City Council - workshop

Thank you.

It is Tuesday, July 14th at 6 p.m. and I'm going to call this Lacey City Council work session to order. All council is present. I also want to acknowledge that we, the City of Lacey, are on the ancestral land of the tribal people of the Treaty of Medicine Creek, including the Nisqually Indian Tribe and the Squawks Indian Tribe. Can I get a motion to approve this evening's agenda?

Move to approve the agenda as published.

Second. It's been moved and seconded. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, all in favor of that motion signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Is there any opposed? Then that motion unanimously carries. We have approved agenda. Is there anyone wishing to address the council this evening? Seeing none, we also did receive three written public comments that will go into the record. Our first agenda item is our Thurston Conservation District program briefing. T.J. and company.

Thank you, and good evening. My name is T.J. Johnson. I'm the chair of the Board of Supervisors.

There we go.

TJ Johnson, I'm the Chair of the Board of Supervisors for the Thurston Conservation District and with me tonight is Sarah Moorhead, our Executive Director. You might remember I was here a couple months ago and gave you a quick overview of some of the stuff we're working on and our new strategic plan and very much appreciated the Mayor's suggestion that we get together for a study session to talk a little bit more in depth and so we're very glad to be here this evening. We've prepared a short presentation. 15-20 minutes, something like that. Sarah will go through most of it. I'll talk a little bit at the end, and then we'll take it wherever you all want to take it to wrap things up. So with that, I'll give it to Sarah.

Great. Thanks, TJ. Again, I'm Sarah Moorhead. I'm the Executive Director at Thurston Conservation District, and we wanted to share with you today a lot of the partnerships that we've had with the City of Lacey and a lot of opportunity that we have in our future. Oh, it buzzes. Thank you. Okay, hold the big button. So first I just wanted to mention a little bit more about who we are. TCD offers voluntary non-regulatory support for community members and those can extend the city's capacity in reaching residents that not otherwise might participate in public programs and help turn community interest into conservation and on the ground action. In this presentation, I just wanna talk a little bit about the breadth of our services, highlight the current work that benefits the city of Lacey and regional natural resources and identify some of the gaps that maybe some expanded partnerships between the city and TCD can collaborate on to provide some solutions for the area residents and also discuss opportunities for us to sort of identify those goals and needs that the city might have that TCD can support into the future. Nope, big button. Okay. So again, Thurston Conservation District is a trusted conservation partner. We are a community-driven organization with over 75 years of experience working with all of the landscapes and residents within Thurston County. I mentioned we're non-regulatory and we focus on technical assistance, education, project implementation, and partnership development. We serve everyone from residents to schools to farmers, businesses, neighborhoods, and public agencies. And we have the ability to combine public funding, grants, technical expertise, volunteers, and private landowners, all to do great conservation work on the ground. Some of our core service areas are water quality and stormwater, habitat restoration, agriculture and local food systems, urban conservation, forestry, and wildfire resilience, native plants and pollinator habitat, K-12 education and community gardens, and so much more. So talking a little bit about our existing partnerships and work in and around the City of Lacey, I think one of the biggest ones I want to highlight is a multi-decade partnership with something called the South Sound Green Program. City of Lacey, Tumwater, Olympia, and Thurston County, and the Conservation District are all part of an interlocal agreement that supports this K-12 hands-on watershed education program. Again, multiple decades, thousands upon thousands of student interactions every year, nearly 100 teachers that come and participate in some on the ground, out in the field teacher trainings Those trainings sell out like concert tickets, you know, within a matter of minutes. But this opportunity helps us work with area residents and their youth, right, to create these next generation stewards. This is a ready-made platform, too, to provide all of the natural resources in climate education and provide that opportunities for youth to connect with science and monitoring really in the field. Another piece that I wanted to highlight too is some of the practical help we have for properties and neighborhoods, and that's meeting residents where they are with the technical knowledge and conservation project construction that we do. Again, our voluntary and really personalized solutions fit the needs of individual property owners, but also meet these regional goals for land stewardship. Residents in the Lacey area often ask us for support with stormwater and drainage, native plants, pollinators, water conservation, food production, soil health, wildlife, habitat, invasive plants, and small acreage and urban property management, naturally. And one of the things I want to highlight is this map here. You might recognize some of that. That is the Woodland Creek Watershed, where we are currently working on some restoration efforts around Great Cuyo Park. Woodland Creek is one of six priority streams for restoration in South Sound for salmon runs. We were invited by adjacent private property owners to do some invasive control work and some forest management in that space. And it became a really great collaborative partnership opportunity with the city where we now have an agreement to make Great Creole Park sort of the center of this massive scale Woodland Creek watershed restoration. up and down. That park is really special because it not only has some of the headwater wetlands, but also some tributaries and main stem of Woodland Creek. And so now sort of the city is the center pivot point of that and we're engaging the private lands that surround that to restore this whole system. This is really in synergy too with a lot of the city of Lacey led projects for water quality. And obviously it holds a lot of potential for future collaborations like continued phases of restoration, volunteer events and stewardship, bringing those students out I mentioned from South Sound Green to do water quality monitoring. and just in general community science and long-term resources management. So opportunities for us to expand our work together could be in community gardens and urban food access. There's definitely a lot of gaps in our region in general around urban agriculture services that are not quite provided to the scale that the community is interested in and needs. Residents tend to lack land, first of all, sometimes technical expertise, access to water, or even just startup resources. How do they begin in a farming venture? And especially multifamily communities and smaller urban parcels often fall outside of traditional agricultural program support. So possible collaborations with the city and the conservation district could look like focusing on urban agriculture technical assistance, small space and container gardening education. It could look like community orchard planning, soil health and composting programs, pollinator friendly habitat, supporting farm to school or school garden efforts, building connections between growers and markets and so much more. And it's also a great space I think for supporting like historically underserved populations and growing culturally relevant food. And I want to highlight a little bit of a project that we are still actively working on with the city of Olympia. where we began sort of an urban agriculture collaboration, analyzing and mapping all of the available and potential farmland within the city and the UGA. And then we built on that land analysis and matched the agricultural resources, farmers markets, community gardens, and we compared that with socioeconomic metrics throughout the city. and identify where there were gaps in food insecurities and they provided some recommendations for how we could address that collaboratively. With that work we built on it and expanded community gardens to these food insecure neighborhoods and especially focusing on transitional housing communities throughout the city. We did a whole lot of education and support and training for that, not only in how to grow food, but then what do you do after that? How to cook fresh, healthy food and preserve the harvest. We continue to work with the Olympia City Council to develop further recommendations about how to support growers within the city. And policy recommendations like rebates for urban agricultural water irrigation for urban growers was one of those pieces. We provided additional targeted planning and technical support for community gardens and growers. and even integrated some pollinator-friendly and native habitat corridors, and developed a cool program called Farm My Yard, which helps residents that don't have access to land that might want to grow on a larger scale than a community garden, find folks that have land that they'd love to see growing food. It was a great opportunity to do some lawn conversion too, and some really targeted irrigation. So obviously there's potential applications with the City of Lacey, like community garden expansion, further targeted technical assistance, and a lot of water conservation opportunities. A cool thing with that is we created some community ambassadors too, which also offered unique opportunities for specific neighborhoods to create culturally relevant food gardens. Green stormwater infrastructure and stormwater pond retrofits is also another piece of this puzzle. A lot of residents really lack the opportunity to translate these general ideas around how to manage stormwater on their property into on the ground construction. So that's an opportunity where the conservation district can come in and support that. Existing stormwater ponds can be improved to provide more drainage, but also habitat, right? Pollinator friendly habitat, And there's partnerships like this, these sort of stormwater management pieces in Mason, Pierce, and Kitsap, where the Conservation District is partnering with local jurisdictions to help increase this on a per parcel scale. Often some of these smaller projects or these neighborhood stormwater projects don't necessarily rise to a high level of significance that the city might have capacity and focus to take on. But that's where Boots on the Ground at the Conservation District can help. This picture is actually pretty cool. It's one of the first projects that I worked on over 15 years ago when I first started at the Conservation District. These are Comachin Middle School students out at the Nisqually Highlands neighborhood helping to install a rain garden in a road right of way. So another opportunity for some collaboration. And urban forestry wildlife and pollinators is a huge piece, this can simultaneously advanced stormwater management goals, but also increase things like heat resilience within the urban corridors air quality wildlife habitat and advance a whole host of climate goals. Current residents in the city of Lacey area request often native plant support from us. Again, pollinator and backyard wildlife is huge. Stream and wetland stewardship and a lot of water-wise landscaping, both for food production and otherwise. There's an opportunity, we're currently working with the city of Tumwater to help provide technical input on urban forestry codes. That's an opportunity for collaboration in the future. We also have a heavy focus on wildfire resiliency and disaster preparedness. We do a lot of home site assessments, home hardening assessments, and help people balance habitat needs with defensible space. We also do larger scale projects like urban tree canopy assessments, or even just education in the community, native plant workshops, arborists, how to care for your urban forests. Preparing for increasing seasonal water demand too, obviously something that's on a lot of our minds often. And water conservation is closely connected obviously to storm water and groundwater recharge, summer stream flow, climate resilience. And that's of big importance not just to habitat but also municipal water and communities. A lot of growers and community members in this area are often asking about drip irrigation, climate adapted landscaping, soil moisture retention, lawn alternatives, rainwater capture, and just drought resilience in general. There's a lot of opportunity for us to collaborate on things like residential water conservation assessments and doing a lot of demonstration sites and landscapes. Other municipalities throughout Puget Sound host large-scale demonstration sites, some of which are here in Thurston County. But that's also an opportunity where we can bring technical knowledge and resources and help to create these great educational spaces. And before I move on, I do want to highlight the Deschutes Preserve. Some of you might be familiar with along the Deschutes River is a great collaboration between TCD in the city of Tumwater and Olympia ecosystems. It's a great sort of multi-way, and a whole bunch of others, a great multi-way collaboration where we're restoring floodplain function and improving water storage, which reduces downstream flood impacts and provides water quality improvements. In addition to creating salmon habitat, and climate resilience overall. It's just a really great sort of opportunity that highlights the power of regional natural resources coordination and collaboration. And obviously, watersheds don't follow municipal boundaries, and so it's a great sort of similar partnership model that could take place in City of Lacey with City of Lacey Watershed Streams, Wetlands, and Shorelines. I'm going to turn it over to TJ to talk about some of our key upcoming initiatives we want to share.

Thanks, Sarah. I'm going to start by talking a little bit about funding. How do we do all of this work? So our base source of local funding is something called rates and charges. And rates and charges are assessed at $5 per parcel and 10 cents per acre to almost all property owners in Thurston County, all of them within the city of Lacey. We have a few pockets in the county that weren't brought into that in 1947 when we started. But everybody in Lacey pays the rates and charges. That brings in about $550,000 a year, roughly. Our total budget this year is $10 million. And so all of that other money comes through grants and contracts with federal agencies, state agencies, other nonprofits, et cetera. And while that's really good that we're able to leverage so much money, our board was thinking a couple of years ago, we need to have a more sustainable funding strategy because particularly the federal and state grants are changing. Priorities are changing. Federal and state budgets aren't robust anymore. And we want to make sure we have a baseline of local funding so that we can continue to do this work. Two years ago, the legislature made a change to the to the statute that governed how rates and charges was set up. It increased the available amount that we could get from $5 per parcel to $25 per parcel, plus the 10 cents per acre. And for the first time, they indexed it to inflation. So we looked at that. Our board looked at that earlier this year. And we realized that if we were to move the rates and charges level up to $25 per parcel, it would bring in an additional $2 million a year to the district. And in good times, that would be money that we could leverage more grants with. In bad times, it would mean that we don't have to make cuts that we would otherwise have to make if we lose a grant or something like that. So last month, we held a public hearing at the Conservation District on a proposal to increase the rates and charges. We had 28 people show up, either in person, online, or provide written comment, and not a single person dissented. Every one of them said, please do this. It works out to about $0.06 per property per year additional to leverage that additional $2 million. So the process now is that our proposal to raise rates and charges to $25 has moved to the county commissioners. The county commissioners will need to approve that in order for it to take effect because the money's collected to the county treasurer's office. And they're currently working to schedule their public hearing and their process to happen early this fall. So we're optimistic that by the end of the year we might get to this level, this new level of funding. With that, we have two particular things we're really focused on. The first is farmland preservation. We are losing farmland in Thurston County faster than any other county in Western Washington. And it's getting worse, not better, despite good policies and things we've done in the past. And we don't have a lot of funding to preserve farmland right now. Over the last five years, the county has essentially been able to make about $200,000 a year on average available for farmland preservation. And that's through the Conservation Futures Fund. We've looked at that and we realize and the land trusts that we talked to realize we need a lot more money for farmland preservation. So of this $2 million a year in new money that we're hoping to get through rates and charges, we are planning to dedicate $1 million a year to farmland preservation over 10 years. So essentially we would go from $200,000 today in conservation futures to a million and maybe an additional $200,000 every year for the next 10 years. And by having it come through the conservation district, we can move very quickly. We're non-regulatory. We have relationships with farmers and producers and landowners. And when people are ready to sell, sometimes our land trusts are not ready to go. They lack the capacity to do that. An agency like us, we could step in and protect threatened farmland much quicker with this available funding. And we don't necessarily need to hold the title to the land. We don't want to hold title to land. We might hold the easements, or we might buy an easement and then sell it to a land trust who can manage and do the ongoing stewardship for this. But this could be a game changer in terms of slowing the loss of farmland in Thurston County. And it's our commitment. It's part of the ordinance that we wrote is we have to spend $1 million a year of that $2 million on farmland preservation. And then the third exciting thing is our Conservation Education Center, which I'm going to let Sarah talk about.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, TJ. So in addition to this exciting opportunity to preserve farmland, which also preserves open space and wildlife habitat and water infiltration and a whole host of other great community benefits, we're embarking on probably the biggest project that we've ever done at TCD to create a conservation education center. It's been multiple decades that our community members have been asking us to have a convening space. A lot of the work we do is on private lands, and they want to see what conservation looks like on the ground before they buy it. They want a place where they can come and they can participate in our workshops and our educational opportunities and our festivals that are growing by the thousands of attendees. And they want to have a space where they can engage in this one-stop shop. So we're looking at creating a regional conservation hub, inviting conservation partners to join us, so that folks really can see conservation in the forefront of their minds and the work that we're doing on the landscape. It'll be a space for demonstration sites for both urban and rural conservation and opportunity to convene people and especially throughout the county and across maybe different stakeholder perspectives to have conversations that are really critical about how we wanna plan and design the future of the space that we live in and the resources that we steward together. So we're really excited about this opportunity. We're looking at things like maybe it'll have a four seasons farmer's market, right, and create some opportunity for those farmers to connect to markets. Maybe it'll have a plant propagation nursery. The amount of restoration we do now has a high demand for native plants, and there's also a high demand for career and technical education pathways and vocational trainings. We have a robust veterans program that does on the ground restoration. And so just creating those pathways and pipelines for folks to come into natural resources careers and get involved in creating a product that's going to make our space even better. So obviously expanding capacity and sort of focus and maybe collaborations between the city and TCD can obviously help increase capacity in general for all of us without duplicating efforts. Collaborative partnerships are really where it's at so that nobody's doing everything themselves. We can help each other achieve stormwater and water quality goals. Improve participation from area residents and also thereby trust, right? Leverage grants and outside funding sources like what TJ was mentioning. Work together on shared climate goals and disaster preparedness. And expand environmental education. That's a robust partnership we already have and the demand for that is even greater. And improve not only our private spaces but also habitat at parks right and throughout community neighborhoods and public spaces as well and then strengthen and support local food production and all of this is really visible to residents so mostly we want to hear from you guys you know and sort of what you guys think this is obviously just the beginning of this conversation and something that we want to continue to have but What are your largest natural resource management gaps? Are there priority resources, neighborhoods, audiences that you're looking to serve? Are there sort of plans or strategic goals or obligations that we can help the city of Lacey fulfill? We would love to hear any of your feedback, our ideas now or in the future. And essentially, we're just really grateful for your partnership and really appreciate you having us here tonight. We have such a shared commitment for healthy water, thriving habitat, resilient communities. And I think continuing to combine forces and sort of work on this collaboratively together is just gonna continue to strengthen that vision for all of us. And I would also say on September 2nd, we're having an elected officials tour of all of the programs, projects, services meet residents, all the cool things that are happening in conservation throughout Thurston County and would love for all of you to attend.

Great.

Thank you.

Well, thank you for coming and sharing. I know all the great work you guys have been doing, and so I think it's just really important that the public gets a chance to hear that. But when I think of partnerships, my mind immediately goes to the Lake Lois Habitat Reserve It's one of the most beautiful spots that we have all in Thurston County. And it's actually, I think, in need of restoration pretty bad. I was born and raised right there in the old historic Lacey neighborhood. I remember a time when fish and salmon ran all the way up to Lake Lewis. People fished all the time. You know, and the Lake Lois then goes into Long Lake, which goes into Pyerson Lake, and all the way to Hicks Lake, there's a natural connection there. But we've seen recently that Lake Lois going almost dry, and there's so much vegetation that has come up and taken over there. I'm really sort of worried about what that means to the long-term health of of Woodland Creek, because obviously that's the headwaters for Woodland Creek. That and we have a historic building that we need to take down right there off of Pacific Avenue. I think this would be a great partnership to think strategically of maybe that being a future spot where you could have, you know, a building and collaboration and figure out, you know, that's one of the really great spot because you're right there in the habitat area, your backyard. It would be absolutely amazing to, you know, take people, you know, have the public come there and be able to go down and kayak and see all, you know, there's bald eagles that are back there and It's just absolutely beautiful and so I would love something special to happen with that property. We were hoping as a council to keep the building but it just, we weren't able to do it and so unfortunately it's gonna have to come down. I would love to see a partnership where that property gets used and it's an area of where our community can come together and see that there's beauty right here in the middle of Lacey. And if you haven't been there, it is truly one of the most remarkable places you've ever seen. And you can't believe you're right there in the middle of the city of Lacey. So that's, when you're here before, and I was thinking, how could you help and how could we partner? That is a possibility that I think I would love, like to talk to you more and see if there's a partnership there available in the future.

I was also thinking Cuyo Park could also offer some opportunities to maybe have an education center or summer camp kind of activities out there with teaching kids to really understand and appreciate and become good stewards.

The other thing that we've talked about for a long time is having a food trail, and we just haven't been able to quite figure that part out. We were thinking to do it off of the Karen Frazier Woodland Trail and be able to plant blueberries and raspberries and strawberries and apples and have a place where you could go on the trail and have a food trail as well. But we've looked into it a little bit and then there were some contamination issues in certain parts and so that's also maybe a long-term possibility, especially as we're looking to expand the trail east. And we're really early in that process of doing a feasibility study of expanding the Woodland Trail east to the edge of our urban growth area. A part of that could be to finally get a food trail that would be really kind of cool as well. And that could be a partnership.

That would be a neat project. Yeah.

For your conservation education center, you said that's a thing that's coming in the future, correct? And you're hoping you're working on that. It's not a thing that's happening now.

Well, we've done a lot of work over the last couple years on it. We've done a lot of financial analysis. We've gone through and determined sort of the size that we need. We've looked at probably what the right locations may be. We recently just got a curb grant, a community economic revitalization board, to take it to the next level to start to flesh some of that out. And we're actively in the property search phase right now. We've contracted with the Department of Enterprise Services at the state They're real estate people, and we're actively looking for a piece of land that would meet our needs and the needs of the community partners that we've identified. And we're hoping maybe something comes together this year or certainly by next.

Yeah. How big a piece of land do you need?

Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Mayor. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Council Member.

Yeah, we're looking for about 30 acres to do all of these sorts of multiple buildings, lots of parking, bus accessibility, farmers markets, nursery production, as well as utilizing the natural landscape and habitat to do recreation and and education. So that's sort of the framework we're looking at as a minimum. I think we would be open to properties that are larger than that, that we could use a lot of that natural landscape to restoration and that sort of thing, or farmland preservation aspects. So yeah.

Yeah, thank you. Well, first of all, I just want to thank you for the current contracts that are happening at Great Cuyo Park. I believe 3,600 pounds of ivy was removed in May, and there's still work ongoing now. So we really appreciate the partnership. But just to add, there is an environmental learning center in our concept plans for Great Cuyo Park on one of the parcels. But the challenge we have is funding to get to that point. because we're just now developing phase 1A and then we'll need to do the rest of phase one before we can even proceed on to future phases. And so, but just to make sure everyone knows that there is actually in the concept plan, you know, opportunity for just such thing.

How many acres do we owe at the Lake Lois Habitat Reserve?

Oh, at Lake Lois? The, oh gosh, I'd have to look it up. Right off the top of my head, I want to say 40 acres.

I mean, right across the street from our Lacey Community Center, It wouldn't be a horrible location.

That's worth having some follow-up conversation on.

Yeah, absolutely. I'd love some more info.

And Mayor, did you want me to add about where we're at with the food forest? Yes. Okay, so we originally had, to your point, talked about the edible trail and then had kind of gotten away from that and onto food forest or community gardens concept. So myself and the Parks Board did a lot of work around that. finding locations and getting them approved by the Parks Board to actually have a one acre community garden or really focus on food forest in the beginning just because of that permaculture aspect. And so we actually, we have several locations that could be food forests or community gardens in our parks and that's approved by policy and everything. What we lack is a non-profit organization to operate And I know that TCD was involved in discussions when we had some prospects. But we've spoken with groups like GRUB, the Hackey Farmers Collective. We almost had a partnership with St. Martin's University. And so we've almost been there with several different organizations. And it just has come down to their capacity to be able to operate it. And we certainly don't have funds in our budget to operate but what we have is the land and we now have approval of use of the land with the policy. So if you know of anyone.

Well I think it might be thinking about the model that we have with the city of Olympia right now because they've contracted with us to develop new community gardens but we've really contracted that work with various nonprofits from the YWCA, to Grubb and others, and when we bring everybody around the table, we can get a whole lot done and the burden doesn't fall on any individual organization. So it's a model that's working well with the City of Olympia right now.

Love to connect. Thank you.

Sounds like more conversation there as well. Councilman?

Shifting gears a little bit, I was looking back at your farmland preservation aspect when you were talking about adding like a million dollars from this rate increase to farmland preservation. You also mentioned earlier about doing analysis for urban farmland, I guess plots of land and things like that. Are you looking at both outside in the rural area for farmland preservation in addition to within city limits and UGAs or just outside?

Yes, we're looking anywhere that we have land that's threatened by the development that would transition away from food production. This is something I'm rather passionate about because I am an urban farmer in Olympia, and I'm working right now with a local land trust to try to preserve our land, which is otherwise zoned for residential development, and we don't want that, our customers don't want it, and the neighborhood doesn't want it, but the reality is we have to figure out the funding mechanisms to be able to do these sorts of easement purchases. But yeah, wherever it exists.

Awesome, thank you. Well, thank you. I think we have...

If you don't mind, can I just say one last thing? Of course. I meant to say earlier when I was talking about the rates and charges increase and moving forward to the county commissioners, we would like to invite the Lacey City Council individually, collectively, if you think that's a good idea and you are supportive of this rates and charges increase, we'd love for you to let your county commissioners know that either through a resolution or just more informally. We're gonna be asking the other jurisdictions to get on board with it as well. And we hope we can just rally the whole community around it and move forward with that new funding to get more of this stuff done.

I did have one quick question. So when you were talking about the rates and fees, you said we would go from $5 to $20 or $25?

It would go to $25, so it would be an increase of about $0.06 per day for the average property owner.

Okay, because when you said $0.06 and then my brain stopped.

Yeah, that's what it works out to. If you add $20 on and you divide it by 365 days, it's about $0.06. Okay.

That answers the question I had. Yeah.

Yeah, I knew there was a math question in there, but I wasn't about ready to do math on, you know, live here like that, so. Yeah, I'm like, I trust him. I'm sure he's done the math. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you for coming. It looks like we have some more collaboration to do.

I look forward to it. Thank you. Good to see you both.

So next up, we have our draft 2026 CDBG Annual Action Plan Review.

Good evening mayor and Council members. My name is Michelle Chavez and with the city I am the human services coordinator for the city of Lacey and tonight we're here to talk about the 2026 CDBG annual action plan. This is something that you're going to become very familiar with. It is required every year because of the entitlement dollars that we get from HUD from the federal government. So it's due every year in July and so you're going to get very familiar with seeing these. kind of reports come your way. So I have just a few slides to go through. In your report, you had the actual action plan attached to the report, to the staff report. Again, this is required each year. We're required to have two public hearings, which we've already done. We've had them at the June 4th and July 2nd Human Services Commission meetings. We also have a required 30 day review on public comment period, which is required, which was held from June 2nd to July 1st. We did not receive, comments from the public during that time frame, but I did talk to the Human Services Commission twice, and they provided comment on the plan. Final approval by city council is hopefully this month, and then we would submit it to HUD in July, and then the program would start September 1, 2026, and go to August 31, 2027. We're required to do with our annual action plan every year community engagement. So one of the things the Human Services Commission serves as is a really great community oversight. It directly helps us meet our federal requirements for community oversight of the funds and how we're going to spend them. We're also in the process of a strategic plan and needs assessment for human services. But that's been ongoing, and that helps inform both the Human Services Grant Program and the CDBG that are required every year. So the 11 focus groups weren't just about CDBG, but they are also helping us inform and make priorities for human services for the city. You'll be seeing that strategic plan later this, in this fall, early fall, and we'll go over that at a work session in the future. We have to do public noticing with these funds, so that's where we take ads out in the newspaper. Again, the two public hearings were with the Human Services Commission, and then the two public meetings are with you all at these meetings. So we've through the engagement engaged 16 different agencies and different boards, and we've also consulted 13 other regional planning documents, and that's all in the report in the consultation section of the annual action plan. So this is just what the annual action plan has in it every year. It hasn't changed significantly. We have to talk about expected resources, our annual goals and objectives. So as you remember, we had to do a three year consolidated plan on how we're gonna spend the funds and everything that we do in the action plan has to connect to a goal that's set in our consolidated plan. So that's the annual goals and objectives. We lay out which kind of potential projects we could spend the funds on. The geographic distribution, so say the city was gonna designate funds to a certain neighborhood, we would put that in there. Other actions as required and then program specific requirements which is kind of just technical financial stuff. So the expected resources for this allocation is 337,498, $337,498. And last year we got a little bit more 348 we could receive last year and the total We've received so far as 685 and then the expected amount. I just took an average going forward next year. We never know what we're going to get until the Congress passes their budget, so it can fluctuate, but an estimate of next year getting 342 945. Again, in coinciding with our strategic, our comprehensive plan, we are proposing to allocate $303,749 to public facility and infrastructure activities. Our first proposed project is the Huntemer Park infrastructure improvements. We would like to allocate of the 2026 funds, 303,749 to that, and then have the Virgin S. Clarkson Senior Center be a contingency project if something were to fall through with Huntemer. And then again, we had gotten approval to approve last year 10% for admin. That's to pay for all the program reporting requirements, documentation, environmental review, annual reports, and things like that. So the proposal for this year is to set aside $33,000 for admin. Question for you.

The contingency plan being the senior center, is that for the parking?

Yes, just the parking lot. So again, Tontemur Park is... in need of accessibility improvements and we have some infrastructure there that's crumbling and we would love to do this project. It would help strengthen civic engagement, improve public health and wellness, and improve equity by improving access to our parks. The administration dollars, so we have our capital dollars would go to the Hunter Mer Park project, and then 10% would go to, again, fund admin. We are allowed to spend up to 20%, but what you all have approved last year is 10%, and we're asking for approval for that 10% again this year. This reduces impact to our general fund, so some of the salary dollars could go towards out of CDBG instead of just the general fund. And then also it supports, again, that environmental review, planning, reporting, data tracking, monitoring, and compliance of the dollars. So again, these projects are not geographic. This project is a site-specific project. This is just an aerial view that shows that the low to moderate income area in Lacey that the Huntemere Park is in. The other action sections, this is just information that we're required to tell HUD that goes beyond just what we're doing with the action plan. So we have to tell how we're meeting underserved needs, how we're reducing lead-based paint hazards, how we're what are we doing as a city to reduce the number of poverty-level families, actions we're doing to develop an institutional structure, and then actions we're doing to coordinate between public and private housing and social service agencies. So the next steps are, we'd love to get it on consent approval for July 21st, then submit it to HUD, then HUD has 45 days to review and approve, and if they need any changes, they'll get back to us. Last year we did not have any requests to changes from HUD, so I was really happy about that. Once approved, we would sign the grant agreements and certification, and we were going to begin the environmental review because we have dollars allocated to the project already from last year. So that environmental review will begin and will continue, and then we would allocate those dollars, the 2026 dollars, for the project and for the admin. That concludes my presentation, and I will open it up for questions.

Any questions? Go ahead.

How many years of funding, CDBG funding, will it take to have enough for the Huntemore Park project? What is the total cost on that project?

The total, if you're looking at, we have enough right now to cover the sidewalks already. The total project, I think it's,

2 million?

Yeah, right around 2, but that includes the whole project. And we can always allocate CDBG to that as well. But right now we have, just with the 2025 and 2026, we have enough to cover all the sidewalks. Thank you.

Anyone else?

So is... Right now, it's kind of look like our CDGB plan is to use for city projects for, I'm not sure how long. Is this three? There's just three full years. And after that, the plan is to make these dollars available to the public.

Thank you, Deputy Mayor, for that question. We have that three-year consolidated plan where we put in there, we would like to start just the first initial, the three years with the capital projects. Based on that, we're hoping to allocate, that would be through 2027. So, and then in 2028, we're going to have to start again a five-year plan process. So the priorities could change and that's up to the City of Lacia how they would like to allocate the dollars. Part of the reason why we're leaning, we're recommending this is because There's three different issues. Number one, this money mainly needs to go to capital projects, and we have the Human Services Grant Program, which is almost all public service, which I'm going to be coming back with that in a few weeks as well. And it really complements it nicely, and there's so much more red tape. I shouldn't say red tape, but... administrative burden on these dollars than the grant program dollars. So that's the first reason. Also our administrative capacity to manage the dollars. We have that grant program plus this. It helps to kind of manage that. And then third is the fluctuating rules that are coming from DC with the current leadership that we have. There's many things have, they change, they fluctuate the rules from HUD. There's been a ton of litigation from different jurisdictions to HUD. And by putting the dollars towards capital, you're kind of, it's less risky in this environment, which with the future changes, however HUD makes, we feel like this is just a less risky way to spend the dollars.

So in our plan, we're doing the first three years And part of it is because of the risk that we would take if we went outside of doing city projects. And they're within the census tract, so they're good. And I saw Hunter Park on there at $1.8 million. I thought that was great. And then when you said that the fallback plan was to do the senior center, and I think that one was a little over $4 million. That's kind of a big leap, double. But then I saw another project that had a little bit less. I think it was College Street. And I think it was just a million dollars. So that's something that could go, go, go, you know, be shovel ready quicker than the senior center. But I understand the senior center is a big need, but I was kind of wanting to see if there was a thought and plan and idea to, um, get these dollars to some of the local nonprofits who are struggling as well. But I understand what you're saying is that in these first couple years when there's a lot of uncertainty in D.C., we are a whole lot safer, and this is the path of least resistance for now, that we use them on capital projects for city properties.

So basically after 27, we need to do a new five-year plan. This is our first three-year plan. And during that five-year plan, all that will be discussed. So we won't. We don't know yet because we're not there. It will be able to revisit for 2028 going forward.

One thing we should get in early on is that with the sale of the Seahawks, the foundation that currently holds it is going to use all the proceeds from the sale for charitable work. And so I think we probably have some things we'd love to do in Lacey that would qualify, but we need... We need that community foundation to get them going for bills like that.

We need a non-profit, yeah.

Right. We need grant writers and all that, but...

Okay, any other questions?

Go ahead. I brought this up before. I really think it's great to add 50 more parking spots over at the senior center. I don't know if that's going to make the problem better or worse in terms of the distance that people have to travel across that lot. So I'd still like this to figure out how we can get some sort of a shuttle service, especially when there are big events that are happening there.

That's a great point and great idea. These particular dollars, we couldn't purchase vehicles or anything with, unfortunately. You can't buy equipment. But it's possible that the city could look at a different collaboration to do something like that.

That's something I'd like to see us consider.

Yeah, I agree. Okay, go ahead. So we talked about how the senior center is like a contingency project. There was also the college street. I think it's like sidewalk safety improvements. Are those a part of other plans or are these just gonna be on hold until like HUD dollars and we do the next five year plan and those things all come up? Are we looking at other ways to fund those as well?

Those will be parts of all different city plans. I can't speak to each individual plan, but they're all part of existing plans that the city already has. And I tried to link in the annual action plan to the different city plans. So like if it was a parks plan or a public works plan, I tried to link to a couple different plans that we have already existing.

Yeah, we're always keeping our eyes out for grants and opportunities for funding for those things. And the fact that we have them in a plan means they're pretty ready to go for the opportunity to get funding for them.

Yeah, I just wanted to make sure we're just waiting for the next round of HUD for those plans.

Yeah, the thing about the CDBG dollars is it's a small pot of money, but you can do a lot with it. But usually any kind of capital project, you're going to have to have multiple pots from different places to come in in order to execute that project.

I remember my last question. Go ahead. So, okay, can we use these dollars as match dollars for additional federal grant dollars for a project? So I know that sounds like double dipping, but that was my question as I was reading through your stuff earlier was, you know, if there's grant dollars out there and they require a match, can we use CDBG dollars to match?

Absolutely. And we do that when we do our legislative agendas and we put together proposals for federal or state funding. We list out where the different sources of funding is coming from. So this much from feds, this much from the state, you know, so that they can see the whole project overall.

Yeah. So that 1.8, this is only what we're getting from that. Well, it's not the only money we're getting from fed because there's a, a, um, ask a congressional, uh, dollars ask in there as well. And then there's a state ask in there as well. So it's all broken down to get that to that one point.

And that was my thought. I thought, okay, well, if we, you know, if we're going for a grant and they see that we're using CDBG dollars, which is federal dollars, right. Then is it, is it going to be like, okay, wait, you want to use our money to match our money? That happens all the time.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. Are we good with putting this in the consent agenda for next? Because we've been talking about, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, very good.

All right, thank you.

Okay, then our last agenda item is our official newspaper designation.

All right. Good evening, Mayor, Deputy Mayor, Council. Thank you for having me tonight. Not often on this side of the table. So I'm going to close out our presentations tonight with the official newspaper. During tonight's presentation, we're going to review an official newspaper definition, its application, qualifications, alternatives, cost comparisons, the administrative impacts, and some next steps. Tonight's presentation is discussion only, so we're not actually asking for any action tonight. So an official newspaper is defined in statute that for every Washington code city to officially choose a newspaper that will serve as the official newspaper. The newspaper must meet the state's legal requirements for a legal newspaper under RCW 65.16. And it also must be widely available and accessible within the city. The city must make that choice by passing a formal resolution. The city's official newspaper is the designated place where we publish our legal notices. That's what it serves as. So these would include our public hearing notices, our ordinance summaries, bid advertisements, there are some exceptions to that, as well as annexation notices, and then any other legal notice that state law requires that we make available to the public through publication. The designation does not give the newspaper any special editorial authority. It simply just makes it the legally recognized publication for our official public notices. It also provides a consistent place for the public to go to to view city legal notices.

How do we let the public know what our official public newspaper is?

So with naming through an official resolution, also on our website is where we typically would update this information as well as places where people are going to look for news, events, bids, solicitations, RFPs, open public meeting notices, that sort of thing, and just make sure that that's also directed there. All of our legal notices that we do publish to our official newspaper are also online. published on our website as well, and then most often outside the public bulletin as well. In order to qualify for a legal newspaper under the statute, the newspaper must be published at least once a week, be published in English, have been publishing regularly for at least six months, and then contain general news, not just news for any specific organization or group, and then have a policy of publishing legally required notices. So under that RCW, the Superior Court actually determines which newspapers qualify as legal newspapers. So Thurston County specifically, the Superior Court has approved the following three as legal newspapers. So we have the Olympian, Nisqually Valley News, and the Tenino Independent. The city currently uses the Olympian as our legal newspaper and has done so since 1988. So why change? The Olympian is currently operated by McClatchy. This is not a locally owned or operated company. This is actually out of state company. It has their headquarters on the East Coast. They were obtained by McClatchy, I think, early 2000s. So considering the rising publication costs over the years, we've experienced some publishing barriers. We have multiple online submission platforms that our user groups have to log into and navigate to one of several publications. publication sites to make sure we get the right one. We deal with variable time zones when we're working with customer service, deadline restrictions, holidays, closures, that sort of thing, and then just some inconsistent reliability. We evaluated what options we had. So looking at the three approved newspapers defined by Thurston County Superior Court, Nisqually Valley News was the only alternative that was widely available and accessible within the city, making it qualified to serve as our official newspaper. All of Lacey and our urban growth area are within Nisqually Valley News' print delivery area, so it qualifies. Once we determined it qualified, we looked at some cost savings for community members using subscription information on both websites. We found that our current legal newspaper is substantially higher in cost for readership, whereas a one-year subscription for both print and digital is nearly $400 versus Nisqually Valley News being about $52. Further review for cost comparison, we looked at the costs impacts to the city. We took a public hearing notice that we had recently had published through our existing legal newspaper and asked for a quote from the Squally Valley News and received the following information. So our current legal newspaper, it came out to $392.84 plus 7% surcharge, which puts it right over $420 total for the legal notice for the public hearing. Whereas we received a total quote with all service fees and taxes included at $213.85 for Nisqually Valley News. So it's about 50%.

I think we solved all of our budget problems. Maybe not all of them.

Looking at administrative impacts, there were a few. The Nisqually Valley News publishes only one day a week compared to our current legal newspaper who publishes seven. I did speak to all of our user groups and kind of made sure that we looked at all different scenarios that this could impact. And staff don't anticipate any disruption or delays for publishing deadlines. I think as long as we know in advance, these are things that we can build into our schedules. and plan for accordingly. So without any anticipated disruption or delays, staff do recommend proceeding with designating the Nisqually Valley News as the city's official newspaper. As part of kind of our evaluation and update, we did look into our publication practices and determined that all legal notices with the exception of public works bid solicitations should continue to be published in the city's official designated newspaper. And for that, the law that governs public works solicitations allows for an exception that those specific notices be published in a widely available newspaper that is most likely to bring the most responsive bids, so maximizing the response for bid solicitations. And as outlined in your staff report, in talking to our public works team, the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce was identified as that newspaper that maximizes their bid results. And so as an internal practice, we want to make sure that That's identified and it's the most efficient place for this type of notice and it's also in compliance with state law. If council supports the recommendation to designate the Nisqually Valley News, our next steps would look like consideration of an ordinance to remove the official newspaper designation from the Lacey Municipal Code. That is where it's currently listed. We actually don't have a resolution. It's just listed there in the LMC. Secondly, it would be to consider a resolution naming the Nisqually Valley News as the city's official newspaper because that's what we are statutorily required to do so. And then with the flexibility with the new agenda format, this is something that we could place on the consent agenda at next week's meeting if council supports that. And then with that, thank you. If there's any questions, I'd be happy to answer.

It is kind of a no-brainer, but I wanted to ask you directly, how do you feel about this? How is this going to affect your department? You guys are the ones who do most of this kind of stuff and put this stuff out. Do you feel like this is something that would help you and your team?

I do.

I know there's been talk about going to two days a week for this quality of life.

I've heard talk. We haven't heard anything explicit.

Okay. But if we did make this move, is it something that could maybe help them get to that two days?

That may be a question for that. I'm not sure what their barriers are currently to increasing their publication days, but they are interested in increasing, I've heard directly.

Well, I'm also totally in favor of this. It's nice to, I just, looked online, Nisqually Valley News, and it's all local news, and boy, isn't that a nice change to see what's going on, and it's all local stuff.

Well, it also doesn't change reporting. I mean, you're still going to have reporting on Lacey and the Olympian. This is just a public, you know, our notices. It's got nothing to do with reporting.

And I would like to add to Nisqually Valley News did confirm they currently don't have a paywall for any of their digital readership, so it is just a bit more accessible as well. Legal notices are not behind any payrolls, obviously, and that's what we would ultimately be using the newspaper for.

I was just going to say, it's kind of bittersweet because I do think it is the right move, but the Olympian, like a lot of local newspapers, has been such a big part of this community for so long, and so I hope at some point it can become what it once was. So for now, I think this is a great move and maybe the Olympian with a lot of others will make a comeback someday. So I'm not excited about it because we're the situation Olympian, but this is definitely the right move in my opinion.

I agree. This is definitely the right move. Does this designation last until we decide to review it again? Yes. Thank you. Okay.

I'm excited that the dollars will continue to circulate within Thurston County, within this community, as opposed to leaving and going to the East Coast, wherever that might be.

I do agree it's sad, the whole Olympian sort of loss of readership and taken over by an out-of-state. publishing company and to see the sort of withdrawal of starting the withdrawal of local sports and everything else has just been really difficult and but it is what it is and it's nice to see that there is a publishing company right here you know reporting on things that are going on right here in our community and and hopefully our public can can look at those things and see all the resolutions and legal notices that we put out from this council and have better accessibility to it because a lot of times even an article will come out and you can't even read the article unless you're a subscriber. And so the whole accessibility side of things has been really, really difficult.

I believe we would be the third local municipality to use Nisqually Valley News. Yeah.

Okay. Looks like we're all thumbs up on the consent agenda.

Thank you so much.

So next we have council reports. Is there anything the council needs to report on where we can save it till next time?

I had a little addendum to a report that I gave last week. I reported on the EDC. One of the things that I missed out on reporting on was the new rapid response team that's kind of being put together, working with the economic development managers and directors from the cities. And so a lot of times what happens is we get these leads from Department of Commerce, and they are time-sensitive, number one, but I'll give you an example. The last lead we got was this boat manufacturer who wanted to locate down here in Olympia. few hundred boats a month. They were going to bring all these jobs and so on and so forth. We had 10 days to respond and 10 days, just not enough. Right. And so, you know, one of the things was like, okay, well let's talk to commerce about these leads and make sure that, you know, we're getting ample time that we have all the resources to put, you know, the action together and get it back to commerce to be a viable candidate for, for these people who want to locate here. So, so with, with the way commerce kind of puts the leads out, it's almost impossible for us to really be competitive in some cases. So as the EDC has kind of put together a rapid response team, which will put all the tools and all the things necessary in one place so that when good leads come, we can respond to them as fast as possible. And if this was in place already, it took a while to put it together. But if this was already in place, maybe we would have gotten that deal and brought all these new jobs to the community and this new manufacturing to the community. this team is going to be put together. In fact, it's in its final stages of being put together. So we should be able to respond to these commerce leads within 10, 15 days. And maybe we will get some of that business to come here.

Yeah. I remember being on the board of directors 16 years ago, whatever it was. And those are confidential leads come in and And you see these big numbers that they're, you know, employment numbers and everything else. And you're right. And it's like you have 10 days to respond. And we've been talking about having this rapid response or some better way to handle that for a long time. So it's great to see that, you know, we're finally seeing some movement on that. Anyone else? Okay. With that, we have reached the end of our agenda. So without objection, I'm going to call this work session adjourned. Stay cool out there. It's starting to get warm this time of year. It hits 80 degrees and we start melting so everyone's right stay stay cool out there and As always you keep it classy Lacey