City Council - workshop

good afternoon as it is 1 p.m i will call this city council workshop of august 11 2025 to order reminder that this is both a physical and virtual meeting the meeting may be viewed on youtube and on facebook following the meeting public comment is not normally taken at workshop meetings although the council may allow or request public participation on action items we have no action items on our workshop agenda today Welcome all in attendance. Um, and then now I will call upon council to report out on any boards, commissions or committees in which you serve. Yes. Council member arms. Mike, Mike,

Anyway, I can't multitask. Anyway, we had a really great Marine Advisory Board meeting. We thank you, David, for bringing that information to us. And so they put some things on the agenda, so it made everybody happy, and it was a great time. Nice.

Thank you. Yes, Council Member Romero.

For the transit district, we have moved from a credit card system to a purchase card or P-card, and it's going to control our cash much better. And then on top of that, we have the amounts to the six-year plans being updated, and that's basically being wrapped up at this time. That's all I have.

Great. Thank you. All right. Is that it? All right, well, we're going to jump right into the agenda then, and the first item up is critical area regulations, concurrent updates with the periodic update of the comprehensive plan. Here to introduce this is our community development director, Stacy Pratchner, as well as our senior planner, Dennis Lefevre. Thank you.

Okay. Okay. No, no. All right. Well, thank you so much, Mr. Mayor and Council. Hello to staff and members of the public here today. Pleasure to be here in front of Council. Also, my pleasure to introduce, as you said, Mr. Mayor, Dennis Lefevre, our senior planner, who also specializes in in critical areas and supports the city in environmental review and SEPA most especially. As the council is aware over its years of past work here in the update of the comprehensive plan, the periodic update of the comprehensive plan 2025 to 2045, counties and cities as well as doing the periodic update to the goals and policies are also required with their periodic updates to review and evaluate and update if necessary their critical areas ordinances. Within the City of Oak Harbor, the critical areas ordinance is covered by Title 20, and that includes protections and rules for applying best available science and then avoidance minimization and mitigation if necessary for impacts to critical areas including but not limited to things like wetlands, buffers off of streams, coastal areas, shoreline management program though can be a little bit of a different animal, as well as steep slopes, though not limited to those. We're happy to just do this introduction with you as Dennis is going to explain the suite of updates that the city is required to do in concurrence with the comprehensive plan. It's not a huge heavy lift for the city this time around. The city's in pretty good shape as far as its critical areas ordinances, but we've got a little bit of work to do. Dennis has been working on that and is going to take you into some of the details. We have talked with Planning Commission already about this as well. Thanks, Dennis.

Thank you, Stacy. Typically, I'm a virtual planner, but I'm glad to be here today in physical form and to see you all in live faces. So that's a treat for me. As Stacey mentioned, the critical areas is an important piece of, let's see, there we go. The state law. I mean, it's a building block of GMA. It requires a periodic update and a review during the comprehensive plan update session, and that's the period that we're in right now. So we're looking at all of our development regulations that need to be updated as part of the state mandate, and critical areas is definitely a component of that. The, uh, as I mentioned, it was, it's not a new thing. Critical areas have been around since the conception of growth management in 1990. Oak Harbor has been consistent with being concurrent with the requirements of growth management and the critical areas ordinance. Uh, our last update did occur in August of 2018 under ordinance 1801. That was a lengthy effort. Uh, there was a lot of, um, A lot of pushing and shoving going on, a lot of wetland issues that we had to deal with at that time. I personally carried that ordinance through at that time. So this is gonna be a little bit easier of a lift for us this time around. Why are we looking at this now? It's basically, If there's any pieces of our ordinance that we can separate out and deal with and address earlier, this is one of them. But I don't want to convey the thought that critical areas are not important to any development aspect that we have in the city. They're very integral. We look at them every time we have a development proposal. But this was a piece that we could come forward with. before we really have a lot of the zoning land use issues the state mandated housing issues come forward as a package to you later this year as far as our code update requirements um i already did that one so we'll go one more forward Defined in state law, critical areas, as Stacy mentioned, include wetlands, critical aquifer recharge areas, fish and wildlife habitat conservation areas, frequently flooded areas, and also geologically hazard areas. Any community in the state working under, well, any community in the state and county need to address all of these five critical areas as part of their development regulations and serve to protect all of them as well. In Washington State, the Department of Commerce is the overseeing state agency that deals with critical areas. However, they don't have the expertise on staff to deal with all of these five critical areas. So they delegate out to other state agencies. Listed here, we can see that wetlands are under the auspices of the Department of Ecology. critical aquifer recharge areas. While the county has good information, it also evolves from the Department of Ecology. Fish and wildlife habitat conservation areas, of course, are under the auspices of the Fish and Wildlife Department. Frequently flooded areas are under FEMA and administered through Ecology. And geologically hazardous areas are under the auspices of the Department of Natural Resources. So basically, where are we right now with our review of these five elements? As Stacey mentioned, wetlands, pleased to announce there won't be substantive changes to this section. The buffers have been decided to be consistent with how we decided our buffers to be according to the 2018 manual. Delineation practices for wetlands are also the same as far as ecology is concerned. There are going to be some minor word tweaking, some additional phrases that ecology would like to see in the new ordinance as well. Critical aquifer recharge areas, I don't anticipate any amendments to those, but we will do checking to make sure that our mapping is correct and still reflective of the best available science. Fish and wildlife habitat conservation areas, we did receive quite a list of recommended policy recommendations from Fish and Wildlife. So we at a staff level are still looking at these policy recommendations and deciding which ones will fit our community. And then we'll also then transfer those into the appropriate development regulations under this section as needed. And of course, frequently flooded areas. That one, we are in pretty good status right now with that because we have a red line version. I think it was Amendment 1 in your packet that reflects What the Department of Ecology has recommended for revisions, they have reviewed this section. So that, we're in pretty good shape with that piece of critical areas ordinance. And then finally, geologically hazardous areas, actually the DNR has looked at our sections. Some minor tweaking I think will be needed as well to kind of bring it up to speed and a little bit more reflective of current. terminologies but their only comment was to identify the new definition that they have for geologically hazardous areas we also included in your packet map that shows the extent of our 100-year floodplain we will be using that obviously as descriptions and in our mapping for critical areas and Finally, just the next steps, we did have a discussion, as Stacy mentioned, with the Planning Commission a couple months ago. We're having our first touch with you folks today. We will be bringing this back possibly later this fall after I have a discussion. We'll see how this links in with the larger development regulation process update that's going to be occurring within the next few months. But we will eventually link that into the whole package as the Planning Commission and new folks look at the approval process for the development regulations. We anticipate this to occur probably beginning later this fall and then into the spring of next year, and then we'll be ready to go with the whole package. With that, I would be happy to entertain any questions or comments that you might have.

Great. Thank you. Council, questions, comments for Dennis or Stacy?

yes councilmember peterson thank you mayor i have two questions please on the oak harbor floodlands picture yes um it looks like uh way up by zone a there's a little bitty zone can you put that back up there at the on the one on the right at the top looks like about six blocks up there's a little tiny blue zone Do you see it?

Yes.

Could you explain why so far off to me and then over here on the left-hand side?

There's another isolated piece.

Yeah, can you explain this to me?

I think it's just the depressions. There's existing wetlands in those areas. As the water flows, it accumulates in that area and it gets to the elevation that is considered flood zone.

So it's basically existing web.

Yeah. Yes.

Oh, OK. Yeah. Yes. OK. OK. I didn't have time to drive by them, so I didn't know. Thank you. I'm sorry. I didn't take the time to drive by. And then my second question, if I might, we were talking about what we're going to update. And there was a footnote. under the current CAO update under the Fish and Wildlife. Can someone explain to me why the Oak Harbor Dairy Oak Society would have to do with the Fish and Wildlife?

Well, for one thing, we've considered Gary Oaks a unique species, which we are allowed to do under state law. And then that obviously brings in any interest that we have concerning Gary Oaks, and that would be the Gary Oaks Society. Okay. They're pretty alert folks and watch what is going on with that tree species.

Absolutely, they are. Do you have anything to add? No, there's none. Sorry.

And this also just a general reminder for the city council and also the listening public. If you go to the city's comprehensive plan website, our landing page, we maintain a library of all public comment that we receive. And so you can access up to date all comments that we've received thus far, including that comment as well.

Okay. I just didn't know. I was trying to figure out why they fit in that particular slot. Thank you.

Yes. Council member Stuckey.

I seem to recall when we went over this with the Planning Commission, because I think it's important to kind of bring what the commissions say to hear a little bit. If I remember correctly, they kind of zeroed in on the effects of this FEMA and flood insurance for those that would be there. Could you expand on a little bit on that, on the implications of insurance rates and this plan?

Well, as far as the floodplain is concerned, any structures within have to pay an annual premium for flood insurance. Did you want me, Councillor, to go into the history of how we were working with FEMA to get the pieces together to possibly lower those rates? I could probably see some eyes staring at me.

Can you give like the shorter version?

Yes, we have basically a citywide habitat assessment, which is required by the National Marine Fisheries Service for any floodplain development that occurs in the floodplain to deal with the Endangered Species Act. And we, oh, my mind just went blank. What were the other pieces? Well, yeah. And if you get a number of pieces together and deal with FEMA, we can actually become a part of a community rating system, which is administered by FEMA. They rank different things that you can put in code that makes it more restrictive for flood development. And then we can reduce our annual flood premiums for those structures in the flood zone.

And I believe some of the conversation revolved with How much is it worth it? What level of reduction are we talking about for the restrictions being placed upon us?

We were moving forward in that direction, but then changes at the federal level and a lot of changes to the agencies, FEMA in particular, They never had a chance to review our wildlife habitat assessment. So Ecology recommended that we actually tailback our ordinance to their recommendations only and maybe deal with that piece at a later time. So that's what we're doing. So we can basically combine it with our update process.

That makes sense. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Romero.

Thank you, Mayor. My experience with federal agencies has been kind of mixed, especially with regard to the Department of Defense. And one of the stipulations was that we had to meet certain deadlines or schedule deadlines. dramatically, we would process the paperwork and do the plans and submit them. And then they would go to the feds and then the feds would come back and say, why haven't you done this yet? And I said, we have done this yet. And not only have we done it yet, we've submitted it three times. And have you done your work? But then, of course, you have to use discretion when you talk to the approving authorities because they may get angry and say, oh, we're going to put you back on the bottom of the stack. So I say all of that because we've got a number of approvals here, including the feds and the state as well. And I was trying to just determine, are there reviews setting us back on our schedule? Are they pretty much in line with the timing that we need for the comp plan? I mean, I'm just... I just don't want the city to get stuck with a deadline that was passed because of inaction on the part of the feds or the state.

Yeah, actually, the critical areas are administered basically by the state. I think the only issue that we dealt with federally was FEMA. So that's why we kind of removed that piece at this point in time so we could stay on our timeline.

Okay, so you understand about the federal piece then. Oh, yeah. Okay, thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Anybody else? All right. Well, thank you both very much for your presentation. Thank you. Thank you, council. All right. We're going to move on next to the fire department annual report and here to introduce that as our fire chief, Travis Anderson.

Mayor counsel, thank you for the opportunity to sit before you and go over our 2025 annual report. It seems like with everything going on, that was a long time ago. So going through this, um, but, uh, anyway, happy to be here. And we always appreciate all the support that each one of you give us at the fire department. So 2025 was a year of growth progress and transformation. A lot of things happened in the fire department. Uh, we made a lot of accomplishments. One thing you'll notice is the call volume dramatically went up in the fire department. We talked about this on several occasions about providing more value for the community. When you looked at our call volume in 2024 with two fire stations in service, Each of those fire stations probably would have been doing about 40 minutes of work in a 24-hour period of actually responding to our community. Even though I was with Wiggenstein was mentioning how much busier he hears things in the street. There's a lot of calls that go on. There's probably 1415 911 calls that go on in the city each day and we were going to maybe one or two of them three of them on certain days. So a lot of people needing help that we weren't necessarily responding to and so we'll talk a little bit about that. But in 2025 we had a 44% increase in the number of call volume. You're going to find in 2026 we're probably going to do quite a bit more than that. It'll probably be about doubling what we did in 2024 and 2026 by some of the things that we've done. We transitioned in 2025 to a full-career organization. So in February of 2025, we ended the paid-on-call and I guess volunteers, if you want to call them part-time positions. Again, I have all the respect in the world for people that are willing to do it. I've been fortunate to do all my life and get paid for it, to do it without necessarily a paycheck, a salary, or a pension. One of the challenges that we had was the availability. If you came to the fire station on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday night, we had all the staffing in the world. During the days when the paid on call had normal, we'll call it normal work, they were not available to necessarily be at the fire station. And it didn't seem like anyone really wanted to work on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. So many conversations me and the mayor were having was challenges of staffing. So if you had an emergency on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday night, that was great. But the other time, we struggled. And it's something that all the fire districts around us and fire departments across the country are experiencing the same thing with the ability of volunteers. Station 82 started construction. We all know it's built and operating today. And then one of the last things that I'd like to bring up is we kind of rebranded the whole organization. Most of the stuff that was there, it's been there for 30, 40, 50 years. Some of you guys know way better than me. But it was a very old patch. It was uniforms that were picked decades ago, it was designed decades ago. Our our mission, vision and value statement hadn't changed. It mentioned, you know, the paid on call program and stuff. And so we went through and and redid everything. I let the internal stakeholders our employees go through and and determine what we wanted our mission vision and value to be so they could get buy-in and what we're all about and what we stand for uniforms we let them pick out new uniforms design a new patch you see them on our fire engines on our stations on our kitchen tables something that we can all take pride in so that was all designed in-house at no extra cost And the cool part about it was they used a lot of the traditional stuff in the history of our department, but just kind of refreshed it and brought it up to today's. I don't think any of us would want to wear our grandpa's clothes and that kind of stuff. So that was the other big piece of what we did last year. And you'll see some of it, like here's a binder that I have. This has all of our programs that we do. We didn't have a way of teaching officers how to be officers on the fire ground. We now have documents like eight functions of command, Tactics 101 that teaches them how to fight each different type of structure fire that we have. Here on the front page, this is what I put together for our personnel. You can see this is our mission, vision, and values right here, the very first page. You go on, second page is our eight functions. These are how we run command, and this is my expectations from an officer. Next one is how we determine what tactics and strategies we're going to make based on risk of our personnel. why firefighters die on fires, how we create change in the organization from explaining the why to teaching, training, giving clear expectations, and we have boundaries of our policies and procedures, and then finally holding people accountable. So this is just an example of change that we've done in the last year for our organization. So again, you see this is the 2349 on calls, which was up 44%. You'll see the vast majority of it is medical calls. That's really what the fire service is for. In fact, while we were just sitting here talking, we had a 50-year-old lady that just fell down the stairs. It came in as a Bravo call. You know, a year and a half ago, the fire department would have never went on there, even though Station 82 is the closest resource to her, right? Now we're providing that service. The first person she's going to see is an Oak Harbor Fire Department, hopefully a paramedic on that rig. We're going through the paramedic training process right now. But now that 50-year-old female is getting the highest level of care at the fastest time that we can provide that service. rather than us sitting in the station and waiting for the ambulance to get there. Then the ambulance is like, oh, we need help. Then they call us, right? We're already delayed eight, nine, 10 minutes. We don't want to do that. So you see the other categories, good intent calls, people calling for whatever reason they think there might be an issue, need some help. Service calls, those are usually like their pipe broke. We get a lot of that, or a lift assist, we need help getting somebody up, we just don't have the strength. Tons of those calls. False alarms, we'll talk more about that in this coming year, false alarms. 10%, that's a super high false alarm rate. We have a city ordinance that's never been enforced. that we'll have some discussion about, probably as this year goes on, of looking at how we enforce that and try to reduce the number of times we're going on false alarms so our units are available for actual emergencies. We have some commercial businesses that have 20 false alarms in a year. The ordinance gives them basically two, so significantly over that. And there's no motivation to get the systems fixed. So hazardous conditions, they smell gas, something like that in their house. And then fires, you see fires 45. And that could be a brush fire, dumpster fire, car fire. We typically have about maybe six or seven actual structure fires a year. So again, we're spending $5 million on a fire department for seven structure fires. You could go in. buy seven new houses for that right so how do we provide more value to the community and that's where this paramedic service is that's where us responding to all these calls comes into play in my mind of providing you know good value for our taxpayers dollars and then we are there when we have a big fire I can keep going. You guys don't need a PowerPoint? I'm just happy to talk. So we talked about, you might be familiar, I know Marshall would be, of the ProQA system. When I got here, we weren't using ProQA. ProQA is designed on how we quantify how bad an emergency call is. So there's Omegas, Alphas, Bravos, Charlies, Deltas, Echos. Omegas is non-emergency. Hey, I need a ride to maybe the clinic or I stubbed my toe a week ago and now I want to go to the hospital. We don't go on those calls. We keep our units available for what I deem an emergency call. We got Whidbey Health here that can go provide that service. They want to ride to the hospital. That's who handles that call. Alpha is similar. Let's just say I stubbed my toe right now. That's kind of an alpha call. The ambulance handles that on their own. We started going to Bravo. So the 50-year-old female that just fell down the stairs, that's a Bravo level call. We now run that. Charlie or Delta is I'm having chest pain. I can't breathe. I'm having a heart attack. I just had a stroke. Those are Charlie Deltas. We go on those now. And then Echoes are the person's not breathing. And we always went on those before. Those are the only calls we went on which was maybe 50 or 60 in a year. Don't have the exact number in front of me, but those are the calls we went on before. So that's been the major change is expanding our role in that. So one of the things that is important to me is being data driven and knowing what success looks like. So we got a new application, a program called first watch that will be on our web page. It can be on the city's page. It can just be on the fire department's page, how we want to do it. And it's going to tell the whole community what our performance metrics are. So if you're having a, you know, a heart attack and in, the city of Oak Harbor, it'll give the individual a performance metric that they'll know that 90% of the time, this is when help is going to arrive, how fast. So I like to build a system around what are our response time goals. And so when we go back to that Pro QA, why it's important to me is because someone that stubbed their toe and someone that's not breathing, they need a different level of care providers and they need a different response time. we don't need to be at someone's door in two minutes for someone to stub their toe but if someone's not breathing we know brain death starts at four to six minutes we want to get there and we want to build a system that is responsive to the acuity of the patient and not do what has been done in the past is it's the same response every single time no matter what the call is that's a very expensive and inefficient system in my mind so with that you know i've went ahead and established response time goals and these are things that i would like to have continued conversations about because it's going to drive RESOURCE NEEDS, PERSONNEL NEEDS, BUDGET NEEDS EVENTUALLY IF WE SAY WE WANT TO MEET THESE GOALS. SO THE RESPONSE TIME GOAL FOR AN ECHO WHEN SOMEONE IS NOT BREATHING FOR US AS AN ORGANIZATION IS AS SOON AS WE GET DISPATCHED TO GET TO THAT HOUSE WITHIN FIVE MINUTES AND 59 SECONDS. REMEMBER, BRAIN DEATH STARTS AT FOUR TO SIX MINUTES AND IT TAKES THEM ABOUT A MINUTE TO DISPATCH US. So and one thing I'd like to point out is you saw in the data previously, everything was average. Average to me is not good. It means 50% of the time. I don't think anyone thinks 50% is success. So we drive on 90% of success. So we can't be perfect, but that's what our goals are. So that's where the echo would be at 559. So when you see those performance metrics, each one of you are going to see in our program budgeting for our suppression part of our budget is how well we meet these goals. And they're goals that I've used in the past. They're goals that can be changed and modified. There is no... The only national standard there is is a four-minute EMS response, which doesn't take into account stubbed toe or someone not breathing. So it's not a very good standard to use. And so this is what I've came up with. And so then we'll go down to a Charlie or a Delta. That's someone that's not breathing or having a heart attack or having a stroke. We want to get there within seven minutes and 59 seconds, 90% of the time. So again, you're going to see on our web page Are we meeting our goal or are we not meeting our goal? And then we're going to you can actually drill down in and we can the public won't be able to why we didn't meet our goal. And it tells a story. Was it because we don't have a close enough fire station? Was it because my personnel were too slow getting out of the fire station? Right. We'll know that. Or is it we had, you know, like the other day we had five calls all within 10 minutes. There's only so much we can do with our units. And so if you start seeing that to be a common occurrence of three or four calls back to back to back, that tells us that if we want to make our response time goals, then we have to add another unit to handle that. Or we have to use our partners to assist with that. But it gives us what success looks like. Otherwise, we're just every single day going out there and just running calls. Uh, structure fires is five 59. So if your house is on fire again, five 59 is when our goal is to get there. So that's kind of our response time goals. Thank you for getting that back up there. So you can kind of see the chart on the right. If you have it in front of you, the omega all the way down to the echoes. Building the future. So again, we're eight months into the 2026 station. 82 is already up and running. Things are going fantastic. It has helped with response times out there in the Southwest for sure. Brought another unit to structure fires that we'll talk about. Oh, and I do want to just go back to this one because I think this is important. You see the bottom thing, 15 firefighters within 10 minutes? That is a national standard. So in any given day, we have nine people on duty. Two people are usually off. We have to give one person off for a Kelly day to bring their hours down. And then one can be off on vacation. So typically we're starting off with seven people. So we have a battalion chief and we have a three person ladder truck and a three person engine. So we have seven of our 15. So I got to go find the other eight. And so I'm happy to ask for anybody that's willing to come and help us. I don't believe working in silos. I found that a lot on this island is everybody does their own thing. But none of us have enough people to do it on our own. So when I got here, North Whidbey is automatically on our dispatch. I hope they beat us to the call. That's good for our resident. The Navy is automatically getting dispatched. Their department has been amazing. I went to them, and they won't do automatic aid saying we'll automatically come. There's a difference between automatic and mutual. Mutual is you request us, we'll come if we can. Automatic is we're coming anyway. We have basically a verbal agreement of auto aid. There's nothing on paper because they can't do that, but they've been amazing every time we ask for them. So we're getting hopefully two from North Whidbey. Sometimes they're down to zero people that are working that day. Some days it's just one. Some days it's two. So our seven plus their two. And then the Navy sends a battalion chief and a four person engine or ladder truck right off the get go. So we're at 14. And then I always have either me or my deputy chief or fire marshals on call 24 seven. One of us come that gets us to that 15 to meet that national standard that we do in 10 minutes. So good partnership, but it's one of the important reasons for me for staffing when I say that I need seven people per day. That's one piece of it is getting that 15. The other piece of it is we can open up another fire station, Station 82, and we can staff two people there. But by law, unless they know there's somebody to rescue, they cannot go inside that house. So you have the driver operator that's on the engine that's going to pump, give them the water, and then OSHA requires a team of two to go inside an ideal H atmosphere, which is a fire. So you need that officer on there and the firefighter to go in there, and they have to be either in visual or voice contact, and radio doesn't count. So they have to be together. So unless there's three, you're getting a fire engine there fast, but they can't do a whole lot until the other unit gets there. So did it really improve our response times for what we want to get accomplished? So super important that we maintain three person staffing on each of those apparatus. If our intent is to get to a fire, get in there and get water on it as fast as we can. Save people's property and affect rescue. Talked about this. I'm going to shoot through this. So this is a, our new patch. I think you guys probably saw that about a year ago in our Facebook posts and we presented it. Um, again, it kind of goes through what was used from the old patch, the history of our patch. I think it's really important for us to remember tradition and honor that stuff, but also make our department ours. So looking ahead, um, A lot of these we accomplished. So I kind of wanted to present what I see as the biggest challenge for the fire department, just so you guys are aware of it. And it's growing pains, probably a lot like you've heard the police chief talk about turnover and amount of people. 55% of all of our firefighters are less than three years on the job. So we doubled the number of fire engines we had in service overnight, which requires double the Especially positions, officers and drivers. That's where we're struggling is to get people that meet the contract standard and kind of the state and national standard to be an officer. When a captain calls in sick or a captain takes vacation, someone's got to step up into that role. That's where we're struggling is to get qualified people to step in that role. Some of it is just time. I can't change how long they've been here. There's a three-year requirement in the contract of years of experience before you can act in an officer. So some of it is we're just having to get real creative. And so our major issue is growing pain. And so what you see a lot is like I worked a 24-hour shift last Sunday to fill in an officer role that we just didn't have. We're doing everything we can to stay within our budget. keep the staffing that we want to do for the city and do it safely with the positions that we have. Everyone in the fire department is amazing. A great bunch of guys and gals that have the community interest at heart and are very flexible in accomplishing our goals. I appreciate them. I tell them that every single day. But that's one of the challenges for us is just the growing pains of staffing. I think in two more years, life's going to be a lot easier for us because we'll have enough. Everyone will have that's on right now. We'll have three years on. They can be officers. And then after their first year, they can start driving. The first year that we hired them, they're learning just to be a firefighter. And then they got to learn how to pump, drive the fire engine, do all those things. And so that happens after their first year. So with this brand new academy that we had and all these brand new people getting drivers is also a challenge. Then we had five members of our department decided to have babies this year. That creates a challenge for us because of some of the benefits that come with FMLA and PFMLA in time they get off and so we're trying to fill those positions. And then the only other piece that's really important to me is gathering data. One thing that I've really struggled out this first year is we didn't have systems to grab data. If you don't know what you're doing and how you're performing, how do you make it better? And so those are the systems, like I talked about, First Watch, some of our other stuff, that you're going to see real-time metrics of how we're performing so we can, again, see if we're meeting our expectations for the community. Yeah. And that is all I have. Happy to answer any questions on the fire department.

So before I turn it over to council, I just want to thank you again. You're doing an amazing job. You know how much I appreciate you. I tell you all the time. I do have one question, though. Yes. As I'm looking at Oak Harbor Municipal Code 8.12.060, there's a false alarm civil penalty. Are you charging that?

It has never been enforced. I talked to the previous fire marshal. Wasn't a fan. Those conversations that we've had about adding it to the... impact fee thing. Those are conversations that has not been enforced. My direction I've given the fire marshal so far this year is to start putting out warning letters so they are aware that there is the potential of fines coming down the road. And then I think it's one question is, is do we have the mechanisms to do that from finance to actually start finding when those are conversations we've we started having months ago with finance. So

So I think that what we should do is take that conversation offline and then we can bring it back to council as well. But I think the three of us should sit down and have that conversation and then have that go into effect starting in 2027. Sounds good. Okay. All right. With that, I'll turn it over to council. Yes, Council Member Romero.

I could not have imagined a more substantive report of improvements in service and processes than you just gave us. So in the law enforcement days, if everything went down perfectly, we'd call it righteous. So I would say that's exceedingly righteous what you've been doing with the department and with the mayor and the administration as far as improvements for emergency services. I'm just going to state, because I'm data-driven too, and unlike many people, I don't do much in the world of entertainment. I'm all about public policy and reading these types of things. And so I've got my eyes wide open, and I see that you're racing forward. So I would just say, good on you, good on your department, and good on the administration for the efficiency improvements. And then also, I note too that not only are you doing incremental improvements, but you're also doing leapfrog. In other words, you're passing over unnecessary things to get to other improvements. I just encourage you to continue to do that because I love this. It's just a delight to hear of it because it saves lives and it's a direct reflection of the service we provide for our community. I got scads of notes here because it was just fascinating to hear your report, but I'm going to pass on the rest of it. Thank you, Mayor.

Yes, sir. Council Member Stuckey.

Yeah, I definitely love what we're doing as far as medical calls. When I look at the 2025 annual report, I see 45 fire calls. And I think, you know, John Key Public might think fire is in the name, yet that's less than four a month. That's less than one a week, you know. So doing that medical is definitely giving people the most bang for their buck. The one question I had was, regarding your goals for response time. When we were looking to discuss putting a levy on the ballot, response times was a big part of that levy and staffing. And just looking up what that previous response time goal was, because I had to remind myself, Maintain a fire protection response time standard of five minutes or less for fire related incidents and four minutes or less for medical related incidents. The time that you're proposing, I didn't hear you give a response for fire, I heard for medical, are a little higher than these numbers. Do you think the numbers that were given at the time, the prior goals were unrealistic or was it just a different environment because we weren't responding as much medical?

Well, I would say there's two things. One, they just used the national standard, which I have yet to meet a department that meets it. Second, they used average, right? So if we want to go to average, which again, let's say you had a loved one that was not breathing and we got there in two minutes and then we got there in 10 minutes in yours, we made an average of six minutes. That's our goal, right? Your loved one didn't have a chance at 10 minutes. His loved one had a great chance, right? That's why we don't use average. So when you look at that levy, the key word in there was average. We're going to 90% fractal, which is putting us on the same plane as how other departments and even the National Fire Protection Association, their standard is. And then the four minutes again, that is travel time, not response time. So again, it's kind of like anything with data. You can make it sound however you want, and you can pull whatever data you want. But we're looking at total response time. So if I'm just looking at travel time, which is four minutes of driving, it takes out the time it takes for us to get, if it's in the middle of the night, out of bed, in clothes, in the rig, on the road. from start to finish, right? Because we have a piece that's important that we play as firefighters and that's hustling to get out of the station. And then we have that travel time component of it. And I don't like to separate the two. I like them to be in one. And we look at it. And if we made it, fantastic. If we didn't make it, I want to know why. Was it we were too slow? There was error in the dispatch system. Distance was too far. So I would say it's meeting the intent of it. Maybe you could argue holding us even at a little higher standard, because it is the 90th percentile. um rather than average 50 we're talking 90 versus 50 so nine out of ten times we have to make it instead of five out of ten times um but it puts us more when you're comparing us to our peers people don't use average they use the 90th percentile so in four minutes for the record it seems very impressive for me to pay upon where it is in the city if we're not next to station now these

These numbers I threw out, they are referenced in the comprehensive plan policies. Will we need to modify the comprehensive plan policies to be in line with what your goals are? Do we need to formally change that at some point?

The drafts, I think they're working on it right now. Originally, when I sat down with CAC, we did change it to these.

Okay. That's all I have. Thank you.

Mayor Prochek.

Thank you. And thank you for clarifying the four minutes, what that means. Because I would assume from the time dispatch picks up a call to the time someone arrives at my emergency, that in my mind is the response time, four minutes. But depending on how we're categorizing it, as you pointed out, the four minute, no that was drive time. That wasn't getting out of bed and getting the bunker gear on and getting in the thing and the dispatcher taking the call and us arriving. And so I think for a more accurate picture for ourselves and the public, Your preference of including the start to finish time versus just the drive time.

Correct, yeah.

I don't care how long you were on the road. I care how long it took from the time I called 911 to someone arriving at my emergency.

Correct, yeah.

And those, yeah, those are two different numbers. So aiming as high as is feasible for the driver. the complete number, seeing that complete picture. Not that those individual parts of the picture aren't important, and I appreciate those being broken down. I love the level of detail in these reports. But yeah, to someone, if you have a loved one that's not breathing, you're concerned about the incident as a whole and I'm very happy to hear about the the automatic mutual response for instead of with the Navy etc North would be instead of waiting for someone to call and ask for help because yeah it doesn't we don't care who gets there first we just want whoever can get there fastest to get there and I am I'm wondering, there's one of the key measures, and this doesn't really have a whole lot, this is just me being curious. The key measures, it has fire injuries, civilian fire injuries, firefighter, death fire injuries. Do you have anything to measure training injuries or do you only count what happens during a fire or on any other call? How do you measure that number?

Well, I mean, we could look at our LNI reports, right, if we get people injured. I think we should look at that just in general for anything, even if it's not training. But for fire reports, specifically what – and it's changed because it used to be – one system in this year, they changed everyone to call it's called nearest now. And so there's still working through the data, but you'd have to report for any fire. If there was any civilian firefighter injuries or deaths, it was a mandatory requirement if you wanted to be eligible for grants. So, but all of our reports for fires or for any incident, we'll list if there was a firefighter or a civilian injury or death.

So, okay. So that that's, just a mechanism of the system that's currently in place for the required reporting, and anything else would just be for our information? Yes, correct. To measure. Okay. Thank you. That answers my question. Thank you so much.

Council Member Wittgenstein.

Thank you. Very thorough. I really, really appreciate what all you're doing for our department and the citizens of Oak Harbor as well as Whidbey Island. Very grateful, glad to see the station 82 up and running and getting its work in. Yes, the calls have definitely gone up. I hear them all day. Not bad. And I do appreciate the politeness you guys do at 5.30 and 6 in the morning when you're screaming by. You're not running your sirens. I just noticed that this morning or yesterday morning, I think. With this increase of calls, I know a lot of it is because of the restructure that you've done and the expansion that we're doing and whatnot. Do you see that number leveling off at roughly where we peaked this year? Or is that... What kind of fluctuation do you expect us to see?

I would imagine you probably see about a 3% increase per year once we level off. That was one of the challenges is there was, as much as I tried, there's no repository. I can't get data on how many calls we had in our city. So this new First Watch program is pretty cool, because you'll be able to see how many people get transported out of our city. Right now, I have access to none of that data. So it's all been built on the back end of CAD. So when we'd be helped to transport, we'll know that it's coming out of our specific zone. So with the help of people in GIS in our city, we created zones and barriers. And so now we can see anytime they're at an address with any of that, we're getting this data populated, you know, so down the road, say if you wanted to know in some type of plan that if for some reason would be health, failed for some reason, went under, did something like what happened in Skagit or whatever, we as a city would know this is what level of service we're going to have to provide is this many transfers per day. But that's been the hard part here is that there is no quantifiable data. So I couldn't, as much as we tried, even when we were negotiating contracts with Whidbey Health and we were doing a per call fee, They were unable to tell us how many calls come out of the city of Oak Harbor. They can pull up the Oak Harbor address, but remember a lot of that is North Whidbey's area. So it's really hard to get data. So we've gradually added these calls. It started off with Charlie's and Delta's. Now we're adding Bravo's. And the reality of it is we may take Bravo's back off the table. Again, we don't want to... overuse our resources right every time we drive lights and sirens down the road that's a risk to the community right if I'm sending two units to a call that doesn't need two units the next person that needs a use resource they may not have it but we have to start grabbing some data to sit there and see you know do we need by people on this call is too fine. And we've had no data repository. So you may see us go and say, you know what, after looking at all this data and going through the calls and now having reports in our system, because I had access to nothing else but our own reports, we may sit here and say that when we go back and look at all these Bravo calls that we found out that very little treatment was being done, they weren't going back to the hospital lights and sirens. It's going to paint a story for us. that that our resources are not needed on this as long as our response time goals are good. So like what I had on Bravo's again, these are typically non life threatening call is to make it there in nine minutes and 59 seconds. Again, I think that is something that maybe next year when when you guys have your council retreat, is that every year that we do it? Maybe that's a topic that can be looked at is what are your guys' expectations if someone's not breathing? When do you want a unit to get there? But I'll be able to bring back realistic data of where we are today. So again, we may find that five minutes and 59 seconds, I'm going off historical of my my 25 years before here of what looks like is doable and not. You don't want to create a four-minute standard that you're so far off it that you can never meet it, that you just quit even trying. We want it to be achievable, we also want it to push us. So again, those bravos, again, if we look back at it and say, you know what? I'll be able to tell Whidbey Health's performance, I'll be able to tell our performance, and I'll be able to tell our performance together. So we'll be able to share together how much stronger we are. But if their times are making it just fine, they're making our goal in our community, and they don't need our help, then why would we waste a resource? It costs us money every time we go on a call and fuel, wear and tear. But again, it's kind of resetting and trying to go and get good data, and then we can start making some better decisions down the road once we have those patient care reports, see what treatment's being done, seeing if we're going back, lights and sirens to the hospital, how many times we're riding in with them. We'll have a lot better data. So if we ever want to have something like that at the retreat, I can bring you back a lot of information. You'll be able to make better informed decisions on what we want in our community.

I'd love to hear that at that point in time if we can kind of make note. The other thing I wanted to ask, and I think I just lost it. I hate it when that happens. Yeah, I'm not going to hold up everybody else.

Thank you. All right, Council Member Arms.

I just want to thank you. You have nothing wrong with anybody prior, but you have really brought the fire station to a new level. You have really put your heart and soul into the city, into the work you do, and to the firefighters and everybody in the community. And so it's a real blessing. that you really take it it's just not the job you really try to make the improvements on everything you do and we're so grateful for that because that makes our community better and we thank you for it thank you very much for those kind words council member peterson the noisy one over here travis i want to echo what council member arms said i wrote down here thank you so much you have raised the bar for our entire community

Um, I've watched you look ahead. I've watched you do the hard work. I've watched you come in here and just do everything it took to make us a better city and that should be recognized and we are grateful. So thank you.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome. I do want to ask you on your response time goals. This was 2025 goals.

They're not. I would say they're our current goals right now. Like 2025, we didn't have any. Yeah, we didn't have a way to really measure goals and break it out. So I think this is what we kind of have, which David's doing in our budget, our program-based budgeting, is what we're looking at for what success looks like. This is what... our battalion chiefs will have access to on their cell phones. They can see performance. They can talk about their crews every single day. You actually see it in the kitchen table, right? They'll know how fast they got out of the station if they made their go on that call. It's going to be a reminder every single day. So this is a starting point. Again, there are numbers I used before that I found to be using it with my medical directors of it worked really great where I came from. We may want to raise the bar here. We may find that you know, it's an unrealistic goal. But again, we don't really have data other than when you look back at what was given in the previous reports, it's not very well filtered data and it's every single medical call. Um, and sometimes medical calls, we don't have a response cause we're added onto it and we're already there. So that gives us like a zero response time. So I think this is, this is just the kind of the starting point again.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

Thanks again, Chief. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Appreciate you.

Follow-up question? Quick one?

We have one more question. I'm sorry. Councilman Romero has another question.

It's not actually a question, but I'm reflecting on governmental programs and process improvement and how things take on a life of their own. And I don't see any evidence of that at all with the fire station. In fact, I see everything going along smoothly. But I would just urge caution that in the processes that you continue to look carefully at the data and the information and that it's driven in the method and the collection, that it doesn't take on a life of its own so that it loses sight of the end result. I don't see any evidence of that with what you're reporting and what you're stating, but just keep an eye on it because, like I said, programs have a way of just ballooning, and the tangible outcome is not necessarily valuable. So that's just a matter for the record, not a matter of correction or anything like that. Thank you.

All right. We are going to move on to the police department presentation discussing school zone and park area traffic enforcement cameras. Here to introduce that is our police chief, Mr. Tony Slowik.

all right good afternoon mayor and council my pleasure to be here today i actually am filling in for sergeant um bilesma he actually did this project um and was planning on presenting today unfortunately we are down staff and he's he's our our patrol supervisor so he needs to be out on the road so today we're talking about automated uh traffic cameras This came to council through a citizen comment period at the May 19th city council meeting. And after talking with administration, it was decided that we wanted to bring this forward to just explain what this program is in the state. Really, our objectives here really are to give you some information, talk about the safety program with the automated traffic cameras, and then costs and next steps. And when we're saying next steps, we are looking for some direction from council on if you would like more information or any action from engineering or the police department or any other staff. So automatic traffic cameras are different than what you might hear on the news, which is automatic license plate readers. These are two different things. Automatic traffic cameras have been in place in Washington State since around like 2014 or so. Often you're going to see them as red light cameras that are like in Linwood or other major cities. Cities, they also are used often in school and park zones as a way to mitigate speeding and then you just don't have enough officers to do traffic enforcement in those areas. They also can be done at high collision areas as well. The cameras are designed to take a photograph of the vehicle and license plate, but not of the driver or passengers. They also are not tied to any AI system or database that automatically checks the registration of the vehicle. So they're independent of any of that. which is also what you hear in the news with flock cameras and those things which are automatic license plate reader cameras. Violations and review are all manually done. This is done initially by a contracted company that installs the camera systems. It then comes over to law enforcement to review the photograph taken for a violation, and then also processed through city staff that processes the violations. It does maintain due process rights. This could be through our municipal court that we have contracts with district court, or it could be through a different process designed in our city ordinance that would need to be created. Um, so often people are like, Hey, these are great ideas because it's going to bring in a lot of revenue for the city. Uh, the reality is, um, uh, there are already, um, the revised code of Washington already has speeding and school zone via, um, uh, fine amounts that when an officer observes, um, those school zone infractions, uh, it's almost double the speed limit or double the fine amount. Uh, they can, uh, a violator can be fined for that amount, um, in the. automatic traffic camera, we would need to create our own city ordinance. And there's an example of Michael Tio's up there. And then they created an ordinance that was for those automatic traffic camera violations, which is a not it's a non moving violation and it's a city ordinance and it would need to be less than whatever the school zone fine amount is. So that's just an example there. The way that the program works is that You sign a contract with a company that installs the cameras. It's at no cost to the city. The cameras are roughly about $4,000 per device per month. So they're pretty expensive. The fines that are collected through that month is what pays for the services of the cameras. And then anything over that goes back to the city's uh traffic fund so you then have to create a traffic fund and that traffic fund can be spent for for specific costs so that traffic fund and it's under senate house bill 2384 says that the revenues can be used for traffic safety related construction preservation and maintenance camera operations and safety improvements cannot be used for employees can't be it can be used for equipment those things but it is very defined there additionally there are some revenue requirements so you have to be in a population of at least 10 000 people which we are the you have to the areas that you're looking at must be have an above average injury crash rate or some speeding in school zones and those type of things must not impact populations that. Different populations in town, so that part of a traffic study evaluates those things and then it must be provided direct traffic safety benefit after four years. Any money that we unease unspent money that the city would have in that fund. 25% of that money automatically goes back to the state and it goes into a traffic fund called the Cooper Jones Active Transportation Safety Account. And that actually pays for what a lot of our safety program, um, items are. So for example, today, uh, the Washington state traffic safety commission just announced that there's a 1000 grant for a dollar grant for law enforcement agencies to gut, to get radar guns. So I could go and apply for that $1,000 to get that, that radar gun. That came from this Cooper Jones active transportation because other cities in the community or in the state have this program going and then they contribute back to that unspent amount. And this is really a hard slide to see, so I'm going to slide over here. So what would be the next steps if we decided we wanted to move forward with this program? So it's compiled data and collision and ticket information over the last three years. That's done through city engineering, through the police department. We already have our IRTPO going, so we're already looking at a lot of what that data is. There's a speed studies required. So you actually go out for an RFP to contract for whatever company we would have to do this program. They would help with that speed study. We would do an engagement with courts to determine can the courts process because we have a contract for our municipal court. We don't manage that internally to the city. We want to make sure that their staffing can process those amounts. Court staff can actually process be paid for through this program of revenues collected, but like law enforcement or city engineering staff could not. would need to develop a new city ordinance for this program and then we would need to train a staff who are evaluating the violations to make sure that they are violations because they do have to be approved by law enforcement and then also the finance staff who would be submitting those invoices for payment of violators and I believe that's all I've got so I'm happy to take any questions

So from start to finish, if they decide that they want you to move forward with this, how long is this going to take? I think we're 18 months out. 18 months out. And how many of these cameras are you going to need?

So I believe we would have three major school zones, Regatta, Whidbey Avenue, and then Heller Street. So those are our three major school zones. And I believe we would have one or two major park zones, possibly Southeast Bayshore Drive right there, and then also Fort Nugent would be our park zones. So they would have cameras in either direction. What I just say that was five different locations. So 10 cameras total.

And then you mentioned that staff would need to process the internal stuff. What would, what does that look like for your current staff? Are you going to need additional staff?

Yeah, I think that would be leveraging. How do we leverage the ERP system? All of that. I think there would have to be a really good conversation with finance and how that works.

Well, best guess, are you going to need more people or not? They're going to want to know that.

That's why I'm asking. Yeah, I think honestly it would require at least one additional staff within the city. I think then the court would be the other question. Do they need extra? Do they need other staff as well? Or can they process it? I know that they have been asking for more traffic infractions, because that brings more revenue back to them. So I'm unsure what their staffing looks like.

Sure. OK. I'm not worried about the courts. I was just worried about us. All right. With that, I'll turn it over to council now. So yes, Council Member Romero.

In general principle, I support this system. I just need to make point that there's a cost associated with it and then there's a net gain or loss with regard to the costs. Are you able to speak at all with regard to the experiences of other departments as far as, because of course the contractors are going to be looking at their profitability and they're going to try to determine what works best for them monetarily. So would you speak to that matter or?

Yeah, I'll say as we spoke with other jurisdictions that have these programs, they are leveraging the technology in lieu of staff. They are a lot of those locations maybe had a traffic program at some point and then disbanded the traffic program because their patrol numbers have increased and they just didn't have enough staff to add to patrol so I think for us around here honestly I think that we have the bandwidth to do that traffic enforcement I'm not necessarily I'm not by providing this presentation is not saying I believe we need to move forward with this We wanted to educate council. I do believe we had the bandwidth and the additional staff that were onboarding to do traffic enforcement. We also earlier this year went out and purchased two motorcycles for a dedicated traffic staff. I do believe that in a community like ours, the face-to-face interaction is extremely important and citing somebody by mail is not necessarily the best course of action. It sometimes is what needs to happen, but should not be the routine.

Follow-up question, thank you, Mayor. I'm reminded of a traffic violator. I stopped doing 80 miles an hour on a close call in a school zone. The particular hate and discontent factor with regard to being held accountable, about damage to the equipment. Uh, can you speak to that matter of, uh, you know, vandals, uh, who can't stand to be held accountable with regard to their unsafe practices and then they destroy the equipment.

I think, I think you can look statewide that the, we've had an increase in DUIs. We've had an increase in reckless driving all since 2020 since we have had a change in our traffic laws and engagement and, um, pursuits and all of those type of things. The legislatures have corrected some of that language, which has given us more ability to stop and pursue vehicles. This is just statewide, which has brought those traffic numbers back down. Um, so I, I, I think that often, and this is experience from my direct experience as being a motor officer is the, uh, the interaction that you have when you observe that offense can often stop or prevent future things from occurring. It also, um, curbs that appetite of just, uh, somebody who feels like, oh, there it's a lawless, um, street and we can do whatever we want out there. So. I think the sooner we can have that contact, the better. And that doesn't always mean enforcement. I mean, that means often it could be a stern warning and there's no ticket. So just like mayor's happy with me doing this.

Mayor encourages tickets. Yes, Council Member Stuckey.

So a couple things to highlight. This came mostly from a public comment, correct?

It did. And it's not the first time we've heard it. So I think it got to the point where we felt like there should just be some more information.

But the public comment certainly helped.

Oh, 100%.

And so as much as I get the reputation of being the Facebook guy, I always encourage people to do public comments. Not that the problem will always be fixed, but if something's written and there's a good argument, we always typically look at it as we are now.

And this was an in-person public comment. So this was somebody who actually came here in person and we actually set up a meeting with the person afterwards and all of that.

So we always encourage that level of participation. A hundred percent. A couple of questions I'm going through. I mean, you touched on it, but right now there's kind of the, the, the dirty word of the flock camera. We see that a little bit with home Depot, which private property, you know, so is what makes the flock camera, a flock camera, as opposed to what you're suggesting. Is it the AI component? It is. Okay. Um, How do you handle... If this isn't taking a photo of the people in it, what if I'm driving... my neighbor's car. Is that ticket then going to be sent to my neighbor under the impression that he is the one driving the vehicle?

No, it's sent to the registered owner. Sure. So there is a, there is in the, the house bill, there is the ability to write the ordinance so that the registered owner can appeal the infraction and say, Hey, I wasn't the driver. They are then supposed to let you know who the driver is, but, but you know,

Because I could see that being issue or people moving, not updating their address and and what happens in a case like that? I mean, it looks like eventually collections would be.

It's correct, yeah, so because it's a non moving violation and it is not a. Anything in the revised code of Washington, it's a city ordinance. The step would be collections would be the term for for receiving it.

I do. I do worry about that component, though, with not knowing who's driving. You kind of touched on it, but this does take away officer discretion.

As well, not necessarily. I mean, you could. So what it does is there's a radar attached to the camera. The radar measures the speed of the of the vehicle. It then takes the photograph of the vehicle. The officer can look at that and let's say that it was a time where school was actually out because it was an early out day. The officer can look at that, see, oh, there was actually no school in session. They can say we're not issuing a citation for this. Also, we can set parameters up where we say, hey, we're only enforcing 10 miles over above the speed limit or something like that. Not saying that's the course we should do, but you can allow there to be some variation with that. So just because a violation was confirmed by the company, because that's initially what happens, it does come back to the agency to issue that violation.

Do you have... Maybe because it sounds like there's some RFQs that have to go out to do speed studies and things like that to see if the cameras are warranted. Any guess on a cost?

Yeah, so it's really just the cost of the camera. So what will happen is you sign up for the RFP. The company, so the company cost, we know that there's other costs, but the company cost would be, the cost of as many of those cameras that you would set up. So say if we're putting up 10 cameras, it's $40,000 a month. A month, yeah. Each camera is $4,000. So you're looking at, you know, I think what was the lowest dollar in Mount Mukotia was $180, an infraction. So, you know, your 120 tickets or whatever that would be. Yeah.

And, you know, I'm glad that you touched on where is the money going, because whenever I hear any comments about cameras, it's it always dives into, well, the city is just trying to pump up their budget by giving more tickets. And we're very restricted on how that money can be used. I guess in closing, you're looking for direction. I don't hate it, but I do like what you touched on of right now, we're not a fully staffed department. I would like to see what it looks like when we are a fully staffed department and the impact on that. And if we become fully staffed and this still seems to be an issue, it would be nice to see, okay, do you add one or two more officers or do you go the camera route? So it's something that I'd, I personally would put on the back burner as in this might be something worth looking into, but first I want to see what a fully staffed department looks like. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Council member. Can I just ask one clarifying question before I call on you? Um, you keep saying it's a non moving violation, but if the car is moving, how is it nonmoving?

It's because, because the way that the Senate bill is written, it automatically makes it a nonmoving violation.

Okay.

And that's why it's a city ordinance. It also doesn't go as a point to get insurance or any of those types of things.

So it's the House bill that makes it that way? That's correct. Okay. It's the way that the legislature- I just wasn't understanding that piece of it, so. Yes, Mayor Pro Tem.

Thank you, that was one of the questions I had written down. The question that I keep asking myself over and over again is, what would success look like? You know, why are we doing this and what would, why, why initiate and run a program and fund a program if it's not gonna, you know, meet your potential end goal. So what is our potential end goal? So that would be better school zone safety, less accidents, less injuries. Like how, how would we measure success?

Yeah, I, I agree. I think that knowing what the outcome is or what the goal of our outcome is, is important. I think that that school zone safety is extremely important. I will off, uh, often the perceived, um, observation by individuals is not necessarily what's going on all the time. So you see one vehicle speeding or what appears to be speeding, uh, you know, at an excessive speed. That might be somebody going eight miles over the speed limit. Could be reasonable or not. Still might be a violation. But because the roads narrow and those type of things, it might feel more than that. I think the other challenges we have are the congestion. And regatta is the big area. because of Olympic View that that narrowing of the roadway there the lack of shoulder for parent pickup and drop off or student pickup and drop off parking really create some challenges and we just have to actively work with the school on how to work through some of that thing it's nothing's going to be perfect until there's a redesign of the roadway which I don't think is any it's not in the works I think the other piece is we do have two speed signs that you've seen they've got reader boards on them those actually have the ability to take traffic counts So we've talked as a group when traffic goes back or when schools goes back in session, posting those in school zones and using those to get better traffic data so that we can put that out to the community. So we actually have accurate speed numbers that also drives enforcement. So we know that, Hey, if, If school starts at 9 o'clock at an elementary school, but we're seeing high speed between 8 and 845, then we know which street to be on when those are posted out there.

Thank you. Thank you. You brought that down really nicely, too, not just from the why, but the how and the when. I live in, I live kind of in the vicinity of Ohio and Broadview, um, you know, and the high school for that matter. So, you know, lots of school zones happening. The way I turn out of my driveway will definitely depend on what time of day it is and what day of the week it is. Um, and all of that. So I have witnessed certainly some bad behavior on the part of, of drivers. And I have heard it's probably one of the most common comments I get when I'm talking to people in the community is the, uh, people, I think like speeding in general lately just has been a topic, but you know, the school zone thing has definitely been cause for alarm and I think a valid cause for alarm and, and you touched on it. It's the, is it our perception because we happen to be right there, that happens to be where the road narrows, this happens to be the time of the day, or is this actually a problem? And so we can't address that problem until we know exactly what it is. So regardless of how we move forward on the camera thing or the not camera thing, I think that gathering whatever data is within our power to gather and or afford to pay someone to gather would be worth that information because it will tell us yeah we're the highest traffic i mean just unbiased log this definitively quantifiably this is where the most cars are going on at any certain time or day and so we can find problem areas and focus our attentions in those problem areas unfortunately with something like a law enforcement thing or speeding Unless there happens to be a traffic enforcement officer sitting right there when the thing happens, what other options do we have? And so cameras would be the next kind of obvious solution, so to speak, because we can only hire so many traffic enforcement officers. But when you're talking like 40 grand a month, we can hire people. For that kind of money. Like actual people.

Yeah. $40,000 a month. I don't think you're going to get $40,000 a month in traffic violations.

Well, right. But if we're willing to spend that, you know, is what I'm saying. And I'm far less, if it ended up being neutral or even costing the city a little bit of money, if we could go two years from now and say, wow, our accidents or injuries or whatever has gone down this amount, To me, that would be worth an investment. This is not a money-making scheme or anything I have any interest in profiting from. I want to see results in the form of safe kids. The big guns, yeah. He's been back there redesigning roads for the last 15 minutes.

And I will just add that engineering does have some data that they receive. A lot of that's through, we don't use it too much at the police department. We can get access to it, but it does show some of that speed data because it uses cell phones and And as you have any of your phone that's turned on and uses GPS, all that data is going to the company and it's sold. And that's how that works.

Yeah, that's how they measure the number of people that showed up to an event or something. Yeah. Alex?

Yeah. Hi. I'm your city engineer, Alex Warner. I just felt like I needed to chime in here with some of the questions that are being asked. So I've worked with Chief Sloak over the years. And traffic calming, you've got education, enforcement, engineering. So those are the three sides of our traffic calming triangle. With our comprehensive safety action plan we adopted last year, there are some recommendations in that. One of those tools that you can use is the speed radar enforcement cameras. The other piece is we have this traffic data available to us currently. We pay about $19,000 annually for a subscription to this big data that the chief just referenced, and we can run reports anywhere across the city. And it is basically, you know, the most recent real time data that that's available. So we no longer have to go out and put the little traffic counter pucks out in the street and wait, you know, two weeks to collect the data. So that stuff is already in place. Okay. And how about I'll just stop right there. This is a great conversation. And I just wanted to let you all know. Thank you.

Thank you for that. That is helpful. I think that something like an automatic camera enforcement that is certainly one of the potential tools in our toolbox that we could use but as you mentioned there is also a number of others and so if we can really identify what the issue is then we can identify the best way to approach it so i'm you know don't not gonna automatically green light up a camera project until i have a whole lot more information but this is a necessary conversation so Thank you for taking the time to look into the request that we got from the public and bring us this information today. Thanks.

I'm assuming these cameras will only work during school hours, too, or is it always the school zone?

No. So they work all the time. They don't they're they're a solar camera that's just on all the time. The data, though, It doesn't get stored on those non-school zone times is what happens.

Because just doing rough math, you would have to have almost seven tickets a day to come out to the $40,000 a month. Do you have a better math than me?

My math was not good, so I'll turn it over to the mathematician over here.

He probably is going to tell me I'm wrong, but go ahead.

Hi, David Goldman, Deputy City Administrator and Finance Director. I hate to throw a wet blanket on the party regarding spending city resources, but next week I'll be doing the mandatory mid-biennial, well, the mid-year review on our revenues and also providing the city council with the unaudited preliminary results for 2025. and our major sources of revenue are really not growing fast enough to keep up with inflation our sales tax is looking like it's going to go down a little bit and then sideways our property tax grows by the one one and a half percent um our utility tax is growing a little bit faster but it's still it's not the it's not the major source of revenue in the in the general fund And, you know, our transportation revenues aren't really growing. It's just based on the motor vehicle fuel tax, and those are kind of not really growing that well. So I just want to keep everybody's mind in perspective of that when we go through the budget process, which we're going to start soon. The first part of it is going to be next week when we talk about revenues, and then we'll get into capital projects and all the other items on the agenda for the budget. So just keep everything in mind with that context. Thank you very much. Thank you.

It's very fun to work with, David. Yes, Council Member Arms.

Well, I realize the cameras are kind of expensive, and that's probably not the best use of our money. But the problem is, as we all know, Regatta is a mess, has been a mess. And the problem is when you turn down to go to Crescent Harbor between, and even though that's county, The problem is the traffic is horrific from the school all the way up to when you turn right onto Regatta when you're coming that way. I mean, I've counted a hundred cars coming up that road. And so that is something to keep in mind. We have an inordinate amount of traffic on there and it's very hard to get in and out, turn right or left on Regatta. And, um, It's a disaster and nobody drives right, probably including me. Uh, but I'm just saying, and we don't, we probably can't have a camera. It's probably too expensive, but we're God is a mess and it's not getting any better.

Understood. Thank you. Have you also shared that concern with the Island County Sheriff Rick Felici too? Yes, you do. So council member Peterson.

Thank you. Wow. My question, my first question, Chief, is underneath the revenue requirements, where it says revenue funds and population of 10,000 plus. First bullet point, must fund locations in low income areas and areas of above average injury crash rates and be proportionate to the population. First of all, what does that low income thing mean? And are we above average and what, what are we drawing our average from?

Yeah. So it's very, it's very broad.

Okay.

And I will say that it all, the that's why you, that's why you go under out for RFP, you get the contract, the company comes in and does the study. They are familiar with doing all of that analysis with you. And, and so, I'm not the right person to tell you about the demographics or any of those things. I can just tell you what's in the bill. But again, it's very vague in the bill on what that actually means and how you implement it.

Oh, okay. So it sounds to me from just the conversation is we most probably would need to have a dedicated staff looking at infractions, which means we might have to hire somebody if all these people are whizzing by.

I think you're going to have to have a dedicated person that does the processing of the invoices or, or, or that's part of their job. So I don't know if that's, you know, I feel like that's what the staff person would be. I don't think you need any more law enforcement staff, but some staff, but, but because what, like for Michael Tio, they process the infractions daily with their patrol officers. So they've trained staff who are on duty every day and that they're already doing traffic enforcement. They just take 30 minutes out of their day as part of a supervisor's duty, and they process those infractions.

Oh, I'm so not sure that's good use of time, but that's not for me to say.

That's just how they chose to do it.

I get it. You mentioned the three schools, the two parks, and one other place when you were talking about potential placement.

Yeah.

I totally could understand the schools, but, and the parks, the, the other place, do we, do we have a problem? I don't know about if people wasn't around our streets and causing Hayden.

I will say Fort Nugent is, is a pretty, if Fort Nugent, it can be very challenging. That is a park that is overutilized and, um, that does not have the parking necessary, especially during. summer soccer season or any of the soccer leagues, football, Saturday football, that area becomes very crowded and it impacts the roadway and all of that.

But that's not what the camera is for. The camera is to find speeders, correct?

Yeah, so in lieu of slowing down, they just are driving the 35 miles an hour, which is what the roadway is. And, and not, and now, but, but you're coming in from county, which was 45 miles an hour or 50 miles an hour. And so often people are driving 10 over the speed limit or something like that could be or over the hill.

Is it, is it well-marked that they're supposed to slow down? Oh yeah. Okay. Um, I did the numbers and I don't know if my math is any better than the mayor's, but I'm sure his is better than mine sounded to me with 10 cameras. we're looking at $450,000 a year. Is that about right? I don't know. I will defer.

I would defer to the mass mathematicians, but that's what it sounds like to me.

I just broke it down to how many tickets a day it would take.

Okay. So this just seems like an awful lot of money to me to, um, spend. Is it worth one? person being spared, being hit, I hadn't been hit. Sure, sir. But we don't have any way to guarantee that. Um, and for my money and I understand that we don't have a lot, I would prefer more active policing on the streets. That's just where I stand for it. And the other thing that I would say is I remember back in the day when seatbelts were not going to be an infraction on their own. You had to be caught not wearing a seatbelt. And now you can be pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt. So it went from a non to a moving violation. And so it takes a stroke of a pen at the legislature's will to make a non- moving violation a moving violation and i don't know how much i trust that i personally would not be overly interested in spending the time and the resources to move much further on this but i really appreciate hearing about what's out there and some ideas potentially for okay thank you yeah thank you very much councilmember wittgenstein

Thank you, Chief, for investigating this. And the staff member who did, the police officer, please thank him. Too bad he had to work versus coming in this nice air conditioned building we have. Sorry, I got it. Are we working with the school district at all in these areas? Yeah, we are. OK. And do they come up with their own ideas on how to mitigate some of these problems?

Alex says yes.

And so the reason I say that is because in my math and I don't know, it's close to a half a million dollars to do this per year. How many officers can you put on the on the street with a half a million dollars?

a lot. I think we're at five, four, four, probably four, four, four, four, four, pretty healthily. Right. Yeah. I will just remind everybody the intent of the program is to be self-sufficient on violations are, are, are bringing in the revenues and then that's, what's paying for itself. It's not money coming out of the general fund. However, you can't bank on that. And once you sign a contract for, for a system, you're, you're locked into a contract.

Yeah, I'm a big proponent. I think we should do everything we can first to mitigate the problem. If we have to do more research of our own, you know, I love the idea of putting those trailers up. I'd put them up on Regatta now, to be honest with you, because a lot of people are, it's busier during the non-traffic, prime traffic, or 15 minutes of rush hour in the afternoon. Sorry.

Yep.

It takes five hours to get through Seattle, 15 to get through Oak Harbor, and we're more upset about getting through Oak Harbor in 15 minutes. Makes no sense to me. Having driven, I drive that quite a bit. I can see that that's a problem. I can see it's a problem during the school. Do we have alternatives to like, can we sell that stretch of road to the school? I don't know. I mean, just let them mitigate that problem. They can extend their parking lot. I don't know. Stupid ideas are not stupid ideas. All ideas should be considered, even if they don't land on the wall if they stick. I have quite a few questions, actually, but I won't go through all of them. It's weird. You're blind as a bat over there. The lights bug my eyes, and I can't read up close. That was that one. You answered the study piece of doing a study and then Alex mentioned that we had access to some data we can get. I don't know that I'm kind of with the Council member Peterson down here. I don't see much. funds and time and effort to be put into this when we have a long way to go before we're even at a place where this is a necessity. And for me, cameras that can potentially be turned six years down the road to do something else bothers me quite a bit. I don't know that, I avoid traffic areas, to be honest with you. Oh, I shouldn't touch that. You know, I drove to the airport, no, I drove Sunday down to meet somebody in Linwood, and I went through three of those just on the way. And Google Maps will tell you. photo trafficking ahead, you know, whatnot. So there is warning out there. I'm glad you brought up the piece about the low-income component. I think that needs to be brought forth and talked about as well, that, you know, the tickets can be reduced as a result. Yeah, I think it's reduced as a result of proving their status, either with SNAP benefits or WIC or I believe is what I kind of saw. I think that's, oh yeah. And again, I'm not, having a third party vendor come in and have access to people's information, I don't know. Well, they get access like anybody, just like the GPS talks after access. So behind the scenes, access of the pictures are there.

So what they have access to is the license plate number. They don't run the registration. That's done at the department. And they have access to the photo and the speed that was showing with the radar. That's all they have access to. There is no stored data where the registration, the registered owner, any of that stuff is put into their database. It's all then on the city side.

That can change though.

If you gave them access. But nothing's uploaded in their system for that.

And so, yeah, I'd just be very cautious. I appreciate the person coming in and expressing a concern. And I'd like to see us do all sorts of mitigation. Maybe we need a civilian speed patrol that can stand out there and really help the kids during the traffic time. Maybe some... Some of that. I don't know. I don't know what we can do. We definitely need to figure out how to do it where it's not going to cost us five officers or four officers that we could put on the because I'd rather see us spend the money giving you an extra four officers to relieve the burden of your department, to be able to do more things within our community and and Take care of some things, I can't find my words, but take care of some things that you can't take care of now because you're understaffed, right? And so to me, that's a wiser way to spend money if we had the money to spend, which we don't have the money to spend. I mean, that's kind of what I heard Dave Goldman over there sharing with us. And so I would not be in favor of us spending any money to do the research other than what we've already done.

Thank you.

Yes, Council Member Stuckey, really quick. And then let's be clear, though. We do have the money to spend on officers. We're trying to find qualified candidates. So we are in the process of vetting people for those positions. So that is not an issue. We have the money for that. Let's be very clear, though, because we're sending the wrong message to the public.

No, that's not what, no, no, no, wait a second. I was not saying that we don't have, we're short staffed. Now I know we're short staffed and I know we have money to take care of those. I'd still rather spend 500,000 on four more officers in addition to.

Okay, I just wanted to be clear that we're sending the right message. Yeah, so Council Member Stuckey.

I was gonna take, say something similar where we're looking for officers if you'd like to apply. I think also too, not everything works for everybody when it comes to, uh, in enforcement. And, um, I like what Alex was talking about. The, uh, the engineering and things of that nature and the traffic calming devices. I mean, when I see one of those things that flashes the speed, I'll be honest. When I see one of those things that flashes the speed, but also has the lights, Yeah. We do have in that plan that you're referring to, aren't we buying one or two more of those? I mean, aren't we getting more of those every year, having somebody put away for those sort of things? Couldn't we get one or two more of those and put those in problem areas? Yeah, the trailers.

Yeah, we have $100,000 annually for the Safe Streets implementation. We've been using those more recently on the rapid flashing beacons, the marked, or the flashing crosswalks. So we have two of the flashing speed signs in place. One of them is on Fort Nugent as you come into the city. The others over on O'Leary and both of those were put in because of traffic calming and the traffic was warranting those, but specifically purchasing new ones that's not in place right now. But again, it's something in the toolbox we could put resources towards in the future.

Could there be a cost sharing opportunity with the school district if we had it dedicated to school areas? No.

Okay, so some grant opportunities. Well, no.

I mean, if we said that we're going to put some traffic calming devices on the roads right in front of the schools.

We just did on Regatta at Olympic Field.

Is there any chance in the future that there would be any opportunity of part of it coming from their budget? That's what I'm asking.

I think we could always have the conversation.

We can absolutely have the conversation, but they're facing serious challenges. Now they're facing layoffs again. And we've actually had to take on more responsibility for even the police resource officer being in the high school next year.

So fair enough. So yeah, I would just, I like the idea of having more of those trailers and things of that nature. I don't know if that's more, I'm thinking if you're someone, especially from out of town, You're only here for a couple of days. You're speeding to that area. You don't know the cameras are there. You get a ticket later. And when we talk about those cameras being self-sustaining as the goal, sure, we could start at 10 miles over. What are we going to do when they're not self-sustained? Now we're going to put it five miles over. Moment of honesty, I got pulled over a month and a half ago for going five over in a school zone. I have not gone five over in a school zone since. That, to me, was a whole lot more effective than getting a ticket. But different things motivate different people. So that's all I have.

I love that that motivated you, but I still would love to see us get tickets. So because that would really, not you, I'm just saying in particular, all of us, it would motivate us a lot more. I will, yeah, Council Member Marshall. Okay, and then really quickly though before Council Member Marshall, I just want to say that the school district is working really hard within the means of the budget that they have. So, and we're partnering where we can, but we're also being respectful of the decisions that Dr. Michelle is having to make and the choices that she's making. Also, I know David's wanting to paint a gloom and doom picture, but we are very fortunate in this city compared to probably 90 percent of the cities out there, and you guys are going to see that when we report out on financial numbers. We're in very good shape, and I'm proud of that. With that, Council Member Marshall.

Thank you, Mayor. Chief, thank you for that presentation. I too am a little hesitant on this just One, the cost factor, right? It's $40,000 a month. We'd have to write on average 170 tickets a month just to cover that cost. And it's not all about cost recovery. Obviously, it's about keeping those areas safe. But you had already mentioned, I think the active policing is the best approach, the ability to talk to the individuals. This only addresses one aspect of driving safety and speeding component of it, but that doesn't take into factor some of the other things that your officers can observe and pull people over for and have conversations about that truly keep those areas safe and safe. Just addressing one portion of it is not a holistic approach. I like the idea of continuing to do traffic calming measures, whether it be through those signs or through speed bumps or other things that are just kind of one-time costs as opposed to these ongoing costs. And then I'm not super crazy about the idea that you really don't know who's actually in that vehicle. And so we're actually ticketing the vehicle owner and not necessarily the perpetrator of the speeding. And then that puts an undue burden on, you know, in the case that Council Member Stuckey mentioned, if he's driving his neighbor's car, now his neighbor has to go and defend himself against a ticket that he really had nothing to do with. And so I'm not super crazy about that aspect of it as well. I'd much rather see us investing in additional officers. And Chief, I know your officers do a great job of trying to proactively patrol those school areas. I can say from my time when I was with ICOM that In the mornings, officers were typically calling in and saying that they were in this particular area, and that's where they were patrolling and making those emphasis. And so I would much rather see us continue to do that, have the proactive policing in that regard, and use the money on our officers and potentially other traffic calming measures.

Did you have anything you wanted to add? Thanks, Council Member Marshall. Council Member Romero.

In light of the discussion with the council and the mayor, I would say in the Navy, belay my last. So that means I'm holding back on the support for the cameras because the cost factor and the active policing alternative seems to have stronger benefits. persuasive power i did want to ask the chief this is there a way to do a trial run on some of the cameras or do we have to it's a all or nothing type of arrangement i mean i'm not i'm not recommending it but i was just you would need to go and do you would need to go do um uh all of this traffic study before you're able to put anything out so there's a lot of work that has to go into it and also you would have to it's an all or nothing as far as the cameras themselves you'd have to get the whole package of however many cameras you said

You would need to have cameras go in both directions. Otherwise, you're going to have blind spots.

Okay. You're saying different locations, though. But, I mean, obviously, Regatta would be a more intensive safety issue than some of the other locations, in my opinion.

Yeah. I think until you do a traffic study, I don't think you really know the full impact.

Okay. So I withdraw my recommendation with regard to the cameras. Thanks.

Council Member Wittgenstein. Just a follow-up question. Alex, you said we've just finished putting some stuff on regatta. Can you tell us what those are and what other steps we might be able to do, like speed bumps every five feet or something? I mean, they're 5,000 apiece last time you told us. So, I mean, one month worth, we can put, what, 20 of them on that stretch of road. And the other question I had was, if we do do a study of our own, What would the impact be to that street if we just lowered the speed limit from Whidbey Avenue to Crescent Harbor? 25.

So Surrogata is complicated. One of the largest complications is the eastern half of that roadway is Navy property. And that actually extends out to the center line of the road in certain locations. So we're extremely limited. Basically, we can't do much on that eastern half where the schools are located. They had so they own the half in front of the schools in certain portions of regatta with their property.

They have all that. OK. Yes.

So the schools are working with the Navy, the Navy on that. We did overlay the road several years ago after Waterman was replaced. We re striped it to ten foot wide lanes, which are two feet narrower than were there before. The idea of that is to help add the traffic calming. Right. at olympic view elementary we installed the flashing crosswalk at the southern driveway to help kids and parents walk to the school from alternate parking locations and we just completed the curb ramps the concrete curb ramps just i think two weeks ago so that enhancement is finally complete The school zones are going to be adjusted to now incorporate or encapsulate both Olympic View and the Forest View Learning Center. That 20 mile an hour flashing zone is going to be about twice the length as it was previously. That's another change that's going on there. And then if you reduce the speed limit on a street, you want to make these other improvements or traffic calming reductions to kind of imply to the driver that that's the appropriate speed. Otherwise, you could just create a situation where you have people speeding or they continue to drive 30 plus miles an hour, which would then put more of a burden on enforcement. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you.

All right. Is that it from everyone? Chief, thank you very much. I think you have your resounding answer. All right. Well, that's it. So thank you.