City Council - Regular Meeting

All right. Good evening, everyone. I will call this tiger workshop, meeting to order. Deputy city recorder Bartholomew, would you please conduct a roll call?

Councilor Schlack? Here. Councilor Shaw absent. Council president Wolff? Here. Councilor Anderson absent. Councilor Gaddusi?

Present.

Use councilor Hellick also absent. Mayor who?

Here.

Councilor Robbins? Here.

Alright. So everyone please stand and, join me in the pledge of allegiance. Alright. City team and council, do you have any non agenda items?

None from us, mayor.

Alright. Seeing none, let's move on to public comments. The public comment period provides an opportunity for members of the public to address the City Council. While it is not a dialogue, either I or staff will follow-up to address the issues brought forward in these comments. The calling number is (503) 966-4101, and those wishing to comment should call now to get into the queue.

Anyone present wanting to comment should sign up on the public comment form at the front of the room. First is written public comment. We received no written public comment by the Monday noon deadline. Let's go on to in person. And I see nobody sign up, so let's move on to phone or video comment. Mister Miller, are there any callers in the queue for phone testimony?

We have no callers, mayor.

Thank you. Alright. Let's move on to city manager report. Acting city manager Trish will give us a brief report. Good evening.

Good evening. Thank you, mayor. Thank you, council, staff, and community members. Happy Saint Patrick's Day to those who celebrate. Great. Thanks, Jason. Over the past decade, Tigard Recreation has grown in incredible ways as we celebrate this year ten years of serving our community. In 2016 to 2017, ten years ago, the city hosted just five special events each year. And today, that number has grown to 28 community events, including seasonal celebrations, concerts, movies, pop ups. Recreation programming has expanded from no in house programs a decade ago to more than 40 programs today, along with 11 camps offered during spring break and summer.

And scholarship awards have increased from 21 awarded in 2019 to 47 this last year. This allows more tigered families to participate. I also want to flag that we're celebrating twenty five years as a Tree City USA community, a national recognition from the Arbor Day Foundation that honors cities committed to strong urban forestry programs and investing in the care and celebration of trees. Together, these milestones highlight Tigard's continued commitment to a healthy, connected community. And on a night where we're talking about parks and recreation, what an evening to celebrate. Thank you very much.

Thank you, acting city city manager Trish. Counselor, do you have any questions or comment for the acting city manager? Counselor Gudusi, I cannot oh, there we go. I see you're now raising your hand, so let's move on. So let's move on to community updates. We will have the Tiger High School Theater Department. So I will invite the department and theater director, Tori Lee Skost. Good evening. Hi. Hi.

Please take a seat right there. And make sure you turn on the microphone when you present. Oh, take your time. Yep. Yep. Now it's on.

Alright. Wonderful. Hello.

Hello. Okay. Hi. My name is Tori Lee Schools. I'm the theater teacher at Tigard High School.

I'm in charge of the theater department. And March is nationally known as Theater in Our Schools Month, where we advocate for theater and arts education, not just in our own communities, but at the national level. Over our spring break, they're gonna be a virtual advocacy for theater with people on Capitol Hill and in Congress. But we're doing our own small part by reaching out to you here. So I have our thespian board president, Vera Hardy.

And she'll talk more about why theater in our schools month in March is important, but theater throughout the year is impactful for our students, our community, and on a global and national level.

Yeah. Exactly that. I'm just here to share some accomplishments that we have, like, made over the year. So first off, we are a national honor society, which is really cool. It means we get, like, stoles at graduation and, like, national recognition. We have a lot of really impressive student accomplishments. Our school is the four time tech champion at our state level, which is very exciting. We're going for a fifth this year. We, last year, had three international competitors, one in makeup design, one in solo acting, and a group doing a one act, which is very exciting. Earlier

And the I'm sorry. I'm interrupting. The solo acting and makeup design international participants actually won superiors at the international level.

Yes. It was it was really cool. Earlier this year in October, we, for the first time, did a haunted house where our technical theater students built these large, like, rooms and came up with stories, and our acting students played, like, scare actors. They would give, like, the little kids candy and try and scare the adults throughout the haunted house. It was a lot of fun.

Everyone had so much fun, and we were able to make a lot of money that will go toward funding our state conference this year and then our regional conference earlier this year. We also partnered with the haunted house with packed with pride. So if you were to bring canned food, you were, like, given a cheaper ticket. We got 400 pounds of food, which feeds 10,513 households, which is 48,858 individual people, which was huge. And when we heard these numbers, we were all like, oh my god.

What? We have to do this every year. So it's now going to be an annual thing, which is also very exciting. We just closed our musical, which was nine to five. I'm sure you all know the Dolly Parton song and the movie. It's based off that. We partnered with our school's period club to do a feminine hygiene product drive during the second week of shows. So if you brought feminine hygiene products, were given a discounted ticket. And we don't have an exact number yet of how much we were able to bring in, but it was it was a pretty good amount, pretty solid. We will definitely be partnering with them again.

The show explored a lot of themes of, like, sexual harassment and, like, feminism. So it was a very, like, poignant topic and a good, like, club to collaborate with on that. And we had a lot of people come and, like, to bring products and get cheaper tickets. So it was good for us as well as for period club. We will be donating the products to, like, local women's shelters.

We were also sponsored by Habitat for Humanity during the musical, which was very exciting. We hope to keep that sponsorship going for our next show, is James and the Giant Peach and then in continuing years. A lot of our fundraising is also community service work, so, like, make getting, like, products to donate and things like that. Every spring break, we do a yard work fundraiser where our students go and, like, do yard work for, like, members of the community for, like, a very, very low price, and we use that to fund our state conference as well. And we're doing that in the spring.

If any of you need your yards worked on. And we also do a pancake breakfast with our children's shows every year where we all dress up in costume and we, like, have, like, students make food and we have kids come and we, like, hang out with them in costumes so they get to last year, we did Alice in Wonderland. So all the kids got to, like, meet Alice and get scared by the queen of hearts and hang out with the Cheshire cat, and it was really cute and a lot of kids really loved it. Yeah. The everything we do is really wonderful for our students, and we all love it.

And it's really good for our community of students in the whole school and also, like, the city at large, And that's something that we're really working towards, is connecting more with the city this year. And then we're furthering that in the following years, hopefully. Yeah, that is pretty much all I have to say. Just wanted to share some good things about us.

Yeah. And and just on another note, thank you for letting us come in and speak. As Vera said, we are a national honor society for theater. And so part it's not just about doing theater or having drama club, which is a part of that and it's part of the community that these students get to be a part of and cultivate. It's also student leadership.

It's giving back to our community as you you heard. We're hoping maybe next year for our haunted house to partner with the city because we want to raise more for Pact with Pride and reach out to maybe Chamber of Commerce to bring in like a way to also help fund our students, but also help with our community, especially in times of food insecurity. I know growing up, I had moments in my childhood where we didn't quite know what was going to happen. And other family members took us in and fed us or let us use their shower because we didn't have any running water. And so I understand that, and I want to make sure that our students have that be a part of their experience in high school, not just doing theater, which is amazing.

And again, like coming from my background as a Latina girl and not having access to theater, I want to make sure to give my students and our students in our community the most access that they can possibly have no matter what their socioeconomic position is, if they can afford to pay or they can't, which is why we do a lot of the fundraising. Because as our demographics are changing here in Tiger, those students are becoming more prevalent. And I want to make sure that the person who I was when I was their age doesn't have to worry about, well, how do I pay to do these things? But also realize the joy of giving back to their community, because I also love to just make the world a better place through theater and through these activities with the students. And I wanted to share that with you all and also with the community at large that we're we're not just doing theater, we're forming lives, we're forming relationships, we're forming perspectives.

This last weekend, and I'll wrap this up because I'm rambling. This last weekend during nine to five, one of our students who had a part in the play, his family had to leave for a family gathering across the country. And of course, they didn't wanna leave a young person behind. So we actually pivoted and we went to one of our math teachers at the high school and said, would you be in this little teeny tiny bit at the end of the show? And he said yes, which was amazing.

And after the three days that he was performing, he came up to me and he said, I knew this was going to be hard. I didn't realize how hard. And watching your students backstage, this was the kindest community that I could have been a part of. But also, these kids are what did he say? It was more these kids are better than some of our student athletes with their dedication, with their the amount of work, with the amount of pride, and everything that they put into doing the musical.

And we had 81 students in both the backstage and on stage and in the pit. So we hope that the city of Tiger can we can partner with you to make sure that these students have more accessibility, but also have that pride in their community to give back. So thank you.

Thank you. And, you know, talk to please talk to our acting city manager, and we can see what we can do. So, counselor, do you have any questions or comments? Counselor Robbins.

I just wanted to commend you. Nine to five was great. I don't know if you know, but a bunch of middle schoolers went, including my middle schooler, and he came home and said, there's a lot of sex in it. And I was like, not exactly, but that's how it used to be. And I really appreciate you making everything so accessible.

The people who are working there's always something to do in theater, whether it's behind the scenes or building sets or being crew or in the pit or on stage. And it's all so important to allow everyone to open up and get the skills that they want. And I really commend you also with fundraising, making it accessible to all those people because I also grew up not necessarily being able to afford everything that I wanted to do. And also partnering with the period club, which we never had that back in the eighties. And certainly to to make sure that's all accessible, think is really great.

Alright. Thank you. Thank you. Nope, all right, thank you for coming.

Good evening, Sylvia.

All right, next item is Tiger High School Envoy and I will invite Becca Kasravani to give her update. Good evening, Becca.

Hello. Hello.

Oh, that's, it just turned, yeah.

It's on now. Hello, thank you so much for having me. One second. It's been a wonderful month at our school as Tiger has started gearing us seniors up for graduation and transitioning the rest of the student body into the twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven school year. Course selection has begun and freshmen, sophomores, and juniors received their forecasting sheets last week.

Seniors are now ordering graduation apparel, so caps and gowns, and registration is open for the all night graduation party. Graduation tickets will be in burst soon. And just a preface, the ceremony will be held on June 5 at 7PM on the football field. Just some updates in terms of athletics. The dance team hosted their annual night of dance showcase last Friday, and they are now off to their state competition, which will be their last competition of the year.

Tennis participated in an invitational yesterday, which they won. And lacrosse is in full spring as they had their first tournament yesterday. And track and field will be competing in their first meet on Wednesday on Thursday. Forgive me. Leadership finished class president elections, and we have selected our incoming ASB president, Sydney Jewell, and our incoming vice president, Gabriel Musangou.

They will definitely attend a council meeting in the next few months in order to better prepare for this and to understand the rhythm of it. And I'm excited to introduce you all to them. They're just wonderful. Applications are also open for committee chair positions within the class, and they'll be followed by applications for general members of a class. So those will just be members of committees and members of classes, not necessarily class leaders, but that will be the last step of the process.

The leadership junior class is continuing to plan our prom dance, and they visited the venue at the Oregon Zoo today. In terms of fundraisers, the National Honor Society is promoting a blood drive on April 14 from 1PM to 6PM. The athletics athletics department is hosting a drive for the athletic wear or gear the students are no longer in need of, and that will end on March 20. Coins for kids will hold a loose change fundraiser, and, I believe that ended two weeks ago, and that money went directly to benefit Tiger Twalton schools. And then, as stated by Thespian, they the theater department executed their musical over the last two weeks, and that was absolutely wonderful.

And I believe that's it. Overall, it's just been extremely busy and simultaneously just very successful, and a lot of things have been happening.

Yeah.

So thank you for having me.

Yeah. Thank you. Sounds like so. Counselor, any questions or go go ahead.

I asked this last month, what's the date of the prompt? Do we know now?

May 2. Yes. I did not know about it until today either. Yes. It will be May 2. I'm not sure of the time yet, but tickets will be going out soon. So we'll make sure to put all that information out as soon as possible.

Well, thank you, Becca, for coming and look forward to your additional guest next time.

Thank you.

Yeah, have a good evening. Thank you. All right. So next item on our agenda is Tiger Police Department report. And today, we will have Commander Sitton to present the Police Dashboard Report. Good evening, Commander.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor. Council. Sorry. There we go. I probably should have prepped this. There we go. Okay. I'm Brad Sitten. I am the patrol commander for the police department.

And as the mayor stated, I'm here to present the February dashboard. I've got a couple of data points I'd to pull out from slide one in your packet, and it's also up on the screen above us. I'm going to jump around on the slide a little bit, so please kind of bear with me a little. I'm going to start with the calls for service. So February 25 to February 26, we had an increase in dispatch calls, which on the slide shows it in red, but I'm gonna turn that to a green in just a minute, and an increase in self initiated calls.

So it might be common to think that if we have an increase in dispatch calls, we would have a decrease in self initiated calls because, of course, dispatch calls typically take or can take longer to accomplish. And the self initiated calls typically are ones that show proactiveness. So the fact that both call types have increased show that our officers are not only responding to dispatch calls, but in their downtime, they're being proactive in making contact with the community. So taking that small set of data and moving to the bottom of the slide and talk about response times. And you see that again from comparing February 25 to February 26.

Through all priorities of calls, the call times actually decreased to include Priority 4s, which has the largest decrease of 22. Priority four calls are calls such as animal calls, abandoned vehicles, you know, the the cold theft reports, those lower priority calls. So that data set shows us there that officers are not only responding quicker to the priority one and two life safety calls, but also to those lower priority calls. The only way you accomplish that is to have officers actually stay in their district, as opposed to being at the station or being a couple districts away with their buddies eating lunch or whatever. And then while they're in that district and they're not responding to the priority calls, the self initiated calls occur.

Dispatch times primarily are tied to the dispatch calls themselves because, of course, the self initiated call has no response time. It just happens. So the fact that we have an increase in dispatch calls, yet our times continue to decrease, is exactly what we'd want to see. Because when you call for police, you want them there immediately. So this decrease in time shows that we're doing that they're doing exactly what we'd ask them to do. So when you close a call, there's a variety of ways that calls are closed. It can be a simple report. It can be a referral. It can be simply asking questions, or it can be an arrest. So I want to highlight the arrest there at the top of the slide.

And you see that between February 25 time or associated with February 26, you see that we had a 16% increase in arrests. Felony arrests are down, which is good, obviously. But you see that misdemeanor and citation to appear tend to be up, which, again, shows that officers are taking the work seriously and not kind of taking shortcuts because arrests mean more paperwork, means more time, more effort in general. So the fact that those numbers are up shows that officers are actually, again, being proactive in doing what we ask them to do. Also, we see that warrant arrests are up.

Now warrant arrests are loosely tied to self initiated calls on on the slide. And let me explain why why I mean that. If I go to a theft call and I arrest a person for theft, but then I also find that they have a warrant, the system only allows us to track one stat. And because the initial call was a theft, that's typically where that stat is gonna get tied to. So in that case, the warrant isn't necessarily counted.

So those 54 warrants in February 26 are through primarily self initiated activity. An officer may see somebody on the street that they know has a warrant because they dealt with them before, or potentially a traffic stop, which could be a violation, turns into a warrant arrest because, you know, the individual might have a warrant. So those warrant numbers are actually good numbers to have. And finally, on the right side of the screen, you see that year to date, so January and February this year compared to January and February, our arrests are up 18.22%, Almost mirror the rest of that column. Self initiated calls and dispatched calls are pretty flat, but again, we're only looking at two months' worth

of

data. But if you look at the response times, they continue to decrease year to date 7%, 10%, and 20%, again, for those priority priority four calls. So again, that reinforces that the officers are out there being proactive, responding to calls in a timely manner, and doing exactly what we would like them to do. So those are the data points that I wanted to highlight tonight. Any questions?

Go ahead, councilor Robbins.

Thank you for this. It it looks like great news. Why do you think the response time is improving? What's going right?

It could be a variety of reasons. One, I think that that we've got a really good core of of younger officers that are out there wanting to, as we put it, kick over rocks. So they're staying in their districts. So responding to, say, River Terrace from here takes much longer than if I'm in that district close to River Terrace. Right?

The other piece of this, maybe a small piece, is the way the calls are dispatched. So our dispatch center, WACA, has got a bunch of new people on, and they're very diligent about following their process. So our response time is based upon when the call comes in and the dispatcher sends it to the officer, and the officer hits he's en route. So the clock starts. They drive to the call. Now they may show up on a call, and there's mayhem. So they don't hit the arrive. They jump out, and they just start dealing with the call. In the past, the dispatchers may not have been quite as diligent to arrive the officers for them because when the officer starts talking on the radio, Okay, clearly, you've arrived. Okay, you've arrived, and you continue with the call.

So that may be part of it. The rest of it is this core of newer officers are now beginning to learn the streets and how to get from point A to point B in a more timely manner. So I think all those combined is what it's reducing those call time those call response times.

Well, that's all great. Thank you.

Mhmm. Thank you. Anything else?

Can can we ask more question not related to dashboard right now?

Absolutely, mister

So, yeah. So we received a couple of committee member complaints about, you know, they have and I observed too more personal staff taking out sidewalk space in front of public work lawn. So can you just tell us a little bit about the challenges the the city staff is facing right now enforcing our time, place, manner regulations and

Yeah.

Absolutely. Help you?

I I'll even add to that that when I was driving here today at 04:40, someone was setting up a tent, and I almost pulled over to be like, you can't do that.

But Yeah. Please don't do that.

Yeah. Yeah. Please don't do that. Yeah. Absolutely. I I spoke with officer Orth yesterday morning, and we had a we had a really good conversation. And he told me a couple things that I hadn't realized before that I think are pretty relevant. So the first thing he told me was most of the people that are over there are wanting to follow the rules. So if you tell them, hey, here's the rule, they will follow it. That being said, it's a revolving door over there.

So as an example, last week, there were six dogs with their owners there, but two weeks prior to that, there was no animals there at all. Asking officer Worth about it, he said, well, of course, the service agencies all communicate, and they and they rotate people back and forth, so to speak. So we have a constant influx of new people arriving over there that don't necessarily know the rules. And yes, the rules are posted, but of course, if they arrive at night or they're not told the rules, then they just kind of make it up as they go along. The issue with the sidewalk, as we all know, ADA requires 48 inches.

A typical sidewalk is 60 inches. So if I withhold 48, I give you basically a foot to put all of your belongings. That's easy to maintain because it's only a foot. That sidewalk is 96 inches wide. So they have almost half of it. And to use an analogy, if you've got a cup of pens on your desk, if you put one or two pens on your desk, those pens always stay there. But if you fill it, you're constantly filling it because people take those pens. So Officer Orth made the passing comment of, I'd like to go and just spray paint a line down the sidewalk at 48 inches so we can easily tell. And I asked him not to do that. But it's not a terrible idea.

We've got the fence in. It's posted well. And to maintain, to allow them to absolutely know where that line is, it may not be a terrible idea to discuss at future, you know, meetings and whatnot. We also see that increase in canines over there, and they're tied to the fence, they're tied to the building, they're tied to the tree, and there's nothing in the place, time, manner that addresses that. Obviously, can't tell them they can't have animals, but we might need to look at that in the future, a way to control the dogs.

Because the dogs tend to be some of ones that encroach out there. They're tied up close to the property of their owners, but they crouch out onto the sidewalk and whatnot with leashes and stuff. And then beyond that, it's just the constant education. If we want to exclude somebody, we don't go over there and just, you're out. We exclude you now. It's posted, they're talked to, and especially if they've got abandoned property there, we post it, we come back three hours. And so to move someone or to exclude someone, it may take a day, two days, three days, whatever. But of course, the public passing, they just see the problem. When it's being addressed, it just sometimes takes more time than,

of course, we like

it to do. But the sidewalk was a surprising element to this, how wide it is and how much space they actually have. And then, of course, that constant rotation of new people. And so that's a lot of what our COPS team does, is they're just constantly educating new arrivals to the area.

Yeah, thank you. And this is helpful for us to consider time, place, manner again in June. Yes, absolutely. So, come forward with suggestions and unfortunately, Tiger Public Works long in such a visible area, so Yeah, everybody can see it. As I explained to one constituent, you know, who who claim other cities don't around here don't have a problem, but I was like, yeah, I talked to other mayors. They are problems. They just may not be visible, you know, but they they are facing problem. We are all facing problems. Right?

So Yeah. And, you know, and as as many problems as as we tend to to talk about with with the homeless situation here, the fact that we kinda have them come to one location Right. We don't have them spread in different places. So that's a good thing, and it's in close proximity to Just Compassion, so they are close to getting services. So we don't have officers going to behind different stores or in different parks or in the wooded areas. They kind of have it self contained. Now, is there people still out there? Absolutely, there probably still is. But at least here, yes, they're visible, but at least they're in proximity to get services. And we keep an eye on them. And so I think in the long run, it is helpful. Obviously, it's not a perfect solution, but

No.

It's not. It's it's better than, you know, so many of the alternatives.

Alright. Thank you. Any councilor Preston Wolf.

Thank you, mayor. And I wanna be mindful of the time. But, commander Sinton, I just wanted to circle back to when you made the comment about when we're able to exclude someone. So what are those actual next steps when we do that with an individual?

So an exclusion, it comes along after they've failed to follow the rules, right? So they're spoken to, they're educated, they continue to break the rules, and then at a point, the officers determine that, Okay, this person just simply isn't going to get it. And that could be the second time or the third time I talk to him. It might be the fifth or sixth or seventh time, just depending on the situation, because everyone's different. And then they give them the exclusion, and then they have to move along.

And again, even those people that are being excluded typically will follow the rules. So they're excluded from the property, and they go somewhere. And if exclusion is for thirty days or forty five days or five days, whatever it happens to be, sometimes they come back because, let's face it, it's better here than in some other places, maybe some of our cities around us. But a lot of times, they just go someplace else and don't come back. The exclusion is, I want to say, like a last resort, because after that, you're into criminal trespass.

So the officers try to educate and try to gain compliance without having to use that semi heavy handed tool. And for the most part, it works. But So

Alright. Any other questions? No? Alright. Alright. Thank you, commander. Have a good evening. Alright, let's move on to the council board and committee liaison reports. Who would like to start? Alright, councilor Robbins, please start. Thank you.

I have a pretty light schedule due to some overlapping. I do attend the monthly library board. In the month of March, they continue to prepare for the meeting with the council next month and trying to figure out how to make that interactive and without being too distracting. And I also have some updates on the first month of the express library service, which included over 1,100 visits from community members at our Express Library, two sixty nine attendees at story time, 20 sessions of one on one technology help, both at the Tigard Senior Center and the Summerfield Retirement Community. 53 teens joined the Teen Winter Reading Challenge.

Neither of my teens did, and I talked to them about that. Social services outreach at Just Compassion Home Plate Youth Services, Oregon Department of Human Services, Tigard Self Sufficiency Center, Family Promise I'm sorry, Family Promise of Twalight Valley in the comfort zone. And the board continued working on the preparations. That's that's it. As far as the immigration board, they are we kind of all did a survey on if we're gonna continue that and in what cadence and we're waiting to hear back.

Thank you. Councilor President Wolf.

Yeah, I too will be fairly brief as a couple of my committees are quarterly and we did not meet. The GAP, which is governmental affairs for the chamber, I sit on that as council president. Last month was really kind of a legislative debrief, update on bills, and continued conversations around the bond measure and facilities plan. I did attend today, as a GAP member, a listening session that the chamber hosted for the Governor's Prosperity Council to give feedback. The key areas for that was conversations around business climate, workforce development, and tools for growth.

It was a very robust conversation in identifying challenges, barriers, opportunities. But anyway, appreciated that opportunity to be there. And then councilor Schlack and I will both be attending the WEA policy conference tomorrow. So that's it for me.

Thank you. Councilor Schlack?

It's Thursday. Right? I wanna get my calendar right.

Yeah. My bad. My bad. I keep thinking. Just

had a small heart attack just like

No. It is Thursday. Thursday.

Yeah. I will I've been encouraged to work on my brevity, so I will. I had a meeting of with Chart on February 18, and it was mainly focused on the perspective homelessness or hassles task force, which counsel provided guidance during the boards and committee discussion on. Megan Cohen has an excellent charter that she's put together, and we're gonna be receiving we received feedback before. We're gonna continue receiving feedback to figure out what a good proposal would be that meets counsel's interests and Chart's interests as well. And then I covered a meeting of the transportation advisory committee on behalf of councilors Gaddusi and Shaw. They talked about building a better Tigard. Vote yes. I can say that. I'm a council member.

They also talked about the McDonald Street project and transportation impacts on downtown reimagined, and they were very interesting conversations about roundabouts. Thank you.

You. Councilor Gudusi?

Thank you, mayor. I will also keep it relatively brief. Just audio check. You able to hear me okay?

Yes.

Wonderful. So the Parks and Rec advisory board, we did have a meeting on-site over at Birken Park, and they'll be talking a little bit later, so I won't get into much detail. The other big meeting was the water advisory board. They did have some recommendations for water emergency preparedness, and they're going to come in front of the group at some point in the near future and discuss recommendations further with themselves and staff. And And those are the two. And thank you, councilor Sai, for covering transportation for me this month.

Thank you, councilor Galusi. For me, last Saturday, I have a good joint town hall meeting with senator Neera Missling, rep Bowmans, and rep Ricky Smith to they provided short session debriefing. And during the short session, I worked with city team and regional mayors on advocating for Tiger's interests consistent with council goals and directions. We didn't get everything including another housing bill that took additional local control away, but hopefully we can target them in the next twenty twenty seven sessions. Some success against three bill passed regarding ethics, including one of them is most important is providing more clear definition of why it's not considered serial meetings.

Example, if staff is providing briefing to its counselor or if a counselor is talking to its constituent, now it's codifying in law that it's not serial meeting, which my understanding that was never, but serial meeting, but now it's codified and TLT, the transit launch tax, now we're able to get more share from TLT, so that's great.

And

recreational immunity, it's not perfect, but next session legislature some legislature promised to continue working on recreational immunity. And the governor's economic development bill passed with a one year pause on providing incentive to data center. Tiger's interest in that is that it will streamline state's permitting process. So it will make hopefully, it will make permitting at a state level faster. I also attend several regional transportation meeting.

We received briefing on TriMas service cut, proposed service cut. I've come to a few of them and we're going to get additional briefing today. And next, and R1 Act, we consider project recommendations which the R1 Act will recommend to Oregon Transportation Commission for funding. Among them is the jurisdictional transfer for Hall Boulevard, but it's not high on the priority list. So that's all I have. Before we move on, any council member have any question for go ahead, councilor Schlach.

Thank you, mayor, and thank you, mayor, for hosting the joint town hall. At Tigard Public Works. Council president Wolff and I were in attendance. It was a full room. There were a lot of great questions, and I look forward to the council's continued partnership led by you with our state legislators. It was a very great event, and I hope to have more of them in the future.

Yeah. And I feel fortunate to have our state delegate in Salem because they they I think they are really listening to us. So it's it's it's great. So thank you. Alright. So let's move on to the next item agenda and I believe our guests still outside, but we're still ahead, so that's good. So next item will be TriMet Board Member reporting to counsel. We have TriMet Local Government Affairs Manager, John Serra, and he will introduce the rest of the guests. I know, I don't know why they sit out there. Hello, good evening. Hi, John.

Hi, in here. Oh,

so yeah. So, John, I introduced you, and I you'll introduce the rest of the guests. So yeah. So so please turn on the mic when you are ready. So

Thank you very much, mayor Hu. And council president Wolff and city council, we appreciate you having us tonight. My name is John Serra, and I am the local government affairs manager here for TriMet. Tonight joining me are JC Veneta, our chief of public affairs Tom Mills, our director of mobility planning and policy and director Robert Kellogg, is your district three TriMet board member. We wanna thank you for this opportunity to join you all tonight to discuss TriMet's budget and the actions that we have proposed to take to address our deficit.

One of the most challenging parts of this conversation is our service cuts. We first announced these proposed cuts on January 5, and we've spent the last several months engaging with members of your community and many of our other regional partners to gather feedback and identify the best path forward. So you are an essential partner for us, and we do understand that our changes to the network are are going to affect Tigard and riders throughout the metro area. And so we appreciate the city of Tigard's continued engagement through this process, and we look forward to our ongoing partnership as we secure the future of transit. So tonight, we have Tom Mills to walk us through the specifics of our proposed changes to the local network. But first, I want to turn it over to JC here to provide some context on TriMet's budget and how we arrived at this point.

Good evening, Mayor Wu, Council President Wolff. Thank you so much for having us. Although I I have been saying that we don't we don't like to deliver bad news, so we really don't wanna be here, but it's good to be around all of you, and we thank you for having us be here. I wanna set the stage for you as to why how we got here at TriNet and how we're addressing some of our budget issues, which are are some of our service cuts are because of that. So just as a region, you probably already know this, but first off, we're seeing record layoffs across the region.

Some are even predicting our region going into a recession, so we're definitely starting to feel that. The vacancy rate, I know you probably see this probably here in Tigard, but the market, the vacancy rate for the market has risen to 27.3%. In Downtown Portland, it's at a record 34.7%. So that is also telling. We have seen, I don't necessarily know if you know this, but Oregon is number two in the nation for the number of people teleworking.

People love to move here, enjoy your outdoors and natural beauty and telework. And then finally, you're also starting to see, or you continue to see, an elevated concern around community public safety. And so those are some of the factors that we are seeing, and that kind of sets the stage to where we're at right now. Next slide, please. So where we're at with TriNet, we're at about 1,200,000 rides per week.

So just imagine for a moment that many cars on the road. This would not be a fun place to live. That's about 65,800,000 boardings in our last fiscal year. One of the things that you all should know is that the rides that we provide obviously connect people to opportunities, but especially to people who are transit dependent. And we really started to see things change at the start of the pandemic, where now today 35% of our riders are transit dependent, and we know that too because of record setting amounts of enrollment in our Low Income Fare program.

So we have a program dedicated just for people with low incomes. We have seen record low enrollments and also record use. Now, with all of the things that I mentioned on our prior slide, we are starting to see declining tax revenue, both our employer and our STIF, and our fare revenues are down as well. Next slide. I'll go into that a little bit.

So as our fare excuse me, as our ridership dropped at the start of the beginning of the pandemic, we have gotten back to about 70 of that ridership, but with it has come a fall in revenue, and that's about $60,000,000 a year that we have seen in a drop in our fares. Inflation costs, another reason why we're experiencing budget issues, inflation costs have gone up by 56% between 2019 and 2025. We have also made investments in safety and security. As you can imagine, some of the things that we have seen in the community have happened and were brought onto TriMet, so we have really done a lot to invest in our safety and security onboard, cleaning as well. We want a clean, safe ride.

And we've also Tom and his team, really did a great job. As we came out of the pandemic, we started to see that a lot of people moved. The demographics people had changed in where they were living versus where they were working. And so Tom and his team really set out to figure out how we could make tweaks to our network to give access to more people, to jobs, to homes, all of that stuff. So we invested in reconfiguring our network.

That also being said, we are facing a $700,000,000 capital maintenance backlog. A lot of our bus yards are old. They're beyond their useful life. Our oldest MAX line is forty plus years and is definitely showing its age. So that's kinda where how we got here. Next slide. So what we identified last July was that we needed to solve, a minimum of a 300,000,000,000 budget deficit, and so we set out, to balance that budget by 07/01/2028. You're saying, why why that date? Why did you just pick it out of the air? We gave ourselves three years to solve this problem.

Good government says that if you identify a budget shortfall, you should at least take three years. It's recommended you take three years to solve the problem, and that's exactly what we're doing. We have identified three areas that we're working toward: administrative cuts, at least 93,000,000 in discretionary spending and staffing revenue. You probably are watching the drama around our state transportation bill. We had hoped to at least achieve a minimum of $48,000,000 from that.

So we're still working with lawmakers, I'm sure that you all are as well, to try to figure out a path forward should anything happen with it right now. Service cut at least $159,000,000 in service, and that's at least 10%. And Tom will talk more about that. And I would just note that if we do not raise any new revenue, we will have to cut deeper, make deeper service cuts. Next slide, please.

So we have already taken a lot of internal actions. We've reduced spending by at least $150,000,000 More is to come through efficiencies, discretionary spending. We've canceled some future planned bus service increases that were in our forecast, and we've eliminated positions and some layoffs. We've had one round of layoffs. More internal cuts are coming, and another round of layoffs are coming as well.

Next slide, please. We've taken a number of external actions. Many people ask what are our riders paying their fair share. We increased fares on 01/01/2024. We are going to be going out this fall with another fare increase that would take effect in 2028 if our board approves it.

We have been working hand in glove with lawmakers to figure out a path forward with a stiff increase, the State Transportation Improvement Fund. We thought that we had gotten there, but it kind of crumbled in front of all of our eyes, and I know it affects you as well for your transportation dollars. We have taken two rounds of service cuts to date. Tom refers to these rounds kind of as trimmings around the edges where our ridership is low, November 30, and then again this last March. So what I'd say is a lot of it we're trying to resize for the ridership that we do have.

There's a proposal on the street, which Tom will talk to you through. Those cuts go into effect August 23, and then we will have another round in August 2027, and we'll be going out this fall for outreach around that. Next slide, please. So before we ever started mapping out the service reductions that we wanted to do, we actually went out to the public, and we did a lot of public outreach to understand where we should cut. We asked them to rank nine different types of service cuts, whether it's frequency, coverage, things like that.

We used all available communications tools at our fingertips. We've had multiple in person workshops, open houses, many of them multilingual. And we used a lot of our community based organizations to get the information out. Next slide, please. And so we had, again, a number of events.

4,800 people responded to a survey to help us understand what we should look at first. And so there was really a lot of support around this. There was also a lot of favor in protecting late night service, weekend service, and high frequency service, a fact that you all should know that when people don't have to think about when to take their bus, they just walk out the door and know they can catch it in a few minutes, frequency reigns king for us. And so with that, I'll turn it over to Tom, who will walk through everything for you.

Thank you JC and and thank you Mayor Hu and President Wolf and City Council members for having us today. Again, my name is Tom Mills. I am the director of Mobility Planning and Policy. I am in charge of the service planning team. What that means is my team are the ones who, you know, make recommendations for how often buses come, how late at night, how early in the morning, where they go.

And in cases like this, it is my team that makes recommendations on where we would cut back. Now, anytime we make a major change such as this, we do work with some guidelines, and they're shown here, and I'll just quickly go through them. And these are not in any particular order, they're all equal to one another. But starting with equity, wanting to ensure that we are serving low income populations, people with colors, people with disabilities. And truth be told, this is a community of people who ride.

And so, not only is it we want to be equitable, but it's good business for us because they're paying riders for us. Also, wanting to serve demand and always trying to figure out where are the origins and destinations that people want to go to. Productivity is a big one that's really important to us. It's how we evaluate our bus and max lines. It's basically saying how many boardings for every hour.

It says here vehicle hour. A vehicle hour is every hour the bus is out of the yard or essentially every hour we're paying for the operator. So, it's getting really at what is our cost per ride and how efficient is this line. Connections, of course, you know, we're always looking at, you know, for community colleges and things like big destinations. And then lastly, growth. And, growth is always kind of a tough one. A lot of the growth happens out on the edge of the region because that's where land is cheaper typically. And, know, we don't always know that the growth is happening until it's already been built. And so sometimes we're chasing growth, really would like it to be the other way around. Okay, we'll go to the next slide please.

So, as we entered this is a lot, I'll explain this slide here. As we entered this effort, we came up with nine different ways, nine different approaches one could take towards cutting service. And, I would say no single one of these approaches gets us to 10% cut. We would have, we have to do a mix of them. And these are the nine approaches that JC mentioned in the survey that we had in the fall.

Where you see FS, that means frequent service, A frequent service bus or max line operates every fifteen minutes all day seven days a week. And, where it says seventeen point five minutes, that's saying we would go from fifteen minutes to seventeen and a half minutes. Where it says 7AM to 7PM, that would mean the frequent service period, the fifteen minute service would only occur in that window. Service would occur afterwards, but it would be less frequently. So, anyway, we took all these approaches and we kind of ran them through this matrix and we said to ourselves, well, first off, green is good, red is bad, orange is in between.

And, we said first said, okay, well, you know, if we were to do this approach, what would the savings be? Is it even worth doing? And you can see here, oh, great. There's a lot of opportunities here with high savings. The next question of course was, okay, but how many riders do we impact? And there we said, oh, uh-oh, you know, there's a number where we have a lot of riders that we're gonna impact. But a few where the ridership is lower. So, okay, that that that helps. The degree of impact is really like, you know, for example, eliminating a bus line has a bigger degree of impact than say, reducing the frequency. Right?

Because the bus is still coming when you reduce the frequency. You get rid of the line, it's gone. Next was the survey results. And so, we really leaned heavily on what the community told us. And then lastly, we weren't able to do this for all of our approaches, but we looked at what we call the job access analysis, where we're able to do an analysis where we can see, well, if we make this change, in in we we kind of put a a time out there, we said forty five minutes. Within forty five minutes, how many jobs can someone get to? How many can they get to today? And if we make this change, how many can they get to after the change? And in many cases, it was less. Well, in all cases it was less.

But, you know, was it a big drop or was it a small drop? And so that's what we were getting at there. So, if we go to the next slide. So after kind of going through this exercise, we came up with a proposal. And this is what was rolled out to the community in January.

Starting at the very top, those trim trimmings that JC was saying. So those are the small cuts that we made in November and then just a few weeks ago here in March. And then followed by the Max Green Line. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this proposal. The idea is the Max Green Line operates on I 205 from Clackamas Town Center to Gateway Transit Center, and then all the way into Downtown Portland by way of the Banfield.

This would just have it go between Clackamas Town Center and Gateway Transit Center, so people would have to transfer to the red or blue lines to get to downtown. But they could still make that trip. And then some network changes, and I'm gonna talk some more about those network changes and the ones that impact Tigard. Some low ridership lines that really were just kind of the lowest ridership on the whole system that we did, even though the degree of impact is high, that the ridership was so low, it was hard to ignore. And so we have made recommendations to eliminate a couple of those lines.

There are some trips, some bus lines in Portland that serve the high schools, but other than serving high schools, they run the rest of the day mostly empty. So we're recommending discontinuing the midday service and just keep the trips to the high schools. And then lastly, two lines, we were calling it short lining. It basically sometimes you'd you'd have a bus line all day long, it goes all the way to the end of the line, but maybe late at night. Every other trip goes to the end of the line and every other trip turns around early, and then you can kinda remove a bus out of that rotation, and so it saves you some money.

So when we rolled this out, our estimate was that this was going to get us to six and a half percentage points of our 10%. We felt really good about that. We have heard back from the community and based on a lot of the input that we received, we put some we took some items out of the proposal. So we're really now saving somewhere between 55% right now. So, next slide.

So now I want to talk about the proposals that impact Tigard. And there aren't many, so that's good news. And they are regarding the the network changes. So starting on the left here where it says current. What I wanna focus on is line 45, which is that kind of burgundy line there that starts at Tiger Transit Center, goes out Walnut to Hundred 21st Washington Square, and then goes all the way to Downtown Portland.

What we find is that on the segments serving 121st and Walnut, we really don't get very much ridership at all on the line. And where we do get ridership, we're pretty close to Shoals Ferry Road where we have other bus service. And then, down close to Pacific Highway Highway 99 where we have other bus service. Highest ridership in that segment are is within walking distance of Shoals Ferry and Pacific Highway. So, what we are recommending is that the line terminate at Washington Square and not serve 121st And Walnut.

Now, furthermore, we're also recommending that that bus line only operate during the rush hour and mostly, you know, getting kids to high schools. And we're gonna connect it with another line called currently called line 39. That's the green line on the left. But on the right, you can see the two are are one line. That burgundy dotted line is one line. We'll just call the whole thing 45. So but the big impact for Tiger would be the loss of service on 121st And Walnut. And we'll go to the next slide please. Okay. This is a lot of spaghetti, so I'll walk you through it.

Again, on starting on the left, again, the Burgundy line that starts at Tualatin Park And Ride, and it goes up 72nd Avenue. That is the only portion of this line that serves Tigard. It goes on cruise way through Lake Oswego and Boones Ferry through Mountain Park and then Boones Ferry on into Downtown Portland. What we are recommending, and we'll look at the right, and now that line I believe is blue. It looks like it's blue.

And it has a new number. It's called 97. It would still serve 72nd Avenue and Cruise Way. But it when it goes up to Mountain Park, it would just go to Barber Transit Center. We would not go all the way downtown, so people would have to transfer to another bus line.

Now, will note that you can see on the right there's another bus line called line 96 that will also go through Mountain Park to Barber Transit Center. At barber from Barber Transit Center, that line will continue downtown. And that line from Barber to downtown, we're purposely choosing to only have that line make three stops, so it will kinda have an express kinda aspect to it. So people could now, of course, I I don't have the schedules in my head right now, but theoretically people could make their transfer to that line 96 and then get to downtown pretty quickly. So, if we're able to make that transfer line up well, then it actually would still be a relatively quick trip for people going to Portland, and likewise coming out of Portland and and coming to the the jobs on 72nd Avenue.

We'll go to the next slide, please. So, is actually a good news story for Tigard. So, we'll start on the left. Line 20 is what we call a frequent service bus line. It operates every that's the green line.

It operates every fifteen minutes all day long, well, I should say most of the day, seven days a week. Similarly, line 76 and that goes from all the way from Gresham through Portland to Sunset Transit Center and to Beaverton Transit Center. Line 76, you may be familiar because it goes just right outside here on Hall Boulevard, that's the Burgundy Line, that also is a frequent service line and that ends at Beaverton Transit Center. What we wanna do is actually with line 20, you know, between Portland and Sunset Transit Center, it we're kinda going through the woods. We're kinda going through the forest.

So, we're not picking up a lot of people. So, we're actually gonna have line 20 only operate every thirty minutes between Northwest Portland and Sunset Transit Center. But, we do still wanna serve that part of Beaverton, Cedar Hills area, particularly Cedar Hills Crossing, the the big mall up there. We wanna serve that. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna extend line 76 all the way to Sunset Transit Center.

It will still be fifteen minutes service in that segment. So, this is good news for Tiger because it gives you more access. You now will have a one seat ride to Cedar Hills Crossing, up to Sunset Transit Center, etcetera. So, we're we're actually excited about this change here. And then, we'll go to the next slide, please. And now, of course, this we'll go one more back. Yeah, there we go. Staying with line 76, and now we have left Tigard, we're actually here in Tualatin and Oregon City. Line 76 is frequent service to Meridian Park Hospital. So it runs every fifteen minutes all the way to Meridian Park Hospital.

Every fourth bus also continues to Westland and Oregon City. That means only once an hour it it goes to Westland and Oregon City. The reason we didn't do every trip to Oregon City is because we were had suspicion that the ridership was gonna be pretty low. In order to get there, we have to go through Stafford, which is undeveloped. We also have to be on the freeway for some of that. Can't pick anyone up on the freeway. And sure enough, we were right. The ridership was very low, and so our proposal now recommends no longer going to Oregon City. So if there are people from Tigard who are riding to Oregon City, they would not be able to make that trip anymore. Next slide, please.

So, those are all the major impacts to Tigard. Anytime we make a big change to our bus service, we have to do an analysis to make sure that we're not having a disproportionate burden on low income communities, nor are we having a disparate impact on minority communities. That is a requirement by the FTA, and our analysis says that shows that we are in compliance with that. We are not having those impacts. I should say, alternatively, we also have to ensure that we're not having a disproportionate benefit to high income communities, nor a disproportionate benefit to non minority communities, and again, we're in compliance with that as well.

Next slide. So, one important note is the Lyft boundary. Lyft is our service for people with disabilities who are unable to ride fixed route transit. It is a kind of curb to curb service. And the way it works is we provide lift service within three quarters of a mile of every fixed route bus or max line.

And so, knowing that we're able to draw a boundary for where the lift service operates. And as you see in this slide here, the hatched areas are areas that would lose lift service. Part of that, big one in the south there, that is that portion of Line 76 that goes to Oregon City, as well as another line. Again, a lot of that is the Stafford area that is undeveloped. And then a small portion south of Powell Boulevard in Gresham. Next slide. Actually, I think I turned this back to JC. Just

so you heard from Tom just how data driven a lot of our work has been done. We, before we put out the proposal on January 5, we did a lot more outreach just to look and see if there was anything we missed. Obviously, a lot of good data has gone into this. We went out and talked to a lot of people. We mailed to 253,000 addresses.

That was one doozy of a mailing, tab with a post office. Our on street folks, went out and talked on the lines that were affected. We used our media partners to get the word out as well. Next slide. And we also did a number of events, 16 events, seven eighty three participants.

8,100 people responded to a survey. So we got a lot of good feedback that has informed the proposal that Tom and team that we have taken out. And one of the themes that we continued to hear were don't disrupt the commute work times. Try to they were concerned about increased wait times, as you can imagine. And there was just a general appreciation for TriMet's work, which we were surprised to hear, but very glad to hear with the bad news that we were delivering to the city or the region, excuse me.

Next slide, please. And so with it, we actually have a board listening session tomorrow, and a new one can come out and either join virtually and or in person to tell our board members exactly what how they feel or concerns about our proposal. We have our first reading on March 25 and a public hearing that people can come out and testify. Again, that's the first consideration for our Board of Directors. And then the second reading in the Board vote is on April 22.

It's where they will consider vote on that proposal. All of this will take in effect in August 23 for the Service Cuts. We'll be doing a lot of outreach, probably beginning in mid July, around all of those changes, to get the word out with that. And with that, I'll turn it over to our Director Kellogg, who will have some comments.

Thank you, JC, very much. I am gonna have some comments, but nothing I say is going to compare to the details of these plans. I'm gonna invite you now to ask questions, and then I'll close-up.

Thank you. Counselor, you have any questions? I can't see Counselor Guzusi, so oh, no hand. Okay, Counselor President Wolf.

Thank you for the thorough presentation. So first couple ones. When you were kind of describing the budget components, you referenced the whole $48,000,000 that's the transportation bill in limbo. So, given the likelihood that that will fail in May, does that mean that this plan will have to go back and then adapt for that 48,000,000 or that you've been anticipated that because of the state of the state?

We will have to go and revisit all of it. And I think at some point in time, as we look to see where our revenue forecasts are coming in, as we, again, we check-in where our finances are, and as we read tea leaves, so to speak, for what's ahead for the legislature, we will have to make some adjustments. I would say that much like you all are, we're working very closely with lawmakers to figure out a path forward. And right now, it's not easy. And so it is something that we will need to revisit.

Okay. Thank you. That's what I thought you had said. I just wanted to clarify. And I appreciate trying to read the leaves.

The other thing I'm curious about is in your survey collection and thank you for walking through all the routes do you feel that you had great tiger data that then, based on the changes that are proposed for the users and the writers, I would just want to know that you felt you got good feedback from those that really leverage it within TIGER to kind of, yay, this is good, or no, this is clearly more is better. Right? I mean, I get that, but I also recognize the reality of what you have to do to make this pencil out. But I was just curious how you felt about your Tigard specific feedback.

Yeah. I would say we did get good data from Tigard. I would say that the the kind of the volume of comments was kind of commensurate with the ridership. Right? So we did get data from Tigard. It wasn't real low and it wasn't real high. There are always some proposals that kind of trigger people even more so. Tigard was not one of those. I would also say that, you know, as you can imagine nearly every comment we receive is, please don't make this change, I need to get this for work. And so, the challenge for us is, well how do we distinguish, you know, one, you know, plea to to not make the change from another?

And I would say that what what we do is we look for those kind of we look for vulnerable communities that we're not aware of. So, for example, if there is a school that serves students with disabilities and they're using the bus to get to school, that's where we take a pause and we say, oh, uh-oh, that we don't wanna make this change. In this case with Tigard, we did not find that, and so we felt comfortable moving forward.

And just a side note, too, we actually had someone who went over all 8,100 comments. And as we logged them, read over each one of them because this is actually a little bit personal for us because we signed up for this job to put transportation service out there for the public. So with bringing it back, it does not work well for us. And so going over each one of those comments and making sure that we're making the right tweak, the right change to the network is definitely something that we, put a lot of heart and soul into.

Wow. And I appreciate that because I don't wanna minimize how essential service this is for, just as you described your, you know, your ridership. Right? I I don't take for granted the fact that I jump in my car and go and that this is really critical for those leveraging the services. So really appreciate that thoughtful approach. Thank you, May.

Thank you. And no question, but I just want to thank you all again for coming in. Especially, I see staff on several regional meetings taking heated comment from mayor, so I appreciate you still coming here. For me, I totally see your financial challenges. I really appreciate you presenting to our community why you're doing this and you're being very data driven and you receive plenty of feedback.

But again, at risk of repeating that, just line 45, I was still concerned about Southwest 121st and Walnut. Service reduction, I understand this is all data driven and but I just think about, you know, those 35% of people you mentioned who are really dependent on that. So but I don't think, you know, I'm not, you know, it is what it is. So I but I have to tell you as as mayor of Tiger, I need to tell you our community concern. And and and luckily, I haven't seen West Commuter Rail Cut and and but I heard talk about it.

So I would just really urge you to really think about those 35% again, people who really depends on West. And I know that there are people who say there's nobody writing it, but thankfully, not the card's not on the table at this time. And I also just want to quickly mention that I really appreciate the SPOT pilot program that I went for the ribbon cutting around part of Beaverton and River Terrace. And I think that's such a innovative project. It's a, for those who don't know, it's like a share, like Uber, but it's for medium sized, a lift sized bus.

And I just think, oh, that's such an innovative thing to do. So, I will encourage you to really, given the constraint, to think outside the box and think more about things like Spot. And I think we're all dealing with budget cuts, so we need to be innovative, think outside the box. So thank you again. So with that, I will ask Director Kellogg to close-up this presentation.

Thank you. And I'll be brief. I know you've got other items on your agenda. So I'm gonna start with a philosophical statement. Previously, I served on the Twalden City Council, so I've been where you guys are. And I remember budget season is a happy time, where you'd come in and say, Oh, we've got things we're gonna pick from, and we're gonna set a CapEx plan, and this is great. So this is my first experience of looking at a budget season in a very bad light. Dollars 300,000,000 is a lot of money, And trends are not our friend right here. Costs keep going up, right? Revenue is going down. So we really need to make this change. I've also got good news and bad news. I'm gonna start with the bad news. Bad news is this may just be the beginning, right? These cuts are difficult but pale in comparison to what we may have ahead of us in another year from now.

The good news is, you're not Tualatin. And I say that because Tualatin lost a lot of service on this. But in all seriousness, the good news is that this group of people and every TriMet staff person is working every day to give you the best transit system they can with the resources that they have. And so we're going to get through this, but we are going to need support from everybody.

Yeah, thank you. And please let the city know let me know how I could be of assistance at the state legislative level. Bus is important for our community, so I'm, you know, just let me know how I can help with the state legislatures and I'll be happy to help.

We appreciate your partnership, Mayor Hu, and we will be contacting you.

All right. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much again for coming. Have a good evening. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

All right. So let's move on to our next item on the agenda, which is the Pilot's seasonally Park Ranger program, seasonal park ranger program. Park and Recreational Manager, Gurren, and Police Officer Orth will give the staff report. Everybody's waiting outside today for some reason. Hello, Rick.

How's going?

Good. Hello.

How's everybody tonight?

Oh, good. Tired?

Should we get started, mayor?

Yeah. So I I do notice that you have 17 slides and we have twenty minutes. So I just want to know how much time do you plan to present, and how much time would you like counsel

to We're going to whip through those slides. I'm not going to just visual.

Okay. Great. So

It's a sweeping overview of Okay.

Yeah. Great.

So So anyway, thank you for having us tonight to talk about the park ranger program for show and tell. I have Brandon Jordan who came on board last April as our first park ranger, and it's a tremendous success. Jordan has done an amazing job. So what we wanted to do is briefly capture the work that he did and the role that he plays. So if you go to the next slide. So just a quick overview. This is about what is a park ranger? How do we measure success? How did we collect the data to document the success? And then some opportunities next up.

And also sitting up here is Ellen Brown. She's our Parks and Rec board chair. Okay. Next slide. So here's Ranger Jordan with Frosty, one of the dogs he met out in the park that became kind of our mascot for our leash up campaign.

But as you can see on this slide, a variety of roles. One of the most important role that the Ranger plays is to have a positive presence in the parks and trails and help educate people on park rules, trail rules, assist with code enforcement education, serves as a liaison between parks and police office, helps with our park maintenance team because as he gets out and about, whether in the truck or on the trails, sees a lot. And what we wanna show you over the next number of slides is how we document and help how do we use that data to make good management decisions and allocation of resources. And then, of course, took part in a number of videos, our Leash Up campaign to try to help promote more dogs on leash, you know, on our our leash rules, our Gee Skies, why do we do what we do with Gee Skies out at Summer Lake, and then the intro, Meet the Rangers. So if you had a chance to see any of these videos, they're a lot of fun.

He's a character out there in a in a good way. So next slide. So this and you've probably seen similar when the chief comes in and does his report outs. Coincidentally, we ended up doing it very similarly. This slide is really the graphic graphically display from the various color codes the different types of encounters that Jordan documented, and kind of the dispersity throughout the city.

So he covered all of our parks, our 600 acres of parks and natural areas. So we can go to the next slide, and we'll start to dive in a little bit. So one of those things or one of our biggest problems is dog off leash. And so these just are showing, again, graphically where they're distributed. Smoking ordinance.

So 125 of dogs off lease encounters, 37, you know, smoking in parks that Jordan will talk to people about. Next slide. So one of the challenges we have at Summer Lake is trying to protect the sensitive lands around the lake. We wanted to make it more aware for people who do like to fish out there. We built some fishing platforms and new signage out there.

We're actually gonna put in a couple platforms. We'll end up with four. We have two right now. Each one, if I don't know if you saw the video that Leandro did with ODFW to really, again, help promote we want people to enjoy fishing at the lake, but we also want to protect wildlife and sensitive lands too. So we created these fishing platforms, and Ranger Jordan helps, again, educate on violations.

They are but, you know, it's education. We want people just to change behavior. Next slide. We all know that we have an abundance of campsites scattered throughout, particularly on our trails. Jordan has done an amazing job working with officer Orth.

As he's out there making the rounds on our parks and trails, he will notify officer Orth where these campsites or campfires are. And, you know, between Martin, our park supervisor, officer Orth, and Jordan, they can take the action necessary to disband those campsites and fire evidence. And it's really helpful for both PD and parks to know where these cleanups are needed. Next slide. So while Ranger Jordan is out there and about, graffiti is also another issue that pops up.

Getting after it quickly helps prevent more graffiti from happening. So where Jordan can do it, he'll do some minor maintenance out there, he'll let our parks maintenance folks know where the issues are. And with Officer Orth, if there's evidence to collect, he'll go out there. So having Jordan out there observing and taking care of some things helps with our park maintenance team not having to get out there. So there's some things that we can do while he's out on-site.

Next slide. So we also, you know, from a park and trail safety, we do a twice a year audit of our trails for safety. And while Ranger Jordan is running around, he'll find some things that we'll report to our park maintenance supervisors so we can get those on our work order service requests so that the we're trying not to get into deferred maintenance. So catching these things early and taking corrective action is very helpful. Also, able to call non emergency or 911 if there's an issue, somebody in distress, that we can be the eyes and ears, you know, for PD out there.

Next slide. Probably the most important thing out of, you know, Jordan's work is being that positive person of authority. Our park maintenance crew do great jobs, but they're out there to clean our parks and maintain them. Jordan in his uniform, you know, having that presence of authority, but having that friendly face out there. So, you know, we document not only the enforcement type of education occurrences, we've documented the number of positive interactions.

And the last one, no issues during visit. You know, Jordan, during a course of a day, will go visit x number of parks. And, you know, it's great to report that more often than not, there's just nothing happening in the parks from a negative standpoint. So we also wanted to be able to document. And you can see combined numbers of almost interactions were both positive and no issue.

So that's great to know as well. Next slide. Just a pie chart that shows the breakdown of everything we just discussed, so I can move on from that. Next slide, please. So sort of as we wrap this up, you know, the boots on the ground, coordination between PW and PD is critically important.

One thing to note about these cleanup costs, prior to the park ranger coming on, an average cost of cleanup, not counting some of the major cleanups we had, was typically around $8,000 just due to the accumulation of of trash. With Jordan spotting these quicker, the cost of average cost of cleanup dropped to about $1,100. So you can see Arranger pays for itself just in the number you know, the reduction of cleanup costs. So all that data that is collected helps us in making our management decisions, allows our maintenance team to focus on the work that they need to do. And as our system grows, it's more and more important to have somebody with that official presence out there.

Next slide. So what are the opportunities? Clearly and hopefully you would agree that the data shows that there is a value added benefit to the Park Ranger position. Currently, Jordan is a seasonal. Working with our Parks and Rec advisory board, we'd love to be able at some point to, you know, make the position a full time position.

And, ideally, we would love to have a full time position and still, you know, a seasonal park ranger as well. What we can do is more education events and activities, working in collaboration with our rec team, but we can do park walks, you know, park ranger story time. Jordan works with Caitlin and who's here somewhere, our recreation coordinator, you know, to kinda up you know, do more with the junior ranger program, collaboration with schools and libraries. And you can read, there's so many things that we can do in campaigns like the Lee Shout campaign. Jordan, we printed up these bandanas called Bark Ranger.

So when Jordan is out and about, you know, interacting with people with dogs on leash, they now get a City of Tiger Bark Ranger bandana for the dogs to wear. So and then also coordination with our neighboring cities and their ranger programs at Lake Oswego, Tualatin and Tualatin Hills Parks and Rec. Next slide. And I think this is the last slide. So, anyway, hopefully, I got through that in time, mayor. Yeah. Half Any questions?

Time for questions and discussion. Do you have any questions? No? Council president Wolff. Oh, you do? Okay. Council Robbins, go ahead.

Oh, I get to go first all the time today. Thank you. This is great, and welcome, Jordan, to being our park ranger. I have a question. I saw on the slide 4.23 miles of social trails or unofficial trails. I'm assuming that's just, like, people walking where they're not supposed to repeatedly, and it kinda creates a trail. Is that I'm gonna assume that that's causing damage, and that's what's creating those trails. Are we trying to stop that and kinda repair that damage, or are we just gonna accept it as this is a new trail? What happens?

So my goal with mapping those is just being aware of where they are. It is doing a lot of damage to the natural areas. Think think of the paved path that goes down Fano Creek. Off to the right, you often see that kind of smash down.

You can see

like, oh, someone's been causing some mayhem back there. That that's what I mean by social trails. As I'm not sure exactly what the future holds for social trails, but now we know now that we know they're there, I can share that information with PD, and it gives them an easier way to get to the campsites that are really entrenched.

Yeah. Enforcement is tough. Right now, you know, Ranger Jordan doesn't have any enforcement capabilities. And, you know, we do, you know, work closely with officer Orth. And it's a challenge even in our other parks. Yes. User generated trails is just nature of the beast. And but it does cause a lot of damage, erosion, you know, and so forth. But knowing where they're at is at least we can let Officer Orth know, and they can do some investigation. But, yeah, we'd love to stop it, but we don't have that ability.

Consent President Wolff?

No. It's very different as to why they're created, but it just reminds me of a college campus when there's very lovely landscape design and students are like, no. Point AB is way faster. But I loved the presentation. I appreciated the value of having Jordan Yu present and the dollars saved. I think that's a really compelling argument to present. And I think my only question and Rick, you don't have to answer this. This can be a conversation during our budget season. Clearly, TriMet just sat here and talked about their financial challenges. We're going to have similar conversations.

So I mean, I can say 100% we should flip to an FTE full time and have a temporary, but then what's the trade offs? Because I think that's gonna be our conversation throughout the budget season is how do we make our choices that make the most sense.

You're right.

And if you have a response now, or that's just a conversation that we continue to have. So you have my support, but that'll be the question. So thank you.

And I think we're scheduled on April 14 to have that very robust parks funding discussion. Yeah. You know, not only with a ranger position, but as the system, you know, the pressure to grow the system, obviously, is going to impact the number of FTE that we need in parks, you know, which would include a ranger position. So if we can hold off on them, we're definitely, we can have that the conversation on April 14.

And I know we were all very supportive of the role parks play in River Terrace 2 Point o. Right? And it's the same challenges that you very clearly brought forward. So, thank you.

Yeah. For for me to just follow-up on council president Wolff's point, well, thank you for the pilot program for presenting the data and I I I it's it's really obvious that the Ranger Jordan provide lots of value, particularly in terms of presence and coordination just identify issues early on which translate apparently translate into at least for chem cleanup. So, but that's one year data. I have no reason to believe you won't continue. So, remind us again, what what months are you currently working?

So as a seasonal, we have to have a after his hours are exhausted, a thirteen week separation. So Jordan left us in December, and he's due back on, like, what, April 13? So we'll have Jordan back

April to December?

Pretty much. Yeah.

Okay. Alright. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, Council President Wolf's Camps, It's like, oh, this is so great. But right now, given our budget constraint, I'm very mindful of what's between what's nice to have and what's must to have.

So for me, to support this, I will need a little bit more internal data like internal cost efficiency and also, it sounds like you will like more full time to support more educational program, but is that something that we have the what the trade off if we offer that because it's good to have, but again, I'm focusing on essential service, right? If I have sort of data like trade off, potential trade off like that and again, like you talk about the not Ranger is not really focused on enforcement, right, because like leash is leash law is something that enforced by Washington County, is that correct? So, yeah, and a lot of things like fishing and and things like that. So

So I believe in code, if there's delegated authority, there's opportunities for providing a limited amount of enforcement capabilities like writing parking citations. Where I came from previously, we let our rangers they didn't do people to people citations. They did like parking violation citations, which was very effective and we let our deputies do the others. And I've talked to the chief about it and, you know, we can have more of that conversation.

Yeah. Just just another thing, like, demonstrate value, right? If ranger can issue citations that of officer, then that save us money and it's a win win situation.

So, stopped wanted I totally agree. We wanted in our first year just to kind

of Yeah. Limit. It's great data.

Each year that, you know, Ranger Jordan is willing to come back, we can add more

Yeah. Exactly. Responsibilities

onto that if we work with Shelby and the chief and how to make that happen and make sure there's proper training and Yeah. All that good stuff.

Yeah. So, again, yeah, that's great. So, thank you so much for your presentation and we can have a discussion with the Park and Recreation Board next. So thank you for coming.

Thank you.

Good to see you.

Well, you're welcome to stay or welcome

Welcome to to stay or not or not. Thank very much. Oh, thank you. It's nice to see you. All right. So, next item on our agenda is our joint meeting with the Park and Recreation Advice Board prep. They'll provide with us annual update and we have Rick with us again. And, please please introduce the item and the team members.

Yes. So I'm very excited to have here Ellen Brown, who's our Park and Recreation Advisory Board Chair. And I'm gonna have Ellen, if you wouldn't mind, introduce yourself and a little background and

Sure. Hi. I've been on the Parks board for I'm in my eighth year now, and I've been chair for the last couple Yeah. A couple of years. And when I started, everybody on the board was in their second term and we had the parks manager had been here twenty, twenty five years or something.

And in that time, we had a lot of turnover of expertise and and continuity, and it's been really lovely to have Rick be have be so experienced and jump in. One of the things that was going on when I first started was we were in extreme danger of losing our rec program altogether. And we lost two experienced employees because there was the uncertainty of even the program even continuing. And so Caitlin and her team have been rock stars at really taking this, like, tiny little program that for a city of our size is ridiculous that it's as small as it is and growing it in, you know, as much as she has in this time. It's been really impressive.

And so I've been living in Tiger since 2012, and when I moved here, from Portland, I was like, what kind of camps can I sign my kid up for or whatever? And there was nothing at all. And so that was a shock to me, and that's one of the reasons I joined Prab. So as as the board, we interface with the public, and one of the things that we do is there's the system plan, the ten year plan that happens, and that was done last in 2022.

Next slide.

Next slide, sorry. We had a lot of we had a lot of input into that. So Next slide. We're gonna high level the accomplishments, advocacy, all that. So we had a lot of input into that.

We talked a lot about what needed to be a part of that plan, what were our priorities, and what were our goals, and we're due for the system plan update. And, you know, some of the areas that were identified as gaps that need to be addressed is, you know, we have aging infrastructure. We need inclusive and accessible amenities for all of our residents to be able to enjoy our park services and to expand our recreation programming. We work with the the staff to their projects and their priorities and things. They bring things to us, know, this is what we're working on.

What's your input? And there's often really, really good discussion about some of those things. Little known fact, we are also the tree board. So, and we've convened as the tree board once in my eight years, but it was to talk about the heritage tree program and we that's a whole other conversation that we can have another time. And but it's also one of the requirements for us being in a Tree City USA program.

And the Lasich property, which we will talk about later in this discussion, you know, the the purposes that we that it was purchased for, we had a really big gut blow that we weren't gonna be able to do that or to do it, it would be another twenty years. So we've been actively working with the park staff on what can we do instead that it that will comply with the zoning, you know, for where it is, that would also be a benefit to our community, and especially on that side of the city where there isn't as much, you know, wild property that belongs to the city. We also, our parks department is really excellent at going after grants and other funding opportunities to pay for some of these important things that we're doing. And so we provide grants support services as well. And, you know, we also get comments from the public, know, we had one example is, you know, one of the sports group was it Little League that wanted the turf, you know, They came to us saying, we really need some turf, at least one of the fields being turfed so that we can actually play when it's wet and messy and then that got the ball rolling on something on that project.

We also are kind of where some of the some of the different ideas get vetted. There was a recent idea that came to us that would take a third of the Pazo dog park and turn it into these like giant battery storage things. And so we're kind of the front line on supporting good ideas to get off the ground and stopping bad ideas before they can take hold. And that was a really bad idea. We also hear public input about things like pickleball conflict things which we spend a surprising amount of time talking about pickleball.

But that is, you know, we hear it so you don't have to. And so and but it's all really good. It's good for us to be aware of what's going on with the community, and it's also good for the community to know that they have a place where they can come for those things. Okay. Next slide.

Next slide please. Oh, that's it. Oh, back.

Oh, no, back one. I'm sorry. The one that says advocacy on the top. Yeah. And so one of the other things that is an important role that we play is advocacy.

And that's one of that one of the hats that I'm wearing here tonight. And, you know, we've seen a lot of budget impacts throughout the last eight years and, you know, like I was talking about with rec and, you know, within the last couple of years, we voluntarily took a big hit in our budget from the general fund with the promise that that would be reinstated and that hasn't happened. So we've already taken a cut that other departments have not taken. And, you know, all of the community surveys list police and parks as their two top priorities for what the government should be doing for them and their community. And, you know, it is one of the most visible things in the community that show people how their tax dollars are being spent.

And, you know, we as such, you know, we're a core service. Not everything that the government does is a core service. They're, you know, we are a core service. And we've been operating on a shoestring for years and years and years and years. When you look at the national surveys around what other cities are size, what their departments look like, we're in below the bottom quartile in the number of staff we have compared to the amount of property that they're maintaining.

And, they do an excellent job. They do an amazing job with the with the resources that they have. And, you know, as new property comes into the the city with River Terrace 2 and different things like that, we're being asked to grow our parks program and maintain what we already have. And it's really important that you we're not just kicking a problem down the road to make them more expensive at a later date by not maintaining the resources that we have. And that's one of the value adds that Jordan has is there's a widow maker in this park that we need to get out and before it lands on somebody and their dog in the city has to pay a huge amount of money, you know.

And so, you know, maintaining the properties that we have, maintaining doing it to a level that is ensuring that we're not just creating more expensive problems later and showing the public that their dollars are being spent well. And that is something that's really important to us. The Park Ranger program, we talked about that for a year before we actually were able to find a way to create the pilot program with seasonal. And you know, he exceeded all of our expectations. Like the data that he was collecting, he didn't have to do that.

He did that on his own, he proactively. And that was amazing that he's been able to do that. And preserving our park system and our trails and making sure that they're well maintained, that they're, you know, that that asset is still an asset that we can be all proud of. That is something that we all take very, very seriously. And we've also since we've added Kim Barker to our team on the board, we've really strengthened our relationship with the Tualatin River Keepers.

And that's been really fun because we get to do the paddle every summer, but then it's also been really meaningful for like the accessible dock and things like that as well. So next slide. And so, I'm going to defer to Rick on this part of the discussion. So what the ask that we have for counsel is around can we pursue the idea that's been being floated at this moment? Do we have your okay to continue the discussion about it? That's not a commitment to yes, we're going to do it, but can we can we continue pursuing that idea? And so I'm going to turn that back over to Rick.

Thank you. Next slide, please. So a little history, and I think in your meeting packet I outlined, some memos that I shared with former city manager Reimer and city manager Tris. I won't go into that. But essentially, once we found out from Metro that we're talking twenty, twenty five years out, we started to think, what could we do?

And I know that since that property was bought, a lot of people still think it's going to be the home for new ball fields. Well, we wanted to kind of get off of that thinking. And so we brought in a consultant to reimagine the use. And so this is a footprint of the Lossettes property. Kind of are you familiar with Lusher Farms in Lake Oswego?

Similar concept if you get a chance to see that. But because we're zoned exclusive farm use, and we're also undesignated as far as the reserves process goes. But consistent with the zoning, and we've been talking to Washington County Planning, you know, putting a community supported agriculture operation in, putting demonstration gardens in, putting a native plant nursery. You know, we're just kind of brainstorming these different ideas of what we can do. In the interim, what we also are currently working on is developing river access.

In that lower left hand corner, if you're not familiar with the property, we'd love to take counsel out on a tour of this property as well to kinda see on the ground what this property looks like. As an old Azalea farm, again, that's we have access. We have 45 acre feet of water that we've protected our water rights. So we can support all the irrigation needed out here. So demonstration gardens, workshops, classes, converting the old pole barn into like a meeting hall, the old stables into some office spaces.

Currently, one of our park maintenance guys is doing a leadership project with Oregon Parks and Rec Association. And we've taken where there was an old triple wide there, if some of you know this property. We had Emory, when they were doing the reservoir project, demo the triple wide for us. And now he's taken that pad and turned that into a native plant nursery project for his leadership. So these are just some of the ideas, but we didn't want to get too far out ahead into further planning or having some community engagement without council support to continue to pursue the concept further.

So this is just a high level concept plan of what can be imagined out there. Again, while we're working with our engineering team to develop the river access that currently Willamette Water is in there with a blow off line. We'll follow right behind them with our river access project. So some of you might ask, well, what about ball fields? You know, how do we we as you know, we don't have a lot of excess capacity for ball fields.

I would love to come back to you at a later date to talk about a project we're working with Tiger Twaladin School District. Because of the Fowler Middle School project, they're gonna lose both the ball field, the football field, and the baseball field at Fowler. So we've been in conversations with the school district to get their participation on the Dirksen property just adjacent to Fowler to develop a secondary ball field and make improvements to the whole ball field complex that we have that would create additional sports field capacity that might also maybe be lighted. So this is kind of very conceptual. I know on the school district side, they're having a similar conversation with their leadership to say, at a high level concept, here's what we're thinking to help support the for us, the need for ball fields, for them, the need to replace the ball fields that they're going to lose.

So the timing is great because what we're continuing under our IGA with the school district to look at other fields that we can activate, like we do at Metzger School Park, now a partnership that's potentially available at Dirksen to create some additional ball fields. So, for those that see loss such as, well, we're losing future ball fields, We have to be creative and find other ways to get more activation of ball fields. While at the same time, we could be looking at further planning this site for this purpose. So I'll leave it at that and open up to any questions. This, I believe, is our last slide anyway.

Thank you.

Next slide, please. Okay.

That's the last slide. So anybody? Questions, comments? Councilperson Wolf, start.

So I'll be really quick. And at the risk of getting in the weeds, Rick, so for Fowler, are they temporarily losing fields as they build a new school, and then they'll come back, or they're just gone gone? No.

They'll be gone for good. My understanding is the new school will be partly built on the football field.

Yep.

And they're gonna lose also the baseball field, so that's not coming back either.

Okay. Alright.

So this is important then that Dirksen can pick up some of that slack.

Yeah, I was unaware of that. So, yeah, I didn't know if that was just a reconfiguration challenge for the short run.

You know Eric Nessie?

Oh, yes. Yeah, Okay.

Reach out to Eric. He can kinda, that's who we're working with, him and Jarvis.

Okay, perfect. I will do that. So then, for me, you know, this is interesting, right? Because it goes back to our River Terrace conversation, I think, in making those tough choices. So if our choice is to really do nothing for a quarter of a century or create space, I felt that the conversations in River Terrace are, what are the opportunities to allow those community members to be out and have places to engage?

And this isn't the same as ball fields or an open park, but it certainly creates opportunities to be active, be outside, learn water, the river access, all those pieces, I think are really important. So you have my support, I guess, is what I'm trying to get to. So

thank you. Are also potential community gardens and things like that, which in those community I live over there, and I know I have I have no yard. So, you know, having a community garden would be nice.

Yeah. Walking trails and, yeah, the river experience, urban farming, you know, opportunities with the, you know, community supported agriculture, the demonstration, native plant nurseries, plant sales, you know, different things that can all be done on the site.

And there are opportunities to partner with other companies and different community partners in some interesting ways as well.

We've tiptoed talking to some of our partners to see if they'd be interested in, you know, some type of partnership, whether it's programming. Some are interested in making investment. So, you know, we're way down the road for that. It's just a matter of, you know, with the council's support, just to continue to have that further discussion and even have some community engagement around it to see what the community, you know, feels about it.

Councillor Schlag, support continuing the late late late basic? I

think I need to get more information on it in order to provide a a decision on that.

Okay. Councilor Robin, continue the direction. Early big picture stuff.

Yes. I am familiar with the property because our scout troop is out there every year chipping trees. I did not see a tree chipping thing on that most recent mock up and in the past it has been there, but we'll figure it out. I think it's a great idea. I could see it being something sponsored at some point possibly in the future in addition to local people being able to be out and about.

It's also something different to do. And what with what we've been talking about with economic development and TLT, it's another thing, frankly, that tourists with families would go do. Or you could, you know, I where I previously lived, there were some urban farms that had certain days where a lot of people came out and so it could be just one more thing to add to Tiger's identity. So I do support it.

Thank you. Thank you. Councilor Gaddousi, do you support continuing the conversation on the LASIK property?

Absolutely, I love the Losses property, full support.

All right, yeah, I really appreciate the vision and the work being done and I support continuing the conversation, but like Counselor Schlag, I will need more information on the long term cost but it sounds like it's in the future and the potential partnership, right, that related to cost. Yeah. So thank you for that. And in turn of the presentation for the Board, thank you for the presentation and thank you for the eight year service. Thank you. Really appreciate some of the stuff you deal you have to deal with like the racquetball disputes. I really appreciate it. So just one question. So why does the Board not recommending any levy for future funding source?

So that creates a level of uncertainty to a core service that is really problematic.

Okay.

Because if we, like like, if we had a levy right now going up against the other levy that's happening

in the

city, we increase the the risk of both of them failing.

Right.

You know?

And I think core services need, you know, a levy for ongoing, you know, you know, maintaining our property, you know, things like that. I think it's just a level of uncertainty that is irresponsible, frankly, in my purse that's a personal opinion, not a board opinion.

Well, thank you for the feedback. I'm I'm not disagreeing with you and I also support I also agree that park and recreation is is very important. Yeah. But I'll just give you some food for thought.

Right.

So, we do have a public safety levy, so even though, you know, so it is uncertain. It's just an unfortunate reality we're dealing with measure of five fifty, you know, it's like we can only go up 3% a year but our expenses go more than that. And also, parking recreation fee, I can see that but that's also Personally, I can't speak for a council, I just feel uncomfortable keeping keep raising some fee that council have control over without voter input. But if the I really appreciate perhaps input, but I would like to see if it's really a priority for the majority of Piker population, then we should ask them to weigh in, see if they're willing to put I forgot the expression, just to see if they're willing to pay for it, so that rather than counsel keep making those decisions and not really knowing that. But again, not disagreeing with you, I'm just telling you some consideration.

And also, SDC, I agree that we need to take a look at that, but at the same time, we that one of the council goal is to provide housing options for more people and SDC obviously asked for the cost of new housing. So we have to strike a balance. I don't know what that looks like at this point but I'm just telling you that SDC can cause, you know, raise prices for new home which were you know, we already have a housing crisis, right? So just give you something to consider, yeah.

So I think that we are definitely at a point where we are long overdue for a creative problem solving Yeah. Around how do we fund this essential service.

Exactly, yeah.

And, you know, I don't think we've had a methodology update. And how many years, Rick? 2015

is the last time the Yeah. Parks SDCs was updated.

And so that's well over ten years ago. The city has changed radically in that time.

Exactly. Yeah.

And And so I'm not saying that we shouldn't I mean, I think we need to be really leery of this or this thinking.

Exactly, yeah. It's just striking a balance.

And, you know, so and I think we also need to be really leery of pinning the success of the department, the majority of their budget on the whim of the voters when things are very uncertain.

Yeah. I mean, agree. Tiger is doing a lot for very little in terms of police department I mean, parks department park and recreation and all department actually. Right. And for jurisdiction like Beaverton, they have a special district for park and recreation in which they pay a lot more than Tiger. So we are paying very little for what we get.

And I will say the parks department has not grown. It's I mean, the only growth that has done is in response to specific need.

I know.

It hasn't been a, you know, and I feel like there are other parts of the city government that have grown that not necessarily in response to a specific need. And it's that we've all been very, very conscious of trying to keep things as close to the bone as they possibly can be. So they're really I can't speak to other departments, but I know this department has really tried very hard to be very responsible with their dollars all along. And I would really hate to see them kind of punished for that.

Yeah. Thank you. And these upcoming have a comment?

Thank you, mayor. And just listening to this conversation, I think that's exactly why I'd requested that we have a discussion on parks funding.

That's really important.

Because this this has reached you know, we had a a revenue review in October where we talked a little bit about the parks fee and and how much it's really contributing to to overall funding. And it seems to be parks funding seems to be sort of in an untenable situation. So I think it's reached a point where really as councils, elected policymakers, we need to provide a solution on behalf of our constituents. And what that solution is, what creative funding mechanism that could be, or, what service levels may need to be right sized to that is something that the council needs to think very carefully about. It's very easy to, you know, go into council goals and say, you know, we love all these things. Let's do all of them. It's it's very different trying to figure out how do you actually make it happen to actually benefit people in reality.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, I you you guys do not have an enviable job ahead of you at all, and I think that it's important that that conversation is coming up. I think that I I just wanna take a little bit of issue with the right size, comment because I feel like that for a city of this size, as mature as it is with the number of, you know, we service elders, we service small children, we service everybody in between. And, I think that when you look at our surrounding communities and look at nationwide at similar sized communities, we are so much smaller than all of those other similarly situated cities.

Yeah. Thank you. Any other last comment? If not, thank you for your presentation and thank you for your service. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you. And with that, there have been no further item on agenda. The meeting is adjourned. Good night, Tiger.