Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee - Regular Meeting

to order. We will hope that Dylan can join us. So do we need to do a roll call or can we do a quick round of introductions instead? I think that would suffice. So I'm your chair, Karen Messmer, and I'll pass it to Erin to introduce herself.

Hi, Aaron Klicka. I don't know how much information we want to share, but nice to meet everybody.

I mean, I know most of you, but Paul, nice to meet you.

I'm Quint. I'm a commercial broker with Green Commercial on Olympia. It's nice to meet you too, Paul. I know everyone else.

Yeah, nice to meet you. I don't know. Did you get like a bio on me or anything like that? Does it matter if you want?

Just give us a few words about yourself, Paul, so we know who's joining the group.

Okay. Yeah. Paul Horton. I've known Karen for a long time because I was involved in sort of energy and bicycle stuff and advocacy. I used to run a couple nonprofits in town. And yeah. For the last 13 years, I've been a consultant with the Athena Group, partner with the Athena Group, and we do a lot of work in the public sector, supporting cities like Lacey and Olympia and state agencies, things like that. I've done quite a lot of work with the city over many years, supporting them on their development of their, the One Community Plan, the Homeless Response Plan, and the Reimagining Public Safety Plan, and more recently, their Equity, Workforce Equity Strategic Plan. Right now, we have no contracts with the city, so... That's me.

So Regina. Hi, Regina Adams. I am a senior HR generalist, and I am here to run this meeting. Manny's not able to visit today, so I'm the techie and the note taker.

OK. And if our visitor from the jolt would like to introduce themselves, they can. Otherwise, We don't necessarily expect it. Okay, I think we've had them attend in the past and that's fine. So we'll call that roll call on our agenda. And the next item on our agenda is approval of the agenda. I would like to suggest a change to the agenda and that is to add Aaron's think piece, I'll call it, become 5B, which would be after we review the previous seller commission recommendations and then move all the other items down. Are there any other suggestions for or adjustments to the agenda that anyone would like to make? Okay. So I would entertain a motion to approve the agenda with the adjustments that I suggest. You could say so moved. That's what you could say.

So moved.

So moved. I didn't want to say anything because I'm the one who submitted the documents.

Oh, that's okay. So I think, did Paul say so moved? So Aaron, if you want to.

And I can second it. I couldn't unmute, so I'll second it.

Okay. So Paul moved and Quint seconded to approve the agenda, moving Aaron's considerations document as a topic To become 5B and moving the other ones down, all those in favor say aye. Aye.

Aye.

Anyone opposed? I think we had a unanimous vote on that. Thank you. So our next item is approval of the minutes from our February meeting. And there are three of us here who were at that meeting, I believe. And so Are there any changes or adjustments to those minutes?

I don't have any.

So I would entertain a motion to approve the minutes for February 26th meeting. Oh, actually it says 25. I think that was this year, correct? Oh, 25. Yep. Yep. Sorry. Title. My fault. The title is 2026. We'll correct that. So, Quint or Aaron, would you like to make a motion about that?

I'll move to approve the minutes. I guess with the date change.

Second. It's been moved. approve the minutes from our February 26th, 2026 commission meeting. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Okay, I think I hear three. So we won't ask for nays unless Paul would like to vote on our minutes that he wasn't in attendance for. So the next item on our agenda is public comment. Do we have anyone else? I don't see anyone else on zoom. This is noticed as a remote only meeting. Have we received any public comment by email or letter or anything that we need to take into consideration? Okay. Well, that one was easy. So, um, The next business item we have is to look at review previous salary commission recommendations. I think the reasoning for having this on our agenda is simply to be able to look back, including our last recommendation. I hope everyone had a chance to look at it. If there's any comments, thoughts on that, relating to how we might move forward this round. We don't have to spend a lot of time on this if folks have already looked at it and absorbed it, or if there's some questions.

I think it might be helpful just to kind of summarize for Paul, if that's okay, what we did. I mean, we basically, the last few years have looked at the pay increase for city staff, and we did the same increase. plus looking at changes in the cost of medical benefits. So insurance, those changes in insurance costs are posted on the Office of Insurance Commissioner website for the state. So that's what we based it on. Feel welcome to share if anyone disagrees with that's how it happened, but just a little synopsis if that's helpful for folks. if people agree. Karen, Quint, you're welcome to share if you interpret it differently, but that was kind of how I remember it.

Yeah.

That was by recollection, too. Yeah.

I mean, just looking through all of these, my sense is that there's been a real, almost a consistency of using the COLA approach. There was that year when it was a catch-up year because it was COLA for a number of years. But otherwise, it's been the COLA for the unrepresented staff, I believe. The benefits have ended up having some different adjustments and different reasoning. And I think this last season, Erin, I agree, we looked at what's the real cost and what is being shown as increases that are expected for benefit costs. And then there's also been a theme periodically in the letters and in the comments about the importance of the council, the kind of decisions they make, the value, you know, what they do and how much time. I think there's been a fairly consistent acknowledgement of about half time roughly. And so that's sort of the themes I've been seeing. So I'm curious, Paul, if you had a chance to look at this, if there's something you observed about the previous and the last year.

I have read everything. I didn't get the reasoning behind the, I think it was the 2017, the large increase. There was some kind of makeup, but I didn't, I don't know what happened before that. Or at least I don't recall if I read that. The rest of it seems like more or less COLA, you know, three, four, three and a half, 4% increases.

Yeah. And comparing to other cities, Nearby and similar population. I think that's also been a fairly consistent method. And we did that this last round as well.

I do it since you're allowing me to ask questions. I do have a question about the comparative, the comparing to other cities. You look at city of Olympia and some similar sized communities, Marysville, for instance, you know, City of Olympia, it's got a lot more FTEs per the similar size city, some other ones, Burien. And, you know, I don't know all the logic for that, but I would assume part of that is the City of Olympia being sort of the downtown for the larger Tumwater-Lacey area. It seems to me a lot of the services are, for better or worse, are located. There's a lot more complexity to the dynamics in the City of Olympia than maybe in some of these other cities. I could be wrong about that, but... So I just, you know, and this maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but I start to wonder, you know, or make some assumptions that the mayor and council are, the leadership challenge there is a little different than in some of the other city, similar sized cities. So size seems like an important factor, but certainly not the only important factor. But I don't know if that's ever been discussed.

I think we did discuss that at least last year, you know, and I had expressed similar sort of ideas about how difficult or much more difficult the project, the work has become. It's just, it has become more complex from what I can see. It's more complex from when I was there. How many years ago now? 15, 20 years ago now. Anyway, yeah. So, well, I want us to just be able to use that as we proceed as background. Part of our conversation last year was to thinking about if we were going to do something more with salary or different. There was quite a bit of conversation about reaching out and thinking about could we engage the community and ask them what they think or describe to them what's happening with the council and then try to get feedback about what should the pay be, what is the image of what that job should be paid by, for example. After last, after we finished our work last fall, I met with the city manager And on the direction from this group, met with the city manager and asked him if there was any way we could have budget and staff assignment to do outreach, to do, for example, survey work and community outreach work to have more understanding of what the community would say about what we're doing as a salary commission. in setting the salaries. And the response that I got was, there is not budget for that. We did, we were, you know, authorized to have staff support for a few more meetings this year. And so that's, you know, we started earlier this year, but essentially we don't have access to resources such as staff or consultants or, you know, more effort to do outreach. So that's kind of the way we ended last season. And so Erin also committed to preparing a sort of, here's some community considerations. So I'll let you, Erin, kind of take that on about why we wanted to document that and then what that document's about.

Yeah. And I think part of it, too, was that it was outside of the scope of the Salary Commission. So, you know, I think the original conversation was, OK, this is outside of the scope. We're making decisions based on comparative data with other cities and. an analytical approach, kind of a math data analytics centered in how everybody's already doing it and not really centered in our community members really that we represent. So I think I can hang on. Can I share? I hope so. Hang on. Wait. The Zoom looks different than my Zoom when I'm hosting a meeting. Oh, there's the share. Okay. Hang on. Oh, host disabled attendee screen sharing. Can you make me like a co-host maybe?

Well, that's just root of the host. Make co-host. Oh, not host because I want to be able to turn it off.

Rename. Okay.

Well, I may just need to make you host and you just have to Give it back to me.

Okay. So there we go. I can share. Okay. So you're seeing a picture in picture right now. Hopefully, are you seeing a document now? Yes. Okay. So the summary that I did was just kind of some areas of consideration is there's limited information about community priorities for making decisions. So we're making decisions based on data, again, comparison, but we don't have any information of what people actually want. We have no authority obtained information. There's budgets and an additional piece, but even to like start asking the questions or like what might we want to know, what things that we could do for free just within this group is also outside of the scope is my understanding. And so I was going to just, I originally just had a document kind of saying, hey, here's the things that we don't know. but it's me. So I was like, well, I'm just going to throw in like, well, we could always ask for it. So I just threw that out there. We can always cut that part, but it's, you know, if we're doing this, we could always consider that something that we want to ask for. Um, so kind of summarize those areas. So when, um, we don't have information about community priorities for making decisions, we make it, like I said, based on data, pay change, cost of living, changing in health insurance. Um, None of this is based on the people who live and work in the city. We don't have that data. And then we have no authority to attend the data. So we don't have time. We don't know. I mean, positions are part-time and comparative data, but we don't know if that's what preferences are for community members. As far as pay, we don't know if there's any information about what community members feel city council should be paid. We don't know if they're saying, hey, we do want to pay for people that are doing certain the you know complexity than the things that we're doing to you know we don't know that um and then there's also the inclusion piece there's no doubt about barriers for community members to run for city council um or barriers people that will represent them so like different income levels family makeup such as single parents employed in specific industries. So we don't know if even if someone themselves didn't want to run, do they feel like people that represent them would also be able to, you know, participate based on the structure? So our salary benefits and schedule a key factor. You know, when I say schedule, I mean like full-time part-time. Um, so we could just state that we don't have this and we're making decisions without this, or we could say, Hey, we want the ability if we have the bandwidth or the resources to learn that, um, it could be through an ad hoc or special members, you know, that could be an option. Um, you know, so we, you know, we could volunteer and engage folks with or without special funds. We still have the ability to talk to people. And if we did do something, obviously we would work with city council staff to ensure we did things in the way that aligned with the city values and protocols. So that is my, that was my starting point. So I am We need to stop sharing. Oh, wait, that's not what I meant to do. Hang on. Oh, did I stop? No, I didn't stop sharing. There we go. I'm going to stop sharing. There we go. And then I should make you host again, right, Regina?

Unless you want to turn us off and get the recording.

Make host. There we go. So this has been, this is helpful, Erin, to see some of the discussion that we had last round about should we engage with the community about the salary and levels or, I mean, that that's one approach. And so I'm curious to hear Paul and Quint's sort of reaction to that and what You know, does that, that doesn't necessarily need to be a statement from the whole group exactly, but background information that we use. But I'm curious where that's, you know, how that might influence Quint or Paul about where you, what direction you think we're headed this time around.

Well, as a newest member, I'll take a risk and chime in. I love the thinking, and it's good, important stuff. Knowing what I know about public engagement, Even if we had a big budget, we wouldn't have time to do something well that wouldn't blow up. There's so much that would be needed just to level set everybody and anybody that's participating in the public and how broad do you go and just knowing how these things go. So I think the best we can do is kind of state our assumptions and say, you know, to the degree that here's why we think it'd be great, but here's why. Public engagement wouldn't be appropriate at this time. To do it in a thorough way would probably be on the $80,000 to $150,000, something like that. Just knowing what I know about working with cities on these kinds of issues. There could be other approaches to it. Like you say, volunteer, but you'd want to make sure it was done properly. Mike Nygren, thoroughly and well with some people that know something about this, that you know engagement inclusive engagement in particular so that's that's one one thought on it, you know and. Mike Nygren, But I do think you know some of the things that stand out for me that i'd be curious about like from a public perspective, are you know there I don't know, maybe there's we already know this, but is there a. Is there a sense that there's a barrier because the amount that council members are currently paid is a barrier for some people, a more diverse representative selection of people that we might want on council to participate in because obviously not everybody can afford it. that little money for half of their time or could even balance two halftime jobs. Obviously, you probably talked about this. Then there's the whole thing around public service versus some level of fair compensation. I mean, if you just looked at it and you say how many hours they're putting in, you go look how many hours, dollars per hour they're getting and compare that to even a middle level manager or staff at the city they're They're grossly underpaid. So, you know, if you take it to face value that way, it's like, wow, okay. But presumably where people are doing this for, you know, public out of public service. So I think those are the two things that are currently stirring for me.

Quint?

I don't know. I guess I feel like a wet blanket all the time in these meetings. I guess my question would be like what, again, I think it would be a huge undertaking, but what would we want from the community? Would we want something along the lines of what Paul said as far as perspective on that balance of public service versus are they underpaid? I mean, it used to be a volunteer position completely not that long ago. I mean, are we saying if we got public feedback that they should be paid $100,000 a year, we would do that? But what if we got feedback that they should go back to a volunteer position? Would we do that? Or would it be more of the satisfaction or what do they see of the benefit? I certainly don't think there's barriers based on who's been on the council over the last decade. as far as people running or people getting on the council. So I don't know that that's an issue I've seen. I think maybe from a talent perspective, like we talked about last time, maybe it is too little to get maybe the right candidates. I'm willing to hear that. So the reason I'm so data-driven is because I think it just makes sense based on municipality size. And I know we're a capital city, but I think a lot of the other stuff is subjective and a little opaque. So that's why I'm kind of more of a data-driven, kind of like what is the consensus from our surrounding communities as far as how they approach it.

Mm-hmm. I think that, you know, that the representation diversity and there were the question of whether there's a barrier to qualified people in the community that would represent our community. That's I think that's less of a public engagement thing than a research thing. Right. That's almost like you go out and you do some kind of a survey or I don't know exactly what that would be, but it's that you will probably public engagement might not be the best thing. Avenue for getting that, but to the other question of should they to our constantly paid at all that maybe that's more of a public engagement 1.

Aaron, so my thoughts weren't like. Hey, let's shove something down in the next year or even the next 2 or 3 years. I think. My thoughts were kind of, you know, hey, if we're in a democracy, how much are we engaging people in that democracy? And I feel like. A lot of people don't, I feel like a lot of people feel like government happens to them, not government is for them. And so I think the goal is more of just like, what don't we know? What would we be curious about? How would we even engage people to start having conversations? the permission to feel like they could engage. I mean, we've never had, other than Karen, before you were a member, I don't think we've ever had, and the media, of course, I don't think we've ever had a community member show up, right? And so I think that's where my piece is coming from, of like, it doesn't have to be, to me, it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to have a big budget. It doesn't have to be, you know, But could we at least start thinking of what don't we know? What are we assuming based on the data that we really don't have an idea on? And then we're kind of guessing how we think people would feel, but we haven't really talked to any people to know how they feel. You know, and just maybe even start opening that up of awareness that there is a salary commission, right? Like, you know, just anything that's even like a starting point. So I do co-creation work and a lot of it is just The door is open. We care what people say. We're a democracy, and you're part of it. And then, hey, later on, if we start going, oh, gosh, we're starting to hear some things, then maybe we need to do a survey, or maybe we need to do a poll, or maybe we need to do more data analytics. But I think it's a very small group of people to be making decisions. And not that data is a bad decision, especially since we have limited resources, but I don't think it's a good long-term strategy.

I'll weigh in here a little bit. You know, this is a, it's an interesting, the Salary Commission is a very unique body because we are appointed by the council, by the mayor basically, but we are completely independent of them and we are expected to be completely independent of them. And that's so that they can't influence what their salary is. And that's the structure that's been set up. There are other ways to do salary setting. And that could be that the council's salary is set, for example, against some other set point or measurement. For example, we could suggest that the salary of the commission of the council and the mayor be set based on the midpoint of top managers or middle managers or maintenance people at the city of Olympia and say, you know, and it will be set at, you know, the hourly rate at that, assuming a halftime job so that when things change, they just change based on that. When we use data from other cities, I think we are assuming that they thought about it. And I think they haven't, except perhaps the ones who have increased the salary, such as Bellingham, I believe. I don't think they have thought about it. I think in some cases they have a routine, as this one has been in the past, of simply choosing a number in order to say, we have to base it on something. And they're basing it partially on what the past has been, which is the initial volunteer almost. And then above that, you know, some sort of setting of numbers. That to me is not necessarily, it's not a scientific data approach. It's an approach that says we're joining in with others and to follow along a tradition that I frankly don't know where it came from. So I'm not set with, I don't feel as comfortable about using surrounding jurisdictions or similar ones as the only method by which we set the salary. And I think we succeeded last time in saying, We're not going to simply use a formula for benefits because we had something to base it on. Things have gone up different than in previous years. And I mean, I agree with Paul that I think there is more complexity to Olympia. I think things have become more complex. And I have a hunch that there's a barrier. I can't say I know that. But I have a hunch there's a barrier because of my personal experience of having been on council and realized that it was a very consuming, and this was years ago now, a very consuming job. And the expectations are very high for visibility, participation, inclusiveness as an individual being out there in the community and studying and carrying on the business of things. And I don't know how we would get the community to understand that. That would be a huge undertaking because they don't see it. And I personally, I want council members to do that. I want them to be out there engaged. I want them to do their homework. I want them to study and learn things. And so again, it worries me a bit that the pay may be limiting us to people who can afford to juggle that. And so I'm thinking about whether we've had, I think we have people, the mayor right now, for example, has children or a child. But it's very difficult for me to picture an individual person single mom, for example, being able to do that. And maybe they never will be able to. But I think there are barriers and I think we are underpaying to pay the maintenance, the level of pay for the lowest, basically the maintenance person in the park. Still, we're not much above that. Just feels, it feels wrong to me. It feels as if we are devaluing that. And as an independent body, If we say the only time we will change that is after we've spent, you know, figured out how to have the agency and the authority and the budget to do a large amount of outreach, I'm very skeptical about whether we can get there, whether we could do a good enough job to feel any more comfortable than saying what I'm saying, which is I have a hunch, I have a feeling, I understand I've been involved in this community for 30 plus years. And I would like to see more acknowledgement of the value of that. So that's my spot. But as two of you know, last year, I voted against the motion and we forwarded a recommendation that was not as much as I would have wanted to see the salary go up. But I'm the chair, so I am at your mercy in terms of the group. and how things go. So Erin?

I think it's going to be hard this year. I think a lot of people are struggling. I mean, I look at wealth, equity, and a lot of people are struggling. A lot of people can't survive right now. A lot of people are getting laid off on a regular basis. I mean, I feel like every time I open my phone, there's a new group of folks that are getting laid off or something that's closing down. I feel like it would be hard this year to say everyone's getting cut, but one group's going to get more and it's paid for by your tax dollars. I think that would be hard this year, I think. A lot of people that I talk to, just because I do work in the community, a lot of people feel disempowered, don't feel like they have access to any government. Any government, like, I'll be like, oh, have you thought of talking to your school board? Oh, have you thought of talking to city council? Oh, have you, like, whatever the, you know, the thing they're talking about, like, have you thought of, you know, engaging in a democratic process kind of thing? And people, a lot of people don't, that I've talked to in the community don't feel like that's a pathway for them. So... Yeah. I mean, Karen, I, it's not that I disagree with you. I, I, I was a single mom. I would have, you know, I, I volunteer for politics as much as I could, but there, you know, you need to pay the bills. There's no way. Um, and you still have to do responsibilities. Like I get that. And a lot of people are doing two, three jobs right now. Um, and Olympia is the, one of the top, what, four, three, four cities in the state to live in. And you have to make $30 and something cents an hour to live. But I, um, I think it would be a hard year to do a big increase. I think it would be a hard year to do an increase higher than what the city employees make this year, honestly, just based on how much people are struggling. But I don't think it's bad to start thinking about what we want to know and how we would engage people and how we, because even if you're like, okay, we would make it higher so everyone feels like they could participate, they still have to be connected to believe that they can participate. Yeah. Even if we made it higher, the people who don't participate or feel like there's a way to participate, I don't know that that's going to change things if there's not some other work that happens.

So we don't need to solve our recommendation this evening. What I would like to do is, based on this conversation, take a look at our schedule for our remaining meetings and see, you know, get a sense for what do we need to, is there more information we need? What do we need to discuss? And targeting, so you saw the couple of sentences only in the work plan, which is we have to target by the end of September to have a recommendation. And so if we want to proceed with you know, gathering updates from other cities and having that presented to us. If there's other information we want, then it's a question of how many more meetings do we want and sending out, once again, our doodle polls to see if we can, you know, how often and to what extent we can meet to get those completed. So, We don't have to detail that out as much as just getting a sense of are we headed to a relatively simplistic approach here, a simple couple of meetings and we can get ourselves going. Without Dylan here, it's hard to know where he's going to be on this, but I know where he was last time, which is the approach that we used last time. so what's the sense of uh where we're headed with this for between now and the end of september um mostly things that we need to cover together information we might need paul well garrett i so with respect to aaron's sort of uh piece here which i think is a good thought piece that i don't i don't know if i have an immediate answer to that one i at a minimum i think it's a great idea that could be explored further it seemed like it'd be hard to really

to tie that up before September, maybe. But one of the things that would inform the answer to your question, Karen, I was like, how much should we meet? might be, you know, how divergent are we in our thinking on what should be done going forward? I mean, at a minimum, obviously, COLA. So I'll just spill the beans here for myself. COLA is, that makes sense, probably for maybe for the near term. But to me, when I, building on what you said, Karen, you know, I I've been working in and with the city for over 30 years, and I've watched 35 years, the things that the city council and the city deals with just ramp up, ramp up. I mean, it used to be the big things were the anti-growthers and the green builders versus the master builders, which is hard enough, but And now it's like sanctuary cities and homelessness and camps and public safety. And, oh my God, you know, it's just like the diversity of the community in terms of the LGBTQ plus community out there. It's, it's, it's so different that, I mean, the city wasn't even built for this stuff in some ways. And so the council is having to come along. So you think just about the, um, just the scope of their, um, I guess their authority and their accountability and putting themselves out. You know, the mayor could have gotten thrown in jail, presumably by the Trump administration over their stance and the city manager as well, but to the sanctuary city or at a minimum taken to court. And so I just think we're in different territory. And I agree, benchmarking other cities is useful, but may not be adequate to the situation. I don't, I don't think anybody could be expected to just do pure public service for the work they're doing. And at halftime, which they're roughly halftime with the number of hours they're presumably putting in there and the amount of access they're providing to constituents that it seems to me, putting my cards on the table, that a larger increase would be warranted. However, the question is how to do that. How much? What do you base it on? You know, how do you want to be transparent about your decision making? But you could also face it in over a period of years. So it doesn't have a big budget spike. So that's another possibility for consideration.

Quint, what are you thinking? I'm putting you on the spot.

No, I know it's fine. I mean, I i i mean i just i i think a lot of the complexities and a lot a lot of this stuff is um you know is is taken on purposefully i don't think it's something that's been piled on that's now making the job more difficult um I don't know. It kind of sounds like you're trying to figure out a way to pay activists, to be honest with you. I don't know what we're doing. I got to be... I mean, to say that you're expecting me to have... I don't know, to be taken aback or think they should be paid more because they're going to be thrown in jail for defying federal law. I just thought... I don't know. I don't even know what we're talking about.

Can I reframe that? I think that's probably a poor example, actually. I could get you told to hear what you're coming.

I mean, and again, who lives in the city on this call? Karen, you do, right? Yeah. Does anybody live in the city of Olympia on this call? Karen, you do, right? Yeah, I do. Yeah, you do. Okay. I mean, again, we're talking about surveying the community. I live in the city limits. I'm not impressed. So I don't know. I'm not saying we don't increase their wage. I'm not saying they don't work hard. I'm not saying any of that. I'm just saying, what are we paying them for? And we're not trying to redefine the scope of the job or, you know, it's a half-paid job. And if you want to tie it back to an hourly rate or call it $45 an hour or $50 an hour and see what that translates to, we can look at that. But I just have real issue trying to find out ways to pay them more money because they're doing a lot more things. I'm not buying that.

Aaron, did you have your hand up? Okay, sorry.

Well, I kind of have mixed, I was, I did have my hand up when Quentin was first saying things and I also have kind of mixed feelings. So I, I feel like, um, what I'm hearing from Quentin is things I'm also hearing from some people where it's, it is getting really hard. Right. And the, there's a lot going on. Um, I do feel like people who are working with community right now, it has totally changed. Like I, I've never been a counselor. I feel like I'm a counselor now. I usually I'm like, hi, how can I, how can I, you know, like let's learn about this or talk about this. I won't say all the different roles I've had and things like that, but it's usually been maybe community anger, but it's community anger about stuff that's, you know, unfair. It's been there for a while. It's not something new. People don't feel heard. So the community anger is more, I don't feel like I've been heard or I don't feel like, This stuff is like there's so much fear, intensity, disoriented people who are just like the kinds of questions and things you get. It is totally different. It's what's going to happen to the kids if the parents are deported during the day? It's am I safe if I put my information? Is somebody going to come hunt me down and hurt me? Like it's, you know, I'm hearing things from LGBTQ, from women, from men. different immigration status, including U.S. immigration status, people who, you know, different, you know, being profiled. I'm hearing people feeling unsafe to even talk to their neighbors outside of anything else, like the intensity of how people are feeling, the pressure. I've never experienced anything like this. And I've been doing community work for 25 years. This last 18 months has been very different.

Paul? Yeah, and again, backing off from my sanctuary city, I could see where that one could be taken in different directions. But what I see at the city and what is happening in the city, which is causing all the consternation and concern to me is... uh you know very little of it is uh driven by city or city choices they are larger systemic issues that are are outside of the um scope or outside of the control of the city and other cities um and they're landing in our streets and this the waters are swimming in um Not the least, you know, which is immigration, but it is the cost of housing and the lack of affordable housing and homelessness and laws that say we can't move people here and we can move them there. And so there's just all these constraints the city's having to deal with. The city... And I appreciate this about the council and staff is one of the things they've done is said, we're going to at least take a compassionate response to this. And if you look at when my experience in working with the city on these other, you know, community engagement around homelessness, public safety, you will see, of course, you'll see people that feel like the city should be doing more. and city people that feel like the city should be doing less. So they're also in a kind of a rock and a hard place right there. So it is just messy stuff. I don't think the council made the city, created the larger problems that we're facing in the city today. And I think that regardless of your political leanings or what have you, you get on the council, you're going to be working your ass off here. And it's always blown me away that people even choose to do it. It's just like, wow. That someone would choose to do that for so little money. But anyway, that's. Yeah.

And it's going to get harder when you look at the numbers. Because housing is the one that, you know, yeah. You look at all the other numbers just to survive. That's the one that.

Anyway.

So what, I mean, this, this creates this sort of two sided thing for me, which is, you know, hard to kind of reconcile, which is. the image that people have of government and their sense of neediness or their sense of economic injustice about how their position, for example, that their reaction to the council and the council being paid at all and what the council is performing like and how they're doing as a job. I mean, this is, you know, if we think that they're doing a bad job, why should we pay them more? I mean, I think that's a legitimate way for people to think about it is if they're not doing well enough for me and the people I know, why should we even pay them more? The flip side of it for me is that we end up with people who don't really have the time to do the job well, or we may not be getting the people who have the capacity and the ability to fully engage into the job, to do a better job, to have the council doing better for the community's sake. And so it worries me that we're, you know, that we end up with it being more volunteerish than it is paid. So that's a struggle for me because on one hand, announcing that they were going to get paid more is obviously going to tick some people off because they're going to say, we don't think they're doing good enough yet. They don't understand at all that they have to hold another job in order to survive. This is a second job. And if it's added on to their 40 hours a week, they can't do a good enough job at either one of them. So that's... the experience I think I've told this group before is you cannot do it both ways if you have a full-time job. So it's a very difficult piece. The one piece that I don't believe is a problem, and this is an internal thing with the city, is that the city of Olympia budget cannot sustain an increase of any kind for the council members. That I don't stand by because there's Plenty of room in that budget. It turns out. I know. I've seen it. There's plenty of room in that budget. Nobody in the city of Olympia is going to get laid off or suffer if they increase the pay or the benefits for the council members. So I don't want to have... I don't see that as an issue. I think it's the external image issue that is a difficult one. So... So back to our work plan and future meetings. We don't want to go too long this evening and end up with, you know, dragging people along here. So what's your sense? I can see where we're at, the four of us here. A little bit of differences in how we might approach where we might go with this. I think, you know, at a minimum, we want to get an update from What has happened with the similar cities that we've looked at before? Did they have some different change? Did they do something different that we could use as a checkpoint? What's going on with benefits? Is that even different than it was last year when we saw this increase coming? So those are the things I would want to know And we can also be including information in our recommendation about where we might want to head in the future. So the way I see this playing out is we have a minimum of two meetings beyond this one. One of them is to discuss and finalize a recommendation. And the other is to Because we create a recommendation, we would have the opportunity for public comment at another meeting. And we could then finalize it depending on what the public comment is. And we know what happened last time, which is we didn't have any public comment. But I want to leave it open that we have a draft recommendation that is available for people to look at and then comment on. So that's two meetings. There might be a third where we hash out something that starts to look like the draft. Does that start to make sense?

Erin? I think we're going to need at least three meetings. I think in the past we did two, three, and I feel like they're... like the where people are at is still kind of far away and I think it's going to get more intense this year just because of how everybody's doing I don't know how other people feel but I feel like I don't know I don't know if that's if people are in agreement if that's where we're where we're at or well we we can we can talk about whether we think we're gonna

have some sort of consensus or come or, or, uh, some sort of coming of the minds of here, or we can say, we may have disagreement and we'll come to some sort of vote as we did last year, where we say, you know, let's, let's get as far as we can and then see, uh, see what we end up with. Um,

Can I ask a question? Remind me about the stipend. It's for medical, but technically they can use it for whatever, right? If they have medical from another job. Because one thing I thought I'd have to be able to maybe increase it more than is, you know, because insurance benefit, you know, that stuff has... increase probably three or four X what cola has. So you could potentially bump up the benefit significantly and then just the base a little bit. And I think that would pass the smell test of the, the market a lot more too. You could justify a dramatic increase because Ben, you know, insurance has just become untenable. Um, So that could be a way to grease the skids on a significant increase without one to the base more than cola or something.

That's helpful, Quint, because I think that is one of the concerns I've had, at least, that if you're not working a full-time job, which comes with full-time benefits, you're kind of stuck. And sometimes a part-time job won't even need to provide benefits. And if you're getting a stipend that doesn't buy you much or it buys you only a partial insurance, you're spending what you get for your pay on the insurance in addition to the stipend. So medical costs as well as the insurance costs are really going, have really gone.

Yeah, I mean, I'm on, you know, the whatever you call it for the first time. And I'm over 2,200 bucks a month from my family of six. That's post-tax dollars. I mean, that's really $50,000 a year, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think that's a productive conversation to have is where have those costs been? And last year we had that conversation and I think it makes sense to have that again to look at where have the costs gone and what would make sense considering what it takes to do this job if you're going to back off of your full-time job and make it your other job part-time, for example. I, for example, was working only 70% or 80% at the university while I was on the council. But a university still pays your full benefits when you're only 70% or 80%. isn't likely to be true in a lot of other jobs.

They probably pay- Healthcare, I think it's like 0.72 or yeah, 0.7, something like that. You still get it.

Yeah. But they still may back off. Yeah. And so it leaves you really dangling out there with high costs and not being able to find the right package that makes sense. So let's have a conversation about that.

I think that's a- I think that's an easier sell optically too.

Mm-hmm.

given some of the things we talked about.

I'm trying to see if OIC posted it yet, but I don't think so. I think it comes later. I'm trying to find it.

It's easily 10 to 20%.

it was i think 21 last year so i can't remember the exact number but i don't into it's been close to 20 each year i don't and look i'm perfectly reasonable and cola is a joke i mean it's probably 2x what they say it is or 3x so i'm not you know unreasonable

What I'm not hearing is that there's at a minimum, I'm hearing there's an agreement among these people that there's a COLA and potentially plus how you get there. And I think that's a really interesting idea to me as well. And it has a logic that would hold up pretty well. The place where there may be some differences, you know, if you're going to look at making even a larger adjustment, whatever that would be, how you would do that. Would you phase it in overtime? We might have differences there. Maybe we don't even need to resolve that before September.

Well, perhaps there's a way to express something like that, Paul, in the recommendation. Making some progress on the conversation about that, I think, would be helpful to think about that. OK, so it's sounding like three more meetings. Am I close there? One to hash out some of our different ideas and what it might be, hear from some research that we ask staff to do, get prepared up hash something out, have another meeting to make sure that we have our draft perfected to the extent that we're ready. And to me, that would mean voting a recommendation that's still called draft so that we have that out to the public. And then our final meeting may go quickly because it would be to just say, Does anybody have any different ideas? Is there something from the public we need to hear? And if we don't hear a lot, we may be done at that last one fairly quickly. Does that all sound close?

Sounds good.

Okay. So we'll have staff put out some doodle polls. on when we might all be able to, including Dylan, we hope, join in on this. Any preferences on trying to spread that out over July, August, September versus closer together meetings?

I think we have Regina figure out between now and then when we can get everyone together because that might just be the only times they align based on vacations and all those things that might, and Regina's schedule. I'm sure she has a schedule as well.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. So, right. So begin the doodle polls because that's really where we, we hung up last year. And I think We're starting earlier this year, so hopefully we'll locate a few more. I would want to put the last two meetings most likely, the last meeting should be in the middle of September perhaps, and the second to last, not more than a month before that, but she and I will work on that. Let's see what we can do. Okay. Anything else we need to get done this evening? We have other topics on our agenda, so that means anybody can bring anything up.

Regina, do you have, I'm assuming we want the OIC data. Regina, do you have a way to connect with them or look on their website or do you want?

I have procured myself an intern. Awesome. for 12 weeks. So I've got a little bit of help so I can pull together.

They're usually pretty responsive. So if you don't see it on their website, if you email them, they should, in theory, they're usually pretty quick. I mean, at least if we're not having a major disaster.

Okay. So if anyone has specific ideas of something they want to find, there's no harm in asking them.

staff to do the research for that to prepare that for our next meeting and you know that's helpful Regina I've just been scanning stuff I haven't read it super deeply because there's a lot of documents but you know the tables that are showing us comparisons there's two or three of them I think there's like internal city salary ones but one of the things I can't do in the table is I can't sort it Yeah, it'd be so interesting to be able to just like cluster the similar size cities and or kind of sort it in different ways to look at it. Otherwise, I find myself going up and down it and trying to, so I don't know if that's possible, but I think that'd be helpful. Shola. Oh, thank you. Can I ask the group a question? I didn't hear anything. I guess maybe you and I might have talked about this, Karen. But just in the composition of this, we are all or not all City of Olympia residents. I missed that.

I am. I think three of the five of us are.

Okay. So that's interesting. I would have thought they would all be City of Olympia residents. I have no idea to yeah paul i'm i'm in the city of olympia but it's or i'm just just outside the incorporated okay so i'm olympia but not i was going to say because one way to look at you know public representation or community representation is this committee and i guess it also represents people that are you know people outside the city but um yeah and then what the other gentleman's name is dylan dylan and dean we know we're awesome

He lives in Olympia, works in Tacoma.

Okay. Thank you.

Okay. Anything else for the good of the order? We will work on doodle polling. You'll see some and do communicate any questions or need for information. And we'll see what we can do for next time to start forming up a recommendation. Okay. Thank you all. Thank you, Regina.

Thank you.

Reconvene when we can. Thank you.

Nice to meet you all. Good night. Nice to meet you all.