The Kirkland City Council held a regular meeting on May 20, 2025, beginning with a study session at 5:30 p.m. and reconvening at 7:30 p.m. The meeting included proclamations, public comments, a special presentation on the city flag process, approval of a consent calendar, and multiple business items including rezoning to park/open space, zoning code amendments for the Juanita neighborhood, adoption of updated park and fire impact fees, and discussion of a wastewater rate comment letter. The council unanimously approved all agenda items, including an ordinance to rezone parcels to park/open space, an amended ordinance for impact fees, a letter on King County wastewater rates, and a direction to increase the lot coverage exemption for artificial turf to 25% with future study of environmental impacts.
All right. I'm gonna call to order the city council meeting of May 6, 2025. City Clerk, will you please call the roll? Councilmember Tim Chishon. Here. Councilmember Black. Here. Councilmember Sweet. Councilmember Falcon. Here. Councilmember Pascal. Here. Deputy Mayor Arnold. Here. Mayor Curtis. Our study session tonight is on two items. First, we'll have an update on the regional crisis response agency. Second, we will have a preview of the downtown and waterfront live parking data web map launch. We expect to reconvene our regular meeting at 7 30. City manager. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Deputy Mayor members of the council. Very excited tonight to have Brooke Bittner, the executive director of the Regional Crisis Response Agency here. As you know, I get the pleasure of serving with her as your representative on the board. I'll look back, a little a bit of the present and a little bit of a look ahead. So and we encourage questions and comments from the council. So with that, I will turn it over to Brooke. Thank you, Kurt. Oh, thank you, Mayor Curtis, Deputy Mayor and Council members. Is can everybody hear me okay if I'm right here? All right, let me know. And let me know if I'm talking too fast because I do get excited. I'm just delighted to be here and see everybody again. As Kurt said, I'm the director of Regional Crisis Response Agency, which we call RACER. So I'll say racer as I'm walking through my slides this evening. And my purpose here, as I see it, is one to give you a briefing and talk to you about how this investment is going, and two, to really thank you and kind of shine a light on how much impact Kirkland's investment is having in our region. And then as we walk through the slides, you'll see also at the state level and at the national level by leading in this area. And I really appreciate that Kurt has invited me to talk to you all. As you know, RACER is a product of an interlocal agreement between our five cities up here in North and East King County. It allows our cities to capitalize on economies of scale, to collaborate across jurisdictions where people do not stay within city borders, so we see people travel across the cities. Because while Kirkland may have been able to do this alone and was doing this alone before the RACER agency was formed, most of our other racer partners could not uh sustain a model like this without the partnership of the other four cities. And so the collaboration is really what makes this possible. It's really what allows us to take it to the next level of becoming a true first response. Um I also want to thank the city of Kirkland for stepping into leadership as the fiscal and administrative sponsor for the RACER Agency. So I am lucky to get to partner with Kurt at kind of two sides of the coin as the city manager because myself and all of our racer staff are City of Kirkland employees, and as the president of the board, and he has been on both sides such an encourager of innovation. I could not ask for a better boss that creates the space for me and for our agency to step into new territory. And again, as we get down later in our slides, you'll see that it's really paying off at the state level and nationally. So I'm gonna talk through what the racer agency is, our goals summarized from the interlocal agreement to provide crisis response, to reduce police response to behavioral health calls, provide alternatives to police as the primary response to crisis, and reduce strain on police and fire departments by reducing repeat calls. And we all know that the traditional answer to a behavioral health emergency for the last many decades has been police, a badge and a gun, because that's all our system has had to offer. And so it's really exciting that our community now has an alternative to that.