City Council Workshops

0:00 (upbeat music) - Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Vancouver City Council. It is Monday, July 20th, 2026, thank you. I'm Anne McEnerny-Ogle, Mayor for the City of Vancouver, and it is four o'clock time for our community survey results. City Manager, do you have any comments? - Nothing further to add, Mayor. We can launch right into it. - All right, let's go ahead, Laura. Please introduce yourself, and let's go. - Great, thank you, Mayor, Council. My name is Laura Shepherd. I'm the Communications Director for the city, and I'm here today to present the 2026 community survey for the biennium budget. The city worked with DHM Research, a firm that has a long history of measuring public opinion

0:59 in the Pacific Northwest. This is our third biennium budget survey that they have conducted for the city. Our other surveys were conducted in 2022 and 2024. I'll leave it to DHM to speak to the mythology. Did I say mythology? Methodology must have Odyssey on the brain, but I wanna point out that the survey was available in English and the city's two target languages of Spanish and Russian as identified in the city's language access plan. This survey marks the second year that we've included performance measurement questions along with resident sentiment and opinion items. This year's survey, I worked with DHM to develop questions focused on resident's opinions on the economy, affordability, and changes in spending behavior. I felt that this was important given the concern in the community around pocketbook issues that residents are facing and how those pressures are increasingly shaping daily life and financial decisions in the community.

1:59 Also different this year, we added focus groups for a deeper dive on a few key issues. The two focus groups were held this weekend, so we don't have a full analysis yet, but early findings may be referenced as we move through the survey findings. And then once presented to you, the report and the full crosstabs will be available on the city's website on the data hub portal. And I'd like to introduce and turn it over to Jen Hoecker, Vice President at DHM, who led our research. And hopefully. - Thank you so much, Laura. - Tawny. - Can you hear me okay? - We can. - There you are. - We can, Jen. I'm sorry, I'm having-- - Thank you, Jen. - We're having issues with the clicker. Tawny? That's okay. There we go. So Jen, take it away. - Okay, great. So I can't really see the research slides,

2:57 but I'm just gonna kind of go through Laura, and if you just, I'll probably just say the slide number that you're on. - We're on slide three. - Slide two, okay, perfect. So I think Laura already went over all of the kind of areas that we really tried to explore with this survey. So just to give her a bit of a deeper click down into the methodology, it was a mixed mode survey. And what that means is that when we had the ability to call individuals, they could either take the survey by phone or via text message and go straight to a web portal. It was about 15 minutes long. And what we did was we really wanted to make sure it was a representative sample of Vancouver city residents. So we did set quotas by area, gender, age, race, education, and income, just to make sure that we were really making sure that we were kind of getting at that representative sample and that all respondents that could participate had the ability to, which is why we also offered it in Spanish

3:56 and Russian as well. And then just to kind of go over a little bit more of the technical research side, the margin of error here is around 5%. That means when we ask a question, if we asked it to a hundred people, the responses would be within five percentage points of any given target. And so with that, I think we can kind of jump right in. - Great, if I can ask you to pause for just a moment. Tawny, is there a view where Jen can actually see the slides? - I can see it now. - Oh, you can? - Now I can see it. - Okay, okay, good. - It just had switched over. - Oh, good. - Perfect. Okay, so we started with kind of general moods and perceptions of the quality of life in Vancouver. And this chart might look a little scary at first glance. We're seeing that about in 2022, we started at 68% of respondents saying that their quality of life was getting worse.

4:55 We have made progress on that with 55% now saying their quality of life is getting worse. And we've seen the people saying that it's getting better or saying the same, starting to come up a bit as well. So 22% saying the same and 20% getting better. A lot of these things are gonna be directly tied to kind of the economy, how people feel about their personal finances. And so as we go through the survey, it's gonna add a lot more depth and color to why respondents and residents are feeling that way. But we are moving in the right direction. When we dig in a little bit more and we asked people, so why are those individuals that did feel the quality of life was getting better? What was it about Vancouver that was making them feel that way? And around 50% said there was a lot of positive growth and development and when we looked deeper into the open-ended responses, what we really found was, is that was looking at kind of the development going on. So the waterfront was mentioned,

5:55 people were seeing that there was new buildings going up, more apartment complexes. It really made it seem like there is new businesses opening up in the downtown area as well. And there was a lot of mentions about parks and how clean the parks were and things like that. We also saw some mentions of transportation and infrastructure. This was one of the areas that we were able to dig into a little bit more in the focus groups. And it really was kind of encapsulating of everything that makes the city work, but it really did focus more on kind of the streets, the roadways, traffic patterns, ability to kind of be able to navigate the city and feel safe while doing so. So that kind of runs the gamut, but I would say it's mostly focused on the transportation infrastructure. And then I want to comment a little bit on that 42% saying it's a generally positive or good place to live. People move here 'cause they don't want to live in Portland or Seattle. They think that Vancouver is a far superior location.

6:53 It's where they want to go to raise families, to get a better quality of life. And so they really do think it's a clean and lovely place to live. Now, if you go to the next one on kind of the other side of this, why do they think the quality of life in Vancouver is getting worse? And that's really predominantly focused on homelessness. It's a visible problem that when they see that in their day-to-day life, that's some of the things that contribute to them not feeling that Vancouver is improving from that perspective. There's also a lot of talk right now about cost of living, inflation. We got into a much deeper dive of that during the focus groups. And it really comes down to a respondent saying like prices are going up, but wages aren't keeping pace. And so really what they're dealing with from an economic perspective is the inability to kind of keep up with rising costs around them without seeing that commensurate increase in pay.

7:53 We also saw a little bit about crime and safety. Affordable housing was a big topic during the focus groups. I think that kind of stems from the same kind of economic hardships and conditions as well. And then there was mention of kind of, you know, government inefficiency, taxes being increased, just really wanting a little bit more transparency with government actions as well. And so when we asked them about, you know, how do they perceive the current economic conditions in Vancouver? Again, this is a little bit more closely together, but it does fluctuate from where we started in 2022. We have 53% reporting that the economic conditions are poor and 42% are good. Like I said, it kind of fluctuates from where we started, but we end up back at the same place. A lot of this is out of the local community hands. Again, people, you know, again, are kind of conflating

8:51 the economic conditions in Vancouver as being heavily impacted by what's going on at a state and national level as well. And so, you know, as things change or as things improve, we should also see this starting to improve as well. Hey, let's get into city services. So the first one, you know, we did ask residents, what is the most important issue for city officials to address? And what we really found here was that we saw homelessness go down from where we were in 2024. That was a very top issue for 44% of people in 2024. And that went down to 29% in 2026. And where we see kind of what's increasing is infrastructure. And I think, you know, what we see there from an infrastructure perspective, knowing what we have uncovered within the focus groups, it's really about kind of wanting that, the street maintenance,

9:49 wanting their intersections to be safe, wanting to be able to navigate sidewalks and have sidewalks and bike lanes. A lot of those things, the city has already gotten credit for in their minds, but it is something that they want to see continuously improve, particularly when they start to complete housing with it as well. Some people view housing separately from infrastructure and some people view it as embedded. Now, this is a little bit of an eye chart. So I'm gonna walk through it in a few steps, but first I'd love you all to focus on kind of those top three. We were asking them their level of satisfaction with the value they receive from their taxes and fees. And so what we see them satisfied with are the mix of businesses in their neighborhood at 59%, the general city services, 58%, and feeling connected to their neighbors. And what we really want to focus on and what we don't want to see is if we look at that not too or not at all satisfied,

10:47 we want that dark red or dark orange to be as small as possible, because those are the individuals that more are very upset with those services that are not at all satisfied. And those individuals can often be the loudest and the most disruptive. And we want to make sure that nobody feels that way, right? So I think that those are something that we always want to watch when we look at these kind of scaled bar charts. We also see feeling connected to your neighbors, 12%, I don't know, but at the same time, I really think that 58% compared to 29% is super strong. If you go to the next slide, these ones, people aren't feeling quite as satisfied with. So right now, the level of safety in the city, we see 52% are not too or not at all satisfied with the level of safety compared to 46% that are satisfied. We see a similar pattern with city streets and highways, 58% are not satisfied currently compared to 40%. And when we look at these two, again,

11:47 we want to look at the strength of the intensity of those feelings. So we can see on people that are satisfied, the only people that are very satisfied are 12 and 9%, right? We want to see that dark green bar grow. And when we look on the other side, we see 23% and 32% that are not at all satisfied with the level of safety or city streets and highways. So again, we want to work to remove the intensity and move it up the ladder towards the dark green bars and people feeling somewhat or very satisfied. The last one I'll talk about is disaster preparation. This is a little bit more tied. People aren't sure whether they're satisfied or dissatisfied with disaster preparation. And that's mainly because they're not really sure what the city is currently doing or kind of what the disaster preparedness plan is. So we see over a third of respondents saying they don't know to rate the city service. And then we also wanted to look at how these factors changed over time.

12:47 So even in the city services that we see performing the best and that have the highest level of satisfaction, we also see that they have lost some satisfaction over time from 2024. So the mix of neighborhood businesses went down nine points, general city services went down two, and feeling connected to your neighbors went down six points. And so that's also something we want to keep our finger on the pulse of to make sure that those maintain or improve. And then when we look at kind of the latter end of the scale where these seem to be holding a bit more steady. So we are moving people in the right direction in terms of the level of safety in the city and disaster preparedness. So things are moving in the right direction even though right now sentiment is more on the negative side. We also really wanted to look at if there was differences in terms of demographics. And so when we look at the level of safety, 46% said they were satisfied.

13:46 We see white residents being more satisfied with the level of safety in the city. So 50% compared to that 46%. And where we see people that are less satisfied are residents of color and only 37% said they're satisfied with the level of safety in the city. When we look at city services overall, age 65 plus are definitely the least satisfied. Only 40% are satisfied with city services overall. So that index is below that 58%. And then we also see long-term residents who've lived in Vancouver for more than 10 years being less satisfied with general city services compared to the newer residents that have just moved into the area. We did get a little bit of a look at this in the focus groups. Longer term residents have seen the city change from a very small area. Some people have been there for 40 years and they've kind of seen all the development happen. So they're really gauging things from a very different vantage point

14:44 than someone who has moved from Portland two years ago or Seattle or kind of just moved into the neighborhood. They really have very different contexts for evaluating their level of satisfaction. And then we also asked them, what do they consider city services as that kind of highest priority within the city's budget? And what we see is really people looking to those essential services first for being their highest priority in the city budget. So fire and emergency medical services, maintaining streets, also police services, stormwater services, affordable housing, attracting businesses. Those are really kind of the essential services that people want and they need those taken care of before they can kind of move down into that latter half of the list. So you can see that homelessness support systems kind of come up throughout,

15:43 but when you ask them to kind of prioritize what they wanna see, they're gonna go with what impacts them first as their top priority and then they wanna see other things improving as well. And I will say too, many respondents in the focus groups brought up police services. They felt that fire and rescue were very quick to respond to calls, very kind of present and visible within the neighborhood and they wanted to see more of that from police services as well. They mentioned a little bit of kind of longer times for 911 calls and things like that, so they just wanted to see a bit more visibility and so that kind of bumped up police services as well in terms of being a higher priority in the city budget. And then we did wanna look again at how individuals in these different demographic subgroups were feeling. And so when we look at police services, older residents definitely place a higher priority on police services than other age categories

16:42 and this includes kind of 45 plus. And then also residents who have lived in the city for more than 10 years prioritize police services more kind of than the newer residents as well. And then we look at affordable housing again, it's really gonna be kind of the sweet spot for prioritization among residents 30 to 64. Those individuals that are kind of in the current workforce right now, maybe starting families, have older families, those individuals are ones that are really prioritizing that. And then also 80% of residents new to Vancouver say affordable housing is a top priority. A lot of them are moving again out of markets like Portland and Seattle and they really value the fact that Vancouver has more affordable places to live.

17:32 And then they still, we talk about, we wanted them to tell us their top three budget priorities for the city. And what we do see is again, we see them hold in comparison to 2024, we see them hold pretty steady, but where we see those huge bumps are in affordable housing and homeless supports and also water, sewer and stormwater services as well. So you can kind of see police services, fire and medical, they're always gonna be important to respond as we don't see a lot of differentiation there, but really we do see the importance increasing in some of these later categories. Okay, now I think the personal finance section is gonna add a lot of color and context to the way people are feeling even in regards to city services. So for this one, we just wanted to understand the perceptions of how affordable they think each of these things are in Vancouver. And as you can see, it's almost all respondents

18:30 that are saying that it's not at all or somewhat affordable. So yeah, 75% are saying it's not affordable. Well, together it's 93%, 91% say housing is not affordable, 88% groceries and 79% taxes. And so you can really see that respondents are kind of feeling the pinch right now, especially with kind of inflation and tariffs and things like that that have kind of hit their pocketbooks.

19:01 And then, you know, we also see, you know, when we look kind of across demographic groups, we also wanted to see, you know, how housing, if housing is unaffordable for them as well. And we really don't see a ton, although we do see that white residents are a little bit more likely to find it out of reach, but otherwise it does stay relatively consistent. And then, you know, when we're thinking about what else they, you know, that they're not finding affordable is, you know, the renters are less likely to view property taxes as unaffordable. There isn't that direct connection to them by seeing if property taxes would be passed on to them in their rents. And so, you know, while they, you know, and especially from the focus groups, renters were just saying, you know, it's almost impossible for us to, you know, move because of, you know, investment that we have to pay in two or three months rent. A lot of people don't have that to even get started

20:00 in the rental market. So they're really focused on kind of meeting that monthly rent barrier and not thinking about all the taxes and fees that could go into it. Okay. And so then, you know, we've asked respondents kind of, how has this impacted your discretionary spending? And we really did define kind of that extra spending is meaning money spent out on things like eating out, fun, shopping, not basic necessities or essentials. And what we really do see is two thirds have said their extra spending has decreased a little bit or a lot, 38% saying it's decreased a lot. So it is having an impact across the board. And really what we see is, you know, when there's rising prices, they're really cutting those discretionary shopping habits. So they're reducing the amount that they're eating out. That was kind of a huge thing that was also echoed in the focus groups. Cutting back on spending for entertainment and shopping,

20:59 canceling or delaying those kinds of big purchases, switching to cheaper brands and stores. And then also their basic needs are being impacted. When I look at, you know, 36%, so that's about a third of respondents, reducing spending on kind of their basic needs is something we really need to pay attention to. And then also kind of the next ones are a bit more negative through this lens, right? You know, using savings to cover everyday expenses, a quarter of people are doing that. Using credit cards and taking on debt to pay for things. And then also, you know, two in 10 are looking for other ways to earn income so that they can supplement their earnings. What we do see from a demographic standpoint is, you know, when the price of basic necessities go up, women are more likely to change their spending habits. So we see, you know, just from that list that I walked you through earlier,

21:55 women tend to do more of those things compared to men. The only thing, if you kind of trail down to the bottom of the list, when we asked, you know, I don't spend, I don't change my spending much, men were more likely to agree with that one than women. But as you can kind of see kind of across the board, women are more likely to be looking for these ways to figure out how to reduce their extra spending to make ends meet.

22:23 And then we asked them, you know, kind of exactly what are you doing? What's the change in your shopping or spending patterns in the past months? And, you know, over half of people are just shopping less overall and buying fewer items. We also see a lot of brands switching, 42%, you know, trying to save money. They're trying to be more economical and changing, you know, how they, the changing and combining when they go on shopping trips so they can save on gas. And then, you know, what we see is 20% more also crossing the border to shop in Oregon to kind of get rid of, to get rid of the sales tax and then to also, you know, sometimes benefit from gas price differentials. And so that's only two in 10, but we do, you know, kind of see that. And what I heard in the focus groups is if I'm going there anyways, I will stop and buy and stock up on things that are more expensive in Washington and in Vancouver, but I won't make the extra trip there.

23:22 And then again, we see that, you know, women are changing their behaviors more than men or reporting that they're changing their behaviors more than men. They're buying fewer items, they're switching brands. The one thing that they're not doing more is they're not gonna go shop in Oregon to avoid paying the sales tax. We see slightly more men doing that, but you know, that's pretty negligible. And again, you know, we see men a little bit more likely to say that they're not stopping or changing where they spend money. And then finally, you know, when we ask them to look ahead in the next six months, you know, what do they think is gonna happen with their extra spending? And we see that 71% say their extra spending, they think it's gonna stay the same or it's gonna continue to decline. And so 42% actually say that it's going to decrease in the next six months. This was a big topic, you know, that we covered in focus groups too. And there was a connection between knowing that that's also gonna hurt small businesses within the city,

24:22 but just not seeing a clear path forward. Now we're gonna get into taxes. And so we wanted to see kind of how the impact of like everything that's happening in our lives, all the things that are impacting them financially, how they currently feel about the level of taxation within the city of Vancouver and kind of what would they be able to kind of find palatable going forward for city services. And really what we found is that the best is always if they're gonna pay more, they want more. And so we see 49%, which was consistent with 2024 saying, they'd be willing to pay more in taxes if it increased the level of city services. We do see, you know, 32% strongly disagreeing. You can kind of see that going the whole way down. There is gonna be a segment of constituents that are against any taxes in any form. But we do wanna see more people that agree that are more open to it.

25:19 What we did see also is only 38% are willing to pay more in taxes, even if it's necessary to support the increased cost of providing the current level of service. So they're not as open if it's just gonna maintain at current levels, they don't wanna see tax increases, they definitely wanna see that improvement. That was echoed within the focus groups, even though there was like a little bit of, okay, I understand, you know, more people are moving here, that should be increasing the tax base, but, you know, if we need more services, we're just gonna have to pay more 'cause those services are essential. And then we do see a constituency of saying they are not willing to pay more in taxes, even if it means the city must reduce the level of services due to increased cost. So 44%, you know, say they're not willing to go anymore and they're even willing to kind of take cuts on the current level of services due to increased costs.

26:18 Okay, and so then, you know, we wanted to see if taxes were increased, what type of taxes would you support, excuse me, or oppose the city using the following funding approaches? And we see that the most kind of appetite is really to put taxation on businesses or corporate tax increases. And the focus group, they really differentiated between making corporations pay higher taxes versus small businesses within the city. They didn't want the extra burden to be placed on smaller businesses. There's also openness to a combination of different taxes and fees so it all doesn't hit in one area or affect one population. Much less appetite for a sales tax or a property tax increase on its own. And then we also did look at that, you know, by age. We do see that the older residents,

27:16 65 plus are more likely to oppose, excuse me, any of these kind of tax increases. You can see 80%, 82% down in the local sales tax or property tax increase. And, you know, I think that that just speaks to older residents potentially being on a more of a fixed income and not, you know, being able to, you know, adjust their level of income when prices go up. Okay, so I can walk through the key findings. I think, you know, it really echoes what we've seen overall within the presentation. And I'm also happy to take questions as we go through. But in terms of the general mood, again, you know, quality of life perceptions may not be in the best place right now but we do see it trending in the right direction. And then, you know, they really tie their quality of life to kind of tangible progress. They love seeing the new development

28:16 and growth at the waterfront, but they do wanna see, you know, homelessness improve, the streets improve, things like that, and be able to kind of control more of the cost of living and housing affordability. You know, there isn't a ton of economic confidence right now. You know, it is a little bit volatile. I don't see it kind of holding steady. But again, that's heavily tied to what's happening at the state and national level and residents really do recognize that as well. When we look at perceptions of city services, I think, you know, residents are growing a bit less anxious about homelessness. They do see improvements. I think, you know, what we did see in the focus groups is a little bit different, is they wanted more intervention strategies before people became homeless. There was large recognition that once you're on the streets, there are services that you can apply for and there's help you can get.

29:13 But more of the low income respondents that we talked to were like, "I've been on the edge a few times "and it would really be great to prevent people "from having to be on the streets in the first place." And it makes it easier for them to get back on their feet if the intervention was earlier. So that was just something we found in the focus groups. You know, also we do see safety increasing respondents, again, in the focus groups. We're talking about how most areas of the city feel very safe, but there are pockets and they would like to see increased police presence. And then, you know, they really do wanna see those essential city services funded first. Those are things, you know, that they depend on in their day-to-day life. And once those, you know, feel comfortable to them, then they're open to exploring additional options. Then on the personal finance front, I think, you know, right now affordability is just really a universal strain. It's reaching every demographic group right now

30:12 in terms of, you know, paying higher, your grocery bills are higher, your gasoline bills are higher, and housing is also increasing. And so, you know, they're under pressure and they're trying to do what they can to alleviate that, whether it's just cutting back on their discretionary spending, taking on, you know, additional jobs, or finding that kind of after hours job to really meet those gaps. And I think, you know, what I heard a lot of was that, you know, they really just want their wages to be able to keep up with the change in their basic necessities. And then finally on the tax front, we know, and I think, you know, everyone, no one loves taxes, but, you know, they are willing mostly to impose taxes on corporations, not small businesses. Understanding too, that those costs may get passed on to them at some point, but then they felt like they really had more control over whether or not they needed to buy that corporation or company's product or services.

31:12 So they felt a little bit more in control. And then, you know, I think one thing that I'll add that we really found in the focus groups was that, and I think it's not a surprise to anyone here, but they would be more open to taxation if they had an easy place to go to, to see where their current tax dollars are being spent. You know, we always hear in talking about taxes that they want that transparency, that they want to go, you know, for more information. There's really lack of knowledge about where things at the state level like lottery or things like that, or gambling for casinos, like where does that revenue go? There was a lot of questions. And so I think, you know, people being more educated would be helpful about like through the system about where their tax dollars go and make them potentially more open to considering those things. But right now, you know, again, with their personal financial situations and things like that, they really are looking

32:09 for more creative ways to get money to the city and get money for those essential services, which they do recognize. Okay. And then the last chart really is just demographics. We wanted to make sure, you know, that we put in basically kind of the mix of age, gender, language, race, ethnicity, et cetera, that we captured, you know, the income levels within the city of Vancouver and that we made sure we got a representation kind of across the board for West Central and East areas within the city, and then also kind of rent, home ownership, et cetera. So I'm happy to dig into any of these if any of you have questions.

33:03 - And thank you, Jen. And that is the data. We're happy to answer any questions you might have. - Councilors, do you have questions or comments? Councilor Fox. - Hi, one of the first questions I have is just out of the focus groups or anyone else we surveyed, do we know how many of them were business owners or lead businesses, given that response rate being taxed the businesses and not the individuals? - We did have two or three respondents in the focus groups, which is a much smaller category. We did not ask that in the survey. So that's definitely a flag that we have for future versions so that we can see how many are business owners. But of those in the focus groups that were business owners or small business owners, they definitely were open to corporations,

34:00 but did not want the taxes for themselves. And they were more hesitant that increased taxes on corporations would drive them out of the States. They cited Starbucks and Amazon as potential threats to leave based on the millionaire's tax or other corporate taxations. There was definitely drawbacks that people recognized, but they weren't as bad as what they thought would be their personal drawback for taking taxes than on themselves. - Okay, yeah, that one definitely stood out for me was that slide 32, understanding that some of the ways that we're going to fund or hoping to fund some of our services are around sales tax increases. And then the other takeaway I had was slide 15 with the views of safety between our populations

34:56 and really hopefully looking to staff to come back to us and talk to us a little bit more about how they're going to close that gap. That seems pretty significant that we have 37% of our residents of color that are not satisfied with safety or the feelings of safety in our community. And then my final comment is really around the disaster preparedness one that kind of surprised me to see so many people not knowing anything that we might be doing to prepare for disaster. And this really speaks to us as a city being resilient to impending future disasters that could hit us and anywhere from wildfires to flooding, those kinds of things that typically do hit the city at different levels of extreme levels that could happen. And so again, I'd say those two stood out to me

35:54 and I'd like staff to talk to us in the future about how to help with more information that needs to go out there or improve our service levels in those respects, because it's pretty important that our community knows that if disaster strikes that we're ready to respond. - Councilor, I definitely agree. And when I saw that data, I really just looked at it as opportunity to move the needle on that and give us something clear in that area to communicate about. - Okay, thank you. - Had the same reaction. - Councilor Perez. - Hi, thank you. Just to piggyback on what Councilor Fox mentioned, can you elaborate a little bit more on the safety portion? Anything in particular about is it the crime? Is it the guns? Is it the drugs? Is it the neighborhood? Is it a certain area? Is it, I mean, a little more specificity or is it more general?

36:53 'Cause it could be fine. - I'm gonna ask Jen to hop in in a second 'cause she could tell you a little bit more what she saw in the data. But I was wondering, given the moment in time that we took this survey, we were coming off several months of a lot of concern and activity in the community around actions at the federal level. So I was wondering myself if that was potentially impacting those numbers. But Jen, did you see anything in the data that might tell us more here? - You know, what we really saw in the survey data was one, kind of the visibility of the homeless population or those in need of mental health services. There was a lot of compassion echoed, but at the same time, the feelings of unsafe if they have to walk through parks or pass them and someone's having mental difficulties at that time. They also did talk about, this is more in the focus groups, which I found interesting,

37:52 is that they were talking about that there isn't sidewalks and intersections are really kind of a thing for them that also bleeds into kind of the public safety. They're even called out a few that I'm not gonna remember off the top of my head. But they did say, when there's no sidewalks or things like that, that also impacts kind of their ability to feel safe kind of within their area, but more of a physical safety perspective. And then I think the final piece that I would really add there from a safety perspective, it did seem to highly vary by, I wanna say income level. So we had income level and age. So we had a lot of older respondents within the focus groups that cited how quick first responders were anytime that they called, that they were given information on different lines to use outside of 911, if they were calling for kind of non-emergency situations, that they were very happy with the response time. And then we had other respondents

38:49 that seemed to be more lower income that said, we had a break in at our apartment, the door was kicked off the hinges and it took at least 45 minutes to show up. And so there was a lot of discrepancy that way. And again, that is a very small sample size, but those were some of the examples that people were sharing. Thank you. - All right, thank you. Councilor Arliss. - Yeah, I was also wanting to know a little bit more nuance of the safety, like what, why POC feel less safe. So thank you for explaining some of it. I'm sure there's a lot more depth to get into as well. And then what was the target? I see that there was 400 people that responded. What were you aiming for? - That was our target. - That was your target? Okay. - To have a representative sample in the city with a low margin of error. - Okay, thank you. - Thank you. - Councilor Stobbe.

39:46 - Thank you, Mayor. And thank you to the both of you for continuing to give us this information. I'll start with my desire comment. We're still way overrepresented in ownership when 50% of our residents rent and only 21% of the respondents are renters. That definitely skews things. It's an interesting story around crime. So on slide 11, we get this great trend that concerns about crime have dropped significantly in the past four years, which is tremendous.

40:46 But then on 12, the very next slide, then we run into people still feeling unsafe.

41:00 And then we have police, the desire for investment in police just barely above 50%. And then we have police services lagging being a major point. So we have this interesting story there that's hard to kind of parse out. Or I'm trying to parse out how does this come together in a cohesive message for us going into this next budget cycle. And as a side comment, back to previous explanation

42:00 from Jen, going back to 2020, when we talk safety in 2020 as a core value, we really were talking about our street. So it's interesting to hear that that perception we had in 2020 still holds that there is that insecurity when we don't have a good sidewalk network. And I've also, in the intermediate years, heard a public emergency management person discuss that we can spend a lot of money on things like fire alarms in people's homes, but how people feel connected in their neighborhood

42:56 actually has a higher impact on whether or not there's gonna be a fire in a particular neighborhood, which comes back to that feelings of safety. There's a lot here and I could keep going, but I'll go ahead and cut off there. - Thank you, Councilor. - Okay, all right. Thank you so much for the information. - You're welcome, thank you. - Let's go ahead and transition over to our 2027-2028 biennial budget. City manager.

43:49 (gavel bangs) All right, so we'll go ahead and transition over to discussion on the budget. It was intentional to give the council the background information from DHM before we have this discussion on the budget because public sentiment we thought was something that could inform some of the decisions or some of the guidance you give us for how to frame up the budget going forward. I will say that this was one of the driving forces between why we took such a more forensic look at the budget and looked at the existing resources and how we can best deploy them. We wanted to be able to, as the survey showed, better tell that story to the public about how we were stewarding the money that we already receive before we would take that next step of going out and potentially asking them for more. So for this point, I'll go ahead and turn it over to Lisa just for some of the framing

44:49 on how we'll go through the discussion and then move on from there. - Good afternoon, mayor, council, and community. Lisa Brandl, deputy city manager, CFO. We are entering our third workshop for the biennium budget and as city manager Lon Plakan stated, this is really a frame up of a discussion following the survey results that you heard and also the presentation that we gave last Monday. And so we wanna get your reflection and thoughts on the presentation, discuss a little bit about the prioritization exercise that has been going on and discuss any possible revenue tools and then just preview again the next steps in the budget process. So really this workshop is really a discussion with you

45:47 to hear your thoughts and take notes as we continue working on the biennium budget. So with that, I'm gonna turn it back over to our city manager. - All right, thank you, Lisa. So I wanted to take a little bit of time here to just provide an opportunity for the council if you have observations or thoughts. First impressions coming out of the information that you just heard from DHM. I will say that one of the things that DHM is also able to do is that they do statewide research. So they're able to compare, for example, some of the sentiment in Vancouver to what they're seeing in greater trends across Washington as well. But when I looked at the results initially, there were some things that I took away from the presentation that immediately jumped out and obviously being the city manager,

46:46 I'm gonna take a look and gauge that public sentiment around taxation and fees. And I would say that I do think that what we have seen with the public's willingness to do things like approve Proposition 5 have demonstrated that public sentiment that if there's an enhanced service or if there's something additional, a value proposition that the public feels is out there for that investment, they have been willing to invest more in the city and more in the organization to be able to meet those needs. I was a little more concerned about that general thought and funding existing services as juxtaposed to that willingness to pay for new and enhanced service levels. I'll also say that for me, it did illustrate the disconnect between the tools that we are being given to be able to address some of our funding gaps and I think the desires of our public. We have got a smaller toolbox and a more limited set of tools

47:45 than like the state has to be able to address some of those funding gaps. So I think that would continue to inform what our legislative priorities are going forward. But just as I think the council is aware, two of the tools that we have available for us in this coming budget cycle, one that you just heard a presentation on last week with the public safety sales tax and then the new children and families sales tax are some of the ones that the public finds to be the most objectionable. But we have very few areas that we could potentially substitute for those. So with that, I will open it up and see from the council perspective, any guidance or any thoughts that you have as we frame up the next iteration of the budget based on that public feedback. (sighs) - Councilor Stilger. - Thank you, mayor. So as you, city manager, as you were talking there,

48:45 I wrote a note here. Slide 30 was one that talked about that willingness to pay. And there, things, the question changed as we went through and almost became an opposite of itself. Meaning it was, I will pay. And at the end was, I won't pay. I will pay for additional services at the, but the last one was, I won't pay for anything. It was kind of a, but the, there was, I'm sorry we don't have this in front of us, but there was a small group, but then there was the negative group,

49:42 the opposite side of it was actually really large that made it look like, oh, well, people will pay for existing services, but I'm not sure, I'm just not really sure how to interpret that 'cause I'm wondering if people, as they were going through the survey, started to get confused on what they were answering. And I'm, yeah, so-- - So tied, let's hold on. Tawny, can you pull up that slide? Take a moment and go back into the presentation. Slide 32? - I wrote down 30, but it could be 31 'cause I know there was,

50:31 oh, 30. - That's men and women, there you go. - Okay. - That's it. - So this last one here, I am not willing to pay more in taxes even if the city must reduce the level of services. So 44% said I'm not willing, but actually over 50% said they would be willing, but that kind of counteracts what's being said before it. - So obviously, that's more than 100%. Do they get to answer each of those? Yes. - They get, yeah, so I'm assuming it's E, but it's just the, there's a, I feel like there's narratives there, and if we can go back and understand, the surveyor's gone at this point,

51:30 but I think it's worth trying to parse into the data. Or what is this slide really telling us here? Because it seems to me that there's some opposing messages happening, and I'm just wondering if they're truly opposing or were people getting confused because the question was changing and going from a positive or a negative to a positive. - Yeah, Laura, I'm sorry. Can you bring up Jen? Is Jen still available and see if she can call in?

52:26 - Perhaps we can answer that question. Let's see what Laura has for us. - It's just because the city manager continued down this pathway, so. - I just sent her a note to see if she could hop back on. Usually when we go through the data as we're preparing to come to council, DHM always flags where there's issues or where people got confused or if people gave additional comment. DHM did not indicate that the public were getting confused by that question. This is, we, as you can see, we asked this line of questioning last year as well too, and we didn't have that commentary, but if Jen can hop back on, she can certainly talk, speak more than that, and if she is not seeing my email, I'll make sure to do a follow up and ask her. - Which is fine, I realize.

53:26 - Jen is available. - Yes, I just popped back on. - I'm sorry, councilor. I'm not seeing what you're seeing. - Jen's on. - Jen's on, I'm not seeing it. How do we know? Oh, Jen, thank you so very much. - Hi. - Councilor Stover, would you go ahead? - So I'd like to hit slide 30 again.

53:51 - Okay. Laura, can you pull that up? - Yes, it's in front of us, Jen, thank you. - Okay, perfect, perfect. - So where, so the middle one, I'm willing to pay more in taxes if it is necessary to support the increased cost of providing the current level of services. We got 38% responding yes, but then we go to the last one. So we're not willing to pay more in taxes even if it means cutting back, but then the negative to that is more than 50%. So there's kind of this counter narrative between those two? - So for this one, it's a little tricky, and we should probably flip the color. So the positive side is actually the negative. So people agree they are not willing to pay more in taxes. So when we look at that 44%, they're agreeing with that statement. It's actually negative.

54:50 That's more of the negative side than the other side with saying that they disagree with that is the 28% and 24%. Do you see most people, does that make more sense? So it'd be 52% that don't agree with that at all. - But it is a little different than the previous one, the question above it, where only 44 or, no, I don't have it in front of me. - 38. - 38% said that they may support paying more in order to get the same services. - Right. - Yeah, so if you have the ability to try and parse through that more to help us understand, 'cause I don't want to overstate, my fear is I don't wanna overstate that 52%. Does that make sense? - Sure. - That 52% makes it sound like there's 52%,

55:50 they're willing to pay more to get the same level of services but that runs counter to the previous one. - Right, exactly. So when I look at it and the 52% in my mind that say they're not willing to pay any more in taxes that are disagreeing with that, so they would be willing to pay more, right? So we can kind of rephrase that slide and get that to you so it's a little bit easier to understand. But then when we look at I am willing to pay more in taxes, the one that's above that, even if it's just to support the current level of funding, you know, we only see that that's at 38%. So what I would take away from this slide is of that 52% that is willing to pay taxes that aren't completely shutting the door on taxes is that of them, their palette is for getting increased services. They're far less likely to support it if it's just maintaining the current level of service. - Okay.

56:49 Okay, thank you. - All right. - Sure. - Jen, stay with us for just a little bit. - Sure. - The councilors have, Lon, let's go back to repeat your question please. - Yeah, I'm wanting to hear from council based on what you've heard tonight and I know that there'll be opportunity to reflect and dig more into the data but I was looking for first impressions on if you wanted to provide direction on how we should frame the budget up and there'll be opportunities as we go through this budget presentation to talk about that as well but I also wanted to make sure that you were aware of what we were seeing in public sentiment. I did not want to bring you a budget that was built around a whole bunch of slates of tax and fee increases and put you in the position of saying but you knew the public didn't know anything about these and you did not give us an opportunity to provide direction to you before going in to do the next iteration of the budget.

57:48 - Councilor Harless. - I just wanted to follow up a little bit on what Council Member Stover was bringing up and I look at it more as a framing and I can see what you're bringing up, Council Member Stover. And so I see it as, you know, if the framing was about maintaining services versus taking them away, that sentiment changes even though it's technically kind of the same thing. I don't know if that's what you were also digging into but that's what I took away from that slide. And before we dive into other stuff, I just wanted to wrap that up. - Any other comments for the city manager? Not at this time. - Okay. - Lon, any other questions? - Not on that, before we get into taking a look

58:45 at the early results of the prioritization survey. - Okay, thank you. - Thank you, Jen, I think you can go eat your dinner now. - Thank you all. - Are you able to switch, Tawny? - Okay.

59:11 And I can't see it yet. - We have so many different screens. I'm wondering, is it under discussion? - It was under presentation. - Under presentation, I don't have presentation on my list. - Ah, there we are.

59:39 - On mine, it shows up under pres one. - Under mine, it's under pres two. (laughing) - Okay, I'm under discussion and I have a split screen right now so that's the best I can do, I guess. - All right, so this is the results so far of the prioritization survey that we sent out to the city council and asked you to complete. This is something that for me is important at this stage in the budget process as we think about the lines of business that the city is in and what we do and what we do well and what we should potentially look at either working with other partners to provide or how we may look at the discussion about any new or enhanced services that the city council wants us to look at over the next biennium. So the first one, and this was an important one for me, was to take a look at the universal policy themes that the city council has set out for us.

1:00:37 So community safety, equity, climate have always been the big three of the universal policy themes and high performing government was added to that to ensure that internal services and the work that we do inside the organization really received fair consideration in ranking these themes. And the reason that this was important is because there are times where the city contemplates an action where you can actually have those values be in conflict with one another. So the example that I would use is a dangerous intersection in one of our most economically vulnerable neighborhoods. Fixing that intersection may make it safer for the traveling public that's traveling primarily by car which makes it easier for people to drive which increases vehicle emissions. So it has the opposite impact of what we would like to see on climate and if it's in a vulnerable neighborhood and we have to acquire properties

1:01:36 to be able to do the intersection expansion, well, that means that it's in an opposition to equity. So we've always had that clear direction from the council on what you wanted us to look at but we did not have the order of priority for how to look at those when we are contemplating projects and where they're in opposition to each other. And so this is the results that we have so far which would indicate to us that in those cases we would want to balance the community safety aspects first then look at equity and then look at climate as we contemplate what are the keys towards making the decision to go or no go on this project or not. Certainly we would have an obligation with the council to make you aware of all of those impacts so that you could make the decision for it more a little bit on a case by case basis but as we are looking at projects writ large or putting to get the capital improvement plan together, this would be the guidance that we would fall back on. - Yes, Councilor, go ahead.

1:02:35 - Mr. City Manager, I thought I read earlier today that a very limited number of council had responded. - As of when these slides were put together, we were up to six of seven. So that's why I say there might still be room for these to adjust a little bit but they are largely complete at this point. - Okay, great, thank you.

1:03:04 Yeah, Councilor, go ahead. - Thank you, Mayor. City Manager, I appreciate the spirit of what you're trying to accomplish in asking this question. I would reflect to you that oftentimes the priority within the previous Big Three, you're now articulating Big Four, could vary greatly depending on the specific circumstances of an issue and so I would be hesitant to take this as a strong indicator of direction to build a budget 'cause the budget is a reflection of our values and our values, although they guide us when we're making decisions, how we might weigh circumstances does vary from issue to issue. So I would just offer that caveat in using this slide. - And from my perspective, this is a guideline, not gospel.

1:04:03 - Okay, are you able to advance to the next slide, Tony? - Yes. - Okay. So looking at the different areas, because of some of the limitations of the ranking sheets and the software, we did collapse some of the categories together to make it simpler and to align some of the priorities we wanted to ask you to rank with our strategic plan priorities and a couple of these I know will actually bridge a couple of different slides and I'm not on these really seeking council members to get to the point of saying, well, I think this one should move up and that one should move down. It's more a validation of the general trends. So as we look at these, if there's anything that jumps out to you as like, okay, that one just seems completely out of place to me, that's the kind of guidance that we're looking for. So with our cultural and heritage priorities, the other thing I should add is that this section

1:05:01 of the exercise is really based around things that we are already doing. This is a status quo budget, activities and initiatives that we already generally have underway. There will be an opportunity that we'll get into a little bit later here to talk about things that are missing that we should enhance and that would be the next stage from prioritization from the council is as we look at what we want us to do next, how would those rank against each other? So the leading candidate under this one is the Arts Hub maintenance contract, followed by community event permitting, city events with Inspire Vancouver and then historic reserve and trust management coming up at the bottom end of the scale. And it doesn't mean that those are not activities that are not important. They are just ones that would, relative to the other one, the council would consider the Arts Hub maintenance contract for example to be a higher priority than historic reserve and historic trust management.

1:05:59 So again, if there's any of these that appear to be wildly out of order, please let me know. You can advance to the next one, Tony. And I will also admit that as a learning opportunity for us in framing this, acknowledging that several of the city council members have provided feedback that our internal shorthand for what we call things may not necessarily provide you enough information to feel like, oh yeah, I know what that project is or I recognize it right away. So the next time we do this, we will break it out and provide more exposition. So on the economic opportunity priorities, we have the Startup Investment Fund, the Andreessen Economic Hub and then Equity in Contracting Program. That's arising out of the disparity study that was conducted through procurement to figure out what we could do to make sure that businesses and companies that have not been able to participate in being vendors for the city in the past

1:06:59 have an easier path to be able to do that. - I have a question. - Yes, Councilor. - I think this was the slide that prompted me to send the message to say I need more information on these programs. It's the first time I've heard of the Andreessen Economic Hub could you explain about that project? - Yeah, so the Andreessen Economic Hub is actually a building that we had purchased with the intent of being able to use it to help as an incubator for small businesses out of the Andreessen area. It came out of the Fourth Plain for All project and was one of the initiatives that we looked at. The feedback from that neighborhood was that they wanted to see more economic support and have more opportunities. So this was one of our responses to that. - And how much staffing and cost is this program?

1:07:53 - Just see if we have anybody from EP&H that can address that. - Well, just in general, just so that my colleagues know that I'd asked a question just for doing this exercise, I submitted my comments, but I felt as if I was some of these like this one, I was just making a guess as to what it was and what the impact is on other services and I would have appreciated having at least a couple sentence description of the project and how many staff and maybe even a level of cost moving forward. And I'd like, you did respond to me and said you'd send that to me, but I almost would plan to do the survey again once I actually have information on these. - Okay.

1:08:50 - Any other comments on this one? All right, so-- - Councilor Carlos has a comment now, go ahead. - Yeah, second, what's been brought up and also if you can include, because as I'm sitting here thinking about the equity and contracting program one, I just remembered a very specific detail that was a conclusion from that presentation that I feel like that was like a year ago. So that's the kind of, where there was a very significant disparity in minority small businesses and that were being awarded contracts from the city. And so like those kind of takeaways or like a link or something would be incredibly helpful. - All right.

1:09:48 - Okay. - Okay, so high performing government priorities actually spans several slides. So I apologize for that in advance, but there were a lot that fell into this category. And I'll just highlight that the top three in general on this section of it were strategic planning, federal state advocacy, and then annexation strategy. Annexation strategy is something that we've had several conversations with the city council about. And so, but it could have a profound impact on the organization moving forward. Vancouver for All is the efforts that are being done by our engagement and access team to really move beyond working internally facing on how we behave in relationship to our community, how our workforce reflects our community and adding that externally facing component to it.

1:10:47 So are there any in this area that any of the council members might feel like are not adequately scored or should be given more consideration? - Yes, Councilor Paulson. - Thank you. This is not in response to your question, city manager. It's more of a observation of some of the feedback that my colleagues have given so far. I have the blessing and curse of having gone through business school where things are put into quadrants with an X and a Y axis, you know, like impact and the cost and those kinds of things. And this is bringing those to mind because you were asked questions about what's the cost of this and what's the staffing. And those weren't reflected here. And the same is true here. And so you could conceivably put some of these items into a quadrants type chart and say, for example, and I'm just making this up, audio description services could be low priority,

1:11:46 but low cost and still make it into the budget very easily. Whereas if it was a low priority, high cost, and that would be a different decision-making criteria. And so in that way, so as a respondent to this survey, it feels a little bit one dimensional. And I think begs the question to you, how do you intend to use the feedback that you've received? - That's an excellent question. And so the feedback from this really in combination with what we'll do in a little bit, as far as talking about new priorities will really be used when we get to the point where we take a look at the budget. And I'll just use an example. If the city council wants us to be more deliberate and intentional and stand up programs to be more supportive of childcare across the community. We've already talked about the option to be able to use the children and family sales tax to do that. But if you tell me based on what you've seen

1:12:45 for public sentiment and your own personal values that you want us to create that program, but you do not want to create additional revenues to do that then I'll take a look at this list and I'll take a look at the ones that you have told me are the lowest priorities and see are these things that we should still be in the business of doing? Is it something that needs to be moved out to be a later priority and moved off into the parking lot? But really inform those ones that when you think about the budget and you think about the things that we have to do statutorily and contractually, they're gonna go down the list of funding first and then we'll get down into the ones that are the ones that we are doing based on council discretion or that are discretionary. But we're gonna run out of money at some point and what's gonna fall above and below the line. And so that's what I'll use 'cause to me the budget should be reflective of your priorities. So if you tell us that public safety and climate and equity

1:13:42 are three of the universal policy themes for the city, I should be able to point at the budget and show you every department, all of our activities should have a link to one of those three priorities. Some of these in here though would fall further down that list than others.

1:14:01 - Okay, other comments on this slide? Evidently not, okay. - So the next one on high performing government priorities starts with the public works asset management program development, content strategy for the website, newsletter and postage, and then the bottom one down there is adding capability to Workday to support city specific business processes. And now that I read that one again, boy does it sound jargony. - Councilor Stover, go ahead. - Thank you, Mayor. Again, I don't know where Workday is currently lacking.

1:14:57 I don't know where it's stopping, where we are struggling to perform core tasks, administrative tasks in the city. And yeah, and so it just naturally falls to the bottom because I don't know. - Mayor. - Councilor, go ahead. - I guess I should probably be more clear. For me, this exercise does not have value, this part of our presentation and because of what I've already raised. And when you look at a list like this, I really do wanna know those additional details. I was, I mean, it really is, I'll just bring it back to my day to day job where I spend the 40 hours of my week,

1:15:54 but when you put a title on a program, I think it might be very disheartening for your staff in particular to see that city council is waiting something merely on the title. I mean, if I was staff and I knew that this was gonna be the exercise that city council was doing, I would have given it a flashier title, you know? Like, hey, the CVTV viewer survey is free or low cost or something. And I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, but I'm just saying I feel for some of these prioritizations given that I don't have enough information to tell you which one is more important by title only. - Lana, I had on the previous slide, New City website was third from the bottom, but here, oh, oh, no, you can go forward.

1:16:53 But here, it's near the top. So we'll need to figure that out. Content strategy and a new website. So, okay.

1:17:18 All right, let's go to the next slide. - Okay, and the next one does get a little bit more into specific projects. I think not surprising that the interstate bridge would show up there as the second one behind the transportation program with public works. And then the third one, that would be arising out of fleet is the City of Vancouver Vehicle Data Collection and Camera Project.

1:17:47 - Okay, Councilor, go ahead. - So again-- - I'm sorry. I've been remiss in introducing you. Councilor Stover. - Council Member Tai Stover. Multi-tenant office building amenities. So this is a multi-tenant office building.

1:18:16 Again, I don't know what this is. There have been previous discussions about moving our permitting team out of here and converting the first floor into retail, but I don't know if that's this or if this is. We're gonna build a swimming pool here in the building. So it just keeps coming back to this same theme. And then Annual Family Medical Leave Act Administration feels, I'm wondering how that's even discretionary to have it be on this list. - Okay. - So thank you. - All right, next slide.

1:19:16 So here we're getting into housing and human needs priorities. I was not surprised to see in this one that the HEART team and emergency shelters were ranked very highly by the City Council. Those have been continuing priorities now through several budget cycles, then followed by the Bridge Shelter Community Court, which are associated programs with our homelessness response. Equitable development is, of course, the strategy that we've been working on in our redevelopment and investment projects to ensure that we're not inadvertently promoting gentrification and actually inadvertently harming the neighborhoods that have been under-invested in the past by making our levels of investment more commensurate with the rest of the community. - Councilor Stauber. - City Manager, where does our safe-stay communities land?

1:20:15 - I would put the safe-stay communities in with the emergency shelters. That would be the second one. - Okay, that was my guess, but I just, I wasn't sure. Thank you. - Okay. - No questions on that one. We can move to climate and natural systems. - Okay. - And on this one, the green procurement policy consultants came in at the tail end with grounds maintenance of the parks, trails, and natural spaces and right-of-ways being the highest priority. - No particular comments? - And from here, we actually move into the capital projects side of the discussion. And I think this one might be a little bit more intuitive with understanding what they are

1:21:13 versus some of the other ongoing initiatives. So with capital projects, there are actually several different categories here, but it starts out with cultural and heritage, economic opportunity. Did I go, I might have gone one extra slide, hang on. Safe and prepared community priorities. So the top two emergency medical services with fire and ambulance and then increasing police officer staffing. This one was specific to a motorcycle unit for traffic safety and fire suppression. Those seem to be in alignment with what the council has expressed in the past around this being one expression of community safety. Development review followed by public defense with fire administration and training being the last one on the list. Again, these are not necessarily indicators that they do not have council support or that they are not things that we should be putting time and effort into,

1:22:13 but when we start thinking about the three things that we can bring to bear, which is people, time, and money, I think the council would expect us to, and the budget to reflect more of that in the top side of the scale than the bottom side of the scale. - City manager Anne McEnerny-Ogle, the increased police officer staffing, I also put in my mind when I ranked this, that that was for additional neighborhood officers, NPOs. - Okay. Mayor? - Councilor Fox. - Yeah, Councilor Fox here. On this one, I'm gonna repeat myself, but on this one, the city-wide emergency, not that one, sorry, real-time information center, I've had the benefit of being part of a lot of really deep conversations in our,

1:23:09 I guess, developing our police program, new programs, staffing, and all of that, and so I have a deep understanding of what the real-time information center is, and when ranking, when you put all of these police and safety pieces in the same bucket, again, interesting what you put into the particular buckets to compare them to, but if we're looking for saving time and money, and perhaps multiple co-benefits for such a system, that would be a higher priority, I think, if the rest of council knew more about that program than some of these others. So it would be worthwhile to maybe spend some time at a future meeting to talk about what that means, and then weight it appropriately against some of these other competing priorities.

1:24:08 - It is interesting that, I'm sorry, Anne McEnerny-Ogle, it is interesting that the survey we just discussed, the emergency management plan and public preparedness outreach was a strong priority for the community. Maybe we know more than the community on that, but the community thinks that should probably go up the scale a little bit. - So moving on to the next one, which is cultural and heritage, economic opportunity, high-performing government. I was not surprised to see affordable housing production showing up at the top of the list, and then several of our more high-profile,

1:25:06 longer-term projects, like the Heights District and Arts Hub, showing up at the top of the list on this one as well. Then the one down there at the bottom is the City of Vancouver Vehicle Data Collection and Camera Project. And just, you know, Councilor Fox's comments about the relative benefit of some of these programs are very well taken, because there could be instances where there are pieces that, when we're looking at these prioritizations internally and looking at bringing back to you a budget, we may make a recommendation that we do something that you have lower on the list, but what we need to be able to do is to be able to articulate exactly why, that if it's something that did show up on this list as a lower priority for Council, it's incumbent upon us to be able to articulate to you why we would make that particular recommendation and what the reasoning was behind it.

1:26:00 There's nothing on that. We can take a look at vibrant and distinctive neighborhoods. And this one starts off at the top with youth and teen programming, long-range planning program, volunteer programs, with the ones down at the bottom of the sheet being fitness and adult programming and the historic trust agreement. - So Anne McEnerny-Ogle, on this particular piece, it goes back to a statement that we've been making all evening. If we knew more about it, we would be appalled by how few of our children know how to swim. And swimming lessons are few and far between. The aquatics program needs to be strengthened, but little did everyone know the data

1:27:00 on that particular piece. - So on the safe and prepared community, the highest priority for the council is to complete the capital projects that were mentioned as part of and funded as part of Proposition 2, followed by parks capital repair, public works operations campus, all programs that we've put significant effort into over the last couple of years, leading down to the police department headquarters land acquisition.

1:27:47 - Question. - Councillor Fox. - Just curious on what the lot two construction involves. It seems as if we were, like I didn't realize that that was a project, again, off of Chalkalove. - So we have the Chalkalove building. When we completed that acquisition, there were two parcels. There's the one that the building itself sits on, and then there's another parking lot to the rear of the building. And when we started looking at what we needed to do to be able to support the new officers that we wanted to bring on through Proposition 5 and through the sales tax, we needed more space for the officers and for fleet, and to be able to support the activities that will take place at Chalkalove itself. So it's a separate parking lot that needs some security enhancements and would also include things

1:28:46 like support for EV infrastructure. - And isn't that the same parking lot area that got vandalized with their EV infrastructure that was there, previously installed? - Part of the need, hence part of the need for the security enhancements. I know that the ones that were in the lot next to the building were vandalized. I'm not sure if there were ones in this lot that were vandalized as well. - Okay, thanks.

1:29:16 - Okay, taking a look at climate and natural systems, the top vote getter so far here has been parks planning and funding, followed by EV infrastructure, and then replacing the VPD admin vehicles with EVs and testing the EVs in the patrol environment. The ones at the bottom of this list are the clean building capital upgrades and then major park development.

1:29:44 And we are getting towards the end, I promise. There's only two slides left. - Okay. No comments? - On capital projects, on transportation and mobility, we've got vibrant and distinctive neighborhoods, waterfront gateway, and then the transportation program through public works and CDD, the old operation center, the current operation center, site redevelopment, and then the ADA transition plan in order. - Councilor Stover. - Thank you, Councilor Stover, here. This was also one I'm struggling with because it feels like ADA is a requirement that's put on us, and so struggling to understand

1:30:41 how we decide not to meet obligations that have been put on us. Not that I necessarily, no, I don't want to say that. It just seems, it feels interesting. - And I think in particular for some of those that we don't view it necessarily as a level of whether we were going to comply or not, but some of these things we have time on how long it takes us to get there. So we can do a lot more improvements in a particular year, or we can follow a 20-year ADA transition plan. If you think about what we're doing with like curb ramp replacements and things like that, we have a long-term plan for being able to adjust those throughout the city. That is something we're legally allowed to do, but we'd always have the option to be able to accelerate that. - Okay, thank you.

1:31:40 And the transportation program, is that our transportation system plan? What exactly is the transportation program? - In this area, transportation program would be the, for here, the transportation, excuse me, the transportation and mobility program. So this would be our complete streets, full mobility systems. - Okay, as separate, well, but a lot of those are in the transportation system plan, but this is, okay, okay, thank you. - Okay. - All right. And the last one is capital projects associated with city services. I think here you can see the council's prioritization on continuing to add capacity to the police department,

1:32:36 and then the willingness to look at a separate unit in the VPD dedicated to traffic safety. Then you've got vehicle equipment repair and replacement, emergency medical services, moving down the line into the last ones, which would be fire special operations and fire marshal services. Again, these are not to say that they are not important or not activities that the city is gonna continue to invest in, but rather expressions of where we would want to focus our efforts, and again, not surprised that hiring more police officers is at the top of the list. - Yes, Councilor Perez. - Councilor Perez, city manager, can you elaborate on the fire special operations? - So when we look at the fire department, there are several different units that they have. So you've got fire suppression, fire training. Fire special operations would be operations

1:33:36 like hazmat teams, trench rescue, the specialized training or specialized water rescue, the specialized training or the specialized response units that they have. But that's one of those ones that there are enough of them that asking the council to rank them relative to one another gets pretty granular versus just putting that special operations together in one bucket. - Okay, and I want to just go back and give a general comment I appreciate the effort to simplify a lot of this 'cause I understand that it could be information overload with a lot of the more precise information to better articulate what actually we're talking about with some of these titles 'cause it's always devil's in the details, right? And I am gonna err on the side of, I need better description of these titles.

1:34:34 I think I did my best in prioritizing them, but I don't know enough to be a well-informed person to prioritize for a budget that's coming up. And so I'm hoping that we can do a little follow up with how we all ended up collectively prioritizing this, but now add in a bit more information to help us better understand what exactly we're talking about. For example, in fire training, is there a specific training that's offered once every three years? Is there a new type of training with the cameras and the data? What specifically is that? I know there's a lot of concern with flock cameras, but how are we? So I just feel like we need a little, just a bit more information versus what's in the title here, the titles.

1:35:34 - Any last comments? Okay.

1:35:49 New and missing priorities, oh. So counselors, do you have any new priorities or are there any items that you were expecting to see on the list? Or the conversations that we've had this evening that have a gap? - So there are a couple of them that I know that have been discussed by the city council and just to run down a few of them. Annexation is one, childcare is another. I know there are several council members that have expressed support for childcare, but it's not been 100% clear if that is something that the entire council wants us to make a priority. And then you have some new ones that have come up based on outside decisions. Like for me, I think of things like the extension of light rail to Evergreen, because that was something that's not in the current IBR that would be something that we should continue to invest in. Public defense, while it's something

1:36:47 that is listed in the priorities, is something that is likely to require additional investment from us in the future in order to be able to meet our legal obligations to be able to do that. And then there have been discussions in the community with council, with the fire service about looking at a regional fire authority, but that's nowhere in our documentation yet at this point. And then finally, you'll get a presentation next month about the strategic plan that Vancouver Fire has put together that I would expect the council to have some support for that would be reflected in the budget as well. So outside of that list, are there anything, any others that I think that you as a council feel like we haven't yet captured? Again, this is not prescriptive. This is not your only chance to weigh in on the budget, and certainly not your only chance to get more detail on taking a look at these. This is merely the first step. Thank you.

1:37:47 I'm sure something will come to everyone at two in the morning. Councilor Stover. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Stover. Another one that's not been listed is the Fruit Valley plan. And then I would say only indirectly have, the comprehensive plan, I understand, is meant to act as a master sub-area plan, but I think there's still areas of the city that could benefit from some focused attention. East Mill Plain is one. Yeah. Upper Main Street, Mid Main Street.

1:38:44 Oh, Upper Main Street is not on here. So it seems like there are some other projects that have been discussed that didn't make this list. Truth be told, there are probably about 47 projects that staff are currently working on right now. Okay. Go ahead, revenue tools. All right. So looking at revenue tools, I really only wanted to focus on the ones that I would consider to be larger scale. And I'm not asking council to make decisions on those tonight, but just again to point them out as we frame the budget up. We've had significant conversation on the law enforcement sales tax. That's the penny of sales tax that we are authorized to do that would accompany the state grants to allow us to do our next stage of hiring in VPD.

1:39:43 But we have the children and family services sales tax. That is tied to services for those specific populations. And we're investigating the application of that to see for some of the services that we already provide like support for the Children's Justice Center. Can those be shifted to that? Which would then in turn allow us to free up dollars to go towards other services. On the business and occupations tax, we have a very limited implementation of that one now. We put a .1% of the .2% that we are legally allowed to do and applied it just to retailers. We're currently estimating that that's gonna bring in about $5.4 million in this budget, but there is capacity there. That tax is one that can be selectively applied, but you do have to make sure that you're treating all businesses in a category the same way. So we could not for example,

1:40:40 say we want retailers that have a gross revenue of more than $12 million per year to pay this rate and all the ones under this to pay this rate. Retailers need to be treated the same way across the board. But the council does have flexibility on that and it's one of the tools that we have not fully implemented. On the utility tax front, that's something that's under council's control. I know that the council has not touched it for a while. Current rate is 28.9%. On our current estimates, every .1% equates to about $230,000. So for example, if you did .5% and said, we want to fund this high priority, we'll do that .5%, puts us at 29.4 and that would total up about 1.15 million. And then on some of the other ones,

1:41:38 our instructions to staff were that, if you've got something that has dedicated revenues or fees supported, we can certainly take a look at that with the decision packages for the coming budget. Lisa, do you want to cover next steps? - Thank you. Yes, so our next steps are, we did open a virtual idea box for our city employees for one month and those are streaming in. I will be returning to you with our financial policies and an update to our investment policy on August 24th, in addition to a biennium budget update. And then on September 21st, a preview of the city manager recommended budget with the publishing of the budget on October 1st, which is required by law.

1:42:34 And then we have two workshops on the budget for capital and operating, October 12th and 26th, and council consent tentatively scheduled for November 2nd with public hearing and adoption. So those are the tentative next steps. And we can schedule other things subject to your discretion and we will be providing information periodically through updates through city manager and available to answer any questions. - Councillors, yes, Councillor Perez. Let's go back to the timeline, please, Tani, thank you. Councillor Perez. - Councillor Perez here. Quick question, I love the virtual idea box for city employees.

1:43:32 I think that's a great step. Is there something similar for the public or have we had the public be able to chime in on any of what we have? - Be heard. - We'll ask Laura. - I'm gonna ask Laura to come up. - Laura Shepherd, communications director. Councillor Perez, we are planning public engagement in addition to the survey that we just did. I'm working with the city manager's office to determine what that question actually is. When we first wrote the communications strategy on the budget, it was premised on a $29 million gap to fill with a proposal to have that largely filled now. The question that we wanna ask the public will change. So I'm still working with the city manager

1:44:32 and the budget committee to determine what that's going to be. I was just speaking with our director of engagement and access earlier today about what that could be. So there will be more to come for the public. - All right, great. And that'll, will I come back to and share with us what you have planned? - Yes, Councillor. - All right, thank you. Councillor Fox. - Well, I was reflecting that city manager had said you weren't sure how many council members shared the priority around childcare in the community. And so I just wanted to, I guess, make a pitch to all council members and better describe what, at least I believe the priority around childcare is. And one of them is thinking back about a couple of our meetings when we were reviewing funding decisions around CDBG funds and other funds that we manage and ensuring that, you know, those future decisions

1:45:32 that come before us where we have the opportunity to support more childcare businesses and availability of childcare in our community, that we are using those particular, you know, opportunities effectively and not, I guess, I know we had some deep conversations about it, we don't need to rehash them tonight, but you know, that would be where I'm at, where I would have preferred more childcare businesses were supported through that last round than other activities, even though all of them, you know, it's hard to make choices, I understand. And then also we had some conversations even with our current congressional representative had come to the city, I think it was about a year ago and held some conversations with our emergency responders. And we sat around the table and we talked about their childcare needs being a little bit unique

1:46:31 and unaddressed given that they work some really long hours, they work in the middle of the night. Sometimes, of course, they have to get up and leave at odd times and having childcare available for all of those makes it really hard for a family. And so I really thought we were going to look more into potential opportunities there, not only to support our staff, but also to support recruiting. Pretty sure we had a discussion just recently about, you know, having kind of this unending ability, you know, police officers retire and we hire, but we're not making headway. And so when we think about childcare, it isn't, there's multiple reasons for us to focus on it and it's internally and externally to this council. - Okay. All right.

1:47:31 Councilor Perez. - Thank you, Councilor Fox for chiming in on the importance of childcare. And, you know, I support that value in our community as well and really helping the city define what our role is in childcare. And I think that's what we're in the middle of doing. And part of that is starting with these conversations and assessing how we can better support our first responders with that and working with the county to look at that, but also elevating the childcare infrastructure and better defining what our role is in that. And part of that is being able to influence the business growth of it to maybe we look at some future legislative agenda item that we could support. I think that we need to also have a better definition of our role under our economic development plan and what that looks like.

1:48:29 I do believe we also missed the boat on helping direct childcare service with the last funding that we had. If there's a way to just bring an update or a briefing on what is happening with the partnership that we have with the county on the impact lab from the National League of Cities addressing childcare, I believe some of that can help better define what our role could be. And this is something that we cannot do alone as a city. Childcare is something that we have to do along with other jurisdictions and the children's consortium and some of the childcare data centers. So there's a difference between childcare providers and the childcare centers. So better understanding where we can have a greater impact in our role as policy makers I think is some of the work that we could and should be doing.

1:49:26 - Okay, Councilor, seeing no additional comments. Lon. - Mayor. - Last, Councilor Fox. - Sorry, but that was my point with bringing up is that more than two of us, he was asking if more than two of us had thoughts about childcare. So before we move on, could we get some more conversation around this or maybe that silence is the answer. - Well, Councilor, in my mind, the city manager gave us a list of 11 different items that we could discuss and do a quick survey on how many people wanna talk about childcare versus annexation versus regional fire authority, et cetera, et cetera. I don't believe that we have enough time to do that right now. If city manager, if you want to send out an additional quick survey on that long list of additional items you're considering,

1:50:24 let's go ahead and do that. But as I said earlier, there are 47 to 53 different projects that staff are already working on right now of which all of these may be on that list. - Yeah, and just to clarify, my general sense is there are at least four of you that are in support of the city taking a more aggressive or more forward-thinking role in childcare. But what form that takes will be part of the budget discussions going forward. To Councilor Perez's point, is that something that we should be seeking to do directly or is it something where we should have a partnership with another organization to be able to do those types of activities versus taking it on as a new responsibility. You know, when I think about Vancouver and I think about where we have been and where we're going, if you look at our budget, we have taken on additional responsibilities for things that in the past may have traditionally fallen to other levels of government.

1:51:24 And whether it was that they ran out of money or that they were pursuing policies that we didn't feel were effective, we have gotten into lines of business that we have not traditionally been involved with. And as we get larger, as a community, I would expect those pressures to continue. - Yes, Councilor Stubbs. - Thank you. So, you know, this has been an issue I've long been interested in. We have had, for a very long time, the ability to do a childcare property tax. It's been in state law for decades. The only city, the only jurisdiction in the state that has done that is the city of Seattle. When we were having these discussions

1:52:20 as part of Stronger Vancouver prior to the pandemic, there was also conversations having a Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce over the same thing. For me, there needs to be partnership. We need to be a partner in something. And we can provide funding tools, but we need the community, which includes our employers, to be also asking us to deploy those tools. And so, I think there's still work to be done on,

1:53:15 and maybe that's the coalition that's doing work, but I, knowing the severity of this issue, I'm just surprised that it feels like we're out here leading on our own and needing, and I feel like this is an issue that needs, people should be coming to us, asking us to deploy tools, rather than us saying we're going to. And so, I'm looking forward to how do we get there? How do we, how can we help get there? How can we support the infrastructure that's there in order to get there? I think there's a lot of steps.

1:54:12 I think there's a lot of steps still to happen in this process before we get to the, this is how we're gonna fund it. Personal opinion. - Okay. - Nothing else from me, Mary. - All right. Then we will excuse ourselves and go into an executive session. This is according to RCW 42.30.1101C. We will be in there from six o'clock to 6.30, and then we'll be back at 6.30 for our regular Vancouver City Council meeting. It is 5.55, we'll see you at six o'clock, Councillors.