City Council Regular - Special Meeting

And a great switch.

I'm like, is it okay that I sign your name? Oh, thanks for doing it. I'm going to ask you your permission. That's all good. She's asking for forgiveness. Good.

Can we have a roll call, please? For Eschke? Here. Flourish? Here. Burke? Yes. Eskew? Here.

Frank?

Present. Heine?

Here.

Councilmember Norwood? Yes.

This is the public's opportunity to provide comments to the council, but you may supplement your comments with printed handouts. Electronic or digital aids will not be permitted during the public comment period. Please state your name and your city of residence. You have three minutes to speak. Please direct your comments to the council as a whole instead of individual members, staff, or audience members. Please come forward if you're in the chamber or raise your hand in the Zoom app. Please remember that public comments are not a discussion. Public comments are to inform the council of your views. And we have one that just stepped up to the end of the... Yeah.

Well, thank you, Rick Marshall, Campus Washington. Just wanted to thank the city for the recent improvements and investments in Grand Park. My wife and I had a chance to attend the celebration on Thursday. Lovely event. Well attended. And then we went back for the concert in the park that night. Had a great meal from the vendor there and didn't cost us very much for a night out on the town. It's only about a mile drive. So, yeah, mission accomplished. so we no longer live uh by the park but we've been working on a property close close by there and so i get a chance to be in that area quite a bit and i and i can attest that that park is getting used and loved um this this early afternoon the splash pad area um and the playground which is swarming with kids. And it's kind of neat. It's not just the kids, but then the families are able to, you know, picnic in the shade of the trees. Let's see, it was probably Saturday I drove past there, and I've never seen so many pickleball players before. It was just crazy. Anyway, I just want to thank the city for making these kinds of investments in, I think, what people, you know, refer to as our third places, places where our community can gather and connect. And these are really, really, really important for getting to know your neighbors, trusting your neighbors, developing that sense of community makes us safer, makes us healthier, makes us a more livable and desirable location. Helps with keeping our property values solid and makes other people outside the community want to come here and invest. So it makes us wealthier as well. So anyway, I just, again, I really appreciate making the investments. We've been kind of keeping an eye on that park for close to 30 years. 20 of it, we actually lived right on the park. And we always thought that, you know, it was a pretty special place and it really did deserve a refresh. And so it's just kind of heartwarming to see community step up, make the investments that were needed and see that park kind of get the attention and love that it deserves. So thank you.

Thank you. Is there anyone else in the chamber that would like to step up to the chair at the end of the table and make three minutes worth of comments?

I'll do it.

You look familiar.

I'm Mark Klein. I live in Camas. I know a few of you guys. So I better read this because if I don't read it, I'll never make the three minutes. It's going to be much bigger than others. So it'll be a little cold that way. But these are my thoughts I just put together in the last couple of days on the topic of switching the government from a mayor council to a council manager, elected mayor arrangement. So these are some of my thoughts in that regard. So I read this article last week in the Post Record. My first reaction to that was, you know, why? Why would we do this? And so regarding stability, I just don't see the issue. You know, we had this blip a few years back, the pool debacle, which is what it was. And really, I think the messaging there was really the issue. It was poor at best, and I think most people would agree with that. And then the follow-up, Mayor, he came in sort of unprepared, really unprepared, didn't last very long, and left. Other than that, I took a look in the past 30 years of all the mayors, we average in this city six and a half, six plus years of service per mayor over the last 30 years. That's pretty stable, just in that regard. The issue of the pool thing is kind of an outlier. And so because of that, I don't think it really rises to the level of change in the whole government structure. I just don't think it meets that, you know, that level. The whole thing about planning for instability, in other words, if we're going to do something because we think it's going to be unstable in the future, is really kind of defeatist. And I, I think that I wonder about what's the real reason for what would be the motives in that regard? Like, are we really trying to plan for failure? Or are we trying to solve current problems, and then move ahead with that? So Those are my thoughts on that. 30 years ago, we had a population of 8,000 people. We moved here 29 years ago. We had 8,000, approximately 8,000 people. Today, we're right at 24, 23, high 23s, 24,000 people. And we've managed that pretty well in this administration, in this structure of the administration. So I think that's a That's a plus in the plus column, and I don't see that as being a thing that we have to work on. The city, if you remember, or if you think back, the city has maintained some excellent relations with the school district. We have an excellent school district with the business community. I've never seen anything like it in the 29 years or so that we've been here. It's gone from pretty much a mill town to not so much a mill town. what, 10 or 12 or 13% of our property taxes comes from the mill, something like that. So over those years, we've recruited some excellent businesses, excellent families as a result, and they all kind of support each other. And then the third thing is that we have, you guys have a great relationship with the Downtown Association. You ought to be proud of that. I'm proud of that. I think every one of those addresses, maybe one or two are leased with some good, you know, with some good businesses. And so I think that's a real, That's a real positive. The whole notion that we won't be able to compete for top managers, I just don't buy it, assumption number one. And the idea then becomes kind of premature. I just think we can recruit top managers. Now there's gonna be some headwinds that are not stated, at least not in that article, if we went ahead with something like this. And those headwinds would include, you would dilute authority. And once you dilute authority, you're gonna start slowing down the work on the initiatives.

Yeah, I think the three minutes.

I'll go, 15 seconds. The mayor would become an elected ribbon cutter. The most concerning part of this that you move authority away from, elected officials to unelected officials. And then I'm going to skip a few things here, but that bothers me. That would be in our best, you know, that wouldn't be our best option. At any rate, we do have suggestions for improving the format. I'm going to leave these with you guys. There are ideas with training, there are ideas with mentoring and working on preparing candidates pre and post election. I think if candidates came in far more prepared, you'd get a better performance. I'm having to restructure everything. So if you guys want to contact me, that's fine.

Thank you.

Sorry about that. I almost blew that.

Okay. Is there anyone in the chamber that would like to step up and give 30 minutes worth of comments? Is there anyone online that has their hand raised in the Zoom app?

I see no hands raised via Zoom. Okay. Darcy just raised her hand.

Okay, we've got one coming.

Darcy, are you able to unmute your audio?

Darcy, we cannot hear you if you are talking. You have 10 more seconds to unmute. Sorry about that.

Sorry about that, Darcy.

Okay. With that, we will move on to the workshop agenda.

Parks National Benchmarking Room.

And that will come from this one. I'm going to not pronounce your name right, so I'm just going to say it's Chris.

Witkowski.

It's the ski throws everybody off.

Let me share my screen. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of council. I wanted to share with you tonight some data from our national benchmarking exercise. Just for some quick background, the National Recreation and Parks Association, NRPA, it's kind of the industry standard in the US for the top trade organization in the US for the parks and recreation industry. So every year they run a national benchmarking exercise. They've been doing this, I think, for 20, 30 years. It's been going on for quite some time. So it's a well-established benchmark exercise. And so when I first got here, I wanted to participate in it so that we could start to get some real data, start making data-driven decisions and understand where we're at as a compared to some of our peers. And so I just wanted to share some of that data with you tonight. I'll just start by saying I know the question is always asked. Do we ask questions during or after? This one doesn't really have a general flow to it. It's just different sections. So feel free to ask as we go if you'd like. We have nine data slides to share, and I have about 20 minutes to do it. So we'll just keep that in mind, although time's at your discretion. I'll sit here all night if you'd like. In terms of strategic priorities, I couldn't pick one. They really touch on all of them. This benchmark hits everything from vibrant community amenities, stewardship of city assets, safe city. So let's just say it covers everything across the campus lily with this report. This is just some of the data that we use just so you have some background of what we submitted. The way the process works, we submit the data by the end of January every year. They take it and produce the report to us in late May, early June. So we submitted this data in January of 2026. Since that time, a little bit of information changed. So I'll kind of go through where some of those changes are just so you have some of the current data. But most of the information is still the same. And yeah, there's just been been a few changes, most notably parks maintenance moving into the parks and operations department. So factored into this benchmark already. So as we just start to get into some of the categories and the results, in terms of just park sites itself, Camas is a little bit behind in terms of number of developed parks. Related size, I want to say, is those in our population density, which was 1,500 to 2,500 people per square mile per community. And then all agencies is the entire, all agencies that participate in the benchmark. So all agencies, there are about 700 agencies that participate in this nationwide. And there were about 400 that were in our size range. So it gives you some comparison as to where we're at. So from a developed parks, from a number perspective, we're sitting at 16. So we're a little bit behind. both our comparatives and related size and agencies. Not surprisingly, when you translate that to acres, we're also a little bit behind in terms of you know, for both related size agencies and all agencies. It doesn't mean that we're bad. It doesn't mean we're good. Maybe this works for us. It just means this is where we're at kind of nationally speaking. We're just a little bit behind the national average. Acres of parks per 1,000 population, again, a little bit behind the national average. And then I'm sure this is no surprise to a lot of you, we're very highly provisioned on open space. When you get into total open space compared to our comparative cities, we have over 700 acres. They're coming in at just over 300 and around 250. So we're definitely well provisioned on open space. Jennifer Senescu asked a good question. You answered it.

So I guess I should wait till the end. But I was talking about legacy lands. I mean, that's the open space, right?

So Legacy Lands, yes, that would be part of it.

So we're killing it on the open space.

We are definitely.

Eventually, I think things are going to equal out. Things will balance out. I think you're doing a great job. I think the city's doing a good job.

And that was one thing. Yeah. So for developed parks. And the other thing is Green Mountain Park will come online. It technically is not in our system right now, although we did include it. in our acreage here, so that does include Green Mountain, but Legacy Lands is considered open space, and some of that will go into the developed parks once we develop that out. So we'll start to see that balance. Council Member Savarage. Thank you, Mayor.

Chris, how do we account for Lackamas Park or William Clark Park? I mean, those are regional parks, but especially Lackamas is considered a campus park.

yeah so those are not in in this study because those are county parks and so we don't put any funding into those parks and you'll see later on yeah you'll see later on where the funding plays into these these different numbers so um so yeah those weren't weren't factored in um well I had a thought and then it went away but it's a little clarification thank you yeah uh just for the note

John Noor has made it on. Welcome, John. And you should continue.

Okay. Oh, that's what I wanted to say. With this being our first year participating in this exercise, we just get a worksheet and we fill in the numbers as they ask. We weren't able to see how they were going to use the numbers. So once we start to see how they've taken some of the numbers and applied to others, I would answer the questions a little bit differently next time, and I'll explain some of those discrepancies as we go through this presentation. These benchmarking exercises, it's always a bit of a learning curve the first time you do it. For amenities, this is one where we actually want to have a lower number because it means that we have a higher number vision in number we're serving fewer residents per per amenity I always have to wrap my head around this one too it's kind of backwards I would have set up the graphs a little different but I wanted it to match what's in the report so I just set it up the way they have it so on community garden although we have two we're actually a little bit ahead of where our comparators are because we have we have one community garden for every 13,000 residents roughly, whereas some of our comparators have only one for about every 45,000 residents. So ball diamonds with that in mind of, The higher number here is not necessarily better. We're a little bit behind on ball diamonds for comparative agencies, a little bit ahead on basketball courts and tennis pickleball. We're right around the national average. I'm sure that we have some pickleballers who will tell us otherwise, but comparatively speaking, we're doing okay. Again, these numbers are population facility.

Questions on this one before I move on?

Okay. Personnel. So we are sitting for full-time employees. We are sitting around 12 or we are sitting at 12 full-time employees. Related size agencies are around 46 to 47 and all agencies are around 41 or 42. We are pretty far behind the national curve on full-time employees or full-time equivalent employees. I factored in, this is where in the report, this is where some of the discrepancy came from from not having parks maintenance under us at that time. I did make an adjustment for this presentation. When you factor in seasonal staff, we have 15 FTEs. We are still quite a bit behind the comparative agencies in this category. When you look at FTE distribution across the main functions of parks, we're a little bit highly distributed on maintenance. But when you're talking about 12 staff members, one or two can really make a change in the percentage. So we're showing a higher distribution of maintenance. But I don't know that that's, I don't know that we're really seeing that big of a difference in the field, you know, 70 something percent down to 40 something percent. I think where we're seeing it is in the lower, just the lower personnel in general. All these numbers are based off median values. The report does give us into lower quartile and upper quartile. And for FTEs and full-time employees, we are below the lower quartile number. So I'm figuring we are in the bottom 10 to 15% for staffing for our parks nationwide. Yes, Jennifer. Thank you.

A nationwide for places that are our population, correct?

Nope, for all agencies. So those in our population density are coming in around 46, 47 employees. And all agencies who participated in this, no matter the size, are coming in around 41, 42 per department.

Within our size, we might be more closely related to the average, right?

Hard to say. It broke it out by population density. So that's the report that I have to go off. I can share with you. If you don't, I'll share it after. We did, through the regional parks funding task team, we did a similar metric using just parks data. and looking at similar sized agencies. And we were, I think at around 6.3 and the national average was around nine points or the state average around nine point something. So we're still a little bit behind that. And I can even bring that up when we're done here. Thank you. Maintenance expenditures, this is the one that requires a little bit of explaining. Of course, when I opened the report, the graph on the left was the first one that was in the report. I almost fell off my chair when I saw that we were so far, so much higher than everybody else. What happened was, this is where, again, I would do a little bit different, was they took the budget that we have and they just divided it by the number of developed acres. It did not ask us to factor in open space, boulevards, facilities that we maintain, to not ask us to break out the budget by that way. It just assumed that all of our budget goes to develop parks. So that's why it's showing us as being in this 11,000 range of being so much higher. When we factor in all of the other Tom Epstein – items that we maintain that aren't necessarily developed part we're actually in that three to 4000 range per acre of parkland so it actually brings us right around the average of our of our comparative municipalities so. Tom Epstein – looks like we're very high on funding but we're right around right around average in actuality, but I think the better one to look at is operating expenditures per capita that takes the whole acreage equation out of it, when you look at per capita. we're really doing pretty well. We're pretty comparable to agencies of our size and then ahead of all agencies nationwide.

A member.

So can you help me understand programming? Is it the events we have or it refers to something? Like the note below says some of the experience expenses are related to.

So that includes, so the graph on the right, on the left, sorry, is just factoring parks maintenance. The graph on the right is factoring our entire budget. So that includes our recreation programming budget, our facilities, all of our staffing, administration. So it's everything. It's not just the parks maintenance.

Sure. And recreational programming, what What does that mean?

So those are programs that we offer at the lodge, like the fitness courses, our cookie decorating class, some of the different classes that we have. And we'll touch on that here in just a second, too. Deferred maintenance. This is another one that caught my eye a bit. So the one on the left is that's what we submitted into the report at the time in January. The only information I had was on our playgrounds and we're around $1.5 million in deferred maintenance on playgrounds alone. So when you look at playgrounds compared to comparable agencies, Even just on playgrounds, we're higher on deferred maintenance than most of the national average. Since then, when I was building this report, I had time to factor in some additional data that has come in over the last couple of months around sports field assessments and some other assets that we have. We're still trying to finish off our asset condition ratings and our asset management plans, lots of work in progress. But right now, we are really sitting at around $7.5 million of deferred maintenance. So when you factor that compared to the other agencies, we are quite a bit ahead. Well, ahead behind. It depends on how you want to look at it. We have a lot of funding out there, funding needs to keep our park system going the way it's going. And some of these, I suspect, I expect this is going to be like a 10-year horizon at $7.5 million. Some things are going to need to be done a little bit sooner. Some can be put off, but this isn't a 20, 30 year horizon. I think this is definitely the next decade. And there's still going to be more information to come. So this number is going to go up as we continue to get more of that asset condition rating. For revenue, revenue per capita and revenue as percent of operating expenditures, we are very low. That's not a huge surprise to me. Our The department revenue is really generated through facilities rentals, recreational programming, or really kind of near capacity on both. We only have one recreation programmer and we only really have the lodge to rent out. You have the community center, but that just brings in a small amount of money each year. So our revenue is really limited to what we can bring in for programming and for lodge rentals. And that kind of brings us to the next slide of programming and volunteers. And comparatively speaking, we're very low on programs that we offer, on a number of programs we offer. We have one staff member who is dedicated solely to providing programming. We really only have one, two space. We have the lodge, but that's also shared as one of our primary facility booking spaces. And then we have the community center, which is, it needs some love, let's put it that way, in order for us to really have it be an attractive facility to have more programming in. Volunteers were a little bit behind our national average, but we're trending in the right direction on that. We have our new software. We have staff members who are doing a great job of recruiting new volunteers. That software is actually getting a better count on volunteers. So we are actually increasing.

and i suspect within another couple years we will be right at or above this number so i'm very happy with where we're at with volunteers and the direction that we're going uh yeah go ahead you should never tell me i can interrupt in the middle of a presentation um let me go back to that yeah no so all of these graphs are representative of what you put in right that's right and so it could be a little different um depending um also we're not comparing apples to apples right we're not comparing um our similar population to other populations these are across the state is that correct too so across the country country so we're comparing ourselves to across the country and we're a wonderful town of camas that is smaller so i think that should weigh into these numbers a little bit and i you alluded to that which is why i picked up on it so thank you yeah So I just want to fully understand what we're looking at.

Yeah, so I would be looking more, when I'm looking at it, I'm looking more at the related size agencies than I am at all agencies. Related size is going to be more kind of where all agencies, we could be comparing ourselves to, you know, Cleveland or Washougal, right? It could be, you know, maybe I should have said Seattle. I don't know where Cleveland came from.

Well, thank you.

And then just on a conclusion, how are we going to use this data? Again, I was trying to use this to make some more data-driven decisions as we move forward. Some of these are not surprises. They're things that we're already looking at. We look at the deferred maintenance and financial. I'm trying to continue to build that asset condition plan. We need to start developing a funding strategy or start to understand What's coming down the road that we're going to have to replace? What is going to become critical soon? What can we put off a little bit longer? For programming, if we want to increase our programming, we're going to have to start looking at maybe using more park space for programming. I know revenue has been a topic since I've been here. I want to explore more revenue opportunities. Really don't have much opportunity to do that through bookings or through programming a lot. The bookings are pretty well maxed out for the lodge. We have like 50 out of 52 weekends already booked out in that facility. So it's hard to find where we're going to get more revenue from a booking. So I think the revenue, you know, we might have to be looking at some parking or some usage kind of revenue. We just have to do some studies on that. I don't know. what kind of revenue that would bring in for us. But I think that would be, if we want to explore more revenue, that's where we're going to have to start looking, as in more of some user fees. Two things that I really kind of hit on from looking at this before under park sites, I think we need to have a land strategy. We are getting into our 27, 28 pros update, our parks recreation open space plan. Rather than build a separate land strategy, I think as we do that update, we start it next year, I want to look at land. Do we want to build more developed parks? We need to find more land where we can develop. What do we want to do with the open space? Do we want to maybe start to develop that out a little bit with maybe some trails? We want to divest ourselves with some of the open space. We want to acquire more. I think we just have to start to have a little more of a strategy for what are we doing around our land because we're a little bit low on develop, very high on open space. And then the last thing that I think we have to look at from staffing, I think we're just at a point, we're going to have to start looking at levels of service. uh we're we're pretty maxed out i don't know really where we can grow a whole lot without expanding our our staffing base um i think we're just getting to the point where we're gonna have to start looking at do we have to start cutting back in some areas on what we offer example i'm giving right now is oak park playground we identified in november that it was it was a it was safety hazard. We couldn't get parts to repair it. It's been closed now for seven months. I'm trying to get to it. Don't have capacity. We don't have anyone on our team who has capacity to tackle that project. And I'm worried that that's where we're starting to head as we start to see more playgrounds or more assets that start to come into that critical failure. Where are we going to find the capacity to to help develop those new spaces, or do we have to take them out of service? So I think that's something that we're going to have to start looking at. Council Member Elzengray.

Yeah, Chris, thanks for this. It's very interesting, and congratulations on Crown Park. I think that's an example of how we can do a great job with the limited resources that we have. And I'd like to congratulate you on having one quarter of the full-time employees of Other cities. So you must be super efficient. I'm guessing you're using AI. You're saying I'm AI. So as I just listened to you, because I looked at this slide earlier and I said, this is interesting, but it doesn't. how do we raise more money? How do we get more volunteers? How do we get up to the level? But it's good thinking, but I think we need to take that next step that I know you've started to think.

Yeah, agreed wholeheartedly. And this was not to give us answers to or solutions to issues. It was to show us where we're at. And as I said, as we get into our pros update in 2027, I think this is a very good starting point to see where we're at. It's already highlighted for me, as I said, a few things that I wanna start looking at on that PROS plan update. So yeah, this is for information by no means, and like Jennifer was saying too, doesn't necessarily mean if we're ahead or behind that we're doing good or bad, it could be working for our community. This is where we're at across national average.

Let's make a plan.

Yeah.

Any other questions or comments?

Councilmember Hyatt. Thank you, Mayor. Chris, thanks a lot for the presentation, and I completely agree with Councilmember Elzingray. I think you nailed it on the conclusion in terms of where we're at, and I think this is really helpful. And you've been really consistent, too. If we go back to their, I think, time in April, a lot of asset management. several other presentations evergreen mountain bike there's several things that are all coming together so the strategic plan will be timely especially with like this season coming up and i think you've got realistic timelines the deferred maintenance is a real concern um but i think that's that's the next step where we got and plan that we can yeah yeah right thank you

Council members to a large.

Thank you, Mayor. Chris, good information. Great. Great to know where we stand, plenty of the numbers, but this last page, the last item, staffing, I think you're very understated. I've been to a lot of meetings where you remind, generally remind people that you, 20% of the admin were in the higher department. I don't think we want to hire professionals like that to be admin. And I think we really need to talk about finding some level of staffing to do that because if he's doing 20% of it, the rest of them are doing the other 80%. And is that what they should be doing? I don't think so. So I'm hoping that the council will keep that in mind as we have further budget talks and further growth. I'd rather hire, I know it's long-term, but I'd rather hire a very competent admin than worry about a playground for right now because that's our long-term vision. Personal commentary. Councilmember Eskey.

Yeah, I agree with everyone. Just want to go back to the asset management. I think it's really key for future decisions and come with priority. It's kind of impossible to me if we don't know where our assets, where we are with, where we have deficit, what's the cost to each program or item we have. So Chris, when is the asset management available?

It's a work in progress. As I mentioned, you know, I'm not trying to beat the same drum on staffing, but this is where we're at is just trying to find somebody that can go out and collect the data. I have thought about going out and just hiring a consultant to do it. I've talked to a few consultants just to get, just to have just general feedback, high level, you know, what do you think this is gonna cost? I got to be honest for what it's going to cost to have them do it. I would rather put that money into an asset replacement and have our staff be able to go do the condition ratings, but it's hard to free up the staff time to finish it off. So I'm kind of in that quandary right now of how do we finish off the asset management? We've had some of it started through the sports field assessment report, um, So it's kind of a timing capacity thing right now.

So part of those data gathering for asset management, maybe we rely on some volunteers. I know part of it gets technical. You need more technical eye on that. But then maybe a group of the students can help. A lot of people were excited to help with Park when we had the Crown Park grand opening. I can bring some army of students for you instead. Yeah.

And it's, I want to word this politely. And I don't mean this offense. This is something my father told me. So this is my father speaking. Garbage in, garbage out. So we need to make sure, while I love the idea of using students, we need to make sure that the students understand exactly what they are looking at. Because if a student just goes out and doesn't quite understand and says, yeah, this is good, this is bad. Without that sense of consistency in the understanding, the data at the output side doesn't really help us. So students, I think it just depends. Are we talking about college students? Are we talking about high school students? Or maybe it's a matter of just doing summer help. It doesn't have to be a student. Could it be anybody who needs a summer position or a seasonal position? That's what I'm still trying to work around. But to do it externally, that requires some funding. So I have to get the funding for it. To do it internally requires the time. So that's just where some of that struggles take place right now. Sorry, follow-up question. Thank you.

So the work in progress, is it more like six months ahead of us or a few years ahead of us?

I would like to have it done in 12 months. I think six months is a little bit ambitious with where we're at right now, but I would definitely like to have this in 12 months, especially as we enter into our PROS plan update. I would love to have that information so we can really build a strong plan that will guide us forward for the next six years.

Council member John Knorr, you're the only one that hasn't had an opportunity to ask questions. Would you like to ask a question?

Well, the only question I had was we had some parks that were taken out of service because the play equipment wasn't serviceable. So does that in this type of survey end up as open space or do we count that as a park even though we can't use it? And I think it plays into the deferred maintenance subject.

Yeah, so we have to watch. We're not interchanging two terms. So a park and a playground are two separate. So the park is the land itself. The playground is one of the amenities in the park. So the playgrounds are out of service, or one of them is out of service. The others were repaired, and that's what's going into this deferred maintenance chart that you're seeing now. The parks themselves are open. The one playground, Oak Park Playground, is out of service.

Any other questions, Sean?

No.

Okay. Council Member Sonescu, I think you have one.

Thank you. And thank you, Chris. So deferred maintenance is upsetting to me that we keep buying more property. I mean, the city keeps buying more and we can't take care of it. So is it an issue of not deferred maintenance, but when you keep buying more property, we're never going to catch up? So do we own too much property? Do we need to look at what we own and look at what we can maintain?

So, yeah, two answers to that. So the first part is that's part of the land strategy that I want to do, and I want to get council's feedback on that. I can make recommendations. It's ultimately council's decision on what we buy or what we sell. For deferred maintenance, this is not – mowing or tree pruning anything that would come with land this is playgrounds baseball fields baseball equipment you know backstops these are hard assets tangible well i guess land is tangible but these are hard assets that we own so so land is not factored into this deferred maintenance but it is factored into uh the park sites here thank you for that clarification and i i

If I may say one thing, I'm sad to hear that Oaks Park has been closed for seven months. I know that services a lot of our citizens.

And I definitely want to build it. We have the funding and I want to get that back up and in service. Like I said, we're just kind of running into a capacity issue right now. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We all know that every time we survey our community, one of the things that they most appreciate and want to sustain our purpose. And so I heard this from you a few times now. And I'm just like fully on the side of our money where residents want it to be. So it's just my I just want to lend support to this plan. I don't like seeing that we're so far below in these places. And our staff is over tasked with trying to keep our residents have asked of us. So thank you for all your hard work and thank your staff as well. Thank you.

Any other questions? What are the next steps?

Well, for tonight, this was just information only, so I don't need anything more from Council unless you have any follow-up thoughts, you know where to contact me. Otherwise, next step is keep moving along on asset management and get ready for the FROZE update in 27.

It's got to be a day in history today that you bring us

There is. I felt like this was all fun facts, so I didn't want to overdo it. But today was the day that John Lennon met Paul McCartney for the first time, and I think it was 1957. So the Beatles were formed after that. I was going to try to fit a Beatles song into it, but I just ran out of time. I was distracted with other things today.

Thank you, Mr. Lennon. And have a good vacation.

Thank you very much. I will be back. You'll see me several more times this evening before I go on my vacation.

Okay, moving on to the next subject. It is the General Fund Budget Outlook with Kayla Mobley, Interim Finance Director and Deborah Brooks, Financial Analyst.

Good evening, afternoon, mayor, members of council. As you know, following the recent departure of our long-term director, I am stepping forward tonight as your interim finance director. I've been working deeply with our team on the numbers we're going to share with you tonight. I'm excited to lead the department through the biennial cycle, and tonight our goal is absolute transparency as we look at the structural realities of the general fund. Tonight marks the official launch of our 27-28 biennial budget process. This session is designed to establish an early baseline of our general fund, look at the economic landscape, and review the structural pressures facing our city so we can align our strategic solutions early. Our goal for this budget cycle is sound financial stewardship, transparency, and sustainability. We're going to move through six core areas to build a complete picture of our fiscal health. So we will start by looking outward at the macroeconomic environment that directly impacts the bottom line. Our staff use independent data-driven baseline metrics aligned with broader national and regional economic cycles. And we specifically rely on data from Moody's Analytics and the Washington State Economic and Revenue Forecast Council. A lot of information here. We're going to work our way through it. We're seeing a real unique dynamic where the top 20% of earners are sustaining steady overall consumer spending, which is hiding an increasingly fragile position for the remaining 80%. So this is creating kind of a high stakes dependency if our high earners pull back at all. So this frequently is referred to as a wealth effect. Additionally, the national labor market saw some mild gains earlier this year, but the momentum hasn't really transferred locally. Our regional job market has kind of cooled off. We still see high mortgage rates that were locked in by the Fed. Those have kind of cooled our local housing market as well. So we see local home sales and prices are declining. And then new construction projects are also slowing down. So kind of a double whammy. And then finally, energy prices are still vulnerable to global conflict. Even if a resolution is found, supply chain stabilization takes some time. We see rising energy costs that have taken a hit to consumer personal savings. So as inflation is trending upward, consumer spending on non-essentials has kind of slowed down. which has had an impact on our local sales tax. So the key takeaway that we want to make here is that all of these external factors mean that we cannot rely on a massive surge of unexpected sales tax or building permit fees to bail us out of a deficit. Our growth is flattening out. On the revenue outlook, We have some assumptions. Our revenue modeling takes the economic research I kind of just went over plus a few assumptions. So we're assuming a slowing population growth at 1% annually. We're assuming or we know that there's a dip in construction revenue in 27. And we're also assuming that we take the standard 1% statutory property tax levy increase. The single largest driver of the drop in our projected general fund, that I'll show you in just a sec, is our commitment to honor the pledge to release the 71 cents per thousand on the property tax levy to the RFA, though that is offset by a loss of associated expenses.

We have a question.

Sure.

Member Hine. Thank you, Mayor. Kayla, I've got just a question on construction. What do you mean by construction assumed at 16% in 2027? What's that compared to? Is that prior year? Is it 16% of budget? What is that 16%? What's the negative 23%?

Yeah, on that second bullet point. So in looking at some of the analytical data and then speaking with our community planning director and staff is where we pulled those numbers from.

So is it 16%, 60% over prior year six?

Yes, I believe so.

Okay. And then 28, it drops down significantly.

Yeah.

Do you know if they've factored North shore sub area that 28 planning and beyond, or is that? And I know, I don't mean to be peppering questions. I know you're new, so. That's okay. Yeah.

Yeah, if I don't know, I will definitely get back with you. I would have to double check. I'm still getting acclimated to all of the areas in Camas. I do have Deborah Brooks joining us tonight as well for any super specific questions. Deborah, do you have an idea about that one?

Yeah, I think the The idea here is that we wouldn't necessarily have building permits coming online by that point. I don't know that we would have construction kicking in quite that quickly. So that's why the drop there.

Okay. Thank you.

Yeah.

All right, so we have some numbers to dig into. I want to start by just noting that these are based off of figures at the close of May. So this is based on May 31st actual data collected from our financial system. So it's important to note for those in the room and those watching at home that much of the $5.8 million drop that you see in total revenue is not gone from the community. It shifts directly over to the fire authority. So that's based on what the voters voted in. It's just not part of our general fund anymore. So the topic of our discussion this evening is specifically about city general fund. Just want to make that note that those dollars aren't leaving the community. They're just leaving the city's budget. This table gives a different visual breakdown of our revenue trends over the past few years. We can see really clearly the areas marked in green that make up the bulk of our revenue. from the bottom up, starting from the bottom, moving up towards the top. There are really three green areas. One of them's real tiny, but starting from the bottom, moving upward is property tax, sales tax, and then utility tax. The sort of salmony pink towards the top is charges for services. And then kind of in the middle, the third largest of Of those colors is the teal color is licenses and permits you'll notice in 23 and 24 there was a lot more yellow at the top of the table, which is reflective of our support that the city received to help balance the budget. which makes sense that didn't carry forward that was one time funding so. We like to be able to show property or excuse me, taxes collectively make up quite a big portion of our revenue, but to break them apart between how much of that is property tax versus sales tax versus utility tax, I think is an interesting view. If we kind of double click into property taxes, we have another chart here to show revenues. The bottom blue area is the city portion of just the property tax. And the top portion that's kind of a pinkish orangish, depending on where you sit, color is the amount that has traditionally supported the Canvas Washougal Fire Department. So you see it. kind of evaporated from the screen for 2027. But we wanted to show this data in this way to clearly demonstrate that while in 27, the fire portion is removed from the city's books, the amount of property tax that is not associated with the fire department is pretty flat. With these very early figures that we're using for the budget kickoff, we're estimating about 100,000 ish more in 27 than 26. So that's pretty flat year over year for just the city's non-fire department portion of property tax. Operating budget baseline is going to bring us over to the expense side of the budget equation. And I'll just start off by talking about kind of what assumptions we're making before I show you some numbers. So to maintain our current service levels, we're modeling a 4% CPI for 27, 3% for 28. We know or we're assuming employee benefit cost growth of at least 12% in 27, followed by 6% in 28. And then we're also assuming a 1%. 1% population growth, which will have an equivalent demand for services. Then looking at some actual numbers here for expenses by department. Again, this is just in the general fund and reflective of the data we collected through May. Major operational cost centers. our center really remains law enforcement. Total expenses in the general fund dropped from 41.9 to 36.1 in 27. So that's due quite a bit due to the removal of the fire department operations from the general fund, which is shown in the transfer line, the very bottom there. So even with these major operational drops, our total projected baseline expenses for 27 are coming in at 36.1, while our projected revenues are coming in at 30.2 million. Just about a $6 million gap at the moment. All right. Similarly to the revenue side, we have some expense trends. So this is a chart of expenses over time. We can see clearly that in the general fund, the major expense overall is human capital. The bottom green bars reflect salary expenses while the next green box above that shows benefits. I think this table does a good job reflecting the big jump in benefit costs that are really contributing to the overall human capital costs for the city. you can kind of see how much those grow from 26 to 27 and then stay elevated in 28. Okay. This graph is showing the cross current that we must address. The reality is that our operational spending began outpacing our recurring revenues back in 22. But ARPA support provided a cushion. It got us through a hump. Again, for the folks at home, a reminder that ARPA, A-R-P-A, stands for American Rescue Plan Act. So that was one-time funding that we obviously spent. It is now gone. And it's kind of exposing the underlying structural gap. So if we take no action to adjust our revenues or expenses, our fund balance is going to drop below the statutory requirement in 2027 and then be completely exhausted by 2028. The key takeaway that we want to make here is that this is a projection of what happens if we change nothing. Our task over the next few months is to collaborate on adjustments to ensure this kind of trajectory never happens. And we don't bring this up to sound alarmist. This is really a standard, predictable, structural math problem that municipalities are facing all over in a post-COVID, post-ARPA season. I have full faith that the city is fully capable of managing the situation through policy levers.

I have a question from Council Member Hine.

Yes.

Thank you, Mayor. I have a question on ARPA funds. Yeah. If I'm trying to recall, specific ARPA funds were utilized, I believe, for capital enhancement and not non-recurring expenditures, correct? for this intended purpose of not relying on future funding that we knew was going to go away?

I would have to double check what exactly ARPA funds were used for. I believe that it was used to offset some deficit, but you are correct that the best use of one-time funding is for one-time expenses.

I appreciate you weren't here at that time, but I thought we used it for the library as well as police funding. Yes.

I know it was used for police, but I'd have to double check what exactly. If it was used to support salaries or capital, I don't know for sure.

Okay. Thank you.

Sure, I can find out. Pardon me while I just make a note. Police and libraries. Okay, so we have a gap to close. A balanced approach, we'll look at both sides of the equation. We'll be looking for revenue enhancements and expense reductions to kind of squish it in the middle. We have provided an example here on the screen for you, a matrix form to show what 2% through 6% utility tax model would generate. For instance, the 2% model, that's what we're in this year, generates roughly 460,000 in revenue, while a 6% model would bring in or could bring in about 1.3. We could consider transportation benefit district fee, the TBD fee, moving from 10 to 20. That should yield about $400,000 and would relieve the general fund of funding transfers to streets. On the- Sorry.

Council Member Savarage.

Yes.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for this good information. I want to be clear though on the examples of utility taxes. We're currently at 2%, but if we go to three, we don't generate, we just generate the difference between those two numbers, right?

Correct. Yes.

So- We don't pick up a lot of money by one point or even two points. Right. Okay, thank you.

Right, yeah. We would collect at 3%, the collective amount would be 690. Right now we're at 2%, 460. So the net difference is the net add.

Council Member Van Eskew.

Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Kayla. I've just been reeling through this whole process of this presentation. So forgive me if I'm all over the board. Let's be clear that these are all projections, right? Yes. And one of the most alarming things I've heard is this can be managed through policy levers. And then the next slide. is increasing utility tax. So when the utility tax was established, it was supposed to go away, and it didn't. And Vancouver's at 29% now. I was afraid of this. We're going to keep creeping up. And as Council Member Szilard said, oh, 1% isn't going to do us anything. Let's bump it up to 9%. And before you know it, we're going to be at 29%. And I do not think this is a way to manage our finances. And that was not an attack. I'm sorry. I'm passionate about what happened with this utility tax and how we're using that to fix any projected, which may not even happen. You're talking inflation. You're talking mortgage rates. Back in the 80s, when I was growing up, mortgage rates were at 13%. I mean, we experienced low mortgage rates at 3.75 or lower. That was abnormal.

Now we're at normal. If I could. Kayla is presenting background scenarios that we were working through. She is not offering this evening solutions.

Okay.

Thank you.

I just got excited because I saw utility tax and that makes me excited. So Kayla, I did not mean any disrespect and thank you. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. Budget gets me excited too. So you're in good company. I love that. Good.

Okay. Take it away, Kayla.

Okay. Okay. All right, so we kind of looked at the revenue side of some strategies that we can consider. Again, I just want to say this is based on a point in time, the information we have at our hands today, and then we're going to continue to have conversations between now and finalizing this budget. So we're just kind of doing a kickoff, really. On the expense side, some options we could consider, some strategies, not all-inclusive. We could consider hiring freeze. We could consider capturing savings naturally through attrition. We could evaluate a flat percentage cut across all departments. We could review of our non-mandated programming. What could we put on hold? What could we adjust for operational hours to kind of curb facility or staffing costs? We could also prioritize an updated IT repair and replacement model to ensure the general fund isn't unintentionally subsidizing an enterprise or utility fund. Just a few examples. And then I also just offer again, at this point in the budget process, we're not looking to solve any issues tonight. we still have a lot of work to do. And this is the beginning step of a multi-month process with collaboration between community, council, and staff. And I'm so sorry. I think I saw Council Member Knorr's hand raise and missed that.

John, do you have something you'd like to ask?

Yeah, I had a question about, there was a reference made to transportation benefit district going from 10 to 20, but I think I've been paying 20 on all my vehicles. So what was that reference?

Well, it should only be 10.

I think it's a $10 tab fee. And that's what we're currently collecting. So John, I don't know why you're paying the price unless you have two vehicles you're paying for.

Which will go up to 50.

Well, I have several vehicles that I pay for, unfortunately, and I thought they said 20. I'll go back and look at the registrations, but thank you.

Oh, sure.

Council Member Burke?

Oh, thank you. I just thank you for this presentation. Of course, it's horrifying, so you've done a very good job of blocking us through it. I had a question. You said that staff benefits would be an increase of 12% in 2027, but then an additional 6% in 2028. I'm not accustomed to benefits going down, right? So to what do you attribute the difference between the 12% and the 6% over that two-year span?

Data that we were provided by our Human Resources Department.

And WCIA has four reports that we will be seeing about a 12% increase. year two, there's another 6%.

I would expect another 12, I guess is what I'm saying, right?

Because they just they always go up and they're doing they're doing one year at a time adjustments. Yeah, yeah.

See this? Some him behind.

Thank you, Mayor. I kill it. The question I don't expect an answer. Now, but when I looked at your presentation, which I found was really comprehensive and insightful, and I also liked the format, I was able to understand it. So thank you. The thing that concerns me the most is that three months ago, it was just not what I understood in a previous presentation.

Sure.

And at some point, I would like to understand what's changed other than the RFA. Because it's three months ago on a previous presentation, it was not the situation that was for them. And in the end, we just need to know what the facts are so that we understand what the future looks like and are able to make some decisions. So I'll be curious what you think.

Yes. Yes. I'll be excited to share it. As we move through a budget process, every stop along the way is really a snapshot in time at that moment. And so things, as we move through the rest of the year between now and the end of the year, we're going to get a little more tidy. That leads me right into my last slide here is just kind of what's happening next. throughout the rest of this month, we're gonna continue to be looking at those analytics. We're gonna continue to be looking at revenues. We're currently working on more detailed salary and benefit projections. So we're gonna kind of fine tune, fine tune, we're kind of closing our gaps so that we can continue to bring more and more reliable information to the collective, to council, and to our leadership team. Our baselines will continue to improve as we move along. At the end of the summer, we'll have some capital budgeting information to share, continuing to do ongoing revisions to baselines, both revenue and expenses. So, not to belabor the point, but we're going to continue to fine tune as each passing month goes by. I just, again, I don't want to sound alarmist in any way, but with the best information we have right now, making decisions based on what we know today, we're going to have some challenges ahead of us, which is, the most difficult part of budgeting, but also can be kind of the most rewarding to really make sure that we're utilizing every dollar. They say, stretch that dollar, and we're really gonna put that to the test over the next few months.

Member Ellsingray.

Thank you, Kayla. Thanks for stepping in. Thank you, Mayor. And I have, I think I'm gonna point this to Administrator Quinn. I have a lot of questions about this. Partially, Councillor Hines' comment, this is not what we thought even three months ago, not the assumptions that we had. And I have zero Finance Commission meetings, committee meetings on my calendar. So I think rather we have a 45-minute discussion after this. I think rather than me raising all my questions now, can we get a Finance Committee meeting? and get the recurring series on the calendar.

With Kathy's departure, those were on her calendar. I believe Kayla at this request will be initiating that as a tool for going forward. And in all fairness to what you're hearing tonight, the optimistic characterization by Kathy was we are flat reducing. It was in that window. And I think what you're seeing now is more definitive estimates.

I can appreciate all that. Absolutely. I just think I have four or five detailed questions that people here probably don't want to listen to. So I would be happy to hold them until we can have a finance committee meeting.

Yes. Thank you, Kayla. Great job presenting. It was very clear, easy to understand. So several of my questions were already answered. Thanks to everyone for the good questions. Only one I want to ask now, and I'll wait for later. The depth we are showing, I think it's page number 45 in our package. It's a graphic that talks about expenses trends. So showing all different category for the expenses we have. The debt is the amount, what is included? Is it what we pay annually or is the whole bond? I think it's just the annual payment, right? Is it normal to have this debt or is it a problem to consider? I wanna learn what this debt means.

Is it a lot concern?

Also, the capital seems a capital expenses. Yes, those are getting a smaller and a smaller just don't know.

You can control capital expensing quite readily. There are certain things we have to do to repair voters and those back with our staff. It is a method by which we control the capital side of what she's been talking about primarily here, primarily operating out of the general most of our capital at that month.

Yes, it helps for the capital. But on the debt, maybe when we have opportunity, I'd like to learn more. Thank you.

Yeah. If you look on this calendar, the budget will come to you in October. And it's important that we have a balanced budget and go to the end of the year without them or the start of the next biennium without a budget that covers every cost so uh we'll affect this uh kayla's been here about a month how long have you been here

Well, I've been here with the city since February as the assistant finance director. I've been serving as the interim for about two weeks.

So we will perfect it. Two weeks is not a long time.

Give us three.

I appreciate it.

Okay. So where are we?

Okay.

Well, where we're at right now is the budget has been kicked off. So we'll take it back to our team to continue to refine, fine tune our models and we'll continue to keep working with departments and leadership to dial it in more and more. And then we will bring it back to counsel at the next iteration.

Okay. Any other questions, counsel? Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it. Okay. Next item is form of government committee presentation. I don't have a presentation, but... We've gone over the new form of government that might take place. That was led by the ad hoc committee that Dan Hendrickson, Greg Anderson, and five other people put together. We had that presentation, I think, June, first week of June. And it's asked if we could bring it back for conversation today. So I don't know where to start the conversation. So I'm going to ask you guys where you want to take this conversation.

So yes, one of the things that we discussed at the last last time we spoke We were just gathering information. We were just learning from the committee's work and things like that. And then we hadn't expressed opinions. And Councillor Senescu was very correct in her saying, wait a minute, people are starting to share, but I haven't. So we didn't do that. And that needs to happen. One of the things that I want to introduce or, you know, reinforce is this idea that We can kick around topics. I want to just make sure that everyone present and anyone listening online, the council does not make a decision on the change of a form of government. That's really, really important to me and the people that I've spoken to. We don't choose that. The voters choose that. So if we were to move forward to a vote, we would now communicate that at the end. But we're at the very baby stages of this conversation, I think. I have some other comments to make, but I want to make sure that everyone has a chance to speak. So I wanted to, in my next round, I want to talk about RCWs and the election process that I've gained. That might be helpful to some people. I can hold on that letter. Okay.

That's it for now?

Well, I have many things to say.

However, on the first round, it's 45 minutes, right?

So it'll be quick.

who wants to go next i'm happy to go next go ahead thank you mayor council members thank you mayor um thank you for opening things up maryland so um this was brought to council in 2018 and council decided not to put it to a vote to people um And I don't ever want to say it's wrong to put a two vote to people, but then you look at the cool bond and that was a mistake. I don't think this is the right time. I think people are happy with our form of government. I think it would be a mistake to bring this to folks when they've got other things on their mind and they're happy with their government and they want a mayor that's held accountable. They want a CEO of our government that's held accountable to them and that they elect. So I am an advocate for continuing our form of government as it stands. And I believe our people are happy with government as it is. That's all I got right now.

I've got to ask that every time somebody speaks.

You know, it'll come back.

We can keep this going. Who wants to be next? Council Member Ellison.

I'm going to be really brief. I have talked to as many people as I possibly can about this. I get two comments. Either they look at me like I have two heads because they have no idea what I'm talking about, or they have a strong opinion. And I have an opinion, but I'm holding that aside until I can talk to people. Em and I have also talked about having a town hall to talk People with whom I've spoken that have an opinion, so far it's unanimously against them. So regardless of my own feelings about it and the excellent work done by the committee, I couldn't support it. It's based on the conversations that I've had that are very much against it. And I think we've heard from Rick, we've heard from other people. So that's just where I stand.

that but for now I'm going with with what I think the people of Hamas that's how it goes okay thank you thank you get it easier uh council member esky yeah um so we have uh want to say that first when it first came to me I said why same as a lot of other people say why we we were all doing Great, especially with our current mayor or city administrator, we are functioning very well. And to me, why was a big question. And then I put so many hours in learning, reaching out almost to every committee member I talk with one-on-one way to just understand the pros and cons better with a more open-minded approach. So my recollection is there's no perfect form of government. It's just based on our understanding. I spent so many hours talking with neighbors, friends, everybody to me, like, why? What happened? Is it happening? So when I shared with them my understanding, why change or not change, the pros and cons. Um, they kind of followed me. Uh, so I felt that maybe I should, anyway, I, I thought at that point, um, definitely public engagement is very important with someone with deep understanding of pros and cons, uh, because I can only reflect what I understood and it may have some gaps. Town hall is a great thing to start. Uh, and I, um, I have planned to do it very soon. I just learned every six months from a good friend of mine. He said, have you had a town hall? I'm like, no. And he said, it's recommended every six months at the council number. So this is definitely my plan to do it. But what I want to say, my opinion, the recollection of all opinions I heard, um, For two reasons, I am toward change of government, supporting that. Definitely, as Council Member Burke mentioned, we are not here to say change it. We are here to decide if we want to give the opportunity to public to decide or not. So my reasoning for supporting that change, if public wants to do that, is we talk about accountability, all right? I look into that and my perspective is different. First of all, when I elect mayor, I don't elect mayor because this mayor or future mayor is a good manager or CEO. There are different values I look at for elected officials. The person I elect is a person I trust to deliver our message, to deliver community needs. and keep a staff accountable to deliver that. Elected mayor, if it's underperforming, what authority we have to unseat the mayor? We only can discipline, as we all know, to certain level. We cannot unseat mayor. It has to go back to the voters. Majority have to vote to unseat the elected, any elected official. And then it just, for that to me, if we changed the form of government to council manager, it reduced that risk. Just, yeah, but if it's the city manager is hired by the council, and if the city managers is underperforming or make wrong the seat, let's say mayor wants to hire half of the staff, By the time we take it to voters, for them to decide and unseat the mayor, the damage is already made. That's why when I look at it, which pros and cons are heavier to me, I am in support of that change. If the general public, the majority wants that, I support. Again, I'm not here to say change it or not. I'm here to support.

thank you i think yes yes yes thank you so much it wasn't very long thank you okay next oh john nor

Thank you. And I agree with council member SG on a lot of those things there. One of the things I keep hearing is the mayor is the only person accountable to the voters. Well, every council member is accountable to the voters and a A council manager form of government can be much more nimble in making changes within the community. Just as you say there, if you get a mayor that goes sideways on you, it takes a long time to fix that. One of the other things that I wanted to point out, and I've said this to different council members, in private conversations, but I'm going to go ahead and go public with it here right now. We are being left behind by other cities in this county. We're being left behind by Washougal. We're being left behind by Ridgefield. You listen to this budget presentation tonight that all of a sudden the budget's got a problem now that we didn't know about three months ago. I think it's time for us to really look at whether or not that other form of government would work for us and ask our community. Let's go out there and make some presentations on it. Let's ask people, because I'm at about 80-20 right now with the people I'm talking to. There's some people who said, well, it's always been this way. Here's how I want to keep it. But I've also got people saying, yeah, it's time for a change. So let's go through the process. That's part of what governments should be doing to make itself more efficient and ask the public what it is they want from us. Thank you.

Thank you. Next.

Council Member Hine. Thank you, Mayor. I agree that you should go to community and ask. If you go to town halls, I do believe If we have a neutral presenter, then not us. We inherently, no matter how hard we try, we're going to have biases. And I think that the information has to be presented as objective and unbiased manner as possible. It will be at the town halls hearing response, but I think it neutral third points and representative of the city beneficial. Um, This has been the top topic over the last two months, for sure, from all community feedback. And I agree with Councilmember Elzingray's comments. There's a lot of questions that come up. Try to present it in an unbiased manner. Generally, feedback is, I don't see the problem. I don't see the change. I want a mayor who is accountable. and the pool issue comes up consistently. That was a one-off, that was an issue, and there was accountability, direct accountability, and that's seen very positively. The vast majority of citizens don't understand it, but they want to learn more. Hence the town halls. I did write down some comments because it's been such a consuming topic for a few months, So my perspective is to keep the current form of government in multiple reasons. Assistant with federal and state government, central point of executive leadership and accountability, strong administrative and performance accountability. The community, as well as staff, It sets up accountability in the electorate and whom the electorate chooses to elect. Citizens have the ability to elect and hold that person accountable. A strong mayoral form of government is balanced as the mayor's ability to execute on the vision and strategic initiatives of the city as a CEO or the city administrator, leads the staff and city functions at a tactical level. City Council establishes policy and is a check and balance to mayoral authority. I think it's an ideal situation. Literally a three-legged stool. It has balance and accountability. That's the reflection at the federal and state level. I think it's an ideal combination. At the time, it was an ideal during November 2019 to May 2021 when You know, due to the election of an inexperienced mayor, hired an inexperienced city administrator. Poor combination, what created the problem. This electoral reaction was a result of the failed Prop 2 that did not gain citizen feedback. Not because of a poor form of government. Who was elected and then who was hired, that combination was the problem. Despite this, the city of campus was resilient. We have to thank and frankly acknowledge the critical importance and professionalism of the city staff, creating a strong fabric of stability during that time when there was a lot of weight being thrown around at key levels. You have a strong council, and I've talked to Aaron Hoffman up in Snohomish as well, and they've gone back and forth with several forms of government. currently the strong mayor, and he had some good insights to share. He said, with the strong council, shared management accountability from council to the manager dilutes accountability, direction to the city manager. Why it's fractional diluted authority on seventh shares that is not as effective or audible. And I do not agree, says Nimble. leadership by committee tends to have inconsistency and multiple personal agendas. I think council can effectively manage policies and policy and not performance and accountability of a city manager. But there is a majority of us that do it four out of seven. That doesn't truly reflect the wishes of council. For these reasons, I support maintain the current form of government with some recommendations for improvement. The mayor's role and responsibilities are already defined. Qualifications and expectations for the mayor are not clearly outlined. I think we can improve that into a citizen's comment earlier today, education and coaching that area. This is important for any candidate in the electorate when voting. I appreciate Council Member Eschke's comments that vote for who you trust and who you think can do the job. It's not enough for a mayor. You have qualifications. Not only qualifications, but respect that people can trust. So I think that needs to be educated. City council, they have the authority to approve the mayor's choice for city manager, as well as require council to approve any termination critical for stability in this position. It was the problem in 2019 to 2021. experienced mayor who made radical decisions, lack of experience at a tough time, and hired an extremely inexperienced city administrator that had an agenda. For council accountability, require a roll call vote for every vote that is summarized in all meeting minutes. This way council is legislative and politically accountable for every vote. City administrator recommendation is to hire locally in the Northwest. They know the area and they can have deeper ties and accountability. See their experiences in the area. Look at some of the most successful city administrators in Clark County area. They are known. They have been in other positions. They have ties and deep ties to their communities in this area. They have deep ties. people on the street and in your community have the utmost accountability. If there's a desire to go for a change, we open it up, certainly get citizens' community feedback to understand what are the wishes of our community in this important position. That's all. Thank you, and I appreciate your patience with that, Dijon.

Well written, sir.

Very well said.

Okay. John, the last one.

Can I add?

There's two hands up. I wasn't sure who was.

Thank you. Thanks for your great input. Just want to say I was part of the interview panel when we were hiring for city administrative. It took over a year. We finally hired someone and he left shortly after. So we are lucky to have Mr. Queen, but it was not easy to find city administrator. Actually, the person, one of them I remember was very well qualified. We lost it to the city that they were, I think Tacoma, that they were hiring for city manager versus city administrative. So I definitely, I don't really, based on that experience, I don't really see it's easy to hire or future city administrator when Mr. Quinn decides to retire. I just, I'm concerned about that.

Do you want to go? Oh no, I was, I just, I didn't see her. I saw her raise her hand and I got, that's why, that's why. Yeah.

Anytime you want to. Thank you. First round. But, Council Member Burma. Thank you.

I want to thank Councilor Maskey for bringing that up. I also got to sit with different teams. I had a couple of really strong candidates, so they would not serve our city. Interesting to me. I didn't look at it at the time, but now I've, you know, of course, like we all have. A couple of comments. You want to talk about the RCWs? talking with people, you know, we've all talked to everyone. Anyone who will talk to us about this, you know, we're talking about it. And I have a similar, like, I would say it's more like half and half. I have no idea what I'm even talking about. There are people who don't even know we have a city council, frankly. They just don't care. It doesn't affect them. And then the other half that I talk to is I've because I've been very vocal about shared governance. Perhaps that's why they're saying to me is, you know what, I do believe in distributed form of governance. And so that's just a different perspective. I'm not sure if people are happy with a form of government or not. I don't have any evidence that they're unhappy or happy, right? That's what town halls would suss out for us. I am concerned about the workload. Our mayor has experience and I've talked with a couple of former mayors who felt the same way that it was an undoable job. So I very much appreciate you. Expectations, defining expectations and making sure that's what we're asking our mayor to do. So that said, I do want to talk about these ding-dang RCWs. So RCWs, Rice Coat of Washington, I'm not sure if you're familiar, but, you know, governs how we do business. And so there's a series of RCWs. So back in 2018, you had to have a separate resolution. If you were going to change your form of government, if you were going to hire a mayor, it's going to be two separate things. In 2022, we're combined into one. So you can now, which came up previously... Could we elect a mayor, not hire him? Elect a mayor, not appoint a mayor from council. Correct.

Is what I meant, not hire. Did I say hire? Yeah. That's not what I meant. Thank you. Excuse me for interrupting, but that was a good word.

And so in 2022, it changed. And so the other thing is, we'll have a mayor. So the other thing I was concerned about was, I think there was some concern if we, as a council, say, hey, people... and it were to be approved, which that's far away from now, what would happen to our current mayor? Well, nothing, because the RCW states, and I'm not going to give you the numbers because it'll sound like a robot, but states that you can write a resolution, you abandon your form of government and change to a new one, to elect your mayor rather than have your mayor be appointed, when you want to have an effective date. So I like tidy packages. That's a tidy package. That was one of the things I was really concerned about. was disruption. We don't need disruption right now. We just want to stay the course.

Then let me see.

Oh, this idea about public outreach. Now I know better than to say educate the public because my friend Darcy is sitting right there. She didn't like that last time we said educate. So discuss this issue with our public. I have allergies. And I agree with that absolutely and completely. That's how we find out, right? Also, if we decide to move forward, even attempt a resolution, I think some kind of message that all the people or as many people as possible could receive would be good. I think we haven't had town halls, Councilor Nor and I, because it didn't come. it's possible that this topic might bring more people up, but it's possible that it wouldn't. And so it's a really big deal that we have in front of us that we're considering. And so the more people that we can discuss it with and find out how they feel, then the better off I will feel on the board in favor of putting it forward to see if we have a majority on council to even consider moving forward. Because if we don't, Spend, you know, we got a lot of work to do. Just presentations. And then town halls by word. I think I would probably word. Series of town halls, but maybe just citywide in separate locations.

Instead of like, I don't have people to show up. It will show up.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm thinking. I think that is all we're now, sir.

Yeah, thank you. John, you ready yet? I'm fine. Yeah, thank you. Anybody else want to make more comments?

I have more to say if nobody has other, okay. So my engineer brain always comes with what's the plan, what's the schedule, look at this. I drew some graphic for myself. I think without planning and schedule, we just talk, at least for my brain, I need to know what the plan is. So according to the plan and the schedule, we say, okay, we have townhouse, we have public, we just have to have more structured plan for the public engagement rather than I would say we need to take it more serious. As mentioned, we're all happy with our mayor and administrative. So our look at it as if we want to make the changes, if public decides to make the form of government change, that has to be after the end of the current mayor term. That means the effective date would be in January of 28th. And then I did backward the schedule from that. So then it put the voting for public voting February of 2027. And February for good reasons makes it a lot easier transition that November of 27, because when the future mayor, for the future mayor election that mayor knows if it's going to be the new form or the current form of government. So it just makes it more clear. So February, 2027, that means the resolution has to be submitted December of this year, 2026. And that means the council would need at least a couple of months. I think you have more experience than me to discuss the resolution, make sure it doesn't have biases, the negative and positive sides of it. So we have really short time for public engagement if we don't plan soon. I thought to myself, if we can plan for townhouse sooner than later in July and August, then we bring the topic back end of August. I think our second council meeting is August 17. Just to decide if we move forward based on what we heard in the townhome, That's my proposal, because if we, a majority, think we should not move forward, then we don't really spend our time on this topic. Just call it good. But if we move forward based on majority interest, then we really have a small move, though, to do a lot of work.

Council Member, hi. Thank you, Mayor.

Were you done?

Yes, yes, we're clear.

I want to say thank you. I agree with your process. The timelines, I mean, speaking for myself, it seems to make sense. The line might be a little tight.

On how?

Yeah, just we're there. But we ought to be having, go ahead and have this communication. We should be starting August and maybe a little bit into, we're anticipating vacations and travel and stuff too. But I'm just tossing that out for discussion.

If we don't have a date, it won't happen. I think Marilyn's correct. We probably do them all. Because we usually only get about 10 people.

There will be a lot of people traveling.

it's out of school in uh july and august september we'll have a football uh to get the message out there uh and i think you said it needed to go i'll do a january vote december december of 26 26.

has to be submitted December 26th. Okay. So then you've got time to get into those. If the council approves it, it'd have to be submitted for ballot.

Thank you. Member Burke. Anybody else?

Nobody's going to try to get ahead of you. I understand the discussion about having uh discussions with our community prior to voting on the resolution i absolutely absolutely my concern means that i think that people i know anyway if something is going to move on a ballot and that's when they get excited about it and i think that's when that phrase um skin in the game that comes in. If we're just having a general discussion about things in the form of government, I don't know that we're gonna get any more people to our town hall than we would normally. People just, I think people, I take it as a trust doing here. So I'm a little, I'm a little, I feel fairly strongly that we should, as a team, determine if we want to put it forward at all. If we don't want to put it forward, then I guess I'm repeating myself, but then to have all the engagement, I just think we should decide if we can put it forward. I'm not quite finished.

I would also like to propose...

earlier than august i just feel that makes me a little bit we're trying to rush something i want to i want to get the people that not just my the people that we all know and talk to already need a lot of people like how many bookloaders in the last election like not as many as we should have like five thousand maybe maybe about five so

General election.

We talked to the same kind of 10 ish people all the time. So that's my, that's my sense. I'm going to just kind of reiterate what I said, I would prefer to know, not tonight, certainly, but to discuss a time we come together and decide who wants to move it forward and who doesn't. It's a lot of work. Not that I sure, certainly do not. I don't want to get people head up for no reason. That's what my Nana would say, head up. That means I'm set. I think that's me.

Okay. Anybody else? Oh, I also remember, hi. I just wanted to ask.

I don't know what head up means.

Is that not clear? No, actually. What I want to ask you is, so here's my concern. Right. I think you're right where there's, hey, it's going to be on the ballot. Okay, that's the lightning rod.

I mean, maybe.

Right, right. My concern is that I wouldn't feel confident in supporting that yes or no until I got more feedback. You know what I mean? It's kind of the, I need to have, I would need to have a hall meetings just to get a better sense over We have a town hall. When we have town halls, I hope we can have it. Not just have to show up. Accessibility. Be able to maximize attendance. Got to get it. Got to get rid of it.

Yeah.

And not the same 10 that we always do.

Right.

After work, having different times. Yeah.

Oh, yes. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor. You know, you guys talk about 10 people coming to your town halls. Just by virtue of what I do, I talk to 30 people a day. So I have a finger on the pulse, in my opinion. I could be wrong, but from what I've learned, people do not want to change the form of government. I am in favor of going forward and saying yay or nay and moving forward. And I think what... Councilmember Burke was saying, well, maybe say we're doing it or not before you go to a town hall, because then people may be more apt to participate. So whether we go or not, let's do it or don't. And I would like to get head nods today and do it or don't.

Councilmember, yes. Thank you.

Thank you. It's important to me to have town halls. We give public a chance to start with us, bring their opinion freely to us. I was hoping actually to have town halls sooner than September in August, maybe second town hall in September. But what I also learned, once we put it in resolution, yes or no, at the town hall, the discussion would be different. We have to just provide facts rather than discussion as a council. So, and I really agree with Council Member Hoyne. We need someone that doesn't have bias. It just brings the good education for the public. And town hall to me, the one I attended, couple of them, only maybe maximum 10 people attended. I'm looking for something more than that to engage more people because 10 or 20 or 50, it's not representing majority. The people I talk with is, People trust me. If I say they, the majority of them say they. If I say no, they follow. They trust me. I understand that. So they trust my opinion. So I need something more unbiased and just more discussion with everyone, not just my CPU.

I want to make a comment at this point. That full bond, I'm not. sure that whoever was the leader speaking did a good job. If you're going to do it, you need somebody that is non-biased and you need balls of strikes. You need to explain it so that both sides will still stay in the room. Okay, John Knorr.

Thank you. What I'm hearing tonight is we should have some town halls. And then I feel like we need to make a decision tonight.

And I really think we need to hear from the people out there.

And a good cross section, not just business owners, not just developers, but residents whose lives are impacted by our government each and every day. So try to get a good cross. cross-section of the folks in the community to see what they are feeling about their form of government. And I concur with several council members in that a lot of people just want to live their lives. They want government to work for them, get the job done, keep the water on, keep the streets paved, keep the fires out. But sometimes we have to engage them to say, here are the different options you have and what would you like to see for our community? And what I'm hearing everybody say tonight is that we should have some town halls. It felt like it tried to do a pivot right at the end to say, well, let's make the decision if we're moving forward or not right now. Are we standing by town halls or are we not? So I think that's the right way to go. Thank you.

Robert Burke.

Councilor Norris, I just want to make sure. I think I said something. I said not tonight. Maybe I wasn't clear. I'm not in any way advocating for a decision tonight. I just... I need to sit with it and sit with it. And that was my represent what I was saying.

Any other questions?

Just want to recap. Sounds like majority wants to have town hall. And then there are just want to update my schedule based on what majority thinks we should do. I was going to propose August 17th. Yes or no to resolution assuming we can town hall in August and July.

You have the floor.

Yes, please.

I just want to make sure we are not leaving without knowing what the majority wants to do.

So voting on a resolution, there can be two steps. One vote could be, yes, we want to create a resolution. We'd know that we had a majority of council to even move it forward at all.

And then the vote, resolution vote could occur later.

The resolution takes time to write those things and vet those things. And what do we do now? We just say, yep, we're going to write a resolution. Don't agree on that. Then write a resolution. So when you said vote on August 17th on the resolution, I just want to be sure for my purposes that you need to consider a resolution or vote on the actual resolution.

Thanks for asking that. Yes, ma'am. is to decide even if we should move forward with the resolution based on what our... Are you two in agreement as to consider a resolution?

That's what I believe. Yes.

Yes.

Okay. Council Member Senescu.

Thank you, Mayor. I think I've been clear on my position. However, if if the majority of council does want to go through tent halls and whatnot prior to making a decision, why wouldn't we have this on the November ballot where we're going to get a higher turnout and not cost taxpayers more money to have a special election?

Anybody want to answer that one or want me to answer it for you? John has his hand up. John, go for it.

It's a matter of timing. So you have to if you want it on the November ballot, you've got to submit it to the elections office by, I believe, the first week in August. And so that doesn't really give us enough time. That'd be what is that three weeks from now? So less than four weeks. So it doesn't give enough time to get the input from the community.

I think I've ever spoken this much in my life. I've been doing a lot of research about this. So I think that Councillor Eshke was talking about not putting it on the November 2028 ballot because if people are interested in running for mayor, they won't know on that November ballot what they're running for.

It's in 2020.

It's in November 2027. Right. Right. So that's why February keeps kind of coming up. And it was a recommendation of the committee.

What about April?

I mean, as long as people like, when do you have to say you want to run for mayor? That's the thing. That's May.

So if those things... It's usually a week in May. It's about mid. Or the first of May, you can send a mail in.

That's why not November. It's just so the people who are running... January 1, 2029.

So, Mayor, sometimes the special election is in May and sometimes it's in April. And it just depends on when the elections folks set that. So if that election is in conflict with filing week, then you would run into an issue there that people may not know what's going on the ballot before they file. And I want to thank you for clarifying that that could have been November of 28. I was thinking that the reference was November of 27. But I would encourage you to check with elections because sometimes... Filing week doesn't line up with the May election.

Okay. You ready to close this out somehow?

To close it? So should we?

You don't have to. I was just making a suggestion.

We're going to have town hall either in August or September, right? We're going to work with city clerk. Is that right? Okay. And then I was just going to say town hall is one kind of public engagement, but to me is not. We need to look at that. And we need another maybe session to decide what to do, what other things. I want to ask council if they want to talk about whether we should move with resolution or not in August 17th or September 7th.

It's the council.

Another workshop based on the input we've heard. Talking about yes, we move forward with resolution or no. Either end of August or we have September. September 7 or 21.

I'm ready to do it now, so I'll take it.

Okay, so does anybody want to give an answer to that question? I think we need a few dates.

I agree.

All right, sounds good.

That was John Knorr.

Thank you. I was just going to say, I would prefer a minimum of two and possibly three dates. We can't... rely on one date for the input. Maybe people would miss that date.

Thank you. You're talking about town halls. Two or three days for town halls.

Dates, locations.

The date I was proposing was when we should talk again as a group about it, but we want to make sure we have enough time for town hall to work.

I guess I sort of, I think, Councillor Senescu and I are aligned on this. I would prefer to know sooner. Forward. I'm asking about creating a resolution, see if we have a majority for that on August 17th.

Yes, August 17, maybe versus September 21.

I mean, to discuss the resolution or have town halls.

Discuss resolution for saying yes or no to move forward with the resolution.

Yeah, I think we need to know sooner. If we're going to have a town hall in August and September, I think we need to definitively standing over potential dates and venues by next meeting. Because next meeting is already, this is the sixth, it's going to be the 24th, right? 20th. 20th. So I think by the 20th, we need to know what are the dates in August, what's the date in August and location, what it is in September. We're going to get behind. Does that work?

No, I'm, yeah, yeah, you follow my stuff here.

Yeah. Chris, you were talking about the weekends. Booked 50 out of 52 or something like that.

Yeah, for a lot of space, I wouldn't count on a weekend availability during the week. I'd have to look at the schedule. It just depends on availability. We can have Carrie work with Susan or the mayor who is covering for Carrie. Just work with Susan Paul. I'm finding a

i think gary's going to be back by at least yes thanks maybe more the schools schools are out right so because they've got a great big school district up there lots of rooms lots of space up there In August, like any time in August, use that space. I mean, speaking experience, but not with kind of a photo whatsoever. Second thing is I'm still kind of hung up on this August 17th. We're talking about dates. You're talking about, I feel like you're talking about dates. Town halls. I feel like you were talking about a date to vote on whether we have enough support to move our resolution forward. August 17.

Yes, August 17. That is just for a town hall. No, August 17 is for the council to say yes or no to move forward resolution.

Okay, now I understand.

So yeah, it's August 17. Otherwise, September 1.

Okay, so you want to resolve that right now?

We won't have time to do town vote here, right?

August 17th has been. I don't think we can get town halls on it not to be for that time.

Remember, I'm sorry to just talking about voting to council in an actual meeting because we can't vote here on if we have support to even move the discussion forward. That's what I want. That's what I want to know.

You want to do it before we have time?

Not necessarily. I'm ready to do it tonight.

John, I know you think we need to know.

That's what we're talking about. I'm ready to do it tonight.

It's a little show on the road. Yeah.

Come on.

No more.

So why can't we do the first meeting in September? What I've heard is August 17th or September 20 something. Is there something going on in the first meeting of September that we can't vote on a resolution then? That should give us enough time to have at least two town halls and get some feedback to see where the voters are, where the residents feel.

September seven is totally fine. I just thought if they're going to be town hall in September, maybe the first week is not enough, but I just want to remind myself and everyone, the school will be in session August 22nd. So we have the last week of August. 24th, sorry. 22nd is Saturday. Instead of August 17, we want to push it to September 7. This is for council to vote yes or no to move forward with resolution based on what we hear from now until then.

Okay.

What do you hear?

Are we putting this on the planning calendar for August 17th?

Yes, let's do that, and then we can maybe change it if it's needed for September 7th. And that was a placeholder, August 7th.

Thank you. Is there a reason not to vote tonight in our regular meeting so that we have some direction on where our town halls are going?

I think that's your priority. Is it?

I think some people are already on the calendar.

I prefer we have town hall first before we even consider a resolution.

That way we can discuss that with the public before we decide on .

so you could or you could not do it tonight you want to or don't want to and uh we could put it on the august 17th but uh tonight because it's not on the agenda okay uh any objection to that well you'll do that tonight someone can make a motion yeah Hey, John.

Thank you. So what I was hearing was let's get the input at the town halls. And now what I'm hearing is, well, maybe we'll do a, a vote to bring the resolution back to make the change. But what if we find out from the town halls people don't want it, as some have suggested, right? So what are we voting on tonight, potentially? Or what could be a motion that could come up tonight? Is it to generate the resolution before we have the town halls to get the input as to whether or not we should do this?

Not that at all. Uh, may I address council member North directly? Yes, please. Council member. No, I cannot, I cannot answer your question. Well, what, but what I, I cannot answer your question because I'm confused as well. I thought we're trying to decide on, on town hall dates. We could just get information and make a decision if we're going to move ahead.

That was the majority of what I was hearing is let's have some town halls and get feedback from people. Right. Um, I guess I look at it this way. Do I want the resolution? Yes, I want this process moving forward because that's my personal opinion based on the feedback I get from folks. But I also believe that we should have a broad amount of input out there. So the message we're sending is, hey, we're going to have a town hall to get what your opinion is, but we already voted to have this resolution put together to put out later in that. So... Let's put the horse in front of the car. Which way are we going? If we just want a resolution to put it out there, let's do that. But if we, what I'm hearing is we want input from community. Let's have the meetings get input from community, come back and vote on whether to have a resolution drawn up to be put on the ballot.

Council Member Smolarich. Thank you, Mayor.

In my experience in the community, town halls were to share information with the community and get additional information, but they were already on courses of action that were decided. We did it with the RFA. We did it with the pool bond. We've done it with other things where we have unbiased input, but we provide information to them. Once the council has decided, they want to send something to the voters. And so that's the councilor Norris' position. Are we getting the cart for the horse?

Getting the cart for the horse.

Are you done? Okay. My vantage point, I would say how did the first RFA vote go and how did the pool bond vote go? They both didn't do well enough because we did not get enough public feedback. Not act upon that. Disagree.

I know. Are we finished with this topic? We've decided something, don't we? 17th was our last.

17. If you, if you have a motion tonight.

So, we can make a motion if they want to make a motion. Okay, so after that, we. This was this topic for, uh. Yes, uh, good. Um, would you guys be interested in skipping, uh. getting to a 17-minute dinner. If you're nodding your heads, that means yes. You have a hand.

Public comments?

Public comments?

I think I have to have that, don't I?

Okay. If there's anyone in the chamber that would like to make public comments, you have three minutes.

Darcy, Kim, it's Washington. I wasn't having good luck with my phone earlier, so came down the mile and a half. Anyway, I loved your comment about the volunteering at the parks. That used to be. It used to be volunteers, especially kids in the 70s and 80s and stuff. Yamas has, it's got to do something. Back to a little bit how it was. Because it's not. The park, that's great. The one thing everybody was talking about, where's the horseshoe pit? You know, it may not mean much to anybody, but a lot of people, it was their past. You know, I remember playing in those horseshoe, having pictures, being a baby in the 60s in the horseshoe pit. So, you know, I mean, on a side note, there and I appreciate everything that's been done with it. The parks, why do we have so much land that's sitting that money should be going to repair? The park should never become in disrepair like they did. And the pool bond, when you're talking about the pool bond, I kept thinking about when The pool should have been maintained and never went away, and everybody was up in arms about the pool going away. So people are irritated. They don't want town halls. They don't care. People don't care about even voting. There's a select few who do, and it's good. I'm very glad for them, but there are a lot who just don't care because we're older. I don't wanna sit and spend my time here when I feel like I'm only talking. There are no town halls to get responses. And as far as this whole mayoral situation, I'm gonna tell you what, five of us barbecuing on 4th of July, or of whom moved out of campus, sold their homes on the lake because they're done, is we would keep the mayor, 30,000 plus a year. We would keep Mr. Quinn, who's been doing great, plus a retirement plus benefits. And then we would add a city manager for benefits, a salary and a retirement. Guess what? And you brought up the 1% utility tax that wouldn't even cover this. So that's why people are done. It's going to happen if it happens and we just don't care. pay what it costs and the respect is gone.

Thank you. Is there anyone else in the chamber that would like to make three minutes worth of comments? Is there anyone on the Zoom app that has a hand raised? That slows the meeting down. next meetings, et cetera.