Ad Hoc Committee on Police and Community Relations - Regular Meeting

Okay, and it looks like we are live. So hello, everybody. This is the Community Livability and Public Safety Committee of the Olympia City Council. We're meeting Wednesday, August 26, and the time is 5.30 p.m. My name is Dani Madrone, and I serve as the chair. And for a roll call, I can see I'm joined by both my committee mates here, Yang Huan and Kelly Green. um the first thing that we need to do um is approve our agenda for the evening so could i get a motion from one of you to do so please promote yep all right all in favor aye aye yes unanimous all right um We're going to start with public comments, and I know that we have a couple of people who are wishing to speak this evening. Let's go ahead and start with the public commenter we have in the room. Dawn, could you go ahead and facilitate us there?

Yes. Thank you. I'm sorry, one moment, please.

Yeah, yeah, you're good.

Are you okay with just vocals for now?

Yeah, that's great.

One moment.

Just the microphone? Hi, my name is Kate Jarvila and we have just some questions wanting to know the company of the cameras, what other alternatives you explore for the speed? It's on the safety for having the cameras near schools. Where our place is, is by two schools. And so we just want to know more information and what other avenues to explore. Um, cause I know like some places they have like speed bumps, like by living, uh, uh, the living water church to help slow down traffic. Um, I'm just concerned about having cameras facing our property and just what company you're working with, you know, with all the controversial going on with the flock cameras so i just want to know if what other avenues have been explored what company you're looking into hiring and so thank you thank you so much and thanks for bringing those questions we actually aren't even that far along so we will be learning right alongside you this evening for that uh topic on the agenda um

And, uh, Don, I see we've also got Matthew Landers, um, signed in, but I don't know if I'm just not familiar enough with teams yet or if I'm, uh, and don't see him or if he's just not here.

He is not online.

Okay. Great. Um, and that was it for everyone in the room who wished to give public comment.

That is correct. Yeah. It's just me and my husband.

Okay. Excellent. Well, you'll, you'll be learning right alongside us this evening. We're very, very early in this conversation around, um, uh, speed safety, uh, uh, cameras and, and, and other, and other things that we've explored as a city before and things and other things we could be looking at. So stay tuned. We'll, we'll be getting into that, um, uh, later on this evening.

Okay. Thank you.

Okay. Excellent. Um, and, uh, um, uh, young or Kelly did either of you want to respond to public comment? Okay.

Exactly what I was thinking.

Sorry. Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, Just for Kate in the room, those are good questions, and we'll be sure to bring them up with the second item on the agenda tonight. So we'll ask those questions as well and make sure that you get some responses where there may be answers or at least good things to consider.

Thanks.

All righty. Our first, well, first, before we get into our committee business, we do need to approve the minutes from June 24th. So if I could get a motion to do so, I would appreciate that.

Move to approve the minutes.

All right, excellent. All in favor? Aye. Alright, and then with that done, we can get to our first item on the agenda here and just one moment here. I'm just shifting all these things around on my screen so I can have all the right information in front of me. We have. the Youth Council update and approval of a recommendation to appoint members to fill the vacancies and reappoint members to the Olympia Youth Council. I believe we have Susan Grisham here to help facilitate this conversation. And we also have a couple of our Youth Council members, Donovan and Kaylin. So I don't see any of them on the screen here. So we might need some instruction for folks on how they move from into this space. Teams is very new for us in terms of hosting meetings. So I believe we, I see that Donovan is here along with Susan and Kaylin. So how do they get over to this screen?

John, are you, Are you working on that?

I am looking to see what options I have to change who's actually on the screen. Yes. And Susan, if you do have that information, I would appreciate it.

So on the on the pad, you'll see the list of names and you can move people on the screen on the pad.

It gives you if you click on the name, it gives you the option.

While we're doing that, if we can also move Jay over as well.

So, when I hover on the manage screen side, it says no more participants can be brought on the screen. So, I don't know if we have some limitations there.

I've never run into that before personally.

I'm going to go ahead and take the team room chambers off the screen. Oh, it happened before. Okay. Yes, go ahead, Ian.

Uh, for tonight's meeting chair, might I suggest that we only, uh, sort of priority. Oh, well, great. Well, just, we have a few different items tonight, so I think it's, I think it's most important for the people that are presenting to be on the screen. And, yeah, because there's, you know, when we factor in all the committee members and all the staff, it's a lot of folks.

Yes, understood. And I think we have a limitation for how many people can be on the screen. So I'm going through the managed screen. I just added Donovan and Susan. And I'm looking for Kaylin. Do we have her here? I don't actually see her. Oh, go ahead.

Yeah. Kaylin's also having some tech issues, so she won't be able to present tonight, but I'll be taking over all the presenting.

Okay, great. Oh, so is Kaylin not able to join us then, Donovan?

No, she won't be able to.

Okay, great. Then we have everybody here. So, Susan, are you going to kick us off?

Yeah, I will kick you off. Thank you. Good evening, for the record. Susan Grisham. I'm here tonight as a liaison to the Youth Council. And tonight... I was going to say our youth council members, but Donovan, our youth council chair, will be writing an update on the Olympian Youth Council and what they've been up to and bringing forward recommendations for appointments for the 2026-27 term. The youth council has had a really productive year so far, and I'm excited for you to hear what they've been doing and the oncoming members and who is going to continue on. So with that, I'll turn it over to our youth council chair, Donovan Hojola.

Awesome. Thank you. And Susan, are you able to share screen the slideshow?

I can share the screen.

And just let me know when you want me to switch slides.

I am trying to share. Can you see the presentation?

Do you see it? No, we don't see it.

Is it there almost? It's coming up. Awesome. Yeah, there it is. Perfect. There you go.

So just let me know when you want me to switch slides.

Awesome, thank you. So yeah, thank you guys so much for having us. And you know, we've had a really productive year and we have a lot of work ahead of us. We've had some really dedicated members and this is the first year where I think we're having almost all of our founding members or a large majority of them are now stepping off. So we have a new wave of people who are coming in taking over leadership roles and who are going to be guiding the Youth Council forward. So Susan, can you go to the next slide?

Is there a slide change?

No.

Okay.

I can't see very well what's happened. So, come up. There you go.

There we go. Okay. So, yeah, just to go over our mission values and our purpose. You can read them there, but I'll just restate them because these are kind of the, this is what really guides us in the work that we do and keeps us grounded in why we do what we do and what makes us special to the city. So the Olympia Youth Council amplifies and elevates youth voices and city governance and expands youth involvement in the community. And our purpose statement is that we connect, represent, and give voice to the diverse groups of youth in Olympia. And for our vision statement, we envision an Olympia that is accessible, equitable, inclusive, safe, and engaging for everyone in the community. So really what's important to us here is that the voices of youth usually aren't given a seat at the table, even though our voices matter so much and that the decisions that the city council and that the city government makes impacts us every day. Usually we're not given that voice. So that's really, this is kind of our mission and what grounds us. Susan, you can go to the next slide. So yeah, some of our accomplishments. We've held joint meetings with the Lacey Youth Council. So something that we're really happy to see is other youth councils spring up in different cities. So we've been working with them and collaborating to be able to amplify voices across the city and across our county. We planned and hosted a joint youth summit with the Lacey Youth Council as a part of the DEIB summit. And then we've been working with inner city transit and the city staff to create a PSA to encourage the youth to ride the public transportation and with the changing in routes. So as you can see, we have a picture there of the work that we've been doing. We recently had our filming day just a couple of days ago and it was a really great opportunity and we had a lot of fun with it. We received a briefing on Olympia Sanctuary City and public safety policies, getting youth involved and informed in those decisions. We've developed recommendations for making public policy more accessible to youth. So we had a day where we developed that recommendation, actually sent it to the city council. And then we've been supporting youth climate action through the Youth Climate Action Fund grant process. So right now that process is going to be distributing $5,000 about a $5,000 grant to different climate projects in the city to youth who are hosting these climate projects. And we're really excited to see youth get involved in the community and begin to make that change. So here's the work to come. We have a busy year coming up and we have a lot of really great plans for what we're hoping to do. So we have the Youth Council Retreat and the new member onboarding coming up in mid-September where we're hoping to have a really big day where we can get, we have about 14 new appointees, which we'll get into in a bit, but we're really hoping to get those people onboarded and involved in the great work that we do. We're going to be hosting a third places for youth discussion, which is something that I'm personally really excited for. We have a mental health resources for youth briefing. We have the development of our 2027 work plan. And then we get to do a review of the Youth Climate Action Fund grant applications, which some of our youth council members will be doing, but there will be others that are actually applying and are hosting climate projects themselves. So recruitment. So this is a list of our outgoing members that have really put in a lot of work to be able to A, get the youth council off the ground in our community for a really long time. We have, we're appointing, hoping to appoint 14 new people and the applications were open through May and we received 21 applications. The interviews occurred over three nights with the Mayor Pertemp, me and Kaylin as our leaders who were interviewing applicants. So these are our recommended appointments. So we're planning to reappoint about six members, including me and Kaylin, who are some of our, and a couple of other of our vice chairs. And we're planning to appoint a great group of new people, all people who bring a really diverse set of experiences, perspectives, and ideas to the work that we do. We aim to get people from all across the community with different socioeconomic backgrounds, health conditions, and lived experiences that can shape the way that we make decisions and work as a group. And so we, so yeah, we moved, we need to move to approve the recommended appointments to fill vacancies and then reappointments to the Olympia Council for the 2026 to 2027, 2027 term and forward the recommendation to the city council for approval.

Excellent.

Thank you so much, Donovan. Thank you. Did we lose Kelly and Eong? I'm putting them back on the screen here. What is going on here? Now we've lost Donovan. Okay, now we're all back here. This is okay. We're still getting used to teams. This is the first meeting I've ever facilitated where we are using teams. So apologies to everybody for the clunkiness. Excellent. I will go ahead and open up to my committee meets for any thoughts or questions.

Go ahead, Kelly.

Yeah, thanks, Jack. Donovan, that's really great news about, I mean, it's been awesome to watch your work, but to see that there were 21 applicants feels like a really huge success. So congratulations on that. When you talk with those folks, how many of them were familiar with the work that the Youth Council had been doing? Like, did they apply because they had already seen what was going on? Or was it just, yeah, I guess, how did they hear?

Yeah, so it was a pretty solid mix of people. There were some people there who, you know, it was a completely new thing to them where they hadn't heard about the Olympia Youth Council before and where it was something that they were really, it was something completely new to them. But there was a lot of people who knew about what we had done and some people who knew really specific projects about what we were doing, what we were hoping to do in the future, and who were really involved and really excited to get engaged. You know, we had a really strong collection of people where something they've never heard about. It's a completely new thing to them, but most people were, you know, had heard about it and we're really interested in it because of that.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, great presentation.

Yeah, really exciting stuff. I'm working on some really. tackling big topics in a really creative way. I'm really looking forward to the inner city transit, uh, PSA. I know that y'all just did some filming on that this past weekend. Is that a fresh photo in that, that PowerPoint? Was that just from this past weekend? Okay. That's what I thought. I was like, wow, they're quick with it. What's the timeline on that PSA? Hmm.

Yeah, so Susan can also offer a little bit of input here because she might know more exactly what we're doing. But this week, we've also been wrapping up some of the extra filming for that. So we've been wrapping up. So like tomorrow, I'm going to go film another scene at the farmer's market. Susan, do you want to add a little bit more about the timeline for that?

So we have to film the scene with Donovan and one more scene with another youth council member that will also include Chappie as an annoying dad. Should be pretty fun. And so in talking to the communications team, after we shoot all of those things, they're thinking mid-September we'll have something to show. The other thing is on Saturday, we had a conversation with Nick Demerich, who is from InterCity Transit. And once this is finished, it is also going to be shown at the movie theaters or films the same way the overdose PSA was. So that's super exciting. So we're thinking mid-September it will be unveiled to the world. I'm hoping that we'll be able to come to council to show that to everyone.

Oh, OK. Yeah, that's that's coming up here pretty quick. The. Oh, in case this is not obvious, Donovan, I'm going to be in favor of all of these applicants. We spent three grueling nights and I think we did our darnest, you know, and. We offered plenty of grace when there was hiccups for folks, and I still think that we made the right decision. So I'm looking forward to that. And glad to see that the chair and vice chair is looking to be reappointed. So happy to see your name on that list as well. Those ones I'm not so sure about. Just kidding. I wanted to tell you that, um, the youth council member that yesterday we, uh, during our regular, uh, city council business meeting, there were two proclamations, one of which for overdose awareness and, uh, council member Kelly green that's on this call right now, uh, gave a shout out to the youth council's PSA, um, about, uh, overdose and the importance of carrying Narcan. Um, and, uh, uh, she, she had seen it a couple of times and, um, and each time had a, had a stronger impact, I think. And she even had, uh, she even had it with her, um, not the PSA, the Narcan. So I thought that was really cool. So y'all are making impacts and I've heard, uh, from kind of randomly from other community members to unprompted about the PSA. So it's reaching a lot of folks. And I think this, uh, one about how to ride the bus is going to be huge. And,

for youth and everyone else.

I think there's a bit of a, well, I know that there's hesitation from folks just not knowing and a fear of getting lost or not making it to places on time. So I think that's really cool. Oh, and then also when there's opportunity, I don't know if the mayor is going to appear in this one. I haven't heard anything, but when there's opportunity, consider including council in it. And I think of our mayor as our elected representative. And so something tells me he might embrace that type of opportunity. Oh, and then I wanted to ask about the 2027 work planning and love that you all are getting to work on what that can look like for next year. And I'm wondering, and maybe this is more of a question for Susan, but I'm wondering how that is going to complement the council's work plan And please understand that I don't want to stifle any creativity or desires of the Youth Council of what to work on. I just don't want these R2 work plans to not have any alignment and be telling totally different stories, you know? So.

I think there's a lot of opportunity there. So for the last year's work plan, what we did is really kind of, we had a sort of popcorn-y conversation and we dipped up with post-it notes and kind of, kind of trying to see what the threads throughout are that helps that the youth council is interested in. And I think now, especially since we're going into basically our third year, now that we have kind of our systems in place and we're really just, it's kind of just working now that we can spend more time aligning what the youth want to do with what the work plan is for council is and see if there's overlap. And I think Just knowing generally what they're interested in. I think there's a lot of overlap there and I think there's ways that we can make sure that what they're doing complements what you're doing. And then also maybe finding some more direct next to your work and involving them and some things that require a community outreach and really looking to them to help us connect with young people. And one of the other things that I look forward to the next work plan is that they did this work on recommendations to how to communicate public policy for youth and what that looks like. And now that we have a new communications director on board, I think there's a lot of opportunity to take those recommendations and figure out how we can overlay them onto our work. So I think there is a lot of opportunity to kind of figure out how we can also see those the regular council to figure out just a little more synergy to kind of support the work.

Thank you. That makes sense. I look forward to seeing it. Chair, I have another question. Go ahead. Is that okay? You get the floor? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, okay.

Oh, no, it's escaping me. I can feel it. Hope the youth council...

Oh, no. Yeah, I lost it. I'll have to email you all later.

All right. Well, if you think of it again before we're done on this agenda item, you just let me know. Donovan, I also was very pleased to see your name on the reappointment list. Really appreciate the leadership that you and others have brought to the Youth Council. The Youth Council has been so successful because of the young people who have decided that they want to come and offer this service to the city. So thank you so much for all of your work. I am also very eager to see that inner city transit PSA. I might even go to the movie theater and just see it out there in the wild. It's not something I typically do because sitting still that long is hard for me, but I do want to see it out there. I'm sure we'll also see it in council chambers. And I also really appreciated that you highlighted the third places for youth part of your work that you're taking up soon. I think that that is something that we kind of struggle with as a community, that there's not enough things to keep youth engaged and not enough places to meet people that are your same age outside of school, not enough places that are open late enough. Coffee shops are great, but if they all close at two or three or four, then what do you do for the rest of the day? So I'm curious if you could tell me more about the third places and what that looks like for you all to be working on that.

Oh, I can't hear you.

You can't hear me or Donovan?

Oh, I can hear you, Susan. I can't hear Donovan. Okay. No.

Is it just me?

Can you hear me?

Oh, there you are. There you are.

Okay. Yeah, sorry. My earbud is about to die, but I'll try and get through it. So, yeah, third place is really, like, there's not a lot of places.

Oh, no, we lost you. Oh, but you're back. Oh my gosh.

Okay. Oh no. Yeah, there's not a lot of places for youth to be able to really, you know, engage with their community and to be able to engage with each other and to be able to interact other than like, I mean, downtown is a place, the mall is a place. But really, that's really where we're limited. And so trying to find those places where youth can be able to interact, because as we all know, the loneliness crisis among youth is a huge issue right now. So trying to tackle that by finding a place that's easily accessible for all youth and that's built for youth to be able to engage with each other and to be able to get out there and to be able to build a community is really important for us.

Excellent. So are you going to be, like, brainstorming ideas of what you would like to see in the community? Are you going to be looking at what currently exists now and, like, mapping it out? Like, what does it look like?

Yeah, so I'll hand off to Susan for a little bit just to be able to cover that a little bit more. For me and for how I've envisioned the Youth Council working on it, partially, yeah. Looking at what is working right now, what exists for youth, and what is that gap, and how can we fill it? know what is what's available and what really you know identifying specifically what is lacking because it's easy to say there aren't third places for youth but identifying why what's not built for youth and what can be excellent go ahead susan just add that one of the things that i've done is i've reached out to oliver bass who has been working with opop and they um had a facilitated discussion around third places in the community

in general. And so I'm actually going to be meeting with them next week to kind of talk about how they facilitated that discussion, what they learned, and what we can apply to this discussion, and perhaps maybe have them come and be part of the discussion, since it's something that they're actively working on in the community with other community members, because there's definitely what affects young people and adults, you know, somewhat different, but there's a nexus there. And I think they probably have some learning that could help us with that conversation.

Excellent. Awesome. Well, and if I could make a recommendation, I think that the folks at the library might be really interested in hearing directly from youth in terms of what kind of things you'd like to see in the community. Because they're kind of the catch-all for a free public place for someone to be indoors when it's raining out. And I know they do a lot of programming around youth, but I don't know how much of that is targeted towards your age bracket for youth. I don't know how much of it is just like story time with the little ones versus what teens need to see in the community, teens and young adults. So that's my curiosity there in terms of what they might bring to the conversation.

All right, go ahead, Ian.

Thank you.

So I remembered what it was. And Susan, are those youth council members already gone? The ones that are heading off? I don't think so, right?

This is their last month. So I'm preparing, you know, letters and things for them. But this is technically their last month.

Okay.

Well, okay. Okay.

I would like to, I'm not trying to sign everybody up to do something that I just thought of, but I would like to do something with them. Like, can we have dinner with them? Can we do something that's like a send off? I mean, we, you know, we could be frugal. We'd cut some cake, whatever. But I just, you know, I want to see them. Remember last time the last group stepped off and I was in your office and I was like, Susan, where'd they go? I didn't realize they were gone already. And so, so I just, it's a unique sort of advisory-ish group that we have. The youth council is unique and I just want to be thoughtful and really be a part of how we're saying bye to people and thanking them for their service. And, you know, and it's like, maybe we offer some space and, you know, Pick or choose if you want to come, you know, but no one's required to. But I just, yeah, I get kind of sad when they're going to leave, you know. I mean, like the last group, I see a couple of those names. I mean, truthfully, I can think of a whole handful of interactions and things. And then Nolan, you know, like, you know, we had some special times together, you know. And we heard some great things from them and that now they're just going to be gone. Just poof. So maybe we can talk about it more later. But, yeah.

I like cake so. Excellent, well, it sounds like we. Oh sorry Susan, were you going to say something just to thank you? OK, it sounds like we need a motion to approve these recommendations and pass that those recommendations along to the full councils. So who would like to make that motion?

Go ahead.

I'd move to approve the full slate of recommended Youth Council members to, oh, both the would-be incoming and also the reappointed group of people.

All right. I see a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Excellent. Well, congratulations, Donovan. that's one more hurdle cleared and you'll be coming uh or actually i don't know it will this just be coming to us on consent for the uh city council okay great so um so you won't have to share your presentation again um but uh uh do susan do you know the timeline for this to come to council so that uh people can be notified of the final decision yeah it will be um on september 15th and i i let the folks coming on know kind of about tonight and then also the 15th so yeah okay excellent Well, thanks again Donovan. So glad you could join us this evening and so glad to see the work that you and your youth colleagues have been doing and look forward to that work continuing.

Thank you so much and thank you to everyone who supports our work and ensures that youth voices can be heard in city decisions.

Excellent. Alright. Well, have a great night Donovan. The next item we have on our agenda is an update on pedestrian safety tools to reduce speeding. And I believe I can turn on Michelle Swanson here, who is one of our people. Oh, there she is. And I believe we also have Chief Parker right here on the screen. Michelle, is there anybody else I should turn on right now to be on the screen?

I think for the presentation, just the two of us for now. Yeah.

Excellent. All right. Getting the hang of this whole Teams thing. So, all right. Excellent. Well, go ahead and take it away. We're really excited to hear what you've got here.

Well, thank you very much. And I'm glad I'm not the only one who's learning Teams for the first time. I want to confess, I was actually the person who was running Donovan's presentation because Susan wasn't able to advance the slides. So I'm really hoping that I'm going to be able to advance my own slides and Chief Parker's as well, because that's what we've arranged here. So we'll see how this goes. I'm going to try to share my screen and hope that nothing goes sideways in this process.

Whatever happens, we're going to roll with it. We'll figure it out.

All right. I love that attitude. Thank you so much, Council Member Madrone. Okay. So I'm going to share this screen, and you should be seeing my background, which is the Washington Monument.

Oh, I think I have to turn that one on, too.

Okay. There.

Oh, I see. That's a part of this managed screen function, so I had to turn it on. There it is.

Okay. Fantastic. And then can you see... my introductory slide? Yep. Our introductory slide. Forgive me. I'm not the only presenter here. Okay. And then I just want to test like advancing the slide and see if I can. Did it advance? Oh, fantastic.

Great. Well, thank you.

Thank you very much. And then just one quick follow up on the Youth Council item. I just want to say that my husband and I had the privilege of being extras in the PSA on the transit, the transit PSA, because they needed older people on the bus. And it was such a joy to hang out and ride the bus with members of the Youth Council on Saturday. So I can't wait for that PSA to go live. It was super fun. So for the record, good evening. Thank you so much for having us. My name is Michelle Swanson. I'm a principal planner in public works transportation. And I am here to talk about some tools to reduce speeding on our streets. This did come out of a referral from the city council to this committee last year to examine the role of speed safety cameras with the intent of improving safety, especially for pedestrians. We are expanding the discussion tonight to also talk about some other ways to manage vehicle speeds on our streets. And with me here, as well, is Police Chief Shelby Parker, and she will be joining me in the presentation. There will be plenty of time for questions when we are done, but I do hope that you all feel welcome to interrupt with questions as we go. And Chair Madrone, if you don't mind maybe keeping an eye out for raised hands if questions come up while we're speaking. We'll just hop in. Thank you. So I'm going to start by giving you some background on this issue. Chief Parker is going to talk about the police department's work. I'll respond to the questions in the referral about speed safety cameras, and then I'll talk about some options for traffic calming as well as some related work. But before we begin, I do want to just touch on why this is important. not only does speed increase the stopping distance of a vehicle and thus the probability that a driver will strike someone or something when driving fast, but there's also a much greater risk of fatally injuring a pedestrian as speed increases. So for example, if a driver hits a pedestrian at 20 miles per hour, the risk that the pedestrian will be fatally injured is about 8%. At 40 miles per hour, that risk is 46%. So the relationship between speed and the risk of fatal injury is exponential. Additionally, a driver's cone of vision decreases as they drive faster. And what this means is that we see less of what's at the periphery of the street, and that's often where pedestrians and bicyclists are. They are the most vulnerable users of the street. Now, for the last several years, we've been producing maps that show the results of an analysis that we do that compares the speeds that people are actually traveling against the posted speed limit. And we included those maps in your meeting packet. What they show is that speeding is a problem throughout the city. So I'm going to just cite one example here and I'm going to bring my cursor over. This is East Bay Drive. And as you can see, it's approaching Squaxin Park. The speed limit the posted speed limit on East Bay drive is 30 miles per hour and the 85th percentile speed so that's the speed at which 85% of vehicles are traveling or lower it's 41 miles per hour and then 43 miles per hour as you're approaching squawks and park so that's just one example. Now we do use speed as one of the factors in the collision analysis that we do for our street safety plan. One of the results of that analysis is the identification of safety corridors or streets where collisions resulting in fatal or serious injuries are most likely to happen. Safety corridors are shown on the map here as black or gray lines. The color difference indicates how many risk factors there are on the street. So for that collision analysis, we do prioritize collisions that involve pedestrians and bicyclists, again, because they are the most vulnerable users of the street. Now we've used the results of this analysis to plan safety projects, such as the intersection changes that we made a couple of years ago at State Avenue and East Bay Drive, the ones that we are wrapping up right now at Fourth Avenue and Plum Street, and it has also informed the forthcoming redesign of the Capitol Corridor. We are also working to redesign Martin Way, and you may note that all of those streets are shown as safety corridors on this map. And with our other capital projects, we look for opportunities to include design features to make the streets slower and safer for everyone who uses them. Pedestrians, bicyclists, transit users, and drivers. One example of that is the Phones Road project, which is shown on the slide here. And we are redesigning this street for a lower speed. The speed limit is dropping from 35 miles an hour to 25 miles an hour when this project is done. We also often require design elements that slow traffic with new private development, such as this traffic circle that we required with the construction of the Woodbury Crossing neighborhood over on the west side. So our analysis shows that arterials and major collectors are where the most urgent safety issues are. And we also know that from a quality of life perspective, people want to see slower speeds in their neighborhoods. Speeding is one of the most common concerns that we hear about from the public. The city did have a neighborhood traffic management program that built traffic calming devices in neighborhoods. but that ended in 2010 due to budget tightening. In response to complaints about speeding, we do put up temporary speed feedback signs, which are proven to be effective while they are installed. We typically leave them up for about two weeks. These signs flash when people are speeding, providing immediate feedback to drivers. Since 2023, we've set the signs in various locations 144 different times. And in fact, there's been so much demand for these signs. We started with one in 2023, and we now have eight to keep up with demand. So I'm going to turn this over to Chief Parker right now to talk about the police department's work.

Well, good evening and thank you, Michelle. It's been an absolute pleasure working with you in Public Works. For the record, I'm Shelby Parker, Police Chief of the Olympia Police Department, and I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about what we often refer to as the three E's of traffic safety, and those are education, enforcement, and engineering. The Olympia Police Department educates our community about traffic safety in a variety of ways. This includes social media and community outreach, but it also happens during traffic stops. where officers may choose to educate a driver and issue a warning rather than a citation. Another important part of our education efforts is the work of our volunteers in policing, including our volunteer speed watch program, which is pictured on this slide. Specially trained volunteers use speed measuring devices to measure the speeds of passing vehicles. These deployments typically last 30 to 60 minutes and focus on locations identified through community complaints. and where we routinely see speeding concerns. When a vehicle is traveling more than 10 miles per hour over the speed limit, our volunteers record that information so a letter can be sent to the registered owner. In 2025, the program sent 325 letters, and through June of this year, volunteers have already sent 269 letters. I want to be clear.

Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. I thought you were at the end of your sentence. Go ahead.

No, these are not citations. They are tended to be a friendly reminder to slow down. The letter tells the registered owner the observed speed and explains what a traffic citation would have cost. This is an excellent program, and we are very thankful to the volunteers who dedicate their time to making our community and roadway safer. Does that answer your question, Council Member Madrone?

Kelly Green's got her hand up there.

Okay.

Thank you, Chief Parker. No, it does not answer my question. But so this is awesome. I have not heard about this program before. How many volunteers, active volunteers do you have who participate in programs like this?

We have around 20 volunteers in policing services in the police department and a smaller number that participate in this specific body of work, probably six to seven currently. Thank you. You're welcome.

I'll say that I have heard of this program because it was a long time ago, but I received one of those letters. I don't remember if it was like 10 or 15 years ago, and it really had an impact on me because of even the language in the letter of like, hey, this is a neighborhood, you know, people live here. And I, to this day, I am going the speed limit down that particular street. I remember exactly where it happened. So it is very effective. So I'll hand it back to you, Chief.

Thank you. I, uh, embarrassingly will admit that this program has been around for a long time. And I know that because when I was a young rookie officer back in the 2003, 2004 era, I too received a letter from our volunteers and policing services. So they are effective. But moving on to our next slide, and we're going to talk a little bit about that second E, which is enforcement. So this slide, it provides a snapshot of the track of enforcement that's currently being conducted by Olympia police officers. In 2024, officers conducted approximately 2,500 traffic stops. That increased to more than 3,200 stops in 2025. And through June of this year, officers have already conducted nearly 2,500 stops. You'll also notice that not every traffic stop results in a citation. In fact, citations are issued in fewer than half of our traffic stops, and in more recent periods, closer to 30%. And this really illustrates the role that education and officer discretion continue to play a significant part of our education and enforcement strategies. Traffic safety continues to be a priority for the Olympia Police Department. Unfortunately, staffing challenges have limited our ability to assign officers specifically to proactive traffic enforcement. Since 2021, we have not been able to staff our dedicated traffic unit. So this work has largely been carried out by our patrol officers while they're balancing their other responsibilities as well. I want to be very clear that this is not a matter of the city failing to resource the police department. We are grateful for the city council's continued commitment to hiring and funding police officers. Like many law enforcement agencies throughout the nation, we have faced challenges recruiting and hiring qualified officers to fill these positions. As our staffing improves, we anticipate restoring a dedicated traffic unit to the middle to end of 2027. In the meantime, our officers will continue conducting traffic enforcement as staffing and calls for service allow. And that brings us to our third E, which is engineering, Michelle's favorite. Education and enforcement will always be an important component of traffic safety, particularly when enforcement capacity is limited. it becomes even more important to examine how roadway design, engineering, and appropriate technology can influence driver behavior and improve safety. With that, I'll turn the presentation back over to Michelle to talk about what we are doing from an air engineering perspective and some of the technology options that are available to help improve safety on Olympia's roadways.

Great. Thanks so much, Chief Farker. So appreciate that. These are the things that we're doing currently to address speeding. We've documented that this is a problem by publishing the data in a way that is relatively easy to digest and accessible to the public. We have identified speed as a collision risk factor in our street safety plan, which makes the streets where speeds are higher eligible for some safety grants. With most of our capital projects, we incorporate features to make streets slower and safer. We do the same with new private developments. We have the temporary speed feedback signs to respond to public requests. The police volunteers send letters to owners of vehicles that have been speeding. And the police department enforces speed limits and educate strivers as resources allow, and I do also want to add that public works transportation also routinely includes messaging about the risks of speeding in our public outreach materials as well. So it's in this context of knowing that speed is endemic that the referral for speed safety cameras came to this committee. And between the time that the referral was made and the time that this committee took up this topic, our community had a robust debate about flock cameras and we opted to remove them. So let's talk about the state law that regulates speed safety cameras. These are different from flock. Among other things, the law does not allow the city to record continuously, We are only allowed to record a violation as it happens. State law also prohibits these systems from recording images of drivers or passengers. They can only record images of the vehicle and license plate. Cities are only required to store the data as long as it's needed to prove that the violation has happened. So it can be deleted as soon as the appeal time for the ticket has passed. The records are also exempt from the Public Records Act, which means that a member of the public cannot stalk someone by making a records request for their vehicle's license plate number. Nor can these records be used in another court action, such as proving that a person was driving in a specific location at a specific time during the commission of an alleged crime. And the law prohibits cities from paying third-party vendors a percentage of the citations. Vendors can only be paid for equipment and services, which removes direct financial incentives for the vendors to issue citations. And finally, the city would have no obligation to share data with other law enforcement agencies, including federal agencies. So having speed safety cameras in Olympia would not violate our sanctuary city status. The regulatory environment under which these cameras can be operated is very different than the one for flock cameras. Additionally, state law says that they can only be used in specific places such as school zones with 20 mile per hour speed limits, school walk routes, park zones, hospital zones, and designated crash prevention zones. So these and other details are covered in the report that was attached to your staff report. And there's also a limit to how many speed safety cameras cities can have, excuse me, which depends on their population. Right now, Olympia's population is estimated at a little over 58,000 people, so we can have six speed safety cameras. Some other regulations include that cities are required to put up signs at least 30 days before the cameras are turned on to let the public know that they will be active soon and those signs do need to go where the cameras will be. Cities also need to report to the public annually on the number of crashes at the camera locations, the number of infractions issued for each camera, the percentage of revenue from fines used to pay costs of the program, and how the revenue is used. So the way these work is the vehicle is recorded as speeding. The recording of the speeding violation can be observed by either a police officer, a civilian employee of a police department, or a public works employee working under the supervision of a licensed engineer. The citation must be mailed to the registered owner of the vehicle within 14 days. So this process works much like a parking ticket. It does not go on a driver's record, so it doesn't affect their insurance rates. And share my drone. I think I see a question. Yep. Yep. Go ahead, Kelly.

Thank you. Thanks, Michelle. Can you clarify, uh, observed by, does that mean, uh, watching the recording of the video?

Yes.

That's my recording of the infraction. Okay. Thank you.

Yeah.

So, um, this functions like a parking ticket. Um, it doesn't go on a driver's record. Doesn't affect their insurance rates. The maximum fine is $145, but it can be doubled in a school zone or a crash prevention zone. And then for people who qualify for public assistance, the fines can be reduced by up to 50%. One of the things that we researched was the data security of these systems. Speed safety cameras have been authorized for use in Washington state since 2005. We researched five other cities and verified that they are all using third party software and hardware for these systems and they are all using the same vendor. During public comment, the question came up about the name of that vendor. Their name is Vara Mobility. That's V-A-R-R-A, Mobility. We did search under the name of the vendor, that name. It had a previous name, which escapes me right now, but it came right up when I was searching for it. So, we searched under the name Vara Mobility, its previous name, and also the holding company's name to see if there was any public record of it having had a data breach, and we didn't find anything. We also conducted a similar search to see if this company had a record of having shared the data with any other agencies, including federal law enforcement agencies that would put our status as a sanctuary city at risk. And we found no record of that either. And we did use two different search engines to do this. Now in our review, we learned a few hallmarks of successful speed safety programs in other cities. First, citations typically decrease as speed compliance increases because they are immediately effective. Second, the programs typically pay for themselves and leftover revenue is reinvested in traffic calming. Some cities build traffic calming on the streets where the cameras are located and then later remove the cameras because the street has been redesigned to make it easier to drive the speed limit. They can then choose to deploy the cameras in another place that they're needed or they can choose to end the program. There are some limitations on where leftover funds can be spent. For example, a portion of revenue must be spent in areas where household incomes are in the lowest 25% in the community, plus areas with above average injury collision rates. Additionally, four years after the cameras have been placed, the city must deposit 25% of the camera's revenue into the state's Cooper Jones active transportation safety account. If creating a speed safety camera. Oh, yes.

Sorry, I was slow to raise my hand. But when you say 25% of the revenue must be spent in census tracts with the lowest 25% of household income for the community, is that after the program pays for itself?

yes okay great thank you so if creating a speed safety camera program is something that the council would like to do we would need to hire a vendor for both the software and the hardware we would also likely need additional staff possibly a half time to full-time employee for program administration ensuring compliance with state law and to manage the contract with the vendor We would also very likely need a full time employee to review and issue the citations. And like parking tickets, there would be appeals. So we would need to work with Thurston County Courts to determine the resources that they would need. We did learn that the city of Kirkland hired a three quarter time court administrator and also a judge pro tem to hear appeals. Most cities seem able to fund staff out of their program, but how self-sustaining this is is something that we would need to explore further. So speed safety cameras are one tool in the toolkit for managing speeds and another tool might be a traffic calming program in which we add features to streets to slow vehicles. So if the council would like to initiate a traffic calming program, we would need to develop an objective data-driven methodology to choose where to prioritize. We would need to fully design the street changes and coordinate with emergency services, transit, waste resources, and other utilities, as we do with all projects in the right of way. Funding levels could be between $500,000 to $2 million per year. This could be absorbed by existing staff, but the impact is it would reduce our ability to build other projects from the transportation master plan that are priorities. Hiring additional engineering staff would maintain momentum on those other projects. We could also incorporate more interim materials in a traffic calming program like plastic delineators, plastic curbing, pavement markings, and things like that. This would allow our crews to install them on a limited basis, but if we did, we would need to hire more maintenance staff, not only for the initial installation, but also to maintain them. Related to this topic is some foundational work that Public Works Transportation staff would also like to do. One is a project that is in this year's preliminary capital facilities plan to update our 20 mile per hour school zones to current standards so that they are clearer and more enforceable. And the second is to update our speed limit setting policy to reflect current best practices and then apply it across the city. There are several places in Olympia where the land use has changed and we would like to review the posted speed limits to see if they should be changed as well. And this work could take a year to do. So we've covered some background on vehicle speeding. We've talked about how speed safety cameras could be a tool to address it. I've also described a possible new traffic calming program that the city could pursue to slow traffic. So the question before you tonight is, would you like for staff to pursue these programs? And if so, we would like to come back with an outline of what it would take to implement them in terms of funding and staff resources. So thank you so much for your time. We are here to answer any questions. And there are other staff here as well if the questions are outside of our realms. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Do you mind taking down your presentation so we can see each other a little bit better? Thank you. Awesome, I will look to my committee mates here on the screen to see who would like to start with any thoughts or questions.

Go ahead Ian.

Thank you so much Michelle and Chief Parker for that presentation. And Council Member Green or Committee Member Green tonight, I was really glad to see that referral come across. I know it was a tough time with everything that was going on with the cameras, just concerned about cameras in general. I don't have any questions of the presentation. I am interested in exploring both options further. yeah, I didn't, I didn't read it as like, pick which one you want to explore. I think both have their merits. Um, yeah. And I'm, uh, optimistic that I, I just, uh, probably goes without saying, but we've, uh, we've seen, um, uh, too many, too many tragedies, uh, because of traffic safety, um, and, uh, in recent years as well. And so, uh, Yeah, I'm so glad that we're having this discussion tonight and I'm really interested.

Let me know if you need more specifics. Thank you. All right, go ahead, Kelly.

Thank you. Michelle and Chief Parker, thank you so much for that. I'm really excited to see this coming forward. Obviously, it's been on my radar for a little bit. I don't know if this is an appropriate question, so I'll also look to my councilmates to say it's not. You are both experts in your field. You're experts in this work. In your opinion, programs like this, both in terms of the engineering and the cameras, do you feel like they're they would add something to, you know, the education enforcement engineering. Do you feel like they have a place, especially recognizing, you know, we are fresh off the frustrations of flock. And I really appreciate it, Michelle, particularly you laying out the RCWs. And because to me, there is very big differences between these types of devices and flock cameras. But I also recognize we're in a kind of difficult moment, you know, even just as a region and as a nation with how people are feeling about anything that is

recording so so yeah if if you're comfortable with it would just love to hear each of your opinions on this type of work Michelle would you like me to go first sure please go ahead committee member Green I appreciate the question and my response is really rooted in our community We have to do extensive community engagement in order to determine what our community will support and what they want. I think it's critical that we prepare our community with all the information about these programs and how vastly different they are than automatic license plate reader cameras and programs because they are vastly different. We have robust laws in Washington state that protect the data, and we don't have any images of drivers or passengers. Also, the cameras are only taking pictures of violations. They're not constantly running. They're not creating a database of license plates and vehicles. And so this is very different technology. Still, that being said, I don't want to compromise our community's trust. And so extensive community engagement will be required to move forward.

I have very little to add to that. I think Chief Parker is absolutely right that a community engagement is absolutely crucial. And I think that these are, given the sensitivity around concerns about surveillance and concerns around cameras, This is a really hot topic. There were news reports yesterday about the city of Bellevue's rollout of these cameras, and half of them were vandalized in a very short period of time. What I wonder is, are you able to reach a critical mass of people to make them aware that these really are very different from flock? People see a camera in public and they get concerned. There's also attitudes around speeding. People really associate speeding with a sense of personal liberty. One of the many tentacles of research that I kind of went off into was about attitudes about speeding. And people tend to not connect their personal decisions with the real public health crisis that speeding is. And they don't see it as really a threat to other people's safety. And they see efforts of enforcement as being an unnecessary curbing of their liberties, their personal liberties. And those are people who often don't come to public comment. And so it's a tough issue, and it's a complicated issue. However, they work. That is very clear. They are very effective. And in both Kirkland and Seattle, where they have been deployed, 90%, 89% of people who get a violation don't get a second violation. I mean, that's pretty effective. And it's pretty quick. You know, it's a pretty immediate way of curbing this behavior on the streets.

Yeah, thank you both. I mean, you hit on exactly, you know, the data of the effectiveness has been one of the biggest drivers for me. And I think about not only the work we're doing as a city to try to develop, uh, streets that are, that are friendlier to, uh, pedestrians, you know, multimodal, like all of those things. Um, and I think about, uh, the role that, you know, I, I think you think about school zones and you think about school and obviously absolutely there's, there's large amounts of, of children and families, all of that. But to me, our schools also are almost part of our park system. Like I look at what's happening, you know, at playgrounds, after school hours, and even when school is not in, there are, you know, folks taking their dogs to those playgrounds, taking their kids, having picnics in the same way that they are in our parks. And so for me, that, yeah, those ideas of they're relatively quick, they're incredibly effective. And because of those robust state laws, like really focused on those particularly pedestrian heavy areas, it won't surprise my councilmates. I'm very interested in continuing to see more on this.

Go ahead, Ian. Yeah.

I appreciate how You know, the complexities of this topics and. And also, we have gotten community members coming year after year during public comment and just like a sprinkle throughout the entire year talking about, hey, we need to slow these cars down, you know, and I mean, that's been going on probably for as long as sidewalks have. slowing the cars down, we have this, I don't want to put them on blast, but we have this, I'm thinking of one couple in particular that keeps on trying to put more boulders and physical barriers outside of their house so that cars will stop literally running into their house. I mean, it's that serious. And then of course, the fatalities because of speeding in our city. So Um, just, uh, I know, I know this group is thinking that, but I just want to keep that top of mind. And, um, and it seems like there is, I don't want to dismiss the concerns about the cameras. I think there is more room for, um, educating ourselves and then helping to share that information with others. And I would hate to, uh, not do something, um, that could bring a lot of good, you know, because it can be because of, how it could be misinterpreted. And I just want us to work hard to make sure we're approaching it well. And I do think it's something that we should approach at the end of the day. Oh, but I started off at first saying when I first spoke, after you wrapped the presentation, saying I had no questions. And my apologies to anybody that is still in the husband-wife duo that might still be in chambers. because I did say that I would bring your questions up. So it sounds like you all are not far enough into the stage of being able to say definitively if the cameras would be catching these property owners. or like sort of looking at these property owners' houses, I think that was the concern. So that was one of them. And then also like what companies we'd be working with. And so I guess, did you have anything on that? Or if we could just note that for something to look into?

Yeah, I mean, we can't know what company we would be working with, um, until we issue a request for, for, uh, proposals. Um, and, um, but it does appear that there's pretty much when one company, um, that, uh, all of our neighbors are working with when I say neighbors, I mean that in a very loose sense, uh, not literally, I mean, other cities in the state of Washington and that's far Vara mobility. And I do need to check on that. I mean, the cameras cannot record continuously. They can only record a vehicle and its license plate. That's what they're limited to recording. So they can't record somebody's house, actually. They can't record people's faces. They can't record human beings. That's what they're limited to recording. So no, they can't record their houses.

Thank you. That's helpful. And Dawn, you can probably hear me, but I wonder if we might, if you haven't already, if we might get the email addresses of the public commenters that came in and we can share with them if there's opportunity for community engagement, or at least as this moves, hopefully moves further along, then we can at least reach out and share with those community members and future ones that are interested in how they can follow along this and track this project.

Already done.

Thank you. Thank you.

Great. Really appreciate the research that has gone into this so far. And also just the sharing out of things that we have done, that we have tried already as a community. It's not like we're jumping to one solution as the be all end all to address this really big problem. One recent incident that I'm recalling is the deaths of two pedestrians on the isthmus because of somebody who was speeding. And I think about, Michelle, you mentioned that there was a city that recently tried to implement new cameras and they were vandalized or torn down or whatever. It makes me wonder about having the cameras accompanied with signage stating, you know, this is not what you fear, not automatic license plate reader. This is capturing speeding infractions is a one-time thing. People's faces are not being recorded. And having just like a little bit of a disclaimer and also stating the intent. It's to prevent fatalities in our community that are a result of speeding and maybe even have a little QR code so people can learn more. I think that would be part of an ongoing education and outreach because No matter how much we do around education and outreach, before we do something, we're still going to catch somebody by surprise. I think that this is really important, especially if it's effective. I am also supportive of us continuing down this path and seeing what we can do. I'm curious, Michelle, you had something on one of your slides around if it's interim materials, more maintenance staff are needed. I assume you're talking about traffic calming type materials, like trying things on an interim basis, like, oh, does this work? Does this work? And so you and I have talked about this before, I believe. So is that what you're talking about? Like if we're trying traffic calming things aside from cameras on an interim basis, that there's just more staff capacity needed to maintain that?

yes exactly there has been some interest we've been hearing in doing some traffic calming with interim materials things like flexi posts you know paint or pavement markings things like that and that does come with a much higher maintenance demand and so if we were to do something like that we would need more maintenance staff

OK, understood. Just want to make sure I was fully understanding that point there. And you know, you also mention that there there's an impact here, fewer resources for other projects that are priorities. So are you, it sounds like, you know, once the program is up and running, it could potentially pay for itself. But so are you talking about the process of getting it stood up and how that has an impact on other things we're working on? It wasn't all that long ago you were talking to us about sidewalks, so. Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. It's two things. So we're talking about two different programs, setting of two different programs. One is the speed safety camera programs. And so that has staffing implications. We would likely need staff to manage the program to, um, you know, ensure that it's compliant with state law, um, manage the contract with the vendor. Um, so that would probably be a halftime to a full-time employee for that. And then we'd also probably need a full-time employee to review the citations. Um, and, um, and then of course there's also, um, working with Thurston County courts to find out what sort of resourcing they would need. Um, so that's one thing. Um, and then if we were to stand up, um, a traffic calming program, so this would be a separate program, um, then that was, uh, what I think, um, you were talking about. We would, um, we could absorb, we could do that. This could be absorbed with existing staff, but it would slow down our project delivery on our other priorities.

Yeah, OK, understood that answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think I also just didn't state the question very clearly because one thing is the potential to pay for itself. The other is would be an ongoing regular thing that takes away from something else. So. Yeah, I would like to hear more about what more about what a traffic traffic calming program entails. It sounds like we had something in place before, but then there were budget reductions in 2010. Would it be like a relaunch of what we did before, or would it be kind of reimagining, you know, current needs, current resources, and what is it we could get done?

We would like to reimagine it. What we did before is... was just a very different type of program or a different city. I could get into specifics if you want, but we think it would be more appropriate now to take a more methodological, more data-driven approach before it was based on requests. And then we had other requirements that neighborhoods would have to do the maintenance, vegetation maintenance, which we have since learned is very problematic from a liability perspective.

Oh, OK, OK, understood. Great. I don't need you to get into the weeds. Haha, vegetation. But I'm trying to think of like, you know, it sounds like this committee is interested in both of these concepts proceeding. And I'm just trying to get a sense of like, what is the staff lift to get from the point you're at now to the next point, which it sounds like reporting back to the committee. So that's all. And so given all the other things that you all are working on, you know, what does that look like to be able to bring some kind of next step to the committee, you know, in terms of timeline? And are we already talking about other things being set aside to move these things forward?

Yeah. Um, we've got a pretty full plate, uh, for sure. Um, but, uh, we anticipate that we could come back, um, in about a year with more, uh, information, things more fleshed out.

Okay. Excellent. So that sounds satisfactory to our, uh, referral sponsor there. Okay. Excellent. All right. Michelle, do you feel like you have a clarity from us, uh, in terms of direction from the committee and, um, what next steps look like for you.

Yes, thank you. It sounds like, to summarize, to make sure that I'm hearing this correctly, you would like for us to explore standing up both of these programs. I'm going to just look at my slide here. So we'll come back in about a year with more information about funding and staffing needs. Is that correct? Yeah. Okay, sounds good. Thank you very much.

Yeah, thank you so much, Michelle. Thank you, Chief. Really glad to have you both with us this evening. And we'll look forward to hearing from you again in the future on this. Thanks. Right. And then, OK, great. They were taking themselves. Now we're all learning to self-manage ourselves in this team's environment here. So we have one more item of business this evening, and that is the approval of the Inspire Olympia Cultural Access Program Improvement and Updates. We have Mary Grace Gadu, Amelia Leighton, and Molly Wilmoth here. So let's see about getting there. There's Amelia. Let's see. There's adding Mary Grace, adding, oh, and Molly got herself here, or somebody got you here. Okay, excellent. Great.

Thank you. Could we also add Melissa Mead, chair of the collection? Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. Is there room?

Yeah, let me add Melissa here. Great. We have Melissa too. Great.

Thank you. You have the whole INSPIRE team here tonight. Amelia is our Senior Program Specialist. Molly is our Coordinator for the Cultural Access Programs for Public Schools. And I'm the Program Manager. And Melissa is the chair of the Cultural Access Advisory Board.

And Amelia is going to run our slides for us tonight. I'm going to go ahead and, oh, there it is.

Okay. There's our great banner. And while I give my introduction, I'm going to have her go ahead to the next slide because, well, I love our logo. This one's better. the Arbutus Folk School summer program. I also want to note that in the audience tonight listening in, we have two more Cultural Access Advisory Board members, Genevieve Cantaco-Chan is with us, and Morgan Montes, who's one of our new members this year, is also listening in tonight. As noted in your staff report, the Cultural Access Advisory Board has established a municipal code to advise city council concerning processes, procedures, and criteria for carrying out the goals of the Cultural Access Program and to review and recommend funding levels for grant recipients each year. The program mission and funding goals and evaluation criteria were developed by the Advisory Board in 2023 and adopted by City Council. And taken together, they represent the framework of goals and values that guide all other aspects of the program. They were reaffirmed by City Council about this time last year, along with a recommended increase in our funding levels. The administrative mechanics of the Inspire Olympia grant process were also developed in 2023 with consultation from the State Arts Commission and modeled after the City of Tacoma's cultural access program, Tacoma Creates. The program has continued to refine and improve on that sort of administrative backend of the program in the ways we support the applicants, plan and manage the program's timeline, the way we instruct grant review panelists in scoring applications and support the advisory board. This evening, we're bringing you a set of recommendations from the advisory board for implementation with the coming 2027-28 grant cycle. Many of the recommendations respond to City Council interest and discussions from the May 27 CLPS meeting and the subsequent City Council discussions on June 16th this year. And you can go to the next slide, Amelia. Thanks. This is a summary of the topics we're going to step through with you tonight. They fall into three categories. Administrative topics, including recommended changes to the grant application and options for adjustments to the program's timeline. And policy topics that include the grant review panel selection and discussion of the location-based eligibility requirements for applicants. And then the third piece is a new program element that the advisory board is recommending, which will establish a competitive application and award process for organizations doing cultural access programming during the school day. Molly will be presenting that last piece and there are attachments to the staff report that will support that discussion. And Amelia and I will be presenting the rest of the topics, which we'll just step through in the order shown here. We welcome questions and invite discussion as we go. We've prepared a fairly high level briefing, but we can add detail as requested. And I'll begin with the clarifying updates to the application and guidelines. And there are three of them. Let me just move something off the screen here. All three of these recommended changes relate to the budget section of the application. The first response to a matter of city council interest, the advisory board recommends adding a line item to the application budget form for organizations to indicate if they are receiving LTAC funding. The next two items are changes that the advisory board suggested coming out of their experience as reviewers in this last granting cycle. They recommend adding a question that prompts applicants to consider alternate plans in case they don't receive full funding. Adding this question supports good planning. It also may help us in the contracting process later if they are awarded something less than they had requested and planned for. And the third change is recommended because reviewers found that the budget form can be a trip hazard, particularly for our small organizations. So some clear instruction and more support in completing the forms is hoped to support applicants in providing clear information for reviewers. And that is sort of the first checklist I have for you. Do you want to stop and I want to see if there's any discussion or questions?

Great looking to my committee mates here and I think what staff are looking for is guidance from us of is this heading in the right direction in terms of the components of updates to the inspire program that aren't policy related. So that's the administrative side of things.

Go ahead, Ian.

We just hang out here for a moment. I know that's what we're doing, but I yeah, this one is. This one is different than or an ad different than the packet. So, and I know we frequently do that in presentation, so it's not a knock there, but I just need to read it. The last one, I just add the last one. It probably is obvious, but could you just share what the issue we're trying to solve with that is? Are we just not getting enough good budget detail from folks?

Yes. Specifically, reviewers were saying that our lights just went out. Reviewers were specifically saying that they'd like to see applicants do a better job of correlating the work items in their proposal to specific line items in their budget so that they're really showing how they're planning to spend the money to support the deliverables that they're proposing. And Amelia, I invite you to add if you have anything to offer to expand that response.

Yeah, so one of the things with impact funding is that some of our smaller organizations are applying for program-specific things. So there might be some things that their one main program in a year is the thing they're applying for funding for. But a lot of our other organizations are applying for year-round funding, and perhaps their budget doesn't reflect the full year-round budget or vice versa. And so just some clarity around that. alignment with their deliverables to their budget. It's a minor change. It doesn't change the form. It would just be a focus area for our support work that we do with organizations who are applying.

Something that I'm thinking about right now that's probably more something to take up with my colleagues, but for the first one is in response to City Council interest of adding a line item to see if folks are also requesting LTAC funding. This is something that has come up a lot, not just, you know, this past year, but it's come up before. And then on the LTAC side of things, you know, there's an interest in adding vice versa, basically, if folks are getting Inspire funding. And so I'm sort of of two minds of that. For one, I go, okay, yeah, maybe it's you know, I can't understand why people would want to see basically like, okay, how much kind of city funding, I mean, it's taxpayers, but like city funding are folks asking for, I feel like is one of them. And then on the other side, I'm also thinking, well, currently people can access both. And so I think that this there's, yeah, there's nothing that says that they can't. And so this bullet point, I, I, think that it satisfies a council interest and maybe a curiosity, but we wouldn't be able to use that in order to, I mean, people wouldn't be put at a lower funding level because of LTAC is my understanding. So I guess I'm just thinking and saying that out loud, especially with recently being fresh off some LTAC meetings. But, yeah, I don't see a lot here that concerns me. I think about that bullet about the LTAC funding because it's like, you know, like I just explained, like, I get it. And also, like, what are we going to do with that information? But, yeah, I don't think it's harmful to have necessarily. I just, yeah, I'm just thinking about that.

Thank you.

And go ahead, Kelly.

Thank you.

I just want to speak to Mayor Pro Tem's question. And I'll just speak to my interest in this. And it's not so much about are you getting both LTAC and Inspire? Because like you said, they're not mutually exclusive. It's perfectly, you know, it's great if organizations can do that. The question for me in both scenarios is, are they applying for the funding for the exact same thing or the exact same program? Because that, to me, does feel different. You know, LTAC has a certain focus. Inspire has a certain focus. So my curiosity is just, is this a program you were already doing, was already being funded, and now... what the what the need is is for more or for expansion or is this you know really an opportunity for a new program a new aspect to your organization and and you know to your point i don't know if even that is necessarily needed or appropriate but i just want to speak to that like that's the interest for me is is are they getting the same you know additional funding for the same exact thing or are they getting you know the the two different types of fundings for two different functions

Go ahead. Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry. Who is that?

I started to defer to Amelia to answer that or to respond to it since she's got eyes on both sides of this equation. But if Council Member Yen has a related question, we can hold.

Oh, I was just going to thank Kelly, just acknowledging your response to that. That's helpful in me kind of figuring out what's the interest. You're also not the only person that's interested in it, but it is helpful. So you're less concerned about the organization. It's more, yeah, I see what you're saying.

I will just add that the addition of this Folks are putting this in their budget worksheet already, if they are receiving LTAC funding, because it helps with their one-to-one match. I think there are times when LTAC funding and INSPIRE funding do go to the same program, but different aspects of the program. So LTAC funding is much more about marketing often, and so that might be where that funding is spent. And then Inspire funding is much more about access. So that might be spent lowering costs for vendors or participants where LTAC is spent on the marketing and the tourism generation of perhaps a similar event. And I'm thinking of some of our bigger Olympia staples like Harbor Days.

And so, you know, Kelly, let me just ask this question. Is having some kind of like flag for this in an application just helpful for just kind of understanding the general landscape? Is this, does this help get to the, you know, the higher level questions that you, that you've had around this? And, you know, as like Ian said, you're not the only one who's brought it up, but I just want to make sure that we're headed in the right direction in terms of addressing this interest from the Council of understanding when an organization is going for both pots of funds.

I think it's helpful. But there again, what it would what it would be for me was it is it would raise a question right of like, yeah, so so and if that's not part of the process, if that's not part of what we need to, again, I don't even know if because again, it's not, it's not a disqualifying thing. It's not I certainly don't want it to be taken into account in terms of scoring or award levels. It's really just about I guess, Clarity and understanding.

OK, and so and so this kind of change to the application process having somebody marked that that's helpful. OK, I'm what I'm trying to get out here is like you know if we don't need to if it's not solving the the I'm not saying there's a problem to be solved, but it's not if it's not providing the information that's being requested. Let's not have another question on the application, but if it is helpful then you know absolutely let's keep it. OK, and the one thing I have about that is I'm not sure what the timeline is for LTAC versus INSPIRE, but it might be that the question is, are you receiving or plan to apply for LTAC funding? But Amelia, I'll lean into your expertise there since you know those timelines much better than I do. Young, did I see your hand pop up?

I just want to ask. The, and maybe this is an Amelia question, but do we always know when, you know, that great example that you had, do we always know when that's happening? Like, what are they using the money for specifically? Not just a general, like, this is for this event.

So we do with LTAC funds, with Inspire funds, these are unrestricted funds for organizations to use however they need. They are then giving us deliverables of their public benefit programs. So they might be spending most of their money on hiring a staff member that supports all the work that they do. But then their deliverables to us are those public programs and those access opportunities for the public. So it's an unrestricted fund. We don't really track where the coins go, but then how they provide the public benefit as an organization. Because Inspire Olympia is looking more at what an organization, who they are and what they do, versus LTAC is much more project-based.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, so it sounds like we wouldn't always get that response. what committee member Green is looking for here. I don't think we'd always have the answer to that, it sounds like. So I just wanted to make sure I was understanding.

Okay.

Well, and so I'm getting a general sense that what we see on the screen here is heading in the right direction. So with that, I think we're ready to move on to the next slide.

Awesome. The next topic is the program timeline. And the advisory board examined the program's timeline in response to council interest. The specific objective of the discussion was to create more time for city council review. And along with that, council members also asked for more information about the individual applicants that are being recommended for awards. So some background, our grant cycle runs July 1 to June 30 following Tacoma's model and a very common granting timeline. The city council's approval by the first week in June is really ideal because it allows time for us to prepare contracts for all of the funded organizations. And this year we have 85 each with unique scope of work. And so we're trying to initiate the contract start by July 1st. From the early January application opening to the award recommendation to city council, it takes five months. This is consistent with other grant program timelines, including doors open in King County and Tacoma Crates, our neighboring cultural access communities. And just an additional note, some of the processes in our timeline overlap a little bit already to keep all the activity compressed into the five month window. So Amelia is going to talk you through our current granting timeline in a little more detail.

So this shows our common year. So this was 2026. So the first phase is that application phase where our guidelines are released in early to mid-November. Applications are open mid-January to mid-March. Application support is happening throughout that whole time. There are a couple weeks of staff eligibility review and training of the review panels that then lead into our review panels. This year we had three, one for the comprehensive pathway and two for the impact funding pathway. Those are all happening concurrently, like Mary Grace said. And then our CAB funding recommendation meeting where they take all the scores blindly and our amount of funding that is available and come up with funding recommendations to present to CLPS and then Council. You can see here that we saw you guys in the end of May, and then we had planned to go straight to Council to support a plan that got us through contracting by mid-June, knowing that this is a bigger year with those two funding pathways. Pushing the Council date back to June 15th led us into some... kind of where we are, which we're wrapping up contracts right now. So all this bright orange is kind of unintended overflow of the timeline shift. We have three contracts left as of today, and we will get through those shortly. And then just so you all know, our reporting and payment phases happen quarterly, and that's the screen bar down here at the bottom.

Thanks, Amelia. Any questions on that timeline real quick before we jump on?

Yeah, I see Kelly there. Thank you. On this, on the payment processing part, you said it happens quarterly. So Am I right in, uh, would it be right to say, you know, if my, if my organization, if my contract was done in June, I would get a payment in August or in September, or if my contract was done in August, I would get a payment in September. Like that payments coming in September, regardless.

So we have quarterly reporting phases. And so their contracts are broken out into quarterly work. So some organizations that have, again, those smaller, maybe once a year programs, theirs might look a little different. We're pretty flexible in that. But the report forms are open about two weeks before the end of the month that they're covering. So some organizations have done their work for that. They've done their public programming. They've done their stuff that they're going to report on. And they can start to get...

payments once the report is in we review it and then process that invoice so that can happen pretty quickly almost within weeks um so those those bans are sort of when payments are going out i think i understand but i i maybe don't completely understand i guess what i'm trying to get at is is uh you know i understand the the goal of contracting by july 1 and i understand that that can sometimes be an extended period what i'm trying to get at is to if that gets delayed for any reason, like it doesn't get to council when we want it to or whatever that is, does that delay their first payments coming in or does that just delay their certainty?

Yes, it delays their first payment. So as soon as the contract, I'm sorry, I misunderstood your question, but it delays their first payment. So as soon as their contract is processed, they've completed the additional forms that we need to get them in our system and all of that, their initial payment is processed. So those can start happening as early as July 1 if all the contracting is done. But yes, as soon As of right now, we're still processing first payments well into August, which is not our ideal timeline, but we prioritized this year contracting with those organizations who have events in July and August right away who needed the funding to support those summer events.

Go ahead, Ian.

so um uh i'm just working on one screen so i'm just wanting to make sure that i'm seeing this correctly so the application would the folks would still get two months but it would be like mid-january to march mid-march is what i'm seeing and then uh they're reviewing so then you know sometime mid-march That takes us into the next phase. And there's going to be application reviews. And then the first time council would see it would be the CLPS meeting, which would be... Where is that? It's in May? End of May. The end of May. Okay. And so then... And then it goes to, so it would be end of May, and then it goes to Council when, sorry, can you help me out here? I cannot see this.

So this was this year. So it came to Council at the end, the last Wednesday in May, and then it went to Council on June 16th.

This year it went to Council on the third Tuesday.

Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. Oh, sorry, who's talking? Was that you, Mary Grace? Sorry.

Yes, I snuck in. This year I went to council on the third Tuesday in June, which was pretty late. And I understand why. It's not a problem. I'm just, but this is how it impacted our schedule. And there's two more of these program timelines coming up in the presentation that show you two versions for how we might adjust it. So this is just what happened this year.

Okay. Thank you. You know, actually when Amelia was saying, or your comments are very helpful too, but when Amelia was saying, uh, this is what happened this year or 2026 or something like that. Cause I was trying to understand how this was different. Okay. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. This is just a picture.

Thank you. Okay. So yeah. So let me move on to the recommendations. The advisory board has suggested two different timelines that might work to offer additional time and information for city council in the weeks immediately prior to approval of the funding awards. And they also recommend, um, considering ways to increase Council's engagement throughout the year to help shape the granting process. So their recommended actions include to schedule an opportunity every year in the August, September timeframe, just like we're doing right now, to brief the CLPS Committee on recommended program improvements for the coming grant cycle. This will keep CLPS involved in program refinements And CLPS can determine what elements should continue on for full council consideration in any given cycle, in advance of any given cycle. They also recommend seeking additional opportunities to engage CLPS in the process throughout the year. And those could include an ex officio position on the advisory board, selection of community representatives for the grant review panels, serving on a grant review panel, and to receive and review the program's annual report in a public meeting each year. Furthermore, if CLPS is engaged and fully informed through some combination of these measures A and B, then the advisory board recommends that the committee, that CLPS committee consider sending the funding recommendations directly to city council on the first Tuesday in June. which would create the additional time for council review prior to approval without compressing other process periods. But if CLPS would prefer to receive and review the awards prior to city council, then we could retain the current schedule, but target council action on the second Tuesday in June every year, rather than the third as happened this year, or the first as we had originally scheduled this year. This year, in addition to y'all wanting a little more time, there was also a council study session on the second Tuesday, which is where we probably would have preferred to schedule you to begin with. But we couldn't hit that Tuesday, and the next one felt too late. So that's kind of how we ended up with a little bit of the train wreck we did this year. In 2027, looking ahead to next year, um the advisory board you know would uh we think would it's not scheduled yet but somewhere around may 20th mid to late may would make their final recommendation to send on to clips clips is scheduled for may 26th um and then the second tuesday in city council would be june 8th um the impact would be less than this year, you know, that delay into the second Tuesday or so is less than this year, but given time to anticipate it, we think it can be managed. So we would do our best to get as many of those contracts ready by July 1st as possible. So our goal would be to have city council review by the second Tuesday, whenever possible. And there are two timelines that can demonstrate this if you want Amelia to run through those.

Before we do that, Mary Grace, or maybe it's helpful for the committee discussion, but I think we should talk about these options A, B, and C here. I think that an annual update to CLPS on this program is a really good idea. so that there's a touch point with council in terms of how things are evolving. And, you know, there's the administrative changes that I think we're interested in as a committee. And then there's the policy changes, which, you know, we would want to make a recommendation to the full council if there's any policy changes being recommended by the CAB. When I look at option B, I think that when I look at those suite of bullets there, I think the ones, and I'm just speaking for myself, I would not be raising my hand to have an ex officio seat on the cab. Not because I don't like the people on the cab, but just because I'm a very busy person. And same for serving on a review panel. I would not be one to raise my hand to do that. However, I think that there could be a role for our committee in selecting the community representatives on the review panels. That's one question that we had as a council. It's like, well, how are these folks being selected? Where is the touch point with council? And it could be that CLPS is that touch point. And then receive and review the program's annual report. I think that's something that is realistic to consider, except that our committee does not typically meet in November and December since we have many meetings earlier in the year because of our advisory bodies. And then for C, I actually think it's a good idea for the funding recommendations to just go ahead and go to the full council. I think that our role as a committee is better suited for helping to shape the program and make those recommendations to council. And by the time those are all carried out through the process, it's a checkpoint with council in terms of, okay, did the things that we expected to be done get done? And I think there could also be some more time for council to sit with those. So like before packets go out, council can see what those recommendations are and have time to sit down with them. But I I would be in favor of skipping that step with the committee and just going straight to Council for funding recommendations. So that's where I'm at when I see this information right here and I'm curious to hear from committee mates and if it's helpful to for to see like what those timelines could look like. I know there's additional slides here for that.

Go ahead Kelly.

Yeah, I'm right where you are chairman drone. I do want to see the the timeline slides before I fully commit to that, but I I feel similar. OK, excellent.

OK, that's from you. OK, yeah, go ahead Ian.

I'm almost in the same place you are. I guess I am in the same place except for I would like to add I'm not quick to nix the idea of having a council member serve on a review panel. I think that there is, I mean, I guess the closest thing that we can kind of compare this to is LTAC, and I do see a benefit there. of having a council member there. You know, I'm coming in as a new chair, but there's, of course, chairs before me. And, you know, they can help because they're in both worlds, you know, and they can help defend the process when it comes across. I mean, assuming that they're proud of the process and worked hard on it. But, you know, so, yeah, I don't want to take away that option just yet. I'm interested in looking at the timeline, too.

Yeah, and it could be an option for a council member to join. I don't want to create the obligation. That's my concern because of all seven of us or all three of us here on clips, but potentially all seven of us on council are like, I don't have time to do that this year. I wouldn't want us to become barriers in moving something forward because we just don't have the time. Go ahead, Kelly.

Yeah, Young, thank you for bringing that up. An important distinction you made, and Danny, you just went back and forth on it, was I think it could be a council member on the review panel, not necessarily a CLPS member. Because I think that does broaden the, like it does have that council representation, Ian, for all the reasons you said, but doesn't necessarily have to come from that small group of three. Like if there's someone who wants to serve in exactly the same way, you know, a single council member volunteers for LTAC.

Yeah, so it could become part of our discussions at our January retreat in terms of the things we, you know, do to support Council business outside of our regularly scheduled meetings. But also, you know, if nobody's raising their hand saying, hey, I want to be the person to support that process, I wouldn't want to. I wouldn't want us to hold it up so so. Does that sound okay to you, Young, to have it be like, you know, that the opportunity is there, but it's not a requirement from council?

Yeah, that's good enough for me. I think that it hits that right balance. Yeah, because it's like, you know, I mean, there could be a future council member or maybe one right now that's like, you know, I'd love to have more to do. You know, I could think of a few people that I'd give them more to do. They give off my back about other things. But anyways, I've said too much.

Yeah. Well, and I would want to also make sure that whatever member of council helps support this process receives the same level of training around bias that all of our advisory folks do. I would just, you know, hate for somebody to just enter the process in the middle and be like, all right, here's how we're doing it when other other folks who are in geese and it have worked together to, you know, kind of create that culture of, you know, how how how things are reviewed. So, OK, it sounds like we're all landing in the same place then in terms of annual updates with clips for continuous improvement of the program. The the opportunity for a council member to engage on a review panel clips participating in the selection of community representatives for review panels and also receiving and reviewing the programs in your report. And then also moving the funding recommendations directly to council. So that's what I'm hearing. Let's go ahead and take a look at those timelines so we can get a visual for how this looks.

Yeah, absolutely. So this would be if we still were going to council. So sort of in this second teal bullet clips and council. Sorry. Yes. Would be sort of. a week in between going to CLPS and Council. It still puts us in mid-July with contracting, which isn't too unusual. And then I gave us a long time for CLPS because, as stated, sometimes CLPS might just be a review of what we're doing and it's moving on as normal and nothing needs to go to Council. But this gives us time to go to council, ping back and forth if we need to, come back to CLPS as we needed. So that's why this big blue line is quite large. And that would show we would bring to you the funding goals, review panelists, review process, proposed quality improvements, and a continued budget discussion that we will bring up here in a second. So this is... This involves going back to CLPS, but the ideal timeline still has us with that big block of time ready to make implementation changes before applications are out in November, but then goes straight to Council potentially at the end of May, which means contracting can start much sooner, potentially ending

uh in june ideally and then all those first payments would go out july 1 which would be great so and amelia um and so one one thing that we talked about is like as soon as the cabs recommendations are complete i think council would like to just see it earlier before it hits our packets but if you go back to that last slide real quick yeah this is also like just solidifying my uh my opinion that things should go straight to council is like when i see that like when it should come to clips um i guess that is the fourth week in may but it just seems like it's such a tight timeline and we only meet once a month that like you know again i don't want our committee to become a barrier in terms of just scheduling things um so before i thought i saw it on the 17th and i was like oh that's not when we meet but it looks like it is it would be when we meet but um i i i think that um it creates more room in the timeline if we just skip that step um and i don't know what value it adds because um again we i think if clips can help with the recommendations to the council on the policy and structure of the program um and then let the program do its thing and then the final comes to council that that seems like a um that seems like a pretty good uh system so

Yeah, so with this timeline, and I'm hearing that you would want sort of that information around the packet that would be published a bit later, perhaps, for council to go straight to council members so they can have time to digest it almost immediately after the CAB meeting. Okay.

yeah yeah and that just helps create opportunities for council members to be able to ask questions and get familiar with it um you know there's never a guarantee that when something comes to council that we're going to approve it but if there's more time built in on the front end of things to be able to resolve questions and talk through things um that provides a little bit more um certainty uh for all the the uh the grantees go ahead yeah

Um, I just, uh, wanted to ask, I, yeah, I just wanted to ask, I can't see the, my screen's, uh, pretty small right now. And so I can't see exactly how much time is elapsing, um, for like how much more time this, this gives us, uh, than, uh, this year's process. So I just wanted to get clear on that. And then the other part is, Should it go to council and then council sends it back to cab? Just saying. So is there a buffer time in for that? Like, so what's the increase? Is it that we're getting things a month earlier? What, you know, so I just want time planned in for if things don't go exactly as planned.

So this gives us more time in sort of our standard contracting window, so this would bump things into July a little bit, but it wouldn't be unheard of and it wouldn't be in August like this year, so it would give. If we provided the packet of funding recommendations directly to Council members after our cab meeting, it would give you two weeks before the Council meeting.

OK, and then thank you and then factoring in the Council meeting. if council wants to make a change, and it probably depends on what that change would be, if they're removing consideration for one of the recommended folks, then there wouldn't be as much back and forth. But if they were to decide that they want to send it back to CAV, what's the buffer time for that? Does that make sense?

We don't have a strong buffer time for that. It would, it would just push things forward and we would move as needed.

Yeah. It would mean delayed contracting.

Yeah. I feel like, thank you. I'll be honest. That's not satisfying to me. I do. I would like to have more time built in. I think that was one of the pressures of this last go around was that we yeah, council can take an action, but weighing heavy on people was, but then it's going to delay Bunny getting out to the community. So I'd like to see a change in the timeline that accounts for any decision that the city council makes and to have time factored in after it goes to council, just in case we do send it back.

Well, and Young, one of the things that I'm thinking through here is just like looking at the timeline that they're already working through. I think it might be difficult to build in that extra time. But I think what we could do or what the program could do is to let grantees know that. you know, it needs to run through its process and funding is not guaranteed at a certain point. That way, if things do get delayed and contracts get pushed out, there's not a grantee who is just like, oh shoot, I was told I'd have, if we got funded, it would be July 1 and now I don't know what to do. Like, I think that that would be the, you know, a potential approach. That sounds fine to me. Just looking at this though, I'm not sure how more time could be built in, but I guess I'll let staff speak to that.

If council, the way it's rendered right now, and these, these are big blocks, you know, that one of those boxes is an entire week. So the beginning of the week versus the end of the week can make a difference. Right now, the, the funding recommendation comes out of the advisory board about May 20th, based on this year. And if it went straight to city council, say the 21st, and then council were to consider it the first or second Tuesday in June, that would give you between from the 20th to June 1st or June 8th. Feels like a, you know, Is that enough time, I guess, is my question back to you. And then the secondary question I think Danny answered well in that, you know, we could build an alternate what-if scenario if council were to send the decision back to the Cultural Access Advisory Board for more work. But the obvious outcome is, it depends on how much more work it is, but the obvious outcome is that it would simply extend the contracting period I think we already have language built in that basically says you're not guaranteed anything in this process until there's a signed contract that's been approved by city council. Is that okay if I respond?

Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so working on the first question that you had, Mary Grace, about the time, could you tell me, I know you threw some dates out there, but could you tell me how much more time I mean, I heard Amelia say that if we're not going to CLPS, then it would give council two weeks before the council meeting. But then how much more time after the council meeting is there? I felt like you were describing something that I wasn't fully catching on to.

If Council were to receive the CAB recommendations on the 21st of May and then consider them for public approval June 1st, that's 10 days. And if it was June 8th, that's another 17 days total.

And we could run either scenario for you. How often does the CAP meet?

That's been a changing target, actually. We've added meetings this year. But about, well, they're meeting as review panelists from mid-March through late May. That entire blue, the second review and funding recommendation line in the timeline The CAAB members are meeting, are working in the review panels. As far as meeting as a board, they're meeting, let's see, in May to develop the final recommendations. They met twice in July this year. They'll meet in October. We'll be adding a November meeting, and they meet in January. So six times a year currently, plus their time as review panelists.

Okay. I guess I'll just wrap by saying that I do appreciate, so I agree that CLPS has this role in shaping it, and then, and I appreciate the suggestions from, you know, however many slides ago, and that there will be a, I guess, more touch points with the CLPS committee on it, and the uh, getting counseled information about the cab, uh, um, sooner. And so I do count those things as wins. Um, I still feel like this is a pressed timeline and I might just be in the minority here, but I think that looking at the timeline, I think it's still set up for, uh, the city council to say yes. And I understand ideally we do, but to, to say yes. And then, um, there is a lot of pressure of not getting that funding out whether we put that disclaimer language in or not i just uh yeah so um i would have wanted to see a timeline that has uh just more time baked in after the council meeting for uh if there were going to be changes and having it sent back to the cab so those are my thoughts thank you go ahead kelly

Yeah, I'm thinking about this issue of, you know, part of the pressure that this is creating, like that July 1 or that July stuff, you know, thinking about summer camps, thinking about festivals, all of those things, which, you know, a lot happens in the summer. Has the committee or have you all considered, like, I know July 1 to June 30 is a pretty common granting timeline, but is there, I mean, our fiscal year is... calendar year so is there a reason it couldn't be an April through end of March time or something that like is there sort of a quiet season that would still allow for these organizations to you know do their planning do their budgeting but really leave a lot more room to make sure that if you're if you're putting this funding towards camps that start in mid-June when school gets out you you have it in hand when you need to hire staff or whatever that is

I'm trying to figure out what's the best approach to answering your question. I don't think there's a slack time during the year. I think that if you move the entire schedule, somebody else will be inconvenienced. There will always be someone who it works better for and someone who it doesn't. And my understanding about the timeline crunch was really that we are looking to extend the the period of time that city council has to consider the recommendations and that crunch will still be there no matter where we move the cycle to during the year. The reason that it is where it is, again, we follow Tacoma's model, but as I understood it, Tacoma selected that July 1 start date to support those planning for school year programming that begins with the school year in September, rather than really focused on the summer camp stuff. So. Amelia, feel free to add to that.

Yeah, the July 1 to June supports the cultural access in public schools is essentially that. So the organizations can plan for a full year of programming instead of piecing years together with funding that may not come the second year.

Yeah. All right. Okay, I appreciate that. That makes sense. I'm just trying to think of like, what are there other, I feel like we're only looking at the compression of this in terms of when things go to council as the only movable thing. And I just, I guess my ultimate question is, are there not other things that are movable? I mean, we have a... 8 week application window, which is lovely. But what does a 6 week application window look like? That's a pretty as someone who has written many grant applications 6 weeks is a pretty healthy timeline. Especially if I know by mid November, what those questions and what that application is going to look like. So, yeah, I just, I feel like we're putting so much pressure just on that council stop and I would just love to see. If there's something else that can help relieve that.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And we have looked a little bit at could we short the application window. We have two application windows running consecutively right now, and we've staggered them just a little bit so that staff are not dealing with all of the closures at the same time. So it probably looks a little longer because of that, but it's actually two application windows that are staggered.

then we may be adding a third pending um discussion later on this agenda tonight so so could you speak i mean i i'm intrigued by what kelly was just saying you know what would it look like to just do six weeks for an application time period and how how could that impact the the that that that could be the thing that we need to build in that extra time later on down uh the pike um i And I'm having trouble coming up with a scenario where we as a council would send the whole slate of recommendations back to the cab. and have that be any kind of a quick process because of all of the time that the CAB puts into recommendations to bring them to us. Like something would have had to gone seriously wrong with the whole evaluation process for us as a council to recommend something to go back to the CAB for them to re review and provide a potentially different recommendation. The scenarios that I think of are there's something that the council wants to do differently. And my perspective on it is that we wouldn't ask the CAB to redo their work so it better aligns with something that we would want to see, but rather that if we see something that we think needs to be changed, we would just take that action. And that could take more than one meeting to do. So if we can find some things that can be tweaked a little bit earlier on to build in time for maybe two council meetings. So instead of having one little block for council, it's two. Just to have that extra time, I think that might address the concerns that I've heard from the committee here. So there isn't that pressure point with council, like, okay, if you don't do it tonight, then you have a bunch of sad organizations out there who have uncertainty for themselves. Yeah. Is that a reasonable thing, you know, dropping the application timeline down to build in that extra space?

Yeah, I mean, it impacts the organizations. It's an accessibility consideration. You know, the longer it's open, the more access there is. But it's not an unreasonable reduction. A week is a manageable amount, I think, for most organizations, I would hope, and certainly with lots of advance notice requirements. We hope that they would adjust.

Okay. And Ian, would that satisfy your concerns if we gave space for at least two council meetings to work through this and the second council meeting is just as if more deliberation is needed among the council?

I think it's better. Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, what I'm hoping for, Young, is that when we reach the end of this meeting tonight, we have a unanimous recommendation from CLPS so that there's greater certainty for the program when it comes to the full council meeting. So didn't quite hear that from you just now. And so I just want to make sure that we dig into this as much as we need to tonight because After this, it comes to council for a study session and then for a decision, and then there's the process and the timeline to move along with. So I heard you say that it's better, but is that better like it's something that you would support?

I think it's better. I'm not feeling enthusiastic right now, but I hear what you're saying, and I appreciate you being creative. Okay.

Well, let's go ahead and move on to the next slide.

Okay. One more.

A little rest for our eyes. This is Fauci Farms. And our policy updates are next. We're going to talk about the grant review panelist recruitment and selection process, location-based eligibility, and the new competitive funding pathway. Next slide. The objective for the grant review panelist selection and recruitment and selection process is to increase council confidence in the panel selection and the resulting review process and open recruitment of community representatives to the public. Each year, alongside the advisory board members who are appointed by city council, additional grant review panelists are recruited from the community because the nine member council point of cab alone does not provide enough panelists. We typically need about a dozen additional reviewers. The added reviewers do more than just support the workload. They round out community representation. They bring talented expertise. They ensure that fresh perspectives are brought in every year because we've got new panelists coming in and they improve the fairness of scoring because the scores are averaged over a larger group. In the first two years, we had only two review panels, but because the program is growing, our number of applications has risen. And this year we needed three panels. We added 11 community members to our seven available advisory board members. Our recruitment effort begins as early as October because the time commitment is significant and the panels, The schedules of the panels are each a little different and we need to move people around to find the optimal mix and representation based in their availability will also drive some decisions. And we're also trying to minimize conflicts of interest in placing people in different panels. So the process has engaged the advisory board in outreach and recommending candidates. And a matrix is used to help strategically identify representational balance on the review panel. And that's used by staff in kind of figuring out where to place candidates. The advisory board recommends formalizing that entire process that we use to recruit and select these additional panelists. And so the next slide offers that recommendation. Then go ahead to the next slide, Amelia. The advisory board recommends formalizing the community review panel selection, recruitment and selection, by first creating a system for year round recruitment of volunteers. We'll use social media, city communications. We will still rely to some extent on that word of mouth and outreach by our advisory board members to recommend good folks. And the city website will help to inform the public and receive candidates. Second, the advisory board suggested creating a subcommittee that will work directly with staff to annually update and apply that strategic matrix that I mentioned, and I have an example for you to look at. The matrix supports diverse and well-rounded community representation on the panels. And sorry, I lost my spot there. And then there was a third recommendation, Amelia, if you'd just go back. Sorry. So we use the matrix to help select those and place those community review panelists on the different panels. And then the third suggestion from the advisory board is to welcome a member of CLPS to join those subcommittee discussions and selecting and reviewing panel candidates. Now you can go to that matrix slide. Thank you. This matrix was recently reviewed by the advisory board. They made some updates, had some input to it, and what you're seeing is an approved matrix for the coming year. Now I'm happy to pause for any discussion or questions.

Great. And I see a hand from Kelly there.

Thank you, Chairman Drone.

It strikes me and I'm asking this from a place of curiosity. I can appreciate why the additional, you know, panel, like why you're doing as many reviews as you are and working to eliminate conflict of interest and working to eliminate bias. So I don't. question the methodology of all of this. I question, have we made this entire process overly complicated if like just putting together this panel is this much work? Yeah, I guess that's just what's striking me is in an already hefty process between everything that the applicants go through and then the contracts and the payments and all of it. Are we adding a layer where there's something else that should be simplified to not need this much time? I mean, 25 to 40 hours for nine people plus cab each. I mean, I don't know, but maybe I'm being, I don't know. I guess I would just be curious as to others' opinions on that.

Yeah, go ahead, Ian.

Or did you put your hand down? Yeah, I did.

Yeah, I agree, Kelly. Or sorry, Committee Member Green.

Yeah, I had a similar thought. You know, the program already has a lot of intensive work throughout the year. And so you know I and I understand that you know one of the that this matrix in the process is the result of a concern coming from Council where we don't have a touch point with who those reviewers are who are advisory to us. We appoint the members of the cab. But but there are additional people involved that we don't have a hand in in appointing and so. I'm curious, you know, to hear from staff in terms of, you know, the function of the matrix in this process. And also curious to hear from committee mates in terms of, like, the other components of this. And actually, maybe if we go a slide back, it'll help the conversation a little bit in terms of having somebody from CLPS join that. that subcommittee to help support that process. And if that meets the concerns that we've heard from the committee and council in terms of this part of it. Sorry, there were two things in there. One for staff to respond to in terms of like, the matrix and if you all feel it's like necessary to go through like that kind of a ranking for advisory body members. So let's start with that one and then we can turn to committee to see if this is solving the problem that we had identified previously.

It's just a tool. The matrix is just a tool to help us kind of see if there's any significant gaps in representation and to make sure that we are including looking for you know, all these different kinds of expertise. It's sort of an ideal thing. We'd love to have somebody in each of those boxes. We know we can't, but it's just impossible. And yet, you know, we need something to help track what we've got and how we can best balance each of our review panels. And that's what that matrix is for. It's just a tool.

Okay. And Kelly and then Ian? Yeah, well, Molly, did you want to say something first?

Yeah, I was just going to add on to what Mary Grace had said. The matrix serves less as a ranking tool and more of a tool to really identify the different areas where all of these panelists are actually serving and where their areas of expertise are. It's a tool that's often used in nonprofits, particularly for board work to identify different areas where boards can then strengthen depending on where their specific needs are. So we were applying this type of tool to our panelists to ensure that there were a number of different ways that we could look at panel selection.

Yeah, I appreciate that. And I appreciate the matrix. I use one as well in my nonprofit work for our board for all the same reasons. So I'm definitely like, I'm not questioning the matrix itself. I'm questioning, you know, even the step before this slide, like has this whole process gotten so complicated to necessitate, you know, 11 additional volunteers in addition to the nine cab volunteers that all need to put that much time in. Like I get that in our process as it stands. that's the best way to do reviews in an unbiased way my question goes you know i guess prior to that then have we made the application process too complicated if it takes that much work just to gather the reviewers to do the reviews to get it to council when like chairman drone said you know there is intensive work that happens on all this year round um i don't know and and maybe melissa maybe you have something to offer here as someone who has uh you know participated in those other pieces of this process of the analysis. And I don't know.

I hear what you're saying. And I always ask myself that have we over complicated things if, if it seems over complicated, but I think it actually moves briskly. And it's about being stewards of the city funding. And so I think our panelists are up for it and really take it seriously. And I mean, not that you were saying that they don't, but I think, I don't know, when I look at it laid out, I think, oh my God, this looks really complicated and a lot of work. But when we're in it, the experience is, it just seems really clear and diligent. I don't know if that gets at what you're thinking about.

Yeah. It helps. Yeah. I just, I really wanted to clarify, like the matrix is not my issue. Just the fact of how much work has to go into the additional recruitment is. Yeah. I think I misheard you on that one.

Oh, and then the recruitment. I mean, I think what we've learned too in the, in going through it several times is that it is it's really useful to have pockets of expertise in the panels and so um that's where that matrix comes in in hand i mean it's a useful tool but um again just to be really thoughtful about um about the reviewers you know we have people who have arts admin background um heritage OK, it's getting late so I can tell my my words are failing me, but people from heritage organizations and you know, like these different pockets are is really useful.

And Amelia, I think you had a follow up on that.

Yeah, I just want to say that. It. Depending on the person who's reviewing, how in-depth they want to get with the application, it is about a half an hour to an hour worth of time for each application. And each panel is seeing upwards of 45 applications. And so that's where that large chunk of time for review comes in. And then to do the due diligence of having those conversations so that some of those people with those knowledge bases can talk to them so if i as an arts person am looking at a an opera organization and i don't understand half of what they're saying somebody who knows that world can kind of help me and we can balance our scores in that way um and so that's also why this the amount of time takes and i think the the desire to have the due diligence and make it as strong as it is is because it's that unrestricted funding. It's not project-based. We are building a trust in these organizations that they are using our money to better support the broad work that they do in most cases. So I think that's also some of the logic behind it.

Okay, thank you. Young? necessary to have this additional review panel.

We share I see Amelia saying yes, I think with her head. Can you share a little bit about that? And what do they do that's different than the cab?

so as mary grace stated they add more folks looking at the application so ideally about six people are looking at each application to create an average score with less people looking at that that average score can be skewed in certain ways if someone is feeling really strongly about something or really negatively about something and the number of applications. We received 95 applications. And so that's an incredible amount of work. And so this would only lengthen the amount of time that those review panels meet and shrinking the amount of time potentially for applications or council review or any of that other stuff that needs to happen. So in order to keep sort of a standard of funding of the five months of application closed to when you know you have funding, that would just make that much longer.

So is there, thank you, is there review panel, so it is required?

In what, what do you mean? required there's the cab of course and so and then this additional review panel which I guess we're calling the community review panelists it's the same it's the same panel yeah good yeah so the review panel is made up of community members and cab members and they all are it's a a group of people so there's at least two to three cab members on every review panel that we we place so there's different review panels

Yes, this year there was different categories.

Yeah, so there's the comprehensive pathway and the impact pathway. Comprehensive is reviewed together, so that's one review panel. Impact is so large that we broke it into two so that reviewers aren't reviewing 60 plus applications.

So then if someone is applying for, an org is applying for comprehensive and then they go through the review process with the panelists, or their application does, and they would be better suited for impact? I mean, I'm guessing that probably happens. So then does it go through the impact panel too?

That would happen during staff eligibility review. We would catch that then, and so then determine where it would go if it needed to move into impact. Yeah.

Okay. And then could you tell me how large, how many people are on the cab and how many people are, I guess, additional review panelists?

Do you want to back up just one slide, Amelia? Thanks. There's nine members on the advisory board and usually at least one of them is unavailable, sometimes more. So we need You know, we start from seven or eight, and this year we needed to add 11 additional review panelists. Twelve might have been better. And so each panel is five to seven panelists. Six to seven is better.

So what is unique about the CAB? Like, what would be unique about the CAB versus an additional review panelist?

Well, the advisory board members have been vetted by city council. You chose them in the advisory board selection process. And the additional community members are being added through a different process. And that's what this is about, this conversation is about, is how to formalize that process when we need to bring in these additional volunteers for this specific task each spring? Is there a way to more formally get out the word that we're looking for these volunteers, bring them in in a very standardized process, and select them with greater care, perhaps, or with additional review by CLPS, if desired?

Would it be fair to say we might just need more CAB members?

Let's see if we doubled the cab to 18, that would get us close.

It sounds like the review panelists, and I promise I'm not just trying to make this meeting longer, but the review panelists, it sounds like they're them and the cab other than how they're selected are kind of like one in one. Is that correct?

I'm not sure what you mean by one-on-one.

It sounds like there's no difference in the work. There's no, there's not a uniqueness of the, there's not a difference in what their role is.

That's what I'm asking. Once they're on the review panels, the review panelists are all this are all treated the same. but the advisory board members who serve as reviewers then continue on into the actual funding award process and continue on throughout the year as advisory board members. The community review panelists are just community representatives who add to the numbers for the purpose of doing the application review and scoring. And all they do is review the content for the qualitative measures that are available described in our evaluation criteria and they score them. And there's a lot of process around that. There's an orientation, there's a training, there's meetings, there's group discussion, there's individual review, there's an evaluation matrix, all of which we've covered in other briefings with you. But we can do more.

Thanks. Thanks.

So what I've heard from the... Go ahead, sorry. I was just going to say, sorry, I was looking for my mic. This is Melissa. And I was just going to say, and maybe Mary Grace already said this, but the panelists don't move the markers for funding allocations. So the panelists come in, they kind of helicopter in review the applications. And then the cab is, is who decides, you know, if you score in this amount, you're going to get 75%, you know, we sort of play with that. Well, Amelia sets it up for us, but we sort of we play with that allocation model. So then so the panelists don't have, they're not part of that conversation about how much organizations should get, they just rank the rank it based on the criteria.

So, you know, looking over the slide in front of us, one of the reasons that this discussion is in front of us is because there were concerns in the Council about having additional reviewers that were not appointed by the council. I'm hearing, you know, from the committee, you know, the, well, why do we, why do we need so many reviewers? And we've talked about that. And, you know, just questions to kind of better understand, but we'll, at the end of what we do need is some kind of recommendation to come out of this committee on how we address that particular concern around having additional reviewers that were not appointed. So, I'm saying all this to try to draw out the conversation a bit more in terms of what it is we recommend to address this particular concern from the Council.

And I think on a different slide was the recommendation from the CAB.

There we go. Yeah, okay, great. So the recommendation here is that someone from clips would join a subcommittee to select additional review panel folks to support the process. Is that satisfactory to us? Would we want the full Council involved? And I'm also hearing questions about is the process too much? I don't know if that I mean we don't have any recommendations in front of us around that so, but we need to figure out how to draw this Particular part of the conversation to a close around a recommendation from the committee so that we can address that concern from the Council.

Go ahead, Kelly.

I hear exactly what you're asking and I'm just struggling to answer it, so that's I'm not sitting here quiet to be obstinate. I mean, I I think if this if this is the. If. In the options we've seen, if this is the way they need to be reviewed, then sure, this seems fine. I don't feel like it's going to address some council members' concern that, you know, just there's a lot of folks. But I hear that the reviewers are not determining the funding, are not doing those final pieces. And I can respect, you know, again, I do a similar process in my day job where we bring in folks who just help us read and score things. And that just gives us the tools we need. So I definitely can respect that. I don't know. There's just something I'm still struggling with that I can't really put my finger on. So if you were to hold my feet to the fire today, sure, let's do this. But I can't say that I feel amazing about that. Okay.

Okay. And I would never think that it's obstinance on your part, Kelly Green. Go ahead, Ian.

Same, honestly. I know that there's been a lot of work put into this by yourself, Chair, and staff as well. So I don't want to be dismissive of that work, but yeah, I'm struggling with having, I mean, you know, we did To be fair, we did agree on some things already that we were glad to see to move forward. But yeah, there's just some things I'm struggling with here. And do we not have any more time to continue this discussion in clips?

Is it like,

Not without scheduling a special meeting so that we can have more time to do it. And my understanding is that, you know, we also have a timeline that the program operates on generally, but at a certain point, staff need a decision from Council on some of the policy components, this being one of them. so that they can pull together updated guidelines, get them out to the community, notify people of any changes to the program so that organizations have time to consider and react as they prepare for the grant process. And so we don't have unlimited time to work on this. And I don't know that we have an extra month to be able to accommodate that timeline.

I saw that the city manager, Bernie, had a hand raised.

Yeah, Young still had her hand up, so I wasn't sure if she had more to say, but go ahead, Jay.

Yeah, I just wanted to add, as you continue to talk about this, I think what I'm hearing from staff pretty clearly is that nine CAB members aren't enough people to take on the volume of applications that need to be reviewed. It would take a lot of time you'd be asking a lot of nine people so they need more reviewers to be able to break it down into categories to make the workload manageable for what they're asking reviewers to do so so to me there's only one or two ways to get there there's either you add more cab members and we we double the number and we appoint more um which makes a pretty big committee or I threw something in the chat and I don't know how realistic this is, but could you, at the same time you're picking CAB members, pick review panelists that just have a very specific duty. They help with review and then their duty is done and then the rest of the CAB, the other nine, continue on with the other work that they have to do to work on the other pieces of this. I think there's the pinch point here is that nine people aren't enough to review. And so how do we add people to it? And what's that process look like? And what does council need to feel like they're part of that selection and vetting?

Yeah. And Jay, I'll just react a little bit to what you said. You know, expanding the CAB to include all the reviews we possibly need. I don't think we get that many people applying to be on the CAB.

Yeah.

the review the the additional support that's needed is a one and done review process not the annual um evaluation of the program and recommendations of the council on updates um and and so um i don't know that just expanding the cab is the solution to that because it's asking for a year-round commitment rather than a limited time commitment um and so i i don't know that we can get through it get to this challenge through our advisory body recruitment process. Because even if we're like, oh, here's somebody who, you know, we didn't select for the CAB, but maybe they want to be an advisory, or sorry, maybe they want to be part of the review panel, they're applying for a year-round commitment, not a one-and-done kind of a thing. So I don't think that that's the nexus here, is that point where we're selecting CAB members.

I agree with you. I'm just kind of highlighting there's only one of two ways to get at this. It's either have more CAB or pick review panelists. And I think the pinch point here is how do those review panelists get picked? And how does council want input into it? Because I think we have to have them to make this work. And so how do we do that?

That's really the question, right?

Yep. Go ahead, Kelly.

City Manager, I appreciate you putting a fine point on that. And to that end, you know, in building off of kind of your suggestion there, if, because I agree, like, I don't want to expand CAB. It doesn't sound like what's really needed here. But in those advisory body selections, if these recommendations are more or less followed and it's a year-round recruitment and there's sort of this pool of proposed folks, and when the advisory body appointments are happening, the matrix is approved, right? Or not the matrix itself, but like, here's our options. Could we then approve the additional reviewers just based on that? If council would feel like that, that was enough of a touch point in that. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it's kind of like we bless the process and accept the outcome, you know, so long as that process is followed kind of a thing.

certainly even blast the process, but if it's a year round recruitment, then when we're doing advisory body appointments, uh, an actual recommendation of like, we're recommending these 11 people, not necessarily with their names, but like with approval, this is what our, our whole group would look like between cab and between these reviewers. Like these are all of the, the, um, uh, skill sets we have covered that sort of thing.

And you're thinking like something that would come to the full council, come to clips, um,

I'm thinking come to CLPS at the same time we approve advisory body members. Oh, I see what you're saying, those advisory bodies. I didn't think of that far through. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you.

Okay. Go ahead, Mary Grace.

We could...

do what you're suggesting, Kelly, Council Member Green, and bring that list to CLPS in the early spring with the understanding that sometimes there's a lot of shifting that goes on in those lists right up to the very end. But setting that problem aside for the moment, we could try to bring that list, as you suggested, just a representational list or names, two clips for your review and consideration. I would say no later than a million, like February would be good because we talk to people starting in October. We try to get some pretty solid lists put together and then we're actually scheduling people and asking them to commit on their schedules for this block of time. And we need that commitment early because it is a pretty big block of time. So, yeah, I would think February, but I'll leave that to you, Amelia, to chime in.

Yeah, I think February is our goal of when we would like to have them locked down. But people's lives change. People have to drop off. We have to rush to find someone. The time commitment, we try to have those dates as soon as possible. But locking something on your calendar six months in advance is often a challenge for average folks. So just those are some considerations that go in.

OK. I'm going to suggest that we put a pin in this one. It doesn't sound like we're clear as a committee in terms of what is needed here to address Council concerns around lack of involvement with the selection of these folks. I would personally be fine with having a touch point with clips or with the Council to say this is our advisory body. Sorry, I keep saying advisory body. Uhm, our review panelists for the process, but it also sounds like that is something that is potentially subject to change just because of the time commitment from it. But if we're not getting new ideas generated here, it doesn't make sense for us to keep circling around on this particular issue, especially with the hour getting late. So I'm going to suggest that we just we move along and you know it can. It can be discussed further with counsel at the study session, but I am concerned without clarity coming out eclipse. that we're going to continue to spin wheels with the full council. So let's go ahead and move on.

Okay, next slide, Amelia.

Okay, location-based eligibility is another policy topic that the council expressed interest in. With our current requirement, and that's under background at the top, an organization that is not addressed inside the city limits may qualify for INSPIRE funding if they can demonstrate that a majority of their public programs are held within city limits, or they can demonstrate that their programs primarily serve Olympia residents or Olympia school district students. We heard city council interest in understanding whether city tax dollars are supporting organizations, particularly as our program becomes more competitive. Supporting organizations outside of Olympia, perhaps at the expense of organizations who are located inside Olympia. And also interested in understanding how applicants are showing that they are meeting these requirements. And I want to address the second question first. How are applicants showing that they're meeting our requirements? All Inspire Olympia applicants describe the public programs that they intend to provide in their applications. And then those with addresses outside of Olympia city limits are strongly encouraged to be clear about how their programs are meeting these location eligibility requirements. It can differ depending on who they serve and what they do, but all funded organizations report regularly on their public programs. And that reporting includes details about program location and participation. So in addition to the plans, and the goals that they offer in their program proposal, in their application, we receive updated accounting quarterly throughout the course of their contract, and we look for them to hit those targets for serving the Olympia community. So I'm just going to pause for questions there before moving on to the other aspects of this discussion about the definition or the requirement itself.

mary grace are you pausing for questions or for feedback yeah questions or or just or feedback yes okay um i don't see hands coming up from either committee member and i believe oh okay yeah i don't have anything but i'm just reading this

Go ahead.

Okay, so this is not the suggested one yet. It's just the current.

Yes, correct. The next slide will offer the recommendation. Okay. So the advisory board revisited the current policy and their discussion included the considerations noted here. The current definition considers who is served as well as who is offering the programming. Inspire Olympia kind of has two components to its mission. One is to provide a reliable source of funding to our cultural organizations, and the other is to make programs, cultural programs accessible to as many people as possible. And by considering who is served, it increases that access. The current definition supports program mission to increase access and diversity. There are important nearby arts, heritage, culture, and science assets that are outside of city limits. that are enjoyed by Olympians. Olympia is a regional cultural hub. Zip codes, I just noted this because some people think that zip codes are a way to easily identify who is in Olympia and they're not. They do not correlate to city and county jurisdictions. So it's not easy always to know who is in or outside of a city Olympia. limits. And additional data can be requested and shared with council for organizations outside of city limits. So those were kind of the highlights of the advisory board's discussion. And I can stop there if Kelly has a question. Council Member Green.

Mary Grace, finish your thought for me.

Oh, I was just going to go on to the recommendations. So the board recommends keeping the current definition around location eligibility. And they recommend adding a question to the eligibility section of the application that requires organizations with addresses outside of city limits to specifically explain how they're going to demonstrate, offer their metrics to demonstrate that a majority of their programs will be held inside Olympia or that they primarily serve Olympia community members or OSD students. That is a recommended response.

Okay, go ahead, Kelly.

Yeah, so I struggle with this one, and I think my challenge with it is the term majority, and I think that came up in the sense of Let's say I'm a membership-based organization. I have 1,000 members. 400 are in Olympia. 375 are in Lacey. That's majority, but that also doesn't reflect who's actually accessing it. Just because your membership base is a certain thing, that doesn't speak to who's accessing your programming. I know it's not an easy answer because this is unrestricted funding. It's program funding. It's not for a specific project, but I think the that term majority is kind of where I struggled. Again, in terms of, I understand the reality is people who don't live in Olympia pay into this tax. By coming and spending money in Olympia, they pay in. So I don't want to make it be like, oh, it's only for Olympia, because I recognize everyone, lots of people contribute. But I also feel like it needs to be bigger than just all right, 51% is Olympia, you're good to go. So I don't know what that right framing would be, but that is the place where I struggle with this one a little bit.

Go ahead, Ian.

Yeah, I'd be interested in exploring what a cap would look like for organizations that are not outside of Olympia. Maybe that's a, yeah, I mean, perhaps it's a percentage. I just, I think that, yeah, I worry that we're opening the floodgates, you know, and it's, we have, there are so many great organizations in, I mean, just even Thurston County overall that folks could, you know, folks could make the argument that there's a benefit for Um, and, uh, yeah, so it's just something I'm thinking about and, um, I would like to, yeah, I'm curious what, uh, if staff have seen that in other, um, in other programs, um, and what that could look like. But I would, yeah, I would, you know, whether we got more clarity on folks serving a majority of Olympia, you know, whatever that majority is of Olympians or not, I would want to have, uh, I do want the majority of this funding to go to organizations that are, are in Olympia. And, um, I understand that we have some, um, folks that, uh, have received, I don't want to call them out by name, but that have, uh, organizations, uh, that do great work that have, uh, received inspire funding. And I, yeah. And I wouldn't want to say, okay, next year they can no longer receive inspire funding or be eligible to apply, but, uh, I'm not encouraging a whole lot of giving this Inspire funding to a lot of organizations outside of Olympia. That's not something that I'm supportive of. And so, yeah. So anyways, I'd like to see a cap on how much we're doing that.

Okay.

And so, Young, I think what I heard you say is that you're good with the cab recommendation, but you want there to be a cap on how much can go out, but other, but otherwise that, that recommendation looks good to you.

If we could get more, you know, I don't disagree. Yes. And I don't disagree with, uh, committee members greens, um, uh, concerns. If we could get more, you know, clarity on, on, uh, and, uh, yeah, an understanding of like, how are they communicating that this, that this is a benefit to Olympians. But yeah, overall.

Okay. And Kelly, your concern, what I heard was around like determining what a majority means and if this funding is actually going towards majority benefit for Olympia residents versus whether their membership is a majority Olympia. Is that what I was hearing?

Yeah, that's correct. And I, uh, committee member when I agree with that too, maybe there's either a, you know, if you're outside of Olympia that, you know, there's either a max percentage of, yeah, of the dollars, maybe it makes the most sense, but, uh, chairman drone. Yeah. It's like, I somehow, who want like strong majority to be the thing. And I don't want to put an arbitrary number on it, but it's like, I would feel differently about an entity that is doing 75% of its field trips for OSD schools versus North Thurston or Tumwater schools than I would about an organization that's doing 54%, right? And so, yeah, it's not perfect guidance, but that's what I would love to see.

Okay. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, you might, is that the right balance is the question, is 50% the right amount? And you might want to look at a higher percentage. That's legitimate completely. As far as floodgates, we haven't seen that. We have a total of 12 organizations currently that have addresses out, I'm sorry, 11, that have addresses outside Olympia, but most of those, all but three, do the majority of their programming inside Olympia. And then there are three who are also doing programming outside Olympia, but it's primarily serving Olympia City residents. So that's how it breaks down, and we haven't had more this year. In fact, none of these, no, one of them, two of them are new. Three, my bad, three of them are new this year, and they're all quite small. So I'm happy to provide more detail.

Go ahead. Go ahead, Kelly.

Yeah, thanks for that data, Mary Grace. And I hear what you're saying that there hasn't been, but I do agree with committee member Fuen's point that, you know, the funding will continue to be, well, popularity will increase as, you know, we're still pretty young in this process and funding will not always be what it is or it would even drop. And I would really hate to see, you know, I think part of this is encouraging, especially like young organizations to start up in Olympia and start doing this work. And I would hate to see that there's organizations trying to do that and we're sending a lot of the money out into neighboring communities. And so I like I hear you that that's not an issue right now, but I do worry a little that that there's, you know, definite risk for that.

Mm hmm.

Mm hmm.

Yeah, and we might also see other funding opportunities get cut off, you know, state programs, federal programs that become no longer available to organizations, so more and more turn to us. So I do think it is prudent to put the guardrails in place before the challenge is on our doorstep. And so the feedback I'm hearing from the committee on this one is get clearer on that majority aspect um you know that it you know 51 is not exactly what we're looking for we're looking for you know a significant amount of their programs um that doesn't have a number behind it so it's a little bit ambiguous um and also um explore um uh you know what a cap would look like for funding for organizations outside of olympia um And I don't think we have time this evening to refine it any more than that. So I'm hoping staff can take that feedback and come up with some kind of proposal, maybe with engagement with the CAB. That sound, is that, I'm looking at my committee, does that sound pretty aligned with what you all are thinking?

Yep. Okay, great. So go ahead, Ian.

Similarly, Uh, uh, when I'm, when I'm talking about a cap, I think this is probably clear, but I'm looking for a low percentage. Like I'm really, really trying to make sure the majority of the funding goes to organizations in Olympia. So, um, yeah, I don't want to throw out some arbitrary number, but, uh, I, uh, you know, if we think of 11, was it out of what we have? I think, you know,

wouldn't want to see more than that i mean i i feel like that's like that's quite a bit already i'm looking forward to what we hear back okay um i think it would be helpful if we got a little bit more clear um so that staff don't work on something and then it's like no no that's not enough um 10 of the funding you know do you want to put a range out there um i i just I'm trying to avoid giving vague feedback to staff and then they bring something back to us and we're like, no, that still doesn't work. Yeah. 1% would be great. Okay. And I don't know how that correlates with what currently went out. That was again, a random number, but, but just to get a ballpark of what you're thinking.

Like it, it appears to be about 10% right now. I'd have to check my numbers, but.

Yeah, I want it to be the exception, not the rule. And I don't want to feel like, say it's 10%, I don't want us to then take that as, okay, we now need to fill that 10%. It's like if it was 100% Olympia, that's totally fine. Yeah, fair enough.

Got it. Okay, great. Let's go ahead to the next component of this, because I know we still have some more content to get through right here, and the hour is getting late.

It is. So thank you for your patience. We are moving to our new policy discussion. Amelia, if you would move us to the next slide and I will turn it over to Molly and hopefully we'll end on a really high note.

Go ahead, Molly.

Thank you. Just wanted to get set up here really quickly. And I think, Amelia, if you're okay, just continuing to share the slides. Yeah, let's not try to do the switch out. um hello all i'm molly wilmoth and hold on just a second i'm getting some echo very great yeah you want me to pull off my headphones i'll just turn my microphone off there we go okay So my name is Molly Wilmoth, and I am relatively new to the Inspire Olympia team as the cultural access and public schools coordinator. I've had the chance to meet with a couple of you really briefly, but I'm really excited to talk more about our cultural access and public schools program and excited about the work that can continue from everything that has been done to date. So Amelia, next slide. Just for a really quick background, you all probably remember RCW says that we need to have a public school cultural access program as part of our cultural access. The resolution that you all just passed as part of city council also made sure that there's an annual allocation for cultural access in Olympia public schools, including transportation. there are two specific Inspire Olympia funding goals that relate directly to the work that we're doing in public schools through cultural access. Expand access to youth education programs in arts, culture, heritage, and science, as well as increase access to these programs and reduce barriers to participation, especially for historically underserved populations. And what better way to do that than through our public schools here in Olympia? So to give you an idea of what is already happening with CAPS, The allocation approach for this year means that we are providing organizations with allocations. If they are giving free field trips to Olympia School District classes, they are then able to invoice us for up to $10,000 per program expenses throughout the year. Likewise, organizations that are providing in-school programming can invoice us for up to $450 for their program expenses. So as you can see, that emphasis has really traditionally through the course of this program been on field trip access. We also maintain an interlocal agreement with Olympia School District Transportation to ensure that we're reimbursing for busing for field trips to inspire Olympia funded organization programming. So that's just kind of like to lay the groundwork. Go ahead, Amelia. And this was also approved by council in June, just to give you a quick reminder that there is separate caps funding. So you can see the transportation reimbursement right there set at $60,000 for this coming year, which I think is a pretty good idea of what will be getting spent. And then we also have school day program and