Board of County Commissioners - workshop

Okay, good morning. Welcome to Thurston County Board of County Commissioners Board Work Session 4. Wednesday, July 29th, 2026. It's 9.05 a.m. My name is Ty Mentzer, Chair of the Board. To my left, Vice Chair, Commissioner Wayne Fornier, Commissioner Rachel Grant, Commissioner Emily Klaus, and Commissioner Carolina Mejia, virtually. County Manager Leonard Hernandez, Assistant County Manager Josh Cummings, and Jennifer Walker, and Clerk of the Board Amy Davis. live streaming to the Thurston County YouTube channel this morning and written public comment may be received up to two hours in advance of the meeting and distributed to the board. Action may be taken at this meeting. First topic up is Puget Sound Energy Public Works electric vehicle charging station project.

Yeah, thank you, Chair. As our Public Works team comes up, they highlighted an exciting partnership and opportunity that we wanted to update the board on. So I won't steal any of their thunder, but I'll pass over to

Yeah, we just wanted to take a few minutes to come and share with the board something that we are pursuing with energy. It's a pretty cool opportunity. We think to partner with them to bring into amenity at basically no cost to the county to. We responded to an interest form that Puget Sound Energy sent out looking for partners in the local areas to build new pole-mounted electric vehicle chargers for public use. And they would locate these on either new or existing Puget Sound Energy-owned poles or other curbside equipment. We reached out to them in late 2025. This slide shows basically how that works. They install EV chargers that they own on their utility poles and streetlights. And for a person in the car that needs to charge their vehicle, they would use a credit card or a debit card on the charger. It would lower the cord for use. And then when the session is complete, the cord would retract. So this slide shows the series of steps involved with this program. We've completed the first two. Public work staff in collaboration with CPED have been meeting with Puget Sound Energy to review the program and identify some potential locations to install the EV chargers. We've been focusing primarily on parks and trails locations as that makes sense for our operational needs. Initial feasibility study was done with TC, Christian County and Puget Sound Energy, and that's been completed. And Ed's going to share the results of that feasibility with you in a few minutes. The next step we would take is community engagement. And the purpose of that community engagement is to solicit input on the proposed sites. Puget Sound Energy will partner with us on this community engagement and tactics to collect feedback on the potential charging station locations and get project buy-in. You can see the purpose is to focus on understanding community needs around the charging stations. They want to be sure they're cognizant of looking at historically marginalized community members and creating equitable access to this program. And here are the benefits of this program partnership. The Puget Sound Energy covers 100% of the cost of the installation, maintenance, and operating costs. We are just providing the places for them to put these to be used. And just in alignment with our mitigation plan, it raises awareness of the benefits of public charging and adds a great amenity to some potential locations. Our role in this is to partner with Puget Sound Energy on the community outreach, site designs, code requirements, and construction logistics. And then we would jointly co-promote the installation of these chargers through news and social media. And with that, I'm going to turn it to Ed, and he can tell you about some of the areas that we've located as potential sites.

So our team met with PSE. We comprised a for their evaluation, their team would go out, evaluate each site. They came back to us and they found four of those sites of interest to them. Initially, we'll start with Burfoot Park, obviously one of our most heavily used parks. We see approximately 100,000 vehicles go through the parks each year. So they have interest in, I guess, let me back up and tell you that when they're assessing these parks, they're evaluating them for their feasibility, and that feasibility includes existing power, obviously. and utilize to put their poll chargers on. If there aren't, but it's still an attractive facility to them, they are willing to install the infrastructure at their cost and dedicate that to two, EV vehicles. That's exciting. Yeah, it is cool. And then on those holes, they often will have decorative lighting as well so that you can fuel your car up or power your car up and charge. So it does add some lighting in some of our parking lots that may be a little more dimly lit. So Burford Park is a great example. We don't have a ton of street lighting there. They would probably come in and The service line would need to be extended from the pad mount transporter, and then they would install a street light with a dual charger on it. So that's our first location. Number two was Kennedale Park, another heavily used park. And I'll tell you what our traffic counts were from last year, if my Kenny Doe Park, we saw about 150,000 cars. And a lot of that's during the summertime in the hot heat, we have like swim access and all that. So it's fairly consistent with Burford scaled out. So we do have some streetlights out there. And they would install a new hole and dedicate to Another potential location is on the Chehalis Western Trail, one of our newer trailheads, 41st Ave, which is out in the South Bay area. This one is a little bit more complexity. They would have to install a pole out there, run power a little bit further into the site. And then worse, we don't have great numbers we had about 50,000 vehicles through there. So a lot of good use. It takes a lot of the vehicles that we're parking on the shoulder of South Bay Road, and it does give them a safe place to park. So it is one of our, the more heavily used end of the Chehalis Western Trail as well. So when you say we don't have great numbers, you mean just the data? Historical data, yeah, sorry. It's not used a lot. Correct, correct, yeah. And then our last potential location is Tenino City Park. Obviously there's a lot of use there. We don't have numbers out there currently for the amount of cars that are using that since we don't maintain that trailhead out there, the city of Tenino. What's that? About 2 million. About 2 million. Sounds about right. The city of Tenino does a great job maintaining that area out there for us. So this is another potential year-round use and trail users and city park users could both utilize from this, the PSE EV chargers.

So that's basically it. We just wanted to let you know that we're pursuing this what we think is a really cool partnership opportunity. And our next step will be that community engagement. So we wanted to make sure that you were all aware of that before you start seeing and hearing things about this in public.

Thanks for innovating.

We filled out an interest form. It's pretty exciting when something like this comes out of that.

They rolled this out anywhere else already?

Good question. I'm going to say yes, but I don't know for sure where.

So up north they have, and I think in Burien, but they've also working with the city of Tumwater for some of their location, one or two of their locations. I don't know what they are off the top of my head. Yeah. This is really cool. Yeah. Yeah. I think so.

And if they, if they, uh, if they're used heavily, will they expand or is it just. We're just going to go forward, call it good, or is there a possibility of there being more locations?

I think we would always be looking for opportunities to continue a partnership with them and expand if we can. We were just talking the other day, just maybe, too, about the dog park, for example, at the Waste Recovery Center as being an option.

Yeah, I would imagine these guys are in the business of selling power. And if they are selling power, they're going to look for more opportunities to do it.

Right.

Commissioner Mancer. It looks like Commissioner Meagher. Oh, sorry. Commissioner Meagher, go ahead.

thank you uh commissioner grant kind of covered my question in terms of expansion but uh just great job this is very exciting i know uh i was very excited that burfoot park was one of the parks that got chosen uh but the other options are are pretty incredible as well so just uh great job is it possible that they may do all four is all four still in the running and then

you said they they eliminated two sites based on their initial feasibility so these are sites that they're interested in and doing that community outreach to get feedback they aren't limited to one or two it is whatever public feedback comes back they will then assess that and then move forward with however many they see fit that's great uh i'm just curious like community feedback's good but like what is the what could somebody object to with respect to this like what's

there's no public money involved is the, you know, like that's the only down.

I never know.

I would also say it's about community buy in.

I think they really want to do that outreach to the community and be a part. Yeah.

I mean, part of it's like promoting what you're doing, letting people know that it's happening versus like,

of object that you don't like electric cars and maybe they'll maybe they'll um the community will have other suggestions for other locations

that would be my guess is that they're looking for feedback on how many electric vehicles do we have in a certain area or radius around this area? What interest is there for that? Right. That also means dollar signs for them. But, um, if, if there aren't a lot of electric vehicles out there or going to that park, then maybe it's not a feasible option for them. Yeah.

Thank you. So I just want to make sure I'm clear on this. First of all, good job. This is really exciting. Um, I see. And you might've said this, but I see that this comes at no cost to the County. And so it's really great that they're covering the installation and maintenance and operational costs for the County. Are they going to be, um, does the public pay to use these charges? So it's not free to the public.

Correct.

Um, are the rates for these chargers going to be lower than the typical cost of like a third private party charger? Do we know?

We haven't covered that part yet. It was more just a feeling out process and we'll get into more of that detail as we progress further.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah. I was curious about that because I appreciate that the benefits include collaborating on projects, serving and benefiting historically underrepresented communities. And so I think it'd be great if they were a bit lower than the typical third party charger cost, but I guess we'll see how that pans out.

probably just another tool for adding capacity to that infrastructure that is lacking.

Yeah.

But this is still a third party charger. This isn't owned by us. This is owned by PSC.

I mean, PSC is a private company and a utility monopoly. But I was meaning the other third party. We see Tesla chargers around and other brands. So I was thinking more of third parties that we don't typically have partnerships with.

So good job, you guys. Thank you.

I'm excited to be here today. I'm joined by the planning manager and Claire Swingen.

Have you been in here before?

She's one of our rock star associate planners and she has been the lead on this project. And I wanted to make sure that she also got the spotlight for all of the work that she's been doing. I just want to start off by saying how proud I am of the work our small but mighty team has done on this. You're looking at two of the folks who've been working on this. There's really only two other people in our department that have participated significantly in it. And essentially what this small but mighty team has done is implement really novel engagement strategies for this project. very different from our prior critical areas ordinance update and just from other projects we've even done in CPED. And the goal, the goal from the outset was trying to create a collaborative community process. So even though this is a state mandated project, we don't, we're not really given a choice on whether we have to do it or not. It's part of our periodic review in true CPED fashion. we are figuring out ways to innovate and go beyond the minimum requirements. So I'm gonna let them tell you all the, all the handsy stuff we can do then. All right.

Yeah, so let's get right into the presentation. So to just give an overview for how the presentation today is structured, we'll introduce you all to the Critical Areas Ordinance, which probably from this point out, you'll have me referred to as the CAO. We'll talk about the scope and goals of the update, what's changing and why basically. And then we'll get to talk about some of that really great public engagement that Ashley just touched on. And then we'll talk about what's remaining in the timeline and get a bigger picture of where we are in the process now.

Those colors watersheds?

Yes. So what is the critical areas ordinance? The critical areas ordinance is the piece of Thurston County's development code that regulates sensitive areas in the environment. It's five specific areas and the state actually designates and mandates their protection. So we're looking at wetlands, critical aquifer recharge areas, frequently flooded areas, geologically hazardous areas, and fish and wildlife habitat conservation areas. And so those all come from state law. it's part of the county's development regulations which means that it applies at a site-specific and project-specific level so what we have also in addition to this tons of really cool more programmatic or long-term planning efforts that also protect the environment this piece is really geared towards specific sites specific projects it's what people are navigating when they come to our front counter on the other side of cped And its main goal is to balance the use of property with environmental protection and human health and safety. Those are the two really big things that it accomplishes. and claire what was the picture on the right side of that oh yes um there's a screenshot here i have two different buttons for me sorry um there's a screenshot here of the website that we have available this is thirstingcriticalareas.org we got a handy url for it and everything that goes back to the county's webpage um but we have tons of great information on there this is kind of a landing page that we can direct people to to engage so they can send us comments they can get more information We've developed some really wonderful looking fact sheets with the help of our education and outreach team. So it's got tons of information available. So a little more on how the CAO applies, kind of the context that we're looking at when we think about these regulations. It's through two main processes. So folks come in to the BDC, they talk to our planners, and they end up, if they have critical areas on their property, getting either a CARP, a critical area review permit, or an RUE, a reasonable use exception. So CARP is the standard one. It is just how our staff essentially reviews the project for compliance with the code in the critical areas ordinance. The fee is currently $708 and the current maximum review time per code is 86 days. For if there's something that would prevent reasonable use on the property in terms of the critical areas ordinance. So let's say there's not an appropriate building envelope, but somebody would like to be able to live on the property that they own. They can get something called a reasonable use exception. which allows minimum reasonable use of the property if those critical areas can't be avoided. This is a little bit more of a lengthy process. It involves the hearing examiner. So this fee is $4,265 and the total review time is 148 days. and just a note on these review times as well the way that these are calculated that's the total amount of time that it can spend essentially on one of our planners desks for review so it doesn't include say if we need to send something back like we have feedback or comments and they need to change something and give it back to us so sometimes that back and forth happens and that can also add a lot of time to these reviews so it's a pretty significant piece of our review process

And just one note, the fee that's up there for the reasonable use exception, that's a deposit for the hearing examiner. We don't control those costs. So that's the minimum they would pay. We have seen bills closer to $9,000 or $10,000 by the time they get through the process. And that also doesn't include all of the private reports that are required from specialists.

Can I ask a question? So I remember when Josh was, you know, when Josh was looking at ways to streamline things, one of the things that he said was the taking the bite out of the apple, right? We don't take one bite and then that's it. And so does this apply to this process right over here?

Since, Since that time, the state has implemented their mandated permit review timelines. So essentially what Josh was trying to shape the CPED process to look like is now baked into state law. So that is how we operate. And even with that, it's just a really long process. We are completely booked for hearing examiner reviews. And we just actually did some research into how many of our hearing examiner applications are RUEs and it's 30 to 50% of our overall caseload with hearing examiners. And in comparison, I asked the planning directors of the three cities how many RUEs they do. City of Olympia told me they think they've done about two in 10 years. And we do 30% to 50% of our overall cases going to the hearings examiner. How would that be true? Yeah.

This is why we're one of the reasons.

Is that our own doing? Or is that just the nature of the geography?

So let's answer Commissioner Diaz's question maybe to the answer to that question. I would say back to your original question, the two bites of the apple. So we would come back to them and say, these are the things that we need for a complete permit to meet our code. And so sometimes they would provide all that information or sometimes they would say, we don't think we need to provide that information. So it still has that back and forth. And so that's what Claire is saying that it can spend 86 days on our desk but a lot of that time is spent with them deciding whether or not they want to get that report or how they're going to answer those questions so we're still working with those timelines and what what you're what we're getting at next is part of those timelines are because our critical area ordinance from 2012 has so much gray area in it that it creates well what if i did this and i could do that and so that's why we're here

I have a quick question. So you talked about the fee for the RUE. Like this is kind of the minimum and there's a lot of cases where it takes longer because of the complexity of the situation. On the CARP, is the fee typically, does it typically stay close to $708 since it's more simplified? Okay.

Yeah, that one doesn't tend to change. There's not like the cost

GO TO THE NEXT SLIDE. HERE WE GO.

SO WHY ARE WE UPDATING IT? A BIG PART OF IT IS IT'S PART OF THE periodic update process, the state requires that we do regularly update and maintain the critical areas ordinance. There's also new requirements and guidance that have come out. A big piece of critical areas ordinances, they have to be based on the current best available science, which is something that's actually defined in state law that we have to use to support the choices that we make in regulating the environment. So we need to actually look to things like agency guidance from the state and peer reviewed literature, expert opinion to support the choices that we make when we're building policy in the code in the CAO. And so there's since the last time we did a major CAO update was in 2012. There's been lots of things that have come out since then. There's some really exciting State guidance that has come out or been updated since then that we're able to incorporate. And then we also have other goals outside of just the baseline state requirements. As kind of you guys have already touched on in the questions, there is a desire to sort of simplify and increase the effectiveness of implementation of the CAO. So make it more streamlined for applicants and for our own staff to implement and to navigate. So building in more clarity, more transparency, that's been a really big piece is trying to help people understand clearly up front when they're coming to get a permit, what they're going to need to do. Because it is a big, it's something people have to plan for financially and in terms of timelines. It often relates back to their own home. So we want that to be as low stress as possible and not have the code.

So I think what I understand is that if we're able to get to a more effective and streamlined CAO, that those reasonable use exceptions that we have a lot of will shift over to the carpet process.

There's some other administrative process. There are a lot of tools that we have the ability to put in our code that still ensures that we're protecting the environment, but offer

But because the critical area ordinance has not been updated for 14 years, that's kind of trickled that effect is that there's the reasonable use exceptions are high. So updating the CAO would reduce those RUEs. That's the intent.

I have a question about that. Is the reasonable use exception process something that is governed by like state law or is it possible that through this process we would update the reasonable use exception, like instead of shifting to a different administrative process, could we just simplify the reasonable use exception process itself or is that governed by state law so we can't really change that? Is that why we're going to pivot to a different kind of process?

Yeah, reasonable use exceptions do kind of get handed down to us through some of the larger legal structures. They're really a result of several different Supreme Court cases that have happened, actually. So even nationwide, this is kind of part of the legal framework for regulation. So they'll always be there. There's kind of, I would say two main ways that the code so far based on, and again, nothing has been baked in yet. So we're still in the collaboration process with the public and planning commission, but to talk to a couple of the conversations we've had so far, one of the ways I think that will reduce the load of those reasonable use exceptions is by building in flexibility where we can without sacrificing um environmental protection and so what that looks like is um for example one of the things that we may implement in the wetlands chapter is actually letting people choose from different systems for buffer calculations that allow for different levels of report so if somebody would like to take the investment to get a essentially more detailed wetland report they also will end up having more flexibility around what the buffer of that wetland was And building in that flexibility would mean that maybe somebody is just getting a CARP instead of an RUE. And there's we can keep that general approach for lots of the critical areas. It's kind of letting people choose their path, letting them see what makes the most sense for their project and their property, building that flexibility and in a way that's still supported by the best available science.

Another area where that flexibility would be helpful is supporting our conservation organizations that want to do restoration within our critical areas. Our current CAO treats pretty much any work in critical areas the same, whether you are a person conservation district trying to do a habitat restoration project or whether you're someone who's trying to build a driveway. And so being able to distinguish in the CAO between the things that we really want to support and see on the ground and incentivize versus those things that we're going to have to mitigate for.

it's just like shoreline plan where like ecology gets to has to approve it and they whatever we decide to do and they might not like it or they might say it's not strong enough or too strong and that kind of process they get final say of it um they

don't necessarily get final say they do get significant input and we've seen cases where critical areas ordinances have been struck down by the growth management hearings board because for example like Snohomish County didn't take into consideration feedback they got from the Department of Fish and Wildlife so it's a it's a there's a lot of a lot of oversight on this process but it's not the same as like the shoreline master purpose we pass it and then people can challenge it and it might get struck in the

wait around for ecology to sign off.

All right, so the scope of this update, we are looking at new requirements from state agencies like the Department of Commerce or other state agencies, the current best available science, as I mentioned. We're also making sure that it's in good alignment with the Habitat Conservation Program, Shoreline Master Program, Comprehensive Plan, which we just adopted. We want it to be well meshed into all of our other programmatic efforts. and big improvements for ease of implementation and permitting as we just discussed. A couple of things that are outside of the scope of this update, we're not changing the comprehensive plan at all. Everyone already worked really hard on that, so we don't want to touch it. And then we're not changing any other chapters of the county code. So it's just Title 24, that's where the CAO lives. There's no other titles that are up for changes with this update. Now to look a little bit at the process. This is parts of what happened so far and what will happen in the future as well. So we kicked off the initial sort of planning and engagement for this project back in 2025. We introduced this update to the Planning Commission pretty much immediately. And this is part of what I'll continue to speak to is the sort of framework for engagement that we're trying to build, which has been really collaborative. We're trying to really take the sort of informational level engagement that a lot of people see from lots of jurisdictions and have that be our starting point and then really move up that ladder of engagement to collaboration and i think that so far that's been going really well so we started introduced the project to planning commission right away at the end of 2025 and have been continuously reviewing with pc for the last several months And that has involved sort of a period of introducing sort of the big concepts. What does the best available science say? What does the state say? How does this all work? How does it fit together? We've even done demonstrations, like what is the experience of going to our front counter like? That was really helpful for getting planning commission an idea for what it can be like to navigate a piece of code like this and how we can improve it. And now we're starting to get a little more specific. So we've actually gone through and created what's called a gap analysis, which tells us if we're looking at the feedback we've gotten, expert opinion, state guidance, best available science, peer reviewed literature, what's different there than what's in our current code. And that gives us a really clear idea of the specific changes that we need to make. So we've just finished that portion of the review with Planning Commission. We have introduced a couple of chapters of the CAO in first draft form to the Planning Commission so far. We have a couple more that are upcoming. Every chapter draft of the code is going to go to Planning Commission two or three times before they make any decision, and that's over the course of several months. um so for each of these pieces they're getting to talk about it and look over it multiple times and that's not true just for the planning commission but for our members of the public who come participate with us in that forum and give us feedback so we're not only just presenting a draft for feedback we've actually brought the draft several times to and then brought it back and pointed out specifically, we heard this, it is now in this section of this chapter of the code. And to me, that's a really important way. If I take the time to engage in my own local governments and I were to see like, My comment is now in this section of this code. It has a citation that, that feels good. And that's the kind of collaboration that we're trying to build. We want the people who take the time to participate with us to feel like they are really having an impact because they are a great, they've been a wonderful resource for us so far.

That sounds very exciting. And I appreciate you saying that I'm, I'm wondering in terms of like the timeline, right. And looking at it, this is again, a chapter that hasn't been updated in a long time. Um, and so is this enough time to kind of fit all maybe public comment and all the questions and, you know, or is there that ability to expand if, you know, there needs to be an additional work session or additional information or.

So, um, one thing I will say the schedule, so we've been going since, uh, Last year, that October, we show an endpoint there. That's really where the first public hearing of a planning commission draft would happen. We anticipate that after that, there will probably be probably one to two months of like back and forth with the planning commission after that. And we're not really focused on that as a like timeline. Like this is really a kind of like a process milestone and ripeness. We think that that's probably enough time, but we've built in some contingency time where we could, we could move the process. If, if it's not ready to move, we could let the process take up a little bit more.

Thank you.

It's commissioner driven.

So if the commission needs more time, the commission always has more time.

Thank you. And just, and the reason I asked is just, um, I want to, you know, I know that this is mandated that we do this right after the comp plan, which we just went through. Right. Um, so I was wondering like, does the state give us a timeline on when it has to be completed by, uh, in order for us to be in compliance?

We've got a, like a 12 month grace period where we need to show substantial compliance. Um, it's, it's a little bit squishy, but the past, uh, kind of past that first quarter of next year, we're going to start to be getting into a little bit more squishy territory.

And I would say that we knew we only had 12 months. which is why we kick this off right on the heels of the planning commission being done with the comp plan, because we knew the community would want more time with this and that 12 months would not be enough. But this timeline was really dictated by when we could move the comprehensive plan out of planning commission to the board. And then we shifted gears and went straight into critical areas and we will, you know, STAY AS CLOSE AS WE CAN TO A PROCESS-DRIVEN APPROACH WHILE BALANCING THE STATE TIMELINE OF 12 MONTHS.

NEW SPEAKER I WANT TO SAY I LOVE THAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT HOW IMPORTANT IT IS THAT FEEDBACK THAT ALONG THE WAY HERE IS GETTING IMPLEMENTED INTO WHAT YOU GUYS ARE DOING. MY QUESTION IS AROUND SOME OF THE MORE I GUESS I'M GOING TO CALL IT SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS LIKE MASTER BUILDERS. know and i'll just say it from my perspective that you know meeting with um people in my district uh there's a lot of you know frustration i'd say from some of those bigger groups that they feel like they don't get the information until final review workshops and public hearing like that that end piece where things are and that they weren't notified that the work was going on beforehand so i guess i'm wondering you know, what kind of outreach are we doing right now to let people know that they should be coming to the Planning Commission meeting so that they can provide input?

Actually, so far, we have gone out to and attended and presented at meetings for the Olympia Master Builders Association, the Realtors Association, and the Squally River Council, and we've also met with some staff from the Squaxin Tribe. So a while back, we, as part of the engagement, I've touched on so far and we've been talking a lot about the planning commission, which has been a really key kind of central stage for the engagement. Part of that is how transparent it is and getting people in on every step of the process as we go through it. But there's been, we've been working outside of that as well. So one of the things we did was just, I believe we used a list from that was a result of planning commission engagement. So the big email out essentially open invite, if you would like County staff, this is happening. And if you would like us to, come and speak with you. We're just trying to accompany you with the right slide. Sorry. Just an open invite to have staff come to your group, your organization, whoever you may be, present, talk about this, answer questions. And on top of that too, we're also focusing on getting out to community events. Like we had a great presence at Prairie Appreciation Day, for example. um and trying to take that approach of if we're doing a lot of engagement here at the county and having people come to us which is very gracious of them we should return that favor and get out to the community engage as well i also say this is where you all being in the community when you hear that you got to say it's happening now you got to check in with the staff because we can go out as much as we can we can have

If they're not engaged, we can't get that information. So we are, the team is doing a great job, but I'd ask that when you're out there in the community, send them our way.

And we are trying to also use the opportunities in the BDC to let people know when they're coming in for these permits. We're hearing a lot of the same concerns you are to say, hey, you know what? That would be really great to share with our planning commission. So that's just another touch point that we have on a daily basis to try to let people know that this important effort is going on.

And if commissioners have groups specifically like, hey, I want to make sure that we can ensure that this group outreach to just send that information over to Josh, Ashley and I. And I think 1 of the superpowers of our team is their outreach component. And I've seen them go out to different events. booth that wouldn't normally necessarily fit the event but they're there and engaging they have a lot of great things for kids and families to connect with so I I think I can say this with confidence that they will make every effort to make that connection and even get on the agenda to speak if they have regular meetings for a group and one of the things that we're gonna we're planning to do is we work with the Planning Commission on is after that Planning Commission public hearing once we start to get

That's really when people really come out of the woodwork. But once we get all that feedback, we plan to hold a series of workshops where we can get folks together to actually kind of workshop through things, talk through them, try and understand what they mean, make sure that we've got the code kind of pointing in the right direction, but really, but literally bring people to the table to help kind of build a code the community wants to move forward. And then the planning commission will make a final recommendation and it'll come forward to the board.

This ask an expert series was so neat. We had people come in to the atrium that had never engaged with community planning before we specifically held them before planning commission meetings to try to entice them to stay and be part of the public process. We do plan on expanding this in the coming years to be basically like a community education series about how do you engage in your local government. So it was awesome. I highly encourage you to participate as we have them in the future.

I just want to make sure that it's okay.

Yeah. Okay.

Just wanted to make sure.

Yeah. So I'll just go through this one and make sure we touch on everything because there have been so many moving pieces for the public engagement for this. Working with our engagement outreach team has been a blast. so yeah we did the ask us series so we brought different staff experts because we have some great minds uh back there in cped um to essentially host like informal q a's with the public as ashley mentioned they were really well attended and we got people who like were new faces to all of us who haven't really been part of our process before and now those people are more clued in to THIS PROCESS. SOME OF THEM DID END UP STICKING AROUND FOR THE PLANNING COMMISSION MEETINGS, WHICH WAS GREAT. WE HAVE BEEN PRETTY ACTIVE ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE COUNTY WEBSITE, TRYING TO REACH PEOPLE THAT WAY. I HAD THE SCREEN SHOT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE WEB PAGE. I DEFINITELY RECOMMEND CHECKING THAT OUT. THERE'S MORE COOL FACT SHEETS LIKE THE ONE YOU SEE UP HERE ON THERE. AS I ALSO MENTIONED, WE'VE DONE MULTIPLE STAFF PRESENTATIONS TO DIFFERENT COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS AND ARE DEFINITELY OPEN TO DOING MORE. Really, anytime any group is interested in talking with us, we're making time. And even just individual people, we've also taken time to just meet with folks who have questions or want to know how they can participate. Ongoing is our engagement through the Planning Commission. That's really been the kind of center of engagement that keeps things really transparent and accessible. Basically, every new draft that we come out with, every piece of educational material, presentation, PC memo, all goes into one place. It's very accessible. People just know there's a central touch point they can check in with to engage with us on this. Staff has been available for one-on-one group meetings. That's continuing ongoing. And then we're always looking for community events to attend as well. And as Derek mentioned, in the future, once we have that kind of public hearing draft for the Planning Commission, We'll plan some workshops because we do anticipate that those hearing notices tend to generate a lot of interest. And so some people do jump in at that phase. We want those people to be able to give just as much input as the folks who've been

um when you were saying that the city olympia has done like a couple rues in 10 years like what how is that possible like don't don't people want to do stuff on their land that they can't do and so you're saying they have other pathways that those get resolved yeah administrative variances are probably the more common thing so it's kind of an in-between step

um between a critical review permit and a full on reasonable use exception and so just a easier threshold it they're already baked into the proposed shoreline master program and so it's really looking to the process that we have in there and trying to you know see if we can do a similar one for critical ordinance and then the strategies that claire mentioned as well just building in more flexibility WHICH IS ALLOWED BY THE STATE. WE MADE IT REALLY HARD FOR FOLKS TO EVEN DO THINGS THAT SEEM TO OUR PLAN AND COMMISSION TO BE VERY REASONABLE, LIKE BACK UP DRAINED FIELDS LOCATED WITHIN A BUFFER REQUIRING RUE AND R CODE. AND THEY DON'T IN OTHER JURISDICTIONS CODES, STUFF LIKE THAT.

mean i'm trying to get a sense of what like what's coming for us and um in terms of those types of substantive changes um you'll have for the planning commission like they'll how it how will it be chunked up for the planning commission like what will they see in terms of a set of changes like what you just described i mean is it how many different like p

of the work that you're in right now would that be fair yeah i think we're looking at the standards first and feel free to jump in claire yeah the way it's been broken up so far is we're kind of following that five critical area structure that comes down through state law so so far we have been focusing really on the standards that go for each of those that's how the code itself is set up too there's a wetlands chapter there's a geologically hazardous areas chapter and so on So we're breaking each of those out. We introduced them all conceptually. So those presentations and write-ups are all currently online. And then we've sort of gone through and made more specific lists of changes. And then PC is getting essentially a matrix of changes and that's the gap analysis and then red lines of the code and everything. And that's for each of those chapters. And then later in the process, we haven't gotten there yet. We'll have a couple of things bundled together that are more like a permit process, general standards,

and things like that all the administrative pieces that support those individual chapters and I will say with 14 years of reasonable use exceptions Claire kicked off this process with an audit of all reasonable use exceptions looking at what the value was to the environment in terms of what the conditions were for those and I think you found it was the staff recommended conditions or things that were already baked into the report so it wasn't like the hearings examiner themselves was adding value to the process. And so that's kind of the lens we're looking through is, are we getting value in terms of more environmental protections out of this? Or is it really just another hurdle that we're making people go over to get to the same end result?

We've been talking about it. We want to keep the bar of the standard high, but make the hoops smaller. We've gotten pretty good and consistent feedback and direction from everyone we've talked to that that's appropriate.

OK, other questions? Next up on the agenda is a executive session pursuant to RCW 4230-1101I to discuss with legal counsel representing the agency matters relating to agency enforcement actions or to discuss with legal counsel representing the agency litigation or potential litigation. to which the agency governing body or a member acting in an official capacity is or is likely to become a party when public knowledge regarding the discussion is likely to result in an adverse legal or financial consequence to the agency. 20 minutes?

I think we can start with 20 minutes, Chair. Before we go into it, I'm going to pass around a card I'd like everybody to sign for Lacey Fire. We just had a member die yesterday.

Wait, was it the person who was? Oh, no.

Okay, circulate that. So we have, it's 9.54, so almost 9.55, so we'll be in executive session under this piece until 10.15, and we'll have an extension if necessary. Board action may follow.

Recording in progress.

Okay, it's 12.13 p.m. After several extensions, the board completed the executive session under item four of this morning's agenda. The board had extensive discussion with staff and the prosecuting attorney's office regarding ongoing HR process with respect to public health and social services department complaints and risk generally. Direction was provided to continue to complete that process, which we understand is planned to include employment of a third party consultant. So with that, we are going to be in recess until 1220, where we will then take up item five on the agenda, which is another executive session related to litigation and a particular lawsuit we'll be discussing. So at 1214, we're going to take about a six minute recess so folks can use the restroom and whatnot, and then we'll pick up at 1220.

progress.

Okay, it's 1225. We're back from the short recess to pick up with item five on the morning's work session agenda. It's an executive session again pursuant to 4231 10 one I to discuss with legal counsel representing the agency matters relating to agency enforcement actions or to discuss with legal counsel representing the agency litigation or potential litigation to which the agency governing body or member acting in official capacity is or is likely to become a party. Public knowledge regarding the discussion is likely to result in adverse or legal financial consequence to the agency. 20 minutes is the estimate. So from 1225 will be an executive session until 1245. Board action may follow. We have

Brittany Garrett, I'm outside counsel with Summit Law.

Perfect. I wanted to establish that because we have counsel here to discuss with us the issues under this subsection. So we'll be in executive session until 1245. Okay, it's 1 10 p.m. We have completed the second executive session under item 5 and we provide a direction to council. No board legislative actions are going to take place. We are going to postpone the commissioner item regarding committee reports to potentially this afternoon or just next week because it is 1 10 and we're going to adjourn and be back for another work session. I want to