City Council - Regular Meeting

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the work session. We'll be talking about our DEI work. And I'm so glad that we're going to be hearing from Eunice and Simone. Glad to see you here. And I'll turn it over to Robbie, who I think is going to turn it over to Eunice.

That's right. Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, so a little bit of context. As you all know, the council has had our DEIB efforts as a priority for several years. And it's been really encouraging to see the progress that we're making internally as an organization. I will say, especially this past year, there's been numerous times where we'll be in a meeting and staff, we're working on a specific project and we'll have staff just naturally and automatically bring up the equity toolkit and the community engagement framework. And that's exactly what we're aiming for. Go ahead.

Oh.

That can. I brought it in and I dropped it.

So just a heads up.

Thank you for your honesty.

I'll turn away when she opens it.

That's not true. Yes. Let me die. I really appreciate you guys.

Sorry.

No, no worries. So anyway, it's been very rewarding kind of seeing the natural progression of this work in our organization and seeing it kind of become really part of the roots of what we do. And obviously, Eunice and Marcus Ford, they've been a huge part of this, led by Simone as well. So we're grateful to have them with us tonight, and we'll turn it over to Eunice.

Awesome. Um, good evening you all. It's been a minute since I've come and presented to you all. So please forgive me if I'm a little rusty. Um, as it was mentioned, my name is Eunice McInday. I'm the D I manager here at the city of Hillsboro. And today I'm going to be presenting on the work we've been doing here at the city for about the last year and a half, but it also encompasses work that we've been doing. for a long time now. Marcus is unable to join me today, so I'll be speaking on his behalf on the work that he's doing. So bear with me as I try to articulate that. Simone is also here. As you know, she oversees both Marcus's and I's body of work, and we would not be able to do what we do if it wasn't for her support and her strategic thinking as well also. So she'll be here to answer any questions if you have any at the end about the work Marcus does.

Sorry that I missed one thing that Eunice just reminded me of. There's about 19 slides. We could probably spend 20 minutes on every slide. So if we could, if the council's okay with letting us get through the 19, and then we'll have plenty of time at the end for questions and good conversation.

Thank you. So today, I forget that it takes a minute.

Try now.

Okay, perfect. So the purpose of today's session is really to provide a high-level update on key DEIB and community engagement work over the past year, is to kind of show you all how we've connected our work to outcomes, how we've moved beyond a list of activities and show what is changing for staff, departments, and community, and then also kind of reinforce the direction we are looking to go with this work and show the work and advances the strategic plan and then y'all's continued support and commitment to DIB work and equitable engagement has provided. Before I jump in, I just want to acknowledge the moment. I think we can all agree that we recognize the times we are in, But at the same time, I also want to recognize that all of you in this space, as well as my colleagues, continue to affirm our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion work, as well as equitable community engagement. And so a lot of what we're going to be seeing here today or talking about would not have been possible without that commitment, especially during times like this. So as always, I like to ground every presentation with our equity statement. This was created several years ago under the leadership of the Equity Leadership Council that was there at the time. Simone was the one leading the charge in the creation of this with that group. And again, this is really what grounds the work that we do. And I always like to just highlight and bold those two areas in the equity statement because I think it kind of encapsulates what the work is and what equity work looks like um and really just that last sentence our mission the city of hillsborough commits to integrating equity into the fabric of our organization and the delivery of public service in the pursuit of equal fair and just outcomes for all and so my hope is as i go through this presentation you'll really kind of see the how we do that And what does that look like when we talk about, you know, equitable outcomes? What questions are we asking? What resources are we providing staff? How are we changing the way in which we think and do the work here at the city? And of course, another thing that just really grounds that work is our mission, vision and values. As you can see, one of our goal focused areas is equity. And then one of our values is diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. And although they stand alone, I think those two really do weave in and out of all of our values, as well as the different goal-focused areas that exist here at the city. So one of the things we really wanted to just ground you all in, this slide represents how we've approached DEIB and equitable community engagement work over the last year or so. These aren't four separate initiatives. They really enforce one another, and the arrows are intentional. in the fact that they're not linear. And what we essentially just are trying to show is that at any given moment, we're doing any one of these four things. So when we talk about building internal capacity, we're talking about giving staff better tools, shared language, training and structures for the work that we're doing. When we're talking about strengthening relationships, we believe a lot of the work that we do depends on trust. And trust is built through relational effort being put in. And over time, we really feel like that is what helps us better invest in communities and change city practices. And that strengthening relationships is not only just internally, but it's also externally as well, too. And ultimately, we believe all this working together is helping us better the community in which we're working with, as well as just making our workforce a better place to work. And so we'll kind of jump around into each of these categories today as well, too, showcasing what's kind of been done underneath each of those. So we're going to start with building internal capacity. Some of the things that changed in the last year and a half is that you probably have seen that we added the B to DEIB or DEI. And a lot of that was just to align it with our strategic plan, especially with stuff that's going on in our world and in our community. I think that belonging piece is ultimately where a lot of people find their connection to DEI work. So really thinking about, you know, when we talk about equitable engagement and, you know, equitable practices, like what does it actually mean to make sure people feel like they belong? The workplace climate survey is another thing. Every couple of years, we try to assess our workplace and utilize that to better gauge how we can do our work. better and then one of the other things too as well when we talk about building internal capacity we have an equity leadership council and that's made up of representatives from every department across the city about two to three people we meet once a month and our job is really to just help build capacity with work that's being done in the city manager's office work that encompasses things that are going on in the city. And we're not a decision-making body. We're really just there to offer some perspective by having different titles, roles, and stuff sitting at the table. And so one of those things that we did recently was having that group really speak into the development of new leadership competencies, something that the HR team has been working on for the last year or so now. And then on top of that, I'm a certified Gallup Clifton Strengths Coach. Any of you who were part of council, the last council group, had the opportunity of doing a session with you all. And I've actually had the opportunity to do some of that work with a lot of our leadership team directors and managers of different departments. And that's, again, just an opportunity to just help working with different leaders on how they can work better together and continue to do the work that they're doing. And then our employee resource groups have been a big part of also building internal capacity in that their voices have been really helpful in the work that we do. I'll talk about this later, but you'll see how they've really been catalysts in speaking into certain things. that are affecting them either in the workplace or the community, and really helping senior leadership and even myself and Marcus in our roles do a better job of supporting not only employees, but also folks in the community. And then always, we like to do lunch and learns and other events that are fun, low-hanging fruit that allows people to show up and not feel like the work that I do is doom and gloom all the time. So when it comes to changing everyday city practices, the last year and a half, we've been doing a lot in this area. And first, I just wanna acknowledge my colleagues in the finance department, our city recorders, and then obviously our executive team, and then our communications team. A lot of what you see on this slide and what I'm gonna talk about couldn't have been possible without their help and their support. So when we talk about language access, kind of it all just started about how do we make sure the resources that we provide as a city are accessible to all community members? And so last year, one of the first steps in doing that was working with our comms department to develop I Speak Hillsborough cards. If you remember last fall, we did an issue of City Views that was focused on language access. And in there, we introduce these I speak cards that community members can take to any of our facilities if they're needing translation services or interpretation services. So our staff will know what to do when they receive those, who to call, the language line, or better yet, what employees to call to help support in that. We've done a really great job of obviously advancing our Spanish speaking materials and things of that nature. But we do have our safe harbor languages as well, other languages, which is Vietnamese, Chinese, Hindi. And so we're hoping that in the next year or so we can progress into those. Another thing you'll know that we did is our staff reports. You probably noticed those two questions that were added this last year and a half. And the idea was really to just encourage folks to begin to start thinking at a higher level than what we maybe were thinking when we were doing our work. And so it was a form of accountability really to say, like, when we are doing our projects, like, how are we engaging community? And is there a necessity for that? And you all were trained on that as well, too, in the last year and have been a big part of pushing that effort forward. And then in terms of dedicating resources, in terms of finance, one of the things that Marcus supported was just adding budget lines that reference interpretation and sponsorship funds being used. It seems like a small thing, but little things like that have huge impact, just getting people to think holistically about the work that we're doing. And then Simone already presented this to you all, I believe, previously, but we also kind of did our own little tour to all the boards and commissions, presenting to them about the equity toolkit and community engagement framework. And our mindset and mentality behind that was those community members are sitting at the table representing community, oftentimes giving input, on important matters. And so we feel it's important for them to also be aware of these tools. And in some ways, hold us accountable as well, too, when we're coming to them saying, hey, did you engage community? Did you use these tools? And we've seen a lot of that happening since we presented to them as well. So one of the foundational pieces of our work is also building the capacity of our staff. And that happens in a series of various ways. One of them is just creating regional and statewide learning spaces. Each year, you all are also always invited to this as well, too, is the Northwest Public Employee Diversity Conference. This is a picture of the group of Hillsborough employees that went last year. It was a massive group. Really exciting to see all those people showing up, which I think shows the level of excitement and participation staff has about DEI work. Another thing too is Marks and I, along with the work that we do at the city, oftentimes sit on other committees as well too. Mark has created a regional engagers network that includes anybody that's doing community engagement work across the state is part of that. And then I also am part of a language access collaborative, one of the leaders of that. And our role is just getting together with other individuals across the state that do language access work and just sharing ideas, collaborating with one another, problem solving, and learning from one another in those environments. Along with that is our equity toolkit and communication framework. You all have heard so much about that, probably in the last year plus. But the goal of those tools, again, as always, we want to emphasize, is about helping staff ask better questions earlier in their projects. Um, and our goal is really to make continue to make these part of our normal city practices. Um, and in a way that it doesn't depend on just Marcus and I to be kind of the like conduits of making that happen. As Robbie said, so, um, said we're starting to see a lot of people taking kind of agency. to ask those questions in meetings, talk about their use of the tools. And that's just something that's been really exciting to see in the last year and a half. But one of the things we want to do to take it a little step further is really about developing a tracking plan and a tracking system to see how many of these toolkits are being used. And the hope is that is for us to just be able to now determine like, where are the gaps? What are things we need to improve in the process? Are there folks still having challenges filling out those tools and how can we best support them and improve the work that we're doing? The next thing I want to talk about is just in regards to what we've been doing in the community and our broader needs there. And that means strengthening the relationships outside of the four walls of employees. An example of that would be the conversations that have happened this last year with Bienestar's residents. For example, initially it grew out of concerns related to immigration enforcement, but these conversations quickly, you know, showcase broader concerns. And I want to just give a shout out to the Beck and Jim from our police engagement team who are continuing those conversations with that organization. And they actually plan on having three more conversations at their properties this year. And they'll do one in English, one in Spanish, and then one in Dari as well, too. And then internally, like I mentioned earlier, this is our RAICES employee research group, a picture of them. They're our largest resource group and our longest standing one, and they continue to grow. And it's awesome to see what their leaders are doing there. And they were a huge part of, you know, just coming to us about a lot of the things that they were dealing with in the workplace this last year and invited our executive leadership team to come to one of their meetings and kind of were able to express their concerns about things that they were experiencing in the workforce, any fears that they were currently having for those folks who were in the field. And so not only them, but many other resource groups have been catalysts in just helping us better understand what the experiences of employees are. And so employee resource groups, although they're a safe space for employees to come and be with folks who look like them or like-minded, it's also been a great resource for leadership and people like me to really understand what's going on in the day-to-day workforce because we can't, we don't have antennas in every single place, every single day to notice that. And so that's something that I think has been really helpful and we hope to continue. So something you all have had a big part in, one tangible structure coming out of listening is the new Human Rights Committee, Advisory Committee, which grew out from y'all's direction and commitments as well as Resolution 2906. And the goal was really to create an ongoing pathway for community experience and expertise that would inform city practices rather than waiting until there was a crisis before we hear from people. It's currently made up of 12 community organizations and partner institutions. They had their first meeting just last month, which was really exciting, and they hope to meet once a month now until, I guess, the end of time. I don't even know, but... So now we're gonna talk about our investment in community. And so I wanna emphasize two things here. The numbers you see represent more than just grants and contracts. They represent the city investing in organizations that already have relationships, trust, language capacity, and cultural knowledge within our community. But also I wanna say that you're probably looking at these numbers and being like, we have given way more to the community and this does not represent any small business grants, I wanna say that. So I'm gonna talk about each of these as briefly as I can, but there's a lot of information here that I'm gonna read. This was Marcus's slide, so bear with me. So we're looking at nearly 1.36 million in direct community investment in addition to other sponsorships and CBO support coordinated through the city manager's office. The largest piece has been our community engagement capacity building grants, just under 958,000 across 10 organizations over two years. These grants were made available through ARPA funding. An example of kind of what that money was used for, Bienestar held affordable housing community forums, provided individual resident coaching, and offered Spanish language advocacy training. And then Working Theory Farm reported employing 20 young people for more than 1,000 hours with that money. while reaching additional youth through their programming. The second investment was a 200,000 emergency community focused funding that you all authorized in response to immigration enforcement impacts that ultimately funded 11 organizations. This slide represents the city doesn't have to be the direct provider of every service to have impact. Sometimes our most effective way of supporting our community is actually allowing our community-based organizations to be that epicenter for you know, disseminating funds out to the folks that need it most. And then most recently, we've used another 200,000 through four eviction prevention partnership agreements in recognition of the secondary impacts that both council and staff have been seeing from immigration enforcement, particularly lost income and housing instability. So shout out to you all for making a lot of that happen as well, too. Just to give you a visualization, in the last year and a half, these are all the community partners that we have supported as a city or partnered with through grants, emergency response funding, sponsorships, and other community investments. So just gonna give you a second to just look at that. So when we talk about direct engagement and strengthening relationships, it really, again, comes back to showing up in our community. And so far this year, we've had over 40 events that we've done as a city. Some examples of that were the Talk a Mile with Hillsborough School District, where law enforcement and many of you all were having one-on-one conversations, walking with students. We've also had citywide presence at booths, employee resource groups. You all have Juneteenth, the Latino Cultural Festival, Pride, youth events, career fairs, community gatherings. We've made our presence known in many, many ways, and we continue to do so. Um, and if Marcus was here, he would want to tell the story. So I'm going to tell it for him real quick. Cause I know I'm running out of time, but if you look at the top right picture, um, at Eminem marketplace and the futsal courts, um, that's just a great representation of all the different various worlds of our community at colliding. You have the police, you have a council member, um, you have a staff member, and then you have a bunch of youth running around playing futsal soccer together. And then support across the organization. This slide is very simple, just talking about, I'd like to say that Marcus and I tend to be in-house consultants. So we're constantly being called on, being asked questions, people seeking support on utilizing the tools or just even guidance on if they're you know, moving in the right direction of what they're looking to do with projects. So that's a big part of what we do. I'm oftentimes called in to do trainings, like for tomorrow, I'm doing a training on microaggressions. So our breadth of knowledge and our work that we're doing at the city covers a lot of different things. So what changed about because of this work? Like I'd mentioned earlier, every year, every couple of years, we try to assess our workplace. And so we're in the middle of doing that right now. We haven't finished that yet, but we did administer a workplace climate survey last year. And some of the things that came from that that I think are worth sharing is that DEIB was increasingly reflected in leadership expectations and routine city processes. And then 93% of staff indicated that they will actively support DEIB initiatives. And that seems like, you know, okay, cool, what does that actually mean? But of that survey, when we look at all employees at the City of Hillsborough, we had an 84% response rate from full-time employees. So that is very, very high. So when you see that number, 93%, that's a good majority of the workforce saying that they support this work. And then 27% of our part-time employees also completed that survey. And then other ways we've seen is that comparatively to our last workplace climate survey we took, employees of color feel higher levels of effective supervisory practices, Women feel higher levels of effective supervisory practices as well and higher levels of inclusion and belonging. And then 73% of all city employees describe a strong sense of belonging, feeling valued and recognized. And a lot of these stats are higher than when we previously did our workplace climate survey back in 2022 and our race and equity survey. So we're coming up on the end of this presentation. I know I'm coming up on time. But again, when we're thinking about externally, we definitely think in this last year, we put in a lot of effort to be more accessible and connected to our community. Like I said, you see on the right, these are various materials that have been made that have gone out to community members as well. On a previous slide, I don't know if you all have noticed, even in downtown for our anniversary, all the little... What are they, flags? I don't know what they're, banners, yeah. They're all in our safe harbor languages as well too. So little things like that just make this place feel more welcoming, we hope, for all of our residents. And then just feeling more resource, as you saw by one of our previous slide, we've received and given a lot more, invest a lot more in our communities financially as well too, to support the work that they're doing. So what are we carrying forward? There's a lot we're carrying forward. And I'd like to say, again, this work is not possible without all my colleagues, my boss, and the executive team, who she's also part of the executive team. But we want to continue embedding DEIB and equitable engagement to everyday city practices. That's something that was really highlighted in the assessment we received. we've been working our way through is that people are wanting to learn more how to utilize those tools and bringing more awareness to that. We want to expand our language access resources. We've done an amazing job and shout out to our comms team of really engaging our Latino community. But there's a lot of other communities represented in the city of Hillsboro that we want to make sure that we're supporting as well too. in the same way. We want to improve visibility and trust in our racial equity progress in the work that we're doing. You're never done with that work. It's always happening. It always has to continue. And then obviously supporting new initiatives or groups like the Human Rights Community Advisory Committee and making that a trusted community center body here for the city. And then again, strengthening the use of equity toolkit and community engagement so that we can tell the story of impact more consistently of how those themes are helping change our community. And I don't have time, but maybe we'll share this some other time of just stories of how those toolkits have really changed a lot of the work that we're doing. And then just sustaining capacity needed for both systems. Marcus and I are one person. We obviously have the support of amazing leaders as well too. And then our colleagues as well. But it is a lot of work to carry. So hopefully we can sustain as we grow and continue to try to do this work more impactfully. And so I just want to end simply by just thanking you all for your commitment to this work and all our executive leaders for their commitment to this work. Honestly, it's so great to say that I still get to do what I get to do during times like this. So I appreciate all the support. And if you have any questions, I'm here to answer them. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Eunice. I appreciate the briefing. And thank you for stepping in for Marcus. Do we have any questions? Councillor Anne-Marie? And then Councillor Sogato, you'll go after Councillor Embry.

Thank you for the presentation. I wanted to ask about the survey. How often is it done or has it been done?

I think it's every four years. Four years? Yeah.

Okay. And how granular is it?

What do you mean by that?

Is it like? Like can you look at organization or?

We can look at all departments. Yeah, specifically departments. We can go that granular, yeah.

Okay, all right. And then could I get a copy of that? I'm assuming it's anonymous, obviously, but just from a,

I'll take that one. So a couple of things on that. So first, it's not quite ready. And so if it's OK, we want to make sure and release it to our employees first. And so it's still we're still working with our consultants on that. Second is we'll figure out a way to get the results. It's a very the data is very lengthy, but we can at least maybe give the council like an executive summary or something like that. So you can see all the themes and everything. We'll work on figuring out how to do that. But it might be a little bit of time because it's not done yet.

OK. And then so Just kind of continue that. Four years is a long time. Why is it four years?

Well, this one I actually think we did three years after the first one. It's just by the time we actually have had the results completed. So the surveys were three years apart, but we're not going to be able to get the results to the employees until it's done. The first time we did it was in 2023, 2022. I think it was 2021. Yeah. we released it yeah it was at the it was at the tail end of uh the pandemic um that was the first time we did it oh so this was this is the first follow-up survey yes um doing a we just felt like doing it every other year feels like a lot um doing three or four years maybe gives a little bit of time for us to actually see meaningful progress but that's why we chose to do three or four years yeah just and you probably know this but like for contacts uh like you know where i work or uh

The place I worked before, we do one every year. And it's a lot more people also. And the results come out in about two weeks or so. So, yeah. And then you can change fast. So I would suggest...

I think a couple of thoughts on that. I think so we don't have enough internal staff to handle this on our own. So we use a consultant. So there's a significant cost associated with it. So that's one consideration that we do. These are not inexpensive studies to do. And so that's one of the reasons why we Probably have decided not to do it annually. And then just the staff capacity as well. We could consider doing that internally, but because this is only the second time we've done it, we need to set a standard test. So even this one compared to the last one changed a little bit. Once we have a standard test, then it's probably easier to do more quickly. But this time we had to kind of change. So I don't know, Eunice or Simone, if you want to add anything to that.

Yeah, I'll also say, too, one of the things we asked the consultants to do was to create smaller variations of the surveys to do more pulse ones ever so often. It was a recommendation, so we still have to think through what that would even look like, as Robbie suggested, just from a capacity perspective. But also understanding it takes about a year to work with a consultant and get all the materials and things aggregated and then how we're going to communicate it out. So it would be... really impossible without a lot of people involved to get that out pretty consistently as well too. And they give recommendations sometimes as well. So you also want to see those things come to fruition over time.

My mind is blown.

You good?

Yes, I'm good. Thanks.

Councillor Salgado.

Yeah, thanks for the presentation. I'd say you knocked off the rest pretty quickly. So I've been doing this sort of work and adjacent work for a long time and so one of the things that I really like about your presentation is that you highlighted the number of respondents right in surveys because I remember early on that was one of the challenges is getting people to actually respond to these surveys so the fact that you have that many people responding is a is a victory on its own so I'm glad that you highlighted that and then I'm glad that Robbie brought up the practical actual change that he's seen in the meetings, I look at that as culture change, you know, that you're doing. It's really hard to track and measure your work as an outcome, right? So that's how I see it. So I see it as very successful. I would welcome, you know, I know that you work with us as a council on like how to work with each other. But I think, you know, the council could benefit from some DEI training around decision making and votes. So I would welcome if you have extra time or I don't know if other counselors are interested in that, that we could have some time committed to that. But if you find yourself with extra time and nobody else is interested, just would be happy to hear what ideas you have for the council, because there's a lot of things that we decide on. I think having this sort of consciousness and ability to analyze decisions through a different lens is gonna be very beneficial for the future of our city. That's all I have to say. Good job.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Are there any other questions? Councillor Sinclair?

Thank you so much for the presentation. This is wonderful. In going back and looking at the chart that broke down the community-based organizations and then the ice impacts to rental assistance programs, Yeah, thank you so much. In this one, it says 10 organizations. I've been thinking a lot about, specifically, there's a couple of downtown grassroots organizations that are nonprofits, the Westside Career Resource Center and then the Hillsborough Farmers Market. I'm wondering if there's an opportunity to further build relationships with those two organizations to feel more a part of the city and understanding what the needs are and how to be a better partner, and to further understand what the needs are for those specific nonprofits, because they do provide both resources and access in different ways within the community. And then for the community-focused funding for the ICE response and the eviction prevention partnership agreements, What is, I know we've talked about this, but I know there's so much that comes on throughout the year. The annual reports, when will council be able to see, I know that it's online, there's aspects online, but a breakdown of how that funding?

So we have a staff report that we can provide, perhaps in the advice and information section for a future meeting. All of the eviction prevention funding has been utilized, but we do have statistics along with that information. So we can provide that.

That would be wonderful for council to have the opportunity to look that over. Because I know there's still room for the community to further understand how to access in the time of emergency when things happen within our community. Because I feel like we started out so good in in communicating what the funding is, what it's used for. And then when it got to the community-based organizations, there was a breakdown of how the community is able to gain accessibility to those resources and how they qualify. And I just think there's a little bit of work we can do in that area. But thank you for allowing me to ask. Yeah, for sure.

Any other questions? OK, I have a few. So you mentioned the Equity Leadership Council, and you said it's made up of people from each department. And then you said the council is two to three people. And I think you, were you meaning two to three people from each department? Yeah, from each department. And how big is the council about? If we have two to three, we're probably close to like 30-ish. Okay, thank you. I want to say thanks for the work that you've done around the iSpeak. I've gotten some great feedback where people feel that they could come and- Awesome. And- either online or in person be included. So I want to say thanks. And I did want to ask somewhat similar to what Councillor Sinclair was asking about the ICE response. I understood You were talking about 1.3 million here. I understood that we got out the door about $750,000 to community-based organizations, but I understood that this was prior to ICE, that there was other monies that went out prior to ICE, the ICE response as well?

Yes. So the 10 organizations who received almost 960,000, that was a combination of ARPA funding that came from the city of 900,000 and then funding that came from Beaverton. So we partnered on that.

Okay.

And then so that's that funding that was distributed probably to a little over two, two and over the course of two years, starting about two and a half years ago, maybe three years now.

Okay. And you did say ARPA. I apologize. So in addition to these funds, we also put out $750,000. Is that right? To community-based organizations to help them respond and to help people respond to the ice impacts. Is that correct?

Yes.

Or is that $400,000 included?

I think the middle $200,000 would be included in your $750,000 number that you just included. Sorry, this is a lot clearer. This is really focused on community engagement. So it's not really focused on the ICE response. But we can get you a separate table that shows here's all the money that went out for ICE. That was That was, I believe, closer to $900,000 in total in ICE response. But yeah, these kind of bring in different areas of how we supported community engagement efforts in the city as well. In general. Yeah.

Okay, thanks. Because I thought it was separate, and it sounds like maybe it's the $200,000 is a part of it. But do we know of any other city that's provided that much funding?

Not that I'm aware of.

for this or for ICE.

The county invested quite a bit of money. When we did the ARPA multi-jurisdictional community engagement work, they actually initially, when we contracted, provided $600,000 towards that work. So I can't speak to the level of investment. So I don't want to make an inaccurate statement.

That's fair. I was just wondering how the other municipalities stacked up and how they were responding as well. I've heard varying opinions. levels of, not donations, but investment that they've made. So, okay. And then we do have some time, so I would love to hear a toolkit story. You said you had a toolkit story, several of them, and I'd love to hear.

I just have one.

Sorry, I'm hitting the wrong button. We're good.

I was like, what's happening? So I'm just going to read it again. This is a story that Marcus had shared. You all know Robin Strawn, our sustainability and resiliency manager. So she had partnered with the economic and community development folks to put on Bike Hillsboro event. um so base they ended up using the equity aid tool and one of the takeaways that they had and this is a quote or what they put on there we will develop a communications plan and make sure that outreach materials registration information maps and wayfinding instructions for the event are provided in at least english and spanish or use graphics instead of words to ensure that most community members can understand how to participate so again that equity aid tool was really helping them to think outside of the box of things that they normally do. Typically a person would either just put signs up in English, put them in Spanish, but then also thinking about, oh, what does it look like to have signage that is universal as well too? And then they said when the event actually happened, it turned out to be a multilingual, multicultural event with more than three times that attendees that they had originally imagined. This small adjustment helped to reduce barriers, which may have encouraged more folks to feel welcome to come and participate. So, yeah.

Thank you so much for that story. And it wasn't a setup, but I actually did bike Hillsboro with my family. And I saw that. I witnessed that. I heard it. It was incredible. And so that's a testament to the inclusion piece of it. So thank you very much for sharing that.

That's awesome.

Excellent.

Mayor, would you mind if I share my own story as well?

Robbie, if you'd like to share a story, go ahead. Story time.

So this one, this might be my favorite. It's not specific to the equity toolkit. This one is specific to the community engagement framework that we have. Our employees put different programs and projects. They're especially large projects that we're going to be undertaking as a city It's a very significant amount of work, multiple pages, several questions that really make you question and think about how we're going to engage the community. And my favorite one happened, I don't know, maybe it was four or five months ago. It was after we got very clear direction from the council regarding data centers and steps we needed to take. And so we were, as staff, wanting to move very quickly. We got to that first meeting. We set up a big meeting internally internally. And we're setting up these things. And it was Rachel Marvel. I'm going to give her a lot of credit. Rachel Marvel from planning, who's amazing. She, her and Dan Diaz, actually, they both said, we need, we need a minute to be able to put this through our community engagement framework. And so we did. We took a few extra days and they spent a lot of time putting it together. And then in our next meeting, they walked us through every single step. Here's how the impacts, you know, here's who this is going to impact. You know, it was amazing and it was a good example for me. Sometimes we have to slow down a little bit, right, to do it the right way. But it was really rewarding. Again, to Counselor Salgado's comment, it was a great example of something that's happening internally to the organization today. exactly how we want it to happen. And it wasn't me. We were trying to move fast. And it was our staff that was like, wait a minute, we need to do this. And it was totally worth it. So that was one of my favorite stories.

Thanks, Robbie. I appreciate that. It reminds me of the saying, if you want to go fast, go alone. And if you want to go far, go together. So thank you. Thank you so much for the briefing. We really appreciate it. Did you have anything else?

I would just like to give a really big nod to Eunice and Marcus. I get to work with both of them on their projects. And really, they have initiatives that cross the entire city. And I hope that that is clear in Eunice's presentation tonight. But it's everything. I just went on our internal website. web page and DEI has its own section and we're loading equity toolkits so people can look at other people's examples. Our employee resource groups are there. She has a newsletter that goes out generally quarterly. about quarterly to staff so that they're aware of the resources that exist as well as actions that we're taking and so that there's visibility. And I think that 93% of staff who will support initiatives that a lot of this is trust-built and Marcus and Eunice have done an amazing job of building trust within the organization and within our community. So yeah, I just want to thank you, nod to you.

Let's give Eunice a hand, right? And Marcus. Shout out to Marcus. Excellent. Thank you so much. It's 643. We'll convene in the auditorium for a council meeting at 7. Thanks so much. And welcome to the September 15th, 2026 City Council meeting. Thank you for joining us this evening. For translation services, please use the QR code on the poster on the left hand side of the room or on the front page of the agenda. Before we get started, I want to begin by setting an expectation for everyone. We will not tolerate disruptions that preclude the council from being able to conduct its business and to hear from the community. This is deemed as a first general warning for all attendees. Any person who disrupts the meeting will be provided with one individualized warning, and any further disruptions will result in that individual being asked to watch the meeting from the conference room, across the hall, or asked to leave the building altogether. So let's keep the space welcoming, inclusive, and accessible for everyone. And to avoid disruption, we ask that all comments be shared respectfully during public comment. To begin this meeting, I invite you to 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.

Aubrey, may I have a roll call?

Mayor Pace? Here. Here. Councillor Harris?

Here.

Councillor Allcare? Here. Councillor Ambry?

Here.

Councillor Sinclair? Here. Councillor Case? Here. And Councillor Salgado?

Thank you. I will move to item two, presentations and appointments. Our first presentation will be provided by Beth Grazer regarding the Hillsborough School District 2026 bond. Welcome Beth. We also have Katie Ryan and we'll join Beth and also Erica Lopez. Welcome from the school board. Make sure you hit that button in the center of the console. There you go, you are live now. There you go.

Thank you so much, Mayor Pace and counselors. Pleased to be here tonight. Again, my name is Beth Grazer. I am the Chief Communications Officer for the Hillsborough School District. And tonight, I'm here to talk a little bit about our upcoming November 2026 capital construction bond. And I've got the clicker. There we go. There. So I won't be taking you through every single slide. I did provide hard copies for you all so that you can reference this information at your leisure. Just wanted to get through some of the highlights and then provide some time for my colleagues to speak and for you to ask questions if you have them. So just some wonderful fast facts about our amazing district. We had the highest on time graduation rate ever since we've been using the cohort graduation rate calculation over 90%. So we're super proud of that. And as I'm sure you've all heard, A regional excellent career and college pathways program and career technical education opportunities for our students that provide them with real world opportunities while they're still in high school. And it's a true model for others in the region. a commitment to fiscal responsibility um that we take very seriously spend every tax dollar we get with a lot of fidelity and because we're part of the community as well so unfortunately under normal school funding through the state school fund we do not receive money for capital expenditures any kind of infrastructure needs we may have That is incumbent upon local communities to pass separate bonds if those are things that they want to fund. So the money we get each year to operate our schools really is for the general operating expenses, paying teachers, buying incidental materials, and So forth. So when we have roofs that fail or HVAC systems that are at their end of life or other infrastructure needs, the only real mechanism we have to take care of those things is bypassing a general obligation bond. And those things have to be items that have a useful life of more than one year. So things like roofs or large building systems, even technology, those types of things fit within the definition of capital expenditures. So we have a lot of ways that we determine what our needs are district-wide. A lot of that information comes through facility assessments, which we just went through a comprehensive facility assessment by the Oregon Department of Education last year. They went through and assessed all of our facilities and gave us thorough reports on those. Of course, we have our own facilities department that deals with hundreds and hundreds of work order requests every year and they know which fire panels are consistently alarming and which systems they're having to repair over and over, so our work order requests give us a lot of good information about that. There are regulations that change from time to time, be those seismic regulations or lighting regulations that are passed by our state legislature. And then of course, end of life or replacement schedules. Our last bond was passed in 2017. And at that time, we were able to do a lot of great work across the district. And there were some things though, that even at that dollar amount in 2017, we weren't able to get to, but at the time they weren't kind of at a critical point of need. But now nine years later, a lot of those things have risen to the top of the list and are things that we now need to take care of to be good stewards of our community's amazing investment in us so just to give you a little sense of the hillsborough school district so we serve almost 18 000 students across 37 schools and two alternative programs we have 42 buildings and more than 2.7 million square feet of internal space that we maintain and over 550 acres of grounds that are incorporated there. Over 19 competition fields, five tracks, 25 tennis courts, of course the fencing that goes around all of those spaces. We have a bus fleet of approximately 200 buses that travel 11,000 plus miles every day, taking students to and from school and to and from extracurricular activities. and we serve almost 16,000 meals a day. So that means our buses, our kitchens are also getting a lot of wear and tear in addition to our school buildings and extracurricular spaces. So for this upcoming bond, we are looking at ways that we can maintain our bond Aging schools, making sure that we have strong safety and security systems in place to ensure that our students and staff and any visitors to the school are kept safe. And then providing the modern learning spaces that our students deserve to prepare them for their next steps after high school. So when we took a look at what I like to call the top of the funnel of all of our district needs right now, that represented approximately $617 million worth of projects that if we did everything on our list, that's what we would need. And that... takes into account the things that I mentioned previously, as well as things like improving our ADA compliance or Title IX compliance, making sure that we're leveraging opportunities to unlock additional sources of funding, be that from the awesome grant at the state level or incentives to replace all of our lighting to be more energy efficient, things like that. So we pulled together a cross-functional team of approximately 50 staff members, parents, students, community members, functional area experts to get together and learn about all of this need that we have in the Hillsborough School District and help us make some hard decisions about what we felt like we could responsibly ask community members to support in terms of this bond. So one of the things that's always paramount in our mind is what is this going to do to our taxpayers? What is it going to be in terms of a rate? And our philosophy has been in the past that we like to try to keep the bond tax rate, which is different than the general education tax rate. So we like to keep that bond rate relatively stable because that provides some predictability for our property owners. And indeed, with the 2017 bond, at that time, our rate was approximately $2.24 per thousand. So when we asked voters to support that bond, we said, hey, we're able to raise this money. And because of other expiring or paid off debt, we estimate being able to keep that tax rate the same. Well, this time around, because our community has experienced a lot of growth in the last nine years, that rate has been declining since 2017, which is great for all of us who pay property taxes. We like to see that. But something we weren't necessarily prepared for was a very large amount of previously abated property that came onto the tax rolls from Intel, approximately $7 billion worth of of previously abated property came onto the rolls, which made that tax rate drop pretty precipitously. So again, great for us taxpayers, not so great when we had been thinking about a rate that was about $1.97 per thousand, which is what it was in 2020. And then it took a drop down to about $1.52 last year. So in looking to build this bond, we didn't want to base it off of kind of a one-year anomaly. And smarter minds in the financial world also counseled us that we could probably expect some pretty aggressive depreciation. So what's a responsible way to look at kind of the time horizon of this bond? So we said, okay, let's take a look at the average of rates since the last bond passed. And that average, since 2017, the average of rates paid $2.02 per 1,000. we landed on with our Bond Development Committee a rate of approximately $1.84 per thousand. So keeping those rates even lower than the historical average would allow us to raise $430 million, which we felt was... a responsible and kind of a more modest ask of our taxpayers, like not going for the full 617, which likely would have taken tax rates back up to up or perhaps even above $2 per thousand. But, you know, we felt like we could responsibly request the 430 with a tax rate of $1.84 and try to keep those rates kind of consistent, kind of the low end of consistent over time, which you can see in those golden rod bars there. I know that's difficult to understand. It's definitely a more challenging message than rates are gonna stay the same, but the reality is that's not what has happened in this last year with the amount of taxable value on our rolls. So again, 617 million in need. $430 million what we felt like we could responsibly raise. That left $187 million gap, so we had to make some decisions about what ended up in our final proposal. We made those choices by keeping in mind several guiding principles, which you can see a subset of here. Definitely keeping students at the center of that conversation, looking for how can we best be stewards of the community's investment, things that will have longevity and give us positive impacts for students far into the future. Here you can see a high level breakdown of how we're proposing that those bond dollars be spent. There is a lot more information about this on our website, hillsborough-bond.org, including an interactive dashboard where you can pick by project type, you can pick by site, you can pick by stage of the bond, early, mid-cycle, or late. It really just provides you with a lot of information on the planned implementation of this bond if it were to pass over the next five years. So we did two rounds of polling. This was a snapshot, just one of the snapshots from the first round of polling we did in late February. that showed that the more people learned about this bond, the more favorable they felt about it. These were the same types of results we got in August, just with slightly softer support than what you see up here, which probably isn't all that surprising because a lot has happened between February and and August, you know, a lot of geopolitical uncertainty, high gas prices, and of course, any time you have a taxation measure on the ballot, and the closer you get to election timeframe, that support can soften. So, but we still, certainly feel really good about it. And the statement about information is the effort's best friend still holds true. So again, here are some of the things you can expect to find if you go to our website. Along with a very extensive FAQ, if you haven't had a chance to check that out, we have answered a lot of questions that we have received through the course of building this bond and then having it out and available for the public to view. Those questions and answers are available in both English and Spanish. So here's just some key takeaways, some of the top points, and of course the timeline. We are all the way down to... the last bullet point, we've taken care of all the other bullets and now it's just the informational effort between now and election day on November 3rd. So I'm happy to either take some questions now or allow my colleagues who are here to share a little bit more of the advocacy side of this effort, whichever way you'd like to go.

Great. Thank you, Beth. Thank you. Do we have any questions for Beth, who is in charge of comms? And then we also have Board Chair Katie Ryan and Board Member Erica Lopez. So, what? Did I mess up? Former board member. I'm sorry, Erica. I thought you were still serving. But you are still serving because you're right here. So, thank you. Okay. Councillor Embry.

Thank you. Thank you, Ed. I love the dashboard. I played with it for a bit. I liked it. So has the 2017 bond, that has expired?

So it hasn't fully expired, but the way we build, because we repay bonds over 20 years typically, and there are some planned reductions in the rate so that we can build in these opportunities to pass new bonds and kind of keep that rate stable. So we have paid off. enough of the 2017 bond to affect a rate drop that would happen next fall if we were not to pass this bond.

And then I was wondering, you talked about the SIP properties coming on the property tax roll. So I'm assuming that's something that you're working with the city finance as well to know when that would happen? Because the SIP programs are, the SIP and the enterprise zone, they do have a cadence.

Yeah, I think this Intel one just kind of snuck up on us. We weren't really planning it. But I think we're so now dialed in to... other entities receiving abatements. We're dialed on when those are on, off. Yeah, we're good.

Okay, very good. And so has that been taken into account for this bond?

So when we ran, had our external consultant run these estimations, like it was kind of point in time reality last December. And so it took into account all of the existing abatements that are in place and so the way that would that the way that would play out is if this bond were to pass you know we are estimating that the rate that would be seen not this fall because that's when the election is but next fall when those when those property tax bills come due is that the rate would be a $1.84 and that would likely, I mean, depending on what happens with growth in the community, that may start to naturally decline right away. We would have to see. But the way that would work is that, so, you've got a series of abatements that are already in play, right? So within the first two to three years of the 20-year bond repayment cycle, you would have some of those existing abatements starting to expire, and at which time that valuation would come back on the tax rolls, and then they would share in the repayment of those bonds along with other taxpayers. So the effect it would have is lowering the rate for everyone. To my knowledge, any abatements have to be on new property that has never been on the tax rolls, which says to me that the 184, we shouldn' t exceed that. The only way it would go from here is down with more valuation coming onto the tax rolls.

Very cool. And then I had some other questions, which I was just curious.

Yeah, and I'm prepared for those because they were sent to me. So if you would like to ask them, I'm ready.

Oh, OK. Yeah, I was curious about the five-year, how that is calculated. And do we know how many students never graduate? I mean, is that something that?

Yeah, so the cohort graduation rate takes into account students who enter ninth grade for the very first time. And what's different about the way that it's done now is that because everybody has to abide by the cohort graduation rate, so even if a student starts their ninth grade year in a different district, that doesn't matter it still counts if they transfer into our district like if they move halfway through their freshman year or their sophomore year and now they're in hillsborough school district they are taken out of the denominator of their previous district they're added to our denominator so we always have a count in our denominator of first time ninth grade to you know, the end of your senior year, basically. And that four-year cohort, that's how our four-year grad rate is calculated. And then if it takes you an additional year, then you're in that either five-year grad rate or five-year completion rate. So for the five-year completion rate, not only graduation, they also count something called the Postgraduate Scholars Program completion. You can have an extended diploma, and that counts. an adult high school diploma or a GED. So that five year completion takes into account those different pathways to kind of high school completion. After that point, the state of Oregon no longer tracks students. But we, as the Hillsborough School District, we continue to track and try to help those students attain graduation up until they turn 21. But that's a much more like hand, like it's a hand-pulled and cross-referenced list that we just manage on a one-on-one basis. And we do everything that we can to keep track of those students and to try to connect them with opportunities to attain graduation because it's important to us. Thank you.

You good?

I'm good. Thank you. Of course.

Councillor Harris, then Councillor Sinclair.

Hopefully this is quick, Beth. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for the presentation. Of course. Will there be a bond oversight committee after this passes? And could you explain to people what that is in case they're concerned about what happens with all this money? Thanks.

Yes. There will be a bond oversight committee. That committee has not been composed yet. And typically in the past, the way we've handled it is that we have made that opportunity available so folks can kind of self-select, folks can nominate people who they think would be good. And then there's a determination made about kind of a manageable number of folks, probably somewhere between, you know, eight to 15 people maybe that are going to be part of this bond oversight committee and then they would meet most likely monthly to get reports from our owners representative group and that's you know a construction management overseer who who could give reports about every single project where it's at how much money's been spent and any other kind of due diligence type of information that they feel they need to stay well informed about the process of the bond and making sure we're spending dollars as we promised. And that would stay in place through the close out of the bond. Yep.

Councillor Sinclair.

Thank you, Mayor. Beth, thank you so much for the presentation. Of course. The details were great. And as you say here on the presentation, information is the campaign's best friend. That's accurate. The question I have is I've heard numerous inquiries from residents concerned about the budget aspect under safety and security and strengthening that. And the question I've heard repeatedly is the $10 million budget on cameras. residents want to understand is that associated with um automatic automated license plate readers um as well or ai power cameras and so that is a question that i've heard repeatedly and i have reached out to board members

yes inquiry and and it's come to me as well and i really appreciate the opportunity to clear up any confusion there is around cameras because any kind of camp there is absolutely zero nexus between any kind of surveillance there's no license plate readers there's no no surveillance of people on our campus for the purpose of turning them over to any sort of authority. It really is all about keeping our own students and staff and school property safe. So, it's you know if there's a fight in the hallway maybe maybe camera footage would help determine what happened and and kind of get to the bottom of things that happen within the schools that's that's the vast majority of our cameras or to give us line of sight on who's trying to get into our buildings so that we can verify you know who who actually has access to our buildings again it's it's it's a safety measure for us that footage is kept it's a closed circuit system it's kept locally by us it's not kept in the cloud it is not you know accessible by any other law enforcement agencies or anything like that. So, and it's honestly, it's completely against our values to be putting any barriers in the way of making people, all people feel very welcome in our schools. We want our schools to be safe and welcoming spaces for absolutely everyone, regardless of their immigration status, their race, their gender, their any other identities. So,

Yeah, so Beth, thank you so much. What I hear you saying is absolutely no. Absolutely no. There's no AI cameras associated with the safety and security of this budget. That's right. Thank you so much. Of course.

Okay, I have a couple questions. Of course. First of all, thank you for the briefing. Yes. I appreciate it. And this one's for Board Chair Ryan. So we've heard that we have the school bond coming up in November. And many people in Hillsboro have kids that have gone to school in Hillsboro or they are in school. How would somebody help the bond?

Well, thank you very much, Mayor Pace. That's a great question. You've heard about the Hillsborough School Bond Measure, Measure 34355, from our esteemed employee of the school district, Beth Grazer, and that was the factual information, as you noted. For me, as a community member, elected official, and also co-chair, along with Erica Lopez of the Bond Campaign, I would like to say that, yes, I'm advocating in favor of this measure, And I'm very excited to talk to the community about that. So the best way for people to help is to visit our website, which is yesforhillsboroschools.com. And there you would have opportunity to work with the advocacy team. So these are not school district employees, but they're community members, other elected officials, business owners, parents, all of the people who really are invested in this bond measure passing so that our school district can be able to afford all these improvements. I'll also add to what Beth said. Bond measure projects were identified through a thorough community feedback driven development process, which was conducted very publicly and transparently. The capital campaign is specifically targeted to not increase the tax rate that working families are accustomed to paying because it will fill in where a previous bond, older one, is expiring. And also, we've completed prior bond projects on time and on budget. And as Councillor Harris noted, there will be a bond oversight committee. Thank you for that question because we do want to be extremely accountable to the community as the projects are being completed. So putting forth this bond measure to the Hillsborough School District community was unanimously supported by the school board and we are proud to say we have the full endorsement of your council as well. Thank you all very much for taking the time to listen to us over the past few months of the summer as we've been describing what these projects will mean to our community. So thank you for allowing us to demonstrate how it's going to help our students. We appreciate your support and most importantly, your vote. And we appreciate this crucial opportunity to really secure, repair, and prepare. our schools and our students for the future.

Thank you. Thank you. I have found, Erica, did you want to say something?

I was just going to add, if you go to our website where Katie said, you can click on our, there's a button to volunteer. So we need as much help as possible in getting the word out as Councillor Sinclair said information is our best campaign. And so if people in the community are passionate about our schools and big supporters, please sign up to volunteer. We're canvassing on the 26th of this month at Jackson Elementary, South Meadows Middle School. And we're going to have our campaign canvassing kick off. So we would appreciate people signing up. Also donations, you can find a donation button on our website. We appreciate any help that we can get.

Okay, and could you please repeat the website? It's yes?

Yes, for hillsboroughschools.com.

Yesforhillsboroughschools.com and at that website you can sign up to volunteer, you can donate, and then you can also go to the canvassing, get information about the canvassing event on September 26th at South Meadows. Yes. And what time is that canvassing event? Do we have that? 10 AM. 10 AM, September 26th. Okay, thank you. And then I have seen in the past in other locations where when voting yes for a bond or no for a bond, it can be quite confusing. Yes means you don't want the bond or no means you do, right? And so I just want to be clear when we see it on our ballots, if we did want to support the bond, yes means yes to the bond. Is that right? Yes, it does. Thank you very much. I just want to make sure. All right, thanks so much for your time tonight. Really appreciate it. Okay, next up is an update from Washington County Sheriff's Office. Sheriff Massey is unable to be here this evening, so we'll be hearing from Chief Deputy McCray and Patrol Commander Jordan Weston. Thank you. Please be respectful to everyone in the space. Thank you very much. Chief Deputy McCray and Patrol Commander Weston, welcome and take it away.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Members. I first want to start out by The sheriff wanted to express her apologies for not being here in person. She's out at some training. I am not as fluid as the sheriff is in presenting this information, but I will do my very best. I will refer to my notes to make sure I cover everything. And at the end, we'll answer any questions you may have. I will start it out, then I will pass it over to Commander Weston, who will talk about our specialty teams, and then I'll close it out at the very end. So thank you again for the opportunity of providing annual public safety update. Public safety in Washington County depends... on strong partnership among the cities, as well as the sheriff's office and the community. Tonight's focus is on how countywide services supports not only Hillsboro, but the businesses and entire county. The sheriff's office serves the county of more than 600,000 people and operates services that benefits the city, including the city of Hillsboro. We're the primary law enforcement agency for unincorporated area, providing contract policing for partner communities and managing the only county jail. We provide countywide services that support every law enforcement agency in the county, even the cities with their own police department. Many critical public safety services are provided at the county level.

Good evening. We want to start by giving you an overview. Some of this is fairly elementary, but it's a good foundation for what the county sheriff's office really provides the entirety of Washington County and its residents. So as you can see from this graphic here, the community is at the top. that is what local policing exists to do and the safety infrastructure that undergirds all of that is something we are happy to provide and we in some cases are required by law to provide and so statute tells the sheriff it' s got to do a few things that city police don' t uh... one of the most important things to understand is that uh... local policing with whether it's contract cities whether it's the city of hillsborough or county policing in unincorporated washington county is a cooperative effort uh... whether it's mutual aid or uh... whether it's just back filling uh... needs that we have uh... we are working kind of as one team on the road uh... when it comes to police work in the community But underneath that, the countywide public safety infrastructure, we operate the county's only jail. So statute tells us we've got to do a few things that the other police departments don't have to do. We have to have a jail. We have to have search and rescue. We have to have civil service. One of the things that is interesting about even where we live in Oregon is one of the very first legal constructs to stand up was a probate court, not the police. Because we knew that even the pioneers, as it were, had a difficult time figuring out what to do in court processes. That becomes a very important part of what the Sheriff's Office provides the citizenry of Washington County. When court decisions are made, who enforces them? That falls usually to us. You can see a couple of other things here as well. Air support, marine patrol, these are teams that operate kind of uniquely within Washington County. In our waterways, Hag Lake, of course, is the largest one, but we developed, as we'll talk about here in a second, some ability to do something in swift water, shallow water, which we did not have the ability in years past to do that we can provide in areas of the Tualatin, et cetera. so next slide please we want to walk through a couple of uh... just idea points to connect uh... what it is that we do and provide to the citizens of hillsborough here countywide coordination in investigations uh... our patrols and our specialty teams we are going to take a deeper dive into those specialty teams uh... what they are and what they do our training and readiness We operate so many interagency teams because the depth of the bench is really helpful, particularly as some incidents go larger scale, the ability to help one another becomes profoundly useful. Our ability to train together is critical. Our technology investment, just like training, has to be integrated across the entirety of the system, otherwise it doesn't work very well. And then the flexible countywide response. All right, so moving into some of our special teams, you can see the right photo, our search and rescue kids. It's the largest youth program that we have. Our search and rescue team has become very relied upon in the region. We operate cooperatively to find missing people, to facilitate large events with lots of people. We do that a couple of other ways, which we will touch on as well. But increasing the potential for peaceful resolution is our goal at the end of the day. If we accomplish that, we have done what we intended to do. We have complex environments in our communities. We have complex incidents, and they need the tools and the personnel and the training to match. So our countywide special teams. Here's kind of a bulleted list of some of the teams that we have. This is not exhaustive. These are just the main ones that you might find interesting as they are integrated across the entire county. The air support unit. We operate an aircraft in Washington County that is one of four that serves the whole region. Clackamas County has another one. The city of Portland operates two others. They provide overwatch and the ability to get eyes in the sky on events that we are that we are monitoring from the air. They are 4,000 feet or above, so their cone of ability to see is much, much larger. So they're virtually on scene when a large event happens. That's very helpful. Our crash analysis reconstruction team, we're actually going to touch on, I think, in the next slide. So I'll move through that for the moment. Our criminal apprehension team, that is a dedicated unit that goes out and finds dangerous wanted people. in a different way. Rather than uniform patrol, they're able to find these people in safer ways. The Crisis Negotiation Unit, this team is comprised of about 25 negotiators. They come from nine different agencies throughout Washington County, the FBI being one of them. The FBI is very skilled at training crisis negotiators. They literally wrote the book. And so our Crisis Negotiation Unit is comprised of professionals that try to bring complex, volatile situations to peaceful resolutions. That team even employs has a clinician on the team that advises them in the mental health situations that we run across there. Moving on to our K-9 unit, most people are familiar with how that works, but that is a county-wide service. They respond to all manner of calls all the way across our jurisdiction. Marine Patrol, like I mentioned, we have boats at Hag Lake. That would be our main operation for Marine Patrol. However, we purchased a new asset this last season, which now allows us to operate in shallow water and swift water rescue as well, which was a component that was missing, so we're happy to have that. The mental health response team, this has been an important team in the last few years. The important thing about the mental health response team, we will touch on very specifically in a couple of slides. Search and rescue, we spoke about briefly. And the tactical negotiations team, people would commonly know that as like SWAT, but that would be special operations with tactical considerations to bring incidents to safe resolutions where possible. And then lastly, mobile field force. Mobile field force is a large group. It deals with very large populace incidents. Anything that affects a lot of people right now, you're going to see a team like this. These teams deal with disorder and serious disorder, but not because we expect disorder or serious disorder, but because we, by the time we get to disorder, we are unprepared. This is the team that is prepared for large-scale events to not allow them to get that far to preserve order, to preserve public safety. Next slide, please. Okay, first up to highlight here is the CART team, the Crash Analysis Reconstruction Team. This is an inter-agency, county-wide team. Sometimes it even operates outside of the county cooperatively when needed. It reconstructs complex crash scenes. If any of you have family members or have been involved in a serious crash, you know how complicated these events can be. This team provides an exceptional service in an area that's sorely needed to reconstruct bad crashes with clarity and expertise, not only in testifying, but piecing these cases back together so the truth can be known and we can hold people accountable and exonerate innocent people. The key technology, though, is expensive in this world. You can imagine that all the car makers that read the little information scanners on their cars are proprietary. You're probably as shocked as I am, but that is the case. And that is expensive to keep up with all of the changing software adaptability with that and the 3D scanning technology that we now have is essential to solving some of these crimes and bringing these cases to a sound resolution. The mental health response team. This has been really front and center for us now for the last number of years. It is an important team. This represented a significant change in police work that those of us in this business for a long time were used to. It brings a master's level mental health clinician in partnership with a specifically trained deputy so that they can bring crisis help to the person in crisis at the point of crisis. So it is an incredibly useful team. It has undoubtedly reduced our need to use force in many, many situations. Some of that things not happening are really hard to capture numerically because we don't know what would have happened. But it is anecdotally, if nothing else, been a very, very effective team at reducing our need to use force. The approach here uses training in crisis intervention. A lot of training we could go into that's very specific to these teams is suicide prevention, crisis intervention, de-escalation training that they get that is above and beyond what the average gets. And good collaboration with hospitals and mental health providers is essential to the success of this team. They've been able to accomplish that very well. The mobile field force. Mobile field force, we are used to in our history seeing these long monolithic lines of people in hats and bats that are standing in line with incited crowds and sort of up and against crowds of people. This essentially is not the way that mobile field force functions anymore. The Oregon legislature a few years ago probably got this right, and we really support it. And they basically told us through legislation, hey, you are no longer allowed to just deal with crowds in mass. You have to find people that are breaking the law or harming others and deal with them specifically. And I think that's right. And so our teams are actually reformed and trained differently now than they used to be in smaller teams that go out and are able to neutralize and address very specific problems within a crowd while facilitating First Amendment protections or all of those things that our citizenry is afforded and we are going to support. And so that's what this team does. And it does it very differently, as I described to you just now. There's a much deeper dive we could take in terms of the changes in policy and protocol, but we're very proud to say this is a very transparent team, and we're proud of the work that it does. So changing gears a little bit to leveraging technology. As we move into the future, we have a lot of technology that has come into the public consciousness in a big way, and we're aware of that. From our body-worn cameras to in-car video, these things have been around for a long time, but have only really moved down to Main Street here in the last few years of our existence, even for those of us that have been in policing for a long time. There's a pilot program right now. Drone is a first responder. You may have heard about that. Using a drone to respond to certain types of calls where it can typically beat the arrival of an officer by a number of minutes. Whereby we're able to catch offenders that normally would have already fled the scene. or whereby we're able to get eyes on a scene and understand what resources are actually necessary there. Drone's First Responder also provides overwatch for things like fires. We looked at forest fires and different car crashes. They're very useful for those types of things. And so that pilot program is a big process that we're kind of undergoing right now, and that is in process. You can expect to hear more about that as we move into the future. License plate reader technology. License plate reader technology has been around as long as my career. It's been around over 20 years, but it really has only come back into public awareness in the last few years, and we're definitely aware of that. License plate reader technology is snapshots of license plates and we believe that we can leverage it to solve crimes and sometimes violent crimes in ways that we otherwise could not detect and apprehend criminals. So we understand that there is a lot of feelings around this issue and we respect all of those thoughts but we really intend to leverage this technology to hold offenders accountable and that is our purpose in using this. Exploring AI-assisted report writing. If you may have heard a term called Draft 1. Draft 1 is a program by which we're able to write police reports based on real body-worn camera footage and the testimony of the officer, the actual report of the officer. This we're still in a pilot phase of and we're working with and auditing heavily and making sure that we understand how this is working. So it's in partnership with the DA's office and the pilot has been very successful. The report accuracy is increasing and that is a very good thing. So we manage Washington County's only jail. We referenced that before. The Sheriff's Office is responsible in every county in our state to manage jail. We have the only one. It was built in 1998, which makes it actually kind of new compared to some, but it's a quarter century old now. It serves every law enforcement agency in our county. It houses all of the adults in custody that are awaiting trial or serving sentences. The jail typically... You can think about a county jail as serving any sentence 365 days or less, but the reality of that is there are a lot of nuances where we're maintaining people for much longer, whether they're retrying cases, whether they've been remanded on older cases, that kind of thing. And so the jail is 572 beds. It's a big facility, but it's the second smallest in Oregon per capita. We are a very populous county, and we don't have the jail to match by size comparative to the others in the state. And so that's something we're working on right now in conversation is what do we do about the future so that this jail is serving the community appropriately. What happens after arrest from the incident, police respond, the arrest, the jail is an important component of that process. That is how we make sure we're identifying people, make sure we're getting them further along into their court process, and ideally eventually back out into the community. Managing today, planning for the future, what a headache. Today, we are hard at work on a few things. One of those things in the jail, as you can see the inset photo is of pod two, but suicide prevention improvements. You know that we deal with a lot of people that are in distress. We deal with people that are not able to care for themselves in ways that we can expect sometimes in the general public. So it is incumbent on us to make sure we're doing everything we can to look after the people in our care. These are human beings that we're responsible for. We have elevated second tiers there that you can see opportunities for people to harm themselves. We are working on updating the jail to prevent any ability to do that so we can keep people safe in there. Detox and stabilization, you may be aware of The fact that the county does not currently have a functioning detox center. That is a significant gap. The jail has been historically able to offer that service or operate in that way. It has not been able to for some time because of capacity issues, staffing issues, and our ability to care for people in that state. It also handles electronic home detention. So these are some pre-trial sort of alternate sanction things that we're exploring so that we can keep fewer people in custody when unnecessary. We obviously have to hang on to violent offenders and people that cannot mix well in the community. But if people don't need to be in jail and there's another way to do it, we're exploring those options. Human trafficking training. We know that in and around our country, let alone our community, these things are a present danger. And so even training our staff when they come into contact with people potentially, either victims or perpetrators, we want to have the highest training so we can detect this and interdict it where we are able. Body-worn cameras are new in the jail. We've had them on our patrol team for some time. But now they're in the jail. If you know how many cameras and things are already in the jail, there's not a place in the jail that is not under some sort of surveillance so that we can hold accountable all of the activities that are occurring there. Looking ahead, it's now 28 years old. With our continued population growth, our long-term planning, I mentioned the size of our jail. We are looking to expand the jail, and that will be a large-scale project, as you can imagine, but it will serve every community within Washington County.

So last year, the voters approved the public safety levy, showing a broad support for the public safety system. The levy supports the jail, investigations, victim services, prosecution, and other law enforcement resources. These are countywide investments, services that support communities regardless of your jurisdiction. The measure is a five year levy that began this year in 2026 at 66 cents per $1,000 assessed value, an increase from the prior 47 cents rate. In closing, public safety in Washington County works because agencies work together. We appreciate the partnership we share with Chief Coleman, the City of Hillsboro, and look forward to continuing our work together to serve this incredible community. Wherever you live within Washington County, they deserve to feel safe. And wherever you live, we serve you. Thank you for your time tonight, and we're happy to respond to any questions you may have.

Thank you for your briefing. Do we have any questions?

I have some questions.

Councillor Allcar.

Thanks for your presentation. I have a few questions. The first one, on social media, the Miranda rights. I guess I want to know if there were two officers there and this was being filmed, why the other officer didn't ask for the officer to slow down and read the Miranda rights correctly? That's one question I have. The other question is, when you arrest people and you bring them into jail, and you've mentioned how much space you have. If people are high and they come into jail, do they go into segregation?

Okay, so to go back to your first question about the Miranda rights. I believe I know what the incident you're talking about, but I don't know the details of that, so I can't speak to... All the information. I'm more than happy to look that information up and get back to you.

I would appreciate it because it's filmed.

Okay.

And it shows both officers. Thank you.

As far as taking people to jail and if they're high, and you said, do they go to segregation?

Do they go into segregation? Do you put them in the hole? Do you separate them from the rest of the population?

Just because they're under the influence?

Yes.

Not just because they're under the influence? No, ma'am.

okay they would have to exhibit behaviors requiring them to go into segregation that's correct the license plate readers you mentioned those and i'm curious about those as well as about the flock cameras and if you use them to assist ice we have a lot of community members here who are concerned about that the presence of flock and the concern about the license plate readers and i didn't go to the county fair people went to the county fair and they said there were flock cameras at the entrance so You use them, they're fixed, I'm assuming, around the city, and some that you use as a mobile unit. What would be the reason that you would need to have them at the Washington County Fair to question children and their families attending the fair?

So we use the flock cameras at the fair for safety and security. the cameras are used to help locate lost kids in one instance we did have that situation uh... to go back to do we assist ice in using flock cameras we do not so if i were to go to the fair and you caught me on flock and i wasn't doing anything except coming to the fair how long would you keep my image and where would you store it We have a contract with FLOC. I don't know the exact time frame that those images are kept, but I can find that information out for you.

Okay. And then I got, and these aren't questions that are all coming from me. These are some questions that are coming from some community members. Okay. This next one is, where does PES web go? What is that? And who has access to that?

PS Web Go is an in-house app that our computer folks that are on our staff design. They show calls for service. They show those folks that are in our custody right now with a photo. what information is that?

To show who's logged in.

Who's logged in and other law enforcement resources like domestic violence resources that officers may need, who's on our peer support team, maybe MHRT folks. So it's just law enforcement information that's available to not only the sheriff's office but other partner agencies.

Thank you. And then my last question is a report on the news that showed public defenders could not have access to the people who they were representing, and that was for, sometimes you have a lack of staffing, right? So how did that issue get resolved?

We are still working on that issue. We still have a staffing concern, but we are trying to do whatever we can as far as our AICs have tablets that they can communicate with their public defender as well. We are looking at additional ways to continue having our lobby open for visitations over time, those type of things.

Okay, I lied. I have one more. So... I just lost my train of thought. I'll wait and see if it comes back to me.

I can give you my business card. If it comes up later, feel free to email.

Okay, I would appreciate that.

Okay. Councillor Anvery and then Councillor Sinclair.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. I had a couple questions. One was just curious. Does your drone fly, can it fly in your airports? Because mine can't.

So I wanted to ask you about the cameras.

I know you don't have the information right now, but could you find out what agreements you have with with FLOC or with others as to what are the restrictions that they have in sharing with third parties. And if you have them, and if not, then are you looking into getting those agreements in place? So that would be very helpful. And I know some of these questions were sent to you. So I wanted to ask you about ICE activity. Are you seeing an increase recently? And how do you track that? Do you have like a separate code maybe? And we did, the Hillsborough Police Department, they have a pretty cool website, and I sent you the link for it, where they list all the incidents that were ICE or suspected ICE and then they update it. I was wondering if that's something that you guys are looking into or if people have asked for that.

We do not have a public-facing website that shows that information. We do track it through our calls. When a deputy clears a call, there's a a box basically to check if it was related to some sort of ICE incident. Okay. So that's how we track those. As far as are we seeing an increase, we are not. We've only received 17 reports for the sheriff's office.

Can we please be quiet while they're testifying? Okay, thank you.

Mayor, this is an issue affecting my community, the Latino community.

It's affecting the entire community and I ask people to be quiet while people are testifying.

I'm going to ask you not to interrupt me so that I can also say something to you. It's respectful of my community, and if my community is going to respond, I don't appreciate you telling them how they can respond and how they can feel about it. It's not up to you. They have to be respectful, and I believe that they have been respectful and been following your rules. I don't think that you get to tell them how to feel and how to express what they feel.

Continue.

So for 2026, we want to receive 17 reports for the sheriff's office.

So actually, I can't hear when people are laughing. And so I don't think that is respectful. If this is affecting, it is affecting everybody. It's affecting me. I'm brown. My kid goes on public transport. It affects me. When people are laughing, I can't hear, right? And if your response is laughter, that is disrespectful, that is not following the rules, and I can't hear what testimony is being given. So I would count that as two. And like that, I don't understand how that is respectful, how that is, if you are wanting us to be serious and do serious work, then you need to reciprocate, right? All right.

I want to say that as long as there's not a rule that says that people can't laugh.

I don't think that we can expect them. There is a rule, Councillor, that says... About laughing? No, there's a rule that if they're disruptive and if I can't hear them, then that is being disruptive.

I don't believe that they're just laughing to laugh.

I don't know.

Let's continue on, please.

Go ahead.

So for the Sheriff's Office, again, we want to receive 17 reports for this year so far.

Oh, for this year. Okay. Okay.

Are you good?

Yes. Thank you.

Okay. Councillor Sinclair and then Councillor Salgado.

Thank you, Mayor. Deputy Chief McCree and Commander Weston, thank you for the presentation tonight. The detailed outline is appreciated. I want to focus on the leveraging technology. Also, it's something we very much have received input from our community. And particularly, I'm going to focus on automatic license plate readers and drones. Especially in the era of AI, there's much unknown still within our community. And so that's what's caused the concern. So the 2026 Senate Bill 1516 governs ALPRs authorizing law enforcement to use ALPRs for specific investigations with guardrails such as 30-day data retention unless there is an ongoing investigation. It prohibits ALPR use for immigration enforcement and requires agencies to publish local policies and conduct frequent data audits. Pertaining to the ALPRs, my question is, where does the Washington County Sheriff's Office publish local policies and data audits that are accessible to the public at all time?

I don't have that information with me right now, ma'am, but I'm more than happy to look it up and get back to you.

Thank you. It would be appreciated if the entire council can get that information.

Absolutely.

My second question is also to ALPRs. What local code currently restricts surveillance technology beyond state law? Meaning, is it only state law that's in place for Washington County, or do you have additional code that's being put in place?

We have policies in place that restrict us in how we use it.

But is there code beyond state policy?

I'm sorry, what do you mean by code?

An ordinance. So further local jurisdiction that's been placed pertaining to the surveillance. as your commission.

I do not have that information but I'm more than happy to research it and get back to you.

Thank you. And then pertaining to drones ORS chapter 837 the state code prohibits public bodies from using drones to collect information unless exceptions are met like a warrant a declared emergency or specific crime scene. My question pertains to the drones. In ordinance 837.362, where does Washington County Sheriff's Office publish policies for how drone data is used, stored, shared, and retained? And in addition to that, How is the public notified prior to drones being deployed throughout the city?

I will have to get back to you on that information as well, ma'am.

Thank you. I appreciate that. This is valuable to have this open dialogue and to further inform all of us as a community. So I very much appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

Absolutely. Thank you. Councillor Salgado and then Councillor Harris.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can. Go ahead.

Are we hosting a middle school trip tonight? That's funny. I want to have a conversation around digital crime with the officers. I know it's not something that's really looked at locally. But there's this concern around license plate readers and ICE. And I think digital crimes are things like stolen identities, child sex porn online. I think that's a pretty high rate here in this area. Do you have, do you foresee, the sheriff's office or city police ever taking on those sort of cases? Number one. And then number two, do you have any sort of training for nonprofits to protect their data from digital crimes? Because just hearing about all these concerns around blocks and heights, and I'm just thinking about all this money we just put into the community, right? And there's an organization that's helping out our undocumented community. And they're literally keeping a list of everybody, every family that's undocumented. And to me, that's risky, right? If we're really concerned about the information and the data related to our undocumented community, we should really be concerned about how that information is being stored and how it's being protected. So are there any resources that we can direct this nonprofit to? Because I would feel really guilty as a city councilor if we gave money to an organization that was collecting a list of undocumented people. and then somehow that list disappeared or somebody else got their hands on it, right? So coming from a nonprofit background, I understand how under-resourced these organizations are. And so do you have any resources that we can direct them to or provide kind of support around protecting that data for our communities?

Okay, I apologize, sir. Some of that I was able to understand, but some of it was really muffled and I could not.

Mm-hmm. You want me to say it in Spanish?

You're more than welcome to, but I don't speak Spanish, so.

Yeah, so I'll summarize it for you. It's about digital crime. I know it's not something that's within the purview of the sheriff's office, but the sheriff's office provides training for other things, right? And so I'm particularly thinking about this conversation around ice and life in pictures. Are you still with me?

Yes.

Councilor Sogato, maybe move closer to your mic. It has become more difficult to understand you. Or you could put the question in an email. But if you'd like to try again, move closer to your mic, please. Thank you.

This is my microphone right here.

Okay. I don't know what to tell you, but it is difficult to understand what you're saying. So... Actually, that's more clear, so go ahead.

Yeah, okay, so my question is around resources for the community. I understand that digital crimes are not within the purview of the Sheriff's Department, but the Sheriff's Department does offer trainings to the community around prevention of other crimes, and so I wanna ask specifically around, you know, ICE and data around our undocumented community, right, because that has been brought up tonight in this conversation. And there's a nonprofit that we've given money to that I just saw that they're actually collecting a list of undocumented community members and thinking about cyber crimes and the impact of cyber crimes and how lax data protection can be at the nonprofit level. Are there any resources that the Sheriff's Department is aware of that we can direct this organization to or other agencies that are collecting names of undocumented families so that they are protected from cyber crimes. Because I would feel guilty as a city councilor that we fund an organization that creates that kind of issue, right? So I really want to connect them to the resource so that they're ensuring protection of that data.

Thank you, council.

Are you able to let us anywhere with that?

Thank you, Councilmember, for repeating that. That was a lot clearer. As far as providing training for financial or identity theft or something of that nature, I will have to research that. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that the Sheriff's Office provides now, but I will definitely research it and get back to you. If there's a resource out there, then I will provide it to you.

Councillor Harris. Thank you for the presentation. I have a couple questions about the jail facility. Since that is one of the sheriff's responsibilities, that's a pretty direct impact on this city. And so I have a couple questions. How many, if you know, how many forced releases have there been in the last six months? Are you still doing forced releases? Yes, we are. Okay. How many beds do you currently have open right now? Um... How many pods are open?

Are all the pods open? All the pods that are open is my understanding, yes, sir. Okay, there's what, nine pods? There is nine pods, yes.

All right, each pod is what, 60, 70 people?

Roughly. All right, pod one, is the treatment pod still? We are changing it to I'm trying to think of the name of it now. But we're still using it for some aspect of treatment or those folks that are struggling.

Are you providing treatment services in the facility? And if so, have they stayed the same, gone up, gone down? How are you prioritizing as far as resources in providing mental health and drug addiction services?

Every person that's brought into our custody is evaluated by medical staff, professional medical staff, and based on those evaluations and needs, that's how we provide their care and treatment.

What types of treatment are the primary treatments for addiction in the jail?

Anything from counseling to education to resources once they are out, directing them to additional resources. I don't have the specific list on the top of my mind, but I am more than happy to get that information back to you.

Yeah, I'm really interested in how the Sheriff's Department is prioritizing addiction and mental health services in the jail. That has a really direct impact on our community and the residents and the people who are going into the facility. So I think that's really important for us to understand how you are all prioritizing our dollars for that. Absolutely, I get that one. the uh... accounts for all carry me to comment about public defender i have a little bit of knowledge on that issue as well uh... i i can tell you that access by defense lawyers is critical to mental health is critical to the addiction it's critical to their social services is critical to their well-being and here's the bonus for you guys people get out of jail quicker when they have access to their lawyers uh... the lawyers can set up have better communication with their clients they can get them out of there if you're either seen forced releases or you're needing more beds a good way to do that is to make sure everyone has readily and quick access at all times not just between 9.30 and 10.30, not just between 1 and 3, not just between 7.30 to 8.30, but I would definitely also look at prioritizing that. I understand it's a staffing and budget issue. I totally see it. I've seen it for decades, having it go up and down, and I can tell you that the iPads are not a full-time alternative. They're not a complete alternative. They're good. We didn't even used to have that. They wouldn't even let us call into the jail with a phone call to our clients. It would be easier for me to go talk to a client in Multnomah County than it would be three blocks from my office here in Washington County. It was a shame. So really access. to legal counsel is really critically important for your jail to operate well. That being said, I find your staff to be professional when I go down there. I really appreciate it. I know you're resource constrained on this. I'm just urging you to focus on a couple of things here that I think would like our community better and the lives of the people who for whatever reason, end up finding themselves in that facility temporarily as well. The other thing I'd urge you to do, and I don't think, you know, everyone's an elected official, right? The sheriff, the DA, they're all elected officials. I'm not trying to tell you anything you probably don't already know, but engaging constructively with the DAs, the bench, and the defense bar, finding alternatives to incarceration is another way to free up jail beds. And I know the defense bar is always willing to take those meetings. Yes, sir. Again, everyone's elected. I get that. They have their own views of what should happen. But I would definitely urge, and I know Sheriff Massey's been really good about that. So I want to praise her for that and her willingness and ability to do that. And I like the culture that has developed in our jail as far as wanting to do this. But there's a lot of things that could be helpful for the community particularly Hillsboro, if we could focus on these things and it would make your lives potentially easier as well. So thank you for your presentation. Thank you, sir.

Councillor Sinclair, then Councillor Allcare, and then Councillor Ambury.

Thank you, Mayor. A quick follow-up question to my initial questions pertaining to ALPRs and drones. It's my understanding that the Washington County Sheriff's Office has received one of the largest grants received by the DA's office pertaining to fund mobile mobile ALPRs and a numerous number of drones. Is that correct?

I'm not sure I can speak to that information.

That's okay. That's probably too specific. But my point is, in my understanding with the grant, it's an opportunity for intergovernmental agreement or partnerships with numerous cities. Do you have information on how many cities are currently participating due to receiving that grant to have the use of the transportable ALPR cameras and drones?

I would have to research that information. I don't have that information, ma'am.

Okay. Thank you so much. I look forward to us following up together. Okay.

Councillor Allcare, then Councillor Embry.

Hi. I would like to know if the sheriff has created a policy response to ICE, and if you could share what that is. policy response yes we came up with a codification of our sanctuary city where our police officers have to document if they see a detainment not interfere but document so i'm curious what policy the sheriff's department has as a nice response so i'm trying to

figure out how to answer this because we don't have a policy of how to respond to ICE. They're a federal agency. We do not cooperate with ICE doing immigration. So I don't know what policy we would establish.

Well, you just mentioned those two things. Are there other things that you don't or do in relation to ICE response?

We do not enforce any immigration type offenses.

Okay.

But we don't have, you were asking if we have a policy for that. We do not.

You don't have a policy?

We do not have a policy.

Have you, has that been a topic of discussion at all at the Sheriff's Department and with the Sheriff?

I can't speak for the Sheriff. I don't know if she's had those talks with someone else. But if she has, I've never been part of those conversations.

And then finally, do you know if she still engages a committee composed of Latino community members that provide some input on sheriff's department and jail?

If you're referring to the Latino group in Cornelius? Yes. I believe we are still in talks with them, yes.

Okay, thank you.

Councillor Anne-Marie.

Thank you. Earlier this year I was part of Leadership Hillsborough and I got to tour the jail and it was a heavy experience for me but it was very eye-opening and I have utmost respect for everybody there. I was wondering if that was something that anyone could do and could go on a tour of the jail, and if yes, how would one do that? Because I think that would be a very good thing.

You can find out information on the Sheriff's Office website, or you can just come right into the jail lobby and ask for information about how to do a jail tour.

Okay. All right. Are there any restrictions? I mean, not minors, I suppose, but other than that?

Obviously, yeah, no minors are if you have certain criminal offenses.

Oh, yeah.

We won't allow you back into the jail. Okay.

All right. Yes. But, yeah, you know, I would recommend going and going and going on the tour and seeing it. Thank you.

OK. I have a couple of questions myself. So first, a comment. Thanks for talking about the mental health response team, the MHRC. I have done a ride along with a sheriff's deputy. And among the many calls that we responded to, one of them said, was to a 21-year-old experiencing a mental health crisis. It was pretty severe. And what I saw in action was the deputy right alongside the clinician. It was very effective, and I just want to say thank you for implementing that, because the person was able to get help immediately. We've had a lot of questions about the ALPRs, and I'm not sure if this question has been asked, but do you share your info that you gather with anyone?

We do have limited sharing with local law enforcement.

Okay.

But not with federal.

Not with federal, not with ICE.

Not with ICE.

Okay. And then the last question I have is you mentioned, Commander Weston, you mentioned that you have AI assisted report writing. And that it increased the accuracy in the reporting. And I was wondering, how do you know that?

So the accuracy in the reporting now can be analyzed against body worn camera. So we can watch what happened. We have a transcripted record of exactly what was said that can be watched again and compared against the original. And so when you know that these reports now are increasing in the amount of accurate data that's coming across, details that were otherwise glossed over in the original report from memory, we can confidently say that we are moving in the direction of increased accuracy of what was actually the interaction between the deputy and the subject.

Okay. Is that audited somehow, like every whatever, 100 reports, somebody watches the body cam and looks at the report?

Is it audited? Yes. I don't know. I can't speak to the details of exactly how that occurs. This is a cooperative effort with the district attorney's office, and so I can't really speak to the process on that side, but there's audits on both sides.

Okay, thank you very much. Yes. Thank you both for the briefing. I very much appreciate it, and have a great evening. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Moving to our last presentation tonight is our annual update from the library board. We have a few board members here this evening. We'll hear from Stephanie Hernandez, who is the library board chair, Abdul Hafiz Usman, who is the vice chair, and Mary Ludlam, who is a board member. Welcome. And make sure you press the center button, and when the light turns green, then you are live.

Good evening, Mayor Pace, Council, and guests. I am Stephanie Hernandez, Chair of the Hillsborough Public Library Board. It is my honor to be here this evening and bring to you our 2026 library update. Joining me at the table, our Vice Chair, Abdul Hafiz Usman, and board member Mary Ludlam. In the audience tonight are board members Chris Armstrong, Deb Duffy, Katie Rine, along with many library staff.

Would you mind moving the microphone closer to you, please? Thank you.

Nope. We kicked off 2026 with a brand new Hillsboro Public Library strategic plan. The work began in 2025 with one important goal to create a plan grounded in our community and responsive to Hillsboro's diverse and growing population. We brought together community stakeholders, library leadership, staff, and the board to assess our services and identify community needs. Most importantly, we listened to our community through interviews, five focus groups, and a survey offered in five languages that received more than 1,100 responses. Together, this work gave us a strong foundation for a strategic plan that reflects Hillsboro and helps shape the library's future. A copy of the strategic plan is in your packet.

Good evening. For the record, my name is Mary Ludlum. Every day at the library, you can witness the community coming together in a variety of ways. Whether it's nearly 100 children coming to Science Sundays or over 200 adults coming to the kickoff of Hillsboro Reads, the library strives to bring people together through inclusive and diverse programming and resources where community members connect, learn, and share experiences. In May, we participated in One Book, One Coast, joining more than 140 other libraries for this inaugural community reading event that spanned the entire West Coast. This year's selection was They Called Us Enemy by George Takei. a graphic memoir about family identity and resilience. These themes enabled us, along with our partners, Oregon Humanities and Civicus, to host timely discussions on topics such as, what does it mean to be a citizen? We also heard from a community member who shared her family's experience in an incarceration camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. We believe it is important to meet people where they are, and that always isn't in the physical library, so we take the library to the people. In addition to popping up in parks across Hillsboro, our outreach team brings people together at apartment complexes, the senior center, schools, and markets. The library is a safe space where staff listen, notice, and respond to community needs. Demand for notary services continues to grow, so the library expanded capacity offering notary services in Spanish, Ukrainian, and Russian. In response to community needs related to ice activity, we also expanded the documents we're able to notarize, including the forms allowing parents to delegate responsibility for their children in case of deportation or detention. This change is now formalized in the city's new notary policy. We also identified a need for people to better understand what library resources are available when they're even unable to leave their homes. We created a brochure highlighting those resources and translated into Spanish, Hindi, Tagalog, and traditional and simplified Chinese, sharing it with our community partners to ensure that patrons know about these resources when they need them. With funding from Friends of the Library, we support community members in need through our HPL Cares program. This program provides small personal supplies like hygiene items, snacks, bottled water, socks, and cold weather gear to make patrons more comfortable. HPL Cares has been so well utilized that we doubled our departmental support for this program in this current budget to ensure that we can meet this need. At Chute Park Library, social service partners are regularly invited to tabling events where they can share in-person information about services with library patrons. This response has been so positive that over the past year, more of these partners have began holding client meetings in the library as well. I'd like to share a story from Miranda. I was tabling an information booth at Chute Park Library representing Westside Queer Resource Center, a local nonprofit that supports the Queer Plus community in Washington County. A patron was having a meeting in the library with a different organization that provides housing navigation services. After their meeting, they saw our information table and came over to talk. This person was able to get housing support services from the other organization and social support services from ours. The library provides a public space for this and actively promotes community building, thereby making amazing connections like this possible. chute park library invites many different types of local organizations and non-profits into their space and as a result this library is a haven of support for the community please mark your calendars for saturday october 3rd when chute park library hosts this third annual community resource fair where 21 partner organizations will be participating another community need and council priority we are striving to meet is digital literacy the library has long offered public programming around digital literacy but we ramped up our efforts in early 2025 with the addition of one contracted digital navigator at chute park library We expanded this to two navigators serving both locations later that year. Now we are building a digital literacy team. We have created a new digital literacy supervisor position to give focus to this work. That position has been filled and the new supervisor will start at the end of September. Two part-time digital literacy librarians will be hired in the coming months. will continue to have a full-time digital navigator in each library this fiscal year again contracted through american connection corps and then next fiscal year the two digital navigator positions will become full-time city of hillsborough employees The build-out of a full digital literacy team allows the program to continue growing and serving the community. Zuma, who's pictured there, is our digital navigator at the Chute Park Library, expanded the program to offer North Star digital literacy courses. Len, pictured with her, worked with Zuma to build her digital skills and earned her first certificate in using email. She's added that certification to her resume and is working toward additional certifications in cybersecurity basics and your digital footprint. We're proud of Len, grateful for the work of our digital navigators have done so far and excited to continue expanding and developing additional digital literacy opportunities for our community. While our children's programming remains strong, we've renewed our focus this year on programs for teens and adults, from arts and crafts and personal finance to writing workshops, job preparation, and language learning. Here's a story about how one program made a profound difference in a teenager's life. A teen in our theater troupe shared that they were frequently being sent to detention and having a difficult home life with few adults they felt understood them. Through weekly rehearsals, they gained confidence and built friendships. They went from being hesitant to read aloud to memorizing their lines and confidently taking on a lead role. As their confidence grew, they reported better interactions at school and fewer trips to detention. They continued participating in library programs and later sent student success librarian Kate Whitman a thank you note for making them feel safe and supported. Kate shared, when we show our teens trust and respect, they raise the bar and shine. It's the great job of my career to encourage all students this way and give them lots of opportunities to grow and shine at the library.

Good evening, Council. For the record, my name is Abdul Hafiz Usman. As you heard earlier, our outreach team brings community together across Hillsborough. In the past 12 months, they focused on holding strategic high-quality outreach events. Their goal wasn't to reach more people by going to more events. It was to engage with more people by having the right event at the right location for the right audience. And the numbers verified this was the right approach. In the last year, they delivered 106 events, which is a decrease of 21% over the previous year. But here is where it gets interesting. By being more strategic about where and when these events are held, attendance increased by 33.7% to more than 14,000 people. Here is what Solomon Hernandez, the library outreach coordinator, has to say about his work. Something as simple as a free activity or event can mean so much more than we may realize. For families who are having to be careful with every dollar, opportunities like this can offer something that might otherwise have to be passed up. It can be a chance to make a memory together, to give their kids something exciting to look forward to, or to simply enjoy an experience without having to worry about whether it fits into the budget. Being able to create even a small moment of joy like that is a reminder of why this work matters so much. That's what outreach means to me. It's finding the people who may not always be able to come to us and making sure they still feel seen, welcomed, and reminded that the library is for them too. Last fall, as we prepared to name the Brookwood Children's Library in honor of Mayor Callaway, we installed front-facing shelving to give children more autonomy to choose books based on their covers rather than the tiny spines that they couldn't yet read. In the first seven full months of operation, the shelving contributed to a 7.8% increase in circulation in the Brookwood Children's Collection. We are looking forward to installing front-facing shelving in the Chute Park Library children's area soon. The front-facing shelving was funded with support from the Friends of the Hillsborough Public Library and the Hillsborough Library Foundation. In addition to making our collections easier to access physically, we are also working to make sure the materials themselves are accessible to patrons with a variety of needs. We continue to add to our collection of juvenile large print items, books in braille, and adapted toys in the library of things. We couldn't do what we do without the support of our community and partners. The Friends of Hillsborough Public Library had back-to-back record book sales this year, raising $91,000 in the fall of 2025 and $96,000 this spring. Those funds support programs, events, books, and projects like the front-facing shelving. The Hillsborough Library Foundation also continues to provide critical support. They sponsored our kickoff event with author Emma Patee for Hillsborough Reads, along with funding book giveaways and shelving. They have also hosted unique community programming like the Living Library event last winter. Hillsborough voters showed their support through the November 2025 WCCLS levy, which passed Hillsborough at 63.9%, 5.5 points higher than the countywide result. And finally, our tremendous volunteers show up every day to help us serve the community. As a group, 846 volunteers contributed almost 23,000 hours for the library in the last fiscal year. We would like to take this opportunity to recognize one very special volunteer. Barbara Wright, who leads Friends, is celebrating 50 years as a library volunteer. We are in awe of her dedication and so grateful for the deep impact she has made on our community through her lifelong commitment to supporting Hillsborough Public Library. We are incredibly grateful for our partners, volunteers, and community support. At Chute Park Library, we are proud to introduce a new mural, Stories Bring Us Together, A Journey of Diversity and Imagination, designed by Christian T. Garcia, with impute from many community members. The mural reflects the diversity of Hillsborough and celebrates literacy, imagination, and connection. We are also honored to welcome Inner Journey, a bronze sculpture by R. William Bain, the first bronze sculpture in Hillsborough's public art collection. This gift, supported by the Library Foundation, was donated by Barbara Swanson Sanders, a retired teacher and librarian deeply connected to literacy and our community. Together, these works of art reflect what our libraries strive to be, places where stories spark imagination, learning connects generations, and everyone can see themselves reflected.

Finally, we want to highlight two upcoming projects. We've begun working with our partners in WCCLS to centralize the way materials in our collection are selected. When this process is implemented in July 2027, most library materials will be purchased and processed centrally by WCCLS. This will reduce duplicate work, create efficiencies, and reduce costs across the system. While we don't expect patrons to experience a big impact from this change, it will result in changes to some of our staff roles. We're working with employees to plan for job and workflow changes related to this new arrangement. We're also planning a self-service library location at Fire Station 9 in South Hillsboro during the 2027-2029 biennium. Its primary function will be holds, pickup, and materials returns with opportunities for pop-up programming, library on the loose visits, and collaboration with the fire department. Patrons will be able to enter with their library card and use self-checkout independently. I'd like to close with a few photos of the amazing staff of Hillsborough Public Library who work every day to make our community a better place. Since we can't possibly share all of our stories tonight, we've provided an information sheet with additional highlights. September is library card sign-up month, and we invite you to encourage our community to discover all the opportunities their library card provides. I'd also like to thank the library staff and board members who helped make tonight's presentation possible. We are happy to answer any questions.

Thank you very much for the briefing. Do we have any questions?

I just have a couple quick comments. Thank you so much. This was really awesome. As a former library board member, I know how much hard work you guys do and how many amazing services the library offers. And I wanted to shout out to Zulma and the Digital Literacy Program. It's a fantastic program. I've had the chance to meet with her, and I'm thrilled to see that expanding. I also wanted to thank you for all of your amazing programming. The One Library, One Coast event was fantastic. It's a great book. I think everybody should read it. And I also really appreciated the Hillsborough Reads program. You did give us a bunch of fun goodies up here. And one that's been on my calendar already is the media and information, disinformation programming coming up these next couple of weeks. So I would just encourage folks to take a look at that. There's some great information about journalism and ethics and media literacy with so much disinformation out there. So I appreciate all of the work that you are doing. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Councillor Embry. You're good?

Any other comments? No?

Thank you so much for the briefing. And more importantly, thank you for your service to this city on the library board. We very much appreciate your volunteering. Thank you.

Thank you for your ongoing support. We look forward to seeing you at the library. Thank you.

OUR NEXT ITEM IS CONSIDERING APPOINTMENTS TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP COMMITTEE. DO I HAVE A MOTION TO APPROVE THE APPOINTMENTS? SO MOVED, CASE. THANK YOU. DO I HAVE A SECOND?

SECOND, ANNE-MARIE.

IS THERE ANY DISCUSSION? MAY I PLEASE HAVE A ROLL CALL?

COUNSELOR, I'LL CARE. Aye. Councillor Sinclair. Aye. Councillor Embry. Aye. Councillor Case. Aye. Councillor Harris. Aye. Councillor Salgado. Aye.

Thank you, the motion passes. Moving to item three, public comment. Persons wishing to speak will be recognized at this time. If you are here in person and wish to speak, please fill out a yellow card. Staff are collecting them and then they will give them to the city recorder. When you are called upon, please use the microphone at the public comment table directly in front. The microphone is live when the green light is on. You will need to tap the purple button at the base of the microphone to make it work. We have one person registered to speak virtually and the deadline to register to speak virtually has now passed. This is called public comment because it's dedicated for you to inform the city council about your views. This is not a time for members of the public to address the audience or the general public. Please direct all comments to the council. Each person will have three minutes. If you exceed the three minutes, you'll be given a warning and asked to stop. If you feel that you have to publicly express your support for a comment or a viewpoint, we ask that you do so quietly and non-disruptively, such as snapping your fingers, a thumbs up, or jazz hands. Please do not use any augmentation devices to click. Just snap, thumbs up, or jazz hands. That's it. Thank you. Clapping or calling out or making any verbal outbursts interferes with the people's ability to hear clearly. These disruptions will not be tolerated. Again, to keep the space welcoming, inclusive, and accessible for everyone to avoid disruption, we ask that all comments be shared respectfully. Tonight, we are pleased to hear from you, and we will begin by hearing from our virtual testifier, which is Elisa Sheth. Alyssa, or Alisa, are you with us?

Yes, I'm here. Can you hear me?

We can hear you, and you have three minutes.

Great, thank you so much. Yeah, my name is Alisa Shah. I've lived and worked in Hillsboro since 2019. My husband was on one of the appeals against the Sky Harbor project, and we have lived just south of the airport. For a little over 7 years now, I wanted to thank everyone. Community members work on fighting this project. Some folks like the arms years of their lives into this. And I also appreciate the opportunity to attend that epic appearing last month and to share some additional comments tonight. While it was encouraging to see that Sky Harbor withdrew their application for the luxury private jet hangar at Hillsborough Airport, I'm not surprised. I sat next to the Sky Harbor legal team during the hearing, not intentionally, and saw that they were noting that they felt three counselors would vote in favor, three would vote against, and one they weren't too sure about. So it doesn't seem like it was the easy process that I'm sure they were hoping for. And I'm also sure that there were many conversations about this project the public will never know about that are impacting what's currently happening. However, I am worried that now Sky Harbor will take the opportunity to reapply as a Type 2 permit, which would significantly limit the public's notification of their plans, the public's ability to appeal, and circumvent the City Council. This will leave the decision to the Planning Commission, an unelected group, making major decisions that impact the lives of many Hillsborough residents. As we all know, this is a wildly unpopular project among Hillsborough residents, and I won't rehash the six plus hours of arguments and opinions to this fact from last month. But my ask is that the city council do what it can to keep the public aware of the Sky Harbor application and permit before any hearings or decisions are made, not after. While you may not be legally obligated to do so, it is the ethical thing to do. I also ask that you book interchange in the code, the guidelines, whatever else is in your purview to stop these sorts of major decisions from being made by non-elected officials and without public input. The council seems to lean into what they cannot do due to city statutes, laws, et cetera. But now is really the time to create the codes, guidelines we as your constituents want to see. Lastly, my ask is that the council consider what the people of Hillsboro want for their community now, not what was decided years ago. Decisions are being made in the name of economic expansion, but at what cost and at whose expense? What is the long-term plan when basic necessities like food, water, and air become more scarce because we've squandered the vast natural resources of our region for data centers and airport hangars? I've attended many city council meetings, hearings, local town halls over the last year or so.

Thank you very much. Your time is up. We'll be moving to the next speaker, who is Tori Lewis. And then Brown Wildfire is on deck. Mr. Lewis, welcome. Please press the center button, and you have three minutes.

All right. Thank you, City Council, for allowing me to speak again today. Two weeks ago, there was a very good question that was asked in response to my time last two weeks ago. The question was, where was God when this evil thing happened? That's a very astute question, and it's actually one of the most difficult questions to answer. I won't be able to answer it completely here, nor do I have the capacity to at this point in my life. But I wanted to share a few things. Let me be clear. Evil does exist in the world, and I think we all have experienced it to some level. There's a sense that the world is not as it ought to be. Innately, we have a sense of justice and we see injustice all around us. It cannot be denied. We all have to consider what is wrong with the world. A related question to consider is how do we know what is evil? This implies that there is good. Philosophers have stated that the only way we can know a crooked line is by comparing it to a straight line. So we know that there is evil in the world and cannot deny it. We have a sense of what justice is. We live in a world where there is also free will. As humans, we have the ability to choose. We can choose to perform good or perform acts of evil. God has created each of us with a free will. He created us so that we can love him and be loved by him. If I am forced to love, it is not love. An AI or phone cannot love. It does not have free will. Now there are certainly people in this world that are influenced by evil and are doing evil things. This is the reality we live in and we must deal with reality as it is rather than as we want it to be. Perhaps the greatest injustice in this world the world has ever experienced is that of God becoming man in Jesus Christ and dying on the cross for crimes he did not commit. Ironically, he died on the cross for the crimes and the sins that we committed. Since Jesus has experienced all of these unique emotions, experiences, and trials when he was on this earth, he is uniquely able to comfort us in our trials. Sadness, grief, frustration are not foreign to Jesus. Jesus is God and has come to earth to provide the ultimate justice for us. He sees our need and cares. God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Thank you.

Next up is Brown Wildfire, and on deck is Simone Campbell. Welcome, and you have three minutes.

I haven't started talking. All right, I think it's hilarious that these people from the district talk about making everyone feel welcome when they're actively putting police officers in the schools, police officers with a track record of discrimination. And it goes to show how disconnected they are from the community and classrooms, because I can guarantee they're currently not working with kids or in schools the same way teachers are. And you want me to respect the pigs with the history of racism, beach pace, or did you not know? And what does it say when the cops get 30 minutes to speak while we get three minutes? Doesn't sound very DEI of y'all. And unrelated, but I think it's funny that Rob Harris only won his election because his opponent said that he hoped Israel would win the next war because you were losing up until that point. And then the audacity you all have to be talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is astounding when you all are constantly tone policing us and standing against the people's interest, all because your hands are tied when it comes to the state. Rob Harris admitted with his own words on his little Substack article that Your leverage over policy is limited, mostly asking state representatives for help, which highlights what I've said from the very start, we don't need you. I'm tired of reminding people that most of y'all will never initiate pushback against the state, which gets its orders from the rich people in the Epstein files. And y'all want to celebrate Latinos while reinforcing rules that punish anyone that doesn't meet your white standards. You celebrate Latinos while funding the police that works with ICE because they do use a lot of the same technologies. You celebrate Latinos while implementing police officers in schools with large Latino populations from the same department that had to settle a $90,000 discrimination lawsuit. The same department that initially dismissed officer Ryan Alden's assault of Albert Molina, who the city had to pay $625,000 to. The fact of the matter is, regardless of where you're from, the police is the biggest criminal organization. If you don't pay your taxes, they'll use the police to commit violence against you if you refuse to pay. That's what the freaking mafia does. People's property and money has been taken through cops from civil asset forfeiture than they've lost through actual burglaries and robberies. And politicians across the nation are supporting the police, not just Hillsborough. Mayor Mamdani has kept Jessica Tisch, an avid opponent of pro-Palestine movements and protesters, who warned that we're not primarily dealing with al-Qaeda, ISIS, or a proliferation of threats coming from conspiracy theories and grievances. when talking about Zionists or anti-Zionist sentiment. A Tigard police officer pled guilty to lying during investigation, which is why body cams have become such a norm. Police officers lie and tamper with evidence so much that we can't even take them at face value. And how about instead of wasting $90 million on this crime organization, you invest $90 million into the working class people and immigrants, to medical health providers, or to the freaking library. How about you hire medical responders and mental health experts to handle emergencies instead of sending someone who's trained to treat everything as a potential threat? because to a pig with a hammer, everything is a nail, and to a pig with a gun, everything is a target. You all talk about expanding the police services instead of expanding the social services. They admitted themselves that they're doing forced releases, and yet you all changed the policy to immediately arrest people when they're doing retail theft.

Next up is Simone Campbell, and on deck is Sam. Welcome, Simone. And when you get settled, you have three minutes.

Good evening, chair and councillors. My name is Simone Campbell. I oppose CDCA-0024, excuse me, 004-26 and I ask you to pause it for an outside ethics review. Earlier today I watched Washington County's own presentations to Beaverton and tonight to Hillsborough. The sheriff was very clear. Our county jail was built in 1998. The county has grown to over 614,000 people. We now have the smallest jail capacity per capita in Oregon. Last year there were over 2,200 bookings from Beaverton alone. The sheriff is asking voters to renew a levy just to reopen detox units and add jump barriers. He's also deploying drones in Tualatin Valley, fire buildings as first responders, using AI to write reports, and relying on a 15-year-old mobile crisis team that has seen budget cuts because staff time is stretched. If that is our baseline, it is imprudent to rezone 470 acres for 221 data centers, which PG&E has already said will be among the largest power and water users in the county without a full accounting of impacts to that public safety infrastructure. Second, and more important for this amendment, the sheriff told both councils on record about a cornelius incident where an armed men was unmarked vehicles conducted what looked like a kidnapping. The community called 911, the deputies investigated it as attempted robbery. ICE initially told them there was no operation, then called back hours later to say it was theirs, no markings. When asked about evidence of integrity and tragedies last year in Minnesota, the sheriff answered, and I quote from the transcript, the same concerns we do not have the authority to physically stop federal law enforcement from doing their investigations. I'm not here to debate immigration. I'm here to talk about trust and process. When our own law enforcement tells you they cannot guarantee a crime scene handover, or evidence integrity, you need more public hearings, not fewer. Yet the request from West Side Economic Alliance and the Hillsborough Chamber that is baked into this CDCA is to remove public hearings for these massive industrial uses. That is backwards at a time of stretched services and strained trust. The community needs transparency. Please do not advance CDCA-004-26. Pause it, send for an outside ethics review, and keep public hearings in place. Thank you.

Next up we have Sam. Next up we have Sam and on deck is Lynn Coffin. Sam, welcome. Make sure that button is pressed. There you go. You have three minutes. Okay, thank you.

I am speaking today in favor of Councilor Sinclair's proposal to ban ALPR cameras in the city of Hillsboro. PERC has published that most kidnappings as of late are happening because, unlike the sheriff stated, ICE is ramping up activity. These kidnappings are happening at big box stores where ALPR cameras are. Not to mention the very clear violation of our Fourth Amendment rights. I do not want businesses like Lowe's and Home Depot to be able to collaborate with ICE and steal our neighbors. even if the city of Hillsboro is not. As we heard from the sheriffs tonight, they want more drones as first responders, they want to use AI to process their body camera footage, and they want to use flock cameras to observe us all having fun at the county fair. But don't worry, they weren't looking at the license plates, they were just looking at the people. But why would we be concerned about that? They want to watch us all the time and let AI make up the narrative of what they see. Soon enough, they'll be bragging about how they can predict crime and arrest us before we commit it. Washington County sheriffs, wherever you live, we surveil you.

Next up is Lynn Coffin. Next up is Lynn Coffin, and on deck is Nicole Hughes. Lynn, are you here? Oh, there you are. Okay, great. Lynn, welcome. As soon as you start speaking, you have three minutes.

So first, I want to thank the Hillsborough residents and the community advocates who spent countless hours researching, testifying, submitting evidence, and appealing the Sky Harbor private jet jet hangar proposal for millionaires and corporations. Your work mannered. Sky Harbor withdrew its application, but this isn't over. The company intends. During the August 18th hearing, city staff explained that aircraft hangars are allowed use in the industrial park at Hillsboro Airport. That means another proposal can come back under essentially the same underlying land framework. Residents should not have to spend hundreds of hours researching land use laws, submitting testimony, and mounting appeals because our code doesn't adequately distinguish between ordinary aircraft storage hangar and a 13-acre private jet campus accommodating approximately 30 aircraft for wealthy non-residents. The city is already confronting the exact same kind of problem with another land use issue, data centers. The Council enacted a 120-day moratorium on new data center and battery storage application. While the City studies those uses and considers changes to the Community Development Code, I am asking the Council to examine whether a similar approach is appropriate and lengthy available for large-scale private aviation development. And I am not alone in asking the Council to examine this issue. Oregon Aviation Watch has now launched a community petition calling for a temporary moratorium on new development at Hillsboro Airport, while deficiencies in the development review process and development code are examined. Specifically, I am asking Council to initiate a community development code text amendment under section 12.80.140, and direct community development staff and the city attorney to examine whether hillsborough's aviation provisions adequately regulate large-scale private aviation developments. Consider creating a separate definition and review process for large aviation facilities with standards addressing scale, compatibility, nearby sensitive issues and environmental impacts. And because Sky Harbor has said they intend to submit, please also determine immediately with a temporary moratorium or other lawful interim measure that is available while the work is underway. The citizens don't want this. The wealthy do. Sky Harbor's withdrawal has given Hillsborough some valuable time. Residents did extraordinary work to get to this point. Now council has an opportunity to look into that lasting policy and stand up for the people that voted for you. Let us use this time to examine the code before another application arrives, rather than asking residents to fight the same battle over again. I waited six hours on the phone to say something. You called me last. I do not appreciate that.

It was very unprotectable.

Next up is Nicole Hughes, and on deck is Adam Campage. Nicole, welcome. You have three minutes. Please depress this middle button there.

I think it's pressed. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Good evening, Mayor Pace and council members. My name is Nicole Hughes. I'm speaking to you on a topic that was not on your agenda tonight, battery energy storage systems. I come to this meeting wearing two hats, one as a local business owner. We own three commercial properties in the Hillsboro area, including the shopping center just down the street where the grocery outlet is and the key bank. Owned that since mid 1990s and two other properties. The other hat I wear is as the executive director of a nonprofit called Renewable Northwest. We're a clean energy advocacy organization that does work in Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Idaho to promote decarbonization of the electricity grid using technologies like wind, solar, and storage. I received a notice that you were passing a moratorium on data centers and battery energy storage systems. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend that meeting because I'm going through cancer treatment, but here tonight to give you some feedback. I've been in the industry since 2005, consider myself an industry expert. And I do know that this particular area of Oregon, Washington County, is experiencing some significant transmission constraints. Which means that new electricity coming to this area will be constrained by the timing it takes to build new transmission. The last new transmission line that was permitted and is under construction in Oregon took 20 years. So battery energy storage systems can be used as a grid reliability tool. I understand your concerns about data centers, but I'm asking you not to conflate the issues with data centers with battery energy storage systems. There are carbon free technologies that support grid decarbonization, and in areas where transmission systems are constrained, like the Hillsborough region, they can be used as a reliability tool. Regardless of whether one more data center is ever built in this area, you will need tools like battery energy storage systems to maintain grid reliability. As a business owner, I would like to know that my tenants have access to reliable electricity. And so I'm here urging you to not conflate these issues. Look at them separately. Battery systems are a grid reliability tool. Data centers are not. Let's separate those and look at them for benefits that they bring to the system. I'm happy to provide my contact info if you want to learn more about these tools and following my testimony will be my colleague Adam Capage who will talk about a new tool that we have developed for decision makers around battery energy storage systems. Thank you for your time.

Okay, thank you. Next up is Adam Capage. And on deck is Carolyn Cohut. Welcome. You have three minutes.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor Pace and council members. My name's Adam Capage. I'm Director of Outreach and Communications at Renewable Northwest. Like my boss, Nicole Hughes, just said, we're a clean energy advocacy organization and we work on policies to promote clean technologies like wind, solar, and storage. Over the past year, we've seen a wave of cities and counties across Pacific Northwest thinking about ordinances to guide the development of battery storage. And this region isn't unique in doing this. Similar conversations are playing out across the country as community members and local leaders grapple with what battery storage is, how it works, why it's important, why it's being developed now, et cetera. These are all totally natural and reasonable questions to be asking. So Hillsborough isn't alone in asking the question. And the good news is that there's many, many resources available to help local communities answer all these questions. There's national standards for developing best safely. Hundreds of other cities and counties with ordinances that can act as models. And there are experts who make their living now talking to communities around the country about all the questions, the same questions that you have. For our part, Renewable Northwest has developed a series of short two to four page documents for local decision makers like you, including links to many other resources around the country. I've printed one out here, and I'll leave it, I've got ten copies, called The Best Toolkit, A Local Leader's Guide. But there are others that are equally accessible with titles like best citing and design considerations and what best enables. And there are other documents that are part of this toolkit that Nicole referred to. So again, the good news is that you're not alone and resources exist. The less good news is that absorbing this information, talking about national standards and how they should work for you here, because that's really important, how they should work here in Hillsborough, socializing all this information among staff and you all and community members, this takes time and energy and resources. So Renewable Northwest continues to be concerned that the data center moratorium is going to take all the time, attention, and focus of everyone involved. And we urge you, like Nicole said, to reconsider splitting this work stream and considering the best ordinance separate from the data center work that staff is currently deeply engaged in. Thank you again for the opportunity to comment today, and thank you for your work.

Okay, next up is Carolyn Kohout, and on deck is Dirk Knudsen. Carolyn, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you for properly pronouncing my name. It's not normal, not usual. I'm here to speak about data centers. I would like it that you publish After you have formed your questions, considerations, and ramifications, and whatever else you're going to create, that you publish these for the public to read. And then after you have gotten the answers to those questions, considerations, ramifications, or whatever else, you publish that so that we can see what you have come up with. That's the focus of what I want to say.

Thank you.

you have three minutes when you start speaking thank you um i'll get at it um like everyone in the room i want enforceable legally sound code amendments that protect our community from unconstrained data center expansion but i'm here tonight to deliver a formal objection and procedural notice regarding how case file cdca 004-26 was handled between july 21st and september 9th first off On July 21st, near the end of your last work session, Dan Diaz floated the idea of the off-the-cuff concept of transferable development rights. Mayor Pace, you and Councilor Elker gave explicit direction to move that to phase two. You said put a pin in it, not right now. Okay, that was your last work session. Dan also said, we'll bring it back to you guys about September 1st for another session. That didn't happen. Rather, it was forwarded to the Planning Commission directly. And those transfer rights were approved by the Planning Commission without much discussion. Certainly didn't have consensus of counsel. Second off, on September 9th, Rachel Marble, on the official record, was asked, where did this transfer right thing come into phase one? She said, It's something that council asked that staff look into, specifically in phase two, but based on conversations with industry partners and stakeholders, we brought that forward for phase one. Okay, staff listened to that, wrote transfer language. Third, on August 26th, a bunch of us did come. We waited four hours at that first planning commission. At the end, Director Diaz says, we're closing the record. Planning commission said yes, record's closed. In the coming days after that, staff engaged directly and in writing with the record closed, according to Mr. Diaz, with the West Side Economic Alliance, Chamber of Commerce, PGE and others. Staff then deleted the six acre accessory battery cap to appease PGE and then did the transfer language and made the transfers available in all zones in Hillsboro, not limited to the zones we're restricting. Finally, on the September 9th, Rachel did disclose 34 property owners, 34 properties, 19 owners were not notified that we were doing this process. I am desperately worried that Showers Development, who owns over 60 acres next to Liberty Zone for a data center, did not receive their notice. And I am desperately worried that this whole process is going to get thrown out, and I want it to pass. So about a five page letter will come to staff and all of you. I'd like you to look into it, and I'd like some answers. Is the record open or closed? What are we doing? Thank you.

Next up is Jacob Roloff, and on deck is Denise Kerr. Welcome. You have three minutes.

Okay, good evening council. I wanted to talk about a few different things. One of them in regards to something I read from Council Harris and also I've been hearing comments tonight about respecting politicians and there being a lot of attitude coming toward the dais from this desk. I actually don't think that as a matter of course politicians deserve respect in their political role. They deserve basic human respect, of course, but as elected, you need to consistently earn political goodwill. It's a little bit like the phrase, billionaire should not exist, where it does not mean that a particular person who is a billionaire should not exist, but that their status as a billionaire should not be possible. Just as some elected and appointees should not, in the end, hold that status. The label of counselor, commissioner, or mayor does not inherently earn respect. It's about whose interests it is viewed that you are acting in, in those respective roles. Some elected favor and seek out public input and they are met in those roles in good faith and others are quietly beholden to corporate interests. I don't think anyone has to respect that, especially not when corporations are buying up the world around us and would profit off of the ashes of a wildfire if they could. On that note of serving corporate interests, I've mentioned this conflict before but found out some new things about the Silicon Forest Partnership that our economic development director founded and is treasurer of. It's apparently listed as a 501c6 with its principal place of business being this address, 150 East Main Street. 501C6s are defined as industry trade associations dedicated to pursuing industry advocacy. The co-founder of this group is also a senior director at the Intel Foundry, which in my view has a lot of connection to data centers, energy facilities, and any codes or updates to codes that would apply to those industries. There's also a counselor that is an engineering manager at the Intel Foundry. And despite this, Dan Diaz serves both as the chief staffer tasked with drafting these local zoning rules on these industries and as treasurer for a lobbying group in that same industry based right out of this building. I'm wondering what official action allowed this partnership to be officialized and how the public is being benefited by this apparent conflict of interest. I'm also curious why I should preemptively respect anyone in a government position who seems to be serving their own personal aspirations and building their political capital over the interests of the people they're meant to serve. Even if it is technically legal for Dan Diaz to be in these two conflicting roles, it does not give me the warm feeling of respect to say the least. As I've said before, I would rather see real forests and real growth for the people that live here and not backroom partnerships to build the abomination that we call the Silicon Forest. I think probably that council or the city attorney should compel Mr. Diaz to choose between these two roles. It may be trite and overly simplistic to say these days, but Jimmy Carter gave up his peanut farm. People want their politicians serving them and they can smell it if they're not doing so.

Next up is Denise Kerr and on deck is Antonia Lopez. Welcome, Denise. You have, as soon as you get settled, you have three minutes.

Good evening, Mayor, Council President, and Councillors. My name is Denise Kerr, a 40 year resident of Healdsboro. I have several points I want to just touch on briefly tonight. One of them is the Sky Harbor situation. I think it's interesting that people on the social media There's a lot of people who are saying, like, have you seen Van Nuys Airport? It's all T-hangers. Like, you guys have to do this. It's inevitable. Another comment was, we need a luxury jet airport. There are people on the wait list, you know. Well, okay, so this is all selfish, self-centered interests and doesn't consider anybody who lives here. That's one point. Another point is when I was looking into the 500-year-old tree they took down, I found something quite interesting on the property taxes. That chunk of property at 6000 Northeast Jackson School Road was sold on November 20th, 2024 to a buyer, Hillsboro Corporate Park Acquisitions LLC. that the Van Rose Farms sold it for $39 million. On November 24th, that's four days later, the Hillsboro Corporate Park Acquisitions sold it to NTT Global Data Centers for $165 million. Now is that legal, is that fair that in four days Uh... Hillsboro would get $126 million dollars more than Vanderbilt Farms? There's something real fishy about that. I mean, no wonder Hillsboro has so much money making land deals like this, huh? And okay, as far as data centers, I think that all roads from Hammond, the Mayor, and DS, Callaway, Wiley, I think all those roads lead to data centers because basically, Intel is the head cheese in this town. They make all the calls and the city just bends over and does whatever Intel wants. Intel, whose jobs will shortly be taken over by AI controlled robots. Thank you.

Next up is Antonia Lopez. Next up is Antonia Lopez and on deck is Mike McTernan. Welcome, you have three minutes.

My public comment is not what I planned for tonight, but I'm going to address Saba. I'm going to tell you what serious work is, and maybe if you would be paying attention, you wouldn't know. The reason the community was laughing at what the sheriff's office was saying is because it is a joke. They're not tracking ICE. And I'm going to answer all Claire's questions because I have the answers that the sheriff's office should have. They are not tracking ICE. There is a code that was implemented with Washington County 911 system because I asked them to do that on December 2nd. We presented actionable policy, the same actionable policy that we presented to you and to Beaverton on December 2nd. They have been sitting on it for almost a year now. Mayor Pace, I'm sorry, you guys all confused me because you're all the same. Massey refused to engage with me because I asked her if she did not care about our community. Why did I ask her that? Because since September of last year, I was trying to get a meeting with her. Our community is laughing to not cry. The conversation that I just had with the leadership that Washington County sent here today to present to you with zero information on ICE, nothing. They're not tracking ICE, they do not care. The sheriff did not have the time to meet with our committee, but she did have the time to go on national media and say that we were asking for ICE to be arrested, which was a blatant lie. They were leaving, they stayed, because I told them that maybe they should listen to what the community has to say, because we're being murdered in the streets. Sergeant McCray, he said, you are? He hasn't seen it, because consistently what I heard from all of you was, it's not happening in Washington County. You want us to die in your goddamn face to care. Consistently law enforcement does not watch the news because the news is depressing. They don't follow social media. And this sergeant behind me does not even know that ICE impersonators assaulted a woman in Clackamas County. The same thing that I spoke directly to the sheriff, that same scenario I presented to her. If ICE comes and takes me and I ask you to come verify it's ICE, would you do it? They said no. I said, what if I get taken and get raped and assaulted? We will try to find the people that did that to you. We have to suffer violence in order for you to act. And don't worry, I'll be here next week, two weeks with the comment that I have for today. And Salgado, I love that you minimize what Harrington did today. Abusers will flock together.

Next up is Mike McTernan. Next up is Mike McTernan, and on deck is Kylie Delgado. Welcome. You have three minutes.

Great.

I came today to speak on the proposed code changes and the proposed method of gathering public comment. According to the latest newsletter, the council plans to make a vote on the proposed changes of the October 6th council meeting. In addition, it said the proposed changes would be posted by October 2nd. I don't see how this makes any sense. In the worst case scenario, that means the changes would be published at the end of business Friday, allowing the weekend and one business day for the public to look at and offer comment on the proposal. Is this really enough time for the public to give thoughtful insights? Is it enough time for you to truly consider the public's comments? Speaking as a member of the public, I say it's not. We have jobs, we have kids, we have commitments. Seems to me that the delay in releasing the information is intended as a way to minimize public input on the code changes. Further, how can the council truly take the public input into account in regards to their own vote when they likely won't get more than a few hours, and this is being generous, to look at the public's concerns? If I was in that seat, I would want as much information from the public as I could gather, and I wouldn't want to wait for the only concerns on the day I'm voting. I'm assuming you know more than we do now, and will know more than we will by the second. And will likely, by the time the public even gets to comment, have gone away towards crafting your decision. How can you digest any written comments that day? How can you consider honestly and deeply the comments you hear during the public hearing portion of the council meeting? If you have questions driven by these comments, how can you get answers before your vote? Isn't there a better way to do this? Can't the proposed changes, even in a draft form, be released this day or the next? In the newsletter, it stated the changes have been approved by the County Planning Commission. Can we see what they approve now? And if not, why? The state recently opened a public comment portal and data centers on the state website, and the comment period is 45 days. They clearly state this is intended to allow as much public comment as possible for people who can't make Tuesday meetings. Why can't Hillsborough do something like this? Post the changes tomorrow, create an email or web portal for the public to submit written testimony. The whole motivation behind the moratorium and the proposed changes was to be more open and honest with the public, to consider their thoughts and feelings on where Hillsboro decides to move forward. Releasing the changes one business day before the vote flies in the face of everything the city and the council has promised citizens about this process. As counsel, your job is to listen to and vote according to your constituent views, not to decide on your own. How do you plan to fulfill your obligations? Please, I ask that your request for public comment not just be a token concession to the rules of law in public governments, but to actually allow meaning- Next up is Kylie Delgado.

Next up is Kylie Delgado and on deck is Joe D Clark Lampa. Welcome, you have three minutes.

I wasn't going to speak, and then I heard Saba speak, and I decided I would. And apologies in advance. Most of what I'm going to say is going to be a repeat of what Antonia said. We didn't consult before. It's just evidence that you should be asking us, not the police, for these answers, because we have the answers. Saba, you were very upset by audience members' laughter, but you didn't care to ask why they were laughing. I invite you to be curious about why your constituents react during certain moments of testimony. The police have admitted to us and to you that they ignore ICE related updates from our community and do not actually respond to citizens calls for 911. So you might understand why the audience was laughing when police officers speak from a place of authority about something they know nothing about. This is further evidenced by the fact that one of the cops who gave today's presentation left before public comment because he, quote, has a family. We all have families, yet here we are. It kind of feels like they don't actually want to listen to the community they serve or be corrected for misinformation. The officer who left said this county had 19 ICE interactions this year. To answer your question, this community has experienced weeks with 19 detentions alone. We have seen hundreds of abductions this year in our community, and ICE activity has increased dramatically since August. Why don't you ask the people who are actually doing the work? Call your local CBO so you can receive education from the experts. Not a couple of cops making their best guess with no data. Again, the community does not feel safe calling 911. To my neighbors. The police are angling toward a new bond. They just spent $95 million on a new police headquarters. A jail will cost significantly more. Instead of asking our taxpayers to keep up with increases in incarceration trends nationwide, why not invest in programs that make us leaders in low incarceration rates and true public safety, like detox facilities, low income housing, third spaces, and fully funded schools. We don't need to race other cities to the bottom. We could choose to lead. Last week, Sheriff Massey admitted. that she had to close the housing unit in the county jail because they could not keep it staffed people who are arrested for non-violent crimes are waiting weeks for agreement because we have too few public defenders the levy was passed to solve day-to-day operational shortfalls so do that before you ask us for more money maybe you'll find when the inmates that you currently have in custody receive the services they need for rehabilitation legal counsel you won't actually need to increase jail capacity at all the police are not experts on what our community is experiencing community members are the experts so ask them

Next up is Jody Clark Lampa, and on deck is Jana Nelson. Welcome.

I feel welcome.

You have three minutes. I just love being here.

Okay, I'm going to quote you, Mayor Pace. at the beginning of the meeting, begin by setting some expectations for everyone. In the past, we've had some disruptions that preclude the council business to hear from the community. And to avoid disruptions, in order to keep this space welcoming, inclusive, and acceptable for everyone, we ask that all comments be shared respectfully. That's not what she got when she brought up the questions we were able to take to her about council members meeting off-site. We learned. But his reaction to that was way off base. We can go to her and say, what? And she'll say, I'll find out. Just because we don't know doesn't mean we're stupid asses. Don't treat her... Oh, I hope that was on camera. I hope that was on camera as much as Catherine Harrington was on camera today.

You butt head.

Oh my God. You guys want to know why people laugh? Why we make noise? Because you don't fucking listen to us. Please do not curse.

No. No. Please do not curse. No.

You want to take me out?

If this is your second, this is your second.

You are not going to interrupt me. You are not going to interrupt me. Well, this is your second warning. Can we make sure her time is remanded back? The judge wants to intimidate us. She was trying to get an answer for us. We don't feel like we can come to all of you. Respect? How about you respect us after months of coming to you? We hear nothing from you. You sit there maybe looking at us and maybe not. We've been coming for months with issues. We're going to get your attention one way or another. If it's these, which you seem to hate. If it's, it's not going to be these, it'll be these. You have to start listening to us. We're not here to appease you. You are here to appease us. First of all, did you notice that we didn't make any noise during the library presentation? No, because it was excellent. We wanted, we believed, we trusted what they were saying. The Planning Commission, they listen to us. You guys don't. And if you think that's not going to boil up at some point, I guess you're finding out you're wrong. You're not listening to us. Just because there's a moratorium doesn't mean you're backing it and helping. Ten seconds, I could just sit here and swear.

Next up is- Next up is Jenna Nelson. Welcome, you have three minutes.

Jodi, you're a hard act to follow. Surprisingly enough, I actually had come up here to thank some of you for your insightful questions. The sheriff's office presented information, they gave you surface level information and a lot of lies. And I was thankful that some of you asked questions. Rob Harris, everyone smile, you just. You surprise me. You ask a great question. And then later you mess it up. But whatever. The Sheriff's Office has been lying. I've sat in this room where we've been told by staff that flock isn't used in Hillsboro. And then you guys just accept that. That's okay. Kipper Lynn Sinclair has requested that you guys talk about flock, but yet it doesn't come up. This has been over a month. Instead, you listen to the staff say flock isn't used. But yet, the Sheriff's Department just claimed that it is. It was used at the fairgrounds, which is on Hillsborough City property. So I have to say, start listening to us, because we've been telling you this stuff is going on. And we've been ignored over and over and over again. I want to compliment you all, but I can't after things that Denise and Jacob brought up. What are you guys doing? Is nobody paying attention that we buy property and four days later it sells for what, three times what it did? That you've got somebody using this address for a different company? What's going on? Come on, you guys. We don't come here for fun. We come here because we're tired of our city being run by people with their eyes closed. Please pay attention. Thank you.

Thanks to everyone who spoke tonight. We will move to the consent agenda. There is only one item on the consent agenda. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? So moved case. Do I have a second?

Second, Ann Marie.

Thank you. Is there any discussion?

Yes.

Councillor Sinclair.

Yeah, I'd like staff to outline the definition of what the three year enterprise agreement means.

I can answer that while John Taylor's coming up. This is simply, so we use a lot of Adobe Acrobat tools, like PDF Maker and everything, so we have multiple licenses for different employees in the city. This is just a three-year agreement with Adobe to do that. So, John, anything you want to add to that?

I think you covered it pretty well. John Taylor, by the way, for the record, Information Services Assistant Director.

Thank you very much. That was it? No.

Thank you, John. May we please have a roll call?

Councillor Salgado?

Aye.

Councillor Harris?

Aye.

Councillor Sinclair? Aye. Councillor Ambry? Aye. Councillor Case? Aye. Councillor Allcare? Aye.

Thank you, the motion passes. Moving to item eight, new business. Consider finance committee's recommendation to adopt a resolution to readopt the current investment policy for the city. Authorizing investment succeeding 18 months and up to 5.25 years in maturity and repeals. Resolution number 2899. Resolution number, well, which one is it, Aubrey? Is it 2899 or 2936? Resolution number 2936 is available. Do I have a motion to adopt resolution number 2936?

Yeah, so moved, Ambry. Second case.

Thank you. Is there any discussion? May I have a roll call, please?

Councillor Ambry? Aye. Councillor Salgado?

Aye.

Councillor Sinclair? Aye. Councillor Allcare? Aye. Councillor Case? Aye. Councillor Harris?

Aye. Resolution number 2936 is adopted. Moving to item 8.2, consider finance committee's recommendation to adopt a resolution granting a 10 year cable franchise agreement with Comcast of Oregon. Resolution number 2935 is available. I do have a motion to adopt resolution number 2935. So moved, case. Thank you, do I have a second?

I have a second in .

Thank you, is there any discussion? May I please have a roll call?

Councillor Case?

Aye.

Councillor Harris?

Aye.

Councillor Sinclair? No. Councillor Salgado?

Aye.

Councillor Ambry? Aye. Councillor Alker? No.

We have a majority still. It's resolution number 2935 is adopted. Moving to item 8.3, consider the library board's recommendation to adopt a resolution approving the library administrative rules related to internet access and computer use policy. Resolution number 2934 is available. Before I ask for a motion on this item, we'll be receiving a presentation from library manager Stacey Johnson. Welcome, Stacey.

Thank you. Good evening. As said, my name is Stacy Johnson, and I am a manager at the library. And we're here today to ask for your approval of our updated internet use policy. So thank you for the time and opportunity to come and share the updates with you. sorry, next slide, thank you, sorry. So our policy was last reviewed in 2020, so it was due for a revisit. Most of the proposed changes that we made are routine. We streamlined some language. We aligned it with an updated WCCLS internet policy. We removed references to outdated resources, such as our children's computer area, or yeah, children's area computer. And then we also worked with IS to make sure that our policy aligned with their policies and protocols. The most significant change, or proposed change, is to add internet content filtering. And since we know that was the most significant change, we wanted to take a little time to talk to you about why we're proposing it and how it would work. So if I could have the next slide, please. So our review of this policy coincided with some events that prompted discussion in how we approach our internet use in the library. As mentioned, we no longer have separate children's area computers, and so all of our computers are in very public spaces and are easily visible to children. This is especially true at Shoe Park, where the computers are in the same space as the youth physical collection. We have also seen patrons intentionally asking for our staff's help when they are watching content that is inappropriate. And this has created an uncomfortable work environment for our staff and can create opportunities for harassment. We've also seen an increase in incidents involving patrons who are visiting sites with inappropriate or harmful content and then act on that content within our library spaces. Because of these factors, we are recommending the addition of internet filtering. So how that would work... if I could get the next slide, is that WCCLS provides content filtering software as a free optional service to all of our member libraries. Most WCCLS libraries already have some or all of their public computers using filtering. There are multiple levels of filtering available, but with this policy, we would content at the least restrictive level, which is the adult filtered level, which would filter out the categories you see on this slide. Please, next slide. This is a challenging topic and we recognize that because at the core of libraries mission, it's to provide free access to information and we believe in that. The American Library Association recognizes the need for filtering in some cases and has given guidance. to help mitigate potential negative impact on intellectual freedom. And we are following that guidance. So first, we are using the least restrictive level of filtering. Second, and this is the next slide. Second, the library Wi-Fi is remaining unfiltered for patrons who are using their own devices. Third, if a site is blocked in error, there is a process for reviewing it and having it unblocked. We also have two Chromebooks at each location that are unfiltered that patrons can use in library. These options are not only included in the policy, but they're called out so that patrons know what options are available to them. So we believe this approach provides a balance between commitment, our commitment to intellectual freedom and responsibility to provide safe spaces for our staff and patrons. So with that, please next slide. So the library board reviewed this and did give us some feedback that we incorporated, and then they then approved the policy in June. With council approval, our next steps would be to work with WCCLS to finalize the procedures and begin implementation, and we would anticipate having the filtering in place sometime in October or November. Again, thank you for your time, and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you, Stacey, for the briefing. I appreciate it. Are there any questions? We have any questions? Councillor Ambury?

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the presentation. It's a difficult topic, so thank you. My question was, are the other libraries under WCCLS doing this as well? Do you know?

Most of the WCCL libraries are filtering to some or most of their computers at some level.

Okay. So Hillsborough had not been before this? Correct. Okay. Okay. Okay. Very good. And do you know if it has been effective in the other libraries?

I am actually not able to answer that question, but we could find out and get back to you.

Okay.

That'd be great.

Next up is Councillor Salgado and then Councillor Allcare. Councillor Salgado.

Hi, how can my voice be heard?

We can hear you right now.

Awesome, okay, thanks for bringing this to us. I do see a gap in your policy, so if I may, you know, you mentioned earlier that part of what prompted this is what some of the patrons are acting on, right? Well, I'm assuming some sort of sex act and being really rude and maybe sexually harassing some of the library staff is what I'm assuming. And so, it's interesting that you're allowing Wi-Fi still, because, you know, somebody could sit there on their phone and still access, so I see that as a gap. So I'm very supportive of this effort. I think public libraries should be safe and free for everybody, and we shouldn't be using public resources to access illegal content, right? I mean, child pornography is illegal content. It's against the law. But I do see a gap in there, so is there an opportunity to fix that gap, or do we need to wait for another round, or is this kind of why we're here, so we can kind of... figure out these little details, like the Wi-Fi being able to still access those sites, which could still lead to some of the things that are returning to the South, right?

Were you able to hear that?

I apologize. I heard that there was a gap, but I was having a hard time understanding or hearing what the gap was.

The gap, as far as I understand it, was that people could still use their cell phones to view inappropriate comment while in the library using the internet. Is that, in fact, a gap?

Yes, so we still would have our rules for use in place, which help guide our response to behavior to illegal or inappropriate behavior such as that.

Okay, so that gap is closed. Correct. Thank you. All right, Councillor Allcarr.

Can you repeat that? We have our library rules for use that guide our response to behaviors that would be illegal or inappropriate. So it's not a gap in that way.

People cannot use their phones at the library to view inappropriate content.

Oh, I misunderstood that. I'm so sorry. I misunderstood what you said. I thought that you meant that they could use Wi-Fi unfiltered on their phones.

They can, but we can still address the concerning behavior through our rules for use.

Yeah, so what I'm saying is I feel like we should also filter Wi-Fi access. That's my feedback on that.

Because I see that as a gap.

Hang on one second, Councilor Salgado.

Hi, counselors. For the record, Tammy Wallen, library director. I just want to add a little bit to what Stacy's saying here. So the reason that we are including the option for personal devices to remain unfiltered is to preserve that door for intellectual freedom. So we want to be sure that if the filtering software filters something out inappropriately, that it catches something that shouldn't be caught, that someone has a legitimate case to say, I need to access something and the filter is not allowing me to get it, that we have an option for them that day in the library so that they're not blocked from getting access to the information that they're coming for. They would still theoretically also have the opportunity to review the kind of content that we're trying to do away with here. In our experience, the people who have been creating the kinds of problems that we're trying to address here have been using our public computers. They're not typically doing that using their private devices. that is a possible gap we would continue to address that with the policy the behavior policy that we have but we do still want to leave that door open for the intellectual freedom principles that that are represented there because that's a really critical piece of the work that we do.

Yeah, and based on my experience working with a challenging community, as soon as they find out that they're allowed to use a cell phone without a filter, that's what they're going to do. So that's why I'm telling you it's a gap that I see. So I would like to see that addressed. Thank you very much.

I think we'll take that under consideration and we will continue to review this policy. So I think a part of, in your staff report, there's a breakdown explaining the review process, pardon me, the review process that the library board recommended that we include. And that was to say that we would revisit this process in a briefer period than our typical policy review to see what the impact is. So I think we'll keep an eye on any kinds of related incident reports and issues related to how staff and patrons are interacting with those filters. And if we see an impact there that we think needs to be addressed, we will go back and revisit the policy sooner than we would have in our normal review cycle.

I totally respect what you're saying. I completely disagree with you. I think it's going to be added in right now. We shouldn't have to wait for them to find a loophole. So I respect what you're saying. I completely disagree. So thank you. That's no more to add on that.

Thank you, Councillor Allcare.

yeah um can you tell us how you monitor what people are looking at we do not monitor what people are looking at that's a pretty important principle to us the only time that we are aware of what people are looking at is typically when another patron alerts us to something that they see or if staff happen to be in the area passing by as stacy noted our public computers are very public spaces and so sometimes it's hard not to see what's being shown but very often it's another patron who will come to staff and say there's something being seen over here that I don't think should be visible my child is here that sort of thing and so that's typically when staff will get involved beyond that we are not monitoring what people watch okay and can you tell us how staff are respond how do staff respond to Somebody who's looking at something on internet that is not appropriate Typically the first step is to have a conversation with them to say hey look you're in a public space Other people can see we need you to stop watching that content now and with most patrons That's where it stops most people once they're aware that someone knows what's happening They immediately stop they continue or don't stop when staff ask them then it goes through our rules for use rubric whereas there's a process of saying how many times we have to engage with you on that topic and if after a couple of conversations you're not willing to participate or to respond then we may ask you to leave for the day or more but that it typically ends with that first conversation.

When I ran an alternative school in Forest Grove and I was on contract with the Forest Grove School District, they had a way of limiting, at that time, what students could access outside their school work. In more recent years, when I've been substitute teaching, that feature has gone away, and I'm not sure why. And it's gone away where staff are allowed to surf internet freely, not students, but staff could do that. So I don't know if you have the capacity to filter I'm appreciating the fact that you want to respect intellectual property. I do research and so people would need to have access to the content and so I think what I'm hearing is that they can arrange with you ahead of time to be able to do that or do it in a space that's not threatening to other patrons.

is that what I heard? Correct. I suppose they could do it ahead of time. What we're anticipating is simply that people would use the public computer as normal, come to a site that they're saying, I'm trying to research legitimate information and it's getting blocked, can you help me? And staff could offer a Chromebook as an alternative to say, hey, sorry that's happening, here's another option for you to get set up to see what you need to see today. And yes, if there was sensitive content that they were saying, I'm aware that this might be difficult, we could suggest that sure, you could go into an area of the library where that's a little less visible to make that easier. But that is the purpose of having those laptops available for people.

And can you tell us, like, is that, do people respond positively to that interaction with staff, or have you had a situation where somebody gets upset and causes an even bigger scene?

We haven't implemented this policy yet, so this hasn't been something we've tried, so we don't know that. We don't know how people will react to that. We did agree with the library board that we would make sure that people are aware of that Opportunity that we'd have some signage at the public computers to make sure that people know that that's an option And our staff would have some training in being very careful to not be Gatekeeping anything in terms of why someone might choose to have that that the initial Interaction is simply that you have something being blocked great. Here's an alternative for you, and that would be the limit of that we hope. But again, we'd have to evaluate how this rolls out and how it gets handled.

Thank you very much.

Okay. Stacy, Tammy, thank you so much for the briefing. Very much appreciate it.

And for being here this late. Thank you.

Thank you. Do I have a motion to adopt resolution number 2934? So moved, case. Thank you. Do I have a second? Second. Sinclair? Is there any discussion? May I have a roll call?

Councillor Ambry? Aye. Councillor Case? Aye. Councillor Alker? Aye. Councillor Sinclair? Aye. Councillor Harris?

Aye.

Councillor Salgado?

Aye.

Thank you, the motion passes. Resolution number 2934 is adopted. We'll now turn the time over to Robbie Hammond for the city manager report.

Thank you, Mayor. Just two items I wanted to share with the council and the public tonight. First is this Saturday, September 19th, we will be holding our annual Arenco Fest at Arenco Station. This is an opportunity to celebrate the changing seasons at Hillsborough's annual Free Family Harvest Festival. Orenco Fest will feature food trucks, artists and vendors, kids activities, live music, and a crowd favorite beer stein holding contest. Hosted at Orenco Station, the event runs from 12 to 7 p.m. with a full day of seasonal fun. And second item. Mark, if we can go down to the next one.

It's okay. Okay.

You heard this actually from the library board earlier today. There was a bronze sculpture titled Inner Journey that was donated to the city of Hillsboro and recently installed outside the Hillsboro Public Library, Brookwood location. The sculpture was a gift from Barbara Swanson Sanders, who was a retired teacher, librarian, and longtime member of the Hillsboro community, whose life has been shaped by a deep commitment to literacy and education. Created in 1990, the artist was Bill Bain. The sculpture depicts a seated figure absorbed in a book, a quiet, intimate portrayal of the reading experience. And for those of you that have seen it, when you get there to the entrance, it's just in the perfect location. It looks like it's been there for decades because it just belongs. It's a beautiful sculpture, and we are grateful for her for donating it. So I hope everybody gets a chance to see it. Thank you.

Thank you, Robbie. Moving on to item 10, council comments. Council members have up to three minutes. to provide comments if they have any. The council should not engage in any deliberation or debate over any comments or topics raised during this portion of the agenda other than expressing general support for adding a topic to a future agenda. If a majority of council supports moving an item forward, the item will be referred to the city manager for scoping. Do I have any councillors who wish to provide comment? Councillor Harris, and then Councillor Case, and then we'll go from there. Councillor Harris.

Thank you, Mayor. This is because of the Sky Harbor, not just the Sky Harbor hearings, but also the leaded gas issue that's recently arose at our regional airport. I did some research on this. I was actually going to mention this after the hearing was complete, but there is no more hearing for Sky Harbor, so I'm going to mention it now. And it regards the Hillsborough Airport Master Plan. According to the FAA, based on my research, airport master plan updates are necessary due to the dynamic nature of the aviation industry and an airport's community concerns. The FAA recommends updating their airport master plans as demands, usage, and projects dictate, but often resulting in updates every seven to 10 years, which is the FAA recommendation. They should be based on these factors, not grants from the federal government. We can't wait or rely on their timeline. Airport master plans serve as a platform to help ensure safety and efficient airport operations while addressing potential improvements. The Hillsborough master plan, the last one, was initiated February 2017. It was adopted May of 2020. That took 39 months to complete. If the port were to initiate a master plan update starting January 1st, and it took the same amount of time to complete, it would not be completed until 2030. That would make it ten years old, which is the maximum allowed or recommended by the FAA. This is in a city and a county where the airport and population has increased dramatically since the time it was last completed. Therefore, I'm asking the port to initiate a master plan update for the Hillsborough Airport to select a work group. I'd like this by 2026. I'd like to kick off by January of 2027. We should be asking the port for a two year deadline to complete the report. That would still make it in January 2029, which is almost nine years old at that point. Once again, we should ask them to include in that master plan work group community representatives who will be impacted by the airport operations, including not only those living near the airport, but those in the flight pass as well. And it should be a well-balanced committee. I realize the airport is built within the city limits. That poses operational challenges and requires compromises and acceptance in some cases. That's exactly why the master plan update is so critical. Discussions about these conflicts with airport operations in the community will not get easier the longer we wait. Airplane owners, operators, and residents of the city and the port deserve predictability and assurance.

Thank you. Councillor Case, then Councillor Allcare and Councillor Sinclair.

Thank you, Mayor. I agree with Councillor Harris' recommendations, and we've actually chatted a bit about this. In addition to that, what I would like to recommend and request is a Hillsboro Airport work session relatively soon, obviously, given what's going on with Sky Harbor. So I appreciated the comments tonight. It was something that I've been thinking about as well. Part of that, I think we need to invite the Port of Portland to either present to us at a city council meeting or as a part of that work session or in addition to that work session, but to be a part of the conversation. I'd like us to also get an update on unleaded gas and the timeline with that. That's something that we've been talking about, something we've been asking for. And then I think really importantly is making sure we review the development code from the airport and discuss our options to update and add some guardrails as we know what we have currently given the feedback that we've been receiving at the de novo hearing. And before Sky Harbor files again, I'd like us to have a further discussion about what we might be able to do to tighten that up. So I know there was some information we got tonight and then obviously everything from the de novo hearing. to discuss as a part of that, but I'd like to request a work session around the airport.

And so if we support that, we need to email Robbie. Same thing with Councillor Harris' proposal. Councillor Allcare, you have three minutes.

I'd like to have a work session on flock and ALPR.

All right, if you want to support that, again, email Robbie. And Councillor Allcare, just flock in the city, obviously.

We can't control Washington County, so yes, in our city.

Thank you, thank you very much. Councillor Sinclair.

Thank you, Mayor. I'd like to address an email that council received earlier, actually last week. Recently, council received concerns of a resident in South Hillsborough observing an ALPR camera on a city light pole that overlooks a residential alleyway where neighbors come and go with their children and their families from their homes. there was no public notice displayed or permit cited for this camera. A developer had placed the camera on the light pole to secure building materials and the camera was immediately taken down once reported by an alerted resident. In moving forward, I'd like to ask, there are many questions that the public continues to ask on the subject of flock and automated license plate readers due to the lack of understanding what regulations are in place or not in place. On August 18th, I asked that this council explore the ban of flock and ALPRs in Hillsborough. On September 1st, I asked that this council support a public work session dedicated to exploring the legalities of a potential ban. It's my understanding that there are two councillors that have reached out to Manager Hammond expressing support of a work session. I'd like to ask Mayor Pace, with the support of three councillors, may we move forward with scheduling a public work session on flock ALPRs and AI drones and the city regulations associated with AI surveillance within the city of Hillsborough. And I know we'll have to talk about this offline, but I wanted to bring this forward tonight. And last, I'd like to bring up, second, I'd like to request that moving forward in work sessions that council no longer raise their thumbs up or down when asked to gain consensus. Instead, I'd like to request that each counselor give a verbal yes or no so that each counselor's position is identified and recorded. And then on a separate note, I wanted to address the incident that took place this morning at the Washington County Commission's work session. During official work, the Chair Harrington and made a lewd gesture to Commissioner Nafisa Fai, which was completely inappropriate in the way she treated her peer this morning. And I wanted to thank Commissioner Fai for her constant display in her behavior of equity and inclusion and deep integrity in the way she carries herself. And I hope that that commission will take action in censuring Chair Harrington for her poor behavior. Thank you.

Thank you. Moving to advice and information. We have a few items under advice and information. The quarterly utility commission's report is available. And as always, community members who want to be informed and engaged on city council matters can sign up to receive The Happening in Hillsboro email newsletter. Spanish language updates are also available through our Creciendo Juntos email newsletter. Please note the city council will be holding an executive session under ORS 192.6602I. To review and evaluate the employment related performance of the chief executive officer. No action may be taken in executive session. If action needs to be taken, the council will do so in regular session. And with that, the city council meeting is adjourned. Councillors, we'll begin the executive session at 1015 in conference room C207 at the top of the stairs. Thank you.