The Bend City Council held a work session starting at 5:00 p.m. and a regular meeting at 7:00 p.m. on August 21, 2024, in a hybrid format. The work session covered legislative priorities, electrification of city facilities, and proposed changes to vehicle camping regulations. The regular meeting included public comment, a consent agenda, and a public hearing to amend the historic sites inventory.
Okay. So we'll get started with our Ben City Council work session. Everyone crack crack your pop all at once. We are fear. Now we're ready. All right, we're gonna start with our legislative update with um Eric. Good evening, everybody. For the record, here at Councillor, City Event Lobbyist. It's good to see you, as always. And tonight we are gonna spend I think twenty-five-ish minutes or so doing a very preliminary, very cursory, high-level overview of some of the broad legislative themes that have taken shape and are taking shape ahead of the twenty-five-long legislative session, which of course will officially get underway. Um first week of January, or first week of February. First week of January for me. And I've got five overarching topics that I want to talk about. Um just to mention what they are. Housing production, shelter operations and governance, uh the statewide transportation package, infrastructure funding, including but certainly not limited to transportation, mostly around uh supporting housing. And then lastly, local government revenue needs. So starting with housing production. It's an interesting point in time on housing production because going back to 2016, we have seen session after session, big new bold ideas on housing production, including a lot of framework changes with the climate-friendly equ and equitable communities, work and housing needs analysis, big broad systematic changes that require a lot of adaptation from cities. Uh and local governments and others. However, I think we're kind of hoping that the big systems changes are done, and we're focusing on implementation at this point. Um I think this city is much, if not more, than any city. Uh in regards to how seriously we take housing knows how intensive all of the reorientations have been to the new systems, and we need help accomplishing the goals. Um I don't yet know what the big ideas are going to be, but I do think that we are not alone in having a preference for the big ideas being about follow-through, being about implementation, being about uh funding in a lot of regards. So a couple early notes on where the energy uh might be coming from. Obviously, the governor's office, and we do have uh at least one LC in our hands for review around middle housing. And um, I don't know what more we're going to see. I will say that I believe that this session the House is going to broadly handle housing production related issues, and the Senate housing committee is more expected to handle uh rental issues, shelter and and things of that nature. So we clearly will have uh interest in both of those processes and and both of the chambers the entire session. The housing innovation partnership, the HIP as uh we call it, which is where the revolving loan fund originated from, has started meeting a little bit to see if they have any new ideas. Um Representative Marsh, also the chair of the House Housing Committee is largely uh facilitating that. Um I'm a part of that. Um I think it's about to kick into gear. I don't yet know if we're gonna get any new ideas out of the hip, but it's possible. Representative Marsh is also, as you all know, because we were the first city she visited after she was given that gavel. Um there is gonna there's gonna be a lot of policy ideas that she is working through. I do believe in some concert with the governor, but I'm sure there will be independence there as well. So we have uh strong relation and interaction with Representative Marsh, our chairmarsh, and with the governor's office, and I do expect that that's where most of the ideas are going to be vetted and and given legs. Uh there's always things on every topic that come out of left field, uh sometimes last minute where we need to play defense, and there's always things where we see an opportunity. At this point, I don't see anything worthy of discussion other than paying attention to these areas of interest, uh the you know, sort of the energetic centers of of uh housing policy. Um quite honestly, I said it was going to be high level so far, and that's pretty high level, but I'm curious if you have any any questions on specifics, just particular to housing production. Sounds like there's not a lot of specific policies out there quite yet to react to. Not quite yet, but on this and other topics, um we will have uh September legislative days, three, four days of committee hearings at the end of next month, and there will be uh noticeable change in energy, I'd say, and then the week ahead of that, and then the week after that we'll have a lot more to talk about. Okay. Just just to know we did though uh post kind of an outline of middle income housing strategies to the packet. So if you're interested in just seeing some of the concepts that are being discussed, the there's additional details. Yeah, and some of those came out of the round table we had with uh Red March while she was here. Yes. And we passed those along term as ideas from our community. So those are in the mix, I think. One quick question.