City Council - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon. I'm calling to order the 04/28/2026 Committee of the Whole for Parks and Environment Sustainability. In attendance are council members, council president Stewart, council vice president Noah Kamena, council member Critzer, council member Forsyth, council member Prakria, council member Parsey, and myself, presiding officer Menka Soni. We have six items on the agenda that has been previously shared with all council members, so we can get started on our agenda. Our first agenda is parks is with the parks department web configuration contract with the d two creative in the amount of 141,900.

And we have with us, staff, would you please introduce yourself?

Of course. Good afternoon, council members. I'm Brittany Pratt. I'm the recreation And And we've the we're we're with the the progress made on the May 5 consent agenda for professional website consulting services for the Parks and Recreation Department. Over the past several years even as we have worked closely with city communications to keep all of our information online as current and visible as possible, we have consistently heard a clear message from community members.

Finding Parks and Recreation information online is just harder than it should be. This feedback has come through really every channel that we use and receive feedback through, customer service interactions online, in person, over email, over the phone, queue alerts, parks, trails, recreation commission, other commissions committees, community engagement for the arts plan that's in process and most significantly the statistically valid survey from our recreation program plan that's also in process right now. One factor contributing is the discontinuation of our printed recreation guide. That guide allowed folks to casually browse opportunities that they didn't already know existed. Our current web structure doesn't offer that same ability to explore and because our digital platforms aren't well integrated, even if we were to explore the idea digital form of a guide, we would risk becoming or creating just another disconnected page.

So fixing the underlying structure is really the necessary first step. It's also worth noting that this challenge spans our entire department. It's not just something from the recreation guide though that's worth noting. It's classes, it's sports leagues, it's rentals, it's trails, it's parks, it's parks amenities, it's events, it's arts, all of those things. So we are constantly consistently hearing that community members run into barriers, not because the programs aren't there, not because they don't exist, but because the systems aren't connected. So this contract is our response, bringing in a consultant to help diagnose the root issue, design a coordinated plan, then implement it. And with that I will hand it over to Lindsay to walk through the selection process and the scope.

Thank you I'm Lindsay Tuesing, the Parks Department marketing and Events Supervisor. The Parks Department is seeking a professional consulting service to diagnose and design recommended improvements to our web platforms for all information relevant to Parks and Recreation. The scope of work and deliverables are included in your packet for review, but I'd like to touch on some key points here. The contract is focused specifically on our parks and recreation department pages and does not extend to all pages within redmond.gov. The work encompasses the community facing experience of discovering parks and recreation information across Civic Plus, where our main parks content lives, Amelia SmartRec, where program registration takes place, and then Team Sideline, where sports league information is managed.

Importantly, the replacement of SmartRec's software is explicitly out of scope. This project went through a full RFP process from February 26 to April 3. We received 16 comprehensive applications and began a competitive jurying process. Proposals were evaluated using the standard scoring matrix provided to us by the city's purchasing department, and applicants were graded across five weighted categories, qualifications, relevant project experience, project understanding, project approach, and proposed cost. The top two scoring applicants were invited to interview with the jury, and following those interviews, we conducted professional reference checks on both finalists.

The results of those reference checks were discussed with the jury, and consensus was reached naming d two creative as our top choice. We anticipate the project to run through 2026 and '27 at a total cost of $141,900 and I'll pass it to Mac for more on what this looks like in practice.

Thanks, Lindsey. I'm Mac Leonard. Today, a resident trying to find a class, reserve a facility, or learn about a trail has to navigate multiple platforms. Our main parks website on Civic Plus, activity

registration on SmartRec, and sports leagues on Team Sideline. The experience is fragmented and it means people might give up before they find what they're looking for.

From the resident perspective, these systems don't talk to each other, so people sometimes hit dead ends. A user might search for an activity on main the main parks website and not see it at all. Or they find the program page, but the registration link is buried several clicks deep. There's no clear connected path across these platforms. The issue isn't isolated to one area of our department.

It affects everything, classes, sports, rentals, trails, events and arts programming. Residents have made it clear that finding what they're looking for is harder than it should be. This project is specifically about improving how residents discover our services, the front end experience of finding us online. Over the course of this project, the consultant will progress through three phases. Phase one is a robust discovery phase that includes user research and engagement with stakeholders and user groups of our websites and platforms.

This process ensures we will identify specific actionable points of improvement improvement through engagement with diverse community voices. Phase two includes a comprehensive design package and delivery plan based on the findings of Phase one. Phase three consists of execution, implementation and testing. It's important to emphasize that this project creates the digital foundation of our department has been missing. By resolving the underlying fragmentation now, we ensure that any future tools can be integrated cleanly rather than becoming another standalone or disconnected feature.

The goal is straightforward, make it easier for our community to find what we offer and ultimately increase usage of our parks, facilities and services. With that, we welcome any questions from council.

Council president Stewart.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate the robust, discussion here, and I do believe that this, resource will pay for itself simply by making these opportunities for residents to register far easier. The one question I wanted to bring to your group is the volunteer services that the awesome Maya has been building out, and, also, she deserves a shout out for all the awesome Arbor Day and Earth Day events last week. Those technology resources are also housed in your department. Was there consideration for having those resources and those registration opportunities integrated into your project scope as well?

Yes. The initial discovery phase is going to be encompassed with all of those different platforms. We don't want to leave anything behind, we don't want leave anything out, and I don't anticipate that being an issue for this team that we've selected.

Great, so it will be considered in the discovery phase. Thank you.

Councilmember Prakria.

Thank you for the presentation. This is very, very exciting to me. My question is what are we doing to expand multilingual access to our website and also with our stakeholders? Because our parks are for everybody in Redmond, we want to make sure that everyone is able to access this information even if they do not speak English necessarily.

That was a topic that we discussed during our interviews and a little bit during the follow-up as well, that fully, not only just language integration, but fully compliant ADA requirements are at top of their priority and some that they touted as being successful with a very relevant project that they completed for a parks department in Oregon that we spoke to as well that was really successful. So I'm very excited for that as well.

Wonderful, thank you.

Council Member Forsyth.

Thank you and thank you for the note on the ADA. I know those laws are coming into effect really fast that we need to have everything compliant so good to know that this will be. I have two questions. First, I know in fairly recent years, my memory is failing me of how recent, we made the shift into the new sign up program. So I appreciate the presentation and, like, talking about how that didn't quite solve all the problems that we were having. So I'm really looking forward to this being a more robust system. But can you can you give us some reassurance as to we're not gonna find a similar issue down the road once we go down this path?

When you say a similar issue?

Because we were we were framed with the new sign up system that it was going to be it was gonna solve a lot of these problems and it was gonna be easier and more streamlined and now we're finding out maybe it's not as much as we thought.

Sure. You're you're speaking of SmartRec.

Sorry?

You're speaking of SmartRec, those issues?

I believe so. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. The I think what we're looking for is that the the new platform that is going to be with the options presented by this team is not to replace SmartRec. And I don't necessarily want to give the impression that the issue is SmartRec. The challenges that we're finding and the searchability that we're discovering challenges with is the way that all of our platforms interact together. And that's sort of what we're looking for in the discovery process to discover where the actual issues are and then have some solutions presented there. So I think we're excited with our Smart Rec platform and we're committed to it. We are excited also that it can be better utilized with better interoperability between our platforms.

Okay. And then is there any plan at all to bring back some of the printed materials?

Can I sorry? This is director Hamilton. So just to be clear, I'd like to just add something to your question, council member Forsyth, is that part of the issue that we're solving for is, for example, how many clicks it takes to get from the parks page into our registration platform. After we got our statistically valid survey back and I read through the results, I don't often go into the website from kind of a user's perspective. So I went to our main park site, and I counted how many clicks.

Even as someone who's internal and understands our website, it took me seven clicks to get to a registration site. So the issues that we're talking about solving right now are less about just SmartRec, but how do people get to registration? How do they get to solving those problems? So that's the bigger issue. And I think the question that you ask is a valid one of, are we gonna have this issue again down the road?

Our hope is no. And, yeah, as technology changes and grows and communication shifts, we may have to revisit this conversation, but the goal is that this creates a different system and platform. From a printed standpoint, printed material is extreme is out of line with both our sustainability goals, but also we weren't actually finding an increase of registration from it. Our registration has been really good. We just need to be able to have people have more of a interaction with our offerings, and that's what we're hearing is that they can't see everything at one location very easily.

They can't see it on the website. And so are there ways we can integrate it? And we are not the integration experts, and so we are looking for someone to help us look at those different solutions and how we would maintain those long term.

Thank you. And I would agree that our that printed, it may be out of alignment with some of our sustainability goals, but it is in alignment with our inclusionary goals. So I think we should have potential for a low amount of printed for those folks that need need that access. Thank you.

And to be clear, we do still do a fair amount of printed material. We simply don't mail we used to mail recreation guides to every home

Got it.

In Redmond. And that's more what Britney is referring to that we no longer do is that multi, like, 100 page printed guide to every in Redmond is what we've seen us move away from.

Council member Parsey.

I see. So I really support improving this process and being on the Parks Commission. I was a vocal supporter for this, so I'm really excited to have this come to the council. I do have some concerns around scope and around both around scope as in us defining where is the separation between say parks and other departments, like communication. So that's one area that I would like to clarify.

And then the second part is measuring how we're gonna hold the firm accountable and defining success, because success could be defined in many different ways. And I think it's really critical that we clarify that scope. So I'll start with my first question. For something like events, we host events, if I count correctly. I counted at least 12 places on Redmond website that someone could go to find events. Some of these pages are hosted through a communications department, potentially. Is that something that we're kind of covering overlap between parks and other departments? Another example would commission pages, is that covered or not?

So the scope of this is really just parks and recreation department programs. That said, we'll have someone on the stakeholder group that is our communications liaison to kind of help us take us through what those boundaries are and where we want to draw those lines. And that would be a part of the discoverability phase, which will be quite long and thorough. So right now that's not like currently fully formed and defined, but we would bring comms into that and make sure that our partners communications are fully aligned with us as we move forward and make those so definitions clear

I'm sorry I'm not a 100% sure exactly kind of with this clarification I'm a little bit more confused what is and is not in scope it would be really helpful to kind of get a more detailed clarification on that, and then I would love to kind of get your help with answering my second question about measuring success and what done would mean. And an example of something that I'm looking for is, for example, we're saying that we require the provider to provide good performance, but we're not really detailing what are the requirements for page load time with that performance. We're just saying that we want to have accessibility, but we're not, for example, requiring any specific accessibility standards. So there's just general, some lack of scope clarification, to me at least, looking from this, that I would love to make sure that we're crisp about our requirements from this project.

Part of that falls to the nature of the consultation process that we've outlined, is that we're really seeking a subject matter expert's recommendation on a solution to propose. And then they'll be able to bring a proposed design package to us. So we couldn't really introduce benchmarks at this RFP stage, not being able to see ahead to what their recommended solution was. Once we got to the stage that we'd passed through discovery and heard from those community voices, then we did have a proposed design package like on our desk that the city would be reviewing for approval, that's when I think we'd really come together and look at the specifics of what that design package were. And then we can name specific benchmarks that would apply to that.

Just for an example, say the consultant were to come and say, your problems could be solved just by organizational or taxonomy changes within SmartRec, then that will have very different benchmarks than if they come back and say, oh we wanna build some kind of custom layer that draws from the SmartRec API. And so we wouldn't wanna prescribe those benchmarks at this stage not knowing what the proposed solution or even really the exact specific nature of the friction points are.

Thank you. I still feel like I am not clear on the outcome as in, say for example, click to number of clicks required to do certain actions, so I can follow-up offline on that. And I see, doctor Hamilton, you have your hand up.

Yeah. I think it might be helpful to maybe understand the beginning of conversation because I think that that actually provides a lot of clarity. So the beginning of this conversation was actually with commute the communications team in our in our city to say, these are this is the type of feedback that we're receiving from our community. They're saying it's hard to find information. It takes too many clicks.

They don't know where to go. It's hard to find these various services within parks. We'd also received a lot of feedback from our Park Trails and Recreation Commission about how our parks and trails live within our current website platform. And so as I spoke that through with communications, but also with the the assistant COO, Lisa Maher, the determination was that the first step that we needed to go through was discovery with an expert in website and communications. For us to come forward with some of these questions that you're asking, if we had that standard at the front end, we're also not being asking that consultant to bring us other solutions that we may be unaware of that may be at our disposal.

And so what Mac is trying to say is that we're asking them to bring us a menu of options, a few different options that say, this would be the lowest lift. This would be the highest lift. These are the types of things you would be able to get in there. Then we would work with our communications team. We would work internally to say, okay.

We want our load rate to be like this. We need it to be accessible to these standards, and and they would be able to help us shape that. So I I understand concern and the question, and what I would say is that we can't be there yet because we actually don't have an idea of what that solution is going to look like. Because if the solution is simply a cleanup of our Civic Rec platform, then what we're able to accomplish will be very different than if it's a far more integrated solution. And so we are happy to continue to update council as we go through this process with the consultant to try to give a little more of that clarity.

But at this stage of the contracting process, we don't have that because we're asking for them to help us define those standards.

Thank you, director Hamilton. I saw hands for council member Kritser.

Thank you. I think generally my question was addressed, which I I was thinking, from hearing some questions that it seems like the council will be interested in being updated, over time. So if you can just kinda let us know about the cadence that we might expect, for you to be coming back, to us to be able to, as more is developing, I think that would be helpful.

Definitely. That'll be, at least in phases one and two of the discovery, there'll be ample opportunity. We will connect with you through our leadership team to get your very important stakeholder input.

Council Vice President, you will come in.

Thank you, Chair. And I see a note from Director Hamilton that says that they can plan on quarterly updates. Thank you, Director. Mine, a user of the website and registration, I am very happy for this to go to consent. I'm looking for what what the possibilities are and and having those possibilities explored because it's the user experience is is difficult, first handedly speaking as as a community member. So, I can only imagine kind of the the headaches that others are having as well as they're trying to do this as a great way for us to provide better service. So thank you.

Thank you so much. So if I hear no concerns, are we okay to move this item for approval on May 5? Seeing none. Thank you so much. Let's move on to our agenda number and we need to catch up on our time. We are a little behind on the schedule. Our next item on the agenda is, again, informational. This is Energy Smart eSight residential electrification program update. And we have Jenny Leibach, sustainability manager. And could you please introduce yourself? I

can introduce us really quickly. So, yeah, good afternoon council. So I am Jenny Livek, sustainability manager, and I'm joined today by Sarah Phillips. She manages our regional energy smart East Side program. Just to ground us before I hand it over to Sarah, so our 2025 environmental sustainability action plan focuses on the five big moves that we're prioritizing to cut our emissions and strengthen community resilience.

So in Redmond, most emissions, about 60% of those come from existing buildings. And so last month, you heard about our new programming to reduce emissions from commercial buildings, but today we're focusing on homes. So our residential work is done, in partnership with five neighboring cities through Energy Smart East Side. And so this is a regional program that brings economies of scale to move faster and allow us to reach more community members. So right now, our top priority is heat pumps because about 80% of East Side homes rely on gas furnaces to heat their homes.

And when we replace those furnaces with high efficiency heat pumps, we can cut emissions from that system by over 90% while also delivering cooling and resilience cooling, resilience, and clean air benefits. So Sarah is shared staff person working on behalf of all six East Side cities and her position itself is actually hosted at the city of Bellevue so she made the the trek over to join us today. So I'm gonna hand it over to Sarah to provide a overview and an update on the program.

All right so thank you so much council members for your interest in energy smart east side and your continued support and I'll just give you kind of a brief update today and happy to take questions. Energy smart east side is focused on accelerating the equitable transition to healthy energy efficient and resilient homes. Now as Jenny mentioned expanding heat pump adoption remains a central priority with a long term goal of phasing out fossil fuel heating by 2050. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the program's North Star but as many of you know heat pumps are solution with far reaching co benefits. For every 100 heat pump projects implemented through ESC incentives 90% of those households will have increased resiliency to wildfire smoke and extreme heat.

20% of those households will experience significantly reduced heating bills. 15% of households will be enrolled in electricity demand response programs which improves our community's ability to withstand a peak energy event in the winter. 10% of households will experience reduced exposure to diesel particulates and 2% of households actually come to us with inoperable heating and we're able to restore access to reliable and affordable heat. Each year more than four thirty gas furnaces in Redmond are ready for replacement our approach ensures all residents can access the benefits of heat pumps through a range of supports so this includes a $1,000 community discount for anybody in the city, a $5,000 bonus rebate for moderate income households, free heat pumps for income qualified households, technical assistance for multifamily properties, outreach education and even one on one support and multilingual engagement and partnership with community based organizations. In the next few weeks we expect to install our one thousandth heat pump, an exciting milestone that reflects strong momentum.

The total includes several impactful projects bringing those electrification benefits I was just talking about the improved affordability resilience to heat and wildfire smoke to priority communities in Redmond. In the last year we've upgraded seven adult family homes that benefited elderly and disabled residents. 22 homes were fully electrified at Patterson Park, a Habitat for Humanity community. We were thrilled to have the mayor there joining us for our celebration recently. Right now in progress 20 mobile homes are being upgraded at the Friendly Village Senior Community to Mobile Home Park and we're kicking off a project at the Avon Villa Mobile Home Park next month.

Across the broader East Side we're working with other Habitat for Humanity communities, Arch homeowners, senior co ops, adult family homes, and transitional housing providers. Together these efforts have reduced emissions 31,000 metric tons which always have to give a quote of equivalency because who knows what that means but it's equivalent to removing about 7,000 gas powered vehicles from the road for one year while also helping those households manage rising utility costs. Graph I think is really impactful I imagine many of you are having conversations with your constituents about concerns of rising utility costs. Electricity has gone up 50% in the last five years, gas has gone up 72% in the last five years and the utility prices are expected to increase another 30% in the next three years. Heat pumps aren't especially effective at lowering energy bills for those residents who are transitioning from inefficient electric heating systems that would be like baseboards and wall cadets which are really common in many of Redmond's 12,000 plus multifamily units.

They're also as you probably know three to four times more efficient which has the side benefit of helping reduce strain on the electric grid during an extreme winter event. Currently a little less than a quarter of our installations are in multifamily housing and we're expanding our outreach and technical support to grow that share this year. Alongside these projects outreach remains essential. While awareness is growing many residents still have a limited understanding of how these heating and cooling systems affect comfort cost resilience and climate this year we'll participate in more than 40 community events and expand our marketing through social media, digital content, and targeted mailers. We also expect to provide over 201 on one consultations through our energy advisor service working closely with our contractor network to help residents maximize rebates.

Work is funded by our partner cities and substantial grant match so just to kind of roughly give you an idea about one third of our funding is from city contributions about two thirds from grants. Over the past three years we've been really lucky and secured 9,800,000 from state and utility grant sources much of which will be deployed in the current biennium. Looking ahead however we do anticipate a decline in available grant funding. This is for a couple reasons. One is reduced allocations from the Washington State Department of Commerce, they're here program which is underwritten by the Climate Commitment Act and the second has to do with the timing of these cycles.

So the next big cycle of grants is going to kind of hit late twenty twenty eight. Approximately 19% of grant funding is spent on projects in the city of Redmond. Now grant funding does support much of our equity focused work especially that full cost coverage low and program for low income households. So we're actively exploring options. We're looking at city funding sources and also strategies to be able to scale up and down our program based on funding levels.

We also coordinate closely with other municipalities and talk to commerce a lot about how they might evolve their programs. We have a more consistent source of funding. We don't have this kind of start stop phenomenon I'll close really quickly just three fun updates and then let you answer some quest or ask some questions we just launched an update to our rebate program and expanded access so it's now applicable to rental properties and single family homes about 20% of single family homes are rentals so that's a really exciting update we've kicked off cross promotion of Puget Sound Energy substantial weatherization rebates They're phenomenal. They actually cover 60 to 70% of the cost of a weatherization project and we have that on our website. We're included in all of our education materials and at those 40 events we talk about it that I was talking about.

And we're working on a rollout of a rebate for heat pump water heaters by the end of this year. So with that happy to answer any questions.

Council Member Forsyth.

Thank you. You were with us last year right and presented? Yeah, great to see you again. Last year I asked a question about HOAs and the state law. Can you remind folks that HOAs are not able to prevent this?

They are not good. Thank you for asking that great question. Recently, about a year and a half ago, state law was updated specifically that said HOA's CAF to provide reasonable access to heat pumps. It's very vaguely worded legislation. What we have really found working with HOAs and condo boards is that they're afraid they're worried about the aesthetics they're worried about building penetration they're not really sure where they want to place them condensate there's a lot of actual technical issues What we've really found to be successful is supporting a champion in the building who really wants to bring heat pumps to their community, working with them, getting in front of the board, finding out their concerns connecting them with qualified contractors having them interview the contractors support their questions I've gone to many condo board meetings over the last year and we have successful in turning condominium communities from detractors where they are saying no to co hosting heat pump workshops with us and opening up the rebates to everybody in their community so we still have some work to do but taking a proactive approach and trying to meet them where they're at has been very successful.

Wonderful thank you for that and I may need to invite you to my condo.

I love to come let's chat.

Being someone that installed one had to move it because of condensation issues happy to share all those issues with you as well. Thank you.

Oh my goodness, we should follow-up. Yes.

Consul Baba Prakria.

Thank you Sarah and Jenny for this presentation and for all the work you're doing. I don't want to get competitive with our with our partner cities, but I'm looking at page 13 of the budget and expenses by budget source of attachment A, that table. And from what I see and I could be reading this totally wrong, we are putting in five times as much money into this program as Kirkland. We're putting in more money than Bellevue. But if we look at page 10 of the same Attachment A, Kirkland installed double the heat pumps using these rebates than Redmond did, more than double in fact.

Bellevue installed nearly triple. And even adjusting per capita, it seems like Redmond is just not getting its fair share based off what we're putting in financially. Am I just totally interpreting this wrong?

Yeah, it has a little bit to do. Thank you for asking this is fantastic question. So first of all I want to congratulate Redmond for really supporting the equity projects in your community that is where the most of that contribution is going to a little bit has to do with the timeframe so a lot of those installs that happened in Kirkland were based off of rebates and not off of that equity component of low income heat pump installs. A lot of that work in Redmond has really accelerated in the first half of this year. So I think what you're going to see at the end of this year is Redmond has more installs probably triple than Kirkland. So over the course of the biennium, it's going to shift dramatically. A lot of those projects we just talked about are actually in progress right now. But great question.

Thank you.

Any more question? Okay. Council member Kreitzer.

And do you expect there's areas of significant balance in the 2026 budget. Do you expect the budgets to be fully spent down by 2026? We do. Great. A lot of good work ahead then.

Yeah. One note I'll just say is right now the energy smarty side budget, we front loaded it with grants. So that's why you didn't see the spend. Year one was getting getting all of those commerce grants that ended at think the end of last year yeah and so now we're finally hitting the city budget dollars and they're all planned to be allocated maybe

one additional piece of color was one of the significant grants last year was specific to adult family homes there's just simply more of them in Bellevue and Kirkland so that's where a lot of those installs but it was earmarked to that particular piece of work this year a lot of our equity work is happening in Redmond.

Any more questions? Otherwise I have a question. So there are many older and affordable homes in Redmond which may not be ready for the heat pump because they may need the electric panels to be replaced. So, can the grant funding be reused for some of these purposes?

Great question. In our full cost coverage program we do cover the cost of a main panel upgrade if that's required.

Any other question? I just have one more if no one else. So what about I heard like Washington is ruling that high efficiency electric home rebate act. So what will be an impact of that one on this impact is can these two be used together or it will be like you know I'd be don't want the residents to get confused so just wanted to hear.

Oh okay are you referring to the IRA funded rebates okay that program we hope will roll out however it's been on pause since the start of the Trump administration and it's unlikely to roll out before the conclusion of the Trump administration. We did engage with the state along with many other municipal providers and utility providers to talk through some of those issues because we had a concern about confusion. The big thing is we would we want it to launch and we want to leverage it and we want to take it super successful but at the moment that funding is tied up.

Thank you so much. Seems there are no more questions. Thank you so much, Sarah. Let's move to our next agenda item which is Park Impact Fee Study Update and it will be presented by we have Director Laureen Hamilton online and Lindsay. Yes.

Good afternoon Council, my name is Lindsay Falkenberg, I'm the Parks Planning Manager and I'm here to introduce Cameron Zapata, our Senior Parks Planner who's going to bring you up to speed on where we are at with our park impact update.

Good afternoon, I'm here to provide an update to City Council on the park impact fee study. The last time this was brought to council was last fall when the contract with our consultant FCS was approved and the project is now at a point to provide a status update. Since working with FCS, staff has collected data for the consultants like park assets, future CIP projects, park usage, and FCS has run models for different methods to calculate the park impact fees and have recently shared those results with staff. So our next steps are to gather feedback from staff in the Parks, Trails and Recreation Commission. And then in June, hold a study session with city council to share these, the three different options for the park impact reschedule.

And so in preparation for the study session, is there anything specific that council would like staff to prepare for?

Council Preston Stewart.

Yes. If I misspeak on behalf of the council, please, I invite my colleagues to, to share other thoughts. But I will say, this is an example of we don't have enough materials in our packet. We have a very brief memo for you, so it's really hard to come prepared with such things. I did, however, have a so on behalf of the council, I would say this is a hard, question for us to answer for for us generally in these moments.

On behalf of myself personally, I did go back to when we adopted this contract and some of the questions. So I would like to, make sure that we are able to hear from the community outreach that the the contract included on-site presentations. Four of them for two to three audiences of the city's choice. Who did we choose and in what venue? Looking forward to hearing what the commission has to say about the rates. And, my burning question was on where are we on track to have the final report by June, and it does sound like, in fact, that that is on track. So thank you. Those are my thoughts.

Any more questions? I just have a questions. Are the you know, Haradman is moving towards the urban side. So we are having commercials as well as residentials and it's just I'm very curious to know when the park fees will be implemented. How does a portion of a commercial versus a portion of residential is taken into consideration? I'm just very curious to know a little bit more about that as well. Like what would the park fee impact on the commercial versus residential?

On commercial versus residential is what you're asking? I think we won't know that until we select a method which is the next step and then but in terms of implementation we're planning on bringing this forward with fire, is it fire that is also doing their impact fee update in the fall and so this would be rolled in with the budget process at that time and then would be able to be implemented started in starting in 2027 so that's kind of like longer term timeline for it But how the fees breakdown for residential, industrial, employee, non employee, all of those different categories depends on the method structure that we choose, which is what we'll bring to you during the study session in June, is those different there's three different methods that are being considered and you all will get to see those in detail and provide feedback on them.

Thank you. Consul Vice President, Nueva Cabina.

Thank you, Chair. Just before we completely wrap up, I know that Council President had spoken on behalf of the Council, and I just want to chime in and let that for the record, I was very glad that she had brought that up, Because without without having much more information, we we don't know what we don't know. So we don't know what questions to ask. So I'm I'm just echoing that, yes, I'm I'm grateful that that council president spoke up on behalf of council for that.

Thank you so much. Let's move on to our next agenda item, which is, dog park. And we have deputy director, David and, DC Rainey. Sorry. Yeah. Thank you.

Yes. Yeah. Hello, council. Deputy Director Dave Tuchak, Parks and Recreation Department and I'm joined by Darcy Rayner Shepherd who is going to be providing an update regarding our dog parks and Darcy is our operations manager.

Thank you, Dave and thank you council. Since 2023, Redmond's pop up dog parks have provided dedicated spaces for dogs and their owners to exercise and socialize. These temporary parks have helped the city evaluate different locations and community needs while planning for a permanent off leash dog area. This year, Luke McRedmond's pop up opened the April and Hartman's opened the April, so both are up and operational now. And during the budget process, a permanent dog park was identified as a city priority and approved as part of the twenty five-twenty six budget.

The permanent amenity will be installed at Luke McRedmond Park late summer early fall twenty twenty six with both pop up parks scheduled to come down 2026. Luke McRedmond's pop up will come down for constructing the permanent amenity and Hartman's will come down to accommodate the Redmond High School cross country teams events and programs. The design for the Luke McRedmond permanent dog park will be similar to the popular pop up dog park layout with a small and or anxious dog area, a large and or social dog area, double gated entry, shade elements, possible enrichment elements, and considerations for universal design with accessible elements. Information will be kept up to date on our Let's Connect Dog Park webpage and through our social media channels. Do you guys have any questions?

Okay. I see council member Forsyth.

Thank you. Really excited that this is going permanent. This was such a big ask of our commission and then of council, so excited we're still rolling on this. It sounds like the construction is gonna happen during our peak months. So how long will it be closed for construction roundabout?

Some considerations for the timing is we needed to do the construction since we're doing most of it in house, we will be contracting certain elements but it was important to do the work while we still had our seasonal staff on to help with our regular park operations maintenance duties. And then it also can get wet down there so we needed to do the construction and be able to bring in concrete trucks and larger equipment during the dry season. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to make it out into the turf.

Do we know about how long it's gonna take? How long it will take?

We are aiming for it to be open early October.

That's still not quite, how long is it gonna be closed?

Six to eight weeks.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah. Council member Kritser.

Thank you. And thank you so much for the work on this. So the Hartman Park dog pop up after it after it goes down this time, will it pop up again in future years? Or is it now that we're having the permanent one, we won't have other pop ups? Since I know we were popping some up to see what were the most popular spaces.

I believe the direction at this time is to continue popping up while we have the materials and we have the space.

Great. So just the one that's Luke McRedmond would be a year round whereas Hartman one would be at?

Continue to be seasonal. Yep.

Council President Stewart. Actually, I do see director Hamilton online. Do you have something to add?

Yeah. Yes. I was just going to add that they will continue popping up, and then we will continue as we look at park redevelopment, new parks, to see other spaces to pop to perhaps install more permanent dog parks as well. So this is similar to, like, our community gardens, how we continue to look in spaces to expand that amenity. This is one we'll continue popping up temporarily, but also both medium and long term look for places that we can install permanent dog parks so that maybe the pop ups become less frequent, but that is not in our current plans.

Thank you, director. Council okay. Any other questions? Okay. I just have a very one just one quick question. You are talking about universal designs. I this is going to take into account the dogs that are going to deal with the mobility issues. So, you know, probably are those pups can also be considered?

Just to clarify and make sure I understand the question, you're asking about dogs with special needs accessing the park. We will take that into consideration. We've been focusing more on elements that we can include and make the most accessible. The challenges with the soft surface to make the entire park accessible is challenging. So I imagine it would be the same for the dogs with mobility concerns.

Thank you so much. And I believe you are staying back for the next agenda item as well, which is climate resiliency and sustainability in vegetation management plan implementation update.

Yes, very long name, but it's a very good name actually. Darcy is going to be providing the update on our climate resiliency in vegetation management.

Thanks.

Thank you, Dave and thank you Council. The climate resiliency and sustainability and vegetation management plan was developed in 2023 and 2024 with a consultant. In 2024 and 2025, park operations began implementation through practices, cultivating wildflower meadows and pollinator gardens, testing a resilient fescue type turf blend at the Great Lawn at campus here. We had our first annual public tree giveaway event, and we are continuing to work on our electrification of equipment. In 2026, our focus is tree canopy and understory expansion, both in house and contracted efforts, rights of way conversions and this work will be contracted for 2026.

And the goals are to align with our CRSVM species lists, making landscape areas more sustainable and resilient and reducing maintenance requirements of these rights of ways. We will continue turf renovations to more resilient fescue type turf. And in 2025 and 2026, we added additional 720,000 square feet, which is about 16 acres and about 38.5% of our maintained turf areas system wide have now been renovated converted to our tall fescue type turf. We are continuing the electrification of equipment such as mowers, small and medium sized blowers, handheld equipment like line trimmers, edgers and chainsaws, and we are conducting regular demos as new technology comes out. We are also participating in a citywide effort to make a GIS green mapping project.

This will capture tree canopy expansion areas, restoration areas, CRS VM efforts, noxious weeds tracking, and more. This exciting work will continue into the next biennium and beyond. Are there any questions?

Consul I don't know which one was first, but I'll go with the council member Parsey.

I just wanted to say thank you so much. This is a really exciting project, and I am so excited. Every time I read through this very long document, I get even more excited. I just wanted to share this for the listening public, that the city manages a lot of land, and to manage this land more effectively, means that we're making a huge difference in the habitat that we're providing. This includes planting species that are more climate resilient, planting native plants that provide better habitat for birds and all the the creatures that live with us in Redmond.

And this just makes a huge difference. So I just wanted to say thank you so much for doing this.

On since president Stewart?

Yeah. Thank you so much. Always great to have this update. This is one of the best plans we have in the city, not only because it's so effective and so clearly laid out, but because it's one that truly reflects the values of the people of Redmond when residents write to us, hey. Why doesn't the city do this?

We're able to turn to the plan and say it's right here. I do wanna take a moment to acknowledge that the project lead on creating the plan in the first place is our deputy director, Dave Chuchak. The council has heard from the grapevine that we may not, have another opportunity to thank you for your incredible years of service here at the city of Redmond. We wish you all the best in retirement, and I know we have one more item at the end of our agenda, but the council does have a small token of our appreciation, Dave, and we just look forward to seeing you back and wish you happy trails along the way. Thank you so much.

Yeah thank you. Totally unexpected and yeah so Thursday will be my last day at the city after thirty eight years which is pretty amazing But, yeah, it's just been an amazing career. I love Redmond. Decided to never leave, and I do have to leave eventually. So that'll be this Thursday. So anyway, and I also wanted to say thank you so much for all of your work and I recognize how difficult it is and how many hours you put into it. So I think as a team collectively, we make Redmond a much better place. So thank you.

Council member Kritser.

I just wanted to put on the record what a pleasure it has been to work with deputy director Tuccik, and just wanna commend you so much on your service to our city. It is a greener, more joyful place because of the work that you've done. And and I wanna note that this climate resiliency sustainable vegetation management plan is an award winning plan. So, and so much of the work that we've done has been really on the leading edge, and a lot of it's been with your leadership. So thank so you much.

Great, thank you. And then just quickly I wanted to give a shout out to Director Hamilton who we really worked on this together and she you know really brought it to us and we embraced it and it's just been it's a really good plan and I really am happy that you acknowledge that and yeah, we can see the results directly.

Doctor. Hibbleton, do you have to say something?

I just wanted to, yeah, echo. Dave will be very, very missed, and he's been an incredible, contributor to our department. He's been an incredible support to me and our managers team. So, yes, thank you so much, Dave, for everything, and thank you, counsel, for recognizing all of his years of service.

Thank you so much, Dave. You will be truly best in city, but, you know, in the city work, but otherwise, we'll keep seeing the greener Redmond because of you. So we'll always remember you with that.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. We are moving to the last agenda. This is item from other committee approval of amendment to the Landor Associates Inc on call contract to provide hydrogeological hydrogeological support in the amount of 300,000. And this is presented okay. Presented by, deputy director Kiss. And I do see director Bert also online.

Thank you council member Tony and appreciate you all fitting us in on this agenda. Good evening council members. I am Chris Stinger, deputy director of utilities and environmental programs for public works. I'm joined tonight by Ernie Fix, utilities manager and Jessica Atlixson, senior environmental scientist. So the aforementioned item, this amendment would increase the current maximum contract amount by 300,000 bringing the total not to exceed amount to $600,000 The purpose of this increase is to allow Landau to continue and expand their technical support for the groundwater aquifer monitoring network improvement project.

This work is focused on strengthening and modernizing our groundwater monitoring system. Specifically, the additional funding will first in our We groundwater resources. So a key component of this effort includes installing new monitoring wells near supply wells number one and two. This will help us better understand the extent of PFAS detections within the aquifer and inform future decision making. Importantly, this additional work will be fully funded through the capital improvement project funds that have been already been approved for the current biennium.

So we are requesting this amendment be placed on the 05/19/2026 business meeting consent agenda for council approval. We're happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

Any questions from the council? Council member Prakria.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. I'm just reading through the the supplemental agreement right now, Exhibit A and Exhibit B which says, which both say no changes to the scope of work or the work schedule. So just for my understanding, why is the amount of money doubling that we are giving allowed payable to them?

Thank you for the question. So the contract is an on call. It was originally we originally went out for an RFQ, council approved it in 2025 or the twenty twenty five-twenty six biennium. The on call was primarily to conduct our semi annual water monitoring that we do two times a year. But we have optional tasks on that contract to also assist with groundwater monitoring while installation and decommissioning.

And so because we have CIP funds this year to do what we call network enhancement, basically making our groundwater monitoring network better, making improvements to it, we are adding that money onto this contract so we can utilize Landau to help us with that process.

Council Member Kreitzer.

Thank you. I'm glad to be able to add additional resourcing to make sufficient testing of our groundwater. We have received several comments from a frequent public commenter about testing for PFAS specifically in the area kind of near Evans Creek. So just curious if the anticipated anticipated work work will will include include testing testing in in that that area. Area.

So we do have funding to do our semiannual monitoring, as I mentioned. And because of the comments we have decided to sample Monitoring Well 25 which is located downgrading of the area that he's concerned about. So we will be testing that for PFAS this summer but that's not using the CIP funds. However, we are slated to drill additional monitoring wells in the area. We'll sample all of those wells for PFAS and it'll just also help really define the groundwater contours in the area as well in Southeast Redmond.

Great. Thank you so much.

Councilmember Barcy, you have a question?

Yeah, thank you. Just following up on your question, would you be able to when you plan to do the testing, you be able to share the location and timeline for test the PFAS testing as well with us?

Absolutely, we our consultants put together a semi annual report for us So, maybe that's something we can do. We can either come in and do a staff report or, submit a memo including that report as well.

Any more questions? Seeing none, are we okay to move this item for approval on May 19? Everybody, thumbs up. Thank you so much. With this, we have re