Okay, we will call to order our events to the council council work session for today.

We are five of us here in person, and then councillor Perkins and Councilor Francosa are online with us today.

So we're starting with our home committee work plan.

Awesome.

Oh yeah, I actually do that.

Yeah, and then just out of an abundance of caution, I'm just gonna declare a potential conflict.

My employer's getting homes.

Um it could have uh a potential impact on my employee or some of these um items, but um I'm still allowed to um engage in the discussion.

And um I intend to do that.

Thanks.

Thanks.

Go ahead, Chris.

All right, good afternoon, council.

Matt Stewart with Real Estate Facilities Housing, joined by Chris Ogren of the City Manager's Office and Rachel Baker in the housing department.

We're also joined by our chair and vice chair, Sarah and Carly will come up and speak around the recommendations of the home committee.

So tonight we just want to discuss and review the findings and recommendations of the home committee's work over the past year.

We'll kind of do a preview of uh the council goals or review the council goals.

Uh we'll walk through what the committee did over the last 12 months, kind of the roadmap.

We'll talk about all the programs that they considered over that 12 month period, and then walk through how we went about the recommendation process, how we engaged the committee and how they kind of came to their final recommendations.

We'll ask uh Sarah and Carly to come up and kind of speak to those, some background of how the committee came to those recommendations, and then um we'll open it up for council discussion and then provide some next steps that staff will work on as a result of that direction tonight.

So, kind of the main things that we were looking for, some direction tonight from council is around the prioritization.

Does council agree with home committee's recommendations and identifying those specific programs and revenue priorities?

Second thing will be we'll address kind of the next steps with the housing work plan.

So taking these recommendations in direction and implementing that into kind of a three to five year work plan that we will utilize as we approach budget discussion and uh council goal setting over the next six to nine months.

And then lastly, you just kind of want to review potential opportunities for public input.

So one of the recommendations you'll hear tonight is around a bond or some sort of significant revenue funding.

So looking at maybe some opportunities to explore that along with some additional public input around what that might entail.

So just a reminder our council goal was to uh create a housing production strategies committee, which is the home committee that we put forth that was identified to look at different funding tools that could help increase the supply of and that kind of missile missing middle housing component that was highlighted in the Oregon housing needs analysis.

And here I'll hand it over to Chris.

So when we put together the home committee um in the first meeting, we kind of explained to committee members that really the goal of uh the group was to come together was to review a series of programs and revenue generating mechanisms that had been predetermined uh or predefined in the council resolution, spend a year um going through those, vetting them, and ultimately coming to council with recommendations on which to implement and which not to spur housing development in Bend.

And so here's a bit of a roadmap or timeline of kind of where we've been over the course of the past year.

So we kicked off our first meeting uh this time last year in August.

We had nine home committee members.

We met three times in 2025.

We returned to you uh in December with some recommendations on programs that could be implemented uh a little bit more quickly, some of those quick wins, and then we reconvened the group in the first half of 2026.

We realized we needed to kind of pick up the pace, so we covered 12 topics within three meetings between February and May, and then in our last two meetings in June and July, we reserved uh just a bunch of time for discussion, kind of winnowing down from the total.

I think we started with 12, it ended up being like around 20, 18 programs, I think.

Um that the group vetted.

We spent um time in June and July kind of winnowing down from that 18 to the recommendations that we have to share with you all today.

I'm not gonna go through all the topics that we discussed um line by line, but we really tried to split the topics that were determined uh both through the council resolution and that came up in discussion into kind of two main categories uh programs, ways that we could spend funds to incentivize housing development, and then revenue generating mechanisms, ways that we could bring in additional revenues to support programs, some of these revenue generating mechanisms also like have impacts on um the housing market as well.

And then I wanted to talk a little bit about the process that we took to get here.

It was really important that we did this transparently.

We brought the community along the way, and that folks kind of knew all the material that was going into the decisions that were being made.

We knew that we had a lot of information to cover in a pretty short amount of time.

And so it was important to us to make sure that everybody, all the committee members, when they attended the meetings, they were all kind of coming to the table with the same baseline level of understanding so that we were able to make informed decisions in a quick amount of time.

And so that looked like we provided information packets on each of the topics we discussed in advance of the meetings.

We sent out pre-meeting surveys so that committee members were able to ask questions and we we passed those questions along to presenters so that we were able to have informed discussions and there weren't you know any kind of like dots of questions that we had to follow up on.

We um we hired a neutral facilitator, Jen Rusk, to support all of the meetings.

Um then we, you know, the meetings were three hours long.

So they were they were heavy.

Um, and we tried to build in time in each of them to discuss the topics that we'd considered.

Um but as I mentioned as well, we built in um we had two explicit meetings, June and July just to spend not learning any new information, um, just to spend kind of talking through the process that we'd been on.

Um we rounded, we kind of concluded the process by using a ranked choice vote.

So folks were able to go through, rank every single topic that we'd um covered over the course of the year.

We used that process to kind of winnow down into uh the programs and revenue generating mechanisms that committee members felt were the most impactful, and from there we spent time getting into the specifics about how a program should or shouldn't be implemented or revenue generating mechanism just to make sure that we uh we had the desired effect and we um we had a unanimous vote in the July 9th meeting to um make the recommendations to you all.

So I want to invite um Sarah Odendahl and Carly Colgin, our chair and vice chair up to share uh the results of the process with you.

Okay.

Hello.

Good evening, Mayor, Council, thank you, Chris and Matt and Rachel.

Um thanks for the opportunity to be here tonight and to sum up what I can't believe it's been a year, a year's worth of work.