City Council - Regular Meeting

Session of the Westland City Council. It's Tuesday, 02/03/2026. The first item of business as always is to approve our agenda tonight. So I would entertain a motion for that.

Thank you, mayor. I move to approve the agenda for the February 3 work session of the Westland City Council.

Second. It's been moved and seconded to approve the agenda for the February 3 city council work session. Any discussion? Seeing none, you can call the roll, please.

Councilor Bonington? Yes. Councilor Brake? Yes. Council president Baumgartner? Yes. Councilor Groner?

Yes.

Mayor Bialystoky?

It worked.

Yes.

My light's not

on. Thank you. So the agenda passes and is approved. And that takes us to, public comments. And I think we have one.

We have one comment. Jeff Gardner.

You can come on up, Jeff. Welcome. He shared with me it's his first time at a city council meeting tonight, so he's excited to give

his comments.

Cool. Cool. Just yeah. Go ahead, and then, just make sure the green light's on on the microphone. And well, Ken will help with that. And then we, just state your name and city residents, take it away. You got three?

Not much. Legal name is Jeffrey Gardner. Go by Jeff. My wife and I have lived in West Linn for twenty two years, and I'm here to express our view about the city council considering whether to allow marijuana dispensaries in Westland. And I think it's no surprise that dispensaries are not allowed in Wilsonville, Sherwood, Canby, and Lake Oswego.

It's for us at least having lived here for so long, a quality of life issue. It's not a matter of legality. It's not a matter of the people that purchase the product. If they wanna get the product, they can go across the bridge to Oregon City. It's it's a saturated, well established market over there, whether it's on Main Street or up the hill on on Wallala Avenue.

I understand the city is concerned about revenue. I understand that. But I think the marginal revenue the city might produce from having dispensaries here, given the limited areas where they could operate, it's not gonna be material in the long run. The legality, as I said, is not the issue. In our view, my wife's view and mine, Westland does not need dispensaries. If the city is gonna move in that direction, we believe that it would be appropriate to have it on the ballot. Let the people decide the issue. And I thank you.

Thank you for your comments. Any any other comments? No other comments. Okay. With that, we can go to mayor and council reports, and reports from community community advisory groups or city business in general. It's been a couple weeks since we last met. I'll start with council break.

Thank you, mayor. I just wanna comment that I attended the vision forty three open house that was held at the Robin Wood Station, and we had a very large turnout. I was very happy to see that many people, there to talk about some of the zoning changes that are being proposed. There will be another open house, next week on Thursday at the Library Community Room. So anybody that missed it can attend that one. And it is very much an open house forum, but there will be staff and consultants and myself there to answer any questions.

You've done a great job as our community liaison, city council liaison to the Vision 43 project. Thank you. And when is the next one?

A week from Thursday.

A week from Thursday.

6PM, I believe.

Okay.

At the library.

Thank you for that report. Council president.

Thank you. I actually had a pretty quiet week, although I did attend a public meetings training virtually for the Willamette Falls Locks Authority.

Councilor Griner?

Thank you. I attended the, Transportation Advisory Board board on the twenty first. They're working on the transportation TSP update. They suggested that we invite TriMet to come talk to us about the bus routes and our views on that. They also suggested we ought to be discussing partnerships with Wilsonville and their bus systems.

And one of the things that occurred to me is, self driving cars are becoming, more of a thing. It occurred to me that a self driving van or bus is a possibility. I don't know anybody who sells one yet, but it certainly sounds feasible. And considering that the salary of the bus driver is a large fraction of the cost of running a bus line. That might be a possibility. So, that's my comments for the day.

I just read that Waymo may come to city of Portland, the driverless cars that they have in San Francisco. Right? Interesting. Thank you for that comment on transit. Councilor Bonington?

Didn't have any advisory group meetings in the last two weeks, but think it's worth mentioning that I spent quite a lot of time discussing the dispensary issue with the people, mostly online. I did an interview with KATU on Friday evening about it, and it's certainly gotten a lot of attention. I appreciate public comments like yours tonight. I think that's very helpful and exactly what we were seeking. So that's all I got.

Thank you, Councilor Bonington. I attended a meeting of the Metropolitan Mayors Consortium a couple of weeks ago, and then also all of us were at the tour of the Tumwater Village site with the Grand Ronde Tribal Council and staff and had a great time along with our city staff taking a look at all the progress they're making on their Oregon City project and discussing future collaborations. And I posted a little post on my Westland Mayer Facebook page with some pictures from the day and my thoughts. So anybody curious can go there and take a look at that. And other than that, it's been a busy couple of weeks.

With that, anything else from reports from community advisory groups? Seeing none. We can move on then. The next item is a proclamation before we get to our joint meetings. This is a Black History Month proclamation since it's February, and I will read it. Whereas the twenty twenty six Black History Month theme, a century of Black History Commemorations, recognizes the one hundredth anniversary since Doctor. Carter G. Woodson's initial observance in 1926. And whereas Black History Month honors the contributions, resilience, and cultural heritage month of the black community. And whereas the this theme explores how Black History Month has transformed understanding and the status of black people in modern society.

And whereas this theme highlights the role of commemorations in building cultural identity and fostering pride within the black community. And whereas this theme emphasizes the ongoing fight for equality and justice through historical reflection and education, and whereas this theme acknowledges the thousands of often ignored stories of black scientists, artists, leaders, and everyday community members, and whereas this theme encourages deeper understanding of the legacy of black history and inspires community members to recognize that telling an inclusive and accurate history strengthens our shared democracy and enriches the collective narrative of our nation. And so now, therefore, be it proclaimed by the city council of the city of Westland that February 2026 is Black History Month, and we encourage all community members to participate in Black History Month activities and to reflect on the profound contributions of African Americans to our nation's history dated this day of 02/03/2026. Thank you, everybody. And, with that, we will move to, agenda item six, which is the police review and recommend committee annual report and public meeting.

And I'll turn it over to city manager, and I see chief Rollins back there too.

Yes. Indeed. My role is very brief here. I just want to mainly thank the members of our Police Review and Recommend Committee. This group has existed since 2023 and is part of the council and the city's commitment to transparency and accountability in our police department.

We have volunteers appointed to this task by the the mayor and council, and they spend many hours doing this work, meeting with city staff, following the city ordinances, learning about our department, and learning about the community and our policing. And we have a great group. We thank the council for awesome appointments, and they ask a lot of questions and are doing the work that you ask. In the ordinance, there's a requirement of an annual report, and they'll be introducing that and talking it through while I have the podium. Also like to thank some of our key staff that are here.

Deputy city manager, Lisa Preston, is kind of the point person. Police department, very involved, and chief Rollins, very very present at the table as well as our city attorney. So thanks to all the staff too. So thank you for being here tonight, and I'll turn over the time to you.

Hi. Good evening. My name is Sarah Warbaugh. I've been in the committee now for, I think, years. No. Three years.

I'm sorry, Sarah. Can you lean forward just a little bit? Yeah. Because it doesn't get recorded.

Mary Okay. Yeah. No I will note that we thought another member was going to be here to do most of the speaking, so Mary and I will be winging it a little bit tonight. But we did draft a report, which hopefully you have all reviewed, and this is just in essence a summary of that. Do you want me to start?

So the the big one of the big things that happened this year is that we had a leadership transition in the police department. Chief Mahouma retired. We thank him very much for his insight and candor and and being such an active and involved participant in this process, and we are excited to work with Chief Rollins. The committee membership also changed in this past year. Our alternate member became a full member of the committee and we have appointed a new alternate. I think that's right. Then a few people were reappointed, including me and you. Yeah.

So the committee remains at seven

people with one

with one alternate.

Why don't you talk about this because you know more about it.

Sure. So I'm hitting the highlights and we're not winging it. We're well prepared. I helped write this.

Yeah. Just for the record.

My name's Mary Carlson. I have been on the committee since its inception. So I believe that's been three years. One of the things that we engaged in this year were three different trainings. One was on labor and employment law, the other was really talking about best practices.

But the one that I think was most compelling was we had a trainer come in and talk about bias. She called it in implicit associations and bias training. And it was as much for us as committee members as it was for us to try and discern whether or not bias was happening within the narratives that we would evaluate when looking at these complaints. So I honestly, I found it really a very helpful training, and it's one of the benefits of serving on this committee is to get that kind of an education. So thank you for whoever set that up.

I really appreciate it. Just to to quickly recap, our job is essentially to look at complaints against police officers. And the way we evaluate those, our our job is then to determine are we gonna move forward with additional internal investigation? Or do we recommend that it be referred outside the department for an external investigation. And the way we look at those complaints is we review the narratives usually written by certainly written by the complainant, but also the narratives submitted by the officers involved.

In addition, we also review a lot of body cam footage. And the I I guess I wanna reiterate what John Williams just said. It's an exhaustive process. You know, we're there for two hours and we generally will review one complaint. We're sometimes lucky to get through one full complaint.

So it's I I I want to just reassure you, we take this job really seriously And I think I would say we are doing a good job. As a result of all of that, we have looked at, I believe, 11 complaints in 2025. And to put that into context, there were 13,000 calls for service. So I think we can feel pretty good about that. Most of those calls were actually, there were 4,800 contacts for traffic stops.

So we're trying to get a better sense of how those complaints fit into the larger picture. And so they're they're quite quite microscopic when you think of 13,000 calls for service. And so we also try to come up with some sort of general sense of are we moving in the right direction. And I think as a group, we sort of concluded that the recommendations that we had made in previous years, which had to do with improving customer service, Those recommendations were heard because we saw trainings that the police department underwent to address customer service. And one of those trainings was called the heart training, which actually I believe city employees also went through.

And it's really a training designed to help officers deescalate. And so the sort of the general sense was that there has been an improvement with regard to customer service. We had, I believe, just one or two additional complaints over the previous year. But that's pretty much a flat line, I would suggest. Anything to add?

To that, not really. Just that a lot of the complaints this year were resolved by body cam footage and reviewing body cam footage and comparing it to what the complainant either perceived or noted in their complaint. And so, that is always very helpful for us to review that. And then, I guess the last thing to talk about is that a lot of our focus, because we were a new committee and a new entity, was on our own internal processes, and we've implemented a couple of improvements this year that have been really great. We have a committee point person.

We were pretty committed to having a non hierarchical structure and not having a chair, but having a person who's sort of temporarily in charge has proven to be a benefit, and that position rotates quarterly. We also have a staff point person who is Alyssa, who is amazing, who keeps us all on task and sends out agendas. Really, really great improvement as well. We have, you know, we can't take a lot of our work home with us because of confidentiality concerns, but we have a case tracking binder that we can reference when we review complaints, and we have a resource binder that has the ordinance and a lot of other useful materials. And we are

trying

to have more regularly scheduled meetings to continue the committee's work. That's about it. And so, you know, I guess at this point, we will take any questions questions you guys might have.

Wow. That was a I'm just struck by your words and honestly powerful comments about what you're doing and just the amount of work that you're all doing just to serve the community, really. I mean, you don't get paid for it in volunteering. It's just amazing. I guess my feeling is we took a leap of faith in setting up the review and recommend to me.

We didn't know what it would look like five years ago or four years ago when we passed the ordinance and started going through the whole process. And this is couldn't have gone any better from my perspective, from what I'm hearing from you all. I'm so grateful for willingness to engage in this work. I'm glad it's it's functioning like as we as I think city council intended. And we're not really city council for just for the public's info, we're not really involved in the committee at all, really.

We just kinda set it up and pick the members based on interviews and just you you all went on your way in in establishing yourselves. And so, wow. Sorry. Thank you for your great comments and and your annual report, and I'm happy to open the floor up to any questions. I don't have any questions, but I I just wanted to say those words. Councilor Rohner?

Thank you for your review.

Glad to hear that

we have so relatively few complaints. And I understand really of those 11 none were viewed as serious enough to warrant further investigations. But the other half of your the title of your group is recommend. Do you have any recommendations, either for your group or for the police department of West Linn?

I think this year, because our more immediate concerns about the customer service issues appear to be somewhat mitigated, we don't have any specific training recommendations, I don't think, that we came up with. But to continue having regular trainings on these topics, I think will be of benefit, especially as staff changes in the department. People should be getting implicit bias training regularly. And yeah, that's I guess to continue that. But that was not really a focus of this year's report.

Okay. Thank you very much. Thank

you, counselor. Counsel president, any thoughts as one of the other folks appear who Yes. Help set this up?

Thank you, mayor. I too would like to thank you all. I was just sitting here just marveling at the journey that we've taken and appreciate so much the unsung heroes who are doing this work, which is all of you. And we aren't really able to talk out in, you know, explain in detail so that people can see what exactly the detail of the work is. So there's a lot of, just, I don't know, technical details of it, which is exactly the way it's supposed to be working.

So, I just appreciate all of you so much for taking this on. It's very serious, and I hear and know that you're taking it very seriously. So I just am so grateful. And on behalf of the community, thank you.

I see that our speaker just showed up. Yeah.

There some

But I think we may have

concluded Yeah. I think we're basically done.

So thank you.

Well, would they like to are they coming through? They're welcome to say a few words.

No, think I

guess we got there a little bit early. So we're supposed to start at 06:35. I'm sorry. We're too efficient today at the City Council of West Linn. We appreciate it. Well, we can definitely connect with whoever it is offline and chat as well at any time. So with that, thank you all for being here, and we look forward to continuing to see your good work.

Thank

you. And also your fellow Lewis and Clark alum, Sarah. I'm I'm a 1L. Working through it and yeah. Thanks. I

would be interested in hearing how our staff is feeling about this. If the if not to put anybody on the spot, but I'm I did find myself think wondering how that's working out from a staff perspective.

This would be a fun opportunity to put chief Rollins on the spot. We can I'll I'll vamp a little bit while he comes up, and maybe Alyssa wants to come up as well. From my I think the key thing that I would say is the way the ordinance is written, the intention is that the volunteer members of our community are meeting with the city staff. And so we're all sitting around the table. Obviously, we do a little prework to get the materials together and make it easy to understand, but we're all looking at all of it together, and we have a discussion together.

And you heard from the committee members that was a little bit of a leap of faith that we all took because we didn't know how it would go. But I have found it, generally speaking, really really valuable and there's always different angles being raised. Sometimes those angles are I don't quite get it at first and then I sort of come around and understand and then we start digging into that side of it. And I've been really proud of the work that our that our staff has done to support this committee. So I would love to hear from Alyssa and and Otis about this too. The police department view would certainly be interesting.

Sure. I'd like to first thing I'd like to do is just I would like to thank each and every one of the review and recommend committee members for the time and the effort, the devotion that they've put into this. As you said, you know, they're volunteers and so they're doing this work because they believe in it and they want to see the betterment for the community. So thank you very much all of you. Greatly appreciate it.

I have appreciated the just the robustness of the conversations that we've been able to have in this group. You know, there are lots of different perspective and lots of different lenses that are that that we discuss. And certainly coming from a police background, I think it is refreshing and sometimes eye opening to hear perspectives from people who are not involved in law enforcement community. There are many many different ways to look at the same situation, and everybody brings in their own experience, you know, their own perspectives, their own ideas, and I think that that as you put it all together and we discuss and we bounce ideas back and forth, there's some what ifs, there's some what about this, But I think it just allows us to to look at all of these challenges from every possible angle and make sure that there isn't anything that we're missing. And so that's it's greatly appreciated and I think that at the end of all of these conversations, I do like the fact that we are able to as a group come to a consensus that we can all agree with and we can all feel good about.

Thank you.

I also want to echo that and also say that we have done a lot of work this year on our process as Sarah and Mary had mentioned because things were maybe a little bit clunky in the first year and we were all learning how to how to be the most efficient we could. I really appreciated their willingness to kind of go through that journey. We have working agreements as a group. We do have agendas. We do try to have regular scheduled meetings, but they're also very flexible if we need to change them. We also just trying to make sure that we had some things a little bit more streamlined in our process to make the meetings more efficient, so we're not focusing on process and we're focusing on the actual business. So I appreciated that very much.

Any questions for staff? Thank you so much for your sharing your thoughts on this topic as well with us. And if and for your of course continued collaboration with the group and I know a city attorney also works closely with you all on this as well. Council president, please.

Thank you, mayor. I just exactly what you said, chief. It's just so gratifying and affirming of this process that you're you're talking about seeing from another perspective and learning clearly with that. That's exactly what we were hoping for. So, I know that this was the genesis of this group was created in kind of a a forged in a fire of sorts, and a lot of us felt the heat, some more than others, I'm sure.

So I think that to come out of through that and out on the other side with this process is I I couldn't actually ask for anything better. So thank you for doing that work. I know you've been involved in all along on this journey. So I'm I'm very grateful to have you here as chief and doing that work. And, Alyssa, thank you for your leadership too.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Councilor Bonington, go ahead.

Yeah. Going to kind of an even higher level further back that includes some of you and the work you did on this. I wasn't here for it, and I was just watching from the outside. Everything you you all did together on this has gone really, really well and everyone should be patting themselves on the back for it because it's definitely a success story that I hope other cities might be able to learn from and and find some value in. So good job everyone.

I'll give myself a little pat. You, councilor, for that. Any anything else from oh, councilor Groner.

I wanna express the hope that we don't have to stress test the system. Thank

you. Thank you, councilor. Agreed. Very much so. Well, thank you everybody for the collaborative and wonderful discussion. Members as well and maybe I'll I don't know. I can pass along a message from the city council. I'd wanna thank all the members as as well for their service and echo the same comments that I made here today to the members who weren't able to join us. So maybe I'll write up a little message or something to get that over to them. Council council president?

Well, it just occurs to me that there might be other cities who would be interested in learning about this process, and I wonder if we could communicate with the League of Oregon cities or do some other kind of outreach to offer up our experience. Because I do think we have maybe the only smaller city that's you know, smaller than Portland, say, who has is doing this kind of work. Just an idea.

Great great idea. I I I totally agree. Okay. Well, with that, we can then shall we transition to the next topic? We have a joint meeting with the utility advisory board and got several members of the utility advisory board to come up and we've got Okay.

Mayor and council. On to the next topic and some more dedicated community volunteers. Eric is here with UAB members and consultant team to talk about a council city council priority that is funding the drinking water capital system following the approval of the water system master plan in 2024, as directed, we've been working on a rate review and an SDC review. And Eric, I think, be starting us off and queuing up presentations on both of those topics, this important theme. So Eric, the floor is yours.

Alright. Thank you, John. Eric Laius, city engineer, public works director. Quick introduction with our UAB team. We're down to only three, but we're strong. We're here.

Jeff Stallard, committee

chair. Torsten keeper, member.

We have the third member online, Lynn Chicoine as well, attending remotely.

Awesome. Thank you and thank you both for being here and you online as well, Lynn, and we're we're recruiting. I'll just make the plug right now. We need members for the utility advisory board to get up to a quorum. If anybody out there is interested in getting involved, we we there's opportunities with the utility advisory board and they're doing important work which you're about to hear about. Yeah. So

Thank you.

Take it back away, Eric.

So tonight in your packet, you'll see that two two presentations really by the same consultant. So we thought we'd tackle one at a time first with the water SDCs, which will probably look familiar since we were just here not long ago with the sewer SDC update. But it's always good to have a refresher. So I'm gonna do a quick intro and then staff recommendations and then we'll turn it over to Amanda and Angie and they'll dive into the presentation. So as you may remember, SDCs are a one time charge paid at the time of new development or redevelopment and account for expanded demand on the city's infrastructure.

The city has contracted with FCS, Bowman Company through professional services contract to review and update its fee schedule to account for current infrastructure demand and to capture updated capital needs for future expansion. Due to Westland being largely built out, the city's water SEC fee is determined to be significantly decreased. Also due to the strict nature of West of when SDCs can be implemented, the city doesn't foresee a significant impact to capital projects. So moving forward, our rec staff's recommendation would be proceeding to an adoption hearing with a proposed SEC rate reductions. This would ensure Westland remains in compliance with state and local laws for SDC assessment.

So with that, I'll turn it over to Amanda. Is she

Hi. Yes. Can you hear me? Yep. Okay. Great. Is there let's see. Think I can just share without If being made a

you can share it.

Okay.

You can let me know if you can't.

Yeah.

I can always share the presentation, Amanda, if you can't. It should.

We see Okay. Perfect.

Alright. Well, thank you, Eric, that introduction. I'm gonna get into the slides right now about the 2025 study was completed at the end of last year, a system development charges. And a lot of the items that were just spoken about is what we'll start off with.

First, we'll take a

look at the current SDCs for the city. Now this is taken straight from the current rate schedule where there's an CCI applied to the previous year's charge. So we've got a reimbursement charge and improvement charge and an admin charge totaling 13,205 for the effective date of 07/01/2025. So this is the number that we'll be comparing our new calculated SDCs against. But really we're just looking at that reimbursement and improvement fee portion for the calculate calculation here.

We'll move on to some of those main items, the key characteristics of SDCs. Like Eric said, they're one time charges. They're not ongoing rates, and they're paid at the time of the development. SDCs are available for water and wastewater, storm water, transportation, and parks. Tonight, first, we're just talking about those water SDCs.

And their only use for capital in both their calculation and in the way that those funds are spent. SDCs in the state of Oregon include both existing and future land capital for infrastructure cost components. And these are for the system facilities, not local facilities. So a couple of main topics for characteristics of the SDCs we'll be discussing. And here we've outlined in the Oregon statute that the uniform framework for the SDCs are allowed by this particular line item here and that the charges may be used only for capital improvements.

So we are drawing directly from a state code to get this information. And we'll jump right into the SDC calculation. So I kind of hinted out before, it's a combination of a few different components. We've got our reimbursement fee, our improvement fee, and both of those items are divided by our growth in system demand. And that gives us our system development charge, which is assessed per unit of demand.

So first taking a look at the reimbursement fee, this takes a look at what is in the ground today or those existing assets. And for this part of the calculation, we need to assess the available capacity within the existing system as stated in the system plan in Westland's case. For storage and pumping assets, what we do is we look at what is available and then how that correlates with the dollars associated with those existing assets in the ground today. So for the reimbursement fee, we're just under $700,000 worth of costs that can be kind of attributed to that particular part of the fee. Now the improvement fee, this orange box, this is what we call the capital portion of the SDC.

So just like in the reimbursement piece, the improvement fee can only really be used capacity expanding projects as well. So we're not looking at the full master plan, we're only looking at those specific projects or portions of specific projects that are expanding the capacity of the system. So in this case, the system master plan approximately 12% of the CIP in original cost is considered capacity expanding. And so those are the only project costs that we can include in the improvement fee portion of the STC. We also have to remember that we need to reduce or deduct the current SDC fund balances from that total charge as those technically could be used to pay for some capital.

And finally, we have our denominator for both of those reimbursement and improvement fees. This is essentially looking at the growth in the system from the beginning of the study. So 2024 through the end of the planning period, which according to the master plan was 2,843. So in both customer data and in the planning data, we need to use the capacity left between what's happening today and what's projected to happen in 2043 to get that denominator. And we're using that same value for both of the fees.

So when we add those together, we get a total of 2,006 of demand. So in general, when we think about that total and we look at what is charged now just for reimbursement improvement, we've got a deduction over in the far right column next to our proposed charge in the middle there. So there is quite a reduction meter size is scaling up. You can see how that ratio kind of shifts from five eighths to one inch or one inch to three inch scales up, but, of course, not as fast as the current charges are today. So looking at this STC comparison from current charges to proposed, it's also important to point out that the fees calculated with this methodology, these are the maximum allowable fees that the city can charge.

And when we look at how that compares to what you're charging now, there is a reduction that brings you not to the end or the bottom of the list, but takes you from the top down toward the bottom middle. So this is what the updated SDC charge looks like here, and this is the updated charge that is also incorporated into our revenue requirement analysis that we'll talk about soon. So I wanted to just open up, I think, for any questions or pass it back to Eric to see if there's any other things to add there.

Thank you for the presentation. Any questions from city council? Seems like the same story as with our storm water SDCs that we talked about a couple of months ago and approved. Any questions from utility advisory board members? Okay. I guess, is are you is is the request kinda consensus on bringing this back for adoption? And then

Correct. Yeah. Okay. So we get on another council agenda to come back for adoption of the new water SDC.

Councilor Frank, go ahead.

And then the new rate would be effective 07/01/2026. Is that would that be the plan if it's approved by the council?

I believe so. I'd have to check with Lauren on that. But I know that's when the new fees go into place. I just don't know how much time she needs to.

Yeah, okay. I think

we have time.

Yeah. Councilor Groner, go ahead.

Yes, this is a very substantial reduction currently proposed. What's the major thing driving this reduction?

I could flip that over to Amanda, but my answer to that would be our lack of growth. As she stated in the we just don't have that growth component for the additional SDC portion of that formula. Amanda can answer it better than

Yes, I'm sorry. Was the question why is it reducing so much? I couldn't quite hear.

Yeah. What's driving the decline in revenues? That's so much, such a drastic drop.

Got it. So there's a couple of things. One of them was just brought up where there's not a lot of growth left happening within the city. So that limits the capacity element of those two parts of the charge. And that's directly reflected in the nature of the CIP and the master plan. So a small percentage of that plan is actually related to capacity expanding projects or activities. So we can't use all of the dollars that need to be spent on the city. We can only use that capacity expanding piece. So that's another part too. I think the bottom line is just the city is close to build out.

And when that happens, the charge has to be reduced to kind of reflect that remaining capacity.

You make sure you're Apparently the current rates were based

on a much larger growth rate than the proposed ones?

So I can't speak to how the original SDCs were put in place, but I do know that they've been increasing by CCI every couple of years or I think every year. And if the methodology was different when those were first put into place or if there was a lot more capacity expanding projects at that time, then yes, it would have been calculated higher than that. But it sounds like or it could be possible that it just hasn't been revisited since those metrics have changed.

So another way of thinking about this is that system development charges pay for large capacity projects, increasing the capacity of our system. And when Westland was growing, there was a need for larger pipes, more pipes in new locations, all of that to serve that development. Now that our system's mostly built out, as you'll hear in a few minutes, the emphasis is shifting to maintaining and replacing those systems. The SDC can only really expand systems or install new systems, and we just don't have much of a need for that. We pretty much have large pipe going everywhere it needs to go.

Would you say that's right, Eric? And really our focus shifts to maintaining that pipe and replacing it over time than building new larger ones.

Thank you.

Good question.

Have question around so we have some, I know in land use, some larger, very dense plants down at Tanner and such. And so I guess this is maybe back to a master planning discussion, but how do these large high dense plants or developments factor into growth, right? I mean, we don't have a lot of land to grow, but we densification would be. And so is there an underlying assumption of dense development that we're seeing potential land use applications for accounted for in the master plan?

I mean, are included in the master plan as far as what and where and how we would serve them. As far as the growth component that I think you're asking about as far as demand, I believe that's in that. Amanda, can you go back to that formula that you talked about?

Oh, sure.

It's a great question. Yeah, thank you for asking that. Council President had a similar question about Vision 43 too.

I mean the other thing while she's pulling that up would be in our master plan as far as modeling, you know, whatever the land use is, we have what that demand would be on the system. So that's included in that project list.

Do you want to jump in at all? No. Carol, she had similar question.

I mean, yes. That's exactly what I was wondering. I mean, here we are talking about Highway 43 vision plan, the waterfront. I mean, we're talking about some pretty potentially large project development happening within the city limits. So, I mean, I keep on hearing we're built out, but actually we're planning in the fairly near future to maybe do quite a bit more with these two projects and how will that how would this affect that?

I don't know that we have I mean, like for Tandler, it's multi it's housing, right? And some commercial use. So, there's not a huge demand on what we have with the existing system. So as far as I think we're back to that capacity improving component, that the system we have in place for that development is sufficient enough. I can't necessarily speak on the Highway 43 improvements on what is proposed along that corridor.

You know, we have it's redevelopment, right? So we're maybe John could help me out with this. I apologize. I haven't been to the all the meetings, but

I think the water system master plan that was approved almost two years ago now looked at the comprehensive plan and the land use plan and the allowed uses in each zone and made a determination about the size of water pipe needed in each area. And I think even with some assumptions about redevelopment in these areas, the system is either large enough fundamentally, the distribution system is large enough fundamentally, or there might be a couple of small improvements that are needed. I think if the I'm way over my skis right now. But I think if we were to be thinking really sort of massive increases in density and usage or large industrial, that would be a you know, industrial is the thing that really draws water more than sort of a four story versus a six story building. I think you might have to look at increasing the infrastructure again.

But based on what we know now, water system master plan is adequate to serve our anticipated needs.

I'm going to let Councilor Bregg jump in. I think maybe before we adopt these things, we could have a little more research done into this question because this is a very important topic. We don't want to preemptively reduce the rates too much when we have future demand. So we'd love to get some answers on that. Councilor Wright?

Well, I think part of it has to do with the sizing of the existing system. So recent waterline replacements have been put in at some minimum size, which is typically way larger than it had been before. And any of those projects that are completed are removed from this calculation. So I know when I lived on Nixon Avenue, they replaced the waterline there and we had a one and a half inch waterline serving like 20 or 30 homes. And they replaced that. And I don't know what the minimum is now. Is it eight inch or for a water Yeah.

Eight.

And so so it was replaced with an eight inch main. So because that work's already done, it's not included in this costing. But that work was included in the previous number, which as we have seen was much higher because they had to replace that one and a half inch line with an eight inch line. So I think that's one of the reasons that we're seeing this. I also think that if we see something different in development that is going to have a major impact on this, we would revisit the system development charges at that time.

The key point to that being that we we can't charge infrastructure that we're not planning on building. Our SDCs are regulated by state law. So if we would have to change the system plan in order to charge a higher rate based on on what you've heard tonight. But I appreciate the I appreciate the question. We took it down. We will talk to planning. And when when if you choose to move forward with this, we can bring back more information about what the assumptions are and what the services are in some key places. We can probably bring some examples. Eric, for example, what is the what does the distribution system look like on Highway 43 and what's it capable of?

Councillor Barrington, go ahead.

I think the only concern I understand what we're doing. But I think for the record, if we move forward, it would be really important to be able clarify that reducing these is not in conflict with the other financial conversation we're having. Just to be able to make that really crystal clear.

Thank you for that. Any anything else on SDCs or maybe we can move on to, the water rates component of the conversation.

Alright. Thank you, mayor. Good discussion on the SDCs. I appreciate the questions. We'll come back and revisit those issues.

So water rate, the water system utility fee is assessed to all users for maintenance and operations of the city's water distribution system. Changes to the water utility rates are addressed in chapter 10, section 44 of the city charter, states that no rate increase shall exceed 5% in any calendar year without first receiving voter approval. Traditionally, the utility advisory board has recommended and city council approved a 5% yearly increase. However, this level of funding has resulted in an increased capital and maintenance backlog of projects. As we go through the presentation, FCS rate recommendations are simply illustrative examples of the increase needed to address capital project backlog as I just mentioned.

They are not proposals or immediate action. Proceeding with any increase over 5% would obviously require a vote of the residents. The result of the rate study will help inform council prioritization and discussions with the Westland community. So with that, I'll flip it back over to Amanda and she can go into the next presentation.

Okay. Can you all see the new PowerPoint, the revenue requirement one?

Yes. Thank you. Okay.

Perfect. Thanks.

Alright. So we'll start with what do the rates need to cover or what is a revenue requirement for the water utility? So there's a lot of different aspects we need to consider when we're building rates for utility, whether that's near term or long term forecast. There are some kind of essential must do things that we need to check off our list. One of them being, we need to determine the total amount of revenue needed to cover your existing operating and maintenance expenses.

Some larger charges from the current budget include wholesale water charges and reimbursement charges. There's also debt service that needs to be covered. And then, of course, we're layering on additional capital costs in addition to that o and m. There are also certain reserve balance targets that we wanna meet with these rates. So not only do we wanna cover those existing costs and additional capital and existing debt, but we wanna make sure we're keeping those reserves at a healthy target throughout the full forecast or at least working towards it over time.

And then we need to make sure that the revenue is sufficient over multiyear period. So we're not just looking at, can the rates cover the planned capital for the next two years, or can the rates cover existing needs, just within the next budgeting cycle? But we're taking kind of a further back look and going out six, seven, ten years and seeing if we can smooth out rates over time to try to cover some of these costs that are coming up later in the forecast. And then we're gonna develop a rate plan to balance all of these financial needs while trying to minimize customer impacts the best we can. So some keys assumptions that we made during this study, each one of these boxes goes over kind of a different element of one of the items I talked about on the previous slide where for our forecast basis, we're thinking about the fiscal year twenty twenty six through fiscal year twenty twenty five, and we're using the fiscal year twenty seven budget as our baseline.

So everything we're forecasting beyond fiscal year twenty twenty seven is really using that year as a starting point. Our operating reserve targets, these are about 10% of operating expenses that we wanna keep in the fund to make sure that if there's any unexpected goals in revenue or if an expense comes up that we're able to pay for that without going in the negative or needing some emergency borrowing or anything like that. Customer growth over time, we have this set at point 15%, which is about 17 new MCEs per year, and the annual rate revenue before rate increases. So if we were just to say, how does your revenue change, year by year without even thinking about any potential increases? The utility is currently bringing in about 6.5 to 6,800,000 over the forecast period.

Expense inflation. So when we look at our 2027 budget, we're gonna take that baseline and escalate specific items by our assumption escalation forecast. So if it's something like a labor cost or benefit cost, we have a specific cost escalation factor for that. General cost is a little bit different. But overall, the budget is increasing by about 2.8% each year to try to keep up with that inflation.

The capital plan, we're looking at the years, fiscal year 2026 through 2035. The total is about 73,500,000.0 for those particular years, but then there's also some out years that we're trying to make sure we can finance as well. So we don't wanna make we don't wanna set rates where you get to 2035 and then all of a sudden, you don't have enough to cover the remaining 19,700,000.0. We're trying to smooth out the forecast so all of the capital can be covered within that time period. Existing debt service, there is an average of about $1,600,000 in existing debt payments per year, which we have modeled within each scenario.

And of course, system development charges, we are assuming a fiscal year twenty twenty seven rate of that $2,644 per MCE here. Alright. So next slide takes a look at the capital plan and escalated dollars. This plan represents the entire system master plan. So this is not just the next couple years of city planning.

This is really everything that needs to get done. So this is all the storage and seismic work, the pump stations, operations, distribution items, building and improvements, the waterline project, which I know is more in the near term. But this is really looking at everything that needs to be done according to the master plan by fiscal year twenty thirty five. As you can see, the first couple years of the plan have a lot of dollars stacked within them, one of them being building improvements in vehicles. Also, the waterline project is another big one that is within those first couple years.

By 2030, it evens out a little bit, about 1.6 average in capital per year with another spike in 2034, some more storage and, CMP projects. So the revenue requirement results, just to kind of get everyone familiar with this kind of table, it really shows two things. One of them is the expenses over time for the utility, and the other is the rates that are needed to cover those expenses. So the green bar at the bottom, this is your operating expenses. So everything that's in your budget as a, ongoing labor cost benefits, small works maintenance, that kind of thing, that's the green bar.

The pink bar represents your existing debt service. So that's the debt service that you're already committed to paying over time. The new debt service is in that darker pink right above that. So that's what we're projecting you would need to take out to cover those projects, in addition to what you already have in debt. And then the rate funded capital is any excess or the additional rate funded cash that is used to pay for capital.

Now this bar doesn't necessarily represent the capital you need to pay for. It's really just showing of your expenses. What of that are you using to pay for capital costs rather than operating expenses or existing debt service, that kind of thing. So if you have your five percents in 2026, the next year in 2027, you need a 25% rate increase followed by another 25% rate increase in '28, which can then be followed by the 4.9 nines or just under 5% for the remaining piece of the forecast. And this will be able to fund all of your capital plan, from the master plan as well as your existing obligations.

Now it's important to note that this scenario includes grant funding. So this includes a $6,250,000 grant in the next fiscal year. And if the utility does not receive that particular grant, the rates would be need would need to be 10% higher for those two years. So

Just to clarify, those are the two grants, the federal and the state grant for the waterline is is that adds up

to That's seven.

Point two five.

Okay. Thank you. Any I should can I stop for questions right now? Any any questions on this particular slide? I I have one question to start out. Could you just say one more time the difference between the dark pinks of the new debt service and the rate funded capital lines? Like what's the difference between those? Like what are those projecting to fund?

So in this chart right here, the difference between the two is that the new debt service represents the new payments that the city will have to make with the revenue that they're gonna revenue bonds or other loans that they're gonna have to take out to cover debt. So for example, in the scenario we're looking at right now for 235% without that grant funding, there would need to be a $6,000,000 revenue bond in 2027, a $5,000,000 revenue bond in 2029, and a and that's it. So those rep those pink bars, the dark ones represent those additional payments that are needed to pay back those bonds, whereas the yellow just represents the cash from rate increases that will be used to pay for capital projects.

Okay.

What projects they're paying for specifically would just be based on the schedule of the CIP and the master plan. So whatever dollars are assigned to that particular year, those are the ones we're trying to fund. We're not really saying, we need to use this specific debt to pay for this specific project with this kind of schedule.

Thank you for the clarification. That's helpful.

I believe a big portion of each of those darker pink is the water utilities obligation for the new new ops building.

Okay. Thanks. Council President Baumgartner, please.

Thank you, mayor. I just wondered when we'll know about the grant funding.

Great question. That's been a topic of ongoing discussions and frustrations, and I know there's a lot of work behind the scenes on that. So go ahead, please.

What I can tell you is that we are feeling increasingly optimistic, particularly about the state one. There has been some significant movement lately, looking to Morgan to make sure nothing fell apart today, the state grant in particular, which is big chunk.

5,000,000. $55,000,000

allocated by the state of Oregon for the water line underneath the Abernethy Bridge, which provides all our water, which ODOT is requiring us to replace. And there was some there were some significant challenges in getting the relevant state agencies to talk in the same language to allow us to utilize those funds, but a lot of folks have put in a lot of effort and that is looking more positive. I actually don't have an update tonight about the federal side. You can give me an up or sideways or a down. Sideways.

Okay. We're gonna say we are still working on that one. That one has also been challenging. Lots of turmoil at the federal level and accessing federal funds and getting clear communication has been challenging. But that 5,000,000 is looking better and better.

She gave a thumbs to the side, is better than the John McCain. Thumbs down. Definitely. Definitely. Thank you.

Thank you. And especially thanks to Morgan for working on that for us.

I think I think there's been a whole staff team of Morgan and Stephanie and John and others that have been Kaylee working on that. So thank you. And I'm looking forward to when we finally have word that those funds are unlocked. As you can see on the chart, I mean, it's a big difference in needs for the city if you have the if we get, you know, 6,250,000.00 versus having to zero. So anyway, any other questions on this slide? This is kind of one of the more important. These two slides, mean, this with and without grant funding. Happy to take questions. Or we can continue the present any question from utility advisory board before we okay. Continue the presentation, and thank you for letting me stop and interrupt.

Yeah. No problem. So the next slide here shows the rate schedule for, the customer facing bills with that grant funding assumption. So if we look back at this slide, we're looking at the 25 followed by the fives. So this is what the rates would look like for customers if we follow that schedule through 2035.

Got about $33, in today's rate. It's gonna go up to just under 42 in the next year and then up to 52 in fiscal year twenty twenty eight followed by some smaller dollar increases past that time. I don't believe it goes up by more than $10 in those first or by either of those first two years. So dollar amount versus, percentage is something that maybe is an important item to communicate to customers as well where it's not their entire bill going up by the 20% or 25%. It's just that water piece.

And when we look at that comparison with neighboring jurisdictions right now, Westlands rate is one of the lowest. And with that rate increase of 25% in the next fiscal year, they bump up a few spots but are still not lower mid lower, range for neighboring jurisdictions.

Interesting.

And then I'm happy to go back to any of the other slides or answer any more questions for y'all, but thank you for your time.

Thank you very much for the, I would call it, sobering presentation for this for the for us and city council. I'm sure utility advisory board members as well, especially with the 5% cap that we have and all that all that goes into water funding and perhaps the 5% cap is part of the reason why we're so low on the list here, which is good for the community but also bad for the water system. Councilor Bragg, please.

I just wanted to say when I used to do this for my work, I always included the city of Lake Oswego as well. So today I looked up what they what it would cost in Lake Oswego, and their rate would have been would be $53.03 So we're still kind of you know, they're more in the higher end of the midrange. So just in case anybody wants to compare that.

I'm curious, advisory board members here, this is your wheelhouse per se on utility rates, so I'm happy to any thoughts or comments from you all, and thanks for being here tonight as well.

And I don't have any the 5% increase in the charter and having to go to the vote of the people I think does put I mean there's a reason Westlands rates are the lowest in the metro area. I think it's a disservice to the kind of the quality of service we're getting for our water. I like to have water three sixty five days a year, twenty four hours a day, right? And not only that, but I also like to have fire protection water. And so if we can't, I think the thing that we've talked about as advisory committee is really about communication out to the public about what if we're gonna have to go to a vote, which it's what the Charter requires, making sure that it's a very well developed communication plan.

When people see 25% that's a very large increase when it amounts to a couple dollars and a month for folks that is a big impact to people right they're not planning for but also what we get for that and I think the messaging and communication is critical and I wouldn't rush it through. Absolutely. I think we saw on the the I two zero five stuff that you know rushing through and not giving good communication to the public and having them understand it is a big deal. People aren't just gonna say yes to bigger rate increases, but I also think it's critical that we get a bigger rate increase and whether that's revising the charter to increase the 5% cap or some other more means of communicating that I think you know that should be considered in this. That's kind of my thoughts on it.

Thank you for that. Wise words.

This is Lynn Chicoine attending virtually. Hey, Glenn.

I had

a question

I had a question for Amanda. Do you did you and maybe this is too granular for where you are now, but did you look at demand charges and increasing those? Or and if you did, that would be part of a message, I think.

Yes. So the volume charges, which I think are currently $3.83 for any CCF over seven CCFs, that would increase with the base charge. So those are increasing as well by the 25 percents. When we show a customer bill though, the the typical average bill might be under that, so they would only see the fixed charge changing over time. But yes, those volume charges are going up with the fixed charge.

Now if we decided to change up the ratio of the volume versus the fixed, that's a little bit different than just this revenue requirement. So these are technically across the board. So we're just saying the rates are applied evenly to every part of the charge. But rate design is more where we would say, well, if we were to raise the volume charge a little bit more than the base, like, how much more could we make up? So, no, we have not looked at that yet. The revenue prime was just figuring out how much money we needed to get in the door.

That might be something to look at and might be something you wanna think about with the messaging.

Thank you for that good good question and thoughts. Go ahead, Kuiper.

Good evening, everybody. I have a few questions related to this and some I guess are just comments. But first looking at the figure that's up on the screen right now, that looks to be the rate increase for fiscal year twenty twenty seven that's represented in the tan bar. The fiscal year twenty twenty eight increase is another 25%. So, if we also put that on the figure that puts us between Gresham and Hillsborough.

And well, actually between Hillsborough and Lake Oswego based on Carol's description of Lake Oswego's rates. So I think that we should be thinking about the entire rate increase that's proposed here. And this is really just showing half of it. I also think kind of in relation to the question about demand charges, this if we're we're looking at putting something to the voters anyway, I think this would be a good opportunity to revisit the the fixed first seven CCF and the rates. It's my view that building that first seven units of consumption into the utility rates.

I'm sorry, could you go closer to your I'm having difficulty hearing you.

It's my expectation that building that seven CCF into the utility rates simply encourages consumption that may not be might not necessarily be consumed otherwise if that was done under a volumetric charge. And I do think that there are some potential impacts to the overall rate design that might occur from having people who consume more water pay for the more water that they consume. Related to that on the final note too here, I look at these increasing charges by meter size. And I was just doing some back of the envelope math. It seems like if you try to normalize for the diameter represented there, those higher meters are getting that first CCF, seven CCF for less than the lower users are doing.

So I think that does raise some equity concerns there.

Those are my comments. Thanks. Thank you for those sharp comments and interesting thoughts about we don't have to think about the seven CCF that are built in automatically. I don't know. I don't I never use seven CCF at my house, but I'm sure there's some who do. So then

my my background is electricity conservation. So Cool.

And thanks for the thoughts also about the chart and that. Councilor Bright, go ahead.

So with relationship to the following years, all of these other cities will also be doing some kind of rate increase over time. And most of them do not have any charter limitation on what that rate can be. So they do a rate study, and they figure out how much they need to cover their costs. So it's hard to go out years. Some of them raised their rates in January.

Some of them raised their rates in July. And it just it makes it difficult to compare. This is the only time that we can actually compare apples to apples. But I personally would be in favor of looking into some conservation pricing where people pay for the water that they use. And if they use a higher volume of water, they pay that at a higher rate.

Thank you. I'm imagining from a staff perspective that would be a sea change in how we do things with the utility the water bill. And so I'm not anticipating any quick answers on that, but perhaps it's something we can take a look at over and as part of our financial discussions.

Mayor, real quick. Please. In closing, all all good discussion and just wanted to remind everyone of you that we were just bringing this as an initial discussion. The 25% is a great illustration, but maybe that's not the number. We can there's a big spreadsheet that you can punch other increases in to see where you land. So this is just an introduction on again, as Amanda alluded to, it covers every project in the master plan. Maybe those aren't maybe those aren't necessary to fund over the next ten to fifteen years.

I appreciate that clarification, especially for the public watching, you know, this is this is assuming we're funding every single capital project and what it would take. And it but it's important to look at that as a starting point baseline for the conversations.

Yeah. And so we're we're happy to bring back other examples again for further discussion. Also to note, there's other water rate discussion going on where we're gonna looking at South Fork being a pass through charge. Is that the right terminology? Similar to Clackamas County Water Environmental Services, you see that as a separate line item on your bill.

Right now that's South Forks bill is included in the utility rates, so you don't see that. So they're looking at the need for big infrastructure improvements, you all know, being on the board. And so if they have to raise their rates, what does that do with ours? Because we can't increase ours more than 5% we got an update from city attorney today. That's moving along.

We got good news from the legal team that it looks like there's a path forward to pull that out. Just have to figure out the next steps.

Thank you for thanks for that update. And that is interesting, right? When if South Fork raises its rates and the city of West Linn can't necessarily we're studying whether we could pass that through. But like Oregon City, they already bifurcated out the other co owner of South Fork. So then we can't absorb that as easily at West Linn under the current system.

Any other comments on the topic? Councilor Bright, please.

I would like to say that having the 5% cap in our charter seems challenging to me because that 5% is not based on any system requirements. And, you know, as Jeff said, we all want to turn on the faucet and have that water there every time we turn it on. And it's a pretty critical need for our community. And I feel like having a utility advisory board, we can look at the needs of the system very carefully, and then the council can receive a recommendation from the utility advisory board of what needs to happen to make sure that we can keep our system whole.

Thank you. Thank you, councilor. I agree with that, and I'm looking forward to continuing discussions about this. I think this is one of the most important topics that we take up. And so this was a work session tonight just setting a baseline, giving us some some numbers and then I'm sure we'll have you have another comment? Oh, I'm not I'm just giving a little conclusion from my perspective, then I was gonna open the floor up for others for comments. So any other any

I I just have I have one more comment. When we talk about if we develop capital plans, we develop master plans, right? Those those are founded in in what we expect to happen in our communities. So if we if we aren't building the I come from a utility background. If we're not building what we need to have, then we won't have it when we need it. And so I just I wanna make sure we we convey again. It's about communication if we're gonna raise rates, I think we should. But if we're going to, we need to communicate. If it doesn't happen, what are the what are the things we're not doing right? We're not maintaining we're not able to continue to to maintain our systems.

And so as Eric said, this assumes all capital gets developed, but I think we have these plans for a reason right? And if we're not delivering on our capital plans, then we're not doing our jobs as utility people in my opinion.

You for that comment. Councillor Bright, go ahead.

One more thing. I do have to say, as the liaison to the utility advisory board, we have the utility advisory board has robust discussions about this. There's a lot of knowledge and interest in what's going on with the utilities of the city. And I appreciate all of the work that they put into that and all of the effort. The conversations have have been really great.

Absolutely. I would extend the same thanks that we gave the police review and recommend community, you all, first community volunteers. And I actually hope we can this is the first of more frequent conversations because I really enjoyed your comments tonight and value your perspectives from the three of you that are here. And then we'll get some more members as well to join us on the topic because I just I'd like to say, one of the most important things we do in having the community perspective is very valuable to me and all of us, I think. So council president, you had another

I just wanna confirm everything they just said, and I just am so grateful that we have such engaged and knowledgeable people willing to step up and volunteer. Thank you. Thank you so much, all three of you.

Any other comments from councilor Bunnton, councilor Groner to close this out?

Again, I wanna thank the committee for the good work you've done.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for working on this. I know it's really challenging and probably a little bit like banging your head against a wall, but it's important work. So thank you.

Agreed. The 5% cap is an interesting number for for from it's put in in by initiative petition, I think, back in the nineties. And it's been there ever since. Yeah. I think so. '9 right nineties. Yep. So

One quick question. We're gonna have a report from the parks department. Do you build a parks department for the water they use? Okay. Okay.

The parks director confirmed from the back that, they do pay for their own water. Councilor Bright.

Okay. One more thing. Also looking at the, revenue requirements chart, after we get this initial larger increases to get us kind of caught up, if you'll notice all the rest of the years, the outline years, are right at that 5%. So it's, you know, we've just gotten behind because we had years where there was more work that needed to be done or inflation was greater. We had a year where the inflation was like 8% and the construction inflation was even worse than that. So we've just gotten behind.

Yes. Go ahead. Thank thank you, councilor Brack as well.

Yeah. In my experience in utility rate design, and, again, I work on the electric side, but this 5% or any real kind of cap is very unusual. And I would encourage us to look towards something like a formula rate or something along those lines instead.

I think it's very interesting. We we should get a briefing on the history of that just as part of these conversations because I I've read a little bit about it from South Fork conversations. And I think Citi had to increase rates a huge amount at once and then the community.

It's my understanding that before that measure in 1999 that the community had to vote on any water rate increase. Oh, interesting. Wow. So this was seen as huge progress that anything under 5% did not require an election. And so I understand that as progress because there were elections where small rates were defeated is my understanding and large rates defeated.

So this is a much better scenario than that. But even with this chart, I suspect over time, you'd hit another tipping point. And so it'll probably just keep happening because unless magically the price of steel and labor and excavation and flagging on streets and all of that goes down, which which it doesn't seem to do. So it it is interesting to hamstring yourself on your most critical system.

This is Lynn Chicoine real quick. And I I've been in Westland since 1990, so I was here for that. And I can fill you in, but I'll also I'll just emphasize that communication with the public is key.

Thank you. Great great thought, and thanks for being with us online. And I'm sure we can get some maybe some if if Kathy has any free time sometime, maybe she could pull a little bit of the history of that that issue as well.

Sure. Happy to report on that.

Just so we all have the same level of baseline knowledge about that as we kinda have these rate conversations because I'm not even certain of the history of it. So with that, anything else on the topic of water rates? Well, I this will just continue these conversations, and I know we're kinda having a lot of financial conversations as a city. So as the plan just to kind of loop this into our broader conversations?

Yes. That was our thought. We we proposed this evening to move ahead with the SDC part of it. And you gave us some requests for information that would be so we'll we'll talk about that at the staff level and I I think keep moving forward with that or bring back more information. But I think this kind of conversation needs to be folded into the really our next topic.

Sounds good.

Great.

Well, anybody want a quick break? Are we ready to continue forward? Well, and we can let our esteemed advisory board members have the rest of their evening. So thank you for coming in. We look forward to continued conversations. And we'll help you have more conversations by getting you a quorum of members. Okay?

Thank you.

Is TJ Landis still on the utility advisory board? Oh, he's off. He's off. Dang.

Okay. Well, no break. We will move forward on to the next item then. And this is a continued discussion. This one this one is a council favorite.

Is that

the other

coats over there? Oh, okay. Sorry.

Yep. So continued discussion of the city's general fund and the parks utility service fee. And so Please. I sort of shoehorn two topics into the same agenda packet because they've been connected in your discussions. So thinking about how we're addressing specifically the parks share of the operation center project and councils had multiple discussions about potential rate increase on the park's utility service fee.

But this has become connected to the broader discussion of the city's financial needs and opportunities. And the packet includes specific information about the park's utility service fee and some specific questions about that, launching off of your your most recent meetings. And it also contains a discussion of a possible road map for the city's city's overall financial strategy discussion. So what I thought I would do is just remind ourselves where we were on the parks utility service present a brief overview of the financial strategy proposal, and then stop talking. In your January meetings, you discussed options for a $5 and 20 month $5.20 per month increase to the parks utility service fee.

And, again, that was to address the parks share of the operations center. And the question sort of the couple of extra questions ended up arising. One is if we were to do that, when would it take effect? There was some discussion of backdating it back to January or having it start at a after a decision is made or having it start July 1. All of those are all of those are possible. As we've been thinking about at the staff level, our thought is if this is approved, we think it should probably be take effect in the future, not go backwards in time. So it could start, like,

you were

to approve it in February, it could start in March, or it could be added into the July increase. I think that gives us time to explain it, to talk about it, to communicate it. So that would make sense to me. And then the council also discussed whether there should be an additional increase. There was a couple of thoughts there.

One was start working at the overall forecasted city general fund shortfall. Also, there was some discussion of maybe some smaller thing that was linked to specific projects to show what the parks what the parks utility service fee could do. So that is sort of where we were at our last episode and where where we propose you keep keep working on tonight. I can stop there maybe, or I can keep going and talk about what is all that stuff in the rest of the packet. Mayor, what would you what would you prefer?

Why don't you just get it all out there and then we can I'll get it all And start the conversation.

All out there and then Megan and I are happy to answer any questions you have in support of your discussion. Unfortunately, Lauren was not able to join us tonight. So if it gets too far down into the financial house, then we'll have to take notes and and get back to you. So going all the way back to last year in your retreats and at the meetings in November and December and January, there was a robust council discussion about how to consider that parks utility service fee in the broader context of all of the financial needs. And I think there was it seemed like there was broad agreement to me on the council that although you might do a small piece of it right now related to the operation center, what you really wanna do is is start up a conversation about about the city's real needs and be thinking about which ones are priorities, how you might address them, how you might talk to the community about them, and moving forward in that way.

And so since your last meeting, some conversations that I had, council Bonington and I and Lauren had a great working conversation where we're writing on paper and writing on paper. Where we were writing sort of timelines and diagrams and ideas, and some of that led to the what you have here. I've also talked to the mayor, and I've talked to each of you individually. What I what I have is a sort of a draft road map really coming out of those conversations that that proposes a a conversation with the community about about this. But it starts not with a specific, hey, would you like $10 or $15, or would you like a tax or a fee, or would you know, it really is starting in an open ended discussion with the community where you ask about what is their what are their expectations about services?

What are their needs? What are their hopes? What do they what do they wish to see? And it allows us to conduct this in kind of an iterative way. For each of these phases, and I proposed moving pretty fast because it seems like the council wants to get to some decision making, and you wanna start working on these pieces that you think are important.

But we propose, basically, just having a resource for the community about what it is we do and having a sort of a listening session for a month about what it what what are what's the what's the temperature of the community? What are you hearing? What are you feeling? What is it that you expect from us? And part of it that we think is key is that piece of telling them what we do so that we don't get a lot of people saying, yeah, you need to schools are a problem or all of that, you know, whatever it might be, fire control, all the things we don't do, really trying to focus the conversation on what it is the city of Westland does.

And when I say I propose moving pretty fast, I propose that listening session is one month long, and that we use a city council work session for it, and that we use city surveying, the weekly email, or social media to just to get responses back from the community that can start informing the work that you wanna do. I proposed a second phase in April where we assemble that, put it together into a into a into a list essentially that we return back to council, tell you what we've heard from the community, what seems to be on the community's mind, and then the council would work to turn that into a initial community's priorities list that has and that really leads to a discussion of so what do we do with this? And it really attempts to capture what you've been doing and talking about in a way that feels to me very open and and and honest with the community. Hey, we're starting this off. Now's the time to tell us what you think.

Here's where we're here's where we wanna go is to be able to address some big picture things. But first we wanna know what's on your mind. And really that that is that is a simple overview of what I what I propose. It's sort of that work product that we committed to at the end of your last big retreat. I'm talking about work session. I'm talking about finances. So that is what is in the packet. I am happy to entirely recycle that and have a completely different plan or use this as a foundation foundation for council discussion. One idea is you have a retreat coming up at the February. We could we could more fully flesh this out along with another discussion of your your goals for the year.

So that is what I have. Megan and I stand ready to answer any questions you have.

Thank you for that overview. And my thought was I I was gonna ask you, what confirm when the retreat is, and I wanted to make sure everybody had a primer on this idea so that we could dive dive more deeply into it at the retreat and kind of our thoughts on on the the community engagement component of the of the work. Thanks, councilor Bonington, for your collaboration on on that topic. Well, I suppose the just thinking about the strategy for right now. We kinda have one main issue before us that I think the staff are looking for direction on, if I'm not mistaken, which is the operation center fee parks component that we've talked about.

So how does can I take the temperature of the city council on that topic? At our last meeting, there were some different ideas brought up related to the funding of that fee. So happy to open the floor up, and then we can talk a little bit about that other idea. Councilor Bright, go ahead.

I think that going ahead with the $5.2 a month would be very helpful for all of this, and then move on to the discussion that the city manager was just describing where we get the community to say, you know, what's the most important to you? You know, what activities do you want to do at the parks, what, you know, all of those different things. Because we're going to have a lot of different, perspectives. And I guess, you know, my biggest concern is with all of the outreach methods that we have, will we actually get a sufficient number of people responding to us and giving us those ideas instead of when we come to a conclusion at the end saying, why did you do that? So, you know, I would encourage the community to take advantage of every opportunity that they have to communicate with staff through these various methods so that we really do know where where the community stands.

Thank you, councilor. I'll go to councilor Bonington, then councilor Garner.

Yeah. Thank you. I I think John did a pretty good job of explaining the concept and how that works. It really comes from asking people what are some expectations and some values what are our levels of service and what the future of the city should look like, and then kind of coming back with a plan at that point, kind of leaving money out of it initially, and just making sure that we're all on the same page about what we expect around here. So actually getting people to participate in that is extremely important.

It's not at all supposed to be a performative effort or something with a predetermined outcome. But I do think that we all share a lot of the same values and have a lot of the same ideas about where this should go. So I would expect it to end up in a pretty agreeable place. But I could be wrong, and I'm willing to be wrong and consider that in earnest if that's the case. So ultimately with the parks fee, we need to move forward with that, that's okay. But my main concern is that we are in agreement about moving forward on a timeline with a a plan for the rest of it.

Thank you, councilor. I think it's a very interesting idea to I think of it like, you know, what's what what services do people want and how do people feel about the services that we're providing. And if it comes out that people, you know, feel like we need more street sweepers or, you know, more police or or, you know, different more parks maintenance or where wherever the peak community is at. And maybe there's some themes that come out of that exercise that could be useful in our I know we're trying to develop a a financial plan for the for the city. So and take care of what we already have. Very important component. So thank you for that, those thoughts. Councilor Groner, go ahead.

Yeah. I agree we have to address the larger problem of the whole financial outlook of the city. But I'm a little reluctant to wait for six months or so before we get input, before beginning to address the problem. And I think actually doing an early $5.2 increase in the park's utility fee sort of as an attention grabbing device. It's the first step of a process. But it basically will announce, but we, I would like to present that as the first step of a process rather than a standalone thing.

And it's funding an essential Yeah. Piece of infrastructure, the operation center. Agreed. I'll share my thoughts are, I think we should move forward with the $5.20. I'm I'm I've been of two minds on staggering it in, like, over time or just taking care of it at at at once.

I the operation center is a very important project. We've talked about it so many times here. It's an essential infrastructure project for the city. And I think it's I I'm nervous about it having to be funded solely based on existing revenues of of the city given our financial picture. And it sounds like from conversations that the $5.20 a month, which would turn out to be about $500,000 a year, would really help offset that negative components to the budget from the operations center.

I think it's a pretty reasonable fee to get a project of that magnitude of that size and cost for the for the community. It shows that we've taken care of our finances to be able to do that when looking at what other cities are are doing. I mean, not to start naming cities, but Tigard is talking about a public works and police facility for a 150,000,000. And we're on a bond to the community, and we're talking about $45,000,000 with with really a $5 a month increase for the community. So we're I think I'm comfortable with it and feel that it's the doing the right thing for the community from from the standpoint of the duty that we have to take care of our infrastructure and our staff and our our people.

And anybody who disagrees, I would just say the current site is unacceptable. So I'm sure we'll probably repeat the same kind of stuff at the adoption hearing. But council president Baumgartner, go ahead. Thank you, everybody.

Thank you, mayor, and thank all of you for your thoughtful input. It helps me to kind of process what I'm thinking to hear what all of you are thinking. I agree that the $5.20 to get us just to be satisfying the needs of our current budget is practical. And I would like to continue the conversation with the community about needs versus how we get there. So and it's it's an open discussion.

It's we all are very receptive to what the community has to say and want to hear what the community has to say. None of us are interested in dictating to people arbitrarily. We're gonna raise this rate or do this. We wanna hear what people think, but we are responsible for making sure the city can run. And that is the base of the conversation as far as I can tell. Thank you.

Thank you, everybody, for sharing your thoughts. And I think we'll go into the retreat with a good idea in mind about what so maybe we can discuss some potential pathways for this community conversation there. And does that sound good? I see the city manager nodding over there. So

That was exactly my thought. I think that would be a perfect way to do it. We might if if the general concept presented here is of interest, we might continue working at a staff level to flesh it out and have things ready to go. But we can I think we could devote a fair amount of time at the retreat to this topic? This feels like the big one to me.

Would also suggest that we look at the priorities that you have adopted, which we adopted as two year priorities. They don't they can be tweaked right now, I think. And maybe we add something about this to that list. Change some of the language to some of the other ones, and be able to really have a clear plan for the community to see. One thing that I will say about the one thing that I I've heard council wrestle with, how much do we ask the community, and there's a whole range of asking. There's there's informal surveys, formal surveys, there's votes on a ballot. Right? There's a lot of degrees of of asking. And and how much do we decide? Because you are settled with responsibly deciding things all the time.

And so the way I see this conversation, you could possibly shape it up as balancing those two needs. You bring years of experience and understanding. Just think of what you osmoted tonight about the water system and how you've done that for years and years now. So your your preferences, your experience, your understanding will have to inform what these lists become, but be combined with what the community is telling us. I think that we'll we'll try to find a balance between those two things.

Make sure the community has lots and lots of opportunities to share what they think, and make sure that you have a lot of ability to influence what gets decided based on your view of what's needed. And this water system discussion was a perfect example. We all know there has to be adequate money to repair water pipes. It just has to be the case. So finding a balance for that is is really important. And I see Megan has come up

to this.

Director Big I'm wondering if our Parks and Recreation Director, Megan Big John, has something to say on these topics.

Thank you, mayor and council, for talking on this discussion on this topic. I was just wanting to make sure, as I'm looking at the budget documents that we have in our planning, is that that additional 5 per $5 that we're looking for for the general fund is not necessarily for things that are new. So keeping in your mind that that's already money that's spent through the general fund above the fee, but that takes care of the assets we have currently. So when you're looking at options of reduction or what we may do, that's really changing levels of services around maintaining those assets long term. And so that's I wanted to make sure to keep that in mind and that with recreational programming, that's definitely separate than what the parks maintenance fee goes So just to make sure that was clear for everybody.

You're and just to make it clear clear, you're talking about not the $5.20 for the ops center, but the

The additional.

Bit about in the past, and we'll have continued conversations about the additional parks maintenance deficit.

Correct.

Okay.

Yeah. Thank you. Sorry. Thanks for the clarification.

I just didn't know if people are watching at home

Might have been confused. Are watching

at home, you know, that we're Yeah. That's the we're funding one project with that.

Correct. Yeah.

But then the good point about the additional if additional money would really just be take care of what we have.

Right. And even our capital projects listed right now are just for maintaining safety issues or replacement. So it's just to keep that in mind that that's where that company is currently being spent.

Thank you for that comment and for all you do for the park system, of course, and your team as well. Good team of people. Any other comments on this topic? I on the so on adoption?

So on adoption, hearing your thoughts on timeline would be useful. So if you're if you're think so if if we're doing the the $5.20, would you want that to be returned to you immediately and adopted immediately and take effect immediately? You have a different date in mind. I did hear the mayor say, drop the idea of dividing it in half and and two different adoptions. All of this is possible. Might And we're happy to support it.

The the real thought there was I I like to try to minimize impact as much as possible. And I'm wrestling in head about, do you do a $2 and 60 increase effective immediately and $2 and 60 increase effective July, but then yeah. So that's what I'm thinking about. I'm I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on on how to proceed. I really don't know how much of a difference that would make.

I think we should do it as 5.2 and effective March or whatever. So bring it back to council this month if we can or in March and make it effective April. The timeline is a little bit fuzzy. I don't think we should wait till July, and I think we should do the whole thing.

Thank you, councilor.

As soon as possible. Okay.

That's I'm hearing agreement. So we will schedule that for maybe the next meeting then.

Possibly the next meeting or possibly in March with the March. We'll talk to Lauren when she's back in the office.

March. Yep. Okay. Sounds good.

Thank you.

I've heard loud and clear.

Appreciate that. That's fantastic. I don't have any other questions on this topic right now.

Okay. Thank you very much everybody. And the retreat is coming up in just a few weeks on a Friday. So we'll look forward to continued discussion there of the next steps on the city's financial situation and plan. Let's see. We're so we're right on time. Can you believe it? Mister City Manager, you have three minutes for your report. It's seven 07:50. I'm a couple I minutes I can do that. I'm I'm kidding.

No. Let me go.

Go ahead.

Alright. I can do that. So next week, business meeting, February 10. That's the meeting where we have SMART coming in to talk about the future of transit. Speaking of transit, we did submit the letter to TriMet that was reflecting the the council's direction. Appreciate that, and we will see where that goes. That that letter included a request to talk more to TriMet in a formal setting. So, hopefully hopefully, that will happen. I actually did get a an email from their staff saying, wow. There's a lot of interesting stuff in this letter, and we'd love to talk to you more about it.

So good. That is fantastic. So February 10, February 17. Right now, I don't think we actually have anything on that agenda. So we may have a cancellation in your future, or there's one or two items that might be out there, so just to put that on your radar. But the twenty seventh is the is the council retreat. It'd be right here as with previous retreats. The couple of follow ups on work that, well, I I guess I already mentioned the DRYMET letter. Legislative sessions started, yes, started this week, and, man, they're coming up with tons and tons of ideas. And I'll repeat what I said in an email.

If you're interested in topics, if you hear about topics, if you hear about other cities doing things and you wanna know what we're doing, email me, email Doug Doug Riggs. We are happy to help, but things are moving fast on the big picture stuff that they're doing. Lots of other legislation that we're seeing. We're reading bills, trying to understand it. It's our expectation that not a lot of those smaller things will actually get done as they work on the big topics. They have thirty five days. So everything has to be reviewed first time by next Friday and moved along. Right? So it's really, really fast. Mayor, sorry. Did I cut you off?

Oh, was just gonna this brings up the topic of doing a a city lobby day, and I wanted to check-in with city council. If if there's an interest, we could talk to Doug Riggs, our lobbyist, about having a setting up some meetings with our legislators during the session and going down. It would have to be before March 8, I think, because that's when they have to adjourn. So if we could do a do do a doodle poll and try to find a day where folk we could folks could go down if there's an interest. So k.

Let's see. I see some head nods. So we can we can maybe we'll try to work work with Doug and see what dates would be good for the schedule to meet with I mean, I'm sure the schedule is filling up very fast with how Yeah. Fast the You bet. We'll check-in with him on that.

You bet. That's great. Thank you for that idea. I only had actually two other things on my list for today. One is we at your direction, we put together a survey for the community on the marijuana dispensary topic, which you heard one community member come, and I wanted to make sure that nothing had changed on that. You still want us to have some communication with the community about about what their interests are on that topic. K. In that case, we will do that. And the last thing I was gonna say is before you leave, grab one of these. If you haven't seen it, this is the Westland Chamber of Commerce Love Local bingo card.

And you can grab one. I don't know about the upstairs lobby. This you too, also. You guys have to do this. So just nine little things you can do to support local business after the holiday season and super simple things. Leave a positive Google review for local business. Eat a meal at a local business. And then if you drop this off by the March, you entered into a contest. So so that is a is a nice thing, and I appreciate the chamber for doing that. That is all that I wanted to mention tonight.

Thank you for the, good report. Anything else from the city council for the good of the order? I see none. So, with that, we are adjourned until Tuesday at 6PM. We'll see you then, and good luck to the operations center tomorrow at the public hearing planning commission.