The Kirkland City Council convened a hybrid special meeting on Wednesday, August 3, 2022, beginning with a 5:30 p.m. study session and transitioning to a regular meeting at approximately 7:30 p.m. All seven council members were present, and the meeting adjourned at 12:00 a.m. after an executive session on litigation. Major actions included adoption of a tenant protection ordinance (without late fee caps), approval of the Parks, Recreation and Open Space (PROS) Plan draft amendments, creation of a Parks Funding Exploratory Committee, and direction to study a seasonal or full closure of Park Lane.
Okay, I would like to call to order the special city council meeting of August the 3rd, 2020. Tonight's meeting is a hybrid meeting. Community members are welcome to join us either in person or remotely through Zoom or by telephone. Clerk, will you please call the role for Council Member Nixon? Here. Council Member Black. Here. Council Member Curtis. Here. Council Member Falcon. Here. Council Member Pascal. Here. Deputy Mayor Arnold. Here. Mayor Sweet. Here. Our study session tonight is on a 2023-2024 preliminary utility rates discussion and also on a tax increment financing strategy for the 85th Street station area. We expect to reconvene our regular meeting at approximately 7 30. City manager. Okay, thank you, Madam Mayor. So Titan, as you mentioned, we're going to be covering utility rates background. We'll actually have our first preliminary rate proposals for you in September, but we wanted to give you some of the context for that discussion that's coming forward. We're coming a lot of rates tonight. So here to be our emcee for this is our utility policy and community relations supervisor, John McGilfrey. Our senior financial analyst Chris Lynch will also be part of the presentation, along with some special guests from the Cascade Waterlands. And that will be followed by a presentation on tax increment financing around 6 30. So Mr. McGalvery, please take it away. Okay, well, well, thank you, City Manager, and uh good evening, Mayor Sweet and Deputy Mayor Arnold and uh City Council members. So what I thought I would do is uh introduce our friends from the the Cascade Water Alliance uh first. Uh Mr. Ray Hoffman is CEO at Sevron, the chief economic economist and treasurer, Alison Bennett, uh intergovernmental and communications director, and Chris Pelucci, I believe your titles finance and administration manager, as well as uh Jeff Morris, uh, who helps us with our solid waste rates from uh Sound Resource Management. So welcome. Um so what I'm gonna do is share my screen here. Hope you see that. Okay, so we got the introductions out of the way. So I have a few opening remarks just to kick things off and then um we'll dive in. But in terms of the format for tonight, um I'm going to provide a high-level overview of each of the utilities, uh, a budget for each, um, a history of the rate adjustments, and some of the key rate rate assumptions and drivers, and then the rate increases, the preliminary rate increases themselves. And uh Josh Panski, Kelly Jones, and Chris Lynch are also on the line to answer any questions that uh may come up. And so tonight I the word of the day really is preliminary. Um I really can't stress this enough. Uh the rates that we present to you this evening um will change when we come back to you in September. Um, you know, a good analogy would be the proposed rates are set in wet concrete, but um preliminary rates are really set in sand. Um they're not really set in anything. Uh the water and stored surface water rates increase increases our our baseline, meaning that they're essentially um maintaining the current level of service that we have right now. Um there's a lot of there are a lot of things uh going on in the background that will impact these rates, such as service provider pass throughs, inflation service packages, capital investments, and the sequencing of those capital investments, uh regulatory compliance, reserve policies, and I could go on and on. Uh solid waste is a little bit further along because we don't have any capital assets or service packages, but again, they are also preliminary. In terms of challenges, it's just becoming increasingly challenging for us to keep rates um at or below inflation and maintain our own current service levels in the face of these um really rampant inflation and um our needs to maintain and improve our own infrastructure and our capital investment. So it's becoming challenging.