City Council - Regular Meeting

Okay. Sorry, I didn't want to be the source of the feedback before I started speaking. It's okay.

All right, welcome everybody. Tonight is Tuesday, April 14th, 2026. This is our first meeting of April. Thanks everybody for your um cooperation in moving last week's meeting due to spring break. I hope those of you in attendance had a good one. Um, and if you didn't go on spring break, um, sorry we all had to work. Um, we're going to go ahead and start our, uh, start our meeting with the invocation. Um, and I didn't ask anybody. Is there anybody who wants to volunteer? If not, I'll take it. All right, I'll take that. And then followed by the pledge of allegiance, please join me. Dear Father, thank you for bringing us together today as a group of very concerned community members both here on the council and in the chambers and online is we're just concerned about making sure we do everything we can to make this a great robust financially stable and invigorating community for decades and generations to come. Amen.

Amen. I pledge 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. Okay. All right. We'll go ahead and call uh the meeting to order and start off with roll call. Looks like it should be an easy one tonight. Council member Daryl here. Council member Severs present. Council member Ball here. Mayor Pro Tim Dan happy to be here. Council member Clingler here. Council member Curts present. Council member Fischer here.

All right. We are all present and accounted for. Um we are up to agenda approval. Do we have any um requests for amendments to the agenda tonight? All right. Not hearing any. U Madame Mayor, I move the agenda as presented. Second. We have a second by Council Member Sears. All those in favor of approving the agenda as presented, please say I. I.

Any opposed? All right, motion passes 70. All right, we have approached our first session of citizen comments. Um, we do have several in in uh here in chambers. If there's anybody online who'd like to make a citizen comment, please send a note to our meeting host through the chat feature. We will get to the online comments uh after we do in person. Just remember this is truly a comment se session. Uh no feedback from the council, but if we do need to follow up with you, we have your contact information on the sheets. Uh threem minute time limit. any topic uh at this point. Do we want to address the the potential topic for next week or not at this time?

Perfect. Okay. Um so you have three minutes and I will hold everybody to that just to make sure it's fair for everyone. So first up is Lyn Atkins. Welcome.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. I was honored recently to serve as part of the CFP workg group. Our role was to validate the methodology used for prioritization and help create an objective project ranking system. Our city staff did an outstanding job. The level of service standards and supporting data for streets, traffic control, equipment, and parks were thorough, well supported, and clearly tied to growth with analysis from parametrics, city logic, and the parks and recreation master plan. Those sections of the CFP are solid, datadriven, and defensible to the public. However, I believe there is an opportunity to strengthen the plan further, and it is in the facilities category. specifically the library and the police department. I raise these two areas intentionally. First, the capital facilities planning guide book states that the CFP informs the public, developers, and decision makers about the level of service that will be maintained as growth occurs. Second, our city is growing quickly. That growth is increasing demand on public safety and library services and we need a clear understanding of how that translates into facility needs. Third level of service is about timing. It defines when a facility shifts from adequate to constrained and from constrained to deficit. That is what allows us to plan ahead instead of react. Fourth, the library and the police department are physically interconnected. So decisions in one area directly affect the other. They should be evaluated through a consistent framework. Without clear level of service standards in these areas, facilities will continue to lag behind growth that leads to strained

services, reduced access, and greater pressure on staff and infrastructure. When level of service is defined, it does three things. It improves prioritization. It increases transparency. And it strengthens funding decisions, whether through grants, donors, or voters. As the city grows, these services must grow with it. Otherwise, we create a system under strain where public safety, infrastructure, and library access are stretched beyond their intended capacity. So, my ask is straightforward. Develop clear datadriven level of service standards for the library and police department and use them to guide facility planning, prioritization, and timing within the CFP. I thank you for your time.

Thank you. Apologize for the timer. I had it here. be great. Okay, next up we have Tom Sberg. Welcome, Tom.

Good evening, neighbors, staff, and electeds. Tom Sberg, Liberty Lake River District. Ordinance 75 establishes the planning commission. In section five related to meetings and rules reads, under duties and responsibilities, the planning commission is an advisory body to the city council shall perform and have the following duties and responsibilities. Number one is to assist in the preparation of a comprehensive plan and development regulations. Further on, number seven says that we are to make monthly written and oral reports to the city council setting forth the progress in completing that work. The last time the city council had a report from the planning commission was on May 20th of 2025 by then chair Joe man. Because we have new city council members who haven't heard a report and other members may be interested in what we've done in the past 11 months. Here's a short recap. Since May of 2025, the planning commission has had 20 regularly scheduled commission meetings. After the comp plan kickoff, November 20, November 1st of 2024, we started having meetings twice a month in starting in January of 2025 in order to complete our extensive work on the comprehensive plan. We have had numerous presentations, discussions, and multiple revisions on the mandatory elements of the comp plan, including land use, housing, capital facilities plan, utilities, economic development, parks and recreation, and climate change and resiliency. Our staff and consultants have done an amazing job of presenting to us and then you huge amount of work in multiple workshops including tonight's on the 20-year capital facilities plan's going to be giving you. Thanks to Amy, Lance, Kathy, there's our staff and directors Ben Turner and Jen Camp for all your help in this. In addition to our regular meetings, members of the planning commission have been involved in five subcommittees.

design review, climate policy advisory team, capital facilities master plan, sidewalk master plan, and pedestrian bicycle safety, as well as participating in a town hall, farmers markets, community events, and holding joint meetings with the community engagement and parks and arts commission for a total of over 45 meetings in the last 11 months. I'm not telling you this in order for the planning commission to give you more reports. Most of you know me better than that. In fact, as soon as possible, after our work on the comp plan is completed, we will propose a language change in ordinance ordinance 75, removing the mandatory monthly reports and suggesting it be changed to periodic so that we're not violating our own ordinance. You're all welcome to attend our meetings and give your input and feedback. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you. And we'll make a special spot in the agenda for reports. Yes, we will. All right, next up, Mark Saba. Careful, he may ask for volunteers for the dunk tank. Got them all. Schedule's full.

Got them all. Um, notice there's some changes over at uh Legacy. Oh, by the way, I'm Mark Saba. I am a resident of Liberty Lake. Um, some changes over by the church. There's a fence up and it looks like city hall is going to be starting to form. With that said, I've got a couple suggestions when the new city hall opens up. One of them is I think I I I s I'm going to suggest this and this only a suggestion. I think we should have a wall where we have a picture of every current city council member who is in office along with the mayor. Just a thought. Okay. My other thought is I think we should have a memory wall in memory of we just uh we just had we lost uh Shane Brickner a while back and I think it would be nice if we had a plaque commemorating him. We also lost about a year ago two years ago I Chris help me out about a year ago. a couple.

Yeah, Bob Moore, another council member. And I think, you know, we should show recognition to those who did give their time and are no longer with us. And that's just a couple suggestions. I think, you know, if you want us to do over them and just just a thought, you know, something that I came up with, you know, thinking in my backyard. So, that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. And next up, Craig Fobes. Welcome. Thank you, mayor, council members. My name is Craig Phobes. I am a resident of the river district in the city and I here today to speak to um the capital facilities plan as relates to the size of the library that is indicated in the presentation uh that you will shortly see uh on the first uh or second slide of the presentation in the purpose slide it says purpose of the capital facilities plan is to quote make sure that quote planned facilities keep pace with expected growth. In the uh facilities slide in that you will see in the presentation, it lists the library uh at 16 to 19,000 square ft. For those of you ha who haven't curled up in front of the fireplace with the 2018 library analysis that the city hired, let me uh remind you where these numbers came from and how they were computed in an effort to have you realize why they should not still be here. The capital facilities plan starting on page 11 goes through three different methods for sizing up the library appropriately. The first method was a square foot per capita standard and it analyzed various sources for that standard. They ranged from half a square foot per capita to two square feet per capita and in that report they settled on one square foot per capita. They then looked at two other methods for

determining the size of the library. The second method was looking at cities of comparable size, cities in our region of comparable size to Liberty Lake and what size of libraries they had. The third method they looked at was a programmatic analysis. What are the programs the library has? What are the size of the collections? And what's the square footage needed for that? Then the consultants boiled that down and said, "We're going to use one square foot per capita as our standard." And people can disagree with that, but that's I'm not here to debate that standard. I'm here to have you apply it. These numbers 16,000 to 19,000 square feet were computed in the 2018 analysis based on the city population of 11,000 at the time and a projected maximum city buildout of 18,000 people. And then using the square foot standard and they went from 8/10 to one, they come up with these numbers. I'm going to have to stop you. Your three minutes is up. Sorry. Thank you. If you'd like to follow up, Craig, but they email to the council. I suggest that. Okay. Do we have anybody online?

We do not. I just make sure I got the everybody here. Yes, I did. And we do not have any written comments. Okay. So, we'll go ahead and move on to announcements, proclamations, and special presentations. First up, we have Spokane Conservation District. Hi again. How are you? Um, thank you uh, mayor and council members for allowing us some time this evening on your agenda. I'm Vicky Carter. I'm the director of the Spokane Conservation District. And with me tonight are two of my co-workers. Cole Laoy, who's helps me out with legislative and governmental affairs, and a very new employee um, but old friend, um, Mike Ben, who is our new conservation uh, uh, services manager. Um, I'm here tonight to talk to you a little bit about what we do and who we are. I've come to these meetings before, but it has been a while. So, a lot of new faces for me. Um, and also to tell you about our rates and charges proposal, which will be going before the board of county commissioners this August. And it's also an opportunity to invite the public out to a couple of meetings that we have coming up where they can be a part of this. I'm happy to pull into your parking lot tonight and see that you are a Tree City USA of 21 years. Congratulations. That's a program that we support through the conservation district. I have a slide presentation. Is that up or available?

Okay. Um well, while that's uh coming up, um just to Oh, perfect. Okay, we can go to the next one. Thank you. Um I'm just going to give some very brief conservation district history. So, if you don't know, conservation districts were born right out of the Dust Bowl. This, in fact, is a picture of Liberty Lake in 1932. And I'm just joking. Um, but you can see these black dust clouds rolled across the United States. There was federal legislation that came out in 1935. The state of Washington enacted that legislation in 1939. And in Spokane County, we formed our first conservation district under the state law in 1941. So, we've been around for a long time. We've actually been in Spokane Spokane County acting as your conservation district since 1941. Originally there were uh there were four districts in this county and in 73 we consolidated those. I wasn't there but it wasn't long after that that I came on board. Um so there across the US though there are over 3,000 conservation districts. 45 of them reside right here in Washington state. And you can go to the next one. In Spokane County we follow the county jurisdictional boundaries. That's not always true in you know across the entire landscape but it's it's widely uh true. But for us that means that we follow the the county uh geographical boundaries and that equates to over 1.1 million acres of land. Um and in that there's nearly 500,000 that's in agricultural lands. Over 400,000 or close to 400,000 in forested ground. It's also over 500 miles of rivers, streams, and tributaries and 68 lakes. Of course, one of which resides right here in your great city and one conservation district. We're governed by a board. It's called a board of supervisors. It's much like a board of directors. Three of those positions are elected and two of those are appointed by the state. Next slide. So, we're called under state law a special purpose district. And what that

means is that we provide services and that can be in the form of technical assistance, financial resources, and environmental education to our constituents and to all of the land owners and land users of Spokane County. And we do this all on a voluntary approach. And what that means is that we have no regulatory or enforcement authority. We do this all by the goodwill of people that want to do stewardship on their land or lands. And that means both private and public. So that could be that we're working with the city and we often do. We've done projects with the city of Liberty Lake. Um I was around back in the early 90s during the timber projects that were held out here. Um we've worked with BJ Adams or Adams on a number of different projects with um some of the water resources. And there's been uh we've done our our um trout in the classroom release days out at Liberty Lake. So, lots of different ways that we have been involved with your city as well as Tree City USA. You can go to the next one. What that looks like on the landscape for a lot of this is um some of our programs. These are just some just a few of the many that we offer, but our tree and shrub sale. This just happened last weekend for us. Um, if you're not familiar with it, a lot of people know us as the Tree Cell People, but we have been putting out over a 100,000 seedlings every year since 1974. It started with the World's Fair, the Expo, and it was part of an Earth Day event that we held, and we have not missed a year. So, 52 years running. It's our longest running program and still doing it today. If you missed out last weekend and it was so much fun down at our property, we still have trees available. You can all come in. There's still great things to choose from. Um, from there we also offer technical assistance. As I mentioned, we have all kinds of programs that help land owners. One of which is um a fire uh firewise assessment. So those land owners that might be in an area susceptible to wildfire. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they live out in the woods. As we all know, wildfire is around us everywhere and including in a lot of our urban areas. And this year is going to be particularly interesting with the

conditions that we're experiencing with the low snow pack and uh it's going to be expected to be a hotter than normal summer. So, um, these are things that we can offer our land owners, and we do this for free. Um, river restoration, this is a big one. This is where our big construction projects come in. And I can honestly say, I've been around now with the district for 36 years, we are seeing the numbers change in Hangman Creek. If those of you that are familiar with Hangman Creek, we're actually starting to see numbers change, which is so great. And some of that is because we're able to get in these very large um multi-mile uh restoration projects that are now connected one upon the other. So they're actually making a difference. Um but we also work up in Spokane, the Spokane River wershed. Um and then across the different lakes. Um Newman Lake is one that we're actively working in right now. Um but it it's it's just across the entire county. And then again I mentioned environmental education. We work with everybody from we call it K to the grandparents. So, um, we have backpacks that are on site on our property that we check out for families on five different natural resource subject matters. They're fantastic. But we also just enacted a new program with the Community Colleges of Spokane. It's called NRAP, Natural Resources Apprenticeship Program. And we actually pay for students 18 to 24 years old to go into a two-year program at the community college in one of the five natural resource programs that they have. and then we employ them for the two summers in between and turn them out with an education and as a workforce uh career. So, it's a fantastic program. We're just starting our second cohort of students and um it's one that I think will, you know, benefit widely across our region and hopefully a lot of these these people will stay in this area and benefit us through their work that they do. All right, the biggest question that we get and I'm sure that many of you are wondering this. Next slide. How are you funded? It's the biggest question we

get. If you look that the the largest part of this pie chart is 76% nearly 76% is grant funded. We've become masters of writing grants and that is because conservation districts typically do not have what we call stable funding. We do not have a source a stable source from the state. We're not a part of a state line budget you know so there's no direct funds that come to us. So we've become masters of writing grants and awards. Um there's about 10% that comes from non-grant funds and those are some of the programs that we do have like our workshops and conferences and events that we hold our tree sales. So that brings in about 10% of our budget but the rest of that is made up from about 15% is rates and charges and that is what I am actually here to talk to you about tonight and what that means. So you can go to the next slide. This actually started back in 1991 with a couple of our own county commissioners here in Spokane as well as some state legislators. Uh Bob McCathlin was one of them. I was trying to think of all of them. Um but they realized that conservation districts were really lacking funding and they went to the state legislature and they asked for what was called an assessment. And an assessment is not a tax. It is different. It is based on it's a it's a flat fee. It's not based on a property value. And at the time the uh state legislature in 1991 they passed that and Spokane Conservation District was the very first district in Washington state to receive that. Today, out of the 45, I think we have 22 districts that do have an assessment or what's now called rates and charges, and the rest of those do not. And there's reasons for that. Um, just depending on their county makeup, and a lot of them have a lot of federal lands. Um, but we were lucky enough to do that. And that was a gamecher for us because that allowed us to be able to take that funding and match it. And that's where we became so successful in that grant writing because as you guys know, and I know you have a lot of grants too, they all require match. So free money is never free. Um and sometimes that matches 10% but there are

grants that it's up to 50%. So once we were able to do that we were able to bring in larger amounts of money and get more conservation on the ground. So from 1991 to 1998 that was $3 per parcel that we received. 1998 the the county commissioners they are the ones that govern this. So we don't even have the ability to set the rate oursel. The county commissioners raised it to $5. In 2014, the state legislature changed the wording to a rates and charge rather than assessment. And they did that because it just better described how we offer our services because some of them are direct benefits to a land owner and some of them are indirect. And an assessment was not the the correct legal term for that. So they changed that. Um and when they did that, they also said, and by the way, conservation districts, you can go up to $15 per parcel. We did not do that. We waited until 2019 when our when our um rates and charges expired, went back to the board of county commissioners and they increased us to $10,5 to 10. So, we're here tonight to talk to you because we're going to be going back to the county commissioners in 2027, but all of this work has to be done now um and asking to move from 10 to 15. Just this last year at the state legislature, they moved that rate up to $25 with an inflationary clause so that they don't have to open up the legislation again, you know, in another 5 to 10 years. So, we're going to be asking our board of county commissioners for an increase going from $10 to $15 per parcel. And you can go to the next slide and I'll show you what that looks like. So, well, let's first talk about this is that leveraging. Um, so for every dollar that we bring in, and right now it's about $2 million, we're able to leverage that and we're able to um our return on that is about a 5 to9x return on those dollars. So our annual budget goes from $2 million to like this year was $16.8 million. That is all money that's going directly on

the ground in conservation programs. So that is why Spokane County is known nationwide for the programming that we have and the services that we're actually able to put on the ground. But what that looks like just this last year and if you want to go to the next slide please that was um that helped us do over 200 of those wildfire assessments that I talked about where we actually go to a landowner's home and u prepare an assessment for them. Over a thousand residents attended our educational conferences and workshops. Um we have a loan program for um farmers and producers to purchase no till conservation equipment. So that equipment is very expensive to the tune of you know a quarter million to a half million dollars. And this is a lowinterest loan program that they're able to access because we're able to leverage that money for them um and convert from that conventional tillage equipment to conservation tillage equipment. That's also what's helping Hangman Creek is we're not disturbing the soil um in some of the ways that have been done in the past. Um again, well over a 100,000 seedlings planted and in um up just including this last year, we have changed over 27 miles of repairarian habitat opening up what we call fish passage barriers. So allowing fish to pass through these old culverts that needed to be replaced. So that's one of the construction projects that we do. So that's just just a sampling of some of the work that we do. you can change. Next slide, please. So, again, that that current rate that we're at right now is $10 and we're proposing to go to 15. The monthly impact to a land owner, to a person paying um this on their on their um annual taxes is 42 cents per month. And I like to break it down this way because I am positive that each one of you could go to your car right now and find that in your cup holder. And that's exactly what it is, is 42 cents. And when you look at that and you realize the bang for the buck that we get and the fact that we are able to get that much conservation

making our county and our our you know our cities that much better of a place to live and provide that much more public safety in terms of wildfire water quality and some of the other great benefits that we bring. And you can go to the next one. I probably Yeah. So there it is right there. 42 cents safer forest, cleaner water, resilient communities. Um and again I heard mayor you talk about um in your invocation about having you know a healthier and better more um robust future for generations to come and that's what we believe in as well. And one more if you will um just putting it all in pictures for you. Um this is just some of the ways we serve our community. up in the top left, that's a picture of some of those NRAP students out on a project. And they are just they're learning all kinds of um job skills in both forestry, urban forestry, water resources, wildlife biology, and small farm and acreage. Um we're the ones that owns on the farm. If some of you are familiar with that, that's up on the South Hill. It's a veterans program that we uh started in 2015 where it's a transitional program for veterans to leave their military career and go into agriculture. and it's a training farm that we started. So that's that middle picture. Um the next one over on the top is our tree sale. There's, you know, literally hundreds of thousands of seedlings that we package up and get out to the community. Uh we do field days with farmers bringing in uh renowned um experts from all over the world to help them with some of the problems that we're experiencing in the Pacific Northwest. Down in the bottom left corner, that's the scalehouse market. Have any of you attended or been there yet? The scale house market. So, we bought the property on the corner of 8th and Havana in 2017. It was the old Spokane Rocks product site. It's an old rock quarry. It's 50 acres. The conservation district bought that and we are restoring it and turning it back into this beautiful conservation campus. And one of the things that was left over was an called the scale house. And it was this building that was 16 ft wide

and 165 ft long. and they used to run the trucks through it with a scale in the bottom to weigh out the asphalt or the rock or whatever they were loading the trucks with. It's a it was just an old concrete building, but it was as a good conservationist, we did not have the heart to tear it down. And so we put it in our master plan as an incubator business, not knowing what that would be someday. And today it's turned into this very vibrant um yearround permanent market where we now have over 125 small farms and vendors in there year round. Um the public has been able to come in, we host events there. Um so not only were we helping these farmers and small businesses um be able to have a place to market, we have in just the first six months, we brought in over a million too in revenue. That was $40,000 in local sales tax that was collected that gets to stay in our community and not sent out uh somewhere else. Created 15 new jobs. And we had over 50,000 visitors tracked. Um and um twothirds of those were not from here. Those are people that are coming in as true visitors to uh Spokane and the Spokane area. So uh for tourism and being able to showcase um the the great place that we live, we're just so pleased and so proud. On May 30th, we celebrate our one-y year anniversary. And I would love to see you out there. So, come visit if you haven't been out there before. And then, of course, a couple pictures of conferences that we hold out in Center Place and just again the numerous numerous programs that we have for land owners where we are out there on site side by side, um giving um advice or um cost share opportunities, uh technical services, etc. And I think I have one more. We have a couple of opportunities coming up for the public. And this is what I wanted to uh let your constituents know. On May 12th at 6 PM, we'll be holding our own public hearing and public meeting where I'll be presenting pretty much the same thing, but an opportunity for people to come in

and provide testimony, ask questions, um get to know us a little bit better, see our beautiful property if you haven't been there before. And again, we'll do the same thing, a repeat on June 16th at 2 p.m. And um just invite, uh you all out. And then we'll take all of that information to our county commissioners in August. And that is it. I don't know if you were gonna allow me any questions tonight or not. Um I'm happy to answer any questions from council members if you had them. We got council member Ball and then mayor prom. Okay. Well, I think this is fantastic and I'm happy to pay my 42 cents. Thank you. Um and so question on this NRAP natural resource. What was the

apprenticeship? Apprenticeship. So, so they get two years of college paid for at one of the community college at the Spokane Community College SEC. Okay. And they have to study conservation. Yes. There's five programs offered and then they get a job or during the summers between, you know, as they go to school uh the the winter or fall, winter, and spring and then the summer we employ them paid. They get a paid internship. Okay. Yeah. So, our first cohort's just graduating this year and over half of them already have jobs in the industry moving out. Um, so we're we're very pleased and we're just now taking applications for our second cohort to start in June.

Okay. And then um what was the other question? Oh, back to the scale house. Yeah, I drove up there but I didn't have time to go in it, but I am curious. So,

well, if you um come um please stop by the conservation district office. We're right next door. Ask for me. I'd love to give you a personal tour. We have a commercial kitchen on site. Um we have state-of-the-art equipment for those uh for the vendors. One of the things that is so um unique to this is that they can actually refrigerate their product right there. They're not having to haul it home in coolers and keep it at temp or you know lose product because of viability. Um so but they also have within our refrigeration room each refrigerator um it can convert either to a freezer or refrigeration and each one of them locked so they have control over it. There's no crosscontamination. There's no borrowing butter from the neighbor. There's you know none of those things that happen. Um uh so it's just a it's just a comp it's a game changer honestly and it's allowed people which is really interesting to literally scale their business to the right size and and all of that being done under the guise of it being the scale house. So it's just really cool.

Thank you. It looks cool. Yeah. Yeah. The scale house market. Yeah. So Oh, so is it the same vendors all the time in No. Um we do have our we do have our regulars um you know our anchor tenants but we also have a lot of pop-ups. So, for this last weekend when we held the tree sale, um we have our normal there's 125 vendors in there, but we expanded to 140 because we had that many popups and then over the summer on uh Saturdays and Sundays there will be additional um produce vendors that will come and do fresh produce as well. Okay, thank you. Great. We got Mayor Prom and then council member. Sure. Uh how are capital projects selected or planned by the conservation district?

As far as the ones that that are building, well, we got kicked out. So, we used to be down at the fairgrounds, if you recall, that old building with the um uh the master gardener building. Most people know it, right next to the baseball field. We were there. It was owned by the county. And we um we had a 25-year lease. Um we started asking for more space because we were running out of space about two years before our lease expired. And they were not willing to negotiate anything. And pretty soon, people started showing up with tape measures and cameras and briefcases. And we thought, they're not renewing our lease. So, we started looking around um for property and it just happened because the vets farm is located up off the um old Paloo highway. I used to drive from our building onto um Havana and 8 and I c I passed this property probably a thousand times. It has the concrete fencing and the big iron gates and I always drove by wondering what was back there because you can't really see back there. And so one day, it's one of those one day stories. One day I drove in, I went, "Oh my gosh, what is this place?" And it happened to be winter. It was December. And it was just this beautiful rolling hills. Well, come spring after we'd already purchased it, I found out those were rolling piles of asphalt which made uh that was great because we were able to trade some of that off. But so we were in need to answer your question for a capital project. We were in need of a facility for us. Um

I was more referring to the improvements along Utah Creek. Projects throughout the county. They're improvements in the conservation, right? I'm curious about, you know, how they're selected and planned for water.

Um, so those go through what we call our water resource team and they're evaluated. So it's based off we we really do look at unfortunately in the world of grants and this is not a secret. It is the tail wagging the dog. So it's what's the source, what project do you have to fit? So, we do uh water resource inventories um routinely and so we know kind of what's out there and what needs to be done and we just kind of we keep a a list a schedule of that and then when the right funding comes along we're able to plug it in and go okay we've got a project for that. So that's something that we meet every week to discuss those projects. Sometimes it's, you know, it can be a more of an emergency need like we have a land owner that, you know, maybe they lost a significant amount of stream bank and um due to a flooding situation and it's like, are there emergency funds? Can we get in there sooner, you know, for the the good of the water column. So, yeah.

Council member Klinger, I think you had your hand up. Yeah. I just want to say great presentation. Uh your passion uh for what you do really comes through. Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that. Also, um just curious about your education. First of all, I would love if you expanded it between 18 to 20 from 18 to 24, right? Yeah. To uh some like me when I retire. We have a program for you. Okay. Called Volunteer. That sounds like so much fun. Uh and then do you go into like elementary schools?

Oh, absolutely. We have a full-time environmental education coordinator and she is in the schools 100%. Yes. And we also do a lot of work with homeschools. We bring them onto the property. Um we're going to have a huge event in May for fifth graders. Um it's called a forestry experience. So we're busing u we find funding to get kids onto our property and we'll be doing um a whole week of of education with fifth graders. So yeah, we big part of what we do. Are you working with Liberty Creek over here right now or do you know? I can't say that. I know that, but that is our education coordinator and I know she is involved with Liberty Lake to some, you know, there I know for a fact that we have released um some of our our tanks into Liberty Lake. So, I could use that because

Okay.

Yeah. My wife just they did the um waste management over there this last week. Kids absolutely loved it. Yes. They brought over a truck and stuff like that. And I think that's where you have a great beginning impact. We are such believers in that. Um on our property, we do have a preschool, so it's for um 12 month to six years old and we have 84 children in it. Um so we've got kids on the property every day. Um they're in a what they call a community-based nature inspired method. And so those kids are outside in the mud trudging through the ponds, looking at trees, um you know, navigating the forests. Um it's it's phenomenal. Yeah. But we are out in the public schools as well. So, I want to be part of that program when I get really old.

Okay. Awesome. Great. My Alzheimer's phase, I want to come in.

So, come to our meeting in May and um I'd love to, and I mean this very seriously, and my two cohorts will tell you, I give tours all the time. I love to tell people um about what we're doing and show them opportunities for our community. And I do appreciate the support. Um we are, and I, you know, we are an unsung hero. Um and I don't just mean us, I mean conservation districts across the landscape. We've been so busy and there's not because we don't have stable funding. We don't have we haven't in the past had great ways to promote our work and so often it goes unnoticed and un you know and not really talked about but we are behind the scenes with the land owners in step with them um to be able to get conservation on the ground.

Yeah. Is there anybody else? And if I ask the audience to not have the cross talk because it interferes with what our people online can hear. Thank you. Yeah. And and as far as um the public, please uh those two meetings are open to you and we'd love to see you there. And if you've used any of our services, we'd appreciate a a testimony from you. Great. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you. By the way, my daughter's a Liberty Lake business owner and and residents. So, plug this into anything. Um she's just right down the street here. It's called Tint Brow Studio. Yep. Thank you. All right. Next up, we have a proclamation for Arbor Day. We'll turn to Michelle to start.

In 1872, the Nebraska Board of Agriculture established a special day to be set aside for the planting of trees. And this holiday called Arbor Day was first observed with the planting of more than a million trees in Nebraska. And Arbor Day is now observed throughout the nation and the world. And trees can be a solution to combating climate change by reducing the erosion of our precious top soil by wind and water, cutting heating and cooling cost, moderating the temperature, cleaning the air, producing lifegiving oxygen, and providing habitat for wildlife. And trees are renewable resource, giving us paper, wood for our homes, fuel for our fires, and countless other wood products. And trees in our city increase property values, enhance the economic vitality of business areas and beautify our community. And trees wherever they are planted are a source of joy and spiritual renewal. All right. Before we move on, I'll entertain a motion from the council to approve the proclamation.

Madame Mayor, I move support of the proclamation. Second. A second by council member Severs. Those in favor of supporting the proclamation, please say I. I. Any opposed? All right. Okay, not hearing any. Now, therefore, I, Chris Kaminskus, the mayor of the city of Liberty Lake, do hereby proclaim. We did this last year. There's no date on here. What is the official date of Arbor Day? April 24th.

Okay, give me just a second. Do hereby proclaim April 24th, 2026 as Arbor Day in the city of Liberty Lake. And I urge all citizens to celebrate Arbor Day and to support efforts to protect our trees and woodlands. And further, I urge all citizens to plant trees to gliden the heart and promote the well-being of this and future generations. All right. So, I got that signed. And um is there anybody here to receive it? Our master arborist is here to receive it. And where'd you go? Oh, there you're surprise.

You and thank you for all your hard work. It's been a great uh great having you on staff. We look forward to lots of Okay, I'm muted. Every year you We have trees. I'm glad my card and I believe our tree planting date will be mentioned during the city administrator report for upcoming events. All right. Next we have volunteer recognition.

All right. Thank you, mayor. So, tonight we are here to recognize uh one volunteer. But before we get to that, I just uh feel necessary to point out that even throughout the things that have already happened tonight, you've heard the importance of volunteers in general. You've heard from a couple of them. As I scan the audience tonight, I see members of boards and commissions. Um and there are others who are volunteering by association indirectly uh with our service clubs that support what we do at the city. Jandy has a cadre of volunteers and when you get her annual report you see those hours um reported there. And so uh all that to say without those folks volunteering their time and energy um we would not be able to do nearly as much service provision as we are able to with their contributions. And so uh one that we want to specifically recognize tonight um is Jooko Kais Jooko Jooko you met uh initially at the January 20th meeting. he was already working for us doing some legislative analysis and tracking bills that were going through the legislature. Um, and so I'll ask Jooko to come forward. Um, and if you all remember this year the even number years are short session. So we were only in session for 60 days but in those 60 days over 1500 bills were introduced. And so it's not just the bills that are introduced. They go through multiple amendments. There are engrossed versions. They cross houses. And so all of that has to be tracked and aligned with our specific um legislative priorities. And and Jooko helped us, keep all of that uh in frame. Um let us know when there were opportunities to testify before certain committees on some of our higher priority bills. And so without his work, uh we would not have been able to accomplish that. And so with that, I'd like to invite Jooko forward so we can give him a letter of appreciation and take a photograph. So Jooko, come on up.

Okay, up next we have our reports and inquiries. First up for city council reports and inquiries. Do we have anybody any council members like to make a report? U mayor prom and then council member evolve.

Sure. Um the Friday the 27th of March I attended the AWC council leader exchange in Ellensburg. This was a gathering of uh council presidents and mayor promps from across the state of Washington. It was a great opportunity to um compare notes and to understand the challenges and the opportunities that the other cities have to deal with. Um that's always I think the most int you know interesting exchange. Um uh there was the traditional introductions or reviews of parliamentary procedure and rules and procedures um uh which I'm going to try and exercise a little bit more of tonight. So look forward to helping the mayor in support of ensuring that all members are heard uh during speaking. I think that's an important action. Um uh in the exchange what resonated I offered was our upcoming town hall related to micromobility or e- scooters. Uh that suddenly generated I mean you know immediate attention from all across the room. So, it's not just our community that's dealing with that as an issue. It's really all across the state. Um, following that, then on Tuesday the 31st, um, I joined the safe and healthy Spokane task force in a walking tour of both Geer County Corrections and the downtown jail. Um, it was kind of interesting to sit in the admin building out of Geer and the warden to look across the table and say, "So, how many of you been here before?" I tried to keep that low-key. Um but um it was really an eye openener to understand what actually our conditions are within our jails and to understand it gives you context. Um this was not the only event. In fact um the task force is trying to arrange for such events monthly and if you want like to as an elected uh I would have a contact information for you to reach out to. I just think it's it's very valuable as your role in leadership to recognize how we deal with incarcerations throughout our county. So, um yeah, I would just highly recommend it for those who have the opportunity. Um back there at the um AWC event, one of the things I'm I've was kind of inspired by, uh City of Maple Valley is well, tomorrow having a volunteer and service expo. Um um kind

of a trade show style event in which all the service clubs throughout the community are invited to stand and table, so to speak, and to meet and greet and to network and to, you know, try and engage with other people who potentially want to volunteer. There are many people in our midst who are looking for ways that they can get involved and so to have such an event to be able to organize I think could be pretty good. So we're looking for a couple of dates and I'm organizing with a lot of the clubs and service groups out and I look forward to being able to put something like that on. Yeah. So thanks.

Great. Well, I'm glad they finally um put together something for mayor mayors prom and and vice mayors across the the state. They haven't had that before and I've got the mayor's exchange coming up and this one this year is actually focused. They've we have our mayor's exchange and then they've added another one um for mayor for strong mayor. So, it'll be interesting to have that. So, I'm glad they're adding some more different ways for our councils to uh to get some education. All right, Council Member Ball.

Um it's been a long time since we all met, so I've been busy. I've got three separate reports and I'll try to get through this as quickly as possible, but um it's all pretty cool stuff. Um March 24th through the 26 I went through C training which stands for community emergency response team. Contrary to what Spokane County Emergency Management will tell you, Spokane County is the only county in the state of Washington that does not have a cert team. That absolutely floored me. And I verified this with Mayor Terry Cooper of Medical Lake who had to guide her city through the horrendous gray fire in 2023. Her advice was um city should have at least $300,000 on hand which will be needed in the first five days of an event. Liberty Lake also needs an emergency response person on staff and that's my opinion, but I think it's um worthy. Um um CERT, if you're not familiar with it, I won't read this whole binder, don't worry. Um it's a property that uh program that is nationally supported, locally implemented. Um teaches people how to better prepare themselves for hazards that may affect their communities. Um, CERT trains in trains you in basic in basic disaster response skills such as team organization, disaster medical operations, fire safety, and light search and rescue. Um, it was developed by the LAPD um after they observed what happened in the um disasters in Mexico and Japan in 1985. While untrained volunteers can be very effective in aiding others, the lack of training puts them at risk for injury or death. So that's why it's important to have this training. Um volunteers, cert volunteers who do not encounter a need in their immediate area, like if there's

nothing going on here, they can travel to other disasters like Red Crosswood for example. Um, at any rate, um, my instructor was a gentleman named Celso Wrangler. He is the only teacher right now in the state. He's the state director of CERT. He's a veteran. He was a Delta Force uh, Delta Force in the army. He saw combat. He got shot in very and very in short, he is a very badass guy, but very kind and a great teacher. Um, the other students in my class included several retired nurses. Not a shock. Um, several veterans. In fact, uh, our own Mike Willis here of Liberty Lake was in the class with me. He's not here tonight. Um, it anyway, it was it was really fun. A lot of curious citizens were involved, too. Um, but what's sad is that and sad fun 87% of C volunteers are over 60. We need some younger people. Um, other problems for us besides not having a search team, and this is another one that I just couldn't believe, there's only one chainsaw team on this side of the Cascades. Now, that might seem funny to you, chainsaw team, but it's very important in fire. Um, additionally, Washington is a no clause state, which means you can't just, you know, something's happening, jump in there. You have to have the knowledge and equipment. It you have to be organized. Um, this class, what I can say, it it was a lot in 72 hours. Um, we learned proper, it was three days, proper use of a fire extinguisher. I know now how to put a splint on an injured person, how to get them on a stretcher, open their airway. Um, just basic stuff. Um, in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, needs

are often greater than what professional emergency personnel can provide. Um, and you're not going to have um, you know, a Spokane Valley Fire Department at your door immediately. That's where we become a vital link in the emergency service chain. Um, certain volunteer certain volunteers are not equipped or trained to respond to acts of terrorism, but you know, it's the old adage, if you see something, say something. At any rate, I'm almost done here. Selzo is putting together a team for Spokane County. They need 30 people. He goes all over the state doing this training. So, and he's the only one. So, he talked me into learning to become a trainer, which I'm doing next week. Why he has so much confidence in me is a mystery because during our first final disaster simulation where he made me a team leader, two people on my team died u on my watch. I I apologize for

revisit that splint training.

Huh. Yeah. No, it was the screaming woman. Oh my god, she freaked me out. She was an actor, you know. Oh my hips, my baby. Where's my baby? And I just lost it. She was so loud. Anyway, there will be no basic training until fall for obvious reasons because it's fire season in the summer and they're busy. Um, one of the last things he said, and this was profound, you guys are a problem. meaning the the county and elected leaders over here that don't seem to get it. That's because every time there's a fire, he has to pull from his teams on the other side of the state to come over here and help us. So, we really need this. Um, I strongly urge anyone interested to take the next training, most likely in the fall, or at least spread the word. It's just a matter of time before we get hit with something, most likely a fire, but not if, but when. Okay. So, that was my CERT training. Now, my second report, um I went to the um what was it called? Um the Spokane River Forum. Um the keynote speaker was Lisa Seals with the Dashes River Conservancy. Um her presentation was interesting because the Dashes River Basin is very similar to ours. Um, but I'll just I'll skip through some of this, but one of the speakers, uh, John Portello, he's an expert in quantitative hydraology and numerical modeling, and he wasn't surprised when the Spokane River went dry last summer as it gets a little hard to describe this, but he said the flow from the dam was normal, the postfalls down, but what happened is from the dam to Sullivan Road, most of the aquifer is 50 to 100 ft below the riverbed. But in the area that went dry,

the riverbed elevation um drops and so it intersects with the aquafer. So the river is underground. So really um it wasn't dry. It was just there under the water. He said the usage by customers is not the reason it went dry. Rather climate change, less snowpack, the natural system all have to do with it. This I know this is contrary to what the gal from the Spokane River keepers told us and I can't address that but um Mr. Porchello had only good things to say about Liberty Lake sewer and water. He's very impressed and he said that Jeremy Jenkins with Liberty Lake water and sewer and water is the president of the Spokane Aquafer joint board and he's real impressed with them and this was a very well attended event very well attended and just a few things these are just some headlines recent headlines Washington declares fourth drought emergency in a row and keep these in your mind has entered water bankruptcy UN says so I'm just you know kind passionate about these things. Lastly, I went to the regional council of government's gig. I thought you'd be there.

I was supposed to. I had I've we've going through some things at work. I couldn't get away. Oh, okay. So, Mary, formerly CUNY Brooks, was kind of the uh head head person, you know, taking care of all the introducing the speakers and so forth. But um you kind of Yeah, you I missed out. I wasn't able to attend

the thing the same day and I I wish I'd known. But anyway, it was well attended, too. There was a lot of uh various council members there from Spokane, the valley here. Well, no, I was it not for us, but um yeah, it was interesting. Um so, you know, more about that, but yeah, they really want to get this thing going for the safe and healthy uh Spokane and it might involve another prison, a new prison, and and uh you know, that could be coming up again for a ballot item. So, anyway, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. busy.

All right. Do we have any other council reports? Okay. Next up, uh mayor's report. Um just again, I was kind of go through the litany of what's coming up. Um uh there are regular Spokane um county elected officials meeting. We're kneedeep into GMA things still. Obviously, that will continue to go through all of comp plans. GSI regional advocacy board um meeting is coming up this week. There is a ribbon cutting for Ziply Fiber. Though they don't have an office here, they're having a little get together this Thursday, I believe it is. Um at Fieldhouse um pizza just to say welcome to all the work they're doing around. Um there's a also Thursday is packed with um things for the city multi the multiare elected officials listening session. Uh I have not seen the full agenda so it'll be interesting. Um I'm hoping my timing works out that I can attend that. Uh we are meeting with Spokane Valley here in another week or so to revisit the uh our progress on this the joint sub area plan. So Mark's been working working hard and Amy and the whole staff have been working hard with Spokane Valley. So we're getting together on where we are in that looking at um most likely asking for an increase in the Harvard road mitigation fee or impact fees. Um we have the Arbor Day um plantings coming up and I'll reserve that for Mark to um with the date. I'm on the AWC nominating committee for the upcoming board of directors. So, we have that meeting coming up to review the applicants. And then, as usual, the last Wednesday of the month, the Spokane, Greater Spokane Valley Chamber of Commerce board meeting. And uh the new director actually starts, I don't know if you guys have seen that press release, but she starts here the beginning of May. So, looking forward to meeting her. So, that that's a lot. There's more coming. Um but that's that's enough since we only have a we have a meeting next week. So, um that's it for me. city administrator report.

Right. Thank you, mayor. Um, as Shane is pulling up the report for you to see, the first item on there that you will see when it pops up is tomorrow is tax day. So, get your returns filed and make sure you get your PF1s in to see.

Very important. Beyond that, um, we have a couple of things coming up. Uh, the mayor mentioned, uh, we do have a tree planting workshop. This is kind of a pre-arbor day event. Um, I I mentioned this because uh Dan is no longer here, but this is an event that requires registration. I believe that we still have slots open. Um, and so if you're interested in going out and learning how to plant trees properly, where they go, uh, what species fit uh, with what climates, depths, all of that. Um Dan will be teaching all of that at this tree planting workshop on the 18th, which is Saturday at Pavilion Park from 10:00 a.m. uh to 12 pm. We don't have it on this calendar, but but beyond that, we'll have another opportunity to brief everyone at next week's meeting, but we will be doing our annual Arbor Day tree planting out at Pavilion Park on the 24th. And so look for some additional information on that. I'll brief that next week and we'll have it on our socials and website as well. Um and then uh the following Saturday, April 25th, is our annual clean green and bulky waste cleanup event that is uh sponsored by WM. This is for uh Liberty Lake residents who are subscribers to the garbage and recycle services with WM. Uh they would have mailed a coupon to you in your bill at some point over the last quarter. Um, that coupon is required to enter and it's got all of the details on it about what you can bring, what you can't bring, if you have too much of one thing. Uh, they will have Goodwill on site. They can take some stuff there. Um, but it's got all of the details on there. And then if you have, uh, questions beyond that, uh, residents can call either WM or they can call the city and we can get you set up uh, with answering any questions that you may have about that event. Um, beyond that, uh, Tuesday, April 28th, we've got the community town hall that was mentioned

previously. We will be talking specifically about, uh, ebikes, motorized scooters, and golf carts. Um, and so we're expecting a large turnout for that. That's going to be over at trailhead from 6 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. And then finally, we have a safety and resilience fair. This is associated with our comprehensive plan development. Um, this will be an event uh again that is over in Trail Head in the Rotary Room. Uh, the Spokane Valley Fire Department will be there. Our community development staff will be there. A Vista will be there and some others to help kind of build some more awareness. Um, and you heard some of that from the conser uh the conservation district earlier. We'll be talking about fire resiliency and just awareness and and safety and a variety of of aspects. Um, that is going to be 400 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday. Sorry, Thursday, April 30th. Uh before we move on to the reports, are there any questions about those reminders before we move on? All right. And with that, uh we've got a couple of employee recognition items that we want to bring before you. And the first one, I'm going to invite Deputy Chief Morgan up to the podium. Um he's got something to share with you about our school resource officer. Um and uh Darren, take it away.

Oh, thank you, Mark. Mayor, council members, it's a pleasure to be here tonight. Uh, so one of our supervisors had the opportunity to uh present an award to our W cops, which is the union that represents our guild. And in that, I'm just going to read the commendation and what they wrote back. And it's a combination of excellence of service for officer David Howard. And to be honest, David is not here tonight because he's still working on an injury and he should be back in tomorrow. For those of you who aren't aware, he actually tore his bicep and he should be coming back in tomorrow. So, he should be good to go. But that's why he's not here today. And that's a big bicep.

It is a big bicep. He is a large man. I'm not even going to deny that. But, uh, they wrote on the ha on behalf of the Washington Council of Police and Sheriff's boards of directors. It is an honor to recognize you with this letter of commendation. This recognition comes the following with your nomination by your supervisor reflecting the respect and appreciation you have earned through your service. Your impact within your agency and community is farreaching. Since joining the Liberty Lake Police Department, you have brought a high level of skill and professionalism to your role. Strengthening your department through your expert expertise in firearms, defensive tactics, instructions, and your willingness to share that knowledge has directly contributed to the preparedness of those you serve alongside. In your role as a school resource officer, have you demonstrated the influence of law enforcement can have beyond traditional duties. At Ridgelon High or Ridgeline High School, you have become a trusted and approachable presence for the students and staff alike. We learned of the relationshipships that you have built and the students seek your guidance and mentorships with speaks to the character and your ability to connect with others in a meaningful way. Your involvement in the track and field coach invol involvement, excuse me. Your involvement as a track and field coach, I don't know why it says involvement twice, sorry, with the Police Activities League further reflects your commitment to investing in the lives of our young people. We applaud your dedication to foster positive relations between law enforcement and the next generation. On the behalf of WOOPS, we recommend you for this professionalism and your leadership and your continued service to others. signed by the president Tracy Chris Tracy, awards committee chair, uh, Tyrina Rose, and executive director, Teresa Taylor.

I just wanted to share that. Thank you.

Thanks, Darren. A second item I'd like to share with you, and I'm going to invite uh, Jandy to come up to the podium, and I'll let her explain some of the things that um, that she went through with respect to this, but I'm going to give you a little bit of a description. Um, this is our second year of being able to put one of our executive team members through the professional development academyy's high-erforming uh, leaders course. Uh, so this is a 12-week course that's broken down into four modules and they go over things like leadership mindset and positive engagement, leading effective change, communication and collaboration, and then leading high performing teams. Um, one of the, I think, benefits beyond just the coursework itself is the opportunity to be placed in a cohort of peers from around the country, um, that are in similar lines of work. And I'll let Jandy address uh, some of what that cohort um, worked on throughout the program. Uh, but this is part of our uh, broader commitment, which you'll hear more about next week. we'll give you a briefing on some other things that we're thinking about to invest in our folks from a leadership development perspective. And so last year, Jen Camp went through this program. This year, Jandy went through the program. And we would expect to be able to put uh someone through on an annual basis going forward. And so, Jandy, if you'd like to provide some additional comments and and just maybe describe uh the cohort and and some of the uh folks that you were able to work with, uh be our guest. Good evening, council. Like Mark said, I had an opportunity to do the high performance leadership academy. Um, I started it in January. It's a 10-week program. Um, it ended up being about four to six hours of work a week, so it is pretty intense. Um, I found it incredibly valuable. Um, I was in a cohort with other people who were in

city government. Um, and all of the members of my cohort were in the um, kind of Pacific Northwest part of the United States. So, it was really helpful to be able to we would meet weekly and have a discussion for about an hour. Um, I had about eight other people in my cohort. So, it was small groups and we had different questions and discussions that we're able to go through each week. It's really valuable to hear how other cities might be managing things, what struggles people are having, what successes people are having. Um, it was just I found it incredibly valuable versus just, you know, looking at a screen, watching videos and answering questions. Like that is valuable, but I I I find the most value out of being able to interact and connect with other people in my cohort. So, it was incredibly valuable and kind of forces you to look at your leadership style, what things you're doing well, what things you can improve on, um, and just kind of hone in on your journey as a leader. So, it was incredibly valuable and I would recommend it to anyone who's interested in doing the program. So, thank you.

Congratulations. And with that, let's congratulate Jandy for Thanks. And I believe, mayor, that concludes my report.

Okay. Awesome. All right. Next up, Community Engagement Commission. Robin, welcome. Everybody's taller than me at affairs. So, let me get this res situated. Good evening, mayor and council members. So, I'm here on the behalf of the community engagement tonight give a report. So, let's um do you have a PowerPoint, Shane? Can you bring that up? I'm going to move backwards a little bit. reminding February 15th, the city council requested community engagement that you develop a plan or something that engages the community for a project and it it's really the initiative it's was titled city logo refresh. So with that what you'll see is what we did was uh a plan. So if we can go to the next screen. Now this is a table of contents. Okay. So engagement commission community engagement commission worked on this is just a table of contents because it is about a five or six page plan. So, we're going to go. We worked on the purpose of the engagement, realizing that we had some defects in the reproduction of this digital problem with the logo and realized something needs to be done. Goals and objectives of the plan. And then the biggest chunk on here was the engagement campaign and broke it up. We broke it up into five different phases. Phase one was the collection of data. Now these are approximate times 4 to 6 weeks. Phase two concept development 6 to 8 weeks. Phase three community review of the

concepts 3 to four weeks. Phase four final approval four to 6 weeks. And then phase five public roll out and celebration 2 to four weeks. That could be optional depending on what the council would want to see. So with that then looking at the there's always going to be a communication strategy component that's going to be integrated with that and we hope that we can bring some good metrics for success call it aspirational metrics for success and that's within hopes of getting a diverse group inclusive uh and broad spectrum of what people think aspirational So what are the next steps and that'll be the next slide. So we're looking at stopping the communication outreach efforts in May. social media, Splash, contacting other organizations, presenting the city logo refresh to the local organizations, uh, selecting the citizen logo committee, and so we're still sort of need to see how we interject that group of people and looking at trying to get another broad spectrum of that so we get an idea Start the communication plan. Devise a strategy regarding public participation for gathering local survey data. and then building the plan then to also be at the events the farmers market we have the fourth of July we have the touch a truck and looking at how many

events corpor incorporated along with the how many organizations too interview potential consultants and then look at the plan and design a town hall meeting now we developed this because of some of the interaction and comments that were made at the city council meeting. So we could only go by that it was you know that it was like a brainstorming session between everybody here. So that's what we went off from and tried to work from that point. So what are the takeaways? Uh next slide please. Hey, if we want just looking at a timeline and looking at a reasonable timeline, if we would like to have the final logo by fall, September, we worked backwards and thought probably the date for what I call we called the launch date slashkickoff for this would be sometime in the May 2026. And what you're going to have is a real project management, what I call the spreadsheet or the to-do list. And several things are going to probably be concurrently happening among all of us for the community engagement community citizen committee happening and there's going to be continued communication with the public during this project time frame. And then there'll be certain elements uh dependent on timing because it's the summer on that may or may not delay the process such as and I just g example of

a town hall meeting just because it's summertime and trying to get as many people as we can there interested. uh keeping cost manageable. Heard that quite often in the talk in the at the DIAS. And then uh realize and too we realize that this offers the city a really great opportunity. So with that next slide is do you have any questions or comments? Um you guys don't mind. Can we go back to the uh the next step slide? I've got a couple questions then I'll hit the council up. I try to go. I may not be able to answer them, but I'll

Okay, that's it. Okay, so and to 100% appreciate all the work that went into this. Um, it's a lot of work, a lot of stuff coming up. So, I've got a couple questions. I thought we had tossed around trying to have something to to present to the public on the 4th of July. Um, I don't know where the October September October came from. So, that's one question. Um, second one is potential consultants. What are you looking at for consultants? As I thought we had discussed hiring somebody to do the final the the the final this is the the logo that we can use but not necessarily a design person. Are you guys thinking of hiring somebody for design or just the final presentable usable product?

Well, I think it's good that you're yeah explaining that a little bit more in detail. I don't know if we've gotten that far. We'll have our CEC meeting tomorrow. Okay. And then we can better now explore office of comments that we received tonight on how best to approach this.

Yeah. Because part of the reason for not hiring, you know, a consultant to actually do the design and do all stuff was to keep that cost down. If we're looking at a refresh, you know, trying to keep some of the major elements but making it more modern, that's where we were kind of hoping to keep the cost down and just hire somebody to do the final file files that we could use. At least that's what I heard from the discussion. Please, you know, raise your hand. I'll put you on the next comments. Um, if I'm wrong, but um, yeah, this seems like a lot. And again, 100% appreciate all the work that's gone into this. I'm just wondering if we can scale it back so it's not as much work for you guys. And I think if we present too many opportunities and too many obviously public engagement is is key, but we also

don't want to over overdo it as well because I think that could have the potential of confusing everything. We'll have too many options out there and we saw what it created on social media the day after the meeting. Um so so um yeah there I think there's maybe a happy medium somewhere. Um those are just my thoughts and questions based on the previous discussion. I'll turn it over to um anybody from the council who wants to ask question or comment. Council member Severs. Um I don't know who to ask this to but can you get close to your mind? I don't know who to ask this to. Is this budgeted? Is this or what is the budget on this?

Yeah. What do we had in there, Mark? I forgot. Uh there's there's nothing budgeted specifically for this work, but all of the things that you're seeing here, save for any consultant work that we really haven't scoped out, would be done uh by volunteers on either the community engagement commission or some kind of focus group that would talk about logo elements. So, do we know do we have any sort of estimate on what it's going to cost in terms of design work?

Yeah. in in the it it's really difficult to say. I mean, I think a lot of that depends on whether uh the the group through its community engagement efforts brings back a more drastic redesign versus a simple redesign, but I would say somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 to $5,000. I would expect pretty reasonable. Yeah. Okay. Second question is I'm not super clear on where are these designs coming from.

Well, the way it was projected or our thoughts was it come from the comments that people see for the refresh in the current design that could be improved, enhanced, made potentially better in some ways. and then try and go from their comments and looking at the various themes and then trying to refresh that. Okay, thank you.

The real this is an outline and so the real logistics of each step has not been formally went through on the CEC. probably we thought it was better to bring this up now to everybody see on the outline and if there was any type of tweaks that we need to make and if there was any misinterpretations that were made um most definitely if we were going to show and ex explore I guess and showed this in July then possibly It would be a lot of things would be shortened and it's an option.

Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you, Council Member Curts.

Yeah, I I remember the July is like the launch date for that that I think that's what we talked about before and somebody can correct me if I'm not remembering this correctly either, but um I think it was a a light refresh to honor the history and the legacy, but just an update. Um, and I guess my assumption was that there'd be there was sort of like a sourcing of who might be interested in doing those designs, them coming up with something, and then the community voting on that versus kind of how how you've laid it out in the design this up here where we're asking for the community input first and then getting a design and then getting more community input because I love community input, but I don't know if we'll meet our timeline um that we've talked about unless that needs to be adjusted by the council. Um, so that's just what I recall and if anybody else recalls anything different, please tell me.

Oh, council member Ball. Yeah, that's what I recall too was that the whole purpose was to have it done by the 25th anniversary slash 250th, you know, anniversary. Mayor Pertim,

um if I could suggest um perhaps if a collection maybe just a handful maybe say five uh concepts could be arrived at and then somehow brought through a um down select procedure uh process. Um you know a committee involved who support the work uh could be able to consider and then down select to you know one that would be favored. um having uh choices to be able to select from I think would really facilitate it and allow people to talk about what reflects and maybe doesn't as much reflect what had been discussed. So yeah, come up with a a set and then get get it down to the one.

I think we can do Yeah, because I think asking for like to council member Curts's point, you know, asking for too much input upfront, we're going to end up with an analysis paralysis um and not knowing what to do and not and getting stuck. I think to to Mim's point, if we, you know, whatever the process is, we we push forward four or five, whatever that number is, say here, here we are and get the input on those four or five, what whatever it is. Um, before we get back to number two, go ahead, Council Member Clingler.

I'm just curious, do we know or have even a um an inkling about how long it would take them to take the finalized logo and render it into files that are digitized and usable? Have we done that before? Uh, that that wouldn't take long at all. Um, I mean there would be a procurement process that would have to take place, but the actual rendering would be, I don't know, a couple of days. Yeah. And based on our estimates, it's not something we would have to go out for an RFP or anything. It would get get some get some, you know, our three quotes and go from there. Yeah, I'm sure you can find that local pretty easy. Okay. If we hear from Fisher.

Yeah, I will. I will. Um, have anything since before we go on to the next round? I I do. Um I think it's imperative that there be a short synopsis of the history of that logo and why it is what it is. There's a lot, you know, so many people are so new here, they have no clue where it came from, why it is the way it is, what it represents. Like Pavilion Park was the only park we had. So I think that's critically important to the history that it represents. Thank you. And council member Daryl, before we go on, you can skip too, but I want to make sure everybody has a chance.

No, I just I I really appreciate the work that you've done, Robin, and I think a lot of times um it is hard for the community engagement commission to know exactly what their job is, even if we're clear about it, because we often throw things to them and say, "Oh, you figure that out a little bit." So, I'm I really appreciate you coming to us with this, and then we can say, "Oh, no, that's what we weren't even thinking in the first place." Um, I think even just the mention of a town hall to me is a is is a lot. Um, there are a few opportunities for um, events um, prior to our our deadlines that we can have some visual representation. Um, the library is maybe a good example or a bad example, but we had some different events where things were visually accessible and people were on hand to answer questions and also a little bullet point um, uh, information sheet to go along with that. for example, the history of the the logo, what the projected budget would be, so that we can answer some of these questions instead of them just circling around social media um at infant item. So, that's what I've got. Thanks.

Thanks. All right. Now that everybody's had a chance, Council Member Severs, I'm just going to reference the Liberty Lake Flag project and how that that filtered from a series of artists and and broke it down to what their final project was. If there's a way to reference how that went, I think that was a this is your source of all the input right here. I sure know that. Mayor Pro Tim really led the charge on that completely. So maybe

I'll come up to the mayor after um well I mean to recount the action um I uh when I sought to create a flag that represented the community wanted to go to the community to collect ideas and so um I conceived of um I'll just call a contest um given a collection of best practices or what it is that makes something great in Vexilogic. It's actually got a name Vexilogic anyway. Um uh I went out to um identify how would you run such a contest and then award such a winner. Well, it's kind of hard. City can't give away money. So um I had to identify a nonprofit which could be used to um for me to do fundraising with purposes of distribution. Uh which was the Spokane Valley Arts Council. And then um then I went out uh to all the elementary schools and all the middle schools and all the high schools and uh went out to the community and said here are some thoughts and here are some ideas. And um um I got this huge staff especially from the elementaryaries. That was so cool. Hundreds. It was great. And um uh then I organized a small pledge of uh community leaders uh to sort of walk and and rate and work and just yeah down select to what was uh considered and yeah we were able to select one and then reward one uh person. I think it was like I don't know $300 or something as a recognition to that. So, um, but what it did was allow, um, real participation, and that's what I really sought most is to, uh, really allow anyone with a thought or an idea of what this could be, uh, to to step forward and maybe get a prize.

So, who did those things? Uh, a member of our community, and I'm sorry, the name escapes me right now. Um, but yeah. Um, and I think she did some other work for the city as well. Later there were some other pieces I think that may have come forward an image or two related to Liberty Lake together. Okay. There was if if that's the case so was Jamie Marl. So I have a question. Sure. Is you would like to have the deadline date in July at that? Okay. So that that'll help because that's an a hard fast date. Yeah. Like to unveil it. Maybe we may not have the files by then, but maybe we can unveil it. Okay.

Because that does change it if Well, I wouldn't expect any changes, but you know, or I mean as far as the planning. Oh, the plan. Yeah. And everything. Yeah. So that then we can talk about that then at tomorrow's meeting on how best then to approach that.

Okay. Thank you. Oh, go ahead, Council Member Curts. listening to Mayor Prom talk. I mean, I'm wondering if can it be like a call to artists similar to what we do with art? I mean, I I don't know the mechanics of it, but it sounds like there there was some sort of call for people to contribute something and a contest and I don't again know the logistics of a contest, but I think that's kind of what we were talking about before is PE somebody from the community being able to design something and for knowing the history and the light refresh and what we were looking for and having it be a communitydriven um product that we're able to use, you know, for the next 25 years.

Yeah, 25 years. And that's sort of where that if we can move back or no, there it is. Just interviewing potential I should say people or public or something. That's where that would probably come in at. And I wonder if it's so much as interviewing them or having them submit something. They know what it is we're looking for and they come up with something and there's your five things to draw down and have people vote on it. I think that's what I'm wondering. put put together the the list of requirements like you said, you know, some history. This is the goal. Um,

and then here's here's your deadline by which you submit your art and then there'll be some community engagement to um from the community to pick which one they like. Okay. Yeah. I think that you know parks and arts commission commission could assist with that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think it in any rate to get I think get something by that July date

when we would we probably should have started like last month but we're still going to have to start in May you know something that because we then we have May and June and then by July you're doing the celebration of this is what we come up with. Uh, Council Member Daryl.

Um, I I don't know what the answer is, but I feel like already I see an issue if we're just doing a light refresh or we're calling something a refresh and we're also asking for a a call to artists and things like that. I already see that we're having an issue with what we're receiving. So, I think there needs to be some clarity who comes from. I'm not sure um about about what that is. And maybe the input isn't um art. Maybe it's um what do you think is missing? and it's a verbal question or something along those lines. Um, I'm not sure that that's the answer either, but I'm just saying a stack of different images. If it's to replace it, but it's a a refresh in spirit or or is it a refresh to the actual image? I think that needs to be addressed. Otherwise, we're going to be getting exactly what I think the problem was in the first place, which is too much in the wrong direction. If I can provide some perspective, um the and and maybe this need maybe the communication of this needs to be tweaked a bit, but but the the combination of process that council me mayor pro Tim Dunn described and what council member Darrow just described is is I think uh working towards this concept of putting a group together, whatever you call the group, doesn't matter. Uh and that group's job is to set the parameters. And what that means is that you go through a process. Um if the objective is a light refresh, you ask questions of the community like do you like this color palette? Would you prefer to replace this color with that color? What elements of this logo do you prefer to keep? What other elements that aren't here would you prefer to add? Those kinds of things. And then when you have that consensus, then you can start looking at conceptual things to put into image that you can rate. And so I think that was the objective that Robin was describing. And so if if we need to retweak the the communication of what that process,

yeah,

entails, we can easily do that. But I but I think getting some input as to what about the current logo to council member Fischer's point. If if we hear from 85% of the people that don't don't touch it, we don't we don't think it should be touched. If that's the input, that's important. That's valuable insight to be able to take into whatever the next step is. But if we hear from people that and to to your earlier point, when the logo was first established, there were something like 3,100 residents there. Uh and in our next uh update from the OFM, we're expecting to have crested 15,000. So we have now 12,000 people uh who weren't here then who are here now that may have a different uh opinion and vision of what the logo represents. And so getting that feedback, I think, is what that first step is designed to do before we get to concepts.

Yeah. So we know if we're going the correct direction. Thanks, Mark. Okay. All right. Any other comments? Right. Thank you. Thanks. All right. Next up, workshops 20-year capital facilities plan. You have two minutes, Ben. Kidding. Let's always put the shorter person in front too. No pants, Rob. We We need We need to get the lift on the uh on the podium like some of us have on our desks.

I think I get to sit at the new uh city hall. Made that made that a point. I know Shane's bringing up um the slides. Um so this is something that we've been uh working on for probably the last couple months. We've been well, we've been working on it for much longer than that as as some some folks kind of test, but we've been kind of putting it all together over the last two months so that we could share it with you. And really the the the point of putting together a 20-year Well, I didn't know I did that fancy thing with the title. Um is uh for inclusion in the comprehensive master plan. So that's kind of we're kind we think we'll probably hit build out right around 2046. So this is kind of a companion piece to that overall comprehensive master plan. We're doing it now so that we can get it done in time to include in that ma that comprehensive master plan. And before I before I get started, this is this is a snapshot in time of the bonafide needs of the city as we have seen with all these master plans that have been put together. Um so this is a living document. I just want to say that. And u so there could there's things that aren't on here that could be put on here five to 10. That's just just the nature of a 20-year plan. You just can't forecast that far. We did our best and this is what we think will need over the next 20 years but that is subject to change obviously as things can change a lot in the 20 years as as can be seen in the last 25 years of the city. So next slide please. Uh so the purpose of this is really to recommend a citywide vision that will indeed maximize public benefits. We also want to assess fiscal capacity. We're gonna I'm going to throw a lot of numbers at you and I've said you've got the backup information and we've got another session scheduled with Kyle next week to kind of go over a little bit of that. But giving you a long-term financial picture of what the city needs uh we think is important and it also aligns us with the strate strategic plan goal number four. Um so that's really why we put this together and like I said the comprehensive master plan. This is really a a very important companion

document to that overall plan. All right, next slide. So this is the definition from the department of commerce uh for a capital facility project. So really it's anything that exceeds 13 years. Usually it requires an involvement in an architect or an engineer. We've gone a little step f quite a few steps further with this capital facilities plan. We've aligned it with more how we've typically done capital facilities plan. do things see things like equipment and trees and all sorts of categories and and classifications that we've included as well to just kind of expand on that definition so we kind of have that full picture of what our needs will be over the next couple of decades. Next slide. Uh so I know Mark and as mentioned you know with the help of volunteers everybody above that line was a volunteer uh for Thursday afternoons at the library. uh we met I think five or six times over roughly really the month of February and first part of March to put this plan together. We had uh from every commission the board of directors as well as several ad hoc members that provided um staff uh with a lot of valuable input especially when it comes to validating requirements and prioritizing those requirements. So like I said we have a lot of we've done a lot of data collection and analysis over the last few years. They really helped us look at that from a different lens um as non- staff members to see how it will best support the community. And we really would like to continue that after this and have that this is a enduring uh steering group as we put together our annual six-year plans because the just the the the recommendations the prioritization they provided was invaluable to put this this plan together. So just want to bring up next slide. All right. So here's when all the numbers start. I apologize but I really like numbers. Uh so these are all the capital classifications that we put together. Like I said these this is an expansion

of the department of commerce uh definition and these are ranked in order of priority from the committee uh in order order of precedence. So you can see that streets is number one. I'm all I'm all about that. That's my that's my baby. Um and then uh what we've really done is put together you know that 20-year overall figure. And just a couple of notes on this um with the asterisks below. Um one thing it's this is in 2026 dollars. So there's no inflation adjustment to this. So that will be needed to you know as we move forward that'll be required. Um it doesn't consider any grant funding. Uh we that wasn't part of this process. So any grants received would probably reduce that number in kind with the grant proposed. got a lot of street grants kind of already set for 27 28 and we'll continue to work on those but doesn't include any of that and all the ones with that one little asterisk that's that's where we've had whether it's a master plan study done a network analysis we're still in the process of wrapping up the parks master plan which you'll hear from Jen here I believe first meeting of May as well as a sidewalk master plan but lots of data heavy as Lynn pointed out during her public comment uh that we can help build these and so some of these aren't um we we don't have a a fleet plan yet. That's something that I plan on working on over the next little while. Um where we didn't have that like large data set, uh we kind of fell back to annual allocations for things like replacement street trees, pedestrian crossing, things like that. Uh public art, public art's really hard to forecast over the next 20 years. Right now, we're really into goats. we could be into something very different over the next year. So, what Jen has done with public art is kind of taken what we're looking at right now and kind of, you know, extrapolating that over the next 20 years, slow increases over time as maintenance needs increase things like that. So, all

right. So, that is just on the uh the when you're when you say that inflation will need to be factored in, would that ever get factored in on this document or you mean just for financial planning purposes? for financial planning purposes. I think we've got to do that during the in the six-year plan. Inflation is um taken into account on the 20-year plan just to make sure we're comparing apples to apples. We haven't done it. So, I think it will more likely stay that way. That's we do updates, little update to that. We do this every five years. It'll be 20 31. I might bring that question back up on on slide 25. Okay. So, just want to point that out. Slide 25 is the uh the annual Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's my favorite one actually.

Yeah. Uh, next slide please. Yeah.

So, this that that previous slide showed up by classification. We also tried to assign current funding streams to those particular projects. Um, so you can see, you know, a considerable general fund commitment uh even more for special projects. That's so REIT 2 is is mostly the the main street projects um as well as the streets and streets capital. Those all combined to about 56. There's a little thing few things that move in and out. Um, one of the ones I want to talk about more is the unknown um one at the bottom. So that that captures a lot of those things that we don't already have like a library or a new park, things that we are projected growth projects that we think we're going to need based on analysis that's been done in the past. um a lot of the traffic control measures that were identified in the network analysis, that's a big chunk of that as well because as we grow, we're going to need a few more signals, a few more roundabouts, um Country Vista is going to get a little busier, things like that. So, right now, those are those are going to things that we we're going to talk about a little more next week, and those are things that future councils are going to have to kind of figure out how we want to do those. Right, next slide. So, I think next we're going to kind of go through and what I'm showing uh just for those at home, this is really the iceberg of the data uh that we collected to do this project. U I I I fored out all the Excel files so that council could see those. Um I can't remember how many line items we used, but I think it's close to a thousand different projects that were included in this. So, we're just kind of really showing you the highlights for each functional class. Uh so far I won't go too in depth with streets because this really is a lot very similar to the payment master plan uh that we we've already looked at over the last few weeks. Um but just to identify the major projects where the fund sources come from and then the estimated 20-year estimated cost. Um and then I've if I've got a condition index where we do for streets I've included that as well. and

just and then you know some of the things that we've got 55 lane miles within the city that will maintain that'll go up a little bit as the river district finishes up with Toledo station and things like that for the most part um those kind of stay the same over over the over the time frame there's not a lot of growth when it comes to streets for instance all right next slide I think I'm over three minutes I apologize Mary uh so for pedestrian and bicycles that's our sidewalks trails pathways we have 75 miles of those We do have a condition index because we did do a analysis last summer uh at the same time we're doing the streets. Uh this is one that we're going to talk about more and more over the next few weeks because we have been working on this kind of goes into the sidewalk master plan discussion the previous discussions we've had with residential sidewalk repairs. Uh so that's left unfunded in the when in that slide that shows fund sources that's included in that one. Uh what is included in the fund sources is the things that we're already doing whether that's ADA compliance with our pedestrian crossing allocations uh bike lane updates things like that. So that's included in one fund but the unknown is the sidewalk plan.

So sidewalks are in the unknown the 24%.

Yes ma'am. Next slide. So traffic control is another uh we do have some in other fund sources things like traffic cameras those were included in in some of the smaller projects that were identified in network analysis we've kind of identified those take care of the streets fun it's the larger projects the new signals the new roundabouts uh that are currently considered unknown funding sources u those are projected growth projects um that were identified during the network analysis period and so this really it roughly it comes out say two additional signals, one additional roundabout, and then one roundabout expansion, which is the one uh Harvard and this the Harvard mission roundabout that's recommended to change to a two-lane roundabout based on a network analysis in about 15 to 20 years.

So facilities, uh we currently have eight facilities um on four sites. Our overall facility footprint is roughly 63,000 ft. This does include Legacy Church uh because that was a city-owned facility. So, it's included in the number. Uh you're not going to see city hall on here because we're hoping to finish that 2026 uh currently. Um so, that one isn't included in the overall number. We do have a little bit of on the on the six-year CF you did see a little bit of um in 27. That's a lot of furniture and things like that AB. So, there's there's a cost in 27, but we didn't include it as part of the 20-year plan. Um, I know Craig mentioned the the size of the library. Um, that that that size was picked because it was it came from a study. It's what we know right now. Obviously, as I've said, that can change. This is a living document. Um, so that's kind of how we picked sizes and costs and things like that based on documents that we have that have been approved by council. So, all of these came from the facility master plan uh for the most part. Excellent. So parks, obviously we're in the middle of a parks master plan. A lot of effort ongoing here. Um includes our three parks plus the arboritum. One of the recommendations that you'll see from the parks master plan as the city grows is we'll need a fourth additional park. Uh that's that's one of the unknown um when it comes to funding as the additional park. So they also did some surveys where like the prioritization survey results. I just showed you the top five. These are the things that people have asked for the most. Those are all included in the plan. And then there's some unfunded projects um down there at the bottom. Like I said, the future park, the expansion of Town Square Park, as well as the uh you know, additional splash pads and different parks, things like that. But we'll get a you'll get like a little bit more detail from Jen here in a few weeks. Slides. We're almost done. I promise. So

equipment is equipment is one of those ones that's it's we haven't done like any, you know, study or anything like that. A lot of it's been inhouse. Uh we've identified really replacement cycles for things like police vehicles and um pickup trucks and lawnmowers and things like that. So it really comes down to police are a large portion of this about 50% because police vehicles just don't last 15 years like a pickup truck and public works because we put 5,000 miles a year roughly on a public works truck whereas Darren could say that's probably probably puts three times to four times more miles on their vehicles than we do. So the refresh rate is basically double when it comes to a police vehicle. slide. So, street trees, that was another one where we we used an allocation method. Uh right now in the CFP, we have $20,000 a year allocated for street trees. Um Dan has spent about half that already on roughly we've got 50 trees. He's planted seven so far. He's going to plant another five to 10 on Saturday and another couple on Earth Day. And so, he's got some other plans. Uh we've got a he's he's the Country Vista Molter project is kind of in progress. He's going to do that and then obviously when we we redo sprag we'll be replanting an additional 75 trees there. There were 51 before so we'll be able to cover a little bit farther down the road with that pretty easily with that $20,000 is a seems to be a pretty good number to estimate from um for future needs. Now, a lot of that's replacing trees because these trees aren't going to live forever. And so that includes basically we could refresh about 100 trees a year, $20,000 with inflation over that. All right. Then we have storm water. Uh we used the storm water master plan uh

for a lot of these major projects came out of that. uh the storm the Sprag Avenue drainage improvements would be completed at the same time as the road uh separate funding stream but the project would be done together. Uh we think that 1.3 million will be a little bit less based on the work that we've already done there. Uh so the design's changed a little bit since the storm water plan was completed. Uh so that number will go down but that's that's really the big project. Then we've got a couple others and then and then we've used kind of the allocation method for sprinkler repairs. Uh you might have seen us replace another section on Molter over spring break if you're in town. Um so we're going to continue to do that because tree roots like to destroy sprinklers unfortunately. Um so we've got that kind of allocated as an just an annual maintenance allocation to replace infrastructure. Couple more to go.

So the spray gradient improvement is that when we replaced spray road Yes ma'am. But that's not going to be for a while though. Yeah, I think we've got it 2930 on funding. Don't forget to use your mics. You guys

All right. So, yes, like I said, public art is hard uh to kind of figure out. So, we've used, you know, that allocation method. Uh Jen took the current budget and kind of extrapolated that out over the 20-year period. Um you can see some of the things we've already got planned or are in process or or uh going to be doing finishing up this year. But like I said, public arts hard. You never know what's going to be in vogue in, you know, 10, 15 years. We may want to do a statue of, you know, Chuck Norris or something like that. I don't know. No. No. Okay. Maybe something else. It's just an example.

I don't get a vote. So, all right. So, the next couple are really those minor um info combined info technology. Uh Shane had kind of looked at our our infrastructure and figured out we kind of need about this much to upgrade every every so often and that could obviously adjust as technology increases. Um but we've used that um as well as for plans. Uh so we have some plans obviously in the CFP the feasibility studies for both the pool and the community center. And then really it's a lot of updates to development code and things like that that uh we've included as little increments within the the 20-year time frame, but those are very pretty small in the in the dollar value. I think I've got one more and we'll get to my favorite slide. Uh so the golf course, uh for the most part, this is just facility component replacement. Obviously, the facility is fairly new, but over a 20-year time frame, we will have to replace things like HVAC and things like that. They don't last forever. So, we've got some of that included in here as well as a few possible upgrades to whether it's the driving range of the course have been included here as well. Obviously, that will come down to a lot to revenue for the course as well. So, all right, we've made it. So what I tried to do here uh was take all the all the numbers and kind of show you what it looked like in its present form over the next 20 years and kind of show you where the big muscle movements kind of pop out whether it's a lot of them are in facilities because that's where we've indicated we may need some additional footprint in certain programs. Um you can kind of see there down there at the bottom a lot of our prioritization when it comes to roads is on arterials and collectors and then after that we would focus more on you know the local replacement. Um that's subject to discussion obviously that's just how we put it together based on current condition. U but we could we could definitely adjust that a little

bit based on need. But you definitely see some of the big big chunks there that cause spikes. And this doesn't take into account if we took out a levy or a bond for the new library where we would pay it over time like we did trail head. Uh this indicates we would basically just pay with basically cash. And obviously $10 million in one year is a lot um based on our current um financial situation. So just want to kind of give you an overall picture here using this kind of sand table graph which may some questions.

You might go ahead council member Several talking about some more finances next week. I think this may be helpful next week. Yes. And we tried our best as we were putting it together to kind of normalize it as much as we could. Uh but when you earmark $14 million for a library, it's hard to spread that over three years and not have peaks. So, but there are options to do that. We can talk a little bit more about those next week. Anybody else?

I particularly appreciate the visualization we've been um the description here and it gives a a real sense of uh specific years and specific targets.

Um can you say whether or not this graph reasonably reflects some of our prior budgeting activities with respect to capital expense? I I think it does for the most part minus some of these big, you know, bigger projects. Um, you know, traffic control improvements, that's that's those are pretty expensive to between$2 to $3 million to spend. We're doing in an intersection. Obviously, the library is a large expense. The public safety expansion. Um, those those are things that we really need to have, you know, frank discussions on next week and in the future. But for the most part and and I know we've t we talked about a little bit during the pavement master plan, but the the pavement specifically the streets does not reflect our current budget environment. We're about 50% of where we need to be to meet that plan.

Got one more. Sorry about that. Anybody has any questions? Uh so we've we've so we've completed step one. We I briefed this to planning commission on the 25th. This is the brief draft version to you. Um we'll come back um next month with a kind of a final version if there's any changes uh recommended uh just really for an action item to to approve it and then it would be um included in the comprehensive master plan that Amy is wrapping up next month so that she can submit it for feedback in the month of May in order to meet our end of the year deadline to complete the plan and adopt it. Okay. All right. Any further questions for Ben?

Nobody. Not yet. Okay. Will we have further discussion next next week? All right. Thank you. All right. Next up, uh, ordinance 142 repeal. Uh, Kyle's going to walk us through this real quick. It's pretty much just administer. Thank you, Mayor Council. Can everybody hear me? Okay. Yes.

Excellent. Uh so what we have in front of us here is a housekeeping item. Uh so back in uh 2005 uh about 20 years ago or so, the city implemented a special events permit by uh ordinance 142 and that served the city really well for for almost 20 years. Uh back in 2023, we had noticed kind of with the expansion of the recreation department and some other requests coming forward, um not all of those requests were able to kind of fit within that special events permit. So there was uh kind of a redo of that permitting process. It is called the community events permit now as well and that was adopted uh with the development code um update back in uh the first part of 2024. And along with that, we did repeal a section of the municipal code that dealt with a piece of the special events permit. There's also another section uh in the municipal code that we're tackling tonight that specifically identifies special events permit. So, we're just doing some uh some some cleanup of the code just to make sure everything is uh is seamless going forward. So, uh with that, I there isn't a ton here. I do want to give mayor and council the opportunity to ask any questions before this goes to uh first second rate though.

Okay. Any questions for Kyle? I think it's pretty straightforward.

Council member Klinger. Um yeah, I did a a side byside comparison and it looks like uh 302A is a um quite an improvement over 142 um with it being more um in alignment with um our overall um legal compliance and things like that. One thing I did note when I was doing it was that um it seemed like 142 was more centralized and had a element of um ease of use for especially firsttime applicants and 302A is a little bit more um disperate and and uh less centralized. And I was wondering if we have in the plans um to make that fully digital digitized um digitalized um so that that userfriendly element is there and it's more um again centralized for the end user. Um, from what I could see, you have go to one site for the application and then you have to download a PDF and then fill it out and email it in. Um, and I was wondering if you know we can um, you know, I I agree with the the changes overall, but is there a way to look at it and make it more centralized on the website, more user friendly, especially first firsttime applicants and make it fully digitized so that they can do a full online um, um, application. And part of this comes from just me and my personal experience of using the website and finding it to be a little bit uh difficult sometimes with navigation and um uh I think that and

this would um just be an overall step forward with our our website and ease of use. That's the only comment I have. So yeah, short answer, short response to that is absolutely we'll we'll look at that with the community development staff and see how we can um make that more user friendly on the website. Any other questions? All right, thank you. This will come up as an action item in a little bit. Next up, we have the memorandum I can never say that memorandum of understanding between um cities Liberty Lake, Airway Heights, Milwood, Medical Lake, and Cheney. And I'm going to turn this over to Sean, I believe, or Mark. Okay. Yeah.

Um and so, uh we tried to get this into your hands if with a few extra days to review it before tonight's discussion. Um and and really tonight's discussion uh is to set the uh groundwork, allow you to ask questions, but we would be bringing this back uh next meeting for an action item. We did not want to put an action item on the same agenda as your first time uh seeing this. And so really what this stems from is uh the Spokane Transit Authorities bylaws in article 2 section 2.1A um spell out the fact that the what we're going to call the small cities, the ones that the mayor listed off who are the parties of the MOOU um are each uh required to appoint an exeicio board member. And if you'll recall back on January 20th, uh the council appointed uh Mayor Prom Dunn into that position. Um the bylaws further state that the small cities appoint an official an official board member that represents all of the cities. And right now I believe that's the representative from Medical Lake if I'm not mistaken. And so what thisouou is designed to do is among those municipalities, the Cheney, Liberty Lake, Airway Heights, Medical Lake, and Middlewood is require some discussion related to board actions so that the represented communities of the single director are represented. It doesn't require consensus. It doesn't require adopting someone else's viewpoint. it it just uh creates a pathway to ensure that communication is happening among the cities that is related to actions that will affect them. And so that really is the essence of what theou is designed to

do. And so if you have any questions on the document itself, the reason behind it, um I'll be happy to try to answer those. But we would uh ne with respect to next steps, we would propose to bring this back for consideration as an action item next week. Council member Paul and then may I just want to be clear and Mark or or Dan, you'll know this. Um so we have one person who represents all the smaller cities mentioned here on the board. Yep. Okay. I just want to make that clear.

Um in the um public transportation benefit district that's been defined the board membership was comprised reflecting largely the populations of the constituencies. So for example the city of Spokane has four voting members. Uh the city of the valley has two voting members. Uh the um county commissioners have two voting members and then the small cities have one. And so um in this small cities of Rena then uh it's Milwood Airway heights Cheni Medical Lake Liberty Lake and there is a rotation of that the one voting member amongst those five uh on an annual period.

We just have a notes there. It's like I was the voting member uh for the immediately prior period. Uh and as Mark suggested it's actually Lance Spears in medical lake. Coincidentally, uh Lance is at this hour the uh chair of the STA board and the chair position also is in rotation. Uh so it moves between the constituencies. And so Lance not only uh as the small cities voter guy officio, but also now as the chair of the SDA for the current period. So um thisou I mean did that answer your question? I just want to make sure. Totally. I would move on with some observations if you're set. No, I'm good.

Okay. Um, so, um, I reflect on the theou as kind of just, I don't know, codifying be nice. Um, which is which is a good thing. I mean, really, uh, and it reflects there was, I'm going to say a vote, uh, which had come up and I want to say probably about last year in the middle of the year in which there was some differences of opinion. And so, um, between, uh, you know, the guy who was voting at the time and then the other guy sitting around the table just with the small cities. And so in this moment, this is, you know, uh, city airway heights came together and saying, "Hey, we really need to be together in that." Um, it was my practice when I was the voting member for the small city guys to really kind of call these guys. I mean, I really did actually. And you know, we went through the agenda and is there anything you guys think's crisis or what we got to do? And um, uh, so uh, Lance, I think, has done that to some degree, but it's just kind of cottifying that. Uh, and I don't have a problem with that. I think it's fine. Um I would commit that Lance in my opinion is so far doing okay. I don't think there's any true exceptions or problems uh with the nature of his work and the representing the small cities. Um as to the votes which come up and how that affects small cities versus large cities. This is one of you know a very large I call it and very successful transit agency. And so most of the votes of the city or votes um that come before the board have to do with continuing operations, budget activities, strategic plans, acquisitions and those kinds of things. and and so I act always in the interest or I speak in the interest of our community but then also of that transit agency as a whole. We as board members have to think of the disposition and the outcomes for really the entire public transportation benefit district. So um yeah um I've reviewed theou and I think it's in order. I don't have any exceptions to it. Um I put it to practice when I was in that voting position and I'm keeping everybody I'm trying to keep them together um when I'm

in the ex officio as well. Right. Any other questions or comments? All right. Not hearing any. All right. We'll see this come back at the next meeting. Right. Yes. And Mark, just for a quick note, I did get a a um Docu Sign request from Cheni um this afternoon asking me to sign it and I responded said it would be in the next next week's meeting. Okay. And I'll update everybody um that it will be on next week's agenda. Great. Yeah. My guess is it's just they've set it up in order and others have voted on it. It may expire. My link may expire before then, but we'll let them know. Yeah. Okay. All right. We are up to general business. U Madame Mayor, I would move general business item 10, actions A through H.

All right. We have a motion and a second by Council Member Severs. Those in favor of approving general business consent agenda items A through H, please say I. I. Any opposed? All right. Motion passes. Um, Madame Mayor, I'd move on to general business item 11A. All right, we have a motion to that was a sorry a motion to general business 11A donation Libert Lake Historical Society pub park sign.

Perfect. We have a sec. Second by council member Sears. I think Jen Yep. Jen's on if you guys have any questions on this. We've been talking about this this type of installation for quite a while now and it's um I'm glad to start to see it um coming closer to fruition. Um Jen, do you want to jump in or do you guys want to start with questions on it? Yeah, I can I can weigh in. Um, can you hear me? Okay. Yes.

So, it this is um essentially a kiosk that's going to be installed uh near the pavilion at Pavilion Park and it's going to explain the history of the park as well as the mural and kind of tell the story of the history of the lake, the pavilion, the carousel, and then the mural um on the building. So, it's being donated by the historical society. It was originally budgeted by the parks and arts commission. Um, but it has turned around that the historical society is going to donate this, which is amazing and generous. And so tonight, we just ask uh your approval for the donation.

That's a fantastic uh donation. That's frees things up in the parks and arts budget to to do some other great things. And I wish somebody was here tonight from from there to uh for us to thank them, but I'll I'll reach out um assuming we get this passed. So, are there any questions? Council member Ball, it's it's more of an observation. Um Jan, in the uh let's see. Okay, where is it? Oh, yeah, the bottom left. Land donor. Okay, this sounds kind of What page are you on? Oh, where it shows what the thing will look like. page. Is there a page of the agenda that you're on? God. Um, what page are we on?

Or what page of the present of the donation portion? Uh, where it shows the the sign? Um, oh, where am I? 10. Placement. 108. Are you talking about the placement of the sign? The location? No. No. that shows what the sign's going to look like with all the different page 108 of our packet. Okay. Um Okay. Okay. So, bottom left, landowner. Do do you see where I am? Yes.

Okay. So, it says um just a sec. I'm trying to make it bigger. Well, anyway. Okay. So, it's talking about the sons. It says donor uh about the don his sons, his brothers. Um, God, I wish I Okay, here we are. The family included 10 boys and two girls who learned the value of community in a small Whitman County town. Elmer Schneider Miller was the most well-known of the siblings at Liberty Lake, having been a resident here and active in the community since the 1950s. At the time of the donation, the family farm included his sons his brothers and then it has a the names in print. Is these are the are these the sons or the brothers? You see what I'm saying? It doesn't make sense.

I can I can follow up on that. Yeah, I don't I don't know the details of the history um other than that they devote they donated the land for Pavilion Park. Um but regarding this particular box, I I I cannot answer your question. all the names and didn't distinguish. Yeah. Yeah. So, do you see what I'm saying? It just kind of doesn't make sense, you know? Yeah. And this is this is this is not the final. I actually received the final draft um earlier today and it was too late to put it in the packet. I doubt that box changed, but I certainly can ask about that. Okay. Thank you. It looks like a grammatical. Yeah.

All right. Great catch. All right. Uh anybody else have any questions? All right. Not hearing any. Those in favor of approving the donation um for the Liberty Lake Historical Society Pavilion Park sign, please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes. 70. Okay, we're up to council comments. Are there any um additional council comments? Um at this time, um Mayor Pim, um comment maybe question if I could ask. I uh regarding our restripes to Madson. Uh Ben, could you answer? Is that going to change the lines in the pavement at all? Yes. Sorry I didn't pull it out to general business.

No problem. So that will actually So we've got that middle lane. It's three lanes right now. And I think I think they were they had good intentions when they did that, but a lot of the development doesn't align with that configuration. So they're going to be reconfiguring it to a two-lane road and have parking spots on either side. Thank you. That's the only thing I was worried was Madson always been a people parking the bike and that's exactly why we're doing it. Yeah. We were able to put signs up to help a little bit earlier or late last year, but this is the permanent solution. It's crowded there. Okay. Next, uh, Council Murb. Well, a couple questions. Uh, Mark, what was the date again for that safety and resilience fair? April 30th, which is a Thursday, I believe.

Okay. And then when are we going to get a um signup sheet for farmers market? Uh, I'll work with male on getting that out because when does it start? Midmay.

Oh, okay. And well, that's coming up. Yes. Um and then um oh, I forgot to mention C training is free. You don't have to pay for it. And then um I ran into officer Fritz recently and I didn't know he'd been u promoted to detective. Was he acknowledged? We had a ceremony at the PD. Oh, well, I still think we should have said something here, but anyway, he seemed happy. Yeah, we actually had two promotions. Oh. Oh, hello. Yeah, he didn't he didn't have a thing here. Well, Kyle Fritz, he was promoted to detective and I didn't know that, but I ran into him at the gym and he told me he was a detective now, but we never had a little

Yeah, we didn't do a formal ceremony, but we did have a little bit of a ceremony at the PD for as a promotion up to a detective. Yeah. Then he said he's also the helicopter guy. I didn't know that either. He's been doing that for a couple years now. Yeah. Yeah. He is something else. Yep. He's a busy individual. That's appreciate that.

All right. All right. Thank you. Any other council comments? Not hearing any. Um public hearings and appeals. We don't have any. We do have a resolution number 12-156H for the city council rules of procedure. So, as the council will remember, there have been uh several discussions about um recreating some committees uh and then some other minor items. Uh chief among them is adding a um appointments item to the agenda and promoting it so that those things happen faster um than they had uh previously been scheduled on the agenda. Those are the two principal changes that you will find. um incorporated into this resolution uh that has been adopted into 156H. Uh the the committee language you will find down on page uh 12, I'm sorry, 13. Um and that is the bulk of the amendment that you'll be considering tonight.

And I will just a side note, I'll have the uh the committee um recommendations based on your feedback at the next meeting. Great. Were there any questions about um the ordinance, the resolution before we have Michelle read it in? Go ahead. Resolution 12-156H, a resolution of the city of Liberty Lake, Washington amending the city council rules of procedure. Right. Do we have a motion? U Madame Mayor, I move resolution 12-156H. Second. We have a second by council member Fischer. All right. Any discussion?

Um I just want to recognize and thank the council for consideration. I believe this is an important step in improving efficiency and uh bringing forward u I'd say more and more qualified information for us to consider during council meetings as well. So I'm looking forward to participation.

All right. Any other comments? Right. Not hearing any. This is a resolution. We do open up the floor to comments from the public on resolutions and ordinances. So, if there's anybody here in chambers who'd like to make a comment on this resolution in particular, please speak now. I forever hold your peace. Do we have anybody online who might want to make a comment on this resolution? We do not. Okay. Um All right. So, hearing no no public comment and I'm assuming no further comments from the council. Um those in favor of approving resolution 12-156H, please say I.

I. Any opposed? Motion passes. 70. Next we have have uh first read ordinance 142A. Ordinance 14 Oh, sorry. Ordinance 142A and ordinance of the city of Liberty Lake, Washington repealing ordinance 142 adopting regulations for special events. Okay, we have a motion. Um this is a first read, I believe. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Duh. Yes. Um but madam mayor I would move that we uh suspend the rules and move directly to a second read on ordinance 142A.

Okay. Do we have Okay, we have a motion and a second to suspend the rules to move to a second read. So that this vote will discussion vote will be on suspending the rules. Is there anybody have any comment on that? Not hearing any. All right. Those in favor of suspending the rules to go to a second read, please say I. I. I. Any opposed? All right. Uh Madame Mayor, I would move us again then. Uh 142. or Shelby. Ordinance 142A, an ordinance of the city of Liberty Lake, Washington repealing ordinance 142 adopting regulations for special events. Now you're on. Sure. Uh I would move ordinance 142A.

Okay. We have a motion and a second by Council Member Severs. Again, any questions? Uh we had the workshop a little earlier, so I'm not expecting any. All right. Uh time for citizen comments. Any citizen comments in chambers or online on ordinance 142A? Not seeing or hearing any. Those in favor of approving ordinance 142A, please say I. I.

Any opposed? My motion passes 70. We have no emergency ordinances. We have introduction of upcoming agenda items. So, you should have your sheet on your table here. Um, we've got lots of things coming up um with rapid rapid fire meetings and workshops um over the next couple weeks. Um, I think we had a nice little break and we're making up for it. So, we have our hazard mitigation risk plan and finance workshop next meeting next week. Um then we do have um the meeting the town hall on the 28th which has obviously fallen off of this um special meeting um proposed for review of the draft comprehensive plan and then um following with the sidewalk master plan parks plan and governance manual. So we are scheduled out through miday at this point.

Um mayor prompor if we could see on the 21st also a committee schedule and assignments. Yes. We will add that as an action item to approve the assignments. Okay. Anybody else? Go May 7th through May 9th. So I mean is it one meeting or we're meeting um every day for three hours between those dates. What?

I had one of those meeting invites the other day. Did you really mean for it to be in perpetuity? Council member Ball, that's a window of time. It'll it'll happen somewhere within that window of time. Got it. Council member Cleler, I don't know the exact procedure, but I'm going to be out of the country on April 17th through May uh 3. Okay. We will take that in consideration. We'll have a doodle poll out. We'll discuss it. Okay. Okay. Great. Thank you.

All right. Any other questions, comments on the workshops? Okay. Um, we have go back to citizen comments. Anybody here or online um like to make an additional citizen comment, please? Okay, come on up, Mr. Phobes. Great.

Thank you. Um, continue. The the bottom line of what I'm trying to say is that I think what's appropriate to have in the plan is in line with what Lynn was saying, the standard of service. The standard of service for sizing the library is one square foot per capita at maximum buildout. Having the numbers in the plan calculated in 2018 for a library that comes online at the soonest in your plan in 2032 is 12 years out of date. So the formula is what should be in the planning document, not the result of an old calculation. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Okay. All right. Um if we don't have do we have anybody online for any more citizen comments? No. All right. So, we do have an executive session um for RCW42.30.1101G evaluation of the qualifications of an applicant for public employment. So, there will be no decisions um after the during the meeting and when we um come out, we will adjourn. So, we expect to be out for how long, Mark? Approximately. Let's start with 15 minutes.

Okay. So, we will plan on we're going to take a couple minute break to get over there. So, come back at 8:40. That work? Okay. So, we'll plan on being back at 8:40. Good evening, everybody. It is 8:40. We have adjourned from an executive session. No decisions made as promised and there's no further business before the council. So, we will adjourn. Have a great night.