The Kirkland City Council met on June 3, 2025, beginning with a study session at 5:30 PM and the regular meeting at 7:30 PM. The council discussed transit needs and a joint bike path and park proposal, received public comments, approved several consent calendar items unanimously, adopted a transportation impact fee ordinance, deliberated on middle housing zoning amendments without action, and directed staff to prepare a resolution supporting the trans and non-binary community for the next meeting.
All right, hello everyone. I'd like to call to order the city council meeting of June 3rd, 2025. City Clerk, will you please call the role? Councilmember Tim Chizon. Here. Councilmember Black. Here. Councilmember Sweet. Here. Councilmember Falcone. Here. Councilmember Pascal. Here. Deputy Mayor Arnold. Here. Mayor Curtis. Here. I've spilt my coffee already. We're off to a great start. Our study session tonight is on two items. First, a discussion on the transit needs study. Second, we will have a presentation on the joint project proposal for a central way bike path adjacent to Peterkirk Park. We expect to reconvene our regular meeting at 7 30. City Manager. Okay, thank you. Madam Mayor, Deputy Mayor, members of the council. So excited to talk to you today about the transit needs study. The presentation is going to be made by Kimberly Scrivener, our transportation planner and Victoria Covacks, also transportation planner, and Sarah Olsen, our deputy public works director. We want to lay out the background as to how we got here and what we're looking for is council's feedback on the proposed elements of the study and any other thoughts you want to share with us before we get going on it. So with that, I will turn it over to Kimberly. Thank you. Is your mic on? Thank you, City Manager. Mayor Curtis, Council. Good evening. I know I'm trying to find the mouse. I need to share the great. Good evening. So tonight we're talking about the transit needs study. The no surprise to everybody, this is a study that's identified in the transportation strategic plan. This project meets a variety of the goals, both the balanced transportation with city council and the goals in the transportation strategic plan and the comprehensive plan. And this restructure was designed to have more direct routes, but required more transfers. We've also seen due to the pandemic loss in service hours, also loss in ridership and change in ridership trends. We've also heard from the community that with a desire for more transit service. And we really want to better understand the what people where people want to get to and what the gaps are and what's keeping them from taking transit now. We wanted to give you a little bit of a reminder of what we heard from the transportation strategic plan. We did ask questions about transit service. It looks like almost 85% of them are at least somewhat interested in taking transit. So at least for the folks that took that survey, that's encouraging. And then this next chart can came from the work that King County Metro has done and from their survey related to the Rapid Ride K line, but they also asked general questions about transit and fewer transfers and again frequency came in pretty high, really high in terms of what they heard from the community.