Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Okay, good. All right, welcome everyone. We are all here. I hear my voice. It's okay. Let's have the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance.

Let's start with our little call. Let's go see who's here. We have Amy Lewandowski.

I'm present.

Jess Huxford.

Here.

Mike Doerr. Here. Bruce Morton. Here. uh we have three well actually do we have just uh jennifer davis who's not here i didn't hear uh she had asked to be excused yes okay she is okay uh and uh and connor davis he's also asked to be excused i assume and i think that's everybody so uh can we get a motion on excusing them So moved. Second. All right. All in favor?

Aye.

All right. Any opposed? Oh, okay. So they're excused. And so we have a quorum. Very good. And let's see, has anyone, has everyone had a chance to review the minutes from the last meeting? Any amendments or changes? If not, shall we put them into the record, I guess. Is that the motion that we're looking for? I guess I can make a motion. I move that our minutes from our last meeting be approved.

I second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed?

Aye.

Item three, yes. Oh, did I miss an item? Ah. Is there any one in the audience? Either online? Well, there's no one in the room. Is there anyone online? Okay, good. Thanks for reminding me. So we will move on to discussion items. We'll talk about the updated sub-barrier plan.

Great, thank you. Secures, they share my screen.

Mr. Troy Davis, our senior planner.

Sorry, I hit the right button here. Presentation mode. All right. Well, tonight we were talking about the update to the Lake Stevens Center sub area plan. And so I just wanted to run through a little bit of background with everybody just for a refresher because it's been a few months and want to make sure we're all kind of caught up. And anyway, this item was on our 2026 docket. And our docket includes all the items proposed for amendments to our comprehensive plan for the year 2026. Back in March, we had a kind of a little focused in discussion on the updates of the city's three sub area plans. So we just kind of did a general overview. Seems like a long time ago. I guess it was a long time ago. So for me, it feels like a really long time ago. But anyway, we went over kind of a high level of the three plans. And so tonight... we're kind of starting to hone in. We're going to first focus on the Lake Stevens Center sub-area plan. And then in future meetings, we'll focus in on the Lake Stevens downtown sub-area plan and the 20th Street corridor plan. So right now our focus is just on the Lake Stevens Center plan, which if you're not familiar, it's kind of the frontier village area of Lake Stevens. So with the sub-area plan, there's a few associated documents. We have the draft sub-area plan for 2026 with our proposed updates. And then we've included the original final environmental impact statement. So a little bit of background on that. That happened prior to the adoption of the sub-area plan. So as you know, when we government, when we do issue plans, documents, whatever, we've got to do an environmental evaluation for their impact on the environment. And so before even adopting the plan in 2020, sorry, 2012, we, and did an evaluation under an environmental impact statement for the impacts to the environment. And that's all part of the State Environmental Policy Act. And out of the environmental impact statement came the planned action ordinance. So in the final environmental impact statement, we evaluated three different alternatives for how Lake Stevens subarea plan or area is going to say it was going to grow. So one of the alternatives was we do nothing and we just let things roll as they are. The second alternative was we kind of focus this as a employment retail, a little bit of residential area. And the third alternative was to kind of focus on, I think, commercial and residential uses. So the city went with the alternative too. And so what the planned action was, ordinance does is it in a way implements that environmental impact statement. And what that does is it speeds up the environmental review for projects that get developed in the area. So instead of having to do a SEPA environmental review for every development project that gets proposed there, we've got it covered already. So it helps the development review process get through the door a little bit quicker. So it's just taking that additional step there ahead of time. And then initially associated with the planned action ordinance, the city had developed a capital facilities plan. And that includes basically all the infrastructure that needs to be put into place to implement the plan. So that's street improvements, trails, sidewalks, sewer, water, just all the utilities, everything it takes you know, to really kind of see this plan come to fruition. Always, you always got to do things in the, you always got to make sure the infrastructure is in place because obviously if we didn't have it, it'd be hard to kind of grow the area, right? So the draft sub-area plan update, kind of focusing in on that, the main attachment here. So basically the purpose of the sub-area plan was to serve as a strategy for revitalizing the area. particularly in the terms of redevelopment because the area is, as we know, largely developed already. But we wanted to turn it into more of a vibrant mixed-use district that had economic growth, employment opportunities, transportation improvements, visual aesthetic improvements, just an all-around improvement to the area with the emphasis on retail and employment opportunities. with some opportunity in growth for residential, but we really wanted to focus this area as an employment retail growth center. So that was the purpose of the plan. We adopted it, of course, back in 2012. In 2022, we did an addendum, and that's because we had done some zoning changes to our overall zoning map that impacted the sub-area, and so it became necessary to make some changes to the sub-area plan, but Aside from that, a sub-area plan hasn't been touched. So we included with the draft here a number Post updates, if you looked closely, you probably saw a little brackets that said placeholder for additional language. There's just a lot of narrative stuff that we've got to add. And we wanted to kind of move the discussion forward at least before getting that all in. But there'll be some more updates coming through that. But everything that was struck through is proposed to be removed. Everything that's in red underlined is language that we were proposing to add. So kind of jumping back to the environmental impact statement and planned action ordinance. Again, we went with alternative two and you can kind of see the different numbers here in the slide of what we're looking at. So the city was anticipating 140,000 to 150,000 square feet of gross retail area. Same with office area. We were anticipating 180 to 200 homes. And what's not shown here is p.m. peak hour trips. Apologies. But we're anticipating, I believe, 915. So what that means is if all the development projects that would come in through the door, as long as we were still under those thresholds, we didn't need to do any more environmental review. If for some reason a warehouse came in that was 200,000 square feet, that'd obviously be way above our thresholds, and we'd have to go back to the environmental review portion of things. So where we're at right now, we have a separate tracker that we keep so we can obviously match the progress. And the top row there, I have our thresholds. So that's what the PAO set as the thresholds. Right below that on the second row, we have our totals of development that we've reached so far. And then the third line is remaining capacity. And then for simplicity, I added a fourth line of what percentage of capacity have we retained. So you can see, if you look at that bottom row, that we've achieved 43% of the threshold for gross retail and service space, only 8% of anticipated office and employment space, 14% of anticipated residential dwelling units, and 55% for PM peak hour trips. So this is over the last 14 years, right? 2026 minus 14 years. This is kind of the achievement rates that we've gotten to so far. So we're still way under the thresholds set by that. I threw this map in here for reference. So we'll go over that in a little bit more detail. And if need be, but essentially what I'm showing here is this is taken from our recent zoning map that came out of our 2024 cop plan. And there's a few little zoning changes and I apologize, I probably should have marked the parcels that are changing on here. So you could identify, but there's a couple parcels. that don't match anymore. And so we're just gonna make a simple change in there to make sure that the zoning maps and the sub-area plan match what's shown on our city's adopted sub-area plan. And then this is just an aerial view. I'm a very visual person, so I like to see what's going on. So I did this little draw graphic. So I apologize for the squiggly lines, but they basically follow the perimeter of the sub area. And you can see from this area, a lot of it, again, is mostly developed. There's some parcels, commercial zone parcels that are available still. But again, the plan is reliant somewhat on redevelopment, particularly as some of these commercial areas age.

And Planner Davis, if I may, that green stripe down the middle is the power line protected area.

Correct. Yeah. Yep. Yep. So in this area, and we'll talk about it more in the narrative when I add that section, but yeah, we've got the Bayview Trail in progress through that area. So that will add to the recreation opportunities in the sub-area, which is great. So some discussion that we wanted to start here. I'll just kind of run through the questions before I kind of open up the floor back to the Planning Commission or city staff if they have something to say that I missed. But kind of what we wanted to get from the Planning Commission is if there's further modifications you would like to see to the sub-area plan that we haven't drafted so far. And if you have any recommendations to some of the language that we're proposing in the draft. We wanted to get feedback on some of those development thresholds that we have in our planned action ordinance and whether we should be proactive in increasing kind of like the resident. This is an example, you know, increasing the residential unit threshold to exempt more residential projects from SEPA. Again, we're pretty low on the threshold, but, you know, we can increase that number. If we want to, and part of that is stemmed from the fact that the Senate has passed a bill that requires us to allow for up to 40% of our commercial areas to allow for ground floor residential use. It does not provide specifications on how exactly the jurisdictions implement that. whether it's on a project-by-project basis or if we do it on a landmass basis. So we've got to kind of work through that. But that does have the potential to impact our commercial areas pretty significantly. If we've got 40% of our ground floors not there anymore, then we can get pretty...

That was my question. Actually, that was my only question when I went through this, so if I may. Of course. It is my understanding that that is being brought back again this year and perhaps might be modified this year. Have you heard the saying?

I have not. This is probably where we'd get Dave on board, but Russ might have heard something.

No, I haven't heard any of the new bill introductions yet.

Okay. I had heard that this one landed flat in a lot of places, not just us.

Yeah.

So that it was going to be, the word that I was told was modified.

Okay. That would be great. I think we'd all breathe a sigh of relief if it was. Yeah. But yes, so if there's any kind of, I'll go back to these questions here. There was any kind of feedback from the planning commissioners on this?

I might add a couple of comments before you move to your questions and comments. So when we go back to the inception of the sub areas, our targets were aggressive and we recognize that some of that was say the target parking lot. We had fully anticipated target building that out into a lot of outlaws. They've been resistant to doing that over the years. We expected the area just on the other side of 204 where those old industrial buildings are in the gravel lot. We had anticipated the redevelopment of that area much quicker than has happened. And some of the area along 91st. So we haven't seen quite the level of infill that we anticipated. And we knew that the residential component would be solely based on any mixed use that may occur, you know, commercial area, something like that. So that was really never intended for additional single family type of residents. So again, we were fairly aggressive if we want to revisit some of those, but we will be comparing what's in. I think that Troy's already done this, sort of looked at what's remaining in raw acreage in the draft of the changed documents.

If I may, when we went through those discussions to my A couple of those opportunities that you just described have changed ownership. And without, again, naming names, are there any proposals from the current owners on any of those areas at this point? There's nothing that has been presented. Interesting. Mike?

Well, I had actually a couple of questions. I'm glad we're kind of sitting on this slide right now. This is one I had some questions about. Actually, most of my questions focus on transit and transportation. So I'm seeing here that our numbers are the cap that we have attained is quite low, basically for office, for residential and for retail services. But our peak trips is already at 55 percent. is that something that needs to be looked at? Because this whole area, even with the changes in infrastructure, is still pretty impacted. And so does that color maybe what some of our targets ought to be? I guess that's more of a question for the group.

Or to ask that a different way, does that number prevent some of the other we've had people look for retail space that won't do that because of the traffic issues that are going on to get in and out of some of these clogged areas.

Sorry about that.

And those were some of the improvements that the city has taken on that we probably should have highlighted in this draft is we built Village Way that gave that secondary ingress, egress out of there. Obviously all of the intersection improvements that have taken place on the highway so that was really to help facilitate you know more growth in those areas so i don't think that's a limiting factor but you're right we should go back and do an analysis of these numbers based on our greater comprehensive plan that we just took a look at our capacity and those targets to sort of reconcile those. So that's probably a good point to see if those numbers are still attainable with this remaining distribution.

Thank you. And then the other question I had, and it looks like We allude to it on page 20 of the PDF or page 9 of the actual document. We talk about transit and how it's serviced by CT. The southeastern corner is the transit station of sub-area. Beyond that, the stops are fairly limited and on Highway 9 that service this sub-area. getting across highway nine is the game of frogger uh at the best of times um and so i guess is has there been any outreach to ct to talk about perhaps a realignment uh maybe some sort of um uh stop complex um kind of within the the parking areas or within within the commercial zones on either side of 9 maybe that would make it so that people aren't exiting the bus on Highway 9 itself.

So yes, in the past we had a fairly robust discussion with CT about other opportunities. I believe they're going to be unveiling their new route plan soon, which we'll look at and comment on. but not in the Lake Stevens Center. The largest discussion we had with them for additional parking area, van pool area, would have been down in the 20th Street corridor in the West Lake Park that the city has recently developed. And that discussion didn't end up going anywhere after the launch of the HOV link. So that's something we can reach out to them, I think, on more of a global

I think that would be wise because if we're trying to maybe push some of those PM trips down so that they're in the same area, at least right now as the retail and office, particularly the office and retail, then having the bus stop in a useful and safe place would, would probably help that. But right now, you know, if you're asking somebody to push their shopping cart down along highway nine, I mean,

that that's that's that's crazy to me right one thing i will point out to the group that had been a big emphasis and uh commissioner huxford is probably the only one here but we had also looked at 91st to create um another shopping district there is one now but we wanted to really recreate 9th first into a main street to deal with that's where most of the heaviest residential is in that area north to south so we really looked at how do we do that and it's been probably three years ago now, two years ago, we did a large public outreach to design that 91st corridor to sort of realize that part of the dream. And again, that was recognized early on that there were significant limitations of Highway 9, not uncommon, you know, lots of cities have those same issues of freeways running through the middle of their town. Actually, probably most every city around us has that issue, but it's how do you compensate for it. So yeah, that's a great point.

Thank you. Amy, any thoughts?

I'm hearing very interesting things. I don't have anything to contribute right now.

So my thought here is this, I haven't brought up the comp plan to compare, but it seems like there's a lot of and the comprehensive plan and i would just want to besides to reduce any redundancy whatsoever that you can hear because why keep two copies of anything that's that uh so um i would really tightly focus this only on the things that are unique to this the subway plan make it as small as possible it's a little too early to really give comments on because of the uh you know there's just kind of like comments of what's going to happen what you know area things that you're going to modify in each section um but um uh as far as the targets uh yeah the the targets were aggressive and and and just like any planning, you can never predict what the future is going to bring. But I'm at least glad to see that there was nothing that was under projected. And so that there's plenty of headroom for growth as it happens organically. My other thought is that, what was it? Oh, yeah. So the retail on the first level and the residential over there. Having been to Redmond lately and other areas in this Seattle metro area, you see that a lot. But we haven't seen that here. And I guess there's plenty of places to do it. But it just hasn't happened. And I was wondering if you have any clue or ideas as to why do other cities in the area have a lot of residential above retail or just, yeah, above retail, but we haven't had that yet.

It's really going back to Commissioner Dewar's comments and the rest of the team can definitely chime in. It's really transportation. So a lot of the cities that have achieved the more dense mixed use have much more diverse transportation systems, public transit, and it's a cost factor in those communities have a lot of valuation of the the properties allows banks to lend on to those and this hasn't been the right market for that yet i mean we do have a couple of mixed-use projects in the hopper but talking to those folks it really is uh financially driven for a lot of that coming out this far north to really build that type of a community so i would think also the uh the trestle is a big um

impediment, maybe.

No? Less so. It's really just overall market, sort of a more suburban market, but more urban-based market.

My impression has always been that the main limitation for growth in Lake Stevens has been the trestle. If anybody is thinking of coming here, we'll see that that's kind of like a bottleneck to be able to get out.

For maybe commercial, but definitely not for residential.

Well, I think there would be a lot more residential if the trestle was free-flowing. But who knows? Yeah, I guess commercial is a factor there too. So for those of us who may prefer Lake Stevens to stay nice and small, let's not touch the trestle. Leave it the way it is.

If I may, when we had discussions, whenever it was, 100 years ago on the 20th corridor, And we were talking about bringing in white tech and we were going to have architectural firms at the base and we were going to have all of this. And one other thing that happened is pandemic. Everybody learned that they can do that from home. And so that ground level, what you're seeing and Redmond's a great example of that. they're having people that aren't renewing leases because they can do that without the cost of having that overhead. So I think of some of the people that work with, again, I won't name names, but work very closely with the city of Lake Stevens have been able to downscale their facilities in Everett because they don't need that amount of space because they have people that work remote.

Oh, and so does that retail or office space on the first level is not being used?

Correct. Which doesn't financially pen out to anybody that's building it.

Well, in that case, the bill that allows for all residential, you don't have to have the retail on the first level, that's desirable for those developers, yeah.

was not desirable for the developers. Most developers will tell you they want to eliminate the commercial component.

Yeah.

And do strictly multifamily.

So they're happy about that, though.

Well, that was the push or they push that.

So there's a lot of nuances.

Yeah. Yeah, I think probably the opportunity for horizontal mixed use projects might be more. viable, at least in their market, you know, where they got a project and there's a standalone commercial building and standalone.

Well, it's a different financing package. It's a different insurance package. It's a different, I mean, when you get into that, it is, it's basically two projects that now have to be meshed into one, but very, very separate when it comes to the design and build up and operation and operation. Absolutely.

Okay, so to answer your questions, I want to make sure that you get the questions answered. Do you feel like, have we, we've just been bantering back and forth. I feel like you've been getting answers to your questions. Are there further modifications that you would propose that are not included in the draft?

It's hard to, for me personally, it's hard to say until I see what text shows up in those placeholders. Okay.

Same with question number two, it's probably the same. Are there any changes proposed for development thresholds?

I love the idea of reopening a conversation with community transit.

I'd say stick with those. In my opinion, I think the thresholds, we clearly have not reached them. So we don't want to raise them and we don't want to lower them. I'd say just keep them the way they are.

And there's some feedback too, you know, I think that was mentioned by the Planning Commission too, right? So we've got our PMP Coward We're 55% at our PMP, and we're still really low at our other numbers, which means if the other categories develop, we're going to max out. That's the first one that's going to hit the limit.

Yeah, long before. Is there perhaps like a reopener or something like that that could be baked into this, where if we haven't hit 50% of the actual buildable components yet, But we're at 120% of our traffic PM peak figures that, you know, maybe we need to come back and take a look at this. Because otherwise it's just going to become, you know, the morass of traffic with, you know, still room to make it worse through development.

And that's what you're gonna see when we bring the 20th street plan to you. It's not that we've hit the plateau on the traffic, but we've hit the magic number on the residential component. So you will see that in sort of real time and that's, sort of the reason to pose the question now and i think your comments earlier in the discussion that we really need to go back to our recently updated transportation plan look at those numbers and really do a deep dive and correlate those to the sub area that will probably provide i think some good direction on if any thresholds need to be to be modified to keep the the traffic flowing and what those projected numbers are. So, yeah.

On the last question, I don't fully understand. You're giving two choices and it seems like it's two ends of a spectrum and I don't quite understand the trade-offs of each of those.

Can I take this one? And maybe have some thoughts. And I don't even know that this is one we really need to include. So the state continually changes the thresholds. So to do a project under a SEPA review, it was traditionally way back in the day, it was four lots. It was just four lots, 100 cubic yards of grading. Now we're in the thousands of cubic yards of grading for it to trigger SEPA. We're up to like 50 residential units, 30 residential units. So the thresholds keep bumping up. What we're measuring in the planned action is not that, even though it might be exempt from SEPA, we've already done an environmental impact assessment here that has triggered certain mitigation. So we really can't swap out the one proposal for another because then it's going to discount, say, if we have too many vehicle trips, well, we've modeled what is the impact on the air and environment. So we can't go back and discount those residences that are going to be contributing to that because we've already built in sort of a mitigation strategy for that. So we can exempt them over here and say, yeah, you wouldn't go through a standard SEPA. And we've done that on projects outside of the sub area, but we still have to count what is the impact on the sub area. So it's probably really not a question that the board needs to really weigh in on. It's a pretty technical question. That would be my perspective, but I'm happy to hear yours.

I feel like I know enough to give an opinion on this. I don't know about you all. This one came from Dave. They say, well, put a pin in that.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's just basically kind of saying, hey, because of this bill that's come forward, you know, for us to include ground floor residential, you know, in our commercial zones, do we go ahead and just up that threshold number now and get ahead of it or not worry about it? Because, again, we've, you know, certain... the threshold outside of our PAO and stuff that the state has set for housing is always increasing anyway. And so you can do what we're at, a 30-unit subdivision without having to do environmental review.

My vote is to resist and wait it out on everything. That comes out of Olympia at this point. So I wasn't going to add that last part on, but I am happy to keep my ear to the ground and see what's coming.

Well, they've given us a deadline and we don't, no need to, you know, we just need to meet that deadline. Yeah. And we'd meet it today before the deadline that's fired.

I think they did give us 18 months, I think, from the date of adoption. So I don't know what month we're on now, but I think there's still a little bit of time.

In the spirit of this discussion, I do have a couple of thoughts. You just said, you know, kind of put a pause on some things. And I think a lot of developers and investors are doing the same thing. So I wonder if that is a barrier to to creating these commercial and residential places. And as Russ mentioned, the the lending for contractors to build commercial and residential spaces is really tough. And as I think about that and I see these thresholds and where we're at. I wonder, you guys are talking about why are we not there? What are the barriers? And we talked about transportation and a few other things. How else can we help identify why we're not getting there? And how can we, how can the city help? How can we reduce those barriers or soften them or something? I don't know the answer to any of that, but it just feels like a lot of people are stuck. Thank you. And I'm really new at all of this, so I kind of feel vulnerable. But those are my few thoughts.

No, Christy Schmidt, planning manager, that's a good point. We've talked about that in-house as staff, is how can we encourage the development community or provide incentives in any way, whether it's in the code, whether it's the environmental thresholds, what can we do to make development easier? Like you said, to remove those barriers. Yeah.

We're looking for ideas. We're talking about it in...

appreciate your feedback okay ultimately it's got a pencil out it does and things aren't right now it's not the city's yeah so have you all gotten the feedback that you need I think so yeah okay great all right moving on to the next item let's uh do commissioner's report and commissioner Lewandowski

Oh, thank you for excusing my absence. I was in Europe for the past three weeks with my 15-year-old son, and it was so amazing.

And I miss everyone. But actually, I jotted down a few things, because when I came back, I came back to Aquafest.

And it was so great to see so many families and friends around the community having a good time. Just today, I popped by the new boutique shop in this frontier area called Mason Mercantile. Yep, and they're great. It's stuff for the whole family. And then we're heading to Costco, and we saw the sidewalks being built on 91st Street, which is going to be a great... pathway for those residents and kids getting to school. Signed my kid up for driver's ed here at our local defensive driving facility that we have. Then yesterday my parents had their 66th and 68th birthday and we're so thankful to be on the beautiful clean lake and they both surfed behind the boat yesterday. And I'm looking forward to playing pickleball at Lending Park tomorrow with some of our neighbors. And then King Salmon is opening on the Puget Sound on Friday, which is my birthday. So I'm excited to spend time out there with my dad. So despite everything going on, this is a really beautiful, vibrant community. And it feels good. Felt good to leave and it felt good to come back. So that's my silly report for now. Thank you very much.

I love that report, and I appreciate your enthusiasm. And I will share with you that as well. I'm excited to see some new business come into town and hope for their success. And for the minutes that we were on the Aquafest Grand Parade course, we had a lovely time, and the weather was perfect.

Thank you. So this weekend, last weekend, I took a shift in the city's Aquafest booth, and I was supported, thankfully, by Senior Planner Levitan, who was there to handle all the tough questions that came through. We had several attendees come by. They're very interested in parks in Lake Stevens and also had some public safety concerns that they wanted to share. Not too far off from what Commissioner Davis shares often, which is traffic safety right around this downtown core. So, um, we were able to refer people to, you know, the appropriate services, uh, wherever possible. And really for me, you know, using that as a listening session to see what the community cares about, um, which helps shape, you know, our, uh, opinions here when we talk about, um, things like, uh, sub area plan tonight. It's good to see it was well attended and, uh, you know, thanks to all the volunteers and staff that make it happen. So until next year.

Great. So, uh, I mainly have a question. A few months ago, I asked about how the planning department is doing on adopting AI as a tool for making your work more efficient, making your department more efficient, making responsiveness to the public faster. I was wondering, is there any progress there? Have you found any tools that you're in favor of doing or using? Okay. Well, I don't know. Maybe you can answer that later, or I'm not sure what's appropriate right now.

No, no. As you know, that was one of our previous mayor. It was a directive from him to utilize AI where we can. So staff internally, along with our IT department, we do have some IT criteria, thresholds, and operation policies. So we do use it as much as we can for our staff reports, any research, consolidating letters, responses to public, tone, graphics, all sorts of things that we're utilizing it for. On a larger note with the city, we have looked at integrating, and we actually have integrated, not AI, however, but automation into our permitting system, which is more of an internal formatted AI type. And then in addition, I think the city is looking at AI policy development and criteria with our IT department. And beyond that, I'll pass it off to Brenna.

That's a great summary. As far as the department, we're just taking baby steps using the tool as appropriate, but we have not looked at integrating it into a large system-wide tool yet. Okay.

Well, I'll continue asking. All right. I do have one other comment. My son and his family came here to visit for about 10 days, and they just flew back to Lansing, Michigan, their home, today. And one of the comments that my son made is comparing Lake Stevens, his hometown, to Lansing is how remarkable things have improved, all the... the parks and all the facilities and especially the splash pad. Spent time during Aquafest and actually this morning I was here with my two grandchildren. right here in the splash pad, and they're having a lot of fun, and they don't have splash pads in Lansing, Michigan. And you'd think that, you know, they're a city that's more like three times the size of Lake Stevens, and yet it's like they don't have the infrastructure that we have. And he was noting how nice it is that we have so many nice things here. So just compliment saying how great a place we live, as you know. And that's all for me.

Thank you.

So now we'll move on to Director Wright's report.

Okay. I don't have a lot for the group tonight. I will say we did interviews for the planning commission vacancy just about a week ago. We did make a recommendation on the candidates. So that'll be to the mayor and then the city council for approval. So you will be back to a full board shortly. Okay. beyond that, just continuing to work on the capital projects. You see the advances on the museum out there, and we have awarded a contract for the municipal campus project. So that's exciting, and we're hoping to move into that space by Q1 next year, and then that will Create a lot of ripple projects and sort of the downtown that will follow. So those are my big updates and also Aqua Fest. Yes, it was great. It was well attended from, you know, law enforcement fire. Didn't hear of any big issues and from some of the Aqua Fest team. They seem to think that it ran very well and they were happy with the the attendance.

Great. Well, with that, I think we are through our agenda. And with that, I will accept.

May I make a motion to adjourn?

All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No.