The Forest Grove City Council held a work session on May 11, 2026, covering two major topics: downtown placemaking and water fluoridation. No formal action was taken, and no public comment was accepted. The meeting lasted approximately one hour and included presentations from staff, council discussion, and feedback gathering.
Recording in progress. Okay. I'm going to call to order this work session of the Forest Grove City Council. The topic is on downtown placemaking. And just a friendly reminder: no public comment will be taken, and the council will take no formal action. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to our city manager. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor, members of the council. I have here with me Brian Pohl, the community development director, and Camizell, the assistant city manager, who will be helping me with this work session. I think we have an hour scheduled. And so the intent of staff is to kind of go through this PowerPoint in a fairly methodical way and solicit some feedback from council and then look at some next steps regarding a placemaking conversation. So if you could go to the next slide. Next slide, please. So before we kind of talk a little bit about placemaking and different options in Forest Grove, I want to recap a little bit about the parking conversation that we had at the previous council meeting. There is a nexus between parking and placemaking. And so kind of just recapping that, I think we'll will help inform this conversation. The purpose of tonight's work session is to raise awareness and seek feedback on what we are calling attributes of placemaking. You'll notice there's a lot of different attributes that go into placemaking, um, how that connects to an event, how that connects to the place in which you're holding the event. And then also we're going to go uh through the downtown place making options. I think we have 10 total. There may be others. Welcome to suggestions. Uh, but raise some awareness and seek feedback on what some of those options may or may not be. So, how does this connect to the 2040 plan? There's a lot of things that connect to it, um, from strengthening partnerships with local businesses, downtown parking, wayfinding, but the two that are kind of really central to tonight are on the bottom. One is explore opportunities to create a central community gathering space that was really a theme throughout 2040. And then the other one that's kind of connected to that uh is develop a festival street pedestrian mall in downtown Forest Grove. So next slide, please. So in the April 13th work session, council reached consensus on the following six things. Prioritizing parking code enforcement, new consistent and recognizable wayfinding to all of our city-owned parking lots. Just keep the hour limits the same. There were no change to the parking lots and how they are managed, uh, except for to prioritize the resources and improvements for the central city lot or lot two. Install a pilot fast stop 15-minute parking stall on Main Street, and if successful, consider another one on Pacific. And then last, restripe downtown parking to increase parking by approximately 16 stalls, which is a significant amount of increase in downtown parking. So here's where we're at on all of those. Staff met recently. Actually, we've met a couple times since the work session. Code enforcement has been prioritized. Compliance and what we call stall turnover is up. That's where people are essentially turning over the stalls in the two and the four-hour limits. Public works is assembling a wayfinding bid package. The estimated cost is approximately $5,000. It does not require a budget amendment. There are some standards that we have to comply with. They're called the municipal traffic code. Um so we are applying those M U T C D standards. Uh the funding for that would come out of the um uh CIP excise tax. You cannot use street fund revenues for parking lots. So we've had several questions about paving parking lots, striping parking lots.