City Council - Regular Meeting

Buddy, thanks for coming to your City Council. Welcome. My name is Mayor Paul Blackburn. I'm going to call us to order for this evening. First thing we're going to all do is put it on focus mode, please, if you would. Second thing we're gonna do is read a land acknowledgement. As we gather today, we respectfully acknowledge that the land on which the city of Wood River sits is the ancestral home of indigenous peoples. This includes the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Warm Springs, Yakima, and other tribes who stewarded this land for generations. We recognize the lasting impact of colonialism and commit to working together for a more just and sustainable future. Please join me as we say the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, Are there any agenda additions or corrections I need to know about, Abigail?

No, Mayor, there are not.

We have several people signed up to speak to council. Now is the time for business from the audience. I think maybe the first person has scratched out. We have Alan and Alondra, if you'd come on up, please, and tell us what you'd like us to know. There's a red circle. If you touch the white dot, like Abigail, now you're on. All right.

I'm about parking in downtown Hood River. I own Allen's Fine Woodworking on the corner of 3rd and Cascade. Yep. And a lot of our clients are having difficulty just stopping in and picking up a sample, dropping stuff off that park blocks away. So short-term parking in that area would be nice to have something where they can kind of be rotating people through 10, 15-minute parking only. One of our clients came to drop off a check, parked in the loading zone across the street. The guy was walking by. I don't know if she got a ticket or not, but she was in there just a couple of minutes and came back out because there was no other parking. Sometimes they park around the corner, the no parking spot and semis can't make the corner. So, and it's just short term just to drop off a check, pick up a sample, being able to have our clients do that rather than have to walk blocks to get there for that short term.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks for coming. And Alondra.

Hi, my name is Alondra Alcantara. I'm with Cascade House & Sotheby's. When Brad came to us about the parking permit, we said about time. We are always having to double park on the street when it's just coming in, getting keys, making copies, putting signs in our cars. And it's become a safety hazard because we have a lot of tourists. We come during the day. During the day, we have to double park and then there's other traffic coming through. So that's been happening a lot. So we definitely need it.

Thanks for coming.

Next, we have a proclamation. I see Hannah is here. Hannah is.

Yes.

How many years has it been, Hannah?

Well, I've been managing the market for, this is my 11th season.

11th season.

Yes. But we wanted your help to shine a bit more light on the work that we do because it's actually Gorge Grown's 20th anniversary. of our work this year. So in conjunction with National Farmers Market Week, I was hoping to have a city farmers market week. So let's see. So yeah, we began in 2026 or in 2006, sorry. So 20 years of celebrating Gorge Grown's work to strengthen local agriculture, expand food access and build a more resilient local food system. We launched the Hood River Farmers Market with just nine vendors. And today, the Hood River Farmers Market hosts more than 65 vendors each week during peak season, and we support over 100 vendor businesses annually. We generate over $1.5 million each year for our local economy. And I'm hoping the city will proclaim next week, August 2nd through the 8th, as Farmers Market Week to help strengthen all the good that farmers markets do for our community, including supporting local farmers and ranchers and food producers. expand access to fresh, healthy local food, strengthen the local economy, build community connections, and invest in the future of agriculture.

And remind everybody which city parking lot you guys do business on.

The Columbia lot.

The Columbia lot. Therefore, to further awareness of farmers' markets contributions to Hood River life, I, Mayor Paul Blackburn, do hereby proclaim the week of August 2nd through 8th, 2026 as Hood River Farmers' Market Week in conjunction with the observance of National Farmers' Market Week. Call upon Hood River citizens to celebrate farmers' markets with appropriate observance and activities.

Super. Thank you, sir.

Thanks for being here. Next, we have a presentation regarding the short-term parking spot. Abigail, how does this work?

Mayor, I think you can just call up Mr. Perrone, and he's giving me some windups that I'm going to distribute to you now.

Great. Welcome back, Bradford. Thank you.

So... Thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak about this. I'm going to talk more about the historic element of it since I've had a lot of my tenants in the attachments. I've got a lot of... additional letters of people that were going to come speak, but I wanted to keep that down so where you guys can do your official business, but I have attached those letters in the back. One of the first items is the historic photo of the building. And I just want to, we've, you know, over the last 30 years, we have, you know, had the, you know, different tenants and restored the buildings to where we're the two largest buildings in downtown hood river. Um, I have more tenants than any of the other buildings and we are one of the only blocks that doesn't have a short-term zone. Um, and so we're, uh, The tenants, my biggest concern is the tenants, I've already lost tenants, and they are needing to find, go down to the port, go up into the heights, and we're going to lose our tenants if we continue to go down the path of that there's just not any available parking. Short term helps for the locals. And so I think it's really important that We offer that to our tenants in the building. The next photograph I've got, I've got two photographs of the spot. They redid the Oak Street loading zone there. And so they widen the curb. And so they have to actually drive in and drop into the spot. And then they're right up against that car. And then the next picture shows when they back up to get out, they're backing right into the pedestrian way. Being that that's the latest urban renewal thing, it was something that, you know, is that they would love for unloading on our building. They're having unloaded. and then we'll go down to get into the building. The spot that we're proposing, there's a picture of the building with the black car. That's the spot that we're proposing. And if you look behind the black car, there is about 12 feet of distance before it hits the crosswalk. And I have more than just UPS. We've got Amazon UPS. We've got shredder companies that come in and shred documents for everybody. Water distribution, where they bring in water to the offices and so forth. And then different companies pick up from the medical offices will pick up the items that they need to take for testing and so forth. So there's a lot of the courier type transport. So this is a much safer spot for them to back up because they will be able to back up and pull out without actually getting into an intersection at all. So I have bled this to death and I just hope that you guys can support that. And I appreciate everybody that came down and physically saw it firsthand. Grant and Gladys and Anna, I really appreciate it because it's an important issue as a historic event. building owner and I would miss Cindy Walbridge because she would be right here fighting for me if she was still here. And so we don't have a lot of representation for the historic nature and the fabric that our buildings create, but we need to have tenants to be able to enjoy the buildings and keep them going. So thank you for your time.

Mayor on this particular issue, You have a staff recommendation and we're looking for some kind of action today.

Thank you. Anyone like to kick off the discussion Gladys.

Thank you, and thank you, Mr. Cronin, to all of your tenants who submitted information or testimony and the gentleman that provided comments. I'm trying to understand the direction that staff would need if we are open to giving a 10-minute space. Do we need to be really specific about the placement, or is that something that staff would – between Adam and whatnot would figure out the best placement-wise? Like, do we need to be really prescriptive and go with the photo that was given to us, for example?

Either would be fine. You could say that you wanted staff to talk with the business owner or the property owner on the best spot. The suggested motion in your packet, it does specifically state on 3rd at Cascade. I would say from a staff point of view, you've kind of two options if you wish to grant this. One would be to say, make it immediate. The other would be pending a future study.

Thank you. And that was my follow-up question. We are in conversations of a parking study open to this being a pilot. And then as we're finding out more information, being able to implement whatever findings from that study, HAB-Masyn Moyer- To the larger parking assessment that's going to be completed so i'm open to to agreeing with this and having this as a pilot, but I was trying to understand. HAB-Masyn Moyer- I know that we discussed this a couple meetings ago but i've already forgotten when with the new parking update take place when would it be completed, so that we can understand simultaneous pilot.

I think the inventory and some of the pre works going to be done in August so that they can do that work during the busy season, but then the the plan itself will probably take a couple months. Thank you.

I would be inclined to approve this immediately as an operational thing and I think a 10 minute parking will spot just like The picture that Bradford provided to us right there at Second and Oak seems logical. The bigger policy decision we kind of hit on it too, Gladys, is we're revisiting the parking study. We're trying to figure this out. But I feel like I'm embarrassed that it's taken this long and it's been this difficult for you to try to get this accomplished. I feel like we should do a better job of trying to help out our local businesses and be supportive to them. And it would be really great if we had a clear cut procedure on, you know, if you have a need like this, these are the, you know, requirements that you would need to fulfill to be able to qualify for something like this. And these are the steps for getting it, you know, approved because I feel like this shouldn't be at the discretion of any one HAB-Masyn Moyer- Like group work for people or person or anything like that should just be a lot simpler like I just i'm sorry that it's been such a difficult hall, so I just wanted to acknowledge that, but I would, I would be emotion when or if anybody else wants to weigh in on that first. HAB-Masyn Moyer- man.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- I agree i'm definitely. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Or this, but I just have a question about the effective at all hours and on all days like most of the parking is only enforced until 6pm on Monday through Saturday so. HAB-Masyn Moyer- essence that's what it is right like. HAB-Masyn Moyer- You know, right or sit on a Sunday and I can enforce that midnight so. HAB-Masyn Moyer- But need to say that, or should it say some more and enforceable hours.

My recommendation would be all hours and all days. And you're exactly right. Enforcement of limited time spots is difficult for us because they're not metered. And so that relies on our staff to see somebody come back more than 10 minutes later and see that they're still in that spot and have documented that in order to provide a ticket. So limited spots are a challenge for us anyway. I think saying all hours and all days is important to the business owners if there was deliveries after hours. How that would be enforced is if you see that red Honda is there for hours or every Friday at 6 or whenever they're parking there, then someone could call non-emergency dispatch and someone could attend to it. Or they could try to reach that person the next day or talk to the building owner about, is this one of your tenants? And can you please talk to them? So it really would be handled informally.

And are our other 10 minute, 15 minute spots the same way?

I'd have to look, but I don't think that they say whether they are all hours, all days. I believe the post office are all hours with a special note on some of them are available on Saturdays, but not other days.

I think the one in front of the library says for book drop.

Yes. Yeah. So that has a specific purpose. And so that implies all the hours, all days.

Well, cool. The one at the corner here definitely just says 10 minute parking and that's it. And that implies all the time. So I haven't seen the question. So I looked at the Google maps down, every sign to see what it said. But I think that that makes sense. I think it's important to be consistent too so that people don't get confused.

Yeah, exactly. So I think if it said 10 minutes, that implies all hours, all days. The loading zone ones, I believe say, Monday through Saturday, they explicitly say when the loading zone hours are, and then after six, that's no longer a loading zone. So this, if it just says 10 minute parking would imply that it's all hours, but enforcement will be a challenge.

I want to respond to a comment about being embarrassed about taking a long time. My fear is that a short time spot would benefit any business on any block, and that this would benefit the businesses on all the other blocks also, and that this group has done a good job of coming as an organized voice and putting a lot of effort into that, and good job, you. I just fear the crack we're opening up. Having said that, I'm fine for the pilot, but there's a 750 page book called there's no such thing as free parking and it's a it's not a joke.

So I will note for the thank you for that the parking study we plan to do as we have asked. Rick Williams Consulting to look at limited duration spots and to help us establish criteria for future decisions. In the past, they have been, you know, the request comes to me, I evaluate with public works director and the police chief from a safety point of view. This one first came as a mid block request. So it didn't have an ADA grant, other pieces are good. I think that was the right decision. Then it came to you and it has evolved into this spot that I think is a very good spot. And so the process has not been as clean as it might've been. And I hope having criteria for future, establishing criteria will help us in these kinds of decisions going forward.

Great, thank you. I agree with the mayor and councilor Cavallari. This is a awkward process that I recommend we not repeat. We as council have become arbitrary arbiters for this random request. And if we go with this pilot project, we may get more requests for arbitrary additional pilot projects from all corners and then this council will put in additional purchase positions to arbitrarily approve other pilot projects all over the place and there should be a standard process that should just be applied to the wide uh council should be here just to set a policy that gets applied across all of downtown the heights wherever it should be through town council should not be here arbitrarily

uh micromanaging every parking space through the city yes very much agree with what you just said grant and that was going to be my comment not only criteria but a process about what to do because um when this request first came to us i was like i honestly don't know like what the process is in order to do something like this um so yeah that would be the one addition yeah

I look forward to the parking study update to, you know, look at this comprehensively. I also want to thank staff for all the time and working through this on a piecemeal scale. I know you receive requests for these sorts of things all the time. That being said, you know, I think it's also good that Mr. Perrone came here and provided testimony and all that sort of thing. But it's, you know, like everyone else is saying, it's look forward to the parking study update to see how this is done. I know we've had a lot of discussions with businesses that want to have an additional parkland or something like that. Neighboring businesses don't want that or we can move this spot to that spot and somebody's happy about that and somebody's upset about that. So it's, you know, I think in this instance, we have a business that's the entire block over there. It's a bit of a unique situation, but it does call into question, you know, TAB, Mark McIntyre:" How much how much citizen and staff time needs to be spent on this sort of stuff and I look forward to the part of study addressing something like this when it's updated. TAB, Mark McIntyre:" ready for his motion. Yes.

I moderate modified the one was suggested a little bit, but I'm kind of glad this is point. I move that city council direct the city manager to designate the parking space at the northwest corner of 3rd Street where 3rd intersects Cascade Avenue as a 10 minute parking space exactly like the 10 minute parking space.

Move by Cavalieri. I'll second. Second by Rivera. Further discussion. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. Motion passes. Thank you all. Why are we laughing?

Yes.

Okay. Thank you. Research, we will now recess to consider the urban renewal agenda.

Thank you, Mayor Blackburn. I call the order of the Hood River Urban Renewal Agency meeting. And Any agenda corrections? I assume not, Will.

They're not.

Okay. Any business from the audience? Does anybody sign up online, Haley, or anything like that? Okay. So the first thing we have on our agenda is the approval of the meeting minutes from the June 22nd meeting on consent. I entertain a motion.

So moved.

Motion by Gagey. I'll second. Second by Rivera. Any discussion? All those in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Chair votes aye, consent agenda passes. Regular business items, the Praxis contract amendment will.

Yeah. Thank you, Chair Stegina, Urban Renewal Agency board members. I'll have a request for a contract amendment with Praxis for support for the Hood River general obligation bond engagement information campaign. You may recall that the city of Hood River contracted with the Urban Renewal Agency to administer the engagement and information campaign and authorized $159,795 for direct expenses. It was 10% on top of that for agency overhead. And part of that amount was for Praxis to do a number of projects number of activities supporting the bond and information engagement campaign. And that included videos, social media posts, supporting community presentations that we did to the school board, the Urban Real Advisory Committee, Downtown Business Association, Rotary, two town halls, one for housing, one for the police station and a Latino focus group. They've also helped help with content for a newsletter, a community survey that we did and supporting our polling work. So all of that ended up being more than expected for the video portion, as well as just general project management support, helping me keep all of this together. And so while I believe that we can stay within the overall budget for the project, I'm asking for a contract increase with Praxis for an additional 26,532. And that's inclusive of them writing off basically $3,000 worth of the video expenses since that went more expensive than they thought. They're essentially just comping that for us. But we do need the additional contract authority in order to continue on and fill the rest of their scope of work from now through November. As well as this funds will add scope for editing existing videos to meet post-ballot referral requirements and also to manage the Secretary of State's safe harbor process, which is essentially pre-vetting all of our future materials to make sure it fits with election laws. So that'll answer any questions.

Luke? I have one question just to explain a little bit about what post means in terms of editing video content and so on and so forth. Will those videos be available anymore? I know they won't be in the same iteration that we had before, pre.

Yeah, they will continue to be on our timeline. on our social media posts. Anywhere we posted it, like pre-ballot referral, it will still live there and sit there. But for reissuing it and sort of renewing and refreshing, there'll be some additional editing to make sure that it is completely neutral and all sort of whiff of advocacy is scrubbed out of it. Awesome.

Thank you.

Anna, you were...

So what is left to pay for after we complete this contract?

Yeah, we are going to continue to pay for ads with bi-coastal media. There'll be some additional social media support. There'll be a lot less than we were doing, but still some social media, newsletters, other messaging. That is most of it. It's really gonna slow down quite a bit.

Okay, I was just looking at the numbers and I wanted to make sure. So we had budgeted 159,795. We're adding this amount. So the total amount would be 68,482. And there was the, so we have about 30 grand left in the budget, right?

Yeah.

I just want to make sure my math is right. Thanks.

Ben?

Yeah, I just wanted some more information about why the video costs were more expensive than anticipated. That to me, as someone who works in videos, is a pretty sizable increase.

Yeah, I don't know if Jake's available to help chime in. I think it was basically everything was shot in one day. And so it was a big effort and it all happened all at once. I'd say most everything happened within the course of about two, maybe three days. And I think it was just that the scope got larger than what actually they ended up producing more than originally anticipated. Just- Yeah, and I think, is Jake in the... Oh, not as an attendee, as someone who would be from the public link to promote. No, yeah.

We can follow up with that information tomorrow.

And then I was a little bit confused in terms of... requesting this additional amount since it says in here that so far, you know, total 85,000 of the 159,000 is budgeted, but it says that expenditures are expected to slow significantly once a ballot title is finalized, which we're going to be doing that soon. So I was just a little bit confused about, it sounds like we're doing pretty, Good right now and that we still have a lot of room in the budget. So I was a little bit confused about why there is an additional ask. I think I feel like I'm just missing something.

Yeah. I think it's the fact that it's going really fast and there's a lot of invoices in process right now.

Got it.

Yeah.

Gladys.

Yeah, thank you. So just to make sure that I guess we're all on the same page, once all these videos have been edited, there will still be access to these videos for the PACs that will continue to move the work forward.

It's going to be, you know, we posted them on our social media platforms and those old posts will continue to be old posts that sit there, but we won't be hosting them on like the city website anymore.

Right, but there will still be access to the edited videos that will be like neutral party moving forward?

Yes. Okay, thanks.

Anybody over here on this side? No? Haley, I saw like a flash go up there. Was that anybody chiming in? Okay. Yeah, let's... Jake, go ahead. We can't... Looks like he's trying to get on there.

There, OK. Go ahead, Jake. I apologize. I joined using Will's link. And so I've been pretending to be Will the whole meeting until I figured it out. So I apologize for that. But I did want to make sure. I've been listening to the whole conversation. A couple of things. One, I'll say in terms of the video production, this may not be the best practice if all you do is video industry work. We provided an estimate before we had even started the project. And so as we got into it and we understood that we needed to kind of develop two completely separate messages around housing and police, and that the housing message was a little more complicated, that we had to kind of help the public understand the larger dynamics around the housing situation, it just ended up being more work. And so that's why it ended up being seven videos and cost a little more than we thought it would. In terms of kind of the other costs, I think Will provided a really good explanation. The only piece I'd add is that, you know, our original scope only went through this step in the process, the referral process. We did not envision kind of what would happen between now and the election. So a lot of the work is for us to support the city, whether that is doing, excuse me, I'm in a meeting. So that is to support the city as they work through safe harbor process and make sure that the language being used after referral complies with the Secretary of State's rules, as well as to the point about the videos updating it. Like we know there's some mandatory language that must now be included in the videos after referral. saying if the bond is not approved, then these improvements would not happen, as well as now that we've landed on the cost of the bond, we need to make sure that is identified in the video. So there's some additional work we'll need to do to make sure that they comply with the law for what's required after referral. So those are kind of the highlights. I'm happy to dive into anything else that might come up.

Any other questions for Jake? No, thank you so much, Jake, for chiming in. That's helpful. Um, yeah, so with that, um, on page seven of the packet, there is a suggested motion. Anybody would like to make one.

I moved the urban renewal agency board authorized amendment one to the Praxis contract for bond information and engagement activities, increasing contract authority to $68,482.

Moved by Rivera.

Second.

Second by Cavalieri. Any further discussion? just say that you know i think it's been uh we've i've seen a lot of output from praxis and i think it's been it's been all good stuff and helped us get uh answer some really tough questions about what we had to do for this bond and get information out to the voters and and whatnot so um money well spent uh all those in favor aye aye any opposed chair votes aye motion passes Will, we've got three updates for us today from the administrator update.

Yeah, three verbal updates. First is that we've received ODOT's conceptual acceptance for a roundabout at Mount Adams and Cascade. Roundabout has been our local plan for quite a while. It was in the 2017 Westside Area Concept Plan and then incorporated into our Transportation System Plan in 2021. but wasn't yet ODOT's preferred alternative. So we needed to go through the process of what's called an intersection control evaluation. It took several months and a lot of back and forth and a lot of eyes over at ODOT giving comments back on our analysis. But it came back that they now, on their side, because it is an ODOT roadway that we're looking to improve, agree that a roundabout is the acceptable intersection treatment at that intersection. So still a long way to go. We still need a lot of engineering and permitting. But now a roundabout is acceptable to ODOT. So that's a big milestone.

Fantastic.

update on height streetscape lighting. So working with MIG and DKS doing lighting studies for the height for the Taylor Avenue project and discussed with the Urban Renewal Advisory Committee at their last meeting that our intention is to use our historic lights that are here in downtown on the waterfront and along Cascade Avenue, along Taylor Avenue, instead of doing a unique lighting type that would be only in the Heights. Sticking with the historic lights will save us money because we already have them, we already service them, we know how to do it. They can also be dark sky night compliant. And so the Urban Renewal Advisory Committee was unanimously in support of that direction, but I just wanted to make sure that the agency board was informed on that decision as well. And then lastly, an undergrounding update for the Heights Streetscape improvements. So undergrounding has been a part of the Heights Urban Renewal Plan since it was adopted in 2011. Undergrounding was a big part of the improvements that we did in downtown. And so that was also something that the Heights business owners wanted when they kind of on the grassroots level created the Heights Urban Renewal Plan. So we're working on that. And we intend to with Taylor Avenue improvements, underground all the overhead utilities that run along Taylor, but through this process of working with Pacific Avenue or Pacific Power, it looks like it will not be feasible to underground what's in the alleyway going north-south, an alleyway between 12th and 13th, at least not at this time. And the reason for that is that is actually a backbone of power for the entire city. And if there's so much power running through there that if we were to underground it, we would need to set up large junction boxes that would take up real estate in multiple places along the way. And acquiring real estate is not going to keep us on track with the Taylor Avenue improvements and our deadlines that we have with ODOT for the ADA ramp installations. So we're recommending setting that aside for now. It would also, we'd have to de-energize most of the city for a period of time in order to underground them. So also discussed that with the advisory committee and they were all on board with keeping the alleyway overhead lines, but undergrounding all the other ones in the Heights. And if kind of looking at the downtown versus the heights, you know, I don't think it's getting a dissimilar treatment because there just are no alleys in downtown. And so all the city, all the streets and where you have view sheds for the pedestrians in downtown, all will be undergrounded. And that would be the same in the heights, even if we do keep the alleyway lines overhead. But I wanted you to be aware as well.

Any questions for Will about those three topics? Anna?

On the first one, you said that ODOT has conceptually agreed around about, is there a distinction between conceptual approval and actual approval? Like, do we need to be worried about that later?

No, don't need to be worried about it. It's just part of the process. So they're just saying conceptually around about. academically makes sense as a treatment there. But if we have not fully engineered the house and gone in for building permits, so to speak, this is like, we've gotten the liminary approval in a sort of at the planning level stage, but we still need to get through submit actual design drawings and get all those signed off on.

Then that could be actually Yes. Thank you.

Some more questions. Thanks, Will. Any items from the agency members? Anything on your mind, urban renewal wise? Speak now. Okay. With that, I will adjourn the urban renewal agency board meeting and return us back to city council.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will reconvene and we are next on the consent agenda. I will take off the OLCC license approval and entertain a motion to approve last time's minutes.

So moved.

Move by President Rivera. Second. Second by Stepina. Discussion on that? All in favor? Yes. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. Motion passes. Now I will entertain a motion for Buona Notte. So moved. Moved by Stepina. Second. Second by Mitchell. Gladys.

I'm going to abstain from the OLCC permit applications, not a reflection of the establishment's business or the owners. We just don't have enough transportation. We recently adopted a code that allows transportation, and that is still in the process between the city and the county. So here soon, I think that will be a great step forward that will address some of the access and capacity remains, but capacity remains limited, especially during the late hours and in our upper valley. I believe that here soon we will have some viable options that will allow for adequate transportation during late evenings and weekends and hope to start approving OSCC applications.

Thank you, Madam President. Do we have a motion?

We have the motion.

Did we already move in second? Okay. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Abstentions?

I abstain.

Any opposed? Chair votes aye. Motion passes. Thank you. Next action item is Chris.

Thank you.

Thank you. So in your page 22 of the packet is the detailed fourth quarter financial report. This includes preliminary data for all of the 2026 fiscal year. This is financial data through June 30th of 2026. General fund revenues are anticipated to be right on top of the $11 million that was budgeted for the fiscal year. Revenue adjustments from the $10.7 million that have been received to date include pending collections for transient room tax, franchise fees, and local marijuana taxes. These are revenues that are expected to be received in July, but will be reflected as part of the fiscal 2026 revenues. Property tax receipts were $3.5 million. That's consistent with a 3% growth rate over the previous fiscal year. and its property taxes represent 32% of all general fund revenues. Transit room taxes are expected to close the year just under $2 million. That would be consistent with budget, but slightly below the previous fiscal year. And franchise fee revenue with projected receipts of approximately $1 million would be modestly below budget, as well as the receipts for previous fiscal years. I'm sorry, for the previous fiscal year. Ambulance revenues exceeded budget expectations by nearly 19%, and we're at $1.2 million for the entire fiscal year. For the first time, ambulance revenues exceeded franchise fees, excluding the utility franchise fee, and would be the third largest contributor to general fund revenues. GEMT, or the Ground Emergency Medical Transportation Programs, These significantly missed budget expectations and historical receipts. The primary disruption was due to federal and programmatic issues during the year. There was the federal shutdown that interrupted with distributions that seemed to delay distributions for the fiscal year. However, it's unclear whether these revenues will be distributed during the current fiscal year and or what potential implications from H.R. 1 will sort of how that will impact this program. So these revenues are budgeted at an equivalent level for this current fiscal year, but there is some uncertainty going into it. Parking meter receipts were strong, 10% over budget and 13% when compared to the prior fiscal year. So overall, the five largest contributors to general fund revenues, property tax, transit room tax, franchise fees, including the utility franchise fees, ambulance fees and parking meter fees, accounted for 83% of all general fund revenues. Again, as we mentioned, revenue performance was consistent with budget. Other items I've mentioned are interest earnings, which exceeded budget as a result of a higher interest rate environment and a higher than budgeted fund balance. The $11 million budget, again, consistent with, I'm sorry, $11 million in receipts consistent with budget, but then also would be flat in comparison. The expenditure side, general fund department expenditures are projected to end the year at about $11.5 million. That's 8% higher than the fiscal year prior, but below the budgeted expense of $12.3 million. Labor expense at $7.5 million represented 66% of all general fund spending, and personnel costs year over year were about 9% greater. For the fiscal year, labor came in at 94% of budget, with the savings primarily driven by position vacancies. Updated for all revenue and expense projections, the general fund is currently projected to operate with an operating shortfall of approximately $442,000, which although is still a deficit, is an absolute improvement from the original budget expectations. It also should be noted that a meaningful portion of that deficit is the city funding its own poorest cash reserve. And so that elective reserve contributed to the overall deficit. The projected ending fund balance would be $5.6 million. That's from an opening fund balance of just over $6 million, but still is 49% of total fiscal 2026 expenditures, and so very valuable. Other major revenues, utilities and local state gas taxes, are the largest revenue receipts outside the general fund. Those collections are trending at 10.7 million, representing about a 3% increase year over year. Water, sewer, and storm receipts were all consistent with or in excess of budget, while the local and state gas taxes slightly lagged expectations. That is reflected in the current fiscal year budget, where we continue to project that those fund receipts will decrease modestly. year-over-year cash balances for all funds, including the urban renewal districts, are $32 million. That's a significant increase from the same period a year prior, primarily attributed to the closing of a $7.5 million loan, which was obtained for the benefit of the sewer and water fund. I should note these cash balances will have and will increase significantly with the receipt of the ODOT jurisdictional transfers funds. However, both the loan and those jurisdictional transfer funds are earmarked for existing or future development work. This is an action item without an action. So I'm just here to answer questions and then to have you accept the financial report.

Gladys and then Doug.

Thank you, Chris. Have you had any chance to maybe start projecting what potential revenue could be lost should there come changes to the expected projections of over 200,000 Oregonians losing Medicaid access? I know that we don't have 200,000 here in the city, but there's about 8,000 individuals that are enrolled in Medicaid, which is about 30% of the population for the county, right? But it's for the county, not for the city. have there been any sort of projections to understand the local impacts that that could have?

No, I mean, I don't, and I'd have to defer, you know, I'd have to defer to the fire chief if he had any additional information with regards to sort of, you know, Medicaid reimbursements. Now I can, I can speak to the GEMT because that is a Medicaid subsidy program, right? We originally, we budget around 150 to $200,000 a year in that program. And, You know, so I think this year in the financials, we received about 10 grand, right? So, I mean, that was about $10,000. Now, again, I don't know how much of that was just a delay in the funding and how much of that is just sort of a loss of subsidy. That'll bear out this year, but at the very least, that would be the first impact. With regards to the ambulance revenues, I'm not sure how much of that is sort of, you know, our Medicare or Medicaid reimbursements.

Is there a way to be able to find that out, just to have guesstimates of here's how much we can expect to lose so that when we do go to potentially negotiate or renegotiate contracts with all the parties, that that be a – it's not like – Medicaid recipients are going to be turned away if they call an ambulance, but for us to better understand, here's what we can expect.

Yeah, it would be a matter of me, it would just be a matter of me sitting down with the chief to understand what are the, what are insurance reimbursements, right? What are private pay? And then what are sort of government assistance?

Similar topic. So I, and I, I meant to ask for for data on this, but it does feel like we're often above the revenues we're looking at for the ambulances. I feel like we talk about it during the budget season every year. So my concern was similar to Gladys's. Is there anything that you see that can be impacting that outside of Medicaid? Do we expect it to grow? And at what point does it become unsustainable? Because we're just presenting people to Portland, all that. I know these are more questions for Chief Rogers, but do you have any thoughts on that in terms of-

In prior conversations in past years, I know that ambulance receipts have always been very, very difficult to budget. There's a lot of factors that the city doesn't control, many of which you've brought up, that come into play there. So I'd have to just get smarter as far as what we project. The way that we project revenues for ambulance fees is much the same way that we do for others, which is just look at a trending historical analysis. and just do a sort of a best guess from there. So, you know, sort of past, right, the existing projections are based off of past results.

It just seems to, you know, have grown in importance now that it's kind of gone into the category where it's the third most, right? So it's like, you know, we don't want to have to rely on that in future years if we can't and all that. So I just think in the next budget cycle, you know, we probably should have some discussions around that.

No, absolutely. And, and I will note so although those revenues are, you know, sort of general fund revenue where they show up in your financials and in the budget is in the, is in the actual fire department. So those are particularly important, right? Because they go to, they're the largest revenue in the fire department as far as as far as controlling those expenses.

Thank you. In some ways, the fiscal is the metaphor for the whole operation. So I don't know if staff are watching or what, but congratulations. Good job. Coming in end of year under expense budget is every single person sharpening the pencil and watching the watching the efficiencies and watching the overtime and. filing the reimbursement on the revenue side. And congratulations, Hood River staff.

Yeah, actually, I credit department heads for all of their effort that they put in managing these budgets, as well as we haven't talked about public works as part of this because we focus on the general fund. But the same is true for public works, where it's managing very, very complicated budgets and keeping everything within budget. So thanks.

Anything else on the action without an action? No action required. Thanks, Chris. Thank you very much. And November bond measures will

Yeah, thank you. Marin City Council is maybe a quick action tonight, but I really the culmination of a whole lot of work to get to where we are today. You know, it was the city council work plan identified exploring a general obligation bond as a critical project. And then we started in earnest back in September and have had about nine meetings on this subject as we started from a wide net and then narrowed down to where we are today, supported by a whole bunch of engagement and public information activities. So culmination of six months of the work, but really I think When you think about the targets that we're looking at for the bond for housing and for the police that really harkens back to 2019 which was when we studied alternatives really in earnest to get the police out of their substandard facilities in the basement and have led through Aaron Brockett , kind of taking off all the various alternatives to leave us with this renovation proposal and then also going back to the 2022 adopted affordable housing strategy which recommended pursuing an affordable housing housing bond. Aaron Brockett , So maybe not a surprise that those were the two things that rose to the top. So what we have for you tonight is finalized by ballot titles that reflects the information that we received through our engagement activities and then also the direction from city council at your July 13th meeting. We've done financial analyses for each one of the bond amounts. And so for $8.7 million bond for the police facility, which is enough to renovate it as well as expand for future staffing need and matching that 8.7 for a housing bond. The packet and page 23 has the necessary rates as well as an analysis of the median impact to a typical homeowner in Hood River and as well as the 25th and 75th quartiles. And so basically what that means is the middle 50% what that ranges by. So what the rates came out to was 39 cents per thousand for an $8.7 million housing bond and 34 cents per thousand for an $8.7 million police bond. And the reason and the difference in those rates has to do with the IRS tax rules around what expenditures can be bonded for on a tax exempt basis versus a taxable basis. So municipal bonds are issued at what's called a tax-free rate. And so investors don't have to pay taxes on the interest they earn. Because they don't have to pay that, they require a lower interest rate in order to get the same effective yield as, say, a corporate bond. Housing bonds have to be taxable because they're going to be combined with private capital. They're also going to be used for private, eventually private residences. So they don't meet the IRS definitions of public infrastructure like a road or a school or a police station would. And so that is built into this analysis that that will be a higher interest rate for those bonds and a higher rate tax rate. So The estimate for the typical homeowner for the housing bond is $8.82. And for the police, it's $7.69. And tonight, what we have for the city council to adopt is two resolutions for the two separate bond measures. And that's authorizing the ballot title and ballot summaries for the November 26 ballot. And then we also have the explanatory statements as well that we've put together that would be in a voter's pamphlet if the county produces a voter's pamphlet for the November ballot. And so with that, there's a suggested motion in your packet, but I'm happy to answer any questions. And I believe Jake is still with us as well.

Amanda and then Gladys.

I was curious, like in the summary of the housing bond, and this is what will be published. And you said if they publish a voters pamphlet, does that not always happen?

Not always. The question in the summary will absolutely be there. But then the longer explanatory statement, we need to work with the county to understand if they're going to produce a voters pamphlet.

Wait, so the summary will for sure be there? The summary will for sure. Okay. So then, you know, we say it's zero to 120% of median income, and we explain what that is, but we don't say, like, is there a reason we can't say, like, as of this date, the median income is this, just to give people an idea of that? I just feel like people don't know what the area median income is, and if we can't put it in here, I know... would put a lot of thought and i appreciate all that but can we do that in another way to share with people because i feel like that's really valuable information and people can say oh i am in that and i'm just curious why it's not in this part i guess yeah thanks for that and yes we will still put out factual public information from now all the way through november and saying what the area median income is is absolutely on the table

We also intend to produce an individualized address specific calculator where people can look up their home and see their individualized cost estimate, similar to how Parks and Rec did for their pool and operating levy. Um, so those will be going up. Uh, the reason why we didn't include it in the summary is, uh, one, there's a strict, uh, character or a word limit where 175 words. And so, um, I would need to see whether or not that would put us over, but we really, I know maxed out, um, what we were putting in there. And, um, you know, if we wanted to say what a hundred percent is, um, you know, it gets kind of complicated around. it depends on the number of people in your household. And then also our bond is really a range. It's not a specific dollar amount. So it's from zero to 120. So kind of picking, I guess, take direction if you want to have a specific AMI that you list in the summary, but otherwise we could definitely have it on the webpage.

Yeah. And I, I guess, yeah, I understand like it does get a little nuanced with like the household size, which I don't, I don't know if I understand what those numbers are, but yeah, I don't know if other people have thoughts on that, but I just feel like it can just make it a little bit more understandable and relatable. And so that's where I'm at. Go ahead.

Yeah, I hear you and agree that we have to simplify the information as much as possible. There is a difference also between the city and the county. I think those are some of the questions that I'm getting right now. Some of the feedback around, well, the pool did this and That was really specific to the county where this is really specific to the city limits. But here we do have to be really clear and try to simplify information as much as possible. My question was around the, you know, it says question on page 27, shall the city issue bonds, fund affordable housing for local workers, children, seniors, veterans, people with disabilities, require public oversight? And there's a question mark. There's also a question mark for the ballot title for the police station. And it says, shall city issue bonds, renovate and expand existing public safety facility to address health and safety hazards and increase accessibility? And both of those end in question marks. And I was wondering why.

Yeah, it's well, it kind of maybe gets lost by how long that sentence is. But we're asking, shall we issue bonds to do this? Yeah.

Understood. Thank you. I thought it was just really specific to the, like, are we going to require public oversight? Yes. Thank you.

Amanda.

Sorry. I guess also on that one, it's, you know, this for like these specific people, does that work? mean that if you aren't a worker, you don't have a job, you aren't a child, a senior, a veteran, or have a disability that you won't be eligible for this housing or like, I don't know. That part's a little confusing to me because it seems really specific to like who the housing is for.

So. Yeah. So that's a very wide, I mean, work be a senior. These groups, I think, is going to cover a lot of people. But this was polling, this was the polling we did and presented in July 13th, just saying, shall we issue affordable housing bonds? And then we also polled this statement, which includes more information about the people we intend to help, polled much more strongly when it listed the types of folks that we're trying to serve versus the broader just affordable housing question mark.

Right. And I understand that. I'm just wondering, like, hopefully, when this passes, and we do this, like, are people going to have to prove that they are one of these things in order to utilize, like to live in the housing?

Yeah, and that was something we discussed on July 13th was whether or not to kind of go with that route of focusing in on, you know, that was what was the results of the polling was focusing this in on local workers and people with historic ties was very popular in the polling. If that's not something that you want to include, we can take that out.

I'm not saying it's not. I'm just like, yeah. And I remember having that conversation, but I don't know if it's because it's in the question that that's like, and maybe that is encompass everybody that we even need to, but it just, I don't know.

I've got Gladys and then Doug and then Ben.

So do you feel that the language might be too restrictive or could potentially be too restrictive and that we need to be more flexible in how the question is stated?

Maybe, I don't know, but maybe this covers everybody that needs help, like. but yeah.

Doug and then Ben. Similarly, I mean, I think your question is really like, if we word it this way, are we leaving somebody out and then all of a sudden we can't do X, Y, Z? I don't think that's true. These are examples, not you shall be this person or this category of person. I don't think how, I mean, or you tell me, is that different?

I'll say this, really closely mirrors the language in Portland and Metro's housing bond titles. There's said South Shell, the city fund, bonds for low-income households, seniors, veterans, people with disabilities and require public oversight. We added onto that local workers and children.

So that's like, in your opinion, all encompassing really, like for the people that are in the community. Yeah. We're not forgetting somebody is I think what you're getting at, right?

Yeah. I'll defer to the council if you think we're- Nick's got an opinion.

We just want to make sure we're not doing something unintendedly where we're saying, oh man, we really should have worded it differently because now statutorily we're required to do X, Y, Z.

Yeah. And I would just add for the counsel that these were all reviewed by bond counsel attorneys who regularly develop this language. And I think if that was the implication of us using this, that it could only be used for these purposes, they would have flagged that. And well, let's correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe they were concerned that that would be a risk here.

No, it didn't flag it at all. But I will say that it is kind of in here that we intend to focus on these groups and specifically the local workers and people with historic ties to the community. That is something that will be extra work on city staff to pull that together and make that programmatically happen.

And the oversight committee might say, does this really tie to that or something like that too, right? So, yeah.

Okay. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, I think what's happening here is that you all did a very good job of driving it into us that if we say something in the bond, we're obligated to do that, especially when it came to discussing about in terms of housing, like a specific project and being, or like a very specific income strata and being concerned about that. I think that's where that comes from. We're certainly supportive of that in terms of the general messaging and communications. And, you know, if it's reviewed by bond attorneys and they're good with it, then, then so am I, but I think that's where we're all our heads out a little bit. So if that's, if that's all good, then I'm good with that. Doug.

And I think we should all be conscious that as this is approved, that it's our responsibility to work with PACs and people that are out there getting the message out there so that the subtext, and by us, I mean council, not staff, to really get the message out there in a meaningful way. people are not gonna look at this ballot measure and say, hmm, what is this? If they do that, then we haven't done our job to really get people more informed about what's going on. So I think it's sufficient language and ready to make a motion if no one else has input. Okay. I move the city council adopt resolutions 2026-17 and 2026-18, forwarding bond measures to the November 2026 ballot.

Moved by Stepino.

Second.

Second by Rivera. Further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Everybody's motion passes. Good work, y'all.

Thank you.

OK. Two discussion items. Abigail. Let the record show that nearly every time Abigail is jumping up and saving somebody to find theirs, this is very uncommon.

Well, thank you. Team effort today. Man, I appreciate all of you. Here we go. All right, so this is very similar to what I provided you in April with just a couple updates. I'll bring it up. How we doing? So close, okay. You have in your packet, you have a more detailed spreadsheet on this, but just a check in on the council work plan. You have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven goals that you adopted. This was a plan that you set, I think, back in December of 24. That seems like a really long time ago. We've made some progress on these pieces. And as you remember, we had divided them into critical projects, you know, first resources, staff, funds really get booked on critical and then significant projects and then other projects. So looking for a moment at the critical projects, you have a couple of things that have completed, congratulations. The system development charges were completed fairly quickly. in this work plan. But most recently, the Heights third sectional transfer was just recently completed. More work to be done in the Heights, but this was a really major milestone. And my thanks to Will Norris for leading that process for the city. Bond funding on track, the action that you just took moves us that much closer. And in that is... you know, facility renovation for the police station. And then the energy plan efforts are on track. And I hope to bring an energy plan update for you this fall so you can see that in more detail. slight delays. The development code update has gotten a little bit delayed, mostly because the planning staff has had some additional project. In fact, FEMA floodplain maps were something I think we dropped from this council work plan because we said, huh, that's done. We don't need to worry about that. They are back. And so the planning staff is working on that right now. And you will see some code sometime in the next couple months on that. So we continue to work on the development code update. It was your top priority for this work plan, but it Some things keep coming up that are on a stricter timeline than that project. New housing, I put as a slight delay, although it is also part of your bond funding process. So I guess I could call that on track. We just don't have a particular housing project in the hopper right now and then i put significant delay of just the facilities when as we're looking at a bond measure for police we are not addressing the public works building which continues to be usable but not ideal any questions on the critical projects do we have a like a

for some of these projects that are slightly delayed. So for the development code, I know that we were in conversation that there is now state pieces that are still in progress, right? So that's gonna delay us. Do we understand timeline? Because we do have a larger discussion right after this. And as we discuss, what would we potentially add, remove? What is our plan for 2027? it would be good to understand specific timelines for what is left on our council work plan to then be able to suss out, okay, we'll hear the four new things that are going to be up for discussion for a 27 work plan, for example.

Great question. And when I bring you the third quarter update, that'll be a really important thing, which are the things that should carry over. Do you think with development code, we still have the hope of finishing it up this year, this calendar year, just had hoped to bring it to you and finish it in the, um, in the late summer and now it's looking, it's getting pushed out to fall and early winter. Great. So significant projects, again, not the top priority, but still important to the city. On track is the year round shelter. You are all aware that MCAC is now starting a campaign for fundraising for land and building to have a year-round shelter. Future Parks and Open Spaces want to note that the Campbell property, I believe the Parks District is still in conversation with the property owner. So that is on track. there'll be some new information coming out on that. And then employee investment, we continue to recognize staff, identify, you know, and recruit new staff, do onboarding those pieces. And then belonging, that's been a piece that we've looked for ways to both connect to the community and internally, we have a staff committee, a belonging committee who works to really help kind of break down those silos between departments, help new staff feel welcome. And that, that, Dr. group continues to do good work in fact that group just organized recently all staff have attended conflict resolution training with six rivers, we just did that last month, and I think was very helpful. Dr. that's the on track the slight delay development review process improvement, I think you know, there are two kind of studies underway with that one was an engineering study with Jensen strategies. on track, but we expanded that scope a bit when they took a look at our development review process and said, you know, I think you need to spend some time documenting everything before we move on to other pieces. So that was important, but it did delay us a bit. And then we've been doing a building study and that consultant has had some conflicts that have really slowed things down, but we hope to finish that up soon. And then the mobile home parks preservation strategy we have not talked about here a lot at Council. But I do believe it's going to be rolled into the ODOT Cascade Avenue streetscape study as both of the mobile home parks in the city are on Cascade Avenue. So there will be opportunity to touch that, but it's not the bigger project that Council might be envisioning. So we have at least some progress on that. And then significant delay infrastructure to enable housing development has not been I think that was mostly to do a study of where we could identify pieces. And then downtown open space, we had a meeting early on, and I think that one just is on pause any questions or thoughts on the significant saw that yep.

And then Doug.

You said on the on track for future parks and open space that you believe Parks and Rec District is having conversations with the current landowner of the, are we the current landowner of the property?

I'm going to turn to either the city attorney or the planning director on this because we have the conservation easement, but the property, can someone please clarify? 100%.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- Yes, it feels like it's going to be so we took a conservation easement initially as part of your application you required it and the easement for the trail we. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Rather than fee you all actually accepted a conservation easement that allowed us to write basically a blanket easement to build a trail, we did not take feet title so. That easement pretty much eliminated most development rights for the property, which was necessity or necessary by the property owner to receive some tax benefit. And we received the trail donation right to build a floating easement as we saw fit. So that's what we have. We have the conservation easement, not the fee title.

Is that what we agreed to? I...

That doesn't seem right.

Well, I hear where you're coming from. And as I look at our plan overall and not saying that, you know, at this point, let's just write out 26, but that in the future, when we're thinking about 27 and forward, that we should be really specific as much as we can around setting specific goals, like What is it? How are we going to measure it? You know, what is the timeline so that we can be really clear from the beginning, like what we want in our work plans?

Yeah, I think this, first of all, this particular goal, I think was opportunistic as we saw opportunities to acquire land for parks and open space. We would try to take advantage of that and make that a priority for the Campbell property. I hope I don't step in this too much, but the first thing thing was we assumed we were receiving the property, but then I think it evolved many times to the conservation easement and then whether we still had to land or not.

Right. These are all kind of mechanics questions of how to get there from here. As I understood the council's objective from the very beginnings, you want the trail. You want that trail completed as a public continuation trail And you don't want the rest of the balance of the property developed. So all that kind of bottom land area. And... what I assumed the mechanics of that would be, they would just convey the property to us, or they would convey a strip to us where we would build our trail. And as their needs evolved, the mechanics got more complicated and kind of, you know, were not what I would have expected, but they had objectives that necessitated this. So in order to get the income tax, get the income tax credit for the, or the deduction for the donation, they had to donate the property to an organization that wouldn't develop it. So there were no development rights. The development rights were held by someone who wasn't going to actually exercise those. So we have, you know, this, this conservation easement and and the fee title is going to go to the parks and rec district. I think, I don't think it's happened yet, but I think there's, I think there's still a conversation. So they get the title to the property. They can't really do anything with it. We hold the conservation easement that allows us to construct the trail within this broader floating area. So, and it also anticipates, you know, maybe it's not just a trail, but it's a boardwalk over wetlands and those sorts of things. So we, I made sure that those sorts of contingencies were put into the things that we could do with this land. And maybe this will qualify for the tax credit they want. I don't really know or care. And so now it's instead of having an outside conservation organization that could dictate new terms and tie our hands and preclude our development of the trail, because all we wanted was the trail. So it's just us and the Parks and Recreation District. So between us, we're going to build it. We're going to have them build the trail. They hold title to the property. And no one can do any development in there because we're holding the conservationism. So.

Thank you for that explanation.

I could do like a flow diagram of this thing, but it would take a couple hours.

Appreciate what you said about ultimately the goal for the community was the trail. Yeah. But I feel like we put some... I recall it being represented to us that we were going to have very strict requirements before they could even begin demolishing the house, which included the easement for the trail. And it feels like we've been extremely squishy with those requirements and now demolition has occurred. So we don't have a trail yet.

We have the conservation easement.

And they are moving forward with their, with that. Yeah. I just, I feel like playing a little bit like a shell game and that I, Just not super excited about that.

I think less of a shell game, more of a bar exam question. But it isn't what I had expected. You know, I'm used to dealing with conservation easements and conservation organizations. Okay, we didn't use that model. The mechanics were different. So we get the trail. And it gets developed with our partner, our close partner, the Parks and Rec District, We don't have these intervening third parties who we don't know or understand and may blow up the deal.

I don't mean to derail this conversation. I just feel like we got a little bit of a switch here. That is not what I understood that we were to do. But that's okay. This is aside from what we're talking about right now. So I apologize for derailing it. But I just, that is all news to me. Thank you. I think it was said without...

Yeah, it's a different topic though. So if somebody else has something on this topic, I'll defer.

There we go.

Will, probably a question for you. So year-round shelter, mobile home park preservation strategy, a couple of things on here. Being that we went down in our language for the ballot measure, can you speak to, can we allocate any funds towards those initiatives to support a year-round shelter, mobile home park preservation strategy related to the bond measure if we're going to house a young measure?

Yeah, zero to 120%. That includes all the way down to no income at all.

I think that's awesome. And the second one that's on here, downtown open space, since we're talking about work plan, I think one of the impediments to that is the parking at the moment. So I'll just reiterate that I plan on, when we get to the work plan session, put a data up for revisiting the Barking-Garage study, because if we alleviate the parking issues downtown, then we theoretically can have more open space and, and, and not cause too many issues for businesses saying that they don't have parking and those sorts of things. If we have open space, cause we'll have more parking. Um, so just putting a little disclaimer out there for that. It's not, it's not a, not a discussion for today, but that's, that's as, as we keep talking about downtown open space, we keep talking about parking. I think there, uh, they're going to be always, you know, connected, right? So one unlocks the other, in my opinion, and I'll advocate for that when we set up the next work plan.

Go ahead.

Thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to mention that as time goes by, we've seen that some of these projects kind of mesh together, and then there's been some that... There are some outside forces that have an impact on us being able to complete whatever project we have on the plan, such as the downtown open space. I just wanted to confirm, Will, for the year-round shelter, and I didn't raise my hand about this earlier, and I should have, and thank Councilor Stepina for bringing this up. In the summary for what the bonds could be used to finance, it does say help prevent displacement, and I did take that for potential support for MCAC, for example.

yeah yeah it's about preventing the displacement of um people who are in hood river yeah okay thank you i just wanted to confirm and thank you for these questions you know this is something i used to do as the in your consent agenda just something to accept but i'm really glad we're having this conversation uh so we can address things that are not necessarily uh their own topic but i definitely want you to all be aware and check in thanks

Thank you. And my last comment was just that as we come closer to the end of the year, really understanding here's what we have left. And as we think about 27, I brought this up in our last meeting that it would be great to have a clear housing strategy, right? And I think having the bond really supports that for the future. But that also means what is the city and the county, like how are we collaborating or what are the pieces that we aren't on specifically for housing, which could include mobile home park preservation, a policy or a strategy around that. And that we really, um focus on some of these policy pieces and the operations really um let staff have their you know potential own work plan that's internal to the city operations city staff operations

HAB-Masyn Moyer- I'll keep going. The last slide of these are just other projects so tax cabin ride share code update is completed. HAB-Masyn Moyer- We have gotten word back from Uber that they are interested. They have the paperwork to fill out to get a license and the city attorney is connected with the county attorney to create some kind of reciprocity or some way that the county would be able to adopt the cities, if the city recognizes an Uber driver, that the county would also recognize that. So that was our last piece of it.

And I'd like it to not require an amendment to your code.

Correct.

If anyone's do a code amendment, it would be a tweak to the counties because I don't think that anything about this.

At this point, they have no code governing tax caps at all. So anything they do, it might just be that they reference our code.

Yeah. Authorize the city to do it countywide.

So those are the outstanding pieces for ride shares. As you said before, Uber seems interested, but hasn't been moving fast. And then Lyft, we've just been unable to reach anyone. So we'll keep trying. Also on track, the Historic Highway and West Cascade Plan, Quetzalceste Avenue Plan. Trying to remember, we have a scope of work that's been approved by ODOT. We have a consultant has been assigned. I think you'll be seeing some pieces of that this fall. Great. Slightly youth outreach. Some of you joined Jackie at meetings in the high school. There's a little bit of a delay because it's summer, and so we don't have opportunities to meet with youth and provide opportunities to connect, but we'll keep working on that. And then... Can't believe it, but Mr. Will Norris has not had time to work on the Columbia Cascade Urban Renewal District. I don't know how he's spending his days, but he said a few other things on his plate. But that is something that, again, is not time sensitive, but we very much would like to see Columbia Cascade District closed out and a final report issued and some decisions about the last remaining funds in that district. And then significant delays, fat oils and grease regulations or fog. This will be work that we will do with Jacobs. As you might remember, we've been doing some significant work with some of our significant industrial users. And so that has taken a lot of time that staff would have worked on for fog regulations, but a critical piece for the health of our wastewater treatment plant and our pipes and the health of our whole sewer system. We need to move that forward. It will be difficult work. You know, there's the regulatory piece that's straightforward, but it will be working with businesses that will be affected by these rules and what kind of changes this might be. So this will be a major workload when we get to it. And then level of service for city parks. I believe this was advocated for by Councilor Emeritus Mark Zanmiller. of just setting a level of what do we want um each of our parks some of them might be like marquee level parks and then kind of neighborhood parks but just really setting what are the level of service we want to see in in each of our parks as kind of a um not just uh for now but also when we um when the crystal greens contract is up and you know what do we want to see in future contracts and possibly opportunities for consolidation or working with um other park partners in our community to have a consistent experience. So those are big projects super important, but really haven't been started. Any questions on this other category?

Great.

Then I would note, I didn't make a slide for it, but in your packet, I also had on page 53 topics that have come up over the last two years that I've made note of that we're not ready to address now, but may be considered. And so I want to note that Councilor Stepina mentioned a parking garage that is on that list. Code modifications around tiny homes and RVs. You talked about that at a past meeting. Creation of a fund to respond to community needs. We talked about that just in the last meeting, two meetings ago, downtown parking garage. Public works, because it's not looked like we're going to get that out here. um an update of city code regarding um food carts you might remember you had some folks come and ask about tables and suggested that if you wanted to do that we should also look at some of the other pieces of food cart code um restrictions on church from rentals and the commercial zone has come up as a request um you've not discussed that as a group but i wanted to recognize that there's been some discussion of that or there's been some desire for that And then I think Kelsar Poulsen brought up a recalibration of building fees to incentivize smaller homes, similar to the process you did with this system development charges. So I'm going to ask quickly, I didn't give you a chance to think about this, but is there anything from that that's missing on that list that you want me to add to that parking lot? Okay. And I want to acknowledge, these are things that I heard you all say, well, that'd be interesting. Not that you have like taken any kind of formal motion or that you have prioritized these things, but these are things that I've really heard as a next year, I want to talk about this, or I would like this to be considered.

Doug and then Gladys.

So, so I guess one thing that I think that's important for the list is like, which is also related to like, say the creation of a fund to respond for community social needs. So two points real quick. Sure. Number one, like, I think we need a framework for And this would be a work plan thing to advocate for. So another pre-doubt for me, if you'll indulge me for a second. Just a framework for how we decide when something's not on the work plan to get added to the agenda, that sort of thing, right, that we've talked about sort of piecemeal throughout the year. but just having a playbook for us, not to say we have to be exactly like this, but we should understand, and I think we think about this without a framework. If something's not on the work plan and we have something that we wanna bring into our discussion, what is gonna be the impact of staff time? If staff feels that it's not impactful or something that could be handled in a meeting, great. If they feel like there will be significant time that has to go into this, that we have a discussion about that and we have a framework for how we have those discussions and how we add them to agendas and those sorts of things, just to be able to protect staff time, to be able to protect the work plan so that we don't see significant delays, or if we say, hey, we think this is really important, we talk about what might have to fall off and just have a framework for that. Again, I use this a lot, boil the ocean on that, but I think we would all benefit from some structure.

Just chime in on that briefly, Doug. As we all know, I won't be here next year. In my experience, sometimes people run for council sort of like on a one note song. Somebody had like little waves of water on their city council sign, like I'm about the waterfront park and God bless her, we got a waterfront park, right? A nice thing about the structure is some new people will be up here in January. And then we have the planning session. And so like that person comes with their six dots on one topic and you guys kind of manage that. So sometimes stuff gets added with the surge of new personnel. That's just sort of this image I had. I wanted to remind you guys of that in your future.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that that's, that's, it's great that we'd be able, we're able to do that. You know, uh, for example, the level of service for city parks, counselors and Miller, you know, advocated for that coming off council after many, many years of distinguished service, you miss you, Mark. Um, so I think that's well understood. Um, speaking specifically to the point of, um, creation of a fund to respond to the community social needs. You know, I had an opportunity earlier to speak with the chair of our budget committee, Gary Reed, who you might have seen provided some testimony. Okay. So I think that that's extremely important for us to be able to do that, to be able to get ahead of, you know, I'm happy that we're not just like, extremely captivated with we should be giving out money for this and this and this. We do a lot of deferrals and say, yeah, we'll waive a fee. My four years on council, I can't remember anything other than a recent discussion related to an emergency that was disbursement of funds. that was not related to the budget committee. But I think something like that, having a committee that's maybe attributed to that, maybe it's something with the budget committee to say, you know, we're going to expect that sometime this year there will be something that's not anticipated, that it's required for community needs, having a discussion about what that bucket might look like and how people are involved in that process. I think in relation to the discussion we had last week on ICE and the $40,000, we're going to have to have some discussions about that sort of in the wrong order because we don't have that framework. Abigail, if you don't mind, I think it's an appropriate time to ask this. Can you explain just for those that are... in the public or even on council, just what happens next with that process for being able to, you know, fund that sorely needed, you know, community need that we have right now and what happens in the process for council. I think the perception out there is, oh, we're just going to write a check and there it goes. And that is absolutely not what's happening here. So some clarification.

Thank you, counselor. So at your last meeting, you directed funds for two specific organizations, the Next Door and Gorge Mutual Aid. I have contacted both of them and ask them for a scope of work. The city attorney is writing an agreement that we hope to bring to you at the August 10th meeting. So you would take an action to approve those agreements and have asked both of those groups to come and present the work they do and what they would do with those funds. So you're right. This was like, they were not named in the agenda. So this was a little bit, we didn't have like a very, thorough process. It's maybe the first time we've had this, and as you say, we're responding to an emergency, but I think you'll be hearing from them directly at the August 10th meeting.

Awesome. And I think I'll just make it known that there wasn't a good time to discuss this during the budget meeting because of the framework that we currently have, right? So we had to be extremely reactive to that. I thank Councilor Rivera for being on that and making sure that it happened. It was tied to one of our goals for this emergency declaration and for the work that we're all the hard work that was being done by city staff and council and community groups to support that part of our community. So let's make sure, I'll advocate again, pre-DOT voting here for something like that to be part of the next two years formed.

Thank you, and I think I've captured those comments and it would know the framework on how items get onto console agenda. I think is covered a bit by your console rules, the last time we did the read did those was in 2023 and so it might be time, whether that's a console work plan project or not, but it might be time to just update and review the console procedures that you use i'm going to go back to my. Oh, thank you, Sunny.

So thank you, Councilor Stepina, and I agree with a lot that you've mentioned, all that you've mentioned. You had asked, like, is there something else that you can think of that I think is really important for us to think about? My first thought was Lot 1, but then I thought, okay, it's really important that we meet with all the governing bodies around Lot 1, for example, so maybe that we are really intentional about one, at least one time this next year, how do we have a work session with our counterparts, whether that's like specific to the county or the county and the court, sorry, the port, for example, where we are having these longer or larger strategy conversations. For example, if we had a housing strategy, there's a couple of these items that easily fall within a housing strategy overall, and that we are being really specific about, you know, you know, consideration of new restrictions on short-term rentals and commercial zones, that to me is a housing strategy. So if we can bucket some of these, that would be great. But overall, I would add that it's really important that we have at least one meeting this next year, but not by the end of the year that's specifically to our counterparts within other governments.

Got it. Thank you. Okay, I'm going to continue on here, if that's okay. So those were the work plan topics, but because you've given me this forum, I'm going to talk about more stuff. So just a quick update of things that are happening with each department, not necessarily things that rise to the work plan level, but do take staff time and resources. So here in administration, as we've talked about ICE quite a bit, we have the election coming up. That's a big workload for the city recorder. And I would once again say, if anybody is interested in being one of my bosses, this is your opportunity to submit paperwork and run for council. I think that is due mid-August. Is it the, was that the second? In two weeks, right? So, yeah. you know, please spread the word. Safe Routes to School, I think you all are aware that you've received a grant from ODOT for engineering work on Pacific Avenue to further ODOT, to further Safe Routes to School. The city's safety manual, in fact, Haley, Elit and our HR manager, Sandy Galvez, are working really hard to really overhaul our safety manual in all of the related policies. A big workload. And then, of course, I've already mentioned the building program and the engineering team study. Finance, worked on the budget, worked on the audit. Dehydro, which we're going to have a ribbon cutting filming very soon, but that is a major workload when it comes to all of the grants and compliance and reporting. IT and cybersecurity audit, we hope to wrap that up fairly soon. Franchise agreements, that's a rotating constant thing. In fact, some of them, I'm just, I had no idea that we had a franchise agreement with a particular agency or until Chris or the companies reach out to us. And I think you're aware, in fact, today was like the second time this has happened. We moved from 24 payrolls, timesheets or paychecks to 26. So that's been a change for the organization. And then you have approved a contract with FCS for a utility rate review coming up. HAB-Masyn Moyer- A fire ambulance service agreement and advisory group that advisory group actually meets for the first time tomorrow, and I know that. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Medicare payments will be a topic that will be discussed there, we have, I think, three new firefighters. HAB-Masyn Moyer- And so onboarding new staff is a major piece, and then the 911 software that the county uses both for fire and police implementing that software and you know having. That system work with our processes has been a real challenge and a lot of time is going in that. And then I also want to call out Chief Rogers for receiving a grant from CIS, our insurance agency, to purchase a subscription to Lexapol. We already used it for police, but we did not use it for fire. Lexapol is standard policies and procedures that we can create. Chief Rogers and our HR manager have been working every week for months now to create our LexPol policies, and now they'll be reviewed by staff and continuing on. So that's been an almost year-long project, but will really help professionalize our fire even further. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Planning lots of stuff happening here I sell it that's the software we use for development review and that the county uses for building review so. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Working on that and trying to create a dashboard dq housing grant that is grants provided for dq for smaller homes and apartments, we still have those funds if we're able to. find developers who are interested in that. You know that we are kicking off downtown parking study and we will bring a waterfront parking study to you at the next meeting. Is that correct? August 10th? Excellent. As I mentioned, we've got FEMA is back on track or it's back on our agenda. The Hood River White Salmon Bridge Review and the RAISE grant. They are doing great work, but as a reviewer of their work and Just as one of their partners, this is a major time commitment for staff short term rental and transit lodging tax compliance software, you know we move to a new package so working through that. hazardous waste and recycling, I think they did a presentation to you well I don't know maybe nine months ago, but continue to work on that and the recycling modernization act. And then the total maximum daily load, this is actually through Indian Creek Trail, or Indian Creek, sorry, requires a DEQ update every five years. I'm going to keep moving. They're alphabetical, we're almost done. So police has tasers, you know, that technology is constantly upgrading and the interpretation and the policies that go with it. As I mentioned, 911 computer aided dispatch. department policy and procedures. This is again, lexical, which police have had for a long time, but requires, uh, every year requires review, especially when, um, the state legislature, you know, has made a lot of new laws, um, particularly around immigration and police. And so all of that has to be integrated into our lexical policies and reviewed by staff. Um, so big piece, um, We have received new vehicles or new fiscal year. We're in the process of receiving new vehicles and then customizing them for police use. Officer Aaron Mason retires at the, I think the end of this week. And so we're currently recruiting for his position. And you know, you just recently swore in tuna officers. So, you know, we've got some onboarding work there. P at least facility. We've talked quite a bit about that we often get requests from community. Can we please put a speed sign or trailer or some kind of monitor up we're trying to seek grant funding for for a trailer like that. And then, of course, always state mandated trainings and traffic grant programs. HAB-Masyn Moyer- All right, public works public works so important they get two slides you thought we were almost done, but I brought you to. HAB-Masyn Moyer- So children's park basketball court renovation that I should say the collective bargaining agreement was completed, I should have taken that off list i'm very thankful to the Union for that elevated sidewalk we have at the key, you are aware of. Oh dot has given us permission to cancel that project or they're canceling that project we have requested mediation to figure out who's going to be paying what costs, so we are waiting for oh dots response on that. pavement management on state on may street it's due for some work. And then safe routes to school improvements effect, I think, if you go by the middle school right now, please watch you will see we move the crosswalk in fact I don't know did we wind up moving the hydrant. We were looking to move a hydrant there in order to make a crosswalk that was a little bit more logical. This was the middle school principal's desire. There's now a dedicated bus parking in front. And all of this was in service of creating the bike lane on 17th. So I'm sure the school and we will try to educate parents and everyone so that they're ready on their first day of school, because that is coming really soon. stormwater master plan. You've got a presentation from that months ago, but you will see that coming forward for formal adoption fairly soon. Zone pressure zone mapping waterfront beach renovation. I think that's been mostly done playground repairs that HAB-Masyn Moyer- playground equipment gets repaired or needs to get replaced way more often than one would think, because it's just so loved and so used and then the waterfront stormwater water project, which is almost at completion, I look very forward to the day when we can take that off the list. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Oh there's two more public works capital projects, these are all things if we tore up your street it's probably because it's on this list concert geeky has survived, I think, so far, she and her neighbors. HAB-Masyn Moyer- yeah we're getting. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Taylor so. And then wastewater treatment plant a number of big projects coming there, and in fact sometime soon, I think, first of all, we invite you to a tour I think the city recorder reached out if any of you are interested in another tour. Both because it's awesome and it's fun to see the wastewater treatment plant but coming in the next couple months, you will receive a wastewater. HAB-Masyn Moyer- facility plan that we'd like you to adopt and wanted to give you that chance to really kind of go see it one more time before you saw that plan like what is the digester again, and you know what's the head works to kind of help you visualize that when you get that plan coming. HAB-Masyn Moyer- All right, my last one here urban renewal, in fact, I think I updated this so there's probably more things on here, but here are all pieces that urban renewal has been working on, in addition to the city wide projects that that will has been working on. All right, those were my comments and thoughts on the work plan. Any other questions, comments for me?

I just have a comment and I should have started off with this. Just thank you all for the work that you do. I mean, we have our work plan and then as you all saw, there are many, many pages. So just thank you to staff for responding to needs that come outside of the work plan on top of your additional workloads. So just appreciate you all and thank you to any staff that's listening.

Anything else on this topic?

No, just a thank you for your support of these things. And thank you to all of the staff who make all of this happen. I get to work with some really smart and dedicated folks.

PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Next fiscal sustainability sustainability discussion. I want to give a shout out to grant's been working so hard on this and many of us have received the because we've all received a number of documents and then I know he put together this briefing specifically for this this session. So without further ado, I'll hand it over to grant if that's okay.

Yes, thank you. And I believe Councilor Poulsen is going to come here so he can see all of you. It can be harder in that spot. And I'm going to stay here for just a second to start his, do you want to start the PowerPoint right away?

Okay.

I just wanted to make a quick comment as we're getting all this set up that, yeah, you know, I've been on council for some time and I haven't experienced this. So I agree. Thank you, Councilor Poulsen for pulling all this together and onward.

And you get when you're when you're done with the slides stop share. Oh, so that the rest of everybody can see on the spaces that.

Thank you. If I don't stop here. If I never stop show. Oh, okay. This is different. We don't usually do this. So it's a lot of the norm. Thanks, everybody. I've always been a fan of proactive governance and eliminating decision latency in terms of governance. So it's a good thing. Thanks, everybody, for doing this. Partially entertaining me. I'll just get right into things. And thanks, Chris, earlier for closing out Q4. Leads right into things. Based on our earlier budget discussion, we know that the Hood River as a whole has a structural financial deficit that we are going to have to address over time. That deficit is not primarily a budgeting problem. It's also a land use problem. It's the difference between these two diagnoses determines whether the actions we take today will work in five years, whether council, the decisions we face today, let me say that again, because I just butchered that entire sentence. The difference between those two diagnoses determines whether the actions we take today will work in five years or whether counsel will be sitting in this room again in 2032 making the same choices under worse conditions. The decisions and assumptions embedded in Hood River's 1984 comprehensive plan, its transportation system plan, its implementing zoning code, and its street design standards determine how much every public service costs to deliver, how many taxable units exist per infrastructure spent, and how fast the assessed value base grows. A lot of this is due to Oregon's tax code measures 5 and 50, a lot of stuff we've talked about before. As an example... Here's a map from Consultancy Firm Urban 3 of Eugene, Oregon. The red highlighted tax plots are properties which the contribution margins are negative and the black are contribution margins which are positive to the city's fiscal position. Urban 3 has done this for a number of municipalities around the country. This one is posted right on their website. You can look it up online. And they do this for a number of places. Every time any city council approves, for example, a single family subdivision isolation, it approves a fiscal liability, as example, here in Eugene, just down the street. The subsidy of each single-family residential unit must come from somewhere else, as shown here, which is why Hood River has a structural deficit. Zoning, comprehensive planning, and TSP in application, not theory. are mechanisms by which Hood River can address the imbalance of contributing tax generation units on existing infrastructure without increasing the infrastructure cost. Changing those decisions is how the structural gap closes permanently, reduces the interdependence between those red and black units. Drivers of the fiscal gap include single family zoning primacy, vehicle priority street design, development without fiscal impact analysis, which I referred to in your primary documents as FIA, strict Euclidean use separation, and economic policy devoid of economic feedback loops. The fiscal strategy document I provided prior, several months ago, I think back in February or March, are measures that if taken alone without any other reform will eventually fail again. We have a responsibility to the people who live in this city in 2040 to be honest about what will and will not solve this problem. The critical insight for strategic decision making is revenue instruments address the symptom. Land use reform addresses the cause. A strategy that does only one will fail. A strategy that sequences both correctly closes the structural gap permanently and produces the fiscal conditions that Hood River needs to function in 2040 and beyond. I received a few questions regarding what other cities have done and are doing. Newburgh, I did a little bit of research when I had time on Sunday. Newburgh, Hillsborough, Corvallis, and Portland have implemented some variations of TUF. Albany, Wilsonville have done some variations of stormwater rate reforms. Sisters, Oregon did a more recent comprehensive plan review to create more sustainable growth implementations, similar to what I've recommended or put together in that document. Ashland, Oregon did more aggressive right-of-way allocations. Further away, and this we would need help with at the state level, Pennsylvania, specifically Harrisburg, adopted split rate land tax in 1975. And by 2001, the number of vacant structures in their downtown, the West Bell area, had declined from 4,200 to fewer than 500. And the city's tax base had grown from 212 million to 1.6 billion. And at the same time, 90% of the property owners, 90% had their property tax bill go down in absolute terms, simply because they adopted split rate land tax. So Hood River has, as I see it, four strategic pathways forward. The documents I've given you are primarily, what we've talked about in the past are primarily revenue reforms, revenue reforms only. TUF is a revenue reform. Stabilize short-term gap through new revenue instruments. Option B is status quo. We do nothing. manage within existing revenue. Option C is we do land use reform only, tackle a comprehensive plan in an aggressive manner. And then what I would recommend is do options A and C on a parallel track. adopt revenue reforms and expense reforms while simultaneously initiate plans to do a full comp plan reform vision strategy. Begin that process now and start that clock. Yeah. Staff, I would recommend staff should be directed to begin planning for community visioning as ours expired in 2015, 11 years ago, while the groundwork for DLCD and et cetera is prepared for the comp plan and current development code update work is wrapped the rest of this year. I would also recommend that council direct staff to prepare financial guardrails, referring to 15 in that document, to bring to council within the next 30 days. I'd also suggest that we add two additional items, which aren't in that packet, to add as additional guardrails, a structural balance pathway and a debt policy and also an enforcement protocol. The structural balance pathway would be a plan showing how recurring revenues will equal or exceed recurring expenses. And the debt policy, the state has one, but we really should have our own. Total outstanding general obligation debt shall not exceed 3% of assessed value and annual debt service shall not exceed 15% of total general fund recurring revenues. That could be worked on with our finance director as to exactly the minutia of how that should work on a mechanical, the exact details of that exact debt policy. In closing, we have the opportunity over the next five years to build a river into the city that can pay for itself, where the things we build generate enough tax revenue to maintain themselves, where workers who keep this community running can afford to live here, and where we are not passing a growing infrastructure debt to future residents. Revenue instruments will buy us time. Land use reform is what makes the fix permanent. What I'm asking tonight is that we begin both tracks simultaneously and that we direct staff to develop physical guardrails within 30 days and that we acknowledge clearly in the public record that this council understands the difference between treating symptoms and treating the cause. We have that opportunity tonight and I recommend that we take it. That's it.

Thank you, Grant. Would you imagine staying up there and we'll talk about it? You want to come back here and talk about it? You don't have any more slides for us? I have no more slides for you. Great. Up to you. Gladys.

Oh, no. Okay. Stay there. Stay there. Thank you so much for putting the time to get all this together and sending it out to all of us and also for connecting with staff. as well. And I want to take advantage and thank staff for putting some of this into work already. It's already been a part of our work plan. When you presented ANC in your slides, when you meant land use, Essentially, you believe that that's the first piece that we can do to better understand what land is available to us. Help me understand that piece. How do you envision that would work for Model C in your slides?

What land is available to us?

Yeah, you said I go for models A and C. And so revenue first and then land use. And I'm trying to understand the process that you envision or would recommend that we pursue those two options. I'm trying to understand like staff time to help us understand a process for those two categories and then how we can.

Our finance director has already been working on revenue reforms and revenue tools for the revenue side. Yes. A full blown comp plan would take a lot of staff time and work that I would envision doing that work like getting into the comp plan after we would discuss that during the strategic retreat. But there's a lot of groundwork that has to be done before.

Yeah. And that's what I'm trying to understand. So maybe my question would be towards Dustin is I'm open to having these discussions and thinking of, you know, what do we have our conversation look like at the beginning of the year? But I'm trying to understand what is the amount of work that has to be done prior to that to get us to that conversation, right? understanding bandwidths and that we still have some action items that, for example, fall into land use. So I'm just trying to get a better understanding of how does, how do you envision all this works out between now and the end of the year to then have these discussions more intentional? Sounds like at the beginning of 2017.

There's a lot of preparation. I guess going to staff time work before a comp plan could be even begun. Like, for example, I mentioned just our vision, our community vision by itself is 11 days, not 11 days, 11 years expired. I would imagine that we should start there. We would want to do a lot of community involvement and community vision before we begin the formal plan process and say, hey, put the burden down. What should we even do as a community to address a lot of these things? So before we begin the massive undertaking of comp plan, doing the LCD process, getting grants and doing all of that work that we have to partner with, A lot of groundwork could be done while we are engaging the community in that envisioning work. That envisioning work is going to need to take time as well. We could do both of those things or that envisioning work while we are laying groundwork for DLCD grants, staffing up and that sort of stuff. Do I make more sense?

It does. And I wholeheartedly agree that we have to include our constituents in these conversations. When I first started council, we would have a yearly survey that would go out. We haven't done that in a while. And I think it's important to capture their perspective in all of this. But with that being said, Jackie's helped us get some sort of communication channels I would envision that that would still take some time to figure out what community visioning or input looks like prior to doing a deeper dive on this, which, again, I'm open to having conversation. I love a lot of these points in here, but just trying to better understand, like, how do we make our work plan look a little different this next coming year?

I think if I may, please correct me. I think two different pieces there. One is the comprehensive plan. There's some work that you have to do with DLCD before you can really launch a periodic review. And one of those things is You need to let them know that you're going to do this and submit a plan. And you need to submit a public engagement plan that is approved by the state before you can start. And I think that's part of what Councilor Poulsen is thinking of that pre-work that has to be done. DLCD has to review your plans and give you their blessing before you can really start that periodic review. And then I would say a visioning process generally has an oversight committee or a leading committee You would really want to scope that out, whether you would want to use a consultant, just how big that scope is, because you all know I love visioning, but it can become gigantic. So I think those pieces would be determining what the scope are, what is the budget. It's not in your fiscal year budget at this time. I think those are some of the pre-work things that Councilor Poulsen is suggesting. And please don't let me speak for you.

Amanda, when you're done.

Yeah, sorry. Well, just to kind of continue on that thread, I guess, is like that's something that we can do before our January? Or is that something that we would say in January we should start this? Because... to me saying that the staff needs to have something done in 30 days right now is out of nowhere, kind of like, can they even do that? Do you guys have like, you're working on this other stuff. So.

The fiscal guard rails can be decided tonight.

Okay. Well, I guess I'm not clear on what that means exactly, but yeah, it just seems like I'm definitely interested in some of the stuff and envisioning and the comp plan and all that, but it seems like We need to start slower or smaller or something, but I don't, I guess like, you know, I'm trying to absorb all this, but it's a lot. And so I'm trying to like figure it out.

I feel like I'm still kind of one of the new kids on the block here, but it seems like a lot of the conversations that we've had up here are operationally oriented instead of policy oriented. And I think that the purpose of council is policy and kind of directing policy. And so if you didn't get a chance to look at it, the fiscal guardrails are kind of policy ideas that are outlined on as number 15. There's not a page number, but in the document that was included I don't know if it was included with all of our materials, but we got it from grant back on march 6 and these kinds of things are just like ideas and so like. they're they're not necessarily things that like we would say in 30 days staff has to come back and give it like it's all laid out here, which is. Really amazing grant like the fact that you put this thought into it and given us a roadmap essentially or policy ideas. And what I'm not completely understanding is I don't think that we're needing to wait until January or where we can actually have a work session or like a session to discuss our next work plan. I think these are things and ideas that we can talk about right now and say, is this what we want to move towards? Because this is what we want to engage our community to participate in as far as like visioning what this, you know, what our community is going to look like and how we're going to be able to pay for infrastructure and do we need all the infrastructure that we're like already, you know, do we continue down the course of requiring this infrastructure? Is there better ways that we can like On to that. Okay, and then I think I might have had a question, but if anybody else wants to jump in here.

Chris, I don't want to put you on the spot, but if you could come join the conversation. 22 years ago when I started on council, for a while we were sort of under austerity measures to like get out of, like when I started here, we were bonding to buy a police car. We were bonding because we couldn't afford a police car. So a lot has happened since then. At one point, there was sort of a remnant of that austerity period that was sort of, in addition to the three-year forecast in the budgeting cycle, there was like an additional, like the way I perceived it was like thou shalt increase the closing fund balance every year because we were just, the fiscal house was in very bad shape. Have you given any thought to how the guardrails that Randall's suggesting Well, in relation to those prior austerity measures that we had, I don't want to put you on the spot.

Yeah, I don't. So I don't have a history for what would be a certain amount of borrowers would get. Yeah. I will say that I fundamentally agree with the premise, which you know, we just talked about sort of a $5.6 million, you know, sort of general fund reserve, right? But as sort of has been demonstrated locally, you know, a couple of years, a couple of years of sort of unjust issues, right? There are things in, without sort of going in detail on all this, right? There are certain things in the sort of the, I absolutely agree with. It would be very easy for staff to sort of make recommendations. It's very easy for us to see. There are certain things that would require some additional guidance. So, for example, trying to come up with a digestible format for communicating to council what the O&M costs are for infrastructure decisions. So there are things such as that that would take a little bit of time. I really do think that when we're talking about this, it's a little bit less sort of like what does the finance department sort of create for council and more is what are the general principles. sort of a cost-benefit analysis, right? There are certain things that we just, that are not sort of council priorities and not sort of how we're making decisions. Like right now we are, to Grant's point, looking at budgets as far as, you know, how much money we're going to spend, right? And how we're spending that money. You know, I think that moving away from that is absolutely a big change.

One of the parts that's really come up for me recently is, and I was asking Abigail about it this morning at the radio show, is the county just finished hiring a consultant to figure out the shape and size and depth of the hole there. Like that big utility analysis is really discouraging from what I've begun to digest of it and how we should behave and operate and plan in the presence of that i mean they're they're further down the road too unfortunate than we are i think i'm not blaming anybody but their structural problem is worse than ours and therefore what what does that mean for us and i am not i i don't know yet and but yeah i mean there were there were four specific topics that the county had mentioned like here's where we would

have conversations with the city council for potential support. But my question to you, Chris, was around 15 and the three guardrails. How much time would that take you to set up even if we do say, hey, Chris, look at number 15 and figure out the guardrails that are there and how much could we truly implement between now and start really finalizing by the beginning of the year, for example, like how easy is it to just say, let's say yes to all of them now, and then what does that mean for tomorrow moving forward if Councilor Polson feels strongly that 15, we could have those conversations today.

While they're looking, I do want to note that in the packet on page 59, the cover memo for this, I did note you have several more than what I listed here, but the city does have financial policies that guide us there every year in your budget book, which I know you read cover to cover. But some of the things I think addressed here are here specifically that the budget will be structurally balanced and recurring revenues will keep pace with revenue and operating costs, one-time resources only for one-time purposes. Other pieces here about long-lived asset investments and the use of debt. So I wanted to recognize that we are not starting from scratch. Right, right.

As I go through this, I look at Some of these were, some of these, well, I would say a number of these, we're, we're conducting some internal policy. I think that, you know, with this, you know, construction authorization until funding is confirmed, contingency is budgeted, projects are ranked and prioritized. You know, Hayley and I have spent a lot of time in a handbook. Just as an example. Going into this year, having acknowledged the budget process, that projects that need to be completed in CIP will require outside funding. Kayla and I are making sure that we're not starting a project without funding in place. So we thought about sort of, okay, where are we in design? When are we going to bid? When does that need to be done? And so to put the funding in place. So things like that, although not a formal written policy, we're doing. So a lot of this is just sort of outlining what are we doing as sort of informal policy and making it formal. So a number of those are easy. The one I think that I said would be really hard is this sort of no new O&M without dedicated revenue policy. right? And I'll just point to like, if we're going to start with that, right? Like the land that was just sort of acquired to the JTA would be a great example, right? The city has agreed to take on what's documented $8 million worth of sort of deferred maintenance, not even just operation maintenance, right? But deferred maintenance for $4 million in revenue, right? Plus a sort of whole other set of projects. So that's really, that's outside of what the finance department can do, right? That's really sort of That's policy. The other thing, too, is once you guys start talking about comp plans and, you know, sort of land use and things, that's completely outside the finance department. Right. And so that's that's. But the things that are here, and I'm sorry, but to make a short question very long, the things that are here, I would say of the five, three of them are pretty easy. Two of them are really more sort of policy and comprehensive.

My last comment, and thank you so much for that, is it would be helpful to understand from staff's perspective. And I know that, Chris, you wrote like the yellow, here's things that we've already done. What sort of policy pieces feel, I guess, achievable or to recommend like here's a great next step for number 15, for example, for the financial guardrails, like let's do the three that you potentially mentioned. Like this is something that council could really look at between now and January to finalize, here's a clear policy decision. There is one piece in here around a grant writer, and given that you were just bringing that up in a lot of the work that you and Haley do, and thank you, Haley, for so much for doing multiple roles, but it would be beneficial, in my opinion, to have a dedicated grant writer. that works for the city and that's their sole job is to go out and look for state nationwide grants, whatever that might help with some of the projects that we do have that, um, you know, we also are restricted by our funding. So I'm trying to just better understand as we think about our very busy work plan and all the tasks that staff are doing and completing between now and the end of the year, what pieces out of this feel feasible that we really need to have these policy discussions as we go into this beginning year while we figure out what is the community outreach portion of this look like?

Yeah, so I think, I mean, there's a lot. Yeah, and like I said, not to sort of reiterate, right, but There are things like financial policies. Can I report to you back on reserve minimums and how we're doing and benchmarks for financial performance and revenues matching expenses? Absolutely. So guardrail number three. So it's a financial impact analysis for all major zoning actions. That goes beyond the finance department. That now changes project development approvals. That's not simple. That's sort of cross-departmental. That probably enters into the comprehensive plan, zoning codes, ordinances. That's not just creating a framework for how you want to look at it. That's something that staff can conceptually discuss. But then implementing that is a different animal of itself. So where I'm on board 100%, is the financial policy stuff, right? We should define reserves, right? We should discuss the CIP in more detail than we do. I would love to show you guys what we're doing as far as managing budgets, things like that. But some of the land use stuff that Grant is talking about, that's different, right?

From the finance director, yes.

From the finance director, yeah. Let me give you one example, because I think that one of the land use things, and this is just emblematic. This is not a specific issue. But there's always been a discussion as far as what's better for parking spaces, parking or a retail use. Now, from a city perspective, that also depends on what city you are. So for a city in Oregon, It's parking, or at least from the finance director's perspective, right? Parking generates revenue to the general fund.

Retail, because we don't have sales tax, retail does not generate city revenue.

That's correct. But the businesses and the business activity, right, and the ancillary benefits and all that stuff, that is sort of a different question, right? So that's where land use might have a different perspective from finance, right, as opposed to counsel as opposed to planning, right?

And the analogy there, excuse me, just quickly, is as you say on your cool picture of Eugene, a residence, a family, people are a cost. It's like, yeah, but we kind of have to have people. So it's complicated and there's different motivations from different parts of the shop.

And opinions, right? I think that, I think, Right. Although Grant has presented his case here, I think that there may be, you know, diving into it, there may be a difference of opinions.

Yeah, I used Urban 3's analysis as it is a fiscal analysis of the land, and this was a fiscal presentation. And that's where the analysis ends, is the fiscal ramifications. That's why my request is a more cohesive, holistic view of the entire city, and not just purely a fiscal recommendation. And

So I kind of remember hearing and Haley, maybe you can confirm this, but I thought Adam said that you guys were starting on an AMP, right? So that's in the works.

So I remember just going to say AMP asset management program.

Yeah, sorry. And, you know, and I kind of remember hearing too, like a lot of these recommendations are kind of already in the works. I just think that this is like a, you know, maybe something that we can adapt if we want to, or, you know, but just like having a plan instead of, again, I just feel like a lot of times we're up here reacting to the things that are coming at us instead of us We have a work plan, but we deviate from that a lot, it feels like. It'd be nice to have a roadmap that we're like, okay, policy-wise, is this what we're working towards? And then, I mean, discussions on if it needs to be different, like let's decide that and get some input from our community about how that would be different. My other question, I remember it was on the land use side of things, we have this development code update, and this is kind of more of a Dustin's Do you want to come and join the party? Please. You know, we're doing this development code update and, you know, Join my party. I don't know if it's cart before the horse or how these two projects, like, we're, like, in my mind, we're seriously considering whether or not we're going to do a comprehensive plan update. And I think that it's past due and probably should be looking at this, whether, you know, at some point, how does The work on the developing code update right now dovetail with the comprehensive plan update.

I think your current code now responds to a number of policy changes that you have no influence on. The law has changed in spite of what we wish for.

Sorry to interrupt you, Dustin. So I think the goals of the development code project have been fairly agnostic to comp plan values. It's been clean up the code to make it understandable and at times make it consistent and to have it comply with state law. So truly a cleanup. Now, you do a comp plan project, you might need to revisit the development code after that, but this really was to get it to kind of a normalize state so that it's somewhat functional. And then, but it's not a like trying to incorporate comp plan values that we, you know, that weren't already there. So very much picking up.

And so some of them are also like to uphold. Like you have comp plan values and policies that your code can't back up. So the idea of the comp plan talks about natural spaces and open spaces and significant trees and about vegetation. The banner in which you have implemented the comp plan in the past can't withstand scrutiny of modern law. So you have to update that. So if you want to protect trees, you got to update the zoning regs. If you want to think about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and make sure a cell phone doesn't appear in your backyard, you're going to have to update the zoning code. These are things that you have to respond to. like today, and also there's things that just over time, you know, planning commission wrote this section, you all wrote this section under, you know, to try to make a, you know, a bunch of people interested in come together. Sometimes when we piecemeal the code by committee, they don't always harmonize. So also it's that internal reconciliation and it has to operate. So part of this is how does this dovetail is. The part of the plan that you don't see is the daily operations of permits and permits out. I need to have something that functions there for all your customers all the time, regardless of whether we reinvent the comp plan. So like those day in, day out, every permit operations, the 500 building permits for a year, the 50 plus land use applications, we just have to run. We just have to run that business. And that doesn't get to stop while we continue to contemplate a larger policy or an overhaul. We just need to operate.

I think I hear you say is that we can finish the development code update, get that implemented, and then work on the comprehensive plan and then maybe some additional requirements. But it's not going to be counterproductive to a comprehensive plan.

Yeah, you will have to. Well, I anticipate you'll have to rewrite some of it. Like if you have a new vision and we have new values that are coming out of the community that say, listen, we don't like the way it used to be and we don't like that. There could be changes, but it's they're not at odds with each other. But for our time, like it takes time and resources. So if it takes you five years to do a comp plan update, you're going to need an operable zoning and development regulations in that time.

You know, I have an opportunity to work for a really large state organization. And sometimes when folks don't understand the operations, a policy with really good intention doesn't always necessarily translate the way that it was written. And so I also see the other end where we could create a policy with really good intention and that it ends up creating some sort of restriction at the operations level where that policy just has challenges to be implemented the way that it was originally designed. So I just wanted to make that comment because I do see that happen often. And I really appreciate you all coming and having this conversation with us to figure out what are these larger policy pieces that we can support so that it, hopefully it's an easier time for you all to do your job moving forward and I just want to mention, again, completely open to having these conversations, but I feel like I just need more staff direction about here's what we feel could be achievable, given that we just received a presentation for a work plan that we still need to finish out. And I hear the urgency as well of how do we have this vision for what the next couple of years look like and that we're involving the community and that we're starting this earlier so that we're not having conversations like our County peers are right now, right? Where they're, they're going to have to make some difficult decisions and they're going to keep running in a deficit.

I feel like some of this in terms of actionable items needs to be smaller than it's being presented. That makes sense, right? Like if we were to take on the sort of vision and the implications of that. I can't imagine we could even have a work plan to do anything else in the first year. And I'm not being ridiculous about that to, to sort of introduce this with four months to go in the year seems like the, an incredible, like, like the wrong time for it. Like, I don't think that any of the stuff that's being discussed here is, it's not worth talking about, but like, usually when we, when we, are having these types of decisions that have massive implications for both operations and policy. We need staff to weigh in heavily. We also need like expert analysis to come into this as well. And I'm not trying to degrade what you've presented Grant, but I need a third party that, you know, like what these other cities that you mentioned that have done some of these sorts of things, did that just come from council doing research or was there? you know, the council get to discuss this amongst themselves, independent of staff with with X expert analysis and that the examples I gave you the examples you gave me what is what does that mean?

I don't understand. The examples that listed regarding other cities that have implemented these things? Yes. The question was asked about other cities that have implemented these sorts of policies. Yes. I provided examples of other cities that have implemented these policies. Yes. That's it. I did the research. I looked them up. I provided those answers.

What went into those decisions at those cities is what I'm saying. We don't know.

I do not know. I only looked at which I only had time to find which cities implemented those policies. I did not have time to look through what their full decision process was as to what went into their full decision-making process. Because I only had time in between receiving the question as to what other examples existed and in between yesterday and today to get those examples together to provide for this meeting. So if I have more time, I can provide you with additional research.

Well, does it need to fall to you? Does it need to fall to staff? That's my question. Usually when we're considering some of these big things, there's an expert in Oregon policy or the League of Oregon Cities or somebody that we can call upon to give us information about this kind of stuff. And to me, like, if we want to discuss this and go forward with that, like allocation of funds and everything has to be from a budget cycle. Like I didn't hear that, like, you know, I, it seems like there will be budget implications to this in addition to staff time. Right. So it's like, we like there, there needs to be a budget discussion here. There needs to be staff time discussion and understand how this fits in and, and, and, you know, the impacts to our particular work plan. So, you know, to me, there's, there's some components of this missing. And the timing is problematic to me because this is massive. It's massive. Am I wrong in thinking that? You stated moderate staff time, heavy staff time. So I think some of the more actionable things you're talking about, like fiscal guardrails and everything, are more something that I'd like to understand from staff, you know, it sounds like some things are in process and what that would take to do that. That sounds achievable without having it make, you know, turn it to the two-year work plan discussion, but the rest of it seems to be massive to me. And I don't think we can rely on staff to do that type of work. If we wanted to budget for it for third-party advisement, I think that that's something... that we could discuss doing as part of the next budget cycle?

I do not mean to be short, but will an additional five months of time be sufficient?

Sufficient to what? I'm talking about allocating budget towards bolstering what you're discussing here. I can't, like staff hasn't weighed on this, like other than some of the fiscal guardrails and some of that kind of stuff. and we don't have any independent analysis to go into how these other things happened at these other cities, right? That's what I'm discussing here.

I provided the document back in March. Chris provided his comments to you shortly thereafter, I believe in March. I can't remember the exact date. We discussed this in, I believe, either the end of March or April. I can't remember the exact dates when we discussed this. And then we agreed to discuss this document at this meeting. So it's been a sufficient amount of time and staff has provided input. So I'm not sure exactly the nature of the question.

That's fine. But what I'm trying to tell you is that document that we got before was something that you prepared. Yes. You prepared, right? As a city councilor. Yes. had some on some of these points, the more like the points around fiscal, some staff discussion, but a lot of this is not addressed by staff. And that's why I'm saying it feels so big that like chunks of this have to be discussed with council and analysis has to be provided from someone other than you, in my opinion. Okay.

And then go ahead.

I really appreciate that we're having an opportunity to have a discussion about this, but I think what we're being asked of tonight is, are we willing to have these conversations about policy decisions and move towards this. And I feel like we're really good at, I'm going to be cynical for a second, you know, paying Portland consultants to tell us what we should do to so we could be just like Portland. I think what's nice is we, you know, do you, are you saying that you need other consultants besides Grant who's, you know, we're looking at other cities who have implemented similar policies policies and then looking at what their outcomes have been as ideas. But you're saying that we should pay some consultants to say, this is why this would apply here or allocate staff time. My understanding of these documents and what I read and looked at wasn't that we are needing staff to say, yep, we're signing up for this. This is what we're doing. We're dropping the work plan completely. This is more like here are the considerations when you're doing the work plan that we've already adopted, like here are some things that we would like to see that you're already doing these fiscal guardrails and stuff. You're already doing these things. We'd like to have a better understanding of that. So can you present them to us? It's not like go out and change the way that you're completely doing everything. It's like, what are the policy decisions that we can consider and discuss so that we can implement some things so that five, 10, 15, 20 years down the road, we're in a better spot. So I don't, I'm not, I don't see Grant saying like, we need to wholeheartedly adopt what he's presented here. It's, we need to have conversations about these things and implement them. And what you're, I don't mean to be putting words in your mouth, but like what I understand the ask of tonight is, Should we be putting time into this so that we understand it better? And again, to use that dovetail word, it dovetails with the work that's already done. So I don't see it as we have to wait four months or we waited too long or it's, do we agree that this seems like a good plan?

Doug, go ahead.

I think on the financial guardrails and that sort of stuff, that's clear. What I'm talking about is the vision, the comp plan, the TSP, everything that's discussed that this is, these are two different things. Like, so.

Eventually anyway, right?

Yeah, but categorically, I think they're completely different asks of staff, of council. And one of them, I think, you know, in hearing like 30 days, like, where does that come from? I think we could debate that kind of stuff. I'm more comfortable with that. But the vision is, is a massive undertaking. And some of the information that I've been provided about this vision and strategy, there's some things that are in there that are movements that I think you've referred to in some of these documents and everything and academic ideas. I feel like I can't make a decision on where I want to go with that without really understanding staff time, really understanding in having citations for where this information has come from. Are there experts that we could call upon to be able to understand these sorts of things? It's just like, I don't feel informed enough to make that type of decision tonight. Like the fiscal guardrail is completely different, but yeah, okay.

Let's go ahead. Thank you. I hear both perspectives. And so my question is to you, Abigail, out of, this information that has come to us, can you come back in 30 days and say, here's what we feel could be achievable from this information? Like, does that, I think overall there's some good ideas in here, but back to Doug's point, like how much staff time would it take to dedicate to number 16, for example, versus, you know, the different categories that are in here. where it's not a massive overload in addition to finalizing what we have for the end of the year?

I think if I can, I will get to there eventually, but I'm gonna take the long way around. I think Councilor Polson has asked for kind of four things, right? One is financial guardrails. One is comprehensive, like start the pre-work for a comprehensive plan periodic review. DLCD recommends you try to get that done within three years. the whole thing, not just pre-work, TSP pieces, and then visioning, I think. Is that correct? Am I getting that kind of?

The first two.

The first two, the financial guardrails and the comprehensive plan. Okay. So with the financial guardrails, I would suggest, rather than focusing directly on that that one's here, maybe an overview. And I did not talk to our finance director ahead of time, but perhaps an overview of the city's budget policies right now. And then with that can be, you know, pieces that Councilor Coulson has identified or other people who can identify. We've not reviewed them comprehensively in the time that I've been here and that could provide a good opportunity. So I think that could be a work session that we could have with you for, but I would like to start with the policies we already have. And then look at the guardrails rather than starting from scratch. So within 30 days, you only have a, you have August 10th meeting, and then you have, you don't have a second meeting in August and I have vacation plans. So I'm not sure if I can make 30 days, but we can certainly say we'll try to get this in a September meeting. The second piece for a comprehensive plan, we did an overview of comprehensive plan for you. Your planning director talked about each goal. We did not talk about, I don't think we did in depth, at least about what the periodic review is. process looks like. But we could do a presentation to you on that. What does it take to update your comprehensive plan? And what are the resources involved, if that would be helpful? So it doesn't, that's not endorsing it. But I would want to give you a clear expectation of if you want to start on this, these are the resources that would be required. And here's the timeline we could accomplish.

Yeah, I think you said that so well, and a lot better than I said it earlier on is like trying to understand what what do we currently have in place? Because you know, as Grant mentioned, we're not starting from scratch. Chris mentioned this as well. And then, you know, the community vision piece, like we are still trying to wrap up some of that work right now as well. So I'm open to hearing more, but would really appreciate some more feedback from staff. And 30 days was just an example. So I think whatever, you know, you all go back, discuss it. What do you feel is feasible as far as by This time we can have a conversation about finances. And then this time we have a conversation about the comp plan, for example. But I do feel that there's some valid pieces here that we should absolutely discuss.

I could try to pencil that in. As you know, if you've seen my whiteboard, I've kind of got topics scheduled for you for the year. You need to revisit your data center moratorium. I promised to update on the energy plan framework for public engagement. All of those are also big topics. So I would want to schedule any of these topics kind of around those topics that are already planned.

This discussion makes me think of two fantastic, I think, fantastic metaphors. One is at the newspaper, like in the old movies, like we print a newspaper in there, stop the presses, because like some big thing just happened. And they're literally going to like change what's in the newspaper tomorrow. So I think it would be helpful for us to give guidance to staff, which of this is a stop the presses kind of

Thank you.

That's one metaphor. The other is when I was in the rainforest on my honeymoon, I learned that a bird cannot eat a seed that is larger than its head. Like that's effective biology. And some of this stuff feels like this seed is bigger than our head. Like this is massive. Like how do I, we begin to make sense of it and figure out the right order. And I celebrate Grant for bringing this to our attention and figuring out, you know, how to nibble away at it and which parts we can move down the road. So those are just two thoughts. Grant, did you want to?

To clarify and attempt to answer those questions, the rest of the stuff and proposals or the ideas that are in there were comp plan lid things. There are examples or ideas potential things regarding fiscal policy that could be addressed in a comp plan that help address the fiscal things that we were talking about earlier. I am not going to presume to prescribe things that have to be in a comp plan as far as premature, and I'm not going to do that. That is absurd for me to stand up here and say these things have to be in a comp plan. No. My proposal is only to start a comp plan process, not to say these things happen in a comp plan. Those things are only to say these things affect fiscal policy and fiscal outcomes. Provide examples, provide potential things that could be in a comp plan and provide the connective tissue in between comp plan ideas and fiscal outcomes. So that's all those things were there. plenty more example that could be used that people can think of that may be incorporated into a confidential plan study. So not the repository of all knowledge that everybody should use for all research. So hopefully that answers your question more thoroughly.

Okay. So that's extremely helpful. And I think, you know, I think Tremendous exception with like the insinuation that, you know, like we should get that from some Portland consultant. That's not what I mean to say at all. What I mean to say is it shouldn't be on the backs of just Grant and our staff, right? So sometimes we have to get consultants that do work because we don't have the bandwidth to do it. And that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Someone doing that research instead of you doing that research to help us make us, you know, make well-informed decisions. Okay. Yeah. So-

Yeah, maybe I just misunderstood the question.

I think what you just said and what Abigail just said, like Gladys was saying, oh, I wish I could have said it that way. I think that's perfect, like what was just discussed. But I'm not trying to convey that I think that this should be on the backs of someone who makes decisions in Portland or something like that. I think that was a gross mischaracterization of what I was saying.

Abigail, what direction do you feel like you need?

Thank you, Councillor. I was just going to raise my hand and say, I think... Some direction that I've heard is, could we come back with a discussion, maybe just a presentation and discussion about our budget policies and include Councilor Poulson's fiscal guardrails as a future conversation? I think that can be a standalone conversation, pretty easy to do. And then my other one would be a review of the comp plan process and what resources you would need for that. The third one I could offer a longer term would be if you want to start a visioning process, you know, cities, many, many cities have done it. You can do it small. You can do it gigantic. And I could bring you some samples of what other cities have done and what those things have cost. If you want to get an idea of what a visioning process could look like.

I feel like a couple comments were made about the comp plan being so old, and I didn't want that to be a throwaway line. I think there's a legitimate argument about how often this kind of an update or a refresher or review should happen. I would also, in my opinion, there's a real cost benefit analysis in there. The cost is the things we're not able to accomplish this list of of long-term goals that we have to accomplish. If you do one thing, you're by definition not doing another thing. So figuring out how y'all want to spend your time and her time that I don't think anybody's like laughing at us that our comp plan is so old. Like there's a lot of things to do and we're doing some cool stuff and that's also a cool thing. But boy, oh boy, I hear the description. That's going to eat up a lot of opportunity, Cody.

And I just want to point out that again, yes, let's sound like Abigail's going to come back to us, but we just approved to go out for a bond, right? Like that's the last step. And I mean, I know for me personally, that that is going to take a lot of my time moving forward. I know that it's also going to take a lot of counselors to penis time as we're now going to be leading those efforts to try and get everyone organized and whatnot. So I, I just think about bandwidth overall, but I believe that as we talk about community visioning, as we're doing education and outreach around the bond, that that could be a great opportunity to say, okay, well, we are thinking about doing this community visioning sometime in the next year. Here's some really valuable components that we learned along the way as we were moving forward with the ballots, for example, or for, sorry, for the bonds, for the bonds. So I just wanted to make that comment.

I like that. Going out and asking about the bond and doing the survey, it's like, oh, that's sort of a whole lot like getting community input on a strategic plan. Those are really kind of overlapping. You get this fringe benefit of paying extra attention to the opinions of the electorate during a bond campaign and during a strategic planning exercise. Amanda?

Yeah, and I just want to say that I would love to, like, to hear all of those three things from you, um, just so I have an understanding of what all of that entails, like, and hopefully that's not too much work.

Great. I will add them to future council agendas and, um, will by August, by the, by the next meeting, get back to you with a timeline. And when I anticipate you can discuss those along with the other topics, I should give you the outline of. Here are the things I've got scheduled for you to discuss, which I think are bigger things. And those aren't the operational issues, but the more policy issues.

Great. Anything else on this topic now? Oh, great. Thanks, everyone. Oh, okay. City manager comments.

Yes, thank you, Mayor. A couple of quick things. I think Council President Rivera mentioned the Board of Commissioners for the county as their financial study. And you mentioned, too, the Baker-Chile, it's called. And they had a short presentation at it at their most recent meeting. I believe they're having a specialist work session. I think it's August 3rd to dive deeper into that. And I will bring you a summary of that. I'll also send you all the report. because it does in a couple of places note opportunities for working both account for the county to work with the city or other opportunities to find efficiency. So I really want you to be aware of that report. And then also at the board of commissioner meeting, they discussed a letter. They haven't officially sent the letter, but it was in the packet so I can send it to you asking to have a meeting with the city council on topics of mutual interest. And I'll send you a link to their conversation so you can see a little bit about what they discussed. And so at your August meeting, I'll put that letter in your packet. And we can have a conversation about whether you would like to have a meeting with the Board of Commissioners and identifying what topics you might want to discuss at that time.

Abigail, in your sense of just watching that, I didn't know if that meeting, were there a lot of topics? Was it a lot about annexation or were there a variety of topics?

I think, and I think some of you, the others might have watched this as well, but generally housing, you know, what has the city done for housing, particularly market rate housing? And then I think annexation is a piece of housing. So it was definitely mentioned, but not dwelled on a lot. And then again, that Baker-Chile study and opportunities for cooperation or collaboration. I think those were the two topics that were identified by the board of commissioners.

Thank you.

i interrupted you did you have a comment counselor yeah so i just wanted to mention the annexation piece because it did come up as i mentioned earlier i think it's important to discuss a housing strategy and i have had conversations with a couple of our county peers that annexation is absolutely a tool in the toolkit but that means finances and if they're not in a position to fiscally support that we should absolutely have that conversation and that for example just As we develop what a housing strategy is, maybe annexation is a tool that is unlocked in year three, for example, just to, you know, it's like a phased approach. So I just wanted to mention that about annexation. And I do have in front of me the four topics that our county peers said that they wanted to discuss with us and it's parks and recreation, public safety, emergency management. fleet, facilities, and administration. So those are the four topics. And as Abigail mentioned, there is a larger report that goes in the details. And so this is a portion of what our peers want to discuss is these four topics in addition to an overall housing strategy.

As you were listing those, what I realized I'm thinking about is kind of two ways to go on many of those. One is we pay them to do ours. Or they pay us to do, or one of us is like, not arson, like a shirt, like, no, that's a bad word. But, you know, there's a lot of different ways to change the status quo.

Yep. Great. So on your August 10th meeting, we'll bring you that letter. And we'd have that conversation about, one, are you interested in having a joint meeting with board of commissioners? And if so, what topics would you like to have addressed?

Just wanted to point out real quick that I also feel like that was part of what Grant presented to us is like collaboration with other organizations. So I feel like that just kind of goes along with that. So good talk.

And the financial crunch can be the impetus to try something that can break the logjam of collaborations hard, right? Because sometimes somebody's box gets gored. But if we can't afford it, then maybe we can really make some

Yeah, I just wanted to echo that piece. It is a portion, and I think it's really important for us to think about this moving forward, which is why I suggested let's at least have one, at least one year, a meeting where we are talking to our counterparts, the port, the county, what can we do? In the end, it is going to come down to, you know, how much money can we each pitch? And that will help us decide what sort of policy pieces we truly can move forward versus not, because that that will absolutely have an impact in all that.

I think it was the last work plan before this one, like improving. Government relations. Yeah.

Which is how you came to assign yourselves liaison duties between the different agencies.

Yeah. Yeah. But to Gladys's point, I think, you know, I don't think there's anybody out there that's reluctant to engage in more of that. So yeah, it's to me a lot more of those,

Great. So August 10th, we will talk about that more in depth. It's not noticed on today's agenda. And then I did have another update for you, which is just with your conversation during the financial report, there was questions about Medicaid reimbursement. And I wanted to let you know that Chief Rogers sent a letter to the head of health and human services, a federal letter expressing concern that- Bobby Kennedy? To- Dr. Oz, I think. I think he's the HHS. Yeah, I reviewed the letter. Just that concern of that HR1 Did not specifically talk about ambulances or the rates that ambulances can charge, but the rulemaking looks like that has been like the ambulance services being folded into that and expressing that concern. So that letter was sent and then I shared that letter with our federal delegation, and I think it was counselor or sorry Senator. Merkley staff who responded, yes, we've been tracking this issue. We are concerned. So I'm happy to say that our federal representatives were responsive to those concerns and we'll keep them up to date. Also, the county has just started or restarted the ambulance service area advisory group. That group meets tomorrow for the very first time. And I anticipate Medicaid reimbursements and funding for ambulance services will be on that agenda. So we'll we should have more information for you in the next couple of weeks, just where we are with GEMT and what that financial picture will look like.

And just taking that up one level further removed from us, obviously the GEMT affects us directly, but you've got a little hospital up there. Like what's the chit chat? Like this hospital signed up and been having a terrible fiscal time and they quit doing health insurance. And are they going to

Yeah, yeah, I don't know the details, but I think the HR1 definitely impacts the ability of hospitals to charge and receive funds. Thank you. Thank you. Those are my updates.

Committee reports, Anna.

Nothing from me.

Nothing from me.

We, yeah, watched the county meeting. I think the other piece that was discussed during their conversation was The mural, and that is something that we've discussed we've passed on to them, you know the the mural would. They wouldn't receive any revenue from that moving forward, and that was a real discussion point of is this something that the county should sign on to. knowing that it's going to have a financial impact for the county, right? So just wanted to give you all a heads up that that was discussed. If you have a chance to check out the meeting, please do, because you'll hear a lot more. I think Will did a great job in presenting and also had some state staff that came and talked about it as well. If that isn't an option, maybe we could think about other ways that we could still support similar work. And I don't know if we can find ways where it doesn't financially impact the county, for example.

Just to that point, I noticed that the gentleman from Big River CLT was here for much of our meeting and was kind of wondering if it was gonna come up.

Yeah, yeah. We'll have a meeting tomorrow with MCAC, so I'll bring you a latest update about what the recent conversations with potential land acquisition looks like here in the city limits. And I believe that's everything for me. Thanks.

Yeah, there was a Saruta meeting, but I think Gladys and I were both unable to attend because it was like, tomorrow at 6.30 and we were both.

I have an update from Kevin on that just recently because I was quite interested. And actually, Dan and I had such a nice conversation about Saruta. And I so am encouraging Dan to go when it happens. So we're sending some kids like pretty soon. Yeah, like next month, we're sending some kids. And then it sounds like they are going to send some grownups in 27. And then ours is going to be maybe late 27, maybe 28. So that's kind of the clearest vision they have right now for celebrating the 50th. Gladys?

And it's July, right? Where we're thinking about hosting them.

Right.

Yeah, their adults would come here in July. Yeah, July 4th weekend.

Yeah, it was early July. They'll be here nearly a year from now. And then we'd be there somewhat after, not in the summer, after next summer. Right, exactly. Okay, thanks. Sorry.

Yeah, no, no. Any other committee? No, no other meetings outside of that.

Grant? uh region one act meeting is next monday um mount hood railroad has a connect oregon grant uh federal grant match application in um which i i will forward to you all uh to provide me with feedback comment uh anything you would have input on before next monday thank you thanks amanda nothing for me

It seems worth mentioning, there's a roundabout on Highway 14, right by Bingen, finally, like emergency services, redundancy, safety, access to all those people who work like in situ and stuff. It is a tiny roundabout. It's the smallest roundabout maybe I've ever seen. And I don't know how that all works, but as we're imagining a roundabout, I'm like, well, geez, if our roundabout was that big, Like that would cost a lot less land. So I just want to make sure whoever needs to know that like that roundabout is very small.

Around a boat.

It's around a boat. Yeah, they put this cute historic boat in the middle of it. Anyway, Amanda, you made me think of that. No, you have nothing. Good, good. Committee's done. Mayor comments. I have nothing. Council comments. Amanda.

I don't know if it's really something that's coming from me, but just wanted to bring up or have a question about what we were sent public comment for about 9th and Hazel. I'm not really sure what the issue is or what we're doing or what. I don't know if that's something to talk about here or not, but I can public comment. I thought it was.

Thank you, Councilor. I can say a little bit, and I hope that Adam, Public Works Director, would jump in or maybe DM his comments, but I believe this is the crosswalk by Children's Park. I think there had been some chatter on social media about someone getting hurt when That crosswalk, you know, those are, it's not paint, right? It's a material. Yeah, thermoplastic that we laid down on that. And I think that road, that had gotten to be a little bit of a bump. And so it's my understanding, I don't know all the details, but that someone was injured going quickly, you know, going pretty fast down that road and hit that. Thanks. So in response, Public Works looked at that. They removed that crosswalk and smoothed out that piece of the street. I believe the public comment that you received requested additional actions, including like accommodating or addressing truck noise, other pieces. So at this time, Public Works is looking at that to determine if there's other action that the city feels is warranted.

I was on my bicycle up there today, and I thought, this is going to come up. I'm going to take a left turn. And I did. I came down on my bike, around the corner, past Children's Park. And I'm like, did I miss the spot? Like, I saw... I ride my bike a lot. I saw nothing actionable. So that's my opinion.

I've definitely written over that before. There's a bit of a bump. Is it like some characterizations that I've seen people discussing? It's like, oh, they have a speed bump there. It's not a speed bump, right? To your point, it's like, you know, the... It's a bit raised because it's been added on. I would also say that regarding that, I don't think anybody should, unless they have to, be riding their bikes there. We have designated bike routes. I have discussions with this with people in the city all the time. I try to remain where the sharrows are, where the designated bike routes are. So I would just advise people to do that. That's a very steep hill. There's a reason why we have... you know, serpentine and some of these places that are a little bit more navigatable. To me, it's, you know, I think that, you know, at some point, maybe we have a bigger discussion about that as the cycling community grows and whatnot, but I think we've had some plans into that in the past. I just urge people to stay in these areas that are safer for bikes. that's a very busy intersection very steep hill goes into a steep hill and i see people cycling everywhere all throughout town all the time sometimes they have to do that to get to their house and whatnot but like that's not a designated bike route i'm not saying we shouldn't fix that or whatever that's not what i'm saying at all but check out the sharrows like maybe we should do uh i don't know what we could do more to like inform people where the bike routes are or whatever but it's the same in portland you know um where you know uh you have discussions with cyclists, it's like, oh, it feels like it's really dangerous right here. It's like, well, that's not a designated bike route either, right? So just, yeah, that's, but I, yeah, I've cycled over it a bunch of times and I stopped.

Sorry, Amanda, I totally jumped in on your thing. Anything else on that topic or any other?

That was it, thank you.

Thank you, Grant. It's almost like our city is not designed for pedestrians or cyclists to get around, it's designed for cars. Hmm, weird.

um what other comments do i feel like about that um no i've made enough comments tonight thanks uh no just grant i i enjoy how you think big and you keep continually challenge us to try to have these conversations and i think um thank you for that and thank the staff also for You know, trying to trying to get us to work through some of these sorts of things that comes to some of these big policy decisions and I know that you are thinking about the city in the right way. And you're trying to do the right thing and all that kind of stuff and say, keep at it. You're a good counselor.

Yeah, I echo some sort of subpoena sent to a sentiment grant.

Thanks for putting all this together for the time that you've spent with staff to help us get into a larger visioning and really having conversations about how often should we be updating specific plans, pieces that make the city run. So appreciate all of your time in that. And I think that's everything for now, thanks.

Ben. Nothing from me, I have something.

I have something. I'll be writing it up because I thought about it a lot. I want to share some reflection on two votes I cast at our last council meeting because I think our community deserves that honesty from me. First, on our updated transportation network company fee structure, I supported lowering the fees to make it easier for larger rideshare companies to operate here. My intent was to give residents and visitors more transportation options, but on reflection, I wish we had spent more time first exploring how to strengthen and promote the local taxi companies who have served our community reliably for years before opening the door wider to outside companies. I still believe transportation access matters for Hood River. I just think I got the sequence wrong, and I'd like us to revisit how we can support our local businesses, in this case, our local transportation providers going forward. Second, on the $40,000 in emergency funding we allocated to two organizations doing genuinely important work in our community, I want to be clear, I believe in that work completely, and I don't regret caring about the people it helps. My concern is with the process. That allocation came after our budget committee, made up of citizen volunteers who dedicate real time and care to that process, had already completed its review for the year, and it came at a moment when our general fund is projected to run at a deficit, meaning we'd be drawing from reserves to make it happen. Here's how I've been thinking about it. Imagine your household budget is already tight. You're not quite covering the mortgage and groceries this month, and then you put a generous donation to a wonderful cause on your neighbor's credit card. The cause is good, the generosity is real, but it's not actually your money to give, and it doesn't solve the underlying gap. It just moves it and puts someone else on the hook for it. That's the discomfort I feel here. reserves aren't found money their money we're borrowing from our own future flexibility and from the process our community already trusted a citizen committee to oversee none of this is about the organizations or the people they serve they deserve our support and i hope we find a sustainable way to keep supporting them it's about making sure that when we say yes to something worthwhile we're also being honest about where the money comes from and what it costs us down the road i share this because i think all of us on this council myself very much included can keep getting better at pairing our good intentions with good process bringing big decisions through the budget process our community built for exactly this purpose and being just as thoughtful about how we help as whether we help i know this council cares deeply about hood river and i'm hopeful that a little more discipline up front will only make it easier for us to say yes to good things more sustainably for the long time to come thank you

I believe that brings us to the end. Anything else for the good of the order? To review, we meet only once in August. So our next meeting is at the regularly scheduled time. And then we skip. And then there's actually a fifth Monday in August. So there's a bit of a gap. All right. Thank you, Mayor. We're adjourned.