City Council - Regular Meeting

Okay, I think we are ready. I'd like to welcome everyone this evening. It is July 6th, and it's 6 o'clock on the dot, and so I would like to call this meeting to order. I would also like to note the absence of Councilmember Young and Councilmember McDougall.

Mayor Porto?

Yes.

May I move to excuse both Councilmember McDougall and Young?

Second.

Great. There is a motion and a second to excuse the absence if there's no objection. Hearing none, I believe it's excused. And at this point, please join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, All right. First of all, thank you for all being here. We've got a couple of announcements to begin with. I think the slide will move up. So first, we're going to start with our fiber update. And this is actually a message this afternoon from Mayor Walters that he asked me to read. Many residents and businesses experienced significant technical problems with the city's fiber internet service in the last few days. We understand how disruptive an outage can be and sincerely apologize. We know this event was frustrating. After extensive troubleshooting over the holiday weekend, staff identified a set of underlying issues on a key piece of core network equipment that has been problematic over the last few months. Those issues happen through the interactions of several complex settings and configurations. staff resolve those issues by early sunday morning a few customers have unique home networks that require additional troubleshooting and the city staff has been working directly with them to ensure their service is fully restored as a result of this work the city's network will deliver internet service better than before consistent with its long-standing reliability since we started service six years ago While the issue has been resolved, we are not stopping there. As part of our ongoing commitment to providing reliable, best-in-class internet service, we are continuing to invest resources in our network, and the City plans to replace the problem equipment as soon as practical. We also recognize that during an outage, communication is as important as restoring service. We are on the cusp of implementing a new communications plan focused on providing timely, consistent, and transparent updates during unexpected interruptions and planned maintenance. Our goal is to ensure customers know what is happening, what we are doing, and when they can expect further updates. As a city-owned internet provider, anacortes fiber is directly accountable to our residents and businesses this accountability means that not only are we dedicated to providing reliable quality internet service but also to earning and maintaining your trust we appreciate your patience understanding and feedback throughout this event we are committed to continuous improvement and will apply the lessons learned to improve our practices thank you for choosing anacortes fiber All right. And then our next announcement is about our wonderful 4th of July events we had on Saturday. I just want to say thank you to everyone who came out to celebrate the 4th of July. And the town photo is now available for anyone to download and print at no charge from our website, www.anacorteswa.gov. And you can see the cool photo there. And also a big thank you to our Parks Department, Public Works, and Sylvia Cooper for their work in coordinating the parade. Next week, Mayor Walters will be recognizing the parade award recipients and Sylvia will be sharing a slideshow of photos from the parade. But it was a wonderful time and we appreciated having everyone come out and also for the fireworks and the partnership with the port. And then lastly, this next weekend, Saturday, July 11th, at Servik Park from 10 a.m. to noon is Kids Are Best Fest, which is always a good time. It's been going on for a number of years. And it's a free event with activities for the whole family, and a bunch of partnerships will be there, including Public Works with added things, which I will talk about shortly from our Public Works Committee report. uh... now that we've completed our announcements i'd like to start with the finance committee if anyone has a report for that reputant thank you at councilmember hot

So Ms. Moulton and I met with Finance Director Steve Hoagland and Rhonda Peck on June 26th. Ms. Clela McGrath was away representing Anacortes at the AWC annual conference that week. So Mr. Hoagland shared year-to-date sales tax and lodging tax figures, and we did some puzzling over the patterns in those revenue streams. Sales tax is up again this month over prior year, but lodging tax is down considerably, so we're trying to figure out why that would be. Mr. Hoagland reported that the fiscal year 2025 annual audit is underway much earlier than last year, which should give us much more timely results this year. Ms. Peck reported that the first phase of the new Tyler EERP implementation would be going live today, which in fact happened, hooray. Huge congratulations and thanks to Ms. Peck for managing that challenging implementation and guiding it to this huge milestone on time. Tyler's staff will be on site this week to support that live transition. The utility billing module of the new EARP is scheduled for implementation the second half of this year, and then HR and payroll early in 27. As if that weren't enough fun, Ms. Peck also guided the new Planet Capital Facilities Planning software implementation, which will be in use by staff across the city this summer to prepare the next CFP update. Council will likely consider the CFP late August or September as the CFP will feed into the 2027 budget. Stay tuned. The finance department also has a new page, as most of the departments do, on the city SharePoint site, which includes lots of useful tools for staff and for council members. I'm sure we've all checked that out. So I just want to offer a huge thank you to Mr. Hoagland and Ms. Peck and the entire finance team for keeping business moving seamlessly through all these long-awaited transitions.

Thank you. And our next committee report is the Housing Affordability and Community Services and Planning Committee. Council Member Moulton.

Thank you. The HACS Committee met on the first Thursday of the month, which was July 2nd, last Thursday. And we had an excellent presentation from Amber Lang. And she is the development director of Family Promise of Skagit County. And that's a service organization that I didn't know very much about. So it was really helpful to learn about their programs and all the different things that they do. To keep it as brief as I can, they are a national organization working with faith communities across the country. But the Skagit County one, and all of them, they shelter entire families, which is not super common. And they also do a homeless prevention and diversion program. And in Cedro Woolley, they have a year-round shelter and a cold-weather shelter that they operate. And they are helped by Bethlehem Lutheran Church. And also... They receive different grants from the county and other funding organizations as well. And they are basically a zero, they're a no barrier shelter. So that enables them to serve more people. different families than other shelters do. So if someone is still in the throes of substance use disorder or anything like that, they're helped to navigate, the people are helped to navigate that through the crisis. And then once Family Promise helps get them through that crisis where they're potentially using, then they often will send them back here to the Anacortes Family Center. So sometimes when people aren't quite ready for AFC, they can go to Family Promise, they get stabilized, and then they come back here. So it's a really great partnership. And they would eventually love for Anacortes to have a transitional center here too that does the same thing so people wouldn't have to go back and forth. as much and they are working on a like a tiny home project in Cedro Woolley and they're doing a ribbon cutting there in July. This month. But that can be found on there. I have a whole folder of really good information from them. And they are always looking for volunteers and they are doing really great work. I found it July 24th. It's called Sleepless in Skagit and it's a multi-chamber ribbon cutting at the Bellingham, I mean the Bethlehem Lutheran Church and they're gonna have a barbecue and activities and the first two cottages will be on site and open for people to look look at so they're really hoping that the community will turn out not just that West East County but people from around the county so it was really heartening to hear all the work that they're up to and The next thing we talked about was the Anacortes Family Center landing project that has been completed, and that project was funded partly with affordable housing sales tax money that our citizens voted to the one-tenth of one percent to increase the sales tax. And at that time, we promised as a city that we would split that money equally between the Family Center and the Anacortes Housing Authority to build three projects. One was the landing for AFC. One is the Olsen Building, which is still in the planning stages. That's the Housing Authority project. And the other was Plum Tree Village, which is five townhouses that have been completed. So $3 million was promised to each of those organizations. But everything is more expensive than it was expected to be because of delays and COVID and prices going up astronomically. So the Family Center has asked for us to consider, as a city, continuing to donate affordable housing sales tax past the $3 million we already committed. So the legal department, Ms. Swetnam is working on that contract and that will all come to full council for discussion. And thank you for listening to my very long report.

Thank you for that thorough explanation. So we also had Public Works Committee today, right before this meeting at 5 o'clock. I was the council member who was there, so I will do the report. First of all, Public Works is going to take a bigger, take a larger participation role in Kids Are Best Fest. So they are going to have a garbage truck. They are going to have a sweet spot. street sweeper, and then have a little construction site with sandbox, an excavator to look at, educational booths, and just to kind of talk about what all of the different things that the Public Works Department provides the city at a kid level of engagement. So that's kind of an exciting thing. The next thing we discussed is the fact that we pull our water, our drinking water, from the Skagit River, and the Public Works Department just wanted us to be aware that there are limits, the water flow expectations that can fluctuate throughout the year depending upon snowfall, and that we may be expecting sometime in the near future, next couple weeks, that the water flow could drop to about 10,000 cubic feet per second. And when that happens for more than two days in a row, we may, the water department may need to issue a voluntary water reduction for 10%. Hasn't happened yet, but we just wanted that to be on the radar for folks. This would happen when coordination with Skagit PUD, who also pulls water from that river, but you will get more information if that becomes an issue. We got a bit of an update on the 12th and K intersection, kind of leaving just west of Whitney School. We received a $250,000 grant for planning purposes to look at that intersection because it's one of our major failing intersections. So we have completed a request for qualifications there. We received about four applications, four different consulting firms to apply. And we are currently working on defining the scope and the fee for that planning process. So Public Works will bring that project probably to council early August. The grant allows for planning preliminary design to about 30%. So it's not the engineering components, but it will help evaluate the intersection and determine what makes the most sense to improve it, and it will be in coordination with WatchDot. So that is one thing that should be on everyone's radar. And then the final thing is an update on 12th and commercial. WatchDot has approved a number of the components that need to be installed, but there is a cabinet, and it's essentially the cabinet that is the brain that controls how the light functions and that is still with watchdot being assessed for them to accept and install so once it's determined that that brain controller can be provided in a timely manner with the installation of the rest of the intersection we will get started but it really needs to happen this summer in good weather so hopefully we get approval soon Moving on to, what is it? Public, no, here we go. I'm gonna get it right. Public safety, does anyone have a report for public safety?

Mayor Pro Tem?

Yeah, Ms. Hunt.

I guarantee this will be much briefer. So Ms. Cleveland-McGrath and I met with Police Chief Floyd last Tuesday and talked through some revisions to a draft of the e-bike ordinance that we are hoping to bring to council next Monday for initial read and consideration. So we hope the members of the public who are cyclists and scooter riders and whatnot and those who have children or grandchildren who use them will follow along and give us their input. Chief Floyd also described some new equipment that's under consideration to allow officers to analyze suspected controlled substance samples without having to open the packaging and potentially expose officers to harmful substances. So we'll stay tuned on that.

Thank you. Great, thank you, Ms. Hunt. Are there any other council members with announcements?

Mayor Pro Tem.

Yeah, Council Member Fantini.

Yes, so I just wanted to follow up. I know I wasn't at the council meeting last week. Three of us, myself, Council Member Cleland McGrath, and Mayor Walters were at the AWC Association of Washington City's conference this year, learning all about everything, the usual topics from infrastructure to housing to clean water, although I will say there was some really emerging content this year around AI and some really cool ways that cities are using AI to not replace workers, but to help workers do their jobs more efficiently. And there's some really practical applications that they showed that were put in place that'll be fun to kind of talk about and look at as we go forward. It was a very fun packed day, many days, three days in fact, and I was happy and honored to get reelected to my board seat again for Whatcom Skagit Island in San Juan County. Anything you want to add?

Yeah, I just wanted to say congratulations as our AWC District 14 representative. Well done. You got reelected. You had competition, so give a great speech. It was a wonderful opportunity. It was my first time attending. A lot of education, a lot of engagement with cities across the state. you know, budget challenges and revenue, stagnant revenue sources is consistent across our state. But we also had some really good discussions about how to engage younger people, how to write, how to access grants, whether it's the transportation benefit district, whether, or transportation benefit, What is it? TIB. Infrastructure Benefit? Something. TIB. There's a lot of money there. As long as we follow through on our grants. We also did, I attended an AI. There was a number of AI discussions. I think all three of us tried to go to different meetings so that we can bring this information back and share it with our committees and our directors. And it was really informative and a very long three days. It was packed. Packed to the brim. So I appreciate that and congratulations. So moving on to public comment, do we have anyone signed up or online? No, okay, easy. All right, so then let's move on to our next order of business is the consent agenda and we have eight items on it. Anyone?

Mayor Pro Tem. Council Member Hutt. I move to approve the consent agenda items A through H. Second.

Great, thank you. We have a motion and a second on the consent agenda. There's no discussion on the consent agenda, so would anyone like to pull any items? Okay, I'm hearing none. We will move to a vote on the consent agenda. The motion is to approve it. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed say no. All right, the ayes have it. So we have one item for other business, and it's Community Action of Skagit County, the mid-year update. If you'd like to come on up, we have Sandy Finney here, who is a local and been a really good partner for the city of Anacortes. So if you're ready, please share with us your update. Thank you.

I don't know where to find my... Oh, there it is. Never mind.

Is that?

Yeah.

Okay. Great. Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem, Council Members, thank you for having me here tonight. My name is Sandy Finney. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer at Community Action of Skagit County. I'm an Anacortes resident, as you know. And I'm happy to give you the mid-year update on the Anacortes Resource Center. And again, thank you for your support of that center for the past three and a half years. We really appreciate it. And I think it's making a big difference in Anacortes. Just for anybody new online who's listening or in the audience, I wanted to make sure that you knew about our vision. Our vision is a community in which everyone works together to end poverty in Skagit County. And our mission, what we do every day, is to stabilize lives, equip people to meet their goals, and build a stronger, more equitable Skagit County. um again just a reminder that our resource centers across the county are focused on making sure that we are going to where people are and they're providing an opportunity for people to meet to get immediate needs met or to get connected with somebody who can meet them long term and help them towards their goals so we have our resource centers in mount vernon and east county and of course here in anacortes So I've updated this data so that you can see how the Anacortes Resource Center has increased its services to the community over the past three and a half years. Again, we started in 2023 towards the end of the year, serving approximately 20. It might have been a little bit more than that that year. And then last year we served 328 people, and we're at about 152 people year to date as of the end of May. We also serve... education and employment participants here in the Anacortes Resource Center as well, and that has been increasing over the last three years, as you can see as well. One of the services that we provide a lot to Anacortes residents is our volunteer services for senior and disabled and our senior food boxes. Some of those are delivered, the food boxes, directly to people's houses, but we also have noticed an increase in the number of seniors who are serving directly in the Anacortes Resource Center. And then one of the places where we've seen the biggest change is in our energy and utility assistance. Of course, you can see the numbers down there. Part of that is because we have gotten more funding from Puget Sound Energy to be doing the work that we're doing and the outreach. But the other reason is literally having an office here has allowed us to be much more accessible to people that need that service. And I did want to share a heart story related to that that happened just yesterday. And I was out for a walk with my son. And I ran into an old friend of mine that I hadn't seen in 10 years, and she was with a friend. And her friend said, oh, my gosh, you work for Community Action. Your energy assistance lets me stay in my home. And she was over 60, and she was just so grateful for that assistance, knowing that it helped so many people. And she was thrilled to hear that we had an office here to make it more accessible, too. So thank you for that. I've been looking at the demographic data just over time. It doesn't tend to change much. So I'll continue to include this, but it's generally fairly steady. Generally we're seeing between 20 and 25% of people over 60 that are served here. We are seeing an increase in the number of families with children. as well. The number of people who are disabled and unhoused stay pretty steady as well for the most part. I did include one more piece of, oh, sorry.

What does FPL stand for? Oh, sorry, Federal Poverty Line. Thank you, sorry.

No problem. Sometimes we look at Federal Poverty Line and sometimes we look at Area Median Income. I did include the education data in here for the first time, so I wanted to kind of see how many people here in Anacortes that we're serving don't have a high school diploma, and so it was about 10%. A few important updates, and there's one more I think I'll add to this. One of the things I wanted to mention was that thank you again for your approval of the CDBG funds, the public service funds to go to community action. As you know, that's going to be for our education and employment programs, which will be offered and continue to be offered here in Anacortes. So it will be spent in Anacortes for Anacortes residents. and to Anacortes businesses as well. I want to make sure that's very clear. Our focus is on job placement and job creation. Our employment specialist will be increasing her hours here in Anacortes to serve the community more. I also just learned today that she grew up in Anacortes and I didn't know that, which was cool. We also had a great discussion with the team today about identifying work sites, more work sites for people to be placed at. So for our work first placements, we need public institutions or NGOs. So if anybody is interested in hosting some supported employment participants that's paid for for a while, let me know. We also have FCS, Foundational Community Supports, employment participants who we try to help find work in various places and not only find but also sustain work. These are people who are on Medicaid who have had other barriers in finding work and need that coaching, not just in writing a resume and learning how to interview, but actually learning how to advocate for themselves, how to interact in a work environment with some support. So we're also looking for work site placements for our participants there too. And I'm happy to answer questions about that. Couple other quick updates. We are working on getting an Anacortes Services page on our website. We have an East County Services page, so we're gonna make sure that we have an Anacortes Services page as well. Relatedly, we've been working with the HACS Committee on making sure that they've got resources to put on the City of Anacortes Resources page. So I'm happy to provide more information as it's needed. And pretty soon we're also working on having a page for data so that people can find data more easily on our website. And so I've suggested that we put some city specific data on there because we do get questions about that. Certainly not just from Anacortes but from other places as well. And the last update I wanted to share was that many of you knew Liz Jennings, who was our community engagement director for, gosh, 14 years. And she needed to step back to take care of aging parents. And so we have just brought on today our new community engagement director, Carson Hansen, who comes to us from the county. And it was her first day, so I overwhelmed her. But we're very, very excited to have her on board, and we look forward to having her meet all of you at various events throughout the year. Oh, I forgot that I was going to mention a quick update. One of the things we've launched very recently is something called Our Whole Family Approach. This is not a program. It's an approach to serving families that's really a mindset about making sure that we're working with families on long-term economic mobility, both for the parents and for the children. And part of the model that we're using is really making sure that we're getting their input. They're co-designing with us. They're helping us really understand how we can improve our services. This year, we're just doing a pilot. We're serving up to 15 families. We've got a parent advisory council that's going. We're compensating them for that. We're supporting them with barrier removal funds. And we're using a family assessment to really understand what not just we as an agency, but what the community can do to help really serve families' needs. And I wanted to share this here because I think this is a really great opportunity for a partnership with Anacortes Family Center or with the city or with Family Promise or the school district to really elevate and support families that want to be looking at that long-term economic mobility for themselves and their children. So we're excited about this new pilot, and I'm happy to answer questions about it. Thank you.

Thank you so much for that presentation. Let's start with council. Does anyone have any questions?

Mayor Pro Tem.

Yeah.

I have an observation and also a question. One, thanks for putting the information about the education as you were giving the statistics. I found that was really fascinating to me because I feel like growing up I've always felt like getting that high school diploma is a benchmark of not having to rely on so many social services, on not falling below that poverty line. And I think it was kind of surprising in a not good way to see that only ten percent like yeah so anyway um i do have a question so uh could you just walk me through a little bit of like when someone comes in um and they want help for instance with the energy uh assistance i can i hear a lot about that i don't know what that actually looks like can you kind of just give me maybe like a case study or somebody calls you and wants to do that and what that looks like

Sure, yeah. And a lot of it can be done on the phone. And in fact, our energy specialists are able to do a lot of that on the phone and get the information and things like that. So that's doable. People don't have to come into the office. But there's a lot of people that prefer to come into the office. And that's where they want to make sure they can bring their paperwork, they can get questions answered. And so that's one of the advantages. So a lot of times what they'll do is they'll come into the office, they will work with somebody to make the appointment that's a phone appointment, but they can come into the office to help have somebody walk them through that because it often has to be done online. So we have the ability to support them in setting up that appointment. Once that appointment's done and they do need to gather their paperwork and set up their paperwork, And then instead of having to bring the paperwork into Mount Vernon, they can bring the paperwork here, and our staff here can make sure that it's in our system and uploaded so that people don't have to make that trip back and forth. So that's essentially how it works. We do have a pretty big energy department. Almost all of them are in Mount Vernon, but the fact that we're here helps them get access to that much more easily.

Great, thank you. I was really happy to hear, too, that you're going to be expanding some hours, it sounded like, too. That's great.

Oh, we're excited about it, yeah. Thank you. To follow up on that, I just want to make sure that when the staff is talking to potential clients about this energy assistance are they also providing information about our 30% reduction in utility bills for water sewer garbage you know all of those things and then also fiber is that being conveyed to our city residents they should be I've let them know about it I'm going to check to make sure I don't know about fiber

Actually, that's something that I will follow up on.

And that and then also the property tax component. I'm sure that's countywide, I assume. But just to make sure we're not having anyone slip through that would benefit. Yeah, it would be important.

A resource specialist here, a resource coordinator here is incredibly good at making sure she's got the information. But I'm going to follow up just to make sure that. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, Mr. Currier. Yeah, Mayor Pretend. Cindy, I was curious to hear a little bit more. You had mentioned that, did you say PSE had increased their grant funding and support?

support how does that work like they kind of use you as a conduit to reach out to people in need to help offset yes yeah so what they do they they use us as the avenue to make sure that we're really reaching the people in need who have trouble paying their bills and so it's it's a way to make sure that people are getting the discounts that they qualify for so it helps take the the work and the burden of PSE doing the screening for income and eligibility and puts it on us because we have to do it for a lot of our programs anyway. So they've been increasing our actually over the past I want to say two to three years they've increased it a lot and it's it's working it's reaching a lot more people. Some of that is specifically for help for families a lot of it is help for individuals and families a lot of it is also for outreach so they want us to be making sure that we're getting the information out about the energy assistance that's available and it's working the other thing too pse we applied for a grant to get a mobile service unit so we got that grant and probably in oh in august so probably next month our mobile service unit will be up and running so we can take it to places actually have people like sign people up for services right then and there so take it to fair resource fairs things like that or to housing units where maybe people have a harder time getting transportation to our offices this will be a great opportunity but that's also paid for by a pse grant as well so i think curious too what's the financial qualification on that at a high level um I believe for PSE, it's 80% of area median income. So it's quite high, which is good because LIHEAP, which is Low Income Energy Assistance Program, is a much lower threshold. And there's quite a few people who are above that sort of 150%

a federal poverty line threshold but they're still below the 80 of area median income threshold so we're serving many many thousands of households in the in the community the last question too are have they what percentage of the outreach does community action do versus other organizations are you exclusively the organization working with them in skagit

As far as I know, we're exclusively the organization working with them in Skagit. I do know that we had a grant from Cascade Natural Gas over the past couple years specifically to work with other service providers to make sure that they were trained in how to get information out to people about the Cascade natural gas support and other energy support. We make sure people have that. But as far as PSE, I believe we're the only one. But it allows us to do a lot of outreach. So, for example, I forgot to mention that we've been at the Anacortes farmers markets at least once a month, and I think at least once it's been twice a month. And a lot of that is paid for by PSE to get the outreach done, and we've been able to reach a lot of people just coming to the farmers markets and talking. Thank you. Thanks.

All right. Any other questions from council? We do have some public in the audience. So if anyone has any questions, there's no reason not to be able to. No. Okay. Well, I just want to say thank you, Ms. Finney for coming. Um, you've been a really lovely partner for a number of years now and community action has been present through a lot of challenges through COVID and whatnot. So it's nice to have that consistency and that partnership, um, with the organization so uh it's good to see you again um and i this is the last item of business so i will go ahead and adjourn the meeting thank you all