City Council - workshop

Stand by.

Good evening, I'm calling this meeting to order. This is a Redmond City Council study session held on Tuesday, July 14th, 2026, commencing at 7 p.m. All council members are in attendance tonight. Mayor Bernie will not be present tonight. Following a staff request, items two and three on tonight's agenda will be flipped. And following a council request, tonight's council talk time will kick off with a verbal report from Director Helen, regarding a business license update that came up in Committee of the Whole last week. So there are five total items on the agenda, the 2026 Annual Community Survey Results, Recreation Program Plan Overview, Pavement Management Program Update, Tenant Protections Update and Discussion, and Council Talk Time. The first item on the agenda is the 2026 Annual Community Survey Results. Deputy Director of Equity and Strategic Services, Zach Hufner, will introduce this item. Thank you, Zach.

Thank you, Council President. Good evening, Council. I'd like to welcome and introduce Sarah Labatt, who is a senior principal with EMC Research Incorporated. And tonight, Sarah and team are here to present the results of this year's annual survey and answer any questions you might have. Welcome, Sarah.

All right, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Sarah Labatt, Senior Principal with EMC Research. My colleague Sianna Ziegler is here as well in the audience and she'll help with any questions as they come up. Hopefully I'm close enough and hopefully you can all see the screen. Okay, so I think we have about 30 minutes on the agenda today. So I'm going to move through this presentation. Happy to take questions. I'm hoping unless it's really critical that we can hold questions till the end just so that we can make sure we get through and then I'm happy to take any questions that you have about our presentation. So first of all, giving an overview of the work we did, this is a general satisfaction survey of Redmond residents about city government and resident priorities for planning and improvements in Redmond. We did the survey April 6th through May 3rd, 2026. So just wrapped it up a couple of months ago. We have done this survey with Redmond for a number of cycles and as our industry is constantly evolving and how we contact people and what the best way is to listen, we also evolve our methodology. I know in years past when we've done this survey, we've talked a lot about methodology and how we contact Our respondents, it's been primarily mail-driven in our last few iterations. We listened to the feedback and broadened our methods to get feedback here in this survey. It is still a random sample survey, but we used not just mail, we did use mail to generate but also did texting, emailing, outbound telephone interviewing to make sure that we are representing a broad, diverse and representative sample of Redmond residents. So we do think this helped to broaden our participant pool and really get a sample that's reflective of the community. We did 528 total interviews with a random sample of Redmond residents. So as we look at this data, it's a margin of error of about 4.3 percentage points when we're looking at citywide data. So as we look at any data point, you can think of a bar about four points plus or minus. And if we could have asked every single person, most of the time the answer would fall in that window. The survey was offered in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi. And most did choose to take the survey in English. We also asked them the language they spoke at home and we did see more diversity of language than we saw their choice in the language that they participate. So we don't force them to take it in a specific language, rather we offer the languages and they can choose what to take it in. We will show a little bit more about language diversity here a little bit later in the deck of our respondents. As I've said, we've been working with the city for a number of years. We have a lot of time series data. So we provide that perspective here in this report. And we are also currently in the field with an open access survey at redmondsurvey.com. It's available for people to take. It is an opt-in. It is not a random sample, but rather an opportunity for anyone in the community. to go and take the survey that is open now. It will be open for another few weeks till the end of the month. And that's up to over 400 completed surveys at this point. It is a much higher response rate than in years past and your staff has done a lot of work promoting that survey and really pushing it out to the community and making sure people know it's available. so we do see a lot of responses to that and as that closes out at the end of the month we'll provide that data to your staff as well so you can sort of understand you know how does that group that are more engaged that are looking for opportunities for input compare with this random sample survey we're showing today A quick look at the map. You all know what your city looks like, but we do have some places where we break down responses by geography and we used your neighborhoods to group them into three sort of general regions, really looking for ways to make sure we have enough in each region to look at. So here we're showing downtown east and west. I know that's not how you necessarily refer to the regions of the city, but just to give us a pool of interviews each that we think we can look at with some reliability and we use the neighborhoods to really create that grouping here a quick overview of the demographic profile this does mirror roughly the census distribution of residents adult residents in Redmond I mean we work a lot to get a random representative sample we do use some population weighting and to ensure that it's reflective. And we're pretty happy with how the results came out in terms of their distribution as compared with census distribution in the city. So you can see here the distribution on gender, home ownership, children and household, age type of dwelling unit, and also neighborhood, which we just saw on the map slide. And we also show in this report ethnicity. This is self-reported ethnicity. They could choose multiple responses, which is the the strategy the US Census uses as well. So we show that here, and you can see a very diverse pool of respondents by ethnicity, self-reported ethnicity and ethnic identity there, and then also language spoken at home. Even though most of our participants chose to take the survey in English, we do see more linguistic diversity when we ask them, what languages do you speak at home? Both of these are multiple response, so they could choose more than one. So you'll notice these total more than 100%. A quick overview of what was happening when we did the survey, you know, a survey is a snapshot in time. We want to make sure we keep in perspective what was happening in the community and in the region at that time. Because some of this we might see in some of the numbers in the data. So, you know, there was, you know, news about some layoffs, we did see the opening that we did the survey right after the opening of the Cross Lake connection, which I rode today, by the way, it's beautiful lovely view today. You know, speed cameras went live, some Microsoft news. So certainly lots going on, as always, in Redmond. And I think just important to remember when we do this survey every year, something is always happening. And we want to make sure we're thinking about the people answering this are in this environment. This is a snapshot of that moment in time when we did the survey. Okay. Getting into the data about Redmond. So first of all, quality of life and overall environment. How would you rate the quality of life in Redmond? Would you say it's excellent, good, satisfactory, only fair or poor? This is a question we've been asking over a long span of time here in Redmond. The dark blue there at the top is the excellent plus good combined, right? So the positive ratings, the red down near the bottom is only fair plus poor. So the negative ratings, then we're showing the excellent as a breakout, sort of that dotted blue line. And I, you know, it's been very consistently high, right? 81% say things in Redmond are excellent or good. So a positive rating and within that 32% give an excellent rating, that most extreme positive rating, which we do see up since 2025 and really the highest measured in a long time in terms of that excellent rating. So certainly very positive environment when we think generally about quality of life and how people are feeling about living here in Redmond. We do have some open-ended questions as well. What is the best thing about living in Redmond? And we give them the opportunity to say anything they'd like. We code them for analysis to really look for how these responses group And I do wanna make the point here that open-ended responses tend to be a little more volatile when we look at over time data, right? It's what is top of mind? So it can be driven very much by what's going on in the moment, what happened last week right before we did the survey, but certainly we see pretty consistently accessibility, scenery and parks, low crime, safe and clean, small town feel. These are the things that are top of mind when they think about living in Redmond. We do see some change over time, higher on accessibility. Remember we started the survey the week after the new light rail connection opened, that could be part of that context. In addition to obviously accessibility locally, but I think that could be feeding in. Beautiful scenery, trails and parks, less frequently mentioned, but I think what's happening is we're seeing more things sort of compete with that in terms of their top of mind recollections about what they like about living here in Redmond. We also ask a second question, also an open-ended question. What's the most important problem facing the city of Redmond today? It's been very consistent over time, housing, affordability, cost of living taxes, sort of the cost to live. And this is not unique to this community. We're seeing this in a lot of places all over the West Coast. Affordability is a real challenge in this moment. And we see that consistently here as sort of the biggest issue they see facing the city. Next, growth over development and traffic, sort of neck and neck, but you can see concerns about growth maybe a little bit lower than what we saw in the last survey, seven points lower. Traffic, crime, homelessness, infrastructure, just a little bit up from last time. Again, open-ended responses are a little bit volatile in that tracking, but it's pretty consistent with what we've seen before. Affordability is a challenge and has been dating back over time. This is that same question sort of going back farther over time. So really looking at not just last year to this year, but going back here to 2019, always an open-ended question and we use essentially the same codes. And to code this so we can really look at that change over time, and you can see affordability has been one of the top concerns in redmond for some time i'm dating back all the way to just during the pandemic. Growth, we see is kind of bounced around less of a concern this year than last year, but more similar to what was seen in 2024. Traffic has sort of been, except for 2019, before the pandemic, pretty consistently sort of in the mix, but not necessarily the number one issue. So it's been very consistent over time. I'd say the biggest shift we're seeing here is sort of that movement around growth concerns, but the rest has stayed extremely consistent over the past, you know, eight years or so. We also wanted to show that top of mind concern by those three regions of the city. Remember the map. So this is just for the current survey. And we do see that affordability and cost of living is the number one mentioned concern for residents across all areas of the city when we look at those three areas we showed on the map. We do see traffic a higher concern among residents west of the downtown area in those western neighborhoods. While you see homelessness a little bit higher of a concern in the downtown neighborhood and growth a little bit more of a concern in the east of downtown neighborhoods. We also asked them what, for each of the following information sources, how often do you hear or get information on what Redmond City Government is doing, including news and events? So really trying to understand where are their information sources. We see, you know, word of mouth comes here to the top. The focus print newsletter utility bills, the website. So a real diversity of information sources. We do see a decrease in the number of survey respondents seeing the newsletter. I do want to remind us that we added methodologies into this survey that went beyond driving the survey entirely by mail. Likely that number is being impacted to some degree, right? The people that were taking the survey were the ones paying attention to their mail from the city. Now we've diversified our respondent pool a little bit more. I think it's actually a better and more robust sample. So we do see a little bit of a drop in the number or the percentage of people saying they're getting news from the newsletter, but it's still the second highest response. It's still a high penetration. That is a way that they get information about the city in addition to word of mouth, other mailings and the website. Okay, getting into city ratings and priorities. So now getting sort of more into detail about some of the specific priorities and services. So we gave them this statement, the city of Redmond uses for guiding priority statements when determining how your tax dollars should be spent. And then we read them the four statements or they read them if they were taking this online. the programs, initiatives and priorities should be strategic and responsive, healthy and sustainable, safe and resilient, vibrant and connected. We read all four and asked them, do you agree or disagree that these should be the city's top priority? So they weren't asked to choose between them or rank them against each other. Just here are the priorities. Does this sound right to you for the city of Redmond? And we do see 87% saying they agree. These are the right priorities for the city. 10% saying they disagree. Very similar to what we saw in last year's survey using that same set of priorities. The way you're expressing what your priorities are is resonant with residents in the community. They appreciate these four priorities as a set. We also asked them some more specific job ratings. So separately from priorities, this is where we're asking them, how is the city doing in each of the following areas? We have an overall rating that we ask them, you know, the city overall, and then these four different areas, keeping community members informed, delivering services effectively, et cetera. So we see that in the overall rating, 67% give the city an excellent or good rating, so that positive rating at about two-thirds. 27%, an only fair or poor rating on the negative side. It's, I think, important to note that most of those ratings are coming from the sort of softer categories, the good or the fair, as opposed to the excellent and poor, more extreme ratings. which to me indicates that this is a community that appreciates what its government is doing and doesn't necessarily always, everybody in the community isn't paying a lot of attention to all of the detail because they're pretty happy with how things are going. Not to say it's not important, but I think looking at the extremes, that's where you have probably your most informed and engaged community members. But a lot of people saying generally, they think the city is doing a good job. On some of these more detailed items, keeping community members informed, delivering services effectively very positive, over 60% giving a positive rating on those two, focusing on priorities that matter most, you start to see that kind of gray bar that I don't know, I'm not sure that applies to me going up, right? Fewer people able to give a response to some of these. using tax dollars responsibly as well. These two are closer to sort of a one-to-one ratio, but certainly still broad appreciation for some of those. And we're gonna look at these over time now, looking at how they've shifted over time. First of all, on that overall job rating, is the city doing an excellent, good, only fair or poor job overall? And it's been very consistent over time, about two thirds giving a positive rating, similar to last year. 2024, we were looking back at the data and we'll see as we go through the next few charts about tracking data over time. That was a little bit of a rough moment for the city. There was a lot of discussion around some things that you were doing that the community was discussing a lot and we see some of that reflected here. So I do want to, you know, that was a moment in the city and when we did the survey, that was when there was a lot of discussion. I think we've seen that coming out of that more appreciation for what the city is doing and more positive ratings similar to what we saw back in 2023. So on delivering services effectively and keeping community members informed, remember we showed the overall in the four detailed ratings. So this is the first two of the four, then we'll show the other two. Generally very consistent about delivering services effectively in the low 60s, keeping community members informed, very consistent with last year, again, with the decrease in 2024, but generally pretty consistently positive ratings for these two. And then the other two, focusing on priorities that matter and using tax dollars responsibly, these have been consistent and sort of middling, right? About a one-to-one ratio between positive and negative. We see this in a lot of communities when you start getting into the details, particularly around tax dollars. This is pretty similar to a lot of other communities in terms of somewhere in the 40s is about as well as any local government can do on the public thinking you're doing a great job with tax dollars because... A lot of times they just don't like hearing about taxes, even though they pay them and they value the things that come out of them. And I think we see that here. You are in sort of an almost net positive or a net positive from 41% positive to 39% negative on using tax dollars responsibly. This is a moment really regionally and nationally where people have a lot of skepticism about government effectiveness. So I actually think this is a pretty good number to be holding in a moment when a lot of people are asking about the value of taxes and whether we're getting what we want. Generally, I'm not talking specifically about red men. So I think seeing this number, it's pretty consistent with what we see in a lot of communities. Okay, getting into services gap analysis. So we ask about a number of services you provide. It's a pretty long list. And we ask them two questions about each service and function. How important is it to you? And then we ask how well you're doing at delivering it. And then we compare these two. So these are asked on a one to five scale where five is extremely important and one is not important at all. They're read in a randomized order or viewed in a randomized order in the survey. These are sorted by the mean for presentation here today, but to control for order effect, we do randomize the order of this set of questions. So this is the important scale. How important is each of these to you, these city services and function? How important is it to you and your household? Protecting the quality of drinking water, ensuring adequate response times for fire and emergency medical services, rising to the top, you know, nearly universally important. Managing police services also very important, maintaining public infrastructure and facilities, parks, trails, and open space, pedestrian and bike safety. So we really see that dotted line is sort of the midpoint of the scale. Everything's important. They weren't asked to choose between things. They could give each one its own rating. And so we certainly see that your community is very interested in a lot of the services you provide. But in particular, rising to the top are these sort of critical emergency life safety services about drinking water, medical services, police services, etc. And then on performance rating, so the same list read to them and asked how, for each one, how satisfied are you with the city's performance for that specific service or function? On this one, we do have an overall rating and then we ask them, you know, we have all of those different services and how is the city doing on those? And we do see 3.6 is the mean for the overall, right? It's sort of right in the middle between where all the responses are coming in on the mean response, but we do see the highest performance ratings. On some of those same ones, we saw the highest importance ratings, ensuring adequate response times for fire and emergency services, protecting the quality of drinking water. maintaining parks, trails, and open space, all of those rise to the top. We do have the percent very satisfied. They're on the right, too, to really keep in perspective that sort of most strongly positive response. Then we see some that were a little lower on the importance list, providing community events, protecting natural environment, recreation programs, right? Still positive performance ratings for really all of these items. The one that's closest to that mean is utilizing community feedback on priority project decision-making, but nothing below. They're not giving a net negative rating on any of these items. How do you interpret all of that? I'm glad you asked that question. Here we show the comparison of performance to importance. So those two means and essentially what we're showing is performance as a percentage of importance. And you can think of these as if it's over 100%, the job you're doing at it, people are giving you a higher rating as a mean response than how important it is to them. I'm not gonna say you're over delivering anything, But I will say that those are things where you're doing such a good job that they are outperforming how important they think that thing is as a city service. The blue, which are right at or just below 100% is where the performance and importance are roughly comparable. And then the red is where the performance is sort of significantly underperforming importance where they rate, this is a really important thing. The way they rate the performance is a little bit lower. So you can see some of those performance and seating importance here at the top, providing community events, recreation programs, diverse community by providing equitable access to services. I think the more interesting side of this is down near the bottom, underperforming in terms of this is the public's perception of how you're doing. what they think, right, which is different than an objective measure of the quality of the services. But I do think it's important to know, right, that when you think about managing public infrastructure, managing police services, they find it more important than the degree to which they think you're delivering that or the way that they rate that performance itself. But most of these are falling in the middle of sort of matching roughly matching performance and importance. Finally, what we do then is sort of look at the gap between those and how that has changed over time. So the last slide was looking at the performance to importance comparison. Here, what we're showing is those percentages and how that percentage gap has changed from 2025 to 2026. So on the right, that net gap number, a red number here means that you have narrowed the gap from performance to importance? No, widened the gap. A black number means you've narrowed it. So I think the easiest thing to think about in this chart is to look for the biggest positive numbers, right? That 6% managing pedestrian and bike safety means that in 2025, there was an 81% match from performance to importance. Now it's at 87. That was an identified item where performance was underperforming importance. and through efforts in communication and service, you've managed to narrow that gap. People are more closely matching performance to importance on pedestrian and bike safety. Similar with providing services for people in need, managing public infrastructure, protecting the natural environment. Some of the ones that have the red numbers are also the ones that are people ranked as less important and also over-performing, right? So providing community events like Derby Days and Redmond Lights, we see over 100% performance to importance ratio, meaning they already thought you were doing a great job of that thing. And it's maybe not the top of their list of importance, and you're still doing a great job. It's just closer, right? It's more efficient, let's say, delivery in terms of what they think you're doing on that item. Okay. Getting into public safety, this is the last section here, and then I'm happy to take any questions or go back to anything. So we do ask some questions around the job the Redmond Fire Department is doing and the job the Redmond Police Department is doing overall. An excellent, good, only fair or poor job, we do see generally positive ratings for both the fire department and the police department. You know, a generally positive trend for both in terms of doing a good job, in particular that dark blue excellent job, right? We see that number going up for the fire department and the police department from 2025 to 2026. We do see growth particularly for the police department and that 24 excellent to 33 excellent this year in terms of their assessment of how the department is doing more positive for both this year than last year on that excellent number and then the sort of outcome side of that how safe do you feel in redmond and how safe do you feel walking alone in your neighborhood we saw this in the earlier questions as well about what do you like about living in redmond they find it a safe place to live And we see that reflected here when we asked directly 90% say that they feel safe in Redmond 90% say that they feel safe walking alone in Redmond with very little shift over time from 2025 to 2026 so very stable very positive environment around their feelings of safety in the city. So just a quick summary and then I'll stop and I'm happy to take any questions and I also have staff here if there's questions about sort of city side. Ratings of the quality of life and city services continue to be positive here in Redmond. We see that residents continue to find affordability one of the biggest issues facing Redmond. We do see concern about growth and overdevelopment remaining a top issue but it's not as salient as what we saw in the survey last year. Residents do continue to rate the job the city does on most of its core responsibilities positively. Ratings of using tax dollars responsibly has dipped slightly. Again, we're seeing this in so many communities where there's just a lot more attention paid and skepticism about how public agencies spend tax dollars generally. We also see, and I think this is a great highlight, that they continue to feel that Redmond is a safe place to live and continuing increases for ratings about public safety departments, managing police service, but we do see that managing police services and utilizing community feedback do remain areas for improvement, thinking about that gap analysis. With that, I'm happy to take any questions or go back to anything you have questions.

Thank you so much. And thank you to the staff for being here as well. Always appreciate this update. And it's one that we in the calendar because we flip back through it several times a year. I'll go ahead and open up the floor for questions. And I was gonna offer to have our new council members go first. They are the ones who raised their hands first. So I will go council member Parsi and then council member Soni.

For safety data, I am curious if, so slide 27, I'm curious to know if there's specific demographics of people who feel safe in Redmond versus who don't. We know that we have communities, we have LGBTQ communities, we have immigrant communities. Does the council get to have the actual data to look at so we can further drill down on which communities are reporting what?

Yeah, we do provide cross-tabulations that you are welcome to look at. And through your staff, you can certainly see those. I will say with a sample size of about 528, not about, exactly, 528 interviews, we're a little bit limited in how much we can look at some of the smaller subpopulations. So certainly there's some we can look at. in terms of if there's particular communities that may say they feel less safe than others. At those sample sizes, it's hard to really find, it's hard to find communities where that difference is significant from a statistical standpoint, just because of the size of the survey. I would also expect, and I don't have all the crosstabs in my head, but that at 90% generally feeling safe, the difference might more likely fall in the intensity of sort of very to somewhat as opposed to safe to unsafe, just because the numbers that are saying they're feeling unsafe are so low in the broad community. So we'll take a look and through your staff, answer the question more detailed. And certainly we do provide crosstabs to be able to look at all those subpopulations that we feel have an adequate sample size to be able to evaluate.

Council Member Soni.

Thank you so much. This was a pretty detailed report. And I have a question on the score where it says utilizing community feedback on decision making. If I look into this thing, I can break down this into three parts. One is communicating to them and getting their feedback. Second could be the actions that are taken. And the third could be it's reporting back. So we complete the loop. Now in this, it's like, you know, if the scores are low, is it possible to have a breakdown to understand, you know, out of like this big bucket, there are three different buckets. So which bucket would be scoring low? Are we not able to, we are taking actions, but we are not able to communicate back to them to close the loop or we are not taking action. So that kind of a detail will be very helpful.

Yeah, we can look more at that. I would say the questions you're seeing on the screen are the questions we asked. So on that specific question, you're right that it is a, A question that contains multitudes right, and I do think it's important to remember. A survey is can only reflect what the Community thinks and can report, so they are not fully informed to assess actual performance. they can tell you what they think, how the city is performing. So I think you're right to identify that that item utilizing community feedback on the priority project decision-making and then communicating it back that that's what you're doing. I think we can look more at if there's something else in here that can help us understand more how we might be able to break that apart. you know, really what we can evaluate on its face is really, do they feel when we read them that statement that you're doing a good job of it? And then on the prior slide, right, how important is that, right? That's what we're kind of comparing. And so, you know, we don't, That is the one, the most underperforming on importance. So when we say that, we know they think it's important. That's a resonant statement. They want you to do it. And then when we say, are you doing it? They're less confident that you are, which could be a communication challenge or it could be a delivery challenge. And I think we can look more at whether there's evidence in here that helps us impact that. I'm not sure I have a ready answer because it's a somewhat complex attitude we're asking them about. It's a great question.

Thank you. We are still on round one. Other questions? Councilmember Noya, Council Vice President.

Thank you. My question is, we've got roughly 82,000 for our population. With this, we were able to get feedback from 528 of the wide variety that we've been able to get feedback from. if the confidence level is that it is representational of the overall, then, and I want to make sure that's before I say the next thing.

Yes, it is a representative sample of the Black community.

And then I think about the mindset of somebody feeling totally unsafe in the city that they live in. And what I'm currently wrestling with is the fact that, or the assertion, that we've got 8,500 residents that feel totally unsafe. And while I know that that's empirical data, it's not factual.

We can't prove that, or anecdotal, rather.

So that's kind of what I'm wrestling with, that I can't quite get past, and that we're facing what, you know, drinking water is very important, and it's great that we have these wonderful events that we have, And we're concerned about, we've got 8,500 people that feel totally unsafe. One of the concerns is managing police services, and I know that that's a shortened term, And I know that that's a shortened, abbreviated version of the actual question. But yeah, so I just kind of, as I'm going through here, like I felt the need to say that like, okay, let's not gloss over that right now, because that's 85 human beings in our community. Right. Okay. Thank you.

And I do not agree with you. And your job is to represent every single person. And our job is to represent the best we can the attitudes of the community. And all of these attitudes exist in this community, including people feeling unsafe. I just want to a little bit. Most of them said somewhat unsafe. just like 1% said like very unsafe. And I'm not at all disagreeing with what you're saying. That safety is a concern for about 10% of the community. For most of them, what they've identified in the survey, which all we can do is ask them the question and they answer it in the best way that they feel comfortable answering in a survey context. Most of those people are saying, I don't know. I sometimes feel unsafe. I feel sometimes unsafe. I feel not completely safe all the time versus that 1% who's saying I feel very unsafe walking alone. I feel very unsafe. So again, not disagreeing with you at all. I just want to make sure it wasn't 10% saying I feel completely unsafe all the time. It was a much more small, but... Many more are saying, sometimes I don't feel the safest, as safe as I could. And I think you're right to then compare that with assessment of how they feel the police services are being delivered and where that can be.

And thank you for that clarification. Yeah, yeah. I'm not trying to at all, like, under. Not at all. And I think then that's when, as my colleague, Councilmember Parsi had brought up, being able to extrapolate more and get a little bit more granular to find out who in our community is not feeling safe. Yeah. And we'll take a look at that. Thank you.

Councilmember Kritzer? A quick follow-up question on that. I did have a different question, but I'll ask this one. How do our safety rates compare with other cities in the region that you are looking at?

I think generally for communities of similar sizes, they're fairly comparable, right? When we do surveys in more urban areas, either in this region or in other regions up and down the West Coast, there's a... generally a relationship between size of the community and feelings of safety. Usually it's also related to urban acid, urbanicity of that community. You know, we even we see even in a place where 90% say they generally feel safe. still challenges around homelessness, housing affordability, things that people do bring up when they talk about whether they feel safe all the time. But I think it's pretty comparable to what we've seen. I don't have all the numbers right here in front of me. I can certainly answer that better with numbers as follow up, but I do think it's pretty similar to what we see in other similar sized communities in the Puget Sound region.

Thanks.

Any other questions for round one? Councilmember Parsi.

Slide number 13, actually thinking about comparing Redmen with other cities. for how people source information about the city. I was thinking oftentimes news sources and journalism efforts outside of the city are one of the critical ways that people tend to find information about their city. Is that something that you have seen in other cities, cities other than Redmond, or is this kind of distribution unique to Redmond?

I would say that Asking people where they get information is not a, there is no perfect way to know where they get information because people are not great reporters of their own consumption of media or understanding of where things in their head came from. There's just, we're not, humans are not good at that. So I do want to caveat with that. I will say that compared to other communities where we've done surveys with a question like this, I think that we see more penetration from the newsletter and website direct access in this slide that you've identified in terms of the percent of people saying they're getting news directly from the city in a delivered way through the newsletter, the website, or the email newsletter, more so than I think we've seen in other communities where it maybe is driven more by things like word of mouth or social media, at least the way they talk about it. I think this is a little different than what I've seen in other communities. I think some of that is probably that you're, I would hypothesize and maybe your staff can perspectivize that you do more direct communication with your community with more channels and we're seeing that here. I do think that even though this survey was driven not only through the mail this time, still seeing a lot of penetration from mail as a way that they get information is very heartening it means that they are receptive to communication so i don't know from the staff side if you have anything to add about how you use some of those channels but i i i'm guessing you use them more than a lot of other communities in terms of that direct communication um yeah

Thank you, and that's a good time to mention, before we go to Council Member Forsyth, that you will see the survey again next year, very similar format. Sometimes no news is no change and no news is good news, but it is that very finding that the print newsletter was so effective at reaching people that drove our decision. this biennium to increase to another additional print newsletter. So thank you so much for your question, Councilmember Parsi, and for the follow-up as well to give us a reminder of that. Councilmember Forsyth.

thank you just adding on to that question um very curious if people are lumping in word of mouth and friends and family with reddit and those sorts of channels of information so hoping that maybe next year's survey we can actually parse that out as a separate question not just the city's Facebook, but separate social media, Reddit, those sorts of channels. Because I know from my conversations that a lot of folks are getting their information through those channels. So I just kind of think we should have a metric that kind of reflects that data point.

Yeah. The answer to your first question is yes. They absolutely, as I said, human beings are not great reporters of why they know something. and where they read it. And in particular, if they know it's being communicated to them by someone who wants them to think it, right? So I will say we can do, we can try to refine to be more accurate on that division and it will never be as good as something like measuring actual eyeballs on websites from those kinds of metrics. But I do think maybe breaking out, especially on I think the social media side people aren't always paying attention to whose social media they're, look, right? You scroll your feed and you see something from the city and you see something from your neighbor and do you notice, right? If your neighbor shared the thing the city shared, where does that fall? So I do think we can look at that again. And every year in this kind of work, the information landscape changes too. So we're always sort of chasing, how can we ask it in a way that gives us the best data we can gather from self-reported data on a topic that we know people are not reliable in detail at reporting. So yes, and Sianna here is keeping notes on all of this because it helps us as we do this survey every year, what we don't want to do is just sort of put the same survey out exactly blindly but think about how we can refine it and i think that's one where it's very hard to get there is no objectively correct answer that we can measure in a survey but we can certainly do better i think on those channels where we've put them together to maybe break them out a little bit better so thank you councilmember procrea first of all thank you so much for for all of your work on this

I have two points that I want to make. Number one, just to respond to Council Member Kritzer's question about comparisons to other cities, and particularly with the safety question, I pulled up the most recent community surveys for Kirkland and for Bellevue, and they have a delineation between how safe people feel during the day versus at night, but both of them are roughly similar with around 5% feeling unsafe 5% or less feeling unsafe during the day and around 20% feeling unsafe at night. And when you average that, that comes out to roughly what we have in the city of Redmond. I also had one question, which is again on slide 13, the Redmond information sources, The City of Redmond focus print newsletter, the net change from 2025 to 26 was a minus 10, which is by far the sharpest decrease in any of our information sources. Is this just a year-to-year survey bump? How does that graph look over, let's say, the last five years? Because I understand that with a smaller sample size, it's more prone to fluctuation.

Yeah, I think there's a little bit of that, but I think the biggest thing driving that change is the method by which we sampled people for the survey. So last year's survey was entirely driven through mailing postcard invitations to participate. So there's a self-selection that's involved there of people that are reading mail that they can identify as coming from the city, and they're more likely to be saying, well, we read the newsletter. because they are receptive to things that come in the mail, and they're demonstrating that by doing the survey. So I do think some of that change is about that we, in this survey, we did sample by mail, but we also sampled directly by telephone, by text message, by email, different channels, that I do think some of that change is because we're not only surveying people using mail. So it's a little bit like self-fulfilling, if that makes sense. And, you know, there might also be changes in the actual distribution of the newsletter, but, you know, when we look at that as survey researchers and one of the things we think about is, well, what did we introduce as part of the methodology? I think that's probably the biggest, one of the bigger changes, because nothing else shifted very much, right? To me, it's in part because we diversified how we reached people and we caught people we wouldn't have caught before because we texted them or we called them instead of just relying on people that are reading and responding to things that they get in the mail. So thank you.

Thank you. And yeah, that makes total sense with regards to the social media having the biggest bump as well if we were texting people for the survey.

councilmember critzer and then I and then councilmember sony and we'll have to move on for time after that.

And and just appreciate that, and I think two things that I want to point out as well. Is I think some areas where we've also decided to invest in we see some of those results here like we have invested more in our communications team and doing more social media so. We see some bump there. I don't know if it is related to the way that you're doing it. One thing that I will note that we've seen, I've watched seven years of these come through. So it's been really interesting. When we first came on, actually, we changed from just asking voters to fill this out to actually expanding to all residents. And now we're expanding even further to say not just people in mail, but trying to find them in different ways. So I think just kudos on that. And I think for us just overall, that we're getting a more representative sample by making some of these shifts. Also in terms of investment, I think in particular, the one that jumps out to me is the bike and pedestrian safety. We've spent the last several years as a council really prioritizing doing that and doing some major infrastructure projects to make it safer to bike and doing some big things in our downtown corridor around pedestrian safety. And so it is really interesting to see that in the data. One request that I would have for the future, since you said you were taking notes is on the affordable housing call, the different responses that you coded together on that are, I see how they all tie together, but I do think affordable housing in particular, I'd be interested in knowing how many people were actually talking about housing versus other types of cost of living issues versus people may have lots of different opinions about taxes, as you mentioned. And so I guess that would be something that I would be interested in getting some more detail on now and in the future as we look at this survey.

Thank you. Council Member Soni.

Yeah, I just have, I'm very curious to know if the data that you have collected, that was by the different neighborhoods, like we have downtown, east, west. Now, every neighborhood may have some unique neighborhoods.

outcomes as well so is the data also available distributed by by the neighborhoods like I can totally see like you know downtown could have some different issues than the north redmond so if that that data will be very helpful for no cards because you know they have been to the sound baths on Friday nights and they have been to the special events and they've done the senior cardio for months on end and they have done most of the things so there is some value in keeping things fresh and being responsive. Additionally, I wanted to thank the team for their attention to activating neighborhoods that deserve their time. And it's too bad I'm not wearing my What About Overlake t-shirt tonight, but really do appreciate the attention to that. At our council retreat this year, we also discussed the need for more recreation opportunities and programming to make it to that neighborhood, which is going to see more growth in our city um, than anywhere else. So, uh, really appreciate all of that. And, um, I did want to ask one clarifying question to, to the director about, um, I saw, uh, uh, an appendice that referenced the current senior trip model of programming. Where do senior trips, we do get questions about that one sometime. Um, Erica, I'm so sorry, Erica, could you tell us what, What is the future of the senior trip kind of category or what might be the questions that you start to ask about it now with this framework?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And also senior trips are beloved. And I know that our seniors are looking to have that be something that we expand upon in the future years. And one of the things that we're looking at is what is the right mix as far as where we go and what's accessible for folks as far as length of the trip and both cost of the trip as well. So as we are working to make sure that our programs are operating within cost of service, it's looking at how we can balance that with what's available for people to go and do and enjoy. So we're looking at both a combination of how we can expand those things in-house as well as if there are some contracted options that we can look at for our seniors as well.

And the only thing that I, thank you, Erica. The only thing I would add to that is that in the realm of accessibility as well as making and ensuring that they are accessible to everyone, regardless of ability to pay. And so our fee assistance does apply to all of our recreation programming. And so if cost is an issue, seniors are able to apply to our fee assistance program and utilize it towards our trips and tours as well.

So we really want to make sure that people are able to connect into the community regardless of that.

Understood. Thank you so much. I think we've just answered a couple of emails that would have otherwise come to the council tonight. So really appreciate that. Any final questions from the council tonight? Wonderful. Well, really appreciate you all. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you all.

Much appreciated. Thank you. Okay. The next item on our agenda tonight is the pavement management program update. We have the Public Works representatives joining us. This presentation will be introduced by Interim Deputy Public Works Director, Brandon Buehler. Welcome, Brandon.

Well, good evening, Council. Thank you for having us this evening. I'm really delighted to be here with Adnan Shabir, Senior Engineer in the Public Works Department who manages our paving programs and our bridge inspections. Adnan's been with the city for 13 years. And early on, just as a preamble, when we began on this asset management journey, Adnan was already doing the great work. And it was related to the plan we're here to update tonight. And it holds up really a shining example for other planning efforts that we have across our large infrastructure portfolio. Tonight's study session is based on our shared value of stewardship. And I saw that come through around infrastructure and pavement in the community survey results this evening and hope that the listening public and council kind of find a synergy with other topics discussed here this evening. But what we intend to do this evening is update council on the progress we've made on our approach with pavement management, namely the delivery of the pavement strategic plan and its corresponding implementation plan. The funding strategy related to the work will come forward with the mayor's 2728 budget this fall. And in order to prepare for those discussions, we will present some of the data and methods underpinning our strategy to achieve Redmond's mobility schools this evening. As you know, our streets are one of our most visible pieces of the city's infrastructure portfolio, and at nearly half a billion dollars of replacement value, it's something the community interacts with every day. Again, this work was conducted by staff in partnership with our consultant, Pertit, out of this current biennium. And the plans, the analysis, and the recommendations embody really the asset management discipline that we've been encouraged to apply in the value of stewardship across the portfolio to assure that we're delivering the levels of service our community expects. And just one final comment before I turn it over to Adnan to dig into the good stuff. I do want to acknowledge the great amount of collaboration and contributions that were made to this work from across city staff, and that includes our partners in transportation planning and engineering, TISGIS, the capital division, our partners on the utility side of the house, and certainly finance. So thank you for everyone listening who helped out with this work, and I'll turn it over to Adnan to dive into the slides.

Thank you so much, Brandon. Thank you, council members. My name is Adnan Shabir, as Brandon mentioned. I'm the program manager for our city's pavement and bridges. It's my pleasure to be here today to present the update on our payment management program. Today, we'll be discussing several topics here. We'll be discussing PCI, the main rubric for assessing the health for payment system, the condition of our streets with respect to our level of service goals, our budget needs and the investment strategy, the plan recommends, and the resources we plan to use and how we deliver payment projects. And lastly, our timeline to budget adoption and implementation of the plan. So what is PCI? PCI is a standard. It was initially created by the U.S. Army Corps and adopted into the American Society for Testing and Materials, ASTM. It is a nationally recognized standard to measure the health of a pavement. For example, PCI measures the condition of a surface of a street on a scale to zero to 100. Brand new pavement, PCI is 100. A failed pavement would have a PCI close to zero. Our city's roadway network is generally broken out by thousands of roadway segments. Typically those are block to block with each segment having its own PCI rating. For example, out here in front of City Hall, Northeast 85th Street, starting from 154th Avenue all the way to 166th is broken out by about eight segments. And each of those separate segments has its own PCI rating corresponding to the roadway condition of that segment. And PCI measures the extent and severity of cracks and the smoothness of the ride comfort. The city started collecting PCI almost two decades ago, so we have a really solid data backup of the roadway conditions. And it's been measured every two years since then. So this really allows the city to monitor the health of the roadway system over time. This is an example of Avondale Road between Novelty Hill Road and 104th Street right after paving in 2025. So PCI range of 86 to 100. Right after paving, it's pretty much almost 100. There's really no minimal and no treatment needed for roadways in this PCI treatment range. And the PCI in this category represents about 7% of our entire roadway network. So about 25 lane miles out of the 362 lane miles of the city network. So may I ask what is a lane mile? One lane mile is a roadway that is one mile long and one lane width, so about 12 feet wide. So one lane road that is one mile long. And as the payment continues to age, it shows signs of minor cracks and wear. This is a picture of a residential street in North Redmond. It's 179th Court. It has a PCI of 71. PCI is the preferred level of service that is established in the payment strategic plan. And it's also established in our transportation master plan. And our long-term goal for PCI is for the city's PCI of 75. The payments that have PCI between 71 and 85 have minor cracks and patches and are the best candidates for preventative maintenance techniques. These are really just really low cost methods applied to payments that are in this PCI category satisfactory condition to keep them in that condition in a longer period of time. This really helps to extend the life of the payment and prevent premature failures of the roadway system. You can think about good analogies of preventative maintenance like the oil changes in your car. Oil changes really prevent larger, more costly issues like engine repairs. About a little under half of our city network or about 150 lane miles out of the 362 lane miles has a PCIF range of 71 to 85. And as the pavement further age and cracks eventually will grow in the pavement surface, The water intrusion getting into those cracks really starts to rapidly accelerate the rate of deterioration of the pavement. Roadways with PCI close to 55, as you can see in this picture, this is up by Einstein Elementary before we paved that intersection. They are no longer eligible for the lower costs prevented to maintenance techniques that is mentioned. These roadways require something called rehabilitation. Think of rehabilitation like major parts replacements on your car, so pretty costly. So they require really deeper repairs that cost three times the cost of preventative maintenance. And currently our city network, about 14% of our city network is in the poor PCI category, so between 41 and 55 PCI. The key thing about this is the majority of our network is projected to decline in this poor category within the next seven years with our current funding levels, which will result in a network PCF of about 54 in the next seven years. This is a PCI range around 20. PCIs in this range are basically failed category. They require full reconstruction of the roadway surface to the very base layers or a very significant amount of work. You can think of the roadways made up of layers like a good house foundation. It has a solid soil layer, then a rock layer, and then a thick asphalt or a concrete layer on top. And often roadways that have this PCI range, they require digging really down to the soil layer. So we're talking about a lot of expensive digging of the roadway. So fixing these roads typically cost 10 times the cost of preventative maintenance techniques. Thankfully, our failed network PCI range in the 20s is about 1% of our total network. So only about four lane miles of the city. And we do have projects that are already underway to address these. I WOULD LIKE TO TALK ABOUT OUR EXISTING CONDITIONS. THIS IS BASED ON THE ASSESSMENT WE DID LAST YEAR, SO 2025. OUT OF OUR TOTAL NETWORK OF 362 LANE MILES, ABOUT HALF ARE IN THE SATISFACTORY OR BETTER CONDITION. SO OUR PCI RANGE OF 71 AND 85 OR BETTER. SO MOST OF THESE REALLY ARE RESIDENTIAL ROADS. SO THE BIG PICTURE HERE IS THAT OUR RESIDENTIAL ROADS ARE IN MUCH BETTER CONDITION WITH AN AVERAGE PCI OF 71 AS MEASURED LAST YEAR. These really are the prime candidates for preventative maintenance techniques. So preventative maintenance, as I mentioned, the residential roads is a key part of our strategic plan. However, our arterial streets are currently at a PCF of about 64 and are failing quickly, mainly due to high traffic loads. And out of these, our principal arterials that really see the most amount of traffic and load face the steepest decline. These are Avondale Road, 148th Avenue Northeast, and Westlakes-Memish Parkway, among a few. So PCI has been collected for the last two decades, and we've been storing that data in our software platform called Street Saver, so just including our 2025 assessment. So the key thing about this is it really gives us the ability to gain really quick insights on our network, how it's performing, and really perform complex level, network level analysis of our roadway assets. I'd like to shift our focus to the funding. The city has put in several payment investments in the last several years. There's really helped to pave key corridors, such as Northeast 90th Street out here by QFC, Westlake-Sememish Parkway by Marymoor, which we paved in 2024, and Avondale Road just east of Union Hill Road up to Northeast 90th Street, among other locations. So this kind of averaged an investment of about $1.7 million a year over the last six years. So while these investments were important, Carrying the same level of investment forward will result in a roadway conditions to decline over the next decade into the poor condition category. So we're talking about PCI closer to 55. So if you can see in the graph there, the projected no action line, the green line shows the result of carrying the current investment levels into the future without further budget increases. And you can see the blue line that shows our proposed investment strategy, which will result in reaching our level of service goals that are shown in the transportation master plan and our strategic plans in the next seven years. And to talk about this investment strategy, I'd like to hand it back to Brandon.

there we go network stewardship uh investment strategies so again this is kind of the invest not kind of this is the investment strategy that is recommended by the work of the plan the exact funding strategy uh is of course for council's deliberation around the mayor's budget this fall um The strategic plan recommends a $5 million dedicated annual paving investment beginning in 2027. And that number, I want to be clear, it's not a request tonight, it's just the plan's engineering answer to the level of service goals the council and the community have already adopted through the Transportation Master Plan. The investment would be recommended to grow by $250,000 each year as an escalator to keep pace with inflation and rising construction costs. And so that would be $5.25 million in 2028 and so on. It would reach $8 million per year by 2039. And that's just an escalation that assures that the analysis we're providing for decision around the budget time is really insulated against like future cost pressures and is kind of grounded in reality. The main point is that to reach our pavement condition goals, the funding has to be consistent year over year. And we've seen that over the last six years as Adnan has indicated the programmatic investment of $1.7 million a year split between the kind of small contracts work that we administer out of the Transportation Operations and Safety Division within Public Works, also coupled with CIP projects that also include some of planning's TP&E projects and otherwise just an aggregate. But that's been a continual source. And I think that shows that we've been doing a great job and we now are able to really quantify how we can do an even better job. And the plan's initial focus, as Adnan touched on, would be on arterial rehabilitation, and those again are the streets that carry the most people, the most freight, the most transit, and really where the pavement gets the most stress. I'm not gonna blabber the point around this. This will be a future conversation around the budget, but just tonight, we wanna make sure that we develop the same shared understanding of the what and the why, and we've adopted a level of service goal in the transportation plan, and this is the answer to it. from an asset management perspective, kind of the boiled down methodology that we've been communicating and discussing with staff all around the city is what do we have the inventory, the condition that it's in, the level of service that the community wants, and then the funding needs that are required to assure that lifecycle stewardship to attain those levels of service. And this is a plan that delivers on that in a sliding scale perspective. And I will point out that in your packets, there's a full copy of the strategic plan and the implementation plan that just goes further into the rationale than we have time for this evening.

Thank you. I really appreciate that, Brandon. To add to that, I just want to say that we have done a significant amount of analysis to show that the level of investment the plan recommends will keep the city on target to achieve this level of service goals in the transportation master plan and our strategic plan. And I'd like to talk about what we've been doing with the program for the last six years. In the last six years, we have delivered about 21 lane miles of paving. So you can kind of picture a one lane road paved all the way from here, Redmond to SeaTac Airport. It's averaging about three and a half lane miles per year. While this was an important investment that we have made, it doesn't meet our level service target about 12 lane miles per year. We have done a capital paving project, so those larger rehabilitation projects every other year. We have done smaller scale programmatic projects that Brandon mentioned out of a traffic safety division annually and started doing crack sealing and other preventative maintenance techniques like slurry seals started in 2022 on a biannual basis. Currently, our delivery mechanism has been myself managing all the paving projects up to 30% design, and then I transfer to the capital division for project management. We've been diligent about combining utility scopes of work with paving projects under one project. And with our new strategic plan, we really want to build upon what we accomplished in the last six years and expand the level of reach of the program. I'd like to talk about that proposed delivery with the new strategic plan. It really centers on annual larger rehabilitation projects and residential paving maintenance projects. So the focus will be rehabilitation on our arterial network and really an expansion of the preventative maintenance work that we have done on residential streets. So this is a strategy to really target the right roads at the right time with the right treatment. We would like to keep our paving contracts simple and focused with the utility scopes of work that are separate. Often utility scopes of work require digging into the ground. They extend design and construction timelines. They require more coordination during construction. and eventually delays paving unneeded corridors. So we'll be coordinating closely with our utility partners to ensure proper coordination still so utilities are upgraded first with a separate contract before the paving project begins. The new method of delivery will see the Capital Division of Public Works take on all paving projects from the beginning of the project instead from 30% design. Our near-term focus with a new strategic plan is really to continue the projects we have already shown funded through our CIP and expand the preventative maintenance activities in residential streets to be on an annual basis. Our mid-term focus is to expand the arterial rehabilitation as our funding source matures. We'd like to expand coordination with utilities and safety improvements and pursue grant funding where it makes sense and to increase the amount of output. Our long-term goals really sees our program keep its focus on arterial paving and we would like to use innovative payment strategies such as fiber reinforced asphalt at higher stress locations like our principal arterials. We'll also like to evaluate a payment cut moratorium on our streets and revisit the strategic plan to ensure we're staying on target with our goals we set. Here's some frequently asked questions I'll go over. This often comes up, why are we investing in the streets that are already in good condition? It's really the same concept as an oil change in our cars or painting our houses to protect the wood. It really keeps our condition of our streets that are already in good condition in that condition for a longer period of time. So they don't really need more costly repairs in the future. And how are streets selected each year? We use a data-driven approach with GIS mapping as our central core. Street segments are prioritized using payment conditions such as PCI, traffic level data, the work done on our Safer Streets Action Plan that was adopted in 2025. centered on safety and equity scoring that looks at proximity to schools, hospitals, fire stations, and police stations. And this data is updated annually or as conditions change. The question is what happens to our network if current funding levels persist? We do see through our analysis that our network will decline to a poor condition within the next seven years. And the cost to reach our PCI targets that we have set in the transportation master plan our community expects will be much higher And when will the council consider the investment strategy? So as Brandon mentioned, the investment strategy, the plan recommends will come forward as part of the mayor's 2027, 2028 budget later this year. And lastly, how do we know things are actually working through our strategic plan. So we'll continue to do a biannual PCI assessments as we had been doing in the last two decades. We'll track key performance indicators like percent of roads in good condition or percent of arterials in poor condition. And we're ensuring that we're making the progress towards our PCI 71 target with a long-term goal of PCI of 75. So this is the milestones. We started this effort last summer in 2025 and we've been diligently working on the payment strategic plan and the implementation plan since then. We've recently finalized the plan in Q2 of this year and presented the program update to the mayor and finance director at that time. And the council will see the investment strategy as mentioned coming forward as part of the mayor's budget later this year. And our target is to operationalize and implement the plan early in 2027. I really appreciate the opportunity to present today. This program has been really dear to me the last six years. Would also appreciate council's feedback today on these questions or any other questions that council may have. Thank you so much.

Thank you and Brandon for the presentation really do appreciate it and would like to get to the council members questions. I also want to acknowledge, as I intended to do at the top of the presentation so i'm going to go ahead and navigate there now. In case Community have been following along and saw that the presentation was slightly different than the one that Council. was posted in the council packet. Council did get some feedback during our dinner break tonight because we had a similar issue in committee today. So I just wanted to demonstrate for the viewing public that when our late breaking updates to council packets, which we do try not to do on a regular basis by any means, but you can access those additional materials by going to the date in the meeting calendar, clicking on meeting details, and they are listed here as attachments. So thank you for the opportunity to just make that a bit more visible for folks. And we can respond to the constituent who wrote to us a little bit earlier today, a bit more directly as well. For this topic, I already see one hand up. So Council Member Forsyth and then Council Vice President.

Thank you. And thanks for all this interesting information. I know this is a topic that we hear a lot about as council members. So it's really great to have this presentation and especially appreciate the conversation around the expanded coordination. And I am very much in favor of the pavement cut moratorium because that is just going to make everyone's lives easier and less construction and more coordinated effort. So I really appreciate that. One area that I was interested if you've taken into account in this longer term plan as far as how much we're going to spend over the next 10 years, we know that EV vehicles weigh more and so they cause more road damage over time. And with climate change and we're seeing a lot more freeze thaws, deputy director and I both grew up in Ohio, so we are very used to really crappy roads, but our area is not so used to that. But we are starting to see more of that freeze thaw and our roads getting worse because of that. So were those two very specific elements taken into consideration in this budget number that we're looking at for the next many years?

Thank you for that question. The EV question, we did consider that in the strategic planning. And what we have been working with our payment experts, they really see that the articulated heavily loaded buses really cause the most damage, even outside of the heavily loaded EV. So electrified buses would even cause more damage. than smaller EV cars combined. So as we do payment design, we do consider traffic loading in every payment design whenever we do a payment overlay. So that is factored into the design question and the thickness of the layers end up matching even the growth factors that we see and project.

Thank you. And on that topic, the state legislature in recent years has also been considering the opportunity to give cities a tool that would allow us to levy a vehicle licensing fee on those heavy vehicles. It would be a new tool of transportation benefit districts. I, when we get to it in the fall, would like to see that included in our legislative priorities for the city of Redmond, but more to come on that. Council Vice President.

Thank you. Going back to kind of the freeze-thaw that we're used to back in the Midwest and being from Detroit, you could lose an entire car in some of our potholes. Going to the opposite side of that, we've recently seen some buckling of roads back east due to the extreme heat that they've been having. Here in the Pacific Northwest, specifically to Redmond, we have seen our summers getting warmer, getting warmer sooner, and seeing some more extreme temperatures when we're dealing with heat domes or we're dealing with fires that are in the area. We're also seeing increased temperatures on our roadways because of the buildings that we're putting up in the reflection of the sun. In very concentrated areas has this yet to come into our our design phase or conversations about this or are we still is that kind of a ways off or how does that play into our planning currently.

Yeah, thank you so much for that question. The freeze talk issue hasn't, the freeze talk issue hasn't been, the Redmond area hasn't been as susceptible to, especially the heating element of it. The oils we do use in pretty much all of our payment Design right now. They are supposed to perform their performance grade oil So they're supposed to perform to 64 degrees Celsius all the way down to minus 22 degrees Celsius. That's pretty high temperature ranges I know Eastern Washington they use different oils just because the higher heat that they do see so so far we haven't seen that so given that the payment is PAVEMENT CONSTRUCTED WITH THE STANDARDS THAT WE HAVE IN PLACE ALREADY, WE REALLY SHOULDN'T BE SEEING AS MUCH OF THAT BUCKLING RELATED TO THE HEATING ISSUE.

Thank you so much for the presentation and all the work that you do. It sounds like you cover a lot. Of course. And to answer the second question you had on your feedback slide, yes, I do think having a robust level of service as our goal is really important. I hear a lot from residents when we're doing other types of services or programs, they say, But are we making sure we don't have potholes in our roads and that we were doing the basics? And I feel like this is the bread and butter of what cities do. So it is very important for us to make sure that we're providing that infrastructure for our community and ultimately saving us money by being at that more preventative place. One question that I have around the budget is that, I remember when we first started doing this work and had seen the first presentation after you'd done the analysis, on our pavement condition index and that was before we had created the TBD. We had seen a similar graph in terms of the levels of investment and then where we would go with same as we had projected versus where we would go if we had a TBD and so I'm curious just when we're when you're and I'm sure we'll get more details with the budget but does the amount that is going to be proposed include TBD revenues or when you're saying status quo does that is that downward sloping line if we keep going with just the TBD and other types of investments that we have?

Thank you for that question. It's a terrific one. It's also quite incisive. The $1.7 million that we've been investing over the last six years, continue to that clip, follow the was it the green line? Yeah, it should have been a red line. But anyway, but that's a bad line we don't want to follow. When the mayor brings forth the budget in the fall, it will include an all-up inclusive number comprised of various funding mechanisms, including the TBD.

Great. And for the listening public, since I used an acronym, it's our Transportation Benefit District.

Thank you. Council Member Prakria?

Thank you, Adnan, and thank you, Deputy Director Buehler and everybody who worked on this. This is very, very exciting to me because I knocked down, I think, between 10,000 and 12,000 doors last year. I cannot tell you how many people, when I asked, you know, what would you like to see in Redmond, told me improved roads. So this is very, very exciting. Just very special to see now that I'm on council. My question is regarding the chart that we have on page 29 of the Pavement Strategic Plan, which is just the annual budget scenarios. We have the last column there that's the total spend. We have a couple of different budget options to get the different different metrics. But I was also looking at page 16 of the strategic plan. And it says that, you know, the network PCI in 2003 was an 88, I believe. 2008 was an 82. And our budget scenarios are trying to achieve a PCI that's far below even what we had 20 years ago. So first of all, I was wondering if it would be possible to get a couple of other budget scenarios for even higher PCIs. But I also... That got me thinking. You know, I'm not so far removed from spending eight hours a day just doing math. And I think this is... I wish we could get a column of money saved. And I know there are a lot of variables that we would have to estimate to get that. But if we set some baseline goal, which we did in Redmond 2050, which is to get to a PCI of 70 by 2050, different money spend rates and how much this would save us at the end. I would just love to see that data because this seems like some kind of function where we could just take a derivative or we could optimize. I would love to see different, a number of other different scenarios for our budget spends.

Terrific question, comment, analysis, yes. More than we can do tonight and happy to furnish some sliding scale or kind of graduated tier schedule. That's kind of the beauty of this plan and the approach and the work that Adnan and the team have done. is it gives us the ability to do that. And that's really a great tool for the whole of government to make these trade-offs relative to level of service goals and also resource availability. The cost avoidance figure, I think, is what you're getting at. And we've done a little of that analysis. We can dial something in and furnish that at a later date but it's it's a good point because uh an ounce of prevention is worth it whatever the saying is it's true because that degradation curve is real and the longer you wait it may save in the short run but it becomes three six 10x more expensive as we go down and so that's that's something that we want to avoid thank you councilmember sony

Thank you, Chair. For the pavements, I believe the utility cuts is also one of the reasons for having the degradations. We are definitely talking about the policy tools like pavement cut moratorium, but that's not going to happen until 2031. I believe that's the timeline, 2030 or 2031. Yeah, 2031 onwards. So what are we going to do from now till then? Are we still planning all our utility projects accordingly so that we can ensure that our payments are not getting impacted with any of these utilities, like with the sewer, water lines, or any of these other improvement projects that are happening?

Terrific point and it's something that we take quite seriously and put a concerted amount of effort and focus and resources into is coordinating the array of project phasing is Adnan described so that we cut do the utilities and then come on with the follow on pavement. contract. And that coordination is alive and it's healthy. We don't always get it right. We can't always control what development may do. And I don't mean that in a negative sense, but it does become complex from a control perspective. And that's where there could be some policy levers that we should approach with some curiosity and explore if they would be good controls to mitigate the exact risk that you're bringing up, Councilmember.

Thank you. Council Member Parsi. Thank you for the refreshing presentation. I usually skip the kudos because I want to be quick, but in this case, I think this presentation really deserves thank you. So appreciate the focus on preventative methods, appreciate the thoughtful approach in coordinating with utilities and other projects and taking on innovative pavement approaches. I'm curious when we think about what streets are coming up next and when people want to know, hey, when is my street going to be improved? Do we have an annual, say, quarterly timeline to say here's what's coming up next so people can kind of have a dashboard to look at?

Yes, we actually do. So currently we have a map identified also in the strategic plan. We have a map of the identified projects currently that are funded and future considerations. So we are able to communicate that out to the public when we have those kind of questions.

Thank you. Okay. All right. Seeing no other hands, I'll go ahead and chime in with a couple. Oh, sure. Okay. Thanks. And then we'll go back to Council Member Prakriti. And somehow Council Member Forsyth beat him to the punch tonight in the first question. I thought for sure Council Member Prakriti has been really eager to talk about this conversation tonight. So anyway, a couple things from me. First, I'll say that I do share Council Member Prakriti's interest in multiple budget scenarios. No one else is coming to maintain our roads for us, and it's really important that we maintain safe roads for the folks using the road lane and everyone on the side of the road as drivers navigate and meander around potholes. It's a function of local government that we alone own, and if we were to take that $5 million recommendation and put it in the current biennium, which is a bit unfair to do, but still the point would be we would be spending about half of 1% or less in maintaining the pavement of our city. And again, it's a really essential function of local government. So I am interested in other budget scenarios that get us to more maintenance quicker than the available option that was presented tonight. But most of my questions are about the funding strategy. So I do hope that as those alternatives begin to sharpen, we will have a chance to begin to weigh in on those. Some of the questions I have as the council will evaluate funding recommendations, first of all, is the impact of the county transportation benefit district that was just established. Two questions, opposite sides of the same coin. How could that TBD, which will now have a pass through of 12 and a half percent plus some other conditions to cities like Redmond, how could that generate revenue to support the proposal included tonight? But also how could that limit the ability of our own TBD and Redmond to raise the revenue we would need to achieve this? And additionally, as I mentioned before, I do think that when it comes time for the state legislature to consider additional revenue tools for cities, I do support the heavy vehicle TBD license fee and hope that the council will have a chance to discuss that. As we heard tonight, affordability and the cost of living plus taxes are the top of mind concern for our residents. And so this is gonna be an example of kind of these hard choices we have to make. Here I am saying, I would like to do more faster. And at the same time, our ability to work on generating this revenue is potentially tough. So I am most interested in solutions that are not based in sales taxes, but looking forward to seeing what the package that comes through looks like. Council Member Prakriti.

Thank you. This is a two-parter, but let me ask them in separate parts. First, I see that we have currently a couple of current CIP paving projects in 27 and 28 in the amount of almost 15 million in 2027 and then 500,000 in 2028. Are these addressing our roads that currently have, I think Adnan, you mentioned, paving There's about 1% or less than 1% of our roads that have that PCI under 20. Are those addressing our most immediate needs?

Yes, they are. So the ones that are identified are Northeast 24th Street, which we have gotten a lot of comments on. Many segments of that road are in that lower PCI currently, 40th Street also. And Avondale also has some segments that are in the lower PCI 20 range. So we have projects currently underway, as you mentioned, funded and currently in design or currently in construction. 24th Street is in construction right now that are going to address those segments. Thank you.

And then I had a question as well about traffic. I saw a lot in the documents about traffic volume and making sure that we kind of pick and choose which streets to maintain based off of traffic volume. But I was wondering if you could elaborate on what consideration was done with regards to, like, Routes, I'm not sure exactly how best to articulate this, but let's say there's a common route that someone takes through Redmond. But we are simultaneously paving two roads that close off that route and this is gonna cause major traffic issues. So not just traffic volume, but when we're actually doing maintenance on streets, making sure that this is not causing further traffic issues. We just got our community survey presentation. I think traffic was number three on there.

During construction, we do make a concerted effort to make sure we coordinate with other projects to ensure we're not creating additional gridlock than what is necessary really to replace that segment of road or repair that road. We also have a robust communication that goes out during project design and construction. So hopefully those measures... aim to really try to mitigate two contractors being in close proximity to each other and creating a further gridlock. So we have mechanisms in place to do that. When it comes to traffic level of data for prioritization, One of the data indicators we look at is the level of traffic. So if there's a higher level of traffic, the higher the level of traffic is, that gets more points in our decision matrix that is weighted. Also, I mentioned there's proximity to schools and hospitals that also gets weighted as well in the overall prioritization weighting for which rows are selected for treatment. Great. Thank you.

Council Member Kritzer? Thank you. Actually, in terms of connectedness and actually following up on Council President Stewart's mention of King County, I just was curious how we think about our planning in conjunction with entities like King County, especially given that some of the roads that we have some of our own pavement issues on continue past our city borders. And I often hear from residents about the condition for example, on novelty Hill road, union Hill road, Avondale beyond kind of North and as well as like Redmond Woodinville road to a two as well as two or two. So I guess just kind of curious how you all do planning and discussion with the County about those continued roads and how we think collaboratively about any projects. where we might do our improvements and they may also be doing their improvements. I guess similarly, maybe with City of Bellevue as well on the other side, Kirkland.

Yeah, we have a pretty good relationship with our adjacent agencies, especially City of Bellevue. So we seek to, for example, 40th and 148th, STREET INTERSECTION, WE HAD AN ILA ACTUALLY COME THROUGH COUNCIL, I THINK IT WAS A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO. SO WE'RE ALWAYS SEEING TO COORDINATE ON IMPROVEMENTS SO WE'RE NOT REALLY DISRUPTING, A, THE PUBLIC TWICE, AND, B, TO MAKE SURE WE'RE HAVING A HOLISTIC RESTORATION OF ONE CORRIDOR AT ONE TIME. SO THAT'S WHAT WE KIND OF DID. FOR EXAMPLE, 148 WAS ONE OF THE ILA THAT WE HAD THAT WE HAD payment restorations and curb ramp replacements in coordination with the City of Bellevue. And if we have projects in proximity to, for example, King County, Northeast Nolte Hill Road, we always give them a heads up that, hey, we're going to be in this area. We're planning to pave this extent, and would you like to partner with us to extend the amount of paving limits? So, yes.

Just one thing that I would add is that predictability of funding allows us to extend the glide path which which we've stacked the right projects in the right sequence with the right utility coordination and importantly the regional coordination, whether that's 202 that's under the state's jurisdiction or, you know, other projects that we'd just be able to better coordinate. And then there's always these late breaking or emergent needs that we coordinate on, for example, like Bell Red Buffer bike lanes. We extended, I don't know how many months ago we were talking about it, but extended that pavement into Bellevue because it was the right thing to do. And then they paid us back on the back end to replenish city of Redmond funds. And so that relationship is alive and well, and we could do it more effectively, which is more protected funding mechanisms.

Thank you. Any other questions from council or feedback on information you might need in order to evaluate funding proposals or feedback on the performance measure? Okay. Sounds like we've answered them all for tonight. Really appreciate the both of you and look forward to seeing this item back. If not in the budget cycle, then sooner. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Have a great night. The fourth item on the agenda tonight is the Tenant Protections Update and Discussion. This item is being introduced tonight by our Tenant Protection Subcommittee, which includes Council Members Kritzer, Forsyth, and Chair Procrea of that committee. Also joining us at the table is Director Helen, Director of Planning and Community Development. So Chair Procrea, I will kick it to you, thank you.

Great. Thank you. And I'm just going to screen share a presentation that our subcommittee made. Wonderful. Can everybody see that on their screens? Great. So the structure of this presentation is just going to be kind of a list of... Actually, I'll start by introducing myself. I'm Council Member Vivek Prakrit, Chair of the Tenant Protection Subcommittee. And we worked on this presentation, the structure of which is going to be kind of a list of possible options for Council to consider with regards to to policy options and budget options moving forward. So we made that distinction. I'm gonna be presenting tonight with hopefully frequent interruptions from my colleagues on the subcommittee, council members Kritzer and Forsyth. So just to give a quick recap of the timeline and our work this year. I think it was the April 28th meeting, council confirmed a charter for the subcommittee to work on issues that were identified by advocates, by the community. We were tasked with identifying, with looking into these issues, working with staff on these issues and bringing them back to council. So that's what we were doing. We presented a matrix of possible policy ideas that were identified by council. and budget items that were identified by us to the staff for analysis. And there's an attachment in our packet, which are amendments to Chapter 9.54 of the Redmond Code related to tenant protections. Staff drafted this for us. They identified amendments that could be implemented in the near term. We were asked to try and make some code amendments before the council recess in August. So this is what staff drafted for us. And throughout this presentation, we emailed this presentation out to council on Sunday, but we received feedback on this presentation post us creating it. So there were many pieces of the amendments, the proposed amendments to chapter 9.54 that we received feedback on that will also be elaborating on in this presentation. So we have just a number of options for you and we need council direction on how to proceed. So we kind of have three overarching policies to be considered and then later we'll get to the budget options. So the first policy to be considered is the draft code amendments to chapters 9.54, what was attached in the presentation. These we could pass, you know, some of them, all of them. It's totally up to council direction. There's a separate item that's passing a rent fixing software ban kind of modeled off after the King County ordinance that was passed in 2025 that bans rent fixing software. This We'll elaborate on, but we kind of recommend as a subcommittee waiting just to get a report. The ordinance on rent fixing software is pending a report from the King County Executive on enforcement, and we're recommending waiting until that report comes out. When it's supposed to come out tomorrow, but it's not likely to. The third policy to be considered are business license updates. And this policy would be revising some of our business license rules to make sure that tenant rights have to be framed more clearly and displayed more clearly to the residents of buildings. And this would be something done through our business license code rather than Chapter 9.54. So this is policy slide 1A, and this is kind of a summary of what was in the proposed amendments to chapter 9.54. There were kind of four items that were proposed changes to the code. The first of which was CLARIFYING NOTICE FOR RENT INCREASES AND UPDATING THESE TO ALIGN WITH NEW STATE LAWS. ONE OF THE ITEMS IN HERE REMOVED, FOR INSTANCE, THE 180 DAY REQUIREMENTS FOR NOTICE FOR AN INCREASE OF RENT OVER 10%. THIS WAS DONE BECAUSE WE RECEIVED, THIS WAS DONE BECAUSE THE STATE PASSED A LAW that banned an increase of rent of 10% in commercial buildings or in residential buildings. We received feedback that this is actually rolling back some of the tenant protection rights that we have on the books because the state law only applies to buildings that are 12 years or older. And this is something that we were not aware of at the time of this getting drafted, and it was not our intention to roll back tenant protection rights. So this is one piece of feedback that we received. We've got another bullet point here on distribution and content. So there's a line in the code that requires that these rights be physically delivered to tenants upon them getting into a lease or renewing a lease. There's a section on fee transparency and limits, which basically just requires completely documented disclosure of all fees up front, and it restricts changes to these fees as well. We received feedback from folks who, from developers, from landlords, that they would just like more clarification on the language in this. There was an example presented to us that if there's a parking code enforcement for someone parking in the wrong parking spot for a given building, and then that fee for parking in the wrong parking spot is increased, that making sure that fees and penalties were differentiated between in our code, that was one piece of feedback we received on this fee transparency measure. And There's a final opportunity to correct a measure that's in these amendments to chapter 9.54. We received feedback from many advocates that said, look, this makes many of the provisions that we have in these amendments toothless. So we provided this attachment to council Council could adopt some of these. Council could adopt none of these. Council could choose to wait, and we're going to have future slides on that, but feel free to jump in right here if there's anything.

I'll just jump in. One note on the first item on the changes in the notice of rent increase. Two things that show up there that we were trying to solve for that we've heard a lot from community since we passed our initial tenant protections four years ago. One was it was hearing around noticing requirements and making sure they're consistently followed whether someone's under a lease or under month to month, so adding that month to month. specificity there the other was hearing that when when people got their six months notice or three months notice if they were going to have a rent increase but sometimes they were told we're giving you six months notice you have to tell us in two weeks if you're going to renew your lease and so part c that shows up in this amendment that says in no case may a tenant be required to notify the landlord of their intention to continue the tenancy more than 20 days before the tenancy ends is designed to address that issue, because we've heard quite a bit from residents about that particular piece. And then I'll also just note on the distribution and content, we'll talk more about the use of the business license, which we changed last year to require a posting of tenants' rights. But this kind of adds an additional piece within the code as well. that would be ensuring that when people sign their lease or renew their lease, they are also handed a copy of their rights. So it's both posted and they are handed a copy. So both are kind of attempts to be able to make sure that the people are aware of their rights. So I would just add that piece.

And I'll just jump in on the fee transparency and limits to the point of, say penalties, the intention is not to limit potential penalties for someone acting out of accordance with their lease, but is to provide transparency for recurring monthly fees that may be a baseline for a lease agreement so that all of those individual fees are disclosed upfront. So you're not comparing rental options and not having the full picture.

Yep. But yeah, we've received a lot of feedback on this code and likely we have to, if we, if council does want to pass some or all of this code, it would have to be workshopped a lot. It would not go to consent, for instance, on August 3rd. Yeah, so the second piece of potential policy is banning rent fixing software. As I mentioned earlier, this would be modeled after the King County ordinance that was passed in September of 2025. Basically just bans algorithmic rent fixing software and anti-competitive sharing of prices to drive rents up in real time. So the King County legislation directs the executive to prepare an enforcement study because this is something that is, it's very hard to prove when it is being used. So that's why the legislation directs the executive to prepare this enforcement study that is due technically tomorrow but is very, very likely to be delayed. And that's why we have heard from advocates and we as a subcommittee are recommending waiting on this potential policy until we learn more about enforcement. And yeah, this is the third potential policy, which is the business license posting requirements. So these are, this is updating our business license requirements to specify how tenant rights information is distributed, how it is framed in buildings. And this could be paired with either of the two previous policies, depending on council direction. So those are the three main policies. We also have proposed communication updates for this biennium. So this involves working to add more information to the website and a current flyer that could detail tenant rights, include frequently asked questions, and capacity to do this would have to come TOGETHER INFORMATION IN THE TEXT WOULD HAVE TO COME FROM COUNCIL AS WE'VE BEEN RESTRICTED ON STAFF CAPACITY WITH THIS MATTER. AND THIS KIND OF TIES INTO OUR BUDGET UPDATES WHICH ARE COMING NEXT. OR BUDGET OPTIONS RATHER, NOT BUDGET UPDATES. So those were kind of the policy proposals. We as a subcommittee have paired a few possible budget options for council consideration. One of them is just funding a full-time employee or a contractor to deal with tenant assistance, with enforcement, with guidance for folks with regards to the current tenant protections and future tenant protections that we will have on the books. One of them is making sure that we as a council fund a dedicated work plan item for our planning staff to support outreach, to support stakeholder engagement, to study these issues because right now, staff capacity has been a limitation. We want to fund, this is a potential option to fund a budget item for a work plan with regards to limiting this lack of staff capacity. And then there are a couple other more specific budget items. One of them is just funding that both of them have to do with communication. One of them is funding the creation and distribution of a renter's handbook, similar to Seattle's model. And the final one is just funding additional communications related specifically to this issue, including the website as mentioned for the future. And there are many great things we could put on this website, including translation services and the like. So these are four potential budget options. and kind of our options moving forward. Consider some of the policy options, the communication updates for this year and the budget options right here. So this is a summary of what we had on the previous slides. But yeah, this is the end of our presentation. If my colleagues on the subcommittee have anything else to add, feel free to chime in or else we can go to council discussion.

Sure, I'll just add, we had some interesting conversations this morning, especially around the posting of the rights and what that looked like. There was a lot of questions around what that would potentially look like. Would that be in, say, a single condo that's being rented? And a lot of those questions I think we would still need to sort out, but I think it was the intention of the subcommittee that those posted documents that are framed would be in the large apartment buildings um and not in like you know a smaller one-off condo so that it's not more cumbersome on the the landlords for that additionally there were questions around language access and maybe those those communications, having QR codes so that they were available in multiple different languages. So we've just had some really deep and interesting conversations, both with developers and landlords. And we got a lot of great feedback from our advocates, a lot of whom are here in the room tonight. So we have a lot of decisions and so many different options available in front of us tonight and a bunch of different pathways. So just very interested to hear the conversation from my colleagues.

And I would just comment on two things. One is on the amendments. You know, we had heard from council and from the public the interest in being able to see this item sooner. And so we tried to speed up and bring this forward now. I think there clearly is, we've heard feedback since we've put this out. There's more work to do. And it's also part of why you see in our budget options wanting to have more capacity and support to stakeholder this work. We did want to bring something forward to the council and felt like maybe we could bring something forward but I think you know, there is, I just want to call out under one, you can see option D, which is because there were quite a few items that are not showing up in attachment A that still, that have a lot of interest in the community. And I think we really do feel we should spend time working on. And so we have heard from some folks that say, let's just pass it as one package. So that is an option as to, take the time to be able to do it all at once. But there's also the option to potentially also change what we have an attachment a so with some pieces that we might want to move forward to support renters now. So it is a question I'm curious to get the council's thoughts on taking into account community feedback. And if we move forward with those pieces to it doesn't mean yes or no, it can mean we spend some time and we bring it back for some different study sessions or committee meetings to be able to work that out as well as work with community advocates and others to get feedback to get those right. And then I just say on budget options. To emphasize, I think, as we started to talk about this work for some of to do this well, and make sure that we it's also enforced, and we're supporting renters, I think this kind of staff capacity piece was it was a big theme. So that's why we really wanted to make sure especially three B, as well as 3D you'll see are both kind of capacity things to say because we often hear from the staff and mayor if we want to work on something they'll say is it in the work plan and so the goal would be with the budget is for us to actually budget it to be in the work plan if that's really a priority for the council so I think the question to the council is whether that is of interest in which case we could bring back we could work on the dollars and cents and bring back an enhancement option for these different areas.

Just one more point. Yeah, we have heard from a number of advocates that they would prefer we do wait on passing the updates that we brought forward to council and waiting to pass a more comprehensive package of updates. You know, any kind of code updates are cumbersome, both for the city. and for the people to whom these code updates apply. So that is another potential option. And the other option like council member Kritzer said is moving forward with some aspects. The other policy option is moving forward with some aspects of what we have proposed, including for instance, the rent transparency measure and reworking the language so that it's more suitable.

Okay, thank you so much to the members of the subcommittee and of course the staff who have been working on this item with the council members and the members of the public. And again, we do have many members of the public here who've taken an interest in this item and have also been communicating with us. So I appreciate them being here. The first hand was from Council Vice President Nueva Camino. So we'll kick it to you. Thank you.

Um, this, this topic is, is one that, um, I was actually involved with back in 2022 as a resident. Um, and I testified as a renter and what the tenant protections would mean to me, um, working single mom, working, living in downtown Redmond and in a property that is, is managed by a locally owned property management company. And I bring up that point because we've recently seen a merger between two very large national property management companies. And it's yet to be seen how that is going to impact our renters. Another change or during that time was then on the planning commission paying attention to as we move forward with our housing, do our partners, do they share the same values that we do as a city? both as staff, as council, as commissioners, do we have shared values? And we saw some instances where we don't. So now when this council adopted those tenant protections back in 2022, we recognized housing stability and that it is foundational to economic stability as a city. And now we've got over half of our residents are renters. My view is, and I've mentioned this several times in different capacities, when I was testifying as a commissioner and on the dais, that to be cautious and aware of a shift in influence and or power and where does it lie with our community. Renters tend to not be as engaged civically because they're seen or assumed to be more transient. They're going to be here just for a short time so they don't have buy-in. And I think that the decisions that we make around this is going to signal to our community as how do we value you as renters? And do we have the power and influence that is only with homeowners who tend to be more engaged or Is it with our development company? Is it with the property management companies? And just kind of keeping that lens because it can get gray very quickly. And by no means do I want to make it harder to provide housing or harder to do business in Redmond. So I just bring this up as kind of an experience in multiple roles around this particular topic. I think that we've got a great opportunity to make some changes that are meaningful. And I love the work that the subcommittee has done on this and taking a look at what is going to be seen as possibly performative, what's going to be enforceable, what isn't, and making sure that we are looking at it through the lens of Redmond. So thank you.

Council Member Parsi. Thank you, Council Member. I share the same values and thoughts. And I think offering housing is more than offering just four walls on a roof. It is offering stability. And without stability, we can't have housing. meaningful housing no matter how many units are offered that doesn't really mean how many units are occupied how much housing and stability the community has so um thank you so much uh council member um so i i do want to thank everyone who worked on this item and i really appreciate all the time that you took but i also acknowledge that the aspirations that i heard from everyone is not currently fully reflected in the proposal that we have in front of us. So I'm curious, what were some of the most exciting things that you wanted to see in this proposal that didn't make it here? And why, for example, I saw staffing was one of the concerns. Was that part of the reason? And is that something that we can kind of look at prioritizing things differently? I am a little bit concerned about kind of So I'll share a little bit more. I am a little bit concerned with moving forward with something like awareness because I don't know yet if problem that we have is lack of laws and or proper regulations or if it's lack of ordinance and or it's lack of say enforcement or awareness. In the previous meeting, we talked about making sure that we coordinate pavement and utilities. We don't want to put pavement first and then replace our utilities. In this case, we don't want to create pamphlets and awareness material and then change our laws and do that enforcement. With that, I want to do better. I want us to look at what we can do in a meaningful way. as you shared. I'm very curious what we wanted to do but couldn't make it here and why. Is there a member of the subcommittee who has thoughts?

Councilmember Kutzer?

Yeah, I'll go back actually. can see some of it here, a couple of the provisions that we hope that we can continue to work on that that showed up in some of the proposals that we got from advocates. In particular, the right to move before the end of lease was brought up. So one of the issues if people know their rent is going to go up and they want to move, whether they could move sooner before the end of their lease. Also, I'd say the Attachment A has fee transparency or has a piece on that, but doesn't necessarily address limits on specific fees. And we've heard from residents about concerns about particular fees. And we also see that Seattle currently is considering kind of a more comprehensive package that looks at both of those things. So that's been brought up to us by advocates. Also, anti-retaliation protection. So if people are asserting their rights to make sure that it's not going to impact their ability to continue renting. and the the right to continue tenancy I think that kind of I think we might have forgotten to write that in that bullet point but was another one that's also on the list that that we looked at and I would just say I think these are all ones that we really would would like to make sure that we could look at as a council and and some of the feedback which maybe director Helen can speak to some of this from staff was that all of these would be good would be ones that we would want to do some deeper stakeholder ring on to be for passing a full policy on it. So, but that there isn't the staff capacity necessarily to be able to do that full amount, which is why we have it in a work item for the upcoming time. Do you have any comments on that director Holland?

I think that's a really fair assessment about what happened because there was so much energy around wanting to do something right now. And I think the learning from this exercise is legislation doesn't necessarily happen fast because when you then propose something, you get feedback and that feedback needs to be evaluated. re-incorporated into ordinances. And if you go fast, you risk actually having to go back and do it again, or you risk unintended consequences. And my input during the subcommittee meeting was I can identify some things that I think are low hanging fruit that you might be able to get to, and you might believe there is universal support for, And what I've heard today is there probably wasn't even universal support for the things that we thought were going to be easy. And staff just simply doesn't have the capacity to do the stakeholder engagement that really is necessary to essentially get to a meaningful piece of legislation that is going to accomplish the objectives you've laid out. So, I mean, I think that was what I heard in this conversation. And it just reinforces for me, considering we're in a budget year, We're about to go on summer break. I'm retiring. There will be a break in continuity for a period of time while we're transitioning the department to new leadership and that this item really could benefit from a work item identification that gets formally put on the city's docket so that we can look at that next year with the kind of scrutiny and effort that it really demands.

Thank you, both Council Member Kritzer and Director Helen. Appreciate that. Are there other items of feedback, Council Member Soni?

First of all, thank you to all subcommittee members for all the real hard work and also Director Helen. It really takes effort to put something together. I truly believe that whatever we want to deliver should be very meaningful. legally enforceable and also operationally viable because a lot of times like you know we may come with some policies but then we are not looking if they will really going to create an impact that we are looking I just have a comment and this was regarding opportunity to correct for the landlord I just have kind of a concern, it's suppose if a landlord would repeatedly violate the provision. So they get 30 days to correct and after 30 days, you know, because if they have corrected within 30 days they're out, then what if they do it again and they keep doing it again? This is just creating a pressure on the tenant who is just getting miserable because the landlord is very easily able to correct it in 30 days and just making things difficult for the tenant so that they can leave on their own or they are left into this miserable state. So how are we going to ensure that by enforcing this we are not creating trouble for the renters? So this is just one example that I'm bringing because the point that I'm going to make is like we can define, but we have to make sure that these can get enforced and can be sustainable without creating a problem.

Thank you. Understood Thank You councilmember Sony did you have a comment councilman?

Yeah, that's that's absolutely something that we talked about and making sure that we work in some sort of You do this so many times and like you you don't get to keep doing this because we saw that as being potentially ripe for abuse that said We do have the opportunity to have the discussion if that's something that we want to include in our decision or not as far as that particular policy But we did actually have that conversation amongst ourselves.

I'm gonna go ahead and chime in with a couple of my thoughts and then we'll kick off round two with Council Vice President Nueva Camina. I really appreciate the work that's gone on so far on this topic, which continues our work on not just tenant protections, but housing stability and housing writ large in the city of Redmond. Something that struck me as we were having this conversation tonight about staff capacity, I just wanna make sure that everyone's clear. Staff capacity is already taken because staff are delivering on the priorities that we've already established and budgeted for in the biennium. For housing alone, that includes standing up more permanent supportive housing, our case managers, and a recent rehire for our homelessness coordinator who does so much work right now actually on keeping folks housed and preventing them from falling into homelessness. We do have 6,000 units of housing in the pipeline right now and there are so many middle housing permits flying through the permit desk that council leadership has actually requested a staff report in September to get an update on those activities. reportedly from every neighborhood of the city. So I think there's good news to share there. So this is the type of work just on housing alone that is going on in the city and how these conversations build onto that. For me, the most compelling testimony that we had heard was regarding the fees and actually having the resident Share with us just just the receipts how the unpredictable fees were stacking up that is compelling I don't know if that lowers the cost of housing affordability, but I if it provides stability That's a step toward Balancing the power dynamic that has been discussed a little bit in this room so I am interested in having the subcommittee continue to explore and that item as well as I have a question back to the subcommittee about how this work influenced recommendations or ideas for the housing and human services plan that's being developed right now and the legislative agenda come the fall. I just imagine we will see a presentation from all of you about what is the correct text to have in there because you've studied the issue so deeply. So those are a couple of my top line highlights. I don't know if there's any response or if I should just go Council Vice President? We'll go there. Okay, Council Vice President.

Thank you. I deeply appreciated the budget options that were brought forth. I would definitely be supportive of having an FTE and proposing that in the upcoming budget for this. Again, I'm not sure exactly what the numbers are. If it is accurate that we're two-thirds renters at this point, We're just over 50%. But numbers that we heard earlier, we're going to grow by 30% over the next 15 years. And that's going to be most likely more rental, for better or worse. So I would definitely be in support of having that FTE put into the budget. However, in this room, we've also seen where we funded positions, and those positions have gotten parsed out in ways that were not intended by the council. So taking a look at what would our council need to see, what can we do to ensure that the FTE that we approve is going to be dedicated for what the intent is that we're discussing right now.

I can jump in on that one, if that's okay, Chair. That was actually a conversation that came up when we were speaking with advocates and Council Member Kritzer brought up the point of we could draft a proviso to make sure that, you know, that this happens in a very particular way so that we could be engaged in what that role looks like, how it operates within the city, how it helps do all of this work because we have seen that happen before. And we've faced that quite a bit recently. So I think that was a really elegant solution brought up by my colleague. And I would ask if I left anything out to please fill us in on that conversation, but we definitely did recognize that as a potential flaw, and we did have a solution for that in that conversation.

Council Member Kritzer.

Yeah, and I would say the ask on the budget options would be if you can tell us if you're interested in a b c d or if you and and depending on interest if there's a majority interest in just even getting more information we could go talk with the with the correct staff to figure out how much would we estimate each of these would cost so then the council could look at that as a potential enhancement and then also look at potential funding sources in the budget for those things so it would be great to hear thoughts on that and we could look at the ways that we might draft that or propose it. I had brought that up as an idea. I think that's been a general theme that we've had around budgeting for particular positions and wanting to make sure that the intent is very clear in the budget. So we could bring some options back if the council's interested.

Understood. So before I go to Council Member Parsi, I appreciate the flag on the subcommittee needing to hear that feedback on the budget options. And in a way that does actually demonstrate and help us practice like how it will work during budget season for other topics, which is as a collective, we agree, you know, which are the ones that we're most interested in so that the subcommittee is able to spend their valuable time over their summer vacation to make sure they're answering the right question. So council member Parsi.

I wanted to double click on what that staff option would look like because we have looked at if we've heard even in the room a few different things we've heard you know we could get. Get staff support for talking a community engagement so that's one type of. kind of staff support another type is potential legal review or um you know helping actually draft the ordinance so i'm kind of curious with and you know we've heard from say the police department that we there's been times where we um have looked for external legal support or like contracting support. So I'm curious if you can kind of share a little bit more about what types of efforts would look like if it's just one person, if it's a percentage of certain departments that we need support from, what could that staff budget look like?

Chair Procrea?

I can jump in here. I think the answer to your question is what council wants, and that's what we're trying to discuss now. When we say one FTE in a proposal doesn't necessarily mean one FTE doesn't necessarily mean an FTE. It could be contracted legal work. But I would just love to hear from my colleagues. Yeah, we have had a number of possible items for staff to work on, including drafting the legislation, legal review, stakeholder engagement. Our job is to kind of coalesce, and it seems like there is kind of consensus around funding. a budget item related to staff capacity, but our job is to kind of figure out what we want that to be. So yeah, because for instance, the proposed set of ordinances were drafted by Director Helen herself, just because of a lack of staff capacity to draft these in other parts of the department and have have review from staff before we implement these changes into law.

Thank you. Director Helen.

I just wanted to note that you all make good points about the budget and allocating resource to what you believe is going to be an FTE and what that FTE does. I just would like to say as a caution that the job market actually brings people to us that have skills and may or may not be able to be suitable for all the range of things you think might be adapted by that FTE or the responsibility of that FTE. For instance, we've not considered a person who could probably do something in the housing ombud space and engagement space as a person who could do legal review or code writing. So I think what you're talking about is if there is a position, for instance, we actually lost two people in our homeless outreach program, Tisa and Alina, that we're rehiring for, but 50% of their jobs is housing navigation for a certain amount. actually hiring someone to do that work would probably put a dent in the capacity that they lose to doing just that part of their job with someone who is more focused on actually housing navigation and tenant support versus actually like redoing homelessness outreach and case management. So then that would actually, part of it is we cobble together FTEs to accomplish what we do based on the skill we're able to hire for. So that's just the point I wanted to make. And I also just wanted to make a very quick point. I think in anything you consider, and this is just As a resident of Redmond and also the director for the next month. It feels like it would be appropriate for the subcommittee and the Council to think about ways not to pit tenants against landlords and in reflection on the code that we adopted in 2022 that we largely took from King county. I feel that we missed the mark. I think an ordinance like the one that you're envisioning and aspire to is not a tenant protection or a tenant bill of rights. I think it's a landlord tenant cooperation and opportunity. And I think that's what's missing is When we characterize things, for instance, as junk fees, we automatically pit residents against landlords. When we say that there's penalties only against landlords and they don't have an opportunity to correct, that creates friction. when we actually have a housing ombudsman who should be providing tenant supports, but wouldn't it be great if the small landlords actually knew as much about how to create the alignment with our codes as somebody who's in a big essentially management firm, then we would have a better housing ecosystem. So, I mean, just thinking about how that push and pull works, I think, Council Member Nueva Camino said it, Council Member Parsi has said it, it's just think about it in the context of how you wanna see that relationship function in a non adversarial way.

Thank you, Council Member Kritzer.

Thank you director Helen. I would just say in terms of kind of the process for our new council members of when we have proposed as enhancements in the budget, new positions, I'll give an example that we did our volunteer manager position that has done things like manage the green Redmond program and other volunteer pieces that came forward as a proposal. where it was drafted um kind of on a one pager of these are this is the the vision the responsibilities the goals of this position and this is the estimated cost um so i would envision for this type of of thing that we could come back if it sounds like the council's very interested in this we haven't had the time as a subcommittee to draft something like that up but all this feedback is very helpful and for us to think through what that could look like get the estimates on how much money that would cost and then we could go back and forth as council to be able to say what do we want in it and even hearing here you know there are multiple objectives we might have and it'd be great for us to as a group decide what are the objectives what aligns best to be able to solve what we need and get input from the staff of here are some of the other staff resources that might be complementary that you might be either duplicating or where this could fill a gap if we're going to add an fte So I think there's an opportunity going into the budget, but before budget this fall, I think the mayor does know, because we put this as a priority, that this was an area we were interested in to begin with. So it's really about kind of figuring out what is that going to look like and how are we going to articulate that if the council's interested and we can come back on it.

And I think how staff can support you in that conversation is talking about that maybe overlap and gaps conversation, because we don't, We don't need another outreach worker. It would be great to take some of the policy demand and education and outreach demand off that group so that they can attend to the actual hands-on outreach that they're doing and spend a little bit less time doing the actual brass tacks navigation.

Thank you. I'll go to Council Member Forsyth and then I'm actually going to poll on this FTE question just for time to move. Make sure we're getting to all the questions. Council Member Forsyth.

Thank you. And that point is well taken that we don't necessarily know what talent coming in is going to present. And that's why we present this to the council as a two pronged full-time employee and space in the work plan so that we know that because we know that this work is gonna take a lot of a deeper effort and so we know that we're gonna want some policy folks we know we're gonna want I mean I don't necessarily want to call out staff names but we know we're gonna want certain people looking into this as well as having that one dedicated person that can be that kind of center for all of these questions. So that's why we presented it with these two options. So I don't see it as A and B, I see it as one item for those two budget options.

Thank you appreciate that so at this time Council let's see if there's interest in having the subcommittee continue to explore staffing proposal for the budget and come back to the Council with a proposal for an FTE and and possible budget are there is there support for for that item. All right. Unanimous support from the city of Redmond, the council. Okay, thank you so much. I hope that is helpful to the subcommittee. Are there any other buckets of priorities or excuse me, are there any other alternatives listed in the budget options that a council member would like to articulate as a priority? Council member Forsyth?

I do think once we get the, because our biennium is two years, I do think we should talk about the renter handbook and the additional communications for the potential end of the next biennium. And just, so we're not kind of caught in the same position we're caught in now. This, you know, we're at the end of the biennium. We wanted to take this on. We didn't have the capacity. So I don't want to see us waiting another two and a half years to develop the handbook and the additional communication and outreach.

I appreciate that. So Council Member Forsyth, would it be acceptable at this point to say that the subcommittee is going to evaluate this FTE and the possibilities that it could take on include these items? Would that be fair? Okay. Are there thumbs up from the rest of the council on that? Or some deliberation needed? Council Member Kritzer.

I guess I'd also say, because we, yeah, we kind of bring back a, we could try to figure out what's a quote for at least the pricing on the other two and to bring back for the council's consideration. If people are interested in just learning more, I'm sure we could find out. I would imagine something like the renter's handbook development could be used maybe with one-time dollars versus the FTE is more of an ongoing dollar.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Okay. Thank you. So on this bucket we started we're going in reverse order On the budget does the subcommittee have the direction that it needs there any moment? Yes councilmember Forsyth.

I just want to clarify for Budget for number three. We're looking at moving forward with all of those options Yes, are there

Comments? Council Member Parsi?

I am curious if this is something that we need kind of support for specifically just one year and then have a goal to develop the program and kind of close the role after that or is this the kind of plan that we're yeah I just I feel like to me once we have a good ordinance and once we have the program wrapped up that's the end to me but I just wanted to make sure I understand correctly what we're signing up for.

Appreciate the question, Council Member Forsyth. I would say this is not a new issue. In my seven years on council, we've always heard about, even before we passed tenant protections, we've heard about people wanting someone to go to as a housing... ombuds, essentially, so someone that they can navigate with someone they can raise issues with. So in my mind, this would be an ongoing position, because as we grow, we're just going to face more questions, more challenges, more potential opportunities for mistrust. So I think this position in my mind, as we become a bigger and bigger city, this is a position that we should maintain full time.

And Council Member Parsi.

One more clarification. So we do plan to move forward with a proviso for the first two years to make sure that we pass Proper tenant coordination program ordinance.

I'll go ahead and summarize how I believe I understand the scenario to be, which is the council subcommittee is going to continue to evaluate what an FTE could accomplish, including the things on this list. And we are also exploring some of the the tools or tactics that may or may not be needed in order to make sure that the council and the community's intent is delivered upon in the budget, but that's not a decision that we're making here today. Okay, so we're giving direction on that. Thank you so much. Going in reverse order then, communications updates this year. The subcommittee proposed working with staff to continue on refinements to the current communications about renters' rights in Redmond. Are there comments? or questions or direction on this item, Council Member Prakriti?

And I just wanted to give a clarification on this item. For one instance, I don't believe that the website is currently up with regards to know your rights and tenant information. I could be mistaken, but last I checked, I don't believe it was up. Part of this involves just making sure that that is up and running.

Thank you. I believe director Helen is going to check on that while we take other questions. Cause we do have a tenant page on our website currently council member Kritzer.

Yeah. And I think for this year would just also, it would be if just kind of having the council support for us to do the work, especially that we linked in the memo to an example from Olympia, Where they have just a page that's very clearly tenant tenants rights and then underneath it's just some very clear links and information, so you can understand what they are in very easy language. I think well, I think, and that is linked to have an actual like linkable page that goes also with faqs and with links to also state protections those other pieces, so I think just making improvements to our existing page. I think it exists on a page called something like living in Redmond, and then underneath it, it's a little hard to navigate to. So I think we would just be working with the staff to improve that as well as the actual flyer, which I think you just shared. We've heard some feedback on that, of just ways that it could be improved to be more holistic of showing the existing rights. Although I think to Council Member Percy's point, we wouldn't want to go so deep if we're going to make some changes in the future. So but to make sure that it's easy for people to find.

But I do want to point out it is on the webpage. And if you simply type into the search tenant protections, it all pops up. So I know the navigation. If you were trying to look through the chain of navigations of where you might find that, if you type in tenant protections, it does.

Understood. Thank you, Director Helen. I appreciate your quick research on that and your comments, Council Member Kritzer. So Council, I'm looking for, the subcommittee is looking for direction as to, you know, we've been having communications briefings tonight, throughout the night, actually. Is this an area where we would like to have the subcommittee or a representative of offer some opportunity to work with the communications office to refine this? I'll say for myself personally, I have found Kelly to be very receptive to meeting the needs of council and on these types of like cleanups and improvements. So perhaps on the other side of Derby days, there could be some room in the schedule and I would say we should ask, we should go ahead and ask. So are there other comments on that or is there support for continuing to work with the communication shop on this item? Council Member Kritzer?

I would just say as one more note, at least my hope for this would be also to go out to folks in the community to find out specifically on FAQs, just to be able to at least for what are the current most common questions now, if we can find out what those are, get the answers, and just have that posted. We have a lot of great FAQ pages on our site that I often hear feedback on, and this would be a great one. to add and all it would be would be the web work. So and we've heard some general support from staff to be able to make those types of updates. So just wanted to make sure we kind of have the council blessing on that.

Okay, is there council support for the subcommittee working with the communications team on this item? Okay, seeing that there is, thank you so much. Does the subcommittee have the direction that they need on that item? Okay, so Council Member Forsyth.

I guess to the last point that Council Member Kritzer just made, and maybe Director Helen, maybe you know this, we had a FAQ before. Do we still have that information?

because I don't want to necessarily create it. I just dropped a different flyer in your box that we actually prepared in coordination with ELAP. So that actually is the know your rights information, but then there's also the other flyer about tenant protections in general. So all of the FAQs that were just kind of, here's a question, here's an answer, were actually developed recently kind of into these one pagers. Great and if there's and if there's feedback about how they could be better how they could be easier to navigate to love to hear it okay.

Very interested in moving that forward, I just want to make sure we're not creating another situation where if we're doing. More Community engagement it's going to prolong the process into a stakeholder in process, I want to make sure that we can. get this accomplished in a timely fashion. So I appreciate the drop of this document because this is actually really good.

So hopefully we can get that up soon. That's wonderful. Well, we'll leave it to you all on the subcommittee to reconvene. Yeah, reconvene as a group and make sure that we are as a city doing our part to make sure that the solutions that we have already created and that the state has created, that folks are able to know about them. I have had interactions with renters who have only known about their rights because they happen to watch our meetings on Tuesday nights and have had to utilize the information they learned in our meetings and conversations with our landlords. So we do know that there is a communication gap and I appreciate you all taking on that work to help close it. Okay, let's go to the final category then of the policy considerations. Are there any council members who would like to share their thoughts on direction for the subcommittee?

Council Member Parsi. I do not feel comfortable with the policy document. I think there's a lot to be... to learn and to investigate further and to connect with the community before we move forward with a policy, at least a attachment open to hearing other people's perspective.

So would you say that option D is your preferred option at this time to continue to work on it? Nothing moves, nothing goes away from this list, but continue to work on it. Okay. Thank you. Council member Sony. I support that. You have the same support. Okay. Thank you. Council Vice President?

I'm in support of holding off. I think as our goals, and it's been a goal of Redmond and of mayors. I think recently she said that she's proud of or she's aspiring to anybody who would like to live, work, and play in Redmond that people are able to afford to live here. So I think with housing stability, predictability, and equitable outcomes, holding off and waiting. until we've got it completely flushed out.

Okay, great. And Council Member Forsyth? I just want to make sure we're talking about the entire package of what was brought forward is going to be what we're going to be looking at as that comprehensive package and not just the items that we initially put forward as A, B, and C. So I just want to ground the level set and make sure we're talking about the whole comprehensive package.

Council Vice President?

A follow-up on that. While the whole comprehensive package, my only concern is some of the things that we've heard from community members about specifically some of the fees that have been undisclosed. In the meantime, then having something to where we're communicating to our community like, hey, we hear you. We heard the testimony that came into this room. and this is what we're doing about it rather than we hear you and it's going to be an unknown amount of time before we do something about it. That's my rub on it, what I'm wrestling with.

Thank you. I'll go ahead and share a couple of my thoughts. On the fees, which I think are addressed in the first bullet and as Council Vice President was just mentioning, I do think that residents have communicated the need for stability and certainty there. I did not see represented in the room necessarily tonight or the chance to hear about how that will impact. What are the other repercussions of that? The other impacts? So I do just think we need a little bit more study on that. like that I do have some meetings myself personally coming up in the next couple weeks just to understand that um but if like we have done on this council in the last six seven years stability really does matter to me and we have taken steps to increase stability where we could um I don't know that that stability through the um making the fees more certain creates more affordability. And so I think we would wanna be clear on the goals of such a measure. I really appreciated the feedback that we got from emails and whatnot over the last couple of days around the rent fixing software and the interest in actually not having something adopted if we can't enforce it. We have passed legislation in the past that is difficult to enforce and to have the clarity on this one that it might not be worth it in the end or it may not make up a good enough impact. I guess what I'm saying is I look forward to reading the report from the County Executive and I'm happy to see it stay on the list for now. The licensing as the subcommittee continues to evolve with that, I do think it's helpful to distinguish and make sure we have strategies that address both for landlords and renters who are in large corporations versus the one-off. I do find it difficult to educate folks who are not in a large building, but are in a building where there might be single units with independent landlords and the like, maybe it's a condo, maybe it's a townhouse or whatever. I think just those relationships are the hardest for us to reach. And I know that their numbers are not as big, but they're important. Much like when we worked on the short-term rentals regulations, it's also a matter of safety. So I think that's important to keep in mind. All of that to say, those are the reasons why I'm happy to see the subcommittee continue to work on this so that we can pursue option D today to make sure that we can just continue the work on all of this. Yeah, Council Member Prakrit and then Council Member Kritzer.

Thank you. And it sounds like there is some interest from my colleagues on council, particularly around the issue of fees. And I want to make something clear that what we brought to council with regards to fee transparency, we brought what we could right now that we felt we could pass. But what has been... Advocated to us goes much deeper and my interest in fees Personally goes goes much deeper than just fee transparency it lies in in regulating fees and Regulating the types and amounts of fees so if this is in particular an interest to counsel We could try to to work on this and work on the rest of what has been proposed and but try to bring a more comprehensive ordinance on this to council i don't want to make any promises but hopefully before the end of the year um or early early next year this could be something that we as a um as a subcommittee prioritize um in bringing more comprehensive reform if if this is of interest to the council thank you councilmember chris

Yeah, I would just say it sounds like there's interest on 1D, but the way we phrased it was bring forward a single comprehensive package. It sounds like it's really subcommittee, go work more on this and come back, as well as we budget more so that we can, we budget so we can do more on this as well. So we can also take some of this feedback, look at some of these pieces, and bring anything back sooner as we're able. But I think, I guess I would, I am curious if it is, to Council Member Proctor's point, I would love clarity on whether people would want us to kind of keep the momentum going and budget to be able to address a whole, because we have quite a few issues, as we mentioned, that we were looking at as one big package and nothing goes until the whole package goes, or whether we might break out One piece, for example, looking at fees and going a little deeper, and then also scheduling the work for the other pieces.

Thank you. Let's see what council feedback there is on that policy choice. I do want to say structurally, this is only like our third or fourth, maybe fourth subcommittee. It was actually one of the OGs, one of the original three. So structurally, I do want to say to the council members who have been working so hard on this issue that we are not kicking the can down the road to you, but we are doing interested as you do go back on the feedback that you heard and then coming back with not only proposals, but what is the scope change that you need in your charter? What are the additional resources? Are there council members you need to swap out? Are there new resources? And if this no longer is a single like subcommittee item, then it gets baked into the council work plan. I have said to three council members already this week about new ideas and proposals that they've had is it's a great thing to bring to the January retreat. So I don't wanna push any of this until January. However, I do just know that we are trying to accomplish many things and we value your time and the effort that you have brought to date. Council Member Forsyth asked a policy question related to the fee issue. Is there a comment on that? Excuse me, Council Member Kritzer. I don't know who I gave credit to, actually. It is getting late, which is also another reason we should wrap it up. But is there feedback on the point from Council Member Kritzer?

Council Member Soni. I will prefer to see a comprehensive package. And, you know, anyways, we are going for a budget discussions. And this has an alignment with the budget discussion. So I would, you know, there is no need to just rush into doing certain things without having a full holistic view of some of these things. I would prefer to see a comprehensive discussions and the plan. Appreciate that. Thank you.

So where we are at the moment, unless there's further direction, option 1D is the direction of the council. Can I see if there's support for 1D? Okay, we will proceed with that at this time. Council Member Forsyth.

I just really appreciate everyone's thoughtfulness and taking on this conversation. We as a subcommittee really worked to take in the advice and all the public comment that we heard to try to get something put forward before we went on recess. Through further conversation, realizing that that wasn't going to hit the mark, I really appreciate that council came back and also gave that direction. I do want to say to everyone here at this table, I really appreciate your dedication to this topic. And I know there is some concern about that dedication waning, and I don't see that happening at all. So I just really want to say, especially with the unanimous consent around several of these topics that I feel the energy, I feel the momentum and I appreciate that.

Thank you. Are there any other comments from subcommittee members? Any other comments for tonight? Okay, with that, we will conclude this item. Thank you everyone so much for your time and your attention. We have not taken a recess. We do have just council talk time remaining with one verbal report. Are we okay to continue? I'm seeing power through. So good news, Director Helen, we have a short attention span. No, all to say, Director Helen is here tonight to provide a verbal update on an item that came up during our conversation last week. We have been discussing a noise ordinance related to a particular property in Redmond at the same time on a parallel track. There has been a business license issue question, business license question that director Helen is here to provide us an update on. We are grateful that she was willing to stay a little bit late tonight and give us this update because, you know, time's getting limited with director Helen, unfortunately, but we will celebrate that another day. So director Helen, please.

Sure. So at what I heard at one of the last committee, the whole meetings was that you would like an update on the, license renewal that is ongoing with the Interlake Sporting Association, or otherwise known as ISA. So they did apply a year ago, that would have been more than a year ago, I'll kind of do it chronologically, I think that's probably the easiest way, but to renew their license. And that is prescribed by the regulatory licensing requirements that are contained in chapter of the Redmond Municipal Code. And so it actually prescribes the process you go through to renew these licenses.

And that is independent from the annual business license that they are required to maintain.

So their initial application was in January of last year. The actual application goes to the finance director who is responsible for overseeing Title V. which is the business licensing provisions, that she is also able to delegate that responsibility. So I've been helping out doing the process piece of the relicensing in my capacity as kind of a permit person, trying to treat it actually like a permit. I think one thing that's worth noting is there was probably less rigor applied to this relicensing, wasn't very much alignment between the questions that staff asked, the input that they provided, and the code itself. So we were kind of professionalizing the application of the code to this particular relicensing in this round. So it actually did require more content than ISA was used to providing previously, but it is more consistent with what the code demands. That application was originally deemed incomplete that happened in February it's a process that's prescribed by code we offered them information about. How they could make that application complete and they resubmitted that application in March, so you can kind of see the pace of how things go there's metal. there's a response, there's a submittal, a resubmittal, and then after that resubmittal, they had been using an attorney, I think that was maybe a member of the club, they actually did provide, hire professional legal services in May of last year, and that actually did help elevate the conversation a little bit about what's expected under the code and how they should respond. So in May, we actually asked for additional information. So for instance, past information about range locations and things like that had been shown just kind of as hand drawn circles on a 11 by 17, it really calls for a survey and that survey was never conducted. So the ISA actually to their credit, actually hired a surveyor, they surveyed all the the locations, the ranges, the topography as is required by the code, and it'll be a really good level set, but it did take some time. So they actually did not resubmit all of that information until October of last year. Another thing that is required by the code is that the public safety authority is how it's called is actually responsible for reviewing the materials and that authority is made up of the fire and police department. And so we talked to the fire and police staff and it was concluded that we did not have staff on site that were experienced to do the type of inspection that was required under the terms of the business license code. So what we did is police department actually did an RFP to solicit consultant services for that inspection and they released an RFP in May of last year and actually again in December of last year and found no one who could do that work. or actually no one responded. We also did make a run at coordinating with ISA to bring a range examiner from the National Rifle Association and that actually concluded that it wasn't going to be the proper independent kind of investigation that we needed. Their contractual information basically said that we were not to use it to rely upon for any of the decisions we needed to make under the municipal code and that their services basically weren't adequate in lieu of professional services of an architect or an engineer that actually practices range design. So that also was kind of set aside as an alternative. The good news is actually just as of last month, the police department did identify a range examiner that could do this work and have them now under contract. We're waiting for a schedule from them, so we don't know how long that will take. We are hoping that it won't take more than a month or so, but it does require the review of all the materials that were included in the application and including the survey to make sure that the berms and orientation of ranges and things like that are compliant with safety best practices. So what we expect the range inspector to probably provide to us is one, a confirmation of either the efficacy of the existing shooting range operations and practices and their operating plan that they're required to submit as part of the relicensing or to identify opportunities for improvement that we can then ask the range to make. And then the recommendations will also likely identify opportunities for us to actually update our regulatory licensing code to modernize it. It was created really when the ISA was annexed into the city of Redmond and it really, It really actually revolves around what happens when a range gets annexed and how does a range renewal its license. It really needs some updating. So two things will happen after my departure. The police will continue to oversee the range inspection itself and then complete their evaluation together with the fire department as the public safety authority to make any recommendations for changes or approval or denial or amendments to the range operations. And then the city attorney's office will also oversee the balance of the relicensing as well as any other code updates that she may recommend to the mayor to update the actually regulatory licensing process itself. So that hopefully it won't be so cumbersome in the future, but that it will continue to ensure that we have safety protections and environmental protections associated with the range operations.

Thank you so much, Director Helen. That's quite a story. This has been going on a long time. So thank you for your work on this and everyone, including all the teams here at the city and our neighbors and the HVAC just went off. So that means it's time for us to go soon. But I do want to give council members a chance to ask any clarifying questions on what to expect next from Director Helen. Okay, so Council Member Procrea, our crockpot thinker.

How often, when was the last time their business license was renewed?

So currently the code calls for a five-year renewal. But as I noted earlier, they really relied on King County's standards and actually King County investigators to provide the investigations previously. Those were no longer available to us. So now that we're kind of doing this level set, it might be reasonable, for instance, to consider a longer relicensure period of time, maybe like 10 years instead of five, because we really are essentially setting the refined baseline. for how this shooting operation will- I see, and I would be supportive of that.

This seems like a lot of hassle and a lot of work on both your and their parts, so I don't want to have to repeat this necessarily every five years.

Appreciate that. Council Vice President. Thank you. Just a quick comment, and that's thanking you for giving us all that back information and setting us up for success as we are going to have kind of a shifting in leadership. So I appreciate the legacy information.

Any other questions for Director Helen? All right. Well, thank you so much, Director Helen. Thank you. Good night. Good luck. No, we're going to see more, so we're not going to do the Ed Monroe thing. Wonderful. Council, as previously disclosed, we have one policy item I want to make sure that we get to. regarding the automatic license plate contract at the City of Redmond with Flock. As you previously saw in the email that we shared with the Council, this closeout agreement has been pending and it was a request of the Council to have this. We have not received it to date. So in transparency for the community, And the Council wanted to make sure that this group had a chance to discuss that as at our last study session on the topic deputy director nara and the city attorney described all risk has been eliminated through the conversations with the state and the various agencies. But. The question, I guess, is a matter of what would the council's next steps like to be, given that we have not yet received the requested closeout agreement? And would we like to go ahead and proceed with scheduling a vote at a business meeting likely next week? I'm just doing math. And also, Council Member Forsyth. Thank you.

I would like to proceed with moving forward with our vote at our next business meeting. The closeout was kind of a document that we had discussed as a nice to have, and it would put members' minds at ease. But given the delays and the information that we heard from staff, I very much think we just need to take this vote already. Thank you. Council Member Kritzer.

I also support us putting on the next business meeting. Thanks.

Thank you. Council Member Parsi is giving a thumbs up. Council Member Nueva Camina, Council Member Soni, and a head nod. So with the Council Member Prakria, excuse me, I'm so sorry. My apologies, my absolute apologies. So with that, we have agenda setting later this week, the Council Vice President and I, and we will schedule this vote for future action likely next week. Council Member Kritzer.

Just just to be explicit for the listening public.

It would be a vote on ending the contract with flock That's correct as has previously been studied and discussed by this council and they'll probably a few words about it next week Okay Are there other items for council talk time? There were a few other items that we had previously shared, including a report out from the Association of Washington Cities Conference. Given the hour and the good work that has been done, we will be punting that. We have reached the end of the agenda. Thank you so much, everyone, for your time and attention tonight. Have a good night. We are adjourned.