City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everybody. You are such a good audience already, hushing up at 6 o'clock, even without being asked. I am Ryan Walters. I'm the mayor of Anacortes, and I'm calling this council meeting for July 20th to order at 6.01 p.m. Council, would you please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, the clerk will note that we have one absence among the council members, and that is Council Member Christine Cleland-McGrath.

Mayor Walters.

Ms. Moulton.

I move to excuse Council Member Cleland-McGrath from tonight's meeting.

Second. There's a motion and a second to excuse Ms. Cleland McGrath from tonight's meeting. If there's no objection, hearing none, she is excused. Okay. Our first order of business this evening is the swearing in of several firefighters, starting with Chief Mannix McDonald. Would you come forward, please? All right. Chief McDonald, would you please repeat after me? I, Mannix McDonald.

I, Mannix McDonald.

Do solemnly swear.

Do solemnly swear.

That I will support the Constitution and laws.

That I will support the Constitution and laws.

Of the United States of America.

Of the United States of America.

The Constitution and laws of the state of Washington.

The Constitution and laws of the state of Washington.

The ordinances of the city of Anacortes. the ordinances of the City of Anacortes, and faithfully and impartially discharge all the duties incumbent upon me as a fire chief for the City of Anacortes Fire Department.

To the best of my ability, so help me God. Congratulations.

Thank you.

All right, now if we could have Lieutenant David Getman come forward. All right. All right, please repeat after me. Raise your right hand. I, David Getman, do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, the Constitution and laws of the state of Washington, the ordinances of the city of Anacortes, and faithfully and impartially

And faithfully and impartially.

Discharge all the duties incumbent upon me.

Discharge all the duties incumbent upon me.

As a lieutenant.

As a lieutenant.

For the City of Anacortes Fire Department.

For the City of Anacortes Fire Department.

To the best of my ability.

To the best of my ability. So help me God. So help me God.

Congratulations. Thank you. All right, now we have three new firefighters to Anacortes. Would you all three come forward at once?

That way I don't have to recite your names.

All right, I will ask you each to raise your right hand. We'll do this all at once. You will substitute your name in the space of a blank here.

All right, I. Andrew Farrell.

Excellent. Do solemnly swear.

Do solemnly swear.

That I will support the constitution and laws.

That I will support the constitution and laws.

Of the United States of America.

Of the United States of America.

The constitution and laws of the state of Washington.

The Constitution and law of the state of Washington.

The ordinances of the city of Anacortes.

The ordinances of the city of Anacortes.

And faithfully and impartially.

Faithfully and impartially.

Discharge all the duties incumbent upon me as a firefighter.

Discharge all the duties incumbent upon me as a firefighter.

For the city of Anacortes Fire Department.

For the city of Anacortes Fire Department.

To the best of my ability.

To the best of my ability. So help me God. So help me God.

Congratulations.

but it doesn't take that much.

Yeah, let's try that. Okay, you'll all come forward. We'll take one photo together. I'll stand at the edge here so you can crop me out later. All right, thank you all, congratulations. No, I'm not set.

So I'll say hang on. That was a little.

All right. Thank you all. Congratulations to you all. We so appreciate the service of our men and women in the fire service and at the police department. We know that you will serve us well, especially because you just swore an oath to do so. Council. Mayor Walters. Go ahead.

No, I just wanted to say one thing to the fire guys. One day, I happened to be headed home and passed one of the trucks that they were doing some training. And I just wanted to come in and see how the guys were doing. And it was so wonderful that they showed me how the truck works. They took me up, of course. And it was just a wonderful thing. And I was appreciative of it. So raise your hand in the back. You know you are. And I thank you for that. Yes. And it was just such a wonderful thing. And you're just so open about what you did, how you did it, the truck, the work. And I want to thank you for that kind of work that you do and want all of you to know how much I appreciate you. And yes, I'm looking forward to working with you, but I'm also especially looking forward to watch and see how you grow. But thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Young. On behalf of all of us, I think we say ditto. All right, we have a couple of announcements this evening. I've got on the list no committee reports, but I think a committee just met. So be preparing that committee report while we go through some of the announcements. We'll give it just a second for those of you that are clearing out to do so. OK, so first of all, we have deployed a new customer communication system for our fiber network customers. However, we know that that doesn't include 100% of our fiber customers. So if you are a fiber customer and you have not received the most recent emails from the city about our fiber service, please go to anacorteswa.gov slash fiber and sign up. Anybody that is not already on the list, who isn't already receiving the emails, please sign up on the list so that we make sure that we've captured you and we'll have your email address going forward. We are inviting candidates. the arts commission for the housing authority board and for the library board of trustees those are the places where we currently have vacancies you can apply online at anacorteswa.gov slash 1306 for those three boards or for any other board because we'll cash your information for later but we do encourage people to participate in any number of ways with the city of anacortes and one of those is through service on a board or commission. So if you have any questions about those, don't hesitate to reach out to my office or the relevant department. The police department is hosting National Night Out again in Storvik Park. This is going to be August 6th this year. That's a Tuesday from 6 to 8 p.m. There's a variety of community partners that are there as well. It is a fairly fun event. Storvik Park, National Night Out. Thank you. Okay, also we've deployed to our website at anacorteswa.gov slash report a number of ways that you can report to us what's going on that you see a problem with in your community. So as an example, we do direct a lot of people there to our C-Click Fix app. Some of you may be already familiar with that, may already be using it. That's great. not everything can be reported through the app uh but we indicate um you know through a menu of things on this website there if you see a car accident if you got a code enforcement problem if you see a downed power line some of these other things noxious weeds you can report those or get the resources to be able to report those at this website we want to fix those things for you but we got to know that they are a problem before we can make that happen so anacorteswa.gov slash report. One of the other important ones that we have, menu items that we've added to this page, is if you see a person in need, somebody that is in need of assistance, somebody that might be homeless or needs some other support, you can go to this page and you can get some resources to direct them to our partner agencies. They will figure out what support resources are available for them. So check that out. and use that resource to make sure that we are able to deal with the problems that you are running into. Okay. Council, we have at least one committee report, right? Who's got it? Mr. McDougall.

Yeah. Yeah. Public Works Committee met right before this meeting. It was myself and the Public Works Leadership Team. We covered a couple items. The first item is we've received a draft NPDES permit. This is our permit which basically kind of governs what and how much we're allowed to discharge from the water treatment plant or wastewater treatment plant into the sea. And over the last several years, the Public Works team, particularly wastewater treatment team, has worked to reduce our nitrogen basically output significantly. And no good deed goes unpunished, so to speak. The draft permit has lowered our threshold that we're allowed to discharge. So basically, the team is kind of working on options and dialogue with Ecology on, can we remediate that particular item? But draft permit is in, so that's great. Other permit, the incinerator title five permit. So this governs what we're allowed to discharge, I guess, emissions into the air from the incinerator. And that draft permit is also in from the Northwest Clean Air Agency. Oh, actually, no, the draft permit is expected here in the next few months. Sorry. We also basically some brief discussion of the incinerator alternative analysis. That's actually going to come before council next week. Mr. Lee is going to present, or I guess the consultant and Mr. Lee. But they've narrowed it down to five options and kind of three of the options are sort of option A, option B. So it's sort of roughly three. And I didn't get any spoilers actually as to what they are. So there's that. From a high level, there was some discussion of the surveys that the council participated in and really it was pretty uniform as far as like what we were looking for and kind of really high level breakdown is like reliability, operability and cost. So it makes pretty good sense. Finally, got a great presentation on cathodic protection. And so this is the system actually that is protecting the water pipes, the transmission pipes from corrosion, from rust, essentially. And there's a whole bunch of really interesting science that maybe we'll get a full council presentation at some point. But it kind of boils down to, I think we're going to get a contract on consent agenda next week for engineer to provide the kind of the survey of this system. And there's a whole bunch of test points throughout the system that they can access with their equipment. Take all these readings to verify that essentially like the rust... uh, or, you know, corrosion remediation is working properly. And what, what it does is it essentially the system sucks corrosive like corrosion away from the actual pipes and like sort of has a set of collectors or sinks where that all collects. So essentially the pipes don't rust. So really cool science behind that. And that's what I have. Thank you.

All right, thank you. Council, any other announcements?

Oh, sorry, I just had one question. Is that for the wastewater treatment plant and the water treatment plant?

I think just the water treatment and particularly the transmission lines. So the big pipes.

Thank you. All right. Thank you. Counsel, any other announcements?

Mayor Walters.

Mr. Fantini.

Yeah, just wanted to give a quick shout out. I know everyone up here has heard me opine quite a bit about the dream of a complete and safe Kansas Avenue. But I wanted to shout out Public Works Department, who went up on West Third this past week and painted a beautiful yellow center line. and as i was gardening quite a bit in my yard this weekend several neighbors stopped by to let me know that they have noticed that that is having an effect so i think it just shows that sometimes even just making little changes here and there can have a pretty significant impact so thank you there is in fact a lot of research indicates that lions help

All right. We will move on then now to public comment. We have a couple people signed up. So we'll take those people first and then we will take anyone else in the room. You have three minutes come up to the podium, adjust the microphone for your height and speak directly into it. Please give us your name and approximation of where you live. First is Courtney O'Rourke.

Hello. I'm Courtney Orrock. I live in Ward 1 in Anacortes. Good evening. Given the financial state of the city, I'm here tonight with questions about the city's financial due diligence and risk management process surrounding the appointment of our new fire chief. This is not about revisiting past litigation or making any sort of personal attack. It's about ensuring the city has fulfilled its responsibility to taxpayers by carefully evaluating potential financial liability and risks associated with any leadership appointment. my questions are straightforward what specific due diligence did the city perform to evaluate any potential financial risk to taxpayers before making this appointment was the city's insurer or risk pool consulted regarding whether this appointment could have any impact to the city's liability exposure insurance coverage premiums deductibles or risk management requirements if it was consulted can the city share whether it received any recommendations or assurances that there would be no impact Again, these questions are not about assigning blame for past events. They are about transparency, accountability, and prudent stewardship of public resources, especially as the city heads into a challenging budget season. Taxpayers deserve to know that every reasonable step was taken to assess and mitigate any potential risk before placing anyone in one of the city's leadership positions. I respectfully request that the city provide a written response. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Our next person up is Teresa Baker.

Teresa Baker, Old Town. I just have a comment about what I perceive to be the city's overuse of consultants and consultancy fees. I don't know quite how to get into this, but let me say that There are many instances, and I will just list one or two of them, of where the city has thoroughly discussed an issue, come up with decent conclusions, and then hired a consultant to for $50,000, as I understand it, out at the roundabout, Sharps Corner, to tell you exactly what you'd already decided. So, I mean, that the city was, it was not appropriate to build housing out there. So... Now I'm concerned with K Street and how the city has come to a conclusion after much discussion and finished the discussion and come to what I thought was a good conclusion that It's not appropriate for a roundabout or a light. There is no reason for a light. There may be a crossing light because there are people crossing at that intersection, 12th and K. Now, because the state has money for you to do a study, you're going to take that money and do a study, which is not going to lead to any kind of new conclusion. But you are going to have to pay a consultant at some point to design this whatever you decide to do. So I would just like the city to think about how much money you spend on consultants and consultancies when you are very brilliant at these discussions and you come to very good conclusions on your own. So that's all.

thanks thank you all right our next uh speaker signed up here is ron johnson thank you ron johnson i live on oaks avenue and this is actually a request for all the presenters tonight for the reports. I went through and skimmed the PowerPoint. And my one request is that the presenters spell out those acronyms at least the first time through. I mean, AMC, I'll give you. The car company is dead. But the other ones, I'm not. Let's just say government acronym speak is not my first language. All the presenters, if you would spell that out at least the first time. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, anyone else? All right, seeing none, we'll close the public comment period and move on to the consent agenda. Two items on the consent agenda, minutes and approval of claims. Counsel.

Van Walters.

Ms. Young.

short of any other conversation, I move we approve the consent agenda items A and B.

Second. Motion and second to approve the consent agenda. Hearing no objections to any item on the consent agenda, no discussion being allowed on the consent agenda, we'll take a vote. All those in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

All those opposed say no. The ayes have it and consent agenda is approved. All right, our only item of business tonight is the quarter two all department update. And although I don't think it is reflected on the agenda this way, we had indicated that it was a work session. If there's no objection, we will make it a work session. hearing none all right uh so the work session tonight is a report from each department head and division chief on the quarter two happenings in the city we expect this will be a little bit faster than the last time we did it in quarter one uh and council you need not um ask for permission to speak. This is a work session. It's less formal. So if you have a question, feel free to interject. However, keep in mind that we do want to get through everybody's presentation. I'll leave it up to you to manage your own time that way. Okay, so let's jump in. The first slide I think is mine so i'll need you to advance it Thank you okay so in quarter to we have been implementing our first executive order that was the order directing staff to conserve funds. revolved around that conserve reform invest framework that you're going to hear about tonight so we've been continuing that implementation. I also issued another executive order, 202602, and that revolved around permit streamlining. Both of these are on the mayor's webpage and both have been sent to you in the past. But permit streamlining directed planning and public works to consolidate some functions, mostly in the planning department, to reduce handoffs and increase efficiencies. There's a number of code amendments that we request the planning department prepare, and those are moving forward now to the planning commission. And then the final component is a fee component, and Mr. Coleman will talk about all of these things when he gets to that section. But we understand that permitting generally is of high importance to the city. We want to make the city one of the best places in Skagit County to get a permit, and that executive order is targeted that way. We did finally hire the last department head, and that's Chief McDonald. We have been working on trees, and there is a page on the website now about our tree efforts. We're looking for ways to improve our urban tree canopy, and some of that is driven by our stormwater permit, which puts a high importance on protecting trees, adding street trees, and generating more urban canopy that also helps with stormwater controls. So we've been working with a group of community members with some expertise in street trees to figure out what it is we might want to pursue there, including better standards for street trees, better standards for city maintenance of the trees that we have. We've been doing quite a bit of work on communications, really a lot of it building the infrastructure behind what we want to do with communications. So we've been making improvements to the website, standardizing a logo, creating templates for departments. Also with respect to content, we've been doing some improvements to the website. Last quarter, we launched our project pages. So if there's a capital project or planning project that the city is working on, the public can find out about it on a single page on the website. We've also cut some of the features that we had on the website. So for instance, you might have seen disappear our little AI chat bot. The AI chat bot is only as good as the information that's already on the website. So we've been focusing on putting information on the website rather than the chat bot. And we will continue that work into the rest of the year. We're nowhere near complete. Importantly, our mayor's office intern, Kira Hines, has been working on a civic academy that we hope to roll out next year to be able to educate members of the public about how the city works, how the city interacts with other local governments, support the county, who does what, and why it is we do the things that we do. So you can look for more information about that next year after that preparation work is complete. We had a beer with the mayor event recently. We're looking for other opportunities to do that outreach. Cydia has been involved in a number of software transitions, most of which you're going to hear about tonight. But the overarching theme here is that we're looking for ways to be more efficient with the funds that we have. So EERP was replacement of an end of life system. But our CFP and our SharePoint deployments are really gaining efficiencies, not just replacing a system that we had to have anyway. And then we are looking at deployment of Microsoft Teams as our phone system, because we already have that. There's a little bit of an upcharge to add phone, but we can reduce the number of software components that we have and we have to deploy. We're looking to achieve some cost efficiencies there as well. Finally, we have been preparing for the 2027 budget. You're not gonna hear about that tonight, but you'll hear more about that next week. And that really is a years long effort. Okay, now we'll launch into department reports, starting with finance. I remind department heads that we have 10 minutes slated for each, and I will be timing you. I don't expect that you'll have this problem, Steve, but let's jump in.

Thank you, Mayor, members of the council, members of the audience. I am Steve Hoagland, the finance director for the City of Anacortes. So a couple of things that we've been working on in quarter two. So we have implemented our enterprise ERP financial system. I'm sorry, we've started that implementation. Let me have it on record that the name of this program is EERP. It's the worst name in history. So generally, an ERP system, ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. It's our centralized overarching software system that has our general ledger, as well as all the modules that we use, the budgeting module, accounts payable module, accounts receivable module, et cetera. Those are all connected. So the system that we're implementing It's called EERP, and it's developed by Tyler Technologies. So July 2026 is the first period that we are working out of that system now. which is super exciting. We fully transitioned the work in accounts payable, cash sharing, and miscellaneous billing. We're in the process now of converting and getting up to speed the capital asset module. All asset data has been transferred into EERP and grants now are in process as well. Another thing that we have Accomplished in quarter two is launching the finance SharePoint. So that's now active and provides a centralized location for a variety of resources, including links to the new EERP system and budget monitoring tools, as well as a number of tip sheets for the EERP system. And coming soon, there will be tip sheets for the new software system called Planet, which will be our capital facilities plan or CFP planning software. No tax on overtime, so that'll be a required reporting element for the city of Anacortes payroll for fiscal year 2026. We are nearly complete with a model now to calculate those benefits. That turned out to be a pretty tricky project because the city has a variety of schedules that the different... City departments work under our payroll accountant carry nap has done a really nice job of getting this model put together in time for plenty of time for year end reporting. Planet, as I mentioned, is the name of our new planning software for the CFP, the Capital Facilities Plan. We have now set a kickoff training for city staff for July 30th. That'll be right here in the council chambers. And then at that point, we will start deploying tip sheets and other trainings and we'll update our CFP schedule. and get that out to council as well as city staff. Fiscal year 2025 annual report has been submitted to the state auditor's office. And just several weeks after that submittal was done, they were back on site performing the audit. So generally what we see in terms of timing with the state auditor's office is we have John Potter, prefer, and they try to provide a completed audit within one year of the completed fiscal year for fiscal year 2024 that didn't happen, we were well into fiscal year 25 before we got the report. John Potter, We talked to them about getting an earlier audit date this year for our fiscal year 25 and a report, so that we could have that done and. within the next year, there are rating agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's both get copies of our audited financial statements and then release updated evaluations on the city's financial condition. So it is important that we get that in a timely manner, but it's been a little bit of a, it's been keeping us busy having the auditors back so soon, but that's in work as we speak. The Event Center bond, we have put together a financing team for that bond issue. We had our kickoff meeting earlier this month, early July. As in past bond issues, As in past bond issues, we'll be using PFM as our financial advisors and Piper Sandler as the underwriter. Foster Pepper will serve as bond counsel on this. We have also pulled the port of Anacortes finance director into the team, Jill Brownfield, so she'll be kept looped in and so she can keep the port up to speed on the status of that project. EERP utility billing is the next major module to the new system. That initiative has kicked off with transition anticipated in January of 2027. So next up for the finance department, we will be looking at the CFP hitting City Council Chambers, And third quarter and then as counsels were consistent with prior years close. City Council Chambers, closely on the heels of the CFP will be the 27 operating budget and then again consistent with prior years, we will review the CFP first. City Council Chambers, But then work the CFP and operating budget in conjunction with each other with adoption concurrently at the end of the process. from a finance status standpoint or a budget actual standpoint it looks a little bit off here when you look at the total utilization total budget utilization this top row here you can see we're at 28 percent of utilization there's a couple things skewing that the biggest of which is this Dave Kuntz, bottom row that says miscellaneous internal the $700,000 we when we have an inner fund transfer out of the general fund that runs through the finance department that becomes part of the finance budget that 700,000 is the resources identified. Dave Kuntz, For the skate park restroom and parking lot project, we have not done that transfer yet so. that pulls the actuals way down the other part of that if you look at professional services we're only at 27 percent of utilization and that has to do with the large amount of budget we have allocated for the eerp implementation we paid those invoices on a quarterly basis and as of june 30th we've only had the first quarter invoice that we've paid other than that everything is tracking to expectation and that's what i have for finance

Thank you, Mr. Hoagland. And we've had discussions about not having big amounts of money, like $700,000 for the skate park, hanging out in an individual department's budget and skewing all the numbers in the future. So we'll look for solutions for that going forward. All right, Ms. Moyle.

All right. Good evening, Mayor, Council, members of the audience. I am the HR and Labor Relations Director. For our human resources Q2 highlights, we had our HR internet SharePoint site launch. Our HR generalist, she worked very hard to get this up and running. It allows for a central location for employees to find any forms such as W-4s or FMLA information or any benefit forms for their use. So that's something that was needed and all the information is there in one place. We also completed promotional testing for police and fire. This is something that we do every two years. We completed in April. There are four positions, the battalion chief, fire lieutenant, police captain, and police corporal positions. We also completed our WCIA annual risk audit. Now, WCIA stands for Washington City's Insurance Authority. And this is something that we do annually, and so we pick any department and we take a closer look at it, so this year we chose to look at fleet. And that's something we dug into and then after the audit they had some recommendations for us to update our fleet and new hire driver policy, so we will be working on that over the next two quarters. For training, I attended AWC, that's Association of Washington City's Labor Relations Institute. That is my annual training that I go to, and then also my HR generalist attended Left One training. This was something that was new. The city of Anacortes has 11 Left One retirees for police and fire, that's law enforcement officers, firefighters. And left one is unique in the sense that the retirees former employer is legally responsible for paying the retirees necessary medical services after retirement. This is entirely managed by HR. It's quite time intensive as these retirees are getting older. So this is something that we we've needed additional education on so that training was very worthwhile. Employee wellness initiatives. HR performs activities throughout the year, and that's to maintain our Well City designation from the Association of Washington Cities. This allows us a 2% savings on our health insurance premiums. For Q2 specifically, our wellness committee planned a plant exchange and then also prepared for the Volume 2 employee newsletter. Additionally, we have ongoing police guild negotiations. Arbitration is scheduled for 2027, but we're hoping to find a resolution sooner than that. We're meeting next week, and we hope to make some progress at that meeting. As far as recruitment goes, we had three major positions that our time and energy went into, and that was the fire chief. Entry-level police officers, we held two oral boards for that as well as seasonals. So we hire each year around the summertime seasonals for Parks and Recreation, Public Works, and Museum for 16 total employees. For our Q2 stats specifically, we had 36 new hires. And I know this seems like a very large number, but let me break it down for you. Of those 36, six were full-time employees. 14 were student recreation assistants. And these are students that help referee for the various sports activities that we have going on. So that was a large chunk of that. And then 16 were seasonal. So you're going to see this uptick around this time regardless. We also had eight exits. There were five full-time employees and two seasonals and one volunteer firefighter. We had 16 FMLA and PFML. It's paid family medical leave cases that we processed. That's an HR administrative task that we do. So we're going to track these numbers. And then we had eight active L&I claims, three of which were new claims that were filed and five that are ongoing that we continue to process. Moving on to our budget, for salary and wages, we're at 50%, as well as personnel benefits, 49%, so that's right where we need to be. For professional services, we are at 67%, which makes sense. A lot of our major expenses are front-loaded. We see those come through in January and February. We do have the recruitment platform NeoGov contract expense that is to be incurred in Q3. That's $12,668, so you'll see that come through soon. And then the additional in the professional services is variable. It's going to be labor relations attorney fees that we've set aside for police arbitration. So if it proceeds as anticipated in 2027, it may be some cost savings there. But also, if we make some progress, it might increase as well. As far as travel and training, we're at 80%. However, we've completed all of our training for the year, so I don't anticipate that to change. Other costs is at 87%. I also don't anticipate any of our supplies or anything major expenditures there. So overall, our budget remains on track.

Thank you, Ms. Moyle. Darcy Swetnum, City of Boulder, Again, Council, I don't mean I don't want to encourage you too much, but if you have questions you can jump in.

Darcy Swetnum, City of Boulder, Good evening Council members of the audience i'm Darcy sweat and i'm the city attorney and I am pleased to provide the legal department update for quarter two. Darcy Swetnum, City of Boulder, So I won't go through this again, this is a holdover slide that religious looks at the scope of what we provide in terms of support, but I will talk about this one. So recent accomplishments, what have we been working on? So there are a couple of growth management hearings board cases that the city attorney's office has been handling in house. One of those we mentioned last time we were able to settle the appeal of the city shoreline master program and have continued to work to finalize that case. We also completed all of the briefing and oral arguments at the hearing on the merits for the growth management hearings board appeal of the city's comprehensive plan and development regulations, which was a pretty big appeal. So we're now waiting on a decision, which we anticipate by early August. We've also worked on filing a dispositive motion for the growth management hearings board appeal of the city's stormwater master program. And we are waiting on the board's decision on that motion as well. We did have an opportunity. We had a case that came up. The city was served with a lawsuit in Skagit County Superior Court requesting a writ of mandamus related to an administrative appeal. And unfortunately, we did have to bring in outside counsel for that appeal. But we were able to work with outside counsel efficiently and get that case dismissed. So that case was resolved. We've had the benefit of a intern over the summer. And so we've been able to give him some interesting projects to work on. And one that I'm particularly excited about is he created a tool for the city that has a spreadsheet with maps that he worked at GIS to develop that show all of the cell tower sites on city properties. So we've got, I think we have five maybe six, and questions come up fairly regularly about requests for permits or questions about the lease or rates. And so he was able to abstract information from each of those leases to create a useful tool for us, which will allow us in the future to more efficiently address those questions as they come up. We also we talked about in our Q1 update that we were going to look at getting an online bidding tool so that rather than having hard copy bids for competitively bid projects, we would have an online platform to do that and we did move forward with that and deployed it and I believe the first bid opening is coming up this week for that tool. So we're really excited to see. We anticipate that will lead to fewer mistakes and more efficiency and better responsiveness on our bids. So we're looking forward to that. So just this is sort of a recap, but just to provide some updates on the conserve front. Again, we're really trying to handle all matters that can be handled in-house, in-house, and certainly all of the growth management hearings, board appeals, and really trying to limit to the extent that we can outside council engagement to utilities which have additional different funding mechanisms. We've we've continued and supply and training to focus on free or low cost opportunities and have delayed purchases where appropriate for things like conferences that we can that we can do in future years and we have effectively. eliminated DocuSign execution for ordinances and resolutions and just use that for contracts where that's legally necessary. In terms of reform, I want to give a shout out to Mr. Franciac, who has been doing a lot of work to help improve LaserFISH processes. So we've made some improvements to the contract approval form. We've removed some redundant processes. and have made some improvements to grant approval processes as well. And Mr. Franciak is at the tail end of testing on a public records request form in LaserFISH, which we believe will streamline the request process and also help us more efficiently manage records related to public records requests. In terms of investing, again, mentioned we did move forward with the contract for online bidding. And just as a reminder, the justification for that were, one, it's going to streamline staff time. We figure an average of nine and a half hours was spent on these hard copy bid openings. And also we've had situations in the past where there were bidding errors that led to the city having a higher contract price than the low bidder would have been. Related to that investment, we've also, Mr. Franciak and the team have been working to update the way that we do records management. So we will be moving our records from, metaphorical files in the basement as we call them to records management in place so we think that's going to create additional efficiencies so I also wanted to mention uh one of the other projects that are uh our legal intern and the mayor and I have worked on is putting up a page on the city's website that has litigation updates and I'm not sure why this that link isn't active Okay, it doesn't wanna let me go to it. We can fix the link in the presentation so council will be able to access it, but essentially what the page goes through all of the recent land use litigation cases that we've had, and I know we did a presentation on that back in April, but it provides updates with links to orders so that the public and council can see what has happened with these multiple lawsuits and what the outcomes were of all of those. So it'll be a good opportunity for transparency to the public and communication with council about multiple lawsuits and where they've gone. So in terms of our budget, we're right where we want to be. In fact, under in some categories, there's not a lot of discretionary spending in the legal department's budget. So you can see salaries and wages are at 50%, which is where we would like them to be. Our overall budget utilization is at 48%. Professional services, we're at 46%, and professional services are where we run the prosecutor contract, so that's where we would like that to be, sort of at the halfway mark for the year, and we're slightly under. Travel and training and other costs were at 1% and 35% respectively. So we're happy with where things are in the budget, where we would expect them to be, and we'll continue to try to find ways to be more efficient and be good stewards of the resources we have. I'm happy to answer questions if you have any. Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Swenton.

Mayor, members of the council, members of the audience, good evening. My name is Jose Cervantes. I'm the IT manager. Second quarter updates, IT has been busy, a few projects, and one is a very important one, and that is what we're going to be utilizing for our vendors, third party, securely access our network. VPNs, traditional VPNs aren't, good enough anymore. So we've been testing a product called FortiPAM, which is going to give us the security and the vendor control. The status of the project is where the trial has been completed with successful proof of concept. And so where legal is reviewing a contract for the licensing acquisition. Some of the key security benefits is enforcing multi-factor authentication, which will enhance the identity verification for all access. Session recording is something it's also going to do by monitoring all the logs and all the vendor activity actually records the whole session. It has a password rotation where it will automate it, resets, and vendor will never see the credentials. So the outcome is increased visibility and robust control over our vendor remote access. The vendor touched on Teams Voice, which is a unified communications. We really believe it will create efficiency and cost reductions. And that is one of the primary drivers, which is essentially save costs by switching from RingCentral to Teams Voice. The financial advantage is that Teams is already pre-funded. It comes with our Microsoft licensing. So it's just the phone add-in, which is going to be about $11 to $13 a user. It will also simplify because it will unify our Office 365 management, which is something that we've been using for a number of years now. And the progress update is we're building the configuration. We're building the policies, the auto attendance, the call queues, and holiday schedules. The pilot testing is currently on trial with 10 users. And we're going to be comparing that to the current system, which is RingCentral. So the next step is put over and migrate the targeted date is in the year. When it comes to securing compliance, we're still very focused, very proactive defense on operating system longevity. Microsoft Defender, we're also testing for our AV endpoint security. And we've chosen five servers to try Windows Defender. Obviously, this is also comes with our current Microsoft licensing. So there won't be any additional costs. Actually, we should be saving some costs by dropping our current AV vendor. We're also working hard on migrating Windows 11 to the latest version, which is 25H2, since 24H2, it's approaching end of life end of this year. We have a compliance deadline to ensure that all systems are upgraded before end of support date. Our goal is to standardize security or security posture across all municipal hardware. We're also very involved with the server infrastructure upgrades. We want to modernize our systems and create stability. As an example, all the Laserfish servers are being currently upgraded to Windows Server 2019. 2019 goes into live in 2029 with our current cluster being refreshed in 2028. So we'll be talking about budgeting for a new cluster, not this year, but the following year. The impact is to enhance performance and security patches for critical city records. Operational continuity, which is reducing technical debt by retiring legacy server environments. And integration, it will align server standards with current IT security protocols. Currently, our overall expenditure, we're at about 43%. There's only travel and training that we're at 55%. And we only have one conference where three IT members will attend. So we'll be right on the mark on that line item. So yeah, we're looking good so far.

Thank you. All right. Thank you, Mr. Cervantes.

Good evening council members, Mr. Mayor and members of the audience. I'm Jim Lemberg and I'm privileged to work with the staff members in the city's fiber division. Our year-to-date accomplishments include 336 new residential subscribers having been placed into service. That has resulted in an increase in what we forecast as revenue for calendar year 2026 by roughly $18,000. Our overall take rate across the entirety of our service footprint is currently at 57%. We are resolved router issues that have just plagued us over the last little bit and caused service disruptions. One of the members of our staff, Corby Stevens, has worked just relentlessly. He's put in a lot of extra hours. to get that resolved. He's learned a great deal and is putting that to very good use. I'm very pleased with the work that Corby is doing. We've developed, largely with the mayor's assistance, a customer notification email system, and I should also, I think, include Jennifer. In that she does a lot of the hands-on work for our customer notification email system. I believe we've Released two such mass notifications to date. Is that correct? Mr. Mayor? Yes. Thank you remainder of this calendar year of course we'll continue new customer installations depending upon the particular week we typically do 10 to 15 customer installations each week some of them are a bit more complex than others so that's why there's a little bit of a variation some weeks it's fewer some weeks it's more we will we hope to deploy a new edge router which will further guard against the sort of issues that we've seen in recent months. Corby continues to fine tune the network's traffic handling. That's quite a complex undertaking and he is just learning more and more and more every day and putting it to very good use. We anticipate receiving the final $225,000 of our EDA grant reimbursement. I mentioned earlier that we've reached a bit over 50% of the potential market, which implies that there is about 50% of the market left to reach. And so we want to aggressively market to that remaining 50%. We plan to bring customer support 100% in-house in 2027. And you'll be hearing a little bit more about that. We're still in the early phases of planning for that, but I'm very much looking forward to that. With regard to our budget, we are significantly, not significantly, we are over budget on our use of overtime. The biggest driver of that is that we had to do a big fiber repair that we spent about $3,600 worth of overtime dollars on. And that's what drove us over on the overtime more than anything. Our professional services also indicate a little bit over, and that's primarily because there's a fair amount of front-end spending, and I've detailed that out there, a little bit over $110,000 in annual contracts that have already been paid. this calendar year. And then we had that emergency repair. We had to spend an additional $3,300 on an outside vendor for that. And that comes under that professional services account. In other improvements, we've chewed up, what does it say, 75% of the budget. And I've laid that out for you. A good bit of that is because, excuse me, contractor work that we had anticipated when we built the budget, and I think I might have mentioned this during our first quarter review, a good bit of contractor work that we thought would be completed during budget year 2025 did not get completed in that budget year and instead rolled into budget year 2026. And hence, you can see that backbone construction work there, $447,000. And then in customer installs, which includes materials and materials Most of the wages of the technicians who do the customer installs, there's $270,000 there. And then we've bought a little bit of network equipment. Those are the details underlying the dollars that are in that other improvements category where you see we spent 75% of the budget. What I would emphasize is that we don't have any more backbone construction to do. We're not going to be seeing that. Our revenue status, I have very good news here. You'll notice in the upper part, in the table up above, the 2026 revenue forecast called for us to have accomplished $1,088,000 of revenue. excuse me, that that's what we've actually received, $1,088,716. The budget called for us to generate $1,089,000, so we're almost at budget, $1,000 off on the revenue side. The very good news is that because that revenue forecast increases every week as we put more and more and more customers into service and more and more people are sending the city a check every month, that the revenues during quarters three and four are actually more than what they would be during quarters one and two. And you can see there, I've detailed that out for you, where the total revenue budget of $2,231,670 comes from its back end loaded there. And so we're in a very good position with our revenue performance. I'm very pleased. And I have to give the credit to the crew. They're the guys out there digging ditches. all day long that's that's what they do when when we hire them that's what we try to tell them they they think they're getting into this really sophisticated stuff and i try to bring them right back down to earth and tell them listen the job is you're going to be working outside all day we're going to have a shovel in your hand most of the day and another one of them believe it But they do great work, and I'm very proud of the opportunity to work for them. I'm available for any questions.

Thank you, Mr. Lambert.

Thank you very much.

Good evening, Mayor Walters, City Council, and members of the public. I'm Chief MacDonald with Santa Cruz Fire Department. Hello for the second quarter report. And I have 10 minutes, so I got to keep speeding. So the strategic goals of the fire department for this year, we were addressing the annual fire inspection program, establishing performance analytics that we could measure our performance, reviewing our annual training program. And then this quarter, we added reviewing the overtime spending. Some of our accomplishments, we had initially planned for about 400 inspections and we have surpassed that, accomplishing 760 inspections with 83 reinspections. When we looked at our performance measures, we have had to put a pause on performance measures at this time just because of the reduction in administrative capacity and some direction from the mayor that he would like to see us doing a little bit more succession planning. Lieutenant and BC Promotion, we put on a successful promotional exam, and we heard some high remarks for our staff, from the assessors, other industry leaders. Currently, we have an eligibility list with two candidates. lieutenants on the battalion chief list and six initially lieutenants with five remaining after Lieutenant Getman's successful promotion here tonight. We also submitted an impact request. The Swinomish Tribe reached out to community partners and have an invitation to submit requests for impacts related to the casino. We provide EMS to the casino area, and we have a formula we've created that comes up with a dollar amount, which we have submitted to the Swinomish tribe. Some additional achievements. We have put on a lateral fire academy for the three firefighters that were brought on for the safety grant. This was organized and taught by the Anacortes fire staff. It was six weeks long. Expansed firefighters don't need the full academy that would normally happen if you were an entry-level firefighter. Typical entry-level firefighters will go through an academy of 12 to 16 weeks, Our academy was six weeks and we're basically verifying their skills and we're also ensuring that they understand how we perform here in Anacortes. They're then assigned to the FTO program, which is a field training office program where we get an opportunity to evaluate their EMS skills. And we're looking for both paramedics and EMT who are are able to assimilate the protocols of Skagit Karni, which are about 400 pages long. Partner, and that's a key term in the fire department, and partner basically indicates when one of our firefighters are qualified to act independently. And what that really means is they have demonstrated proficiency in performing all fire ground tasks and skills. And they also have demonstrated that their ability to be kind and compassionate competent and confident in providing patient care. Overtime tracking. You know, I'm really grateful for Ms. Swan and her attention to detail over the years. She has tracked information that I don't know if she was asked to track it, but she has all of the overtime hours tracked in documentation for the last 10 years at least. So we've been able to go in and pull the last five years and put it into a spreadsheet, which we need to... look at a little bit further and it definitely warrants some deeper discussion. We heard last week about some concerns over the Anacortes the forest lands and the urban interface and I just wanted to inform you that this quarter that 21 of the Anacortes Fire Department have reached the red card certification and there's one pending This basically is the training that qualifies them to work in the wildland firefighting arena. Some other accomplishments, we're doing some work at Station 1. Station 1 was built back in 1993 when it was mostly a volunteer fire department. And there were two career staff in the station, and I'm unsure if the number of chiefs that were involved. But we ended up with a contract, and a contractor actually out of Ferndale, Washington, Laser Construction, and the CEO there, Mike Quinn, who has been really... a great person to interact with and work with and to deliver this work. I will give a couple of kudos to Jill Underwood from Underwood & Associates, the architect firm that undertaken the drawings and all of the details involved with trying to get it right. Lance Jordan, one of our city engineer employees, has been just a phenomenal help. His advice is priceless, and he is just a great resource. And then internally with BC Buyer, who has been He takes the lead with the facilities for the fire department. And as you see, the progress now is moving really fast. If you look at your presentation that you have, it may not have this updated flooring. And that was something I came in, I had an obligation on Saturday morning that I had to come in for. And when I came upstairs, I saw it, I took a picture, and I this morning asked if I could add it to the presentation. We are hoping for the remodel to be completed in the first week of August. So some next steps for this year. I have a keen interest in filling the open assistant chief position to increase abilities to complete the work that is assigned to the executive branch of the fire department. We have two open positions currently, two firefighter positions and one community paramedic. And the MIH is the Mobile Integrated Health. We have some interviews coming up on Wednesday and Thursday. And after the list is certified through the civil service process, then we will have an opportunity to see a number of those candidates and hopefully make job offers. uh that that in turn also creates another lateral academy that we will have to put on we do have the experience in doing this and we have been able to uh make the the academy very efficient uh by the end of this a quarter i was hoping that we'll have some movement on the fire boat so i'm looking forward to that and also a note what is not included in my presentation is the annual training program. We have ongoing review of that and determine what is required training, what is needed training, and trying to make plans for next year. Some next steps for 2026. I say a parking lot because it'll all depend on how fast that we move through hiring an assistant chief and that person's level of experience with analytics. And I mentioned earlier that we The mayor had indicated he would like to see some succession planning. I'm one of the few people in the department that can pull the analytics out of our software. And my plan is to put on a class and teach a series of staff members how to pull analytics out of our program. And I was waiting for the new assistant chief to include that person in that process. The development time analytics for NIRS. NIRS is the National Emergency Reporting Information System. That hopefully we'll address this year. And we're going to continue to review our policies. The radio P25 compliance, and P is program 25, and it's just where we're going to make digital our radio. So we're taking an assessment of the radios that we own, what radios can be upgraded and what radios are not going to be upgraded. There's a current timeline of June of 2027 that we have to be compliant on that. I got some analytics for you and it's just basically the first and second quarter of 2025 and on the top line and 2026 and the second line and. The increase of what 99 calls is a reflects a 4.1 increase in incidents just what it looks like each month and it's pretty consistent through the months. One of the questions I do get asked a lot is, hey, who uses 911? And what demographic group uses 911 the most? And so we do track patient age. And from the analytics that we've had in the last eight years, 2018 through 2025, the most frequent 911 calls is through the 10 years of 80 through 89. And that's pretty consistent over time. This is the Anacortes Fire Department budget. And so we're halfway through the year, and 50% is a number that I'm looking for and trying to evaluate. And our total budget utilization is at 46%, with wages at 45%, which is significant because we have had time when we have not had full staffing at the department, which in turn causes some overtime. And we'll talk about that. uh so benefits are at 46 percent and then i see two red numbers on the board the first one just addressed at the very bottom the miscellaneous internal is 62 percent the miscellaneous internal i believe is the ambulance write-off and that's where we predict as a as an ambulance provider that we're going to charge this amount of money for transports and the insurance companies come back and tell us, well, that's nice, but we're going to give you this amount of money. And I think we're all used to that with an EOB, an explanation of benefits with our own personal medical. The other line is the overtime at one, two, three, 123%. You know, I'm really unsure why the overtime budget was reduced for this year and significantly reduced from previous years. And that overtime document that we have been able to pull out of our database will help us really explain this. You know, there are two things that I see trending immediately, and one is when our full-time employee count is down, we see overtime increasing. And then the other, we have a contractual obligation for minimum staffing, and today that minimum staffing is nine persons with the battalion chief and two people on the engine ladder or ladder. two people on Med 14, and then two at Station 3 and two at Station 2. So a total of nine. And any time the number drops below that, we have to hire to cover that position. This last revenue status, At the end of my presentation last time, I basically said that was new information to me. And I said I would learn this. And I have failed to do so. And I failed to do so because of just a lack of capacity. I have a lot of work on my plate. I am just one person at the administrative level. So I will endeavor to do better next time.

Unfortunately, we have the finance department to help out with revenue stats. And we'll have more information on overtime and what that number should be and how it breaks down in a couple of weeks when we bring that back. Council, any questions? Okay. Thank you, Chief McDonnell.

good evening mayor walters members of the council members of the audience i'm dave floyd the police chief subtle and subtle there yeah uh starting off uh our uh opening slide as i was preparing my uh slides for tonight last week uh that was the temperature inside my office so We're staring down the barrel of our second summer in a row without air conditioning in a building that doesn't have opening windows. So we're doing our best, but the forecast this week is not encouraging. As we dive into our second quarter accomplishments, We deployed our new TASER platform and have completed training for all but just a couple of folks. And this is significant. If you recall the presentation that I gave to you last year during the budget discussions, this new TASER platform is allowing us to increase the distances between the officers and suspects. Increasing that distance increases officer safety and also gives us more time to do de-escalation work and prevent uses of force when possible. So that's significant for us and we're very excited to be able to get those out and deployed to our staff. Brent is our Crime Prevention and Community Service PIO. Brent ran a Citizens Academy earlier this year. It was a 14-week academy. We had a number of attendees that got a window into the work that our folks do every day and have a newfound... level of knowledge that they got from attending that academy. It's something that we have done every year, the beginning of the year. That spans part of first quarter into second quarter. And we'll be recruiting for next year's class probably around October. So if that's something that interests anybody, I would encourage you to get your name on the list early. We do have a limited number of seats that we can accommodate just to keep the class manageable when we go do off-site tours at the 911 Center and the Skagit County Jail. We filled our third general crimes detective position. This is Officer Rhodes, and he started in our detective division in June. So he will be helping with our general crimes caseload and allowing our detective sergeant to take on some other duties that I'll be assigning him as we look at different programs for the police department going forward. We also rolled out our new artificial intelligence scam prevention presentation through Brent and the Crime Prevention Division that was well received at the Senior Center. And for those that missed it, we'll be doing another presentation on that same topic August 12th at the library. So it's a very worthwhile presentation, especially for some of our older folks that are less familiar with some of the scams that are out through artificial intelligence. These folks are getting very creative and it's easy to become a victim. So trying to prevent that is our focus here. We hosted another successful Bark in the Park in June. And this is a, our annual event that officer Naibo puts together, um, kind of emphasizing our animal laws in the city, leash laws, uh, picking up after your dog, those types of things. And we've had a great level of success with attendance and partnerships in the community. So, uh, this is Zeke who made an appearance there and, and, uh, gave the demo to attendees. Also, while not specific to the second quarter of the year, earlier this month, the crime in Washington report was released. And this is where we get our crime statistics and just an assessment of how we're doing. These are typically, there's a lag time of six to seven months in these because the information has to be collected by the FBI. These are all statistics. We report to them on a monthly basis. They take it, they compile it, and then a very nice report is done by the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, and they put it out about this time of the year. Looking at that report... What we saw was our property and violent crime combined saw a 15% reduction in 2025 over 2024. And when you go back and look at the 2024 report, the reduction from 2024 from 23 to 24, excuse me, was 27%. So over a two year span, we're now looking at a reduction in crime at about 40%, which is significant. And I think that's worth calling out because that is a direct result of the increased staffing that we have from our public safety levy. So that's significant. And that is the return on your investment. Also from those crime statistics, significant to note that our clearance rate, which anytime we are able to bring a case to a resolution, whether it's by arrest, exceptional clearance, or otherwise, Those clearance rates are tracked and our increased clearance rate by 5% is also, I think, attributed to our increased staffing levels. Our officers have more time to dedicate to those investigations, to be able to do them in a much more timely manner. So we don't have time elapsing between when the crime is reported to us and when we're able to bring that case to a resolution. The quicker we're able to do that, the higher our success rates are. Our drug case numbers were slightly behind 2024, but I give you that bit of information and the side note that basically the first five to six months of the year, K9 Zeke was in training, so he wasn't even available for us to use in our drug crimes investigations. for basically the first six months out of the year, and we were still almost at 2024's numbers. So I think that's very noteworthy. Other crimes, if we look closer to each category, robberies were down by 50%, thefts down by 22%, vehicle thefts down by 44%. And when you look at the collective value of all property that's reported stolen to us, our total amount or total value of stolen property in 2025 was $600,000 less than the property reported stolen to us in 2024. So as a city, our citizens lost $600,000 less. That's significant because your insurance companies are looking at those statistics when they're setting your rates. And our rates here are going to reflect the lower crime rate as opposed to other cities across the state have a much more significant crime problem. Moving on to budget. Every line item that's under our control is either on pace or at what it should be at this point in time of the year. You'll see that under the category of other costs, we're at 57%, but those are largely categories that I have no control over. One example of that would be insurance. I have no control over the insurance, and it's significantly higher this year than we had forecasted. As far as revenue, everything is, for the most part, on pace. I'm sorry, I want to go back just real quick and call out that our overtime usage is at 34%, so significantly less than you would expect at this point in the year, and we've been diligently managing that. Moving on to the revenue, Our revenue coming in is for the most part on pace with what we expect it to be this time of the year. The two specific revenue sources that I will call out is our parking infraction penalties are at 71% of what we'd expected them to be at this point in the year. and our traffic infractions are at 68%. So we're tracking well above the predicted pace. Our public safety sales taxes, our jail pass-through money that shows up on our ledger seats, but it really goes directly to contribute towards the Skagit County Jail. And the Department of Homeland Security is the grant program that we participate in through FEMA that allows our staff to do patrols for cross-border smuggling, human trafficking, drug introduction, weapons that are crossing the border illegally. That's at about 80%. So our revenue streams that are coming in, though we don't have many, are fairly strong. That's all I have.

Chief Flood, the law enforcement services line item, is that things like Oyster Run where you actually get reimbursed for some of the time that is not regular patrol? Right above traffic infractions.

Correct. That would be if the refineries have us out there conducting traffic control or the school district pays for an additional officer to be at a football game because the attendance is going to be unruly, those types of things. We typically are reimbursed for our overtime costs when we put that option out there for officers to sign up. And I believe that would fall under that category.

Mayor Walters, go ahead. No, Chief, you seem to be suggesting that the hard work of your department has aided in the reduction of crime. Is that what I should infer from what you said? I think it's the hard work and the increased staffing levels. Good, good, good, good. I was hoping, I just wanted to make sure I was anchoring that. No, I really appreciate that. And, um, You know, when we're talking about numbers and when you were attributing part of the savings, if you would, if I could use that word with it. Part of that is the investment that we are making into these things to prevent crime from being able to happen and also having the officers to be able to pursue it. Exactly. Oh, okay.

Yeah. I mean, statistically increased presence is going to deter crime that would have normally happened. And when we prevent that crime from even occurring, we now save the cost of not having to prosecute it. And we also save the cost of not having to incarcerate those individuals. So it's spending money upfront to be preventative is much more efficient in the long run.

That visibility is manifested in the bike program, too. Yeah. Yeah, you need to get out more, I guess.

I know it. I mean, council's sometimes late.

Yeah. All right. Thank you, Chief Floyd.

Yep.

Low Council and community rent Lunsford and quarters museum director. happy to be here. Put the slide of historic downtown and a quarter share we think of this as an area to invest in for the museum supporting cultural enrichment and tourism projects beyond the walls of our three facilities. We are adding to self-guided tours available to visitors and locals using story maps, links on our website. A new one that we developed is the Fidalgo Shoreline History story map. Thanks to community artifact donations, we add to the Anacortes Museum collection every month. We recently completed cataloging the Anacortes Sports photo exhibit and stand by to support future community and Anacortes High School efforts to display these in the Williams Gym Foyer again. For now, they are displayed online on our database website. And working with Island Adventures, we have had another sold-out season of historical cruises around Fidalgo Island, raising money for the Anacortes Museum Foundation. Uh, the August 20th is, uh, sold out also, but never hurts to get on the wait list. Uh, cuz sometimes those open up last minute. I'd like to especially thank Leslie Eastwood of the sandwich Indian nation for teaming up in support of our, uh, presentations there on those circumnavigation trips. We are attempting to spend as little as possible. For a functional view of our budget, it might help to remove the $200,000 building fund, which is mostly past and are all entirely past and future donations. And so in that sense, our... functional budget is $438,115 for 2026 and the $216,787 spend represents about 49.5%. So that's all I have to say.

And again, council, you'll see in a couple of weeks, we're going to be proposing to move those building expenses off of the operating budgets for these departments. Any questions? Okay. Thank you, Mr. Lansford.

All right, members of council, mayor, members of the audience, I'm Jeff Vogel, library director. Myself and librarian Trish Wilson will be providing the quarterly two update for the library. So overview, the foundation-funded desk projects are on track. So we're hoping for a 2026 build, working with Underwood on that. Design phase is moving around as long as it should. We've been working on updating our bylaws and policies and moving that through board approval and our student card and of course school district 103 cooperative agreement is in place for the next three years. Thank you for that. And then summer reading is off to a big start. Question for you all. How much has our community saved in quarter two, three months, by checking out items that the library instead of buying them? What's your guess? $10,000, $100,000, $500,000, $1 million, or $3 billion? Any guesses? $10 billion, wow, sold. It's not that much. It's almost a million dollars that the community saved just in those three months. So at year so far, $1.86 million saved just by using your local library. Some statistics here just for the last three months, 68,000 total checkouts, 1,000 new books added. Big thanks to the Friends and Foundation for helping supplement that budget, of course. um 1500 program attendees uh i think that will double tomorrow with our foam party at seafarers park so bring your kids um 228 new library cards in the last three months uh 10 new steam backpacks if you're not familiar with the steam backpacks really cool um Backpacks that have books and resources and activities in them for subjects like mindfulness, birdwatching, gardening, all sorts of cool stuff. They're wildly popular with kids. And 530 library of things checkouts. Like I said, summer reading is off to a big start. More readers this year are joining than ever before. Our children's librarian, Stacey Paul, again went into the three elementary schools and gave away 1,300 books thanks to the Diane Webb grant and promoted our summer reading. Trish, do you want to tell us about our new resource, Parent TV?

Good evening, council, mayor, audience. I'm Trish Wilson, librarian. Parent TV is a new online resource that we're offering free to all cardholders through Family Place Library. As a Family Place Library, we have free access to this. It's basically Netflix, but for parenting. So there are videos done by experts on all kinds of subjects, like how do I get my kid to have less screen time? How do we handle our difficult feelings? and they're all done by experts. So, so far the feedback from parents has been really great on that. We launched it in June and it is available through our library website. One project we worked on in quarter two was how to participate in celebrating the nation's birthday. So we embraced the theme 250 years of stories and that culminated in walking with the friends of the library, embracing that theme at the Independence Day parade. In June, we installed some new shelving in the teen area to replace the temporary carts that were there from the teen remodel. And teens have continued to use the space even while school is out, just at different times right now. And we anticipate in the fall, they will be back mostly in the after school hours. Our next big teen event will be a teen trivia night that myself and children's librarian Stacey Paul are hosting after hours in the library on August 11th. So that will be fun for teens to come to. Another interactive question for you is raise your hand if you know how to request a book. We've got a few. Sign up for library emails. Book a passport appointment. Or read today's New York Times. Well, the answer is you can do all of this on the library website. And we spent some time redesigning it to make it simpler and more user-friendly, clarifying some terminology, and just making it easier to find things that people are looking for. And we finished that up and launched it in the middle of June. I believe we started and finished at the end of June. So check it out, see if you can navigate, find some things. And then we've also been working on a brand new marketing campaign called Here For You. It's sort of a refreshed, did you know, trying to connect our community to the resources that the library has. A lot of these things are important because people don't know that we have them, and we want them to use them. We have jazz concerts, the Friends of the Library Bookshop, New York Times has games and cooking, so you can keep up with your wordle streak. We have the Seed Library that Transition for Doggo provides, and of course, printing services that are used quite often. And people still come in and say, can I print something here? We want people to know that, yes, you can. And I'll give it back to Jip.

Oh, went too far. So looking forward, we have a wonderful volunteer committee that's met many times to plan forward for our genre event that we're hoping to do in 2027. And hopefully some of you have been to these in the past. They draw over 1,000 people usually. And the theme this year, I don't know. It's a mystery. All right, budget. We are pretty much on track here. The professional services line is still underspent. I wish that was just the cost-saving measures that we've been doing. But most of that is because there are subscription services that pay out in likely quarter three or quarter four. All right. And then revenue. So the most notable thing here is the passport services. We have added Friday appointments. So we've got a total of 15 appointments per week. We're trying to aggressively advertise the service again. and hoping to bring people in. We'll likely do a passport fair on a Saturday, which means you don't have to make an appointment. You just come in. But no matter how we look at it, we have some serious competition from the post office who has open appointments six days a week. We are working hard to meet this revenue expectation. So that's all I have. Thank you.

Mayor Walters. Thank you both for the presentation. It was fantastic. Actually, I love the stat on the savings, the essentially projected savings of $1 million in a quarter. And of course, with the annual budget of $1.5 million, if you take that $1 million in savings across four quarters, the return on investment is fantastic. Even if half of those purchase decisions are skipped, it's still a really good return on investment. I'm curious, though, that the library of things, like just for the community, for the audience, what sort of things might we find in the library of things?

Yeah, I mean, it's a growing collection that we're hoping to work on right now. There's telescopes, there's puzzles, there's energy meters, there's what else?

There's a civics kit, all sorts of cool stuff.

And we're hoping to grow that. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Rizk.

All right, thank you, Mr. Vogel. Mr. Lunsford.

Good evening, Mayor, Council, members of the audience. All right. Quarter two program and events. We try to litter our slides with cute children doing fun things. and a dog. So our track and field camp went off with a great fanfare. You can see the relay race, peewee baseball, something we do in Q2. We start our camps. Everyone's joyous. The most joyous person is hidden in the back, it seems, though. We're raising our arms up. And we work with the police department on bark in the park at Storvik. One picture I don't have is our fishing day at Heart Lake, which draws a lot of young anglers. At the Senior Center, Senior Activity Center, that's the Aging Mastery class. They are excited. They just graduated. And the Billiards Room got an upgrade thanks to some generous donations, some private donors and some through our partner at the Anacortes Senior Activity Center Foundation, which is a great partner to us throughout the year. Q2 programs and events that we worked on. This one snuck in just in Q3 on the 1st of July. Many of you were there to help us celebrate the new plaza that our staff worked on with Public Works. Shout out to Dustin South on our team and to Sabin Williamson in Public Works and the legal department helped us with all of our contracts to do this. You can see Some of yourselves in this photo. And we're working to create something with our friends in collaboration with the port, not to conflict with their time on Wednesday and Friday, but maybe Thursday nights in July to drive people down to this kind of a night market idea. So we're working with our partners at the farmer's market and perhaps the Chamber and Downtown Alliance. Look for that next year. Q2 projects, finish the forest lands plan that we brought to you. And then the installation of our columbariums at Grandview Cemetery. Looking forward, Ms. Moulton's favorite night, the haunted forest. She's a recurring volunteer. And then we have, so your registration is open for that this fall. And then our Soccer Saturdays that take place down at Volunteer Park, where we have about up to 650 children running around in all-color jerseys, making lots of noise and having a good time. If you want to register for that, you would have to get on a wait list. So if you want to contact us, just call us up or go to the website. Goals for 2026, again, just maintaining our level of service at all of our parks. We have grant applications that are out now about to be reviewed by the granting committees with the Recreation Conservation Office. Those are for Ship Harbor and Volunteer Park improvements. And then collaboration across departments on A Avenue with Public Works and Legal. We collaborate quite a bit in the parks and recreation. We couldn't do without collaboration with fire, police, public works, legal, finance. It's a great thing to be able to call on people for assistance and know that it's economies of scale, that we don't have to have every piece of equipment or every tool or every piece of knowledge. We can collaborate within the city and make it work for the community. the public, who aren't really caring which department they're calling to just want their problem solved. So we try to take that philosophy, as do others. Okay, upcoming programs and events. This cute photo is a teenager holding a hand of a young child at one of our day camps. And so Dustin South on our team got a grant through the National Parks Association for doing this very thing, mentoring youths. This is one of our teen programs that's hiring teens, and they don't want to maybe... come to camps anymore, but they want to make money, so they'll work at the camps. And so they learn how to work with young people, how to work with one another, how to take direction. And Mr. South has kind of expanded that. You'll see these young students working at the senior center as well. So we're excited about that growth. Project wise, West Sixth Park, we're working on that project and trying to come up with some solutions to build a $400,000 park for under $100,000. So that's never easy, but we try to thread the needle, even if we have to look for the needle and the thread to do that. So we're working on that and we'll be in touch with you in the next few weeks, hopefully about that progress. Pickleball, I mean, why would I be up here? if I wasn't talking about pickleball. And so I want to thank the Port of Anacortes for meeting with me to look at some property that they have. They, as you know, are looking for the highest and best use for the land that they have, but have some land that they can't use. And some of that is... encumbered with wetlands and or access so we're trying to see can we work there um and that's still conversations that we're having but again thank you for the port for reaching out to try to solve a community problem that's not necessarily theirs um i think i threatened to name a pickleball barge after mr dumas but that you know It's not happening. We're not having a pickleball barge, but we appreciate them working with us nonetheless. So we are also looking at any private land that we can and working with people if possible, if the neighborhood would accommodate that use. So we're still looking.

We'll keep you posted as best we can.

The Erie statue and the trees in the roundabout at the top of the commercial. A request was brought to you, you asked me to investigate that request. So this is the statue on my right hand side of this photo in the circle showing the roundabout location. The trees that are there are three healthy cedar cultivars, not Western Red, but another cultivar, and then Giacomani birch. The Giacomani birch are struggling, but they're the shortest ones. So the ones you really want to remove to see the tree would be the healthiest trees. um so we're looking at a couple situations uh the trees are located under the power lines so we're trying to understand how that will play out in the future um we cannot cut uh shut down highway 20 just as we couldn't when mr lee was doing his highway 12th and commercial problem washed out doesn't like that so we would have to stop traffic intermittently if we were to drop these trees Our main goal would be the safety of the workers, safety of the traffic, and the safety of the statue. So we would have to take our time and do that if we were to proceed. I imagine the public may have some questions about that, which is why I'm bringing it up to you publicly tonight to announce that we are looking at that so that the public can give us feedback and you can give us feedback on how you'd like us to proceed. So we're still investigating how and when we could do that in-house. It would be done completely in-house. Senior Center Meals on Wheels, thanks to the Skagit Council on Aging, they started, they revamped their whole organization to, instead of just being a voluntary board, they now have staff and they have taken over the meals program, not only Meals on Wheels, but the congregate meals, so the meals that people come to the center. you approved a contract with them and they have delivered on that contract and there'll be more conversations. These are our great meals volunteers you're seeing here that help prepare the meals that are delivered now by the Skagit Council on Aging every day, Monday through Friday to the center. So I think that's about 1,300 a month, the meals that go out, I want to say that's about right. So people depend on them, obviously, as part of their daily nutrition. And we are very grateful for not only these volunteers in this photo, but the Schedule Council on Aging. We'll have more contract conversation in Q3. The Ben Root Skate Park. Well, as Ms. Swetnam talked about, we were the... first bid to go out through our new process so that will close on Thursday and we should hopefully be bringing you a contract in the next couple weeks to get that going A avenue landfill site. That work has begun taking samples. And I will come to you, I think, in a week or two to talk about a small hurdle we have to jump over. So essentially, we can't get through the layers of rock and soil to the depth required for groundwater. So we're going to have a conversation about that contract. And Heartlake Shoreline, we are working on that with our design. And Stormwater, great thanks to Erin Esterholt and our Stormwater division for helping us navigate this and make sure we're compliant as we design this. And the Senior Center activity upgrade is almost done. If you go up there, you'll see a little bit of changes in the library. What was the video room? There's not a lot of use for VCRs anymore, so we converted that room to the computer space and are doing more remodeling work. No walls are coming down, just things are being shifted around. And that's all funded by the Senior Center Foundation. We are continuing with our conserve, reform, invest protocols. We're working with partners to help fund us through the foundation, Anacortes Parks Foundation and other foundations. We are grateful for their support. We're down one maintenance FTE and we collaborate across the board with like the Parks Foundation, the Port of Anacortes and the Samish Nation on 4th of July. They helped to fund that. We did not draw any other than LTAC for that display that we had just a couple weeks ago. We're working on our grants, and we've done some minor fee increases across the board at those places. Our budget, we are in the Parks and Recreation, we're holding tight at 39%. Professional Services is the aforementioned 4th of July, so we're spending more on that, $47,000 to do the show. We'll get the refund, we'll get the reimbursements in, and so that will balance out. Same thing with the Senior Center. Revenue, we're doing great. Our staff works hard. We're happy to see these numbers and everything's on target that we would expect. Notice the 245% increase in retail art sales. So art is thriving not only in the city of Anacortes, but at City Hall. And then at Cemetery, we have an overrun there, and that is this year's cost of the install of the columbariums. People are choosing that service, so we'll see that money come back into the city. And there you go. That's it. If you have any questions on revenue, expenses, cute children photos, happy to answer them.

Okay, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Wansford.

Good evening, Council, Mayor, members of the public. I am John Goldman, the Director of Planning, Community, and Economic Development. And I don't have any quizzes for you like Jeff did. I thought that was excellent. I'll try to work some of those in. Unless of course you didn't like it, then maybe I won't. As the mayor alluded to earlier in his speech, This quarter has been heavily focused on executive order 2026-02, in which we were tasked to make the goals to make changes to streamlining the permit review process. There were some target timelines for actions in that executive order. And as the mayor mentioned, there are several updates to the Anacortes municipal code. So... In addition to that, we're still on a statutory deadline to complete our critical areas regulations update by the end of 2026. And mixed up in all of that is, of course, our Shoreline Master Program updates that were due a while ago, but we've talked about ad nauseum why we haven't got that done. And this is a reminder that we're trying to complete our critical areas regulations update and then in not quite lock step but the next step would be to complete our shoreline master program because it requires our critical areas regulations to be updated so we can incorporate them into into the shoreline master program so That gets a little tricky. There's some logistical issues there, but we intend to have the shoreline master program done early in 2027 after we get the critical areas ordinance done. So some of the achievements that we've had this year is we completed the code amendments for the vehicle repair in the industrial zone. Nice, this is a quarterly report, so you probably remember some of these things that we've talked about, hopefully. This was a small change that we thought had a lot of impact for an important business owner. So we've completed items one, two, three, A through E of the executive order. I don't think I really have time to go through all of those because as you break it down, there's like 15 or so individual things, but I'm happy to answer any questions or if you'd like me to, I have the executive order and I can go into those. We met the timelines built into this when we started work on item number four, which also has five subsections to it. We've had first read on all five of those. with the Planning Commission already, including five other smaller relevant amendments that made sense to go along with it while we're talking about these issues to put them all together into one ordinance fix. So timeline for that is we'll be bringing that back to the Planning Commission on September 15th for a second read in public hearing. So hopefully we'll have a recommendation from the Planning Commission on all of those amendments. We've also... started working on number five of the executive order, which talks about fee amendments to more accurately recover permitting process costs. So, you know, We know what our costs are vaguely to operate our permit center based on the number of hours of staff that we have dedicated to permitting. And then we know we have some fixed costs, such as SmartGovs. We know exactly how much that costs each year. We also know how much Bluebeam costs, which is our... It's a PDF reader-writer program that we use heavily for reviewing and making comments on plans. So those are, want to make sure that we're capturing costs like that, as well as the time spent actually reviewing permits. and then trying to suggest some fee increases to accurately recoup those costs. And that'll be a whole conversation that we have at the city council level. So hopefully those numbers aren't too eye-popping and we don't really want to charge an arm and a leg, but we do want to be able to collect enough to cover our costs. You've probably also noticed one of the big changes in our department recently is we've begun our transfer transition to appointment based counter service, which is item number six in the executive order. What that means is we're now asking people to use our online bookings. it's kind of like an app where you go in and you select, do you want to work with, are you, do you have a question for a building department person, a public works department person, or a planning land use person? And then you can select, you know, so you select one of those and then you choose the date that you're looking for. And then it'll give you a, uh, a list of day, uh, times available and you can select the time that's most, uh, uh, best interest to you and then you input what is the question that you're asking and what specific property are you asking it about and that way staff has time to prepare and have answers for those questions and it makes these meetings go a lot more direct instead of free flow and people don't always know what they want to ask when they get to the counter and so this really helps direct it and they're 15 minute meeting appointments and, uh, I think that we're, we're testing it out, see how it goes. And so far, uh, we haven't had too many who haven't had any complaints and it seems to be working okay for staff. We're still working out the bugs. This is, we started this, uh, July 6th after the break. So it's still brand new and we'll be constantly monitoring it to make sure that that process is working well for everybody. Um, Other things that we've achieved is completely the downtown streetscapes plan. I won't go into that because we talked about that at length last week. So thank you for that. Other things going on that I don't have on the slide is we applied for economic development grant through the county. That's the 0.09 grant that the mayor gave a presentation to a couple of weeks ago and to the committee making the recommendation to the county commissioners. And we're hopeful about that. We asked for $750,000 for the Anacortes Cap Santa event facility. Our department, following up on what legal had to say, all the appeals that they've been working on this quarter, obviously we were heavily involved in that because those appeals were largely out of things that came through our department. And so we've supported... the legal department and those. And then we also spent a lot of time this quarter working on the Anacortes letters, uh, that are out at the ferry terminal, Washington state ferry terminal, as well as the info plaque that people can walk up to and say, Oh, what else is there? Good. What? I've never been to Anacortes before I, or I'm here all the time, but I've only been to the ferry. So what else is going on here? And so there's some, uh, There's some QR codes and information about what else one can do while visiting in Anacortes. And we encourage people to come back and check it out next time they're in town because when you're on a ferry schedule, you don't necessarily have the time to go and do something else in town. So that's our achievements this quarter. quarter three goals are largely to continue these, uh, processes that we're working on. And it's one of the things in the planning department is, uh, you know, these are long range plans. So, um, For better or for worse, they don't always get done in one quarter or in a few months. They tend to go on and on. But we still have the things that we have to do all the time, including our annual special events applications. And we are in the thick of special events season right now. And you've probably seen, I understand, Shipwreck was... uh very successful the fourth of july was very successful i'm hearing positive things from uh downtown businesses about the number of people downtown and the business generated by these events we of course still still do community development block grant we're in a little bit of a lull on that right now as we just uh chose next year's allocations a couple of months ago LTAC, we're getting ready to ramp up for the lodging tax committee requests. The applications are out for people to submit lodging tax requests, and we'll be wrapping that up, I believe, in early September and start reviewing those applications. And then, of course, we're always doing permit processing review and inspections. That's kind of a bread and butter of the permitting department. Fortunately, there's no surprises in our budget status. We're on budget, and the way things look right now, maybe a little slightly below budget spending. On revenue, we seem to be right on target, but... Always remain, the planning permits are a little low, but the way it goes with the land use permits is you get one big one that brings in a bunch of revenue and that kind of makes up for much of the year. And we've been carefully tracking interest rates for years now and understand their impact on permit revenues. And interest rates aren't going in the right direction to improve the permitting outlook. So we'll just keep our fingers crossed and plan accordingly in the meantime. So that is... what we've been doing. Any questions? All right. Well, thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Coleman.

Good evening. I'm Logan Lee, the director of public works and public works as a whole is filled with some of the most talented people that I've had the pleasure of working with. So I'm excited to show you what they have been up to. And our operations division, our street and sewer maintenance crew, just keeping everything looking nice, a lot of road maintenance. And they also, they designed and built a bench and a new kind of street tree enclosure all in-house. Saved a lot of money by doing it themselves. There's a picture of it on the left there. Just additional vegetation maintenance all over. That's the time of year for that. We're also working with City of Mount Vernon to paint all the long lines throughout the city. That includes 3rd Street, which Councilmember Fantini mentioned earlier. They're coming back to do the white lines in a few weeks. If you see cones on lines, please try to avoid driving on them. So our fleet department had some pretty cool purchase this last quarter. One of the fire trucks needed a new fill cap, and they were quoted, I believe, $1,800 for that cap. And they were able to purchase 3D printing machine and all the filament needed to print out the part for $1,600. So we were able to save money creating that part ourselves and give our department the ability to create more parts. We have one of our fleet mechanics, Jeremy, knows these 3D printers really well and is able to print out a lot of the useful parts and pieces, including some cable management stuff and custom tool holders for the shop to just make their workspace more efficient all around. Solid waste, besides doing their day-to-day work, running their routes, there are annual trash drop-off day. And so that's a really well-received event by residents. Hauled out a ton of garbage, 28 tons to be exact, and scrap metal and 90 yards of cubic waste. It's a great event that we're happy to put on every year. Facilities group. Did work all over town, including the depot fascia repairs. And then as John Coleman mentioned earlier, the new planning department wall up in City Hall, along with some other work at the senior facility, just keeping everything looking real nice. And also helped out at the library and finishing up a covered storage area at our op center. So for the stormwater department, the name of the game is regulatory compliance for them. And so they've been hard at work doing a lot of community outreach. Both our Kids Are Best Fest as well as the Waterfront Festival. And anytime anything that's not rainwater goes down the drain, it has to be reported for us to be in compliance with our MPDS permit. So every illicit discharge has a lot of paperwork behind it, a lot of coordination with Ecology. There's just a huge stack of requirements that we have to do every year to meet our permit requirements. And so it's a full-time job keeping up with all those reports and paperwork. The engineering department has been hard at work fulfilling our capital facilities plan. This quarter they finished up both the Jura Lane water line replacement and the Terrace Drive water line replacement project. The pictures on the right are kind of a before and after of Terrace Drive. That was a street that's been in long need of some TLC, and they got it, so we were happy to be able to get that one done. Engineering also helped out with the Depot Market Plaza and Fire Station 1. We're also working on, we're just finalizing an expansion at the admin building at the wastewater treatment plant, as well as pedestrian crossings on Q Avenue near Safeway, 23rd and D, and over on T Avenue at the Tommy Thompson Trail. They also finished a big project, the water treatment plant, repairing the north line, which is one of two 36-inch transmission lines that leave the plant. It failed a few years ago when there was a sinkhole nearby and there was a temporary repair, so they were able to get a permanent repair there and replace a couple of vaults, new discharge meters. And the engineering department also does the majority of our permit review for public works. So they did process about 42 right-of-way permits and reviewed over 50 construction and land use permits.

Mayor Walters, or should I wait till the end?

Whenever you would like.

Okay, just a quick question about the new crosswalks, particularly 23rd and D. Could you remind me if we're getting rapid flashing beacons there, or is it just, is it complete?

23rd and D is not. So 23rd and D is complete. They're waiting for flashing beacons on T Avenue and on Q Avenue.

Okay, thank you. We have talked about programming those for the future, but they weren't part of that project.

Okay, thanks.

Yeah.

The ongoing large project that our engineering is handling at the wastewater treatment plant is our CSO pump station, combined sewer overflow pump station. As you may have known in the past, during heavy rain events, can ca so much water gets into our system that can over overwhelm our plants intake capacity which causes backups particularly on q avenue also near safeway so this project will prevent a majority of those overflows it's a really unique really cool project the the pipe that you can see supported there on the left is the main intake to the wastewater treatment plant. So any water that is used throughout the city goes through that pipe and they're gonna place a 10 foot wide manhole over the top of it and break it open and allow wastewater to leave that pipe in the event of a overflow. GIS management, besides just keeping all of our assets in check, keeping track of every foot of pipe in the entire city, they worked with the Parks Department to integrate their system, their processes into Cartograph, trying to help find efficient ways to keep doing the work that they do. Updates continue to work. more updates for fiber and then also integrated our capital our facility plan that mckinstry prepared a year or two ago so they got all that information into cartographs of our facilities to help manage or keep track of all the upgrades and work needed throughout city facilities wastewater plant has been doing a ton uh the crew at the wastewater plant has really stepped up to trying to cut down costs where possible finding more efficient ways to to keep that plant running as best they can we've been doing a lot of work with uh the the kind of looking at the future of the wastewater treatment plant you'll hear more about our uh our incinerator evaluation and our alternatives analysis next week, where we'll come with a discussion for, as Councilman McDougall mentioned in his report earlier, we'll be bringing that for discussion. Excited to see where that conversation goes. They've also been working on just, the admin building has been going, a lot of permit issues, looking at just ways to keep the plant running in tip-top shape, and they've been doing a fantastic job at it. Water system. If it goes to the next slide. Oh, there it goes. The water treatment plant. Uh, that, so the, the project that I've mentioned earlier, engineering ran where we replaced the north line and installed two new, uh, magnetic meters. So those are our main discharge meters that, that count every gallon of water that leaves the treatment plant. So getting those meters upgraded, uh, new vaults, new ways to access the meters is, uh, been really big for the plant to keep as accurate records as we can and minimize any, uh, unaccounted water loss. They've also been doing some upgrades around the plant to be more efficient with their backwashing procedure, save water, save money, and do what they can to run the plant efficiently. Water distribution is maintaining all the pipes throughout the city. Every year, we need to make sure that we're turning over the whole system and getting water to move. Stagnant water is no good, and so we... do a lot of work to to flush any systems make sure that whole system is turned over on a yearly basis and of course uh water mains never break at an opportune time so there's been we've had a couple breaks so far this year in in the middle of the night and crews have responded and and i mean they kick butt repairing those mains, getting people back in service with minimal downtime. And we are in the process of replacing the main as we speak on 34th Street to prevent any future breaks in that area. So on to our budgets for street construction. It's on pace or on track to be under budget. The overall utilization is definitely skewed due to our other improvements that includes a lot of CFP projects that may or may not get constructed this year because they're dependent on grants. So a lot of those projects aren't happening this year. Otherwise, the only the only real item indicated over 50% is our travel and training and that's that was for very small pesticide yearly training that a couple members had to take but very low cost overall and unexpected to run over budget. So our street maintenance fund is primarily on track. We do have a big red number there on professional services. So there are a couple of factors here that push that line item over budget. The first one is that there is an expense, an invoice that was for about $23,000 that was allocated to the wrong fund. It wasn't corrected at the time that this chart was made. So it puts our overage more around the $11,000 mark. We kind of switched gears at the beginning of the year for our plan for professional services, and we focused more on spending, using that money to aggressively go after grants. And we utilized consultants to support and help us, walk us through those grant process to make our grants as competitive as possible. And we also had the consultant work side by side with staff so that staff would be able to potentially, and well, they have been applying for a few grants on our own in-house. So taking that knowledge and applying it to city staff to carry on those grant processes. And so we're allocating some of our training budget to those expenses, it just doesn't properly affect it here, but if you see that in our travel and training, it still has $5,000 that we plan on allocating towards that use. We also sense the majority of that money was spent towards respective capital projects, We're looking at ways to apply the funds used for those grant applications to apply towards the project accounts if and when we receive those grants. The city has historically been pretty successful with grants, and I'm pretty optimistic that we will be awarded at least a couple towards the end of the year. We applied for seven, and so I'm optimistic that we'll get a handful of them. Equipment rental is also on target. As was mentioned before, the other costs are somewhat out of our control. For equipment rental, it's definitely skewed by insurance rates, which are higher than anticipated. Otherwise, the budget itself is looking solid. Solid waste, of course, they're workhorses over there, and everything is lining up looking really nice. no issues, no expected issues. Wastewater is a similar story. The overall utilization is skewed a little low, mainly because we have our CSO project that is in the neighborhood of $3.5 million that has only just begun and hasn't processed a lot of invoices, but we expect to be on or below our expected budget. Stormwater is a similar story where we don't expect any major overages. A lot of the professional services that we plotted out for our stormwater fund are front-loaded. We have a lot of, as I mentioned before, a lot of mpds permit requirements that we attacked at the beginning of the year to knock them out and those a lot of those do include some consultant services that we we utilize so I don't expect any major issues as we close out the year for that fund. Uh, water is, uh, all in all on target media at or below expectations with the exception of overtime, uh, water main breaks were the primary contributor to that fund. I do want to note though, that our 2026 budget is about half of what we spent last year in overtime. So even though the utilization is high, we're still, we're still tracking, um, on below what we have historically, uh, So, you know, hopefully we don't have any more water main breaks this year and we can all sleep easy. If we do, fix them. Yes, we won't let that hold us back. And for as far as revenue goes, for solid waste, right at 50%, as expected, it's a pretty turnkey operation. So there's not a lot of surprises there. wastewater uh is just below 50 percent well wastewater generally tracks with with water demand and so we haven't quite entered our heavy demand months which are july september july august september uh so we expect that to catch up to uh expectations um storm water looking healthy, above expectations, and water sitting right at 49% overall. And again, we haven't ran into our high demand months, so it's looking pretty good. Happy to answer any questions.

All right, Council, if you have any questions for Mr. Lees, now is a great time. But if you have any questions for anybody else, we can also field those at this point. Otherwise, we go ahead.

Yeah, first of all, thank you to all of the department heads and the staff for the amazing work that went into this presentation. One thing that is extremely clear from this presentation is all of you are working extremely hard. You are totally behind. The mayors invest, conserve, reform. And I think it's clear from what I'm seeing here that there is 100% effort being put forth by our city staff. And so that... Great, thank you. I'm also really concerned. And I'm sorry that I haven't had a lot of questions up here tonight because the more that I looked at the numbers this weekend, the more that I looked at the revenue numbers over the weekend, the more concerned that I am becoming. By what I look, I look at a lot of numbers all day as a banker, so I'm willing to be off But by what I can see from the expenditures and the revenues, we're still on track to fall short by somewhere between two and four to three and a half million dollars is what I'm seeing. And it's July. And that makes me incredibly nervous. I'm just wondering if we are planning any kind of budget retreat. And I know it's July. We're halfway through the year. But I guess I'm just at the point here where I'm like, what more can we do? Because I'm not seeing a course correction despite some amazing effort out here. And I don't want us to find ourselves having a similar end of year like we did last year. So I'm just curious if there's plan for any kind of budget retreat or anything around that.

Are you talking about year-end projections? Yeah. Okay. We're not projecting a $3 million shortfall at the end of the year. We are projecting a deficit for next year, just like there was a deficit last year. But that's for the 2027 budget. So that's where we are with projections. Next week is a budget review or a finance update. So we're planning to go in depth next week on the finance update for the city generally. But no, we're not planning a budget retreat. to answer your question.

Mayor Walters, why wouldn't we be doing that? Isn't that something we've traditionally done? I actually sat there as a candidate and watched the whole thing and found it really useful.

Yeah, we have in the past done budget retreats and I've asked, I think, every council member if you would like to do a budget retreat and I haven't heard anybody say that they would like to do a budget retreat. I haven't found them useful. But we will engage in budget discussions in real significant depth right here in this room in front of everybody.

Thank you.

Any other questions for any departments? OK. Well, that's our only agenda item tonight. Thank you all. We'll adjourn the meeting.