The Astoria City Council held a work session on August 25, 2026, from 6:00 PM to 8:07 PM. The meeting included routine agenda setting and a detailed review of the Homestay Lodging (HSL) and Vacation Rental (VR) licensing programs. Council discussed the upcoming "Conversation with Council" event, assigned ad-hoc committees for municipal code review and a council handbook, and received a staff presentation on short-term rental regulations.
I think there was one of the stopped uh structure. I know people can earn you know every time we're on the feature of endbooks. All right, we all ready. Good evening and welcome to the Monday, August 24th, 2026 work session of the Astoria City Council. For the record, the time is 6.01 PM. Mr. Spence, if we could have a roll call, please. Counselor Davis. I'm here. Counselor Conklin. Here. Council Mozzarella? Here. Counselor Adams. Mayor Fitzpatrick. Here. So at our work session tonight, we have uh, as we always do, uh, we have two items and we have agenda setting first. So Mr. Spence, if we could go into agenda setting, please. You bet. And one thing it's it's somewhat related, but I do want to kind of talk to council since we have this opportunity to be together about the conversations with council just for tomorrow night to make sure everyone's prepared for that. As you know, that we change the location from the library to Fort George level showroom that will start at six o'clock and then we'll end at 7 30, roughly. It can really be break in or broken down into thirds. So the first is an informal meeting greet. This an opportunity to engage one-on-one with council. Um, so that would be the first part of that. The second part will be to do a presentation. Um, there's been a lot of discussion about housing amongst council. This would be an opportunity to kind of highlight what has proceeded really in the last uh two to well, even four years. Um that'll be roughly the second third, and then the final third will be a QA. This has been uh a subject that's come up with council. We talked about this the council retreat, have an opportunity to do two-way conversation with council. So to be mindful of that, we do need to have a little bit of structure with that to ensure that everyone has at least the opportunity if they want to to engage with council. So the thought would be one question per person per instance. Um we can go two questions at the mic and then go to a written, not everyone's comfortable speaking in a mic in front of council. So we can go like a two and two again. If we go through everyone if that's possible, then if someone has another question, they could always come back. But just trying to figure out what's the best way to ensure everyone has an opportunity to engage with council with a question. As a suggestion, I mean, two-way dialogue is hard to essentially put a time limit on, but maybe roughly think about a three minute sort of dialogue. If we don't, then potentially one person could spend five to ten minutes on one question and no one else has that opportunity. So that would just be something at the conversation with council. We'll just have to sort of go into and try to manage that to make sure everyone has an opportunity to engage. So does that make sense in terms of a structure? Okay, yes. Are you gonna be sort of fielding like the uh posting the conversation or fielding doing the so that was we'll set you? Yeah, we'll set we'll set council up once we do the informal mean greet. We'll put you as almost like you're in front of a you know, the dais, if you will, and then we'll have a mic so people can address council. We will have a box where people can do written questions, and so we will pull those out and then give those to the mayor to hand out whoever wants to read the question and then be able to respond to that. Um one sort of bit of business originally, probably a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about this. We did have a presentation for housing.