City Council - Regular Meeting

Thank you. The Puyallup City Council meeting for June 2nd is called to order.

We are having a little bit of technical difficulties, and I'd like to turn a couple of moments over to our city manager to explain what's going on.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Just wanted for the audience out in watching online, we are having a challenge with our YouTube channel. And so you can watch it, the meeting on PCTV through our website. So that is available. It's just our YouTube channel is not available. So we're working on that. The meeting's being recorded. You can go to our website and just click watch meeting on PCTV and watch the meeting. It's just not the YouTube channel at this point. So thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Okay. Will the audience please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance?

of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. Will the city clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Smolko?

She is delayed and should be here shortly.

Councilmember Adler?

Present.

Councilmember Castremont? Present. Council Member King? Present. Council Member Gilliam?

Present.

Deputy Mayor Johnson? Present. Mayor Whitting?

Present. And given that we are a week and a day past Memorial Day, I just would like to take a moment at this first meeting after that momentous day to remember the people that have given their lives in our service and I'd like to just take a moment of silence. Thank you. I always want to be sure that we take the moments to remember those that have provided this service for us. And just as a matter of note, in World War II, we lost 100,000 Americans in that war. And in World War II, we lost over 400,000 citizens. But the worst war of all in terms of American casualties was the Civil War, where Citizens fought citizens, and brothers fought brothers. And in this day of polarization, I just hope and pray that we find our common interests in all that we do and work together to find good solutions that serve all of our citizens. And that's my hope and prayer, and I thank you for indulging me in that. Moving on, we've got an agenda to approve. Do I have a motion to approve the agenda?

So moved.

Second. All those in favor? Aye. Motion passes. We now have some minutes to consider the approval of the minutes of the March 24, 2026 minutes.

Move approval.

Second. All in favor? Aye. Motion passes. Approval of the March 31st, 2026 study session minutes.

Move approval.

Second. All in favor? Aye. Motion passes. Approval of the April 14th, 2026 minutes.

Move approval.

Second. All those in favor? Aye. Motion passes. This brings us to our citizen comments. I will... Yield some time to the city clerk to outline the rules by which we govern these citizen comments.

This part of the meeting is for general citizen comments. Please reserve any public hearing testimony to that section of the agenda. The mayor will call on those who provided their names in advance. Then the mayor will call for other citizens who wish to speak. For the record, please state your name and address or city council district in which you reside. Please direct your comments to the council as a whole, not individual council members. All comments are limited to three minutes. The clerk will provide verbal notice when only 30 seconds remain. As a reminder, this portion of the meeting is council's opportunity to hear from the community and not a time to engage in debate. Lastly, per state law, this public comment period cannot be used to speak in support of or in opposition to a ballot measure or individual candidacy, and no such comments will be allowed.

Thank you. Our first citizen's comments will come from Paul Wicklander from District 1.

Mayor, council, members, I'm just reading a public statement regarding a petition that we turned in Monday morning. So I'm here tonight speaking on behalf of an 80.8% supermajority consensus of 21 out of 26 affected property owners across the eight-block corridor from 15th Avenue Southwest to 23rd Avenue Southwest. Our goal this evening is entirely constructive. We want to bring a clear physical infrastructure reality to your attention so the city's mapping database can accurately reflect the ground truth. This specific eight block corridor is not an open natural stream channel. It has no natural headwaters at 23rd Avenue Southwest, and it dead-ends directly into a municipal pipe network at 15th Avenue Southwest. Miles Penk, a habitat biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, explicitly confirmed this engineering reality in writing, stating, and I quote, Appears at some point in the past it was disconnected from its historic channel near 15th Avenue Southwest, routing north to 10th Avenue Southwest and piped, end quote. This quarter-mile municipal pipe stretch discharges straight into Meeker Ditch, confirming this channel functions strictly as a disconnected stormwater conveyance for regional street runoff. City utility crews are already aware of these unique physical constraints. Public Works recently sent a mapping technician out to trace this 200 feet of subterranean pipe north of 17th Avenue. The technician's field gear unfortunately became permanently stuck at the 17th Avenue culvert outfall due to the aging, collapsing condition of the subterranean pipe system. When the state's own habitat biologists, the city's stuck maintenance equipment, and your active utility maps all confirm an artificially piped infrastructure system, applying a rigid standard of 100-foot natural stream buffer over our neighborhood's lawns becomes a simple data mismatch. It inadvertently restricts the regulatory flexibility of your own utility crews needed to clear the infrastructure, bottlenecks, and cause high-volume hydraulic surges in our private land. Our request is simple. Please defer the final map adoption for this specific eight-block corridor. Instruct staff to run a routine... energy audit to reconcile the digital map layers and apply the CAO's built-in functional disconnect rule to drop this artificial surface buffer to zero feet. This clean administrative adjustment perfectly protects both public works ability to maintain assets.

Mr. Mayor, the speaker has reached three minutes.

Thank you for that. Appreciate. Our next speaker will be Andy Anderson.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the council. Andy Anderson, District 2, with a battlefield update from 1776. The military situation remains unchanged. The Continental Army is in New York and the British are in Canada. Politically, however, there have been some breakthroughs. On April 12th, 1776, the Provincial Congress of North Carolina unanimously approved a resolution allowing for the state's delegates to the Second Continental Congress to vote for independence from Britain. This is known as the Halifax Resolves and is the first official act by any colony to do this. On the 15th of May, the Fifth Virginia Convention in Williamsburg unanimously passed crucial resolutions instructing their delegates to the Continental Congress to propose that the United Colonies declare independence from Great Britain. On June 11th, Congress agreed to appoint a committee of five to draft a statement to outline the reasons for the colonies seceding from the British Empire. And between the 11th and the 28th, they worked on that. And the document was presented to the Congress on June 28th. And we will read it together on July 4th. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Thank you. As an alumnus of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, that strikes close to home. Thank you. Next, we'll hear from Jim Jenkins.

Good evening, board members and Mr. Mayor. My name is Jim Jenkins. I live in District 1. I'm going to put my glasses on. I don't like fuzzy words and I don't like fuzzy food. I'm speaking on the 7th Street closure. I live a block and a half from Puyallup High School. I've driven 7th Street for over 40 years. 7th Street is one of the routes, one of the three routes on this side of town connecting Pioneer to River Road. It's used by local residents, commuters, students, emergency vehicles, and is actually a Lahar evacuation feeder route. I'm for student safety. I'm not for a permanent closure of 7th Street. I worked campus security at Puyallup High School for almost nine years. I saw the crossing problem daily. I know the district caused the problem, and they can fix it, but they choose not to. They don't need 7th Street to fix the problem they caused. The district had a previous plan that could have gotten the fix right. Their new plan solves the crossing problem, the very problem that we're talking about. They fix it. However, it adds a new problem that makes it less safe for students. It's less safe. The council needs to know and understand all these plans and options. If you don't know them, you cannot vote for this. If you do know the plans and options, then you cannot vote for this. You must know what you are really voting for, and it's not what people think. We'll never get our road back. The council cannot make the district do what's safer. You can only enable the district to do what's less safe. And you will do so at the expense of the greater community. Also, giving up all of 7th Street to 3rd Avenue will only push more traffic into the community and promote a bottleneck on 3rd Avenue. In the meantime, reopen 7th Street during the summer. It should take about an hour. There's no need to keep it closed, and you need to get on that because school closes in three weeks. I see there's a four-way stop put at 2nd Avenue and 8th Street. That was a good move. Let's put some stop lines to define the intersection. So the car that almost hit my wife a couple days ago probably wouldn't have done that.

30 seconds.

Okay. Okay, for those lines. And then maybe some speed humps on 2nd. Put in a new entrance to the big student lot halfway up the street. This will keep students from having to use 2nd Avenue or even 3rd Avenue. Remove all the parking on the west side of 7th, which is the parking lot side. That's for line of sight and for greater maneuvering. Take out the parking spots on 7th and improve that crossing. Also, cut the trees away from the stop sign. You got a suggestion about having a community council district meetings about this? I'll volunteer to help. I know some of the people from the school district and they're good people.

Jim, your time is up. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Next we'll hear from Valerie Dent.

Valerie Dent, District 2. By law, the flagpole memorial on SR 161 will be owned by the state once in place, and the state will be responsible for the maintenance, flag replacement, and any public access. This means we are paying for a state-controlled memorial, and pretty much that is all the plaque will say. This flag pole was donated and dedicated by the city of Puyallup to the state of Washington for the 250th anniversary of these United States. The state is doing the design, the construction, and the installation. We're paying for their time and material. There was a question raised as to where the access point would be. This was deferred with, we are still talking to the state. What was meant was there will be road sign markers similar to don't drink, don't drive. I find that the stripping of the funds from the Tier 3 projects unacceptable for this funding. There was a council member who's insulted other council members with claims of unpatriotic actions, but also the veterans and their supporters who were here, including my husband, a retired army sergeant. I had asked the city to go back to the drawing board and give us the full information and get more public support. You ignored that advice, claimed that a small part of us were unpatriotic. How dare you? I have supported the military, the men, women, and children who have died helping on a battlefield next to a soldier. The medical care given by men, women, and children to uniform personnel while bombs are dropping around them on a field, either here at home or abroad. These are provable facts. I have fully supported the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I have fully held these ideals, and I carry them with honor. The objections were never political. They were never anti-patriotic. We never put them there in our objections.

Thirty seconds.

You did. If this is how the currently seated council is going to continue to operate in the future, you will need to rethink that. I will be reviewing all future fundings, projects. especially those that are shadowy in being pushed. As General Christopher Gadsden once said, don't tread on me.

Mr. Mayor, speakers reach three minutes.

Thank you. Ms. Figueroa.

Good evening, Mayor, Deputy, and Council Members. My name is Maria Figueroa. I represent FEMA Governmental Affairs, a point of contact for this county. I am here to remind those who were impacted by the December floods that they have until June 10 to register for assistance with FEMA. If your home was impacted, you might apply. If you are a renter and you lost your personal effects, you can apply. If you're already repaired, you can seek reimbursement through applying. The method to apply is you call the helpline 800-621-3362. You go online to www.fema.gov or you download the FEMA app. Again, the last day to apply is June 10. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Figueroa. Have we disseminate that information to the people that were impacted? Thank you. I appreciate it. Our next speaker will be Andrew Lynn Esquerdo.

Good evening. Council members. My name is Angelina scared. Oh, I'm from Pierce County District too. I'll be talking about abortion rights. So in our state of Washington, abortions are legal and our rights to an abortion supposed to be protected to a woman, according to Washington State Department of Health. A woman does not even have to be a resident in order to qualify for one. Even state-regulated health insurance plans and Apple Health, aka Medicaid, are required to cover abortion services. There's also no age requirement as there is a legal right to end a pregnancy without parental permission. But there still seems to be one small detail that I have seen and heard that doctors and other medical professionals have overused. That is a refusal of participating in medical assistance for this specific women's health procedure by simply stating no. even though it is legal and there is a noticeable emergency affecting the quality of life of the woman, and even including the case of rape and incest, which can still be deemed as approved by God in the General Handbook, serving in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other different faith traditions. In the case of the conscious causes of moral or religious objections, shouldn't there be a direct referral or transfer to another doctor in the facility or elsewhere to prevent a dead end? This can work well for the other excuses of institutional restrictions and state scope of practice laws also. This leaves a lingering question of why do we have these restrictions at all if we, the people, have the right to an abortion where it is legal, aligned with the law? Not only I do not understand this, but friends, family members, and others share the same gripe when there are so many states in our country that have the necessary and life-saving practice banned completely, inaccessible to all. Good Samaritan Hospital has been known to reject doing abortions in the recent years, along with at least nine other hospitals and emergency rooms within our state of Washington. Can there please be an expansion of access since abortions are illegal? Perhaps an insert of an amendment that helps bypass these preferential barriers to our rights to help prevent dishonesty, influences of human traffickers who encourage the denial of this procedure to targeted victims and other sexist, racist, or discriminatory behaviors from interfering with the livelihood of pregnant women, Please consider this call for action to provide adequate and justifiable admittance to women's health care. Thank you.

Thank you. Lee, you're up next.

Lee Van Pevenage, 203 6th Avenue NW, Puyallup, Washington. I'd like to address the Council and the Mayor about the condition at Woodbine Cemetery. When Bruce retired about 18 months ago, the cemetery was always wonderful, always beautiful. But since that time, there's been excuse after excuse as to why it's not happening. And if you haven't been up there recently, I suggest you go. I went on Sunday right before Memorial Day.

It looked like hell.

there's weeds growing, and they can have all the excuses they want. One time they said, well, we have a lot of funerals. I'm sorry, they had a lot of funerals when Bruce was there. Or we can't get the help. Well, we've got to get the help. I've talked to Bill a number of times, who I understand is the head of the park system. Last time I talked to him, he laughed. And what he said was, well, overtime is down, and we're not using as much water. I says, yeah, and the cemetery looks like it. You go up there, go to Founders Circle up at the top, My parents are buried there. My grandparents are buried there. And I'm ashamed of how it looks. I take flowers up there to my wife. There's about 22 of my relatives up there. And I think, again, if you haven't been up there recently, go take a look. Oh, they keep the new part looking pretty good. But they're just not caring enough for the cemetery. Again, I've been going there since I was four years old with my mom. And I've never seen it look this bad. Never. So I don't know what influenced the city council or the mayor has on it. I have brought some pictures. There are dates on it. And I'd like to offer them to the mayor and the council to take a look at. Something needs to be done because it isn't getting better. It's getting worse. 18 months of getting worse. Thank you.

Thank you, Lee. And just pass those pictures along to the city manager. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Penny Thorpe.

Good evening, members of the City Council and Mayor. My name is Penny Thorpe, District 3. All of you have either had or have teenagers or you have been a teenager or you work with teenagers. I have a story. My daughter about 20 years ago wanted some jeans that her friend, whose mom was on Section 8 housing, bought. $100 jeans she expected me Because if I loved her as much as this mother loved her child I would certainly buy her $100 jeans and I said no it's not in the budget and On May 5th, people insinuated that we did not love our country if we were interested in the budget. And that was inappropriate. This behavior needs to stop. We are all caring about our community and our country, and that needs to be honored. Thank you.

Kim Field.

Y'all get so nervous when I walk up here. Trust me, this is good. Good evening, council members. My name is Kim Field. I am the executive director of All Things Fun Sports. Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of Global Running Day. a worldwide celebration of health, wellness, and community through movement. Over the past several years, ATFS has worked hard to help put the city of Puyallup on the map as a destination for running and walking events. We have welcomed thousands of participants to our community, introduced visitors to our local businesses, and showcased everything that makes Puyallup great. With that in mind, I would like to suggest that next year that we make a proclamation of June being Running and Walking Month, promoting healthy lifestyles, community engagement, and supporting our parks and our trail system. I also want to share about our Explore Puyallup event that was held this past Sunday. Our town was vibrant with runners and walkers trying to figure out What clues I came up with and where to find them. Our local new businesses, the coffee shop, what is it, Rainier View or Rainier Valley? They saw a bunch of our runners in there. Fire Mine Brewing, again, rocked it. So these races that I bring forward. bring an awareness to this community that nobody else sees. We have put Puyallup on the map as a running and walking community. So what I am standing here before you today as, so I want to talk to you guys about the Daffodil Classic 5k challenge. For those of you that are unaware of what this is or unfamiliar, it's a 5k in every city before the Daffodil parade. This has precedence. And up until COVID, we had permits issued in every community, including Puyallup. This will bring heritage back to the Puyallup Festival. Talk about my father drove the Queen's Loop, just so you know. So I go back. I'm a Puyallup Viking. I am daffodil through and through. And I will tell you, we are losing that tradition. We just throw a parade on. Oh, look, it's the daffodil parade. Da, da, da, da, da. Now let's bring over 300 people running through our city before the parade, having them see what we are, showcasing that Puyallup is still the Daffodil capital. I thank you. I am willing to sit down with you. As council members, as city officials, chief of police, and, of course, our community stakeholders, April 3rd is not that long, and I do need to get it going if we're going to bring it back in style. I thank you for your consideration and your time, and most of you know how to get a hold of me. Thank you.

Thank you, Kim. Our next speaker will be John Hopkins.

Uh oh.

John Hopkins District 1, under threat of violence, I have to back up what she said. But Kim's absolutely right. We are a running community. Note the shirt. You might wonder what we're doing this weekend on Saturday. Well, some of you won't be wondering because some of you will be running, including the fastest man in Puyallup. Where's Eric? He's back here somewhere. There he is. He took the crown from our city manager. But we also have the director of parks. So thank you for your support of the event. It's a huge event. We are now back to 2,000 runners. They will be coming through at the East Meeker Trailhead at the edge of town by Farm 12. Really, they should be running through the park and going through where that Roger Knutson did the blockage there, illegally in my opinion. We should be hitting the River Walk at that point, but we'll get there someday. I know that. Then they'll go through up until Veterans Park, where they'll hit the streets for a little bit. Thank you for working on that link. I know we'll get there on that one, too. From there, they'll continue to Fred Myers. the back of Fred Myers. And that one's pretty exciting because that is going to be where the link is to the, here's where I butchered the name, the Spualipabs Trail. Totally butchered it. I know it. A better way of putting it is the Puyallup to Tacoma link. That's something that is being paid for. It's WSDOT is doing it right now. Should be done 2030, I believe. I'm not sure if they're doing it in stages, but it's going to be absolutely gorgeous. And there will be a link spot. And we need to emphasize that. You know, there will be signage, gorgeous landscaping, nothing but our tax dollars at work. You know what I mean? It's going to be first class. Maybe we put some artwork there. We need to make a big deal out of that because when you add all these things together, the link to the rails to trail up to the mountain and you throw the link in to Tacoma, we're really right at the middle of all this stuff, not even mentioning the interurban. Thank you for your support in all these matters. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you. Bob Storcik?

Stancic. Stancic? Stancic. Hi, it's great being here. Puyallup is a wonderful town. You have a lot of retired people. I'm one of them. I've been in the community now about 46 years. I own a couple acres above WSU up on the hill, my own little private park. But about five days a week, I walk in what used to be the watershed historically forever. I don't know when it got changed to Clark's Park, but it's not a park. It's a very rugged three canyons up and down. But I've been looking into this for 35 years because I talked to the water department and people in the city over the years. And this goes way back. I've raised my kids and grandkids. And the property is being ruined because of COVID, because of the motorcycles, the electric bikes. I contacted the state and fishery people. I've gotten to know them real well the last seven years. I made hundreds of phone calls. Jesse Reeves, Region 6 Water Access Manager, Wildlife Program. And so I just wrote up a quick thing. I gave those guys a plan and a mitigation plan. I did that for a living for 20 years for the power company. As a utility arborist, we covered seven dams in five counties and homes. So I've never seen a piece of property like that. It's better than Mount Rainier. But the only people that use it are the people that live around there. But I've become very concerned. I've been hiking in there for 40 years. And so I'd like the original name restored to Clark Creek's watershed. There's a lot of springs. There's a lot of water there. There's three sets of springs. The water's two foot under the table right at the cemetery. My wife ran the cemetery. She just retired. The gun range, motorcycles, electric bikes. I had pushed away the big animals and compacted most of the loop to slick rocks and exposed roots and mud. It's very hard for seniors and children to walk the trails. For 60 years, the loop was narrow foot trails, no rocks, roots, or mud. The 300-acre watershed is used by local homeowners nearby with no rules for 80 years. Jesse Reeves, the guy from the state, it was never assigned from 1946. There's been no rules on that property. Thirty-five years ago, I tried to figure out. I was concerned about it because they were talking about putting a 15-foot sidewalk down in the fish hatchery.

Thirty seconds.

And... So the local homeowners, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, Jesse Reeves, Region 6 Access Manager, the land got lost in the paperwork in 46. The watershed's an extraordinary rug of 300 acres of steep ravines, springs, giant trees, and creeks. It's like dropping back in time. It's beautiful. It will become a water problem in the near future at that point, an endless money pit for the city of Puyallup. All the cities around have increasing costs from not managing their watersheds. We're talking tens of millions of dollars. And you know something, I just want you to be aware of it because I know all the people involved with the city, with the state, and they're good people. They've just never been aware of it. But no rules. That property is going to be destroyed. And if we lose control of that water, there was only six trails in there. There's 100 in there now. Because the motorcycles, the bikes, and the people try to get away from each other. It's gone crazy since COVID.

Thank you, Bob. Appreciate it. I have to cut people off a little bit.

Sorry about that.

Richard Casmian.

Good evening, my name is Richard Cashmere, 12909 130th Avenue Court East. I'd like to address the situation at Woodland Park. Woodland Park was established in 1895, and there's some pretty famous people that are buried there, including Ezra Meeker, our first Governor Rogers. And there's names we all recognize, such as Stewart and Sparks, that are buried there. My family immigrated to Puyallup 100 years ago from Europe with stops in Kansas for 20 years. Our roots run deep in the community. Over the years, extended family members have owned seven businesses and at least 12 others have worked in Puyallup businesses. I worked at Schmitz Pharmacy in the late 1950s while a junior and senior in high school. I have almost two dozen relatives buried at Woodbine, including my wife. I also have relatives buried in Sumner and Tacoma. When a family chooses to bury a loved one at Woodbine or anywhere, there's an implied understanding or expectation that the grounds will be continuously maintained. As I drive around Puyallup, I see the parks are meticulously maintained, the flowering baskets that are hanging on the major streets. It's my understanding, I heard tonight, The cemetery comes under the preview as part of the Parks Department. So it's puzzling to me why the Parks Department can take care of the parks but not the cemetery. The east section facing Fifth Street and the section near the cemetery shop have been maintained the best. This is probably due to most of the recent burials have been made in those areas. Also, there are very few headstones in those areas, and it makes it far easier to sit on them more to mow the lawn rather than weed whack around headstones. I invite you to visit the cemeteries in Tacoma and Sumner. These cemeteries also have headstones. They have been maintained meticulously. The conditioning of woodbine in the last 18 months has been a disgrace and actually somewhat disrespecting. So I hope you listen to what I've said today. It makes some sense.

Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker will be Kathleen McLeod.

Kathleen McLeod, District 3. Mr. Mayor and council members, the theme of tonight seems to be legacy. A positive, memorable legacy is based on two things. First, what you've done. Former Mayor Murray Murdoch is a good example. Second, how you did it. Who's shaping up to be the legacy leaders of this city council has many constituents concerned. The current council appears to be composed of a square team of four and a triangle team of three. This results in proposals being passed by those that sit in the square seats. Let's think of them as a consensus club. Now let's consider how they pass their proposals. Example, add change to documents like a draft from the Planning Commission mere hours before a scheduled vote. Another example, proposed to spend three tier dollars on a Texas car dealership sized flagpole in the middle of a freeway. How did they do it? Did they present this proposal at a city council meeting with the intent of seeking constituent feedback or input? Into the source of the funding and other ideas or concerns? No. In fact, what they did was prepare contracts in collaboration with WisDOT, everything that needed to be in place to ensure that as soon as the consensus club voted yes, the proposal would pass and work would begin. This is why citizens of Puyallup believe they have no voice in this government. This is why they do not trust the city council to work collaboratively. It would be easy just to take one side of the four square, just one line to move away and change the triangle into a square. Representative government, we all believe this council could be, would then exist. Your legacy will literally be determined by how you align. Thank you.

Mike Craven.

Mr. Mayor and ladies and gentlemen, I've lived here for 30 years and I'm speaking about the proposed sign and the process. We want transparency. We want a real opportunity to be included in the process. Being advised after you have voted is not acceptable. we live here our patriotism is not in question a larger flag does not indicate greater patriotism there are better ways to spend our taxpayer dollars thank you bud metzger

Bud Metzger, District 3. Interesting meeting. Is Mr. Johnson going to return while I'm talking? I'd like him to listen. I'd hate him not hearing what I'm going to say. I hope he comes back. He seems to leave quite a bit. Now, I think we have kind of two major problems going on in the city. One is you guys are spending too much money. You spent millions of dollars on the arches. You spent millions of dollars on the new Fair Boulevard. You spent a lot of money on Meeker. You want to put up a flag. Our council member on the end over here, he wants to take the whole council back to Tennessee for a meeting with the city manager and the police chief. You're spending our money, you know, recklessly. We have District Tier 3 funds that need to be used for the city. By the way, I didn't even mention the police station, did I? So my point is this. You need to manage our money better because you're harming us and you're not looking at the needs that are going to happen to Puyallup. The kids from the Highlands are going to go to Shaw Road Elementary. How are they going to cross Shaw Road? Are you going to build a bridge? Or are you going to do that after the kid gets hit on Shaw Road because he jumps the crosswalk? Because you know sooner or later that's going to happen. It is super freaking dangerous along that roadway. And up to sixth grade, kids, you know, they're kids. They're going to see the stoplight, and they're going to try and hot dog it over the road, and someone's going to die. You guys need to think ahead, not argue about stupid things like the flag. It's about regular stuff. You know, it's like the sidewalk. It's good that we're working on the sidewalk in Seventh, but it's been a long time. We need to be proactive, not reactive. I already told you we're having enormous growth here. All around us. And if we don't deal with it proactively and wisely with our money, we're going to be inundated. It's going to be worse. As much as we all wouldn't want that. And the second issue I have with what the council needs to improve on is politeness to the community. I've heard it so many times. Council use derogatory terms, even though they say they like kids. A couple of the council members said they should call a policeman because a 19 year old was upset that you ignored him. I've never seen that in 25 years of coming to these meetings. It's wrong. It's wrong for the council to insinuate that everybody else isn't patriotic. He received $4,000 from the developer of the police station. Did he donate that money to the flag? I don't think so. So, thank you.

We have gotten through all of the citizens that have submitted their chit in advance. Is there anyone else in the audience that would like to speak?

Hello, I'm Samantha Miller. I'm from District 29. As the cost of living continues to rise, it is imperative that as a community we pull our resources together to help our neighbors. And this is why Indivisible Puyallup is hosting another community mutual aid event. It will be held Sunday, June 14th, 2026 from 2 to 6 p.m. outside the Sprinker Recreation Center in the park. At our community sharing closet, we will have clothes, shoes, hygiene products, non-perishable food, and additional resources, which are free to anyone who stops by. You can bring a donation of goods or just come find something you like. Hope to see you there.

Thank you.

Thank you. Any additional speakers? Can I make one comment? No. Sure, go ahead.

This is the best volunteer city that I've ever lived in, and I've been in all 39 counties. I had quite a professional before I retired. Anyway, the short... I can do, all of this stuff can be done for free. You've got 50% of your people volunteer, they're retired, they take care of the homeless, they feed the hungry.

I'm going to cut you off. They're great. You've had your three minutes, sir. Okay.

Sorry. Anyway, I want you to know it won't cost a penny. I gave a mitigation plan and a plan to the state, and we're going to start to work together. I just don't know where the process goes.

Any further speakers? With that, we will close our citizen comments and move on to our consent agenda. The consent agenda are items that are considered to be non-controversial and would pass by unanimous consent. Is there any item on our consent agenda that a council member would like to remove? Hearing nothing, do I hear a motion to approve the consent agenda? So moved.

Second.

All those in favor?

Aye.

Motion passes. We will now move on to item 4A, other business traffic calming presentation. We'll have a presentation by development engineer manager Ken Cook.

Great, thank you. Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. I'm Ken Cook, Development Engineering Manager. I have a presentation here this evening on the Pilot Proactive Traffic Calming Program. Our presentation this evening is a follow-up on direction received at the February 4th council retreat. This evening, we will start off with a brief history and then describe our draft proactive traffic calming proposal and touch on ballpark cost of typical traffic calming measures. Also, an important component of traffic calming is coordination and enforcement with our police department. So there are two slides near the end of the presentation with relevant statistics for our police department that Chief Engel will present, and then we will finish the presentation with an opportunity for questions. At the City Council retreat on February 4th, we presented a summary of our current traffic calming program. The existing program is initiated by residents and neighborhoods. Council direction was to create a proposal for a proactive traffic calming program, whereby the City would initiate, prioritize, and implement traffic calming measures. On one question that came up with the retreat, I would like to clarify that the average number of traffic-related questions received by our department, typically by email, phone calls, online questions, et cetera, is approximately 20 per year. Some of these inquiries are for locations that are not in the city or do not relate to traffic calming. We coordinate as needed to answer those questions and concerns and issues at hand. As we were working on this pilot proactive traffic calming program, we reached out to Pierce County Traffic Operations. We met with the county to discuss their rotational driver feedback sign program. This is a process where the county has been rotating locations of radar speed signs. It seems to work well, and we plan to incorporate a similar process into our program. This slide shows the radar speed signs. We presently already have four of these signs. Our police department has been using these as needed, but going forward, traffic engineering will be deploying them as a part of the proactive traffic calming program. They do serve as driver education and also collect speed data. The overall goal of the proactive traffic calming program is to improve safety. Specifically, this will be accomplished by reducing speeds, utilizing a consistent evaluation process for prioritization of locations for traffic calming, and proactively responding to citizen concerns. This slide gets into the details of our proposed pilot program. So we are proposing a two-phased approach. Phase one is data collection, education, and enforcement. Phase one has four steps. In the first step, we will deploy the radar speed signs for two weeks. For the first week of each deployment, the unit will be in stealth mode, which does not provide driver speed feedback and appears to be turned off. In this configuration, the unit will... record speed and volume data discreetly to more accurately represent normal conditions. For the second week, the unit will be switched to display mode and the speed will be visible to the driver. The purpose of this approach is to establish baseline conditions, evaluate any behavioral changes due to the speed sign itself, and provide public education and driver awareness of the actual speed. In the second step, traffic engineering staff will evaluate the speeds and volumes collected by the radar speed signs and determine if there's a speeding issue along the corridor. If an issue does exist, we will proceed to step three, which is enforcement. Traffic engineering will inform our police department on any specific time periods or durations where speeding issues are more prevalent. Enforcement is subject to police department availability. The expected duration is one to four weeks. Our step four is post enforcement evaluation. We will redeploy our radar speed sides for two weeks to assess effectiveness of the enforcement efforts. We will determine if speeds have decreased below threshold criteria and if the reduction is at least somewhat sustained after the enforcement effort. If speeds are still above thresholds, we would then proceed to phase two, which is physical placement of a traffic calming feature or project. Phase two is physical traffic calming measures. And step five is evaluation of the site and location to determine what would be the best traffic calming solution. For consistency, the same general thresholds as our current traffic calming policy would be used. Our step six is neighborhood outreach. The city would gather information and feedback on the proposed measures. These measures would include features such as speed humps, permanently installed radar speed signs, neighborhood traffic circles, raised sidewalks or curb bulb outs as pinch points, roadway striping or other features. And the final step is the installation of the traffic calming device. This would be funded using the neighborhood traffic calming budget. Our city capital engineering group will manage the delivery of the project. The project could be designed and installed in-house or by a contractor depending on the scope. So we've looked ahead and identified these nine potential locations on the slide. Essentially, these are relatively straight and flat neighborhood streets that, in coordination with our police department, do have a history of known speeding. Two of these locations, 7th Street Southeast and 27th Ave Southeast, are currently active traffic calming projects that we're working on right now. This slide is about funding. Our current traffic calming budget amount is $193,000. The table on the slide, it's a little bit small, but hope you can read it. It has average and ballpark cost of typical traffic calming features. The cost will depend on the location and exact scope of the project. We do not have striping in this list above, but that can also be a cost-effective traffic calming measure. So these next two slides have enforcement statistics from our police department. So I'm going to have Chief Ingle go over these next two slides.

Ken, before we lose you, Council Member Gilliam has a question. Sure.

Hi, Ken. Thank you. Yes. I just want to go back to the initial pilot study locations slide, if you don't mind. And I believe this slide shows some hotspots where we want to include some traffic calming. But I was curious if anybody from the city has thought about A lot of the reason why these are clogged up or people are speeding is because they're looking for alternative routes or they're trying to get somewhere quickly. Have we considered looking at expanding or creating more road options for people like through other, just spread it out a little bit so it's not so congested on these roads as part of the traffic calming measure?

We do that a lot called connectivity with new developments, and we look at those routes. Of course, this is sort of a – we're calling it a pilot project right now. We're going to be moving around with this program. So we'll start off with the signs and kind of determine with the speeds and the volumes what we have there. And so – The answer to your question, yes, we do look at connectivity and also construction project, things like sometimes long-term construction project or different routing can affect that. So that's an important point, and we can certainly look into it more.

Well, I just recognize we are a throughway city in some ways. key points in our city. And I'm just wondering if maybe as we can also add that to the plan of, hey, we recognize we're clogged. Let's create some more byways or pass through and just kind of spread it out a little bit more. So if you don't mind adding that to the idea and concept, that would be great.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Can do. Yep. We'll have time for more questions or we can go right now with questions, Mayor, whatever you'd prefer.

Let's go ahead and proceed. Okay.

Okay.

Chief Engel. Okay.

All right. I'll go back down to the, there you go, Chief.

Thank you.

Yep.

Mayor Wedding, members of the council, Scott Engel, Chief of Police. Before I get into our two slides, first, I just want to thank Traffic Engineering, Engineering, Developmental Services. We're lucky in the city of Puyallup to have a very good working relationship with Traffic Engineering and Developmental Services. Courtney Scheme and Ken's team. I think there's a lot of synergy, a lot of collaboration, and we have a lot of traffic, and it's not just an enforcement issue, so I'm grateful for those folks that work with us to sometimes solve the more challenging traffic issues that we face. So the first slide we're looking at is just some basic statistics. As we think about traffic calming, obviously the question becomes what is the police department doing? This slide on the left gives you just a very quick kind of down and dirty statistical look at our calls for service over the last two years. Very consistent. Traffic complaints have stayed very consistent. Traffic stops. We continue to be a department that encourages proactive enforcement from our police officers. And what we mean by that is when we're not answering a 911 call, we expect you to be doing something else. And that something else can be traffic enforcement. It can be walking in the downtown core. It can be getting out in parks. It can be doing things with community groups, but we do expect that you're doing something. We have lots of folks that do enjoy traffic enforcement. We know that's also one of the number one thing our telephone rings about at the police department, our traffic complaints and traffic concerns. It also gives you an idea of our citation enforcement information there, as well as our verbal warnings. And I would just note on the DUI numbers, those are incredible for a city our size. We arrest more DUIs in the city of Puyallup than some of the big cities of this state. And that's really a compliment to our police officers who are out there every day trying to protect the roads for everyone else. From my opinion, my view, one DUI arrest is a guaranteed one life saved. And then, of course, our red light citation program. As you know, we've had a red light program recently. for a long time now in the city of Puyallup. It's very effective for us, particularly in areas where traffic volumes are such that it would be very difficult for us to have an officer either on a motorcycle or in a police car actually try to do enforcement just simply from the logistics and the mechanics of trying to stop a violator in five o'clock traffic at River Road and North Meridian. It's just not an optimal thing. One other to the right of that slide is something that I thought you all would find interesting. Our complaints related to traffic, most traffic things have actually been trending down. What is trending up, and this is probably a surprise to no one in the room, is the complaints about reckless driving. That has continued to climb. It's climbing at a concerning rate. That's not just a Puyallup thing. It's across the state. If you look at some data provided by the Washington Traffic Safety Commission, we're not alone. The driving behavior of the general public is concerning, and that's something law enforcement is absolutely trying to focus on are those dangerous driving behaviors that move someone from maybe just speeding into a reckless driving category. And then finally, on the bottom, particularly up in District 3, to be candid with you, off-road vehicle complaints are a challenge for us right now. The county has some different rules than we have, and so sometimes there's some spillover to that, and we are definitely dealing with some off-road vehicle challenges up there. So as we look at traffic enforcement, the real question is what is PPD doing as it relates to traffic stops, traffic warnings, and traffic citations? This is a quick snapshot of a rather in-depth study we just did last year that we provided to the city manager. You know, I hear sometimes in community meetings, we want to be known as Fife or Furcrest. We want to write tickets. And so we said, OK, where do we stand? And so this is a good example over the last two and a half years of where Puyallup stands. I am very proud of our officers because we're ahead of anybody, frankly, in Pierce County for our traffic enforcement. We write more tickets. We give more warnings. We stop more cars. Bottom line, that is indisputable. And the city prosecutor's office feels that. As we take enforcement action, our officers do that because, again, we know that our neighborhoods are feeling the pinch of that cross your traffic. We know that folks are trying to cut through in many areas to avoid the 512, which if there's one thing the state could do for us, it would be to improve 512 and Canyon Road. So it would help half the city feel some relief from people cutting through. But again, the importance for traffic enforcement is that relates to traffic calming is when folks in engineering work. come up with the areas that they feel we need to go out and be in, we will be there and our officers will be available to, as the stats show, write tickets and give warnings. And with that, I'm going to turn it back over to Ken.

Ken, I'd just like to thank you for this work that you've accomplished. It shows some real response to our study session and I'm really encouraged to see what the the direction we're headed here. I think it'll be good for our city. What are you looking for from us tonight? It's just a general

thumbs up on the program and you'll move it forward yes exactly mayor uh thank you just just the kind of the the to wrap it up you know here in the questions and feedback slide we're seeking your feedback on our proposed approach for the implementing the proactive traffic calming program so the proposed major steps just as a quick recap placement of our radar speed signs evaluation of the data collected enforcement if necessary redeploying the radar speed signs to check if the speed significantly reduced after enforcement efforts, and then as needed, moving on to a traffic calming project. So with your approval, we can begin implementation. And the first step would be the placement of the radar speed signs, and it would be about 30 days or so before we could start, you know, putting those out in the mapped area. So that's pretty much it with my presentation. So take any more questions.

Yeah, thank you. And I'd like to view this as being a really important first step, but as we move forward on implementation, I'd hope that we'd be ready to take additional actions and so forth as the need arises. So I just wanted to make that comment. I'm wildly in support of this, but don't see this as being the destination, but maybe a an important first step. Certainly. Deputy Mayor Johnson.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Ken, could you go back a couple of slides where it talked about the graft, this reckless driving one there, one pass right there. Oh, sorry. Yeah, so that's great. And then maybe, Chief, I don't know, maybe you don't need to comment, but if you feel you need to, you can. But I want to make more of a statement. I find it ironic. It looks like in 2021 or whatever, there was a drop. I don't know what it was happening before in 2020 and so forth, but if we were to extend that graft back into 2020 and then, you know, 2019, 2018, was there a constant drop going on in reckless driving? And all of a sudden in 2022, we started climbing this way. Yeah. So, um, I find it kind of, um, uh, maybe coincidental, uh, maybe, uh, Not, but I was doing a little reminder. I think that the good intentions of the state legislature, which passed these police reform bills that basically did not empower officers to pursuit, created a culture where... Bad behavior knew that they couldn't be chased and therefore kind of created this new habit that says I want to flee. I remember hearing from an officer one time where there was some suspicious activity down by the fair. Police officer was called up and there were some. drug paraphernalia on the passenger seat, and the police officer came up to the car and asked a few questions. They're licensed and didn't have one, of course, and began to see some paraphernalia and began to try to crank the screws down. And as I understand it, because they knew that they were, in a sense, bound by this good intention law, basically, as I understand it, flipped the bird, started the car up and took off, knowing they couldn't chase them. I don't think it's a coincidence that when that happened, it created... Now, they've since changed some of that, so they've improved that. But what happens is that over a series of several, two, three years... People begin to realize, get in this habit that I can drive recklessly and just outrun them and create some danger. Coming home from Seattle last week, I saw one of the worst, awful accidents on I-5 I've ever seen in my life. Multiple scores of over-teamed vehicles, I mean, on the ceiling of the car everywhere. And if somebody was driving reckless in DWI, it caused that kind of suffering for so many people. Fortunately, no one got seriously injured, but imagine the fear and the trauma of that. So I do not like reckless driving. If there's one thing that really tests my self-control, it's reckless driving. When I see that, my blood pressure and anger goes up at a level that is... probably off the charts. And so I think we need to curb reckless driving wherever we can and nip it quickly and, in a sense, retrain bad behavior that you're not going to get away with this anymore, which takes me to the next draft, if you want to go to the next one forwarding on that one. I want to thank, again, Puyallup for having the reputation that we do pull over and we do hold people accountable for, in essence, public safety. It's not a matter that we want to be mean. It's a matter of we want a place where our kids, our children, our families can live in a community where reckless and bad behavior is not acceptable. And I'm glad that we are one of the top ones. I hope that that continues to grow. and that we do continue to develop a reputation just as when I was a kid growing up in a fircrest. You never went over 25 miles an hour in a fircrest because you were going to get a ticket. And that was a healthy fear. And when I got out of a fircrest, I would probably step on it a little bit more, but going through a fircrest, I kept it at 25 miles. And I want people to recognize, hey, come to Puyallup, enjoy passing through, enjoy visiting here, enjoy, you know, living here. But let's not provide reckless driving habits that could jeopardize and harm. perhaps even injure or kill people. So it's a real testament and more of a comment that I believe we're on the right track now, but we just need to curb bad behaviors that have had several years to develop a response that needs to be brought back down again. So I hope that that graph that we saw, you know, pre-2021 that was diving in terms of reckless driving, we'll see once again that graph come down and we'll see less reckless driving if possible. Thank you for those comments that allowed, Mr. Mayor.

Council Member Gilliam.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I love your plan. I'm excited for it. I especially love the targeted areas where you're going to initiate and implement and go for it. I just want to go on the record saying I would also like to add to the plan infrastructure improvement to help spread the traffic out. Just throwing that out there. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Adler.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Certainly this is a top priority for this council and I am certain that my colleagues similar to I find that this issue is something that is the top of what we hear from our constituents and neighbors in the city. I have a couple questions and the first one is related to the radar displays. I just wanna make sure that I'm following accurately. So is the hope to what could potentially be deployed in the future pending results? Am I following correctly that there could be additional technology, or are we just going to take these four and we redistribute them throughout the city pending the data results?

It's kind of the second part of what you say. That will inform what to do next. And they get kind of shopworn. We learned that from the county that once you put them out there, people kind of, after a while, we're only going to put them out there for a couple of weeks and As I was explaining, when we first put them up, they'll be dark. So we've taken data, but people won't know that. So it's a little more discreet of how they're collecting the speed and the volume. And then we'll turn them on and we'll see if there's a problem there. And we think that there is because we've already coordinated with our PD. These are straight, flat roads that we just intuitively think that those ones are people with speed on. And so we'll take that data. We already have these four movable, and they're battery-powered, so they're pretty easy to put up and down. And then that will inform us kind of what to do next. We'll move from there to enforcement and then go on to there, as I was saying, in the program. That might inform speed humps. It could – this traffic circle. It depends kind of on the corridor that we're talking about because – Traffic calming as a definition isn't really like on an arterial road because you couldn't put a traffic circle on 9th Southwest or something like this. So it's kind of like your higher volume neighborhood streets that we're trying to focus this on at this point in time right now. But to your question, it's kind of like it's the first step and it's a dynamic thing because it's going to move around a little bit and wherever the priority would be.

Right. Okay. I just wanted to... Thank you. I just wanted to confirm that that is what I understood correctly. Exactly. You know, I think... I appreciate the program and particularly on phase two, step five, notating that if phase one measures do not sufficiently address the issue, the location may advance to phase two where physical traffic calming devices are evaluated. Evaluation criteria will be the existing traffic calming program criteria. I appreciate that because sometimes I grow frustrated that You know, we are hearing oftentimes in real time from individuals in communities and neighborhoods of what they see all day, every day at different points of the day that they happen to be home and petition goes out and then they don't meet the standard. that would trigger us to go through our internal processes to address the issue. I think I spoke about that at our retreat. And so I appreciate that phase two does call this out. And I would just underscore that I hope that there is a way that we will continue to reconcile data that doesn't always match with what we're hearing from neighborhoods and vice versa um if that exists so um thank you for including that bit and and also as well as step six which is neighborhood outreach I also appreciate the slide about funding. I recognize $193,000 is not a lot if we get serious about expanding traffic calming and all of those responses to that. I just will go on record and say that I would expect in the fall when we start having budget discussions that we look at ways to increase this budget if we want to be serious about traffic calming in this city. So I look forward to that. And finally, I think this gets to your point of what to do on major arterials. So I just want to preface by saying that. But in the fall, it was reported that Milton purchased and implemented automatic traffic enforcement cameras. And it's a lot of comparing apples to oranges here. So I want to be really clear about that. And I also want to, again, just preface that we're talking about major arterials, major roadways. This is different than what you have presented on. But to me, I think at the end of the day, it is all connected. And the reporting says that six cameras were placed. in the park area or the park close to Milton Way and the school zones on Milton Way. And the program went into effect on October 6, 2025, with a one-month warning period. And in the first nine days alone, the cameras recorded 1,500 violations. which that doesn't surprise me, sadly. So I'll just also say that I hope that we can get to a point in the very near term, particularly when we start talking budget about the purchasing and deployment of these cameras. And would that make sense for us? So maybe further down the road. You know, certainly this issue, this problem is not going anywhere anytime soon. The chief said it very well. And so I look forward to working with everyone and really drilling down on this and protecting our neighborhoods. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Council Member Kasten, I saw that you had your hand raised there for a while. Did you wish to address us?

Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Ken, I actually just want to clarify that the current traffic calming program will stay in place as is, and this is in addition to and in no way a replacement of, correct?

That's correct.

Okay, thank you. That's all I needed to clear up. Thank you.

Council Member King.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. A lot of my colleagues have already expressed a lot of my concerns, but I just wanted to say thank you for the presentation and thank you for the effort that you put into this and all the study work that has been going on. And keep doing good work. Keep doing good work. And thank you, Chief. Appreciate you.

Great. Thank you. Just to close out, how long do you expect to work on this before we get a follow-up report?

we can come back when you'd like me to come back well we want to have you come back when you've got something to report it'll be pretty quick mayor we can we already own these speeds these four speeds and these are not the the um the ones that write tickets right so there's kind of a different variation to that but but we can and they're also not hardwired in like a permanent one they're more like ones you move around but I think after we take a look at our nine sites, or actually seven and two, because two we're already looking at, maybe we get those two sites that we're looking at already, which was 27th and also 7th up on the hill. So to answer your question, probably five to six months, probably something like that might be a good time frame. Okay, thank you.

I believe that's it. Okay, I see Council Member King. I'll take care of it for you. Okay, thank you, Ken, and we look forward to that future report. Next, we'll go to ordinances, and this is a presentation about the battery energy storage systems, and we've got kind of an interesting procedure here tonight. So we will have our Development and Permitting Services Director, Courtney Brunel, give us a presentation.

Thank you, Mayor. Good evening, Mayor, Deputy Mayor, members of the Council. I'm Courtney Brunel, your Development and Permitting Services Director, here tonight to propose a moratorium on battery energy storage systems. The presentation tonight will provide an overview of what these best facilities are. I'm going to discuss some of the potential benefits associated with this technology and then explain why staff is recommending a moratorium at this time, as well as briefly review the proposed ordinance and conclude with next steps. Battery energy storage systems, as the ones pictured here, are systems that store electricity for future use. So similar to any type of rechargeable battery, they store excess electricity when it's available and then supply it back into the power grid when it's needed. Best facilities can range from small installations serving a single site to large utility-scale projects that support regional needs. And you can see two examples here. The top image would be that smaller-scale residential, or the bottom image is more of a commercial larger. Let's scale. Puget Sound Energy has indicated that battery energy storage systems play an important role in meeting future energy needs and maintaining grid reliability. Through recent discussions with PSE and neighboring jurisdictions, staff has learned that regional energy demand is expected to continue increasing. And additional energy storage capacity is going to be necessary in order to reduce the risk of future power shortages and service disruptions. Battery storage systems can help improve grid reliability, store excess energy from renewable sources such as solar and wind, and support long-term energy planning and clean energy goals. This is a relatively new technology and utilities all across the state are actively evaluating its use. At the same time, many communities are taking additional time to consider how these facilities should be located or how they should be regulated and where they may be most appropriate to locate. Tonight, staff is recommending a temporary moratorium because battery energy storage systems are not specifically addressed in our municipal code. A moratorium will provide a time for the staff to evaluate whether additional regulations are needed before considering future project applications. The moratorium would apply only to larger commercial and utility scale facilities and would not affect residential battery backup systems or rooftop solar installations. This would give the city time to research best practices, evaluate potential impacts and develop recommendations for future regulations. Approval of this moratorium would establish a temporary prohibition on new commercial and utility scale best facilities within the city, prevent acceptance or processing of new permit applications for those facilities during this moratorium period of one year, and allow staff to conduct research and develop recommendations regarding future situations. If the council adopts the moratorium proposed tonight, the next step is to hold a public hearing within the next 60 days. In addition, staff will begin a comprehensive review of battery energy storage systems and applicable regulations with the intention of returning to council before the end of the year with findings and recommendations in order to draft code prior to the expiration of the moratorium period. Tonight, staff is requesting council to make a motion in the form provided in the agenda bill to waive first reading, conduct second reading, and adopt the ordinance establishing the temporary moratorium. This concludes my presentation. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Deputy Mayor Johnson.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'd like to make a motion that we... Implement this moratorium and we waive the first reading going to the second reading. If I heard that correctly from staff and get this put into motion, unless council wants to do otherwise, that's my motion.

Do I hear a second? Second. Any council members desire to comment at this time? Council Member Gilliam.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just want to say I'm in full support of this, especially since I work at a junior high where there was a battery fire, and there's a lot of things that we're learning about and how to repair. So I think this is very wise of the city to do. It's very wise of our city staff to do research and find out how to protect our residents and, of course, our land, because it is very destructive if something were to go wrong. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Thank you.

I'll weigh in a little bit. This is obviously a concern after what happened at Ferrucci Junior High School. My understanding is the batteries there were lead acid batteries that went haywire. There are other battery technologies, lithium ion, and both the lead acid and the lithium ion have a propensity to overheat and cause runaway flames that are very difficult to put out. There is another technology called lithium-iron batteries, which are more stable, but they give off hydrogen, which is a potentially explosive gas. So I think there's a lot of study to be done here, and so I, too, support this moratorium. So we have a motion before us. Seeing no further comments, I will call the motion. All those in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Aye. Motion passes.

Mayor Whitting, we will need a roll call vote for this.

Yes.

Proceed. Council Member Adler?

Aye.

Deputy Mayor Johnson? Aye. Council Member King? Aye. Council Member Gilliam?

Aye.

Council Member Castemire? Aye. Council Member Smolko?

Aye.

Mayor Whitting? Aye.

Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. Thank you, Council. We'll now move on to Item 5B, first reading of an ordinance amending zoning of the Puyallup Municipal Code. Associate Planner Rachel Brand. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor, Deputy Mayor, members of the council. Rachel Brown with the Development and Permanent Services. So tonight I'm here to present a package of minor housekeeping amendments related to our phase one zoning updates. So this package of amendments is intended to implement policies that were previously adopted in our comprehensive plan updated earlier this year, as well as kind of the phase one of our zoning map amendments that we also did earlier this year. The Planning Commission has reviewed the proposal and is recommending approval of these minor code amendments with two modifications which I'll outline as we move through the presentation. So tonight's amendments include updating the zoning district list for consistency with our adopted zoning map, allowing certain auto-oriented uses in our RMX and CCX zones, allowing standalone multifamily development in our mixed-use zones, increasing residential density allowances in the RMX and UCX zones, increasing the size allowances for incidental signs that are exempt from sign permits, and clarifying the appeal process for preliminary site plan permits. So the Planning Commission reviewed these amendments at a public hearing on May 13th. At that meeting, they voted unanimously to forward a recommendation to adopt the proposed zoning code amendments as proposed with the exception of two minor changes. The first was a recommended change to the proposed amendments to allowing car sales service and other auto-oriented uses in the RMX and CCX zones where they're currently prohibited. The Planning Commission does not recommend that the code be changed to allow these uses in RMX at this time, but rather only be changed to allow these uses in the CCX zone, which is generally the mall area. The second recommended change to the amendments as was originally proposed was the sign code. The Planning Commission recommends that the two square feet sign exemption that already exists remain the standard for RS or single family zone properties and only be increased to six square feet for all other zones. They also recommended adding a clarifying reference noting that home occupation signs are regulated separately. So I'll just briefly go through each of the amendments. So this is the first one I identified. This is a simple list of our zoning districts throughout the city. And again, it's a small housekeeping item. It updates the zoning district list in the codes that matches our zoning map, which was previously updated by city council. It removes classifications that either no longer exist or were missing and adds them. This amendment does not create new zoning districts. It simply ensures consistency between the code and the zoning map as it already exists. So this amendment has to do with allowing car sales, service, and other auto-related uses in RMX and CCX zone. So as originally proposed at the Planning Commission public hearing, this proposal would expand the geographic areas in which car sales, service, and those other select vehicle uses are allowed in the city to include river road mixed use, RMX, and community commercial mixed use CCX zones where they're currently prohibited. As mentioned previously, the Planning Commission does not recommend that the code be changed to allow those uses in RMX, but did recommend the CCX zone. So this map shows the two additional areas of the city where car sales service and other select vehicle uses would be allowed if the original code amendment were adopted. Note that vehicle sales are also currently allowed in other areas of the city that's not shown on this map. So this amendment has to do with increasing density, or I'm sorry, changing the uses that are allowed in the MXO. So this amendment would allow multifamily and townhouse developments to occur as standalone residential projects within mixed use zones, rather than requiring a commercial component. This change is consistent with policies adopted in the comp plan and provides greater flexibility for smaller housing projects and projects that are not directly abutting major thoroughfares. From an implementation standpoint, staff has found that requiring commercial spaces on every mixed-use site can sometimes result in vacant commercial spaces or situations where a leasing office is being used to satisfy the commercial component in a project. So this amendment would continue to allow mixed-use development where market conditions support it while removing barriers to residential development where commercial demand may not yet exist. So the comprehensive plan also includes policies to increase housing unit density within RMX and UCX zones to help meet the city's housing goals. So this proposed amendment would remove the dwelling unit density cap in RMX and UCX zones. So while that may initially sound like a substantial increase from the current density limits, development intensity would still be regulated by other standards, including minimum parking requirements, maximum building heights, setbacks, landscaping requirements, lot coverage limits, stormwater requirements, and other site design standards. So this is a map showing the areas that would have the maximum density increase to no defined dwelling unit density cap. So this next amendment increases the allowable size of incidental signs, so smaller signs that are exempt from sign permit requirements, and also establishes a maximum height standard of four feet. So staff proposes amendment after encountering implementation issues with our current standard, particularly for on-site wayfinding signs for commercial developments. So the intent of this amendment is to make the code more practical while still maintaining some reasonable limits on signs that are exempt from getting a sign permit. So after review of the proposed amendment, Planning Commission voted in favor of a revised version, as I mentioned. So pictured here in the highlighted portion are the Planning Commission's amendments, the original code that was presented to them. So it would only increase exempt sign size in non-residential zones. And in residential zones, it would maintain the already existing two-square-foot limit. And then this amendment addresses a procedural issue that staff identified regarding our preliminary site plan review permits. So currently, appeal opportunities are generally tied to SEPA environmental review with this process. However, given that there are portions of our downtown that are covered by the SEPA planned action, there may not be a corresponding SEPA appeal opportunity for projects that are undertaken in that area. So this amendment clarifies the conditions standards and removes language that effectively limits site plan appeals to situations where a SEPA appeal is also filed at the same time. So staff believes that this creates a cleaner and more predictable review process while maintaining opportunities for administrative appeal. So city staff analyzed the proposed amendments and found consistency with the applicable review criteria. We did adopt the notice of, or the final environmental impact statement, April 26th, 2026. And the planning commission, as I mentioned, had their public hearing and they recommended approval with those two amendments that I mentioned. So at this time, we're asking for a first reading of this ordinance with a tentative second reading scheduled for June 16th.

Happy to take questions. Thank you. Deputy Mayor Johnson.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, Rachel, let's go back to the River Road corridor. And as I understand it now, it's currently zoned RMX. Is that correct? Which allows primarily auto type uses and other limited commercial. Is that correct?

A portion of the river corridor is drawn to RMX, pictured on the top portion of this map.

But the area in question is the section that is north of River Road, is that correct? That's highlighted? Right. Okay. And is that currently RMX as well? That is an RMX, yeah. And if I understand correctly, the CCX, is that what was discussed at one point? CCX was discussed, I think, at one point by the council. If, in fact, that... layer of zoning was in that that would also that would not restrict continued uses of auto usage, but it might possibly broaden the net out for other economic development growth in there that could include housing and specifically high density housing. Is that correct?

Right. So this would just expand the uses that are already allowed in those two MX zones. It doesn't remove any existing uses, which includes housing in both of those zones that are pictured here.

Am I correct to say that the Planning Commission has not supported additional housing units in that area, but they're just keeping it in the RMX with no allowance of economic development for high-density housing in that area is how I understand it.

I can't speak to that. What they were referring to was the uses for car dealerships. They actually moved to approve the density increase for housing.

Oh, they did? Right. So they didn't remove the CCX. That's still on the table.

Right. I'll go back to this slide. I know all the zones kind of get mixed together. There's a lot of them. So the recommendation from the Planning Commission, what we proposed to them was allowing car dealerships in the River Road mixed-use zone, where it's currently prohibited, and in the CCX zone, which is essentially the mall area, where it's also currently prohibited.

I want to address them all separately. I just want to focus on the River Road. Sure. Because I know the council had discussed this prior to planning, looking at this, and I thought that I heard there was support for existing RMX, but also they added CCX, which would allow for intensity development of housing. Is that amendment what we're seeing here tonight? Is both of those involved in that recommendation? It sounds like the Planning Commission did not recommend it.

They did not recommend expanding car uses in the RMX. They did recommend increasing the housing density.

Oh, so they support the increasing housing density, but they did not want to increase car. Correct. Yeah. So I'm not sure if we'll need to separate these out on a motion here, but I... Well, OK, so we'll pause there for a moment. Now, let's go up to the South Hill. And that's currently at CCX now. And is my understanding correctly, they want to maintain the CCX, but they want to potentially allow RMX to be included as well to expand that as a wider net. They would also include car sales up on South Hill.

So no zoning change is proposed in any of these. So the zones would remain. So the zoning that's up on the hill, CCX, would stay the same. But the change that they did recommend is to allow car service uses and sales in that CCX zone where they're currently prohibited.

And not adding RMX. Right. Okay. Okay. So I there's no way I'm going to support that as stands. I want to see we already have a very council. We already have a very established auto row center that's been in place for absolutely decades. It has proven to be a tremendous economic driver for our city, a tax base, and to somehow limit that tax. Growth for car expansion sales in that area would would not be wise. And so I would not support the non expansion of auto sales in that area on the north side of River Road as we're referring to. And I think mine would be to do the opposite. Let's allow car sales on the north side of the river road and not allow car sales in South Hill. I don't think we need any, we don't need to distribute car sales. We already have a very established area. We don't need another car dealership strip up on South Hill. Imagine what the traffic would be like and the real estate of the housing cars up in there would just not be good. I don't know how I can support this bill the way that it's recommended now. Let me just go back before I move further. This is important. What's the old saying? measure twice, cut once. I don't want to just pass this without really discussing this thoroughly and then realize, hey, what did we miss here? So let's talk about expanded, going back to the railroad corridor. Is the motion on the table, does that limit housing density or does it open it up to no maximum density?

It increases it in the RMX, the River Ward Corridor Zone, to no maximum density.

Okay, so that's good. So we're good there. I'd like to see a motion that, I don't know if these are separate. It sounds to me like they need to be itemized separately. So I would make a motion that we expand the auto dealership zoning to include increased density. car sales in that section of parcel north of River Road. And then I would also have a separate motion say that in the South Hill area that I would not expand or allow car sales up in the South Hill area, but allow that to be focused in on the area that's already been established for literally five, six decades. So that would be my motion.

So I'd like to step in and just I'll try and clarify a little bit. The RMX zone is the River Road mixed use zone. Correct. So that would never be up on South Hill. It's the River Road mixed use zone. That zone was established some time ago with the idea that we would try and encourage residential development along the river corridor there. That has not happened. It's been in place for an extended period of time. So two things are happening here tonight. One is increasing the density there. And the second is allowing auto-oriented services to be provided in that area. They're allowed now south of River Road, but not north of River Road. So, and, you know, there is something to be said for allowing the increased density code to take effect and see if that would generate additional residential. I'm a little skeptical of that. Therefore, I'm supportive of the, I'll call it an amendment motion by Deputy Mayor Johnson that we allow the auto-oriented services to take place in that RMX zone. And I further agree that the commercial zone up on South Hill has no auto zone characteristic at this time, and I think it makes sense to leave it below. So I'm 100% in agreement with Deputy Mayor Johnson.

Mr. Mayor, is that a second? That is a second. Okay, thank you.

Council Member Kastema. You're muted.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Staff, just for clarification, the proposal that you have before us this evening, in fact, does allow for auto sales in the RMX zone on the north of River Road. Is that correct?

What is in your packet does not allow it on River Road. I have high... I've highlighted the change that would need to be made to allow it.

Okay, that's what I wanted to clarify. So the Planning Commission, you're just bringing forward what the Planning Commission recommended, not what staff recommends in addition to what the Planning Commission recommended, correct?

What's in your packet is both, if you will. In red underline is the Planning Commission recommendation. The highlighted portion is what would need to be removed to... to allow car dealerships in RMX.

I understand. Whatever affects that change, I'm fine with and in agreement with the Mayor and Deputy Mayor. Thank you.

Deputy Mayor Johnson.

Oh, I got, sorry.

City Attorney.

Mayor, I just want to clarify the process. You're being asked to adopt an ordinance tonight and you're talking about one component of that ordinance. It would be more appropriate, in my opinion, if you had a motion to adopt the ordinance with the features that you want included in that ordinance. So in this instance, what I've heard at this point, the motion would be adopt the ordinance as presented with and then state that you want to want to allow car uses in vehicle uses in the RMX and not in the CCX. And there's also another just highlighted. area of this that is what was presented to Planning Commission and what was Planning Commission recommendation is you're going to have to make a decision on that as well. And so your motion will need to include whatever you want to do in that other example as well. And that's the sign code. Yes.

So we have a motion on the floor to amend the presented motion, but we have not yet addressed the sign code.

I don't want to be pedantic, but I guess maybe I will be. You don't have a motion on the floor. You don't have anything to amend. This is the first motion on this.

Okay, fair enough. But let's go ahead and discuss the sign issue. Do we have anybody that's interested in commenting on the signs? No. So we're increasing the sign capability from two square feet to six square feet. Is that correct?

In only non-RS zones.

Right, so...

So multifamily, commercial, manufacturing, all of our other zones other than our single family zones.

And the Planning Commission... Were they in favor of that language, or is that a difference?

That was their recommended change.

Okay. So I'm not seeing any comment on that, so I'm making the assumption that we've got that in place. Okay. So we now have before us a proposed ordinance, and we are – making changes to the proposed ordinance to allow the auto services in the RMX zone and not allow auto use services in the CCX zone. Do I have it right?

That reflects what I had. So it seems to me that the motion really should be stated that we make a motion to pass the ordinance in 5B with an amendment, if I understand correctly, a city attorney to allow for expanded auto sales in RMX north of the River Road, as well as an amendment that would limit car sales in the CCX in the south. Would that be a correct amendment rather than a motion? Does that make it proper?

That would be a correct motion.

Okay, so that's my amendment. I think we probably have the same second.

Second.

Okay.

She cut me out. Supporting, sir. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Is there any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed?

Mr. Mayor, I'll be abstaining from this vote.

Fair enough. Council Member King's abstention is noted. So we are, so we have passed first reading of this ordinance and can expect to see the second reading on the 16th. Moving forward, we are going to consider a first reading of an ordinance amending section 2.27.020 of the Puyallup Municipal Court related to membership on the Arts and Culture Commission with a presentation by Public Affairs Officer Eric Johnson.

Yes, so good evening, Mayor and City Council. Eric Johnson, your public affairs officer, and tonight I'm just going to give a brief presentation about the Arts and Culture Commission ordinance that we are presenting to you tonight and just some of the background that led us to this proposed ordinance. So again, talking about some of the background behind the commission. So the Arts and Culture Commission was formed by city council back in 2016. Membership is to consist of seven members. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. A super majority of the members should be residents of the city and members who are not residents should be artists or artists who engage in performing arts, exhibit a portfolio of artwork or are arts instructors in the city. The appointment of members is done by the mayor and confirmed by city council. Each member serves a four-year term with a maximum of two terms. The officers consist of a chairperson and vice chairperson, each serving one term each. I have Chair Pugh, who is in attendance, and also Vice Chair Busse, who is here in attendance. So thank you so much for coming. And then a quorum for meetings consists of a simple majority. So I won't go through all of these commission duties. These are enshrined in the city code, but essentially the Arts and Culture Commission serves in an advisory capacity to the city council concerning arts and culture issues, events and projects that come before the city and also provide recommendations to the city council and other groups on artistic and cultural endeavors and projects. So in July of 2024, the Arts and Culture Commission adopted their work plan, and that work plan consisted of a series of short-term tactical items and then longer-term, more aspirational items that they would like to see accomplished in the city. And I have a list of some of the short-term items that we have included here, along with a photo of one of our new signal cabinet wraps up there on Shaw Road, I believe. That's at Shaw and 23rd, I believe. Some of the short-term items include partnering with nonprofits such as the Northwest Sinfonietta to create music nature walks on the Loop Trail and also Bradley Lake Park, working with Arts Downtown and the library to create a public art gallery, expand the Signal Cabinet Wrap program into the South Hill region of Puyallup, which we are currently doing, strengthen connections with our Arts Downtown group, and then also review the Commission's current mission and vision statement to ensure alignment with their goals. Some of the longer term items that they would like to see, again, these are kind of more aspirational in nature. Integrating art into our new downtown street furnishings. You can see a photo there of some of our new benches and new garbage receptacles. Partnering with the South Hill Mall to find opportunities to potentially put art galleries in some of the empty spaces. Musical performances in Pioneer Park and partnering with the Liberty Theater on that, on more like theatrical performances, perhaps up on the stage. creation of a community mural plan and also creating some sort of incentive program for businesses to install art on their property. Some recent accomplishments, we just completed the new round of signal cabinet wraps. You may have seen them out in the community. So those look beautiful and we'll continue to work on those. The wood sculpture in Pioneer Park, you see a photo of that right there. That was something that the Arts and Culture Commission was very heavily working on last year. And then we are also in the middle of designing a new artwork display case in the library hallway as you walk into the library so that artists from Arts Downtown can display their artwork in a more prominent place. Just to kind of tee up the discussion about why we're bringing this ordinance to you, we've had some quorum challenges over the past few years. I just have some high-level statistics here for you. In 2024, we had 11 meetings scheduled, so about one per month except for the month of December, which fell towards the Christmas holiday, so we ended up not having that meeting scheduled. we had 11 meetings scheduled and four of them ended due to a lack of a quorum so to help address that we actually changed the meetings to be from once a month to once every two months to try to get commission members to get that quorum up but unfortunately in 2025 we had six scheduled meetings and three were cancelled due to a lack of a quorum And as of today, 2026, this is June, we haven't had any meeting scheduled due to a lack of sufficient commission members. So we currently have three commission members that are on the commission, and we need to have at least four to have a quorum to conduct business. So the proposed ordinance in front of you changes the language in the code relating to the total number of commission members. So the ordinance would propose lowering that total number from seven to five, and it would allow the current active members, which there are three on the commission to continue to hold meetings and work on items that I mentioned in the work plan before you. So next steps are suggested motion is to do a 1st reading of this ordinance, amending section 2.27.02020 of the municipal code relating to membership of the arts and culture commission. And before I pass it off to questions and feedback, I'll have Brad Pew, who is our commission chair, come up and just say a few words for you all.

Mayor, Council, I'm Bradley Pugh. I'm the chairperson for the Arts Commission. And we brought this to Eric a few months ago because we're struggling to get our meetings. And we were really making some amazing progress, as Eric has shown you. And there's a core group of three commissioners. Amor is one of those. And we've been able to have those. Either we're in person or virtual. What happens is the other two members don't show up. And so it's a seven-member commission. We just can't make a quorum. And it's very frustrating. And so we haven't had a meeting since November. And because of that, we cannot conduct our business. And we were really doing some great projects. And I think this probably serves two purposes. One, it gets us back in front of you guys so you know that we do exist. Because I think one of the problems is we were doing our work quite silently and actually doing great work. And now we're in front of you to help. Move us forward because we're now halfway through 2026 and we've done nothing. So, and we were getting great community support parks department was would come before us and our biggest project and most successful and most visual is the signal wraps. And we're actually crashing into the moment where Eric has to submit the proposals to the school districts and other members to get that work. I mean, last year, how many entries did we have? Like 500? It was insane. And what came from that was the public art display at the library because there's no place in the city palette for people to display static two-dimensional artwork. Obviously, the three-dimensional is well taken care of with arts downtown. And with Amora, we were hoping to also get the music component spread out, and we were making progress with that. And so we really need this to help us move forward so we can get back to our work and make the community better. And, you know, we're going to partner with other groups and those kind of things, and we just need to get back to work, basically. So I appreciate your time, and thank you very much.

Thank you. Deputy Mayor Johnson.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Brad or Bradley, thank you for that presentation. Who's your colleague here? I didn't catch your name.

Oh, this is Amora Busse.

Amora? Amora, yes. She is our vice chair. Yes, Amora. Okay, thank you. Well, first of all, let me just start out by saying as clear as possible and as focused as possible, I want to do everything that I can. I hope that we want to do everything we can to empower the Arts Commission and Arts Downtown to thrive in what you do. To me, it's not just another board that, you know, does routine bureaucratic meetings, but it would be my hope that you would take the posture as the Arts Commission and as Downtown Arts as a separate entity and to aggressively pursue vision that would take us to the next level. This is what you do. We don't do this. I appreciate art, value art, but we need experts who can set the vision and share that with the community and share it with council to validate and empower that and see it move forward. So when you look at great cities, specifically old great cities in Europe, The majority of them are very arts orientated, beautiful sculptures and music and just very appealing and historic. And in compared to some of the cities were pretty young but that development takes place because of intentionality that didn't happen by accident And so not only do I support You know this this motion to take it down to five and allow for a quorum of three to move it forward I would just challenge Brad and a more and even arts downtown was a separate entity to take our city to the next level be proactive and Be visionary and go for the height. I mean, you know, how can you it doesn't happen if somebody is not casting a big vision. And you might say, well, how can we do that? Well, we don't know until we get the vision out there. And usually typically a good vision, you'll get support to say we'll help you carry that and make that happen. So it's not just passive. We can do these little things, little things here. That's great. But I would really empower the Arts Commission this new year coming up. Please be proactive, vision conscious, think big, dream big. Let's see what we can do as we as you set the tone and gather the community around that and council behind it. Our city can take it to the next level. And I think we've already have a precedence and a base here. So it's not like this is brand new. There's already a presence in the base here of artsy kind of a vibe. You look at the concerts in the parks, Liberty Theater, all the things happening, the festivals over at the fair. I mean, there's stuff happening. So let's get the synergy going. So with that in mind, I would certainly gladly make a motion that we adopt this first reading in Section 5C as something that's absolutely essential with a slight contingency off the record that you take it to the next level.

Council Member Adler.

Thank you. As an alum of this commission, and it's nice to see my former fellow commissioners here this evening, I just want to say that you can only do what you can do with what you have. And I appreciate the thoughtfulness in working with city staff on how do we change this so we can get to work. um for me even outside of having the experience of serving on the arts and culture commission it's very evident to me the impact that you have had and are having and will continue to have despite the challenges in quorum so um i just want to be very clear, you know, my perspective is, you know, your work is very evident throughout the city. The wrap, the signal wraps are just incredible. And to hear that there were 500 applications, submissions. There we go. Is really outstanding. I definitely don't think that was the number when I was on the commission. And so we had many, but 500 is really a testament to the way in which the program has been developed in the way that you have been thoughtful in sharing that and garnering that many submissions. so thank you i really appreciate it when government works good and brings solutions and this is an example of that and i'm happy to support this thank you councilmember gilliam thank you mr mayor um i love all the art downtown you help make puel beautiful

I want to play devil's advocate just a touch, though, because I'm slightly concerned about the amendment to reduce for quorum's sake because my heart is like, okay, now we're going from five people kind of pushing the vision to three people pushing the vision. So the support for this program is actually shrinking rather than getting larger. Does that make sense? So I'm not saying no. I'm just saying I'm a little concerned. So I don't want to slow progress, but I want you guys to be vivaciously recruiting. And then maybe in another six months, we come back and bring it back up to more people having a voice to make this move forward, if that makes sense. Again, I'm not trying to squelch our arts downtown. I just, if it keeps shrinking... is it valid anymore, right? When something just shrinks, like, what are we really doing? So I just want to put that out there because, again, it's all about voice across the community. That's what I hear our constituents say all the time. So can we actively recruit, give us a timeline for this amendment, and then bring voice back into this? Make sense? Okay. So I'd like to make an amendment to the amendment presented to us that we're going to come back in six months and hopefully the arts downtown will recruit artists that live in our area to help bring it back to that love of art for our city. Make sense? Okay. That's what I would like to say.

Can I, a point of clarification? Yeah. Just that I think I'm confused now on the

um proposal here is from seven to five is that right and then the number in which the uh um quorum would be three yes thank you yeah so i'd like to make a motion to allow this amendment for a year we'll give you a year to recruit more people and then um we'll see where we're at on whether or not we should continue with three people carrying arts downtown or if we need to dissolve it Commission, thank you for giving me the commission.

Okay.

Okay.

So we've got a motion on the floor. Is that correct? Yeah. So we've got a motion. Do we have?

I'd be willing to discuss Council Member Gilliam's proposal, maybe wrap them into one unit possibly. I just want to discuss that because she brings up some great ideas.

Okay, go ahead, Deputy Mayor Johnson.

So I'd like to, I guess, think outside the box a little bit. Is it possible, maybe city attorney, maybe not normal or let's say precedence, but could we as council define the limits of still having seven on the commission, but... Considered a quorum of three as if it was a five and just to allow for movement, but still open it up for a full group. Do we have to have that? Is there anything to say that we couldn't do that?

Yeah, there are. You could do that. You could set the quorum and we could revise the ordinance to maintain the seven members, but allow meetings, official meetings to go forward with as few as as three members. Or you could as. Councilmember Gilliam was saying add a sunset clause that would, for a year, that would add a year or whatever, and then we'd be forced to bring it back if we needed to extend it. So both of those options are viable.

Okay. Yeah, I think I'd be happy to make it just to clarify my amendment that we move forward with the quorum being at three with a total of five. But as Council Member Gilliam has mentioned that we come back in a year and in the act of recruitment, maybe look at bringing that up to seven again, possibly. Is that kind of your thoughts, Council Member Gilliam?

Yeah, the whole what I'm thinking about is how do we continue to grow it, not let it shrink.

Right.

So I'm OK with letting it be small and mighty for a season and then show that, hey, people are committed to this and people do want to see this and then we can regrow it back up again.

I think that makes sense. So I would revise that to meld that with yours into one amendment. Again, going back to that charge to you is that dream big, think big, and that's going to require more people that are passionate about that. So let's grow this thing, but let's start at a nucleus so you can get work done, but let's grow it and get some synergy. It would be a wonderful problem if we had to grow it to 10 or 12, right? What a great problem to have. But anyway, I'll make that. Thanks, Council Member Gilliam. That's a great insight on that.

Okay. Was it just recently? Out of order, sir.

Call of order, yeah. So the motion on the floor is to approve a reduction of the art membership in the Arts Commission from seven to five, with the matter being revisited in a year's time. Is that correct? correctly okay so that's the motion on the floor to is there any further discussion was there a second hi there's not i don't think we need a second so yes do we have a second i did the motion so there needs to be a second or i think council deputy mayor johnson amended changed his motion so you would be the second Okay, so we have a motion and a second. All those in favor?

Sorry, reporting voter, this is an amendment that we're voting on.

There's no amendment, there's just a motion. The motion, as I stated it, is to reduce the membership in the Arts Commission from seven to five for the coming year to revisit that in one year's time. That's the motion. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. Okay, and we'll now move on to item six on our agenda, the resolution to designate an applicable agent to obtain and administer a state of Washington building resilience infrastructure and communities grant. City Engineer Hans Unger.

Thank you, Mayor Whitting. So Hans Unger, City Engineer. Right now, if you don't know, we've got work going on on one of our water tanks up off 39th Street where we typically have to recoat these about every 20 years, but we're also seismically retrofitting it so that during an earthquake, the tank won't fall over during all the shaking of the water. And we're doing that with a FEMA grant of about $3.5 million that we received. So we applied, there's actually two water tanks up there. They're side by side. And the second one also needs to be retrofitted so that during an earthquake, the one the standing doesn't get tipped into by this one but you know there are expensive projects so we did a pre-application with fema that has a grant program to make your community more resilient and this fits into that theme and so they reviewed our pre-application this is a nationwide grant and they said you know you look like you have a good project and we want you to put in a full application But one of the requirements are that they want to see a resolution passed by the community to support putting in the application and at the same time naming an agent. So this is what's before you with the passing of this resolution. Then we can apply for the full grant there, which would be about $4.5 million that we'd be applying for to retrofit the second tank up there off of 39th.

Okay, I don't think there's much discussion on this. Does anybody have anything to say? Seeing none, do I hear a motion? So moved. Second. The motion has been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please so indicate. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes.

Thank you.

Okay, we've concluded our council business. We'll now have a report by our city manager.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Your next meeting preview of that agenda, there will be two primary items at this point. One will be a zoning-related matter regarding the neighborhood commercial zone, and staff will be seeking direction from council on what the parameters of the neighborhood commercial zones will be. That was part of the comprehensive plan that you approved. And the second item will be a presentation on the railroad quiet zone project that staff is working on. There may be a few other items on there, but those are the two primary ones. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Thank you. We'll now move on to council member reports. Council member Smolko. And nothing to report today, sir. Thank you. Council member Gilliam.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to share with the community city that I had the opportunity to take our CERT class, and that is Citizens Emergency Response Team. The city of Puyallup does a fantastic job of equipping volunteers from our municipality and surrounding municipalities and just making people aware of how to handle crisis. say, when the lahar might happen or when there's an earthquake or just whatever major crisis might happen. We have community members that have been trained and have an opportunity to be part of that team to walk into scenario and help support our emergency response teams. And our I want to make sure I'm getting the title correct. Kirsten Hoffman, Emergency Manager of City of Huell, recently got an award. And I was just wondering if City Manager Kirklig would just do a quick shout out for her. And I just want to say I'm so proud of our city and I'm so proud of her and her great work. City Manager, what did Kirsten get an award for?

Sure. Yeah, thank you. So the Sumner-Bonnie Lake School District had a ceremony last Friday amongst many other school districts. And they do this, the first time I've been there, they do this regional award ceremony where they recognize different categories of award winners from the district, school districts throughout the county. And the Sumner-Bonnie Lake School District gave their community award to Kirsten Hoffman for her work surrounding the Lahar Drill, which was the world's largest, as you all know, Lahar evacuation drill in the world.

Yeah. So we have an incredible leader in working on our behalf to make sure citizens are safe during crisis. And if you ever want to be part of that class, be part of that group, just become aware. I strongly encourage any resident and child to look into that and sign up for the course. It's free. And they take you through some scenarios. We had one scenario where... The there was an earthquake and we had to put on our gear and go in. It was like our final exam, if you will. And there was a young lady with her finger cut off. And I won't repeat what I had said when I saw that. But needless to say, or maybe just to wrap this up, I'm much better at the trauma recovery than I am at the bloody stuff. And I learned that about myself in this training. So everybody's welcome. It doesn't matter your age. You will have a purpose. One of the things during a crisis is to put those who are able to work and just help everybody work through it together. And it's actually healthier for everybody to work through that with everybody who has a job that can. So thank you, Mr. Mayor. That is my report.

Thank you. And Council Member Adler.

Thank you, I'll be brief. Number one, I just want to highlight that today is the first sunset at 9 PM or after, so we can see it coming through and it looks very pretty, so hopefully we'll see it on our way out. Secondly, real quickly, I would like to highlight the many Memorial Day programs that our city had over Memorial Day weekend and how honored and privileged I felt to be part of representing the city alongside a few of you in laying a wreath at our Veterans Memorial here in Pioneer Park and also up at the same Memorial Veterans Memorial at Woodbine. And I also just want to note that I appreciate individuals that have come forward sharing their perspectives about Woodbine Cemetery. There is no excuse. There is no excuse. And we will do better. I have many generations of my family buried at Woodbine and we will get it right and we will do better. And I wanna thank folks for coming forward and sharing their perspective and experience at Woodbine with us, despite how difficult it can be in remembering and talking about those who we love, their final resting places. Finally, I'll just say that it is Pride Month, and Pride is important because someone out there believes that they are better off dead. And that's why we acknowledge pride. Thank you.

Council Member Keene.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Just wanted to, again, echo some of the comments from my colleague, Council Member Adler, regarding Memorial Day festivities and all of the festivities that we attended last weekend and honoring those that have served our nation and allowed us the freedoms that we have today. I also echo the comments made regarding Woodbine Cemetery in that I firmly believe that we will do better there. So I won't go on any further about that. I know that we will do better. Regarding the America 250 flag memorial, I am pleased to announce that we have already raised within the one-week period a little over $25,000 to turn back into our general fund once those funds are allocated. And I am fully confident that we will be able to reach that full amount by the end of the year. with those that are wanting to contribute. And third, I just wanted to remind our constituents and everyone out there that if you do see road problems such as potholes or asphalt starting to alligator a stoplight that is no longer working, a stop sign that is not visible, a street sign that is falling off or bent or what have you, you can visit our free app called SeeClickFix.com. That's cclickfix. You can download it in the App Store. And once you're on there and you sign up for it, I don't know if you can see that there, but these are all the little – hopefully that's still there, yes. So these are all the little dots throughout the map that have already had call tickets made. And you can actually – go on there and put a new request and let our city works department know that there's a pothole forming and they will be able to respond accordingly within a couple days usually and be able to take care of that so make sure you download the app see click fix and they'll be able to take care of a lot of your infrastructure uh needs on the roadway they're really good and uh you gotta give them a good kudos they always whenever i see something i always put it in there it's the fastest way to get

that attention and uh and be able to take care of those issues on the roadway so see click fix download it today thank you mr mayor deputy mayor johnson thank you mr mayor um yeah just a comment on the city of kill if i wanted to um state i have a chance to uh i work in seattle and uh and Puyallup seems to come up a lot as a place that people find very fond and enjoy visiting. And some of them even living there even had the opportunity for a medical appointment in Auburn. And one of the workers there loves Puyallup. She just moved here from abroad. and absolutely loved hearing about the vibrancy that's happening in our downtown core, specifically with the farmer's market that we have every Saturday, and of course, one of the largest farmer's markets in Washington State and probably beyond. It's phenomenal. And I think sometimes it's easy for us to take for granted the special little pocket that we have here. When we looked at those police reports and we saw how what they call it, that thin blue line is pretty strong around Puyallup, and that's a protection. It's like a fence that tries to keep bad behavior minimized in our city, and that's not by accident. This city is composed of some great people, and it's not just the great people that are here now, but the ones that have gone before us and laid the groundwork that we're enjoying, and Hopefully, as we continue, all of us to be good stewards of this city, that those that will come behind us will continue on with this wonderful, vibrant city. So a real spirit of gratitude for our city. And even though we may not be on the. the headlight of big cities in the East Coast or whatever, this is a pretty great little community. And it's a place to raise your family, to create some memories, and to enjoy the quality of life, the all-American quality of life in a manner that's safe. Everyone respects each other. And lastly, I'll say this. It's interesting. I've been to some cities here in this region, King County region, where sometimes there's an appearance or a feeling of uppity Well, there's a real kind of high class kind of vibe when you walk in there. It's kind of like, man, do I fit in here? But, you know, Puyallup has got such an eclectic mix of very well-to-do people, very simple people economically. But everyone respects each other and gets along. It's just a kind of a unique vibe here. And so, again, it's a little bit of a. reflection of how wonderful we have it here and how important it is for us to continue the quality of this community for those who are here now and those who will come after us. So lastly, I want to say hello to Marla, who's always watching, and God bless Marla. Thank you.

Appreciate the contributions by all of our council members this evening. We're having no further business, but this meeting is adjourned.