City Council - Special Meeting

All right, it is uh 6 o'clock. Let's get to work. So, uh we're going to have a uh council meeting tonight at Lake Steven City Council. for downtown Lake Stevens and we are also recording this and it will be published to our YouTube channel later on. And with that, I would ask all to rise for the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible.

All right. Um, we did a roll call. Okay. Council member Dorstad. Council member Donahghue, present. Council member Packard, present. Council member Edwards, present. Council member McManis, present. Council member Aria, here. Council member Shipman, present. Can we get a motion to uh excuse council president Joret? I believe she's uh traveling home from family. So, make a motion to be changed. Second. Okay. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor? And any opposed?

All right. So, we're going to um if you notice, we we we're we're doing agenda no. We're doing the new agenda. We'll see how it works. And uh if council uh vice president Shipman, can we get an approval of this new agenda? Yes. Could I get an approval of agenda or a motion, please? I'll make a motion to approve the agenda. Second. Any discussion? The agenda is approved. Got to have a vote. Oh, I got a vote. Sorry. All those in favor? Those opposed? Now it's approved.

Now we're approved. We're good. Got to be legit. All right, let's do some guest business. Deputy Chief Thomas, where you at?

It's already on. Good evening. I get the pleasure of introducing a couple of our officers to a new position of corporal. I will start off with um Amber. Amber, do you want to come up here? With how many?

When we get to the meat and potatoes, they could always they could all come up here. A transplant from California, Amber has been with Lake Steven Police Department since 2023 where when she later rolled from Redmond PD. Throughout her time with Lake Stevens, she has enjoyed making homeless outreach one of her many focuses, finding new friends to help and encourage through the process. Amber has found each person has a beautiful, diverse situation, and loves to encourage others to change and better their surroundings. There is nothing Amber finds more joy in than finding housing for a homeless individual down on their luck or someone struggle struggling with addiction, checking in with her to tell her about her so about their sobriety journey. Amber owes all of her career success and support to her wonderful and patient husband Tai along with her four children Kate, Elijah, Oliver, and Josie. Due to the busy and chaotic time in her family life, Amber recognizes that currently her children are her free or her hobbies and her free time. This obviously makes her a 247 snack dealer, subpar therapist, barely on time chauffeur, and professional negotiator to a one-year-old, six-year-old, and two 8-year-olds. Surviving and thriving, Amber handles her daily life, both personal and professional, with a bucket of grace and is extremely blessed to have this opportunity to serve the department she loves as corporal. Mayor, do you want to

do the fine? Thanks for

you want this

here. Switch you. All right. Let's do the swearing first and you can.

All right. I I your name Amber Sheros. Do solemnly swear or affirm Do solemnly swear or affirm that I will support that I will support and defend the Constitution and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and laws of the United States and the state of Washington in the state of Washington the ordinances the ordinances of the city of Lake Stevens of the city of Lake Stevens and the mission and regulations and the mission and regulations of the Lake Stevens Police Department of the Lake Stevens Police Department and I will faithfully and that I will faithfully and impartially perform and impartially perform and discharge the duties. And discharge the duties as a Le Stevens Police Corporal. as a Le Stevens Police Corporal. According to law. According to law, best

to the best of my of my ability. You just put it on. Put it on. There you go.

She's got her hands full. Yeah. Yeah. Amber. You're not done yet. got to do the walk the baby. Ready?

Sure enough. Corporal Bo Zelanox began his law enforcement career in 2018 with Lakes Lake Forest Park Police Department where he served in patrol and as a field training officer. During his time there, he was selected to assist with major crime investigation and was recognized with the chief's word for proactive officer of the year. In 2023, Corporal Zelanak lateral to the Lake Stevens Police Department where he has continued serving as a community the community as a patrol officer and field field training officer helping train and mentor new hires. He has served the Lake Steven community for the for the past two years. Prior to law enforcement career, Corporal Zelanox served four years in the Marines and was assigned to the Second Assault Amphibious Battalion in Jacksonville, North Carolina. He reached the rank of corporal and served as a vehicle crew chief, including deployment in the Middle East. Corporal Zelnak lives in Lake Steven with his wife Nicole and four children. He is grateful for their support and honored to continue serving the community in his new role as corporal.

Nicole's do things better. my neighbor.

All right. I vote I I vote Zach. I vote Zel and I do solemnly swear Do solemnly swear or affirm or affirm that I will support and defend that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws the Constitution and Laws of the United States of the United States City of Washington and the state of Washington. The ordinances the ordinances of the city of Lake Stevens of the city of Lake Stevens and the mission and regulations and the mission and regulations of Lake Stevens Police Department of the Lake Stevens Police Department and that I will faithfully and that I will faithfully and impartially perform and impartially perform and discharge and discharge the duties the duties as a Lake Stevens Police Corporal as a Lake Stevens Police Corporal according to law according to law and to the best of my ability

and to the best of my ability. Got it. Congratulations. All right. Let's police get out for just a second. All right, let's move forward then on the agenda and hit citizens comments. We have anything anybody online who wants to provide citizens comments tonight?

There's anybody online that would like to address the council, please raise your digital hand and I'll let you in. I don't see anyone. No, I don't have any green sheets. We have anybody. Mitch, nothing.

Okay. So, with that, uh, let's go and um, can I get a motion to uh, pass the consent agenda, please? I make a motion to pass the consent agenda. I got a motion and a second. Uh, is there any discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor I. Any opposed? All right. And now we have an action item up first so we have lots of time to discuss it. If needed hopefully we don't need a lot, but we've created the space. Uh I think Lori, you're up to bat, aren't you?

I don't have the agenda in front of me, but I know I am coming up. You are up to bat. I promise you. I'm going to share my screen.

Maybe I need to try it again. Oh, here we go. Okay. Okay, it's loading. Here we go. Okay. Good evening, council and mayor. My name is Lori Ericson. I'm the public works analyst and tonight I am following it up following up to an item we talked about at the council retreat on February 7th. So tonight's topic is called the open gov contract award. And at the retreat, I presented a business case for us to consider moving away from our current suite of asset management tools that we use and move forward with a tool that we have vetted internally with various stakeholders um including IT endusers uh public works and parks leadership and others. So, um, the ask coming into tonight's, uh, session was really for us to take a look at possible funding sources other than asking for a budget amendment which would dip into the city's reserves. The short answer or um, short story here is we have a proposal on how to absorb this cost out of existing operating budgets and so I will be presenting that now. So, here's our agenda for this topic. I will do just a really highlevel quick um recap. Uh we obviously did a deep dive at the retreat, but I'll hit on a couple of high points um and bring everyone up to speed. After that, we will talk about funding and impacts to the funding proposal. Uh we'll have some time at the end for questions and discussion and ultimately we will be asking for action to help plant the seed for those of you on council for what I will be asking at the end of this presentation is that city council will be asked at the end of this presentation to authorize the mayor to enter into the agreement with open gov in the total amount of $333,5702.

Okay. So, I'm actually going to use this slide to kind of set the stage a little bit and do the quick recap. So, at the council retreat, we talked about some of the issues that we are currently experiencing with our suite of tools, including Viewworks, Street Logix, um the lists app, and another tool called Asset Tiger. During the retreat, we talked about many of the issues that we're experiencing, including uh a number of instances of rework, not being able to see full asset history um for each of our assets, um and other things that we have tried endlessly to work through with process improvement. What we would like to do is move forward with a platform, a public service platform called Open Gov. OpenGV, and you'll see it on this graphic up here, has a number of applications that we could subscribe to and implement in the future if we would like to. What we would like to do first though is focus on that green box um in the upper right corner or about 2:00 I guess on that image. And we really want to start with the asset management system, excuse me. What we have done so far with VW works is we have been able to implement a uh service request portal where people out in the community can uh send in a virtual request letting us know where an issue is. They can upload a picture and ultimately we've received those requests and we can take those and assign them accordingly. We have also with Viewworks today been able to build out our work order management systems. So, we've been able to uh build out our recurring or preventative maintenance plans and also manage our recurring work, including what has been done on each of those work orders. However, with um the transition to open gov, we see a lot of opportunity for us to eliminate waste in our current processes. A few things that we're looking forward to with the open gov implementation includes the use of

integrated AI tools. So they have lots of tools already built into the system that we can leverage and find efficiencies when it comes to scheduling uh managing the labor that we have available today. Forecasting um for what kinds of materials we'll need for each type of job that we're we have coming up so on and so forth. Another thing we're really looking forward to with this application is the util utilization of their open API. In short, what that means is that they have uh the ability for us to plug and play with other systems that will talk with OpenGV along with also building out or adapting um other AI tools that aren't included in their platform today. One of the other benefits that we're looking forward to is when a crew member, for example, or a team is out in the field, if they happen to wrap up their work early, they'll actually be able to see on their mobile device what other work orders are being uh either worked on in the area or which other ones are ready to be worked on. So, they don't have to make a phone call or run back to the shop and figure out what's their next thing. They hopefully will be able to squeeze out a little bit more work uh with that capability. In today's systems, seriously, a crew worker will only see the work assigned to them. Even if there's another job that's 50 feet away from them, they simply just can't see it. And there's no plan in the future for view works to make uh improvements to that future. The last thing I will highlight as far as things we're looking forward to with OpenGV uh include the crew workers being able to write back to the GIS. That's our geographical information system. So when they replace a stop sign, for example, they'll be able to actually update that assets uh attributes or descriptive points like what kind of signpost does it have, what kind of sign is it, and any other changes or modifications that were made in the field. We're anticipating that with these features, along with many other

features we haven't talked about, that we should save about $130,000 per year in labor. knowing that's that's a soft cost and I'm using air quotes. What that means is that's $130,000 more dollars on the conservative side that will be spent with shovels in hand doing actual work and not spending time fighting a system that we are challenged with today. I'm actually going to go back one more slide. You'll see here too and we talked about this at the retreat. There's a couple of other boxes that I have highlighted as well. A few other apps that we potentially could look at if we go with open gov would include the financial management system and budgeting and performance applications. These have been vetted internally already as good candidates to replace our existing software. And the b benefits we would see from this is that we would have that seamless interaction or the one system of truth. So instead of having to send information or pull information from one system to the other, all that information would already be housed under one application or one system. We also have uh potentially earmarked permitting and licensing as a future implementation as well. However, we have not gone as far yet as imple um vetting this application internally yet. Okay, so a quick recap. We talked about this at the retreat as well. Um, so we currently have four systems that we would like to sunset and move uh forward with open gov. Those uh systems are listed here and our total annual price to be able to have this selection of tools that help us with asset management today is a little over $52,000. I also shared last time kind of our business case, right? And the amount that it would cost for us to move forward with open gov um at this time.

And this is the same slide that I showed you last time. Uh to quickly recap a couple of the high points here. Um the agreement with open gov would be for three years and 9 months. So it would be the rest of this year starting in April and then it would go all the way through the end of 2029. As far as year one, the year one costs are higher than the future years after that. But the biggest part of that is the implementation. So Oakland gov would be coming on site to help us uh with training implementation along with other ongoing support and maintenance. Uh the quote that we currently have with open gov is based on the 2025 pricing that they offered us. So we started this journey about 9 10 months ago and so we received this quote um in the fall. uh the kind of burning platform that we need to think about here is if we don't get this system now then the 2026 pricing will come into effect for us. The 2026 pricing is estimated to be about 20 uh% more uh than it is right now. The quote is good until the end of the month and if we don't do this now it'll ultimately cost us about $66,000 plus or minus uh to move forward. So here's the big part that we are asked to look at as a leadership team and to come back to this council and present on which is essentially how do we plan on funding this project. Council had asked that we take a look at where we might be able to cut in other areas and ultimately avoid a budget amendment that would dip into the city's reserve accounts. So without showing all of the math here, essentially the gap that we had to close from a funding perspective was about $102,000, well about $103,000. We do have some cost avoidance.

We have some places where we can avoid costs in today's current state when we move away from um the suite of tools that we currently have. And so what we are proposing is that the parks division, storm water division, and streets division uh take an equal cost sharing for this year 1 amount of $103,000. This means that each department would need to find about $34,000 to cut out of existing operating budgets. So, in collaboration with um Sarah, our parks and recreation director, and Aaron, our public works director, this is what we came up with. As far as the parks operating costs, the exact like codes or budgets that that will come from is TBD. But here's uh something that our parks department has been experiencing for the last several years, ever since its inception in 2022. There's always uh at least so far there's always been a couple of either capital projects that were unforeseen or larger projects that were unforeseen and so there's always been a budget amendment at the end of the year to move funds from one account to another to accommodate for these unforeseen projects. Uh Sarah was uh gracious enough to sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh share a couple of examples with me um just to give this council a better idea and context of what some of these projects uh can be like. One of them that I'll share is around the London bathroom sink replacement that we had to take care of in 2025. You might think it's just a bathroom sink, not a big deal. However, it's an older facility and the sink that we needed to replace because there was a leak, it's no longer manufactured and so it cost an additional amount to get a sink that would fit in that area and get everything to retrofit accordingly. That one bathroom sink ended up costing us about almost $18,000. Another example I'll share is around the

war memorial, the one that's right out here um in North Cove Park. So, in 2025, uh, the American Legion, uh, noticed that one of the requirements wasn't being met for the sizing of the emblems on the memorial. So, working through that project, um, it ended up costing a little over $8,000 to get those replaced and up to the standard u per, these kind of requests come all the time. Sometimes they're regulatory, sometimes they come out of something breaking or needing a repair, and we just don't always have insight as to when these kind of costs are going to come up. So, what the parks uh division would plan to do is have this be one of their unforeseen projects for the year that we would uh account for. And that simply means from an operational impact perspective that it's one less larger or capital-sized project that wouldn't happen or be accomplished this year out of those budgets. When it comes to the storm water division, um we would propose that the storm water aquatic vegetation maintenance budget um take a about a $35,000 reduction. As far as what does that mean? uh the it would be a reduction in the area that the lake is treated with herbicide. So the kind of the good news on this front um a lot of work has gone into storm water management resulting in a much healthier lake right our our um water clarity is better. it's generally in a much better place than it has been historically, meaning that we've been able to avoid treatments like with alum um and reducing those so they don't happen on a regular cadence anymore. They happen when they're needed. So, we think this is a lower risk um operational change that we can take going into the rest of this year. Finally, as far as the streets division, um we would propose that we take that

about $35,000 out of the streets uh pavement preservation budget. And essentially what that means is that some of our roads that we maybe would have tackled this year for repairs and maintenance, they would not be uh repaired this year. And what that ultimately means is that we would have continued reduction in pavement condition for those areas. I think the last thing I would say on this slide before moving forward is you might think like okay well those are hits do we want to take those hits for this community. We strongly feel that going with open gov is the right move for us. We believe that the operational efficiencies that we'll see um will allow us to be more wise and be able to make more strategic decisions on the data that we have and that this would be just a short-term modification and an ultimate good in the long run. So, a quick review of the proposed schedule. We already had the council retreat on 27. I'm coming back tonight uh asking this council to please authorize the mayor to enter into the agreement with open gov. And if we get that consensus tonight, the mayor would ideally sign that agreement tomorrow and we would begin the early stages of planning the implementation later this month. The actual implementation would start probably in mid to late March, but it for sure uh would wrap up in August for the current processes that we have today, including the service requests and uh work order management modules. And it likely would finish up no later than September for the other modules that we don't currently have, including our warehouses or inventory module, the fleet module, and the facilities module. So, here's our recommendation, and I'll read it one more time. Recommendation is for city council to authorize the mayor to sign the

agreement with open gov in the amount of $333,000,570 and two cents. Great presentation, Lori. What are your questions for Lori? Two cents. I know negotiate that two cents. We couldn't. We tried. Everybody's got to get their two sets at Yeah.

So, I guess my only question is around the pavement preservation. I mean, that's pretty important to our community, I think, is preserving the roads that we have now because uh they need it. Um, but can you give us an idea of what $34,000 in pavement preservation actually covers? Like what would that look like? Great. Actually, Director Halverson, do you want to take a stab at that? Oh, I gotta share a mic. I suppose um

yeah, Council Member Edwards, I I think um in the grand scheme of things, the the budget for pavement preservation this year is $700,000. And so $34,000 is is a is a it's a pretty minor reduction. So, we're talking um you know half lane width for I don't know 50 ft or 100 ft. Yeah, thank you. That's my next question was the the budget allotted amount for that. So, thank you for answering that. I appreciate it. Could we go back a slide please where the numbers are showing? Oh, one more. There you go.

You know, I just more had a a comment than a question. Um, first of all, I appreciate all the work that went into this. Uh, you guys were put in a situation where you had to make some very difficult choices. I think all of our departments are rent tight. I think you all do a great job on your budget and managing things. And so, taking, you know, $3,400 from each one of those apartments couldn't have been an easy find when you're looking at where you can can trim. So, I appreciate all the effort that went into that. Um, I would agree that this is an operating system we need. Um, when I hear the difference between what we have and what you're proposing, it's significant. And when you're proposing, I'm not looking at, okay, what are we just proposing today? I'm looking at how are we going to be moving our city forward? And I feel that um the open gov contract moves us forward not just for today but into the future as well. And I just want to say I appreciate you making the cuts. I know that's not easy and I appreciate not having to make a bud uh an adjustment to our budget.

Great. Right. So I just really quick want to confirm my understanding of some numbers. the uh the current systems we have that'll be phased out uh I believe some of those will still continue through part of this year there's going to be a period of overlap correct so I think what you're asking

view works we would keep view works on until we have uh implemented the open gov system at least for the services that we currently have going with view works when it comes to uh the lists app we would stop using that immediately. Um, and with Street Logix, the payment cycle for that, it comes up annually, uh, in the fall. I believe it's September, maybe October. So, we just simply would not be renewing for Street Logix. So, uh, and with Asset Tiger, it's only $850 a year, but once we move over to OpenGV, we would be able to avoid that cost as well. The police department still uses um asset tiger and they may use that for some time in the future, but they have so many fewer assets than public works and parks um does meaning that we would actually be able to go to a free subscription uh with asset tiger. So we have about six months of V works that we would continue with and um director Troy Stevens our IT director he already has put in for just a six-month continuation of that current agreement. So we for sure would be done in August. That one has a renewal that starts in February.

Okay. So going forward in this contract years 2, three, four, we're effectively offsetting those costs. Uh looks like about 65 to $70,000. We can mentally offset 50ish,000 of that. Correct. Because we're not paying for these current services. So the delta is, you know, 15 $20,000. No. So the delta is $103,000 on this slide annually. No, for year one, right? Sorry, I'm talking about years two, three, and four. Okay. So, we're not spending 52 on all these legacy systems. We're spending 64, 67, and 71, respectively. Correct.

Okay. And we expect uh cost savings of roughly $130,000 a year through efficiency gains. Yes. So, you guys have managed to cover the year one cost out of the existing budget and more than make up for the delta in years three or two, three, and four. I would say that's pretty impressive and a job very well done. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions? Just Yeah. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Please, Nathan. Go ahead.

Just a comment that um yeah, in the event that we have a parks issue or a road preservation issue, right? I'm not opposed to coming back at the end of the year and asking for a budget modification, right, or amendment. I just appreciate that we took a stab at what we could do now and then we'll see what happens later. So, thank you. Great. Thank you. Right. Uh just a clarification, you mentioned um the savings would would increase shovel time by 140,000 roughly. Yeah, about 130,000. About 130,000. So would that be a cost savings or increase? Are you behind on work orders now? I don't know where you're at with like keeping up with the pace, right? So are you behind on work orders now? So we'd be more efficient to be able to complete those with that extra money. Yes. Okay. Yep.

All right. Perfect. Thank you. Great job. Thank you.

I just have one more question. Is citizens view also going to be continued for roughly 6 months or are we switching? Okay. And then do we have a plan to make sure that our citizens know this changeover is coming so they can expect it so that we have a smooth transition? Yes, we don't have that plan fleshed out yet, but I'm very much focused on change management, especially too when it impacts our residents. So, we'll be coming up with a communication plan um with our communication specialist and making sure that we're trying to hit it, you know, from many different angles, including social media, maybe flyers. I'm sure the mayor can help us out with a plug when he has coffee with the mayor regularly. I'm a big plugger.

We'll we'll tackle that. We'll also like make some videos most likely like we did when we implemented view works and and citizen view where we kind of explain what's the difference and how do you do this. So I promise it'll be covered. Nice. Thank you. With that, can we get a motion uh on this subject? I move to authorize the mayor to sign the agreement with open gov. Let's second it. We have a motion and a second. Do we have any discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor?

I. And any opposed? All right, motion passes. Great job, Lori. Good work, staff. Um, and appreciate it, council. It'll uh I think move forward in the right right uh lane. All right, let's talk about council procedure review and Facebook discussion. Jean, I think you are on in the box. Let's do it.

This is a kind of a housekeeping matter. We we uh do this every year January, February time. We bring it to full council and we did not read through it and make any adjustments to uh either make it more user friendly or adapt to today's procedure which we just made a change to the council meeting agenda. So that'll be updated in our update for 2026. Uh you probably noticed that it hasn't been updated since 2023, but prior to that there was quite a few adjustments because the city, you know, was change so dramatically. And that's okay. It's good to make these adjustments. So, uh I'm not going to go down through all of these, but I'm uh willing to answer any questions. I know we've got the city attorney, we've got the clerk here as well. Uh, I'm guessing everybody's had ample time to read through it. One of the topics that we do want to talk about before we leave this is the social media p piece, but I'd like to leave that for last and just kind of address the rules of procedures for today. Any questions? Any comments? Any adjustments you'd like to see other than the agenda?

It looked like there was a couple scribers errors. we needed to fix. Okay, that's right. What I saw on bit are already noted. Okay. Any uh any thoughts? Everyone's good. Everyone's too new to know what they don't know. How about that? We had a lot of training lately. A lot of refresher stuff. So, I think all any questions we' have is already they've already been covered. Serena,

I did wanted to thank Caitlyn and and Kelly to making the adjustment to the ADA requirements we had. Um, I saw that you have 48 hours. Um, so that kind of jives with when you put out the agenda, so I appreciate that. You're welcome. We appreciate the fresh set of eyes. So, thanks for pointing that out. Okay. Um, uh, well, let's move forward then.

Okay, that sounds great. And again, we can bring it forward anytime, but we typically do it in January, February. So, if we don't get it this time, we'll get it next time. And it was kind of funny as I was reading through this uh preparation for the meeting today. I saw something else that didn't jive. So, um I can't find it right this second, but I will definitely read back through it and work with the clerk. So, let's transition into the social media discussion. We've done a lot of work on that. Uh, and we have a saying here, uh, how do we get to Yes. And so we've worked really hard to try and come up with a solution. We've reached out to, uh, tons of cities and we've yet to find a city that's able to do exactly what we want to kind of do. be able to have a place where a council member can post on Facebook and kind of re recap a council meeting and uh kind of utilize that as a communication tool with the public. Uh the pitfalls in that as we've talked about is the public records act. How do we retain those records? And when we retain records for council members, the retention schedule is a lot different than for myself or uh field staff, right? For elected official, it's not I I won't say for an eternity for for a long long time. And so the the the problem with that is if a post goes out on social media and somebody pops back up as a friend a year or two later and comments on your post, how do we collect that? if we get a public records request for the that information in five years and many cities have tried to deal with that and nobody has come up with the solution as of yet that we've seen and I did meet with my managers and

administrators group today and six cities from Snowish County were present and not a one of them have been able to solve this riddle as yet. Some have uh created Facebook pages for council members. Uh and that can happen here as well. But right now we have a procedure of push only. So we push out information. We don't allow comments. Um the reason we do that is if you open up the comments then you have to allow all comments. And what that means is there may be groups out there that represent who knows what, but might not align with our strategic plan and the council goals and our operations and you don't have the ability to remove one person's post and leave somebody else's post just because it doesn't align or maybe there's some profanity. Uh, and I've seen policies, in fact, ours kind of talks about that as well. And as we went back through this, we read it and said, "Well, how does that align with what the council wants to do and the same answers that don't have a billion that could choose what they pull off of Facebook once it's on there, it's always on." So the the guidance from uh so there's an AWC training social media 101 101 and in there it does say that uh city can define sorry let me find the slide um sorry there's several things it does say in there that the city can as part of their policy dictate that yeah the comments have to be aligned to the topic that was posted comments have to be appropriate, can't have any vulgarity, things like that. Uh so AWC guidance guidance again they say this isn't legal counsel it's just guidance is that we can as a city define certain guidelines and if those are published and made

available then we can enforce those things were appropriate. No, I'm I'm familiar with that and that's what our policy says. Sure. Uh and that may or may not be was acted till it's tested in the court of um in the court. We we really don't know that and we're seeing new court cases come out and even if we did that how do we control the public records aspect and that's separate separate question but yeah okay but I I did read that Nathan I really appreciate it and that exact language is in our internal policies

and when we're trying to reach that goal with parks that language is in there and it hasn't been tested as of yet but I do No. Well, it it has been tested in a couple of cases where comments were taken off because they did not meet guidelines and those cities did get sued. Yeah. My concern with that would be there's there's guard rails for trying to steer your meeting in the comments and then there's what you have to do with the record if someone actively chooses to go outside those.

Separate question though. I that right I just want to make the point that we say it's not it's not possible to remove comments versus hey there we can remove them but there's other issues that so I'm wondering about first amendment rights people say whatever that's that's the issue would a possible solve would be if council wanted to put something out on social media that we just work through the city's Facebook account so it's all captured in the same area can be vetted ahead of time would would all seven of you have the same message. I will probably not. Would it um at the very least would we be able to have our own accounts that are public that don't have comments?

We've talked about that and that's something we can pull off. I believe we'll have to do some noodling around and this gets back to your um council rules of procedures. There's a section there talks about communication and as long as it's crystal clear that you're not representing the entire council you're representing you in your opinion we could probably work through that and I'd work with Greg and our IT folks u again it would be push only and it's interesting you know mayor just brought up a great point I appreciate that a lot of cities have been reaching out to us and said how did you uh not allow comments on your Facebook because they did and now they're trying to get it turned often

meeting a lot of resistance. And so, uh, if if this is the the will of the council to have a city Facebook page for each council member, I can work with it, our city attorney, and figure out how we can do that and then work on the messaging and and get an answer back to you. I guess the if I create a Facebook page that I administer but it's public, do you not have a a a way to archive that information?

It it would need to it would need to go through our systems. So the way that we've seen it done before is we would create the page for you and then it would have the all of the credentials as a backup because once you leave the position, we'd have to archive, right? and we'd have to have access to that for public records requests. And then it would be the same as our city Facebook page. So no comments. It would have to have disclaimers like Jean's talking about. Um and and then you could just push information, but it would be captured in Jon. It would be captured in our archiver so that if there is a records request, we as staff can go in and get those records out. Can I share a couple things? Um I've obviously have been looking into this a lot. Um, I'd be curious to see those lawsuits that you're talking about because everyone that I have found is focused around uh private Facebook pages by council members. Um, that's not necessarily what we're asking for or what I'm asking for. Um, a city official page like you were talking about. Um, I actually played around with um a public record and comment policy that I could propose um to be put on uh the Facebook page. Um, but basically it's a used by a public official to share information and hear community feedback about city issues. So part of being a council member is being able to interact with our constituents. And right now we can't really interact with our constituents. Um, and so being able to have that two-way conversation, not to get into details, I think is important. However, if we have to say no comment, then that is what it is. um our our constituents want to hear from us. They want to know what's going on. They want to know um the you know actions that we've been taking. They want to hear those things. So if they want to communicate with us via our official email, so be it. We can do it that way. Um another part says comments, reactions, and direct messages may be public records subject to disclosure under Washington Public

Records Act. Um the page is not monitored 24/7 and is not the official way to request city services. Um, this is a limited public forum. Comments will not be removed based on viewpoints. However, the following may be hidden or removed. True threats or incitement to violence, obscenity or sexual content, commercial spam or repetitive duplicate posts, personal private information, and contact that content that is unlawful. U blocking may occur only for repeated violations after warnings. Conversations between council members about city's decisions will be redirected to public meetings in compliance with the open public meetings act. So, I think that um we can do this with our bases covered and do what our constituents are asking of us. Um and it might take some trial and error, but um I mean, we have a huge opportunity here with social media. Um I I think that it's important. I'm not sure what the data shows for the city social network page. Um, but when I was campaigning, I would get 6 to 8,000 views on my on my posts about what's going on within the city. That's huge. That's a huge spread. Um, and I think that it's it's a we're missing that opportunity. So, if um we take off having a a private page, that's not something that I think we would even need to consider. But if the city is willing to set up a social media page for those of us that want it, maybe not everybody wants to have that, that's fine. But I think that those of us that do should be afforded that opportunity as long as we're following all the rules. And if it's a city sponsored page, then you're able to do that that um records retention. Um because I also had looked up there's like four different archive social um softwares that that you can use, but it sounds like city's already using one. Um but ultimately all the advice that I have

gotten from people is to ask the city to to open a designated official um Facebook page for city council. Um and that kind of as long as you have that that public record and comment policy posted on there um it kind of takes away from that liability. Um, and it's not a place where, you know, we would argue with constituents or anything like that. Um, it's just strictly getting information out, which is, I think, the goal, right? So, I just wanted to share that. And I do have several examples also, um, of cities and council members um, and things that they post. So, um I mean I'm able to share that with our social media person and maybe you know we can step it up on our city page as well um with what's being shared. Um but I think you know I just I understand the hesitation and and the liability that comes with it but we need to think about our our constituents and our taxpayers and they want to know what's going on and what's currently being done is not working. So

question on those accounts. Yeah. Are they the type uh is it possible to set it so only city staff can remove comments? Like we wouldn't have a council member inadvertently deleting stuff or making snap judgment calls? I mean, who who has ultimate control over that? Because I'm not familiar with I would assume anyone who has access to the account would be able to do that. But if we have an understanding that we are not to delete comments, I mean, I know how to follow rules. No, I'm I'm just I'm guarding against the lowest common denominator. You know, the people that come after us. You never know who will sit in these chairs, what they're going to do. Um, but I would feel a lot more comfortable with that if we couldn't delete the records. So, I was just curious how that

and I'm not sure what the settings would be for that as far as administrators or whichever. Nick looks like he knows.

So, the so the issue you get into here, every decision you make on removing, hiding, editing a comment will involve about a full page rubric. I've done this at other cities in other states that are much less rigorous on the open uh public records act. Um so it becomes very untenable for anything beyond very publicly open areas like a library. Um so places I've done this in in the past it's been the library, it's been uh it's been a recreation program. it hasn't been council directly cuz then the other thing to remember when you guys get into uh election cycles and things like that, you are going to have to very very narrowly make sure that nothing coming in on that page is anything about a campaign material. Whether you put it out there or anybody else puts it in there, it gets very tainted very, very, very fast. The risk on this is very large. I mean, you're talking a lawsuit on this will make the savings and the the discussion we just had about open gov, it's it's in that order of magnitude. It's it's a quarter a million dollars.

How could you even stop that? Didn't we? Isn't that the whole point of the discussion is we can't control the inflow on these accounts. And that's what I'm saying. That That's why I'm saying if you turn on comments, you're open for that. So, you're saying that it has to be commentless. Do not turn on comments. I say I have a couple of questions. Number one, what are we spending out of our city budget on social media oversight now? Oversight. Like I know we've got our Facebook page, we've got the splash, we've got the meet up with the mayor and I really like that recently there's posts about the upcoming council meetings and those type of things. Um I'm trying to think of who controls those lights right on the tip of my thumb. Olivia. Olivia.

Olivia. So, how much of Olivia's day now is spent on social media budget-wise? All we have is So, Olivia is a split position. So, she's part-time grants, part-time communications. So, part of her week is communications and part of her week is grants. And then depending on where it's heavy, so we really only have a half FTE to do communications right now. And if we were to implement something like this, um, where someone's going to have to start monitoring this even more so, we do not currently have the personnel to do that. No, we don't.

Okay. So, my next step or my next question is kind of along the same conversations here because I mean I like talk. Anyone who knows me knows I'm a talker. Um, but I also know on our community pages like I'm not even on them anymore because I it was just too hard for me to watch all the inaccuracies being stated, especially this last campaign. Um, and just the mudslinging. And you'll see even without comments, people laughing at our posts.

And so, how would we control the inaccuracies, especially if they start to snowball, right? How do you how would you control snowballing inaccuracies? Because, and I don't think people are intentionally lying, per se, but this makes sense to me. So, this must be what's happening. Oh, yeah. That's got to be what's happening. And so, it starts snowballing on us. And for us to remove that, we're impinging on their first amendment rights.

So Kim, I'll give you for an example of why the comments were shut off on our page. Um, one, I just returned from a seminar on this subject. And that attorney/media expert suggested no comments. So I was in that debate mode. And then what turned it was, ironically, a couple weeks after that, there was some sort of conversation going on on our page and someone went in and created a profile, took our logo, said City of Lake Stevens, and they had like added an extra S or they did they they changed it just a little bit and they started that exact thing, talking as if they were the city answering these questions. in the most horrific ways.

Yeah.

So, I blocked it and then 3 minutes later, same logo and they just changed the spelling enough that they could start doing it again. And we do not have staff does not have time to play those games and monitor those those comments for that type of misinformation going on. And so, we turned off the comments. So just real quick, I think going back to what I originally table is having a council page on Facebook through the city, right? So it doesn't we don't have to be on the same page. Any one of us can go on there and make a statement and you know you can see it before it goes out on the the city can vet it if you will for accuracy or whatever else, but at least it's all being captured. It's all in one spot and and you don't have comments turned on. But if I went on to that Facebook page and I don't like Facebook, I don't do Facebook. But if I went on there and I just wanted to get something across to voters, let's say we want to really explain why we're going into this 330,000 for this new software. And just put it in real easy terms for people to understand because it gets above people's head when you start talking about software, right? Then I'd also put my by line, my my contact information through the city. So my city phone and my city address. That's how they can come back to me if they want to talk about it further. Right. And then obviously if it comes back with some really hard questions, call Jean first and say, "Hey, can you help me with this or have

So it's a control thing, but you don't have to get out of the gate that way." Yeah, I I I think we can look at what you guys are talking about as far as having individual pages. I have I have really a lot of concerns on the commenting. Um, if I really like the idea if you can do an email,

like do a weekly email to a group of people that want to subscribe to your email um, newsletter. That way we can really be able to capture all of the public disclosure request issues. Um, I do have a question for you. Um, Council Member Edwards, you said roughly that we don't do a good job communicating. What could we do better? Well, I didn't say we don't do a good job. I said that the the citizens are saying that they're not getting what they want. Okay. So, what what else what else do they want that we're not providing?

Absolutely. I can give some examples. So, number one, the recaps of the council meetings. Um people don't have time to go in and read an agenda that they don't understand. Um they want to know what actions are being taken by the council. The only way they can find out is if they read the minutes or go over the agenda or or watch the video. I can tell you as a parent of three that works full-time and a two working parent household, people don't have time for that. And so the information real quick on that one. So other than the minutes, what would we do to recap it?

So have you looked at my um previous campaign page at all? Have you seen the post that I did? You might want to take a look because um I think I did a really good job on breaking down what was going on in But that was your interpretation. So, how do we get a singular council interpretation? You just use a central page and whatever council member wants to post something that week, it's on that, right? We don't need a seven different pages, each individual pages. We just have a council page. It's on the Facebook site. But, but then do you start creating this inner council struggle? Yeah, I'd be concerned with each other. We need to be cautious of OPMA.

No, no, I'm I still have the floor with with council member Edwards. keep going.

Yeah. So, um that's a huge a huge thing um is is being able to see what's going on in the council chambers. Um another thing is um you know, I'm very active in the community. I know a lot of people here. I I work with a lot of nonprofits and community organizations that want to be involved with the city and do more things here. Um and so something that I would be able to do is to connect those things. um share information not just about the city but organizations. Um for example, businesses. We have a business here in Lake Stevens that just um is getting ready to sign a new lease for a new a bigger larger location. We should be highlighting that. We should be saying, you know, maybe do once a week have um a business highlight so that constituents can see who's here. How many times have I saw a business and been like, "Wow, I didn't even know that we had that here." Um there's a lot more information that we could be disseminating to people to make them feel like they are part of our community. Um and and as a citizen myself that has been following, you know, the the council meetings for a long time, that's something that I personally felt a disconnect with. Um, and when you go and look on my campaign page with those posts that I was making after every council meeting, some of that may have been my perception, but that was my campaign page. And if I put this is my perception, then I put that. However, most of this information that I shared for that was not my personal perspective. It was this is what we did. This is the vote that was done. This was on the agenda. Um, and so I mean I don't need a babysitter. Like I I I feel like I'm we are all adults here and if we have rules that we are given to follow

um I think that we should be able to follow that. And uh it the another example um one of the uh city of Belleview they also do city department recaps. So, um, you know, when when we have a the the public works department comes and and does a presentation to to the council, um, there's not a recap of that for our citizens. So, they don't have a clue what's going on with our pros plan. There's some stuff with the pros plan, but again, you got to click on a link and you got to go read all of this stuff. It's not it's not accessible. We can say it's accessible because it's there, but telling people it's there, you just need to go find it, is not what people want.

Anything else? I mean, I can keep going if you want more examples. No. Okay, Sabrina.

So, I think the gap that we see here is that we have Facebook private our our personal pages. We have campaign pages. There's nothing in between that would allow us to communicate with our constituents who are not our close friends. So, I would not necessarily want to encourage people to follow my personal page because that's not appropriate and that's not why I put it together. But, it would be useful for those of us that want to communicate with the people that um follow us for different reasons and they may have different interests. we are we have different things that we care about and maybe we want to highlight different events or different resources. Um we don't have that right now other than creating it ourselves. Um the public disclosure request component I think it's very easy. Nothing is really erased on the internet. You as an administrator can go and provide that information upon request. Um, the comment moderation, I think that's the u more sensitive area and I think if somebody really wants to have the comments turned on, that can be worked through. But I think if at the very least we we have pages that are available that we can share information that don't have comments, I think that's a pretty easy ask. I I don't think that's a

and yeah, we're responsible for what we say. we understand that what we say in an email is also uh what we say face to face is also um we have to be responsible for that and I don't I think in the age of social media and I think Tasha is right I saw a lot of engagement on the Facebook page you cannot avoid this we've had social media for what more than 10 years you have to figure out a way to to to make it work as another venue and I I think it's doable. I Yeah, I would go ahead.

Oh, go ahead. I was going to ask um Council Edwards a question. So, I'm looking at the agenda and it's basically saying everything that we're we're doing tonight. So with Olivia who does the splash and does those is there any reason this city I guess my challenge is um why are we we're council is supposed to be collective as a whole like we are one of seven um my and it's hard to call it anything but opinion like you're saying we all have various strengths right um is not me we are all part of a council we're one of seven we're supposed to act collectively So, I was wondering and I don't know again because I know our budget's tight. I mean, we've got an agenda right here. I mean, it's pretty, you know, the oath of office is in here. I mean, we're not going to put up our whole slideshows obviously, but a one or two sentence summary below maybe, you know, asterisks or something like that done by the city would do exactly what you are asking, which is a summary of our city council members, but it wouldn't be one council member. I I'm challenged with one council member us all doing this individually because that's not how we're supposed to work. We're supposed to work collectively. So collectively as a city council, we've got a city council meeting agenda. That's collective. We every Monday, if you don't know, Monday morning sometimes are canceled if things are going on. Monday mornings at 8:30, there's agenda planning meeting on Teams that anyone can attend. anyone can speak. If you can't attend that, which oftentimes I have scheduling conflicts where I can't attend on a Monday morning at 8:30, um you can go to Angie, you can go to Brett, you can go to anyone else and you can have that discuss. I'm sure you could probably reach out to Caitlyn, but anyone has the power to add

something to our city council meeting agenda, which is our collective as a council. What are we looking at? Right? I'm challenged being okay with a fragmentated um city council that's not working collectively as a whole.

I think one thing so I agree social media has been around for a long time. It's very powerful. It's a very useful way to reach out to people. I don't think there's anyone on the council that doesn't want to engage with people otherwise we wouldn't be here. Um, I am leerary of things though like trial and error when I hear that because the penalty for failure on this is so high if we get it wrong. I'm not saying it's impossible. Um, but I just think of it as if I was personally liable for some of these damages numbers I hear floating around from some of these things. I wouldn't be comfortable with that risk. I'm not comfortable with it for the city. I think we could do more research on this. I think we could look into, you know, what kind of controls are possible to prevent this stuff and hopefully come back with some solutions. Um, because I I I don't think trial and error is the way to go on this, but I I I would like I'd be interested to see hear what specific tools are out there to try and enable this.

So, if we take the comments completely off the table, what's your um concerns? Honestly, it's council members having control enough over the account to either uh unintentionally or again lowest common denominator looking to the future maliciously um deleting stuff and not preserving public records accurately. If it was something completely in control of the city where once we post it, it's out there and then somebody like Nick has to go through a process to remove it. I' and there were no comments, I'd feel much more comfortable with a system like that. But

Kaitlin and Nick, maybe you can clarify on the city Facebook page that we have now, as soon as something gets posted on there, is it automatically saved to the records? Yeah. So, if we had a if we had an account that

it Okay, so every single page it is archived within a reasonable amount of time. Five minutes is kind of basically what you're looking at. I mean, there we're we're talking to separate systems that do have to do things and realize what's there. There's about a 5minute window. The issue you have to Ryan's point of view is malicious, unintentional, or even just a abs just a poor choice of words is now sitting there on a city page. You as a council member on a private page or on a campaign page, you don't have a large budget behind you. You're not going to be a target for somebody looking for a lawsuit. The minute we put a city logo, have a city attorney to defend it, and everything's sitting there, your risk is gone up by several orders of magnitude. That's why I tell you, I mean, that I've I've been at cities with this, and it is I mean, you're playing with you're playing with a quarter million dollar mistake. Is is

there also a concern that a hint? Um, hey, there we go. You said the wave. Is there also a concern we would need to turn off sh I'll tell you where I'm at. Like if you guys want to have your own pages and there's no commenting, I think I'm probably okay with it. Um, but I think we'd have to turn off sharing also because if your comment gets shared into a community page, that's still an open, but you you can share city comments right now, right? Yeah, I would think in a different environment. Maybe if we don't share it, if somebody else shares it,

right? Yeah. Then yeah,

I mean, that's the whole point. the whole I mean I I guess I'm I'm really baffled by if I right now create a page like um council members do in bigger cities which have more money and more liability and have comments on their pages and they're making it happen. If I create a page as an elected official, I we are we are yes a council but we are individually elected on different issues which are important to us which we want to keep talking about or or share resources on or other things other than what's obviously on the agenda and we invite the public to comment on. I'm really I guess I don't understand. I I guess there's some fear-mongering that I I I get it. Um but to keep, you know, bringing up a a situation that doesn't quite apply, the $250,000 that was on a private page, I think that's a different context.

It's it's rules. Okay. So, here's here's where you guys stand. So, there's a set of rules. Somebody in the city is going to have to monitor these pages. Who is going to monitor these? And you guys, we are not a full-time council. You got everyone on council has other things they're doing during the day. So that means council will be posting at night.

I guess hang on. That's a posting question. What is your method? What is the method you're you're proposing then to have somebody be able to monitor and manage and maintain those pages going forward after hours? So, are we looking at paying staff after hours? I mean, the all of these questions do end up snowballing and there's a lot of a lot a lot to think about. So if you don't have comments on Facebook page and you're sharing resources and I'm the administrator of it responsible for the comment that gets archived on a regular basis what is the issue? What? So what happens just hypothetical what happens if council member A goes and says something that now four or five council members do not agree with and

but it's on their page but but it's on their page and Brian's responsible for what would be on Brian's page. So if the council member what what is the what is the mechanism for taking back the council page if the council member goes or we can disagree on items. I don't and we have the authority to say whatever we want to say.

I think that we're getting away from why the request is really there then we're we're not campaigning for four years. It's not like you get elected so I'm going to have my own page. I'm going to campaign. I'm going to follow up on all those promises, which follow up on promises are good. But if we have a city page that already can do this collectively as a council, we have a parks department, they have their own page. If if citizens only want to follow the elected official they want to follow, follow our city pages. And then if they have questions, they can certainly email that elected official. But this very much feels like four years of campaigning under the guise of sharing information that the city's already sharing.

But the city's not sharing it though. That's the problem. But if we're making these these these changes like you know we just we asked and they've been posting this is when we're doing so I see the city's effort. Oh yeah.

Because of our conversation. I've seen the city's effort. So, I think it'd be more, again, I'm one of seven, and I've never had the illusion that just because I might think differently than people sitting next to me, I need to step outside of the one of seven, that I can't work collectively with my group. And that's what this agenda does. And then when you're talking about the different departments, I follow all of our city departments. And then I used to share everything on the community pages. I never commented a word. I just shared what the city said. Um, sometimes I'll share them on my personal page, but I never said a word. And so, because again, we're supposed to be collective here. And then if you have someone that you know, someone that's following, someone that you're friends with, and they have a question, somebody who just knows you, you are from your campaign, you're probably more like-minded than maybe another council member. They have a venue. It's email. Email's been out way longer than Facebook has. So, I guess I don't understand why we want to break away as a collective group and go stand on our different

laurels. I I just I don't understand why we can't Can I address her comments to me, please? Good.

So, I I understand what you're saying. Um the city is doing the the um Olivia and the parks, they're doing the best that they can with the social media, with the resources that they have. we've already been told that they do not have the resources to sit there and post stuff that we would like to see posted. Um, as far as being collective, you're absolutely correct. I totally agree with that. I am one of seven. However, we all have our own strengths and my strength is a community organizer. Okay. Um, and so I would like to be able to use my strengths to strengthen our community connection. And that is not a campaigning. that is me sticking with what I set out and committed to do when I decided to run for office. So, I just want to clarify that um that this is not about me posting my opinions or anything like that. I mean, I would even say I won't put any of my personal opinions on it if that's what it came down to to give me this avenue to communicate with the constituents. Like I said, we talked about newsletters. Newsletters are great, but people have to put in effort to sign up for them. How, just out of curiosity, do you know how many people are signed up for your newsletter?

I don't have a newsletter. Okay. So, um, and I and I appreciate I truly do appreciate that this is a passion of yours and that this is a strength of yours. um is there not a way you could meet with Olivia and say, "Hey Olivia, when you're posting about this, could you maybe add this or this or this?" And so then we're still working as a collective. I think our parts department does a great job announcing groundbreaking, announcing what's going on at the docks and now it's just the fact people aren't following them, which is people's choice. Commander Jefferson because it looked like council member Packard had a thought there. Go name.

Yeah. So, um I appreciate what you're saying about being a collective. I think the but being a collective in my mind is after a vote has been taken, right? So, for example, we have an issue coming up. There's a dock issue or something, right? We want to talk to our people. We can go, right? We could go to Starbucks and say, "Hey, let's talk to people." And people share their opinions. We share back. Great. Right? There's no public record because it's just talking. We're not writing it down. But sure, we can have that conversation. I as an individual council member uh want to have conversations with people to help influence how I vote, right? So before a vote happens, I am just one person. We're not a collective. At some point, we're going to vote. Okay? At some point, we're going to vote. And at that point, whether I win, when I'm whether I'm aligned with the majority or not, I should then align. Then I become a collective. Having said that, it is still valuable to me to communicate to people why I voted against a certain way, right? So, vote comes out, step housing used that as a recent example, right? Uh, I voted a certain way. I want people to know why. Now, having said that, now that the votes happened, I'm going to align with that. I'm going to encourage people to follow that. I'm not going to be disparaging towards that majority, but I want people to know why I voted that way. And Olivia can't do that for me. that's not possible. So I I need to be able to commun I want to be able to communicate that to pe with people so they know why I voted that way. Um so it doesn't mean there has to be comments. Again, I think if we get rid of comments that takes away the majority of the concern, but at least and I guess I'll just say I I'm not comfortable with a city councilwide campaign page. No offense, but I don't want any of the rest of you speaking for me, right? I would like to say what I would like to

say just as I would put it in an email or while I'm talking to somebody on the street, whatever that is. Again, I have the responsibility to be responsible especially after a vote to align with that. But there are certain things that that are valuable for me to communicate who I am uh so that people understand that. Hey, I this has been a great conversation and I think we've got some good notes. I could recap. How about that?

I would love a recap. Okay. And so would Tasha. So, here's what I would propose is that I work with staff and I bring back a package. I agree. I think it needs to be separate. So, each one of you would have a Facebook page so we can avoid OPMA issues. There's going to be a cost to that around probably 400 bucks a page. Doesn't matter. I'll bring a package back together and that 400 bucks would be because we have to be able to archive each one of those, right? So, it's a add-on to our existing security and backup stuff. So, anyway, point is is I'll put all that together and come back and then I'll come back with a policy that talks about the practice and a review may like a peer review if you will from the council president and vice president. If somebody posts something that is out of sorts, some of what you hear staff talking about, the mayor and I talking about is everything that goes out from the city, most of it. There might be some things that don't, but we go through a vetting process. So, if I want to put a post out there, mayor reviews it, staff reviews it, everybody reviews it to avoid liability. So, what we're talking about with council is you'd be responsible for your own comments, no review. And so that's that's the difference in in what we're talking procedurally for a city employee. We follow a practice of review, review, review. We all sign off on it, then it gets posted.

Can can we implement a review process though? We we we can and and I was thinking about this while council was talking. There's a time element to this, right? Because you want to be current, but you only meet once a week. So how is that review going to be done? We're certainly not going to review your work, but I'm just I'm just setting the stage for what I'll bring back. Does that sound okay? No. And and then you guys could vote on it at that point in time and say, "No, we don't want to do this." Or, "Yes, we do. Could you make a switch and we could talk about it?" And Yeah. I think it goes back to what I was talking about. If we had just a council Facebook page, I wouldn't be speaking for you, Nathan, because you're going to speak for you on that page. Simon, right? You're going to speak for you on that page if you want. You can sign it,

right? Yeah. Yeah. But I I I do have concerns about that. One of those engagement would be if Nathan post something, I'm not going to follow with my account that you're not a slippery slope there, Brian, to be honest with you. If we're if we want Jean can look into it. Yeah. Let me work my magic. I'll bring something back in a couple weeks and staff's probably throwing things at me. That's why I'm looking at you.

But let's see if we get to Yes. somehow. One thing I want to add to Tasha's earlier point though, I do think a lot of our content could be more digestible. One thing in particular that has always kind of puzzled me, I don't know how much work goes into it, but on plenty of YouTube videos, I see timestamp segments, you know, it makes it very easy, but there's an index and I'm like, "Oh, this is the thing I care about. Jump to minute seven and, you know, 40 second." If we could time stamp our YouTube videos to the agenda and say this is the time where we talk about this um I think that would be immensely helpful

and and maybe it would be helpful for us for the communications team because we do have a part-time communications person to gather ideas that you have and then look at what is feasible for staff to execute. Um it could be that you guys have a lot of really great ideas that either don't fit our communications plan because we've looked at appearance of fairness. We can't share every single business every single week and who tracks that and and to make sure that the city is being neutral and is really just pushing out valuable information. But all ideas can come in and we could then, you know, look at those and respond with what seems feasible or what we've already looked into. So, we're always here to try and creatively problem solve and we we can definitely take in feedback with the limited resources we have. Yeah. And I I appreciate that. And I definitely don't want to put more workload on our already stretched.

Yeah. And as our department grows, maybe this is a future. maybe, hey, these things would be great if we get a full-time communications person at some point. This is our dream to grow that because it's very important to council. Um, and those are things that we would love to do. We have lots of really cool ideas that if we had more staff time, we would be doing um, you know, we're always looking to improve. So, we can definitely take those ideas in.

All right, I think we've collected some good nuggets. Let's move forward on the agenda. And Sarah, you're up to bat with parks and rec. All right, perfect. Uh, Parks and Recreation has put together our 2025 year end report. Um, it was included with the council packets. Um, with the exception of two small changes that I made, and I'll go over those when we get to the page. Um, I won't go through all of this. You can all go through it, read, send me questions later if you don't ask them tonight and have them, of course. Uh some of the highlights on the year end overview is we acquired property to expand Eagle Ridge Park. We also acquired Cabalero Park. Uh some of the projects within parks is we added auto locks to the handles at the North Cove restrooms. This allows for those bathrooms to automatically lock uh at dusk. We do manually change the clock on that about once a month. Um, but now all of our bathrooms do lock after hours and so that has cut down on vandalism. Uh, we striped three parking lots included including Lundine Park, North Cove, and Davies Beach. We created a new swim area at Sunset uh with the re uh with remodeling that dock last year as a capital project. We didn't have an established swim area, so got that up to um make sure everybody is safe. and we installed three communication boards at playgrounds, Londinine, North Cove, and Frontier. On this first page, you'll also see progress of capital projects. Second page is where I just have two updates on my screen that are different from yours as we found two typos and transposing of numbers. Um the 2024 boat launch parking revenue, this is just from day use. That was originally um on your screen in the packets as both annual passes and day use. And so it increased that number to almost 61,000 which was inaccurate as

we're reporting those two numbers differently on this screen. Additionally, in 2025, we had a change where our day use option is 3 hours. It's no longer 2 hours. Um, so we have that update on my screen that I'm sharing as well. Overall, we had an increase for day use passes as well as annual passes. One of the major changes in 2025 is around July and by August, we started enforcing parking and payment of fees at our boat launches in um in coordination with the police department. Uh that was when our ranger also came on board who is actually called our cso. So, our second cso over in the police department, um annual passes for the first time in 2025 offered a residential discount. So, if you live in the city, you can uh receive a $15 discount when you buy straight through our department. So, that's a $60 pass instead of a $75 pass. Um we did see um increases and expect to see increases as we go into 2026 and continue to enforce fee star locations. Uh our vandalism report was down in 2025. Uh this could be because small things are taken care of out in the field and not every single one was reported. Uh we've talked to staff greatly about making sure everything gets put into Vue Works um which will now be open as we go forward. Um parks was a late adapter to the VWorks system and this was the first year we really started to use that system in whole. Um sponsorship revenues is the thing I want to talk about on this screen. Uh these are directly related to department pushes to allow sponsorships and donations um especially at our special events. Uh we've created sponsorship tiers and have been pushing that and it's been wellreceived giving businesses the opportunity um to uh promote and um does a great thing to help us lower our cost when it comes to Harvest Fest and

Winterfest and the movies in the park. Um, Easter sponsorships are being published this week as well for 2026. On the last page, you have a bunch of numbers which usually make people go a little cross-eyed, but we tried to make it a little easier to read. Um, overall, all our shelter reservations were up by almost 40, I believe it's 41 total between 2024 and 2025. Mills did go down by just about five total rentals. uh we're analyzing on RN days of the weeks and how rooms are used. One of the major changes between last year and this year in the use of this building is because of conflicting noises. Uh we've decided to block off extra rooms for all public meetings, not just city council. So when we have parks board um or planning commission, the upstairs and Hartford Hall are also blocked off to prevent noises. We had some issues in the past. What that does is just limit how much time this building can be available for public use. Um when we talk about cost recovery for the mill. Um you can call it a a profit loss on this building or cost recovery. Uh we did better a lot better than last year. Last year I believe it was around the $30,000 mark that we were in the negative operating. And this year for the public rental portion we're at about uh 13,500. Um what we do for the allocation of public rentals is we look at the time that all of the rooms can actually be reserved for the public versus when they're blocked off for city use only. Um so that's great progress and we anticipate that to continue into next year. Uh we know that this uh will be a different game after city hall moves to a new location and this is fully available for the public. Um up top we have the parks and recreation department. Uh we have never created a cost recovery for parks and recreation before. Uh this is something you might remember in our retreat I tro I talked about across the nation and what those numbers look like and I briefly touched

on it. Um we've established this year that our cost recovery is for 5.99%. That is low. Um however we don't have a lot of revenue generating activities within our department. So that is to be expected at this point. We are looking at how to increase revenues through all of our different systems. And that does not always look like fee increases. Sometimes that looks like economies of scale and where are things underutilized or where we might be able to um get more reservations on off days and times. Um our marketing push is going to be the biggest thing happening this year as we realize we don't do a great job about um letting the public know what we have. That concludes my report. Does anybody have any questions?

Question. still be published on social media and the website tomorrow and printed copies will be available in our office. Really good detail. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you. Just how often do we uh is it annually that we look at park fees.

Typically the city tries to do one big park fee push. Um this year um I already know parks is going to have to come for a updated fee resolution. We've asked other departments if they need one. We're hoping to bring that back u by the end of this month. The reason why is internally we've discussed the use of the mill and decided that we would love to open the mill for all day rentals and public use on Thursdays and um take that block from city business out. And to do that, we have to update the Thursday fees. Uh we also identified um two other fees that may need some adjusting that have not been adjusted in in years.

Okay, I'll thank you for that. I'll be a little bit more direct. Uh, so I am not interested in imposing any more fees on our community. The boat fee, I think it's great that our citizens pay less. I would love to see it if our citizens paid $25 and non-citizens paid $100 or something right like that, right? What we're already paying property taxes. We're already feeding into that system. It's those who are coming from outside that I would love to see pay into that. So, I'm not giving direction here. It was mostly just food for thought for right now and we can figure out how we would want to address that later.

I think we also talked about like having a city parking permit versus so if somebody's a lot of folks come from out of town to use the lakes right in the summertime, charge parking for it. If you're if you're not a citizen, charge parking. I appreciate that. We are working on bringing back that to council to show you what that program would look like to have paid parking at all of our locations and separate that out by resident and non-resident. Um and then I'll add um Thank you, Council Member Packard, your note for annual boat passes to be 25 for residents and 100 for non-residents. And we'll run the model just so you can see the impacts of what

Yeah. And play with those numbers. Ultimately, if you can find a way to keep the revenue the same, but I mean, I'd love to pay zero, right? as this is and I just threw out a number but understood. Thank you. I was going to say our um hourly rate is shockingly low. Um cuz how much is it for 3 hours? Is it $5 or some crazy number like that? Correct. When we went from the 2-hour day use that was only $2 and so we went to three hours we did $5. We're finding with the round dollars that it is um working better as our machines don't give change.

Right. And then just something as somebody who actually I use it. Um I don't live on the lake. I trailer, I park, I launch, right? Um that's a tiny tiny fee for three hours on the lake. Um our our boat launches are incredibly expensive. Um the upkeep of all that's very expensive and it doesn't it isn't just paid by the taxpayers who are using it. It's paid by all of our taxpayers here in Lake Stevens when you're talking about property tax which of course what we get 7% of a small amount. So, I see this as a user tax. And when we're looking at budgeting, especially in a tight economy, I think users tax make a lot of sense because if we have to then recap the difference between a $25 um seasons or season parking permit to a $60, okay, that money is going to need to be made up somewhere. And I and I I don't think it's real fair to have it made up by people that aren't using it. So, I I personally really like the idea of user fees because we all collectively pay as if you live in city limits, but then those that actually are using it pay a little bit more and I think that's fair.

That's just Do we want to get into this conversation right now? I was going to say worms, right? I won't go there then. We will bring this back. Thank you for your feedback. Thank you. And I guess my reason for bringing that up is where would we make up that money when we're talking about budget and how we're trying to balance our budget? Where would we make up that money? No, to be fair, I opened the can, so I apologize, but All right. Any other thoughts for Sarah on her presentation? All right. Great. Good stuff. Thank you, Sarah. Appreciate it. Good stuff with the parks department. Council vice president. Let's do council of business.

Okay. Okay. Well, we don't have anyone online today. Um, so let's start with Council Member Packard. Do you have anything for us this week?

Yeah, real quick. Um, I went on another ride along this time with Snomish County Regional Fire and Rescue, uh, Station 82, I think, is here. Um, it was clearly with these fine gentlemen. I just couldn't remember if they're 82 or 81. Um, again, like with police department, I was very impressed. I spent an afternoon, uh, went on a few calls. uh learned a lot about what it means to be a firefighter. Uh well, I'll say that again. To be uh they don't just fight fires is ultimately the big thing, right? Very little of what they do is fighting fires. They do a lot of mental health support and community engagement and uh their emergency medical people, right? They're very capable. They're very well-rounded. Uh they have very difficult jobs. And so it was great to see that. Um, and yeah, again, I would just strongly encourage others to take the opportunity to go do something like that if you haven't before. Uh, and then second, I had an opportunity to talk to Ray Stefinsson. He's the CEO of Economic Alliance of Snomish County. Um, so I am trying to get involved in my boards and commissions as with SECIT, which is Snomish County Council of Improved Transportation, and then the ESC and other things like that. And so it was good to talk to him, learn more about who as EASC is. Uh we talked a little bit about their military relations committee. Uh we have obviously uh designated military housing in our community, but outside of that, obviously, there are a number of folks who are uh in the military and live in our community, even if they're not in that designated housing. And so just talking about the impact that uh the naval base has on our community and its constituents and the importance of maintaining that naval base active and strong etc etc. So it was good conversation.

Thank you council member Edwards. I uh don't have any updates per se but I do want to say that I have spent the last month and a half meeting so many different people here in the city of Lake Stevens and I have not met anyone that I don't like. I think that we have an amazing city staff and I am really really excited to um get to know everyone a little bit more. So, thank you. Thank you, Council Member Donahghue. Nothing for me. Council member McManis. Nothing for me. Council member Aria,

uh no updates. I wanted to say congratulations to the uh corporals today. And also, I don't think I had mentioned it, the uh Lake Stevens Robotics team did really well and I wanted to give a shout out to them. I was reading about them recently and um yeah, congrats on that.

Thank you. Um I just have a a couple of things. Um it's been a little while since we've been here, so I've attended um two board meetings with the school district. um the one that was January 28th um focused on some student um recognition and um buildings reports. And so a lot of this is online already because of course they're working with the bond. Um and also in that meeting it was uh um the school board directors. It was time to honor them. And I just wanted to remind if if people don't know, cuz I didn't know this originally, that this is an elected position, but it is non-paid. So, they all volunteer a lot of their time and energy um to help our our school district run smoothly. So, they were honored and they got big goodie baskets and I'm sitting out there going like this. But, that was really nice. Um the last one um again was recognition of students and staff. And you know I don't I like to bring back a funny quote this time. I don't have a quote because there was a very similar theme amongst all of our students of the month which is they were all very humble. They were all very humble. They were all very appreciative of the schools. They were all very appreciatives of their teachers. Um one of them actually said the equivalent of you know this is my favorite teacher because of this teacher. I believe anything's possible if I work hard enough for it. And that was a theme with every student from sixth grade through high school, high school. And uh very very touching to see. Um they touched a little bit on their food service. I think I mentioned this before. A big thing with our bond is we want to start doing cold serve. So right now they cook the food and then they ship it out warm. And so it's a warm ship. And so they had a great analogy of if you get a piece of

pizza that's been sitting underneath the heating lamps, not nearly as good as one that just came out the oven. So by being able to like rapidly chill it and ship it and then heat it on location, it'll be better food for um all of our students. So that's a huge thing that's happening with the bond that they're already starting on. Um and uh that was about it. not a lot of information um these last two meetings um but we are moving forward with our bond and making those decisions and those plans. I encourage people to go to the website. There's a whole just a ton of information on the website itself. And then on February 9th, I attended the senior center um board meeting. Lots of things going on there, but basically they've got about 200 members right now, but they have 90 returning members that have not signed up yet. So they're working on um gathering them. Um, they need a new oven, a new stove. They actually have a homemade raw iron welded shelf in their stove. Um, it's it's pretty dilapitated. The burners are yellow instead of blue. It's gas. Um, and so they're looking at trying to find somebody in their budget. They they found some as low as 3500, but then it needs to be installed. They may need piping that needs to be replaced because it is gas. So, they're going to be looking for a $5,000 somewhere in their budget to replace that. Um, they're also discounting anyone who has EBD cards. So, if you know low-income seniors, they do get a discount. Um, so we're trying to get that word out. Um, word is getting out. Lake Stevens is attracting people, a lot of people from Mary'sville and Granite Falls. Um, we're a small location, but we have such amazing people on our senior center board that put together so many fun activities that I mean, they fill up almost immediately. Um, additionally, when we're talking about um, they always go over, you know,

their budget and money, they also had an audit which came up spotlessly clean. Um, and then the exciting news to share is they got a brand new grant um, from Somish County. it has to be used for their wages. Um but it's over $77,000. So the um senior center does have paid employees and so they just received a new grant from Snowish County support for wages. Um and then of course Lake Stevens um provides about $30,000 for them. They do a lot of fundraising on their own and then they try and keep um any charges for their field trips to be reasonable so that our seniors can afford them. But that was an exciting meeting. a lot of things going on. I encourage anyone over 55 to look into our senior center.

Good report. Um for me, real quick, um uh we do have a leaders round table tomorrow. Uh if you don't know, I I do a monthly leaders roundt with um just different leaders, uh school superintendent, um different YMCA, PUB, other folks, and we do a little round table, see what's going on in the city. We'll do that tomorrow. I also have a Starbucks of the mayor tomorrow and um we're monitoring the legislation that's still going on. Um, and then something I want to let the council know that we've been working on and we will look to try to kick this off uh probably April and May is we are forming a um contractor-led um citizen financial review committee to take a hard look at our finances as a city and uh have that citizens review committee make recommendations. ations uh to the council and to us on um where they see our finances and if there's any uh thing that we need to go to the voters for maybe. Um so um uh that committee we look to have comprised of a wide variety of folks. Um, not too many so it doesn't get bogged down, but enough that we represent a good swath of our community. Um, who can take a look at our books and give us another eye.

Sounds like you just described a city council. What? Sounds like you just described a city council. Yeah, that's a great idea. They don't have the power yet. Can I also suggest I was thinking about that um when we're looking at savings, is it possible sometime this year to have an employee survey? sometimes the people on that are working can can figure out some savings that others may not. So I think it would be really um so I think in the last budget cycle we did a lot of that. Okay. Already not that not that you can't that's not continuous improvement. Uh absolutely we can. Yeah. So uh that's my business.

I'm sticking to it. Can I get a motion to adjurnn? I'll make a motion to adjurnn. Second. All those in favor? I. Any oppose? We are adjourned. Uh you may wake up to snow in the morning. It's what the weather report says.