Ad Hoc Committee on Police and Community Relations - Regular Meeting

And filled.

Well, hello, everybody. This is the Community Livability and Public Safety Committee of the Olympia City Council. Today is March 25. The time is 05:30. My name is Danny Madrone, and I serve as the chair of this committee. So I will call this meeting to order. Roll call, we've got all committee members present. Hello. Committee member Green and Nguyen. The first thing that we need to get rolling here is to approve the agenda. So I would entertain a motion to approve the agenda as published.

Move to approve. Second.

Alright. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Excellent. We had nobody sign up for public comment, so I am gonna, scroll right past that here. We need to approve three sets of, meeting minutes, because we've been very busy lately. So I think we can entertain a motion in one fell swoop to approve the minutes from February 25, March 4, and 03/05/2026. Can I get a motion?

Yeah. Move to approve, the meeting minutes from February 25, March 4, and 03/05/2026.

Yep. Am I right?

All in favor? Hi. Hi. Excellent. The first item we have on the agenda for committee business is approval of the parking and business improvement area phase one findings and discussion of phase two. So I'm gonna pass it over to Jenica who is going to introduce the folks from Uncommon Bridges. Hi, Jenica.

Yeah. Thank you so much. Jenica Machado, economic development director. I'm joined today with Brian Scott, founding partner at Uncommon Bridges, and Ashley Day. They were the consultants on this project.

And before I hand it over to Scott, I'd like to provide just a bit of background and frame to today's discussion, and then I'll hand it over to Brian, and then I'll kinda close it out with some additional comments. So this presentation is the result of a process that began in 2024 when both the PBI advisory board and city council identified the need for a comprehensive evaluation of the PBI. And I just wanna highlight that at that time, there were a number of concerns around PBIA's long term sustainability, including equity of the assessment structure, the effectiveness of current programs, and just the administrative complexity and available capacity. And so at that time, the advisory board considered dissolution as a possible option in 2025. However, both the board and council agreed that a more thorough evaluation was needed before making any type of structural decisions.

In late twenty twenty five, the city initiated this evaluation, and that's when we engaged Uncommon Bridges. And Brian provided an overview last month with some kind of national best practices and context around understanding BIAs and examples. And then today, he'll walk through more so the final findings and recommendations from that work. So I'll hand that over to Brian for the presentation. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. Brian Scott with Uncommon Bridges. I'm joined by Ashley Day. We're glad to be here with you. Thank you for making some time available for us.

As Jennica said, I was with you a month or so ago, and we had a robust conversation about this. I think it's important the context for this for a reminder for the folks that are here and anybody else that might be watching to put that context in there. But I'm gonna go really fast through the first part of this because you've seen it and come to the new information that's at the second half of this, if that makes sense to everybody. As a quick overview, I'll give you a quick introduction to who we are, background, remind you about the BIA best practices we talked about last time, and then focus most of the presentation on findings, recommendation, and road map to get there should you choose to move forward. Ashley has been engaged all the way through this process, helped with a lot of the engagement of stakeholders and the PBIA board.

So if if you ask questions, Ashley may join me in responding to those. Uncommon Bridges is a consulting firm I founded eighteen years ago, Seattle based, but we've worked really thoroughly throughout the Pacific Northwest. I've been doing this work with districts like this since the nineteen eighties, worked all over Oregon and Washington as well as in 19 states across the country. Some of the places we have worked on districts like this include two districts in Tacoma, two districts in Everett, and all 11 districts in Seattle from the biggest one in Downtown Seattle to smaller ones in neighborhoods throughout the city. Olympias PBIA was founded in 2005 with 500 businesses, part of 60% of the 520 businesses downtown signing on in support.

Its budgets have been fairly consistent since then at about a $120,000 a year. The assessments are calculated mostly based on the number of employees. And, unfortunately, there was no provision to keep up with inflation when that was first created. The table on the left is the current rate structure. There are three zones in the district. Rates are based for restaurant and retail, professional services, financial institutions, lodging, and apartments, and personal care divided by

Are you are you speaking to a presentation?

I am. You know?

And they're meeting Is that why you raised your hand, Kelly? As soon as he said the table on the left, I was like, wait. Hold on. There's a table on the left?

You know, I should probably should have said, let me share my screen. This whole, you know, virtual meeting thing is no. I'm not gonna gonna finish that smart ass report.

Thank you.

There you go. I apologize for that faux pas. The the table on the left shows your existing rate structure that has your three zones, small, medium, and large businesses in the various categories that I just listed. The table on the right, I did not show you last time. It's worth taking a bit of a look at the way the city collects these assessments now.

Based on the table at the left, they've identified 10 different category or 10 different rates ranging from a 150 to $750 a year. You can see the number of rate payers that pay each of those rates, and then the total raised of the $113,000 raised in 2024. You can see that the vast majority of the rate payers are in the p one and p two, 150 and $200 a year per ratepayer category. That table will become relevant when I come to findings and recommendations later. To do this evaluation, we we looked at the current status.

You invoiced a $114,000 in 2024. You didn't assess anything in '25 or '26 to allow for this evaluation. We did a background review. We did a fair amount of stakeholder engagement. We did a comparison to national best practices.

We are delivering this evaluation final recommendations and a road map. These districts emerged in the nineteen sixties as downtown started organizing to fight back from downtown's decline in the nineteen fifties. Public area management became a thing in the nineteen seventies. Assessment districts to pay for the long term management of districts emerge in the eighties and nineties. It moved into neighborhoods, more programming and social services added to services.

Today, there are thousands of these districts around the world. Today, more than 4,000 organizations globally, 2,500 in North America, employing a 100,000 people and paying $3,000,000,000 in wages. The average organization provides $1,200,000 in services to their districts. That's compared to the $120,000 that Olympia is doing currently. There are 25 or more of these in Washington with 11 in Seattle, two in several cities, some of them which I just listed.

They're spread all over the state. A business improvement area comes by many names in many different places, but they are always a funding mechanism for local place management that is enacted by the city council, but managed in the neighborhood by the folks that are paying the assessments. The assessments can be prop on properties and or businesses. In Olympia, it's on businesses. The assessment how you do the assessment is a local preference.

Yours is based on number of employees. How you use the money is also a local preference. Most common are cleaning, safety, marketing and promotions, business development, and professional management. Somewhere in the country, somebody's using one of these districts to do everything that's on this table. Nobody's doing all these things, but just kinda anything you can think of that is in the mutual interest of the ratepayers themselves can be done through one of these districts.

Two examples. I used these last time, so I won't spend any real time on them here. In Downtown Everett, they assess about $636,000 on properties on a combination of the land area and the value of the properties with the city and the county both making meaningful contributions. They serve about 54 blocks in Downtown Everett. In West Seattle Junction, which is a district that's more like yours, and that they assess tenants, their assessment is about $570,000.

They have three zones like you do. They break out retail and nonretail in various places, and they do an assessment based on gross income of the businesses. I did a quick comparison of those two districts to yours. Three columns here, Olympia, Downtown Everett, and West Seattle Junction. The real estate value in Everett is about one and a half times Olympias.

In West Seattle Junction, it's about three quarters of Olympias. The land area is about half as much in Downtown Everett and one fifth as much in West Seattle. The building square footage is half again as much in Everett, and half as much in West Seattle Junction. The value per square foot of land is three times as much in Everett, and four times as much in West Seattle. The assessment is four times as much in Everett and five times as much in West Seattle.

That's not to say what you should or shouldn't do, but I think these are somewhat comparable districts, and they're raising four and five times as much money just to put yours in perspective. Why do people create these districts? Because they wanna increase activity in the area. They wanna increase vitality, occupancy rates, cleanliness, public safety. They wanna improve the district's image.

They wanna do advocacy for the district. And probably most importantly, they wanna make sure that everyone pays their fair share. How do you create these districts? You assess your current situation. You go through an iterative process with a core group of key stakeholders who work on what is the service area and goals, what's the work plan and the budget, what's the assessment mechanism, then you build support with the ratepayers, you draft an ordinance, you document ratepayer support, and you go through a formal city council process.

This is an important piece of national best practices that's worth thinking about for a minute is how is this thing organized or operationalized. In most cases where successful organizations are happening, there are three entities involved in managing one of these things. In the middle is the city, the city council, and the city administration who are responsible for collecting the assessments, providing financial accountability or audit, or the funds being used for what the ordinance says, and providing operating standards for how the city wants those to be upheld. Then there are the rate payers. That is who are the people who are actually paying the rate for this assessment.

In your case, it's businesses. And they're represented by a rate payer board just like the one that you have. Their job is to approve and monitor program priorities, budget, and performance. They're basically an advisory board to the city saying, are we following the ordinance? Are we following current priorities?

Are we managing the budget correctly? How is the how's the performance of this district? And then there's who is managing this program with often an individual an an entity that is the program manager, which has its own board of directors. Typically, that would be an organization like a downtown association or like the Olympia Downtown Alliance, and they have district funds as one of their funding sources, and they do the operations that are called for the ordinance, like clean, safe, marketing, activation, economic development. Then they often have other contracts with public agencies, private entities, properties, or businesses that are just a little bit outside the district, but want the same services through memoranda of understanding or on call services.

And then they often have dues or donations or other services that they provide to members or for charitable purposes, like policy, public affairs, and things like that. That's not how Olympias is currently organized. You do have the city playing its role, and you do have the rate payers and the rate payer board, but the city is also providing the program manager function. So you've got city employees trying to manage all of that process, which is not the simplest way or the most cost efficient way to do it. Coming to our findings.

Your structure doesn't really align with current best practices. It's easy to see how you got where you were when it was created in 2005. That was one of the typical ways that it was created. But your assessment rates have not changed since 2005. As a result, the PBA does not raise enough funds to justify the cost of collection.

It's a tenant based district, excuse me, which is challenging to administer. The main reason it's challenging to administer is there is no master list of businesses or tenants in Downtown Olympia or downtown anywhere else that says who's there, how big are they, how many employees do they have. There is no list, so there's no easy way to calculate the assessments. You rely on voluntary reporting by the ratepayers. You made an attempt in or Olympia made an attempt a few years ago to create a property based district, is much more national best practice.

It didn't succeed, although it got close, that has left some of the organizers discouraged and not optimistic about being able to do that again. So that's where you are. Your rates, as I mentioned, they're unchanged since 2005. The left side of this table is more or less the same numbers that you saw earlier. The right side, we just calculated.

What if those rates had been increased by the rate of the consumer price index since 2005? That woulda had your 2024 assessment would have been about $200,000. So near double if you just kept up with inflation. Also, the services may not align with rate payer priorities. When we did individual interviews and my colleagues, including Ashley, did focus groups, we heard a lot about clean and safe, What the PBIA funds have mostly been used for in recent years has been marketing and beautification.

So there may be some disconnect there, though, although there's no it's just anecdotal. The public perception of the PBIA is quite poor. As we talk to people, we've heard lots of finger pointing and negative associations with lots of things. At the same time, the public perception of the Olympia Downtown Alliance is quite strong. And some of the work they have done in recent years and contract with the city and other ways has been really pretty positive.

So as we heard about it, that's what we heard. Also, the PBIA board is it's not very efficient. They meet mostly every month, which is, you know, with 10 or 15 people on that board and one or two city staff supporting that board, that's a lot of work to manage a $114,000 a year. And they could probably meet much less often. And then using city staff to support that is not cost effective.

City staff, you know, have all kinds of other priorities they need for their jobs. So this is not the most effective way to do that. I summarize these. I think I did that for you last time in strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Some of the strengths are you've got a robust business space in Olympia and a solid history of services.

The city has provided a lot of commitment to downtown. The PBIA board is passionate, and that Olympia Downtown Alliance has a reputation for strong performance. Some of the weaknesses is your business mix is kind of thin and the economic base. There are persistent issues with street disorder. There's not enough money to get much done, inefficient staffing, an out of date assessment model, and no provision to keep up with inflation.

Opportunities would be to create a property based assessment to get more revenue so you could get more things done, adopt a more cost effective management and operations, and get into a formal partnership with the Olympia Downtown Alliance. Threats, if you don't do that, would be erosion of credibility of the program, a outright protest or revolt by ratepayers, termination of the PBIA, and downtown stagnating. So recommendations. Olympia needs stable place management funding. There's a reason that there's 4,000 of these districts around the world and 2,500 in North America because they work.

They do really good things. Ideally, this would be through a property based district that would be much more efficient to administer. But since the recent attempt to create a property based district is still fresh in people's mind, it may be too soon to launch that. But nevertheless, that should still be the goal. There's no question that that would be the most effective thing for Olympia to do.

In the meantime, you should substantially increase PVA assessments and budgets for more service and more effective support of Downtown Olympia, and you should reconfigure PBIA administration and services for cost efficiency and effectiveness. A little more specificity to those things, substantially increase the rates and budget, certainly adjust the antiquated rates for inflation. That's it. No brainer from my perspective. You should also increase residential assessments to be equitable with more uses there, dramatically low.

A pure equivalent budget, as I just illustrated with Everett and West Seattle, would be something on the order of $500,000 a year. It would also make sense to use an easier metric to calculate assessments, like maybe building square footage, which you can at least get the square footage of a whole building from the Thurston County assessor. You can't get it for each individual tenant, but you can get a place to start to try and figure it out. Here I'm doing just some arithmetic. This is nothing other than arithmetic.

The numbers on the left side of this slide show that your assessment in 2005, you know, the 2005 rate totals were a 113,000. If you just adjusted that for inflation, that would be about $200,000. I showed you that earlier. Those are the same numbers. If you wanted a $500,000 budget and you didn't wanna change anything else, you just wanted to turn up the rate to solve for $500,000, it would mean substantially increasing rates at the same based on the same metrics.

So a p one rate payer currently paying a $150 in that top row would now pay $663. That's about four times as much. A p 0 or $750 rate payer would pay $3,315. It's increasing similar amount to the total amount of there. That would be the simplest way to do it.

All the problems you currently have with figuring out how many employees people have and having collections and having an accurate list of businesses would still be there, but you'd have more money. Another way to get to that same answer would be to shift and assess based on a easier to calculate metric, which if you wanted to use building square footage, so you wanted to increasing antiquated rate for inflation, increase the residential assessments, go to 500,000. I'm using that same logic. If you switch that to building square footage, there are about 4,300,000 building square feet in Downtown Olympia according to the Thurston County assessor. If you divide 500,000 by 4,300,000, it would mean 12¢ a building square foot.

That would include all kinds of space that you probably can't assess for, like non leasable space, vacant space, or otherwise nonaccessible or discounted space, hallways, elevators, stairways, things like that. So probably once you eliminated those things, you might wanna consider a rate in the 15 to 20¢ per building square foot range. The question also came up, well, what if we did made the adjustment for residential rates? What would happen to this? And if you increase residential rates, then square footage rates on other payers would go down some.

But getting to getting to the getting to a more more sensible metric and a more sensible budget would look something like this. The gigantic caveat I wanna put on that is these recommendations assume agreement under a majority of ratepayers that are more that a more robust portfolio of services is something they want to invest in. I mean, that's assuming that the ratepayers themselves think spending something on the order of $500,000 is a good idea. To confirm that and negotiate exactly what would that bundle of services look like would require an iterative consensus building process in which we engaged many of the ratepayers themselves in this and talked about what services are needed, which was beyond the scope of work of this project. So I'm confident that an answer would look something like the arithmetic I just showed you, but it's just that arithmetic.

It's not representing agreement by your own property and business owners downtown. Moving to the management side, I think you need both a rate payer advisory board and a program manager or operating entity that would, like the illustration I showed you, that diagram I showed you, Streamlining p by PBIA administration, you could go to quarterly board meetings plus an annual rate payer meeting would be plenty even to administer a $500,000 program, and they should use clear performance metrics with consistent tracking and reporting of services, outcomes, the health of downtown. So they're reporting to the rate payers annually and regularly through a newsletter what they're doing. And then streamlining services would be I would recommend transferring day to day operations to a nonprofit program manager such as the Olympia Downtown Alliance, and then the program manager could also manage the ratepayer advisory board. That is, I think, that Olympia Downtown Association should either perform or contract for the services that are being provided, and the Olympia Downtown Association staff and and Downtown Alliance staff should be providing the staff support for the PBIA board, which would meet less often than they're meeting now.

I think that would and then have the city have a seat on that board as a representative. And I think that would save you money, be more efficient, be less of a headache for the city, and it would get the management closer to the people that are receiving and paying for the services. That was a lot. I just recommended a whole bunch of stuff. A logical question would be, how do you get there?

So if you were if you wanted to do that, here's an outline of how you would go about that. Making a final presentation and report right now. The first question is, do the city, the PBIA board, and the Olympia Downtown Alliance board all agree that you ought to do this? And that would mean, basically, I'll say, yeah, let's figure let's let's go through that iterative process of figuring this out, and everybody agrees that you want to do that. You haven't agreed to any conclusion, but you agree you're gonna work on it.

You reckon you form a leadership group to build that consensus and do that engaged outreach. That would take a month or so. And then you develop revenue and services budget, which means a robust iterative process of rate payer engagement, determining priorities, building support. And in this case, I would recommend that the people that are closest to it in Downtown Olympia are reaching out to their peers downtown to talk about how are we gonna do this, how much is it gonna cost, how much of it are we gonna do, How are we gonna build this? And sort of put together a program that the key the ratepayers were willing to support.

And then if the Olympia Downtown Alliance was gonna be the long term management entity, they'd need to do an operations plan to convince the city and the ratepayers that they could do it, what they said they were gonna do for the budget that they had. Once you got all that figured out, you felt like you had support, then that's the appropriate time to have some community open houses so that everybody that hadn't been participating had a chance to see what the proposal was. And then once you'd had all that engagement and all that thinking, it would be time for the downtown alliance and the PBI board both to approve the plan and send it to the city for approval. And then you'd go through a formal city council process, including a notification of all the potential ratepayers and a public hearing and the process that you would have through your committee and the full council. That would get you to a launch of a new PBI with a new assessment, a new collecting methodology, new oversight, and the services that everybody had agreed to.

On paper, you could do all that in a year or less. Sometimes it takes longer depending basically, the and the the the the part that would take longer is, like, building the local agreement and how much energy do people have to put into it. There's my spiel. I know I said a whole lot of stuff, but I'd be happy to respond to any questions. Like I said, Ashley joined me in a lot of that engagement. So if you wanna know what people thought, they might weigh in.

I just have a couple a couple more comments to wrap it up, but I just wanted to underscore that the recommendations presented are not intended to be ready for implementation and voted for approval. It's really a framework on best practices that we can then use to build off of and make a right size proposal for Olympia and Olympia businesses. And so moving forward would require a phase two or the road map that Brian provided, to further refine the concepts, do the the public engagement. The PBIA advisory board received the same presentation and the report, at their March 4 meeting and unanimously voted to recommend, support for moving phase two forward. That recommendation did include a request to share phase two costs with the city, and we do have funds identified through the economic development reserve fund to cover that portion.

Kind of thinking about timeline, if supported, the next step would be bringing this forward to full council April 14. If provided the direction to move forward, phase two work would begin midyear. I think a significant portion of that time will be stakeholder engagement, and the goal would be to return to council with a refined recommendation early twenty twenty seven. And so after the phase two completion, we'd likely return to clips, then a public hearing, and finally, an ordinance with full council vote at that point on a finalized proposal. That's it. Happy to take questions.

Great. Thanks, Jenica. And just to be clear, what what you need from the committee is essentially what you got from PBIA, like our recommendation that that we proceed with phase two, however that ends up looking, but the the, you know, the the recommendation to continue down this path.

So alright. Go ahead, Kelly. Yeah. Thank you. Brian, thank you so much for this. I mean, there there's clearly been a lot of, there's a lot of clarity from the last time that that you all were here in terms of your direct recommendation, so I appreciate that. I do wanna hear about stakeholder engagement. Was it just the PBIA board? Was it other folks? And and, you know, Ashley, it sounded like you did some of that. I'd love to hear what they said. But before you answer that question, Jenica, can you clarify for me specifically what you're calling phase two? Is it everything on that list? Is it a piece of that list? What are what are we picturing as phase two?

Full road map, slide, Brian, if you have that available, that would be the phase two. It would be working to get kind of a steering committee together. It would be doing the stakeholder engagement, working with the potential operating entity on what the operations plan is, revenue services budget. It would be all of this.

Right. Okay. So, yeah, Ashley, do you

mind talking a little bit about say that these Sorry.

Go ahead.

These these kind of build on each other, and this is a process that if you agree to start this process, it's not guaranteed you're gonna get to step nine. You know, if if you don't build that consensus along the way, it could it could stop along the way. I just wanna be clear that getting all the way to the end assumes you've got pretty good support from the ratepayers.

Thanks. So, yeah, Ashley, do you mind sharing a little bit about what stakeholder engagement look like? Like, other than the PBIA board who you talked to and and even from them, what was some of the your general sense of where they were at? I I may hear their recommendation, but I'm sure they didn't go straight to recommendation.

Yeah. I would say our engagement included other business owners in the community. There were also some, like, staff of the city who worked more on the administrative side who shared some of their thoughts about just that administrative piece that's been quite a challenge, I think, informed a lot of this evaluation piece. There also were there were interviews and and focus groups that took place to kind of get people's perspective. Also, the ODA board as well was able to give some feedback.

I think, like, the overarching sentiment is that I think people love Downtown Olympia. I think even in our, like, walking tour of, like, spending time in Downtown Olympia, that was, like, a general I think people love Olympia, and I think they want to have a business, a, like, downtown space that feels like it will enhance the thriving of their businesses. I think the, like, kind of there was, like, concerns about services in particular. I think, like, particularly clean and safe services as being a huge priority. But I think what we came in with that information, that assessment is, like, the amount of money that is being collected is not going to be able to provide the level of service that people want.

And I think even the things that are being provided, people do like. Like, people were like, yeah. I do like the fat flower baskets. I do like when there are events. And it's like, we can't expand the events any further. Like, we can't expand their footprint to better benefit people who are on the furthest edges of the district, or we can't do things as often as we would like, etcetera, etcetera. So it was more of, like, a I would love there to be more. I just don't see where that is. And I think I don't see that with the current money we're collecting that you can you're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, essentially. And I think that was, like, a huge frustration for people.

And I think the other frustration is that, you know, other attempts were made to maybe address that, but there were still kind of unresolved, I think, stakeholder disagreements, which I think is a big part of the phase two, is that, like, it takes time to get people like, you know, since the legislative session just ended. Like, it takes time to get people to agree to anything, even things that people think are a good idea. And so I think that that's really the my that's, like, my biggest takeaway from all of the conversations is that no one thinks that this work is a bad idea, but I think the recognition that, like, there are people who are very much onboard, and there are people who need much more engagement and much more trust building. I think that's something I did wanna highlight that I don't know if, like, necessarily, like, eros the surface is that people do embrace this idea that there is, like, a new era kind of launching with the PBIA in the sense that, like, there had been a lot of distrust. There had been a lot of challenges.

People see some optimism with the way that the relationship with the city has gone. And I think want to believe that, like, these incremental efforts towards trust building and towards showing that we can, like, have a organized PBIA that, like, feels structured well and it's, like, designed to be effective, I think people wanna see more of that evidence and more of that kind of decision making moving forward. I think that was

a So sorry. I think

something that I would add in terms of feedback that we got from the PBA advisory board on this was there's still a lot of details that need to be worked out in the proposal. And so there are concerns around we have some businesses that have large square footage, they're in historic spaces, and that might not match how large their business is. And so those are details that we would need to identify and consider as we're looking at the rate structure, like do we need to have caps on max square footage that's assessed? Do we need to take carve outs for storage? I think those are kind of the details that they still had concerns about, but just wouldn't be addressed in this phase one and would be addressed in phase two.

Thank you.

Anything else, Kelly? No? Ian, do you have any questions or thoughts to share?

Yeah. I do share. Thanks. I'm curious about whether it's, something that came back or, came out of of this process with the city of Olympia or, it's just, some kind of best practices that Uncommon Bridges is, is aware of in in your line of work. But I'm curious about compliance with rate payers, because, even with our you know, before we, stopped collecting, we stopped collecting dues, I guess, there was still a compliance issue.

And so I wonder what your thoughts are on that. I think there's some, you know, education to be done. There's some people that also just, you know, don't wanna pay it. And then, I think there's also some cultural barriers as well, and language barriers with some of our, with some of the businesses downtown. And then, of course, there's, you know, seeing the value, but that's part of the education. So if you could share anything about that, that would be great. I worry about the compliance piece moving forward. And yeah. So I I think about that a lot.

Good questions. I wanted to add the one piece about engagement. We talked to everybody that asked that wanted to talk to us, and we made a concerted effort to talk to several people that we thought were important, some of whom we got to, some of whom never made themselves available, but we've they we tried. Compliance is always an issue. The the Washington state statute for parking and business improvement areas does not allow for a lien on property that for people that don't pay, and yours, you're not even assessing property.

So there isn't a property to put a lien on. So what you have to force compliance would be a process of collection and conceivably, ultimately, a lawsuit to try and collect. And at the rates you're talking about, it is unlikely that you are gonna get as far as a lawsuit to collect the amount of money that you're talking about here. It won't be cost effective to do that. It is very common that these districts in Washington State have a two to 3% uncollection rate.

Yeah. That is probably the norm. The stronger districts with the stronger track record and the best communication programs have lower noncompliance rates. Yours is higher than that. I don't remember exactly, but I seem to remember five to 7%, maybe something like that.

But the it's common, and and it's an issue, and it it's it's very annoying, especially with people who do pay. But it tends to be a cost of doing this kind of business. One of the reasons that I'm a big proponent on getting the day to day management of this as close to the rate payers as it can be that is putting it into a program manager entity is is in their own interest to have a better communication program with the businesses and ratepayers that are there. And you're right. There are all kinds of cultural and language challenges with these districts, and it would be in their interest to do their best to communicate better with those folks.

And, ideally, they would do that very well. And as you can imagine, some places do it bet better than others, and, you know, there are always outliers.

Thank you. Any, I I have another question about, the the stakeholdering. So I heard that, there's PBIA members and then also ODA members. Were there folks that you all spoke to outside of those groups?

Yes. There were. So we did have other stakeholders, like other business owners who were just generally, like, kind of like, we did more of, like, a we asked, like, hey. Like, who are the people that you think are the people we should speak to essentially? And then of those people reached out pretty broadly.

And then there was a really clear directive, I think, in the beginning to say, like, the people who talk to each other talk to each other all the time. So how can we make sure that people who maybe are not always the first person asked are also included? And so I think that we were able to get, like, a couple of other people who were not necessarily, like, the on the board of either who were just like, I own a business, and I'm just kind of expecting there to be. Like, I'm paying my rate, but, like, that's really the amount of, like, participation that I have. And so there were those voices represented, but I think similar to what Brian said, like, there was at least, like, a person that I can, like, think of where it was like, people wanted to talk to that person.

They did not make themselves available, and it was, like, multiple angles of outreach, and they're kinda were, like, still a little on the hesitant side. But in general, I think hearing even from, like, chamber of commerce, for example, I think you were we were able to get a pretty broad swath of people in different perspectives, not just at the

board sites.

Well said, Ashley. And I know for sure that we talked to a couple people who doggedly don't pay their PBIA assessment, And we talked to some people who had grumpy things to say about the Olympia Downtown Alliance. So I'm pretty sure we talked to some people who are neither PBIA ratepayers nor members of the Olympia Downtown Alliance. Although, I didn't ever ask anybody that question specifically, so I don't I can't document that, but I bet heavily that we did talk to someone. So

Yeah. Thank you. I'm just trying to get a greater understanding for what the outreach looked like. I'm I'm not sure if we're here yet on this item, but for me, I'm generally in support. I'm worried about, later on down the line, what that compliance piece is gonna look like, especially since it is on tenants for now. For now, I say optimistically. And and so I I think this group knows that that's not ideal. Yeah. I don't wanna be in a situation where we're we're, you know, sending businesses to collections. It just you know, I would never wanna do that.

So that's, that'd be tough. But, anyways, sort of getting ahead of myself there. I I think it is a a big feat, what you've accomplished here. And, I do appreciate that there was also some, staff input into this as well. We're doing a larger, project where we're evaluating all of our advisory bodies, and so, I think it's really important to get that that administrative perspective.

Yeah. I think we should move to phase two, and I also am, really supportive of of, using, some of our city dollars for that. I think that built so much trust and encouragement with PBIA the first time around, and so I love that they're asking for that again.

We did not talk to any employee of the city of Olympia who said, oh, no. We really like administering this program. I wanna continue to administer it.

Alright, Brian. It's a great program. Okay?

Alright. You know, I have got all these questions coming up that I feel like your answer is going to be that will be addressed in phase two, except for one question. I'm I'm almost certain that we have business owners downtown who are like, what is the PBIA? And I'm just I'm kinda curious, you know, in your knowledge of different improvement areas. Like, does anybody ever, like, rebrand to something that is more, like, plain talked, and people are like, oh, I know what I'm paying for, and I know what I get.

First half of your statement, yes. Absolutely. And I don't think you ever get away from people who don't have any idea what it is and say they've never heard of it. But, yeah, the the district in Ballard is called it's called a BIA, but they call it the Ballard Improvement Area. In Downtown Seattle, it's the MID, the Metropolitan Improvement District.

Those are both PBIAs according to Washington state statute. You know? And it is very common all over the country for people to brand these things, all kinds of things, even though there's some underlying state statute that creates an acronym that only a small handful of people actually understand what that acronym means.

Okay. So it sounds like we could take some liberties there to at

least Absolutely.

Make it a more recognizable thing. I mean, even having the word parking in it, I think, confuses people.

So It is. It it is You know, I wish I could go back and find those people that wrote that into the statute. It's dumb.

Yeah. Well, it's there now, isn't it?

Yep. Yes.

Well so, yeah, like I said, all my other questions, I feel like, are gonna be phase two type questions that I'm very curious about. So I'm also in support of us moving forward to phase two. You know? And I it sounds like, Steph, you're requesting formal action from us. So if there's if we're good on discussion, you know, is there a motion someone would like to make in terms of, you know, taking the phase one recommendations to the full council and also recommending, have the committee recommend that we do move forward with phase two.

Go go ahead.

I'd like to move to approve the parking business improvement area phase one findings, and, move into phase two and, forward to the full council for consideration. Is that is what I have on my motions list. I wonder if there's anything we need to do as far as the funds go.

I don't believe so. I think we are able to access those dollars without a formal motion.

Okay. Thank you.

K. So I'll second.

Okay. Excellent. Alright. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Jenica and the folks from Uncommon Bridges. I've learned a ton from you and the couple presentations that I've had, and I look forward to this moving forward to the full council. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you. Have a great night.

Thank you. Bye bye.

So the next item we have on our agenda is approval of the civilian police auditor 2026 work plan. We have Margo Morales here, and, she can introduce our police auditor who's also here with us. Yeah. Thank you so much. So Yeah.

For the record, my name is Margo Morales. I'm a community engagement program specialist, and I support the community oversight of law enforcement programs, including, supporting the civilian auditors contract. And with us this evening, have Steven Connolly who's representing OIR Group, which is the city's civilian police auditor. And this evening, we are bringing their first annual work plan, before you for consideration. So let me go ahead and share my screen.

Alright. So, hopefully, everybody can see that. Okay? Yes. Perfect.

So first, I just kind of wanted before we get into the work plan, to touch on the role of the auditor, the history of the city's retention of a police auditor, and some recent updates to their scope of work. So the central role of the auditor is to review certain types of investigations completed internally by the Olympia Police Department and provide regular reports to the city council council, which includes recommendations for the police department operations, policy, and training based on the findings of their audit. In September 2002, the city council approved an ordinance creating the police auditor chapter of the municipal code, and hired its first auditor in 2003. In 2009, budget cuts necessitated the reduction in funding to retain an auditor. But in 2020, council appropriated funds to reinstate a civilian police auditor contract.

In May 2023, in response to direction from the city council, the Social Justice and Equity Commission launched a community oversight of law enforcement process, where they developed recommendations for community involvement with the Olympia Police Department and enhancements to the role of the auditor. These recommendations were accepted by counsel in July 2024. So with those recommendations, there were enhancements to the role of the civilian police auditor. So they're listed here on the slide, but some of those enhancements were to receive complaints directly from community members, and then refer those to OPD with recommendations on how to handle the investigation. Also, what we're talking about tonight was to develop an annual work plan that includes prioritizing, specific police policies or training for other issues of interest, that the auditor intends to review, and then putting that work plan before the community policing board for input.

Also, the recommendations included adding some collaborative work with the community policing board on alternative ways to engage with the community around the role and work of the auditor. So from those recommendations, also, as we mentioned, the community policing board that was established, and its purpose is to ensure the Olympia Police Department's accountability and transparency and serve as community representatives providing input and community perspectives on the work of the civilian police auditor. The auditor's expanded scope also includes community engagement and implementing alternative ways to communicate about their auditing function, information concerning misconduct complaint investigations, use of force, and investigation process, that have been audited with the goal of fostering, just widespread understanding of the auditor's work, the Olympia Police Oversight System, and ways that community members can get involved. So this picture here on the slide, I feel like, is a great kinda touch on that. So this was from when OIR visited us in person in October, and they did a joint, community listening session hosted by the auditor and the community policing board.

So the auditor's work kinda has an annual cadence that we're kind of, finding our way into with this new contract. So that starts out kind of with this annual work plan, which has already been reviewed by the community policing board, so that will be standard practice. Then the next step for that work plan is tonight coming to clips, and then, depending on how you guys feel, moving that forward to council for approval. So one of the key things about this work plan is identifying, things from the most recent reporting cycle that the auditor would like to proactively address, considering, systemic change. So then next in the annual workflow is kind of a midyear report.

Typically, that would include the first six months of the year. Then there's typically an end of year report, that would cover the rest of the year and look at kind of annual trends, of what they saw throughout the entire year's auditing. And then quarterly meetings with the community policing board and community engagement initiatives throughout that annual cycle. So then tonight, where we're looking at the work plan, it includes some information about that regular reporting cycle and community engagement. But then the big piece for this evening is looking at what are they finding from their previous auditing cycle, which they just, put together a draft report, that they would like to look at in this coming year more proactively.

So they presented their work plan to the community policing board, and kinda discussed their desire to look at, the integration between the police department and the crisis response unit during calls for service involving persons experiencing mental health crisis. So this evening, we're bringing this work plan to you for, consideration and approval to move it forward to the full council, for approval. If there's any questions about the work plan.

Is that the end of your presentation, Margaux?

Yes. I can take this down so y'all can see each other. Oh,

okay. Cool. I didn't see the the final thank you slide yet, so I wasn't sure if it was the. So okay. Questions from my committee mates here? I've already had the opportunity to look at this at the community policing board meeting. And I apologize, Margo and Siva, but I gave a little bit of a spoiler last night at the council meeting in terms of what would be here. So Kelly or Young, any questions? Go ahead.

Oh, yeah. I'll just keep mine short. I am so happy that we picked OIR Group, And it sounds like they're continuing to to do, you know, what they sought out to what they said that they would do in their interview. They were really and you actually covered some of this in your spoiler alerts. Yeah.

Or I guess spoilers, last night, chair Madrone. But they're not just thinking reactively, right, or, you know, when, I mean, a big part of their their role is to review things that have already happened, but they're also thinking proactively as well. And so, I think that's reflected here. And I'm just, I don't have any questions, but I I'm just really enthused about the work.

Great. Kelly, assume you'll raise your hand if you have something to say. So, otherwise, I will, entertain a motion to, make this recommendation to the full council to approve the work plan for OIR group.

Move to approve it and move to the poll council.

A hearty second.

Alright. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Margo. Thank you, Steven. You. It's always good to see you, and we look forward to this coming to the full council. Margo, could you say something about timing? Is this gonna come forward alongside the, the report that is, coming in, I believe, early May?

Yeah. I think the goal, but we can be flexible with that, was kind of having this follow the same timeline as the advisory body work plans so that OIR group doesn't need to wait until this is officially approved that they can get moving on it. So if we can manage to maintain that same timeline as the other advisory body work plans being considered tonight, I think we would like to do that. But if there's, a request that you have for changing that, we'd be happy to do that.

No. I think that makes a lot of sense, to just bring it along, as we're doing this evening. So, that that makes a lot of sense. Okay. Great. Excellent.

Thank you so much. Thank you so

much.

You guys have a great evening. Alright.

Good night.

Alright. We have got one more final thing on our agenda for business this evening. That's approval of the city council appointed advisory body twenty twenty six work plans, and I believe Stacy is taking the lead on this. Or is it you, Debbie?

That's me.

Oh, wait. No. There she is. I I cannot see her on the screen anywhere, and then you popped up. I don't know what happened. Okay.

Thank you, chairman Joan, committee members. Good evening. For the record, I'm Stacy Ray, assistant city manager, and I'll be talking about council appointed advisory bodywork plans tonight. So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen. See if I want this one. Okay. Can everyone see that okay? Yes. Okay. Alright.

And make a couple adjustments. Okay. So the, community livability and public safety committee annually reviews the proposed work plans, for city council appointed advisory committee boards and commissions. The council guidebook talks about not only the purpose and establishment, and appointment process and relationship to advisory bodies, but also talks about how important these boards, committees, and commissions are in providing you all with the assistance, in formulating public policy and transforming policy decisions into action. So I think, we may all know by now we've had a planning commission since 1935, and since then, we've established an additional 13 standing bodies.

So today, there are nearly, somewhere around a 100 community member volunteers that participate on our advisory bodies, and they share their time and their expertise and their lived experience. Not all advisory bodies have work plans. In advance of this meeting, we sent you work plans for 10 different advisory bodies that do. So the purpose of tonight's agenda item is for me to provide you with an overview of those proposed work plans and seek your recommendation to move them forward to the full city council for approval. So, again, tonight, I'm gonna talk about the 10 work plans, a bit in a different way than I think we've talked about them before in the past.

I first wanna thank Debbie, Sullivan, and Margo, Morales for having worked on this approach and presentation, and Don Don Carvalho as well. Certainly, advisory body work plans forward is most definitely a team effort as we have a lot of them. Also, you know, appreciation to all the liaisons for working with their bodies to develop the work plans. So tonight, rather than go over each one individually, instead, I'm gonna share work plan items organized by how they advance the community's vision, specifically by focus area, and by highlighting those work items that directly support an item on your council work plan this year. As I mentioned up front, there's some advisory body work plans you're not gonna see included tonight, and that might be because they're reviewed separately, or the advisory body doesn't traditionally develop a work plan as their role and responsibilities each year is limiting in scope or is largely the same year over year.

So just a few examples. The youth council work plan was already reviewed, and approved separately, by council. The newly newly established community policing board, as Margo was referring to, doesn't have a work plan. And, of course, tonight, you saw the auditor's work plan. Salary commission is an independent body, and the lodging tax advisory committee is is one that doesn't develop a work plan.

So, again, you're not gonna see all the bodies represented here. The work plan items highlighted tonight don't include the routine work needed to just operate an advisory body. So you're not gonna see mention of elections of chairs, or development of work plans. We've stripped that out to focus on the substantive items. Apart from those housekeeping things, there are different ways that items get added to a work plan.

Debbie Sullivan, last year, did a very deep dive analysis on our advisory bodies, and she identified the ways in which items get put on work plans. And those are really either it's a required responsibility, you know, often defined through the OMC or through the Olympian Municipal Code. It's a responsibility of that body. So, for example, making a funding recommendation. It could be a council request or referral, and staff staff will often request input or something from an advisory body, feedback from an advisory body.

And then also, you know, things are put forward by the advisory advisory body themselves, either it's an of an area of interest or an area they might wanna learn more about, and those show up often as informational briefings, which will you'll see highlighted here. So, you'll also see as we work through the focus areas, work plan items that largely fall into two categories, work plan items that have a deliverable or an action or an outcome, and those that are called informational briefings. And some of those are of interest to the body or may be, you know, for learning purposes and may prepare the advisory body for maybe a a for a future coming, work item. So just a little bit of data before we dive in here about this batch of work plans. Through the process, you'll see on the following slides 31 different work plan items.

And of those 31, 16 will result in a recommendation coming forward to council. 14 will result in a recommendation to staff. Two will, result in a recommendation to an outside entity, and I'll highlight those. And then 12 of the total 31 are related to twenty twenty six council work plan items.

Okay.

So we'll look first at public safety focus area. So just a few things to highlight. The work plan items that align with council's work plan are the two items in this focus area. So reimagining public safety as being taken up by the social justice and equity commission. So the commission will be providing input on the status of the reimagining public safety recommendations and their implementation and a community perspective on priority areas going forward, and speed limit enforcement cameras, which will be taken up by the bicycle pedestrian advisory committee.

And this topic, as you probably recall, was born out of community dialogue around safe streets and a council member referral. So informational briefings for the planning commission and the bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee will support them in, again, kind of learning, building their knowledge base, and applying it to some of their other work items. So the next focus area is community livability. So a few highlights around the work plan items shown here. This is the second highest number of work plan items only behind well plan city, which we'll get to in a few minutes.

The work plan items shown here that align directly with the council work plan, and there's an asterisk next to those, include the experiences and discrimination findings for the Social Justice and Equity Commission, Rebecca Howard Park Concept Plan for the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee, and the Yashiro Japanese Garden Relocation for the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee. A lot of what you'll see here for arts commission can be thought of as annual routine responsibilities. So for example, each year, they develop a municipal art plan to accompany their annual work plan. They support arts walk, you know, recommending a cover artist, and each year, they identify, when applicable public art for park development projects. The Heritage Commission shown here too annually works to host information sessions for community members on topics like historic home preservation.

The other thing I'll note here, which I I talked about a little bit earlier, is that the Arts Commission and the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee are the two bodies this year that, have called out making recommendations to two outside organizations or entities. So the Arts Commission making a recommendation to the Olympia Downtown Association through their municipal art plan and the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee to the Recreation and Conservation Office writing letters of support for city grant applications. Next we'll talk about environmental stewardship. Highlights for this focus area just you include that there are more informational or educational briefings that fall within their within environmental stewardship, and they're primarily for the utility advisory committee and one for the planning commission. The utility advisory committee also has a work plan item to make a recommendation to staff on the city's drainage design and erosion control manual.

It's not uncommon for our advisory bodies, particularly in the public works realm, to regulate pride input to staff on management plans, and manuals so they can be updated and keep us in compliance with our with our state requirements. Not all the utility advisory committee work plan items are shown here because a lot of them fall under a different focus area, well planned city. So you'll see more of those in a minute. Okay. So for economy focus area, so, like the arts commission, the cultural access advisory board work plan largely revolves around their responsibilities for developing an annual funding recommendation.

They also regularly include in their work plan a continuous improvement analysis and enhanced outreach. However, I do wanna make one edit to this slide. It says here that they are going to do that that that program analysis this year, but in actuality, they only do it in odd years. So so just a slight revision that they, that this year, they're not recommending revisions to community liability and public safety committee and then council, but they do do that. They say in their work plan, they specify they do it in the odd years. And for Heritage Commission, the special tax valuation application review and recommendations are really part of their core review and permitting responsibilities.

Okay.

So organizational excellence. So, the process currently underway that community member, Huen, mentioned earlier around evaluating city council appointed advisory bodies as shown here. And that's because the social justice and equity commission has it on their work plan to have a role in providing input on those recommendations to ensure that whatever new framework or recommendations coming forward meet council's goals for equitable and inclusive engagement. For the Olympia Metropolitan Park District Advisory Committee, what's shown here are really two of that body's core responsibilities for ensuring transparency and the responsible allocation and use of park funds. Okay.

So lastly, we have well plan city, which has most of our work plan items. So there's a couple slides here. So yeah. Several slides here. This is where most of the work plan items have landed.

There are two items on this particular slide that align with the council work plan, and, again, they're highlighted with an asterisk. But and multiple multiple advisory bodies are are shown here as being engaged in the review and providing feedback on the capital facilities plan. That, again, is to help ensure that, you know, master plan goals and projects and prior community priorities are in being prioritized in the in the CFP. The parks and recreation advisory committee is gonna be continually engaged in the multiyear effort around the revisioning of the downtown waterfront or Percival Landing. And many other work plan items here, again, are kind of wanted some of those annually completed items that advisory bodies do on a regular basis.

Two examples of that include utility rate recommendations by the utility advisory committee and project design review by the design review board. The second of three slides, additional work items shown here that align with the council work plan include the sidewalk repair policy being considered by both the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee for a recommendation to staff and the Planning Commission for a recommendation to council. Consideration of SEPA categorical exemptions by the planning commission, commercial parking standards outside of downtown by the planning commission, subdivision code updates, by the planning commission. Okay. And we'll we'll wrap up Well Plan City with the informational briefings.

So, again, these are noted for utility advisory committee, planning commission, and the heritage commission. And one thing I'll just note about the planning commission, you know, they're advisory body that meet most often and have probably the most significant work plan, number of items, but they have multiple briefings that are consolidated here under the heading, parking strategies. So this this concludes the overview of the proposed advisory bodywork plans. Again, we did it this year by focus area, so a different approach. You know, I believe we have, yeah, we have our planning commission liaison, Casey Shoffler here.

But, otherwise, if there are questions about specific work items, I'm happy to take those and try to run down some responses or clarifications for you. I think I just wanna highlight as I think it's pretty clear to you that our advisory bodies do a significant amount of really thoughtful and important work. And, again, wanna recognize our liaisons for helping them be successful. The the thing I'll add too about looking at work plans in this way is it it dovetails really nicely with the evaluation work around the advisory bodies as a whole, because it helps us be able to see differently what work is happening each year that's largely routine, what aligns with the focus areas, and what aligns with your with the council work plan. And, you know, how might we be able to think about adjustments to the process to maybe seek better alignment.

So for purposes of tonight, the action we're requesting is the committee to consider moving forward the 2026 work plans to the council for approval. If approved tonight, we will add them to the April 14 council agenda for consent. And and that's it. Great. Thank you, Casey. You can put

your slides down, I think.

Okay.

Alright. I will turn to my committee mates here and see if there are any thoughts or questions. Go ahead, Kelly.

I'm trying to be respectful because my councilmate, Quinn is very good at the raise hand. So, Stacy, thank you for that, and I I appreciate the way that is all structured. This is my first time seeing these work plans, so I'm just trying to get a gauge. In your experience, are these like average size work plans? Is this a heavy year for any of the groups? A light year for any of the groups? I mean, you confident that these work plans are, are well within the capabilities of the the time and effort that the committees have?

So I can't say that I'm familiar with the development process of each one of these work plans. However, I did work with Margo for the Social Justice and Equity Commission. And I do think, you know, we tried to take into account what what, you know, what what's an achievable workload, you know, based on also looking very closely at alignment between what's the department work plan, what are the the staff needs, and then what what are the council's priorities with the council work plan. So I'm I'm hype I know. I'm guessing a little bit, but I think this feels like a pretty normal year for for work plans. They're still ambitious. I think Jay's gonna jump in here too.

Go ahead, Jay.

Thank you. Yeah. I would say, you know, from my view and look at this, this was like a fairly normal lift of work for our committees, both matching into the council work plan and then fitting in their own. And the other thing too is and and I think Stacy and Debbie can speak to this too is the liaisons do a really good job of talking to the committees and making sure they have a workload that's manageable and not too cumbersome. And the committees tend to speak up if they feel like they've got too much.

The you know, the planning commission's always the hardest. They they just are always gonna have the most robust work plans compared to other advisory committees, and I think you know that. That might be the one exception. It's hard to look at their work plan at any given time in a year and say it looks like it's just totally manageable. I think they have some long meetings from time to time depending on their workload, but that might be the exception.

And planning commission also meets twice a month. Right? Or is that just during plan development?

Yep.

Yeah. So the so planning commission meets more often. Anything else, Kelly?

That is helpful. Thank you.

Yeah. Oh,

go ahead.

Oh, yeah. It's, it hasn't always been that way with the planning commission, so I feel like their workloads just increased quite a bit over time. But, hope hopefully, everyone's, workload will ease up and be quality over quantity after this, this evaluation round with the advisory bodies. I don't have any big questions about I have a little, like, in the weeds questions that I could reach out to the different staff liaisons about. But I just, oh, and I will say, I was surprised through the, I learned, in the arts commission, work plan that there had been an accident that hurt the triumph of vegetables, and I did not know that.

And so that was that was good to know that we're gonna be fixing that. But it was installed in '98, and so I do kind of wonder you know? I mean, it's amazing that the the artists are there to fix it. But, anyways so, you know, I can go down on these little, these little holes. I just, really appreciate, how staff and how, chairman Jerome, I feel like you're probably a part of this, but I really appreciate how this item is coming, forward to us, this time around.

A lot of times we've had it be just stacked where where committee member Green, there would be the staff liaison, I believe, and then the chair or the cochair or vice chair, and everyone would give us a rundown of their entire, entire work plan, and folks would be pinched for time. So, yeah, well done. No questions. Love how it's laid out. I am curious to see how the evaluation work is going to, possibly change some of these work plans, into the future. That's

Well, to give credit to where it's due, this is all Stacy's idea on how to bring it forward in a more concise way that shows how it relates to our work plan as a council, and all I did was say, yes, please. So I'm

gonna I'm gonna give credit where it's due. This is actually this was a concept that Debbie brought forward with an eye towards looking at our focus areas and thinking about how are we lining up with the council work plan in our focus areas. So thank you, Debbie.

Thank you. Wonderful.

Okay, Debbie. You get all of the goodness then.

I I do have a couple of questions. One is that, so, the council appointed body advisory the the the the work on, you know, how we do our council appointed body. So that's gonna be making its way to the Social Justice and Equity Commission. Correct?

And Yes.

So how does the timing of that look? Like, are they gonna get a chance to talk about this before we as a committee are reconvening on that?

Yes. So it's yes. Margo and I were just talking about this actually, and, we were talking about, bringing this forward to them in April and May. So that aligns with during the same period that we're having we're surveying our current advisory body members and also having a conversation in early May with the chairs and, of course, continuing our conversations with liaisons. So the idea is the next use the next two months before we come back to you in, late late May, to have kind of further refine the recommendation and be able to have all of this input, you know, built into that.

Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. And and I did notice, like, in the the presentation, there were some things that were, like, recommendations to staff, recommendations to counsel, recommendations to both. I I and and on that one in particular, it said recommendations to staff, but I sure hope that, you know, that also, you know, comes to us in terms of what their their thoughts are. I I assume that would be the case. Yep. And then I have another question. And, you know, I noticed that the planning commission's got, you know, interest areas on their agenda.

Like, you know, I I guess I I you know, use the chair land. Use would meet with the chair of the planning commission, you know, a couple times a year. And I'm there's a couple things that I'm curious about. And one, I guess this is a question for Casey, and not just because I miss you, Casey, because I'm no longer on land use. But, Casey, how does you know, when I I love that our planning commission is so engaged and interested, and I'm just curious, you know, how it how it looks for you and your team in at CPE and D to, like, be able to do your day to day work and then also, you know, meet the planning commission's needs to address topic areas because I'm sure you guys have to prepare presentations to bring information forward.

So I'm just curious how that looks for you and your team.

Yeah. So just real quick, can you folks hear me okay?

Yeah.

Yeah. So some of the informational briefings in particular, those are topic, areas of interest to some of the commissioners. And the informational briefings, we try to be real clear, with the commissioners upfront that those are, as time allows, and to some degree, somewhat aspirational. So, we we have to be very clear with the commissioners that, we will support those informational briefings as much as possible, but they have to bear in mind that staff time can be pretty limited on some of those topics. Some of those topics, and what we've done in the past, our commissioners will actually bring, topics that they'll present on, without a lot of staff input.

So some of those, topics in particular, were brought by, chair Quieten, vice chair, Daniel Garcia, and also by, commissioner Najjadi. They had some specific topics that they wanted to bring up as discussion items that don't necessarily have recommendations tied to them, and they're not necessarily directly tied to active policy decisions. They're more of just internal conversations and and how can we, in their words, move a conversation at the committee level and possibly bring shape future policy discussions. So that being said, that was kind of a long way to say that we would get to those informational briefings assuming we have time. What wasn't necessarily highlighted were a lot of the community planning and economic development and council plan items.

So the the planning commission, I think it has 12 items that are directly tied to the the CP and D and the council work plans. So, those will obviously be the priority, and then we also have work plan items that are, as they come about. So if you're if you're not familiar or still tracking, we are now open to comp comprehensive plan amendments again. I'm fully expecting to see some comp plan amendments, and I'm also hearing some of some OMC amendments coming our way as well already. So those are applications that would might come through that typically have to be reviewed.

So, I'll stop there. Hopefully, that kind of answers what you're saying.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. No. That was really good. I'm just you know, knowing that the planning commission has that responsibility as people, you know, apply for changes for the comp plan or OMC on top of, like, the things in our work plan, and then they are a very aspirational group. I just you know, I'm just curious on how all that gets balanced, because they're really, really great passionate people there on the planning commission. I I am curious, like, you know, as they're having their conversations that don't connect to something we're necessarily working on as a council. Like, how do we ultimately, like, learn from them as an advisory body on those those conversations? No no no need for you to respond. That's more more rhetorical and me thinking out loud.

But, actually, one, example of that is I saw that the multifamily tax exemption is on their agenda as something to discuss. I know last year that that was an, area of interest for the council to learn more. And so I think it would be prudent for us as a council to be kind of in tune with some of those discussions that are happening that aren't necessarily tied to any decision point, but we also have an area of interest because I I know it was a meeting that I missed last year where NFTE came up, and everybody's like, oh, send it to land use. And I said, no. No.

No. Send it to the full council because land use talks about this stuff all the time. And if the questions are coming up from people who aren't on land use, like, you know, we gotta bring the conversation there. So that that's just one area that I think is important to flag, in terms of, you know, having heard interest from the council in, being, having a refresher on multifamily tax exemption, how we got to where we're at now, anything we might consider. And if the planning commission's already gonna have a discussion on it, then, you know, I'm just thinking about timing those things so that we're not having these separate conversations that that that don't relate to each other in any way.

So nothing for you to respond to, Casey. Just, again, thinking out loud in terms of just, where where I've heard interest from the council on things that didn't make it to our work plan, yet the planning commission also appears interested. So excellent. If

we do have those briefings, I I think we would certainly communicate those discussions back up through management and through through counsel. So just so Excellent. It's all on the record.

Okay. Excellent. Well, good to see you, Casey. Thanks for being with us this evening. Alright. So, looks like we need a motion to approve these work plans, to, make that recommendation onto council so that, so that these, advisory bodies can get on with their work.

So moved.

Second.

Alright. All in favor? Aye. Excellent. Thank you both so much. That brings us to the end of committee business. We are now at reports and updates. Stacy, I feel like you and I had talked about doing something at reports and updates. There was some conversation to be had or maybe I'm misremembering, or maybe that was for last meeting and it's still in my brain. I don't remember. Do we have anything?

No. That was the last meeting. I think it was regarding advisory body appointments, but I I think we're current.

Okay. Okay. Debbie, did you have anything for us?

I do. Just very quickly. So April, we, this committee will not be meeting in April, but we have two meetings scheduled in May, one on May 6 and one on May 27. So enjoy the month of April.

Yes. Oh, I will. Great. Anything from committee members? Go ahead.

Oh, sorry. I'm I wonder if I'm missing something that might be happening in April. Why are we not meeting in April again?

Because because the chair is not available.

Oh, okay. Scheduled.

Yes.

Oh, I see. I see. Okay. Thank you.

Yes. So we just bumped the meeting out a week, and that just brings us into May. That's all.

Got it. Okay.

Okay. Well, I'm not seeing any hands go up for any reports or updates. So just appreciate y'all. Thank you so much, and I will call this meeting adjourned. Have a good night.

Thanks, everybody.