Get Started. Great. All right, so we will begin the business meeting of the Benin City Council. We will start with roll call. Start on your end Barb Campbell.
My name is Mark Campbell and I prefer the pronouns she and for
Arielle Mendez,
he had Anthony Brogdon and he him. Not many people she heard Meghan Perkins she her
Mike Riley he him Megan Norris she
her. And today counselor Riley has our land acknowledgement. Where
the bend city council would like to thank the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs for offering this land acknowledgement for us to read during our meetings. We encourage everyone watching to learn about the indigenous people whose homelands we occupy. We would like to acknowledge that the beautiful land known as Bend Oregon, north of the Columbia River is the original homelands of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. the Confederated Tribes seated this land in the Treaty of 1855 while retaining regular and customary hunting, fishing and gathering writes, The One A llama Warm Springs, Wasco Wasco and Northern Paiute people inhabited this area in certain seasonal times that clearly established their presence. It's also important to note, excuse me, that the Klamath trail ran north through this region to the great saliva false trading grounds. This trade route expanded the impact of commerce between tribal nations. We acknowledge and thank the original stewards of this land. It is our hope that guests continue to honor and care for this land. And I just wanted to share one other comment, kind of personal on the land acknowledgement and that today I had a chance to spend some time outside it was a beautiful, beautiful fall day. If anything, it was a bit on the warm side. And just I was really reminded of the value of being outdoors and the healthy environment in order to provide some solace and some quiet and time for reflection. Especially in times that are very, very difficult. You know, there's lots of controversy and turmoil in our national capital. There's a variety of things happening in the Middle East that are very difficult right now and and it's always provided a place for me to just get some perspective and help myself calm down and figure out kind of what the bet the best path is forward. And I just really wanted to acknowledge the value of that and thank the native people who came before us and helping us leave a place where we could still get that today.
Thank you, counsel reality. All right, we'll move to get the order we have a Domestic Violence Awareness Month proclamation and Cassia McQueen from saving grace has been with us and in passing, have a seat in front of them make and all I will read the proclamation. So whereas domestic violence affects every person in Deschutes County, whether as a victim or survivor or as a family member, and partner, neighbor, educator, employer or co worker, and systemic oppression and inequity create a culture in which some communities are especially targeted for violence and experience greater barriers to access services. And now more than ever, we are being reminded that we are capable of change and each person makes choices everyday. That either support or challenge a culture of violence. And every individual in Deschutes County has a role to play in moving change forward and promoting health and safety for all people by not tolerating violence by promoting accountability and by participating in the efforts to end violence and new efforts. Built on foundations led by dedicated advocates, preventionists activist and other partners who've been doing this work for decades, in by taking action where you work, play, learn worship or live. Change is possible and domestic violence is preventable. We're all working together to end systemic oppression, which is the root cause of domestic violence. Now therefore the City Council does hereby proclaim October 2023 to be Domestic Violence Awareness Month in Bend and encourages everyone to join in this observance.
Move to approve. Second. All right,
counselor, counselor ready seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Hi. All right. Thank you, Cassie. Yeah, if your words.
Thank you, Mayor Kiba. Thank you, counsel. Thank you, Mr. King. I think you all know me well enough that I normally come in here and share some numbers with you. I'm not going to do that. today. I'm going to tell you a little something that happened to him that I'm here at the Deschutes County Courthouse. Here and then today, we had to trained advocates and a volunteer which has historically about three times as much as we've ever had. There was a line out the door of folks from our county from our city, looking for temporary restraining orders. We had two staff and a volunteer working every hour possible before that restraining order clinic opened and wasn't able to serve the need today. We had a line outside the door and we were calling in reinforcements. And I share a little bit of a different perspective with you today because again, we know that this is pervasive. We know that we are throwing resources to try to look at domestic violence to try to intervene with it to try to prevent it. But it is here and is here in our community and it is felt it is felt by our friends. It is felt by our colleagues and our family and it was most certainly felt here at the Deschutes County Courthouse today. So I want to thank the Council for acknowledging it. I want to thank the community for supporting us and I want to make sure we all know that this fight is far from over. That we have a lot of work to do to end domestic violence here directly event and again, thank you for your support.
We're gonna go no trucking
involves we're going
okay,
um, so that will include good of the order and we'll move on to our visitors section. We have a couple people signed up in person and a couple of people online. To the reminder, the visitor section is the time for relevant public participation and public comments on issues with city business. We shouldn't be having any public comments about items that are public hearings. We do have one public hearing on our agenda is Item six today. I don't see anyone signed up for that. But if anyone's here intending to talk about item six, I will call on people at that time. Otherwise, we expect to follow our council rules. And to respectfully engage in dialogue with us. And make sure that this is a place where everyone feels comfortable to speak and say their piece even if we don't all agree with each other. So I'm going to start with our couple of folks who signed up on Zoom. So I have Freddie and Duran who are on Zoom and when staff is ready, let's start with Freddie and then Duran. We'll go next. Everyone's going to have two minutes to speak. And once you get to the end of your time, I'll ask you to conclude there will be a timer on the screen for two minutes so you can see what your time is. And let me know when Freddie is ready to unmute and we'll let him begin. He's only okay Freddie. you're unmuted you can go ahead. Awesome.
Hello, thank you again for the opportunity to speak. I'm gonna try to keep this short. I'm pretty familiar with it. I'm 21 years old. I've lived in been for 21 years. I'm here as a youth climate. activist and part of the Deschutes Youth Climate Coalition, as well as part of Friday's for future bend. I'm here today again to talk about electrification. I've mentioned before how 54% of Ben's emissions come from buildings, much of that is from methane gas. Methane gas is of course a fossil fuel and a greenhouse gas to ensure a Livable Future for young people. Like me, we need to address the climate crisis on all levels, including here in the city level, electrification is a great way to take a huge chunk out of our emissions. In addition to fighting the climate crisis, all electric homes are also safer, as shown by research into the harmful effects of inhaling excess methane gas, they're more efficient. And very importantly, electric homes are cheaper to build and cheaper to own. With that, I would like to really thank you, council for all you've done on this matter so far and for listening to Ben soothe and I hope we'll continue to see that we've greatly enjoyed meeting with some of you to discuss climate action. We're looking forward to continuing those meetings. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Freddie, has had a chance to meet with Freddie and the other folks in his group. And I think we're working on a formal response to your letter that you sent to us. So we'll get that to you soon and continue the conversation. Okay, next online will be during tie
Good evening Council. I I had a really interesting experience tonight to just kind of confirm So this morning, you know, I sent an email copying some of the online comments about how the paragliders from your airport have been landing all over Central Oregon are just invading people's space being in their backyards and their backfields and tonight just you know, is kind of like a retaliation for me saying anything online. Here they are in my backfield, circling my cows of course, send you a video of it. And I'm just fascinated that you know, Anthony Rodman's talked about going outside and the quiet Can you hear my quiet? I live a mile and a half from the airport. This is unacceptable. The airplanes you know, and I keep coming to you about it in a world safe from harm. And here there's obvious retaliation on a constant from this airport. Um, you know, and Landon acknowledgement tonight, like how do you acknowledge land you're allowing these people to decimate for less than 1% of the population and, you know, lead increases lead and they all run on unleaded fuel inlet increases violence, lead increases cognitive, decreases cognitive function, it makes people very ill mentally and physically. And they've gone from 10,000 to over to 200,000. Maybe more. It's hard to tell they give different numbers depending on what they're talking about, and the emissions from this airport. You know, while you guys are promising climate action, you're increasing operations 1000s of times over, you know, we need some help out here. We need some protection. The FAA isn't going to do it. It's your airport, you have some responsibility. Please help. Thank you.
Mentioned please address council as a body and not individual councillors when you speak. Okay, so that is it for our sign up zoom callers. So we will move to folks who are here in person. Let's start with Debbie Putnam and you can come on up to the bench here. We've got a little device here that is green. While your time is running, it gets to yellow when you have about 30 seconds left and then red means please wrap up. I'll give you your time cues. Just go ahead when you're ready. Okay.
Good evening. My name is Debbie Putnam and this is Cody Manasa. We are two of the three owners of Riverside Animal Hospital. We are here today to call your attention to the impact that the proposed modifications to the safety corridor project on only Avenue will have on our business. We'd like to stress that biker and pedestrian safety is important to us and several of us want to or bike to work every day. The current proposed projects will create a barrier that will divide the traffic on only in front of our hospital. The barrier will prevent a left hand turn onto the access road to our clinic for clients and county building employees that are traveling less done only. options presented by the city include driving West and Franklin or revere adding more drive time and rerouting our clients paths other veterinary clinics with easy access to their building as employers of over 30 Deschutes County residents who are concerned that this will directly impact the income of our business resulting in unwanted layoffs. And additionally, it is not unusual for our clients to be driving to us during a time of crisis. A sick or injured family pet causes a great deal of stress and limited access to our building. Increasing drive time by adding more light controlled intersections, forcing clients to drive through unmarked alleyways or parking lots is unacceptable solution to city wide problem. This divided road will also prevent our clients from taking a left hand turn out of our access road to head west on only although it is inconvenient for our clients, we can see the wisdom in this decision. Our hope is that agreeing with this modification shows the city council and engineers that pedestrian safety is important to us. At a recent meeting we had with some of the city engineers we talked about options such as allowing the left hand turn heading west on only to remain possible until such a time that a roundabout is built at the only wall intersection at that time that barrier could be constructed thus completing the original project. We kindly request the opportunity to continue working with the city to find a balance solution for that preserves vital access to our hospital while still ensuring the safety of our residents. Thank you.
And then our last culture, Eric Krizia and let me know if I get your name wrong. It was good okay
go ahead. Okay, council My name is Eric proozy. I live on se Tempus drive. Over the past, Eric over the past year. Me my wife and other people in the neighborhood have been dealing with a very particular set of homeless gentleman that have the relationship has gotten progressively worse. I think it started last summer with a torn up with a motorhome that was pulled up that was missing the roof that very quickly became just kind of a trash repository for whoever pulled it up. We were originally very patient. I mean, we didn't contact anybody. We tried to be fair to everybody and we understand people have difficult situations that devolved again, kind of to them trashing the street and basically trashing our neighborhood putting the camping codes it's had made him hard to move. He could kind of get some friends to push it 50 feet or whatever it is and then he just stayed and he would just like go around the neighborhood. Since then, some of his buddies have also decided that they want to camp in our neighborhood. They've been particularly aggressive. We've called the police multiple times. The police will show up trying to be quiet and when they leave, you know, they will shouting at the neighborhood throughout middle fingers curse. It's all out. I've had a verbal confrontation, just asking like, Hey, when are you going to leave and then I get cussed out. And I think a lot of the problem is just the kamy code the way it is doesn't force kind of some of these bad apples to move along the way. So I guess I request some sort of update whether it's like you can't camp in the same spot twice or something like I understand people in hard times, but there's something else that we can do to make it so one certain neighborhood doesn't have to suffer. Also, it is unfortunately tied to the high density housing and kind of putting a bad light on them. And I think that can be bad for future housing projects. If we can't figure out how to deal with things like these.
Thank you. And just so you know, this is a subject that we're coming back to to look at our canceling plan and the RV regulations are part of that conversation. Yes, it's very helpful
to have some that'll take place November 15. Okay, is there is the work session,
encouraging you to watch that and then we provide additional feedback afterwards after you hear yes question and
we'll be talking about this issue.
I know at times I should be clear it's it's was an RV first now it's an abandoned Suburban. It's just and I really just don't want it to escalate and thank you. Thank you. Okay, that
concludes our visitors section. So we will move to the consent agenda.
To approve the consent agenda items items A B and C, E and F. I'd like to pull item C is there a second? Second,
okay. All those in favor of approving the Consent Agenda except for item D. I fine. Okay. Consent Agenda approved. We will move on to Item D Who do we have?
I'm happy to cover any questions that you might have.
But in the record D is to approve sole source findings and offers an agreement with art in public places for administering the city's Percent for Art program for an initial amount not to exceed 110 $110,380 for the management of the selection and community education process of art at the public. Works Canvas staff Juniper rich.
Thank you. I just I have to start with how much I support art in public places, arts in education. I absolutely am supportive I used to serve on our arts and beautification. Committee when we had one and was instrumental in passing our Euro code. And it just makes me so happy to go through our city and see those works of art that wouldn't have been allowed years ago. However, when I saw this item, and first saw that it was $110,000 Not for art, but for management and selection and community education. I I honestly balked at that amount. And then I saw what the total amount for art with this project is. And it's more than $100,000 I believe that in my experience, this might be the first time I've seen the city's percent for our program in use. I just I don't think we've ever had, you know, any projects that met this program. The program sounds like something I myself probably voted.
Can we have Eric maybe explain a little bit.
I'll just jump right into specific questions that I have the background, they might be questions for this committee that would be you know, for the work that would happen. And so either way, you can go first or I can start with you know, the questions I have
about the background is the city entered into a contract with art in public places to comply with state law. That requires 1% of the state requires when you're spending public dollars 1% for art and then we sort of put a local program in place to implement that back in 2007. But you're correct. This is one of the first times where we are actually spending money on a facility so it's a little bit unusual. And it's a large facility that's building buildings, not just for staff, but for all of our equipment. There's a lot of investment and so that 1% is accounts for all of that. And so Art in Public Places is our contractor that we use per that action back in 2007. And so the there's specific in that resolution that that was approved by Council, it set forth kind of different activities, the art itself, but then there's a selection process and so this is just in compliance with that.
I am honestly I am happy to hear all of that I again, I very much support Oregon and public places. I also support absolutely everyone having good and decent workspaces and you know, yes, mechanics shouldn't have a nice place to work and a place to take a break and a place to have their lunch. So my questions if you don't mind run along these lines. Can architecture is art. Can we spend some of the money on architecture structures? I noticed one thing that was called out was we have the need for a large fence. We can make the Large Fence the work of art. It's exactly what we're doing great. Yep. Can we spend the money around town? What about just playing using some of this for more or in roundabouts? We hear from people on the east side all the time. They think there's more on the west side. It's another question.
So I think there could be an option to go outside of that site. However, remember the public works campus is open to the public for events. And so we're really inviting
public spaces in there. And I'm really happy about that. We are short on meeting spaces. I will look forward to having a council meeting out there when it's done
just to just to share the art the whole focus of art at that campus is for the public. Not for staff. So it is more externally focused. We're actually looking at concepts that would take infrastructure, pipes and things and make art out of them so so at the same time that we're complying with this. We're also educating the community about things that they don't see every day underground and using art and demonstration is going to be display gardens rain or storm water, demonstration sites, all sorts of things that we want to incorporate art so that it's not something just pretty to look at its funnel and people can actually see their infrastructure at work. That's the intent.
I love that. I'm gonna go back to the 100 does Intel instill ask? You know, could any of this maybe there's an opportunity in other places in town, that education piece and we you know, support some kind of art, arts education with the money and then the other concern I had was spending $800,000 All at once out front. I believe the whole point of art is to provoke thought and provoke interaction and art that is created in a particular period of time might not reflect you know, this campus will be entered years. And you know, as all of our art money for that campus, going to be spent in the early 2020s when maybe we want works to be appearing throughout time. So those are the questions I have I understand fully that maybe this process will start to answer some
of these questions. And maybe what I should do is to volunteer to be the council representative for arts and public places as they start to work on this process. So those are my comments. Again, we've just never had a project of this scope. And yeah, 1% works out to a whole lot of actual money. Because I think the other comment too, is you know, we are also in a very early stages of look planning for a new city hall, right, that also comes with that same requirement. So I think the idea is to have because we talked about East Side investment and art and in that part of town, we want to make sure that we have investment in our core and other parts. So I think there's plenty of opportunity to get engaged and sort of help us shape some of the details with this for sure to answer your question, but I think the intent is to really focus it in and around that site. And I think that's probably what the law requires. I'm not sure legally we can just take that money and spend it all well. That's what I mean. That's absolutely I heard you Yes, I heard that this is a state requirement. The state requires a public entity to manage the money Arts in Public Places is our entity, as you know, with all of that, oh, man, are you gonna say something else? No. No, we're racing to get up here. Okay. It's probably important to distinguish this is a requirement in our code. So it's not so much a state law issue. It's a city of ENCODE issue, doesn't mean it's not equally as compelling but its own required states. Okay. And the total state has similar requirements for their for their for the total, but the total budget, including this 110 is about 900 and something $1,000. Something close to that. Yeah. So this is spending a little bit more than 10% of the budget on this kind of management. I mean, I'm not challenging that. I'm making that point. 15% Yeah. I mean, I don't know that that's necessarily when you, you know, think about the work that goes into all these kinds of things. I don't know that that's really unusual or inappropriate. Buy an item or percentage of an overall budget like this, and these were sort of run into this in the nonprofit world. A lot of people expecting you to spend nothing on overhead and admin and all the what it takes to actually get a good project done. But it's not reality. The reality is it takes real money to do good things. And so I I don't have a problem with that percentage if it was 25 or 30. Yes, but this doesn't seem reasonable to me, especially if part of it involves actually delivering a program around education.
That's what I was just gonna say, especially when you throw in that education part of it. So you know, I might say to the camera, maybe we'll leave the heavily on the education part of the 110,000. But having said that, I move to approve agenda, Consent Agenda item D and thank you for all of that information.
All right, moves by Councillor Campbell, second Councillor Riley. All those in favor. Thank you. Look forward to seeing that and then forward as we get that going. Okay, so we're gonna move on to item six. That is the Sheila Do you want to read it? Yep. Go for it.
public hearing on the draft application for the pathway to removing obstacles to housing grant from Housing and Urban Development.
All right, so we have our housing department here, and I'm just going to make declare a potential conflict just on this item. Because I'm a employee of Hayden homes, there might or might not be some sort of financial impact in future.
Thank you. All right, Lynn,
Mayor, councillors. I'm Lynn McConnell, your housing director and pretty fantastic opportunity to present to you this evening, HUD has released a grant application that really aligns wonderfully to your council goals that include things like removing potential barriers in our code and processes creating incentives to development with a focus on affordability and infusing equity into our planning systems along the way. So a lot of what we already are doing is encompassed in this potential. What we are hoping is that HUD now wants to give us money to do exactly what you all want to do already. A really great opportunity. It's a way for us to scale our housing goals over the next six years, the term of the grant and to provide a much needed revenue infusion to actually get that work done. I'm here with our amazing affordable housing coordinator, Melissa Manya. Melissa is one of our newest team member and a former grant writer and I can't tell you how thankful I am that the opportunity aligned with her coming to work for us and this grant being produced while she was on the team. really thankful for her effort. It was pretty incredible to get this thing written if you've managed to make it through all 60 pages. With that wanted to hand it off to Melissa to explain the details of the grant.
Thank you. Thank you so much. mayor and city council. It's my honor to talk to you today about the pathways to removing obstacles to housing or the pro Housing Grant. As Lynn mentioned, HUD has made this offering available it's $85 million and they anticipate up to 20 awards that will range from 1 million to 10 million. So HUD has access to data that's from the American ACS is American community American Community Survey. And their data is a little old and and what they did is they took that data and they looked at three different factors to determine community need, and you have you don't have to qualify for any of those to apply but it's strongly recommended. So the first one is off pace factor and that refers to a community that didn't develop housing on pace with population growth. And the time period for that is 2009 to 2019. The challenge we did qualify we are identified as a priority geography for off pace, but we know the population and been changed dramatically from 2019 to 2023. And so I think the limitations of the data just so we would we had that much more of a need for that. So all of the proposed activities that we're going to talk about tonight, address this off pace factor with the ultimate goal of producing more affordable housing. The second factor is called housing problems factor and that relates to cost burden, which is severe cost burden is spending more than half of your income on housing. It also relates in this problem to substandard housing. So we didn't we were not identified as a priority geography for this section. But our grant does address it because we believe that the data that they use isn't an accurate representation of bend. My case in point is with respect to cost burden. We have seen cost burden decline over the last few years in Bend and some might think that that means that people are making more money or housing is cheaper. And what it's actually showing is or rather it's hiding data that shows that the most severely cost burdened folks left and so it's a false piece of data. And so our grant addresses that and our grant, many activities address impacting cost burden. The final factor is housing affordability factor, and that relates to the general unavailability of affordable housing. We were not identified as a priority geography for that and our activities don't specifically address that. It's all their their data's 2009 2018.
Even in 2015, there was no we had we did not have access to affordable housing.
Yeah, the HUD data is challenging to work with I'll say, typically what happens is they will take say ACS data and go sit on it for a couple years and then crank it back out in a new way. Same data different format. They are looking at very minut portions of that. So for instance, in one particular loan product that HUD has, they say we are over supplied on senior affordable housing. That is not true in any other loan product or any other factor and I think our HUD reps were successfully able to argue that that's not in fact true. And Ben, we're just using data from 2015 or whatever. So it's an extraordinary challenge. We have encountered this with our CDBG program generally, and being sort of discounted according to the factors that they use. It's sort of unfortunately a part of our life and dealing with federal formulas. Yeah.
You mentioned I mean, rising household income makes it sound like oh, people are making more money. But when you talk about in migration and out migration, that might not be the whole story. Do we have data that supports the idea that that describes the affluence of people who are moving to Ben compared to existing households, and
we have data and when we did our consolidated plan that was just submitted to HUD this year? Some of the research and resources that we looked at talked about the primary immigrants coming to band especially during the last three years have been highly educated, high income. And so when we have a static amount of houses or a static amount of units, they're competing for homes to purchase or units to rent with lower income folks. And it's just there's there's no housing options. So people are getting pushed down and out. And so we do have some data. One of the activities that we have to talk about tonight talks about getting better data as part of what we need to do. Yes.
And just to be clear, I assume none of these factors take into account how many unsheltered homeless people are homeless folks? No,
correct. So here's our vision and six years we have identified five activities that will help us identify barriers to affordable housing production and equitable access to housing. It will push new subsidy to our developers and increase housing units, and it will streamline and simplify our housing production. And I'll just give you a quick overview of each activity in case you didn't read. The 65 pages before I came. Activity one. Activity one is an internal assessment of city processes. So a big piece of this grant is looking inside you look inside your house before you go outside and we take care of business inside and so the grant strongly suggest that we look at permitting zoning code and land use and so that is activity one. We propose with this funding, we will hire a consultant to do that evaluation for us. And we have left money in the budget in case the consultant recommends additional staff be hired in any of those places. The ultimate goal of this is to improve the ease and access to housing production. Activity two is all about the data. And so our activity is called housing production and implementation plan. We're partnering with growth management and our equity department. We recognize that that real crux of not having been specific data, and I'm just going to give you a really quick example. As I was writing the grant, I wanted to see how does Ben's homeownership rate compare by race to state and to the nation. I could find data and from the state of Oregon, I could find data from Deschutes County, but federal data was available in 2010 and not 2020. And there's no Ben's specific data. And so the whole crux of this activity is we will be working with Andres and his department to get better specific data. The initial step of that is to get a baseline we need to understand what our situation is and then get that baseline data. Once we have that we can identify what the barriers really are and then make an actual plan which is this housing production implementation plan. Activity three is to establish a new fund for development. I think our community partners are very excited to see this. This is almost $8 million that we're proposing to create a new housing fund regularly and we have situations when we have our annual application cycle we have so many more millions of dollars of requests than we have funding to give and that results in underfunded projects or rejected projects. This fund will fund land acquisition it'll fund infrastructure and something that is new our other funding sources don't fund this is new home construction. So this will be a really great opportunity for our partners to develop more affordable housing and we'll partner it with affordable housing and CDBG funds.
My clarify something that our existing CDBG funds by federal statute do not allow construction which is funny because that is in fact a construction tool according to HUD. So we typically use it for things like land acquisition, downpayment assistance with construction is out. These funds is grant fund just like the Cares Act, removed some of those restrictions in CDBG and will allow us to do construction. So I just wanted to clarify because our affordable housing fund does currently allow for construction. Thank you. Thank you.
Okay, activity four, we are planning an activity that will expand incentives and subsidies. There's different things that we'll be looking at tax credits. Homebuyer Assistance with respect to equity, the state of Oregon is doing different projects where depending on outcomes of historic inequities with lending or with housing, they offer additional downpayment assistance. So we'll be looking with the state to find out how we can potentially implement that into our our programs. In addition, the LA HTC program is something that has been underutilized in the city of Bend because it has a pretty big requirement that you have In person sponsor. We haven't had a funding source significant in Ben to be a sponsor for that. So we are looking at options for co sponsorship. Maybe developers could consider applying for this fund as co sponsorship. And lastly, activity five will streamline and simplify housing production. I'm excited to talk about this one. We know that our developers alone can't make all the dents that we need and the number of units to build and we're looking to community participation. So that is building an adu in your backyard or maybe a duplex but we know that development is hard to navigate, even as a professional developer, let alone a community member. So this activity will work to develop systems to help the average community member join us in the housing production.
What's your question about that? How much of that activity that you described is focused on our own code in terms of its own complexity or versus providing something that's sort of like prepackaged making it easier on the resident side or the developer side?
That's a great question. How we wrote this activity in the grant is that there's a toolkit that we're proposing looking at where Mr. Smith wants to build a duplex, he would have assistance with guidelines on what type of resolution is needed for their plans to be submitted and what forms need to be filled out and like what, what potholes to look for in the process, so it's more for here, we're going to help you do this and try to identify where things get stuck in the system and provide you with the resources needed to navigate that.
And some of that code work that we're looking at is in one of the earlier activities. So the idea is really to dive into that with really the entire organization early on. And then from the recommendations if there are any out of that code work, we'll build these other projects if that makes sense.
So here's our timeline. Most of the work will start pretty quickly in 2024 and taper as the project timeline goes on. I would like you to know that each activity though has a milestone or a check in so that we can readjust and reevaluate if needed. The total project cost for this, all of these activities is just over 19 million. We're requesting $10 million from HUD and we are matching almost dollar to dollar with City of Bend funds. So a big requirement of this grant or a large section of points is for leverage and how we're able to do that is with our affordable housing fund, annual CDBG funds and other city funds.
What are the other city funds?
So we have a little bit of construction excise tax right now we have some middle income funding anything that's kind of coming that will serve the same intent and can be dedicated to this project. The good news is most of what the housing department does, looks like match for the purposes of this grant.
And finally, a requirement for this grant opportunity is public comment period and public hearing. And so this was noticed in the bend bulletin on October 3, and close public comment period close today. And we've had zero comments submitted and at this point, we cannot make substantial changes. To the draft without having another hearing and applications due on the third Yep.
What is their what's their decision timeline? It is
that Jan 24 That means we could find out in March you know or tomorrow who knows? We will certainly let you know as soon as we know more.
So on that note, I'll go ahead and open up public hearing. We did not have anyone sign up online. Or in person for this item. So literally only see city staff and was injured basically. So I don't think there is any public comment in the room. None. I'll go ahead and close the public hearing on this any other comments before any other deliberation
across our fingers? To approve and authorize submission of the draft application for the pathways removing obstacles to housing pro housing grant to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
All right, Moved by Councillor Brahman second Council. All those in favor. Great. And I will mention that I reached out to our federal delegation, all three of them in hopes of getting a letter of support. I think we got a positive response there and also our state delegation. So to add to the many letters of support already on the grant can't have too many. So thank you. Thank you. Item number seven
Resolution amending the fiscally constrained transportation system development charge project list.
DD Oh, you're doing great.
Good evening Council. I'm trying to make this as quick and simple as I can. So I'm here to talk about the transportation system development list. To amend it as back here in I believe June, doing a quick amendment and this one, some more background. It's a fiscally constrained list. It was done in 2011 for the SEC methodology. We're currently working on our new methodology right now. And you can see the recent amendments like I mentioned, we did timber yards, Parkside place and ODOT back in June of this year. This one is to bring one project onto the list and this is to help with development needs for the Gateway project that was done earlier this year and also for the future Caraway project up north, I believe is also on 20 Council. And in order to bring this project on the list, we have to take the the equal amount off of the list as well. And so these projects the reasoning for bringing these projects off of the list. They're either already completed they're going to be done by ODOT. Or they're on the geo bond, the 2020 geo bond.
There's no projects that don't meet one of those three ways of getting done versus on the projects that are being removed are all either one of those three
things right. Yes. Yep.
All right. Any other questions? The minute sec list.
Let's adopt the resolution amending the fiscally constrained transportation SDC project list.
Second All right. And second, all those in favor. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Looks like we're down to Item nine. Oh, are you ready? Oh no, we got to do it.
Second reading of an ordinance to amend banned development code chapter 2.7. Special plan districts to create the Caraway master plan development and approximately 150 acre major community master plan to SPD 2023 Zero ones.
I move for the second reading and adoption by roll call vote the ordinance to amend then development code chapter 2.7. Special plan districts to create the Caraway master plan development as amended by the Planning Commission and reducing the minimum lot sizes for triplexes and duplexes in the Caraway RS zone to match the underlying zone I'm sorry triplex and quad plexes
are second. I'll second that. All right, moved in second, and let's do a roll call those
counselors Campbell.
Yes. Broadman. Yes.
Perkins. Yes. Mendez. Yes, Riley. Yes Norris.
Yes, Mayor Kubler yes Adams.
Second reading of an ordinance to annex approximately 153.56 acres in the north triangle urban growth boundary UGB expansion area PLA n x 2023 0176.
Move for a roll call vote on the second reading of the ordinance annexing landowners Carrie annexation area the North triangle urban growth boundary expansion area. Second,
All right. We are down to Council action and reports. kick us off counselor. Really?
Um, maybe the only thing I wanted to report on was just on my went to the Landmarks Commission last night. There's an exciting renovation of the post office that's going to be happening. Downtown here. Yep, right over here across the street from us on Wall Street. It is going to become a boutique hotel. But it was pretty exciting to see what they're planning to do. There's not really any changes. They can't it's a historic building. Yeah, to the outside. Of course on the inside. They're changing a lot. And there was some funny discussion about Park Service having veto power over which treatment they use them to canopy at the entrance so we they approved two of them so that they have an option to park service. Anyways, it was interesting National Park Service I didn't quite get the connection. That thing maybe was more interesting for us. They got a ship a grant the State Historic Preservation Office grant for code review. And there was a variety of things they talked about. wasn't clear exactly when that was going to be coming just sometime next year after they get the project done. They've hired a consultant. He was there last night. I did. There was some discussion about densification and housing and how that gets in the way of historic preservation and I said you know that's all important and you all have to balance that and I just want to remind you that affordable housing is an important priority of this council. So please be sure to refer to our goals. And if something really comes up that maybe you need an option or two for us to consider, so I didn't make that point.
Thank you. All right, council Norris.
I went to the Cleveland Commons groundbreaking on Monday and that was just really special to see. I know that council. You know, I didn't take part in that decision. But it was just really amazing to see. I think it's our first permanent supportive housing and really exciting that's it. That's it Robin.
I attended the adult treatment court graduation, which is the last one for now, due to a variety of circumstances. It was amazing to honor that the gentleman fathers who graduated a program it's a very valuable tool in this community and was glad to hear so many people, elected leaders appointed folks, various city councilors who are committed to restoring the adult treatment court in Deschutes County because we need it and attended the healing rains fundraiser, which is a pretty amazing organization that uses horses for therapy and launching their new facility out on climb falls, which is something that we were asked to support with ARPA dollars. We didn't because it wasn't housing related. But I just wanted to highlight the amazing work that healing brains is doing for our community. Attended the Simpson groundbreaking with rooted homes and Housing Works. Councillor Campbell is there also. An amazing project that when completed will have 99 units of both affordable housing for purchase and rent. And that the city was obviously a huge contributor to particularly want to thank staff for working with rooted homes to work on a really challenging site, provide us the infrastructure we need around that around those new homes and provide a resource on the housing front that we really need. We had Chief Justice Flynn in town from the Oregon State Supreme Court, talking about our needed public safety resources here and what we can do to better better serve the public including like what we heard earlier today with domestic violence advocacy and are really concerning crisis when it comes to public defenders. So that's a very critical, equal can't, you know, access to equal justice issue in our community and it was great to see the Chief Justice so focused on helping Deschutes County at attended the tooth shoots collaborative force meeting as our representative there attended the Warm Springs museum Gala, which was amazing to see some of our Inter governmental partners from Warm Springs and and so many members of the community supporting that amazing museum and then finally, I want to highlight something that was really moving to me I was able to attend in the place of the mayor who was not available to be there. The change of command for the local Army National Guard unit based out of band that's for Squadron, 82 Cavalry and that was a very moving event, especially given everything that's happening across the globe right now. Lieutenant Colonel Christopher occur, transferred command of that squadron to major James Restek. I want to honor and salute Lieutenant Colonel Kerr, who served in Afghanistan lead 182 has served our community throughout the COVID The COVID pandemic, your natural disaster as well as obviously serving our nation in Afghanistan. He will be retiring from the army and the Oregon the Oregon Army National Guard in March of 2024. And I just want to say I was I was able to express on our behalf to Colonel Kerr and his wife Brandi at the change of command ceremony from from a grateful city and a grateful region. How you know how fortunate we are to have people like Lieutenant Colonel Kerr and his family serving our city and our region and it was a it was a really wonderful day. That's all I got.
Great, thank you. So Mendez,
just one meeting to report on on that with the two members of our planning department, Renee Brock and Colin Stevens to talk about some of the takeaways that I had from some of our recent approvals. And one thing that came out of it was whether I thought it would be valuable for counsel to have maybe a chance to sit down and talk with some developers before we see them when, at the end of the process to get a sense of what kinds of things are possible because I'm sure all of you have, well, maybe I'm not sure but I suspect that many of us are a little bit frustrated when we get to the end of the process and we don't have, you know, how many how many things we can change is pretty constrained. And it might be valuable to sit down with with developers, many of whom we get to know over the years to have a conversation that is not focused on any specific project, but more open ended and I thought that sounded like a good idea. So that's something that I'd like to talk to the mayor and Eric about to see whether there might be interested in other councillors doing that as well. Other than that, nothing to report.
Great. Yeah, and along those lines, I actually had a recent meeting with LRS architects who invited me to come by and just chat a bit not about a specific project, but just about development in general. So I encourage folks to do that. Just be mindful of our laws around land use and making decisions, but I think that's a good idea to help get their perspective before it's in a formal meeting. Councillor Campbell,
I also was privileged to go to groundbreaking and what a remarkable day it was to see such a spectrum of affordable types of housing that we are seeing come into our community from the permanent supportive housing, that counselor Norris mentioned, which is really for some of the folks who have two biggest needs and all the way up to the Housing Works project which is apartments for folks who can be successful in apartments, and then there to have those products that people can buy was really just a remarkable day to see all of those things happening in our community. I also got to go to the Warm Springs fundraiser and I am going to tell you, maybe the thing I enjoyed the most was getting to sit next to a staff member who works in our planning department and just be able to chat with them and get to know you know, someone that you know, my question was, so are you the one who hears complaints about the things that we're doing? And so that was just such a wonderful The museum is such a wonderful resource for Central Oregon. So so happy to be there. I was also able to go to the fundraiser for the endurance Academy, which is a wonderful program for kids to get kids involved in Nordic skiing, and mountain biking, and rock climbing. And I certainly reflected on how those are sports. You really can do your whole life. You don't need a team. You don't have to pay every time you go out. And what wonderful, wet opportunity this is for kids to get that experience and get into those good habits. Where our septic to sewer committee nets this week, we were able to choose or project three projects. Thank you. That's our, we expect are going to come in at about $3.8 million and connect another few dozen homes to our set our sewer system without bankrupting them frankly, I said that day that to me this is also a housing initiative. This is all about keeping people in their homes and the city manager stole my timber thunder on the ISO and our Rural Fire Protection Board we learned that our i s o rating I stands for insurance has gone up to the number two on this scale. One is the best 10 is the very worst. And frankly to have a rating that high in a community that is in danger of wildfire is remarkable and such a testament to our own fire department and to that Rural Fire Protection District at large. The old bar then neighborhood association meeting, they were interested in the neighborhood street safety program and what programs staff was there presenting projects that they thought would be effective in their neighborhood? That was great. And I'm afraid some of those neighbors are not too excited about botique hotel and so that's you know, these these things are generally a little on both sides. Thank you. That's it
all right, council Perkins.
Let's see the highlight of the last two weeks was I got to spend the morning with a bunch of third graders from silverrail Elementary, and we had a lot of fun in here. They were very, very into the gavel. Some accessibility so like the temporary speaker of the house. That's exactly they got to end they also got to use the teleprompter and announced a new planned community called Kid town. We had so much fun yes, where ice cream is aplenty and there. Yes. Yes, yeah. Exactly. Um, the Affordable Housing Committee met as and talked about some STC exemptions and the surplus property on Franklin. We had our joint city county meeting which I'm assuming you'll talk about so I'll just gloss over that. And let's see. Last thing is track the tree committee. had another meeting today. Looks like we need one more meeting. Before we can come to we're hoping one more meeting to come to council with some recommendations, but we're getting there. And the guidance from counsel was was I think really valuable to them and moving forward.
Right. Yeah. Um, so recently met last week with the school superintendent and chair. Melissa Morris lucky just to talk through shared issues which was great and trying to make sure we're having those touch points more often with our with our fellow districts. We had our joint city county meeting right here in this room. I was really excited and pleased a lot of information that we got about that the chrome governance structure moving forward and finding the right pathway forward to find more solutions and get them on the ground for our community. So thank you to the commissioners for attending and doing that meeting with us. We had our transportation roundtable which you kind of touched touched on on our last planned one with folks in West we decided we need more and I think we've Eric already mentioned the next steps in that process. carpooled with counselor rally to the League of Oregon Cities conference in Eugene. I was on a couple of panels. One of them was talking about our implementation of our camping code. Since there is state law that that cities are bringing their codes into compliance. So that was a good discussion about what's legally allowed and what what cities are tasked with doing which is regulating our right away and without a lot of resources to do it and without a lot of resources to provide other solutions. So many, many other cities feeling that same thing. I also presented on a panel about Council compensation with a couple other folks from around the state and that was a very good discussion. And I learned that Salem, a city with a bigger population than us does not pay their counselors anything. They get reimbursement for conferences, and pretty much not a lot else. So which was shocking to me honestly, it was a very good conversation amongst folks talking about how to explain to the community, what they do, what we do, and also how to meet community expectations and how to level your compensation to the point where you're getting more diverse voices doing that work. So that was really valuable. Went to the Central Oregon villages open house that desert streams location, which has been operating for a bit but had an open house and it was great to see the facility they have their you know we're working with them, I think to maybe start to provide some sewer access so that they can have more reliable and better showers that are actually cheaper than paying for gallons of water to be brought in all the time to their truck. So they're doing great work there and want to continue to see that going keep going, um, groundbreakings that we've covered. silverrail actually went today to go to perhaps those same folks I went to their school to do a q&a after they come to City Hall. Lots of great questions like what's your favorite animal? And do you own the whole city? I said in my heart. Did you say so really great. I just love encourage anybody if you have a chance to talk to kids about city government they will ask you the best questions and they're really eager to learn which is awesome. So I will finish there and go to city manager.
I remember when I was I went to my kids class, as my capacity the city manager and said what do you think the city manager does and like kids like pick up toys? Oh, pretty much. Well, chair, yes. Right. So I will end up talking about kid town and fun stuff taxes, which go Don't invite me to a party because that's what we'll talk about. The taxes just came so property tax bills went out. And we always watch that very closely, because that's kind of a key indicator of where things are at. So we'll report that our property tax we budgeted a 5% increase in tax assessed value. So remember, there's the 3% that law is kind of the minimum and then that means that about a 2% growth is what we had budgeted, but it came in at 5.7 A little higher. So that's good news, which results in about a $234,000 Delta in a you know, what a 30 million or so general fund so not you know, good news, but in perspective, urban renewal, so we also get the division of tax and that has implications. The core came in a little bit less about 190 396 $6,000 less than what was budgeted. Murphy came in a little bit higher Juniper Ridge was right on target so we'll have to dig into the core area to see what was going on there. But something we'll want to watch closely and then of course the other taxes that we levy all kind of came in fine. So and then we do every couple of days you'll get dashboards on the council agenda for our financial dashboards. We're watching revenue very closely things are overall coming in as budgeted so far like development activity, some of our other key revenues, nothing to report of any major significance over the last couple of months, but we'll keep watching we're pretty early on in the fiscal year. And then lastly, there was a water caucus that took place last week. It was with state representatives. We had our Deschutes water collaborative, I might just use Basin Water collaborative. That is our tribe, though Confederate Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and the Deschutes rivers conservancies environmental cities, agriculture all coming together. It's a pretty large group that we've been, you know, had a long history here of collaboration that was sort of on full display at the water caucus. And as you as we've talked about marriage brought up this round making rules and some concerns there and really led a conversation with our partner saying we are we do have a unique base and we work really well together. We want to make sure that rules that are coming down make sense for the space and because we do share water pretty well, you know, and if we want more water to go back in stream, we need the groundwater mitigation program that we are under currently, it doesn't expire till 2029. We want it to work and we're concerned with some of the rules right now and having that all work. One of the keynote speakers was Bobby Bruno with the tribes and we also want to report that we do have a scheduled meeting with Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs on November 1, we have our first joint meeting so that's taking place. We'll be planning for that. We have an agenda planning meeting, I believe this Friday, so
great. That's it. I forgot one thing. We do need to make a change on the draft because our central organ LandWatch representative is moving on from that organization. So we just need a different person from that organization. Corey Harlan, who I know is very good and he will do a good job so I'm just going to recommend her appointment to true.
I moved to accept the recommended appointment of Corey Harlan Central Oregon LandWatch, the tree regulation update Advisory Committee.
It's moved and seconded all those in favor. That's it No, no adjourn.
