City Council - workshop

Okay, we'll take roll call. Heather Watland?

Here.

Yvonne Gallardo-Van Ornam?

Presente.

Nathan Sim? Here. Tim Abrahamson?

Present.

Michelle Blythe?

Present.

Leisha Noback?

Here.

And Rob is excused. Okay, do we have approval of the agenda?

Mayor Vanney, motion to approve the agenda? Second.

Questions? All those in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? None heard. Agenda's approved. Okay, we'll move on to our workshop items. Item number one, Ordinance Approving Amendment to AMC Chapter 20.44, Supplemental Use Regulations, Ameresia.

Thank you, Mayor Vanni. So the chapter 2044 zoning code amendments include revisions to the unit lot subdivision standards to clarify and ensure consistency with the middle housing requirements from the state. Update accessory dwelling unit regulations to comply with RCW 3670A, 680 while simplifying and clarifying existing standards the amendment also adds a new section for retrofitting existing buildings and passive housing from state regulations Updating the administrative conditional use permit provisions for mobile sales and delivery to provide a consistent language and requirements for mobile food vendors along with outside of title 20 and replace the existing cottage housing section with a broader middle housing section that establishes standards for middle housing types per the state regulations around middle housing, which then includes the cottage housing regulations we already had inside of it.

Any questions? Great, okay, thank you. We'll move on to our next item. Ordinance approving an amendment to AMC Chapter 20.48, Density and Dimensional Regulations. Again, Mauricia.

Thank you, Mayor Vanney. So this amendment includes reorganization and clarification of several development standards to improve the usability and consistency Consistency within this code. There's new language added for building setbacks requirements accessory building setbacks and multifamily unit setbacks. That was previously in AMC 2046 design that was more appropriate for this section. So we've been working on that change. along with new footnotes for the table addressing accessory dwelling units and corner Lots because those have special requirements the amendment also updates residential density maximum lot coverage fences and wall height requirements and then updates table the table and figure 15 to remove outdated provisions, correct some errors, clarify some standards, and align terminology with current state usage. This includes the change of courtyard apartments. We had garden apartments. Courtyard apartments is just a more regular term, so no actual change in that regulation. And then in particular, we changed the lot coverage requirement and removed it to provide greater flexibility for property owners while maintaining regulations through the existing design, landscaping, setbacks, and safety standards.

Thank you. Any questions on that one? None seen. Boy, you must have did a good job.

I've been working hard on my descriptions.

Okay, we'll move on to item number three, ordinance approving amendments to the Arlington Development Design Standards. Again, Amaricia.

Thank you. So this one is a clean adoption of removing the old design standards and adopting a new one. However, it's essentially the same information. There was reformatting because it was in landscape and the rest of our code is in portrait. So that was the primary change. There was removal of some ambiguous language or do nots that we shouldn't really have in our standards and focusing on what they are allowed to do. and then clean up some requirements based on other changes we made in our design code so that it was consistent, and that's it.

Any questions on that one? No, none seen, great, thank you. Okay, we'll move on to item four, Utility Extension Agreement for Harmony at Arlington LLC. Jim Kelly.

Thank you very much, Mayor Vanney and council members. And I'm going to start off by saying I am nowhere as prepared as that. So anyway, this first item between you is a utility extension agreement between the city of Arlington and Harmony at Arlington LLC. Developers have to extend water utilities to the furthest extents of their properties as part of our city ordinance and development codes. The Harmony development includes two parcels. One parcel is the property that they are building all the town homes on, and the other property is a thin strip of property, approximately 300 feet wide, that encompasses Portage Creek. And as part of the development, they were going to donate that piece of property to the city of Arlington. As they started going through the development process, their plans only showed extending their water main across one of the parcels, not underneath the creek to the other side of the creek to the furthest extent of the properties. So we had to work out a utility extension agreement with them to make sure that this water main was extended. The extension requires horizontal directional drilling, permitting, to get this water main underneath the creek, a waterway. So we agreed that we would split the costs on this, and the city would do half the costs, and Saeed or Harmony Development would do the other half. That is the crux of this utility extension agreement.

Great. Any questions? Tim.

Yeah, just looking at this, Jim, and I know we kind of talked about it on Friday, but there isn't another way to connect without having to go up underneath the creek. Is that what I'm hearing?

That's correct. There is currently a six-inch water main that goes under the creek, and we're requiring that that whole water main along SR 9 from 204th be upsized from 6 inches to 12 inches. Bartels did their frontage improvements when they developed. Harmony extended it past Bartels up to the edge of the creek, and now this agreement means that both of us are going to partner on getting it under the creek.

All right.

Thank you. Any other questions? Michelle?

Did they change their mind and decide they didn't want to do it, or was it not just kind of a solid deal?

It was a little bit of misunderstanding and miscommunication in between during the development process. So after several meetings between myself and Saeed and then also with Paul, it was agreed that we would share the split the cost on this. All right.

Thanks. Thank you. Any other questions? OK. Oh, Heather.

Thank you. You said that there's already a line that goes through there?

That is correct.

And have we had any problems or anything with it before?

No, we have not.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, thank you. Any others? Okay, unseen. Thank you, Jim. Okay, thank you. Okay, we'll move on to item number five, the 188th Street and Smoky Point Boulevard Roundabout, project change order number three. Again, Jim.

Thank you very much, Mayor Vanni and Council Members. This item before you is a correction to change order number three for the 188th roundabout project, a change order that the Council has already approved. The correction that we are adding that we would like to bring to your attention is there was an incorrect number included in there as a credit. We understood the credit to be for reduction in 270 lineal feet of 18-inch sanitary sewer. It was a reduction in 212 feet, so the credit was for $95,000. It was reduced down to $74,836. And then the other thing is we forgot to include sales tax on the change order, as this is a utilities project, so we do have to pay sales tax on it. Total correction that is requested on this is for $34,793. It brings the overall change order to $166,966. Thank you.

Any questions? Okay, none seen. Thank you, Jim. Thank you very much. Okay, we'll move on to our next item, the Police Department Quarterly Report. Jonathan.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor, Council. Had a couple things that were not in your packet as they kind of happened timely. I wanted to talk about first fireworks and the reason it's not in your packet is because obviously we just had the 4th of July and talking about it next quarter would be kind of like my parents would say it's like punishing the dog a week after they had their accident and the dog wouldn't understand what we're talking about. So with that, just real quick, we did see about a 15, almost a 16% decrease in fireworks complaint over the prior 4th of July. So we did have the same number of officers on patrol. It is a mandatory workday for all staff, just with all the events that are going on. So every officer available did work that day. We had four. officers that were dedicated strictly to fireworks patrol. And two of them worked the fireworks show and then transferred from that into fireworks calls. So there was 32 calls for service during that time. And like I said, about, they couldn't get to everyone, but they got to everyone that they could. with that decrease in calls overall, which is somewhat in line with what the entire county saw. There was a slight decrease in calls throughout the entire county for fireworks calls. Obviously, the big times were pretty much between 8 p.m. and they really started tapering off about just a little bit after midnight. I don't want to steal Dave's thunder, but for some reason the biggest actual fire suppression times were 7, 9, 10, 11, and 12, according to Snow 911. Also not in your packet, and I will send this out probably, I can send this to Paul tomorrow, but I just got this. This isn't even public yet, but the crime numbers for Washington State, they're not officially published, so unless we have some major changes these will be our numbers for Arlington. Last year when we went from 23 to 24 in the last year's report we saw about a 9.6 percent increase in crime for Arlington. This year we're looking at the 25 report which will be made public probably the end of this month. We're actually looking at about a 23 percent decrease in crime. So that's actually speaks highly for Arlington. A lot of that is a big reduction in auto theft, and that has to do with a lot to do with license plate readers, proactive enforcement, visibility, and things of that nature. So I was excited to share that news with you. And again, I will share that with you as soon as it gets published publicly. Getting to the the packet itself. I first would like to go over the numbers. You could have looked at them for yourself. I won't spend too much time because everybody's been so efficient. I don't want to be the thorn. One thing I'll focus on just real quick is on that first page when it talks about traffic stops. You'll see a huge decrease in traffic stops from 2005 to 2006. What I'll say about that is really to do with our significant decrease in staffing that we've been dealing with. And right now, with a recall of an officer from the academy, we will be at full staffing short of personnel, internal personnel issues. When you have that big decrease in staffing, you see a big decrease in traffic stops because we just don't have as many officers on the road. The positive to that is when you have new officers, a big portion of their training is out there doing traffic stops. So we're likely to see that quickly reverse as officers are out there training. So that is the biggest thing of note on this report there. I'm getting into some of the highlights of of the summary. The police officer association did a blood drive in downtown. We pulled the investigations. All of the detectives pretty much accept the supervisor down to the road to fill those gaps. And that's pretty significant for our department. And it's made a big difference. And it actually helped in some ways. One of those detectives was on our sergeant's list, so it gave him an opportunity to get some experience as a supervisor. So the bad side of that is we now have a backlog of cases upstairs. So whenever you pull from one area, another area suffers. It's just a push-pull. So we're looking forward to getting those detectives back upstairs to start working on that backlog. Commander Gilbert worked at Smoky Point for the National Drug Take Back Day and saw some interesting things out there that came in. We released our 2005 annual report and had some good feedback on that. Did some great training and de-escalation crisis intervention. We did two different coffee with the cops. We did one down in Smoky Point. We did one on the north end. We're working to release a brand new wellness app that's available for all of our employees on their phones. We're just wrapping that up and should be launching that any day. That'll tie in with the wellness room that's now painted and Commander Gilbert's now ordering all of the equipment from the grant, so that stuff should be coming in any day now. We did order the barricades from that $100,000 grant, and if you came down to the street fair, you saw some of them used for the first time, so you could see what they looked like. It sounds like we could use more of them in some places. You might have seen one of our officers undercover as a, as a busker down there playing at the, at the farmer's market. Um, I don't know how much money he made. I don't know if he made any arrests, but, uh, that was a fun time. We did some, um, bicycle rodeos, um, over the summer and those were well attended and the kids really loved that. Handed out some free helmets for bicycle safety. We also had one of the hardest months, um, that I've ever been here, uh, with the arrest of one of our officers, um, That was very unexpected, but we worked with the agency that did that investigation to make sure that that is reaching the conclusion that it needed. And we had a pretty officer-involved shooting that most of our agency was involved in at a local apartment complex, and that shooting lasted almost two hours of back-and-forth shooting, the most intense shooting that I've ever seen since I've been here. Um, and that was pretty involved for our agency. So like I said, uh, a big use of resources, um, and, uh, having come from the military, I haven't seen anything like that since being in the military. Um, special thanks to Sergeant Adkins, Shander, Pennington, Bauer, and, uh, kids Zimmerman for giving just tons of school tours, um, right before the end of the school year, uh, That's probably the most we've ever done in a year. And we have lots of pictures to prove it. And those officers did an amazing job. It's great public relations. We participated in the law enforcement torch run for Special Olympics, and that's a great thing to participate. The officers really love being a part of that. We welcomed lots of new officers. Abby McVeigh, she came to us from Department of Defense Police up at Jim Creek. We have a lateral officer, Mike Riz, joining us from Lake Forest Park Police Department. We have a recruit officer, Tyler Kirby. He comes from the Red Menace, those nozzle boys. Fire service, whatever they call themselves. We have a lateral officer, Bailey Holland, who comes to us from Bothell Police Department. And then I'm working on some others right now. Officer Ambrose did a great job at Bolia, and we are calling her back to fill the last open position that we have right now from the academy. Officer Bauer is finishing up his fourth year at the school where they really loved him there, and I think he's looking forward to taking a break from the kids. He's got his own kids at home, so I think between the two, he just needs a vacation. And then Commander Barrett finished his time at Quantico. You may have seen Silence of the Lambs. So he's been there in person. He's lived it, and we welcome him back. It's quite an accomplishment, and we're very proud of him.

But I'll answer any questions. Thank you. Any questions? Tim?

uh... not so much a question uh... but again just wanna add another positive that i noticed wasn't on yours or on chief kratzky's update was i went down on memorial day and witnessed and helped out with putting the flags up and i did notice a huge group from your department as well as from chief kratzky's department that came down to help out whether they were doing it as part of their change of shift or not i don't know but it was great to see them down there in uniform and participating as well so i just wanted to add that because i noticed it wasn't on either one of your your updates but i wanted to say i really big kudos because i know you guys probably have if not some military background some people who come from the military and that's a big deal to me to see them down there so thank you i'm glad to hear it thank you very much any other michelle

Well, I have to comment and say it's nice to have your comedic self back. Congratulations to Peter. And then one other thing. Can we, like, I think he did this one time. You gave us a copy of how many detective cases you had in a month and what was closed. I mean, I thought that was really interesting. I don't know if you can do that or if that's appropriate.

Yeah, I can get that. But right now, not to give you an excuse, but all the detectives are doing traffic stops. They're not doing detective work. I can give you a stack of unworked detective cases right now.

Yeah, when you get back to normal.

I'll go up there and count them for you and tell you how many are waiting.

All right, anyway.

There's about 50.

He's on a roll and he's not going to stop. Thank you.

Okay, thank you. Any other comments? Heather?

Mine's really quick. Thank you. You guys are great and we really appreciate everything you do.

Thank you. Yeah, no, same thing. Kudos to all the patrol officers and even M&O and all them that work this weekend for the street fair. That was it was great to see him. And I got several comments from people that as the officers patrolling around, they're also friendly. And so it was really nice. Yeah. Thank you.

They do a great job. Thank you.

OK, we'll move on to our next item. North County Regional Fire Authority quarterly report.

I'm not even going to try and match Jonathan's dry humor tonight. And Jim said that he's not prepared, but you've probably all been here long enough to know that if Chris is quietly sitting in the back row, Jim is prepared. I immediately knew that. uh... good evening talking about this second quarter for north county regional fire in your in your uh... packet was it's a two-sided uh... one side just talks about tennis and data for the city of arlington and the backside is uh... the entire are fake so talk about both uh... in the city of arlington that station forty six and forty eight we had a total of uh... Station 46 had 928 unit dispatches and Station 48 had 1,451. The key note there is those are not individual calls. They're unit dispatches. So a lot of times we send more than one unit to a call. The way Teresa did the report this month, she just kind of changed it up. It's unit dispatches. So, you know, collectively about 2,500 unit dispatches in the second quarter. And from those, we had 613 transports from within the city of Arlington. Our standard of cover, so our turnout time, our response times, are kind of how we measure ourselves, and we have an adopted standard of cover from our Board of Commissioners, and we're performing well within our acceptable limits. We're actually in the process now of kind of updating this, because this is about five years old, our current standard of cover, and we're consistently exceeding it, so we're gonna kind of raise the bar on ourselves. And at the bottom is a heat map. So all of those individual colored dots are different types of calls. And there's a little key index over to the lower right. And all but three of those are EMS-related type calls. You can just kind of see where the three clusters are, and it's kind of in downtown where we are now in this old town of Arlington. Glen Eagle and Smoky Point area are kind of our central call areas, especially downtown and Smoky Point area. And those really, I mean, this just never changes. It's just the consistent addresses of the 620 South Hazel at Arlington, used to be Regency Care Center and 8400, 207th at the care center. All of the medical clinics and the care centers are where we are day in, day out. Looking at the back side of that, upper left talks about unit utilization. So this is looking at like a 24-hour window is what period of time are units out of service on a call. So they're committed to a call and not available for something else. Kind of the index on this is that when a unit starts reaching like a 30% UHU, it's kind of getting saturated. So that would be a time that we start looking at changing our deployment model or adding a unit. None of our units are anywhere near 30%, kind of averaging in like 10 to 14%. So we have one unit that's kind of last quarter was at almost 18%. So they still have lots of capacity. Call volumes by station, again, this doesn't really change. Station 48 on Airport Boulevard is our busiest facility. They had about 1,450 calls in the second quarter, followed by Station 99 in Stanwood and Station 46 right behind it. So we have three busy stations and three slower stations in the rural areas. transports throughout the entire RFA. So in the city limits, we had 613 and the entire RFA, we had 1,315. So the city of Arlington is about half of our kind of transport area. And from those, we transport no questions asked to three facilities every day. And that's Skagit Valley Hospital in Mount Vernon, Cascade Valley here in Arlington and Providence in Everett. So we will take you wherever you would like to go. A lot of times, depending on what the nature of the call is, that also dictates where you're going to go. That lower right is just kind of some mutual aid given and received from our neighbors. Some highlights that I wanted to talk about is all positions are filled. We have no vacancies. Currently in the RFA, we do have some members that are out on paid family medical leave and family medical leave, and we have one member that's been out on an extended military leave. So in all, we're hoping to see him back later at the end of 26, which is going to be about an 18-month deployment for him. He's a reservist that was activated. In May, we hired the assistant chief of operations, Rick K. Seuss. I brought him a few weeks ago and introduced him to the council, and he's fitting in well. We had two battalion chiefs retire, Chief Nyblad and Chief Knepper, both retired with 27 years of service. Kind of interesting, they started on the first day and retired on the same day. And from that, it's just a domino effect. So two captains were promoted to the battalion chief, two firefighters were promoted to captains, and two entry-level firefighters were hired that went through the academy. So two exiting creates just a domino effect through the organization. So that is all done. The two graduated the academy in the end of May and are working on the line. Kind of at an organizational level, we are working through kind of some looking ahead the next couple years at some facility needs. We had a pretty comprehensive facility study done about 18 months ago, and it essentially said that two of our facilities are not even worth considering to be remodeled. They're just they're teardowns and need to be rebuilt, and that is. Station 90 on the Kakman Road, kind of up by Angel of the Winds, which is a really interesting building. That was originally essentially just a two-bay fire station, and they literally built the current building over the top of the old building. You can go upstairs and open this odd closet door and look down on the roof of the old fire station. So it's kind of a hodgepodge-y building that was never intended for four people to be there. As it is now. And then Station 96 is our station that's just south of the Skagit County line on 300th Street. And again, that station was built in 1968, intended to be just a volunteer fire station. And so we have two facilities that we're trying to figure out how we move forward with updating those. We've been busy with summer events, as Jonathan mentioned, the Arlington Car Show, the Fourth of July events, the parade and fireworks. Interestingly enough, I don't recall this ever happening in my career. this is staggering in the city of arlington and the city of stanwood we did not have a single fireworks related call It was crazy. I know you guys had a lot of bang calls, right? Bang is a type code that dispatch uses to send out if somebody's complaining about fireworks. From a fire standpoint, we did not have a single fireworks-related call. We did in the unincorporated area. We had a fireworks-related injury, pretty serious injury that we transported from the Warm Beach area, and we assisted Marysville with a house fire on Lake Goodwin that was fireworks-related on the night before. But pretty staggering, not a single fireworks related. So I think it made me think the ordinance has been in effect for about seven years now, six or seven years. Yeah, five or six. I think it's settled in enough that everyone's kind of gotten used to it. Yeah, so pretty staggering statistic. We were active in the street fair here a few days ago. We've been fortunate to receive some donations. Still, Guamish Tribe, through their gaming compact with the state, has what they call an impact grant. And so every year they... donate a 2% of their proceeds back to the community. We have to write a grant how North County's impacted from Angel Lewin's Casino. And so we just, about a month ago, they awarded us $180,000 for our impact from 2025. And we kind of, this one was a complete surprise. The actor, Gary Sinise, who, if you don't recognize the name, you'd recognize the face, He has a foundation that gives back to the fire service, and he's recently partnered with Amazon. I literally just received this cold call one day, and this gal tells me she's from the Gary Sinise Foundation, and they've partnered with Amazon, and they're giving us $50,000. And I'm like, well, what? And she said this was all driven by Amazon. So Amazon said they want to make sure that this goes to North County. So that was great. Those of you that were at the 4th of July parade saw the old antique fire engine that is now out at the museum. So that's a really historic piece of fire apparatus for the city of Arlington. It's a 1962 Ford, and the history on it is Seattle hosted the World's Fair in 1962, and that engine was on display. at the 62 World's Fair. And that was all about innovation and technology, the World's Fair. So this was a modern fire apparatus that was built by a company called Western States Fire Apparatus in Cornelius, Oregon. After the World's Fair, it toured around the Northwest. Western States toured it around to fire departments trying to get sales from it. And it ended up here in Arlington, and the Volunteer Association went to Citizens Bank that used to be in the brick building across the street, and they got a loan to buy the fire engine, and they literally forewent their stipend, their call stipend, for several years to pay the loan off. So it's a really historic fire engine. Still got the Century 21 logos on the door. It's never been painted. Still pumps water. We've been working with the Stillogomish Museum to get that into the museum. So as we all know, they built the building. Finally, that took forever, and it was almost done, and then somebody ran into the building. So 4th of July, it drove Olympic Avenue, and it went to the museum that night. So it is there. Yep. Yeah, and then just, I'm going to switch hats here, so kind of from a Rotary standpoint, I'm this year's Rotary president. I don't know if you all know that Mandy won first prize in the Duck Dash. I'm sorry, Michelle. Another year. And I hope that Wednesday the 29th is on your calendars for the ribbon-coating at the pump track. And National Night Out on August 4th. We'll be active at that. So happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

Any questions?

The one last thing. We did our annual report a couple months ago, and I printed copies. I printed copies printed for Arlington Council, Stanwood Council, and some various things. And I had more left over. And just today, I'm like, why do I have so many of these? These are yours. So I'm going to hand these out to each of you, please. So thank you. Heather?

Again, I just wanted to make a comment. Thank you as well and to your department for all that you do and for being so quick. Since I live in Glen Eagle, I know how quick you are today. So thank you.

Thank you. Is that why you were late? I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

Great. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you. Okay. We'll move on to our next poll. Do you have anything to report?

Nothing else right now.

Okay. I just, again, kudos to the DABA for the street fair and everybody that helped put it on and stuff. It was a great turnout. Glad to see it. Any comments or reports from council members? Nathan? Yes.

So I was gonna just say that thank you to the community and vendors and coming to our town for street fair. Had a lot of interaction with people from all over the area and just getting to know Arlington better. I also had another thing today, I was driving through town and I was like, why are there huge groups of people? I didn't realize that a huge production, which is our local, production team does classes with local teenagers so I was seeing a whole bunch of kids and some internships and they were going through town literally with all their gear and getting stuff ready to report on things or record things or make b-roll which is like background footage and so it's very interesting to see that through our town we actually have other things happening with that's outside of school during the summer. So I just thought it was something to point out that even our local small town businesses are very much intertwined in our community. Thank you.

Anyone, any other comments or words? Go ahead, Alicia.

what you guys said about Street Fair. It was an incredible weekend. It was still recouping from it, but it was amazing. Everyone who turned out, the vendors, I hope everyone did good, and I just want to thank all of those who put it on and did the hard work and APD and everyone who was there. So just thank you a lot. Great, thank you.

Okay, none other. Okay, at this time, is there anyone from the public that would like to speak? Okay, none seen. Review the consent agenda.

I'm good with, I was gonna say I'm good with two, three, four, and five. No, I'm good with one, one through five.

So everybody in agreement with that then? Okay, I guess we take one through five. Okay, do you think we do have an executive session tonight?

We do. Thank you, Mayor. We do have an executive session tonight to discuss pending litigation pursuant to RCW 4230-110, Section 1I. Expected to be about 15 minutes, therefore we should return about, with walking back and forth, maybe about 6.50.

Okay, we'll adjourn to executive session. I'd like to call our meeting back to order. I don't think we have anything else. Do we, Paul? That's it for this evening.

Motion to adjourn? Second. Second.

Question? All those in favor?

Aye.

Meeting adjourned. Thank you.