City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening and welcome to the Kent City Council meeting for Tuesday, 03/03/2026. If you could all please rise and join me in the flag salute. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Right. Melissa, could you please call the roll?

Mayor Ralph. Here. Council President Kaur? Here. Council Member Boyce?

Here.

Council Member Boyd?

Here.

Council Member Larmer? Here. Council Member Michaud? Here. Council Member Schocher? Here. And councilmember Troutner? Here. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. Moving on item number three is approval of the agenda. Do we have any changes this evening?

No changes from staff, your honor.

All right. A motion would be in order to approve the agenda as published.

So move. Second.

And a motion and

a second.

All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carries seven zero. That moves us right into public recognition. We have a couple of items this evening. The first one is our March 2026 employee of the month. Each month here at the city, employees can get together and nominate one of their coworkers who exemplifies our mission, vision, values, and goals here at the city. It can be for both a special project that an employee worked on, but most often it is just about how they show up every single day and do their job. I am really pleased to say that our March employee of the month is both of those categories.

The recognition stems from a pretty big event, but there's a lot about this in how he just shows up every single day. I am pleased to announce our March employee of the month is Evan Swanson. Evan was first hired on 04/01/2011 as a temporary employee in parks maintenance. He was hired full time 08/01/2014, and was re classed into his current position as a conservation coordinator on 10/01/2018. As a conservation coordinator, Evan oversees and participates in development, implementation, and coordination of the city's resource conservation programs, which include solid waste and recycling, water conservation, water quality, conservation education, household hazardous waste, and critical resource areas.

Evan was nominated because during the flood event, which we all can remember so well, in December, numerous staff performed well beyond expectations, and Evan is certainly one who stood out among that group. Evan worked extremely hard during this difficult weather event coordinating levy patrols, leading the entire department by example, sacrificing time with his own family and to ensure the safety of the meetings with leadership, leading additional levy safety training, etc. Being here late at night, I know I saw you more than once at nine or ten at night here. Evan went above and beyond. In addition to working long hours and going above and beyond his standard role requirements, he has done so with consideration for his fellow coworkers' best interest while maintaining a positive attitude that stems from a genuine desire to protect the Kent community.

He was available at all hours of the day and night, making sure the city had people ready and in the field along the river. He did this emergency work with the same kindness and upbeat demeanor that he brings to his work every day. His passion for the profession and community is contagious. Evan continuously embraces our values, and we celebrate him

as March's employee of the month. I'm gonna call Mike McTudis up to say a few words, and then, Evan,

I would love it if you could introduce your family as well.

Good evening. I'm Mike McTudis. I'm the environmental manager for the city, and it is my pleasure to talk about Evan tonight. All of the things that you said, mayor, are absolutely 100% on target. Evan, it has been my pleasure to see Evan grow over the over ten years that I've been able to work with him.

He's taken on more and more responsibility from water system plans to managing the habitat conservation plan for the city's biggest water supply out at Clark Springs, as well as our storm water planning and helping to move the city into the modern forecasting era to incorporate that into our storm water planning and implementation. During the storm event that we had in December, we had two levy patrol crews going twenty four hours a day. So there we had two crews coming in checking in every six hours, six a. M, noon, six p. M, and midnight.

So it was Evan's responsibility. He was the lead making sure all those people were ready to go every six hours. That the vehicles were had the equipment that they needed, that the people had the information that they needed. And he was he was on available all the time for well over a week. It was not a small thing and he and and like you said mayor, he came in, he was happy, had the the little grin that he always has on his face. He has that all the time. So it was just a pleasure, a pleasure working with him. And and he did get eight nominations. So there were a lot of people who saw the same thing that that I have the pleasure of seeing every day.

We're so proud and grateful, and I would love it if you could introduce your family, Evan.

Alright. I'll stand here so you guys can hear me. But, yes. So my oldest is 10. This is Jackson. Jackson's all about sports and baseball. He's a great kid. Kinsley is seven and she's also all about sports playing basketball and softball and just loves life. And then Adeline is five and Adeline is very outgoing, loves the outdoors and yeah, just great kids and really they're all phenomenal children because of my wife Jessica who

Yeah.

She's she's awesome. Just the best mom and wife and is a teacher in the Kent School District. That's one I think that's one cool thing about our family is that we've chose to raise our kids in Kent and we live up on the East Hill and I was born and raised in Kent and decided that we wanted to do the same with our kids. Both of us were born and raised in Kent and we decided to stay here and really kind of embrace it.

To support dad and husband and also your willingness to share him. He put in a lot of hours through that. Thank you.

Yes, thank you.

All right, with that, council president, ibulturacenter.com. On March 6, it's Tacoma Stars versus Kansas City Comets. And March 7, Seattle Thunderbirds are playing Tri City Americans. And March 10, Saddle Tundra birds are playing again Victoria Royals and on March 14 also Saddle T Birds are playing versus Portland Winter Hawks. On March 21 is Tacoma Stars versus St. Louis Ambush. And we also have Kent Arts Day happening at Kent Commons on March on this Saturday from ten a. To three p. M. And with that, back to you, Madam Mayor.

All right. Councilmember Boyce.

Yes. Just want to remind everybody, tomorrow morning, I think there's coffee with the Chief at Maggie's. So feel free to sit down and talk about anything with the Chief. So that's tomorrow at Maggie's. Thank you.

Thank you. Alright. We are gonna move on to the next item on our agenda, and it's the Puget Sound Regional Fire Authority update and strategic focus. And I'd like to invite chief Mark Jones up.

Good evening, everyone. My name is Mark Jones. I'm your fire chief. It's an honor to get to speak with you. I've also brought along deputy chief Josh Kelch. He is the city of Kent liaison. So he'll be starting to come to some council meetings and be involved. You're all welcome to call me whenever you need or or reach out, and then Josh will also act as a liaison. So a little bit about myself. My family moved to Kent in 1984. I went to Kentwood High School.

Won't hold that against you. No, Pucks. I

actually coached varsity swimming for four years at Kentwood after I had I did a service in the military in the marines. I'm an original Kent volunteer firefighter starting in 1991. So if you do that math, it's about thirty five years, serving this community. Got hired in '93. In 2000, for some reason, I wanted to be a police officer.

I got into arson investigations and became a city of Kent police officer. So I went through the full academy, did the FTO, did all of that. So I've seen both sides of public safety for the city of Kent, and I think that makes me better as a fire chief. I did some federal work with ATF arsons, and then I'd had enough. And it's time to go be a firefighter again, and then I've just, done most of the roles leading up to fire chief.

So I'll take you kind of through what we have going on in Puget Sound Fire. We're very proud of our organization. And any chance I get to brag, I'm going to take, I'll try to keep it succinct. So I always start with our mission to vision. Our mission is to professionally and compassionately help people.

Our vision is creating an environment of excellence, respect, and fun. I truly believe our employees should have fun when they come to work. This is a difficult job and building mental resiliency is a big part of my focus. So we try to make sure people enjoy coming to work. Our values serve with integrity, lead by example, be resilient, and take care of each other really are at the core of everything we do.

And I try to make sure our executive team models the lead by example behavior and that we're putting things in place to take care of each other and to be resilient, both mental and physical resiliency. So these are some fire facts. And like I said, when I got hired in Kent, we had seven fire stations. So whenever I talk about what we've become, it's it's very impressive. So we serve five cities now in two fire districts, Covington, Kent, Maple Valley, Sea Tac, Tukwila, District thirty seven, District forty three.

Our population served 270,000. Our total AV is pushing 67,000,000,000 and we're across to a 120 square miles. I used to say we go from Lake Sawyer to Lake Washington, but now we're even a little bit bigger than that. So it's impressive. This year we crested 500 employees. We have a minimum of 70 people that serve every day across 17 fire stations. And in 2025, we went on just over 44,000 calls. This is a busy place to work. And we run a lot of calls. We do a lot of time out in the community.

Most of that is EMS calls, about 30,000. 18 or 1,800 fire calls, but 204 structure fires. So those are house fires, commercial fires that we've gone to. Our busiest unit in our department is right up the street here and they ran 4,300 calls in 2025. And if you divide that by three sixty five, they're a busy unit.

Every day they're busy. Our busiest engine is also in the city of Kent up at Station 73 on the West Hill at 2,300 calls for service. Those are busy apparatus. We are internationally accredited, which is a big deal for our organization to push continuous improvement. I like accreditation because it forces us to open up our books, open up our department to peer review.

And they have teams that come in every five years from across the country and they come in and see how we're doing. And then we get evaluated against other like sized departments. We have a stable funding model via the tax levy and our fire benefit charge, which I know this group is all aware of. And we are an all hazard service provider. So we don't need to rely on other departments, other agencies to perform heavy rescue, hazmat, swift water, confined space.

We provide all of that. And this really is our service area. So we have annexed fire stations with the city of Canton Fire District thirty seven, which those Canton Fire District thirty seven had has existed as a partnership since 1974 out into Maple Valley. So it's a large service area. We've talked about how we're funded, but it's a two part, and I always stress stable funding models.

For a fire department to fund themselves purely on the tax levy and be at the whims of AV and voter approval, We have the fire benefit charge. We are the only agency in the state of Washington that has a lifetime fire benefit charge to approve by our citizens. We had one of the highest votes, about 73 to become a regional fire authority, and about 65% voted to have a lifetime fire benefit charge. So we're very proud of that. We're the only ones.

I think it's important for you to to have a look into how I look how I consider the principles of service. Now I will say, and Raf is in here, so I can give him credit. Raf Padilla has always been a mentor of mine. It's nice to have a much older gentleman that I can meet and talk with and learn from. And one of the things that he first said to me is he goes, what are you about? What are you gonna be about as a fire chief? He goes, you need to let your organization know in the first ninety days what you're about. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that and for me

Good entry.

I was just saying that I learned these principles of trust from my much older mentor.

Older mentoring people.

Yes. So at the core of everything that we do is public trust. And I love the line that public trust is a currency of our profession because that's truly what it is. And we exercise that currency on a daily basis. How we treat people, the quality of service that we give, it takes a long time to earn public trust and a moment to lose it.

So we value that most. Training for me is not optional. I push training throughout our organization both on the fire ground and professional development. Training builds confidence, so we train all the time. Our labor management partnership is key to what I want to do.

I came from labor. I was union president here for the city of Kent and the firefighter union. I've held all of the labor roles, and I think it makes me a better fire chief to understand the perspective of labor. I did steal this from Ralph as well, where the checks and balances of a strong labor partnership make us better. I want to be challenged by our labor group.

We want to be held accountable so we can make the organization better. Health and wellness is a priority for us. Last year, eighty percent of the on the job injuries were caused by cancer. And I preach a lot of cancer awareness to our RFA governance board. The cost not just to the organization and money, but the emotional costs that we go through.

Cancer for the fire service is we are listed as a type one carcinogen just being a firefighter. And so health and wellness is key. My style is servant leadership, leading by example, modeling the behavior we expect to see, assuming positive intent. We try to make space to develop others, but this piece on culture is one of my favorites where we strive to value collaboration over control and inspiration over intimidation. I think if we can get that right every day, we've got a good organization.

So in 2026, these are the things we're going to focus on. We need 100 new firefighters in the next four years on the street. So that means 25 a year, we have run two fire academies. So we need to get people through our academy. To do this, we're looking at new pipelines.

And one of the most exciting ones is partnering with the University of Alaska out of Fairbanks. They have a premier firefighting school that is vastly untouched by career fire departments going up there and meeting with them. Right now, they feed into Memphis and they feed into Charlotte. My goal is to take all of those for Puget Sound Fire. So we're doing something unique where we're going to go up there and interview people to be firefighters. That hasn't been done before. Part of the reason is it's minus 40 degrees there and dark twenty four hours a day. But we're going go up there. We're going to hold interviews. We're working with the professors to set the criteria of who we can see.

And then we're going to feed our explorers and our cadet program, our high school kids into their program and then pull them out when they're educated. We're really excited about this program. Health and wellness. We have created a new physical program. We're pulling a company out of Phoenix to do that. Phoenix Fire Department has been the leaders in firefighter health and wellness for the last thirty years at least. We're gonna model what they do. We're gonna advance our precancer screenings. Right now, there's 16 presumptive cancers, meaning if you got this cancer and you were a firefighter, you got it on the job. Like I said, the occupation of firefighting is a group one carcinogen.

And then our staff position. So we're gonna do something unique in Washington. While I feel that we do a lot of things right, we're behind the rest of the country in some of this cancer awareness stuff. Arizona, Colorado, Virginia are all ahead of us, so I'm racing to catch us up. And we're gonna do a bunker gear, our PPE protective equipment swap on the fire ground.

It's being done in Canada. It's being done in a couple of other places, so we're gonna bring it here. And when I look at a firefighter coming out of a burning building, the equipment that they're wearing is a hazardous waste. I need to get it off of them as quickly as possible, get it clean, get them in clean equipment because all of that absorbs through their skin. So we're gonna be revolutionary in that.

Our FD Cares program is at a pivot point where in the past it was to support fire department call reduction, it was to support people getting to the resources they needed. Our next wave is to overlay public health issues with this team. We're going to do some great things on addiction intervention, mental health, and then establishing new partnerships. So more to come on our FD cares. We've promoted one of our social workers up to the manager position.

She's amazing. She has a lot of vision. You'll see partnerships with University of Washington and their doctor of nurse practitioner program, where we'll be bringing interns into our area to really evaluate our bigger public health issues. And then annexations. We have two annexations we're currently working through.

RFAs were created to bring communities together, to bring fire departments together. It's the natural evolution of this system. City of Black Diamond is meeting tonight to vote on officially approaching Puget Sound Fire for annexation. Maple Valley is a contract agency. We now want to shift them into annexation.

They've already voted. So once those votes take place, we work through what governance will look like and then it should hit the ballot sometime in the next year. So we're very excited to be able to offer services to those communities. Black Diamond is growing. We haven't been through that area and so we want to be a part of that growth out there. And I'm happy to answer any questions. From the majority of the panel. Anybody left of Tammy, I don't. Thank

you chief. We do have some questions. We'll start with council member Boyce.

Thank you madam mayor. Not necessarily a question, but I just wanna just, make a statement here, you know. You know, in my ten years plus as an RFA member, you know, I watch and observe you. And, we had some tough organization that was not well ran. And each time, you was elected to go in the organization and completely turn them around.

And I just totally have been impressed with your leadership. And I just really want to congratulate you on being the new chief. Think it's a perfect timing and occasionally I do get an inside scoop about the great job you're doing. So really, know the organization is in the best of hand. I mean, you are such an awesome leader and really happy to see you in your spot. Congratulations.

I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. Council President.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you, Chief. Thank you for coming down to speak to us and it's good to see you again and I'm very excited about our FD Cares program and all the changes that you're we talked about during our meeting. So I appreciate that update and I just want to welcome Josh as well and looking forward to working closer with you. So I just want to say thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember Michaud.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. And it's nice to meet you. You for coming in and sharing your values with us. It sounds like you have some great experience, well rounded. I appreciate that. And I also appreciate your focus on health and wellness. Super important, so I'm looking forward to seeing what's coming from that. Thank you.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

Chief, I have a question, or maybe a comment unrelated to the presentation, but could you talk a little bit about the event that happened on Saturday and specifically the community partner that you've been working with in Pacific Northwest Restorations?

So we had our charity hockey game, which was firefighters versus police officers.

Not to bring up a sore subject on that front.

It was a good game. The one thing that mattered was, I don't know if I can say this, was the fight. And I think that we won that. Regardless of what the score showed, I think we follow-up on that. Pacific Northwest Restoration is a business here in Kent that is doing amazing work.

And they work with homeowners and commercial businesses that have had loss of fire and flood, any type of damage that goes in. And their business is right over here. They believe in community service in the right way. And we've been partnering with them for several years. They were a 10,000 sponsor for the hockey game.

They gave $5,000 to the pick event that we had the year before, and they've supported Toys for Joy multiple years. And I've spent a lot of time over there talking with them because they're amazing people. And I said to the owner one time, I said, how do you make money? You give away so much of your money because we're just a small part of what they do. And he said, I'm a firm believer that good deeds follow money. So our organization leads with good deeds. And it's an impressive organization that they have and they're big supporters of us in the city of Kent.

I was had the opportunity to be introduced to them and the thing that I walked away with is the amazing work that they are doing, but organizations with integrity partner with organizations of integrity. And it is clear that they see significant value in the work that the RFA is doing for the community, and I think that's why that partnership exists. So thank you for sharing that with the council and the community.

Thank you.

So, all right, any other questions for the chief? Great.

Nothing.

Thank Thank you. Okay, we're going to move into item number five, reports. Each one of the council members here not only serve on this council, but also represent the city in regional and statewide committees and conversations. It's extremely important that the city of Kent is represented in those conversations outside, both for setting a policy and for grants and funding, things like that. So this portion of the agenda is an opportunity to report out on some of those things.

I'm gonna go ahead and start. It's been a busy couple of weeks. Few highlights. Last week we had the Sound Cities Association board retreat and really the focus was on how does Sound Cities Association best represent the 38 cities that are members working proactively on communication with both the county and the state as the county is continuing to bring forward levies and ballot measures, and what does that look like for cities, and how can we convince them to engage cities sooner. I'd say we had a fair amount of conversation on that front.

It was a very good retreat, and I am excited for the work that the board is going to be doing. As a Sound Cities board, we have nine new members this year, so a lot of change, and it was a good opportunity for everybody to really settle into the work that SCA does. I also had the PSRC executive board meeting talk through the public comment that had been submitted on the regional transportation plan. Really proud of that work, you've heard me talk about it in the sense of chairing that transportation policy board, but at executive board, we had the chance to hear about the public comment. The good news is, is that the public comment, there was a significant amount of engagement leading up to the release of that plan, and so we didn't have a lot of very significant pieces of public comment, because I really feel like the advance work met the needs of the community.

So we're very close to working that through the process with the adoption at the General Assembly in May. Had a chance to attend the hockey games on Saturday, heard the chief talk a little bit about that. Final And update is today, I had the opportunity to go up to Meridian Elementary and read to a couple of third and fourth grade classes. It was a lot of fun. The reading was the reason to get in the room, but the best part was really the conversation and the questions.

It is amazing how much is going on in the minds of third and fourth graders, and the questions that they had, so I want to say thank you to Meridian Elementary for the opportunity to come up and spend the afternoon. Before I turn it over, just a reminder, the State of the City address is coming up on March 19. It is going to be held this year at Kent East Hill Operations Center, so an opportunity for the community to see the importance of that significant investment. Why why as a council you chose to support that building, getting our our operations team out of the facility for the most part that they have been in since the very, very early seventies when we were a city of 30,000 people now serving a 140,000 people. I'm also excited to say things like there's no porta potties in the parking lot.

Really important for our operations teams to be able to serve the community, and I'm excited to host the State of the City there, again March 19 at seven p. M. With that, I'm going to turn it over to our Chief Administrative Officer, Pat Fitzpatrick.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Just one quick update. We have our council retreat on Friday starting at 08:30 a. M. At the Green River Campus in Kent Station, and looking forward to seeing you there. Thank you.

All right. Council President.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I serve on King County Board of Health and PGA Sound Regional Council Growth Management Policy Board. We had our meeting last week and I'll have that update in our council newsletter that comes out tomorrow. I also had the honor of reading at Meridian Elementary and I read to fifth graders, two classes and yes, they had really amazing questions. And I read Malala and her magic pen to them and what a great book to read in this Women's History Month.

With that, we also had our council workshop earlier tonight. We had a great presentation on urban forestry. So if you have questions or comments you want to contribute, you can watch that on CAN TV twenty one or on our Facebook page. And I'm going to go ahead and get started with my colleagues. On my right here, Councilmember Troutner.

Thank you, Madam President. I sit on the Puget Sound Regional Fire Authority Governance Board. And as you heard from Chief Jones this evening, lots of good things happening with the RFA. Our last meeting, we heard the final petitions on the fire benefit charge. That is something we do every February. We consider those and take action if needed. So that is done for the year. We have our next RFA meeting tomorrow. I also sit on the regional transit committee. Our last meeting was very light. We just discussed our work plan and the next meeting we will have is March 18. That's all I have. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Troutner. Councilmember Boyd.

Thank you, Madam President. I sit on the local hazardous waste management program and on February 17 we talked about our 2026 waste mobile season, which was launched on February 13 and will be running through October 21 this year. And during our 2025 season, the waste mobile served over 10,000 customers and collected over 502,000 pounds of hazardous waste. Residential service program also has launched its youth prevention work at Ty e high school, a 2026, 2027 safer choice and hazardous waste disposal education request for applications applications that were recently closed. Business service partners also we partnered with the city of Kent to support a pilot program evaluating whether to install a tire storage storage enclosure that would reduce levels of six p p d one.

Six p p d one for those that don't know is a chemical associated with salmon mortality, which is when the tires on the streets wear off the the rubber stuff, the the drain water has to flow into the river, so it kills off the salmon. We also have a program that was completed as an investigation into a presence of lead in commercially available braiding and hair extension, finding that around one third of products contain detectable levels of lead. The policy team has also been tracking legislation on extended producer responsibility, also known as EPR, for paint and then against six PDD in tires and PFAS in agricultural microplastic nicotine policies and industry supported cookware. Internally, the program is continually to implement an assessment to evaluate how the reorganization is working to identify opportunities for improvement. And that's all for my report.

The rest will be in my newsletter. Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, Councilmember Boyd. Councilmember Boyce.

Thank you, madam president. I sit on the Sound City Association PIC Committee, which is a public issue committee. We'll meet a week from tomorrow. However, on tomorrow, there's a SCA network dinner at Mercer Island at the Mercer Island Community and Event Center. It starts at 05:30, go to eight. And some some pretty big main people are going to be there tomorrow. So if you haven't registered, it's still not too late. Talk to Tobias. I'm sure he could hook you up. So but that's tomorrow at Mercer Island. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Boies. Councilmember Larmer.

Thank you, Council President. So I'm the subject matter Chair for Economic and Community Development. And tonight during our Committee of the Whole, we had two agenda items. First one was a Lodging Tax Advisory Committee grant award. We awarded $65,000 to organizations that brought events and therefore lodging tax to Kent in January. And then our second item was a resolution imposing the moratorium on additional expanded jail correction and detention facilities. I also serve on the growth management planning committee, and we will have our first meeting March 25.

Thank you, Council Member Scho.

Thank you, Council President. It's raining outside. Wow. Okay. So at our Committee of the Whole meeting tonight, I'm the Parks and Human Services subject matter chair.

And tonight, we renewed the Salvation Army homelessness and homelessness navigation contract. The street team from Salvation Army last year in Kent served two eighty five people and got 144 into housing and 95 into shelter. So we are extending that program for another year because that is a huge success. Grant applications are also open for our human services grants. I also serve as Washington Community Forestry Council AWC representative, and the House budget basically eliminates DNR's pass through grants for tree projects, which Kent has had in the past, as well as many other cities in the state.

So the committee has submitted a letter to our legislators opposing that cut in funding. And that concludes my report.

Thank you, Councilmember Scher. Councilmember Schroker.

Thank you, council president. This evening in the committee of the whole, we passed a resolution that affirms that the city of Kent complies with the keeping Washington working act and remains focused on local public safety and support. You know, this resolution enforce reinforces that the city services are available to all and that our role as a local government is to serve the entire community. That's it. Thank you.

Thank you, council member Schorkel. With that, back to you, madam mayor.

Alright. Thank you. Councilmember Schoe highlighted we are still in legislative session up until March 12. It has been a very challenging session to say the least. I want to highlight the amount of work that Kyle Morris put in this session.

Really, unfortunately, you spend a lot of time working to get bad bills eliminated as opposed to supporting good things. It's been it's been very, very frustrating, and we still have still have a few more days to go, and we'll keep fighting that fight, but a lot of very unfortunate consequences of decisions that are being made at this point. Once session is over, we will have a full report out on what we can expect as a result of this legislative session. With that, we're going to go ahead and move on. We do not have a public hearing this evening. Next item is public comment. Do we have anyone signed up?

Have a Gwen Allen Carson.

Gwen as you are making your way up just a reminder public comment periods the opportunity to speak to the council and the mayor on issues that relate to the city of Kent or to agenda items the council will consider. This is not an open public forum and comments that do not relate to the business of the city are not permitted. Additionally, the state of Washington strictly prohibits people from using public comment for political campaign purposes, including supporting or opposing a ballot measure. We do have a three minute timer. And if you could state your name and city of residence for the record, we'll go ahead and get the timer up.

Thank you, madam mayor, and good evening to everyone. My name is Gwen Allen Carsten. I live in Kent since 2004 up on East Hill, And I just want to come tonight, I don't know if very many women know this, but March is Women's History Month. And I just want to say happy Women's History Month to all the females on this council, the the mayor, all of the women in this city who have made history. And their names may not be in the books, if you will, but we have a lot of women who have made history in their lives.

And I don't want to overwhelm you about me. I hail from Leesburg, Florida, and I came up to the state of Washington in 1972. And just by doing that, I made history. And as I came to Washington State, my very first opportunity for a job was on Mercer Island. And I don't know if very many people remember Mercer Island back in that day, 1972.

There weren't very many people that looked like me in Mercer Island at that time. And I was making history by being one of the first black African American women as a meat wrapper for Mercer Island, for Safeway, and all of that. And I did that for seventeen years. Then I did a stint as a salesperson for the United Grocers, or used to be Associated Grocers. I did that for seven years.

And then as I came to Kent and got acclimated, if you will, I learned that when you're paying taxes somewhere, you should speak up. And as a woman, I'm admonishing, not admonishing, but I'm suggesting that whenever you can, speak up. And especially when there's times for folks to scrutinize and all this kind of stuff, you want to speak up and make your voice heard. So with that in regard, I just want to say I'm the type of person that I'm beginning to be that type of person that when you see something, say something. I love living where I live, but I'm not happy about what's going on in the community as far as the well-being of the community.

And chief can probably attest to the fact that I called him a lot to ask him to sit to look into certain situations that's going on in our city. And he has been very helpful. I'm trying my best to work through things with others on the the the council, whatever the case may be. I want to continue making history in my life and that's all I wanted to come and say. Happy Women's History Month to all the women here and to all the women wherever they may be. It's a good time for us to be women and have our voices heard. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Alright. We are going to move on to the consent calendar. Consent calendar is a compilation of items that the council has reviewed, both at workshop or committee of the whole, had an opportunity to have conversation and discussion, and these items have passed out of the committee of the whole without controversy. Tonight we have consent calendar items A through I. Is there a motion?

So move.

Second.

A motion and a second. All those in favor, please say

aye. Aye.

Opposed? Motion carries seven zero. Alright, we do not have any other business this evening. We do have one bid and it is for the Riverbend Irrigation System and joining us this evening is parks director Julie Paris Candola.

Hey. Thank you. Good evening mayor and council members. I'm pinch hitting for Eric today. He's on vacation. He owes me. Happy to do it, though. Before I do walk through the bit, I did just wanna share some positive news about Riverbend. We finished exceptionally strong again in 2025. We finished the year at a 700,000 net profit, which is pretty amazing. Performance just obviously reflects strong rounds. We've got lots of playability out there and then just the discipline and resilience of the team. They're pretty incredible. And from a financial standpoint, Riverbend and the Gulf funds, very healthy. We had a beginning fund balance in '25 of $2,100,000 added 700,000 obviously for the profit and we had $1,000,000 in capital reserves.

So that fund alone has $3,850,000 in it now. We are purposely and intentionally holding $1,500,000 for cash reserve and that's just a matter of business philosophy. It's a little bit higher than what the city's financial policy requires. Obviously, from history out there, we want to have protection. We've got a few things that we've already allocated like, you know, making sure we have funding for insurance deductibles. We have capital allocated and so on. So we have still have about 875,000 that we still haven't even allocated yet. So lots of great stuff. I'm hoping to get to a workshop to give you a little bit more of a strong update. And then the only other update is the restaurants doing amazing.

Incredible partners. No problems. It's they're just doing lots of creative stuff, so we're super happy for that. So great great stuff. So turning to the item before you, this is the irrigation control system at Riverbend Golf Complex, specifically on the 18 hole side of the course.

Our irrigation infrastructure that we have in the ground, the main lines, the laterals, the the irrigation heads, they're all pretty structurally sound. The control system, unfortunately, is the original to the course, so we're talking 40 years old that this piece of equipment is. This system has far exceeded its life cycle. And even though staff try to band aid it and manage it, it really does place us in vulnerability in cases of failure. If this fails on us, the only choice we have is to hand water that golf course, which is obviously not feasible to do.

So it was one of our higher priorities. We we have probably we estimate around 4,500,000.0 of irrigation repair need at the golf course. No way can we stop and just close the golf course and do that all at once. We also don't want to do it fiscally all at once. We're going to phase that going through it.

We have an irrigation consultant on board, Greg Bear from Bear Design Group. So they gave us kind of four options to consider. We chose right now to focus on the control system upgrade because it's gonna allow us to address the weakest piece of this irrigation system. So with the outdated technology and now we get a new modern piece in there, it's really gonna improve our water efficiency usage out there. And it's weather based scheduling, it'll turn off irrigation if it's raining versus staff running around trying to turn off things.

It'll align with some of our climate resiliency goals. Then for those councils that don't know, Riverbend is actually on its own well system. This allows us to manage our own water resources a lot more effectively. It obviously increases turf playability, reduces time. Then just so you know, because you're thinking like a control system, what's that? It's half $1,000,000. It's actually pretty significant. It's a it's an irrigation management system oversees the entire 18 hole golf course. It includes central software platform, field satellite controllers for weather, communication infrastructure, integration with our pump station, and so on. It's commercial grade infrastructure that manages hundreds and hundreds of irrigation heads across multiple zones at the course.

It requires specialized installation, programming, calibration, all that good stuff. It's good. Lifecycle normally not forty years. It should be fifteen to twenty years. So once we have this, it'll stay in place now for a really

long

time. The consult our goal on the irrigation is this is phase one. I think I mentioned this a while ago. We're thinking cart barns and other things like this is our number one priority at the golf course because if our irrigation fails, we're in we're in we're kinda hurting there. So our goal is to every two years or so reevaluate and do another chunk of irrigation and do another chunk and just keep moving forward.

So it's not too much of an impact on the course or our coffers. The engineers estimate for this project phase one was 475,000. This was a formal bid and bid opening, and we have a Northwest Irrigation Contractors LLC was the lowest responsive and responsible bidder at 472,512 after tax. And so I am respectfully asking counsel to approve that contract, and I'm here to answer any other questions.

Right. Counsel, any questions? Council member Boyce.

Right

away. In fact, we I'm pretty sure Tammy's team already has a contract ready because we've had we had we bid it once and it was way too high. We had to readjust it. So now we're a little behind. Our goal is to get it done before summer golf season. So it's pretty fast turnaround.

Any other questions? Alright, seeing none, a motion would be in order.

Madam Mayor, I move toward the Riverbend Golf Course Irrigation Upgrade Project to Northwest Irrigation Contractors LLC and authorize the mayor to sign all necessary documents subject to final terms and conditions acceptable to the city attorney and parks director.

Second.

Alright, we've got a motion and a second. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? All right, motion carries. Julie, before you go, I just want to really highlight, thank you for the update on the golf course. I was sitting here thinking about back when Councilmember Boyce and I came on to council in 2012, the fact that the golf course is sustainable and then to have money in reserves, I think that is something that we were only hoping for at that time and it has come so far under your leadership. I just want to say thank you for the effort that has been put into that golf course and making it an absolute regional attraction.

Thank you so much. I had some business philosophy, but it's 100% the team out there. They really work super hard, so I'll pass the comments on. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Those were rough days. Those were rough days. Do not have an executive session this evening, so that brings us to the bottom of our agenda. And with that, we are adjourned.