The Bend City Council held a work session (starting at 4:00 PM), a joint work session with the Bend Urban Renewal Agency (BURA), and a regular meeting (starting at 7:00 PM) on January 17, 2024. Key agenda items included a quarterly update on council goals with a focus on public safety and automated traffic enforcement, the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council (COIC) strategic plan, a capital improvement program (CIP) update, first reading of a right-of-way code and fee resolution, a public hearing on system development charge (SDC) methodologies and fee schedules, and a contract for the Riverfront Street Design project. The council also heard extensive public comment on the Israel-Gaza conflict and on SDC impacts.
The uh den City Council work session, and the first item on our agenda is the council goal quarterly update. And we are going to start with hearing from our honored guests here. Um we have I think uh Chief Crance, you're gonna start us off this. So this is an opportunity to just kind of recenter ourselves in the council goals that we work so hard to create. It's those goals cover a two-year period, aligned with our budgets. Um, so what we we try to do at each quarter is is theme a goal and go a little deeper in tonight is public safety, and we're going to talk about um technology and the use of technology to reduce our response, be more efficient. Uh, we talked a lot about alternative responses in our community building subcommittee where we're uh deploying the um crisis response team. That acronym has changed. So we've done that, but we want to we want to tonight's focus on technology and helping us be more efficient with a focus on automated traffic enforcement. That is something that the council goals identify. So we're going to go a little deeper there. We want to hear from the police chiefs advisory council that was also part of the previous council goals and how they're tracking. We'll have an opportunity for broad board committee, commission uh engagement at the end of this meeting. Our hope is to get through these items by about 450 or so, and then in time for a five o'clock start time for our work session. But before we uh turn, I turn it over to Chief Kranz and Chief Riley. I'd like to just give you a high level of the council goals by the numbers. So as you know, we've got five goal areas, 13 strategies, and about 50 actions, about 92% uh tracking and in progress. We have a couple of items mainly uh on hold due to uh court cases related to climate-friendly and equitable communities, related to uh measure 114. So things that are beyond the city's control, so we've kind of flagged those as either not started or need some attention. But we're making progress. There's nothing that I have to report from our last quarterly check-in that is completely shifted. We might make some tweaks as we go forward on timelines and things like that, and we'll we typically will do a reconciliation midway through halfway through one year into our our goals this summer. So uh we'll probably do that in the July update. But just a few highlights from the last quarter since we had our check-in. I want to focus on our permitting process improvement. So, as we committed to, we had a first phase of permit and process improvements of just really getting our dashboard up and a focus on timelines. We hired a third party to help us identify issues. Um, so we've got uh we're building from a foundation. The next phase of that, this phase two, is really focused in five different areas. It's our pre-application process and setting expectations on the front end, internal communication and coordination, uh, communication and customer service, data and technology, and then engineering standards and land use or permitting requirements. We're engaging folks, our external stakeholders and addressing those. We have a series of meetings. Our first one, first external stakeholder group will be held tomorrow. Um, that includes architects, engineers, developer reps, commercial and residential builders, the chamber, and COBAR are all included in that process. Um, so we will continue to provide monthly updates so that you can you know just understand how this how this work is progressing. Of course, we have our dashboard, and I should have mentioned that at the outset. So I did a high-level overview of the council goals. We have a more detailed progress report on all those 50 action items and timelines and milestones, as well as track uh metrics that we're tracking for each of the five goal areas, including uh turnaround times for permits that I mentioned. And we are currently meeting all of our goals uh for those turnaround times, uh with the exception of we have engineering is uh having some staffing challenges right now, as well as just a high volume of activity, but all other areas we are meeting those benchmarks. Um, some other highlights include we've broke ground at public works campus, so we've done our grading work and we're starting to go vertical on some of the buildings. The warm water or warm uh vehicle storage uh building is starting to go vertical. Our air traffic control tower, as you know, is funded. Our design contract is underway. We're expecting to submit 90% drawings this week, which is a huge milestone, uh, and then allows us to receive additional funds for construction, uh, which uh we expect to hear kind of the final piece of the funding puzzle in March or April. Uh on the transportation projects that are completed, Neff and Purcell, big one. A big thank you to the community for their patience with that project. Newport was finished largely a while ago, but there's some last uh other pieces that were related to stormwater that were wrapped up. Um, and that that project won some awards that we highlighted in our year wrap-up. Our neighborhood street safety program, a number of just improvements to our mainly our residential system and creating uh more safer crossings, uh filling and missing links to our biking and walking system, and then our pavement rehabilitation program. We uh treated about uh uh 37 of our 900 lane miles, um paved 18 lane miles and slurry sealed uh 19 lane miles.