I'm calling this meeting to order.

This is a Redmond City Council special meeting held on Tuesday, January 13th, 2026, commencing at 6 o'clock p.m.

Council members in attendance are Council Member Council President Stewart, Council Vice President Nueva Kamina, and Council Members Forsyth, Kritzer, Prekria, Sony, and we have a vacancy.

This meeting is being held for the council vacancy interviews.

We have 11 candidate interviews.

Each interview will be 15 minutes long with a five-minute transition period between each candidate.

There will be a 10-minute break at 8 p.m.

At the end of the interviews, the council will go into executive session to discuss candidate qualifications.

Following the executive session, the council will come back into open session and we'll have candidate nominations, discussion, and decision on the finalists.

The finalists will come back for an additional interview on January 20th.

Council President Stewart, would you like to make a few comments?

Yeah, thank you so much, Mayor Bernie, and welcome everyone.

We are really excited to get this process started tonight.

I want to take a moment on behalf of the entire council to thank our incredible community members who applied for this leadership opportunity.

We are deeply grateful for every candidate and applicant who took the time to prepare such a thoughtful submission.

The size of the turnout and the quality of the application packets we receive leave me nothing but incredibly proud of our wonderful community.

And please know this is not the only way to engage in local government.

Please do check out our boards and committees page and speak with us about other ways to engage if you are not advancing in the process tonight.

The council reviewed 35 anonymized applications, and the unredacted versions of those applications were distributed to the council earlier today.

And as the mayor said, we've got quite a few conversations to have tonight, which we are really looking forward to.

So we are eager to get started.

Thank you so much, everyone.

Thank you, Council President.

And with that, we will welcome our first candidate.

We'll get him situated.

Properly I've seen it.

Good evening.

Um there is a button.

Turn green.

Great.

Thank you.

Um welcome.

Um I'm Mayor Burney and welcome to the interview.

You will have um a total of 15 minutes to answer questions.

Um, but we will first ask you to share your name and your pronouns, and then we'll get going on the rest of the questions.

I'll start with my name.

Uh, please call me CK.

I have a very long, complicated name, even for an Indian name.

So CK works just fine.

Pronouns are he him.

And yep, very nice to meet all of you, and thank you for inviting me for this opportunity.

Hi, CK.

I'm Councilmember Vivek Prakria.

I use he him.

Um the first question is why do you want to serve on the council?

And how do you envision your approach to successful service?

So, plus I see Redmond at a is that pleasant application.

Plus, I see Redmond is at a very critical kind of juncture as we make that transition from a suburb to an urban center, especially with uh the transit coming in.

And uh I've lived in Redmond for about 10 years now with my family, and we love Redmond.

I've got two kids in the Lake Lake Washington School District system, uh uh elementary and middle school, and we make extensive use of all that Redmond has to offer.

We use the bike trails, we're hiking all the time, and we love that kind of uh urban uh urban hiking divide.

We can take a hike and come back, come down to downtown for a coffee.

We love that thing, and it's a wonderful place to raise kids.

But as we grow, I think we're gonna face pressure to expand services.

And I when I read through, I didn't I didn't know a lot about how the Redmond government functioned, to be frank.

But as I read through, I was really fascinated with the price of government and that commitment to keep that price of government between five and five and a half percent as we even as we grow and kind of keeping that as a ceiling.

So that was really attractive to me.

And then my service on the Redmond 2050 Community Advisory Committee, that was really my catalyst where I really understood a little bit about how Redmond functions, what its priorities are, and I really wanted to devote more time to that.

But at that time I was really busy.

I was at the Gates Foundation, uh really long hours and lots of travel, mainly to Africa and India.