City Council - workshop

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good morning everyone and welcome to the july 1st 2026 city council workshop thank you for joining us in this hybrid meeting format today for sessions like this one there is no opportunity for public comment and those wishing to access the meeting can do so by watching the live stream available on our website the broadcast on comcast channel 21 or by calling into one of the phone numbers listed for this meeting on the public webcast and meetings materials page OF THE CITY OF EUGENE WEBSITE. THANK YOU AGAIN FOR JOINING US AND I NOW CALL THE JULY 1, 2026 MEETING OF WORKSHOP OF THE EUGENE CITY COUNCIL TO ORDER. AND I WILL TURN THINGS RIGHT OVER TO OUR REF TELUS TEAM TO INTRODUCE TODAY'S TOPIC AND LEAD US THROUGH A LONG RANGE FINANCIAL PLANNING WORKSHOP DAY TWO. TAKE IT AWAY.

ALL RIGHT. ARE WE GOOD? EXCELLENT. GOOD MORNING.

Good morning.

Good morning. Thank you. Welcome back and I'm looking forward to really building on and continuing the conversation we had yesterday. I thought that we had a nice foundation I'm going to offer in a moment, an opportunity to kind of look back and even to do kind of a quick review of The conversation's not a deep dive, but I want to make space for any takeaways, reflections you might have as we are preparing ourselves and grounding ourselves in yesterday's conversation for today's conversation. As we left off, we were identifying some potential, what we're now calling sort of revised strategic areas of focus, those things that are important to all of you collectively for moving the city and the community forward. We're going to talk a lot about that this morning and talk about what defines success and how you want to chart that vision. And then we would like to hear also what are those things that are going to be important to you over the next two years. And so we're trying to define that future vision within the focus areas, but also start to... kind of identify, harvest some ideas about what that looks like. I'm gonna say at the outset, and I will remind us that this is a messy process. We want to really have authentic conversations today. Please give us the space and the permission to bring this back to you. We will be regrouping on July the 13th. And at that time, we will, have synthesized the outcomes of our conversations yesterday and today, so you can bring it back with fresh eyes. We don't want to get ourselves stuck in ways that are specific to words and intent. We want to have the conversation that we can listen to and bring that back. And so with that permission, I want to open up for today. And so here's our agenda. We're going to kind of, again, recap, and I'm going to ask you to to not get too settled in because I'll have you take a look at some of the work that Julie did and just kind of do a quick walkthrough just to bring it back, make it fresh. And then we'll ask for some quick reflections. And then we're going to be focusing just specifically on where do you want to go, right? This is an important part of the framework for evaluating budget options. And so we talked about the importance of those priorities and how choices might be determined. But this is a time to kind of take a step back and have that big conversation. This will be helpful and instructive to the city manager, to staff, to hear where we go, and then they can work through the preparation of the budget and work planning to make sure that they're reflecting the direction that you have consensus around through our conversations today. So that's what we will be doing. We will wrap up with clarity around actions and next steps so that you feel like, okay, I know what happens next. It's not just a conversation. That was one of the things we talked about in some of the interviews we had is like, where does this go? It's nice to engage and have thoughtful conversation, but it needs to translate to action. And so we'll outline those next steps and what you can expect from that and your role in pursuing that. So we'll connect the dots before we conclude our time together today. Sound good? OK, any norms, course corrections that are necessary for our time together? Are we feeling OK with the format and the way that we've been having these conversations? And I will do my best to make sure that I don't miss any hands as hands are going out by night. If I've done that, I apologize. Good? Okay, well then I will invite you to take a stand up. And over here we have where we started, you know, what do we hope to accomplish, our hopes for today. We talked about roles and governance. And so kind of that refresh, that reminder of why it matters, how that is important. And then we talked about budget principles and the service framework. And so I would just invite you to fresh eyes, look at Julie's work and kind of some of that conversation just to get us back there. And then we'll sit back down and any takeaways you might have, we can share. Yeah, we do need some music, right? Maybe not Benny Hill. I can give us some music.

It's just amazing. Yeah, I agree.

Thank you.

All right, after you have had a chance to take a look at the graphics, I'm going to ask you to return to your seats.

We're both laughing.

All right. Know that these... These captures, the images, we'll bring them back. You have these. And so they're not gonna disappear. We'll have them digitally. You'll also have the major files. And so I see the pictures, which I appreciate. Know that we will also provide those too. But I thought it might be helpful to realize we covered a lot of ground yesterday. And we had really great conversations. And I think that they're reflected in the graphics. So any takeaways from that? Reflections from yesterday? Aside from the gratitude for Julie. Thank you, Julie.

Yes.

Okay. I had a few thoughts last night. One of them about the work specific to the conversation about principles, which I just thought was really valuable and connects to a lot of the goals that this body has highlighted related to communication and helping to effectively share all that goes into the work that the City of Eugene does and that it is very thoughtful work and that we also people aren't just coming into a council meeting or coming into this room and making a decision that's unconsidered. So I thought that was a really helpful discussion and then thought about where you left off with us last night in that we have our organization, the operations of the city, but we also have a strategic plan. And with other entities who have strategic plans, they're different from their operational work. Craig and Alan. Just one more moment. I just was thinking that there is a strategic opportunity that's before the body that is probably for this next window of years, and then that will happen again and will happen again. And in the conversation today, I'm hoping that our strategic plan refresh can just dig into that opportunity, that it's not just about the excellence of the organization and how we operate every day as a baseline, but about how are we trying to strategically focus our attention in this next window of time. And that's different from an operational plan or a work plan.

I appreciate the comments, and you'll recall yesterday we had a focus area around organizational excellence, which is sort of still there, which speaks to that, and that is the work of the city and how staff deliver on the direction of council, on the needs of the community, on the ongoing regular operations of the city, and so there's a place to provide some clarity around expectations within that, but you're right. So the areas of focus, the strategic focus areas we're gonna talk about this morning really are those more focused goals that you want to really drive towards so it doesn't have to capture everything. In fact, it shouldn't capture everything. It should really focus on those things that are gonna move the city or the organization, sorry, the community forward. They really are strategic in nature. We're putting on that strategic hat that we talked about yesterday. as we're thinking about these. So to use the other phrase, let's put ourselves up on the balcony. What is the vision that you hold? And how do we communicate that in a way that is accessible, concise, and provides clarity around what's important? with all of those words, let's take a look at where we left off yesterday. So we had some initial framing of kind of those broad areas of focus buckets that kind of seemed to emerge through interviews that we had plus the community survey as a starting point. And we had great conversation around those. So we tried to do some updating, so revising them based on that conversation. Not a whole lot of modification, but a little bit of tweaking and refinement that hopefully sets the table for our conversation today. So I'm going to walk through these and we can kind of affirm them, recognizing that the final language we can still work on. I want to make sure that the essence of what's important is there's space for that in these areas of focus. And we're using the term strategic focus areas, revised strategic focus areas, as kind of the iteration. This is a bridge between your strategic plan, which was 2023 through 2026, to kind of extend that as a bridge using council-directed vision through these strategic focus areas. And so that's what we're working on today, and we're going to drill in onto the specifics. So we talked about, and we reordered these a little bit because some of them didn't have much change. Others did. So financial stability, that was kind of an attempt to modify the language around sustainability so that we're minimizing that confusion. And the mayor had suggested that as one of the options. And so... It could also be stewardship was, I think, the other way that you had defined it. But this is really around the financial health of the city, right? And so making sure that there is a space to provide focus and that we know that that's gonna be important over the next two years, which is what we really wanna have in view. Housing and homelessness, the bucket, if you will, the focus wasn't changed in terms of the category. We're going to talk about what does that mean, and that's where it gets a little bit more nuanced, and there's more to it. But in terms of a category, housing and homelessness, that's housing affordability and other sorts of things, as well as addressing the homelessness challenge. Transportation infrastructure, nothing really bubbled up yesterday on that area, so we have left that consistent as well. And again, we'll talk about what does that mean to you this morning. So the next two, we did a little bit of refinement based on the conversation, and hopefully it provides ample space for the conversations around what that looks like. So first of all, public safety and community trust. Community trust was part of the themes that emerged in the interviews and the conversation. also something that has been important in your prior strategic plan, so we tried to bridge that a little bit. It still has an emphasis on public safety, but with a little bit of an additional breadth in terms of how the community receives that. And so that was the suggestion for that one. And the next one we had previously, thriving community, and there was a lot of conversation around livability. making it a livable community, kind of the quality of life components. And so that's what we have tried to reflect here. We left thriving in there because of the economic vitality component in particular, but it could be broader by nature. And so we've just made it a thriving, livable community as the framing. Organizational excellence stays the same. And again, we had talked yesterday about how that shows up in the organization and that that might be defined and built out a little bit more through Jenny and her team. So reactions. How are we feeling about this set of focus areas as our launching pad for today?

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Okay, do you want me to preview that? So what we're gonna do is once we have the buckets, and I'm gonna suggest we don't focus on, we're gonna use organizational excellence as an example. The first step would be defining success, right? And so what we would be asking you to do is to think about what is the spirit and intent, the goal that you are striving for in that area? And so starting off with individual activities, we brought you all the tools today with post-it notes and markers to write down what does that mean to you? What does success look like if we're talking about public safety and community trust? What does that look like with the idea? So we would capture that first. and then break you into some small groups to look at what are the things that are there. And to draft, what does the success statement look like? And we have an example here for organizational excellence. Just to illustrate, not that it's a completed statement, this I would want to... We created this, we roughed Ellis, and so there may be changes. But the idea is to have something succinct that really speaks to spirit, right? So the city exemplifies a culture of service and collaboration that delivers solutions rather than roadblocks. And so it tries to make the uniqueness of what is Eugene, a parent, in the area of focus. And so that's what we're striving for is this first iteration, is to define that. The next step would be to then talk about, well, what are the to-dos? What are the actions that you want to ensure the city is pursuing in that area over the course of the next two years? And so two years from now, using the city example, what is gonna change? What are the things you wanna invest time, money, resources into to move in the direction of your goal. So that's the flow we're talking about, if that helps at all. And I can take us back to the revised focus areas and see if that works.

What I meant was, depends on what the bullet details were after these. Absolutely.

I took those out intentionally. Because what I want to do is I want to make space for you to define that. I was trying to show how we arrived at those based on the conversations that we had had. And I don't want to overtilt or make it concerning. So if you're talking about thriving, livable community, what does that look like to you? And we want to start there. What does that mean? What are the ingredients to success?

But you didn't synthesize what we talked about with another list of details. Right. That's right. Thanks.

Thank you. I generally, in these things, do not try to wordsmith because I think that can become a distraction and you can end up down a rabbit trail. But one thing I have noticed consistently is the use of the term public safety. I've tried to change that to more community safety. And the reason being is you say public safety, and people instantly think police and law enforcement only. And while I think our police department is incredibly important, and I've seen the evil that walks amongst us through many, many calls, I still think it's important to broaden that out. beyond just police and fire, because there's supporting pieces that come into it as well. I think our sewage treatment plant is community safety. I know our road systems are, because that's how we get to help people. It's how people get moved to the hospital, et cetera. I even think lighting is community safety. But anyway, just a minor detail that I saw yesterday, and I should have said something yesterday, but I said it today. Thank you.

So what do you think about that? So modifying that focus area to describe it as community safety. Maybe it's community safety and trust.

I think adding the community trust piece gets to the heart of what you're saying, but public safety is on top of people's minds in every poll and every door knock and every council meeting in which the public comes and testifies to us. There's a range of what that means to that individual, but I would caution, to your point earlier, Councillor Groves, about wordsmithing these. I would caution changing something so well-known

Well, it's well known as police, and community trust is tied back to police. Right.

Nothing else. I'm okay with that. I'm fine with that. I have a question.

Not an eye on the hill issue for me. Just something I've noticed.

Before you continue, because you have another question, can I follow up on that? Because I want to ask the clarifying question, which is, I think, an important point. The adding of and community trust, does that reemphasize even more the focus on?

I think it emphasizes more the focus on police.

Right. So maybe that is. In this community. Right. So maybe that is not a good addition. I don't know.

I totally agree with what Randy said. And when you go back and you look at the community survey, what they were talking about, it's illegal activity and public safety. It really is just the police. And when you add community trust to it, I think what the issue of do we trust the police So it's confining in that regard. And it doesn't, I don't go direct, I agree with Randy, so all those things about MDOMC and the wastewater treatment plant and all the other things we do for public safety, for community safety, don't fit there.

If it was public safety and community well-being, is that something that lands it, or is that too, especially or too much?

For me, it leaves out the fire department.

Okay. All right. Do we have ideas, suggestions? Yes, please.

I remember something. I know it's not being said here. Everybody loves to fire guys. Everybody. Not the same with the police. There's a different, you know, trust. Yeah.

Yeah. So maybe I would make a suggestion kind of to your point here and the conversation. If for purposes of our conversation today, and we can revisit the kind of the naming of it, if we talk about it as community safety, no, to allow us to provide other, you know, for defining success, that's going to point us into a broader lens and maybe it'll emerge, you know, and maybe it is community safety. community safety. Maybe that's the right language to use. But we can kind of revisit that after we've talked about, well, what are we trying to do? You know, what's the vision here? And I think for each of these, we might need to do some refinement based on what emerges and how you're defining success. And so I really appreciate the comments. Okay, here and then here. Yeah.

Now, I always like the metaphor of a three-legged stool. We have police, fire, and then we have other related social services that are part of that triangle. That's one of the things that, as we have taken action in different areas, like with the CSI, which we adopted, what, six years ago? A lot of what... The expectations of our constituents are stems from that. They expect more police, more effective police response. They expect the same level of fire service or more fire service than what they've had before. You don't necessarily see that right off the bat when you're calling fire. And then when we start talking about the social service side of that and plugging some of the holes that are there. Like, you know, our police officers are expected to be, you know, instant psychologists, instant social workers on the spot in a lot of different areas. I was talking to an officer the other day about this, and he was telling me about, you know, what, a lot of people don't see the two suicides he went to. And these were mothers of young children. I mean, I don't mean to be a doubter on this, but this is a lot of the stuff that they're seeing and dealing with on a first responder basis that when people complain to us about you know, what the police are not doing, part of it is being able to communicate to our citizens what the police are doing.

They're right. Let me interrupt and I apologize because I think what you're describing is a broader lens which we've just described the three-legged stool right that I think community safety allows that conversation and whether it's whether the response the safety element is happening through police or happening through you know response and preparedness to you know fire emergencies or medical emergencies or other areas and the social social services elements all of that is kind of A SAFETY FOCUS AND HOW IT SHOWS UP HERE. AND SO ARE WE OKAY WITH USING COMMUNITY SAFETY AS OUR FRAMING FOR THIS CONVERSATION?

IT'S PUBLIC SAFETY. MY QUESTION WAS DIRECTLY RELATED TO THIS. YESTERDAY THESE WERE ORDERED, ONE THROUGH SIX. And I appreciate the financial stability instead of financial sustainability. I appreciate listening to what we were saying about the livability piece. But now they've been reordered. And the public safety piece has dropped to number four in housing and homelessness. But starting with financial stability indicates that without financial stability, we can't do anything. And then the next tier is broadly... broadly public safety. It's the safety of the public, the ability for anyone in this community to go to school, to go to work, to play safely and feel safe. I don't interpret public safety as just fighting crime. I interpret it as the community's feeling of wellness and safety of going about our daily lives in this beautiful city.

Okay, we're going to go. I'm not sure who had hands up first, but okay.

Mike, okay, I get what you're saying, and I don't disagree with you, but I don't think this list is just for us. I think this list is for the whole community, and I think if we just stopped people on the street and asked them, what's public safety, their view of public safety is going to be a lot narrower than yours, or probably ours, because of just how we talk about it, rather than in everyday life, public safety is fire and police. So I think... It's important for us to remember, yes, these are the words that we are creating, and these are things that we're gonna use as a city council, but the whole community is gonna be reading these, and we want their takeaway to be as close to our takeaway as possible, because that's part of our communication with our community, and so it creates that transparency. So I agree with Randy. I like the idea of community safety, because I think it makes people just step a little bit outside of their, and think about it for a second, and they, and then they add things to their umbrella. I don't think you're wrong. I think it's the way that people interpret it. That's my take anyway.

And I know you have a comment too, but let me just really quick while on this topic. We haven't defined what this is yet, right?

That's where I was going.

Okay. And so all we're doing is we're framing it. There could absolutely be a portion of the success statement that speaks to traditional public safety or the broader world of community safety. I think we're jumping ahead a little bit with just the names. I think if we can provide that space and maybe we revisit it. Maybe public safety is the headline and there's a description that is broader or the reverse, right? And so I don't think we need to be prescriptive at this moment about what that looks like. I wanna make sure that we have space to explore what does it look like? Like what are we striving for? Again, kinda what is the spirit and intent we're aiming for in that area? And that's gonna come through the success defining statement.

I could jump in for a moment. I want to give you all credit for making us better facilitators. When we realized that our default slide templates number things, for visual design purposes, solely, not for any sort of this is the order we are recommending things in. So we took the numbers out with the idea that we don't want to presume or suggest that there's an order to these at this moment. You as a body may at some point in time decide let's present them in this order. Awesome. Right now, that was not the intent. Also, we had inside baseball on why we changed the order of them solely for how we're going to do the next exercise. It has nothing to do with the order of them of operations. So you're like the super sleuth that needs the gold star for finding the little hidden bit. But I think that, please, we hope you do not get caught up on that piece of it. It is purely so that we can assign activities in the next round and then how they are presented, the order, with or without numbers, entirely not part of this conversation, if that helps.

That's super helpful. Thank you. So it comes down to semantics, and as colleagues have pointed out, it's what we fill in. So I get it. I'll get along to get along. It's not a long time. But we're going to have a robust, I hope we have a robust public safety conversation, and we don't shy away from it by removing the word public safety, the words public safety, and we have an honest, unvarnished conversation. And thanks for the clarification about the numbering piece.

Yes, absolutely. Mike?

I know that the larger point of our being here is financials, long-term financial stability. I thought, and you both have just done a great job. What I was going to say, which is contextualizing our conversation might help a little bit for us to stay focused as a group a little bit more about the moment's discussion. We're doing exercise to lead to why result. in advance of doing it might help the group. That's all I was going to say.

Okay. The moment today, right now, is to define, this is a longer-term vision for these areas. These are the strategic areas that seem to have residents and will define what they look like. That's step one. Right? Absolutely right. I mean, what we need to try to work toward today is after we've provided some definition, and again, we will have to move through the conversation. We're listening for the spirit of what you want to make happen. If we get stuck on specific words at every turn, we won't get through the broader conversation of what do we want to really prioritize in the next couple of years. which is the next step. And so after we have done the framing, which is important, and the conversation around it, having robust debate and conversation is important. And so I'm not meaning to suggest we're going to rush through this, because I think it's helpful for all, for all of you, but also for those who are listening, to what does this mean. You know, what are we aiming for? And maybe it's not crystal clear until the conversation starts to emerge, and that's perfectly fine. The next step, then, is to say, okay, well, given that, we're not gonna be able to do everything, you know, in six months, one year, two years. Right, I mean, there are things that you can continue to make progress on. There are things you're gonna want to emphasize and not lose momentum on. And so that will be the next step in the conversation to define, well, if we had a limited number of things that we can spend our time and energy on within this broader framing, what are those things? And so that is the step two in the conversation today. And just as a reminder, we wanna listen and we wanna hear where there is energy and consensus. We're coming back. You can't shake us that quickly. We'll be back on the 13th. And so you'll have a second at bat. hopefully with kind of a revised language framework that is intended to really reflect the conversation that occurs today. And it will be kind of a cleaned up version that synthesizes what is happening. And so, again, process is messy. We're comfortable with it. And if you can feel comfortable with us kind of listening carefully, then I know we'll get there. But I don't want to close off the debate. I think that's important, and it's important for everybody to hear. So we will let those trains ride, but I will also try to keep us moving so that we can get through the depth of conversation that will be helpful.

THAT BROADER CONNECTION TO FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY. IN THE BUDGET PRINCIPLES, THERE WAS A PRINCIPLE OF CONNECTING THE BUDGET TO STRATEGIC GOALS. WITHIN THE BUDGET, THE SERVICE EVALUATION FRAMEWORK, ONE OF THE BUDGET LENSES IS HOW AND WHAT GOALS IS IT CONNECTED TO. WELL, THOSE QUESTIONS CAN'T BE ANSWERED UNLESS WE KNOW WHAT Y'ALL WANT. SO THIS IS THE NECESSARY CONVERSATION TO BE ABLE TO LINK THOSE PORTIONS OF THE PRINCIPLES AND THE FRAMEWORK TO SOMETHING STAFF CAN ACT UPON.

And perhaps the principle for this conversation, too, at this juncture is, again, we're stepping up on the balcony. And I will just say, this is not easy work, right? And so let's acknowledge that, that you're trying to get to a distilled, clear statement of what the goal is, what success looks like. is not something that just magically appears. And so, you know, we'll give ourselves some grace and we'll talk about it, we'll explore it, and then we'll do our best to define that. It's a little bit of an art, but we will get there. Okay, so I want to affirm that we can use modifying the fourth one down. So we'll use the broad community safety as the framing of that with the reflections of what's important and what success looks like that have been already outlined in the room. Are we okay with using thriving livable community as the bucket for that one? He was asking if it was public safety or public safety and community trust. I heard community safety.

And public trust.

So the suggestion I'm offering is that we call it community safety if a success factor is that the public trusts the city to create a safe, livable environment. That might be what success looks like, right?

Why did you add trust?

Why did I ask this here? Because that was part of what the themes were that had emerged previously. And I was trying to honor kind of that broader lens that I was hearing yesterday. And so that's why I put it there.

I think most of the conversation was about the public safety part, not the community trust part. I think all of us agree that the trust part is an important part of it.

You're trying to narrow us to community safety, and is everyone good with that as a topic? Am I missing where we went with that conversation?

He was asking about the title, whether community trust should be. I think community trust could be a part of your success statement if that's something that is important. And so I was trying to just synthesize it to community safety to give a broader view into how we approach this.

I said that right up front.

Your fault, man. All right. Everybody gets one turn to wordsmith, and then you're done. Yours is done. And everybody's done. I'm just teasing. Okay. All right. We're going to move on, and maybe I'll update that on the slide. And so before you all arrived, we came around and we gave you some Post-it notes. Everybody loves a Post-it note in a workshop with Sharpie markers. And so you can find those. They're yellow with a little blue marker. And so... What we want to do, this is the example again, is we're going to start identifying what success looks like. And we want the intent, the spirit, like what is it that is important to you in each of these areas, okay? And so you can write those as outcomes. You can write those as, like, community trust could be an example. Like, that might be what success looks like. The community trusts us. They are, you know, whatever. You can define how that looks. Maybe it's, if it's on, you know, thriving livable community, you know, maybe part of that is that there is a spirit of community and engagement. or within the community that's thriving, or economic development might be something you're focused on. Maybe it's that you have an active and successful business community, or you have new housing, and the housing, there's success. Don't worry about the words. We want the idea that you can put in there. And so on those, you'll see behind Julie's moving the big chart away, we have a poster for each of the areas.

Those five areas, one, two, three, four, yeah, five areas.

So once you have your post-its and those ideas, you're going to go up and just stick them on the appropriate one. We're going to then break into some groups to look at what emerges and to try to think about how do we want to define success. First one says thriving, livable community.

I'm not sure what we're doing.

Pardon me? You can do multiple post-its if you have... I tried to give you a little stack. I didn't count them.

We'll give you more. Could you put those topics back up here so we can see?

But are we only supposed to do thriving, livable community right now? No, all five. All of them.

And we'll bring you more post-its. You can do more post-its. And so if you run through them, just say so, and we'll do that.

Do you want us to put one idea per post-it, though?

Yes, please. Thank you. Very important clarification. One idea per post-it note. Rule number one for this kind of activity.

Yes.

We will work toward the statements afterwards. We just need the ideas of what's important to you in each of these areas.

Can we post them as we get them? I just like posting things.

What does success look like? When you have your ideas down, please feel free to go ahead and stick them up on the appropriate flip chart. Unmove the bike rack. PARDON ME? I KNOW. YOU CAN PUT THE IDEA, JUST THE IDEAS. YEAH, I KNOW. I DON'T KNOW IF I CAN SPELL THAT PART. OH, YEAH, SPELLING DOESN'T COUNT ON POST-IT NOTES OR FLIPCHARTS, SO YOU'RE GOOD. This is not a test.

Okay, my writing is bad enough that you won't be able to tell that I can't spell.

That's like a childhood strategy for writing things down. You just make it a little messy and nobody will know if it's spelled out.

Then I could say, that's what I meant.

Exactly.

All right, how are we doing? Lots of post-its, I see. That's good. Halfway there? Okay. What's that? Oh, that's nice. No.

I kind of like it.

It wasn't intentional.

Stickers, Mike, little badges that say just TLC. You can wear those all around. That's just what I'll do. Thank you. Okay, as you're continuing to write these, we're going to be next breaking into groups and looking at each of these and trying to really identify what are the major themes that you're seeing across the post-it notes. We're not writing down the details of what we're doing. We're trying to just get the essence of what you're striving for, the spirit and intent of that focus area. And so that's what we're going to be working toward as you're preparing for the next part of our activity. Tempting to always want to get into what are we going to do? What are we going to do? Everybody wants to go there. It's tangible. It's concrete. We're still in the framing conversation. Welcome. I didn't think it would take you long to enter, so I'm just saying. Right there, on the very end.

We're not doing that one.

I know. Sorry. I probably wasn't clear enough because it's still on the screen. But you know what? Let's give it to Jenny. Then she will have it. If you're still working on organizational excellence, you can put your pen down because we're gonna let the staff work on that one. We're only working on the first five. No, no, that's fine. I'd rather have more information than less information, so all good. We all get out of practice with actually handwriting things, right, because everything's keyboard. Mm, and now?

Yeah.

Exactly, it's so different. I feel like back in the day, it was a lot more legible than what I do today, where it's like, what? It's like your hand loses the practice and the discipline of what you're supposed to do. I can be artistic in them. Yeah. That was always how I studied things. I had to rewrite things. Like, that was part of my, like, process was just, like, that activity. Well, my dad was visiting recently. He brought these old folders. And so, that he's taken now, doesn't want to have anymore, naturally. So, he gave them to me and my sister. And it has, like, reports that were all written. I was like, wow, that was my, you know, as an eight-year-old. Or not eight-year-old, eighth grader or whatever, right? So. Yeah, that's so special. Amazing. That's such a gift. Wow, that's really, that's special. Okay. We have a few more minutes to get final post-its drafted and onto the wall. A little more coming too. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna start with three of them. That's the big reveal that Jen was referring to to get us to practice and so we can have some groups of three working on these and then we'll do the final two as a second round. Oh dear, not again. Was that intentional? Well, it's not my battery this time, so. Okay, all right. Sometimes technology needs a break, we get that. All right, Alan's got all his post-its, get them over there. Sort them through. So as we're getting the final post-its up on the wall, First of all, hopefully this was stimulating to think about what does this mean to me? What does success look like? How do I define that? We're gonna start off with financial stability, housing homelessness, and transportation infrastructure. So those three we're gonna work on first in three separate groups. Okay? Three separate groups, right. Right, and so we're going to work in groups of three. We're going to count off, and you're going to get the pleasure of reviewing and trying to review and interpret the cursive handwriting of your colleagues. But to look at the post-its as a group and identify what are the themes, what are the things that consistently are bubbling through in terms of what's important, how we define success. So I want you to kind of do some sorting and identify those themes. Bonus points, if it really emerges and you're like, we can write a quick statement of what this synthesizes, but if you can't and if it's too much, that's okay. Really, I want to make sure we can extract what are the themes of what does success look like for these areas. Does that make sense? Okay. All right. So we'll just count off on three, and then we will hand them off. And if you want a barter for what you're in, then that's on you, but we want three people per group. We're going to do financial stability, housing homelessness, transportation infrastructure. Know that we will come back to the other two in two groups. Okay? Yes.

What do you mean? One thing per...

You can do additional post-its. Yeah, that was okay. If you're looking as to why there are more, that was okay. That was permitted. One idea per post-it? Right.

Could you repeat what we did? Absolutely. We're going to count off.

We are going to count off into three groups, and then each group is going to be assigned a focus area to review the post-its and identify what are the common themes that come through the post-its in terms of what success looks like.

We're removing our lens and interpreting what's in front of us.

That's exactly right. Ding, ding, ding, ding, gold star. I have gold stars. I should bring them out. Okay, so let's do a count off. So we're going to go... Okay, we're doing it in Spanish. Uno.

Next one.

Next one. Two, three. One, two. All right, so group one, I'm just going to go in the order we have here. It would be financial stability, okay? So that's the one you're going to work on. Jen's going to take pictures of all the little, never mind, she's done that already because she's licking his foot. So go and take a look, read through the comments, have a conversation, and you're going to be reporting back on the themes that emerge. Group two, you have housing and homelessness. So you're going to take a look at the post-its that are there. Same process. Group three, you get transportation infrastructure. Same idea. Okay? Yeah, we might want to give you some more space. If you want to use additional wall space.

Okay.

All right, we need to give them... Oops, I'm sorry. Give markers. We need to give them some markers to write their themes on.

They have their own markers here.

I also have some that are bigger if we want any of them.

We've got these guys.

Okay. Do you want to open them or just use these?

You can. People are touching your markers.

You guys get first dibs on a color to write down the themes after you've sorted them.

Oh, someone else needs to do that. That's okay.

Just pick a color. Just pick a color.

Okay, we're going to go purple.

All right, purple.

You're purple.

All right, you guys pick a color that you want to write your themes on the flip charts after you're done. All right, here, pick a color for how you want to write the themes after you're done.

Oh, we're writing on here.

Yeah, you can sort them, you can move them all around, whatever's going to be helpful, and then the key themes at the bottom.

Hmm? Mm-hmm. That is actually really cute.

You guys should take a picture.

Hang on.

I wish I would have. I have stripes. I have breath stripes. You have the color memo.

I've outfitted the rest of the group. I have basically that shirt times seven. I keep buying it, and I'm like, I just like this shirt. Apparently, I want to look like I'm a girl. I enjoy stripes.

I do.

Yeah. Stripes mean dress down?

Okay. Gotcha. Can't tell.

It was with jeans and no jacket? Yeah, that's fine.

If it was a Saturday. Yeah.

So, for the record, we've now eaten almost all of the power in that box. It's down to 15, so at some point, maybe when we have lunch, you will want to have them plug it back in.

Okay.

Apparently, our laptop... Let's see where we are on my...

I'm pretty full. Yeah. That won't be a problem. When it's full, I have, like, eight hours, ten hours...

here, so if you make changes.

Good. Yeah, okay. That's what I want, actually. Yeah, I want everybody to see those changes. Thanks.

I think this one supports growth. I feel like that feels...

All right, I got a crack at it. You ready?

Yeah, go for it.

Fully support Vision Zero, reducing bike deaths to zero, improve and maintain roadways, bike paths, and sidewalks, prioritize and invest in infrastructure, a complete transportation system that should support all users and not be deferred.

Oh, is that one big thing? It is, and then we... Vision Zero is all road users, not just bikes?

That's why Vision Zero, MDASH, reduce bike deaths to zero.

Pedestrians. I think that we should not be specific.

Reduce deaths to zero?

I think Vision Zero implies that we're reducing deaths to zero.

To us. That's okay. Right? If you were to survey 500 Eugenians, what vision zero is?

We need to rename it. Eight of them. Eight of them.

You're using my argument against me. But it should be reduced.

Reduce bike and pedestrian.

Reduce roadway deaths. Roadway deaths. That's good. I mean, technically, it's roadway deaths and injuries.

it is helpful to keep it up because then you can you can define it and you with what you're doing is helpful so what two things so the first is if you can just like on here you know what are the the topics the themes that emerged right just like is one word enough what was i thought was i was did i get too weedy

No, this is step two.

This is good. No, so if you had a focus on pedestrian... Safety. Safety, yes. A theme of safety. You also have infrastructure maintenance, right? So if investment in infrastructure maintenance, then I'm wrong.

Excuse me.

Thank you. No, no.

You know, it's...

Do we need a quick break before we report out on these, or are we good with reporting out and then taking a quick break?

I'm sorry. Break now.

Correct.

Oh, wait a minute. Okay.

Report out, and then we'll take a quick stand up, refuel, whatever. Okay.

Unless somebody has to go.

Right. And if they do, that's fine, too. No one's locking anybody in.

Get in the way of nature. No, definitely not. Yeah.

Okay. We'll just go to the order we have on the wall. Goldfish?

Oh.

I was going to have them share the themes. Big buckets. We don't need the solutions, just the buckets.

That's one of the challenges of this group. So far they're down. You're not unique to this group. That's fine. It's okay. Okay. Break time.

We're going to do a report out, then we will break. And if you need to take care of business before that, you do you. Okay. Okay.

Here's what we're going to do.

We're gonna go through each of these and I'm gonna invite either the whole group or one person, a spokesperson, to share what you saw in terms of themes, like what were the, on the post-its, what were the things that gave rise to either the groupings you have or the statements you developed, all right? And so a little bit of overview on those. So we're gonna start off with financial stability since that's the first one on our list. No order of preference here, just going here. Who from group one would like to share? And you can come over here if you want to, or you can do it from where you're sitting. But what were on the post-its? What did you see? And then how did that translate, in this case, into a statement?

I finished chewing. Actually, this was fairly simple because a lot of the posters said basically very similar things. So, Jenny, could you just scoot back so I can read? We created a statement, a theme statement, build a long-term vision for financial stability across budget cycles that meets our strategic vision and service delivery within our means. Read it, Mike.

So the statement that resulted from review of it, really, it leads up to the vision of what you want to accomplish. So it starts off by build a long-term vision for financial stability across budget cycles, meeting strategic vision and service delivery within means. And so it's the within means that's sort of the mic drop, what we want to make sure we're doing over time. Is that fair? Is that...

Are we discussing that?

We are discussing.

Okay. I feel like looking, I don't feel like that captures what I had on my sticky and what I saw on some other folks' stickies, which was when I see service delivery, like obviously we have to have a balanced budget, so we have to have service delivery within means. Yeah. But the way that I interpret that is that's almost a... limiting vision that's saying that we are gonna deliver the service that we have the means to deliver. Several of the stickies, including my own, I got the vibe that it was more sort of investigate how we are able to deliver the services that our community wants and kind of finding the means to do that. And so I feel like that's a, it's a little bit of a different spin and I feel like this one to me comes across as sort of a cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, kind of vibe as opposed to a how do we create stability and be able to deliver the services our community is expecting of us.

And so I think that's... That was the intent with the meeting strategic vision is that we have our goals that we would like to fund. We're trying to fund those as best as we can within our means.

Could it be maybe aligning available resources with services and maybe that's a little softer?

Yeah, I think there definitely needs to be something in there about being able to provide the services our community wants from us. Because that maybe isn't captured within the strategic vision.

Well, and maybe, and I see you here, maybe it's the word community needs to be in here someplace, right?

If we raised our budget by 50%, still we'd be living within our means. So we weren't putting a qualifier on how much we're bringing in. It's just, you know, whatever we have to work with at the end of the day, that's what we need to build our service delivery system around.

People that say you need to live within your means don't mean that. They mean don't raise any more revenue. That's what that means to them. So that's kind of the trigger for me. Eliza was talking about, too. So because it's a buzzword as opposed to.

Sure. No, I get that. I'm just saying kind of where our thought process was putting this together.

Yeah. And again, going back to what Jennifer said, it's community. Community will read this.

I like the way it was initially, and I understood your point of view, but I think the only, we know that we have a structural problem. And if we want to solve for the structural problem, the structural problem is expenses are growing faster than revenues. So I would hope that our strategic goal in that area is find a way for expenses never to exceed revenues or, the other way around, revenues to grow sufficiently to and surpass expense needs. I don't need to wordsmith it, but that seems to capture that, but I don't want to get too far away from that basic reality that we're solving for, which is our expenses are growing faster than our revenues. What do we do about it long term?

And part of it is the approach. And this is a helpful conversation. And so you're expanding the pie to meet need, or you are using the resources you have to meet those needs. It's a balance. It's both sides of the ledger. But I think that some of the language that speaks to community need, community priority, might help to broaden it, to make it accessible.

Is that... Yeah, I think that the... I think Mike's correct. I agree with that. We need to look at how do we address that broader structural revenues are not growing at the same rate of expenses. I think some of it is that maybe this particular statement, I think Alan made a good point that some of these terms are used as sort of catchphrases or buzzwords that have specific meanings that I'm not sure is the meaning that was intended. I do think having more in there about sort of the community needs and meeting those community needs. I think alternate language for service delivery within means like having a balanced budget, something like that. Just because I think, Alan, your point about it being sort of a,

Loaded term, I think is... Well, achieving financial sustainability and addressing the structural budget deficit are things that you have talked about, right? And so maybe it just needs to be explicit with that.

Well, by law, we have to have a balanced budget. So there's no point in putting that up there, I think. And I kind of like what Mike was talking about, which is the financial stability challenge is meeting the structural problem, right? And so it's the long-term vision for sustainability that addresses the long-term structural problem that's created by the state. And you have two choices. You can make cuts or you can raise revenue.

But you incorporated that structural piece, of course.

I was just going to say, I'm sorry. I was just going to say, if it were just me, okay, thank you. If it were just me, for example, I would call success looking like finding a way to grow our revenue stream faster. And that doesn't mean, to me, to increase taxes, for example, on the people who already live here. It's finding new ways to add to the pie. That's what it means to me. So that you can have revenues meet expenditure projections.

Yeah, I agree with that, if you're talking about both short-term and long-term, because the problem is the short-term. The long-term fix is more economic development, getting more businesses here that create more revenue, but that is not a short-term budget strategy. It's just impossible to get that much development in place to come up with the $10 million that we need to balance our budget. You need $2.5 billion worth of development. Does that mean long-term doesn't get done? No.

No, no, you do both. You absolutely do both.

It's short-term and long-term.

Okay, Matt and then the Mayor.

I am so thrilled to hear my friend and colleague talk about the need for growing revenue. Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes, I am picking up what other colleagues are putting down about the statement or the way this statement closes. The clause, service delivery within our means, is not... articulated in any one of those post-its. I don't think it's necessary to memorialize that because of the aforementioned triggers. But if you go back and look at our potential strategic goal areas that you shared with us yesterday, there are pieces that aren't enumerated in front of us, including not limited to the revenue options, which is not articulated here, and exploring service delivery alternatives. And I want to be really clear, I'm not advocating for outsourcing, but there are not-for-profit and for-profit partners who can deliver some of the services in a way that might reduce our costs. I don't see that piece articulated in this statement. I do want to give this group credit, though, This might be the most challenging of all the buckets in front of us today to synthesize from, first of all, it's so challenging just to put it on right here. So I give credit and kudos to that financial stability team, but that's one, I see we have two left over. I think this one could use a revision.

We don't have to land the plane entirely today. The conversation, we will bring back kind of a version that reflects what the conversation we're having. Mayor, you had a comment too.

Just thinking that picking up on Councilor Kaczynski's observations about this description and what Councilor Zelenka shared, we know we have to balance our budget. And I think the aspect of this that could be important to emphasize is that we're meeting or we're advancing a strategic vision and we are addressing community needs, that we're doing these things at one time while we build a long-term vision for financial stability. So I would be comfortable with it just being simpler and shorter and emphasizing that there's a strategic vision and there's also the continuous context of community need that we are having to respond to at the same time as we are building a long-term vision for financial stability across budget cycles.

And the stability may require different approaches, right? And maybe that's relative to revenue. Maybe that's how services are being provided, the partnerships, the other things that you had to comment.

I think sort of it is so hard to know exactly the right way to approach this task when you don't know exactly how it's going to be used later. So like there is so much grace for that. Right now, a way to think about this that might be helpful is what is it we're trying to achieve? not how are we going to achieve it. And things like alternative service delivery or enhanced revenue options or anything like that is the how that is a later step. But first is what are the goalposts? What does this look like? Why would we be doing those things?

I think that's what I was trying to get to, that we are advancing a strategic vision and meeting community needs. We are doing those things, hopefully, all the time.

I think addressing that exactly. What about build a short-term and long-term vision to address our structural financial problem?

That sounds like an action, though, right? So how do you translate that into the statement?

If we build that long-term and short-term vision, that's success.

Right.

What it is is TBD.

Can you read the second part of what you wrote down also?

Build a short-term and long-term vision to address our structural financial problem.

So that's, to me, that's the nugget of what success looks like, that you have addressed that long-term balance, right?

As long as you come up with a plan or a vision.

Right, and that, absolutely. And so when we start thinking about what are we working on, that can be an action. It's like we need to create a strategy, a plan that is going to accomplish that, right?

And so that's- Maybe strategy's a better word than vision. Yeah. That's a little bit more hefty, but- Yeah, okay, we have a couple hands.

I had you here first, and then I'll get you next.

I think one of the pieces that we're missing in this conversation are what are the benchmarks that we need to achieve in order for us to be able to clearly define how we're making progress toward that vision. Ultimate question for me is, and like I said, I've done this with students over the years, and I've always said, tell me what your life is going to look like in 15 years. Cut it out of a magazine, draw it on a paper, whatever the case may be. What are we going to have in Eugene that we can point to that we said that we were starting this 15 years ago, and this is what we have now. It's what we did with MX, with Bus Rapid Transit. We put out a situation where we said we were going to build 61 miles of this particular system. It's going to be new, it's innovative compared to what has been out there before. It has flexibility, all of those kinds of things. But we knew what we were shooting for. We knew what the kind of vehicles were going to look like. We knew where this was going to go, and then we had to make some adjustments based on political realities to get there. But again, we're in the same boat. What are we going to have, and what is it going to look like?

Yes, so what you're describing, I asked Jen to put up on a flip chart the interconnectedness of these pieces. What we're doing right now is we're trying to say if we have been successful, What does that look like? Well, we now no longer have a structural deficit. We are meeting community needs within the resources we have available. However we get there is that strategy. Those are the things you're going to be focused on and doing. So we want to state that, which leads us... Pardon me?

That's later.

Right, which is the next step, exactly, which leads to, okay, well, what are we going to do? What are the strategies we need to pursue?

When we come back to it, we say, that's what we're doing.

Right, we're going to create a vision or a long-term plan to address it. We're going to advocate for change at the state level to help out. I mean, we have things we might want to be working on. That's the how we're going to pursue these things. That's the next step. And then, importantly, it's like, well, how do we measure our success? How do we know if what we have decided is important if we're doing that? And maybe that comes through your credit rating. Maybe that comes through, I mean, you have to have a balanced budget, so it's not just that. But there are ways to tie that in.

Go ahead. Yeah, there's a couple of things here. One is there's a quantifiable way of measuring success. where we're going successfully. But there's also a qualitative piece to this that resists those kinds of metrics or structures. It's like what people have said for years. I don't know what beauty is, but I can tell you what it looks like when I see it.

Yeah, and what we're trying to do is just to describe what we're aiming for. And I know that you had a comment as well.

Yeah, I think some of it for me is that we've morphed into kind of like very strategic plan language, which can tend to be sort of fuzzy and not concrete, and I'm much more of a concrete person. And so I feel like, you know, for me, the kind of concrete... sort of goal measure of success is to have a budget meeting where we are talking about where we can invest instead of where we have to cut. And that's, I think, that where I kind of see that being that's the goal, that's how I know we've succeeded is we're not having the same, okay, are we going to close this? Are we going to get rid of that conversation? Are we not going to invest where we need to invest? not having that conversation again is how I would see success. Great. That's helpful. Okay.

The problem with that is that that's never going to happen because of the structural problem that we have.

Well, if we get there, we'll fix the structural problem.

Oh, okay. Then I'll buy it.

So let's pause on this one. I think we could spend the remainder of our time circling around this because this is instructive conversation. Again, we'll bring back some language that tries to reflect what you've just talked about. And he's laughing because he's like, well, you've got a big job. Good luck. Yeah. That's okay. That's okay. We accept the task. Exactly. That's right. But I want to just, so we put this here just as a reminder as we walk through these others. And I recognize that this is... It may feel unsatisfying for some of the things where you want to get to tactics, and what are we going to do, and how do we do that? So I just want to share that I get that. That's hard. We are trying to just define in the future world, the future state, what does that look like? What is the goal we're aiming for? So let's hear from our next group, which had housing and homelessness. Jen's going to bring that back around. And so using the, so a reminder, the things you saw in the post-its and how they showed up in terms of themes, categories, and this is actually maybe helpful because we don't have to get ourselves overly bent on the language of the statement. We'll just hear the themes and we'll talk about those, make sure that they reflect what's important.

I just tried to summarize those into bullet points, but for the process, what we did was take everyone's sticky notes and try to organize them into categories to see what what the big stones, big rocks were, and then look for any of the outliers within that. And I'm in real time thinking about what you just said relative to a goal from this work, so I'll come back to that at the end. But the highlights are to accelerate the production of diverse housing types and increase affordable housing production and availability within our community. to address the harms of homelessness through providing appropriate slash adequate services and shelter capacity. There was a series of points about increasing the production of housing at the median income level to ensure that both renters and first time home buyers have an access point into our market. There was also a point on this series that had to do with economic development and increasing wages. So that's a bullet to move over to another conversation. And then also effectively using data on vacancy and median prices to track progress. There are a couple of sticky notes about vacancy rates and increasing vacancy rates as they relate to an indication of a likelihood of a high degree of homelessness across a city. So those were the kind of big five categories that we sorted into. Some of them are goals. Some of them are strategies. I would say the goal would be to accelerate the production of housing and mitigate the harms of homelessness, if you were trying to distill it down into one really simple statement. But there are a lot of different points made by the body to support that.

which is great. And that's, like I said, that's the place we go to. And so hearing all of those, what I hear is a lot of strategy. What do we wanna do? What are we gonna focus on? Increasing housing stock, mitigating the harms of homelessness, I'm paraphrasing, not very appropriately. Those are the things that you can see as, all right, how do we do that, right? And how are we driving those in order? But the goal is that you have created, you know, Read the last part you said. You just had a nice.

Accelerate production of housing and mitigate the harms of homelessness.

Okay, and so that leaves us with an action of accelerating. The statement from there is that you have adequate housing that meets the needs of residents. And so it's aspirational, I get that. And that's where the linkage between the future vision you want to create and then the things you want to focus on, the strategies, which are all enumerated there nicely, are the things that you're working on. And those are the things that, you are making progress toward, and some maybe come into play sooner than others, right? Depending on what you're focused on and where current service levels reside, but that's the linkage between the two. Reactions on the categories and what was summarized?

I'm guilty as anyone else.

That's when he's guilty, yeah.

I'm guilty as anyone else of the following thing, which is my opinion of what I saw there, being in that group, is that you asked us to draw a picture of happy land, and all of us drew a picture of the road to happy land.

Yeah.

And not what happy land looks like.

And what I will say is that's okay. And that is perfectly fine. We need to know what is the path you want to take in order to be able to start to define what it looks like. And so that doesn't concern me. And it's natural that that's going to be, you're going to focus on those things. That's why we want to hear, that's part of the exercise is that to understand what are the things that are on your mind that you want to work on, it's helpful to create happy land.

And I think the natural inclination for highly productive, action-oriented human beings is to identify what's my next action. Absolutely. What's the next step I have to take? The challenge and what staff see over the course of time is when we're only talking about action, we don't know what the finish line necessarily is, or there might be a slightly different finish line for different people, and if we're taking this action, it precludes that, and it just sort of snowballs. I WILL SAY, AS I LOOK AT THIS BOARD, THERE ARE SOME POST-IT NOTES THAT DO SPEAK TO WHAT HAPPY LAND LOOKS LIKE. AND BY THE WAY, I'M GOING TO USE THAT AT, LIKE, EVERY GATE I USE NOW. YOU'RE WELCOME. YOU CAN HAVE IT. SMALL FEET, BUT... THAT WILL BE PART OF YOUR ALTERNATIVE REVENUE SOURCES. I see sufficient affordable housing, right? You have enough, and regardless of exactly how it's wordsmithed, what's interesting to me is that was interpreted as how do we get there, there's an action that gets us there, but the post-it said sufficient affordable housing. There was a post-it that said there are less vacant homes and more affordable housing options. Those are what Happy Land looks like, kind of, ideas, and as naturally inclined, action-oriented human beings, you already started solving for X. Like, how do we get there? Right? And so you've got it. It's in there. I'm pretty sure.

I'll add that there's another note up there that is maybe part of also the getting there and especially the Happy Land vision, which is about development pattern. And there is a connection in that work to a lot of the near term and strategic work that this body will be doing around planning for urban growth strategies and strong neighborhood centers and our transportation planning work in the coming years, climate friendly and equitable communities integration. And that is actually probably could be used as some of the clearest inputs to draw a picture of what it looks like to have a community where we have abundant housing options and all of the harms of homelessness have been mitigated and we're working towards a functional zero outcome. But that's... I'm not sure how to pull that into this conversation and it's more a discussion topic than what did we see on the sticky notes and how to bucket them.

I think what you have just described is when you have the vision, when you can kind of articulate what you're aiming for, what you're striving for. There are things that, as the elected body, you want to prioritize and focus on. There are also lots of things that are happening in the organization that are going to contribute to these goals. And so some of those other areas that may not bubble up into the conversation here are things that can still communicate how we're working toward affordable housing or however we define that. And so that alignment piece is really instructive when we can define what we're shooting for. And by having some clear kind of bullseyes we're shooting for and not just everything in our strategic goals, it allows that focus. And so that's the true value in strategic planning is we're saying where do we want to go, but then how does everybody get aligned to that? And it's, you know, it isn't, it is messy, and that's okay. And I think that working through this and thinking about as you're evaluating, you know, budget proposals, you can say, well, we want to make sure we don't lose momentum on the affordability of housing in our community. It's a strategic goal for us. Okay, well, what are the things that are being proposed? Is it going to get in the way of that? Or does it help move it forward? And so that's the lens you can bring to the budget conversation as it relates to these what feel like broad, lofty goals, if that helps. Comments, reactions? All right, let's hear from the next group. So we have transportation and infrastructure. And then we will take a break.

Thank you to Councilors Yeh and Kaczynski for the collaboration in this group. We were able to synthesize Council's input to five rocks or buckets, and then we made an action statement. You can take it or leave it. But safety, maintenance, supporting all users, plan for future growth, and reduce deaths to zero with a little artwork. Nod to Julie. Thank you. You inspired us. What does success look like, Julie? We should have let, totally should have let Julie do it. Success looks like a community that fully supports Vision Zero, reducing roadway deaths to zero. A community that prioritizes improving and maintaining our roadways, bike paths, and sidewalks. A community that prioritizes and invests in infrastructure, a complete transportation system that should support all users and not be deferred. and not be deferred.

I'm curious on the post-its and in your conversation within transportation and infrastructure, because we leave with transportation, it puts your head there, right? And I'm wondering if there are post-its or if there is any discussion around related infrastructure or other infrastructure, even technology.

So there were definitely some that were very focused, post-its that were very focused on traffic and transportation, but we did interpret, there were a few on here that was like reduced maintenance backlogs, and another one that's really far away, I can't read it verbatim, but that we definitely got sort of a vibe that it wasn't just roads, sidewalks, it was all, we discussed wastewater systems, as being part of that full infrastructure picture. So when we talk about maintenance and planning for future growth, that is including non-road, both road and non-road infrastructure.

Great, okay, great. Mike, you had a comment?

Kind of got to it at the end there, which is, I know my post-it that I put on that particular area was really about the rest of the stuff that isn't roads, about the infrastructure of readiness for our economy to grow, land development, land availability.

The future, anticipating growth and future needs. Alan?

Yeah, the statement came across as being too transportation focused as opposed to all the other things. There's so much more to infrastructure that makes the city work than the roads. There's all sorts of the modes, but also the wastewater, the water, the electricity, the garbage collection, all of those kinds of systems that we have that are infrastructure that are the purview of government is what that meant to me.

Okay, great.

Same thing along the lines of what Alan said. I mean, when we're talking about housing development in certain areas like Crow Road, we had no infrastructure there. So we had to go to the state in order to get the resources and the money to invest in that infrastructure. The same thing is in my ward in Bethel, and other parts of Eugene, and parts which we have designated for residential growth that has the potential to have residential growth like the LCC basin, but we have no infrastructure. So that just... The whole readiness piece. The whole readiness piece is there on the map, We've said it, we've articulated it, this is what we want to do in 2037, but we don't have the means to get to 2037 yet.

So that future focus within infrastructure is what you're talking about, and anticipating growth, future need, changes perhaps that will need to be addressed. And so that can be an important part of your defined success, is that you're not just reacting, right? You're proactive in pursuing what the future needs are going to be.

Well, and you talk about how do you define that within the context of where we are with our traditional partners, the things that we've been able to move major projects on. We haven't been able to move that without partnership with the federal government and or the state government in a lot of respects because with transportation, for example, with LTD and the MXs, we wouldn't have been able to build an MX if we had to come up with our own local match. We didn't have it. We got the local match from the state. That's how we have built it so far. Now the dynamics and the formulas have changed on a federal level. It's no longer 80-20 split. Now it's more like a 50-50 split, and we have to compete with other communities.

So you're describing the problem that has to be solved, right? And so it's like, okay, the dynamics have changed. The wherewithal to do this has changed, and so that becomes part of what you're going to have to incorporate in your strategies of what you're going to do, because the landscape has changed fundamentally in some of the access to resources.

Yeah, what happens when our federal partner either... retracts or recedes their original commitment. And in some cases, that commitment just flat out disappears.

And so this translates into how the organization has to respond. We still want to be clear about what we're seeking to accomplish. The methods, the means to get there will have to iterate. They're going to have to evolve based on the current operating landscape. And so that kind of shifts, that's the dynamic and the relationship back between staff and council in terms of, you know, give them permission to go figure out some solutions to bring back. This is what we want to do. We want to plan for the future. We want to be ready so that we can invest in economic development or future housing or be ready for those things. What's it going to take? You know, give us some guidance. Because we want happy land. Right. Mayor.

I think this topic is particularly interesting because there's so many overlaps that connect to the other strategic focus areas in this area of work and the fact that it's pulled out as separate I think really is a way of highlighting the fact that this is a huge area of work within the City of Eugene. It is larger than I think most people within the community realize because We touch infrastructure and we just presume that it has always been there and it will always be there and it's magically continuing to work. And when it doesn't, we hear about it immediately. So that I just wanted to observe. I also think this category, interestingly, has the opportunity to carry a lot of the collective will of the body and the public in that there's so much influence that the city has in this category related to economic development, housing production, and climate action. This is a huge lever relative to those other goals, and I think that the framing may have pushed us into thinking about it very tightly to transportation, but in terms of a goal, I think that the, and this is why I also say overlap with other categories, because a thriving, livable community is going to have opportunity and a diversity of wages and entry points to different career options. and is also gonna have great park infrastructure and options for active transportation and reliable power and water, all sorts of other things. So just wanted to say that aloud because I think that this category actually captures or braids together some issues that we sometimes discuss as being separate but that I actually see as being very tightly connected to each other.

The success here contributes to the success in other areas is kind of what you're describing. That's great. Okay.

Super helpful feedback. I really appreciate the conversation because you're not wrong. It was very transportation heavy, but at least from my vantage point, my post-it is the one with the other shoddy cartoon, the fewer bike deaths. We've had four bicycle-related deaths in this community in the last year. That's unacceptable. There's a... There's a reason why multiple counselors put zero bike deaths, safety concerns, vision zero goals realized. So I would, yes and, encourage inserting the infrastructure pieces that you all articulated so well without detracting from the need to highlight that vision zero piece. When we distilled this, we intentionally bookended our rocks with safety and reduced deaths to zero. So yes, and I think we can embrace both, but you're right, we somewhat failed on delivering the broader infrastructure piece, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention the bicycle deaths in our community and the dire need to be at a Vision Zero mark for success.

Okay, all right, let's take a deep breath, take a little break. We're gonna come back and we're gonna tackle the last two of these and kinda see where those take us. And then just foreshadowing, so depending on where we are with time, we do have lunch that's coming in. We have until 1.30, so I think we'll have some time to at least start to identify some of the key things to prioritize within the next couple of years. We may do, we'll see how far we can get and we'll bring them back. Landing these conversations is really helpful. So I just want to say gratitude for the engagement and the conversation is really helpful. So let's take 15 so you can do whatever you need to do. We'll call it 20 after now. So 25 till, we'll come back.

Sound good? That sounds great. Thank you, everyone. The Eugene City Council will now take a 15-minute break and we will be back at 11.35 a.m. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. you Thank you.

back to the July 1st, 2026 workshop at the Eugene City Council and I'll turn things back over to our team with Rep. Dallas.

So what we're going to do now is we're going to have a similar activity on conversation but on the two remaining focus areas. So we're not talking about organizational excellence today because we're going to move that to organization, to staff, but community safety and I had to because it's happening. Nice. And starting to think about. And so we'll work through this part. And then we were imagining at some time, we will be bringing this back.

I don't have to retread, right?

Okay, good. So after we do that and we kind of work through what success looks like and how we define that for each of these two, we will summarize and synthesize, again, asking for permission to bring these back to you, July 13th. But we're going to ask you then to give some thought to the next two years and, you know, what is most important to you. And so given the time we have, we want to make sure we leave with some of that. So I'm foreshadowing. I will restate what we're asking for now. I just want you to be thinking about these two areas in groups and what does success look like. So we'll do a similar count-off, but only one-two. Una dos. You can do it however you want. Don't talk with your mouth full, though. You can just say peace. All right. One-two. Okay, so ones will work on community safety and twos will work on thriving, livable community. When you are at a chewing breaking point, you don't want to talk with your mouth full, a new ground rule for y'all. We have community safety where Jen is. The other is farther off to the right just to give some space for the larger groups. Same activity. Read the post-its. Talk about what stands out. Identify those themes and then bonus points for a draft statement. Sound good?

One is community safety.

Yes. Exactly. So let's do this. Let's try to work through those conversations to resume by noon. Give 20 minutes for that conversation because there are larger groups. If we're ready earlier, that's great, but not going beyond that because I want to make sure there's adequate time for the conversation.

I just read one. Okay, we solved the world's problem? Demonstrated.

Excellent news.

I nominate him to do it. You know, I'm fine with that.

Mike, you just focus on that.

Looking out for him. What a brother.

All right.

I'm just gonna go ahead and pick it back up for the conversation, because a lot of the groups kind of worked through the review of the post-its, identified the themes, so we're gonna do some sharing and having some conversation around the goal. And I put back here, over here next to Jen, You are here, right? So we're trying to define what success looks like. What are you aiming for in that area? And we know and appreciate that there are strategies and there are metrics and those other ways to assess how you're doing and guide how you're approaching that. Those are very instructive to what we will ultimately land on. So... So we will start with community safety. To hear what did you see in the post-its, how did you approach the conversation, and what does, what were the themes that emerged? Who's got the proverbial mic for that? Here, yeah. Anyone gonna share? Randy's like, I'll do it. Yeah, I'll do it.

We basically took what we saw and we broke it into three broader categories, recognizing that some of them could have fit really in multiple categories. We broke it down into, the first one was trust, perceptions, and how does the public see what we are providing? How do they feel about it? A lot about feelings. And then the one on the far right was more operational issues of how you operationalize the goals you're trying to accomplish. And it included, of course, the traditional police and fire, but also alternative service delivery and some pieces like that. And then the last one was more about the outcomes, and we were looking at it from a standpoint of... measures of what we're trying to accomplish. So it's kind of taking community feelings, building that into the operational piece, and then measures, for lack of a better term. And anyone in the group, if I didn't get that right, please say something.

So in the first category, which is sort of the goal statement category, right, which you have the note there that says trust, belonging, and safety. And so those were the posted themes that emerged in terms of what you're aiming for, that you have a community that trusts one another and the organization. People feel safe, and they feel a sense of belonging and connectedness, that they feel not disenfranchised from others. Is that fair?

I think so. Okay. I think so.

So is that then, does that describe what you're aiming for? Is that the vision then, you know, with some obviously some framing of the words, does that miss anything or does that feel like it touches on the high level of what we're aiming for? Recognizing that the, how you operationalize this and how you measure and track performance ties back to that. Eliza, I can see your, I can see the wheels. That's fine.

It feels a little, and I know we're at a very high level, but it also feels a little, I guess, for lack of a better word, like I'm having trouble sort of saying what does that actually look like? How do we kind of see what that looks like within our community? It's sort of like, okay, we feel safe and trusting, but what is feeling safe actually? What does it take to get there? not even what does it take to get there, but what is that kind of, like what kind of safety are we talking about, like where? We know it when we see it, but it's hard to kind of articulate.

Well, and I would ask the group, too, for those that identified some of the operationalized Post-it notes, those are some of the things I think that probably define a little bit of where you're activating on making people feel safe, belonging, and a sense of safe and security. Again, that's maybe where we start to think about them in terms of How do we define it and how do we make these actionable? So thoughts on some of the post-its perhaps that were provided relative to those elements, the things you're going to do. What were some of the things you wrote about? Matt.

Yeah, I'm going to criticize myself here because my submissions were more in that operational desire category. Shocking that the paw print and ensuring animal services are prioritized and more dog parks. It was one of my injuries, but also I submitted the support for the behavioral health and mental health stabilization and the acute mental health response. And I should have really... I should have started with more of an, and I don't see it up there, with more of an accountability piece to ensure that community trust exists or expanding on the accountability piece, both with our independent police auditor and with our law enforcement team and our first responders broadly. This is an unwieldy, massive topic. I appreciate my colleagues for kind of breaking these down to these buckets. But I think they need more in outcomes or more definition in the outcomes and measures category.

So one comment, and I do want to do this real quick. So you said accountability, and so maybe part of what the goal is that you have reliable response. That could be something that would build in, and that could be in fire and police and other services, but that reliability and access.

To that point, the best note on here, I don't know which one of us submitted it, was the right person for the right response at the right time. And if I had to synthesize this whole community safety, trust and belonging, those three bullet points really stand out. So kudos to whoever submitted that piece.

I got Randy and then I got Ellen.

I think it comes down to what you're saying, this is missing, is in the third category in the center. That's the measures and outcomes. I'm not saying it's well fleshed out at this point, but I don't think any of these are well fleshed out at this point, but they're kind of a starting point to build the full expectations in. But that's, you know, the outcomes and measures is the proof that it is either working or it is not. It's the metrics.

Alan, you had a comment?

Yeah, I can't read all the little sticky notes, but... One of the things around community safety is the perception and the reality dissonance that we see all the time. Let me give you a couple of examples. People fear homeless sites, like the Opportunity Village or the campsites. the organized ones, because they think they create crime. Well, the statistics are actually just the opposite. They're actually safer around those than... But for people's perception is stuck in their own stuff. Downtown is actually barely safe, but we have a perception problem. And there's a whole... And the community is very safe, but people don't feel safe necessarily. And so there's this education component, and I was wondering if that's up there, or if there's a way to, where that would fit.

Well, so maybe that may be the two things. I think that's great comments. Thank you. So first of all, how you're measuring, maybe you need to measure the combination of perception and crime rates or whatever it might be. And so when you start to talk about tracking, results and measuring what's going on is both sides of the coin help to tell the story narrative, which is the next part, which is, okay, well, how do we tell our story? How do we educate and inform the community? And that might be something that is important across a lot of these, right, in terms of how you are engaging. And maybe that becomes part of the organizational excellence is that you are communicating and providing data or updates on how things are going. But I think they're all important points.

Yeah, and it's also overcoming hyperbole that people are using at the federal level to make a political point. When in fact, calling out cities for being hell holes when their crime rate and murder rates have dropped for like 10 years in a row and still saying they're horrible. That kind of stuff is helpful.

A lot of pressures that are contributing.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, current context.

Because it's hard to break through all that. Yeah.

Eliza.

I want to follow up on something Matt brought up regarding trust and accountability. I'm feeling like that's not just needing to build trust and accountability between our police officers, our first responders, and our residents, but also how do we build trust and accountability between residents? Because to pick on a different safety topic that we talked about earlier, It's not necessarily that I need to trust that the police are going to pull over everyone who runs a red light in order to feel safe crossing the street. It's that I need to have some trust that our community members are going to be accountable to our rules and not run red lights. And so I think some of how do we improve community safety is how do we that sort of community relations where people are taking some responsibility and some working together to kind of beyond just what we as the city are providing or enforcing. How do we build that community where there is that accountability and that sense of spirit between community members, not just between the city and the separate entities. And so I think that's a piece of it too. And I don't quite know how to do that, but we're not talking about that right now, so it's fine.

And I think you raise a good point, which is that with strategic planning, goal setting, there are the things that we're going to do. What are we responsible for? What do we have ownership? What can we do as an organization? And then there's the broader view. Both are important. This is, again, kind of the bridge for the next couple of years. As you think about what a next full strategic plan might look like, you'll have to have some conversations around who's the audience and what are we aiming for. Part of this conversation is really trying to understand and recognize the bigger picture, but also think about what is it that the city, capital C, of Eugene is gonna focus on over the next couple of years. You know, it's gray in between, but it's also something to kind of keep in view.

No, Eliza's point's a good one. It's not about education. People know it's wrong and illegal to run a red light. It's that they're not taking responsibility to not do it. That's a whole different problem.

Right, which we may not have solved in a couple years. But it's important to recognize that you don't have complete influence and control over people running red lights, right? If only. Mayor, you had a comment?

I was just thinking that also based on what Councillor Kishinsky just raised, that with all of these different strategic focus areas, there is a really significant communications and education component to the work that is down in the bullet points supporting each one of these, but I think just the fact that we're taking this time and this intensive effort to put these up as areas of strategic focus, and that is the beginning of telegraphing a lot of different levels of communication and education and enforcement that reinforce these as goals. So I just wanted to make the point that I think that type of accountability and Community responsibility that Councilor Kuczynski was just raising is a really beautiful aspirational outcome related to all of this different work. That this is not just the work of the city and of elected officials, but much of the success of the work will come back to how we as a community are also engaging with these same sets of goals.

Well, sort of the spirit of collaboration and partnership, which is kind of overarching, is kind of fundamental in a lot of this. And that translates into convening, to communication, to transparency, to all of these things. And as the city is thinking about the organizational excellence and what does that look like, there may be elements of that that can find their home in there in terms of how the organization interacts with and supports the community in its own way. kind of accountability. So we'll get pretty philosophical pretty quick, but I think that it's important lenses to bring for sure. Lindsay.

I mean, I want to build on that accountability piece, but it's also where in the world are places with less crime and it ties to like this happiness quotient, right? If we go back to Boudin.

Happy land.

Right, but yes, less crime is because we have built a community that is beautiful and accessible and the people are accountable to one another because they can be, because they do feel safe. And so coming back to that prevention piece, prevention looks so many different ways. It is our beautiful parks that we're making a lot of effort to keep nice and clean for families to come and It looks like appropriate response in every piece of our system, from our community service officers and our customer service folks at the city level, all the way up to our police and fire, and all of the alternative response pieces along that way. It's kind of trusting the people Basically, I've gone through a lot of collaborative problem-solving trainings, and it's really this concept of people do well if they can, not if they want to, not if they're trying really hard to, not if there's pressure to. It's if they can. And if they can't, then that's when we see a lot more problems rising. So meeting them back as far downstream, whatever the term is, as we can, to be able to create that beautiful, that kind, the safe environment, and then expecting some of the budget language, more costly behaviors down the road to be reduced. So in my value system, that's where I would put so much focus on our budget. If we could still maintain what we needed to address urgent issues, I would be putting every extra dollar into that. Because in the future, that is our long-term financial planning. is to reduce the very, very costly concerns that happen in our community, the big crimes, the big mental health issues. I think of public health in terms of healthy environments where people have a lot of opportunities for exercise, a lot of opportunities for nutritious food, farmers markets. All of these things are going to reduce the number of times that we have to go and save somebody who's having a heart attack, right? So my lens is way, way over here. And we often are in this land way over here addressing the very, very costly things and trying to find more and more revenue to continue in this bucket versus over here. So my happy land is having the ability to put a lot of resources over there.

Thank you. What you've described, I think, in the last couple comments is sort of the, as I'm hearing it anyway, the intersection between community safety and being a thriving, livable community, right? And that those two are connected in a meaningful way. And so how those get shaped, how you define those, how you define success, you know, one may hinge on the other in terms of how that shows up potentially. Okay. Okay. Other comments relative to community safety reactions?

Yeah.

Just a quick one. I think housing and homelessness also fits in with that overlap with community safety, and I do think it's good trying to look at our different categories and where those overlap points are.

That's an excellent point. Well, and I think the braid analogy, Mayor, that you used earlier is a good one with some of these pieces, right, that they weave together. Naming them helps you get focus, but recognizing the interconnectedness.

We can't solve all of our problems that way, but if we can reduce, it changes what our systems might look like in the future.

I just want to point out, part of this, I apologize in advance, is going to be anecdotal, but we've seen a decrease in violent crimes, but an increase in property crimes. And I don't think that necessarily means that the community is unsafe. I've lived at three different addresses in more than 20 years I've lived in Eugene. One in southwest Eugene and two in southeast Eugene. And each one of those residences, my vehicle had been broken into. One of those residences, it happened so many times, I even stopped calling the police about it. I stopped reporting it. And I'm not alone. But this council and this community have encouraged people, if they see something, say something. And it is important to put those on the books so we know where the patterns are and we know that these are happening. So I think the community, this is just gut check, I think community has responded and has started to report those smaller property crimes more that doesn't necessarily correlate or translate to an unsafe community. I think that we are safer when we're all accountable and responsible to each other, whether it's running a red light, whether it's reporting a crime, whether it's encouraging others to report what they see. The data can tell a different story than the reality. And so I just wanted to point out when we're looking at our... Oh, we've already moved on to the next one. That's great. Never mind, my cheat sheet's not there. But when we finally get down to the deliverables and the metrics, I don't want to hearken apples and lizards, but one thing might not mean the other. I just want to be cognizant and aware of that.

Okay, so let's hear about the next one then. So we have the Thriving Livable Community. Who's reporting out on?

Okay, she knew. Yes, we broke it into some categories that we saw. There was a strong focus on library parks and cultural services, on recreation, keeping our environment safe, clean and healthy, good customer service at the city with an equity lens and economic development. And so we created kind of a statement that lists the themes that we saw throughout those, and that is our community can freely access good jobs, a clean, welcoming environment, recreational opportunities, library and cultural services, good customer service slash value for their dollar, and a feeling of belonging.

Comments? No comments from this group? Okay.

I feel like that's all, I mean, there's a lot there, maybe all there. I think that's a great summary and gets to a lot of the heart of what we are working towards as a city and as a community every day. I'm trying to My personal orientation is to think also about how would we see that as, where do we need to see attention applied or energy applied in that collection of efforts? And I don't necessarily have an answer, but I think that we're having really active conversations at council about several of those bullet points. and all of them speak to the need to reimagine or innovate or shift trajectory and to improve. to improve circumstances related to job opportunity and wage growth and career paths. And that extends out to the community feedback that we hear around opportunity and careers, but also in education and the quality of that experience and the connectedness of that experience, not just K through 12, but also post-secondary. I think there's a lot that has to do with accelerating or looking for ways to more quickly retrofit existing environments that aren't supporting some of these outcomes. And so I'm trying to process if there's anything else that needs to be added to this or any kind of additional... energy behind it, I don't have an answer. I'm just thinking that there are specific areas that it feels like we are trying to lean in to this work. And I would say, I mean, with that, that environmental stewardship and climate is a big piece of that and connecting some of these dots and also the qualitative aspects in the sense of delivering return on investment that is a multitude of positives for people.

I feel like within this group there are some places where we have very notable successes and strengths as a city. So I think about our library system, our park system, those are areas that I think we as a city and our community are justifiably proud of because they are amazing assets that our community has and I think there are other places in this where we could do more than what we're doing now like such as with the good jobs and the environmental stewardship in the climate and so I think part of what I see this as like kind of looking at your point about where we need to focus is that as we put more emphasis on some of these other areas we don't want to lose sight and lose Places where we are already strong. We don't want to sacrifice our strengths in order to try and expand areas where maybe we need to do something.

Well, I think it's important also as a reminder, as we're talking about these kind of longer-term aspirational future states, right, that the vision for what you want to create in here, defining them is really helpful so that you can sustain the things that you have but also work towards what you are also wanting to create with an understanding of the current context. And so we're defining where you want to go, knowing that some of these things may take time. You just don't want to lose sight of that, of those elements. And so maybe it's... maintaining the quality cultural library services that the residents already enjoy. Maybe it's making improvements. But there will need to be, as you are contemplating budget choices and trade-offs in this next round, you'll have to be evaluating, what's a longer play? What are the things that we are comfortable with making slow progress on? What are the things that we really want to accelerate? or more actively hold on to when we are evaluating trade-offs and choices. The activity and the importance of identifying where you want this to be is that you keep it in view. But I also want to just make sure that there's an element of realism that we can talk about. And as you are working through the results of the analysis of the framework and making budget choices, you're informed by where do we want to go and how do we temper the timing and pacing on some things over other things, if that makes sense.

Yeah, so I think that's great. I think this is really, really good. The only thing for me is that feeling of belonging, is that what that says? Feels a little too squishy for me. I think a thriving community acknowledges inequities in its community and is actively working to address those. And if you're not... I don't think you're thriving. And so I think the feeling of belonging is not quite strong enough to say or to be able to use effectively. For a vision statement. Yeah. I think it needs to be more. precise at what we're trying to get at because if you know I mean I think this is fairly obvious but if something is a success but it's only a success for some people then we're failing and that's what you're not as successful right it depends on your perspective but we're gonna if you're gonna go big right yeah but I mean I think that we need to be very clear about that so that our community community understands that that's a lens that we're using what you're aiming for absolutely when I

Well, I think the earlier conversation I see, Greg, we'll come back, is in the community safety, we talked about evaluating through metrics that look at quantifiable metrics and sense of thriving, sense of safety, whatever it might be. And it's the combination that can help to inform where things are. I think that you need to have a little bit of both of those things.

Yeah, I think there's two examples that we brought up that we have to really kind of drill down into. One is the library and the other is the parks. So across the country, most libraries are done on a county or regional basis. Here in this area, we have the Eugene Public Library, Springfield Library, Nothing on the county level. And I remember we just got an email, at least I saw one email that came through over the last few days that said, okay, well, we want to form our own kind of library district or whatever the case may be to address the issue of those people who are not annexed into the city that if you want to be part of the library system, you have to pay to get into the library system, it's not part of your taxes because you're paying, you know, a county base versus a city base. And same thing with parks. I mean, you know, as was pointed out, you know, by Councilor Clark, oh, you go over to Springfield, you've got Willamalane, Eugene Parks and Rec, you have River Road, parks and they've got their own pool. And then you have countywide parks. So this goes back to whole governance issue within the context of how we move forward. Are we going to have to change? Are we going to evolve into a different governance structure to be able to deliver the same level and quality services to the Our customer base that has or will expand because it has to expand and we have to figure out a different way of delivering those services at the same time understanding that we have to get over the governance issues first.

So I think you've nailed right in the sweet spot of how these have to wed together.

So if you're saying we expect quality library services for our community, also we have limited resources or ability to deliver to their level of expectation, maybe we need to rethink about how we do this. And that may or may not be where you go. But it's the combination of what do we expect? What do we want? What's our vision for the community? And then the how do you get there? It's going to have to reflect current circumstances, current financial realities, current external pressures that you may or may not have control over. And it's that combination of letting staff look at some solutions to bring to council with the expectation that this is what we're still aiming for. We want to hold on to that.

And I think there's an example of a place where we might not want to go, and that is what happened up in the tri-county area with land use planning. They ended up creating a metro system of government in order to coordinate the land use issues between the three counties, Clackamas, Washington, and Multnomah. And I don't see that as being an add-on, but it becomes another body that you have to deal with and you have to coordinate with. We want to get away from creating new bodies, but we want to be able to maximize what we have currently or consolidate what we have currently in order to provide the best and most efficient governance structure that we can.

Long-term strategy and solution to... The resource limitations and the expectations you have for the community.

Because our resources are going to shrink anyway. I mean, that's very clear all over the map. And like I said yesterday, you know, my daughter-in-law worked for FEMA for 10 years, and the feds are now expecting the state and local governments to take up a lot of these emergency services that FEMA had provided. And we do not have the capacity or capability that the federal government does have to come in and fly in and drop in people and services and food and resources to a disaster area that You know, either we have partially planned for or we really haven't planned for in full because we are dependent on our partners at the state and federal level to provide, you know, some backup for what we have already on the ground.

any kind of effective planning's really gonna have to factor in the broader landscape and current context. Who are the reliable partners? What are the resources? And so you start to get into, kind of under the hood of how are we gonna approach this and what strategies might we pursue in order to be able to either leverage or offset challenges that may come from other areas. Okay, any other comments on the Thriving Livable

I want to thank Councillor Yee for bringing up kind of the feeling of belonging. I think it's one of the most important there, what all of the others kind of support. In my work, I see the impacts of isolation and not feeling seen and how that impacts just their perception of happiness in general, right? So for me, the solution of bringing community together really does help. And we've seen that for a long time. We saw a lot of comments about bringing back Eugene's celebration. And that's such a small thing. But what does that represent? It represents a community that embraces that connection and community. And I come from this really, really small town in Nebraska. It's in the middle of nowhere. and the thing that you cannot do is be hidden there. If you only have 1,000 people in your town, everybody knows you and they know your business. And what does that do is sometimes it's uncomfortable, but you feel seen. And feeling seen means you're not isolated. And these are really simple, basic concepts. But how do we make people and allow people to feel seen, even in their differences? And how do we bring that connection into our community And we've done that in a many variety of ways that have been extremely successful. And some other pressures and challenges have made some of those more difficult. So just thinking of that in a broader sense of how do we, when we're building things, always having that focus on connection and coming together and who is excluded in that and who might not feel comfortable coming to those spaces. We just had Pride. This last weekend, Pride, the sponsored march was canceled because they didn't feel safe to do that for the first time in a long, long time. And why? How do we dive into some of those issues and ask ourselves why are people not feeling seen and safe and like they belong?

in today's city there there are um there's a lot right it's a it's a lot to change the world it is there's a lot of change pressures you know circumstances that drive people's experience individually collectively as a community and these are all contextual right these are all important things that that in the day-to-day of meeting the needs of a community are in mind. They're not easy solutions, but they are things that inform choices. And part of the challenge here is what can we do? Right. Without feeling like there's you know, there's always going to be more you can do. There's always things that are going to be missing and there's going to be a lack of resources to address all the needs always, you know, and that's hard and uncomfortable. So how do you prioritize? How do you figure out where we we we the city capital C of Eugene can contribute to the quality of life and to, you know, a thriving community? a thriving community. So it's a lot. It's a lot and it's hard. And it's, you know, and there are choices and trade-offs that are uncomfortable. And as you continue to figure out, grow your budget or change your budget, whatever, all of those things, there will be pressures. And there will be opportunities for conversations around what can we do in the near term that doesn't lose sight of the community we hope for our future and for the residents that we serve. How are we feeling with all this? Hopefully not overwhelmed.

To be thriving and livable is a lot and we're working on it.

That's right.

And some of it is acknowledging all of the strengths of our city and our community and some of it is also leaning into the areas where we have significant work to do and also have big goals that we've set. So it is a, I think it's a, and that's a little bit maybe where we started in this discussion is that we've captured a lot of our strengths and also being sure that we're applying attention Actively is maybe the other piece.

Right, right. I mean, I feel like the conversation in each of these five areas has been nicely framed. Obviously, there's work to do to kind of synthesize and fine tune that. But I do think that there's some clarity around the things that seem to resonate collectively around them. And through all of the posted activities and the conversation, you can start to see some of the strategies perhaps that are gonna be of interest to pursue. So I think, thank you for all that. And remember, we'll come back on the 16th and put fresh eyes and see how that is taking shape. But I think it would be helpful and instructive also, kind of in light of this conversation and in light of the timeframe that we now want to bring us back into, which is a two-year horizon. You know, we unfortunately can't change everything in two years. We don't have the resources, capacity, bandwidth, wherewithal. I mean, and that's okay. That's okay. And so what I'm going to ask you to do is to take a few minutes and kind of reflect on the whole of this conversation. So all five areas, not by, you know, just take a zoom back, right? And if there was one thing that you want two years from now, so today is July 1st. July 1st of 20, what does that make? 2028, right? Right? What do you want to feel good about that you've been able to accomplish? What is the one thing, as you imagine all this, that realistically you can pursue? And so I want to take a few minutes and think about that. And that's not easy. I get it. And you're not held to this, but I think to hear from one another about where's your focus? What's your one thing? And let's write that down and we can share that.

Clarifying question. This is big picture, not thriving community.

This is for our conversations today. We've talked about from financial stability through thriving livable community. I want you to think about. To confirm, thank you. What is your one thing that is like your B in your bonnet, like we just got to do this? And maybe a little step that's going to go to something longer and maybe whatever, right? Did you have a question, Alan? I have one. Yeah, I know. Right? Hard. And this is not saying that nothing else is going to happen. I just want to hear where people are. Like, what's your thing? And it's helpful for Jenny and for staff to hear, like, what's your thing? So take a minute. Don't just, like, blurt it out. And then maybe write it down on a Post-it, and then we'll share. In two years. So July 1st, two years from now, what are you going to be like, thank goodness we were able to do blah. Fill in the blanks. Feels like Jeopardy? Yeah, why not? We're working on handwriting today, it's good. We're refinding what it feels like to put pen to paper. When you're done, just look up so I know you're ready and we're working. That's fine too. Or put your pen down like that and I'll also know. Nobody likes to pick one thing, but yeah, it's instructive, it's helpful. But it's still one thing? I didn't say one sentence, I said one thing. We try, we try. Anybody remember, this is when you show your age. Anybody remember City Slickers? Yeah. Yeah, remember? One true thing. What's your one thing? Just what is it? Tell me what it is. But that's for you to decide, right? Such a great clip. That's for you to figure out. That is, yeah, curly.

Yeah.

Yeah. Classic. Right? If you can do it in one word, then I will give you another gold star. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe even a reptile Starbucks star. What is it? All right. Are we good? Mary, are you good? All right. When you share your one thing, so we're going to capture some notes over here. Julie's going to capture them, but we'll take these also just because it's helpful. But I really want everybody to hear each other and kind of where we are. So who is brave and wants to not start us with a run-on sentence to get started?

Okay.

Do you want to go first, Matt?

It's broad.

Give it to us.

Invest in services that make Eugene shine.

Boo. Okay, what is that? Boo. Woof. Woof. What does that mean? How do you know if that's happened?

Based on the feedback that we've received over the last two days, I would submit that that includes but isn't limited to parks, beautiful spaces, building new affordable houses. I got one thing. One thing.

One thing.

One thing.

What shines?

What shines?

What is in Eugene that is shining two years from now that you are proud of? Because you invested and did all the other things in your sentence.

Come back to me.

You got it. Totally. That's fine. It's harder than that. All right, who's next?

I'll go. Adequate funding for climate action, homelessness, housing. It is one thing because I put it in a work session poll two years ago as one thing.

Today is a new day. You got a new sheriff in town.

All right, wait.

I want to hear it one more time, and I want to explore that.

Adequate funding for climate action, homelessness, housing, and housing.

Okay, so we're going to come back to you all. So if you had the one shiny thing.

They're connected to me, so I'm not going to let you do that.

Okay, that's fair.

The thing.

I got you guys.

Fewer people living on the streets by investing.

Okay. That's fine. No, no, he got it. He got there. That's good. Okay.

You want me to continue? Nope. Oh, just... See, that's the thing. I knew he wasn't done.

She's going out full Austin Powers.

Zip, zip.

I knew he wasn't done. All right.

Everybody says... No, but that provides focus, right? You want fewer people living on the streets. How you do that, all the things, like, okay. I've got loads. I know, I know. Okay.

Thank you. Mine were merged. In all fairness, I'll cop to it. Mine... merges two into one.

We do have a pattern. We're consistent.

Financial sustainability through adequately available housing.

I need to understand more. Tell me more.

Well, I think one is a very large part of the solution to the other.

Sustainable housing.

Building enough housing in our community will go a long way to giving us financial stability.

So that's your one thing, right? So investing and building additional housing for all the other things.

Sufficiently to do both, yes.

Okay. I'm trying to drill in, and I'm not trying to be mean and to parse things, but I want to, like, get in, like...

It's the financial stability, which...

Right? But you have a method. You're focused on one thing. So two years from now, you want to see some evidence of movement in the housing market because you know that's going to address the financial stability.

And vice versa. Financial stability because, yeah.

Right. We got a good one?

I think it's good.

Yeah, good.

It's one very specific thing.

Good, perfect.

We have landed two major employers providing 2,000 new living wage jobs, placing us on the path towards COE financial stability.

C-O-E, C-O-E, Eugene, C-O-E, right. Okay, very specific. So we're focusing, so read that first part again. Sorry.

We have landed two major employers providing 2,000 new living wage jobs,

Yeah, okay. So we're focused on bringing in sizable new business, and that's going to translate into other outcomes.

It translates into several other things. Towards a stabilized budget, it's not going to fix everything, but the other half of affordable housing is living wage jobs, which we have a dearth of right now.

Okay. No, that's good. All right. All right, gentlemen.

Mine is tell our story.

Okay. All right.

Tell our story. I wrote more, but I feel like... She's a quick study.

Okay, so, and that touches with everything, right? So how you are showing up with residents, how you are keeping people connected and transparent on all the things you're working on. Not losing sight of that. Okay.

Years ago. Yeah.

Fresh blood.

Greg. So mine is welcome to happy land. Thank you, brother. Economic development. That's it. Unless we are building a strong and resilient private sector, which we haven't done since the 80s when the timber industry tanked and all of those guys went in and got involved in commercial real estate. We need to be able to pivot to a more diversified economy And I think that's when I talk about economic development, that's what I'm looking at. a more diversified economy. We need family wage jobs to come out of that, and that will also relate to having people pay more into the property tax pool from buying houses, building businesses that are going to help balance our imbalance between our profit sector and our nonprofit sector. So it's welcome to happy land. Eugene, Oregon.

All right. So the focus on economic development, building a diversified economy, making progress in that for a long-term set of outcomes that you've eliminated.

That's great. Okay.

That's three things.

Well, we can smush them into one. You can smush them into one. Yeah, in terms of the one thing. So making steps to diversify. Eliza.

So my one thing was the financial stability piece because I feel like there are lots of different ways we can get there that are up on those boards. And there are lots of things up on these boards that would be substantially easier and more achievable if we had that financial stability. And so that's where I want to see it as a groundwork for being able to do all of these other things we want to do working on that financial stability.

We already talked about the interconnectedness. Some of them really are a build-to, right? The future state you want to create. So focusing on economic stability, investing in kind of local economy, thriving areas, telling the story of where you are and where you want to go. Go ahead, Lindsay.

Finalizing implementation of... Governance for fire and ensuring appropriate funding levels so that we can have the right person, the right response, the right time.

Now we know who wrote the post-it earlier, the one you were mentioning. Okay, so the one thing is to complete the fire governance work that is underway. And so that's two years from now to be able to have that stable as well.

Okay.

Am I the only one left? Okay. I thought about a couple of things. The first thing that I wanted to just share, though, as context, is that I remember a few years ago learning from some of our education leaders in Bethel. We were having a conversation about education and where we're trying to go as a community, and many people in the room were talking about excellence as an objective, and that's a really resonant objective, but one of the very thoughtful... insights that came from this leader was that we are seeking excellence, but we're also always seeking relevance. And those things together are really central to how a community moves in ways that are aspirational, but also, you know, deeply connected to the needs of community. So that was, as you said, July 1st, 2028. That's what was going through my mind is the excellence and the relevance piece. And I care a lot about what I mentioned earlier about having to do with the demonstration through outcomes of the full integration of the vision that we hold for sustainable economic development, for sustainability and economic development, for opportunity and the ways in which actions related to environmental stewardship and our local economy support each other, and that's central. So I tried to write something that was about that, and then it really felt like the actual takeaway is more like a quadruple bottom line, and that that would be the goal. Because we are talking about economic opportunity, and we are talking about increased economic opportunity, and increased climate action, and improving quality of life, all of those things, but specific to this wonderful place. Those actions specific to and calibrated to the needs of Eugene, and the every time that we can reset a horizon line for what is the capacity or the potential or the goals for our community, I think we need to continually do that and keep putting some of these really big marks out for ourselves and as orientation points that they might not be within two years, but we can deliver on a big vision through incremental action. And I do think that we all are also starting to see some of that even in a handful of recent actions that city council, city staff have been mobilizing around and That's not one thing, but it's never possible for us to do one thing and have it only be one outcome. So I'm sticking with the quadruple bottom line.

I may have missed it, and I apologize, but what are the four things?

Oh, so increasing economic opportunity, increasing climate action, and improving quality of life, belonging, but that all of those are very specific to the community of Eugene, very based in this place. That's the quadruple part. The three would be the social, environmental, and economic.

But those are sometimes- The ad is making it unique and specific to Eugene, correct?

And seeing that, demonstrating that in really clear ways.

Yeah. So two years from now, we have a roadmap for what that looks like. Is that?

And we have, I mean, backing up from there. Sorry, I'm going to be very literal now. Yes, literal thing. So the first piece of that would be demonstrating the full integration of our sustainability and economic development vision. Okay. That we've integrated these goals and they're aligned and we're working together with two of the, you know, sort of deepest, largest oars that we have to put in the water.

That helps. I appreciate that. Okay. Comments or reactions to the one thing that stands out to all of you as you think about what your colleagues have said?

They're all connected. Clearly. They're all connected. That's the one thing that stands out to me. I mean, we all had kind of different variations that they're all connected. Stating the obvious. Just to be able to turn up my mic and let everyone else.

Any other reactions or comments? Yeah, I hear it as the Prioritize the foundation, but for the long term. I mean, I hear a lot of the long term in this, which is great, but kind of the initial step, maybe I, and if I'm over-tilting what I heard, then you correct me, but kind of getting the foundation solid, and that is through your budget, through investments in kind of the elements we've talked about today in terms of thriving community economic vibrancy, whether it's through specific new investment of companies or, you know, kind of that support of the jobs and the foundation that create some of that thriving piece and not missing out on the opportunity to engage and tell your story about what's going on. Right? So that's a legitimate part of it. Okay. Anybody else have any? Is that down there? Okay. All right. Well, so thank you for all of that. Let's do some kind of next steps and, you know, kind of what to expect. And, yeah, it's a lot, and we've covered a lot of ground, and I hope that you're feeling like the dots are connecting when we come back. No, you have questions.

No, I don't.

OR REACTIONS.

OKAY.

I'M JUST THINKING WHEN THEY'RE SAYING THAT, SO FORGIVE ME.

THEY ARE. YES.

No, I was just saying, you had just mentioned that hopefully we're all seeing the dots connect, and I was shaking my head because I don't see the dots connecting yet. Now, we're going to have a problem next year. I haven't seen what the road is to fixing that. It's a short-term problem that connects, like he mentioned the other day, or earlier today. Yes, we should be looking at the long-term, and we are, and these things do. But they don't help us with the short-term. as well as we will need help next year.

Bye. So let me offer this and maybe I'll ask Twyla to come up too and talk about how the next steps come because what we have spent yesterday afternoon and this morning on is attempting to create a framework and a tool for having conversations that do what you've just described, which is to figure out what is that path. It's a framework, and it's foundational, and there are going to have to be next steps in terms of how you bring it to the community, how you engage with it, how staff applies the framework. All of these dimensions and elements may feel disconnected, but you might remember, and it's several slides ahead, so I'll click way apart. There it is. You may remember the puzzle pieces, right? That I came through the informational sessions that were provided to you. These are intertwined, and so we've been talking about kind of really essential key elements for how to bring the puzzle together. It doesn't happen in two half-day sessions. But it sure does set some concrete foundation that you can now work from. And I'm hopeful that the framework, while not ever going to be perfect, will help to level the conversation. And the goals conversations that we've been having today do shed some light on those things that you don't want to lose sight of long term, and how then can staff MOVE THE NEEDLE IN THOSE DIRECTIONS WHILE STILL EVALUATING WHAT YOU'RE CAPABLE OF DOING WITH THE RESOURCES YOU HAVE AVAILABLE.

HAVE WE GIVEN THE STAFF THE INPUT AND DIRECTION WELL ENOUGH? HAVE WE DELIVERED IN OUR CONVERSATIONS OVER THE LAST TWO FOUR-HOUR SESSIONS? I'D LOVE TO HEAR FROM STAFF. Is it more of a head scratcher now? Or are you like, oh, I see what council's talking about.

If I, and I'll let Jenny speak to this, but keep in mind, we're gonna, there's still, we're gonna come back. It's still, we're still loose. We haven't written the final words on paper. And so let's give a little bit of space for that reflection and to come back with that and then to make sure that it's clear and helpful. But Jenny, you wanna?

So there was that kind of graphic that was drawn where it was the goals, strategies, and the measures for success. What this council collectively has done for the first time, several of you have done some of this exercise in the past, but you've begun to sketch out your long-term vision for this community collectively today. You've sketched it. And as Nancy said, we're gonna put the final touches on it. That is an incredible first step. That gives me a lot of direction because it's helping to inform the shorter-term strategies that we're going to talk about next year. and you're still gonna put your fingerprints on it. But what's important is that you collectively have spoken today with one voice to the community and to staff. And so that's the first step. Now we're gonna start to refine that a little bit more and put more bones, you know, meat on the bones for the shorter term strategies, which many of you have spoke to today already, and so we have copious notes. So I do think that actually there is some dots starting to connect, although to Nancy's point it's not quite clear, but you've done a tremendous amount of work today. And so for that I'm very, very appreciative.

What's that? Thumbs up. Okay.

Thank you, Jenny. That's great.

And, you know, you'll be having conversations. You're going to continue to work on this. And this is, again, this is a two-year horizon that ultimately you will be navigating as you're developing the budget and thinking about next steps. And that's the short term. And how you... how you have conversations within that timeframe that honors the goals that you've started to take shape will be important. And so how do you balance those things? All right, so for next steps, as Jenny just said, we have been taking copious notes We have them visually through Julie. We also have them electronically through Jen. So with all of that and also all of the activities and the post-its that we have available, our commitment is to at least bring back kind of a synthesized version that you can react to and respond to when we reconvene in two weeks on the 13th with fresh eyes. And so we have not just the goal piece, although that's probably going to be the majority of what we want to make sure we're comfortable with, on the 13th, but also the budget principles that we have some refinement to do, and then a reminder of the framework that didn't have a lot of modification, but will be part of the puzzle pieces coming together. And so our next steps are to take this together and get prepared to come back to you on the 13th but there are steps to follow we don't end on the third we we may you don't the journey continues and so we wanted to make sure to preview how do you engage from here and so i'm going to give it to twilight to just talk about some of those immediate next steps

Great, thank you. So yes, your next wrap-up session will be on July 13th, and we're hoping we get affirmation on the principles and the service framework from you all. You'll recall that when I was here earlier with work sessions, we talked about this being the beginning of a journey with different phases. So phase one is kind of through the end of your summer break. Taking the principles and framework and then having two opportunities with groups in the community. So first is the technical advisory group on fiscal stability. That's kind of take 2.0. They'll be meeting with the city manager later this summer. That group and then also the citizen members of the budget committee. We'd like to meet with them over the summer and provide an overview of the work you all have done here today to bring those folks along as well. And then we would come back as you come back from your summer break. We have a tentative work session scheduled on September 14th. We can bring any feedback or information from those groups to you and really taking the service framework that you all have drafted and just providing you, taking our current service set and taking a sort. How do those services and programs kind of sort into the service framework that you all talked about and you'll be kind of affirming on the 13th. As you'll recall, we haven't revisited our financial policies in some time, so we anticipate a couple of budget committee meetings in October and November, so that would be full budget committee where we would come and we would bring, staff would bring suggested revisions to our financial policies and additions, and we'd have a conversation there along with potentially updates on budget methodology and pieces of that nature. And then financial policies would come back to city council in December for adoption along with your third supplemental budget of the year. That brings us to the end of the calendar year. All during this time period, we'll start creating the next biennial budget. And so we're taking all of the feedback, your budget principles, the framework, and your strategic vision that you've been talking about today, and we'll be weaving those elements through our budget methodology and our budget to begin to develop the budget framework. We anticipate it might look different. So we usually have a very prescribed schedule. We do the capital budget in February, and then come back with a series of budget committee meetings. We may have a different approach. Staff are thinking about how might we engage differently and provide different opportunities as we engage with you as council and also the community. So as we think about developing what that looks like, that'll be part of the information we'll bring back to you along the way. We just haven't developed that plan yet. That's kind of what we look at as we think between today or your outcomes that you'll be talking about on the 13th and the proposed budget that you'll be considering next spring.

Questions? Yes.

So I think this would be the fourth time, third or fourth time we've gone over financial policies. Mike and I have been on council, and they really haven't changed at all. So I'm wondering, is this more of an education process to get everybody on the same page, or is there something new that's going to come?

The last time we had an overview was actually quite some time ago. We've looked at pieces. So in 2008, the Budget Committee, that was the last major conversation kind of with Budget Committee and Council was in 2008. So yes, we do have updates both to language, just because the world has changed, and also there's some new best practices and things that Council might want to consider memorializing more, such as For instance, we have a reserve revenue shortfall target, but it's not memorialized in our financial policies. There are some new best practices. You know, the world's changed. So there will be some things we will want to bring back. So there will be revisions and things to consider and then for council to adopt.

Okay, thanks.

I think we'll have Mike and then Eliza.

Mike.

I can't, yeah. I can't tell whether that light's on or not, so sorry about that. My only question is, my last understanding from you, Twyla, in presentation to us, is that next year's budget looks like current service level is still about $5.1 million shy. Is that correct?

With our mid-binding strategies, it'll be about $4.4 million under our current assumptions, yes. Mm-hmm.

So while we've done a wonderful job of talking about long-term budget and visioning strategies, I don't yet understand how that connects to next year's discussions and whether it involves increasing revenues or cutting services to get to that point. I'm hoping, am I hearing you say we're going to hear more about that on the 13th?

No, not on the 13th. No, but the tools that we have been developing or talking through, including the goals, as well as the evaluation framework and the budget principles, those are the methods that staff will be able to evaluate and bring proposals to you. And Jenny or Twyla, if you want to speak to this.

I think the point is that it's going to be a combination of both. We're not here to find solutions for cost containment or revenue, but you will have both of those elements presented to you as a part of the budget. In order for us to know how to present a budget that represents your goals and priorities, this is why we're having the conversation. Excellent. Thank you. If that helps you. Very good.

The budget conversation is a longer term conversation. I guess that's what I would go. Oh, I see you had a comment.

Yeah, I think I may have had some of the opposite concerns of Mike. You know, this had been kind of discussed as the long-term financial planning conversations, and we've done a lot of planning with sort of broader strategic planning discussions and sort of more detailed how do we... work with our budget for the next year. But I don't feel like we've had a really good strategic conversation about how do we approach the long term GAPS WITHIN OUR BUDGET, THE CONTINUING INSTABILITY WITHIN OUR BUDGET, AND WHAT IS OUR STRATEGY AS A CITY FOR ADDRESSING THAT? AND I DO SEE, I CAN HEAR DIFFERENT COUNSELORS HAVING DIFFERENT VISIONS OF WHAT THAT STRATEGY MIGHT LOOK LIKE, AND WE'VE KIND OF HINTED AROUND THE EDGES OF THAT, BUT WE HAVEN'T REALLY SAID, OKAY, THESE ARE THE, THIS IS THE PATH. THIS IS THE PATH THAT WE NEED TO WALK DOWN TO GET TO THE FINANCIAL STABILITY HAPPY LAND. And so I'm wondering where those conversations fall into this plan for the next phase. Because what's up there is very specific to how we're building next year's budget, not how we're starting to take the actions that we need to take to build that longer term stability.

I would say yes and. We need to be really clear where we're going before we can start that conversation with council. And that's a little bit more nuts and bolts. And I think we'll have to talk offline of what we need to present to you to help inform the how in which we would But right now, we need clarity on what our vision is, what the collective vision of this council is for the community, and then we can figure out, okay, what is it that we need to do in order to get there, whether it's to expand or contract, invest, generate revenue. It's a combination of all of that. So I think we're getting there. I think the first step today was just kind of more of the bigger picture because that's going to inform the strategies that staff is going to come up and present to you. And we can certainly build in this process more conversation around the nuts and bolts on that if that's the desire of council.

I look at this in a slightly different context when I start thinking about it is that We have a health situation. We're continually managing crises across the board. What we don't look at in the broader context is the chronic situation that we're under. It's like diabetes. You're not going to cure it, but you do have tools in the toolbox to manage it to address crisis situations, also understanding that diabetes affects other parts of the body and other maladies that come about because of the nature of the disease. So we have a disease that we're permanently saddled with. It's called money. That's a problem. Or lack thereof. And it's chronic, it's not gonna go away. And we always within that context are dealing with crisis points that are coming along that we have to address in the near, in the now. versus how we are managing ourselves for the long term so that we can stay alive as long as possible with the right management tools to manage a chronic financial situation. where we have to get money at, how we have to do it, where our partnerships are, all of that. So that's the way I frame it in my head is chronic versus crisis, crisis and chronic at the same time that we are continuing to manage. We're managing emergency situations on the regular. Right.

And it's complex by the nature of where sources of revenue come and how they fund different parts of the organization. It gets complex quickly. What I am hearing, and tell me if this is reflective of what I'm hearing in terms of concern to run next steps. and that is within the levers that are available, what is the conversation and what is the agreement in terms of what you are interested and willing to pursue? Is that part of the... No? Yes? I'm seeing both. We've been talking about a framework and tools. What's important to you collectively? Those are the conversations we've been having today. Also, we have had conversations around the analytical tools and the guiding principles that will inform conversations through staff and then through you in terms of your choices. But what I'm hearing is, well, when are we going to talk about what we're willing to do in terms of the levers we want to pull? You know, are we going to pursue new revenue? Are we going to consider different alternative service deliveries? Are we going to stop doing certain things? Those are the questions that I'm assessing here. And I just want to check that assumption. Is that the missing piece?

Picking up on that and inspired by the medical metaphor, in the pursuit of revenue, I see... They're all good. I see all layers of government make the same mistake, that they swing for the fences. They want to hit that home run, and that's the revenue cash cow that's going to save the day. Rather than, if I can make a clunky baseball metaphor, to play small ball and do a series of get them on and get them over and get them in that's going to win the day. I would love to see us, when we have that pursuit of revenue conversation, that we look at things that might not fundamentally save an entire thing. But rather, what are the small, what are the many multiple ingredients that make up the stew or the soup? Moving on from medical to baseball to food. But I hope I'm, Mike. Welcome, welcome. One thing. So my one thing in that pursuit of revenue is let's do a series of small things that will ultimately add up to saving, to doing big things.

Well, and I guess what I was going to offer is that within the analysis and the framework that we talked about yesterday, and, you know, the decision options, right? So how you evaluate service delivery models, how you think about revenue choices, those are all of the conversations that we'll have to follow, right? And so that's the structure to have the conversations in order to, you know, move in a direction that is more sustainable and stable to the council's goal. Okay, I got to say, Alan, then I say, okay, we'll swing around.

What are you gonna bring back on the 13th? And what's gonna happen on the 14th? Yeah, that would be helpful because that's the road map I am

The other piece, too, is that you said, for example, you put out a choice there. Are we going to talk about cost containment and service restrictions or new revenue? I would suggest to you we aren't even at the point where we can define what new revenue actually means.

And actually, maybe I wasn't clear. That was sort of my point, was that those are the conversations that I'm feeling that you are, like, how are we going to have those conversations? And so that is part of the evaluation through the framework, right, and bringing back ideas. And please jump in, Jenny or Twyla. But the question to Alan, and this might help to answer immediate next steps, is we want to... affirm, clarify, set the direction regarding the budget principles around the framework, which is, of course, the important tool that will be necessary for coming up with options and proposals for all of you to consider and to define what success looks like within those focus areas that we've been talking about today. So to provide that definition and clarity. So those are the three things that we would imagine bringing back on the 13th. Two of which will probably be, you know, hopefully, kind of fresh eyes together to see the budget principles and the evaluation framework. The goals, which is what points to a direction of what you care about for the long term, is the area where we might want to, you know, put some fresh eyes and decide on those. So that's what we're imagining currently for the 13th. The work that is to follow is sort of outlined here in a deeper dive.

Well, so a couple of things. One is I think there are many elements in the budget lens that we talked about that, you know, we're hearing here, like what are the different kind of levers and pieces? That's kind of like the smaller, when I say smaller, kind of like how we're evaluating choices and bringing information back to you. What I'm hearing as well though, which the city manager alluded to, is kind of like, so what are the levers that you want to consider? And how do we bring all of the pieces together as you think about your long-term vision, short, mid, long-term strategies? And I think that's what the city manager was suggesting is we need to have a little more, this is a great first step. We need to have a little more conversation, and we'll be weaving some of these pieces in as we work with you, kind of as we work towards the budget. So I know that's not a clear answer. I can't say X, Y, Z at this moment, but I think part of it is we'd be working to understand some of those pieces more. On the 14th, it was really to come back based on what kind of the outcomes on the 13th, if there are other pieces we need to bring back, but also the way I was envisioning the 14th was really taking your service framework and taking our current service set so you could see how we would operationalize the framework, kind of how the services and programs would flow along with any other new information or considerations that we want to bring at that time. But it was really kind of thinking about the service framework so you can see what it would look like with our current service set.

I was thinking you'd bring that back on the 13th, and we'd comment on it.

Yeah, we won't. We need a little more time, but we'll bring it back on the 14th. Yeah, well, you know, it's summer. And there's work weeks, just to clarify.

And also, keep in mind that this is, we're July 1st, and so you're aiming for the adopted budget a year from now.

And so there are steps that we'll have to... Just a few, really just a few weeks until council break. We have a meeting next Wednesday, a meeting the following Monday, and a meeting on Wednesday. And that is the duration of our currently scheduled meetings for this body until after Labor Day. So this is coming back very quickly with a lot of synthesis from these discussions. And then I think the time over that council break, while staff will still be working intensively, is what will be needed to bring really good information back in September and be able to sort of see that clearer, bigger picture. Okay. That was not the comment that I was hoping to make, and I was somewhere in the queue, and I'm not sure where, so I don't want to go into that if there are others ahead.

So Lindsay, it looks like, and then Mayor, we'll come back to you. Okay.

Perfect. Thank you. I wanted to appreciate this process. partly, I see some frustration maybe about how high level we still are, but I think it's really, really important work that we're doing right now that we haven't really gotten a chance to do. Alan mentioned, a few years ago putting in a work session poll request for figuring out climate and housing funding mechanisms. And we started down that line and suddenly it was not funding for climate and housing, it was, oh my God, we have this huge structural gap. And then it was diving into a revenue committee And we didn't do this work as a council before that revenue committee. Alan and I and Eliza was there as budget committee. We were in that committee and we just had this big book of revenue options. And I think what came out of it was good, but what didn't happen first was a broader community council-led vision and values that allowed us to communicate with the broader community about the why and the how and really collectively come together with the need and how we're gonna get from the need to the funding mechanism and how that funding mechanism is gonna lead into the outcomes that we are looking for. it got a little muddled in there, and so by actually starting here, I think that we're gonna be able to, whatever we come up with, whatever levers are gonna be there, whether that are, maybe we make more cuts, maybe we have more revenue, maybe we bring in some other strategies, it's gonna be because we have done this slower, deeper process, I think the outcome is gonna be more accepted and it's gonna feel better as a council and as a community. And so I really wanna appreciate the work that we are all doing together in this process. And I'm looking forward to the next steps.

I will add to that that I think this is new work in the sense that having a new city manager, having this body spend time looking at the strategic plan and refreshing it so that we can be more tightly oriented in the short term, but also with the long term trajectory. Just for those who are listening, our current strategic goals by focus area, there are just four, urgent community needs, communication and outreach, culture of belonging, and organizational well-being. And those have been categorically the most similar reference points to this, I think, six areas of focus that we've discussed today, which I think give us a much clearer sense of the orientation of this body and the near-term strategic work that we have before us. And then I'm actually personally very comfortable with now taking everything from this very robust conversation over two days and being able to empower and enable our staff and our expert resources to take that and mill through it. I think the leadership that is being offered by this body both in providing that feedback and then saying we now want to see what comes forward from these inputs is is right in the pocket in terms of where we should be as a body trying to guide policy and the near term and long term stability and opportunity of the community. So I'm really looking forward to this work and I really appreciate the fact that we've covered so much that is foundational, informative to what we're trying to do in just two four hour sessions. I think we've actually covered an enormous landscape of points of input.

When we come back on the 13th and we bring the pieces together, hopefully you will be able to see that, the fruits of that work too. Because it has been, we've covered a lot of terrain, as I said at the beginning. We could probably have spent our whole time on any one of these topics, right? And we covered a lot. I think in a productive way that we'll frame it together and you can decide. But the objective here is to give the tools and to give the framework that will equip staff and you for future conversations. And so, you know, it is very foundational work and it is big picture. So hopefully you feel satisfied.

Lessons learned for me.

It's really loud.

I feel like the luckiest man. One of the lessons learned for me is something that brought up by Lindsay, which is that, and this is for the council, when these processes are council driven, they end up having the outcomes that Lindsay was talking about. When they're staff driven, they do not. The strategic plan that you referred to, nobody on this council ever refers to it because it wasn't a council strategic plan. It was staff driven. And that revenue committee that was staffed by council direction, by the way, I voted no. But having these processes be council driven creates a different WAY OF CREATING IT COMES OUT WITH A DIFFERENT OUTCOME AND CREATES A DIFFERENT KIND OF BUY-IN THAT THEN CAN BE IMPLEMENTED BY STAFF, BUT IT NEEDS TO BE AT THE COUNCIL LEVEL, OTHERWISE IT DOESN'T HAVE THE SAME WEIGHT AND IT DOESN'T HAVE THE SAME OUTCOMES.

And hopefully you feel that there was space to have those conversations and to provide input that we'll revisit on the 13th so you are providing the clear direction around what matters, what are the tools that you want to employ in order to have continued conversations and to provide clear direction to staff. Mike.

I have a question. Sorry, microphone.

Sorry. Thank you. Well done. I don't know because I'm not sure of the staff involved and I don't see them here for the ones I think are the case. My question is this, the council has had a very good couple of days on strategic planning and with some specific emphasis. How would the rest of the community know if they weren't watching Channel 21? What's the plan for telling our story?

Nice. Well done.

For anyone to know that we did this.

This will be pushed out. We do have a comms approach to communicate this to the community. And remember, this is the first meaningful step, and there are more. And so we're packaging this together, Mike. So, yes, I hear you, and it will be happening.

And I apologize. I'm not doubting you. I'm just asking because I don't know.

Yeah.

So we have a communications plan, and this will be pushed out on social media through our net news?

That is correct, and we'll continue to do that process all the way through the budget development. So we have points of communication already designed, and the past two days are the first two, and this will be going out. Okay, cool. Thank you very much.

Okay. Any other closing thoughts or questions regarding next steps? All right. Let's just conclude with, kind of as we began, we asked, thank you, Twyla, for coming up. I asked you your hopes at the beginning of our time. Just in one word, how are we feeling about where we're going? And I recognize that it's still squishy, but I do want to just provide a little bit of closure for today and get to see you again in two short weeks to revisit some of these things. So let's just kind of a quick wrap up. How are we feeling? We're going to conclude with Matt. Want to start us off, Randy? We'll just go around the horn.

Sure. I think we're headed north.

North. All right.

I'm still confused, but I trust.

I wish I could give you a better answer than I'm not sure. I do, however, like my friend, trust that on the 13th, it will become clearer to me what some strategic next steps are.

I think that this was a good start. Generally positive.

I'm ready. Okay.

We're headed true north. Hopeful.

Confident.

Okay. All right. So the real medal will happen on the 13th. We'll ask that question again. And hopefully at that point you'll feel clear and content and optimistic and these sorts of words. But I appreciate that. And I get it. I mean, this was a big first lift. And we never anticipated that we could get across a finish line for your whole budget strategy. you know, in two, four-hour sessions, but I do believe that there are tools and foundation here that will inform your next steps. And so if I was to offer a word, which you didn't ask me to do, but I would say, you know, hopeful, and I do, because I can only do two words, too, confident. You guys got this. Like, I think that you have had, you know, lots of... meandering perhaps in lots of conversations over many years. I'm hoping that this brings you together in a slightly different way than maybe you've experienced in the past and that that is foundational to future conversations, which will be uncomfortable, no doubt. And that's okay. That's okay. All right. That is what we have. Thank you, Mayor. You want to?

Thank you. I will close this out. I will also say thank you to Nancy and to Jennifer and to Julie and Rev. Tillis for guiding us and facilitating this conversation over the last two days. Thank you to City Manager Haruyama and our executive staff, our teams for being here. And especially thank you to City Council for dedicating this time yesterday and today. We will come back and pick up this discussion on July 13th, and I now close the July 11th, 2026 City Council Workshop, and we are adjourned.