City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening and welcome to the February 17th, 2026 city council regular hybrid meeting. I'm Mayor Dave Rosenbomb. Tonight's hybrid city council meeting is being brought to you in person by Zoom. We're also broadcasting the city's YouTube channel on MITB21. Welcome to all and thank you for joining us today. Council members, please have your microphone on for the roll call. Deputy City Clerk, Depa, please call the role. Thank you,

ma'am. Everyone shut off. Council member here. Council member here. Council member Reynolds here. Council member Wer here. Council member Weinberg here. Deputy Mayor Becker here. And Mayor Rosenbach here. Thank you.

There is a quorum pleas a quorum present. Deputy City Clerk, please note that council members uh Andrew and Reynolds have joined us via Zoom. Next, we have the pledge of allegiance. Council, if you would join us in council chambers, please stand and face the flag. If you join us via Zoom, please mute and turn off your video to ensure the US flag is visible. Please join us in saying 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. We now move to the approval of today's agenda. If there are no questions, may I have a motion to approve the agenda? So moved. Second.

There's a motion by Council Member Weineberg and second by Deputy Mayor Becker. Deputy City Clerk, please conduct a roll call vote. Thank you, Mayor. Mayor Rosenbomb, I. Council member Weineberg, I. Council member Sheay, I. Council member Reynolds, I. Council member Androl. Hi. Council member Wer. I. And Deputy Mayor Becker. I. Thank you. Motion passes and the agenda is approved. Next up on the agenda, we have the city manager report. And we welcome city manager Jesse Bond.

Good evening, city council. Happy Tuesday. Got a few things popping up here. Let me close them. All right, Casey. Next slide, please. Council, just a quick meeting snapshot. As we look ahead to the end of February and early March, I will remind you that your next hybrid city council meeting is Tuesday, March 3rd. Uh upcoming board and commission meetings, uh we have the planning commission on February 25th, and the parks and recreation commission meeting on Thursday, March 5th. For anyone following along at home, we post all of these uh board and commission meetings on our website as well as the agendas are posted several days in advance. Next slide, please. A couple of updates I wanted to share. Happy Lunar New Year. Uh the year of the firehorse is here as council member Sheay has uh reminded us so many times. Thank you for your uh support. On Sunday, February 8th, we partnered with the Mercer Island Chinese Association to bring uh this community celebration to Mercer Island. Again, this has been a multi-year partnership. Uh and uh the staff were uh noting that even though it was Super Bowl Sunday, we estimated we had close to a thousand community members here for that event. Uh this has been a strong showing year-over-year. Super exciting. uh lots of activities, live entertainment, vendor booths, many many partners and sponsors. So, a huge s shout out to the Mercer Island Chinese Association for partnering again with us on this uh very special event. Thank you and great job to everyone. Next slide, please. Uh council, this is just a shout out. I think we've sent this to you in a couple of weekly emails, but I wanted to remind you that we are asking for public comment on the six-year transportation

improvement plan. This is something that we review and update annually and the call for public engagement is also an annual call. We have been promoting it across our uh communication channels and we will continue to do that. We have some information posted on the let's talk page for anyone that would like to do a a deeper dive on the tip or the process. Uh we are looking for comments on transportation projects uh by April 21st. Uh and this will be in front of you for a first look um and a public hearing on April 7th. So anything you'd like to do uh to help us promote this opportunity is much appreciated. And you'll see our social media and weekly emails continuing to feature this over the next couple of months. Next slide, please. Uh just a opportunity here uh once every few months we update you on the sewer SCADA system and the upgrades that we're working on. As a reminder, SCADAS stands for supervisory control and data acquisition. It's basically the system that runs all of our sewer system. Uh we awarded a contract to Valley Electric in January 2023 to modernize our very old I'm I'm dating myself 1990s era system um which provides real time monitoring for us of the entire sewer system uh including our pump stations. In fact, recently when we had that uh I guess it was almost a twoe deluge of rain, we had some issues in the sewer system and it was uh this upgraded monitoring capability that helped us identify those issues that were happening kind of overnight and early in the morning. Uh recently we traveled uh to Lynwood to look at the newly fabricated pump station 11 SCADA panels. That's what you

see in that picture there. So, they're being fabricated offsite. We go up to take a look at the testing and verify that those panels meet our functionality before we bring them here and install them in the field. Uh we'll be bringing these panels, they passed their testing uh here in March and we anticipate to wrap up uh pump station 11 work in April. So, this is the final remaining city utility site requiring an upgrade. And once it's complete, it will integrate with all of the other water and sewer utility sites uh on our modernized network. So, we're almost done with this huge project that we've been working on for years. And I know um I just want to keep calling it out how important it is uh this work. We'll probably have our communications person who's sitting right in front of me do a a feature on this important infrastructure upgrade because it it really matters to uh maintaining uh utilities and quality of life here on the island. Uh nice work to the public works team on that. Switching gears uh entirely, no pun intended. I wanted to call out uh the emoto legislation and council. We've been keeping you informed about this, but our community may not be aware. Uh this year we've been working directly with our legislators in Olympia uh to advance, you know, legislation that will address uh e motorcycles and hopefully eventually ebicycles, which are kind of in a gray space in the RCWs. Uh they're not clearly defined. There are two bills that have been working their way through Olympia. One on the Senate side and one on the House side. Uh the House Bill 2374 is uh the lead sponsor is Representative ZH. Uh and she has been just really incredible to work with and drafting that bill and making sure um it was moving forward. It did pass pass off the House floor just over

the weekend, kind of a late night thing. Um and the Senate bill also passed uh off the Senate floor. So we have two bills that are moving right now. um they do a little bit um they achieve different things. We favor the house bill and we are talking to Repzan and Senator Wman about how we reconcile these two. I won't get into all the sausage making here at the council meeting tonight, but I just wanted to tell you that I'm really proud of our whole team, city council and staff uh for taking initiative on this issue well over a year ago getting it to a bill. And even though it hasn't passed yet, we are getting really close. If you haven't done so already, uh please uh say thank you to Representative Zan when you see her. She's worked really hard with us uh to keep this moving. So, we'll keep you posted. We're not to the finish line yet, but we're making progress. Next slide, please. Okay, again, shifting gears. We're covering a lot of topics. Uh just a reminder that we currently have three vacancies in our boards and commissions. one on the Arts Council, one on the Open Space Trust, and one on the utility board. Uh that recruitment is currently open. Uh we've extended it to March 6, hopefully to get a few more candidates. And we plan to come to you city council on March 17th to make those appointments. If for some reason we aren't able to fill the positions, we will just roll the vacancy into the next recruitment, which will start actually really soon um for the next round. So hopefully we'll have some more applicants come in and we'll see you on March 17th to make those appointments. Next slide, please. Upcoming events. Just wanted to make sure this was on your calendar. I think uh Casey Thompson added it, but just in case, I'll have her double check that. Here at the community center on March 7th, we'll be hosting our annual senior resource fair. It's exciting to say that this is annual. We've been doing this

for a few years now. It's one of our most popular events. Uh it's from 10 to 12, open to really anyone of any age, but primary audience is senior adults. Uh we'll have a range of information booths here uh on topics of activity, healthc care, volunteer opportunities, and more. Uh council, you are welcome to pop by and say hello. So again, we'll make sure that is on your council on your calendar for March 7th from 10 to 12 here at the community center. Next slide, please. Uh coffee with a cop. This is something we do about once every other month. The next opportunity will be on the same day as a senior resource fair from March on March 7th from 1 to 3:00 p.m. Uh this will be our police chief Bennett and several of our uh police department officers will be at the Starbucks on the north end uh to meet with community members. Council, if you'd like to stop by, you are certainly welcome to do so. And I believe this was added to your calendar. Next slide, please. By the way, as I'm running through these events, I'll just acknowledge that all of this gets promoted across our social media channels as well. Okay, I think we've got some good news items. And council, you may be aware of this, but I wanted to share it again. Uh two weeks ago, uh members of our marine patrol were out uh training in Chalan County working with King County Sheriff's Office on a specialized rescue when somebody a man fell through the ice really close to the area that they were training. Uh this was, as you've seen our social media post, a right place, right time situation. our officers and the sheriff's office partners were able to jump into action and make a rescue uh quickly enough that upon uh getting dried off and warmed up uh the man was able to drive him himself home. So, wanted to take a moment to recognize Officer Tranter, Sergeant Herszog,

Corpal Robinson, and Officer Johnson for their great work. Um thank you all for that. And that is all I have for you this evening, council. Okay, thank you. Our next item of business is appearances is the opportunity for anyone to speak to the city council on any item except items requiring a public hearing, any quasi judicial matters or campaign related matters. Deputy city clerk is anyone who has signed up for appearances that wishes to address the council. Deputy mayor, no, they just contacted us and said they won't be able to join us. Okay, thank you.

We now move to our next item of business, approval of the consent agenda. Staff, please put the consent agenda on the screen. The consent agenda contains seven items which are available on the screen in the agenda packet for review. Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented? So moved. Second. Moved by council council. It is moved by council member Weinberg and seconded by Deputy Mayor Becker to approve the consent agenda. Deputy City Clerk, please conduct the roll call vote. Thank you, Mayor. Deputy Mayor Becker, I. Council member Wer, I. Mayor Rosenbomb,

I. Council member Reynolds, I. Council member Anderrell, I. Council member Weinberg, I. And council member Sheay, I. Thank you. Motion passes. The city council will now go into executive session for approximately 30 minutes to discuss with legal counsel pending pending or potential litigation pursuant to RCW42.30.110 I sorry 1. The city council will be in recess from 5:15 until 520. The city council will convene the executive session from 5:20 until 5:50 p.m.

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Thank you. The city council was in executive session from 5:20 p.m. until 6:05 p.m. Our first item of regular business is AB6865, compliance with growth management hearings board final decision, an order related to city of Mercer Island. periodic update to the comprehensive plan. Welcome, city. We welcome city manager Jesse Bond and CPD director Jeff Thomas. Thank you, mayor. Good evening, council. Uh, for the record, I'm Jeff Thomas with CPD. There we are. Very good.

Okay, I'll repeat that. Uh, thank you, council. Uh, good evening. I'm Jeff Thomas with CPD. What I'd like to do first is introduce um all five of us sitting at the table here, staff table this evening. Uh from your uh left to from my left to right, uh Kim Adams Pratt, she's our um outside legal council. Uh Jesse Bond, city manager. Michaela Jelico is a senior economist with Community Attributes um consultant that we've hired to help us unpack and uh build um a model here related to GMA compliance and Allison Van Gorp, a deputy director of CPD. We're going to uh run through a slide deck with you this evening. Um it's a little bit long. So um we're going to take some breaks in between to ask uh if you have any questions or comments you'd like to make and uh we'll we'll just move through it in small chunks and um go from there and get to a discussion. Alison, do you want to share screen? Okay. So, for this presentation, we have um essentially six parts that we'll cover. Um and Michaela is going to go through um part three, which is going to be the longest part of the presentation. Uh going through some of the background and how CI has done their work for us. Go ahead. Okay, before we get there, we're going to cover um a couple of other things here fairly quickly. Um a friendly reminder, um this is all related to the

growth management hearings board um decision that we received in August of 2024, uh 2025, excuse me. And that was related to our comprehensive plan update which occurred in November 2024. Um it was appealed. We got the growth board decision and uh what we've uh need to do is we need to go back and do some work related to that. Go ahead. There are four primary issues that came out of the growth management hearings board order in 2025. Um one was related to land capacity, two was related to adequate provisions, three was related to a transit station area sub area plan. and four related to anti-displacement policies. Go ahead. So, skipping uh forward to give you a preview of where we're going to end this presentation. Um our objective here for this evening is to uh walk you through the work that's been done and um have a discussion about um the um transit station sub area map that's been developed with the the boundary specifically. And what we're going to be asking the council to do this evening, should you agree, is to provide direction to staff to move forward with a compliance strategy that uh is related specifically to the growth border order, landing capacity, and adequate provisions and also move forward with using a draft transit station sub area boundary that will allow us to go out and get some public feedback um between now and March 17th and come back on March 17th and report to you on that public feedback and then have you move forward with locking in a boundary that will be used

for the rest of this growth board compliance process.

Let me get my mic on. Okay. Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna walk through a overview of

of the station area boundary um and the development of the boundary modifications that we conducted over the last few weeks based on the council's direction at the January 16th planning session. Um so to start us off uh rail station area is defined in um the state statute and it is any walks that are fully or partially within a 1 half mile walking distance of an entrance to a train station with a stop on a light rail system. So we've we've mapped that out the 1 half mile walking distance from the entrances to Marshall Islands light rail station. You can see that here in the magenta line. Um you can notice that the line is not a smooth circle. It's kind of a jagged zigzag and that just has to do with how this anal this analysis is conducted. Um the walking distance is calculated based on street grid. And so because that has a lot of right angles and whatnot, it produces this line that's a bit jagged. And then when we capture all of the parcels that are fully or partially within that walkshed, we see that likewise that follows a similar pattern with a really zigzag sort of edge. And the boundaries aren't necessarily following streets or neighborhoods. There's, you know, certain properties are in and certain are out within the same neighborhood. So, it's not a very clean way to look at changes to zoning development regulations. Um, there is the opportunity to modify the station area. Um, that would eventually need to be approved by the Department of Commerce, but we would like to move forward with developing a modified station area now for further consideration of all the work we need to do for GMA compliance.

Um, back on January 16th, the council approved motion 2B that gave us these four guidelines shown on the screen um to guide our work in modifying that boundary. I'm going to walk through uh that analysis and show the modifications that were made one by one and then the final boundary that's produced. Um so the first step was we wanted to remove all of the parks, open space, rideways, and public property um that wouldn't be appropriate for uh residential development or or new zoning. Um so you can see on the map there in green all of those properties includes Luther Burbank lower and upper Madale Park, Mercedale close open space as well as a light uh right ofway area along Island Crest Way and that interchange and then the property where the Merc fire station is located. So those were all removed. And then for the second guideline, we wanted to remove the a non-ontiguous area that was created by guideline one. So you see there on the right side of the map, there's a yellow area um that's sort of separated off from the rest of the station area by the removal of Luther Burbank and upper Luther Burbank. So, we'd like to also remove that yellow area just to keep a continuous boundary and kind of a a even line there on the right side of the station area. Then we move to guidelines three and four and we tried to align the remaining boundaries with the street grid first and then where that didn't work with existing zoning boundaries. Um, and so you can see in orange, those are the areas that we're recommending removing from the station area. And then in kind

of the brown or maroon color, um, those are the areas we're recommending adding based on guidelines that we have before. So when you put that all together, it produces this boundary. And this is the recommended preliminary modified station area. So, that's the final result of the council's direction from last month, and we're recommending that the council moves this forward as part of a public feedback period over the next month. Um, and then at the March 17th city council meeting, staff will bring back a summary of the public feedback that we receive on the boundary and we'll ask you to make a a final approval of the boundary to move forward with the rest of the work we need to do for GMA complaints.

With that, let's uh take a quick pause. Any questions from the council on um what Allison just covered or any of the opening remarks? Council Reynolds, I just want a kind of a two-part question. First, I just want to confirm what I think you told me, which is commerce will will have to approve all these modifications we've made. Is that correct?

Eventually, that's correct. Um, as part of the to bill, we will be required to enact zoning changes within this half mile station area. And for that purpose, commerce will need to approve a modified station area. um given the timeline for GMA compliance with July 31st, 2026 as our deadline. Um you know, we're not certain if we'll be able to attain that commerce approval in time to meet our our deadline. Um so I think we'll set this as the boundary for the work that needs to happen here near-term. If we need to, we can make any changes to a taken commerce guide uh approval prior to playing with the the TOD. We'll we'll talk more about that whole process and phasing um as we get a little further into the presentation here.

And and the steps you followed struck me as kind of inherently reasonable and defensible things to do if we wanted to. Could we stretch it further, you know, and treat it like silly putty and make a completely different zone?

Well, we haven't seen guidance from commerce yet. on how this modification process will work or what the requirements would be. We have been talking with them about it. Um, our intent with this what I've just presented is to keep the area and acreage of the station area approximately the same. Um, so that we can show that we're meeting the intent of the legislation to upzone this area that's within an easy walk of the station area. Okay.

Thank you. I I I want to add uh council member Reynolds, you know, setting the boundary is a policy decision of the council. Uh working through the guidelines that you directed us to follow at the planning session. We believe that we prepared a defensible map. If the council would like to make changes, it is certainly within your prerogative to do so. I don't know that I'd go too far away from kind of the general geographic placement. Um, but before we start making changes, I think it's important to move forward with that public comment period. Um, the staff, uh, we acknowledge that we've been staring at this for several months now and we may, uh, certainly learn something, you may learn something from that comment feedback period that you think needs to be considered. And so, the appropriate time to really dive into those changes, I would recommend would be March 17th, uh, once we've received our feedback. That

that makes sense. Thank you. Go ahead. You ready? All right. So, Michaela Jelico is gonna jump on next and um we'll move on to talking about the capacity analysis.

Thanks, Alison. Good evening. Uh next slide. Uh, as Jeff mentioned, my slides are numerous. So, I've prepared a little bit of a agenda here to to level set what we're going to talk about. I'm going to start with a little bit of background and introduction and then I will go through the housing needs allocation and then get into the land capacity analysis before we talk about compliance strategy. All right. So, this process started in 2021 when King County published the urban growth capacity report, which found that Mercer Island had a net housing unit capacity of 1,67 units. In 2023, King County allocated housing need to cities through amendments to the countywide planning policies and those identified needs by affordability levels. Mercer Island was allocated a need of 1,239 units through this process and most of the identified needs are concentrated among units serving affordability levels greater than or less than 80% of AMI, excuse me. In 2024, Mercer Island com completed a land capacity analysis supplement which identified a deficit in capacity of 143 units. Subsequently with the adoption of the comprehensive plan, uh the city identified upzoning to parts of town center that create additional capacity. And then in 2025, you adopted policies to comply with House Bill 1110 and uh 1337 that allow middle housing and ADUs. Next slide. And those policies are important in some of the subsequent analysis that I'll be

talking about tonight. This slide shows your housing needs allocation. The first column is showing your baseline supply as of 2019. That's the number of housing units by AMI that you have in the city. The allocated need, that 1,239 units, is in the next column. And then our team added in the number of units that were built between 2020 and 2026. And that's a total of 173 new units during that period. And so we identified an adjusted allocation of your net new housing unit need of 1,191. So that's the baseline we're working at from as of 2026. So before we move off this slide, I just want to pause and make sure there's not any questions. We have several slides like this with a heavy data set.

No. All right. Mayor is saying move it along.

All right. Next, we looked at the Department of Commerce guidance on land capacity analysis that was provided to all cities um updating their comprehensive plans um and and use this as a guideline for the updates that we're making to the land capacity analysis. So, we start by summarizing the land capacity by zone. We then categorize those zones by the housing types or densities allowed and summarize within those zone categories. And then we relate the zone categories to potential affordability levels, which allows us to further disagregate your housing unit capacity, which is where we spent a lot of our time and effort with this analysis and in the update. And then we end by comparing that projected housing needs to your capacity, that updated land capacity analysis. Next slide. All right. So, step one is the land capacity by zone. We started with the initial land capacity from your 2024 supplement and we summarized that by by zone and we updated that to include the up zone in town center that you adopted as well as your middle housing enabling zone changes and ADU enabling zone changes so that we can better account for the policies that you've already enacted. The result is an updated existing baseline land capacity analysis with 1557 baseline residential housing unit capacity that includes the town center up zone, 337 additional units of middle housing capacity and 239 additional units of ADU capacity. So across all zones, we've identified capacity of 2,133 housing units. Next slide. And here's what that looks like in a

table. So you can see the the zone, every zone, and the capacity by zone, the the baseline. That first column is the baseline including the town center update. Next column is your new middle housing capacity and then ADU capacity and then lastly is the total residential capacity. And it's important to note here that this includes deductions for rightaways, public per purpose and a market factor to account for what may be uh may actually transact within the planning period. We've also deducted the existing supply of housing units from the resident the redevelopable land to give an idea of net residential capacity. And then our middle housing and ADU capacity reflect update uptake assumptions as well which is essentially a market factor for those new new policies and new housing unit types. So I'm just going to pause here. I realize um we have a technical problem occurring as we speak here. the closed captioning is running over the top of uh our slides which means the viewers at home aren't seeing those bottom line numbers. Um so what I'm going to do uh Allison has the live slide deck up. I'm going to ask her to just read the totals off from the bottom. And for anyone that's watching at home after this meeting tonight, we will uh post the PowerPoint and amend the packet uh to the website. but we'll be more thoughtful as we're going through the presentation um to try to pick up anything that's being blocked by the closed captioning. Um so why don't you go ahead and read that line and then I have one more comment. So the baseline number is

1557 and the new middle housing capacity is 337. Yeah. Or or you're not close enough to it.

Okay. So baseline final residential capacity is there we go baseline final residential capacity is 1557. The new middle housing capacity is 337. The ADU capacity is 239 and the total residential capacity across all zones is 2,133. And so before we get to council member Reynolds's question, council, this is just a really important moment moment to po uh pause and remind you that that new middle housing capacity and the ADU capacity reflects work that we did in 2025 after the comprehensive plan was adopted. And so this is the first time you, us, uh, the community is seeing that additional capacity. We are create created by those legislative actions, which gets us to that number, uh, 2,133 in the bottom right that you can't see. All right. Council member Reynolds.

Yeah. Talking about the the ADU capacity, it's interesting that it's not broken down by zone, and maybe there's a good reason for that, but um it struck me as small compared to the number of residential lots in the community. How do you go about determining it?

Yeah, I might call on my colleague Brian to get into this a little bit. He's he's on the Zoom, but we we looked at middle housing and ADU capacity together because there's a little bit of crossover in according to I think Allison might be able to explain this better than me um in how those sort of compete for each other. Um but one thing that keeps the ADU capacity small is the actual production of ADUs. So we're using the best available data to be able to understand how much production we think will happen in that time frame. And I think it's averaging like nine units per year. Yeah, that's our current our historical rate of ADU production over the last um 15 or so years is averaging about nine ADUs per year. So that is weighing into our thinking. And then the other factor is so middle housing and ADUs are both allowed on residential zoned lots. And so it's a little bit of a either or proposition. If someone is looking to

add development to their single family property, they could either build like a home and one or two ADUs or they could come in and do a middle housing development. And so the ADU capacity shown is, you know, meant to be looked at together with the middle housing capacity because those are both occurring on those residentially zoned lots. Okay. And and the the column before the new middle housing capacity is specifically capacity that was created by the the I guess 1110 and 1220 or whatever it was.

Yeah. So there was existing capacity in our residential zones for single family housing when we approved when we adopted the ordinance that enabled middle housing. Um that added the ability to also build those middle housing housing types. Um so yes, it does add capacity because it allows you to have more units on a lot than was previously allowed. Okay. Thank you. I think we can move forward. Next slide.

All right. Second step is categorizing zones by the allowed housing types and densities. So you can see here that we've described by zone the typical housing types allowed, the density associated with those housing types, and then we've assigned a zone category. And I think I'm going to go to the next slide unless there's we we can come back to this table if we want. So um one addition one one new change that we've made to this is that zones like R15 are broken into two categories that better allow us to capture the range of densities that are allowed in each zone. So the updated methodology better captures moderate densities that are supported under the middle housing regulations. We've got four categories that we've come up with. So low density categories are c are characterized by detached single family homes. Moderate density or middle housing capture town homes, duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, and courtyard apartments. Lowrise captures apartments and condominiums in buildings up to three floors. And mid-rise captures apartments and condominiums and buildings with four to seven floors. Next slide. Summarizing this by zone category, um we find 356 within the units capacity within the low density category, 337 in the moderate density category, 918 in lowrise, 284 in mid-rise, and the 239 ADUs for a total baseline capacity of 2,133, which is the same number we saw previously. So we've just reorganized those by zone category.

Okay. Step four is where we really spent a lot of time to be able to disagregate those zone categories into the affordability levels served. So to do that, we calculate affordability level assumptions for market rate units as well as units that are supported by internal subsidies or incentives, which is your right now is your incentive zoning program in town center. And then also external subsidies or incentives, which are units that are built by external actors. Um, and there's potential for that in Mercer Island. So the market rate assumptions are informed by a robust data set that we collected representing a reasonable market area. Internal subsidies are based on your current policy and external subsidies are also based on uh data collected for a reasonable market area focusing on strictly affordable units. And then we apply those assumptions to calculate your capacity by zone category disagregated by AMI level. Next slide. A little bit more detail on what that actually looks like in practice. The 2025 King County area median income or AMI from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD. We use that as a starting point to figure out what the afim affordable rents are and affordability levels. So we take that AMI which is 157,000 in 2025 and for example households earning 80% of AMI have gross income of 125,680 which translates to a maximum affordable rent of 3,142 applying the 30% assumption which is what we can assume is a reasonable

amount for housing um costs. or not cost burdened and divide that by 12 for a monthly um rent affordable rent. The data that we use to distribute the rent by affordability level is we pulled market rate data from Co-Star, Zillow, and we even looked at individual property websites to gather rent data for um Mercer Island specific units. When data wasn't available for Mercer Island, we looked at comparables in the region and that distribution then reveals the percentage of housing units with rents at each affordability level. Next slide. And this chart shows what that looks like, what the result is. Most of the findings are based on a representative market area. Due to the limited information specific to Mercer Island, we wanted to make sure that we had a reasonable data set. So we included Belleview, Kirkland, Redmond, and Seamish, all of which are arch cities as well. We have calculated this for high-rise as well to allow for a variety of analysis, but you don't currently have high-rise um within within the zoning that you have. So, it's not used in the land capacity analysis currently. This shows us that no market rate units serve the 0 to 30% of AMI affordability level. But with sufficient capacity, the market does develop units to serve the 50 to 80% of AMI affordability level without additional intervention from the city. So you can see the yellow is 30 to 50. You'll see that there's no dark blue which would have been the 0 to 30%. Um and then we see

ADUs and mid-rise and lowrise units support uh that 50 to 80% pretty well. And then low density and high-rise both see large percentages serving the greater than 120% of AMI levels. Okay. Well, just a quick pause here for anybody that's watching at home. I know the uh the bottom bar is blocked by the closed captioning. Um, so that teal color or dark blue I think as you called it is 0 to 30% AMI. Orange is 30 to 50% AMI. Uh, the darker green is 50 to 80% AMI. That lighter blue 80 to 100%. Purple is 100 to 120%. What I'm going to call is a more lime green seahawks green. Go Hawks is greater than 120%. Uh, for the next time we're in front of you, council, we'll make sure we adjust the slide deck so that we don't have images being blocked by the closed captioning.

They're okay on on Zoom. Yeah. If somebody that's watching at home is not going to be able to see it because that's getting recorded.

Um, council, this is a pretty foundational table. Um, I'm not aware of a data set that exists like this in our region. um bringing this forward helps to lay a foundation for the policy work ahead and address where we might um need to focus our work. Um just you know kind of an obvious finding is the low density that that um very lower part of the graph in that lime green that's predominantly your single family zoning is not producing any affordable housing. That may not come as a surprise. Maybe it did. That that's important finding from our region. I think the other takeaway that we had at least on initial pass of this data which I just want to go over again um the assumption was adding a density and more highrises to the town center may be the the solution to affordable housing, but our data is actually showing that's not what's happening regionally in the high-rise bar. So, I wanted to call that out. where we're seeing more affordability is actually in that mid-rise to lowrise category. So, we're happy to spend some time here if you have questions and want to talk about this.

Uh, Council Reynolds. Sure. And if this is a topic for later, that's fine. But I I I'm just I I missed something key, which is take the the top bar, the ADUs. Is the subdivision by color just based on historically what has what has emerged in the county when people have built ADUs? Is that correct? We looked at current rents for units that are identified as ADUs

for example ADUs specifically. And then for you know all the other categories we looked at buildings that met the criteria for the for each category and looked at current rents. So, we're looking at current rent compared to current maximum affordable income. Okay. And Mr. Mayor, can I ask an additional question? Hey, go for it. Um, I need a refresher. The the affordability criteria does not vary by family size at all. Is that correct? In application, Austin, do you want to answer this?

Sure. Um, so it's a yes and no answer. So HUD sets the AMI level as one singular number. However, when agencies like ARCH or other affordable housing providers look at how to set affordable rents for the units they're offering, it is adjusted based on house household size. and those rents represent there's a whole table breaking out the affordable rent by the number of members of the household and the income level.

That's why I was confused. I remember seeing that. But here it's it sounds like we could technically meet the requirement just by building a bunch of cheap studio apartments. Is that correct? Or do we have to build a distribution of threebedroom and twobedroom and oneb? There's no requirement in the commerce guidance related to the size of the units. It's really just looking at the affordability levels. Okay. Thank you, Deputy Mayor Becker.

Uh yeah, so sorry. Uh Allison said earlier that there I think Mer's building nine ADUs a year. I'm just curious um I given that this is showing that ADUs are producing a decent numbers of low of of affordable units um at marketer rate like whe what the impact would be of us improve changing the rules around ADUs to streamlining them making them easier in the future I think that probably wouldn't help us correct me if I'm wrong with the actual immediate GMA compliance but how would that impact us in over the coming years um in terms of requirements for affordability mix.

It could certainly make ADUs more attractive for property owners on Mercer Island uh to engage with and eventually construct. Um there's a variety of different tools that we could certainly look at in a program uh post GMA compliance to to work with. An example of that would be um pre-approved um building plans, for example. um could develop a program where we have a small selection of ADU plans that are pre-approved for permitting. Uh and that certainly could encourage uh property owners to engage and say, you know, I like that idea and um it would be an expedited uh permitting process and uh go from conception to construction much more quickly.

Okay. And we would look at that in the coming years. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. So, I might be jumping ahead here, but um what are the policy implications for trying to address that 0 to 30%? Are you going to get into tools and ideas later? Um it looks like a tough problem to solve.

Yeah, this is an important tell here and Jeff probably has some things to add. Again, part of the reason I mentioned that as far as I'm aware, an in analysis like this hasn't been done before is um we've done it now and we've demonstrated that inclusionary zoning and and just the market itself is not producing those units. So, it's likely going to mean uh direct subsidy uh partnerships with the state, the county, ARCH, perhaps our own contributions, fee and ll programs. something else is going to have to be implemented to address that 30% at under affordability and we haven't quite gotten there yet. Jeff and Council Member Wer, that's that's a policy discussion to be had in this process.

Can you remind me the count for 0 to 30 that we need? 519 units and that includes permanent supportive housing as well as non

and we do have a few more slides in the deck where we'll actually take this analysis a step further and start to quantify uh what that need looks like in terms of dollars. So one pattern I'm seeing in the data which you alluded to earlier is that there this chart is showing us a couple of outliers. Uh that low density is not going to get us where we need to go as far as affordability. It's also showing that high-rise is not going to get us there uh as far as affordability is concerned. um mid-rise and low-rise seem very close uh in terms of uh what they produce um as is as they are to uh the moderate density and middle housing. I'm wondering I maybe I missed it on a previous slide, but what is the definition of high-rise versus mid-rise versus lowrise? Is it number of floors? And do we know what the number is that's the threshold between those?

Yeah, we can flip back. By the way, when when we prepared these slides, um they're not the best for a meeting presentation, but all the detail is there should you desire at two in the morning to read through the step by step. So, here's that slide we were looking for. It's shown here in the the bottom half of the bullets here. So, lowrise is up to three. Midrise is 4 to 7. So, that essentially covers anything that's currently allowed on the island, I think. Um, and high-rise would be anything above seven. Is that right? Yes. Yes. Good. Thank you.

Actually, mayor, if I may, just to answer council member Weinberg a little bit more fully. Um, this the transition when you're at 7, 8, nine stories starts to become a conversation about construction materials. Mh. um eight stories, you're still going to be in that generally same construction materials as seven and six and five. So, um I think we're we're generally viewing eight stories as a mid-rise concept on Mercer Island and in the region in general. Thank you.

Yes. can go back to a couple of slides where you were um before this where it has the different kinds of middle housing. Yeah, there. Okay. So, um House Bill 1110, which is the middle housing bill, you know, allows six out of nine types. And I think on Mercer Island, you know, we have the town homes, duplex, triplex, quadlex, courtyard, apartments, and stacked flats. And um just in talking to community members, people have asked me about cottage housing and whether that is something that we can look at as an option for middle housing during phase 2. Yeah, that's something that when we adopted the existing interim regulations for middle housing, we chose not to include that type because um we were relying on our existing development standards within the residential zone and just allowing these new housing types. If we'd like to pursue cottage housing, I think it likely needs customized development standards to facilitate that type of development. the existing setbacks and other dimensional standards likely wouldn't result in the type of development that people are envisioning when they talk about cottage housing. The cute small little cottages. If we were to allow two freestanding units on a lot currently, they would likely look like pretty large blocky single family homes because there's nothing to limit their size or height. when we like other jurisdictions around us were all facing a very tight turn with um the implementation of the mental housing um bill. So, as Allison correctly pointed out, some of that was a proc some of that was a product of efficiency in 2025

in trying to get housing types that we could work within our existing code without doing major reconstruction on. Um, and I agree with Allison's comments. If um when we get to permanent regulation process for middle housing, if that's something the council would like to explore and the community would like to explore, can certainly do it. Um cottage housing regulations uh do exist in other places. So

yeah, Council Sheriff, if I recall correctly, Allison um presented a pretty length I think we went through this and you went through the details. I think if you take a look at the ad from back then I think it probably some more answers there. Uh counc is that an old hand or new hand? Okay. Right.

Okay. So, we've been talking a little bit about uh mid-rise versus high-rise already. So, here's a little bit more detail to help understand what we're seeing between mid-rise versus high-rise types in terms of affordability. um I think is is intuitive. Greater high-rise supports a greater number of units per parcel which means greater potential revenue per available square foot of land that comes with significantly greater construction costs due to the construction materials required um as well as advanced fire and safety systems, engineering costs, elevators and other factors. This requires significant initial capital and those greater costs result in higher average rents. So what we're seeing in the market data and based on our expertise locally, high-rise development is very unlikely to produce units at less than 80% of AMI, which is what we see in that data previously. Midrise on the other hand, um obviously the limited height results in fewer units per parcel, less potential revenue for developers, but much more economical construction, faster development timelines. So we see that more than 60 76% of midrise rent comparables serve incomes ranging between 50 to 80% of AMI. So we are seeing those unit types support housing capacity in the 30 to 80% of AMI level range. Can I hop in with a question here? So, how did you think about ways like things are going on in the legislature right now? My understanding is there was a some sort of stair bill that was pending that I don't know if it actually I

we didn't anticipate any potential changes in the legislature. It's nearly an impossible thing to do, but uh the session will be ending here in a few weeks and if any of those changes happening happen that could impact our analysis. Yeah. I'm just curious because I think the idea there is that it, you know, you you have fewer sets of stairs and that can obviously allow for more units, but I don't know. I don't know where that bill went.

Yeah. And actually there's like thematically there's a lot of interest right now in taking like existing commercial buildings and allowing for easier transitions to housing for example. That's kind of a theme. Uh the stairs and ingress egress and some of the safety things are being assessed. I mean, there's a whole slug of bills. I I don't have a sense right now of what's going to make it to the finish line, but we will certainly pick up that analysis if it changes any of our assumptions here.

Yeah. I mean, I wonder if that's another policy decision or at some point we have to talk about if, you know, if where our rules are about converting what would be a commercial building into a um residential building. Um yeah, that um we generally as a smaller city prefer that uh the building code changes come from the top down. That way they're properly vetted. But we um certainly at the direction of the council, if there's something specific uh that would make good sense for Mercer Island, we could identify that for some advanced work. Um that would be probably an after July task. Yeah, I don't I I just won't remember it if we don't put it on the record now.

No, no, thank you for bringing it up. It's a And it reminds me too, if Robbie's watching, um the analyst in the city manager's office, we'll make sure we do a roll up of the bills that pass with all of you and certainly with our planning department team. Uh Council Weber.

Yeah. So, the bill you're talking about is a scissor stair bill uh that was actually put forward by uh Janice. Um I don't know whether it's passed or not but I do know that it would have a minimal effect uh in terms of increasing the number of units that we be able to do. Uh essentially it would uh its intent is to try to uh reduce the number of uh stairwells that are needed for a uh a mid to high-rise uh apartment building. um by having essentially two pathways going down the same stairwell um with fire separation between the two. Uh and technically it's feasible uh to do but it would only gain you about one unit per floor. Uh so we we at the scale of Mercer Island we might gain you know a few dozen by doing that.

I think there was some conversation too about having smaller elevator standards. I don't recall that one but I can research it. All right, let's keep going.

All right, so step five is comparing that projected housing needs that we talked about a while ago now to the estimated capacity or the land capacity analysis. So in a very formula fashion, I provided here what this looks like. So it's market rate capacity plus those externally subsidized capacity plus internally subsidized capacity equals to total housing capacity. And we've done that by AMI level. So on the slide I'm showing the very low income housing capacity. So we see 150 market rate units plus four externally subsidized units of capacity and 42 internally subsidized units of capacity for a total housing capacity of 196 units. We then take that housing capacity and subtract your allocated housing need to arrive at either a surplus or a deficit. For the very low income category, what that looks like is 196 total housing capacity minus 202 allocated housing need for a deficit of six units. Next slide. And this is what that looks like for every category.

So the example Michaela you just walked through was the 30 to 50% AMI. So you could see the formula. Exactly. So that's the fourth column from the top or the fourth row from the top, excuse me. Can we just to make sure there's absolute clarity on this table just reaffirm what each of the columns mean? Yes. Thank you.

Okay. So the very So I'm going to start from left to right. The first column is income level. So that describes each AMI or affordability level that we're looking at. Starting at the extremely low income on the top, that's 0 to 30% AMI broken out with uh PSH all the way down to very high income, greater than 120% of AMI at the bottom. Zone categories are the next column over. And that's where we look at those were those zone categories we talked about a few slides ago. low-rise, mid-rise, um, moderate density, middle housing, um, low density and ADUs. The third column is your allocated housing need. The fourth column is market rate housing capacity. The fifth column is externally subsidized housing capacity. So that means housing capacity that's potentially served by actors external to the city but not market rate units. The sixth column is internally subsidized housing capacity. So right now that's looking at your incentive zoning program in town center zones. The seventh column is total housing capacity. So that's the sum of those three capacity columns. The eighth column is the calculated surplus or deficit. And that's showing all of the surplus and deficit. So you see that the first three categories have deficit. The remaining categories have surplus for a total surplus of 942 units. And then we take out any in surplus because any category that has a rema has a deficit will require some sort of policy or adequate provision. as commerce calls

it to to correct. So those are the units that are requiring new subsidies or incentives that need to be addressed by the city and that's a total deficit of 519 units when we look at just those deficit categories.

Yeah. Can you give me a feel for the the externally subsidized what sort of what that would be?

Yeah, so we actually looked in very much detail at the the data coming from CoStar for your reasonable market areas. We're looking at Belleview, Kirkland, Seamish, Mercer Island, and we CoStar actually breaks out their data by market rate units, market rate and affordable units. So those are buildings that have both a combination of market and affordable units and then buildings that are affordable only. So that's going to capture um you know arch provided units and other other types of affordable housing providers that that develop um affordable housing units in that region. And so they actually separate out that uh those those buildings and those units. So we're able to look specifically at, you know, how many units are produced regionally of affordable housing and have data to to show that.

So is it basically any form of affordable housing that is not directly resulted from subsidies, incentives or mandates that we create? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, for example, the incentive zoning program that you have right now is going to be captured in that market affordable group because it it the way that it functions is that you that the developer builds a certain amount of affordable units in exchange for a bonus or an incentive. So, that's a those are going to be buildings with a mix of affordable and market rate units and many policies even like inclusionary zoning policies in other cities are going to be captured in that category.

Thank you. Uh, Captain Rocher. So, um, can you talk a little bit more about how Fee and Lou might play a part in all this? Yeah. I do. We want to our next couple slides get more into that. We're going to cover that in the next few minutes if that's all right. Yeah. We ready to go forward? Yep.

Okay. Okay. So, just as a sort of an overarching summary of what I what I described on the table, but in words, um, we take that summarize of that housing unit capacity by affordability level, compare it by your allocated housing need, and we find that all of your allocated housing unit need falls at level income levels of 80% AMI and less. Your total need is 1,191 units. Your capacity is 2,133 which gives you a total capacity surplus of 942 units. And we see surpluses in uh affordability levels greater than 50% of AMI and deficits in C affordability levels at 50% of AMI and below. And those remaining deficits will require new policies or adequate provisions to supplement capacity to meet that need. Next slide. Um so this this is a little bit of a preview onto that that helps us understand that in Luffy conversation a little bit. Um but just to sort of understand the cost of direct delivery of affordable housing. We from ARCH know that the cost to develop affordable housing ranges between $425 and $500 per square foot. Average unit sizes range between 500 and,400 net square feet. Um, we also have heard from Arch that affordable units trend larger than market rate units. So if we assume gross square feet of 1,200 uh per unit, the average development costs range between 510,000 and 600,000 per unit. So a housing unit deficit of 519 units results in a cost between 264.7 and $311.4

million. We do know that these funds can be you know that that funds can be leveraged. Um so with that assuming a loan to cost ratio between 65 and 75% the funding required to cover that cost ranges between 66.2 and 109 million. That loan to cost ratio can vary widely from 55% to 90% based on the project type, location, level of risk, and it has a pretty big impact on the level of funding required to actually provide those units if you're able to leverage a smaller number to cover a greater cost.

Do you want to explain that just a little bit further on the cost concept? Yeah, I the the concept there is is it's kind of like a when you're thinking about a mortgage, right? The the funding level is equity and then how much loan can you you get? How much you know how how much can you borrow against that equity to to cover that cost? Is that better? Perfect. Okay.

Council Reynolds. Yeah. I follow up on just the prior one. I mean, I I understand the concept of leverage that when we we make a contribution to ARCH, other cities make contributions to ARCH. Tons of money comes in from other sources, state government, federal government, etc. So, we get a building that is a lot less expensive to us than than we might have thought. But is this basically saying that the city or some other entity would need to put in between 66 million and 109 million of cash to get this development of around 300 million. That's correct.

Ouch. Okay. Thank you. And and even just backing up a bullet there, Council Member Reynolds, before we get into the analysis of leveraging, I just want to call out the estimated cost to develop affordable housing to serve that need is 265 to 311 million. Um, that's something that, you know, when the growth management hearing board told us to go do this work, one of the things they said was quantify the cost. And we have done that now. Um, and that number represents what we'd have to pay a builder to build it. And that includes land costs as well. Is that correct?

It's an estimated cost. Yes. Okay.

Yeah. And so council, as we think about the work ahead of us, it's now upon us and I think the other cities in the state of Washington based on um the directive that we've received to figure out how we close this gap on on Mercer Island. So you can now that we're paused here, you can see from the the data we looked at earlier that the the units under 30% are not being delivered by the market. So, we played it out a step further to quantify what it's going to take to deliver those units. And it's, as I mentioned a moment ago, it's a likely going to be a combination of, you know, direct funding, federal, state, county, city, uh, fee and loo program, uh, certainly would help fund these units. Uh, donation of land. I think there's a little bit longer list, but just to give you an idea. I I see people with heads in their hands. Okay. Do we have an um we have some more slides?

Yeah. I have one more question if I may before we move on. Go for it. Um I I I think I'm understanding that the 250 to 311 or 2645 to 311 includes land cost. Does that allow for the fact that Mercer Island land is more expensive than other land around the county?

Thank you for asking that question. It's something that we talked about internally. Arch provided us with the cost estimate. I I think it's something we want to just verify. Um I'm not sure if we did the analysis of like Lancasta Mercer Island to the rest of King County, which on the fly here I don't want to speculate, but we could be just a tick higher. So, that's something we want to go back and and make sure that we're at least in range. That's on our list of things to do. Okay. Thank you foring that question. Okay. Okay. So, sorry. Go for it. Um

I'm just a little bit of shock and awe with these numbers, Jesse. So, I wonder if you could just speak to what your thoughts are on that. that time

questioning uh personally why I became a city manager. No, no, I I've had a a chance to talk with some of you about um the data before we got here tonight and it's a staggering number and if you think for a moment, this is the Mercer Island, the city of Mercer Island number. And now apply that uh across King County and the Puget Sound and you now have a number that's somewhere in the billions of dollars. What I'm happy about is we have a number. I hope that arms you with information to talk to your legislators about, even begin to talk to the federal government about uh the governor and others who are working in affordable housing space. I think we've delivered a model here that other cities can use to calculate their own costs. Um we don't have $250 to $300 million. We currently have our police department working in trailers. Uh I do not sit here tonight with any sort of a solution of how to solve this problem among all the other issues the city is faced with financially. Uh but this is an important moment where we have data now and we can start to understand the problem. Uh it's clear that we are going to need partnerships and support from the state and federal government in solving the affordability needs at 30% and under. I'm also encouraged by what the market data is showing. It is showing that units above 30% are being delivered in other ways and that gives me a little hope that as we continue this work um as as ordered by the state that we can we can get there except for the under 30%. And so we have a lot more to talk about. you all um have a fee and lube program on our list of things to work on that

will start to solve for some of this but that is a very big number and and I'm I'm estimating perhaps that once we do a little uh more analysis on the land cost on Mercer Island it may go up a little bit and when you say partnerships from other government agencies you made money

I do made money yeah um and there's you know we use the term leveraging and in a future presentation we might need to unpack that a little bit more. Uh we have been a member of ARCH since it was founded and we have uh seen an organization take resources and match and mix and really work as a strong regional partner. So I believe there are some tools out there to deliver this housing. One of the things that is going to challenge us is that housing that Arch is delivering is not being delivered here and what is required is we deliver the housing here. So we uh one of our first steps may be to go to Arch and say let's bring a project here. So these are just things I'm kind of thinking about on the top of my head.

And one more opportunity for you to keep going if I may. Can we talk about the infrastructure needs behind all this? I know that's coming. I just want to give you the floor to sort of talk about that um yes complexity highly on right now

um as we start to take more density and plan for more density council you all are aware that there's another conversation happening with our public works department primarily about how we modify our infrastructure to meet the additional density not just this step but in a future step as we get closer to 2029 and implementation of another bill we haven't talked about yet, the TOD bill. Uh we anticipate additional sewer capacity will be needed, water capacity, storm capacity, perhaps roads, sidewalks. I haven't even talked about parks and open space. Um it is all going to add up. Uh this number is likely going to double or more once we add in all of those costs. Um that planning work is happening now. I don't know that we'll have a fully um completed analysis of the infrastructure needs by the time we get to July, but it's certainly underway and we anticipate by the end of this year going into quarter 1 of next year having a comprehensive assessment of that infrastructure need. That's another just flag for you. One of the strategies for con concentrating the density is one in one place is it allows us to focus those infrastructure enhancements in one area of the island where we are best served to do that type of work.

One final question all due respect to our finance manager in the back. Could you remind us again what the budget headwinds are coming our way already? Do you want to I I can briefly touch on this. These numbers are big. This whole I think it's worth I think it's worth noting for our community that this is compliance work we have to do and this is really important. These are really big numbers and there's a whole bunch here and that's within the context of trying to keep the city doing what we're doing.

Right. Council, it's not lost on me or any of you perhaps. We've been in front of you I think twice now talking about uh the financial planning work. Uh we are constrained on the operating side of the house. year-over-year inflation has driven uh expenditures well above what our uh revenues were increasing. We're anticipating if not in this coming bienium in the next one that our expenditures will exceed our actual revenues. So we have pressures there. Uh your capital fund is equally strained. We have intense needs, current infrastructure needs, we have facility needs. Um there's a lot in front of us in the hundreds of millions of dollars on all fronts and I don't have a solution but we have data and we will start talking about it and I want to emphasize again I do believe we are one of the first cities to have done this analysis. I hope this gives you some at least initial information that you can use in your conversations with legislators and other cities um you know beyond us. I know Jeff and I have talked about uh when we have a little time uh to share this analysis with our other cities so that they can start to understand what we're seeing here. I I don't know that when the legislature passed all of these bills, this number for Mercer Island was well understood. We understand it now. We are going to need uh state and federal help to close that gap.

And I just want to thank you and the team for doing all this hard work, all this crazy analysis. Community attributes, you guys are amazing. I knew that, but to break it out and put it together and then help us understand it in the context of everything we're trying to do here and still bring affordable housing to our community in the region. Thank you for your hard work. I know it's hard and I know the timeline's tight, so just want to say thank you for that. Thank you. We have more slides.

Yeah. Um, okay. We've got eight slides left, including this one that's on the screen. So we are uh coming around the final bend here towards the home stretch of the presentation. Um we're going to transition here a little bit into um where are we going to go with all this. So what we have here on the screen is what we have here on the screen is the same boundary that Allison shared with you earlier in the presentation. the same outer boundary uh for this uh station area sub area plan uh that we need to work on as part of the compliance strategy. And then we're showing you two uh phases um here on the map, a darker purple color and a lighter purple color. So phase one um as outlined there on the lefth hand column is really the GMA compliance scenario. That's what we're going to work on between today and July 31st, which is our uh deadline with the growth border work. Phase two uh will be part of the strategy to achieve compliance with the transit oriented development, the TOD bill in 2029. So these are going to work together overall for um the station area sub area but they're going to occur in two different phases. So with the darker purple color, uh the now item this year, um that darker purple area constitutes our current town center sub area boundary and the multifamily zones that flank the town center uh boundary on both the west

and the east. So that's what we're looking at for phase one. And then phase two again will come a few years down the road in a timely fashion for compliance with the TOD bill in 2029. Next slide. Okay. Um so what we're looking at for phase one, the dark purple color on the previous slide is an up zone of the town center to eight stories. Um, it was referenced here earlier in this presentation that we did some upzoning in 2024 of the town center, not all of it, but some of it to seven stories and I believe there was an upzone of four stories to five stories as well. So, that was 2024 work that's already been baked into the model that Michaela has presented here this evening. Um, what you're going to see on this slide here is we're Oh, I'm sorry. I missed one piece. And multif family zones would go to six stories. So, eight stories for the town center, six stories for the multif family zones. That's the header across the top of the table there. Um, what you're going to see in the table is similar to what you've already seen. Um, we're still that 0 to30 gap is still missing. It's not there's not going to be a lot of actual housing in the model to be produced at 0 to 30. Um you see there the number seven on the second row down under total housing capacity. There will be a little bit of 0 to 30 uh produced but not a whole lot. So um we're still left with 510 unit gap that's going to have to be accounted for. Next slide please. Jeff, before we Sorry.

Can you just I want to make sure if anyone's following along at home that they can go left to right and ex understand what each of these columns is showing. Yep. Because the right hand column does zero out and I just want to

So the left hand column affordability level those are your AMI bands that Michaela covered in a table earlier. Uh the zone category same thing those haven't changed. So your um uh the types of um housing that you would see in those different AMI bands, the allocated housing units um your total there is 1191. We covered that earlier as well. The 3164 total housing capacity, uh that gets us to um the revised capacity based on the analysis. So that number was shown earlier. And then the Mercer Island capacity surplus or deficit. That's going to show whether we have a surplus by AMI band or a deficit in housing units. And again, those two red numbers, the 178 and the 332 are in our 0 to 30% AMI category or bands. And then the final column on the right hand side, units requiring new subsidies or incentives. um that is um again the 0 to30 what those adequate provisions that we're going to need to develop the help that's going to be needed to produce those units.

So what this is starting to tell us is that like fee and ll program correct me if I'm wrong is going to be directing funds to the 30% and under housing need almost exclusively likely just some things we're starting to see as we do this analysis. Exactly. Okay. Uh let's move forward from that and Michaela is going to cover the next two slides and then we'll wrap it up.

Great. So, some of the takeaways from that that table that we just saw. Um if we break out Town Center and the multifamily zones, the capacity there is estimated 1,698 units. And so you see that total capacity increased from 2133 to the 3,164 on the previous slide. Um we find that the additional capacity from this up zone eliminates the need for adequate measures to serve affordability levels greater than 30% of AMI. So now we're concentrating all those that need for adequate measures in the 30% and below. We also looked at what an internally subsidized housing capacity could look like based on a 10% inclusionary program. Um, we assumed affordability levels consistent with your current incentive zoning program. They're in line with what we're seeing other inclusionary programs looking like regionally. Assuming 100% performance, meaning developers opt to build the unit within within the structure, we estimated that that could produce 171 units. Um, but those would all serve the 30 to 80% of AMI levels. So, alternatively, we looked at what payment only would look like. So, that's an ENL fee program. And if everyone if through an inclusionary zoning program and an inlue fee there was 100% payment we estimate in loo fees could total 30.7 million applied to that phase one sub area. So the up upzone town center and multifamily zones we assume $25 per gross square foot in l fee. is we we made that assumption based on a review of other inclusionary zoning

programs in L fees within the region and assuming average unit size of 160 square ft. So that's also based on the types of housing um developed in Mercer Island. Based on that, if we we think about that idea of leverage again, that 30.7 million could support the direct delivery of 170 to 200 units depending on the cost of construction and some of the assumptions that we make. Next slide. So here's just a a little bit of a comparison summary. So your baseline housing unit capacity 2,133. Under this scenario, it increases to 3,164. That remaining deficit or units that require new subsidies or incentives goes from 519 to 510 units. And we also see that that AMI level with remaining deficits goes from 0 to 50% to 0 to 30%. With that increased capacity, we see a slight decrease in the direct delivery total cost. So this is a set of assumptions to give you one number, but this is obviously a range like we discussed in previous slides. But under scenario one, total cost of direct delivery for those 510 units is around 275 million. We estimate about 31 million in L potential in Lu fees leveraging that would be around 102 million or approximately 190 units meaning that there's about 320 units under these set of assumptions that require additional adequate provision beyond that in lu fee funding and the estimated cost remaining at that point is 173 million. This is like I said this is under a sing a set of assumptions to be able to provide you with a magnitude

idea here. um those additional adequate provisions. I think that um we talked about those a little bit already, but that could include providing public land for affordable housing development, partnering with ARCH and other affordable housing providers, state and other grant funding, tax credit financing, lowinterest loans, or just just a selection of some of the policy strategies. Uh Council Reynolds.

Yeah, I'm getting confused again. Bear with me. The I'm trying to reconcile this to the slide I asked about a few minutes ago where there was 250 65 to 311 million and then there was 60 million of city funding or whatever the figure was. Is that a different thing than the additional money we're talking about here?

It's the same idea. So that that was showing you sort of the the magnitude of funding you would need should you le like how much equity would you need or funding would you need to be able to cover the cost of all 519 units in your baseline capacity deficit. Here is the same idea, but we start with that 30.7 million in LO fees and ask the question, what how many units could you potentially build with 30.7 million and how much funding do you think how much could you approximately leverage out of that? And we only get the 30 million if we no longer require the the the affordable unit, the inclusionary units. Is that correct?

The the 30.7 is based on a set of inloo fee assumptions. So essentially if with an inclusionary zoning program that includes an inloo fee option so developers could pay towards housing rather than performing.

So I I guess the the rationale for doing the fee rather than just requiring more units is that we believe when we when we take the cash we could leverage it. Correct. a and address units under 30% because we've now shown a couple different ways that they're not being produced by inclusionary zoning and traditional strategies. So, we're going to need cash and partnerships and all the other list of things we've been rattling off to close that gap.

So, and last question then I'll shut up for a minute. the the potential leverage funding of 102 million here. I had thought that that was primarily what we would get through ARCH or state or federal money and yet we're saying the 173 million potent could potentially be filled with ARCH or other affordable or or grants. So are we are we double counting? It's not really, it's not a double count because what we're saying here is is if Arch were if you were to give Arch 30.7 million, they could go and get a a better loan. They they can go and get a a loan through the through their means to be able to stretch that money. Um, so partnerships with ARCH and other housing affordable housing providers, one way you can support that is with ENL fees, but there's other opportunities to work with them beyond that in fee.

I think with the the punchline here is under this scenario. So, and just to be clear, council, we started back on on ground zero. We've introduced a compliance strategy now. And so where this up zone gets us is still having to close the gap of 173 million. And I'm not sitting here today as your city manager telling you that we've solved for that. But this is what the the analysis the data set is yielding uh on our first pass. Okay. Uh Deputy Mayor Becker.

Um well, there's a lot of data in this uh slides tonight. And before I forget, I just want to say thank you to staff for putting like I can only imagine how much time this has taken and how much work you have put in and thank you for everything that you have done to get us to this point. Um I have a question about the up zone which is mostly the two previous slides before this but sort of related to here which is that earlier in the deck we showed a deficit of six units for 30 to 50 is really the only I mean it appears that this is only solving for those six units and so I'm trying to understand is that all we're getting or I mean I think that we're probably also increasing our fee and loo that we're getting ultimately so I'm just trying to understand what we're getting from the upone

other than just the six the the majority of it is good is is going to be driving at that fee in lie of right because that wasn't included in the earlier in the presentation. So now that's being introduced again as part of the compliance strategy here. So the up zone is going to cover our 30% AMI and above um uh needs for uh affordable housing, but then it's also going to start generating the fee in le of as well. Okay. Yeah.

Thank you. And Jeeoff, I I know we built this scenario so that we could take the analysis all the way to this step. As the council starts to wrestle with this, are there other E upzone scenarios that we might want to consider uh they might want to consider that we'd be bringing forward later or how will that conversation play out?

There certainly could be. I think I think what we're doing here is we're providing you a baseline to get from A to B. And um if there's spot discussions uh not spot zoning because that would be illegal, but if there's if there's uh specific discussions that come up on this journey here over the next number of months that there's opportunities to discuss, we'll certainly do that. So,

okay. Thank you. So, um the 30 million that uh is projected to potentially be collected on uh the FE uh leveraged to uhund uh adding 102 to that I presume when you say leveraged uh that we'd be able to get 102 more approximately Um I presume the money that is uh raised by that uh we're saying we would turn around and build uh 0 to30 AMI uh units on the island and presumably those units would also be built in this town center area. I uh am I assuming correctly that you subtracted that out of the uh the units that would be generating fee and new in the first place? Uh cuz 100 uh 90 units is a pretty large area. It's a a block uh at least. Um and I presume that would uh therefore be land that we'd be purchasing and building the uh 0 to30 EMI units on. So I presume that block was subtracted out when you were calculating the 30 million.

Question. Yeah, I do. We did not. So this is I mean these are very broad assumptions that we're making here, right? So we we could go more in depth with the analysis to really understand the interaction between the direct delivery of affordable housing and the potential for in fees. But we've done here is basically say what's the maximum potential in fees that you could get and how many units would that look like agnostic of where they might go.

Okay. Thank you. Second question if I may. Uh I remember on the the uh uh the distribution chart you were showing us before comparing the high-rise, low-rise, mid-rise uh and uh I remember the high-rise uh being kind of an outlier in that it doesn't uh contribute uh as much to affordable housing. One thing that comes to mind is that it does create uh higher uh cost uh units which uh if fu were applied to something that is a high-rise area that we would get more yield from the fu of such an area such as if we had a block or two that was high-rise uh in the uh town center area. I wonder I'm wondering whether that would significantly alter the calculus of the amount of uh fee and new or would it still kind of be around be a rounding error in terms of our overall ability to raise feel money. I think one of the things that we could uh probably come back with, Jeff, tell me if you agree with this, is there's a once you get to a certain height, you've you've got to go up even more to make it pencil out because the construction costs rise so con so so much.

And I I think we before we can really have that discussion, I think we need to understand where that sweet spot is. like what height would we need to go to to make that high-rise construction feasible on Mercer Island? And I I think we have the right consultants to help us answer that question, but we're probably not prepared to do it tonight. But what you just mentioned is what we've been talking about behind the scenes is while high-rise isn't directly delivering affordable housing, there is a potential that it could deliver a significant amount of fee and loo to close the other gap. Thanks. Yeah. Do you want we can talk about that a little bit? Yeah, go ahead.

Council member Weinberg, I I think you know from what we've looked at so far and we've talked with our building official about construction materials and generally speaking about costs, we'd probably be looking at going to a height that would put us in terms of number of stories into the teens perhaps. Um and you know up from there it's your your 9 to 12 or 13 is a little bit perhaps of a dead zone in terms of feasibility. So you end up going from 78 and then you make that jump. Um that is getting into a brand new conversation with the council and the community you know.

Understood. Yeah. that comes with its own sets of pros and cons, I suppose. So, do we have any more slides in this deck? Three. Three. Shall we keep going? Yeah, we're almost there.

We're going to wrap up here. So, um next steps and recommendations. next steps. Assuming that um we end tonight's session um generally in um alliance with the recommendations that are in the packet with the agenda bill. Um we'd schedule a community information session uh looking probably right around the end of February or beginning of March. Um we'd open up the public feedback period on the draft station area planning boundary that we've discussed here tonight. and we would come back at your March 17th meeting to again deliver uh the results of the public feedback that we received and then look on March 17th for the council to lock in a boundary so that we can complete the rest of this compliance work very quickly uh beyond March 17th. We'll be back to council a couple more times I expect and uh we'll be uh adding some refinement to the overall compliance strategy to talk with you about and get your direction on. planning commission will have to do their body of work uh for this which is legislative review and a public hearing uh at least one public hearing and then um as part of the legislative process we'll be back to council in June and July let's say for final review and adoption of the different comprehensive plan amendments and development code amendments that will need to take place Uh as Kim reminds us frequently, our uh growth board order deadline is July 31st. And then uh we currently um have a date of September 15th, I believe, is hidden behind the caption with um reappearing uh in front of the board to

explain our work uh that the city has done to comply with the order. Next slide. which is simply uh the recommendations that are included at the end of your agenda bill in your packet. So, recommendation number one, I'm not going to read the whole thing, but it's to essentially pursue scenario one, as we've discussed here this evening, uh where the upzones in the town center multifamily zones would result in capacity increases. Um and then implementation of the to would be pursued uh in a timely fashion for 2029 at a later date. Recommendation number two is to get moving with the public feedback period and come back to you on March 17th to report out that mayor turn it over to you.

Okay. Uh so council there's a couple motions before us. Um, is there motion direct staff to pursue compliance the GMHB order under scenario one and describe within the agenda bill whereby up zones and resulting development capacity increases will be limited at this time to the existing town center and adjacent multif family zones and implementation of the TOD bill will pursu be pursued as a second phase of work. So moved. Second. It's moved by council member Reynolds and seconded by Deputy Mayor Becker. Any discussion? Please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council member Wer,

I. Council member, excuse me, Deputy Mayor Becker. I, Council Member Sheay, I. Council member Anderol, I. Council member Reynolds, I. Council member Weinberg, I. And Mayor Rosenbomb, I. Thank you. Motion passes. Next. Is there a motion to direct staff to open a public feedback period through March 13th, 2026 on the preliminary station boundary map? Sorry, preliminary station area boundary map and provide the results of the city council at the March 17th, 2026 city council meeting. So moved. Second.

It's moved by Council Member Reynolds and seconded by Deputy Mayor Becker. Any discussion? Please call RO. Council member Sheay. I. Mayor Rosenbomb. Hi. Council member Wer. Hi. Council member Ander. I. Deputy Mayor Becker. I. Council member Reynolds. I. And Council Member Weinberg. I. Thank you. All right. Thank you. The motion passes. Our next item of business is AB6866 GA Compliance Public Engagement Plan. I'm actually going to take this on, Mr. Mayor.

Sounds good. Um, given the uh the hour and the very dense material we just went through, I'm going to uh skip over a PowerPoint and just mention that when we were in front of you at the January 16th planning session, uh you directed us to come back and prepare a a public engagement plan. At the time, we were actually talking about u as staff accelerating uh compliance with the to bill. Uh, as Jeff just covered, we have actually broken this work out into two phases. And so what's in front of you in AB6866 is a document that just uh gives you an outline of all of the steps we will take uh related to community engagement for GMA compliance. Let's call this phase one of this work. um know that in the next phase of work, which will span probably about three years, there will be a whole different public engagement plan that we'd be happy to prepare and bring to you uh when we get to that step. Uh but meanwhile, it's it's here and summarized for you. Our immediate next step, as Jeff just mentioned, is holding a public information session so that the community can hopefully better understand uh this body of work that we've been wrestling with. Um, so with that, Mr. Mayor, I I assume everyone has kind of read the outline. We're happy to answer any questions you might have about the steps. Um, just noting that this will be in front of you at least once a month, if not more often, as we get towards July and the planning commission will also be holding a number of u meetings and hearings on the material as well.

All right, council. Is there a motion to approve the GMA compliance public engagement plan? So moved. Second. Moved by council member Andrew, seconded by Deputy Mayor Becker, Council Member Reynolds.

Yeah. I just like to give the city manager a chance to comment on strategy for engaging the community on this. And it strikes me these are hugely important decisions and hugely impactful ones we're making. in in my experience with with past public outreach, there's not always a significant number of people that show up. Um, so h how do you plan to get people to come and learn about this? And it's also this is dense technical stuff where we spent hours and hours talking about it. It's I'm I'm challenged to see how you can come up with a presentation that will help the community, much of whom will be new to this, to understand it. So, can you just talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, me too. That was very flip. Um, look, I'll be honest. We've had uh some questions already coming in from community members and I think one of the things that Jeff and I need to do at this first information is is go back two or three steps and set the table for what happened. Uh, you all have been through it now several times. You know what happened. U, that's where we need to start. Uh, this very technical deck we just went through tonight. I don't intend to be um covering all of that. we will streamline it and simplify it. Uh, as I've shared with some of you offline, I think it's really important that the community uh, engage with you here. Uh, the information sessions are intended to hopefully be as plain language as we can get them. Uh, property owners that are impacted by the upzones and town center will likely come. We're happy to have Q&A. uh but the policym will happen at these meetings and so that is where we we will be encouraging participation as well. Uh this isn't a very um it we will do our best to get people there. I think we'll attract the folks that are impacted and interested but I'm under no illusion that we're going to have thousands of people swarming our information session. Um we will record it so we'll be available for anyone else that would like to watch it at a later time. Okay.

Thank you. Anybody else? Okay, please call the role. Council member Ander, I. Council member Reynolds, I. Council member Weinberg, I. Mayor Rosenbomb, hi. Deputy Mayor Becker, I. Council member Sheay, I. And Council Member Wer, I. Motion passes. Thank you. All right. Our next item of business is AB6871, legislative review alternatives to help city meet GMHB order compliance deadline ordinance number 26 C dot sorry-03 first reading. We welcome city manager Jessie Bond.

It's me again. Everyone's running away now. Uh council, uh similar to the last agenda bill, I'm going to assume that you've had a chance to take a look at the materials. I'm not going to torture you with a long slide deck. Uh the history of this item is similar to the last one. At the planning session in January, you asked me to take a look at opportunities um to streamline this work knowing that the July deadline is looming and we have a lot of tasks in front of us. Uh so I was able to work uh with legal counsel Kim Pratt is still with me up here. Thank you Kim for hanging out. um to present some opportunities where we may be able to uh shave time. Uh just quickly uh as a city council, um one alternative you may consider is uh conducting the duties of a planning agency prescribed in uh state law and assigning that to a committee of yourself. That would be an alternative to having your planning uh commission conduct this work. Uh the way that would save time is you would simply convene a committee that would likely meet on the same evenings as your council. A subset of uh your body would be considering the same work uh and it would be a little more efficient. Uh but you have a planning commission uh who is also standing at the ready to take this on. And so if that feels like something that we don't want to do yet, um my alternative number two was simply that we will be very crisp when we are handing off items of which there will be many uh to the planning commission related to the growth management hearing board compliance. And when I say crisp, I mean specific deadlines, tasks and parameters so that they are turning around their review in a timely manner so that we can meet our July deadline. I anticipate that would probably be like 45day turn times. Uh some of these

hearings require noticing. Um so that was alternative number two. Alternative one, uh have a a council subcommittee take over the role of the planning commission in the interim. Two is just really crisp and tight uh handoff deadlines. Um and number three, alternative number three relates to a different um work item uh that is going to be landing at the same time as all of this work. We anticipate we know the city has received a sightsp specific reason to be processed uh likely in the next several months. Uh that is a significant body of work for both the council and the planning commission. And so what I've recommended as I was uh working with Kim on this analysis is that you consider uh lightening that anticipated workload of the planning commission and assigning that those duties the sight specific reason to a hearing examiner. Uh this is something that I have raised previously with the council and a change that we did not um make but I do feel that it would be appropriate to consider that now. Um, I'm happy to talk a little bit more about any one of those alternatives if alternative number three is something you wish to consider. Uh, legal council did prepare an ordinance for first reading and it's included as exhibit one to the packet.

Council member Wer. So, uh, could you talk about the timeline, Jesse, between option two and option one? So the crisp and the quick turnaround and like we only have till July. So can you talk about how much time we'll give number two before we go to number one depending on how things go?

Oh, I see what you're saying. Like if we get if we get hung up. Yeah, council. Um this is just and I we have an upcoming planning commission meeting and certainly our staff will be staying well connected to the planning commission so that they understand the magnitude and timing of this work. Um, I would expect that turn times are being met and that we're able to process the work timely based on your handoff directions. Uh, if we are running into problems, I'm not sure what those would be just yet, but if we can't get the material processed, I would be coming back to you and letting you know this um, we have a problem of some sort and then we can talk about solving it. Then um, Kim is here tonight. She is the attorney representing us in front of the hearings board. Uh there may be an opportunity to ask for an extension but that extension uh it may not it may or may not be granted. It is not a guaranteed and my position is that to get an extension of the work we have to demonstrate that we have made meaningful progress. And part of the reason in that earlier agenda item, we were we were being very clear like you have a decision make on March 17th around a station area boundary. We need you to make that so that we can continue uh the cascade of work because turning around right away in April, you're going to have immediate policy decisions to make that will then be handed off to the planning commission to do their review. So it's all of us staff meeting our deadlines, council meeting your deadlines, and planning commission meeting your deadlines. followup. So, if it's May, mid May going into June and we're running behind, do we have to add more meetings or try a different process? Like, I'm worried about July. Honestly,

I'm worried about July, too. Um, I will say uh another of my staff mentioned this earlier, I feel about 50/50 that July is reasonable at this point. um council and and for the record, we started working on this um last fall. Uh much of the work hasn't come to you yet because we were working on this monstrous data set behind the scenes all the way through the end of 2025 and into early January. Um we've just now gotten to the data set and we're starting to talk about the policies that now needed need to be implemented. Um I can tell you that we are all working in good faith right now. I have been sitting with all of you meeting after meeting. You all are doing a great job keeping this moving. Uh we ha have a record here that demonstrates we are working in good faith to comply. If it becomes unreachable unreachable to hit the July 31st deadline, we will ask Kim to pursue an extension. I just want to be very clear otherwise she's going to throw an elbow at me right now. Um it is not guaranteed. Um and so we're going to do everything we can to get to July 31st. uh we we may have something that that interferes with that like you know something that needs to be reanalyzed something legitimate but let us not make just intentional delays part of that was a very long answer sorry about that

okay would anyone like to make a motion where's I gave just I I should have prepared a slide for this I'm sorry you have you have a motion for each of the alternatives Uh, I move that we direct the city manager to develop a clear handoff instructions and legislative review deadlines to be included in the comprehensive plan legislative review transmitt memo to the planning commission. Second. Okay. Moved by Council Member Wer, seconded by Deputy Mayor Becker. Any discussion? No. Please call the RO. Council member Reynolds. I. Mayor Rosenbomb. Hi. Council member Wer. I,

Council Member Weinberg, I, Deputy Mayor Becker, I, Council Member Sheay, I, and Council Member Anderl. I, thank you. Motion passes. Are there any other motions? I move that we schedule ordinance number 26 C-3 for second reading and adoption at the next possible city council meeting. Second. Moved by Council Member Wer, second by Deputy Mayor Becker. Please call the RO. Deputy Mayor Becker. I. Mayor Rosenbomb. Hi. Council member Reynolds. He's on mute. Council member Reynolds. Hi. Thank you. Council member Sheay. I. Council member Anderl.

Hi. Council member Wer. Hi. And council member Weinberg. Hi. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Motion passes. We now move to other business in the planning schedule. And welcome back Jesse Bond. I think it will be refreshing to hear me say I have no updates. Okay. Council, is there a motion to excuse council members Annall, Reynolds, and Wer from the February 5th joint city council MISD school board meeting? So moved. Second. Moved by Deputy Mayor Becker, seconded by Council Member uh Weinberg. Please call the RO. Council member Weinberg. I. Mayor Rosenbomb. Hi. Council member Wer. Hi. Deputy Mayor Becker. I council member Sheay.

I council member Anderrell. I and council member Reynolds. Hi. Thank you. Okay. Any other absences coming out? Okay. Uh council member reports. Deputy Mayor Becker. Nothing to report. Council member Wer.

Uh pick had a meeting. Julie was there as an alternate. Thank you for being there. Um it was mostly preview of coming attractions and rules for engagement. Um and the Reton airport advisory committee met I think it was last Tuesday and they're doing great work about trying to minimize uh noise and traffic impact by going over the east channel unless they can't see. There's an IVR technology for pilots uh that they have to whatever their operations are. It's keeping them safe and it's keeping uh the area safe. And finally, there might sometimes be noise in the middle of the night because they're doing emergency uh operations for people who need life support. So, uh those two events were very interesting.

Okay. Council member Weinberg.

Uh so, the East Side Transportation Partnership held its monthly meeting last Friday. Metro announced the uh deployment of several new electric buses as well as its new pay by credit card option just in time for World Cup this summer. Uh Sound Transit announced that it would be running simulated service on the two line all the way from Redmond to Lynwood including the Cross Lake segment. Uh running every 8 minutes without picking up passengers yet. We're just making sure that it deals with all of the traffic. Uh they also announced their plans to break ground on the three line going to Kenmore and both later this year. Uh Robin Kausski from the she's a director of government relations for the Pugound uh regional council uh gave us a rundown of the transportation related legislative bills including continued funding for bridge maintenance and new fairies. And the ETP meeting wrapped up with WASHDOT's climate operations lead Chelsea Buchanan, who walked us through her 2-year plan to pull together a statewide transportation resilience improvement plan. And it includes a climate impact vulnerability analysis for a wide variety of assets, roads, bridges, buildings, airports, railroads, and fairies. And it also attempts to prioritize uh transportation investments using a long list of factors. And my next open lunch is going to be at 12:00 p.m. this Saturday uh the 21st at Sushi Joa restaurant. The address is 27178th Avenue Southeast. As always, everyone's welcome. Uh it's an open agenda, news, sports, weather, humor, things about city business or legislature, whatever you like. All I ask is that everyone please show their respects to the chef by ordering some food and or beverage. and let me know if you're coming so I can reserve a large enough table.

Uh, Council Reynolds.

Yeah, couple couple of things. Um, off uh the parkition we had after the last meeting and it was quite an interesting meeting. They're working on the dean's children's park plan and parks commission usually uh reaches consensus very easily on things and they're people with similar values and similar priorities and similar conclusions. This meeting was a little bit more contentious than most and I think that the uh they're going to be working on a handoff memo and the plan to the council but uh writing a handoff memo that everybody agrees on will be challenging. So we may have an interesting discussion ourselves about that coming up. Um, also want to just mention, you know, we've been uh seeing some uh ice activity in the area. Wanted to encourage everybody in the community to be safe and watch out for each other. And I went back and looked today at our June 9th, 20, I'm not sure if it was 2020 or 2021, I can't recall now, proclamation of a renewed commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I just wanted to read part of it because I think it's very relevant. It uh proclaimed our continuing commitment to would be an inclusive community that rejects stigma and bias against individuals because of race, ethnicity, place of origin, physical ability, socioeconomic status status, gender identity, sexual orientation, age or religion. And we urge all members and residents of our community to treat each other with respect and work together to overcome all expressions of hate and bigotry. I think that statement is as relevant today as it's ever been and uh I commend the prior council for having the wisdom to include place of origin on that list. It seems relevant now more than ever. So everybody please be safe out there.

And yeah, the um Open Space Conservancy Trust, which I'm newly back as a trustee, uh met 5 days ago on the 12th and council can look forward to an annual report at one of the upcoming council meetings. They've done a lot of tremendous work and I'm really proud of the way the um parks levy funds have been being used for restoration and maintenance. So, um you'll you'll get the full report from the staff on that, but uh it was was a great meeting and it was great to be back on that uh on that commission. Thank you, Council Shay.

Thank you. So, happy Lunar New Year of the Fire. Wishing everyone a um prosperous, joyful, healthy, and safe new year. And Lunar New Year actually starts today. And um the year of the firehorse promises to bring action, progress and change. So um brace yourself. So also Ramadan Mubarak, I would like to wish our Muslim community a blessed Ramadan and may this holy month bring you peace, happiness, and countless blessings. And we had um the MIFFS Foundation breakfast last Wednesday with nearly 500 community members coming to support um and I was a table captain for the third year in a row and this time as a council member and just so grateful to our community for supporting YFS which helps so many people in our community including students, seniors, our neighbors um in need of mental health services, food and rent assistance. Um, and the next the next day I had a tour of our city-run thrift shop, which also helps to fund MIFFS. I met with city staff and volunteers who run the thrift shop so effectively and with such care. And many thanks to our community members for um their generous donations. And um yeah, on on February 5th, we had our school board and city council linkage session. Um we talked about legislative priorities including the emoto house bill and we brainstormed ways that our city and schools um could work more closely together. So there was an election on February 10th for the school levy renewal um which passed currently at 74% yes votes with nearly 39% voter turnout. Um, and as far as community engagement, you know, this Saturday, February 21st, our three legislators will be holding a town hall at our community center from 11 to noon. So, welcome the community to come out and meet them and share with them what matters to you. And I have my um

community coffee coming up next Wednesday, the 25th, at ASA from 11 to 12:30. Hope to see you there. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. The next regularly scheduled hybrid city council meeting will be on Tuesday, March 3rd, beginning at 5:00 p.m. The time is now 8:04 p.m. As a reminder to the council, please stay seated until the city staff is terminated to broadcast. Good evening and thank you all for joining us.