City Council - workshop

You know, is it gonna be here tonight?

I got it here.

Okay, it's 5.31 and I'm going to go ahead and call the City Council Planning Commission work session to order. And I would like to call on Heather Richards, Community Development Director, to present.

Maybe.

Thank you, Mayor, Councilors, and Planning Commissioners. We're doing a joint work session tonight for something that the Planning Commission has already had a public hearing on and made a recommendation to the City Council about. But in our process, what we do is if there are significant changes made to something that we've noticed at ELCD and the public and have gone through the Planning Commission, We'd like to go back to the representative bodies to let them know that those changes have been made, notice that work and go through it again. I thought it'd be easier just to have a joint work session tonight so that the Planning Commission can contribute to why some of the recommendations are the way they are and also the resulting discussion. City Council, when I presented the Planning Commission recommendation, had some concerns about the significant and landmark tree program And then I've been working with state staff on some concerns over the repairing corridor program as well. So both of those are programs that we're gonna be talking about tonight. And then we did get a letter from a property owner that was impacted by the tree growth program and didn't participate in the public process prior to the city council consideration. And that has generated some questions too. All three of those are on our agenda tonight to talk about, and that's the reason for the joint work session. We're gonna do this a little bit differently. I actually deliberately waited until just a couple of minutes ago to send to you sort of a work folder, and that was, I'll be pointing it out to you as we walk through the presentation. That's meant to be a reference folder for you, so you can look at different things in the code. and it wasn't intended for you to read it in advance. It's really intended to sort of get everyone at the same level of information as we walk through this discussion. We're talking about natural resources planning. Many of you from city council have been talking to me about it over the last couple of weeks because it's generated some discussion in our community from a couple of property owners. Why are we doing this? We're doing this because this is actually one of our Oregon land use goals. We call it goal number five that deals with natural resources. And that requires cities to conduct natural resources planning. So goal five tells us that local government shall adopt programs that will protect natural resources and conserve scenic, historic, and open space resources for present and future generations. And then these resources promote a healthy environment and natural landscape that contributes to Oregon's livability. So there's a statute that tells us what Oregon Land Use School's purpose is, its intent, its larger Components of how you work through it and then there's also Oregon administrative rules Relative to different components of land use goal number five that gives us more detail about how to do the work So the statute tells us that government should inventory the following things repairing corridors including water and Perry areas and fish habitat wetlands wildlife habitat federal wild and scenic rivers state scenic waterways groundwater resources approved Oregon recreation trails, natural areas, wilderness areas, mineral and aggregate resources, energy sources, scenic views, and cultural areas. The work that we're working on right now is looking at these items in front of you. The wildlife habitat we're looking at from the perspective of tree groves and riparian corridors here in McMinnville. The wilderness areas we're identifying as the tree groves. And the cultural areas are currently being addressed by the Historic Landmarks Committee that's working on some proposed code amendments for you, for both the Planning Commission and City Council to consider. So the goal, the statute also tells us the process in which to do the work. First we inventory the resources, then we determine their significance. Significance meaning is this something we wanna protect for present and future generations? Then we identify what would be conflicting uses and define impact area for protecting those resources versus development in the urban area. We analyze what we call an easy consequences of the, and look at three program options. So the easy consequences are looking at economic and social conditions, environmental conditions as well, and weighing out Does it make more sense to preserve these for those elements for the community versus limiting development on the site for the private property owner? It gives us three options in which we can do the work. We can decide as a city we're gonna do full protection of these resources. We can decide to do no protection of these resources. And we can decide to do limited protection of these resources. We just need to come up with findings for what those decisions are and why. And then we need to adopt a program that achieves our response to goal five. So that's where we're at today. History of this work. We started this work when we were going through what we called McMinnville Growth Management and Urbanization Plan. That was that 2003 Urban Growth Boundary Amendment Plan that did not get acknowledged and finished until 2020 for the city. And based on that, we were required to do goal five, so natural resources update. We were in periodic review for that particular urban growth boundary amendment. We did an inventory of our resources in 2021 and 2022, looking at repairing corridors, tree growth, scenic viewpoints, and view sheds. We drafted programs for that, and then we've been working through these programs with the City Council and Planning Commission for the last four to five years, And we've had work sessions in 2022, 2023, 2025, and 2026. As we've been working through this program, we have had some significant losses of some resources that we were hoping to protect, mostly in the northwest area of the city where we're seeing development occurring right now. So if you look at that map right there, there's a couple of view sheds that we were looking at to preserve and park and also some tree groves that we were looking to preserve as well. The tree groves did not get preserved through our land use process because we did not have codes allowing us to do that. And the view shed also did not get preserved. And just recently, and I'll go through this with you per the letter that you received from one of the property owners, There's a property north of where the Holt Homes development is taking place right now that's in the city limits. That has a tree grove on it as well. I don't know if you can see. Oh, you can see it. Okay, great. That's right up here in this area. And because we did not have a program in place, they have gone ahead and cut 75% of the trees in that area.

Heather, where was that? I didn't see where you're...

Right up here. Here, can you see that up there? I can't see the screen. So just north, it's still in that red box, if you want to think of it that way, and it's on the very northeastern side of that red box.

Is that within city limits, or is that the UGB?

That's within city limits.

Where is it at?

It's a property just north of the Holt Homes development. So if you think about what they have graded thus far, if you're familiar with that area, It's the property right north of that.

Okay, thank you.

Many of the streets are stubbing right into that. All right, I haven't seen that, thanks.

Is this the property that is being used as a tree farm?

Well, we don't allow tree farms in the city.

Allegedly.

This is the property that you got the letter about.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Trying to be very careful about how we work through that. So tonight's work session, we're gonna do it in this order. We're gonna look at repairing corridors first, which is a state mandate under goal five. We're gonna look at significant and landmark trees, which is a local value and direction that we received back in 2022 when we were putting this program together. So it's not a mandate by goal five. And then we're gonna look at tree groves, which is responding to the state mandate to look at wildernesses within your city limits in UGB.

I'm going the wrong way. My apologies.

So repairing corridors. So I did put together a work folder for you. We have all three of those identified in here in different clips. The first one is repairing corridors. What you have is handouts to help you is a large map for you. We heard from the Southwest Area Plan work session that really helps you to have the map We're also providing you with the proposed amendments and that's chapter 17.47. In the proposed amendments, these aren't new to you, you've seen these before, I've tried to highlight things that we're gonna talk about tonight. So we're always scrambling to find out where is it in the code that we're having this discussion about. What I've tried to do is highlight that for you and where I have questions for you, I've also pulled that aside in comments. So that's part of the sort of reference materials. I'm also providing you with a copy of the administrative rule, which talks about our safe harbor. So there's been a lot, you've all been invited to a property here in town to look at the impact of, the city councilors have been invited to a property here in town to look at the impact of the proposed amendments on that property. There's been discussion of, using the safe harbor or not using the safe harbor. I wanted to provide you with the Oregon administrative rule that walks you through what the safe harbor is and what would need to happen if you're not using the safe harbor. I have highlighted the two sections of that rule, which are the safe harbor and which our code is built upon. So you have that for you too. And we'll talk through that as we go through the presentation. And then lastly, in the discussion for repairing corridors, you have a letter from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife as well as Department of State Lands to talk about a particular reach of one of the waterways that has been under discussion here locally and whether that is considered a repairing corridor and should be considered a repairing corridor per the state database. So we have chosen to do this safe harbor The Safe Harbor points to a database that we need to use to identify repairing corridors. This reach is on that, and they have heard the discussion here locally. I reached out to them for some help to see how we could work through that, and they've provided the letter for you. Amanda Putten is here as well. I hope I pronounced that right. She is with the Department of Land Conservation and Development, and she is the natural resources specialist. So she's also here, especially for repairing corridors. She's here to help you answer any questions you may have about veracity of data and the safe harbor and how we're using it and what the goals and rules require for us. Okay. So per property owner request, we were asked to look at removing what we call the tributaries from the repairing corridor overlay. So this map right here in front of you is the map that responds to the safe harbor. So if you look at section five of the Oregon Administrative Rule, It tells you the different inventory and database you need to use to have that safe harbor. So Section 5 says if you, the city, does not want to do the inventory yourselves, and there's a process in which to do the inventory, and I'll walk you through that, and you want to use a safe harbor, you can just use these databases and create your inventory from those databases. So we were directed to do that by city council when we started this work, and that is what you see here on this map today. We have been asked to look at some of the tributaries of that database to see if we could remove them from the repairing corridor overlay. And so I've identified and read on this map what those tributaries look like. And if you notice, they're also the ones that aren't protected by our floodplain zone. So our floodplain zone protects our repairing corridors on our larger waterways because we don't allow any development in our floodplain zone. but they do not protect these tributaries or reaches. We have been in discussion with DLCD and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The database we use, one of the larger databases we use for the Safe Harbor inventory does come from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife for fish-bearing streams. And we have been visiting with them about how do we work through this issue where... There is concern that these aren't really fish-bearing streams and shouldn't be repairing corridors and that we can't, and to try and move this program forward because we're kind of in this stalemate right now and locally. And so based on that, they have provided the letter to you. I will enter that into the record. But they do say in that letter that we cannot rely on our floodplains as a finding that we are meeting the mandates of goal five as it pertains to repairing corridors. So my question was, since our floodplain zones protect most of the repairing quarters in the database, can we rely on that? The answer was no, we cannot rely on that as a finding. So the safe harbors, to talk a little bit about them, we were directed to use the safe harbor for the inventory, putting the inventory together. And so that's what you saw on that map. And then it's described in section 17.47.110 of your proposed amendments and 17.47.190. The Safe Harbor also says in Section 5 that a repairing corridor is 75 feet set back from the South Yamhill River. So the type of waterway, the repairing corridor includes 75 feet on each side of that from the top of bank, and it's 50 feet set back from other fish-bearing streams. So all the other waterways in that repairing corridor are 50 foot set back from each side of the stream. Adjustments are allowed with city-approved engineering studies, and you'll see that we have actually provided the opportunity for those adjustments in our code as well. There's a second safe harbor in the administrative rules, and that's Section 8, so the second highlighted section in there. And that's really how do you manage your repairing corridor. So that's where it says the city can adopt ordinances that do the following things, allow these uses, exempt these uses, that type of thing. So in our code, we have used that, and it is under Section 17.47.120. That's the table that talks about permitted uses and conditional uses and what you need to do in terms of getting approval for those uses and what's the review body to do it. And we'll talk through that a little bit. And then 17.47.180 is also in there in terms of development standards. So for development, per the Oregon administrative rule, no permanent repairing alteration is allowed except for limited uses, so recreation removal of non-native or hazardous vegetation, public facilities, utilities, trails, and replacing existing structures. Now, if you have existing conditions, you are allowed to maintain your existing conditions. So things like there's been questions, can I Maintain my lawn, that would be in the repairing corridor. Yes, you can do that. Can I maintain my driveway that's in the repairing corridor? Yes, you can do that as well. If I have structures, can I maintain those? Yes, you can do all of that. That is considered exempt. There is vegetation management. So removal of vegetation is restricted and managed and it allows for non-natives to be removed and replaced with native vegetation. We have relief mechanisms written into the code, which allows for density transfer. So if the city is removing some land from development opportunities, that development opportunity can transfer to other portions of that land in terms of increasing density on the rest of the site. We also have the opportunity for economic hardship variances in the code. So there's an opportunity to say, I'm losing all economic value for my property And here's why, and you can go through a process that's reviewed for that. It's not reviewed by staff. That is reviewed by a decision-making body, the planning commission. There's opportunities to make corrections to the maps, and there's opportunities for unbuildable parcel relief. And then we looked at alternative protection. So if you look at the code, we're really kind of looking at a limited development approach to this. We're limited development. We're providing those relief mechanisms mechanisms, and the safe harbor allows the city to reduce the setback, so that 75 foot setback from the main fish bearing streams by 50%, so to 37.5 feet on each side. And the rule allows you to do that automatically, that's what that safe harbor allows. So the safe harbor allows what's exempt, it allows what's permitted, and then it allows this reduction in setbacks. So let's talk through the code itself. If you look at the code, the exemptions are on section 17.47.110, which spells out the different exceptions. I've had some questions asked of me, is routine site maintenance exempted and what does that look like? So I highlighted that for you, because I know that was one of the discussions you were having with one of the property owners. I also highlighted some things that I thought we should talk about that actually Amanda pointed out to me, which is if you look at Section 8 of the OAR, there are things where it says the city can adopt an ordinance that does the following, allow these things to happen. We've adopted the OAR. We've adopted the approach to allow these things to happen, but with two different sort of pathways. One is to allow these things to happen that just has what's called a staff review. So it's considered a type one permit. It's just a planning director approval. We don't notice anyone. Did you meet the criteria? Yes, no, and it moves forward. And then you'll see in there, and this is in the table, 17.47.120, permitted uses but that's with a planning director notice with public notice that means we send it to the surrounding property owners this property owner is doing this. You'll also see the second caveat in there is whether we require a mitigation plan or not. So there are times when we say if you want to do this it's allowed but you need to provide a mitigation plan so we can make sure you're doing it and mitigating the impact of what you're doing. So the safe harbor doesn't require you to separate it into planning director approval and then planning director approval with notice. That was a local decision in terms of those two pathways. And so that's something to consider. One of the things that Amanda pointed out was we have removal of non-native vegetation and replacement with native plant species as a exemption. So you can do that. But then we have in our table, we say removal of non-native vegetation and replacing with native plant species is allowed within 10 feet from the top of the bank or edge of wetland. And we put it under the permitted uses. So that means we would get, someone would tell us how they're going to remove those non-native plants, but if it's an exemption, they're just doing it. And so there's that conflict there. I wanted to bring that to you to see how you wanted to move that forward. If you look at the second piece B of that table, that's where you have planning director notice with planning director approval with notice, public notice. And we have in there that you can do private in-stream and stream bank enhancement, including vegetation removal and replacement within 10 feet. So of the top of bank or edge of the wetland. And there we require a mitigation plan. So mitigation plans coming in, we're reviewing it, and then we're letting the neighbors know. So those three are slightly different, but they're all sort of in the same category. If we as a city want to say, you know what, we just want to make it an exemption, we can just make an assumption. If we want someone to be looking at what's the plan for the removal and the replanting, we can come up with that too. But that's kind of how this table works in terms of, what we're allowing and then the process in which we're allowing it. So the ABCs and Ds are important in that table. And the other thing that's important is whether a mitigation plan is required, because that's work that the property owner will need to do and it will be reviewed. So when going through this process and developing it over the last several years through all those different work sessions, this was discussed with what the decision making bodies at those times felt should have a mitigation plan that the city should be reviewing. And then also what those bodies felt that neighbors needed to know was occurring on that property. And that's how it got divided into those four categories. That's something if you wanna continue forward to sort of massage a little bit to create either more clarity for the property owner or to make the program easier for the property owner to navigate through and for city staff in terms of what we're reviewing and not reviewing, we can look at those pieces too. The prohibited uses are coming from the state law. And then the conditional use or variance review is the economic hardship variance, very similar to our tree grove. So that's where we say, if you feel this program takes all economic value from you, you have the opportunity to go to a planning commission with a conditional use permit to change how that applies to your program with your argument. And that also shows you in the ABCs and Ds, we tried to make it clear who was the decision maker for these different elements. It was decided at the time when this was put together that there would be two decision makers. It would either be staff or it would be planning commission. It wouldn't go all the way up to city council. The other portions of the code to become familiar with is we do allow an administrative adjustment to underlying zone dimensional standards. That's section 17.47.160. What that means is if somebody has a property that is adjacent to a riparian corridor, and we typically ask for a, let's pretend a 20 foot setback from from the back for the backyard. And that, so that'd be 20 feet set back from the 50 feet or the 75 feet set back of the, of the actual waterway. We have the opportunity to look at that and say, we're going to adjust that by 50%. And it's just needs to be a 10 yard setback because you're not impacting anybody behind you for that. Um, we have the opportunity for the density transfer, as I described, that's a, uh, That's a transfer, much like our other ones that we adopted for our natural hazards program and we're talking about for the tree groves, where someone can take their loss of development and transfer it to the rest of their property to increase the density on the rest of their property by one zoning allowance, so to go up from an R1 to an R2, so to speak. And then we have in the code a determination of top of bank. Amanda worked with me a little bit on that. We had a lot of language in the code requiring a survey to be done for these types of determinations. And after discussion with Amanda at DLCD, it was determined that we don't really need a surveyor to do that. There are other professionals that can do that that may be less onerous and costly to the property owner. And so we have removed that condition from there. And we are looking for a site plan that identifies where the top of bank is. And then there's a determination on how you walk through that process. So that's intended to provide some relief for the property owner. What we don't have in the code itself right now is a section where we can remove the, prairie and corridor from the inventory. So if somebody wants to argue based on the fact that we adopted it as a safe harbor using these state databases, is there a local way to remove a section of this from our inventory? And if that's a discussion you want to move forward with, I'd invite Amanda up here to help us with some guidance on that because it's dealing with the safe harbor If we had our own inventory, which we had done ourselves, so like the tree grove inventory we did ourselves, we did write a methodology in there for how to come to the city and say, we think that our tree grove no longer meets your methodology and it should be considered for removal. Because we're the ones who govern the methodology for that. So what if we do not use the safe harbors? That's been the question proposed to us. We can conduct our own inventory that is allowed in the OAR that I provided to you. It is section four and it walks you through how to do your own inventory. It also points to other administrative rules that we need to utilize for that. And just to sum that up, it's really looking at the same data as the safe harbor and then local findings. So we do the inventory, put all that data together, We come up with our long list of it and then we have our own methodology for determining significance. So if you remember with the tree groves, we did a whole list of tree groves and then we went out and did these tabulations for them and then based on the tabulations which we put together as to what we felt the community values were and then we looked at what's the scoring mechanism for what would be considered significant. So we'd be going through that process And then we would have to conduct the easy analysis for it. So you're no longer in a safe harbor for that work. You have to then say, okay, we've created our own inventory. This is what we think is significant. Now we have to review that in terms of impact to the property owner as we're putting together our program to protect it. And it talks about how you can do that in the Oregon administrative rule I provided to you. That's in section six and section seven. And it looks at identifying the conflicting uses and defining the impact area. And then you analyze your consequences and you come up with whether you want full protection, no protection, or limited protection. So exactly the same program we use for tree groves. And then we develop a program with comp plan policies and proposed code amendments. So the cost for that that we did for the tree groves, just to let you know, which was done in, the inventory was done in 2022. The tree grove inventory was $39,500 with our third-party vendor. The easy analysis, which was done in 2024-2025, was $50,000. And we calculated we have about 300 hours of staff time into that work, and we have about $5,000 of noticing into that as well. So if we were going to move forward with doing our own repairing corridor inventory in our easy analysis, I would say this is a good baseline to think about in terms of cost for that. It might be a little bit more complicated or less complicated. I haven't done that type of research into it yet, but just to give you some idea. So for the repairing corridor, some of the questions I have for you is how do we move forward with this? Do you want to do our own inventory and easy analysis or stay in the safe harbors that the program is built upon? And are there revisions that you want to make to table 17.47.120, which is where I shared with you, you have that sort of flexibility to move things around a little bit in terms of what's required.

Okay, before we start, City Manager Garvin, could you have somebody or could you look at the temperature? It's... It's, we're all up here kinda hot. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, so we're gonna start with the 17.10, is that where you said?

I think you should have a general discussion of, some of the questions on the table are, Do we do our own inventory and easy analysis? So there's been questions. There's questioning the safe harbor and what it's doing to some of our local property owners or a property owner, right? So that question's been raised. I think you need to answer that question. If we're going to move forward with a different analysis altogether, that sort of stops and we start again with that. If you want to keep the program as is, so remain in the safe harbors, Do you want to look at the table in 17.47.120 to see if that sort of meets your standard of policy for the pathway that needs to be navigated as to, you know, the different types of permit approvals and whether a mitigation plan is required? Because that table reflects what the Safe Harbor says is allowed in the repairing corridor. And then we sort of have dropped it into these buckets of how it's allowed, if you want to think of it that way.

Okay. We will start. So everybody on my right, just be aware that I can't see your faces. So give me this if you wanna speak. And then again, just wait for me to recognize you and we'll try to divide it up so everybody has an opportunity. Councilor Benner.

Thank you. In general, It seems silly to jump the rails on the safe harbor. We've got great data on that, whether the data affects landowners seems to be, we could solve that with the table is my thought on that. And then in general, what are other jurisdictions doing? It seems like an incredible amount of work has gone into this. Is this the same thing that other jurisdictions across the state is doing?

I'm actually gonna ask Amanda to come up and share a little bit about that. In your original repairing corridor assessment, we did share what other cities were doing back in 2021, 22, but there may have been other work done since then.

Do you mind? Good evening, Councilors. My name is Amanda Punton. I'm the Natural Resource Specialist for the Department of Land Conservation and Development. So, Councilor Benner, to answer your question, protecting riparian areas under Goal 5, most jurisdictions use safe harbor. And I want to clarify, I think Heather did talk about this, but just put a finer point on it, is that a city can choose to use a safe harbor inventory and then do what we call the standard protection approach, which would require doing an ESEE, or you could switch it, right? So the, the protection program, I mean, the inventory and the protection program are two different steps. Each have a safe harbor and each have a standard process. So, but largely, uh, jurisdictions use both the, uh, safe harbor inventory and the, uh, the safe harbor protection and I will also say that it's possible you don't have to apply either of them citywide you could pick an area that was particularly like you're using the safe harbor both inventory and the and the protection measure and you had a place that seemed that that just wasn't working well you could do either apply either standard inventory or standard protection approach to one reach of a stream or one stream and not do that for the rest of the city.

Okay. And in the reverse, I'm assuming we could apply our own inventory and easy analysis to one reach and keep everything else in the safe harbor.

Right, and really where the rubber hits the road here is the protection measure. Some people object to having a resource inventoried on their property, but really the problem landowners have is a limit on development. So the limits on development can be addressed through an EC analysis if there is really unique situation there. So if the protections need to be less in order to make reasonable use of that property, then that could come out of an EC analysis, or an EC analysis could support findings to make a decision to reduce protections for one reach of a stream.

And who reviews the EC analysis? Is that your, or us?

I would review it, yes. I guess the other thing to be aware of is that when you enter into the standard process, you're opening yourself up for objection, you know, so appeals. Generally, if an ESEE is thorough and findings are made well based on the ESEE analysis, that survives appeals. But the nice thing about the safe harbor is that it's not appealable. You do what the rule says and you're done.

Thank you. Can I ask one? I have a question. Oh, sorry. I was going to ask one third question to give you a third sort of consideration. Can we write into our code an opportunity for property owners to do an easy analysis at any time in the future, as you just described, to sort of remove their property from the program?

Yes, and you won't even need to put it into your code. A property owner can come, and I don't know how your city works, if they could apply directly to do a plan amendment or if they would have to solicit the Planning Commission to open up a plan amendment, but essentially you can always amend your plan in the future. It puts people at ease to write something into the code because they see it there, but the fact is is that you always can amend your plan going forward.

and your code going forward. I'm going to go to Councillor Chenoweth and then Councillor Tucholsky.

I'm not going to give you an opinion, but I am going to ask a question. One of the concerns I have... in all of this, first off, I'm grateful that we're protecting our streams. That is important to me, so I don't want any question that I ask to be misunderstood as something different than that. But one of the concerns that I have is that if the process is so expensive for the property owner to try to address a concern, that it becomes prohibitive for them to address it, that the unintended consequences of that is problematic. I hope you're following where I'm going with this. And so one of the questions I have is what is the actual cost to our property owners if they come and ask for a variance in any of these boxes that I'm looking at?

So, Councilor Chenoweth, The cost would depend on what the fee structure is for your city, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I have the fee schedule with me. So the cost for a variance would be $3,830 to apply for the economic hardship variance.

And does that include any documentation they have to go out and solicit from some third party expert to provide with that variance request?

It does not include that. So that's our application fee. We did reduce the standard of what's required as part of the economic hardship variance to try and reduce any sort of cost to the property owner to go through that process. Now that's to say I have no economic value left on my property. and I can't do anything with it, and so I'd like to be removed entirely, I think that's a harder threshold to achieve than if a property owner did an easy analysis.

Yeah, I'm talking more if you've got something growing on the property and we're requiring them to come before us and get permission to remove that thing, you know, or you've got something, you know, they got a property split by one of our tributaries and they are trying to work both sides of that property and they need to do something in order to facilitate that across the riverbed. How much are they gonna have to spend to get the variance to do those things.

That's your table 120. So table 120 will walk you through what you can and cannot do on your property and what's required for it. That's different than the economic hardship variance because you're really talking about sort of maintenance and management at this point in time. Correct. So routine maintenance, you can do whatever you want. And you're not even coming to us, you're just doing it. If you are doing anything that's going to change the area of the riparian corridor, so the baseline of the ground and what's in the riparian corridor and what it looks like, then there is a review process for that. And it could be a director's approval, which is the cheapest way to do it without public notice. It could be a director's approval with public notice, which is the next standard. And then it could be, I think it's only those two actually.

What's the cost? Dollars, real dollars.

Costs are.

I sort of hate asking this question, right? Because what's the price of the stream? But I still want to know because the unintended consequences concern me.

Yeah. So if somebody presumably wanted to make their pedestrian bridge that's going over the creek a little bit bigger. and it changed the repairing area, and that was a director's notice, director with notice, that would be what we call type two, that would be $2,258. If it's a type one, and that's why this table is so critical, if it's a type one, which is just a planning director approval, that's $650.

Okay, thank you very much.

May I chime in additionally here? I like your example of putting a bridge over a creek, because if that solves the property owner's issues, great. The safe harbor protections actually allow driveways, streets, and paths to cross the riparian area. If it was something different, putting larger buildings on where the stream was just in the way, that would be backed for the city side would be a plan amendment, but in addition to that, these streams as noted in the letter that you got from the joint letter from Department of Fish and Wildlife and Department of State Lands, that's a state regulated stream. And so the cost of dealing with the state permitting requirements for filling or moving the stream Would be quite large and that's independent of what the local code would have to say about the stream.

yeah and to be clear, my concern is not so much about future development when i'm asking this particular question as it is about already developed current property holders, so if you if you look at point one to the table.

And you look at section B. So section B right now says permitted uses with mitigation, planning director approval with public notice. So that is type two permit, which is $2,258. This is an allowed use per the safe harbor, but we decided that this needed to be a public notice of surrounding property owners that they were going to do this work. This is where you have opportunities to move things around. In that you see seven, which says bridges, boards, walks, trails of previous construction. So a mitigation plan is required. It's a planning director approval with public notice. That's 2,258. You could move that and just say, you know what? I don't think that the neighboring property owners need to know that stuff and move it to the one above it, A, and that's $650.

Do we have any idea what a mitigation plan costs?

No, but the mitigation plan, if you look at, so what's required in the mitigation plan, just like our hazard work, it starts off at the... the minimum level of information to be able to make a decision, and then it grows from there if any sort of red flags come up. So it's hard to say what the final outcome would be. I guess it's scale to the amount of impact, if you want to think of it that way.

Councillor Tarkolsky.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor. Sorry, got a bunch of notes here. So first of all, I guess I'm a bit with Councilor Chenoweth on this one. I'll just read my note. I think it's the idea to have the EC review requested by a homeowner is, I assume, rather costly. Most property owners would not be able to afford this, and at that point, you don't have equity. You only have those who can pay to play, which is very few in some areas. And the $4,000 minimum, Plus whatever discovery is needed to collect at their expense doesn't seem like a reasonable cost to an individual homeowner. That part of it concerns me specifically. And, Councilor Benner, you brought up the fact that we have good data. I respectfully fundamentally disagree with you on that one. I've been an opponent of this data since 2023 when it was first brought to the Planning Commission when I was on there. This information that we're using for this specific riparian corridor was never intended to be used for this overlay of a policy. It was set up for the natural hazards, talking about landslides, fires, other things that are possibly impacting the entire city, not just a riparian corridor. So I don't believe in the data itself because it wasn't collected for this, but it also is at a scale that is unreasonable to apply to specific parcels. I have people in my ward, and I know people around this city where they have two or three natural areas that are intersecting their specific parcel, and at that point, the entire overlay applies to their entire parcel, which at the resolution that has been provided doesn't seem reasonable. If the resolution was better, I could believe in that, but I don't, go ahead.

I was just going to say, Councillor, I think you might be conflating two different data sources. So the data set for the natural hazards work is very different than the data set that was used for this work in terms of the repairing corridor. So there are two different data sets that are being used. Now, on David's property, that's the property of concern. He does have the managed development area as well as a repairing corridor. He has both of those areas. pieces sitting on his property. But the repairing quarter data set is a different data set altogether.

Okay, I'll go with that. I'll let that one lie. Could you go back to your slide that's a number of ways back? You're asking how should we move forward? It was like the third slide, I believe. I didn't have a number out on the time. I had a question on one of your bullet points. It talks about, there's a goal five. I think it's like bullet point number three. I don't believe that was it. No.

How do we move forward? Is it the one that has the goal five at the top?

Yeah, there's a goal five. There wasn't a slide number. I don't know which one it was. That's not it. No, basically there's a goal in there that says, you're talking about the proposal of how to move forward, and the bullet point itself states that one of the options is to not provide any protection at all. That's the one I'm looking for.

Oh, so that's the easy analysis. So from the easy analysis, and I don't know if you can just make that decision as a council, and that might be your question, The easy analysis describes how you can approach a property and you can say we're gonna do full protection, we're gonna do limited protection or no protection and that's weighing out the consequences. Is your question can the city council make the decision, we've done the work for goal five, we're in periodic review, you asked us to do this work, we did the work and now we're gonna make the decision that we don't want any protection of these resources.

Well, I'd actually argue that your bullet point is fundamentally misleading because it's not like we don't have protection of a significant amount of these corridors already.

Yeah, in the floodplain zone.

Yeah, they're in the floodplain zone, they are. I actually have some of that on my property. However, it's not necessarily covering the entirety of the riparian zone. I will agree with that. But the floodplain itself does cover the majority of the riparian zones. It doesn't cover the totality of them, though. So I don't want... That bullet point itself saying that we have no protection of these areas, I believe is misleading, not intentionally, but it could cause a choice to be made that otherwise wouldn't be made if we don't believe that we have any protection at all.

Yeah, and I think we have protection and I think I have that in this presentation. We asked the question of the state agencies, can we use our floodplain zones as our protection for the bulk of our riparian corridors The letter that you got back from ODFW and DSL is that the floodplain zone is not a finding for that.

Yeah, I understand that. And then reading at the fundamental level of Section 5 of the OAR, it says a local government may determine the boundaries of significant riparian corridors. It doesn't say shall, and that's in Section 5, right in the first area. So if it's not a shall or a... It seems as though it could be optional to this case, so if you're asking how should we move forward, I'm asking that these riparian items be moved out of this decision. I do believe that the trees and the other areas need fundamental protection. I'd like to move forward with all of that. But I'd ask that this one gets addressed specifically, because I think if you overlay an entire policy on an entire city, when the riparian areas, I don't know the percentage, but probably less than 10% or maybe even 5% of the area. It seems like we're bringing a policy into effect for 100% when it's only 5% of the city.

So is your question, just so I can make sure, getting back to my original thought, which was, is your question, the city's question, getting back to my original thought, which was, is your question, The city's going to decide it's not moving forward with the repairing quarter program as presented. We're comfortable with the floodplain zones protecting the majority of our repairing quarters.

That's what I'm saying right now, because I think if we focus our attention greater on the specificity of this riparian area, we could probably do a better job overall, rather than just applying a blanket policy, which doesn't probably meet the needs of anybody, but applies to everyone.

Councilor Tuchelski. I just want to focus on the may part of the rule that you were bringing up. And that's because that part of the rule goes alongside the other option, which is the safe, the standard approach to an inventory. So it's not saying if you are applying a goal five that you may or may not pick a boundary for your repairing area. It's just you do it one way or the other. So that's why the may is in section five, because you may use that way or you may use the other way.

Okay, it's still a choice.

Yeah, and gosh, things get a little complicated, but I want to say that I'm not encouraging the city to go start from scratch, because I think you've done a lot of really good work so far here, and that some of the issues, you can figure out a way to address them, even if it's the city choosing to support somehow an ESCE analysis for that one property so the property owner doesn't bear the entire cost of it. But the rule, when you read through it, you'll see Actually, it's not this rule. It's when you get to the rule that talks about how to do an EC analysis. The very first question is, are there conflicting uses allowed in the resource? And so if you look at your riparian area and much of it is covered by floodplain with this city where you can't develop, which is different than most cities, that's good that you have that protection. And you come to a conclusion there's no conflicting uses allowed, you're done. You don't even have to get to the EC analysis. So the logic is built into the process, but that's when you're going through the standard process and you have to essentially start from scratch again on that.

Okay.

So Heather, to answer your question that you have on your slide here, how should we move forward? I believe the riparian should be removed from this specific discussion and taken up on its own so that we can be specific with it and intentional. I don't want to see us do our own inventory. I think that using this other stuff is probably the way to go if everyone else is using it. Whether I like it or not, I agree with it. It's rather expensive to do otherwise. I don't wanna keep the program as is, so.

So just so I can clarify from my own understanding, when you say that we should set it, do it, set it aside, pull it out, and do it as its own component. That's what we're doing now. We've already pulled it out as its own component. So what you have in front of you is its own component by itself. What would that look like in terms of a process moving forward?

To me, I don't believe, so the Planning Commission's gone through this significantly, which is a good thing. The City Council's rather coming in, I will say warm, not cold, and it doesn't feel as though we, if we're going to be making this decision as a body, have had enough chance to, have had enough time to actually fundamentally and intentionally make this what we want it to be so that it applies the way we wish rather than just the way it happened to policy overlay everywhere. So I don't believe that we've had enough time to do that analysis. That's how I feel, that's my opinion.

Oh, okay, so to you it'd be doing more work sessions on repairing corridors.

Specifically on the repairing corridor.

And moving the other stuff forward.

Yeah, that way we can be intentional.

Councilor Peralta.

Thank you. This question is for the lady from DLCD, I'm sorry, I forgot your name. Amanda Punten. Amanda, thank you. Okay, so with regard to the, Table 1747-120, the activities in riparian corridors. It seems to me that this is very much complimentary to something that you might see to a floodplain because most of these activities are prohibited in floodplains, aren't they? In our floodplain zone. Right, but I mean building bridges, putting in pumps, local streets, drainage facilities, utilities, water-related, some water-related uses. I mean, it seems like a lot of these are not things that actually are things that we can do in the floodplain, isn't that true?

Yes.

Okay, and Councilor Tokolsky said that nearly all of the riparian areas in the city are in a floodplain, is that true?

I can show you the map. I don't know what the percentages are, but everything that's in a red box is not.

Okay, so that's fairly significant. So my question for DLCD is, you've kind of explained what other cities do. Do you have recommendations for cities as far as best practices in terms of how we deal with this? And then the approach that staff has been moving forward with, To what extent does it align with those best practices and to what extent and where might it be at variance?

Councillor Peralta. Thanks for the question. I guess I would say that the safe harbor, protection measures, at any rate, were developed as, you know, through a statewide conversation about best practices for protecting riparian areas. The rule was written in 1996 and the, I'll say, fairly narrow protected riparian corridors come into play when you Think about Oregon's approach to urban development and you have dense urban development within urban growth boundaries and presumably you have your natural resources handled much better outside of urban growth boundaries. I think since 1996 and in other places where they don't have Oregon land use planning rules and urban growth boundaries, Probably best practice is wider urban, wider riparian areas. But I don't know. I think what's most pertinent here, again, is the protection measures and the safe harbor protection measures are quite fair, I think. So I would say those are best practices for protecting riparian areas.

Okay. Thank you. And I have questions about the permitting costs. Heather, could you repeat what they were? 700?

I'm going to repeat them as per that 120 table is set up, right? So the type 1 permit, which is a planning director approval, is $653. A type 2 permit, which is a planning director approval with public notice, so we've now noticed all the property owners around, is $653. you're doing that because it's presumably a more complex application is $2,258. A planning commission decision, and that's where you have the economic hardship variance that falls under planning commission decision, that's $3,722. So I'm a little confused because the table that you refer me to is 1747-120.

And at least on what I have, I don't see which of these are type one, type two, or type three?

Yeah, it's not written that way because in McMinnville, we don't talk about type ones, twos, and threes. We talk about planning director approval without public notice, planning director approval with public notice. That's how our code is.

Can you give me an example of a $4,000 permit, a $3,000 permit, and a $700 permit in terms of what they might apply to?

Yeah, so... Short-term rental, I believe, comes in under the Type 2 permit because we notify surrounding property owners. A Type 1 permit is a property line adjustment. We don't notify surrounding property owners about that. And you think of it this way. If there's no impact to an adjacent property owner, they don't really need to know about it, so we're not noticing them. If there is potential impact, what you're doing on your property to your neighbor, then we do let them know about it at the public notice.

Okay, so you said short-term rental is a type two permit.

I'll have to look that up because that's a little different here in McMinnville, the way we've addressed that. But let me look that up. And I can send you, I actually, we have a policy sheet we put together as to what applications fall under the different types one, two, three, and four. I can send that out.

So is it the... The use type?

Yeah, it's how it impacts. So staff can make decisions by themselves if the criteria is clear and objective and it's a checklist. Did you provide this, this, and this? Does it meet this, this, and this? Yes, yes, yes. Approved. So that's the $650. Not a lot of work goes into it. It's very simple to do.

Wait, stop there. What kinds in a riparian corridor, apropos of this list, what would be an example that would fit that category?

Determination of repairing setback boundaries. Okay.

And that's a $700 planning commission.

Okay. $700 staff. Yeah. Okay.

And that's everything under a. Yeah.

Thank you. Okay. Okay. Then under B and, and, Just to clarify, staff did not come up with this table. This is a table that was decided by decision-making bodies that have changed over the last five years, but by direction from City Council and Planning Commission in the eight work sessions that we've done with those bodies over the last four to five years. You have the opportunity as the decision-making body where this has landed to to change that because as Amanda pointed out to me after she reviewed this, you don't need to separate what's an allowed use into the two different sections of planning director approval or planning and director approval with notice. It's allowed, you just review it and then you move on. You also don't need to require a mitigation plan if you don't want to. It was a decision was made at one point in time through this process that the city should review how the impact to the riparian area is mitigated. But the safe harbor does not require that.

Is that right? So this is beyond what I was trying to get at. But Chris, I think, got this back to it. So if you're wanting to put in a local street driveway serving a residence or public facility in the riparian corridor, that's a $3,000 something permit?

Yes.

OK. And if it's a drainage facility, $3,000 something permit. Utilities, $3,000 something. Bridges, same thing, right? And you need a mitigation plan. Currently, yeah. I mean, from my perspective, I guess, I think that I agree with Carson. I don't think that's particularly onerous for putting for what they're considering with the usage. $700 for a lot line adjustment, $3,000 for planning the mitigation of the riparian corridor, at least on the city's end. I feel like that's fairly in line with what the costs and time spent for staff might be. And that's how we, That's how we base our fee structure, right?

And that would be based on us reviewing it, right? And that's new. So if you have an existing driveway, you're maintaining that to your heart's content.

It's just if you want to put something in in the riparian corridor. At this point, it's not in the floodplain because you can't put a driveway there anyway. Right. Okay. Thanks for that. That really kind of helps me understand. how this will be applied in the real world in the city. And I really appreciate the work that you all have done. It seems like a very complicated set of policies and certainly grateful for DLCD lending their expertise as well.

Commissioner Mudrick.

As I'm looking at this map, I'm thinking a lot of what's included that extends to these preparing quarter overlays. The extensions from our floodplains that are being suggested by the safe harbor are in areas that are. You know already developed in a lot of cases. I know a lot of the conversations that are going on with the Southwest area expansion are taking this into account as it is, so I think when we are considering using. our very precious city resources to consider an extra 300 hours of staff work as well as you know $90,000 as it just a rough estimate and that was for I think five years in the past. Director Richards had said for the city conducting its own inventory and of course if we parse it out into smaller areas that could be less but I'm assuming if we did it overall that would be more and as we see you know our CDC getting you know, losing funding over time. I think we have to be really smart and not put more work onto a dwindling program that does so much, so much for us infrastructurally. So I, you know, would just like to, I guess at this point, third, Councilor Benner's comments, I think it's great as it is. I think, I think in terms of the various mitigation plans, I think I would like, more information in terms of if it's not required, for example, for a lot of things in section A of that table, what would be a benefit or what's the big impact then for number five as that being that highlighted one? I would elect for a mitigation plan, but I guess also if somebody's in their riparian corridor cleaning out non-native vegetation, they're probably doing it in a good direction and hoping to do some restoration. So I don't know. I guess I don't understand the extent of what a mitigation plan is and if that would be too onerous.

Councilor Peralta?

Oh, wait. I guess that's a question if there's an answer for it. Yeah.

You can go ahead. I'm looking for words in the code.

Thank you, I'm being directed. I mean, the criteria could be written so that a layperson could count the number of trees that they were going to replant and the number of shrubs they were going to replant. If your code said that you needed a stream biologist, wetland ecologist, something like that to do it, then it would all depend on how many hours it would take for that person to do it, and that would be the cost.

Yeah, thank you. As Commissioner Everest pointed out, the requirements for mitigation plan are at 17.47.140E. It does not require that expertise. It just talks about replacement on a one-to-one basis.

So, cool. To track back to your other question, and I know I kind of lumped a couple of my answers in terms of how do we proceed together, but I would say for... I would say, sorry, back to that table. I think it was number five. Yeah, five. I would advocate for a requirement of a mitigation plan. I think in a lot of cases, if somebody's doing this work too, that's even a little bit of fun and could be inspiration.

And just to make sure, the state law or the administrative rule requires that if the 75 foot setback of the South Yamhill River, that's the waterway in McMinnville that will have that, if the property owner wants that to reduce by 50% to 37 and a half feet, the state administrative rule requires a mitigation plan. That is a requirement, but that's the only thing that requires one.

Is that right? The rule says that they need to provide equal or better protection, which kind of lends itself to having some kind of mitigation plan. It doesn't use the word mitigation plan in the rule.

Councillor Benner.

Thank you, Mayor. When I have other councilors agreeing with me, I want to point that out. Thank you. But more importantly, what I'm suggesting is that let's use the existing data and where we have differences, let's adjust in table 120. And so I'm not suggesting that the table is a perfect match for everybody on the council, but rather than starting with new data, let's use the data we have and adjust.

So that kind of leads into, so Safe Harbor is going to cover a lot of it and cover our floodplain? Oh, sorry.

Can I ask one more question?

I thought you were done.

And then the second question, I went online and looked at the interactive map where you can get down to a lot more detail. Heather, is there any way we could pull that up? Because I think looking at a specific property and sort of talking through that might be helpful.

Are you talking about the natural hazard map or the natural resources map?

The natural resources map under goal five.

Okay. Okay.

adjacent to Darcy Court, there's a number of houses that appear to be sort of in the floodplain and very adjacent to the repairing zone, and just trying to get my head around what does that mean for those property owners.

Is it possible, Claudia, to allow Councilor Benner to share his screen, since you already have it loaded up?

I need some assistance.

Yeah, I think I mean, they'll figure that out. No making fun of how many tabs I have open.

And for a time check, Mayor, you also have the significant landmark trees to get through tonight. And maybe if the decision is that we need to work the table, as the city council that we do that in a separate work session.

I was hoping we could get to some answers for you.

While we're waiting, can you tell me, Heather? Heather?

Councilor Chenoweth?

Sorry, Mayor. I apologize, I should ask. I'm looking at... Table 120. A5 versus B2, which you have so diligently highlighted in yellow. Am I understanding that the difference between those two is native versus non-native?

It's both. So like Councilor Peralta just described as well as

Because then you're having two different qualifications for the same procedure.

Well, one is removing non-native.

The other one is native. Okay, that's right. One is non-native. Okay, perfect. Thank you.

And I think B2 is written wrong. I think the intention is that you can actually go within 10 feet of the top of banker edge there as well. So A5 is you stay, you just go to the 10 feet edge. you go over it, the remaining 10 feet. But again, that's all policy you guys can discuss.

Councilor Benner, what did you wanna show us here?

So on this map, these houses that are adjacent to Darcy Drive. Yes. you know, they're in the floodplain, according to this map, and they're very adjacent to, or their property is within the riparian zone. How is this going to affect them? Because I suspect this flood map changed after they built.

So in McMinnville, the most strict ordinance applies. So the floodplain zone is stricter than the riparian corridor overlay zone.

Meaning what can they do on their property?

Meaning if your property's in the floodplain zone, that is sort of the minimum that you can do or the maximum that you can do if you want to think of it that way. So we would look at what's allowed in the floodplain zone, which is very little at this point in time. They're grandfathered in as is, but...

I guess, what effect would the goal five riparian zone have on these property owners? When I think of a riparian zone, I think of Cozine Creek, where it's sort of an obvious riparian zone. This doesn't seem as clear cut, and it seems like they may be mowing their lawn in a riparian zone. And not- Which is allowed.

That's allowed. So the repairing quarter for these properties is really kind of a mute point because they're underlined, the floodplain zone is a more restrictive zone than the repairing corridor as proposed is.

Does that make, that's not a clear answer. If there's a tree in the backyard that you don't like, you can cut it down regardless of, because the floodplain doesn't protect the resources.

No, it does. So it's actually a stricter risk, more strict protection because of the endangered species act lawsuit that was against FEMA in Oregon.

Thank you.

Yes, Commissioner Byrne.

So Heather, I'm hearing that early on you said that the reason why we would not look to the current data set and potentially do our own is because we don't have a way to remove a certain property from the riparian zone. Is that the only reason why we would want to use our own is to allow for somebody to get out of the riparian zone?

I was asking the question and I didn't know the answer. So I'm glad Amanda talked about it. Can you, amend your inventory if you're relying on the safe harbor and it sounds like yes you can you can pick and choose where you want to apply the safe harbor in the city and For those places where you're not applying the safe harbor you're doing an easy analysis and since that doesn't have to be in the code we can use that at any point in the future right for an individual property and Well, there would be two things. So if this gets adopted, it's in the comprehensive plan. So that's a comp plan amendment, which is expensive. And so I would say if there's interest in addressing an individual property owner, we'll just put it on the table. This is all about an individual property owner. If there's interest in addressing the individual property owner, we would do it now so that we don't go through the comp plan map amendment.

Councilor Everest, I just want to make a distinction again between the inventory, which would be in your comp plan, and the protection approach, which might be policies and described in your comp plan, but that shows up in your code. And it's the protection measures that, if you use the standard approach, are informed by an EC analysis. The EC analysis has nothing to do with the inventory. It comes after the inventory.

and then as far as the table goes I think the distinction for me on why we didn't have a mitigation plan for the removal of non-native plants was because it was non-native and we want those removed and the having the mitigation plan on the removal of other plants native plants presumably to be replaced with native plants would require that mitigation plan right thank you

So I just want to clarify, so if we do safe harbor, we can't take anything, so we can't say safe harbor in floodplain areas or undeveloped property and everything else would not be in this plan? We could look at the EZ program or not? I'm just trying to simplify the easiest way to deal with what we need.

So Mayor Morris, so the question is, is your question about the inventory or is your question about the protection measures that would apply to inventoried areas?

I guess whether this property would be part of the inventory that's protected.

We have a property owner who doesn't want to be part of the program at all. So that's what we're talking about. Right.

I think you would have to address, if you're applying Goal 5 in the city for repairing areas, you would have to inventory that area. And I'm going to use inventory in two different ways. Inventory is a verb. Like, look, figure out what's there, whether it's significant, whether it's not significant. And if the city decided not to apply the safe harbor there, then the city could do the standard inventory and you'd look at things like existing vegetation and just other qualities of the stream and the riparian area and then identify either maybe possibly different width, maybe say it's not significant at all, but you'd have to do that based on ecological principles of the stream and then make reasonable findings for how you inventoried that or not.

I think what Amanda is suggesting is if the property owner is concerned about not being able to do something that they really want to do in the future, that's the management standard. So that's where the easy analysis. So you keep it in the inventory. You do the easy analysis to identify conflicting uses. I want to widen my bridge and I'm not able to do that per this code, though you can make it allowed per this code. Well, it is allowed per this code, actually. Stop there. But you have to go through this permitting process. You can decide as city council, we're gonna reduce the permit down to the A section of the table to make the bridge wider. Or you can decide as city council that there's no permit required at all. We're gonna go through the easy analysis that the property owner provides or the city does for that property, takes that bridge off the table altogether. It's not even permitted. It goes through a process.

I personally would like to simplify it. I mean, we want to protect our riparian corridors, but I think we also, we don't have these in place right now, except for in the floodplains and people are taking care of them for the most part. And I want to make it manageable for our citizens to take care of their property, especially those that already own property that is going to be affected by policies that we make. but I think there's a lot here still to uncover, Heather, just to go through these questions, not necessarily to change what you did, but to go through them and get some direction.

Mayor Morris, may I offer a thought that I definitely appreciate looking at the aerial photos and where trees still exist along your riparian areas. That's great. There are more pressures for developing particularly housing in urban areas and those pressures can influence how someone or maybe a future property owner decides to treat their riparian areas. So it still might be a good idea to get some protections in place even if there's been good stewardship up to now just so you know that good stewardship will continue into the future.

Yes, Commissioner Bedrock.

I just, yeah, I wanted to kind of echo back to some of Director Richards' comments at the beginning of our meeting that have stuck with me and are certainly brought, were brought back to mind by Amanda's comments just a second ago is, you know, was that 75% cut, significant loss, 75% cut of significant tree groves. So I think we don't, get that back, I think if we're having all these conversations at the behest of a couple, of a landowner, I just, it makes me concerned about the benefit to the larger community. 75%, I mean, yeah, the whole homes area, I know that broke a lot of hearts across McMinnville. And again, I think, It's important to remember that this is a lot for future development, but not for maintenance or for existing development. So that's my piece, I guess.

Mayor.

Councilor Tchaikovsky.

Yeah, thank you. Commissioner Modric, we fundamentally disagree on a lot of things, but I believe that you just made my point here. We're digging in on a singular thing that we're talking about that we're literally progressing nowhere tonight. I don't know what kind of progress we've made. We haven't answered the questions that you've asked us, and we've done nothing to make anything safer, right? Tomorrow, everyone could go cut down all the Oregon white oak they want, and we've done nothing tonight except talk about verbs versus nouns. That's why I'm saying let's take this riparian thing out, let's do it correctly, and if you wanna actually protect the trees, which we all do, then pass that stuff through first, move it forward. That's the easy one. Why would we just not do that? Otherwise, yeah, but who's to stop anybody from taking out a bunch of trees tomorrow? Nobody, while we argue about words. Yeah, I just wanna see some progress on the trees. There you go. We can deal with this. The trees are actually the ones that are threatened. Those are the ones that are being cut down. And the streams right now, they are less impacted because we may not see it as much. However, I'm sure there's impact, but I'm talking about a real threat of the trees otherwise. Thank you.

Oh, I didn't see his hand, thank you. Mr. Jones.

Yes, I too want to protect the trees. I know we did a lot of work kind of working on that. To me, the riparian quarters seem a little bit more simpler. The state is mandating that we protect them, and they're giving us two options. Safe harbor, or we pay the $90,000 to do our own inventory. And there's another way where landowners can kind of exempt themselves if they need to spend the money and do so. And any existing... structures can be maintained. I just think we should do the safe harbor because I think it makes the most sense from protection and from finances and it's within the mandate that we're given.

Thank you. Councillor Chenoweth.

Yeah, I just want to make a couple of clarifying comments. One, when the trees were taken down by Holt Homes, that was done in violation of our code. So, you know, the code didn't stop them from doing what they did. Just make that point clear. Second, I believe we've already passed the grove protection. Am I wrong on that, or we're partly, mostly through that process?

We have not passed it.

Oh, okay. I thought we were pretty much done with the Groves. That one was the easy one, because I think we all are in agreement on the Groves. All right, well, with that, I will be quiet.

So maybe we can answer one thing, whether it's safe harbor or not. That'd be great. Okay. I'm gonna start over here, but thank you, Councilor Gary. Councilor Chenoweth.

Yeah, I gotta go back to being a fiscal conservative. Spending the money for a list when we do have a way to get individual property owners that have some concerns addressed doesn't seem to make sense to me from a fiscal conservative perspective. So I'm gonna have to go with yes, Safe Harbor. Safe Harbor.

Safe Harbor.

Yeah, I also wanted to thank Commissioner Jones for breaking it down as straightforward as he did for everybody, so also in agreement.

Yes. I'm going to agree to Safe Harbor due to cost, but I do want to make sure that there is an option for current property owners to do an easy approach to deal with their issues. Councillor Geary.

Safe Harbor.

Councillor Tarkovsky.

Yeah, I echo your comment there.

Safe Harbor.

Safe Harbor. Safe Harbor.

Safe Harbor. Safe Harbor.

Okay, well, we answered one question for you. And we'll schedule a work session to go through the table. It sounds like we still need work on that. To get to the tree grove, just so I can get some direction from you, you did get a letter from one of the property owners who that property is transitioning into trusts, and so the property The current property owner is elderly and did not respond to our request for public engagement over the last many years. Her kids are now engaged and they are, you know, looked at it at the last minute. They recognize it's the 11th hour. I just wanted to say that and we've worked through all that. With that said, they submitted a letter to city council to request a public hearing. We had brought it to you. We told you your options. We were asked to bring it back in ordinance with just the tree grove and not the other parts of the natural resources planning so you could move that forward. And then you got the letter from that property owner. We have been working with that property owner's team, legal counsel and planning consultants, to work through some of the clarifications that they felt that the code needed. I agreed with them. They were just clarifications on what a property owner would need to do to go through the process. I thought they had great recommendations for that. They have already cut down 75% of the trees that were in the grove. This is a picture of a new map. They flew a drone over it recently. And before we move forward with the map for the tree groves, they wanted us to represent what the new grove would be on that map. It's gone from 34 acres to 10 acres. The canopy has been reduced by 50%. So if you're comfortable, we will bring that back to you in a public hearing process with a revised map for this particular tree grove. to move that forward. They have said that they'll, they're going to review the amendments that I put together and they'll let you know in writing whether they still want a public hearing or not, which is your decision to make.

And if I can ask everybody to look at the details that Heather provided in this packet in more detail before we meet again so that maybe we can make some decisions more swiftly, that would be great. Mr. Chenoweth, I can see you have a question.

Are you asking for us to give us our thoughts on what you just said? And A and B, are you asking both bodies or just the council?

Just to counsel at this point, because that was your, I believe your direction was to bring back an ordinance with the Tree Groves code and program in it. And then when this letter went out, I got several phone calls from counselors asking, should we have a public hearing? So I just wanted to let you know, we're prepared to move forward with the Tree Grove as a standalone product and bring it to you as an ordinance.

So then your question to us, are we willing to accept this changed Tree Grove designation from what it was before for this area?

We'll have to do it. The trees are gone.

Okay. So what are you asking?

She's just letting you know more than anything.

Thank you.

I'm not asking for your opinion tonight. Anything else? Okay. I'm going to adjourn at seven o'clock.

Thank you.

And we're gonna take a few minutes to get readjusted here before we start our council meeting.

Recording stopped.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Recording in progress.

Councilors, can I have you back up to the dais?

Okay, we'll give them a minute.

AND HE'S NOT OUTSIDE? IS HE OUTSIDE? NO?

I DON'T KNOW.

I DIDN'T THINK SO. I'M GOING TO GO AHEAD AND START. Okay, it's 7.08 and we are going to start our city council meeting. If I can get everybody's attention. Great, thank you. Claudia, roll call.

Councillor Cunningham. Here. Councillor Tucholsky.

Second.

Councillor Chenoweth.

Here.

Councillor Bundner. Here. Councillor Geary.

Good evening.

Councillor President Peralta.

Here.

Mayor Morris.

Here.

If you're able to stand, please stand and join me in the pledge. All right, and now it's time for comments from our community members. Any interested audience members are invited to provide comments, and any comment provided that requires some type of follow-up will be assigned to a staff member. Anyone may speak on any topic other than a matter in litigation, a land use decision that is or will be in front of the city council, or a matter scheduled for public hearing at a future date. Comments will be limited to four minutes per person for a total of 32 minutes. If you are on Zoom and wish to speak, please use the raise your hand feature or chat feature and send a chat to the city recorder team. You will need to provide your contact information prior to being promoted to speak. Once your turn is up, we will announce your name and unmute your mic. So please announce your name if you come up to speak tonight in the city you live in for the record. And Claudia, do we have anybody signed up? Yes, first we'll start with Richard Allen. Mr. Allen, come on up and sit here. And make sure that the light is green. Sometimes it's red, but if it's green, great. And then just pull it pretty close to you and announce your name. Okay, so pull it closer to you. There you go, and announce your name and the city you live in. Green, it's still red? Oh, push it, and it'll turn green.

Oh, there we go.

There you go.

Okay, my name is Richard Allen. I live in McMinnville. I live on First Street, right over about a block from the monstrosity that's going in to the Methodist place. And I'm here to talk about I understand this is not a big deal for a lot of people, but for me it is. I wanna talk about parking. In my block, we have three houses. And if you go around the corner, there's two more houses. Within those six houses, there are two off street parking spots. And so we have been relying in my case for the last 18 years of parking on the street in front of my house. Now, usually I can do that, but these days, now that we have, now that the farmers market has migrated down to my end of the block or whatever, on Thursdays, I can't find a place to park within two blocks of my house a lot of times. And I worry that once that thing gets built, with the somewhere between 75 and 100 cars that are going to be attached to it, I won't ever be able to find a place to park. My wife is semi-disabled, and for me to have to park three blocks away or two blocks away because there is no place to park is unacceptable, not after paying taxes for 18 years. So my thought is, or my suggestion would be, that for those of us who don't have off street parking, that you put together a permit system where we can park in front of our houses only if you have, or you can park in front of our houses only if you have a permit. And those permits would be limited to the people who actually live there. I mean, right now, the house next to me usually has four helicopter pilots in training in it, and they have no parking spots. I have no parking spots, and I just have my one car. My neighbor has three cars, and she has one parking spot. And going around the corner, same thing. To me, it's an issue. You know, certainly it would severely disrupt my ability to live in my house if something doesn't change. Anyway, that's my comment. I know you guys were kind of under the gun when it came to doing this, but I would hope that you can now at least make that right for those of us who live in the surrounding area and who are going to be severely disadvantaged by what you guys had to do.

Thanks. Thank you, appreciate you coming up. Thank you.

Claudia, do we have anybody else? Yes, next we have David Koch.

Mr. Koch.

Good evening. So I want to clarify something because what I want to speak about, I think will be in a legislative public hearing later, not a quasi judicial one. And I just want to make sure that it's going to be okay for me to talk to you for a couple minutes. David, you? I think that's the purpose of that admonition is you don't want an ex parte contact here at the council if there's gonna be a quasi-judicial. That's exactly right.

That's what land use is referring to in that admonition.

Okay.

Thank you.

Great, thank you. Okay, so what I wanna talk to you about is something that you were just talking about, riparian corridors. I am that mystery property owner that everybody was talking about. I had reached out to Councilor Benner and Cunningham, hoping to speak with them before your work session this evening. We did not have the opportunity to connect. but I did connect with a few of you. I think you were presented and it was kind of subtle, but I think you were presented with a middle path in what you heard from the representative from DLCE. And that was that you could designate 90 to 95% of those streams within the city as being safe harbor and pull out just the one or two reaches that are maybe running through developed properties that have much lower value and do your own inventory on those. And it would not be anywhere near that scary $90,000 figure that was thrown up on the PowerPoint presentation. That would allow you to actually identify whether there is any value, ecological value, in what is basically a glorified drainage ditch that runs through my property that drains Highway 99, that drains the parking lots of Safeway and HomeGoods, that drains the impervious surfaces around the creamery where we've seen milk solids come down the creek a couple times a year until the fire And then we got all that stuff down our creek. But when it starts raining this time of year, we just get a lot of subsides. The only things I fished out of that creek are clothing and basketballs and office chairs and printer copier combos. That's what I'm doing down on that creek that runs through my property. Because upstream, it's a garbage dump. And nothing you do with these regulations affect any of that. The goal five inventory, if you even do your own inventory, it's not gonna look at dissolved oxygen. It's not gonna look at turbidity. It's not gonna look at the pH levels in those creeks. It's not gonna look at any of the real characteristics that fish need to survive. And I guarantee you, fish do not survive in that creek. We've lived on that property since 2019. It is not a fish bearing stream. It's designated a fish-bearing stream because an ODF&W biologist named Gary Galovich in the mid-90s sat behind a desk, looked at some maps, and said, I think that might be a fish-bearing stream. Now, I don't want to diminish Gary's credentials, okay? But I also have a master's degree in environmental studies. I've done coursework on hydrology. I've done coursework in environmental impact statements. I've worked for a federal agency where I advised on federal environmental impact statements. I've represented local governments in Oregon for nearly 25 years. I specialize in land use and real estate and economic development. So I would like you to think about what looks good on paper this always matched with what's actually happening on the ground. And while everybody voted unanimously for safe harbor, because it does sound like the better choice, it's not the one that actually has, I think, credibility, particularly in this case, when you actually drill down into the data and figure out where the data came from, where it was sourced from, and what the basis was for it. So if the city really cares about the quality, the water quality of that stream, and reintroducing salmon into McMinnville, it's gonna have to do a lot more on its own to capture and treat its stormwater, because that's what feeds this creek that runs through my property, that runs under Jay's Landing, that runs under 27th Avenue and Highway 99, past the HomeGoods and the apartment complex into Wortman Park, where all those storm systems drain into. That's what I want to leave you with to maybe give you one other point of view on safe harbor. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Cash. That's everyone that signed up and nobody on the phone or zoom. Okay. Is there anybody else that didn't sign up that wanted to speak? Okay. Thank you. All right, and now next we have a presentation. I'd like to call on Judge Arnold Poole to present the topic of municipal court. You got a name plate.

Oh, hi, everybody. Hello. For some of you newer folks, I agreed... Actually, it was a mutual decision between me and the council when I was first hired to come in once a year and kind of tell you how things are going. I'm glad I did. It's a good feedback both ways, I think. So just to give you kind of the bird's eye view of what we do, we have court every Wednesday. It's divided quarterly. between criminal cases and traffic cases, and we literally do criminal cases one week and traffic cases the next week. Mornings are for sentencings and violation trials. Afternoons are for arraignments. An arraignment is when a person is explained what the charges are, what the maximum consequences are. Quite honestly, at arraignments, most of our cases are resolved that same day. First time criminal offenders are often offered what we call a deferred sentence where they enter into a contract between the city and themselves where they agree to do certain things and the city agrees to do certain things and quite often will often lead into a dismissal and most of the time we don't see those folks ever again. And most of the time it involves a fine and work crew. I love work crew. We use the parole and probation department for Yamhill County. It's pretty easy to do. They only have work going on out at the fairgrounds. But you know what? There's somebody supervising, and they got to show up, and they got to do it. And I warn everybody when they sign up for work crew that the alternative is jail, and you'd be amazed how many people who show up begging for more time, and they don't get it. It was explained up front. This is what you got to do. We had a... Community service, it doesn't work that well, quite honestly. Most of the time, they'd come back and say, well, I did this work for my brother-in-law, Al, and he said I did a really good job. And so that's why I like the work crew so much better than the community service. Traffic offenses... You know, I want everybody to have a valid driver's license and have insurance. So when they run into my car or my family members car, we can get some compensation. And so we are we have a couple of programs that are follow ons from Judge Kaufman Noble. And I think it's I don't know whether she was following on from someone else, but we offer traffic school. It's a good deal. It's an online program. You can do it in one of 16 different languages. I tell people, this is the time you wanna practice your Portuguese. This is the time and place to do it. I've taken it now three times and it reminded me of the review class that I wish my own kids took before they went and got their own driver's license. So it's a nice little program. It's for review of all, you know, Oregon traffic laws and how to do stuff. And so it works really good for like your speeding tickets. And particularly if it's somebody, you know, when they show up with their mom and dad, they are exactly the people that we're looking for. I'm sorry, did you have a question? Oh, okay. And then the other thing is we offer fix it tickets. And quite honestly, a lot of folks, they didn't realize their license was suspended until the kindly officer told them on the side of the road. And I, what I like to do is I get a copy of their driving record. They don't, and I can't give it to them, but I'll go through and say, well, you know what? When you didn't go to court in Newburgh and in Amity, the court sent your information to DMV. This is how you get it fixed. I suppose that's given out free legal advice. I don't know, but, and then I'll give people a copy a month or two to see if they can't get it fixed. And then I've kind of developed a new legal term called eat it. I'll say, well, you ought to just eat it. But I also remind folks, a ticket for driving while suspended is $440. You can go onto Amazon and get an electric bike for a lot less than that. So I like to give them alternatives. Another thing is insurance, the number of people who who forgot to pay their insurance the day they were pulled over. Or the other thing that I see often is somebody's pulled over in the middle of the night, it's pouring rain, there's somebody wearing a gun standing outside the window But the insurance company said, hey, go paperless. It'll be good, very efficient. And then when they're trying to look up their insurance information, they can't pull it up. And I just have them, they come in, they show me that they got the insurance. That's great. I'm gonna give them a fixer ticket. It costs a little bit of money, but it's not the full amount and it will lead to a dismissal. So people are delighted with that. Jail, we check on the jail every working day. Jason was sitting in the back trying to, looking conspicuous, and Suzanda, they checked the list of who's been arrested. And on non-court days, either Jason or our senior clerk, Suzanda, they'll go to the jail and they'll call me on the phone. And over the phone, I'll do an arraignment, I'll make a release decision, we'll let them know what the prosecutor had offered them. And quite honestly, most of the time we do a plea and sentencing right then and there. And I've done it from out of state. My vacations are irrelevant, quite honestly. I, the most fun one, and Jason was involved, I conducted court and did an arraignment, a plea and a sentencing from the steps of the Congressional Library in Washington, D.C. And I actually had to say to a lady, I'm actually a judge and I'm gonna hold court in a couple minutes and if you don't wanna be in court while I'm doing it, you might wanna move down. But it works out really well. And on Wednesdays, myself and one of the clerks, again, Jason and Susanna, will go to the jail. The jail commander has set a room aside for us and the probation officers so we actually can pass papers back and forth without having to call for somebody and whatnot. Again, our court clerks are looking at the jail list to see if there's somebody who happens to be in jail on a circuit court matter that we want to talk to, we'll go see them. And we work things out that way. It seems to work pretty good. You know, my next section is specialty courts. Quite honestly, we got a member of the Yamhill County Mental Health who's here mostly. court dates when we have the criminal court. I've now done two magistrates notice of mental health to initiate a civil commitment. The circuit court judges seem to like that. We've only had to do it twice. And in both cases, it worked out very positively. One of the folks went to the state hospital. She came back. got set up in housing and she started volunteering at a provoking hope and very very matter of fact she came to visit once i didn't even recognize her it was it was that wonderful um speaking of provoking hope them and encompass they are here um actually they're here every wednesday and um particularly with our folks who got in trouble for camping where they're not supposed to camp, I can point to the ladies from either Encompass or Provoking Hope and say, see that lady right there? You want to talk to her afterwards because, and we have a, well, yeah, my next section is about the camping thing where our prosecutors worked out, I think, a fairly enlightened system for folks. And the first time, you know, we just say, if you go to the counseling and to look on ways that you can get into some kind of, you know, have a roof over your head, that's good. You come back and we'll dismiss the case. Second time, well, they got to do the counseling, but this time I will add on work crew. And again, but it doesn't get dismissed this time. Now it's just reduced to a violation because it's originally charged as a crime. Third time, it turns into a conviction, there's probation, you still gotta do the counseling, and we're sending people to jail. I can't think of the word, but what I've noticed is when we first started the illegal camping cases here, we were swamped. And it's gone down steadily. And that's because of a number of reasons. And I'm not sure if this is part of it or the county opening up some more shelters and things like that. But it's down to a reasonable amount, I think, at this point. The next thing is the court's now going through a software upgrade. Jason tells me that the folks from the company that is selling, I guess they're called the vendor, they've been working now with them for 40 hours this week. They're going to go do some stuff, he tells me, then come back. The launch date is going to be sometime in March. And that'll be wonderful. And then, at least from my point of view, hopefully it is for everybody else as well, I put together the statistics, and this is one of the things that I'm really excited about the new software. It's these stats, Jason worked on them. And I think between he and I, he did most of the legwork and then I did the addition. It was like a couple of months. Now, same situation, I'm the judge in Toledo. They have that same software that we're going into. I got ahold of the clerk says, hey, I need to talk to the council in a couple of weeks. Can you give me the stats? Two hours later, I have the stats. But what these are, these are the number of active cases, you know, by month. It's ironically, or interestingly, there's only 10 case difference between the misdemeanors and the traffic violations. So that tells me we still do a lot of misdemeanors. You know, the legislature changed the rules the and I'm sure the chief has told you about this where the drug cases where they can go into a deferral program or whatever they call it in circuit court and we were thinking that that was going to reduce a bunch of the cases and and it has but they're being made up with other ones so really that's about it if anybody's got any questions I'm I'm here now's your time In the several years I've been coming here, this is the first time I've seen a council completely maskless. This is really cool for me.

All right, any questions for Judge Poole? Comments? Councilor Benner.

And maybe this is directed at the chief. Is this traffic violations, is that typical? It seems a really consistent sort of, And are all these coming from you or some of these county?

I can answer that part. They're all coming from our folks here. Okay.

To the first part of your question, that's been my experience, that consistent level during my time here. It's been relatively the same.

Sorry, I'm cheating and asking the wrong guy questions. But is this something that you're... you wanna see go up, go down, or is this a steady flow is good?

I think that two things I wanna see in relationship to traffic enforcement. In terms of going up, I think this body has heard on multiple occasions from different folks coming before us that it's a community that's seeking more traffic enforcement from our organization. We've been giving them as much as we can give them. Traffic enforcement unfortunately sometimes takes a backseat to answering calls for service, and we fit those enforcement activities in in our unobligated time when we're not responding to calls for service. I also think that there's opportunities to have more focused traffic enforcement opportunities seeking to address specific hotspots for crashes and places where we're seeing repetitive issues.

Thank you. The chief, he's kind, his people very kindly and with a great deal of thought will call me. I think about two times a year in the middle of the night asking for a telephonic search warrant for someone who's refusing to take a breath test. And they're very professional. It's caused me to upgrade my own technology. So I have a printer nearby so they don't have to read the whole thing. It's been story hour for a few times. And so that's been helpful. But really it's just been a couple of, I think the entire time I've had like four or five calls. I'm sure you're picking on the circuit court judges when they can. But I doubt it. You know, there used to be a big complaint in my own family that I would continually forget to leave my cell phone in the car at night. And they would say, nobody can get a hold of you. Well, now it's by my bed. And so, I don't know. I guess that's kind of good. It's drug me into the 21st century kicking and screaming.

There you go.

Councillor Peralta. Thank you.

The misdemeanor cases that you hear in the court, do they carry potential prison sentences?

Carry what kind of sentence? Prison. No, no, no, no. You... That's my statute. Something that you can go to prison for is a felony. It's something that you can be sentenced for more than a year. We only have the authority on misdemeanors, and that's up to a year. Actually, it's 364 days. Yeah.

So my question is, do they get assigned, like, if a person needs counsel, how does that work at the city level?

Yeah. And that's one of our challenges on our, well, it's the same challenge every year. It's the number of trial days that were available. We set aside the fifth Wednesday of the month for a trial. There's only four. fifth Wednesdays in a year. Jason and I have talked about ways of essentially eliminating one of the traffic days, but that's gonna make the other one super, super gigantic to stick in a trial. But their problem, of course, is that we have to put out requirements for 1,000 people on the jury pool to ensure that we have six people that actually show up for the trial to serve on a jury. So the people in the jail, they are offered often really good deals that they can't turn down, and then they don't ask for a trial. But they have the right to have a trial, and the right is to have a trial within 60 days of the date they go into custody. And if they ask for a lawyer, then they're given a lawyer as well.

And so my question about the attorneys, that's not a city cost.

It is. It is.

How much do we spend on...

Well, you're talking to the wrong guy. I don't do that.

We'll ask staff later.

I know, but I don't think I'd be talking out of turn if I told you. It's not much. And we've had problems having lawyers to represent folks because we don't pay nearly as much as what somebody could get in private practice or working in circuit court. And I mean, we're paying people in the hundreds of dollars where down on Fifth Street, they're getting thousands of dollars. So that's, and all cities have that same problem right now. Thank you. Okay.

Councillor Tucholsky. Yes, sir.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor. Judge Poole, I just wanted to say that I've had the opportunity to work with you in a few different areas of my life. And I wanted to say that you're one of the most caring, firm, but also fair people I've ever met and dealt with. And I think that the city of McMinnville is very fortunate to have both you and Jason on staff because you really make... our legal department and our court, something what I consider to be special.

So thank you. Well, that's kind of you to say, although I'll tell you the same thing I tell folks and I'm sitting up there. Don't think you're fine is going to be any less.

Oh, don't worry. I don't have any parking tickets.

I ditto what Councillor Tucholsky said. I come and watch quite often and you're very entertaining, but you're, but you're a good, You're good, and you give them opportunities.

People are here on one of the worst days of their lives. We don't need to make it any worse. But I also don't put up with stuff with people as well. All right, thank you.

Thank you for what you do. All right. Mayor, may I? Katie, over here. Thank you. May I just answer the question about how much we're spending? Sure. So... 23, 24 and 25, we were spending between 20,000 and 30,000 a year. And then in 26, we only spent 13,125. And so far this year, we're only at 1,500, but we've only had one month bills really that have gone through. So that's where we're at. Thank you, Director Henry.

Okay, so now we're gonna move on to our consent agenda. Does any Councilor request to have any item removed from the consent agenda? All right, I see none. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented?

So moved. Second.

So I have a motion from Councilor Gary, a second from Councilor Cunningham. Any discussion? Claudia?

Councillor Cunningham?

Aye.

Councillor Tucholsky? Aye. Councillor Chenoweth?

Aye.

Councillor Benner?

Aye.

Councillor Geary?

Aye.

Councillor President Peralta?

Yes.

The consent agenda has passed unanimously by a vote of six to zero.

Thank you. Okay, we're going to move on and consider resolution number 2026-49, a resolution adopting a standardized naming policy for city facilities. And I'd like to call on City Attorney David Lightberg.

Thank you, Mayor. This item comes before you as something that was part of the city's adopted strategic plan. This particular item has been hanging out there for a while, but was reiterated, reaffirmed by this council in August of 2025. And as you know, this summer I had a legal intern and this being A DISCRETE AND ACHIEVABLE PROJECT. I ASSIGNED IT TO HIM TO COME UP WITH SOMETHING THAT MET MODERN STANDARDS AND SENSIBILITIES AND AIMED AT BEST PRACTICES AND ANSWERED THE COUNCIL'S GOAL. SO BEFORE YOU WE HAVE A RESOLUTION TO ADOPT A STANDARDIZED NAMING POLICY FOR CITY FACILITIES. The timing is a little bit unfortunate because as you can see, my intern was not able to make it back. He does appreciate the opportunity to be introduced to you last time that we spoke. He had good things to say and regrets that he could not be here tonight. But another positive about the timing is that This was completed or nearly completed just in time for Director Sprague to also have some input. She recently having some insight and best practices in her last job. Which brings us to the policy itself. This policy as requested, directed by council is for the naming of city facilities. Think particularly buildings and parks. This effort at reaching best practices, as you'll see in your staff report and in the policy itself, first sets out to give some general guidelines for how namers should think of names in the city, what sorts of things should be in mind. Those being the geography, the history, the uniqueness of McMinnville as a broad culture, and other things along those lines. It calls out something that's maybe a little bit counter to some of our previous efforts, and that is to avoid the naming after individuals. It calls out that that might still be done. There are still exceptional contributions to the city that should be called out, but also that that shouldn't happen until a person has been deceased for five years. There are a number of reasons for that that I won't get into. I'll just reiterate that these are best practices generally accepted around the state. There are also prohibited naming considerations. I think those are largely obvious and so I won't run through them. Just understand that the beginning of the policy has ideas for how names should be thought of in this context. As far as the policy itself, the procedure for having facilities named, it follows the flow chart that you see on the screen in front of you. Naming proposals start with either the city council, you yourselves initiating the naming of an asset, the city manager initiating the naming of an asset, or a city advisory board or commission. If individuals throughout the community would like for something to be named or have a proposal, have a great idea, we just recommend they bring it to one of those bodies to initiate an official naming of an asset. When that gets received, it has to have, it's gotta have a bit of a packet, a bit of a rationale that requires identification of the asset to be named, the name, the rationale for the name, and any supporting documentation, historical, cultural significance, things like that. Upon receiving it, the city manager will review the packet and assign it to whatever board or commission is the most appropriate to be hearing that name. That board or commission with the help of their liaison director will do a little bit more background, thoroughness into the history, the rationale, bulk up the name proposal packet so that it's thought of, put forward any alternate considerations, and then either recommend or not recommend to council how that might go forward. At that point, it comes in front of the council, The summary and the bulked up packet would be presented to council, including the historical evaluations, the evaluations by the committee and a summary of the public comments received up until that point. And at that point, the city council retains the sole authority to approve, deny or modify any naming proposal. The policy also tries to avoid renaming existing facilities. This is not to start from the ground and start going hog wild with every name that we can think of. Existing names should not be changed except in extraordinary circumstances and it gives sort of an idea of how that extraordinary circumstance might come to be. And it exempts from this policy any naming rights agreements if the council or city manager is working through something whereby something might be sponsored or named under a rights agreement, that would not apply, this policy would not apply to that. Of course, this being a policy, it may be adopted by resolution, it may be amended by resolution, we may come back and change it entirely or tweak it here and there. And how exactly this goes is ultimately up to you. But this presented to you now is here with a resolution for your consideration and possible adoption.

Any comments? I have a comment. I am fine with it, except for I would like to take out that the person has to be deceased for five years. It may be the case that that happens, but I don't think it should be in there. If we look at the parks that have been named already, Joe Dancer Park, Jay Pearson Park, Ed Gormley, Civic Hall, Galen McBee, substations, they're all people that have been working with the city for years that we're still alive. So I hate to put that in there, even though the person may be deceased that we choose, I don't wanna put that in there in my opinion.

I may I don't mean to go back on this that will absolutely be your prerogative that's the case, I just want you to understand where this best practice comes from. This is because there have been communities in which they have named facilities after a person who is store history bears out that that person is not the person that they thought they were. Unfortunate things happened. I would never cast aspersions on any of the named individuals that we have for our facilities, but that consideration is what brings this as a best practice. It's absolutely your prerogative to pull it out.

I personally think that we can't live our lives and assuming what somebody is gonna be judged in the future, it's at the point we're at now. Councilor Peralta.

I agree with the mayor just from the standpoint of our historical practice in the city. And I would say that history is not always kind to people who have been dead for many years as well, so.

Councillor Chenoweth.

Yeah, I just, I'm gonna make it a habit that I'm going to express why I'm voting no on something before I vote no. So everybody's clear on my intentions and reasons. I'm a no vote on this at all. I think the history of this city has done a really good job of picking names. I'd rather just leave it in the hands of the council when we're doing such a thing, rather than having some set of guidelines that could end up with unintended consequences. And we've listed a couple that have come up already in this conversation, but I can guarantee you that at the time that we had the unintended consequences, at the time we're gonna wish we didn't have this rule. And to this point, I think we've done a really good job. I really appreciate the work that was done, so this is to no reflection to the efforts that were put forth by your intern, and I do understand it was part of our strategic plan. Had I noticed that, I might have taken it out last year and saved him some time. But for me, the more rules you create, the more opportunity for unintended consequences, and this is just one that's superfluous, so I'm a no.

Councillor Benner.

Echo the Mayor's comments about the not naming after living people. I think that we should get rid of that. I also think that I love having a policy for everything because it keeps you on a straight and narrow path. I agree with Chris on this. Pretty soon we've dumbed everything down to sort of the everybody agrees middle and we're gonna have parks that are named after things that don't have any relevance to our community. So I'd like to get rid of the must be deceased. And then leaning in Chris's direction, I'm not sure we need a policy.

Thank you, Councillor Tucholsky, were you wanting to say something?

Yeah, there are people in our community who are obviously still alive and they've been significant contributors to our community. I'll mention former Mayor Ed Gormley is our current example who can't be matched. almost four decades in volunteer public service, 24 in the city of McMinnville as mayor, another 15 or so on the Mack Water and Light Commission on top of the time that he served the 24 as mayor on the Mack Waterlight Commission. So I would ask that we don't have a policy where you have to be deceased for any time. I did attend the Jay Pearson Park opening, which my family had worked significantly with Jay Pearson to help gather funding, and it was... Very excited to see Jay and his spouse there. And it was just a overall positive thing for everyone. So I ask that we remove that.

Thank you. Councilor Cunningham.

I'm pretty much gonna echo every one of my councilors up here. I think that the naming of Kent Taylor was announced at, I believe, an MDA event. And I can tell you, it brought joy to the hundreds of people that were there. And I think that to take that off the table for not only you know, the person that is being named or the people that are been by their side when they've done all the good work who may also be passing away at the same time. I think that it's, I don't think that's something that we need. I'm okay with the rest of it because I think that specifically some of the protections that go into the naming rights of what's currently here is important, but I would be against the five-year requirement.

Any other, Councilor Geary?

Yeah, I think I appreciate the work that went into this and the concept of creating structure to the great act of right assigning a name to a great public thing that's gonna outlast us and the person or the thing. And I think it's important I think it's more transparent process and it gets more engagement from our community and it governs all the future decision makers on the requirements that they have to do to bring about those names. And I think it gets the community engaged in a great way and I think it'll lead to a more robust process, whether it's a street sweeper or a park. And as a person who put forward the motion for the name of the Jay Pearson Park, I've had time to reflect on it, and I think about all the names of people we have on parks, and I'm not sure the homogeneity that comes about when you look and actually see and think about what those names are and who those people are. While they did great work, I'm not sure it does reflect the wide range of people who we have currently or future contribute or play in our parks and move about our public systems. I'm happy to go with the group and think that this policy is good overall, but if you guys feel compelled to take out the, you have to be dead for five years clause, then I'll support that too.

Okay, do I, oh, Councillor Peralta.

I think you were just gonna ask for a motion. I would like to call the question. So I'd like to move this motion this resolution with the amendment that the five-year requirement on being deceased be eliminated. Do I have a second?

Second. So I have a motion from Councilor Peralta, a second from Councilor Cunningham. Any further discussion?

Claudia? Councillor Cunningham. Aye. Councillor Tucholsky. Aye. Councillor Chenoweth.

Nay.

Councillor Benner. Aye. Councillor Geary.

Aye.

Councillor President Peralta.

Yes.

Resolution number 2026-49 passes by, with amendment, passes by a vote of five to one.

Thank you.

Thank you all.

Okay, now we're gonna move on to ordinances. We're gonna consider the first reading with possible second reading of ordinance number 5185, an ordinance authorizing a lease amendment with the state of Oregon acting by and through the Oregon State Police at the McMinnville Municipal Airport. And these can be found on pages 57 through 60 in your packet. Does any councilor need to declare an actual or potential conflict of interest, recuse themselves regarding this ordinance? Okay, we will now consider the matter of ordinance 5185. Okay, so I'm gonna call on John Pascal or, nope, David Lightenberg, sorry.

To read out loud, right? 5185 is what you said? I'm sorry, Mayor, I was not following the script.

5185, and I guess I should ask if anybody has any issue with him just reading it by title only, no. 5185.

This is a short one, it'll hurt less. This is the first reading of ordinance number 5185, an ordinance authorizing a lease amendment with the state of Oregon acting by and through the Oregon State Police at the McMinnville Municipal Airport.

Okay, now I'm gonna call on John Pascal, Airport Manager.

Thank you, Mayor. Good evening. John Pascal, airport manager. This is a pretty straightforward amendment. It's their Oregon State Police exercising one of two amendments that exists in their current lease. It's a bit of a budget bruise to the airport budget for two reasons. One, they've been overpaying for a piece of vacant space inside that building for the previous five years that was vacated by FAA many years ago and somewhere that got lost in the shuffle. So we're correcting that oversight. And then two, they exercised a portion of their lease that allows them to reduce space if if the legislature cut the budget. So their original request was to reduce space by about 25%. That's obviously a huge chunk of that building. It would have required some significant interior building modifications to segregate their space from what would be left as vacant space. And it would have made a difficult situation for the city to try and find a comparable tenant to share space with both the Oregon State Police and the FAA. We negotiated with them over the course of six months. There were three amendments to this lease, and the terms we came to was just a rate reduction for the next five years. So that's the second piece of what I call a bruise to the budget, particularly in the first year, because we do have to pay back their overpayments. But what this does is that it saves us from having a vacancy, and I'm, you know, Just past my first year, I'm thinking this Comcast lot that we had next door that's been vacant for many, many years. I didn't want to put the city in another situation where we had a larger budget issue and the inability to lease additional space. And so this keeps the OSP in place for the next five years. It gives us an opportunity to work on our business plan, our economic development plan, look at our airport master plan, see what the future of that building might be. But it also locks in the Oregon State Police for at least another five years. And then we'll readdress this then. I would remind the council that this is, they are by far our largest revenue source at the airport. So while there's a reduction in here and a payback, there's still significant revenue generator for us. And so that's the amendment, or I'm sorry, the ordinance before you.

Thank you, does any Councilor have any questions for Mr. Pascal? Okay, do I have a motion to accept the first reading of ordinance number 5185 and possibly pass it to a second reading? Okay, so I have a motion from Councilor Tucholsky. Second from Councilor Geary, any further discussion?

I have one item, yeah. I just wanna say Manager Pascal did a great job of negotiating this, and it wasn't an easy thing because of the decrease forced by the state, but I commend him for retaining our number one largest source of revenue out there, but number two, the opportunity to have OSP out there, which I think is a real positive for Highway 18, so thank you.

Great, any other discussion? Okay, Claudia? Councilor?

Aye.

Councilor Tucholsky? Aye. Councilor Chenoweth?

Aye.

Councilor Benner?

Aye.

Councilor Geary?

Aye.

Council President Peralta? Yes. Ordinance 5185 passes unanimously on its first reading.

Okay, I'll now call on City Attorney David Lankberg State the title only for the second reading.

Thank you, Mayor. This is the second reading of ordinance number 5185, an ordinance authorizing a lease amendment with the state of Oregon acting by and through the Oregon State Police at the McMinnville Municipal Airport.

Thank you. Do I have a motion to adopt the ordinance?

So moved.

Second.

I have a motion from Councillor Chenoweth, a second from Councillor Tokolsky. Any further discussion? Claudia.

Councillor Cunningham. Aye. Councillor Tucholsky. Aye. Councillor Chenoweth.

Aye.

Councillor Benner.

Aye.

Councillor Geary.

Aye.

Councillor President Peralta.

Yes.

Ordinance 5185 is adopted by a vote of six to zero.

Perfect, thank you. Now we'd like to consider the first reading with a possible second reading of ordinance number 5187, an ordinance authorizing ground lease amendments with hangar owners of the municipal McMinnville Municipal Airport. That's pages 61 to 64 of your packet. Does any counselor need to declare an actual or potential conflict of interest or recuse themselves regarding this ordinance? Okay, I'll now consider the matter of ordinance 5187. Does any counselor object to having the ordinance read by title only? City Attorney David Lightmurray.

Thank you, Mayor. And this is the first reading of ordinance number 5187, an ordinance authorizing ground lease amendments with hanger owners at the McMinnville Municipal Airport.

I'd like to call John Pascal again to report.

Thank you, Mayor. First, I would note that there was actually three tonight. So 5186, you'll notice that we skipped right over that. That's going to be on the docket for next council meeting. And that's going to be a much more enjoyable. I should probably do a presentation for that one even. It's going to be a significant benefit to both the airport and the community. So I'm really excited about that one. We couldn't quite get it under the deadline for the for the ordinance this time around.

Good, because I thought you meant I missed it.

No, no, no, that was us. I had three in a row there, but we couldn't quite sneak that one in. This particular ordinance, 5187, is really just a fundamental fairness and equity amendment. There are several ground lease hangar owners that have ground leases with the city of McMinnville out at the airport. And over the years, they've been allowed to have amendments to their leases that other ground lessees were not allowed. either offered or were not aware of. So several of those, excuse me, those folks have approached me wanting now the same lease amendment terms that prior hanger owners have had. So rather than doing them individually as they come in terms of requests, number one, it's more efficient for staff to do it all at once. And then there's a concern about the grant assurance violation of allowing permitting some terms for some folks that others have not been offered. So I'm going to call that an oversight as well by my predecessors. It's something that probably should have been addressed years ago, but here we are now. That's okay. You know, better later than never. So there's no budget impact here. It's actually a positive move. Number one, it kind of gets us out from under the ground assurance violation that we're likely up against. Number two, the airport commission, rather than just allowing five-year waivers, rolling amendments if your hangar is still in good condition. And we still need that space for hangars recommended 10 years, which of course is more efficient. And then it helps us lock in around lessees for a longer period of time. That is probably our third largest revenue source at the airport. So there's a benefit there as well. So I'm fine with that. A lot of the airports in the state of Oregon, including the one I came from, do 10-year extensions if you meet certain criteria. And we confirmed said the attorney and I looked through the grant assurances and the language that's in the amendments that we're comfortable that offering this and it will be a one time offer. So this wouldn't be something that's just exists in perpetuity. I'll send a letter to those that do not have these amendments. They'll have some period of time likely six months to execute these amendments so we can just get it all wrapped up and not have to cross this bridge again another time.

Any counselor have any questions of the airport manager Pascal. Councilor Chenoweth? Oh, Councilor Benner.

Thank you. It's my understanding, thank you, Mayor. It's my understanding that one of the reasons for the 10-year extension was so leaseholders could get loans to do improvements.

That is correct, yes. That was one of the items that was brought up by a couple of the hanger owners that have been long-term tenants at the airport. They're at a point now where they'd like to sell their hangers. But with fewer than 10 years remaining, what I understand is that banks will not loan for a hanger if there's not at least 10 years remaining or an amendment for greater than 10 years. And so that limits the current hanger owners to cash buyers only, and there are not a lot of cash buyers

to do improvements on their property?

Correct, it would just be, well, either, to either purchase the existing. Do we have any,

I agree in principle. I think that the airport, and thank you for your good service because you have much more confidence in what's happening at the airport with you there. But I think it's one of the most underutilized facilities in our inventory. And so I hate to be extending leases without some level of assurance that the properties are going to be maintained.

or brought to a level of sellability, so to speak. Correct. So that language does exist in both the leases and the amended leases that property owners are required to maintain their hangers to a certain standard. it has been brought to my attention that the city-owned hangers have not been, we've not held ourselves to that same standard, which is true. But we do have a pretty robust program where, again, one of the requirements to exercise your amendment is that your hanger has to be in good condition if there's noted violations like roof leaks or doors that don't work or anything like that, those have to be corrected before we'll exercise the amendment. So I'm pretty comfortable that that language exists. Thank you.

Any other questions? Okay, do I have a motion to accept the first reading of ordinance 5187 and possibly pass to a second reading?

I motion. Second.

So I have a motion from Councilor Tucholsky, a second from Councilor Cunningham. Any further discussion? Claudia. Councillor Cunningham.

Aye.

Councillor Ticholsky.

Aye.

Councillor Chenoweth.

Aye.

Councillor Benner.

Aye.

Councillor Geary.

Aye.

Council President Peralta. Yes. Ordinance number 5187 passes on its first reading unanimously.

Okay, since it passed unanimously, I'd like to call on Attorney David Leitenberg to read the ordinance by title only for the second reading.

Thank you, Mayor. This is the second reading of ordinance number 5187, an ordinance authorizing ground lease amendments with hangar owners at the McMinnville Municipal Airport. Do I have a motion to accept 5187?

So moved. Second. A motion from Councilor Chenoweth, a second from Councilor Benner. Any further discussion? Claudia?

Councilor Cunningham?

Aye.

Councilor Tucholsky?

Aye.

Councilor Chenoweth?

Aye.

Councilor Benner?

Aye.

Councilor Geary?

Aye.

Council President Peralta?

Yes.

Ordinance number 5187 is adopted by a vote of six to zero.

Thank you, John. Okay, now we're gonna move on to reports from counselors and on committees and boards and department head reports. And I am going to start to my left with Director Henry.

Good evening. Just a quick report from court. As you heard from, well, you heard a lot from court, from the judge. We are immersed in this court software implementation. I have never seen an implementation require so much time in so little time. Basically, it is requiring all of the court staff for 40 hours this week. We've got a few other weeks that are like that. So it is really, really labor intensive, but it's going to be a really amazing product when it's done. At that same time, we are less than one month out from the audit. So the finance team is also knuckling down on their things. And I am doing both. I apologize if anyone has any questions or requests from me, if I'm a little bit delayed in my responses on things over these next four weeks, I am trying to juggle both and get all of those deadlines met. And we are down one court staff person and we just have a lot on our plates. That's it. Thank you. Director Sprague.

THANK YOU, MAYOR AND COUNCIL.

I'VE BEEN WORKING THE LAST FEW WEEKS ON REALLY GETTING TO UNDERSTAND MY DEPARTMENT'S BUDGET, STAFFING, OPERATIONS, AND MEETING COMMUNITY FOLK. I'M FOCUSING MY WORK ON THE BOND THAT'S COMING UP AND THE COMMUNICATIONS PLAN, MOVING FORWARD WITH THAT. ALSO LOOKING AT PARK PROJECTS WITH PUBLIC WORKS, AND FINALLY also the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee. Looking forward to presenting that to you in the very near future.

Thank you. Planning Director Heather Richards.

Yes, so Mayor, we are getting ready to advertise our vacancies, the year-end vacancies for city committees. We're going to start that advertisement earlier so we can start recruitment earlier and interviews. So we hope to get that out in the next week. We have about 10 vacancies that we're going to be looking for one site. We get a final on that. I'll send it to all of you as well so that you're aware and can share it with people. And then I also wanted to let you know, we have two positions that are in active recruitment right now. We have our associate housing planner position. That's the position Evan Hippas used to be after. And then he got promoted to planning manager. So that's currently being advertised, and we'll do a first look at that on September 21. And then we have a senior planner position that is also being advertised right now. And another staff member out on leave. So we're down three in the planning team, and like Director Henry was telling you, we're doing our best to respond to everything in a timely manner, but there may be a couple of extra days of grace in terms of responses needed.

Thank you, Heather. Chief Wood.

I think my last report happened before we had the air show. So I'm glad to report that we had an amazing air show and it was relatively uneventful for at least the police department, um, from it was, it was eventful for us, but uneventful for everybody else. And that's just the way we like it. Uh, we also had a very good time at the car show again, um, I think everybody came down, enjoyed the car show, had a good time. And if you attended either one of those events, you probably had an opportunity to see MPD officers out on mountain bikes for the first time in a while. We're real excited to have that program back and grateful to McMinnville Industrial Promotions and Visit McMinnville. for the grants that help make those happen. As far as hiring and filling the bathtub back up, we are still moving forward. We have two of our officers, candidates that have been moved into the background phase of the hiring process. And we have one that's in the psych medical phase of the process. So closer to the finish line.

Thank you. It is exciting to see the police officers on the bikes like that. Councillor Carson-Bidder.

Landscape did not meet this last month.

Councillor Tucholsky.

Airport Commission has not met since we last talked and DEA committee meets on Thursday this week. That's it.

Councillor Geary.

Nothing to report.

Okay, I have on August 28th, I attended McMinnville Chamber Greeters for True Wealth Investments featuring With Courage, which is a nonprofit helping families impacted by breast cancer. I spoke at Sunrise Rotary along with city manager Adam Garvin. We spoke on the state of the city in my first 18 months as mayor. Met with Laverne Pitts, the new executive director of YCAP, but she is not new to the organization. She's been there for quite some time, but took over for Alexandra Ball. We talked about the status of turnkeys remodel, which is out by Lowe's and half of it is completely done and they're trying to raise the money to finish the other half. The happenings at the navigation center and some discussions that we'll have around that as the city manager and myself and her, but things are going well and unhoused numbers are still hovering in the Lowe's at around 40. Today, after my weekly water and light meeting and leadership meeting, I met with Heather and Adam to ask some questions about tonight. And I appreciate Heather's time knowing that you're down three people. Thank you for doing that. I met with John Olson of the Chamber of Commerce and Eric Corning, the president of the Oregon International Air Show this afternoon to speak about plans for next year's event. And I had our weekly legislative meeting, excuse me, bi-weekly and Heather and Adam Garvin and to offer a part of that. And we're looking at a bill to hopefully address Oregon home rules and pushing back. I am trying to push back a little bit on Senate bill 1537, which are both kind of hurting our local voice. So those are the things I'm working on. So Councilor Peralta.

Thank you, Mayor. MCM 11 meets this Thursday. COG meets on the 14th of September. On Labor Day, I actually had the opportunity to visit our McMinnville's Chinese Underground, which is a museum that is hosted by the Asian Historical Society. Association. If people haven't had the opportunity to see that, I really recommend taking the opportunity. They're only open six days a year because of code limitations, but it really is a remarkable piece of our history. Thanks.

Councilor Cunningham.

Yes, thank you, Mayor. I was unable to meet with the Historic Landmark Committee, but they are taking the challenge of the Star Mill Wall Restoration Project. There's lots that goes into how you can go about that. So I'm happy to say we are working towards that and hopefully we'll have some sort of safety measures in the future so we don't continue to have this issue. The Affordable Housing Committee had a really pretty amazing meeting. We had invited Dev Northwest up from Eugene to talk about community land trusts. Currently, we don't have the same type of program that they have there, but I will say that Habitat for Humanity is actually going through their first Community Land Trust. And so that's gonna be taking place probably over the course of the next year. But we got to learn quite a bit and also learned that there's quite a bit more to learn. But there's really, I think, some remarkable positives that we could see happen within our community around Community Land Trust. And so I look forward to seeing how that develops further.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor. Last time that we did reports, I neglected to mention that on August 13th, I enjoyed the afternoon doing one of my favorite events with our fellow councilor, Zach Geary, as we judge the incredibly competitive zucchini races. is always a joy and one that I look forward to. Shout out to the Park and Rec Department for such a great program and all the smiles of the little kids that we saw that really thoroughly enjoy putting wheels on zucchinis and sending them down a table. On the 25th, I attended a kickoff for Highway 18 Lafayette Highway Roundabout, part of my function of being on MWACT. That process is now underway. They're gonna be engineering the road. You can expect that intersection to be fixed probably in the next four years. So we're on the fast track. It is now one of the highest priority projects in this area. It's in the top 1% of accidents in the state. So they are working now, it's been elevated between the work done by myself and Kit Johnston to a point that ODOT knows it needs to be done. So we're thankful we're there. On the 26th, I went back to ODOT and was involved in the Connect Oregon Region Two Priority Discussion. Connect Oregon is a program in which they give funds to projects that will help connect transportation infrastructure across the state. We had the McMinnville Airport was one of the applicants that was on the list. Again, this was part of my function with MWAC, but it was also because of that application that I made it a special effort. We elevated that up to the top 19 projects. And then this morning for four hours, I was back at it on that Connect Oregon grant, trying to get that done. And we just missed the cut. So unfortunately we didn't get it, but a bunch of time and a bunch of elevation has occurred. And if we go for it the next time around, hopefully we'll have a better opportunity. On September 2nd, I attended the Southwest Area Plan. We are coming down the home stretch for the Southwest Area Plan. It will be coming back before us and the... Planning Commission jointly next and then I think we have one more meeting as a pack before it starts the public hearing process so as was kind of referenced by one of the commissioners during the work session and we have done a good job of protecting the riparian zones and the various different archeological features and trying to make sure that we leave, that we develop thoughtfully and mindfully, making sure we have plenty of green space parks and rivers through the area. And I think that's all that I have. Thank you. Oh, I wanted to say one more thing. Shout out to Heather after I met with the earlier mentioned resident. Quick answers for me to deal with questions that I had. Shout out to both Adam and Claudia for a scheduling mistake that was made so that I got an opportunity to spend a couple of minutes getting questions answered with our city manager before the meeting. Thank you.

City Recorder, Claudia Cisneros.

Yes, so a lot of my work was on your consent agenda tonight, so thank you for approving that. And then just a quick reminder about next week's work session. The work session itself has been canceled, and instead we'll be holding the, it'll be a special called meeting for a public hearing regarding ordinance number 5182. And I'll start at six o'clock, which is our regular work session time, but there's no work session ahead of the

5182 is the Chequenac Station, is that correct?

Yes, it is. The rezoning of that property.

Yeah, thank you.

Information Systems, Scott Burke.

Thanks for your counsel i'm over in is we've been spinning up a project with our partners at yam hill county to upgrade our phone system that we've shared with them for many years. Currently, we use an on premise my tail system attending is heading towards the end of its functional life and we'll be working with them to deploy new zoom phone. voice based voice over network system that will give us a lot more functionality than we had with the old system at it at a cheaper price so we'll actually have a lot more. operational separation from county than we've had. We've been partners with them for a long time. We'll still share a contract and a master account. Basically, we'll have our own deployment phone system as we work the process over the next probably three to six months.

Great. Thank you. City Attorney David Lightburg.

Thank you, Mayor. Nothing from the legal department tonight.

City Manager Adam Garvin. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor. Lots going on, some of which we'll discuss here after our reports. Since the air show, that was a busy week with the Blue Angels, and Friday that week, I introduced Park and Rec Director Sprague to the business community at Chamber Greeters. and then we've had another like next steps meeting around the CPR bond and we'll have a bond council back before you guys, October 23rd I believe is the date on that. Had a monthly meeting with Superintendent Ferreira with the school district, MNEP monthly meeting, Monthly meeting with John Dietz from Water and Light. And the rest of that, I think I'll cover in our executive session.

Okay, sounds good. Thank you. HR Director, Vicki Hedges. Nothing for me tonight. Thank you, Mayor. Public Works Director, Gia Fonseca.

Yes, a few project updates. So for the Third Street project, our project manager, Jeff Gooden, met with our ODOT liaison today and we should be getting our statement of work from them for the design work coming up by tomorrow. So hopefully at the next council meeting, I'll be able to give you an update, like I mentioned before, about what that process is gonna cost and how far we think that those $850,000 are gonna get us. We submitted our response letter to DEQ for our NPDES update permit on Friday last week. Good work by our wastewater team there. And we're not gonna be seeing anything too egregious in the next permit, but we're trying to make sure it's as favorable to the work that they do as possible. As John mentioned, we have a very exciting lease that just missed the cutoff for today's meeting, so that will be in our next meeting, but that's a good one to be looking forward to. And then for the fountain update, we now have all the final plans and specs from the consultant, David Renshaw, with the help of our engineering teams putting together the bid package for that. We'll probably be seeing two items that will be coming to the Council for that one to hire that contractor to build it and another to purchase the equipment ahead of time that we're gonna do to hopefully save some time getting the right equipment in there and the right parts so that can be installed here in our slow season in our parks.

That's the splash pad, right?

Yes.

Just wanna make sure the community understands what that is, okay.

Yep, splash pad, thank you.

Thank you.

And lastly, we've had a busy few months since the start of the fiscal year. We've had 10 recruitments and hirings in public works that we've done. About half of those were people being promoted internally, about half being new people. And one of those new people I have here tonight to introduce you. We have our new city engineer, Claire Robinson, joining us this evening. And I'm gonna ask Claire to do a quick introduction of herself for you.

Mayor, council, good evening, y'all. Name is Claire Robinson. A little intro on me. I started in 1998 while in college doing geotech, civil engineering, environmental engineering, engineering geology in the Southern California region. 2015, I ended up moving to Oklahoma where I worked for about four years with the city out there. And then in late 2015, 2020 we're given the opportunity to move to Oregon, which I've been trying to move here since 1998. I came up and visited my mom's cousins up here. It just took a long time. So the last five years I've been working at the Bureau of Land Management and now I'm here in the great city of McMinnville and I've been blessed with this honor.

Thank you. Welcome. Great. Thank you. All right. Did I miss anybody? No. Okay. So we're going to move on to the city council. We going into the conference room for two close to the public executive sessions pursuant to ORS 192.6602H to consult with council concerning the legal rights and duties of a public body with regard to current litigation or litigation likely to be filed and ORS 192.6602H to P as in Paul to consider matters relating to cybersecurity infrastructure and responses to cybersecurity threats. Does any councilor need to declare an actual or potential conflict of interest or recuse themselves regarding these executive sessions for the record? Okay, I will now adjourn the city council meeting at 827.

music music