City Council - workshop

The view of the river or the view of the mountain, those are resources. So some proposed policies here. Development should be planned and designed to account for the topography and landscape while minimizing the environmental impacts. It's actually pretty high bar, so that's a lofty policy. Next, hillside development should, as much as practical, blend in with the natural shape and texture of the land. And lighting comes up here as well. Lighting should be designed to promote public safety, but also promote those dark sky principles. So we don't want to be illuminating the night sky when we don't need to be. There's safety, security, but then it stops somewhere.

Good evening, everyone. It is now six o'clock. Welcome to the city council workshop meeting for Tuesday, August 25th, 2026. First time up on the agenda is the 2027 capital improvement program. And I'll turn it over to our city manager for context.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. I appreciate having this opportunity to present what I would consider a very preliminary capital improvement plan. We bring this to Council this time each year, recognizing that Myself and and the executive directors and the rest of the staff that work on building the budget We're still in that building process of building ultimately. What is the city managers recommended budget to Council? which is legally required to come to you by October 1st of the year and so You'll see a couple of different sheets in front of you, which I'm sure Brandon and the directors will go into more detail on. The blue sheet gives you kind of an amount by year and the different project, but it doesn't share the funding source for those projects. The sheet that has green on it tries to give you a breakdown of the projects as well as the funding source breakdown for those specific projects. You can see in some instances, say the fleet replacement program, of course that's a good one that has funding coming from multiple funds to maintain our fleet replacement program. And so, in addition to the capital improvement, preliminary capital improvement plan, this last week, city departments have been meeting with city manager's office, and we've been having what we call our city manager budget meetings, and they present their line item budget plans. to me and we go through that as well as any expanded program requests there's two buckets for that there's expanded program requests that are personnel related and non-personnel and they provide a justification and and why they believe they need those items and then based off of what we think we can anticipate from a revenue standpoint and an expenditure standpoint. We try and match those with what council's priorities are. And so with that said, I'll turn it over to our finance director, Brandon Allen, who has worked with the directors on creating tonight's presentation and go from there.

Thank you, John. Brandon, before you get started, could you clarify for me if you prefer questions that we would have at the very end, or would you like us to ask as you go along?

Probably as we go along. We will have different directors coming up, and so if we want to maybe do questions while the director's up here before they sit back down, then they can maybe answer those at that time, if that works.

Yes. Thank you.

All right. Okay. Well, thank you. Good evening, everybody. Just a couple... John got most of my housekeeping stuff taken care of. The only one is... There's different screens here just to kind of orient you. Behind you, which, well, behind and to the right or left of you, depending on where you are, will be the presentation that was included in the packet. It was determined, I don't think they used the word boring, but my presentation might have been a little dry. So we've livened it up. I should say they've livened it up. We've got on either side some pictures of the location or what we're doing that will probably be much more interesting than what I've put out there. More interesting.

or are interesting?

You are interesting. That's why I wasn't the one that put it together, because it would have come out the same way. So we'll just jump right in. So the first slide here, I'm using the wrong clicker, on the front page of the presentation, just a big picture comparison. Pretty much what this is here is this is these blue sheets condensed down without each individual project. Just the totals by electric, municipal, parks and facilities and so on, and by year going out. As a comparison to last year, we had 41 projects last year for $48.4 million, roughly. This year, one less project. for 52.6, so pretty comparable to last year's CIP. You'll notice that as we go out, the further out we go, the less, I guess, exact we are. We're still, you know, that's a ways out, going out six years, and so you'll see a little bit looser numbers as we go out, and as we get closer, we kind of fine-tune those numbers as we get closer. And so what we're going to do is I'm going to just be up here, I guess, to direct traffic. As we go through, we'll have each department head come up and kind of go over their slides and over their projects. And we'll just start out with electric. So you have Trevor Wilkerson with us today. He's here covering for Clint, and he's going to jump in on his projects for electric utility.

All right, thanks, Brandon. Again, yeah, not Clint, obviously. Trevor, electrical systems manager with Energy Services. So I'll go over our projects. So this year, or coming up here, 27 is a very substation-heavy year. We're doing two new substations, which is not something we've done. With that, you can see we have our Dallas Road substation, the first one on the list there. It'll be serving the customers and the load growth in the Badger Mountain South area. fed from the Bonneville Power Administration and out to our customers. That substation is a joint substation with Bent PUD. They'll have a piece, we'll have a piece, but it's a good project to help strengthen that capacity in that area and provide some reliability redundancy to the Queensgate area. Moving on to our Sandhill Bank 3 substation. That will be an additional bank added on. If you look at the picture up on the big screen, you can see we're extending out the yard, and it'll actually be technically two new substations in that facility. We're building Bank 3 next year, followed by Bank 4 after that the following year. This is to provide low growth in the north Richland area, out by the PNNL area. So it'll provide... needed growth to cover that area out there. Followed up with our Kingsgate. This will be the design portion of the substation only. Its intended purpose is to serve the Washington Energy area, and we'll be doing design and then working towards construction in 2028. The BMID SPCC is our spill containment upgrade for that substation as Badger Mountain Irrigation District substation. And what that will be is adding in a spill protection around that substation to prevent any kind of catastrophic failure. All right. So moving on to our line extensions, these are our developer-driven areas of town where new developments, new neighborhoods. The focus of our work will be in the Badger Mountain South, which is where most of the developers are working right now. The bulk of that line extension is we expect to come from that area. There might be a few pockets here and there, but that is where the vast majority of our construction, which ties back to why we are building the Dallas Road substation to cover that load growth. With those line extensions also comes in the new services, which is part of our system improvements, but I'll talk about it now since it's tied to it. That is the new homes that are built and providing the actual service to the house, which averages about 450 new homes a year. So those two line extensions and system improvements are a little tight at the hip, and again, driven by developers. And then under our electric utility renew and replace, this is our new cable overhead and underground. For underground, most of our attention will be focused out north, kind of north of McMurray up to St. off of George in that region over there. That is driven by the data that we collect to tell us where to work, where are we seeing problems, and where we have an aging infrastructure that needs to be replaced. So we focus our attention on getting that. The bulk of the $2.2 million is the underground replacement, which is the bulk of our work. There is some overhead that will be done. That will be focused in the central Richland, which is where our overhead exists. We will go in and replace the backyard poles and the wire and upgrade that to modern equipment.

Okay. There was controversy, and I think it had nothing to do with the city, but over the new poles there.

Yes.

Will those be going in in other places?

There is some more BPA work that will take place, which none of our stuff will include anything like that. Any pole replacements we're doing will just be the standard wood poles that we're used to seeing.

Okay.

Okay, no, go ahead, please. Sorry, I'm just bouncing around here a little bit between, so we've got the capital improvement plan by fiscal year, sorry, and then we've got the total costs, I think, over here, and I get, I think most of it matches with 2027 project costs, but I'm looking over at the totals, and the totals don't seem to match up on a fair amount of these with what's here and then what it is by, Charge code, essentially, if that makes sense. What am I missing, John?

Are you looking at the blue sheet?

Blue sheet comparing to green sheet comparing to that.

So if you're looking at the blue sheet and you're looking at the total line, you're looking at multiple years? Right. Oh, okay.

They're not necessarily in the same order. I just realized that. So you're looking at the 27 line for electric and the total funding needed for electric? Correct. In the green? Yeah.

So which one?

So I guess they look like they're matching up.

Oh, and then you're looking up here. Let's see.

Is there any difference up there? Oh, there is some difference.

From what I can tell, the two sheets line up for 27. Okay.

Yeah, and one that might be different is the two through four is combining substation improvements of 5.2 and the Kingsgate planning station.

But this is, we're talking about 2027, right? Yeah. Total costs. Correct. It's close. Okay, keep going.

Okay, so that was most of what I had. The electrical system improvements is all new services that would, again, we kind of covered that line extension. So I'll open up to any questions.

The underground that you're putting, is that replacing underground or is it taking above ground and putting underground?

Yes, we'll be removing old infrastructure, underground infrastructure, and replacing it with new cable and conduit.

Okay.

And then same thing with any of our overhead projects. We like to underground them when we can. It doesn't always make sense for us to do so, but for overhead projects, we'll be replacing poles and wire, and the underground, we'll be replacing the underground cable.

So it sounds like everything's going to look kind of the same.

Yes. When we're done, it would look no different than before we started.

Yep. Just want to confirm, too, some of these are long lead items. Some of this funding includes buyheads for long lead items? Yes. I don't want to know the details on it. Just confirm that's how it is accrued. Yes. All right.

Okay, thanks Clint. Just another quick, just a point to point out, the map you're looking at up here should coincide with the numbers up there, so it kind of shows general area for those things, and then the pictures will show kind of just what it looks like out there as we're going through it, so just to clarify.

All right.

Thank you. So next we will do municipal. And I'll handle some of this, and Joe's going to handle some of it. So we'll go through some of these. The first one we have up there is track Q, waterline relocation and partial landfill excavation. If you had the same question I had, I'm like, I know where tracks D and E are, where tracks Q, that's where track Q is. And I don't know what happened between E and Q, but that's what it is. So track Q is right next to that development in track D and E. There's a couple of things we need to do there. There's a water line that has to be relocated over into track Q. It goes underneath the golf course, I believe. That needs to be relocated as part of that development. There's an old landfill that we have to do some excavation on this project shows 800,000 It's actually gonna be about 1.3 million about 500,000. We've already Budgeted in a prior year and we'll be carrying forward. So the total will be about 1.3 But we only need about 800 new money to have this project happen. And so and the total cost is about 1.3 the second item there is 27 or Dupre tail Street this this is the the storage racks and You can see some pictures here that we have in a warehouse. I don't know if you all remember, I don't know if everybody was here when we did the tour out there. We walked through the warehouse, and I don't know if everyone saw, we have some of these racks that are in pretty bad shape. If you look at the bottom, some of the legs are a little crushed on them. And so we're in need of just replacing that racking system. It's getting to the point where it's just end of life. And so this would replace all the racking system in the warehouse. with some new stuff that would be more stable and safer. So we want to get replaced before it becomes a problem, a bigger problem. And then I'm going to skip number three, and we'll come back to Joe on that one. In the citywide section, we have... fleet and vehicle and our heavy equipment replacement plan. So what we do is the way we manage that is all the departments have vehicles. We track those and all the departments make contributions every year to replace those vehicles over time. And so we may be contributing out of the general fund or out of Electric, you know five years in advance and it kind of helps us build that balance up so we can replace them I have to have you know, we have to do a fire truck We don't think up with a million dollars. We've been contributing for five years or so. So this is just part of our program. That's the 2027 contributions from all the funds into Fleet to buy those vehicles the actual purchases in 2027 or more are about I think about four or five million and those things don't won't match as we're We're building up big so you'll see them kind of go back and forth But the total purchase is about four or five and then we have contributions about nine And then the last one is citywide safety and security enhancements. This is a Program where we put 60,000 a year in it's used for a wide variety of things in the parks and streets The blue light you see out here in this corner. That was one of the things we did we've done lighting in the parks just safety safety projects within the parks and the public way and so we just We have something every year. It varies from year to year on what we need, but that program has been successful for us.

I will say on the fleet vehicle and heavy equipment replacement program, I've been really impressed with our current fleet manager. We went through the fleet, the recommendations for replacement for the 2027 year, and And there was more of those that was a hold and revisit next year because the vehicle is still in excellent shape or has low cost of ownership over the last several years where it might have, say, the year. that we've been contributing as as the fund is due for replacement. But there was as many if not more, where we're delaying that replacement because the vehicle is still in excellent shape. And they do a very good, what I would consider conservative job. It's not just an automatic and we do literally kick the tires on each of those vehicles that are up for replacement and have a comprehensive process that we review each of those.

Thank you, John. And so I'll turn a little bit of time over here to Joe to talk about the Richland Police Station.

Wrong button. This is the button I'm looking for.

This is somewhat familiar. Joe brought this forward a month or two ago, just to kind of revisit our funding plan and kind of where we're at now.

Thanks, Brendan. So yeah, we talked about this project a couple months ago, a pretty exciting one. There's a picture of it on the screen here. Remember, we closed on the property earlier this year after a lengthy negotiation with the owner and a good due diligence process, so we clearly understood the building that we were buying and what risks and opportunities that that presents. Our next steps here are to hire an owner's representative to help get us through the design build process. We've received responses to a call for qualifications. They're on my desk now. You'll see a contract at the second meeting in September, or sorry, yeah, September, for us to make that selection with the idea that we can get in front of the state committee that makes that decision at their December meeting, keeping us on track. That'll lead us into work next year just involving design. And so of the remaining 42 million that's on the balance sheet here, we'll need about 3 million of that to go through the design process and validation, additional inspections, before we start construction in 2018. So there's 3 million in the budget this year to, what did I say? Oh, 28, 10 years off. I do that more often than I like. So $3 million in next year's budget to get us through design and then start a construction after that. So we have, you know, a number of potential funding sources to contribute once the large expenses start hitting. We don't have a recommendation on what combination of those funding sources make sense at this moment, but that's something we continue to evaluate. And when it comes time to dig deep and make those big investments in construction, we'll have a clear package ready.

I've got a quick question. When we deliberated this plan, one of the appealing aspects of it was that there was a rest of the building. How much of the design work that's coming up in that three million is toward designing how we handle the building in between delivering a functioning police station and deciding what to do with additional floors and space in that building. So is this just focused laser in on get a working police station up and going, or are we moving, looking forward with that process today?

It's a little both. I would say we'll have parallel paths on immediate needs, which are, you know, completing a police station project. And then we'll also be working on potential tenant ideas. You know, there might be other federal law enforcement that might be a good co-location with us. If we can find somebody that's interested, that'll bring additional revenue to the table, and we can work through the design and construction process with that. We'll carve out a large enough space for fire administration, anticipating at some point in the future that Fire Station 7-1 will potentially locate on this campus, and it'll be a smaller response station on the ground with admin in this space. And one pretty intriguing idea that we want to explore is creating a floor just for training. And I think we might have talked about this a couple months ago, but there's a surprising amount of what I've been calling law enforcement tourism, people that come to Richland and the Tri-Cities for training. And we have that little modest training facility in the police station now that's not much of a room at all. But Chief Pilcher ran the numbers, and it's an impressive amount of tourism coming from around the state to come and train in that facility. And these are people coming on per diem travel, staying at our hotels, and eating in restaurants. And so we're going to explore an idea that an entire floor of this building could potentially be an enhanced training facility to help double down on what we're seeing as a positive economic benefit now. So that'll be part of the design process. We'll do some concept level stuff and see if it pencils. If it does, we'll include it.

So, so the, it's a design build approach. Yes. But there's no scope for the build past the police station. I'm trying to figure out where that line is drawn.

I would just add to Joe's, and he can fill in additionally. I'm guessing that there's going to be a number of systems that are going to be building wide systems that we'll have to address when we do the overall renovation and build for the police station. The way I interpret it is the floors that we don't immediately use will be a shell and have a very limited amount of renovation occur until we determine a path forward on additional tenants and what the specific use is.

Okay. And that minimal restructuring is in scope for this? Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.

Mayor Pro Tem Van Dyke.

A couple things. First, fantastic job. I'm excited about this. I continue to encourage, and we've had conversations about this idea of a nexus for both federal, could be local, not always, or it may be law enforcement and there may be other agencies. It would be really great to, you know, in this building, in the floors that we're not using to pull in tenants that could make us a regional hub for helping our communities here regionally and nationwide. I think there's great opportunity there. The other part is I just want to say thank you to Joe and Chief and others that you've gone out and talked to the police officers and like, hey, what could this be? What do you need? And I think that's just fantastic to solicit their input on this. Thank you. That's really good.

I know you mentioned bringing in other partners, and I'm thinking the 911 call center. They are in a different location, single building. Is that something that we're also maybe concerned just to kind of have all the first responders in one area so they get to know and build that relationship and report with each other so they know who they are as well? Or is that something that we're not concerned at all?

I don't think it's off the table. It does introduce a new complexity to this project because the building would have to be brought up to current seismic standard, which is not the case for a regular police station or some of these other tenant spaces. So there's some additional reinforcement that would be necessary on the building. Again, not out of the question, but it would introduce a new cost that we haven't scoped yet.

And if you're bringing, you know, now that you mentioned that, if you're thinking about federal agencies, they will require that as part of the lease.

Yeah.

Council Member Meyer.

Yeah, just one thing I forgot to ask earlier. With the design-build process, I know that we're required to get certification and approval from the state to undertake that method of contracting for this kind of work. Is this specific to this project approval that we've got here, or have we qualified for the blanket you get to do this stamp from the state?

We haven't. Yeah, we tried for agency approval several years ago and didn't receive it. Caused quite the stir, as I understand, on CPARB. That's the group that makes the certification. Benton County just got theirs. Transit just received theirs. We probably could get it. We might not have the volume of projects where it makes sense. It's a multi-year approval. It's three years or five years or something. So if we get additional interest from other departments that they want to pursue this type of construction method, we might look at that option. But for now, we really just have this one project. I know it's not a budget thing. Thanks.

Thank you, Joe. Brandon?

Yes, any other questions on municipal before we move on? OK. So we now have Chris Waite. He'll go through our parks and facilities projects.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Admittedly, this is probably the most exciting part of the presentation. Parks and facilities are fun to talk about. alert you to the picture over here. This is just an illustration, so this isn't exactly, obviously it's a residential site, but our first project is our parking lot renew and replace program. We're really fortunate that we're able to piggyback off of the work that Public Works is doing. So as they're doing their pavement preservation process, we follow them throughout the city and then do municipal and park parking lots. So next year we'll be in central Richland. You'll see a lot of building parking lots done next year. So that'll include the community center, the library, here at City Hall. And then there are some other parks in central Richland that will be included in that. And it's a seal coat process just to help extend the life of our parking lots. So that's our first item. We can go on to number two. This item is kind of a little known project, but it's something that we need to do. Over here on your left, or my left, is the W. Johnson southern end of the park there. And we have a service road that runs through the south end. There's a culvert there. The water table is pretty high. And so we see the groundwater and water from the river kind of migrate in and out of that park. And we need to maintain that service road. That's the only access point for us on the south part of the park. So there's a culvert that's pretty aged. And we're just asking for some funds to do design and engineering. There's a fair amount of permitting because of the location of that. So that'll help us preserve that access road there. So that's our second project. And then we can move on to number three. You may know this more commonly as the Tapteel Trail. But we have a large area that we'd like to do some planning on. There are some existing trail segments, some potential future trail segments. And this is all up in the Horn Rapids area. So you can see the Yakima River on the left of that image. And then on the right is the SR 240. And basically, we'd like to do some planning to help align the segments, make sure we're establishing consistent surfaces and trail standards there. So this will just be a planning phase of this project, and that will be complemented in future years by construction and improvements on the trail. We can go ahead and go on to number four. This project really came about, the Columbia Park West and White Park Long Range Plan update, because of the removal of the Bateman Island Causeway. That kind of changed the nature of those parks. And so we recently brought to you permission to submit for a grant to the state to do some planning on these parks. So this will proceed if we do receive state funding. It's $175,000 that we requested for. And it'll help us kind of just reimagine that space. It also dovetails nicely with some planning that the REACH Museum is intending to do next year. And then we will look across our border to our neighbor Kennewick and make sure we've engaged them if we do get those funds. Primarily, we're looking for restoring some of the things that were taken away when the pedestrian access to the island was removed. So some of those things are birdwatching and then fishing access and those types of things. So we're going to see how we can accommodate those recreational uses, but within the existing footprint of those parks. We can go ahead and go on to the next one. This is just samples, but our Columbia Point Marina Playground is our last playground in the system that still has a sand safety surface. So that was an older surface. We don't use that any longer. And this is kind of a really great space for us to try and do something a little bit larger. So we just wanted to show you some conceptual images. We're currently going through a process to evaluate some potential playground options there, but we'd like to do a larger destination playground. Our request on this is only $200,000. That's not how much the playground will cost. The total project is about $1.1 million. But we do have some existing funds that we've been securing over the years to do improvements to that park. And so we'll be tapping in and using those existing funds and just enhancing them. And then we do have a lodging tax request for this for the funding source for the additional $200,000. We can go and go on to the next one. This is just an example of some of the erosion that we experience along the shoreline. So we've had a multi-year project all along the Columbia River, basically from Howard Amon Park down to Columbia Point Marina Park. And we experience erosion in different locations. Next year, you won't see a lot of construction. It's just continuing with a little bit more design and engineering and also quite a bit of permitting. And then you'll likely see a follow-up in 2028 of some more enhancements. One of the areas we're most concerned about is in Columbia Point Marina Park, if you've been on that. kind of the northeastern side. The erosion is coming so close to our trail and some of our assets like benches and things that we really need to address that. So these funds are to continue that process and help us armor that shore so we don't lose any more of our assets there. We can go on to the next one. I love one thing about this park, Meadows East Playground. This playground was built in 1986. Playgrounds typically have a life cycle of about 25 to 30 years. So this playground has really done an incredible job of serving our community. On the image on the left, I don't know if any of you grew up playing on those old metal climbing structures. But it is a gem to have this still in our system. But it's about time for that neighborhood to get an upgrade. So this is just a replacement project of this playground specifically. And for those of you who might be new on council, different districts that the city is divided into. So as there's residential growth, there are impact fees that go into those districts. And we can use those funds to reinvest in the parks in that area. So the funding source for this is the district funds where Meadows East Playground is located. And the next one is a fun one. This is a continuation of our project at the library. So this year we finished the lawn outdoor space. It's a beautiful space. It really activated the library. And I hope you had a chance to go see some of the incredible programming out there. This is a continuation of that project. We have a site specifically for a playground. Because it was fairly small, it was important for us to go vertical. So you can see that we're looking at a tall structure. And this is a neat project, too. It's a combination of not the Friends of the Library. It's the other one. foundation thank you the richland library foundation funds we've also are seeking state grant funding for this and then a small contribution from the city as well so that's what we intend to put in the library when we get if we get those funds and i'm ready for the last one this is a continuation of what we heard from our community and our parks recreation and open space planning Our community really came out strong and loud saying that they want us to maintain the assets that we have. So this is a section of trail that has a pretty significant undermining from tree roots. It's a companion and similar to the project we did over between Leslie Rose and Howard Amon Park along the levee where we did a section of trail that we replaced. So we're proposing to do the same thing. This site is located near Gage Boulevard and Leslie Road. And there's a section of trail there on the Keene Road Trail where it kind of comes off of Keene and then continues on east. And so we're proposing to do a full rebuild of that section of trail. It's one of our poorest condition sections. And so that's what that project is. And I'm happy to answer any questions if you have any for me.

Mayor Pro Tem Van Dyke.

This is probably a question more for John. Without separate line items for things like reserve, I'm assuming there's management reserve built into these for management reserve for the various line items on capital improvements.

I guess I'd need a better understanding of what you're meaning by management reserve. Things don't always go to plan.

Are there often in projects you'll have a 5% or so opportunity of like if things Scope changes slightly if there's escalation or things you run into. Are these exact or are there some reasonable reserves built into them? I don't want to know the specifics. Has reserves been planned into these?

I would say that we run pretty lean. And when we've had to bring forward change orders to council, we have. versus say build in a lot of contingency I think that we do have a very conservative amount of contingency built in but they in general they're fairly lean plan B is to ask you for a donation

Anything further? Oh, pardon me. Council Member Meyer.

Yeah, so parking lot renew and replace, you said you're doing Central Richland. You mentioned City Hall. Is that the immediate surroundings of City Hall or is it the one we share with the federal building? And if so, are they chipping in?

We actually have an obligation to do some work on the federal building portion of the parking lot based on our original agreement for the parking lot stalls that we're using. But this project is not included in that yet. That'll be a separate future project, so it's just the city's portion. Thanks.

Council Member Jones.

Thank you. So I'm trying to understand, when we do ask for funding for a project, that's just a one-time cost. How about the maintenance? Because that's a long-term asset that we have to maintain. So we do account for forming and maybe building, but then we're not accounting for the actual yearly cost. How are we doing that when it comes to our budget? Because I think that's important for us to know. It's OK, that's a one-time cost for building, but then we still need the money to actually maintain that facility.

That's a great question. I would say some of the projects we highlight tonight are actually going to decrease our maintenance. The playgrounds specifically, as you have aging playgrounds, the maintenance costs increase and the time related to those increase in the short term. Or I'm sorry. Older playgrounds just take a lot more time to maintain and replace parts on. So we'll actually see a small reduction when we replace those with new playgrounds. The thing that really gets us is if we're expanding actual acreage or land to maintain. So most of these projects are replacement projects. replacing an older asset, and then we'll actually see a small decrease in our direct maintenance costs for the next couple of years because we have a new asset that has less maintenance obligations. So we would be really looking at if we were adding new parkland or more new trails, that's when we want to complement that with maintenance staff.

City Manager.

And then I will also say that each of these departments in their general fund budgets, specifically to, say, parks maintenance and then facilities maintenance, they have a number of line items that align with, say, small tools and equipment and mowers and weed eaters and edgers and trailers and chemicals and pesticides and herbicides, all of those things that go towards the maintenance of these facilities that you see.

Could you hear your microphone, please?

So we don't have anything that ties to that specific facility on an accounting line, saying this is how much it costs to build or replace, and this is how much it's going to cost us on an annual basis to maintain this facility. That's kind of where I'm after mostly.

Yeah, that's a great question. We're moving towards adopting an enterprise asset management system. And that will be able to help us produce a lot more accurate numbers. Right now, the way we operate is a lot of our maintenance are based on programs. So we have programmatic schedules. And so that... cost is broken out, for example, for mowing a park, we know how frequently we go to those locations, and it's broken out through a lot of parks. We could drill down and find more refined information, but really we'll have a lot better information about specific asset and life cycle replacement once we move into full asset management and have all those mapped.

And I think that would be great for any city resident just to be able to determine, okay, this is the actual cost, but the maintenance adds up over a period of time, and we want to know what that really is at the end of the day.

And I would add, as we add new, like in our expanded programs or new things, we ask the departments to identify the cost to build it, but also what the ongoing cost to maintain it will be. So we identify that up front. And then as we look at that, especially with Chris's programs, like Chris mentioned, it's a lot of programmatic, like mowing. And so we look at that and say, is this going to bump us over the threshold where we need additional resources, or can we manage it with our current staff? And so we do... Especially if we like with software, for instance, we'll say here's the implementation cost of the software. We know it's going to be $20,000 a year going forward, and that's baked into the budget as well. So we do look to see what additional ongoing costs, whether it be maintenance or any other software costs or anything like that, would have to happen in the future.

Yeah, we're looking forward to actually seeing that. Council Member Weyer.

I just want to comment for the folks following along at home that those sort of costs usually get surfaced in our annual budgets, and this one specifically focuses on the capital improvements. And so that's why a lot of those pieces aren't in this sheet, because I know I'm going to get questions about that. Thanks.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Chris. So we'll move on now into our public works. This is, you get Carlo the rest of the, at least the rest of this presentation. So he's got several here. We'll go through all the utilities, and we'll just turn it over to Carlo. He's got a little bit to go through here.

Thank you. Yeah, that's a result of... You know, four different utilities and streets. So there are a lot of projects that we do to maintain and rehabilitate and renew our resources on top of adding new infrastructure. Start with salt waste. We have an annual program in solid waste for the landfill facility improvements. So as things age, we have things to renew and replace or to add things to the site that are needed to continue to serve the city. In this, $255,000, it includes a methane gas header connection. So that's to connect our landfill cell to our flare station for the methane is a byproduct of landfilling. And that flare station is actually connected to the Pine Creek facility that is processing the methane into renewable natural gas. There is an existing condensation pond. You'll see that little orange dot kind of in the middle. That is a condensation pond that collects the condensate from our flare and puts it in the pond. We need to rehabilitate the liner of that pond. So that's included in there. Improving some of the site lighting around the landfill.

just see that that that number on that line item from 255 takes a big bump next year why what are you anticipating you're talking about yeah well I'm reading 255 for this year and then it takes a bump up to 900,000 that's the construction of the compost pad expansion okay

So we have new organics legislation that we need to comply with. We already have a composting facility at the landfill for those organics. We do need to expand capacity of that compost facility to account for the collection of food waste. So that's also part of this year's $255,000 is the design of that compost pad work. And also to begin the study and design work for a shade structure for the scale house, since it's pretty difficult for people driving onto the scale to see our staff because of the sun and glare, and we want to make sure it's comfortable experience for people when they are interacting with our staff. So creating some shade over there to reduce that glare will help. You can go to that next slide, yeah. This one's super exciting. So on the stormwater side, we have a regular stormwater conveyance system renewal replacement. The conveyance system is our pipes and pumps that are used to move stormwater throughout the city. What is pictured there is a Lift station, it's called. Most of the interesting stuff is underground because there's pipes going into a station at one level so we can pump it up to another level so it can actually get gravity flow to its outlet, which is the drain that runs through the center of the city. This is at McMurray and I think that's Pined. OK. Yeah. And that one in particular, we already have a project on the books to do. We got new engineering estimate that increased. We estimated far increased costs than we had originally estimated based off the amount of work needed in there. It's a full pump replacement. We thought we could keep some components in there, but just because of the age of the system, we need to replace a lot of that. Also, on the conveyance side, there's just other small areas we've identified in and around town. to make improvements to our stormwater system. It includes some work off of Tanglewood to improve our storm and swale system over there. There's been some flooding that happens when there's large rain events. We have other swale fixes in the Helena Fowler area. as well as storm fixes on Geneva off of Columbia Center Boulevard. That area actually in the Richland Y area is very prone to a lot of little flooding in and around there because there is no real stormwater system to speak of due to its age and when it was constructed. So there's some additional work we need to do over there every once in a while when we start identifying problem areas. As well, included in that $1.7 million is in advance of our pavement preservation program, we do storm catch basin fixes so that we don't have to tear up the road after the fact. So we're planning ahead, doing our storm fixes, and then doing our pavement preservation behind it. So that is that. Okay. On the transportation side, lots of work. So SR 240 Snively Road intersection and the Snively Road realignment, those are both design phase funding. This is work primarily that would be completed by the Veterans Cemetery. in cooperation with the Washington State Department of Transportation, especially the intersection work. But we are going through a process of finding ways to fund that, to help them fund it. And so we've included a provision for that in our budget, knowing that we may be moving some money through the city to help with that. The Gage Boulevard-Leslie Road intersection, that's what's pictured right there. This is going to enter into design. So that's what those funds are for. We already have a grant to do that work with some matching city funds that are matched. The matching city funds are through our transportation impact fee program. So no new funding, no impact to the general fund or anything like that. And that's sort of the setup. It adds right turn lanes on Gage and an extra left turn lane on Leslie. And it'll also include some medians because right now at that northwest corner there is a coffee shop that got built. One of the things that we anticipated was that we would need to restrict left turns in and out of that coffee shop when we complete this project. So there's provision for a small median curb to go on the center line of the road to prevent those left turns. to prevent crashes. So the next on the list is the pavement preservation program. There is a lot of work to do, more than that funding that's in there, but there's what that funding, what that number shows is the amount that we have funded through the transportation benefit district. plus a portion of REIT. So there's an unfunded portion that currently right now to get to about $4.2 million, which is what we've projected we need to stay up at our level of service to keep our payment condition index at the correct level for the city in 2027. The work will happen in central Richland. So we split the city into three different sections. So next year is central Richland, which is where that three is. I think three, or is it? Yeah. And it will include slurry seals, which is what we do on our residential streets. Microsurfacing, which is what we do on our more collector and arterial streets that haven't reached the level of needing a full repave. And then it will also include some overlays on more deteriorated section of streets, the overlay would be like a full asphalt repave. As well as what's also funded through that program is ADA ramp replacements, and we're required to do it when we do overlays or microsurfacing. That's a federal requirement, so it includes that ADA ramp replacement project as well.

Renewing our pavement markings through the city, which we do on an annual basis And just all just step in real quick on the payment preservation Just to kind of I guess a little bit about being our TBD sales tax. So we started clicking that in April There's a two-year or two-year a two-month delay in getting those funds from the states We've collected three months worth so far and so far we've had A little bit better collections than we budgeted. We were conservative as we always are, but we're seeing what we expected happening with that money. And so that does provide us some additional funding for our parent preservation program. But as we get a few more months in, we'll keep looking at this to see if we can add some additional funding in the parent preservation from that source. But it's looking like a promising start to that change from the TAB fees to the sales tax.

I have a question. You might be just coming up on this on your discussion, so if I'm cutting your agenda off, let me know. But it's the line item that is entitled Neighborhood Traffic Safety Program, 100,000 there. I remember when council... lot of that to be able to address the speeding concerns through neighborhoods. Are you finding that that's an appropriate dollar amount? Are we using those dollars up?

Yes, so Yeah council made a provision for some additional funding for that program which has helped us get to deliver some of the more complicated projects like Queens gate this year, but also Next year there's nine locations that have nine different streets that have been identified and uh as well so that's that's going to carry over sort of the remaining funds from that additional funding that council had moved over into that program to complete those projects in 2027 so really what this would fund is the the additional work in 2027 so that we can pretty much complete our full list of projects. There will probably be around four of the legacy projects left to complete after this, and the $100,000 is about enough to get through that. Our incidence of petitions for the Neighborhood Traffic Safety Program is finally starting to drop over time. We received a very large influx over the past three years, but I think we're hitting the most significant locations now. And I currently don't see a need to increase funding in that program moving forward.

Thank you. I receive a lot of positive feedback, and so it seems to be dollars well spent. People appreciate the good night's sleep.

Right.

Yeah, and I was actually going to ask the same question, what funding we use to do the road diet that was implemented along the Queens Gate all the way to Badger Mountain, which has been just amazing. It's been a great addition. I know there was a few complaints. of people that crashed because they did not know how to slow down. But I can tell you, I have seen a significant difference in the speed once you get to that area. Maybe not from Cane Road to where that specific project was done. They're going pretty fast. But I got to say, it's made a huge difference. So $100,000. I mean, it doesn't seem like it's a lot of money for doing a lot of improvements to our safety and for our city. But you seem to be able to accomplish a lot with very little. I guess the question for me will be, do we really need to do more? Because this has been a great project to reduce speed in some of our roads. Should we be doing more?

Well.

I think I heard you say that it seems like the appropriate amount for the request coming in.

If I remember correctly, John, didn't you have if there was additional funds that may have been left over close to the year, you were able to fund some further down on the list? And I liked that model of having a budget, and as things come up, there is ability to address more. Am I missing? Is that right?

Yes, and to Council Member Jones' comments, some of the projects that are slated for next year are part of that initial list of those that I would call maybe the backlog. And I think we had an influx of, was it 800,000? Yeah. So 800,000 is really what's carrying us through. And as Carlos mentioned, we have seen a decrease in There is, at least the way the program is currently constituted, there has to be buy-in from the neighborhood. And so if they don't get the majority of those in the area to vote in the affirmative, then it doesn't it's not successful.

Um, so there were, there were two streets that were slated to be done this year that didn't pass on the balloting stage. They, it was voted no by the community members so that some of these projects just don't have the support from the community. Um, and you know, that's, that's fine. I mean, that's part of the program and it's, uh, It's a little bit democratic, but that's good.

But I think that's important for us to know as well, because when we hear complaints and people say, well, this is a very dangerous street, whatever that may be, we can tell them, well, some of those projects have been shut down by their own community as well. So thank you.

Councilmember Meyer.

I just wanted to piggyback on that. I heard some complaints about the Queensgate choker curbs and I got in my F-250 and I drove through them and it's totally fine. And while I was there, I have seen those things function. I've seen people manage their speed appropriately where they obviously had not intended to at the outset. So I'm a big fan of the neighborhood traffic safety program. I understand that it kind of ebbs and flows with community demand, but I'm a strong supporter of making sure that thing has the resources it needs to be successful.

Thank you. Council Member Holton. Can you tell us what the projects were and what they turned down? And the other question is Haynes Avenue and Harris, are they on the new list?

Would you like to have us look online where that's listed to help you continue with your presentation?

Right. I'll just say about Harris and Haynes, yes, they're both on the list. They're both on the list for 27. And the next step, I believe we've already informed the petition leaders that of the projects that have passed for 2027 so So the next step is to meet with the half our neighborhood meeting for each one of those streets and Talk about the project and what you know city staff has identified for locations for the traffic calming elements and and the type of traffic calming element, like speed humps or chokers, things like that. And then to get the input from the neighborhood about what would be the best way to get neighborhood consensus so that it does not fail on balloting. That's the point of having that neighborhood meeting, so that we can get a project that the neighborhood can agree to. And then if it passes balloting, then we go to design and construction.

Can you say which neighborhoods failed and what the projects were?

Oh, I don't know about failed, but I'm navigating to the page.

Pat, I think Van Dyke has got the website for you. Thank you, Shane. Which?

Yeah.

So... The threshold to fail on the points is very low. It's one and a half points. So that would mean that there really isn't a large speeding or large volume of traffic or... situation like what we give points to are this posted speed or speeding the amount of traffic the if it's located near a school or park if there's presence of sidewalk and how many collisions are on that street so each one of those has different point values associated with it in 2027 We identified Harris Avenue, Morenci Drive, Ava Way, Englewood Drive, Meadow Hills Drive, Bridal Drive, Haynes Avenue, Galloway, and Country Ridge Drive as the nine projects that we would be able to complete. in that year. There are still a bunch of projects that are, that meet that point threshold. There's just, that's a lot of projects. So it's difficult to design for and complete in a whole year. So the next year would, we would deliver the next slate of projects.

Sounds like a great program. I didn't mean by the question to derail your presentation. I know you've got a lot to get through and we're getting down into the details. Should we move along?

Yes, I will continue with some of the citywide programs that I guess we already covered at length, the Neighborhood Traffic Safety Program, but the Systemic Pedestrian Crossing Safety Improvements Project. If you could go to the next slide.

Yeah.

So this says Safe Routes to School Improvements, but it's also dual purpose, the slide. So the Systemic Pedestrian Crossing Safety Improvements includes things like rapid flashing beacons, which is what this is. It's an improved pedestrian crossing that creates more visibility for pedestrians crossing the road. in areas where there's higher volumes of traffic, so enabling those crossing movements and creating that visibility. That program is funded through the city safety funds from the state, and they're funded at 100% through that program, so there's no city funds needed. This would be a grant that we already currently have. The systemic stop-controlled intersection safety improvements, those are those mini roundabouts that we've installed. If you want to go back a couple slides, that's another dual-purpose slide. But that one is, that'll be a mini roundabout at Belle Reve and Canyon and a mini roundabout at Thayer and Simons. And then a couple of other, yeah, that's, Pretty much what they look like. They're small. They're relatively inexpensive. They're around half a million dollars. But they are really effective at reducing speeds, keeping traffic moving, but also creating a greater safety benefit for those intersections. Those are intersections that we have high crash rates. So... The citywide sidewalk repair and ADA accessibility program, again, that's part of our, we have two sort of ADA sidewalk repair programs. One is associated with our pavement preservation program. The other is related to funding that we would normally get through the community development block grant program, which I think we're making some changes this year. That is a really good program. It helps meet our adopted ADA transition plan in public rights of way. So it's a really important program for our residents with accessibility needs. And so we can move on to Safe Routes to School stuff. Yeah, awesome. A couple of years ago, we identified safe routes to school improvements through a study that looked at all the elementary schools in the city of Richland and a couple of middle schools and looked at the surrounding area around them and their walk routes. We did a whole effort of reaching out to those schools, to the students at those schools to get their input on what's preventing them or issues for them on their walks and bikes to school. And so we developed a pretty comprehensive list of projects to complete. This is just one proposal of work that we got funded through the Safe Routes to School program through the state. So we do already have the funding. We have about $3 million. We're starting the design work this year and moving into construction next year. Lots of different components to it, like race pedestrian crossings, rapid flashing beacons, improvements to the school beacons, like having the radar feedback signs for people, and improvements like that, improvements to crossings and markings around schools. One of the things that isn't really included, which was a big part of people's input during the Safe Routes to School study, was getting more sidewalk installed. The unfortunate part about the scoring rubric that the Department of Transportation uses for Safe Routes to School is that sidewalks do not score well, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. We will do the improvements that we can get funded. They're very good improvements, especially in the areas where our vulnerable users will be interacting with high-speed vehicles. So that's the focus of our Safe Routes to School program. And that's just one project at Jason Lee. And then pedestrian pathway preservation program. This is an attempt to start up a new program. This is just for design funding. We have a lot of little pathways throughout especially central Richland area that are aging and old. They are used for children to get to and from school from their neighborhoods. They are used as cut throughs for pedestrians to get from one street to another. And they're in not so great condition. We do need to improve them over time. And this is the start of a program to do that. About transportation.

Council Member Holton, is your light on from the last discussion? Yes. All right. Thank you, Carlo. I don't see anyone's light on, so we appreciate your work.

We have two more utilities to do.

Okay. But wait, there's more.

Yeah, a lot more. So wastewater, super important utility. wastewater treatment, anaerobic digester improvements. This is the construction phase of a project we've already started into design. This is phased in two years, so this is the first half of the construction. We've applied for a public works board loan for this project, and we're still waiting to find out how that turns out. With our rate changes that we made this year, we did anticipate bonding for this project. So we are, from a rate standpoint, we're in good shape to be able to fund this project through bonding. So if we get a loan, it'll be even better, because those low interest loans work out in our favor. The improvements to the digester, the major improvement in that circled area, that's the digesters. The major improvement is replacing the top, the roof part of the digesters because they are not functioning properly. One is fused in place and the other one is kind of failing. And so we're making those changes plus adjustment to the mixing system in the digester. And what the digester does is it treats our solids in that wastewater stream. It works like a stomach, essentially, and it digests those solids so that we can create Class B biosolids that we then put into our compost stream. Wastewater treatment plant infrastructure renewal and replacement program. There are a couple of projects associated with that amount. We have a pretty old facility now. It's about 40 years old. The lunchroom has not been upgraded since 40 years ago. And there's even a nice cool refrigerator there that's 40 years old. It's pretty interesting to look at. It does need some upgrades. So $100,000 of that is to make improvements to that lunchroom. That's utilized by over 20 staff. Sliding gates and valve replacements. So we have some gates and valves that need to be replaced over time. It's just stuff that comes up on the site. There's some safety improvements we need to make to the roof access. of our facility. So the main building, which is that building in the middle top section there, we need to get some roof access safety improvements done. There's flow meter upgrades to our effluent station. So when the treated water leaves, we don't have a good flow meter, actually. We have a flow meter way downstream at a location that's actually surcharged with some river water in it. So we're not getting good flow meter readings in it. So we want to change where the station is located and get that installed so we know how much better readings and how much water we're sending back out to the Columbia River. And chlorine injection pump and plan all upgrades. So we do disinfect our water before we send it out as effluent. and we use a chlorine injection process, and that's another system that is older and just needs to be replaced at this point. So those are the improvements at the plant. Our wastewater collection system renewal and placement program, so this is all the stuff that's underground that's collecting all the sewer. So we do... normally do an annual sewer lining project. So we find areas of the city that have sort of poor condition sewer and we get a plastic liner project in that improves the flows and the system renewal on our collection system. But we have shifted focus a little bit for next year to make improvements to our lift stations. So we have, just like that storm lift station, we have a bunch of sanitary lift stations around the city. There's four lift stations in particular that need to be replaced. We've already programmed for their design in 26 now we know what their construction costs will be and that is that number right there 3.3 million dollars and then industrial wastewater collection and treatment study so We've identified with a bunch of industrial users that we have and future industrial users that we currently have a wastewater treatment plant that's really good at processing municipal waste, not so good at processing industrial waste. And especially with the larger loads that are coming in on the industrial side, there's a point where we're going to have to make a decision on whether or not we expand our capacity at our existing wastewater treatment plant or if we build an industrial facility that serves those large users in the industrial area of the city. And that's what this study would be for, to do that feasibility analysis to see if it's worth doing. And we'll probably go down the route of as well seeing the feasibility of wastewater reuse as well as just treatment so which is also good a lot of a lot of industrial wastewater users don't have a really large large um load on the um on the bod side which is a biological oxygen demand so the this the types of solids you would see in a in a municipal wastewater system, but they have a very large water input that's filled with suspended solids, like things that aren't really human waste stuff. It's sort of chemical waste or just an increase of the solids because of their processes. They have evaporative systems. in any of the industrial users that just have a bunch of those total suspended solids in them. So there's different processes that would be better suited to treat that wastewater than our current wastewater treatment plant. So that's what that one is. That's wastewater.

Quick comment. In about the last six weeks, there's been significant upticks and attacks, likely from nation states on municipal critical infrastructure, operational technology, SCADA systems. I know that we have improvements, significant ones set up for 27 and 28. Humble thought is, are there some bang for the buck things that we could move forward potentially to help protect us? The size of municipalities are right in the zone that we're at. Just a thought.

I think in the past I've been a little bit loose with how I've talked about our SCADA system, so I'm just gonna say we are in a good spot from a cybersecurity standpoint with our system. Yes, the SCADA improvements we will make will make improvements even further on that system. And that program is still continuing. There's just no funding in 27 set up for it because we've sort of front-loaded in 25 and 26 the funding, and we'll have a bunch of work product to deliver in 27 that will carry over 26 funding.

Thank you. Council Member Meyer.

I was going to ask the same question on the other end. Looking forward, we've got, as you said, SCADA replacement funding in 28 and 29. Given the velocity at which new methods of cybersecurity vulnerabilities are being detected, is that something we might want to look at revisiting in the longer term instead of, because whatever evaluation we did for something that we started in 25, was already obviously last year's news. So I'm wondering what the sort of support life cycle is expected to be for the replacement system that we're getting in the future.

Well, I guess our IT director has volunteered to answer that. Council members, we are actively working with our vendor. It is an ongoing, it is not a static solution. It will be an ongoing and living solution, and we will move and adapt to the coming threats as they present themselves. Okay.

Thank you.

I'll just say we do have an on-call cybersecurity and operational technology consultant or contractor helping us.

One day you get rid of me talking about SCADA systems.

Okay, moving on to water. Kind of a small project, but an important one. Snyder Street domestic water intake fiber optic system. So in the small rectangle in the top corner there, that's where our intake is located for our water that we treat at the water treatment plant. So there's a pipe that goes to the water treatment plant. Right now, the way that those two things communicate, the water treatment plant and the intake, is through radio. And so the fiber optic system would be installed to strengthen those communications. That's really all that is. From the water treatment renewal and replacement, that is an ongoing program. We have a lot of pumps. the city a lot of them we replace we essentially pull out two pumps at all of our facilities every year get them refurbished and reinstall them so that's what that program is that's at the our high service Bay at the water treatment plant in the North Richland well field in the intake at the corner there and additional ones at locations around town as we need them at our booster pump stations. But also included in 2027 is HVAC system replacement at the water treatment plant. It's, again, a very old facility with a very old HVAC system. And replacing or adding a third on-site chlorine generation station at the North Richmond Wellfield. So we do have this requirement to disinfect, always have that requirement to disinfect water as we distribute it into our system. And we need another chlorine generator. We turn salt into chlorine, into essentially a chlorine mixture that disinfects. On the irrigation supply improvements program, similar. Replacing several pumps, we do two pump rehabilitations a year in the irrigation system, as well as replacing some sections of the large steel transmission pipe that we have in our irrigation system in the Horn Rapids area. and water distribution system repairs and replacements. What we generally do, sort of similar to stormwater, we will jump in front of or add on to a pavement preservation project to do sewer, not sewer, water service replacements. There's areas around town that have old galvanized water service lines that need to be replaced because they fail, and we put new copper service lines in. This also includes we have certain pressure relief valves around town at a bunch of different locations. Several of them are starting to fail. We need to replace them. Those are when we connect a higher pressure zone to a lower pressure zone, and we have a relief valve that's put in between them so that we're not blowing pipe up, essentially. And also included in this is we have several basement meters that still need to be removed or replaced with meters by the road. Currently, basement meters, we rely on self-reads or no reads at all from people. We don't enter into people's houses to read their meters. So that's an old legacy way of installing, of giving water service. And we're moving toward replacing all of those. And that's part of that program. So that's just part of that is just That doesn't replace all the basement meters, just one neighborhood. That's water.

Anything else? Thank you. There's a lot we take for granted when we wake up in the morning and flush the toilet and turn on the lights, so thank you for your work.

Thank you.

All right, Brandon.

That's, that is actually, this is really the end now. So, yeah, that's our CIP, preliminary CIP program. So we're still working through this. There will be some changes to funding as we go and as we find, you know, we're still updating some of the revenues that are coming in. Like I mentioned with the paint preservation, we're thinking there may be some additional funding. But, you know, we're still working on this. It's pretty preliminary at this point. Like John said, we're doing our city manager meetings this week through Monday. And when those are done, we start kind of pulling it all together, looking at big picture. And so keep working through that. You'll be seeing us in September and October and November as we get through this budget system cycle. So if there's any overall questions, I'd be happy to attempt to answer them. John. John.

Yeah, I was just going to mention that as part of the September workshop, we'll turn to more of an operational standpoint for the budget. And so we'll highlight at that time the best we can any expanded programs that the departments are asking what has It will, at that point, be draft recommendation from myself as far as inclusion and what the general fund is looking like and each of the additional utility funds and so forth. Some of the impacts, for those of you that have served on council in years past, we talk more about the impacts of, say, rising insurance rates or how our health care plan is doing from a funding perspective. the different risk pools we are a part of, the impact of the labor agreements that we have and so forth. And so those are all things that we will provide in the context in September.

Thank you. It seems like we just finished up on this and then there's another year to face it all over again. All right. Thank you, Brandon. Next on the agenda is number two, automated license plate reader data access with Chief Pilcher.

Good evening, Madam Mayor, City Council. Thank you for this opportunity to discuss and give a brief overview of the automated license plate reader technology currently installed in Richland. As you can see from this slide, there's a number of things I would like to address during this presentation. But basically, I'd like to talk about what ALPR systems do and don't do, the safeguards around its use, and where we are in our implementation process. The Richland Police Department uses ALPR systems to identify vehicles associated with qualifying investigations. locate stolen vehicles, assist with missing endangered person investigations, and develop investigative leads, particularly in those qualifying investigations. Examples of those are felonies and gross misdemeanors. Examples of gross misdemeanors are violations of no contact orders and certain assaults and thefts and DUI. ALPR is not facial recognition, nor is it an automated enforcement tool. That is, we do not use it to enforce speed or red light infractions. And lastly, it does not make a determination that a vehicle or a person has committed a crime. Senate Bill 6002 was passed during the 2026 legislative session. This bill placed significant limits on the ALPR use and prohibited collection at certain locations. These locations include K-12 schools, places of worship, food banks, courts, protected healthcare facilities, and immigration matter facilities. As a result of this, we did shut down our ALPR system at that time so that we could evaluate the changes and ensure that we were complying with these changes. One aspect of this was that it was mandated that we as an organization register our systems with the State of Washington Attorney General's Office. It took them a few months, but they did provide us with a registration process and we did fulfill that and have received our receipt for that registration process. Currently, we have two different types of ALPR systems. Both are dual systems, however. Both have a general recording capability, and both have automated license plate reader capability. On the left, you see the Axon Fleet 3 system. That is installed in all of our patrol cars. That has existed for a number of years. It has the traditional in-car camera capability that an officer can use during their patrol functions and responsibilities. It also has an automated license plate reader capability that was used up until 2026 when we did shut that down. That system is not going to be reactivated until such time as it can be properly used so that it is not collecting information at those restricted locations I previously spoke about. Recently, we concluded the installation of 10 of Axon's light post cameras. Again, this camera has a real-time access capability. That is, an individual, if they're working in our real-time information center and a collision or some other activity occurred at an intersection, they would be able to turn the camera on and begin to gather information. That information can be used and communicated to any of those officers or fire and emergency personnel responding to that location. That's very helpful for officers and for fire to dispatch the proper amount of resources to the location. Further, these types of real-time access can assist, for instance, at one of these locations, an individual is reported to having a midst of crisis and in possession of a weapon. Those are very challenging calls for an officer to show up to. They show up under normal circumstances. They have to quickly gather information that they see as they arrive, whereas if we have this access to these cameras, that information can be provided to the officer while they're en route. That helps an officer make a better plan when responding, calls for proper assistance under those circumstances, and also is more likely to have a good de-escalation planned under those circumstances. Also, these cameras do have an automated license plate reader function. That function is currently not turned on. It has not been activated. These are the locations at which the light post cameras have been placed. These are either locations at which people make egress and ingress into the city of Richland, or they can also be very busy intersections. However, each of these locations abides by the restrictions placed by the state of Washington. That is, none of them are placed in a location where they're gathering information at one of those restricted locations. Now, going just specifically to the ALPR system, it collects a plate image, a vehicle context image, direction of travel, lane, and such, visible vehicle attributes, color, make, model, the time and location that the information was gathered, and there is other mandated state information that has to be collected that is part of our yearly reporting to the state. There are significant guardrails placed on access to this system. As we previously talked, there's only a defined information is collected and under specific circumstances. Limited retention. The law requires that routine information collected shall be deleted after 21 days. Previously it was 30 days. That is for that routine information that's collected. If a case dictates or shows indication that we should be collecting information from the system and it is part of that investigation, it can be retained for a longer period of time, much like any of the other evidence in that particular crime. Depending on the severity of the crime, it is held for a longer period of time or a shorter period of time. The access to the system is limited. It's role-based. Not everybody within the police department has access to the system. Every search is documented. It has to be documented with a case, call number, and a purpose, an offense type. And also, any of the decisions made based upon an ALPR alert has to be verified by an officer. And that was the same as it was previously with our use of both the Axon in-car cameras and the flock cameras. The Richland Police Department controls the data collected. We control the access, how long and under what circumstance the information is retained, to whom we share it, or whether with whom we share it, under what circumstance searches are authorized, and then approved hot lists. Hot list is jargon for that information that we enter into the system. For instance, if a Richland resident has their car stolen, we can then enter that plate into the system so that if we get an alert on it, we have an idea where it's located and when. Also, vehicles that are identified connected to a felony or someone with a significant warrant or somebody who's missing and in danger. All that information can be entered by us so that our officers are alerted that that vehicle, which is connected to that incident, was located or seen at this location. There is no automatic sharing of the data. There is no national database into which our information is placed. It's very similar to our Axon body camera. It's kept in evidence.com, which is an Axon product, into which all of our body camera footage for the last years has been placed. That's where this footage is also placed. There is no automatic cross-agency access, and Our sharing of our data has to be approved by us each time. It's not something that someone can get into our system and then take that information. Access to the system, searches in the system, and that data which is shared is all logged in the system and can be audited. Further, as cars pass through the system and if their information is collected, the ALPR system does not automatically run that car plate through Washington State or any other database. That would only occur if an officer gathers that information for an approved investigation and then themselves has to run that plate to determine who the registered owner of that vehicle is. Previously, the ALPR was primarily functioned as a vehicle detection investigative tool. Data governance depended heavily on agency policy and, as we learned, vendor architecture. As I talked about, the changes in state law required and appropriately required us to make changes in how we operated our system. The Richland Police Department, as I said, retains ownership and control of its data. Sharing relationships are invite only. Retention is controlled through our agency policy and law and this configuration of the system. And access and system activity are logged for our review. As I said, neither of those systems is currently activated. The only one that would be would be the light post system based upon the restrictions of Senate Bill 6002. We need to complete training. We've finalized our policy, which was part of what needed to be presented to the state of Washington. Configure access and retention controls. Also complete a compliance review. Ensure that the system is operating in the manner it is supposed to and we expect it to operate. And then only then will we activate the ALPR system. We will continue to monitor its use, access, and compliance through audit controls. I will say that is not something that is unusual to any law enforcement agency, including ours. Police officers have access to, and I'll focus solely on the Richland Police Department. There are thousands of law enforcement agencies in the country in 50 states and countless counties and countless municipalities. So speaking for the Richland Police Department, our officers have vast power. Some of that power is our access to a wide range of databases. That includes everything from our local databases to license plates, driver's license, warrants, and criminal history. All of those are regulated. All of those are audited. And officers cannot use those for their own private use or any other use other than that connected to their professional responsibilities. So we are comfortable with doing that, have done that. We've identified individuals who violated that. They have suffered either disciplinary measures up to and including terminations. Our objective is not to collect more information. We haven't added cameras and in fact we have fewer cameras. The system is intended to use the necessary information more effectively so that we can fulfill our responsibilities in connection with the authorized investigations. Questions?

What is the timeline for completing the training and activating the

We probably could be ready in the next month or so. We want to make absolutely sure that everything has been addressed appropriately and then have a period in which we can test the system to see that it is doing what we expect it to do and what it is advertised to do.

Thank you for your presentation. First, I saw Councilmember Jones.

Yeah, thank you very much for the presentation. Does the state have access to that data?

The state does not have access to that data.

Okay, so we have to actually give them the authorization if they wanted to?

Yes, we would have to provide them. Anybody who wants it, they have to ask us, and we have to permit it.

Okay, that's all I wanted to know. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Meyer.

Thank you for this. I think it's important that all of this stuff gets said out loud and on the record, and we have these conversations. I do have several questions. One is you mentioned that there was other state mandated information that gets collected. Can you describe in brief terms what that might be?

I don't have that off the top of my head. It is mandated that of those things that we have to report to the state. Much of it is what is logged in the system, who accessed it, when, under what circumstances.

Okay. That leads into the next topic. You said the access to these records and videos and so forth is auditable. Who does that auditing?

Our records management is the primary auditor of all of those systems.

Okay. And recently the courts decided that the video collected as part of these systems is not subject to public records requests. Is the access log subject to public records requests?

Yes, and It is my understanding that if something information is pulled and used in a case that is then Available for public records request.

Okay State law, as you mentioned, with SB 6002 mandates a maximum 21-day retention period. I assume it is RPD's intention to make full 21-day retention the policy? Correct. Is there a reason not to have a shorter retention time?

Yes. A report from an individual, a victim, may come in a week later, and it may have some connection to a case, a vehicle. That would then limit us to be able to gather that. Further, that investigation may take 10 days. So now we're at seven days. And then it may take 10 days to develop the information about a vehicle that was connected to that person's victimization. that would then leave us four days of ability to go back and gain it. Or if we had set it at 10 days, we wouldn't have that ability at all.

Okay. And do we have information based on previous years use of LPRs on what the average sort of retention time is between collecting data and when it's useful for the data that is involved in cases?

We should be able to measure... Each case is different, however. I mean, if it's a... Yeah, each case is different. Like I wouldn't put a number on this system and say if it does this many, if it is useful in this many cases, then it's a success as opposed to it's only used in another number of cases. I don't, it depends on the case. And so I don't know how to place an exact number on it. I could try to make a search of our previous system to see at what point So you're asking like...

I'm asking for how old the given piece of data is on average when it becomes useful. Is the 80-20 putting it at it's useful the same day it was collected? Or is it more common that it's useful 20 days after it's collected? You see what I'm saying?

Yes. I would think that if with the... with instituting the real-time information center we may have more contacts at a shorter time frame because we could have an individual say i saw a drunk driver that's going down the road this is the license plate and then if the real-time information center individual is working there they could enter that plate and then there they get a hit on that plate five minutes later passing something an officer could respond to that at that point and then begin to conduct an investigation to see if they could make a traffic stop and then conduct that investigation whereas in the past it tended to be further out because then the report was made and then the investigation was begun okay and

But what I'm getting at is if we are going to say, well, we want to keep our data as long as legally allowed, I would like to be able to justify that with some performance information explaining that we are getting real benefit from maximizing retention of this tracking information. I'd rather see a minimum effective retention policy rather than a blanket, we're going to keep everything as long as the state will let us. And that's strictly for privacy reasons. What I'm curious about here, and again, all that stuff, I'm expressing a personal preference, I'm not trying to order anything. But I'm curious whether that sort of research has been undertaken in these topics, right? So I'm asking the question sort of partially to find out if anyone else has asked this question. Because it's that's something we do in the I mean with data protection is part of what I do for a living and You don't keep what you don't need as a security measure and so I'm interested in Extending those best practices for data protection to this data as well and But let me pivot to another topic. The Axon contract has other services and Axon provides a bunch of different stuff. They do body cam auto transcription, they do all kinds of things. One of the things Axon sells is a sort of integration thing with private video streams. What guardrails, as presented here, Does Axon's private stream integration, is that covered by the same rules as ALPRs, or is there a different set of laws covering streams that we essentially get donated to us by residents and local businesses?

We would only access those if there was a call for service at that location. For instance, let's say there was a store in town that allowed us access to their systems. They then call us and say, there's a robbery occurring at our location. Only then would, if we have somebody in the real-time information center, they can access that and, again, as I described, begin to provide information to responding officers. Again, that can reduce the chance of an untoward confrontation, provide us the ability to respond with the right resources, and better plan for a de-escalation if that occurs. That information can then be recorded at that point and then would be stored in our system. And the same guardrails would be present, the officers. So an individual working at that cannot just turn on that camera and begin accessing a business. That would violate our policy, and that person could be subject to disciplinary measures up to and including termination.

And that access is logged? In the same system as the ALPR access logs, or are those covered by different technological systems?

It would be covered in the FUSIS system.

Okay.

The ALPR system can come into that system, but one would be researched and logged differently, and we would search another log to see if we were accessing those other cameras.

Okay, so it still acts on products. Either way, but different products within their portfolio. Yes. Okay. And that auditing is also records management oversight. Okay. Last thing, sorry. You mentioned we had to approve sharing each time, but I got the impression from some of the other phrasing that there were sort of standing sharing agreements that we can revoke at any time? Is it a case by case, no pun intended, sharing request or can other law enforcement agencies set up standing sharing agreements where they have access at any time?

We could set up an agreement. We have not set up any standardized sharing agreements with any other agencies. We could set up an agreement with one of our partner agencies in this area so that we can share that information, but we have not set up any of those agreements.

In such an agreement, would that be handled through Axon's systems so they log in directly, or would they put in data requests to your office and your officers respond to those?

If we had set an agreement, then their request for information about an intersection or a car would be logged in our system. But if they ask us for that and then we voluntarily give it back to them because they do it, that would be a one-on-one transaction.

So that would log us accessing it?

Yeah, and then providing it. And then the system prevents them from then taking our information and then passing it on to some other organizations.

Okay, that's axon system prevents. Yes. Okay. Okay, that's all I've got.

I wanted to clarify one thing. The image of that is not part of the public records request. It would be in, if it was part of an investigation, it would be documented in the investigation that an ALPR hit did indicate this vehicle was involved, all that would be articulated in the case. And these systems can also be exculpatory. An investigator could determine that a vehicle was involved in an incident, begin to search for it, and find out that indeed it did hit an ALPR across town at almost the same time the incident occurred. and that would be exculpatory for that individual who would then say, I obviously wasn't over here involved in this incident because my car was over at another part of town and could not be in two places at once.

So that does bring up an important point. Do we have data on the accuracy of the license plate transcriptions and the vehicle make model color identification?

Each of those have to be confirmed by an individual. So if you're riding with an officer when they still had the in-car license plate, System operational they would go buy a car and it would trigger a hit and it would the officer would look at it But then see there were numbers similar numbers and letters similar to a stolen car for instance from Oklahoma But they would then look at the car in front of them and see it's from Idaho And so there can be, I wouldn't say mistakes made, but the information provided is not accurate. And it is incumbent upon each of our officers, and they have done this in the past with these systems, to confirm whether that information is accurate.

Okay, thank you.

My question is a follow-up to Council Member Myers. The previous retention period was 30 days, right? Correct. And so do you feel like the 21-day limitation now, is that going to be detrimental for you to get your job done, or do you think it's workable?

I think it's workable. It's possible there could be a significant case, and by the time we get to a point where we've identified a vehicle and wish to look in the system, it's 22 days later. And then that is no longer available to us to pull. But I'm not going to sit here and say this is a travesty and it has to be changed. These are the strictures under which we work. And those are the legal strictures placed upon us by the citizens of Washington. And we will follow them.

And then the comment about the sharing agreement. It seems like in our area, sharing with jurisdictions makes a lot of sense, because Richland runs right into Kennewick and other smaller communities. And so would that be feasible to work together on some of these things?

It would be, but to start, we now get a lot of information from our partners, Kennewick, Benton County, Pasco, provide to our crime analyst vehicles and individuals that they're looking for. In the case of ALPR, we can enter those vehicles into our system, and if the person, the vehicle is here, then we'll get an alert on it. And the same goes for This system would not be used for it and I want to make very clear to that that there are individuals that Other agencies are looking for for either probable cause arrests or warrant arrests They communicate that to us and we follow through and trying to locate those individuals if they're here so to start we will do that on a case-by-case basis, okay councilmember Van Dyke Chief that was excellent.

I appreciate the I mean, that was quick, too, a week to put all that together. That was fantastic. Just for council, I wanted to provide some recent things for me that I gained context on this topic on. A couple weeks ago, I had a chance to do a ride-along. It was with a squad on the night shift, and it was great. A few things specific to this is I saw firsthand that their ALPRs are not active. But I also learned something else from that, and that is that doesn't mean that license plates aren't being searched or looked at. I found officers have phenomenal memory for seven, eight-digit alphanumeric digits, and they are able to put those in and look those up. Now, I also am quite happy to see a lot of the constraints that have been put on this. There are absolutely privacy concerns with automated systems. systems, but you know, the Mark one eyeball still works okay to, to read things and are able to enter them in the system. Coming back to the timeline, I can't, Kurt, I understand exactly where you're coming from and I don't have any data on that. But one thing that surprised me is, and I'll be kind of oblique on this one. There was a traffic stop and in the process of this traffic stop, it was very clear that there was illicit materials in the vehicle. Um, By current restrictions, they couldn't get into the vehicle. And so what they had to do was they had to tow it, maintain a chain of evidence, but it could take, I heard seven to 10 days to get a warrant to actually search the vehicle. And then they have to go through and actually search the vehicle. And that's a different topic if I'm surprised how long that took, but it was to me, I'm like, well, shoot, there was half of the time just eaten up right there. Then lastly, I worked with ALPRs about 15 years ago. And at the time they were, they were very, very accurate and, in getting the numbers, the alphanumeric numbers off the plates. Anyway, that's just from my context, things that are going through my mind in relation to this. That's all.

Thank you. Council Member Houghton. Will we be voting on this?

It can be brought to the council to determine, but we have the system and plan on implementing it as we have had ALPRs in the past.

So you don't need a vote? Is that what I'm hearing?

The workshop is for discussion and learning.

We don't take a vote. No, I know we won't tonight, but in the future?

We voted to approve this contract like a year ago, I think, in October.

So it's already approved? Yes. Okay.

Okay. Thank you for your presentation.

I did want to just say that I did not create this myself. I had significant assistance through others at the police department, and I do not want to take credit. Though I take responsibility for it, I do not take credit for the efforts.

So I thank everyone at the police department for doing that. I think it reflects well on your people.

Yeah. If not me, it does on them.

Well, and congratulations on receiving a $1.6 million grant.

Again, an example of others doing hard work, including people in this room, including Mike and a lieutenant that has since moved to New Zealand. So, yes, we're very happy to have received it.

Thank you for your work. All right. City Manager Amason, do we have anything further to cover?