The city council held a work session on fiscal sustainability and the Transportation System Plan update, followed by a regular meeting that included a public hearing on a code maintenance text amendment, a presentation from Clean Water Services, and public testimony on immigration enforcement impacts. Council discussed a potential local option levy to address a projected $15 million general fund deficit.
To you. All right, I'm going to call today's meeting to order. Will the recorder please call the roll? Counselor Duggar. I am here. Counselor Hartmeyer Prigg, I am too. Counselor Hassan. Here. Councillor Kimmy. Councilor Teeter. Yeah. Councilor Tivnon. Here. Mayor Beatty. Here. All right. And for the record, the city attorney asked me to sit here so we can elbow me during the meeting to keep me in line. So that's why I'm looking at you guys. Just kidding. I wanted to be able to look at everyone. Okay, so the first part of our meeting today is going to be the assistant city manager, and we're going to be going over our fiscal plan. So I'll turn it over to you. All right, good afternoon, Mayor and Council. So I'm Elizabeth Coffey, one of the assistant city managers here at Beaverton. And we'll be talking to you about fiscal sustainability today and giving you an update on our action plan and local option levy questions. So we'll just give just a quick second for the PowerPoint to get pulled up. So today we're going to be going over a fiscal sustainability action plan review. Give an update on our fiscal year 2026-27 strategy, and then we'll cover some local option levy policy questions for your consideration today. And you can move to the next slide. And the next slide after that, please. So the policy questions for you to keep in mind as we walk through today's presentation are these following three questions. And we're not asking for any decisions today. We're just looking for your initial feedback as we start to dive more into the conversation around a potential local option levy. So three things to keep in mind. We're curious about feedback if council agrees with pursuing an amount of a minimum of 40 cents per thousand assessed value for a potential levy. And we'll talk a little bit more about why that potential amount later in the presentation. Second, we also will be gathering your feedback about a couple of different proposed levy packages to start the conversation as we work towards finalizing those. And then third, we do want to just check in and see if you want to continue pursuing the potential of a May 2026 levy as opposed to a November 2026 levy. So but first we'll kick off with a review of our fiscal sustainability action plan. Just wanted to recap. You can go to the next slide, please. In the October 21st council work session, we talked about a short-term, medium-term, and long-term fiscal sustainability action plan, because the city has made great strides in accomplishing many of the efforts that they had in their last fiscal action plan. And so based on council feedback, we have adjusted the short-term actions to also include a transient lodging tax increase. And you can see a number of other actions in particular in the short term, which includes exploring a local option levy and services fee, transportation utility fee evaluation, business license fee study. Next slide, please. So this is a very, very high-level overview of the short-term actions. And I think what you can take away from this slide is that we're doing a lot of different things around fiscal sustainability, and we're kind of doing them all at once. And so we're working on the local option levy if we do proceed with a May uh potential levy. Um we have lots of work to do between now and May. Uh concurrently, we will be working on the services fee, and we'll provide an update on that in just a minute.