The Kirkland City Council held a regular meeting on April 16, 2024, beginning with a study session at 5:30 PM and the regular meeting at 7:30 PM. The meeting covered a broad range of topics including a proposed homelessness resolution, the ARCH strategic plan, Earth Month proclamation, public comments on various issues, approval of a consent calendar, updates on community surveys, expansion of the Mobile Integrated Health program, adoption of an organizational statement on international conflict, a sustainability strategic plan report card, changes to the Tourism Development Committee, and a community flag initiative. The meeting concluded with council reports and adjournment at 9:52 PM.
Thank you. Hello, everyone. I would like to call to order the city council meeting of April 16th, 2024. Happy Earth Month, everyone. Tonight's meeting is a hybrid meeting. Community members are welcome to join us either in person or remotely through Zoom or by the telephone. Councilmember Falcone is joining us remotely. Clerk, will you please call the role? Councilmember Tim Chizon. Councilmember Black. Here. Council Member Sweet. Here. Council Member Falcone. Here. Council Member Pascal. Here. Deputy Mayor Arnold. Here. Mayor Curtis. Here. We're going to switch our agenda this evening and we're going to do the Arch study session first and then follow that up with the city's commitment to addressing homelessness through a person-centered approach, resolution R 5631. We expect to reconvene our regular meeting at 7:30. City Manager. Okay, thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you, Councilmembers, for joining us down here at our study session. We're still learning on this, so we'll welcome your feedback at the end as to ways we can make this experience even better. We're very lucky tonight to have Lindsay Masters, the executive director of Arch here to talk about our strategic plan. I was just asking Lindsay, she is coming out on our fifth year as executive director. So it's an awesome I was one of the people who had the privilege of hiring her on the board. Well, part of that, she actually talked about the need to do an update to our strategic plan. We hadn't done a strategic plan in I don't even know when. And so over the past year, I was the chair of the subcommittee, the strategic planning subcommittee for Arch that led to this recommendation. This was passed by the board as a document and it's being presented to all the member jurisdictions. And so Lindsay was hadn't been here for a while to see you all in person, so I wanted to just remind you of her and uh have an opportunity for you to ask questions at the end. So with that, I'll go ahead and turn it over to Lindsay Masters. Thank you. Great, thank you. Can you hear me okay? Okay. Um it's great to be here in person. I I've missed coming recently. And um to walk you through our strategic plan, I have some some slides to share. Um, I'd love to spend a little time talking about kind of the context in which we were starting the planning process, some of the boards, the the board's goals for what we were hoping to get out of it, um, how we really use the process as a way to help better define Arch's identity and clarify our role in some of the work that we do. Um, and then and then would love to dive into the specific strategies that we're actually hoping to move forward in the coming years. So with that, um, I'll just talk about really big picture planning context for Arch is we've spent the last five years since I've since I've come really looking at our organizational resources, our staffing levels, um, right sizing our programs and services to our staff capacity, um, working on improving our policies and procedures, becoming more efficient, um, more proactive with monitoring, a lot of kind of internal improvements, um, at the same time still trying to scale up our impact in our mission and growing how much affordable housing we're producing. Um, so we did a various consultant studies over the last few years that was very helpful in laying the groundwork for the board to be able to look longer term. Um, and then in 2022, we were um really excited to celebrate 30 years as an organization of our founding and take a look back at some of our major accomplishments in that time. And so um also kind of setting uh some some framework for what has been the successful efforts, um, how can we grow some of those? This chart here just kind of shows you the relative affordable unit production under all the Arch member programs over time, and you can see um a lot of a lot of progress has been made, and we've we're coming over 9,000 affordable units produced in that time, which are permanent um long-term assets to the community.