It's exactly five o'clock.

I'll call to order the Ben City Council Work Session.

First up is our quarterly council goal update.

Great.

Good evening, Mayor Pro Tem Perkins and Council.

I'm Stephanie Bedridge, Assistant City Manager, and I am joined this evening by Russ Grayson, Assistant City Manager and Chief Operations Officer, for your council goal quarterly update.

Tonight's update is a milestone for council goals as we'll be closing out the 2023 to 25 goals and embarking on the goals that you recently adopted for the current biennium.

We'll be doing this by taking a few minutes to reflect on the accomplishments and highlights from the last set of council goals with a focus on growth and infrastructure.

We'll then shift to the current council goals by reviewing current and upcoming projects, policy discussions, and council work sessions.

Brian Rankin is then going to join us to provide an overview and update on the growth plan, and then we'll wrap things up with an update on Ben Bikeways with Ryan Mostert.

In the interest of time this evening, I'll be keeping the recap of the previous goals pretty high level, focusing on the highlights.

But did want to note that there's a comprehensive status report that was included in the council packet that includes specific details on each of the actions.

So taking a quick look at the 2023 to 2025 council goals by the numbers.

There's 10% still in progress with one action on hold.

You're probably wondering what that one action is.

That was the action to advance local gun safety policies, and that's currently on hold due to legal uncertainty related to recent state legislation.

You'll also note that 53% of the actions that have been incorporated into the current set of council goals.

That includes those five actions that are in progress as well as a number of the actions that we noted as complete.

You're probably wondering how that math works.

A number of the actions that were complete because the scope of work that we identified for the last two years has been completed.

Many of those projects will continue into the next biennium with a new scope of work and new focus.

So while numbers are helpful, they don't always tell the whole story.

So I'd like to quickly walk through the five goal areas and highlight some of the accomplishments.

We rolled out a number of innovative engagement and outreach approaches, including roundtables, pop-ups, open houses, and the neighborhood trailer that's out and about in community.

The right-of-way code was adopted and implemented, and we've integrated infrastructure asset management into our operations for both prioritization and making maintenance decisions.

On affordable housing and sustainable development, we secured five million dollar pro housing grant for affordable housing development and process improvements, as well as some additional shelter funding in the last legislative session.

We partnered with Deschutes County on the temporary safe state area, created a homeless services grant program for safe parking, completed a number of studies, including one around climate-friendly areas and target sector.

We have continued to improve on our permitting timelines.

We also completed an RFP and sold properties at Juniper Ridge, as well as surplus two city-owned properties, the proceeds of those going towards affordable housing, and then created the site specific housing and employment.

Focusing in on environment and climate.

Council adopted an updated community climate action plan just a few months ago, and we've been implementing CCAP outreach and education strategies as well as piloting some microgrids and energy storage at the new public works campus.

Natural gas policy options analysis was completed, and some of those options will be along with some work of a working group, will be coming to you in the next few months.

The tree code was adopted and implemented, made changes to auto-dependent uses, expanded our water conservation programs, have continued planning efforts around the Deschutes Base and Water Collaborative, and have made some great progress on the water reclamation facility.

Turning to public safety, we have continued to maintain fire and EMS response times as well as cardiac survivability.

Have done staffing studies for both police and fire, have focused and invested in some technology plans for both police and fire.

And police is has evaluated automated traffic enforcement.

We've established our department of emergency management and began development of a continuity of operation and natural hazard mitigation plans, and then conducted community education prevention and preparedness programs.

Dissutes alerts has been a big part of our outreach and around community preparedness.

And I just learned today that we've had 955 new signups for disuse alerts just since April.

For transportation and infrastructure, just a couple of quick highlights before I turn it over to Russ to provide some more detailed updates on those projects.

We updated the SDC methodology, implemented transportation fees phases one and two, and completed the in-conduit hydro feasibility study.

So just a few things to reflect on and accomplishments to celebrate.

So I will turn it over to Russ now to do a deeper dive into growth and infrastructure.

All right, so we'll we're gonna go through the projects that were completed over the past couple years and then what's really kind of coming over in the next 12 months.

Before I get into this, as you can see, even with what Stephanie went over and what we're gonna present here, there's a lot of work done.

So first of all, I want to thank council for their involvement and direction to keep everything moving because there's a lot of balls in the air that were juggling at one time, and also our staff for the commendable effort they did to bring all these things actually to life information to get them constructed.

So I'm just gonna go over um kind of what we did and on our projects, then we'll go into what's coming.

We'll talk up start talking about all the policy discussions that are upcoming, and then lay out the next six months of work sessions to give you an idea of what what's coming in front of you, all tied to our next biennium council goals that are now in effect.

So talking on here are the here's a highlight of not all of them, but kind of the major projects that were completed over the past two years.

We'll start with the the Newport Avenue Corridor project that was completed in 2023.

That project uh did win a major award with the Oregon chapter of the American Public Works Association for the all the work on the transportation and uh utility work, especially the stormwater on that.

Wilson Avenue Corridor project was fully completed, um, really focused with the work at the Wilson and Third Roundabout, or sorry, Wilson and Third Intersection.

Purcell Bowl Road was also completed that included the extension by the hospital and the improvements of the Purcell and NEF intersection.

The Greenwood Avenue uh project that was also completed this year, and and we'll have uh upcoming updates on that that I'll get into here in a minute.

Second Street, we just did a celebration for that uh a couple weeks ago, I believe, for the grand opening of that.

That was part of the one of the first urban renewal projects in the core area that got constructed to set the stage for development in that area.

The only improvement uh we opened up as everyone's aware, the critical wall and only intersection, um, and then we're still working on the rest of it, but that that getting an intersectional was a major accomplishment that just occurred before summer on the utility front.

Um, just take a second to look at the size of that water line.

You know, this is a uh middle of the night tie-in they did.

That was a major waterline improvement.