The Bend City Council held a work session from 11:00 AM to about 5:00 PM, followed by a regular business meeting at 7:00 PM. The work session focused on the Council Goals Quarterly Update, including updates on permitting process improvements, development activity, housing incentives, and a comprehensive growth strategy. The regular meeting covered consent agenda items, first readings of ordinances, approvals of contracts and resolutions, and a public hearing on the Greenwood Avenue quick-build project. Key decisions included adoption of tree code ordinances, authorization of a $2 million contract for a Collection System Master Plan update, and approval of a guaranteed maximum price amendment for the Midtown Multimodal Connections project.
Let's get started with our work session. Um with our capable update. Oh, there it is. This is often my favorite time, these quarterly goal updates, because it really is a chance to just take a beat and reflect on what we've accomplished over the last couple of months, look ahead to the next quarter, calibrate with our boards, committees, commissions. We have some folks here today to do that. And just to make sure that we're headed in the right direction. I think it's pretty easy as a fast-growing city to be in a reactive mode, and you know, we also face other issues that are just you know in real time we have fire threats and other things going on, and those are really important, and we need to be ready to respond, but we also can't afford not to focus on kind of the big picture going back to those goals that you set now, which are over a year. It's we're midway through this biennium. So one year in, we'll we'll share some of the numbers. Um we actually move to the next slide. We'll talk about the agenda here. We've got about an hour and 45 minutes worth of content. Our intent is to take a break, about a 15-minute break or so in between this quarterly update, and then we have our formal work session starting around five o'clock. But for this update, I'll give a few over a few highlights and um summary action items from the last quarter and kind of what's ahead. I'm gonna have Jesse Thomas talk about the some updates to the council dashboard that I think they're all already live and walk you through. I think we're continually trying to evolve and improve that as a communication tool. Um then we're gonna flow into some background information from Russ around Colin around the pro the permitting process, which we've been very focused on, improving our permit process, not just turnaround times, but just our own internal processes, improved customer service. We'll give you an update there. That will flow into some context setting from Russ around the development activity that we're seeing or not seeing some projects have paused. And I think it's important to recognize we are in a bit of uh some a lot of uncertainty right now, some slowdown and what kind of impact that's having. And that'll flow into a discussion and potentially some and also some direction, I should say, from council on housing incentives and strategies that I'll be seeking. And then the main focus of this update is going to be really hearing about our growth plan. So we talk about our growth plan, we've got some short, medium, and long-term strategies that cover us all the way to the year 2080. How are we growing as a city? So we're gonna really put that all together for you. Uh, and then we, as we always do, have opportunities for you to ask questions of our boards, committees, commissions, for them to maybe share their reflection. We'd like to keep it focused on the topic at hand, which is really our growth plan and kind of all things development related today. Um then, as I said, we'll we'll make sure to have some room for a break. So just kind of by the numbers, as I said, we're halfway through 50 action items, 51 actions. Um we're on target, so you can see the in-progress versus complete, 96% kind of in the realm of things are moving fine. There's a couple of projects, mainly as a result of state legislation that's not clear because it's tied up in the courts that projects haven't started or needed need attention. Um we have uh detailed action status on our website, so you can go there and really if you want to are concerned about one something you we don't have time to go through it in detail today. It's it's all on the website. Um, but I do want to just offer a few highlights. Uh, since our last uh quarterly update in April, uh we're almost there. I would say we're 90% there with the tree code. So the tree code was approved at the June 20th council meeting, but we have that piece that we have to talk about today, which is on around uh our standards and specs and kind of our right-of-way um right-of-way issues landscaping the erosion control, Title 16. The uh language access policy work that's part of council goals. That work is uh really quite far along. We're at the point of completing our needs assessment, and we've presented all of our those results to our internal DEI group. Um all departments have uh conducted what's called a four-factor analysis to derive the frequency, urgency, and then scale of the language inclusion moving forward. Um our public works campus is uh going vertical. I was just out there yesterday or the day before, and buildings are up. It's pretty exciting. We just did a video to our employees. So our what's called our operations building or all of our the warm storage vehicle uh location, that's that's vertical. The headquarters is starting to go vertical, and our fleet building is not that far behind. So it's on track on schedule, on budget. Uh we are intending to move into that facility the end of 2025, which is not that far away. So that's really exciting.