The Bend City Council met on June 7, 2023, in a hybrid format (work session at 5:30 p.m. and regular meeting at 7:00 p.m.) to address a range of topics including hate crime reporting, fee adjustments, a master planned development, affordable housing initiatives, and various code amendments. The council approved several major items, including the Timber Yards Master Planned Development and the Simpson Avenue affordable housing project, and discussed fiscal year 2023-24 fee adjustments and the Visit Bend budget.
Okay. All right, welcome everybody to our work session for this evening. First, we are starting with a council schedule request from Councillor Perkins. This is actually um a pretty timely uh schedule request. Um surveys done by Oregon State, by Embrace Bend, you know, show that a majority of our Black Brown and queer communities do not feel safe in Bend. And this also includes uh much of our Jewish population, our Spanish speakers, our AAPI community, and more. Um, and just in the last week alone, we've had the son of a state representative from Central Oregon post a picture doing a Nazi salute next to a plane with a swastika on it. We've had a raccoon with a racially explicit and threatening note left at the door of the mayor in Redmond and addressed to the one black elected city councillor in central Oregon. And at a Ben Middle school, assistance had to be brought in because a group of kids were posting American flags over the pride flags and harassing LGBTQ kids physically and with homophobic slurs. Uh will be and could include uh hearing from a coalition of impacted community members that is being formed right now and being facilitated by a local nonprofit. This coalition would come and tell us what they need from city council and from the city for a potential resolution with specific actions, a timeline, and an accountability process. And this coalition would also work with the city and the human rights and equity commission helping investigate public agency coordination in this effort and a public community campaign. And going along with this would be hearing from the Human Rights and Equity Commission about the work that they've been doing on bias reporting and resources for people who have had a bias incident happen to them. So we could be working with between the city, the coalition of community members, and HREC to determine what our next steps would be and if we should do a campaign with the public and how we can keep people safe. So I was hoping to get your support on all of that for the end of the summer, early fall. I support it. Yes. I think everybody fully supports that. I think thank you for the background work that you and I think Council Riley have been doing to get this item ready for us to put on the schedule and working with staff, and so I think there's full council support for that. One one just uh we have been talking about potentially unveiling a dashboard to show our incidents of bias crime and reporting and really provide more information about access to resources that we currently have. I know we need to be doing more, but love to be able to integrate that into that work session as well if possible. Sounds good. Okay, great. Um then we will move on to our fee adjustments discussion. And I think everybody has in really tiny type a printed out version in front of you. Of all of the changes, and then um staff's just gonna highlight what we want to pay attention to here. So thanks. Yeah, thank you. So good evening, Council Sharon Voida, Chief Financial and Administrative Officer, and I'm here with Clayton Getzinger, who is a senior financial budget, budget and financial analyst in the finance department. So he's gonna go through kind of a summary of kind of the primary across the board changes, and then as the mayor mentioned, there's also a matrix with a teeny tiny font of the summary of all the changes. So you have an electronic copy of that. We emailed that out yesterday. It's also on the website, and we will get on the we don't have on the website right now the full whatever 40-page resolution. Um you should have a copy in that your in your email from yesterday. You can send that out again if you need it. Um, and we'll get that on the website for the public tonight, so or tomorrow. Um, so Clayton will walk through kind of a slides of all the um the main changes, and we'll kind of walk you through the matrix and just explain what information we have in that summary. And as a reminder for the public or information for the public, um, we're going through all of these proposed fee changes tonight and work session, and then they'll be presented for formal adoption with a public hearing at the next meeting on the 21st. So there will be an opportunity for public comment on the 21st. Well, thank you, Sharon. I'll just add that I have a couple copies of the full resolution if people do want to see a large printout, but it's small type and printed. Um, so starting off, Sharon already introduced me. This is the kind of summary of what I'm planning to walk through. So this presentation right now covers the overall across the board changes that we were proposing for the fees. And then, as mentioned, that specific change matrix in front of you shows each uh individual fee change. Tonight we'll go through the development fees, system development charges, utility fees, cemetery fees, and solid waste fees, and then there's a short slide on summary of other city fee changes. And these are all consistent with what we've discussed in with budget committee already. So starting off, we have the development fees, uh, which are the building, planning, and private development engineering fees. We're proposing a 12%, 20%, and 10% increase to these, which again is consistent with what we discussed with budget committee and is to align with cost of service for the departments. We've included the long-range planning surcharge fee on here just because it's been discussed, but we're not proposing any change to this fee, so it's here at zero.