City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Kent City Council meeting for Tuesday, 01/20/2026. If you could all please ride and rise and join me in the flag salute. Kim could you please call the roll? Thank you madam mayor.

Mayor Ralph here council president core here council member Boyce Council Member Boyd? Here. Council Member Larmer? Here. Council Member Michelle? Here. Council Member Schocher?

Here.

Council Member Troutner? Here. Thank you. Thank you.

Next item is approval of the agenda. Are there any changes to the agenda?

No changes from staff, your honor.

Seeing none, a motion would be in order to approve the agenda as published.

So move. Second.

Got a motion and a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carries, six zero. I'm gonna move right into public communications. This evening, we have several items under public recognition. The first one is an appointment to the Kent Arts Commission. I am pleased to announce, and I believe we have in the audience with us this evening, Geletti Tran Korea. Geletti. Geletti? Yes. Got it. Sorry about that. Thank you.

Jeledi has lived in Kent for nine years, and currently works as a software analyst. And she lives here with her husband and two teenage sons, as a mom of two boys that are no longer teenagers, but went through that phase. That's a full time job in and of itself. She' applied to the arts commission in her creative pursuits she' does painting and cake decorating I thought that was pretty interesting. We' excited that you have applied and are looking to serve the community in the form of work on the arts commission. Council that is on the agenda to approve. Would you like to come up and say anything? I didn't get a chance to check with you ahead of time. No pressure.

Volunteer work. I I actually did it for my son, and then he changed his mind. So I was like, I might as well do it. So so I'm glad, like I said, you know, I I've been here a little bit over nine years moving here from Chicago. So I'm glad to get involved. Thank

you very, very much. The other item we have under public recognition this evening is a reappointment to our land use and planning board. Counsel, tonight is a reappointment of Ben Reed. He has served on land use and planning board since 2023 and is eligible for reappointment and is interested in continuing to serve. Those are both on the consent calendar this evening. I just want to say thank you to all of our residents that choose to volunteer their time to serve on our boards and commissions. Are very, very grateful for the work that they do. Thank you for being here tonight. All right. The next item on the agenda is community events. Council President.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. We have an update here from assessor Schubert Center with their events happening in January and February. On January 23, they have Seattle Thunderbirds playing Kelowna Rockets and on January 2425, Tacoma Stars are playing and on January 27, Seattle T Birds are playing against Brandon Weed Kings. If you haven't been to ice hockey games, they're actually pretty exciting. A lot of fun happens.

And if you have teenage boys or just young boys, they can come home and start imitating the players. It's always fun to have give them hockey's and then start hitting their siblings. That's what happens at my household, fighting with whatever they see. But it's very exciting. And I remember last time, Madam Mayor, you were going to actually take your spouse to WWE event that's happening on February 14.

On January 30, the Harlem Globetrotters I always struggle with Globetrotters They have their one hundred year tour, and on February 1, Seattle T Birds are playing again. So, tickets are available at assessoshowarcenter.com. Thank you.

All right. With that, we are going to move on to our public safety report. Joining us this evening is Chief Padilla.

Good evening, Madam Mayor, members of the city councils. My pleasure to bring you this year's first public safety report. And it'll be all good news and it'll be relatively brief. We have two swearing ins to do tonight of our two of our newest officers. I'd like to call up officer Michael Curry and officer Nicholas Heath, please, up front.

Alright. I'll introduce each of them, starting with Michael. He is from he says his roots are firmly planted here in Washington, born in Bellevue, but he spent most of his life here in Kent where he currently resides. Growing up, he moved around quite a bit, which led him to attending five different high schools, ultimately graduating from liberty high in 1999. Before Kent, he had a successful and rewarding career managing technical support teams within the data software industry.

When we asked him about why he chose Kent, I will read what he said. It's a little different than what you normally hear me report out on our swearing in. Here's what he wrote. A simple answer is because I wanna serve and give back to the community I call home. However, beyond just calling Kent my home, Kent PD also holds a special place in my life due to the loss of my youngest son, Gabriel.

Gabriel lost his life on the night of 07/11/2023 due to a speeding impaired driver. That night, one of the first officers on scene was officer Will Morrison. Officer Morrison visited our house a couple of times after the crash. The level of compassion, humanity, and empathy he showed my family truly stuck with me over the next year and a half as I mourn my son's death and tried to figure out how I wanted to serve and give back to the community. In the 2024, I participated in the Kent Peak Police Community Academy.

On the very first night, one of their officers was talking about being a law enforcement, being in law enforcement and said, we go to people on their very worst days and in their very worst moments. He writes, as soon as he heard this statement, he thought about officer Morrison, how he showed up for his family, and that was the moment he knew he wanted to pursue a career in law enforcement with KPD being at the top of his list for where he wanted to be. That's his reason why. In terms of family, he's married to his beautiful wife and beautiful and incredibly supportive wife. And they have three wonderful children who I'll ask him to introduce here shortly.

For fun, in addition to spending quality time with their kids and attending their various events, he and his wife are also avid live music fans, primarily enjoying blues and soul. Though they occasionally venture into rap and hip hop, additionally they enjoy attending Kraken Seahawks and Mariner games when possible. Something notable or interesting about himself, he wrote, this is a tough answer, but I guess a fun fact would be that each of my dogs has a full proper name. So it goes, professor Lincoln J. Woolfington, Duchess A.

Wimperson, Lord Leopold B. Woolie why'd she make you so hard? Wigglesstein, and Countess Lolita Tres Manchidas. And so there you go. Ladies and gentlemen, officer Michael Curry.

Michael, would you like to introduce your family?

Yeah. So my wife there, Shelly, my son, Jaden, my daughter, Sophia, she's not here. She's off in college in Missouri. Behind her I have my sister, Nina, my two nephews, Bradley and Colin, and my brother-in-law, Wyatt.

Alright. Welcome. Thank you for being here. Alright. Next up we have officer Nicholas Heath. He grew up in Grand Junction, Colorado and he played all kinds of sports when he was young, basketball and football. He liked to ski and kayak as well. He has an associate's degree in organizational leadership and resource management. Before Camp PD, he served his country in the army starting in 2005 serving for six years and deploying twice. Following the army, he worked as a territorial sales manager for eleven years selling equipment to government agencies.

We asked him why he chose Kent and he wrote, I chose KPD because of the people. I've met a lot of great individuals while in training and look forward to meeting more people around the city. In terms of his family, it says he is fully supported by an amazing wife who encourages him at every turn And they have three children, which I'll ask them to I'll ask him to introduce here shortly. Something notable and interesting about himself, he wrote, I love to laugh and enjoy making others laugh. I approach life with curiosity, with a desire to learn more about myself and others. Ladies and gentlemen, officer Nicholas Heath. Douglas, would like to introduce your family friends?

Yes. My wife Julia is in the back row there. My daughter is sitting right in front of her. Her name's Miriam. And then I have Sammy. He's my middle boy and Sam Sam is my youngest.

It can be confusing at all. All right. Well welcome. Thank you guys for being here. Appreciate that. Mayor Ralph, would you do the honors please?

Raise your right hand and repeat after me.

I, state your name. I, Nicholas Heath. Do solemnly swear. Do solemnly swear. That I will bear true faith and allegiance.

That I will bear true faith and allegiance.

To The United States Of America.

To The United

States of

The state of Washington.

The state of Washington. And the city of Kent.

And the city of Kent.

That I will uphold the constitution and laws

That I will uphold the constitution and laws

Of The United States

Of The United States

and the state of Washington

and the state of Washington.

And that I will obey the rules and regulations

And that that I will obey the rules and regulations.

Of the Kent Police Department.

Of the Kent Police Department.

That's it. Thank you.

This is the test.

Mayor that's all I have for this month's report just one side note unless there are questions from the council, we are moving into a season of hiring, what I'll call a hiring surge. So I hope to do this many, many times in the next few coming months. Stay tuned.

I love that and gratitude to the council for making the hire of those additional officers a possibility and also knowing that we've got some significant number of retirements coming.

So

happy to have you back any time for this purpose chief. Any questions for the chief? All right. Thank you. Moving on, the next item on our agenda is our economic and community development report, and joining us this evening is Bill Ellis. Thank you, Bill.

Thank you, mayor. Hello, council members. Nice to see you all today. Happy New Year. I'm gonna start off with a little bit of happy news.

El Polo Loco opened, to some resounding, success. There was a ribbon cutting on the right. Two and a half hour lines, I heard reported on the opening, just pent up demand for more chicken offerings on the East Hill Of Kent and around Kent Meridian High School. I want to start with the happy note because I do have to go and address some of the things that have occurred over the last few months in terms of closures in retail. So one of the things I want to stress is that some of the closures that we have seen, some of the biggest stories of 2025, like the closure of Fred Meyer, but also Jo Ann Fabrics and Rite Aid and Walgreens, is part of a very slow moving thing over many years, which is the changing face of retail.

And so I'm just trying to contextualize that with this slide here. Hudson Bay Company, I don't know if many people are familiar with it in Canada, very large department store chain, almost four centuries in business of history. That's quite a long time. They're sort of like the Macy's or Kohl's or Pickard department store in Canada, and that was Hudson Bay Company. They shut down all their stores in 2025.

And it points to something that's been changing in the nature of retail and how do people shop. That same set of factors between online shopping and people looking for experiences and kind of moving to larger centers for retail, it's also something that's been taking place in pharmacies. So in the map on the far right there, it's over sixteen years but more than one in three pharmacies in The United States closed. Right? And so some of the model of how we sell toothpaste or basketballs or air valves and beauty cream and food product and all of that in one giant 200,000 square foot store isn't quite the model it once was.

So that's why Kroger for a lot of years was looking to merge at a national level. And when that they were thwarted in that, they exercised this decision on many different stories in the Puget Sound area, including Kents, with negative impacts and consequences for residents on the Kents East Hill. We are in communication regularly with the brokerage outfit that was hired by CBRE in Cincinnati. The local brokerage chain is Liebsen and Company. Cincinnati has the overall national portfolio for all of the Kroger closures.

Kroger had been losing market share for some time at a national level to more value discount stores like Aldi's and online. And I think one of the things that's sometimes difficult to process is that even small percentage change in the sales in an individual store, it might be something you might not notice to the profitability in your experience or how busy a place is, totally changes the value of whether or not at a national level this is the direction you're looking to go in. And so one of the things that we've been doing just locally is something that probably traces the steps that Kroger was looking at, at a national level, which is analyzing where do people shop or where are they likely to shop. And so this is something we just made in house on GIS. What is the closest store for East Hill residents before and then after this Fred Meyer closure?

So as you can see, for only about 8% of East Hill residents Fred Meyer was the closest store. If you just measured the closest transportation car route from a house to the front door of Fred Meyer, obviously more people were shopping there than 8% of East Hill Kent. But QFC was only 4% the closest store. And this is the kind of thing that plays into a decision in Cincinnati when they're just looking at their data on their dashboard. They're going, where's the nearest Target? Where's Trader Joe? Where else do we own stores? We own QFC. Will our sales increase there? Will we lose exposure to those areas of department store that are less profitable and increase our sales at something like a QFC?

So these are some of the things that go into the thinking of a retailer like Kroger. Again, this is a situation that is not great for the city in terms of the immediate impact. But one thing that I am a little bit positive about is that the level of interest that this site is receiving from a variety of either use the building or redevelopment opportunities is much higher than what I heard all those years when Tops Food was closed in the Hancey's till. Most importantly, and this is probably the most significant thing, the property owner themself is interested and motivated to sell the property. Having their name at the broke derelict store doesn't really say a lot for the company when they're trying to encourage sales at other locations around the area.

So I think they have a business reason to seeing a quick turnaround sale, which is very vastly different than an outside REIT purchasing a portfolio of commercial properties. One of which happens to include a former supermarket and not really caring what the look of that former vacant supermarket is. They're just making the straight speculative play on the real estate. So I do think this will transact this year and I do think we will see action and activity. I can't predict exactly what at this point in time and it's not really my place to, but it is getting a lot of interest and I think that speaks to larger fundamentals things about Kent, which I want to talk about.

So one of the things is what is our role? What can we actually do? So this is a bit of a clumsy metaphor, and please don't try to connect letters to silverware and goblets and plates. But I'm fond of saying that the city needs to set the table for investment. And when you talk about setting the table for investment, there's a lot of things that we just receive. There are received conditions. What is household income in your community? That's not something we directly as policymakers or staff control. We do not we inherit where the existing South Center Mall is, where the shop you know, where all the cluster of auto dealerships are. So that's already received and that kind of influences where businesses go.

And then there's the trade areas. The trade areas, does business speak for when I draw a little circle around the households and I look at the demographics of that area, do they match my consumer portfolio and my algorithm in my corporate offices in another part of the country? And then there's macroeconomic conditions. Is Microsoft hiring? Is Microsoft hiring? Where is their headquarters? So these are some of the things that are beyond our immediate local control but we need to take good stock of and really understand because how it will impact us. Then there's tools for direct intervention. There's taxes. There's the fees.

What incentive policies, if any? I know we're highly constrained in the state of Washington around public gifting rules about adopting a lot of these. And then we' further constrained in our degrees of freedom sometimes because city of Kent revenues are perhaps not as robust as others so we don' feel like the risk assessment works for us. But that' some of the things that could be more direct. How do we choose our capital spending on common goods like streetscapes, infrastructure?

All those design choices actually do play a role, and I'll go through that in a moment, on what makes sense where. I think you've heard also from the planning group, off-site improvements are also sometimes the types of things that go into a commercial real estate investment. The regulatory environment, policing, but also code enforcement. These are some of the things that help influence in a more direct way what the landscape looks like. So if you are an investor, you're someone from a developer and you're taking a windshield survey of a neighborhood for the first time and you're looking out the window and you're going, does this feel like the place that also matches my algorithm?

So there's a two part of that decision. One is more important than the other. The algorithm tends to be the threshold choice. And then there's the second decision, which is the person driving around and then making sort of an instinctual, does this feel like my brand? So we're left with often the soft influence moment there, that last headline.

So the efficacy of just sharing what we know, talking to everyone in the permit process, monitoring the permit process, talking to people who are in the know and listening to what our property owners and investors say. If I hear somebody chooses to pass on the Kroger site, I want to know why, right? And if they do choose, I also want to know why. I use those things to help present and frame a better case about why to invest in Kent the next time or to the next group I meet with. So to the first point, things that are received, things that are not really in our favor generally at this moment that we don't control, job losses in the region.

So if you look in the right hand of the screen there in orange, see San Francisco, Seattle and Santa Clara, Santa Rosa rather California. So big tech hubs, job postings on Indeed, all those tech jobs, double digit drop, 35%. So the amount of hiring that is not happening is very noticeable in the Seattle Metro right now. And one of the things that's been interesting over the last year is that those tech jobs have kind of stalled out in terms of hiring in our hub. But commercial real estate kind of felt like the wild e coyote that had run off the cliff and was just bullish anyways because they're just used to population growth, they're used to hiring in the region.

So projects were proceeding. And then the headline to your left is just from a couple weeks ago in the Wedgewood neighborhood where a local independent grocery store was part of a big mixed use development, 200,000,000 project in the Wedgewood neighborhood, had all its approvals, everyone was very excited, and it's off. Why? Well, the development team said the fundamentals are just not there right now. I think what they're reacting to is jobs aren't there. The job growth cycle that has been underwriting the investment story for these big mixed use projects in North Seattle and elsewhere isn't there now. So why are people still interested in Kent? I think they're still buying on the trend and property is scarce. But fundamentally in the immediate moment we're not in a great place. Here's another example.

You know, I just picked some examples of parts of Kent where I think it's important to say this, streetscapes do not determine what kinds of investment you can get but they do influence of what feasibly can be built or they constrain or shape the opportunities you have. So on the West Hill at the Sound Transit TOD station, lots of money has been spent creating a nice receptive streetscape. That doesn't fundamentally change what's in demand on the West Hill Of Kent near the TOD station, but it does make it more cost effective to build there. Near the Sounder Station you can see in the streetscape there with the transmission lines and right of way those very large transmission lines if you were to do a multistory building there on Central Avenue and we've been talking a lot about Central Avenue in our downtown sub area plan. If fire needs access to buildings on that road, a multistory building, they'll have to contend with large power lines.

That's very costly to underground. So the table is a little less set at Central Avenue, right? But both light rail TOD areas, different streetscapes, different funding sources to create those streetscapes. Not on its own determinative, but clearly helpful in terms of constraining what are the opportunities to build in one location or another. Then the top image there is Washington Avenue near on your left would be sort of the Dollar Tree and Safeway and what's known as the Langston Landing Shopping Center.

The other side is formerly Kmart. You can see all the cars going south. You see the little this is known to staff and we're working on it. But that little curb there, the little curb cut out, all of those cars going south, if you're the ownership from California looking at the analysis of the trade area for that shopping center, you don't count any of those cars because there's no signal that creates a left turn directly into it. So it discounts the value.

It constrains the opportunity. So these are areas where government does play a role. Doesn't fundamentally mean that but for a street signal here we would have a Whole Foods because it would still depend on demographics and a variety of things. But it does constrain maybe the investment of decision should we reinvest in a facade here? Should we build another pad?

Should I look at my tenant mix and kind of go towards one thing or another? They make these decisions partly reactive to choices the city makes. So these are areas that where we do influence. And I share all this because I think it leads me to this and something I'll talk more about on February 3 where I think we spent a number of years actually setting the table for better investment at this location, is the Naden Avenue assemblage. So going back some years we've had a lot of dialogue with counsel about this site.

I'm not going to read everything on this slide, I promise you, but I wanted to have it up again, which is that back to 2017 we changed the zoning to allow for manufacturing. We did trial balloons with a request for qualifications not a proposal with the development team. The market didn't want to cooperate with us in 2023 on a speculative bid. The market is still not in a speculative place but the site fundamentally has always had certain attributes that lent itself to a build to suit for a manufacturing campus. It has massive power, big power substation.

If you drove by today, you'll see PSC work crews upgrading that substation. It has easy access to two state highways. It has big transmission lines. Along the western edge of it is a King County sewer main. Generally that's negative because you can't build on it. But if you have a manufacturer, wastewater right into the main hub of the sewer line is actually not such a bad thing. It's actually a positive. We've been doing a lot of work with the Roundabout and Willis Street. We have MeetMeMeeker on the northern edge. So we've done a lot to actually, over a period of years, set the table for a better kind of investment here.

So we did an RFP a few months ago, and we had, thanks to Council President Choe's, three council members sit on the selection panel. We got discussed with many potential developers and investors, but three responded and we interviewed them and we've made a selection. Come February 3, we'll bring forward that proposal and go into more depth on a purchase and sale agreement for that development team. But I did want to revisit some of the reasons why council has gone in this direction. So on the left is some place for AI data.

That's data where you're actually being monitored most people are, unless you deselect your apps where you're going. So in an aggregate way, retailers and others kind of know how many people are going in and out of an area at a time. So if you're looking in Downtown Kent, where are the peak hours of activation? Where are most people's cell phones wandering into the downtown areas and wandering out? You know, it starts picking up around middle of the day as you would expect and slopping off around six or seven.

It's a workday type of audience in the downtown. If you look at the jobs in our downtown on the right hand, the orange band, those are industries that are traded sector. That means industries that are primary industries. Think IT, think manufacturing, think a company that is producing a product or service that is bringing money from outside the area into your downtown. That's the little orange band. Pink band is public administration. So think the regional justice center, thinks those workers at the Centennial Center. That's the pink band. And we know some of the Centennial Center folks are going to relocate in the coming year. The blue is non tradable.

That's retail, that's social services, it's public health. It is jobs and occupations that are linked to industries that are servicing people in the local area. So the growth in that has been somewhat steady, but the overall numbers is only a few thousand. So one of the things we talked about a while back was that in our downtown to have a diverse base of many different types of uses, many types of jobs, if we were to achieve that we needed to have other types of kinds of businesses into the downtown, kinds of businesses that bring in greater revenue. This is a retread of a slide from a few years ago, so I apologize, but I will be updating this shortly.

The bubble on the left, South King County, over $13,000,000,000 sorry, yeah, dollars 13,000,000,000 from the aerospace industry into South King County. It is one of the few bubble charts we can create where you show the East Side, Seattle, and South King County, and South King County wins in terms of just overall size and impressiveness. The aerospace industry in South King County is critical for us, partly because it is a way of bringing value and dollars into our communities from the outside that we don't really have a rival to. On the East Side, it may be a smaller portion, but they have a lot of other things going on, biotech or cloud computing. We don't really have those same opportunities.

This is again from a few years ago, but the story is still true. Direct impact of the aerospace sector in Kent is over $4,000,000,000 with a B. Just Kent. Not Kent Valley, not anything else Kent. The number of aerospace jobs? Thousands. The indirect impacts that they have for all the spending that they do? Hundreds of millions. The indirect jobs that they create? Thousands.

The induced jobs, that's the jobs that they indirectly support that then purchase other services. And that trade area story? Thousands more, right? So if we're looking to increase the number of the amount of economic activity in our downtown, aerospace manufacturing is the high value industry in our backyard. We have the most chance of recruiting at this location and for benefit to our city and to our tax base.

Why does that matter for tax base? Well, if you look at in orange there is the Kent Downtown Partnership boundaries and the Fuchsia is the regional growth center. You look at our parcels downtown, how many of them are exempt from property tax? It's actually a shocking amount. Something like 63%, 63.7% of the square footage in our regional growth center is exempt from property tax.

Our regional growth center is almost two thirds exempt from property tax. Within this area, the need to actually generate revenue, pay tax, recruit primary industry, bring jobs with indirect and induced spending couldn't be more acute. This is something we're talking about in downtown sub area plan as well. So these are all things that I think get to the why ahead of the what on February 3 for the conversation about the proposal we received. All right.

So that's a lot. But Opportunity Zones two point zero. This is a federal tax incentive program that the city of Kent will need to pursue in the year 2026. The federal government created Opportunity Zones ten years ago in 2016. I'm not going to do a deep dive on all the best practices but I have been attending some trainings.

We did not have any opportunity zones one point zero in Kent. It was a process by which the National Federal Government Congress created a capital gains forgiveness program for investments in certain severely distressed census tracts that the governor's offices are tasked with creating the process of selecting. Washington State gave that responsibility to King County in 2017. King County put a lot of these tracks in Skyway and in White Center and in So To and then in Federal Way. It's kind of like a map all around Kent but not including Kent.

I'm very determined that the city of Kent, given the fact that almost 83% of our commercial land areas are likely to be eligible for opportunity zone two point zero, not be left out come application season June and July of this year because once every ten years we don''t get another opportunity at this. The state has not created an application process as of today. A lot of states are creating through their legislators sweetener programs, ways that state taxes piggyback on that. I think none of that will happen in Washington state. But within, if all other things are equal, and we know they never are, but if all other things were equal, the influence to choosing one location to invest versus another there will be pretty clear for those cities that have opportunity zones and no capital and a capital gain a pathway to capital gains forgiveness versus those that do not.

Right? And so for us where we will have the vast majority of our commercial industrial lands is eligible, we need to be very concerted in our focus on going to the state and saying these are the policy cases and policy reasons why there will be a lot of positive benefit and leverage if you select Kent. It is a rare opportunity for dollars sheltered from federal taxes to have an incentive to actually be invested in Kent. So that would include our downtown. That would include need.

That would include our super fund sites. This could include our industrial valley that we heard earlier today experienced the confidence shock of a levy failure. There is a lot of reasons why we would want an incentive program, especially if we cannot afford those incentive programs ourselves. So this will be a key focus of my division over the next few months. Probably enough said.

Having said that, we haven't forgot about small microenterprise. We continue to monitor the work of business impact Northwest and the drop in hours. They served about a couple 100 businesses last year. We worked with the Community Business Connector Program in the Kent Chamber, did a lot of outreach, sort of going out, talking to hundreds of businesses door to door and understanding, taking surveys and basically doing a health checkup on how our little businesses are doing and then making the connections and referrals as need be to technical assistance or providing that assistance themselves. So we continue to work with partners and we continue to think about ways that we can invest in ourselves.

And actually, Kim didn't pop up on his own unfortunately. I want to play a video. Yeah, no, I'm sorry. Let me just frame it a little bit. A couple months ago, we had at the Excesso Showers Center an employer event with over 800 students from around the region. It is an outgrowth of our industry driven Kent Valley Air and Space employer table. It was a really big success. It was something that we asked our industry members from the aerospace table drawn from Renton, Tukwila, Kent and Auburn, what do you most care about? What do you most want to do? And they just, we want to talk to young people about what's unavailable in our aerospace industry.

We think this is kind of a hidden thing. Even if we don't we're not hiring ourselves right now, we want to introduce this to young people. So we took the challenge. I just want to recognize my colleague, Michelle Wilmot, absolutely instrumental, ran the show in terms of putting together all the organization for this. And January 30 just got recognized by the U. S. Conference of Mayors as a best in showed, otherwise innovation grant for the Kent Valley employer table work. On the sidelines, I met with philanthropists who were kind of walking the floor, seeing what we were doing, talking to employers. And I just wanted to show a video here in a moment to kind of explain the video does better justice than a thousand words. Yeah, Kim, if you could please just hit play on that.

I beg your indulgence for two minutes.

We are at the first annual Future in Flight Expo talking about advanced manufacturing aerospace and outer space with almost 800 high school students. There are companies from all over the Kent Valley here helping them connect, and I think the biggest thing that I'm most excited about is explaining to those students what career paths are available, what options are out there because these are jobs that are not you don't wake up and say, I wanna be a firefighter or a police officer, those kind of things. But these jobs, super technical, really good paying jobs. And unless they know about those opportunities, they're never gonna know how to attain them.

The Penn Valley is a hub of aerospace activities with a lot of the leading employers in the space industry as well as the aerospace industry. And Boeing obviously has a presence here as well as Blue Origin and other companies. And it's really exciting for students to be able to see their future in these industries, whether it's designing the next rocket or spaceship or whether it's building an airplane or contributing to the engineering of and design of our products. We're just really excited for students in this area in particular to have the opportunity to see the jobs that are located here in their hometowns that they could access in the future. Having an opportunity to be able to

come and speak to over 700 students across Washington State or at the South Puget Sound area, all in one location, they all have an aptitude or interested manufacturing and hands on aligned skills. This is like the mecca. Right? We're able to come and share with them all the different opportunities that our company has available for them. We ensure that they understand the alignment of their academic programs to our critical skills, and we're able to engage with other industry partners who are looking for the same skills and supporting those students and finding opportunities there if it makes more sense for them.

Yeah. I'm super excited to be here today. Students are very interested in the space industry, and many students were not aware of the large, collection of space industry that we have here in the Pacific Northwest. So it's been really, you know, like, eye opening for me as well.

I I find it amazing. It's it's pretty cool to be here, like, being able to communicate with the people behind. But what we see every day, it's really interesting. When you know more about it,

blow it it blows your mind.

At my high school, we have a lot of aerospace, like, activities. We have an aerospace class. We have a like, we have a shop, and we have a wood shop. And it's really important, especially for our youth, to be able to get these new opportunities and especially for someone who is a woman in a field that is mainly male dominated. Having these resources out there for everyone and just being able to see that aerospace is such a very diverse, very welcoming and accepting community is just really nice for me as a student and just really nice for me also as a woman, and it makes me feel very proud

of where we are right now. Just a huge thank you to all of our sponsors that made this possible. This is not something that we could have done alone. We had incredible partners and sponsors and really, really grateful.

Thank you. So it was it was a great event, and we wanna build on that and leverage off of it. And we had over 20 employers present and we want to make sure that everyone who participated or sent their employees to staff a table sign up for the guest speakers bureau so that this event works hand in hand with some of the work I've been sharing with you with this Kent School District, that we have recruited potential mentors, that we are getting students prepared and excited about it. So it fits into a part of a strategy and I think it was important to say that the employers wanted to do this. We didn't say, hey, let's do a career fair.

They said, no, we want to do a career exposure thing. And so we delivered that to what the employers wanted to do. And one of the key things is that we had the employers on one of the side of the hallway, and then on the other side of the hallway, we had all the potential training providers and education programs that you could sign up to to actually get access to that career. So it was kind of a it was an all day affair, and it just takes a lot of logistics to arrange something like that and get teacher credit accreditation from Puget Sound Skills Center and I'm sorry. Not Skills Center, Puget Sound ED in order so that teachers who are participating could clock hours.

It was just a lot of work and effort that went into that. I just wanna thank Michelle again for that effort and the demonstrated success there. And just again point out that this nests into a larger strategy and vision for the city, which is this is our prime industry. How do we reinvest in it? Reinvest in ourselves, our young people to be a part of that industry, And how do we make that exposure widely inclusive?

I think these are all key things to share when we are thinking about fundamentally what's going to move the needle on things. This actually comes back to who lives in your community, what types of careers do they hold, what can they invest in, where do they shop, what do they do, all of those things. When I talk to a housing underwriter, top three question, what are the jobs like in Kent, What's the employment projections? What are the education levels? All of that goes into underwriting as to whether or not any type of housing project pencils.

So it is, to me, a fundamental thing upon which a lot of other things rest. And with that oh, last slide says questions. Oh, no. I don't want to do that anymore. So thank you. Yeah.

All right. Bill, thank you so much. Counsel, any questions for Bill?

All

right. Thank you very much.

Thank you. I'll be back. Want to point out, we've got Michelle in the back as well. This dynamic duo of work in economic and community development, Well known around the region, and they are absolutely driving the conversation to Kent, making things happen here, and could not be more grateful for that. So, thank you to both of you.

Thanks, Michelle. Thank you, everyone.

Yeah, very much. All right, we are going to move on to reports. So, counsel not only serves here at these meetings during our normally scheduled first and third Tuesdays, but they also serve on committees around the region and the state making sure that Kent is being represented in those conversations both around policy development and funding opportunities. So, this portion of the agenda is really a report out of the work that's being done outside of council. I am gonna kick it off just a couple of highlights had our our first skip South King housing and homelessness partnership meeting on Friday.

I was reelected as vice chair and we worked on the housing capital funds, awards that will be going out to both build new affordable housing and make sure that we're maintaining the existing household in South King County and council you'll be hearing about that work in upcoming months. Had an opportunity this morning to spend about four hours waiting in front of the Washington state legislature for one minute of testimony. We were signed up to give testimony in front of the house and they cut off public speakers before they got to us. After four hours give one minute around our flock cameras. There are several bills regarding automated license plate readers in Washington state.

The two big concerns that the city has is around retention and how long we have access to those records so the both bills that have been presented in both the house and senate have a seventy two hour window so that means if our office is doing ask access that video within seventy two hours they no longer have access to it and as you can imagine when you' investigating a crime sometimes it takes more than a couple of days to know what you' looking for and to track things down so we did ask for an amendment to extend that to thirty days. The other problematic thing in both of these pieces of legislation is the limitation on misdemeanor crime so the bills both are indicating that the cameras can only be accessed for felony level crimes that leaves a lot of pretty serious crimes on the table that we would no longer have the ability to use the flock cameras for so those are the two amendments that we asked the senate for in our testimony this morning and then because we didn' get the opportunity to testify in the house sent a letter to those committee members asking asking for those two amendments to that legislation.

As you can imagine spending a majority of time these days on what' happening in the legislature. Shout out to Kyle Moore and all the work he' been doing in getting everybody organized and in place over 200 bills that were currently tracking it' overwhelming. Things are moving very quickly getting set for hearings, they' moving through those committee meetings quickly. I talked to the mayor of Normany Park who was also signed up to testify in a bill today and got cut off before they allowed him to So, that seems to be a little bit of a theme. So, we're going to keep working to make sure that Kent is being represented at the legislature.

Final thing I want to mention, late this afternoon, an opportunity to meet with senator Patty Murray, along with the mayors of Tukwila Pacific, council member Stephanie Fain, and the King County Executive to do some debriefing around flood response, and then what what recovery looks like, and what will be needed. I have to say she was very, very receptive to the conversation. You heard Chad talk about it, the issue with the gauges, and what is being released from the dam versus what it's showing up at in the valley, and how that could be help prevent some of the flooding. We' ve sent a request to her to take a look at that and she talked a lot about the fact that the state is getting ready tomorrow to submit their the first round of requests for federal dollars. Cross your fingers pray whatever it is that you do there' there' a lot at stake in in whether or not we get recovery dollars from the federal government.

I want to wrap up my report council you heard a presentation about the amazing work that was done during the flood response tonight from all of our departments and the person that you heard coordinate that presentation was pat. I' going to put him on the spot right now and I want to very publicly say thank you for everything. The amount of work that pat did over that period of time and now to coordinate everything that you saw make sure that the meetings were happening and departments were talking to each other and that we were talking to the county and the state and all of those things every decision that was made every process that we had everything that we are doing going forward was all coordinated by him. And, I cannot say thank you enough for that amazing work that has been done and is continuing to be done. So, thank you, Pat.

Yeah, please. It's a big deal. It's a big deal. This is and there is I was going say there's no playbook. There's plan, but it's not something that we have been through as a city. So, just really, really grateful for that. Thank you.

Well, you, Madam Mayor. I think I'm up next.

You're next.

I'm just going to take it over. And I'm just going to deflect a little bit because this organization is as good as the leadership in this organization, and you have top notch people in every department. So it's because of them, and it's because of the culture they built in their departments that that work got done the way it did. Thank you, but they really deserve that credit. From my end, I have one thing to mention here.

Otherwise, I refer to my report in the council agenda. The other bill we had on this evening for hearing was a bill that would essentially eliminate for all intents and purposes the ability of the city of Kent to regulate in any way illegal camping, anywhere within the city, be it a park, ball field, or a sidewalk. So today, big shout out to Kyle Moore, our government relations manager. In the a matter of about eight hours, he was able to pull together multiple cities who joined a letter that that that the city also joined on to send the committee. I do not know how the hearing went because while we were in here, the hearing was going on.

This is round two of this bill. We faced the same bill last year. This version is much more strenuous in its regulation and essentially, for all intents and purposes, eliminates a city's ability, any city in the state of Washington, to regulate camping. So I just wanna remind you heard me talk about this last year, and we have invested millions, if not billions of dollars in the region, in parks and sidewalks. You think about the billions of dollars the state has dedicated to orcas and salmon habitat.

And a couple years ago you heard a presentation from staff regarding, oh, the name is escaping me now. Chad, West Hill

McSorley.

McSorley Creek, which is the headwaters to a $20,000,000 salmon recovery project that the state of Washington is working on. That is a battle that we are constantly in to try to deal with homelessness. That area is constantly becoming a garbage dump, and we, the city, we're investing thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a year to try to keep that area clean. This bill, if passed, eliminates our ability to do that completely. So we signed on to this letter.

It has been issued. It went out today, and we're hoping that this bill will end consideration immediately. So I have sent that to you all, you can take a look at that. If you have any questions, you can call myself or Kyle Moore. So thank you.

Thank you. All right, Council President.

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

First, I

want to say Council Member Boyce is not here to hear you say good things about Pat, so he definitely missed out. You should send him a recording and let him know to watch this for sure. Thank you, Pat, and thank you to all of our departments. I said that during our workshop earlier for the amazing teamwork they did and worked together with RFA on our flood issues we had. I serve as the chair for PJ San clean air agency advisory council.

We had our meeting last week and we had updates on our comprehensive climate action plan. I will have that information in our council newsletter that comes out tomorrow. I was elected as the Vice Chair for Caucus for PGSA Regional Council Growth Management Policy Board. And, I'll have information on that meeting as well in my council newsletter. As we mentioned earlier in our council workshop tonight, we had a very thorough presentation on all the work that went through during flooding and how all of our departments work together and how they were all coordinating and communicating with our residents and ensuring that our businesses and residents were safe.

So, please watch that on Kent TV twenty one on our Facebook page and or on our YouTube. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and get started with my colleagues on our council reports and I'm actually going to change it up and start on this side. Councilmember Troutner. Thank you, Madam President. I am the subject matter chair for public works.

We had one item earlier this evening, and there will be information on that in the newsletter that we'll go out tomorrow. I am also on the regional transit committee. We are not going to meet tomorrow so that members will have an opportunity to attend the Association of Washington Cities Action Days in Olympia tomorrow. And I am also chair of the Puget Sound Regional Fire Authority Governance Board and we will have our regular meeting tomorrow evening. That is

all I have. Thank you.

Councilor Maboy.

Thank you, council president. I sit on the advisory council on the aging and disability service and also I sit on the arts commission committee and also sit on the local hazardous waste management program committee and at all three of these meetings I took down notes and a lot of this information will be conveyed on my newsletter that will be coming out tomorrow. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember Larimer.

Thank you council president. So I'm the subject matter chair for economic and Community Development. We had one information only item earlier this evening. It was an introduction to phase two and three of our Recode Kent effort. So you can catch information on that. We got a lot of detailed information about what's going be included in these phases. You can watch the Committee of the Whole meeting playback for some of those. I also serve on the King County Growth Management Planning Committee, and we have not met yet this year. So I'll have more on that when we do. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilwoman Michelle.

Thank you, Madam President. I serve on the Human Services Commission, and at our January meeting, we had brief presentations from four organizations: Indian American Community Services, Open Doors for Multicultural Families, Orion, and the Chinese Information Service Center. Also, this is a grant application year, so we are the commission is gearing up for that. Grant applications open up on March 2, and they're open until April 6. Staff is holding multiple application assistance workshops, and they're always available by phone or email. And you can email them at humanserviceskentwa dot gov if you want to attend those workshops.

Thank you. And Councilmember Schocher?

Yeah. So, on the past couple of months, I had the opportunity to meet with so many folks across Kent and really get to know folks and their concerns and priorities and what they want to see out of the city. Now, since being sworn in, I've been doing that more internally and meeting with city staff and spending the last couple of weeks really knowing how the internal processes work. Thank you, and

we'll make sure to get you on some boards and commissions in the future. So, thank you. With that, back to you, Madam Mayor.

All right, thank you, council president. Moving on, item number six is public hearing. We do not have one this evening. Item number seven is public comment. Kim, do we have anyone signed up? We do not. All right. Moving on to the consent calendar the consent calendar is a compilation of items that the city council has considered at both workshops and committee of the whole they' had an opportunity to receive presentations ask questions, and have discussion around these items. They have passed out of committee of the whole without controversy. Tonight, we have items a through m. Is there a motion to approve the consent calendar?

So move. Second.

Got a motion and a second. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carries six zero. Item number nine is other business. We do not have any, nor do we have any bids or executive session. That brings us down to the bottom of the agenda. And with that, we are adjourned. Have a good evening.