The Kirkland City Council met on September 1, 2026, for a study session beginning at 5:30 p.m. and a regular meeting at 7:30 p.m., adjourning at 10:07 p.m. All seven council members were present. The study session covered domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy programs and a preliminary review of the 2027–2032 Capital Improvement Program (CIP). The regular meeting included proclamations, public comments, a public hearing, consent calendar approval, and action on four business items: civil detention center code amendments, an International Community School (ICS) development plan amendment, affordable housing zoning amendments, and revised parking enforcement code amendments.
All right, welcome back, everybody. Um, welcome to the city council meeting of September 1st, 2026. Before we call the roll, I'd like to thank everybody that worked hard on transforming our chambers. Yay for the new AV. Thank you, everyone. Um, and it's gonna be great. We have monitors down below and new mics, so we might have to work on these mics a little bit. City clerk, will you please call a roll? Certainly, Councilmember Tim Chisholm. Here, Councilmember Arnold, here, Councilmember Prem. Here, Councilmember Phil Cohn. Here, Councilmember Pascal. Here. Deputy Mayor Black. Here. Mayor Curtis. Here. All present. Our stage session tonight is on two items. First, we'll have an overview of the domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy programs. Second, we will have a review of the preliminary preliminary 2027, 2032 Capital Improvement Program. We expect to reconvene our regular meeting at 7 30. City Manager. All right. So thank you, Madam Mayor. Deputy Mayor, members of the council. So we're going to start off with the overview of the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center and our pilot project. We are very honored to have Kate Garvey, the CEO of KSARC here today, as well as Walk Goldstein, who's been our legal advocate. They're going to describe our experience so far with the pilot. And then we're going to be turning it over to the public defense team, or excuse me, the public safety team to talk about the domestic violence. But I wanted to note that this is our final check-in on criminal justice in terms of the city work program item. However, we will be having discussions of these topics during the budget process. So looking forward to wrapping this up and then to take what we learned into the budget proposal that you're going to see in October. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Kate. Good evening, everyone. Thank you again for having us here. This has been an amazing opportunity. And then to be here with you all today to talk about this past year and what we've learned from having a Kirkland dedicated legal advocate pilot program. It's been just such a wonderful opportunity, and I'm so grateful for the partnership of the City of Kirkland. So before I get into the pilot itself, I wanted to take just a minute to provide a little bit of context. I'm honored to be here and included in this presentation with the Kirkland Police Department as well as Kirkland's DV system advocate. That context is important because there's a very um unique distinction between domestic violence and sexual assault, as well as the roles between a community and a system advocate. So domestic violence generally refers to a pattern of abuse or coercive control within an intimate partner or family relationship. Sexual assault is sexual contact or behavior that happens without a person's consent. Yes, they do overlap, but they're not the same thing. And they often require very different specialized responses. So at Casearc, our focus is primarily on sexual violence. And when we talk about sexual assault advocacy, we're talking about supporting survivors through very specific impacts and systems that can follow an assault, whether that means navigating law enforcement, understanding legal options, accessing therapy, connecting with family support, or simply having someone who understands what they're experiencing. There's another part of advocacy that's really especially important to this pilot. So KSARC legal advocates, including WA serve as community advocates.