City Council - Regular Meeting

For the pre meeting under Westland City Council. We've got reports in community advisory groups and council priorities adoption. That's meeting. Proclamations, we have three we have three today. Women's history month, we would like to read that. It doesn't have to be a woman, but Mary will read that. She volunteered

or something. Do this. People pay.

And then equal pay day. Proclamation.

I'll do that one.

Former finance manager. I'm thinking I'll can I I'll read the last proclamation for National Drug and Alcohol Fact Week, and we got a request from Pam Pierce today to attend their poster pain in a couple of weeks? So Nice. I'll I'll read that and maybe take the confirmation. It's also, like, National Sleep Week. We don't have one for that. I have many. We we never We don't sleep here in. So that handles the proclamation, and then we have a presentation from TriNet. They're coming at the council's request. Do update us on the service desk. Mhmm. I think John's there. Real quick. So I know Mary has sent that.

Great guy. I look forward to that presentation. I'm sure there'll be an opportunity to ask. We have a a full consent agenda. Four things on the meeting note, an investment policy update in very easement for the bridge construction, and then a grant agreement with the Oregon Water Resources Department for the I 205 Abenacca Bridge water line replacement so that we can get our 5,000,000. Any any questions on that? I don't know. Any of those?

Yeah. I read that the easement is temporary easement is for five years or did I misread something?

Yes. Well, that is Dylan staff memo, but, under our under our rules, we have to bring it to you if it's gonna extend more than thirty days. Company manager can always approve a temporary easement for up to thirty days. Yes. And this is one that has already been approved.

It came back to you, but it's not, like, my understanding is ODOT did not finish their work. It's gonna have to be significantly longer and been working. I only touched on this a little bit with Dylan. Like, he's done some good work and following everything through is that this would be to expand that temporary easement for an additional five years, and we will receive that document. Because I actually haven't reviewed and approved the document itself, and so this would be just directing beyond to be able negotiate the terms of that agreement.

And I just wondered if it's five years because they don't wanna have to come back for us to approve another intention. I hope it's not really five years.

Well, I think you probably speak to that. I feel like you know the timeline more on that third project than anyone, you and Morgan. I think they also hope it's not five years. Okay. Brands agreement and executing, I think. I think that should be much worse.

Okay. Yeah. Just just just cover so we don't have to keep doing this.

Yeah. And there it's quite a rigmarole on their end too, like, through the training.org and DOJ, etcetera. And so I think they deserve it. Let's do it as long as we can.

That's what I thought.

That's a really good clarification.

Yeah. We make it go through the appraisal process. It would cost them 30 about $30,000. It would take several months, I think. Yeah. So we've yeah. As a courtesy, we've done this before. But I know I hope it doesn't take five years. Maybe if we say we can take only two years, it won't be up the project. I think it's very small piece of the puzzle. Yeah. I agree. I agree. Okay.

I just wanted that. To confirm that. Thank you.

Is this grant agreement? I mean, entertaining question on the consent agenda because, you know, otherwise, we could pull it off if further discuss this need during the meeting. But the brand's the premium, does that mean we're looking towards getting the 5,000,000 in place? That's great.

Yeah. We've made a lot of great strides with that. If Stephanie is gonna speak to it, I can talk to any of the legal aspects, we have. But is there anything in regards

to that? Does this does this mean we've got the money, or how does this This get this in place?

Once the grant agreement is in place and is executed by both parties, then we will be able to draw it down. We will be able to request reimbursement for the drawdowns that we've received from our department. So

which

is right now, a little over 2,000,000 in drawdowns. And everything is we've got we've worked so hard to get everything in place. We need And really have developed good relationships with the new folks that are on board with ODOT, which has been it's just been really great moving it forward and working with our water resources department. So once it's executed, we'll send it over. And once they do or OWRT does what they need to do on their end, we should be able to start requesting reimbursement for the drawdown.

And that would include, the most recent drawdown that was 1 and a half million. Yeah. That that's that we I wanna give kudos to Stephanie and Morgan. They're continuing to work with that. The reason the city's relationship through this grant agreement with Oregon Water Resources Department has been held up is because we needed much more detailed information from ODOT in terms of what they're billing for for Oregon Water Resources Department to accept that And so it's quite a while to negotiate. Oh, you're nice. Get that in

No. Go to bed.

So the reason this is on the council agenda is because we don't have any specific local rule or code. Yeah.

Is that the one? No. Council has signed on. He's muted himself. Thank you, councilor. Welcome. The records can reflect that. Council has joined around 05:37.

So we don't have anything in the West municipal code or local rules about whether grants need to come to you guys. So because it's 4 or $5,000,000, I thought it was worth bringing it to your attention, letting you review the terms if you're at all interested and just making sure you're aware that this process is moving forward. So that's why it's there.

Questions on that? I appreciate it. Okay. Councillor Gronin, did you have a question?

No, I don't.

Okay. Thanks. Thank you. Welcome. Well, that's on the consent. Any need to pull any of those items off the consent agenda, we're comfortable approving that. Okay. Sounds good. And then with that, we can go to the business meeting. And we'll just approve those, Stephanie.

Go on.

Feel better. Thank you. Business meeting has three items on it. First is an ordinance, opting into the limitation of liability for trails and structures and public easement for an approved right of way.

I can speak to that in case you have any questions. This was a great project that Kristen took on, and, I said that she could go home. So I'm gonna present it today. But most of this work is done by her, so I wanna, give credit to her for that. But this is very straightforward. This is lack limits on liability that's provided by state statute. It's automatic for cities that have over 500,000 people. We're below that. And so the statute has another subsection subsection three that allows cities like us to opt into it. And so this liability protection is specific to public easements, or unimproved rights of way that the city owns.

This is completely different from recreational immunity for parks. So what we're talking about here are like some of the trails. They have lots of trails in Westland behind developments or connecting. Think about the ones right here outside of City Hall. And it is a little bit tricky because I can't say that all of those are public city right of way or easement.

Some of them could be owned by HOAs and other things. But at least the ones that we do have ownership rights to, this would protect the city if someone was injured while using those. And most cities have opted into this. We did opt into similar coverage, several years ago by resolution, but it only extended it to the city. And this recent statute provides broader coverage to owners of land abutting the public easement or an unimproved right of way and nonprofit corporations or volunteers involved in trail construction or maintenance.

And we feel like this is important. Obviously, most of these trails go behind people's property. And so to give them that liability protection like reroute kind of came in and or something caused the trail not being perfectly flat. I think they're if they were viable for any damages, I think a lot of people would I don't want trails behind my house, and it's something that our community really enjoys. So it helps provide that additional coverage.

And, again, this is only for common negligence. This isn't for, like, gross negligence or, like, willful misconduct. And so the, you know, the city will obviously maintain those trails, as Megan has said, it's pretty difficult to, make sure we're not all of those.

So this is just

an added layer of protection for the city. It can be done by resolution, which is a little more simpler, but we decided to go with Fortman, just for transparency and for ease of us, frankly, finding that coverage. Because I thought we didn't have any coverage, and I sent Kristen digging, and she found the old resolution, but it's just kind of illustrated the problem of when you enact major coverage by resolution, you have to be able to find it, versus very quick searching in our code. So that's why we went with that procedural method. Questions?

And this this is the recreational immunity issue. This is different.

This is different. This is only to the own right of way or public easement.

And that would that's the by the park. The recreational immunity is more like the park.

More usually, we're talking about parks.

Mhmm.

Park. And the city does have quite a few easements or trails that connect neighborhood. Mhmm. Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah.

Think about where you live. I mean, I have tons from where I live. I I feel like all of us know what is the trails we're talking about.

And we have a resolution adopting architectural survey of Westland Robinwood neighborhood. Any

We'll have a presentation from Lynn Schroeder, the management analyst in the planning department, and he will be there to support her.

Yeah. So

let's have some brief remarks. Really, we the work has been done on this survey, but we wanted to present it for the company. To, I think, highlight the great work that was done behind this and Mhmm. Give an opportunity to any questions and for us to answer those.

I think

that I heard that was pretty well received by the Robinwood Neighborhood Association.

Yeah. So

Absolutely. So that's something.

Yeah. Mhmm.

Guess the wind. I like it.

And one point I would add to that, which is that you probably read in the staff report, but it's informational in nature. It doesn't create or designate any historic areas. The community member was concerned about that. That's not what it's doing. And

then we have a building evaluation for the agreement, intergovernment intergovernmental agreement, also known as. Mhmm.

Any information on that? So, Alicia, Bloomfield, our building official, and people will be here for that. They do have

Alicia's coming to council meeting coming. Yeah. Building official. Yeah.

And they'll do a brief presentation on the building department and the need for why we why we signed with IGA. And as you know, because it's an IGA to approve it.

And I repeat that.

Sounds good. Then city manager or city manager?

Yeah. So I we rallied this morning. Not this morning. Yeah. So we do have some updates for it.

Yeah. This pre meeting. But what's getting done? One meeting. See no other comment. We can adjourn until this clock. So I have a few minute break. We're adjourned. And, councilor, you can stay on the line here. Same same meeting, like, for the regular meeting.

And then we'll just see you once Okay.

I'll do that.

Sounds good.

City council, and the first item of business is the pledge of allegiance on the agenda. So we will do that quickly. Rise and ready. And, again, I pledge allegiance to the flag of

The United States Of America

and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. Good to strive to those ideals as always. The first item of business is to approve the agenda. So I would entertain a motion to approve.

Thank you, mayor. I move to approve the agenda for the March.

Second.

It has been moved and seconded to approve the agenda for the 03/10/2026 Westland City Council meeting. Any discussion? And I note that councilor Groner is attending online today. So I see no discussion. Councilor Groner, can you just unmute so we can test your audio there since we're about to vote for the first time.

Councilor Groner. He could have stepped away. So I suppose we'll just call we'll call the roll and see if he votes.

Councilor Bonington?

Yes. Councilor

Bright? Yes. Council President Baumgartner? Yes. Councilor Groner?

He could be deemed excused for the vote. You can proceed.

Mayor Bialystovsky?

Yes. Thank you. So the motion passes four to zero. And that takes us to public comments. And I know we have a couple of comments tonight. So when you when we call your name, come up and make sure the mic's on. And we have a timer. You have up to three minutes. But since there's only a couple folks here tonight, we'll don't don't feel pressured by the time too much. Happy to be flexible. So we'll start with the first speaker.

Bill Hamilton.

Hey, Bill. Welcome. Just make sure the green light's on and if you can't state your name and city residents for the record when you start this for our minutes.

Does this work? Hello?

It's on? Alright. Go ahead.

Okay. My name is Bill Hamilton. I live at, 2650 Lexington Terrace in West Lynn. I am here tonight to talk about noise ordinance number four point I'm sorry, 5.487 and trying to get it enforced. On or about November 5, my the neighbor behind me, his son started playing the drums, and not just a small set of drums, a complete set of drums.

Had a number of conversations and emails with the neighbor trying to get them so that I didn't have to listen to the drums. That went nowhere. They implemented some noise mitigation measures. It had no effect. I tried to get our HOA to deal it with it.

They've become very nervous about addressing things like this, and so they won't do anything. So I started in January approaching the city of West Linn trying to get it get this particular ordinance enforced. I talked to a number of people, sent a number of letters to the city council at the contact email on the Internet, which apparently don't go very far because they ended up in at least Kevin Bonington's spam email. He got back to me last meet last week, somehow had found it, relayed what had happened. Since then, I've had a meeting with the mayor, and then today, the mayor and council president came to my house and listened to the noise.

So they've heard firsthand what happened or what I listened to. So when I called the city police, to find out how to get this enforced, I think I spoke with officer Higbee, and she said I needed to file a complaint when the noise was going on. I did that. The city dispatched officer Churchill, who came out, listened to the noise, and this is not a literal translation, but he said something to the effect that that's awful. I'm glad I don't have to live by it.

He went back, reported to whoever, and at some point after that, came back to visit me and said that the powers that be, and I think he was talking to the city manager and maybe the police chief, I don't really know, had decided this is not a violation of the city code. And I was flabbergasted at that. Anyway, they said they won't do anything more. So then I started some more communication with the city. I submitted

We have a copy of the Okay. Ordinance right here.

This is my version of 5.487 as it relates to this particular situation. It says, basically, the city likes a quiet city. The following acts are declared to be per se violations of this chapter. Musical instruments and similar devices are designed for sound production that is plainly audible to any person other than the players or operators of the device and unreasonably disturbs the peace, quiet, and comfort of neighbors in residential areas, including single family dwellings. To me, that speaks to this issue a 100%.

I'm a reasonable normal person. It bothers the heck out of me. I am 50 feet away from the their music room. The closest neighbor this is the back of my house, which is my family room and kitchen where we live about 90% of the time. My closest neighbor is probably two or three times as far away from it. My other neighbor's house is up the hill, and their family room is on the 2nd Floor. So and they have a lot of trees. So they hear it occasionally, but nothing like I do. So at this point, what I'm trying to do is get this enforced. I don't have anything against music.

We've had neighbors, kids that have played piano and violin and all sorts of things as they grow up and graduate, and that's all normal. Drum music in a neighborhood is not. I'd like to read an excerpt from a supreme court decision in 1978. In a supreme court case, FCC versus Pacifica Foundation, supreme court justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion said, when the commission finds a pig has entered the parlor, the exercise of its regulatory power does not depend on proof that the pig is obscene. He adapted this quote from a 1926 opinion by justice George Sutherland, who said, nuisance may be nuisance may merely be the right thing in the wrong place, like a pig in the parlor instead of the boneyard, the barnyard.

This is a situation that I'm in. Drum music of this magnitude does not belong in a residential neighborhood. I've recorded it on my iPhone with a sound meter, and it often goes 58, 59, and 60 decibels. That's pretty loud. I haven't recorded it in my house, but it's just really, really out of place. So I know you guys can't take any action tonight, but I would hope that you would direct whoever is responsible to review this and have people that actually have heard the noise decide whether or not that it is in compliance or in violation of the city code. Happy to answer any questions although Thank

you for your comments. Any questions from the council? I know our deputy city manager there was taking some notes, so we'll have our staff follow-up on that.

Okay. Thank you very much. And thank you all for volunteering.

Thank you. Thanks for your comments. And we have another speaker.

Adam and Jennifer Brown.

Adam and Jennifer, welcome. Just make sure the green light's on on the mic and you have up to three minutes, but you can take however long you need. Great. Thank

you so much, mayor, council members. I'm Adam Brown, and this is my wife, Jennifer Brown. We currently live in Portland, but we purchased a lot in West Linn hoping to build a house and make this city our long term home. Unfortunately, the financial barriers that we've run into, have been surprising and discouraging. Before construction even begins, system development charges and permit fees alone will cost us about $90,000.

Rolled into a construction loan, that becomes part of the mortgage, and at today's interest rates, over the life of the loan, that'll be about $200,000. In practical terms, the city is asking one household building one house to finance nearly $200,000 infrastructure costs before a shovel hits the ground. We know that housing costs come from many places including land, construction, and interest rates, and that no single policy decision determines whether a project gets built. But when costs get layered on top of each other, projects that might otherwise work stop penciling out. For individual households, fees like these can easily become the tipping point.

Jenny and I both grew up in lower middle class families, the first generation, in our families to graduate from college. Financial literacy wasn't taught where we grew up. But through self learning, careful saving, and good decisions over many years, we reached a point where building a house seemed possible. Costs like these put our project in serious doubt. And affordable housing isn't an abstract concept to us.

My mother raised five kids while living with severe mental illness. She's now elderly, living on a thousand dollars a month, in Social Security as her only income. She lives in rent controlled senior housing, and my siblings and I and Jenny pay her rent. Without our support and advocacy, she would likely be homeless. We know what's at stake when housing is out of reach.

We want to acknowledge the council's hard work on the state mandated housing production strategy. Housing affordability is a supply problem, and supply grows one house at a time. Households like ours are often the one cities want to attract. Stable careers, local investment, and for us with no children, net contributors to municipal infrastructure over time. And yet when fees approach $90,000 before construction starts, it becomes very difficult to move forward.

We're seriously reconsidering whether we will build in West Linn at all, especially considering that West Linn has the highest permit and SDC costs of any community in our region. During a recent conversation about regional housing inventory with a colleague who works for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, he mentioned West Linn unprompted as an example of a community where high upfront cost discourage development. When I told him about our situation and how we might be chilled out of our project, he encouraged us to come share our experience with you. We're not here simply to complain. We hope the council will consider whether the fee structure lines up with the city's own housing goals and whether practical adjustments are worth exploring, both faster and broader than the ones you've considered in the housing production strategy.

This isn't just for us, but this is the sake for housing affordability more generally. You could consider establishing a low interest loan program for SDCs tied to rates the city would yield from state treasury managed funds. This would beat the cost of rolling them into a mortgage. Or you could scale fees meaningfully based on house size or assessed value, not the nominal adjustments that we see in the plan, but modestly sized houses, small houses paying materially less than large houses. Or you could create a distinct fee tier for owner occupied houses built by individual households rather than commercial developers with fee forgiveness tied over time to the length of time in the home.

And this could be extremely meaningful for low income households who then could build equity in their homes and not have to bear the cost of the SDCs. We would really like to build our house here and become part of this community, but right now, the cost structure is making that decision harder to justify. And if a project like ours, one household trying to build one modest house is struggling to move forward, it's worth asking how many other houses are being quietly lost to these policy decisions. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for your comments and sobering numbers there. And any comments from counsel or questions?

I don't have any questions, but thank you so much for communicating with us on this topic and how it's impacting you. I'm very interested to hear, And especially the way you're putting that that the how did you put it? The quietly losing potential homeowners.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think there's a quiet chilling effect on development when you don't hear comments like these.

Yeah.

Thank you.

We appreciate you coming and sharing your story, and we will note the suggestions that you had, and hopefully, we can we'll follow-up with our staff on on that.

Thank you.

So thank you for taking the time to come from Portland. Any other public comments?

There are no other public comments.

Okay. Well, then that takes us to mayor and council reports. Any reports from city council? Let's start with councilor Bryke.

Thank you, mayor. I attended along with councilor Groner, the Arts and Culture Commission meeting last week, and they are working on an exciting project, that's called the Willamette Arts Corridor. And this is a project where we are connecting art projects from Oregon City through Westland to Lake Oswego. So it's a regional project and the Clackamas County Arts Commission, I think, has some money available to assist with this. So the first thing that was determined was the location of where our first piece of artwork in the Willamette Arts Corridor would be, and the decision was made to, locate it at Hammerly Park.

So this is right on Highway 43. It's property owned by the city. One of the reasons that because they had multiple places at first, but it was determined that with the volunteer arts and culture commission, would be easier for them to have a single call for art to determine what would be located in this. Lake Oswego, there's they've selected the, Lotus Tower, which is on Highway 43 in front of Merrillhurst area. You probably have seen it, and Oregon City is finalizing its selected piece, near the Oregon City Westland Bridge on the Oregon City side.

They're working on some branding. There will be some signage waypoints along in both the other cities as well as ours. And the executive director of the Clackamas County Arts Alliance, Diane Alves, is exploring county and state funding sources to help cover some of the cost. Additional costs that would come from the city would come from the percent for arts funding. And so we've got some short term.

We're gonna partner with the Clackamas County Arts Alliance, And then next steps would be finalizing the location at Hammerly Park, presenting the project to the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, to the Bolton neighborhood, develop a call for art so that we can find somebody that would like to participate in that and explore the fiscal sponsorship and get a draft MOU, to help pay for it. And then it will come to the council as well so we can see how the project is moving forward.

Sweet. That sounds awesome.

And, Councilor Groner, did I cover everything?

Can't hear him.

He unmuted but I can't hear him.

Counselor, we can't really hear you yet. Your mic might be covered up or your I we we can hear that you're trying to talk, but with the audio the your microphone's not working very well.

We can add more information at the next meeting when he's here in person.

Is our audio is our volume turned up on our system there?

Oh, yep.

Councilor, try one more time. I can't. I don't know what's going on. Okay. Well, you asked him a question, councilor Bryke. So I think you covered the Arts and Culture Commission report well. Could we mute that background noise?

There

we go. Thank you. Thank you. Council president, do you have something to report?

Yes. Thank you. Let's see here. It's been a couple weeks. Of course, we had our wonderful council retreat. I don't think we've met since we had our council retreat. So that was really wonderful. Thank you to staff for all the effort and arranging for a very effective consultant that we worked with for our priorities and goal setting. That's always a really excellent opportunity that we have to have a several hour session together. So that was beneficial.

There was a an event a few days later was the or prior to that was the West Linn Heritage Landings And Heritage Area Coalition and the Willamette Falls Trust hosted a partner lunch at the Historic City Hall, and that was an excellent opportunity for area partners who are interested in, sharing the space at Historic City Hall, but also have endeavors in the area. We also had a similar event last week that was the opening of the new exhibit at Historic City Hall, which I would invite everyone to go to. There's opportunities to see exhibits from museums in our area that have have basically kind of a small distilled offering of what they present. So there's among others, Aurora Colony Museum has an exhibit, the end of the Oregon Trail Museum has an exhibit, Baker Cabin, which there's some lesser known sites that are very interesting. Caris Schoolhouse, historic Caris Schoolhouse that, I didn't know this had recently been moved.

They actually moved the building, so it's fun to just see some of the history of the area. So and we had a South Fork water board meeting. The mayor and I went to the capital to visit and discuss some of the needs and goals with our representatives in the state legislature. That was always it's always a good thing to meet up with our representatives to represent the city. Let's see what else.

It's been a busy week.

It has. We've let's see. Had a meeting, the Willamette Falls And Landings Heritage Area had their coalition had their meeting, and the locks authority will be having their meeting in couple of weeks. So those are some of the things that I've been working on.

Thank you for that report.

You're welcome.

Also had a great time down in Salem visiting the capital with city manager, and thanks to lobbyist Doug Riggs obviously for setting that up. And I won't go through and repeat all the same things we were at, but South Fork was in the was great as well exciting. Oh, We went to Clackamas County coordinating committee out in Malala and got some updates on all the work going on out there and had a good saw their new police station. And I was just going through my calendar as well to see if I had any other updates. I will say next Wednesday is in addition to the reimagine the river event downtown with the Willamette Falls Trust and Ecotrust that so many folks are participating in.

I'll be in a panel there at noon. There's a mayor's panel talking about our waterfront redevelopment efforts with the mayor of Portland and the mayor of Oregon City. And I think the mayor of Milwaukee as well, so that'll be a fun event. And then in the evening I just got asked to moderate senate president Wagner's town hall at the adult community center from six to 7PM on next Wednesday evening. So it'd be a busy day for me next week on that Wednesday.

So that'll be fun. And I know representative Walters will be there and also representative Wynn from Lake Oswego. So that'll be a good town hall event. And with that, I'll turn it over to councilor Bonifant. Anything you'd like to report?

Yeah. Sure. I was also at the Willamette Falls Trust Lunch, and that was that was nice. After that, immediately after that, we swore in our new police chief, which was a really lovely event, and you all know that because you were there. But I I've gotta say that he's already exceeded my already high expectations for him, which is impressive and appreciated. Let's see. We also had economic development committee last Thursday, and they got a presentation on Vision 43 code proposals. And yeah

that's that's it. Thank you for that report. Everybody's doing a lot of great work on the city council I appreciate all your volunteer service. Councilor Groner, I see you've unmuted. Do you have a report you'd like to give?

I can try to call councilor Groner on the phone. Councilor Groner, are you able to call in?

We're not being hung. No.

Councilor Groner? Okay. Are are you able to call in on your phone? Maybe we could send him I'll I'll try to send him a text to call. See if he see if he can do it or maybe you can do it through your system. He's he's back in New Jersey visiting with his family and wanted to sign on to try to join the meeting. Okay. Councilor Groner, we'll come back to your report if you have one. And now we'll move to adoption of the council priorities. Would anybody like to make a motion? Or first of all, any changes or adjustments to the priorities list?

I can make a motion and we can discuss.

Okay.

I I move to approve adopt the twenty twenty six twenty twenty eight council priorities. Second.

It's been moved and seconded to adopt the twenty twenty six twenty twenty eight council priorities. Any discussion? This is a culmination of the work that was done over about six hours at our council retreat last a couple weeks ago, and I feel like they adequately reflect all of our priorities. And the new priority on the list is our financial plan discussion which I think is exciting and we'll look forward to community engagement on that. And in fact, sitting on my desk is a big pile of these QR codes where people can we're getting ready to launch a new website at yourwestland.com/ framing our future where we'll be able to do some financial engagement.

Could you mute that? I'm getting annoyed. I'm sorry. I can I'll text him in just a minute once we get to the next topic, just to let him know. We have to call a vote, think. Councilor Reich has a comment.

I just wanted to say how much I appreciate the fact that we're taking a little bit of a longer term view. Instead of just saying, in the next twelve months, we're gonna look at these five things, We're looking at these and it's kind of rolling priorities. And as we make progress on certain things, when we meet again next year at the beginning of the year, we can kind of start where we ended. And so these things don't just fit in a year. And we're just looking at specific priorities for how we can make the community better and the things that the council can actually be working on when we're out in the community talking with our community members.

Absolutely. Thank you for that comment. I think was, I think, a good switch to go kinda towards the longer term 2026, 2020. I know last year we did two year priorities as well. We used to do it annually, and then every year was just reincorporating the same priorities because so many things are longer term. Good good change there.

One more thing to add, we've got staff committed to reporting back as we make progress and I think that really helps us move along the line to actually make things happen.

Just student councilor Groner message there. Yes, agreed. Any other comments on the council goals? There was a tidings article out. Mac called me last week and did an interview about the council priorities. So I gave a like this commentary there in the tidings online. So folks are interested in my longer thoughts on the priorities. Seeing no other comments, you can call the roll.

Councilor Bright? Yes. Councilor council president Baumgartner? Yes. Councilor Groner?

Councilor Bonington? Yes. Mayor Bilodoski?

Yes. Thank you. So the motion passes. Councilor Groner, I'm guessing you can't hear us, but if you are which if you'd like to vote, you can unmute yourself. Okay.

With that, we can then move on to proclamations. And, during the pre meeting, we divvy those out. So council president Baumgartner is going to read the Women's History Month proclamation.

Thank you, mayor. Whereas the twenty twenty six Women's History Month theme, leading the charge, women shaping a sustainable future celebrates the diverse contributions of women who are leading sustainability efforts across environmental, economic, education, and social justice movements. And whereas women of every race, class, and ethnic background have made historic and historic contributions to the growth and strength of our nation in countless recorded and unrecorded ways. Whereas women have played and continue to play critical economic, cultural, and social roles in every sphere of the life of our nation by comprising a significant portion of the labor workforce working inside and outside of the home, and whereas women have long provided the majority of the nation's volunteer labor force, and were especially instrumental in establishing early charitable philanthropic and cultural institutions, and whereas women of every race, class, and ethnic background served as early leaders in the forefront of every major progressive social change movement, and whereas women have served our country courageously in the military, and whereas women have been leaders not only in securing their own rights of suffrage and equal opportunity, but also in the abolitionist movement, the emancipation movement, the industrial labor movement, the civil rights movement, and other movements, especially the peace movement, advancing a more just and equitable society for all.

Whereas despite these contributions, the role of women in history has been consistently overlooked and undervalued in the literature, teaching, and study of history. Now therefore be it proclaimed by the city of council of the city of West Linn that March 2026 is designated as Women's History Month, and we urge all citizens to celebrate with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities that honor the history, accomplishments, and contributions of women dated this March 2026. Thank you.

Thank thank you, council president. And that I'll read the National Drug and Alcohol Fact Week proclamation. Whereas National Drug and Alcohol Fact Week is sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. To encourage teens to ask questions about drugs, drug abuse, alcohol, and alcoholism, and receive scientifically based facts and answers in return. And whereas it's an annual week long health observance that provides high school students across The United States with the opportunity to ask questions to get answers from the nation's leading experts in the fields of substance abuse, misuse, and dependence, and disorders via a web chat.

And whereas it's a celebration of the inquisitive minds of teens and encourages them to ask questions about substances, drug abuse, alcohol, and alcoholism, and get scientifically based answers without judgment or biased comments. And whereas it celebrates the efforts of national and community organizations working with teens to encourage science based conversations about drugs and alcohol and alcoholism. And whereas National Drug and Alcohol Facts Week attempts to inform teens about the impact and risks of abusing substances. And so now now therefore be it proclaimed by the city council that 03/15/2020 March is National Drug and Alcohol Fact Week in the city of West Linn, and we urge all community members to participate in the activities planned. And I just got an invitation to the annual luncheon at the high school on this topic.

So I'll go and present the signed proclamation there. So dated this March 2026. Thank you, everybody. And I'll turn it over to councilor Bright to read the equal payday proclamation.

Thank you, mayor. Whereas March 26 is equal payday this year, the date that fittingly falls within women's history month and highlights the persistent issue of the pay gap. And whereas we highlight the injustice of gender wage gaps by marking how far into this year women must work on average to earn what men made last year. And whereas women's labor force participation is the highest it has been in decades, and the gender pay gap is the narrowest it has ever been on record. And whereas despite this progress, the fight for equal pay continues.

And whereas according to the American Association of University Women, women working full time earn around 83% of what their male counterparts make with the gap even wider for women of color. And whereas we are making tremendous progress, however, there is still much more we must do. And whereas let us ensure women get the pay they have earned and deserve and give our daughters the same opportunities as our sons. Now therefore, be it proclaimed by the city council of the city of West Linn that 03/26/2025 is equal payday, dated this March 2026.

And I Thank you, counselor. Just trying to get a message to counselor Groner. Do you think we can could do it now? Okay. You're you're talking with him. Okay. Okay. Thank you everybody for that for those proclamations. And with that, we will move on to the TriMet presentation, which we're grateful for. We've got the three esteemed members of the TriMet team here. Welcome, JC. Nice to see you. Outside of the RTAC context, I used to see you at the regional tolling advisory committee meetings. I remember those days. Been a while.

It's been a And John, nice to see you as well. And I can't remember your name again.

My name is Tom Mills.

Tom Mills. Thank you very much. Good to see you. Welcome back. And I you have a slideshow, I'm guessing on We do. We do. And we're grateful for your partnership and willingness to be here and to share a little bit more with us and our community about what's going on with TriMet. So

Great. Thank you, mayor Bialystatsky. Thank you, council president Baumgartner and members of the Westland City Council. My name is John Sarah, and I'm the local government affairs manager here at TriMet. Joining us tonight is JC Veneta, our director of public affairs, our chief of public affairs, and Tom Mills, our director of public mobility planning and policy.

I wanna thank you all for inviting us here tonight to discuss TriMet's budget and the steps that we are proposing taking to address our deficit. One of the most challenging parts of this conversation is our proposal to cut service. We've announced these proposed cuts on January 5 and we have spent the last few months speaking with folks from West Linn and our partners around the region to get feedback and to find the best path forward. We recognize the impact of this proposal on riders in West Linn and throughout the metro area. And I wanna thank mayor and council president Baumgartner and city manager John Williams for being tireless advocates for the city of West Linn and for your continued partnership with transit and TriNet throughout this process.

So even through these challenging conversations, we appreciate you working with us. And tonight, Tom Mills will be detailing the specifics of our proposed cuts. But before that, I'd like to hand it over to JC Faneta to discuss our budget and how we got here.

Thanks, John. Mayor Bialystovsky, president Baumgartner, council members, it's so good to be here. It's good to see you. It's great to be here in West Linn, but I'll be very frank. We don't wanna be here because we are delivering bad news.

Yeah. And it is not what we signed up to do as Trimet because our mission is to deliver safe, convenient transit service to the people of this region. So it is it goes against our religion to be our religion our mission, Excuse me. Well, it's kind of a religion to be here, but we wanted to we wanna talk to you about it, have this discussion because it's so important. So the first part, I wanna just give you a couple of quick some quick context to understand where we are.

Let's just see if I can get this little guy to go. Oh, sure. Go ahead. Thank you. So just I wanna give some background of where we are at as a region, so it kinda helps tell the story of where we are for TriMet.

We are seeing layoffs around the region at a record pace. You've seen the latest, they're predicting that we are actually going into a recession as a region. The vacancy rate across the entire region is high, especially Downtown Portland is at a record level. I don't know if you know this, but our great state is the second in the nation for teleworking. Second state because people love to move here and they work remotely.

So we are dealing with that. And we're also dealing with elevated concern around community safety. And I think that we all see that day after day in our communities. So where Tri Med is right now? So our ridership, people always ask us about our ridership.

And our ridership is holding steady to 1,200,000 rides per week. We move a lot of people. That's about 65.8 boardings for this last fiscal year. One of the things that you should know about is people in our community need Tri Med. We are a lifeline. 35% of our riders identify as transit dependent. That means they depend on Tri Med. And we know this because of our Low Income Fair program is has reached record enrollment and record use. So you're really starting to see the pinch that our economy is having on people. I would just also note that we are seeing, and I'm not necessarily sure if West Linn is, but we're seeing declining tax revenue.

We have four different sources of taxes and they're all coming in lower than what we had forecasted. One final note, one of those four revenue sources is our fair revenue. And next slide, if you don't mind. This kind of shows where we dropped when the great the pandemic hit. We saw a drop in our ridership.

And a drop in our ridership also means a drop in our fare revenue, which is the money that we take when people ride the bus or max. They actually they pay their fares. We've also seen our inflation costs grow by 56% from 2019 to 2025. We've also made some investments in safety and security, cleaning, and I would just note the first two, we really pay attention to what our customers are saying. And with, you know, going through the pandemic, seeing what's happening in our communities, we actually made record investments in both safety and security, more contracted security on board or on our stations and stops and cleaning.

We also and Tom did a great job, him and his team, as we are coming out of the pandemic, we actually had a huge conversation with the community because we knew that people moved around in our region and we wanted to serve them better, understanding how the pandemic has changed lives. And so we have also made some investments in reconfiguring our network. As you can also imagine, we're dealing with a $700,000,000 backlog in maintenance. Some of our oldest lines are over 40 years old. And our bus we have two bus garages that are beyond their useful life. So we're dealing with that as well. Next slide.

We relate to that. We're building a new operation center for our public works in the Fleet Building where the city's the vehicles go in is probably 80 years old.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. See? Yes. You

We're all going through that.

Yes. Yes. You do. So we identified excuse me. Last July, we came out being very upfront and transparent with our issue. We are at a $300,000,000 budget deficit and we are dealing with it head on in three different ways. We're looking at cutting at least a minimum of 93,000,000 through administrative cuts. This is discretionary spending. We've already done one round of layoffs. There will be another round of layoffs this year.

We're looking to raise revenue. You probably have seen the what's happening with the transportation package. Are part of that. We were hoping to raise a minimum of $48,000,000 from that. So we are watching that closely, maybe saying a few prayers here and there too.

And we're also looking at cutting service around a $159,000,000. Tom will get into that, but it's around 10%. I would just note that if no new revenue is raised, we will need to make some deeper cuts and or if we don't, yeah, if we don't also meet our goals for cutting administratively. Next slide, please. We have already taken some one of the things that we when we were down in Salem, when we were talking to you, asking for more additional revenue state funding, one of the things that we heard from state lawmakers was get your house in order before you come asking for money.

And we have been doing that, absolutely. We've reduced our discretionary spending by over a 150,000,000. We are looking for various efficiencies. We've again reduced our discretionary spending, canceled future planned bus service increases. And we've also again, we've eliminated positions with some layoffs. Again, more internal cuts and more layoffs are ahead. Please. So some of our external actions, a lot of people ask us, are people paying the right amount for their fares? We think so. We increased the fares 01/01/2024, so we are asking people to pay more.

We will be doing that again. This fall, we'll go out to the public for outreach around another fare increase that we look to put into place in 2028 if our board of directors approve. We've also been working with lawmakers, but in our budget assumptions, we don't assume that we are getting this stiff increase as part of the transportation package for now. We have already done two rounds of service cuts, November 30 and March 1, which were smaller. These were lines with excuse me, where ridership was low.

We have a larger cut that's coming this August, which Tom will talk about. And we are anticipating yet another round that will come into play next year. Next slide, please. So we did a lot of work. We have done a lot of community engagement around what people are thinking, feeling about how we go about cutting service. And so last fall, in an extensive amount of outreach, we asked people to rank nine different types of service cuts. Do they, do we end the service early? Do we reduce frequency? A number of different things that we took them, and Tom will hit on all of that. Again, we did a lot of outreach to get this data.

Next slide. There's one more slide. And so with that feedback, we it informed how we went out. We took the proposal out, but we did 13 events. We got over 4,800 respondents. We had a really good showing from people to give us a great basis from which to form a proposal that we came out in January. We then did another round of outreach that will be informing our next round, our proposal that will be coming out tomorrow. Tomorrow. Next slide, please. And so with that, I'll turn it over Tom.

Well, thank you JC and thank you Mr. Mayor and City Council for having us today. Again, my name is Tom Mills. I'm the Director of Mobility Planning and Policy at Tri Med. Basically, that means my team is in charge of deciding or at least recommending how often buses run, where they run, how late at night, early in the morning, and unfortunately in cases like this it is my team that makes the recommendations for reducing service.

And before we do any changes in service, we really try to look to our service planning guidelines to help us develop those proposals even when we're growing. And so I'll just run through these real quickly, I won't read through all of it. But first off, being equity, you know, trying to serve communities of low income, communities of color, communities with high disability. Obviously, demand is another one we wanna put the service where, you know, people wanna go, the origins and destinations. Productivity is a really important one.

Productivity is really looking at how many rides are we getting for our investment. Right? Is it is this a high efficiency, highly cost efficient line or is it a low cost efficiency line? And that way we can maximize our investment as much possible. Connections obviously, you know, schools, colleges, etcetera, and then growth. And that's always kind of a tricky one because we can't, you know, we don't guide where growth happens and and sometimes growth happens without us even realizing it. And we find out, hey, there's this new facility out on the very edge of the region. Can you put a bus out here? And it's like, we weren't expecting that. So that's when we're we're tend to be chasing growth sometimes.

We really want to get ahead of it as much as possible. We'll go to the next slide, please. So JC mentioned in the fall, we went out to the community and we said, look, we we are gonna have to cut service. We would like to hear from you on the best approach to do that. And on your left there are nine different approaches towards that.

Real quickly where you see FS, that means frequent service bus, and that so you know saying those are buses that run every 15 minutes and that would be reducing the service on those lines. So there are various options for eliminate or reducing frequent service bus and frequent service max. But we took all of those approaches and we kinda ran them through this matrix. So in this matrix, green is good, red is bad, yellow is in between. And so first we said, well well, you know, can we if we make this reduction in service, how can we do how well will we do in terms of saving money?

And then we say, okay, well, there's a number of these. We save a lot of money. Okay. But what does that do in terms of rides? How many people are riding those lines? And uh-oh, okay. Some of these, there's a lot of people riding these lines. We should really be concerned about the impact to people. The next column really is, well, what is the degree of impact? So, for example, eliminating a line completely has a bigger impact than say, reducing the frequency of a line.

Because at least another bus is coming. Then, by the time we kinda got through all that, we started getting our survey results and started getting an understanding of what the community was telling us to do. And here you can see some of the ideas that we were hearing from the community that JC mentioned, particularly around network changes, also the proposal to have Max Green Line only operate between Clackamas Town Center and Gateway Transit Centre. And then lastly, we weren't able to do this for all of them, but we did something called the job access analysis, where we basically said, you know, if we make this change, what is the change in the number of jobs that somebody can reach within forty five minutes? And that included the wait time.

So, for example, you'll see on some of those frequent service ones, that has a big impact because if the bus is coming less frequently, their wait time is even longer. And so therefore, they can't travel as far within forty five minutes. We'll go to the next slide, please. So based on all of that, we developed a proposal that, you know, using this matrix is is kind of shown here. So the first line there are those small reductions that JC had mentioned that we did in November and just a couple weeks ago here in March.

Followed by having the GreenLine Max only operate between Gateway Transit Center and Clackamas Town Center. Next are the network the network changes where, you know, where we were looking for lines that, you know, were operating relatively close to each other. Can we serve this area with one line instead of two lines or two lines instead of three lines and trying to get some efficiencies. Next were lines that were low ridership and we really looked towards the lines that really had the lowest ridership on the network. Followed by a couple lines that only they they run trips to high schools, and for those trips, they're pretty full.

The rest of the day, they're pretty empty. So we would cut the the midday service and just maintain the the high school trips. And then lastly, two lines that run they're it's called a short line. It's where rather than running to the entire line on every trip, maybe every other trip goes to the entire line and every other trip turns around early and goes back. When we put all that together, our total savings was projected at about six and a half percentage points of our 10%.

But of course, we knew that we were gonna hear from the public. We're probably gonna have to give a little bit back. Some of our we never really know our exact savings until our scheduling team writes the schedules, and that takes a long time. So it's probably gonna be closer to a five percentage point, somewhere between five and five and a half percent reduction in this. Either way, it doesn't get us to our 10%, which is that second round that JC was talking about, that we'll be talking to the public next fall about.

We'll go to the next slide, please. So I want to talk a little bit about the the two lines that we're making proposals for changes here in West Linn. One of which is line one fifty three. And this falls in those low ridership lines that really are are so low. It's it's hard for us to ignore them.

So in 2019, prior to the pandemic, we had a service standard for low ridership lines of 15 boardings per vehicle or rides per vehicle hour. A vehicle hour is every hour the bus is outside the bus yard. Essentially, it's every hour we're paying for the operator. However, you know, come the pandemic came, you know, people stopped, didn't work in downtown as much, ridership dropped. We said to ourselves, look, we need to rewrite these standards to to our new reality.

And so we dropped that to eight rides per vehicle And I should say, using today's dollars, that comes to $19 and almost $20 per ride. That was our standard. For this effort, we dropped it even further to six rides per hour or $26 a ride. And we said, you know, anything that's gonna be greater than $26 a ride, we really should rethink about whether whether we're doing the right thing here. And when we did that, we came across three lines.

Line 82 in Gresham, which is only getting five rides for every hour that bus is out of the yard. Line 97, which is getting only three rides per hour and that's almost $50 a ride. And then lastly, line one fifty three here in Westland.

Two rides.

Which is getting two rides costing us $76 a ride. Now, as an example, I'm showing line 76, which also serves a portion of it serves here in Westland. That's kind of more the kind of middle of the road line that on that entire line, it's 17 and a half rides and cost us $9.23 per ride using today's dollars. So that is why line 153 landed on the list of lines to consider for elimination. I just want to recognize that, you know, this line hasn't been in existence for a long time.

It's only been in existence for a couple of years. And I also recognize that prior to that line and prior to the 76, there was only Well, was only the line 35 on Highway 43 through Westland. And we had various versions of lines going to the Willamette neighborhood via Willamette Falls Drive. So, I do recognize that and I recognize that there isn't a lot of service in West Linn as it is. But again, this one was hard for us to ignore.

We'll go to the next slide, please. So I wanna talk a little bit about line seventy six six here. So, I mentioned line one fifty three a couple years ago was created. At that same time, we extended line 76 from Meridian Park Hospital to the Willamette neighborhood and then on to Oregon City. And that was on an hourly basis.

So line 76, most of the time, the rest of the line runs every fifteen minutes. It was only hourly for this. And the reason for that is, as you can imagine, much of that line as it approaches from the the West is going through undeveloped areas. It's on the freeway. We can't pick anyone up on the freeway.

Even when it's on Willamette Falls Boulevard, east of the Willamette neighborhood, you really can't pick anyone up. It's an embankment down to the river, and it's the freeway up to the to the north of it. So, you know, there were limited origins and destinations for us with that extension, which is why we had it operating every hourly. That segment of the line was only getting is today only getting about four boardings per vehicle hour. So for that investment, we're only getting four rides per hour.

And so that is also why that was put on the list as for a reduction in service or elimination. However, there is some good news here. If we can go to the next slide. So you may have heard of Smart's new service that they're going to be launching this spring. It's gonna go from Wilsonville.

It's gonna come here to West Linn to 10th. It's gonna come off I 205 to 10th Avenue, turn around at the circle, and then go to Oregon City, and then go on to Clackamas Town Center. What you may not be aware of is Tri Med is actually funding this service. So as part of the statewide transportation improvement fund, Tri Med or the the one of the things that we are encouraged to do is to break down barriers between different transit districts. And the way we have done that is by giving Smart in Wilsonville money to to cross boundaries.

So, for example, already they have, we are subsidizing a line of theirs called line two x that goes from Wilsonville to Tualatin, to the Tualatin Park And Ride. This is another line that it hasn't launched yet, but this is another line that they will be launching that we are actually giving them our payroll tax fund funds for them to operate that line. And that line, they are still working on, you know, how much of Tualatin it might serve, but it certainly will go to Westland and it will it it rather than taking Willamette Falls Drive into Oregon City, it's gonna get back on to my understanding is it's gonna get back on to I 205. It's gonna go to the Oregon City Shopping Center, and then from there, it's gonna go to Clackamas Community or Clackamas Town Center. So to a large degree, the line 76 is actually gonna be replaced by this service of which we are funding.

We'll go to the next slide. Anytime we make big changes, we have to do an analysis. The federal government requires us to do an analysis to ensure that we are not burdening low income populations or minority communities and this proposal this proposal keeps us in compliance. We are not burdening those communities. Conversely, we also need to make sure that this proposal doesn't disproportionately benefit high income people or disproportionately benefit non minority communities.

And again, we are in compliance with this proposal. And one more slide. So one of the big questions I'm sure you have also is, what is the impact to the Lyft boundary? So I don't know how much you know about Lyft, but the way Lyft works is we are required to provide complimentary paratransit service within three quarters of a mile of any fixed route bus line or or max line that we have. And so, once you kind of figure out that out, can draw a boundary.

So, when you look at this slide, you can see the black line the pink line is the TriMet service district. The black line is the TriMet boundary or excuse me, the Lyft boundary. And you can see that this portion of West Linn and the Stafford area would lose Lyft service. Now, there is other service that Clackamas County provides. The Transportation Reaching People program is a service for older adults and people with disabilities.

I I don't recall if your senior center has a shuttle or not through Clackamas County, but that may be one as well. We, just looking at the lift trips that we've provided in this area, there are 11 client home addresses. And in 2024, we did 162 trips for them. Next slide. So I'll pass it

back Yes, I'll pick it up from here. So the full on proposal we actually took out to the community. You heard how it's data driven. All of numbers came to that proposal. We then took it out to the public and we we again revved up our engagement machine to not only various outreach events, we also mailed it to 250,000 addresses. We flier it on board. We tried to get out the word as much as possible. Next slide, please. 16 events, 783 participants, 8,100 people responded to our survey that we did. Most of them were open ended comments.

We read every one of them. And then we handed off to Tom's team the top themes, like disruption to work commutes, increased wait times, in general. And what's kind of made our throughout all this, it actually made our hearts warm that there was actually just a general appreciation for the service that we provided. So that was a lot of the feedback that we had. And then that's what Tom's team has been doing in producing what will come out tomorrow that our board will eventually next slide, please.

They'll actually there's a board listening session on March 18 that it's special for our board. We'll hear comments. We'll have the first reading and public hearing on March 25. Another opportunity for the community to come out and speak. And then we have a second reading and board vote in April. All those service cuts will go into effect on August 23. So we'll be doing a lot of work in mid July to get the word out to those people who are affected. And then in September, we begin this all again with our outreach at the fall, not only around the next round of cuts, but also a fair increase. And that's and that's all we have and ready to take questions.

Well, thank you for the presentation and your dedication. Can tell you all are very dedicated to our transit system, and I know it's bad news. So it's not easy to deliver this kind of news to any city. But when you I look at that one fifty three ridership, you know, we can't really it's hard to justify keeping that route operational when there's only two riders per hour and so lowest by far of your list. So we're not here to criticize. We really wanna be part of solutions and appreciate your willingness to come address us. Council president, I think you have some questions I see from in your notes. So go ahead and you can have the floor.

Thank you, mayor. And, yes, I echo all of everything that the mayor just said by way of thanking you for not only the service and your passion around it, but also to come here and especially John having allowed me to come and bend his ear. And I really do appreciate all of this information. Just briefly for context for my own experience, my grandmother who lived in Lake Oswego never learned how to drive. She had her first job after she graduated from Beaverton High School in 1915 was Downtown Portland, and she rode transit.

It was at that time an electric train. And then when she was older and I was going places with her, we'd ride the bus in Lake Oswego and Line 35 downtown, and later I worked downtown and also rode Line 35. So I appreciate the ability to access transit even though I have personally a lot of privilege in that I own a vehicle, and so I have more flexibility. And I know that in the suburbs, we have kind of gotten away from relying on transit. So it's it's both people's choice but and then ability.

But what happens that I've seen now that I've first came to volunteering for the city on the transportation advisory board and spent some time just analyzing what what would help people in Westland, and and also being aware that Westland has a sort of invisible component of the population that has is pretty high needs actually. We are a 27% rent burden community, for instance, and I worked in my career in public schools, and so although and and I had actually gone out as a young person and experienced when I went to college, when I'd say I'm from Westland, people would say, oh, like I just said I was from Beverly Hills and I I always thought that was kind of funny because I knew that Westland wasn't wealthy, but there are wealthy people and it has only increased that we have a certain wealth component in our community, but we also have people who really need support and they're almost invisible because, well, Westland's just wealthy and everybody's wealthy there and well, that's not actually true. So I appreciate that you're able to have this conversation with us. We have recently experienced potential closures of primary schools partly because people need help with affordable housing.

Young families who need to be able to have affordable housing can't move here. The more we take away access to things like support services of transit, etcetera, the less people who need those supports will be able to move into Westland. So we'll have an ever increasingly filtering to only people who who have ability to not use transit. So what I see happening, and that I'm hoping we can have conversations about how to how to reverse that is creating communities of exclusiveness and and privilege, and then we're having things like our schools close, and partly because young families can't afford to live here. So how do we I'd like us as a city and and council working with people who are providing these services to help people who maybe can't afford to own a car or choose not to, which is also a choice and is an important factor.

How we can do our development, we're talking about our Highway 43 corridor and how we can maybe change and and put some more dense housing. I'd like to have conversations with the public because there's a lot of things that we want to do that people say, oh, no. We don't we don't want that in our area because we don't know what'll happen. It'll be different. So how do we work together to educate the public about the importance of having the ability to have transit and have people have access to it?

We need to have ridership. So we can't have transit if we don't have ridership is what I'm hearing. So those are just some of the things that I've reflected on, and and I really do appreciate you coming here. I I did have a question. Oh, I also wanted to mention, and thank you very much for a family member of mine who was as age as he was aging was unable to drive, and he used TriMet Lift all the time to get to the VA.

He was a veteran. He was having a lot of medical issues. And I know that without services like the TriMet lift to help him, he would not have lived as long. So it it really does save and change lives to have transit. So I just want us to work together, and and so I appreciate you taking the time to be here and to hear my little soapbox talk.

President Baumgartner, thank you so much for writing. We appreciate it. And and I also wanna say it sounds like you're at a perfect inflection point for the city. I heard about your visioning work that you are doing as a city, so it's the perfect time to take all of this up. And however, I'm volunteering Tom's time, but however, we can work with you. Say the word, and we're there for you.

Wonderful. I think that's a great partnership because as I think you mentioned, you don't want to find out later that

Right.

Some transit or I mean, some planning and development happened without coordination. So Absolutely. I'm I'm looking forward to doing that.

And one of the things too, as I've seen, you probably have seen this too, and you may mention of it a little bit, but even like the housing that's being built are on the fringes of cities, on the fringes of our service district, on the fringes of our urban growth boundary, and where we have not served before. And so it's trying to get our arms around that, how we can influence where housing is developed also helps.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And the other thing that was interesting to me when I first got on council, sorry, don't usually talk this much, but was wondering how much the proposed tolling had on the impact of creating some lines because of to offset the impact of tolling, which now we're I think we're hearing has been shelved, although that remains to be seen. But one of my biggest talking points in all of those tolling discussions was that you cannot put tolling in a transit desert. That is just counterintuitive.

And and also seeing that we've put so much and we're putting continuing to put so much in single driver car infrastructure. We are not addressing what we need to be to move forward for sustainability, for the environment, for equitable transit, traveling, all of these things. I I just I couldn't be more, passionate about this. So anytime you need a partner to go down to Salem or I'll go anywhere and talk about this, just call me up.

We're going to do that.

Okay.

Thank you. I have a couple of questions that came to mind. First, just is there any way to reach those who use the line 76 in Westland before that gets eliminated to kinda let them know about the service to Clackamas Town Center and how that change is gonna take place? Just can think I know council president's heard from at least one business owner with an employee, for example, who relies on that line to as as three employees to to realize in that line to get to work from Clackamas Town Center to Westland through Oregon City. So the change actually, I think, will be helpful for them. But that's one thing that came to mind.

Yes. We will do that.

Making sure they're thank you. Made aware. The other thing is just the the hardest thing for me about this is the Lyft service loss. I mean, I know the 2024 numbers were 11 clients. I can my grandparents use the Lyft. I can imagine those are, like, our most vulnerable community members. And some of those might be from Lake Oswego as well because it's the whole one fifty three boundary. But is there, know, what are some potential solutions or anything we can do to kinda reach out to those people and connect them with the county or try to get some backfill service for that? I I liked your idea about talking to Clackamas County, but we haven't had any of those conversations yet.

Yeah. So I do know that right I was gonna say right connection, not right connection. Clackamas County does have services in this area. Now, obviously, you know, we don't want to overburden their services either. They are part of a larger funding process with Tri Med to how to to allocate funds that come from the state as well as the federal government to help support these types of services for older adults and people with disabilities. So our hope here is that it should be a relatively easy transition for those customers to just transition to the Clackamas County services.

Is there anybody we any conversations we should be having at this point or involved in to try to help with that transition? Or do you kind of handle that?

I believe the services are there in place. So it's really more about an education and and that is something that we do plan to do is to inform customers of what their options are. Sounds

good. And we'll have happy to maybe we could get a little more information about that program. Sure. I know our city manager's absent tonight, but we'll both connect on that because that's really the biggest concern for me going through this process. Councilor Bragg, please.

I think a lot of what we see, especially in the suburbs, is that people don't grow up riding transit. I've got three sons. My oldest used to take 35 to downtown when he was 13. We had exchange students that had programs at Portland State, and he was the teen mentor. So he was riding with a bunch of students from Taiwan that were 15 to 18 years old, and they got this 13 year old that's guiding them on transit to get to get downtown.

He's currently a student at Portland State, and he lives in Tualatin. He rides TriMet to go to school, cheaper than paying for a for a parking pass. But I, you know, I know a lot of other families that their kids would never consider getting on transit. So I'm I'm thinking that elementary schools should have field trips where they have to take transit somewhere. And that gets people saying, oh, I can get from here to there on this vehicle that I don't have to drive, I don't have to park. And then as they grow up, they might say, you know, that's really easier. And I think we just don't build that in. You know, mom and dad will take me where I need to go.

Yeah.

Agreed.

Thank you, counselor. Counselor Bonington?

Yeah. Thank you for coming here tonight and explaining this to us. I seem to remember twenty plus years ago, there was a similar service to line one fifty three that was up here. I recall it being much smaller buses, but it also appeared. And then as the economy took a downturn around 2008, I believe that is when it went away.

So I don't know if any any history from that was helpful in designing it this time around. But one complaint I did hear was that with it no longer running after about 05:00, a lot of people who felt it might be a useful tool to them couldn't use it to return home from work. And so I was wondering if that was factored into, I don't know, the the inception of it this time around and how you guys would approach that.

Yeah, that's a great question. And you're right, there was a time when we operated another bus line up kind of up the hill in West Linn, and that bus line came from Oregon City. This time around, we we kind of thought to ourselves, well, maybe people wanna go north towards Lake Oswego. And of course, there's always the thought, well, maybe we should have gone all the way to downtown, but that just adds more cost, which means we've got to get even more riders to make it pencil. You know, I will say that line West Linn, there's a challenge with West Linn, and, you know, to your north, there's some undeveloped areas and to your west, there's undeveloped areas and to your south, there's undeveloped areas.

Right? So you're not quite an island, but you're you're kind of a bit of a Peninsula, so to speak. And so that means there are going to be portions of the line where we're just not picking anyone up, which then places the burden, you know, it's like a higher burden on the portion of the line where there's development in West Linn to provide that more riders. Right? Because because you're kind of subsidizing from a ridership standpoint the areas where there where there's no development.

And of course, we as TriMet are trying to balance that, you know, investment, you know, what's the right investment, what's our, you know, point of diminishing returns, so to speak. And so that's where decisions like, well, okay, maybe if we only go to 05:00 and we know that's not gonna be convenient for everybody, but you know, we can get, you know, we we can get the right amount of riders and not, you know, over invest and then, you know. So it it is a a tough balancing act and a challenge for us as we develop lines like this.

Thank you.

Well, looks like councilor Groner, do you have a question or comment?

Yes. Can I be heard?

You you are we can hear you now. Great. Go go ahead.

Okay. Yeah. I too grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and I remember as a 12 year old riding streetcars and taking two transfers to get from one end of the city to the other. Pittsburgh is a city comparable to Portland in size And it was like a one hour transit trip. I did that once a week for a couple years.

One of the things I'm thinking about is basically, maybe this is kind of out of the box type thinking, but rather than TriMet trying to manage and own and administer all the transit system. Is it possible to contract with organizations like Uber or LYFT to provide services in certain neighborhoods or certain people? It seems to me that they're already operating in these areas and can provide transportations and already have an infrastructure. That's that's one of my thoughts. A second thought is we're beginning to see driverless cars.

I can imagine driverless vans will if they're not don't exist today, could exist in the near future. That would certainly reduce some of the the cost of drivers. I'm just wondering if some of these ideas are things that have been considered. Thank you.

Thank you, counselor. I've actually seen something similar, I think, in out in Washington County, maybe there's a shuttle that where it kind of people can call it in certain areas and

don't know

if you might that might be the closest thing to what he's talking about.

So I can talk about a couple of those things. So certainly we're familiar with the idea of of contracting out service. There are other transit districts around the country that completely 100% contract out for their service. And in some cases, they contract with Uber and Lyft to do that. And in Washington County, they have a a pilot project that's being funded with state a state grant to do an on demand service kind of out on the edge in the the mountain. What is it? I'm forgetting the name of it. But out near Shoals Ferry Road. Cool. And Tile Flat Road in that area.

We are not able to do that. So we are our workforce is a unionized workforce and our working wage agreement says that every line of the district must be operate operated by an ATU Amalgamated Transit Union member. And so that doesn't mean it's impossible to not have that clause, but that is something that's a pretty big big hurdle that we would have to get over to make that happen. And I would also say that, you know, there is value in having people drive the buses. You know, they're they provide a certain level of safety for our customers.

Additionally, you know, we are providing working wage jobs for this region and I think that's something we should all be proud of. And I think we'd want to continue doing that.

Well, we are just about at time. So one final comment from council president.

Thank you, mayor. So I just had a couple of questions also while I was taking notes here. One of them is kind of back to what I was saying about where we're putting our money, where we're funding, and and I don't mean we, the city of Westland. I mean, we, the state, or I mean even beyond. So what could we be doing better is a question I'd like to not maybe have you answer, obviously, right now, but maybe how we could partner together.

Again, I just feel like we're missing an opportunity when we don't. Take take a hard look at this time. So why is this happening right now? Why is this happening with TriMet? And and so and do you have is this happening in other states? And and do you all talk to each other? Where who's doing it right? Has anyone found the answer to this? I mean, I think we're smart people, and we care a lot, so I feel like we should be talking more to each other and and trying to figure out how to make this work because we have a city. We need people to be moved.

We have we don't have extra funds to give to TriMet necessarily, but if if we did, I would say that would be a priority of mine, to help people. So but maybe we need the state to prioritize it more. But these are just kind of really, I'm just kind of thinking out loud. But thank you again for coming to talk about this very important, and your work is very important.

Thank Thank you, council president. I would say that we will be looking to create opportunities like that and we'll be looking to partner with you and the city as we as we approach those. We would love your partnership and we will be continuing that conversation with you. And to answer your question very briefly, yes, we are aware of other this is something that's not just TriNet. This is the entire these are transit agencies across the nation going through these challenges.

So it is not TriMet, we are looking to our partner agencies and learning from them. This is something we're actively doing. Other folks that are doing it right and trying to resolve this problem, I would say their states have very different sources of tax revenue that we don't have available to us. I think that's a pretty common theme for other locations that are resolving this issue. So we will be looking to ways that we can also work to do that.

And President Bob Gardner, I would say to you, your advocacy matters. And I think this our continued partnership, which we are very, very grateful for our collaboration, but just your advocacy with those who are at work in Salem, those who work in our region. Again, going back to your visioning process, they're doing a visioning process at the regional level. We know that with Metro, at the state level. How can you make your voice heard?

Because I think it because there's so many fires right now, you know, with homelessness, affordability, all of these different things, that sometimes transit starts to fall down on the list of importance and people forget the importance of transit. So I think in any conversation that you have, any advocacy that you can lend to why transit is important for your community, it would be so much it means so much to us and also help us in our effort to bring more transit service to you all. Because I would say this, we've taken this roadshow to a number of city councils delivering bad news, and what's kind of funny well, not funny, it's it's indicative of the communities. They want actually more service. They're like, have you thought about a line here?

Have you thought about Trust me, Tom has. He just needs the money to do it. And so we're hearing just the opposite that people want more. And so, however you can help us deliver that, we're right there with you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That fits well with how I was gonna close by asking how we can help, but I think you've all covered it. So we're we're just stand ready to partner where we can. And thank you for taking the time to come out and brief us and just share it so we're all on the same page on the information. And we'll keep in touch.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, counsel.

Means a lot that you came out. Yeah. So with that, anybody need a break? Are we ready to continue on? Okay. We now go to the consent agenda. Would anybody like to make a motion to approve the consent agenda?

Yes. Thank you, mayor. I move to approve the consent agenda for the 03/10/2026 Westland City Council meeting, which includes the 02/10/2026 meeting minutes, the investment policy update adoption, the temporary easement for Abernethy Bridge construction, and the grant agreement between West Linn and Oregon Water Resources Department for I 205 Abernethy Bridge waterline replacement project. Second.

It's been moved and second that you approve the consent agenda for the 03/10/2026 West City Council meeting, which includes the 02/10/2026 meeting minutes, the investment policy updated adoption, temporary easement for Abernathy Bridge construction, the grant agreement between and Oregon Water Resources Department for the I 205 Abernathy Bridge waterline replacement project. Please call the roll. Thank you.

Councilor Groner?

Yes.

Councilor Bonington? Yes. Councilor Bryke? Yes. Council president Baumgartner? Yes. Mayor Bialystovski?

Yes. So the consent agenda passes unanimously, and several items are hereby approved. And thanks to all our staff for your hard work on several of those matters, in particular, the Abernathy Bridge waterline agreement, which is a great step forward in securing the $5,000,000 that we got several years ago down in Salem. So looking forward to seeing that come to fruition the waterline. With that, we can move on into the business meeting.

And the first item is ordinance seventeen seventy one, opting into limitation of liability for trails and structures in public easement or unimproved rights of way. Limiting liability, always a good thing. City attorney, you may take it away if you have anything to say about this item.

Well, thank you. I wanna give credit where credit is due. So thank you to Megan Bigjohn for preparing this memo and also for Kristen who works in the legal department for all the work she did on actually drafting the ordinance and understanding underlying statute. But in a nutshell, we have a new state law, it's ORS one zero five point six six eight and it went into effect January 1. It provides liability protection from negligence claims for cities with populations of 500,000 people or more for injuries or property damage arising from non motorized use of, here's the important part, trails or structures located within public easements or unimproved rights of way.

So to be clear, we're not talking about recreational immunity for park parks or park property, these are the many trails which I I think we all agree our residents use and enjoy quite a bit here in West Linn that connect communities, neighborhoods, go behind homes, we have quite a bit of those here in West Linn. And so subsection three of that new statute allows cities with populations under 500,000, which would be us in West Linn to opt into this protection either by ordinance or resolution rule or regulation. So we had two options available to us, we decided to go forth and proposed an ordinance for you to review and consider enacting mainly for transparency and for honestly ease of locating that protection. I did find through Kristen's help that we adopted a resolution back in 2011 that provides a lot of this liability protection, it's just not quite as broad. It only covers the city and this particular law has slightly broader definitions.

But in that exercise, it took us a while to figure out if we were even covered so it kind of shed some light on putting it in code might be a really good option for this. So just to quickly review, this proposed ordinance seventeen seventy one would provide immunity from personal injury or property damage resulting from the use of a trailer structure in a public easement or unimproved right of way by any person on foot, on an equine, which we looked into is horse ponies or donkeys, on a bicycle or another non motorized vehicle or conveyance. And pursuant to the new state law, this extends and protects not only the city but city officers, employees and agents, as well as owners of land abutting the public easement or unimproved right of way, And also finally, nonprofit corporations and their volunteers that are involved in trail construction or maintenance. Again, we think staff and the legal department thinks this is important. West Linn allows public use of trails within public easements and an improved way right of way for walking, hiking, biking, playing, informational excuse me, informal recreation and an important component of community connectivity.

So as I mentioned to be clear, we do have some protection enacted several years ago but this would be broader coverage. And as a result, recommends that the council enact this ordinance and codify the city's decision to opt into the limitation of liability provided in that new statute ORS one zero five point six six eight. Are there any questions?

The questions for counsel? From the counsel for legal counsel? Very interesting because there's only one city with a population of over 500,000, Portland. They should've just said Portland. But we're glad to be briefed on this. So, we have an ordinance before us, and there's a motion sheet, to take action. With it, I'll take a motion. Seeing no questions.

Thank you, mayor. I move to approve first reading for ordinance one seven seven one, opting into limitation of liability for trails and structures in public easement and unimproved right of way, and set the matter for second reading.

Second. It's been moved and seconded to approve the first reading for it in 1771, opting into limitations of liability for trails and structures in public easements or unimproved right of way and set the matter for second reading. Any discussion? I see none. Go ahead. Call the roll, please.

Councilor Bright? Yes. Council president Baumgartner? Yes. Councilor Groner?

Yes.

Councilor Bonington? Yes. Mayor Bilodoski?

Yes. So proceed to the second reading as it was unanimous.

Thank you, mayor. I move to approve second reading for ordinance one seven seven one opting into limitation of liability for trails and structures in public easement or unimproved right of way and adopt the ordinance.

Second.

Been moved and seconded to approve the second reading for 1771, opting into limitation of liability for trails and structures in public easements or unimproved right of ways and adopt the ordinance. I see no discussion. So you can call the roll again, please. Thank you.

Council president Baumgartner? Yes. Council Groner?

Yes.

Council Bonington? Yes. Council Breich? Yes. Mayor Bialystok?

Yes. So the ordinance is passed unanimously and adopted. Thank you, Kaylee, and Kristen, and of course, Megan as well. And with that, I see Lynn Schroeder has come up from the planning department to talk about the Robinwood neighborhood historic inventory, which I know is important to the historic review board as well. So Right. I'm glad you're here. Take it away.

Thank you, mayor and city councilors. My name is Lynn Schroeder. I am the community development management analyst. Tonight, staff is asking the city council to consider adopting a resolution that would adopt the Robinwood Robinwood survey excuse me. The architectural survey of the Westland Robinwood neighborhood as an as a historic present informational tool for the historic preservation program.

Adopting this resolution would not create any historic designations either locally or nationally and it would not provide any regulatory requirements or benefits to these homes. It was strictly an informational resource for us. As background, in 2025, the City Council authorized staff to pursue a grant to conduct the survey And the consultant conducted the survey in the summer and finalized it in December with HRB review. And HRB has recommended that you approve this resolution tonight. I wanted to mention, give a shout out to HRB chair, Kirsten Solberg.

She could not be here tonight, but she did participate in preparing the survey by taking photographs when our consultant needed some retakes. So she was very helpful to the survey. To let you know, the survey was of the Robinwood neighborhood. There were 620 resources that were built from 1970 before 1975. And the consultant researched every did a windshield survey drive by, took pictures, did a very preliminary review.

And her findings found that there were there were 40 high priority resources that would warrant additional resource and could potentially be listed either locally or nationally as individual resources. She also identified six potential historic districts and I can tell you those names if you'd like. One is the Robinwood neighborhood, Robinwood area which represents the original plat of the Robinwood subdivision, the 1923 plat. There was also the Cedar Oak area which has the densest most cohesive collection of historic homes in Eastern Robinwood. The Old River Cherokee which is notable for mid century modern homes and nineteen fifties ranch.

The Shawawawa Historic District district potential districts. They are excellent examples of mid century modern ranch, modern ranch and split level homes. The Upper Mid Hill area which is notable for split level homes between 1964 and 1975. And Maria Court which is notable for its ranch style homes from 1960 to 1964. Are there any questions?

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation there. I'm pulling it up on my laptop still and it's still loading. It must be a big document. Looked at it earlier. It's several 100 pages. Right?

Yes.

Oh, man. Councilor Bryke, you are a Robinwood neighborhood liaison. So I'd like to invite you to ask any questions or comments on this this

Absolutely. So, thank you, Lynn. So this, doesn't put any designation on any of these homes. But if an owner of one of those homes wanted to pursue a historic designation for their house, Now that it is in this survey, does that help provide them with information to pursue that for a state historic designation or a federal historic designation?

Yes. This basically would allow homeowners to know if their property was significant enough to be listed and then they would pursue an individual survey, more in-depth survey of their home which would have to prove that it would have to show that it met several criteria for national listing. We also have local listing which is another option.

Thank you.

Any other questions? I just Council president?

Thank you so much. I think this is a fascinating report. I just really love all this history. And, I mean, I remember as a child, my friend lived in Robinwood, and I

just loved

to go around in the streets and see all the different styles of houses. And so it's fascinating to see all this history about them. Thank you for bringing this to us.

Counselor Baumgartner, the consultant was very impressed with the integrity, his historic integrity of Robinwood and she was she felt it was very charming and well preserved neighborhood.

There's I've even heard talk in the past of the trolley and there's a little history on the trolley in here too.

Yes. The heart the trolley is a a is a piece of Westland history that a lot of people are interested in. And and any little bit of information we get on that is that we can document is well is well received.

Well, councilor Bonneton, any any anything? I don't see anything. Councilor Groner, you're welcome to make any comments or we can take a motion if there's no further discussion. Seeing none, we can take a motion on the resolution.

Thank you, mayor. I move to adopt resolution twenty twenty six dash o two, adopting the architectural survey of Westlands Robinwood neighborhood as an informational resource for the city's historic preservation program.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded to adopt resolution twenty twenty six zero two, adopting the architectural survey of Westlands Robinwood neighborhood as an informational resource for the city's historic preservation program. Any discussion? Thanks for the historical view board and staff and consultant for putting together this awesome report. I'm sure it'll go a long way to helping Robinwood neighbors get their homes designated historic areas if they like to and provide a good resource for the community to learn more about Robinwood. Please call the roll.

Councilor Bonington? Yes. Councilor Bryke? Yes. Councilor council president Baumgartner? Yes. Councilor Groner?

Yes.

Mayor Bilastoski?

Yes. So the motion passes. And now we gotta do one of these for Willamette too. That's historic as well, you know. We opened the floodgates for this. Because and sunset, all all of our neighborhoods have some history, so we'll have to take a look at that. Thank you, Lynn, so much for your work.

Thank you.

And Steve as well. I know you're

Thank you.

Here for the next topic as well. And I will welcome up Alicia Bloomfield, our city building official. Glad you're here with us tonight as well. I think you've been before us before. I can't quite remember. It's rare we get to oh, wow. Hey. Welcome. Doing a great job filling the shoes of their retired building official, Jim. I'll turn it over to this topic is about an intergovernmental agreement, the Building Evaluation Support Agreement, also known as BESA. And I'll turn it over to you both to present to us.

Yes. Thank you, mayor Billastowski and council. Good evening. I'm Steve Coper, the community development director, and joined by Alicia Bloomfield, our building official. We are here tonight to seek approval of an intergovernmental agreement for the city to enter into the visa or BESA, which would provide the opportunity for the city to join other cities in the state of Oregon and the state of Oregon itself to have essentially a collaborative agreement to be able to share and receive building permitting, inspection, and building official related services from each other.

Historically, other jurisdictions in the state have essentially entered into one off intergovernmental agreements with each other. And so, seeing that the state saw an opportunity to be able to have essentially one giant omnibus intergovernmental agreement between all jurisdictions who might want to, at some point, share services with each other. So that's the purpose that we're here for this evening. We also thought because Alicia had not been here and because, you know, some of the council is a little bit newer, we thought it would be a great opportunity to come and introduce the building department, who they are. We've had some new staff join the department recently, and a little bit about what they do in order to help explain why entering into the visa is a good idea.

So with that, I'm gonna turn the presentation of the building department over to the expert of the building department, Alicia.

Hello. So as Steve said, we would we're asking your permission to approve this. The building codes division with the state has presented this to us about six to eight months ago to all jurisdictions in the state of Oregon. And at this point, I believe a very good portion of the state jurisdictions have signed this so that we can trade between jurisdictions and help each other out as needed. And so it appears that it's working out well to do so instead of having to use third party consultants to help out if if you need help with plans, examining, or inspections or whatnot, which we actually ran into in our department this last year, and we were only a two person department for of the year of 2025, which was very troublesome for us.

And we did it, but it put a burden on us, and so we knew what it was like. And so this is something that would have been helpful at that time. And so, we created this slide for you all, and it's just a quick informational slide for you

to

see just a little bit about the building department. These are some bios for us. Myself and Adam, who we have both been with building department for a little over eight years, almost nine years each. Myself is the building official, and then Adam is the main plans examiner for the city. We both do everything.

All of the inspections and plans examining also. And then John is our main inspector out in the field for us. He's out in the field every day. And then Taryn is new to our department, for community development, and so she is a shared position that we were lucky to be able to, bring on. And so we are sharing her between planning, building, and engineering. And so she's helping us, all three of our departments right now.

And just to add, she deserves a shout out because she helps put together this lovely presentation.

She

created this for us, and it's

That's awesome.

Beautiful. Yes. We're lucky to have her. And so, just a little bit about what we do, what we are about, the fact that the state governs us by all of our codes, And so, everything that we do is run by the State of Oregon. That's how we are inspecting and upholding all of our codes in the building department.

Again, a little bit about that, and a little bit about our fees, and how they are. They are also governed by the state, and actually nationally governed, our fees are, our fee schedule is, to an extent. The building permit is 100% self funded. We are not funded at all by taxpayers. The fees that we take in for building permits are what pay for the building department. There's no general fund money.

And just to add to that, I think that as we begin this framing our future conversation, I think it's important to understand that the building department provides a great value to the community by supporting safe building structures, and ultimately, the longevity of structures in the community leading to protection of people's life, property, and long term investments. And so we wanted to showcase that for you tonight.

And these are just some numbers that we have, that we just thought we'd throw up there in the slide from 2025, as far

as

the permits that were pulled, the inspections that we did, the inspection trips.

3,713 inspection trips in one year. Wow.

Yeah. It's impressive.

Busy. Alicia's being a little in her saying some numbers. When I first saw these numbers, they knocked my socks off. And when you go back and consider that this building department was two employees for half of the year, those numbers are even more impactful.

Yeah. It was we were quite busy in 2025. And then we, Taryn again, went and took some pictures out in the fields and, just to show a little bit of some inspections that were done while on-site.

And like thinking about the like an average new construction home, how many inspections would like a typical home have?

I just was downstairs before this, and was just preloading some inspections for a new home. And I believe just the preload of that without any new additional inspections, there were 27. But they typically, I mean typically there's more than just one inspection for each, they'll call in more than one. There's usually two of those. Depending. Depending on the job and how big the house is.

So this is just a slice of life or a day in the life of the building inspectors going around to different various job sites and, you know, often going back and reinspecting work that was done. And so all of these things, you know, feed into that same ethos of having fee funded code support for the city.

Yeah. So one of the these houses could take for a framing inspection could be two to four hours, depending.

Wow.

Yeah.

So that's just a little bit just of a little information for the building permit. Do you have any questions?

Any questions? Okay. Councilor Bragg.

I was just gonna say it probably makes a difference if you're dealing with a developer versus an owner builder as far as the number of inspections.

It does. It's also the size of the project and how much they've spoken with us in the beginning or if they are asking us the questions after they've already started the project. So all of those things kind of take a different role in that. Yes.

Councillor Bonington.

Yeah. I've I've had a unique insight into how homes in Westland comply with building code as I've I've started working with more and more clients in Westland, my professional life. I have noticed an alarming trend of many things from a decade or more ago not being permitted at all, and I was rather surprised to to notice that. I was wondering, kinda what the approach to to things like that would be, and if that's a concern, something we should consider trying to do something about, or how do you view that?

The code is very specific on how you can handle those types of things, the building code is, and whether you can we can't inspect something unless there's an active permit on it from the building department. Specifically, that's how building code is written. And so if there's a code enforcement action, then we can go in and we can say you have to pull permits for work that's been done. But if it's over a decade old, then it wouldn't even have been built to a current code because codes change every three years. So then there, it kinda takes that ball rolling, and so there's a lot of steps that would have to be taken for that, and we take all of those

as they come in.

Fun. Because sometimes that is happening, people will ask us, we're permissible for this house because I'm buying it, and that's a lot of times when those things will actually come to us, and then we try to help people through those processes sometimes.

Sure. Thank you.

That's when

that does come to

us. Yep.

Councilor Brunner, I see your hand is up. Go ahead.

Yes. Couple of questions come to mind. You mentioned a number of aspects of the inspection. I did not see electrical. So I presume you are those are somehow done by some other agency and you have to coordinate with them. Is that the case?

It is. Clackamas County does all of our electrical permitting and inspections. We do not have an electrical program within the city.

Okay. Thank you. The other question was, is there any liability that the city might incur for something that you have inspected that may in at some time later fail?

We through the state building code, it is written that the city that we're licensed through the state of Oregon, but we are backed up by the state of Oregon also, and we don't take as long as we are in good faith, approving and approving in good faith, then we should not have any liability.

In other words, taking the steps of doing the appropriate inspections Yes. And having plans that were prepared by the appropriate people and then reviewed by our people. If we do those appropriate steps, then we limit our liability.

Yes. Okay. Thank you very much. That solves a couple of puzzles in my mind. Thank you.

Good good questions. Thank you. At this time, I will ask council president just to make a motion on the IGA. We'll get that approved, and we can wrap up the presentation.

Thank you, mayor. I move to approve the building evaluation support agreement, intergovernmental agreement with the state of Oregon and joining parties.

Second. It's been moved and seconded to approve the building evaluation support agreement, intergovernmental agreement with the state of Oregon and joining parties. Any discussion? And then from council? Okay. For the final time tonight, busy night, go ahead and call the roll. Thank you, Theresa.

Council president Baumgartner? Yes. Council Groner? Yes. Councilor Bonington?

Yes.

Councilor Bright? Yes. Mayor Velostovsky?

Yes. So the IJ is approved. We'll get that signed. And now we can go back to the presentation. Any final questions or comments for Alicia? So appreciate all that you do for our for our city and of your team. I enjoy when I walk through the downstairs. Sometimes I get to chatting with the the two guys down there, and they're very good at their job. They're not they've really got these giant computers too. Must be to look at the plans too.

It is. It's for plan review.

Cool.

Makes it makes it a little easier. Cool.

Well, thank you for all of your hard work, especially when you are understaffed.

Yes.

That is difficult, and I appreciate your efforts.

I think everybody in the city tries very hard, and we all feel that sometimes.

Thank you. Yeah.

It's amazing. I mean, I just thinking back, last year, was living in a condo on at Fawn Court, Deer Point Condominiums. They did an incredibly invasive plumbing. They replumb the entire condominium complex. Every single thing in my room was completely torn up. Every condo was, like, totally decimated. The walls were and they had to Alicia came out and inspected every single one of them. She actually inspected my my place. I mean, that's just one place. Yep. You know, and what an amount of work that was for just one building. But then thinking about all the other projects, whether big or small throughout the community, really are doing a lot of amazing work. So we appreciate it.

Thank you.

Sorry I had to tell that story because I remember seeing you and you went in my place. It's like, oh my god. It's all torn up. Yeah. I I didn't like it either. I I was billed to me as a mind like, it was gonna be a minor little repair. So the wonders of being a tenant. Anyway, with that, we can transition now. And thank you, Steve, as well, to the city manager report. And council president talked a little bit earlier. She talked a while, so I had to catch up a little bit with the speaking time. I think somebody's counting.

I don't think you've you've matched me

yet. Go ahead.

We're back on schedule.

Go ahead.

Good evening. I'm filling in for John Williams tonight, so I'll just try to make this pretty brief. But just a reminder that there's no council work session next week as many of you will be in Washington DC at the National League of Cities conference. So your next council meeting is scheduled for April, April 7. Oh, nearly a month.

A couple of things to report from around the city departments. The recreation department wanted to welcome and let you all know that Lucky Leprechaun is playing hide and go seek. And so you can get a pamphlet or a booklet from the recreation department and go looking for Lucky the Leprechaun until March 17 at 4PM, and you can enter your booklets at the City Hall Parks and Rec counter. Also, police department and TBFNR are partnering with a food drive for the Westland food pantry at all three fire stations and the police station, March, April, and May. So you can do drop offs at any of those locations.

The public works department wanted me to tell you and to the community that they are expecting heavy rainfall over the next several days. So if our community members need sandbags, there are sandbags at the old Bolton Fire Station and the Willamette Park nearby the play structure. And then lastly, what you do have up on the dais is some little business cards. You've mentioned it earlier, but our communications department has provided some communications cards regarding Framing Our Future. The Framing Our Future campaign is a long term community driven effort to understand the service that residents value the most and how we can sustainably fund them in the future.

And so just wanted to let you know that that website is live now and your QR codes on those little business cards will work. We had some up at the front when people walked in as well and we have many more boxes if you run out, so please just let us know.

Thank you.

Yep. Thank you.

For that report. And please pass along our regards to mister Williams and his mom. Anything else? From the good of the order from city council, council Gronert, you're a dedicated city council signing on after a travel day across the country to visit families on eastern time now, 11:00. I know how that goes from past meetings. Thank you for signing on. Well, thank you. And with that, we were adjourned for the evening. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you in a few weeks.