City Council - workshop

Okay, I'd like to call to order the study session of September 14th, 2026 at 6 p.m. All members are present.

So we will move right into our study session business. And item number one, 2026 budget priority survey results. So we have with us communications director, Carmen Palmer.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Thank you for your time and attention. If you recall, last summer you had us hire Great Blue Research to conduct our budget priority survey once again. They did it for us two years ago, so they were able to get us results and also a comparison year over year. It's really nice to contract this out. They can do it much more efficiently. They're built to do this, and it also gives our public a little bit of a divider from the city so they can be more honestly critical of us if they would like to be. So without further ado, we have Seamus here online from Vermont from Great Blue Research to go over the results. Uh-oh, just a minute, we can't hear you. He's unmuted.

I mean this, you know.

Seamus, if you can hear us, would you check your audio settings? It appears to be on your end. Mayor, at this time, I would recommend we actually move to item number three, and then we'll step out and we'll try to fix the audio issue with Mr. Seamus.

Thank you. I think that's a great recommendation. So we will call on item number three. We'll look for the police department update. Police Chief Andy McCurdy. I'll talk loudly.

Thank you. They warned me I'd have to do an interpretive dance, but nobody wants that. Is the mic on?

We do want to see that, please. Oh, sorry.

There it is.

Thank you.

All right, so I'm going to talk to you about a couple different things tonight. One, we're going to go over some crime data. We're going to talk a little bit about trends comparing last year to this year. We're also going to talk about crime trends from the first year three quarters or so of 2026. And then we're also going to talk about, do a little bit of a case study on some technology we've been using. And then we're also going to go over some data around and some other information about our OPS, which is our professional standards, complaints, pursuits, and so on.

Do you have the motor?

All right, there we go. So here's the organization chart for Sumner PD. If you kind of look toward the right, that would be the patrol side with the commission. On the left would be Metro Animal Services and Records Unit. It's really small, so I'll just kind of give you a quick overview. On the left part, we have Lauren Wallen is our support services manager. She's in charge of records, evidence, and Metro Animal Services. On the far left of that would be Metro Animal Services, Nikki is our animal control supervisor. She has two animal control officers she supervises and then she also supervises our Samantha who's our shelter coordinator and then our technicians that work under her. In the middle would be investigations and SRO and community service officer. That's supervised by Lieutenant Justin Gregson. And then to the right of that would be patrol. We have four different teams. They work three 12-hour days. either 5 a.m., 5 p.m., 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. Each team has a sergeant and currently two or three officers. And if you look right now on that org chart, we have one vacancy. We have Officer Christian Davison just started the academy. When he graduates and is on his own, he'll fill that vacancy. And then that will put us into the first time we've been over having officers 16 assigned to patrol, which gives us some flexibility what we do with that one extra person. So it's a great place to be. Also, we have another person who we're just completing a background on. We hope to offer him an entry-level job. He'll also be going to the academy and probably graduating in the first half of 2027. And then the next position that would be open, assuming we pass the public safety tax, would be a 2027 ad position. And again, that's where we will start talking to all of you about our plans for what to do with the bodies. We've had a lot of discussions around what priorities would be. A lot of our public doesn't realize we only have two officers working as a minimum staffing level. Since we have a sergeant and three officers on each team, typically if one person's out in training, another person's on vacation, that puts us down at two. The only time we backfill other than during special events or holidays would be when we go below that two officer minimum. But the reality is with just two officers working, it doesn't take much for both of them to be tied up. If they make one arrest, that'll tie up two officers for hours. They have to transport to the jail in Nisqually or Enumclaw or even Pierce County that can tie them up for a while and just leave one officer in the city. So one of the goals with increasing staffing would be to be able to go to a three officer minimum, at least during peak hours, which would be like Friday, Saturday nights. But eventually it would be great to have three officers working at all times, particularly if one of them is a supervisor. If you're not aware, having four supervisors is fairly new for the city of Sumner. For many years, we operated with just two sergeants. So there was oftentimes entire shifts would go without, sometimes go for weeks without having a supervisor work with them. So it's been kind of a game changer for us to increase the number of sergeants we have working to provide a little bit more oversight and supervision, direction, coaching, and so on to all the officers. We have a really young department right now. Our senior patrol officer has 20-something years with the department. Our next senior officer has six years as a cop. We've hired some laterals with experience from elsewhere. But with such a young department, it really helps to have sergeants who've been around a while, know what they're doing, and have a little bit of extra training for leadership and so on. So any questions about the org chart there?

No?

Okay. Okay. So 25, 26 crime and then we'll do the 2025 OPS review. So overall crime is down by about 30%. That's pretty consistent statewide and actually nationwide. When we look at crime data, it's really interesting if you try to get into it. We like to tinker with the crime rates. We will address a particular area where we're having a lot of crime. We'll move that around a little bit, maybe to another neighborhood, hopefully to another city. But when you look at crime rates, there are so many different factors that impact crime. The current economic factors, family structures, other things going on in our society, how likely people are to report or not report, all can impact crime rates significantly. So typically when we see crime rates going up and down, They often follow patterns that match the rest of our region or sometimes nationwide. So the 30% overall crime reduction is a significant decline. It actually puts us back still above pre-COVID times, like 2019. So we're getting close to what would be probably more of a normal crime rate. During 2021, 22, all the way until now, crime was significantly increasing. I think it was 2022 we had an all-time or at least over the last 30 years they've been tracking the crime rate the way they are now, high in all categories of crime. So it's nice to see that starting to stabilize a little bit. Clearance rates, when we have an investigation that we do and we actually identify a person and forward those charges to a prosecutor or make a physical arrest, that's called clearing a call. That's one way to clear it. There's some other ways as well. But when we have an improvement in... The percentage of calls being cleared by arrest or identification of a suspect, that's a positive improvement. So we've seen an increase there. And then we've seen about a 55% reduction in dollar loss.

Do you want to wait until he's done? It's really quick. It says 25-26, so this is 25 in the first half of...

This is 2025. That's the last year we have full data for. Okay. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the first half of 26 toward the end. So the bottom line is the current strategies are producing some measurable results and there are some economic impacts to crime and we've seen some improvements there as well.

So here's a little bit more out in the weeds with some of the data.

The first set of bars are total offenses. And group A offenses would be most of the crimes you think of as slightly more serious crimes like moderate or high crime. I actually have them all listed down there at the bottom. Things like arson, burglary, forgery, destruction and damage of property, drug violations, frauds, gambling, homicide, human trafficking, kidnapping, so on. So this is total crimes that you really think of when you think of crime. It leaves out some of the most kind of minimal types of crimes. But 764 down to 532 from 24 to 25. Total arrests went down, but when you look at the number of crimes going down, you would expect the number of arrests go down as well. But then the number of crimes cleared also dropped. But again, when we look at the total numbers of cases, that would be expected. So again, we're continuing to see that trend. We're down from 2024, improvement in clearance rates. And then it really shows the value of proactive policing technology and partnerships. Even though regionally, statewide, and nationwide crime's going down, we're really starting to see a return to a lot more collaboration between agencies, a lot more cooperation from the public when they call us. There was just a period of time there where people were really reluctant to go out there. Cops were reluctant to go out and do police work, and the public was reluctant to call and report. So we're starting to see that get a little bit better. We actually saw in some of those reductions, motor vehicle thefts went down the most by about 57%. And again, that's when auto thefts were up to historic levels in the last few years. So to see that drop would be expected. Robberies also were extremely high so to see those go down would be expected. Destruction of property, larceny and burglary, those are a little bit less expected but we are just seeing in general kind of some of those crimes of desperation going down. And again the way we're trying to address these is directed patrols, targeted enforcement, trying to work through some public awareness and then regional efforts around auto theft and some other things that are starting to have an impact. And we're doing a lot more investment in investigative follow up and technology. If you're not aware, we developed some specialties for officers and they actually get paid a little bit more money to do some extra work. They go to some more training and so on. And one of those categories that they get paid for is called patrol investigator. And we actually send them to some advanced investigations training. We actually give them some support and some mentorship from our detectives unit. And so having more people out there helping to investigate these crimes makes our cases more solvable. So that's really starting to have a big impact. We've also been trying to do through social media and public meetings. We're trying to raise awareness about these crimes. And I think when people are aware of what's going on, I think that encourages them to report because they know that we may do something. So some of the big cases we've had and big arrests and stuff, I think, have started to shift the numbers in the right direction. So overall violent crime, aggravated assaults increased from 22 to 28. Aggravated assaults are one that's often kind of a crime of passion. So those are often not tied to the same factors that would increase something like a property crime. But when we see this type of an increase, the numbers are relatively low. We're only talking about 22 to 28. to see a increase even though the numbers statistically may seem significant. It's kind of not outside of what we might expect. Sexual assault rape reports went from three to six, and then fraud also went up by about 17%. DV offenses decreased slightly in 2025. In 2025, we implemented a new program called DALE, which is Danger Assessment for Law Enforcement. Gave our officers some extra training and a risk assessment tool that they administer when they're investigating a domestic violence incident. And that gives a lot more information about the risk factors that a victim of domestic violence is facing and has helped us bring in some more resources to support them. And again, one of the issues with kind of more awareness and digging a little more means that we may end up having more reported crimes because officers are asking better questions and finding out a little bit more about what's going on. Even that being the case, though, we still saw a slight decrease in DV offenses. Stolen property losses went down significantly. Property damage also went down. One of the things to keep in mind is we have a large industrial area in the north end of town. A lot of those businesses are physically located in our cities and when they have embezzlement or other major losses, major theft, it gets reported here in our city. So some of the significant reductions are because in 25, I'm sorry, in 24 we had some unusually large losses reported and we didn't have as many of those this year. With property damage, you know, a lot of times we can have one major incident like a fire or something like that that causes significant damage that can sway these numbers significantly from one year to the next. But it is interesting, like when we talk about impacts on crime rates and activity of officers, the industrial areas still do increase our kind of the draw on police services. And often the crimes being reported up there are a lot more complex than the ones in residential areas. So this side, I'm just talking about kind of what we recommend for the next budget cycle. I obviously want to try to sustain the results of seeing a reduction in crime. That's often done by directing patrols, offender accountability, license plate reading technology, investigative technology. I'm going to talk about here in just a minute. That's been really powerful for us. And then in starting to start to leverage our regional partnerships. We are a small small police department. We don't have all the resources of a large department. We're really lucky that we have a lot of regional teams that we're a part of, everything from our SWAT team, crime response unit, major accident reconstruction. We're able to work with other small agencies in the area to bring in more resources to help us investigate major incidents. So that's been huge, and we want to continue to kind of leverage that. Do our best to kind of spot these risks early. We want to review the violence trends quarterly. We're going to take a look at what types of, you know, when we see an increase in aggravated assaults as an example, we're going to figure out what that really means. Are there particular factors that are impacting that and see how we can address it. And then prevent victimization, particularly in some of our communities that, elderly community where they're often targeted by scams and financial exploitation. We want to try to find some more ways to go out there and communicate with them about that. We fairly regularly do presentations at the senior center about fraud and how to reduce your likelihood of being victimized in that way. But we want to try to locate some other groups that would benefit from us going out and having those discussions as well. But again, personnel training technology partnerships, they're a huge operational cost, but ultimately that's what protects our citizens and strengthens our business community. and also supports our long-term economic viability. Talk a little bit about technology use. For us, the flock cameras, although they've been controversial kind of countrywide, I want to talk about some examples of, first of all, what we're doing to safeguard the data, but then also some of the cases we've used, that we've used flock data to solve them. So we do regular auditing and system access searches to make sure that the system is being used properly. We also have agreements with agencies that have access to our data to make sure that they also are using the data properly. There have been some stories in the news about people who intentionally misuse the data. If that were to happen here, we would address it as well through discipline or whatever action was appropriate. It's hard with any technology to avoid intentional misuse, but I think we're being very careful about tracking it, making sure that our officers are using it properly. Currently in the flock system, if you're going to access the data to try to do an investigation or to look for information about a license plate or a vehicle, you have to enter an associated case number and a reason that you're doing that. And we regularly audit to make sure both of those sections are being filled out. FLOC recently initiated a mechanism where those are required fields now, whereas you used to only have to fill out one of those fields, now they both are required. And it also, when other agencies are accessing our data, they have to fill out those boxes as well. So we had one incident. Oh, go ahead. Well technically we have 10 right now because two are being moved so they were deactivated because one of them was too close to a school area and I can't remember what the other one was too close to. So we're adjusting those based on the changes in the law about where they should be physically.

Just one second. So Councilmember Evers, When you go to ask a question, one, you need to let me turn your mic on so that we can hear you up here, and it will be recorded. And then the other thing I would ask the council to do is write your questions down, and at the end, I'm sure Chief McCurdy has an opportunity for the questions, and we can ask them and get them answered then. True?

Gotcha.

Yep. Okay, thank you.

I'll talk briefly. You may have heard this story before. This was actually before we had our own flop cameras. We had an incident. It actually started up in Buckley. Two people were at a wedding. One person has agreed to give a stranger a ride. That's never a bad idea, right? As they were coming down 410, somehow they ended up on Thompson Street. They got an altercation because one was a fan of, I think, the 49ers. The other was the fan of maybe a different local team. The fight ended up escalating to the point where one guy pulled out a gun and shot the other guy in the chest. And luckily, aid responded quickly and saved them. It would have been a fatal wound had they not gotten there as quickly as they did. The guy was actually driving a relative's vehicle and... We had some trouble identifying the suspect based on his physical description, not matching that of the registered owner of the vehicle. So we actually contacted Tukwila Police Department because they had access to flock data. We had a contact there that searched it and actually were able to tell us where he worked because the vehicle was frequent in this particular place in Tukwila every day. And then we went there to Tukwila, ended up arresting the guy and he got charged with attempted murder. So that's just one example. It would have been really hard to track this guy down, but we were able to really expedite how quickly we got there based on using technology. We had another incident. This was, I believe, in 2025. It was a road rage incident on East Valley. One driver Accidentally cut the other driver off. That infuriated the other driver. So he started chasing the person at high rate of speed. When the person stopped their vehicle, he got out and fired multiple rounds that the guy missed. The vehicle's hit his own vehicle because he's not a very good shot. He was shooting over his roof. He put a couple holes in his own roof. also hit the other guy's car. But then he fled, and all they had was a description of the vehicle. We were able to search by vehicle description and flock, found a vehicle that matched that description in the vicinity around the right time, got a license plate off the flock data. He was in Kent, so we asked Kent to go check on the vehicle. They went there. Sure enough, there's a vehicle with bullet holes in the roof. They talked to the guy. He admits to being in a road trades incident, but fails to mention that he also had a gun. So they arrested him, and... We were able to get some charges after some omissions of guilt there. We had another incident you all may remember from Winco. There was a woman whose car was jacked. Another guy was shot in the face as the suspects were fleeing. We were able to track that vehicle as it went north up into King County, Auburn, and then down into Spanaway area. Because the vehicle was seen multiple times in one particular neighborhood, we were able to do some more research and identify some associates of one of our possible suspects, and eventually were able to locate and arrest both suspects and recover the stolen vehicle. I honestly believe had it not been for the flock data, it would have taken even probably months longer to locate the vehicle and maybe never would have identified the suspects. We had another one where there was a motorhome stolen. They switched license plates. Because it was switched slightly after it was stolen, we were actually able to use flock data to identify the same RV with different license plates. And then we were able to search those different license plates, and the vehicle was located in Yakima. And then we had a sexual assault incident here in town. It was a man in his 20s who met a 15-year-old girl through Snapchat. arranged to come to her house and meet her. She had a vehicle description of him and a license plate and a possible first name. We were able to put all that information together and actually locate him at his new address up in Marysville. When you do obtain a search warrant, you have to have fresh information. Oftentimes, just the person's place of residence and their driver's license may be stale information. So in order to establish a pattern of life and prove that he still went there in the same vehicle, we released flock data to do that. And then that helped us in our search warrant to go up there and make that arrest. So these are just some examples of cases in the last couple of years we've used flock data for. And I know there's a lot of controversy around misuse, but I don't see there's as much discussion about proper use and how it can be a really powerful investigative tool. A little more, so now when we talk about accountability, we do a lot of robust review of officers' actions and decisions. We look at different categories. We look at vehicle pursuits, uses of force. We look at complaints. We also look at awards and commendations. So this is actually from 2025. We only had seven vehicle pursuits in that year. We had six legal interventions, which are either deploying spike strips or doing a pit maneuver to stop a vehicle when it's fleeing. One of those was considered out of policy, and that was because they didn't communicate properly with the outside agency before they had deployed spike strips. And even though nobody got hurt, it was one that we just reinforced and did some counseling with the officer to make sure they communicated better about what their intentions were. We had three OPS complaints, and those all internally generated when a member of our department reports misconduct by another person and we conduct those investigations. And so that shows that we have a healthy organization when we are reporting more than the public is complaining about. And actually in 25, we didn't have any formal investigations that came out of a citizen complaint. And then we had one lifesaver award. We have two places where we track commendations and such. We have officers in our journals if the citizen makes a compliment or if they have a compliment on one of their partners. And then if it escalates to the point of a department-level award, that's when we put it in the system for tracking. So again, pursuits did increase this year. If you look at the 22, 23, 24, and 25 data at the bottom in those bars, we did have an increase to seven, but that's partly because officers were getting comfortable again going out there and doing pursuits. For a while, we weren't allowed to do any, and they're still kind of getting used to having that authority again. And then you look at a trend down in complaints over the last four years, which again shows, I think, that we've been more clear with what our expectations are. And we also have a young department that's trying really hard to do good work and takes feedback well. So that is less likely to result in a formal complaint. As far as uses of force, in 2025, we had 14 reported uses of force. Level one is the lowest, where it's a control hold or some other compliance tactic. Level twos would be something more serious that either resulted in a minor injury or a strike or something like that. And then a level three would be use of a weapon like a taser or a firearm. That can also include pointing a firearm at somebody. So again, these numbers are exceptionally low. I've been doing police work for a long time, and even in a department our size, we have an unusually low number of uses of force. And when we watch our body cams, it's not because our officers aren't out there doing stuff and arresting people. We're just really lucky we have some really well-trained officers who do a really good job of de-escalating and avoiding force. Overall, our reviews found that use of force were consistent with our policy. Our officers were able to gain compliance and transition to lesser force as appropriate. We review every single use of force when it comes through. The officers write a report, a supervisor conducts a first level of review, and then our deputy chief or lieutenant reviews it, and then I reviewed as well before we accepted into the system with a disposition. There weren't really any concerning trends, no training issues or policy reviews involved with any of our use of force during 25. And again, it's just a support of that fair and equitable policing that we're trying to achieve. Now in 2026, so far this year, January through July, as compared to the same period in 2025, service demand has been steady. Arrests and higher level traffic outcomes are up. So we had a total of 7,738 police events, which is a decrease of about 1.5%. We had 799 official, formal incident reports written, which is an increase of about 8%. And arrests were up by about 17%. To get a little more detailed with that, the calls for service stayed flat. All these numbers were the only real significant increase was arrests. And then also collisions trended a little bit lower. Traffic stops were down slightly during the first part of the year. Traffic infractions were also down a little bit. But the more serious violations like DUI and DWS's driving while license suspended, those were up significantly. Criminal traffic citations were up. You'll often see that kind of relationship when you're issuing somebody a more serious citation. You may not issue a lesser citation for an infraction that was the reason you initiated the stop in the first place. But it's really positive to see more officers going out there and making arrests for for DUI and DWLS, because those are really the ones that raise the highest concern for public safety. Total police events, again, pretty flat. Not huge changes on any of these categories, so just a different way to kind of visualize that. And again, kind of just for a takeaway, service demand has been steady. Dispatch events are pretty flat as compared to prior years. Workload and quality is shifting. More original reports and arrests suggest that we're doing more substantive case enforcement mix. Targeted traffic enforcement is having an impact. These routine infractions and collisions are down while the more serious violation citations are up. Again, overall conditions are lower, but we're going to keep monitoring that because it's also concerning that we have more DUI drivers, but that also can be because officers have more time to get out there and look because total crimes are down. Any questions on that real quick? I'll keep moving on. I did want to mention the community survey. You're going to learn more about it shortly, but safety is a community strength. About 94.7% feel they're safe walking during the day. Police service satisfaction is high with 87.6% satisfied with our service. And our future priorities, they rank prompt police response as a top priority for about 63.5%. Safety is one of the strongest quality of life drivers, includes a safe place to live. Low crime is the leading reason people choose to live here. Traffic remains a top concern for residents while public order, homelessness, drug, alcohol, crime, and a lack of police presence code enforcement appear to be reasons that they may feel unsafe. And then the report recommends reinforcing safety and police services as demonstrated by community strengths while recognizing that declining prioritization may reflect residents feel their needs are being met. When we talk about implications, adding more officers and police resources helps us sustain that prompt response, also expands our ability to be proactive in traffic and other visible patrols. Problem-solving projects, investigative follow-ups all take a lot of time, and when we start to see these crime reports actually reducing a little bit, it gives us a time to go a little deeper in these cases and do a little bit higher quality of work. That's all I got. Questions? Council Member Evers?

Deputy Mayor Elfers. Thanks, Chief McCurdy. That was great. I had a couple questions early on in the presentation. Just trying to clarify and make sure I understand. So it looked like on the number of arrests versus the offenses, it was like 20%. I'm just curious, can you explain how that works? Because I don't know if that's bad or good, or I don't have a lot of context.

So when we look at clearance rates there's a lot of different ways to clear a case. An arrest is one. Other ways to clear it would be like a lack of leads. You can also actually exonerate somebody and prove that a crime didn't occur. So you don't always see a number of arrests matching. We did actually overall Our clearance rates were up, but because we had less crimes reported, we had a reduction in the total number of arrests, right? So it's the higher percentage of fewer cases, if that makes sense. Okay. Good.

And then I think I noticed, I'm just curious on the flock cameras, you mentioned it a little bit. Is there anything that the city is concerned about? Or just like you're tracking that, I'm sure, but I don't think I am. So can you just give us a little bit of an update? Is there anything we're concerned about? Or I know there's some... talk about an event at the end of October?

Yeah, so one area of concern was about use for things like immigration enforcement. We do not allow any federal agencies access to our FLOC data. I think in the public there have been some concerns that FLOC or agencies are sharing that information with people who shouldn't have it. We only share it with particular agencies that have signed agreements with us and have signed up to access our data. FLOC has given us a lot of control over who sees it. That was one area of concern. Another area of concern people had was around misuse by the public requesting data. How long we retain that data was shortened by the courts, so they allowed us to not keep the data quite as long. They were concerned that people would be trying to follow other people by searching for their license plates to see where it was hitting. That hasn't really been as big a concern. We don't get a lot of requests like that for our flock data. It's also historic, so it's not like you're currently seeing where somebody is. It's just reported after the fact and recorded, and you can search it that way. The one other area where I've heard people, it's just kind of like the big brother idea, like people think there's cameras all over and it's following them. But FLOC is not capturing faces. It's literally just taking still photographs of the rear of a vehicle where the license plate is. Sometimes you'll see the side of the vehicle, which has helped us on some cases when we know that there's damage to a car because of a collision or something like that. You can see it because of the angle the camera was at. But a lot of the concerns people have just about people spying on them just really doesn't match what's actually being done. So I think that's the main concern. Maybe other people have heard different ones. Okay.

And I think one last question. I feel like you mentioned the state law and the pursuit issue and how that's kind of adjusted. Some of the pursuits has changed, and I know there's been quite a bit of new state laws in the last few years, and it's been a little bit confusing to follow. Are there things you're tracking now or things that you're about that you'd like to see changed, or things that are changed in 2026 that are affecting things, or just the interaction with state laws. I just feel like, like I said, there's just been such a flurry of, every year it seems like we have a record number of new policies. And so we're just, if you have any update on that, I'd love to hear.

I think there are a lot of, there is so much criminal justice reform being attempted that the legislature's not always communicating clearly about what is expected. I do have some concerns, like just recently an issue came up where there was a committee that sent some information to the legislature and then they created a law requiring that justice-involved youth who interact with criminal justice agencies that appear to be involved in human trafficking, that the agency interacting with them has to administer a validated trafficking risk assessment tool to determine how much at risk they are. They used some terms that typically did not include law enforcement. They were typically for corrections and probation parole people. The committee's intent was for all law enforcement to administer these tools, but there actually is not a validated instrument to conduct a risk assessment for people experiencing human trafficking. And so the legislature thought they were telling us to do something, but the way the law was written, it didn't seem like it was telling us to do something. And so there's just a lot of concern that we just discovered that a couple weeks ago and we're trying to figure out, like, what do you really want us to do? Because as much as I think we probably should be administering these risk assessments when we think somebody's being trafficked, if that risk assessment doesn't exist, then it's hard to ask us to do it. So that's really the concern I have is as we're really getting deeper into Some of the laws that were passed, we're still uncovering these little issues that come up that really create some expectations that we're having trouble meeting because a lot of the ideas went ahead of the realities.

Perfect. I actually said that was my last question. That wasn't true. I had one more. I think I'm looking at just regionally. I feel like a lot of, it seems like crime is regional. Like you mentioned, some of the people going from Canton to Coquilla, people are going all over the place. And so some areas are better or worse. dealing with crime or have different factors that maybe contribute or how does that, so as far as like, how do we, is there something that the police department in Sumner is doing to kind of strengthen that or try to, try to help? How do we fit in the region? Other than being the best? Besides being the best, how do we spread that?

How do we spread that? I think that what I'm really impressed by, having worked in King County for most of my career, I'm really impressed with the collaboration between agencies, particularly with us and Puyallup and Bonney Lake. The partnerships that we have and how we work with each other is really powerful. And I think it allows us to really leverage those relationships when we need them. It's rare for a crime to go on in an adjoining city without the cities nearby knowing about it and being able to respond and react. And so that collaboration gives us a heads up about what may be coming to our city also. going out there and helping them, they return the favor when we need it. So I think that we are doing better than most just because of those relationships. And again, even the formal regional teams are really powerful to investigate cases that we wouldn't be able to do on our own. So I think that is a little bit unique. And not that that doesn't go on elsewhere, but not to the extent that I see here. I think we're really lucky to be surrounded by the agencies we are. Perfect. Thank you.

Council Member Malcolm.

Thank you, Chief McCurdy. Really good presentation, some really good stuff, and I really appreciate the kind of candid insights you bring to bear out here. I have some questions. You touched on it a bit about people feel insecure about flock cameras and the idea of flock cameras. And I was just curious about what we're doing internally around auditing. How often do we audit? Who conducts the audits? And also just our safeguards when we're sharing that information. Do we audit when we do an external sharing? Do we audit those as well? And do we ever deny any of those? And I'm just curious about what that process looks like for us.

So it starts with, in order to have access to our data, the agency has to reach out to ask for permission. And then we do some vetting to make sure that they are in a federal agency and have an agreement they sign about what they're going to do with that information. So that's where it starts. So nobody else can just reach out to us and ask to have access. It's something that's done in advance.

Perfect.

We have agreements statewide. There are some agencies we've excluded because of issues that have come up. So we try to stay on top of that. The other thing that I think is the review piece of it, so once a month at least, the lieutenant who's in charge of our flock system, Gregson, he actually goes in and he looks at all of the requests to access our system. And so when somebody does a request, like I said, they have to enter a case number and a reason. And if he looks for any irregularities there, like if now they have to fill those out, it used to be an issue because some agencies were only putting in minimal information. And so we would reach out to that agency and say, like, hey, you have an officer. They may have really good intentions, but we're going to exclude you from our list if you don't make sure your officers are following the rules. And so that was one thing. We've had a couple agencies we've reached out to where their officers weren't. Now that that's required, we're still looking to make sure that the case numbers and the reasons are consistent with proper use. So if they were to put in there, like, There was kind of an interesting news story where a newspaper did an audit, and they saw that somebody had run a license plate, and the reason was ICE, and obviously the concern was immigration. But what they actually were doing is somebody called in to find out if an ICE vehicle was in their area, and the officer searched to see if any ICE vehicles had been there, because it actually would pick up the lettering on the side of the vehicle as well. And so, again, if we see irregularities, we look into it. I think most agencies, when you have FLOC, you also get training that goes with it that talks to you about proper use and the consequences of not using it properly. Within our policies and all the other agencies that use FLOC, there are consequences for improper use, and we talk about those when officers are first trained in how to use the system. So those are kind of some of the safeguards around it. I think the one lingering concern people have is about the public actually requesting that data. And that's why the window has been shortened. And really, the photographs of the vehicles disappear really quickly. So it would be most people are not getting any of those. So all they would get is literally they don't get any of the owner information. The most anybody would get, even in that small window that's currently available, is the list of license plates not owner information, vehicle descriptions, or anything like that, just the license plates that the system picked up. So I don't know what people would do with that other than, like, another concern about stocking or something like that was kind of what was brought up. But I'm not aware of any of those cases.

I appreciate that. That's really, you know, good confidence building when hearing that we're on top of it like that. A couple of other questions. I wanted to ask a little bit about the the OPS investigations, do we conduct that internally or do we work with, does somebody externally do that or how does that happen? So we conduct them typically.

The only time we would go outside if it was a complaint against me or somebody else, if it was a complex one, we may hire somebody out to do it. when it's typically the deputy chief's job actually to do a lot of those investigations. When I was deputy chief, I was doing those investigations and it's pretty standard in our industry to do our own investigations because we are holding people to our policies and it's hard for somebody else to come in that's not part of our agency and doesn't know our policies. And in a lot of ways, we have a higher standard than most. So it's appropriate and kind of the best practice for us to do our own, with a few exceptions, like I said. So if it was a sexual harassment within the department, things like that, we would have it an EEOC violation, and that might be done by HR or hired out for it by somebody else to do it. But the typical complaints here in Sumner, our typical complaints are... Not as serious as you might see some other places. But we have had, even since I've been here, some pretty serious allegations and officers terminated for misconduct.

Okay, thank you. And lastly, I just wanted to compliment you on the success with the de-escalation. And I'm just curious if you can give us some insight on how frequent and what type of de-escalation training that the department goes through. And is it something we can port out to our surrounding communities? I don't know.

Yeah, so there is a whole state program around it called Atasca. And essentially, there was a big shift about 10 years ago it started. After COVID, it accelerated, where we shifted away. Typically, when I use the word de-escalation, it would be about me, how I interacted with you, the words I used in trying to calm you down. When the state really started to look at what works in de-escalation, what they found is that creating distance, slowing down the encounter, officers getting behind some sort of a barrier to protect them is really what creates safety for the public. So whereas we used to teach officers to move in quickly and try to gain physical control of somebody faster, and in fact, I was a longtime defensive tactics instructor, I would always say, like, the faster I can get somebody under physical control, the less likely they are to get hurt and I am to hurt. get hurt as well that's not always true and what we saw is a lot of times my mere presence is an escalator so what we teach officers to do now is create time and distance and shielding while that person has that opportunity to to kind of settle down and and continue to engage with them and talk to them but to do so from a distance and what we're noticing is that we're seeing a lot of people who we typically back in the day would have had to fight with um Eventually, just our patience wins out, and we are able to get them into custody faster, even in the long run. Now, sometimes it does prolong those encounters. It used to be really fast for me to come in and close the distance and grab somebody and arrest them and throw them in my car and drive off to the jail. But what we're seeing is not only are we seeing fewer uses of force, but we're also seeing better investigations because we learn how to talk to people better. And it's been pretty powerful to shift mindsets to teach officers about how to maintain their own safety by having that time and distance and a shield while that other person and them kind of communicate about it. The other part of it is it gives us more of an opportunity to bring in more resources. So this is a statewide training. We also do a lot within our own department for defensive tactics to make sure officers have the best information. We shifted away from a traditional defensive tactics model where we would teach strikes and batons and use of weapons and then also some counter joints and takedowns and stuff. We're more of a kind of a ground fighting approach because a lot of officers would have to use high levels of force when they ended up on the ground because they didn't know what to do. And so we're using a jujitsu-based way we train officers where they can learn to get leverage and physical control of somebody, even if they end up on the ground. So they're not resorting to high level of force simply because they're in a bad position. So that's pretty standard. I think we've been lucky. We have some officers who've been teaching and training defensive tactics for a long time who've stayed up on what some of the best stuff is. And we even had some officers who were involved in that change very early when it happened. We're pretty lucky there. There are regional training sites, to your point, across the state. Officers have to have their initial de-escalation training and that time-distance shielding in the academy. And then after that, it's every three years you have to go back through that training. It's a 40-hour course. But, yeah, and then we also change all of our policies to make sure that we're holding officers accountable to that new standard.

All right. Thank you for sharing all that and really good information.

Great. Okay. Council Member Isaacs.

Thank you, Chief McCurdy. That was a great presentation. I have a question. Forgive me for being maybe naive, but I see with specifically Sumner, with the crime going down and with our flock cameras, I know you cited some specific major crimes. I'm only assuming that those flock cameras probably assisted in a lot of the other crimes as well.

Yeah. It's constantly changing kind of what the standard is about which cases we're going to be using to investigate, but typically we're using it on a lot of the lower-level crimes. They're not as helpful, actually, and officers don't always have to go in there for that. So typically on crimes against persons, more serious crimes, we're accessing that pretty routinely. Our detectives access a lot more on the back end on some of the lower-level crimes or things after the fact. Pro officers are more concerned with what can I do right now, and then our follow-up detectives Not only flock, but through other resources can do a lot more searching after.

Is there a limit to a city size as far as the amount of flock cameras allotted? Financial limit, yes. They'll sell us as many as we want. Okay, so Sumner could have as many as we possibly could, right?

Yeah, originally the amount we purchased, they're actually leased cameras, and you're paying for the service while you're paying for the camera itself. Originally it was because we had a grant, and so we purchased the amount of cameras we could under that grant for two years, and then the council made the decision to continue to support that after the grant ran out. So we still have that same number of cameras. There could be decisions later to increase. I actually think we have pretty good coverage. We had one camera, the location wasn't as good, so we actually moved it down by WinCo because that kind of southeast corner of the city didn't have any coverage, and it's actually been pretty useful down there. Great. Thank you.

Okay. Any more questions? All right, thank you. That was great. Thank you very much. Okay, so are we ready for...

If we could just pause for just a moment to do an audio test, and then we'll move on to probably the judge.

Okay, thank you.

So Seamus, if you could give us an audio check. You got to unmute. One more time. All right. We'll go to plan C on that one and we'll move on to the judge. Sorry, Seamus.

Can we check his, he also called in. Sure. Check his phone.

Can they hear him online? And maybe we just don't hear them in here? Is that a potential? All right. So we will go to item two. We're just going to work upwards. So state of the court. So we'll call on Deputy City Administrator Jeff Steffens and Judge Anique Berry. Thank you. Okay. So will it just be Judge Berry? Sure. Okay. Thanks.

And... You'll have to forgive me. Well, good evening. Thank you for having me. You'll have to forgive me. I'm not the greatest with technology, so please bear with me. All right. So I'm going to try to go to the first slide and see if it works. Are we ready? Okay. Okay. Worked. Okay. So my name is Anique Berry. I am the judge for the Sumner Municipal Court, which is a joint contract with the Bonney Lake Sumner Courts. And this State of the Court Address, what I chose to do because this is the first time I'm presenting, is tie what I think are most citizens' questions in with the State of our Court. That's why it'll seem like perhaps I didn't get the memo about what you wanted to hear, but I'm hoping that you'll hear exactly what you wanted to hear and also maybe learn something about court. It's probably because I was raised by two educators that I like to weave information. I also find in being in court and being in a municipal court for 30 years, that as much as I am kind of a geek about the court and I love the government, lots of people know nothing about court and so have a lot of questions. So if it's a bunch of stuff you already know, then I apologize, but maybe there'll be some fun things to... learn about today, which is what I hope. All right, so I'm going to, this is what I'm going to try to cover through the State of the Court Address and also through answering questions, both to citizens listening and then to the council today. One of my most common questions is, what do you think about AI? So I'll just read the questions first so you know what to look forward to. Also, I'm trying to entertain you a bit because I was in court all day, I've been talking all day, and so hopefully there's a little bit of something to look at other than me. I get tired of hearing my own voice and I'm certain that everyone else does too. Another popular question is, aren't all judges elected? Next is, aren't judges politically biased because the city hires them and pays them? What do you think about the mistrial in the Kilnancy case? Aren't judges supposed to do what is right? What is municipal court and who is Judge Berry? And how often do you use your gavel? I'll start with the last one, though. I use my gavel almost never. In fact, I got it out the other day just because I wanted to make sure we had one and that it worked. But everyone asks me how often I slam my gavel around, and so I can now officially say once. And there we go. All right, so my personal opinion about AI is, is it going to be in the courtroom? Yes, it's inevitable, and it's highly inaccurate. And so I just created one example to talk about that, and that's on the next slide. The question was, how many cities in Washington have appointed municipal judges? This is the response I got that I typed in there, but the last sentence is really, it has 77 incorporated cities, and therefore it has 77 municipal judges appointed under state law, which is not even close to accurate. And so I just put a few facts in there. I contacted AOC just last week about there are 79 current municipal judges. The process to go through a judge, for those who aren't aware, is that the mayor appoints subject to council confirmation if it's an appointed position. And a district judge also can also be appointed, though, through the mayor if there's a district court judge and they don't go through the process to appoint a separate municipal judge. But it also can be an elective position through RCW 35050. And we have an appointed position, and there can also be contracts between cities, which, as this council knows, but the citizens may not know, is that we have a contract between cities for municipal judges. So probably half of the judges in the state are elected and not appointed, probably about half are. So the actual answer is very different than the real answer. looking at the frequently asked questions. So I tried to answer AI and our judges aren't all judges elected and aren't we biased because we're appointed by the city and we're paid by the city. So talk just briefly about that before I get into numbers because I'm certain that everybody here wants to see a judge talk about numbers. When people go to law school because they aren't good at numbers, but we'll do our best today the GR 29 is a general rule 29 which Controls what the court does so people think about their bosses controlling what they do and sometimes the RCW if you're not going to violate laws, but for for me, it's the canons of judicial conduct and the general rules that control me. And so I'll put up an example from GR 29, just a moment. So, but I already referenced judicial conduct commission. And then in regards to funding, there's a lot of different fundings that can go in from the general fund, and current grant funding which right now the City Sumner split with the Bonney Lake has, we had a previous court safety grant that was prior to me but this year alone we've obtained a pretrial grant funding $15,500, post-conviction funding $15,000. We're getting interpreter reimbursements, that's not really a number, they give you a number, they just reimburse as long as they decide to reimburse us. and then a community court grant, which is $233,000. And so that's different funding sources that most people aren't aware of that the courts can use and to defray lots of different costs, including most significantly for lots of courts is the time that their people serve in jail and it comes out of the police budget. So while it's not in the in the court's budget necessarily does greatly affect the police budget. So we're happy to minimize wherever we can because the city has a huge burden and that's to maintain the court. Once the city decides they want to have a court then they have to maintain it and that's by statute. So lots of people think that now well they can just decide what they want to pay you or not pay you and that's not true. You have to maintain that and they have a The cities have strict rules about that. This is just a brief. I'm not going to read it all, but if people want to get interested, you can look up GR29E, and that talks about the court's authority within the court and how the court's in control of the court. So those are some of the questions in regards to whether we're politically inclined and that we have to follow the rules. Really, the only person who can remove us once we're instilled, appointed, whether it be appointed or elected, is the Judicial Conduct Commission, which would find on the far right there, the Kansas Judicial Conduct, that we violated one of those. And a quick overview for the role of the judges in the courtroom is due process and interpreting the law. And then I give some ideas of how we do that and our requirements. And then our role 24-7 is by choice, is to choose to act in a way that doesn't, focusing mostly on canon number one, avoid impropriety and appearance of impropriety. What I say when I'm teaching, for instance, Sumner U or in the classroom, I say, don't be naughty and don't be with people who look like they're being naughty. So that's a choice that we make. And so I choose that whether I go out to dinner or whether I'm hanging out watching my kids get slide tackled at soccer or cheering for my wrestler. So I have to be mindful that somebody sitting next to me might be coming before me and might have said, oh, I remember that person was talking about this political issue or whatever. this sports team or what have you. And so that's a choice that I make and that judges make. So turning to more appropriately to the citizen's conduct in Sumner with the judicial system, we look at traffic accidents, speeding and reckless driving, destruction of property, theft from businesses, neighborhood property maintenance, abandoned vehicles, homelessness, mental illness, and these are protections for both the victims and the accused. So that's what I feel that I deal with almost every day with the citizens of Sumner. And we're looking at protecting both those accused of crimes with due process protections as well as the victims of crimes and making sure that their due process rights are protected. So what does due process really look like? I just did a list of the kinds of hearings for a criminal case are on the left hand side. So our first appearance in court is arraignments. Then we go to pretrials etc. I won't read through all of them but one important Important aspect which jumps to what do I think about the Clancy case? Which was a mistrial and if you're not familiar with that I can't explain that now because I'd eat up all my time but kind of fun to talk about but number one two three four five competency those are assessments on competency to stand trial and Um, that's kind of related to the one way that we relate to maybe the Clancy trial is that we do assess when people come in front of us and quite often are assessed as incompetent. Um, whether they either can, uh, are able to understand the charges and we're competent enough to understand right from wrong, or perhaps they aren't competent to sit through the system. And so maybe they're not able to understand the system, communicate effectively with their attorney and therefore can't be prosecuted. And, um, And then there's some options if you want to do a deep dive or ever want me to come talk about any of these individual issues, happy to come back and talk. But competency is quite a deep dive and very many spider legs on the things that you can talk about what happens next for people. But that's kind of my thoughts is, you know, the system set up ways to deal with the competency and also mental illness and so but love to talk about anybody with anybody about the interesting parts of things we see on TV and that are real life. For even for our citizens that we see that got most hostile you would think it would be people charged with a crime but I would say the people who are most dissent when they come to court is traffic infractions. And so they have feel very strongly that they didn't do X, Y or Z or they want to be heard. And so that's a real opportunity to educate both about the police officers and their exchanges with them, which I will say I get very few criticisms of how the police interact. And in fact, For Sumner and in fact, sometimes they go out of their way the citizens to tell me how nice the officer was So that is very exceptional having been the last year before I took the position in January I was in 13 different courts as a substitute judge as well as the sitting judge for Buckley and I can tell you There have been probably I can count on one hand the amount of times that citizens come in and tell me hey I just want to compliment the police officer and this is my time to do it. So I As you can imagine. So I'm working through, now I'm to what is a municipal court. So I'm trying to show you what the Sumner Municipal Court does. And these are the numbers for the 2023 through 2025. The different numbers between DUI and physical control. So if you don't know the difference, DUI, you're driving, physical control, you're in control of the vehicle, but you're standing still off the road. Maybe the car's running. Great minds may differ exactly how that works. But in any case, and you're under the influence of something, and other traffic misdemeanors, and then non-traffic misdemeanors, traffic infractions, non-traffic infractions, and parking violations. So those are the main things that we hear. Of course, there could be a few little others in there because when we deal with an animal case, for instance, that usually ends up in a non-traffic pile and some things that maybe overlap. But these are, as you can see, there are different things. There's always a huge number of traffic violations as far as what we get, but that isn't necessarily consistent with what the police have to do. It just has to do with what ends up getting filed and then resolved in court. And so this was the 2025 report. amount of hearings that we had in regarding criminal hearings, infractions, and parking. So just to keep in mind when I get to the slide about the number of filings, and I think I've got it through just the first nine months of this year, when we think about hearings and we say, wow, that's a lot of criminal hearings, remember that we still have cases from 2005 and 2014 that maybe somebody went to warrant and now they're showing up again. So just the new filings, they may have three or four hearings this year, but old filings that have sat in warrant status or those can come back again and again. And unless we try to track people down and trying to come up with some different strategies, of how to have cases actually come to conclusion as opposed to sit in piles waiting for them to resolve. But when you abscond and you leave and you never come back, it's hard to track those people down. So just as a general high-level view, I tried to say, okay, how much daily are we doing, because Sumner's one day a week, is 40 to 70 criminal cases can be seen in one day. And we usually have a separate day that we do once a month for civil infractions, and that's 20 to 40 per month. So in one day of 40 to 70 hearings, I can tell you the 70 hearing day, that's a big, long, full day with lots and lots of cases. I've taken some measures these last nine months to really balance out because I was just noticing that we aren't going to do our best work when we're exhausted. And by the time we get to case number 70, that person is just as important as case number one. So for me personally, I moved calendars around so that I was the freshest for the hardest cases. And so things that were easier for me, put in the afternoon and a lighter calendar in the afternoon because we can all work pretty hard up until lunch because we're thinking about lunch. We're going to make it and we're working hard and everybody's clicking. And then we get after lunch and people are a little bit, and when I say people, I'm talking about the staff that's handling all the people, right? Myself, the attorneys, the clerks, and all the people that support us. And so trying to put the most cases in the frame where we're the freshest and the most capable of handling all those people. But some days, they're long days. I think we've balanced out quite a bit, especially in the last three or four months. So the hearing totals, as you can see, these are lots of hearings when you're saying, well, we're small, we're Sumner, we don't have that many cases filed. Well, it's just every year the cases that don't get resolved because people don't show up for hearings. So that's so I tried to do through August the number of filings that we had DUI related other misdemeanors and I'm sorry other traffic misdemeanors and other misdemeanors leaving infractions out of it. The number of filings just because this general to me is more relevant to what I do and I feel like I process every day. So when you see filings at 30 For instance, in DUI-related misdemeanors, you see proceedings 251. Remember, that's a bunch of other DUIs that never got resolved or the person keeps failing to appear and coming back. And so that's how that works and that's the same in each of the columns. Let's see. I don't know where I am as far as timing, so hopefully I'm doing okay. Lots of people ask under the question of aren't judges just supposed to do what is right or what is a municipal court kind of answers both is are there alternatives to traditional courts? And so this is the long statement justifying, in general, the idea and the concept of community court. But I'll just talk more specifically. It's a fully grant-funded court, so everything's funded about the community court other than, I guess, the extra energy and time that you might put into it. There's an enhanced assessment tool that we start out with Community Court. And again, I would need a whole other session to talk to you in detail about Community Court. But what I can tell you is this year we changed it so to have more citizens able to access this grant-funded opportunity. Initially, it was... promoted mostly towards therapeutics. So we're talking about addiction, right? And so, and of course some of these people have the highest needs. And so it's understandable that you would promote it towards people that are having the most significant challenge staying out of the criminal justice system. But we talked it through with our team and we have a new community court case manager this year. And I said, Well, what about the first time people that get to come through the court? What about those citizens that really aren't about staying in the criminal justice system but this is their first exposure and there no longer exists a lot of these diversion options that say in the 80s and 90s existed. It was just a very different time where you had community-based panels that reviewed maybe if you stole for the first time and talked to you about don't do that and volunteer community service hours. As an attempt and also based on some best practice that I reviewed nationwide, we put together a track one, which is just that. It's an opportunity prior to being arraigned. If you haven't had significant touches with the criminal justice system, you have an opportunity to perform some tasks. and have an opportunity to keep that off your record so that more citizens are able to take advantage of the community court as it's traditionally thought of, this community court of like, okay, we're gonna help you reinvest in your community as opposed to be in the criminal justice system. And then the other part of it, the track two, bordering into the track two can be a combination of the two type of individuals and then into track three, which would be more therapeutic approach. to probably somebody who's heavily, has very high needs either due to mental health issues or addiction, substance abuse, and poverty relating to all of those. So that's kind of what community court looks like. Again, I'd love to talk about it again, but I do want to emphasize one thing that I like about it personally is it's individualized justice, which I think is what a small court is intended to do. When cities say, we want to have our own court, they say, we want this opportunity to do it the way that it should be done. And that's, I take that very seriously. And the individualized justice allows me to do that, allows each of the prosecutor and the public defender to look at each individual and say, what's the best solution, not only for consequence for that person, but how do we keep them from reoffending, which is the biggest motivation. And community court, the numbers nationwide really show that once you get involved in a community court, you are likely to be less involved in crime. If it's because of the support that's created, if it's because you had to go to so many court hearings, you thought, I never want to do that again, I don't really care what keeps you out of the criminal justice system. If it's because you love me or you hate me, stay out of the criminal justice system either way, right? So that's... But there is a lot of evidence to show that hope is a way that people move from being perpetually in the criminal justice system to being an active member of society because they hope for something more in their life rather than just avoiding jail. So one thing I would say that's notable and then I'll move off the community court is that we hold people accountable and we expect them to be honest, which is kind of a funny thing for criminals to come into the courtroom and say, and they say it all the time, I'm not used to being honest with you, judge. And so, but it is a very different thing when you say we're not here just to penalize you, what we are going to have consequences and accountability coupled with some compassion. So. That's my best assessment. Maybe I don't want to take the time. For those people who are really not familiar with municipal court, I love to geek out and throw a little bit of this is how we're created because here I am with the legislative and the executive and here I am the judicial and that's exciting for me and how we come from the huge court system down to the Washington judicial system and where the municipal court falls. and where we are born from, which is the U.S. Constitution and the state constitution. And then we have state statute, which authorizes us, and then the Sumner Municipal Code. So sometimes I think it's fun, even though sovereign citizens are tough, because sometimes they really challenge our thoughts about, you know, should I be able to come and claim my rights? But I enjoy walking through the Constitution and reminding all of us exactly where this court comes from. All right, and I also promised under question, who is Judge Berry? This is me. I graduated locally from Tahoma High School in 1989. I went to Pacific Lutheran University in 1993 with a French major. That would be a whole session saying, why does a French major go on to be a lawyer? But in any case, and then I went to Gonzaga Law. I think high school things are more fun, so I put my high school things that I enjoyed. And finally, I put To Kill a Mockingbird up there because that's the reason I wanted to become a lawyer, because I read that book and I thought, Atticus Finch has to be the most noble person. I'm sure all lawyers are just that way. But of course, I was in fifth grade, so that's all I knew about that. And I will tell you, I love that. That's not just because it looks good on a slideshow. My youngest son is named Atticus, so I'm pretty invested. I've been here around the area doing municipal court for 30 years. Started in Spokane the first couple years I went to prosecution, and I've done a variety of different things, but mostly just in the area of municipal law, other than one little deviation with the Tears Foundation, which is a non-profit which provides funding to parents who've lost a child. So that's kind of where the compassion and understanding of difficult situations comes from because we lost a child many years ago. So that's my current family. And I just wanted to end with my staff and those people they were willing to get in a photo and listed here. Although we're missing the CSO and transport officers, we have the judicial branch administrator, five judicial specialists, the court support services officer, community court case manager, prosecutor, and two public defenders in there. And so we are thrilled to serve the citizens of Sumner. We're thrilled that I'm personally thrilled that you put me in charge of this wonderful court, and I really enjoy serving you and would like to answer any questions that you might have.

Okay. Questions? Council Member Kenna.

Hi, Judge Berry. Thanks for joining us tonight. First of all, I have to say I was a debater as well in high school. I did dual interpretation as well.

Okay, so you know exactly what that is.

Yeah, fellow nerd here. But I just want to say no real questions. Just thank you for your presentation. I think you did exactly what you intended to, which is keep it light, but also very informative and kind of lead us through some of the successes of court and some of the difficulties and challenges as well. So I just want to thank you for your time and joining us.

Appreciate being here.

Thank you. Council Member Evers.

I just want to thank you as well. I think you started in January, huh? I did. So did I. Okay. Anyway, I did say go Lutes, go Zags. I don't know if you knew, but your high school was in Sumner the other day playing a football game. Yeah, I did hear that.

So, yeah, go Sparks. All right, fair enough, I know.

Enough of you, I think she said.

Deputy Mayor Elfers. I just want to say thank you for coming. It's great to meet you and I appreciate your presentation. I hope I don't meet you in court.

I don't think you will. Anyone else? Okay. Looks like you're good. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

And please, I invite you to, if you ever want to invite me to talk about something more specifically that you think is important to you or the citizens, happy to do so.

That folder, is that the old school?

That's a peachy. Old school peachy. No, you have to find them. But if you need one, I'll find you one. All right. Thank you again.

So are we on to item one? Perfect. Item one, which is now item three, is the 2026 budget priority survey results.

So communications director, Carmen Palmer.

Hello again.

Hello. Thank you.

We went ahead and let Seamus go to bed. He is on the East Coast, so if you're tired and looking at the clock, add three. And we really don't know. It does seem to be an issue with our room. We're not sure what. I have a feeling Jeff's putting in a help desk ticket to IT, but it seemed useless to keep Seamus with us to not be able to say anything that we could hear. so um i'm going to pinch hit gave me a couple of pointers of what he was going to be sure to point out to you um and we will also make him available to you a couple different ways we'll look at the schedule if there's a way for you maybe him to join a meeting in the future once this is fixed to ask any questions or if there is a way um he also offered to record what he was going to present to you and then we could share that video with you and the public um so we have a couple backup options um and he will watch this to see how well or not I did in presenting his data. The reason we're not just pushing this is because you are on a very careful timeline with your budget and your next meeting's agendas are all very full. And the whole point of this is to get the feedback from the public before you start looking at all those details in your budget. This is very important. We want the citizens and the public very involved in our budget and it's really important we get that feedback at the front end because people have competing things. I might tell you what my priority is and above all else fund this. Ryan Johnstone might tell you something else and say above all else fund that. And we are both your constituents. So it's really important to get this aggregate data so you see the trends of priorities rather than have to decide which of your neighbors you're gonna please and which you're gonna disappoint. So with that, I will jump into the study. And you all have this in your packet, so I'm not going to read every single slide. It's already been a long meeting with a lot of great information. The objectives were to check in. Again, we went with Great Blue Research. They did our 2024 one. So the nice thing about this is it not only gives you this year's data, it compares it against two years ago to start seeing changes or trends. And Seamus was particularly annoyed because we actually, in general, went positive. And he's like, I don't often get to deliver good news. So he was looking forward to ours. We did have close to 600 responses. This was, I don't know if you remember, from back in the summer, we did a duo where residents got a password protected postcard to take the survey and then afterwards we opened it up to everybody. You could live here, you could work here, you could just love Sumner. The reason we do that is just in case someone stuffs the box on a particular issue, we can catch and see that versus what residents with the one time password protection. There was no concern with that. Things all tracked. So you'll just see the results in this response. That's kind of a backup plan just in case we need it, which we never have, thankfully. This is just the demographics. I do think the one and the teal is this year. The yellow in all of these slides is two years ago. Not surprisingly, and we actually use, to send the postcards, we actually use voter registration, not property taxes, so that we hopefully pick up renters as well. But as you can see with most things, it did skew high to people who own homes here in Sumner. However, again, we had it open to everybody. So kudos to the 7% who just liked to visit Sumner and still shared their thoughts with us. All right, the key findings. Again, this is a lot of text to read. I'm not going to go over this one because it's what you're going to see in the next, but definitely look at this. A nice thing with hiring outside support is their outside perspective in our community and giving you that aggregate response. Big thing... Quality of life went up. People's response to their quality of life. Very positive perceptions of the city. And we're increasingly positive about Sumner's direction. The main concern really centered on growth, which is not surprising. What was kind of nice is I think it replaced anything traffic related, which is still high, but we'll go into that. But growth definitely replaced kind of roads and congestion concerns. Again, this is a great graphic. 91.9% either gave us excellent or good. And you'll see that is higher than two years ago. So that's just nice as we delve into a bunch of different data points to just keep that in mind. Interestingly, obviously we had these ordered in a little different way, so you got a bit of a preview teaser with the chief, but safe feeling went significantly up from 2024, which is really nice to see. All our other positives stayed about the same. The ones that went down were events, which is interesting with another slide coming up, and access to transit and transportation, which is not surprising. This is just a further breakdown so you can look at this later on exactly how those numbers broke out. This is almost the same question, but we ask it two different ways on purpose just to see if we're tracking. That is a survey thing is to kind of ask the same, get the same information two different ways. And it's tracking. Again, you see that spike on safe place to live, low crime numbers. which is really nice to see. All other good positives, everything's either staying on track or even increasing a little bit. Now the negative reasons for moving away. 14.8% do expect to leave Sumner within the next five years. Huge difference from 2024 in that top reason. Tax increases with the state. So that's something to keep in mind as we, in a few weeks, form our 2027 legislative agenda. There's nothing else huge I don't think in changes other than you see the negative, the reverse of the safety going up. You see crime concerns dropping quite a bit. And then housing market mortgage rates, I'm guessing that's a reflection of the real estate market changing a little bit in two years. Top concerns, as I mentioned, growth and development went up, and that's not surprising as we're seeing some of the things we knew were coming in the permit pipeline actually going vertical and being visible. The part I think I was a little pleasantly surprised was the decrease in homelessness and crime. Again, this is the same information tracking across every question, which is interesting because that gives you confidence in that response, right? They're not answering one way on one question in a different way, a different question. So high confidence in that feedback. And traffic is holding right about the same. And again, that's more information on that if you want to delve into the actual numbers. Again, satisfaction is high. Here's where I said I thought it was interesting before that events took a little bit of a negative because here, variety of community programs and events took a significant gain. So this is one of those where the two different points are a little contradictory. This is more what I would expect to see, although the survey was early in the summer with Heritage Park coming back online, Hops Alley, seeing some of our events. We really see a growth. But they're all in about the same area still. Kudos to public operations and the water. I know you had a tour of the watershed not too long ago. Our drinking water quality went up, and so did police services, which is tracking all the other trends we're seeing, and everything else stayed right about the same. Again, these are, I should point out, these are services the city of Sumner provides directly. Next are services that are provided by our partners. So we just wanted to make that distinction so that we knew and they knew we know what we don't provide. We don't provide fire schools or anything like that. People are still pretty happy. The reason library services is missing a 2024 data is we actually missed them off the list and caught that after the last survey. So we added them in this year. So that's why the difference. Again, asking that safety question a different way, how safe do you feel walking in your neighborhood during the day and at night, and both went up. 94.7% is quite a number during the day. Even, I would argue, over 75% at night is quite a number as well. So good job to the police departments. Moving forward, as you can probably guess, seeing all these data points, that's the simple question, are we going in the right direction or the wrong direction? More people responded right direction than two years ago. So again, that's a really nice data point to see. And then top priorities. you'll see growth, not surprisingly, went up a little bit and where we took a negative was ensuring prompt police response. I would argue if they actually saw a change in prompt police response, the survey would change very quickly again. So just a reminder, I think at the end, Great Blue wrote it very well. Our positives are not things we can necessarily take our eye off of. That means our investments are working. All the hard work that Chief and his staff are doing are working. It doesn't mean you can stop doing what you're doing. And then where we see some negatives, particularly like around growth, are opportunities for improvement. So I just wanted to be sure people didn't think we saw that and went, oh, great.

Let me...

I'll make a note for in two years for you to have this feedback before you do the Community Partners Fund, if at all possible, in the schedule. But this was primarily asked while you were doing your Community Partners Fund to give you a little bit of feedback. All of them are trending fairly high and I think are in alignment with the choices you made a couple weeks ago. It's hard to pick. All of it is good, right? And so again, this is in your report. It's a lot of text to see in a presentation. I do like that they reminded on building on the strengths. So, you know, safety is trending very high. I know public safety is one of your top priorities. It probably shouldn't change. It is people's top priority. I think the takeaway is people are noticing the work that's being done and appreciating it. Preserving the characteristics residents like most, small town feel. You're doubling down on that. When Fox 13 called us adorable and said, they were using words like we were more intentionally adorable now with things like Hopsallie and Heritage Park. It was really nice to hear that people are seeing it and appreciating it and then knowing that growth and development are the place to for some opportunity to grow in our satisfaction and that's traffic roads mobility transportation and infrastructure and then continuing to track these over time so we keep seeing the trends and the changes I believe that was their last slide yes then it was about their company so Any questions for me that I can try? And then again, we will find a way to connect you with Great Blue to ask them directly. All right.

Council Member Evers.

Thank you, Carmen. You did a great job, by the way. Anyway, I thought that was – I didn't know that the city did that. I thought it was fascinating to read, and obviously growth is going to be – we kind of hear stuff that we already know, but there's some other stuff in there that kind of surprised me. But I just have to – there was like 600 or so people? Mm-hmm. And did it have to be Sumner residents? No. I wasn't clear on that.

No. So we did it in two parts. So the first part, they did have to be Sumner residents. It was an initial postcard invitation mailed to registered voters within the city of Sumner. And then we opened it up wide after that. So after that stage, because most people in town would take it off the postcard, then we opened it up wide to businesses and visitors and really anybody. And the only reason we did those two parts is should some data point have really skewed. You know, if everyone in Bonnie Lake took it and said, adding parking for Bonnie Lake to park at Sumner Sounder Station, you know.

Yeah.

Of course, if you're in Bonney Lake, that sounds fantastic, as long as it's not your house that's losing parking down here in the valley. If we saw a discrepancy like that, then we would have the two to compare it against. But the results you're seeing are residents, businesses, it's everybody.

Do we know how many of those 600 or so were residents?

Yeah, it was that first question. I think... Try not to spring my thumb going back. That was quality of life. I live here in Sumner. 81% responded they live here and own a home, and 12% say they live here in Sumner and rent.

Thank you.

And they could answer multiple things, right? Like, you know, Council Member Wilsey would own a business and live here, so that's why they don't add to 100.

Thanks, Carmen.

Uh-huh. Council Member Malcolm.

Thank you, Carmen, good stuff. Just as a data integrity, I guess, or not integrity, but just a comparison, do we use the same methodology of sending out cards and then opening up broadly? in 2024 as we did this year? It's the same?

Same, yes.

Perfect, thank you. And it seems like it's only about, we only got about 80% of what we got the previous year. Do we have any kind of theory on what that was?

It was a little down this year. We weren't sure why, and we actually extended it a week and did a don't forget, don't forget, don't forget, because people are deadline-driven. So other than... We couldn't see any. That's the reason for the other data points there on demographics is to see if you're completely missing somebody. And they shifted a little bit, but not much from 24 to 26. So we're not really sure why that's changed this year.

Great. And lastly, I was just thinking, as we go into the budget process, is there a way for us? I mean, this is probably a question for the mayor and for Jason, too. when we're looking at a budget item to be able to reflect back and say, oh, by the way, this is a really high priority that grew over the last year, and that you should keep that in mind as you're debating the dollars on that and whatnot. It'd just be nice to keep bringing this into bear as we're talking about budget decisions.

Well, okay. So I would say this, that yes, there's been a lot of discussion about this and in correlation with the asks that you'll see in the presentations tonight Chief McCurdy, you know, addressed it somewhat. So, yeah, we do look at this data and use it for quite a bit of different decision-making, including in the budget.

Yeah.

Would you agree with that? Okay, thanks. Thank you. All right. Oh, Council Member Isaacs.

Thank you for stepping in. You did great. I just had a question. I see there's a big representation of 35 and 55 and over age percent. Is there any, just seems like that sample size of under 35 I don't know the representation is so well. Do they have the same access as the duo? I'm just looking at a group of maybe two elementary schools that have parents in those schools that are in a small minority there. And I'm not a survey expert, so I don't know if that's 600. I mean, I'm just trying to do some quick math. I know a little over 11,000 residents, 18 and over, about 8,000. And we're looking at not even 600, which is maybe about 6.5% to 7% math people. It just seems like 6.5% of our population really representing this survey. The full demographic. The full demographic.

Yeah, like is that enough to give you... Yeah, I think with anything, I do think, and this is one thing where I really wish Great Blue could have been able to talk to us, but I think this is with using, because I am trying to remember my college statistics class to fully explain all of this. But I think if they had had significance concerns, you know, they did talk to me about the numbers are a little down from before. But if they had had significant concerns, I believe they would have flagged that to me. I don't think they would have put a report out saying their confidence level was 95%. I do think in general you're seeing, and Sumner bucks the trend. I mean, I was surprised when I got here how many respondents we could get to a survey. So it seems low for Sumner, but comparatively, I think it's still probably high for other communities. But you've heard a lot with the primary. The results were very low in voter turnout. People are not engaging the way we wish they would on different levels across civics, whether that's a survey or voting. So ways to up that, we did try to promote this all the different ways. It was in your print newsletter, but it was also on Instagram. The mayor did a video because YouTube is the way people are getting a lot of their news now. So we tried the different ways we know to hit more people and the widest range of demographics. But in two years, we'll take suggestions too on how to up that.

So it seems like the trend too, the younger age group is not as interested in supplying the information.

Correct. I believe that's pretty typical too.

Well, we do get old and care more. You brought 55 plus up and I'm thinking it's okay. There's a few of us up here. I would say that Carmen hit something really key statistically around the voters. We have approximately 6,500 registered voters here in the city and a little less than 1,700 actually vote. This last year, it was a bigger push than normal. So I think it kind of correlates. And I think when I saw the data, I did go out and look at towns this size, kind of statistically speaking. So I feel like we're in the realm. It's not enough for all of us, but I think you can track the data to get the answer. You know what I'm saying? So it does help. With that, Council Member, were you done? I apologize. Okay, thank you. Council Member Kenna.

No, I think that's a great point that Council Member Isaacs brings up. A couple of things that I was thinking about is just another way we get at least young people feedback, not exactly young families, but we do do the youth forum, high school youth forum every year. And so that's more of a workshop and intensive and you're hearing from different groups of kids every year. whatever it is, 30 minutes or something, they're changing out. And so we're getting their feedback, and I've done that for a couple years. The mayor and staff and people have joined, and so we do have that. I did wonder also, I've used a tool called Peach Jar, which is a digital flyer tool. Could be a good way of distributing, if you've considered that, maybe you've used it before, of distributing flyers or surveys to school families, because I get them for all sorts of community events and fairs and things like that. So that could be something. But I wondered also if I saw in the research dates there or the time frame, it was June 25. So this is basically right after rhubarb days, right? I wondered, it kind of got me thinking about just like little pulse surveys, because this is more of a longer survey, if there were specific like when the Ryan Park, when we start having ideas for that. We want to do a QR code. Here's a five question survey you can fill out in five minutes. Do we do anything that's a little snapshot on a specific issue? Can you describe some of those?

We do. And actually that was a, I believe Jeff Steffens pointed this out when we were looking at the responses is what's also changed is there's many, many ways to give responses to the city. You don't have to wait for the biennial budget survey, which is a good thing, right? When I first got here 20 years ago, I'd say we got closer to a thousand responses, but we didn't have all these other tools as well. And so I do think you have to take it holistically and we're not willing to stop talking with people the other months out of the year just so that the budget survey carries more of a weight to respond. We do quick surveys. There's one right now for utility boxes. I know the Senior Center did one of their services and what did people want to see? They did theirs by paper given their audience. We can use that Sumner Connects. We can use that for surveys. We can use it for ideas. I think actually Ryan Park, that project page right now is open for share your idea for the park. People can go on there anytime and say hey, I think you know we should X Y or Z You know, so we balance all of that with then, you know Being at rhubarb days or the mayor having her coffees or going into the senior center or like you said going all of us going into the schools so, you know a wide range of in-person quick polls, you know even asking something on social media and getting responses in the comments, so We have a wide range across the boards, and I do think that reflects then when this comes. It's an opportunity, but it's not, ooh, I got to take that because that's my one chance to tell the city what I'm thinking.

Right, and whenever you mention the word budget, a lot of people just tune out, right? So it's hard. We'll get you another time of the year, but thank you, Carmen.

Anyone else? Okay, looks like we're good. Thank you so much. All right, so City Administrator Jason Wilson, do you have a report?

Not tonight, Mayor.

Thank you very much. Okay, do we have anything around agenda setting? Anything, any changes to any of our committee meetings? Any changes anybody knows of or that needs? Council Member Malcolm.

Are we doing something with finance? Committee with? Okay, thank you. Sorry.

Okay, good? Okay, great. Thank you very much. All right, so with that being said, there's no changes, and we do not have an executive session tonight, so we will adjourn this meeting at 7.38 p.m. Thank you.