City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Kent City Council meeting for July 7th, 2026. If you would all please rise and join me in the flag salute. 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.

Here. Thank you. Thank you, Kim. Item number three is approval of the agenda. Are there any changes?

Seeing none, a motion would be in order to approve the agenda as published. Got a motion and a second. All those in favor, please say aye.

Opposed? Motion carries 6-0, and the agenda stands as published. We will move right into public communications, starting out with public recognition. We have several items on the agenda this evening. The first one is our July 2026 Employee of the Month. So every month here at the City of Kent employees get together and there's a nomination process to nominate one of their co-workers to be our Employee of the Month. The person that is nominated and ultimately chosen as the Employee of the Month consistently exemplifies the mission, vision, values, and goals here at the City of Kent and has has

Julie, thank you so much. I'm going to pile onto the thank yous to our entire parks team on our rec side, human service side, the operation side. I think about parks and I also think that it's a lot of people's first. It's kids' first chance to play t-ball or soccer. it's teens first job being a referee and working or after school after they're done with high school in their first career as a maintenance temporary professional those kinds of things that there's so many places where parks touches people's lives and and you said it and I don't think that we always stop and think about all of tha

Thank you so much. I was out at the Hillcrest neighborhood last week for a drinks in the driveway event. They are one of our new neighborhood councils, and they are also signed up to be one of our newest National Night Out neighborhoods. So we're very, very excited. And we walked through all of the possibilities, some of the things you mentioned. And I know that there's going to be all kinds of fantastic events happening around the community. So thank you so much. All right. Council Member Boyce.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Upcoming events at the Cecil Showbiz Center is coming up. So, July 16th, we have the Kent Chamber of Commerce Business Bowl and South King County Employee Summit. On August 16th, we have the Pacific Cascade Mustang Club Car Show. So, you have a Mustang. Please bring it to the show. On August 30th, we have this group called Mama Moo. I had to Google that because I didn't know. But, It's a South Korean girl group, and that's going to be August 30th. September 19th, we have Sono Nigam, and that's an Indian playback singer. September 28th, that's the Seattle Thunderbirds ha

All right. Thank you. Council, any other community events? All right. We are going to move on to reports. So each of the council members that are up here serve not only on the city council at the first and third meetings of the month, but also on regional and statewide boards and commissions. part of our agenda is an opportunity to share the work that's been done outside of these council meetings. I'm gonna kick it off, a couple of highlights from the last few weeks. I wanna start out with a huge thank you to all of our city crews that worked on the 4th of July. So it takes an entire team to b

All right. Thank you. All right. I am going to turn it over to Council Member Boyce.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Appreciate that. So at 4 o'clock, we had our COW, Community as a Whole meeting. One of the things we talked about, we got an update on our financial statement. And I will say we are tracking just a little higher than last year. with a little bit of variance, but we are within the budget, so we are looking in pretty good shape so far this year. We also had, with our police department, we have an MOU, which is part of the Collective Bargain Agreement, so where we incentivize employees, I'm sorry, police officers, that we try to recruit and try to keep within the police de

Thank you. I got to attend a bunch of community events, which was on the council newsletter and social media. Also, the AWC conference, which Mayor Ralph talked about. That was a very valuable experience. I was shocked to see that there's 600 elected official council members in our state. I was also appointed to the Sound Cities Association Equity and Inclusion Cabinet, and during our first meeting, we discussed how cities in our region are approaching diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we identified practical goals for the group. And then I also wanted to, I hesitated when you, when Counci

Thank you, Council Member. I will also have updates in the Council Newsletter. Human Services Commission meets next week to make their final grant funding decisions. Right now they are working on an optional individual funding exercise where they get to, on their own, determine how much funding out of our available 1.6 million to give each of the approved organizations. And then Human Services staff is going to collect that and kind of compare and show everyone next week at the meeting. And then those final decisions that come out of that meeting next week will come to council as part of our b

Thank you, Council Chair. So I actually do not have a report tonight. I sit on the King County Growth Management Planning Council, and we will not meet again until September 16th. And then in our Committee of the Whole, we did not have any topics for economic and community development. So I will give the time back.

Thank you, Council Member Boyce. We had Committee of the Whole earlier this evening. I am Subject Matter Chair for Public Works. It was all about public works today. We are doing some important work down on South 251st Street. We authorized an agreement and a project that will help with flood mitigation and hopefully protect our community in the event that we have a major flood event like we had in last December. Good work happening there. We also submitted two projects for the Transportation Improvement Board grant opportunity. We're always very lucky with those, so I'm hopeful that we will b

okay there you go all right thank you everyone we are going to move on we do not have a public hearing this evening but we do have public comment public comment period is your opportunity to speak to the city council and the mayor on issues that relate to the city of kent or agenda items the Council will consider. This is not an open public forum and comments that do not relate to the business of the City of Kent are not permitted. Additionally, the State of Washington strictly prohibits people from using this public comment opportunity for political campaign purposes, including to support or

I need to stop you there. Very specific state law indicates that we cannot use public comment for any type of campaign purposes.

I was also- Do start, say your name and city of residence for the record, please.

Right. Thank you, Kim. Okay. With that, we will go ahead and move on to our consent calendar. Consent calendar is a compilation of items that council has worked on through both workshop and the Committee of the Whole over the last several meetings. They had an opportunity to have discussion, ask questions, and these items have been voted out of Committee of the Whole without controversy. Tonight, we have items A through J for approval on the consent calendar. Is there a motion to approve the consent calendar?

We've got a motion and a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Opposed? Motion carries 6-0. All right, we are going to move into item number nine, which is other business. Tonight we have a state legislative agenda development presentation. I'm going to call up Kyle Moore, our government affairs manager. Joining us online is Brianna Murray, our contract lobbyist. And I'm going to turn it over to Kyle to get us kicked off and also...

Second Kyle. Kyle Schroeder is joining us in person as well. So Kyle and Kyle and Brianna, turning it over to you.

I'm a type of guy that I believe the glass is half full, right? That's my approach. But, you know, it's pretty clear that the expense so far is superseding the revenue, right? The governor said no new taxes, right? But, yes, so you're asking what the city wants. I mean, there's a lot of programs out there, and some of the programs are very important, and some of the people are very attached to the program, right? The only way to do that, you have to cut expenses, which is going to be extremely tough to do. And then on top of that, we want to be able to give the city more, I would say, more mon

and don't create more unfunded mandates to us as we're seeing declining revenue just like you are so thank you councilmember voice i think that that that is the most important statement is that i i too want to be optimistic there's not new funding coming our way i don't believe that i think what we do need to continue to say very clearly and out loud is don't take any more away from us leave it, let us, and don't keep putting things on our plate. You think about public defense standards, and while that was done by the Supreme Court, it was in front of the legislature last session, and the ask

Council Member Troutner. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I think you just said it just right. I agree with this list, and I appreciate you and Brianna and Kyle working to bring this forward to us. I'm on the AWC Legislative Committee. Thank you to Kyle for you were at the meeting during the conference. We were both at the meeting at the beginning of this conversation, and then we have a meeting in a couple weeks. We are hearing this from cities across the state. A lot of these things that are on our list are priorities that they are having. And I think when you bring that voice together and everybody'

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Kyle and Kyle and Brianna, I want to thank you for spending your time. I feel like you are the experts and you know what will work best and what has the most chance of going through. and so i will agree to this um yeah so i just want to thank you for your work and i think it's super important that we get other cities involved and on our side sometimes i talk to council members from other cities and they don't really know what's going on in this you know in the state legislature so i appreciate you doing that work to bring everyone together and advocate for our similar n

Council, any other comments, support for the direction that this document is heading? Any other things you'd like to focus on? Okay, so at this point, and Kyle, I don't know if there is another slide after this. With that, there we go. That is what I was going to talk about, next steps.

All right. That concludes our other business. Item number 10 is bids. We do not have any bids this evening. Item number...

I'd like to have a personal privilege, please.

Before we move into the last agenda item, Council Member Boyce.

Well, since it's your birthday, Madam Mayor, I think we all should sing happy birthday to you. But we're not going to see you before your birthday. How about that? Anybody disagree with that? All right, here we go. Pat, lead us out, please. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Next time, I will ask you and not Pat to lead us off, okay? Thank you.

That was really embarrassing, and thank you very, very much. I appreciate that. All right. Item number 11. We have a closed session this evening relating to collective bargaining that will last five minutes. Council will be coming back following that closed session and there will be action taken. The closed session, I need to ask everyone that is not related to this session to please clear council chambers. Again, we are looking at five minutes. It's now 8.22. By the time we start this, we'll be five minutes in. 828 will be coming back in. Council will be taking action. Following that, there w

Council has returned from the closed session related to collective bargaining. I am now going to turn it over to Carrie Endicott, our Human Resources HR Director, sorry, to provide counsel with a short presentation, and then there will be action.

All right. Council, any questions for Carrie? Okay. Seeing none, Council Member Boyce, do you have a motion?

Yes, I do, Madam Mayor. I'd like to make a motion. I move to authorize the mayor to sign a three-year collective bargaining agreement with the Teamsters Local Union Number 117, effective January 1, 2026, through December 31, 2020. I second.

All right, we've got a motion and a second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carries 6-0. Thank you. Council is now going to move into an executive session regarding current or potential litigation. We are anticipating this executive session lasts for five minutes. It's now 8.30, so council will be back in session at 8.35. Thank You mayor before councils consideration tonight is the

Any questions for chat? Seeing none, Council Member Troutner, do you have a motion?

I do. I move to authorize the mayor to sign the settlement agreement with Old Republic Surety the amount of $463,153, subject to final terms and conditions acceptable to the Public Works Director and City Attorney.

Second. We've got a motion and a second. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye.

With that, we are at the bottom of our agenda for this evening. Just another quick reminder, Cornucopia Days is happening all weekend long right here in downtown Kent. Huge thank you to our Kent Lions Club for putting this event on year after year. Hope to see you out and about on Friday and Saturday and at the parade on Sunday afternoon.