Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening. I'd like to call the order of the Infrastructure Planning and Sustainability Committee meeting of August 26, 2026. Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Council Member Diaz? Here. Council Member Hines?

Here.

Vice Chair Sevalbe?

Here.

And Chair Watts?

Here. All right, we're going to start with public comment. Clerk, will you please repeat?

To request a speaker in public comment for items on the agenda, please sign up in the front of the room with the event done so already. If you are speaking virtually, please press the raise hand button at the bottom of the Zoom window or star 9 for the phone. Your name and the last four digits of your phone number will be called out when it is your turn to speak.

Great, and I know we have a few people in the room, so let's start with those. I will turn it over to you. Nope, I'm going to read something first, but then I'm going to let you call the names. And just so everybody knows, you can come up to the table, and the microphone works better, so we need you at the table when you make your remarks. Okay, so when you are called, please state your name for the record. You have two minutes to make your remarks. Please be mindful of the time frame. Please call on those who have signed up. And you are welcome to come up two at a time so that we can keep things moving.

Okay, I'd like to note, before I call the people in the room, that we did receive four written comments, and that was provided to the packet today. And the first person I'm going to call in the room is Jodi Coates.

So thank you very much. My name is Jody Cook. I sit on the Tacoma Urban Forest Friends on the Northern Neighborhood Council. And so I've had for years an opportunity to take a look at what's been going on with our tree canopy. But first, I want to thank the council for the nomination of adding the North Union Greenway nomination. That was supposed to be an example of what Tacoma was supposed to do throughout a lot of avenues as the city was developing. And so I'm hoping that it will resurge as a way of bringing canopy to other boulevards and avenues that are here in Tacoma, and I look forward to working on that to make that happen. What I'm showing here real quick, is that this is the map that is the same map from about 2020 that came off of the urban forestry plan, but it was color coded. So instead of being in shades of green, which implies there's green everywhere, this particular individual went ahead and did an analysis and changed the color code to make it more outstanding. And what I want to show back here is that Look at all the orange. So the orange represents where there is only a 10 to 20 percent tree canopy. That's throughout most of Tacoma. And it's not just exclusively in a few areas. So we have a urban canopy problem throughout the city. And I want to just emphasize that even in the north and the west end, trees have not been part of our psyche. as it relates to people planting trees in their yards and certainly not the right of ways. There are areas here that are yellow. That is where we have a 20 to 30%. Now mind you, they're still not even at 30%, which is our new goal by the year 2050. And the reason why a lot of these are yellow is because those were the sections that had been clear cut back at the turn of the century. People moved into those areas. That's where the older houses are. So at that point, that's when people started planting trees. And the only reason we have those older trees is because they're old houses and old neighborhoods. So I just encourage you, as you're taking a look at your different options, that you consider a whole citywide program. Tacones are generous. They've repeated that through the street living, through the parks, and through schools. And I think if the information is provided to them and the analysis that they will cop up once again to be able to support this important infrastructure that we have to bring back to our city thank you i'm sorry i went over thanks jody and can you call those two people uh tom giski and jeffers i'm tom giski and i

on D Street at Tacoma, and I too want to thank you for the work that you're doing with this project. It's needed, and you're doing a great job. And I wouldn't want to disappoint you, so I've got the poem. Urban Forest Synergy We come with all due respect, knowing not what to expect. Filled with hope and energy, seeking urban forest synergy. Synergy is when value exceeds the sum of its unique proceeds. With trees, the sum of surging values, we can rehabilitate our avenues. Synergetic right-of-ways, energetic tree displays, every street in our town, graced by shape, thus sprung on. Yes, urban forest synergy integrates God's energy to unwind human dignity and create forest unity. Visualize 6th Avenue with people strolling by you. rather than rushing to their car to avoid walking on hot tar. Imagine enterprises showing guests their surprises rather than sitting at their desks looking out at emptiness. Think of opportunities within our communities where afternoon streets remain cool for children walking home from school. Wonder why it's not possible to do the impossible? All we need is leadership to reforest our parking strip. By now, with all due respect, you must know what we expect. City-sponsored tree plantings on our right-of-way landings. Are we not all on the same page? Right-of-ways. Our canopy stays. Reverse years of ROW lethargy by launching urban forest synergy.

Thank you. Thank you.

Go ahead. Get in. Oh, the next person. Oh, the next. Sorry. Okay, great. Go ahead, Ken. Oh, I get to close. Great.

My name is Kit Burns. I live in the Hilltop area, and I totally support the Maryland Forest Plan. I have been looking at all the documents, including the South Dakota Neighborhood Plan, the Urban Forest Management Plan, and other documents that the city has put together. I've also put a bunch of questions into people. There are many questions that have to be answered. My favorite saying is that the two best times to plant a tree is 20 years ago and today. And as I was looking through the management plan, the idea of planting trees in the right way is a huge priority. And that has to happen sooner rather than later. And if we wait five more years, we'll be five more years behind. So I just want to say that the first thing is figure out how to get to plant trees and pick an area of the city like South Tacoma and plant trees there as a community. I know there's some of the drawings have street avenues. We have some street avenues which are quite good, but I have spoken to the attorney and other people within the city. The primary thing is to use trees as infrastructure and make them a requirement of the city. to plant trees in the right of way. And so I'm fortunate to be working with the Washington State Grant City Tree Account. I've been going out counting trees.

I've got a couple more days to spend doing that. So I'll keep counting trees. Keep counting on you guys to come through with some money to plant some trees. Thank you.

Thank you. Do we have anyone online? There's no one online. All right. Anyone else that missed the sign up? okay we'll go ahead and close public comment thank you to everybody who spoke today and i know uh as the clerk said we got a number of um emails ahead of the meeting too so thank you to those folks who took the time to email all right we have two two items today both tree related and we're going to start with tree and landscaping code update with adam nolan from planning and development services and if anybody else is joining me to introduce them

good afternoon evening council members my name is adam nolan i'm a senior planner with uh plan development services comprehensive planning team i'm joined by mike gary urban force program manager for the city and steve atkinson who's our assistant division manager for long range planning so i'll be providing a presentation on the tree code update next slide please and this uh Our presentation will be informational only, but provide some updates on the tree code update and focus a little more on reviewing options for the tree retention outside of development piece of the scope of work and conclude with an opportunity for discussion and input from council members. Next slide, please. So this project is part of phase three of the urban forest priority action plan that council adopted in 2025. and that focuses on launching a planning commission process to develop new regulations regarding tree canopy management and preservation so we're we were here with ips in march of 2026 and gave an introductory presentation and we received some input including some direction to focus on gaps in code not revisit recently decided code that council had adopted focus our benchmarking on cities that are grappling with that balance between population growth and tree policies, and also considerations for flexibility and incentives as we look at drafting code. So we are currently in step three of the project, and that is working with the Planning Commission drafting code and taking into account that IPS direction from March. So in July, we took our first draft of code to the Planning Commission, and this focused on the tree credit system and tree retention with development. The city adopted regulations through Home and Tacoma to apply to development in urban residential districts pertaining to tree credit system and tree retention. And with this update, we've been directed to look at expanding those regulations to other zoning districts in the city. So additionally, the scope includes assessing and addressing gaps in parking lot tree requirements and then the remaining work with the commission is exploring low canopy management strategies and drafting code for tree retention for non-development scenarios so that's that's a new program for the city it's going to require significant considerations for developing code next slide please so as the name suggests when we talk about true retention for non-development the question is what do we To what degree do we want to regulate tree removals that aren't associated with the development action? So when a property owner wants to remove a tree for whatever reason, how might we want to regulate that? So August 19th, we went to the Planning Commission and brought forward, walked them through some key decisions on this topic. That's going to be the main focus of this presentation as well. And these key decisions, they build upon each other. We start with at the base level of what tree sizes to regulate, what are some of the allowances to consider for removal, mitigation for canopy loss, and permit submittal requirements. So I'm going to individually walk through these different decisions and share some context in terms of benchmarking, things like that. And we've also included a general framework to assess the level of impact from high to low impact. This assumes impacts to Advancing our canopy goals and the public benefits that trees offer to the city and also impacts the property owners and city resources so Baseline way to interpret this approach is higher impact translates to more aggressively pursuing the advancement of our canopy goals But also potentially equating to higher impacts to private property owners and city resources so and working with the Planning Commission and drafting a this code, recognizing that we're standing up a new program that's going to have impacts, including fiscal impacts with administration and enforcement of code. We're working with the Commission to explore putting forward two different options for Council Way later in 2027. So what would their preferred option be and what would an alternative option be? So since this is going to be quite a bit of information to work through, I'll just note that at the end of the presentation we've included a table that has the high and medium impact options, and that will be an opportunity to invite some discussion and input from the committee. With that in mind, I would just request to have it at the forefront. potential discussion questions of what code options do council members prefer and what impacts most concern council members.

And Adam, if I can just, before you go too far, this is an informational presentation only, so we're not voting on anything at this point. So any discussion is just input from the committee and not a council decision. I just want to be really clear about that today so that the public knows today we're not making decisions.

Yes, thank you for making that Next slide please. So the first decision point to consider is what tree sizes to regulate and some ranges for consideration looking at potential high impact option would be to regulate trees over six inches diameter at standard height or DSH and medium impact level would be regulating trees over 18 inches DSH, and lower impact, regulate only trees over 24 inches DSH, our largest trees. So with our benchmarking, we've seen that it's common for jurisdictions to regulate trees six inches DSH and larger, and our code that currently applies to development activity in urban residential districts regulates trees over six inches DSH. In terms of some of the direction and interests that the Planning Commission has expressed, they have indicated interest in drafting code for regulating six inch DSH trees as their preferred option and 18 inch as an alternative option. So with this, there's the question of what degree of tree sizes that we as a city and council, what's that baseline for oversight and permitting tree removal in the city, especially as it relates to non-development.

Next slide, please.

Actually, I want to build in a pause just to make sure there's no questions. So... On the previous slide? On the previous slide.

Sorry about that. Okay. Questions from the committee?

Okay, the second decision point to consider is frequency and size allowances for removal and some potential ranges for consideration. A high impact approach could be only a certain number can be removed in a given time and that could have some variability based on size. The medium option would be allowing And a lower impact would be no regulations on the frequency or size of removal. So it's common for jurisdictions to allow a certain number of trees to be removed in a given timeframe. And there is, we are seeing a variability in their approaches as well. In terms of planning commission, some of the interests that they've expressed is having greater restrictions on removal of our larger trees. So the 24 inch DSH and above. But then allowing for greater allowance for removal for smaller trees, like six inches to 18 inches DSH. But also an interest in exploring a floor, so a limit to how many trees can be cut down on a site. And that's out of concerns that sites may clear out all of their trees and the city does not have, currently have any mechanisms in place to mitigate for that, if that was to happen. So, at this time, I'm going to take a pause, see if we have any input or questions about this information.

Next slide, please.

Okay, the third decision point is considering mitigation measures that would apply when trees are removed. So different ranges for consideration. A higher impact approach could be requiring a canopy loss fee and tree replanting for trees that are moved. A medium impact could be require a canopy loss fee or tree replanting. And a lower impact would be no mitigation required. And In our benchmarking, we see that it's common for jurisdictions to require replanting ratios along with the variability in that ratio based on tree size and tier. The Planning Commission has expressed interest in more protections and mitigations for large trees, such as the 24-inch DSH and above, and to have replanting and canopy loss for those larger trees. But for trees smaller than 24 inches, the option of a canopy loss or replanting. And another option would be that medium approach of requiring the canopy loss fee or true replanting to apply to all tree sizes. That's sort of what we're weighing with the commission now. I'm going to take a pause and see if there's any input or questions.

Adam, is this section, is it silent on where that tree is replanted, or is it assumed to be replanted in the place that it was removed?

I think that that's something we're working through with the commission, but yeah.

It doesn't come up in a later section or anything? Okay.

Not in a later section, but related to this incident in North Ryerson, does it have to happen on site? Can it happen elsewhere? And right now in the Cobra and Tacoma, there's kind of what we call mitigation sequencing. And actually, sorry, for the record, Mike Carey, I'm a different force, but you're in the city. Sorry, I should have said that. And so it's preferred to do it on-site. If you can't do it on-site, then off-site, maybe right-of-way would be an option.

And then if you can't do it from there, then you can either do it through a treatment mitigation banking program, or you find a partner that is willing to take your treatment on, or you can pay a fee. So it's kind of the tiered system for mitigation.

And who makes that decision as to your ability to plant it on-site?

Right now, for Oklahoma, it is the applicant's responsibility to demonstrate that they either can plant it on-site, or if they can't, they have to demonstrate why.

And then you kind of go through the sequencing.

So it happens in the pertinent. Other questions? Yeah, go ahead.

Did you ask Richard that or just questions?

No, please.

I like the high impact. my thought around it however is how do you make a how do you make them sort of separate is it like one invoice that sort of has two lines on it because in my mind i don't necessarily want the person who's chopping down trees with disregard having to be the person who goes and replants them i don't know that i trust that individual to know hey know what they're doing but be care how they're doing it so i just wonder if that is that's sort of that second piece is some way that we feel the love or how do we

yeah that's a really great question i think the distinction on this is this is for the most part assuming they're legal removals too so it's not a consequence of illegal removal which might be the case um still might not be somebody qualified to planetary i don't know yes not that it's a high qualification necessarily but that's fair i think i mean the way the code is currently written is that

people have to if they're planting trees on their site they have to plant trees on their site and then they have to be established right so that kind of is the piece where if they're doing it incorrectly the tree doesn't establish they're required by code to reclaim and that's our current control for that we don't say who can do the planting necessarily but again that's that could be a decision right if it needs to be somebody qualified or specific it could probably be an option maybe because i'm just here to say i don't know how to do this but can i figure out what goal or tree foundation what kind of way

I don't get a tree expert to do this because that's not my thing. Whether they're a good actor or a bad actor.

Not my thing.

Any other questions before we move on?

Yeah, yeah.

This isn't your last opportunity to comment on this. We're going to circle back.

Next slide, please.

Okay. The fourth decision point is permit requirements. And range considerations of higher impact would be required permits, including arborist reports. Medium being required permits with documentation for removal of all regulated trees. It doesn't necessarily have to be an arborist report, but alternative documentation. And a lower impact would be to not require a permit for removal of regulated trees. It's common for other jurisdictions to require a permit for removal of regulated trees. Some jurisdictions only require it for hazard, deceased, and dead trees. The Planning Commission wants to be more protective of larger trees, 18 inches and above, requiring permits and harvest reports in the case of wanting to remove. They want more flexibility for smaller trees, 6 inches to 18 inches DSH. require, they still require permits, but allow for that alternative documentation instead of a full harvest report that can carry great expense. And then also alternative documentation when it comes to those dead, diseased and damaged trees. Any questions about this slide?

Just my question to you about if we're talking about a citywide policy, are there not arborists that could be on the plate? Are we going to have enough people that would actually allow it, or is that just a children's point by which we'd say it's going to naturally, when the countries come down, we don't have enough arborists to take on the city? That is a really good distinction and question. So the way that we have been having these discussions with the planning commission is

of code successfully. And so I think as a city, what a lot of folks are recommending is that we don't set ourselves up for failure and adopt a code that's unimplementable with the resources that we have or that we're able to achieve. And the model that different cities use for this is kind of two different models. One is that you put a lot of the burden on the applicant to demonstrate certain requirements. Our risk reports providing surveys or providing a piece of paper that have a survey of the land and the trees. And then the staff resource can be smaller, and it's just a review, and we're complying, and we're looking through the code. The alternative is to put more of the burden on the city, where we would staff up with arborists. We do more of the work. So we do the inspections. We do the surveys. We do the arborist reporting to take that burden off of the applicants. Two different levels of service, two different staffing resourcing needs, those are part of the discussion that should be had

are working inside the city of Oklahoma right now? How many people are in our city, but how many private arborists out there?

Oh, right, in the industry? That's a really good question, and I don't have a good read on that, to be honest.

I know the ones that I intersect with for permit review or for other reasons as well, but it's a really good question. I just, I think it's here. Is there a capacity for it to go down? Not only is there a capacity for us a year, or six months, or three months, to remove a tree that they may or may not think is a hazard, or that they may or may not want to remove because they have whatever reason it is, and they have to wait until it never persists anymore. So having no idea about how many of those people there are, and I recognize that it's just, if our roasters are in the city, I mean, you have people waiting five or six years to probably be able to remove a tree, but if that's our goal, then that would be that's the council but um there's a that's the question i was having with that part right there um that's just one way and then i guess my other question would be um i guess if the city doesn't give me free for the assessment but if i needed a private office to do it would i have to pay for that not necessarily okay so it could be

It could be that way. Or a lot of times with permitting, and Jim's taking a big part in this, but we try to achieve cost recovery to some degree, right? So we charge permit fees that are considered with the resource that we have to provide to ensure those permits.

That's good characterization.

Next slide, please. So I'll touch on the next steps here for concluding with the discussion, but moving forward, we are going back to the Commission in September for review of next round of draft code and planning for public hearing with the Commission in October, November, 2026, and then planning Commission issuing their recommendations in early 2027 to IPS and the Council And keeping in mind that as we work with the Commission looking at several different alternatives, we plan with their recommendation to also include an evaluation of potential fiscal impacts. We've provided like a pretty general assessment of impacts here. Once we have some code that will be brought for council consideration, we'll do a deeper dive of impacts. Next slide, please. All right, so with this, we've captured on the table the higher impact, medium impacts, and also some of those current standards that the city has that apply to development in urban residential zoning districts. And just want to tee up discussion around if the council members have code options that they prefer or any impacts that really are concerning And with that information, we can go back to the Planning Commission September and just channel that back to them as we continue this work. That concludes everything I have to say in terms of the presentation, but open it up for discussion.

Great. Thank you. And thank you for those answers throughout the presentation as well. this or any council but this council can't do anything without understanding those fiscal impacts unfortunately so i appreciate the the understanding in the timeline the next steps where we have that conversation so thank you for that for including that can we leave that up there actually so we can stare at our options I do not print the PowerPoints for us in a safe place. So we don't have this in front of us and all the people have it on their phones. We don't need anything else in screen. We don't have to stare at ourselves. So I was opening it up to council comments on the discussion questions. Who wants to go first?

Um, I guess the question I'm coming back to just in all of this, right, is, and something I'm not seeing anywhere in here, is what about low-income, B-cap people who want to remove the tree? Because what I'm seeing is a layering of a lot of requirements that are going to make removing any tree in the city very expensive.

And so, if the goal is to make it so expensive that no one removes the tree, that I think we have to be clear about there are some folks who will pay the cost to remove it, and there are some folks who won't be able to afford it, and that will have disparate impacts on parts of our community. So I think as I'm looking through this, how are we thinking about people who may not have the means by which to remove the trade now? The answer is hopefully no one ever wants to remove a trade in the state of Oklahoma ever again. But if people do choose to remove a tree for reasons of their own kind of why, I do think that's something I see layering of requirements on top of it that's going to make that really hard. And you may have parts of our city where people have the means by which they're going to remove the tree.

They'll pay whatever, they'll replant it, they'll pay, they'll have an arborist come in, and they'll have access to tree removal. You don't have folks that don't have any access whatsoever.

I also, this is also just private property. I also wonder about, is that related to development? So resources around tree removal, arborists, staff who are able to do that is limited because some of those folks are going to be doing work around development sites. And these are non-development sites. So thinking about how that's going to tax the overall kind of requirements here. I need arborists to put a tree on my property so I'm not going to develop it, but all the arborists are being utilized by development sites related to the home of Tacoma, how much longer am I going to need to wait before I'm able to do that?

Again, hopefully that's not a joke point, but it's something I think about.

And then the question would be, trying to be in line with best practices in other jurisdictions is fine with me, so I appreciate all the research on what they're doing. I would love to know more about when they talk about regulating 6 inches or greater or what that looks like versus 18. What's the scale that they have? I agree with my commission's notion that The amount of regulation should go up with the size of the tree, despite some of the bigger trees should have probably more protection than smaller trees. It should go up as size goes up. The requirement can't be lost to the orchard or tree planting. I have been in meetings where folks, their lot itself, once they remove the tree, does not have capacity for a tree to be put back onto the property. And so I think flexibility around that makes sense, I think would be important. So we do want trees replanted.

We talked about a camp philosophy as part of that conversation, but is there flexibility about where the tree can go? I feel like this is a space where we'd be better served if people just wrote checks and sent them to COLA and it allowed us to execute on our urban forestry plan to plant trees the way they make the most sense.

And I think, again with permit requirements, I just come back to the, I probably land more in the medium impact versus having arborists weigh in on every single tree in the world that we see, but having some permitting and having some documentation requirements part of it.

But again, and that could be, I guess in my mind, the bigger the tree, it could be tied to the arborists weighing in versus

Great. Thank you.

Go ahead. And a similar thought as I was articulating my joy of seeing high impact around mitigation measures was the piece around What do we do for low income seniors or folks who just in general can't afford it? I think of that particular group specifically, because I think if we write a code, it can include that program. We have an assessor's office that already includes low income seniors for other exemptions, tax exemptions and things. So there's a natural nexus there. But where that leaves me is what about the missing middle of folks who, like. a pass or something comes they have to get rid of this tree for something that is not within their control and now we've bankrupt somebody or put them at a risk that is how we always talk about people we sort of one one bad health care journey away from bankruptcy i don't need it to be one bad tree away from that so how do we mitigate that piece around folks who aren't sort of protected in other safety net programs i don't know how we control for that but that is my thought right now

Can I ask a question around that? Do we have, or maybe I should say we might need a reminder of, would a pest be then a hazardous tree?

So that's a really great clarification. In the presentation, just because we wanted to condense, we didn't talk about all the exemptions. So in the current code, there are exemptions already built in for all exemptions. and outside of development, we could adopt similar exemptions. So those things are things like if the tree is a hazard, if it's a dead, dying, diseased tree, if it's damaging existing infrastructure like collapsing side sewers or losing sidewalks, those are all things that would provide for exemptions where you wouldn't have to then pay for the tree's loss. There's an important flag, though, because some of those do require a qualified individual to determine that tree is a hazard. but an arborist would have to assess and say, yeah, that tree is a hazard, which has a cost associated. So it doesn't entirely get them out of having to contribute funds if they have to hire a private arborist, which again is out of their conversation where the city, if it was resourced accordingly, could provide arborist consultative services to not make them hire an arborist versus hiring an individual arborist. That's just the way the program's set up.

Yeah.

Okay, thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Great point, and also,

Yeah, and I think that could be similar to that code enforcement program that we have that helps that little bit of amount of folks who can't get to their venturations. Maybe there's a there there somewhere in code land. I don't know, but just a thought. And then I tend to lean in the same direction as Councilmember Hines around the median impact for permitting requirements because the arborist question is a real one. I would love for the market to be there. I don't know that it is. to surround how many arborists there are and at some point we do have to do the trade-off between what affordable housing and the funding stack for developers while there are evil developers there are a lot of good ones so how do we mitigate that too i think comes to mind uh thank you there's a lot of um kind of good comments and questions

I guess around the hazard thing, the thing that came into my head was, you know, what's the difference between potentially, I'm from the East Coast, so in the East Coast, a neighbor of mine ended up having to deal with the fact that they had a child that was very allergic to a certain type of tree nut that was falling. Like, does that count as a hazard or not? How do we, like, is there flexibility in that? And apparently this was a real, like, allergy or something from what I understand. I don't know what kind, I don't know trees enough to know what kind of tree that was. I think it was maybe a walnut or something.

It was very spiky, I believe.

Versus, you know, just the annoyance of having, you know, like, pine sap fall in. I mean, I have a corner of my front yard that we do not go to at certain times of year because things will stick to you, right? And it's hard to get off, and it's annoying. So kind of knowing more about those exemptions, like are there flexibilities? Could we be limited if we have a duty of care and the liability in not providing something like that? I guess there was another kind of thought in my head, and this might be more of a question downstream, And this is related to this idea of also kind of wanting to understand. So today non-development, we have nothing correct or limited.

We have regulations for the public.

Yes.

And then we also have regulations for critical areas, which do apply to private property, both inside and outside of development. So if you're a tree on a steep slope, the shoreline, whether you're developing or not, the tree is regulated through the critical area. outside of the critical areas, you are absolutely correct that outside of urban residential in development, we do not have tree protection.

Okay, so it includes these, we're looking at things both on residential and commercial non-development things. I would like to kind of understand if there are considerations for the difference because we have different zones, because there's different goals for different zones. We have industrial areas, you know, we have, uh, uh, residential areas or different types of industrial, you know, have a light industrial, like, are there different, are we considering different kind of requirements or is it a one size fits all and is that right? Or is that wrong? I don't actually know the answer to that. Right. Are we considering, um, um, those because in some of those areas, maybe we should be thinking more about mitigation being in the right of way as a way to get something because it may stop industry. And we do need to balance that kind of test. I'd like to understand that. But more, I guess, for me, a bigger kind of thought is, are there, I mean, there's no city like Tacoma, but are there other cities? And what do they do, especially cities that have that mix that we have of a port, you know, of tide flaps, of commercial, of residential, in those types of, are there like cities in size and shape that have this type, or we kind of knew, and what did they do, and when did they do it, and what are some of the impacts they think they've had, right? Good, bad, or indifferent. I don't know if there is a city like that. Maybe you have to do an amalgam, but I'd really like to understand recent history in some of that policy as a way to kind of say, hey, maybe we can have some lessons learned and understand if there's more flexibility, less flexibility. You know, how can we put it in a way that says we've actually learned from others who've done this and this is kind of what we've discovered. Um, if that is a possibility, cuz I don't even know how many other municipalities have added things like this when they did it and what they, if they've even kind of thought about what that impact is.

Do you mind if I respond to that? Sure.

Yeah.

Um, so the consulting team has done a pretty good analysis of looking at benchmarking other cities for kind of all the things that we're sharing here on Gansome. of looking through what are the right thresholds for tree regulation size and what are the exceptions that are kind of across the industry. So all of these things, plus some more that I didn't have the opportunity to share tonight.

The industry being here in Washington or just nationwide?

Mostly, I will say, a bare amount of the research is local, regional to us, but then also some other specific cities that they looked at for reasons of density or dealing with city middle housing opportunities. So a lot of the research originated from home in Tacoma, very thorough research, and then of the other kind of non-urban residential uses as well. So some of that has been done in terms of what people are doing. I'll just say it's more of a quantitative, and we haven't necessarily had like individual interviews with those jurisdictions to learn from their lessons, the qualitative part of it. I will also say King County recently produced a pretty substantial report looking at all things tree regulations for King County jurisdictions. pretty comprehensive review of all of the jurisdictions in King County that have regulations for trees inside, outside development, different zones of land uses, et cetera. And we would be more than happy to provide those reports to you if you're interested in reading through them, or if there's something specific you'd like to know more about, we can dig out those details and provide those specific reviews.

And guess what I'd really like, when we get to a point of considerations being done, is to understand was this part of the original kind of maybe consultant recommendation Was it changed from that? Are there others that have done what we're doing? Are we different in the recommendation from that? Good, bad, or indifferent? That helps me. Another thing that also I think would help me, because this is also learning from home is put examples on how much it's actually going to cost if we're going to put fees there. Because sometimes I get developers that come in and go, hey, by the way, this is how much the cost can be lost if you ended up costing me. Right. Just to have us understand the actual impact, because I can't actually lost view, you know, is what, 100 something dollars per inch. Right. And then you forget that they can add up. And we have to consider that also in light of the fact that we can have people that have and what what today our permit costs could be right to be the permit cost plus the canopy philosophy of a certain amount per inch. Right, it's really easy to just look at, for me, when I looked at that, I'm like, bigger than six, I do math, so in my head, I was trying to figure out, oh, this costs $12,000 or $1,200, right? You know, 18 inches times $125 is a lot of money, plus a permit fee, right? I think it's also, for us to make a decision, we kind of need to know that real impact, because it's gonna impact everybody. not just a corporation, but also someone who might be on a fixed income, may not be on a fixed income, may have just lost their job, maybe not, right? That today, and that's something we have to do because people, especially today, are feeling like they're being nickel-denyed in every way, shape, or form. And it'd be irresponsible not to at least have a real number. Because some people might look at that and like, you know, that's worth it. And other people might be like, I don't think that's worth it.

One of the things that I'll offer if you don't mind is the way that the fees are structured in the current code is based on if the city were to then go replant the inches that were removed. So if we were to replace inch for inch, how much would that cost us to do that planting on their behalf? The question becomes, again, all of this was in the context of urban residential was for how it was kind of structures. Now that we're expanding it citywide for different zones, the question is, should it be a flat fee for inch across all the different zones, all the different land uses? And I think that's kind of what you're getting to. That is. Should we treat it the same way? Yeah. Right.

Maybe the mitigation, because we were thinking about mitigations like that where, you know, it's onsite on right away, maybe in the same watershed. right, to start having a nexus to the development but still kind of balance it. So I'd love to kind of see those types of, you know, I think I gave you a lot over there. But, you know, I will end with answering the, you know, my questions aren't meant to in any way kind of delay this. It's to be more responsible about how we think about non-development. Because at the end of the day, Tacoma exists. by abusing a natural resource that was everywhere here, which are trees, right? We exist because we chopped down a whole bunch of trees and that was our industry for a really long time. And like many other things that we humans have done, right, we are learning the lessons of having done that. And we're trying to undo things, whether it is removing contaminated soil, removing, you know, creosote-laden, you know, stumps that were holding up docks, cleaning our water, doing fish passages for our dams because we realized, oh, it's really important the fish actually went up the river. This is another mitigation that we should and be responsible in doing because it is important that we protect the natural resources that we abused and removed and then have a lot of issues with.

it is important that we thank you great thank you um i this has been really really great and i think um there are a lot of pieces of this that feel like they need different levels and talking about different zoning actually makes sense to me and then we get this thing so complicated we have to remember that it's individual homeowners and residents who are trying to take a look at this and understand what they have to do um and as we've all talked about before most people don't know that they need a permit for anything related to trees right so there's a huge amount of education um as we start this off too so just even to get to that point and kind of hand them something that makes sense so um i'm a little bit torn about the levels but i think that we do have to treat i mean i think replacing one to one makes a lot of sense um for any size tree but i do think that um to come over dia's point earlier I as your average homeowner could pull one out and put one in that's one inch but when we're talking about a big huge tree and how we replace that and how the site actually looks we are going to need some help so I am curious about the expenses around having more arborists on staff that does feel like a way to mitigate that and I want to be careful about how much we're requiring so I think especially on that last one I think I also 10 towards the medium as we step into this. Just to also say, look, looking forward to see opportunities for low income and thinking through some, thinking through who we're actually talking about. I think one of the things that you all did during home and Tacoma in the planning department was to say, you know, we have all these terms and all these types of houses and we actually have that document that showed, oh, this is what a duplex looks like, and this is what it looks like on this type of site and look at, you actually can fit four trees and four units or whatever the, those examples were so, so helpful in understanding who's actually using this code and putting trees in the ground. So I think, I know that was a huge lift to create those things. So I don't want to take it too far, but just having maybe a few examples of like, okay, so-and-so has a tree they're taking it down for their own reasons that are not on this list because by the way there's a huge amount of huge number of things on the list of why you need to take trees down and we've addressed that right but what what could that situation be and how much would that person be charged and i think um to council members doggy's point how would that add up um with all of the fees so i think having just a few examples would be really helpful in the conversation um for us but also with the public as they Because I think as we've all done, we've all talked to folks and worked through the research. Everybody wants there to be more trees in Tacoma and figuring out how we do it without making it too complicated for an individual or having everyone apply for the exemption. And then we've done all this work and we're not actually taking in any money or putting trees in the ground, right? So I think having some of those examples would be really helpful. Thank you for... The presentation, Adam, and for keeping it brief, I think we, we, um, we knew we would do that, you know, ask for something that wasn't in here, but I think this amount of information was really, really great. And having them slide by slide was a really helpful way to think through it. So, thank you. It was a great presentation. I'm looking forward to hearing the next steps from the planning commission and thank you to planning commissioners who may be listening that have done a work on this to get us this far. It's very exciting.

Thank you all for the good input.

It will be useful moving forward.

Just one point that just popped in my mind. If we're charting for B for removal, do we need to regulate the number of trees? Or does B take care of that at the same time? Because it simplifies things. It's the E, right? Yeah, we have to get the B right. So we have the B escalates, and the B space, and the size. And if someone didn't want to receive through multiple trees, the fee would counteract that. And maybe the fee being such would discourage people from moving trees into a fee, versus adding a, you can remove one, or three, or five, or whatever. It's a question maybe for the planning commission to think through. I haven't thought about that. The other point I wanted to make was, and that would be maybe something for the planning commission to consider, Is our goal to make sure we generate revenue to be able to pay for what we're looking for? So do we set the fees in such a place that people pay to them? Or is the goal to set the fees so high that no one does it? And if we set it so high that no one does it, do we then inspire people to do it irrespective and not do it in a legal way? So we just put this whole process about making it legal for people to thin and winnow trees on public property because we know if we don't allow them to do it, they'll just do it anyways. And so my question is, if we crank the fees so high, will we get people to say, well, I'm not going to pay you to do that. And my other hobby is animal rights. I'll use an example. The Humane Society has raised its animal insurance rate to $400. Why did they raise the rate to $400? They don't want people to surrender their animals. What then happens? People just dump their animals. They don't pay them $400. So we get no money. and we get the animals dumped at the same time. And so in my mind, it's like, when we think about the fees, is the goal of the fee to be something that we feel good that people are paying it, what happens, it makes them pause and consider it, and then we use the money in a positive way, or is it set so high that we're just trying to, don't remove them, and then we're willing to address the consequences of what they're just doing, right? It's because, I don't know, there was a big court case in Seattle recently of the guy who removed 140 trees out of a state park to improve his views. on the cover of the Seattle Times today, and then sold his house for a million dollars more than he wanted to, or that he was going to get beforehand. So people will, like, I do not assume that people will just run their trees for reasons we don't respect or like.

So, sorry, that was a quick report from all of you.

You tell me wonderfully. I know. Well, now that you have the last word, Adam.

Well, thank you, gentlemen, for that, and I look forward to coming back in early 2027.

Great, thank you. I appreciate it. All right, moving right into our urban forestry priority action plan update with Mike Carey and Nathan Fennig. Come on down.

Chair Walker, members of the committee. Once again, find here that our program manager still hanging out. And with me is Nathan Crane, who works on a recent budget team and did a lot of the supporting analysis for some of the fiscal stuff associated with this report. Kind of as was previously discussed with Adam, we as a city adopted the service board's priority action plan and had multiple phases for our approach. One of those phases was zoning code that we just heard a little bit about. Another phase is this Power Reaction Plan Expanded Right-of-Way Tree Maintenance Analysis. I tried to think of a fun acronym. I came up with nothing, so that's what you get. But essentially, the task here is to look at... Next slide, please. The task here was to essentially look at what would it take for the city to take over some enhanced level of maintenance for trees in the right-of-way. And we framed that, and I'll go through the framing here in just a moment. But the intent for today's presentation is really an informational briefing, so it's not asking for any decisions at this time. It is really providing information that you all could use to frame whatever future conversations you want to have about this increased level of service. So the purpose here is just to provide that technical foundation to support that future evaluation. And then I also wanted to take a moment to pause about just a legal foreword. to be clear that this report was generated by urban forestry staff, by staff with public works as well, looking at the main inside and kind of what the equipment needs would be and the staffing needs would be. as well as our rates invited team. So it's really looking at kind of the foundational data to support a future decision. It has not been evaluated by our legal team or risk team to figure out, are some of those options really feasible? What liability would be incurred by moving forward with those options? And so just a moment to pause that. Any recommendations to look further, we would want to do in consultation to other staff like our legal department for those considerations. Next slide, please. I'm not going to bore you with the 100 reporting page report, but I will just say that there's a tremendous amount of detail in it, and I want to take a quick moment to go through the structure of the report so you know how to refer back to it if you're interested in diving deep in any particular issue. What you're seeing here in deep blue is the focus of tonight's presentation. Again, with the time you have available, we kind of really wanted to dive into what I'm sure you all are curious about, which is the level of service concepts the fiscal analysis associated with those concepts, and then getting down to a menu option of service levels. But really quickly, just to navigate the report, it starts off with a background section, which essentially is framing the baseline of Tacoma. What do we do today? What are our policies and codes? Then we get into a benchmarking section where we look at national studies that describe how different urban forest management programs across the US, structure programs, fund programs, There's a lot of really good information in there that we've used to fold into our analysis. We get into the LIDAR section, which looks at our actual tree inventory for Tacoma. And we can use that to then frame quantities of trees in different geographies and assume level of service impacts if we were to bite off a certain chunk of debt. Then we're going to get into the level of service concepts. Again, we'll talk about them today. Fiscal analysis and service level options. And then the report concludes with some assumed conclusions and next steps. So how can we take this information to break out the conversation?

Next slide, please.

So I'm going to really briefly touch on some of, again, the sections that we're not going to dive deep in. I did want to mention the background section just to give some context of what's in there. And specifically framing, and this is something that's obvious to you all, but I know there might be folks in the call that don't necessarily know this, but in the city of Tacoma, existing regulations and policy place the burden of right-of-way tree maintenance and responsibility on the adjacent property owners. And while we do that, the right-of-way itself, because of its complexity and use and density, has kind of a high and specialized care need for managing trees in the right-of-way. So that environment itself has to respond to de-icing salts, to a heavily paved environment with extreme and urban heat. So it's just a very complex and stressed environment for trees to thrive in. In addition, there's technical management constraints like setting up traffic control if you're gonna prune big trees in the line of way, dealing with sidewalks and utilities and other infrastructure issues too. And because of all that context, the abutting owner's management delivers inconsistent results. So if you expect All the residents in Tacoma to manage right-of-way trees that have these complex and hard environments, the outcomes you get are diverse, right? So sometimes you get top trees. Sometimes you get inappropriate tree species selected for the wrong place. And so I guess one of the trends that we've seen is with inconsistent results, having consistent management approach is a really good way to get that. And then, just again, calling attention to the resolution that directed us to look at a range of options to raise funding for expanded city management of the maintenance and driveway, which we'll briefly discuss. I briefly mentioned the benchmarking, but it was categorized into two different groups of benchmarking. On the left, you'll see some of the high-level statistics from some national studies. And again, they inventory 667 cities across the states who have management programs, many of which are right-of-way tree management programs. And they distill things like how many public trees are managed in those cities or jurisdictions, what's the quantity of street trees, what's the pruning cycle for those trees. They looked at how many trees planted, removed, et cetera. I won't go through all the stats here. But the end result of that analysis is essentially kind of this quantitative data set that we can use to fold into our analysis to see what would our same approach be if we use those national standards. And then on the bottom left there, there are additional studies too that were able to correlate the size of a tree to the assumed amount of maintenance and FTE hours it would take to manage that tree for specific tasks, which will become important here in a little bit. On the right hand side, our urban forestry team conducted these studies with different jurisdictions that have tree management programs. So while the national studies were really good at some of the quantitative analysis, the qualitative, so how is your program structured? How is it funded? Is that a successful funding tool? Are you finding constraints? How are you dealing with liability, with concerns around sidewalks, et cetera? A lot of that came from these individual interviews that are attended with all of these different jurisdictions here. The kind of key takeaways from some of those jurisdictional interviews was essentially A good program structure requires dedicated, sustainable funding. No surprise there. But having a centralized urban forestry management program helps to alleviate concerns around gaps in services. So having everything under one house. There's no passing of the baton or trying to keep people around the city. Align your commitments with capacity. So, I mean, we just discussed this in the last presentation. Don't overcommit. setting yourself up for each other. And then having complete tree inventories, or tree inventories, really understanding your assets and your needs is really important, an asset management approach, if you will. And then ensuring that you have good just organizational structure and tools for your toolbox.

Next slide, please.

With that, I'm gonna hand it over to Nathan here to talk about how we translated our LiDAR analysis, so that big picture data set that we have that has a complete tree inventory of every tree in the city, and translated that over to a level of service concept using some of the data in the benchmark that we just discussed.

Yeah, thanks, Mike. Once again, Nathan Crane, senior business services analyst in the environmental services rates and budget group. And yeah, I'll take you through, as Mike said, some of the data underlying the study and how we use that to generate the labor estimates and eventually the levels of service. So one of the strengths of this study, I think, is how it was grounded. LIDAR survey data that's recent citywide, it's really high fidelity. It gives us counts of trees citywide, locations for each of those trees. It also gives us details such as tree height for each tree, and other metrics like tree vitality, which is a measure of the leaf coloration as well as the leaf density, and that's a pretty good proxy for determining tree health. So we have all these different metrics for each of the trees in the satellite population that are geographically mapped. We can then overlay those with other city mapping tools and look at a number of really important geographic characteristics of all of our trees. And so obviously for the study, the most important one, first of all, is which of these trees are in the right of way and how many are there? And so we found 190,000 trees that fell into that geographic category. Now, some of those are actually what we call undeveloped right-of-way, which is right-of-way that passes through open spaces, for example. It's not actually adjacent to a street. So that's kind of outside the focus of this potential increase in city management responsibility that's under consideration. So we set those aside and we filtered down to trees that are within 50 feet of a residential or arterial street center line. Those are considered more of our true street streets that are long city streets that are under consideration for development. And so those are the two big buckets, trees along residential streets, trees along arterial streets. We have other, within that, geographies of interest that are kind of smaller subsets. For example, trees in business districts, trees in regional growth centers, and those particular geographies have high management needs. They're high intensity, lots of traffic, so lots of benefits with more canopy care. And also, real hardscape, highly developed typically, and so those trees probably have a high level of need as well. So we've got individual tree height and vitality for each tree in our data set of those 73,000 trees. And some really good benchmarking studies we found gave us parameters that let us link up labor hours for municipal workforce to perform tree pruning, as well as tree removal and stem treatment. of that removed tree, and that's linked up to tree sizing parameters, like tree height and tree diameter. So that let us, at an individual tree level, do labor estimates for how much time it would take to maintain that tree, or in the case of our low-vitality trees, of which I think we have around 7,400 medium to large-sized trees that are low-health, and would probably be, excuse me, low-vitality, we assume that a large portion of those are low-health, be a priority for management and potentially something that's hazardous or non-viable. So we can sum up those labor hours over different geographies that we're considering and develop overall labor hour counts for those. And that really lets us create, first of all, overall labor estimates to service the entire cohort of 73,000 street trees. But also look at other potential smaller geographies that would work at the pilot level or the kind of middle level to give a range of options for level service. So that's kind of on the what, when, where on your screen there, the where side. We have potential different geographic options to kind of select between that have different pros and cons. Now we also have different types of work we're looking at. Of course, I already mentioned the pruning and potential removal of unhealthy or hazardous trees. We also looked at planting water. as potential additive options to a right-wing tree maintenance program. Of course, to build up our tree canopy, especially in areas that are currently lacking, we could look at hiring a two-person crew that does tree planting for half the year during the wetter half of the year, tree watering during the drier half of the year. We had some good data from our existing new city tree crew on the rates at which we can carry out those tasks that informed some estimates that you'll see on later slides. So that's the what and the where. There's also a when consideration to the potential levels of service, which is how often do you maintain each tree? How many years passes between each pruning the tree receives, and this is where the national benchmarking data that we dug into was really helpful. We found that nationwide, on average, trees prune around every 6.6 years, and so we adopted that into our data analysis under the assumption that the city of Tacoma would fall in line with what is kind of the typical maintenance cycle at the national level. So, you know, for watering as well, that's been a good consideration, trees being watered

years through their establishment period and so that plays into the labor consideration as well for that option. Next slide please.

So this is where we'll start to get into the details of the different potential levels of service and you can see there at the top we have the different geographies under consideration in blue, along with the tree counts in those geographies. Below that, we have the crewing requirement to service that geography. And below that, we have the startup cost and the annual cost. And on the crewing side, the industry standard is crews of three in order to perform this type of work. increments of three. And whether we're looking at one crew or multiple crews, there would also be one supervisor added to oversee this group of arborists that would start in the city. And on the cost side, the annual cost includes, of course, the labor costs, but also the ongoing equipment costs for consumable equipment, equipment that's replaced annually. Startup cost is really largely driven in the case of pruning and removal of spire heavy equipment, bucket trucks, sub grinders, wood chippers, things of that nature that have a high cost of acquisition. And there is also an annual cost, an annual set aside of replacement funds for those heavy equipment items so that at the end of their use, there is enough accumulated funds to procure the replacement for that piece of equipment. And with that, I think I'll hand it over to Mike again to talk through some of the strengths and trade-offs with each of these services.

Thank you, Nathan. So just really quickly, we're going to go through five little service options. These are just menu items that we've kind of pieced together for you just to discuss some of the strengths and opportunities within these different service options. Just know that you can really pull together any menu that you would like. And these are just some general categories that we've decided to present to you today.

I will also say I printed out page seven of the action plan, priority action plan for my colleagues so that we're looking at the graph too. Excellent.

Yeah. Yes. Thank you for that. It's helpful context to see everything together. So we'll just go quickly through five level of service options. I'll talk about what we're talking for the geography and the services and then some of the strengths and trade-offs. So quickly, level of service one here is just those priority areas. And what we've looked at here is where are those higher use, higher density areas where servicing an existing tree would make for a greater impact in terms of who benefits from that tree. And so in this case, regional growth centers, business districts, and priority corridors, and across the urban forest management plan are those geographies. about 10,000 trees. We can do that with one crew and a supervisor, and you can see the costs there associated. Some of the strengths here is that it's a very scalable program. It's an easier entry point that we can scale up from. We specifically would be focusing on those higher visibility and higher public interface areas. And there's very explicitly defined boundaries, and so it's easy to say what's in and what's out in this. And it's also kind of our lowest cost option, right? This is our foot-in-the-door program. So the trade-offs is that ultimately it's just fewer residential trees, or there's no residential trees in this model, I should say. And that's fewer trees in total. It's only about 14% of those total assets. And if this is not coupled with the planting program, you would have potentially an equitable work distribution. So if you're only servicing existing mature trees, thinking about those business districts that have few trees, it really wouldn't receive many benefits if you don't couple it with a planting program. The next option here is level of service two, arterial streets, so it's substantially more than the first option. We can do this with three crews of three staff each, so a total of nine, plus an FTE supervisor. You can see the cost associated there. Some of the strengths here is that we have arterial streets all throughout Tacoma, so every neighborhood we can service through this model. It could be supplemental to things like the transportation plan or connect coma, where we're already doing existing projects within a neighborhood. And so we could couple this level of service with those projects to make greater bang for our buck. There's higher labor efficiency here because we are on arterial streets. And again, especially if we're supplementing with other programs, we could just leverage some of those labor efficiencies. And then this level of service option aligns with what we found in our national benchmark. So it's a level of service that's actually kind of the standard across the US. The trade-offs here, again, it's mid-range, so it's not nothing. And it would exclude residential neighborhood streets. And so if, for instance, one of your priorities is to service residential neighborhoods, they would not be serviced through an arterial street trade program. Next slide, please. So level of service three, this is the biggest one. It's all street trees in Tacoma. This is that kind of full meal deal option, about 73,000 trees at the service. It would take us about seven crews of three each, so 21 FTEs plus a supervisor. You can set the cost associated. Again, the strengths here is that every neighborhood is serviced. It eliminates any responsibility confusion, so if the city takes on all tree maintenance in the right of way, There's no confusion about, is this tree maintained by the city or residents? It's just very clear. It aligns with some of the goals identified in the Climbs Action Plan, the Comprehensive Plan, and the Forest Management Plan. And it would equate to significant reductions in hazard, because every street tree in Tacoma would be managed in this program proactively. The trade-offs, obviously, it's the highest cost. It's pretty substantial there, as you can see. And it's a major shift in our city services. And it would require, again, significant, dedicated, sustainable funding as the source. And so later in the presentation, we'll talk through different funding options that are on the table for consideration. This would take some of those off the table, because some of those would only be appropriate for a smaller-scale program. And so your funding options would be reduced in terms of what's feasible. Level of service four I like to think about as the supplemental option. So this is explicitly a planting and watering program. So any of those other level of services that we've talked about before, which are all about mature tree maintenance, could be supplemented with a planting and watering program. And here you can see, as Nathan mentioned, one crew could do two FTPs. Half the year they plant, half the year they water. I will just call out the significant limiting factor here is watering. It's actually not planting. We can plant within the six-month period that's the planting season way more trees than we have the ability actually it'll come here a little bit later, but in terms of the amount of trees that we can plant, we are limiting that to the amount of trees we can responsibly water. Because again, we wouldn't want to plant a tree that we don't follow through with watering. So the strengths. This is the first time that we're really targeting low canopy neighborhoods in any of the service models. If you don't have a tree today, there's nothing to manage with a maintenance program that targets mature trees. If you plant trees, this is where we can increase canopy where it doesn't exist today. Again, it can supplement any of those other level of service options we talked about and ensures that there's the correct planting and establishment standards. If the city's taking on tree planting and establishment in the right of way, we don't have to worry about if a contractor is doing it right, if residents are doing it right, some of our other programs are doing it correctly. It puts the responsibility on us and we can ensure that those standards are applied. The trade-offs, as I mentioned, Watering is the limiting factor here, and so it would necessitate some level of supplement with a contracted service for tree watering to meet some of our planting goals in our planters. And it requires pairing with a level of service option for maintenance if you're going to include mature tree maintenance, which I think was part of the exercise that we were set out to do. And again, it does not address that concept of a butter's duty. If we plant a tree and water through the establishment period, but then we do not supplement with a level of service that says you're now responsible city to maintain that tree, that burden gets passed to the abutting property owner after we plant. So there's that equity issue. Are we planting assets in the right of way that then somebody else becomes responsible for? Next slide, please. So we kind of put some of those together in this concept of a hybrid option. Again, those are just menu options. You can choose whatever your flavor is for the day. This hybrid option puts together some of those major areas that we're talking about in the first level of service, the corridors, regional growth centers, and business districts, with an arterial program, and that's all for the mature tree maintenance side, and then it supplements with a planting and watering crew as well. So through this approach, you could achieve all those goals with three proving crews, again, nine FTEs in total, plus a supervisor, plus a two-person watering and planting crew. And so you can see the FTE count there. We also broke down the costs a little bit directly so you can see the difference between the planting and the watering costs. So the number of trees planted through this program, you can see annually you can plant about 1,560 with the capacity of a two-person crew. And watering, because again, we water for three years, so that number accumulates times three, right? So once you get to that third year, now you have your one, two, and three-year watering all at the same time. So that's how we get the weekly watering numbers of trees there. And specifically calling out that in order to achieve that much watering, you would have to supplement with contracted services. And so that's part of the reason why the costs there are so high for the annual costs. The strengths again of this program are that you're really balancing existing tree maintenance with increasing tree canopy in areas that don't have it today. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. You are also, I will just say that you're, to get a holistic crew that meets your service levels. Some of the trade-offs here is that, again, in this model specifically, we're not really focusing on residential streets. We're having two different crew structures, one that's based on maintenance, one that's based on planting and watering. And so there's just some complexity there about who does what that we can figure out, of course. And the annual costs here are pretty high as well. And again, getting back to that note about boundary complexity, when you say the city maintains these trees but not those trees, it might be confusing to people that are developing in different areas across the city or homeowners in different areas across the city, et cetera. So we really have to lean on an education campaign and really making sure that people know what tree is in and what tree is out. Next slide, please. And with that, I'm going to take it back to Nathan, who's going to talk to you a little bit about some of the funding things that we have found in the research that was conducted.

Thanks, Mike. So this table shows some of the funding mechanisms that we saw in our benchmarking study that other cities have used to fund their right-of-way treatments programs. And as Mike spoke to in an earlier slide, we need to do more legal work appropriate in a Sucoma context, and some of these are better sized for a larger program, some better sized for a smaller program, and so counts of feedback on which potential level of service scales to pursue would also be important in kind of narrowing down which of these may be feasible. So with that in mind, we have provided some kind of initial pros and cons that are relevant for Sucoma context, but again, more workings And also just to reiterate one other thing that Mike mentioned earlier. We heard from other jurisdictions repeatedly during benchmarking work that it's crucial to have a funding mechanism that's right-sized for the program. It's crucial to have funding that's stable and sustainable. The risk you want to avoid, of course, is getting stuck in a cycle of increasing backlog, not being able to keep up with the scope of work based on the funds you have available. expectations. And so that is important to keep in mind as funding mechanism is selected. So on the general fund side, one option would be property tax and this would be through a ballot initiative this would be a levy with lift it would go to Tacoma voters for consideration and this would be probably most appropriate for a large-scale program you know there's significant administrative work to carry out a ballot initiative and to be successful and to administer that but it is dedicated funding so there's the complexity to implement balance against the potential size of revenues that could support a large program. And then also on the general fund side, they're utility-related, but they are taxes on utilities, so these revenues actually go to the general fund. You have the option that we've seen in other jurisdictions potentially looking at a utility excise tax on wastewater or a utility excise tax on solid waste. And these are simpler to administer. They also can be adopted by ordinance, so they don't require a valid initiative. very stable revenue stream because they're based on utility rate revenues that are pretty steady. But there are other constraints, other pressures, other regulatory considerations that are relevant to both of these utilities that may limit the feasibility of imposing an excise tax, or in the case of solid waste, increasing an excise tax. We do already have the tight end Tacoma excise tax on our solid waste utility. And on the utility rate side, we have seen other jurisdictions have implemented to fund some portions of their right-of-way programs, stormwater utility rate enhancements. And this is another stable utility revenue stream and relatively simple to administer, certainly compared to the property tax option. Now it's really important with utility funds that those funds be spent in a way that has a direct and rational nexus to that utility's core operational priorities, that utility's core function. And so with trees, you know, there is certainly the stormwater benefit. They are an ecology-recognized stormwater pest management practice, but trees also provide other benefits that are more aligned with general fun functions. For example, traffic calming, neighborhood beautification, public health, air quality, things like that. So there would need to be an economic analysis of what benefits are sort of proportionable to stormwater versus what belong more to those other categories. loan funding source that would need to be supplemented by a general fund funding source. And likely this would also support something along the smaller pilot end of the program. One other option that was interesting that we wanted to mention, although it's in the less feasible category, because it would likely require some legislative advocacy at the state level. I believe it's in Ohio, there are programs that use property tax assessments that's based the linear feet of frontage that a property has along the right-of-way to raise funds to perform specifically urban forestry right-of-way tree management work. And that's nicely matched to the amount of plantable area that the properties have along the right-of-way. And so it's sort of proportional to the potential tree area along the property and is another reliable funding source. However, in Washington, from our preliminary research, it appears that assessed property value is the metric that needs to be used for property tax rather than property frontage or a measure like that. And so, again, more research needed on this one, but it appears from our initial review that there would need to be legislative advocacy to potentially allow for using frontage as opposed to assessed property value as a metric for that property assessment. So it's something we got good feedback on from our benchmarking interviews in other jurisdictions, but it may not be feasible without some blood work here in Washington. And then the bottom one there, it has potential for business districts, but it's confined to those it's related to.

Okay, we know that was a lot. It was a lot of numbers, a lot of options. But we wanted to, again, just get back to the core of the intent of the presentation was really just to kind of provide some data to you all to think further about, do you want to advance something? What additional data would you need from staff to support decisions going into the future? So the central next steps here are really with that foundational knowledge, that there's these various level of service options that are presented, as well as program structures, et cetera, that have all been based on either national benchmarking standards or those jurisdictional interviews. We're willing to support whatever next steps you'd like to see from us as staff. And just a little bit of a cross-cutting consideration caveat here, that whatever options you might choose, if you would like to do so to move forward with an additional conversation, we would also recommend folding in other impacted work groups as well. So for instance, The legal is one that we've talked about quite a bit tonight, but another one would be if we were to take on more tree management in a positive way, that would have an impact on things like our capital projects. So right now, contractors, for instance, plant trees typically aren't our capital construction projects. We could have conversations about should that shift to our tree planting program? Also things about sidewalks, right? So what is the nexus there with how we deal with trees and sidewalk issues if we're not responsible for some of those? And then permitting and private development. So how does kind of the private side also intersect if we are now managing more of the right-of-way trees? So they're just kind of asterisks, we'll put a pin in them for now, and should we decide before with an option, that would be a good time to unfold in some of those additional conversations. With that, I think, next slide please. That's our spiel.

Great, thank you. And just to anybody listening, The full report is available online in the IPS packet, so anybody's welcome to dig into that if they want more information. And I will open it up to the committee. Councilmember Diaz.

Just probably because it's the last thing you said, but it's top of mind. On the cross-cutting considerations, I'm wondering if there's a world in which if they somehow found four plus million dollars to be the biggest pick-the-baddest option, could we make it somewhere in the code so that every department is required to come to y'all as the experts on this? Rather than just sort of saying, we'd like to work with these couple of departments, but sort of flipping it on its head and saying, now that we exist and we're here, you have to come here.

That's a really great point. I think the intent of having it on the cross-cutting slide was to say that we know that what we're doing here is not in a vacuum, that it will impact others. Not necessarily to say that they're required to go through our program, but that we should be working together. We're doing a flag that we already do support a lot of our construction projects with our program already. So actually, I'll point Shana sitting over in the corner over here. I don't know if you had an opportunity to meet her yet, but she's our construction arborist. So she already consults on our capital construction projects for ES and Public Works as well. So I guess just to make sure I fully understand your question, are you thinking about the private or the public side or what would funnel through?

Any and all of the above. My head was immediately towards not just departments like y'all are doing the good work already with, but folks who might not think that they need to talk to an arborist, but like I pick on them because I'm the EDC chair, but CED is working with a business issue. Can they have something going on? Could we have some sort of a checklist or form where if they're required to talk to you in a consultant way, not in a punitive way, but rather a, did you know we have tree arborists? We have folks who can help you think through these ideas if we have folks who think through these ideas. I guess that's where my head's at. On the internal side, just some of those departments who might not think that they need to talk to you, but they could. Or like our participatory budgeting folks were thinking about how they give away gift cards or something. If we had a A team that could just give away a tree, right? Like those kinds of things that we could just get creative around. How do we, how do we do things that are more nexus around your work? Cause I think there might be something there, there in the climate action plan as well as like, maybe that's how we tie it together. Um, and then it's more of an awareness checkbox in my mind than a pivot. Um, On the flip side, I do wonder if there's some sort of a, there's probably a fully out of scope of this conversation, but something we might want to think around our climate action goals and our 2030 goal around talking to our partner governments around how they can be partners in helping us get to 2030. Similar to, again, my EDC framework, but we're doing something around community investment strategies and how we're working on contracting and our LEAP program, and how could we do something like that with trees and right-of-ways next to projects and commercial districts in all these areas where we know schools, parks, support, other folks own lands where we would be impacting or could be helpful.

Thank you, Council Member Diaz. Also, I know Mike and I recently had a conversation about Parks is really working on their urban and forestry plans. This might be a perfect opportunity to plug in.

We're all already sort of a network, but I think we have more. There's got to be another framework where we can kind of leverage strategic and thoughtful network. And maybe it's JMAT because I'm not there, so I don't know. There's lots of places where this could already be happening, but I'm just not there.

So I think just to recap what I'm hearing, it's providing a little bit more structure around how these different people, these different entities work together more intentionally to bring up the entire city canopy coverage, not just one agency or another.

Because in my head, this is all us working very hard to do a goal that I think everyone in the city should be also helping us reach towards. Ourselves, our own man in the mirror included.

Thank you.

Who wants to go next?

I just want to be clear, you have annual, but we do biannual, so our budget impact is twice the numbers that we're seeing there.

That's true. So we broke it down based on annual costs. So the 3.7 is really 7.4 for us on a budget basis.

But that's not, oh, that is, the startup costs are taken out already.

Okay. I do think we do need to explore some of those kind of considerations. I do appreciate that there were other municipalities kind of put in there, and I appreciate that there were some in other states, but I am more interested in the ones in the state because they would be under the same regulatory framework as us, but it is nice to see kind of a comparison um with other states and kind of how they get to where they are i do appreciate that um actually in that one do we know how you mentioned how they pay for theirs right I'm looking at the Table 8 over here, the funding source.

There's no funding source here.

For which city specifically?

Any of them. It doesn't have any.

Well, I'm really interested in the four, three other, wait, one, two, three other Washington cities.

It's all in the report. It is? Okay. So there's a specific chapter in the report that's all of the benchmarking research. Got it. The national and the local. And the local ones are all structured in the same way. We always go through where does the program sit.

Okay, what did other people use in Washington?

In Washington State, there's a mix. So, oh gosh, I don't know. Actually, I'm going to call for a friend here from some other colleagues that have done some jurisdictional research to see if you've got thoughts too.

For a funding person? Yeah, to put you on the spot for Washington State. I think stormwater is a big one, and a lot of cities have kind of gravitated toward funding through stormwater funds. General funds and Department of Natural Resources for some smaller degree.

What I recall is a lot of, there's the base funding that would typically be through a for instance, they're entirely funded through the stormwater utility for their base funding, but then they add in supplemental funds like in move feeds and those other things that were kind of a topic of discussion for the last presentation too. And then some places like I think Olympia did some portion. We did a benchmark for Olympia in this report as well, and that would be through the general fund.

Yeah, general fund, and they're just tapping into stormwater. They're just starting to.

I will look through that because Cher is actually showing me where it is very clearly put out. Some general fund is what we're kind of seeing. There's some stormwater. There's some property tax levies. You know, not having seen that before, I was gravitating towards a property tax levy because it has the greatest kind of flexibility. It has the ability to have, you know, people are actually... voting on it also we have a framework through the assessor's office to identify lower income households and elderly and senior households to kind of mitigate that impact for them so a lot of that stuff is kind of built in and my only concern with the property tax levy is the same concern I have with just funding in the state in general which is the ability for it to really be truly sustainable for a really long time, given the fact that we have limits on property tax remittances with the 1% tax. Can we maintain and or grow, or if we go by the property tax, are we just going to end up losing service at one point? I do think it might be a good first step, and then to consider other opportunities to maybe supplement it. my initial thought but i will read through that list and see what other how other municipalities kind of fund a program like that i do appreciate the many approaches you can put in here to kind of understand pros cons to the cost right because it's not just a number we have to understand what we get for that number so i'm going to think about that

One thing I'm interested in is looking at the comparison across the municipalities. I am curious to see if our annual budget is $2 million for 2 FTEs, but Buffalo's is $900,000 for 7 FTEs, and Bellevue's is 5 FTEs for 2.6 million.

What are they paying for that we're not? Yeah, so that's a really good flag. Some of the caveats, right? So we can say generally what their staff provided to answer the budget numbers. We don't necessarily have all the nuance of what services are under that, how many trees they're maintaining, et cetera. Yeah.

No, I think there's a total tree, correct, down below, which helps kind of break it out. But that's just a broader question.

Thank you for kind of clarifying that. That's kind of interesting. One point would be, I just reiterate the fact, what Dr. Diaz said, just about the kind of broader coordination of different groups that are doing it.

I mean, if we believe in the premise that trees exist anywhere in this world or this community provide a benefit, then we should be thinking about how we align the works of all the different organizations that have trees, whether that's schools, parks, city, county, all the folks around us. I think it's something I'm thinking about what that looks like.

we're talking about regionalization, whether it's a lot of other topics, and I think it's probably a broader part of the conversation, not saying that the city shouldn't do their part, but also just making sure we're aligned with others. So I just wanna, just work out some ideas. You know, what are the different levels of service? You know, I think that there's, where's the cross one? That's where Walker, for example, is looking at. Ah! You know, I think the question comes back to is this something, I've always would think about having us demonstrate our effectiveness as we move up the ladder, so starting with level one option, showing we can do that, and then slowly expanding ourselves into greater and greater capacity. By looking at option three, four, five, getting larger, more moving pieces, are we going to be able to execute that? We'll be better off starting with smaller numbers and growing into that. Any questions I've had around those things?

I do think there is a – oh, that was my bad.

do in-house for some contract with organizations that do some of that work is a question I've had, which is we have people who do tree pruning and maintenance. There's a small business owners, small businesses that are in our city that are doing that work, and could we contract with them to extend our reach as part of this versus taking it all in-house? I understand your point, Mike, that we would have less oversight over the process, but I do think by very good effective contracting, we can manage that.

We can think about how we break the work apart to maybe extend our reach in a way that maybe gets different by looking at some of the contractors as a part of this. And I have done something I was going to say, and then when I made that point about contractors, it went away from my mind.

That's a whole load of utilities working in this. So I've been driving around the state the last two days, and I noticed they topped, probably, effectively, the trees along South 12th. These are the type of power lines that I was over off of by my house on 4th and 11th. They were trimming trees around the power lines. So how would you see them functioning as part of this?

That's a really good plug, and that's back to the cross-cutting discussion, where if we decide to move forward with a certain level of service, it necessitates folding in discussions like with TPU. They have federal preemptions which allow for them to prune trees to maintain clearances to lines. And so they take that on themselves as an organization because it's a benefit to their utility to ensure that we don't have conflict there. If the city were to step up on the general government side and perform some level of tree maintenance, we would have to have a discussion of are we now pruning for clearance on the trees that we would otherwise just be managing through this portfolio? Do we exclude those trees that they're pruning for clearance that, you know, take them out of our portfolio? but I don't have a really great idea.

Yeah, because as I'm, you know, driving until I'm 12, they're just, I mean, they're probably reasonably topping all those trees, and it's probably not, like, kind of the top of the fir tree, but they are, like, basically, askable enough, they're just literally the tops of all those trees, straight down the block, for the power lines, so how do, you know, are their standards the same as our standards, or are they just purely on the, don't touch the power lines, and we don't care what the tree looks like at the end of the day. I mean, I guess it's more of a question for you. Do they have some standards around, or is it just like, don't touch the power lines?

Yeah, so there's, so they are a certified arborist that they do their pruning in accordance with industry standards for power line clearance, traditionally, right? I mean, I'm going to, I'll just say, that's the standard, right? So they, as a utility, have adopted the standard that we're going to want to apply these national standards for tree pruning. And, again... They have federal preemptions that require certain expectations.

Do we have preemptions on the utility side saying a tree eating a side sewer or a sewer line, or is that?

That is not a federal preemption that we have. It's just a, so again, as of right now, trees in the right-of-way are anybody's property and their responsibility. So if it's collapsing their side sewer, that is fully their responsibility, whether it's the tree or the side sewer, right? And so just flagging that if we were to adopt a program, that might shift the dynamic, and we have to have a conversation with the legal to figure out how we deal with things. Okay.

That was just as I was watching the trees being turned by a part of the organization, and they obviously probably have a robust crew of people that do that work. Maybe we can talk a bit about how many FTEs HomePower has for tree cutting on their side. I think the last part, when I look at the funding, I'm just gonna be really honest here, I think that it's probably more likely not a general fund. funded responsibility I think when we start looking at kind of other options like I could be talked into a stormwater excise tax I could be talked into something but that feels more like a bank shot which is kind of like well we can't the general fund is what's constrained I mean that's the challenge we have right now is our general fund is constrained by how much revenue we bring into it and as most of these costs are associated with general So, you know, a property tax ballot initiative seems like that makes the most sense, right? I mean, it's also, if you believe the premise that trees improve property values, I think you could make a direct nexus to the property owner that a property tax is the best way to support the ongoing benefits of trees. So, I also recognize that's a harder, heavier lift, right, versus any kind of excise tax on a utility. But, and even the stormwater utility rate enhancement down below says requires general fund supplementation because you can't assign the 100% of the cost to the utilities. You'd have to, even if we were to go down that path and say that it has a stormwater nexus, we would still have to back it up. leads me into that part right there. For the public's sake, we're only allowed to raise our property taxes to a certain level. We just raised them two weeks ago for streets, and there's a $3.60 cap, and if we want to pay for fire or anything, or libraries or anything else on the general fund, those things will only chunk away how much we have to collect. So it would be a conversation we'd have that I would say it probably best lands there. I do have one question, though, about the DIA assessment. Why do we see that as administratively complex?

So DIAs, and actually anybody else in the room who can take part in DIAs is welcome to chime in, but they are independent governing structures. So each DIA would be set up different, and they get to choose the services that are provided to the DIA, who's paying in, and how much. So that's how those are assembled. thinking through if that was the structure through which we manage treaties. Each BIA that's assigned to all those different districts might have their own governing rules, their own scopes of work, and what services are provided. So if the city, the city essentially would have to tailor all of our services accordingly, and it would just be kind of patchwork.

Okay. And then I was, the LID's also been one, too, but there's, there's three accurate, but the LID, which would be similarly, you charge property owners to pay for that. I understand it'd be administratively complex, but I do wonder about The way LIDs work is there has to be a direct property benefit to the property owner to be able to do it.

And if we are under the premise that adding trees to your property or buying property improves your property value, it feels like that also is a good nexus.

The one thing that I'll flag about LIDs, just to make it clear about this, and it's said a little bit more thoroughly in the report as well. The conversation about an LID is really, again, it's a certain percent of the people that live within the benefited area would have to vote to say yes. And then it would directly benefit those people that are able to afford to say yes. And so in terms of distribution across the city for those services, places that can afford to say yes and pay more So that's just that. And I think that's why the LID is kind of put into that category just because of the distribution.

All right. Thank you so much for all of these. I think having the menu of options and thinking through what we might be able to tackle in the short term and the long term is really, really helpful. how many people do we have working on trees right now because i know and get to me i know we added this position recently for the construction arborist and we have a couple other people but they're not dedicated to pruning at all or do we have one crew so we currently have one crew of two people and we need three to do some of the technical scope and that's a really great question thank you for making that distinction we have a crew of two people so they aren't able to do some of the

ground typically. They're also currently assigned to the city responsible treaties. So treaties that are on our own properties primarily or are abiding right of way. And that keeps it busy more than full time.

So could we roll those two people into some of these other crews or would they continue to do the city stuff and then we'd be building a whole new thing?

That would be the question, right? So we could, right now they're assigned to city responsible treaties. What we decided was that the highest must use their time to kind of manage our own workflow if things are currently responsible for it. If we improve capacity, what we would honestly recommend is that we would make that crew whole. So we'd add a third person to the crew, no matter what their services are that they're doing to allow them to do the more technical work. And then with that, we could say, are they still doing city owned facilities? Are they going to be doing right of way or what is the highest best use for their time?

Great. That's super helpful. And then, um, so all of these. could be a pilot right we could take any version of this and say we want to do arterial streets and we just want to do one district per year or something i mean we could pick any sort of thing and give it a try within a certain capacity or parameters and and see how it goes right any of these could work like that absolutely okay great um and then same with the planting right we could do a combination My question about doing both, which obviously is the dream, would we want to, and this is maybe also a question for you, Ramiro, is we've got people out on an arterial building, a new complete street. They're building sidewalks. They're laying asphalt. They're doing all these things. Do we want to do trees at the same time, or do we want to do all of these trees in anticipation of them being a project and then come back with this crew? Or is that sort of understood that you would manage that piece of it? And I'm getting way into the weeds.

I think we'll be the latter. Okay. Because I don't think we're going to invest in planting those trees. Not only that, both projects just come in and renew the trees. I think that will be part of the coordination. The customer, Diaz, was speaking. That would be better coordination as to how we're going to be doing this.

Okay. Yeah. It seems like the opportunity, even without any additional funding around connect Tacoma is really big. And I know you all coordinate on a lot of things that I've seen, like we talk about the come away, um, flume line trail and the number of trees on that project is just awesome. Right. And it's a beautiful bike lane. So it's, you know, multi multimodal and, um, a tree corridor. So, um, But we could lean into that more with just a little bit of investment with these crews, sounds like.

Yeah, and I guess just some clarity on that. When we do certain types of projects, they cross thresholds where trees are required for the project. And so things like Connect Tacoma, for instance, if they're building something that crosses the threshold through Connect Tacoma, they will plant trees as part of the project.

That's already going to happen.

That's already going to happen, regardless of what happens here, if it's legally required. this could potentially supplement, so if those projects don't cross the threshold, this could be supplemental too, and that's kind of what was nodded to in the presentation, is there's some opportunity there to add funds to make a more mobile project.

Okay. Thank you for saying that or saying it again. That's really helpful, because I do want to recognize the great work that's already happening, and our new department is part of the beauty of it, that we can make these things happen. Uh, 1 of the notes I left for myself on the funding sources is just to dig in because I know it does say in the report some information about capacity and they're not really. Apples to Apple, so, because I wanted to call them that was like, this gives me 2Million dollars. This gives me 10Million dollars and they're not really like that because of the way that they work. So I'm going to do a little bit more digging on that to understand those. I mean, I think that there is good reason to work on on many, if not multiple. to make a choice not about one, but about two potentially different sources. I'm thinking especially about the assessment on frontage that would require a change in Washington law. That's going to take a few years of advocacy. I think that's great work to be done, but what could we do in the interim? So I think that this maybe is also a little bit of a menu of options. I know they're heavier lifts, but I look forward to digging into that. And then, so my last question, can you talk us through sort of how these decisions can or should be made, and what do you need from us to further the conversation to get us to that point?

Yeah, and I might lean on Ramiro a little bit, too, for thoughts around that. I think right now it would be ideal to understand where your priorities are if, let's say, money wasn't an issue, which is what it is, but how would you prioritize or rank level of service? Is it we want to hit arterial streets first, is if we want to hit business districts or downtown corridors. So kind of the where question really helps to decide the level of funding that's necessary to accomplish that mission, which then leads into what options are on the table to fund that level of dollar amount. I think that's kind of the progression of that conversation, really. And so you all obviously communicate with the community often and understand needs and wants from the community. And so thinking through, is it really that residential that you're thinking would have the highest, best use of the program? Is it the arterial? Is it business districts, et cetera? That's kind of what would be helpful for us to understand next steps.

Okay. And then ultimately, whatever that level of service package is, that would go to council as part of a budget amendment next year. Is that?

I think, I mean, it doesn't, I don't know if it's time limited.

Well, I think perhaps the next steps will be to you know, get a little more detail on the funding options for you because that is going to be critical when the council makes those decisions. And what is a levy limit, for instance, if that's an option? You know, considering what Council Member Hines stated, you know, the $3.60 limit and all the many different pressures the council will see and get into the funding source, that part of the consideration. Whether it's stormwater fee, additional fee, and how that we can come to a conclusion that it's not going to be 100% nexus, it's going to be a smaller portion of nexus. What else that can be complemented is an excise tax on the solid waste, already a little bit maxed out. Excise tax on the wastewater, you know, an option. So I think we may need to take a little more detail on the funding options, bring back to IPS, and at that point maybe a little more constructive conversation that we need to have perhaps in providing a direction in any of the level of service that you may gravitate.

Okay, great. Um, and I'm happy to maybe more directly answer your question, Mike, and then I'll open it up to my colleagues. If you have thoughts today, I, I mean, I, I think any 1 of these, there's good reason. I think if CD was excited about doing business districts, I could see a lot of value in focusing in there because I think those are low canopy areas that could benefit in a lot of different ways. I think we'd have a win win there. Um, but if they don't have the capacity or the staff to partner on that, I don't think that makes a lot of sense. I love arterials. Um, I know connect coma is focused on arterials. So what the opportunity is there, um, we have that connect coma presentation coming up. So I think we need more information on that too. So I, I feel like we could pick any one of these and do some really good work. I don't think for me, nothing rises to the top as the one that we have to do. but I think we have to do one, I guess. So other thoughts as we send our team off? And then thank you, yes, I think I had another deep dive, or deeper dive on financial stuff, both for us to do our homework a little bit, but then also to come back for discussion, I think is very valuable.

Yeah.

Go ahead, if you have.

No, I was just agreeing. I hear that we need to figure out what we want to pay for, And I think sometimes what we want to pay for what we're going to pay for. Right. So not just to lose Spider-Man, Spider-Man, but we do have some amount of like that. It's not negotiation, but that brainstorm that needs to happen.

Right.

It's like, if we have the grant coming in, we're not gonna use general funds for the sidewalk. We're gonna go put the general funds over here that, you know, we can't get the grant to fall back. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

LIDs. How do we look at that in the context of where these critical sidewalks are? Yeah. Like what, how do we.

mesh the things any final parting thoughts okay thank you this moved me forward a lot i don't know if we got you all that that you needed but um this was really great and i think gives us lots of options i think it also gives the public a lot to react to and telling us yeah business districts is crazy or you know we really should focus on our tear heels so i look forward to hearing from folks And then I also commit to briefing our other colleagues too and bringing them along, because I know we're doing a lot of the hard work here in IPS, which I think is valuable, but we want to make sure that they're looped in as well as we move this forward. So I appreciate you all, and I know we're all looking forward to 140 pages of good info.

Slight reading.

All right, so those are our briefings today. We have a couple of our classic last-minute topics. But checking my notes before I call on Marvin, I just want to note that at the request of staff, the Green Blocks Tacoma briefing that was scheduled for September 9th has been rescheduled for next year. So stay tuned on that. But I know that's a topic of interest for everybody in the room on trees. It does not mean the work is not happening. The work is carrying forward the presentation. I'll just be later. So with that, Margaret.

So September 9th, the solid waste management fleet alternative fuels update. September 26th, combined committees, boards, and commissions report and then October 14th, connect Tacoma, safe streets and sidewalks update, and then the Planning Commission.

Great. Anyone visit one of our CBCs since the last meeting? All right, a couple notes. We are open for Planning Commission applicants until September 14th, so if folks want to apply to be on the Planning Commission.

Is it just District 3, or is it other ones?

I do not have that detail. I know it's District 3.

Just District 3.

Okay, we think it's just district 3 for the planning commission, and then the urban design board also has a couple openings and I don't know specifically which ones those those are. But that is another board that has very specific. But if you're interested in either of those, take a look at our website, any other items of interest.

Yeah. I believe we are all going on a bike ride on Monday. Yeah, that's right. Tell us. All of us, some of us, many of us.

Oh, you're the only one who hasn't heard that, sorry.

No. We're doing a policy bike ride. Maybe you know more details about it.

Monday at 5.30, meet here. Meet at Second Cycle. Thank you. Meet at Second Cycle with Tacoma on the go. We'll ride bikes and look at new infrastructure and infrastructure to be built. Anything else? I will take a motion to adjourn.

I move to adjourn.

Second. All those in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

We are adjourned.