The Bend City Council met on March 18, 2026, to receive a state legislative update, discuss a Southeast Bend neighborhood roundtable, approve a parking management contract, adopt a resolution supporting immigrant communities, and authorize a sewer project loan and construction contract. The meeting also included several council member reports and public comments.
Start on your end, Counselor Francisa. Gina Franzosa, she her. Ariel Mendez, you know. Mike Riley, Melanie Keebor, she her. Megan Perkins, she heard. Megan Norris, she her. Steve Platt, he here. All right. So we're gonna start under good of the order first with our legislative update from staff. Good evening, Council. I'm Kate Schneider, executive policy officer in the city manager's office. And with me is Sarah Hudson and Eric Cancler, and we're just here to give a brief update of the short session. As you know, it ended earlier this month. We put together an issue summary just trying to highlight the most important bills to the city. But as you know, Eric Cancler is our uh contract state lobbyist, so the one on the ground, and we just wanted to give him give you a chance to hear directly from him on some of the more important bills this session. All right, thanks, Kate. Uh, for the record, Eric Counselor, City of Benz lobbyist. It's good to see you all. I think there's really four primary issues to talk about. We have, as Kate Lewis, we have you know formalized legislative priorities. We had a press release put out both public documents about where we focused our attention. But in terms of on the ground interaction and what we were really invested in, there was uh primarily uh the lodging tax issue, the protection of shelter funding, and then a couple housing issues related to urban reserves and uh complete communities. So going through in that order in a little bit more detail. The effort to gain additional flexibility on local lodging tax dollars has been going on for a very long time. I think the first time I engaged seriously on uh in it on the city's behalf was in 2017, so that was almost a decade ago. It took a lot of buildup. I think a lot of past efforts built on themselves and led to the success this session. And effectively what happened is I I think you all know that under the historic regime, 70% of the lodging tax dollars had to be earmarked for tourism and marketing oriented purposes, leaving 30% for other things, general fund or you know, a mix of responsibilities. The 7030 is now shifted to 5050, and that is true whether or not your lodging tax increment is pre-2003, a lot of which was grandfathered in uh post-2003 and already existing, or whether it's prospective in the future. So, Bend, our historic pre-2003 lodging tax is better than 5050, so this doesn't affect us in that regard. There are some local governments, cities, and counties that were grandfathered in at a at a very high ratio. I think Lane County was effectively grandfathered in to use all of their pre-2003 increment for marketing. Now they have a considerable amount of flexibility. So there's flexibility we can consider with uh the 2013 increment, and then there's flexibility should the city decide to consider uh another increment in the future, and that at a high level is really the bill is very simple in that regard. There was one additional element that was moved into the restricted portion, which involves what the legislature termed resiliency grants for small small businesses in the restaurant and lodging industry. It was a bit of an odd fit. It was important for getting the bill out of the house, but nobody really loved it. Um there was consideration about whether they should strip it up, send it back to the house for a clean fix. They left it in, moved it through, so it's quite possible that I don't know if the legislature is gonna come back in the long session and re-look at that one little element, but I don't think it's really a game changer. It's just an additional thing that the restricted portion can be used for, but it's not just a handout. You really need a business or a restaurant that's uh experiencing some sort of hardship was the intent. So that's a component of it as well. So moving on from, and that was our number one policy priority, our number one budgetary priority in terms of discrete budgetary priorities was protecting the uh I think it was 207 million dollars in shelter funding that was established through a lot of work, including by the city bend city of Bend and others ahead of and during the 2025 session. There was a lot of speculation that that allocation for shelter funding, which is pretty bare bones for essential facilities around the state, would get robbed to pay for some other things. Of course, we had uh increase we had maybe six months out before a session, really dire looking revenue forecasts, and they got incrementally better as we got into session. So fortunately, that allocation was kept entirely intact, and so that means that was our number one budgetary priority. So on those two fronts, uh we did very well. Of course, we were um part of large groups of people who were on the one hand fighting for lodging tax flexibility, and on the other hand, protecting uh shelter funding. It certainly wasn't the city of Bent leading the charge, but it was a really good group of people, and we were at the forefront with them. More specifically to our initiatives are two concepts that we did.