Appointments Committee - Regular Meeting

I'd like to call to order the Community Vitality and Safety Committee meeting of August 13th, 2026. Clerk, will you please call the roll? Here. Here. Here. Do we have anyone here for public comment? Okay, great. So we will close public comment. And we will move to our first Greek-United, which is our Tacoma Community Development Authority Annual Report. We have in the room Sarah Bridgeford, who's the interim housing division manager, Rhonda Vandermeer, senior housing analyst, neighborhood and community services. So if you want to come on up. And we will start our presentation. And thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having us.

Good afternoon, Sarah Remba, Vice Chair Scott, and I'm Sarah Richard, the interim housing division manager with Neighborhood and Community Services. And I'm joined by Rhonda Vandermeer, who is a senior housing analyst. And among her roles is the Tacoma Community Redevelopment, or PCRA, staff liaison. She'll be presenting with me this evening. And I also want to recognize that I'm joined, that we are joined by Deirdre Patterson, who's the business and economic development manager, and Sherry Hart, who's the business and economic development analyst. And they work with programming with TCRA. They'll be available if you have any questions. So today, we will be providing an informational briefing on the 2025 accomplishments at TCRA. And next slide, please. This briefing will cover four primary areas, which are background on TCRA and its creation, the TCRA board membership, programs and activities, and then 2025 accomplishments. Next slide, please. And with that, I will hand it over to Brenda who will orient us to the background issue here.

Sarah. As Sarah stated, my name is Rox Vander Baron. I'm a senior housing analyst, along with being the TCRA staff liaison, and I'm happy to be here this afternoon. The TCRA was created in 1973 as a public development authority, also known as a PDA. which is a legal entity separate from the city. TCRA administers the programs with federal funds received by the city, along with state and local funding. Excuse my voice, the smoke and the allergies in the air. Next slide, please. The funding administered by the TCRA board is set by councilmatic action through budget development, strategic plans such as the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, consolidated plan and annual action plans that are approved by the council along with other council approved initiatives. Funding included in the agreements between the city and TCRA include the Home Improvement or Home Investment Partnership, also known as HOME, Community Development Block Grant, which is also called CDBG, Affordable Housing Fund, which we refer to as AHF, Community Reinvestment Program, also known as CRP, Down Human Assistance, which is DPA, and Economic Development Administration, which is EDA. And these agreements allow implementation of programs with community benefit, including the affordable housing financing, property acquisition, single family rehab, down payment assistance, and economic development. Next slide, please. The Tacoma Community Redevelopment Authority Board is appointed by city council and each member must either live or work in Tacoma. The board consists of 10 positions from various industries and two community members. We recruit from the legal, banking, real estate, accounting, development slash construction fields, and the community at large. As you well know, we're very lucky that and fortunate that we have 11 positions that continue to be filled by returning members of the Tacoma community with the newest members coming up on two years serving on the board and a few members who have served close to seven and eight years of a tenure term. Next slide, please. The TCRA is supported by city staff, which includes Community Economic Development, CED, Business Services, Finance Department, and the NCS Housing Division. The Housing Division recently transitioned from CED to NCS. The NCS Housing Division administers the TCRA in addition to implementing some of the TCRA programming. The housing division work groups include loan servicing, grant tracking and reporting, grant planning, new construction projects, compliance and monitoring, and the home rehab program, homeowner rehab program. Exciting. The Affordable Housing Program provides low interest loans for affordable housing development. Funds are approved through a NOFA process, Notice of Funding Availability, which we are currently in the process of. Homeownership programs for Tacoma residents offer 0% interest loans. Programs include single family rehab provided to applicants in the approved guidelines. And the down payment assistance program allows Tacoma residents to purchase a new home. Additionally, TCRA supports land acquisition and disposition and infrastructure grants. These funds are also monitored as to meet compliance throughout the designated program guidelines. Next slide, please. The economic development team works with small businesses that include that are not limited to industries such as hospitality, restaurants, salons, and professional services with the intent to provide enterprise loans, working capital loans, community reinvestment program, CRP loans, and equipment loans. CRP aims to foster economic revitalization and wealth building in communities disproportionately impacted by the historic enforcement of drug laws. CRP does this by offering collateral-free loans and capital to local small businesses. I'm going to hand this back over to Sarah, and I appreciate your time.

I'm going to review some of the highlights from 2025. On this first slide, you will see that the CCRA, with support of city funding, advanced seven affordable housing projects with four projects in pre-development. Regardless of which phase of development the project is in, these milestones continue to advance and create progress and accelerate access to quality, affordable housing. On the next slide, I will share briefly about each of the two projects that completed construction and was placed into service in 2025. Next slide please. So the first project that we'll talk about is the Low Income Housing Institute Patsy Serve Place. This is located in Tacoma's Lincoln District. Patsy Serve Place opened in May of 2025 as a six-story culturally inclusive senior community. It delivers 77 units, including 48-bedroom studios and 31 bedroom units. It serves seniors age 55 and over with incomes from 30% to 50% of the area. Amenities include community lounge, multipurpose room, courtyard, non-flight laundry, and ground floor commercial spaces. It's designed to be reflective of broader community. It's named after Pat Cesar O'Connell and reflects the AAPI, the Asian American YMCA. And you'll see an image on the slide of that. With that, I'll do a brief review of our next slide, which is the Shiloh Baptist Church. Shiloh New Life Housing. And this project offers 60 affordable homes across two buildings in the Hilltop neighborhood led by the Shiloh Baptist Church. It offers one and two bedroom units with 30 of the units for households with incomes up to 30% of the area median income and 30 units for households with incomes at 30% to 50% of the AOM. Amenities include accessibility features, shared community spaces, and on-site services. Next slide, please. The Brown Amendment, PCRA, offers two homeowner programs, including single-family rehab and down payment assistance. Single-family rehab is a 0% interest loan program that assisted 12 homeowners in 2025 with seven completed repairs by the end of the year. The program assists with a variety of repairs focusing on health and safety, such as the one that's pictured, which was a Not actually focused on the kitchen rehab itself, but on the water leak and damage issues and what that repair was focused on. Additionally, through down payment assistance, the TCRA supported 21 Tacoma households in purchasing their first homes in 2025. This program lowers barriers for income eligible buyers and creates pathways to long-term stability and well-being. Not mentioned on this slide, but something that I would highlight, is that Rebuilding Together Southbound is a sub-recipient and service provider with BCRA. And they offer another component program to the single-family repair program. It's minor home repairs, but slightly smaller. They're not home-based. And they were able to offer 15 Tacoma homeowners minor home repair in 2025 as well. And there is another sub-recipient that supports the program through a variety of program coordination, volunteer material donations. With that, next slide, please. We have a couple highlights on here, and I'll speak to one that is not. A significant accomplishment is that the Business Services Division with CED implemented the Community Reinvestment Program by providing $3.2 million in loans to 19 businesses. These are flexible capital investments that supported entrepreneurship, job creation and communication. While not on the slide, I would also recognize that three organizations provided technical assistance and support to 103 small businesses in Tacoma. And they did this with just $300,000 in funding for 2025. So a lot of varied support, very adaptive to the needs of the businesses. And then in 2025, I would just like to recognize that TCRA service 731 loans that are in the portfolio with 68 loans paid in full. Payments provide continued support for reinvestment into programming and future projects. And next slide. With that, that concludes our overview of the 25 accomplishments. We welcome any questions.

Thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it. I think it's sort of helpful for us to know council members for what we're doing so we can share it with the community since we are out there all the time. So I'm just going to open it up to questions. Does anyone have a question for staff? Okay.

Thank you. So thank you for the presentation. I've had lots of questions around the service recently just trying to learn what it is and how we get to help the folks that we help. Um, I was noticing that under the, like the compliance and monitoring that the, that position is vacant. And so I guess I'm curious about the process that we go through to like, reassure that the funds are used.

And we can talk about that. We will be filling that position. And just because that position is vacant doesn't mean that we are not continuing to be able to compliance and monitoring to what extent how that impacts our other work. But that position is primarily on the affordable housing side to do inspections of units that are in the portfolio. They also work on the pre-development side with environmental needs and some other components. We also have monitoring of separate sit-ins in a variety of ways. Ongoing support of our loan servicing, which is another form of that monitoring. It's one staff person who's primarily on the servicing side. Lots of staff are involved at different stages throughout the service.

That's great to know. Thank you. And then as far as when we're looking at the affordable housing development, there's the seven projects. that were listed out here. Can you talk a little bit about the process as far as, I guess, how do folks learn that this is available to them? And then what is the criteria to apply? And how do we determine the amounts that we award?

So in terms of how developers would learn a bit, I can speak. I'm not going to answer that one directly, being new in the school. I know it's a smaller community. There's a lot of word of mouth. I'm not aware of what specific outreach we do. And so I want to be mindful of that and say that I will follow up for any specifics on that front. And then we do run what's called the Notice of Funding Availability. And that's a competitive process by which Projects would come in, developers would come in with that application and seek funding and support for their projects. The third question was, how do we decide on a now? Yes, thank you. We have the equivalent to the city selection advisory committee, and this is a current run through TCRA. And that selection advisory committee will review applications once they've gone through an eligibility with staff. and then they're rated, so fully evaluated along a number of factors or the capacity of the project sponsor and developer, a feasibility or readiness to proceed. We look at their financial and their portfolios. Are they financed for this? A lot of different factors that go into that. They're rated similar to what we would see coming to CVS. with the Human Services Commission that rating recommendations would then be brought forward to TCRA, including the funding. The funding is a little more complex because we're talking about a few different funding sources and also considering their capital stack and how that project is ready. So do they have committed funds? Are they proposed? Where are they seeking other funding? from Pierce County, the states, are they seeking tax credits and are any of those confirmed? So those are all presented then as part of the recommendation to the TCRA board that would then either approve or make changes or offers.

Yeah, that helps. So then I guess that's part of the other question about the criteria. It sounds like maybe applying is broad, but then it gets narrowed down depending on kind of the credentials of the folks that are applying?

Not by the credentials. We do look at experience, but that can come in a variety of ways. So if we have a new project sponsor or a project that's coming in that is less experienced, but they have a developer or a contractor that has more experiences, kind of all that can balance out. All the partners involved were new. That would be certainly a consideration, but not preclude a project for funding. Yes, there are a lot of factors in a project that do get evaluated that can impact whether or not they're ready for funding in this round or perhaps come back. So we will see projects that apply multiple times if they don't receive funding. Sometimes if they receive funding and they need more to complete, their projects, they might come back a second year seeking additional funding. But there aren't so much criteria about the who's coming in for the project. There are different criteria around what we're seeking. And we actually have a fairly broad application that does allow for a lot of different housing models that come in under the NOFA.

Is it, I'm guessing there's a application or something is it possible to see kind of how that's worded in the um does it does it say these are like the desired aspects of your project that you know that we're looking at or that we score on oh for the the rating criteria yes it was included in the NOFA that is currently under review right now

The rating tools.

That's what you put out. So people see it. The whole public sees what you're looking for and then they apply for that based on what the criteria you're looking for are. And then they go through that. That's that process.

Okay. I would add, Sarah mentioned that there's a current NOFA under review, and so they just met today.

If you wanted to look at those meeting materials, we could send them to you, and they're in the process, in fact, of looking at those ratings and making recommendations. Yeah, I'd be super interested. And the other question, I guess my last question, sorry for monopolizing time, is I know, what is it called, AP... I know that they're independent from the city. And so I guess I'm curious, it's mentioned here, the, the relationship between like council priorities and then the programming that y'all administer, um, I'm just curious, what are the dynamics of that? If there's something that council believes should be weighted maybe differently or considered more, would that matter since it's independent? Or how does that work?

I think that there are ways that that and show up, which is through planning documents that come through board councils. When we look at the head plans that Rhonda had talked about, our consolidated plan and the annual action plan that guide use of some of the funding sources, that's an example as that's been developed with engagement. We have conversations around different priorities and how those show up. The affordable housing action strategy is another conclusion of the affordable housing fund. prioritization with those funding sources. So I think that that would be the primary way that that can get transferred to TCRA because those are guided documents that inform how they also give some additional prioritization.

That's all I have. Thank you. I just also want to say we have a lot of control. I don't mean to interrupt, but we have a lot of control because we're picking the people who sit on TCRA. And so as we go through that, those interviews, it's really important that we make sure we get the right people in those seats. And that's why they're all designated for certain things, because they have to have a background that really understands development. And I can see, I know we have a great team because they wanted to reapply. So that was really, really great. Does anyone else have a question?

Yes. Can you talk a little bit about... Because of the separation of the housing division, I am not clear on the slide that says 2025 additional damage. I don't know the slide number, so I'm not sure what slide it is. But the community reinvestment program and the loan servicing, does that still – it seems like that's under CED, but it's still under TCRA. So, like, TCRA kind of does both. Or do you guys both do TCRA? I don't know. Can you just talk a little bit about that because of the separation?

So the CRP as one example, there are a lot of other economic services that are connected to TCRA. The implementation is staying in CE with Deirdre and different services, Carol. So that will stay there. Loan servicing is actually within housing and has been, so that will stay in housing as well. So we'll have some things in the transition that we're working out together where it didn't seem like there was any separation per se. There's just so many of you coming in and saying this, and we have all the things around that already in terms of what that transition looks like, the implementation of that.

Okay, so when the TCRA meets, they're going to hear from both.

On the back end, it doesn't change a lot of our processing with TCRA.

Okay, great. Well, this is super helpful. And then you might have said this, but I know you highlighted a couple projects. There were seven, but then I think we only got highlights. Yeah. Can you just direct us to where that whole list is? You don't have to list them all.

There is a list on the city's website. Okay. And we just had the conversation about TCRA as well, but it does have commitments on each process. I want to personally say $15 million is a lot of money. And you said some were being developed.

are in the process. So those are the two that are done, and are the other ones done as well, or are they in the process? Some have completed.

Viva Crossing was one. That was another one. For example, Gritty and Grove is completing and will have opening.

Yeah, it'd be great when you go, if you're coming to council at all, to like, it would be great to start with the funding source and then see like how they got the project done just to understand, like, this is how much money we were, we leveraged for them and this is what they had to bring. And it would be nice to see one project that way, because I think we kind of get lost when we do the CBDG over here and understanding where does that fit with this? And again, with the HUD dollars come in, how do we see how it was? how it was administered was what I'm looking for, if that's helpful. Yeah, thank you. I have one question about the down payment assistance. I might have asked this in the past, but what was the average down payment amount that people received?

I don't know. You know the average? In 2025, the overall down payment assistance was $80,000 per home that Carrie Wick struck.

administered so it was pretty amazing and then um when they're giving me dollars are those zero interest then to return yeah and so then gosh so they're so they're having to pay back that is that true or no you know it's not a feedback it's a deferred payment loan for 30 years okay so that they don't pay it back until until they're paid off is it part of the actual cost of the mortgage No, this is an additional loan in addition to the mortgage. And they can pay it over the 30 years. So what I'm saying is that they're having to pay that back and also do their mortgage that they have.

That is correct. We are pretty flexible where we offer loan modifications and a lot of times easy payments. much later.

I was just curious because I didn't really know anything about it. I mean, I know that you've done this. I just didn't know the detail. Wow, so it's really gone up a lot, the amount that you're giving because I think in the past it was a lot less.

Yes, and that's reflective of the home values of the community and for this to be a resource that is supportive to households. Well, that's great. I just wanted to call you out for that.

So thank you so much for all of that work. I appreciate it. Are there any other questions or Can we send you packing? Thanks for being here today. I really appreciate all this information, and I just want to call TCRA, the people who serve on that, if they're listening at all, we really appreciate all the work they do. They come to meetings at like 7.30 in the morning. Yeah, we were in here. Twice a month, isn't that right? They really work hard. Appreciate all their work.

Sounds great.

Yeah. Hopefully we can get that accounting for you. All right. So we're going to shift the list of people who are going next because Tika, I'm going to get your last name wrong. Adia again? Adia. Since you're in the room, I'd love to have you come up to the table and present next. You'll be presenting on the comprehensive emergency management plan update. And so I want to just thank you so much for being here. You were amazing. here this week at a council meeting to receive the proclamation for Emergency Management Month. So I just want to call you in and say thank you here with the fire department, correct? Yes. Okay. Thank you so much.

All right. So I will talk about the Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan update. It is essentially the emergency management plan for the city. So we've had one for several years, and every five years we do update our plan. Next slide, please. I'll talk about the purpose of the plan. We'll review the structure, the brief overview of the updates, and partner outreach that we do when we're updating the plan. Next slide. All right. So a little bit of a background. Once a jurisdiction or a municipality decides that they want to have their own emergency management team, they're required by state law to maintain a plan. And that's under RCW 385270, which just got a lot of fun. update that is really beneficial for emergency management at the city level. And so we'll cover some of those updates that we included in the plan as well. It is required for the city to maintain its recognized independent emergency management organization status. So even though there is a Pierce County emergency management, county emergency management is only there as a support, while city emergency management does all of the work and preparedness for the city. So It also allows for reimbursement experiences during a declared incident. So if something happens in the city, let's just say we have a wildfire, which hopefully we do not want any urban wildfires, but anything that happens that can be devastating to the city, having that plan allows us to use that to apply for federal reimbursement and anything that happens during that declaration to get money and funding. It also includes our EMPG funds that pay for the emergency management program. It pays for one employee. all of the services that we all the things that we continue to provide the city so it helps us do mass care supply needs and stuff like that if we have to do anything mass shelter or anything like that next slide please so i'll quickly cover the emergency management team there's myself the chief emergency management officer i have two emergency management analysts one does all the internal outreach coordination and so that's a lot of the continuity of operation plans that we require departments to do And another is like the internal training and exercise. So we've done some with our department so far where we've tested their cognitive operations. Can they actually continue to operate if something like that is taking place? Especially, that was a huge gap identified during COVID. So I got on right as people were sort of coming back to work. I don't like to say the end of COVID because I still hear about it in the news all the time. But it allows us to actually help identify some of those gaps and training and needs internally. And then I have another management analyst on the team that does public outreach. So she's very involved in the CERT, which is the community emergency response team. She does a lot of public outreach and presentations. Like we're just doing a series of presentations to House of Matthew. And so it's been really great to go and do that and actually take them from supplies because we know that they can't obviously have the financing to prepare for themselves. We actually take stuff and do presentations on preparedness for those kinds of groups. And all encompassing, we do all of it. I externally reach out a lot. So I spend a lot of time with our other city jurisdiction emergency managers, county emergency management, state and federal partners. So we do a lot of stuff across the board. There's my contact information if you need it and the emergency management email where you can reach the entire team at any point in time. Next slide, please. All right, I covered that a little bit, the internal and external partner coordination. We partner really well with other city emergency managers. So you may not know the county is split. So there's the East Pierce Coalition, which is made up of Puyallup, Bonnie Lake, Bethlehem, Carbonado, and Orting. And they have all emergency management as a city. They have city EMs, but they partner together as a coalition. And then there's the West Pierce Coalition for Steilacoom, Lakewood, and University Place, and so they're also a coalition. They have city emergency managers, and Tacoma's the largest, so we're standalone, but we work really well across the board, so we have a lot of mutual aid agreements if something were to happen to provide support to each other, and same with our agreements with Pierce County DEA, and if something happens, we're definitely walking step, lockstep with them if something were to go on, but we really love that. We do alert and warning. So if anything really big happens, we want to use our alert and warning for that. So we do get a budget for that, which is really nice, but we manage Genesis. All of the other local jurisdictions use Genesis as well, but we have, if something happens, we have it set up to notify liaisons. Other departments are using alert and warning. So IT, TPU is using it. We just got... Oh, my goodness. Environmental services, but I know that they have merged now. So environmental services and public works have their own. So we just keep adding departments who can do their own internal alerting capability. And we love that. And so it's been kind of a growing thing. And we always are advertising it to the public.

So the public can sign up for emergency alerts only or general alerts where we would notify them, hey, we have an event in the city and we have street closures. So.

and we use it for that. We do a lot of training and exercise. I actually just left incident management training where I was facilitating a tabletop for TPD. We do a ton of that internal piece. We just did one in April of this year with city directors to talk about civil disturbance and what we would do in that case. And we're planning a larger one that Kian was hoping we could get done this year, but with everybody's schedule and now budget season, we'll look into doing a larger one in 2027 where we include more county partners. So we've started some of those planning meetings on those. And again, we've been working heavily with departments on continuity of operations training. When I got on that, we identified that that was a huge gap is that our departments actually don't exercise their emergency plans effectively. that's a problem because when something happens if we don't exercise that now they're going to be looking everywhere for it and trying to figure it out on the fly we want them to be as prepared as possible we do a lot of planning so we do hazard mitigation planning for this city we also do continuity of operations planning support i should say we support that because our departments maintain that the comprehensive emergency management plan and right now we're actually doing a large distribution plan and so we can actually look at mass feeding capabilities and stuff like that for the city if something were to happen how are we actually taking care of those individuals um we don't have a plan like that for the city already and that's something he really wants to focus on and my predecessor Uta did start identifying points of distribution so right now we're actually looking at maps and kind of are those points of distribution still beneficial for our community members to get there if they need to? Or do we need to kind of relocate that to have coins of distribution that are more feasible for people to get to? So lots of plans, lots of things that we do. The EOC, which is the Emergency Operations Center, we actually manage that. So if we have a large incident, we have liaisons that are given to us by departments. And so we have the EOC at South Palm 911, which is our job to manage if we were to activate it. resource coordination and support. So a lot of what we do is collect information on resources that we do have available and what we would need to coordinate. And so sometimes that's just incident dependent. Sometimes that is more if we're having an event like the summer blast, what core resources do we have on hand and what resources does my team actually end up pre-ordering or at least being ready to pre-order if we have to help support anything. But usually they're pretty well staffed. So we try to put those things into consideration beforehand Next slide. All right, so this is a very busy slide, but really all of the plan elements have to cover the main elements of emergency management. So preparedness, prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery. The plan structures, we have the basic plan, which is just how the city in general works how it's governed all of that fun stuff and then a department-based function so some of our departments focus on like public works would focus on streets and environmental services support cleanup if something were to happen so all of them have their specific focus during large events and what their capabilities are so those are maintained in that plan and we try to update them um as we see fit. One thing we found as we went through this was that my predecessor, Uta, and the gentleman that was in with her at the time, he went to emergency support functions. And in that, that's a language that emergency management understands. It's not a language that everyone else understands. So if I say ESF-1, none of you understand that that means transportation. And so when we sent that out to our departments, departments were Like, we don't even know what this is. How do we do that? So we actually sat down, my employee did, and we went over just the basics of what can they do for large-scale response. So we made sure that that was captured correctly in the update to the plan.

Next slide. All right. These are the quick updates.

So we went through a full review of the 2020 CEMP-based plan. We replaced the city's ESS or emergency support function based operation model with department based. So it's actually accurate of what our departments can do versus what FEMA says that they should be able to do. Because there's a realistic aspect of what FEMA said you should do and what we can do as a city. So we went ahead and went through all of that. We changed emergency coordination center, which was ECC to emergency operations center, because it's more in line with common language that's used everywhere. ECCs are typically used in a more like a hospital setting. You could use it there. It makes more sense there versus here in a jurisdiction our size. We updated language about co-located shelters, which is a requirement that went into effect for the updates for some of our RVWs there. So you can see that. And it's basically talking about that the city at some point when we have a large scale incident will identify what shelters can house, pets, and humans. And so it was a big deal. It was a house bill, and then it finally went through, but it was required that we actually add that into it. So we don't actually call out those shelters, but Tony and I know a couple other people were actually very helpful in making sure we got the language right to capture that in the CEMP. We also make sure to maintain alignment with national emergency management standards while making the plan easier for city staff to use. So we in emergency management use NIMS, which is the National Incident Management System. That's a lot of big language that no one in emergency management is going to understand. But if we can talk about the basics of what is recovery, recovery is the city being able to be functional again, right? So we talk about resiliency and stuff just in more plain language for everybody to use, but it still follows the alignment with NIMS, which is required federally for our plans and for anything at the jurisdictional level for emergency management. improved operational coordination between city departments, the EOC, the Emergency Operations Center, and city leadership. So one thing that was missing, the 2020 plan, when it was updated, was updated during the height of COVID. And so there was not a lot of crosstalk between the city departments and emergency management. A lot of that actually got developed just by Vuta and her team without that crosstalk. And so we actually went back and had to do crosstalk between cities, departments, TPUs, And other groups, we also had a good conversation with the city manager's office about capabilities so that we were making sure we were maintaining a correct operational picture of what we could do as a jurisdiction. Next slide, please. All right. Engagement.

So I've talked about this.

We definitely spent a lot of time with all of our city departments and various external agencies and partners to have a really good common operating picture of their true capabilities versus what is outlined in a support function versus what the city departments can actually do when we're talking response. After that, the plan, once we do the update, it actually goes to review for the Washington State Emergency Management Division. And so we send it to them to make sure they review it for federal indicators to make sure we're meeting those federal marks. And then they don't actually grade it other than they give us suggestions. So they grade the federal piece with FEMA and then they give us suggestions. And so we actually get 99%, like we were missing one little piece and that's actually the signature from city council. So we did get 99% on that. And with that, we received a letter of acceptance from Robert Ezell, who was the director of the Washington State Emergency Management Division. And so with that letter of acceptance, it shows that we meet all the federal markers and any state recommendations that they find important. Next, next question. So the next thing is that my staff and I just recommend that the committee for the CMP to the full council for consideration for approval. We don't have a huge timeline. We would love to have it done by September 30th, but if there's, if it needs to be extended because of council approval, priorities, then that's fine. We've already let state EMD know. The only reason we put a timeline on there is we just let state EMD know that we're hoping to have it fully signed and promulgated by that date. And if not, we just let them know that it's a matter of when city council can get that completed. Next slide.

And that's it.

All right. Thank you. I'm going to open it up for questions before we do the motion that we have here. So does anyone have a question? Okay, council member Palmer.

Thank you for the presentation. I know that there was some work being done around like resource hubs around the city in case of emergencies. I'm not familiar with where that's at.

Yeah, that is actually with the climate adaptation team. And so we partner with them. We don't do a lot of that work. So kind of they identify those resource hubs. It's just a little – oh, we talked about the points of distribution that I was speaking on. Yeah. So that's climate adaptation. We partner with them in the aspect of when heat events or things like that get to a certain threshold, then we as emergency management would support helping supply resources. So we spend a lot of time talking with them about locations where they have them so we know where we would send resources to support their work. So we're connected. They just do a lot of that work on their own, in fact, because they get their money and funds to finance those.

Thank you for that. And then is there a web page or something available?

Okay, so we, to be fair, we were digging and digging to find kind of how Uta did this prior because prior to me being here, they did come to this committee all the time. They do provide, it looks like once you guys decide to send it forward to city council, we can provide you the link. It is on the city's emergency management website already, though. So it is there. That's the link we would give you. And I can make sure you have that. But you can go ahead and go in there and view it if you'd like.

Thank you. Yeah.

Vice chair? Thank you, chair, for the presentation. For clarification, so like if we did have something happening in the city and say it was specific to Tacoma, who makes that declaration that it's an emergency? Is that a City of Tacoma thing? Yes. Okay. We don't have to like necessarily, and that would allow us to then activate those federal resources we wouldn't have to go to.

Yes, absolutely. So the City of Tacoma at any point in time could declare something at emergency for the city because what's an emergency for us is not the same as what's an emergency for the county. So once the mayor makes that choice or you have a city council, even I can recommend, hey, we need to make this a declaration of emergency as soon as that's done, that opens up for everything. But we have the ability at any point in time to make that clear.

And then on the outreach thing, so it sounds like a lot of that outreach is like internally through like different departments. Do we do any type of outreach, like community engagement type stuff where we have like large scale training, like preparedness exercises or things like that?

Yes and no. We do a lot of engaging the community on, do you know where your evacuation routes are? Do you know where you can find this and how you can do that? He made it very clear he wants to start doing larger exercises where we do have more community involvement. I tried to see if there was anything like that before I got here and there wasn't. So it takes time to kind of develop that. But that is our goal in 2027 is to actually have more of those exercises so we can bring in communities.

Yeah, I think that'd be great. I remember as a kid, like, doing things in the, like in school, like actually the fire department used to come and they'd build a little thing that looked like a hallway and they would pump smoke into it, like the, like, you know, the dry ice smoke and you'd crawl under it and test the door if it's hot and use like a sheet to plan your evacuation route in your house and things like that. I've like, for me, I took that very serious as a kid. I still do in a lot of ways, but I, I, you know, you want to check the door with the back of your hand. Yeah. Yeah. And so I just, you know, I think, especially when we think about kids and schools and the drills that they go to go through and, you know, I don't know if anything has changed about like, you know, you know, how, where I'm supposed to look for safety in the event of an emergency, if that's changed since I was in middle school and high school when I did those drills last, you know. And so I just think sometimes things like that, and then especially with other stuff, whether it's a natural disaster or, you know, like we saw in Seattle with mass shooting or something. So I just think when people are more prepared, it allows them to not panic. Yeah. Awesome. Just a couple more questions. Where do community members sign up for these alerts?

Yes. So we often, because we're under the fire department, we often post monthly about how they can sign up for Genesis. It's actually just a very simple link. And I can share that with you. We've asked media communications and Tacoma PD to start regurgitating that for us. So September is National Preparedness Month and we're going to be putting out those weekly. Because we really want the community to understand that they can sign up and receive those.

What was the different name before? It wasn't Genesis.

It was Code Red.

So you had Code Red before and now it's Genesis. Yes.

That's the system, sorry.

Yeah, this is the new system. And not just that, we are the leader on picking out what system is going to happen and then all the other systems. Pierce County and all the other cities follow on. And so now South 7-9-1-1 is going to fund all of that so that we make sure that everyone has the emergency system that Tacoma chooses.

Yes. Yeah. So we're all on Genesis and we've all branded our stuff based off of our jurisdiction. So our Tacoma alert is the Genesis system, 12-12 alert. So it's consistent across the board just so we can have that kind of consistency. And just really quick back to your question about schools and stuff, we actually have We've had a couple of private schools, believe it or not, ask us to help them with active shooter exercises, which we don't mind doing. We've offered to help a thousand times and we will. Some of them want to have kind of scary versions of active shooters where they have a full police and fire presence. And so we've kind of been talking about how do we have maybe one engine show up and maybe a small, you know, three or four police officers and we have one classroom with a few students that might be designated and they're older because I've If we do that, then we're putting a lot of fear into younger students. So we've been talking about that. One thing we do talk about with schools and parents when we get to have those presentations is kind of more modern day, have a safe word, right? So we're, I'm okay word because a lot of kids text. So something's happening. How do you text? Turn your phone off. You know, don't put it on. Don't have your ringer on. And so we kind of teach a lot of that. And how can kids be prepared at school? So we talk about in your backpack, have this with you so that you can at least, you know, medication or out of area contact. things like that. So we're trying to get a little bit more into that. And so it's, it's a, it's a whole process, but in 2027, that is our big focus is doing more with the community and having them involved.

I, um, When I did AmeriCorps, that was also part of the thing that we did. They trained us to be emergency preparedness folks. And so that's just to say that if there's a way I can be helpful, please let me know.

Absolutely.

My last question is about the distribution sites. And what do you look for in determining those? Is it location? Is it capacity? Is it all of the above?

It's everything. So what we look for first is seismic retrofitting. Are they going to actually be something that's still standing? And so we rely a lot on planning and development services to tell us what structures are actually within the latest code or at least a code that counts for us. And the next one is how can community members actually get there? So if I have something on the top of a hill, who's actually getting to that, right? And so the locations that Uta previously had picked out, Heidi on my team, she's actually going through right now to kind of first check, are these still viable locations? What does the structure look like? And then we'll kind of go from there. How quickly can community members get there? And some of that will also be involved in exercising that. So if we do a mass distribution exercise, we're going to know quickly if some of those locations are viable or not. Because if the community starts saying we couldn't get there or it was hard to get through with traffic, and we really consider those people that we know areas based off of being in the fire department where people are actually homebound. And so if they're homebound and we don't have a distribution squad there, what are we doing, right? And so if there, if we know a location where we can at least get someone to help get those services there. So we just try to, we're trying to look at all of the pieces, but first right now, we're just trying to see if the locations previously identified actually work. And then we have to kind of just build from there, but we look at everything. Accessibility is huge.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

That's a great question. Thank you so much. Council Member Walker.

Thank you. Council Member Palmer asked my first question. So I just, I want to clarify. I had to look this up. So next month is emergency preparedness month, and this month is emergency management month. Awareness month. Yeah, it's only the second one ever. Okay, so we should look at the Tacoma Fire social media to share those alerts. I want to make sure I get this out. Yeah, so sign up.

We are talking to Dee, because Dee's kind of been assigned to emergency management from the city side to help us. So we've actually been talking to Dee. We call it Wagda Wednesday, where the PIOs get together about actually putting together a post that goes out just from the city, which I think is really important. Because people, they'll check the fire page and they love fire. But I think the city pushing that messaging is going to be crucial. So we actually just had a conversation about getting that out from the city website. But yes, right now it's being shared largely on the fire department's page.

Okay. And then I just want to thank you. I think it must've been last September, somebody from your team came to my Safe Streets group and it was so good. And it genuinely, like I was there to present on something else. So I was like, I've seen this before. And I went home and changed two or three things. So you guys have a great team that really does a good job. And everyone else in the room too was super thankful. So thank you for the work you do. It's tough.

Get you out more places because people need to hear that. Yeah, we're, I mean, we are a small team for our jurisdiction. where we're almost 230,000 people, if not a little bit more, big in Tacoma. And it's hard, but my team, they do a great job. So I appreciate that. Thank you.

So thank you for those questions. I have one question about TPU and how you intersect with TPU. Since many people have emergencies, a lot of times the things that we need to look at are our infrastructure and as a house or apartment, how we turn off things. How do you get that information out? Do you actually... Do you coordinate with TPU to make sure that they put that out? Because I don't remember seeing that on their website.

So, yes, we do not. TPU doesn't post that on their website. Before we have done any presentation, we've always checked in with them because we do actually talk to the public about turning off their, you know, water heater and things like that and where they can go to get resources. And so we've actually checked in with Power. I meet with Courtney Rose, their emergency manager, every week. well, we try to every week, but we have a standing meeting every week. So her and I are usually on the same page about things. So a lot of the times it's us pushing that preparedness message with all of their buy-in or feedback. So we've done a presentation where we've included direct language and links from Tacoma, from TPU so that they can, people can have access to that. They're not huge on the push part, but we don't care. We'll do it on our end, which is, you know, we partner in that way so that we're not missing the mark. I really appreciate that. Thank you so

And I do appreciate you doing as much as you can to push the Tacoma Alerts because I know a lot of people might have PC Alert, but they don't have Tacoma Alert. And it does matter because we have jurisdictional areas where Pierce County and Federal Way kind of come together. But knowing that Tacoma is reaching out to Tacoma residents, I mean, we did have the fire on the boat, and it's a good example of why. We need our city to do that because sometimes Pierce County doesn't think they should. And so I just thank you so much for all your work.

Yeah, it's hard. Like I said, a life safety message for the people of Tacoma is not the same as what the county deems a life safety message. And so that's clear. Yeah, yeah. That was, you know, lessons learned. But I think the best thing is that Tacoma, as large as we are, should always be resilient on our own. And I know that's what Hannah's loved. And I know Mayor Ibsen has definitely been driving that home. And so one thing we wanted to really focus on is emphasizing that the more we do here, the more independent we become. And it's not that we don't meet the county, but they should be doing exactly what they're required to do is really just be a resource for us once things get to a point where we can't handle it anymore. And so, yeah.

Okay, question. So we have a motion in front of us.

Okay. I move to forward the comprehensive emergency management plan to the full city council for consideration.

So again, All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, motion passed, adopted. Thank you so much, Tika, and it will be on our, I'm sure it will be on the September, I think it'll get done before you heard it.

Thank you so much, I appreciate it.

I just wanted you to be able to go first because you were here. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right, we'll go back to number two, the Community Police Advisory Committee Annual Report, and I'm going to have you introduce people. I'm going to have Vice Chair Scott introduce people the people who will be speaking because she is our council representative for CPAC.

Thank you, Chair. I believe we have Lori Arnold and Rolla Trickwell. And Rolla is the chair of CPAC. Lori is the vice chair. I believe we also have Christina Kahn, who is the staff liaison to the committee. Probably just say bye for any questions.

I didn't hear what you said. Okay. Half an hour.

I think she's talking to somebody else.

So yeah, you guys can jump in when you are ready. I think Christina's standing by in case there are any questions that come up for Rolla and Lori that maybe they don't have the answer to immediately. And whenever you are ready, I think we're ready for you to jump in.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for having us, Chair Rumbaugh, Vice Chair Scott, and committee members. My name is Rowlett Churchwell, and I serve as the chair, as stated, of the Community's Police Advisory Committee.

Hi, everybody, and I'm Lori Arnold, and I serve as the vice chair of the Community's Police Advisory Committee, known to most by the acronym CPAC. Next slide, please.

Lori and I are pleased to be here on behalf of CPAC. Today, we're going to share a presentation with you that reviews the structure of our committee, some highlights from 2025, and some of our upcoming work for 2026. Next slide, please. This slide shows some of the fundamental responsibilities that CPAC members were committed to. For example, we're responsible for helping to increase an understanding between the community and the Tacoma Police Department, to reviewing policies and procedures, to holding public outreach events for community discussions on public safety, as well as a number of different responsibilities. Next slide, please.

So our committee meets monthly and we have three subcommittees that also aim to meet at least monthly. These include policy, outreach and complaint review committees. We have suspended our oversight committee because bargaining is taking place now with the three police unions, but independent oversight of TPD continues to be one of CPAC's priorities. One of the two community members attending the negotiations sessions is also a member of CPAC. We have support from Jacques Colon as our executive liaison, Christina Khan as our staff liaison, Lieutenant Steven Storwick as our TPD liaison and CVC's very own vice chair, Council Member Scott as our council liaison. Next slide, please.

We currently have 11 seats filled on the committee with three vacancies. We're also proud to have a racially, professionally, and economically diverse group as well as a good range of ages. And I like to make special mention of Mason Harris, who is in our emerging leader seat. Mason just graduated from high school and intends to join the police force in the future. We're all very proud of the hard work he's doing and the commitment he's made to our community. Next slide, please.

Thank you.

I'm excited to share some examples of the presentations we received in 2025. As you can see on the slide, we have had presentations on TPD's complaint review process and our use of force policy. Also among our more emergent concerns was a UW Center for Human Rights presentation, which revealed a systemic decades-long pattern where 911 assault calls from inside the Northwest ICE Processing Center were not investigated due to incorrect jurisdictional assumptions. These presentations underscored for our committee members the importance and continuing need for greater transparency in TPD and as well as cross-community collaboration. Next slide, please.

Okay, so I'm very proud to serve as the chair of the Outreach Subcommittee, and I will take a moment to brag about all the great work our subcommittee is doing. As you can see on the slide, we attended or held more than 20 events last year. We try to engage in a range of public events from festivals like Porch Fest to talks with TPD Chief Jackson. Next slide, please. I want to spend a little more time talking about the ways that we are evolving our outreach in 2026. We're working hard to do more to be a conduit, not just from TPD to the community, but also from the community to TPD. To that end, we have launched several community engagement projects that we will run during our outreach events. One is sort of like an opinion poll where community members get to pick their top answer to a question from a series of answers. Excuse me. You can see some of the examples on the slide. One that I have found particularly interesting so far is how often people are picking patients as the key to a great police officer. It raises questions for us about how TPD might test for patients in their recruitment process, or even offer training on remaining patient during stressful moments. Along with these opinion poll questions, we have launched a basic survey. We're going to be compiling the results from all of these engagements into a report by the end of the year, and we will send CVS a copy. While our work is not a formal survey, we think there may be some useful recommendations that stem from this information and we look forward to sharing more results. Next slide, please.

One of the most important jobs that we have in CPAC is to review complaints that are submitted to TPD by community members, reviewed by TPD internal affairs, and then ultimately reviewed by the chief of police and city manager. Last year, we reviewed more than 150 complaints. The most common issues that appear in the complaints are related to unsatisfactory performance and TPD's courtesy policy. We review complaints that we believe are particularly problematic with Lieutenant Storwick, and he is generally able to shed some light on those issues. We're also working with Lieutenant Storick to make some revisions to the TPD complaint form that we think would make it easier for the community to understand. We're also in the beginning stages of drafting a work plan that will encompass our total amount of work tasks and assigned duties, which we believe will help improve our communications and share out the objectives we have with our stakeholders. We'd be happy to come back and update you on that very soon. Next slide, please.

Well, we have a lot of big goals for 2026. This year, we are especially focused on increasing our community engagement and our recommendations for policy and procedure changes. In addition, we are planning to focus more on youth engagement. Next slide, please. We do have some exciting upcoming work. Our outreach subcommittee is planning to host a large community town hall forum on September 26th. That'll be from 2 to 4 in the afternoon. We are still finalizing a location, but you all are, of course, invited to attend and we'll make sure you receive the invitation. We have also drafted several memos that we are finalizing. We've mentioned some of them already, but the memos will offer recommendations on revisions to the complaint review forms, the creation of a handbook for the HOT Team, and more. Next slide, please. This concludes our presentation.

Lori and I, on behalf of the entire CPAC team, would like to thank you all for your time and the opportunity to share our work. We would be happy to answer any questions that you have or provide any additional information. We would also love to hear more from you about your expectations for CPAC this year and the work you would like to see us pursue. We also welcome the chance to collaborate with you on our work plan. Thank you very much.

Thank you both for taking the time to give us that update. And there's a lot of information there. I've been able to sit in, obviously, as the liaison on many of the meetings this year. I think maybe I've missed one or so. But I've just been really impressed with how much you all dig in and the passion and the just the curiosity as well as advocacy that you all bring to the roles that you have on CPAC and the time that goes into it, and especially looking at that list of community events that you all have attended last year. And I know that I've seen you at plenty this year, so I just appreciate the time that you put in both on the committee, the subcommittees, and taking your roles out into the community at large. I didn't have any questions. One comment that I had was once you guys have that full engagement report, I'm sure that the full council would love to see that as well. So, of course, we'd want to see it here at CVS, but I think it's something that all of our colleagues would be really interested in being able to take a look at and review as well.

Thank you, Jeff. Thank you so much. And I'm just going to ask a question. So we get a lot of updates from Vice Chair Scott. We always ask for updates during our meetings, and she does keep us pretty well informed of what you're working on. I know that you have some openings on CPAC, and it would be curious for us to find out. We usually hear from staff, but we would love to hear from you what type of members you're looking for. It sounded like you said you had a pretty well-rounded group. so far, and so we're just curious, are there certain types of people you think are missing from TPAC at this time?

I would say that, yeah, we just would like to bring more members on that just pretty much share a commitment to improving communications with TPD and outreach to the community, people who have differences in lived experiences. I know that one of the focuses we have right now is to work with our HOT team on some of the procedures involving outreach to homeless. So it would be great to bring in voices who may have done volunteer work or some sort of work in dealing with extremely vulnerable communities like the homeless and things of that nature.

Thanks for that information. That's really helpful as we go forward and are interviewing people just to make sure. I appreciate that lens that you have.

Thank you. Thank you for the question.

You're welcome. Do you have any questions?

I don't think I have any questions. I did want to maybe just reiterate what my chair, Scott, said about being excited to see the engagement results. I do think you mentioned that there's probably some things we can learn together on that, and I would love to see that. But thank you for including some of these. I'm already excited about seeing more. So thank you. And thank you for the time you all took to gather that. I think that's really, really valuable. And I do... Your committee is one of the hardest working ones given all the subcommittees and everything, and I really appreciate that. You said you had a couple of memos coming our way. Are those coming to the full council or to CBS? How should we expect to see those memos?

I think we probably need to think about that as probably a discussion we need to have amongst ourselves. and maybe reach out to Council Member Scott on that. I'm really not sure at this point.

Okay. Well, looking forward to it, I know some other committees send us memos with requests and just information on particular issues, and I find them really, really valuable, so thank you. However they end up coming to us, I just don't want to miss it, so appreciate it. Thank you.

I know some of our previous memos went directly to the City Manager and Chief of Police, but Yeah, so we just need to figure that part out.

Great, thanks.

Thank you. Council Member Palmer?

Yeah. Thank you all for your hard work. I know that the way that you have organized yourselves and come about this work is really fantastic and I think serves as an example maybe for some other committees. I'm looking forward to that engagement report. Again, that's I think above and beyond, and I appreciate that work. When I know that this is like the first, I think it's the first year that you all have had kind of a larger budget in order to carry out that engagement. And so I'm wondering if the report is going to kind of dig into the process of how y'all decided to do that, that outreach and kind of the lessons learned and the changes that are going to happen.

We can defer to vice chair, uh, Lori on that.

Thanks for all that. Um, that's a really good ask. Um, council member Palmer. And I think that's something that we can definitely add into our reports and, and updates for you all. What we have mainly, well, the, the budget part happened before I came on to this committee and was handled obviously before I became chair of the subcommittee for outreach and But the kinds of things that we have been able to do with those funds are, you know, to have identifying clothing and signage for ourselves. We have, you know, table materials and things to hand out to the public, informational materials. And, you know, it allows us to, you know, even pay for times when maybe having a booth at a large event isn't totally free. So those are the kinds of things that we've spent that budget on. But we can definitely include information about that in more detail as we move forward with updates for you all. Thanks so much.

And then my other question, oh, the work plan. Again, I think you guys are fully capable of coming up with an amazing work plan. But if you are asking for any kind of input, I would love to participate if possible.

Absolutely. Thank you for that offer.

We will definitely take you up on that.

You know, because our goal really is to make sure we have a successful work relationship with the city of Tacoma that we're filtering out. We're operating as a successful partner and making sure that we're bringing community concerns to you and then working with you to help make sure that we are communicating the right information back to the public. We don't want the public to be so reactionary. We want to keep the relationship going and work to build bridges and just all around improve the quality of life that we have here in Tacoma. A lot of us love living here. We love working here and are truly committed. So I would love that engagement.

Thank you. Looking forward to it. All right. Well, thank you so much for being here tonight. We really appreciate all of your work and just really active and really, it's wonderful to have committees that are just so engaged with our community.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having us.

Of course. All right. And I just, I also wanted to give a shout out to Vice Chair Scott for all your work. A lot of work. And I really appreciate how you show up and all the stuff you've been doing. And I'm sorry, I didn't get to go to ice cream. Don't feel good. I mean, you've missed out. I like that thing. That was at the same time. I really found out. Yeah. Get out of it to get there.

Yeah, no, it was really cool. And I updated you guys on it after it happened, but it was, it was a really, I think, you know, I had seen CPAC at other events where, you know, people are just kind of a million about, but this was one where like, they were kind of the, only like not that people came to the some people might have come to the park expecting them to be there other people were just kind of walking by and so it was nice to see um not just the amount of people who engaged but the various types of folks there were you know younger younger families walked up people with dogs people uh there are some folks that we tried to stop who told us they were from out of town but they still kind of asked a couple questions and So it was, you know, and then on top of all that, of course, there was ice cream.

And when there's ice cream, it's a good thing. Okay, so Tony, I'm going to call Tony Esparza, our executive liaison for topics for upcoming meetings.

Great. Thanks, Chair. So on August 27th, you're going to hear from three entities, the Human Services Commission, the Human Rights Commission, and the Commission on Immigrant and Refugee Affairs. They'll each provide you with their annual report. On September the 10th, you have interviews for the Human Services Commission, and then you're going to hear the Neighborhood Council annual report. And then on September the 24th, Neighborhood and Community Services is coming to present the funding recommendations for investments for the city for 27 and 28.

We sure are busy. So I know it's really late. So I just thank you so much for all of that. I just want to know, is there anything that we have somebody has to share of interest? Okay, then I will move to the last motion. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, the motion is recorded adopted. We stand adjourned. Thank you so much, everyone who was here.