Session held on Wednesday, November 12th, 2025, commencing at 7 p.m.

Council members in attendance are Councilmember Anderson, Councilmember Nueva Comina, Council Vice President Forsyth, Councilmember Stewart, Councilmember Fields, and myself, Council President Kritzer.

We're also joined by Mayor Burney.

There are five items on the agenda tonight.

The old firehouse facility recommendation, a budget update, 2025 environmental sustainability action plan, draft document review, council appointment process, and council talk time.

So with that packed agenda, we'll go to the first item on the agenda, which is the old firehouse facility recommendation.

Lorreen Hamilton, our Parks and Recreation Director will introduce this item.

Go ahead.

Good evening, City Council.

I'm Lorraine Hamilton, Parks and Recreation Director here at the City of Redmond.

I'm joined today by Lindsay Falkenberg, our parks planning manager, as well as Darcy Edmonds, who helped lead this engagement effort from Stefferson and Associates.

Tonight we will be updating City Council on the stakeholder group and engagement process for the Old Firehouse Teen Center.

I want to start by thanking all of our stakeholder group members and community members for taking the time to make your voice heard in this process.

Our stakeholder group was a diverse group made up of eight teens, six service providers, five city commissioners, one facility staff member, three old firehouse alumni, uh, one of our old firehouse music staff, the OFH founding director, um a former council member, and two parents of OFH alumni.

And so we worked very closely with this group over the last few months.

Um tonight we're gonna be sharing the recommendation from the stakeholder group and the council subcommittee will also share their insight at the end of our presentation.

Oh, I'm too far.

That was way too far.

We went to the end.

There we go.

There we go.

Just jumped to the end.

Um so uh this evening we're gonna go over kind of just a brief timeline as to how we got here today, review our process, present the recommendation and impacts, and then share what the next steps after this evening will be.

Uh so this is just an overarching timeline.

In April of this year, operations moved out of the old firehouse into the Redmond Community Center at Marymoor Village.

Uh in July of 2025, we brought an expanded facility condition and the options, and we brought them here to City Council to seek um direction on our next steps.

Through from August through October, our stakeholder group met and went through a recommendation process led by Stepherson and Associates, as well as our parks planning team, so that we could uh really truly dive into the recommendation for the future of the facility to bring forward to you.

Uh tonight we are here to present that recommendation to City Council for direction, and then in Q1 of 2026, we would begin implementation of the received direction from City Council.

In our last committee of the whole update, council requested information on facility usage for teen programs.

Uh, is not easily available due to the fact that most of that um check-in and programs were done uh not within our technology systems, and so a lot of those that data is not as easily available.

That being said, uh the hours and services for the old firehouse teen center have followed the school schedules and take into account holidays and whatnot uh for the better part of its history.

In the last two years, our data has gotten significantly better as we've implemented a Microsoft Teams or a Microsoft Forums check-in, and then recently moved into our Smart Rec, which is our recreation um software for check-in.

Uh that check-in process has not always been adhered to strongly, yet this is kind of the best data that we are able to bring forward to city council in line with the questions that were asked.

The hours of operation prior to movement over to RCCMV was Tuesday through Thursday from 3:30 to 8 and Friday from 3:30 to 6.

Some Fridays would also have live music.

Uh the services offered were drop-in spaces for after school classes and mental health and behavioral services with youth east side services or YES.

YES also participated in the stakeholder group process.

Our Redmond Youth Partnership Advisory Committee had a very strong presence in that facility, both meeting there as well as leading programming, and then of course our live music programming was one of the most um popular and influential programs that we've had.

In the 24 to 25 school year, uh our data shows 122 unique users.

Um staff stated that 10 to 30 drop-in teens were um present daily.

There was 31 RIPAC members, um, but 50 plus teens in the meetings.

And then live music events were two to three times a month and averaged 60 to 100 attendees, and these were all ages events.

We did not have registration or check-ins for the live music events they were drop-in.

At this time, I'm gonna hand off to Darcy Edmonds and Lindsay Falkenberg for the next two slides.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lorraine.

Sorry, not used to using mics.

Thank you.

So yeah, so we um we had a six meeting process essentially, and we started out with evaluating uh two options or presenting two options uh for recommendation, um, and those were to renovate or to rebuild.

Um, over the course of the process, I think as the subcommittee saw, um, we started to hear feedback that um made us realize that uh towards the end, it would be really, really helpful to add in an option to recommend the location as well later on in the process.

Uh a lot of um topics that came up uh over the course of this process were the opening timeline for renovation and rebuild, um, as well as the importance of the location, um the importance of it being a really teen-oriented space.

Um, and so we heard we heard a lot of really great uh quantity just qualitative or quantitative, sorry, qualitative feedback, uh just values-based, really understanding the priorities of um of all of the stakeholder group and and especially the the teen members and hearing from them what their priorities and needs are for uh for whatever the the future of the the facility would be.

Um additional elements of this process included uh visioning.

Um, we did a lot of breakout group conversations, and we also tried to mix those up so that members got to hear from different perspectives and and you know participate in different conversations with different groups.

Um we used um a process that you may have seen in the report called um shorthand uh MODA.

Um that is short for multi-objective decision analysis.

You may have uh seen processes like this before called uh multi-criteria analysis or MCA.

Um there's you know similar similar processes for this, but essentially you define your criteria, right?

Define your decision making or recommendation making factors, uh, determine how important those factors are, uh, and then determine how your options in this case renovate or rebuild perform for those factors.

Um that is what our group did over the course of those six meetings was, and that was the um the quantitative aspect, as they would give scores regularly as part of this, and those scores did not in determine the recommendation, they were intended to inform conversations and help the group better understand their own leanings.