City Council - Regular Meeting

Well, I'll hope that I've got them handled. Mr. Mayor, I'd like to move consent agenda item F From the consent agenda actually, I think you want to add the downtown grant first since that was published on the agenda So we know the alphabet in the proper order gotcha Okay, so we'll go with a add to a business item D the downtown grant application some of the This was a late arrival onto the agenda and we want to just make sure everyone has that proper agenda here at the dais and and out in the public and

I'll go again. I'd like to move consent agenda item F to business item E. Second.

I move to approve the agenda as amended.

Mr. Mayor, I move to approve the amended consent agenda.

Mr. Mayor, I move that the City Council adopt an ordinance approving and authorizing the Mayor to execute the development agreement between the City of Port Orchard and McCormick Communities LLC for park and open space mitigation within the McCormick Urban Village as presented.

THANK YOU, MR. MAYOR. I WOULD LIKE TO READ A STATEMENT FROM COUNCIL MEMBER WARREN WHO PROVIDED ME ONE AHEAD OF TIME KNOWING HE WASN'T GOING TO BE HERE. HE HAS AN EXCUSED ABSENCE. as he had a procedure this week. So thank you for allowing me to share my comments while I'm unable to attend tonight's business meeting. Currently, city code requires small active open space tracks in each new housing development. I have often compared pocket parks to bus stops. When they are being used, they are highly valuable. When they are not, they can become expensive assets that still require maintenance, insu

There we go. Just because it sounds like a lot of people were saying we're making this assumption. So if we could get clarity as to I guess who will own and pay for this park would be good for the public to hear. I guess Director Bond if you can answer that.

So I too was thinking about updating our maps just to make it more clear and also I think when we have future discussions about communities it would be nice to to note whether it's a McCormick community or the community at large. So I think that confuses people a little bit too. Those are my comments. I look forward to a final product. It looks like a great park.

mayor um i am very happy to be here and my first comments of uh as a city councilor will be regarding something in my neighborhood i personally am very excited about this one of the things that i did want to make sure that was brought up this evening and i'm happy that director bonds and the other speaker in the public hearing brought up was just basically all the concerns that had been raised by some residents within the mccormick woods area And I think the only thing that wasn't really addressed was the surfacing of the playgrounds. But I would imagine that that's something that the HOA deal

Mayor Rospepe. Mayor, I move to adopt resolution

Thank you, I was like, I didn't say anything. So I made the motion, that means I get to speak on it, right?

Great, fine. Okay, so mayor. I support making sure that Port Orchard has a safe and reliable and adequate water supply for our current residents and for future growth. I recognize that this water system plan addresses important infrastructure needs, and I appreciate the work that has gone into developing it. However, I have a concern about approving the plan as currently presented, specifically regarding to future plans for fluoridation and the proposed investment in fluoridation infrastructure. My concern is not simply whether fluoride has dental benefits. I believe that it is a question that

Yeah, Mr. Mayor, I move to approve a contract for 821 to 825 Bay Street under the downtown building refacing program with the final form of the contract subject to the city attorney's approval in a grant amount not to exceed at this time $15,991.50 and a total project cost of $22,845.

I don't think I have a lot of questions for Mr. Bond. I would like to see in future iterations, those of us who have done any type of development know these costs are estimates and we know that's probably not where they're going to be. So I don't know where we can be in bringing this back, I guess is what I'm trying to say. I don't know that we talked that through with the city attorney when setting this all up. So we're kind of learning as we go. I would love to hear what the fruit of those conversations have maybe next month when we come back together. And then secondly, Mr. Schaefer, I beli

Yeah, absolutely love this project. Mr. Schaefer, thank you for getting us kicked off. That's exactly what the intent of this program was for, and I'm really thankful you're taking advantage of it. Nick, I read in the preparing or proposing hardy lap siding on the front and the sides of this building. I've had a little bit of experience with that, but I'm just curious. It's very durable. I know that from experience, but does it meet our building code requirements?

Does the current code allow for say a brick veneer?

I know the Mayor and I talked about this at one point. My thoughts are, if it improves the aesthetic of what's currently there, I'm in favor of it. I would like to see, especially if we're helping to fund some of this, that maybe we'll encourage future applicants, can we get something more stone-like in some capacity? But I'm not opposed to saying no. Hardy plank board works for me is what I'm trying to say. It's not my preferred alternative, but I think it can be acceptable.

So thank you for taking advantage of the program. And this is exactly what we're hoping for. I support an interpretation that's liberally construed in favor of this project. I look forward to more discussion because maybe some renderings might be helpful to see what we might like ultimately. But for this particular project, I think it looks good. And thank you again. There was something else I was going to say, but it has trains left the station on that one. So I'm good. All right. Any other comments?

Yeah, Mr. Mayor, I move to approve the City Council work-study meeting minutes of July 21st as presented.

That's right. Noted. Trying to understand that process, thank you.

Okay. SAC met today. SAC met, yes. That's right. We did.

Council Member Rospepe. Thank you. Nick, I want to commend your team on doing the outreach because I know that from the first meeting Mark and I were both at it was a little bit sparse and your outreach got a lot more comments. and participation from that area of the community, which I think is imperative to moving forward. I like the hybrid approach. It shows that the initial comments of keeping a lot of natural space, especially with some of the development that's gone around there that they were asking for, but at the same time has a little bit of a park feel to it. uh that people can enjoy

Okay, well, one of the first questions I had was who put this presentation together, and I was wondering if it had some external support. So great job, staff. I'm going to talk about a couple things. With respect to active recreation, I think we have other parks in the city that are primed for that. I think of the Paul Powers Park and some of these other parks that we have simply that are underutilized. And so I personally am not necessarily a favor of a park that's dedicated to active recreational use, and I think that also came out in the surveys. I wanted to talk about maybe including a lar

Yeah, thank you, Mr. Mayor. A couple of quick things. In the name, it's a stormwater park. We didn't talk about where's all the stormwater coming from? How much stormwater are we saving? Do we get mitigation credits for building this park? I'll start there.

So this is the ideation phase. We don't know what type of capacity yet then we need to hold for that.

I think we all know what Councilmember Warden's day job is. So I call about these things because when I regularly walk around, say, even my neighborhood, there are many water detention facilities that have zero water in them. And even year-round, the minimal amounts. How can we make sure that if we're going to set up a park to have these nice water amenities part of it that we're getting to that point that we can be accurate in knowing what type what quantities of water will be there, because I would think that we would have a conservative approach on some of the ones that exist today, but I'v

Good. One of my largest concerns there is that we're going to have a stormwater park that doesn't actually have stormwater in it.

I hear you. I think I'm trying to draw out that I know that especially Where I'm driving or walking by these in my neighborhood, it's fairly new. I would guess they're with the new standards, which I think are over-engineered. That's a personal thought, but that's my concern for this park. I know you have one more.

Perfect. Thank you. And I think my last comments are around just kind of our presentation tonight. I don't want to go against what the folks of Port Orchard are asking for. I will say this feels very zen garden in its appearance tonight. I don't know. that will take that feeling once developed. Being adjacent to Highway 16, I don't think I'm gonna get a ton of zen with all that traffic noise in the background, but I don't know if there's any type of design that can help mitigate that as we move forward. I would bring that up. And I wanna leave with, I very desperately would love to see, and I

Well, I'll weigh in a little bit. Yeah, I've been a participant in this process from day one. Connor has done a great job with this. He had people who are not tech savvy at all taking QR codes with pictures with their phones and actually answering questions on their phones within a very short time. We had a great gathering of people come out, participants come out. Of course, we would have loved to have seen more. but we had a lot of people that came out to both meetings full presentations and they're they're very passionate about wanting this to stay natural wildlife friendly as they can but

Well, I just, I think I know the answer, but detention vaults are not being considered as part of this project.

Go ahead. Sorry, ma'am. Correct me if I'm wrong, we have a town hall for September 3rd.

Right, so I thought that it was still on the agenda. We probably should talk about it.

So I thought the last town hall was, you know, an improvement. I think we're marching into a direction that I think we all want to get to and we got lots of good feedback on that. One of the things that I had advocated before the town hall was that we have displays and something that people could gravitate towards and talk about before the actual town hall got underway with presentations. but i i personally was a little disappointed that there was only one or maybe two displays there was one display that talked about that showed uh roundabout renderings but there weren't any other displays and

So what I was going to say, or I was saying, is that some of these might just be blowing up the talking points a little bit and showing those so that people can kind of read what they're going to hear later, maybe word it on paper a little differently than what they do. here uh later on so that they have maybe more of a context but um i just for me it was it was important to see that people could wander around and get engaged in in some graphics or just some displays before the meeting got underway but we really didn't have that so that's my two cents thoughts go on councilman rosbeck um no i

concur with Scott that if, especially since we have a before, you know, before kind of welcoming time period and then afterwards where council members are kind of individual and people can come up to them. I have, I think, three slides and one of them, you know, all on the parks and one of them could be easily, you know, a static display for afterwards to talk to people. So I think it's up on, it would be up to the council member Who has that topic to see if they want to have something static display? Afterwards to contact whomever whether it be Brandi or Megan and say could I have this? displ

I don't know that I would have one. I would also advocate now realizing, well I think I knew it, but now realizing, we don't have another meeting before then. I think it would be easiest and I would throw out there, unless somebody really has opinions otherwise, that we kind of keep the look and feel the same as it was with same topics. I would say that if we needed to, that does feel very transitory and maybe we could find a way to do that outside of here.

I had one more thing. If that's the way you're gonna go, and there is somebody- We'll start there. No, but if somebody has consternation and wants off their topic, to keep things easier, I would horse trade just to keep things easy. All right. Okay. All right. Did you have a comment, Council Member Devin?

Oh, yeah. Sorry, this is a little bit late, because I realized I should mention it. I was looking at, talk about graphics. I was looking at the website. The stormwater park, I wasn't seeing it on the larger... map so you know how it says like it has a like even the givens play field improvements it has that on the um on that map but i wasn't seeing the stormwater park um

And just as another statement about that, sorry, now that I'm on that. I know I think maybe this is something we have to talk about land use we haven't met like all of our committees haven't met I mean I guess we met but there are so many parks right now so we have like the Gibbons we're talking about stormwater and I guess the community center is going to be like under the parks purview that having people understand how many projects are under like parks would probably be a good idea. And I'm not kind of seeing that on the website. Like that's not that's not obvious to me that there's like al

Thanks, Scott, for keeping us on track. We did, we had a short meeting today where we went through mostly the projects that are occurring at the facility. There's nothing that's outside of, out of control or budget. However, their NPDES permit from Department of Ecology uh, is, uh, been 37 months since they submitted it. So they're still waiting for reply from Department of Ecology and that will drive, uh, some of their projects in 2027 should get, get done. We also had a discussion that's going to carry on into next, uh, next month, uh, regarding bio loading. Uh, specifically we have both aff

Can I just state for the record, I'll be abstaining from the head nodding.

You're not, yeah, I can appreciate that. Council Member Rospepe. And my initial impression with the information you gave us, Mayor, is I'm totally against this unless it's proportional. that we need to be receiving the revenue that we would have collected otherwise, and putting anything else on the city makes it basically an unfunded mandate, and I'm totally against this from the get-go, from how it sounds. I would definitely need more information, but again, I find it to be punishing the cities.

is that we see places like Tacoma who have adopted this extra tax and the money isn't going where it was supposed to where people who voted to have this tax put in place for public safety and that money isn't getting used for what the people thought it was going to be. So that's another concern from my perspective of seeing this tax.

I'M FOR IT BECAUSE IT'S NOT EVEN A VOTE OF PEOPLE. IT'S THE VOTE OF THE THREE COMMISSIONERS THAT ENACT THIS TAX. SO IT'S A COUNCILMATIC TAX. IT IS NOT A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE FOR THIS. IN FACT WE AS A BODY OF SEVEN COULD IMPLEMENT THAT HERE FROM THIS DIAS TODAY. I won't get into that today but I will say I also would concur that I'm in favor of that and I would ask that maybe you ask this body to come lobby with you when they take said motion up the hill.

I'd be interested to see what they would say, how our citizens benefit from this tax that they're going to place on our citizens. and the city receives nothing to provide that benefit to our citizens.

To the tune of $950,000 a year? Probably not. So I'm in favor of marching up there with you and lobbying against this.

Sorry, I also want to point out Ms. Archer. Ms. Archer, go ahead.

Oh, I was, well, this is my question. You were stating that we currently pay for Kitsap County Prosecution Services. Through a contract. I'm not sure how the county and the city negotiate, but is that like a point of negotiation where if the money that they take from this public safety tax could offset that uh bill so any um like funding instead of us that coming out of our pocket then using that uh tax money worthy conversations to happen but yeah so yeah councilman mitchell go ahead

Yeah, thank you. So, um, I need to take some time to as an employee of state. I need to also make sure that there is no conflict here for myself in this way that Councilor dinner feels about the county. I don't believe that there is. I think that speaking very broadly, asking a smaller entity to essentially pay more in taxes and get nothing in return is not a great thing. And broadly, I would support a letter that stated that. I think at this time, I would request that we hold off on saying it is from the entire council until I can confirm that. But I certainly think that it would be great for

I JUST WANTED FOR TIFFANY TO ILLUMINATE. WE USED TO HAVE A COUNCIL MEMBER WHO WORKED FOR DOT AND HE WOULD SAY I WORK FOR DOT BUT I DON'T FEEL THERE'S A CONFLICT OF INTEREST AND THE COUNCIL WOULD SAY YEAH OR NAY ON THAT. SO COULD BE VERY SIMILAR IN YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES. FOR THE COUNTY IT'S ACTUALLY BAKED INTO THE EMPLOYEE MANUAL FOR THE ELECTEDS, SORRY, FOR THE COMMISSIONERS AND THOSE EMPLOYEES THAT WORK UNDER THAT

NO, I WOULD NOT. I THINK ALL I WOULD HAVE TO DO IS ESSENTIALLY DECLARE IT, BUT I DON'T HAVE TO WORK WITH YOU. I'LL HAVE TO ASK CHARLIE.

Quick question on that. Do we recoup any of our costs from the contractor who? We'll be billing them. Okay, thank you. Mr. Crocker.

Mr. Vaughn, could we get a report at, well, the next council meeting on how that permit screening software is working?

I'm going to take the opportunity to double down and thank you and your team for being there, leading the charge with our partners. I know I saw Pulsebow, Bainbridge Island. I was working with the South Kitsap Fire. They were our pancake flippers for the Rotary as well. But it was a great event, very well maintained. Thank you to Director Ryan and your staff as well. They were there all day. They even beat me down there and I was there not long after 5.30 a.m. And so it was a long day, appreciative. I do know preliminary reports said it was the most cars they've ever had. I have no idea about

I'LL JUST MENTION THAT I ALSO ATTENDED, AND IT WAS VERY WELL DONE. IT SEEMED LIKE THERE WERE MORE CARS THAN EVER BEFORE, AND I'M GOING TO GUESS MORE PEOPLE, BUT VERY WELL DONE.

Charlie, could you cite the name of that case again? Because it does seem like a really big deal.

Thank you. Okay. Sometimes it takes a little while in the head. First of all, thank you for coming tonight and Participating appreciate it About a year ago maybe a little bit longer John brought up about the two members of council having to recuse themselves because of working for the county on anything this council business and It really hit home when we had the streets contract. It was a couple weeks ago and we were down council member and then two more. I sent a very strongly worded from my own email to the commissioners and I think that we ought to consider as a council I haven't received

While we're going back there, are we good? I could have done that.

I just wanted to say thank you again for the opportunity to be here. This was a great first meeting and I just hated it so much, so. Thank you so much.

So I guess I should have asked more questions. Thank you. Thank you.

I thought we were going to talk about this. So you're talking about the staff actually that are stationed there?

Here, let me see if I can, well, I don't have my computer. But it's a city, it was a city, you know, thing. Give me a second.

Because my understanding is that there may be staff stationed there.

Let me see the wording. It has to do with, you know how the mayor says all the time? I think your mic is on. Oh, oops.

So that's why they have . Let's rock and roll, guys. I have not been asked for a while.