City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening and welcome to the Tuesday, July 21st, 2026 study session of the Olympia City Council. For the record, we have a quorum with all council members present tonight. We did have a modification with our agenda and it was republished. So I do just want to state for the record that if you had the original version of the agenda, reimagining public safety update was item 2B. So we have switched those out. So now item 2B is the city council appointed advisory body recommendations and 2C is now the recommendations or excuse me, the update on the reimagining public safety progress report. So we're going to begin with our first item, which is item 2A, which is our sidewalk repair policy discussion. And we have a presentation to be led by Michelle Swanson. Hi, Michelle.

Great. Thank you, Mayor Payne. As the mayor said, my name is Michelle Swanson. I am a principal planner in public works transportation, and I am here to brief you and seek your input on a draft sidewalk repair policy. Sidewalk repair is a broad subject, and there are several city staff members here to help answer your questions when we get to them. They are Max DeJarnette. He's an associate planner, also in public works transportation. Sophie Stimson is also here. She is the director of public works transportation. Sarah Green is here as well. She's the traffic operations supervisor. Kevin McGee is also joining us. He is the interim street operations supervisor. And also here is Leanne Wells. She's the city's urban forester. So thanks to all of you for coming. So broadly speaking, I am planning to start by going over how we got here. Then I'll share what we heard during a recent public outreach process. I'll go over the draft policy, and then I'll turn it over to all of you for questions, for your discussion, and for your input on that policy. I hope it goes without saying that if you do have any questions while I'm presenting, we would be very happy to answer them, of course. And I hope you feel welcome to interrupt. First, I wanna be clear about the scope of what we are talking about this evening, and that is fixing existing sidewalks that are either lifted, cracked, or otherwise need to be repaired. The city does have a separate program and funding to build new sidewalks. That program is outlined in the Transportation Master Plan, so this conversation is just focused on repairing sidewalks. And it is some time in the making the work began in 2022 when the land use and environment committee requested that staff research some different approaches to sidewalk repair. We did that and returned to the committee in 2023 with a presentation that covered a variety of possible ways to address sidewalk repair. One of the outcomes of that meeting was the finding that we did not really know how much or where the sidewalk repair was needed. So the Land Use and Environment Committee recommended that the city do a full inventory of the sidewalk network and rate its conditions. We did that inventory in 2024, and the city also began a capital facilities plan program for sidewalk repairs. That program has been funded at a half million dollars annually through the Transportation Benefit District Sales Tax. In 2025, we got the final results of the inventory, which we shared with the Land Use and Environment Committee, as well as the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee and the Planning Commission. Also for the 2026 budget, this body, the City Council, directed that a four-person crew be created to do sidewalk repair. So now we're here. The crew is in place and has started working and we are having the discussion about a long-term policy approach. This discussion began at the May 28th Land Use and Environment Committee meeting. Like most cities in the United States, Olympia's existing code holds property owners responsible for maintaining the sidewalks adjacent to their property. And like most cities, Olympia has found that enforcing this code has been difficult for a variety of reasons. We are not alone among cities that when I say that we have enforced it unevenly when we have enforced it. Currently, we have an interim strategy in place and it works like this. Someone reports the sidewalk damage to the city. We paint it as soon as we're able to alert people that the damage is there. We send a letter to the property owner advising them that it is their responsibility to fix it. And the city also repairs sidewalks as resources allow on the same streets where we maintain street trees. We are in good company in seeking a better way to improve the state of repair on our sidewalks. And in fact, the state legislature's Joint Transportation Committee has funded a study about new ways local governments in our state can fund sidewalk improvements. This project is still underway, but one of the preliminary findings is that of the cities that they surveyed, 72% required adjacent property owners to fix sidewalks. More than half reported that this was not effective, and nearly all of the remainder said that it was only somewhat effective. This leaves only 3% of respondents reporting it as an effective policy. So I mention this to emphasize that we really are not alone. Now in 2023, when I presented to the Land Use and Environment Committee a variety of policy alternatives, They fell along a spectrum that basically broke down between property owners being solely responsible, the city being solely responsible, and a middle ground with a kind of shared responsibility and various options that fell along the spectrum in between. But it's hard to make a decision without knowing the scale of the problem that you're trying to address, which is why land use recommended doing an inventory of the city sidewalks and their conditions. So in 2024, we hired a consultant to do that inventory and of the 226 linear miles of sidewalks in the city, they found almost 28,000 unique locations that needed repair. They rated them based on severity and the results of which are shown in detail in the report. Of note was the finding that 83% of the high severity uplifts were related to trees. The report is posted to the city's website, and members of the public who might be listening in, who might want to review the report, are welcome to do so at our website, olympiawa.gov slash sidewalks. While the inventory was underway, the city began the capital facilities plan sidewalk repair program. There we go. This is funded at $500,000 annually from the new transportation benefit district sales tax revenue that the city began collecting in 2024. This is earmarked for pedestrian, bicycle, and active transportation projects. And you can see the before and the after of one of those sites on the slide here. And we're now in the third year of that program. Last year, the city funded four new positions and a mini excavator to do this work. And this is also funded by the new revenue from the transportation benefit district sales tax. We estimate that the crew can repair between 20 to 25 sites per year. One lesson that is really clear from this work is the strong nexus that this has with our street tree policy. Right now the city's practice is to require both the city and private property owners to have an arborist on site when doing sidewalk repair when a street tree is involved so that the arborist can assess whether the whether the tree could be preserved and if its roots need to be pruned or can be pruned rather. And there certainly are urban forestry policy questions to explore. For now. The sidewalk repair policy questions to examine have to do with where should the city focus its resources and by resources, I mean both the new crew and the capital facilities plan program for sidewalk repair. And is there a role for property owners. Given the scale of the repairs that need to be done. It is unlikely that city resources alone will make the progress that the public expects to see. With this in mind, we launched a story map to outline some of the challenges, and we asked the public for feedback in March. So a story map is a website, and it has maps, photos, and a narrative to more easily explain complex topics. And we included a link to it as an attachment, rather, to your staff report. And we also embedded a survey into the story map to ask people what they thought about some of the key policy questions that I just outlined. Nearly 1,900 people viewed the story map between March 2nd and March 20th when the survey was open. 363 people opted to respond to at least one question in the survey. And if you checked out the story map before the meeting, you would have seen a high-level overview of the survey results embedded within it. And we also included more detailed results as attachments to your staff report. Finally, for those who wish to see the raw responses, they are available on the city's Engage Olympia webpage, to which we also included a link. And again, if there's anyone listening in who wants to view the story map, it's available at olympiawa.gov slash sidewalks, the same URL I cited before. We got a lot of interesting, nuanced feedback, and we are grateful to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts. We read every single comment. For all of you, here's a high-level overview of what we heard. Most people said that they think the city, not adjacent property owners, should be responsible for fixing sidewalks. We heard support for prioritizing repair near common pedestrian destinations. There is some acceptance of large property owners being held responsible for fixing their sidewalks. And there is also some support for requiring that people fix their sidewalks upon sale of their property. So here's what we know right now. There is a very big need to do sidewalk repair in our city. And city resources alone are unlikely to meet it. Between the capital facilities plan program and the new crew, the city is now funding sidewalk repair at nearly $1.2 million annually. At that rate, our rough estimate is it will take about 250 years to fix all of the places that need fixing. With the spectrum of possible policy approaches that I mentioned earlier in mind, we considered some options and we weighed their pros and cons, which is what's shown on this slide. The first option is that we stay the course with the existing policy and enforce it better by holding all property owners responsible for fixing the sidewalks adjacent to their property. This has the pro of sharing the burden of repair among all property owners in the city and the cons of being very unpopular difficult and frankly unexpected for property owners. The second option is the shared approach which splits responsibility between the city and property owners. As the outreach results indicated there is some support for this. It may be seen as unfair to require some property owners to fix their sidewalks and not require others to do the same. The third approach is that the city take full responsibility to repair all sidewalks, presumably with the new crew and the capital facilities plan program. There is strong public support for this, but we will likely not be able to make the progress that the public expects to see in the time that it expects to see it. Therefore we are recommending a shared responsibility approach specifically that the city crew fixed sidewalks near common pedestrian destinations as opposed to along the street tree corridors, which you may recall is our current practice. I would like to note that many street tree corridors are also close to common pedestrian destinations. So many of those places may still get repaired under this approach, but not all. We also recommend that the sidewalk repair program and the capital facilities plan continue and that it also be focused near common pedestrian destinations. We further recommend that owners of large parcels be responsible for fixing their sidewalks. And that the city pursue creating a program that requires a sidewalk be repaired when a property is sold. We think a shared responsibility approach is rational because it is the most practical way to make significant progress in a reasonable period of time. It shares the responsibility to fix sidewalks between the public and the private realm. And the reality is city resources alone cannot meet the public's expectations of repairing sidewalks in the timeframe that people want to see them fixed. This is a complex problem that does not have a silver bullet or an easy fix. If it did, it would have been fixed already. And we think this approach is realistic and responsible. So let's break down each component of this recommendation. The first two components have to do with where we focus city resources, specifically the sidewalk repair crew and the CFP program. We are recommending that both continue to exist and that they shift away from fixing sidewalks along street tree corridors to fixing them near common pedestrian destinations. Because these are the places people most need to walk to. Common pedestrian destinations include inner city transit bus stops, schools, parks, grocery stores, and public buildings like libraries, post offices, et cetera. And we did include maps of those as attachments to your staff report. Those are the first two components of this policy recommendation. The third component is the recommendation that owners of large parcels be responsible for fixing their sidewalks. And the reason we're recommending this is because it could make a lot of progress quickly. Many of these properties are institutional or commercial, and the owners or managers likely have the skills to hire a contractor or to do the work themselves with their own crew. We did an initial analysis of parcels in the city to see how many have 200 feet or more of frontage with sidewalks. And the preliminary results showed that there are 84 linear miles of sidewalks adjacent to these parcels and this represents 37% of the total sidewalk network. We categorized the parcels into three very broad categories and found that commercial properties make up about 28 miles of sidewalks, multifamily housing is about 12.8 miles, and government agencies, including the state, are about 14.9 miles. In this category, the city is the largest property owner with 6.8 miles of sidewalks adjacent to its parcels. And the fourth component of the recommendation is pursuing a fix upon sale program. And we're recommending this for several reasons. It too can make significant progress. Our initial analysis found that about 17% of parcels in Olympia changed hands in the five year time period between January of 2021 and December of 2025. When we excluded the large parcels that I just talked about on the previous slide, this equaled about 19.6 linear miles of sidewalks in five years, and that's a little over 8.5% of the full network. Additionally, when a property is changing hands, there are opportunities for the buyer and the seller to negotiate over who does what and who pays for what. There are also often financing opportunities at that point. And this also means that all property owners at some point may potentially be responsible for fixing a sidewalk, not just those who own large parcels. So tonight, we are asking for your input on these four policy components, and specifically if you support this recommendation. So to reiterate, those four components are to continue the city crew and focus its work near common pedestrian destinations, to continue the CFP program and also focus its work near common pedestrian destinations, to start enforcing the requirement that sidewalks adjacent to large parcels be fixed, and to explore a fix upon sale program. We would like to know if you'd like to change any of these policy components, and if so, if you have any direction to offer. If you are comfortable moving forward with this recommendation, then the next steps would be for staff to shift the city crew and the CFP program toward fixing sidewalks near common pedestrian destinations, to refine the large parcel recommendation, We would also like to explore what it would take to stand up a fix-upon-sale program. There's a lot to that. And we would need to update the municipal code to reflect these changes. We would then need to return to this body, the city council, with the results of this work to move toward finalizing the new program. So thank you. very much for your time and your attention. If there is anyone listening in who cannot see my contact information on the slide and would like to get in touch, I hope you feel comfortable emailing me. My address is mswanson, that's m-s-w-a-n-s-o-n at c-i dot olympia dot w-a dot u-s and you are welcome to call at 360-753- 8 5 7 5 and I will turn this back over to you mayor Payne.

Thank you very much Thank you very much Michelle for their presentation Are there any questions from Council? Mayor pro tem win followed by councilmember green.

Yeah, I just have a quick one Sort of Adding to the foundation is I Michelle, this is specifically repair only. It doesn't address areas where community members feel like there should be a sidewalk. Okay. Thank you.

Council Member Green.

Thank you, Mayor Payne. Michelle, early on you talked about one of the challenges with our current program being enforcement. Um, and it strikes me that some of the, you know, even in this shared responsibility model, there's a lot of enforcement questions. Um, did, did you all, or did land use talk about, are there changes that would be made there to ensure that this is complied with or would it be potentially new regulations that are enforced at about the same rate as our current regulations?

Thank you, that's a great question. And so that's one of the things that we need to define further. And that's something that we would like to come back to you with is more information about what this would entail if this is a direction that you want to go in. Do we have the resources to do the enforcement that this would require? And if not, then would we need to hire more staff? And if so, how many more staff? and give you that information at that time.

Council Member Madron, followed by Council Member Gilman.

I do have a few questions, but before I ask them, I'm really curious to hear from the Land Use Committee, the chair, in terms of the conversation that you all had, consideration of recommendations from the Planning Commission to just kind of tee us up a little bit further in terms of how our council colleagues have already weighed in on the issue.

I guess I'll start that, and then I'll let my councilmates kind of give that, because it was a pretty robust conversation about a variety of things, whether or not you do neighborhoods, whether or not making the fixed upon sale, how that affects seniors was part of the conversation that came up, and home ownership. I wouldn't say there was a unified, clear conversation, per se conversation. I think the thing that we outright rejected was the do-nothing option, the null option. It was definitely a conversation about whether or not the city should do it fully or hybrid was the big debate about that. And I mean, I think the biggest question is, do we do the... The the main routes the arterials or and collectors or do we do the neighborhoods was a big con part of the conversation and I don't know if councilman Gilman or parent want to chime in on that part I Think that the biggest real discussion was about which of the three options it should it should be you have the three being Continue as is

city full responsibility or shared responsibility. And part of the discussion was just the immense expense of this undertaking. And I think the reason we kind of landed kind of in the middle was just the city probably can't afford $100 million plus. toward sidewalk repair as much as we would love to do it. So we also had a deep discussion about what should be the priorities. Worst first was, I think, a general feeling that worst first was important. And as the recommendation is shown community centers are more important, schools, bus stops and such. But this issue of the cost and how we go about it, I think was kind of the centerpiece that I recall discussing. I don't know, Clark, you might.

Well, we didn't arrive at a consensus with the three of us, but we did have a lot of discussion and thought this was all worth bringing to council. I just first want to start us out by saying while the last three years has been a run at it that included the survey, it's been an issue at least through my adult life. It's been a top priority. neighborhood discussion issue and We're certainly at least 10 or 12 years since Sophie first started asking or talking about the possibility of Repair upon sale, so it's a it's a long discussion It's because it's hard to make to actually make the decision and move on either Acknowledging that we're not requiring people to repair their sidewalks or garnering the resources together to do it ourselves. So we've kicked the can down the road for decades and certainly across these last 12 to 15 years that I've been engaged in this. For me, I think that... I still understood and still would really value that that tenth of a percent sales tax that we approved through the Transportation Benefit District, I understood the conversation was about getting into the neighborhoods and making repairs to sidewalks. And so while I see some value in continuing the capital facilities plan list that's a very long, long list, I would like to see that funding used specifically to be out in neighborhoods making visible repairs, realizing it's not going to fix 200 miles of sidewalks all at once, but we could be making a visible difference in each of the quadrants of the city. So one thing about the question of common ped destinations, and that's a lot of... people most need to walk there. I would argue that we have relatively few people who walk any long distance to get someplace and that we have many, many people who cross the sidewalk to get from their car to where they're going or to get from the bus to where they're going and that that's a lot more feet on sidewalks distributed across the network pretty evenly. And I think the impact of badly lifted plates in a residential neighborhood that stops people from getting from one house to the next or from the dial a lift into their house is a substantial impact that shouldn't be made less than maintaining the downtown core or adjacent to schools or other big destinations. I'm not convinced that the common PED destinations will actually net the most feet on sidewalks. I think that's aspirational, much like our hoping more people will ride their bikes or ride the bus instead of driving, but the reality right now is People drive and walk the last 50 feet on the sidewalk. And then I agree with Paul that the cost was a big part of our conversation. And I agree with him that I would support working on that repair at sale and considering the large parcels to maintain their own sidewalk frontage. That's what I remember from last month.

Okay. Thank you. Council Member Madrone and Council Member Barrett, your mic is still on. Your mic is still on.

Great. I really appreciate hearing. I was certain you all had a robust discussion on it, so I was just curious to hear some of the highlights. So I appreciate that. I'm curious about all the options in front of us, and maybe as the land use committee was not all in the same place, I feel like I'm personally not all in the same place. So I don't know how helpful that'll be, but I'll talk through some of my questions and just kind of see where I land. I'm really curious about the maintenance of vegetation alongside sidewalks. I remember seeing somebody put a sign up in my neighborhood on their fence and said, I know this tree is going to ruin the sidewalk. I'll take care of it at a later date. And like, it's like they knew that they love the tree so much. They knew that one day that sidewalk would be a problem. And it's probably actually in an area that would consider be considered a common pedestrian area right across from a school. So I'm curious, you know, what is our approach to working with property owners on understanding the impacts of vegetation and maintaining vegetation. There's actually a lot of sidewalk that is in perfectly good condition, except there's a bunch of plants in the way, and then people can't, you know, need to step around across. So, yeah, weeds. But I don't know, there's a really lovely lavender plant that creeps over. Okay, anyways, if you could respond to that question.

Thank you, Council Member Madrona. I'd be glad to. So our current policy is we would ask the members of the public, please let us know if there is vegetation that is blocking a sidewalk. The adjacent property owner is responsible for removing that vegetation, and we will send a letter to the adjacent property owner and let them know that they are responsible for that.

Okay so and it sounds like another area where like okay enforcement it might also be a challenge around that in terms of staff capacity and you know somebody could be like thanks for the letter but I like my lavender plant that's sprawling out over the sidewalk so um and I bring it up uh not just because vegetation can get in the way of the sidewalk and make it impassable but also um vegetation can also ruin a sidewalk. And so there's a bit of liability on some property owners in terms of creating some of the damage to sidewalks. So I guess I just say all this. I just think there needs to be a lot broader education out there in terms of what is appropriate to plant near a sidewalk. And it also lends to that shared responsibility component of it. If there is something somebody planted that is ruining the sidewalk, I can get behind the shared responsibility perspective for things like that. I'm curious, when it comes to the cost of repairing a sidewalk, I know the range is probably significant, but I wonder about, let's say somebody goes to sell their property, their home, And they've got a pretty significant gap and, you know, the arborist needs to come out and assess it. Do you, what would be the high end range of doing some kind of repair at the sale of the property?

It really depends. It really depends on how many panels are affected. And actually, if it's okay, my colleague, Max DeJarnett, did do some research on this, and he might be able to shed some light on that. Max, are you comfortable coming up and weighing in on that?

Sorry, Max. Hi, again, I'm Max DeJarnett, associate planner, public works transportation. And I did do some research on this, and Michelle's correct. It really depends. I mean, like she said, how many panels are involved? If a tree's involved, can the tree sustain root pruning, or is this a tree removal at this point? Another factor is the scale of the project. So I've heard from contractors who Because of disposal costs, because of concrete trucks, if they're doing small jobs, it's more expensive for them than if they're doing larger jobs. So actually for these these onesies and twosies, you know, contractors won't want to show up for anything less than, you know, $3,000 in some cases. So when you're just doing the math at Home Depot or wherever and you're like, well, it should only be this, it's really not the case when you need to have a contractor who's, you know, licensed, bonded, insured, and so forth.

Okay.

So I know it's not all that helpful. I mean, it could, you know, if you're talking large tree removal, then you could be, you know, over $10,000, right? So, yeah. Okay.

Yeah, it's helpful enough. I knew it was going to be arranged and not a clear answer to a question like that. It's really site specific. So yeah, I'm just thinking out loud here in terms of like that surprise cost if somebody is going to sell their home. And it just makes me think, you know, I know that property values have increased substantially in the past several years also. But I know that for our home energy score that we just passed, that we had an exemption for people who are low income, who maybe that is a significant burden for them. So I raised that just so that it's something that we can ponder if this moves forward. And I'm curious, can we actually compel the state to fix their sidewalks? Are we able to do that? That might not be a question for you. That might be back to Michelle.

Thank you. Great question. And we are looking into it.

Okay. Okay. Awesome. Um, and I just, um, I might have more questions as we, as we talk more, but, um, one of the things I do want to know is that like, it's actually not all property owners who would ultimately, you know, uh, be responsible at some point for sidewalk repair because not everybody's got sidewalk. Um, And if you're in a high pedestrian area, then the city might take care of it for you. Or maybe you sell your property and you take care of it, and then the city scratches it off the list. And so those are just some of the complexities that I think about in terms of what would it take to pull a program together that feels equitable for people. I'm so glad that this work has gotten to where we're at today. I know it has been an immense lift from staff and also from the Land Use Committee. And none of my questions are a lack of support, just having trouble seeing what the final vision is and knowing there's a lot of unanswered questions.

Thank you. Yeah, I'll echo those sentiments. When I first came on the council in 2022, this was right up there at the top of the list for the Council of Neighborhood Associations, who said that this was a big issue. And I'm glad to see that a few years later we've conducted our citywide assessment and now we're considering a repair policy. Um, I have a few questions. The first is, um, I know it's just a summary of the survey, but I noticed that in the, uh, summary of the survey, there's a racial demographic question, but I'm assuming we asked about disability and access.

We did.

Okay.

Yes, and forgive me, I don't have those results handy. They are on the Engage Olympia page, and I will get that and email it to the full council.

Okay. Thank you, Michelle. I'm curious about, since we're pondering this, you know, the... property owner, you know being responsible sort of in tandem with some share responsibility with the city, but let's say I am responsible for repairing my sidewalk in front of my property, but my sidewalk was just fine and my neighbor was walking by with this giant weight and they dropped it onto my sidewalk. Who is responsible for that? And so how would we handle that if it's the property owner that's responsible?

That is also a very good question. And that is something that we will need to research and follow up on unless the city attorney has an opinion. I don't mean to put you on the spot, city attorney, but I guess I am.

I have a policy of not giving opinions in public meetings.

Fair enough. Thank you.

Thanks. I'm also curious about the timeline upon notice of repair. So if we're, let's say it's a commercial space and we're requiring them, we send a notice that says, hey, we noticed The sidewalk needs some repair maintenance done on it is there is there a timeline with which they are to respond and actually have the project going or Maybe these are things we still need to figure out which I have a feeling that's what you're gonna say But yeah, I'm just these are things that I'm thinking about

Yes, those are things that we need to figure out, and we need to be reasonable, and we also need to have a deadline. So, yeah, the short answer is these are things that we need to figure out, and these are things that we would like to come back to all of you and have fleshed out. Right now, we're asking if this is a direction that you want us to pursue.

Okay. Yeah, I... Well, I guess to answer that question, so thanks for bringing us back. If I were to answer that question, I would be supportive of moving forward. However, if asked to take action, I feel that I would need a lot of these things clarified before I would support a policy. Yes, Council Member Vanderbilt.

I'm getting at the crux of how land use couldn't come to a question because, you know, I guess Michelle mentioned it earlier, is that, like, there's no silver bullet and there's a million questions on how to resolve this in an equitable way. I mean, I just got to talk to someone the other day that said it very clearly to me. And another perspective is, like, if we're supposed to think of our sidewalks as part of our transportation system for folks that roll... then shouldn't the city take responsibility? That's what someone told me. I said, well, that actually makes a lot of sense, but it would take us a long time to meet that responsibility, catch up, right? Imagine if our streets network was... as fractured as the sidewalk system is. Imagine how much that would cost to get to and how much time that would get to. So I think that in my mind, it's thinking about as transportation, does this, how much, I believe the city should take a significant amount of responsibility in this, but I also think that the fixed upon sale, I'd like to know more information about that. I would want to know more about like, if we're looking at, property come back to the same questions I had on land use like if a property is over so many feet and then they're responsible suddenly I mean if they're an apartment building will that cost be put on the renters right and so things like that like how do we equitably meet those needs because we have a complex transportation system right and and even with our routes had changed recently for our bus service. And so there were folks that had to take different routes, slightly different routes, and they were affected by that. And they realized that there were some sidewalk segments that were not to what they were used to. And so I think It's kind of like, you know, I also think the other part of this thought I have is that the enforcement factor, right? I think that if we're going to, how much does it cost to enforce rather than put more money into the program to do more sidewalks, right? That's another question I have, right? How much money would it cost to do one versus just expand the program further is a thought I have quite often. And then I guess another thing, and I think this would be kind of a legal challenge. I don't think we should do this per se, but I've always thought that if we had more capacity with the crew and then say someone wanted to do repairs and then it costs too much in repairs to do it privately, could they pay the city at a lower rate to do it? another thought i've had in the past so it's just it this is all to say that there is no silver bullet and there's a million questions on how to do this because we're so far behind council member madrona

Thought of a couple more questions for you. I was thinking about Council Member Gilman's question around or concern around the common pedestrian areas versus getting into the neighborhoods. And when I looked at the definition that you had in terms of areas that would be considered common pedestrian areas, it does make me think that we would be getting into the neighborhood some, especially with bus stops included. and things like that. So I am trying to provide clearer direction. I am actually very supportive of us refocusing our city crew and our CFP program to those common pedestrian areas. And I had a thought when you were talking about somebody dropping a weight on the sidewalk. And I also wonder about this with trees causing damage or other things that could happen. Have we looked into how homeowners insurance plays into sidewalk repair?

To a certain extent, yes. Some homeowners insurance do require that homeowners fix their sidewalks to reduce the liability for the homeowners. So that is... The extent of our knowledge, it is a bigger deal with commercial property owners and with their insurance companies we're hearing that some commercial property owners insurance companies are requiring that they fix the sidewalks adjacent to their property to reduce their liability.

oh, okay, so that kind of gets at the larger parcels. It kind of aligns with that approach from staff. And one of the things I'm curious about that we maybe dig in more is, like, are there instances where something accidental happens and it damages a sidewalk and then a homeowner could maybe lean into their insurance for that, but they would need to know that that's an option for them. And then I'm curious, I'm thinking about, you know, in thinking about the common pedestrian areas and... and bus stops in particular, man, there's a bus stop right on Rogers where there is just no ramp on the sidewalk to get up to the bus stop. So I'm kind of, I'm curious how this intersects with our, the mapping we've done around our ADA needs and if there's, you know, how we would link up the work around ADA needs with sidewalk repair because it'd be unfortunate to repair that sidewalk and somebody still can't get up there if they're in a wheelchair.

Thank you that's a great question, so we have prioritized the locations that need curb ramps and we gave the highest weight to curb ramps that are close to bus stops, so we already have that already prioritized. And depending on how close the sidewalk repairs are to the curb ramps, it's very possible. These are the types of things that happen when a project is being scoped. That can also be included in with the project. And in some instances, depending on the proximity, may be required to be included by federal law.

Okay, great. Yeah, I just want to make sure that staff working on different things are talking to each other. And then as we move forward, you know, with common pedestrian locations, we're also thinking about other projects that need to be done. So they are like truly accessible.

If I may, the common pedestrian destinations, one of the reasons why we are including that in our recommendation is that those are already woven into the transportation master plan for the prioritization of the new sidewalks. And that was also part of the prioritization of the curb ramps that you've just referenced. And so what this is, what we're trying to do is to be consistent across all of our policies. Everything that relates to sidewalks, new sidewalks, sidewalk repair, curb ramps, pedestrian oriented infrastructure. We want to have a consistent approach to all of it. And so that's part of it is so that we can do that type of easy synchronicity for all of the what we call facility types. Okay, excellent.

Okay, great. Well, I've mentioned that I'm favorable towards common pedestrian locations for the city crew and the CFP program. It makes sense that large parcels would have that responsibility, since it sounds like it's already expected of them from other entities. And it sounds like we have questions around enforcement that I know that more digging would need to happen. When it comes to the sale of property, I think it's an idea worth exploring further. But I do think we're going to need to do a lot of public engagement around it. I'm just thinking about, you know, I don't have a sidewalk in front of my house. And now part of me is like, well, thank goodness. But, you know, for somebody to go sell their property just to find out that they are responsible for a potentially very expensive repair that they didn't plan for. Um, it just makes me feel nervous and I, and there, you know, there's, there's, um, you know, we, we see the public expectation that, oh, the city should take care of all of this. And, um, but there's also the reality on the ground of, of, of the cost. And so it makes me think about like in some of those extreme situations, what cost share might look like. Um, I lots of unanswered questions, but also no easy answers in this one and a very difficult problem to solve so I appreciate the options in front of us and I think some of them are an obvious yes for me and some of them like well tell me more so I hope that's helpful.

All right councilmember Gilman followed by mayor pro tem when followed by councilmember green.

And if I may, I believe Council Member Barron's been waving at you also. Okay. So I agree that those destinations in the Transportation Master Plan include bus stops and schools and neighborhood and all that. And I also know that there's a... There's a resource drain on this limited resource by trying to fix downtown. And I understand it's important, but to me it's kind of a separate project to keep downtown going that I hadn't imagined that the city concrete panel crew would be working along Franklin Street when we approve that funding. But I'm going to back up and make one more run. I think that there's an opportunity to make a shift in thinking to consider that sidewalks are part of the street system. We've been treating them as kind of this, I don't know what, but I'd rather not deal with them, in between the person's private property and the street. They're within the right-of-way, they're part of the transportation network, and I think they should have the same attention as street repairs do. One constituent who reached out said, would you start assessing larger property owners for the pothole that opens up on the street in front of their business also? How is that not equivalent? So I think we all pay for the street system. We all pay for the bus, the transit system, and the sidewalks should just be considered part of that same system to my mind. The shift in thinking that I imagine is we have considered and rejected over the last couple of years things that are sort of the good instead of the perfect, that haven't been the same roadbed standard as our ideal of sidewalks. And we're watching neighboring jurisdictions to cut and replant street trees, use the super sucker thing to lift panels, even though that might only last for a period of years and not for a lifetime. We're watching the asphalt repairs, rubber mats, other ways that it's much like housing to me, that if we can't afford to build $350,000 studio apartments for affordable housing, would we allow building less expensive units to get people in housing that might not meet our full standard right now? And the piece that Robert mentioned about creating alternative pathways for somebody to be able to get two panels replaced and roots pruned, whether that's a city cooperating, a fund that cooperates with people, whether that's having preferred contractors cooperating, having standards that could allow neighborhood work parties there's got to be some path to help in the near term to address the unpassable sidewalk panels through neighborhoods so I those are those are each measures that we've considered and we've gone back to building sidewalk and repairing sidewalk according to the eds to be very long-lasting high quality and i appreciate that's a good value but i think it's it's um such a conservative approach that people in neighborhoods aren't going to feel much impact or see much difference for years so i appreciate you hearing me out thank you mayor pro tem win

Councilmember Gilman, I totally agree with you. So I'm biting. Thanks for putting it out there again. Over the years, I've heard you talk. Oh, maybe I should clarify. What exactly do I agree with? So over the years, I have heard you talking about this. We've met quite a few times, and this has come up. And I would hear it when I was initially on the coalition or the Council of Neighborhood Associations. But having some, just thinking about our current standard of sidewalks and what could be something that's in between, what could be a less, a cost-effective alternative to that. And it seems to me that this is a time to explore that. So that's something that I would like to hear from staff on. I really... I really would like to see when this comes back to us more specifically about how it ties into our ADA plan and helps move it forward faster. That is also one of those that's like has some realistic but sad number on it, kind of like how it would take if we did our current system here, it would take 250 years. So it's very similar, the ADA plan. Um, so I'd love that. I also just wanted to boost, um, the planning. There is a one point on the planning commission's letter. Well, there are several, but, uh, one that I just haven't quite heard yet here, um, is about, uh, what's a possible intersection, um, with, uh, what we're talking about, the sidewalk repairs and the vacancy study or, uh, how we address, uh, building vacancies. So that's something that I'm interested in. I am curious about about what costs sharing, like, what does that mean and what does it look like in other cities? I know we're not deciding tonight, but, you know, are you saying it's literally 50-50? How have other places gone about this? What do folks imagine? Or is it, like, you know, the city negotiates and gets a master contract with someone and then it lowers it at a discounted price. Like, what does shared responsibility look like?

Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. A lot of questions there. And I would like to preface this by saying that we have done some research on the sidewalk sucker. We also have a lot of experience with using other materials And in fact, one of the attachments to your staff report had some information about that because this was brought up in the public in the responses to the survey. Many people in the public also asked about this. Do they have to be concrete? And what we have, and actually Olympia has a long history of experimenting with new types of materials. And so that is covered in the staff response to the survey questions. And what we have found is that, and I'll let my colleagues here talk about the sidewalk sucker in a minute, but I want to answer your questions first, Mayor Pro Tem, if I may, if it's okay. But what we have found is that with the other types of materials such as the asphalt or the rubberized asphalt, which has also been experimented with as well, is that it just doesn't last very long. And so then instead of addressing this maintenance backlog, we end up creating more of a maintenance backlog by using these types of materials. So that's been our experience so far. So that's to address that question. To answer your questions more directly, your first question was about how does this move our ADA transition plan forward? So one of the things that... sidewalk repair does is it does move it forward and we are reporting our sidewalk repairs to Toby who is responsible for reporting out on the ADA transition plan and she'll be bringing that forward later. So you will be getting some information about that or we will be publishing that rather on our website, on our ADA website. So we are tracking that. And we do track the number of curb ramps that get built every year in the city, and all of that is reported as well. So all of that work is happening. And in terms of the intersection with the vacancy study, so the vacancy study found the consultants, if I remember correctly, and please disabuse me if I'm wrong, But I believe that the consultants noted the state of sidewalk repair in the downtown. And you may recall from the pedestrian destinations maps that many of the pedestrian destinations are downtown. So we anticipate that in the transition, if you let us know that you'd like to move toward transitioning our work, in the CFP program and with the city crew toward fixing sidewalks near pedestrian destinations, then what will happen as part of that is those locations near pedestrian destinations will get fixed, which means that there will be many places downtown that do get fixed. So that's the intersection with the vacancy study. Shall I ask my colleagues to come up and talk about what they learned with the sidewalk sucker? Is that something that you want to hear about? Great, thank you very much.

Sarah, Kevin, do either of you want to talk?

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Kevin McGee, and I'm the interim street supervisor for street operations. And Max went with me. We went and looked at the concrete sucker that Lacey has. And, you know, like anything, there's some applications for it. But some of the difficulties that I might find in Olympia is that it can be, you know, very time consuming to set up because the weight of the concrete so you have to saw cut it every five feet in order to lift the panels so Part of the issues with that be is if the roots are not addressed Instead of lifting one panel you're lifting it every five feet Our infrastructure is pretty old and so there's a gasket that has to suck to the concrete so if it's highly exposed all the rocks are You're not going to get a good suction on those panels, so you're not going to be able to lift them. Other issues that we would have is that it doesn't work for panels that have already cracked because you're just not going to be able to fit those pieces together. Some issues that are hard to address would be compaction issues because you kind of have to lift the panels and set them back down, mess with the subgrade to get it to sit flush without any trip hazards. And so sometimes that can be an issue with not being able to get full compaction as you're resetting the panels. Let's see. And then, but you know, there are also some pros to it. You know, I think it could save some time just because you're not having to form and pour a new sidewalk all the time. And then other things that are a benefit too, it would be you're using the same concrete, so it's matching. You don't have... you know, Lego pieces looking down the sidewalk, you know, it's all matching. So that's a big pro to it. So like I said, there's applications that it's beneficial, but, um, there are some constitute as well. And that's kind of what I found is that it's best applied when the infrastructure is fairly new. Um, and you know, the sidewalks are not cracked and they're still smooth enough for the aggregate will, um, not be an issue to get full suction.

And then Mac, did you have, Anything to add on that?

And did you guys have any questions for me on that?

Any questions on that? All right. Council Member Madron.

Not a question. I just wanted to make a comment of just to hold up one of the things that you said is how old our infrastructure is here. That was what I understood is that there's certain things that other jurisdictions can do if they have newer infrastructure like the city of Lacey. their challenges with sidewalks are just very different than ours because we're dealing with very old infrastructure. So I heard that and I wanted to hold that up.

Sure. And then we're going to turn it back to the Mayor Pro Tem who still has questions.

I just want to ask because several of the examples folks have shown me have been in subdivisions at least built during my work career. And so not unlike Lacey's growth around passing the same same era subdivision so of our 228 miles how much is is newer than 1990 because I'm surprised how much Subdivision is in the city limits. That's something I learned as a street Nally guy when I got involved in the city So I know that there are old sidewalks in the streets and alleys But I also know that a lot of a city do we have a sense of what the breakdown is of the suburban style Post 80's city versus the old street Nellie.

I don't have a answer for you. Was there any other questions on that. Thank you. Thank you.

The short answer is we don't have that broken down per se. It is visually broken down in the inventory. If you look in the report, there are maps that show where the sidewalk ratings are the lowest, and generally speaking, they are in the older part of the city.

Thank you. Back to you, Mayor Pro Temp.

Thank you. This one's just a comment. For the selling, or sorry, repair, completing repair during the sale of the property, I'm curious about that one. Much like what's been expressed already is I also am concerned that it would come as a surprise to folks. And so how would we, if that's something we were to implement, How would we go about notifying? And I would hope that we'd notify people shortly after we'd put that policy into place. And then also, you don't have to wait. So here are some options. You can actually take care of it. Not everyone's sitting around waiting to sell their house. Some people really like it here. And I wanted to go back to Councilmember Gilman just asking, maybe this is a question for staff, but when you were talking earlier on in your comments about your belief that we should think of sidewalk as transportation like we do buses, like we do fixing streets, what prevents us from doing that? Is it money? What is it?

Well, to a certain extent you already are. You have funded a crew to do the sidewalk repair, and you also have a program. We, as the city, have a program in the capital facilities plan to do sidewalk repair as well. So to a certain extent that's already happening. The question is whether that alone is not enough to keep up with the public's expectations, right? And so that's the question before you is what do you want to do, do you want to continue with just the city funded approach, if you do, then it will likely not meet the public's expectations of fixing sidewalks in the time period that people want to see those sidewalks getting fixed, therefore. This raises these other questions, which is, is there a role for property owners? And so that's what the bulk of your discussion has been tonight. The other policy question is, where should city resources be directed? And that is the other question is, should they be directed toward fixing sidewalks that are near common pedestrian destinations? Right now, the city practice is to be fixing sidewalks along street tree corridors. And so those street tree corridors, we included a map in your meeting packet that showed where the street tree corridors are, as opposed to those common pedestrian destinations. So those are the two big questions.

Thank you, Michelle. I'm clear on why we're gathered here tonight and then the different options and And I will make sure that I give some clear leaning of what I think for the four of those. But perhaps there is something that some additional information. I don't want to gloss over what you're saying, Councilmember Gilman, because I feel like we do think of sidewalks as a big part of transportation. Is there something, like, what's missing? I just feel like I thought that comment, I was like, oh, that's interesting. I do think of it that way. So what's the shift?

The shift is that we don't resource sidewalk maintenance in the same way that we resource road maintenance. We don't have the same expectation of maintaining the quality of the road, the road condition. And And my classic example is when it snows, we bring plows up and we cover the sidewalks and we cover the bus stops and we say that walkers, disabled people and poor people are SOL until it melts. that's the difference between how we prioritize the street. And if you look at, I mean, we fought to go from zero budget dedicated to sidewalks and bus stops to having a chunk enough to put a dedicated crew on now. But it's been a real struggle to... to try to get some parity so that people using multimodal walking, biking, buses have the same care and consideration as people driving cars to get to their destinations.

Council Member Vanderpool.

And I would also add to that, it's like similar to bike lanes and other pieces of infrastructure that are not as high a priority as the streets and the roads are, generally speaking. I think that another aspect of that that hasn't been brought up is things like a local improvement district and other things that you could apply to a neighborhood to fund projects faster. That has not been brought up tonight. I mean, I may have brought it in the past, but it is something that I would be interested in in addition to the other work so that we can move the projects along. I mean, it's really up to the neighborhoods if they would be okay with that, of taxing themselves to do a thing, get a project done moving faster in a district. But that's something I'm also interested in.

All right, thank you. Are you finished, Mayor Pro Tem?

Yeah. Some of the things I was saying to you initially, there were just bullet points for later, but impressive. You just went boom, boom, boom, boom.

Mayor Pro Tem, I did forget one of your bullet points. Mayor, with your permission, may I respond to one of your bullet points? Sure. You asked about cost sharing. And so I think cost sharing is a little bit different than the shared responsibility approach that we're proposing. And I saw this in my notes, and I thought, oh, I didn't answer your question. So we did explore that. And one of the examples that we found was very interesting, and it was from the city of Auburn. And I did want to share that. The city of Auburn set up a contract where residents could buy into the contract and could have their sidewalks repaired at the city rate. And what they found is they needed to go property by property. And whenever you do that, whenever you go property by property, is really labor-intensive and they had one staff person doing this pretty much this was half of her job and throughout an entire year and the most number of properties that they were able to fix the sidewalks for was 14 and This they found just a lot of complexity they needed to have permission to from the property owners that had to be attached to the title of the property because they found that if the property sold between the time that they got permission and the time that they went out to do the work, that they no longer had permission. I mean, it was a very complex process. So that is one of the reasons why we didn't bring that forward as part of our policy recommendation. Thank you for letting me, for indulging me.

Yeah, thank you for responding. Councilmember Barrett.

A couple of questions come to mind subsequent to our previous meeting for the Land Use Committee. This has to do with liability. If we move from the... This is really kind of, Jay, probably more for you, but for whomever. If we go from The landowners responsible to. The shared responsibility or you know the city full responsibility. There be a shift in liability when when there and and who would be. Our homeowners insurance of some trips on our sidewalk, you know if we have an umbrella of insurance. That I would assume if we go to A shared responsibility that would formalize the shared responsibility, but I don't know if you should some light on how this is likely to work in these various scenarios and would would it cost us more money for our self insurance program at the city is is is something that came to mind.

Yeah, and I'll say probably a lot like you've heard from Michelle say tonight, it's complicated, right? So generally, yes, the more responsibility, when the city takes responsibility for things and we say that others aren't, we tend to be responsible. And then if claims occur, then we can be more on the hook. Now I say that, and I'll tell you that we may still be responsible for claims because we have paid out claims for trip and fall all throughout the city even on sidewalks that aren't necessarily our responsibility by policy because as claims go and people make their claims it's hard in a court of law when the and that's probably why we're here is when policies aren't exactly clear it gets into gray areas so But generally, yes, if we take on more responsibility. In terms of what that costs, I think that's some additional work we're going to have to do as part of bringing this back is have that check in with WCIA about what are they concerned about in terms of how we want to put parameters on this.

The other thing was, do we survey how much fixing is getting done currently? I mean, people are supposed to get a permit, I guess, to do work, do we have a sense of the volume of that?

Yes, we have been looking into that, into the permit system, and in terms of like private property owners is what you're asking about?

Right. Currently, I just am curious how much work gets done under the current system.

Yeah, we have been looking into that. We don't have an answer yet. That's been actually challenging to dig into. And then, of course, we are tracking how many repairs are being done by the city crew.

And several have touched upon this grant program, a shared responsibility. I was thinking more of like a grant program. The city creates a pool of half a million dollars or whatever, and we put out the word, we'll go 50-50 or whatever, whatever. We decide what it is. Maybe we decide in some cases it should be 60-40 or in others 40-60, you know. But I'd like to see, I guess, as part of this, instead of calling it shared responsibility establishment of a city grant program to fund programs, I don't know how much interest there would be. It's just a thought I'd like to put out there and It seems to me that this would be a way to maybe ignite, and if it were popular enough, it would be a good argument for higher city funding for that, if we could get people to invest 50-50 willingly, and if they felt they were saving money by doing a shared program, grant program.

Council Member Barron. I have a question about that, because it sounds like that's an approach to shared responsibility, not that it's not shared responsibility. I guess I'm just trying to...

Correct. Really more of an approach. That's right. But it would be an incentivization, more of an incentivization program instead of just sharing responsibility, which I think would be more of a win-win, but just for your consideration. And finally, this is something we haven't delved on tonight, but I think having the crew is great. It seems like the 20 to 25 sites repaired per year seems a little low, unless they're big sites You know, I mean, a panel can, a crew can do a panel in a morning and be on to the next panel. So when I see 25 sites a year, I think, why not 25 sites a month if it's a panel? I mean, I literally am thinking this, but I could be mistaken about the scope of these projects. Maybe these are big projects. It's just a comment I have. It just seems light to me that we can only do 20 to 25 sites in a year, unless I'm mistaken about the scope of the project. I could be mistaken about that. Finally, I wish we had enough money to do a grinding crew also. I know that this is controversial. I understand that you grind down the high spot in the sidewalk. THREE YEARS LATER IT HEAVES AGAIN. I UNDERSTAND THAT, EXCEPT I JUST THINK IT WOULD SHOW OUR CITIZENS THAT WE'RE SERIOUS ABOUT GETTING AROUND AND IT WOULD BE MORE OF A NEIGHBORHOOD PROJECT AS OPPOSED TO THESE HIGHER IMPACT ZONES. I believe hiring that crew would be a good investment as opposed to subcontracting a lot of this work personally. So those are just, the last was more of a comment, and some of those were ideas I didn't get a chance to share with my colleagues on the Land Use Committee. I don't know if you have any thoughts about any of these things, but...

Thank you. I'd be happy to respond, and I would like to give my colleagues the opportunity as well, because they would have more information than I do, if they want to weigh in. But I will say that in terms of what the crew is fixing, it really varies from site to site. In general, our estimate assumed fixing two or three panels or repairs of two to three panels. There is a lot of complexity when there are street trees involved. As a reminder, when there is a street tree involved, we do need to have an arborist on site to be evaluating that. And that takes time and expertise. In terms of grinding, my understanding, and again, I'll give my colleagues the opportunity to correct me if I'm mischaracterizing their work. But my understanding is that we do have a grinder. They do grind sidewalks. As was discussed during the land use meeting, grinding is not a permanent repair. It is a temporary repair. And there's only so much the sidewalk can be ground And also the grinder as I understand it Cannot be operated when it's raining heavily so that does limit how often Grinding can be done, but it is happening and what and and does get done on a routine basis is my understanding Is there anything would you like to weigh in? Okay, thank you

Is that all? That's all. Okay. Thank you, Council Member Barrett. Your mic. Your mic. Yes. City Manager Burney.

Yeah, just one quick follow-on to Michelle's about the question about how many. I think where we're at as a starting point is to be conservative with our estimates about what the crews can do, and I think we'll get a year or so under our belt of what we experience, and then I think we can kind of come back and check in with you about our progress around the use of our crews and What are they what can they really get to and what are they what are they? What are they coming across when they're doing their repairs in terms of complexity? Or are we actually getting a lot more done than we thought we would so I think we're giving you a conservative to start and I think that's a great question that we can follow back with you after we have just some at least a year of experience with that crew to figure out what that looks like Thank you, okay councilmember madrone followed by councilmember Vanderpool and then I am in the queue I

Always good to put yourself in the queue.

So what Council Member Barrett was saying around having a grant-slash-incentive program, that's what I meant when I said cost share. And I could imagine that we could do some kind of program like that that is a big call-out to the community. Maybe we're targeting specific areas, but to just get people to incentivize people to get things fixed sooner rather than later, because I think we could be waiting a very long time if we're waiting for... property sales, especially with the way interest rates are right now. Interest rates are higher than they have been from 2021 to 2025. So the housing market's always going to be in flux like that. And I'm curious about what Council Member Gilman was saying in terms of, is there a less expensive sidewalk that we could build? Do our engineering design and development standards exceed state and federal requirements around sidewalks?

I don't know, but I think they're pretty standard.

Okay, that's what I thought. I don't know how much flexibility we do have in that space, but if there's a cheaper sidewalk to be built, I'm sure we've looked into it. But if there is a cheaper sidewalk to be built, I'd be curious about that. And then I'll just kind of say my closing statement. I've said where I'm at with all of these things and recognize that it's an extremely complex issue of high public interest that is just so difficult to, you know, I have a feeling this is going to be a very iterative process to land in the right place. And I just want to say that I absolutely view sidewalks as part of our transportation system. I use sidewalks to get around all the time. And I don't think there is a solution in front of us where we're treating them the same as we treat our streets. And it's not a failure of us as a city. It is, I would say, the failure of many past decisions that have made us such a car driven society. If we have always prioritized sidewalks the same way we do streets for the generations before us, We'd have less people driving, people would be walking around, and sidewalks would be in great condition, and they would be treated the same. And so I just want to say that I hear what you're saying, and I fully 100% agree. And there's no clear answer in front of us to get us there. So if you have more ideas for us to entertain to where we bring sidewalks up, to the same way that we treat streets in a way that we can afford. I'm sure the public would love that, but we don't have the tools to do it, financial or otherwise. And so that, I think one of the things we're wrestling with is what the public demands of us for sidewalks and what they can themselves afford based on many, many, many decisions that weren't made long before we got here.

That is very well said. Thank you. Uh, council member Vanderpool.

I couldn't say it better myself.

Appreciate it.

So, uh, uh, And again, I also think that to that point is focusing on the pedestrian destination, folks that roll. These are important things. I'm glad that's in there because that's something that we have to think about consistently. Transit related areas, right? Bus stops and whatnot. Because folks that get around the community by rolling, they don't have the convenience of driving like the rest of us do. And we have to ensure, at least in the minimum, that their needs are being met. And I'm glad that got brought up tonight, ADA ensuring that we're meeting those needs. I guess I still have questions about enforcement. I think that's a big question that I think even the public has is like, how do you enforce such things? I also would love to know how this will, I guess my last question would be, how will this process over the next year as we're going and learning more and getting back questions to the council, how this will inform the urban forestry plan that we're working on right now? How will that inform that? Because the urban forestry plan will not just be new trees, but existing trees and managing that process in the community. And so much of the trees affect was it 80 something percent of it affects our panels in the community. And so I wanted, I just want to, I don't know if you have, if you want to come up and talk a little bit about that, but I'm just curious about how that, how this information will affect that and vice versa, as we're working on that plan the next few years.

Okay, so Leanne Wells, community planning and development urban forester for the city. So thank you for mentioning the plan. And as you know, we are in the very, very beginning stages of kicking off the plan. So there's no way to be able to discuss trees in the street or street trees without talking about sidewalks. that it's a conversation that I have every day. And so the code right now, and we also have the luxury of having quite a bit of canopy. We have 42% coverage according to the 2022 canopy assessment that was done. And we'll find out if that's gone down in the last four years when the new one is done. The code does look to preservation first always for vegetation and trees. So yeah, it definitely will look at that. And then also just a little bit about the process of what an arborist does when they approach a tree when they need to look at the roots. Do you want to hear, is that too much detail? Would you rather I didn't go into that? But the Urban Forestry Management Plan will be looking at all of those things and coming up with detailed policy or recommendations for policy.

Thank you. I just kind of wanted to briefly bring that up as kind of a point of shared policy that's going to have to come across and just thinking about that.

Every day it's on my plate, so I'll definitely be bringing it to the table.

Thank you.

All right, thank you very much. Just for everyone's awareness, Councilmember Green is excused for the remainder of the evening. So I want to bring us back to our original questions, because I think all of this discussion is great in terms of giving staff some sense of what we're thinking and where our minds are. But we've got to get back to the original questions to make sure that you leave with your clear guidance. So are we OK with the recommendation from the Land Use and Environment Committee to move forward, or are we offering some sort of modification or alternative?

I don't believe we have a recommendation from the land use committee to move forward with these staff recommendations I think we made a motion to bring this discussion to come.

I'm sorry. Yes, that's an important clarification. Thank you. Yes, you were divided. Yes All right, so But my original question still stands what direction are we giving I just need clarity I heard councilmember Madrone But I just want to make sure there is a majority on how we intend to proceed.

Yes, Council Member Gilman. So I think this is good work. And it's also my frustration is that I don't think people in neighborhoods are going to feel it. and that the sales tax that we passed will generate about $3.2 million in current dollars each year. And we've got a $1.2 million sidewalk chunk. And I know that the language we finally agreed on, even though we discussed putting that tax in talking about sidewalks and neighborhoods, we agreed on language that said bike, pedestrian, or active transportation projects. But I'm frustrated. frustrated that there's nothing here for the thing that several council members raised of what do you do with the worst of the worst panels? How do you help an elder that can't get across the sidewalk to their car or to the dial-a-lift? And I just, I felt like that was part of approving this funding. And I also, I recognize that the Transportation Department desperately needs any funding and that we have a Transportation Master Plan to aim us towards a more complete street, multimodal future. But whether it's a dedicated grinding crew, a grant program, some flexibility in cutting and replacing with something less expensive, whatever it is, I want us to have some gesture out in the neighborhoods for the worst of the worst sections alongside this good work about how we share the responsibility, what we do with large parcels. So that... That's the interest that I don't think is addressed in this proposal.

Yeah, that's helpful. And I think that's fair, considering that especially, for example, the CNA, as I mentioned earlier, has been such a big proponent of these changes. And so that does make sense to me. I do think that in terms of prioritizing common pedestrian areas, I do think about not just the walkability and accessibility throughout the city, but I do also think about the liability to the city as well. And so I do think there's a balance to be struck. I saw two hands go up at once. Yes, Council Member Madrone, followed by Council Member Barron.

I just wanted to get some clarity. It sounds like you're not opposed to the recommendation. It was kind of a yes and. Okay, that's where I'm at, too. I think I, and I, you know, I did a plus one on my version of a cost share, what Council Member Barron said on some kind of grant program, too. So I heard a yes and there.

Okay, just to make sure it works. Yep, thank you. Yes, Council Member Barron.

Yeah, I'm a yes on this with a few thoughts, just my own opinion here. The grant program, I think, is important. If we had a number, 500,000, the city could still have a certain pool of money to fix some of these awful spots that will never get fixed unless we go do it. This is my thought. The... I would love to see a grinding program, personally, over and above what we have. Maybe a couple more employees. I don't know how much that takes out of our budget, but a couple of people doing grinding, it would be visible in the city, we'd make a lot of progress. I just mentioned that. It's a group process and it may or may not be in it, okay? I... I DO THINK WE NEED TO MAINTAIN THE LARGE PARCEL RECOMMENDATION, AND MY THINKING ABOUT A GRANT PROGRAM IS THAT SHOULD BE LIMITED TO SMALLER PROPERTIES. I'M NOT SURE, YOU KNOW, OBVIOUSLY IF IT'S A DUPLEX OR SOMETHING, THAT'S FINE, BUT IT SHOULD BE LIMITED TO PEOPLE LIVING IN THEIR HOUSEHOLD, I GUESS. really kind of the summary of my thinking. So thanks. Thank you. Thank you.

That's helpful. Uh, council member Vanderbilt.

Um, I guess my question is, um, we move forward. Yes. On these. Uh, but some of the questions will come back to us as council this next year or this year, probably just to kind of answer some of the other programming here, like the fixed upon sale details and the, the grant program details. And then, I also agree that there needs to be a focus on neighborhoods to ensure that it's not just downtown, it's not just the arterials, but some of those other places, which seem to have a little bit of that with destinations, but it's not entirely clear if we're going to get all of that. But it would be yes for me, but I also would like eventually to come back with some of these questions, these other aspects of it, just to kind of clarify with the council what that grant program would be,

details of that and then of course the fixed upon sale details yeah all right that's very helpful and i made my position known earlier so michelle do you have what you need i'm not sure that i have clarity on whether uh city resources should be directed uh

toward pedestrian destinations. I am hearing an interest in some resources going toward neighborhoods, and I'm just not clear on what that means. Seating Manager Bernie.

I'll try, based on what I heard. I think what I'm hearing is based on the recommendation is for now the CFP and the crews remain focused on the common pedestrian areas, but come back with some additional thoughts and thinking around alternative programs around grinding or potential grant programs for cost sharing and bring some of those other components forward. So it's stay the course, but bring additional information back as part of bringing this back. Did I get that?

Thank you for translating, Mr. Manager. Yes.

All right. Yes, Council Member Vick.

If you have time, with all of this other information, I mentioned briefly I'd be curious about the local improvement district because I've had folks in the neighborhoods ask about this in the past as kind of an additional thing, like the grant program, that could help speed up this process.

Thank you. All right. Thank you. All right. Now I think you have what you need.

Yes, thank you very much.

All right. Well, thank you, Michelle. Very informative presentation, and I appreciate counsel's discussion on it. And thanks to all of our public works transportation staff back there. Thank you very much for your input as well. We appreciate you. Thank you. All right. So that concludes our business on... SIDEWALK REPAIR POLICY DISCUSSION. HOW ARE WE FEELING, COUNCIL? DO YOU WANT TO TAKE A RECESS OR POWER THROUGH? OKAY. WE'RE GOING TO GO AHEAD AND MOVE ON TO OUR NEXT AGENDA ITEM, WHICH IS ITEM 2B ON OUR AGENDA, WHICH IS THE CITY COUNCIL APPOINTED ADVISORY BODIES RECOMMENDATIONS DISCUSSION. AND WE HAVE STACEY RAY, OUR ASSISTANT CITY MANAGER, PRESENTING TONIGHT.

OK. All right. OK. Thank you, Mayor, members of the council. So for the record, I'm Stacey Ray, Assistant City Manager. With me tonight is Margo Morales, our Community Engagement Specialist, and Genevieve Canseco-Chan, who's been our consultant on this project. Also, not here tonight, but supporting this work, I just want to mention Don Carvalho in our city manager's office. And thank you to our advisory body staff liaisons who support somewhere around 100 volunteers who participate on our advisory bodies and have been involved in this work from the outset. So tonight, I'm bringing forward for council discussion a recommendation from the community liability and public safety committee. on updates to our council-appointed advisory bodies and the process. And I want to acknowledge our CLPS members for their really diving into this topic and providing the leadership, the input, and the guidance to bring forward a unanimous recommendation for conversation tonight. This work was initiated by retired communications director Kelly Perspraseth and then moved forward by retired assistant city manager Debbie Sullivan and I'm now leading it alongside Margo, Genevieve, and Don. Okay, so tonight I'll briefly review the project purpose and how it helps meet our engagement goals, highlight the steps in the evaluation process, and provide an overview of the recommendation brought forward by CLPS for discussion tonight. So... The purpose of advisory bodies are to provide public participation in city government. Really, the primary purpose is to provide you with judicious, okay. Yeah, thank you, Mayor.

We got it.

Advice from a community member's perspective to the city council, and that's defined in the guidebook around advisory bodies. I also want to highlight that throughout this conversation, we've identified some council goals around engagement. And these just come from years of having participated in engagement with you and what you've said is important to you. So that's community members providing meaningful input, ensuring equitable and inclusive engagement, the experience of community members is impactful, and that there are resources to support engagement that's sustainable. So and I also want to highlight that several weeks ago, all of you had the opportunity to meet with our current council appointed advisory body chairs and co-chairs to talk about work planning. One of the discussion questions for that evening was what makes for impactful work. And I think what we heard is a good way to also frame the conversation tonight. We heard that impactful work for community members, in the perspective of our chairs and co-chairs, is changes that the community can see and experience. System improvements that are equitable and address barriers to city programs and services, enhance community trust in our government process and work aligned with our community priorities, and early, often, and meaningful engagement throughout the process. So knowing that why, when, and how we involve our community members matters so greatly, we launched this evaluation process in 2025 because of the following reasons. We hadn't done it before. I mean, that was one of the driving purposes. We had not really taken a constructive look at our advisory bodies. The others that we have over the last five, six, seven years really been leading an effort to do engagement differently. And so that has evolved for us and what we've learned in terms of what works. And then we've also had staff and advisory bodies speaking to some challenges with lack of advisory bodies members staying engaged and involved in their body. And lastly, We've gone through the last couple of years where it's been important to look for how are we sustainable in terms of our staff resources and our finances and what we can support. So that's a little bit about the why. And so I'm going to transition to talk about the process we've gone through briefly. So to ground you in the scope of the work, Here's just a bit of background. I'm not going to go into detail tonight, but it just demonstrates that we've had advisory bodies since 1935 and then have since then continued to add additional advisory bodies, with the most recent being added in 2025, the Community Policing Board. Those are in blue are those that aren't supported by staff but are still appointed by council. And currently we have 14 standing advisory bodies. So those bodies are listed here. I will just call out that Salary Commission and Youth Council are here, but they have a bit of a different recruitment appointment process and weren't part of this work, this body of work. So Debbie Sullivan did a comprehensive analysis of our existing advisory bodies. She found parts of the system that maybe weren't working well and needed attention. She looked at work plans to identify how often had work plans been made up of council referrals, what was the alignment to council work plans, and also noting that a lot of advisory bodies had work plans made up of informational briefings as opposed to council-driven work. She took a deeper dive into understanding which boards were having challenges with attendance and turnover. And then also was was Speaking to council at the time about the different kinds of engagement. We had started doing over the last several years She also used priority based budgeting to identify that we invest nearly six hundred eighty thousand dollars a year in supporting our council appointed bodies One of the things she highlighted at the time was just taking a look at which bodies are required and which are not required as a data point for consideration as part of the analysis and And out of 14 bodies, Debbie found that six are required. The Design Review Board and Heritage have asterisks because some but not all of their work is mandated. She also evaluated trends and patterns in advisory body vacancies. It's not always accurate to say because someone can't make it to a meeting means that They're not engaged in the work, but it's a bit of a proxy to just understand where might there be high turnover or other challenges with folks staying, you know, sustaining the work on those bodies. And then lastly, I'll highlight that Debbie evaluated 2024 work plan content and how work plan items were coming to advisory bodies. And in 2024, council requested four work plan topics and staff had initiated 33. That was the 2024 evaluation. And Margo did the same look for 2026 work plans. And of 31 work plan items, 16 will result in a recommendation to council, 14 will result in a recommendation to staff, and two will result in a recommendation to another entity. But of those 31 items, 12 were related to 2026 Council work plan items. So this is, again, taking a little bit of a look of what are advisory bodies working on and where is their alignment with Council's work plan. So after Debbie's evaluation of the system she presented to CLPS in May of 2025, And then Genevieve joined us to continue the evaluation process. So she came on board and built off the prior work by conducting research with other cities. She's met with staff liaisons, surveyed our current advisory body members, and consolidated input from the Social Justice Equity Commission, from meetings with the chairs, and from what we've heard from CLPS to date on this topic. A full accounting of her findings were included in your staff report. So next I'm going to move into outlining the recommendation. I want to talk a little bit about how we got here for those of you that aren't as familiar as clips. And now I'll shift to talking about the recommendation. I'm going to talk about it in three components. The first is a multifaceted toolkit for engagement. So that's one element. The second are current system improvements. Think about like process improvements to how we run our processes right now. And the last are some opportunities for restructuring several of the advisory bodies. So we'll talk first about engagement. And we're introducing the concept, as we did with CLPS, about having a public engagement toolkit. And the goal would be to apply the right engagement approach to the need or the topic or the issue. And each approach is aimed at helping us achieve that certain level or kind of engagement that we want to do. So for example here, a lower level of engagement might be to inform, which you'll see down under the left-hand side. So inform just looks like making sure the community is educated or informed about something. all the way up to kind of the highest level of engagement here, which you'll see collaborate, which is listed under advisory bodies on the far right-hand side. And collaboration looks like co-creating or developing something together with community members. The concept of the toolkit is really this overarching approach to community engagement. And all the methods are intended to help balance each other out. in terms of how much time and staff resources they require. When you move from left to right on the graphic, it shows that each tool does require more staff time and resources. So we start at the left side where Engage Olympia, still a very robust tool, but it might require less time and resources to develop a survey through that, as opposed to the time and resources involved in liaisoning an advisory body. So just to briefly touch on the elements of the toolkit, I think we're all very familiar with Engage Olympia at this point. We've used it quite effectively in a lot of our projects. Talk a little bit about community connectors. These are individuals who have connections to maybe specific constituents groups in the community. or maybe demographic groups, and would share information or help us reach out to those folks. So a little bit of a back and forth connection to the community. This might also look like working with existing groups. So CNA could be a community connector, members of the Coalition of Neighborhood Association. The other part of the toolkit is around community collaborators. So these are individuals maybe with special interests or could serve on an ad hoc work group or a focus group, and maybe not for a long period of time, but more established period of time that has a beginning and an end and can really come together and focus on something specific. We've used this approach with our one community plan and also our reimagining public safety for just two examples. And we have community academies. So a city-led community academy could help educate our interested community members on how city government works, how decisions are made, or even dive into specific topics or programs or services. We've done this historically in the Olympia Police Department in offering community academies. This concept was really well received in our conversations with advisory body members and chairs. They like the idea of having a great entry point for community members that maybe can't dedicate as much time and energy to a long-term commitment and are just looking to get involved in some way or learn more. And then lastly, we have our advisory bodies, which I won't dive too deeply in here because I think we're all familiar with. But again, this is clearly a more structured way with much more built-in framework and process for appointing and utilizing our community members in providing their opinions and perspectives. So a few notes around implementation of the toolkit. I want to, again, just reiterate, this is meant to be an overarching kind of approach to engagement. And within, it's not necessarily that we use all of the approaches for one topic or issue, but we're choosing the right fit for the right moment and the right need. There are some things that would need to happen for this. We would certainly be having a conversation around stipends for the concept of community collaborators and connectors, which is a process we've done, a thing we've done in the past. And we'll want to talk with staff about when to use what, when each of the tools makes sense. And then we want to dive a little bit more into what a community academy could look like. Is it a cohort model over time or just individual topics? So any questions so far about that element of the recommendation, the toolkit?

Council Member Vanderpool. So one of the things that I'm glad I got mentioned is engagement. One of the feedbacks I've heard from folks that have been on advisory boards and are currently on advisory boards is making sure that their position and involvement in the community, not just on advisory boards, I guess, but through some of these other processes also is ensuring that they're not reduced to a sounding board. Essentially making sure that they're not just like Saying concerns they have about a design on something Six months later none of that feedback is in the slideshow Right. I think that that's that's a disconnect problem that the community has where it feels like They're not being heard their feedback isn't being made. It's and then they eventually Contact us and say hey, what's going on? You know and And I would wish I would rather not have to go through us in that method and there be a process. So my curiosity is, like, how do we ensure that there's a policy impact through this process? And then I guess the other part would be who chooses the tools and process? Does the council choose that or is it staff deciding that?

Yeah. Well, I'll start by, I think what's really critical in your question is understanding kind of what the purpose for the engagement is and how the information will be used. So I think part of the, when you run into an issue where their input isn't used is because maybe the right expectations weren't set from the outset about why we were seeking input. That's one reason. The other is similar to what we heard from our chairs' meetings, which was just putting in place a stronger feedback loop to ensure that just as we're going to do tonight as the mayor has suggested in the lead up to this meeting that we're going to summarize what we heard tonight around these recommendations and then provide that information back to the advisory bodies that contributed to the recommendation. So there's a feedback loop there and they know what the next steps are in this process and how their input was used. So there's two things there. One is choosing the right engagement method to meet the purpose and being clear about how input will be used from the outset. And then the other is creating those systems and that feedback loop regardless of what tool we're using.

Okay. I am trying to understand. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And then I guess the second question was who chooses the tools?

Yeah, I would see that as a collaborative effort between staff and council because it's really about when you're scoping an issue or a project and thinking about what kind of input do you want and ultimately who's the final decision maker, that will guide which tool you use. It's, I'll go back and use, you know, we've been very particular when we've used a Collaborative or co-creation model and when that final recommendation got to council you you generally accepted it as is as a recommendation from community members Other times you've asked for input maybe in an involved model and when that recommendation comes to you you may make changes And then adopt, you know adopt it You know as as you see fit Thank you

Thanks. Council Member Madrone.

Well, and just also to speak to, you know, this body of work as the chair of CLPS. This isn't a decision point tonight. This is actually, I mean, kind of like the sidewalk discussion, bringing a conversation to the full council, asking are we on the right track and digging in deeper. So those kinds of questions are very good. And if the answer is not, concrete, it's because this will probably come back to clips for us to refine further. So I hope that helps. It does. Thank you.

All right. Stacey, I just want to provide a little clarity of what you alluded to earlier. So earlier in agenda setting, I asked that there be a response to the letters from the commissions that wrote letters. There's a couple items that we have where there were letters. And we had discussed this in the joint meeting with CLPS, that there be some sort of exchange, right, in terms of correspondence. The discussion we had earlier is that there would be a recap of our discussion tonight in response to the letter that was sent to us Yeah, all right Stacy, okay So I'll move to the next section of the recommendation which really has to do with current system process improvements and

So here's a few things that have clearly come out of the conversation that we've had since the outset on this that are pretty broadly supported in terms of our process in talking with chairs and both clips to this point, which is standardizing onboarding. So we've just found that across our 14 council-appointed advisory bodies, members are having a very different experience depending on which body they're a member of. So we really want to look at how do we standardize that onboarding experience for them. We've also talked about this is the first time we've really done this deep dive, but it would serve us well to establish a criteria test for when we create new advisory bodies and implement a regular review cycle of our existing advisory bodies. So we're doing this a little bit more often to ensure that they're continuing to meet our engagement goals. But we hope to accomplish that. Again, the work they're doing is impactful and meaningful. So I speak to recruitment, but I want to highlight there is a handout in front of you that looks at both our current process timeline and then below it is our proposed process timeline. I'm not going to go into the level of detail that's on the handout. But the point that I want to make is that I'm going to speak next to recruitment and also work plan process. And I just think the visual speaks volumes here in terms of our process improvement, whereas on the top, we have a very multi-layered little incongruent process. Whereas the bottom, you can see that by looking at our timing and flow, that there's a much more simple and a process that builds off each other throughout the year. And I'll talk a little bit about what you're seeing there. In terms of recruitment, we would shift the recruitment timeline so that terms start January 1st. The new shift in the timeline would allow new members to participate in work plan development, which I'll get to in a second, but it would also be pushed back than where it is currently. And then we also had talked with CLPS about splitting the recruitment. So there's not maybe a significant lift each year with going through the interview and appointment process, but we split it into a two-year cycle. Also, CLPS expressed support and support WANTED TO MOVE FORWARD FOR DISCUSSION, THE IDEA OF HAVING ALTERNATES AVAILABLE IF YOU NEEDED TO FILL KIND OF MIDCYCLE VACANCIES.

STACEY, I HAVE A QUESTION ABOUT THE ALTERNATES PROPOSAL. applied for an advisory body there's usually a question about are there other interests that you have and you can select a few others so if the timelines don't match up and then you're thinking about alternates so are we thinking about maybe modifying how we would ask about those other interests based on the timeline throughout the year or Have you thought that far?

We haven't gotten to that level of detail, but I think, yes, there's a lot of nuances to this that we would need to consider. Did you want to, Mayor?

Yeah. Mayor, as a former enthusiastic Eclipse member, you'll remember that when we did those extensive interviews, that we would interview everyone and we'd deliberate. And there are some folks that just didn't make it because of the amount of vacancies. We just didn't have enough. But if we had more vacancies, here's the people that we would really want that were next in our rankings. So it's just formalizing that, yeah, is a big part of it. So it's something, it's kind of like a best practice that we had adopted on CLPS for quite a while now. And so we're just formalizing it.

And I do hear a question about would they then be available for ones that were going through appointment during that cycle? And then might they be available if we were going to fill a vacancy on the other cycle?

Yeah. I wanted to ask, how many people don't get appointed? We go through this process. We have 100 people apply. How many people...

I would be ballparking it. I mean, absolutely ballparking it. But I'd say, you know, it's probably maybe we appoint 25% out of, so if we had 100 applicants, we might appoint 25.

Great. I just wanted to know if there was an abundance of applicants or if it was tight. Just something I didn't know.

Thank you. Council Member Barrett, please wait for me to call on you. Otherwise, your colleagues are going to start going rogue on me, too, and they're going to start just jumping in. Thank you. Stacey, back to you.

Okay.

That goes for the deputy mayor, too, by the way.

Where am I? I went too far. How did I do that? Why, wait, what just happened? Okay, thank you. Sorry, all right. Okay, just a quick review. Yeah. OK, let's talk about work planning. So we are recommending a shift in work plan development and approval timeline. And really, the benefit to the change here is that while currently we have advisory bodies working on work plans anywhere between October to the typically, yeah, October to February. Thank you, current liaison. that what we're recommending is a shift. So the advisory bodies are working on their work plans after your retreat, after your January retreat. So what we're trying to seek out and what we heard from chairs and co-chairs was just trying to find better alignment with what they're working on the items that are a high priority to the council and to the community. So that I think would help us get to that alignment. Um, what we also heard from the meeting with the chairs and have embedded into this, you know, this conversation is, um, refining the referral process, uh, which was some feedback we got, and then also building in a fourth quarter advisory body work plan progress report to council. So you can hear what work had been completed and kind of their findings from the prior year that would also then inform your January retreat when you're setting your priorities for the coming year. So some considerations around implementation. This is not everything, you know, an exhaustive list, but just some things we're already starting to think about. Just looking at, you know, if we want to change the recruitment timeline, we need to get going on that pretty quickly and thinking about which ones to move, do the first year, and then which ones to do the following year. And we would base that on kind of what we know are upcoming work plan items. We would also... need to look at some extension of terms for current members if we were asking them to stay on until we were changing their recruitment cycle. Let's see. Yeah.

Council Member Madron.

Maybe this is in the next slide or something, but I'm not sure it is. So I just want to say if we also if we change the recruitment timeline, the appointment timeline, so that we're working on it every other year. Were you going to get to this if half of the advisory bodies turn over one year and then it's the other half the next year, then we would have to switch from doing three-year terms on these to either two or four years.

Yeah, that's great. I was going to go. Yeah, thank you for highlighting that.

Yeah, that's something that we discussed in CLPS. But yeah, if we wanted to try to lighten the load on the CLPS committee and our advisory bodies and just do that every other year for each advisory body, the three-year term would no longer work.

Okay. Okay. So now let's talk a little about restructuring of existing advisory bodies. So as I mentioned, again, reflecting on the work that Debbie and Margo had done to really analyze our advisory bodies, there's some criteria, if you will, that rose to the top in terms of considering where might we have opportunity to maybe streamline or look at some of our advisory bodies of accomplishing those engagement goals in a different way. And so some of those considerations Reflecting back on Debbie's work, is there a legal mandate? When we look at work plans, is there an area where work is duplicative or perhaps complementary to another advisory body? Are members engaged in the current purpose and mission? So are we struggling with turnover and attendance? Or is there another entity or option for completing the work? So some of the options that we've explored around restructuring could look like integrating into another existing advisory body. Some can look like reducing the work plan scope and number of meetings to really kind of focus the work that that body's doing, engaging with community collaborators when specific topics or projects arise, or in some cases, shift the requirement to be administrative through staff. So there were four specific bodies that rose to the top in the analysis as opportunities for potentially restructuring. And these are, again, the same ones, the conversation we had with CLPS that we're bringing forward for further discussion here. But those include design review board, which could be shifted to administratively done by staff. The bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee could be integrated into the planning commission. Social Justice and Equity Commission, we can look at a reduced kind of focused scope for that body. And the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee, excuse me, I'm going to back up, not necessarily a reduced scope for the Social Justice and Equity Commission, but a reduced work plan. Let me put it that way. Because some of what they've talked about is kind of what we heard from the chairs is being focused on systems change, impactful work from start to finish. Okay. And Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee integrated with the Olympia Metropolitan Parks District Advisory Board. So those are the four opportunities we discussed at CLPS that we're bringing forward tonight for discussion as well. I'll talk a little bit about implementation. This was raised quite a bit in our conversations with advisory body chairs, which is around ensuring that we're putting systems in place to retain depth of knowledge and expertise. So this is in terms of if we look at restructuring advisory bodies or using different engagement models, how do we retain that depth of knowledge and expertise? We can look at transitioning existing members into vacancies in other bodies or finding other pathways for those individuals to stay involved. If we were to look at restructuring, again, we'd want to think about the timing and considerations. Are there work items that those bodies have coming forward? Or maybe you might need to phase this in at a different time, and thinking about what the recruitment timeline and communication would look like for those that might be changing. And then lastly, we want to take into account how are we communicating this out to current members, potential members, and community members that have an interest in these areas. So I want to next move to just questions and discussion. That was a lot of information that we went through rather quickly. I have Margo and Genevieve here to help answer questions. But what I'm posing tonight to frame up the conversation with guidance from CLPS is what elements of the recommendation should we move forward? And again, we talked about those in three pieces, the toolkit, the process improvements, and the restructuring. What areas might need further development? And would you envision us going back to CLPS to do some additional work or maybe perhaps coming forward to council for, with a more formal refined recommendation.

All right. Thank you, Stacy. I'm going to turn it over to our chair of clips council member.

Yeah. And I chimed in a bit earlier, but, um, you know, this is kind of like the sidewalk discussion we just had, where what you have in front of you is not a final product for us to move to council for action. There's a lot of things to be worked out. Um, and so that's where we're interested in hearing feedback from everybody, but where this is unlike the sidewalk discussion is this is coming to you with a unanimous endorsement from the clips committee in terms of, we think we're headed in the right direction and we think we have some good stuff here. So, um, So I just wanted to highlight that. We evaluated these options alongside another potential option, which we decided, you know, not now on, which would have been a complete wholesale restructure of how we do advisory bodies, you know, kind of getting rid of all the ones that we have and, well, except the ones that we're required to have, and and aligning advisory bodies around our focus area and our comprehensive plan. And ultimately we decided that there's merit to that line of thinking, but ultimately not something feasible. That would be a substantial change with how we engage our advisory bodies, how we engage our community. And so we said, okay, that has merit, but for now, this is the suite of options that we'd like to pursue to really fine-tune and formalize in some ways the way that we engage our community. You probably noticed a lot of the things in that multifaceted engagement toolkit are things that we kind of already do, but this would create a formalized structure around it, questions to be answered in terms of When do we pick which of those tools? The process improvements are something that I'm hoping we can get clear direction from so we can move that part forward quickly because I'm excited about a better schedule that better aligns the timing of how we as a committee work, how our advisory bodies work, when we bring people on, having them engaged at the start of the year, all of that. And then the restructuring of existing advisory bodies. It was unanimous on CLPS that we think that those four advisory bodies that were identified, that there's some room for some improvement in terms of how folks are engaged. One thing that Council Member Vanderpool was mentioning earlier is people like, you know, I review things, I give comments. We don't want to have people sitting around a room talking about things that aren't adding value to what we do as a city. And so all of this has to do with how to better engage people in the work that we do as a city and in advising us as a city council for making better decisions. So looking forward to the dialogue.

Thank you, council member John, John, that's, um, really helpful to kick off the discussion council member.

All right. So I have a few thoughts about this. Um, I guess, uh, to continue the, the, the, the concerns are out the existing advisory board bodies and making sure they have something to do, right. That part three there, um, is that, you know, if, I guess the question here is, if we're ever to integrate some of these and restructure, does the workload for, say, if BPAC goes into Planning Commission, does the BPAC work go into planning commission or does it just not like I would like, does it, does the membership size increase? Does the, does the, does that part of the work plan that was be packs be part of planning commissions? Kind of a question.

Well, I would, I would encourage dialogue around that, but the, but the proposal being put forward is that the, um, They would not add additional work to the Planning Commission, but you would see a similar schedule and work plan that integrates those topics that were addressed at BPAC. So now it may be that you might be able to work some of that through a subcommittee with some OPC members that have a particular interest in that area. Part of what we looked at in terms of this as an opportunity area was looking at going back and analyzing work plans and thinking, well, how, you know, trying to look at the balance of informational briefings versus maybe there was duplicative or complementary work with the planning commission, if that makes sense.

Yeah. I guess my main concern as a prior BPAC member is, is that there needs to be more engagement in transportation from the public. Like, you know, engagement in options is something that I really think is very important for the public. You know, if staff were to say, you know, we have this project coming up. It's not fully baked. We're early on. This is option A, B, and C. And even just, like, the recommendations saying, you know, Planning Commissioner or BPAC says this is the thing that we landed on B, this is our recommendation to council, right, and so on and so forth. And I think that the same thing with, like, the work that's in the comprehensive plan, sometimes it feels that, like, I'm glad they brought up work plans because sometimes it feels topsy-turvy where the work plan is being selected out by staff and then it goes to council and then it goes to, planning commission BPAC and so forth so they have so you have passionate people that get on these advisory boards and they feel like they have they look at the planning commission they look at the transportation master plan but not at no point in the entire time they're there do they actually uh feel like they've been able to pick and work on things in that sense and I really want us if we're going to be doing this work to and to try to resolve some of that problem as much as possible all right um

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem Nguyen, followed by Council Member Madron.

Yeah, I really appreciate your care for and, frankly, your advocacy for the BPAC, Council Member Vanderpool. I know we have a couple of former members here, including Council Member Gilman. And I just wanted to share that it's not as though we're looking at, okay, if we were to do this and, okay, the planning commission's work plan stays as is, and then maybe we can add a couple of, you know, BPAC ornaments on it. It's more thinking about it as interdisciplinary. I mean, something that we're also trying to address here, other than just capacity, and some of the other things you heard tonight is also things that we hear from BPAC members all the time when we engage over the years is that we don't want to be in a silo. We feel like everything should be looked at. I mean, there are so many BPAC members that say everything should be looked at with the BPAC lens. And so that would be certainly my understanding is if they were to be combined, then it would achieve that, right? So I'm It would help with capacity, help with de-siloing things, and then make it more of an interdisciplinary process. And when we're looking at things that the planning commission would typically look at, we look at BPAC's not over here on this side, a completely different committee, but actually they're right there. And when we're picking out future planning commissioners, We're also looking at, I mean, it sounds like they have some rewriting of exactly what that body does, but we would be looking at people that value bike pet as well. Does that help?

Yeah, I mean, I think that it's, I hate to say that we have to write everything in stone, but sometimes you feel like you have to when you're writing out what these boards and policy, these commissions do, because sometimes those, like, so for example, I've talked to Councilman Gilman about what it was like when he was on BPAC and when I was on BPAC, and it was a totally different thing by the time I got there, right? The amount of work we were doing, decision-making, it changed, right? And so for me, I think the thing that would make me, because this is, to be very frank, the thing that it makes the most concern from the public that I've spoken to about this is the restructuring. Everything else people feel is of a value to the community in a lot of ways. The restructuring is the thing that makes people the most nervous, I think. And the reason why is the fear that folks need to be more engaged and have things to do on these committees and the fear of taking that back and giving it to staff. Instead of giving them more work, taking it away. That's the fear that I hear from folks. And so when it comes to if there's a consolidating down to the planning commission, I want to make sure that there is more engagement around transportation, not less.

Council Member Madrona, it looks like Stacey may have a response to that. Are you okay if I go to Stacey? Stacey.

So I think I just would like to offer that the idea of the toolkit is that maybe the work can still happen around bicycle and pedestrian advisory and provide advice. It just might happen in a different form. It might look like a group of community collaborators as opposed to the resource intents of needs of an advisory body. So that's kind of how we want to use the toolkit.

Sure see manager Bernie, so I just want to give maybe a real life example that stated, but back in the days when we did the quarter project with the place on 4th Avenue bridge. We formed a quarter vision advisory committee, so we formed a group of community collaborators advisory committee that stayed on with that project all the way through and helped advise on design and components community engagement. And I think there's opportunities when I still think about larger public works projects for models like that because they can be more specific to a project and not broad-based at times. So I think this model here, to Stacey's point, could add different opportunities than we have now through what is a traditional BPAC.

Thank you. Council Member Madrone, followed by Council Member Gilman.

I was going to say some similar stuff, actually. When it comes to transportation, some of the feedback that we need from the community is very project specific. And the people who are most impacted by that project should probably be brought in. And so I see opportunities like that. And then I think about the transportation master plan updates and, you know, the potential to bring in a, you know, ad hoc, you know, a limited term type advisory opportunity for that so that we're still getting that input from the community, but just in a different way. And you had also spoken to the desire of advisory bodies to be able to put things on their work plan that actually connect to what we do as a council. Some of the things that I've seen is like advisory bodies are like, we want to talk about this, and then they do, and then nothing happens with it because it's not connected to anything that we're doing as a council. And so maybe a fun thought experiment, but actually not connected to any decision making. And so I think, first of all, this restructuring of our calendar is really going to help with that because they're going to know what we are looking at as a council. But then also the discussion that I heard in this room when we had our advisory body chairs and co-chairs and vice chairs here was was the potential for a two-way referral system so that advisory bodies could say, hey, we really think that this is important, and we would like to see if there's space for the council to consider taking this up, and we would like to help inform it. I mean, the answer may be yes, absolutely. The answer may be We're going to put a pin in that, the parking lot, I'm sorry, the bike rack for next year. But that's some of the stuff we're talking about when we're talking about changing the current system process improvements so that to bring about that two-way feedback system so that those opportunities do exist.

Thank you. Council Member Gilmour. First, two quick things to put in the parking lot on that invisible flip chart over there. Transportation is a huge interest in the community, and we're doing a lot of change and innovation pretty quickly. So we've had a similar conversation in land use about once upon a time we reviewed the transportation planning team's work plan along with the building department's work plan. and that that's one place where it might get some attention. And I do think whether it's through planning commission or whether it's through one of these subordinate engagement levels that continuing to engage is really important. The other parking lot item is in the conversation that I had at our chairs meeting, there was a lively conversation at my table about the citizen academy notion. We've had the police academy, but that idea of a short, intense, how does local government work, there was excitement. So those are two parking lot things. Thank you. Oh, my goodness. I'm thinking Mayor Pro Tem Quinn brought this idea up, and I hadn't. idea what she was talking about about five years ago and we tried a couple of work sessions and clips and it just tripped all over itself and it was so difficult and so I have a sense of the challenge of what you took on and of the long conversations with the liaisons and chairs and and I'm just I'm glad that you stuck with advocating for this and I'm just humbled by this work I support all three of these ideas of ways to improve the way 100 community volunteers can be engaged in helping the city. My interest is about increasing the value of the work, which, I mean, of course, that's what you're doing, but a couple of specific ideas about the remaining boards and commissions. One is that as much as possible, their work is impactful and actually heading towards shaping a policy or a programmatic decision. That there's some value of serving as a sounding board for staff developing projects, but maybe that belongs in one of these lower levels of engagement that we have now. Because that's been a historic use of a lot of board and commission time is valuable to the staff team planning it, but it doesn't give people the feeling that they helped make a decision. The other side is Stacey has beautifully described collaborative governance, co-creating as sort of the most consensus-y, highest level decision-making. And the biggest frustration that I've heard from board and commission members has been that We've used that on a few special projects, but generally in our business with boards and commissions, if they have an idea that's different from supporting the staff recommendation, they're allowed to write a letter in opposition. And really, it's a very different feeling for the Planning Commission or the UAC or PRAC or BPAC to have a letter that tells us that we need to ask for more and they disagree with the staff recommendation. So if there's a way that at that level their input is... given more power and has some impact on the recommendations that come to us, I believe that. And Genevieve, you did your survey and you've described beautifully this continuum of engagement. I'd love to hear your reaction of what do you do about that notion of you're allowed to write a letter that comes in parallel to the staff recommendation rather than you co-created it.

I think what I heard in some of my interviews is there were conflicted feelings on both the part of the advisory board members and staff liaisons, where they're feeling like, I have an idea. Each of them is having an idea or proposal, but it's not in conjunction or it's not congruent with either the other staff member or the advisory body member. So being able to hear both sides of those viewpoints, I think, can only help better inform counsel. And I think that's looking at ways to sort of making sure, and again, maybe this is through this more refined feedback loop where we are able to capture those kinds of discussions, right? So I'm hopeful that that's included or that speaks to your point there.

It almost does, but I'm talking about a power imbalance where the staff initial recommendation or the white paper that came from the consultant doesn't change in spite of vigorous conversation and a different recommendation or consensus from one of our boards or commissions. So how would you balance that so that before it gets to council, as we have two options, there's some impact of planning commission having a strong opinion?

Well, I think that so much of that starts at the beginning of a project of, You know, you talk about advisory bodies that felt they feel restricted by only being brought in for one slice of a project. And what we heard pretty continuously is they want to be involved from the beginning to the end. And so I think thinking about what are we bringing to our advisory bodies, they tell us what impactful work is. I think it has everything to do with what we're choosing to bring. And setting those expectations from the start that staff and then, you know, And ultimately council is is is invested in that as a that topic or that issue as a co-created solution It's wonderful and you have my deep appreciation for this work.

Thank you Thank you councilmember Barron, I believe council city manager Bernie has a comment Okay, all right, that's go ahead council I Can I'm going in a different direction here?

I So we're looking at merging some of these committees and I am interested in how we would go about doing that. I mean, the parks and the Metropolitan Park District Board caught my attention in particular. The Metropolitan Parks District Board does have kind of a quasi audit function as opposed to the Parks Advisory Committee, which is more advisory. Would we merge these two committees? Would we expand the membership? I'm not quite sure how it works on the Metropolitan Parks District, whether there are a specific number of committee members that are on that committee. that it would be limited to, that would limit the number of people we could transfer over if there were people who wanted to continue serving, and so on. I'm kind of more concerned about the smooth transition to a merged committee, and if you have any thoughts about that, because I think there are people who are pretty passionate advocates on both committees. The Metropolitan Parks District Board has traditionally only met a couple of times a year, and they essentially do this audit function, and they haven't really delved into parks policy per se, but it's more keeping the city's feet to the fire on the obligations that they've made. And we don't foresee any change in that function in this process, do we?

So I would compare this to our community policing board because what we had were we had community members that were trained and available to respond to an incident or use of force and serve on a, I would have looked to Margo, a CMIIT, and I can't remember what that stands for. But they had a very specific, narrow role and scope and responsibility. But what we did last year was we broadened the community. We created a community policing board in which those members transferred and stayed on. They still can meet the requirements of that very specific role within the police department if needed, but they expanded their scope to then be able to work on other issues related to community oversight of law enforcement. So I foresee a similar situation in which you might have some, The members of the body would continue to do the very mandated required financial duty they have, but also can expand their scope to them provide input on other parts issues.

And in the merging, if I may, in the merging. Your mic, Council Member Barrett. In the merging of the committees, Obviously, some people would fall off the Metropolitan Parks District. There'd be empty spots, and I would assume that we would give those parks board members first option to continue their volunteer service.

Yeah, so rather than add new positions, which can certainly be considered, but I think what we would find is having a conversation with existing members to say, you know, how do you feel about this expanded scope? Does this still feel like the right fit to you? But we may need to look at transitioning some folks off and finding other ways for them to be engaged. And that may be as a community connector or community collaborator. We oftentimes have advisory body members that get appointed but have multiple interests, so they may be a good fit in another vacancy. So we can look for other opportunities to place people in areas where that would be fulfilling for them.

Thank you. And just one final question. So you don't foresee any change in the responsibilities of the existing committee, the Metropolitan Parks Board? These would just be ancillary add-on responsibilities, any modification of their core responsibility?

There's still going to be mandated duties that the members need to do, and those would be retained.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I believe Council Member Madron has a response to you on something, Council Member Barrett, and that will be followed by Council Member Vanderpool.

You know, another thing that we discussed as it pertains to park, it sounds like one of the things you're concerned about is like limiting involvement in the park system. And so one of the things we discussed on clips is like, yes, you know, there's potential to merge OMPD with PRAC. And of course, maintaining those core responsibilities, but also bringing in some of those park policy considerations. And then also when we're working on developing a specific park, a plan for a park, bringing together an ad hoc group of people who have a specific interest, similar to how we did Rebecca Howard. And so it's not necessarily a, necessarily a limiting of opportunity to engage in how we shape parks and park policy. But again, a restructure, we're taking two committees, pulling it into one,

then creating other ad hoc opportunities for people to get engaged in different ways so i hope that alleviates some of your concerns all right council member vanderpool i have a couple like three comments or questions give or take it may not be answerable at this time but just some thoughts around this process um so uh community connectors i'm very interested in um who decides those organizations that they work with, like how, how is that weighed out? Um, do the, I'll be very curious about how that structure is kind of decided upon. Um, I'm also interested in, so the community collaborations, like, um, I guess how, you know, or does, how, how would this be, um, created, right? Does it, does it, Does the council create that? A kind of similar question is like creating these new structures and how do they, what is the trigger for them happening is kind of the question, right? Does the council have to write a referral? How does it, how do... How do we ensure that these new tools happen in the community? Does it have to be one of our advisory boards or planning commissions that would just kind of say, hey, we need to establish one of these tools? Or would the council?

Yeah.

If you want to answer that.

So I think it would be... project or work item base that I think would be determined in collaboration with, if it's coming out of an advisory body, it would be determination and collaboration with staff. But I think, you know, it's not unlike the conversations we're having around, we're just getting off the ground with workers' affordability and protections, and we're having conversations right now about what does the engagement process look like for that. So I'm asking you questions about what you hope to achieve, what you want to learn, what you want to do, how you want to engage community members. And then that would give us the ability to talk about what tool or approach that we might use. Does it live with an existing advisory body, or is this a better fit for community collaborators or community connectors? So I think it would happen at the outset of the issue topic or project. I would want to give Genevieve maybe an opportunity to talk about because she did a lot of the research with other communities that have used the collaborator connector model. And I think maybe she can speak to your questions about kind of what might those look like.

I think one of the things that was included in the slide was that continuum. And I think one of the things we haven't fully fleshed out is those categories below, right? What are the goals in terms of engaging the community? Is it just to inform them? Is it to solicit their opinion or survey, but maybe make the decision-making happen still more council-based or staff-based? Or do we really want to have a back-and-forth conversation where there is more individual involvement of the community members? So building out that continuum that we saw, that graphic, will kind of help create a decision-making kind of – process for which which tool we want to use and I do see this as I don't know if there I think that most most of it should be a collaboration between staff and council in terms of resources as well as the Desired community involvement for the ultimate decision or policy making for that project so I think one of the things that we want to be able to you know bring back to clips and council is a maybe looking more at those criteria, at what level we want to have community members involved and how does that determine or predetermine the tool that is going to be chosen. One of the things that came up in, I think it was in the advisory bodies and the liaisons, there was that concern again about who is going to decide who's a connector and who's a collaborator. One of the things I think we discussed was taking a look at who are we working with currently and are they already identified as a connector or could we solidify that relationship as either a connector or a collaborator and then seeing where the gaps are. We have XYZ individuals helping us with this particular topic. but we're realizing that there's a gap of knowledge or connection on a particular other topic, and then being more intentional about building relationships for those areas that we don't have existing connectors or collaborators. Does that help a little? I understand.

Yeah, yeah, it does. I mean, it ultimately comes down to my mind is, like, I'll be interested to see how that develops a little, because... Is it is it is it because of capacity is it's like in the broadest view of things is it within the executive is within the city manager is it within councils purview right is this a policy council power or is this a thing that comes from staff capacity and the city managers all side of things and that's kind of the question I keep thinking about as we do work like this is and capacity as a city is like, where does that ultimately lie in the ability to trigger the process? Um, and I guess the, my last question is, and this is kind of a smaller question, but I will be curious about if we're going to be switching to two or four year terms about the term limit cap that we currently have. Um, I know that playing commission has a three term term limit cap. Um, and I'd be curious about things like that. Just kind of a small detail.

ahead stacy yeah just thank you for raising that i mean those are the kinds of things that we yeah want to continue to raise so that we can be paying attention to that so thank you okay city manager bernie just a couple of thoughts on some things i heard one is i really want to lift up the comment that councilmember gilman made around the committees that ex that will continue to exist and so much of what i hear from time to time from committees is it's around timing of when things are brought to them in the sense of have staff already brought, I've already cooked it and they're just looking for you to say yes to it. Or is it brought early enough for the advisory committees have a chance to shape it. And I think there's some learning in there for staff in this too, in terms of how we move things through advisory committees so that they're feeling like they're part of the work and not at the end of the work. And so I just that just hit me as you were talking about that is something I think we need to continue to think about around timing. Councilman Vanderpool and I've had that same conversation and one on ones from time to time about just kind of the timing of things I think that's really important here and then I think Stacy's really said it, but I think. Decisions around who and how we use this engagement tool is going to be collaborative between us and you. I think there'll be times when we'll look at a policy choice that you want us to work on and we may propose something. There may be other times where we come to you, workers affordability is a good example of when we say, well, depending on what you want to do, how and who do you want us to engage? And then we shape the engagement tool around that. So I think it can be a two-way and not kind of prescribed one place or the other. for what it's worth.

Can I just add another piece to that? I do think the, I'm glad you raised it, Council Member Vanderpool, about the capacity issue too, because that will be part of the conversation, you know, is that some of these tools allow us to get at, you know, what you would want to get at, but use less capacity. And so that is part of our conversation. And sometimes you're going to say something is such a high priority that you'll want us to shift and put more

Capacity and resources into something and that's part of that collaborative conversation is finding that balance Councilmember Vanderpool, I guess another brass tacks way to look at it in capacity is mentioned I think it was six hundred eighty thousand dollars is used to support advisory boards and commissions I know we can't, we won't know until we start trying these things, but I'm curious about comparing it to other cities, I guess also is like how, how do, how much different is this in the, you can ballpark it and cost because time and money are the same. And as a city, I'm just very curious what the difference would be.

You know, I can't put numbers to that, but, but I guess I would just use a hypothetical that rate, Let's take PRAC, for example. You can have the staff resources and the time and intensity that goes into maintaining an advisory committee for two years, or you can dedicate staff to doing an intensive work with a group of community collaborators, and they're not the same level of resource intensity. So I think we're... Because once that project's done, there might not be anything that those folks, they can sunset that until the next thing is needed. So I can't put numbers to it exactly, but I think the idea is that we're being more intentional and targeted in how we use our staff capacity.

Sounds good.

Thank you.

Okay. Mayor Pro Tem Nguyen, and then I'm in the queue.

Also, this is, it's staff capacity, and it's also council's capacity, and it's also the capacity of the people that are engaging. And so, in case, I think, you know, it's done a fine job of laying out this presentation, and also, like, this has been kind of a long time coming, and there is an issue of capacity. There is an issue of time and resources. Some of it's not quantifiable, you know, with like a dollar amount because, you know, a lot of staff are salaried. You know, they get that salary, that's it. But the amount of time and effort they put in, that's different. The amount of energy that council members put that are on the Eclipse Committee into interviewing all of, it's not just interviewing. It's all along the year of all of the touch points we do with advisory bodies and making sure, and some of it's like housekeeping stuff, and making sure they're functioning, they're up and running, they're staffed with volunteers or community volunteers. It's a lot. And there has been a lot of feelings. There's been a lot of feedback from, I'll say first and foremost, from community members that are on those advisory bodies. It was said just earlier about doing meaningful work, right? And part of it is actually the advisory bodies have had no issues like creating, like having things to do. But things to do that actually touch policy or that actually, you know, land in a meaningful way, you know, yeah, it could be better. And the amount of thought experiments that Council Member Madron used, I like that, thought experiments. And I understand people want to have interesting discussions. I think you could relate to that, Council Member Vanderpool. But it's that it's also a lot of a lot of work and like presentations and follow up for staff to do so. Um, so this is something that would really help everyone and it would get us to a place where, um, we can, uh, address, I think first and foremost, a lot of the concerns that we've been hearing for years with, uh, advisory body members talking about how are we, you know, How is our time impacting policy or decisions that council members make? What's our connection to council? I mean, we just don't have it in a seven council member board to nurture all of these different advisory bodies. And not all of them are even on here. So there are some like there's PBIA, for example, right, that we're not talking about here. There's other ones too. And then, yeah, and just and then also like the quality of like the feedback that we're getting. And so I loved the idea of getting, you know, when things are happening, get an ad hoc group together because the people that are most concerned or it touches the most should be the ones on it. So there's just a lot of, all this to say, you know, it's not an exact dollar amount, but this has been something, I'm so excited that we're having this at our study session tonight. It's something that we've been needing to address for a long time. And there's a problem. And that's why we're doing this. And so I just want to, I'm not just saying that to you, I'm just saying that to everyone. And I know we want to be kind about it, but there are things to fix, things to address. And capacity and resources is definitely one of them.

Thanks, Mayor Pro Tem. That segues pretty nicely into mostly for my comments, which is mostly gratitude to the current CLPS committee. I spent four years on CLPS, so I don't have a lot of questions about this because there was just, I've watched the evolution of this thing. But I will say that I think It would be helpful to hear more about some sort of monitoring or evaluation once, presumably, that we choose to adopt a restructuring process. How is that going? You know, just to, you know, be sure that things are going the way we would like them to. I think it's hard to try to anticipate every single challenge or con, and so we should monitor those to capture what we might be missing as a result of a restructuring. I also think we need to consider, sometimes we don't always think about heritage, and we are very quick to just react or make a change and then move on. So thinking of ways to historic preservation, how do we intend to memorialize what was right? So all of the bodies that existed before, how are we going to capture them and recognize them as part of the city's history? other than that um i want to make sure that i return to the two questions for all of council to answer just to make because i heard of i heard a lot of discussion around it seems like uh there are some areas that need further development so i just want to make sure that we're giving staff clear direction um so on every thing that we just discussed tonight are we feeling that Based on this discussion, there needs to be further development and exploration to go back to CLPS with this information or move forward to council. Yeah, let's go down the line again so we can make sure we have an understood majority here. Yes, Councilmember Maduro.

Sorry, like looking at me, I was like, what? I said, oh, I think that there's further refinement to be done here that can be further vetted by the CLPS committee and then brought back to the council for some decisions to be made to kind of codify this work and move it forward. That's my thought.

Okay. Okay. I agree and my priority is about really working so that the continuing boards and commissions have meaningful work. Thank you. Sam.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem.

I'm good with this.

Thank you. I agree with everyone else. All right. And I am supportive as well of doing some refinement and returning it to committee. All right. Is there any further discussion? All right. Yeah. Just thank you. And thank you, Genevieve, for your work and contributions as well. This is a big process, lots of logistics involved, and it's taken a long time. So thank you. All right, we're gonna go ahead and take a five minute recess. I need to stand before we move on to the next agenda item. So we're in recess. Okay, we'll wait for you. All right, so we are back with our final agenda item for tonight, which is item 2C in our agenda, which is the progress report and implementation update on reimagining public safety. And presenting tonight is Margo Morales, who is our community engagement program specialist. Hi, Margo.

thank you mayor payne and council members thank you for hanging on until the end this evening i appreciate your time so again as the mayor said my name is margo morales i'm a community engagement program specialist for the city and this evening i'm honored to be here to share with you a progress update on implementation of the recommendations from the reimagining public safety process this update represents a significant amount of work across all parts of the city's public safety system and dedication of many staff and community members to move this work forward. I'm joined this evening by Chief Parker. So thank you, here. All right, so this evening, I'd like to start with an overview of what we mean when we say the public safety system, review of the reimagining public safety process and the recommendations development, a look at the guiding principles and goals that were developed through that reimagining public safety process, share some highlights from the progress made to date discuss opportunities to continue to move this work forward, and then seek your input to inform staff as we collaborate on prioritization of remaining goals. So what do we mean when we talk about the public safety system? And more specifically, what are we talking about with the reimagining public safety recommendations? So we are talking about Olympia's public safety system, So that's police and outreach services, fire and emergency medical response, prosecution, public defense, court services, corrections, code enforcement, and homeless response. And you'll see there's an asterisk next to homeless response, and it is not directly called out in this report because their work is included in the one community plan. However, you will see them mentioned as internal partners in the progress report. So in February of 2021, in the wake of civil unrest and community call for social justice, the Olympia City Council responded with a community-led process to reimagine the city of Olympia's public safety system. An eight-member community work group led an 18-month effort supported by city staff to evaluate and develop recommendations for enhancing our public safety system. This model of community engagement was the same approach used for development of the One Community Plan. So the original work group members were Chris Belton, Christina Daniels, Larry Jefferson, Malika Lamont, Vanessa Malapote, Todd Monahan, Allie Upton, and Wade Uyeda. And the role of the work group was to learn about Olympia's public safety system, to listen to community members' experiences, concerns, and hopes, and synthesize what they heard into a recommendation for counsel. So much of 2021 was dedicated to learning about the public safety system. And in May of 2022, the work group started seeking community input by hosting listening sessions and focus groups. Then the work group synthesized what they heard into recommended goals, strategies, and actions. On December 6th of 2022, the city council accepted the work group's recommendations. So the recommendations included four guiding principles and five goals. So those guiding principles were that it will not perpetuate or cause additional physical, psychological, or economic harm to any member of the community, will be pro-equity and anti-racist in nature, will be based on meaningful collaboration and authentic engagement among everyone in the community, and will be based on the best available information and process will be measured and regularly reported to the community. The five goals were to build trust and legitimacy in the city's public safety system, reduce overall crime by addressing root causes, acknowledge and correct the disproportionate impacts the public safety system has on marginalized community members, reduce the number of individuals who connect initially and repeatedly with law enforcement and the criminal justice system, and ensure the public safety system is accessible and responsive. These goals are broken down into 21 strategies and numerous actions. A full list of those strategies and actions is attached to the staff report in the progress tracker. So before we dive into progress updates, there are a couple of changes worth noting to the city's programs and services that have occurred since the recommendations were developed. The closure of the Olympia City Jail and the transition of court services to Thurston County. So at the time of the reimagining public safety process, Olympia had a municipal jail, and that jail was part of the Olympia Police Department's operations, and it was built in the 1960s. It lacked qualities a lot of modern facilities offer, And in 2023, the city closed the Olympia City Jail and contracted with Nisqually Jail for misdemeanor cases. The city also had its municipal court and court services. The city transitioned to a district court facilitated by Thurston County in February of this year. Included in the agreement with Thurston County is their commitment to work collaboratively to advance the city's reimagining public safety goals, including annual reporting to the city on services, including therapeutic courts, pretrial and probation services. So since the council accepted the work group's recommendations, there has not been a formal or comprehensive update to the council or the community. There's been much work completed and there are many ongoing projects throughout the city's public safety system. Tonight's presentation will not go into detail about all of the items listed in that progress tracking document, but will highlight some of the actions in each of the five goals. Also, you'll see in the progress tracker that some of the initiatives listed are not directly aligned with a specific recommended action, However, they contribute to carrying out the strategies and goals of reimagining public safety. We continue to learn and identify opportunities to support the goals and strategies with other actions. So you'll see those listed in the tracking sheet under the supported strategy as other related. The original community work group also identified recommended priorities for starting the work of implementation and progress towards those priorities will be called out throughout the progress report overview. A copy of the draft report and progress tracker was shared with the community work group members in advance of this presentation. So how are the recommendations implemented? So before we start looking at those specific actions and the progress, it is helpful to consider that those recommendations get carried out in a variety of ways. Sometimes changes and operations can happen quickly, like policy updates, and some, like community partnerships, take time to develop and build trust before you can start working towards a shared goal. So the report includes updates from December, 2022 to around March of this year. You will also see a few updates listed that were happening concurrent to the re-imagining process or started before the recommendations were officially accepted, but they align with the specific actions and strategies in the recommendations. The report includes city led initiatives and does not include partner led initiatives. So actions and initiatives included in the report were identified through interviews with staff. And I'd like to acknowledge the department representatives that contributed to this report. So Deputy Chief Ray Brady, Interim Chief Hillary Flowers, Brianna Pinkston, Diane Whaley, Dalton Maurer, and Whitney Ramirez. This progress report represents substantial and genuine progress toward the outline goals. There are many staff whose names are not listed that were involved in the implementation. The draft of this report was also presented to the Social Justice and Equity Commission for feedback at their June meeting. So the majority of the actions identified in the progress report are from goals area one and five. And when viewed holistically, the updates also fall into two major themes, strengthening and building relationships and the expansion of alternative services. So the first goal of reimagining public safety was to build trust and legitimacy in the city's public safety system. So strategy 1.2 was to expand the role of community in the city's public safety system. So after the reimagining public safety process, Council directed the Social Justice and Equity Commission to develop recommendations for community member involvement in law enforcement in Olympia. After those, the recommendations included an expanded role for the civilian police auditor and a creation of the Community Policing Board. The Community Policing Board was launched in fall of 2025, and OIR Group was hired in May of 2025 to facilitate that expanded role. Strategy 1.3 was one of the recommended priority areas of the original work group and centers around using data to monitor outcomes and inform decision-making. Both OFD and OPD launched data dashboards in the last two years on the city's budget and performance page. Also in goal one, strategy 1.4 was to develop a healthy and inclusive workforce that reflects our community's values. One of the recommended actions in this strategy was to explore more ways to help ensure public safety staff feel safe and supported when they're on and off duty. Both OPD and OFD have invested in expanding their peer support programs. And additionally, OPD joined Counseling Team International to provide free mental health services to employees and added a new health screening program called Sigma Tactical. Strategy 1.5 focuses on regular and proactive communication about public safety in Olympia. Both the fire and police departments have added communications tools in the last few years to support that. Some examples include dedicated Facebook pages for both OPD and OFD. OPD also has transparency pages on the city's website for programs like their unmanned aerial systems program, where flight plans and details about its use are published. So goal two emphasizes reducing overall crime by addressing root causes and contains two strategies with a variety of suggested actions. Both of the updates listed here are part of strategy 2.2, focusing on supporting successful community reentry and stabilization of justice-involved individuals. This was also identified by the original work group as a recommended priority. So public defense receives a grant which funds a part-time social worker These grant funds are awarded by the Washington State Office of Public Defense, and it funds a part-time social worker currently through mid-2027. And when Olympia transitioned to the district court with Thurston County, it gained access to mental health probation. So prosecutors have the option to ask for individuals to be placed on mental health probation, if appropriate, providing more hands-on care for individuals, supporting them towards wellness and stabilization. All right, goal three is to acknowledge and correct disproportionate impacts the public safety system has on marginalized community members. The Olympia Police Department has completed a variety of training through the Criminal Justice Training Commission and other providers in alignment with this goal. So some examples of those trainings is introduction to historical intersection of race and policing, introduction to indigenous concepts and culture, LGBTQ plus core competency, And the criminal legal system, structural inequalities, monetary sanctions, policy and reform. So something important to note here is OPD is one of only a handful of departments statewide that has met the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission training requirements to be eligible for House Bill 2015 sales tax and grant funding. The training topics included in the requirements for House Bill 2015 eligibility are closely aligned with the training recommendations included in the reimagining public safety recommendations. and demonstrate the department's commitment to both reimagining goals and officer training. Code enforcement has also participated in related trainings as part of their annual Washington Association of Code Enforcement Conference. And looking at strategy 3.2 to build authentic relationships with marginalized community groups, this was also identified by the work group as a recommended priority. Chief Parker and OPD's leadership team have really pressed into this work of building new relationships with community groups not typically engaged with the police department, and particularly in the last year, attending meetings with a variety of faith-based groups and nonprofits. And in 2025, CREW initiated a collaboration with Thurston County's Project SAFER, which is Special Assistance for Emergency Response, and they participated in a variety of events designed to build trust with individuals with developmental disabilities and their families before a 911 emergency occurs. Also in goal three, strategy 3.3 centers around equitable and anti-racist procedures, policy, and services. OPD has made a number of changes to policy and services, including adding Axon body-worn camera translation, which provides real-time translation of over 50 languages, and also officers have received deaf awareness training. OPD also regularly reviews and updates policies, and a couple of those updates to note related to the strategy are updates to their standards of conduct, which was completed in December of 2022, and updates to the interactions with transgender individuals policy, which was updated in February of 2024. So goal four is to reduce the number of individuals who connect initially and repeatedly with law enforcement and the criminal justice system. The first strategy there is to expand the availability and use of unarmed crisis responders, and this was one of the work group's recommendations as well for a priority. So the crew team has expanded its services in 2023 by expanding hours of service to include a swing shift. And additionally, in 2024, they added a dedicated downtown walking crew team. Crew and outreach services staff, along with the neighborhood policing team, also regularly share with the community about crew services and how they can contact crew. And goal five centers around the public safety system being accessible and responsive. So that first strategy is to ensure that the public safety system is accessible and supportive. In 2025, OPD detectives launched an alternative reporting program for victims of sexual assault. Seek, then Speak is a confidential and interactive tool that helps adult survivors of sexual assault find information, explore reporting options, and begin the reporting process on their terms. Strategy 5.2 is to evaluate the public safety staffing levels. OPD did a staffing study in 2023, which identified the need for additional patrol officers and additional familiar faces peer. Public defense also implemented changes to its case credits to support manageable caseloads for public defenders. Another update to improve the responsiveness of emergency services was the creation of the OFD CARES program, which was established in 2023 to support healthier community and reduce reliance on 911 for non-acute concerns. OFD also added a low acuity ambulance transport in 2024 as another service option to provide responsiveness and the appropriate level of care for each call. And goal five focuses on ensuring that the, oh, sorry, I already said that. Just kidding. So strategy 5.4 and goal five focuses on enhanced coordination amongst all the parts of the system, the community, and regional partners. So in the past five years, OFD and OPD have increased joint scenario-based training and coordinated response training. So some examples would be hyperactive delirium and the active shooter response. So the strategy 5.5 addresses conditions or situations that contribute to people feeling unsafe. So specifically continuing to invest in debris removal and maintaining clean public spaces was one of the work group's recommended priorities. Code enforcement and the city's clean team have developed a strong partnership and coordinated effort and maintaining those clean public spaces. Um, and both of those teams participate in the city's core team, uh, which meets biweekly to improve coordination and response, uh, to community concerns. So also, so there's code enforcement, clean team, then also OPD homeless response and parking services participate in the core team. And that was established in 2022. Um, so we took, uh, all of this information that was synthesized into a draft report and brought that to the social justice and equity commission for their perspectives and feedback at their June meeting of this year. So we asked them to weigh in on what, uh, on the progress and where they thought we should focus. Uh, the full comment letter is attached to your staff report, but here's some highlights of what we heard. Um, they would like to see attention to goal three specifically around healing and correction of disproportionate impacts. They discussed the importance of frequent communication with the community about the work. And they would like to see a focus on strategies and programs related to restorative justice. And they'd also like to see an emphasis on juveniles within the criminal justice system. And they also discussed wanting to see some development or additional identification of specific metrics to track outcomes. So throughout the process of developing this report, some near future opportunities were identified by staff to continue to move this work forward. An OPD records management software update would give the department greater flexibility to collect information consistent with our community values and in alignment with the plan. There has been some initial conversation about adding capacity in the prosecutor's office to support expanded use of existing therapeutic courts with Thurston County and the establishment of a new community court. An enhanced focus on two of the goal areas with less reported action is also an opportunity for further review. So that was goal two and goal four. Goal two was also an area recommended by the original work group to prioritize. Also, identification of metrics for tracking outcomes of this work. And then kind of next steps for where we see these future opportunities is that staff representatives from the public safety system would meet and review input from the Social Justice Commission, from some public comment we've received and from conversation tonight to help establish those priorities and focus concrete steps to move this work forward. We also recognize that it's been four years since these recommendations were developed and an assessment of potential updates to the goals and strategies and actions sometime in the next couple of years would help to support continued implementation. So tonight I'm seeking feedback on the work to date and input on what goal areas you think we should focus on moving forward. This will help inform that staff team when we get back together to work on prioritizing next steps.

All right. Thank you very much, Margo. Questions, comments from council? I'll go. Okay. Council Member Vanderpool. I guess I'll just start the conversation.

I only have one concern, and I guess it's because it's something that I heard a lot about as we transitioned our services to the county last year. I have... is the and he mentioned briefly was the community court issue. I'm curious about because it's an external thing but we contract I'm curious about our other the other jurisdictions if they have any interest in also joining us in that cost to try to bring that back like I know Lacey and Tom water and county I'm just curious if there's an interest in bringing bringing that because Um, although it is the county and it's outside of jurisdiction, I hear a lot about the capacity of the, the jail system. And I just want to make sure there are all ways for us to build alternatives and continue to, to, to use our, um, uh, standards, even if it's in, uh, joint situations.

Yeah.

Thank you. Council member Madron.

Well, I first want to appreciate this body of work. When I think of where we were as a city and as a community when this work began is such a different place from where we are now. There's very clear change in culture. There's a very clear strengthening of trust in relationships. You can really just feel how different it is here. And I think because of that, when difficult things come our way, they're easier to navigate because we have not just that change in culture and trust, but also accountability and systems in place so that we know that we're doing our due diligence and that we're constantly changing. how we do things. And I think we saw the results of that in the community survey that we just looked at as a council over the weekend at our retreat. So I just wanted to start with saying all that, like, oh my gosh, look how far we've come. This is amazing. And another thing that came to mind for me in terms of addressing conditions that make people feel unsafe is a body of work that I see is connected to all this, but it's actually, you know, kind of separate, I guess. And that's all of the equity and belonging work that has happened. Because when people, and we saw those results also in our community survey, like really, really strong results from across the community in terms of people feeling like like they belong here, like, you know, that this is their home. And I think that also builds on all of this. So not in any of the slides there, but just something that I wanted to, just an observation that I wanted to share. And in terms of, you know, what it is that we, We focus on going forward. It's, you know, we have some big challenging issues in front of us. You know, we've been talking about the jungle encampment a lot. There are, you know, there's some big sticky things in front of us, and I just feel that we are well-resourced with the right relationships in place, the right skills among our staff. You know, we need to make sure you all have the capacity and the tools and everything you need to move forward. So I would say keep on keeping on with what we're doing. And also just I noted the Social Justice and Equity Commission's interest in goal three. And so I would say lean into that. but That that's what I've got just lots of accolades lots of excitement for this work And obviously we're always gonna have room to grow in this space But I think that we're doing that growth and we're doing the work.

So, thank you Thank You councilmember Gilman Thank you.

Well, how nice to take a look back and and to see how much has been implemented of what were hopes and vision in 21 and 22. I had a meeting Sunday night where we were sitting downtown in the evening, and it was interesting that a couple of people said, wow, this is not the downtown of 10 years ago. And the chances of there being a big brawl erupting on our block are next to none now. And I credit many of these efforts all working together. My question, if you all could speak a little bit to the Social Justice and Equity Commission recommended continuing to find ways to work on root causes to create more safety and to reduce the contact, the stickiness of the system with folks. I'm wondering... What kinds of initiatives, because that's not just straight up policing, that's something else, right? What kind of initiatives feed those two objectives?

That's a great question, and I think that the initial work group did a lot of really good work in recommending some actions around that. I just have to remember what page that's on in the tracker. I think that they also had a lot of conversation around juveniles with that reduced contact and that they didn't feel like there was a huge emphasis on that within the reports. That's something they'd like staff to look at. And which goal was that? Sorry. Goal three was acknowledging the disproportionate impacts. I know that their conversation around goal three was really they felt the city had done a lot of great work in acknowledging the disproportionate impacts. But one of the things that their discussion was around was now we need to move into that healing. And so that's where they'd like to see the focus in goal three was moving away from just the acknowledgement, but then looking into the correction and healing from those experiences. I don't think that totally answered your question, but.

And maybe some of it's really in the one community plan and in the multiple kinds of responses we have. But I do think that. We've made a lot of progress in addressing root causes in terms of housing, access to health care, and a different model of interacting with both police and other responders. So I was just curious if there were any specific ideas of what it would mean to keep working on that beyond continuing to implement what we're in midstream on.

Thank you for the great question Councilmember Gilman. I would offer that as we lean into the work we're discovering what Margo said around youth and this is a critical piece that we really need to lean into when we look at interacting with folks and they're at an adult age and we look back there's so many touch points they've had with the system over the years and if we can go back to their younger years that's really where we may have been able to change their trajectory and their direction. So we're doing a lot of work with youth right now. Yesterday, for example, I was presenting to youth about ethics in law enforcement and helping to ensure that youth are aware of the decisions that they're making now and how it's impacting their future pathways and decisions. And that's, I think, more of the work that we need to lean into and making sure that we're getting youth in the room that maybe haven't commonly had access to these spaces. So for instance, we have our youth academy in the summer where we bring youth in and get to network with them. And we need to do more work in just making sure that we have more opportunities for youth and folks from all different backgrounds. I've talked to the NAACP about partnering with them and helping their group of youth that they really work with in the community, making sure that they have access to the spaces for these youth academies. So good work.

And I think some of the additional specific to reducing overall crime by addressing root causes was in that goal to area. Um, and a lot of the actions, especially in that strategy 2.1, um, focus on kind of lobbying the state for, um, state level reforms and funding for services. Um, so that is one area that I think the original work group had kind of looked at as an opportunity area.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, especially in the area of behavioral and mental health, I think is really critical in that space. Additional questions or comments? I have some thoughts. First of all, I'm going to jump on the gratitude train with Danny. and just say thank you so much for the evolution of this work. I feel a certain affection for re-imagining public safety because it's what, this is part of the reason I even ran for city council to begin with, right? And then when I came on, we were in the thick of this work and So much has happened since that time. And Chief, I think you are building off of that work and I appreciate it. As Council Member Madrone said, I think what I'm hearing and experiencing is consistent with what we were shown in the community wide survey results. at our retreat where people say that they see a significant improvement, including people of color and people who say that they are marginalized in our community, which is really significant. that's not to say that we don't have any problems anymore because obviously there's still more work to do um but there's been significant improvement and investment in this and i think when we're investing it shows um and so i would be remiss to not mention your predecessor as well chief rich allen who i think um you know obviously Under his leadership, so much of the reimagining public safety initiatives were really just starting to be implemented. And he was part of all of that work of engaging with the community members and building that trust, which you now do as well as Chief. And so I just thank you for that because that's goal number one is building trust, right? And so that's something we can't let up on. And I know that we're asking about which goals do we focus on? Obviously, they all matter, especially building trust, because so quickly, with the snap of a finger, that can be gone, right? So that's really important. I have a few thoughts about some of the goals. But specifically for goal three, which is to acknowledge and correct disproportionate impacts to the public safety system has on marginalized community members. And then we have strategy 3.3, which is to develop equitable and anti-racist procedures, policies, and services. And under that, There is, in short, a system is fully accessible for all community members, including those with a disability or who have a neurodivergent or have a language barrier. And I think I mentioned this to the city manager maybe a while back. I can't remember. So many things happen. But there is a program that the state has as a result of legislation that passed last session. It's called the Blue Envelope Program. And so what this is is it's a voluntary program where folks can If they are neurodivergent say they're autistic they can have a blue envelope inside their vehicle that maybe has their driver's license their Insurance and voter registration information and when the police see that they know that this person has some sort of disability and so that training or what have you can kick in in that moment and they can respond accordingly and appropriately to that situation. So I think that that is something that could be, you know, even though it's a state program, maybe you could speak to how we might be able to partner in encouraging folks in our community who may not know about it to voluntarily enroll in the program so that it's You know, it's better for all people in our community who may benefit from that.

Thank you, Mayor. I appreciate you mentioning the Blue Envelope Program. It's exciting to have it on a statewide level, so it's available through the Department of Licensing. Anybody in our community can just click on the website and follow the links and get a Blue Envelope. We've worked internally with our staff to make sure that they are educated on the program and know how it works and what it means and communicates to officers on traffic stops. And we can absolutely do some education with our community. We'll put it out on our social media. It's a great first step. And then we can work on getting it into our newsletters and really leaning into that. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Even something as simple as a blue envelope can make all the difference in what happens in a situation. So thank you. I, like Councilmember Gilman, I think that goal two and four, so reducing overall crime by addressing root causes, and goal four, reducing the number of individuals who connect initially and repeatedly with law enforcement in the criminal justice system, That we should focus on. Um, I know, um, it's been a whale a while since this council has, uh, looked at jail data. Um, just to see how, you know, we're doing, especially now that we're contracting within squally. Um, and for. variety of reasons that data could change right suddenly we see more people in jail or you know what have you and there's reasons for that the idea though is to not have as many people in jail right and now we have transitioned to our services to the courts and so I'm thinking about how we can make sure that through the process of the county sort of trying to, what's the appropriate word I want to use? fulfill what we've been asking as a council when it comes to some of the alternative diversion programs and services that we offer here at the city that that is very much done in in a way that is CONSISTENT WITH WHAT REIMAGINING PUBLIC SAFETY SAYS BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY THAT THEY ARE USING IT. So hopefully that is something that's a part of their process. I would hate for them to create something and then go back to looking at our reimagining public safety plan. Hopefully they are reviewing it as they try to build a new program and system that works with us. And that would be consistent with what's in our ILA with them anyway. So yeah, between those two goals and the work of the county, I think that that's a focus. And I also, I really wanna stress the importance of looking at goal two as well with the reduction of overall crime by addressing root causes. What we saw with our community-wide survey is that We tend to have more property crime than violent crime, and that's been the case for a number of years in the city now. But there are still root causes to that as well, right? So we should be looking at what are those root causes to property crime, right? I'll just be honest, I couldn't tell you off the top of my head other than perhaps poverty is a significant one, right? That comes to mind, that's obvious. But we should be looking at other reasons why that might be a significant cause in a community. So those are just a few of my initial thoughts on where we should focus. And again, great work on getting us this far. Any other questions or comments?

All right.

Seeing none. Thank you very much. And we look forward to another update. Hopefully we'll have even more significant progress the next time we come around. Great job. All right. This is a really great night of really robust discussion. I don't know about you all, but I feel productive and proud of the work that we do. So thank you all. So with no further business before the Olympia City Council, we're adjourned.