City Council Workshops

0:00 (upbeat music) - career city council today is Monday, July 13th, 2026. And we're going to start off this afternoon with a biennial budget update with Lisa Brandl, our deputy city manager. Before that city manager, did you have anything you wanted to say? - Yeah, I do. So heading into this budget work session, this is the second one we're holding with the city council. And we'll provide some more detail for you today on what we've done to address the city's budget gap going forward. But I think as the city council knows, this is something that we grappled with in the last budget cycle, when we had about a $43 million gap between available funding and ongoing funding needs, ongoing expenditures. And coming into this one, we were sitting at about 30 million.

0:59 That we knew that we were going to have to figure out a way to be able to address. I've approached this budget, since it's my first one in this seat full time, as what I'd call kind of a reset budget for us. Really encouraging the staff and working with staff to fundamentally understand all of the assumptions that have gone into crafting our prior budgets. What do our financial policies look like? What decisions were made about the levels of reserve funds to really take a look at how we utilize our existing funds before we ever would make a request to supplement those funds with additional revenues. And so there are a lot of things that this budget contemplates that will require future decisions by you as the city council to make some policy changes for us. But at the same time, there are some things that I've got the ability to pull some levers on administratively to help us close that gap into the next couple of years. It does not mean that that deficit, structural deficit is going to go away.

1:57 But we've really sought to give ourselves some time on some issues that we've identified that we want to do some deeper dives into over the course of the next few years to really position ourselves well into the biennium after this one. And with that, I will go ahead and turn it over to Lisa. - Thank you, Lon. Good afternoon, mayor, council, and community. Lisa Brandl, deputy city manager. I'm gonna go back to the agenda. We heard from our city manager, Lon Pluckon, with our opening remarks. I'm gonna start with the recap of our last workshop where we presented our forecast, our initial forecast, share a little bit of the progress we've done to date, and give you an update on our forecast, a summary, and then talk about next steps. So I'm gonna go into a short recap

2:54 of our previous budget workshop that we held on April 27th. And during that workshop, we discussed the ongoing structural deficit issue, which occurs when we have more expenses than revenues. It's an ongoing issue and continues unabated. We see increased costs across the landscape, including personnel, professional services, and supplies. And previous to the budget workshop, we heard from the community development department and the economic prosperity and housing department joint workshop on economic development and construction that slowing commercial development is a trend, and that we see that as a downstream effect on our city revenues. With all of these factors and many others, the city budget must be balanced. So with that, we presented a forecast in April

3:51 with a total deficit of $29.8 million over '27 and 2028, with the deficit continuing its growth pattern in the next four years. And this is in line with the continued structural budget deficit. And we also shared with you that we are not issuing across the board cuts. Rather, we plan to take a measured approach and return in July to you with options and results. And since that time, we've done a lot of work behind the scenes across multiple departments. So I'm gonna share that with you. So here's what we did. We took a hard look at the existing budget and financial structure. We looked at existing funds and how they are being used, and also how they are not being used. We reflected back on our recent operational decisions

4:49 that made an impact on our assumptions. We looked at our legacy practices and assumptions, and some had been in place for years, and we really took a hard look at those. And this was not just done in the finance department. It occurred across many different departments working with a lot of different city team members. So continuing the topic of how, we analyzed our reserves and financial policies. We looked at the possibility of allocating existing funds. There are some new revenue tools, the public safety sales tax, which you will hear about at the conclusion of this workshop, which will be discussed shortly, and a new one, HB 2442, the children and family sales tax, which will be discussed at a future workshop. With this work and a status quo budget, we are presenting a forecast today

5:47 that closes the deficit for the 2027-2028 biennium. This forecast leaves no room though for any new initiatives or projects. And some of the elements to close the deficit require further council action, which I will highlight. So I will present a forecast update based on the work we've done. And what's being presented today is a revised forecast of a $5.5 million surplus for 2027 and a $400,000 surplus for 2028. Notably, because we remain in a structural deficit in the next two biennia, we are projecting a $105 million deficit over the next two biennia. So the inherent structural deficit isn't going away and continues to grow.

6:46 So as previously mentioned, we looked at our legacy practices and assumptions of budgeting and how we structure reserves. So I'm gonna go over these next two slides to illustrate some of the key elements of those practices that contribute towards closing the deficit that I just presented. Some are one time and some are ongoing, and some require further council action. So I'll start from the top. The closure of the self-insured benefits fund. The city made the operational decision to switch over to the Association of Washington Cities pooled insurance rates. And previous to that, we had a fund that held funds to pay for the insurance because we were self-insured. And because now we switched over to a pooled rate, we no longer need to hold those funds. So we are refunding those back to the funds that contributed to that.

7:45 That's a one time transfer back to those contributing funds. We are transferring back to the general fund interest income of ARPA unrestricted funds. These are unrestricted from interest income that's been earned, and that would be ongoing, and that would be a transfer back to the general fund. We have an interest income transfer back to the general fund from the facilities asset management and replacement fund. And that is a fund that is originally source funded from the general fund. So the original source of funds is the general fund. The interest income would be transferred back to the general fund, and that would be an ongoing transfer back. And we will be presenting to you during the budget, during the biennium budget recommendation an update to the business and license surcharge language,

8:44 which would allow for broader park usage. Currently, it is restricted towards parks, major maintenance, and capital. And our proposal is to insert another language amendment that would say something to the effect of, and parks operations. So it would say something, parks major maintenance and capital, and parks operations. And so that would allow for broader parks usage in the future years. And then pausing on the last item, pausing general fund contributions for non-public safety fleet acquisitions. And so when I say non-public safety, we're excluding patrol vehicles, we're excluding fire vehicles. These are non-public safety fleet acquisitions, like sedans and things that are used for regular travel,

9:43 for office staff. And so what we're doing during the next biennium is analyzing our current methodology of how we purchase surplus and purchase surplus and retire vehicles in the future. Right now, we don't really have a good, a standardized methodology for our vehicle purchases. And this pausing of the general fund contribution would not impact the current acquisitions in place. There's ample enough funds in the current fleet fund to continue purchasing vehicles. The plan is to have public works contract out for a consultant to present some different methodologies to the city manager's office so that we can adopt a methodology

10:41 that takes into account best practices on fleet acquisition and usage, including depreciation, surplusing, and things like that. And that would occur over the next biennium. This would be a one-time pause of the general fund contribution for fleet acquisitions. So I'm gonna go into the next slide 'cause there's another slide that shows some of these elements. So as we've previously shared in other workshops, we are going to go into the Proposition 2 bank capacity for related firefighter salaries and benefits and also for capital projects. That would be ongoing. We are temporarily pausing general fund transfers to the fire pension fund for the biennium. I know it says ongoing,

11:38 but it is right now going to be a temporary pause with a quarterly review of that fund that would be presented to the city manager. So the fire pension is fully funded at 120%, and this was presented to the fire pension board on July 6. We are eliminating the catch-up contributions for our risk fund, which is used for our liability self-insurance purposes as we are at the 85% actuarial confidence level from our recent actuarial report. Over previous years, we had to catch up to get to that level. We are now at that confidence level, and so we are going to eliminate the catch-up contribution. That'll be one time we would evaluate during the biennium because we do a actuarial analysis during each biennium

12:32 and see are we at that actuarial confidence level again, and then it's possible we would not have to do the catch-up contribution in anticipation of the next new biennium. But for this, for the 27-28, we would not do the catch-up contribution from the general fund to that fund. And then finally, a recalculation of the compensated absences reserve formula that requires council action, and that would come to you in an August 24th workshop that I will be coming forward to you on with our financial policies update. And our recommended proposal on that compensated absences is a five-year average of actual usage of our compensated absences, which is our paid time off,

13:29 is another way to say it, of city employees. And so right now, it's at over 50%, and we will be calculating it based on a five-year average. That would be our recommendation. So these actions highlight the thought process that many team members collaborated on. We collectively reviewed and asked the why behind some legacy practices, which is always helpful to look at to see what an organization is doing and see if there's opportunities for improvement. And this is what any business or household would do when in a financial bind. You look at how you're operating, how you're spending, and see how you can make some adjustments. And this process is ongoing and continues to this day. The process has proved to be successful and has enabled a possible biennium budget

14:27 without issuing massive cuts across the board and allow the departments to continue the work that's been done to date and see what else is possible. As City Manager Lon Plaucon has mentioned, this is a reset budget that gives the city time to continue the work to meet the needs of the future and work on solutions to closing the structural deficit. So I'm gonna keep going. I'm gonna go into the summary. And so although what's presented here is pretty significant, the projection for 27-28 that you've just seen is a balance. There's a lot of elements that contribute to closing that deficit and some require further action. And although some of those elements are one time, some are ongoing. It's not gonna be one large solution that fixes the issue. It's incrementally based with analytical focus and intense teamwork that will keep steering the organization.

15:25 Any change or alteration to any of these elements eliminates the forecast that's presented today. So we do have continued challenges. The economy continues its pressure on operating expenses concerning supplies, long lead times, and the uncertain international impacts that continue today have a ripple effect that we can't predict. So going back to long lead times, we were recently informed that there's a back order on steel that's up to 12 months due to the tremendous pressure of data center construction that's going on across the United States. And so that is requiring us to rethink how we construct our capital projects. And so that was something our General Services Department shared with us. I thought that was kind of interesting.

16:20 So we've assumed a status quo budget with no new initiatives and programs. Although we know things could change, you have priorities, things you wanna share. So anything that is added, we will do an accommodation. It could require an adjustment somewhere else in the budget. It could require an elimination of existing programs, a reprogramming, or a changing of level of services that could be necessary to better address the priorities. We're prepared to do that. And as mentioned before, our structural deficit continues. This is a breakdown of that 105 million over the next four years. You can see it's broken out by year. And it's a delicate balance. Any change to the elements and then anything out of our control that we are monitoring all the time could change the numbers in the forecast.

17:20 I'm almost done. So one thing I wanna share with you that it's important to me to acknowledge the monumental level of work that went on behind the scenes. I wanna thank everyone here on this slide and many others that I could have missed. There's been a lot of back and forth, research, vetting, legal analysis, and many meetings to provide these elements. This is a wonderful city team who are doing everything possible to provide solutions. I wanna thank everyone here who've truly exemplified our city values of collaboration and innovation. So I'm gonna go on to our next steps in the biennium budget process. So for July, the city manager's working with you on confirming your priorities through a prioritization process. The department submitted their budgets yesterday before midnight, and so we haven't had a chance

18:18 to look at everything yet. There is an all-staff meeting tomorrow that our city manager is having. Additionally, we have a virtual idea box we are opening up to all of our city employees for one month to provide any budget-saving ideas they may have. We're interested to hear from them and opening the lines of communication. We're calling it a virtual idea box. They can submit their ideas anonymously. And then we have another budget workshop with you next week to share community survey results and also discuss the prioritizations. I will be returning to you on August 24th with revised financial policies and a revised investment policy which hasn't been updated since 2012. There will be also be another opportunity to discuss the biennium budget at this time,

19:16 and also our new chief financial officer, Katie Shifley, will be on hand, so there'll be an opportunity for her to introduce herself to the community at the workshop. Looking forward to that. And then we will have a workshop on September 21st before the budget is published on October 1st. So the September 21st workshop is the preview of the city manager's recommended budget. It's kind of like the last look before we have to publish October 1st, which is required by law. And then we have two workshops scheduled to review the operating and capital budgets on October 12th and 26th. And then scheduled for consent for you on November 2nd, and adoption scheduled for November 16th. So although we are in the midst of summer, we're right in the middle of budget season,

20:14 this is our second of seven workshops in total, when I believe in the past there have been about three or four workshops. We've heard from you that you wanna hear from us more often on the biennium budget, and so I'm hoping that this is more amenable to you to have more conversations with you on this biennium budget. So with that, I'm gonna close and open it up for any questions or discussion items. Thank you. - Thank you, Ms. Brandl. Councilors? Councilor Perez? - Thank you, Lisa. A couple of questions. Is it possible to get a dollar amount or percentage on those key elements that was on the first slides? You went through the line items, pause here, ongoing here. Is it possible to get an idea of the amount and percentage? I don't have the slide number.

21:13 - Yes, I can. They are distributed over a number of different funds, that's why I didn't exactly give. If I gave you one amount, it could be distributed over a number of different funds, in addition to the general fund, street and fire funds. - Yeah, just to get a big picture of that percentage, I don't need to know what fund, but just what are we talking about? - I can do that. - Thank you, and we can share with the rest of the council. And then the no new initiatives or programs, is that decision going to be made by city manager or a check in with us at some point? - Yeah, I'll let Lon answer. - Yeah, so I was gonna address this one a little bit later, but all of you in your email inboxes have the first round of prioritization sheets from the staff.

22:11 Basically lets you rank the different activities that the city is engaged in to help give us some feedback on what your collective number one, number two, number three projects are. There will be a second round for that, and at the workshop next week, first you'll hear the results of the DHM community survey. I wanted you to have that information so you have that grounding and community sentiment about taxes, fees, what the community is feeling right now. And then we'll go into a discussion, review what we have so far on the prioritization. But at that meeting, I really want to, for lack of a better term, mind the council for the things that you would like to see for priorities that we should be pursuing that we are not. We'll give you the information on the ongoing projects, the priorities that we currently have, but there are things that I know, for example, that we've talked about quite a bit, childcare being one of them, that we don't currently have a lot of massive efforts behind.

23:10 So if you want to do something like that and make childcare a priority, then we can respond to that. We want to make sure that these are things that would be a shared priority of the full council. So also, because we're at the point that the decision packages are in and we can really start shaping the budget, we want to have that information sooner rather than later. So that will be coming next week. - Okay, and then my last question. I know that you looked at the forecast through 2032, but we've got some other things playing out in the world, and that's a regional fire authority discussion, a metro parks district discussion. So at what point, with those two in mind, would you think about how they intersect with our forecast? - Yeah, so some of those pieces, I'll use the regional fire authority as an example. This budget presupposes, I'm not making a presupposition that the voters would approve a regional fire authority during this biennial budget.

24:09 If they did, most likely that would be something that would happen in the second year, and then we would have to take a look at the transition plan for when it would actually be created, when it would actually move off onto its own dedicated funding instead of being part of the services that the city provides. So when we say status quo, those items are included through this biennial budget as expected city services, and we have not modeled them out. But essentially, I think none of them would be expected to show up before 2028, so if they do, we'd have the ability to adjust the budget through the supplemental process to account for those. - Okay, and then last question. You mentioned that the fire pension presentation on July 6th to the fire pension board. What was the feedback or input? - The mayor was also there, and they understood, and they were okay with it.

25:08 They understood that we were gonna come back and review it every quarter, and they didn't have any negative feedback, so yeah. - And Ms. Brendel, I'd like to add a note to that. The board and the administration set a limit that if it's at 120% now, if it dropped to 115%, that we would take a look at that to understand why it did and make a recommendation to the city manager. So it's fully funded, and unfortunately, we're losing firefighters that are in that category, in that retired firefighters in that pension board, but they accepted it unanimously. - Yeah, and for those not as familiar with what that is, the city maintains a pension fund that is a closed system

26:08 for former city employees that are eligible for it on the fire side, and there are certain expenses that we have to pay for by law and some by choice out of that fund, but we've reached a point, as the mayor said, where the number of people that are drawing from the fund over time tends to dwindle, and because we've been contributing to it and because interest earnings have been on the climb, we're at a point where it's funded at 120% of expected liabilities. - Okay, thank you, that's all for me. - Councilors, any other comments, questions? Oh yes, Councilor Fox, go ahead. - I just had a question about the reserve, the changes to our reserves on those different funds. First, just I was wondering if we could get information back to kind of show the historic levels of those reserve funds and then what the proposal is, so kind of building

27:06 on Councilor Perez's question, just to better understand the difference between then and what's proposed? - Okay, okay, thank you. - Thank you, sir. - And my final question is, well, more of a statement, but it is a big concern considering, you know, the state the city was in during kind of the recession timeframe, and even with reserves, there were a lot of layoffs, a lot of big changes that had to happen, so I'm just wondering how we're insulating ourselves from that. - Thank you for the question. - Thank you for the question, I don't have an answer just yet. Ms. Brandl, did you hear? - Yeah, that's a great question. As I'm reviewing the financial policies and going through the reserves, we have different reserves.

28:03 You have a revenue stabilization reserve, you have a designated liability reserve, you have a compensated absence reserve, you have an emergency reserve. So in short, you have different levels of reserves of the general fund, and they are established in the policy to not go below a certain level. And so it creates a cushion, if you will. And so for example, on the compensated absence reserve, I think I have that amount here, just like a recalculation of that formula would return 3.3 million back to the general fund. You're holding it in reserve for over 50%,

29:01 when in actuality, over the last five to six years, it has not occurred. So we're taking an average of those five years at 150%. So we're presenting a conservative formula still, but not as conservative as it has been. So I will definitely share all of that with you and can share those reserves. And those financial policies will be presented to you. We have to present those to you. And we found some reserves that were held for a project that doesn't exist anymore since the early 2000s, Columbia Art Center. So I'll be bringing that forward to have that re-designated for the arts hub. So there's a lot of different reserves that we have in short

29:59 that I think adequately insulate the city as much as possible, as much as we can be held insulated, all things considering. - Yeah, and if I could just add a little more context on that, as Lisa's saying, that we have a lot of different reserves. We have not looked at anything that would make changes to things that I would consider critical for operations, like the emergency reserve, the general fund reserve. But some of these, like this one for compensated absences, are restricted on what they can be used for. And when you look across the industry, for example, the best practice would not be to put 100% of compensated absences into an amount every single year, because that would presuppose that all of your employees would leave at the same time. And that is not something that's going to occur unless the city of Vancouver decides to disincorporate.

30:57 And so we want to make sure that as we look at these that we are incorporating best practices, but that also allow us to utilize our existing cash flow in other ways before we go back and ask the community what would you like us to do, or what other financial resources would we look at. So I think the broader context, we do have our new CFO that will be joining us, but we are also bringing on an outside financial consultant for the first time to really help us work through, for example, a strategic use of bonding. But they will be doing a more forensic look at all of our financial policies, and determining some of these date back to the 2000s. Are they still appropriate for the way that we operate today? - Councilor Fox, Mayor Pro Tem Fox, do you have any other questions or comments? - I don't, thank you. - Thank you.

31:57 Councilors? All right, Ms. Brantel, thank you so very much. We will see you in a month. All right, let's move on to the public safety sales tax.

32:19 - Thank you. - Good evening, Chief, Erika, JC, City Manager, did you have something to start this off? - Yeah, so we're bringing this to the City Council, and it's really running kind of parallel to the budget process, but that's intentional. And I just wanted to, I guess, in a little bit of historic context, remind the council that when we went to the public last year for Proposition 5, our funding strategy for being able to increase our police services was based on three different tools that we could use. One being the property tax that the voters ultimately approved, the second being a grant program that we just received notice that we were eligible for from the state, and the third being the sales tax that was authorized by the same legislation. So this is a timing issue for us, entirely based on when we would like the city to start receiving the revenue.

33:19 But I do feel like this is something as part of our Proposition 5 campaign and conversations with the community, we did make people aware that this is something we were looking at. So I will turn it over to the chief and team. - Thank you. I think the city manager pretty much said what I was gonna say. - Of course he did. - But we're here with Deputy Chief Nilsen and our business intelligence analyst, JC Elliott, and he's been pivotal in getting our applications approved and helping us advance towards this point with the House Bill 2015 sales tax. So JC. - This is the part where I get introduced myself. I'm JC Elliott, business intelligence analyst, and I also get to say that city manager Pluckon took some of the things I was going to say. - We'll start with a high level overview here. Today we'll go through a background,

34:16 what House Bill 2015 is, our qualification process, the public safety sales and use tax component, and then the statewide public safety grant fund. And I apologize. Deputy Chief, did you wanna introduce yourself before we jump in? Okay. Here's a timeline for you just to contextualize where we are today. Way back in April 2024, then city manager Eric Holmes convened the police community advisory committee. Their goal there was to really assess the needs of the police department and how best to fund those needs or make recommendations to the city manager to provide the city council. Ultimately over a series of seven or eight meetings, that police community advisory team culminated into a recommendation to issue Proposition 4 onto the November 2024 general election ballot. That was a levy lid lift that would have funded

35:13 80 officers and 36 non-sworn professional staff for the police department. City council ultimately endorsed that. That proposition in October of '24, it went to the general ballot where unfortunately it narrowly failed by about a 4% margin. If you recall the general election 2024, very lengthy ballot. It was the last thing on the ballot. So there were many things contributing to that. We believe, but nonetheless, now city manager Pluckon reconvened that police community advisory committee to discuss the outcomes of Proposition 4 and navigate a path forward. Simultaneously, the Washington state legislature was also discussing new revenue tools through House Bill 2015, which provided the public safety sales tax and this grant fund that we'll discuss further later on. With those in mind, the police community advisory committee and the context of Proposition 4 narrowly failing

36:13 recommended a smaller proposition, Proposition 5, which was successfully passed in November of 2025. And it supplies us with funding for 13 officers and about 10 non-sworn professional staff. A bit short of the 80 officers and 36 non-sworn professional staff from Proposition 4, but it was really, Proposition 5 is meant to be a component of a triad of funding sources in tandem with House Bill 2015, which will leverage that sales tax, which wasn't available to us when we went through the Proposition 4 process and then leveraging the state grant funds. So that leads us to where we are today to discuss House Bill 2015. Again, it was passed in by the legislature in 2025. Governor Ferguson promoted this throughout his campaign

37:11 and coined it as the $100 million statewide grant program. It also created, in addition to the grant program, it created the 1/10th of 1% local public safety sales and use tax that can be councilmanically adopted via ordinance. It's intended to address Washington's public safety staffing shortage. As we know, Washington State is the least, on a per capita basis, the least staffed state among the 51 states, including the District of Columbia for law enforcement professionals. And so he was really trying to focus on how we can right size public safety staffing through this mechanism. It requires agencies to meet specific policy training and reporting standards before qualifying. I will say that this has almost been like a quasi-accreditation process for the police department

38:09 and we'll discuss that in a little bit. So like we've already discussed previously, this provides two legs of the triad of funding recommended by the Police Community Advisory Committee. The first being Proposition 5, which is a property tax levy lid lift that provided us $6 million of ongoing revenue to support about 13 officers and other associated expenses with those officers. The grant funds, the amount of the award is to be determined. We are applying for funding to support 16 officers out of the grant funding to support their salary and benefits. And then to sustain those 16 officers, we intend to present the public safety sales and use tax ordinance to Council for their consideration. Again, that will be a penny for every $10 spent or one-tenth of one percent sales tax. And we anticipate that to supply about $6 million of ongoing annual revenue.

39:09 In order to leverage either of those House Bill 2015 revenue sources, the grant or the sales tax, like I alluded to earlier, we had to go through what I would call a quasi-accreditation process. BPD has successfully completed this process and has met CJTC's qualification requirements, CJTC being the Criminal Justice Training Commission who administers the qualification process. We had to go through our programs, our policies to assess how well we meet the model policies and the CJTC qualification requirements for things like crisis intervention, de-escalation, use of force, integrated arrest tactics, the Keep Washington Working Act, which really is founded in how law enforcement and other government agencies interact with immigration and immigration law. We had to work through our policies for civil protection orders and firearms relinquishments,

40:08 use of force, canine, and then we also have to abide by data reporting requirements under the use of force state reporting requirements. So now that we've successfully met that, we have submitted an application for a public safety grant. Again, this is administered by the Criminal Justice Training Commission. It's intended to provide funding for newly hired entry-level police officers, explicitly differentiating from lateral officers. They want new police entering in, which will add to the pool of employees in the state as opposed to hiring laterals from agency to agency. The state will fund up to 75% of salary and benefits during the grant period, which expires in June, 2028. So we are on a very compressed timeline on this. The maximum state contribution per position is $125,000 per officer per year.

41:07 And the city of Vancouver will provide a 25% match. Our application is in the current round of requests, which opened up on July 1st. And we request limited term funding for 16 new officers. And again, we'll sustain those, or we intend to sustain those with the sales and use tax. And this would be the final piece of that triad, the public safety sales and use tax. As I've said already, 1/10th of 1% tax. That's a penny for every $10 spent. It's $6 million in annual revenue. It can be councilmanically imposed through an ordinance. So today we're doing our council workshop with you to re-socialize this with you and the community. We intend to come back in August or September with the ordinance for your consideration and approval. And then should you approve that, the tax collection for this sales and use tax

42:06 would begin in January of 2027. It would sustain those 16 new sworn positions and some additional non-sworn positions. With that, I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you. - Thank you very much. Councilors. Councilor Perez. - Hi, just clarify for me, I got a little confused on, I was looking at the 13 officers from Prop 5 and then the statewide grant funds, 16 new officers, but then I heard that the grant was for training. So is it training of the 13 officers or is the grant being requested to hire 16 new officers and train them? So can you just, I got a little confused on that. - Yeah, absolutely.

43:06 It can be a little bit confusing here. So Proposition 5 funded 13 officers. That's totally separate. Those are sustained. The grant will be hiring in 16 new officers or that's our intended goal is to hire in 16 new officers. Some of the funding will go towards training. We also applied for their fees for like their basic law enforcement academy, some of the equipment associated with those officers, like what they were on their person, vehicles, as well as salary and benefits. That's limited term funding for those 16 positions. And so then the sales tax would help sustain those beyond that period of time. So those are two separate, but all components of what the Police Community Advisory Committee recommended. - All right. And so none of the grant or the sales tax is going to training for the 13 officers? - That's correct. - Just the 16. Okay. Thank you for that clarification. - Councilor.

44:06 - I had a couple of questions, with the maximum contribution from the state being the 125 plus our match, does that actually like add up to the full cost? There's all the benefits in retirement and matches and everything else that's like a full package of an employee. Does that equate to that? - It's close. Yeah, it's not gonna be quite there. It'll be just a little bit under, but since we'll be collecting revenue beginning in 2027 on the sales tax, should it be approved by council, we'll be able to supplement that additional. So the 16 officers, any gap between their total costs and what we're bringing in from the grant, we'll be able to cover that with the sales tax. - Okay. And then there was a mention of non-sworn hires for, that was this sales tax, right? Not the grant.

45:05 - That's correct. - And what would those non-sworn employees be doing? - Troy Price, chief of police. We have several support roles that still need to be filled in the agency. As we bring more people in, that's more people we need in evidence. There are several support roles that happen, that people in IT, there's people who take care of our IT needs or people who take care of, thank you, training. And so it just grows and it helps us to continue to provide support for those additional sworn bodies. - Okay. And so, and that would be, so there's 16 officers plus additional sworn would be, what would be part of the sales tax? - Non-sworn. - Yeah. - Non-sworn. - Non-sworn, sorry. Okay. And there's definitely an interest of ensuring our co-response that we're doing

46:05 continues to be sustained and if anything expanded to make sure we're meeting the need. So I just wanted to check in and see if that was also on the list. - So we're always looking to enhance that. It just helps us meet the needs of the community. As more people move here, we understand that there's gonna be even greater need in that area as well. - Okay. I definitely have an interest in that and I know the community does as well. And as we continue to have these crises, it's really important that we have that co-response model and that it's adequate at the level that we need and also predicting the future too. So a lot of this is predicting the future on what our needs are. I also wanted to, what did this note mean? I wrote carve-outs and I don't know why. So it might come back to me. Thank you. - Councilor Hanson. - Thank you, Mayor. Taking a look here with the 16 and 16,

47:02 what is your attrition through retirement each year? I mean, how is this going to enhance? You see where I'm going here? - Yes, I do. So this is over and above where we currently are staffed right now. We are trying to keep pace with retirements and I think we actually had reached our level where we brought an additional three people on under the Prop 5 funding. And then the second we did that, then we had someone else retire. And so we gained three, lose one. So we'll kind of be in that mode. We are stepping up our recruitment efforts through our recruitment and backgrounds department. And so we're going to, I'll be honest, we want to steal the best lateral officers that we can under the Prop 5 money. And we want to entice people to enter this field who may have never even considered it before under the sales tax money, if that's approved.

48:00 So we are fully understanding that we need to ramp our efforts up and we're positioned to do that right now. - Thank you. - Chief, it was important that you made a comment here. Prop 5, we can use for laterals. - Correct. - The sales tax, we can only use for brand new officers. - So not exactly. The grant can only be used for entry-level, brand new officers. Prop 5 is flexible. And if I can add to what the Chief just said, as a component of the grant, in addition to our recruiting efforts that are ongoing now, we also ask for additional revenue to be able to supplement some of the staffing in our backgrounds and hiring unit as well to expedite that hiring process as much as we can. - Okay, good point, thank you. Entry-level on the grant. Okay, yes, Councilor Stover, go ahead. - Thank you, Mayor, and thank you all for being here.

49:00 And it's great to be making progress. At one point, and is this still true, that the sales tax, us doing the sales tax was a requirement of the grant? - It is not, they're mutually exclusive. The qualification for both is the same. And so I think that's where it got confused because initially it was advertised as, you must qualify for the sales tax to be eligible for the grant. But now as long as you qualify either or both. - Okay, great, thank you. And now for the elephant. What would this bring sales tax in the city to? - Honestly, I'm not prepared to answer that question. I would actually have to look to the city and ask. Councilor? - I will have to look because I know what ours adds,

49:57 but the county has made some changes real recently. - I think the number is 8.8. I just, we, I'm not saying I don't support this, but it's still at the same time something we need to keep in mind that all these great things keep adding up. So thank you. - While he's looking that up, Councilor Harless, go ahead. - I remember what my note was for now. And it was actually related to that with, you know, having the property tax, just all these things are adding up right now and being in an affordability crisis right now, I was curious if there were carve-outs for like specific, I know sometimes we can and sometimes we can't

50:55 for like certain products or something like essentials. I assume the answer is no, but I wanted to ask. - I don't think the legislation was written flexibly enough for carve-outs like that. I think it's gonna be a universal one-tenth of 1%. - Okay. - Councilor Stover, with the county having adopted their version of this sales tax rate, we are at 0.089 right now. - So city manager adding the 0.1 would bring us up to? - 0.09. - Yeah. Yes. Councilor Stover, go ahead. - To Council Member Harless's last point,

51:51 carve-outs, I'm saying this because I've been part of conversations at Association Washington Cities. So that's why I have knowledge. The quote unquote millionaire's tax provided carve-outs for things. If that gets overturned or thrown out by the courts, those carve-outs, I believe are tied and would go away. So, yeah. - Any other questions of Seth? - Mayor, if I could, I think just to help with the context on some of this discussion, I think the question might come up about what changed between proposition four and proposition five. And if you think back to proposition four, JC has already talked about some of the conditions

52:51 that changed as far as HB 2442 being passed and the new state grant program being created. But with the second one, we really focused on how many people could we accommodate within our existing facilities? Because proposition five was also accompanied by the knowledge that at some point the city was gonna have to add another building and that there would be an excess levy bond vote that would be put in front of the public and then that there would be in future years the likelihood of a sales tax vote being put out there to both pay for the cost of operating that facility but the ongoing costs of those officers. So it was a very long seven, eight year process with multiple asks that would have needed to be put in front of the public. And with the second one, we really worked to simplify it, work within our existing facilities. Part of the driver on the existing facilities was that annexation discussions actually started to happen as the county and the city moved through

53:50 our respective comprehensive planning processes and looking at the future of the area. That was not part of the original discussions and as those types of things take place, if annexation starts to occur, that changes our needs, it changes the possibility of facilities locations and trying to do something with locating a facility now really would have seemed premature. So those conditions changed as well. - Thank you. Chief, JC, Erica, thank you so very much. - Thank you. - Thank you. - That concludes our workshops and it puts us into a break. We will be back at 6.30 for our regular council meeting. Thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]