The Kirkland City Council held a hybrid study session at 5:30 p.m. and a regular meeting at 7:30 p.m. on March 7, 2023, with all seven councilmembers present. The agenda included a Google Fiber study session, a NE 85th Street Station Area Plan Phase 2 briefing, a Women’s History Month proclamation, public comment, a Capital Improvement Program update, the consent calendar, and business items including Health Through Housing agreements and a state legislative update. The regular meeting adjourned at 10:30 p.m. after entering closed session to discuss collective bargaining.
Thank you. I'd like to call to order the city council meeting on March the seventh, two thousand twenty-three. 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 roll? Council Member Nixon. Here. Council Member Curtis. Council Member Falcone. Here. Council Member Pascal. Here. Here. Thank you. Our study session tonight is on two topics. The first is a Google Fibre discussion. The second is for Northeast Eighty Fifth Street Station Area Plan Phase Two Briefing. We will expect to reconvene our regular meeting at approximately seven thirty PM. City manager. We're approached last fall by representatives of Google Fiber about their desire to want to talk to us about having them build a fiber network on their own cost, but in Kirkland right of way. What we're looking for in the study session is sort of what questions do you have. What more would you like to know? Are you interested in us continuing to go forward with at least exploring the option or not? So presentation is going to be done in partnership between Shaan Nzheng, who's our technology and resiliency officer who's going to focus a lot on the fiber side. And then Julie Underwood, our public works director, who's going to talk about the potential challenges and opportunities in the city right of way. So with that, good evening, council. We have about nine slides, so it should hopefully go pretty quick. So allow you to uh give us input and feedback. Um, Shawnee's gonna kick us off with um why would we even consider this? So what are the benefits for this? Shanine, are you there? Yeah, all right. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Julie, and good evening, Madam Mayor and the members of the council. Uh, before I talk about high level concept of the Google Fiber proposal and its benefit to the community, I'd like to share a couple of maps to provide some context. Um, the first map you're seeing on the screen is uh um is showing the uh Washington State Broadband Office 2020 Internet Speed Survey results, which highlighting the reported speed in our area and the report, the average reported speed for downloading is around 100 megabytes, and the upload speed is around uh 40 megabytes, even though Kirkland area does have some you know high speed available. Um, and the second map, um Julie, can you yeah, the second map is the uh our Kirkland city owned fiber network map, which shows the current connectivity extent. So those highlighted color is Kirkland owned. So as described in the staff memo on Google Fiber approach the city and proposed to deploy uh gig five gigabyte speed fiber to the home network in Kirkland. The proposal package includes citywide deployment over a two-year period. And the company will cover the entire expenses for installation and ongoing maintenance and provides the multiple gigabyte speed products to consumers, including either one gig, two gig, or five gigabytes. And the company also will primarily using the micro trenching for installation, and it's open to discuss um joint trenching to potentially expand the city's existing fiber network. So we're kind of excited, and uh um we know the implementation of the Google Fiber um gigabytes, fiber to the home network in Kirkland could offer many benefits to the community, um, which include advancement of cities, diversity, equity, inclusion, and uh belonging objectives 18.3, and which means the city will explore continued and expanded opportunities to make internet access available to all. And in addition to creating access, reduced fee for low-income residents could be explored in the franchise agreement. So, which provides some opportunity to improve digital equity and enhance the quality of life for all. And through joint trenching, the city will potentially enhance the resiliency of the existing fiber infrastructure, which includes reducing single point of failure and uh uh enhancing connectivity to other public-owned facilities and assets. And also joint could increase the capacity for supporting future city services and smart initiatives, such as intelligent transportation systems and other IoT devices. So, yeah, so there's some also staff projects, they might be business and rest residential consumers who'd like to have this kind of services available to them for fast streaming and virtual reality and simultaneously used by multiple devices. So yeah, also, you know, as Kurt mentioned, there are also some challenges. So I'm going to turn over to Julie to talk about potential challenges, since this is a complex topic.