The Bend City Council held a work session beginning at 5:00 p.m. followed by a regular meeting at 7:00 p.m. on June 21, 2023. The work session included discussions on managing the Brooks Promenade (alley), a parking system update, and the Crosstown Bikeways (Key Routes) project to deliver one north-south and one east-west low-stress bike route within two years. The regular meeting included a consent agenda (with one item pulled), a series of budget resolutions, a public hearing to declare three city-owned properties surplus for affordable housing, second readings of multiple ordinances, and council actions. A major topic in public comment was the city's announced cleanup of the Hunnell Road camping area scheduled for July 17, 2023. The council also addressed safety concerns following a fatal e-bike collision over the prior weekend.
All right. We can go ahead and get started with our city council work session. And first Ben and Toby. Great. And I think Eric was going to teed us up for a minor. Yes. So normally management of our rights of way is something that you as council delegate to me in terms of management. So we have to close rights of way for detours or we permit special events, uh parades, etc. Um, this is a unique situation when we're talking about the management of um this space, uh Brooks Alley or Promenade that uh has been known as. I think the intent here is before I we would make any decisions from an administrative perspective and how we would manage this, we want to get some stakeholder feedback. And um so we've done that over the last couple of months, and so today tonight is really about sharing uh options that were presented to that group, um, hearing uh preferred option and getting your direction uh before we would make any kind of administrative decisions on how we would manage this right of way. Um so I'm really looking for some general direction from you all tonight. Um and uh those options would include move forward as per as recommended, view maybe one of the other recommendations that was presented as something you would want to consider, or no recommend or no change at all. I I would like to know where council um is with uh regard to this process in the summer and the things that we've learned throughout the process in terms of what next steps might look like. And Eric, sorry before you start, can you clarify this? This did get presented to one of our subcommittees earlier this year, it did. It's actually been in front of the um stewardship subcommittee uh a few times. Yeah, and then we'll then we'll kind of go into more of a lot of things. Um and yeah, no intro necessary, though. Thanks Eric. Uh so uh this conversation, and this is I think the third or fourth time I've been involved in a conversation around how do we change or look at the management of uh Brooks Alley uh since I joined the city in 2016. But this conversation really started at a stewardship subcommittee meeting on April 14th of this year. We were talking more broadly, and counselors uh Riley and Perkins were there, I believe, along with Councillor Mendez. Uh talking more broadly about um potential tourism investment on the Mirapan Plaza area. Uh that's really probably a 2025 or 2026 time frame for us to make any investment there uh in terms of actually breaking ground and building a new project. The feedback from the councilors on the subcommittee uh were was excuse me, um do something sooner than that. At least look at what we can do around managing wrongway traffic and other issues that council had heard about over the prior years around um management of the uh Brooks Promenade. So with that, Toby and I started in earnest uh the last week in April, I think, by sending an email out to uh the stakeholders along the alley around hey, we want to have some conversations around what we're gonna do on Brooks Promenade or Brooks Alley or Brooke Street. A lot of names for the the area. I'll call it the alley in this case because that seems to be the colloquialism uh most folks are going with. Uh but yeah, so I sent an email out end of uh end of April. Um some of those stakeholders that received it are behind behind me tonight. I think uh many of them sent you emails as well. Uh and that really started our discussions around, okay, what can we do here? Because it seemed like there was a lot of friction around full closure of the alley. And also there were folks on the complete opposite side of the issue saying, um, keep it open, do nothing. So May 4th, we had our first stakeholder session. We were in this room. Uh Mayor Keebler and uh Mayor Pro Tem Perkins, you were there as well. A little oh and councillor Campbell. A little tense. Uh I think as anyone that was there would attest to uh and really talked a lot about um, you know what works in the alley, what doesn't. And really talked a lot about what works in the alley, what doesn't. It was kind of a brainstorm session. We then jumped into the meeting on May 11th. That was the intent there, and Toby did a great job of leading these meetings was to have a second brainstorm session, and the that one didn't go as well. So we ended up pivoting and really talking about okay, what does this group, this stakeholder group, uh businesses and building owners along the alley need or want from the city to kind of move forward in making decisions. And their feedback was we really want to see what options you think you can execute on managing the alley going forward. That led us to our final stakeholder session on June 8th. Really a discussion of five options, winnowed those down into one staff staff recommendation that Toby will share shortly.