The Kirkland City Council held a study session at 5:30 p.m. followed by a regular meeting at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 19, 2026. The meeting covered utility rate frameworks, the Cascade Water Supply Plan, affordable housing requirements, a housing dashboard update, an ESRI parking map pilot, and annual boards and commissions recruitment. Council also approved consent calendar items, adopted proclamations, and directed staff on minimum wage and wastewater rate letters.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Um I'd like to call to order the city council meeting of May eighteen nineteenth, two thousand twenty-six, before asking the clerk to call a roll for tonight's regular meeting. I'd like to note that Councilmember Pascal will be joining us late for our study session. He expects to arrive around 6 p.m. City Clerk. Councilmember Tim Chisholm. Councilmember Arnold. Here. Councilmember Prem. Here. Councilmember Felcone? Here. Deputy Mayor Black. Here. Mayor Curtis. Here. Our study session tonight is on two items. We will hear an overview of the Kirkland utility rates first. Second, we will have our briefing on the Cascade Water Alliance of the Cascade on the Cascade Supply Plan. We expect to reconvene our regular meeting at 7:30. Deputy City Manager. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Good evening, uh Deputy Mayor and Council members. This is somewhat unprecedented for the public's purposes. In his 15 years, um, he's in Greece on vacation. Um and so tonight I actually have the distinction of being acting city manager, but also doing the first presentation for the study session. And so um my apologies in advance, it's a little bit of a lecture. There are actually fair number of slides, but I will move through it quickly because some of that was really for um you to be able to take a look at in advance. And they're just um some policy issues, particularly in the middle of the presentation, that we wanted to highlight because it'll be coming back to you as we bring rates back. I also wanted to introduce Jenny Gauss, who is our surface water strategic advisor, but she's also helping shepherd the rate study while um Carly Jorger is on maternity leave and she's doing a great job keeping everybody aligned, and so you will be seeing more of Jenny as we bring these rate items further. Um to basically start, um, why we're doing this now is to basically provide you a framework in advance of a number of rate decisions that are forthcoming. Um, and we'll be bringing that to you over several months, also while we're starting to roll out the budget process. So we just wanted to have everybody to have a foundation and you don't talk about rates in detail every year the way you talk about other topics. So we just wanted to give everybody a good starting point. So I'm gonna do a little background. I'm gonna talk about the key pieces of the rate study, which are rate revenue requirements and the cost of service, and then we'll just give a high overview of the rate study schedule, which you'll start seeing in the coming months. So the basics regarding utilities is that most municipal utilities are enterprise funds, and what that means is they're intended to stand alone. They're not intended to be tax supported, and in fact, they are taxed like separate utilities. They generate a tax to the general fund. Um funds have to be used for the benefit of the ratepayers, and um you can't use utility funds for non-utility purposes. However, they can reimburse the share of central services, so HR and finance and the city attorney. Um again, they also generate revenue to the general fund because we tax them like we tax other utilities. So, with that as a basic context, we just wanted to run through really quickly a few facts about our utilities. We have four utilities that are operated by the city: water, sewer, surface water, and solid waste. And I'll talk just a little bit about each one. But it's important to know their annual budgets combined are $90 million, and so they are a very large piece of the budget, and it's something that doesn't always get the kind of attention that that the tax side does. So we for water, Cascade Water Alliance, who you'll hear from um later in the study session, that makes up about 38% of those costs, and the city does all the distribution and delivery um of that water. But the important thing here is that our water utility only serves the southern part of the city. It's about 55 to 60 percent of the city, um, roughly south of 124th Street and east of 98th Avenue. And the other customers are served primarily by North Shore Utility District, but there are also a number of other providers on on the edges.