The Bend City Council convened to address community welfare, code amendments, and administrative reviews. A significant portion of the meeting focused on supporting residents impacted by a federal SNAP benefit delay through an emergency $20,000 contribution and internal food drives. The Council also engaged in extensive deliberations regarding the removal of public access requirements for private open space in master plans, receiving substantial public testimony and planning commission feedback before approving a cleanup of the Development Code. Additional actions included approving staff alternates for the Metropolitan Planning Organization, finalizing zoning for a school-adjacent parcel, and initiating the annual City Manager review process.
All right. The Benn City Council will now meet in executive session in pursuance to ORS one nine two six six six six six six six zero two H to consult with legal counsel concerning the legal rights and duties of a public body regarding current litigation or litigation likely to be filed. Representatives of the news media and designated staff shall be allowed to attend the executive session. No decision. Oh wait, representatives of the news media are specifically directed not to report on any of the deliberations during the executive session, except to state the general subject of the session as previously announced. No decision may be made in executive session at the end of the executive session. We will return to open session at 6 p.m. Thanks, I think. Okay. All right. So we will go ahead and call to order. Whoa. There's an echo from someone. Who's echoing? Oh good. Uh, we'll go ahead and call the order of the Ben City Council business meeting for tonight and um start with a roll call. Start on your ends, uh, Councilor Platt. Steve Platt, he him. Megan Norris, she her. Melanie Keebler, she, her. Mike Riley, he him. Ariel Mendez, he him. Gina Franzosa, she, her. And Councilor Perkins' excuse tonight. So we are going to go right into good of the order. And tonight we're going to start by just some um information and then ask for counsel. Um, so I'm going to invite um Molly Heiss from Neighbor Impact to come on up to the table. And this is just going to be an item receiving some information about the SNAP benefits issue that's going on right now with the delay of SNAP benefit money to people in our community. A couple quick stats, and Molly might cover these too, but um 34% of Central Oregonians are struggling to cover their basic expenses, and twenty-seven thousand Central Oregonians rely on SNAP to keep food on their tables. That includes nine thousand children and forty-five hundred seniors who face food insecurity. So thought this was a very timely topic that we wanted to make sure we're hearing about for our community. Um and Molly's gonna talk with us a little bit and then I'll have an ask for counsel. Indeed. Good evening, Mayor Keebler and esteemed counselors. Thank you again for the invitation to invite Neighbor Impact here to speak about the SNAP disruption and how neighbor impacts responding. I'm Molly Heis. I'm the deputy executive director of community services, which includes uh oversight of the regional food bank. Neighbor Impact is the community action agency serving Crook Deschutes Jefferson Counties and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. And we are also the regional food bank in partnership with Feeding America and Oregon Food Bank. So here to just create more information around the need and talk about what we're doing. My stats are slightly different in that I have 23,000 405 Central Oregon households without food assistance as of November 1. That includes 9,01 as reported by the Oregon Department of Human Services local branch office that are in Bendalone. We supply as the regional food bank food across Central Oregon to 57 partner agencies. We also maintain and operate 15 mobile pantry sites, taking food out to communities and regions across Central Oregon that don't have access to food resources. So we're going out to food deserts with our mobile food pantry to help deploy. So we lost a 28% of our food volume that we're normally used to. The thing that's of significant note about this disruption and government shutdown is the last government shutdown, we were flooded with food commodities. So we had a significant amount of food to move, almost more than we could handle, including our partner agencies. This time is extremely different. We had a shortage that we started, we were informed of in March, started feeling by May, and that's disrupted food flow across Central Oregon and to our partner agencies and our mobile distributions.