City Council - workshop

Okay, we are here for the Bend City Council work session. Let's do roll call. You can start, Councilor Mendez. Did you eat some pizza? I picked you.

Mike Riley, he, him.

Melanie Keebler, she, her. Megan Perkins, she, her. Megan Nahr, she, her.

Steve Platt, he, him. Ariel Mendez, he, him.

And Councilor Prentz is on her way to the meeting and will arrive later. Oh, she's online. Okay, so she's listening.

I am. Yeah, I'm actually parked right now. So this is good. So I'm here to Gina Franzosa. She heard.

All right, so we are starting with our CIP update.

Perfect. Thank you, Mayor. So Ryan Oster, I'm the director of the engineering department and supporting me up here and partnering with me. We have Sarah Hudson from the city management office and Corey Johnson, also from the engineering department. There's obviously a lot of thought and conversation that goes into this. they're going to elbow me and remind me of things that we have talked about that I have forgotten to mention. It'll be a joint presentation primarily from me, but don't be surprised if they jump in as well. Feel free to interrupt at any point if you have questions. Obviously, this is an interactive thing. The point of this today is really to focus on both the geobon and transportation and CIP updates. This is a mid-dynamic update, so nothing really new, but we will have about an hour here. Here's the agenda. we'll talk about a mid biennium update and what that means we'll go through the process timeline i'll share a quick calendar of kind of what we've been doing to date and how we got to this point then we'll take a little bit of a deeper dive into both the geobon and the transportation fund and then of course council discussion related to those And then I do have a little bit of an update on our other important water services slash utilities side of the house. But we'll have a more in-depth discussion on those topics at a June 24th council work session meeting next month. So that being said, the overall objectives of this meeting, we add another year at the end of the five-year CIP, right? So a year has come and gone. It was weird to talk about fiscal year 30, and now we're talking about fiscal year 31, but here we are. Overall, we just, the whole point of this is to make sure we're still in alignment with council goals, community expectations, financial projections, and everything so that they're still delivering the way both this public and the council expects of us. And then really just to highlight some of the things that have changed. if you'll recall we we had a nice friendly work session meeting while we were all down here in a horseshoe back in october so we took that feedback and we've implemented that into the draft cips it's it's not shown in the presentation but you you all have or should have access to the draft cip as an attachment as well as a memo kind of describing the changes that we've experienced this year so we can reference that at any point in time And that really gets us to where we are today and the idea of here's what we understand as staff that we're being asked to do. There's a few fundamental questions that we do want to run by you. And so we're going to introduce these questions up front. Don't want to take too deep of a dive into them yet because the presentation should answer a lot of these. What we're sitting at today is with respect to both of these funds. We have the GEO bond fund and we have the transportation fund. So on the GEO bond side, questions to consider is the consolidation of the ODOT money. That's something we talked about in October and what possibilities lie ahead of us in terms of what to do with that money. We've outlined three potential options there. So we'll take a bit of a deeper dive into those after kind of going through all of the possibilities. And then on the transportation side, a little bit less excitement there, but there are some things that we have adjusted, whether it's moving a project up or back in the schedule as well as accounting for things that weren't in there when we adopted the biennium budget. and really just ensuring if you have other priorities you'd like us to consider. The transportation fund is where we maybe have a little bit more flexibility within reason, but the GEO bond fund obviously is more in sync and it has to, you know, we got to deliver what we said to the public on there. And then the third question really is you're going to be at next week's council meeting. You're going to be seeing code updates for AHAC, BDAB and TVOC. A lot of acronyms there, but one of those is the reformatting of the Transportation Bond Oversight Committee into more of a general Transportation Oversight Committee. So what are you asking of them moving forward? And out of this update, what would you like us to go back to them to consider and work on now that they're going to have a little bit more ability to look at both the bond and the transportation fund? So those are the high-level things to consider. We will show this slide again at the end of the presentation, and we'll kind of run through each of these options in more detail. So timeline-wise, we adopted the current biennium budget we're operating under now back in July of 25. A couple months later, that previously mentioned work session where we talked about the geobond and transportation fund. Internally as staff, we continue to deliver projects. So we make budget adjustments at the end of each calendar year. We make fiscal year projections of how much more we're going to spend, how much needs to roll over. Here we are in May of 26, having an update meeting. All of this is leading to the mid biennium budget adjustment adoption. And then once we're done with all of this and we approve the mid biennium, it's only a few short five or six months from now that we're going to be talking about the next biennium. So keep that in mind is there's never a final decision point. You always have flexibility moving forward. And every six months or year that goes by, we have better information. We have more concrete numbers about how much something like the reed market over crossing bridge is going to actually cost. And so with that certainty allows more flexibility in what to do with some of this other money. So jumping into the GEO bond at a high level, Where we sit today is the original resolution that was passed, Resolution 3218. Out of that $190 million, it basically called for about 180 in projects and another $10 million in just general overhead, about 5%, which is actually a pretty good number when it comes to this. That's to help pay for the additional staff we brought on board. That pays for overhead costs. There's a lot of management and administrative work that has to go into working with the bond and who else we work with here on the financial side, and then just monitoring this from investment income side and all of the things that go into that. So that's the original intent. For reasons we've previously discussed, and we can jump into more should we want to, our current spend rate is far exceeding that original $180 million intended. The good news is, is with the REIT market grant, which we are confident will be hitting soon. We got confirmation from the Federal Railroad Administration over the last couple days that I think because we've constantly been, I don't want to say pestering them, but we're getting them to move at lightning speed, which is not normal. We're confident that we're going to be coming to you on the June 3rd council meeting with the actual grant language and asking Council for acceptance of that $32 million. And so everything we're talking about here is under the assumption that that $32 million will hit and will be programmed into the next budget that you're going to be adopting. So the good news is overall it's with that $32 million, it basically trues us up. It takes us back to the projection that Corey ran for us here is we're right back to where we should be in terms of how much we can deliver from a project standpoint. So winning a $32 million grant did not mean, oh, great, we've got an extra $32 million we can spend. it basically brought us back to where we should be so that that could be viewed as how did we get there but also is okay at least we're back to where we need to be overall that does give us some flexibility moving forward and we'll talk about that in more detail um and there's there's some other areas within the geo bond that we might have the potential uh to consider of what to do with with some funds that should be freed up so ryan can i ask you a question

Uh, I mean, I'm so amazed at the, at the grant work that our, that our city did to get that. That was fantastic. Um, and so much changed for 2020 after we get right here. So the burn rate is where it is. And it's because of a lot of what's happened in the world. What I'm trying to think about here is we're sitting up on the dais. We're looking at five years in the, in the front of where we are right now. What can we do to try to help with all that's going on in the world? to help you get as much of a predictable outcome as possible.

I appreciate that. No, that would be a really good conversation to have in terms of we've managed to true this back up, but we have to be very cautious moving forward. And over the next five years, we don't put ourselves back into that position. So a good example is the Butler Market project that's being built right now. So the original scope of that from the TSP and from the Geobond is I'll read it here. So shared use path adjacent to the roadway, close sidewalk gaps and create a low stress network. That's a kind of a general description. In reality, what we're building is a fully protected shared use path on both sides. That is much more expensive than the original project that was outlined not only in the TSP, but money that was dedicated from the GEO bond. So internally, we've already, you know, we've been asked on projects that, you know, whether it's like the Bear Creek or 27th work that's going on now, you're building a shared use path on the north side of Bear Creek and on the east side of 27th or the west side of 27th. Why not both sides? Why not both sides of 27th? And our answer is we just we can't like we can't afford that. We have to stick to the original intent. so right now what we've built on 27th is a shared use path on the west side and we're just putting in missing sidewalk on on the east side which which is great it's a dramatic improvement but it's it's not as far as we would have hoped to have gone given how our standards have evolved since 2020 in the passing of this so just an understanding i think would be best for staff of we can't do everything we would all like to see. We just don't have enough left in the geobond to do that moving forward.

From the dais, not requirements or designments creep is what I'm hearing.

Yeah, it's scope creep. It's not uncommon because nobody would deny that a shared use path on both sides is a better option. You've got the bikes out of the roadway, you have a 10-foot path, in some cases, a dedicated bike lane and a dedicated sidewalk behind the curb. that's amazing i would love to build that everywhere um but it requires right-of-way purchase purchases it's a utility movements and all of that just adds up and adds up so we can't keep doing as much as we would like to do i really appreciate that ryan and i think that one other thing that i was thinking about is in our growth plan part of that is transportation system update right that and and so I I feel like there's going to be some friction yes there as we as we hit that what what can we do to to avoid or or smooth that out as we approach that yeah I mean I I one thing Council did not long ago or a couple years ago maybe is you know key we want all 12 key routes built but we really want a Bend bikeways north south east west that is the priority so we were willing to overspend on those specific ones But as we're building these other key routes, we're going to stick to what the original description said. That's where we need to come back to, what is the intent? We're going to build this backbone and then over time, it's going to take a while, we will connect things to this and then we'll mark it, we'll way find it and eventually, but we just can't deliver everything everybody would like to see in such a short time frame. And so, yeah, as we're going into this TSP discussion, it really is a prioritization effort in saying, yeah, we all agree that would be a nice thing to have, but we got to price everything out appropriately. We got to factor in inflation since 2020 that, you know, the cost of oil and everything we're experiencing and be understanding that we can change scope somewhat. But if we do it here, we got to pull it back somewhere else. Thanks for the background. Absolutely.

So, can I just add, I think I also want to. Because we're having this question, it's not, we're just not coming up with things when they come to the open houses or when they do the projects in their neighborhood, or they think about how they want to get around are asking for a lot of these things. So, I think we've refined. I've seen us refine over the years, helping our community understand. Option A, B, and C, if you want both sides, it's going to be shorter because we don't have money to go all the way here. And just really helping people understand the trade-offs with the restriction of our money. I'm also going to say something here about our grant for the Read Market Bridge. that reflects a federal administration that was keyed in on infrastructure across this country and put historic levels of money towards infrastructure, that if that had continued and we had an administration that was continuing that right now, we'd also, I think, be seeing a lot more opportunities to enhance these projects with grant funding. The current DOT priority appears to be moving away from all of that um just purely the funding itself but also the idea of any kind of transportation that's not in a car um and that doesn't align with our community values right and that's a huge resource that we are basically fighting against while administration also is causing the chaos that you just mentioned around inflation oil costs tariffs everything else. So there's a lot of headwinds. And I think it's a good question to ask on how we stay focused on trying to deliver these projects, and that people need to understand that there are going to be restrictions. And we're gonna have to find other sources of money if we want to make more enhancements.

Yeah, that's a great point. A good case in point is Midtown Crossings, right? We all understand Franklin, Greenwood, and Hawthorne. If you go back to the original language, it said explore all three, try to build one of them if you can. Because we won grant, we're building all three of them. Like we did not expect to be able to do that. So Hawthorne grant money, Reed Market grant money, like we struck while the iron was hot and fortunately we were successful. I mean, that's an additional $60 million worth of infrastructure that we secured to supplement the GEO bond. So good news. So key items for the bond. The biggest thing right now is at ODA or at Council's guidance, We took all of the ODOT contribution money, which included $10 million from Murphy and then another couple million from Powers, Colorado, Butler Market, and even some Empire money. We pulled all that together. That's a $17 million bucket of money. And so the options we displayed at that, you know, questions to consider is would council like to continue trying to find a way to partner with ODOT? Or is there a different plan of attack you would like us to explore? So ODOT contribution money is a bucket that we can do something with. But we'll dive into that in more detail when we get to the question slide. A few other things that we're exploring as staff right now is there are a couple of projects on the GEO bond that, you know, as time has passed, you know, staff has taken a closer look and it's like we understand the intent when the TSP was adopted and when the bond passed. But we're not sure if that's the right thing to do today. We're not sure. A good example of that is it's called the Colorado Capacity Improvement Project. There's $7 million allocated For that and the intent was really thank you, Corey. It says incremental approach for Colorado Ave Whiting right of way acquisition, including intersection capacity at Colorado and Simpson as well as Colorado and industrial way. So what could we do with the roundabout? Do we need to widen the bridge? What can we do with the signal? And we've done some feasibility work in. it's not a $7 million investment that's going to really move the needle. So is there something we could do there? Probably. So we'll come back as staff and recommend for, for a million or 2 million or whatever, we can do this and that'll help a little, but an extra five to 7 million is not going to really do much in different. So we're looking at projects like that. We're looking at, I've got Chase Peril Powers listed on here. That's another one kind of connected to the Powers interchange. And another one I was talking to staff about today is the Ani project. The original budget for that was 14, but the timber yards master plan development is taking a good chunk of that off of our. where are we gonna have leftover money at ONI when we're done building it? So all that to be said, there's the ODOT contribution bucket as well as other buckets that six months, a year from now, I think we can have a really good conversation about here's where we would actually recommend we should spend that money. And what could we do that would give us a better rate of return on this investment?

Peter Haslund, The other things to have to pull them in yes, please yeah sorry i'm the chase peril powers is is that a similar thing where there might still be some smaller investment than what was originally envisioned because that's a five or $6 million.

Yeah, I think that total all in, if we could find it, it's connected to the Chase Broster House roundabout in the transportation fund. So that 90 degree turn in Broster House and private development has built right up to it. And so putting a roundabout in there would give access from Chase down to peril. And the question then is, how do you get from Chase to Powers?

I guess what I think I heard from you already was that the original intention on that project was that it would help with the flow of traffic when during especially during the closure during the right yeah instead of doing some of these projects before that happened um i think what i've been hearing is that that's maybe the modeling is not showing that it really makes much of a difference anymore so if the scope is there still a smaller scope that would be required so if that's five million it is spend one, one and a half still. And so we're not netting 5 million out of that or that one we just...

not doing well. Yeah, well, that would be the question is, do we just let it be what it is with these offset intersections? I think the all-in concept was maybe like a dog bone roundabout that would allow you to smoothly go from powers to chase. The modeling doesn't show that it's going to really make that dramatic of a change because ultimately it puts you on to the powers interchange, which is still signalized, and it's not an ideal setup for where we want to push people. Again, if ODOT was able to work with us and build an overpass at Powers, which we would all like to see, then a project like that would probably mean a lot more. So yeah, that's another one where we're questioning whether that investment is really going to give us that much of a difference when it comes to where the traffic is going to go. So a couple other things to hit on the bond side. You will see that we're proposing to capture what I'm calling Butler Market Phase 2. Right now we're building Butler Market Phase 1, which is from the 8th Street roundabout east up to Brinson. And that includes money from the Transportation Fund to build the Butler Wells roundabout. But it's all the bond is paying for all the shared use paths between the H Street roundabout in Brinson. We now need to come back and finish that gap from the Ben bikeways. And so we have a small section that we need to do between the 8th Street roundabout west to the Butler Boyd intersection. So we have program that money into the bond. We've also programed the money to improve the intersection itself in the transportation fund. So the idea is we've lined these up and we can in an ideal world we bid out this other work and we basically move straight from phase one into phase two, and then that will complete the north-south area of the Bend Bikeways project. It'd build a protected intersection at Butler-Boyd, and then somebody could be on a shared use path all the way to Brinson down through the Butler-Boyd intersection. So that is currently reflected in the draft CIP on both the bond and transportation side. We've also plugged in money for what we're calling the Hawthorne Extensions Project, right? So we've had this conversation of what's going to happen when the bridge lands, what's going to happen once we get over to Harriman and once we get to Third Street. So we've got geobond money programmed in there to at least design something. There is no money program to build it yet. So that's another what if when we're talking about this flexible bucket of money, whether it's ODOT or other projects. So we're going to design it. That's the money you see in the draft CIP. But if we want to fund the construction, we need to still develop a good cost estimate of that. And if that's something council wants to move forward, we would plug that into the biennial budget that we would bring back to you in eight or nine months. And the 3rd thing that we have put in the draft is reflective of the that council signed with the parks board, and that is to fund the design and construction of the Gilchrist bridge. And that's a 1.4Million dollar contribution. That will take that currently city owned asset and it will, it's an allocation to the parks district. They will design it. They will build it through their process. And when it's all said and done, they will take over ownership of that bridge. So it's one less of an asset. that we as a city need to own, which is it's interesting because it connects the Deschutes River Trail to a park. So we really probably shouldn't be in the business of owning that bridge to begin with. So that is also reflected based on the IGA. Keep that in mind as we transition to the transportation fund, because we could do something similar with the Drake Park Bridge if you're interested. So I'll pause there to see if there's anything further on the geobond side. If you want to go through any of the projects shown in the draft CIP, we can go through any of those individually. But that is the summary of the draft bond CIP you have before you.

Any questions? Yeah. Yeah. So the ODOT contributions, are there restrictions on that? I mean, so you're saying, it sounds like you're saying we could just take it and... do whatever with it, but.

Yeah, no, that's a great question. Yeah, I appreciate that. So the bond resolution obviously has bumper pads, right? We can't just say we're going to take this 17 million and put it on a completely different project that's not in the geo bond resolution. ODOT, they have $5 million in their proposed STIP, which is their version of a CIP that they're trying to adopt for their 2027 through 2030 STIP. That's a $5 million plug to do some signal improvements at whether you call it 20 or 3rd Street, it transitions there and Empire. That signal has gotten worse since North Corridor Phase 1 has opened up. So their intent is whether the city is going to play in that sandbox with them or not. They recognize the need for some improvements at that signal. It could be a right turn lane from Empire on the 20. It could be some other modifications. So they're looking to do something there to begin with. The options we listed there is would the city want to Does the city want to contribute to the empire improvement at a limited amount of money? Because we see the need to do improvements across the interchange at the exit and on ramps and off ramps. The other option we presented was the missing key in all of this that everybody has known for years is there's no southbound direct connection from 20 to 97. So an idea that we're kicking around with ODOT that they're open to is maybe we take some of their $5 million, if not all of it, and some additional money from the city, and we just build a direct connection which would alleviate a lot of traffic off of Empire. Sure way. So we're working through some initial cost estimates with ODOT now. I don't have those yet, but that is a consideration of what we could potentially do with some of that ODOT contribution money. And that would be well within the limits of the bond resolution. Doing an improvement at Empire, in my opinion, and we, of course, could run this by legal, Doing a direct connection is a benefit to Empire. That's an improvement on Empire. So I think we're in safe harbor there. But we can vet all of these in terms of the resolution language. And if Elizabeth or anybody would want, they could jump in if you have a more direct question related to that.

That's helpful. Thank you. for a future conversation too. And I just want people watching to know when it says ODOT contributions, this was in the bond that this is little pieces of money we give to ODOT, assuming ODOT is bringing their big pot of money to make all these big improvements and we're just gonna help out. And that is not what's going on. Four years we've known that's not what's going on. So I think when we had that discussion as a round table, we were recognizing if we sit this pot of money and wait for ODOT to come to the table on the powers overpass, it will not be within the bond period, right? So we're trying to figure out how to use this money in a way that's actually going to build a project, right?

Yeah. So I have two questions, one related to this project. So do we not have some money in the bond measure for Empire?

Yeah, so outside of this 17, there's still a 1.4, 1.5. 1.45. What? 1.45 for Empire. So if you don't want to use any of this 17, we could take that 1.45, add it to ODOT's 5, and we could focus on Empire alone.

Or we could add it.

Or you could add more. So we're developing kind of three different tiers, kind of the small, medium, and large package. Small is really the ODOT-focused work. The medium is ODOT plus us. And the larger package is that direct connection southbound from 20 to 97.

And as part of that, can you do the modeling? We're looking out a little bit in a little bit of time, at least, you know, let's say 10 years out, which takes us beyond the current growth plan. Maybe what was done for the TSP just because I'm assuming a fair bit of new growth is going to happen.

Right.

Oh, yeah.

So we're going to use all these intersections that will come in and out of the community.

Are you able to do any quick and dirty, like, well, if we had X amount of new... houses up there and the jobs that are associated with June 4 Ridge and see how it influences these possible solutions?

Yeah, absolutely. And that's part of the exercise. If you want to give us guidance to take a deeper dive into that with ODOT, yeah, we would run a full model of different scenarios and say, yeah, if we build this direct connection, it's going to take the level of service at Empire from an F to a B. You know, 20 years from now, it's going to climb back up, but it would do a lot to. So, yes, the answer is we will model that. We will come back with cost estimates for each of those options and the resulting traffic impacts for doing those.

So shifting gears to Hawthorne, then the design money. Tell me a little bit more about the scope. I mean, are you thinking like designed all the way to like 4th Street or 5th Street or on the east side?

where on the west side yeah so yeah it goes to like right now we're going to hill right with the current project with the bridge it's right the current bridge scope is taking us to hill street yeah so the extension work basically looks north and south of Harriman so this takes you from hill street to Harriman and then it looks to connect south into crossing uh greenwood and then ultimately franklin and then tying into the ben bikeways system and then north it ties into the only improvement work that we have done up there recently so it's not looking to go into downtown or anything but it's really focusing how do we connect the bikeways yes on the bikeways uh you know low stress network that we already have identified so it's really a north south focus on the west side but it is an eastern focus to On the east side, it's crossing third, crossing fourth, getting all the way over to Juniper. How do we more safely cross third? How do we integrate with CET? We've had conversations with them. about what it could look like in terms of where buses park. But then it transitions for a block into a highly residential area. So yeah, the extension project, there's that full scope.

I think we should talk about that a little bit. It looks like you're talking about the roads. To me, when I read that, I see something that's in fact the driving. So just to make sure the framing is the right way for the public, what we're talking about is the bikeway project. and how we better connect what we've built into moving primarily cyclists, but also pedestrians safely.

Roads probably misleading. That's probably the nod. It could just be the Hawthorne extension. It's a bikeway to continue that connection.

All right, let's get in the transportation.

Okay, jumping to the transportation fund. So highlights here again, if you compare the existing that you've adopted versus the proposed 1, it's really just a slight prioritization of some of the projects based on feedback made some recommendations. Council said, yeah, that's fine. We got some feedback related to an NSSP project that we were trying to do on Century. So we adjust the timing of the Tetherow slash Century slash Bachelor View Drive intersection. Key takeaways though is we're servicing a lot of debt on the transportation side. So if you look at the draft CIP, there's a decent amount of money in there. You'll see the REED market grant funding show up on top. which gets added to the total sum but that's a that's a good portion of the money so you kind of gotta ignore that that line and then look below that and the i that the idea is that you know two three years from now our transportation construction fund really after servicing the debt will only have enough money to maybe you know i like to say seven or eight finance tells me five or six you know we'll we'll find some problem ground in there um but basically you'll see there's maybe a couple intersections a year and so in years three four and five you'll see something like we're gonna design two intersections while we're building two the next year we're gonna design you know build the ones we were designing and design two more and it's just kind of a two at a time moving forward as we go so we are a little bit limited outside of the next couple years so That being said, the key differences you'll see is we have moved Tetherow and Century up. I think we all see the benefit of creating a roundabout entry coming back from the mountain. You're really transitioning from the rural to the urban, and we want to slow speeds down. We would also integrate a safe crossing there so people can connect out to Phil's Trail and up through Tetherow. So that was a priority we heard from council. I mentioned it a little bit briefly earlier, but we are funding the Butler-Boyd protected intersection through the transportation fund tied to Butler Market Phase 2. The Bond and Reed Market roundabout is an interesting one. At Council's request, we have accelerated that. I'm about to push that RFP out on the street in the next week or two. I have shown an increase in funding. So in the current CIP, I think there was four, what did he say, four and a quarter at that intersection, which was an evolution from the 750,000 we had originally when we were going to consider something like signalizing the roundabouts. So I took it from there to four and a quarter. At the October work session, there was a good discussion about what are we going to ultimately build there. There's the hybrid option versus the full double lane option. So manage to squeeze a little bit more money into that project so that council isn't limited by funding. I would rather you have the discussion and decision be made based on capacity, safety, speeds, and other things. So if you want to go a full double, we will come up with a plan that we think would be safe to do it. And so you'll see an increase in funding to a little over $7 million. at that intersection because it will be a complex project either way and i didn't want funding to be the limiting factor of whatever the decision may be so that's important to note um we that that will be multiple touch points not only public outreach but ultimately back to council to say you could do path a or path b at this cost or this cost and uh we will we will present a couple options for you on that one Drake Park Bridge, so this is piggybacking the Gilchrist Bridge. In the current CIP, you have, even in the draft CIP, in the next two years, we're showing half a million and half a million. And the idea behind that has always been, let's get the design moving, let's get something on paper, and then maybe we'll go for some grants. Maybe we'll find, we'll use some other funding options to fund the construction of that. We obviously we have some success on the Gilchrist side. So one of the primary questions the council is, if you want us to be aggressive here, we could bump that up to, say, a million and a million rather than a half and a half. And I think two million all in would probably be enough for us to sign another IGA with parks to say, here you go. We'll make the contribution. yeah have a nice day and ultimately it's another asset off of our books that is connecting up you know two sides of the same park so that that's a good question for council if you'd like us to do that i'm hoping i don't break the model by asking for an extra million dollars i don't think we will but uh but if council would like us to do that we will we'll rerun the model and make sure that's something we can afford

Ryan, just on the Drake Park footbridge question, could you remind me again why or what the cost would be if we just resurface the planks and make them smooth?

Good question. I couldn't give you a good number for that off the top of my head. If you tried to maintain the existing piers and structure that's in the water and just worked above that, I mean, I would want some guarantee that the piers are gonna last for another 50 years, which I'm not confident they would, but we could explore that option if you're interested in doing that. I'm gonna throw out a number of maybe a few hundred thousand dollars if we wanted to look at rehabbing the existing bridge. You know, rather than the strollers, you know, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump as you go across that thing. But I want to do a real good structural analysis of what's under the under the surface there.

It's going to cost us some money, right?

Yeah, yeah, that would, yeah, just doing this rehab consideration. I mean, but behind the feasibility side of it and the cost, I mean, it's probably at least a half a million. And that would, maybe we could get another 10 or 20 years. But it's an interesting idea. I wouldn't want to throw that out if that's something. Bring a planer out there. Right, yes, yeah.

Yeah, we also have enough. I mean, I hope you have an opportunity to pursue some funding through the sustainability fund. Yeah. Yeah. There's other films about this once this project is shovel ready.

Yeah. And I can't promise that parks would say great. We'll take this asset.

It's not that's not new and guaranteed to last another. The only bridge that's not been improved or. There's been some new ones and then there's been some that have been replaced, or I guess the 1 is being replaced at Gilchrist. Yeah. Right so this is the last bridge that we haven't made a full investment to sort of guarantee that we've got 5075 more years. Yeah.

So, what the idea be, if we were going to do new. we take whatever money, the 500 over two years or the 1 million over two years, hand it to parks and say, now go forth, go find some grants parks, or are we helping with the grant? How is this working?

If we go from a million over the next two to 2 million over the next two, that should fully fund the whole thing. so that yeah that would be us saying hey parks we will build you a new bridge if you take it off we could build a new bridge for two million yes i believe we did okay if gilcrest is 1.4 this one's a little longer a little more complex but i think 2 million should be enough to to get that asset off of our books and on to theirs and then 50 to 75 years from now we're not worried about having to rehab it or rebuild it this is this is built into their system got it okay that makes sense Okay, last two bullets on here is, you'll remember the Galveston project, which is 15, 20 years in the making, just was at the River West neighborhood district meeting last night. Thank you to the counselors who showed up to that. There's some good buzz about that project now, but we are gonna get going finally on building something on Galveston. So that will start this summer with transportation and mobility crews doing driveway and alley replacements and then phase two will be in the fall and that will be a raised crossing out on 17th to the west which when we mentioned that got a good applause from the audience which never happened so that was exciting it was even more than just good applause yeah yeah i was ready to walk out of the meeting right yeah right then

That's great.

I think someone said mic drop even. Yeah. And then phase three, which is more the Galveston proper area, will happen kind of from the winter into the spring of next year with a final grind and inlay of the asphalt and restriping. And so Galveston basically is going to start this summer. And my goal is to get it done by either by the spring or summer of next year. And we can finally cross that off of our project to-do list. um that's been been hanging over there for a while and then last thing i'll mention um and it is intentional that the word study is in all caps here is one of the few remaining projects from from our transportation system plan uh for the first 10 years which is really an amazing thing to say is we basically have every project we wanted to do after the adoption for is a southern crossing river crossing bridge feasibility analysis and so there's no money allocated for design there's no money allocated for construction this will kick off A very healthy conversation that I imagine. So, but, but we, we did program this in new and I think it's important that we do it as you probably all know, parked a little bit ahead of us with respect to developing a pedestrian bridge crossing. And these things are going to kind of work hand in hand, but. We do need to at least initiate a feasibility study. The initial guidance was to focus between Powers and Murphy. I'm going to put an RFP out that just says anything south of Reed Market, we're willing to look at so it's going to be a very high level study it's going to outline all the pros and cons of considering doing a southern river crossing all the legal ramifications that we know would be we'd be getting into all the environmental impacts that that would be outlined with with considering doing a southern bridge south of reed market All that is to ultimately say, we talked about the Bond and Reed market roundabout, but at some point, no matter what we build there, the Bill Healey Bridge and the rest of Reed market is going to hit capacity someday. Is another bridge south of there in a growing city like ours, something we should consider? The feasibility study may come back and say, no, don't consider doing it. It may come back and say, sure, go ahead and consider it, and here's the things you need to do if that's going to become a reality. So we're open to whatever this study may result in us doing. Questions on any of those key items?

Okay.

Great. All right. Let me kind of overview this.

And we've got like 20-ish minutes.

I'll try to wrap up the last.

We can go a little over that, but it's a time check.

So I know this isn't the easiest read, so the next two slides will be a little bit easier, but this is just an overview of projects that either the Geobond or the Transportation Fund will be building over the next five years. This doesn't include any utilities work. This doesn't include private development work. This doesn't include things like street preservation projects or anything like that. So as you can see, it's a good amount of work on some pretty important roads in the city. So breaking this down a little bit tighter, this is the north half of the map. So we are programmed to do a roundabout at Empire and O.B. Riley. We're currently building Butler Market phase one. We would be adding Butler Market phase two. We have two roundabouts on 27th, both at 27th and Wells and 27th and Connors. We have the NEF pedestrian improvements project, which you'll see a contract for here next week. We've got what we call the four pack of intersections then, so we're moving on that. We've got the Hawthorne bridge that you're intimately involved with. We've got the rest of the Franklin work for midtown crossing. We've got the improvements project as well as the Galveston stuff that I mentioned. So all of that work is going to be built on the north side of the city in the next 5 years.

The 4 pack is are some of those kind of the mini roundabouts. Is that where they're drawn smaller on here? Just.

Good question. I don't have a legend on here.

Those are signals.

Yeah. The cheerio looking things are roundabouts. The dots are signals. That's intentional because Fourth Street is so close to the signals at Third Street. When you put those two side-by-side, it removes the capacity that you get from a roundabout because the cars are coming out of the signal in queues, and that just interrupts the whole idea of a free-flowing roundabout. So likely going to build signals at 4th and only 4th and Revere, but that's far enough away from the signals that we would be looking to build roundabouts at 8th and only and 8th and Revere. Okay, on the south side, it's a little bit lighter, but you can see here's the Tethro Century roundabout. Here's the Bond Reed roundabout. Here's the Chase Broster House roundabout. This isn't quite as dramatic as it looks, but the key in all this is the Reed Market bridge crossing over the rail, right? So that's gonna be a full closure of Reed Market. For what I'm saying to be safe is probably Most of all of 2028 and all of 2029. Hugely impactful to everybody will also be building the shared use path on the night on the on the West side of 9th St. Shared use path here. We're going to be double laning 15th and read. shared use path down 15th, and then finally building that roundabout needed at 15th and Ferguson. And then we also have a couple other roundabouts on Knott Road, both at Country Club and Broster House, which are just problem intersections and have always kind of especially country earth yeah country club is always high on our crash uh crash data so these are all programmed to happen so just in that area you can see there's not only new roundabouts but it's it's the the widening of two existing roundabouts so it'll be the highest roundabout per capita for all this

almost still way behind caramel yeah no caramel indiana has got so running though okay so or that's a significant increase yeah it's a good number to either read and build new or rehab yeah council friends

um about roundabout so the eighth and only i've received some concerns from folks in the community and i'm i'm pretty concerned about it too um because i don't believe it's a very high crash intersection right now as a as a signalized intersection it's it's really large intersection so it's kind of difficult to get through as a pedestrian um or a cyclist uh but um it just seems that there could be a lot more low-cost safety measures down there as well as maybe some smart signal improvements there that are way less than what you would pay for.

around about um so was that considered yes is that evaluated side by side yes it has been and i'd be happy to share share that information with you and the rest of council so at peak hour that the intersection backs up it we give it a level of service f at peak hour uh but but it's only really during a limited window of time right so the fundamental question is could we do some more minor improvements and really what this boils down to is that you know as you know that the western leg of this has a retaining wall on the south side so unless we're willing to bust into that retaining wall we can do some signal modifications but it's not going to buy us a lot of time whereas the roundabout footprint because it is an existing intersection it would buy us a lot more in terms of capacity and for a longer period of time so yes a more expensive option but that that's kind of where we've landed as a staff evaluation But, of course, council can direct us to do something different if you want to see something different there, but every intersection we dive into, we run it through an intersection evaluation form. We lean towards being around about for city. And so that's where that specific evaluation landed and kind of 2 of our 3 main criteria. um but i will share the information and be happy to take a deeper dive if needed into that and well it's coming up on our agenda in june it is yeah yeah it'll be something coming out that yeah and maybe if we can go to the council touch points and kind of Yep, keep moving here. So, yeah, real quick. Yeah, this is just what we're going to keep monitoring over the next, you know, year and even the life of the rest of the bond. I'll kind of skip through that though. Council touch points. This is just to highlight how often we're going to be coming back to you with geo bond or transportation related items. So you're going to see the REED market grant, the NEF improvement contract, GMP four for Franklin, which is the final, it's the undercrossing work that we're negotiating right now. We've got 15th and Ferguson. We've got the four pack to your point, Mayor. Neighborhood street safety contracts, the adoption of the proposed five-year CIP and a few other things. So multiple touch points over the next couple months with council just on getting more things moving to build what we showed you we're gonna do. So that being said, it brings us back to this overall council considerations. So I'll pause there and see how we would like to dive into these options or questions and if there's additional guidance you'd like to take as staff.

Sure. And I think we can start with, and we don't have to stay there, but start with this idea of the ODOT contribution money, which came out of the roundtable we had last October of pooling that together and maybe doing something else with it. So I think it would be helpful for staff to hear if folks have particular leanings of which way we might be thinking about using that money. And just to be clear as well, like we're adopting a CIP plan in June, and there will be further budget decisions that happen after this, as Ryan mentioned. So there are also possibilities to make changes in the future if we feel like we have to, but staff is sort of trying to figure out what direction we're heading and how to incorporate our feedback from that roundtable into the actual CIP for the next five years.

There's one thing I haven't heard about yet, and that is just contingencies. Do we need to be considering any kind of contingency reserves for both, in particular, the Hawthorne project and Farid? Yes, thank you for saying that. No, we can pull this somehow out of the bond measure. I mean, we have roughly a million. I mean, we're a million shy of . So we're basically equal. So I'm asking the question. That's not on the list here.

It's not going to be on the list contingencies in the budget though, right?

But that's so that's part of it.

Let's go right into the question.

What amount of contingencies?

So a good example is the read market bridge. We're at about a 30% design. We're about to get the grant funding. We estimate that's a 46 million dollar project, but costs will evolve between 30% and 100%. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if that goes up to 47, 48, 49 million. So yes, the answer to your question is we've budgeted 46, but we probably do need to reserve some contingency, especially for those two bridges as the designs continue to be finalized.

Knowing that when we get to the place where we know what the costs are, then we can, if that money's freed up, you know, how long we need to hold that. I think that needs to be part of what we consider.

What is the contingency that you assume now?

Yeah, right.

Yeah. So for something like Reed Market at a 30%, you could still go up or down anywhere from 20 to 30%, I would say. By the book, it might go up or down 50%, but I feel pretty confident in the work we've done in working with the Federal Rail Administration. So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me. I mean, I don't think we're going to go up 20 or 30%, but that would be normal to account for at this point in time.

And how is contingency reflected in the CIP as you budgeted it now?

Yeah. So 46, that factors in a little bit of that contingency. Like 10%? Yeah. I mean, it's not a huge number today, but I mean, when we get a 30% engineer's estimate, which is we had to run it by the rail, we said, great, you're providing 32, so we're going to account for our match. and so that's the other you know 13 you see out of the out of the geo bond so there's there's a few million in there but i wouldn't say it's it's the you know 10 to 15 million but i i would be disappointed if we kind of went beyond that but it would be safe to say let's let's make sure there's a little bit held in reserve just in case

Okay.

Thank you. So it's a, it's a little bit hard to make these kinds of allocation directions with without. Price tags on exactly. Yeah, I think I'm, I'm not interested in option 1, mostly because it's, I think it's an O dot project that needs to own and I don't want to see the city get involved in funding. What? really are fundamentally ODOT projects. My question is, you know, we have partial investment up there. How do we think about breaking this down into different parts? You know, is it, we have to go 17 million all for option two, or how can we provide the direction in terms of 50-50, or how do you Think about that.

Yeah. I mean, I have cost estimates being developed now that my consultant is doing. I would need to hand that over to ODOT and their team would make their own cost estimate. But I can't even tell you now if this southbound connection is going to be a $5 million, $10 million, or $15 million investment. My gut's telling me it'll be less than $17 million. okay and so you could you could if you wanted to now to say we're interested in throwing maybe seven or eight into that kitty and you know if it winds up coming back that the city needs to put 10 in there that's something we would discuss with you over the course of the next you know eight or ten months okay so i think i would of the of the options up there i think option three has the

Probably the highest merit because of the safety component to it. We had 362 applications for the NSSP, the Neighborhood Safe Streets Program, when it first opened. These were extensive applications, and we've only built 22 to date. Not saying that we would have to build all of them, but there's no funding for that program left. And it's one of the most popular programs in the city. So I would be interested in saying, you know, let's reserve some funding to continue the NSSP, uh, study Hawthorne connections and think about what it would take to actually fund those connections and then see what we have in reserve to do something at Empire.

Okay. I just want to remind council, I've mentioned a couple of times that ODOT capital planning process that started this year and it's going to go forever and ever. But eventually dollars will be allocated and we've had come up with a list of projects that aren't on this that aren't on this list. So I feel like I kind of feel like I wish this information was presented along the lines of what Councilor Mendez was saying with some criteria that we could judge and compare them. so like cost data um what we looked at compare what sorry i'm confused the different projects the different options so so first i and i and i believe i see two projects on the near term transportation list that i think are not allocated and worthy of doing but maybe i'm wrong um colorado and 97 northbound on ramp Is that funded?

No, it is not.

It is not funded. Okay, so that is on the near term TSP list. And I think a lot of people in the community would agree is probably we talked about it in our comments to ODOT. And then also Revere, the Revere and Wall Street intersection, Revere off ramp, that's another one that's not funded. It's not right. And that's kind of an ODOT city contribution.

Yeah, we've developed a design concept with them, but there's no funding beyond that.

Right. So those are the kind of things that I think would be nice for us to be able to see them all sort of side by side and see crash data, for example, related to each of these and kind of rank a low, medium, high level of urgency to them. I know that probably sends you back to the drawing board a little bit. You're probably hoping to get either option one, two, or three from us today.

No, to be honest, I anticipate a good eight months of discussion, potentially working with the Transportation Committee to do exactly what you're asking. If you want us to put Revere on the what-if table, we will do that. We can absolutely, whatever list you want us to investigate, we will do.

Yeah, this is just high level council direction. Like, do more people think we want to put all of it on Empire? Do we want to do that today? No. Do we want to hold it into this fund and look at these different projects? Do we want to focus on what Ariel just said? Like, that's the high level discussion we're having today. We're not making a final decision. No final decision needed now.

The other, I mean, the other ones that come to mind are, we talked about, um, the read interchange where ODOT did have on the list and they took it off the list and so now there's nothing allocated for it but we know it's not very safe yeah 97. so there's a there's a kind of a couple things there so I I think it would be nice to see sort of the landscape of projects with some comparison criteria yeah that'd be helpful and and I and I agree with with um Councilor Riley like modeling it would be really helpful for me um absolutely I can do that

But I will, and Councilor Mendez will not be surprised that I'm bringing this up, of course. But I will say again that when we did a city survey, they said congestion was the number one transportation issue that the public would like us to deal with. So I definitely do not want us to discount option one or two.

Yeah, I really like option one. But I say out of that three, I totally agree with Councilor Mendez that the NSSP, I constantly, in meetings, I'm always hearing about neighbors bringing up improvements that can happen in their neighborhood. And so I think it's really important that we continue to fund that. But I'm not necessarily wedded to pulling all the money in any one option. Maybe we could spread it out a little bit, but I would like to see some more analysis financially as those models get developed further.

Ryan, the $5 million in the drafts tip at the Empire project that ODAT has, it's a draft, right?

Yeah.

How confident are you feeling that those dollars are going to materialize?

Very confident. They said that's their number one issue here in the city is addressing the Empire signal.

I think that's constituents number one issue. If you were to ask them about anything along ODOT's facility in Bend. So I think we should do more than we originally allocated in the bond towards Empire, whatever that is to help with that. But I also agree, I think we need to fund NSSP and I think we need to look at that contingency and the volatility in the market and materials, inflation, all of that, I really think we need to be cautious. And I would love to see if we could get the transportation committee involved also in helping think about some of these things. But I don't think I need to see a total every ODOT project to know that I think I want to increase our contribution towards empire. um i do feel strongly about that not that i don't i don't need to see it for that but if we're going to do more on odot facilities or we're going to look at other things then maybe yes so so that's where i'm at yeah i mean generally i'm in agreement i think

We need to spend some of the money on the fix up there at the North end for the highway 2097. I just don't think we should be paying for the whole thing now. And I think if we can at least persuade them to ideally, they move the 5Million from the, just the 3rd street empire fix to this larger project. And they give us a few more millions of that. Maybe we're getting closer to half seize on this project. I think NSP and SSP round 3 is really important that we do another batch of that for all the reasons people said, and it's what we hear about constantly speeding, you know, and all the little things we can do, and maybe some bigger projects. And now, as I would like to see the Hawthorne connections, at least the study and cost estimates get done. So we have a.

That we've budgeted for.

Yeah, fully budgeted. So I'd like to have some sense of what it might cost us to at least to see that as an option as part of the final discussion as decisions are made. Because I think that is a part of the greenways and kind of delivering on the promise of how easy it's going to, how well that bridge is going to work for people who are cycling and walking. Because it's not just the bridge itself, it's their connections that otherwise people are going to be less likely to use it. And it's not going to deliver on the, I think, the promise value for the community.

And one thing I think it should also be in this, it's not listed here, but that you mentioned is this look at a couple of projects that you're looking at and saying, are these worth doing as described or do we need to tune these down? I think that also frees up a little bit of that money that might be going into contingency or to over NSSP. And I really, I do see this as a conversation that our transportation committee can have is really, take a look at these moving parts we sort of indicated direction we want to go and let them dive into some of those details and help us with that is sort of how I think they should be involved um next is knowing this is going to be a little bit of a process yeah right so other comments okay yeah and then on the construction fund um side let's talk about Drake Park Bridge yes how people feel about that. I mean, we had our meeting with parks. I think they'd be receptive to trying to get this done. I do appreciate the sort of can we resurface, but I think the bridge just needs to be more accessible. Like, even if we resurface it, I don't think it's big enough for the amount of traffic that goes through there.

to be totally accessible to everyone so i unfortunately i think it is a new bridge that's that's on order but i mean i've been advocating for this for a while i think we need to do it i think um park and rec is going to want the new bridge yeah as an asset that then is off our books we don't have to worry about the maintenance cost like that becomes their issue over the medium and long term And I'm hopeful that we can get, again, some grant funding in particular on Visit Bend, but also maybe through the state, maybe. We'll see. Yeah, probably not. Yeah. So, but that could be a significant contribution once the project's shovel ready.

So, the proposal was to increase the map that we're. Listing in the transportation fund up to 2Million dollars over hoping that we'll get a grant to to in addition, claw some of that back or in addition to our plan is we're going to still pursue, but let's put in, let's program in. So, I guess we need to hear from council. Are people comfortable with that? Or do you want to stay with our sort of level of? Well, we're kind of about a half funding and then we would need to pull in money on top of that before we could really move forward.

How do people feel about listing this at 2Million to 2 thoughts on that? 1 is. The first, just the question, if it turned out, for example, that it was going to be $250,000 and the structure was sound, would there be interest? I mean, from my perspective, I'm on that bridge of probably six times a day. The extra 15 seconds it takes to walk and squeeze by people is not that big a deal. What is a big deal is how bumpy it is, and it's not accessible from that perspective. So if it's going to be 10% of the cost of the bridge replacement, I would be interested in at least learning if that's an option. And then the other point is just to say, we are going to have a conversation around but the transient lodging tax and how we might think about some of that funding. And I feel like this might be a good candidate for some of that too.

OK. Other thoughts?

Let me see if you show of hands how many people support pumping to a million per year.

But as long as we are definitely applying for grants. Yeah, I think that's given.

And BPRD couldn't, I can't recall, they're just not willing to chip in any funds.

no i mean it's our asset today so right yeah but even if we eventually were turning it over i don't think they're interested in and they're not programmed in their budget yeah counselor mandate is like yeah we can as a part of this design you know like we can like let's do a quick you know would parks be willing to accept an asset that we just resurface we can ask that question

I'm okay asking that question. I think I know what the answer is, but I'm going to ask.

What level of improvements would be the minimum they would like to see before they take it?

If that goes another 20 years, then I wouldn't care if we gave it to the Parks District because I feel like that's a pretty good deal for 20 years of use.

Okay. Okay, so yeah. Is everyone okay with increasing this to the 2 million level in the CIP over those two years?

Okay.

Okay, yes. Thank you. Brian mentioned that he is showing increased funding for the Bond and REIT market roundabout. Does anyone have any issue with that showing in the CIP? Again, it's not necessarily what we're going to spend, but that's the plan in case we do need to do a doubling and we do make that decision. Go ahead.

Yeah. I would, I mean, I would take issue with the way it was framed just to say, you know, I wanted you to have the option to expand where money was no, no issue. I mean, money is an issue on every single one of these projects. So I, I have a hard time with that. I spent some time at 27th and Butler Market, the one where Empire and Butler Market and 27th connect, just watching to get a sense of how people navigate that, both driving and on foot. It's pretty tough. The speeds are very high. It's very hard to cross. I think people do appreciate flashing lights, but I think what they would probably appreciate more, hearing them say this in conversations is reducing speeds. So I wouldn't support going full two lanes. I think that's not a situation that we want to replicate across town automatically without consideration of budget. But if we do, regardless of what we do, I would like to see us consider something like raised crossings to make it easier to actually drive the 15 mile an hour target that they're supposed to be driving at roundabouts. And also that would make it easier for people to cross, including people who are visually impaired and have a really hard time with roundabouts as they are now.

And just to be clear, we're not making that final decision today. We're just deciding how it's listed in the CIP. We did make the decision to move it up, right? So I guess the question, Ryan, is like if there were to be raised crossings, would that still fit within the budget?

Yeah, I think seven and a quarter in there would be enough to explore every potential safety option you would like to see. And a good example, Trinity Lutheran, they have flaggers out there, even though it's a push button RRFB. They still have volunteers out there. escorting the kids across this double-lane roundabout. So fully acknowledge, I mean, there's nothing preventing us from doing raised crossings. We can explore all those potential safety options and we'll look at the geometry, we'll look at other things. And so we'll go all in on our safety options in this one.

That's what the more money provides us the ability to do. And I think as we've seen in other projects, when we add more safety enhancements it does cost a little bit and that's we're doing what the community's asked us to do is make our transportation system safer but there's no way to do that generally speaking without some additional cost considerations can we just build bridges instead of roundabouts because they sound cheaper federal government um other final thoughts um and other final thoughts about the transportation committee's involvement

What I would say is I think synthesizing what you've heard today, we might need one more touch point to frame what we want the Transportation Committee to advise us on to help make sure, because it's a lot. And so I think we need to narrow down what are the questions that we're asking. And so maybe staff can do some work. Absolutely. And we'll have one more touch point before it goes to them. And also we need to revise their code, get that all figured out first too. But I think they could be very helpful in helping to figure out some of these questions. So, okay. It sounds like there's support for that.

Okay. Very quickly. If we would like to skip this, it's fine. We can revisit this in June. We'll be coming back to this. That's totally fine. But yeah, it was just a couple more slides highlighting touch points. So you will see a lot of us in the next couple months, even related to the water and sewer side of things.

Great.

All right. Thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

All right next is our transient lodging tax discussion. I'm going to step off real quick. I'll be right back while they get going. You guys can go ahead and get started.

Good evening Council.

My name is Cyrus Mooney, Business Development Manager here at the City of Bend.

I'm Jeff Knapp, I serve as the President and CEO of Visit Bend. Thanks for having me here.

So a little bit of intro, really the intent with our conversation today, this is the first time we've had a council discussion post short session of last year where there was legislation that was passed in House Bill 4148 that allows specific jurisdictions to make some changes to their TLT allocations. And with that, want to have a broader conversation about considerations and sequencing and timing of any changes that the Council might like to pursue. And I also just wanted to take a moment to recognize the collaboration that we had between the City and Visit Bend as we navigated this piece of legislation. Obviously a contentious issue, but I think we showed some really strong partnership in how we talked about trade-offs and what was negotiable from each perspective. So I think that's something we should be prideful of.

And I'll second that, you know, it's a privilege to serve in a sort of quasi as a partner with the city on its economic development goals and the staff has been really, really great. And so we have shared goals with the cities. Our goals are in line with yours. We are an economic engine. for the city, for both the general fund and for businesses here locally. This year, pouring nearly $405 million in visitor spending back into local businesses, about $1.5 million a day, and visitors accounting for about 31% of all the spending in the city for this past year. We shared your goals and deploying grant programs and staff support to serve infrastructure and and work collaboratively across to reinvest our resources back into both supporting business and community. You've seen this a million times probably, but as of right now, and this is what we'll be talking about as far as percentages go, this is a mixture of decisions that have been made along the way. Currently, the city receives 64.6% of all transient room tax, so people staying in hotels, vacation rentals, bread and breakfasts, RV sites for under 30 days, and 35.4% goes to Our efforts at Visit Bend, you can see the large, the blue part is the destination, getting folks here, keeping that engine primed to grow that pot of resources. And the other two slices are the resources that we put directly back into grant programs with the community, about roughly a million dollars.

Alright, just to give a little bit of background of TLT within the city of Bend dating back to 1983 where the city of Bend established our first lodging tax at 6%. There's been various changes at the city level and at the state level over the course of time. What I really want to hone in on and emphasize is the change that happened in 2013 when ballot measure 994 was passed that increased the citywide lodging tax from 9% to 10.4%. So that 1% delta of increment is really what is enabled to change or have altercations based on the legislation from House Bill 4148. So that 1.4% increment is really pivotal in the conversation we're going to have a bit later. Also want to note that that legislation is enacted January 1st of 2027, so no changes can be made overnight, but it's something that we would like to have some time to plan for and get direction from Council on. That's a great slide. Very informative.

Yeah.

Nate at Visit Bend is a huge history buff and he definitely helps put that together.

Yeah. And just to be clear, 4148, it was very intentional that this only applied post 2003. so it left you alone. If you'd implemented anything before 2003, that just stayed frozen in time and then only looked at post 2003 increases.

Thank you for that clarification. Yeah. um for 4148 specifically there's two different components um as we noted that reallocation of tax percentages for the restricted funds our portion as jeff mentioned is 64.6 percent that could increase to 67.3 percent um because the legislation gets enacted in the middle of the fiscal year for both visit bend and for the city of bend that number in fiscal year 26 would be roughly 200 000 in future years it would be more upwards of 400 000 plus And then the other piece of the legislation was around business resiliency grants, which I think we have consensus. There's a lot of skepticism of the vagueness. There's not any thresholds of how many dollars can be put towards it. I think we've heard some concerns that because of that vagueness and how it was rushed into the legislation kind of last minute, that it could potentially be heavily altered or go away in the long session this next year. And then another consideration with that is just visit ben's history of standing up implementing and evolving their existing bank programs so is it does the money for the bill business resiliency grants should we choose to do it come out of the city's portion or visit ben's portion or 50 50 split or it would come out of visit ben's portion separate from any changes that the council would pursue for that 1.4 okay

So you can do it if they want it.

I think we would, yeah, if our position is Texas. We'll get to that.

Okay. Yeah.

Now more for the considerations outside of just specifically hospital 4148 working with procurement for the destination management contract services that we Have with visit been currently we're hoping that because their contract expires June 30 will need to get direction finalized for any changes that Council would want to have implemented into that RFP before it goes out to bid by the end of this calendar year. with the hope that we would put that out on the street at the start of 2027 and have a contractor on board and finalized in the May timeframe to give us some time before the contract expiration so there's no lapsing services. So just to put things a bit in perspective, because of the scope of the contract being as significant as it is, we need a fair bit of time to make sure that the administration of that is handled accordingly. Bigger picture for TLT, there was another piece of legislation that was passed at the state level that raised the statewide TLT 1.25% this past year. I think that's just something to think about in relation to the overall tax burden that our visitors are experiencing. The city may consider a future room tax increase in future years. I think it's no secret that we would need to garner industry support from VisitVend and all of the partners within those that they serve to make sure that was a successful process. And that would need to be something that goes out to the voters for council to pursue. So I want to make sure that that's clear. Again, VisitVend's current contract expires in about a year, June 30th of 2027. And then Jeff, if you want to.

Yeah, I just think in general right now as we're looking, we'll be here next month talking to you about projections for next year around budgeting and all of those things. We've had a very, very good year and we are very cautious about what we have ahead of us for revenue. With fuel prices skyrocketing, we're in the middle of a super El Nino year, predicted high temperatures, a lot of smoke pressure. We know when we see that, especially in July and August, it has a huge impact on businesses, maybe even being able to survive through a full year. um visitor spending right now is up 10 but we're seeing local spending down nine percent so that visitation really is kind of carrying small businesses right now it's sort of a fragile balanced time um and then yeah we're also as we're working with the data with Oregon State to look at you know with 1.5 on the state where is that elasticity where visitors may choose to not spend that much money to make a trip. So we are in a better place than a lot of folks in the type of climate that we have. Well, this type of economy in a sense that we are predominant drive market and people still do travel. And hopefully we can press our fingers that we have some snow next year. But with that Super El Nino as well, we're looking at potentially some another dry winter.

So, is there recent data or you're saying that there will soon be some new data that tells us this about the relationship between taxes paid and occupancy and kind of willingness to spend.

I think I thought Todd published it.

Yeah, for sure. There's a recent study we'd be happy to share with you that came out around that, looking at kind of the sweet spot of lots of different destinations and their tax rates and the impact. There's a threshold by which you hit a certain level of tax and you start to see negative returns. We've also done some modeling in general around just, you know, uh and our modeling shows that if uh visitors uh visitation drops four percent we we basically are operating flat we start to not see any growth in the revenue for the city or for ourselves and then anything below that starts to down so again for us it's just balance of of how we invest so i'm not hearing a punch line related to that data in terms of how it impacts ben so i'm just asking like what what's i don't know what i'm just saying we should consider that when we're like i'm not um i could be happy to provide this study i'm just saying this may have sent that to us a while back and i think it's just basically showing a curve it's not giving an absolute data number but it's saying there is a point where you raise the tax enough that it starts to

you start to lose revenue because people aren't coming yeah and i'm not so that's over there or that there's no yeah room for growth um it's just it's better yeah jeff are you suggesting that the one and a quarter hits us harder on this side because people have to drive to get here and gas prices are high or it's statewide right it's yet to see this is a statewide thing uh the industry right yeah yeah but it's just that it's just out of state folks is what you're saying no no anyone Right. That's what I'm saying. It doesn't matter where you go in Oregon, you're going to get that. Yes. Correct. But are you suggesting that one and a quarter hits us harder because people .

I'm not saying that it hits us harder. I'm just saying, again, it's layering more on top of it. As we think about our decisions and how we want to potentially go out and increase and what we may do with that, Those are the types of factors that we should be considering. One thing about that particular tax increase also is that it goes to that 1.25 is going to support the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife for conservation efforts. So you'll start to see that also on receipts when you do stay somewhere that that's happening. So just trends right now, we are hitting a record year. So visitor spending is eclipsed. So this says 400 million, we're gonna be about 405. Interesting statistics, 65% of all spending in Bend came from people who don't live within the city limits. So that includes anyone 10 miles or out. So a lot of spending from Central Oregon. We see about a third of the spending from just within our 50 miles and then another third within visitation. uh hospitality jobs and health care jobs were the two things that grew this year as far as um wages uh this is here in town uh 3.2 percent wages grow eight percent in 2025 and we also have to think about our competitiveness with the growing uh investment from our our neighbors so you know that we do have leakage about 50 of visitors uh here don't stay here and they're staying and spending resources at our neighboring city so um we continue to see increased leakage um and benefit people basically coming you know if you're staying in Redmond or you're staying in the pine you're staying in Sun River you're going to be here on the river or using our trails so there's usage there that we're not necessarily capturing um

tax dollars for you to put back in to manage so all righty for council discussion um we have a couple different checkpoints and questions if council wants to pursue then we have some additional direction that's needed so first question is just generally does council want staff to pursue options from hospital 41 and 48 related to the allocation of ratio split and or business resiliency grants I think let's go let's break that down into the two parts yeah Justin Fields , City of Boulder, Already um if the Council wants to adjust that 1.4% increment that we discussed for tourism related services that is currently 70% but could go down to 50%. Justin Fields , City of Boulder, Where does the Council think that that additional revenue should be allocated again that roughly 20% delta will equate to $400,000 of anticipated revenue that the city would receive in future years beyond fiscal year 2026.

Yeah, actually, let's just go through all the questions, then we'll come back to the front.

So a couple of different options in talking with other staff internally and our finance team about things to consider for council of where that additional revenue could go listed below. Does the Council want to direct staff to explore the Business Resiliency Grants portion of the legislation under House Bill 4148? Again, to Councillor Franzose's point, that money would come from Visit Bend's allocation separate of any changes that would be made. and if we do go down that path where who does council think should manage that program what kind of criteria or characteristics would you like to be included and options that staff could bring back for you to consider in the future i think those are things we would look for some guidance on tonight and then in terms of timeline A couple of different options. If changes are to be pursued, when is the right time to do that? Would that be at the time that we go out for bid for the new destination management contract services? Would that be something more broad in working with Deschutes County and whoever that provider is in the future that have changes occur at that point when a potential eventual ballot measure goes out?

that could be a consideration or would Council like to move as quickly as possible and look at implementing changes for this legislation that would be enacted January 1st of 2027 great okay so let's go back to the adjusting the 1.4 um so Council I think just want to hear from folks today what you think about adjusting this yes or no I do want to be very very clear like we're not deciding today where this money would go That would be part of a budget process where this would money that would be coming back into our general fund and would be. We could say we want it to be allocated a certain way. We could say, just put it in the general fund. We could do a lot of different things with it. And that would be decided through the budget process. I think we can signal today. Some things we think this would be appropriate for. But also just need to know if folks want to make this move at this point or if people want to wait or other considerations. So. Thoughts.

Yes. Okay. And I mean, you know, additional funds for public safety. I mean, there's a lot of needs on there and I think there's merit to all of them. The one that I wanted to put out for consideration in particular is additional funds for public safety, but in particular, we continuously hear about the desire for more traffic enforcement and that is we have a very lean police department they're stretched pretty thin um so that would be an area where i would be interested in exploring okay what would this look like you know visitors also violate our traffic rules and benefit from safe roads everybody benefits from safe roads um so that would be an area to explore

great steve yes and asap uh and the reason the asap is i would like to have this percentage set prior to us putting the contract out okay yep and that's part of the timeline question prior to the rfg steve yeah or or as we could i just like it to be baked in when the rfp goes out which is what i mean for the new contract right for the new contract okay so that's set

Is anyone opposed to taking a look at putting this in the RFP and saying this 400K will be going back to the city?

I'm a yes on putting in the RFP. I'm a no for right now.

Okay. For January. Well, it doesn't go until January anyways, right?

Yeah. Okay. I'm very nervous about the summer and the thousands of jobs that depend on tourists. And so I don't want to make a move right now. Okay. Anybody with a different thought?

No, I'm in agreement. I'd be open to thinking about it in January, but I think there's valid concerns about we're not going to be able to impact in January what's already occurred. There may be some questions about what's to come in terms of the winter experience. And so when we have a better picture of what that's looking like, if we're really going to be experiencing some trouble it may be too early to do that but yes on this i i would like to see us seriously consider using some of these dollars for shelter services i think it's part of our budget that we really struggle with and um what we know is not being at the state level i think if we are serious about following through on our commitment to maintaining at least the level of service that we have now in terms of how we support people that are houseless we really need to think about Some revenue that's going to support that, that we have some authority and control over, and we're not dependent on other levels of government. So, I think that 1, and I would sort of look at that and public safety together. Sort of proposed.

All right. It sounds like there's a majority of folks that want to move forward with this, but not until basically fiscal year 27 starts. And so this would be incorporated into the RFP for the next provider that they would understand that this would change down to what we're legally allowed to take back. Any other thoughts? on allocation i um agree with counselor mendez my thoughts on this is potholes and police um are things that are impacted by tourism and also benefit tourists right um and i think you know in the argument to the legislature cities across the state were making the arguments especially around public safety impacts that visitors have and um just thinking if you could say this was allocated to an additional traffic pop and that's what it paid for to just put another person on the street that is out there enforcing um and i think our community would appreciate that and i think it would also benefit visitors um but again this is not the decision we're making right now just sort of signaling where this might go um i i am committed to trying to keep it as as much of a nexus as we can to like the parts of our services and systems that are impacted by tourism and visitors and trying to put the money back into those those areas Okay, so on the business resiliency grant side, is there any interest in pursuing this at this point?

Can Jeff finish his statement that he was earlier in the response?

Yeah, here we go. My position is we will deploy whatever the council feels. I mean, A, we would love to, if you decide to move forward with this, we would be happy to throw our hat in as the person who would um administer a grant program um my concern is just that we it's a very broad thing and if we were going to consider it I would ask that we'd maybe spend some time looking at the thresholds of what could really what impact we could make with the resources that would keep things in balance but have significant impact and that would take to me engaging the business community and what resiliency they need. What about the other grant programs? I think it would, I mean, everything that we, yes. I think we would just, everything would shrink in proportion. That's what will happen with the percentage that you retain. We will If we add on another program, we're committed to continuing to deliver the other grant programs and we'll come to you next month and talk about this, but we've been through this process this year with FM Civic to look at both of our grant programs and see how we can begin to measure the impact and see what changes we may need to do to meet the community's needs in this current state. So we're doing a lot of work around that and that will be part of our

coming to talk in a way it's just sort of expanding the eligibility of grant recipients for a limited pool of money potentially yeah yeah I think it's it's kind of an interesting idea because if we do have a terrible wildfire season then businesses are really going to face some hardship and in that case it might be better to invest in business resiliency instead of cultural tourism or even sustainability well and I think that's the which is yeah

We're committed to putting resources back into the community. It's work we're doing with everyone. So it might be that. We may be doing it differently. We may see that, okay, this year we'll be focusing on an issue. And arts and culture is this year. And next year is, or, I mean, it could look a lot of different.

Is it something we could kind of... write in flexibility into your contract, too? That's what I was going to ask, Cyrus.

Like, is that something we could, in this RFP, could we say, tell us how you would do this and how it would impact, you know, and that would be part of the...

Absolutely. Yeah. And something that we've discussed previously, just in trying to pick our brains about the effectiveness of this legislation as it's currently written, I think an idea to consider is that we could collaboratively come up with some sort of like definition of triggering of when these funds get deployed so it's not just set aside two hundred thousand dollars in your budget that goes out to business owners every year it's a little bit more compelling to say this event occurred that requires some support to these businesses and hopefully more directly to the workforce specifically that's being impacted by labor shortages or operational deficiencies or closures that have to occur due to weather conditions or you know something like that um but having it be more of a triggering event rather than the process I think one of the things I'm learning when the discussion about grants with um via bura I mean we have a small pool of hundred thousand dollars right for economic development Outside of Burra.

I understand that's outside of Burra. But within Burra, we have these new grant programs that they're not insignificant amounts of money. However, they're not able to help with cash flow issues. In the first round of grants, they have to be in capital projects only. So I'm thinking about like my restaurant or my business couldn't work well because of the air quality and I don't have a way to filter. So there might be some capital investment you could support with those grants. But if it's really just my cash flow is down so hard, I'm going to close if I don't get some support. We can't help them through Burra. So this might be a different tool to be able to provide some support there. But I like the idea of developing some criteria and triggers. I think it makes sense.

Yeah, just to give context from the conversation at the legislature. So the business resiliency grant was a late amendment to the bill. And what had been happening at several of the hearings was there was a call to action and there were many small businesses in the hospitality industry that all came in and said, know you can't pass this bill it's going to hurt my business and the one of the main sponsors of the bill said why don't we put some grants in here why don't we allow some of this money to come to you directly to address some of those concerns that we're hearing that people are bringing up in hearings and it also was a political move to try to help um get the bill passed but because it was a short session it was all pretty quick there is not a lot of definition in the bill and i think there are some valid worries about our city is going to use this as sort of a loophole to then pull a lot of money out of the the dmo side of the budget so i think if we are going to explore this i think it needs to be really thoughtful and it needs to be very detailed we are going to have to report all of our spending to the legislature as part of this bill and there was there was statements by cities saying we have transparent budget processes we you will know what we're doing with this money so i think we need to be very careful that we're doing that and that we have very clear intention with it um i'm actually really interested to hear from you how you are looking at your grant programs and restructuring those before i'm really ready to commit totally to this but i think this could fit in with maybe how visit ben does grants um and so maybe it feels like a good thing to maybe again putting into that rfp is sort of tell us how you think this might work or what the it might even be you say well i need a six month period of sort of ramping up and figuring out how to do this but we could do it right um but it sounds like there's enough interest from council to maybe include that as part of the rfp and explore this further okay

Just 1 other note for council, because sorry, folks, I'll jump in for a 2nd, because we have a chapter in our code on room tax. There's a section in there describing at a high level, the allocation to tourism and other things. So, if the direction from council is. to move to that 50 50 for the 1.4 um we'll talk about when to br that that will there will be a minor code change to go along with that it could happen later this year it could have a delayed effective date if we're looking so that'll that'll be a part of this process a relatively small one but um look for that at some point too yeah it sounds like there's support to do that yeah

okay so ours on the timeline I think we heard consensus about moving this into the RFP so we're not looking at starting next year when the bill goes into effect we're starting fiscal year 27 and through the RP process um I think the second question here I I'm not ready to really start planning for a rate increase at this point I don't know how other people feel about that I think that's a conversation we have going forward into the future but I also want to keep an eye on what's happening with our economy and any other money measures that might be coming up from other districts. But when we do look at that, of course, it should be in coordination with the county and the DMO. Any other thoughts on that? I will also state for the record, I would like to get to the point on that curve that's optimal, where we're not hurting tourism, but we are asking visitors to pay a fair share as much as we can.

Well, that might be really the first question is what's the gap between where we are now and where there is an optimal range, you know, more than this, to see what the potential revenue might be. So is there a way to get an answer to that question sometime over the next six to 12 months?

Yeah, I think we can definitely follow up and send some data and just anecdotally, comparatively for our peer cities, we are at a lower rate at 10.4%.

I guess I'll be a little more clear. I don't really see starting that conversation until we start fiscal year 27. Honestly yeah yeah I don't see starting that until we get this the contract with this abandoned we're in the next fiscal year and we're actually seeing how this yes plays out and what we're spending the money on but yeah. Any other thoughts on that?

No, I think specifics are helpful. Yeah. Where's that number? Yeah.

I mean, a source of revenue that the city is going to continue to struggle with revenue stuff.

Yeah, no, it's going to be on the table.

It should be on the table.

Yeah. And I think we already answered that question on the bottom too, that we're not interested in that. So anything else you need from us, Cyrus? That was it for this evening. Anything else for us, Jeff?

No, just thank you. And we're really excited to explore and innovate and Tom Connelly, Be back next month and talk about. Tom Connelly, yeah this year's plan and then soon back around you know, looking for the art forward to the rfp and crafting now, we can both improve revenue for the city and quality of life and next month is when we'll be hearing about the grant program results of that. Well, we'll have our annual budget, and we'll mention it in sort of what's coming up in the next year. So we'll get a kind of a report of what we'll have a recommendation from BDEP, hopefully, and then we'll come to you. We'll show you our annual budget, the plan, and then what we're looking for in this little report on where we're moving with that grant program. We've been working for the last six months. We'll have some information for you.

Perfect. Okay. Thank you.

Thanks.

All right, our last item is a wildfire season update from Eve Riley.

yeah and I think we're okay I think we're okay on time so I think we can dive in just to introduce this topic so we had uh initially intended to have a joint meeting with the rural district uh we're just looking through some issues so we're going to pump that for a little bit later but I wanted to have Todd here with the upcoming fire season just to share high-level messaging with you all to prepare the community this is just an informational item we're not asking for any direction here um and just also be available for questions that council might has related to this upcoming season

Good evening, Mayor, Council. I'm your fire chief. I'm not your climate scientist. Bear with me through this. Just some key points about what we're facing this upcoming fire season. We are in a transition phase in our climate. It's called an El Nino Southern Oscillation or an ENZO in neutral, which means because we're in transition, a lot of this is a coin flip. We're not exactly sure which direction we're going to go, but there is no strong wet signal expected. layman's terms, not expecting a lot of rain. As yesterday was a perfect example, we have persistent above normal temperatures that have accelerated drying and higher than average snow levels, high meaning higher in elevation, limiting the mid elevation snowpack. On snowpack and moisture, the precipitation was uneven and we received less than 50% of our normal rainfall. Mid elevation snowpack is gone. And because of that reduced snowpack, less spring moisture recharged our fine fuels. Punchline here is big snow doesn't save us, and low snow doesn't doom us. As examples, we had big snow years in 2011, 2024, and 2002. And in those years, we burned 198,000 acres, 76,000 acres, and 622,000 acres, respectively. On low snow years, 2015 and 2005, we burned 24,000 acres in one and 2,000 in another. So again, back to that coin flip conversation. Our fuel conditions. The mid and lower elevation fuels are drying quickly due to warmth and limited moisture. Fine fuels are responding quickly to short dry periods. Our 100-hour and 1,000-hour fuels are drier in central Oregon in the interior zones where we are. And our heavy fuels, they're not available quite yet, but the drying trend is accelerating into this spring. Recent fires we've had, the Trout Creek fire just southwest of Sisters burned 43 acres, and then the Pine Mountain fire that started as a controlled burn, which turned into an actual event, is now 100% contained at 2,600 acres. This early fire activity reflects the pre-greenup dryness and our warm conditions. Our drought status, portions of Eastern and Central Oregon are in moderate to severe drought. Limited improvement is expected without a sustained spring precipitation. The risk of our drought expanding if spring storms underperform is very real. Our early summer outlook, so June and July, there's significant fire potential increasing in June. Above normal fire potential expected across Central Oregon by June, our peak fire risk is in July, and fuels are expected to cure earlier than normal. And key concerns for us here in Central Oregon Early fuel availability due to our warm temperatures and our absent mid-elevation snowpack. The green-up period was very compressed due to temperatures and the increased likelihood of large fire conditions by early summer. And our analog comparison years of 2015 and 2018 show similar patterns with an early fire season onset. So what's the bottom line? Is we can describe the setup, but we cannot predict the season from it. Central Oregon has less water stored. We have more grass on the ground. We have earlier than normal drying, early ramp up in fire potential and a high fire risk by July without significant spring moisture. Buckle up.

How was the preparedness fair on Saturday?

Yeah, it was well attended. Great. Melissa Steele also did a wonderful job. She's really pulling in a lot of our partners and making sure that everybody can appreciate the risk and everybody does play a role in not only keeping us safe, but the mitigation before the fire starts.

Great. Own your zones, not just a one and done. It's kind of a recurring thing. Those stuff grows back. But that was very interesting about the correlation about wet years and dry years and how much has burned. Because I know there's a question about what the effect of that is. And it sounds like there's a lot of other random elements involved.

One doesn't determine the other.

you know it's about the rapid melt off like earlier in the spring too right either rain on snow events right things that happen yeah snow water equivalent right like how much how much water is in that snow and and what does that pertain to it helps with the uh the green up so when we see early season fires it's because there there might be a lot of moisture out there but the fuels are still They haven't absorbed the molten moisture yet. And then they green up, fire activity goes down. And now where we are today, those fuels have dried out yet again. And so they're curing and you see the cheatgrass change color and they're really receptive to fire.

It's riding my mountain bike yesterday up a little higher. it felt like we were it was at least a month ahead of where we would normally there was not a sign of snow anywhere yeah in the forest and feeling the forest was well shaped like and the dust that we experienced when we're on the trails it's like this is normally late June yeah yeah

Chief, your folks are on a four-shift schedule now, right?

Not yet.

Not yet? That happens in the middle of July. In the middle of July. Yeah. Will that provide some relief for folks, a little resiliency?

What will provide relief is this academy that we have right now graduating and getting those firefighters on the street. Our folks are working a lot right now due to all of our vacancies. All right. Yeah, they graduate in two weeks, and then we'll have a month of –

um observation so really by July 1 is when we're going to feel our workforce is going to feel some relief okay yeah thanks and I see Carrie's here I got a message from Deschutes alerts today so everyone look at your messages make sure you're signed up for Deschutes alerts and update your information

It's all accurate. Yeah, it's good to know that's legit. I was especially.

Yeah, if you didn't get it, go to just two alerts and find out why and make sure you're signed up because we get so many emails.

Are there any controlled burns plan that we should be aware of? Are we kind of hitting that stage where we're hitting the stage closing?

Yeah, they can be pretty responsive to changes in our weather. You know, yesterday was record heat and then today we're 20 degrees below normal. If we get a rain event, their burn window opens up again. And so anytime they burn, we often find out about the same time that you all do. So we're working to improve that communication.

thank you for your vigilance yes thank you for your time we can all play a part yes by reducing how we are causing risk in the community that pass card was great that we all got yes our neighborhood just did our big cleanup we did all the like five feet you know no branches off off the ground tree cutting and a lot of brush clearing the dumpsters yeah thanks to everyone in the community that is taking those efforts because it's really important all right thanks thanks chief thank you

All right, I think we're ending. And then there is a reception of the artists that are responsible for the public art that was installed at the Public Works Campus at Scalehouse. So we'd love to have a vote right now at the reception. It starts at 6. It starts at 6. So we have a little time to get open. And then just a reminder, tomorrow we have a Public Works opening, too, at the Actual Campus. Two different locations. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. All right, well adjourned.