Ad Hoc Committee on Police and Community Relations - Regular Meeting

All right, everyone. This is the Community Livability and Public Safety Committee of the Olympia City Council. It's May 27th at 530 p.m. My name is Dani Madrone. I serve as the chair and I'm calling the meeting to order. For roll call, we have all committee members present. Hello, committee member Kelly Green, committee member Ian Huen. We need an agenda to proceed with our meeting. So could I get a motion?

You have to approve the agenda.

I'll second. Okay. All in favor? Aye. Aye. You know, unanimous. That's amazing. All right. Public comment. We don't often have public comment with this committee, but we do have two people today. We've got one person signed up in person and one person online who is I see that they are there. So I'll first go ahead and call up the in-person public commenter. So, Anna, please make your way to the podium. And I don't have a timer, but we don't have a whole lot of people. So, you know, two minutes ish. But, you know, I won't be, you know, kicking you out if you go a little over.

Hi there. Do I take it away now?

Yeah, go right ahead. You hear me now? Great.

Well, good evening. My name is Anna Schlecht, an Olympia resident for nearly 50 years. I'm here tonight because of an item on your agenda, but I'm also here speaking because I read a Jolt article in which people made nasty comments about the Inspire Fund. And Rather than right back to the jolt, I would like to share with you that the Inspire Fund was created by a ballot measure that was supported by a very strong majority. A majority of the people in our community support the arts. And it's something that I really believe in. Some of you know that I Spent a little bit of time here at City of Olympia, nearly 40 years working on housing and homelessness. And the way that I portray it is that I believe in bread and roses. I spent 40 years of my career focusing on bread, the survival issues of housing and homeless shelter and services. But I also believe deeply in roses, what we live for. And I'm just really proud of a city that both funds housing, homeless services, but also the arts. I'll just end by saying taxes are what we pay to live in a civilized society. And I'm so grateful to live in the city of Olympia, where I've been for nearly 50 years, and so appreciative of the work that your committee does, your staff do, and that all of our community supports. So thank you very much.

Thank you, Anna. Our next speaker is virtual, and this is Skylar. Skylar, I believe your last name is Red, but I hope you will correct me if I am incorrect. You have the ability to unmute yourself now, and you can go right ahead.

Hi. Yes, my name, I'm Dr. Shiloh Rad, and I am involved in the Olympia Arts community. So I just wanted to speak about two items that are on the agenda in the agenda packet. It talks about the qualitative assessment that's done by the panels for the Inspire Olympia grant. I've talked to Mary Grace a bit about changing some of that assessment. The way arts are assessed is something that I'm very passionate about. I care very deeply about arts assessment. Um, and I, I think that Mary Grace kind of needs the, um, the mandate, you know, she wants, I think she's interested in doing this stuff. We've, we've talked about it a bit, but, uh, there needs to be a little bit of looking at this qualitative assessment because the quantitative qualitative divide is it's, uh, it's non-existent. We can be more pragmatic and we can transcend those differences between qualitative and quantitative. So, um, That's one thing I wanted to talk about. I did share that comment at the CAB meeting as well about the quantitative side of things and integrating those two. But the main thing I wanted to mention tonight was about Decay, one of those who have been recommended to be funded, fully funded, it seems. Yeah. Which is great to hear. DECAY stands for Diverse Events and Creative Arts Yard. If you imagine Olympia, if you think about that spot east of Percival Landing and west of the Hands-On Children's Museum and north of the bus terminal and south of the farmer's market, we've got these few blocks of Olympia, like right next to the food bank, where decay exists. Not just the organization decay, but this is the center of decay in Olympia. Things... urban decay is a real thing and it's ripe for gentrification, right? It sits right across the street from this beautiful hotel, the Double Tree Inn, I believe, right across the street. So this little spot in Olympia, ripe for decay, ripe for gentrification because of its decay. And I just want to make sure we protect spaces like this because decay for me has been really important as a trans person. I felt very included in, uh, at Decay. And, um, yeah, I see more trans people there feel included and authentic than anywhere else I've been in the whole city. So, and I've only been here a little while, a few years, uh, but I've been to a lot of places where trans people show up and Decay is really special. So I want to make sure that this place, um, is protected. So, uh, thank you for, uh, this opportunity to speak, uh, and I wish you all luck with your agenda tonight.

Great. Thank you so much. Appreciate the constructive comments there. Any response from committee members for public comment? Go ahead Ian.

Yeah, I just really appreciate both of our public commenters tonight for, you know, making some time and, you know, we don't always get public comment in this committee and it's really, really nice when we do and we get to hear what things are, what things people appreciate and what things could be going a little better. So I am, I'm really interested in, you know, the feedback about how the arts could be better assessed. And so if I heard you on the qualitative and quantitative and also I'm curious about like, what does that mean to you? And is there more feedback? And, um, so it would be, it would be great, uh, to get, um, even if it's just in an email, just some information about what that looks like, or it sounds like you've connected with Mary Grace. So you could possibly get it through Mary Grace, but I'd love to know more about that. Um, this is a new, uh, still a pretty new funding stream. And if there's ways to pivot and improve the process, then I think we're all probably interested in that. Yeah. And then, oh, and also I have not, I haven't had any interaction with the Decay organization. I know that they're one that we funded through this Inspire grant last year. And what a really special place, you know, for you to be able to be in community with and just the way that you're talking about it. And I think it's really, it's really, really special. So That's that. I feel like that's that additional culture piece for inspire. Right. Sounds like it. It checks a few different boxes for inspire goals. But I think about preserving the culture as well that that space brings, it sounds like. And Anna, if you're still at City Hall, they're listening to us. Um, uh, yeah, I love that you said, you know, I'm just going to come here and tell you why, um, I think inspire is so important and, um, I agree on all those points. So it was really heartened, uh, to hear you say that. And if I had access to a right now on the zoom screen, if I had access to, um, one of those heart reactions, I would do that, but, uh, I'm listening and thanks so much.

You could always do one of these. That works. Yeah, there you go. All right. So up next on the agenda, we have approval of the minutes from May 6, 2026. So if I could get a motion to do so.

Move to approve the minutes.

All in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay, excellent. That brings us to committee business. First order of business is we are going to discuss recommendations related to council-appointed advisory bodies, and I'm going to pass it over to Stacey Ray to lead us through this conversation. Hi, Stacey.

Hey, good evening. Thank you, Chairman Jerome, committee members. So yes, I'm going to talk about council appointed advisory bodies. So we were in front of you earlier this year seeking some direction with regard to council appointed advisory bodies and kind of exploring some potential updates to how our advisory bodies work. First off, before I jump in, I just want to acknowledge that I'm picking up work that Debbie Sullivan had started So, again, she did a tremendous amount of work on the first half of this project. Also, Kelly Persith before her retirement last year. And then also want to, again, introduce Genevieve Canseco-Chan, who's our consultant on this project, who's here with us tonight. And then acknowledge Margo Morales, who's also our team member and has done quite a significant amount of work to support this as well. Myself, Genevieve, and Margo are here to respond to questions, but I will be the one walking us through the presentation and briefing tonight. So let me go ahead and share my screen. Okay. All right. Can everyone see that okay? Yep. Okay. Thank you.

I'm going to adjust here.

All right. OK. So tonight, I'll just recap very briefly the project purpose, talk a little bit about process to date, because we've done some additional work since we were last in front of you. And then I want to highlight some input that we've heard from meeting with advisory body staff, liaisons, and advisory body chairs. I'll talk about the proposal tonight in terms of current system process updates, and included within that, we'll have a conversation a little more broadly. drilling in a little more specifically around recruitment process and timelines. And then we'll talk about the overall recommendations around council-appointed advisory bodies. And we'll talk about it in terms of two options, one being improvements to the current system and the other being transitioning to a multifaceted engagement approach. The last time we were here, these were two options that we started to introduce, and you had told us to move forward with continuing to develop and flesh out both. So tonight, again, we're just seeking your guidance on options for recruitment, and we'll pause and talk about that midway through the restructuring of advisory bodies and also any input or guidance on implementation timelines, which I'll talk about in terms of both options. So just to briefly recap for anyone kind of joining us new to this conversation, we have 14 council appointed advisory bodies. That's really an opportunity for community members to participate in city government. And it's really advisory bodies provide you as a council member, a community member perspective that can support your policymaking and your decision-making. We've talked earlier in this process around council member goals for engagement, and we want to ensure that community members are providing meaningful input that's useful to you, ensure that we have equitable and inclusive engagement, that community members' experience is valued and impactful for them. And we also want to ensure that overall, when we're working with our advisory bodies, that the mechanisms and the framework and the funding is sustainable, that we can continue to support our advisory bodies. So we launched this evaluation for several reasons. One is that we really hadn't been done for quite a while. We also had tried and had success with a number of different ways to engage with community. And we also were finding some advisory bodies having some challenges with either meeting quorum or kind of understanding their purpose or mission. And then again, for budget sustainability reasons, we wanted to look at potential efficiencies. This is an overview of where we are to date with this process. By the time we had come to you earlier in the year, we had already done the deep dive analysis of the current system, had conducted interviews with council and staff. Genevieve had done quite a bit of research around other cities to look what other models we could look to. We also had met with staff liaisons. New since the last time we saw you was conducting a survey of all advisory body members to get their feedback and input on some of the recommendations we're talking about tonight. Meeting twice with the Social Justice and Equity Commission for their feedback as well. And that information, a summary of that was included in your packet as well as the survey results. And then seeking input from advisory body chairs. So this is a high-level overview of the recommendations, and we'll break them down and talk about them a little bit more in detail. But I'm going to talk about them in terms of current system process improvements Last time we talked to you, we introduced some of these and you said, yes, these are great. Move forward with further fleshing these out and developing these. So we'll have some conversation around that. The other bucket, if you will, are community engagement methods and a restructure of advisory bodies that really focus on the development of community academies, which are learning opportunities for community members to learn a bit more about the city and city engagement or can be topic-based. There's the concept of community connectors, which are, you know, working with individuals in the community that may be part of either specific groups or it can help kind of make connections between the city, the council, staff, and those groups within the community. Or community collaborators, which are individuals that may want to be participating in process that can be called in maybe on an ad hoc basis to be part of a group, work on a project, and maybe there's a bit more of a defined scope or timeline. And then lastly, the concept of multidisciplinary advisory bodies that we talked about a little bit last time that we'll go into further. That would be advisory bodies that would line up with our comprehensive plan focus areas. So that's a high-level recap of kind of the all all the recommendations, and then we'll move through in more detail. So we shared those recommendations, as I said, through the process with advisory body chairs, advisory body members through the survey work, and the Social Justice and Equity Commission. I want to talk a little bit about what we heard. So in terms of some potential challenges or concerns, we heard, or excuse me, um, no, actually I'm going to start with support. We're going to start with things that we heard that, um, you had broader support, uh, from those groups, but one for, um, similar to what you shared with us last time, a lot of individuals really supported the administrative improvements or the process improvements. So yes, please, you know, um, Try to shift the recruitment period so that better aligns with work plans and maybe there's some opportunity to improve that process. Look at aligning work plans more effectively with council's work plans. And there's a lot of support for standardizing onboarding and orientation so that all members were having a similar experience and kind of knew what was expected of them when they came on board. There was, you know, there's in general a broad understanding of the need for the city to be sustainable. I think most folks involved in advisory bodies kind of know some of the challenges we've gone through in terms of budget. And so they recognize that this is a reasonable driver for wanting to look at potential other options. There was a lot of broad interest in the multidisciplinary approach. multidisciplinary approach. So the idea that maybe if there were advisory bodies that are working on a broader range of topics, and this came up during the conversation around focus areas, if you had an advisory body that was focused on, say, community livability, then members would have an opportunity to talk about different topics that are broader than their current scope, and they love the idea of bringing together different perspectives. and different interest areas to problem solve and provide guidance to counsel. And lastly, there was just overall broad support for the idea of the different engagement methods that were part of the recommendations. So we heard things like, you know, continue to work off of what's working. So when you're thinking about identifying community collaborators or community connectors, you know, what groups are already naturally organically having success, you know, bringing people together in the community and kind of work with those. The Coalition of Neighborhood Associations was brought up as a good example of that. we really heard an emphasis on meeting people where they are being out in the community. And so they felt like the new methodologies proposed here, like we're more nimble and able to do that better. You know, working through community connectors, for example, who might are trusted partners or already have connections in the community and maybe could introduce us to different places and spaces to kind of meet people. There's a lot of conversation about, wanting to continue to build relational engagement. deepening relationships between the city and community members and people felt that the academies were a good way to do that. Also just, you know, to bring people in and give them an opportunity to do something new with the city who maybe hadn't engaged in the city in any way before. And then also, again, working with trusted partners or collaborators just to build relationships over the course of working on projects together. And then support around choosing the methodology and being very intentional about why you're choosing the outreach method that you are and ensuring to reach diverse communities and being inclusive in that work. The last thing I'll say that came across was A lot of advisory body members and chairs like the idea that there are different levels of involvement. It's a high level of involvement to be on an advisory body for the most part. And so they like the idea that by having connectors and collaborators and academies that, you know, individuals have an option about how involved in the city they can or want to be. And so it's just different pathways for different people. Okay. Okay. Now I'll talk a little bit about some of the concerns that were expressed. I think a lot of this revolved around concerns around the restructuring or potential consolidating of advisory bodies, which we'll go into a little bit more. I don't think that was unexpected. I think what came across loud and clear was a concern about maybe losing depth of expertise, either for members who had been on boards for a long time or Or if there's a consolidating happening, you know, is there a chance that you lose people that have built, have the opportunity to go really deep and have a deep learning and understanding in a certain topic? So definitely some concern around that. There was also some conversation around, well, if there's less, potentially less advisory bodies, is that there's less... Recruitment and then maybe less representation. So really being cautious of being intentional around recruitment to still ensure that there's diverse representation and perspectives at the table. And then just concerned about, okay, if there are less advisory bodies, how might the work get done? Or if there are less members, are there still enough folks available to do the work that are on the work plans? And in large part also still kind of some questions. I think overall there's definitely more to talk about and explore here, but these are kind of initial questions and curiosities. kind of regardless of like if people were in favor of the approach or had concerns, there was a desire expressed to really improve the feedback loop with council, you know, and that kind of applied across the board with every methodology, just wanting to ensure that, you know, have a clear pathway for understanding how their work is received by council and how council and or staff are responding to it. And then there was some kind of questions about differentiating between community collaborators and community connectors.

Any questions about input or feedback so far?

Or should I keep going?

I would say keep going. I see no hands. Okay.

So I want to talk first about current system process improvements. And really, these are what we've been talking about in terms of administrative improvements that help with efficiency and effectiveness. And the first piece I'd like to talk about is the recruitment schedule. So I think that we just heard from you all that this it's a pretty significant lift to recruit for all council appointed advisory bodies to recruit, to advertise, to select, to interview. And so we wanted to start to explore some potential improvements here. Now, one, we've broken these down into three options. Of course, there can always be a mix or a hybrid or some kind of combining of them. But three general concepts. Option A is to shift the... shift the timeline. So we would just move this and actually, and I'll go to this one in a minute, but it would mean recruiting earlier so that members would be appointed earlier and start their terms at the beginning of the year, which really enables them to I'm going to look at Genevieve to see if she wants to add it there, but really enables them to kind of join, get onboarded, orientated, and kick off the work right in alignment with the new, with a new work plan process. So the reason I have a note here about launching that in 2027 is because to move forward with something like this would mean starting the recruitment very, very quickly in order to have it completed by the, by the end of the year. And I'll, maybe touch on this one again in a minute, but option B is the idea of a rolling recruitment. We heard a lot of support around this just to be able to kind of fill vacancies as they come about, really keep advisory bodies moving, keep the momentum moving. And we know that we have year-round interest in advisory bodies. I know I get emails of interest from folks that are like, hey, when is the recruitment period? So we know we have interest and we know that this could be a way to to not only fill vacancies as they come up, but also kind of spread out the workload that's attached to making a selection and appointment process. And then option C is looking at, you know, you could split out recruitment, you know, recruit for some bodies one year and recruit for other bodies the next year. This may be a good fit considering the idea that if we're to transition some advisory bodies into a to look differently or function differently, you may be able to start splitting recruitment now and kind of recruit for those that might stay similar to how they are today and then do future recruitment depending on what the others kind of look like going forward. We'll come back to the conversation in a minute. I just want to highlight the idea of the option A, the shifting the entire timelines is a bit of a visual to just show Like currently right now, we recruit and host interviews September through March, work plan approvals in March, and folks start their appointments in April. This would just help us get them appointed. And then those new appointments would have an opportunity to work on the work plan that they're then going to be carrying out with their colleagues on their advisory body. Let me just double check. Okay. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about the other current system improvements, and then I will pause a couple slides forward and we can talk about the recruitment timeline piece if that's okay. Okay. So the other current system improvements, again, administrative improvements for efficiency and effectiveness include standardizing, onboarding, and orientation. We brought this up last time you supported it, and we largely heard support across the board for this one. There's also established a criteria test for creating a new advisory body. Again, we've largely heard support for this one. And implementing a regular review cycle of existing advisory bodies. So this is a bit of what we're doing now is kind of looking at our existing advisory bodies through maybe through some criteria that we can develop to say, well, is this body still meeting its current purpose and mission? And then lastly, the alignment of advisory body work plans with council work plan. So I'll talk a little bit about the aligning the advisory body work plans. Again, it's a helpful visual that Margo created to currently Um, staff are working on, um, work plans in October and December, the advisory bodies working on them December into February, um, and, uh, with final approval in, in March. And it's right now, it's just out of alignment with when council, when you're working on your work plan, which is generally at your retreat in January. So what we're hoping is just to make some slight changes to the timing so that, um, Staff, you are providing the guidance in your January retreat to then inform the advisory bodies working on their work plans. Okay. So I'll just pause there and mention next I'm going to move into the two options. Yeah, but I'll pause.

Stacey, I do see a hand up here. Go ahead, Callie.

Yeah, thank you. Can you go back one slide, Stacy? Yep. Not having served on an advisory body and been part of how they build their work plans, How, like, would it work to do it concurrently with the council? And why I say that is, like, we do a lot of work plan on the, excuse me, a lot of discussion on the work plan at the January retreat. And while there's a lot that's kind of known about it or a lot of probables, like, the ultimate final product isn't done until after that. So is there a risk that the advisory bodies could be developing work plans around stuff that does not end up on the council work plan? Or, like, I'm just... Is it really feasible for those two to happen at the same time, or does it make more sense for the advisory bodies to discuss it after the full work plan is known?

Yeah. Genevieve, did you want to, I saw you kind of nodding. Did you want to jump in here?

I think that was the end. I mean, and maybe just to clarify, that is sort of the intention, Kelly, is that, you know, that the January, so are we saying that the council's work plan wouldn't be finalized until February? There's a January retreat. And then when is the final version of the council? My understanding was that it is when the council's fully approved work plan is is set that then that gets distributed or referrals and get assigned to the advisory bodies. And that's when they would begin. So new members starting in March, right. Would, would, would receive with, along with their existing advisory body members would receive the referrals and March timeframe so that it's not like it's the, the it's not out of alignment, but am I, am I misinterpreting that timeline Stacey or.

I think that's it. I think that the piece we wanted to try to get to was that advisory bodies are informed more strongly by council. So they know what your focus is going to be for the year so that they can then be working on the things that will best support you in the coming year.

I think in that flow also, I think that we're working to also update and inform council. I think one of the things we discussed is that as you see that proposed timeline, as city staff are kind of working with their advisory bodies to kind of update on those referrals that were distributed to the advisory bodies, that part of their end of year reporting before your January retreat is to give you updates on what those referrals, what product or recommendations have come out of those advisory bodies based on those referrals from the current year. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I hear what you're saying. I think I'm just struggling a little with this. Like these two timelines look remarkably similar to me. And so I'm just struggling with really where is the change, you know, in the current December through February, the advisory bodies are working. And in the new one, it's January, which is between December and February. So, yeah, I guess I'm just not fully seeing the change in this piece.

I think some of the, oh, Stacey, sorry, I just want to make a quick, I know that some advisory bodies have begun work. They've had retreats in the fall. And sometimes that's where they are pre-formulating or anticipating what they think is going to be, you know, council priorities. And those get baked into a work plan that then all of a sudden becomes that those priorities gets supplanted by the actual finalized priorities of council. So although an advisory body might have set some work plan items in December and January, they get kind of relegated further down their work plan because they're realizing that January, come January, they're getting new referrals or actual referrals from council. I think that's why there's a broader range for the advisory body timeline is that there has been inconsistencies in terms of when those advisory bodies have met and to form their work plans. So I think the proposal is to make sure that all advisory bodies don't begin their work plans until there's the final council work plan, which would be in that winter time frame.

I think there's this ties into the other component that Stacy was just talking about in terms of the timing of people joining an advisory body under the proposed timeline, they would come on. in January, have a month to kind of get oriented and then participate in the work of developing the work plan. Whereas the way we have it now, they kind of come in midstream. And so I think if you think about this in context to the other slide that looked a lot like this, but with different timelines, I think the goal is to kind of line up when people come on, when they're doing their work plans, when it's known what council's priorities are for the year, et cetera. Is that correct? Yes. Yes. Okay.

Yeah, thank you.

Go ahead, Ian. Yeah, thanks. Just looking at Stacey before I kind of go in about my thoughts on this is, did you have, I know you said earlier that you wanted to get through a few slides and then pause for questions on recruitment of advisory bodies. Did you have more slides about that?

Yeah, I was going to come back to the recruitment timeline as I talk about option one. So yes, we will be there shortly. Okay, great. Thank you. Let's go ahead and talk about option one, which is just taking a deeper dive into improvements to the current advisory body system. So this is where I was hoping we could talk about recruitment process. So, um, So, again, this is kind of reiterating the option A, B, and C, or, you know, certainly open to a hybrid as well. A couple things to note for the recruitment. I mean, one is that regardless of which direction we go, we'll just want to update the Olympian Municipal Code. I think I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but just being cognizant of what advisory bodies might be in transition if we're looking at restructuring or consolidating. And then... Just making sure we're really thorough with our communication with current members and being really kind of paying attention to when terms are ending and beginning and making sure we're making adjustments with sensitivity around those things. Yeah, so with that, I was going to offer that this is probably a good time to pause and think about the recruitment piece.

Yeah. Yeah, I. OK, so I really like what I'm hearing. And I know that you need us to make some decisions about the different options, but I really just appreciate what where we're at with these suggestions on the recruitment. I feel like there was a lot of work done from last time to now. And I just really appreciate that these are recommendations that could really make a huge impact and is something that I'm really excited about for community members that serve on the advisory bodies for the Eclipse Committee and all of the staff efforts. that it takes to even do the advisory body recruitment, you know, and many of you have all been along for that. So I know I'm kind of preaching to the choir here. So just want to start by saying, I really appreciate that. I feel like this team of people are really digging deep. And so I'm these, this is like what I was hoping to see, you know, and I feel like we're in a good place. So with that, yeah, I have just a couple kind of comments, questions. I like the idea of shifting the timeline. It makes sense that it would launch in 2027. Well, sort of, sort of, because it's kind of like it would start now, you know, but the actual, the, yeah, when it comes to like getting the members and it would be, it's launching in 2027 full on, but it's, but I recognize that there's work to do now. Um, I am curious. This is something that, uh, I'd, I'd, I think I had heard was that, um, we would be then choose whichever ones we would do. Um, there was also, uh, this idea that came from This team of people that when we choose, no matter which option we do, when we choose people, say we had, you know, 10 candidates and but we only had two, two or three vacancies and you would pick more people. Then, you know, you'd you'd have. OK. And it kind of works out that way anyways, because it's like, OK, we only have these many spots. But, oh, if we had these extra spots, we definitely want these people. So we would communicate that ahead of time. And then those people, I feel like we've done that in informal ways, but it's always good to get it clear, you know. And so then as vacancies sort of just occur. then it would be easier for staff to just support and go down the list, call that person, see if they're still interested, and slide them right on in. Is that right? You can certainly do that.

I think Margo and I were just talking about this earlier today, actually.

I think it kind of depends on what's most important for you in terms of process improvement.

If it's most important to not have two full nights of interviews, then maybe you might spread your interviews out over a rolling recruitment. If you're okay with maybe having two full nights of interviews, but you build your bench with alternatives, then you can do the rolling recruitment that way, right? You go through it and you do exactly what you just suggested. So I think there's certainly some different options and some hybrid options in here too.

OK, and when you say rolling recruit, I will get to a place where I actually pick one, but the different options that I'm just trying to make sure I'm understanding them first. So for option B for rolling recruitment, does that literally just mean it's always open? You can always apply. Is that what that means or is there something else that I'm missing? And it can be done that way, too.

So you could have like we could be collecting applications. But, you know, I think that's a decision we need to make if we just want to recruit during a certain recruitment period. I think primarily what we talked about rolling recruitment was being able to fill vacancies when they come about. So the idea that a vacant seat wouldn't necessarily sit until your next recruitment period.

Okay. The... I see. The... Option C, um, is appealing to me. Um, uh, I, we can, we can only pick one. It seems like some of these are not in conflict with each other. That's why I ask.

Yeah, you could, I mean, we could split, like, again, we could split the recruitment. You could do a, a, a Lengthier set of interviews so that you've identified alternatives and then fill your vacancies as they open in between recruitment periods. So you can do a combination of B and C. Oh, I see.

Interesting. OK. Wow. OK. Seems like there's a lot we could do here with this a la carte menu. Yeah. Yeah, I am in favor of – I wonder how this would work out, though, in practice. But I am – and I'm interested in splitting their recruitment over two years. Um, that, yeah, that's really interesting to me. I like the idea of keeping applications open, understanding there's like another, another way to do rolling recruitments too, but I would be interested in just always having, like, you can always apply, but then of course being really clear on like, this is when we actually recruit for it, but you can always apply for it type of thing. And we may or may not get a vacancy, something, um, that, uh, and I'm, And I'm fine with A and B. I could be convinced. I really like C because I like that it provides... I would like to have less interviews and more depth of interview. I don't want to be interviewing people for 10 minutes. I feel like we have not always gotten to... I feel like there has been some... You just don't get enough time with someone that you get a good enough gauge. And then it's chalked up to really first impressions. And so I would like to... I would like to split the recruitment over two years and and, you know, maybe this will be for work later on. But figuring out how we just have doesn't necessarily mean we need more questions. I'm not sure what it looks like, but I'd like to have more time with people. And I'll be honest, there are times where and this also just happens even with longer interviews where. I probably feel like, wow, maybe I could have done some more vetting on that one. You know, but there wasn't time. Maybe we could have looked more into, you know, and and then I think, wow, I don't know if I really did a good job for myself or for the work that is at hand or a really or did them a disservice to and placing people on advisory boards. And it didn't work out in a major way. You know, so just going to be honest about that. And I and I feel like this process could help with it. Yeah, I have some thoughts on other things, too, for that, because you had kind of mentioned other stuff about like the work plan and stuff. But I'll hold on that until we get to it. I wonder with this thing that makes me a little nervous about the rolling recruitment as far as doing like. my understanding is like more interview, not just the application piece, but more interviews throughout the year, like spread out is, uh, I'm not sure what that looks like. And I do like having the, you know, a concentrated time where this is a time we interview and it's not, um, that we're built building our work plan. And then, Oh, we have to interview someone like here's an added item. We're interviewing someone. I just feel like, This feels off to me. And I think that that could create a little chaos later. So, yeah, those are my thoughts. Thanks.

Thank you. Looking to our other committee mate here, Kelly. No? Okay.

I'm happy to jump in. Yeah, I also like the idea of splitting the recruitment over two years or kind of alternate years. I think that lightens the load just a little bit in terms of when we think about those interviews. And I'm in favor of shifting the recruitment timeline so that terms begin in January. I think it's just a logical time for people to start, and especially if that's where they're building the work plan for the year and just doing that. Yeah, at first I was excited about the idea of rolling recruitment, but the more I think about it, I feel like logistically that would actually add a lot more work for staff. So I'd be more in favor of a situation where we select an alternate or two that, like Young said, if during the year a vacancy appeared, they've already gone through the process and it's real easy for staff to fill those. Because it'd be nice for those vacancies to not have to sit for a long period of time if they... don't have to. So yeah, so that's where I'm at, is I feel like a combination of A and C feel like, you know, a not drastic change in terms of huge impact on the folks that are currently on the committees. But yeah, but would make things a little, make the load a little lighter and stretch, spread some of that work out.

Yeah, I'm on the same page. And just to be clear, so for option C, splitting the recruitment over two years, does that mean like starting this year soon, we would recruit for half of the committees and then the next year we would recruit for the other half? Yeah. Oh, go ahead. I'm just sorry. I was just confirming.

Yes.

Okay. And so is it currently three-year terms? Mm-hmm. So would we need to either extend or shorten term length so that it's either two or four years?

Yeah, we would need to take a closer look at that. Yeah, just whether it's asking people to extend or yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, asking people to extend, but then also as things move forward in the future, we're no longer doing three-year terms. They would need to be on even years or every other year somehow. That would all need to line up. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, so I am totally on board with splitting the recruitment over two years. I think that it's a lot. It is a lot to get through all of the interviews. And I'm also very supportive of the idea where we have, you know, we choose folks who might be interested in sliding into a vacant position as the year moves on, as positions open up, which might mean that we need to even interview a few extra people if we want to have a bunch of folks who are able to slide into that. I'm not into the rolling recruitment idea, again, because it's extra work. And also just the opportunity to always apply and just have an open application on the website. I'm a little nervous about that, too, because, I mean, somebody might be like, oh, I'm interested in this and apply and, like, you know february and then they just wouldn't hear back until like june and maybe their application is not even as relevant anymore because things have happened in the community and that you know it's a lot of work to fill those out so i wouldn't want to just have that um always always apply opportunity um i would want applications to come in based on our uh the period we design uh determine And then, of course, just shifting the recruitment timeline, I think, is an obvious one for all of us. So I'm with option A and option C, where we shift the timeline and we extend those terms to four years or shorten to two. It sounds like we have a decision to make around that. And I think that'll help lighten the load and realign everybody with, you know, The calendar of the year for all the, for the council, for the advisory bodies, for the council committees as well. So go ahead, Ian.

Freaking where this is going. The, I just add my two cents is if we're about the whole two or four asking people to shorten or extend, I would much rather ask people to extend.

Yeah.

Yes. It, you know, just cause it's so much work you, you know, you invest in people, they've made relationships. Um, yeah. Also I feel like it has a different meaning to it, you know? So, um, yeah. Thanks.

Yeah. I agree with you there. I just didn't want to be presumptuous. Um, so, uh, yeah, I, I think going towards a four year option for folks, um, I mean, it makes a longer commitment. So some people might be like, Ooh, four years, that's a lot. Um, so, um, I don't know that we need to answer the question tonight, but I do want to flag that that is a decision we will have to make if we do indeed split it over a two-year period. And it sounds like that's the direction we want to go. So, Stacey, is that a put a pin in it discussion between the two-year, four-year appointments?

I feel like we have the guidance that we need to come back with something more fleshed out again. Yes, I think we understand what your priorities and interests are, and we can certainly work on some of the detail.

Okay. Go ahead, Ian. I just understood what you were talking about. I'm on the same page as you now, Chair Madrone. You're talking about always, like the term. That makes so much sense. Oh my goodness. Okay. Yes. I mean, that's a whole length of time someone's in high school, you know? That's a bachelor's degree possibly. Yes. Okay. I see. Yeah. I would be interested in hearing from staff about that at a later time, like you were saying, Stacey. Yeah. It probably also depends on which group it is too, you know, and what their focus is maybe. I don't know. But yeah. Okay.

Okay. Great. Yeah. Sorry. I mean, much of this also ties to the next conversation we'll move into, which is around restructuring. So, and then I think also, you know, you do support members that if for some reason they need to step down, sometimes there's a lot of hesitancy on people's parts because they're like, oh, I'm leaving, I'm leaving them with, you know, with a gap. And if you had a bench of alternatives, I think people, you know, they have the option to step away before their term's over if they need to. So.

Great. So it sounds like you have what you need from us on this particular question. And I don't see any hands popping up from my committee mates. So I think you have more for us here.

I do. Thank you. So continuing down the path of improvements to the current system. So we're still in option one. So I broke this out in terms of phasing. So we talked about, I wanted to dig in specifically about recruitment. We talked about that. Now, I know we're going with a bit of a hybrid, so I think as you just said, we'll put a pin in recruitment for now. But the idea is that if we were to phase in these improvements in this first year, we would start to do some initial steps towards updating the recruitment process like we just talked about. we could also, um, shift the timeline for advisory body work plans. Um, so, uh, so that they would be seeking approval after they receive guidance on the council's annual work plan, uh, so that your, your retreat in January can inform the work planning for 2027. And then I think, um, this is where we want to spend some time in particular, is the potential of restructuring advisory bodies under this option one. So in this first year, we would be looking at planning an outreach around a restructure. And what the team and I have put in front of you tonight are what we're calling some opportunity areas. So I'll go into this in more detail in a minute. But I want to highlight design review board, bicycle pedestrian advisory committee, social justice and equity commission, and parks and recreation advisory committee. The last piece I'll just add before we go deeper into that is in phase one, 2026, we could start the planning and outreach around what a community academy would look like. So that could start in phase one. But let's spend a minute on the restructuring piece because there's a bit here. One of the reasons you see the opportunity areas that we identified in front of you is because it was through the following considerations. Is this a body that has a legal mandate? If it's state, some are legally mandated, but through our own municipal code. So we're looking at kind of what is the legal mandate defined there? Is there work that's duplicative or complimentary to another advisory body? You know, are the members from the work that we've done in talking to advisory body members, staff liaisons, chairs, you know, and looking at the data behind attendance and work planning, et cetera, are members engaged in the current purpose or mission? And or is there another entity or option for completing the work? So, and then the second section here you see are some of the restructuring options. So there's the option to integrate into another existing advisory body. There's the option to reduce the work plan scope and number of meetings. You can use community collaborators when specific topics or projects arise. So that would be in lieu of having a standing advisory body. You can bring people together maybe on a temporary or basis to work on something that needs to be worked on. Or in the case of like what I'd say the opportunity around design review board, you know, is there, can you shift the requirement to be completed by staff? Yeah. So I wanted to outline, again, kind of the considerations that went into identifying those, what we call the opportunity areas, and then what the restructuring could look like for those. And I'll come back here. So I was hoping we might pause and have a conversation around these pieces. And also, I can elaborate a bit on these four and kind of, if you'd like me to, about why we're looking at these areas.

Go ahead, Ian. Yes, I would like you to.

So Design Review Board is an example of one that in conversations with community planning and economic development could potentially be done administratively by staff. So that was a key element in looking at Design Review Board. It's also looking at, they have a work plan that's really kind of an on-demand work plan. They're called together for work when needed. Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee is not one that's, oh, go ahead, should I pause for?

I just have a quick question on design review board. Is there options or could there be options for some of these to be ad hoc? Like they only come together when they are needed to do the thing they are needed for and they don't schedule meetings just for meetings sake?

Yes, so that's why I didn't want to tie a specific that's kind of why I want to call these opportunity areas because we can have some conversation around them and there may be different ways to approach a restructure on these. And I think, you know, depending on which direction you might be leaning or guidance that you give us, we can go forward and then really dial in the details of what a transition would look like for these. But the short answer is yes. Bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee. So that's one in which case we'd look at. Well, they have very complimentary and sometimes duplicative work for the planning commission. So maybe there's a consolidation opportunity there. And or this is another one that might work is bringing together community collaborators when, for example, they're working on a master plan update. or they're working on a specific scoped project that needs an advisory body that can focus on it for a year, for example. Social Justice and Equity Commission. There's a couple of things we looked at in terms of this one, is that this is another group that could maybe benefit from a very streamlined scope. They really benefit from working on projects soup to nuts that have a systems impact. So this is a body that we looked at that perhaps could either kind of have a streamlined schedule, maybe fight some efficiencies by really narrowly focusing their scope on a project of impact and or kind of using the community collaborator model in which you could potentially bring a broader diversity of voices together for specific bodies of work. And then Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee, this is another one in which maybe there's some duplicative or complementary work to other advisory bodies. And one that also may be served through a community collaborator model, in which case folks are brought together with this specific area of interest when there's a specific project or scope or timeline in which they're needed to dig in. Another good example is like a master plan process, or maybe we, you know, a group of community collaborators come together for six months to look deeply at our park naming process. You know, I'm just, I'm giving examples, but that's another concept to explore here.

Does that help? Yes, absolutely it does. And so, Stacey, you're hoping for some conversation right at this point from us to give some direction on these. Okay. Young's hand went up and then it went down. Yes. I would like to listen first. Oh, okay.

Kelly, did you want to weigh in with any thoughts?

Sure. As long as it was me, Young was waiting to listen to. I know. She wasn't very specific on that. So you go right ahead. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think exploring opportunities and, you know, you all, Stacey and Margo and Genevieve, as you've worked on these. there does seem to be nuance to some of them, right? Like there's no reason we need to have one singular model that needs to be every advisory body. I think it makes a ton of sense to tailor the advisory body to its purpose. And if that doesn't mean meet every month, or if that means it should be project-based, um, you know, that makes a ton of sense to me. So, um, so yeah, personally, I'd be really open to some recommendations around, um, yeah, some specific models, if there are some that make sense versus a standing body, which I know some of them, that probably makes the most sense.

Yeah, I'm in agreement with Kelly. And I think that the four opportunity areas that you've identified are good places to start. My understanding is that, you know, we were just talking about splitting recruitment every other year. And so we're Moving forward with that, we would delay these ones so we can figure out what the next steps are for them. Okay, I see some nodding there. And one thing that stands out to me is the Social Justice and Equity Commission because that's a fairly new one for the city. And we actually went through kind of like that community collaborator type model, but we had like an ad hoc group that worked to the scope of that, of the Social Justice and Equity Commission, only to find out, you know, on the other side of all that, that some of the things they wanted to do were not actually within legal authority because of differences between us and other cities. And so I think it's actually a good opportunity for us to kind of reevaluate, you know, what's the best path to move forward with our social justice and equity work and the community engagement that we do around that. And all the other ones that you've mentioned make, sense to me as well. I'm curious because we have OMPD, the Olympia Metropolitan Parks District Advisory Board, and I'm curious about opportunities for PRAC and that group to kind of come together and where all the parks work is happening. I don't know if that's something that's possible, but I know we were able to do it with our community policing board and the, I don't remember what the other one was called before. But so I think these are good areas for us to start digging in. and thinking about how these bodies of work that are taken on by these groups could be done differently. And I know we're not landing on what that is now, but I'm in support of these proposed opportunity areas.

Go ahead. I am. So a question real quick. So what about the other groups? Are we going to look at those later? Did the team review those and feel like those were not opportunity areas? Can you talk a little bit about that?

So I'll answer that two ways. One is I'm going to move forward. I think we really tried to focus on the considerations here. Is there a legal mandate? Is the work duplicative or complimentary? Now, that's not to say we couldn't find other opportunities. I think we were looking at what were the ones that readily might have moved to the top when thinking about those considerations. The other thing I'll say, too, is we really wanted to seek some guidance first because in a moment I'm going to talk about the other option, which is transitioning to multidisciplinary advisory bodies. So I think, you know, we wanted to identify where a place would be to start with this model improvements to the current system, but could certainly come back, you know, at a later date with more options if you, you know, if you wanted us to.

Okay. Thank you. That's helpful to know. Yeah. Thanks for showing me the last slide. It had already left my mind. And I know it was a lot, a lot of work to put it together. I'm sure. Um, design review, uh, I feel like I'd be fine with that going to administrative. I do think about who serves on that board, though, and not necessarily like the person specific, but more like the organization and the lens that they bring, that they're from. And I wouldn't want us to lose that bit of I don't know if it'd be a partnership relationship perspective probably is the best way to put it, but with architectural firms in the area, that kind of thing. And so there are folks that would, would compliment the city and folks that would complain about about you know, our permitting process, all sorts of things. And so that's, that's something that that's probably the only pause I would have for the going administrative process. But I do think that this is if this is something that we can do in-house and let's do that. Does that make sense, Stacey? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And if I might add to Mayor Pro Tem that, you know, the I think there's also an opportunity to use the community connectors model here, too. I mean, we still can tap into folks that have expertise in the community. It just might look different than a formal appointed advisory body.

Okay, yeah, that's helpful. The, let's see, bicycle, yes, the BPAC, I think we can add them to, I think we can combine them to the planning commission. I think that when we also talk about combining, possibly combining groups, I wouldn't necessarily want to combine the group and then peel the members off. So I don't know if we do that through attrition or what that would look like. So that is something I'm thinking about. But I do feel like the BPAC could be part of the planning commission. Uh, parks and recreation advisory committee. I wonder if they can be, uh, combined with, I know they're, you know, different. Um, but, uh, I wonder if they can be combined with OMPD and have, I know we have to have OMPD, but if OMPD could be like that, like a subcommittee or, or, or something. But Parks is one that is, to me, very popular, usually has really strong engagement. Parks advocates also go hard in this community. you know, and so, uh, and, you know, kind of beat back a little bit too. So it kind of depends, but, um, uh, but I, I am actually a little bit nervous, I would even say about, uh, turning some of these into community collaborators, um, social, oh, I guess I skipped over. Sorry about that. The social justice and equity commission will come to that, but, I'm nervous about some of these becoming community collaborators because they can be really. I guess it depends on how you'd set it up, but people are really impassioned about these issues. And and I think that in some cases to get to a place where we can have productive conversation, where we can do a thing. Um, I think that takes time, relationship building and knowledge, right. Um, about what the city is currently doing. And, and, uh, I feel like that, I wonder if it might be, uh, too much for it to be community collaborators, um, that, yeah. So, uh, that takes me to social justice and equity commission. Um, I'd be in favor of it, uh, the work group or the current advisory body saying if I don't really have a big feeling about how often they meet, I think they should just meet as often as they need to get the work done. I really do feel like they need to do one, maybe two, but probably just one focused work. And from start to finish, that is one that I'm very nervous about it being community collaborators. I think and I know in my experience that this body of work, not just for the city of Olympia, but just in general is evolving and in some spaces newly recognized. People have a lot of strong opinions about it all across the board. And some of them, like Chairman Joan had mentioned, I wouldn't want people to be a community collaborator and then And then we're spending a lot of time with spending a lot of time that could possibly be wasted because people have a bigger view of what they want, wanted to get done. And they didn't realize that it wasn't something at the local government level. I think that, yeah, I think, yeah, if there's anywhere where people are going to have big radical ideas, it's going to be, it's going to be this one. And yeah, I'd rather us have a consistent group of people that there has been some learning and engagement with and really big on focused work. It's like I twitch every once in a while when one of my very well-meaning council colleagues says, you know what? We should give this to the Social Justice and Equity Commission. And I think they're busy. They are busy and they're not just going to pick up whatever you want. Okay. So, so yeah. So emphasis on the focus to work. Yeah. Okay. I think I hit all of them.

Thank you. You know, I agree with everything you said on the social justice and equity commission. And I also would like to get clear on, You know, I know we all recently looked at all of their work plans, but they had imagined a different scope for themselves. And that is not a scope that they were able to do. So I'm curious about, you know, how that's evolved and if there are some potential changes to explore as a result of that. Okay. Right. Stacey, do you have what you need from us on this component?

I do. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you for the conversation. Okay. So what I'm going to do is continue down this path of option one, which is, again, improvements to the current system and what the rest of the phasing would look like. But that was one of the extensive conversations for tonight. Okay. So we talked about the restructure of advisory bodies. So a phase two in 2027, just a few notes here. We'd want to make sure we're updating the council guidebook to reflect our changes. If we were, again, we'll revisit the recruitment process, but I wanted to make note of when that would start. We can start the standardized onboarding and orientation for new members. And this would look like year one of a transition year for restructuring. So I think... We would use 26 to start communicating, planning, talking about all of the nitty-gritty details that would go with a transition. And then in 2027, we could start that transition. Getting direction from you tonight helps us, again, flesh that out further, but I make note of it here. We could launch the concept of the community academy or be hosting the community academy and hosting the community collaborators. And then phase three in 2028, just to note that this transition of the advisory bodies would move into a third year, depending on how we map that out. And we could launch the community connectors concept. And then I also just want to make a note that we're always going to want to pause and reevaluate our process improvements, doing what we intended to do. Is there anything that we need to make adjustments on? So that wraps up improvements to the current system.

I see a hand from Ian.

Hey, Cece, could you go back to the phase two?

Yes.

Okay.

I'm just reading it.

Yeah.

Okay. A question about Community Academy. Is that... What I guess we'd have to figure out the specifics on it. But is that sort of like in a way separate from the advisory bodies? Because I think about people coming in and like a cohort of people coming in and learning for, you know, maybe X amount of months or something like that. And they go around. This is in my mind what it is. And then they go around to the different departments and then they just learn about it.

Yeah, so I'll do a brief summary and then ask if Genevieve wants to add anything additional. But the idea is that you're giving community members an entry point into learning about the city. And the community academies can be generalized. You know, what does it mean to be involved with the city? What does city government do? Or if you have a specific need within a department or there's an area of interest or a priority of the council, we can tailor a community academy to that topic. But I think that a lot of times when Genevieve was doing her research, and I'll let her jump in, community academies are just a great way to kind of almost... recruit and train potential future advisory body members who this is the first step they want to take to understanding the city. And then it might, they then might be able to move on and either be a community collaborator, you know, raise their hand to work on a certain project, or maybe put an application in for a standing body.

Genevieve, did you want to add anything? No, that's exactly right. As I was talking with other cities, it's an opportunity for us to do some information sharing, be more proactive of sharing out some current issues or projects that the city is taking on, but also be a way to share structure or information about how city government engages with community. And it's an opportunity for people to raise their hands to say they're interested without fully committing to an appointment or an advisory body term. So this is an easily accessible opportunity to kind of engage with city staff and to hopefully learn a little bit more about how community members can get involved.

Yeah, thanks. I really like that. Yeah, just generally interested in people civically engaging and it'd be open to more than just advisory body members. And so, yeah, I mean, who knows? We get a future staff, future council members that come out of this. I think it's all around a good idea. OK, great. Could you go to the next slide? OK, OK, I'm all caught up now.

I think, you know, in general, I broke this out into phasing just to acknowledge that, you know, it takes some time to stand up some programs. It takes some time to manage the change of restructuring advisory bodies. So just noting that we would want to move through that transition at a good pace where we're bringing everyone along. Okay, option two, a multifaceted engagement approach with a broader toolkit, basically. It's tapping into the new engagement methods that we've been talking about. This will look somewhat familiar as the last one, but in terms of phase one, 2026, we can still launch a new timeline for advisory body work planning. We can... potentially pause on recruitment because this option involves the next bullet down, which is a restructure of advisory bodies by focus area. So that would involve a deeper coming back to the work that Debbie had done earlier around reviewing mandated responsibilities and work plans. We would look to restructure via our focus areas. So public safety, community livability, environmental stewardship, economy, organizational excellence and well planned city. And we would want to, you know, carefully identify the process for transitioning our, our currently appointed members. So, yeah, I could, I mean, I can pause here if you want to have some conversation around this concept. But this is the extent to having fleshed this one out because we would want to get some initial guidance from you first before we would develop it further.

And Stacey's question, this would be an alternative to everything we just discussed? Okay. My immediate reaction is like, Just as a council member, having to understand that many layers of city government to the depth needed to be able to make decisions is a lot of work. So I'll just start there. But go ahead, Ian.

Yeah, thanks. So for the focus areas, are those like is it kind of like. scrap the existing and this is where we're moving forward. And so public safety would be one group, community livability would be one group, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Is that the idea or the years or is it something else?

The concept. So Genevieve brought this forward from having researched some other cities and, and thinking about what could multidisciplinary look like, you know, in terms of advisory bodies and some other cities are doing it. And, and, Through our public input, we did get some positive reaction to this idea of using a multidisciplinary approach to bringing different lived experiences and perspectives together to, for example, work on public safety issues. Genevieve, did you want to speak to this through your research? Sure.

No, so just to share a little bit more, it would basically be one of the ideas is to scrap the existing advisory body structure, which are primarily commissions or committees based on either certain departments or areas of the city government, right? And here instead would be more blended and focusing on themes or a broader scope. So thinking about community livability could have aspects of parks and recreation, but also potentially also social justice and equity commission. But bringing those different perspectives in the same room to talk about issues. And one of the things that we heard from, I think it was the chairs or even some of the advisory body members, was seeing how like maybe members of, for instance, a group that has a very narrow scope like bicycle pedestrian could be part of something bigger like the well-planned city. Like it didn't have to, they would be able to be, to see other opportunities to engage in education. and discussions around the city planning on a bigger scale where transportation is one aspect of it, but they could see how development of a well-planned city initiatives would impact bicycle and pedestrian issues or priorities.

The other thing I'll add, too, is that we may, as we go further down this path, find that there are some mandated requirements that just may need to stay outside, may need to continue to function outside of this structure. And that may take some time to assess out what that would look like. But to the extent possible, we'd be looking at trying to move into six advisory bodies.

Another thing that came about in our sharing this idea with other advisory body members was when especially when we were going through the review of the comprehensive plan and how there were a lot of different commissions and committees receiving that their discrete presentations from that particular chapter. Hopefully, something like this would reduce some of that repetitive presentations where you'd have multiple people representing different perspectives around a certain issue, but then they would be able to talk to each other about their reactions to a particular area or chapter of that comprehensive plan, as opposed to different commissions giving feedback to that comprehensive plan chapter author, And then having it's then the onus is on the staff to kind of reconcile all those recommendations, right? All those perspectives or reactions that the different commissions or committees had when they were being presented to that particular advisory body. So this is some some of that some of the the appeal in that is that like, oh, it would be great to hear how other commissions or committee members were reacting to that particular issue and then have that discussion together. as opposed to having them be parallel.

Yeah, I'm completely against this idea. I'm just thinking something that would be helpful is if there was like a chart or just knowing which ones would uh already fit under i mean i would think well-planned city probably the planning commission you know so yeah but then but then like where would social justice and equity commission go some would say everywhere you know and then but if it's everywhere is it nowhere you know so so and i know that uh cecil just said that there would be some outliers and the thing why I'm gravitating towards it is to just make it more succinct. And I think that if thinking about, we don't have to go back in slides, but thinking about possibly like combining the BPAC with the planning commission, and then we could call that well-planned city. So I'm not saying that I want everything, all the options, but I feel like that kind of fits here. like organically, if we did choose to do that, then we could call them well-planned city. And is there another element or another thing that we could add to it if we needed to? And it does help us get at the annual CLPS meeting in person with the different committee's staff liaisons and the leadership of those advisory bodies. They, there's a lot of, you know, we, we'd really like to work together. We'd like to break down some silos, you know, though. So that this could help us get at that. And so is there something more to the multidisciplinary that I'm missing? Because if we combined some, wouldn't it be this, you know what I mean? Or is there a different flow to the work and everything?

I think this would involve a greater transition. I think this would involve some additional streamlining than what we showed you in option one. So this would move us to potentially six, maybe a few other advisory bodies that might not be a perfect fit under here. But I think just hearing what your kind of your reaction, your thinking and what's important to you is helpful because if you want to see some more detail about what this framework might look like, which where the bodies might go, we can flesh that out and bring that back to you. But I do think you make an excellent point. I mean, it's not unlike some of the earlier restructuring we showed. We were looking for like complementary

Yeah.

Bodies that would fit under these headings. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. When I think about it like that, it's making more sense and seeming less intense to me. Also, I will say thank you for using less words for the focus areas. That's also appealing. Seriously.

Thanks.

You I think the other thing about this particular process here is it aligns with your party based budgeting work also so there's another piece of alignment that brings your community around kind of how we're budgeting how we're working and another connection point.

yeah.

It's, it's, it dovetails really nicely with the work, thank you, Jay, that Debbie's also been doing around performance metrics and kind of looking at, you know, data driving our decision makings. And so it really rounds out the whole, the ability to stay focused on our comprehensive plan and our priorities through our focus areas.

I'll, I'll throw in a few thoughts here. I would need to see some kind of like flow chart of like what work lives in each place, what advisory bodies would like, you know, become these would live within which focus area. And I think one thing that could be challenging with this is we already struggle with our own three council committees of like, Oh, why is that in your committee? It should be over in my committee. Why is that over there? Um, And I feel like, I mean, even looking at community livability, oh, yeah, parks would live there. Well, what about environmental stewardship? We have some parks where there's a lot of great environmental work happening. You know, economy is not an area where we currently have an advisory body, but it's a more narrow focus than something like, you know, community livability. I come back to community livability. It's just such a broad area. kind of a catch-all. So I struggle to see... I'm not completely opposed to the concept of it, but considering the conversation we just had about the other option, where there's a clear path forward, I would not, like... Throw the baby out with the backwater on this one, but consider this as part of adaptive management going into the future. It's already going to be disruptive. Some of the recommendations that we're making that we just discussed, that's already going to be disruptive for some of our folks serving on advisory bodies and confusing for some, and it's going to take a while to implement. So I would my my recommendation would be we don't let go of this concept completely, but we keep it in mind as we're adaptively managing our way forward with how we do our engagement with advisory bodies and our other forms of community engagement. So does that make sense?

I think if what I think I hear you saying is you're you're leaning towards option one, which is which is you know, updates to our current framework, but maybe moving us in the direction of a future state where we are more aligned, our advisory bodies are more aligned with these focus areas.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we can even do some of that work, you know, I think there's a future future state with that incorporates this more. But even as we are working through our work plan as a city council, we're thinking about those focus areas and we can start doing that with the advisory bodies as well and start seeing where things are grouping up. And then we'll have more more information that can potentially help lead us down this path. But I think. trying to move forward on something like this. I can't picture it as it is right now. And I think that it would, yeah. So I saw Genevieve tried like raising a hand right before Debbie raised hers. So do you want to jump in there real quick, Genevieve?

Let me hear Debbie first, because I want to, and I'll respond after that. Thank you, Danny. So.

Thank you for giving me an opportunity to chime in. When I hear the conversation about a multidisciplinary approach and trying to align our current system into it, I think they are two different systems. And I don't think you can easily pick up what we currently do and put it under the umbrella, say, of public safety. I think it's a rethinking of how... how people give you comments within that broad topic. And it will take more time to really think through that. So I just wanted to share that. I think the first option that you have is using your existing bodies and how they are currently structured around themes or departments, right? And this other multidisciplinary approach is around a broad topic of public safety. So I hope that makes sense. I just think it will be, if you want to go in that direction, it will be more evaluation and really thinking through how you do that.

Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense, Debbie. Genevieve, did you want to chime in?

Yeah, and I could see where maybe in the middle ground would be, as we're thinking about more intentionality around work plan items and the referrals that are going to these advisory bodies, thinking about how work plan items could be categorized using these focus areas, right? So that I know some commissions and committees do kind of tag or identify their work plan items as following under that public safety umbrella or community. I mean, I could see that maybe that's something to consider is if we're not moving wholesale into restructuring advisory bodies into these six focus areas, Is there at least some consideration about maybe thinking about how the work plan referrals that you're giving to advisory bodies, identifying how this may be attached or relevant to a particular focus area. I think that might be helpful in maybe a middle ground kind of solution.

I think our referral form already has these areas identified because it's part of our plan. I think that's a recent update that happened. Yeah, no, both of your comments is helpful. It's like, you know, we kind of got to get ourselves out of the current thinking. And like, this is a completely new way of doing it. And I just, I know that we're wanting to see some change sooner rather than later, which is why I'm like, okay, well, that's what option one gets us. Whereas with this one, there is going to need to be a lot more thought and creativity that I think we can think through as we are going through the motions of the first option. Go ahead, Ian.

Yeah. I'm... Well, maybe I don't know where the group is at, so I'm not sure. But I also would like more information on this for phase one. If that's... if it turns out that we're at all interested in it. I don't want you to just do more work for no reason. But yeah, I am. And maybe this is also what you meant, Chair Madrone, about the adaptive management piece. But however we come out of this, I would like to have a clear vision to share with community members, specifically ones that are already working or are on our advisory bodies. And then we work through that, you know, however, however it's phased out. Looks like three phases right now that we just saw. But I just I'm nervous about getting into any place where like we make a big change and then we make another big change and changes keep coming. And I think it could be really, really tough for everyone involved. And then at that time, staff included. And then at that time, the council has changed over. Maybe there's been some turnover on the advisory bodies and then, you know, we never get to kind of like our end state. So that is what makes me nervous about the multidisciplinary approach. I actually really like it. I just have a lot of questions about where things would be grouped. And if it doesn't, if it turns out that we end up having, maybe not, but if we end up having kind of like the same number, then I'm like, well, did it really get us to where we want? I love that. Thanks, Jay, for mentioning that it is the same. The focus areas are the same as priority based budgeting. That makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. And then also, on the other hand, if we're able to combine even a few of those and Of the advisory bodies, I think that's a win for just time, effort of a lot of people involved, including staff. So. Yeah, I yeah, I just I guess I I just I'm more clear on the first one. of our current process, I'd really love to get to a place where we could do the multidisciplinary approach. I don't think it has to be as scary as it sounds, but maybe I'm just oversimplifying it in my mind. Yeah, I wish we just had more. And we've already done a lot of work, which is evident to me. But I just wish I knew more on this so we can, you know, so I could have a clearer thought about, yes, I definitely want to do this because I totally understand the merits of it. Kelly?

Yeah, I can appreciate the creativity of this, and I'm glad to see it. It's too far for me. Like, I can't envision it. I can't. I feel like if we were at a place where we're, like, our advisory bodies or the majority of our advisory bodies, Community advisory system is just not working and needs to be wholly reconfigured. Like, you know, I think this would be an interesting direction. That's not what I've heard from, you know, the work that you all presented last time, the work that Debbie did last year. So, yeah, I'm really struggling to envision what the, you know, and maybe it's just because it's late in the evening and my brain just is not that focused. fluid right now, but I, I, I just, um, I feel like this, I'm struggling with what the rationale would be for this over let's simplify, clarify, get really clear on, on purpose and mission of our existing committees, uh, bring together if needed. And if like, I, I dunno, I'm, I'm not supportive of any additional work in this myself.

Yeah, I agree. I think that with the first option, we've got something that is clear, explainable, has a path forward. And like I said, I think this is something we can keep in mind, like as advisory bodies are doing their work plans, flagging what area of the comp plan it ties to, And then we could be thinking about this, you know, because one thing I understand is that it's also part of the recommendations is just kind of regularly audit how our advisory bodies are doing. And so keeping this in the back of our mind that we've got these focus areas and the comprehensive plan that tie into our budget process and keeping that in mind. But I would I would recommend I think that we've got a good path forward with option one. And that's what I heard Kelly say. Young, I think I heard the same from you. okay um i know that the staff are hoping to get a recommendation from the committee so um and i don't want us to spend an exhaustive amount of time um you know just kind of hashing through something when if if there's a clear yes on one side and uh maybe on the other like i we at a certain point we do need to move forward on it so um is oh look committee discussion did we jump ahead of you stacy

I think the direction you're going, I mean, the phasing that I was going to cover was very similar to the phasing from option one. So I feel like we didn't necessarily need to tread over that ground again. So I, yeah. Oh, go ahead. I think, would you like me to recap what I'm hearing then in terms of direction?

Well, first, I want to understand from Ian what what this means. And if we like I just what I need to know is, do we have a split recommendation on this committee or are we all on the same page?

Go ahead. That was me calling on you. I don't. Sorry. We go back to the other side. Yes. Yes, that's the one. So I'm hearing. So I'm thinking about. the fact that there is some improvement that needed to be done on advisory bodies. And then also we're heading towards, or I guess we are now, but priority-based budgeting. And, and also there is going to be, even with the first one, the first set of slides that we saw, that's not the multidisciplinary approach. There is going to be some combining. So again, To me, I would really like to move towards this. And please tell me if for the team that's worked on this, if I'm oversimplifying it. But for me, it's a naming thing. It's a naming thing and getting clear on what it is. So if you combine planning commission and and and bicycle and BPAC and call it well-planned city. I don't have a problem with that. I think that it, it can help just simplify, um, and, and streamline, uh, all really a lot of our efforts. Um, so for me, it's, it's just a naming thing. Um, and, uh, and if it can clean, like if we cleanly, I would love to get to a place where, on our priority-based budgeting, you know, we saw all of these categories. And then we also, community members or us as council members, look at our advisory bodies, work groups, and they're all these different categories. And it's just streamlined. So for me, I would love to, am I oversimplifying it?

I think for me you are, because we don't currently have an advisory body on the economy. the local economy. We don't have one on public safety. So I think it's a little bit more complicated than taking what currently exists and fitting it into these categories.

Sure. I had more to say, but we can move on to city manager Bernie. I think he has something about this. Yeah, go ahead, Jay. Okay.

Thank you. I do think it's a little bit of oversimplifying, community member Quyen, to just kind of change them into new names. I think this concept is really a wholly different concept than what you have now. And it's really kind of taking a step back from the current structure that you have and figuring out how would you structure an advisory committee around public safety? What are the kinds of topics that that group would take on? What are the lived experience and types of community members you'd need on it? And you'd take these one at a time and figure out what it is you want to scope, what's the scope of them, and then who is the right choices in terms of community members to be on them. And then how do you align them to the other work? I think the conversation that you are all having about this being aspirational makes a lot of sense. I think just by taking that first step to do option one, you're getting closer to this. And then maybe in a couple of years, we revisit this. But I do think this is kind of wholly blowing things up and starting over again. That's how I see it.

Go ahead, Ian. Um, okay. That's helpful. Uh, yeah, I guess I just want to make sure that we preserve it somehow. Um, yeah, I wouldn't want it to completely die tonight. Um, and we have so many things that, you know, we'll, we'll get into a group, whether it's clips or something else. And we say, okay, we'll work towards that. But you know, the reality is we get so busy all the time.

Yeah, I mean, I think some tangible things have been put forward in terms of how we may keep this on the horizon. One, the ongoing audit process that we've talked about, that's part of the recommendations. And having this as kind of a lens for that, our comp plan, our focus areas, all that. And also tying the individual items and work plans to different focus areas, I think, is another way to make sure that we don't lose this concept completely. Yeah, we can, sorry.

I was just going to, you know, offer that, yes. And we can continue to think, to think further about that too, about what might this look like, you know, to what other steps might we take to move in that, in this direction. So we can continue to branch out and think of what else that could look like if we're coming back to you, you know, the next time we come back with this, because we'll want to flesh out some of the details around that. I think we still may want to come back to you with some additional information.

Interesting. Yeah, potentially. I mean, I think that, I think I would really want to make sure that the limited capacity that we have to work on this stuff is actually moving towards an area where we did have agreement among us as a committee when it comes to the restructuring of what we currently have and the the option one, essentially. I wouldn't want you all to spend a lot of time on option two just as a thought experiment, essentially.

Oh, sorry. Let me clarify. I think I was just adding or just agreeing with what you were saying, that I think there are some things we can do within the work plan process, you know, that gets at what Genevieve was offering earlier about just identifying which work plan items are tied to what focus areas. So, yeah.

And Genevieve, did you have something? Yeah, just to comment. So one of the cities that was doing this was Asheville, North Carolina, and they primarily did it because they were in a recovery process. They were hit by Hurricane Helene a few years ago. So they were looking at, again, staff capacity commission work. and sustainability during this recovery period. So suspending all of their advisory bodies and kind of using their advisory body members and reallocating them or using them to fit under one of four recovery boards. So again, like you said, it's a very drastic rethinking of how to use community members and advisory body members. But I'm hopeful that the conversations that we had around approach number one or option number one those are already substantial recommendations and that we can still see this as sort of that aspirational potential reorg down the line, but there's already a lot that we are offering with that first option.

I think the unresolved question that you all have for us is if we would like you to return to the committee with option one more fleshed out, I think there are some more decisions that need to be made in terms of a recommendation, but I do want to check in with my committee mates here it wouldn't be till July, I believe June is with our meeting with the committee chairs correct, and so it wouldn't be until July. So our options are that we could give this direction to staff. They could make some guesses around some things like, you know, we talked about term length as an example and bring it to the full council as a study session or bring it back to the committee as a in July. I'm looking to my committee mates here for any input you have.

I'll go. Yeah, go ahead. Thank you. Yeah. Uh, yeah, I don't, I don't necessarily feel like it has to, um, I'd be fine if it came back to clips, but I think that it could go to the full council for a study session with some of those details, uh, flushed out.

Great. Kelly, you feel, you feel good about that?

No, I feel good about that as well. I think it can go forward to a study session and there may be more questions that come out of that. But I recognize that, you know, this process has already gone through a lot of iterations and I don't want to feel like it just needs to live in this committee forever and ever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough. And, you know, we certainly had the experience of when a committee gets so far down the road and then it gets the full council and they're like, wait, hold on. And then it has to go back to committee to be reworked. So I think it's actually good to have a check-in point with council before, like, figuring out every little detail. And then maybe by the time we're at study session, everybody's like, looks great. So awesome. So no need to return to clips on this. I think we do. Do you need a formal motion?

PB, Lupita D Montoya, From us Stacey I think I do because I think I would like because you're making a recommendation to counsel so. PB, Lupita D Montoya, I was expecting to maybe need to come back, but now i'm looking at moving forward a recommendation from you directly to city council for study session so.

Great, so you needed a motion to move forward with option one as discussed by the committee to the full council for a study session. Who would like to make that motion?

Go ahead, jump in there. I'd move to recommend moving this to the full council. Oh, option one as discussed. All right.

All in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay, excellent. Congratulations, Daisy, and to Genevieve, and to Debbie. I know that this has been like a long road here, and we're not at the end of that road yet, but that's enormous progress that we've made on this, and I'm really pleased to see this come forward to the full council. I know folks are very eager to join the conversation. Sure.

Yeah, if I might just also just say thank you so much for the conversation tonight. You know, we felt really good about being able to bring forward kind of a full recommendation for conversation, and we feel like we got great feedback tonight. So thank you. Excellent. Thank you.

All right. Next item on the agenda, we have moving around all the things on my screen so I can get back to the agenda. It's Inspire Olympia. It's an approval of the 26-27 Inspire Libya funding recommendations. And we have Mary Grace Gadu joined by Anne Larson, our co-chair for the Cultural Access Advisory Board. So I'll go ahead and pass it on to you all. You're muted, Mary Grace.

There we go. Thank you, Chair Madrone. And for the record, Mary Grace Gaddu, Program Manager for the Inspire Olympia Program. And Anne Larson is with me today. She is the co-chair of the Cultural Access Advisory Board. And I will share my screen, which is going to hopefully come up. which is on the wrong slide. How are we doing?

I see Inspire Olympia.

All right. Do you have that? Let's see. I think I need to... There are menus everywhere. It's not full screen, though, is it?

It's not, but it's kind of... Enough. It's not like there's notes on the side and it's really small.

All right. We're just going to roll with it if you guys are on that. So I'm going to give you a brief overview of the Cultural Access Program and share some data information about the organizations that are recommended for funding and brief you on the INSPIRE Olympia program budget. And then Anne is going to describe our application review process and present the recommendations of the advisory board for your consideration. So I invite you to ask questions along the way. I don't think I can see you very well while the presentation is going. So please feel free to interrupt me.

Yeah, I'll call on people if I see hands go up. So you just don't worry about that.

Most appreciated. Thanks. Okay. So let's see. Why? Why? There you go. Inspire Olympia, as you know, is a voter-approved initiative that dedicates one-tenth of 1% of Olympia's sales tax to support local nonprofit organizations offering arts, science, heritage, and cultural programs and experiences for the public in Olympia. Our mission is to provide a reliable source of public funding that sustains a healthy, visible, welcoming, and inclusive nonprofit cultural and science sector, making creative cultural experiences accessible to everyone in Olympia. This multi-year public investment works to strengthen our community's nonprofit cultural and science sectors and expand access to quality experiences in these areas, especially for youth and traditionally underserved populations. Funding is distributed through contracts for services with the city, competitively awarded to the organizations that best demonstrate how their programs meet the public benefit goals of INSPIRE. INSPIRE also supports cultural programs for Olympia public school students during the school day from the very youngest through high school. Cultural access revenue covers the cost of transportation for field trips hosted by INSPIRE Olympia programs. Participating nonprofits apply for INSPIRE funding in March each year. There are two funding options separating the larger and more established organizations from the smaller ones to level the competitive playing field. Last August, City Council approved an increase in the grant award amounts that are available in both pathways. Eligible organizations are local nonprofits whose primary purpose is to advance or preserve visual or performing arts, science, heritage, or culture, and who do public programs in Olympia. The next few slides offer some data on the cohort that's now recommended for funding, and it shows kind of the change over time. The takeaway from this first slide is simply that we're growing. The columns show our growth from 60 funded organizations in 2024 to 75 in 2025, and now 85 recommended for funding in 2026. And the blue are those who are in the comprehensive pathway, and the orange represents the number of organizations in our impact group. These are the same cohort over the years divided up by the area of focus. And it shows the change in the number of organizations we have in each area over these first three years. Within the sort of trend of overall growth, the arts continued to lead with half of our grants going to arts organizations. And one more chart. This one shows the growth in the number of organizations offering youth programming. In blue, you see those who do general youth programming, and that's really increased this year because we now require comprehensive organizations, the larger funded group, to do general youth programming. But the purple represents the number who are doing educational programs in our public schools. In the program's first two years, we just tracked field trips. Now we're going to be tracking field trips and in-school, like classroom work. We've got a staff person now who's dedicated to helping our nonprofits to design and deliver programs for the public schools. And we're working to build the number of providers for those in-class programs along with field trips. So that's where the color changes to a darker color for 2026. And now I want to try to bring these numbers to life a little bit for you by sharing some slides that tell you about who these programs are and what they're doing and the energy that they're bringing to Olympia. So you saw that we have 49 organizations who are in the arts. And the breakout has 32 of those are performing arts organizations. 14 are musical performance, including five choral groups. We have eight theater groups, seven dance, and four who are producing music festivals. And this slide features the South Sound Block Party, which is produced by a group called Team Tomorrow. A few other examples, if I can get my slide to go. Why doesn't my slide advance all of a sudden? There we go. This is two for one. You got Ballet Northwest and Masterworks Choral Ensemble. They collaborated this last year for the first time. This is String and Shadow Puppet Theater. They have become a beloved local organization. They do performances every summer in Decatur Woods Park. And last year's performance was funny and fun as usual and attended by over 5,000 people. The Olympia Youth Chorus. Let's see, I can catch up on my notes. They produce three major concerts each year and perform all over the community, often using their performances as benefits for other local nonprofits. In the visual arts, we have 14 organizations, including the Tacoma Museum, sorry, Tacoma, Thurston County Museum of Fine Arts, which is pictured here. Nine of these visual arts organizations directly engage the public in creative production, and we have five maker spaces of various kinds now. And another five focus on exhibiting four of those supporting local artists, like TC MOFA. Arbutus Folk School, Where's my notes on Arbutus? Did I get my pages mixed up? Well, you guys know Arbutus. They're right up the street. They offer classes in arts, craft, and culture led by local artists and experts. Great emphasis there on hiring and business. and delving into and utilizing the local wisdom and talent we have. With INSPIRE funding, they have increased the number of full scholarships and they no longer have to limit the sliding scale tuition opportunity because of INSPIRE funding. Artists with Ecology works alongside native artists and local partners to transform public spaces into meaningful cultural landmarks. a mural project that they did just this past summer downtown. You heard in the public comment about an organization called DECAY, Diverse Events Creative Arts Yard. They were new to INSPIRE in 2025, and their downtown location is a popular hub for technology-leaning experimental arts, and it serves an amazing array of people, including teens, which is really great in the downtown. We have 19 science organizations that engage our community in exploration and conservation of our farms, forests, and beaches, and waters, including Pacific shellfish, which is shown on this slide. Some more examples of our sort of science-oriented organizations include Garden Raised Urban Bounty, a working farm that serves over 1,500 people annually with a focus on those facing food disparities, especially low-income, and minorities and youth. And they use the farm in ways far beyond growing food to also grow leaders and mentor young people into agricultural and all kinds of other careers. The estuarium engaged over 11,000 people of all ages last year in learning exploration and stewardship of our estuary environment. South Sound Green is an environmental education program serving primarily K through 12 students and teachers with watershed education programs that include salmon spawning and a water monitoring program. They served over 4,000 Olympia School District students last year with classroom and field trips. And heritage and cultural organizations, 18 of our applicants are in this group. We're really happy to see the number of organizations by and for minority groups expand by four new organizations this year. The Hispanic Roundtable's Latinx Youth Summit is shown on this slide, and some other examples include CLO. They are new to INSPIRE this year, but they've been working in the community among the indigenous immigrant community members for a long time. Celebrating these cultures is the backbone of their work in community education, strengthening leadership, and encouraging and supporting civic engagement. The Olympia Arts and Heritage Alliance in their new downtown location shown here in this slide, they're offering an increasing range of exhibits, activities, and walking tours in downtown, welcoming visitors, and they're focused on local arts, culture, and heritage. Window seat media uses community oral history and storytelling to spark conversation, connection and social change. And they emphasize stories of the forgotten, silenced and unheard and bringing those into the fabric of public life. And then I have a couple of final slides that are offered as a reminder that these categories, they're fluid and they're overlapping, and we often see them naturally and joyfully mixed together in activities of all sorts. This is a community cooking class at the Grub Kitchen, and they also celebrated Kwanzaa there last year. This slide is from the Hands on Children's Museum, and it obviously features an ethnic celebration. And I just love the way that little girl is standing in the middle, and she's just so happy. And then this is a musical performance during the Sorghum Festival at Hockey Farms last fall. So this is what's making it happen. This is our budget, and this is an updated version of the spending plan you reviewed and approved last summer. It targets a funding balance of $500,000 to $600,000, and that's here in the middle gray line over on the right. in the range of $600,000 by the midpoint of 2029 when the tax must be reauthorized for the program to continue. So this is a four-year spending plan that gets us to that point. That target amount represents 15 to 20% of the program's obligations, which is recommended by our city accounting staff. Income from the cultural access tax revenue is here in the first column. annual CAF projected revenue. And for the coming 12 month period, it's $3.38 million. And we have budgeted to spending not to spend 97% of that this year on grant contracts alone. And over the next three years, we'll continue to budget for 95% or more. So you see that number carried across here in this top line of expenses. So we'll continue to spend close to that level on just contracts. This is possible because the tax collection began 18 months before our first grant cycle. And because, you know, as a startup program, it took a while for us to get the momentum going. So to speak to the other expenses here, $390,000 is recommended for the cultural access and public schools program in the coming year. And that number increases over time. But the breakout for that is here under the green bar. It includes a transportation reimbursement for the Olympia School District. And just FYI, $60,000 will buy about 300 bus trips, which is pretty cool. It includes funding for one staff person, fully loaded, and funding to support cultural programs within the school day. That's the field trip line. It also includes funding for workshops and training to help our funded organizations design and deliver programming that meets teachers' needs and intentionally addresses the Olympus School District's teaching and learning goals and prepares them to work with students in the formal setting, which is an important, a really important element in providing safe and effective programming and helping our organizations to get there. $60,000 a year is budgeted to, so that covers our school programming. And then back up here under workshops and capacity building, there's another $60,000 budgeted for our inspired and connected initiative that works to build connections among our cohort, promote interdisciplinary programs and partnerships and educational opportunities to help them build up better operational stability. The budget also allots 11% for administrative costs, which is almost entirely program salaries and benefits plus a little bit of city shared indirect costs. And I'm going to pause and see if there are questions.

I don't see any, Mary Grace.

Okay. Awesome. Then I am going to turn it over to Anne. to tell you about the process we used to select this year's grant recipients and share the funding recommendation of the committee, of the board.

Great. Thank you, Mary Grace, and good evening to all of you council members and committee members and city staff. Just a quick kind of overview of the process we've been going through for the last few months. As Mary Grace mentioned, we had 94... record-breaking 94 eligible organizations who submitted proposals for funding in the upcoming cycle. And because of that number this year, we did increase our review panels to three. We've run two panels the last two cycles. So we had three panels this year, two of them focused on the impact applications. And then we had one panel who focused on the comprehensive applications. And each of those panels was one or more of the Culture Access Advisory Board members and then some additional members of the public who were gracious volunteers. And gosh, we appreciate them so much. As panelists, one of the first things we did was review any conflict of interest prior to scoring and then recused ourselves from considerations of those applications. that we jumped right in. And the reviewers individually evaluated each application in our panel, so about a third of them per each group. Using the scoring system, we provided written comments and had some pretty robust group conversation of every application that was in our panel. We did meet in person for an orientation and practice session, if you will, using the evaluation system. And that sort of helped calibrate our scoring across the group. And it helped us learn from one another. If we had any blind spots, things we were missing in applications, ways to look at it. And so that's really helpful to particularly for our community members on the panels who hadn't worked within the system and within the, uh, scoring metric before. Um, and that whole process, uh, was a significant amount of volunteer time. Um, I think we figured about 30 hours per person between, uh, all of the, uh, review time and evaluation time. Yeah, that up, that's, that's 500 hours, uh, that this group put in and, um, Certainly my gratitude towards both our community members and my fellow CAB members and of course our staff liaisons to help us work through that whole process. And it was a fantastic process. The funding goals, the published funding goals of the Inspire Olympia program and our evaluation criteria are on the screen. And all of these proposals were scored on the extent to which the applicants in their application address the funding goals in those areas of, as you see, the programming, merit and value, community engagement and impact, commitment to equity and access, youth programming, if they offered it. And then for our impact applicants, we looked at capacity and feasibility. And for our comprehensive grant applicants, we looked... largely at their management and operations for the bigger groups for the bigger dollar amounts. Once that happened, the scores were averaged across all of the reviewers. That gave us a final score for each applicant. The final scores were ranked highest to lowest. And the panels each discussed qualitative groupings among the scored proposals. And we identified the group of top scoring proposals that we felt deserved full funding. And then we also recommended ranges of scores for partial funding. And then each panel forwarded their final scores and suggested funding ranges to the full CAB, Cultural Access Advisory Board.

A quick question here. Yes. Kelly. How do you know it's going to be quick, Dani?

I said that and I was like, wait, maybe it's not. It is a quick question. Can you go back one slide for me, Anne? When you talk about evaluating management and operations, can you give me an example of like on the application, what do the applicants answer to help you all assess that?

I'm going to lean on Mary Grace for this one. And only because I hate that it's not my job, but this for the last two years, I've reviewed impact and I've not been on the comprehensive. And so I want to make sure that you get the most accurate answer.

We're looking at their budget. We're looking at their budget and we're looking at their staffing, their organization. Um, we want to see their board, um, composition, um, It's really that. And then also in the comprehensive group, they are required to have a two-year track record at least. And then in impact, it's more about, can they pull this off? They have a sort of a lower-level budget worksheet that's a bit simpler, and it's just graded sort of on a different scale.

Okay. Thank you.

Yeah.

Yep. Yep. Great question. Thanks for the assist, Mary Grace, there. Okay. So if we pop forward to the next slide. Are we ready for the next slide? Not quite yet. I'm trying. I don't know why. Sorry. Let me talk to you a little bit more. So the review panels, three panels, we forwarded those final scores, like I said, and the funding ranges. that we suggested to the full culture access advisory board we met last week in our regularly scheduled public meeting and at that point what we looked at was the combined list of all of the scores only so applicant names were redacted so we were only looking at the range of scores and um discussing that range, looking at the review panel suggestions and where the breakdown could be for full funding and partial funding and came up with the recommendations that you will see this evening. And we worked within our budgeted amount that you saw a couple of slides ago with Mary Grace. So the next two slides are going to be are funding recommendations by organization. And this first one is our recommendations for the comprehensive grants. So these are the larger, relatively more established nonprofit organizations in town. As Mary Grace said, they have a little bit different criteria that we go through to review them. So this comprehensive grant award totaling $2,402,000 $1,090 is recommended for 17 two-year service contracts. So again, the comprehensive awards is a two-year contract, half of that equaling about 1.2 million for the 26-27 year. And in this group, I would like to share that these applications were almost universally uniformly strong, and we're recommending 16 out of the 17 receive awards that are equal to 90, up to 100% of their requested funding. And then on the impact, so these are our one-year contracts, and we are recommending funding that totals $2.2 million $57,243, and that is for 68 one-year contracts. And this, again, these are impact groups and it's a much more diverse group reflected in a greater range of scores. And so our recommended funding awards correlate really to their final scores, their application scores. There's a group of nine very low-scoring organizations that we are not recommending for funding at all this year, and they do not appear on this list. Of the remaining 68 of them, over half, so 45 of them, or 57%, we are recommending that they receive 75% to 100% of their funding request. And the remainder, 23 of them are recommended for 50% of their requested funding amount. And big math, the funding recommendation all together for 26-27 Inspire Olympia totals $3,303,288. And as a reminder, the second year, of the comprehensive grant total would be an additional 1.2 million coming out of next year's cycle. And a quick reminder of the allotment of 390,000 to support the cultural access in the Olympia Public Schools. Every applicant, including those who were not selected for funding this year will receive comprehensive written feedback on their proposal and that feedback summarizes the comments from the reviewers and the group discussion about their application as well, so that we can help them learn and grow. As a Committee member, I want to share we're really proud of this work that we've done. We believe the outcome is fair and unbiased and based on thoughtful review. And more than that, we're really proud of this hardworking nonprofit organization, the community that we live in. the contribution that they are making to help Olympia just be a wonderful place to live and participate in art and thankful to you all. We're thankful to the city council and the voters who recognize the value of investing in our kids through the arts. And happy to answer any questions alongside Mary Grace.

Great. Thank you. And Mary Grace, if you could go ahead and take down the presentation, I think we'll, I think we asked questions about slides as we went along, so we can just be able to look at each other here. So I'll go ahead and look to my committee mates to open it up for discussion.

There she is. I do have some questions, but I know E. Young has some questions as well. So I will defer to E. Young first.

Yeah, well, first, I just want to say thank you so much to Mary Grace and Larson and the CAB team for all of your very just hard work. I mean, you said 500 hours or over 500 hours. It's a lot of time. And what a that was a thorough overview, Mary Grace, you started with. And so How amazing we have grown right from trying to make this happen to where we are now. So I do have questions. And. OK, so just kind of y'all good if I just hit all of them real quick. So. All right. So the first one is. My understanding is that in order to apply to Inspire Olympia, you must be in Olympia. And that is what I also saw the list of last year. I saw some organizations that were not in Olympia. So I asked about that. I saw that we had also funded like there's a list online on our city of Olympia website of the organizations we had funded before. And so and under the FAQs on the cultural access program, They did say you must be a nonprofit in Olympia. So could you tell me a little bit about that?

Yeah. Olympia is geographically not very large. And a lot of organizations that are not strictly within Olympia's city boundaries, nonetheless, primarily serve Olympia residents. And so we allow for organizations who are primarily serving Olympians whose membership or their activities are primary in Olympia, even though they're addressed outside, if they're serving Olympia residents or all of their activities are happening in Olympia for Olympia residents, they are eligible.

Okay. And that's something that they share in their application materials? Is that how we identify that?

Yeah. Yeah. We give them a heads up as an applicant, you know, Lacey Makerspace is a great example. Make it really clear that you know, that a majority of your membership are in Olympia or Olympia residents. So there are a few. Okay.

And is that something that we verify regularly?

We trust that they're telling us the truth. Yes. I mean, yeah. Nisqually Reach Nature Center is another example, but they are primarily serving Olympia School District classes, and they bring something like 3,000 kids through the Nature Center from Olympia School District. So they're another one we chose to fund. even though they're outside because of the numbers.

Yeah, that could be, you know, truckable. And I ask this because while the, I think you all said 94 applicants are exciting and that we're having such a reach, I'm also, I feel like there's this trend on these types of groups where there's an amount of funds, a pot of money, and the applicant list gets longer and longer. which is exciting and also not exciting in some ways, because we want to make sure that we can give as much to our community as possible. And so that's why you're hearing my questions about specifically in Olympia. Now I know our entire community is like really Thurston County, right? And so people don't track it as far, but that was something that was coming up for me when I was looking at the grantees list. Um, I also, uh, wonder about, uh, is it clear in my, is, is I wasn't sure how much each organization had asked for. So if they're an impact, did they definitely ask for 50 grand and then no, they, they might've asked for a different amount.

Yes.

Okay. Same with the, um, the two year group.

Yes. The two year group has a slightly different sort of. it's framed differently, they can ask for up to 20% of their operating budget over the last two years, up to a maximum of $85,000 per year. So they're sort of capped by their own size to a degree.

Sure. I see. Thank you. Those are my very specific questions. And then I guess I'll look to my committee mates and just be honest that I, while I really, really appreciate and I don't mean to disparage any of the work that has been done, I generally feel like I don't have enough information on Unless I were to stamp and say, hey, like, great, great work, of course. And and it's not that I'm having distrust. It's just it's hard for me to feel like I know enough to say, yeah, these to like fully get behind. I guess. So when I think, well, we just ended with our first item is advisory bodies of recruitment, which I know is different than this, what we're doing now. But when we look at those, we see the full application of what someone asked for. We're able to do some of that thinking, ask, dig deeper, do more questions. And sometimes we don't pull applicants forward that were not recommended by advisory bodies, but we have a deeper understanding of what it is. And sometimes we think, hey, you know what? This is causing me to think, why don't we give them a chance? Or maybe they're, maybe, you know, in this case for how it's relevant here, I feel like I don't have enough information to say, these, you know, whatever the organizations are, deserve this amount of funding, because I don't know how much they originally asked for. And, and I'm inclined to look at certain ones. And there's ones that I'm more familiar with than others that I'm like, well, you know, why aren't they getting more funding? And you'll see, you know, if anybody on this call is a i have these same things that and that's a process that we'll be working on but i have these same things that come up for me is that um when we're uh given these presentations and it's not on the presenters um necessarily but it's just you know we are uh we are given like this is this is everything that all of the work that's been done and i don't want to be uh dismissive or uh or you know um disregard that work at all but For someone that is going to be voting to recommend this and then voting on it at the council, I just don't feel like I have enough information.

And to be clear, Young, in terms of more information, one thing I heard you say is how much did everybody apply for, you know, compared to what they received? I know for me, too, like just looking at the list of organization names, I'm like, what are they doing with it? And this came up, this has come up on the Regional Housing Council, which is a funding advisory body for the county on, you know, homeless dollars, homeless and affordable housing dollars. And I remember when I first joined that committee, it was just the list of the organizations and the amounts that were recommended to us. And I'm like, wait, what are we funding here? I have no idea how to even make a recommendation on this. So is that also what you're thinking is like, what is the project? Like, what is what is the scope of work being funded, even if it's just a little blurb? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Anything else? Yeah. What'd you say? I just said anything else. Well, I just think that we're going to next year, we're probably going to see even more applicants. And yeah, you know, money's drying up in places. I don't know, I'm preaching to the choir here, but people are, and the more that people know about Inspire, which is a lovely thing, people are going to put their hat in for it, which they should. And also at, you know, at some point we're probably going to have to say more no's or reduce funding. And I just want to make sure I understand that um, fully what's behind it. And also we know people, uh, from, you know, it's a small community. Like you were saying, Mary Grace, our geographical boundaries are small. I bump into people all the time from these different organizations and they ask, Hey, uh, what's going on with this or how much we got this much. And, and, uh, I, and I, and I'm on this committee where I get to, you know, make, make decisions and help move things forward. And I just feel like I need to know more about it and, um, Certainly, if I were to even want to make any changes, I'm not at a place where I could say reasonably no or... So, or, or if I wanted to make any amendments to it, so, um, yeah, yeah, probably not. Um, you know, everyone's maybe favorite response, um, to what was a lot of work. Um, but I just, uh, I think it's important to just be upfront and, um, and also I hope what people are hearing is an expression of care. Like I really care about this. I really care about these organizations that are in our community. I think this funding is so important. And I'd like to be more knowledgeable and I want to have an intelligent conversation with people when they stop and ask me about it.

Thank you. Mary Grace or Anne, did you want to say anything in response? There wasn't really a question in there, but I wasn't sure if you wanted to jump in there at all.

Yeah, you know, the summer, the interim here is the time to look at this question. So thank you for raising it. I think it's really fair to want to know more about these grants. And I'm excited to tell you about them because there's great work going on. That familiarity that we get to have being in a small town is awesome, but it's also kind of double-sided when we're talking about the need to be unbiased in making decisions about funding. And so that's why we've developed a process that is based on scoring, a metric system, a system of evaluation metrics that every applicant receives with instructions and they can follow it and then their applications are evaluated carefully and thoughtfully and as unbiased as possible. I'd love to talk more about it. I'd also like to know if it's simply a matter of providing some summaries to city council and to CLPS before this process comes to you for funding, we can do that. If it's here's the mission, here's the deliverables, here's the award amount, we could probably do that for you so that you can feel more informed about what you're funding. There's probably a couple of different ways to try to help you to feel more confident about this. And I'd love to get you there. So, Anne, feel free to add.

She's declined. Do you want to respond to that, Ian?

Yeah, just quickly. I really appreciate that, Mary and Grace. And I wonder if there's something that... It that we can do during this initial or during this current cycle that wouldn't put more hours on the cab members, but to get that information and and also and also it's about, you know, making decisions, too. And so I don't mean to you know, I wouldn't want to blow up all of the work that the cab has been doing, but. You know, if I get a vote on something, one of the options is to also to vote to change it or move it forward with some amendments and also, you know, vote no on it. I don't really see myself ever voting no on Inspire funding. But so what is the path that doesn't feel really awkward? for folks that are in this position, in my position of saying, hey, you know what, I might wanna make a change. And I'm not sure if I do yet, I just, I don't know enough. So I'm also saying that too.

I think a path that would give city council members some qualitative and quantitative review would require an investment of time by those council members to do them in 94 applications. It's a lift. So how to make that timing, how to create that process as effective and efficiently as possible. And once again, to avoid bias within You know, within the timeline is an important question to spend some time with.

Let me go ahead and call on Kelly here.

The city manager's hand has gone up and down, so I have a series of questions if he has something pertinent to what we're talking about.

You're flapping your hand around.

Wasn't trying to. I'm sorry about that. I was trying to think of that. Did Mary Grace get to it? And then I heard. So I guess the question I have is just around process. Right. So on the one hand. Council has the ultimate decision-making authority here to approve recommendations. And then you've delegated the selection authority to an advisory body to advise you. A group that has developed a criteria, has assessed all the applications for that criteria, and made a recommendation to you that's unbiased based on that review. And I worry, if I had to worry, just something for you all to think about, is bringing that to the council and then the council then starting to say, well, I want to take $25,000 from this group and give $25,000 more to this group, having not been part of the review team and the review process. I think can get really difficult. So I... What I'm hearing is concern is maybe that we need to really look at the criteria for how they're evaluating and to make sure that there's agreement that it's the right kind of criteria. And maybe I'm hearing it wrong, committee member Wen. I'm just cautioning that an approach of Council kind of moving things around too much within a committee's recommendation that you've delegated this to. So I may not be saying it right. I'm just trying to raise a concern here for you all to think about. And so my apologies if I'm not kind of getting it out right.

Young, I presume what you want to say is in response to what Jada said. So, Kelly, thank you for your patience. Jump in there.

I'll just keep it short. Yeah, I yeah, I mean, I don't want to insult the the the committee, but, you know, honestly, that probably would happen. It probably would happen. I'm moving having the option to move some things around. I mean, that would be the amendment process. And so this is and, you know, I apologize for folks that might not know me yet. I'm really not trying to make an ordeal about this, but I really key in on things that I care about. And this is one of them. So if it is so that we I think it's great that we have the cab. I really do. But if this is. something where council is pretty much expected to say yes every time, then I'd rather move it to administrative or something. It just feels... Yeah, I just don't know enough. I can't really make changes. It's a weird place again. It feels very similar to me. I know there are two different pools, but it feels very similar to some of the issues I have with or concerns I have with LTAC funding. It just feels like I'm supposed to definitely say yes. Otherwise, it's going to be weird. So I'm raising the conversation. And we might not get to a solution right now.

Yeah. Well, and it may be that as a committee, we do look at criteria and the process and talk about that more in depth. But if it is a situation where the work has been done, we're trying to keep bias out of it for fairness in the community, for all the organizations that are putting in the time and effort to apply for all of the folks who are working through the review process. I guess my request would be like, just go straight to council. Like why stop in clips? Um, cause now the three of us are going to get the same presentation twice. Um, which, you know, if there was, if there's, for me, it's like, if there's an opportunity to shape something, absolutely. It should come through a committee, but if there's, but if it's really largely, um, uh, a recommendation that that's being brought for us, I think one of the things we might look for is red flags. I remember with LTAC, um, There was an issue with a particular group in the community that had recently emerged, and we decided at that moment to pull funding. So it was a different kind of situation. So that's the kind of thing where I think we may at some point intervene. I'm not saying that situation exists right now, but that's a situation in LTAC where we change the funding amount. I would be nervous about changing funding amounts around because well, especially with lack of information, but I'm not I don't have the time to review many for applications so. Good conversation, I do want to move over to Kelly who's hands been up for a while.

Yeah, my arm was getting so tired. No, same question. No, thank you all so much for doing this. I mean, one of the things I love seeing in these applications is just the immense variety of types of programming and types of like, to me, it feels like It's hitting all of the things that this funding was imagined for. So kudos to all of you on clearly it's being effective, it's being recognized, and we're seeing that in the types of applicants that are coming in. So much, much, much praise. And now I have a hodgepodge of questions that don't really go in an order because it's my brain works. Um, as the applications were being scored, is there any impact in the scoring if they meet like more than one of the, the pieces of the mission or the goals, or is it like they've touched on at least one of our goals? Check Mark.

Reaching for the guidelines. Um, they are scored, um, to the degree that their programming meets, meets those different metrics. So, um, I'll try to give you an example. Um, and do you remember the phrasing? It's, uh, Yeah.

So Kelly, each one of those, the programming, merit and value, community engagement, impact, et cetera, et cetera, those five things within each five of those, there's a range and it correlates to a number, but it's, you know, doesn't address any of this criteria at all to meet some of the criteria, maybe meets half of it, but they didn't really talk about more than half of it. It meets a lot, but we still have some questions. And it might have five yet. It meets every bullet point in this. And there's no way we possibly could make this any better. Then we go to the next one. So each one of those five buckets has bullets within it. And then we individually, as we're reviewing, you know, I go through with a little tick mark, right? And I'm like, okay, yep, they met this one, they met this one, they met this one. And so at the end, right, then I go back and I'm like, okay, under programming merit and value, I think that they have touched on five out of the six.

Let me ask this question a little differently because I hear what you're saying and I appreciate it. I get that and that's awesome. On that slide with evaluation criteria, there's also the stated funding goals. I think that's the piece. Is there a recognition of organizations or programs that are meeting four of those five stated funding goals? Is that taken into consideration versus an organization that's meeting one of those five funding goals?

Yeah. Yeah. So usually it's reflected in the way they're broken down by the, they met these, they didn't meet any of them. It's reflected within that.

So for instance, programming and merit and value would be a good place to say, wow, they're firing on all funding goal cylinders. But then in addition, under equity and access, you could score them higher if they are you know, have a really strong effort to outreach to minority groups or to underserved populations. Same with community engagement and impact and so on. And there's in the guidelines, each of these categories, each of these metrics is called out and then there's bullets underneath to describe what kinds of activities an organization should be considering or sharing in order to score well in that area. So community engagement and impact, for an example. At a minimum, all applicants should demonstrate who they serve, how they engage with participants and audience members, how they build and develop community trust through approaches like partnerships, collaboration, communications, and culturally relevant programming. The most successful applications will also demonstrate some or all of the following. A history of or specific plans for continuing community engagement and programming to strengthen community connections and interactions. How they maintain or expand relationships with partners and participants. How community members are engaged in envisioning, planning, delivery, and evaluation of their programming. Strategies for understanding community specific needs and designing programs that respond to those needs. And meaningful collaboration with other local organizations, either inside or outside the cultural sector, that improve or expand the impact of the work. So that's one category, one metric. And then they're scored on the degree to which they hit all of those areas. And they all tie back to the funding goals.

That's why it takes an hour per application on average. It does.

And then a couple of questions specifically on the comprehensive awards. So I see Cielo was not a two-year award. Did they not ask for two years?

So Cielo was an interesting case. Thank you for bringing it up. I knew somebody would. They made the mistake of applying in both categories. And when we looked at their application in both categories, Their impact application was written very differently than their comprehensive application, and it was actually much stronger. So we were trying to figure out how to make this fair, and we also, I don't know if you noticed, but we had fewer comprehensive applications this year, applicants. That was sort of a mistake, the part of the, I won't go there, but CLO really belonged in the comprehensive group because of their size. So what we did was we took their impact application, we considered them under the rubric, under the scoring rubric of a comprehensive organization, And we funded them, I think, at $45,000 or something, very close to $50,000, which was the impact limit. And we'll invite them to apply as a two-year, hopefully in two years. They'll apply again for a one-year grant next year, I expect. So that's how that fell out.

So because there was not as many comprehensive applications, were there any in that category that did not receive funding or was there few enough that it was like, even if their score wasn't awesome, like they're going to get the comprehensive funding.

There was one whose score was significantly lower than everybody else's. Um, and there's a lot of discussion on that one, should they be funded or not? Um, And it was determined to fund them because the program had strong merit and value. It did score pretty well. And so it was the only one that was funded at less than 90%. All the others were 90 or 100. Okay.

And then last question on the comprehensive awards. Four recipients on that list who this is their second time through. Are there any of those on the comprehensive?

This is only the second.

Okay.

Yeah, this is only the second two-year cycle. So these organizations are just finishing their first two-year grant.

So for those organizations or for organizations that got impact last year and now would like comprehensive, did they were they asked to provide any information, even just a little bit of narrative on, hey, this is what you said you were going to do last time. Tell us how you did it so that we just had some understanding of how they utilized it.

Oh, yeah. All of the return applicants, anyone who's received funding before, had a question to answer on the application, an additional question about the impact of their work, how they used Inspire Olympia funding and what the impact of that was, and particularly, I think, how it improved advanced equity and access. So, yes.

And then my last question, and I, you know, for my committee members and maybe for Jay, like this I'm not sure what the right avenue is for this conversation. But one thing that comes to mind for me as I look at these is there's a lot of familiar names on there. That's awesome. Olympia has some really wonderful, wonderful organizations. And we do as a city have multiple pots of money, right? We've got this, we've got LTAC, we've got opportunities to sponsor some events and programs as a city. And one of the things that comes to mind for me is as we look at all of those pots together, do we ever look at is there an organization that's getting funds from each of those for the same thing? I recognize there might be one that it's like, oh, we're using LTAC for this festival that we put on and we're using CAB for this youth programming we do. But what I wonder is, are there any that it's like, yep, we've got LTAC funds for this event and the city is sponsoring the same event and we're getting an impact grant for this same event. And I say that, like, I don't know that I have judgment on that. I just feel like it would be helpful information to know, are there some events or programs or organizations that are really being backboned by the city in a way that, you know, could be risky for that organization if any piece of that ever changed?

Mm hmm. Yes and no, I think. We are aware when an organization gets LTAC as well as Inspire Funding in part because we use the same granting platform. So it actually, we try to make it easy for them. They can use a lot of the content and just copy it into their new application. But the But the premise of each of those funding grants, grant funding resources is really different. LTAC is focused outward, bringing visitors in, and Inspire Olympia is focused inward on serving people here in Olympia. One is about equity and access, and the other is about economic development. And so they have really different premises. And so generally, if an organization qualifies for both It's valid. Like if you think about the, it's late and I'm starting to go, but the festival, the Harbor Festival. Or what's another one that gets both? I think Team Tomorrow, the South Sound Block Party also gets LTAC funding. You know, the block party features a lot of, we kind of encourage them to feature some Olympia bands and to keep, to have a really strong local character to that event. But clearly they're also serving an economic development purpose by bringing in so many visitors. So it's kind of legit. In my mind, it's worth looking at and we could easily provide kind of a list if you want to see it of who's receiving more than one city resource

Yeah, I don't know. And that's like I say, like, I don't I don't know whether I have a feeling on that one way or the other. It just comes to mind for me of, you know, there are certainly organizations that any one of those funding pots, you know, is serving them. But but then, yeah, the organizations where all of those funding pots are serving them are like you say, like there could be very, very there's probably very legit reasons. And that's great. But it's just something I'm curious about.

But and nobody's nobody's getting all three. I know that. Yeah.

Go ahead, Ian. Yeah, Kelly, I think it's a great point. And, of course, in nonprofit, we're always encouraging a diverse revenue stream and not over-reliance. You're in my nonprofit brain, Anne. I know. I've been there with you. And so... Two points. These funding sources are reflected on the budgets that they submit for both comprehensive and impact. We ask about their sources of revenue. And then on the questions about capacity and feasibility, that's also something that we look at. And if they have limited sources of revenue or really adjacent sources of revenue, Those are comments that we make. If we see that they are heavily reliant, perhaps on municipal and other government funding, we might make suggestions such as, have you looked at sponsorship? Have you looked at funding? you know, expanding your individual donor base. And so those of us on the review panels with that experience really kind of hone in on that as a feasibility, as a sustainable data point. Okay.

All right. Thank you.

Those are my questions, Chair. Excellent. Thank you. I don't have any specific questions on the recommendations. I'm in agreement that it'd be nice to just have a little bit more information in terms of what we're funding. One of the things I think about is exactly what you brought up earlier, is that as this program gets more and more competitive, then more people will be asking us questions, um, uh, and, um, uh, and start to scrutinize the list a little bit more closely. I'd like to get more clarity, um, eventually on, um, organizations outside of the city of Olympia. Cause, um, I, I get a little bit nervous with like, okay, well they've told us they mostly serve people from Olympia, but I would like to, um, I, and, and it might be a hard, hard, uh, needle to thread, but, um, I would like to know how we can verify that because, um, ultimately, especially as we, the, the resource constrained environment continues, we're seeing a reduction of all sorts of public funding are all over the place. More and more organizations will look to this program. And as it gets more competitive, I think we might see some, you know, hard feelings, um, around funding decisions. And I would want to be able to, as a council member explain, you know, that, uh, uh, what, what, why I supported a recommendation from, um, from the advisory body. So that's my big thought there. And then ultimately with process stuff coming forward, I think that this step of the process where the work is done and you all are looking to us to say, how did we do? How does this look? I don't know that it needs to come to this advisory committee and then go to the council because largely the work is already done. There's not too much for us to shape at this point. However, when it's about checking in on the criteria, checking in on the process, and, like, how those things come together, I think that's a great stop to make at this committee. So I hope that all makes sense. It's getting a little bit late, so I'm hoping I'm not too rambly. But that's kind of how I parse it out. One of my goals as a council member is, like, how do I not see the same presentation twice? So no offense to you all at all. It was a great presentation, but I've been through enough meetings where I'm like, I've already seen this presentation, so... So no offense intended at all. I'm just thinking about process improvement and efficiency and things like that. So other than that, though, you all are looking for a recommendation from this committee to go to the full council. I've heard some concerns from one of my committee mates here. So, Young, I just kind of want to look back to you in terms of you know, where you're at in this decision-making process that we have right in front of us.

Yeah. If the group were to move forward. So my other two committee mates, I would not be ready to move forward at this time. So I would not be voting in favor of this and it is not a reflection of the cab members. Um, and for, you know, the, the one that is here, I hope you do know that.

Yeah. Um, I saw the lights go off on Mary Grace as you were speaking. Like literally, it like got dark. So let's talk a little bit about that. Because one thing I heard you say is that you just need more information. And will that more information, like you feel like if there was more information, you could feel more ready for a decision on this, correct? Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. I also recognize that that would be a significant amount of work because I would go through all of the different ones. And I'm also hearing a bit of pushback from folks that there's not really a lot of room to move it. And I find that pretty frustrating. So if other committee mates are feeling like they would benefit from more information before making a decision, then I'm on board with that. If folks are wanting to move forward, you will not be moving forward with me saying yes on this one. So just just being clear about that. Okay. And I will still try to influence the process in the future so that we, you know, not randomly moving things around, but, uh, uh, Yeah, I just, yeah, I don't feel like, I really don't like being at a place. Today it's inspire, maybe tomorrow it's something else. But I don't like to be at a place pretty much ever where I feel like I'm just, you know, I'm expected to say yes to something. And in this case, I don't have enough information about it. And, you know, and it's tough. Thank you.

Kelly, where are you at? Yeah. You know, I can appreciate that. And I also... I didn't speak to that. I apologize, Young. I was so focused on my questions. But I do feel, you know, there's a certain level of... would like to know more. I certainly don't feel the need to read all the applications. Like if you hand those to me, I definitely wouldn't read them. But you know, Mary Grace, you mentioned, you know, is there an opportunity for and I would hope this is like a field on their application, right? Like, what is the thing they're applying for? What's their mission? What did they ask for? What's the funding recommendation? You know, like, I feel like some information like that would at least help me understand Yeah, a little more about that. I would be okay moving it forward if we could get some of that information when it comes to full council. Which is Tuesday, right? Oh, like next week? Tuesday.

Yeah, and you know, it feels rushed, and I apologize for that, but the reason for that is because it comes to CLPS, We publish all the awards, right, for clips. The information's out there. Everybody's saying, oh, what'd you get? What'd you get? Hey, did you see? So the idea is to move it through to council so that there isn't this sort of suspense period or to minimize that suspense period. So that's the schedule.

And a lobbying effort?

Yes, and to also protect you all, honestly, from... It's not a perfect process. I won't pretend it is. And in grant work, grant administration is fraught because it's money on the table. It's hard to do it well. It's impossible to do it well and make everybody happy. So, yes, there will be people who will come to you and they will not be happy and they're going to want to know why and what and wherefore. It's going to happen. Yeah.

To a certain point, a reflection on what you just said, though, is a little bit, I think, making committee member of one's point is that they see it published in the CLPS agenda and say, this is what we're getting. What are you getting? So if it's already decided, you know, what vote is needed?

I would be in favor of it going directly to city council.

That makes sense to me.

But I also respect your desire for more information. And I can print a lot of what you just requested out of the grant platform itself. It may not be tidy and it will be lengthy.

Not as lengthy as all the applications.

No, that's true. But I could print, I think I can separate out the mission statement and I know I can separate their deliverables. And I also have spreadsheets with what they requested versus what was awarded. But that is a lot of information. And once you have it, then you are open to all of those questions about any decisions that you may make. Go ahead, Jay.

I just want you to have what you need when it comes to the council versus a forced timeline. I hear that there's a packet out there and there's information out there, but until the council votes on it and makes a decision, they're all recommendations to the council at that point. If you're feeling like it needs more information in the packet for the full council, Then to me, I would rather wait, push it out, let Mary Grace and that team pull that information together that you're asking for and get everything to you so you have what you want next Tuesday versus not having what you want next Tuesday.

So there's no timeline in terms of organizations need their funding by a certain time. And if it gets delayed, then they won't be able to start when they expected to be able to start. kind of a limitation?

Yeah, I can't speak for 85 different organizations, but the funding is scheduled to, you know, most contracts are scheduled to begin July 1. If they don't begin July 1, it'll not be because of us. It'll be because the organizations haven't completed the paperwork. That's the schedule. It's a July 1 contract start. And there's timeline, there's lead time to prepare all those contracts and they're underway to kind of get as much of the work done so that we can just fill in the blanks later. But there's a significant amount of work there. Yeah.

OK, that's kind of what my question was, is like, what is the, you know, quote unquote, fiscal year that we're operating off of with this program? So, well, I feel good about moving this ahead to council. I think there's a lot for us to consider here as a committee in terms of, you know, like I said earlier, I'm concerned about like as things get more competitive. At this point, it seems like there's almost enough funding for almost every organization, but it's not always going to be that way. So I think there's some things for us to consider in that, but it's not happening tonight or, you know, before this process needs to complete itself because I think those will be, you know, longer conversations and the hour is late. But I would support moving this forward to the full council. I'm not sure what the lift looks like to get that additional information into the packet for council, which I think is probably due tomorrow. So And I'm not sure what our upcoming agendas look like in June to be able to make a decision in the timeframe that we have right now. So Kelly, I just saw you come off mute.

So I'm kind of putting a question out there. I was just going to ask that same question. And I think maybe Jay was going to address it as well. It was like, what are upcoming agendas? Is there an option to move it out even just a week?

Yeah, you would have to move it out to the 16th because the 9th you have a, we have a study session.

That's kind of why we ended up on the second, but that would certainly give us time. Okay.

So would that give you enough time to compile just basic info? Yeah, okay. That would be helpful for me. Like I shared with my, like when I served in the Regional Housing Council, it was kind of like, I don't even know what is being funded here. It was a very similar situation, actually, that led to the formation of the Regional Housing Council was different organizations kind of like wanting to influence the outcome. And so different structures were created to try to remove bias, you know, create clear structure, right? Uh, but even then it would come to the regional housing council and be like, wait, I still don't know what's, what's getting funded here. And like, as I'm voting on things, I at least want to know what that is. So I think that information would be helpful, but, um, um, you know, I think we can include that as we go along here. So, um, with that and hearing, we'll have a split vote on this, but I'll need, um, a motion, um, uh, to advance these recommendations to the full council. I will make that motion. Okay. And I'll second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed?

Nay.

Okay. Thank you both so much. I know this is a substantial amount of work and it's also a fairly new program. So there is, you know, there are always going to be keys to work out. And I, you know, have faith that we'll be able to address these things as we move forward. So thank you so much.

One final question is, should we plan on a June 2nd or June, where are we landing on this council calendar?

Unless you would like to compile the requested information before, what is it, 2 p.m. tomorrow, whatever the time is, I think probably June 16th is probably going to be that.

It may be possible. So I'll see what I can do. I think it's possible. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. I'll leave that up to you and Jay to figure out. Okay. Excellent. Well, thank you again. And our final order of business this evening is approval of recommended community development block grant program year 2026 annual action plan allocations and substantial amendment to the consolidated plan. So Anastasia, we are finally ready for you. Thanks for hanging in there with us. And I know you got Jacinda there as backup as well. So thanks for hanging in there, Jacinda.

Excuse me, Froggy. Thank you chair and committee members. And I'm gonna get my presentation going. Do you guys see that okay?

It is loading on my end. Oh, there it is, yep. Showed up great. Great.

Can you still see it or did it click away? It's still there. Perfect. Thank you. So good evening, chair and committee members. For the record, my name is Anastasia Everett and I am a senior program specialist with the city's housing division. Thank you for this opportunity to prevent staff recommendations for the program year 2026 community development block grant or CDBG award, as well as a proposal for an amendment to the consolidated plan. Tonight, I will be giving background on the CDBG program, go over the program year 2025 status, and then I will move into the 2026 staff funding proposal and consolidated plan amendment. CDBG is a program funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, and it is used to support communities by investing funding in each community's identified greatest needs. The CDBG program is flexible and has a variety of eligible activities. Activities selected by grantee communities should prioritize the needs identified in the five-year consolidated plan. Olympia's greatest priorities have been identified in the 2023 to 2027 Consolidated Plan as the creation and preservation of affordable housing, economic development activities, public services, and public facility improvements. Each activity must also meet a national objective, primarily to aid our community's low and moderate income residents. In a typical program year, each winter staff releases a request for proposals soliciting activities for inclusion in the annual action plan. CDBG regulations do not require a competitive process for selecting annual action plan activities, but the city has chosen to take this approach since 2021 to make the funding process more accessible to nonprofits. And our program year begins September 1st and ends August 31st. And so we're going to go into an update on the Program Year 2025 grant. In 2025, the city joined a lawsuit filed by numerous local governments challenging the federal administration's attempt to impose new grant conditions on federal funding, including CDBG. The court granted a preliminary injunction to named plaintiffs in the suit, blocking HUD from enforcing the grant conditions. I'm going to go back really quick. We typically receive our grant agreement for CDBG in late summer, and then we're able to execute it and all subrecipient contracts September 1st. But due to this delay in Jordanville lawsuit, we weren't able to execute our subrecipient agreements until nearly February this year. So we're about six months behind. The upcoming program year 2026 is covered by the injunction that's currently in effect. However, HUD has appealed the injunction and the appeal is active in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. If the injunction is overturned, HUD would have the authority to issue the city a new grant agreement requiring compliance with the new conditions. So I'm going to move us into our program year 2026 funding proposal. And the following proposal is based on the current threats and uncertainty at the federal level and, in my opinion, best positions the city to protect its CDBG funds in future years. So this process looks a little different this year. Staff presented a proposed change in the process for the 2026 award to the Community Livability and Public Safety Committee in February. The recommended change was to directly award existing CDBG subrecipients. Existing subrecipient organizations have each received multiple years of CDBG funding and have demonstrated the ability to compliantly spend down funds. Staff have communicated with proposed program year 2026 subrecipients on the risk to our CDBG award. Should these recommendations be forwarded to the council for approval, further communications will take place in the coming months as the city prepares and launches the annual action plan. Does anyone have any questions so far?

I don't see any.

Moving into our available resources, the city's Program Year 2026 award is $376,000. which is nearly a $35,000 increase from program year 2025, and we haven't seen an increase in CDBG funding in a handful of years, so I was very glad to see that news. Staff also proposed to reallocate $35,000 in existing revolving loan funds to subrecipient programs, bringing our total available resources to $411,000. Staff recommend each proposed subrecipient to be awarded approximately one-fifth of our total available funding. The proposed subrecipients each have experience in compliantly and quickly expending funds, which is a big ask for kind of the smaller nonprofits, but that supports our city's spend-down requirements. And the 20% administrative cap here is calculated only on the city's entitlement award and not including the reallocated funds. So that's why that figure is $75,000. The rest is split evenly. Staff also recommend including these contingency projects in the upcoming year's annual action plan. Contingency projects are identified during the annual action plan process to reduce the administrative burden of preparing a substantial amendment to the annual action plan or consolidated plan, which require a 30-day public comment period and a public hearing. In the event of a canceled project or receipt of program income, that funding is then routed to projects identified here. And we'll now move to the substantial amendment process. A substantial amendment is required whenever a significant change is made to the city's five-year consolidated plan. The consolidated plan public participation process includes a 30-day public comment period as well as a public hearing held at city council. The substantial amendment is essentially the city has two pots of program income and divided into regular program income and the revolving loan fund. Revolving loan funds can only be used for rental rehabilitation projects, while regular program income can be applied towards CDBG subrecipient activities outlined in the annual action plan. We receive a pretty good amount of program income from both funding sources throughout the year. But we can't really bank on how much we will be. They come from homeowners paying off their existing loans. So we received a lot in like 2020 when the interest rates were incredibly low. And now as they're increasing, we don't have as many. Staff recommend dissolving the revolving loan fund in the existing rental rehabilitation program and allocating program income as a whole to contingency projects outlined in each year's annual action plan. So that can change every year. Some information about the Rental Rehabilitation Program started in 2021 as a creative approach to the rental housing preservation need. Staff have determined over the past five years that there's not sufficient capacity to compliantly spend down that federal funding as quickly as we are receiving it in an in-house rehabilitation program. We just don't have the expertise There is currently one project underway, the rehabilitation of a 12-unit multifamily property, and staff recommend completing this project as it's already allocated, and it will result in the property being restricted to affordable housing with a 20-year affordability covenant. The rental rehabilitation program has also caused some negative impacts to the city's timeliness and spend-down. Each year, the city has to have below a certain amount of grant funding in our line of credit in order to meet HUD's timeliness requirements. And due to the complexities in completing the rental rehabilitation projects, the funds can't be spent down quickly enough, and it puts us at risk of noncompliance. For some background, we typically spend all of our previous year's program entitlement by the time the next one rolls around so we're really good at spending down our regular activities. there's currently 285,000 in the revolving loan fund with 250,000 allocated to the project that is currently underway and staff recommend the unallocated remainder to be awarded to program year 2026 sub recipients. Program income received during this year would also be awarded to the activities listed as the contingency projects in the plan, and those projects can change annually based on the city's needs and priorities. Timeline and next steps. Should CLPS approve the funding proposals, staff will prepare the annual action plan accordingly and will post the draft plan for public comment beginning June 8th. Both the annual action plan and the substantial amendment are scheduled for public hearings on June 23rd with the public comment period ending July 9th. And staff, I am optimistic that the annual action plan process can return to its traditional approach. to the RFP in the 2027 program year as we keep an eye on what goes on with the appeal. And I am now available for any questions, and thank you.

Great. Thank you so much, Anna. And thankfully, we had a briefing on a lot of what you shared while you were out with Jacinda, but some new information for us to consider as well with the rental rehabilitation program. So I'll look to my committee mates with any questions that you have. Are we all questioned out?

Go ahead, Ian. I don't have any questions, Anastasia. I just want to, I don't want to be weird, but I just want to thank you for being so consistent, you and the team, and staying strong during a really, really tumultuous time. And I'm watching it. I'm kind of a part of it, but I'm not in it with CDBG like you are. And I just think it's... just really special. And I see a big effort from you and the team. So I'm listening. I don't have any questions, but I just wanted to share some gratitude.

Thank you. That means a lot to me. I really appreciate the kind words. Thank you.

All right. Well, I don't have anything. I feel like the information you presented is exceedingly clear. And I know a lot of hard decisions have had to go into getting us to where we're at now, but it's also kept us at a as stable of a place as we can be in this current environment. So appreciate all the hard work that's gone into it. And if there are no other questions from committee members, I will entertain a motion that we approve this recommendation to the full council.

Go ahead. Okay. I will make a motion that we recommend to send this to the full council. Is that? Yeah, that's great. Yeah.

I'm picking up what you're putting down. Yeah. All in favor. Aye. Aye. Aye. Excellent. Thank you so much. We'll see y'all when you come to city council with this. With that, we've reached the end of our agenda, except that we do have reports and updates. I don't have anything as the chair, but I will look to staff, look to committee members. It's Debbie's last CLPS meeting. That's all. That's my one report. Okay. Well, with that, thanks, everybody. I know we've had some pretty heady conversations this evening, but we are now done. And so I will call this meeting adjourned. Thank you so much.