The Public Safety and Human Services Committee of the Whole met on Tuesday, March 17, 2026, at 4:32 PM (scheduled for 4:30 PM) in Redmond City Hall and remotely. Council Vice President Prakriya presided. The meeting covered four action items, one feedback item for a future staff report, one informational presentation, and one read-only report. All action items except the body-worn camera fee resolution were forwarded to consent agendas; the fee resolution was held for additional language.
I'm calling this audience order. This is the public safety and human services committee of the whole meeting for March 17th, 2026, commencing at 432. Council members in attendance are Council Vice Pres Council President Stewart, Council Members Parsi, Forsythe, Sony, Kritzer, and joining us online is Councilmember Prakriya. Today we've got a pretty packed agenda. I'm going to try and keep things nice and tight because we do have another thing afterwards at 6 p.m. Um, make sure that we've got time to eat. We do have four action items to discuss today, one item looking for feedback for upcoming study session, and one read-only item on the agenda today. The first item that we have is the approval of the Washington State opiate settlement with remnant defendants. And joining us to present this today is uh COO files. Wonderful. Hi CEO files thanks for joining us online. I was just in the room. Apologies for being online. Um so really quickly, the state of Washington has settled another opioid case. This one was worth 97, about 97.6 million dollars. As council might recall, um, back in June of 2022, the council approved the one Washington memorandum of understanding, which gives us the right to participate in these opioid settlements. Um so far we participated in five. This is the sixth one. It's called the settlement for remnant defendants, and I put in the memo the exact companies that have settled. Um for this, Redmond will receive one point. Should we sign the participation agreement? I should say redmond will receive 1.2 million dollars. Um, and it will go towards um all of the um human services and public safety needs that are outlined in attachment C of your memo. I'm asked asking council to uh approve this on the four-seven agenda and to sign the participation agreement so that we might receive those funds, as well as um this this will come as council might recall. The dollars for all of these settlements are between we either get a lump sum or we get it over 17 years. This will be a lump sum to us. Um we do need to sign the participation agreement by uh May the 4th. And if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. Wonderful. Um, council, any comments or questions on this item? Council President Stewart. Uh thank you so much, COO files. This is really consistent with um prior decisions and conversations that we've had here on this body. I just want to also flag for our newer colleagues that um this is the best way for us to receive these kinds of dollars, and um having received them does free up some other dollars in our it makes our human services dollars go faster, and that was uh a big part of conversation in our last budget cycle. So I support moving this forward. Thank you. Wonderful, thank you. Uh council member kritzer. Uh following up on the on the comment around the last budget cycle. So just to be clear on this, um, I know that we we did uh in the last budget cycle um budget assuming uh a certain amount of funding from opioid settlements. Is this um additive to that or is this um funding that that we were projecting when we made that budget? This is additive to that. So in order to spend this money, we do have to do a budget adjustment and put it in the budget. Okay, great. I'm in support of moving this to consent. Wonderful, thank you. Other council members? Councilmember Sony. Um so I see that these agreements were set in the 2022. Um there any limitations or exemptions from that time that may not be reflecting today's local needs or like you know, valid for today.