City Council Workshops

0:00 [ Music ] >> Good afternoon. Welcome to Vancouver City Council. I'm Anne McEnerny, Ogle Mayor for the city, and today is Monday, August 24th, 2026. City Manager, we're going to start this 3 o'clock meeting off with a Vancouver Fire Department support staff proposal. Would you like to make the introductions? >> Yeah, I'd like to welcome Chief Drake from the Fire Department to brief the council on some of the activities that he's been working on. And I think the council's largely aware

0:57 that he spent the first half year of his tenure so far really working to develop a strategic plan for the department, kind of evaluating where he sees cracks in our overall levels of service, what we can do to improve across multiple different arenas. But in order to really effectively be able to carry out that strategic plan, he's also taken a look at the gaps in the department and the level of staffing that it would take in these early years to really make it successful, hence the need for the presentation today to come to the council, both the update on the strategic plan but also an outline of what he sees as being able to carry it forward. >> Thank you, Chief. Go ahead. >> Honorary members of the council, Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle, Council Member Perez, Stover, and Paulson, thank you for the opportunity and a privilege to speak to all of you today on something that I am very passionate about and that's public service,

1:56 public safety, and safeguarding our community and I know all of you are, which is my prelude into this city's strategic plan because I want to talk about that first and how we developed ours to factor into the city's plan. One of the major attractions about coming to the City of Vancouver was the fact that I recognized there was progressive leadership here. The people who had the ability to forecast where we needed to move into the future and in fact, I was very optimistic about the strategic plan that the city had. But then through further research, I learned more about all the things the city is doing. So I want to talk about that and how our plan comes into it. We've just-- the city has just gotten approval for a comprehensive plan, as all you know, a 20-year plan that talks about shared community vision. That's a long-term 20-year plan. Additionally, master plans, robust plans with community partnerships, more of a medium,

2:55 5 to 10-year program. And then the strategic plan that the city had from 2023 to 2029, 3 to 6-year medium term, a city council's citywide focus areas that are extremely important, which gives organizational direction for employees. Then there's your biannual budget, financial policies and operational plans, short-term, one year, but these are departmental service levels and capital outlays, financial forecasts and tax revenues. So why bring these into it? Because I want to talk about strategic plan organizational fit. And the city of Vancouver also had a performance management program when they were discussing this performance management policies and the things they were going to pursue. And that involved daily strategic discipline, performance management, pathways for improving and innovating

3:53 and regular reporting to the city council. I'd like to add a few things to that. The majority of strategic plans fail, and the reason that they do is they're not properly measured and managed. Too often, they are 8 1/2 by 11 glossies, about 50 to 75 pages, and they're communicating to elected officials how well their department is ready to perform. And these plans too often become rhetorical paperweights, meaning that they're not really employed to work. And we're not going to do that in the VFD. I like to quote John Wooden because I do this a lot. Bear with me. He said, "Failing to plan is planning to fail." Dwight Eisenhower comes on later and said, "Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable." They're both right. The first thing you have to do is build a plan, but don't allow that plan to become just a product. What's important is that it is measured and managed

4:50 to the extent that it becomes a strategic process. And that's why in our plan, we are calling it strategic processes for service excellence. And it dovetails right into that. But first, I want to go into the city's core values, livability, sustainability, and resilience, innovation, equity, and inclusion, trust and relationships, all important. Other factors involved in this were collaboration, inclusivity, innovation, empowerment, and compassionate perspectives. In our 26 to 29 strategic plan, we intentionally use those dates because that's when I got here and we started developing this plan. And I want to avoid i's and me's in this presentation because I'm very fortunate to have a great team. We have about 400, 500 people that need to sign the plan, not me,

5:46 about how well we did, I think, to factor our plan into what the city's endeavors are with all of those other macro level plans that you've developed. And in our safe and prepared community, it was very easy to come up with a title, the title being a safe and prepared community, because that was what was brought to attention in the city's strategic plan and public safety was charged with doing that. So that was one of the easiest portions of this process. But we went through many iterations and environmental scans and internal external stakeholders. We did this SWOT analyses, the macro level political, economic, social, technological, environmental, legal analyses, and the things we did to try to get the information that we needed to come up with substantive vision, mission, values, and goals. And then a greater level of specificity with our focus groups and all of our stakeholders that provided

6:44 specifics relative to our strategies to achieve those goals which are identified in our plan. And then even more specifically, we always champion the value of smart tactics, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. So if we establish focus groups to develop these tactics that have a great level of specificity, so it's tailored to the needs of our community, but it also factors in our capacity to be able to provide those needs. So in this safe and prepared community proposal, we are also talking about staff positions that could be factored into this as well. All right. And of these staffing support positions and the funding that I would like to address, too, we have, for lack of better terms, a benevolent altruist in CC Fire District 5. After talking to them at our commission meetings and sharing

7:41 with them our plan and the endeavors that we have moving forward, communicating what we need to get there. And they have graciously initially signed a commitment and ILA, interlocal agreement, and that's transitioned into an amendment to support the positions that I'm going to talk about. Our VFD vision is to be a regional leader in public safety and emergency services, forging unified partnerships and safeguarding our community. And that is not a rhetorical statement. All of the statements that we have in there are sincere and evaluating. Thank you. And so we started off a program called High Performance Organizations and invited our regional partners from Portland, from Camas, from Gresham, Salem, the VPD, District 3, District

8:41 6, CCFR. And we've been doing a program for four months to cultivate these relationships so that we can operate on a larger scale to provide optimal services. We know our size and we know that we have great people doing a fantastic job in this organization. However, we do have limitations. We have 53 people on duty every day. That's not enough to handle a major high rise fire or a wild land conflagration or even sometimes a multi casualty incident or active shooter hazardous materials with 25 billion dollars or more. I could be corrected on that. Traveling down the Columbia River, there's so many things in the way of the emergency services that we can improve upon that would help us. So more specifically, that's what we see in our future. Again, to be that regional leader. But in the immediate, the reason we show up for work every day is our statement about our mission. And that is to preserve life, protect property and ensure a

9:40 safe, prepared community. Values, extremely important. Earlier in my career, I was more dismissive of these values because I thought I'm a type A. I want to work, just work and get the job done. Well, we also learned that they affect the culture of the organization, the informal and the formal culture, and they are extremely important. So it can't just be one word. There needs to be statements written about what those words mean. So they resonate most with our people. And like I said, our formal and informal cultures in the VFT are great, but our people and myself, we have not reached our full capacity to make the community as safe and prepared as we like for major type incidents. I would like to just read through our goals real quick and then we'll move on to what the plan represents and the positions to deliver exceptional public safety and emergency services. It's typically a public safety partner goal that you're going to see in fire service organizations throughout the country. Goal number two, to promote a safe, healthy work environment

10:38 that effectively manages personal and organizational risks. Goal three, commit to a progressive, respectful culture that advances belonging, equity and inclusion. Goal four, cultivate interactive leadership, collaborative partnerships and responsible performance management. Goal five, foster personal growth, professional development and organizational succession. Goal six, identify, implement and integrate emerging technological innovations. And last goal seven, strengthen disaster preparedness, response and community relations and resilience. So in these goals, I'm not going to go into the great level of specificity. I realize I have 45 minutes to go before you with 15 minutes of questions. So I want to hit the highlights of what each of these represent.

11:34 But as I move through this, I want to explain how this works. The overarching vision all the way down to the tactics. If there's not a great level of specificity in your tactics, it will be vague and vagueness kills leadership. This is the leadership mantra, in my opinion, when you establish your vision, your direction for your future, your mission, your purpose, your reason for existence, when you communicate your values, it really exudes what our principal beliefs are here in Vancouver Fire Department and their goals. What we're going to do when I came here, there were no goals for this fire department and then specific strategies and tactics how to achieve them. So on the right side of your screen, you'll see that we have numerical prioritizations there. Our goal number one is obvious up at the top to the left. That's what we're calling a strategy to achieve that goal. And then the tactics in the column that's colored just above

12:32 the numerical prioritization are what we're actually going to do. So with those tactics, we are communicating operationally what we are going to do, but we're going to use this roadmap for success. And when I said numerically prioritized, I meant as budgets ebb and flow, what I felt important was to ensure that we had this prioritization so that we can accomplish what we can within the budgetary constraints that we do or the resources. And that's what you're seeing right there. And on this page, the other thing I want to say about these are when you look at those numbers, number 1.1.1 is to conduct a comprehensive strategic plan that has a standards of coverage, which really looks at our resources, our distribution, concentration and effectiveness and reliability of our resources as call loads continue to increase. And they're increasing about 3.86 percent per year.

13:31 The previous year was 38,422 calls for service. And this last year, 2025, was 3.86 percent more of just about 40,000 calls per year. And so what we're doing is we're leaning forward on what we need for special operations, deployment of these resources and EMS. Approximately 80 percent of our call load has to deal with EMS. The numerical prioritization also identifies areas like emergency operations, administrative operations, our fire marshal's office. These are all areas where we need to develop plans. And in these plans, that includes EMS division, training division, logistics, health and safety, as well as marine and shipboard operations, hazardous materials, technical rescue, wildland fuel management, community risk reduction, railway and earthquake, to name a few, because there are more.

14:30 And I will say this, and I'm not condemning this organization. We have no plans. I will also say this. We have no emergency operations for that. The city I came from, we had very robust plans because we need to think forward on these issues. We can't wait until the emergency happens before we start preparing for it. These plans will show our level of preparation and the operational manuals will map out what we should actually do to be the most effective. These things need to be done before the emergencies happen. And we see what's going on in Seattle with the active shooter and active threat in Oregon, with the wildland conflagrations, whether it's a hazmat on the railway or on a shipboard, there's many incidents that we need to do more preparation for. So these plans and operational manuals are so important to our success in the future as we grow and evolve as a city. And the regional relationships we have are extremely important

15:28 because of our limited resources in the event we do this. If we had a high-rise fire in downtown Vancouver, which could happen, we have 16 stories and it's still growing, 53 people aren't going to take care of that, but the partnerships that we have will. That's why we need to develop these plans. And I'm not going to go into a tremendous amount of specificity because I'll bore you to death and hit you with PowerPoint pain. However, I also want to say administratively we don't have professional standards. We don't have policies and procedures and we don't have progressive discipline, no discipline procedures. And I'm actually dumbfounded by this. We have SOGs, people doing great things within those guidelines, but they are not overarching plans and operational manuals that are going to demonstrate effectiveness as a regional public safety leader, not even close because in my career I've worked in a city where we had these incidents and I know what it takes to prepare for it and

16:28 to develop these manuals. And that's why I'm trying to reinforce repetitively and resoundingly how important this funding is going to help us as we move through this. So before I go into those positions, because in the fifth tenet of your strategic plan, the cities, I thought it was fantastic that they got into performance management. That is something that I'm a huge believer in. But before you start managing and before you start measuring you have to develop a plan through that progressive leadership. The city's done it. The VFD has done it right now and everybody has an electronic copy of this. And so we've outlined our roadmap for success. We've showing what we need to navigate to get there. We don't have the resources to do it. Not on a large scale. And so the performance leadership tenets I just talked about performance measurement. I won't go through all of those things but the performance measurement practices will be employed.

17:26 We'll look at our inputs, our resources, our activities, our product. What are people doing? Are they are they aligning with our desired outcomes? What really is happening? And then we'll measure targets along the way incrementally as we navigate our way through the 26 to 29 VFD plan. And then on a management cycle we will monitor and evaluate our progress towards achieving these goals. We will evaluate our measures of effectiveness. How well we're actually performing in the pursuit of these goals. We will analyze trends to determine what is actually going on so that we can lean forward and make adjustments to prepare and then we're going to learn and iteratively we're going to go back through that cycle and we are going to supplant obsolete tactics with more relevant tactics that are important for the needs of our community because this is an evolving community. So I don't call it a strategic plan as much as I call it a strategic process.

18:24 Again the process needs to be used not a product that sits and doesn't get used. So that is my prelude into what the city's done and what what I think our team has done to develop a very robust comprehensive plan for our limited capabilities here in the VFD. So I'd like to move to our chief of staff position in our chief of staff. I think this is an extremely important position and I've forwarded an updated org chart to make it more clear of of how the VFD is overlaid right now. Currently I have one deputy chief and I have a vacant position as a second deputy chief I have two authorized positions to and I was willing to give up a position as a deputy chief for support services and strategic planning because I knew we as a team could handle it. But the reason I did that was because we are working on an underfill to allow a battalion chief to act as the chief of

19:24 staff which would provide upward mobility and succession planning for the VFD. I would like to see your eye and vision in the future with the fantastic employees we have especially in the battalion chief's rank and our captain's rank of not bringing in the outsider so much although they provide fresh views and I laugh and joke with the city manager say look what you did. You hired a knucklehead from L.A. but the thing I'd like to add is we got great people in this organization and we're missing the mark. I wouldn't trade any of them for any of the 3500 I had in L.A. That's how good these people are but they don't reach their full capacity because we haven't done our leadership piece. They can be better and we will make them better if we are awarded the opportunity to have these positions. This chief of staff will learn what it takes to become a division chief what it takes to become a deputy chief and he might even be the next fire chief and I want to see these

20:24 people ascend the corporate ladder because they have institutional knowledge at its extreme value. So the bullet points they would report to me certainly but they would also manage key priorities initiatives I outlined in our strategic plan. And in fact each of in our job descriptions that we outlined there is a nexus between the numerical prioritization in the plan and what we've identified on the job descriptions so you can see by looking at those how important those positions are. This isn't just me arbitrarily unilaterally or capriciously saying I need him because I'm saying we need him and I'm outlining with direct tactics of all the things we can accomplish with these positions. So I I ask the council to please take a look at what these they can actually offer us because this is a brief synopsis in the PowerPoint in the job descriptions it shows what they are going to be able to do and that chief of staff is

21:23 instrumental to upward mobility and succession planning and the development of our own people. They'll be working with our internal external stakeholders they will be working with administrative improvements to recommend enhancements to the VFD. There's so many talents on an administrative on a labor perspective and an operational level they have here and no insult at all but they still don't understand the incident command systems the way they can they aren't going to be able to match it manage those larger incidents the way they have the capabilities of doing because we haven't provided this for them. So that is instrumental and this is an underfill at what I'm going to say is I'll probably get corrected by our CFO or a city manager at no cost to the city because this does not create overtime for battalion chiefs. It is an administrative position and it is an underfill which is less expensive than a deputy chief onto the next seven positions the emergency services manager will do professional

22:22 standards manager next. Incidentally there is no professional standards here as I mentioned no progressive engagement no professional standards no discipline policies they're just not policies and procedures on anything that I can find other than guidelines. So the professional standards manager is there to provide progressive leadership mentorship coaching counseling investigative discipline and performance management initiatives to help this department get better as we grow because the more employees and the higher the call load and the more services we provide the more challenges we're going to have and we need to lean forward on it. They will help with the reviewing VFT manuals and developing and review to professional standards for guests of engagement and performance management. They'll also collaborate with H.R. because I think we need to cultivate that relationship with H.R. and many others to ensure

23:20 accountability for professional conduct and oversee administrative investigations related to internal external complaints or personnel matters. The next position emergency services manager I think this is important also the emergency service manager will coordinate completion and maintenance of standards of coverage analysis which is NFPA 1710 once again on the distribution concentration and reliability of our resources. And basically that means is the distribution. How many stations we have 11 concentration. What do we have in each of those stations. Well some have an engine or you have a truck an engine and a squad and then reliability is when there are impacts in districts due to call load and say engine eight the only resource in that district is out on a call. We have to send a resource from a further location thus increasing our response times and reducing public safety and service levels.

24:18 So these are all factors that we look at in determining where we're going to apply our resources. We also have another positions that can help us in our data analysis unit to facilitate our success in developing those. But the emergency services commander will help us with a standard to cover for our public information officer program. We have eight members in our PIO program that we would trans transfer that to one member that would be coordinating more of that on a on a more regular basis at least and a 40 hour week. They will also facilitate the completion of these operational manuals and sharing integrated planning with regional law enforcement partners. We have a great relationship with VPD and of our regional partners here too. We also need a continuity of operations plan a plan that shows what we're going to be doing to keep continuing operations when we do have challenging events that we're at too. So those are the ones outside. The next one is a support specialist.

25:14 The support specialist three performs a responsible record management suppression for personnel training and certifications. We cannot run an academy for recruits at the same time as engage in promotional processes for engineers and captains and battalion chiefs. So our domino effect is actually not cost effective. If we could have more of a capacity with it with help in our training division to be able to run these programs concurrently it would help with our staffing levels. And my goal is is to reduce some of the overtime that we are because we all know that we're very expensive in the overtime. There is no doubt about that organized and manages logistics provides general support for core training things like academies promotional processes department wide drills read regional partnerships cooperatives with our law enforcement person or partners clerical support for implementation of new programs procedures methods and systems.

26:14 And incidentally we had three I want to say we have two and a half support specialist positions removed one half was at the fire marshal's office and then one at the front desk and one in training. So we don't have those two and a half support specialists and we hope to receive approvals for these other positions because we will be able to revitalize what we've been doing in the past. That also is our material control coordinator is a position we lost at 24 25 just a couple of years ago and they assist with purchasing supplies equipment and other services for the VFD. I have a division chief who's hanging while he's doing physical work to try to get things done. That is not tantamount to having barcoding and innovative technology and using people but he's doing things because they're getting things done. And this material control coordinator would be very helpful

27:14 in large logistics and supporting what our operations are doing. They issue equipment supplies and tracking and renewal disposal surplus loss damaged items manages inventory through tracking and auditing and assesses and implements new processes procedures for responsible stewardship of department inventory and we can do better on that too with technology and barcoding. The next one is a business intelligence analyst and the BIA will support the implementation of performance measurement and performance management processes. They will help us with performance benchmarks. If you had a chance to look at our plan you'll see that we're very direct in who's responsible for those specific tactics. However we don't have dates and timelines because we don't know what we're going to be able to do without the positions that I am requesting here today. And we also want to measure that internally because we might meet some timelines and there are those where we won't.

28:14 I'm not living in Pollyanna thinking we're going to get everything done in this plan. In fact I hope to get some of these things done and that's why they're numerically prioritized. They will also develop analytic products that identify performance trends that help us through technology and looking at where the workloads are becoming the greatest where the changes in the city of Vancouver what dynamic trends do we need to adjust to to be more contemporarily relevant to provide optimal service to our community. They'll partner with and lead embed performance practice and daily operations. In fact I established a performance measurement committee at the VFD with our current business intelligence analyst but also with Portland where he's going to be working on this with us CCFR District 6 so we're getting their data people and we're leaning forward on our capabilities and the economies of scale that we will derive from effective management and the potential regional fire authority in the future.

29:13 So we're trying to build these partnerships and do these things together. CCFR District 6 Portland said they're going to build a plan with the exact same format because it shows unification and they like the format enough to say hey that works for us and they're in our program learning how to do it. So we're enjoying those relationships so we're leaning way ahead on potential for RFA or even annexation in the future if that happens. The other one I'd like to address is I did talk about our support specialists I've got these a little out of order on mind so I'm sorry about that so the BIA is our data analyst unit and the support specialists there is oh this one is a two for the with the fire marshal's office. They assist with billing and collection permits and fees and they are 90 percent cost effective or revenue replenishment. They're very close to that.

30:09 They lost a half a person not literally but halftime equivalent in the fire marshal's office and supporting them with one full time would be very helpful with all the permits and the things that are going on in in our fire marshal's office. They provide a wide variety of administrative support with data entry records management report preparation. We have software that's been antiquated and you've approved concourse software for our fire marshal's office and our fire marshal is telling us that they it's going to be extremely helpful because it will help them keep up with the developers and keeping the processes moving on a temple that is more amenable to growth. Administrative assistant again I have one deputy chief and a vacant position for the other one.

31:06 So I really have just one for right now I have a battalion chief who is acting as a deputy chief and doing a fantastic job but that's why we want our our chief of staff and that's why we need to provide some administrative support because with the positions that we lost. We're we're playing whack-a-mole we're doing the best that we can to get the information out that is required to keep things moving not only in our farmers office but operationally and administratively. And again with all these plans and reports and operational manuals that I would like to develop I can't even ask our people to do that at this stage because they're just that busy maintaining things the way they are the status quo. So the administrative assistant would be assisting for the deputy chiefs in administrative operations and emergency operations as well as working concurrently with the chief of staff and other personnel.

32:03 Again prioritizing calendars appointments. I don't know what I would do without my executive assistant. I I think all of you can understand that and she's juggling so much between other deputies and captains and training and so are all of our people. So again reinforcing the importance of these positions internal external communications agendas presentations meeting materials or alternative support to we're also developing specialized strategic plans at varying levels in the organization we think what you already have an overarching roadmap for success for the department but it doesn't have a level of specificity to provide a specialized plan and hazardous materials for the wildland urban interface or intermix or railway operations or earthquake operations. We want people to know what the operational plan is well before it happens. So we are building subordinate strategic plans with a great

33:02 level of specificity in areas that we deserve or the public deserves that's our intent. From another perspective funding for the new positions do you you could see that slide and the last commission meeting I had at District 5 they've committed to not only all expenses but anything else computers laptops and all the other issues that we required for each of these seven positions and they again I said they signed an ILA interlocal agreement in the beginning it's translated to an amendment and they are ready to go. If there's some way I can compellingly and convincingly reinforce the importance of these positions to move the VFD forward and the last thing I'm going to add is successful organizations redefine leadership as an organizational

33:59 rather than an individual or positional set of responsibilities that must be undertaken throughout the organization. I cannot do this by myself again. I don't like eyes and knees. This plan is as great as it is and I can assure you that it's a great plan but it's because of a team it's become it's because of all the people who contributed a tremendous amount to get us to this plan. I don't want this to be a futile exercise or rhetorical paper wait I would like to see us make this community more safe and more prepared so that we're not in Oregon's place or not in Longview's situation or the things that are going on Seattle the concept of leadership at all levels emerges in which all individuals are leaders as they accomplish their leadership responsibilities no matter their technical function or level in the organization. One thing I'm doing and we had a recent concern with some of our members is the leadership.

34:56 I think our people have been doing a fantastic job in not knowing what the goals are what the plans are and where this department is going. We've had every captain come up with policies and procedures on how things are going to be done. But again vagueness kills leadership and we need to have organizational policies and procedures. And I'm surprised I don't have more problems than I do in this organization it's because of the great people we have. But there's going to come a day as we grow and we annex or we are if a that we're going to have more and more problems and more challenges and that unity and that direction in the roadmap for success is more imperative now than it's ever been as we lean forward on all these. So that is my presentation. I would like to thank you very much for enduring the PowerPoint pain I just presented and I would like to entertain any questions you may have at this time.

35:50 Thank you Chief Councillors Councillor Paulson. Thank you Mayor. Thank you Chief. Appreciate the PowerPoint presentation is painful and painful than first of all. Congratulations to the team on the plan. It's a great plan and I think that's demonstrated by the fact that other organizations who have seen it are seeking to replicate it including internally in the city with the Vancouver Police Department are using that template but not only that but others in the region I think that shows great leadership and I think it demonstrates what's possible and as you said in your presentation it also lends itself well to better collaboration when we have plans that are using a similar template and format and are easy to translate across different jurisdictions. So congratulations. I also want to say thank you to the commissioners from Fire District 5 and one of them is here with us this afternoon for their generosity.

36:49 The voters in the district authorized funds to keep the public safe and those funds are available to make an investment in our fire department for the mutual benefit of Fire District 5 and Vancouver Fire Department. I think that's a tribute to the leadership and I really appreciate that leadership from Fire District 5. So thank you. I think you've done a great job of outlining the importance and value of the positions that you're contemplating and tying them back to your strategic plan which I think is really important and I commend you for that. And I'm definitely supportive of using them those ways. I am a little bit concerned however because I know that we're going to put these people in place and they're going to demonstrate their value and they're going to be a demand for that value ongoing beyond Q4 of 2029. And so my ask in that regard is that we have regular touch points to talk about the successes that we're seeing from the plan writ large and also from these positions demonstrating the value but then also you know as things

37:48 continue to evolve over the coming years and potential funding mechanisms become available or not available. You know what are the ways that we might be able to explore to either continue those positions or be very clear with the folks who were in those positions and the folks who rely on those positions that unfortunately we're not going to be able to continue them forward because I think we owe everybody that transparency because right now we're very clear in saying these are limited term positions there through Q4 of 2029 there will be another budget cycle between now and then and so by then we will have definitive knowledge of whether we will or won't be able to keep these positions in place. But I just think it's really important for everybody involved that there's a lot of transparency there. And speaking of transparency I have a request both for you and the city manager. It was it occurred to me city manager that it's been a number of years now since the voters passed Prop 2 and we have made some investments. We're continuing to make investments and we have more

38:44 planned investments and I think it would be good for us to continue to provide periodic updates to the council and the public about what the status of that is so that they can see the value of the money that they have invested in public safety and see how that's tying not just to the investments that we're making but also to the results that we're seeing. So I would ask that we put that into our regular routine conversations that periodically we have those kinds of updates so everybody can see the great success that we're seeing from the fire department. Those are my comments. Thank you. Councilor Fox. Yes. Appreciate the presentation. Definitely echoing the collaboration that we're seeing with District 5 to move this forward. In looking at maybe I'll I'll start with more focused comments first but just the staffing pieces here.

39:40 One of the questions that kind of when I was looking at the job titles and the inventory coordinator seems a similar job as the materials coordinator. So just wondering what the difference is there for a new position versus maybe duplicating having two positions filling for the inventory coordinator. Which page are you on. Oh I was just it's the org chart under the logistics chief. There's an inventory coordinator an administrative assistant an engineering technician and then this new material coordinator material control coordinator. OK and in that org chart I'm trying to get in front of me. Sorry I didn't mean it to be a pop quiz question. No that's it might even be people in the crowd that are

40:40 ready to answer for you. There it is. Our material coral control coordinator is directly reporting to the division chief in logistics the inventory coordinator I would have to give you more information with what they're doing is I've got a division chief and one inventory control coordinator that are monitoring turnouts they're monitoring boots supplies hose all these other things. Their job descriptions are somewhat different. And in fact I think I have a logistics chief who could probably provide more specifics on that. People here are we allowed to let him speak to that while he's here. Oh please do come on up chief Willis and I guess I'll give more background on asking that question but it kind of leads to builds upon what Councillor Paulson was saying.

41:38 You know this creating new positions that we may need to let go in the future if we don't have enough funding when you have a position that is perhaps you have two folks serving in the same position it might not feel as big of a gap losing one person from a particular role. Of course you always will be but it's not like a unique position in in our department. Yeah so thank you for let me speak. Historically we've had the division chief that's been in charge of logistics and support services. Then we have another position in there that takes care of all of our procurement all of our payables takes care of all that. And then I do have the inventory coordinator that used to be labeled as a resource service technician and it got renamed in the last last time they went through the city.

42:35 But what that person does is all of our ordering of supplies tools equipment all of our EMS supplies. They're the one that fills out all of our EMS orders for all 11 fire stations that person drives around in their delivery truck and delivers supplies and equipment to all 11 stations they've been doing that for the whole time that I've been in this position. And then when I got into the position there's a lot bigger body of work that needs to be done outside of that. And it could be everything from inventorying fire hose labeling fire hose it's making helmet patches it's doing all sorts of this other tertiary stuff. And so prior when I did take over this position we didn't have anybody to do that so I was doing that as a division chief which probably is below the level of what I should be managing but it's work that needed to be done.

43:31 So as we approach Prop 2 our former fire chief chief blue one of the positions he put into Prop 2 was for a material control coordinator and we did get that position and I had that position filled for a year and I was able to push a lot of those details onto that person and it was very successful we were going along pretty well. And then unfortunately one of our support specialists moved on to a different position. My material control coordinator who I loved dearly did a fantastic job. She promoted into the administrative assistant position and she blew at that time we were having some city budget issues decided not to refill that material control coordinator position which then pushed all of those things that we had assigned to that position for that year back onto me. So here I was then not being able to manage the logistics division as well as it could be and being pushed kind of back down to doing some of these other tertiary things just to

44:31 keep the equipment everything flowing. So it was a position that we had and it was being very successful. And then due to some budget constraints a couple of years ago that person promoted up and we just never did refill it. So I'm hearing that there is an overlap between these two positions. They're very distinct. All right. The other nice excuse me but not to add more but another nice thing is in our division we don't have any overlap so if anyone in our division leaves I'm the one has to fill in. So for instance our inventory coordinator has to take a sick day or whatever. I'm literally out driving a delivery truck on Thursdays. The material control coordinator we used as a backup to the other position so that if if our the person do procurement had had to take a couple of days off the material control coordinator could fill in if the delivery person is gone for a week. The material control coordinator could fill in.

45:29 So we had a little bit of backup for each of the positions so that I didn't have to step down to do those. I totally understand that. My other my other day job there's a couple of people out and I feel it very directly. So thank you. So I had another question on really maybe not a question. Yeah a question. You mentioned you know one of the strengths of all this work is really being able to identify the gaps and understand where you need to focus your efforts and really put together these standards for things like our emergency responses and you and I had the benefit of chatting last week and know that I have a lot of interest around the wild land urban interface planning earthquake planning all of these different events that could happen in our city. So it is a little shocking that we don't have a plan to date on

46:28 how we're going to respond. You know I'll mention one thing about wild land urban interfaces that maybe a lot of people haven't been exposed to. So if you've been to a conference and you've seen how fast these fires can spread in a city it's pretty amazing because what's happening is really that all of those embers from those tree tops start blowing in the wind and they can go hundreds thousands of feet to your rooftop in your yard. So they they spread really fast through those embers and and not understanding how I've geeked out way too much on these videos that from training. But you know having a crew show up and try to fight shrubbery fire in a yard not understanding that those embers are hitting the porch they're hitting you know other more vulnerable areas of the structure. It's really important that our firefighters know how to properly respond and get the fire under control.

47:26 And it's just all about training and having those procedures in place. I really am supportive of the initial work you've done so far in identifying these by priority area as well. I'm not sure others I know you highlighted it but I'm probably just re emphasizing that this report is also in priority order as well and also highlighting a statement you made about plan before emergencies actually happen really important so that everyone knows what to do on the ground at the time that it's happening and then we can move forward in a professional way. But my question now leads into how did we handle disciplinary procedures when we didn't have policies. You mentioned something about working with H.R. moving forward which is a great step but just wondering how that happened beforehand or how it's happening now because we don't have those.

48:25 My understanding is that there was some policies and procedures that were in play and one of my predecessors when he came in and again chief Willis can provide a greater level of specificity during due to his tenure with the VFD completely abolished policies and procedures and said we're going to move forward with axioms and expectations. And that is not tantamount to success in my opinion. And so now we don't have them and we're at a baseline where we're establishing committees to just try to develop these things and we're having challenges getting these things across the board with not just the staffing but we have collective bargaining agreements and we'll use in negotiations with our partners in labor. And so we're starting all over from a ground level on a different plane.

49:20 It's all right when you have all high performing staff that the disciplinary procedures seem like they're something you can handle later but appreciate you being proactive. Thank you. Kelsey press hello. Thank you for being here. Just echoing a bit of what some of the questions you've already heard and I just wanted to add a little bit to that. First of all I love the outcome that we all want based on what you're proposing here with the strategic planner process with our limited capability and that is a safe and prepared community and appreciate the listing of the positions that you see are very important and critical for us to reach that outcome and I'm fully supportive of that. A couple of questions on the deputy chief. Is there an expectation or a timeline given that we are

50:18 looking at succession planning for the deputy position two to three years to move on and then bring in another person having that upward mobility within. So that was one question. Do you want to address that one. Yes and thank you for throwing me that lob. I'm so glad you did that because I am thinking ahead three four or five years because I know it's going to take time to develop a battalion chief into a level at a division chief and a deputy chief and I'm a huge advocate of education and I've got members that are interested in it now that weren't in the past because of other barriers whether financial health care issues the agreements they had. But what I'm seeing is we have some members that are buying into this process and believers and now they're interested. So we could avoid spending fifty thousand dollars on recruitment on it on a peripheral potential employee who we know for 40 minutes in an interview as opposed to one who has

51:15 tremendous institutional knowledge and 25 30 years of experience that has been developed in this Vancouver paradigm. And yes so there is exactly why I'm doing that. I I wanted to ensure that we had the opportunities to promote some of the officers that we have not only from battalion chief but from captain to battalion chief to each of the ranks there in this org chart as attrition takes some of them away and I've held off on a couple of positions because I'm hoping to get this under filled on for the chief of staff. Thank you for that. And also a question of well how do we manage that before as far as like the professional standards and any cross program coordination with public information especially with first responder with fire department and other areas.

52:12 So I'm I'm a little perplexed of how we've been able to do that with you noting it that we don't have anything really solid or concrete to really guide us on process but most importantly a smart tactic approach where that is the accountability to our taxpayers who supported funding and continuing our fire department support. So my question you mentioned the potential for regional fire authority and that there was a draft IFLA ILA sorry inter a local agreement. Can you elaborate a little bit on that on the RFA or the ILA ILA inter local agreement. District 5 again has been gracious enough their understanding that they contribute twenty two point eight percent of the funding for the Vancouver Fire Department because contractually we provide services into District 5.

53:10 And in our last quarter of the year we identified that 23 percent of our coal load is in District 5. So that's a pretty good contract and they have been great partners in agreeing to that but they've also agreed to finance the development of Fire Station 11. So they're actually contributing more in some respects and willing to do that because they have the funds more accessible as far as I understand. OK thank you. And then from today into the possibility of RFA thinking about efficiencies within those areas that may or could overlap if we were to think a little more innovatively or creatively which has to do with public information as well as maybe some other other areas records management what have you. So I'm just wondering if there has been any thought to that as

54:08 well to cultivating and developing these partnerships. Oh yes yes ma'am. Like I said I was here a month and I really wanted to develop some of our deputy chiefs so I was using a program a curriculum that I teach at USC. And it is performance leadership performance measurement and performance management. And I thought if I'm going to take the time to go through a semester long curriculum and all this work why not develop these relationships. And so it was actually good that this happened and they've been coming for four months and we're filling up a room of interested parties on this whole process because as our Portland Fire Chief would say it's worth the effort on the front end because of the opportunities we're going to have on the back end. They understand that getting people moving in a certain direction an entire staff of 300 employees if we can get them all moving that same direction that unification that motivation the

55:06 satisfaction the performance there's an inertia and synergy there that really grows exponentially. So not only that I've even invited Chief Russell to participate in our executive staff meetings before I got here at the executive staff meeting was the fire chief and the two deputies I include H.R. District 6 I include our people in our data analysis unit our GIS are I include everybody that's a fire station five and that's because through the voices of everyone that's how we develop not only a great plan but keep the process moving or everybody's on board with this. So we're RFA it before the RFA. Yes thank you and my last comment has to do with the whole emergency response and my colleagues have heard me up here before talk about how well are we prepared in our public

56:03 prepared for severe emergencies and I'm happy to hear that you have highlighted that we really don't have anything solid and it's so important for us to think about that preparedness especially fire prevention and our wildland the WUI area as a former back in my young years a member of a 21 person initial attack wildland firefighting crew down in southern Oregon. I know how important it is to have fire prevention awareness and work collaboratively with different jurisdictions to do that so I'm hoping that we have some type of campaign effort to do that across the board to better prepare our communities for for a response like that. We are. That's exactly what we're doing in fact on October 28th and 29th we've got a subject matter expert throughout the country and teaching high rise operations that I've actually

57:00 taught that with him for years and he is coming in volunteering his time because of the relationship I have with him to teach Portland and all our regional partners a non fee based high rise operations program that goes through building construction the inventory in these buildings fire protection systems how to use the incident command system because again we got great people but they haven't had the experience in this and honestly I have and I know what needs to be done. Well thank you. And my last comment is having to do with our homeless community and when we do that emergency response the you know our role with that it's it's a different tactic and approach and I'm not looking for an answer right now but would love to continue to have this conversation about that response with all of our members of our community. It would be my pleasure. Thank you.

57:56 Counselor harness and thank you for your time. The other day to sit down over coffee and have a conversation and initially you know reached out just to talk generally about the public safety ecosystem and I had a little a little list of things I wanted to check in on. And as we were having our conversation you kept you're like well actually over here on page you know and so you know everything every question I had was in the strategic plan and I didn't know it was coming to us so I knew something was in the works so it was actually wonderful timing and then so you know this is also incredibly helpful for that reason right in the future when looking for answers it's right there in the strategic plan I know that we are working on it you know things related to recruitment and standards and workplace culture and mental health and you know PPE and physical health

58:55 as well and the professionalism and kind of what council member Perez was sort of talking about is like you know what that experience is that residents are getting and making sure that to check in being often the first on the scene wanting to make sure that that is you know part of that strategy is making sure that everyone always has a great experience. It's the worst day of their life potentially but you know what I mean not a great experience per se but that they are walking away from going you know that was wonderful and they're going to call 911 in the future right if something were to happen and so just great appreciation for this and the efficiencies that have been brought up as well and the emergency manager role you know concerns of climate change and wildfires of course so I'm happy to see that those plans are coming into effect and the amount of collaboration too with all of our partners and I'm

59:54 really excited too for these standards and policies and performance measures because I know it's so important to have a sense of ownership and camaraderie as you know for teams to work towards goals and to have that sense of pride too and so this is a wonderful plan so again just accolades and appreciation but other questions have already been answered for me so thank you again and I look forward to those timelines when they're established and also agree with Councilmember Paulson about checking in so we see how this plan is rolling out so thank you. Thank you. Councilor Stoker. Thank you Chief. Before the pandemic I had the opportunity to participate in an emergency management seminar that was conducted across the river hearing from the Portland's

1:00:51 emergency management coordinator at the time and in that you know the he kind of posited that a city is living organism living organism and by city I mean the corporate boundaries not the the organization that we are participating in this evening but the the the totality but he posited that there was a correlation between calls and sidewalks and neighborhoods that had sidewalks were less likely to have calls and neighborhoods that didn't have sidewalks are more likely to have calls. We're going to cut out the rich neighborhoods that don't want sidewalks but in that

1:01:49 social connectedness is an important part of fire prevention of health and safety and so I have interest. I didn't see it as I went through your plan, but I have interest in in understanding where the calls line up with our vulnerability index and that there's larger conversations happening within the city organization about those interrelationships and how are we how are we tackling those and going a little further on on this particular person who's probably not there anymore because it's been quite a few years but his feeling was that sidewalks were much more important than a smoke detector in in helping prevent fires

1:02:47 because again of that social connection. So I'm interested in the data that you're bringing in forming the rest of the city organization and how we are setting our priorities. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Chief, your document, first of all, is incredibly wonderful. Thank you for putting it together and the same as our colleagues. I haven't had time to go through all of it. I do appreciate people experiencing homelessness in that particular section that you've added also the opportunity for the chief's diversity advisory team similar to VPD. It's been a great opportunity. I would hope somewhere in here that you also have put in continuing the building of the relationships with the policy makers in the old days. We had the Fire

1:03:47 Academy where electeds and community members spent 24 hours with staff. That left a big impression on a lot of us because then we learned the strengths and weaknesses and the performance measurements that you'll be looking for. So if that opportunity comes back up, please consider it. Any other comments from Councilors? All right. Thank you so very much and thank you for bringing a body of support with you. We will now move into our City Financial Policies and Investment Policy Review. Lisa Brandel, City Manager, you want to tie this one up for us? Yeah, so this is something that the city has had a practice of periodically wanting to look at our financial policies but with the change in people in the seat in the Chief Financial Officer's role, we really

1:04:46 wanted to do a broader review of different policies. So Lisa has had a chance in that interim role to take a look at these and we'll be joined by Anthony Glenn to talk about the proposed changes we would like to make.

1:05:05 Good afternoon, Mayor, Council, community, Lisa Brandel, Deputy City Manager. I'm here with Anthony Glenn, our City Treasurer. We are here to present on the Financial Policies and Investment Policies Review. We are going through the process of updating both and so we want to walk through a couple of high points with you. So we're going to go through the financial policies, the investment policy, a quick update on the budget process and the status and update and next steps in the budget and then opportunity for discussion and questions.

1:06:00 The city as a practice updates the financial policies every biennium as part of its budget process. With the new city manager leadership and some new directors that have come on board since the last biennium, the financial policies have been updated to reflect current practices and lay the groundwork for future planning. Most financial policy items remain unchanged. According to the Municipal Research and Services Center of Washington, every jurisdiction is unique and financial policies are not necessarily one size fits all approach and do vary. So over the next few slides, I'm going to go over at a high level some of the changes in the financial policies that will be submitted for your consideration at the September 14th meeting. So we've done some updates to the

1:07:00 policies for accessibility, mainly changing from landscape to portrait mode, updating language terms throughout the document to reflect equity and also with the Public Works Operation Center project and other public works projects, citywide capital projects. There are language updates updating the need to address the possibility for debt service. Along with the debt service, there is the establishment of a six-year capital improvement plan for city facilities similar to the six-year plan that Public Works already has in place for their projects that will be created by general services in the next biennium. This plan will be important as it informs leadership of the timeline and cash flow needs for the project completion and when and if to consider debt. We also have contracted with a municipal

1:07:57 advisor, PFM, who will be assisting us over the next few years on debt strategies and their stronger language requiring the finance department to complete cost recovery studies every two years where previously the language was more implied and also a review by the city manager's office prior to any implementation citywide. The financial policies were updated to align with the city strategic plan and also with the city council themes of climate equity and community safety and after review by our directors of public works and general services and their leadership team, the capital planning and asset management sections were separated into their own sections to acknowledge the level of work and the continuing workload growth in these areas and then there's the overall theme throughout

1:08:55 the policies of establishing a regular cadence of reports and studies in the financial policies with an eye towards making this a regular practice to ensure costs are monitored, recovered, and reported on a regular basis. So, two highlighted recommendations within the policy are a change in designation for one is to change the designation of 1 million dollars in the liability reserve from what is now called the Columbia Arts Center to the Arts Hub Project. So, in 2000, the city sold a building known as the Columbia Arts Center and with and in which a reserve was established for an arts facility by that city council. As it in our, it is known in our books as the Columbia Arts Center and for state audit purposes, their

1:09:54 recommendation is to change that designation of approximately 1 million dollars to the Arts Hub Project, which is the current active project that we have. So, this is in the proposed 2728 financial policies that will be sent to you on September fourteenth. The second recommendation is one of the key elements that is being used towards closing the budget deficit. The current reserve for compensated absences is 5.9 million dollars which represents 50% of the unused PTO balances. PTO standing for paid time off of our city employees. The new formula being recommended is a five-year average of the actual usage of PTO used balances multiplied times 150%. This would lower the reserve to

1:10:49 2.6 million dollars from the current 5.9 million that is held in the reserve and returns 3.29 million dollars in one time general fund dollars back to the general fund that would be used to close the deficit. So, I wanted to highlight these two recommendations to council because they are the largest and most prominent recommendations throughout the financial policies. Great. Thank you, Lisa. Let's stop. Okay. Put a break right here. Counselors, you have two items in front of you right now. The Columbia Arts Center designation change and the new formula for compensated absences. Do you have questions or concerns?

1:11:51 Counselor Perez. What is the significance between Columbia Arts Center to Arts Hub Project? Is just the wish to change the name or is there something tied to the name? It's it's recorded in our accounting books and our financial statements as Columbia Arts Center and I think to be clean and for state audit purposes, our recommendation is to have council action to actually change it to the Arts Hub Project. So, then we could use that 1 million dollars towards the project that we have in place right now. Because of the name? Yes. Okay. Thank you. So, I do not see any other council concerns or questions about these two actions. You have our approval. Continue, please. Thank you.

1:12:50 So, very quickly, I want to highlight the reserves that we've shared in April and July and also I want to share with the community. These are the reserves that we have in place and so the compensated absences is on the far right of 5.9 million and it would change the balance. And so this these balances have been shown in our previous two workshops in April and in July. So, now I'm going to turn it over to Anthony Glenn, our City Treasurer, who's going to present on our City Investment Policy Update. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Anthony Glenn, City Treasurer. Today I'm presenting an update to the city's investment policy. The current policy was adopted in 2012 and while the city's investment approach

1:13:50 has served us well, investment practices, regulatory requirements and industry standards have continued to evolve. The purpose of this update is to modernize the policy while maintaining the city's long-standing conservative investment philosophy. The city's priorities will remain unchanged. Safety of principle, maintaining liquidity and achieving a reasonable rate of return within those constraints. So, why update the policy? The updated policy reflects several important improvements. First, it brings the city's investment policy up to date with current Washington state law and incorporates recognized best practices from organizations such as the Government Finance Officers Association. Bless you. Government Investment Officers Association and Washington Public Treasurers Association. These organizations emphasize strong governance, clear roles and responsibilities, transparency,

1:14:49 diversification, appropriate risk management and regular reporting. Importantly, this update does not represent a change to the city's investment philosophy. The city will continue to take a conservative approach focused on protecting public funds. A key component of the update is strengthening oversight and accountability. The revised policy more clearly defines the role of city council, the city manager, the investment officer and finance staff. It also strengthens internal controls by adding clear delegation of authority, investment training requirements and improved reporting requirements. Another improvement is the addition of procedures for downgraded securities. While investment ratings are monitored closely, markets can change. The updated policy establishes a process to review any downgraded investment and determine the appropriate action while protecting the city's interests.

1:15:49 These changes align with public sector best practices and provide stronger governance around the investment program. The updated policy also modernizes the city's investment framework. It expands the list of authorized investments that are permitted under Washington state law, providing additional flexibility while maintaining conservative limits on credit quality, diversification and maturity. The policy also clearly identifies prohibited investments to eliminate uncertainty and ensure investments remain consistent with the city's objectives. The updated diversification and maturity guidelines provide better tools to manage risk, including credit risk, interest rate risk and liquidity needs of the city. The goal is not to increase risk but to provide the city with a more effective framework for managing investments responsibly. Overall, the updated investment policy protects public funds through a

1:16:46 disciplined investment framework, improves transparency and accountability, aligns with current laws and professional standards and preserves the city's investment priorities of safety, liquidity and return. The most important point is that the city's investment philosophy remains the same. Safety of principle continues to be the highest priority. Liquidity ensures the city can meet its obligations and return remains an objective only after those first two priorities are satisfied. This update provides a modern policy structure that supports responsible stewardship of public funds and strengthens confidence in the city's investment program. So just one quick slide on debt capacity. This slide was originally presented as part of the April budget forecast and provides an overview of the city's available debt capacity and its ability to support future capital investments.

1:17:42 Based on an assessed value of approximately 40 billion in 2026, the city has roughly 1 billion of legal general obligation debt capacity. By comparison, the city currently has approximately 23 million dollars of outstanding general obligation debt so there's substantial capacity available for future capital needs. That said, having capacity does not mean we intend to use all of it. With several significant capital projects at various stages of development, as Lisa mentioned, we recently engaged a municipal advisor to help evaluate which projects may be appropriate for debt financing, the appropriate timing and structure of any issuance, and how debt fits into our overall capital and financial plan. We also recognize that the city's debt management policy is due for an update. We will work with the municipal advisor to modernize that policy and provide clear guidance around debt capacity, issuance, and long-term affordability.

1:18:42 We anticipate bringing an updated policy to council for review in the coming months. Finally, I want to emphasize that we are still early in this process. There will be several opportunities to return to council with additional analysis and recommendations as the overall funding strategy is developed.

1:19:09 Okay, with that, we'll go quickly over the latest on the biennium budget and where things currently stand. The departments have submitted their budgets and they're currently being evaluated by the city manager's office and the finance department and we are currently in labor negotiations with some labor groups and those are ongoing. And some good news to share, our chief financial officer Katie Shifley started on July 27th. I'm glad she's here and she's working alongside us getting immersed in all things budget and getting to know our city organization. I'd like to point her out here in the audience for the community. So, Katie, thank you, Katie.

1:20:05 Sorry about that. And our forecast remains unchanged from July 13th, so very quickly we are still forecasting a five and a half million surplus for 2027 and a 400,000 surplus for 2028 with our long-term eye towards the next four years of a 105 million dollar deficit. And so we are planning on a status quo budget with most likely some adjustments to reflect prioritization. It's too soon at this point to know what that is going to look like for 27-28, but we are working earnestly on that. And so our next steps in the adoption activities

1:21:00 is that Anthony and I will present to you two separate staff reports for the financial policies and the investment policy amendments and updates for your consideration and approval. We have a workshop on September 21st for a preview of the city manager's recommended budget, and then the budget will be published on October 1st, which is a state law requirement. And we have two council workshops, one for the operating budget scheduled for October 12th, and the capital budget on October 26th, and the council consent item for the budget is scheduled for November 2nd, and the public hearing and adoption tentatively scheduled for November 16th. So with every presentation, our timeline seems to shorten more and more. Feels like it was just the beginning of

1:21:54 summer, and now we're almost in fall. So with this next slide, I'm going to turn it over to Laura Shepherd, who's going to share a little bit about the community engagement schedule relating to the biennium budget.

1:22:15 Great. Thank you, Lisa. I'm Laura Shepherd, director of communications for the city, and I'd like to share a little bit with you about what you and the community can expect regarding community engagement and communication for the remainder of the budget cycle. So just a little bit of a look backwards. We brought online a budget web page in April where people can go and find different information about the budget, about the city's finances, how our budget works, and the schedule. We dedicated our summer newsletter to the budget, mostly to the budget. Our center spread talked about the budget and talked about sales tax, talked about property tax, talked about the different funds. What we really wanted to do was try to provide a base of information for the public. So we were starting all at the same place with our understanding of the budget. We presented the community survey out to you last month and then you'll see both myself

1:23:15 and Jen Hawker from DHM later tonight to talk about our focus groups. We recently opened our Be Heard budget exercise where we asked the public to play city manager and city council and decide where the funding gets allocated across a group of city services. That's been open now for about two weeks. In that time we've had about 130 people participate in it. Last time we had about 544 people participate in it. So I would say we're, I was hoping for more, but we're on track and I'm confident we'll we'll get higher numbers in participation in this as we go through. We had great success with our first reel about it to the community on social media. We had close to 2,000 views of the reel and largely the comments were positive which is, which was really lovely

1:24:09 to see. And then we also opened, we had the employee idea box open for a month where we asked employees their thoughts. Did they have ideas around items that could be cut or changed or find efficiencies or different ways of doing things? I'd like to stop there for a second and just tell you a little bit more about that. So we had about 36 ideas submitted from employees. Most of them were ideas that employees felt could be applied citywide. Some of them were a little niche, meaning they pertain to one department, like there we received four for VPD, we received one for IT, I received one. So, but most of the ideas that employees had were around citywide ideas. I did, when I looked at the data, I did

1:25:06 create themes around it. The themes were the employees talked a lot about city-owned facilities, they talked about remote work and alternate schedules, they had ideas around procurement and spending, there was some thoughts around training, travel and benefits. Other employees also talked about staff allocations to different programs and the city's use of consultants and then there was just a few that I would just call miscellaneous. I didn't feel fell into any specific category, it was just a general idea. I provided a summary to both the city manager and the budget committee as well as a summary and well of course all the data and all the data to all the directors so they could take a look at it and see if there were things that we could apply to the budget. I would say though my takeaway from the employee that exercise is there were some good creative ideas. I think

1:26:04 the some of the good news in that is a lot of them are already being done. We know that staff is looking at our city facilities, the idea around that should we lease different floors of our buildings to get better use, that's already being done. So I think the employees were thinking along the right track just I think maybe a little bit more awareness about what the city has been doing might be helpful for employees to understand a little bit more about about their workplace. What's coming up next in September are city meetings in the community with the city manager. We have a series of three, a couple of them are still in flux on the dates so I'm loathe to give them in a public forum because I don't want people to get a meeting date idea in their heads and then we change it. But I can tell you we are we are planned, well I can tell you has been confirmed already, we are visiting

1:27:01 the Vancouver neighborhood alliance on September 9th. We have a meeting where we're going to be visiting with different non-profit and social service organizations. We have a in-person community meeting planned for mid-September at I believe it's at Furstenberg and then we have another meeting where we're focused on the business community. And then at the end of all of our communication and community engagement activity we will provide a summary as we have in the past so you can see what what folks have said and you can use that as you as you deliberate on the budget. I'm happy to answer any questions if you have them.

1:27:42 Councillors? No? Councillor Perez? This is Councillor Perez. Thank you Laura. How exciting. This is really just a call to my colleagues here that we take this be heard what you have and share it with our own personal networks to really expand the input that you're getting from the community. Thank you. Any other comments? Thank you Laura. Thank you Mayor. Thank you Council. And with that that concludes our workshop. We're all available for any questions or comments Council may have. Councillors do you have any questions of Anthony and Lisa? Councillor Stauberg? Thank you Mayor. Thank you for the presentation. Anthony as you are looking at the bonding policy I'm interested in knowing

1:28:42 how we can if it still exists as a market but how we can make sure we're packaging for green bonds to appeal to a broader or a different set of investors. So how are our projects meeting climate goals and making sure that that's being broadcast out so would love to see that baked into the into those policies that are being developed. Thank you. We'll take note of that. Any other comments? Councillor Perez? Thank you. Laura on the emergency or sorry I'm spacing on your name. Anthony.

1:29:34 On the emergency reserve it's 19.6 and that's 17 percent of the of the 114.4 balance is that that's just basic math that I was doing. Is that 17 percent the goal for our emergency reserve and I ask because of the surplus that was shown on the graph for 27 and 28 totaling 5.9 is the plan to put that surplus in reserve? I'm sorry can you reword that question can you repeat the question? Okay the there are two parts to this question do we have a percent goal for emergency reserve? So that's the first question. I can jump in on that right now the uh for our current debt policy there's language in there that will retain 10 percent of our limited

1:30:29 capacity towards an emergency. Okay so 10 percent is our our goal to have? Correct it's currently written. So with the surplus now second question surplus of 2027 and 2028 which totals 5.9 million according to the numbers on your graph is the plan to put the surplus into reserve? No the the surplus is going the current plan for the surplus is to see how we can use the surplus against the requests from the departments that have submitted uh some items for consideration. So there's uh for example uh there is a request to increase the allocation for public defense uh to increase the amount that's been

1:31:27 allocated so that is currently being discussed. There's also another uh increase in the amount the city pays to the county for animal services so there are some increases that the city is obligated to pay based on obligations for various services that may have to be used against that reserve. Okay and my main point is with 105 deficit 105 million deficit and surplus before that a step to come back to city council to approve how that surplus would be budgeted is that a step? Uh and on September 21st the the plan is to share the city the preview of the city manager's recommended budget

1:32:27 and there would be a recommendation on how to use that surplus to council and so um Lon I don't know if you want to chime in on anything else but that would be the general plan to present to you on what the recommendation would be to use that surplus for. Okay. Thank you that answers my question. You're welcome. All right thank you so very much. Thank you. Let's go ahead and transition into our climate action framework update. It's good to see you staff. Thank you for coming in a little bit early.

1:33:27 Okay first time in the new uh new space. All right good afternoon mayor and members of council. My name is Rebecca Small. I am the climate action lead for the city of Vancouver. I'm joined today by my colleague Lexi Farina our two-year fellow with the climate team through the part through the Bloomberg Harvard program and we are very excited to be back to date for our third workshop of 2026 to keep council informed on the progress of the first update to the climate action framework. Today we'll be talking about the development of the CAF work plans which was a new element that we are adding to the climate action framework this year. We're also very excited to share some of the early results from our community engagement and talk about our next steps and our pathway towards adoption vote in December. I also wanted to quickly note I know last week we had a request for an update on the city's solar efforts.

1:34:27 I'm happy to provide that after our workshop session if time allows or we can submit that in a memo for a future date. All right so this is just a quick check in on our timeline. We are in Q3 of this year and as you can see we are very much in the thick of it. My colleague and I are wrapping up the more general outreach phase of our community engagement and transitioning to more focused conversations with specific stakeholder groups. We're also continuing to work with the city staff across departments to refine the CAF actions and develop the work plan. So about that work plan in response to department director requests for more clarity on what to prioritize and provide guidance for budget requests. We're developing work plans this year. The work plans identify priority actions

1:35:21 by department for the next five years. And a quick note on this time frame. In council's original direction to staff we're scheduled to update the CAF every four years. Staff are proposing to move to a six year cycle for updates for a few reasons. First it would better align with some other city planning cycles including the strategic plan, the capital facilities plan update. Second it recognizes the time commitment required for a full plan update and community engagement particularly with a very small team of just two full-time positions. And third a six-year cycle gives plans and programs enough time to develop and play out before we undertake another comprehensive update. For this next cycle we would propose completing the next update five years from now which would allow us to finish the planning work in advance of the biennial budget process and have our priority climate projects clearly laid out in a work plan

1:36:20 well before we begin developing that budget. We'll bring this to council for consideration with the draft CAF review in early November but we would welcome any early thoughts you might have on that during our discussion today. All right, returning to the work plan. The priority projects that we are including in this work plan are intended to align with council's direction from earlier this year. One of the biggest priorities that council expressed was that we get our own house in order and work work aggressively to meet our municipal greenhouse gas reduction targets. As you can see in the pie chart of our 2023 municipal greenhouse gas emissions our biggest emission categories from the city's operations are water and wastewater treatment plant accounting for nearly half of our emissions footprint. Our buildings and facilities all of the energy required to operate those comes in next at about 23 percent and then fleet

1:37:18 is accounts for 11 percent of our municipal emissions so accordingly we'll be prioritizing a wastewater solids renewal program that minimizes emissions building energy efficiency and clean energy product projects for city facilities and the development of a road map towards full fleet decarbonization. Other work plan items like a tree canopy expansion goal and sidewalk infill goals are in response to that feedback we've gotten through community engagement and we'll address the second goal from council of projects that will make a tangible difference in our residents day-to-day lives. I think it's also worth noting that all of the projects that we have listed here are underway by city departments so this is outlining some specific goals and targets for us to achieve under these different categories with our with cooperation from all of our departments. This is also not a comprehensive list just a couple of examples to illustrate

1:38:16 how we're responding to council's earlier direction. At this time we expect the work plan to include the elements that you see here. In 2027 after we know the outcome of the budget process we'll finalize the development of performance measures to accompany the work plan elements. What gets funded this year through the biennium budget process will have a big impact on what we're able to accomplish over the next five years. All right on to the fun part community engagement. Our small team has been very busy this summer thanks to the extra capacity provided by our climate fellow Lexi and our excellent summer intern Ezekiel Wells both courtesy of the Bloomberg Harvard city leadership program. The climate team has connected with nearly 600 community members at 22 outreach events across the city. This includes the council community forum in June. Many of our council members here attended thank you so much for being a

1:39:16 part of those conversations. We've also had tabling sessions at community centers libraries and city-wide events like the waterfront concert series movies in the park and community fence festivals like Juneteenth and the pollinator festival. The one planned event that the climate team didn't make it to was the national night out on august 4th that had to be rescheduled on account of wildfire smoke and extreme heat. We also hosted four events for pacific northwest climate week and conducted an online survey which we'll go into a little more detail next. We also have a few other activities like presenting to neighborhood associations on request but this has kept us pretty busy this summer. And just a quick note on pacific northwest climate week we wanted to call out this part of the engagement program to highlight some of our great partners. Pacific northwest climate week is a regional celebration of climate action

1:40:14 that extends from Vancouver bc to Eugene origin or Oregon that brings people together for fun interactive events education civic participation and community building. Vancouver was participating in climate week for its first time this year and thanks to some great partners including waste connections clark county our own solid waste and urban forestry programs and even the fort vancouver pipe band the city hosted four events for our community members. We all get by with a little help from our friends but we truly could not have done this without these great partners. In particular urban forestry's excellent heritage tree ride was booked to capacity and got a wonderful write-up in the columbians so if you haven't gotten a chance to join that that ride or they also have a walking tour please try to add it to your schedule so it's really a treat. All right and i will pass it over to Lexi to talk about the survey.

1:41:12 Thanks so much Rebecca good afternoon mayor and councilors. Another key part of our climate engagement this summer has been the online survey that was really designed to understand residents concerns and priorities related to climate action all across the city and i want to give a big shout out to our intern Rebecca mentioned Zeke Wells who really played a pivotal role in the design outreach and analysis of the survey. Fortunately he's already back in Boston getting geared up to start back up at school so he can't be with us today but i'm going to share a little bit about how we got out in the community and what some of the findings were that we heard. So outreach was conducted through lots of different community event tablings at the concert series and movies in the park across the city as well as placing flyers around the city at everyday locations that residents frequent just in case that we want to be able to ensure that we reach people that are not coming to the events. We were really excited to hear that we

1:42:09 had responses from about 165 residents across the three weeks of outreach that we were able to do and also wanted to note that the results are weighted to reflect the representativeness of Vancouver's population. So getting into some of those key results the first part of the survey really asked people about what climate impacts they are seeing and feeling in their everyday lives and not surprisingly all almost all respondents said that they personally feel climate impacts specifically extreme heat and wildfire smoke. This survey was conducted during July of this year so it's not surprising that these things came up as top of the list. We also want to note that climate impacts are felt unevenly. We had our households with lower incomes reported higher utility bills and more health impacts as related to climate despite having similar exposure to wildfire smoke and extreme heat.

1:43:08 The next topic that our survey got into was focused on questions around transportation and buildings given these sectors represent the largest pieces of our pie of community-wide greenhouse gas emissions. So related to transportation specifically we asked some questions about cycling and the first was you know what barriers prevent you from cycling more and the primary barrier that we heard was around safety and then similarly when we asked you know what would encourage you to cycle more people responded overwhelmingly that protected bike lanes were substantially more likely than other options like painted or buffered bike lanes to encourage them to bike more frequently. We also asked about support for a bike share program and found that 67 percent of respondents were in favor and specifically those younger residents and renters reported that they would use a program like this the most frequently.

1:44:09 Next we also asked about community support for a climate action. The first question was around which climate action programs would the community feel important to contribute public funding towards. As you can see on the left side of the screen we had resounding support for trees and green spaces as the highest funding priority with public dollars. We also want to note that we had high support over 60 percent for other areas like clean and renewable energy, walkable and bikeable spaces and home energy upgrades all areas that would really move the needle on our greenhouse gas emissions. The next piece of information that we really wanted to highlight in this survey findings was that we asked respondents if they would be willing to contribute anything additional monthly to contribute to climate action and we found that 81 percent of respondents would

1:45:07 contribute something and as you can see on the screen this ranged from zero to fifteen dollars. Fifteen dollars was the maximum asked on the survey so nobody could say anything above that but we wanted to note that the median amount is around five dollars per month and these levels differ when you break it down by income levels. We found this to be really interesting because we know that throughout this range we've seen other cities have programs where participants are able to opt in to contribute something monthly for a climate action on an energy or utility bill for example to support clean energy and these are programs that can really support investment in climate priorities while still meeting people where they are financially and willing to contribute to this sort these sort of activities. We also wanted to note that anecdotally we heard people would be most willing to contribute to climate priorities

1:46:06 when their investment went towards the priorities that they value so as we see on the left side like trees and green spaces. People also want a transparency around where their investment would go if they would be willing to contribute something. And then finally getting to the questions around healthy and climate smart homes. As we mentioned in the last council workshop this is a key focus area of our engagement track this summer because we recognize again that buildings especially residential buildings are a key piece of that greenhouse gas emissions pie and we heard from the comprehensive plan engagement process that people are increasingly worried about staying safe and comfortable and resilient in their homes with the changing climate. So this survey asked people about their concern level around different climate related concerns at home and we found similar results to the comprehensive plan team that concerns are really centered around

1:47:06 resilience and specifically we had 88 percent of respondents highlight concerns around power outages in their home. I also want to point out that when we asked people what they were very or extremely concerned about we found that there is a real intense concern around indoor air quality specifically. And then to dig deeper into the why behind some of these selections and just to get a better sense of how people would like the city to interact and support them to create safer more affordable healthy and resilient homes. I've been hosting small group discussions with low and middle income homeowners as well as renters throughout the city to really hear their perspectives around what are their home priorities what home improvements would really make a difference to them and what types of programs would be most useful. We actually have a dedicated climate workshop about this

1:48:04 in October so I won't get into all of the findings but just to give you a sense of what we're hearing. Specifically with homeowner discussions you know everyone kind of comes at this conversation from different angles. Some people are environmentally motivated some people are just trying to make sure that they can afford their energy bills each month. But we've heard a resounding set of priorities across conversations really thinking about comfortable home temperatures indoor air quality and ability to maintain and afford their homes monthly cost. With that being said in addition to financial support people really value personalized information around how to navigate the home improvement process. So some things that were mentioned are thinking about home energy assessments residents were interested in getting that personalized information about where in their home would make a difference and what types of improvements that would look like. One resident mentioned

1:49:03 how it doesn't have to be a big improvement like a heating system change but rather something as simple as changing the degree on their water heater made a big difference in their energy bills. We also heard from renters specifically since they have more limited authority to make some of those structural changes that they would be really interested in just education around how to become more energy efficient in their day-to-day home operations as well as thinking about simple home improvements that they can do themselves like things like weather shipping that really do make a big impact. We'll also be talking with small property owners hopefully in the future we're working on setting up a conversation and then tomorrow we actually have a conversation with participants in the city's existing home appliance rebate program funded through the department of commerce to hear from them about their experiences in that program how it worked for them what their appliances have been able to see in their home different impacts and

1:50:03 any advice that they would have for us as we continue to expand that program and find ways to complement that. So with that I'll pass it back to Rebecca. All right for the last segment on our community engagements we first wanted to acknowledge support that we received this past year through a climate planning grant courtesy of the department of commerce which is funded through the climate commitment act and from that funding we're able to bring on some much needed capacity to assist our small team in building on those outreach and doing some deeper conversations in the community. So one way that we've approached that is to turn the community's climate resilience conversations into action. Thanks to our colleagues with the comprehensive plan we have a really strong foundation on some of those conversations with neighborhoods that are most impacted by impacts like urban heat islands localized flooding

1:50:59 and some of some of the other community climate hazards. So we wanted to build on the ideas and priorities that residents had already expressed through those conversations rather than asking them to have the same conversations over again for the sake of our update. So in Fruit Valley one of the neighborhoods is most vulnerable to some of those impacts. We've been focusing on advancing neighborhood climate resilience priorities in tangible ways. That includes partnering with nature play designs local landscape and ecology firm to coordinate green scaping activities like volunteer tree plantings, tree canopy infills, depaving events and educational events while bringing together teams across the city such as our equitable development teams, forestry, stormwater and parks to coordinate those efforts. The goal is really engagement through action taking what we heard from the community and working together to make it visible on the ground.

1:51:57 The Commerce Grant has also enabled us to hire Washington Conservation Action a non-profit to help us with a few more in-depth conversations. They have convened the Climate Policy Advisors Group to provide some early guidance on policy questions around partnerships and funding and to review early drafts of the CAF with its updated actions and strategies. You can see a list of the participants in attachment B of the memo. This group is very engaged, very eager to explore the issues and eager to engage with council on issues of concern. So you may see testimony from this group over the next several months. WCA is also conducting a series of one-on-one interviews with community leaders, elders and youth. Coming up tomorrow they are teaming up with the Southwest Equity Coalition for an event at La Casita Art Gallery and Cultural Center that will include breakout discussions on climate issues that are most relevant

1:52:56 to youth age 16 to 19. Youth leads and SWEC staff will be facilitating conversations at each of the table. We'll have some interview questions for the students and they will be working together to complete an original mural designed by a local artist. Cool. Alright and finally that brings us to our next steps. We will be working on the community engagement we've just described as well as continuing to coordinate with city departments on the development of the CAF actions and the work plan. You'll be seeing Lexi again on October 12th for a workshop on the Healthy and Climate Smart Homes effort and then our full team will be returning to you on November 9th with a draft update of the CAF and we are still on track for an adoption vote on December 7th. Thank you so much for your time today. We're curious to hear if Council has thoughts on shifting to a six-year work plan or any comments on the survey results on climate funding

1:53:54 and we would welcome any follow-up questions that you may have. I'm also happy to provide that solar update after the Q&A time permitting. Thank you. Thank you. Rebecca would you go back one slide? Let's leave it right there for just a bit. Okay. Councillors do you have some comments or questions? Councillor Stilbo? Thank you Mayor. Good to see you all. It's hard to believe that four years have passed. So in the beginning I was a I didn't want to wait four years. I wanted updates to be much more quickly than four years and I come down as a hard against expanding out to six years. Two big reasons. One is we set a 2040 goal and you're talking about the difference between three updates or

1:54:52 four updates in between now and then and I believe we're going to be struggling to meet that goal and waiting longer. I believe we will need to be making more frequent adjustments. Second council terms are four years and by going to six years what you're saying is it's potential that a council member would not have the opportunity to participate in influencing the calf during their term and I believe every single council member that serves on this dais should have that opportunity. So I'm a strong no there. One thing you talked a lot I felt like you talked a lot about home ownership in this and I have concerns about multifamily.

1:55:51 One of the greatest regrets I have of my time on council is the approval of a low-income multifamily project that doesn't have air conditioning and sits on very busy streets so high particulate matter outside of smoke coming during the winter and and it's it's a concern that flows over into what we have approved in the in the green buildings because it means the because the green building what we approved is well if the particulate matter in the air is bad you have to go to a central location in the complex versus me as a homeowner I can go anywhere in my home because I have

1:56:49 modern windows and I've put insulation in my house so I've I think that I want to make sure that we are not just focused on homeowners but we're also considering that 50 percent of our residents are renters. Thank you. Councilor Fox. All right one of the pieces that I was well I'll be really excited to see is really those kind of ways of tracking that you had at the beginning of this presentation I was trying to go back I think I wrote down slide where was it oh maybe it wasn't in the presentation but anyways putting together these particular projects the work plans and then actually showing

1:57:48 the tracking and progress for those I think that's going to be really important feedback for the community I'm assuming but maybe I'll say it out loud that that will be part of feedback that they would see every year or that kind of feedback wouldn't wait four to six years for them to see the progress on these particular initiatives so maybe we should highlight that next time you guys are before us but also one of the pieces that I'm kind of wondering about is the requirement by the state to show progress on on the emissions side every five years and some of these maybe priority work plan items aren't all emissions focused you know as you guys had mentioned that some of them are

1:58:43 more reflective of of community kind of community concerns around tree canopy and and and things like that versus being emissions reduction activities and so I'm wondering if maybe talk to me a little bit about how do we as a community as a city we can definitely move forward with our tree canopy expansion but whether or not we're tracking that as as a priority action in the calf is where I'm a little bit kind of not sure that's where it fits happy to offer some thoughts on that absolutely correct adding tree canopy has a minimal impact on our carbon footprint we do see some co2 reductions but it's really a drop in the bucket compared

1:59:37 to the emissions that we generate from powering our vehicles and our buildings and homes so when we're thinking about the green spaces and the canopy it's really not as much in a context really not as much with the goal of greenhouse gas reductions it's really more of a goal focus on climate resilience adding tree canopy is one of our it's one of our most effective strategies to help mitigate urban heat island effects and change the experience that our residents will have as summers continue to be hotter hotter and drier and try to make that lived experience for our residents you know comfortable as conditions continue on their current trends so it's it's really more of a community resilience focus in addition you know it's the public who who would not want another perk yeah so we

2:00:35 you have like i said it's not that i it's not that i don't support more trees and parks of course i do but i'm just wondering about that kind of the tracking under our calf program knowing that we have this reduction this pretty aggressive reduction emissions reduction goals and knowing too that again the tree doesn't show a lot of climate resilience benefits in that four to six year window either you know we're investing for that bigger future the 10-20 year future with that tree so just just to clarify for anyone maybe that doesn't help clarify for others but that's where i'm going with it is wondering if some of these that don't seem to be reducing that emissions as being top priorities of the calf staff's priority is still to achieve the goals that city council have set out it's very worth our time to understand

2:01:33 what the community prioritizes and try to find the nexus between those our urban forestry program already has its 28 canopy goal set and they will continue to work towards that if we're able to bring additional partners to the table or accelerate some of those efforts so much the better it doesn't mean that we it does not mean that we do not work towards other goals that have a more measurable impact on our greenhouse gas emissions i think the healthy and climate smart homes effort is probably the clearest example of that one of our biggest and hardest to budge sectors of emissions is our built environment and we know that if we are going to move the needle on that we need to have some dedicated programming and funding that goes specifically towards that so it's not to say that we want to focus on tree canopy at the expense of other actions that do have a bigger impact on our emissions

2:02:32 and will help us get towards that goal it's good to acknowledge that there are some areas where the community's preferences and climate direction and council's direction do have some overlap though i just had a question about um clarity on you know it's indoor air quality like why is it indoor air quality not air quality broadly and you know what we're you know digging through what was provided it couldn't quite find an answer to that like what was the concern you know is like when you think of wildfire smoke that's air quality generally so i'm just wondering about that clarifier like what that dialogue was about yeah i think that's a good point and people approach this conversation differently and so when we ask

2:03:32 these questions they're often just at face value and we don't provide any additional descriptions so it's open to interpretation we've definitely heard the concern about wildfire smoke we've also heard the concern about you know i live on a major highway in an area where the air quality is poor so i don't want to open my window and therefore i have to crank my ac and my energy bill goes up we've also heard that concern just in other parts of the home that are maybe less related to energy efficiency but just thinking about proper ventilation in the bathroom or thinking about some of the unintended consequences if you weatherize and insulate a home but then don't think about the proper ventilation that can then have unintended consequences on the air quality so people have come at it from different points when i've had those conversations and i think as we think about program designs in the future it will be good to clarify as different actions will impact your quality in different ways but it's definitely come up in in different contexts so far thank you

2:04:32 um and then i just wanted to echo what um council member stover said about more i also was an advocate for more frequent updates more frequent celebrations of when we reach milestones um it's really important that the community hears and sees and that sort of feels that we talked about before and part of that is just those continuous updates of things that we can celebrate on what we've accomplished so far because otherwise it's just a plan that just sort of keeps going and nobody really knows what's really happening or you know if it's not easy for folks to say to each other that means we need to do more check-ins and more of those milestones and so i would also um i'm supportive of what council member stover mentioned of more frequency counselor chris hi rebecca um also uh want to echo council member stover's comment

2:05:30 related to multi-family housing and emphasizing what we could do there we just heard before earlier today in the workshop from our fire department about a safe and prepared community and um you know climate is something that should be weaved in all of our our plans as a priority and i'm wondering if you've given any thought about um with the extended heat domes that we're having or more severe weather um and our fire department um strategic plan there when it comes to climate and how as a city we work collectively to really deliver our mission i'm just wondering if you had given that any thought and if you haven't if you can do so especially within the area of preparing our residents and our public for those you know for the reality of climate change and the impacts that

2:06:29 we're all feeling um that was the one comment i wanted to share and i think uh as far as community resilience goes and we had talked about and i believe council member fox mentioned it also the resiliency hubs within our city and so just i don't know if there's been any movement or any thought or if that's maybe it was mentioned in the comprehensive plan and we missed it but just wanting to see this weaved throughout all of our major documents that guide the city also acknowledged in in the calf framework thank you council member i'll start with the first question um with regards to what we can do to try to help our community members be more prepared for the climate impacts that are already upon us and that we expect might be worsening in the future um we did get

2:07:27 to have a wonderful conversation with our new fire chief earlier this year who comes to us from an environment that has been deeply impacted by wildfires and he brings that experience to the table which is a wonderful body of experience to have as we just hear this afternoon about residents north of just north of battleground being evacuated from their homes for a wildfire i think there's some lessons that we can learn from their team about defensible space with homes that are located on the urban wildland interface i think some of the lessons or some of the messages that our team has already been working with is for everyone that lives in a home that was not built with air conditioning to deal with severe heat severe heat events or that did not have a high quality air filter you know installed as part of its h-pack system how do we help how do we help all of those residents

2:08:26 weather those kind of changes and i think the healthy and climate smart homes idea is an effort to bring some of those protections forward you know we see a lot of examples of how other cities are approaching this we have rentals of portable ac units for example or portable air filters that that households can check out like a library item during extreme weather events we also have an opportunity to try to work with some of our utility partners like clark public utilities and energy trust of oregon to try to bring some of those home upgrades like replacing an outdated furnace with a heat pump that can provide that heating in the winter but also air conditioning in the summer while being more energy efficient and helping helping our energy efficiency goals so we do have some we do have ideas for how to pursue those efforts i will say that they are going to take a

2:09:24 lot of time and one-on-one interactions because it does depend on making those connections with individual households to you know to let them know that this opportunity to check out an air filter exists or to talk with someone through the not insignificant process of updating your home hvac system or insulating your house if you know depending on what's appropriate for them so it's it's something we're trying to get underway now we have heard that feedback from a lot of your constituents that that is that more than the mitigation side is is what's on their mind because they're trying to protect their families so it's it is a part of the the puzzle that we're trying to put some attention towards with this update thank you and the other thought that just came to mind as you're talking and i was thinking about people who are renting is in weaving throughout our our efforts across the city is the rental registration

2:10:23 and if there was a way there too to be able to to assess an inventory where there is a shortage or lacking and something in the future that we can strategically think about helping our landlords with this effort so anyway just wanted to put that seat out there to think a little bit about not only our renters but our landlords as well other comments yes councilor pelston thank you mayor thanks for the update i'd like to dive a little bit more deeply into this question of how frequently we should update the plan and so i'm thinking about we we have a plan and we talk about updating the plan but then there's also a cadence of updates to council which are separate and distinct from each other and i think they're sometimes conflated with each other so i

2:11:21 wonder if you could sort of detach those two things from each other and talk about the cadence of updates to council and what that looks like and how that might look under an update paradigm where we only do it every six years and then we can take the actual planning process as a separate but just just talk about council interaction council updates and council opportunity to amend the plan within that six-year time period if that were the change that was made absolutely and there's definitely precedence with other plans of doing doing minor updates to the plan in between the larger kind of full formal update of the plan i think the comp plan has opportunities to make those kinds of adjustments and we adjust code from time to time when we discover that something isn't working the way we need it to and we need to make those adjustments our team is committed to giving an update to council at least once a year on you know kind of our progress towards the calf as a whole

2:12:19 but also on the individual projects that are moving forward we also have our scheduled greenhouse gas inventory which is every four years and we're not proposing to change the cadence of that whatsoever i think it is very important to have that regular check-in of you know just how are we doing like measure it track the specific metrics that we are looking at towards our progress and see where we are measuring up and those are great opportunities to talk about what's working and what needs to move faster i think the interest in spacing out the the full plan update i think is a little bit of a reflection of the capacity of our team we do have a smaller team we've been one full-time fte this year and thank goodness we've had the support of our fellow and our our intern who have just been life savers but it really has taken the full bandwidth of the team for this year so in that time

2:13:18 we're not working towards advancing the climate action programs with our full focus and so it's it isn't interest it is in the in our interest to spend time working to advance the plans and programs that are in the calf i think with a larger team or if we're if we have consistent funding to bring an outside consultant support which we were lucky to get with grant funding this year then you know that engagement component of our plan updates is a little bit more feasible we are committed to updates as frequently as council would like them but a minimum of once a year for the full calf progress and then also on individual plans and programs so we hope you would never feel in the dark or behind behind the curve on where we are and that greenhouse gas inventory update does provide that four-year check-in on

2:14:16 our specific progress towards our goals in each of the various sectors both for our municipal emissions and the community-wide emissions thank you for that clarification and so one of the things in my mind that i'm hearing you say is when we're updating the plan like we are now we're not actually doing the work of the plan and so really what that translates to is if we're planning every four years versus every six years then we're planning 50 more often which means we're executing the plan 50 less often so to my way of thinking the fastest way to achieve our objectives is to plan less often and spend more time executing the plan understanding that we have opportunities all along the way to adjust the plan based on the reports that you're giving us and the progress towards and i respect the perspectives that have been shared and in particular the notion that a council member might not have an opportunity to weigh in on a particular plan but i think there's precedent for that we have a strategic

2:15:13 plan that's six years long we have a comprehensive plan that's 20 years long but all along the way council members in various different points of their terms whenever it may fall within those time periods have opportunities to opine and influence and possibly even change in significant ways those plans and so it's not as if we're just going to stick it on the shelf and a person could go for four years without having any opportunity to influence the plan so for for me i i'm actually supportive of moving to a six-year cycle mainly because because we have constrained resources that we can apply towards planning versus doing i'd rather spend that time doing that not planning so thank you thank you rebecca and lexie i wonder if you could show slide nine that was the percentage rating public funding for each the number four over there the home energy upgrades we have a great opportunity

2:16:09 especially with our renters that we are asking landlords to register their rentals in the old days clark public utilities used to give great financial grants low interest loans and everything else for new windows or storm windows we saw the grades on the air conditioners all of those opportunities with heat pumps and everything else when you do have the time and lexie is sitting there with only 17 000 things to do would you see if we can tie the two together can we take any information from clark

2:17:08 public utilities on those opportunities for low interest loans and grants and etc and send them to those landlords who have registered their rentals and develop an incentivized program thank you for registering when you had your inspection we noticed you had electric heat or electric whatever maybe we can tie the two of them together and help those landlords apply for grants with clark public utilities with the state with all of those and that was that one email that i sent earlier because they're looking for those opportunities and they just don't know how to help with that but if we get any climate commitment act funds

2:18:04 and we can help leverage then let's see if we can work with our rentals to help with that that clean energy people want to have the air filters we saw that in the meridian we saw that in the pacific they worked with vancouver housing authority we were able to close the windows take the air conditioners out of the windows and make it happen let's see if we can tie those together and incentivize something with those landlords who have registered with us and we know they have electric heat anything else counselors counselor harless um i think the the disconnect that i want to try to communicate um and council member stovert let me know if you agree um is the sense of urgency in a crisis like

2:19:02 we're not in a strategic planning crisis we're not in a comp plan crisis we are in a climate crisis and so having a plan that is more frequently updated is because we need to take more action and we need to do it quicker and i don't know what it takes to get that staffing and resources as we you know are going to be talking about this budget pretty soon climate is one of our main lenses and so we need to actually give it the resources and the funding that it needs you know whether that's a resolution to acknowledge that we're in a crisis that's the kind of action i want to see compared to other plans that come before us and that's the different lens that i'm seeing this and why i want to see more more frequent updates more interaction because also science and everything changes so rapidly and from our young people it's one of the top issues that's on their mind and we don't hear

2:19:58 their voices enough either and so again that's why we need to do more and more action where possible so i just wanted to try to clarify what i was trying to communicate earlier thank you i agree okay council Perez mayor thank you for inquiring a little bit more on the home energy upgrades with clark public utilities and doing that and i'd like to offer the other area potential area of the affordable housing fund on the preservation of homes and so that i don't know if that's another area that might be worth just looking into also thank you okay lessee it's good to have you rebecca thank you for allowing us to use the bloomberg asset we will see you shortly with all

2:20:55 sorts of other things and we look forward to seeing some of those requests in our budget mayor yes i think we have time for a solar update that was requested oh okay sure go ahead thank you thank you all right so thank you so much for the additional time we are moving forward with several solar efforts uh primarily through our general services and public works teams on the general services side a solar and battery storage assessment and feasibility study was conducted in 2022 to 2023 through a department of commerce grant funded by the climate commitment act we were able to assess five facilities for solar potential through that through that grant so building on that work general service has general services has submitted a decision package for this biennium to fund one of those projects that would be the city's first solar

2:21:52 installation if that's if that moves forward however we also have the ops campus which is moving forward in construction right now that will have solar arrays installed with potential to add arrays to the main building and vehicle canopy structures in the future the arts hub renovation will bring the roof to solar ready status and we believe that this facility would be a good candidate for a solar grant and we will be looking for opportunities to secure outside funding to actually install solar panels for that facility and then the new roof for the fire station 8 expansion has also been designed to be solar ready to an extent so we're making sure that as soon as funding is available we are ready to spring on those opportunities and we will we are continuing to work with our grants team to scan the horizon for any and all opportunities to bring in some capital funds for the solar installations and then on the public work side public works is taking a phased approach to solar development

2:22:51 staff have met with gft which is one of the city's on-call electrical engineering firms just this past month to discuss a high level low-cost gis survey of public works buildings facilities and surrounding grounds such as the wastewater treatment facility settling ponds and surrounding areas to identify promising solar sites higher potential sites would then undergo more in-depth engineering and electrical assessments and once the city has a clearer picture of the opportunities staff would explore potential solar programs and uses for the resulting credits we have options for what to do with solar that the city generates for example we can use them to offset the city's consumption maintain some more stability for utility rate pairs we could also host a community solar project or another option so once we have a clearer picture of what opportunities are clearly available then we can start exploring what are some of those specific pathways that the city might

2:23:49 like to direct that solar production towards and i think steve all might be in the room with us in case there's further questions on those on those developments are there questions concerning those developments counselor hanson thank you mayor how many planned kilowatts do we have we don't have any planned kilowatts right now i think with the continued development of the ops campus we can get a concrete number so i think that array is there's a minimum size array that's required by the state so we'll definitely hit that minimum for our other facilities it's really moving into the next phase of study for those to do a full electrical study on the potential production thank you all right okay thank you so very much thank you

2:24:45 for the update counselors we'll go ahead and excuse ourselves um we'll be back here at 6 30 for our regular council meeting thank you so much