Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The North Bend City Council held a workstudy on July 28, 2026, at 7:00 PM. The meeting covered four primary discussion items: a proposed Parks and Recreation Service Area (PRSA) for a regional aquatics facility, a request to rezone a constrained property for townhome development, regulations on expanding single-family homes in the downtown zone, and funding strategies for downtown activation and revitalization. The meeting adjourned at 9:13 PM.
2026. We want to start with Arts and RAC Creation Service Area discussion with A. Okay. Thank you everyone for having me. Very appreciative of the opportunity to update you on our work. And I'll just try to make this a very quick informational download and then give you some time to ask the questions as well. So as a quick overview, the Snowqualming Valley Productions Collaborative was formed in late 2024 through a resolution by the Sciview Commissioners. And it was renewed in 2025 by the commissioners as well with the addition of Snowqualmie. So if you can go ahead and vote the next slide. All right, so now we have City of North Bend, City of Snowqualm, SDSD, Sideview, False City, MPB and our organization as well as participants in this collaborative group. Over the last few months since we began meeting again, we worked on a uh list of shared premises, and we wanted to do this as a way to find common ground for uh anchoring our future decisions and compromises that this group is going to need to make to find that board. So uh we came up with this list of 11 snow palming valley residents value aquatics. Snow Palmy Valley residents want a pool. A new pool should serve the entire upper Snopalmie Valley. Snowcraumy Valley residents expect value and efficiency. No single entity can provide a pool on their own. That was a good one to see everybody come to. Uh good faith regional collaboration and compromise is necessary. Location matters, the selected site must be capable of supporting the facility long term. The community's voice should guide the process, long term sustainability matters, and lastly, there is no perfect solution. That is always an important one when you're talking about making compromise. It's uh how to come to terms with the fact that no one's going to be happy about everything. So uh let's see. Uh we are tackling the problem of how do we make paying or building and operating a new pool fair and equitable when there doesn't exist one taxing district that you can spread that cost out over. So with that in mind, we started exploring the idea of a parks and recreation service area. Uh go ahead and forward to the next slide. A park and recreation service area is one of the three statutorily allowed uh park uh districts for the state of Washington. It's it would be a new taxing district created specifically with the narrow purpose of pool construction and operation with boundaries that reflect the service area. Uh there would be a new governing board established with representatives from partner jurisdictions, and the cost to construct and operate a new pool, then would be funded by approval of the registered voters that live within that district. All right, next slide. So there's four currently that exists in the state of Washington. One of those is in King County, and that is North Shore PRSA. The distinctive part about this type of district is that this is administered through the county. So the county can delegate that to the cities that are part of uh the park and recreation district, but the the government's really lives with them. Uh, and then they it's administered through an ILA when there are cities involved. Uh and we have been working with uh Sarah Perry's office and her staff to start to talk about what would this look like to establish and run in our particular situation, and I'll add in some of the information they've shared with us about that as we go. All right, uh, next slide, please. All right, funding and governance. So I'll I have a nice little illustration of the um the how this is established on the next slide, but for now the funding is done through a six-year regular property tax levy, which requires a 60% 60% approval, and it can issue uh voted general obligation debt, uh similar to what a city can do. Uh funding can be submitted on the same ballot as formation, or it can be two different ballot measures you can form first and then fund it later. Obviously, there's advantages and disadvantages to both. Um, approval of the voted debt as well, must be 60%. It's considered a quasi-municipal corporation and independent taxing authority. King County is the governing authority, and then as I mentioned, it's governed with an interlocal agreement with a provision for the administrator or joint board that's responsible for governing it.