City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening and welcome to the March 3rd, 20 26 city council regular hybrid meeting. I mayor Dave Rosen. Tonight's hybrid meeting, hybrid city council meeting is being brought to you in person by Zoom. We're also broadcasting on the city's YouTube channel and on MITV channel 21. Thank you to all and thank you for joining us today. Council members, please have your microphones on for the roll call. City Deputy City Clerk Deanna, please call the role. Thank you, Mayor. Council member Androl here. Council member Sheay here. Council member Reynolds here. Council member Wer here. Council member Weinberg here. Deputy Mayor Becker here. And Mayor Rosenbomb here.

Thank you. Okay, there's a quorum present. Next, we have the pledge of allegiance. Council, if you join us, please stand and face the flag.

Have to read this whole thing. Okay. Uh, if you have joined in the council chambers, please stand and face the flag. Okay. Join via Zoom. We don't have that. Okay. Please join us in saying the pledge of allegiance. 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. You go. Thank you. Okay. 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 Weinberg and second by Council Member Reynolds. Deputy City Clerk, please call the role.

Thank you, Mayor. Deputy Mayor Becker, I. Mayor Rosenbomb, I. Council member Reynolds, I. Council member Sheay, I. Council member Andre, I. Council member Wer, hi. And Council Member Weinberg, I. Thank you. Thank you. The motion passes and the agenda is approved. Next up on the agenda, we have a study session on AB6893, compliance with growth management hearings board order and a follow-up discussion our financing about on affordable housing. For that, we welcome city manager Jesse Bond. Could you call on Jeff? We will call on uh CBD director Jeff Thomas.

Thank you, Mayor. Um good afternoon, city council. There's my video. Um, I'd like to introduce uh Deputy Director Alison Vancorp and Elliot Weiss from Community Attributes, a consultant that's been working on us on uh for this effort. Um, this is a follow-up from February 17th uh when we had a lengthy presentation uh regarding GMA compliance and uh some of the work that's went in so far um in the background related to uh technical analysis and so forth. Um, in reflecting on that uh session on February 17th, we felt that uh it would be helpful for the council and for the public if we came back and expanded a little bit more on the concept of leveraging and um how that relates to affordable housing. So Allison and Elliot have a short presentation that they're going to walk you through and we'll have uh ample time for your questions at the end. With that, Allison, um take it away. Share your screen. All right, thank you. Um, I'm going to walk through the first half of this presentation and then we'll we'll pass it off to Elliot. And yeah, like Jeff said, we're just hoping to go over a few more in a little more detail on a few of the topics we touched on last time. I'm going to start with just kind of a a quick summary of of where we've come and where we're at now. So, just as a reminder, the the growth management hearings board um appeal that we're under now, the comp plan was adopted in November of 2024, and it was appealed by the nonprofit organization future-wise in 2025. And that went to the growth management's hearing hearings board for the appeal hearing. They issued a decision last August and that requires some action from the city by July 31st of this year.

Um the growth board order has four issues that the city's required to act on. Um land capacity, adequate provisions, a station area sub area plan, and anti-displacement policies. Um we've talked over these topics a number of times already. I'm not going to go into much more detail about them now, uh, but just wanted to give that overview of of the four issues that we'll be touching on. Um, at the last meeting on February 17th, the council gave us the direction to take a two-phaseed approach to compliance with the growth board order. And, um, the first phase is focused in the dark purple area that includes the existing town center and the multif family zones that are directly adjacent to it on the east and west. and we'll be looking to focus um our near-term action in that area with some potential up zones and other changes to development regulations. And then phase two will be in the the other areas in light purple. And we're not intending to make any amendments to the zoning in those areas until it's required under state law in 2029. Um last meeting uh February 17th, the council also reviewed this preliminary modified station area. Um as you may recall, the city is required to adopt a sub area plan for the station area and the station area is defined as the halfmile walking distance from the light rail station entrances. And the city has worked to modify that boundary slightly to kind of sync it up with existing land ownership, streets, and zoning boundaries. And that was all reviewed at the last meeting. This boundary is now out for public feedback through the end of next week. Um, okay. Now, diving into our topic for tonight. Um, we wanted to talk a little

bit more about strategies for financing affordable housing. And kind of at the most basic level, there's a few ingredients for success for for affordable housing projects. You need an experienced developer, available land, local financial resources, as well as public and private funding or financing. Um, these types of affordable housing projects tend to be quite complex and have multiple financing sources and often multiple partners helping to bring things together. Um, cities sometimes can bring to the table either available land such as surplus public property or financial resources uh that they either have access to through taxing revenue or or resources that have been saved over time from their general fund. Um, many cities here in East King County also partner with ARCH, that stands for a regional coalition for housing. And that organization works closely together with the member cities and can help bring all of these ingredients together. They have existing relationships with many nonprofit developers throughout the region that construct and operate affordable housing. They also have a very good understanding of the various funding sources and grants and tax credits that can be available to help fund these projects. And they provide technical assistance to cities and developers as they work to put together a portfolio of of funding and financing for a project. Um, finally, I wanted to touch on a couple of terms that we've talked about a couple of times before. These are two policies that will make up part of the the adequate provisions, one of the requirements from the growth board order. We need to adopt policies that help us achieve the affordable housing targets that have been set up for us in state law. And so these are the the

primary two strategies from the adequate provisions that that we're looking to employ. The first is inclusionary zoning. and that is a requirement for a percentage of units in a development project to meet an affordability level or or requirement. So a certain percentage of the units in a project would be set aside um as affordable. And then the second concept is fee and loo. And that's an allowance that when you have an inclusionary zoning policy and you're requiring a certain percentage of units to be affordable, the developer could choose either to provide those units within the building. Um or instead they could pay a fee and that fee would go to the city into an affordable housing fund. the city could could hold that money and pull it together and then later use it to fund or construct uh affordable housing units in other projects. Um so that's one way that the city can generate local financial resources for affordable housing. All right. Now, I'm going to pass it off to Elliot Weiss from CI, and he's going to talk a little bit more about how these tools can be used together to help generate funding for f uh affordable housing projects.

Yeah, thank you, Allison. Thank you, council, for having me. And good evening. I was here for that February 17th meeting virtually when my colleague from CI, Michaela Jelico, presented. And I will revisit some of the numbers that she presented at that meeting. Uh but it occurred to us after the meeting that it might be useful to clarify some of the more technical aspects of how fee and lude dollars translate into the production of affordable housing. And so that's the purpose of this discussion tonight. I've outlined the steps here on this slide. Generally, as far as the mechanics of what we're calling direct delivery of affordable housing units are concerned, the city receives the dollars that are paid by the developers uh the fee and loo money um to a housing fund and identifies an affordable housing developer as a partner. The city funds that housing developers project with dollars from the housing fund, dedicates those dollars to that project, and then the developer who's got expertise in how development projects are financed, supplements those funds through the fee and loop program with dollars from other sources, grants, loans, um tax credits, those sorts of incentives that are available for affordable housing construction. um at other governmental levels, federal tax credits for instance. And through this process, a smaller contribution of dollars can be leveraged to cover a higher total development cost. And we relate this to the concept of having a mortgage on a home. You take a certain amount of money, that's your down payment, you finance the rest. The same is true generally speaking in commercial real estate where this fee and loo that the city receives could be used to either satisfy or supplement a potential quote

unquote down payment uh in this analogy. Now this does not necessarily absolve the city of other contributions or other adequate provisions to use the language that we have been using. Things like the dedication of developable land, you know, surplusing public property for affordable housing development would still be beneficial to affordable housing creation because it does change the economics of the development project for the affordable housing developer. If the city's able to contribute land to the deal, then the developer doesn't have to pay money to acquire the land. And so it reduces the total development cost. But in a nutshell, this is the concept of leverage where we take a certain number of of dollars generated through the fee and lube program and we magnify the impact of that by partnering with an affordable housing developer who understands how to leverage those dollars. This slide sort of summarizes that process in a simple flowchart. The developer pays the fee and loo as stipulated by the city's uh development code. That fee andlue money is put into an affordable housing fund. those dollars from the housing fund are dedicated to your partner, the affordable housing developer. Uh, and that developer then leverages those funds to cover the total project cost. And once the project is built, the project yields affordable units. And so that's how we sort of determine how much affordable housing unit capacity we could plan on for the city of Mercer Island based on the number of dollars that could be generated through a fee and loo under an inclusionary zoning program.

And so these next several slides are slides that you saw on February 17th uh when again my colleague Michaela Jelico presented them. But just to sort of summarize where we're at, um we followed directions from the Department of Commerce to summarize housing unit capacity by afford affordability level at each of the income bands for which you've received a housing unit allocation. That analysis resulted in a deficit of 519 units between 0 and 50% of area median income with the vast majority of those units existing between 0 and 30% of area median income. That 519 number is before any modifications to existing zoning under uh the assumptions that we have to work with many of which were sourced from the direct experience of ARCH which Allison referenced earlier. We can estimate the number of housing units that could be produced with inclusionary zoning both without and then with an upzone to certain zoning designations in and around town center. We start with the cost to develop affordable housing which ARCH has estimated at between $425 and $500 per square foot. That includes land acquisition costs. So that number goes down if the city is also able to dedicate land for affordable housing construction. We have to figure out how much square feet actually need to be built. And so for that an average unit size assumption is useful. And those average unit sizes generally range between 500 and,400 net square ft. Net being the rentable building area. There are common areas

like a gym or something like that. uh just corridors in between the units that uh mean there's actually a few more square feet per unit than just the 500 to,400 which the developer still has to pay for. Uh but notable is that affordable units t trend larger than market rate units. They tend to be more of the two and threebedroom variety than the studio or efficiency variety. So we make an assumption there, an informed assumption about the size of the units. Average development costs resulting from these prices and our assumptions around unit size uh range from about $510,000 to $600,000 per unit. Uh the note here is that we're assuming 1,200 gross square feet per unit respectively. That'd be somewhere between 1,00 and,00 net square feet just to compare it to the previous bullet. Housing unit deficit 519 units from the prior slide. That would equate to a cost to develop affordable housing uh to serve this identified need of 519 units of about $265 million to about $311 million. Assuming these funds are leveraged, to go back to the concept of leverage that I introduced on the other slide, the funding required to serve that need would estim would be estimated at 66 million to $109 million. Uh assuming a loan to cost ratio of 65 to 75% and simply speaking, there are some technical details, but a loan to cost ratio is just essentially the inverse of what you might think of as a down payment. It's it's the project cost that is remaining to be covered after the developer contributes equity to the development project. Now loan to cost can vary widely from roughly 55% to 90% and there are a number of factors in

that variance including project type, location, risk. Uh there are funding programs through the federal government that allow affordable housing projects to be funded at a relatively high loan to cost, say 80 to 90%. And so our assumption of 65 to 75% might be a conservative assumption, but it's one we feel is useful for planning purposes. Another slide from the presentation that Michaela gave two weeks ago. This shows the resulting capacity deficit based on the proposed up zone of town center to eight stories and surrounding multif family zones to six stories. That does eliminate the deficit at that 30 to 50% AMI u income band which is useful because the types of programs and policies that we might suggest to target the 30 to 50% income band are different than those that we might suggest to target the 0 to 30% income band. So this up zone uh that is being proposed would would really allow us to target our efforts to just that 0 to 30% income band. However, in terms of the number of units we are trying to solve for from 519 to 510, it's not a huge change in the aggregate, but that 510 would be the resulting number that we are planning for after this proposed up zone to the town center and multif family zones. And so um with the UP zone, total town center and multif family capacity gets estimated at just shy of 1,700 units. Additional capacity from the UP zone eliminates the needs for other adequate measures or adequate provisions to serve those affordability levels greater than 30% of AMI. That's the point I was just making about getting rid of that deficit

at 30 to 50. We talk about internally subsidized housing capacity. That's based on programs and policies specific to Mercer Island. A 10% inclusionary program with affordability affordability levels consistent with the current incentive zoning program in Town Center results in 171 units produced through that program. If we assume that everyone who develops a multifamily building in the area affected by the upzone decides to uh perform as we call it which means they actually include the affordable units in the development project. If uh sort of in the inverse scenario, those developers choose to pay inlue using an assumption of $25 per gross square foot of inloo fee rate. Uh that would result in $30.7 million hypothetically of inloo fees that the city would receive as a result of these development projects. that inlue fee could support the direct delivery uh through some of the mechanisms that I've already discussed of between 170 and 200 units of affordable housing. And so to go back to the flowchart that I presented earlier and put some numbers to it that you've seen in our analysis previously, the developer pays the fee in Lou. that results in $30.7 million again hypothetically and depending on the fee and loo rate that you as a council would adopt. Um that money goes into the housing fund the affordable housing fund. It gets dedicated to the developer the affordable housing developer or city partner as I've previously described. that developer leverage those funds and based on

leverage and assuming 65 to 75% loan to cost that could yield 88 to 103 million of total project cost. We divide that by the range of costs that Arch has given us for the production of affordable housing units. $425 to $500 per square foot. and that then yields 170 to 200 units. So this is just a more granular breakdown of some of the assumptions behind the analysis that was presented 2 weeks ago. Uh we wanted to make sure that there was a a solid understanding of the mechanics of all of this so that uh if we choose to proceed with some inclusionary zoning provisions and a fee in lie of providing those units through an inclusionary zoning program that uh there was a common understanding of how those units actually came to fruition within the city limits of Mercer Island. So finally uh the baseline versus scenario comparison that Michaela presented two weeks ago. Uh under baseline no reszone or upzone of town center and multif family zones. There's 519 unit deficit that we're trying to solve for under scenario one which includes the upzone of town center zones to eight stories and the reszone or upzone of multifamily to six stories adjacent to town center. That cuts the deficit to $510 units. Uh the direct delivery total cost under that scenario is about $275 million. But the inloo fees of just short of $31 million allow you to uh leverage that funding up to potentially $102 million and fund

somewhere around 190 units. I think the range I gave on a previous slide was 170 to 200. And that results in a remaining unit deficit that needs other adequate provisions. With those other adequate provisions given in bullet points on the right, you know, surplusing public land for affordable housing development, more robust partnerships with affordable housing providers, and other sources of financing, tax credits, low interest loans, state and other grants. Uh this list could go on because there are other tools available to the city. Uh but this is simply meant to indicate how those fee andlude dollars um solve for a certain portion of the units that we are currently showing as a deficit in terms of affordable housing unit capacity.

I think uh Allison I'm happy to take questions here if it's useful. Uh, customer rentals, first of many. Um, I I I think last week or last meeting we talked about this. I asked if the the the $500 a square foot figure he had, if that was the number, I can't recall now. Um, if that allowed for the fact that Mercer Island land is more expensive. I just want to confirm. It sounds like it does not. And do we have an updated estimate of what that figure would be if we allowed for the higher cost of land here?

Yeah, thank you, Council Member Reynolds. Um, as I said, I was at that meeting. I noted your question. We've not been able to complete additional analysis yet, but it is absolutely on our to-do list. That estimate of 425 to 500 because it comes from Arch is representative of transactions in Arch Cities, which have similar economics to Mercer Island, but may not be a perfect comp. So, we're talking Belleview, Kirkland, uh, Redmond, Seamish. Mercer Island is the largest of the arch cities. We will follow up with revised numbers once we've been able to conduct an analysis of land sale prices in Mercer Island specifically.

Another one. Go for it. Um I want to make sure that I'm not misop I want to make sure there's no double count that I'm misunderstanding. Can you bring up the slide that you had near the beginning where it had the uh that the unit count at each affordability level? Um, this one. Is that the one you're looking for or something else? We're not seeing anything yet. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not sharing.

Yeah, that's the one. Okay. So the inclusionary zoning is taking care of everything above the 30% threshold or at least that's what I'm understanding. If we adopt Fee and Lou to raise money for the 0 to 30% portion of the cost, have we then just shifted the problem because instead of building the 30 to 80% things, we're getting money to build the 0 to 30 and we no longer have 30 to 80% housing.

It's a good question, but fortunately, I think the answer is no. We're not eliminating deficits above 30% of AMI by virtue of anything related to the inclusionary zoning program. We're eliminating those deficits just by increasing total zoned capacity. Our analysis has shown that based on a distribution of market rents that we see within market rate projects that have been developed in recent years, the market does actually produce some units at these lower affordability levels. It's not a huge percentage of the total, but there are some. And so using market data, we can justify an assumption that, you know, there will be some units, maybe they're smaller units, they might be studios, uh, that will be delivered at somewhere between 30 and 50% of AMI. And so it's the up zone under this scenario one that we've been discussing that eliminates that sixunit deficit. uh the fee and loo requirement need not be for 0 to 30% AMI units specifically they could be for units at any affordability level if the fee is structured in such a way that the developers opt to pay the fee instead of provide the units directly then that fee is what the city through an affordable housing developer partner can leverage to solve for the remaining 510 or 5 yeah I think it's 510 units

so I I think our current code provides for 15% affordable units if I remember correctly. Um, yes. Are we saying that we're going to require the 15% and levy a fee in L on more property or is it we could reduce the 15 down to seven for some property and make them pay a little fee in L on the difference? I would defer to staff in terms of the proposal that's being advanced, but my understanding is uh the new inclusionary zoning requirement would uh replace not supplement the existing requirement.

So Allison, would that mean we would have a uh would we still have the 15% requirement in the current plan? Um I think what we're talking about or what was modeled by community attributes in in the data that's on the screen was modifying the existing requirement to reduce it from 15% of the units to 10% of the units at 50% AMI. Okay. And if somebody built at 10% um and agreed to do that they would not pay the fee in L. It's only if they wanted

they have an option. they can decide to either build the units or pay the fee. And depending on how we structure the fee, the amount of the fee that we choose, that could incentivize them to go one way or the other. Like if the fee is quite high, they might prefer to just build the units. If the fee is relatively low, they might prefer to not build the units and pay the fee because that would make their project pencil out a little easier. Okay, thanks. I have some more, but I see other people have raised hands, so maybe you can circle back. Man,

yeah, Mr. Mayor, and uh thank you for your good questions. Uh, Council Member Reynolds, I just want to make sure for folks that might be watching uh at home or watch this recording in the future. Uh, we haven't done any of that yet, right? The fee in Loo is still in development. Additional inclusionary zoning is still being, you know, worked. So, I just want to qualify as these questions are coming up. I think it's good because they're um they illustrate the work that we're doing, but they are still hypothetical and speculative. So, if we could just, you know, remind folks that that um that is the nature of the discussion tonight. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Council Wyberg.

Yeah. And along the same lines, uh I presume that if we were to implement a fee new program and if it were to uh generate the $30 million of uh fee that is projected and if we were then to turn that into 190 units of uh housing that's available in the 0 to 30% range that the numbers in the uh second to rightmost column um that are in black ink on this slide uh would go down by 190. I'm not sure if it would all be in the top category or spread across that category, but that 190 units has to be built somewhere. Um and that there there would reduce the amount of uh units in other categories. I presume that there's room for 190 units in there. There's uh I'm looking at over a thousand units of black ink there. Uh but or was the 190 units already factored into those numbers?

No,

that's a great question. I suppose in short, the 190 units that could be produced have not been netted out of the other categories. Um but they might not need to be. It would depend on where the land came from for the construction of those affordable units. Right now, any land that is owned by the city of Mercer Island is not being considered uh as far as generating capacity in those other income bands. So, if the city were a land partner in the affordable housing development deal, hypothetically, then it wouldn't reduce any of the capacity that we're showing in those other income bands because the lands used for that analysis would still be available for private development. Sort of a devil's in the details sort of situation. And uh to the city manager's point, we are speaking in hypotheticals here. Uh but if you assumed that those 190 units were being built on land that could otherwise be available for private development and that we in the analysis assumed would be used for private development, then yes, we would need to net out those units that are being shown as uh surplus capacity in other income bins. Okay.

Thank you, Director Thomas. Thank you, Mayor Elliot. Just a question for you. This wasn't why I raised my hand, but it's the the fee in lie of will the up zone will actually build the city's capacity to actually build the fee in lie of it's a it's a direct relationship. It's I think when Elliott talked about this slide um a number of minutes ago, the the zoning will take the the existing zoning will take care of what Elliot and Allison have pointed out is a substantial part of our above 30% AMI affordable housing needs. But the up zone will also then enable the fee in lie of to generate. So the hypothetical scenarios that Elliot ran through, I I think he ran through an or it was this or this. The idea is that we're starting or at least as I see it, we're starting at a baseline and that as we move forward in time, there's going to be a need to review housing unit production at what AMI bands, how much fee in Lua has been generated, and it is very likely that there's going to need to be future conversations with the city and the city council about whether adjustments need to be made as we move into time and production starts and we start seeing results on the ground. Um I do believe we had a similar discussion during the 2024 comprehensive plan update um a very similar discussion as we're having here tonight related to that where this is a Kodak moment what we're

looking at here and we're at the beginning Uh, but there is going to be reviews necessary over time as the numbers change. And I would suspect one of those first reviews will likely be 2029 um, which is also a required check-in uh, a midpoint check-in during the uh, the 10-year period between um, comprehensive plan updates.

Thank you, C Reynolds. We talked a little bit about leverage and it strikes me that there are two types of leverage. One is when other people throw in money as as as a funding source like Kirkland, Belleview, etc. Maybe they contribute through the arch housing trust fund money towards this. Another type might be uh tax credits or other incentives, but it seems like the only thing you're allowing for in your analysis is the is the loan to value thing that you could borrow part of the money. Is is that correct? And how does the the math change if you consider the other possible sources?

The assumption as far as financing is concerned doesn't change. What I refer to as loan to cost remains the same. And I wanted to highlight that there's tremendous variability in loan to cost. We're making what we think is a reasonably conservative assumption and varying it to provide some sensitivity analysis between 65 and 75%. But as I noted on that slide, the observed range is more like 55 to 90%. And so there's a there's significant variability. the other sources like from the Arch Housing Trust Fund um or other funds that the city could raise locally uh would just supplement those fee and L dollars. So it would allow you to to cover a larger total project cost. Um but it it just kind of goes into that pot of the again to use the analogy from home ownership down payment, right? It becomes supplemental to the dollars that the fee and loop program would generate. So if we generated $20 million in fee and loo and and well actually what was the number did you have? 30 million was the fee and loo it was about 31 million 30.7 million. So if you generated 20 million in fee and loo and found $10.7 million elsewhere then the outputs of the analysis would be the same. You could make up any gap from the fee and loo program with other funding sources. But similarly, if we had 30.7 of our own through Fee and Lou and got 30 million by some miracle from some other cities in the region, we could build twice as many units.

You could fund a lot more affordable housing units. Yes. Subject to, you know, all the other caveats related to the assumptions baked into the analysis. And then the the related question is the the loan to cost ratio makes some sense to me if we're building housing at the 80 to 100% level or something like that, but presumably at the 0 to 30% ratio or level, we're not collecting very much rent or the developers are not collecting very much rent. Can they really borrow at the 75% level when they're collecting minimal amounts of rent? It's project specific is the short answer and I I don't want to give you a copout response here. Um nor am I in the lending industry so I don't claim deep expertise here but generally speaking it puts you into different loan products for commercial real estate construction. Those projects are subsidized by the federal government or offered directly by the federal government and that allows them some more flexibility in funding terms. is something it seems like something that would pencil out at an 80% level on the associated rent. I mean 80% of your area median income if it pencileled out to be able to cover the loan. Something affordable at 30% is not likely going to be able to cover that same loan. Right. And I I I I worry that we're overestimating our loan to cost ratio pretty dramatically by not allowing for that. So I wonder if you could think about that.

Yeah, happy to. And again, we've got those values calculated. It's all in the spreadsheets, not in the presentation, but we've got those values calculated for that full 55 to 90% range. So, we'd be happy to return with those just to show you the sensitivity of that assumption if that's something that you would like. Thank you.

Okay, keep going. All right. I think I just had one final slide at the very end talking about next steps. Um, so like we talked about on February 17th, we are planning a community information session here coming up next week on March 10th. That's Tuesday. And that'll be a webinar for the public to join and learn more about the growth management hearing board decision and the city's compliance strategy. We also have a public feedback period open through next Friday on that um station area boundary. And then we're going to be continuing to keep the council updated and and getting your input and direction throughout the spring on this project. Um and continuing legislative review at the planning commission later in the spring and and then back to the city council in early summer to meet our July 31st deadline for for finalizing the amendments. C Reynolds, how many people are signed up so far? Do we know?

I don't know that. Okay. And you're not intending, I think, at that point, to cover the to stuff. This is only about the GMHB compliance, correct? Correct. Correct. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Allison, you said this is your last slide. It is. Okay. Uh, is that an old hand, Council Member Reynolds? Yes, I'm working on shutting it.

Okay. Uh, thank you very much. Uh, next up on the agenda, we have the city manager's report and we welcome city manager Jesse Bod. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And Casey's going to assist with the screen share. Let me close my popups here. Okay, next slide, Casey. And one more. Uh, council, here is your meeting snapshot for the next couple of weeks. As a reminder, your next council meeting is Tuesday, March 17th. Uh, as for the boards and commissions, the parks and recreation commission will be meeting this week. Next week, the utility board meets at 5:00 on Tuesday, and then we will hold an information session on the growth management hearing board order at 6:00 p.m. on the same night. As a reminder, we keep all of our uh meetings updated and posted to our website at the link that's on the bottom of your screen. Next slide. Got a handful of updates and a good segue. Speaking of board and commission recruitment, I wanted to remind you that we have three vacancies currently on our boards. One is on the Arts Council, one is on the Open Space Conservancy Trust, and one on the utility board. I think uh we may have applications for each one of those seats, but applications have been a little late. So, I just wanted to remind you that uh recruitment is open for just a few more days through March 6 and then council, we will be coming to you to make those appointments at your meeting on March 17th. Uh this is also a good reminder that we're looking down the stretch um probably in just a couple of weeks, we'll be opening the recruitment for annual um our annual board and commissioner commission recruitment process. So, stand by for more information on that.

Next slide. uh a communications reminder and our communications manager is sitting right next to me. Uh he has been supporting us uh promoting uh the need to gather feedback on the transportation improvement program. So this is a reminder uh to you as well council that the public comment period on the tip is now open. As a reminder, your transportation improvement plan comes to you annually. It covers roadway, pedestrian, and bicycle projects uh planned for the six-year period from uh 2027 to 2032. Uh we have a let's talk page set up on this and we're continuing to push out uh communications over the city's communications channel. Uh, council, your first touch on this will be April 7th where we'll open a we'll have a a formal public comment period at that meeting and then the tip is scheduled to be adopted at the first meeting in May. Next slide, please. All right, I wanted to take a moment to recap uh a couple of days of challenging situation we had last week. It's uh kind of an honor tonight that we have a number of our maintenance team members in the council room and uh watching in a room adjacent because it was really credit to them and our engineering team that we were able to uh resolve in less than 48 hours a blockage that was detected in the sewer lake line. Uh this started last Monday when um our system uh sent off alarms saying that pump station 10 on the north end of the item had on the north end of the island had a problem. Uh this is in reach five. Reach is just a fancy term for a different section of the lake line. Uh when we got out there uh we confirmed that there was a likely blockage in the

lake line. And as a reminder, that's the main pipe that conveys sewage off the island. Uh unfortunately, the backup resulted in some discharge of sewage into the lake. Uh your staff team notified King County Public Health, the Department of Ecology, and residents that were impacted along the shoreline. Next slide, please. Although I've included some notes here, I just have to tell you that uh this was, you know, 36 hours of incredible intensity uh with a broad staff team uh working to solve this issue. Uh we began troubleshooting right away and council, as you're aware, getting into the lake line has always been the challenge for us. Uh using a sewer jet truck, ultimately staff worked to clear the blockage and to clean the affected section of pipe. Uh the part I'm skipping over here is that it took some real ingenuity to figure out how to get into that pipe. Um we're thankful that we have tenured employees here that um came together uh to solve for that. And by Tuesday evening, the lake line was um operational. Again, I want to also give a shout out to the neighbors and community members that were impacted by this uh sewer lake line problem. We sent out an alert first thing Tuesday morning and said, um, uh, we have a problem. Stop, uh, discharging wastewater. And the response was immediate. Um, if that had not happened, we would have had an even even bigger problem. So, my thanks to the community for their partnership. Um and certainly as I've already mentioned uh huge shout out to the public works team, our engineers, our maintenance workers who um were working around the clock. Uh the emergency management team, communications, and others. Uh it was a great response. Next slide, please. Um ultimately, council, I spoke to many of you over that 36-hour period. You know, um where my blood pressure was as this was uh happening. This is a very serious utility emergency and it

continues to highlight the vulnerability that we have um of the lake line especially because access to that line is limited. So I wanted to share tonight uh that we never waste a good emergency. Uh this uh adds to the work that we've already been doing um on the lake line. So we're meeting uh this week and next to debrief the event uh review our actions and see if there's any opportunities for improvement. Certainly, I welcome any input you would like to share with me. Uh we are going to put a camera inside the lake line between pump stations 10 and 11. That's where the blockage was detected uh to document our conditions and connections uh to identify anything else that needs to be addressed right now. Uh we are also working on developing a design and permitting contingency. Should this happen again, and unfortunately it will, um, we need to be able to respond uh, faster if access to the pipe is needed. I shared with some of you that thankfully we were able to get into the pipe. Um, if we had not been able to go through an existing access, we would have been uh, seeking an emergency emergency permits from many permitting agencies to put in that that access pipe. that would have slowed us down by not just days but possibly weeks and in an extreme situation months. Uh that's just not acceptable. And so we need to come up with a plan so that we can respond to these emergencies in this aging infrastructure. And finally, we have a lot of data and information from other Lakeland projects um that will certainly inform our next steps. Uh council between the water system and the sewer system, we have a lot of projects on our plate. I certainly continue uh to recommend it making those investments and uh focusing on this infrastructure. Uh it is essential and when something like this happens, it's a really serious um emergency. Uh finally, a thank you to the council for the support you offered during these couple

days. I know many of you were talking to community members and doing other things uh while the staff was focusing on the immediate response. Okay, switching gears. um couple of events to highlight and then that will conclude my presentation. Uh this Saturday, just wanted to make sure these uh two items are on your calendar. The senior re source fair is happening here at the community center. Um gosh, we've been doing this for a couple of years now. It's a really popular opportunity for our senior adults in our community to stop by uh meet with vendors um others that are providing resources on and off the island. And there's even some uh seminars planned uh from 12:30 to 1:30. So the main event is from 10:00 to 12:00 here at the community center and then some additional seminars and featured presentations from 12:30 to 1:30. And once you're done here, we encourage you to pop over to the north and Starbucks where members of our police department will be holding a coffee with a cop. It's just a great opportunity for community members and others uh to meet with the police department, ask questions, and uh learn a little bit more about what they're doing in the community. Next slide, please. Uh family movie night returns. My kids would probably enjoy this. Uh Friday, March 13th. Uh this is a fun event that we started, I think, a year ago. We'll be hosting at 5:30 here at the community center. Looks like the movie feature is Super Mario Brothers. All right. We provide snacks and uh pajamas, pillows, and blankets are encouraged. Um all of our recreation events are posted on our website and we have more information if anyone would like to attend.

Great. Thank you.

Oh, one more. Sorry, I forgot about this. And council, I know you have this on your calendars. I want to make sure this is on everyone else's calendars. Uh March 28th is the opening of the two line. Uh we've seen the Sound Transit safe sound transit trains in testing mode for several weeks now, but we're excited to announce that the line is opening March 28th. Uh the event that's happening here on Mercer Island is from 10 to 2 at the park and ride uh council. There is a ribbon cutting that will be at 9:00 over in Seattle and we'll have uh more information for all of you on the logistics. But in the meantime, we wanted to make sure our community has us on our calendar and as we get closer to the date, we'll be rolling out more information about parking and transportation to actually get here because the town center will be really busy that day. All right, I think that might be my last slide. Oh, one more or two. Ah, yes, this is the last slide. Uh wanted to say uh just a heartfelt thank you again to the Youth and Family Services Foundation uh for hosting the fundraising breakfast the beginning of February. We had nearly 500 attendees and it was just an outstanding success. I'm told that fundraising is approaching a $450,000 goal um which goes right back into the youth and family services department. And since council I shared with you today um what is a pretty challenging fiscal situation for the city, this partnership just means that much more uh to us. So, thank you to the Youth and Family Services Foundation, all of the staff, and a huge huge uh moment of gratitude to the recreation team who work late the night before and are up early in the morning supporting the event. Overall, it was a great success. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Uh, 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 there anyone who has addressed who has signed up for appearances that wish to address the council? Thank you, mayor. We do have uh three individuals actually four individuals that have signed up. I believe I believe one um is not in the waiting room. So that leaves us with three.

Okay. Tonight's agenda will include inerson public appearances and remote public appearances via Zoom. Individuals wishing to address the council may do so in person or by Zoom or telephone provided they have registered with the city's clerk with the city clerk's office by 4 p.m. today. When it is your turn to speak, you'll be called on by name. Remarks must be addressed to the council as a whole and not to individual council or staff members. Any person making personal, impertinent or slanderous remarks or becomes boisterous, threatening or personally abusive while addressing the city council may be requested to leave the meeting. Please speak audibly and state your name and city residents for the record. There will be a timer on the screen. You have 3 minutes to speak. When your time is ended, your microphone and video will be turned off. I'll thank you for your comments and move to the next speaker. Right into business staff, please promote or welcome the first speaker. May our first speaker is uh Fuan and he intended or she intended to be here in person. Is that person here?

I'm not saying they are I don't doesn't look like they're in the waiting room either. So our next uh person is Chuck Spece. Is he in the room? Yes.

Thank you from Peace. Good evening, council members. My name is Chuck Spece. I'm the staff representative for Ask Me Council 2, Local 21M. Uh you see them in green. It's your local um city employees. We've come here today in solidarity after our members have overwhelmingly rejected the city's last best final contract proposal last week. We've been bargaining in good faith since August of last year in an attempt to reach an agreement that respects and values the work our members provide and yet we don't have an agreement. We appreciate the city's desire to be conservative with public funds. We urge you to consider the other costs. The cost to morale um to retention of those tenured employees that were just mentioned, cost of ongoing mediation, which I had to file for yesterday. Cost to the relationships that the city has with its labor force. Our members don't serve this. Our members serve this community, but they don't live in this community. Um, we saw some housing affordability things come up that that reaches all of our members also, but they still come here every day. Your employees cannot afford to live here um or even close by for the most part. And our goal is not to negotiate a contract that provides a living wage for Mercer Island, but to help mitigate some of the additional impacts of those commutes, of the disruptive emergency callouts that they respond to, commutes that take hours out of their personal lives um to provide these city services that employees in other cities don't have to face. We need a contract that helps retain the talented and dedicated employees you have and the ability to recruit the best candidates possible when the need arises. The stated goal of the city's bargaining team when we met was to be was to uh maintain a costneutral contract or as close to costneutral as possible. A three-year costneutral contract feels like falling behind for our members. We need something that moves them forward. I've heard the city council commend and applaud our members for their work in

previous meetings. We need to find a way to show them that they are valued and reward their ongoing commitment and contributions to this community. We are amendable to a variety of ways to do this. Everything from longevity pay, retirement support, standby pay increases, um even changes in the definition of a holiday for people working the flex schedules to help accommodate those commutes. There has to be some way that some of these changes can be made and we can find a solution. Nobody wants a labor dispute. We want certainty. We want to reach an agreement that moves us forward. We want to keep serving this community. I believe that's what you want, too. We look around at all these green shirts. More than could fit in this room. Over 30 people, um, more on Zoom. They're logged in remotely. They're your employees. They're the people who do the work this community needs. They are here instead of trying to get home to their families because this is important to them. They need a contract. We are hoping that you can empower your bargaining team to find a solution that will reach an agreement that we can all ratify and also values and respects the work that these members provide to this wonderful community. Thank you.

Thank you,

Mr. Mayor. Our next speaker is Scott Heath. Hello, my name is Scott Heath. I have worked for the city for over 10 years. I'm currently a foreman in the public works department and I am the local 21M president and I have been for six years. This is my fourth contract negotiation with the city and it is the first time that we have been at been at an impass. It is also the first time that the chief negotiator for the city has threatened negotiations a week before they started. So I'm going to read to you an email that our staff rep sent the human resources department documenting an interaction between myself and the public works director. The email is dated August 20th, 2025. Hello, human resources. I have some concerning behavior from our from Jason Kitner that I would like to document but keep confidential at this point at the request of our members. I recently filed a grievance on Thursday, August 14th. It was filed to address concerns of skimming that were brought to me by our members. I was later informed that upon learning of the grievance, Mr. Kitner called the union president Scott Heath and proceed proceeded to berate him at length for us filing agreements. Among the many things said by Mr. Kitner were quote we're greedy and this was Point of order Mr. Mayor. Um, I we are we have policies around what we're allowed to say during appearances and and around specific people and I'm just wondering if reading the the specific language here

and the specific allegations about about particular people was allowed. Uh, city manager B.

Hey, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Uh, I appreciate the point of order. It would be um it's disappointing to me that a personnel matter is being read aloud in council chambers. As your city manager, I hold uh in high regard my duty to honor the request that was just read aloud for confidentiality. We've been treating uh these complaints as such. Uh given that besides uh the inappropriate language, I do not see a reason that the comments uh may not continue. So, uh, it will be at your pleasure, Mr. Mayor.

Uh, thank you. Your point of order is not sustained. Please continue. This was really poor timing with negotiations coming and we'll have to see how they go. Now, negotiations are going to be a dandy. I hope you have a dollar amount and I hope it's big. And you should have given me a heads up. These actions by the director were not only unprofessional, but they were also illegal. He implied retaliation that could jeopardize our upcoming bargaining agreement and interfered with union business. I'm sure his behavior violated a number of city personnel policies, but the legal implications of this retaliation are something the union is willing to pursue if needed. Our right to grieve violations of the contract and to engage in good faith bargaining are guaranteed by law and we must know that they are protected. It is only at the request of our members and their concerns of future retaliation as well as a desire to preser preserve a professional relationship that I'm not asking to do more than document this right now. If at any point in our negotiations it becomes apparent that our director is going to act in bad faith and detract from our bargaining sessions, I will not hesitate to involve our attorney and pursue matters further. Thank you.

Thank you, Deputy City Cler. There's anybody else who signed to speak? No, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. Uh there no further appearances. We'll now move to our next admin business just approve the consent agenda. Staff, please put the consent agenda on the screen. Okay. The consent agenda contains 12 items which are available on the screen and in the agenda packet for your review. Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented? I'll move.

Second. It's moved by Council Member Andrew and second by Council Member Reynolds to approve the consent agenda. Deputy City Clerk, please call the role. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Council member Shay, I. Council member Anderol, I. Council member Wer, I. Deputy Mayor Becker, I. Mayor Rosenbomb, hi. and council member Weinberg. I thank you. Okay. Thank you. The motion is approved. Uh moving to regular business. Our first item order. Did you call me? I thought that I did, but perhaps I didn't. Okay. Council member Reynolds. Thank you.

Okay. Uh now we move to regular business. And our first item of regular business is AB6880 public hearing on interim regulations at MICC19.16.101. Sorry. 010 related to emergency shelters and housing, traditional housing and permanent supportive housing, ordinance number 26-02, first reading. Uh, okay. The public hearing is now open as of 6:02 p.m. Individuals who register with the city clerk's office for 4 p.m. today may make a public comment on this agenda item. You'll be called by name when is your turn to speak. Please speak audibly. State your name and city of residence for the record and limit your comments to three minutes. Deputy city clerk, is there anyone who has signed up for public comment that wishes to address the council? No, mayor.

Okay, there is no testimony this evening. The public portion of this hearing is closed as of 6:03 p.m. Now we will welcome CBD director Jeff Thomas.

Thank you a good mayor. Uh for the record, Jeff Thomas and joining me for this item is uh senior planner Molly Magcguire with CPD. Molly is going to walk you through a very short presentation uh before we turn it back over to you. Um, I would like to just say before or while Molly is getting her screen ready here to share, um, this will be the seventh, uh, time we've come to you since 2021 with a renewal of these interim regulations. And I'm hopeful this is going to be the last time um as this work uh will be part of the GMA compliance effort um that we will be undertaking here in just a few short months uh and bringing it back to council mid year. So with that, Molly, why don't you go ahead and share your screen and we'll walk council through the slides. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Um, okay. So, uh, as some brief background on House Bill 1220, um, we can go back even further to 2003 when STEP housing, um, has been permitted, uh, islandwide, um, where regulations were adopted to permit special needs, group housing, and social service transitional housing. Um, in 2021, the state passed House Bill 1220, uh, which required amendments to Mercer Island City Code Title 19. Um, and those amendments were done through, uh, amending the definitions to special needs group housing and social service transitional housing, uh, to include, um, definitions of emergency housing, which I'll get into later. Um, but as Jeff said, uh, between 2022 and 2025, uh, those have been renewed six times. um and permanent regulations were originally proposed um as part of the omnibus ordinance but were taken out and postponed um and are now part of the GMA compliance effort. Um so these interim regulations will expire on April 2nd of this year if they're not renewed. Um so they would need to be renewed this month to remain in compliance with House Bill 1220. Um, so House Bill 1220 essentially forbids cities from prohibiting transitional or permanent supportive housing in residential zones or zones where hotels are allowed and indoor emergency shelters and housing in zones where hotels are allowed. Um, there's also regulations regarding occupancy, spacing, and intensity that must be reasonable and uh restrictions cannot be used to prevent the sighting of a sufficient number of housing units necessary to meet the projected housing need. Uh there was some guidance published in

2024 uh which will uh need to be evaluated for compliance uh uh which our regulations will need to be evaluated for compliance with the House Bill 1220 and uh this commerce guidance uh when we develop permanent regulations um as part of the GMA compliance uh which is due on July 31st, 2026. And so this ordinance renews the interm regulations established by um the ordinance 24-03 uh which amends 191610 the definitions um to comply with house 1220 section 4 and uh the recommended action is to schedule ordinance number 2602 for a second reading on March 17th 2026 and that is All I have for you. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. I'll uh start a question uh just so everyone is clear and here and maybe watching at home. Uh the permanent regulations for this are set to be done soon and sort of the next batch of uh regulations that the planning commission and the council is going to be considering. Is that fair? It is. It is part of the scope for our GMA compliance effort related to the growth board order. That is correct. Great. Uh is there a motion to schedule ordinance 2602 for second reading on March 17th, 2026? So moved.

Second. Moved by council member uh Weinberg and second by council member Reynolds. Deputy Any discussion? Um, yeah, I I would like to ask some questions about the public comments that we received via email with regard to emergency shelters throughout the island. Um, and the extent to which that is compliant or non-compliant with state law or more than what state law requires and if it is, which is been suggested that it is more than state law requires, why are we doing that? Is that going to be in the permanent ordinance?

So, council will certainly have an opportunity to So, to answer your question, council member Androl, um it is it is possible that we have overshot that area um a little bit. Um, one of the, um, problems with just making immediate changes is there is going to have to be some analysis done, uh, before we're able to bring bring back changes certainly and our next step here is to try and get the permanent regulations adopted. Um it is going to take a little time to go through that process and um we have got that resource scheduled to do that this spring as part of again the permanent regulation making process that we want to have done by July 31st.

Mr. Mayor, if I can also add um our legal team has been working on this since this issue was raised last fall. Um, I sent an email to you uh just a couple of hours ago. I'm sorry you didn't receive it sooner. Uh, the staff acknowledged that there's additional work to be done. Um, that's why we have interim regulations because we're still working on it. Uh, this item was removed from the omnibus ordinance that you had in front of you last fall so that it could be uh dealt with uh more intentionally and uh with some additional review time. Um, I'd like to say that I can move this to the top of the list, but as you're well aware, we're also working on compliance with the growth management hearing boards order. Been talking with staff. The step housing permanent regulations and the other uh regulations we have to adopt as part of that larger order uh go hand inand are being worked at the same time. Um, I just want to reiterate again, your legal team has been working on this. I know they were meeting last week, this week looking at the step housing regulations and so the work is moving. Uh we do not have an opportunity, we do not have time uh between now and April 2nd to put permanent regulations in place. Uh we need the additional time uh to work on the the permanent regulations. So I would respectfully request that you move forward on adopting the interim regulations so that we maintain compliance with state law. And I'd just like to say that I will likely be voting in favor of these interim regulations as they've been in place for some time and the continuity that we need to be continue to be in compliance and the time we need for permanent. But um if the permanent regulations include emergency shelters throughout the island as opposed to just in zones where hotels are allowed um I will be voting against them. And council

member Ander, I want to make just clear for the record that is not the intent. Okay, that's Yeah, my hand is down. All good. Okay, please call the role. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Uh, as a reminder, Council Member Weineberg made the motion and Council Member Reynolds seconded it. Council member Androl. I, Deputy Mayor Becker, I. Council member Weinberg, I. Council member Sheay, I. Council member Wer, hi. Council, excuse me, Mayor Rosenbomb. Hi. And council member Reynolds. I. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Motion passes. Our next item of business is AB6881, review of city facility strategy, community survey results. We welcome city manager Jesse Bond, senior management analyst Robbie Cunningham Adams. All right. Good evening, council. Again, for the record, Robbie Cunningham Adams, senior management analyst in the senior manager's office. Um, tonight we are u reviewing the results of the city facilities survey. And you can go ahead and share your screen on the front slide when you get Chancellor Ian. Um, as a reminder, council, during your January 6th meeting, uh, you approved funding to do a, um, a statistically valid survey and an open public survey, uh, to gather input from the community about last November's public safety maintenance facility proposition one and the city facility strategy going forward. Um, so the purpose was to learn what happened last fall in the election and what our priorities for the community going forward. Um we uh selected a consultant who's here with me uh to help us do that work. Um so I'm joined by Ian Stewart. Uh Ian is a partner with Fulcrrim Strategy Group firm he started uh with longtime colleagues this year after spending 27 years at EMC research. Um Fulcrrim is a nationwide opinion research firm serving a wide range of clients from both public and the private sector including numerous east side cities including King County east side cities and the Belleview Chamber of Commerce. Ian's done this a lot um including for the city of Mercer Island in the past with our parks levy measures in the past and other city um you know approval and uh satisfaction surveys in the past as well. Um and so with that uh we we selected Ian Ian worked with city staff and with the council um select committee of deputy mayor Becker,

council member Reynolds, council member Wer. Uh we came up with a great set of questions and we're here to go into the results. So, with that, I'm going to put it over to Ian. Make sure your mic's on and uh he's Ian's going to walk us through the results. You're going to see a lot of data, a lot of a lot of charts. Um I guess uh the mayor, deputy mayor, um happy to go through the whole thing and take questions at the end, but it's pretty dense. So, if anyone has I want to I have a question about a slide or a data point, feel free to raise your hand and interrupt us and we can we can dive into discussion. With that, I'll leave it to you, Ian.

Great. Thank you. Looks like my mic is on. My name is Ian Stewart. Nice to see you all this evening. I will get started and as Robbie said, please do uh stop me whenever you feel like it. So, um I was asked to do a little bit of background on how random sampling works and how we approach this work, which will give you a sense of methodologically how we did the survey. When you think about doing a random selection survey, it's a bit like this metaphor of tasting soup, right? So, if you take a spoonful of soup after it's mixed up, you get a good sense of the flavor without having to eat the whole pot of soup. So when we think about this that that jar at the right I think of them as every potential respondent in our universe and we start with that larger set of everyone possibly that we could that's possible to get selected from that known universe which is in this case every eligible voter on the city of in the city of Ireland. We then shuffle that universe. We shake up the the marbles and then we draw them at random. And when we draw that sample at random we essentially achieve uh the responses within a known margin of error which we'll talk about in a few minutes. We then achieve our survey with that random selection uh with reducing bias. So our intro, if you were to look at it, it's very generic. You don't know who's calling you for the reason or what the survey is about necessarily when you start. That's on purpose because if someone decides not to participate, that means they're not doing it because of the topic at hand. They're just doing it because they don't have time or they don't take surveys, whatever it might be, which is fine because it doesn't it doesn't affect our our sampling effect, right? You can see how that would work. Um we then make multiple attempts to reach someone. So, for example, if Robbie was selected and was living the island and we tried to reach him, we would reach him, maybe try at the evening if we were doing by phone, we would do it again the next morning and then wait a couple days and try him again before we replace him with somebody else also randomly selected, right? And if you think about it, we kind of live next to where each other lives. The demographics are similar. So, if you get somebody on the south end, we make another random selection, probably get somebody else the south end again and represent the universe geographically, demographically, and so forth. Um, we then look at the known universe. In this instance, that's all voters. And because u we know that universe, we have that from regular updates to the universe. We know what that universe should look like at the

end of the day when we're done collecting the data on the survey. In this instance, it's unusual that we don't have to wait. We did not have to wait our data at all. The demographics look very much like what we expect the total voter universe to look like on the city of Mercer Island, which is going to be different than all residents. So, we can talk about that again uh at the end. So, with that background, then think about other examples of reducing bias. So, as I said, the generic introduction, they're not refusing based on the topic. At least they don't have time. Uh, it's there's a good bet that respondents probably know who the sponsor is, but they don't really know because we never confirm it for them until tonight. Now, anyone who did the survey will go, "Oh, wait a minute. I remember that. I remember being surveyed for this, and now they know who the sponsor was." Um, we we uh include data from people who completed the entire survey. So, you're not looking at partial responses here. Anyone who did a partial response, they're eliminated. We replace them with another randomly selected person. And throughout the survey, then, and we can go into this more detail if you're interested, we offered balance scales. So there are four point scales. They're going to have two on one side that are positive, two on the other side that are negative, as an example. And then the clarifications, if it's a live interviewer, the clarifications are always done the same way. So someone says, well, what is that? What is that supposed to mean? The respondent, the interviewer then says the question back to them. So they don't they're not trying to lead them in some way. They're not trying to guide them in some other way. You if you want interested, you can listen to these surveys. It's pretty it's pretty interesting. If you're doing it yourself, you're looking at the same response each time. So the one to seven scale. So this survey specifically ended up about 400 interviews. And this is a margin of error chart. So one of the questions that I get asked a lot is why don't you do a bunch of interviews? What? Why not? Well, really at some point it doesn't matter anymore. We're getting diminishing returns as we move up the list. If you look at the sample size universe, 400 is a really comfortable place to be. We do that often at the city or countywide level 400 interviews. Sometimes we do higher five or 600. But on the island, we actually have a limit of the number of interviews we can do because the population is just not that big. If you're doing the city of Seattle, we could do 600, 800 or a,000 without any issue. But you can see margin of error error wise we don't lose all that much in terms of our overall power for the overall results. The margin of error results you're going to see about five points in a direction one way or the other.

So this survey to get into more of the results now this was a survey of voters a mixed mode which means we used landline and cell phones but mostly cell phones these days. There's still a few people you can imagine we might reach on landlines. You can imagine that demographic. uh email and text to web so that people are doing this on a device of some kind, a phone or a computer via that email and text message invitation. If they were done by telephone, these are all in English by trained professional interviewers. The text invitations were sent with that link to the web survey. So again, it's a generic invitation that they're receiving. Uh we did do allow multiple completes per household, although we did not actually have to use that. I mean, there were only five of them that we got multiple completes per household. As I mentioned, 400 total interviews, the margin of error right around that five percentage point number at the 95% conference interval, which is another way of saying if we repeat the survey, 95 times out of 100, you're going to see the same results to within that plus or - 5% point margin of error. Uh, when you think about margin of error, if it's on the far ends of things, so if it's an 8020 response, our margin of error actually gets even better. So it really the 50/50 is where that full five point could be five points higher or lower comes into play. And then finally, we did the survey January 28th through the 11th uh February and 26 recently. So let's get into the results unless there are other demographic or methodological questions. Okay, one of the first questions we ask, if you look at the lower left hand corner, you'll see the question text of what we asked. This is very early in the survey. Uh are things going in the right direction? Are they gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track? That pretty seriously is intentional language. I've asked it the same way for about 30 years as as a company, one form or another. The right direction number and the wrong track is usually a culmination of a variety of things. Mostly this is about how do we feel about things life on restaurant and it's pretty good pretty good at 78 right direction and 17% wrong track. Um we can talk about some comparisons that are made from previous surveys. We we'll get into that at the end. Next again question lower left hand corner. We call this the most important problem. It's an open-ended response and open-ends means that people can tell us whatever they think. They can say a word a paragraph. We take that and put it back into these response categories. So obviously the person that said growth

and development they might have told us a story for you know a minute or two about what's going on there or they might have just said it's growth there's too much or something like that. If you look at that growth and development there at 12% um we usually say about 10 points is a significant response an open-ended response. So we have you know three of them are right around 10 and only one above 12. There's no concentration though here. If you were looking at other communities you would see other items especially Seattle's a great example homelessness crime things like that into the 30s and 40s in terms of open responses. This gives you a sense of what's happening to the island right now. Whole bunch of items that are small percentages that people are concerned about. As you move down the list, particularly for tonight, city facilities and municipal buildings next to the bottom there at 3%. I had to keep going until I got to that 3% number, but it is there. It does register among a whole bunch of other items on the list. Other actually is a whole collection of probably 1% mentions that people said that just don't that don't make the cut. On the next slide, we're doing a series of questions. These are uh there's one of these that are not not in a randomized door. the job the restaurant city government does overall. This is rated on a scale of excellent, good, only, fair, and poor. So, two positive, two negatives, and then an unoffered middle. If you wanted to offer, you could you could say, "I'm not sure. I don't have an opinion on that." Uh, I'm showing you on the far right, the excellent and poor, the two most extreme on those ratings. So, that one is asked out of order. The other three are asked randomized. You see me do that a lot in the survey where we randomize things because then not any respondent are receiving the same question in the same order, right? They're all receiving a different order for that. As you move through the list here, the first one, the job the mer on the city government does overall pretty strong at almost 70% positive, 25% negative. As you move down the list though, we get more specific, you're seeing differences in those ratings. The job the city uh does spending tax dollars responsibly. That's 5434 in terms of positive or negative. Although the excellent and poor are just about even in those two, whereas in the first one, the excellent about, you know, two or three times the the the poor. uh the job the city government does providing city services and maintaining city infrastructure is pretty good at 7378 both higher than the job overall that the city's doing. So you can see as we as we dig into the ratings here things vary a little bit

depending on which question you're asking about. Well Keith stay at this slide I see a few hands raised. Do you want to do questions down or uh cand? Yeah thanks. Is there any explanation about the logic behind driving some of these answers? Because to me, there's a complete disconnect with how can 73 or 78% of the people think we're doing a great job maintaining the infrastructure um and providing city services, which is where all the money is spent and think we're not doing such a great job spending the tax dollars. I I think it's fair to say that we have any insight into that. That just doesn't it doesn't click for me.

Yeah. I I I think it's fair to say that that it's first of all, you can see there's 13% that have no opinion. So there's a group of people who there who there were who were thinking I don't know what the city spends money on at all. I don't know how to answer this question. So you could actually say those 13 might give it a better rating if they were if they were if they knew more about it. But that's the other challenge of city government is that most people don't pay nearly as much attention as you do to to what's happening to the the city budget, right? They have their own budgets to worry about. They got their own their own concerns and and and life that they're managing. So for a lot of people, I think they're being more critical of government generally. That's the way you could you could walk away with this uh understanding.

Thank you. But on the flip side of that, those two that you see direct evidence of this the state providing services, we should feel pretty good about that that they're much higher even than the rating overall.

Cyn almost an identical question, but I was going to ask it a slightly different angle on it. Is that sort of disconnect between using tax dollars wisely and general impression of how the city is doing, is that unusual? Do other cities see that as well? I would start by saying usually cities don't see good ratings for the job they're doing overall. If you compare your neighboring cities, Merc is looking a bit better than other cities. But no, we see that disconnect all the time, especially because the evidence of what I see on the ground, I experience the city's services in a very different way. The generic version of winning my tax dollars, it's a far more difficult question to answer because it's all the tax dollars and do I know what the city spends on all tax dollars? No. So, it's a lot easier to be critical on that kind of question.

Okay. Thank you. Do you want to continue? Thank you. Okay,

moving on. You can see how we're sort of doing questions in an order where we're releasing a little bit of information at a time. So, the next question here on the far left, have you heard, read, or seen anything about proposals for new city government buildings on Marcela. This is about the least specific we could make it while still giving some indication of what we were after, but obviously we're sort of tipping our hand a little bit on this question. I won't claim this is entirely unbiased, but there's really not a great way to ask this and get the response. You saw the unedated version where we asked the most important problem at 3%. Right? So, if we ate it, now we're getting to almost 70% saying that. Of course, they're self- selecting them, saying that yes, I've heard something about this. We move them along to say, "All right, well, what have you heard?" On the right side, that's all that 70% that said yes, 69% moving on the right and saying, "All right, tell me specifically in an open end, what have you seen?" Uh, a new city hall, a permit center at 16%, it was too expensive to raise taxes. They're literally going all the way to the November measure we're going to be asking about in a few minutes. Um, it was voted on or a failed measure. You can see there's various versions of this that are somewhat more generic all the way to the specific. So new police station uh in EMS or in public safety pretty specific right of of an answer whereas some of these other ones general building development that's much more generic about 11 11% said that. So there's a collection of answers here among that 70% of people who actually could tell us what they think is happening specifically. This is the way to understand just how aware are people of what are we talking about here. We wanted to follow it up with another version of this and again this is also self-offered. These are randomized questions, but our question was, tell us how well aware you think you are of each of these three specific items. How aware are you that city hall closed, that the police department is operating out of temporary trailers, and that many systems in the city's public buildings are failing and need to be replaced. So once again, this is a self-offered version of this, but the awareness there, you can see in almost every instance about a quarter, just over that are saying, "I haven't heard at all about that." So it this is this is asking of everyone. See, when you ask yourself when we go out in the community and talk and people say, "I don't know what's happening." Well, there's a solid third that actually don't they're not paying attention at all to what's happening with in regards to these buildings. And as you move to the other three items, the very aware ranges anywhere from almost half down to a

third. So to make the assumption that people are following along as we talked about a minute ago with how taxes are being spent then to this level of detail, right? It's it's hard for people to follow that because how much time are they giving you the city council proceedings and what's happening in the city government? Uh so moving on, we then did our next question. This question is the text. We essentially repeated the November 2025 measure and then said you may or may not have voted on this but tell us if you did which way did you vote or if you hadn't which way would you have voted or maybe you wouldn't have voted at all and you would have skipped it. On the left is what we got in the survey. 55% yes and then a collection of other no plus the other responses. Either people said they wouldn't have voted on it or they didn't know. The actual election results as you recall is 5545. So we were almost dead on with that uh with with what we saw in our survey here. Uh, so then moving forward, we said to ask everybody, all right, whatever way you voted, or maybe you didn't vote, what do you think was the best reason to support this measure? You can see a collection of items here. Once again, this is an open-ended answer. So, we're looking at anything above 10% being significant again. And in terms of a connection to the actual item, you can see new updated facilities, pretty good, but, you know, less generic. Updated municipal buildings, that one, the third way, the third one down, that's pretty specific, right? So, we're actually seeing now some specific connections. But again, you think about driving down to the level of awareness, right? we're getting now here to people who voted on this level of awareness is not that high like specific recall what's happening what's going on here and then 8% actually said I actually there's no reason to support it I opposed it but again this is asked of both people who voted yes and who voted no right we did the same thing for those on the other side and said right what's the best reason to oppose it now if I go back and forth you're already noticing the concentration of answers here among cost and expense right and the next one the tax increases and high taxes those two together is a majority of the answers you move through the rest of these go back and forth right you can There's definitely a much higher concentration here of connection on the opposition side. And again, these are yes voters who said, "I heard this and that's what I think the best reason to oppose this measure was." So clearly, and this is one of my first conclusions here, that this measure got the brand of being too expensive. Whatever number you

might have had in your head, people connected with being too expensive. Moving on, we then wanted to dig into this even further. So this is a series of agreed disagree questions. Again, these are all randomized. So no one is appearing in the same order for anybody. The scale here is going from strongly agree and somewhat agree. That's the blue. The dark blue is the strongly agree. So the most intense on the scale on the far right, the somewhat disagree and the strongly disagree. The somewhat disagree is that sort of light orange and the dark the dark orange is a strongly disagree. These are ranked in order of agreement as we move down the list. Right? And there's a series of questions that sort of investigate uh why the measure might not have reached 60%. What were the reasons you think the size of the property tax increase made many people vote against it? That is far and away the number one agreement on this list. 43% strongly agree. another 40 3% somewhat agree 86% total. So if you're walking with nothing else, right, the brand of the November 25 measure was it was the property tax was too big. Now whether we can all argue about how big it actually was, but this was the brand that it got, right? Um the next one, people were concerned the city would not spend the money wisely. The intensities dropped off here, right, from 43 to 23, but they somewhat agree at 52%. That's still a concern. You know, that's about the 70ish% 75%. Um, I believe the city needs a new facility, but there are features that should be cut to make the next next measure cost less. This one, 27% strongly agree, 38% somewhat agree. To me, this is one of the most important questions of the survey because it allows you a a path to move forward. You're looking forward and saying, "All right, is there something we can do to bring the sides back together again in some way?" And this gets, you know, well above 60% like 65ish% there with another 4% saying, "I'm not quite sure." 20% of some of this resale. So, there's some room to move here. We'll talk about that more in a few minutes. As you move through the rest of this list, city was not transparent enough on how the money would be spent. City already has enough money. This is where we starting to get get the disagreement on the majority side, right? So, city has enough money. No, actually majority said no to that. Almost 60% said that. 13% weren't sure. So, once again, this group coming back that you know is not exactly sure what the city's doing, whether they have the money or not. Uh, I won't support new

city buildings until a school want passes. A little moot now, but u that's into the 70s there. the this the disagree and the strongly disagree really jumps up in these last few right I oppose any tax increase regardless of what the money is used for 57% and I know 22% somewhat disagree uh location was wrong that's clearly not it although the intensity is down a little bit there the city should never ask for it because it doesn't need any new buildings this this disagreement there almost 60% I strongly disagree 28% somewhat so clearly there are some items that people are gravitating towards that do explain the vote in 25 and some other ones that are clearly not what's happening in the vote for 2025 at least by their uh admission. Any questions there before we move on?

Is it possible uh obviously you're talking about sample size of under 200 at this point, but is it possible to get these answers for people who also self-reported voting? No. Yes, that's actually my next slide. Let's move on then. Unless there are other questions on this before I do that.

Okay, one more slide just to highlight this one specifically. We'll go into details on what you just asked in a minute. So, I wanted to pull this one out because this is exactly what you just asked. this question of yes and no. If we have an agreement here that the city does need a new facility, but maybe we could cut some things, what happens if you ask the yes voters and no voters that you can see they actually split here. So yes, there's a chance for us to work together, but there's also some yes voters who were especially in that disagree category like I think you got it right and I might not be okay with cutting some things out of that because I think you were on the right trajectory here. Whereas on the no side, 78% agree with that. So we've got kind of a split here in this question as you move forward between yes and no voters. Um you move forward. Did you want to add something to that? No. Oh, keep going. All right. So, on the next slide, uh you can look at all these. This is pretty busy, but um I think just to give you a key to how you how to read it, the agree and disagree have com been combined here. The yes is the first line, the no is the second line. So, yes votes on the first line, no votes on the second line for each one of these items. And you can see there are some differences in how people are thinking about this. Almost universal agreement on the size of the property tax, that first one, right? They're both almost the same on the agree. Uh people were concerned the city wouldn't spend the money wisely. more agreement with that among the no voters than the yes voters. I believe the city needs a new facility but needs a cut. We just looked at that one 7853. Uh the city is not transparent. We're seeing the yes voters start to drop a little bit now as you move down the list, right? Uh and and then the the no voters is more likely to say yes here. Um as you move through the list, the city already has the money. It doesn't need a new tax increase. Yes voters only 18% but the no voters 41% agree with that. So u some interesting differences here. there's there's this sort of group of the no voters who are holding on to some perception whatever you know valid or not perceptions that they have is what they're holding on to you should know about them before you move forward with this uh and the last items of these I think what one of the most interesting ones you look at the location numbers and the city should never ask for it these are starting to drop but they're about that you know 28% about a quarter we're seeing here which are still pretty uh solid saying you know I I don't want to vote for this because I I don't you

know it's in the wrong place or you don't need the money so there still are some reasons among both yes and no voters to be hesitant about this uh in various degrees. I'm not sure who that yes voter is who said I oppose any tax increase. I I guess they made an exception for this one they when they voted yes but and council I this this slide was added yesterday. It's not in your packet. Um we will staff will update the the link in the packet to the updated kind of final presentation here. I I know it's pretty small text and a lot of information to um take in right now, but we'll be sure to share it out with you to and if you have any more questions, feel free to reach out after the meeting, too.

Okay. Even so, even so, so this this would be answering the question of from a yes voters's perspective, they believe that someone who voted no did so because obviously the property tax increase was the number one reason. It's not necessarily their personal opinion. It's their perception of the

That's right. Yeah. If you look at if you look at the the intro question, do you agree or disagree with each statement? And these are generic enough that you could agree without without that being your own personal opinion, right? In some instances. In other instances, it is in fact your personal opinion that you're that you're reflecting. So yes, uh but in that instance, again, the yes voters are saying I think it's because the size of the property tax that other people voted no. So and the no voters are saying that for sure. So

okay. Okay. Uh, we have just I think just one more slide and then we're closing things out. So on this next one, we do on a series of a one to seven scale. The question text is here at the bottom. How much of our priority are each of these items? One means it's not important at all. Seven is extremely important. You can use any number on the scale. On this scale, you can see a midpoint would be four. So I'm showing you everything over a four on this. The five and six are grouped together in that light green. The seven is the most intense, the extremely important, and it is organized by the total of five, six, and sevens together. But uh the sevens are really important here, right? Because if you if you choose a seven, it really gives us an easy way to understand intensity behind these answers. If you look, there's kind of a group of three at the top there. The permanent home for the police department, maintaining our park, street and utility maintenance program, in building new facilities so that uh they can survive an essential earthquake. Those three are both together kind of overall in the extremely important and in the total importance. There is a little bit of a gap in there, but you can see they're kind of grouped together. The next group of three is the public works, the city employees permanent home, an in-person customer service option. Those three kind of group together in terms of overall intensity drops off a little for the inerson customer for service center for the overall importance, but kind of in the same category there. Well, well above 60%. The intensity drops off on the covered facility here. Only 13% saying that. Same with the green buildings. And then this one is kind of unrelated to the building which is building new parks and trails and other parts of the island that don't currently have them. to the end of the list here. It's not as if these are things you shouldn't be doing. It's just in terms of overall importance of not outranking these other items on on the scale. Hope that makes sense to you. Like for example, I wouldn't necessarily not build the new building with to green standards. It's just that that's not as important as making sure that it's it's earthquake safe.

Uh so I'm going to move to my conclusions and then I've got some other questions that were asked I want to refer back to unless there other questions before I do that. No. Okay, good. So, we looked at the the outlook overall, which is really positive, especially on some elements of government performance, although it dropped off as you saw. We asked about responsible tax dollar usage, and we talked about why that might be. That's a harder question to answer. We did find that a large majority of voters have some level of awareness of what's happening with civic buildings, but there's a persistence quarter that said they're not aware. Like they told us, I have not paid attention to this at all. Even even when they were given given the chance to answer, they said, "No, I haven't paid attention." So, that's something you're going to have to grapple with. The strongest association with that November 2020 25 measure was its cost and the property tax increase. Whatever else happened, that's clearly the brand that it got. Uh and then when we talked about the other reasons people might have rejected the measure, the city doesn't need the money, already has it, doesn't need the building, it's the wrong location. Those were clearly things that people disagreed with kind of whether were your yes or no. People were disagreeing with those items. Uh it does appear like there's support for a new facility if it costs less, but as you saw, there's that split between the yes and no version you're going to have to work on. And then finally, a lot of the priorities that you saw for a new facility uh are seen as important, indicating there is some room for agreement here. You've got some some path to move forward. And quite frankly, this feels a lot like the other projects I've done for both the island uh uh the city and for the Marsh Island School District where we said no one time, we got back together, worked on it, talked about it, planned it together, and then got to yes the next time. City, the school district just did that. School district's done in the past. The city's done it on this very building in the past. That one was my first projects here. So, uh that's all I think in your future. A couple other items I wanted to mention. Um, we did in fact have an open survey. I don't know if you wanted to address that first before I did.

Yeah. So, the series of questions that we kind of presented the results of in the statistical survey, we essentially asked the exact same set of questions and an open link that went out in our city communication channels. Anyone in the island was given the opportunity to fill out that survey. It was open for several weeks. It closed on Sunday. Um, just to make sure anyone, you know, we want to get as much public engagement and feedback as possible. Um obviously the difference between like a statistically tailored survey and a survey where anyone can open it is is a little different but it gives us that much more um kind of public input and ideas and Ian I think at a we're going to share the kind of full results of that to you all um within this week and we'll post results online but I think Ian you have maybe like a high level summary of how it compares to the statistically valid survey.

Yeah one of the reasons to do an open survey as you just described is give everyone a chance to participate but it also comes with a challenge which is we don't know who's coming to take the survey. So there are a few differences to to note there. Uh the yes votes only about 50% there where it was 55 in this survey. Um most of the responses are generally aligned but there is more negativity toward the city government. So sort of spending tax dollars performance on some of these items. Um there's also um even more agreement that that uh this this question right here because I think it was the most was among the most important. Um I just want to make sure I get it. So uh uh online the the agree on the city needs a new facility but feature should be cut was 41% strongly and 28% somewhat. So quite a bit different. There's even more agreement there that uh the city should come back with something that's cut a little bit. The uh the priorities here are just about the same right this list. Um and then finally the demographics. There's a lot higher refusal rates. A lot more people are saying I wasn't going to give you my answers but it is generally older and longerterm residents from what you could see in that from the open survey. Uh there was a second question about let's see um which slide was this? It was slide eight but I think it's moved now.

No it was this one. So uh you had a survey done citywide in 2024 different methodology that was done via I believe a mail survey

either filled out or back to the web. So in that one some of these same questions what I actually believe are holdover from my previous work way back when. Um the the government overall question here in that survey was 71% positive, 29% negative. Uh the tax dollars responsibly question was 55 positive, 27 negative. So a bit more negative on this one. So those are really the only questions that I saw that were a direct parallel between the two. Most the other questions there isn't a direct parallel in some way that the scale is off. The question text is different. So can really do a bunch of other comparisons. Um the last question was on demographic differences. So if you were to look at the US census, the the under 65 population on the island is 81%. Over 65 is 19%. But if you take out the under 18s, which is a much more direct comparison to what I just did, uh the under 65 is 75, over is 25. And our survey, it's 68 under, 32 over. So a bit older, but makes sense. If you're going to voters, we're going to get a bit older. Uh and then other demographic uh comparisons that I wanted to make sure you knew. the gender was basically the same as you'd see in the census. Um, ownership is the same and education levels a little higher in the survey than you'd see in the census, which again makes some sense. Are there other questions that I haven't answered that I could for you?

Oh, yes. Uh, council and stop.

Thanks. And I don't know if I know how to answer this question, but I mean, if you're asking yes voters something, does the fact that they already voted yes and they believe that that was the right thing to do, does that kind of skew their answers to other questions? they're kind of clinging to the um the position that that they thought that it was it was the right thing in the first place and they don't want to kind of back off of that to say like whether the question specifically was um where the the yes voters weren't as enthusiastic about downsizing the project. So do you think that's just because they voted yes and back backtracking on that makes them feel weird about their original yes vote? I I think that's a good theory. If you were to vote yes on that and say, "I think you had the right package. I like what was in there." The second question as a guest voter, you're being asked here is what would be cut. If like

if I liked all those things and thought they were a good idea, you know, this is also we we also can't exactly tell them that on this survey. So, if I'm a yes voter and you're telling me I'm going to cut something and you say, "Well, you got the earthquake paradise that seems like a bad idea." It that makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. So, it doesn't necessarily mean that if we do make a smaller package that any of the yes voters are going to be offended or vote no. Not necessarily, but it it's something to be aware of that if they thought you were on the right track and and we're going to say, "Well, now now we're not going to do this or this." I don't think that's I don't think that's where you're heading here. We're not talking about wholesale changes here. You still need the things that you need. So, yeah. Okay. Thank you, Deputy Mayor Becker.

Um, yeah, I have a couple questions here, but I'll start with one on the agree disagree slide. I don't know if you want to bring this up or not, but on the yes no breakdown, I'm just trying to I'm curious what to make of all the ones where the people the yes voters

said ostensibly no on these slides saying no, I won't vote on for it until the schools pass. No, I won't ever vote for it. And some of these are pretty significant. I mean, you have 18% of people saying city already has the money and does not need a tax increase, but voted yes. 20% saying I won't ever support it until school law passes but voted yes and then you mentioned the 12% and the 12% is smaller but I mean 20% is a sizable number of people to say I won't vote for it and so I did yeah so part of this is is one margin of error right because we are talking about a smaller universe so it it tends to do that two um we only are showing the agree so this is the this is the strongly in somewhat so I don't know how much is in someone

and you can hold two things in your head at the same time and say I voted yes but I also think you got some money to throw around so um as long as it's not overwhelming in one of these instances. That's where I would really be concerned, right? If what if the yes voters were way off on something, you go that doesn't make any sense of why they would be in that instance. Okay, sounds good. Because we're wer. So, general math, 25% are going to be a no no matter what. 30 are going to be yes. It's that middle. We need to get to the 60, right? Is is that sort of from all your data, is that sort of the 20, 30, and 50? In general, I think it's hard. It's going to be really hard to push that to whatever you're coming up with next, but I think it's a fair place to say that's where we're starting from.

Becker, um, this is an easier question. So, you said on one of the earlier slides you had 31% of the people did not were not aware of that we needed new facilities or that we were asking new facilities. This one uh if you go back one even more but basically that oh this one that one this one but you had previously said that you thought that this was kind of a leading question and that were like prompting people about it. I mean do you think that the leading question made some people would make some people say yes I'm aware like you just I just told you so presumably the number of people who were unaware of this is even higher than 31%.

Yeah. I mean I think that how do you ask about you know right don't don't don't think of an elephant right you can't really you can't really do that in this instance so this is but if they if 31% self offered no I haven't heard anything about it you can tell they're they're not paying attention to any so but yes it is it is there is a there's a there's a response bias here for sure what you just told me of course I heard about that right and but it could be anything right it could be anything about any it might not be the number of measure we're talking about it could be city hall it could be community center it could be right it could be any number of things that are that are included here. So the net is a bit wider. I think it's fair to say sometimes when someone asks you, do you know something? It's embarrassing to say you don't know it. So

right, I'm mostly just saying like I mean I think 31% is a lot of people who weren't aware and so if we want we think it's probably higher than 31%. Yes. Is more even more than a lot. Yes, please. Thank you. Might also be some noise in there from the school bond too. Yeah, might be higher than it is. Uh, councelors,

this is something that hadn't occurred to me until recently, but uh, I think you said you you surveyed registered voters, correct? Around 10% of the island is not a citizen and therefore not a registered voter. There's other non-registered voters, too. But, and I and I guess it makes sense that we survey registered voters because we're trying to figure out how how to pass this thing. Um, but is is there any precedent or way of knowing how the non-citizens feel about this given they use city services and pay taxes as well? I'd like to know what they think as well, even if they don't have a literal vote in this.

I would I would point you to the open survey as one measure of that will will help a little bit, although again we don't quite know who's coming. The second thing is the the concentric circles of population on the island, the registered voter population to the all residents is actually a lot closer than it is in most other places. If you were to go to other parts of Washington, you'd see that the registered voter population is very different from the overall population, right? The overall population is younger, more diverse, lots of other things you might see. Merland, the overlap is smaller. So, you're you're still representing a lot of, you know, like 80% of all uh all residents with voters. Of course, cutting out the 18, right? We can we can go through those numbers again if you're interested, but uh there's a lot of them are represented here in that. So, but certainly that is a choice we made and we and we haven't included them. So, we have to make some assumptions about what's happening there. Okay, thank you.

All right, thank you. Appreciate all your work on this. I think obviously it's really important that we get this feedback from the community. I mean, from my perspective, you know, nine out of 10 people think that it's important that we build a new facility for emergency management and police and emergency services. And also, I think there's a, you know, a large number of folks that had concerns about the price. So, I think, you know, we kind of have our work cut out for us here, but I think we have directionally, you know, a little more uh focus than we did an hour ago. So, appreciate that. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Well, sorry, Craig. Was that an old hand? Yes. Okay. Thank you very much.

Our next item, regular business, is AB6872, sustainability work program annual update. Welcome, Chief of Operations Jason Ker and sustain sustainability program manager Alana de Roatus. Mr. Mayor, just give us a couple minutes here to switch folks out. Certainly. Whenever Jess tells us we're ready. All right.

Right. Good evening, city council. My name is Alana Deratus. I'm the city's uh sustainability program manager and I'm going to go ahead this evening and uh give you some updates on what we've been working on in terms of uh implementing the climate action plan. So give me one moment to get my slides on the screen. Okay. So, uh, this evening I'm going to be running through a quick review of just the climate action plan and the targets that the city adopted, uh, regarding greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Uh, some 2025 project highlights. Um, notably the 2024 greenhouse gas report, which was published at the beginning of this year. Uh, the results of our 2025 PSSE green power campaign. uh the energy smart east side program which is a heat pump program which I'll give some details on shortly and one notable emission uh from the project highlights is our EV charging infrastructure plan development process uh because that is the next agenda item uh this evening so I won't be getting into that here uh following some project highlights just going to talk about the uh climate action plan implementation dashboard that's recently been published on the city website separately from the greenhouse gas report results and uh just a kind of quick overview of what is coming up in 2026. So, just to briefly review, the climate action plan was adopted uh by city council in April of 2023. Uh consists of 59 actions divided into six different focus areas. Um and all of those actions are uh to help guide the city to a more strategic roadmap for achieving the greenhouse gas reduction goals that had been adopted previously and are in alignment with other uh cities in King County. So our most uh near target is 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to a 2007 baseline uh by the year 2030. So it is coming up

uh jumping right in to where we're at right now. Uh as of 2024 so the we always do the year kind of in a rears uh for the greenhouse gas reporting just based on data availability. So this is our most recent community level uh greenhouse gas report. You can see the main sources of emissions are electricity, natural gas, and primarily on road vehicles on Mercer Island. Um just to kind of summarize some of the key findings, we're down not quite a percentage point compared to 2023 and regarding our uh 2030 target of a 50% reduction, we're currently down 8% versus that 2007 baseline. Um, one notable thing to point out though is that we're actually down uh 21% in per capita emissions compared to 2007. So per person on the island emissions have decreased. So kind of just showing that over time population has increased but we are actually um you know still decreasing and significantly per person. So um one other finding is that uh municipal operations decreased a further 14% in emissions compared to 2023. Um, however, a a significant portion of that reduction is due to the transition of the east side fire and rescue uh buildings that they operate now and their fleet vehicles off of our reporting. And that's in alignment with how other cities um that have epher services handle their reporting for emissions. So, just to clarify that we're not trying to claim uh further reductions that we actually earned. So, this is just kind of a highle snapshot of what the dashboard looks like on the city website. Um, you can go in and click and d drill down into like the very specifics of the different focus areas with the built environment, solid waste and transportation and kind of see exactly um like consumption of electricity at different uh like residential versus commercial and a lot of uh different ways to kind of view

that data. So, uh yes, we can go ahead and ask questions whenever. I didn't know I was out of the room. I didn't know what the profile was. Um, so are we responsible for the emissions created by Sound Transit for the portion of the rail line that is on the island?

Uh, that's not going to be included in any of our reporting. Um, it's going to probably show up in a little bit of the community level when they do like it's it's tough to kind of quantify because a lot of this is done via modeling. Um, so we do models for um a lot of our transportation emissions because we can't really measure it super concretely. So, it will have some level of impact um at a very high level, but hopefully it's going to be bringing down our vehicle miles traveled in terms of passenger vehicles. Um so, we'll see.

We Yes, we shall see. Um but I don't expect that to have a huge um impact in terms of added emissions from Sound Transit, but I won't be able to see it granularly. And I meant not the Sound Transit operations, but the Sound Transit construction. Oh, the construction. Yeah, like all the concrete. So, all of that construction work would have already happened and anything that was on Mercer Island. Um, we only would have been capturing it if it was reported to King County as like originating from Mercer Island. So any of that would have already been accounted for and I these prior years before I joined the city. So not quite sure what that data looked like.

All right. If there's no other questions, I will move right along. Uh so one of the early actions from the climate action plan was to hold another green power campaign with PSSE. There had been one um many years ago on Mercer Island that was very successful. So essentially the PSE green power program is an opt-in program that any customers of PSSE can opt to have their electricity usage offset with renewable energy and you can do up to 100% of your build amount of electricity consumption. And so essentially asking folks to choose to uh enroll in this program to have their uh electricity matched with renewables. So, we were hoping to get another 100red enrollments in this program in 2025 and we far exceeded our goal. Um, we achieved over a 100 uh new signups by August of last year and then we ended the year with 142 total new enrollments. So, um at the beginning of the campaign, PSSE had pledged uh $10,000 towards a new uh community solar project on the island for achieving this goal. And since we exceeded it uh by so much, they added another uh $2,500 onto that award amount. So we have 12,500 that is going to a new uh project that I am still finalizing the details for and hope to be able to share that uh in coming months. Yes.

I just want to say congratulations. That's awesome and well done. That's really hard to do.

All all the work was to the community who uh opted in and enrolled. So thank you to them. All right. So finally for some of the project highlights just wanted to uh just give the latest updates for the energy smart east side program. So I've mentioned this program in our previous updates. So it's a joint program that we do as part of the east side climate partnership with a total of six cities uh on the east side and this program is primarily right now aimed at uh encouraging the adoption of heat pumps. So in electrifying home heating that is a huge opportunity to drive down greenhouse gas emissions um in residential homes as uh you know home heating is really one of the largest sources of energy use uh on well on Mercer Island as residential uh electricity and natural gas is one of our largest contributors to our emissions but also just in general in terms of energy consumption in the home heating is the largest source. So this program educates residents on the benefits of heat pumps and provides incentives based on income in income qualification and also just a general uh rebate for anybody who goes to get a heat pump through this program. So in 2025 we saw 26 total heat pump installations. 20 of them used uh the rebate program. So you can see the kind of breakdown of uh on the right side of the screen is the total number of program heat pump installations of all time which I believe we're at 52 now. So the vast majority of those have been market rate. So that means that uh the only incentive that uh somebody received was just an equipment discount. Uh our rebate program is the one that we stack on top of that. So there's the equipment discount plus that's for moderate income. So we give a slight additional uh bump there in terms of financial incentive. And then the boost program which is a quarter of our installs is ones that we have fully funded for um

incomequalified households. The vast majority of our funding for that program has come through grants and the whole program we've seen a a ton of really awesome grant funding that we've received from the state and also PSSE. Uh yes.

Yeah. Um, so I mentioned at the uh uh King uh County CI climate cities collaboration meeting on uh I guess it was Monday of this week uh about this program. Um I remember hearing from some of the uh attendees who are not from the east side um that they would love to create a similar program uh in North Seattle. Um and I wanted to follow up after the meeting uh see if we can figure out or email is fine. uh to see if we can uh help them identify how K4C got started. Uh because they're seeing numbers like these with 459 uh uh uh heat pumps in the east side, 26 of which that last year were were here. Um and they're like, "Wow, they can really work together and uh and get a lot more done together than uh individually." So this is great work. Yeah, this program has been really successful and also just very helpful in terms of uh kind of shared resources. Um not something that you know we would have been able to put on by ourselves. So absolutely I think um through like K4C and other sort of collaborations with other cities is kind of the way that we can all pull resources and share like education materials and staff time to be able to have a much larger impact. So yeah, that was a a good note to hear from Shoreline. So, um, so moving right along to the climate action plan implementation dashboard that I recently published on the city website is just more of a way to provide visibility into how we're tracking towards our various uh, key performance indicators for the climate action plan. So, in addition to the overall community level greenhouse gas reductions that I u cited on an earlier slide, there's a a host of other targets that the city adopted in the adoption of the climate action plan. um including achieving carbon neutral municipal operations by 2030. A that 65%

of new passenger vehicles would be EVs on the island by 2030. So all of that information I am going to be kind of keeping up to date on an annual basis on this dashboard. And so this is just kind of the first sort of highle overview to show that more than uh threearters of the actions in the climate action plan again all 59 of them um are either underway or complete. So you can kind of see on the breakdown on the right hand side, those are the different focus areas of the climate action plan and just showing kind of a visual of how implementation has been uh going. So this is just a one of the various key performance indicators um and just kind of showing this green line being the 2030 target and then this is our most recent year uh 2024 reporting. So, uh, anyone who would want to go see how we're trending on other, uh, of these key performance indicators, this is going to open a link that I just wanted to walk through briefly this evening, um, because I was quite excited about getting this PowerBI dashboard to work. Um, so you can also see all of the various kind of projects that are happening with the climate action plan, but I would say most largely um being able to view just trying to make it as large as possible. Oh, realized it did not switch the screen I was sharing. There we are. Okay. So, here you can see the various uh status updates for the actions and kind of highlighting what projects are related to the various actions. And then if I navigate back to the 2030 targets,

um you can see all of our different targets that the climate action plan adopted and the data that we have and where the targets are for each one that has an associated target. So there are some uh key performance indicators here that are more indicative of trends rather than things that actually had a defined target, but just to be able to kind of visualize um where we're at on all of the various uh data sources that we have. So um pause for a second here. There's a lot of different uh KPIs if there's anything anyone wanted to know specifically or any questions or anything else I can share. Right.

Yeah. Question. Yes. I mean the charts are indicating that a lot of the greenhouse gas emissions are associated with the use of electricity. Um and so doesn't I mean shifting from fossil fuel vehicles to electric vehicles. I what's you take a gas vehicle off and you reduce emissions but you put an electrical vehicle on and you create additional emissions associated with electricity. have is it possible to net that?

Um, so there's a couple different things that are kind of happening at the state level with regards to our electricity grid. So, uh, utility providers are having to transition their power generation to cleaner sources. Uh, it's the clean energy transformation act. So, a actually a lot of the greenhouse gas emissions reductions that we have seen over the past couple years is due to PSSE making their electricity generation more green. So, they phased out coal uh plants. I think 2025 is the first year that it was completely offline or 2026. It's very recent. Um but they as they are making the power um in a more renewable fashion and reducing the greenhouse gas emissions in their generation we are seeing kind of downstream that uh reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions. So even though there is still greenhouse gas emissions associated with the electricity that we are using to then charge electric cars, it's still a lot lower than um burning the fuel right there in your vehicle. Um,

I'll skip for now. Okay. Okay.

All right. I will just uh transition back into uh my slideshow here quickly, as quickly as possible. Um, just to give kind of the quick highlights for 2026. Okay. Apologies for my technical difficulties as I try to reshare my screen. Okay. All right. So, all right. Next uh item on the agenda will be going over the electric vehicle charging infrastructure plan that has been under development. So last year was primarily focused on the municipal um plan and then this year we've been focused on developing the community level plan. So we're planning on wrapping up that development of the plan in June and then we're going to begin implementation uh as soon as we are finished with the plan development and also going to be working on outlining an environmentally preferable purchasing policy. uh that we're going to use it within uh the city for purchasing decisions and that's in line with items that were highlighted on the 2025 2026 work plan. So um with that that is my full presentation uh this evening if there was any other questions on the sustainability work or the climate action plan implementation.

Councelor Reynolds. Well, first just a general comment. I was encouraged to see all the progress had been made. I didn't realize it was this much this great news. Um earlier you made a comment about vehicle miles traveled which is obviously hugely important. Last time I'd looked in depth at this emissions were not tracked that way though. They were tracked by fuel sales or something like that. Is that still the case? I mean how do we know how much emissions Mercer Island people are doing from auto use since I don't think we track vehicle miles traveled? So all of that is done through um modeling that's done by the Puet Sound Regional Council. Um it is kind of drilled down based on um vehicle registrations on Mercer Island. And then for the vehicle miles traveled, it's going to be primarily based on assumptions with that modeling, but they do use data that's specific to like vehicle registrations on Mercer Island and the fuel intensity of those vehicle types. So,

so if everybody at Mercer Island just stopped driving for a year, we wouldn't really get any credit for that. You would, we would definitely get credit for it. It would be a little bit fuzzy as it's kind of taken at the macro level and then modeled back down to Mercer Island specifically. I am trying to find other ways to get more granular data for vehicle miles traveled. Um, but it's it is challenging to have access to some of that data.

One of the things I had advocated with our legislative delegation in the past was when you renew vehicle tabs, you should be required to report odometer readings and that seems like an easy way for the state to start having that information and track it back. That might be something you can think about it to put on our agenda.

Yeah, that would definitely be uh one way to we could solve that problem. Yeah, it's it's very um tough because even there are some like Google for example has their uh they have a platform I'm blanking on what the name of it is right now but for larger cities they would share access to vehicle miles travel that they have from Google map data and whatnot but we are just at the threshold that they won't give it to me. Um I've been asking

call Google. Okay, council wer uh Alana this is great work. you took the plan and made the dashboard and doing all the data and I know you're doing a ton of coordinating on the east side and um I just want you to take a minute to just brag about how you're working with the other cities and how the K4C is doing. I understand there was a change at the county and how that's managed or supervised or reported out or whatever the word is. But um I just think you're doing great regional work too. I hear your name come up in different conversations and uh I know other cities have different levels of staff and expertise and I think you're a gem. So thank you for your work. Why don't you brag a little more about how you work within the region?

Well, thank you so much, Council Member Wer Wer, but um yeah, I just I think a lot of the work that we're able to do regionally has just been really helpful to be able to lean on other cities that have more staff capacity or just more knowledge or are further along in their implementation. and uh just also getting to get lessons learned and be able to kind of avoid some maybe missteps that others have already kind of learned about and are able to warn others. So that has just been very helpful for me to be able to kind of maximize what we're able to do for Mercer Island. So Robert,

yeah, so first of all, I'm delighted with all of the uh progress that we're making. Uh it's great to see uh heat pumps uh being created. It's great to see uh new programs being developed uh and to see the uh first draft of the uh uh the electric vehicle uh charging infrastructure plan that we're going to be talking about in a few minutes. I I was wondering if you could share with us some about the pilot program that uh was run for a while to uh uh on the there was a uh commute travel reduction plan uh that involved uh the city and I think it was Riot Games uh and kind of what the vision was for that and what was learned from it and what we might try uh with the next one.

Yeah. So what you're the pilot you're referencing is uh last April. Also, for Earth Month in April 2025, we did a short four-week pilot of an EV shuttle that operated from the Mercer Island Park and Ride and was aimed at helping commuting staff that work at both the city and at Riot Games, which are the two sites on Mercer Island, the two employers that qualify for the um that are required to meet the state's commute trip reduction plan. So, um there's a couple different uh qualifiers that go into that. you have to have um more than 100 uh staff reporting to a work site between the hours of 6:00 and 9 in the morning. Um so that's why it's pretty limited to just those two employers because those the only two that have enough at a single work site. Um so this pilot was to try to encourage uh staff that commute to those two facilities to take uh the bus at at that point uh public transit to their work site. And the pilot was for, like I said, just the four weeks. It was very short-lived. Um, and we did not see a huge amount of wrership, but I think that was due to several different factors. Um, one being that the amount of staff that already had reported using public transit to go to their work site for both uh the city and at Riot Games was already pretty low. I don't remember the exact percentages off the top of my head at this point. um but also that there was only the bus and that there wasn't the light rail. So essentially what we're hoping to have learned from that is that once we have other options for public transit that we can encourage more commuting staff to be able to take uh public transit the vast majority of the way to work. So um we are seeking opportunities grant funding to try to do a larger pilot that's maybe longer lived. I think also having a short-term program is really hard to change your habits around um if you know that something's not going to last for very

long. So really looking for something that we can do for a longer period of time and hopefully that impacts more people than just those two um work sites. So,

so, so the one we had was entirely uh grant funded. Uh, and uh I I think there is a lot of enthusiasm uh on the island for the new uh light rail system and uh finding a last mile solution uh to get uh to and from uh the the uh station. So, I'm enthusiastic about uh and and quite optimistic about what the next uh pilot will be able to accomplish. Yeah, I will note that that program was not entirely funded by grant uh funding, but it was part of the implementation of our commute trip reduction program. Um, but yes, I think we have heard uh from quite a few community members that they're really interested in having a different some sort of solution in general to get the light rail that's not parking um in their vehicle. And also like very aware that we don't have a lot of bus service at different areas of the island, including by our city facilities. Uh so trying to fill that gap with what we can.

Deputy Rebecca. Um yeah, first I would echo what everyone else said about thank you for putting in all this work and making lots of progress. It's encouraging to see all of that. Um I I understand that the major sources of emissions are vehicles and home heating and we've talked a lot about vehicle miles travel. I'm curious on the um the heating side and the heat pumps. I mean, I see the the effect of the um the ESC um pilot, but I'm curious if we know how many people in the city have gas heating. Like, do how how do we even measure whether the numbers that we are seeing as successful or not? Um how do we know what what we're even shooting for?

So, we actually do have some idea of how many heat pumps we need to see installed through the program. I know that I had a chart up in my presentation last year with um some data from an outside uh organization that had said like essentially how many we would need by 2030 in order to reach uh kind of like our saturation goal for heat pump installs. Um but there's a couple ways that we're kind of trying to track this. One is through how many times we're seeing in permits that get issued for some a mechanical permit if they're swapping out a furnace. Um specifically if folks are choosing oh my my furnace has died like now what is my next do I want to just do like for like or do I want to take this opportunity and switch to a heat pump and we are seeing an increase in people making that switch. I think it's because not just that they are maybe interested in electrification, but also because heat pumps offer cooling, which um if you're just doing like for like on your gas furnace, you're not going to get cooling options. Um so they not only are um better for the environment, but make a slightly more comfortable household as well. Maybe more than slightly, but uh yeah, so we're tracking permit data. But we have some vague idea of exactly about how many heat pumps need to be retrofitted into homes and also with the new building codes, it's kind of pushing folks towards new builds at least to have heat pumps installed immediately.

Thank you. Mhm. Okay. Uh our next our final item of regular business is AB6836, the electric vehicle charging plant development update. We welcome back Chief of Operations Jason Ker and sustainability program manager Doragatus.

All right, I'll have to put up with me again trying to share my screen. Okay, and we also have joining us uh this evening uh Eleanor Garrett from EXP. She is our consultant who has been working uh with us on developing our EV charging uh infrastructure plan uh both um the municipal and the community level. And just kind of as a quick reminder, this is one of the specific actions in the climate action plan and was identified as a work item uh specifically for this bienium. So I'll pass it to you.

Is that on? Yes. Okay. Hello. Um, like Alana said, my name is Eleanor. Um, I've been working with, um, EXP, which is an architecture, engineering, and design firm. My department specifically focuses on long-term sustainability and resilience planning projects. Um, so very briefly, since Alana already just gave us a really thorough overview of the climate action plan, I'm going to touch on how the climate action plan um, interacts with EV infrastructure and, uh, why we're even talking about this. um go into how we've been developing the plan um and then talk about the municipal flea transition strategy which is the portion of the plan that we have already developed um and then go go into uh what is currently underway which is the community portion of the plan um so um as you could see from Alana's presentation the transportation sector does contribute a really significant portion of Mercer Island's overall GHG emissions um I believe In 2023, the 2023 inventory, which is what we were using when we made this report, it was 71% total. And in 2024, it was still 70%. So, a pretty significant chunk. Um, in the climate action plan, the city is aiming to have carbon neutral municipal operations by 2030 and to reduce um 56% of all on-road emissions by 2030 as well. Um so electrifying the municipal fleet starting there um is a really easy win to make some significant progress towards those goals. Um so this slide is kind of repetitive of what I've already been saying. Um but basically what we're doing here is providing an update on um the EV charging infrastructure plan. Um this is a project that is in support of city council priority number four which is focused on making Mercer Island a more

environmentally and fiscally sustainable community. Um and like I said the transportation sector does represent a really large portion of the city's emissions. So to assess the city fleet to develop our strategy um we looked at the whole existing fleet um and uh sort of looked at the long-term picture to get us to both the 2030 and 2050 goals um outlined in the cap. So that's that 5 to 25 year range you see there. Um we were focusing on aligning the plan with um uh the design and construction for plan facilities um as well as the existing fleet replacement schedule. Um overall in terms of transitioning to an electric vehicle fleet um there are quite a few benefits. Um you see lower long-term costs which I will get into. Um obviously decreased emissions which is the primary goal. Um, and also the ability to if you have a fully electric fleet, um, sort of take the lead as we start talking about that community portion of EV transition. Um, if the city has a fully electric fleet, it's a lot easier to get the rest of the city on board. Um, here is that 2023 data I was talking about. 71% come of uh, Mercer Islands emissions come from transportation and other mobile sources. um we can skip

I just want to note that the that's the municipal operations emissions was 71% not overall community emissions but

yes okay um okay so here are those cost savings I was talking about um so the total cost of ownership analysis for the entire Mercer Island city fleet um yes you are going to see some initial costs that are higher than what you would see by replacing with internal combustion engine or IC vehicles um replacing entirely with EV vehicles would invol involve 2.8 million approximately more in capital costs. Um, but you make that back pretty quickly when you look at the 12-year operational costs. Um, you end up getting net savings of about $1.2 million over that 12-year period. Um, digging into that a little bit more, uh, you can see broken down here where we're getting those cost savings from. So yes, the initial cost of the EVs is higher than an IC vehicle. Um, but you end up saving quite a bit of money in terms of uh fuel or powering those vehicles in this case. Um, and the overall maintenance over the lifetime of an electric vehicle is lower than an internal combustion engine vehicle. So looking at the entirety of Mercer Island's fleet, we broke that down into what we are calling our slow charging fleet and our fast charging fleet. So essentially what this means is we looked at the use patterns of the entire fleet and looked at which ones sort of need to be ready to be operated all the time and need that fast charging which is uh a more expensive way to charge a vehicle um versus the slow charging vehicles which don't necessarily need to be active all the time. Um so there were 24 lightduty vehicles in that slow charging fleet. Um those are all non-emergency vehicles and then the 27 vehicles in the fast charging fleet that is anything related to emergency response and then all of the medium to heavy duty trucks. Um and just to note a key constraint was

that uh when we were looking at the existing infrastructure at the public works facility um of course uh available charging there was severely constrained in our analysis and it it still is severely

um that remains true. Um, so like I said, we're also looking at the existing fleet replacement schedule because we want to make sure that we are not um, sort of throwing huge costs that aren't budgeted for in long-term planning. Um, and so here you can see the planned replacement year for all of the existing fleet vehicles out through 2034. Um, so when we're talking about implementing this plan, um, our goal here was to hand you guys a clear actionable roadmap um, that can actually electrify the vehicle fleet um, and give you all a timeline for vehicle replacement and the specific charging infrastructure and installations that we would recommend um, based on the transition scenarios that we looked at. Um, so in terms of those transition scenarios, we evaluated two different scenarios. They're very similar. You have a pretty small fleet, so uh, not a lot of variability there. Um, but scenario A, um, we would be fully transitioned by 2037. Um, but we wouldn't start replacing vehicles until 2030. Um, scenario B actually takes a little bit longer. We're not fully electrified until 2039. Um but we can use some existing slow charging that we have on hand to start replacing vehicles before 2030. Um I just wanted to add a little bit more context on the kind of reason behind the two scenarios is entirely due to the fact that we are so constrained in terms of where we are able to charge vehicles uh at the city hall public works sort of campus. So 2030 was more of just an re not maybe necessarily fully realistic but an ideal scenario of when we could maybe have more of an idea of when we can install chargers because we would

prefer to not install chargers that we then have to remove and risk damaging in the meantime. So this was just kind of giving us a little bit more of a cushion in terms of timing.

I can add some additional context too. to the council. We've been talking for many months now about the facility needs. The electrical challenges at the public works facility have come up a numer numerous times and this is an area where you're seeing it impacted as well. Um I will also say we have transitioned a number of fleet already to EV or plug-in hybrids and we're we are competing for space now as it is. Um so just some additional context for consideration as well. Council Rose. Yeah. Is the constraint there solely ours or is there a PSSE constraint? Is can PSA deliver enough power to the island for us to do this?

Uh yes, PSSE can deliver more than enough power and in fact that site has more capacity just generally based on the transformers but it would require u work in terms of installing new charging stations and whatnot. So the charger install issue not a capacity issue. again an issue of more not wanting to install chargers that we then have to move based on construction or anything else. Council, yeah. Um well, for me it always kind of comes down to the money. So where where does all of this work um and planning fit into a um candidly very constrained budget?

Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So as part of the capital improvement plan or program that we do every two years with the budget adoption, the fleet replacement scenario is part of that conversation. So staff involved in the fleet replacements, we're we're looking out and in terms of our replacement strategies for those vehicles within our fleet. Some of the fleet are replaced at uh quicker intervals. Some of them are spaced out. And there's always a true up exercise that takes place as part of the budget process where a vehicle may, you know, may be able to extend beyond where we currently project it to be replaced. But essentially, we're creating a sinking fund for the replacement of that vehicle while the vehicle is aging out over time. So, we will incorporate um the dis the decisions, discussions around EV options for these vehicles as part of that fleet replacement strategy as part of the capital improvement plan and budget adoption process. They'll be in front of the council later this fall.

But I will say we are as we are starting to implement some of these uh transitions within our fleet that some of them have pencil out to be um cost neutral in terms of the upfront cost. Um an example I use is actually a recreation facility here. Uh recreational team used to have a 13 passenger van where we did a lot of the programming in house. The cost to replace that van was originally budgeted a higher dollar amount because that vehicle cost more money. Um, we've actually converted that van to one of the Ford Lightnings. Uh, that's provided a remarkable um, improvement for some of the popup special events that we have in parks and uh, throughout the course of the summer and spring and fall. Um, that provides different advantages to them, right? They have a truck that can carry equipment to and from the site. They actually have a a plug-in station on site. So, if they have some inflatables or some fun stuff to do with the kids, they can actually use the the vehicle to their advantage on the site. and the replacement at the the Ford lighting was at a lower cost compared to a 13 passenger van uh that was used historically. So that's part of that analysis and conversation discussion that happens uh every two years as part of the fleet analysis.

Okay, thanks. I have another question if when my turn comes around.

Uh Core Weber. Yeah. So, I I hear a lot of talk about the relative costs of uh EV versus uh gas vehicles, and there should be a lot of talk about the costs, but I'm not seeing a counterbalancing discussion about the impacts to uh the greenhouse gas reductions uh and the environmental gains uh of doing these. Uh, for example, on page 31, we mentioned that the slow charge fleet has a total cost of uh, ownership savings of $2 million, while the fast charge fleet has a total cost of ownership premium of uh, $850,000. Uh, and so it almost looks like a no-brainer to go with the the slow vehicles first. But what I'd like to see is how much do uh how much is the greenhouse gas reduction uh the same for the slow vehicles and the fast charging vehicles. Um or do we get actually get a much greater greenhouse gas reduction for every dollar that we put into a fast charger uh than into a lower slow charger? I don't know the answer to that by the way. I'm I'm just asking. Uh but I think we need to be looking at both. We shouldn't just be thinking through our pocketbooks. we should also be thinking through our lungs. Um, and I also think um I didn't see any mention about using the uh 9655 building parking lot uh as a temporary uh place uh for uh parking uh vehicles that otherwise would be parked on the other side of the uh hedge uh in the uh PSM uh site. Uh, but I think long term we're eventually going to be needing uh chargers in the 9655 lot. So, that might be one way that we could temporarily uh uh park some of the uh vehicles there nearby. It wouldn't be in the uh uh public works site. I was wondering was that considered uh the using the 9655 uh area?

Um so this plan, the municipal phase of this plan was completed in June of last year. So that we did not own the 9655 building yet at that point, but that I think is definitely something we are going to evaluate. Um, but with ideally it not being totally temporary chargers that are installed there, that they're chargers that will be used there going into the future, but maybe the vehicle specifically that's living there might be more temporary. But yes, and uh, regarding the greenhouse gas emissions reductions associated with um, the slow charging versus fast charging fleet, it's pretty dependent on the vehicle itself. um vehicles that have a higher mileage are going to see more of a greenhouse gas uh emissions reduction. So sometimes that's the uh fast charging vehicles if it's more of like the emergency related vehicles, not so much the heavy equipment vehicles versus the slow charge that maybe don't travel as far um which is why they're able to be slow charged. So it is it's very specific to the vehicle um that we're looking at uh which is why they did such a thorough fleet analysis. I don't know if you have anything else to add.

And Mr. Let me add one other follow-up item on that if I may. Um uh uh which is that the uh that with options A and B uh option A doesn't have any vehicle uh replacements before 2030, which I presume would put our chances of reaching our 2030 net uh reduction goals at greater risk than if we went with option B, which replaces quite a few vehicles uh between uh now and 2030. Uh so I think there's uh significant uh reason as far as our GH goals are concerned to be uh seriously considering option B.

Yes, there's uh definitely pros and cons with both. Um and yes, your point about us not having a as good of a shot at hitting our 2030 goals uh for municipal operations is absolutely true. As Eleanor noted, like 71% of our transportation emissions for municipal operations are from um or greenhouse gas emissions for municipal operations are due to transportation, but that is a 50-50 split between fleet and employee commutes. So,

Becker, um notwithstanding the prior comments, I'm going to continue asking about the costs of this of this whole thing. And this is partially a question about this and partially a facilities question which is um you know if you're saying that we're slowed down because of the facilities and we would have cost savings of $1.2 million in total. Is there any sense of, you know, the cost that we're losing that we could understand or show and and show that um like how much could we be how how much are we giving up by not having a facility right now or do we know that? Um

um that is something that we can evaluate. Um we did as part of the community phase of the project we did um set aside some budget to continue to look at the fleet plan because we knew that the PSM campus was not sort of set in stone. So that is something that we can analyze and add to the plan. Okay. Thanks. Uh I think one of your first slides I believe the goal was 20% of vehicles for non-municipal operations would be electric. Is that true? um of all registered vehicles on the island. That's Mercer Islandwide. So, so where what are we at now?

Um we're actually pretty close to that if not already achieved that. That would be on the uh PowerBI dashboard I showed earlier actually. I just can't remember because there's a lot of different stats on there, but I know we're actually quite close to that. That was like 18% years ago. So, um I don't want to say for sure that we have already hit that, but I know we are very very close if we haven't actually. So, got it. Okay. Uh, move on.

Um, okay. So, a little bit more about the two, uh, scenarios. Um, the total cost of ownership is slightly lower. Um, under scenario B. Um, so I I don't have the exact figures on that in front of me. Um, but the benefit for scenario A is that all gas vehicles are fully phased out by 2037. So again like Alana said there are some pros and cons for each scenario.

Can I actually ask a question about that for the what what are the assumptions for the modeling of the cost of electric vehicles? Um so included in the total cost of ownership is the all of the capital costs and all of the operating costs. So um the the cost of the vehicle to purchase it. Um and then um I I I would have to refer to like the full packet and I could share that with you. Yeah. I mean on the vehicle cost to purchase it. Is it is the assumption that they go up or go down or relative inflation or what's the

I would have to look at my model. Um I'm pretty sure that we are accounting we're accounting for uh pretty significant inflation. We're assuming that there will be some but we're also assuming that the cost of the production of vehicles will go down a little bit because there's so many more technologies that are emerging. Um and it is becoming easier and more efficient to produce these vehicles. Thank you. But yeah, I can dig into my model. Uh customer.

Yeah, just on on this slide and make sure I want to make sure I understand what it's saying. Uh so in scenario A, the rightmost blue column there is in the year 2038 and it has a height of five. Um and it the the vertical axis says it's vehicle count. So I presume that means that in the year 2038 the last five gas vehicles get replaced with five electric vehicles. Is that correct? Yes, I believe so.

Yes. This is based on like the vehicle replacement years that we have already have outlined in our fleet. So, so it's actually 2038, not 2037 that uh the scenario A finishes. And in scenario B, in 2039, there's only one vehicle that's being replaced. So, the difference between the two in terms of when the last vehicle goes is only one vehicle a year essentially. U effectively, they're ending at uh about the same time. They start at very different times though. Uh, scenario B starts a lot sooner uh and helps us a lot more with our uh 2030 goals. Yes. Yes. And and kind of spreads out that capital cost um a little bit more.

Yeah. Cander. Um yeah, thanks. And I realize this is probably way too late to be asking this question, but um with the recent pivot by number of automakers away from electric vehicles and billions and billions of dollars in write downs on manufacturing equipment. I mean, how confident are we that we're on the right path?

Well, Washington state still does have um legislation that like all passenger vehicles and also medium and heavy uh duty vehicles also have to be electrified. I think by 2035 is the passenger vehicles and then it goes out further. So we still still are in alignment with state legislation is pushing us in this direction. Um anyway, so I don't know what the state is thinking about all of these other things, but the state doesn't make cars though.

Yeah, if I could just chime in here. Uh council member, your question is a good one and I just want to remind you all that what what we're reviewing tonight is a planning document. um as we make decisions on vehicle replacement, it has to be right time and right vehicle. In u many circumstances, we're still seeing the technology isn't there. Um so these are decisions that are made on a case- by case, vehicle-byvehicle basis. But what I'm proud of here is that we have a plan and we're beginning to study this issue. Um because I do anticipate some of this will be operationalized and some of it may come much later. Like many of our bigger rigs are probably a ways out. um from fitting into this plan. So, it's a good question. Thank you.

Thanks. Um yeah, I think we discussed that electric fire trucks are not in the immediate future. Okay.

Right. Um so in terms of the infrastructure that is required to support a fully electric fleet um we would need a total of 64 charging ports um across the public works city hall site and the community center site. This would include 18 level three those are the fast chargers um and 14 level two chargers in addition to uh this that 64 number is the total number of ports and then the chargers are each one has two ports on it. So that's why those numbers look very different. Um the total power demand that we are expecting will be required to power the fleet is uh approximately two and a half mega uh megawws of additional power. Um this is fully within PSSE's uh uh ability to supply to the island both currently and with their uh planned expansions. Um as part of this um report we also looked at sort of the feasibility of vehicle to building charging. Um so basically what vehicle to building does is it allows you to uh what generally you plug your car in, you get power out of it. Uh vehicle to building you can turn that back around, you can flip a switch and pull power from the car's battery back into the building. Um there's a few different vehicle tox uh technologies. There's vehicle to building. is vehicle to grid. Um these are fairly new systems. Um they're still kind of under study. I know that uh Puget Sound Energy is currently conducting some pilot programs for vehicle to grid. Um but they are not sort of doing those as like a an install right now. Um vehicle to building pairs really well with on-site solar generation and battery energy storage systems. um if you are trying to build uh a way to store a lot of power and have access to power um during extended power outages. Um but what the fleet could provide in terms of build vehicle to building power is a little bit

negligible in terms of sort of long-term operations during an extended outage. Um and that's just a little graphic of what the vehicle to building uh looks like. Uh where we currently are is in phase two of this project. That's the communitywide um EV adoption. Um so currently underway, our goal here is to support uh communitywide adoption of EVs um and address any barriers to charging access or switching to EVs. Um so what we're focusing on here is growing our existing public EV charging infrastructure. Um and then working with any commercial and multif family uh sites uh that we identify as sort of key to helping this transition and encouraging them to look into charger installation in places where it's sort of out of the city's hands. Um and then we we're also as part of this sort of looking at existing policies and regulations at the local, regional, and federal level um to see how we can sort of further support EV adoption. Um so for both the municipal fleet um transition strategy and for the communitywide um plan we are using a platform called electrotempo. Um this is a platform that is designed to help places transition to an EV future basically. Um so what we are doing in electrotempo is doing what we call demand forecasting. So, we're looking at existing demand in Mercer Island and then extrapolating out into the future, trying to get a picture of what we think demand for charging will look like in 10, 20, 30, 40 years. Um, this involves looking at current EV registrations. Um, looking at goals like getting to 100% um, EV registrations on the island by 2050. Um, looking at existing charger uh, coverage and all a whole bunch of other different factors to try to get a picture of where people are charging,

where there are gaps in charger access and all of those things. Um, city staff um are working with us right now to look at a set of potential sites for future charging um installations and to prioritize them by how effective they would be at sort of bridging any existing gaps. Um we're also working with Puget Sound Energy to get an idea of how ready the sites that we're looking at are for charger install because that is a huge factor. if we need to be bringing in a lot of new power, those are less sort of desirable sites than ones that already have plenty of power ready to go. Um, we are hoping we are looking to wrap up the community phase of this plan by June of this year. Uh, this is sort of an idea of what you can see inside of the Electrotempo platform. Um, on the far left is um what we call our adoption curve. So this is looking at uh a model of when people are adopting EVs over time. Um that second uh image shows you what our charging demand maps look like. So um darker colored areas are areas that have a lot higher demand. Lighter colored areas have lower demand. And you can we can scale that from present all the way into the future. And that sort of pairs with that adoption curve. So the demand you can see the demand go up um over time. Um the site analysis is where we are ranking sites and I'll get into that a little bit more. Um and then site feasibility. Um that's a little bit of what I was talking about working with Puget Sound Energy. Overall um all of the projections that I'm showing you are looking at um winter usage. Um so winter charging um is going to be the most uh demanding of our grid. um it takes a little bit more power to charge up those batteries in the winter time. And so this gives us the p the best picture of like the highest demand

that we're ever going to see. Um and we are also looking at sort of the average projection. We also analyzed a sort of lower demand uh of adoption where people are sort of adopting EVs a little bit slower and a more aggressive um adoption scenario. But everything I'm showing you here is just sort of that middle ground one. They're all going to be expanded on in the full report though. Um, this will show you sort of how we expect EV electricity demand to impact um, Mercer Island's um, total uh, demand from Puget Sound Energy over time. For reference, right now um, in 2026 we estimate that uh, EVs use about 33 megawatt hours of power. Um, so you can see that's already expanding up to 55 in 2030. And by the time we get out to 2050, and we're expecting and assuming full um full EV usage across the island, we're up to 222. Um EV charging demand also varies uh by time of day pretty significantly. Um you can see we have a huge peak at about 8 a.m. Not surprising. Um and you can also see that at home and away from home charging demand varies pretty significantly throughout the day. Again, not super surprising to see that at home charging demand is much higher overnight when people are charging their vehicles while they're asleep and away from home charging demand is much higher during the workday when they are out and about. Um so this is what the EV charger site prioritization um dashboard looks like. This is what we are currently working on. Um so there are a lot of different ways that we can rank the different sites that we're considering. Um and so we are assessing um all of the different um ranking weights that we want to be using to look at the different sites that are under consideration before we sort of come up with our final prioritized list of potential sites for

installation. Um some of the things that we are considering like I said are the feasibility of installation. How ready is that site to receive um a charger? Um making sure that we are pri prioritizing access for our under uh represented groups. um sites that we believe based on the charging demand data will provide the greatest benefit overall to community members. Um and then also their proximity to existing chargers. We don't necessarily want to be putting them across the street from each other. We want to be spreading out that access. Um just for an example of a couple of the demographics that we might be looking at. Um you can see on the left are the existing chargers on the island and then a couple of measures of uh historically disadvantaged groups uh when it comes to electric vehicle ownership. Um renters and then non-white residents. Um you can see that actually charger access for renters is not bad. Um but could probably be a little bit better if we pulled some charger access up into that top quadrant. Um, and same with our non-white residents.

We have some questions, council. Yeah. Um, and I don't know, maybe I missed the memo on this, but I'm I remain unclear about who's going to be installing these charging stations. Um, it's a mix. So, some of them might be city-owned chargers, but we're also trying to work with multif family properties and like commercial property owners to help connect them with pre-existing incentives for installing chargers. So, this is not going to be entirely on the city and the city will charge for the chargers, right? For the city owned ones. Absolutely. Yes.

But, um, so I guess I'm questioning why do we need to be doing this? Because we're not trying to figure out where to put a new gas station on the island. The market drives that. And, you know, so why doesn't the market drive this? because um one of the main factors that we're kind of looking at with this specifically is as you can notice in town center there's a large portion of uh renters and there's a lot of multif family housing where there might be uh folks who live in an apartment building who have an EV and can't charge it at home as opposed to folks who live in a residence where they have access to a charger that they could charge in their driveway. So, we're trying to expand access for people who don't have that ability currently um and to help fill that need as people choose to uh electrify their vehicles. So, it's again not just city-owned chargers. We're working with multif family property owners and parking lot owners to help connect them with the ability to uh add that asset into their facilities.

Alana, may I um chime in too? Council member Ander, I'll I'll give you an even lowerhanging fruit answer. Uh the infrastructure, the electric vehicle infrastructure plan, charging plan, uh was part of your um climate action plan. And this item was directed to be the work item was directed to be performed by the city council. Um so we we are here tonight, you know, on a check-in on a a work item that was set by the council. I just want to be candid. This isn't um elective staff work.

Sure. I I understand that. I'm just again worried about the bud the budget and where the money for installing chargers comes from. Yes. And and I I will say this uh just today I sent you an email because uh my blood pressure is through the roof right now over the budget and our uh foreseeable deficit. And so as we continue to work through the plan, um it it is not a foregone conclusion that the city will be funding any of this. That will be a future policy decision of the council. And I want to give you assurance that there's multi- multiple checkpoints as we work through a plan like this and implementation. Thank you. That's what we're

uh yeah so uh one thing I was noticing uh on the uh previous slide uh that I didn't see a dot uh at the baseball field uh that is in the middle of the island where the uh the islanders uh play against uh schools from other areas around the region. uh if somebody is driving from uh Northbend uh in an electric vehicle and needs to be able to park there and then get all the way back home uh that evening, if it's a cold day, um I'm I'm concerned that some electric vehicles wouldn't have the range to be able to do that, especially if they didn't start off with a completely full uh charge. So, I think uh for our visitors coming off the island, it's important to have uh Chargers prioritized in the places where visitors are coming like to our our sports fields and would hope that uh eventually they will do the same as well. Uh so that when people from here are going in electric vehicles some far away place, they can make it back home uh without uh having to stop for an hour uh somewhere to get some power uh partway through. Um, and let me know if I'm just not seeing it, but I think it was supposed to be, you know, right just to the right of the Groveland uh dot is the area where the the ball field is, but I just want to make a plug for that one.

Noted. Thank you. And for Reynolds,

yeah, I'm curious if you've done some analysis on one thing I've I've never seen. Um, retail price of electricity, last time I checked, is around 11 cents a kilowatt hour, give or take. Um, we were early adopters of Tesla, so we had free supercharging for life. So, I've never had to worry about the cost of electricity at chargers, but now that we got another vehicle, I looks like most superchargers are charging about 40 cents a kilowatt hour given that difference between the 40 and the 11. Can charger installs pay for themselves? And if so, over what sort of time horizon? So, that's actually something that EXP hasn't gotten to yet, but is going to be evaluating in this plan development is how we want to approach charging for um charger usage in the future. So, right now, I actually earlier this year adjusted the rate for all of our the at this time it's just the one at the community center because the ones in the city hall parking lot are no longer publicly accessible. But um for anybody charging at that station, I tried to relevel set it to make sure that we're at least covering our cost. Um but I would like to use this plan to take an opportunity to say, can we use this as some sort of way to have a fund for either new charger installs, uh charger maintenance as it needs to be repaired and go beyond just trying to cover um ongoing usage costs.

Thanks. I' I'd love to see that analysis as part of a future update. Yes, definitely. That will be hopefully completed by June of this year. Yeah. Alana, when you say that you raised the cost, is that to cover the cost of the power that cost the install? I have the power. The cost of just the power. The the charger that's installed at the community center was installed I think in 2014. It's been there for a really long time. Um, and I think we had some grant funding for those, but right now it's just about covering the cost of the power. We were not covering the cost of the power for a little while.

So, what is the rate at that charger now? uh it's 16 cents a kilowatt hour because that also is to account for depending on time of day that somebody is charging at the community center. If they're charging at a peak demand hour for the building, um the rate of the electricity is going to be a little higher. So, I'm trying to kind of level set it for all times of the day. And at least residences on the island, the charge for electricity is not time dependent. Correct. Um, no, it's not time dependent for residences on the island right now, but there is options for PSSE. Some folks might have opted into their time of use uh program. I'm not sure, but it's not across the board. Thank you, Deputy Mayor Becker.

Sorry if I missed this, but is if we're looking at the facil the chargers that would be at the um for the city there eight I think you said something like 18 level three chargers. Are you would those be publicly accessible or would some of those be publicly accessible or is it just the city has some for internal use and then we have several ones for and the the city fleet chargers would be just for the city fleet. So they're constantly accessible for us but Okay. You said there were some at the public city at city hall that weren't publicly accessible. So I wasn't sure if we could you know they're not they're not currently public they're not they used to be public chargers. They're not currently publicly accessible because we are using them for some of our electrified fleet vehicles. Okay. All right. Thank you. Uh, council Weinberg.

Yeah. A a question for uh city manager Bon. Uh, was the uh cost uh and the process or or was the let me put it another way. Was how we're going to fund this part of the scope of this uh um uh electric vehicle uh charging infrastructure project? or was the scope of the project just to figure out how much do we need and how much do we currently have and how long it would uh take to build it?

Thanks for the question. It's not typical that you would scope how to fund it. Uh the plan identifies the need and implementation phasing and then the council through subsequent budget discussions would determine how to fund it. Okay. Thank you, C. Wer. Not to blavorver the point, but Alana, do you see any uh climate commitment act money coming through or PSRC or like what what is the appetite for funding grant programs in communities like ours with a project like this?

So, um for well, we did get funding for the plan development for the municipal phase that was fully funded through a grant from the Department of Commerce. Um and then for charger installs, um there are a variety of grant programs. Commerce has one and ecology also has one. Um, I will note that uh we have been applying to those rounds of funding every time they've become available and we have not yet been successful. They're very competitive and Mercer Island is not the most competitive applicant for some of those grant requirements. But every avenue that I can s find for funding I am trying to I figured you were and I can't thank you enough for trying.

Kyber, is that all it? Sorry. All right. Okay.

Um All right. So, talking about the where we want to be installing these chargers. Um so, we are evaluating both public uh city and county owned sites as well as some private sites. Um overall, I believe we're looking at 97 total sites. Um nine of those are city and county owned. So, those would be chargers that the city installs and operates. Um and then the other ones are multif family locations, gas stations and some other private or commercial sites. Um so those are sites that we will be looking at evaluating for their feasibility. And then uh we are developing outreach strategies and materials to sort of try to get some of the people who are we rank as the highest priority for infrastructure um on board with installing. Um, so overall, um, we're going to be closing out our community plan with an implementation strategy that's going to be including recommendations for, um, how Mercer Island can support, um, like EV charging as a whole across the island for the broader community. Um, we've only just started this part. Um, but we will be doing, uh, making some policy and code recommendations. So, some potential changes to city code um or uh some new policy that could help uh further installation of new charging infrastructure. Um we are going to be looking at potential funding strategies. So, we are going to be trying your best to pair any recommendations for charger installations with potential funding sources um as well as at least our best estimate of what that's going to cost right now. Obviously, that's going to change pretty dramatically um over the coming decades. Um and then also looking at um developing some recommendations for managing that charging infrastructure, particularly for the city-owned sites. Um next steps, we're going to finalize that prioritize site list. Um finish creating all of those outreach materials and

finalize the implementation strategy recommendations. Any other questions? I think we asked them all. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Okay, we now move to other business in the planning schedule and welcome city manager Jesse Bond. Uh, city council, I do not have any uh any updates for you on the planning schedule. Okay. Uh, council, are there any upcoming council member absences to report? Council Wer,

I'll be remote on the 17th and might have to miss the second half of the meeting. Okay. Uh, council reports. Deputy Mayor Becker. Nothing to report. Council Wer,

Council Weinberg. Uh so I've now uh completed a 11 of my 14 planned day trips to Olympia this session. Of the 110 bills that I've been monitoring, I've identified 20 of those which are still alive uh and if they pass uh will have some impact to Mercer Island. Uh I'll send the full list to uh the city staff and the council. Of those 20, the top seven are uh House Bill 1796, which allows schools to issue bonds for capital levies, which only require a simple majority of voters. Uh Senate Bill 60002, establishing ALPR camera uh regulations, which several of us have already testified on. Uh Senate Bill 6110, creating an e motorcycle advisory work group. Uh, House Bill 1859, expanding the existing incentives for building affordable housing on land owned by faithbased organizations. Senate Bill 6162, which expands property tax exemptions for income qualifying seniors and the disabled, including a standard deduction and a deduction for those who rent out a room in their house. and House Bill 1717 allowing qualifying affordable housing projects to apply for sales tax exemptions on building materials, which uh could help a lot with some of our uh uh 0 to 30%. uh and House Bill 2266, which would require some revision to our permitting process for extremely low income housing and uh permanently supportive uh housing. We've also averted some significant policy implementation issues. And we say when I say we, I'm referring to uh the broad legislative team, including myself, Mayor Rosenbomb, Deputy Mayor Becker, city staff, our lobbyist, and our partners at the AWC,

as well as other testifiers. Some uh concrete examples about how our careful bill analysis and concerted testimony has made a difference on Senate Bill 6026. it would have disallowed our uh ground floor retail requirement in town center, but that's been now amended so it aligns with our current code. Uh House Bill 2418, which would have allowed a homeowners architect to decide unilaterally when a building permit application is officially complete. That has now been amended to keep that decision authority appropriately in the hands of a city employee. and Senate Bill 602, whose data retention timeline requirements would have made police carmounted ALPR cameras unusable for parking enforcement. We got that amended to allow parking enforcement data to be retained until the parking tickets have been fully adjudicated, including appeals. Finally, no discussion about the 2026 legislative session would be complete without mentioning the elephant in the room, which is the proposed bill on a new income tax on those making over 100 $1 million a year, excuse me, 6336. I'll leave the pro and con debate of that to the op-ed page authors, but suffice it to say, the bill does appear to be on track for passing this year. And my next open lunch will be on noon Sunday, March 15th at Vivian's Beastro. The address is 244176th Avenue Southeast. As always, all are welcome. It's an open agenda, new sports, weather, humor, even questions about city business or state legislation. All I ask is that everyone show their respect to the chef by ordering some food and or beverage. It's delicious. And let me know if you're coming so I can reserve a large enough table.

Thank you, Coun Reynolds. Nothing to report. And nothing. That's

Yes. So last Friday, um, Deputy Mayor Becker and I attended the Puget Sound Regional Council conference for newly elected officials. And, um, yeah, it was, um, really nice to meet um, mayors and council members from four counties, King, Pierce, Snowish, and Kitap. And we had a um small group breakout session and found that um the top five largest issues facing our region are number one budget constraints, number two growth management, um housing affordability, infrastructure, and then access to transportation. So pretty much aligned with what's going on on Mercer Island. And um actually tomorrow we um Mercer Island is hosting a very large Sound Cities Association networking event and right here in our community center over 20 Sound Cities Association um cities will be here and over 60 elected officials and staff will be attending. So um yeah, so I think several of us will be there to welcome um you know people from all over to to Mercer Island. And um yeah, I was invited to uh for a talk at a local retirement community and um it was surprising to hear that they most of them did not know about our city weekly e newswsletter. So I just wanted to put out there we do have a city e newswsletter that um our community can sign up for through our website mercer island.gov. and um and some people didn't really know who to talk to or call if they notice um some some you know some issue that they want to to be addressed. So customer service that is the um first line um of defense you call customer service 206275760 or email customer service at mercer island.gov.

Um and um yeah, so my next community chat is on Sunday, March 22nd from 1 to 3 at a new event menu on Mercer Island, The Rock at 7605 Southeast 27th Street, sweet 2 uh sweet 102. And um there's actually also if you enjoy culture and music, there are two free concerts um at um the high school performing arts center. So the one tomorrow night, Wednesday night is the all district band concert at 6:30 and on Thursday we have the all district orchestra concert at 6:30. So there are free concert and welcome the community to join. Thank you.

Uh great. Thank you. Uh tomorrow, Deputy Mayor Becker and I are meeting with the chamber uh for a little conversation. Looking forward to hearing from local business owners. Uh next week the there's a meeting of uh east side mayors essentially talk about sound transit expansion and what sort of that looks like going forward. So uh I will report back after that. Okay. The city council will now go into executive session for approximately 30 minutes to discuss with legal counsel pending or potential litigation pursuant to RCW42.30.110 uh 1 I. The city council will now be in recess from 8:05. Sorry, 15 minutes, not 30. I I forgot to correct you.

Okay. 15 minutes. Uh, the city council will now be in recess from 8:05 until 8:10 p.m. And the city council will be in executive session at 8:10 until 8:35 8:25, excuse me, Yeah.

Thank you for waiting. Uh the time now is 8:25 and the city council are going to continue in executive session for an additional 5 minutes.

Good evening and thank you for your patience. City Council is going to continue in executive session for an additional 5 minutes until approximately 8:35. Thank you.