The Hillsboro City Council held a combined work session and regular meeting on January 6, 2026. The meeting centered on reviewing the city's 2026 federal and state legislative priorities, receiving an update from Clean Water Services, hearing public testimony from over a dozen residents, and conducting official business including the adoption of a new city flag.
City Government Relations Manager Ariel Nelson, alongside state lobbyist Andy Smith and federal lobbyist Jeff Markey, presented the draft legislative agenda for the upcoming short session (Feb 2 – Mar 6), which is heavily shaped by state budget deficits and federal uncertainty.
Federal Priorities:
State Priorities & Policy Context:
CWS Interim CEO Rick Shanley and Chief Utility Relations Officer Joe Gall provided an overview of the regional partnership. Highlights included the completed West Basin Master Plan, which identifies $1.4 billion in regional infrastructure investments over 20 years. CWS is launching a study of its billing structure to explore efficiencies. Council members questioned the potential impact of billing changes on customer costs and asked for details on how infrastructure costs are recovered from large industrial users.
Over a dozen residents provided testimony on several topics:
Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the work session. Uh, tonight we're going to be talking about Hillsborough's legislative agenda for 2026. And I know we have Ariel Nelson and Andy Smith here to do a briefing, but I'll turn it over to Robbie. Service off. Thank you, Mayor, and happy new year to everyone. As Mayor mentioned, tonight we're going to be talking about the 2026 federal and state legislative agenda, maybe just a little bit of context why this is important for us. As we get into the legislative session, whether it's a short session or a long session, things move very quickly. There's hundreds, if not thousands of bills, I think last session that we have to go through that staff goes through. And so what this does tonight is it gives us the ability to have confidence that we have direction from the city council about what areas we want to support, what areas we don't want to support. And so that's what really tonight is about is our proposal to you all. It's very similar to years past. You'll see lots of common themes. There are a few tweets that we made this year, just based on obviously new things from the federal government, for example. So with that though, I'm going to turn it over to Ariel and uh and Andy, and they can take it from here. Thanks, Robbie. Uh, good evening, everyone, and happy new year. Uh just for for the record and those listening I'm in, I'm Ariel Nelson. I'm the city's uh government relations manager, which includes both federal and state relations. Uh, joining me today um to take all the hard questions is Andy Smith, one of our contract lobbyists on the state side, and we also have our federal contract lobbyist Jeff Markey here joining us virtually from DC. Um, also any hard questions for him. Um, but we'll uh we're gonna go through uh the agenda today. Um it's um currently in uh draft form and until we get some feedback from you. Um, and we'll also cover some political context and the process. All right. So just to give you a sense of what we'll cover, we're gonna talk briefly about the federal dynamics, um, the state legislative session and those dynamics, um, both the process and political context. Uh, and then we'll dig into the actual draft agenda, uh, which is structured, uh, similar structure to years past. Um, but you'll note this is the first year we've had a formal federal agenda on paper. Um, so you'll see that reflected, and we'll go into more of those details. Um, welcome your questions throughout. We will have, I'll ask that you leave your uh feedback for the agenda to specific moments that we'll pause for. So diving right into uh the federal dynamics and the context as we head into our federal advocacy for this year. Um this is obviously we are in uncharted territory. Um last year, when I presented to you, we talked about a major theme for the state legislative session was federal uncertainty. And we're experiencing that. You've been experiencing that. And um, so what that really has meant is that we're really approaching our federal advocacy and engagement in kind of two separate tracks. The first, and um, this is largely informed by a lot of your discussion, a lot of what we've experienced with um federal changes at the administrative level is um there's a clear commitment to push back against federal overreach and provide support and protection for members of the community that are being targeted and harmed by undemocratic and discriminatory federal actions. We'll get into more details about where that's in the agenda. And then second, the city of Hillsborough is going to continue to engage as we always have on a wide array of federal issues that help us deliver core city functions and services to meet the needs of our residents and you know, approaching that collaboratively positively, but they you know, there's been some uncertainty and challenges there as well. Um, and we'll get into the specifics of what that means. So any questions there. I mean, this is kind of just a broad general statement and lens of how we're approaching the engagement. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I do have a question on that real quickly for you and for Andy's those those two tracks that we've just discussed, potentially could conflict with each other as far as outcomes. I'm assuming you're taking that into account as you strategize on these two tracks. That's right. And it's, you know, there's there's congressional advocacy with our delegation. A lot of the work what when we're looking at what Congress is approaching and and is is the budget process, what's being funded, how that funding is coming to us regionally or directly, what we're able to apply for.