City Council - Regular Meeting

Tuesday.

All right, let's go ahead and uh get this uh city council meeting going. It's February 24th, 2026. We are down at the mill. We are recording this um on our um with Zoom and we'll later publish it on our YouTube channel. So with that, I would ask all to rise for the pledge of allegiance. To the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Excellent. Can we get a roll call, please? Council member Aria, here. Council member McManis, here. Council member Donahghue here.

Council member Shipman here. Council member Jarstat here. Council member Edwards present. Council member Package here. Excellent. And can we get an approval of the agenda? I will make a motion to approve the agenda. Second. Excellent. We have a motion and a second. Any discussion? All those in favor, please say I. I. I. Thank you. You have an agenda. Excellent. Thank you. All right, let's kick off some guest guest business with uh Snow. Where we at? Antinet. Antinet. Antinet is the holder of the books in the city. Every single one. Every single one.

I didn't realize I was first. This is all right.

Um, hi everyone. Uh, my name is Anuanet Morales Tanner. I'm the manager of the Lake Stevens Library. Um, I really just wanted to take a few minutes today to introduce myself since so many of you are new to council. Um, and just give you like a real quick update. Um, as you may know, Snowell libraries serves Snowomish and Am I am I microphoneing enough? Okay. Um, Snow Snow Library serves 800,000 residents across Snowomish and Island counties. Um, we have 23 branches and a bookmobile. So, we are serving the entirety of these two counties. Um, one of the most amazing things about Snowil and what drew drew me to the organization, um, is that you really do get the resources of this this large large organization. Um, but you also get a very personalized feel. Uh, and we aim to do that at the Lake Stevens Library. We really aim to serve this community. Um, so some of the things that we've done over the last year that are specific to the Lake Stevens Library, um, and responding to the needs of this community are the launching of memory care kits. So, we have memory care kits at the library that you can check out for 3 weeks, um, to help support caregivers and those they are caring for who are experiencing a variety of memory needs. Um, we also launched and piloted this program. We were the first library in Snowell libraries to do this to do self-service hours. You can use the library from 6 am to 10 pm seven days a week, 365 days a year, including holidays. Um, you get your own code uh to let you into the building. You can use our computers. So on Sunday night when you forgot to print that mailing label, you can just swing over to the library, use your $7 of free printing credit, and get that done. Um, it's a wonderful way to use the library on your own schedule. Um, we just launched uh at the well I guess it's it's been about a month now. So um the middle of January a

homework help program. Um so on Wednesday afternoons kids K through 12 can come and get assistance completing their homework assignments. That's also a pilot project. It's only available at a few Snowell libraries. And um starting on March 21st, we'll be launching a seed library at the library. you can come uh check out seeds, take them home, plant them, bring seeds back at the end of the growing season. And this is in response to community requests. So, these are all things that are fairly unique to to the Lake Stevens Library and things that we are really proud of being able to serve this community specifically. Um you may have seen an update earlier this month on the construction of the new library. So, I wanted to give you just a brief update on that. Um it will be a 15,000 square foot twostory building. The entire first floor will be dedicated to children's and early learning. Um and there will be dedicated community gathering spaces. So we have three study rooms, two meeting rooms. We did this specifically in response to the feedback that we received during our listening tours before construction began about what the community really wanted to see in their library and spaces for community to gather was top. Um so this this library really prioritizes that. Um we have a dedicated space for teens. Um and uh the children's and teen spaces are being supported by the friends of the library. They've given a generous amount to really make these spaces incredibly unique. Um, I'd love to invite you for a tour of the temporary building if you haven't been by recently so we can I can show you some of the new things that we have. Um, or if you're interested in a tour of the construction site, I'd be happy to set that up as well. Um, Mayor Gaye and Jean have come it was a while ago now, so it looks very different.

Um, graffiti a wall for us. Uh, so they know that that's there forever. Um, but I would love to set that up for you. Um, I can give you I can leave you my business cards. I'll leave a little stack here. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or thoughts about the new library. Um, if you'd love to if you'd love to take a tour or if you'd like to just come and talk to me. Um, I am at your disposal. Uh, later this spring, um, our executive director, Eric Howard, and I will be back to give you a more formal presentation. I really just wanted to say hi. Questions? Any questions? Thank you. Um, thank you. Yeah, I would definitely like a tour of both locations. Absolutely. That'd be awesome. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Uh, thank you for your presentation. I I you're a great asset to our community and I I enjoy that you are with us. Thank you so much. I feel the same. So, I really appreciate being here. And if you'd like another tour, definitely reach out. Let me know. There's still opportunities to gripe. You know what? I'm going to say yes, even though I do not have the authority to do so, we will find you a space. When when they pull the sheetrock off in 30 years or whatever, they'll be like, "What's this writing?" You know, the floors aren't in yet. I feel like that's fair game. We find a spot. Yeah, absolutely. So, this is awesome. I'll pass around. Thank you.

Great. Let's do some new employee introductions. for us.

All right. Thanks for having us tonight. We're excited. If those of you haven't met Carolina, she's our official. And we're happy to say that our department is fully staffed. Um about a year that we've had some movement up and down. So, we've had some internal promotions and some new people on board. So, I'm going to start with our new planner and then I'm going to have Carol introduce the team, the new building team. So, I'd like to first welcome Troy Davis. Troy comes to us most recently from the city of Duvall. He worked there for about 10 years. Before that, he was in Arlington and he's had some big side real estate businesses as well. Um, but we're really happy to have him. He has experience in current and long range planning and he is an outdoor enthusiast. You hear that often with the folks that come through here.

No, I will. That's fine.

So, anyway, he's been born he was born in Snomish County and he's lived here most of his life. He loves the outdoors, especially southern Utah and Arizona. Um, he enjoys hiking with his dog, Cabo, kayaking, going on road trips, and anything else you can do outdoors. Um, he's also very interested in housing as a professional interest. Um, specifically tiny housing, cottages, things like that. So, again, want to welcome Troy to the city. And we have a tradition here where you need to walk the why they call it the gauntlet.

I'm excited to introduce um Brian also from the city of Duvall. We stole two of their employees back to back so sorry city of Duvall. Um so Brian's come to us. He started at the city of Duval in the public works department, worked his way through the building department as an inspector, plans exam examiner, and was the building official when we stole him away. He's part of the small cities building official group has been. That's where I met Brian and I've been trying to recruit him ever since um to join the city of Lake Stevens with us. Um I'm very excited to have him here. Um, this is a position that was really needed. So, I really appreciate council keeping it on the docket from last year and moving it over to this year. So, thank you very much. This is Brian. Brian,

I'm gonna have him come back and introduce our new inspector. Nice to meet you.

Um, so the other thing I wanted to introduce before we I give it over to Brian to introduce our new inspector is Caleb Glasser. Um, has been here with the city for a few years. Started in 2022 as an inspector 1. He was um a master builder um out in the trades. We converted him, got him in the office to do inspections for us. He's been studying the code, took his certifications for residential and commercial building inspection and plan review. Um moved himself up to an inspector 2 in two years, which is pretty good timing. And then um this last um November he got promoted to being the plans examiner in the office with me when Tyler Farmer who had worked here for 15 years um decided to move to Idaho on us. So Caleb Glassler is not here with us this afternoon but um he received a promotion to be our new plans examiner. So you'll see him around the office. So I'm going to give it to Brian to introduce our new inspector.

Okay. All right. This this is Anthony. Um Anthony is our new building inspector. Um and a little bit about Anthony. Um Anthony is a native of Southern California. Uh he's lived in Western Washington since 20 2006. Uh he has over 10 years of construction experience in masonary carpentry and as an estimator service technician. Um he is a licensed Washington state home inspector, um IRC residential building inspector, and he also uh has a FAA part 107 remote pilot. Um he enjoys photography, videography, he plays the drums, he loves nature and history. This is Anthony. Does

this mean I need to avoid the new Tuval mayor for a while? That's all I know about. Yeah, probably. All right. Uh, let's go forward then on citizens comments and let's check first online for anyone who wishes to provide citizens comments. I don't see anybody or I don't see any hands up, but if you do want to speak to uh the council during citizen comment, you can raise your digital hand if you're online on Zoom. I can let you in. Okay, great. And then I have one green sheet. Um, Bruce, is it Wolington? Yes.

Bruce, you want to take the podium there and uh say your name and you'll have three minutes. Okay.

My name is Bruce Molbertton. I'm with the uh HOA of Kathleen Creek. And this is one of our other members here, Christine. And uh what we are here want to talk about is Bryce Park. Uh Bryce Park was donated to the city back right around 1999 and uh is was registered with the city and uh we donated approximately $20,000 in playground equipment and since then it's come to our attention that there our HOA is responsible for all the financial for the park and the upkeep of it and we felt that since it's a community park owned by the city and registered to the city that uh you know it shouldn't we shouldn't be burdened with maintaining the financials of the of the park supplying all the playground trips supplying the fence around it keeping it all trimmed and stuff like that being that we have at least three communities around our HOA that actually use the park it's always been handled to the best of my recollection I've been there since 99. It's always been handled by the city and then all of a sudden it's come to our attention that we're now responsible for it and we have to have certain playground trips. We have to have, you know, all the equipment looked after and brought up to speed. And so we just felt that as an HOA, we don't we don't have a lot of resources without jacking everybody's dues up so high. And being that it is shared by three other communities and others that are, you know, come walking through there that it should be our we shouldn't be burdened with that uh task of of the financial part of it. And so we're here to ask that it get shared, you know, basically

with from the city. I don't think that the expenses are going to be that much, but you know, the the upkeep of the park, the playground chips, the there's the wire fence around part of it that keeps kids from going back and jumping into the stream back there, and some bushes that are overgrown that probably ought to be addressed. So, Okay. All right. So what um did you want to

Yeah, we had a situation last year where the city came in and apparently the seat was kind of broken on the swing set and then um also there was some chips that they replaced. So the city has maintained it in the past. Um it's just been we've had some turnover on our board over the last year and a half and so there's been some miscommunication. We have worked with a couple people at the city but we're not getting a resolve. Um, well, there's 88 homes in our development. So, people are a little upset that now all of a sudden we're being burdened with the budget of everything. So, I think that's kind of where we're looking at is, you know, we want to work with the city, but we're kind of holding the bag at this point. Okay. Well, we can follow up with you with the parks director. We can see where we're at on that.

Okay. So, good. Thank you, Bruce. All right. Perfect. Let's move forward to pick it a motion to pass the consent agenda, please. Second. I have a motion to pass the consent agenda and a second. Is there any discussion on the consent agenda? Hearing none. All those in favor? I. And any opposed? Okay, let's go to a public hearing. Uh we are going to do a public hearing tonight on the 2026 comprehensive plan docket ratification. I'll go and open that public hearing and hand the floor over to David.

All right. Thank you, Mayor Council. David Levitan, principal planner. So, we are here tonight for the public hearing for potential ratification of the 2026 comprehensive plan docket via adoption of resolution 2026-01. So, I'm just going to walk through a little bit of a background on the docket, especially for the new city council members. Um, and then just a quick overview of the proposals and then request action from the council at the conclusion of this following the opportunity for public comment. Uh, so just a little bit about the comprehensive plan docket. So, the growth management act affords local jurisdictions the opportunity to update their comp plan and their future land use map. once per year with a few exceptions such as adopting new sub areas. Um basically our the chapter one the introduction of the comp plan outlines the process for the docketing uh procedure. Um and that includes allowing citizen initiated proposals uh through January 31st of each year. We did not receive any uh requests for citizen initiated amendments this year. Um and then city initiated amendments may be proposed by staff, city council or the planning commission.

So we did uh issue interrupt you for just a second as we have some new council members who may not be completely versed in planning comp. Can you give a layman's

two sentence? What is a docket ratification? So ratification of the docket is basically outlining the items that are going to be included uh for potential consideration comprehensive plan amendments that year. We're not doing any of the technical analysis. We're identifying, hey, this map needs to be updated. This chapter needs to be updated. So it's basically just saying these are the things that we would like to work on this year and we're requesting that the council ratify the docket to do so. and then actual adoption by ordinance would be later in the year. Okay.

So, uh we did issue public notice uh via the website, put it in the city newsletter um and as mentioned did not receive any citizen initiated amendments. Um we have included uh within attachment one which is uh the proposed resolution uh sorry that should read exhibits A1 through A4 include an analysis. Basically the comprehensive plan requires us to evaluate uh the potential docket items against the ratification criteria. So those exhibits A1 through A4 uh analyze uh compliance with those criteria. Uh basically the process is that the planning commission holds a public hearing um and then ultimately makes a recommendation to city council on potential adoption of the docket and the planning commission held their public hearing last Wednesday and made a unanimous 6 to zero recommendation to ratify the docket um as included in attachment one. Um and then as mentioned this basically advances these items for further analysis um and consideration later in the year. We're not actually making any modifications to the comp plan at this stage. So there are three proposed map amendments all citizen sorry all city initiated all cityowned uh parcels with the exception of also uh one parcel owned or two parcels owned by the fire district. So map amendment M1 uh which is included in exhibit A2 of the resolution uh this was acquired last year uh basically within it's essentially completely surrounded uh by Eagle Ridge Park. So the city did acquire that the parks and recreation department did and the city will be going through a master planning process for future development of the park and

future phases of the park. The existing land use designation is multi- uh sorry a medium density residential with a corresponding zoning designation of RA12. And so as part of the docket, we are requesting um to include this for consideration to be changed to both a land use and a zoning designation of public semi-public. And again, the exhibits include an analysis of the ratification criteria. So that's the first one. The second one is in the southern part of the city off of 100 sorry 103rd Avenue Southeast just south of uh South Lake Stevens Road. Um so this was uh donated to the city last year. Um it has the same medium density residential and RA12 zoning designations as the previously discussed item. And similar to that one, we are proposing to modify, sorry, to amend the land use designation and the zoning designation to public semi-public. Um, just to kind of to provide some background, the comprehensive plan does include a policy that says all publicly owned properties should have these land use and zoning designations. So this would be consistent with the comprehensive plan and this would be an implementation item uh from the 2024 plan that was adopted back about a little bit over a year ago. And then the third one and which was actually included on last year's dockets uh which has been carried forward to this year um is related to the fire station. Uh so this is kind of a interesting one in that the zoning uh for the four parcels that comprise that site is correct. It's all public semi-public and the two northern parcels

have the accurate corresponding land use designation of public semi-public. But the two southern parcels have an existing zoning sorry an existing land use designation of downtown local commerce. So we are proposing to change just those two southern parcels the areas in red uh to change that land use designation to public semicol. So those are the three map amendments and then there are three uh kind of overarching text amendments as well. So the again these are also carryovers from 2025. We had actually ratified the docket back in 2025, but the primary item on the 2025 docket was a potential modification of the parks and recreation element and we are waiting for the pros plan to be completed. So, we decided to hold off on that and just move these forwards these items forward to 2026. So, um, text amendment T1 is to update, uh, the three sub areas, uh, which is 20th Street, Southeast Corridor, Lake Stevens Center in downtown Lake Stevens. Uh, so basically, there are some maps and some texts that are inconsistent with the 2024 comprehensive plan. So, we want to make sure that that gets updated, that the goals, the policies, the maps, the general text is consistent with the comprehensive plan. um as required by the growth management act. Uh text amendment T2 is kind of a broad-based amendment. It it kind of captures and covers kind of the standard annual administrative updates. Um the most prominent one being is that we update our capital facilities, our six-year and our 20-year plans uh each year to keep those current and reflective of uh the city's capital improvement needs. Um and then text amendment T3 is to update the parks element. So the pros plan will be coming

before you I believe in April of this year uh for adoption of that pros plan. The pros plan is basically an ancillary document of the comprehensive plan which we would um the proposal is that the council will adopt the pros plan via resolution in April or May whichever month that occurs. Um, and then that would be incorporated into the comp plan as part of the 2026 docket. Um, and we would basically update the parks and recreation element in the comprehensive plan to reflect that pros plan. It would essentially be kind of a condensed executive summary version of the pros plan because the pros plan is over 100 pages long and we don't really want to drop that into the middle of the comp plan. So we'll basically have a parks and recreation element that is consistent with the pros plan including the goals and policies. So with that uh just a little bit of a notice um did provide the required public notice for both the planning commission and the city council public hearings. Uh we did not receive any oral testimony during the planning commission public hearing and we have not received any written comments in advance of either the planning commission or the city council public hearing. Uh the public is invited to provide uh oral testimony this evening. Um the proposal is categorically exempt from SEPA. Um, and at the conclusion of this hearing, the city council is asked to adopt resolution 2026-01, which would ratify the 2026 docket and move those items forward for additional analysis and potential adoption via ordinance later in 2026. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions.

Any questions for David? All right, seeing none, I'm going to go ahead and open up the floor for public comments on just this uh public hearing topic. Is there anyone who wishes to provide public hearing public comments tonight on this topic? Can I ask online? Let's do it online too, Kelly. Okay. Yeah. Uh if you're online or on Zoom and you'd like to speak to the 2026 comprehensive plan docket ratification public hearing, please raise your digital hand. None. I had a few people join, so I thought I You You're keeping me straight. It's what we do.

All right. Perfect. So, with that, we'll go and close the uh citizens comments. Um David, do you have any additional? I do not, mayor. Excellent. Council, do you wish to discuss this at all? If not, you can um take action on this resolution. I just I have a clarification I want to make. Um, on the the photo with the fire department um area, you I think I heard you say the red area is what's being amended. Um, is that the whole red area or just that little triangle where the fire department lots?

That would be just the two parcels, the fire department lot, not the whole red area. Basically, just because that is publicly owned, we want to make sure that the land use designation is consistent with the zoning designation. Okay. Thank you. I have a question. Go ahead. Um, I recall late last year it was uh there was a an agreement to or a request to do a a zoning swap of two parcels in the South Lake Stevens area 99. Would that be something that would come through the docket and be reszoned or is that a different process?

Uh, yeah. No, that's a good question. So, because both of those properties already have the appropriate land use designation, they don't require a comprehensive plan map amendment. They just need a zoning change. Uh that doesn't need to be included in the docket. That just is a separate land use application specifically for the reszone. Thank you. Anything else? All right. We get an action. I move that we adopt 2026-0126. Second. Okay. I have a motion and a second to adopt the resolution 2026-01 and a second. Do I have any discussion on the motion? Hearing none. All those in favor. And any opposed?

Excellent. Good work, David. Good luck on the docket for the year. All right, Olen and Shannon, let's talk salmon. We like salmon.

Okay. Uh, good evening, council and mayor. Um, my name is Shannon Front. I'm the environmental programs manager in public works. Um, tonight we brought to you a contract. Uh, this is a contract with the Department of Commerce to accept a grant award in the amount of 106,000. This project is a continuation of a project that we started this year called the basins plan. Um, it's actually full name is the Smoned Basins Plan. And what it is is really it's kind of a land use planning document that looks at water quality and salmon habitat at the basin scale. This first phase of the project that we're currently working on is a modeling exercise where we're looking at land use, we're looking at water quality, we're looking at habitat, and we're using GIS to kind of model areas where we want to maybe focus some specific goals or policies at that basin scale. Uh the kind of results of this first phase will be potentially a recommendation to adding these goals and policies in our comprehensive plan. But what the second phase of this project is really kind of taking those planning ideas and policies and turning it into something that's actionable. And so that would be identifying projects that we could do to either preserve uh the qualities water quality that we see that we want or we could do enhancements. So that might be restoration, it might be storm water retrofits. Uh but this second phase will kind of help us identify what those projects look like. It'll also identify any potential code amendments that we want to make uh to help implement those goals and policies. So, it's really what's the actionable steps that come with it. Um the other kind of component is is identifying areas where we want might want to have more land preservation. And this is really great because when we have things that come up like conservation futures

grants which we purchase six properties on Hartford Drive with or other opportunities where we can purchase properties that we want to do some land preservation. So this is what this project here um this is kind of that second phase and we were fortunate to get a grant through the department of commerce uh to continue it. And I just want to be clear. So there we're requesting a budget amendment because this was not originally included in the 2026 budget proposal. And so we need to include it in the 2026 budget by giving an amendment. The total cost of the project will be the amount um that we are awarded in the grant. The additional city match cost will be something that um is just given through staff time. So, we'll track our staff time on this project and that staff time is already budgeted in our salaries. The work that we do on this project is work that we would already be doing. Um, this project also help us helps us meet several of our MPDS or National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit regulatory requirements. And so, it's something we would already be doing. We're just really fortunate that we have these additional funds to actually take it a little bit further um and to implement some good projects. So, tonight we're just asking for a motion to authorize the mayor to sign the grant award with the Department of Commerce so that we can access these funds. Um, but I'll also take any questions if there any

any questions? Sure. Did someone have to apply for that grant? Who is responsible for that in the city? Um, my team. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, appreciate that. Yeah, we're uh we're very excited. We we got the first phase of the grant and actually commerce came to us and said, "We know you want to do more. We have more money. Do you want to apply?" And so it was a good relationship. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. So, just really quick, I want to make sure I'm reading this right. Tonight, you're just asking for approval to sign the contract. The budget amendment will follow. Correct. Okay.

Any other questions for Shann? I don't want this to sound cynical, but does signing up for these dollars uh lock us into any future action?

No. So, the scope of the project is not the actual construction of those projects. It's just the identifying them. We'll look at kind of conceptual designs and cost estimates. And that will help us go out for additional grants um or our rates. Um if we look at our storm water utility rates for the actual constructions, we also wrote it that uh the deliverable for this work under the grant, it's not actually the adoption of any code language either. It's really draft ordinance and the reason for that is um just depending on what it is that we are proposing to change. We know that the timeline may extend past the grant timeline and so we're not committing to that and within the timeline.

Thank you. Any other good questions? All right. Can we get a motion on this? I move to authorize the mayor to sign the contract to receive a grant award in the amount of $16,000 from the Department of Commerce. A second it. Okay, I have a motion and a second. Any discussion on the motion? Hearing none. All those in favor? I Any opposed? All right. Great work, Shannon and Olen. Is Olen here to know how to get back? He's not. No. Okay. Well, good work to him, too. And you, too, Seth. You're doing good work, too.

All right. All right. We get Sarah and Tanya now. Let's talk about inkind donation programs.

All right. Thank you, council. I have Tanya with me tonight, and she is going to be the one presenting the inkind program since she gets to talk to the public and facilitate all the front-end work. waiting on. There we go. Sorry for this. And I apologize I didn't introduce by uh title. Tanya is our recreation specialist. So, she handles um all of the special events in the city as well as programming and helps with volunteers as well. Thank you for the opportunity to present tonight. Uh it is my first time and I'm very excited about the prospect of speaking to you with a program that is very important to me. Um if I go too fast, let me know. Uh we are discussing the inkind donation program. Uh my presentation is a high level overview. I would refer you to your council packets for more detail. We've given you uh all of the program paperwork, examples, applications, uh rubrics, a full staff report, and an indepth financial summary showing breakdowns for each event and category that I will talk about tonight. Uh the inkind c the inind donations were formed by council direction in March of 2023 and we have been supporting events via this program for the past three years. Uh it is the method by which the city may support special events through fee and staff cost waiverss. Um our greatest focus on this program is the new events, bringing new uh special opportunities to our community. We want to give the most to those first years when they're trying to get off the ground and they don't have a lot. Uh then we reduce our support as they grow and develop. um with also giving consideration to those established

events that are older than 3 years that bring a significant value to our city culturally, economically. Um the program provides a legal way for the city to support the community residents, community development, residents quality of life and economic development. Uh, our eligibility guidelines limit this to nonprofit, notfor-profit organizations or city residents. Um, the events must be run in Lake Steven spaces. They promote must promote city goals. We do have a couple of limitations. Fundraising events that have no other community benefit component are not eligible. We also will not award more than 50% of an event's operating budget in in kind donations. In 2025, we supported nine events with a total of $64,885.84 cents of support. Um the complete breakdown is in the council packet on the financial summary. This table shows a couple of key takeaways. Um, I focused it on the bang for the buck that we got from our donations and the city's ability the the event's ability to raise funds outside of asking the city for its inkind support. Here's a donation breakdown by category. Our biggest category of support is mill rental fee waivers. Um, of the events ran, six of the nine events received mill waivers. The second biggest category was staff and equipment. Though this is combined um this year, next year we're splitting it out, but the majority was staff overtime. Um events tend to run on the evenings, the weekends when we don't have staff working their

regular hours and so it's reflected in the support we gave last year. So parks is bringing two adjustments to the program that we would like your discussion on. First, we would like to limit the mill rental fee discount to 50%. Uh the mill has hard costs electric janitorial that fall on us. Uh by limiting the discount to 50%, we're striking a balance between supporting our special events while still supporting the cost recovery of those hard costs that we have. The second uh recommendation we are bringing is that our staff overtime be removed from an ININD program. These overtime costs only occur because the events are happening. Um we would not have them in the city else-wise. So we feel it's reasonable to ask the event organizer to cover them. Um we will still support events using our onduty staff whenever regular duty allows, but this is the late evenings and the weekends. That concludes my presentation. At this point, we would appreciate uh you guys to discuss and provide us a consensus of moving forward.

Any questions for Tanya? Go ahead. Question. You may. Thank you so much. Thanks, Tanya. Great information. Appreciate it. Just a quick question about the overtime costs. Is are these employees that would have the option to flex their time or comp their time or is that allowed under whatever agreement they're currently working under? Usually the we don't do flex or comp because they still need to get the daily jobs done. So Sarah can speak more on that one. Um under the teamsters union agreement all of our field parks and public work staff are unable to flex their time and must be paid overtime. Okay, great. Thank you.

And on that same subject, is it by volunteer? Do you ask for volunteers to help with the overtime? We post it to our teamsters and to our admin. Um, and we normally take the ones that that volunteer first. Yes, we will force a point if we need to to make sure that the event happens. Um, but we do try and go with volunteers. I have a couple of questions. Um, I'm looking at the chart that you have here that breaks down each individual event. Mhm.

Um and I was just hoping that maybe you could give a little more information on how um that number um where the event profit and loss is listed comes about. I'm looking particularly um at the two with the largest um profits they say. The first one being Aqua Fest um which was awarded $47,000 in uh inind um donation from the city last year, but it says the event profit was 36,000. So um where did that 36,000 come from and where did it go?

So the calculation on this was from their budgets that they submitted their afteraction reports. It was their total expenses and the total income that they brought in not counting what we awarded. So in the case of Aqua Fest, they brought in a carnival. They earned money from that carnival from their vendor fees and they had a pot left of the 36,000. Okay. Not counting what we had awarded to. So that's not necessarily city profit. That's organization profit that Yeah. All of these organizations are not city and therefore it the prop the money stays with them.

Um on the overtime, do you notice that a lot of that overtime comes from law enforcement on at these events? It depends on the event and what they are running. Um we we yeah sorry um the police overtime is not included in this incind support. There's a separate contract and all police hours are paid for for overtime. I believe their regular time rate is waved since they're already on duty and it is the overtime. I would have to defer to police who's not in the room currently.

I think I saw um a report previously that said for Aqua Fest alone it was $18,000 in overtime for a police department. So I was just curious if that sounded correct like if that seems like a pretty large chunk. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. when they do their runs, there's a significant amount of police in order to safely shut down streets and direct traffic. Yeah. Um, one thing I do want to note about this year's Aqua Fest um, profit is this is the first year that they've had profit. U, their carnival has not been around since co times. This was the first year they received the carnival back. The carnival is what makes the event profitable. Um so you know they struggled for uh three plus four years and um that is one of the reasons why the support was so high last year in conjunction with the profit you're seeing.

And is there um what's the process for this these in kind donations to like be approved? Is that something that comes to the council? Is there a dollar value limit that after a certain dollar it needs to be approved? Like what's the process for that? At this point, they submit their application in um we have a rubric that we grade it on to make sure that they even qualify. If they qualify, then uh we do the calculations for what they're asking. I send that to Sarah. She reviews it, makes a recommendation, it goes to Gene, a city administrator. He will make his approval or any adjustments, and then send it back through Sarah and myself.

Okay. Thank you. to to answer the question on that or part probably part of your your um question on that is is you guys set the policy on it and as long as it fulfills the policy then we don't come back to you for it. I I would note that if there is any cash being given not inind that comes to council. This is just for waiver of fees and services. Okay. Thank you.

I have two questions. M um one, have we reached out to any of these organizations to see how this policy change might affect them and their ability to put on the events? We gotten any any feedback from them or are we just looking at this on our own? I have been talking to events about the three-year windown and especially for events that have been longer than 3 years, setting that expectation that at some point they would not or may not be able to have all of it. um they are including Aqua Fest aware that this may be changing for this year.

Okay. just because so like for example I I want to make sure our our policy is sound and financially responsible but excuse me I'm not sure this the the breakdown I'm seeing here is telling the whole story because if I'm thinking of the right event festival of trees is listed as by far having the largest profit but if I recall that was the one where they auctioned off the beautiful Christmas trees correct and then turned around and donated the I don't know what the actual number is but I'm guessing it was very close if not all of that 92,000 to the food bank And so I I don't know does our process haven't in the afteraction did we account for what they're doing with this money because I look at you know the the inind donation we gave them versus the benefit fed directly back into our community and that's something I would very much want to support.

Correct. Um we did not ask where the money went after it got to the event because we were looking at a snapshot of the events not where operating costs for other groups come. Yeah.

Um I can tell you that uh in the case of Festival of Trees, if you were to put this the two suggestions tonight, it would reduce the award by half. They their inind was for the mill. It did not have any staffing time in it. Um the one that would hurt the most on staff would be Aqua Fest. Uh that is where a lot of our staff comes into. Also, music in the parks because we have to keep a staffer on until 9:30 at night. Um, both of those would be affected. Uh, the art gallery was completely the mill. Spring sprints is a lot of other things, neither mill. Um, it had some staff in it. Uh, the esports was all mill. Um, and aan was all mill and rental income.

Okay. I guess just I don't know if it's you know we're splitting policy hairs at this point but if there is a way to kind of draw a line so that events that provide some kind of large scale benefit to our community you know have an easier time the festival of trees or even Aquafest if they're willing to share I'd be very curious what that profit went to. Again I know it's all volunteer run so I would assume most of it's fed back into the budget for this year. I know the community really enjoys that event. So if they are willing to provide that level of details a condition of these inkind donations I that would be uh I think ideal.

I sit on the Aqua Fest meetings every month um because it is our biggest special event. Uh they are turning it back into operation profit for this year. They are also looking to minimize some of their expenditures um and bring in other funds. um they've got a lot of plans going to help lift their reliance on the city um quite so much because they do realize in in giving them the numbers they've they've gotten to see them for 2 years now and I think they realize just how much has been given before that it wasn't tracked as cleanly um with Festival of Trees it is a fundraiser at heart and fundraisers are exempt from the inkind program so it qualifies because it has a 4hour open period where people can come in on Saturday and see the trees. Without that, it would not qualify at all. So, I would say that um there could be some mixing of pots there if we were looking at it too, you know, more than needing that committee that that community piece of it. We are funding community events, not fundraisers or operational costs out of this program. So, if I understood that correctly, even though the money they're raising feeds right back into a program that I think this community very much um cherishes and relies on, that's not part of our our process. It's purely that the the mill is open to the public is part of the event.

Um so, I want to back up a little bit. The program is not about the mill. The program itself is about events and how the city is able to donate money. Um, two of those legal qualifiers is how can the city give money away, right, to support other organizations. One is the poor and the infirmed. Other is this community benefit that we're talking about. That poor and infirmed could be operational support from the council, from the city directly to the food bank in order to fulfill that portion. The portion we're talking about with this program is specifically for event support. And we had to make a qualifier that events must be open and available to the public in order to qualify. Otherwise, we would have a tremendous amount of applications that come through that are um private events, closed door ticketed events, and fundraiser events that are not available to the general public. We would not be able to keep up with that as a city. And so this program really is designed for the ones that are open. So that's the qualifier. Um so I I think as a a policy what I'm hearing is maybe you as a council um and I'd love to hear more dialogue about it. If you're saying no, we do not support the 50% level for the mill minimum. Would it be a 25% level? How can we make sure that our costs with janitorial and electric and water and Wi-Fi, all the things that need to keep up the building are covered? And if the council comes back and says, "No, keep with the 100% mill, that's that's great." Um, but if there is a level other than 50%, we'd love to hear that.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is, and I don't know if we can legally do this, is there a way to add in qualifiers to something like Festival of Trees, you know, we we can do the max inind donation and then where's another event that maybe isn't going to directly feed back into our community at that same level or that same amount? um it's it's a there's some criteria that puts it in a reduced category. So I guess part of my my question there is is it even possible to to do that or is that just you know uh bur too burdensome? What it what it might look like is instead of building it into the specific rules for this program is saying on an annual basis, you want to allow for one weekend to be used by food bank in the mill or for Aqua Fest to have 5 days of free mill rental and separate it from this program and instead set that up as an annual policy that we can follow. I I would also counter Councilman Donahghue the the idea that just because something brings in more money makes it more valuable to the community. I think that there is real inherent value in all of the different events that happen for the people that are a part of that. And so I'd hate to give events that bring in a lot of money a break when when we're then putting a value on what we think that brings to the community when in essence they all bring different types of value. Maybe not a monetary value but still a value to our community members.

Well, and if I use the word value in that way, I I apologize. I I guess I'm looking at as return on investment. You know, if we can give Festival of Trees $4,600ish in in kind donations and that generates 90 plus thousand for our food bank and helping that community, you know, the people rely on that. To me, as as a council, as a city, that seems like a a good policy cuz I mean, will we turn around and try and donate $92,000 directly to the food bank? I guess the flip side of that is if you're bringing in $92,000, then paying $4,000 to rent the mill is is doable. If you're not bringing in funding, but you're running a gaming convention that's really benefiting the youth of our community, and the goal isn't to raise money. It's to really give youth some pro-social activities, I don't think they should be um I don't think there should be a burden on them to have to pay the full the full price.

Right. Sab

um I think generally speaking I'm in favor of of charging a fee for use of premises because we are responsible for city property and that puts some value back to the people that are using it and also you know instead of 3 days maybe they they will really think about having it for two days. So I think when you have 100% coverage you're you're a bit more liberal with with how you use it. So, I think I'm in favor of of putting a value to that back into the organizers. Um, the one question I did have is on the Aqua Fest. It seems like the, you know, the staff equipment uh in kind that they receive would pretty much um equal the profit that they made especially for this past year. Do you um is the staff and equipment that we provide is that something that they that they can only get from us or is that something that they can get from other places or volunteers? Um is that something that you know is is it specific specialty positions that we're providing that we're telling them that they need or I guess what is your sense of that amount?

It is not. The past couple years, Aquafest has very much struggled to get a green team to do their trash and their cleanup all week long. And the carnival only exacerbates the amount of trash and and bathroom issues that need to come up. And so the city has been deferring a lot more rounds of the park um having two field staff on uh all weekend so that they can do the the garbage and keep it going. Um, we have asked them to look for their volunteer pool much earlier this year because if we could even reduce that piece, it would be a very large chunk of what Aqua Fest needed from us.

Understood. Thank you. How did you arrive at the 50%. Is that a swag or you do some calculations to get to that versus like 25 or 60 or 75? You know what I mean? We have done a lot of analysis of the mill in the department. Not me exactly, but um both Don and Sarah looking at what our baseline mill costs are and then just from that what would we need from an event to make us hit those costs. Okay, so it's it's based on what the actual costs are for the event. So if it's a three-day event and we get 50% of that cost granted to them and we recoup 50%. Then we're breaking even. Is that accurate?

Not entirely. No, we haven't ran a specific analysis about what break even would be for each event. And the reason why is it can drastically vary between if you are a 4-hour event or if we're literally checking you in on day one and you have the keys until day three. Um what I can say is that total staff time per event when we calculate um staff time for admin as well as janitorial for a one-day rental runs at about $285. And so that is one of the reasons we have a 4-hour minimum on rentals in these rooms is because that is about our break even point. There's not much left there. Um but this hasn't included any overhead as I haven't been able to fully break that down. Um to tie in um then what is the cost of uh communications and operations? I can tell you communications, operations, repair and maintenance utilities for this entire building per year runs at $50,000 for year 2025 and the public allocation at 63% was about 32,000. So, if I was to take that number and just divide it by about 250 days, give or take, um that would be an additional $130 per day. Um so, I'd say with those two numbers, about $400 per day would be the minimum. So, a 50% rental, um it'd be closer to maybe pay 25% a mill fee if you're trying to get exactly break even. That's kind of what I'm getting at is we should be able to at least break even on our cost. So maybe revisit that that 25 is better than 50 or you know what I mean? Let's come up with a better number based on history.

So I would also remind you that parks is where our major debts. So make a little bit of money is okay to keep our parks up and running. That's what I'm saying. I want to make sure we're looking at all those costs and at least breaking even on it when we give a a 50% or 25% whatever you decide on. So the the very break even would be 25%, I feel comfortable with the 50%. Um, typically rental buildings do help fund the rest of the parks locations. Um, Brett, I was going to bring up something similar to you real quick before I do that though. So the staff and equipment that does not include the police department,

correct? So if we were to take I think you said roughly $18,000 and subtract that from Aquafest profit, their profits about half. Yes. Correct. They no I would say that when they gave me their expenses they gave me all contract which it would have include included the police contract that they had and they had to pay. So that has already come out of it's just not line item here. It's just not line item.

Okay. Okay. That makes sense. And then I was going to kind of piggyback on what the mayor said. Um we spent a lot of time on budget. um lot of time on budget and there were a lot of concerns about overspending and bringing in less revenue via taxes with the economy where it is where building is um new construction where all that stuff is that we're bringing in less money while our costs continue to go up. Um our parks department does not have its own funding. It comes out of our general fund. I think 50% is fair because our city has to pay for things. Um, and the rental while um, you know, it's certainly not free. Um, when I look at the Festival of Trees, I was full disclaimer on the board for that. So, I know innately or intimately what went on with that that program and they were super excited about their their profit. Nobody expected that. Um, but when you look at they were awarded $4,500 and you cut that in half for a three-day event, that sounds pretty reasonable to me. Um, and so I don't think our pricing is unreasonable to expect 50% because our budget needs that 50%. Um, as much as my heart would like to say I would like to give them 100%. Every single one of these is deserving of 100%. If any of these qualify for the 50%, they're deserving of 100%. But in a real world, unfortunately, a big heart doesn't pay your bills. And we need to look at how we're paying our bills. And um I would suggest other inind gestures from our community and our city to, you know, work on more volunteerism, but I think that 50% is a fair amount. What else do we have first?

I have um one more question slashc comment. Um I was actually really pleased to see this on the agenda tonight because this is something that I have been thinking about for a while. Um Sarah, can you remind us what the deficit was on the mill building last year because I think if I remember correctly, we're still not even on the mill and we have a problem with rentals as it is. Um, and it seems obviously we want to support our community. We want to make sure that people are able to enjoy these events and it brings business to our local businesses and everything else that comes with them. Um, I would be okay with the 50%. I think that's a decent compromise. Um, but on top of that, I think that there should actually be some sort of limit like a dollar value limit. like we can do I read the um policy for inind donations a while ago and I saw that it said we cannot donate more than 50% of the total cost of the event which is great but if the total cost of the event is $180,000 that's a huge chunk so I would propose the 50% um and then I would love to see something that says no more than x amount without approval of council And what was the number?

Uh yes, last year we allocated 63% of the building towards public rentals. And with that we had a loss in the building of $13,500. Okay. So much better than the previous year, which I think was 32. So we're we're making head space here. We're we're gaining ground. But yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. Tanya, can you go back to the slide that just had the two specific things you were asking about? Yep. Y

the question was asked earlier and I'm sorry what I I missed who asked it about how this was going to impact events as well. I think there's been a trend of event of events going well the city will just handle it if we can't get the volunteers if we don't do outreach if we aren't as proactive as we could be the city will pick up because they're not going to let us fail. And that has I think what you're seeing in some of this staff time is we make sure the parks are clean. We make sure the people are down here regardless of whether we have volunteers or not. and the city events have fallen to this as well. So, it's not just a private sector event management. Um, but I think that getting the news out to these events that no, this is not the direction we can go anymore will help them to go look for their volunteers, try other sources, make other partnerships between multiple groups that could help each other.

So, I just need a clarifying question. When we talked about 25% that would actually mean that we would cap the mill rental fee discount at 75% of the maximum so that we're reimbursed for the minimum the 25% is covering our base cost. Yes. So that Okay. Yeah. I think the only thing I would set you're talking hard costs like personnel overtime lights. What about wear and tear on the building long term? Are you putting a metric in for that? Because it is you know use the carpet gets worn out has to be replaced. That has to be figured into it. So I think with the 25 for your break even cost if we go to 50 that should more to cover that and they got a little bit of profit to try to make the mill whole even. So I'm okay with it.

Any other discussion? Great discussion. Good job and Sarah. Sorry. Real real quick. Do we need you said a number for a maximum? Do we want to talk about that here today and and come to a consensus as a city council or you want to bring a proposal back to us parks department? You'd bring a proposal back. Let's let's do some let's step do a little exploration on. Okay. Then we will uh let you know what our explorers found. And for the record, I would say probably 10 grand max. I mean that's a that's a good chunk of money, you know.

Yeah. Well, um, looking at this, um, with no longer allowing overtime to be included and taking the mill to 50%. It's going to be hard to reach that $10,000 number. So, I think we're safe with these two adjustments, still meeting the intent that you have. And what we'll do is a year from now bring back another report. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Great job. All right, let's move to the next uh topic uh favorite of mine, Shannon. And is Seth jumping in on this, too? Yes. All right, great. He's just leg manager.

All right. You don't see. Okay. So, again, my name is Shannon Front. I'm the environmental programs manager. Um, I'm also joined today by Seth Waltz. He's our surface water specialist and we're going to give a presentation today on how we manage Lake Stevens. Um we're going to just look a little bit at the history of the lake. Um why do we need to manage it? What's going on in the watershed? We're going to talk about some of our management strategies. What's the current health of the lake? Um some other management programs that we have that tie into the lake. and then some things that our community can do to help uh keep Lake Stevens healthy. So, I just want to start off with this. Um, a lake is a mirror of its watershed. What happens in the land reflects in its waters. Now, full transparency, this is just kind of like a random internet quote that I found, but I really like it. And uh what it really means is when we talk about lake management, we're not just talking about the lake and the water in the lake itself. We're really talking about the watershed. And so what I mean by watershed is um you can see over here on the left hand side that picture of Lake Stevens the aerial imagery and then there's that yellow border that's like Steven's watershed. So any water that falls within that line will make it to the lake. So that's water that um gets captured on roads and goes into our storm water system and makes its way into a pipe and eventually makes its way into a stream and then it'll make its way into the lake. So when we talk about lake management, we're really looking at how do we manage not only the water in the lake but how do we manage what is going on in the watershed and what are the things that we need to look at the watershed and how is that a reflection of the water quality that we're seeing in the lake. So, just some basic statistics about

Lake Stevens. It's approximately 1,000 acres. The deepest spot uh is about 150 ft. It averages 63 feet and the wershed is about 3,500 acres. In the grand scheme of things, for the size of this lake, it actually has a pretty small whed. Um, that's great for us because that's less area to have to worry about. So, just some little bit of history, and I promise this will all tie together. Um, kind of in the early 1900s, we started to see the area around the lake develop. So, we started to see land being cleared, trees being removed, ground being disturbed, homes going up, impervious surface being created. And that's really kind of the start of where we started to see, you know, as time goes on, we start to see there's degrading in the water quality. And what we really started to see was algae. So, a lot of that kind of green gunky stuff showing up in the lake. This really prompted some of the um first restoration studies in the 1980s. And when we were looking at those, we really wanted to understand, okay, why are we seeing all this algae? Um, one of the things that we need to do is we need to understand, so what causes algae? There's a this is a a famous study that was done. um it looks at nutrients and it particularly looked at phosphorus and nitrogen. You can see this is a lake where there was uh nitrogen added to kind of that top part of the lake and phosphorus added to the bottom part. Lakes are really uh sensitive to phosphorus. So a little bit of phosphorus is enough of the food to cause large algae blooms. you don't see as much with some of the other nutrients um in this study such as nitrogen. So when we say that okay phosphorus is

really what we're concerned about. How do we get phosphorus in the lake? Again we start to look at the watershed. How is the watershed bringing phosphorus into our lake? And there's through several ways. Um as I talked about before the watershed anything that falls within that watershed makes its way to the lake. And so it um and we call this external loading. So this is phosphorus coming from outside the lake water body itself and flowing into the lake. And it can come from many different places. Um as the more roads uh impervious surfaces, homes that we build, the more water that runs off and makes it directly into our lake. We get that from eroding and bare soils. Um you can get it from septic systems. It comes from pet waste. Um, and again, more imperous surface means more of those pollutants quickly flowing into our lake versus kind of getting caught up in the vegetation where if you had no imperous surfaces and get it from fertilizers. When we talk about internal loading, we're starting to talk about how is all that phosphorus and all those nutrients that once came into the lake that are now settling in the bottom of the lake, how are they kind of getting recycled into the lake and causing problems that way? So that's internal loading. The study that was done in the 1980s, we really wanted to see, okay, for Lake Stevens, where's our phosphorus coming from? the majority of it is um you see coming from that internal loading and then there was also at the time uh there's the landfill and so there was actually quite a bit of waterfell that uh were kind of feeding off the landf landfill and then they were um you know they were around the lake and so we started seeing a lot of waste from them but the internal loading is important because as I talked about earlier we

started to see like Stevens develop in the early 1900s so we had all that development, all that disruption to the land. We had all that runoff, septic systems, waste, and then all of that came into the lake and then we started over time, we started to see the water quality degrade and we're starting to see, well, we're getting a lot of phosphorus that's been here inside the lake and now it's just releasing. Um, that's really important because that helps us understand what kind of ma management strategies we need to look at. Uh I'm just going to give you a really quick lesson in uh limnology of how does that phosphorus kind of recycle back into the lake. This is important because this has a lot to do with our current man management strategies. In the winter, uh the lake is cold and we say that the temperature throughout the lake is pretty much uniform. So you get a lot of cold water that's mixing um throughout the lake and it's bringing a lot of oxygen. So you have a lot of oxygen throughout the lake and the temperature is about the same. In the summer months, the water starts to heat up on the surface and it essentially it creates a trap. So you have warm water on the top, cooler water on the bottom, but you're not getting the mixing. So you're not bringing oxygen down to the bottom. In the fall, as the water starts to cool on top, creates more dents, and then you have wind action, you start to mix it again. So, we're taking that water from the bottom and we're moving it up to the top. For Lake Stevens, we only turn over about once a year. Um, that usually happens like December, January time. It's a big lake. It doesn't turn over as often. Okay. So, why is this important? So, in the winter, like you said, we've got lots of oxygen and it's moving throughout the water column. In the summer, you have less oxygen at the bottom because you're not getting that

cool water from the top and mixing in and bringing the oxygen from the atmosphere down to the bottom. What? Wow, that was really a fast animation. Um, so what that means is the phosphorus at the bottom that is bound with the iron, if there's no oxygen to keep it bound with it, it then gets to be free. And so it starts to move into the water column. Then when we start to see it mixing, that's taking all the phosphorus that was at the bottom that's no longer bound with the iron and it's moving it back into the water column. So that means that we're we're giving the water more phosphorus. Um, and as we saw, more phosphorus, more algae. We actually see this now. Um, we've had a couple of recent algae blooms, and we usually see them right around this kind of January, February months. That's because the lake is turning over. So, just some history. Um, many of you are probably familiar. The first management strategy that we did was the air raator. So in we said that well there's not enough oxygen down at the bottom so let's put oxygen down there. That's what the air raator did. It worked for a while. Um it put oxygen down at the bottom there. It was in operation from 94 to 2012. Uh but we started to really see that the algae was returning. It wasn't didn't seem to be as effective. And uh what we found was that there just wasn't enough iron down there. So the phosphorus needed the oxygen to bind with the iron, but if there's not enough iron, then there's nothing to bind it to. And so we started to see more algae blooms. Uh these red numbers here are this was toxins detected um above the limit. And so we started to say, okay, well now now what do we need to do? Um and this is yeah, we didn't have enough iron.

So, in a 2011 study when we started to say, okay, well, we're starting to see different things happen with the lake. Let's look at where's where's the phosphorus coming from? Where where's the challenges? We start to see more of we still have the internal a large component of internal loading, but we also have a watershed that is continuing to develop um is developing quickly and so we see a lot of runoff too. So, this is a lot of that external loading. Um so when we say that okay we've got this internal loading we have this external loading now now what do we need to do and again so this is just some side by side they may look pretty similar but just to give you some context you know Lake Stevens um is developing quickly we all know it's developing quickly it's one of our more developed areas and um that's great but we also again have to consider well how what does that do to our lake? Uh so currently we use uh alum as a treatment. This has been in effect since 2013. Uh this is the alum the aluminum will bind with phosphorus even in low oxygen conditions. So it still works in the summer when you don't have oxygen down at the bottom. The other benefit uh with alum is it helps kind of intercept phosphorus in the water column. So, we do a treatment usually in the fall months, which that's when we get a lot of our um you know, first rains and we get a lot of that runoff and it brings a lot of those pollutants into the lake and you treat with alum and it helps kind of bind to the phosphorus and then when it goes down to the bottom, it seals all the phosphorus in so we don't get as much internal loading. This has been the management strategy um like I said since 2013. We did do a study in 2021. We did a sediment study. We looked at sediment cores from the

bottom of the lake to see how is it working. Um, and it is it's still working. And it's working really well that we've actually uh are kind of the second phase of this is we're only treating with alum every 2 to four years based on how much phosphorus we see in the lake through um monitoring. And I'll kind of go into that. So that really brings us to our current program. Um, even though the management strategy is working, the lake seems great, it's nice and clear, uh, we still we still manage it. We still look at it every month. We have multiple different programs that feed into this. Two of our main programs is we do monthly water quality monitoring. Um, you'll see Seth there in the picture and then our surface water field technician, Taylor. They're the ones that normally get to go out on the lake. Um, unless it's like really nice and sunny, then I sometimes need to help them. Um, I'm just kidding. And, uh, the other one is the algae and aquatic plant management. So, this is really looking at, uh, invasive plants in the lake, also nuisance native plants, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. These are our two main programs. I'll talk a little bit more about all the other programs that feed into overall lake management a little bit later in the presentation, but these are the two main ones. So, what do we do when we look at the monthly monitoring? We look at water clarity. Uh we do this by it's very scientific. We take a disc that is black and white and we drop it in the water and we see how far it can go until we can't see it anymore. That's how we measure water clarity. Um it this is this is something that's used all over. This is very common. Uh it's called a SECI disk and that's what as part of our u monthly monitoring process. We look at the the SECI disk readings. We also take

water samples. We look at phosphorus. We look at chlorophyll algae. And then one of the other kind of components of this is looking at the shoreline. Uh this is something there was a survey done in 22 I think the snowish county did a survey in 22 to look at the health of the shoreline and as I said before you know everything that's in the wershed it comes into the lake and so if it kind of think about it if you have if you have a bunch of pollutants and you put it in a pipe and then you outlet that pipe directly into the lake all those pollutants make it to the lake. It's like a water slide. But if you say you have a bunch of pollutants and you dump it out on the ground, well, how much of that is really going to go into the lake? It starts intercepting with the vegetation and the soil and starts leeching into the lake slowly, if it even gets there. Um so that's when we talk about the shoreline, we're really looking at well what are the ways of this water getting into the lake and do we have any of those buffers any of that um ways to kind of prevent things from coming in without being intercepted first. This is a health rating. Um Snomish County actually uses this health rating. Uh we we continue to use it. The county has actually done the majority of the lake monitoring and lake management up until just a couple of years ago. Uh we've been fortunate. We have a wonderful team and we have the expertise to do it and the city has taken over the primary role of the monitoring in the last two years. We still work with the county regularly. We still work with other professionals too. Um they're a great resource, but they've kind of they have this they use this health rating scale. So if you see it in some of our old lake health report cards, this is what it refers to. Also, all the other lakes in Snomish County are kind of rated based on this scale. So, we

continue to use it. Lake Stevens is in excellent health. Um, but as you've heard, there's been a lot that's gone into this. So, I'm just going to share with you some of the water quality uh parameters that we test for and just look at the overall trends um since we started monitoring. So, we had the airator and then we have alum. Those are our two management strategies that we've done in the past. Uh you can see that in this graph here, what you want is you want to see kind of a decline because the top is the water surface. So this is how far can you see down into the water column. That's that clarity measurement. Um you can see that it's trending. We can see further and further down the the lake is clearer. Um and these are in meters too, just an FYI. Um these are the phosphorus levels. So this is looking at the top one meter in the water column. This is important because this is really more of a measure of what are we seeing coming into the lake more as the runoff. So that's at that top part of the water. Um unless of course the lake is turning over, but we we take a lot of that into consideration.

What happened in 2006? Um, oh, just a high reading. It's just Yeah. So, we we only take these samples once a month. And so, the reason why we take a long we have a long term of data collection because we're really looking at trends. There's a really a possibility that you can get like a high reading or like kind of an outlier. That just looks like an outlier. Yes, it does.

When you capture it, you it's a snapshot in time once a month. So really what we're looking more at is like long-term trends. And as you can see um overall the phosphorus levels have decreased and this is looking at the 40 m. So this is down deeper in the lake. So where are we seeing this is more of the phosphorus that would be released from the sediment. So you know how much are we seeing that's probably from that internal loading. Um, and as you can see, I mean, over the years with the LM treatment, this in general, this has gone down. Um, chlorophyll, this is just a parameter that we look at to kind of identify algae. Um, it's pretty much stayed baseline, but we see a lot of that with the clarity, too. We don't have as many um algae blooms, so we have lower algae levels. I said we don't see that much. We we have had a couple in the past. Um more notably, we had one in 2023. That's a photo there of Davies Beach. We had another one this year in 2025 also at Davies Beach. And um sorry. Um and uh so we still see we're still seeing these algae blooms. Now remember, we haven't done an alum treatment since 2022. our phosphorus levels are still low enough that doesn't really hit that threshold where we say well we're going to treat with alum but these are all things that we also take into consider how what are the algae blooms how often are we seeing them what are other parameters going on and then that's how we decide annually if we're going to do a treatment then just a reminder if you do see algae or scum like when in doubt stay out you can call us we will come take a look at it. We'll take samples. We take it down

to the King County lab and we test them for if there's toxins in it. Out of curiosity, how much does it cost to do an alum treatment and medicine? Sorry. Yes. Uh how how much does it cost to do an alum treatment and and what does it entail? What do you do?

Yeah. So, um it's about $150 to $200,000. we have to have a contractor come and do it. It's all done under our NPDS permit for um basically that's allowing you to discharge into the lake. We there's monitoring that happens before the treatment and monitoring that happens after the treatment primarily looking at um the hardness of the water pH and then um so those are the kind of monitoring around it. Um, but yeah, we we hire a contractor to do it and that's the cost of it. Thank you,

Shannon. Really quick, um, what's the turnaround time on getting that tested? Like, if somebody sees something suspicious in the lake, are we able to determine fairly quickly and let the public know they need to stay out? Are we looking at like a couple days before the lab results come back or how long could people potentially be exposed once it's been seen? It can be a couple days. So yeah, we'll collect it and then uh send it down to King County and then they process it and it usually takes a couple days, one to two days, I guess. What's what's our policy? Do we have like a better safe than sorry or do we

Yeah, we do. So whenever we identify algae, what we do is we put out those signs of when in doubt, stay out. We contact um our lakefront homeowners group and we notify them. We post it on social media and if it does come up with a toxin level that's dangerous. There's additional signs that go out and contact the department of health. Um, but we do have like a better safe than sorry policy. So, anytime that we see it, uh, we notify the road club. You know, we have a process on who we notify, how do we get that information out, and then we go put signs at the area where we've seen it. Okay. Thank you. Mhm.

Can Can I add I had a citizen um come up to me last week um concerned with the clams. Remember last summer we had all those clams coming up on the shore and they were concerned, you know, about was it how we treated the lake? Was there toxin in the lake? Did we test it at that time? I think it was determined it was temperature if I remember correctly. Yes. Um

there wasn't really anything to test from what we could tell. Um, I'll I'll keep the story short. So, when when that happened, it was actually right after we did do a treatment for aquatic plants. Um, it's something that we had never seen before, though. Uh, our contractor who did the treatment, who's who works all over the country, they had also never seen it in a response to the treatment. Uh, I even talked with um linenologists at UC Davis about this. like we did quite a bit of research on okay what is it even coming from. There's there's potentially we don't know for sure but there's a couple of factors. Um it's some of the highest lake temperatures that we have recorded that happened during that time and so temperature does play a factor with those specific clams and they are invasive too. So like that's good that they're not you know that they died but um so there's temperature. It could be too that the the oxygen level from the treatment dipped enough and already that those clams were stressed because of the temperature and then that was the catalyst. But we don't know for sure because there's not really something that you're you're testing, right? We would have to like take the clams and we'd have to look at a toxicology on the clams and it's not something that we did. Uh we do have kind of a memo that summarizes what we looked at available on our website. We do have a Zen City page for Lake Health. It's an oper it's where we have all of our studies posted. Um people can contact us. They can sign up for notifications through it. Uh we do post updates there when we're going to have treatments if there's uh algae problems or things like that.

Is that a good enough answer for now? I can go more into it. No, that's good. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions before we move on? Yeah, real quick. Your uh I guess I'm looking at page 147 of the docket shows is it 992 kilograms of annual load. Is that what that's saying in the bottom right corner? Versus back in 86 and 87 there was twice that much. 2200 kilograms.

Oh yes. Yeah. So part of it is too um I think just the way this was measured. This was a study um that was done that they didn't have a great way of measuring it. So these are a lot of estimates and based on kind of the literature review on how they estimated this. Yeah, I guess you have runoff highlighted uh in both categories and runoff goes up dramatically in terms of the percentage, but the actual amount of phosphorus in the lake is substantially lower and that was in 2011 compared to what it might be now. So I guess even with the development there may actually there's a lot less phosphorus now than there was four years ago, even potentially 15 years ago. Yeah,

I think some of that is from when the the landfill shut down and then a lot of the the seagulls and and birds that were congregating the lake. Okay. Stopped. Yeah. I I guess I don't want uh the community to be misled to make it suggest that development is the cause for all of our problems. But

no, and um I I wouldn't say that either, right? Development's not the cause. development. It's just it's just a factor of when we start to see development, you see imperous surfaces, you have more runoff. There's a lot of things with development, especially in today's development that mitigate that. So, we have storm water infrastructure that detains runoff. We have treatment systems. We have uh wetland buffers. You know, there's a lot of things that it's not development is the cause of poor water quality. development is one of the things that you look at because you're changing the watershed, right? So, it's just a factor that you look at the the more time goes on, the more things we know and the more things that we put in place to make it better.

Does that help clarify? Yes. Thank you. Yeah.

Um, so, uh, aquatic plant management, this is something that we do annually. We do a spring survey. That spring survey helps us identify where are all the plants and what type of plants are out there. And then we do a summer treatment. Historically, we've treat for invasive like mil foil or curly leaf pondweed. And we've also done a treatment for it's called we call their nuisance native. Um that's the American pond weed. You can kind of see this large leaf pond weed down here in the corner. I don't think you can see my mouse down here in the corner. Um, it is a native plant. It's good for our lake, but it is a considered a nuisance plant, and that's because it's long and ropey, and you don't really want to jump off the dock and kind of land in all of that. Um, it gets caught in boat propellers. So, we have historically done treatment in specific areas to help remove some of that vegetation. All of that's um done through our NPDS permit. There's a certain amount that you can remove um and that kind of thing. The treatments are also depending on the type of treatment, there's certain timing requirements and when you can do it. Um so there's usually either one to two treatments in the summer. We know that those treatments usually fall around time when people want to be in the lake and there's sometimes swimming restrictions. That really comes from the timing restrictions that are set by Department of Ecology. And so just to give you kind of a a recap what you could expect this year. Um we actually have a new permit that's coming out in March. There's a couple of new requirements in that. We don't fully know what they are just yet, but we'll learn here soon. Um a lot of it around alum and I think the monitoring and then some of it around aquatic plant management as well. Uh some of it might tie in with that t those timing

restrictions. We'll do a spring pre-treatment survey. We'll do the uh summer treatments and then we do a post survey to kind of look at how effective was it? Do we need to target something more next time? And then if we do an Allen treatment, we'll do it in the fall. Currently, we don't have a contractor. Our contract expired in December, so we're looking at contractors now. And uh we'll bring in the near future here another contract back to the council uh for someone that'll perform these treatments.

Shannon, you have the temporary or tenative alum treatment. So do we have the money for the alum treatment in the budget every year and we just choose not to spend it? Correct. So we we do we have budgeted for it? We do have it in the budget and the reason we do that is because we really look we really start to look at the the summer like in the winter and the spring and the summer phosphorus levels and we make that decision. We don't want to just treat based on a timeline just because we said we're going to treat every two years if we don't need to. But we also want to be prepared that if we do need to the budget's there and available.

Thank you. Where does that money come from?

Um, that comes from the storm water utility fees and the lake benefit fee. Um, that's under taxes. Yeah. So, this is another thing. Um, I'm not sure I think some of you were were here last year and we talked about this. One of the other things that we've recently started looking at is uh pchlorate. It's a compound that's typically found in fireworks. Last in 2024, uh the council was kind of interested in well are how are fireworks impacting the water quality? We actually it was kind of fortunate the EPA was doing a study specifically on the impacts of fireworks to water quality in 2024 and we were able to be a part of that study. So that's when we did our first samples. Uh we're looking at this specific compound called preclorate. It is naturally occurring um mainly more in the southwest. It's most commonly found in fireworks and um yeah it's highly soluble soluble. Um it's found in water and a lot of it is looked at in drinking water too because um consumption of this there's a potential for it to cause thyroid issues. So just to give you there it goes. It might be I apologize a little bit too small to see but uh this first all the data here we looked at three locations. We looked at Steven's Cove, North Cove here, Davies Beach and Lundine. And we looked at we took sample water quality samples before the 4th of July um the day after and then a week after. You can see that we do have some spikes in prechlorate uh right after the 4th of July, right after the fireworks. And while it's still pretty small, it's

still under the EPA's drinking water um contaminant level. There are some studies out there um that say anything even above one part per billion could potentially impact aquatic species, but that's something that's probably over time. Um you can see that one week later the levels dropped right back down. So it's something that we did we did this in 2024, we did it in 2025. It's not a study that we plan on doing in 2026. Uh it's not something that we have budgeted. It's about3 to $4,000 uh to run these samples. If it if the council is interested in kind of seeing what is the long-term trend of this, we do recommend maybe sampling every 3 to four years. That might help give us a baseline. Is it accumulating? Do we kind of see the same patterns or or or what's happening? Um but yeah, I don't Is there any questions specifically on this or does anyone want more information? When you say the EPA say, is that the one where we saw the scatter plot with our lake and all the other lakes? And from what I recall, our our dot was still fairly low amongst all the other lakes. Okay.

Yes. Yeah. These levels are still are still very low. Um I think previously there was a concern too about kids playing in the water especially after Fourth of July and consuming the water. Um, based on the information that we found, they would have to be drinking that water every day for a very long time to maybe potentially have an impact. Is I want to make sure I'm reading the scale right. We're roughly even on the 5th of July, we're 120th of the safe drinking water limit. Okay. Is there anything else that contributes this to the lake besides the fireworks? Typically,

there's I'll let that happen. There's some studies that uh there's not there's not a lot of studies on this, but there is some information that that says that it does occur naturally in the environment either from just salty ocean air um and UV light can cause the percllorate to to form and then uh uh okay deposit in the wershed um and also lightning strikes um the um lightning can create it too. So interesting. Thank you. Yeah. Any other questions on that?

Okay. So, I'm just going to go quickly through this. I talked about we have other management programs. Um, this is really all the other things that we do out here that have an impact on our lake and a lot of that is the routine maintenance of storm water infrastructure. Council Member Packard, you mentioned, you know, development and as we get development, we also have more infrastructure out there that helps keep our water clean and that's that's a great part about newer developments, right? And so those are that's storm water infrastructure and so maintenance of that infrastructure is really important. Um our we have uh we've cleaned about uh 68,000 ft of storm water pipes. So that's all that legacy material that can contain phosphorus in our storm water pipes. We've cleaned it out. We've been working on this since 2024. We've rep replaced all of our publiclyowned storm water filters in the city. We did that last year. We've cleaned all of our storm water catch basins in the city. There are over 6,000 of them. Um it's amazing. Our storm team works really hard in in keeping the storm water infrastructure clean and maintained and that has a huge impact on our lake. Um and then we also have other requirements as mentioned the NPDS permit. This is really a programmatic permit. And so there's eight different programs that are really involved. And that's everything from education and outreach to long range planning to uh routine maintenance to storm water retrofits. Um there's kind of a whole slew of things that we look at when we look at managing the watershed and particularly looking at storm water and water quality. We also have capital projects where we're looking at restoration um and implementing more storm water retrofits, adding more of that kind of

naturalbased infrastructure into the system. That's that green storm water. There's also a lot of community actions. We do a lot of community education. Um that's everything from natural yard care to throwing away pet waste. We talk about our shoreline. Um, our shoreline is very heavily developed. We don't have a lot of that natural buffer, but there's always opportunity for people that live around the lake or um that live up against our streams and things to change their area, incorporate some native plants and reestablish that native buffer. And those are all community things that can happen. So, with that, I'll take any questions. This photo was taken by one of our facilities um maintenance crew members. He Yeah,

thanks Shannon. Um I always appreciate your presentations. Every single time I learn something new, so thank you. Thank you. Um I can't remember when I feel like it was at least a year ago, maybe two years ago. There was a conversation about or an idea from council about u because our shoreline is the is the consistent thing that scores below where we would want it to be. they are they're um shoreline issues that there was a talk about an incentive program for homeowners around the lake to learn about what they could do on their property to improve their shoreline and therefore improve lake conditions. Did did that ever did anything ever come of that?

Yeah. Yeah. So, we we've hosted several um webinars. We did like a uh a rain um why can't I think of a rain garden um class like what is a rain garden, how to install it, how could you put on your property. We've done native plant natural yard care webinars. A lot of the webinars are available on our website. We partner pretty closely with the conservation district to implement that. This year we're focusing on private storm water facility maintenance in our webinar and also invasive plants. So that's kind of ties that in. At one point we did try to do some sort of an incentive program um to like encourage people to change their shoreline. We used to have the Cascade Award which was kind of highlighting those folks that wanted to incorporate more native vegetation into their yards. We did a survey at the beginning of last year to just get a sense from the community what what kind of things are you interested in? What do you want to see? Um, what came out of that is the Cascade Award is is going away. Um, there wasn't a lot of interest in it, but there's still a lot of interest in wanting to learn more. So, we'll continue to do webinars and we'll continue to do opportunities for hands-on learning and training. Um, but we're always open to new ideas and if people have like a great idea that they know a lot of community members want, you know, we'll look into that.

Great. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I just wanted to add a little bit that was discussed in our workshop for those that um, you know, didn't hear what was discussed. Another factor of this is our street sweepers. Like they go out in our city and they sweep our streets and it always looks so nice and clean when they're done. Well, they also take all those pollutants that would have otherwise, as Shannon said, found a pathway to our lake to um, contaminate the lake. So, when you see those street sweepers out there, um they're also a very important part of keeping our lake clean. Yeah. Thanks, Kim. Shannon, got a budget question. So,

oh, um, just looking at the budget from last year or this year's budget, uh, so income resources is like 7,000 or million dollars and expenses are $10 million. Am I reading that correctly? Are you looking on um the clear gov? No, I'm looking at our meeting notes from November 25th. So when we did our final public uh and you're looking at the storm water budget. Yeah. So I guess my primary question is regardless of how much we spend uh the exact numbers it looks like we're spending more than we're bringing in

is our current trajectory of expenses sustainable right within the resources that we have or do we need to make an adjustment one way or the other in the future? Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I can't speak specifically to what the budget's showing as far as uh expenditures exceeding the revenue. I I

yeah, I can um talk with Barb and I can get back to you on that. But when we do look at do we have enough of a revenue to sustain this program moving forward, we're actually going to be doing a rate study towards the end of this year into next year. We're going to look at just that. We're going to look at do our storm water utility rates, are they still providing us with enough of a revenue to continue these programs that are important to us? As costs increase, as we need new equipment such as a new sweeper, um we will be bringing that back. Yeah. Oh, and and maybe Director Halverson also has something to add.

The costs are coming. It's not operations, right? the the costs are comingled with capital and so in some of those years you're going to see an overexpenditure because it's drawing down reserves to pay for capital projects. So grabbing that as a snapshot is is uh challenging and problematic. So um and furthermore that's a really it's a different discussion than the lake management program in in a lot of ways. But we're happy to have it. It's just uh yeah and if that's the case then yeah I'd like to talk about that at some point. Right. How much is the capital just to maintain the infrastructure that's needed to just manage storm water, right? And then yeah, what percentage of that

budget is going to uh lake water management and maintaining water clarity versus hey, we just need to yeah, capture this water and do all the stuff that's required to have a functioning city, right? Yeah. the the the best time to have that conversation is going to be during the rate study and we're going to take a deep dive into the um the regulatory requirements as a baseline and then the things that are above and beyond that or or capital uh projects as well and so you'll have that opportunity in the next few months. Thank you. Yeah, we have for Shannon. Well, a great presentation. Uh I got was it last year or two years ago that I went to the lake conference with you and Seth? Yeah, it was a couple years ago.

I had I learned quite about limnology. So, lake management. Kelly, you're you're giving me the finger. Whatever that means. Oh, no. I I want to clarify. I was just saying, can I have one second of time? Clarifying finger. Yes. Uh the workshop next week is canled. So, next council meeting is March 10th. That's what that meant. All right. So, with that, let's uh get a motion to it. Oh, no. Wait a second. Whoa. We got more to do. Whoa. See, our new schedule's throwing you off.

I was in two weeks from now. Um, council business. Council President. Um, let's see. Let's start in the middle for something different. Council Donovan. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, so I attended the planning commission meeting and I have to say it's really nice on the new schedule not have to not having to worry about stealing David and Russ's thunder. uh content was pretty much what we saw tonight. So that's all for me.

Great. Thank you, Councilman Shipman. Um I didn't attend any meetings, but I did want to give a shout out to our public works um the day we had the snow that lasted brief period of times in little pockets. I drove down grade road several big branches on blocking the sidewalks and within hours they were out there and they had that cleaned up. And so two thumbs up to our public works for getting that done so quickly. Um, I want to thank our guest speakers or our our citizens comment speakers for taking time out of their evening to come speak to us and share a concern. That's always important. We always want to hear from you. And um, then lastly, I'm assuming there's a high school assignment due. So you guys, good meeting. We're within time limit. So good meeting to pick to come do your assignment. Thank you for joining us. And that's it for me.

Thank you so much, Councilwoman Edwards. Yeah. So, I just have two things really quick. Um, I have been fortunate enough to attend two um, LSSD events in the last week. Um, the first one I went to the open house for the new elementary number eight. That was amazing to see the work that the architectures and the architects and um, the school district has put together an amazing plan for this new elementary school. And as someone who lives in that neighborhood, I live like a block from both of those elementary school locations. My concern had been the traffic. We already know that there's so much issues with um parent pickup and drop off at our elementary schools. So to see the extra thought and work that they had put into that was I it was very impressive and I appreciate it so much not only as a parent but also as a citizen who lives in that neighborhood. So, thank you LSSD for all the hard work that they have done for that. Um, the second one was tonight at Cavalero. They had the heritage night. Um, if you haven't been to the heritage night, you guys got to check that out. I'm telling you, it is so cool. We have students from every culture you could even imagine. We got to see music, food, dress, art, um, people, you know, in in of high status from these different communities. And it was just really really great to see people from all different um cultures come together to celebrate our differences. Um and so I want to thank um Dr. Meadows for all the work that she put into that. Um I know she works really really hard to gather um community and and students to be able to do that. And so um I just want to give a little pat on the back to LSSD. So thank you.

Great. Thank you so much. Um Councilman Beckard. Yeah, I wasn't going to bring that up, but I've been to the cultural event in years past. Uh it was significant enough that my daughter wanted to go again. This year I was here, so we couldn't take her, but uh it is a very cool event and I would recommend it. Um I did have the opportunity to uh attend the skit meeting this morning, Snomish County Committee for Improved Transportation. Uh just real quick, there was a good Oh, we had Senator uh Lias, I think is his name, one of our state senators. He's the chair of the transportation uh committee uh at in our state senate. Uh so he talked just a lot about what's going on. One of the key things that came out of that was the desire to revamp conversation around US2. So, Mayor Gaye and some of his previous efforts were were brought up uh as something that they wanted to pick back up. And so, I think you and I are on some emails with uh some folks there to follow up and talk about what that means and how we get what East County Coalition or whatever we want to call it moving forward to help pick some of that activity up. And then next month is uh is focused almost solely the agenda is be almost focused solely on US2 trestle and and what we do there. So there's some attention. And then uh typically uh in this community or forum, people will address school sports accomplishments. Uh women's wrestling doesn't get the attention that many others get, but I believe they won state this past week.

So congrats to the women's wrestling team. Very cool. Thank you, Councilman McNos.

Yeah. Uh so I had um the opportunity this week to talk to several of the businesses in the downtown area and there's a lot of concern obviously with all the construction projects that have gone on and the impact it's had on business. I can tell you our business is down 40%. Um there's a lot of just a lot of angst about that. There's a lot of angst about the upcoming construction that's going to happen downtown with some of the developments and road work. So, they asked me to just kind of let council know that they're upset, they're scared, they're worried about their businesses closing up and if there's anything economic relief or anything you can start thinking about for some of these downtown businesses or at least go and having a conversation with it might be gratefully appreciated. So, just want to table that for today. Thank you, Councilwoman.

Uh, sure. I attended the CT board workshop. They have that quarterly and at the workshop they had a presentation similar to the zip shuttle presentation that they had last year here but uh encompassing all of their three pilots and their Alderwood service. Um they found some some highlights of that 24% of zip shuttle um customers connect to a transit uh mode fixed route bus based off their orga card usage. Um the zip shuttles have about a 100,000 um hours of which about 38,000 are the Alderwood shuttle and 68 62,000 um the three pilots among which we are. Uh I did ask about how much does the agency pay per trip and the cost for the zip shuttle is about $19 to $22 per trip. Uh except for Darington and it's $40 there for obvious reasons. It's just so much further. Um they're still um for their fixed route they are implementing their 2024 and beyond plan. Um and that was an addition of service of about 143,000 hours to date from their September 2023 baseline which I believe is probably the lowest amount uh level of service they've had in the last 10 years or so. um they still do have about 25,000 hours left to add and they're now starting to think about how to integrate the two services better, the zip shuttles and the fixed route working together. They gave an example of that on in our area on 83rd um when they took the 209 from Highway 9 to 83rd because 83rd had had a lot of development um and it bypassed Walmart. So to mitigate that they um they put uh Walmart as a zip shuttle area. So that's how they kind of um mitigated that. So

um they mentioned they're working on a plan to bring forth to the jurisdictions and to to the board um at the next workshop which is in April. So I'll have more details on that then. Great. Thanks. Thank you. Um I just want to take a minute and talk about this last weekend's polar plunge. I didn't see any of my fellow um council members in the water with me. I'd like to challenge you all. We have a year, you a year to practice. Um I think we should have a team next year, a polar plunge team. So, let's talk about that. We'll do do some training. Only if we swim from the dock. I'll do it.

Um I want to thank the um so much regional fire uh folks for being there to make sure everybody was safe and not jumping from the dock. That's not very safe. Um but it was a great turnout. There were over a hundred folks in the water. Um they raised close to $30,000 this year which was a record for them. Um really just well organized, great energy. Um it was a really wonderful event for Special Olympics. So I was um happy to be a part of it and I'll see you all there next year. Thank you.

Cool. U I'll be real short. Um we've been just having lots of staff discussions lately about different things. Um, I will be gone uh for the early part of this next week attending the Association of Government Insurance Risk Pools. And if that doesn't sound exciting to you, you have no idea what party is. No ambient meeting. Yeah, it'll it should be fun. Actually, it's interesting stuff. And uh Nathan stole my thunder on the girls wrestling. And I I think Mary, you're one of the trainers, aren't you? You're active, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Whenever they they tap you in, you jump in the ring. Love it. Make a motion to adjurnn. Move to adjurnn. Second. All those in favor? I. Any oppose?