City Council - Regular Meeting

5432.

Good evening, and welcome to the Tuesday, 05/05/2026 regular business meeting of the Olympia City Council. For the record, we have a quorum with council member Barron, joining us online tonight. Hi, council member Barron. Can you hear us okay?

Pretty good. Thank you.

Great. So before we adopt our agenda tonight, I'm gonna turn it over to council member Gilman to give us an announcement on letter carrier food drive. I see you have the bag there.

Good evening. I I wanted to call out that the second Saturday in May is the National Association of Letter Carriers Stamp Out Hunger. So in your mailbox is a bag like this, and this began in 1993. There are over 10,000 cities participating across the country. And if you will put nonperishable food into the bag, it goes to our local Thurston County food bank in this area from our Clark Savage branch of the letter carriers.

Each each local union has a a relationship with a local food bank. And my letter carrier, Danny, wanted to give me to give you this little heads up that if somebody who's not the letter carrier and not in the mail van comes and grabs the bag of food, that's because they sent runners out. They have volunteers to expand their capacity because it's more than the letter carriers can gather while they're also delivering the mail. So I hope you'll join me in participating in the Stamp Out Hunger food drive on Saturday. Thank you.

Thank you very much, council member Gilman. And at this time, I'd like to invite up, city manager, Bernie, for an announcement.

Thank you, mister mayor, council members. For the record, Jay Bernie, city manager. I'm here tonight for a wonderful occasion to formally introduce you in the community to our interim fire chief, Hillary Flowers. Chief Flowers has been with the Olympia Fire Department since April 2025 when she was hired as the assistant chief of emergency medical services. Prior to Olympia, Chief Flowers spent nineteen years in a variety of leadership roles at Lacey Fire District three, including serving as the assistant chief of health and safety and interim medical services officer.

She assumed the role of Deputy Chief of Operations here at the Olympia Fire Department in November 2025, and with the retirement of Chief Morris, accepted the role of Interim Chief, where she's doing amazing work. During her time at Olympia Fire Department, her primary focus has been on streamlining operations and ensuring organizational readiness and resilience. She has also spent considerable time focusing on staffing and recruitment in addition to collaborative efforts on the standards of cover and long term planning and development for the agency. Everywhere chief Flowers has been, she has excelled. She's widely respected in the fire service, and we are fortunate to have her here leading the Olympia fire department in the role of interim chief.

I look forward to moving forward with the permanent chief selection very soon. Please help me welcome interim fire chief Hillary Flowers.

Thank you for having me here this evening. I'll keep my remarks brief. I know we have a packed agenda. It is an honor and privilege to serve both the state of Olympia and the Olympia fire department. We have a wonderful team that serves our community. And the thing I'm most proud about is our mission, which is taking care of people always. And so you will hear us say that over and over and over again, which is we are here to serve the community. And I believe as fire chief, my responsibility is to serve those within our organization as well as our community. So thank you again for the privilege of being here, for being in this role, and being able to serve.

Thank you so much, Chief Flowers, and congratulations on coming into your new role. Alright. So with that, I need a motion to approve tonight's agenda.

So moved. Second.

All those in favor of adopting the agenda as published, signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. We have an agenda. So our first item tonight, item two a on our agenda, is a special special recognition proclamation recognizing Asian American, native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and we have a shared reading of the proclamation beginning with council member Barron.

Yes. Because each May, The United States celebrates Asian American native Hawaiian and islander Islander Heritage Month, a time to honor and uplift the generations of Asian Americans, native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander individuals whose perseverance, contributions, and cultural traditions have enriched the the fabric of our nation and reflect

the ongoing pursuit of equity and justice and

Whereas Asian Pacific American Heritage Week was established by congress in 1978 to commemorate the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants to The United States on 05/07/1843 and to honor the critical contributions of Chinese laborers to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad on 05/10/1869. And whereas in 1992, Asian Pacific American Heritage Month month was officially designated as a full month of celebration to recognize the historical and cultural contributions of AANHPI communities across The United States and

Whereas the twenty twenty six AANHPI Heritage Month theme, power and unity, strengthening communities together, recognizes the collective strength, solidarity, and resilience of a a n h p I communities and affirms the importance of working across communities to advance equity, belonging, and shared prosperity. And whereas Washington State is home to a vibrant and diverse AANHPI population representing many cultures, languages, and histories, and AANHPI residents have played a vital role in shaping the state's civic, economic, and cultural life while continuing to advocate for representation, equity, and access to democracy. And

Whereas Olympia's history has long been shaped by AANHPI communities, including early Chinese immigrants who established one of the city's historic Chinatowns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, creating a vibrant center of commerce, community life, and mutual support despite facing systemic exclusion and displacement. And whereas today, AANHPI residents in Olympia continue to shape the city through leadership in public service, education, small business, health care, arts and culture, and community advocacy, residents social, cultural, and economic vitality of our community. And Whereas the city of Olympia recognizes that AANHPI community has continued to experience racism, xenophobia, and systemic inequality in inequalities that affirm and affirm its commitment to advancing racial equity, dismantling structural barriers, and ensuring that all residents feel safe, valued, and able to thrive. And whereas AANHPI

heritage month provides an opportunity to acknowledge both the historical injustices experienced by these communities and the ongoing work to build a more just, inclusive, and equitable Olympia. And

Whereas the city of Olympia is proud to sponsor the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Festival on 05/23/2026, which will be hosted and coordinated by the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition of South Puget Sound in celebration of community heritage and unity through culture and storytelling. And whereas the city of Olympia encourages all residents to take action by learning from and engaging with the histories, cultures, and contributions of AANHPI communities.

Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Olympia City Council does hereby proclaim May 2026 as Asian American, native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the city of Olympia and reaffirms its commitment to equity, inclusion, and belonging and standing in solidarity with AA and HPI communities. The city encourages all residents to celebrate the enduring contributions, rich cultural heritage, and enduring spirit of Asian Americans, native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders in our community and to actively participate in building a more just and equitable future for all. Signed in the city of Olympia, Washington this May 2026, Olympia City Council, Dante Payne, mayor. And now I would like to invite up Lynn Crowley, who is the president Coalition of the South Sound for a few words to accept the proclamation.

You'll have

to use the mic so that folks can hear you who are watching at home. Yes.

My apologies. Hi, everyone. My name is Celine Qualley. I actually had, ask if that's okay, because I usually have been talking with the community pretty often, I wanted to make sure that we have a opportunity for one of our board members, who is here today to to speak on our behalf, if that's okay?

Sure. Just one board member.

Yes. Yes.

You. And then, for all of you who are here, I just wanted to say we do have some flyers here. We didn't really make a lot, but I will be happy to share that with all of you. And the idea is to invite all of you to join us on May 23 at the South Puget Sound Community College to join our festivities and celebration of the AA and HPI heritage month. Thank you. Go ahead.

Anne, good to see you again. And please, introduce yourself for the record.

Hi. My name is Jay Chitra, and I am an Asian Indian immigrant in Olympia. Been for past twenty five years in here. I'm part of the board of the Asian group. So I would like to first thank the city council and all the members present here for this is a great honor, and this even helps us to be more safe and secure.

And so about Washington has a rich and diverse AAPI group. And with over 20% of state population identifying as AAPI, This community includes individuals with the roots in countries such as China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, Samoa, and Indians, and others. AAPI individuals have played important roles in shaping the history and the culture of Washington State, from early Chinese immigrants who helped build the railroads to the Japanese Americans who were interned during the World War II. As proclaimed by Governor Inslee in May 2016 in Washington State, we celebrate this month to recognize the contributions and influence of Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and their history, culture, and achievements in United States. Starting last December, we have put effort in organizing the events and activities to celebrate AAPI heritage in Washington State for the month of May.

We hope through these events, we can offer educational programs and resources to promote understanding and appreciation of AANH history and culture. In recent years, the celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month has taken on and added significance due to the rise in hate crimes and discrimination targeting AAPI individuals across the world. We work with the community leaders and organizations to raise the awareness of these issues and to promote unity and solidarity among the communities. Asian Pacific American Heritage Month serves as a reminder of the ongoing work needed to build a more inclusive and equality in the society for all of us. I want to also take this time to thank the city to help co sponsor the DEIB summit that took place last week.

And it helps our community to know that they are all part of this community and that we will. All I need to say is that all of us has barriers, but we we unite under one roof with a great bond. Thank you so much.

Thank

you very much. And now I'd like to invite everyone, forward, to join us as we present the proclamation and take a photo. You did not have to arrive with the folks that are here for it. If you wish to join in the photo, feel free to come forward.

Yes. We love for you to join us. For those of you who are here who also like to help us celebrate. Thank you. Thank you.

If we get a group picture in front of

the building, it sounds moving.

Alright. Thank you all so much, and I look forward to seeing you at the celebration. Alright. So we are gonna continue with our agenda and move on to another special recognition proclamation recognizing Jewish American Heritage Month. And we also have a shared reading of this proclamation beginning with councilmember Madron.

Whereas the Jewish American experience is a story of faith, fortitude, and progress, and one that is connected to key tenets of American identity, including our nation's commitment to freedom of religion and conscience, and whereas generations of Jews have fled to The United States in search of a better life for themselves and their families, and these immigrants made invaluable contributions in a myriad of ways in support of equality and civil rights through their leadership and achievements. And Whereas, now recognized in May, Jewish American Heritage Month was first proclaimed in April 2006 by presidential proclamation stating that the Jewish American story and the story of our nation as

a whole is fueled by faith, resilience, and hope. Whereas, Jewish Americans connect to their Jewish identity in a variety of ways, such as culturally, ethically, religiously, and by following Jewish ethics and values and

Whereas over one hundred and fifty years ago, in 1873, the Hebrew Benevolent Society of Puget Sound, the first Jewish organization in Washington state, was established in Olympia to create a cemetery. That cemetery is still in use, and it's the oldest Jewish cemetery in Washington. The Hebrew Benevolent Society was later absorbed by Temple Beth Hatfiloh. Founded in 1937, Temple Hatfelo continues to be a growing and vibrant community. And?

Whereas Jewish Americans are racially, ethnically, socially, politically, and economically diverse with approximately 12 to 15% of Jews in The United States being people of color. And whereas in recent years, Jewish Americans have increasingly experienced antisemitism, including but not limited to physical attacks, vandalism, verbal and physical harassment, and hateful comments posted on social media and other online platforms. And

Whereas, this month, we honor Jewish Americans, past and present, whose experience and accomplishments are inextricably woven into the tapestry of our community, including places of worship such as Temple Beth excuse me, Temple Beth Hatfiloh and the Shabbat Jewish in Olympia, and whereas the Temple Beth Hatfiloh is active in the work of Tikkun Olam, which translates to repair of the world by advocating for immigrant justice, engaging in environmental stewardship, honoring the freedom of religion, and collaborating with Interfaith Works and other organizations, and

Whereas the Chad Jewish Center of Olympia, established in 2007, purchased of, their new campus in the heart of Olympia, Westside, in 2023, creating a hub for education, celebration, and community engagement that that continues to bolster Jewish pride, foster meaningful practice, and enrich the broader community. And

Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Olympia City Council hereby proclaims the month of May 2026 as Jewish American Heritage Month in the city of Olympia and encourages all Olympians to condemn antisemitism, hatred, and bigotry of any kind, to include Jewish Americans in all facets of civic life in our community, and join our Jewish community in the work of repairing the world. Signed in the city of Olympia, Washington this May 2026. Olympia City Council, Dante Payne, mayor. Alright. And now I'd like to invite up Daniel Farber, who is the president of Temple Beth Haute Filo, to share a few remarks.

Honorable mayor Payne and and members of the council, my name is Daniel Farber. I live at 219 West Bay Drive in Olympia's West Side, and I am proud to represent, Temple Beth Adfilo as its congregational president. With me in the audience, you'll find, other TBH leaders, Barbara Sewell is our vice president, the members of the board and and leaders. Unfortunately, the two rabbis leading Olympia's synagogues were not able to make it tonight, but I've spoken with them both. Rabbi Seth is on sabbatical, so he has a good excuse here, as does Rabbi Yosef, who is carrying out a a this evening.

It's don't worry. It's not a religious, thing. It's a festival thing. So it's it's not a this is not inconsistent with that. On behalf of TBH, we are pleased to support the powerful statement, you approved that proclaims May 2025 as Jewish American Heritage Month in the city.

We are not only in favor of this proclamation, but also so thankful to the support that this city, its government leaders and staff, and its people have provided to our Jewish community for over one hundred and fifty years. Jewish Americans have found in our beautiful city broad freedom to worship and carry out our cultural practices. And with that freedom, that tolerance of religious differences, there have been great dividends for Olympia. As the proclamation states, Jewish Americans have been woven into the tapestry of our community. For decades, businesses such as Goldberg's Furniture at the prime corner of 4th And Capital, Olympia Supply with its humorous spokesperson, Sadie Kumquat, sharing the latest weekly specials on KGY Radio, were centers of commerce and community life.

The Jewish Olympians have been leaders in the establishment and growth of social agencies, the Community Youth Services, the Dispute Resolution Center, instrumental in the relocation of St. Peter's Hospital and the provision of a wide range of medical services. TBH has been a major supporter of interfaith works, promoting dialogue with Christians, Muslims, and other faith communities. More than once, Olympias, voters have elected Jewish mayors as well as port commissioners, school board members, and other civic leaders. Our small Jewish community has been intimately connected with the health and welfare of Olympia almost from its founding.

But our city's ideal of inclusion and tolerance have not always been met. We have experienced anti Semitic incidents of property, destruction, and threats of violence at our synagogues. Antisemitic messages have been scrawled on our city's buildings and along our streets. It is to these realities when our values are are truly challenged that we have seen Olympia's city government rise to the occasion and rise to our defense. When our security is seemed at risk, the city's police department has come to protect us.

During times of difficulty, city elected officials have sat with us in our synagogue demonstrating solidarity. So we are here to support and thank you for the proclamation and also to thank the city of Olympia for the many actions it has taken and continues to take that advance social justice, religious tolerance for Jewish Americans, and all members of our human family. For your proclamation, we give you a hearty, which means basically, a job well done. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. I just realized that I moved really quickly during that last, special recognition and forgot to ask counsel if they had any comments. So does anybody have any comments now for this proclamation or the previous one? Alright. Well, I just wanna say it's good to see you all here again, and I thank you for your words and its encouragement for us to keep doing what we're doing, and that's much appreciated.

And I also just wanna say I know right now is a very difficult time for the Jewish people, for the Jewish community, And we get a lot of flack for proclamations. Sometimes they're seen as performative or just words, but words matter, especially when it comes to things like antisemitism where we see that people don't say anything at all and they don't speak up, and they allow it to just continue. And so statements like what we're doing here tonight with this proclamation is more than just words. It means that you know that your elected leaders, stand in solidarity with you as you just expressed in your comments tonight. So thank you so much, and, we're very proud to proclaim it Jewish American Heritage Month in Olympia.

So come forward if you wish for a photo. And, again, if you wish to join, please come on up. Alright. Thank you all so much. Lucky you.

You go get to catch the last little bit of sunlight we're gonna

have for the rest of the day.

Alright. So we're gonna, continue with our agenda and go into public comment, and I'm gonna turn it over to the mayor pro tem.

Thank you, mayor. So a reminder for those that are returning, and then I guess just some learning for those that are might be new to public comment. So public comment, each person has two minutes. I will do the in person public comment first, and then we'll move to virtual. When it is your turn, please do, stand at the podium there, just like you'd heard our speakers, and then you'll see the two minute timer begin, to count down once you once you start speaking.

And then, there are some lights before you at the stand there, and so when it gets to yellow, that's just a kind reminder that you have thirty seconds left to wrap up your comments. And once it is read, then your time is up for two minutes. Please feel free to wrap up your sentence. Although, if it is going much over two minutes, you'll hear me come in and say thank you. And I'm really trying to say I'm sorry, but we've got to keep it moving.

If you don't have enough time to share all of your comments with us, do feel free to email them to us. We do read them. With that, I'll call a few folks so that you know who's in line next. And, apologies in advance if I do mispronounce anyone's name. Please do state your name for the record. Alright. We have, first, have Shana Hawk, followed by Javon Bird, followed by George Collin.

We're going to ask that you please, hold your applause so that the mayor pro tem can call the next person forward and they can hear. Thank you.

Hello, Council. Hello, community. I have been working with the City of Olympia for over ten years, since 2016. I brought out guest speakers such as Rosa Clemente, Tim Wise, to help with racial tensions and cultural inclusion. Then at the height of the 2020, protests, I was asked by the city to come in and do some trainings around making our our city parks more inclusive and safe for black community members.

At that time, the opportunity to work on the Rebecca Howard Park came about, and I wanted to do a little bit of a a history, correction. I was one of the ones who suggested that it be a a black focused park. Kelly got the idea of of bringing, writing into the park, but she didn't get the from the, Anne Frank Memorial. But she didn't get the idea from the park by the Anne Frank Memorial. So I wanted to, you know, correct that.

And, also, it seems to be some kind of energy around erasing my participation with the Rebecca Howard Park since 2020, so I've been doing that work since 2016. And at the height of at the time of Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Andre Ann Bryson, and many more. While, working with the park, one of the things I also wanted to bring up was the city has a has a seems to have an issue with pitting the black community against each other. When one black community wants to hold the city accountable for something, then they go and work with another community member. And, you know, you don't seem to do that with the other communities.

You're working with Lynn at the Pacific Islander. You've been working with her for the last four to five years. You're working with the Hispanic group, the same group that's been putting on Hispanic event, and you didn't give give them two months prior to to to letting them know that they, weren't gonna be sponsored or going with another community member. Also, I wanna, so much to say, but also I wanna say, weaponizing the the proclamation, using it as a proclamation. You know it's important for us to stand in front of community, our community, speak for our community.

You know it's important for us to be able to come up here. So weaponize an app by uninviting people and inviting others, it's really wrong to do. And so what I wanna say is I'm not here to ask you to reverse your decision to support Juneteenth. We're gonna find a way to do it anyway. We're gonna make it happen. Thank you.

Thank you. Go ahead.

I'm here to formally place on record concerns regarding a First Amendment violation and subsequent actions that raised concern about potential retaliation. I was invited by the city, to speak during Black History Month. During my remarks, I was interrupted. My speech was mischaracterized as something I did not say, and I was not allowed to complete my statement. At no point did I name any individual. I addressed a comment in the defense of the comment. That speech is protected. Following the incident, members of the community submitted a formal accountability letter documenting these concerns. The city has not remedied the situation. Instead, they have done other things.

The Juneteenth celebration of Rebecca Howard Park is not simply an event. It is rooted in a site intentionally developed to honor American freedman history and community healing. The shifts, the city shift to a regional model appears to have occurred without sustained partnership with original community leadership that established and stewarded this space. Given the Olympia's documented history of redlining and excluding excluding, black residents and those of American freedmen lineage, the removal of localized support signals historical implications. At the same time, the city has continued partnerships of other cultural celebrations.

That raises a clear question of consistency. Juneteenth is a federally recognized holiday commemorating the end of slavery and the contributions of American freedmen. Representation does not replace accountability. The presence of a black official does not justify ignoring grievances of American freedmen community members, nor does it, relieve the city of the responsibility to uphold constitutional protections and respond appropriately when concerns are raised. No individual can serve as a proxy for an entire community.

Given the timing and sequence of the events, there's a reasonable concern within a community that these actions may be perceived as retaliatory towards prior advocacy. I am asking for a formal review of the February incident, transparency in the Juneteenth decision making process, and reengagement with original community leadership. Due to the lack of response and remedy over time, this matter is now being formally documented and has been shared with the Washington State Attorney General's Office for review. Public trust requires accountability and consistency.

Next, we have George Collin followed by, Elijah Roland followed by Cale Moffett.

Evening, counsel. You can all hear me okay. I appreciate your time in listening to the public comment as usual. But I'm here to express concerns over not just what's been mentioned immediately prior, but in reporting that I've also seen as well regarding the decision to yank support from the Juneteenth event organized by Sean Hawk because I find it rather contradictory with the stated aims of the council. And to understand, I believe that many of you sincerely hold commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

These are values that are being placed under attack at the federal level, which to me makes it all the more perplexing of the decision to retreat back from these things here because these are not bygone issues as has been stated with these other communities that have been here today, the Asian Pacific Islander coalition, their Jewish brothers and sisters as they were here just now. There seems to be a carve out for black Americans specifically as this is no longer a priority. And, again, perhaps that's not a belief that you hold, but it's one that's very much reflected in the actions that have been taken. But these are not bygone issues. The legacy of Redline and the lack of wealth in black Americans' pockets relative to their counterparts.

Even my own stepdaughter, who at the ripe of old age of nine, has been hearing disparaging comments about her skin color at school. Grewing that child's entire week, it did. Never have I seen the pain in her eyes I've seen that way. And we have this entire context around us, but there's now this decision to not support something that can directly help assist and advance the fortunes of black members of our community. What I'm asking is for some level of soul searching to see how this has been reached because, frankly, it's very, very concerning as a constituent. Thank you.

My name is Elijah Roland, and I'm about to just say my name because my name led me to everything that put the pieces together for me. If I could put my name into a poem, first word that would come is seed and a mustard seed. When I tell you everybody who led me to my life, and I pray that if you have ears to hear, you hear me now, because being mutual is being lukewarm. Not standing for anything is giving Judas the keys. My Judas gave me the keys in the opposite way.

And if I could tell you my life, they buried me six feet under the ground, and they threw mud on top of me. And at the end of the day, I died in that mud, and I still rose up. So I'm telling you all the names at the school. I'm about to say my Michael, Justin Stern, everybody who put the pieces together for me, Lindsey, Meyer, Yukie, Rochelle, when people who are supposed to be my blood people who are supposed to be my blood try to take the keys away from me. I'm standing before you here. My name is in a lot. And at the end of the day, I'm a victim of everything I ever studied. Look up post traumatic slave syndrome. Look up why don't you check my credentials? I got an a in abnormal psychology.

Me seeking the kingdom of god first led me to do led me here because at the end of the day, I came off on a whim because I passed on my assignments, I chose right, and I didn't allow myself to not be I earned my wisdom, so I can't sit around a spirit of Solomon and think I'm about to be okay with it. Mind you, the people that came before me, they inspired me. And at the end of the day, my generation, who if you check by astronomy mind you, my name is Elijah. This is the generation that overthrow. Guys, never seen a girl Elijah, my Judas, named me.

And that's all that needs to be said at the end of the day. And it looks like I got eight seconds left, so I pray that if you guys ears to hear in Romans twelve twelve, and you will be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Amen.

Thank you. We have, Kale Moffett followed by, Jaya.

Good evening. First of all, I'd like to recognize that today is also missing and murdered indigenous people's day of awareness. Indigenous peoples, especially girls and women, have suffers from among the highest rates of violence and murder in North America. This is a scourge that we all must address. I'm here tonight because I've learned that the city has recently pulled sponsorship and funding from the upcoming Juneteenth celebration, and that disturbs me.

In the short time I would have, I would like to make highlight two specific points that bother me. First is the timing. In addition to the question of why support was withdrawn in the first place, you'll need to answer the question of why this decision was reached so late in the planning cycle. My understanding is that Shawna Hawk of the Women of Color Leadership Movement, who has planned the event since 2020, only learned about this in mid April, just eight weeks before the event. From a logistical perspective, this is an inexcusable In a very short time, miss Hock not only needs to finalize community partnerships and support as well as plan programming contracts and arrangements, but also she now needs to fundraise on top of that.

All of you have run successful election campaigns. How much of a burden would it have been to make logistical arrangements, advertise, and fundraise in eight weeks? There is something deeply disturbing about the timing. My second concern concern is a bit more sociological. Given that this given this timing and the strong possibility that the this withdrawal of sponsorship will undermine Olympia's June Juneteenth celebration, it seemed like an affront not only to the black community, but also to communities other communities of color and marginalized communities.

If this celebration can be derailed almost at the last minute, then what f other efforts are at risk? Juneteenth is on the city council's events page as well as other celebrations. In organizations rooted in western white heteropatriarchy and American municipal and other governments certainly are, any and all marginalized communities are vulnerable and subject to the winds of power. Please withdraw. Please vote down this withdraw and restore funding and support. Thank you.

Thank you. I think the following few next folks that have signed up here might have already spoke. So there might have been a confusion in the sign up, but I'm gonna go ahead and call their names a couple of times. And if you are here, you are invited to speak for public comment. So first, have Jaya. I'm not seeing Jaya with us. And then we have, Ardi Gunesilan. Ardi, are you with us? Okay. Then we have Sipreeti Prasana.

Alright. We have, CC Coates.

Hello, Olympia City Council and fellow citizens. My name is Cece Coates. I moved here about thirty five years ago. I was very accomplished. I was a union carpenter and had a small farm, and then I became disabled. I wanna put a shout out to Cinco de Mayo and my Hispanic brothers and sisters. It is their day of independence. I also want to say that I was raised without hate. I'm both poly religious and I have blood relatives that are of every shade. I've got Polynesian nephews and nieces.

And all of the minorities in my life, whether they're religious or racial or sexual, have always offered love and support equal to my own. I want to talk about the intersectionality in between homelessness and poverty and being a minority. You all should know by now that being a minority has barriers to getting employment, stability, housing, and your general treatment when you're already on the street. We all should know that minorities are disproportionately on the streets. Now we seem to have a disappear and die housing policy.

We don't have affordable housing anymore, and people are being punished for being homeless, such as myself. I'm told to go park on private land, which has been illegal for decades. And now there's ordinances that specifically target my home to be taken from me if I don't move every twenty four hours, which is a policy of failure all the way around. We're going to see increasing numbers of people kicked out of subsidized housing and care facilities. We need to meet this moment with compassion and love. Thank you.

Thank you. Next, we have, Danny Bunnell, followed by Molly O'Neil, followed by Chris Lewis.

Good evening, council. Good evening, mayor. My name is Dana Burkett. I am the executive director and founder of Our Arc. We help out homeless youth and young adults here in Thurston County.

Today, an 18 year old young man in our community was sexually assaulted as I was conducting street outreach in our community. For the past five days, he has been crying, not just from the happening what's happening from him, but because after the assault, others on the streets began targeting him as an 18 year old, picking on him, isolating him, and breaking him down even further. This is not a rare story. This is what happens when young people are left outside without protection, without safe placement, and without immediate response systems. What are we doing for our young people?

We talk about homelessness in numbers. As the seasons go, there the numbers will be higher, but I need you to understand what it takes and what it looks like in real time. It looks like a young man who is traumatized not only from homelessness, being exposed and now being revictimized by the very environment he has no choice but to survive in. At 18, he is legally an adult, but developmentally, emotionally, and situationally, he is still a young person without safety. And I don't believe this council accept this.

So I'm asking you to step out from behind policies, your computers, your office, and into action. Work with providers like us, Our Arc. Fund emergency households because tonight, one young man is waiting to see if this community will actually show up for him and others. Thank you.

Next, have, Molly O'Neil.

My name is Molly O'Neill, and I am, I would like to speak on both of these issues, actually. First, I want to stand in solidarity with the folks organizing Juneteenth. I think that the timing of your withdrawal of support is abominable, and I highly recommend that you step away from that action and continue supporting that organization in the organizing of that event. And I think that these two issues, the second issue that I wanna speak on is homelessness. I think they are in some ways related, and the urgency of both of them is absolutely related to our current climate and how our city is responding to the fascism that has taken over our country.

And homelessness creates incredible barriers for anybody who's suffering from it. I'm a psychologist in town and work with people who are at the very edges of our society. And I think that as a city, we need to take care of our community better than what we are doing. We need to create solutions and utilize the city lands and buildings that are not being used at this time. We need to find solutions that meet the needs of business in downtown for sure, but not at the not at the damage of others in our community who are literally the most vulnerable.

Thank you.

Thank you. Next, we have Chris Lewis followed by Annette Rusica.

Thank you, mayor and council, and the opportunity to speak tonight. My name is Chris Lewis. I'm a live in Lacey, but we have a virtual office here in Olympia. I'm the vice president of our local ground zero outreach program that my daughter started a few years ago. We are a nonprofit mobile outreach. We're RN led, which means my daughter gets out there and hands on probably three or four months ago. She was out at the jungle, and she had Narcan with her. We're a supplier of Narcan. My daughter saved this this person's life, brought her back. And I think fire marshal said it earlier, we wanna help all people.

We don't turn our backs to anybody. We provide intensive case management, which is hands on counseling, one on one personal medical treatment if we can. Our organization works with many organizations here locally, such as God's Land, Olimap, Family Support Services, and Our Arc, providing resources to unhoused individuals. Daily, my daughter's out there trying to find folks on housing, food, gas vouchers, Narcan passing out. She's helping daily in the community.

We look forward to contracting with the with the FCS because that'll provide more access to our current participants for supportive housing and employment. We also help with essential resources such as locating facilities, rides to treatment centers, medical appointments. We can also provide peer support. My daughter's organization, our organization provides gas vouchers, laundromat vouchers, warming supplies. We're here in the community. We are truly ground zero on the ground daily looking to help people out that need it. So please keep us in mind. You see us out there on the roadways, sideways, where we might be. Please reach out to us. Remember, be the change.

Support grounds or outreach. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening, council and community. My name is Annette Rozica. I'm here tonight to continue pushing for humane or simply human treatment of our unhoused community members and to encourage the council to consider the ways that can open up pathways and create more ease for people who are unhoused. First, I wanna acknowledge the organizers of the celebration at Rebecca Howard Park. I encourage the council to respond to their concerns and support their efforts to your fullest abilities.

What I read in the Thurston Chronicle presented as sabotage, with the city dropping communication and choosing nonresponsiveness to such an extent that it undermined these organizers' efforts. That in relation to this, a community member was cut off from public comment for calling out unaddressed racism is problematic. Racism is alive in Olympia, and we must be able to explore if and how it lives in these halls and in this room. Refusing to acknowledge it and lashing out at those who do is exactly what protects racism and enables it to persist. Yesterday, a group of us met with council members Vanderpool and Gilman.

It was a productive meeting, and I invite a meeting with every one of you. In that meeting, we explored some of the ordinances that increased challenges and burdens for our unhoused community. I want to acknowledge that much of those ordinances reflect colonialism and white supremacist values, including valuing property over people. A straightforward example is that the traditional longhouses native to the area and lived and thrived in for thousands of years would now be considered illegal dwellings. That is white supremacy. We need to be able to talk about that as a community and with our government. On the topic of housing, many of the responses we have heard from council are that there is not enough housing and that we need more units. I want to push back on that narrative. It is my understanding that there is more than enough housing already built for everybody in this community. What is lacking is affordability and access.

Building more units is only one part of the problem. To meet the current needs of people already living without housing, I ask the city to relax, suspend, or not enforce any ordinance that targets people who are living in nontraditional structures, including vehicles, tents, or open air. This is not costly to implement and would ease the situation for many people who are already living this reality.

Thank you. So our final in person public commenter is Reskeva Hughes.

K. Hello. My name is Hughes. I'm also here to talk about homelessness. I myself have been homeless twice, so I'm not really coming from a hypothetical place here. I wanted to start with saying that it's a really empty and hollow argument to talk about this from a not enough housing perspective. We have plenty of housing. As Annette said, it's an issue of affordability. Really wanted to, focus on just, like, leaving people alone. We don't need to be bothering people in tents. We don't need to be bothering people in cars. We need to make things more affordable. We need more transitional resources. We need micro homes. We need low barrier, low barrier shelters.

Our nonwhite homeless neighbors have a lot more disproportionate impact with police violence, with harassment, with sexual abuse. They are disproportionately impacted by these issues. Like I said, what we really need are, like, transitional resources. We have the Quincy Street Village downtown. That house is about a 100 people.

We need about a 100 more of those. We would be able to house a lot more people. What what seems like we have right now is a go die somewhere else mentality like CeCe was saying, and I would really like to see that not happening. I you know, my question to the city council people is, do you any of you know how many homeless people we have downtown? Like, a rough estimate of how many people are we are not able to fit in these resources, how many people we're suggesting should be going to die somewhere else, how many people we're condemning with this mentality.

That's, I guess, that's that's my point. Yield the rest of my time. Thank you.

Thank you. Right. So looking at staff, we have two public commenters online. Hopefully, they're still signed in and joining us. I see David Webb first. Great.

Yes. Hello. David Webb, Olympia. Thank you for the Jewish proclamation and mayor Payne's comments on it. Words do matter, and silence does speak very loudly.

I wish I could be more appreciative, but I know our mayor supports the colonization of Palestine. So I'm just gonna say that we need politicians who believe in morals and ethics, not birthrights and borders. It's genuinely great that the Jewish community feels respected and listened to. I think everyone should be able to see from pretty much every other speaker today that there are some serious systemic issues with the cultures and policies in Olympia affecting lots of demographics, and we should listen to all of them. I wish Olympia's government and police department could come to the protection of other demographics that aren't represented in its government, but I'm glad to hear that they have risen to the occasion, that's their quote, for the Jewish community.

Antisemitism is a real issue, but so is Zionism, transphobia, racism in the form of black voices being erased and the Juneteenth event canceled, as well as the lack of actual police oversight or accountability. Someone else said it well. Public trust requires accountability and consistency. I've been watching for a half year or so, and y'all love your photoshoots and pretty proclamations, but don't seem to be doing much to mitigate the barriers in place or improve the circumstances harboring the communities claim to care about. You keep saying you're listening. The city needs to value the voices more than the chamber of commerce, developers, and like minded religious leaders. Listen and learn. If you listen to the public comments and read those emails, it doesn't matter if you don't believe the people you're listened to. You need to believe them. You need to be able and willing to learn.

There is no transparency. There is no accountability, and it is harming the communities you claim to be a safe place for. You need to start holding your police department accountable and stop your police from hunting people who are struggling to survive. There are sufficient resources to take care of people. They are being wasted on hunting them instead. You are systematically displacing people to jail or other towns so that they can die elsewhere, and that is frankly evil and not something Olympia should be willing to do. Thanks.

Thank you. Our final public commenter online is Mary. Mary is not signed in. Okay. Alright. Well, then that concludes public comment, and I'll turn it back over to the mayor.

Okay. Thank you, mayor Pro Tem. Are there any comments from the council? Going once? Going twice? Okay. Council member Gilman.

I appreciate all the voices that that we've heard tonight, and, I I especially appreciate the the many calls that that our our efforts at providing emergency housing, our efforts at providing social services are are not approaching the need in the community, and we're leaving a lot of lot of people out. And and to the commenter who asked how many people are downtown, I don't know downtown, but I know within our coordinated entry vulnerability index system for the the county, there are more people waiting for services than we have served over the last decade. We've we've added about 500 units. And last week when I checked in, there was about 560 people who we know who they are, and we have their information and and they're awaiting services. So and and that's that's only of people who are completely unhoused.

That's not folks who are couch surfing or staying with grandma or, you know, other informal sorts of ways of being housed. So the need is great, and and I appreciate each of your your your thinking and framing this this issue because I I I think we have to move beyond relying on on getting grants and standing up a few more apartment units and and figure out how we allow people to exist where they are right now. So thank you so much for your comment this evening.

Alright. Councilmember Vanderpool.

I wanna appreciate everyone for coming out commenting on a variety of issues I've written down, and I want to you know, one one one comment stuck out was the, you know, stepping out behind policy and speaking with folks. I think that that's very important to this job. As hard as a lot of these conversations are, I think it is absolutely important for us to to go out and talk with folks even if it's a difficult conversation, even if it's not what we wanna hear because, you know, there are so many limitations to the city, funding, staffing, so on and so forth. But it is absolutely important to continue to meet with folks and see where they are in their issues. As it was mentioned earlier, Clark and I spoke with some folks about some of the policies we've done as a city and trying to find an answer, a solution by working through problem and continuing to meet with people, I believe, is critical to the role.

So yeah.

Thank you. Any additional comments? Alright. Well, first of all, I just wanna thank everybody for their comments tonight. We certainly heard you, and and, I will personally be, connecting with, council members Vanderpool and Gilman to hear all about that meeting you had yesterday.

I would love to learn what you've, discussed. And as I said last week, I am open to looking at maybe some of the things that you're proposing and and see where that takes us. I do just wanna mention that despite the revocation of the sponsorship for the Juneteenth event, the city of Olympia is continuing to observe, Juneteenth as a holiday here in the city of Olympia, via declaration by proclamation, also with the raising of the flag over City Hall, and is continuing, to work with other partners on how we celebrate and observe the holiday in the city of Olympia. So, with that, we are going to continue with our agenda and move on to the adoption of the consent calendar. I need a motion and a second.

Move to adopt the consent calendar.

Second.

Alright. We have a motion and a second. Is there any request for polls for questions or comments? Alright. Seeing none, all those in favor of adopting the consent calendar is published, signify by saying aye. Aye. Consent calendar Okay. Is That takes us to our first business item tonight, which is item 6a a on our agenda, and it is the twenty twenty six state legislative session debrief, interim planning, and the preliminary 2027 legislative agenda check-in. And I would like to call forward Susan Grisham, who is our legislative liaison, to introduce our lobbyists. Hi, Susan.

Good evening, council members. For the record, I am Susan Grisham, who serves as your legislative liaison. And this evening, I am pleased to introduce a briefing on the twenty twenty six state legislative session, some interim planning, and initial look ahead to potential 2027 legislative priorities. Tonight is an opportunity to reflect on the outcomes of the past session, how the city advanced its priorities, key elements of the state budget, and emerging issues on the horizon while also beginning to position the city for the year ahead. Before I turn it over, I'd like to note that this is our first session working with our state lobbying team at Capital Path.

They've been responsive and strategic in supporting the city's interest, and I've appreciated their partnership during this session. So joining us this evening is Kyla Shakrick Blair, who is the principal, and Daniel Pearthorpe, a senior associate. They'll walk you through the session debrief and help guide the discussion on interim work and early priorities for 2027. And with that, I'll hand it over to Kyla and Daniel.

Good evening.

Good to see you both.

Good to see you. For the record, Kyle Skarsch Blair, Capital Path Consulting.

And Daniel Paleithrope with Capital Path.

Perfect. So do I work this? Oh, right there. Okay. Perfect. Okay. So we're gonna go through kinda past, present, history of the legislative session for 2026, and then we'll go into what to expect for the future for to plan for 2027. So if you all remember, we came here and presented a preview to the twenty twenty six legislative session. There was a 2.3, I believe, billion dollar operating budget deficit, just for last session. There were tight directives from both the budget chair, chair Robinson and chair Ornsby to legislators saying, hey.

Keep your pet projects at home. We don't have money. Focused on keeping what services we can, and backfilling any federal cuts that may come forward. So when governor Ferguson, introduced his budget, to the legislature initially, it was an all cuts budget, but that means it's just there was no revenue in his budget initially. So he just focused on figuring out how to keep essential programs going and then making cuts where he could.

So he did $800,000,000 in cuts, a $1,000,000,000 withdraw from the rainy day fund, and proposed moving $600,000,000 from the CCA account to the working families tax credit, which I'll go into more here in a bit. The legislature took that those nice suggestions and said thank you, and then proposed a millionaire's tax. I will I should also note that when the governor rolled out his budget, it was the first time he really said he'd be open to exploring a millionaire's tax and a as a way to balance the state budget. So the legislature moved forward with a millionaire's tax. This is a 9.9% tax on income, households to make over a million dollars.

So your first million dollars is not taxed, but if you make a million and 500,000, you'll be taxed on that 500,000, anything going up from a million dollars. This is the most progressive progressive tax tax that we've seen from the state. It's set to take effect January 2028 with revenue being, with payments going into the state starting April 2029. So what they won't see any of that revenue until 2029. It's estimated to generate about $3,500,000,000 annually.

In in order for the tax to pass with the negotiations with the governor, they had to propose a spend plan. So I'll go over highlights of that spend plan, but happy to send you all the full details of the spend plan. Again, this is just a spend plan. Nothing's in law. Like, it's all subject to change. Part of the spend plan, we saw $1,500,000,000 in reduction, in sorry. $1,500,000,000 in tax reductions. So reductions on sales tax, which I'll get into in a little bit. Remember that number. This is on diapers, hygiene products, and over the counter drugs.

The largest bucket of funding of spend will go to keeping essential services, so education and health care, social services, human services, higher education. That'll be the largest bucket of where the spend goes. There were also put aside money in that spend plan for free breakfast and lunch for all children every school day, doubles the small business tax credit for being no taxes. So for businesses with gross receipts under 300,000, they will not owe be no tax, and the businesses with gross receipts up to 600,000 will receive a small business tax credit as part of the spend plan. It does expand the working families tax credit further, and this is part I wanted you to remember.

It sets up a local government a local government mitigation account. So they currently put in $200,000,000 into that account. Part of what they're trying to offset there is remember I talked about the, sales tax exemptions? That's going to inadvertently harm cities. You all benefit from those from those taxes. So by them taking that back and putting it towards a state tax, they're

trying to

figure out how to compensate cities in that. So they put aside $200,000,000. That will need to be revised as they look into what actually the exemptions what the what actually happens with those exemptions and how much it actually cost the cities. And then how they get that out to you all is still up in the air as well. I will also say the Millionaire's Tax has a few challenges. A lawsuit has been filed as you all probably know. A group has attempted to run a referendum on on it that was first blocked by our secretary of state. It was then taken to court. The court said no. They can run an initiative still.

They just need three hundred and three hundred and eight thousand signatures, almost 309,000 signatures by July 2 in order to get it on the ballot for this fall. So they are working to do that. We'll see what happens. The other significant money source, I'll call it funding source, if you will, is the left one pension reduction. This was a onetime reduction in left one pension plans.

So this account had a 106 a 160 of the necessary funds. So it was argued that because there was such an over run of funds, they could pull out of that account. I think it was actually closer to $4,000,000,000 that they pulled out of the account, as a onetime fund, taking the account down to a 110% of overflow. So they'll there's a lawsuit on this too, but to see where it goes, but they did pull that funding to balance the budget. I think the other part of this is, as you all know, local governments pay into that pension account.

And so there are conversations and pushes from other cities and other local governments to say, hey. We've paid into this too. You can't just take that funding to balance the state budget. What is what does the city get to mitigate some of those costs as well? Let's see.

The other sources, I would say, they pulled back data center tax assumptions. So right now, in most counties in Washington, not every county, most counties in Washington state, data centers receive tax exemptions to be built newly. They also were receiving refurbishment tax exemptions. Tax exemptions on refurbishments have been pulled back as of this session, and that was another way that they balanced the budget. There were some cuts to agencies, not as significant as what was being proposed, but some small cuts to central services.

So the funding buckets. We talked about a lot about making sure the public works account was not touched. It was touched. It was swept, with some flexible dollars that were pulled out of the public works account. However, it was backfilled with bonds. Make there's some arguments that's less stable. However, the money's there. It's accessible right now, and we'll see what they do next session. We did see the largest investment in housing for a supplemental budget with a $123,000,000 in the housing trust fund. And then I will say climate commitment act. This is where

we

saw maybe some budget creativity, if you will. So what they did on CCA is there are climate programs that have been funded by the state for however many years. My understanding is they looked at those programs, took out what what flexible funding they could out of those accounts. So for instance I'm just for instance, I don't know if this account was actually touched, but EV charging station program. If there are flexible dollars in that, they might have pulled those flexible dollars, put them into the general fund account, and then backfill that with climate commitment dollars.

So climate commitment act dollars have to go to new programs, technically speaking. Those aren't new programs such as backfilling our programs, so there's some debate on whether or not they're actually able to do that. And by freeing up the flexible dollars, they were able to increase the working families tax credit with those flexible dollars. So that's how CCA is a little confusing on how it ended this session, but just some backstory there. And then we also saw some pretty significant cuts in k through 12 and early learning.

Oops.

K.

Great. As you can imagine, there was a lot of bills this year that dealt with cities. I wanna highlight a couple, and this is probably the biggest one. It's, 2442. It's a kind of omnibus local taxing, jurisdiction bill, and it does a couple of main things. First, it gives Councilmanic authority to do a new local sales tax of one tenth of 1% for children and families. So some of the potential services are up there, and I would say the items that could be funded are quite broad. There's also expanded REIT tax use flexibility, and then there's a county level property tax authority for public health. There's also some changes on, levy lid lifts and, essentially, allowing them to be done for longer as well. So we have a couple items.

There was another bill, I think, two two four two. No relation, but it got brought into this bill because it essentially died because it ran out of time. It was a great bill passed quite broadly. And that gives jurisdiction fire protection districts. It allows it makes it easier for a single entity.

So a city to spin off your fire, fire department, into a separate fire protection district, and it lessens impacts on your property taxes as the city when you do that and you create a new separate authority. It also allows a new fire protection district to contract with the city for central services, so HR and admin, stuff like that. There was a lot of debate about whether city councilors could serve on both boards, from your election to the city council. It was ultimately decided that there have to be independently elected commissioners for a separate fire protection district if a city so so chooses to do this. There was a lot of focus on housing.

I'm just gonna say very broadly, just a few items here. I was just at an event where, senator Jessica Bateman, who is the repress the senator from this district. And if you're unaware, she is the chair of the senate housing committee, talked about shared that there's been a lot of work done on zoning policy and that she is changing her focus a little more and looking at financing and just the supply and looking at that as an impact on housing and shelter costs. There were a few things. Essentially, housing and shelters must be allowed in more zones and cities, and residential must be allowed in commercial zones as well in the city with few restrictions.

There are some exemptions. And then in greater flexibility in the home fund usage, which we'll talk about in just a second, and then some switches on condominiums. There's also an expansion, and a consolidation to the state's, property tax exemption program. So about 30,000 households were added around the state. And I think there were a few different levies technically or different authorities, and so they were consolidated into a single property tax exemption for seniors and disabled veterans.

So good stuff there. I think you all got the longer legislative agenda that we prepared with item by item lists of kind of through all three pages, what occurred. Just a few top line highlights on housing, homelessness, and infrastructure. Operational funding for transitional housing was protected. That is good. Alternative to a new picture process, no real movement. There are a couple of small bills, but that's a conversation we can have of how much we wanna push on that as a city. And then greater flexibility in the home fund, as I mentioned already. We had asked we'd hoped to get even greater flexibility than was offered, between operating capital and administrative expenses. We are unsuccessful, but this bill was the bill that passed was still really, in line with what the city is hoping to do.

So that was great. This Deschutes Estuary was fully funded for the design, which is a major win. Ecology is the entity that oversees this and also has been leading or maybe organizing the advocacy both at the state and the federal level. I think there are big questions about when the whole project must be funded at several couple of $100,000,000, how the state legislature, sees that and the budget shares for the capital budgets. But right now, we are in a really good place with the shoots.

I think there'll be a lot more work here to come. On revenue or kind of buckets, we talked about a bunch of these, but generally, were maintained, which was a good place to be where we started from the session. Couple of things, the authority to have a second public facility district was extended indefinitely, and so thank you very much to Silvana and also, members of the council that helped, get that across the line. So we had initially asked for a two year extension on creating a second PFD. Lisa partially amended the bill to do it indefinitely, just so that there is no deadline on creating a second public facilities district if this community so chooses to do so.

The last thing is the 1% property tax growth cap. This is a big issue in 2025. In 2026, it was really quiet, so it just wasn't the focus. Already heard conversations from the association of cities about, you if this comes back in 2026 and how high on the priority list. So this will continue to be an issue.

Great. So looking ahead to 2027, it is filing week, so our numbers are a little skewed here. Every member of the house is up for reelection. Handful members from the senate are up for reelection. I believe we're now at 13 retirements that have been announced. We do not anticipate anyone in the twenty second LD to change, but 13 retirements have been announced. We'll see where it ends by the end of the week, but that's a pretty significant change. Yeah. And it is an election year. There are several high profile races that are interparty races as well.

So we'll see how those play out come November. 2027 session is a long session. It is a budget year. We are hearing operating will still be not great, but capital and transportation will have some opportunities there that we definitely wanna explore with you all as we head into that session and make some significant requests. Millionaire tax still will not be collected quite yet, and we're also anticipating other federal funding cuts that the state will need to backfill.

So with that, we wanna go through interim planning with you all. We've met with the executive team, put together an initial list of brainstormed ideas with them things that we can focus on for next session, but we, of course, want all of your input and ideas and thoughts and conversations as we plan for that. We'll go over what we heard with them today for you all so you have a sense of kind of where they're landing, but obviously, one here where you're at. So putting a plan together, what we wanna ask for. I also think when we were in Olympia for our lobby day, we heard from the house housing chair that he would be interested in coming and touring Olympia.

He's toured Olympia before, but could we could we put together some more opportunities for folks to see what Olympia is doing as it relates to housing and homeless ness and the great work that you all have been doing. And then we wanna identify various policy as as well. Going to June and August, this is when we wanna socialize our policy as with the at least the twenty second. Again, I would say when we were in Olympia, we broadened out away from just our three legislators who are wonderful, but we broadened it out a bit and making sure that we're continuing those conversations and building those relationships with other folks, which are priorities and policies. Touch who are on those committees and have those interests.

We wanna meet with the governor's regional staff to make any capital requests we might need. And then in September and October, we wanna jump right into planning and finalizing our legislative agenda. I tend to have this hard and fast rule of no new ideas after Thanksgiving. So we try and have our agenda set by the November so that we know exactly where we're headed as we go into the New Year. And then from there, we'll meet with our twenty second delegation folks, see what they're doing, and then get ready to go into session.

Great. So this is just a summary of what we heard from e team, last week. I think there's still, you know, a lot of details to figure out, and this is kind of just initial brainstorming. And I think what's that what your, city leadership would like is you can also folks have an opportunity to share ideas as well and priorities. So let me just run through this quick.

As we talk about the left one pension contribution backfill to cities, I've heard both the association of cities and also the house majority leader, talk about that the legislature might be interested in taking on the remaining left one health liability and coverage away from cities and taking that on as a state, and that would reduce financial requirements of all cities around the state. I don't know if that's in lieu of a backfill or if that is in addition to a backfill, but that could be something, that might be very beneficial to the city of Olympia. We heard about declining, cable revenue, and there's no mechanism to tax streamers. And so declining cable revenue, funds certain city programs. Additional avenues for arts grants and funding, so expanding to make sure cities are eligible for all of the opportunities there.

City insurance and liability reforms, there's three buckets there. I'd say that this last session, there was a big push from some people to reduce the state's tort liability. They were ultimately unsuccessful in getting that across the finish line. That is probably gonna come back in the longer session. I know that this is a priority for cities and also for the risk pool as well. On housing and homelessness, it came at resolution funding. It said funding increase and greater stability. This funding essentially requires a year over year renewal, and so that makes it very hard to plan if you have no idea if the money's gonna be here in a few months. So if there's an opportunity to create a dedicated bucket with a dedicated funding stream. Alternatives to the eviction process, we talked about this already briefly.

This when we met with you all, late last year, we talked about the annexation sales tax diversion program, which is expires in 2028, and that there might have been an in a semi imminent annexation. Understand that that may not be may be less imminent, but still expanding that authority would probably be good, as well. And then impacts of the potential, sit and lie legislation. So there was major legislation this last year and for several years that would, disallow any city ordinances that ban, sit and lie pieces of ordinances, including the one that the city of Olympia has. Few other things, public safety and emergency response.

Right now, there is a state law that requires, the state to negotiate with cities when the state's, facilities make up more than 10% of the assessed value within a city. I understand that, the City Of Olympia were getting kind of close as state facilities have been sold to places like the county, and also there's continued development within the city of Olympia. So looking at that percentage, addressing copper wire theft, which is something we are hearing about from across the state, and then easier access to previously allocated and appropriated public safety funding. So this was not this session, but last session, HB twenty fifteen, and the $100,000,000 that was put there in that bucket. In terms of CCA, predictability and funding, more form formulaic funding, to entities, and then tweaks to eligibility for certain recipients.

So I understood from the example that was shared that, the city is able to go after certain bus grants, but intercity transit is not. So how can we elevate partners but also support the city, in the important climate work? And then on transportation, Montman Road, was pushed out, I think, kind of in into the indefinitely bucket of transportation funding, which I think starts in 2035. So we're seeing this, I would say, around the state. A lot of local projects are being pushed out. The state is trying to complete several big mega projects, with very high dollar amounts. So, transportation priorities continue to remain Montman Road and then also the capital a project that, we we talked a little bit about this session. So those are some things.

Yeah. And I would just add on some of these buckets, there's definitely an opportunity we can work directly with the state agencies. So state agencies have an opportunity to make budget requests to the governor's office as well as legislation requests. So, for instance, on the CCA predictability and funding idea, that might be an opportunity for us to meet with commerce, provide feedback on what is working, what is not working from some of the programs they offer, either commerce or ecology, I guess, should say. And then from there, see if there might be a way that they can proactively work on updating the program in some way.

I'd throw that out there as well. So this is what we heard from e team. I think we obviously threw a lot of information at you. Happy to take questions on the 2026 legislative session, but then would love to hear some ideas on what you all hope to see in the 2027 legislative session. I know it's early, but love to get a jump start on it, and we can create kind of a working document that we build off of.

So then when we come together in the fall to put, our legislative agenda together, we we have a sense of where we wanna go, and we're not starting from ground zero. Oh, and yes. As well as capital s and transportation s. So capital budget, this is the year if we wanna make a request. Obviously, Deschutes was gonna be in there, but is there a housing project? Is there a community center? Is there an art center? I mean, there's opportunities for us to make a capital request for things that the city might need, and we can work directly with the twenty twenty second LD, but then also meet with capital budget chairs and members to make sure that they know the request is coming, and then they can prepare for it.

Alright. Well, thank you both. Before we jump in, I just wanna take a moment to thank you both for this session. You are, this is our first session working together, and we're very impressed. You've helped us a lot with process improvement, and it's thanks to you that we've been able to try some new things that we haven't done before. And, when I talk to people around, you know, at the hill, they tell me that, they see you out and about, and, and I think your reputation is is pretty good. So I just wanted to say thank you

Appreciate that.

For helping us out here, and looking forward to working with you through a long session. Yeah. Absolutely. We've enjoyed it as well. So thank you. Alright. Alright. Comments. Councilmember Madron followed by councilmember Vanderpool.

I wanna echo the accolades, that the mayor just offered. I'm, really pleased with our work this past session, process improvements, new ideas, and just, you know, seeing the funding come through for the issue testuary and just knowing that you were tied in with all the partners going on on that and a variety of things that we had on our legislative agenda. And I have a couple of questions, and then I have a policy idea for us to consider for next session. I'm curious about what exactly was achieved with flexibility around the Home Fund. You said we got a little bit of what we wanted, we got most of way there, but not everything. Could you get go into a little bit of detail on that?

Yeah. I I you were on the regional housing council, I believe. So you are you so, essentially, in the in the home fund, when it's created, it was meant to be a way to build projects. So a significant portion of the home fund, if a municipality were to enact it, would go to capital, a small to operating, and a small to admin. There was legislation this year that expanded the ability for operating costs quite significantly, which was great. We were hoping for even more flexibility on the admin costs as, as to balance out program administration. So that was that was the hope. Had some conversations. Didn't really get anywhere. So that's where that landed.

Okay. Okay. And the major goal with that was actually on the operational side there. So really, really pleased to to hear that. That's great. I'm not on regional housing council anymore, so I'm I'm not quite in the loop on all the things. I'm curious about we know that the operating budget is gonna be probably even more constrained this next session than it was the past couple. Well, how how's the capital budget shaping up? How's capacity looking there?

Yes. So as of now, it's looking okay. I will say they don't know until what they like to do is it's all bonded. Right? So they like to use the as recent as they can get forecast because that's what their bonding authority is going to be.

So the further the closer we get to session, the better we'll understand it and know exactly how much they have. But the supplemental, I think each legislator had probably $200,100,000 dollars that they can spend in their district on capital projects. We're hopeful that going into, this upcoming legislative session, they'll have more, of a couple million that they could spend on capital projects for their legislative districts.

Okay. Great. And then I just wanna put out a policy idea for us to consider for our legislative agenda. This actually comes from our transportation staff here at the city. Currently under SEPA, State Environmental Policy Act, when there's a new development, the project proponent has to do a traffic impact analysis and address vehicular impacts on traffic.

And that's not how we do things anymore in the city of Olympia. In many communities across the state, think about all users of the transportation system. So this is an idea that came from our transportation staff to see about legislation that can amend that component of SEPA so that the traffic impact analysis could consider the needs around bicycle needs, pedestrian needs, transit needs in addition to what cars need. So just wanted to get that one out there and on the list for us to consider as we we, continue down the process.

Thanks. Thank you.

Alright. Next is the council member Vanderpool.

Actually

Council member Gilman.

I have a question, about H B 4 42 or, sorry, 2442. You mentioned a lot of things in there. Are are those all councilmanic, or would they be something that we'd have to bring to the ballot to do some of those things?

Yeah. I I believe the councilmanic authority is just on the childcare sales tax increase.

Okay.

There's a I'm not sure about the county one, frankly, but, like, the REIT flexibility is just innate, and also the levy lid lift changes is just innate and goes into effect. I believe the fire protection district creation, there's a couple different avenues. I believe there is an avenue for the public to petition in the creation, and there's also, this essentially this kind of new authority for a single jurisdiction to spin off their fire department. And I'm going to get back to you on if that's calcimimetic or not because I do not remember at this moment.

That that makes a big difference Yeah. For us in time frame, if if we were to pursue something like that. I'm also, you know will there be another I have a few ideas I've written out, but is there another time that or a way for us as council members to individually talk to you about next session? Yeah.

Thanks for that. So I should maybe mention this upfront is, what we wanna do tonight is just kinda get a to the conversation. And one of the things that CapitalPath has brought forth this this year, which we've been talking about for a while, is more of an interim path. So we're spending more time on this throughout the summer months as we get into fall. So we're we're kinda starting a conversation tonight. They're gonna take an initial list, and then we'll kinda take that away and start to put some thought to it. And then we're planning to come back to you and spend more time with you around this in the future too, and we're working that those details out. But this will not be your only bite at the apple.

Sounds good. Because there are there's a a few things like I know there's some RCWs around street design. I'm not sure what RCWs are. I'm gonna have to talk with staff a little bit about what those are, for example. And I I I I'm thinking of things like that that are RCW changes that don't require funding that could make an impact for the community. Right? That we can do more as a city, which I think should be just a theme to itself. Yeah. So I will Jay, should I reach out to you first? Yeah.

K. Thank you. Thank you.

If I can say one thing, because, you hit the nail the head. I heard from the majority leader, so that if it's given out of the 34th Legislative District, it would general ask of, like, are there things that the legislature can do for cities that cost the legislature no money? And so, item items like that, I think, are would be greatly appreciated. So thank you.

Mayor Pro Tem?

Yeah. I just have a quick follow-up for council member Vanderpool. I think it would be helpful, if you're not ready, you're not ready. But you could just it's okay if it's not fully baked. But, know, if you if you know the topics that you're interested in, I think that would be helpful for this discussion.

How much time do we have?

Keep it brief. Bullet points.

Okay. So I'm always you think this is funny? Well, the first thing is removal of restrictive street designs, which is an RCW. We have to have things uniform according to state law where the city is at risk, for lawsuit. This is a conversation I've had with staff for several years.

I'm also thinking about, of of course, continued tax tax flexibility to for implementation of more taxes, seem to be more of a theme. How can we as a city become more self reliant, less regressive? Let's see. I would have really liked to be able to pilot things and try more things locally. I know we've been working at housing for a long time, but I always think about what do we do about like, I guess, working class housing solutions.

Right? And, you know, Seattle has been trying its social housing thing for a couple of years. What can we do with less resources to pilot things locally. So those are types of things that I'm I'm just the top of mind.

Alright. Councilmember Gillman.

Thank you, mayor Payne. So I'll share all the accolades, including the mayor channeling Garrison Keeler with I'm really impressed you did pretty good. I I just thought about his, you know, coming home from his wedding night and saying, that's pretty good.

I was like, yeah.

So now there's a good Norwegian for you. I I I I first, I wanted to clarify the when we talked about the sit lie legislation, was that Mia Gregerson's twenty four eighty nine? Yes. Yeah. And that's something that Beth Doleo had been a a signer, a cosponsor on that was intended to end the criminalization of of being poor and being on the street, I guess, from from the proponent side.

So that that was one where I was I was pretty torn about. I I understood law enforcement wanting to keep a tool, but also if we're not providing resources, you know, just like the Martin Boise decision. If if people have nowhere to go and they can't bring a pet or can't bring their belongings, it's it's a a frustrating spot. And so what what this leads me to suggest for our our legislative agenda is that the legislature has really aimed their homelessness interventions very narrowly about increasing housing supply and forcing local governments to allow emergency housing, permanent supportive housing. I think that urging the state to take on an emergency around homelessness and and scale up their efforts so that they're actually helping us, not just giving us permission to take it on locally, but actually helping to engage.

And I I think about it's both wonderful that the largest allocation ever, 123,000,000, went into the housing trust fund, and that's like two apartment complexes for a state with hundreds of thousands of you know, it's Yeah. It's a drop in the bucket.

Yes. I don't disagree. I I should clarify the largest housing investment in a supplemental budget.

Okay.

That so Sure.

Sure. But Just for context.

Nonetheless, our our investments to date have have been helpful, and and we certainly wanna continue to fight for and advocate for the resources that we've been able to the federal and state resources that have helped us to put up several 100 units. But since we're behind thousands and we're building hundreds, I I just I I have a hunch that that we're not even holding our own with the kinds of funding they're putting in, that we're we're still having a net a net loss of of housing available to folks. So so I just if if we could consider pushing on the legislature to pivot from just giving us permission to actually engaging in in work around poverty and and housing, I I would be really grateful.

Great. Thank you.

Alright. Thank you. Councilmember Vanderpool, before I call on councilmember Barron, did you have a point that was related? Okay. Go ahead.

Yeah. Just to kinda add on to that. You know, I appreciate councilman Gilman mentioning this because one of the issues, even at the regional housing council, is a lot of those dollars go to nonprofit developers. I would really like the state to try to be its own developer in the future and consider doing its own building, especially if we head into a downturn and the private market falls out, even if it's not even if it's nonprofit. One of our recent projects struggled to find loans and had to change the area median income on some of the housing because there wasn't there wasn't enough private investment.

And so I do think that if if this is an emergency, the state should take on the responsibility of being its own developer in the future and using its own dollars to build the housing stock that if the market falls through, we don't fall behind as a state.

Alright. Council member Barron, thank you for your patience.

Oh, thank you, mayor. And, thank you for the great report to, to our our folks. I have several items that I just wanna get on the radar. And I I I concur with council and Gilman and and Vanderpool on on on their comments regarding homeless issues. I they're big and expensive and difficult, and and I bet I bet I really think we have to double down on on homeless solutions.

One of the difficulties we've had, I I see, is the pullback from the right away funding for tiny home villages. And we need to keep pressing for those wraparound services for the tiny home villages in order for them to be successful. I also know that representative Parsley is doing some work around, oh, greater flexibility on on levy lids and and modifying levy the the levy lid law to give local governments more flexibility. And I'd I'd like to see I'm not I'm not sure where her head is at after this session, but there may be a real opportunity for us to support the work that she's doing, which I think it it holds Olympia's interest very high. Hey.

Great great news about the the step forward on the estuary. We need to continue continue that. I I also want to kind of put forward the greater ideas of sea level rise as it affects downtown and policies that may be on the horizon in the legislature dealing with sea sea level rise or multiple communities across the state that are impacted by rising sea levels. There's been a lot of planning work. Councilwoman Madrone is is familiar with a lot of this, and I think we're right on the cusp of being able to actually do some projects that will be great in helping to protect our downtown from sea level rise.

Certainly, how the Deschutes Estuary project is is developed needs to be that that legislation needs to be designed in such a way that prioritizes sea level rise for that portion of our downtown. Again, for me, the entire number of of of issues related to homelessness and maintaining our tiny home villages, expanding tiny home villages, expanding shelters have got to be a priority for us in in our legislative agenda. So thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, council member Barrett. Additional comments from council? Mayor pro tem Nguyen.

I really appreciate what we had for the 2026 legislative priorities, and I would generally you know, that that front page, I I would generally say, keep going on those things. Right? And for folks that might not be able to see it, have housing and homelessness infrastructure, one on revenues, and then the Deschutes Estuary project. You had already talked much about policy extensions. And so and if I might add some ornaments on it.

So if you just sort of these are not items that I necessarily am fighting to put for, you know, prime real estate on our on our one pager to the legislators. Though, something that I would be interested in, if there's an opportunity to support a bill or an effort that's already happening, I know that there was some movement to try to get recycling more accessible, right, making it more clear what is recyclable, what isn't recyclable. I think they were going back to having a clear numbering system. And then also, is some movement on bottle having a a bottle I forgot what that's called. But Deposit.

Yes. Thank you for that, sir. Yeah, a bottle deposit, those types of things. Just generally interested, even though I do not feel this is the consumer's problem. Generally, on how can we as a community make it more clear what can be recycled and more opportunities to recycle things.

We are a community that has many of our Rudwell bins popping up all over the place. Right? And so, like, just kind of in that theme, I know it says, sustainability, is really important to our community. It's important to me. And then, also, I'm generally interested on things that would strengthen our main streets, strengthen small business.

That could be I mean, it depends on the business. Right? But there are a lot of things. So, one, folks will ask about liquor control laws and how I have been told that they're quite stringent in Washington State. And so, that makes it tough for restauranteers, for example, depending on an event that they're trying to host, like, those types of things. It's a little in the weeds. And then, also also on our agenda tonight is about vacancies. Right? It's about building vacancies. And so we are we are not interested in having vacant buildings in downtown.

And so just things that would I could go on and on, but things that would liven our and strengthen our our small businesses and just organizations that are that are downtown. Right? Mhmm. If that means a punitive vacancy tax, I would be fine with that too. But sort of unpopular.

Then, I think this also goes along with housing and homelessness, just different housing structures, right, different types of housing, some not so creative, like long standing ones will be like condos and townhomes, that type of thing. Just trying to make it easier to build those while still keeping those consumer protections. And then, also, something that we've heard again and again is that not only do we need more, tiny home village types, but, if, there are other types of types of shelters. Right? If there is something that you learn about, that's something that I would be interested in hearing about and potentially helping advocate for.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you. Any additional comments? Okay. I have, just a few things. First, I have a question now about, the governor's proposal to have a department of housing.

So maybe you can help me because I haven't actually looked into this, so I'm not entirely sure. Is this something that he can just do, or is this something that requires the legislature to sign on to? Like, the office of equity legislation has to be passed in order to create it kinda thing.

Yeah. I believe legislation would have to be passed. I also believe I don't believe they're gonna need some significant funding to do it, which would all be operation dollars in order to stand it up so the legislature would have to fund the development of the office of housing as well.

Okay. Well, I'm gonna put a little caveat when I say this. So depending on what exactly it is that it does besides just more bureaucracy, hopefully, it's not that. But I I I would be supportive of that effort to to have that. Specifically, I I I'm hoping that they don't just look at the, the development of, you know, traditional housing, so to speak, but, that there is an effort, for the state to get more in the game on addressing homelessness as council member Gilman said earlier.

I'm more interested in getting assistance with short term, funding for short term solutions like shelters. We we talk a lot about housing. Housing. Housing. Housing.

And we're trying to meet those goals and those targets that are projected. But meanwhile, we have more imminent, demand, for shelter, and we could use the support of the legislature, in those efforts. That includes the additional funding, that we've already been having for the encampment through the encampment resolution program. We need to continue, that funding. Operational dollars are, something we just we're gonna consistently need, to continue operating the sites that we do have.

I'm just gonna say it. When I look at the headers of our legislative agenda, I don't think they're all that different, than what we're gonna be, I think, asking for. I, you know, I, I look at it and I see, revenue when you, showed the slide on the the the sales tax, that we could pass, for child care and and other, you know, social services, it's a little ironic that it is a regressive tax to support that. So I, I would like to see us find other ways to to, try to support those efforts other than a sales tax.

Yeah.

Just because I was at a thing last week. This was shared with some legislators, and I know you know senator Batemans was there. That's, some cities brought up the fact that while the state is doing more progressive tax, the only options that they're giving to localities are regressive options. And so the city made the point that it feels like we're making no progress on the progressiveness, which is a ideal that they believe in, but that they feel like they're stuck. So I I I think there are other people that we can build work with have a coalition on that.

Yeah. Yeah. I and then I, I'm thinking of specifically, I know that there's some interest in having the state, take up, legislation around predictive scheduling. And as you know that this was a a discussion for us here locally in Olympia, but specifically the state, I believe, would be looking at this for certain employers. And so this is something that I would like us to have our eyes on, and and just kind of watching to see, where we might, you know, either lend our voice to it or just at at the very least be in the know as to what's happening in the development of that, because our, assistant city manager is doing work, specifically, on, working with our community members and and various interest groups and stakeholders in the city on how we address economic impacts in Olympia, and that includes, that piece of predictive scheduling.

So I would like to see us, keep our eyes on that. Additional behavioral health and mental health resources. So, we obviously know that, operating dollars is just a part of it. But if we wanna continue to offer wraparound support services, municipalities need that support to continue, providing, that support. And, again, this is something that, we would like to see the the state, take more of a a concerted effort in supporting us.

If they are if they don't wanna do it themselves, then help us do it. And so I I would, really appreciate seeing, some more support for how local jurisdictions can address some of these challenges, and tackle them at the same time as we've tried to do. And I think that is it for now. I have a few capital projects in my head, but I'm gonna sit on that for a moment because I don't wanna blurt them out and think that it means I'm prioritizing any one over another. So I'll just hold that for a moment.

Alright. Any additional additional questions or or comments? Alright. Excellent. Well, thank you all so much.

Thank you. Hugely helpful. Appreciate it.

Yeah. Alright. And thank you, Susan, our legislative liaison who's, I don't know how many years this is for you doing this work, but thank you. Alright. So that takes us to our next agenda item, item six b, which is the approval of the opioid funding for pooling with the opioid abatement council.

You too. Have a good night. Good to see you.

We'll get in here.

I think Susan's gotta do some presto change out here. There we go. Thank you, Susan. Good evening, mayor council members. For the record again, Jay Bernie, city manager.

I'm here to this evening to seek your approval for the pooling of a portion of our opioid settlement fund balance with other jurisdictions that comprise the Regional Opioid Abatement Council to launch the first request for proposals to seek partners and providers to advance the strategies that are consistent with the one Washington NYU and the twenty twenty six through twenty twenty seven Thurston opioid response plan. In terms of our discussion tonight, I'll provide a bit of a background summary for our opioid abatement settlements and the creation of our regional opioid abatement council, talk about the role of the opioid abatement council, and then the mayor and I will summarize the request for the pooling of funds. Just some background. Since OxyContin was approved by the FDA in 1995, opioid related overdoses have become the leading cause of death in The United States, surpassing fatal car accidents. Since the year 2000, more than three hundred thousand people have died from fatal opioid overdoses.

In April 2018, Olympia retained legal representation in litigation against pharmaceutical companies. In the 2018, our case was consolidated into a national class action. In March 2022, Olympia joined the state of Washington and other jurisdictions in entering into the One Washington Memorandum of Understanding. The One Washington MOU addressed allocation of settlement funds and allows for establishment of of local independent opioid abatement councils. On 08/23/2022, council approved a settlement with three of the largest opioid distributors.

On 03/03/2026 of this year, council passed a resolution which continue to prove our participation in an interlocal agreement with our regional partners to coordinate the use of opioid settlement funds through a local opioid abatement council. And again, the update to the ILA was really around the concept of pooling of our funds. So just a little bit of background on the Regional Opioid Abatement Council. Again, it was created through an interlocal agreement. It's comprised of Thurston County, the City Of Olympia, City Of Lacey, the City Of Tumwater.

Mayor Payne is Olympia's current Olympia Abatement Council Representative. Again, there's some agreement to pool some or all of our opioid settlement funding that's received after 01/01/2018. I'll get into kind of what that looks like for us in a moment. Each jurisdiction must convey the percentage of funding to be pooled by June 30 of each year, which why is I'm here for you tonight, so we can meet that deadline. Thurston County serves as a lead agency and fiscal agent. The Oprah Abatement Council funding recommendations are approved by the Thurston County Board of Commissioners. What's important about that is it's an up or down. They don't have the ability to say, well, we don't like this piece or that piece. They don't have the ability to make changes. They have to approve the recommendation of the abatement council in whole.

They can send it back and ask for some updates or changes. But in the event that they don't pass it a second time, all the pooled funds are returned for individual use. The Abatement Council is launching a request for proposals to find partners and providers to, again, advance the strategies that are really consistent with the opioid response plan. The RFP is for $2,000,000 and runs from 07/01/2026 through 12/31/2027. Mayor Payne, as Olympia's representative, is requesting that we allocate 50% of our settlement funding towards this initial RFP as Olympia's share of the cost of administering the request for proposals and all the services that it will provide.

Our current opioid settlement fund balance as of the December 2025 is about $1,100,000 just a bit more than that. Citi's 50% contribution would be $562,714 The remaining 50% of Olympia settlement funding would remain in our settlement account for future pooling. So with that, I'm going to

turn it over to

the mayor to add some additional context around this request and the request for proposals and any other information he wants to provide as your representative.

Alright. Thanks, Jay. So just a few weeks ago, the Opioid Abatement Council met, and we had a discussion on preparing the request for proposals or the RFP process to begin, you know, vying for applicants to apply that would utilize these funds to support those who are impacted by opioid use. So the funds can be used, for things like anything that is in line with the you all should have received a copy of the opioid response plan for the county with your staff report. As you can see, there's five goals in there.

And anything that pertains to the that helps meet those five goals, we wanna make sure that, the organizations that are applying for the funding are going to, in some way, help us meet those goals. Also, they must be consistent with the one Washington, memorandum of understanding, which is basically a document that talks about what the funds can be used for and what they cannot be used for, and there's a fence around that. So, they can be used, again, anything that supports the plan, but also, like, educational materials, administrative costs, although there is some, exceptions to that as well, where funding is not permitted. So things like lobbying or capital projects or things like that are not permitted. I am recommending, 50%.

As you can see, Jay's presentation had started out with this issue going way back to 2018 for us, and we need to get these dollars out of the door. I was talking about this well over two years ago that, you know, we were moving really slowly, and we were waiting to get the structure of the opioid abatement council up. I am not entirely sure of what the fund balance is for the other jurisdictions, but I do know that the city of Olympia has the largest allocation of the three cities. And so I am recommending a 50% because we need to get these funds out the door. We, this is, $2,000,000, total between all the jurisdictions, including the county, and we have the largest allocation.

And so, that's my reason for recommending this. I think, it's it's time to get it out. So, and happy to take any questions that anybody has. Yes. Councilmember Green.

You may have already said this, but can you just confirm for all of the jurisdictions, it's 50% of their settlement? Is that the

Not necessarily. So it's a total of $2,000,000 total for all of the jurisdictions for the RFP, but that doesn't necessarily mean it would be 50% from each jurisdiction's allocation. Their bodies will have to decide on which portion of the funding they agree to. But based on the discussions that were had in the opioid abatement council, it's possible that some of the jurisdictions may even be giving all of their funding, because they don't have as much as we do, but that's yet to be determined. I actually just spoke with Katie earlier today. And, as of today, the other jurisdictions haven't taken this action, as we are tonight yet.

So what would happen if, when once the jurisdictions decide we don't reach that $2,000,000?

The the RFP actually says that we can change the the amount of funding. So the the verbiage is flexible in the RFP. So we're not fixed to that $2,000,000.

Thank you.

Yep. And, Mara, I might add, I believe Tom Water has taken an action to allocate all of their funding. They have a much smaller pool. The county's portion is actually spelled out in the ILA. It's it's around $600,000 is their piece as well. And I'm not sure if Tom if Lacey has acted yet.

Any other questions?

Okay. I have three options in front of you, but the bolded one is the one that, is is the recommendation from Mayor Payne.

Okay. Thank you, Jay. Do we have a motion in the second, council member Gilman?

I would move to authorize contribution of $562,714 of Olympia's opioid settlement funds to the Regional Opioid Abatement Council. Second.

Alright. We have a motion and a second. Is there any further discussion? Alright. Seeing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye.

Opposed? Alright.

Motion passes. Thank you. Thank you, Jay. Alright. Thank you, council colleagues, for your support on that. It's very important that we get that funding out, and looking forward to the the RFP process. Alright. So item six c on our agenda, which is the discussion of the downtown commercial vacancy study. And we have Jenica Machado, who is our economic development director from community planning and economic development, to kick us off and introduce our consultants.

Thank you so much. Good evening. Tonight, we're bringing forward the Downtown Olympia vacancy study. The observed vacancy in parts of downtown has raised interest to better understand the downtown market and potential development in occupancy barriers. As council may recall, the city's Olympia Strong Plan initially included an initiative intended to activate vacant spaces.

I had learned that the effort ultimately did not gain enough momentum to move forward. Rather than immediately developing a new action without a clear understanding of the problem, we felt it was important to take a step back and more deeply understand what is actually driving vacancy in downtown to appropriately match initiatives. That question led us to this study. We engaged Leland Consulting Group through a competitive process. And since October, they've conducted fieldwork, stakeholder interviews, and data analysis.

The goal was to provide a data driven understanding of vacancy and identify practical, actionable strategies the city could consider. Importantly, this work also recognizes the strong connection between vacancy and vibrancy. We present, we presented to land use and environment committee as well on April 23. So we're here this evening to provide an overview and the recommendations, and we'll have time for q and a at the end. So with that, I'll turn over to our consultants, Chris Zahas and Jennifer Shook from Leland Consulting Group. Thank you.

Hello. Good evening. Welcome.

Yeah. Good evening, mayor and council. My name is Chris Zajas. I am, managing principal of Leland Consulting Group. We're a Portland based urban planning and real estate economics firm.

We've had the pleasure of working, with Jenica and her team since October, on this study. With me is Jennifer Shook, our senior analyst who did the bulk of the research, and we'll walk you through some of our key findings and hopefully answer questions that you have this evening. Let's hit that button. So when we were hired by the city, we framed our research really to answer those key questions that have been persistently raised in the community. And those were largely about the extent of vacancy in Downtown Olympia, where that vacancy exists, and really fundamentally, are the main causes or the root causes of that vacancy so that we're solving the right problems when we start to address ideas.

How does Olympia compare to peer cities? Are the perceptions of downtown aligned with the data? We hear a lot about perception versus reality, so we wanted to do and you wanted us to do some data research to ground that before we get too far down exploring solutions. And then finally, let's have some recommendations with the data. So what are some strategies?

What are some best practices we can do given what we have found? So as Jennica mentioned, we did a number of research steps in our work. We had a couple of site visits, one of which included a full walking, inventory of ground floor vacancies, through a walking and windshield survey, in part because some of the desktop research that we get from CoStar and other data sources is frankly not very accurate, and the really only way to do it is by walking and seeing for yourself. We held a number of, one on one interviews and and group interviews with city staff to understand more about city policies and, perspectives on downtown from, the staff that are working here day to day. We held a number of stakeholder interviews, with downtown business owners, property owners, brokers, and others who, are, you know, filling and operating spaces today.

We conducted some market research and analysis that included Pier City, comparisons to see how you stack up with similar cities. Jennifer took a deep dive into some of the regulatory things to see if there are issues in your code or policies that are impacting the ability for, investment to take place. We conducted some best practices research, and then, again, we had, some key, recommendations for you. So some of the quick takeaways that we had from the research and and I'll hand it off to Jennifer in a moment who'll hit some of the highlights of the data. So first of all, you're not alone.

You're not an outlier. Some of the data that we see and the trends that we see in Olympia is similar and in some cases better than some of your peer cities. We heard, especially from developers, that there's there were actually a lot of compliments to improvements that your permitting department has done to make it easier to do, development in the city. And so that was a, we wanted to make a a special shout out for that because that's something we don't often hear when we're talking to, developers and communities. Usually, we hear nothing but complaints, but we actually heard, some good compliments on improvements that have been made.

We also wanted to note that a lot of the challenges that are fundamentally driving, vacancies vacancies are outside of the city's control. There are re there are national economic factors at play. There are global trends, post COVID, work from home trends, things like that that impact the health of downtowns. There's the homelessness crisis that doesn't directly drive vacancy, but it's a factor in downtown. Again, those are things that affect you.

You can't single handedly solve them on your own. But there are some things that we think you can do, and that that's the perspective that we took when we, got to the recommendations. And we'll walk you through those in a moment. So with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Jennifer who will walk you through some of the, hopefully, very interesting data points and key findings that we found, and then I'll wrap up with some of our key recommendations, and then we'll open it up for q and a.

Okay. So, first, I wanna talk a little bit about where these vacant spaces are. I'm sure you all know from walking around. But, as Chris said, we wanted to make sure that we had a real thorough understanding of where the vacancies are in relationship to each other and also what type of vacancy we were looking at. So we looked at short term vacancy.

These are just businesses that are turning over. It might take a couple months to lease, but, you know, activity is happening. Long term vacancy, especially in those, older and historic buildings, that's probably what you think of when you think of vacancy in Downtown Olympia, and then vacancy on the Ground Floor of the newer mixed use buildings built since 2016. This map also highlights where there are surface lots because even though parking is an important part of downtown, if you have, you know, a few vacant spaces next to a surface parking lot that really can make it feel like the space is not activated. And then we also, on the city's request, looked at where, compared city owned properties to the vacant properties and found that really other than that one historic firehouse, the city's properties are largely not vacant, which is good.

And then also looking at how much space is vacant. So, most of the space that is especially ground floor space that's vacant is retail. 16% of that vacant space was built since 2016, and 66% is that long term chronic vacant, especially in those older buildings. So that is the the major challenge when it comes to retail. We also looked at some dining space.

So any retail can kinda be fitted into dining space, but we looked at, like, kind of purpose built dining, area, and a lot of that is in the buildings that have been built since 2016, though that's a much smaller share of the space. And then 57% of the office was long term vacant, which is obviously a big challenge. Talking first about the Ground Floor vacancy and new mixed use buildings. Some of the challenges that contribute to this, these are typically not purpose built spaces. They're kind of, you know, just empty shells.

The cost of tenant improvements is high. These are challenging for smaller businesses to cover, and so a lot of times landlords try to amortize those costs over the term of the lease. The higher the cost, the longer the lease term is needed. And for a lot of small businesses and for landlords as well, that can be very risky to have a longer term re lease. So those longer term leases and the higher rents narrow the tenant pool, which just means that it takes longer to find, an appropriate tenant.

This isn't a challenge that's unique to Olympia. I'm sure you've heard that in the legislative session. The state restricted, the amount of area that is, that cities are allowed to require ground floor active spaces. Olympia's ground floor retail requirements are already fairly limited and pretty flexible compared to a lot of peer cities. So that's good news.

But, you know, that's still something that, you know, is is being looked at at the state level. Historic retail buildings, as I said, this is a a bigger contributor to the longer term vacancy. A lot of these are large spaces. They're not ideal layouts for modern retail, so a lot of them are pretty narrow and then deep. And when you think about retail layout, you wanna have a lot of that front of house space, the space that people can see windows from the street.

And so what ends up happening is that retail has this kind of back of house space that's not as well used. But because retail rents are on a price per square foot, they're still paying for that space. Some of the historic retail buildings have not been well maintained. There's a need for modernization, and significant renovations and adaptive reuse are expensive due to high construction costs. And then there's also state and local requirements, things like the state energy code requirement, fire codes, which obviously the city doesn't have a ton of control over, but those are just contributing factors.

Office vacancy is a challenge nationwide, as Chris said. You know, the the state shift to remote work has had an outsized impact on Downtown Olympia, and there isn't a near term replacement industry that's going to be able to absorb as much space as was vacated by the state government, which is a challenge. We spoke with real estate professionals who talked about the expense of converting older class c and class b and c office buildings to the type of, like, high quality, amenitized class a office buildings that businesses look for, and it can be around $600 per square foot, which is about the same as ground up construction. So that's that's a major challenge. There's also there's been some conversion of office to residential in Olympia, some movement on that.

That's great. It can also result in increased vehicle trips, which can result in some impact fees and other costs. But that is not always the case, which is good. As Chris said, we wanted to look at some peer cities downtowns to see how Olympia, has recovered since the pandemic compared to other similar cities. So in 2020, downtown visits decreased by 44% in Olympia.

That's huge. That's a lot to recover from. But, as of 2025, visits are just down 2% from 2019, so you have recovered most of the visits that were lost during the pandemic. And there's just a matter of, like, a couple thousand visits a week, which is not nothing, but is is a a pretty significant recovery. And when you look at Bellingham and Edmonds, which also which have recovered the visits they lost during the pandemic, it's still a matter of just a couple thousand visits a week.

So Olympia is not doing much worse than Bellingham and Edmonds. And then we compared Salem, Oregon because that's another capital city in the region, and their visits are still down 11% since 2019. '19. So you're way outperforming Salem. Good job. And we heard from the folks that we talked to that there are some areas of downtown that feel less active. Active. So the area North of the transit center, the area surrounding the children's museum, and the area kind of right outside of City Hall. We heard when you walk outside of City Hall, you can see eight vacant spaces just from there. And we looked at this.

This is a hexagon map showing the visits to Downtown Olympia, and that really bore out in this data. Visits drop off substantially north of the transit center, and the Children's Museum is kind of its own little island. So thinking about areas that could benefit from activation, these are some key points. And then the area along 4th And 5th between Columbia and Jefferson is the the main hot spot for visits. One of the things that came up when we were talking to city staff as well as real estate professionals and kind of digging into the regulatory review, was street repaving.

So on on when there's a change of use or new development that's expected to generate at least 20 additional vehicle trips on a street with a low pavement rating, there's it triggers a a half street repave. That was something that we hadn't encountered before. We know a lot of cities require frontage improvements, things like sidewalks and planting strips and things like that. But the half street repaving was really unusual. And digging into it, we looked at Bellingham, Bothell, Burien, again, Salem, Oregon, Spokane, and a few other cities to see do other cities have, of similar size to Olympia and in in the area have this requirement.

And we didn't really find anything comparable. Salem kind of does, but, the trigger is a thousand vehicle trips compared to 20 in Olympia. So this is something you know, the city doesn't have any control over costs because of, you know, state energy code requirements or building code requirements when it comes to fire safety. But this is somewhere where, you know, the the city could help mitigate some of these costs. And this map is showing where there are industrial and warehouse spaces, are going to be your your future opportunities for adaptive reuse and continued vibrancy in Downtown Olympia.

And these are spaces where this requirement is likely to be triggered. Just digging into the ground floor retail requirements. So in this map, the streets that are red are where ground floor active space is required. That's already a pretty targeted area of downtown. A lot of cities have it where it's the whole downtown.

And Olympia is already doing what's best practice, which is figuring out what specific streets this really matters for. And then another thing the city is doing well is, there are a lot of uses that are already allowed in these spaces. It's not just retail. It can be retail, office. I think, like, light assembly and manufacturing even.

Like, there's a really wide variety of uses. The one use that is not allowed that the city could consider is live work, which kind of bridges the gap between residential and commercial space. We also heard a lot about impact in building fees, and so we dug into that and found that for transportation impact fees, Olympia actually charges less than the state average. So in our estimation, this is not outrageous by any stretch. And even downtown, the impact fees are less than in the rest of the city.

And then we looked at building permit fees, comparing Olympia and Lacey, and they were pretty similar. So, yes, they're an extra cost when you're talking about downtown adaptive reuse or redevelopment, but they're not a primary barrier to, vacancy. I'm going to hand it back to Chris to talk about some of our key findings and recommendations.

Thank you. And it goes without saying that the full report, which hopefully you had a chance to flip through, has lots and lots of data and tables and maps that expand on a lot of these data points that we've been speaking to. So, to the first question of what are the root causes or the main drivers of vacancy in Downtown Olympia, we we identified three core things that Jennifer touched on. One was that it's those historic buildings, which you which are a great asset and character and cultural historical value to the city have their challenges for all the reasons that Jennifer mentioned, including that that trigger of a new use or a change of use impacting not just building upgrades, but potentially this half street, paving in certain parts of downtown. The second area is those newer ground floor spaces in some of the newer buildings that have been vacant for a long time or some of them not ever occupied.

That's, again, a significant kind of fundamental economic challenge of new construction, that is, again, not unique to Olympia. Thirdly, the amount of, vacant office space. And and I wouldn't say just vacant office space, but also just the loss of the daytime workforce as well, and what that means to buying power. There's no easy answers to this one because of the the high cost that Jennifer mentioned and the lack of another industry to go in and occupy all of that. And even the conversion to housing is diseconomic in most markets, and so, that's an area where we think a lot more effort and study will probably be needed because, again, without action, those spaces are probably gonna be vacant for a long, long time.

So I'm gonna hit on a few of our core recommendations, before we break for q and a. So one was take a look at that half street improvement with this triggered when the change of use generates more than 20 additional trips per day. That is gonna be particularly impactful on those edge areas, maybe in the area where you have older warehouses kind of on the periphery of downtown. And in particular, it's it's, I would say, slightly, not random, but it's out of the building owner's control whether they happen to be on a street that has this low pavement rating. So some buildings that are apples to apples equal, if one is on a low paved low quality paved street versus one that's not, they may have a big impact of, a street upgrade versus one that's not.

And so study how to maybe balance that and maybe alleviate or bring yourselves in line with what other cities do. Second, cultivate ongoing relationships with business and property owners and downtown organizations. So you already have Jenica here. That's that's part of her job. That's a best practice for cities.

Really, the underlying thing behind this is downtown is a very complex environment. It's not like a shopping center where you've got one major property owner, but you've got hundreds, if not thousands, of property owners, business owners, their families. There's corporations. There's it and they're all at different points in their business cycle and, financial needs and so on. And it really takes relationship building over a long sustained time period to build those bridges and create those relationships and and create the knowledge flow so that you know what's going on on the ground, keep your ear to the ground.

It's a it's a fundamental role of a a downtown economic development strategy. Continue to support community events that highlight local businesses. So just a little bit of boosterism, temporary activation of spaces. Some of that you're already doing. Continue to do that.

That's really important. The the the frequency of change, something new, for the visitor is an essential part of what drives visitation to downtowns. Increased transparency for city policy. So one of the one of the issues that we discovered as we were starting to dig into, you know, what are the city's policies around downtown investment and are there barriers there? It a little we'll be honest, it was a little hard to find some of that information in a kind of in a one stop web page or even brochure or PDF on your website.

And so that's an area where, particularly around some of these codes that are kinda complex and fees that are triggered under certain circumstances but not others. The more transparency and and, access you can provide to outsiders, the better. That creates certainty for them, assurance that they know what the pathway is, and there won't be surprises. So that's an area for a potential work. Explore opportunities for a low interest loan program for new equipment.

So this gets to that ground floor vacancy in newer buildings where that cost of tenant improvements can be prohibitively expensive. And we've seen some cities create programs where they can provide, assistance for that initial outfit of restaurant equipment and other things. And it needs to be done a little carefully in Washington State because some of your constitutional limitations around gift to public funds. I forget which city you Seattle. Seattle has found a way to sort of thread that needle, and we think that's an area that could directly address that particular issue of expensive outfitting, which is particularly pertinent for restaurants, which is one of the key activators of downtown vibrancy.

Jennifer mentioned, you know, consider allowing live work units on the ground Floor on those secondary streets. Your your prime retail streets hold the line and and really focus on retail, activation. But on those secondary areas, live work has been very popular, in other cities, and that's something that we think you could consider. Around vibrancy, which is less about filling vacant retail space and more about just creating a a robust downtown environment, Some cities have what we call a downtown ombudsman or a business or a small business ombudsman. So this is different than a sort of a a permit, assistant, which we understand you already have.

This is more of, like, a small business advocate, somebody who, hey. I'm coming to town. I wanna open a restaurant downtown. What do I need to do? It's not just about a permitting question, and maybe it's licensing or how do who do I connect with at the alliance or brokers or whatever? Or I'm I'm having a real struggle with a certain policy. Who can I talk to that will listen and advocate for me? So that's a internal staff person that could be very good. And there's a number of cities around the Northwest that have positions like that, specifically focused on small business development. Prioritize downtown for sidewalk repair.

As visitors, we noticed a lot here downtown sidewalks are in poor condition. And, a lot of those improvements won't get triggered until a building is doing an improvement. But until then, it could become a barrier, certainly from a ADA perspective, but also just from a general beautification. And so we understand that later this summer, there will be a, staff will be looking at, your sidewalk program. We think is is sort of the heart of the community.

It, it would be good to prioritize downtown in that process for, public capital improvements. Also on the, on the building side, a facade improvement program, a lot of cities do that, which is providing grants or typically matching grants or loans for exterior improvements to a facade of a building. Could be awnings. It could be paint. And the idea behind that is that short of a a big capital redevelopment of a building, $5,000 of paint can make a huge impact visually on the vibrancy of a block.

And it's really low cost, and there's some great models around the state of how that's done. Continued so the last bullet there, continue to explore the need and feasibility of a downtown parking garage. We're not parking consultants, but we know that's a topic that's been discussed for a long time. And I I would say our takeaway is that it's not a clear cut. Wow. You don't need a parking garage. Why are you even talking about it? And it's also not a clear cut. You absolutely need one. We think there's enough there there that it's worthy of further discussion.

I would say Olympia is relatively unique in a city your size that you do not have one. There's not a sort of a designated place coming in off I 5. Visitors come here, park here, and and walk. And so, again, we don't have enough information to definitively say one way one way or another, but I think we do have we did hear and see enough to say that there's probably enough there to keep digging into that issue. Streeteries are those sidewalk dining or or parking strip dining areas that we saw a lot of, during the COVID pandemic.

We were as people coming from Portland, we have those all over the city. If you've been down to Portland, you'll see those downtown, in the neighborhood business districts all over the place. And so we were kinda taken aback that there's virtually none of that in Olympia. And particularly where you have such narrow sidewalks throughout most of downtown, it's a great way to allow restaurants to, expand their dining space, creates great street activity, the activities outside where people walking and driving by can see it at relatively low cost. And so, as we dug into some of the policies, it's fairly complex the way that it's administered here, and we think that that's a sort of a low hanging fruit, low cost way of creating some, great vibrancy.

All of that is apples and oranges and bananas. There's a lot of policy. There's some live work housing. There's some street and policy around fees and improvements. A downtown plan is kind of the place where all of that should come together so that it's not just whack a mole or it's not a bunch of disconnected, solutions, but that there's a comprehensive vision that each of these ideas are focused towards.

Your last downtown plan update was done in 2017, so nine years ago. That's about the typical cycle that we would expect for a downtown, usually once every ten years, especially for a capital city and, the region's primary, downtown. That would be a great strategy that we recommend you start thinking about budgeting and planning for, the your next iteration of your downtown update so that all of these ideas that we're talking about tonight are thought about holistically and not, as a bunch of disconnected disconnected actions. And then finally, Jennifer touched on it. You have, there's quite a bit of public property ownership downtown.

It that's not a contributor to the vacancy. Most of that is activated, but it's also a great asset that you can leverage to attract and the kind of investment and development that you want, whether that's commercial uses or residential. As the as the owner or disposer or public private partner of those projects, you can set the terms and get what you want within the parameters of the market. And so we think having a strategy for that, get them on the tax rolls, get them activated, even more than they are holistically again. So those are our, core recommendations.

Again, thank you. It's been a it's been a real pleasure, getting to know Olympia and your stakeholders in your downtown. Lots of data in the report, and, hopefully, we can answer any questions that you have for us tonight.

Alright. Thank you both so much. I'm gonna turn it over to council member Vanderpool before, we take any additional comments.

Yeah. When this was on land use, it was a week ago, maybe two weeks ago, week ago, we had quite a robust discussion. Right? Lots of ideas that came out of that. You know, I wrote I wrote down even some of them just thinking of them again.

You know? We talked about the downtown plan out. It's over ten years old now. It was 2016, including more folks at if we're gonna do a further study, including people who are residents, conversations about our streets, decoupling the streets, the pedestrian areas and streeteries, a little bit of a conversation about land trust downtown for commercial and residential. Like, there were a variety of conversations, even repaving, including all modes of transportation in that repaving process.

The omnibudsman was definitely a a conversation. Nightlife is also a thing that would I would think would be in the further downtown plan. But also asking businesses in an extended study, a a plan, asking businesses that aren't downtown, who were downtown, or businesses that moved from somewhere else to downtown and vice versa, just to get a more of holistic idea. Facades brought were brought up and what what ways could we do an improvement, like a facade improvement, but also say, hey, we're gonna do this improvement. Could you lock the lease for a while for this small business while the city does this investment?

So different various different ideas came out of it. I'm if any of my other councilmates on land use have any ideas, also that they had mentioned because it was quite a discussion.

Thank you. Additional comments from council councilmember Gilman.

Thank you. I've got a a couple of questions at Gee Whiz. That's amazing. And a and a a couple of, thinking about how to frame some of these suggestions. So first, I was intrigued, Jennifer, when you were talking about empty spots, empty parking spaces, and and the number of our street lots. And and I know at the end, we got to garage, but at the beginning, I was thinking, do we have too much parking? Too much surface parking? What what do you think?

I mean, I think, you know, the surface parking lots serve the businesses. Right? And that's great. And we need that. Right? Because Olympia is not just the downtown for the city of Olympia. It's the downtown for the region. It's the only historic downtown around. But those surface parking lots are not the most active spaces downtown. They're not the most interesting spaces downtown.

They're also the the spaces that are the most likely to be redeveloped in the future. So I think part of the consideration for whether or not you need a a parking garage is probably thinking about whether those surface parking lots should be or can be or will be reactivated or, you know, improved in the future.

Mhmm. Thank you. Thank you. And brings me to my gee whiz. When you described large retail space spaces that are narrow and deep, I was thinking, wow. Some of these places when I was a kid had a service counter and then a stock room, so there was no roaming around. Right? And now we have no inventory in our retail stores, and they want it to be an experience where you're gonna spend some time and get a cup of coffee. And and so that's a a fascinating challenge in having a place that was an an auto parts or an office supply that just had a counter you walked up to. And and now we're trying to figure out how to sell some other sort of doodads or widgets there.

It's anyhow, thank you. I was intrigued with that. And that's why have two two comments on the on the suggestions. The repaving, the the real interest for me is about our pavement preservation program and the impact of cutting utility trenches in the adjacent street. So that's that's my interest more than trying to nudge up our overall street condition by having each each person who has to do frontage improvements also pave half of a street.

So for me, if you cut it, you pave it. And if if you have any question about whether we had a failure before we started getting strict about this, you can walk the block on Franklin from 7th to 8th, and you'll see that each blacktop patch has a set of chuckles along the sides of it where the road receded. And it was it was a similar struggle very recently with the views on 5th, the the adaptive reuse of that office building, but the trenching was not up to the the quality that could withstand the traffic that came down the hill. So so for me, we could be flexible about the half street repaving, but I want us to remain vigilant about our pavement preservation, program and not allow an asphalt patch across a utility trench because they just have not withstood, time or traffic. And then my others, the live work.

I I think it's it's it's it's fascinating, and I know it's not unique to us that these requiring retail pedestals, requiring street facing doors. For me, the objective there was about having a pedestrian oriented streetscape and having it feel the appropriate scale. Right? And and so offering residential opportunities and, you know, things other than retail restaurant, can accomplish much of what I was hoping for of a a street that feels like some place I wanna walk along. And it so what my question here was if we offered that residential option to some of these empty pedestals that have sat that way since 2016, do you have any examples of cities coming back, changing the policy, and it influencing folks who made their bed building pencil for a decade with a bunch of ugly steel studs that we walk by every day?

That's a that's a good one. I don't know. So you're talking about existing. They it's built out as a retail shell and then later adapted to a live work or a residential space. Yeah. I don't know if I can think of examples of that. Typically, the live work is, like, purpose built live work. And but that's something you know, I don't know. You it would be something worth looking into, for sure. I think the I don't know.

I I would have to think harder about that because it's tricky because, you know, something that was built for for, retail may not have the the windows in the back for bedrooms and and kind of the kinds of the needs that that you would have for livable space. But, so it might be a case by case kind of thing.

Absolutely. I just I guess what I'm saying is I would be open to doing whatever we could do to put some sort of activation into those 1st Floor pedestals because we just we have a lot of this recently built space, and it includes it it expands out of downtown where we were required in in new retail that faced main streets outside of downtown as well that never opened in their twenty years of sitting there. A door that never opened with a beautiful awning and a bench. You know? We could do better. Thank you very much for your work, and and I just I I'll just close by echoing that it would it would be a great moment to look again at the downtown strategy at a decade later. So appreciate you're giving us a push. Thank you.

Alright. Councilmember Green followed by councilmember Barron.

Thank you, mayor Payne. And councilmember Gillman, I I appreciate a lot of what you just said, and I I think thinking about the downtown plan, in light of the work that's already on our work plan around Plum Street and and all that's coming, I think, would be a really exciting time to to look at this all as a whole. Thank you all for this work. I've got a question and what I'm gonna call a manifestation because I don't have a question with it, but I just feel like there's an opportunity and I don't know the right path to it. So so the opportunity I feel like is the the parking garage question.

So there are two parking garages downtown, one that was built by a state agency and one that was built by a private business, both of which have drastically changed how they use those spaces since COVID. So I feel like there has to be an opportunity in there to say, are there ways we can collaborate with those folks to create some parking opportunities, even if it's for employees of businesses downtown, like maybe it's not wide open public, but how do we put those in the mix? Because I just have to feel like those are a lot of unused space in what is what I've always heard with thinking about parking garages downtown is how incredibly expensive it is to build per space. So if we already have them, I just would love for us to find a way to use them. So I've put it out in the world and surely it'll just happen.

I think that's how that works. But my question is, so you mentioned a couple of times, you know, high rents, expensive tenant improvements. Can you help me understand if I own a property downtown, and I have a a vacant retail space that's long term vacant, so I'm sitting on this for ten years and nobody has rented it, how why doesn't what's the calculation for me to say, I'm gonna keep rent at a level that people feel is too high or I'm not gonna do any tenant improvement? Like, I'm gonna do nothing to actively attract a tenant because like, what's the calculation that says, I'm fine with that space sitting empty?

Yeah. That's a it's a it's a tough one. I would say any rational landlord is is probably not looking at it exactly that way. They're they're not they would love to have that space revenue producing, filled with the tenant. I think the the major challenge I'll say one thing.

Sometimes, not in every building, sometimes there there are, like, loan covenants that won't where the bank won't let them lower the rent even at the expense of leaving it empty. That's not always the case, but some but that is a that is a reality, on some buildings. I think the the barrier that Jennifer outlined of the cost to to make those tenant improvements of of taking a a a bare, sometimes they don't even have, you know, a a floor, to fully plumbed outfitted restaurant is, it's so expensive that even, there's no amount of rent that a tenant can pay that can cover that cost at a rent at a lease term of, say, five years or less, which maybe an entrepreneurial startup would have the credit to to sign a lease on. And so it's that it's that conundrum, and I think that's where our our recommendations of looking at, you know, are there ways where, through loan programs or others that the city could maybe alleviate that capital cost of the tenant outfitting, the tenant improvement to allow either the lease term to be brought down to a shorter term or a, or the total cost of the of the tenant improvement and therefore the rent to be more affordable.

Yeah. It's a it's a conundrum, and we and we see it. And I think second secondarily would be sometimes those are not in, like like, awesome retail corners or locations. And so it's not only do you have, you know, what has to be very, very expensive retail space because it's a new building and all these costs that we outlined, but it's also it's not like a prime corner. And so, it further narrows, you know, who might be willing to go into that space.

But the motivations of a well, anyway, I'm beginning to ramble, but I don't know if you have anything else you wanna add, Jennifer. But, but that's where I would say finally to the the last thing, I guess, I would leave you with is, like, what are the motivations of that landlord? Why would they do that? That's kinda get also gets to that point of that, having that downtown not the ombudsman, but the downtown manager within the city within city hall that sort of doing that outreach property owner by property owner and understanding every because every situation is different. There's not a there's a lot of common threads that we see, but every every property owner situation is different depending on their loan or their, you know, their their family's investment or whatever.

It it's it it varies. And so having really getting down to individuals, talking to individuals, and finding out those stories and finding out what the right solution is for that particular situation is is honestly what it often will take.

Awesome. Thank you.

Alright. Councilmember Barrett.

Thank you, mayor. I, I I had just a couple of comments. One, I I voiced this at land use. It it it does seem that the 20 trips is a very low threshold to require the improvements that are that are needed. And I agree with councilman Yeoman.

Maybe some modification of how we approach street repairs. If if a if a street needs to be torn up for that that business, then they should be responsible for for for those improvements. But if not, the city could make an accommodation to lower that cost by just not not not not requiring a a new pavement necessarily. I also one thing I don't think we delved in in too much or I I didn't was this whole idea of live work. This is very intriguing to me, and I think it falls into a couple of buckets.

One is the retail that is vacant on, for instance, State Street, these buildings have been built, it's just a crime that this space is wasted when it could be used for housing. Then, oh, traditional more warehouse space that could be converted into lofts. And I just wanted to ask and I'm not sure this may be a better question for Jay or Tim, but or to the consultant. What are the barriers to that conversion? What what are the barriers to that we face to getting these spaces to be to allow these people to live in live and work in them.

Is there an ordinance that's required? What what would be the modification we would need to do that? This is just a question I have. And and I don't know, Jay. You may be a better person to answer this than the consultant, but I just wanted to ask that question.

Yeah. I'll give it a shot. I I I think when it comes to, like, vacant warehouse spaces, there's a there's a few things that come to mind. One is sprinkler systems. So we have requirements for sprinklers. And and if you're gonna convert to residential, then certainly the infrastructure to put sprinklers in, it can be quite costly, particularly in a in a big vacant warehouse space. And as you, again, convert that to residential, that's one of them. Two is just momentum. Right? So there is a lot of vacant space, particularly north of the transit center.

And if you can kind of get one of them started to redevelop, then it starts to pick up steam for others to start to get developed. The frontage improvements, some of those streets out there are in poorer condition than others. So as you start to pencil out change of use and then frontage improvements, which I think is why some of their suggestions are there. Because I think some of those frontage improvements what I mean what I heard through land use is maybe a one size fits all is not the approach we should be taking. We should really be looking at the situation of each individual street and then making a different decision based on street condition.

So I think there are just a number of things that the sprinklers, the the infrastructure, some of those buildings, the age of the buildings, some of the other, mechanical electrical systems are outdated and will need to be upgraded in order to residential in them. That adds costs that you don't see in buildings that are more up to speed. And then a lot of our electrification and some of those other goals are harder in older buildings. So that's just a sampling of some of the things that makes the warehouse space a little more difficult, not impossible, just a bit more difficult, and I think is worth some further exploration.

Hope that helped.

Thank you.

Alright. Additional comments from council? Alright. I I just wanna echo that I am supportive of revisiting our downtown strategy and taking a look based on the findings here and the recommendations here. I am also wondering along the discussion about our our parking garages, our private lots as well.

There's a number of times that we have events or maybe it's just a regular weekend in Downtown Olympia, and there's empty lots, and the the streets are filled with cars, and and we have a bunch of empty spaces that are privately owned. So that's something that I'm thinking of. I am curious, though. I have a question about business diversity. So how much of we have a lot of, great restaurants, great bars, great coffee shops, and they're all doing well.

But what about other types of business businesses? Does this play a factor at all in what we're experiencing with, specifically with, the, draw aspect, if you will? Do you notice a difference between us and other communities that maybe have other types of establishments in downtown?

I would say just from my perception, not necessarily from a data point of view, is that you're you have a very eclectic, well known as a local, you know, locals. I don't know if you have any chains here in a limp in downtown. That's actually fairly common nowadays when we look across a lot of downtowns of your peer cities. They also don't have many chains, maybe a Starbucks or some banks, but not not the kinds of things you'd see out by the freeway or anything like that. And that's actually, I think, your one of your strengths.

We're I think there's there's room for the diversity. So I would it's not to say don't allow those, but to say that you're what I what I think you've got is something worth playing up and that and strengthening and and making sure that you you don't lose that. Particularly the dining, the dining is you know, with the with I mean, it's talked about ad nauseam, but, you know, with online shopping and all of that, what is left are the experiential kinds of activities. And dining is dining and and nightlife or and and music and, you know, things that Olympia is known for for decades are your core strengths, and those are the things that are gonna, persist. And so I think, like, with the mix of businesses and things that I see in Downtown Olympia, looks really good to me, honestly, from an outsider's perspective.

And I think, but it's always fragile and needs, you know, t l some TLC and and attention Because as you can see, like, with the pandemic, you know, it doesn't take more than a couple months of bad news and things go south real fast. And so and it's very, and with some of these costs, things you know, the the tipping point of what makes something feasible versus not feasible is very, you know, it's very fragile.

And just to add to that, some of the feedback that we heard from the folks that we interviewed, we heard from one business owner who had a really good point, which is, you know, the best blocks are ones where you have, you know, maybe a bakery that's operating in the morning and then a shop that's operating through the day and then a bar at night so that it's always activated. But as the city, you can't really, like, plunk the businesses you want in the spaces you want. Right? So as Chris said, it's a lot of it is about, you know, playing up what you have and and trying to find opportunities to bring more people downtown and and create that welcoming environment for new kinds of businesses. And, also, we did hear from some folks that, you know, it would be great to be able to buy a pair of jeans downtown.

So, you know, there there are definitely things that the community wants downtown that don't exist right now, and those are those are opportunities to fill.

Mhmm. And I guess just like to close the kinda to her point of you can't you know, it's not the city's role to to tenant individual spaces. The kind of the the free market and your and your small business entrepreneurs are the ones that do that, but the city's role is to create the the playing field and the environment that that small businesses can thrive in and be successful in. And it's you know, there's a lot of hurdles economically about operating in older buildings or, in complicated environments and, compared to, say, you know, just plugging into a strip mall in Lacey or something like that. And so we wanna try and remove those barriers and make this the easiest place to do business and be welcoming to entrepreneurs.

And that's really what a lot of these ideas speak to is, kind of get get as much of that in order as you can and, draw in the the private business owners that and others who will do the activation for you in a way.

Okay. Thank you. Yeah. When I think about those experiential type businesses and then I think of those long, those empty, spaces that you were talking about that go way back, I'm like, it would be awesome to get, like, a mini ature golf, you know, thing or something Oh, yeah. For people. So if you're in that business

There's several in Portland. They're indoor mini golf that do exactly that old warehouse spaces. Yeah.

I, I was thinking also about the what you were saying about, just the your various recommendations and, how we prioritize those. So when I when I look at your recommendations, I see some that we could do in the short term and some that are a little bit more longer term or or more like, it's gonna be a a minute. Right? And so I am happy to have a a discussion with with our my council mates on that on what we think is are things that we want to do that are we could do sooner rather than later. And we're entering halfway through our year, so maybe that's a discussion as we go into next year about what that looks like.

But I certainly wanna have it. I appreciate the recommendations. I don't think I'm surprised, by any of them. I think they just kinda confirm what we know. And but I do have one last question, and that's about the ombudsman. So other than it being, Jenica's other duties as assigned, how how is it different from, her role in the way that you're recommending it?

It may not be that much different than than that. I think in in some cities, it's more of a kind of an information broker. In other communities, it it can be more of a fixer, kind of a a political, operative to to break down, you know, when there might be barriers in at the administrative level. I'm not presuming one way or the other that that's the case here. But, so sometimes that might be, and I I can't remember which ones.

But in some of those cases, you know, it's it's operated out of the mayor's office as opposed to out of planning or or another. It's kind of, like I said, it's, it needs to be the right fit for Olympia, and and we didn't get deep enough to to know, but, exactly what the right fit is. That would be something for further deliberation and discussion.

Okay. Thank you. And, also, thank you for, calling out in a report about, a vacancy tax not necessarily being an action that we need to take, right now because that was something we talked about in the past. And, there's a little bit of tax fatigue, so it's good not to see it in this list of recommendations. So, I think that's it.

Great. Well, thank you again. It's been a pleasure, working with you and getting to know your community.

Alright. Well, thanks so much. We appreciate it.

Have a

good night.

Have a good night. Alright. So that concludes, all of our business for tonight. So we're gonna move on to reports. I have just a brief mayor's report, and that is I'll I'll start with the fact that I've been appointed as a cochair to the social services work group for the South Sound Military Communities Partnership.

So this is a work group tasked with all of the social service needs of military families. One of the first things we're doing right now is looking at a one stop shop resources website for military families. There's so many resources, some vetted, some not, that service members in their families are referred to and are sort of kinda, like, scattered all over. And when you're new to this area, you have no idea how to navigate it all. And so, if you have, organizations, that are, you know, maybe, that you would like me to either know about or, or anything like that at all, that'd be great.

If you could send that along to me so that it could be added to a list of organizations so that we can list them on the website. Of course, they'll be vetted, but pleased to do that. I attended the diversity, equity, and inclusion and belonging summit, this weekend, and gave a a report out on all of the equity work that we do here at the city of Olympia. I tried to capture it in about ten minutes of speaking or so. And, obviously, we do so much of that work that I just kind of, you know, hit the the main points, but it was very well received.

And, of course, when I hear, the work that's happening, you know, with all the other jurisdictions, it's great to see them doing the work, but I'm proud of us for, going even beyond, you know, where we've been. And you can see where some of our neighbors are just starting out in that work, and it's it's great to see, but we're we're maturing for sure. And so I just wanna call out again our staff, who did such a great job. Kelly and Olivia and, Toby, who were all there, and, it was it was great to also lift them up in the work that they do, to support us in our equity work as well, and Susan for our youth council. And then lastly, I just wanted to, just cover the opioid abatement council's request for proposal process, so just so you kinda have an idea.

So, once, the RFP, closes and we get applet applicants, there'll be, designees that are determined by the county that will, use a scoring matrix, to determine gets recommended to the opioid abatement council. And once we have reviewed it, we'll refer it over to the board of county commissioners, and, and they will, approve it. So that's the process. Yes. You have a question? Oh, okay. Alright. And that's my report. Any questions? Alright. Seeing none, I'm gonna start to my, left with council member Barron.

Thank you. Thank you, mayor. No report to give. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember Green. Thank you, mayor. I also have no report. Mayor Pro Tem Nguyen.

No reports.

Councilmember Gellman. So help out your letter carrier, stamp out hunger, get your food bag out hanging on your mailbox on Saturday. Nothing further to report.

I have a few items. Of course. So on Friday, it was May Day. For everyone who celebrates May, I, you know, I got a chance to speak on the history of labor, but also labor in policy work as something that is universally important in most of the developed world as a part of the economy, but is often not included, something that is as normal as public works and parks, and there is no economy without the working class, and so this is something that I will continue to push as not just not as just as important as talking to our small businesses. I also, on Saturday, rode the the last ride for the 41 with customer Gilman.

You know, it's been a long longer that route has been a long longer than interstate transit existed. It actually was a part of a system of three different transit agencies at one point way back in the before the eighties, which proves the, that regionalization can happen. And, it does and sometimes it works so well that no one remembers that there were three agencies before. Anyway, no one remembers. That's why it was so good.

Not off top of my head. So, and as we've mentioned before, Clark and I spoke with the folks with cc and on housing policy. This is gonna be an ongoing conversation. They're gonna meet again. But it was nice to some folks brought some of the code with them, and we sat down and looked at some of the code. We had a little bit of a thinking session about it. In fact, was almost a two hour meeting talking about what can happen and, you know, what standards we have. I think it's a good start. They're gonna meet again. I told them that, you know, that keep working on the issue and trying to trying to problem solve.

I also recommend folks also meet with them. It's nice to see that we're not just thinking about one individual. We're thinking about the whole community.

So that's it. That's my report.

Alright. Questions and comments for council member Vanderpool, mayor pro tem Nguyen?

Yeah. I'm, so it's more so a comment. I'm glad to hear that, you and council member Gilman were able to to meet with some of our public commenters. And I, like the mayor had shared earlier, am interested in learning about what you all learned. I I hear you, council member Vanderpool. It's something that you you, know, constantly say. I mean, I think you probably have like 10 people that you want me to meet with every time I talk to you. And I love that spirit. I really do. And it's something that I've been it's not really a you thing.

It's just something that I've been thinking about a lot lately as more things are getting scheduled, is that every single one of us meets with a lot of different people. And I really appreciate that there are seven of us, and I think that we can triage a little bit. It's not as if people necessarily need to lobby each one of us on every single issue. I think that we you know, spread things out and help the workload. And so, you know, I can think of a couple of people that I'm about to meet with that I know met with every single council member already.

And I just think, All right, I'm not going to go to lunch with my dad till I can have another meeting. So I just, you know, and I just say that it's just something that I've been thinking about. And so I'm telling my council mates while I'm doing council reports. So, we're all meeting with a lot of people, and we're all really busy, and we can all help each other out a little bit. Thank you, and thank you for meeting with people.

Thank you for that. Alright. Councilmember Madron. No reports. Good night. Nice. City manager, Bernie. No report. Thank you. Awesome. Alright. Well, with no further business before the Olympia City Council, we're adjourned.