The Redmond City Council Committee of the Whole for Parks and Environmental Sustainability met on Tuesday, September 23, 2025, commencing at 4:32 PM. The meeting covered three informational items: an update on the Old Fire House facility recommendation process, the Public Art Master Plan update, and the Community Based Events Innovation Fund overview. Council also considered a consent agenda item for approval of the Sixth Amendment to the Interlocal Cooperation Agreement for watershed trail maintenance.
Thank you. Call to order the meeting of the parks and environmental sustainability meeting for Tuesday, September 23rd, commencing at 432. All council members are in attendance. The first item we have tonight is an approval for the Sixth Amendment to interlocal cooperation agreement between King County and the Redmond, City of Redmond for maintenance of the Redmond watershed trails. All right. Good afternoon. I'm Meg Antifine, one of the park operations supervisors, and I will be presenting this tonight. I won't go through the whole title again. In 1989, a King County bond measure financed the acquisition, construction, and development of public green spaces, including the Redmond Watershed Preserve. As part of this agreement, King County has a financial obligation to support maintenance, operations, and administration of the trails and support system until the watershed has contiguous boundaries with Redmond or some other city. In 2001, the original agreement was amended to reduce the county's annual contribution from $30,000 to $20,000 to more accurately reflect maintenance, operation, and administrative costs. That amendment also provided for a reduction in the county's annual contribution when new regional connecting trails were developed outside the watershed. In 2010, the Third Amendment to this agreement reduced the county's annual contribution to $6200 in recognition of new regional trails constructed through Redmond Ridge Trilogy and the resulting reduction in the amount of regional trail in the watershed preserve. Subsequent amendments, including this Sixth Amendment, include adjustments for inflation as defined in the agreement. The first year of this term calls for remittance of 82 $220 and 50 cents from county to the city. And our hope is that this is placed on the consent agenda of our next business meeting. Yes. Thank you. Any questions from council. Fabulous. That was an easy one. Thank you so much. Next on our agenda, we have informational item on the fire old firehouse facility recommendation process update. A couple of handouts. Ah, fabulous two. Good afternoon, City Council. So this item is an update on our stakeholder engagement process for the Old Firehouse Teen Center. I'm joined today by Lindsay Falkenberg, who is our parks planning manager. She is the project manager for this engagement process, working with SA, our consulting team, and she is going to present this item. Hello, Council President Kritzer and the members of City Council. I'm Lindsey Falkenberg, the Parks Planning Manager. And I'm here this evening to provide an update about the community engagement process for the old firehouse facility recommendation. So the last you heard from Parks and Recreation on this topic was during your July 22nd study session when Parks Director Lorene Hamilton and consultants from Pratit and McKenzie presented the facility's condition assessment. That report outlined the current state of the building and the challenges it presents. Since then, we've launched a community engagement process designed to provide this council with a community-informed recommendation to guide your decision on the future of the facility. So we began by convening a staple stakeholder group of 23 participants. This group was formed collaboratively with input from park staff, city leadership, and the city council teen center subcommittee to ensure a balanced and diverse representation. Members include teens from a range of backgrounds and experiences, including service providers, uh community organizations, commissioners, parents, city staff, alumni, and teens. The full list of members is in front of you, and it's available publicly on uh redmond.gov backslash OFH as well for the public to see. For privacy reasons, the name of the teen participants are anonymized. The stakeholder group will meet six times in total. We've already met twice on September 10th and 17th, and we have four more meetings scheduled on October 1st, 8th, 22nd, and 29th. The first two meetings have been focused on leveling everyone's knowledge of the project through sharing more information about the facility, its use over the years, the challenges inherent in maintaining it, and the facilities condition assessment, and more. And the following meetings will be focused on providing stakeholder space to discuss for discussion, centering around stakeholder desires, visualizations, opinions, knowledge, wants, and needs. While the first two meetings have been information heavy, our facility facilitator Darcy Edmonds has carefully built in time for stakeholders to ask questions and be engaged. The stakeholders stakeholder goal is to recommend whether to renovate or rebuild the old firehouse or investigate a rebuild of the old firehouse. And the location of a potential rebuild is outside the scope of their recommendation work. To reach this recommendation, we're using a carefully guided community engagement process led by our facilitation experts at Stepherson's and Associates. The process is a tool called multi-objective decision analysis, which is aligned or outlined in attachment A of your packet. And I've provided with you with an updated paper version of the factors that are involved in the in the process.