City Council - workshop

I'd like to call to order the City Council Study Session of July 28, 2026. Clerk, please call the roll.

Deputy Mayor Bushmill. Present. Councilmember Diaz. Here. Councilmember Hines. Here. Councilmember Palmer is absent. Councilmember Rumbaugh. Here. Councilmember Sedalge.

Here.

Councilmember Scott. Here. Councilmember Walker is absent. And Mayor Ibsen.

Here, our first agenda item is the state of the courts. I'd like to call on Tacoma Municipal Court Judge Stephen Krupa to begin our presentation. STEPHEN KRUPA, TACOMA MUNICIPAL COURT JUDGE STEPHEN KRUPA, TACOMA MUNICIPAL COURT JUDGE STEPHEN KRUPA, TACOMA MUNICIPAL COURT JUDGE STEPHEN KRUPA, TACOMA MUNICIPAL COURT JUDGE STEPHEN KRUPA, TACOMA MUNICIPAL COURT JUDGE STEPHEN KRUPA, TACOMA MUNICIPAL COURT JUDGE STEPHEN KRUPA, TACOMA MUNICIPAL COURT JUDGE STEPHEN KRUPA, TACOMA MUNICIPAL COURT JUDGE STEPHEN KRUPA, TACOMA MUNICIPAL COURT JUDGE STEPHEN KRUPA, TACOM

Welcome, Your Honor. Okay, so I've got to push this while I'm talking.

You're all good. Please proceed.

And this will work to move forward? Okay, let me know when you're ready. Please proceed. Okay, so I don't have to push it. I'm good. All right. Good afternoon, I guess, everybody. You all know me. I'm the committee chair. For those of you out there in Zoom land or wherever that don't know me, I'm the committee chair for the Tacoma Municipal Court. And, of course, I have my wonderful staff here and the other judges. So today, of course, is a State of Court. You saw the CAM memo talking about what we hope to give you here. But let's just cut right to our mission statement. And I guess the most important thing I want to stress to you guys is what's our job as the Tacoma Municipal Court? It's to serve the public. and to make our city safer. And really, the only way to make our city safer is to change behavior. And that's what we're talking about when we're talking about compassionate accountability and providing a therapeutic approach to justice. And we have the tools, we have the mechanisms, we have the forms to steer people towards the services that they need so that we can do what we want to do, again, serve our public and make our city safer. So folks, a threshold issue here, because there's some things we can't do. And this is our civics lesson, three branches of government. Of course, we're all separate. And there's a separation of powers doctrine. So while we're partners, you guys, us, the executive branch in this quest, there are some things that we can do and some things that we simply can't do and we can't weigh in on. So I mean, obviously, we can't tell you what laws to pass. We can't tell you what laws to enforce. We can't tell you how to make prosecutorial decisions. or how to deal with your cases. That's an executive branch and I guess a legislative decision. You guys work together. But I want to tell you that we are here to help. We are here because we have the forums and through our therapeutic approach, we believe that we can make a difference. And we're here to answer questions and to work with you in conjunction. It's just important that we understand there's some things that we just simply can't get involved in because we're the judicial branch. OK, I think you all know these folks. You've met them all. This is our all-star lineup here of judges. And I brought my team down because I think you know most of these people. But I wanted you to see their faces in person. And maybe if you have some time, you can talk to them afterwards. I don't know what your calendar is like here. But you guys, I'm pretty sure, know everybody up there but Christine. Christine is our new addition. She's our court support services unit supervisor, manager. We poached her from Pierce County District Court. Think supervision when you think of Christine. More about her later. All right, now a little bit about us. We work hard. We are a lean organization. We work hard, but we play hard. This is, again, I wish I could have brought everybody down here. You're welcome to come up and see us if you wish. But these are just some of the faces and some of the things we do to have fun. OK, what do we do? And I have questions sometimes from folks because they think we do felonies and we do civil law, stuff like that. What we are is we're a court of limited jurisdiction. So really what we do is we do misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors. And what I did there was I bumped out kind of a list of what our top crimes would be, DUI down to controlled substance violations. We also do, as you know, civil infractions. Those are your tickets. I'm sure you've all gotten them. Sorry. But anyway, and our photo enforcement stuff and our other civil things like dog off leash, things like that. And then, of course, the wonderful world of hex appeals. And you can talk to Chris about what that means. We do those as well. Very, very limited part of what we do. Now, from a perspective of how to think about what we do, I put this up there as considerations. So you can kind of break down the criminal side of the house on what we do to crimes that are critical to public safety charges, such as domestic violence charges, DUI charges, reckless driving charges. These are the charges, basically, where it's dangerous. These are the type of things where people can really get hurt. There's a lot of repeat offenders. Recidivism is a big problem with these crimes. What we're trying to do with these folks, again, using our therapeutic approach is hold them accountable, of course, if they're convicted of crime, hold them accountable, and stop that behavior, change that behavior. That's what our CSSU supervision is going to be like. That's what our therapeutic model hopes to do. The bottom one, though, critical to quality of life, what I want you guys to think about here are these are the things that your constituents are talking to you about. I put a broken window there, Andrea, Mike. My slide guru put this together. I think it's beautiful. These are the things that, you know, people think about when they think, is my city safe? Because I got, you know, shoplifting. I got people shooting up and smoking dope behind my house. You know, things like that. And these cases, again, not telling anybody how to enforce the law or where to send them. These are the cases I think we can get the biggest bang for the buck in moving these folks into our therapeutic spaces. our therapeutic courts, our specific therapeutic courts. So again, this is kind of a tool for you guys to think about what we do and the types of cases that we have, our public safety, our quality of life. Okay, next slide. Here, I just wanted to show you, things are really rocking in this city. The laws are being enforced. You can see how the increase from 2024 to 2026, criminal traffic, way up, way up. Criminal non-traffic, way up. Look at our domestic violence and our DUI charges. A 33.2% estimated increase in total criminal filings 71.9% in domestic violence charges, 274% in these DUI charges. These are these dangerous charges that we feel people need supervision on, especially our repeat offenders. So we're busy. We're busy with our lien operation, but we're here to help. our infractions are going up too. And, you know, God bless them, those cameras are going to be out there. We're all going to be affected by that, I think. But we estimate that our infraction folks are going to be real busy too. You know, I'm sure you all met the commissioner. This is his bailiwick. These are the cases that he deals with. OK, I put this slide together to kind of illustrate to you, again, because this is a state of the court, what kind of effect it's having on our staff. These increase in filings take staff time. We run a lean operation. Our folks work hard. But in fact, I think these numbers are probably conservative. they're going to go up significantly. For example, customer service contacts, that's the people that come to the window. That's the phone calls that we get. The supervised caseloads, as you know, we've never really had supervision. That's something we're going to talk about later. And I've talked with all of you about that separately. That's going to go up exponentially. And of course, it's going to have an effect on our workload and on our personnel. So I just wanted to stress that with you. OK, here's some really neat things that we've done lately. If I can blow our own horn. And I think I always get, hey, how's Blake doing? Well, Blake's doing great. We're at 95%. I'm not sure where the other courts are in this county and in this state, but we're at 95% in getting those Blake things done. We've established a text feature. In other words, we're going to be able to allow people to get their... notices to, hey, show up in court tomorrow or the next day by text. And we went out and got a grant to pay for that. You'll see down at the bottom with all those AOC things, we're grant shoppers, folks. We know this is a time of fiscal problems, but we're out there beating the bushes to get money any place we can. And we're partnering with folks, too, as you can see there with our CEPP partnership. The other thing I wanted to talk about that I thought I should highlight on this slide is our improved access to justice. What we've done, I think this is really magnificent, what we've done is we've created full-time hybrid dockets. In other words, people, you know, it's tough for people to take off from work, leave their kids or whatever, to come into court. So we've got Zoom on every docket now. So we're really doing our part. Thank you. Working hard here. OK. And again, there's a picture of the wonderful folks that are making this happen. OK. Our therapeutic courts. I know you guys have heard about our therapeutic courts. We are so proud of our therapeutic courts. They've been around for three years. You've probably seen this slide before. Judge Sontag and her team have just done an amazing amount of work here. Going through the numbers here, this is our behavioral court. Think the folks with mental health issues. You might wonder why these numbers seem a little low. It's the nature of the beast, folks with mental health cases. There's a lot of people out there with mental health problems, a lot of people that we wish we could help. We can't help all of them, and a good deal of them are not eligible. and or don't want to participate, but we are here, as I told you in that first slide with our mission, we are here and we are providing these forums. We need to recognize that and get these people the help that they need. Connecting them to services means changing behavior. Okay, community court is our big winner. You know, you're probably aware of this, but if you're not, I'm going to tell you that our community court is recognized statewide as being one of, if not the top community court in the state of Washington. And it's getting national attention. We're, as I said, extremely proud of our community court. And some of you have talked to me offline about this. We've got room to grow, OK? We're going to ask you for some stuff, as you know. But we've got room to grow. And again, there are certain things that you want to talk about with your partners in the executive branch about enforcement and things like that. These might be the type of crimes, as I said, the broken window crimes that we can push into the community court. So we're here. OK, just some feedback. This is a slide that you've seen before. The folks that go into this program, these therapeutic courts, again, these therapeutic courts specifically, they're really getting a lot out of it. And we're getting great feedback from them. Here's the thing. to think about with our therapeutic models, therapeutic court models, the recidivism rate. I mean, because that's, again, when we're talking about change in behavior, we're talking about stopping recidivism. The therapeutic model writ large is going to do that. But specifically, our therapeutic courts do that too. They're really, really working. Okay, a little bit about the outcomes. And I know you guys have these slides. You'll be able to take a look at them. The numbers speak for themselves. For themselves, I should say. Okay. Before I talk about these challenges, well, let me talk about the challenges first. Bullet one. Hey, guys, we get it. We're in a time of... fiscal tightness. And our therapeutic courts are grant funded. I just don't want you to forget that, especially considering the way the country is going. At some point, maybe those grants are going to go away. So we're going to come to you. And I know we have, at least I hear these promises. We may be coming to you at some point and saying, hey, we got to pay for it. We got it. A city has to pay for our therapeutic courts. We want to increase therapeutic court access. We're working on that. Those are some of the suggestions that I gave you before. Again, we're not here telling your branches what to do. We're just telling you we have the forums through our therapeutic courts to put people in there. I know you saw my slides earlier when you were reviewing them. We're also asking to have some additions to our therapeutic courts, one of them being a certified peer support specialist. I guess the best way to think about that is sort of like a translator. This is somebody with a life experience who can help our therapeutic court staff connect with these people and help them connect with services. By the way, remember, our job is the bridge. It's the connection. We're going to make the contacts. We're going to work with these people. But anything you can do to fund these social service agencies to help these people is just icing on the cake. OK, so those are our challenges in our therapeutic courts. All right. Now, here's the big one, the big new thing that we have in Tacoma, and that's our court support services unit. And you all know, because I know I've beaten it into you many times, it's such a shame that this court never had a probation department. Probation is not a word that we use anymore. We use support services. A lot of court Some folks use the term client support services. But really what it comes down to is it comes down to supervision. And that's what Christine is here for. You know, the reason we hired Christine is basically she's a subject matter expert here. She's going to build this program for us. You know, she's going to ensure, well... her and her people are going to ensure accountability. From a pretrial standpoint, they're going to limit. What we're trying to do is we're trying to keep people out of jail, pretrial if possible, so that perhaps, again, they need to make their own decisions at that point because they're not convicted of anything. but perhaps connecting them with services, but certainly ensuring community safety because they're being monitored. And for a lot of these folks, they don't need to be monitored in jail. So if we can monitor them and keep them safe and keep them online through pretrial services, beautiful. Post-trial, especially with those cases I was talking to you about earlier, our big ticket cases, our DUI cases, our domestic violence cases, we're talking here about changing behavior. We're talking about reaching these folks who, frankly, were never reached before because we didn't have this post-trial tool. So that's Christine's job, and she's the woman to do it. Anyway, again, community safety. But what are the challenges there? Well, again, I know it's lean fiscal times. But one of the challenges is Christine needs workers. She needs staff. And there are rules and laws regarding the qualifications of those staff. These CSU officers, the old term would be probation officers, They have to have certain qualifications by the RCW, by the court rules, and by the WAC. So we're coming to you asking for that. We need a dedicated support staff. That's something that we're working on in-house right now. Private workplace tools, technology, this is stuff that we're all working on. We want you to be aware of. End goal, of course, community safety, making this city a better place for everybody. OK, so why are you here, Krupa? I'm here to tell you. I'm here to ask you questions and point out the way forward, right? I love this slide. It's the Golden Road. All right, so what do we do? And why do we deserve this? Because this is what we do. We address, at this low level, the root causes of criminal behavior. What do we do? We connect people to the services they need to change their lives. What's the result? It makes our city safer. It improves the quality of life for everybody. And some wise guy made that quote down on the bottom. I think it was me. We're on the front line, man. We're on the front line. That's what Tacoma Community Court does. OK, what are our priorities? Number one, responding to community needs. The reason that we're doing this is because you hear it a lot more than we do, but we hear it too. Make our city safer. Take care of these people. Find ways to stop the train. How do we do that? Well, we need funding. We need adequate funding to accomplish our mission. What are we going to do? We're going to grow our operations and personnel, the folks we have now, to get that done. We're going to implement technology. We're going to develop tools. So the rest of them is in no particular order, but number one and number two are tops, right? Going from my left to right, of course. OK, so here's the pitch. This is over biennium, right? And don't look at me like that. We'll talk more about where this might come from, OK? Court support services specialist. Again, in the old days, we called this a probation officer. These are the people or the person that's going to help Christine do her job. These are the folks or the person who's going to reach these people connect them with services, supervise them, make this city safer. Peer support specialist, the second item down, I talked with you about that. Again, this is a biennium mask here on each one of these. This is the translator, if you will. Support tech, well, let's go to the bottom one first. Information technology analyst. I don't know about you folks, but the amount of data that we get and that we need to manipulate is staggering. I told you about how hard these folks work. None of them are experts at dragging this stuff out of the systems and putting them into the programs and spreadsheets and whatnot that we need to analyze our data and also to ask our grant funders and other folks for money. It's really hard for us. We would love to have somebody on staff to do that. In that regard, I should tell you that we're saddled with some programs that the state has given us. And we're going to use those because they're great programs. But getting the data out of them is a bear. So that's why we think that's a big ask and a reasonable ask to get that person. And then finally, computer support tech. That's a hardware guy, basically. We'd like to have a dedicated hardware person on staff. Why? Well, stuff breaks, okay? Why? Community courts off-site, we have issues. They're doing a great job over there, but sometimes we have issues, and God bless those folks. They work really hard here, our tech folks for the city, but we like to have our own. So total number, under a million bucks. Where is it coming from? You guys asked me to tell you some suggestions. I don't know. These are some suggestions for you. What about the public safety sales tax? What about the opioid settlement funds? Other sources? I don't know. That's what's your guys to figure out. But I don't think this is a big ask. I mean, especially when you consider, again, what we do and how important we are to making this city safer. I got to tell you, you know, your city manager will tell you, we participated in the budget exercise and we're prepared to make improvements. some sacrifices, and I think we came in really well there. But these are some things where, look, the funding sources are different. These are sources that really, I don't know how they would affect your bottom line, because these are funds that need to be used for community safety, right? And things like the courts and things like supervision. So we're asking you to think about that when you think about our proposal. Okay? Last... Here's the kicker. A fully funded municipal court is essential for the delivery of justice. I love that quote. And there's our hardworking folks. All right. As we used to say in the Army, subject to your questions, that is the end of my presentation.

All right. Well, Judge, thank you so much for your presentation. We have a lot of questions. This is a very important topic to us. I'm going to start with Council Member Scott. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Judge, for being here. Thank you all for being here. We really appreciate not only the work you do, but getting the opportunity to see you while you're not sitting behind the bench. So I just had a couple of questions, just for clarity's sake. On page 8, which is slide 15 for me, here it says just the behavioral health court numbers. So when it says the referrals received, Is this based on capacity, or is this based on willingness of the potential participants?

Well, you could say that it's based on willingness, but really the bottom line, it's based on referrals as to whether we can get the cases. We can take more cases. We want more cases. We would like... the Department of Science Council and the prosecutor's office to refer us more cases. Again, we can't tell them what to do, but we're ready to take them. We're ready to take them. We have the room. We want to grow this program.

And I think I've asked that question before, but I appreciate you reiterating it for me. Just hopefully it sticks in my brain this time. I remember hearing that answer at some point. And so I was like, I think I knew that. But I appreciate that. And then the other question I had was on slide 22 around the staffing for court support services. What is the general process of getting qualified to do that? And is there a pipeline? Or is there a shortage in that pipeline? You know, you have to have a degree. But Christine, you want to talk about that? Come on. Mind? No, don't mind at all. And you can either come sit down here, or you can stand up and think.

She'll be able to tell you kind of what the qualifications are for those kind of folks. Again, she's been in this field for decades.

Good afternoon. Currently, there's a two-week academy that's held at the Criminal Justice Training Commission that each probation officer, or whatever you call this person, will go through. They're currently working on getting it out from underneath the Criminal Justice Training Commission and putting it underneath the courts. So that's going to be a long-term project because we are a bit different than law enforcement. So, yeah, there's a two-week training academy. It's off-site at the CJTC, and they go through that.

Is that something – is that – that process, is that in addition to some needed level of education ahead of time, or could somebody who's been working as a baker their whole life decide, I want to go to work in court support services and just take that to be treated? You do have to have a bachelor's. Okay. And anything, or something like criminal justice specifically?

I believe it's a closely related field, but I would have to check on that. ARL J11 specifies.

Awesome. Thank you. I just was interested in that, and I think I had Oh, never mind. I had one other question, but you answered it.

Anything else for Christine? By the way, the one slide that you referred to... Oh, I'm sorry.

You have one right.

I'll just... How about if I just do this? The one slide that you referred to, but I think you're referring to big picture, was the mental health slide. Both mental health and the community corp, both We can take the referrals. Mental health is always going to be a little bit of a different situation because of the nature of the affliction. But again, we have the capacity in both of our strict therapeutic courts to take more people. And we want more people.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks.

Council Member Sedalge. Oh, I didn't know a second. Okay. Thank you very much, Judge, for being here. And I want to thank the rest of the court staff for being here, many of whom I've met in person and attended court with. I had a couple of questions. Well, first a comment. I really do appreciate in your... I guess slide eight, where we talk about the ethos within which we operate, which is a world in which we are looking to hold people for criminal or public safety. We want to hold people accountable. We want to reduce recidivism and change behaviors, because ultimately that's better for our society. And as someone who is out in community and you get that kind of... I'm trying to find a diplomatic way of saying the knee-jerk reaction you get from a number of constituents who feel a little, you know, It's usually something like, why can't you just arrest them and throw them in jail? That was a consideration for a really long time. And really, in this modern world where we are today, we want to hold people accountable. We want to reduce them coming back into the system and change their behavior. And in worlds where it's quality of life, the one that is very you know, the ones, you're right, we get a lot of. We want to connect people to services, and we want them, we want to give a therapeutic approach when that hasn't been a chance. And I think it's really important that we, I thought it was wonderful that you put that in here as a reminder of how we go about things. So I want to thank you for putting that in there, and I've seen how that plays out with every person that's in the therapeutic courts. So I'm going to move on to very specific questions. A follow-up to Councilmember Scott's. I understand that there are very specific criteria on community court on who can get in with the types of charges. And for it to be a referral, are there also very strict kind of requirements whether those individuals can be considered for referral for Behavioral Health Court, or is that not as strict?

Well, I'm going to let Judge Sontag come up here and talk to that. The thing, of course, to understand is it was a mental health complaint to it, but she's best qualified. You can come up here. Take the big chair. I'm Judge Sontag.

Thank you for the question. It is really important to know that although it's a willing participant for either of our therapeutic court programs, in order to be eligible for behavioral health court, there must be a serious and persistent mental health diagnosis. So they don't already have to have that. once they are referred to our program through the risk and needs assessment, it may be the first time that then they are referred for a full mental health evaluation. But then we would have a diagnosis, and then they would be eligible for the program. So that is one of the considerations why you see those numbers are significantly lower is because it's a significantly smaller population of our community.

And so it's... Is it just a larger funnel of everyone that's referred, and then on the risk assessment, we decide which one goes into community court versus behavioral health? Is that kind of how it works?

It's a great question. We do have two separate referral processes right now. However, we're looking into maybe having one because we've had some folks that might have been referred to community court, but through the process, we realized that they have more significant mental health concerns. And then we've redirected them with some assistance of mental health professionals to be in the Behavioral Health Court because the Behavioral Health Court is just more suited to handle those that have serious mental health concerns.

And last question on that. Can you remind us what the criteria is to be eligible for community court because there are types of offenses that cannot be?

There are. So what best practices tells us for therapeutic courts in general is you want objective criteria. You want individuals to be able to look on their face to say, this is what you're charged with, this is what your situation is, and whether you'd be eligible or not eligible. That being said, we have community partners that have come together that are really committed to trying to make our criteria as flexible or as open as possible. So you're going to have DUIs, DVs, Some of the street racing cases are going to be on the case-by-case basis. But if you don't have the statutory excluded prior convictions, serious violent offenses, sex offenses, vehicular homicides, things like that, you would otherwise be presumed eligible. There's just a selection of charges that might be case-by-case.

So generally, as long as it's not one of these higher level felonies, we would presume you'd be eligible and then go through that and then see if that individual also has to volunteer to be part of the program because it's a much longer program, correct?

Yes. And best practices tells us that willing participants, they just have a higher risk of success. And so that's why we ask them to be willing and be able to go through the process.

Thank you. And I wanted to reiterate the voluntary nature of those, which I think really helps with the mission that we have. So thank you very much for everything you do.

Thank you.

Last question, and this might be more for city manager. Where does most of the current funding for courts come from? Is that the general fund, or do we have a specific fund for that?

Council Member Sinalge, most of the court's funding at present comes from the general fund.

Got it. So that is, again, one of the many important things that are affected by our current budget deficit. OK. Thank you.

Thank you. Hence our suggestion to other sources. And by the way, Council Member, just for your constituents' concerns, These jail, I mean, I know people are saying, well, we put them in jail. Jail's not going away. It's how we use jail. Yes. Okay? How we use jail. Some people need jail to get them moving. Okay? But jail's not, we don't want it to be answer number one in many of these cases, especially, as you pointed out, these lower- Or the only answer. Yeah, or the only answer. And it's not. And that's why we have these forums.

And that's why the voluntary nature is so important to be referred to these therapeutic courts, because you have a choice. Yeah, they've got to buy into it. Do you want to buy into it, work through it? And yeah, so thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you. Council Member Hines.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Judge Cooper, for being here today. I really appreciate it. And I really think laying out kind of the mission and vision of the municipal court's been really good. I just had a couple clarifying questions, just to dive in a few things. So when you said we're really doing a lot of good work, writing a lot of citations, processing a lot of people, I could see people saying that's a bad thing, meaning crime has exploded and you all are a lot of work. But I think what you were saying was you all are processing more people through than you were probably during 21, 22, 23, correct? Yeah. What I meant by that is that

the laws are being enforced. To me, that's a good thing, that the laws are being enforced. Because you want to talk about a funnel. That's where we get our cases. And we can help people. We can correct their behavior. I think I was saying to the mayor the other day, you've got to arrest them first, or at least put them in the system, or cite them.

No, I mean, I think when you said, look at how many domestic violence cases we're processing. It's like, wow, is domestic violence exploding? Or is it that we're finally able to process and they're being charged more regularly? And I think the answer is the latter, not the former.

Correct. I think so.

And we've processed through a lot of the backlog that the court system had during the COVID period. I remember there was a large backlog just of court cases moving through at that point in time.

I think Prosecutor Boccia will be able to talk with you more about that. But I believe so. I believe so.

So I just wanted to make sure I clarified that because I was listening and I was like, okay, make sure that was really clear. The second, the next question I had was just looking at some of the data here, right? So when I look at community court numbers, so referrals received, does that mean that the prosecutor has referred them to the community court or the prosecutor has referred them to therapeutic court if I'm looking at the charts on 15 and 16? Sure.

OK, there needs to be buy-in. That's right. And again, this court puts us kind of in a, because we can't tell the prosecutors how to do things. What we're trying to do is suggest to you folks and to Prosecutor Batcheson's series that some of these cases we feel could be really well served in our community courts, especially as Council Member Saldaghi was saying, these lower-level cases, the cases I like to call the broken window cases. But everybody's got to be on board. We're telling you that we have the forum, and we want to grow this. So it's just part of this exercise is to help you guys think about it.

Well, I guess what I'm getting at is here, so if I look at, say, 2025, 178 referrals received, does that mean that the prosecutor, all the agreement referred them to you all for potential entry into community court?

Yeah, why don't I have Judge Sontag address that?

Because when I see the referrals decline, which is next, who is declining? Is that the person who has been accused? Is that?

That's a great question, Council Member Hines. And so anyone can refer to our therapeutic courts. So typically, it's going to be the individual with their defense attorney making the referral. But a prosecutor could make a referral, or a community member, a law enforcement, mental health provider could make the referral. And that's what we count as when we receive the referral is once we originally have it. One of the ways that the referral would not continue if an individual went on to warrant status, or if they just respectfully declined to enter for not being a willing participant. And we have, in some cases, the prosecutor has declined to allow them to participate with the discretion that they hold in the therapeutic model.

So if I look at the last two years, January to June 2026 and 2025, back in those math, it was like 65% of people who are referred declined service. So two thirds of the people who get referred, don't go through the process.

And I think it's laid out in there. And if not, we certainly will be issuing our annual report here in the next month that you all get a copy of. And we keep all the stats on what those decline cases look like. So if somebody goes on warrant status after six months, we do close that, and we consider that to be a closed referral. However, when they come back into the courts, get their warrants quashed, we may redo the referral. So it's going to be those individuals or those that otherwise maybe are held on bail because they failed to appear before, and then now they're held, and they're going to resolve at their first pretrial. Maybe they have a credit for time served offer or something. So those are going to be declined cases. So that would be in there. And then also the cases that are declined by the prosecuting attorney's office.

That number is very large, right? So if there's a process by which only one-third of those folks make it through and two-thirds are declined, the question is, what are the barriers? Providing that from happening, right?

Well, then once we receive the referral, that's also when all potential participants go through that risk needs assessment. So if they then flag for either a substance use disorder evaluation or a mental health examination, they might have then be recommended for treatment that they at that point say, respectfully, I don't want to or I'm not ready maybe to go through that. And so what's, I think, unique to our programs is that we require potential participants to do all of that before entry, because when they enter our programs, we want them to know exactly how many service hours they'll be completing, exactly what their level of care is for their substance disorder treatment, and then also if there's mental health treatment. So when they do enter, they're then set up with a solid foundation, and they'll be set up more for success. I think that's why you see the higher numbers as well in the referral process.

Yes. And thank you for explaining. Because I think one of the premises underlying this conversation is we think about the funnel. So we currently have a funnel in which so many people are brought in, and only so few come out. A smaller number come out the other end. And so it seems like the premise of the conversation today is if we can expand the funnel on your end, more staffing, more capacity, more things, more people will come out. My question is, are we also looking at how we get more people through the funnel in the first place? Is that also part of the analysis? Because if it's still a lower number, if we expand the funnel and pull more people in, but still few people are making it out the other side going through the process, I would have questions about whether that was the, we were investing in the most effective space. Certainly. I mean, is that all stuff you all are looking at, which is how do we get more people through? is that 30% number about when we think about the population of people you're going to be entering the municipal court system is going to make it through? Are we going to be set around 30% no matter how much we expand, or will we see that number grow over time?

Well, again, from a threshold issue, council member, the top of the funnel, the people that are coming in, that's not our decision. From a capacity standpoint, we can expand our courts. And frankly, the numbers always might not be high, but there'll be more of them. So we'll be reaching more people. Remember, I stressed to you to think about it that way. Because you know what? A lot of these people have issues. Otherwise, they wouldn't be in the criminal justice system. So the more that we reach, the more that we get in there, the better it is for the community. I would also point out that, remember, we're also talking about, this is a part of what we do, our therapeutic courts. We're talking about a therapeutic approach writ large, though, when we're talking about our client support or court support services unit, when we're talking about our supervision, that's going to have the same result. It's just going to be perhaps longer, although it's going to be structured in such a way, especially considering all the new models and tools that we have today, that these people are going to get the same kind of help. okay, to stop recidivism. And really, that's a big thing because, frankly, we've seen it over the years, these folks with these multiple DUIs, these domestic violence charges, these other serious charges, and they can't be in therapeutic models. But without supervision, they're not being reached, and we're just kicking the can down the road.

Thank you. And I think this is all really good. And I think the way you've described this is correct. I think seeing this as part of a system and not the panacea or the solution to every, you know, there's not going to be a situation where every single person we arrest in the city of Tacoma that goes to municipal court could somehow end up in community court or therapy court. One, it's like they have to want to do it. There's also a conversation around it. And then also, you're asking them to do more than just go through the process and come out the other side. You're asking them to commit to a life change. So there's going to be some friction about how much of our population this is going to be able to serve. And I want to make sure I say that, because I do think there's parts of the community that think this is the solution to all of our problems, and we'll never have to do any prosecution whatsoever again. And there's some folks who say this is not working for anybody. And the answer is it's part of a broader comprehensive strategy by which to approach public safety.

I love that. And that's exactly what we're talking about. This is an important tool. It's part of our forums. Our other forum, and this is where you can talk to those people. Let's call it, for the sake of this conversation, probation. That's what this court support services thing is going to be doing. And it's much, it's like, it ain't easy for somebody to be on probation. Yeah.

So I have two questions, and then I'll try to make these really direct, pretty brief. So the supervision conversation, so we don't have supervision currently, correct?

It's bench supervision. Which does not work. That means that you go out and follow these folks around? I can't.

Oh, yeah.

So that's why I love our community court, because there is supervision. But we've never had, well, I guess when I first started in the 90s, the early 90s, we had supervision. Tacoma had probation. They used the county, and it worked well. Budget decisions were made immediately. Mr. Botch probably remembers this. But after we looked at this as a court, and we thought, man, this is something that needs to happen. I got to tell you, council member, when we go and talk to judges and other courts in this state and in other states, and they say, you have a city of 230-something thousand, and you don't have a probation department, they look at me like I'm insane.

Do other cities of our size have probation departments, or do they contract with the county for something like that?

Many have their own. Fife has their own. Bonney Lake, I can't say for sure Bonney Lake. Lakewood has their own. Many places have their own.

Okay. That's really good to know as we're thinking about kind of the conversation here. The last question I had is, and looking at the ask here, which I think is important for You know, as we think about what our budget going forward, I guess my broader question, I'm on the board of the Association of Washington Cities, and we're talking a lot about indigent defense costs, right? So that's a huge unfunded liability, at least for a lot of cities where we're going to have to pay more for indigent defense. So do you have a large number of indigent people coming through the municipal court that we're going to be looking, or that we're going to be hoping, that is going to be a part of our work to try to pay for in the near future?

Well, yeah, sure. I mean, let's face it. a huge percentage. I mean, probably 90% of the people that come in to see us are indigent. Easily. Easily. But that's the nature of the beast.

I put that out there for my colleagues. We're not a county, so I don't know if we think about it quite as much. Because the county, it's a huge part of their budget, is their court system. are collecting data because cities see a huge amount of costs in the future with providing adequate defense for indigent folks in our court system, which this is just something else I want to put out there. It's going to be, in the next couple of budget cycles, a large cost upon us if we can't prevail upon the state to pay for it. And so it's just another piece that I want to make sure I've brought into the conversation because it's something we're actively working on at the state level. And we'd probably like to see it part of our legislative priorities as we start formulating those. Otherwise, those are all my questions. Thank you so much for the presentation. I probably have more questions, but I don't want to belabor it here. Maybe that's a follow-up conversation with you all.

Absolutely. You know how to get a hold of me. Yep.

Thank you.

Council Member Palmer.

Thank you, Mayor. I love that we're leading in this and that we're going to be a, or are a, an example for other municipalities with our therapeutic court system. But did I just hear that we would not be leading in the court support services specialist? That's something that other municipalities do.

I'm sorry to say that you're correct. Everybody does this, basically. But we are leading in that we're finally recognizing that Tacoma needs this. So it's time has come. And again, it worked to the extent that it could without having a supervision department. But that's why we got Christine, the subject matter expert.

Thank you. And I don't know if this is a question for Judge Sontag or if you wanted to answer. As far as the number of folks that are on warrant or become, I don't know the right verbiage, have warrants and then can no longer continue on through the program, would this position, the support services unit, would that affect those numbers in a way that those people could continue with the program?

It's a really great question. So how I would answer that is earlier when we talked about these were individuals that were referred and then later decided not to enter. So 48% of those warrants were issued for those community court referrals, 37% 23% of behavioral health court referrals were due to warrant issues. Where our pretrial services division that's under this court support services unit is going to help us is they're going to be able to help connect individuals who are in the referral process or still in that pretrial status, helping them connect them to health and social services, help them get stabilized. So then they are in a better position to resolve their case, where they are now able to go through a referral for a therapeutic court and or they're able to take another resolution or exercise their constitutional right to go to trial. So you're going to see an expansion of this court support services unit. You're going to see everyone that's involved in the Tacoma Municipal Court help through pretrial services if they're in the pretrial status of their case. Or if they're post-conviction, under this post-conviction court support services, you're then going to have them get help connected to services so they can satisfy court conditions, have less court appearances, and then end their supervision sooner. The odds of them having a warrant. Is going to be significantly reduced, yes.

Thank you.

Great question.

A good example for that would be with these people, these folks that have, you know, they need to get an alcohol evaluation, and they need to do the follow-up. They need to get domestic violence treatment, and they need to do the follow-up. That's where we're losing them. That's where we're losing them, and that's what our court support services unit is going to be. They're going to hold these folks accountable and help. I mean, yeah.

Thank you. Councilman Rumba.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you so much, Judge, for coming in today. Really appreciate everyone who's here. And I think that what Judge Sontag just brought up was really important because I have talked to her in the past about people a lot of the people trying to use community court are people that Need housing so they're not prepared necessarily to go through the service because they aren't stable and So helping with those pre tribals trial services trying to get people into into housing or into shelter Which is something that we do here at the city and don't have enough of I think it's really important to have more success with our court program so I totally want to make sure that we're working together and you understand we are your partner and and making sure that we see more people utilize this service, because I think it is really necessary to have behavioral health, a therapeutic court, and a community court. And I have believed in this for a long time. So thank you so much for that. I wanted to know, one of the things that I'm looking to support that we don't have here is a court appointed advocate and i want to know how a court appointed advocate is going to help the court the municipal court i'm not really familiar with that term okay so um we have people who um there's a case that's a domestic violence that would be like three or four is that right it's uh

It's assault fourth degree.

Assault fourth degree. Thank you for correcting me. And the idea that our paralegal would get a hold of somebody to ask them if they want to go through. I think that your number is really low, actually, for how many people actually have domestic violence cases in our system. Because a lot of times when they get called back after 13 months, possibly, They're not interested, because at that point, they weren't reached out to soon enough. They don't feel like they were heard. It's the wrong kind of person talking to them. Not to say paralegals aren't great, but that's not somebody who understands what it's like to have gone through domestic violence. Also, so if that person was helping you get more cases, I guess my thing is what I'm looking for is to see more people utilize municipal court who've had a domestic violence case. But not just that. I want them to feel heard. And secondly, I want the person who may have been the abuser, the suspected abuser, to get help then rather than see them in superior court.

And that's exactly what we're trying to do. I think what you're referring to is a forensic victim's advocate, which is on the prosecutor's side of the house. And correct me if I'm wrong, but what I think I'm hearing from you is the victim or the alleged victim in these cases having a voice in the process. And that's not something that we can control. I think it's very important. that's a conversation I think is better had with the executive branch to determine whether or what they should do. But I think that's an important conversation. I think that creates justice, that helps justice.

Yes, I just want to say if we're supporting that, I understand that that's going to be a cost that we don't already have. So I'm just saying that there's a whole system of places we're trying to put in things that will be supportive on the victim side and also on your side, which in the work that you do to get somebody to want to come in and not go to jail instead. And I really would like people to take the option that you're giving them, because I don't think they get as much out of going to jail, serving time. I think they get more out of this program, which will change their life forever, and we won't see them again. I really appreciate the conversation about recidivism. I think it's what our court is for, is to try to create people who feel that they're valuable, and they had a chance to see another opportunity out there for themselves.

Well, thank you so much for saying that. And I think a lot of that, when we see these people, like second, third time domestic violence folks, and thinking, why was this a failure? Wasn't there treatment? And when I look back at it, I see, no, they flunked out of it, and then these other courts just passed the buck. And we don't want to pass the buck anymore. That's what our court support services is going to do with these people. Again, these are not the cases we're going to push into strictly therapeutic courts, but they're going to be part of our therapeutic model. The other thing that I really appreciate you talking about and talking about from a partnership perspective is the services side of the house, yeah, please, please find a way to fund those folks too because We can make the connections, but the stuff's got to be out there to connect to. Thank you so much.

Of course, thank you. Judge Krupa, thank you so much for your presentation. Probably the, oh, I'm sorry, we had Deputy Mayor in my remarks. Go ahead.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Judge Krupa, Sontag, and Flores. Really appreciate all the work that each of you are doing and the whole team. And I do appreciate this conversation around therapeutic courts. I think it's really important to have Have it and be it's have the success of it, but then also I think it really helps the holistic portion of our justice system I have just a few questions And and one of them and this might actually be a city manager question is In the build-out of the civil infractions, particularly the photo-enforced tickets, I know that there's some restrictions on how those funds can be used. Does this allow, is it currently allowed for any of those funds to be used to support court services?

Deputy Mayor, I'll have to get back to you on that one, what the restrictions are and what we might be able to expend on with regards to courts. I'm Not sure right off the top. So we'll get back to you on that one.

Great. Thank you for that. Part of the reason why I bring it up is if we are building out our camera program, which we are, there's the other side of it, which is the side of folks that need to be seen for those infractions. And I do recall that some of that money is required to go back into paying for the system itself, public safety improvements in the roads. But then also the state actually takes a pretty significant portion as well. So I'm just curious if there's a additional nexus that we can maybe support the court system in making sure that they're adequately staffed to handle the level of infractions that may present itself for that. And if not, then that might be something that we need to add to our legislative agenda to be fixed, because I think that the state would have to change that for us to allow for that as well. Sorry, I have notes all over the place. The other question I had is, if I recall, the public safety sales tax, the eligibility, there is eligibility for the criminal justice side of the house, is that correct?

For the public safety sales tax, Deputy Mayor? Yes, there is.

Gotcha. Thank you so much. Okay, I just wanted to double check that that was a funding source that was available to us. I'm trying to nail into the nuts and bolts of the ask here. And so the critical needs and estimated costs that you laid out, these are ongoing costs. So if it was authorized, this biennium, we would expect to see some level of this Ongoing correct correct yeah, okay? I just wanted to double check on that because as has been mentioned earlier most of its coming through the general fund But maybe there's opportunities for other funding sources, and so I'm trying to reconnect back to that And then the question I also have right now is your is The technology and data support that you currently have, does that exist within the current city's IT department? Or do you already have some standalone IT staff that do support you? Or is this an add to that, potentially?

The tech folks that the city provides are really tech folks. They can't build reports and stuff for us. The folks that I have working for me are professionals. That's part of what I was trying to say they're stretched, and you know what they're not experts in doing this So I'm looking for somebody who knows how to do this kind of stuff above and beyond my staff because my staff is they're Direct they're at capacity basically and I and you know I'd have to train them and Like I can't I just can't do that.

I got too busy doing other stuff Totally understand that so there's like some really specific expertise you're looking to expand within the skill set of that department department or whatever in order for you to generate the reports, get the data information, tease it out so you can make adjustments to the organization.

Absolutely, Deputy Mayor, absolutely.

Okay, that's super helpful, and I think maybe there's some potential for some administrative introspection on that. Maybe there's a capacity we can build within our current ID department that's not available, or Or maybe it is a standalone thing. I'm just trying to be creative with how those dollars could be used and what kind of workflows might be needed. But that's obviously a conversation we'd have with our city manager. And then one topic that you brought up also, and many other cities do, is the probation officers. Could you talk to me a little bit more What kind of gap that that presents the city by not having them and how how it could benefit? The courts you got you all if we had some level of probationary officers, and I don't know what that looks like I'm not exactly fully understanding what their their duties and responsibilities are and that also Is that something that? falls within the court itself, those probation officers? Or is it like TBD that has those officers? I'm not sure exactly about that.

RICK BERKELEY JR.: It's actually a court department. I think, and Christine can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe in some states, I don't think in Washington, that there are separate models where There's a probation department that's not connected to the courts. I've never heard of it. The federal probation is part of the courts. Most Pierce County probation is part of the courts. But what these folks do, what you want to, just from a big picture perspective, we're trying to get away, and this is the trend in supervision, get away from the cop, if you will, model, and towards more of the, let's call it the social worker model. And what their job is, is to hold people accountable and change behavior. And so is there a liability to the city? Well, the liability to the city with not having it is recidivism. Because when these people don't get the tools they need and aren't supervised to change their behavior, they're just coming back in our court, right? Or Lakewood's court or someplace else's court. And they're committing more serious crimes. or the same crimes, and people are getting hurt, and families are getting destroyed, et cetera. People are getting killed. So why not having it? I think it's just wrong, wrong not to have it. Certainly it puts a responsibility on the city, because when you're supervising people, you have a responsibility to supervise. There's legal ramifications there, but this isn't something new, Deputy Mayor. This is something that's been around forever. It's just something new from a city perspective, having our own department. And really, I've got to stress it again, this is something that's time has come, and it's going to make this city safer.

Great. Thank you so much. So would probation officers within the court program make sense in the In the future? Because it's not necessarily in your critical needs ask now.

Well, that is. So that first one, that is one person.

Gotcha. Okay.

Support services specialist. I see Council Member Ramba saying don't use that word. We don't like to use that word, probation officer, but we can use it. That's the probation officer. Okay. That's the person who's going to be Christine's right-hand person. And you know what? You're right. At some point, we may need more. I mean, if things keep getting bigger and bigger, yeah. I mean, if we want to help people and we want to hold people accountable.

Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that clarification. I just didn't understand the nomenclature.

I know. Well, I appreciate that we straightened that one out.

Yeah. Thank you. Okay. That... brings everything full circle, OK? And then aside from this, I'm assuming that there's going to be some level of startup or one-time costs. Has that been calculated into this as well, or is that going to be a separate line item?

You know, I'm going to look back to my staff here, but I think we've kind of built the startup costs into this. And I see them all shaking their heads. So yeah, we did a good job with the money.

Okay. And part of the reason why I ask that is if, for example, we look into opioid settlement dollars, those are one-time funds and they're not going to be ongoing. And so whatever we're doing, we want to make sure that there's a fiscal sustainability over time. So maybe those can be worked into if we do happen to use those for that. It could be used for like one-time startup costs potentially in order to support the overall program.

Thank you.

Yeah. Okay, that's kind of the nitty gritty questions I had. I just, again, I appreciate everybody and all the work that you're doing. And I really think that this is a fantastic model for many others across the state to utilize in the country. So you guys are doing some cutting edge work here and just really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Deputy Mayor. Let's try this again. So Judge Krupa, thank you again for your presentation. The thing that I'm most excited about this is that unlike so much of what we review as a city where we're reacting to crises or shortcomings, sure, there are tough budget conversations we have to have. But this is an instance where we're taking something that's already successful and talking about how we can scale it and make it even more successful. So I just want to start by saying I really appreciate that. I, too, share the questions about the decline admissions or referrals. So it sounds like you have a report that is going to be forwarded to counsel. In that report, it would be great to just learn more about what some of the top reasons are in consultation with the prosecutor's office, with the courts, for what those are. And what I'd be interested in seeing is with this budget ask, not simply how many more people can we grow the program with, but for example, if you could see room for making the amount of people already referred to the program more successful and maybe dropping the amount of declines in a way that's sustainable and successful. Do you think that there's room for that as well, just making the current program more efficient?

I think... I think so. It's always an ongoing project, and we're doing that. Again, there are a lot of things that need to be taken into consideration here, and I think that conversation and the data that you're seeking is what Judge Sontag was talking about because, again, she will be presenting to you regarding the community court. I don't know if you had anything to add to that, Judge Sontag, now.

Yes.

Reports forthcoming.

The report is forthcoming, and I think that the plan, as we've laid it out, is going to reduce those numbers of decline cases.

Great. And since what we are talking about, besides literally healing the community and improving people's lives, is that this is also very real budget savings down the road, because folks who don't continue to recycle through the jail system and can restart their lives as productive citizens, those are also people who are houseable, employable, and aren't permanent wards of the state, basically. you actually can put a price tag on that. So to the best extent possible, as we are talking about the budget moving forward, do you think it would be possible to maybe put an estimated amount of savings if we're reducing the recidivism rate, if we're increasing the success of the program? Is there a way to basically measure the return on investment for that?

I don't think we can put a metric on it, really. I don't think we can do that. What I think we can do is understand exactly what you said, that what we're doing is we're changing people's lives, and the end result is that it's going to make the community safer, and it's going to make the community better for everybody. It's really hard, though, to kind of quantify that and say it's worth this amount of money. But I guess I would say not doing it going to cost a lot more, right? Because we're going to have more of these crimes because these people are not going to change. You're going to have people that are angry because of the broken windows crimes. You're going to have families that are affected. You're going to have the perception that the city isn't safe. So, you know, can we put a dollar figure on that? No, but we can certainly put a public perception figure on it and we can put a frankly, responsibility analysis on it, that this is the responsible way to go forward.

Of course, I appreciate that. And final question, I want to start by expressing my appreciation for our earlier meeting where we talked about this in greater depth with also the perspective of the city attorney's office and local law enforcement. My understanding after that conversation is that the court doesn't operate in isolation, but law enforcement, the city attorney's office, community partners are integral parts of the whole, of this integrated process. Again, going back to the benefit of this program of therapeutic court, is that this isn't just simply about making folks whole and addressing the root causes of crime, but it also allows us to be a lot more responsive to crime as a whole, and in particular, the quality of life stuff, the property crime, the vandalism, what have you, right? And so, as we talk about expanding the successful program, Can you talk more about the conversations that we'll also be having with law enforcement, with the city attorney's office, and basically back to the notion of return on investment. Can you talk more about if we are to grow this program, frankly, are we able to go after more crimes in the community? Will people see more relief when it comes to enforcement if we're referring more people to the program?

I think so, but again, that's kind of outside of my area because of being a separate branch. I can't really talk to that. I think, though, that I use the word forums in my slides. By us providing these forums to deal with these types of people and these types of offenses, it will allow law enforcement it will allow the prosecutor's office to process these cases, to go out and make the interventions from a law enforcement perspective and from a prosecutor's perspective to go forward with the cases because they know that the court has their back. We have the forums to take care of these people. So that's the best way to do it. And again, I'm not here to tell the prosecutor or the police, you should arrest for this or you should arrest for that. That's a bigger conversation that I can't be a part of. But as you said, we're partners in the big picture, and we have these forums that we believe are successful, and we have the room to expand them. We just need funding.

So it sounds like on top of scaling up the program, one of the other opportunities, if I'm hearing correctly, Judge, is just making sure the departments are talking with each other better, whether it's law enforcement, city attorney's office, the courts, and whatever we can do to better facilitate that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think we're always willing to talk and absolutely be part of the conversation. I've told you that. I know I have a great relationship. We have a great relationship as a court with the prosecutor's office, with the police department. So yeah, we want to be part of the conversation.

Great. So this is more of an open request to the city manager's office. But as we flesh out the budget, which I understand will have accompanying goals and metrics for each department that we associate with the budget, I think referrals to therapeutic court or some kind of measurement for how we're doing with these, not just for the courts, but also maybe the city attorney's office, that might be something exploring. So just an open missive on that end.

Wonderful. Thank you.

All right. Judge, thank you so much for your presentation.

All right. Thank you, everybody.

Pleasure. Great conversation. All right, moving on to item number two. Our second agenda item is the Tacoma smelter plume annual update. And with that, I'd like to call on Justin Zakorin from the Department of Ecology to begin the presentation.

Good afternoon, Mayor Ipsen and council members. Welcome. I'll note that I am joined today by the health department, who we work with, Esther Goumier and Chris Matter. And then I also have my colleague here, Sarah Miller, who does our outreach and education to the community. So we provide these annual updates as a way to check in with a progress update, but also let you know about initiatives that we've taken or are looking at to improve outreach and the longevity of community awareness around the Tacoma smelter plume, which will be a forever problem given the scale of the plume itself.

I'm going to advance the slide.

I got this. I got the thing. So today, we'll talk about program updates. Generally, that'll just be me covering the yard program, the soil safety program, and our voluntary cleanup program. And then we'll also hear from the health department on their outreach efforts in the community. We'll also hear from Sarah who will respond to some questions we received from this council last year and provide an update as to those conversations regarding notifying folks before they purchase property in the Tacoma smelter plume and Also a look at moving forward with the outreach effort and engagement of the community So A real quick rundown, and we've reworked this presentation a little bit here to make it a little shorter on the background of the plume. We realize you guys have heard this presentation for many years, but perhaps there's some of you who are less familiar with the plume itself. There was a copper smelter that operated in Ruston and North Tacoma from 1890 to 1986, about 100 years. At one time, it had the world's tallest smokestack, and smokestacks are really good at removing pollution and sending it somewhere else, and this one was excellent at that. Prevailing winds actually carried the pollution from the Asarco operations all across the southern Puget Sound Basin up to Seattle and down to Lacey. The EPA declared the Asarco site a Superfund site in 1983 as one of the first in the nation. And in 1993, they started cleanup in the study area, which is a one mile radius around the former smelter site itself, the residential upland portion. The Tacoma smelter plume project that Ecology runs is really funded by the environmental liabilities we won from ASARCO after they filed for bankruptcy in 2005. We won about $95 million in that lawsuit, along with many other states across the country. We have put those funds into an interest-bearing account called the Clean Up Settlement Account. And we use those funds to... Well, to fund the different programs of our project, which are outlined here in the pie chart, cleanup, outreach and education, technical assistance. And as you can see, the cleanup is the largest majority of the funds and expenditures that we do in this project. It turns out scooping up soil and hauling it off and disposing of it is quite expensive. The outreach is another significant portion of our work, and we feel like it's one of the most significant portions of our work when it comes to impact to the community and making them aware of the risks that are associated with contamination in the soil. We also offer a technical assistance program. This is to help property owners and developers who are looking to build housing or remodel their homes and who may be disturbing contaminated soil and need guidance with how to work with it, how to sample it, how to clean it up. So the yard program is the first of our cleanup programs, and it started in 2013. It is a voluntary program, meaning we make offers for cleanup to qualifying properties, and they can choose to accept or decline. It is a relatively long process since we have to go and meet with every owner, design a cleanup specially for their property, and then go through the state's public works contracting process with those designs, and then start work. The work itself can take quite a bit. So there are some reasons why folks may not be interested in participating, but we generally have a pretty good opt-in rate. We do soil sampling and replacement through this program. And for every property that we sample and find that arsenic is above 100 parts per million or lead is above 500 parts per million in their front or backyard, they would qualify for this. You can see on the bottom there we have a progress bar for our current status on cleanup. To date, we have 415 properties that we've cleaned up. We have 22 yards that are currently in cleanup. And I'll use properties and yards interchangeably. Apologies for that. But we have 22 properties that are receiving cleanup from us right now. And we have 46 more that are being planned, with a remainder of 576 yards remaining. And I should note that about 133 have opted out as a process of our offers and work here. The map shows the extent of our service area for the yard program. southern Bashamori in yellow, and then the study area, the EPA study area in blue there, surrounding the former Starquist Multisite. And then from Point Defiance down just past Highway 16 in green, there's the Tacoma service area.

All of this is where we do our work.

So just to give you a better visual for where our cleanup has been active, you can see on the map here the green boxes indicate properties that we have cleaned up. And the yellow boxes are those that are in progress now with more planned in 2027 in salmon or red. The sampling results that we've conducted sampling since the beginning of this program, 2013, we've sampled over 3,000 properties. Of those 3,000 or so properties, we found about 13% of them qualify for our program. Roughly the same amount are below MACA, meaning they're below the state cleanup action level for arsenic and don't qualify. And then the vast majority, about 75%, are above the state cleanup law level of 20 parts per million for arsenic, but don't qualify for the state-funded cleanup through the YARD program. And these are the folks that we focus on for outreach and education and who benefit from the work that the health department does. Another portion of our cleanup program is the soil safety program. This actually pre-existed the yard program. It was one of our first initiatives, and it was to protect the most vulnerable in our communities, meaning children. Zero to six years old are the most vulnerable because they're often closer to the contaminated soil. They may be interacting with it more and putting their hands in their mouths, like when kids are teething and can't help themselves. We serve parks, schools, childcare centers, and daycares in this program and offer free sampling, site evaluation, and remedial actions. We work with DCYF on this. DCYF actually has a code that requires license applicants to check in with us and determine whether or not we need to evaluate their properties in an effort to make sure that children aren't being exposed to metals in soil. To date, in the Tacoma city limits, we've supported cleanup of seven parks, eight childcare centers, nine schools and preschools, and 27 in-home daycares. And I'll note that in-home daycares is a big deal because these are usually small family operations that can't afford to do the cleanup themselves. The last portion of our program is the technical assistance piece. This primarily works with property owners and developers that are seeking to go through the voluntary cleanup program that the Toxics Cleanup Program of Ecology offers. This is a way for property owners to do their own remediation and receive state support via our technical assistance. We provide free support to those folks. That means walking them through our guidance for sampling and to get them to a no further action letter, meaning they have cleaned their soils and are good to go per MACA. The model remedies guidance is a key piece of this. It's a document that we have online on our website and that has the sampling methodology that we require for property owners to ascertain whether or not they need to do remedial actions and then recommended remedial actions that will get them that NFA. So broadly speaking, this program has impacted many properties in the plume, lots of acreage, and it's always really satisfying to see how just a simple program can help support folks do their own remediation. The technical assistance impact here in Tacoma amounts to about 52 properties sampled per our guidance, 23 properties below, the cleanup level for arsenic, 29 properties enrolled in VCP for cleanup during development, and 20 properties that received a no further action. And you can see on the map here, the pending cleanups are marked in red, and the completed cleanups are in green. Next, we'll hear from the Pierce County Health Department. Come up, Pierce County Health Department.

Good afternoon. Esther Beaumier, Tacoma Pierce County Health Department. I'm here with my colleague, Chris Matter, at the other end over there. And so we're delighted to be here today joining Ecology for this presentation. Chris and I have over 20 years of experience in this project. And so a little bit, Chris is going to go through more of this in depth, but the basic things that we do are we take soil samples. We do a lot of So if we've previously sampled, we do a lot of interpretation of the results. Most of actually what we end up doing is answering a lot of questions and concerns and trying to allay people's concerns about the Tacoma smelter plume. We promote healthy actions, which are common sense approaches to protect you and your family. And then some of the fun things we do, like hand washing presentations and our community garden signs. All right, I'll hand it over to you, Chris.

Thanks again for having us today. And I just want to say at the beginning, all the numbers I'm going to mention are numbers that have happened since last year's presentation from Ecology. We do have two different types of soil sampling. Our yard program sampling is a specific protocol designed by Ecology. Those samples go to a lab, lets folks know if they qualify for soil remediation or not. And in the past year, eight houses I did that sampling at. These are mostly new homeowners where previous residents had declined sampling or occasionally a property that qualified for remediation some time ago has done significant landscaping changes in the interim and ecology asked me to go back out and resample. And then our home soil testing program, I've sampled 175 properties. Five of those were in the yard program area and had additional what we call educational sampling. So this is where I talk to a homeowner. Where do you want to put a garden in? Where do your kids like to play? What bush does your dog dig under and track soil into the house? more useful, perhaps, to residents in that much larger area that Justin showed two maps ago, where it's from Northeast Tacoma all the way down through Lakewood, Stiltham, DuPont. No possibility of remediation by ecology there, but really working with homeowners to figure out how their family is being exposed and what are the simple things they can do to reduce risk to their family from that exposure. Five of those homes, as I mentioned, were in the yard program area. And it was folks, new homeowners, properties that didn't qualify, folks who had a lot of concerns. And I would go out and talk to them specifically about how they used the yard. And then also lots of folks getting questions answered by phone or email, homeowners, new homeowners, previous sampling results, explaining those to them. We do work with schools and child care. Some of you were at our Board of Health study session in January where I gave a bit of our hand washing presentation that we give. And so five schools, 31 classrooms of preschool, kindergarten, and first grade students. 609 students took home what we call our dirt alert packet that has our brochures, a fingernail brush, shared information with their grownups at home. We do songs with them. It's a very fun part of my job. We do a science experiment with a black light where they get to use glowing lotion and see how well they're washing their hands. And then I'm the one who goes out and does the sampling under the soil safety program that Justin was talking about as well. So there were three child cares that were newly licensed that I sampled. One additional child care that did not have accessible soil in their play area. So I just assessed that. Community garden signs that we post on exterior fencing of these gardens so that when folks are walking by in the neighborhood they might See the info and decide to learn more about their own yards We've posted 25 signs in total the only one that was posted since the last presentation was at the newish still a come historical community garden And then Esther mentioned healthy actions. These are those risk reduction strategies that I talk to folks about. Most of them are free. They're pretty simple. They're relatively common sense. A lot of things inside the house, like just taking shoes off so you're not tracking soil in where your kids are crawling around and then putting their hands in their mouths. you know, being exposed to when they're playing on the floor, vacuuming and damp dusting often to keep dirt down, keeping kids' toys and teethers clean, and then washing hands well after playing outside or working in the garden. And then outside healthy actions, like wearing a dust mask when you're mowing, dampening dry soil. We talk a lot about raised beds for fruits and vegetables when arsenic levels are above 40 parts per million in the in-ground soil. Washing fruits and veggies, although I'm adamant that I don't want people telling their kids not to eat raspberries like fresh off the vine in their yard. So I'm always trying to just, you know, try to get 90% of those things inside and wash them well. Fruits also don't tend to take up arsenic and lead into the part of the plant that you eat. And then wearing gloves when people are gardening, recommending nitrile gloves for the many gardeners who hate wearing thicker gloves. And then another healthy action is covering bear patches in yards where kids play with a mulch or grass. And so we do what's called the Get Covered program. We advertise it annually in Ecology's mailer that goes out to the yard program folks. Eligible homes have kids playing in the yard. 148 properties participated in this last year. And all of those folks got what we call a Get Covered toolkit, which is just our drug alert packet, like I mentioned, for hand washing presentations, but there's an additional double-sided mulching instruction sheet in there and then a list of local resources for where they could purchase more mulch or a rubber playground mat or borrow a rake or a wheelbarrow from the tool library. And then I also drop off two bags of play chip mulch on their doorstep. That's a cool program, I think.

And... Yeah, so thank you, Chris. If you do want to reach out to us directly, you can either reach out to Chris or myself, or we have our shared inbox at dirtalert at tpchd.org. We also have our website where you can look up your address if you live in Tacoma and you're interested in your results or your constituents have any questions. I think you probably need the presentation, Sarah.

Yeah, is the presentation done?

Oh, it's not up there. Oh, okay.

Okay. All right. Thank you. So, yeah, I'm Sarah Miller, and I'm here to kind of talk about the future a little bit, but first kind of responding to a discussion that we had last year at this meeting when we, I think one thing that, another thing that the health department does is send out letters to new homeowners explaining that they've purchased a home in the Tacoma smelter plume in Tacoma and there might be arsenic and lead. We had a robust discussion about people being, people's responses to that and not all of them are Happy to hear that. We do get some unhappy folks calling, either Justin or myself or the health department. And one of the ideas that we brought up as a potential solution was this seller's disclosure form, Form 17. In the real estate process, a seller has to fill out a pretty lengthy form. that asks a whole bunch of questions. They do have a question about soil or groundwater contamination, but it's not specific to Tacoma. And it also doesn't provide any resources for the buyers. We have had this idea at Ecology for a number of years. It would be great to add a resource to this form. CHANGES TO THIS FORM DO REQUIRE LEGISLATION AT THE STATE LEVEL. SO COUNCILMEMBER RUMBA ASKED US TO GO AND BRIEF THE SPEAKER, SPEAKER JENKINS, AND SO WE WENT THROUGH THE PROCESS AT ECOLOGY TO through our internal channels, we wrote a memo that was then delivered to the speaker earlier this year, and we did not hear any response from her, so don't know what she thought of it, but we did what we were asked to do. And one of the ideas that we, included in the memo is instead of just talking about, you know, if we were going to add to this form, instead of just having something that was so specific to the Tacoma smelter plume, and this is a statewide form, is to add our ecology statewide resource called What's in My Neighborhood. You can see the website down there. This is the landing page for it, and you can see all of the various locations for contaminated spots that are being either cleaned up, have been cleaned up, or still need to be cleaned up across the state. If you zoom into it, here's Tacoma and Ruston. YOU CAN GET A LITTLE MORE DETAILS. YOU CAN CLICK ON THOSE INDIVIDUAL DOTS AND SEE WHAT THE ACTUAL SITE IS. MOST OF THOSE SITES DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE ASARCO SMELTER. BUT YOU CAN SEE HERE THAT THERE'S A CALL OUT FOR THE ARSENIC AND LEAD CONTAMINATION. AND SO IF YOU WERE TO CLICK ON THAT, YOU WOULD GET THIS LINK TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE DACOMA SMELTER PLUME. We thought this was a good resource, and we mentioned that in this memo. And then coincidentally, the Realtor Association over this last legislative session ran a bill that would make some changes to that seller's disclosure form having to do with the pollution liability insurance. And the bill didn't go anywhere, just short session, ran out of time issues. And so we approached them several months ago to ask them if they were interested, if they were planning on running that bill again, and would they consider adding in our idea, this What's in My Neighborhood resource. And we had a couple of discussions with them. And the person we talked to, Bill Clark, he went and spoke to the realtor attorney work group about it and came back to report that those folks had some concerns. They are worried about making property transactions leverage for regulatory action. And they are also worried about adding one more way for a potential buyer to negotiate. And so he did suggest perhaps we could go back and look at the idea of a handout. And we were a little surprised because a few years ago, I think prior to Justin and I, It was the Realtor Association's idea to add something to Form 17. And the realtors had told us that a handout wouldn't be a great idea because it's really hard to keep it up to date. It's hard to keep it in the hands of realtors. And obviously, you can't make a realtor give a client something like that unless it's regulated, which is not our intention. interested in regulations. We're interested in providing resources for buyers. So we are, that's where we are right now. Our ecology leadership is not going to propose this as agency sponsored legislation. And we would certainly support it if it did. go forward as legislation, but it won't be part of any legislative package that we would propose. So that is that. The one last issue that we wanted to bring up, and again, in the spirit of looking forward, moving forward, YOU KNOW, JUSTIN MENTIONED OUR TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAM AND THE MODEL REMEDIES GUIDANCE WHICH WE HAVE AS A RESOURCE FOR DEVELOPERS. OUR COLLEAGUE WHO RUNS THE VOLUNTARY CLEANUP PROGRAM WORKS REALLY CLOSELY WITH DEVELOPERS AND FEELS THAT WE AREN'T REACHING ENOUGH DEVELOPERS. THEY'RE NOT HEARING ENOUGH ABOUT THE PROGRAM. THEY'RE NOT UNDERSTANDING. the intricacies of it and how helpful we can be. And we don't have much of a stick, for want of a better word, to make folks participate. So we earlier this year sent out a survey to developers in the Puget Sound area who had worked with the VCP program in the past. We got a great response. We sent out about 100 surveys, and we got about a third responders, six of them from Tacoma. And just asking them what they thought of the program, if it was helpful, if it was easy to understand, et cetera. We took those survey results and we actually met with City of Tacoma planning staff a couple months ago now and We had a great discussion with them. It sounds like a lot of them are pretty new and We're realizing that we need to come back and meet with them once a year They agreed that that would be a great idea. Just you know staff turnover and this is a relatively small program, I imagine, the VCP program. Our biggest discussion points with the planners were our support in general of a local jurisdiction creating an ordinance requiring sampling and cleanup. And this, I'm talking about like new development or for development only. This is separate than our yard program. THE EXAMPLE THAT WE USE IS THE CITY OF FEDERAL WAY HAS A CODE THAT REQUIRES ANY NEW DEVELOPMENT, THOSE DEVELOPERS CHECK WITH US FIRST, WITH ECOLOGY. THEY GET THEIR SOIL TESTED. IF IT'S ABOVE THAT MOTCA LEVEL, THEY HAVE TO JOIN OUR PROGRAM OR THEY WON'T GET PERMITS. AND THAT'S VERY CUT AND DRY. In Tacoma, we don't hear from developers. We don't know about development until they get to the SEPA level of, which is a pretty large level development. So we miss out on individual new homes, new decks kinds of things. So we're really supportive of that Federal Way model. We also talked to the planning department about adding the Tacoma smelter plume info and the voluntary cleanup info to some sort of permitting checklist. And finally, we are actively working with them to create some either website and definitely a flyer for inside the planning office for folks who come by to check on permits. you know, a QR code and some quick info about the VCP program and why it's important to talk to us and how we can help you. So these are just some things that we're working on for the future. And with that, we are all finished and happy to answer questions that you have for any of us.

Thank you for your presentation. I'm going to start by calling on Council Member Rumba.

Thank you so much, Mayor. Thank you all for being here today. Thank you, Sarah, for following up on that. And I'm wondering, is it possible to share your memo with me? So I'm meeting with Speaker Jenkins in another week. And also, I can meet with Senator Trudeau or Representative Fai and have someone else. put it forward, but I could, I mean, I just, I would love to have the information of things that you were looking to do, because I thought your form was great. I think that's exactly how to handle it. I understand realtors' concerns, but when we're selling something and people don't know, I just think that that is just, that's wrong. And they don't know because they moved from Seattle, and they maybe are, like, we're born after, and They don't know about the small turn. I think it's good for people to know more than less. So I would love to help with that. And I understand you said that you're not moving it forward. But is there something I could do to help move it forward?

Yeah, we definitely I mean, I'm sure it's fine to share the memo with you. I'll double check.

I mean, and I don't need to be the one. I can give it to Council Member Hines. It's his district. But I mean, I don't have to.

But I just would like to see this done. Our informal name for this memo all last year was the Rumba Memo.

So it already has your name on it.

Wow.

I appreciate that, but I think it's probably more of us think that than just me.

The message that we have to convey is ecology has done everything we can. We're willing to talk to the realtors one more time, especially if we get some feedback from you all. Otherwise, somebody else needs to take it on. If you all

would like to you know again we support the idea we're just not gonna do it i will do it yes okay thank you you're welcome thank you customer thank you um i'm wondering because it looks like there's a lot of folks if we're looking at i don't know what number slide this is but the the yard program service area um there's a lot of folks that are within the 21 to 100 parts per Million. Million. And I'm wondering if there's any conversation about lowering the threshold to receive services within the YARD program.

The level of 100 parts per million for arsenic to qualify was set by looking at lowering Community risk, broadly speaking, by targeting the highest contaminated properties with the funds that we have from that Osarco settlement. So should there be more funding made available for additional cleanup to get to those MACA levels? I think we... have a pretty solid program here and would be willing to move forward. Ecology would probably, I mean, I can't speak for the director. But I think that that would be something that certainly Ecology would like to move forward with in increasing the amount of cleanup that we do in Tacoma, certainly.

Is there any other? Oh, go for it.

Oh, I would just add that that money that we got from the Osarco settlement, the almost $95 million, is we are going to run out of that money before we've cleaned up all the homes that are at $100 or higher. So just another important consideration.

Yeah, Sarah brought up a good point. I mean, currently, of that $95 million or so, we have about $30 million left. It takes about costs for cleanup, and we do groups of about 25 properties through the public works contracting process. One group will cost us between $1.5 to $2 million to do, depending on what the bids look like as they come in.

Yeah, that's expensive. Is the only criteria to be above that parts per million, or is there anything else that they have to, is there like a certain wage level or income level?

So we did, because there's roughly 1,200 properties that qualify that we've found so far. Some properties we can't offer cleanup to because it's just not practicable. Maybe they're not built on a slope, things like that. We don't need to talk about that. What you're asking is, is there a consideration of economic disadvantage or health need? What we do in the service area outside of the EPA, that blue area on the map, the EPA study area, the rest of the Tacoma service area, we use a a sequence to guide our cleanup, which is built upon a one-to-one weighting of contamination data, meaning who's got the highest arsenic levels per neighborhood. And then also the Department of Environmental Health Disparities map rankings. So that's how we guide our cleanup is by looking at that in combination with the contamination data.

That's great. And then I'm hearing right now that There's no testing that's is this am I hearing correctly I guess in my question There's no testing that's required before folks are doing any kind of development So we're it's not holding up permits in any kind of way right now Or what it could it hold? do we want to get it done like taking care of at the beginning because it could hold up permits later in the process and

So the voluntary cleanup program, our colleague works with, I mean, you all, the city, whatever jurisdiction, issues the permits. So in the case of Federal Way, they say we won't issue a permit until you've talked to Ecology and done the sampling and they've figured out if you need to join the voluntary cleanup program or not. And then they get the permits. We don't want to hold anybody up. And we want the development to happen. We want it to happen safely and carefully. We want the dirt, if it's contaminated, we want it to be disposed of appropriately and stored appropriately, et cetera. Is that answering your question?

Yeah. I think my main question is, obviously, there's an advantage to the community in order to get this cleaned up. Is there an advantage to the developer to get it cleaned up early? Like, why would they willingly do it, I guess, is my question.

We think that so during site development, their clearing and grading. And one of the key model remedies that we promote is for parcels of land that have, on average, 40 parts per million of arsenic or lower, mixing that soil, as does occur through grading, is a great way to knock that overall average down to below MACA. So it's kind of like a no-brainer. Like, why wouldn't you? Sarah said something important that SEPA, right now in Tacoma, SEPA is the only way that we catch large developments, like many, many acres. And anything that's based off of cubic yardage moved, and I don't have that number off the top of my head, I'm sorry. But it is large developments. So there are these mid-sized and smaller developmental activities that we're missing that would be great to at least provide guidance to should they be interested in taking part in making their homes and their communities a little safer to live in.

Thank you.

Council Member Hines.

Thank you, Mary Ipsen, and thank you to the team and the presentation again this year. It was great, and I got a little preview ahead of time. Since as Council Member Moe was clear to remind everyone, this is mostly in my district and the mayor's former district. No, I just want to take a moment to thank the Health Department for all your work at educating people and sharing the blacklight Great one. My nine-year-old still talks about that one. And really exciting for that. And so I appreciate all the information around that. I would just take this as an opportunity to, first of all, to thank you for reiterating the fact that we don't have the economic, the money needed to mitigate everything through the settlement. And so something we've been doing along with Council Rumbaugh's advocacy in the past is adding our legislative priorities, continued support, financial support for the ongoing cleanup to get to what Council of Commerce brought up, which is we have a cut point of 100 parts per million. There may be people who are looking for more than that, but that's all predicated on how much resources we have, how much money we have to pay for it. So do you know how much longer you think you'll have money, like how many more years you'll be able to continue to do the cleanups at your current pace?

Yeah, so current pace is about 50 properties a year. And I could go into the vicissitudes of why that number is as low as it is and why we're as slow as we are. But it takes a team. And when you work with a lot of people, it gets messy. And it takes a lot longer than you would think. The funds themselves, I said we have about $30 million left of the original $95 million. And some of that money, by the way, has been used to improve other, you know, other Tacoma smelter plume related projects. Think of the Dune Peninsula Park. But that being said, you know, we are currently at a stage in our team, in our Tacoma smelter plume unit, where we are a skeleton crew. We have about as small as we can get to manage that amount of properties clean up a year. and do the outreach work and also, you know, manage all the contracts that we have to manage. So our size probably isn't going to change and our output probably won't change. And the number that we use for a binaural benchmark is about 8 million. So every two years we need about, sorry, every two years we need 8 million. Right. Yeah, so we have about six more years or so of the CSA fund left, maybe a little more. It is an irony. I can't help but not comment on that, you know, if there are slowdowns, you know, if there's another COVID outbreak, if the state legislature doesn't pass the budget, you know, sometimes we stop our work. And then, you know what, the CSA fund actually accrues more. So we actually make more money when we're not cleaning up. It's kind of a sad irony.

Yeah.

SO THAT'S KIND OF THE OUTLOOK RIGHT NOW. AND I SHOULD NOTE THAT WE'VE BEEN REALLY GOOD ABOUT REGULARLY NOTIFYING THE LEGISLATURE VIA THE CSA, THE CLEANUP SETTLEMENT ACCOUNT REPORT THAT IS PRODUCED BY ECOLOGY AND SENT TO THE LEDGE EVERY TWO YEARS, I THINK, AND THEN OUR OWN LEDGE REPORT TO NOTIFY THEM ABOUT OUR PROGRESS, HOW MUCH MONEY WE HAVE LEFT, AND THAT WE WILL HAVE AROUND 250 PROPERTIES OR SO, IF EVERYTHING MATHS OUT, We'll still qualify for cleanup, but we won't have funds to clean up. And so the Ledge is aware that we're going to have that need.

Well, I thank you for all your work and for explaining that. I think that's, again, why we need to keep it in our forefront of kind of our communication with our legislative asks. And it's only going to become more acute of an issue as those six years lapse. So thank you all, and thank you, Mr. Mayor. Those were my questions.

Thank you. Oh, yes, the Form 17, otherwise known as the amnesia form. Don't know, don't know, don't know, right? Because the reality is homeowners don't want to know a thing about their properties because disclosure responsibilities like the property, right? So I would say that insofar as incenting people to use the Form 17 might be a way to go, I actually, I'm rather team disclosure form myself. I think that there could be ways to write them really simply and And really, I think the appropriate person to put this on is the buyer, because we're a due diligence state. And the reality is we already do that. Like in Tacoma, for example, if you're buying or selling a property, you have to sign a form saying side sewers are expensive. You should investigate the side sewer, basically, right? So it's not unheard of for different regions to just have a little one-pager form saying, hey, buyers, do your due diligence. You may be purchasing a property in an area that had a plume of some kind. here's a hyperlink to look online to see if the property you're considering buying is in the plume. And you could even have a line for sellers. Here's a link. You may be selling a property. And then basically just putting the onus on people to do due diligence and maybe be a bit more honest on the disclosure form. That might be one thing. One other avenue maybe to consider is besides just the legal aspect or the professional real estate community would also be the multiple listing service because what they do is they have attorneys on staff who write pre-planned forms. And I know the realtors would not be wild about this, but one thing that would just be ironclad from the perspective of peace of mind for any buyer or seller and also just, you know, TOTAL SAFETY AND SECURITY FROM A LEGAL PERSPECTIVE WOULD BE SOME KIND OF CONTINGENCY FORM. SO WE HAVE LIKE A 22J FORM, WHICH IS, YOU KNOW, IF YOU WANT LIKE A LEAD-BASED PAINT TEST ON YOUR HOUSE, I MEAN, WHAT IF YOU HAD A 22SP, RIGHT? WHICH, AGAIN, MY REALTY BROTHER WOULD NOT BE THRILLED THAT I'M SAYING THIS, RIGHT? BUT I PAY DUES, SO IT'S FINE. BUT MAYBE ONE THING TO CONSIDER IS TALKING WITH THE non-aligned, non-sales related, but just the attorneys or the staff with the multiple listing service community and just seeing what's going on there. My final question is, I'm assuming that any kind of abatement and testing goes through a contractor list. It's not in-house staff who do it, but pre-approved contractors, is that correct?

So if a homeowner is doing homeowner-led cleanup, yeah, they would contract out that work. We do the technical assistance. Our associate, Diane Ison, who provides technical assistance to property owners, does provide them with a list of known contractors that do this work. It's not something that Ecology is endorsing. It's just like, hey, here's folks that do this work.

Yeah, so there are people who meet your standards, not dissimilar from TPU or general government. We have a list of contractors and meet our standards. My question is, do you know if those contractors accept escrow payment? Because it's one thing if you have a 10 grand bill to remediate your lawn, right, versus, hey, this sucks, it's $10,000, but it's not out of pocket, which would be mission impossible for most Tacoma homeowners, but it can come out of my equity at the time of sale or even a refinance, and hey, I'm not wild about this, but, you know, so that might be something to vet and verify, too, if your contractors allow that. Yeah, thanks. We'll look into that. I'm not aware of that. Okay, very good. Any other questions? Okay, thank you so much for your presentation. Oh, Council Member Diaz, I'm sorry. Sorry, I was slow.

You're good. Can you tell me, and I think I might have asked this in the past, so I apologize that I just don't remember. What is being done in Point Defiance since there's so many kids and dogs? I know I used to roll down the hills in Point Defiance. What has been done in the parks in general up there, but that one particularly?

Well, the park has been, it's pretty much impossible to like remediate the park because the way we do like the yard program or the way we would do like a school or something is we dig out 12 inches of soil. You'd have to clear all the trees from the park. We've done some work in the play areas there. And actually, I should have you. You should talk about that.

I don't mind you taking the lead on this. So you heard me talk about the soil safety program, which addresses child play areas. We have sampled the child play area, I believe it's on the southeast side of Point Defiance Park, and there are some elevated levels. The average is below, I believe, but there are some maximums that are, sorry, when we do sampling for this, we do individual samples, and then we look at individual results, but then we also pool them as an average. And if they meet our thresholds, we offer cleanup. Metro Parks Tacoma, or Parks Tacoma now, I think they know about those. We've provided those results. They have to give us authority to go and do that sampling because it's their property. So those are online. You can find them on our Dirt Alert map, which is a standing feature of our outreach where you can search up properties and see if they've been sampled, what their predicted arsenic is, what the sampling results actually are, and if any work's been done. So if the public has access to that map, they can see whether or not the child play area in the park has been remediated or not. I will say that the Fort Nisqually site has been remediated. And we recently, last year, sampled the off-leash dog park as well in response to a question from the council. And maybe it would have been yourself.

It might have been.

Yeah. And so we did find that there are elevated levels at that off-leash dog park when we recommended a increasing the amount of mulch cover that they're placing at the site because it is heavily wooded. Again, we run into this problem where we don't want to destroy valuable habitat. just for the sake of cleanup. So it's a bit of a conundrum, but it's something that can be managed. And like I said, the mulch approach is probably the best Parks Tacoma can do for that site.

Okay. And then has that been recommended to parks around the trails as well, or what can be done on trails? Or is that taken care of by the foot traffic at this point?

I can't speak to all the evaluation that Parks Tacoma may have done for Point Defiance Park. It's a large area. It is heavily forested. There is a valuable habitat there. I would say any paths that have an asphalt, cement, or other impermeable surface to them are safe to walk upon because you're not contacting soil. Off path, there are risks with contacting soil. And that's back to regular healthy actions communication. But really the problem here is ingestion. We don't want people eating the soil. And that may sound flip to say, but it can happen, especially if you're maybe, maybe if you're gleaning huckleberries at the park, right, and there's dust on them, you might be getting contact that way. If you're a small child and you're on your hands and knees, you could be getting contact that way, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Your dog, running your dog in the park and bringing it home, you might be bringing soil in. We have communicated to the parks about these healthy actions, and we'll continue to work with them to improve that outreach that they provide to the constituency.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Diaz. And thank you so much again for your presentation. Thank you. OK. Our third agenda item is property maintenance and enforcement modernization. I'd like to call on Councilmember Rumbaugh to provide opening remarks. She'll be followed by Planning and Development Services Director Peter Huffman.

Thank you, Mayor. So I'm going to be talking about our property maintenance enforcement modernization presentation and how we got where we are today. So I'm just going to talk about holding property owners accountable for complying with our city code is one of the essential services that our residents expect from the city. And I want to take a minute to recognize how much work has gone into improving how we do code compliance here in Tacoma. So pump it up for that. I just know that we've heard a lot from community, and this is really important. And that's why we're here today. And I want to thank everyone who serves on the Community Vitality and Safety Committee who has spent so much time digging into this topic. And we've been tracking administrative updates for our code compliance processes and have provided feedback on the direction policy change should go. And I especially want to acknowledge former Council Member and CVS Chair Catherine Oshka of Blessed Memory. Catherine cared deeply about this issue and really championed this work. She pushed us to think about how our property maintenance system can better serve neighborhoods and residents. And I just want to say this could have lived in a lot of different committees, and she really wanted it to be in CVS. It could have been easily in EDC. It could have been in IPS, maybe possibly even GPSC. But it got in CVS. So the city is adopting the International Property Maintenance Code, and we've been calling it IPMC. And I think I got it wrong all the time. I call it IMPC. It's just easy for me to mess up, which will consolidate enforcement under the uniform enforcement. And this work started in the neighborhood and community service department and continued when the code compliance team transitioned to planning and development services, which I think is a great thing that's happened. Although I've heard from Peter, it's been a lot of work. A lot of people have contributed along the way. And today's presentation reflects years of work. And thank you to every person here at the city who has contributed to this effort. And finalizing this code change requires high impact policy decisions. I'm not even sure what that means. That just sounds like a lot of work. Council will need to make so that this code can finally come for a vote. So that's why we're here today. And that's why at this time I realized that the question isn't simply how we modernize property maintenance and enforcement. It's also about what service level the council should fund in this upcoming budget. So it's about money. As committee chair, I thought it was important to bring this conversation to the full council before we get into the budget process. This gives us all the opportunity to weigh in on whether these investments reflect our shared priorities and how they fit alongside the many other budget demands we'll be considering. It also gives the district council members, which there are five of us, the opportunity to bring their perspective on enforcement and penalties to the table District representatives are often the first to hear about code violations and carry the weight of explaining our enforcement system and its limited capacity to community members. We hear on a regular basis about things that are impacting neighborhoods in our own districts. My hope is that we as a council can provide direction today so that staff can bring us an ordinance for a vote. Like many of you, I want this to move forward as quickly so that the improvements can go into effect. And then with that, I'm going to turn it over to you, Peter. And I see that Mindy is here as well.

Thank you, Council Member Rumbaugh, Mayor, Council, Peter Huffman, Director of Planning and Development Services. And I do want to give Council Member Rumbaugh a special thanks for her leadership on this issue as well as those others who have been on the CVS committee. So before I turn it over to Mindy, So in January 2025, just a way of background, code compliance was transferred from NCS to Planning Development Services. And there's a lot of reasons for that the basic reason for that was just improved service delivery because so much of a lot of the code compliance work is done by The you know building inspector staff and other staff in PDS. So we were highly involved in partnership with NCS and in code compliance cases. And so this was just a way of sort of streamlining that process. And my example is instead of getting two business cards, a property owner gets one business card now from PDS, not two city departments. So it was really simplified that way. So we continued on when we inherited code compliance with a lot of the great work. that then Director Allison Griffith did in NCS. And part of that work was this code update that was going to CVS. So we took on that work and continued that work, along with some other work that Mindy will get into associated with upgrading technology, integrating it into our Accela permitting software. So it could be monitored. Cases could be monitored in the same way that a permit is monitored in the system and we could monitor success and where we're at, as well as working with 311 and looking at ways that we could make the whole process more transparent, not only internally but externally. So there's been quite a bit of behind the scenes technology work that we've been doing in partnership with IT. And so what we really wanted to do today was just come to you with the presentation that we gave to CVS on May 12th. And what we're at right now in the process is we're prepared to, you know, draft a code and come to the full council for council consideration of that. And I'll get into the next steps at the last slide, but just to start off, there's a lot of information in this presentation, so by no means Are we thinking that we're going to get the level of detailed direction from council members today? But we just wanted to get you all thinking about it, those that have not been exposed to it. And between now and first reading, which we anticipate would be sometime in late September or early August. We'd love to get your feedback on some of the topics on here, the key policies, as Councilmember Rumbaugh said, so that we can come back to you in late September with a study session and go over the draft code with you. and provide you with some case studies, some examples of situations and how the new draft code would, what would be the new processes associated with that draft code for those different situations, and what would be the outcomes so that you could have some time to modify the draft code before we go to first reading of ordinance and second reading of ordinance. Unlike a lot of the processes that you're participating with PDS, there is no planning commission review. required. There is not a public hearing required. So there's just first and second reading of ordinance. So we're really at the point now where we want to roll up our sleeves with the council and finalize an ordinance so we can get that thing on the books and then start educating the public before it goes live, likely sometime in first quarter of 2027. So with that, I'll turn it over to Mindy Weber, the assistant division manager in PDS overseeing code compliance.

Thank you, Peter. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Thanks for having us today. As Peter said, my name is Mindy Weber. I am the Assistant Division Manager of our Regulatory Compliance Group in Planning and Development Services. So we'll go ahead and get started. Today we'll be asking you for direction on three main components of this effort. The first one would be the consideration of adopting the International Property Maintenance Code, This points our enforcement authority to that code, which is broader and allows us to act differently. And it comes along with clearer and faster tools. And as Council Member Rumbaugh mentioned, it will also point to our existing uniform enforcement code. Secondly, we will be asking for direction on our different enforcement options. So we'll be bringing to you three different tiers that include different staffing levels. and service levels. And lastly, we will ask you to confirm the repeat offender framework that we're looking at, so higher penalties, faster escalation, a few different components in order to hold repeat offenders more accountable. All right, so the current operating situation of our group, right now we have three inspectors, and one supervisor for the entirety of Tacoma. We're receiving on average about 4,000 to 4,500 complaints a year. And of those, currently of those complaints, we have 740 open cases that are assigned across those inspectors. Right now, we have probably a little bit over 2,000 complaints in our 311Q that are waiting for attention and their first inspection. And just to give some context about previous staffing levels and kind of what the picture looked like about 10 years ago, we previously had five administrative staff, and now we have two. I'm sorry, we have three. And for inspection, we had nine code inspectors. and now we have three, so a big difference in those 10 years of our staffing levels. Back in 2021 through the 2022 period, it used to take about five days on average for a case to reach its initial inspection. On average over the last four years, it now takes about 15 days for a case to receive its first inspection after it's been created. All right, I'd like to talk a little bit about what the International Property Maintenance Code does and does not do. What it does is it broadens the property conditions that we can act on. It lets us start penalties higher and escalate faster, and we'll get into some of the policy decisions around how that would work later in the presentation. It would offer stronger tools for repeat offenders. It would allow for one case type for us to enforce on instead of multiple. And just to give some context on that, currently due to how our code is set up now. If there's a nuisance condition on the property and a different condition, let's just say like a derelict building, that would require two different cases that we have to track separately. And so that does take additional staff time. And I believe that with this code, it would decrease based on being under one record. And this aligns Tacoma with neighboring jurisdictions. There's many jurisdictions nearby that utilize the property maintenance code. and I've done some research on kind of their success with it, how they implemented it, and all of that. What the IPMC does not do is address nuisance conditions with chronic issues. So that route would require legal action. They would need to obtain a warrant for a potential abatement of the property. It doesn't make enforcement pay for itself through our fines, and there will be some more data coming in this presentation about kind of what that looks like as well. It will not expand staff resources necessary to process cases more quickly. Even with adopting this new code, we still have the issue of being under-resourced, which we would need to fix in order to make progress on that. Okay, so I mentioned just a moment ago that fines that are assessed under our code compliance team will not fully fund this program. Right now, the city fronts about $550,000 to $1.1 million in abatements, board up costs, things that we have to act on on behalf of the property owner to resolve critical issues. Right now, we collect less than 10% of our assessed civil penalties. And so we do recover some of that abatement money through liens that we place on the property. Once we go in and do an abatement, we would take the cost of that and file it as a lien against the property. But it could take a number of years for properties to sell. So it can't be budgeted as a funding source because it's very sporadic. A home could sell within five years. A home could sell within 25 years. So it's not a reliable funding source.

Yeah, so thank you, Mindy. So this begs the question, how is it funded? And so it is funded by the general fund. And so this is one of those activities, unlike most of the other activities in PDS, that by state law has to be funded by the general fund. It cannot be funded by the permanent enterprise fund. So this is a general fund activity. And so that is the remainder of the funding for the program.

Thank you, Peter.

All right, now I'd like to dig into these different enforcement options or the tiers that we're calling them and kind of what they would include. Right now, today's backlog requires us to work cases that we've received as a complaint from oldest to newest. An added capacity would let us reach the conditions of the property and investigate them before they worsen, which would improve compliance and not just response time overall. The first tier would help stabilize our current service level, and we would be proposing to add one inspector and two administrative staff. This would reduce the intake backlog and stop response times from sliding further. It would allow for minor improvements to re-inspection times, And it would also have the increased repeat offender tools. This tier would not include any proactive enforcement. And we anticipate that the fiscal impact would be around $500,000 for startup costs and 0.2%. $0.9 million for recurring costs. For the second tier, this would be a little bit more balanced. We would be proposing three inspectors and two administrative staff. We've calculated that this would result in a 25% to 30% faster initial response time. We would make earlier contact with property owners, which would mean that more cases could be solved voluntarily. The repeat offender tools would also be included in this and then this would also Include something that we heard from counsel was a priority with some proactive case Investigation so this would allow for about 150 to 250 proactive cases a year The third tier would be more targeted proactive. We would be proposing to add five inspectors and three administrative staff, and that would calculate to about 50% faster initial inspection response. And it would allow for about 400 cases of proactive investigation per year.

Yeah, so I might add, so we've been working with... Through the budget process, we've been working with the budget office and the city manager's office on a budget proposal for the implementation of an updated code, anticipating council adopting a code. And in the budget proposal, we provided these three tiers and the cost estimates because we don't know what the council will adopt. But again, this is general fund money. Now, what we've recommended based on the feedback so far from CVS and under the guidance of sort of the status of the general fund, as you're all aware of, is we've recommended tier one as the funding request, recognizing that that is general fund dollars. now depending on how um the council proceeds in their discussions we're hoping to have discussions you know through august into september with council through you know one-on-one meetings or however you would like to have those conversations and as those evolve my plan is to keep the city manager and the budget office informed on where we think the council is going insofar as this policy choice of choosing a tier so that we can make an informed decision on an appropriate funding request. And so if you have questions about how that general fund money would be identified, and resourced, I would suggest that you can speak with the city manager about that and the trade-offs associated with that. But that would be part of your larger budget deliberations. But we are right now just informing the city manager's office that these are sort of options that are available to you and the fiscal impact of those so that we can have an informed budget discussion moving forward.

Thank you, Peter. One more thing I'd like to mention about all three of these enforcement, these tiers, these options, is that each of these tiers will also require expanded legal capacity, which would have to be budgeted separately by the city's attorney office and the hearing examiner's office.

And if I may, I just might add. So it is my understanding that the city attorney's office has a budget proposal in for what I believe is tier one. And we are working with the hearing examiner on what resources would be necessary for the implementation of this. And so as we move forward in the next few months before your final consideration, we're hoping to have some dollars solidified for tiers two and tiers three. And again, I would just be working with those departments as well as the city manager's office and making sure that they're fully aware of what the potential cost could be depending on that. what the council adopts in September, early October. And just for sort of your awareness, those funds obviously would not, if they were adopted, would not become available until the first of the year when the budget goes into effect. And then it would take us time utilize those resources to staff up if you will and also we want to do lots of public outreach so that's why we're probably looking at a date of implementation beginning sometime first quarter early second quarter of 2027 Thank You Peter now I'd like to go over some of the key policy choices that come along with adopting this code so right now as far as repeat offenders go

If a property has two violations in a 12-month period, they would be considered a repeat offender. We're proposing to keep that base trigger maintained, but also add in that if three cases per year occur, then that property would be subject to escalating civil penalties and a higher repeat offender fee. The next policy area would be compliance windows. So right now, the code allows 18 days for reinspection which is standard, but it's often longer due to our resource level. We would be proposing to shorten compliance timelines for repeat offenders and keep the same kind of standard timelines for more general non-repeat offender cases, with final timelines to be determined by what the additional staffing would be allocated to this group. As far as the penalties go, Right now they are assessed on a bi-monthly cadence based on our current resourcing level with a fixed rate per the code. We would propose increasing and escalating penalty amount, reinspections of still non-compliant, faster billing processes with additional customer service staff. So, you know. An inspection might happen, but because of the limited resources with our customer service folks, it can take kind of a little bit to get that bill out to that property owner. As far as escalation triggers, right now those are treated on kind of a case-by-case basis, but we would be looking to implement some impact-based triggers tied to objective property conditions. And as far as abatement goes, also case-by-case, we would like to consider escalated abatement faster for repeat offenders and standard cases based on those objective property conditions and owner responsiveness. So some of the questions that we hear quite regularly regarding our current operational status is how many inspectors did we have before? As I mentioned earlier, we had nine in 2016. Today we have three for the entirety of the city. what does the different tiers kind of buy? And that would be measured in response time and proactive capacities that were listed for each of those tiers. Can fines pay for the program? And the answer is no. Fines cover about 10% of the cost or less. And comparable cities, we get questions sometimes, well, what does this city, you know, what's their inspection team look like? Spokane currently has nine inspectors. Vancouver has ten. And another question that we get is, you know, why is this property dragging on for so many years? Why hasn't this been remedied permanently? And so we would need to take increased action on aging cases and improve some of our internal procedures to reduce those resolution times. This would also include legal involvement being initiated sooner. Peter mentioned that we are working on some other things outside of just the code operationally to improve our service to constituents. One of those things being the Acela case management, so we're working on moving all of our records to be created in Acela instead of SAP. That's the legacy system, and Acela is the cloud-based software that our permit services division also uses. We recently worked with 311 to rebuild the complaint categories so that they would be more descriptive and they would help route requests to the right place. In addition to those categories being rebuilt, one really critical thing we're working on right now is auditing our general responses. So we have standard responses that we provide based on the outcome of the case, but we're going to be rewriting those to explain more about what we can do, what we can and cannot do, and why. So people have more understanding of exactly what the reason is for the case being closed, the case being in progress, whatever it might be. In addition to that, we want to be more transparent about why the cases are closed. So we don't ever want a constituent to feel like their request has been ignored. working on, that kind of goes along with the audit of our responses to make sure that when a case does get closed, it provides as much information as possible as to why.

I might add that we're also working through the budget process on upgrading the inspectors' fleets, their vehicles, some of which are upwards of 20 years old. And so we're looking to modernize those consistent with the vehicles that all of our other inspectors and planning development services have. So here's a In summary, here's at the top here some bullet points of sort of what the next direction is. And again, I fully recognize and don't anticipate getting into the level of detail that they've gotten into at CVS today. But I just put these in front of you that we're here and willing to work with your council assistance and the mayor's office on whatever venue or audience you want to give us your thoughts on this. And certainly, if you've got questions or want more detail, please feel free to reach out directly to Mindy and I. And so that's sort of the high mark of what we need direction on. And based on that direction, we will draft the final code. And as I mentioned, we are going to schedule first and second reading Coming up in late September early October and a study session likely in late September to come back to the council with the draft code what we'll do is and I have to give councilmember Rumba a credit for this suggestion, which is a great suggestion. We'll come back with some case studies and run the new code through some practical likely scenarios that you would see on a daily basis, unfortunately. in the city of Tacoma, so the council can get a good, concrete idea of if they make this policy choice, what the process will be and what the outcome will be. And that will be all the way down to the detail of the timing, the penalties, those type of things, especially on the repeat offenders. I know that's been a big issue. We've heard a lot about that. So we'll come back in September, have that conversation, then likely two weeks later we'll be first reading. So there'll be time for the council to modify whatever final draft we propose. So with that, that concludes our presentation. Thank you for the time.

Thank you, Peter. And thank you to Chair Rumbach for bringing us forward. We'll start with Council Member Rumbach followed by Council Member Scott.

Thank you, Mayor. And I want to just, like the elephant in the room that you kind of mentioned, Mindy, was... You kind of said it, but chronic nuisance code, which is not what we're talking about today. So chronic nuisance code is different than the nuisance enforcement code. And I know that many of us have examples of that. There's a lot of them in downtown. A lot of times it deals with a vacant property that is not being secured. And then what happens with that, it's with the police. and then it becomes a legal issue. I just want to say I think that's a big issue, but that's not what we're talking about today. So if that comes up, I'd love us to kind of focus back on what Peter and Mindy are asking us today about is whether or not we're interested in approving the IPMC and also talking about what does it look like to have some type of enforcement and staffing to do that enforcement. So if we could have a conversation on that, that would be really helpful.

On that theme, maybe it's useful that we talk about what the difference between chronic nuisance and what this would cover if you have examples.

Yeah, so generally, the chronic nuisance code, which is TMC 8.30A, It is covering more so the behavior of what affects the property. So, you know, loitering, different police-related issues really actually kind of sum that up. And then the nuisance code currently is for property conditions, overgrown vegetation, nuisance, derelict vehicles, derelict buildings. Okay.

Okay. That's also really important and they're related, but they are different and sometimes the nuance of that with public may not be there in terms of this type of These issues have popped up a lot in district 4 There's this kind of thought process or There are a couple of things around all this, and I'm really glad you have a comprehensive presentation here that kind of hit a lot of the key things that I was looking for. I'll start from the end first, which is obviously better communication, better verbiage, and a commitment to explain what closed in 311 actually means and what our purview within certain categories are. I think a lot of it starts with, you know, that goes to trust between residents and the city. I put a 311 in, and it got closed right away. And there's many reasons why that could be. And quite frankly, a lot of residents do not understand what's happening. And then what they say and the words they say are, the city doesn't care. So ultimately, it's about how do we show that the city cares. And what people say is, I just want to see something get done. That also doesn't necessarily mean that we have to be heavy-handed about it. It can also say that we are communicating more effectively on what we are currently doing and what we have to do. Because at the end of the day, we're not an HOA, right? As a government agency, we have certain rules that we have to follow. Pesky document, I keep talking about the Constitution. We have to get warrants and all that stuff. So I really appreciate at the end that we have a, we're talking about administratively, talking about how do we improve the 311 responses. So I had a couple of questions. In your tiered approach, I happen to notice that in tier two and three, you get a two for one for inspectors to administrative staff, but in tier one, we would add one and two? So you'd have four inspectors and three administrative staff. In tier two, we would end up with six inspectors and three administrative staff. Sorry, four administrative staff. And then the last one, we'd get eight inspectors and four administrative staff. I just want to kind of understand what the difference is. Like, what does an administrative staff give us?

Absolutely.

I'll just add while Minnie gets her notes. Tier 1 is kind of a catch-up, too.

So it would be four inspectors, three administrative staff. And really the question is, why one more administrative staff at that? Like, what are the services?

Because we're still down now. And it's just to sort of catch up on the current work situation and propel us forward. But I'll let Miggy elaborate on that.

Yeah, thank you, Peter. Right now, we get on average about, I would say, probably 200 complaints a week. And with three administrative staff, that's very difficult to manage from a volume standpoint as the action of creating cases is not their only work function. So as Peter was explaining, this tier one would just kind of help stabilize us. So getting more administrative staff up front would help with kind of the backlog of the cases that are waiting for attention. And then an additional inspector will We'll help get to those cases faster. But really, the first priority.

But what does the administrative staff do?

Oh, I apologize. So they perform all of our customer service functions, phone calls, emails. They do all of the intake for 311 to create cases. They do all of the administrative functions on behalf of the inspectors. So preparing notices, getting things mailed. I'm assessing civil penalties, filing liens and judgments.

So the communication to organizations and individuals, because it's also really important that we also talk about it's not just people. In District 4, I've had a lot of issues with LLCs that own property that are not responsive. would be putting together those notices that go out and ask for voluntary compliance. Yeah.

Councilmember, they are the critical path in your communication. Got it. So that's an important aspect of not only what you've suggested and what we've been working on, but any sort of expansion of the program. They're a key piece of that.

Did I say that right? Like the administrative staff would help us get at least that first notice out there that starts the process on people.

Right. And additionally, you know, while our inspectors are on site, if they happen to encounter a representative of the property, the property owner, then a verbal conversation would happen first as well, addition to the notice going out.

Got it. Okay. That explains why you have two administrative staff and one inspector on that one. And so when does legal support comes in? Because there's also, you had that put in where we also need some legal help.

Yeah.

When does that kind of, when do we use those resources?

Yeah, absolutely. So... Right now, we would send a notice of violation, which would have specific requirements for them to follow to comply. That did not happen. We would head into our civil penalty phase, go through that. After that, we would file a certificate of complaint on the property if there's still noncompliance after those penalties, which puts a record on the title of the property. And depending on the nature of the issue, if it's determined that the property needs to be abated, that's when legal would get involved. have to work on getting a warrant for abatement for us to be able to access the property. There are times where property owners are willing for us to come on the property without a warrant. We call it a private property encampment abatement. And that would be for, they would be allowing us to come on the property knowing that they were going to be getting the charges for the abatement.

Because as a government agency, we can't just willy-dilly go on private property.

Yeah.

Right? Yeah, I think the other thing, here's a solid example for you. So I think last year, the year before, the council adopted an upgrade to the tree ordinance, and so our tree enforcement became more proactive and aggressive, if you will. And while those violations are appealable to the hearing examiner. And so we are now working with the city attorney's office on the staff support necessary to take those cases, those appeals, through the hearing examiner process. And so not only is it impacting the city attorney's office, that code change, it's also impacting the hearing examiner. And so that's an example of when we change these enforcement codes and implement them, how it's not just PDS, it's not just inspectors and administrative, there's also costs to the city attorney's office as well as the hearing examiner.

So for city manager, I'd like to kind of understand the fully baked cost of what the additional... When we review in the coming weeks, I'd love to know in these tiers what that would be. So, okay, got that. Next question. Do we know... How many of each violation go through kind of the funnel of violation comes in, what percentage are found to be valid? Because many of them we cannot always verify, right? Because often the complaint isn't a thing that is illegal, you know? Someone parks in front of my house. Well, someone's allowed to park on a street. That is not a violation, right? I literally had a call about that and tried to explain. You may think the spot in front of your house is yours. It's not yours. So it's really important that we verify a violation. So when we're talking about repeat offender threshold, it has to be something that is verified independently, absolutely. Do we have kind of that understanding of allegations, verifications, how many letters we come out, how many end up going to that other end of nonvoluntary compliance?

Yeah, I can get that data gathered for you. I don't have all of it off the top right now, but I will say that we do have about a 68% voluntary compliance. That's what we achieve each month with.

Roughly two-thirds will voluntarily comply, and then about a third of all... Verified violations have to go further down the path.

Correct. And it's also important to mention about inspection methods. So the Fourth Amendment would put some limitations on how we can expect. We do have to view all properties from the right-of-way, and we can't peer over a fence. We can't take a camera and shoot over the fence because of privacy laws. So we have to be able to verify from the right-of-way.

And due to evidentiary rules, we can't really take people's photographs that they put in.

Yeah.

Correct?

Right.

Yeah. I took photographs. I can share it to you. I'm sorry. You know... That is not as easily defensible in court based on that event entry rules. Or you have to go through way more kind of hoops before you can use evidence such as that. Right.

You have to be willing to testify to your evidence. Yes. If you're going to use that evidence in a violation.

You can't both be anonymous in your complaint. That's correct. And remain anonymous when you go into court. Yes. So to answer kind of your questions, where I am today given that, you know, I was on CVS when the IPMC was first introduced. I do think as a policy, it is a more efficient, better policy kind of framework. I appreciate that it will align us with our neighbors and allow us to be more efficient. So absolutely, I do think we should consider adopting the IPMC. The preferred enforcement tier, you know, given our budget challenges, I lean towards one. I do want to kind of understand both that conversation of what does that, you know, 32% or whatever that isn't voluntary compliant, where do we go? Direction on repeat offender, I'm going to... You know, I want to understand as we write this code, how are we treating the idea of nonvoluntary compliance is really what it is. I like the term nonvoluntary compliance rather than repeat offender because there are individuals and there have been organizations in my district that has shown that they are not willing to want to voluntary comply. I think we should have a voluntary compliance first kind of view on all this and give people reasonable timelines to be able to achieve that. So in that world, I'm not really that at this juncture. I don't know how much I'm really at, you know, shortening timelines and everything. I think we have resource issues on how do we even adhere to that ourselves without additional. So at least for this biennium, I think it's really important that we support YOU KNOW, SUPPORT AND ASSESS HOW CAN WE GET THAT 68% HIGHER THROUGH MORE RESOURCES UP FRONT WITH BETTER COMMUNICATION, WITH BETTER KIND OF SERVICE OFFERING PERHAPS WITH MORE RESOURCES IN THERE. THAT ISN'T AS HIGH A NEED FOR ME. AND QUITE FRANKLY, I DON'T THINK WE'RE AT A LEVEL WHERE I think it's prudent to do proactive enforcement. We have so many things that are coming in right now. It's just not. I think given where we are moving, let's put the new policy in. give at least the bare minimum resources that allow us to see if we can get better education, better compliance out there, assess how people are reacting to that new framework before we go in and just assume everyone's a bad actor, right? I want to kind of understand how do we actually identify individuals and organizations that just refuse to voluntarily comply. I think there should be some sort of framework around nonvoluntary compliance. I don't necessarily think it needs to be that punitive in this first iteration. Proactive enforcement. I think it's just something we We should look at in the future.

Thank you Thank you Thank You customer lines Thank You mr. Mayor and thank you for the presentation And thank you customer more for our work in CVS. I'll try to keep this brief and stick To the questions you asked for just Looking at the time and recognizing a couple of us probably chat about this I think we should adopt the International Property Maintenance Code. I think it seems pretty straightforward in updating kind of where we are. So I'm in support of that. I think your conversations between a nuisance property and kind of where this lands, I think, was really good for us to consider. I think when I look at the tiers, in my mind, I would probably land in tier two and see what happens. And then if we need to go to tier three, that could be a further conversation about productivity. It's interesting. In my time here, what I found is everybody wants the city to be more proactive in addressing their neighbors and more kind in addressing them. What I want is I want you to act as fast as possible on the guy across the street. What about this in your house? Whoa, don't look at that. That's not an issue here. It's the person that's over there. When I look at the proactivity, there will be some concern. There will probably be some blowback as people are like, why is the city driving around just looking for things I did wrong versus getting out there and actually going after the bad actors that are in the world. When I listen to my residents, what I think I hear more and more is for... bad actors or non-voluntary or repeat offenders, however you want to term them, escalation on that. So let's focus on the people who are really doing things that are causing issues and escalate it to address it quicker. So I think escalation and then speed at which we address them and how quick we move them through. And I think tier two gets us closer to that. If we were moving faster and also escalating to address some of the bigger issues, I think 90% of the things I hear from my residents would be taken care of. And then if we start there, if we find, though, after a biennium of that's not enough, we can always look at adding continued resources, like what are the gaps? But I'd rather kind of have us take a step forward, do an analysis of the impact before we kind of go to the next one. I think your tree example is a really good one for kind of what happens when we start saying something like we were going to, Increase emphasis. More people are going to start coming through the system. And then how fast can we get to it, I think, is really important. Let's see the piece I was going to say. Yes. Yeah, I think really focusing on more frequent offenders and escalation framework, I think that's really where we should put a lot of our effort and energy into. Because I think what I, you know, When we had our briefing, I made this comment. I think it's currently illegal to not mow your grass or something. There's some code enforcement on grass mowing and what your front yard looks like. And I would hate for the city to go out and start ticketing grandmas who are in hospice or who are not in their homes anymore because they can't keep up with their properties because we're being super proactive. And then that blowback comes from it. So can we think about prioritization of the most... And I think maybe the question I would come back to and maybe something the committee could look at is proactivity around... the nuisance issues that are the most detrimental to the community. So the ones that actually spill out or actually kind of have broader thinking about what that looks like could be very helpful. Yeah, and priority started enforcement. I mean, I think that part, which is focusing on things that seem to have kind of a big spill out in the neighborhood. So something that it's on a property, but then is kind of going out in other places. So those are my thoughts on that one. I would just really comment on the final one that I think using Acela to really try to manage this and move things faster will be very helpful. I've seen a lot of their tools, and I think it could be really good. And one thing I am very happy to hear is the transparency on closed. I hear people, residents, saying things like, well, the city just closed it and didn't tell me what happened. They didn't do anything. It's actually the city did things. It may not be transparent to you or clear to you what they did, but they did things. There's limits to what we can and can't do, which I thought your example was great. We can't go into your bedroom, into your house, into your backyard. We can't yank you out of your house and push your face into your code violations. We have to be really proactive about it. There's some rules around it, but I think making it more clear what we did do so people don't feel ignored could also carry us a long way. That's it. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Hines. Council Member Palmer.

Thank you. Thanks for the presentation. I would love more clarification around, I guess I'm not clear what this does and what it doesn't do still. I'm one of the folks who are interested in the vacant building conversation. And up until the study session, this was part of this conversation. So I'd love to know if it's not for here where that should be. And then as far as the fines, I had a question. So less than 10% of assessed civil penalties are collected. Does that mean that they're not paid or that they come into compliance before they pay? I'd probably want to break that down for you in different percentages so I can get that back to you. Okay, that'd be great to know. And then that's within that $18. That all depends on that 18-day period right now?

Yep. So right now, what the code allows is for us to return within 18 days to re-inspect. It often takes longer due to resources right now, but that's what the code allows. But there is no initial penalty? The first visit is an inspection and the opportunity to voluntarily comply.

So I think that that's worth looking at is should there be some instances where it is an initial penalty? And I think that repeat offender conversation is part of that. But then I also think things are just egregious, could be egregiously, like it's obvious that this is something that is an issue and should have been addressed. Hopefully those aren't most cases, but those might be some of those one-off cases.

If I could add, too, so one of the things that we have reinstated in PDS is collections. We did identify quite a bit of backlog there and understood that collections were less aggressively sought prior to PDS taking over, and so we have put that back in place, and we do pursue collections now.

That's good to know. And then the other question I had, if these other cities... Like, we're looking at Spokane having nine inspectors, Vancouver having 10. If they're not making that back through fines, do we know how they are? Like, how are they paying for this program?

Well, as I mentioned, we'll look into it and see if they've got some creative funding source. But most jurisdictions, because of that state regulation that I said, but it was a general fund.

Yeah, I'd be curious to know if it's not fully funded by their fines, could we figure out how much is funded by the fines that they're collecting? I'm just curious about that breakdown a little bit more. I've recently made contact with both cities and have somebody I can speak to at both of them. That's fantastic. And then I guess my last question is, it seems like a lot of the administrative staff work could be Some of the things you were talking about, like initially sending out the letter could be done in an automated way. I see our IT guy here. I don't know if that's a discussion that's been had as far as, hey, can we set up pathways to trigger different things where it's not a little person that needs to be doing some of these things.

So I can just... give you some thoughts from my experience on that. So we've gone down that path with inspections, with building inspections. And there has been some discussion back, and this is going back when all of this was in public works, about doing that. But what we find is, to some of Council Member Stalge's point, that sort of automation becomes kind of bureaucratic. And one size fits all situation, which becomes very inefficient and frustrating from the customer service side and a person understanding what their actual violation is and what they need to do to miscommunication. And honestly, going back to my example of trees, we're seeing that right now in some circumstances where some folks who get involved in tree violations, some other departments are more automated in their sort of just sort of canned letter or whatever. And they're not updated as often. And so we've ran into some situations like that. So there is some nuances to having actually even being involved in some of these cases because the cases are unique. And frankly, a lot of times they are dealing with an individual situation that is unique to that individual situation. But we'll look at that and we'll continue to look at that. And I'll just mention too, as we've moved it into Accela, what that does give us is better case management, sort of like a a permit, and also what it does is it gives us some opportunities, and we're going to continue to work with 311 and IT to make it so that somebody who files a 311 complaint can actually track the complaint. And so when the closed comes up, they see it's closed, and they can see why it's closed, similar to how a permit applicant can track their permit through the system and understand the various steps. Status of it and understand what's being done by the city to address their issues and then communicate back to the city So that's the vision that we're working on. It's just a matter of time of Reconfiguring the technology and working with three well one to do that Thank you. Thank you comes from DS Thank you

I think just to try and address the slide 10 with the direct feedback y'all are looking for, I am interested in adopting the IPMC. I think that makes good sense. You guys have probably done the bulk of the work at CVS to make sure that you're reconciling the pieces that need to be there and don't need to be there. So I have faith in that. I think for me, I'm leaning towards Tier 2. While I would love to see us go for Tier 3 or just even get to the place, because Tier 3 doesn't even get us to the comparable cities like Spokane and Vancouver. I think, I can't remember who said it, but I want to make sure that we are... being mindful of the budget gap that we have this year, but also being mindful of our responsiveness around these topics versus, I know we still get complaints less so nowadays that we're more fully staffed at TPD, but we still get complaints about people not responding as quickly for property damage. So I want to make sure that we're right-sizing that so that we're not Over over correcting in one spot and then sort of hearing complaints that we're not doing other things and in the most timely fashion And a lot of that is perception, but I do think that there's something to us Suddenly having 15 inspectors and then going out and then having some other deficiencies that aren't quite where we would like them to be and then I think around the I'll skip the repeat offender piece because I don't know that I heard enough of that conversation to have much to add to what's already been said. But I am sort of thinking around the targeted proactive enforcement, if that could be potentially around the high investment corridors or around, now that we have those defined, or around business districts. I think I'm particularly interested in making sure that we prioritize going after property owners who are commercial versus residential, because I think that those are probably going to be entities that we will take more work but will get us better results in terms of public sort of feedback. I would much rather go after the derelict Rite Aid than Grandma, just for perspective. And then I think another layer below that would be potentially neighborhoods based on the Opportunity Index, just making sure that we're not only looking at neighborhoods that the one house that looks horrible stands out, but looking at some of those neighborhoods where there's several of them so that we can try to sort of lift the whole neighborhood where possible, if that makes sense for the context of what we're looking at here. Those are some of my loose thoughts on it. I look forward to hearing what else comes out of the conversation in CVS and what else we have before us. But so far, so good. I want to thank the committee for their work and you guys for all you're doing. Thanks.

Thank you. Deputy Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you so much for all of you for your work on this. Councilman Rumbaugh, CVS, for really deep diving into it. This has certainly been a big topic area for myself and a lot of the residents I've talked to in District 5. and certainly a big area of concern. So thank you so much for all the work, and I'm really happy to see that we're bringing the conversation here to study session. I think it's been long overdue, and I'm glad we have really clear choices before us that we can work through. I do have a few clarifying questions I'd like to ask about, and then I'll kind of Also, diatribe a little bit, to be honest with you. So just prepare yourselves. One of the questions I had is in regards to the, oh, my gosh. In terms of, like, the city attorney's office and the hearing examiner, back in 2016, we had over nine code inspectors and five admin staff. Did they also downsize their departments when the code compliance downsized as well? I'm just kind of curious of how they were able to operate at that level at those times or how things might have shifted. I don't know if you can shed some light on that.

That's a great question. I don't have those numbers right now, but I can work with the hearing examiner's office and the city's attorney's office to confirm. Okay.

Thanks. I'd just be curious, are we expecting, I mean, obviously we'd expect a larger influx of cases to be looked at through the city's attorney's office. I don't know, and the hearing examiner, but I don't know if that's the same levels as it was before then. Were we expecting, did we have the same amount of folks being looked at also?

I can give you one little piece of information. I can't speak for the city attorney's office, and we can research that and get back to you on that. But my understanding is the hearing examiner used to have a contract for a pro tem hearing examiner, specifically for code compliance. And my understanding is that budget no longer exists. And that's the exact conversation we're currently having with the hearing examiner now. Great, thank you.

And then the other question I had is in the compliance window, the proposed direction, shorter compliance timelines for repeat non-voluntary compliance folks, and standard timelines for standard complaints, are we differentiating between the scale of the ask for compliance? For example, to mow a grass would be significantly different than you know, another complaint or compliance issue, and what does it look like when there's monetary costs as well as a potential for, like, they have to hire a contractor or something like that. There might be some timelines. If they demonstrate good faith and goodwill, like, hey, we've hired someone. Their schedule at this time is technically outside the compliance window. Is there some level of reprieve? Because to Council Member Hines' point, I don't know. I don't think anybody out here wants to punish grandma that can't get her grass done. Maybe there's some ways organizations or others that can help, and we can connect them with resources that can help with those things. But showing demonstration of trying to get to compliance, because I think one of the challenges that I face in many members of our community is that you have folks that are out there willfully uncomplying, and there's no really major recourse for that.

Yes. One thing that was mentioned at CVS that I'd like to bring up again now is The IPMC would also allow us to require written mitigation plans. So if we have a case that might take a little bit longer to resolve or any of that, we could work with the property owner to get a notarized document that said this is the cadence I'm going to follow to hit voluntary compliance. And if they do not do that, then we would use our enforcement measures on top of that.

Yeah, and one thing I might add, and this is really a conversation to have with the city attorney's office, is the code has to be applied uniformly. And so what you're talking about there, and that has to be codified, is what we refer to as off-ramps. And so if there are going to be circumstances like age, which is always hard to verify, given certain circumstances, or economic status, those thresholds and those criteria for establishing that has to be codified. And then the process of how that individual or that property goes through has to be codified and applied uniformly. So it gets, and my experiences and conversations from a side, because I haven't been involved in code compliance conversations and policy discussions with the council directly, but indirectly over the years. there does become sort of this point where there wants to be sort of a code that gets the bad actor, if you will, but in a very similar circumstance doesn't get the bad actor because they're not that bad this time or something like, you know, it's hard to say. And so it gets into, and I'm not an attorney, but it gets into being arbitrary, application of the code. And every time we kind of go down that path and having those discussions, my esteemed counsel, Deputy City Attorney Steve Victor, Chief Deputy City Attorney, excuse me, Steve, always instructs me to go in a different pathway. And so I think when you start talking about those sort of nuances of, applying the code for circumstances, it's worth a conversation with the city attorney's office on the legal and the due process aspects of that.

Yeah, thank you for that. That kind of leads me into my next question is when offenses are stacking up, does one thing, like for example, If a case is open for months and months at a time and there are different things that happen over that time, is each thing its own offense or is it all bundled under one offense? And if something is closed voluntarily, does it count as just one offense because of all the things in it? or would it be like on a case-by-case individual basis? And you had mentioned earlier that you're changing it so it's not just the single or double, excuse me, like multiple offenses, but it's going to be looked at in a more singular fashion. But if a case is already open on a property, does that also fall within that or does that open up another case as well?

Let me ask a clarifying question. Do you mean like let's say they started with one condition and then three months later, The first one isn't resolved, and then they have another? OK. So we would add that to the case right now if it was two separate issues, such as nuisance or derelict. Those would be separate paths for enforcement. But with the IPMC, it would all be under one. But right now, it all would just accumulate under the same record if it was the same type of offense. And we would create a second record if it did not match the first offense.

And does that, when does that trigger also as like being a repeat violator?

Right now, two violations at a property in 12 months is considered a repeat offender.

And then would the additional be added to that violation? So it would be two, even though it's falling under the one overall violation?

Oh, would it add to, would they reach like the three offenses?

Yeah, would they reach the three, could they reach the three offenses within the inspection periods that are occurring? Yes. And then now all of a sudden, so within a year or within X amount of time, they're now a repeat offender even though they've only had the one case open against the property overall.

Right. And I might add, the real egregious cases that most of you are at least talk to us about, those folks aren't responding at all. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So they're not responding at all. And so what happens in those cases is they start getting back to sort of what's the difference between this code and the chronic nuisance code. They evolve into chronic nuisances because these folks just are not responding to the first violation, the second violation, the third violation, et cetera. And so those are the real egregious ones. What we find is most folks do respond and make some attempt to voluntary comply? It's when they kind of lose control of the situation because illegal dumping or things like that. So those are all really good questions and we can solidify that for you. It's obviously a timing thing and then the lack of response by the violator. And there is some sort of Good faith effort in there to do something. But we'll solidify a response for you on that, Deputy Mayor. Great. Thank you.

And this might, apologies, Council Member Rumbaugh, this may dovetail into the chronic nuisance. But if not, then I'd just be curious of, like, when do we off-ramp those problem properties to the chronic nuisance codes? through this process, like, how quickly does that happen? And, like, for example, if there's, like, specific abatements that are occurring on a property, are we doing it, if there's an abatement, does that mean it's pushed over into the chronic nuisance code automatically, or do we have to, like, have repeat violations over X amount of months before it switches over? How many abatements does it need to be? I have a property that's had five abatements. And I suspect the cost of abatement has cost more than the property value itself. So I'm just curious of where the off-ramp is. Do we actually finally get folks into the chronic nuisance code?

So to answer the question about whether an abatement necessarily means that it now lives in that chronic nuisance area, The answer to that would be no, because the abatement would be for the property conditions. In order to classify something as a chronic nuisance under that other code, we would have to have police involved and the city's attorney's office. And that would usually happen when there are behaviors of individuals on the property that also contribute to the conditions of the property. So I would say it's really case by case to determine what's happening at a property at any given time to determine to make the call if what is currently happening would meet that threshold.

Great. Thank you. And maybe this is a question for the city attorney. When those cases of abatement occur and it costs the city money and we lien the property, for example, up to a certain dollar amount, if we are continuing to abate properties beyond that dollar amount, is that not technically a gift of public funds for the benefit of the property owner? Because we'll never actually recoup that cost.

So I wouldn't, council member or deputy mayor, I wouldn't consider that a gift to public funds because there's a public benefit in abating the nuisance. The cost recovery is a separate issue that's typically through a lien and foreclosure on the lien. or waiting for a sale of the property, and then the lien is resolved through the property sale. And if there are any funds available, depending on the priority of the lien, because we have priority on certain liens only up to a certain amount, and then after that we're no longer in priority. We don't typically get full cost recovery, don't often get recovery on the liens that we filed. And as was pointed out in the presentation, that could be years down the road before we see any cost recovery. But I would not consider that a gift to public funds.

Okay.

Thank you. I do want to talk about some of the intangibles that not having a robust compliance in our code enforcement. You know, it really does put significant detrimental impacts to the neighborhoods. And some of those intangibles are lower property values, unable to sell property. I have a property owner complaining to me right now because they're unable to sell. Multiple properties are like that because of nuisance code issues in abutting properties or within the neighborhood itself. And so if I were a property owner and trying to sell a property and unable to do that, from my perspective, that's a civil problem. civil suit right there because you're not able to, one, recoup the value of the property itself, and then a civil suit against the property owner that's not complying with city code. But that's a separate issue. The other intangibles are, and particularly especially to Councilmember Diaz's point earlier, I really think proactive enforcement at some level is really important because it's a health and safety issue. I have kids walking where there are sidewalks on the street because we are unable to enforce on a blackberry bush that's been sitting there for five years. And are we expecting a kid to report that to 311 when they walk to school every single day?

I don't think so.

What about folks in a wheelchair that are needing to use the sidewalk? Now they can't because there are bins in front of it. There are cars in front of it. I've talked with folks on our disability commission that complain to me that constantly. Those are some of the intangibles. I would say they're very tangible, to be honest with you, and they're really significant problems. And so I appreciate the effort on high investment corridors, but what about safe routes to schools? Are kids being able to get to their schools appropriately? and safely because there's a blackberry bush there. In some cases, that's not happening. And so I would love to see us to get to Tier 3, but I understand the budget constraints and issues we have. I think Tier 1 is the bare minimum, but I do think that trying to be fiscally prudent and proactive at some level, especially when it comes to the health and safety of folks that need to utilize our public spaces to get to where they need to go, I would say tier two. I do think it's high time that we invest in changing the code to the IPMC.

I'm also struggling with the acronym.

Yes. And I do appreciate the efforts that every single one of you have done to really try and streamline the process, try to make it more transparent and understanding for the public, because I do know there's frustration, as has been mentioned before, with, hey, this has been closed out, but I still see the problem property. I still see the issue. I didn't see the city go out there. Maybe an inspector drove by and took some pictures. But what they're looking for is resolution. And so... Understand that frustration and until you sitting in the living room with 20 other neighbors getting yelled at I think I think you would I think your experience would be a little different and not once not twice not three times But many many times all across our city and especially in my district I show up to people's houses I sit in their living room and I hear them and so there's a reason why I'm so passionate about this because I have entire neighborhoods coming to me about these as issues and So I'm really looking forward to these updates. And however I can support and help move this along, and thank you again, Council Member Rumbaugh, I do think we need some level of proactivity. And maybe we can figure that out within a Tier 1 structure, and I'd be happy to see that, some level of proactivity. But otherwise, I think Tier 2 would be where I would look at. I think, did I answer all your questions? I think I might have. Okay. And again, I just appreciate everything that you all have done and looking forward to the next steps. Thank you.

Thank you, Deputy Mayor. Definitely share your sentiment. And clearly, this is a council that really cares about this. I mean, blight is right up there with public safety, right up there with housing affordability and homelessness in terms of the core issues that Tacomans care about. And this is us taking a step in responsiveness to that. So to answer your initial questions... Yes, I'm certainly in favor of moving forward with IPMC adoption. I would love the top tier proactive level, but in light of current budget constraints, tier two is something that I support. I think that in some ways, just like getting on top of public safety, just like our previous therapeutic court conversation, this is very much preventative work. If we're investing in our neighborhoods, we're growing a tax base, then I'm not saying that pays for itself, but I do think that there are a lot of positive synergies there. I also support Councilmember Sedalge's point about voluntary versus non-voluntary in terms of being sensitive to how we're dealing with a more proactive system because we're very pro grandma council apparently. But we want to make sure that in having a more forceful responsive system that we're not penalizing people who just simply don't have the physical or the mobility or the financial means to mow their grass, paint their siding or what have you. And so making sure that we're building sensitivity into that. Something I'd also put forward is something to consider in that same vein is owner occupied versus investor owned because I think a lot of the most problem properties that border into that nebulous nuisance, chronic nuisance property threshold are the difference between a property that maybe someone who's disabled or senior lives in versus like, if you remember the Paul Post era, right? Those kinds of properties, those kinds of either out of state or absentee slumlord types who just don't care. That's just part of their business model. And I think if you talk to the average person, they could clearly make a pretty obvious distinction between someone who might just need some help or being connected to a social worker or resources versus someone who just doesn't care, right? And so making sure that we're being sensitive there. I don't believe landlord versus owner occupant is a suspect class constitutionally. I think that we might have additional means there. To that end as well, is there any opportunity for engaging our provisional licensing system with this? Is there any way that that might intersect?

The provisional licensing system would come into play when there is a property that is...

When it's a rental.

When it's a rental, yes, exactly. So we do work alongside the landlord-tenant coordinator when there is reports of an unsafe situation at a rental property. So our inspector will go out, work alongside with that department to determine what the findings are, and then enforce on it from there. So the provisional license piece... We do work with tax and licensing right now to let them know about our findings when we do those inspections, but I do think that that program, how it interacts with ours could be more refined.

Yeah, and we won't get to full complete cost recovery, as you mentioned, but we could move maybe more in that direction because you have to have a license if you have a rental. Exactly. And so we could maybe be a little bit more forceful. We could, frankly, just put a price tag on the behavior we don't want to see and also recoup a little bit more for the general fund. So that's something I'd really encourage you to look at is finding ways to build off of what's a pretty successful underutilized program through provisional licensing. Also, this is more spaghetti on the wall, but our fire chief is here, so I can't, this really reminds me of the dispatching system where there's very much an 80-20 rule where the smallest group is often the most impactful on calls for service, right? So if you look at 911 dispatching, for example, just if you look at the CARES program, for example, which for those who aren't familiar, it's caseworkers who interact with the frequent flyers who call 911 for everything, emergency or non-emergent, and connect them to services in between the calls so as to reduce their reliance on calling on first responders for something that might not really be an emergency I'm just wondering, for that more sympathetic cast of characters, not the Paul Post slumlord types, but the grandma who can't mow her grass or fill in the blank, might that be something we could look into? Could there be, whether it's one of your administrators or a third party we contract with or something, to find if there's a way to systematically connect the people who the system is classifying as, quote, repeat offenders, but maybe they're just people who don't have access to a program and In doing so, that could really stem the tide and reduce the overflow of our work. So maybe that's something that you could consider if we are floating up to tier two, for example, and the scope of the administrator's work. And then finally, this is just a clarifying question. What makes someone go to collections versus being leaned if they have violations of the property?

It would be based on the amount of time since the fee was assessed and it being unpaid.

Okay. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you.

Appreciate your presentation. Okay, our fourth agenda item is a letter to the Urban Gardens Management. I'd like to call on Councilmember Diaz to begin the presentation.

Thank you. If you look at the bottom of your stack of paperwork that we have worked through today You will see a letter that I have drafted in response to a request to receive from organizers and workers at the herbal garden gardens where they are working to bargain their their contract This is a Something that we brought forward today for full council consideration, I wasn't sure who received the request, but I did know that the whole council always stands with folks looking to collectively bargain, so I thought we would bring that forward for everybody's consideration. A copy of the letter was already sent to the Herbal Gardens this morning from just Council Member Palmer and myself, because they had a meeting earlier in the day that they wanted to make sure it was addressed earlier in the day, but we wanted to make sure that folks had the opportunity to sign on this evening. And that was the quickest we could bring it forward. So it will be on the agenda for this evening for everyone else to be able to sign on. We'll send a full completed letter over. And hoping that folks will ask any questions they might still have.

I just want to say thank you so much for bringing this forward. I'm a really big, strong proponent of collective bargaining agreements and workers being able to collectively bargain, so I really appreciate that.

Thank you.

Any other questions or comments for Council Member Diaz? Council Member Hines.

Thank you. What is the business that this is, again, just to clarify? I got the email, too, and I just didn't understand what the business was.

I want to say it's a dispensary, but I might have the words incorrect as to what, yeah. It is. Dispensary is the right word. Thank you.

Council Member Sedalia. Yes, it's a cannabis retailer. I believe it is. Oh, it's right off the exit on 16th.

I just didn't look up which LCB licenses they have, but that is the genre of business it is.

All right. Thank you so much, Council Member Diaz.

Any additional questions or comments?

All right. And that's coming tonight? Perfect. All right. Do we have any other items to share? Do we have any committee reports to share? All right. We're moving on to item number five, a general review and city manager's weekly report. I would like to call on Deputy City Manager Allison Griff to begin her presentation.

Thank you, Deputy Mayor. Hopefully I'll be very quick so you all can get to your afternoon business. For your awareness, there are no ceremonials on tonight's agenda, no modifications on tonight's agenda. There is one opportunity for public comment under public comment regarding motions, resolutions, and ordinances on tonight's agenda. Please let us know if you have any questions about tonight's agenda. And attached to the study session agenda today was the weekly report to council. Thank you, Deputy Mayor.

Thank you so much, Deputy City Manager. Do I hear a final motion?

Move to adjourn. Second.

Been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? We stand adjourned. Thank you all. Have a great day.