much more experience in federal government contracting, but we're obviously, like, you're always, you know, choosing between and negotiating between what type of contract you want to do based on where the risk lies and things of that nature. So, how attractive is this as far as getting the best contractors to bid on this project?

Mr. I'll start. Ms. Yeah. Mr. So, I'd say one disadvantage immediately is that the architectural costs and engineering costs are subjects to tax because the contractor is providing the design services in a gccm and or a design bid bill there is no tax on that so that's a cost that you're paying to do this model for the juanita high school pool modernization we did it in multiple phases and so we did not do it with progressive design build we currently have a modernization project to finish that and that's a gccm project prior to that we were doing multiple different things with the envelope in the pool the pool work we performed with an ESCO contract, which is an energy services company that was doing the mechanical work. And then, was there another?

The third one was, how attractive is this type of contract to contractors?

Oh, yeah, Laura can answer.

I'll answer that one. The delivery model is a very popular one, actually, right now. We have a lot of school districts that use it. We were not the first at all. Cities are all very interested in using it. I know this because several have reached out to talk about it with myself. City of Redmond, one of your neighbors, is right now actively using progressive design builds. And the partners, the contractors, the engineers, the subs, Lake Washington spent a lot of time before we engaged in this process asking those questions of our partners. We did a lot of interviews with different architects we work with and general contractors and we asked them, you know, is this something that you would be interested in? I'd encourage the city if they had the opportunity to do the same. And the majority said yes. And one of the main themes that came out of these discussions with them was that they want to be in a collaborative space with their owners. They much prefer that. And they're seeing better retention in their staff. They're seeing overall kind of a more team dynamic amongst all of the different partners. We have big, big teams when we do construction projects. I mean, there's hundreds and hundreds of people that work on our jobs, and the fact that they want to come into work those days, and they want to do their best, and they also know that their shared value between the owners, the designers, and the builders, it is an environment that is very enticing, and again, very popular in our space. The Northwest, Pacific Northwest is a leader in progressive design build. I don't know if that was shared with you all, but when we go out to national conferences, it is the Seattle market of people and players that are doing a lot of the talking because we have a lot of that experience here. So this is really the best place to try this out if you're thinking about alternative delivery, as you all are, because I don't know any place that does it better.

I appreciate you both being here.

Your experience has been super helpful. As a taxpayer of the Lake Washington School District, early on, Laura shared this great story of how, I forget which school, but it was where you initially, like if she had done traditional design, bid, build, they would have placed this school in a certain site. Again, tell this story. You tell it better than me or Brian. Someone tell this story. It's a good story.

We have a, we, so I guess pre-COVID, it's really pre-COVID, we had enrollment projections that looked like increasing enrollment all across our district. We're a very large district, second largest in the state. And so we got permission to do our very first design build, progressive design build project. It was going to be an urban school project. um in downtown redmond and uh in between the the time that we received all these approvals and plans we received new enrollment projections during covid post covid and that really altered a lot of the planning that we had done before that type of pivot coming to our district was incredibly challenging and hard. And one of the things that we looked at was we still had a handful of aging schools in our district. And our leadership and our board decided that it was very important that we pivot and address these aging facilities. And so our project team transferred from this original site in downtown Redmond to a neighboring site in northern Redmond. and we were able to facilitate that because we had selected progressive design build. We did not lose any time in procuring a new contractor. You had mentioned a plan B. This ended up being our plan B, and there was no way for us to predict that. But that is honestly the crux of this delivery method, is it allows you to adjust for all these unknowns. You think about a pool project and what is there and what isn't there. I don't know anything maybe more complex than that. And that is why this works so well, because you have the best people talking to you about what our options are, and having those conversations out loud, and we call them big rooms, very similar to this, enables us to be able to make those adjustments, especially when it's things we cannot predict. And there was no way for us to know that. That is probably the most... EXTREME EXAMPLE OF WHY THIS DELIVERY WAS VERY BENEFICIAL FOR US AS A SCHOOL DISTRICT IN THIS AREA.

I WOULD JUST ADD, YOU KNOW, WITH PROGRESSIVE DESIGN BUILD AND GCCM, GETTING THE CONTRACTOR IN EARLY IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE THEY'RE THE ONES THAT ARE ACTUALLY BUILDING THE BUILDING. SO THERE'S VERY QUICK, ESPECIALLY WITH PROGRESSIVE DESIGN BUILD, THERE'S NO HIDDEN architectural grand staircases or roof lines, the contractor is trying to meet your budget and your needs. And so it helps to like unearth some of the hidden architectural complexities by having your contractor in there early.

Thank you. Monica, I have to do a time check. We have about eight minutes. Okay.

Can I just, I want to jump back to the question about the industry and market. I just want to second what Laura said. What I see, the best of the best show up for these procurements. Sometimes we get eight SOQs, and to be honest, it's hard to shortlist to three. When you get to three, they are all more than qualified. At that point, you're selecting for fit, really, you know, very much qualified. The And the best contractors in the area who have the ability to choose, some of them are only using alternative delivery. They don't even do hard bid jobs anymore because they like the collaborative environment. So they will show up for this project, 100%, no concerns about that.

Thank you. All right, the last slide is the third item that the PRC is looking for is the city of Kirkland readiness. Are we ready to deliver? a progressive design-build project. And so we've kind of got a team of support here. I borrowed this graphic from my daughter's social-emotional learning from school. And so we've got all kinds of support in our court. And first, we have independent expertise. So we've procured Turner Townsend Healey. I did not write the whole name there. And we have Pacifica Law Group, who can provide assistance in the contract. And then we have prepared staff. We obviously have experienced capital project management, CIP team. We also have individuals, personnel have experience with progressive design builds. So while this is new to Kirkland, this is not new to us entirely. And then we've got training opportunities and networking opportunities with DBIA and AGC, which for years now our staff has taken advantage of with the encouragement of Julie. And then we have our peer network, which first we've got City of Bellevue, City of Redmond, who are both working on progressive design build projects right now. They're both new to it. And City of Issaquah is thinking about it as well. So there's other peers out there who are trying to do the same thing. And then we have Lake Washington School District. I was going to say, they show up for our meeting. They get their own circle. On a really nice night. And I just have to say that I have known Brian and Laura now since working on the Fire Station 24 project back in 2020. They were my stakeholders for Juanita Elementary across the street. And they knocked my socks off then, and they really take the slogan building excellence to heart. And then I've had the pleasure of working with them as a community member on the Facilities Advisory Committee. So I get to meet with them once a month and tour their schools and tour their construction sites, and I've learned so much from them, and I know that they're willing to show up for us and help us out if we have questions, as you can see.

Thank you, guys. I think that that wraps it up. All right. So go ahead.

Do you want to have recommendations or staff recommendation? Please support our application to the PRC. So that's that's free. We just submit that. And then that'll allow us to present at the PRC meeting. on July 23rd. And then I've got some options here of either meeting ahead of that to discuss, you know, progressive design build ahead of that meeting or in the meeting, the council meeting after that. We can talk about how it went. Yeah. Okay.

But just before anyone makes a choice, I want to be reminded we can't make decisions in study session. So the goal was under city manager report, I was going to ask the council. You saw the presentation in the study session. Are you supportive of us going ahead with an application? So that will happen at the end of the meeting.

I was going to ask Council if there's any more questions. Any more questions? All right. We will talk about it later. But thank you. Thank you both for coming. Thank you again so much. I appreciate it. Nice job. Another fun project. Thanks, everybody. That concludes our study session for the evening. We'll be back at 7.30 for our regular meeting. That was pretty fast. All right, we are back in session following a briefing from the Cascade Water Alliance on the preliminary rates and cascade supply plan and consideration of alternative delivery for the Peter Kirk Pool project. We're going to start the meeting with our honors and proclamations. The first proclamation we're doing is the Juneteenth proclamation. Then we'll follow that up with the World Refugee Day proclamation. I can't do my pee this evening. I better practice. Deputy Mayor Black will be reading the Juneteenth Proclamation. City Manager.

Okay, thank you, Madam Mayor. Deputy Mayor, members of the council, so as they're coming down to read it, we'll be proclaiming June 19th, 2026 as Juneteenth in the city of Kirkland. For all the reasons that will be outlined in the proclamation, I'd like to note to members of the audience and the public that there are links in our webpage and the council packet memo about events that are occurring and a link for more information as well. Here to receive the proclamation is Allen Edward, who is a junior at Eastlake High School, who has been recognized for his leadership and for creating community, and his friends and family are here, and they are welcome to join him in receiving the proclamation.

It's on now. Well, welcome, everybody. Alan, I'm gonna give you the proclamation. Thank you. Oh, and I guess if I can squeeze in here, I am gonna read a proclamation of the city of Kirkland proclaiming Juneteenth on June 19th, 2026. Whereas Juneteenth recognizes and commemorates June 19th, 1865, which is the day enslaved black Americans in Texas were informed by Major General Gordon Granger that they were free. ending 246 years of slavery. And whereas in 1866, one year after Major Granger's announcement, freed black people in Texas held the first Juneteenth, or African American Independence Day celebration. And Juneteenth celebrations would later spread to all corners of the country. Whereas for people of African descent in the United States, Juneteenth is the closest occasion to a true freedom day to celebrate with special events, picnics, and family gatherings. And whereas despite that over 160 years have passed since slavery officially ended in the United States, The nation continues to struggle with inequities and injustices, which provides us with an opportunity to make meaningful change in dismantling the lingering effects of discriminatory systems and structural racism in our country. And whereas learning and acknowledging that black slavery is a large part of our country's history is of the utmost importance in dismantling systems. that negatively impact black people in our country. And whereas the city council strives to create a Kirkland where black people feel safe and respected and interpersonal, institutional and structural racism no longer exists. And in 2020, the city council passed resolution 5434 to examine and dismantle institutional and structural racism in Kirkland. And whereas in 2023, the city adopted June 19th as a city-recognized holiday in commemoration of the emancipation of enslaved black Americans and in celebration of the black community and their amazing achievements and culture in the United States in every field and industry, including the military, politics, education, engineering, science, art, and music. Now, therefore, Mayor Curtis, on behalf of the City Council, does hereby proclaim June 19th, 2026 as Juneteenth in Kirkland, recognizing its historical importance and calling on our community to join us in listening, reflecting, and acting so that we can celebrate achievements and continue to make progress on the arduous journey toward achieving racial justice for all. Would you like to say a few words?

First off, I want to thank the city council and the mayor for giving me this proclamation. I really appreciate it. And I want to thank my family and friends for pushing me to be a better leader, my teachers. And it's an honor to have such a meaningful holiday as Juneteenth to be placed upon me like this. Like Councilman said, it marks June 19th, 1865, where enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, were told by the governor that they were freed people. But what I always found most interesting about the holiday is that it came two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, which is what freed enslaved people throughout the US. It seems that liberty and freedom can't come without delay, especially in the black community. But through this, a beautiful culture has come to life through music, sorry, storytelling, dance, food, or tradition. Juneteenth doesn't only remind us of what was taken, but what was made through black continuance and excellence. For me, that's what makes Juneteenth so powerful. It shows how black people have always found a way to protect joy and create meaning even in the face of injustice. And that's something that I carry with me as a leader, a student, and someone who's still trying to better my community. I see Juneteenth as a day to celebrate these accomplishments and commemorate those who fought for them in our past. As a young black leader, I take this proclamation and holiday as motivation to keep making the world a better place and strive for those goals set by those before me. Thank you guys so much.

Lost the microphone. Next, we're gonna do World Refugee Day, and Council Mayor Arnold is gonna read the proclamation. City Manager.

Okay, thank you, Madam Mayor. So we'll be declaring June 20th, 2026, as World Refugee Day in Kirkland. And again, on our council packet in the memo, there's links for more information. And here to receive the proclamation is Nura Adam, who's the Executive Director of the Immigrant Women's Community Center. She's also joined by friends and family, and we welcome them to come up as well, if they would like.

Whereas World Refugee Day was first proclaimed by the United Nations in 2001 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1951 convention relating to the status of refugees, and whereas World Refugee Day shines a light on the rights, needs, and dreams of refugees, helping to mobilize political will and resources so refugees will not only survive but also thrive, And whereas asylum seekers face numerous challenges, including not being able to work for an average of 18 months after arriving in the United States and having limited or no access to many federal benefits, which results in them being vulnerable to food insecurity and homelessness. And whereas current federal actions related to admittance to and deportation from the United States are deeply impacting the refugee community and exacerbating individual, institutional and systemic racism, stirring up fear, anger and grief. And these actions can result in harmful disparities in education, employment, income, housing, criminal justice and quality of life. And whereas the city of Kirkland supports several nonprofit organizations that provide services to immigrants and refugees in this community, including organizations providing assistance to individuals who have endured the unimaginable in their journey to our community and who arrive with very little. And whereas Kirkland believes that those who come to the United States in search of a better life, bringing with them hope, resilience and a commitment to positively contribute to their new community, deserve the opportunity to achieve economic stability, liberty and happiness. Now, therefore, Mayor Kelly Curtis, on behalf of the City Council, does hereby proclaim June 20th, 2026, as World Refugee Day in Kirkland and invites all community members to explore opportunities to uplift refugees in Kirkland and through individual actions or by supporting organizations that help refugees survive and thrive.

Thank you, Council. Thank you, Mayor. Wow, what a day. It's absolutely beautiful to be here today in the city of Kirkland. I speak about the city of Cricklin everywhere. So this gives me an opportunity today to really thank the city for the incredible work that you all do to welcome all of your residents of all backgrounds. My personal journey to the city of Cricklin before I speak about IWCC and the work that we do is I came here about three decades ago. to visit my uncle who was a business owner and lived in Kirkland, fell in love with this place and immediately relocated from California and the rest was history. I am excited to say that I have become connected to this city and fell in love with this city and that's how I relocated to this region. Fast forward, the work of IWCC started right here in the city of Kirkland before we became a non-profit. So whenever I speak about the journey of IWCC, the city of Kirkland is always mentioned in the most beautiful way. We started the work here organically with community members to welcome refugees and immigrants who are going through challenging times, whether they're long-term immigrants who lost jobs, newly arrived refugees, or asylees, people who are having a hard time finding work or unable to work. And the saying that impact is impossible without the entire village, that's really what IWCC is about. This village and many more people who are not here today are the reasons we're standing here. And the city of Kirkland also was the first city who reached out to us during the pandemic, shortly after we become a nonprofit. And I have to say a city is by the ambassador who represent the city. And the two amazing people who reached out to us was Antoinette and Jen. And at that moment, we didn't think that we could get a grant, though we needed one badly. And we had over 100 families from Afghanistan and Ukraine who were refugee in our community. And we were lucky enough to get a grant from the King County for mental health. But we needed language access and we needed digital access for which the city of Kirkland was willing to help us with, but I had to pause and say, I don't think we can receive that grant because we are unable, we don't have the funds to use upfront and get reimbursed. And for that reason, we let go of other city funding in the past. And your two amazing ambassadors, Antoinette and Chen, said, well, that's not right. That has to change. And they were able to listen to us with empathy and compassion and humanity. And they took that challenge, that roadblock to upper up and said, we'll get back to you. They got back to us and said, guess what? You are going to get your funding and we will advance you 50%. I was in tears. I was absolutely in tears. That was a challenge that was a roadblock for us. And they immediately felt the inequity in that process. And they took the leadership, the city took the leadership to make that change. So I really want to give an applause to the city of Kirkland for making that change. Thank you. Thank you. That did not only help impact our community, but it helped impact many, many other grassroots organizations that were on the same boat. And also, I have to really shout out for Erica and Daniel, who are two other ambassadors who always are there to welcome all of us, whether it's grassroots organizations or just residents, with their warm, welcoming energy. And thank you. The city is all about the people who represent the city. So I want to give a applause for Erica and Daniel as well. I don't want to take so much of your time, but IWCC is a nonprofit organization that does its work with compassion, empathy, and humanity. We are not just an immigrant community, as you can see, all of our friends here, invest on this space. Young people, our community, youth leaders right here, Inaya, who does wonders for the community in terms of leadership, in terms of creating ideas to help newly arrived communities with ESL classes and much more. So thank you, Inaya, for your amazing work. And we also, are grateful for having partnerships like Eastside for All, Debbie Lacy, and Friends of the Village Collective, 11 organizations that work collaboratively to help all communities, especially immigrant communities in our region. So I believe in collective effort with the cities, county, communities, individual Washingtonians who have shown us love and compassion. Ellen and Mark has been with us from day one as well, showing up to all of our efforts and so many other community members who are not here today, our board members. youth, and all of the volunteers who join us as families that we cared for. And today, the refugee families that we cared for are teachers, social workers, nurses, doctors, entrepreneurs. They are giving back. to the country that welcomed them, to the region that welcomed them. And they are giving back to the community. So they are thriving because of the compassion and the support that they have received from the entire village. And our services are not just holistic case management, but we also have healing circles. Storytelling, those storytelling sessions are a way for our communities to connect in a deeper level where people can forge friendship over people who felt that they were different culturally, linguistically, race, religiously, now are really friends in a deeper level because they had an opportunity to explore their common core humanity while also celebrating the diversity that we have. So I encourage all of you to come and find us. It's a place for everyone. It's a place where you can make friends and contribute to your community. And thank you to the city of Kirkland for being our biggest supporter and the one that changed the path for the rest of us.

All right. We are moving on to items from the audience. This is a time in our meeting when we normally hear from the public on matters that are not quasi-judicial or otherwise scheduled for a public hearing. We do have one public hearing this evening. It is item 6A on the proposed zoning code amendments regarding affordable housing requirements and low density zones. On all other matters, please limit your remarks to three minutes. We will provide up to 45 minutes for our items for the audience with no more than six speakers on a subject regardless of their position on the subject. To address the council during items for the audience period, please sign up using the online public comment instruction link or the posted QR code in chambers. For those participating by phone, please dial star 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 a speaker. When that happens, even when we're supporting a speaker, it can be disruptive of the meeting and discourage others from sharing a different viewpoint. We discourage people from using obscenities and making personal attacks against others. And we ask that you direct your comments to council, not to staff or audience members. In addition, because they can be disruptive, signs and placards are not allowed in council chambers during our meetings regardless of their content. As a reminder, state law does not allow items from the audience to be used for promoting Opposing or discussing a candidate's campaign or ballot proposition Kirkland prides itself on being a respectful welcoming community We want everyone to feel like they belong in council chambers expressing their viewpoints. Thank you everyone city clerk Who do we have signed up to speak Thank You madam mayor.

We have two guests both on-site wishing to speak Karina O'Malley followed by Alex Timmerman Karina welcome

Hello. Thank you for letting me speak, council members. My name is Karina O'Malley. I live in Kirkland and have been running a safe parking program in Kirkland for 15 years. We are a ministry of Lake Washington United Methodist Church, delivering hospitality and community to our neighbors who live in their cars. We welcome folks to park in our parking lot, and we provide basic necessities and a stable spot to access resources to exit homelessness. For years, we have noticed that the wear and tear on our parking lot needs to be corrected and decided to repave it. Community partners have offered the use of other parking lots for our guests during the month-long project. We had $200,000 raised from the congregation already in our capital budget. As costs grew, as they do during construction, it was a good time to broaden the invitation to participate in this project, so I posted an appeal on my personal Facebook page and asked folks to share it. Soon after Mayor Curtis reached out to me asking me if I'd be open to having the city consider supporting this important community resource and in fact I am. Your city homeless outreach folks refer qualified people into our program and we have partnered with the city to offer some of our amenities to other city clients so they have access to showers while they are homeless and household goods and furniture when they move into an apartment. We work well together. We've served over 400 people last year, and these folks would have otherwise been parking on public streets alone and vulnerable, struggling to get basic needs met. Our 2025 spending for safe parking was about $175,000, primarily funded through community individuals giving directly to safe parking. We operate from an account kept separate from church finances. We leverage hundreds of volunteer hours and in-kind donations so that more than half of last year's budget was actually direct support to guests in food, gas cards, car repair, help getting IDs or other things necessary for work, but most significantly for moving costs, moving 28 families into housing. We're in a privileged position to be able to move dollars to low-income people where it might make the greatest impact in improving their lives. The more dollars we have, the more we can help. We appreciate the city's partnership in responding to the horror of homelessness and look forward to being part of a robust response of neighbors helping neighbors for many years to come. Thank you.

Thank you, Karina. Next, we have Alex.

Hi, my name Alex Zimmerman. This brochure what is give Yeah, city. Two people. Number one, ask question. So I ask question Deputy Mayor Neil Black five months ago. And for five months, twice per month, I come and ask where is answer. And nothing happened. There's not problem about his stupidity. There's problem about you. You know this, and you support him. Because when one from you not support him, he will give me answer. So you are crook by definition. And I know you. Why you crook? Because you all Democrat. And Democrat is a crook, is a bandita, and killer. It's exactly what's happened now. So not surprise me, so couple week ago you invite King Country Housing Authority Director and give him her golden star. Why you give King Country Housing Director golden star? or spend a dozen and dozen million dollars for thousands and thousands of non-legal immigrants? And people like me, senior citizens, Americans, cannot have a place for living? I'm totally confused. Who are you? Are you a real bandit? Why you doing here? And why you all absolutely identical? How this possible? Why this hundred thousand idiot always elect people who pure idiota, from my understanding. A bandita, democrat, fascism. It's exactly what as we have this. And I speak in you for 20 plus year. And nothing changed. How is this possible? Is this America? Or German Nazi? Or Soviet Commie? What is going on? Can you explain to me? Maybe I think mentally. Men, you know what I mean, and don't understand. How is this possible? Ask question. For five months, and no one answered. He don't answer, mayor can answer. Mayor don't want answer, somebody you answer. And nothing happened. You all acting like a damn Nazi, fascist. You controlling us for 20 plus year in my eyes what is I come to Kirkland. This not a problem. Problems is hundred thousand idiot what is don't react to this. It's a problem. Viva Trump, viva new American revolution, stand up, slave and happy cow. And guys, stop and steal us money. It's absurd what has happened right now for last 10 years. You steal billion and billion dollars. Sound transit with $35 billion. Classic example, like Democrat, mafia, bandita, steal money. Stop and steal us money. Us. Citizen money.

City Clerk, anyone else?

No.

All right. We are closing items for the audience. And now we are going to move on to our public hearing, which is on the proposed zoning code amendments to the Chapter 112 regarding affordable housing requirements in low-density zones. I will now open the public hearing. City Manager.

Okay. So thank you, Madam Mayor. Before we start the public hearing, I want to give you a brief presentation of the proposed ordinance. I'm here to give you that presentation as our Planning and Building Director, Adam Weinstein. Also joined at the table by his staff, and I think they're going to share the presentation.

All right. Sorry. There it is. All right. Okay. Thanks. Good evening, Mayor Curtis and Deputy Mayor Black and council members. I'm good to be here tonight. So I just have a 10 slide presentation for you. I think this is not a regurgitation of the staff report. Obviously, this is just really highlighting a couple of things that can help you sort of think through the decision making tonight. Just to start off, this is a slide from the last presentation actually, but I thought it was a good place to start. These are the guiding principles that we use for the development of the new affordable housing standards for the lower density zones. There's three key ones. One is that right now we have a little bit of an unequal system for affordable housing requirements in the city. had for many years, actually, affordable housing requirements in medium density, high density, mixed use commercial zones that are fairly robust. They're not size limited. So regardless of how many square feet your unit is, you pay affordable housing fees or you set aside an actual unit. The second principle is related to the fact that we implemented pretty substantial state legislation back in 2025. In doing so, we granted a pretty substantial up zone to our lower density areas under state law. That is the time when we are allowed to require a new affordable housing. And that's why we took that opportunity in 2025 to adopt these new regulations. The last principle is about not impeding middle housing production. I think you all know that We have a really good track record for middle housing in Kirkland. Back in 2020, we produced 34 units of middle housing. Over the last year, we produced 166 units of middle housing in Kirkland. That I think compares really favorably to other cities in the region. So what we're talking about with middle housing is it's entry-level homeownership or what counts for entry-level homeownership in the city. That's the type of housing that we want to protect and support in the city. So we sought to design our new affordable housing program to protect middle housing. That was the third principle. And then, again, you've probably seen this graphic 100 times maybe, right? We showed it a lot during the comprehensive plan process, but I thought this was also good context. These are the housing targets that we have to meet in our comprehensive plan. This is the capacity that we have to achieve over the next 20 years. I hope it reminds us of why we're here in the first place. We have to have capacity for 13,200 housing units. The key point here is that 10,440 of those units, about 80% of the total, are for households making 50% or less of the median income, right? So that's about $60,000 a year for a three-person household. We have a lot of tools in the toolbox in Kirkland and throughout the region and in the state for building affordable housing. We have TOD. We have inclusionary zoning. We have public-private partnerships. We're doing a faith-based land project in the city as well and other tools as well. But none of the tools individually is a silver bullet. So we need to really leverage each tool and use it to the maximum extent possible. That was also a major motivation behind the project. affordable housing program for lower density zones. This is a pie chart, as you can see. At the May 19th council meeting, council asked for more information on townhouses. And the townhouse data is a little bit complex, right? The key point I want to make here is that this pie chart shows that permits were issued for 663 units of middle housing in our lower density zones between 2020 and 2026. the tiny little slice of the pie the little orange slice of the pie is shows that less than five percent of the total of middle housing units built in our lower density zones here in kirkland were townhouses duplexes and triplexes so although townhouses are built in sort of a widespread fashion in other zoning districts They are not really built in large numbers in our lower density zones for a variety of reasons. Height limitations is one, lot coverage requirements is another, and there are other reasons as well. And that also means that the vast majority of these 663 units are less than 2,000 square feet in size. So again, we designed this program and the thresholds to really not interfere with middle housing production in the city. All right, this is table one from the staff memo. It's showing average townhouse sizes across different zoning districts. This is what I just referred to. So what we're really here tonight to focus on is our lower density zones. And as shown in the previous slide, there are not a lot of townhouses that get built in our lower density zones. I would also note that The townhouses in the medium density zones, the high density zones, the commercial zones, the mixed use zones are already subject to inclusionary zoning, right? So that's a really good principle to keep in mind. And again, just to reemphasize the point, that inclusionary zoning program does not exclude smaller units. It applies to all units in those zones. In most of those zones, I would say, whether you're building 1,000 square foot units or 1,200 square foot units or 3,000 square foot units, those are all subject to affordable housing requirements, unlike what we designed for the lower density zones. The other thing I want to mention on the slide is that if you look at the average size, right, what we're seeing is that across the zones, the average size is generally in the mid-2000 range, but basically every zone has units that are smaller, smaller than 2,000 square feet, meaning that you really can accommodate family size units in 2,000 square feet or less. And this next slide is sort of an illustration of that. I have a little bit of a Redfin and Zillow addiction, so I got to dig this up on Redfin a day or two ago. But this is just an example of one of the townhouses that is currently for sale in Kirkland that is less than 2,000 square feet. that has four bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms and a suite, a bedroom suite with a bathroom on the ground level to allow for things like aging in place. It has also walk-in closets. You can see from the picture a really, really nice kitchen as well. And again, this is all built within a 2,000 square foot envelope. So that's that's the point I want to make right, you can really get good family size units for 2000 square feet and 2000 square feet units. But there are lots of incentives to build bigger right, generally speaking, people will pay more for bigger units right so there's a sort of perverse incentive to build bigger and bigger units. All right, so this is another table from your staff report. This looks at the impacts of fees under the two scenarios, the 2,000 square foot scenario and the 2,500 square foot scenario. And again, we're not seeing a lot of townhouses in lower density zones. But even under, you know, a 2000 square foot threshold, the fee on the average size townhouse duplex triplex that's built in lower density zones is really modest, right? It's about $6,675. That's probably less than the monthly mortgage that somebody will pay for that housing unit. So it's very, very modest in comparison, especially to the fees that are imposed on other housing units and other zoning districts. And then cottages and ADUs, always below 2,000 square feet under our code, are completely exempt from fees regardless of which threshold you choose, whether it's 2,000 square feet or 2,500 square feet. You could build 40 cottages in the city under our affordable housing threshold and not pay a cent of affordable housing fee. All right, this is another slide, I think, that I shared at the last meeting. That May 19 staff report for the previous meeting, it compared our current fees that we currently have adopted to recently adopted fees in our peer cities. I think I said this last time, but in every single case in our peer cities, our fees in Kirkland are more lenient than in those other cities. So again, not to go through these in minute detail, but Redmond requires 12.5% set-aside compared to our 10% set-aside. $30 a square foot starting in 2027 in Redmond. That's double our fee. Sammamish, they're only exempting units smaller than 1,500 square feet. They have a $30 per square foot fee. Again, double ours. And then Bellevue has a very, very stringent fee as well. Basically, if you want to build six units in certain districts, two of the units, so about 30% of the units have to be affordable. If you're not providing affordable housing units on site, you pay $150,000 per unit. So that's, again, very, very substantial compared to our fees. We spent a lot of time, you'll recall, last spring designing these affordable housing regulations, especially, I think, to respond to Master Builder's feedback and other feedback that we heard from the building community. I do think we addressed every one of their concerns. compares where we started with the code to where we ended up. So again, we talked about a delayed effective date initially. We have a very delayed effective date that was ultimately adopted, January 1 of next year. The square footage threshold, there was discussion about where that should be. We set it fairly high, relatively high, 2,000 square feet, exempting almost all middle housing. So again, this should not have any impact on middle housing. We talked about exempting small rebuilds when we started. We ultimately ended up exempting very, very major rebuilds. You can basically double your square footage if you're rebuilding and not pay any fees whatsoever. We have a very complicated in lieu fee methodology that we use in our medium density and high density zones. It's calculated on a case-by-case basis. You take into account the land value and the cost of construction on a specific site. We created a much more simplified methodology here of $15 per square foot so that it's easy for developers to figure out how much fee they're going to be paying. And then we also identified a couple of council check-ins. We're at one of those right now. All right. And I think this is the last slide that I have. This is just our recommendation to start the public hearing. We're just recommending that you hold the public hearing on this matter. And again, it's about whether you want to change the affordable housing threshold from 2,000 to 2,500 feet. And happy to answer questions.

Thank you, Adam. Council, any questions? I see none. All right, so Deputy Mayor, were you flagging me down?

No, Madam Mayor, I was just, thank you. Is this the time in our meeting where we're going to have, we're not going to have, we have time in our business meeting for more substance, okay, thank you.

Correct. This is just questions to the presentation. Okay, thank you all. I'm going to now call on members of the public who have signed up to address the council. Please limit your remarks to three minutes. During this time, you are limited to only speaking on this topic during this public hearing.

City Clerk, do we have anyone signed up? Yes, Madam Mayor, we have three guests wishing to speak, all on site. Veronica Shikotko, Alex Zimmerman, and Troy Schmail. Me?

No. Veronica, come on up. Welcome Thank you

Mayor Curtis, Deputy Mayor Black, and council members, my name is Veronica Shikotko. Here on behalf of the Master Builders Association, we want to thank you for taking another look at the affordable housing fee methodology before it takes effect in 2027. MBACS continues to support increasing the exemption threshold from 2,000 square feet to 2,500 square feet. We believe it's a modest change. and it reflects today's housing market, and it will result in smaller, more affordable family-sized units. That 2,000 square foot range, that can be quickly used up. When you're talking about a small family home and you've got a garage, which is usually about 300 square feet, and you subtract that from the 2,000 square feet, you suddenly have 1,700 square feet of livable space. When you're trying to add a home office or a primary bedroom on the main floor for aging in place, I know that was discussed earlier, or space for a multi-generational housing, generational family, that square footage gets used up really fast. I also regularly hear from middle housing builders that it's difficult to compete for land against traditional one-on-one redevelopment projects. To afford the land and to make a middle housing project work, these builders need the ability to achieve multiple units on a site. Builders also spend a tremendous amount of time evaluating potential projects before they ever submit a permit application. A middle housing builder may review hundreds of properties to secure just a few viable projects per year. When those numbers don't work, these projects are abandoned long before they show up in permit data. That also usually means that a site is more likely to redevelop as a single larger home rather than multiple smaller homes, which is the opposite of what the city is trying to encourage. I've also heard some growing frustration amongst our middle housing builders following the decision to push parts of the middle housing optimization out to 2028. Some of our builders are already looking more closely at neighboring cities to see if projects there could be more easily workable. We're concerned that that trend might continue. The reality here is that builders are already having a hard time making projects work in today's market, and unfortunately, many of them are dangerously close to shutting their doors. So we believe that the 2,500 square foot threshold will better align with the family-sized, small, affordable homes you're looking to build. Thank you.

Thank you, Veronica. Alex? And I will remind you, you must speak to the topic.

You must speak to the ordinance. Only about housing. I will speak only about housing.

Can we run the meeting?

No, this is exactly what I want to speak.

Alex, you must speak to the ordinance that we are looking at, which is about low-density zoning.

Absolutely. It's exactly what I want to speak.

I'm going to give you one chance.

No, no, it's exactly what I want to speak, because I see what you show, so I can give you my opinion. Everything they show, what is you doing here, is a fraud. You're acting like a criminal.

Alex?

No, you show this guy who's talking here, show everything here.

Alex, you are excused. You are disrupting this meeting. This is your first strike.

No, I want to speak.

You are excused. Thank you.

Why are you talking? I want to speak about his tablets.

Would someone please escort Mr. Zimmerman out?

You are a bandit.

Troy Shmail. Thank you.

Troy, welcome.

Welcome.

I get to follow that?

Just gets a little energy going. I'll stay on task. I promise. There you go. I got a gavel.

There you go. Mayor Curtis and Council, my name is Troy Shmail. I'm a local builder. I'm here to talk to you about the City of Kirkland affordable housing fee threshold and ask you to raise the threshold to 2,500 feet. One thing I want to comment on real quickly, Adam, which you talked about, there was A couple things. One, when you talk about 2,000 feet of a townhome, that doesn't include a garage. When you talk about cottages, that 2,000 includes other spaces besides just living space. The other thing, and I am building in Bellevue also, is the $150,000 that he mentioned in there only counts if you're going over four. So that's if you wanted to put additional units on a lot, which is literally not going to happen. Anyway, the housing market has deteriorated in the past couple of years with layoffs across many companies. interest rates going up and not down, and other issues buyers are not buying. The amount of inventory has grown and prices are dropping across the board, but especially in middle housing and a lot of it in Kirkland. What was $1.6 million for a cottage is now $1.3 million. What was $1.2 million for a Dadu is now $1 million. That's great for the buyers, but it's not great for the builders. It's really causing a lot of stuff. So we need to build what the buyers are wanting right now. Right now, the way the code is written, you're encouraging one-for-one builders where they're paying $1 million to $2 million for a lot, putting up a big house that's $2.5 to $5 million. For detached product, which is what the market is asking for, I thought it was interesting, the stat that you had, that townhomes, I'd love to build townhomes. The market will not buy them at prices we can make money on right now. People are losing money. If we don't build the right product right now, it will not sell. There's also a large market for aging in place and multigenerational housing, and I've done a lot of that in other jurisdictions. I've tried doing it looking at your code. With the sizing and what we have to build today, I just can't make it work. If you want a variety middle housing, please increase exemption to 2,500 square feet as this includes the garage So the actual living space is more like the 2,000 in the townhomes. He was mentioning Close the size and price gap and allow us to build what the market wants, which is variety I'd still like to see the city look at the other things Florida ratio a lot coverage and setbacks because they're not in line with other Eastside cities and And lastly, my company, I set out a year ago to build in five jurisdictions, Bothell, Bellevue, Redmond, Sammamish, and Kirkland. I have projects in all the other four. For whatever reason, I cannot get a project to work in Kirkland under the rules as they're currently written right now. So all I ask you is let us build the product the market wants. It will be middle housing. It will be nice looking. It will fit in well with the city. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Troy. All right, City Clerk, anyone else?

No.

All right. Thank you, everyone. Public hearing is now closed. The council will consider all public comments received on this issue, including those that have been submitted in writing. We are now moving on to our 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 payroll in the amount of $7,610,838.79 and bills in the amount of $3,562,875.45. Thank you, Deputy Mayor Black. Is there a motion to approve the consent calendar? So moved. It's been moved by Deputy Mayor Black, second by Councilmember Prim. Are there any comments, questions on the calendar?

It was seconded by Council Member Falcone. Oh, you guys are sitting too close to each other.

All right, Council Member Falcone. Deputy Mayor, go ahead.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. There was just one item for the public I want to highlight on the consent calendar. It included our latest report from our police department on their work and crime statistics. I just want to highlight... Some of the really good work that our department has done and the reductions in crime that we've seen. These are compared to the past four year averages for the past four years. Sex offenses were down 50%. These are 50%, not 15. Robbery down 20%. burglary, residential and commercial down 63%, and theft from motor vehicles down 62%, and theft of motor vehicle parts and accessories down 78%. So these statistics, they get included in a report that we see on the consent calendar. They don't always get

disseminated to the public I just wanted to take a moment to highlight them so and and the chief of police is in the in the room and I want to thank him for him his command and his officers work Thank You deputy mayor and Thank You chief st. Jean all right any other comments all those in favor on the motion to approve the consent calendar please say aye aye any opposed motion carries 6-0 All right, we are moving on to our first business item, which is potential adoption of zoning amendments regarding affordable housing requirements and low-density zones. City Manager.

Okay, thank you, Mayor. So this is the actual ordinance that was the subject of the public hearing. Here to give you a very brief overview is, once again, our Planning and Building Director, Adam Weinstein.

Okay, let me get this up. Kes, are you getting it up? Yeah, it is. Okay, great. Let me scroll to the right. Yeah, there it is. Okay. So, yeah, good evening again. Again, we're back for a consideration of the ordinance. This is our staff recommendation. This is just one slide. This part of the presentation. So we're asking you to consider the ordinance that's in front of you. Our staff recommendation is to retain the existing 2000 square foot threshold by not adopting the ordinance. As you know, we have a lot of work to do left in the housing realm. We have it programmed into the planning work program. We will be working on House Bill 1491 implementation, 6026, middle housing optimization. There are a lot of projects that we can undertake to increase our housing capacity, and we can also think about our affordable housing thresholds at that time. So there's a lot of work to do. The fee is not even in effect yet, right? It doesn't go into effect until January 1st, 2027. We would like to monitor how the fee is affecting housing production. After that, we don't think it will have big effects, but we'll monitor it carefully. The fee will generate needed revenue for affordable housing. That's another point. And we mentioned this in the staff memo, but it's an important point. Every dollar that we contribute to the housing trust fund leverages $10 or $15 of regional, state, and federal dollars, generating additional investments in affordable housing across states. the ARCH consortium. So that's a really important reason also to think about how we are using our revenue to generate more affordable housing. And then as we've mentioned, the fee is relatively modest in comparison to what our other peer cities have adopted. And we don't believe the effects will be significant on housing production, particularly when it comes to middle housing. And I think that wraps up our summary of the ordinance. We're happy to answer questions again.

Thank you, Adam. Council, any questions?

the director deputy mayor i do have a thank you madam mayor um and i may have remarks on the on the motion later but just questions for staff at this point so um in our neighboring i have two questions related to sort of our neighboring peer cities um particularly bellevue samaritan redmond who've adopted last year adopted um affordability requirements for a single family um My first question has to do with Bellevue. So I was looking back at the materials that were provided to us the last time we talked about this topic. Um, can you, how, how good is your understanding of Bellevue's requirements? One of the things I see, um, it's a little different than testimony received. It has to do with the lots capacity, not with the, the plans for that lot when it comes to the affordable housing requirement. Yeah, I'm putting you on the spot, I realize.

Yeah, it's okay. Yeah, thanks, Deputy Mayor. There are different components of the Bellevue program. My understanding is that it is not based on capacity, actually. It's actually if you want to build up to six units on a lot. And Bellevue, unlike Kirkland, doesn't allow six units on every lot, to my knowledge. So we have a relatively liberal... We had relatively liberal implementation of HB 1110 where effectively we allow six units on every lot. Bellevue, to my knowledge, does not do that. And so the affordable housing requirements would come into play if you are going beyond four units on those lots where the six units are allowed. OK.

But one of the things I take away from that is Bellevue may not, compared to the development allowances that we made in 2025 when we addressed, enhanced our middle housing initiative from 2020 to comply with House Bill 1110. We actually increased the development allowances throughout our city in a way that Bellevue did not. Is that fair to say? With them not allowing six units on many of the lots? That is my understanding. The other topic or question I had was about middle housing. We are exempting all typologies of middle housing. It's not clear to me in the materials that have been provided to us how our peer cities are handling middle housing. Yeah. For example, if Sammamish is charging $34.45 per square foot, if Redmond starting next year is charging $30 per square foot, does that include middle housing typologies?

Yes. So they're not exempting, those two cities are not exempting middle housing, right? And in Redmond in particular, there's literally no exemption for housing units, regardless of how small they are. So you could build a 500 square foot unit In ADU, for instance, in Redmond, that would be subject to the fees. In Sammamish, if you're building anything above 1,500 square feet, whether it's a middle housing unit or not, I mean, if it's 1,500 or 1,600 square feet, we'd probably consider it a middle housing unit. That would garner fees in Sammamish as well. Okay.

And, again, I'm putting you on the spot, but can you remember off the top of your head how long Redmond, Sammamish, and Bellevue have had their requirements in place? Has it been, for example...

Has it been a full 12 months? June, yeah. So Redmond, Sammamish adopted their fees in June of 2025. Bellevue adopted their fees in July of 2025. So it's been about a year. I did call my colleagues in Redmond and Sammamish and ask them if they had seen any impacts of their fee. And again, the caveat is that in Redmond, the fee ramps up over time, so the full fee doesn't go into effect until 2027. But I did ask my colleagues in those two cities whether they had seen any adverse impact on middle housing production. They said they hadn't noticed any significant trends. The housing market, I think I mentioned this last time, but the housing market is weird right now, right? There's a war in Iran. interest rates are really high they're going up right now actually a little bit um and there's all the you know some of some of the issues that came about during the pandemic have lingered right over the last couple years um so some weirdness in the housing market but they when I talked to them they hadn't seen any adverse impact that they noticed okay that's helpful thank you yep anyone else all right um council council mayor Tim Chisholm

Well, I intend on making a motion to amend this to 2,500 square feet. Does the city attorney want to advise me on the language?

You could just move the ordinance.

Okay, I'll move the ordinance.

Thank you. All right. It has been moved by Councilmember Tim Chisholm and seconded by Councilmember Falcone to move forward Ordinance 4937. Is there any discussion?

May I ask her? Do I need to amend anything or is this ordinance at 2500?

This ordinance contains the language that would move it to 2500 from the current 2000.

Okay. Thank you.

Councilmember Tim Chisholm, since you make the motion, would you like to speak to your motion?

I would. I understand there's people on both sides of this issue that think this will lead to more housing and more affordable housing. But I don't think additional taxes and fees on housing at this time will lead to more affordable housing. I think it'll lead to less project feasibility and less things happening in Kirkland. Both the master builders and our City of Kirkland Planning Commission have made recommendations for 2,500 square feet, and based on their recommendations, I'll be supporting 2,500 square feet. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Falcone? Thank you, Madam Mayor, and thank you, Council Member Chisholm, for making this motion. You know, this is a seemingly simple change that has complex potential implications, right? You might think just 2,000 versus 2,500 square feet is just a tiny little thing, but sometimes the devil is in the details, and that can make a really big difference. For those that are just catching up on this discussion that may be listening either here in person or at home and didn't listen to our meeting last year, the lens that I've had in this and that the purpose in my mind for this is twofold, to incentivize missing middle housing as opposed to large single family homes and to increase funding for income restricted, you know, low income housing, right? And those are two that in this discussion, are a little bit in conflict with one another. So it's important for us to be thoughtful about what the right balance is here. So that's my lens in the purpose of this. You know, we also can see that in the really thoughtful input that we received, both from testimony here tonight, but also email communication and other communication that we've had leading up to tonight. We've had really thoughtful input of various perspectives on this, right? So I just want to say I understand both sides of it, and I get kind of the pros and cons and that this is a lever that we need to be mindful of, again, striking that right balance. We talked about townhomes earlier. They've been discussed a little bit tonight. And I know that's not a lot of what we've seen in the permit pipeline yet to date. And there are various economic factors at play there and market factors. But that's the type of housing that I want to see more of in our community, that our community needs more of, right? And missing middle housing in general, townhomes being one important part of that. You know, Adam mentioned kind of some of the early successes that we've had in missing middle housing since our revisions that we've made in recent years. And what I think is really important is they do not want to stifle what we've seen, right? We already know that there are a lot of economic factors that's stifling housing production. And I want to be really mindful that I don't want to add to that stifling of housing. As was mentioned last year, the Planning Commission had a really thoughtful discussion on this. And they put forth their proposal. Their recommendation was 2,500 feet because they were considering a lot of the things that we've heard about even tonight, like aging in place and the factor of having a garage and how that's often important, especially in today's economy, to attracting buyers for the home. And also to our community, right? That as the state has mandated that we've changed some of our parking minimums, that builders are able to build what the market demands for some of that parking on site, right? And that they're not blocked from doing that. When the council discussed this last year, we decided to adopt the 2000... square foot due to time constraints. We knew that we could increase that threshold and not decrease it, so we said, okay, let's just put 2,000 in there for now, knowing that in a year from now we can check in and we can increase it at that point to the recommendation of the Planning Commission. In my mind, that was the intent all along. We just wanted to take this year to be thoughtful and learn more about it and have a more thoughtful approach to making that decision. And I know that, you know, $7,000, you know, as was mentioned as an example for the increased, you know, 400-something feet of what might be an example of a townhome or another missing middle housing fee here, fee in lieu, it doesn't seem like a lot in the big picture of how much it costs to build housing. But something I repeatedly hear from housing providers is, is that right now it's death by a million cuts. There are so many fees and fees, and I understand that this fee is very, very important. I care very much about building income-restricted housing, low-income housing. I know that's a really big need, but we also just need housing. We need more housing. Some of this is a supply and demand issue where you just don't have enough supply to meet the demand. And missing middle housing is a lot better than getting huge mansions everywhere in our city, which we know is not the urgent need. There's not a lot that we can control as a city in building price factors. A lot of that, as was mentioned earlier, is interest rates and labor costs and material costs and things that are not under our control. But little decisions like this are things that we can control, that not only could make the difference to make something more feasible to pencil out to get more housing built, but also signals to housing providers that we want to work with housing providers, that we want them to build in our city. When they're making a decision between building in our city versus another city, that $7,000 could make the difference, right? Or even the... the perspective that the city has on wanting to work with developers. I think it sends a message, it sends a signal as to how much we welcome housing development in our city. My understanding as well is that we're seeing a housing decline in the housing permits submitted in the pipeline in our city, and we don't want to have a huge, you know, period. It takes years, you know, from the time that, you know, an application is submitted until we actually, people are actually moving into those homes. We have an urgent need for homes, right? What I don't want to see happen is that we're only thinking long-term and we forget about the short-term. Obviously, we don't want to just think about the short-term and not think long-term, but again, it's about striking that balance. So for all of those reasons, and probably more, I am supporting increasing from, I'll be supporting this ordinance and increasing the threshold from $2,000 to 2,500 square feet. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Prim?

Yeah, I, you know, I struggled with this one quite a bit. Went back and forth, back and forth until literally just, I would say, an hour ago where I ended up landing. And I have to say I do agree with a lot of what Council Member Falcone has said here. I support increasing the affordable housing fee threshold from 2,000 square feet to 2,500 because My primary goal is to really ensure that we are not unintentionally hindering construction of much needed housing in Kirkland. Every additional fee imposed on a project can affect whether a project gets built, how many units get built, and what type of housing ultimately reaches the market. Applying affordability fees to homes above 2,000 square feet may create a disincentive for builders, like we heard from some of the builders today. And at a time when housing supply remains one of our biggest challenges, I really don't want to create an additional barrier to that production. And what was interesting is in the packet and the table was shown today, the attached housing analysis that evaluated 300 attached housing units throughout Kirkland showed that the average size of these attached units are 2350 square feet. That means that a 2,000 square foot threshold would affect many of the homes that are currently being built today. If our goal is to encourage more housing production while still capturing larger homes for affordability contributions, a 2,500 square foot threshold is a more balanced and data-driven approach in my mind. And this is particularly important. I do understand that that chart represented homes that were in many different zones, including the low-density zone. But if you look at even just the low-density zone, there were, I think, 15 units there. And even within those, the average size was 2,400 square feet. So what the market wants, they want homes that include homes those within the scope of 2,000 and 2,500. So bottom line, you know, more housing supply remains one of the most effective long-term tools we have for improving affordability. And frankly, I don't want to hinder that. I want to provide as much flexibility for various options for housing to get onto the market. And that's the reason why I will be supporting this ordinance. Thank you.

Thank you. Deputy Mayor next.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. So I want to share where I'm at on this and sort of what my touchstones are and how I'm thinking about this just so my colleagues understand and also the members of the public understand and also those who've come before us and advocated understand. So, you know, one thing that I think is important for me is that The city took an extra year to do this analysis from the get-go. That was in response to the advocacy that we got primarily from the building community. That was an attempt to really demonstrate to builders that we care about housing and we care about builders building in Kirkland. That's what the one-hour pause and analysis was all about, was making sure that our housing production partners. And I use that term because we don't build housing. We rely on our housing production partners to build housing. Whether you call them builders or developers or housing partner productions or housing production partners, that's who we rely on. So this one-year delay and further analysis is really about sending a very clear signal that we care about housing production. But we also care about threading this careful needle of increasing the number of units of housing that we have in Kirkland. You saw everyone saw what we have to what we're statutorily required to produce in in or at least plan for in the city of Kirkland. And so we absolutely statutorily have to provide for additional housing units. We need those housing units to be a greater mix of smaller housing units. And we also know that there are huge segments of that housing production that we're not going to get without government subsidized housing. That means we are relying very heavily on the Housing Trust Fund and ARCH and the multiplier of 10x, 15x that we get for every dollar that goes into ARCH. We're threading a needle here. While we do not want to have a chilling effect on housing production, we also absolutely need that housing production to be a greater mix of smaller homes. And so I ask myself as I'm analyzing this, which of these two options, 2000 or 2500, is more likely to produce a greater mix of affordable homes? which of these is more likely to get more units. The case for this 2,000 versus 2,500 having a chilling effect just simply hasn't been made to my satisfaction, especially in light of the fact that we can reverse the decision of staying at 2,000, and we can later bump this up to 2,500 after we have more data and more information. We can't do the reverse. So since we can't do the reverse, I have to look really hard at whether the case has been made, and it simply hasn't been made to my satisfaction that this is going to lead to more housing units, that this is going to lead to the greater mix of housing types that we absolutely need. We need them not because they're going to be affordable units today, but because, number one, they are going to age in place and, sorry, age over time and be naturally current affordable housing in the future. And one of the reasons I say that the case really hasn't been made is we've heard from many different parties. We've heard from master builders. We've heard from the Housing Development Consortium, which is equally interested in making sure that housing is built in our region. We've heard from residents. We've heard from the chair of our planning commission in his individual capacity. We've heard from our staff who've done the analysis, and every single time I look at the numbers, what it shows is that a very traditional housing product in Kirkland of this type is between 2,300 and 2,500 square foot. I'm not interested in further fostering the traditional housing product. I'm incredibly interested in trying to figure out a way, threading this needle, to incentivize the greater mix of smaller housing types, the non-traditional housing types. If 30 people walk through one of these units that's 2,000 square foot and 29 of them say it's not the product for me, that's fully what I expect. It's the 30th person that walks through it and says this is just the product for me and the impact that that house has on housing throughout the city of Kirkland when there's a new unit of housing when there's a new construction of housing and someone who you saw the numbers someone who can afford a 1.1 million dollar townhouse they're not over bidding on one of our naturally current affordable homes elsewhere in our city it has a waterfall effect So for all those reasons, one thing I also want to emphasize is I've consistently heard, in connection with this idea that I'm not interested in the traditional housing product, I'm interested in trying to thread this needle to foster a unique type of housing product. That's why there's no fees on middle housing, and that's why I would like to hold this down to $2,000. I've heard consistently from our older residents that they would like to age in place in Kirkland. They'd like to take the equity they have in their existing home that's four bedrooms. They only use one of them. They have three available. They'd like to downsize into something that's reasonable that they can buy, and there's no product being built in the market. If the case had been made for the fact that this was going to have a chilling effect on housing production, I might have a different take on this, but it simply hasn't been made, and we also have time to look at actual data and judge, and then we can make an adjustment in the future. So for that reason, I'm voting no on this ordinance.

Thank you. Next, we have Council Member Arnold.

Thank you, Mayor. Looking at the goals of what we are doing with this affordable housing fee on single-family homes. First is we want single-family homes to contribute to affordable housing. Attached homes today contribute through inclusionary zoning. Anytime you have a multi-unit home, you already have a requirement here. We don't for single-family homes. That's why we're looking at this originally. We also have, as you look at that graph of our housing needs, we need funding for that housing that requires a subsidy. And I think that's why we are wanting single family homes to help contribute to that. In addition, for what we've heard about what this impacts to the market, we're talking about perhaps, and I share the goal with the Deputy Mayor, an incentive for a more affordable 2,000 square foot home that complements our middle housing work on colleges and ADUs today. For that reason, I am against this ordinance, and I would also note that This fee itself hasn't taken effect yet. Its effective date today doing nothing is 2027. The cost that we're talking about through this debate is $7,500 on a home that is going for more than a million dollars in the market rate today. The fees that we're looking at are significantly less than what our neighboring cities are doing. And if I'm wrong, in the 2,000 square foot threshold negatively impacts production, we have that ability to change that in the future. As the Deputy Mayor noted, if we were to adopt this ordinance and set the threshold to 2,500 and we weren't getting the results that we wanted regarding affordability, we wouldn't have the option to reduce the threshold in the future. And for that reason, I'll be voting against Ordinance 4937. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm going to keep my remarks brief because everything I had written down has been already shared. I will be voting against this ordinance for the very clear reason that what we, what you have heard from my colleagues is that we are trying to incent smaller housing that's at a lower price point so that we can meet our goals of providing uh housing for our community members and this is not something that we need to do now so i will be voting no and um city clerk will you please call the roll thank you madam mayor on ordinance oh 49 37 relating to affordable housing requirements and amending chapter 112 of the kirkland zoning code councilmember tim chisholm yes councilmember arnold no

Council Member Prem? Yes. Council Member Falcone? Yes. Deputy Mayor Black?

No.

Mayor Curtis?

No. So we have a split vote at 3-3, so the motion fails for lack of a majority.

Mayor, under the council policies and procedures, rule 3.13, they depart from standard parliamentary procedure and have a tie vote tabled to the next meeting where all seven council members are present. And then any council member can move it from what the rules call the table to take up the matter again.

All right, then. Okay, we are now gonna move on to our next business item, and I think half the room is here for this business item, which is an update on our health through housing, Sheila Stanton Place, city manager.

Okay, thank you, Madam Mayor. So, yes, we're getting our check-in. You might recall that we required as part of our agreement with King County that there be a six-month assessment of Sheila Stanton Place once the building is open and residents start to move in. And so we're excited to give you that presentation tonight. We have special guests here from Plymouth Housing, King County, and our staff. And this is all going to be led off by our Deputy City Manager of External Affairs, Jim Lopez. I would like to comment for him and everyone on this table how much hard work has happened over the last two years to make this happen. Been an incredible number of meetings and so forth. And Mr. Lopez actually said to me he's met more times on this issue than he has on the Seattle Kraken facility. So that's how much his commitment has been to making this go well. So with that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Lopez.

Thank you, City Manager. Good evening, Madam Mayor, Deputy Mayor, and Council. It's my privilege to be here tonight with this wonderful group. We're going to talk about what is now called the Sheila Stanton Place update. This is the health through housing project in the city, originally at the La Quinta Hotel. It seems not too long ago, that the council approved in Resolution 5583, a document that was innovative enough that we had to think of a name for it, and we called it the Permanent Supportive Housing Agreement. And in that agreement, it had several requirements that we come back to you and report on our work, and this is, and this team, and this meeting is part of that promise, and we're very pleased to be here tonight to do that. So moving forward, I'll give a brief overview of what we're going to talk about. And I am joined here at the table by Amanda Judd from the city, Sarah Dickmeyer from Plymouth Housing, Shanna Clinton from the county, King County, and Krista Wood from the county. We do meet a lot. We do meet a lot. So we're going to talk from Plymouth Housing's perspective about the engagement work that we've done with the community, the wonderful story of, well, heartbreaking story of the site name, but a wonderful human being, the namesake of the facility, and the resident experiences. You can ask about our resident experiences. We have several in the facility now. King County will talk about facility updates and some reporting data and referral and screening processes. And all of this kind of was envisioned in our original partnership agreement with the county. I'm going to go back to my seat, but I'll be here to answer questions as well as we move through the presentation. And I will turn it over to Sarah.

Welcome. We're so glad you're here.

Is your mic on?

Press the button there. There we go.

Better? Yeah. That sounds better. All right. Thank you. Good evening. As Deputy City Manager said, my name is Sarah Dickmeyer, External Affairs Manager at Plymouth Housing. We're very thrilled to be here tonight because it means we've been open for six months, which is something to celebrate. This has been a long journey and longer for some, and we are, again, deeply grateful for the opportunity to partner with the county and the city to make these supportive homes in Kirkland possible. So, believe it or not, the last time we publicly convened in this setting was October 2024, so we wanted to give a quick recap of the engagement that occurred before this building opened in January of this year. As we promised when Kirkland last presented at Council, we take community engagement very seriously. Our position has always been that we want to engage with anyone who wants to engage with us. If a community member or organization wants to learn more, we are available. We know that trust is built by showing up in a consistent, accessible manner, which honestly I think we learned from our staff who work with our residents. We had two distinct strategies for engagement, building relationships with immediate neighbors and integrating within the broader Kirkland community. On the first, we are especially proud to report that we held monthly meetings with immediate neighbors, now and forever called the Lindbrook Group, where we answered questions, deep-dived into facility planning, co-developed our three required community agreements, and got to know each other. We didn't initially plan on meeting monthly, but when we convened for the first time in November of 2024, someone spontaneously suggested meeting monthly, and there was very quickly room consensus, and Plymouth, the city, and the county were fully on board. Fourth Tuesdays at 4 p.m. at Eastside Prep were the place to be, and a very special thank you to the EPS team for hosting us. After the community agreements were finalized, and we had our January opening date, we held our final pre-opening meeting in December, complete with the site tour, which you'll see in the bottom left photo, while the facility was still partially under construction. At the same time, we wanted to build community relationships outside of our immediate neighborhood. We joined the Kirkland Chamber, tabled at the Kirkland Kiwanis Seven Hills Bike Race and City Hall for All, gave presentations to community groups and individual neighbors whenever requested, held many Coffee Get to Know You meetings, and hosted every then council member for a visit of our Bellevue building for a sense of what Plymouth on the east side is like. We did our very best to be easy to find, hard to avoid, and open to questions and learning. When it came time to pick a name for the building, we had already met so many people and learned so much about Kirkland that when Sheila Santon's name was suggested, we and just about everyone we talked to understood that it was the perfect fit. So as you know, buildings in the Health Through Housing portfolio must be named after a person who has passed, who had a connection to the area and the work. And as you also know, Sheila Stanton was an incredibly impactful local advocate and volunteer who tragically and unexpectedly passed in 2025. We wanted to take this opportunity to recognize how her legacy is living on as the namesake of this building. And just this afternoon, a special plaque honoring Sheila arrived in the mail and will be affixed in the lobby for residents and staff to see every day. Today, Sheila Stanton Place is home to 40 Kirklanders who have successfully put homelessness behind them. They are your constituents and your neighbors. Some are newer to the city. Others have lived here for a very long time. And they reflect the diversity of experience and identity that make Kirkland a welcoming place to call home.

Hello, my name is Krista Wood. I'm a project manager with King County Facilities Management Division. And I'm here with a facilities update for Sheila Stanton Place. So the major renovation to convert the building from hotel into permanent supportive housing is complete. We handed over the units to Plymouth in several phases with the first residents moving in in January. Phases two and three relied on some site work being complete and I would like to thank the city of Kirkland for their hard work and dedication and all of the coordination effort that it took to complete an almost 400 foot long stretch of wall which is here in the center photo on the screen. In terms of what is going on with the building today, unfortunately, we have had a pretty major plumbing leak that is kind of a base cause in the building that has 15 units currently offline that the county is working to assess and repair as quickly as we can. Because of this surprise condition in the building, there is a slowdown on leasing as we work to get residents relocated on site and the work repaired fully. In terms of the overall project, the exterior of the building, you may have noticed that it has been repainted. We also added a new roof and replaced all of the windows and created a smoking shelter for the residents at the exterior of the building. At the interior of the building, up on the screen, you'll see a progression of the work throughout construction from hotel room into the final state of it being a new home. The typical work at the interior of the building included extending the sprinkler systems, updating mechanical systems, adding new flooring and lighting to the building, and adding a kitchenette to each unit so that residents can be self-sufficient. We did have a few unanticipated surprises as well. As you do in construction, we ended up providing a new hot water system and boiler to the building and doing a fair amount of electrical rewiring to bring it up to code. But all in, just over 100 new homes have been created, and there are spaces on site for wraparound services, such as a nurse's room, resident laundry, and community gathering spaces.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for welcoming us back to provide an update on our shared health through housing site. I'm Shanna Clinton. I'm the acting manager for the health through housing initiative at King County. And I'm tasked with the content heavy slides and my apologies for the density you're about to experience. I'm fulfilling the county's commitment to report selected data elements within six months of opening as articulated in the permanent supported housing agreement. And I just want to celebrate the successful opening of this site despite some building issues which have slowed our phased lease-up plan. As Sarah's mentioned, there are now 40 people living at Sheila Stanton Place, all of whom are receiving services there, and all but one of whom have come through the local referral process exclusively. I'll talk about that in a minute. We had demographic and bed-night data only for the first 25 residents at the time that we needed to pull the data in order to analyze and have it available for you today. And we do not have, as the Permanent Supported Housing Agreement indicates, we do not currently have health care income and employment data for this site specifically. We will provide that when our next report is due one year after opening. And we expect it to be consistent with the rest of our portfolio. That data is available for 2025 in a data dashboard that we have online. We can provide this detail to you for your own review in more depth later. This is some emergency response data that's provided by Seattle King County Public Health and the Kirkland Police Department. There have been four emergency medical services calls to the site, three of which required transport to the hospital. There's been one law enforcement response to the building and two responses that were offsite but involved a health or housing resident. That's two residents who have had criminal justice involvement since opening. Also talk a little bit about the referral information, and I really wanna highlight our close collaboration with the Kirkland Human Services staff in selecting local referral partners and determining capacity allotments for each of these organizations. At the city staff's recommendation, we separated them into two tiers. Tier one consists of homeless service organizations within the city, including Lake Washington Methodist, and the Porchlight Shelter in Bellevue. These tier one organizations were invited to submit more referrals than tier two and currently They have provided more than half of the referrals into the building the tier one organizations have We, King County, are fulfilling the screening requirements in the Permanent Supported Housing Agreement. So far, only two out of 63 referrals have been screened out, one due to the results of a criminal background check and one in the suitability screening. A person had a medical event after the time of referral and was going to need a higher level of care following hospitalization. I really want to celebrate that all people served by the Kirkland heart team who meet health through housing eligibility criteria have been housed. So this building is not, we can clap for that. This building is not yet 50% occupied and it's already having a major impact on homelessness in Kirkland and on the east side. We're deeply grateful for the city's long-term partnership and collaboration, for our joint community engagement, for welcoming residents, and for you working to end homelessness here. We're glad to implement this project with and through Plymouth, and I'm going to turn it back to Sarah to share about services that are provided at Sheila Stanton Place.

It's pretty great. So while Shanna's slides gave you some numbers, I'm excited to present a more dimensional snapshot of how things have been going at Shula Stanton Place. So just to kind of help visualize day one for a resident when they moved in, every resident's home is filled with a welcome basket and essentials for a warm move-in. In addition to things, as you could see in the photos, like furniture, bedding, kitchen, and bath items, We also have shelf-stable food, cleaning supplies, and donated welcome items like quilts and handwritten notes, including some wonderful welcome messages from Eastside Prep students. Every resident is paired with a case manager who works with them to set individual goals and support them as they rebuild their housing stability. Staff distribute welcome packets and materials on available resources, including walk-in substance use disorder assessments and referral services, financial counseling and coaching, and job training provided off-site by other local organizations. These resources are shared with the wider building community as well as in one-on-one case management settings. We have 24-7 site staff and maintain a visible, approachable staff presence so residents can share concerns directly and staff can provide warm handoffs to case management or other supports as needed. We are offering multilingual communications and staff to increase access and work to use culturally affirming, personalized touches to support a sense of home. We also utilize visiting resources, including Transit Navigators and Expressions Arts, which is a really wonderful nonprofit that brings in one high school student and two middle school students, along with adult parents to support and supervise to create art projects with residents every other week. But recovery from homelessness is complex, not just clinical, and building community takes engagement. So our staff work to host community gatherings like Black History Month and other holiday celebrations, community meals at least twice a week, the menu often informed by feedback or requests on preferences and dietary restrictions. We had an Easter egg hunt and host activities like Tai Chi and bingo. We also host opportunities beyond the building, like attending a Mariners game and the monthly Kirkland Kiwanis community dinner, which is open to all. Highly recommend you stop by. You'll probably see some Plymouth folks there. And group outings to the Kirkland Waterfront. which brings us to community engagement with other Kirkland community members. So as part of the PSHA and as finalized in our community relations plan, we'll be hosting quarterly community meetings for the first two years of operation or post-opening, co-organized with the city and county. We had our first meeting in March and our second one later this month, like our pre-opening meetings focused at least in this early stage toward immediate neighbors. Our fabulous neighborhood liaison, Kira Madden, is in a lot of these photos, including one on the Kirkland Chambers Instagram. Actually, several on the Kirkland Chambers Instagram. It was hard to pick one. At conversations with council and presenting to the Eastside Interfaith Social Concerns Council. You'll see those photos up there. We tabled again this year at the Seven Hills Bike Race. That photo of the Plymouth booth is right before the rain started. And you should see us again at City Hall for all in September. We've had at least seven faith groups, three community organizations, and one immediate neighbor business volunteer to create welcome baskets and help set up units. We like to host these volunteer events both on and off site to deepen connections among neighbors through support for our residents. At one presentation last year with a neighboring business, we had one very kind employee come up to us and let us know that she is a prolific knitter and wanted to help, and she ended up donating three giant bags of hats and scarves for our residents. Big bags. As I said from the start, we know that there's a lot of community conversation and attention involving this building, and stories like that are part of that. Here we included on screen some of the comments we hear from residents, staff, and then our neighbors and fellow community members. And while it's not on this slide, and I won't read out all the words on this slide because you can see them, we also hear in our community engagement that quite a lot of people are struggling with their own housing security in Kirkland. Whenever we do public-facing external engagement work like tabling, some of the most common and hardest questions we receive are from people coming up to us looking for housing they can afford. Whether for themselves, a family member, a neighbor, it's just about at every event. Sometimes they're looking for housing like ours with supportive services, but for a variety of reasons don't qualify. The Hopelink 2025 needs assessment recorded that 42% of renters in Kirkland are cost-burdened. with about half of that severely cost burdened. And one building like Sheila Stanton Place can't fully meet all that need, or even necessarily all the people who may be eligible, but at least before January of this year, there wasn't really anywhere in Kirkland that could, and now there is, and we are very proud to be working with you to create that space and home. And lastly, I wanted to wrap up by sharing these wonderful photos of city leaders and staff who spent half of their day with us preparing and serving a community meal to residents last week, including the wonderful Amanda Judd sitting next to me. Barbecue meatballs, beans, potato salad, fruit salad. Mayor and Deputy Mayor, great job. And thank you so much for joining us and serving up lunch and kindness to our residents. And with that, I think all of us are happy to take any questions.

Thank you all. Thank you for inviting us to help serve lunch. It was a great experience, the best potato salad ever. I was on fruit. I wasn't going to take anything hard. But what was really wonderful about it was being able to meet the residents. And I met a couple residents that had known Sheila, and it was so powerful. that they were living in a place safe that bared her name. So I encourage all of you to take a chance when you can. But I appreciate you being here. I appreciate this work that you're doing. And congratulations on 40 residents. So council. Deputy Mayor?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Well, thank you for being here. Thank you for presenting. And thank you for all your work, both staff County and Plymouth Housing, really all. And I did want to say how wonderful it was to volunteer for a food service. Thanks for making those kind of volunteer opportunities available. They must be work. You can nod your head and say that they are work. But I think it's so important and it was so great was, again, like Mayor Curtis said, meeting our new neighbors, so many of them knew our staff, not just knowing Sheila Stanton, but they knew our staff because our HART team has been so active in this work. And the fact that we're able to house everyone who's eligible that the HART team has identified is just amazing. So I definitely encourage groups in Kirkland, when these opportunities come up to volunteer, please do. I think it's a wonderful, there's just wonderful synergy there. And it's a wonderful way to serve our new neighbors, to make sure our new neighbors do understand that they're welcome. And and to give back in this in a small way that's really easy and fun. I did have two questions, and Amanda, probably one of them's for you, maybe. It's wonderful to hear that, I probably won't word this right, but what I said a moment ago, every person living homeless that the HART team has identified as being that they've had contact with, they've developed a case, that part of the caseload that they've identified as eligible has been housed. And is there any reason to forecast that when Sheila Stanton Place is fully open, that that won't continue to be the case?

What I can share is that we have been in regular communication, especially with county, Shannon and I, as well as Jim, have met to kind of have conversations about priorities. One of the slides you were able to see, there's tier one and tier two priorities. So even though during phase two, and that's the phase that we're currently in, we're right on the cusp of opening up phase three, from what I understand, that if Alex and Mellie, who are our homeless outreach staff currently, as well as any of our HEART team, in the next few weeks, up until phase three is closed and the site is fully staffed, if they begin working with folks that are eligible and are interested, they would still have priority to be open. Beyond that, it would depend on availability, depending on how long folks actually staying in place and what that turnover rate would look like but one thing I do know is that we do have regular meetings as Jim had said we meet I meet with these folks more than I probably meet with my co-workers on a regular regular basis but that's something that's not going to change now that the site is open so we get to have those continuing conversations and and kind of share, like, here's who we are working with and who would be eligible to utilize those spots if one happens to come open after it's already fully staffed up, or I'm sorry, fully leased up.

You made me think of another question, so I'm going to still have two more questions. One is, we heard earlier from our leader of the United Methodist Church safe parking lot, Some of the placements have been from the safe parking lot. Do you have a sense of the numbers?

Yeah. So currently the Lake Washington United Methodist Church safe parking has been able to place six referrals as of phase two. That doesn't count phase three that hasn't opened yet.

Okay. That's great.

And I would like to point out that I think at least one of the referrals that our city homeless outreach has placed came also from safe parking. They were currently residing at the safe parking site.

Okay. Last question. I saw in the earlier picture, earlier slide, you don't have to go there, but there's, I saw leaders of one of the neighboring schools, Eastside Prep, volunteering. Two of their most senior leaders volunteering. It looked like probably putting together welcome baskets. Is that what they were doing?

I have to unfortunately clarify they were visiting, not volunteering. They were holding up the bag that the Eastside Prep students had put together.

Well, that's a fine segue to my question. You know, despite the fact that the proximity of Eastside Prep has often been used as a reason that this facility, this apartment homes should not have been sited there, My experience in working with Eastside Prep from very early on is that particularly some of the key leaders and also the students, and I've done activities at Eastside Prep and taught the students, and they've been really fascinated by the opportunity that exists. I think they feel very committed to being trained as the next generation of leaders solving complex, interdisciplinary, intersectional issues that are complex and difficult to solve. And there's few issues that are as difficult and complex and difficult to solve as this one. And they see that even as 16, 17, 18-year-olds. They've repeatedly expressed to me the interest in finding a way to serve and learn Are there opportunities like that for the students? I know they've expressed excitement about it. I know that leaders at Eastside Prep have expressed interest in that. I'm just wondering if those kind of things are at least being discussed.

Well, we certainly have already engaged with some Eastside Prep students on class projects. Yeah. Off the top of my head, I want to say it's three or four Eastside Prep students who reached out to us kind of throughout last year. They had a class project and they wanted to focus on whether it was the issue of housing and homelessness more generally or this particular building specifically. And so staff worked with those students, and it was really an interview, but had an extensive conversation with them. We don't have a kind of formalized protocol, but we definitely see that the interest is there. I know we had some ESI prep students donate menstrual products in a couple years. pictures back you'll see some people carrying some big boxes in front of the building and that's what those product that's what was in those boxes and then just thinking about how we engage students at our other buildings and how we have we've had a car wash event that some students have hosted at our Bellevue building we've had schools I can't remember off the top of my head if they were high school or not but who put together sandwiches off-site, but then those sandwiches were delivered to our building, and so there's plenty of opportunities.

Yeah. Well, thank you, because that takes time and commitment to do that work, but I think it's really important. And, of course, I'm only mentioning Eastside Prep because of its proximity. I assume that these opportunities are available to students throughout Kirkland at all schools if they express an interest. I certainly would encourage schools if there are volunteer activities to to volunteer so not again only highlighting Eastside Prep because they are adjacent and they have often and I would say unfairly been used as the the reason that that Sheila Stanton place doesn't make sense so I appreciate that I appreciate their specific engagement and I hope that there'll be opportunities I hope they'll be interested in opportunities for students throughout City of Kirkland. I think that covers, oh, please.

I'd just like to add that I personally did participate in an interview with one of the seniors from Eastside Prep last year who was doing a research project about permanent supported housing, and I was blown away by how much research he had done, how well he understood the model and the issues. It was like an honor of an experience to get to participate with him in that learning. So I'm so glad for the administrator's engagement with us, very long-term positive engagement with Eastside Prep leadership and with the students as well.

The kids are all right, as they say. And I remember at the very first monthly meeting, I think it was, when we didn't realize they were going to be monthly meetings in November 2024, the head of school gave a little bit of a welcome address to the room and said, our kids are watching. And they absolutely are.

Well, with that, I can't top that, so I'm going to sign off.

Good. Council Member Falcone. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Ditto to all of that. Thank you so much for not only being here, but all of the work that each of you do. One of the things that I think we've... all learned from this is that it takes a really long time to do some of these things and due to what the Deputy Mayor mentioned about just the complexity of bringing together so many stakeholders and just all of the process, right? But I do remember years ago, I don't even know how many years ago, four years ago, three years ago, one of these many meetings we've had over the past several years about this project, hearing from community members, including Karina Malley, who's here tonight, and even some King County staff who talked about that folks are living unsheltered and are dying in King County on a regular basis. And we know that to be true. And we know that this is life-saving work that we're doing here. So I just want to remind us of that and the importance of that. And I know we mentioned that and cited that many times over the years when there were delays. Like, hey, people, there's an urgent need here. We also know that... This is, there is a much larger need as, you know, I think Sarah, maybe you had mentioned or Amanda, you know, that there's a much larger need, not only in King County, but here in Kirkland. We know that our housing needs, not only for zero to 30% AMI, but permanent supportive housing is zero to 30% is pretty high. It's in the thousands of units that we need. So we know that. And yet I want to say this is a big celebration to have this is the first of this type of permanent supportive housing in our city we have multiple other types of permanent supportive housing in the city of Kirkland that I like to remind people you know and folks who maybe were a little bit scared about something that's new we've had permanent supportive housing for a very long time serving different populations this is just permanent supportive housing that's serving a population that we haven't served within the city of Kirkland before so and so thank you for this being such a great example of what is you know, the common reality that change can seem really scary and that change can be hard, but then when the change actually happens, we usually realize that it's not as scary as we thought it was going to be, right? And so thank you for leading that example, as I know that we have a lot of work to do, to continue to do as we look to the future in replicating this type of housing in many other projects that we are already required to plan for and accommodate. And per our conversation earlier, really need to work towards funding and subsidizing as well as a region, not just as the city of Kirkland. And with that, I just have a question or maybe a suggestion. I'm sure we're already doing this in some part, but I would love to think through in our community and not just in Kirkland, but some of the other facilities on the east side, What are some of the lessons learned in this process so that we can be even more efficient in future projects? Are there things that we can do? I assume we're having those conversations. I know we're still in the midst of doing a lot of this work. I would love to get an update on some of those lessons learned and how we can how we can be even more efficient in building this type of housing, just given the large need and given the testimony that we have heard over the years about that this is life-saving and urgent work that we need to do for our neighbors and our community. And I also just want to thank the community for just the outpouring of support. Thank you for presenting that here tonight, because as the Deputy Mayor said, there are some folks who are still a little bit nervous, you know, about the type of housing in our city, but we're showing to them that it works, it keeps folks housed, it saves lives, and it also makes our community safer. And so thank you for that, and thank you to the community for just the outpouring of support, and I'm sure that's going to continue knowing our beautiful community here in Kirkland. So thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else? I do want to echo one thing that Council Member Falcone said. You've really made an investment in the community as far as community outreach. And I'm including some people in the back there too. And it's really made a difference. And talking about this and answering questions and telling stories has really made a difference. So thank you. We notice and we appreciate it.

One brief thing. I do want to shout out to Chief Mike St. Jean and his team. They've been there every step of the way. Lieutenant Troy Knopfla and his whole leadership team. And I think one of the learnings and innovations that we are noting is the innovative community policing approach of the Kirkland Police Department and the wonderful innovative approaches of the on-site staff. And we've had several conversations about that.

Fantastic. Great. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for coming. We'll see you again soon. Oh, Council Member Tim Chisholm has a question.

Thank you. I'll forego the introductory thank yous. Two questions. One is related to the condition of your building. You said that it has plumbing issues. My understanding is it was built in 1979 and maybe nearing the end of some. That's my first question about the general condition of your building.

Yeah, sure thing. So the issue that we're seeing right now is in two of the plumbing waistline stacks, We've seen cracks in the cast iron waste lines. To be honest, every plumber that I've talked to in the last two weeks has said, there's no good reason that I can think of as to why this would happen. It's not that the system is at its end of life. It's something that potentially because the building sat vacant for two to three years, once it started being reused, Potentially was a reason But it is an original waste line to the building and we are working to assess All of the waste lines to make sure that it is not a building-wide issue Where we're seeing The the stack lines that are broken it is all adjacent to each other as well So we are right now hoping that it's a localized issue, but that is the reason why there is a pause right now on the lease ups is so that we're able to make sure we really have our arms around it. The units that were pulled offline, those residents were able to be relocated on site, which is also a priority for when folks move into the building that they do not experience more trauma by having uncertain housing after the fact. Besides the plumbing systems in the building, Really, the other major components were renovated or replaced as a part of the repair project. And so this is one that unfortunately did catch us off guard, but is one of the few, if not the only, that we expect this type of surprise on.

Thank you. Question number two is, our staff thoroughly negotiated a code of conduct prior to the opening of the currently Sheila Stanton place. Attached to that code of conduct was no enforcement mechanism or steps of escalating enforcement, I guess. The code of conduct appears to be 100% discretionary in terms of enforcement by Plymouth Housing. And I'm wondering how you exercise that discretion, who exercises that discretion, and how it gets exercised, essentially.

Yeah, so that discretion was intentional and with full consent and encouragement from the city. and staff that we worked with. And the reason it's there is because every case genuinely is different. Every person is different. Every recovery and stability journey is different. And our staff take a comprehensive person-centered approach. to every incident and every person's journey. We do keep extensive records of incidents and staff resident engagement, both positive and negative. And over time, we develop rapport and trust and familiarity with residents so we can better assess what behavior may signal an underlying issue and how best to determine the right response. And so that there is discretion in there, but that discretion is informed by knowledge and experience and relationships with residents. As far as the process though itself, it's not in the code of conduct. I think maybe because the enforcement mechanism or process wasn't in the permanent supportive housing agreement as a required component of the code of conduct as we were negotiating these agreements. Pretty much everyone will tell you, including our immediate neighbors who went to those meetings, that we frequently were juxtaposing the requirements in the permanent supportive housing agreement with the various drafts of the agreements. And so if it's not in there, that's why. But we do have an outline of that process in the safety and security plan. And so it's on page six and seven for anyone listening who wants to check it out. Highly recommend going to kirklandwa.gov slash health through housing. They are hyperlinked at the very top of that page, very easy to find, and again, it's in the safety and security plan. But the process is to, if it is an urgent or immediately pressing situation, we will engage an emergency response protocol. But after that, we engage with the resident, we address the incident, as in we let them know what was observed or what happened. And we listen to the resident explanation or response and kind of evaluate potential next steps from there. In situations where it appears that initial engagement with the resident isn't sufficient to either address the underlying issue or there's more to discuss, We may convene a care conference with the resident and their care providers, so that includes the case management team as well as external service providers, if applicable, to better understand the causes of the behavior and initiate the appropriate interventions. And those can be anything from medical treatment for physical ailments. Believe it or not, quite a lot of behavioral, quite a lot of disruptive behavior can be a response or consequence to a physical ailment that's unaddressed. It could be behavioral health counseling or medication. substance use disorder treatment, whether it's inpatient or outpatient, connection to peer programming, which we have available and are in the process of ramping up, and could also be more frequent check-ins with their housing case manager. If we need to, we will assess the resident to see if they need either temporary or permanent higher levels of care that we can provide. But to kind of go back to the enforcement question, in certain circumstances, if it, again, is appropriate after going through many of those steps, we'll issue either written and or legal notices, you know, identifying the behavior and saying that it needs to cease. And then if In certain situations, if an incident or repeated behavior provides a significant safety risk to either the resident or the building community, we will escalate it to leadership for review. In those instances, we may work with the resident to execute a mutual lease termination. Honestly, in quite a lot of circumstances, just simply the act of engaging the resident or delivering some written notice is enough to remediate the behavior. We also have residents who will work with us to mutually terminate a lease. This is also common and also common in the private rental market as well. But if neither of those routes are sufficient to remedy the situation, then we'll start exploring termination of tenancy. And so for that, the reason I want to explain the long road to get there is because we consider it the responsibility of all Plymouth team members to do everything possible we can do to address what the underlying causes may be and provide whatever support we need to to address whatever the Whatever the behavior is. That is part of our mission. That is part of what we are charged to do also by the city and the county. And it's what our residents need. But when we seek to pursue termination of tenancy, we... have to make sure that the process is transparent, fair, equitable, and has legal merit. And that part is really important. Here we go. We do not have the power to unilaterally evict a tenant. No landlord in the state of Washington does. An eviction must meet a legal standard and be approved by a judge. And again, we strive to make sure that process is transparent and has that legal merit. When a case like that involves, apologies, I'm trying to combine some notes here. In general, when we're considering whether to elevate a case for consideration of pursuing termination of tenancy, we, in general, consider the progressive nature of the behavior the response to staff engagement, and the severity of the behavior when making that decision. We have an eviction advisory board, which we call our EAB. It regularly convenes and it involves leadership from multiple Plymouth departments, including our service staff, our compliance staff, and executive leadership. That group is about nine people. The EAB reviews incident logs, staff reports, recommendations, history of engagement between the resident and staff, that kind of whole history of engagement. And that board will issue a group recommendation, and if the recommendation is to pursue termination of tenancy, staff will initiate that eviction process. If the board assesses that we cannot likely meet that legal standard, then we may go back to acquire more evidence. But for the most part, that is not usually a challenge for us because of our extensive record keeping. And I just want to say that Plymouth and the courts consider the same question when it comes to legal merit. Does the remedy, eviction, match the behavior requirements? In other words, descending someone in all likelihood back into homelessness matched the gravity of the underlying lease violation. And the answer to that is always dependent on the particulars of that situation and is not our decision.

I want to thank you for your thoughtful answers on this, and thank you for your time.

All right. Go ahead.

Thank you.

Okay. Anyone else? All right. Thank you again. We'll see you soon. I'm going to call a break. We'll come back at 9.47. City Clerk, are we ready?

All right.

We are on to our next agenda item after a short break. Thank you, everyone. I did go look at the sunset. We are on item 9C, adoption of state-required municipal code amendments for residential lot splitting. Council, it's 10 o'clock, and we are not even in the halfway of our business agenda, so let's try to do these fairly efficiently, please. City Manager.

Okay, thank you, Madam Mayor. So this ordinance is required by state law to update our lot splitting ordinance. So here to give the presentation is our senior planner, Stacey McGregor. It's her first presentation to the council, so we're excited to have her here. And I do think we have an amendment. I was just about to.

Welcome. Thank you. Thank you, City Manager. Good evening, Mayor Curtis, Deputy Mayor Black, and council members. I'm Stacey McGregor with the Planning and Building Department. Tonight, I will present eight brief slides highlighting the proposed amendments to the subdivision code to establish residential lot splitting, a new state-mandated land division process under House Bill 1096. I'll begin with what residential lot splitting is, how it differs from existing subdivision tools, the proposed code amendments, and the Planning Commission recommendation. Before discussing the code changes, I want to start with the problem the legislature was trying to solve. Under a traditional subdivision, required infrastructure improvements are generally completed and the final plat is recorded before newly created lots can be sold separately. Residential lot splitting takes a different approach. The process focuses on creating a legal lot division first, allowing a qualifying residential lot to be divided into two separate lots through an administrative review process. The resulting lot may be created and transferred before roads, utilities, frontage improvements, or future housing development occurs. This allows land division, infrastructure improvements, and development to occur in separate stages rather than as part of a single subdivision process. For example, a homeowner with a large residential lot may wish to remain in their existing home while creating a second lot that could be sold or developed in the future. Because the lot can be created before development occurs, the homeowner is not required to complete subdivision infrastructure improvements or undertake a development project before transferring the new lot. This flexibility can create a range of opportunities. A homeowner may choose to sell the newly created lot while retaining their home. A builder or developer may choose to sell an existing home on one lot to help finance future infrastructure improvements or development on the second lot. In other situations, the lot may simply be retained for future use and developed at a later date. While the lot division process is streamlined, all applicable zoning, environmental, utility, infrastructure, and development regulations continue to apply when either lot is developed. The proposed code establishes when a residential lot split may be used and the requirements that apply. To qualify, the property must be located in a residential zone, meet applicable lot standards, and comply with environmental regulations. If approved, the owner may create one additional legal lot that can be sold or developed independently. The process is administrative, meaning applications are reviewed against objective criteria with director approval and no public hearing process. The proposal also includes requirements related to access, utilities, right-of-way dedication, and displacement mitigation consistent with state law. This proposal does not replace short subdivisions or other existing land division tools. Instead, it adds residential lot splitting as an additional option that property owners may choose when eligible. Highlighted on the slide are the additional steps in a traditional short subdivision process. Subdivision improvements are generally completed and the plat is recorded before the resulting lots can be sold separately. With a residential lot split, a new lot may be created and sold before development occurs. Unit lot subdivisions serve a different purpose and generally occur after residential development has already been constructed. Each tool serves a distinct purpose within the city's land division framework. The Planning Commission held a public hearing on May 14th, 2026. Prior to the hearing, the Department of Commerce issued updated guidance regarding implementation of the state statute. Staff incorporated that guidance into the proposed code language and presented those revisions during the hearing. After discussion, the Planning Commission unanimously recommended approval of the ordinance. Staff received a limited number of written comments regarding the proposal. Comments in support highlighted the benefits of a more predictable and efficient land division process, expanded home ownership opportunities, and additional housing options. Comments expressing concern focused on increased density, parking, and the lack of a public notice process. The city also received comments regarding cultural resource protections and consideration of inadvertent discovery procedures during future development activities. Overall, comments reflect both support for the policy objectives of the legislation and ask clarifying questions regarding implementation. Tonight's ordinance establishes the city's process for implementing a new land division option as required by state law. Implement House Bill 1096 requirements for residential lot splitting. Amend the subdivision title to establish a new process. Update the city's fee schedule for residential lot splits. Delay implementation for 60 days to establish new applications, forms, and systems integration. The Planning Commission unanimously recommends adoption. And that concludes my presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Well done, Stacy.

Thank you.

Any questions for Stacy? I'll entertain Deputy Mayor.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I can get us started with a motion to approve Ordinance 04938. Second.

It has been moved by Deputy Mayor Black, second by Council Member Arnold, to move Ordinance 4938. Is there any discussion? Council Mayor Prim. I have an amendment.

So when does that get presented? Right now. Oh, okay. I would like to amend Ordinance 0438. Is there a slide?

Okay.

I'm proposing this amendment simply to provide greater clarity and certainty for both applicants and the city by explicitly stating that a decision must be issued no later than the maximum time period allowed under state law. We reinforce expectations around timely review and help ensure applicants have a clear understanding of the process and timeline. So it's purely to just increase clarity in the language.

Is there a second?

Second.

It's been moved by Council Member Prem, second by Council Member Falcone to admit the ordinance as shown on the screen. Are there any questions for Council Member Prem? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion is amended 6-0. The question is on the amended ordinance 4938. Is there any further discussion?

City Clerk, will you please call the roll? Sure. On the amended ordinance 4938, Councilmember Tim Chisholm.

Yes.

Councilmember Arnold. Yes. Councilmember Prem. Yes. Councilmember Falcone. Yes. Deputy Mayor Black. Yes. Mayor Curtis.

Yes. Ordinance carries 6-0. Thank you, Stacey.

Thank you.

All right. We are moving on to 9D, which is adoption of code amendments related to automatic fire sprinkler requirements for existing residential buildings. City Manager.

Okay, thank you, Madam Mayor. So we're looking for action tonight on this. We're making some specific exemptions to requiring sprinkler retrofits to certain homes in certain conditions. And so here to give this presentation is our Deputy Chief of Fire Prevention, Gary Smith. I think this is also his first presentation to the council.

Yes, it is. Thank you.

Welcome.

Mayor, deputy mayor, council, city staff, thank you very much for having me tonight. Again, like city manager said, my name is Gary Smith and I am the new deputy chief here involved with fire prevention and all things prevention. So you might be asking why am I here or why are we here tonight? We are here for a quick, and I think I'm good to fly through even though the screen's not matching, I am here for an update or an amendment to our current code on when sprinklers are required in existing homes that are not otherwise sprinkler today. So currently today there are some pretty stringent rules around that and we're trying to give some flexibility to that in regards to the exceptions that we are looking to amend. So there are currently, oh thank you, perfect. So the ask for us would be, we're looking for you guys to either approve these amendments as they're written, that hopefully you've seen in the memo, or provide some feedback for some direction for a future meeting. There's basically three things we're looking to do. We're looking to add a little clarity for the current exception one, to kind of make it more clear that we're really talking about enclosed space. And we'll follow up with this in a second. And we're also creating a new exception, an exception two, that's going to address, basically it's going to give the opportunity for a 500 square foot one-time add of a cover of an outdoor deck or patio area without triggering sprinklers for the rest of the home. So that's the new exception. And then the third thing we just want to make sure we are making clear is that A homeowner can do both of these things. They're not mutually exclusive, so we're gonna have the opportunity for people to be able to actually take advantage of the deck covering as well as exception one, which gives them 500 square feet if they meet the criteria of exception one, okay? So pictures help. So we'll just fly through these. There's only like 40 more slides, so, you know, we should be here a minute. But, no, honestly, this is the meat and potatoes right here. So today the top picture on the left just shows a pretty classic picture patio cover. In a home that was over 5,000 square feet today, if they wanted to add anything, it would trigger sprinklers if they were not already sprinklered. This exception would allow a home that's 5,000 or larger to be able to add this as long as it's under 500 square feet. um the middle picture to the right kind of a classic daylight rambler with a two-story you know kind of covered deck we drew a line in the sand and said we're going to stick with the 500 square foot rule so it just means that that covered area might be a little smaller so it'd be a couple hundred square feet in the top because it's covering both an upper and a lower area and you'll see in that one there are those are that's a prime example of a the lower floor having you know a built-in covered area as well then the lower area this is not our lake um but yeah it works it gives you the the intent is that we're trying to show limited access and so we probably have some limited access sites around our city with uh waterfront homes or long driveways or other fire flow issues so with these exceptions regardless of their fire flow or their access we're still allowing this outdoor area to have a 500 square foot cover so it does give some flexibility to homeowners and builders are out there you know promoting this these kind of additions to a home we'll fly through this this is the actual language as you probably have in the memo in front of you that for the ordinance that we're looking for approval from tonight And with that, like I said in the beginning, we're looking for the approval of this ordinance 4939. And I'm here to answer any questions. And if I can't answer them, I have one of our planner reviewers that can also help. So I'm here for questions.

Thank you, Deputy Chief. Any questions? Council Member Arnold.

Not a question, just a comment. I really appreciate your work on this. I know a constituent first. CONVERSATIONS WITH COUNCIL, AND NO ONE HAD PREVIOUSLY CONTACTED STAFF ABOUT THIS, AND HERE WE ARE A FEW MONTHS LATER WITH A POTENTIAL SOLUTION. SO I'M GLAD THAT WE'RE HERE, AND THANK YOU FOR THE WORK ON THIS, DEPUTY CHIEF. THANK YOU.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE THE MOTION?

THANK YOU, MADAM MAYOR. I MOVE ORDINANCE 4939. SECOND.

It has been moved by Councilman Arnold, seconded by Deputy Mayor Black, to move forward 4939. Is there any further discussion? All those in favor? Oh, City Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Thank you. On Ordinance 04939, Councilmember Tim Chisholm?

Yes.

Councilmember Arnold? Yes. Councilmember Prim? Yes. Councilmember Falcone? Yes. Deputy Mayor Black? Yes. Mayor Curtis?

Yes. motion carries six zero thank you again deputy chief thank you moving on to 9e first reading we do not make a motion tonight for clarity everyone this is our first reading of a proposed non-exclusive telecommunications franchise agreement with i'm loving this sqf llc dba verta so city manager

Okay, thank you. As you mentioned, Madam Mayor, this is first reading under state law required to present this twice before the council can vote on the second reading. So this is the first overview. Vitaly Protin, our property analyst, is going to give you the overview and is supported by our city attorney's office if you have any questions.

And is this your first presentation to us also? It is.

My gosh, we're three for three.

Welcome, Vitaly. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor, Deputy Mayor, Council Members. Tonight, I will provide an overview of the proposed small cell wireless franchise with SQF, LLC, doing business as Virta.

Whatever she said.

Joining us virtually this evening is Leila Vaga, who is the Vice President of Jurisdiction Relations with Wireless Policy Group, who is representing Virta. I have eight slides to share with you tonight. Virta is a wireless infrastructure company that owns and operates small cell wireless facilities. These facilities are generally smaller than traditional macro cell towers and include antennas that are smaller than three cubic feet. Wireless carriers such as T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T utilize Virta-owned infrastructure to provide service to their customers. WERDA currently operates approximately 4,000 sites nationwide, and they anticipate initially deploying 6 to 10 facilities within Kirkland. These facilities are anticipated to support both 4G LTE and 5G networks. This is the first This is the first facility-only franchise considered by the city. Under this model, Virta owns, installs, maintains, and operates small wireless facilities, while wireless carriers such as T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T utilize that infrastructure to provide service to their customers. Since Virta owns and operates the facilities, A wireless carrier such as T-Mobile does not need its own franchise to use Virta's infrastructure. A separate franchise would only be required if a wireless carrier independently owns and operates facilities within the public rights of way. Staff reviewed similar franchises adopted in other local jurisdictions and incorporated provisions addressing this type of arrangement into the proposed franchise. The franchise also remains subject to applicable federal, state, and local jurisdictions regulations including FCC requirements, Washington state law, and Kirkland's telecommunications and wireless facility regulations. Back in 2018, the city approved a small cell communications master use permit for Verizon under Ordinance 4633. Today, these agreements are generally referred to as franchises. Verizon also entered into a separate pole attachment agreement with the city for the potential use of city-owned facilities, but ultimately they did not install any small cell facilities on city-owned poles. That communication master use permit has since expired. Similar to Verizon's franchise, the proposed Virta franchise authorizes the use of public rights-of-ways but does not grant the right to use city-owned facilities. Virta is not requesting access to city-owned facilities as part of this franchise. Any future request to use city-owned facilities would require a separate agreement with the city. The city council has previously indicated that the city does not wish to allow 5G facilities on city-owned poles, structures, or other city property, and Virta has not expressed any concerns with that policy. City code strongly favors the use of existing infrastructure for small wireless facilities. New poles may only be approved when the applicant demonstrates that the existing utility poles or other structures or other private property cannot reasonably accommodate the proposed facilities. New polls remain subject to review of the planning department, concealment requirements, environmental regulations, and other applicable standards.

Oops.

This image provides an example of what a small wireless facility may look like when installed on a existing light pole. This currently is located in Kirkland or on Market Street. These images, which are from exhibit B of the proposed franchise, are representative examples of the types of facilities that might be installed. Facilities are expected to be substantially similar to those pictured in Exhibit B or as allowed by law and approved by the City. To conclude, staff is requesting that Council conduct the first reading of the proposed ordinance granting a non-exclusive telecommunications franchise to Virta. Assuming there are no requested changes or additional direction, staff will return on July 7th for a second reading and consideration of final adoption. Thank you for your time. Staff is happy to answer any questions if there are any.

Great. Thank you so much. Any questions, Council? I guess not. Thank you. Have a good night. Sorry we kept you so late. All right. We are on our last business item, which is Ordinance 4941, the adoption of the 2025-2026 Mid-Year Budget Adjustments. City Manager.

All right. Madam Mayor, our last topic. So here to give you the presentation on the budget adjustments is our Financial Planning Manager, Kevin Pelstring.

Good evening, Madam Mayor, Deputy Mayor, City Council. As always, I prefer to last to talk through any financial things to make sure that you're nice and awake. So I'll be testing you throughout the presentation. All right. So tonight I have about 10 slides and we're walking through the 25-26 budget adjustments. So this is nothing to do with the next budget yet, but just reflecting changes as we've gone through the current biennium. So as a reminder, state law requires that we update the appropriation number for any fund when we're increasing or recognizing new revenues or recognizing new funds that were established during the current biennium. which were not included in the current original budget so we bring um budget adjustments to council uh roughly five times throughout the biennium um so this is the third of uh sorry the fourth of of the five times uh so tonight there's about six million dollars in total adjustments and about $3.1 million in appropriation adjustments, which is actually recognizing new revenue to a fund. One note on this is that oftentimes we're recognizing the same dollar multiple times, so I'll kind of walk through that. Just a reminder that we're not always recognizing $6 million of newfound money. Often it's just because of governmental fund accounting, it shows up multiple times. So again, yeah, this is our fourth of five adjustment opportunities during the biennium, so we'll have one more shot in December along with the adoption of the 27-28 budget. So at this point, this is capturing probably the majority of all the adjustments that we'll have in this biennium. There probably won't be too many more at the end of the year. So we'll go through the five different adjustments and categories that we'll walk through today. And I'll walk through them a little bit more in detail for each category. The first is council-directed adjustments. So these are fiscal notes or other council-directed or approved funding changes that have occurred in the last about six months or so. So some of them are just notable based on discussions with council and that sort of thing. The appropriation change here is about $4.2 million, most of which is coming from the general capital funds, about $2.4 million, recognizing additional money for the Public Works Maintenance Center, which was already previously approved in the 2530 CIP update, as well as the million-dollar transfer for the church acquisition that we discussed in, I believe, last meeting in June. It also includes previously approved funding for the capital funds and design costs for the Kraken Iceplex and Kirkland Community Center. That was approved on the March 17th fiscal note. The second is other items requiring council action. So this is kind of a catch-all for a number of different things. These are items that include any other operating adjustments involving an appropriation change. if we're recognizing LTEs or FTE changes, or a use of reserves, including grants or internal transfers. So a couple things to highlight here. We are recognizing the additional reimbursement for wildland fire deployments from last year deployments, about, what is it, $443,000 for that, as well as recognizing $330,000 of additional BLS levy funding that was not previously budgeted from the new levy. And in addition, I wanted to highlight that at the top, we're substituting $700,000 of fire impact fee funding in place of what was formerly intended to be GEMT funding towards the new ladder truck. um as an opportunity that we recognize to to use utilize that fire impact fees so we wanted to to um to make sure that we're able to spend that within the intended time period which is within 10 years so that will free up 700 000 of gemt back to the reserve The second is, or this is the rest of the other items requiring council action. So this is the capital and utility and internal service funds. One notable piece here is that we're recognizing $150,000 of PEG fees, which will be used for the additional costs for the council chamber AV improvements. We're also recognizing about $670,000 of grants from surface water and solid waste funds. And we're also recognizing 2026 Houghton Village rental revenues that weren't previously budgeted as those. Obviously, without keeping the property on longer, we have tenants in those leases longer. So we're recognizing that revenue and expenses here. So that's about $653,000 for those. Line item adjustments. So these are not changing appropriation in a number of places. They're simply moving funding from one object to another. or one expense category to another within the same fund. So these don't technically require council action, but some have policy significance. We wanted to bring them forward. Notably, this includes $100,000 towards supplemental help to review the Cascade Water Alliance in King County Regional Water Quality Committee towards future rate increases. So staff is recommending $100,000. I'm not sure if that's exactly going to be LTEs or professional services but to help evaluate those rate increases all right you were told to pause in case they had questions i had a sense but i'm not seeing no questions

You waited for it.

I know. I waited too long.

Just to comment on that. First, just two comments. One is the Houghton Village revenue stream. I think that's actually really interesting to see that, and it's a pretty decent investment. So kudos. That's great. The $100K for the Cascade funding or the Cascade consultant, I just want to make sure that we are – Is there going to be a way for us to know what exactly the deliverables will be for that consultant?

Absolutely. We'll draft that and come back to council with what exactly we're looking for and get your approval. Because it's designed to support the staff who supported the original water quality committee or the board member of Cascade, Councillor Paschal, and the alternate Mayor Curtis. So we'll be telling you exactly what we hope to achieve.

Okay, thank you. Go ahead, Kevin.

All right. And next is the capital project adjustment. So there's a number in here. So this is including any transfers or project closeout transfers from completed CIP projects. So usually this one has a lot going on, and most of which is reflected in the CIP or is reflected in the CIP. So the first, notably, is that we're adding an additional $308,000 needed for the City Hall mobile office expansion project. for a number of additional tenant improvements and electrical improvements. That's coming from a mix of GEMT and Police Prop 1 related to the Police Prop 1 funded human services staff that will be housed in that new facility. We also are reducing, so there's a big 3.6 million of actually a reduction in appropriations from the debt funding in the Houghton Park and Ride stormwater facility. That's reducing the debt in that project down to reflect the approved forgivable loan that we discussed in the last meeting as well. And there's a number you'll see of the housekeeping adjustments. Those are correcting appropriation to align with the December adopted 2530 CIP update. So that is now in alignment. So now appropriation will match everything that's in the CIP update. All right, and finally, position changes. So council only formally adopts the FTE number, so that is unchanged since we adopted or council adopted the FTE total in December. There are a few additions of LTEs, and the reductions here are actually just those LTEs expiring, other LTEs expiring, in some cases actually being converted to FTE, including one firefighter position. But that number remains 781.25. And finally, here's our adjustment summary. So this is just showing what the adopted appropriation number was by type of fund as of December 2025. We have the 3.1 million of appropriation adjustments, including the reduction in surface water related to that debt reduction, and the final amended budget that we're asking council to adopt tonight. So our staff recommendation is to approve ordinance 4941, amending the biennial budget for 2526. So back to you, Madam Mayor.

Great, thank you. Any questions for Kevin? I will take a motion. Deputy Mayor.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'll move for adoption of Ordinance 04941.

Second. It's been moved by Deputy Mayor Black, second by Council Member Prim. Any further discussion? City Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Sure. On the motion to adopt ordinance 04941, Council Member Tim Chisholm? Yes. Council Member Arnold? Yes. Council Member Prem? Yes. Council Member Falcone? Yes. Deputy Mayor Black? Yes. Mayor Curtis?

Yes. Ordinance passes 6-0. Thank you. Terrific.

Thank you.

All right. We are moving on to City Council reports. Deputy Mayor, I'll start with you.

Just quickly remind everyone that you got a update on the meeting of the Eastside Transportation Partnership that Councilmember Arnold and I attended last Friday. That's in your email box. And next week, I'm going to the Association of Washington City's annual conference, if that's what it's called. I can't remember exactly what it's called, but... Anyway, it's the annual meeting. It's the conference that includes the annual meeting where City of Kirkland sends a delegate to vote. The reason I'm going is to, because as you all remember, I was appointed to the Association of Washington City's Legislative Priorities Committee. I'm going for that meeting, which I just want to note starts at 6.30 a.m. in Spokane. But later that same day, I'll still be in Spokane to attend the actual annual meeting. And so I'm just looking for confirmation that the council is okay with me acting as the voting delegate at the Association of Washington City.

May I have head nods? Majority says yes.

Thank you. And that's all I have.

Thank you. Council Member Falcone?

Thank you, Deputy Mayor, for attending that on behalf of the City Council. I also got some personal invites to some specific meetings there that I, unfortunately, was not able to make. So I'm appreciative that Kirkland will be represented there. Other than that, I have no reports. Thank you.

Thank you.

Super quick, met with the head of the More We Love organization. They tackled child trafficking in the area. Heard that they'd recently also worked with the Bellevue Police Department and the Kirkland Police Department on a very... a horrible issue that occurred in bellevue but incredible organization was really impressed sound city association pick meeting last week uh went to the we choose kirkland luncheon uh held by the chamber uh last friday i think um it wasn't last friday i don't even know the weeks all blend um and then conversations with council is coming up on the 26th so look forward to those who want to meet me there thank you thank you councilman arnold

Thank you. Two East Trail things coming up of note. On Monday at noon, we'll have a ribbon cutting for the crossing of at 132nd of the Cross Crooked Corridor. I know that that had been open before, but we get to celebrate it again. And I will be at that. And then on Monday. Wednesday, July 8th, East Trail Partners will be starting their Wednesday summer concert series. And I'm proud to announce that Vlad and the Dads is going to be opening that concert series Wednesday, July 8th. Join us at Farrington Spur Park. We'll be playing from 6 to 8.

Council Member Tim Chisholm.

I recently umpired the Miners Little League Championship between the Kirkland American Little League and Kirkland National Little League. And both sides were unhappy with me. It was exactly like being on the city council. And just because I'm not at city events doesn't mean I'm not doing nothing for the community. Kirkland American Little League won 16-3, something like that. But I don't think umpiring had a big impact on that. Impact.

All right, I'm gonna try to go through mine quick. Deputy Mayor and I attended the County Exec State of the County. Thank you, Kirkland Chamber, for the We Choose Kirkland Luncheon, Pride Proclamation, and Juneteenth Proclamation. Thank you, Council Mayor Falcone, for doing the Juneteenth Proclamation. Fun events, really good. City Manager and I attended the Lake Washington Technical Early Learning Center opening tomorrow. Beautiful facility. They did a really nice remodel. Next week, in addition to the cutting, we have Habitat for Humanity is going to be at Heritage Hall with their event Building Hope on the East Side. And heads up, the Bellevue Downtown Association has announced their study tour this fall to Boston. I've asked Andreana to outreach to council to see if anyone is interested in attending. City Manager, to you.

Okay, I think Madam Mayor wanted to first have a discussion of a potential authorization from the Council for the Council Special Projects Reserve. And then I have a couple other options. I can go to those first or if the Council wants to take those.

I can do that. I have another issue and a couple things for you, but would you like me to do that first?

I think that would make sense before I go into my...

All right, thank you all. So I sent you an email, and it's a big ask, and I recognize that, and I appreciate your grace, but I would like to ask the council to allocate $100,000 from our council's special projects reserve to help fund the Lake Washington United Methodist parking lot repaving. Thank you for staying through our long meeting. I recognize this is a significant amount of money, and I don't make this request lightly. As you are aware from the email I forwarded you from Karina O'Malley and her testimony today, the Safe Parking Program has been instrumental, partnered with the city for the last 15 years, helping over 1,000 of our unhoused neighbors stay safe. I know many of you have attended the dinners and spoken to the residents and heard their stories. which are impactful, and I'm so grateful to the organization for providing this for our community members. Without the Safe Parking Program, we, the city, would be struggling to find homes for dozens of people. We would be running this program ourselves. This program, as you heard, serves a real need in the community, and I'm so pleased that some of the guests of the program have been able to find housing in the Sheila Stanton Place. It's just, it's a powerful story. So our council policy reads, the city will maintain a city council special project reserve, which is available to the city council to fund special one-time projects that are unforeseen at the time of the budget was prepared. This qualifies. The city council special projects reserved is primarily intended to be used for council or city staff initiated requests that support council's initiatives and directions and not to fund outside organizations. As you saw in my email and you heard from Karina O'Malley, I am the one that came forward and said that the city, we should fund this with our special projects. And it's very clear that this supports our initiatives and our heart team and our homeless action plan. The reserve is limited to one-time projects, pilot programs, budget amendments, or special event. The council may use the reserve to fund outside organization emergency requests on a case-by-case basis. Again, this qualifies. When the reserve is used, it is replenished from the general fund year-end fund balance to a target of $250,000. We currently have $250,000 in our fund. It's fully funded. As you also heard, the total paving project is $440,000. The church has amazingly, impressively raised $330,000 today. and they need the community's help to cover the final $100,000. I believe that this organization supports our city missions, and this improves their facilities so that it's safer for the Safe Parking Program. I have walked through the parking lot. I'm well aware of the bumpiness, the lack of ADA compliance, the tree roots. It's not a safe parking lot right now. So, and I feel strongly that, you know, the Safe Parking Program does fundraising, and I would like the funds that they raise to go to benefiting the guests in the Safe Parking Program for food, job navigation. I would rather they not raise funds to pay for asphalt. So, I would like the council to support my recommendation to move forward with this And I am welcome to answer any questions and hear your discussion. Deputy Mayor.

Well, first, I was going to go ahead and make the motion.

Yes, that would be wonderful. Thank you.

We'll get us started. I move to direct staff to return to council with a proposed fiscal note authorizing $100,000 of council special projects reserve funding for the Lake Washington United Methodist Church parking lot to support the Safe Parking Program.

Second. It has been moved by Deputy Mayor Black, second by Council Member Falcone to bring forward a fiscal note at our next meeting for $100,000 to cover from the Special Projects Reserve to support the Safe Parking Program. Deputy Mayor.

I was just going to speak quickly to the motion to support a lot of what you said. The key for me on this is that this is an organization that provides a critical service in the community. It has for many, many years. It is really integrated in many ways into our homelessness outreach action program. It's an organization that's a nonprofit that receives human services funding from the city of Kirkland. And like you said, if this money is spent making the facility safe, then that hopefully frees up additional raised money to provide direct service to residents in need. So for those reasons, I'm supporting this motion. Oh, and the last thing I'll just say, I appreciate the process we have, which is it's introduced now. This is a motion to bring back a fiscal note that gives everyone an opportunity, actually three weeks, because this is one of those rare cases where we have two weeks between council meetings, three weeks between council meetings, three weeks to get any questions you have answered from staff. So I'd encourage folks, if they feel like they haven't had enough time to consider this, there is an opportunity to get your questions answered, and it'll be the vote on the fiscal note in July, July 7th, where the final decision will be made. So thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Falcone?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Well, I obviously strongly support this motion. Just wanted to add on to your rationale of why I think it's best for the city to be making this investment rather than the fundraising is that I had an opportunity to speak with Karina over the weekend at the Juneteenth event. It was a wonderful event. It's great to see you there. that there is so much logistical work going into this month while this paving work is being done. And the last thing that these folks, community members who are working so hard to help during this especially challenging month where folks are already living in their cars and then needing to move to another location temporarily for a month and all the logistics of the meals and all of those things, having to fundraise on top of that during that time is just something that they don't need to be spending their time and energy doing when they're already doing so much to help support those in need. So just wanted to add that on for all the reasons both of you said and that as well I wanted to add. Thank you. And thank you to Karina and all of the folks who are volunteering and doing this incredible work. We really appreciate you.

That's for Tim Chisholm.

So I appreciate the work that happens at this church. The value of their organization is instrumental in Kirkland, and I don't have any questions about the value of this organization. I have questions about why we're trying to use the council special project reserve for this project. The policy states that the reserve is limited to one-time pilot projects, budget-amended or special events. Council may use the reserve to fund outside organization emergency requests on a case-by-case basis I Don't know whether the word emergency has been defined in this policy and Secondly I'd like to see from staff Historically the amounts of money that we've traditionally taken from the project Special reserve because I believe they've been amounts Like ten thousand or twenty five thousand they haven't been one member of this council asking for a hundred thousand dollars from this fund This is unprecedented. This has never happened as far as I know And the third concern I have is what we're getting for our money and When we give $10,000 or grant $10,000 to an organization, I don't expect a lot of assurances that we're getting anything for our money. But what I would have liked to have seen is a serious proposal that if we're going to give an organization $100,000, that we have ensured that that organization is financially solvent. that we're going to continue to operate there and that perhaps this organization is willing to guarantee another five years of operation at that facility or something like that. But I think we need some sort of assurances when we write a check for $100,000. I don't understand if the parking lot operation And the church are separate entities or they're the same entity. And I'm not even exactly sure who we're giving the money to. This organization is instrumental in Kirkland. And thank you for all the years that you've put into this. And I want to ensure that if we support this organization, that the level of support we're giving is sustainable. that it's long-term, that we've thought about the best long-term way to do it, and that perhaps the money comes from the city, but not necessarily from the Special Projects Reserve. Because we should think about this long-term and think about how to best support this organization in the upcoming, not just one year, but the upcoming decade. Thank you.

Thank you. Councillor Arnold?

Thank You mayor, thank you for bringing this this forward as we look at this One of the questions I always ask as we make these individual considerations is what's the opportunity cost? And I think that's why we give ourselves some time to take a look at this and touch this in two meetings. Council Member Tim Chisholm brings up some good points that this is a large amount of funds compared to how we have done this before. But I will say a couple of different things that really came through, both in the mayor's remarks and our previous business tonight. One is that the United Methodist Church has been a partner with the city in our homelessness response. If safe parking didn't exist, the city would have to. Invent this program we have an incredible long-term Partnership and we're seeing the success of it as we have moved several Kirklanders into permanent supportive housing from from safe parking and So it is a program worth supporting, and I agree with the comments from my colleagues about this is the kind of infrastructure the city should support instead of the church funding a parking lot compared to funding people. So I do think this is worth considering, even though acknowledging this is an extraordinary opportunity. We do have the advantage that we are approaching the end of a budget cycle. And because of... PREVIOUS ACTIONS BY THE COUNCIL IN PLANNING. WE HAVEN'T HAD THE SURPRISES WITHIN OUR HUMAN SERVICES BUDGET OR WE FOUND OTHER WAYS TO DO THAT THAT WE HAVE THIS MONEY IN RESERVE. SO I AM SUPPORTIVE OF LOOKING AT THIS AT OUR JULY MEETING. THANK YOU.

THANK YOU.

I'm not going to repeat what others have said, but I generally agree with the direction that we should be looking at this. I definitely support looking into providing funds for this purpose. I do consider this organization to be a very instrumental partner in battling homelessness in our communities. I run past this place every single day and I see the impact you are making on our community. So I thank you for doing what you do every single day. To Council Member Tim Chisholm's comments, I do think as part of our next meeting, we will have a lot of that information, right, of who the fiscal note is going to be going to and all those very important details should be presented at the next meeting. But overall, I do support the direction of providing this funding. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. The question is on the motion of direct staff to return to council with proposed fiscal note authorizing $100,000 of council special projects reserve funding for the Lake Washington United Methodist Church's Parking lot paving project to support the safe parking program It was moved by deputy mayor black second by council member Falcone all those in favor. Please say aye. Aye Any opposed? Motion carries 6-0. Thank you everyone. I appreciate you and you So, all right city manager before I go to you. I had another agenda item for City Manager reports. So, I didn't send you, hopefully this one is not a big surprise to you all, but this is regarding the Truck Eating Bridge mural that is currently on the Cultural Arts Commission work program. So, in February of 2023, the staff brought us a legislative request memo that I sponsored with options for a mural to be painted on the Truck Eating Bridge. in the Everest neighborhood. Council Member Prim, are you aware of the truck eating bridge? All right, it's a bridge, it's an old rail bridge in the Everest neighborhood. It's concrete, this Cross Kirkland Corridor runs across it, and it gets bridge strikes frequently. And we have done, with large panel trucks, and we have done signage, the community has hung banners, one of them is a shark, and that is why it's now called the Truck Eating Bridge. in addition to the murals on it it also has a historical railroad symbol on it that was put together by the everest neighborhood and our kirkland historical society because deputy mayor correct me it's the termination of the thought you knew okay yeah it was i don't think it was a terminus but it's right near where the uh kirkland station was okay on that line okay so That's the truck eating bridge. I'm glad I asked you that. So in 23, I proposed and the council moved forward that we would paint a large mural on this bridge. What has happened since in the past three, and it's been added to the Cultural Arts Commission work program. What has happened in the last three years is because there are quite a few stakeholders, the people that are attached to the railroad symbol, the people that are attached to the mural, It's become a very complicated project. I'm speaking just to you, sorry, no pressure. It's become a very complicated project, more than we thought. The community has a wide variety of opinions on it. There's issues such as traffic safety, what kind of mural that we present. There's issues around historical preservation. There's issues around the mural being damaged if there's additional truck strikes, and then we would have to go back and repaint it again. So on reflection, as the original sponsor, I think we should take this project off the Cultural Arts Commission work program. it's been sitting there for three years as everyone has struggled how to move forward with this project they have a number of other projects that are bigger priorities and so my question to the council is if you will entertain a motion to suspend the truck eating bridge mural project and remove it from the cultural arts commission work program so they can focus on other work so Deputy Mayor, would you please?

Well, yeah, and I just want to say I support, I'm going to make this motion, and I support this motion, and the kicker for me is even if we could resolve the conflict among the multiple stakeholders, we're still painting this bridge, and it's still going to get struck by trucks. A lot of these are driven by people who rented a truck and don't know the issue of the size of their truck. It's going to get struck, and just the thought of going out and repairing this mural over and over again, that's the kicker for me. So I know I'm speaking to my motion before I make it. I just want to get that out there. So I move to suspend the Truck Eating Bridge mural project and remove the project from the Kirkland Community Cultural Arts Commission's work program.

Thank you. It has been moved by Councilmember, or Deputy Mayor Black, seconded by Councilmember Falcone to remove the truck eating burge mural from the Kirkland Arts Commission work program. Is there any discussion? Councilmember Arnold.

A couple of questions. One is, is this something where the Cultural Arts Commission has weighed in in any way?

Thank you.

And secondly, is there any staff feedback? Thank you.

Thank you. I should have mentioned the Cultural Arts Commission. The reason this came up is Deputy Mayor and I, when we met with our different boards and commissions, this came up and they asked for how we wanted to move forward with this project because it has been a complicated project for them. So they are in favor of removing the truck mural from their work program. And Deputy City Manager, he asked if staff has any feedback.

Yeah, I would say staff is supportive of the mayor's motion. We do think that there's plenty of really good work to prioritize, and this might continue to be a complex, time-consuming endeavor.

Good questions. Anyone else? All right. The question is on the motion whether to remove the truck-eating bridge mural from the Kirkland Arts Commission work program. All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye. No.

Any opposed? Motion carries 6-0. All right, City Manager, I'm done talking. It's back to you. Thank you.

I appreciate that. So my first item is we had a study session where we discussed the option of going to the project review committee at the state and so we need a motion to authorize staff to do that. We have drafted a motion which I'm going to read and I'll be seeing if any one of the council members are interested in making this motion. It would be a motion authorizing staff to submit an application for progressive design build for the Peter Kurt Pool project to the state's project review board and return to the council for further direction if approved. So the council still gets a second option. Second.

It has been moved by Councillor Falcone, second by Deputy Mayor Black.

Did the clerk capture that?

I know. She was typing really fast.

We'll type it in. But it's going to let us go to them and then come back to you if there is an approval. We'd come back to the council for permission to proceed. All right.

Deputy Mayor.

Just one quick comment for the public that might be watching. Not only do we get another touch to approve this after, but this is also something we're not obligated ultimately to do. We're getting the permission to do it, but we don't have to do it. Exactly. Okay. Thank you.

Okay, the question is on the motion for council to give permission to go take the pool project to the project committee, I can't remember.

State project review.

State project committee. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries 6-0.

Okay, then just two quick updates one I was proud to be the President and Chair of the racer principles meeting and counselor Falcone was able to be there as the Kirkland representative. Very impressive group of folks elected officials representing the racer agencies, they got a brief update on things that were happening and asked us a lot of good questions, particularly around. how it can start to improve dispatch, both the NORCOM system and also getting to direct dispatch, but Council Member Falcone, if you had anything you wanted to add, but I just wanted to make sure we highlighted that the RACER agencies are going well. I think it was actually Council Member, no, it was one of the other Council Members asked if everyone was still all in, and as we went around the room, all of the City Council Members who were there said that they were, so it was a positive meeting for all of us, but Council Member Falcone.

Thank you, yes, that was me that asked that question at RACER. Thank you. Your first recollection was correct. I'll just add to that the Community Advisory Committee of RACER. I may be using the wrong terminology, but essentially that's what it is. Folks with lived experience, they're continuously looking for or currently have an ongoing ask out for new members of that. So if you know anyone who may be interested who has lived experience in behavioral health crisis of themselves or a close family member, please do let our city manager know. Thank you.

My second update, since the mayor mentioned this, we went to the opening of the Early Learning Center at Lake Washington Tech, and I just wanted to highlight that we've had a good partnership with Lake Washington Tech about the Child Care Center, and they have reiterated that they are providing City of Kirkland employees discounts, so we're going to be pushing that again to our employees to have high-quality child care. The facility is beautiful. The staff is amazing. It was a really cool thing to see. We appreciate that partnership and we'll be letting our employees know. So you'll probably see that in the emails that we send out as well. And then finally, some of you may have seen this email, but I wanted to highlight it for you because it's been of huge interest, but you got an email today from Sarah Olson. that we are in fact about to proceed with turning on the booster pump for the Highlands neighborhood. I wanted to give a huge shout out to the staff that were mentioned in Sarah's email because they have been working incredibly hard and innovating and doing all kinds of things in parallel. And the last piece they were able to secure was the check valve. They actually were able to get the company to give us someone else's check valve because we were worried that was gonna be the delay factor that might cost us a month. There was another group that didn't need it as quickly, and we were able to swap it out and get the second check valve in time. And so we are looking at probably an opening of the pump booster station next week. So I'm very happy to announce that. All right, so on Frodo's calendar, I have coming back with the fiscal note for the $100,000. I will make sure that the memo does include the questions that were raised by Council Member Tim Chisholm. I also want to remind council that if the city ever does execute money, we have to do so through a contractual agreement where we'll also articulate the benefit for the city. So we'll talk about that in the memo as well. So I've got that, but is there any other things on the council calendar that the council wants to talk about?

I have two things. I want to remind everybody that we will have a virtual meeting on July 21st, and City Manager, we passed Resolution 5729 in April. That is our resolution on federal immigration activities, and I would really appreciate that you schedule a report out on that.

Yes. Thank you. That was one I was supposed to highlight. So, yes, we will be scheduling that. Our Deputy City Manager of Operations, Tracy Delap, has been convening that, Group will have a lot more report soon, and I'll make sure that we get on the calendar for an update to check in One item one of the biggest action items that will cover accounts for discussion is the idea of a moratorium for detention centers So that's that'll be the first thing we're likely to schedule, but we'll also give you an update on the rest of the topics Thank you matter.

Thank you anything else. That's all I have council anything All right. Thank you. We are adjourned