So much.

I'm calling this meeting to order.

This is a Redmond City Council study session held on Tuesday, March 24th, 2026, commencing at 7.04 p.m.

Councilmember Procrea is online with us tonight, and all other council members are in chambers tonight, as well as Mayor Bernie.

There are four items on the agenda park signage and wayfinding standards and the strategy plan, the 2027-2028 budget process, our first departmental budget overview with parks and recreation, a progress update on the municipal operations center campus redevelopment project and council talk time.

The first item on the agenda is the park signage and wayfinding standards and strategy plan.

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

Welcome.

Good evening, City Council.

I'm Lorreen Hamilton, Parks and Recreation Director.

I'm joined this evening by Lindsay Falkenberg, our parks planning manager and our consultant from Tool Design, who I will allow Lindsay to introduce.

This item that we're bringing forward was an enhancement that came through the last budget cycle and has been a priority in our park plan and also a priority of our Parks Trails and Recreation Commission for many years.

So we're very excited to be moving this project forward.

And so I'm going to hand this off to Lindsay to get you all updated on this project.

Thank you, Laureen.

Again, I'm Lindsay Falkenberg, Parks Planning Manager.

This is Chris and Losi, who is our consultant from Tool Design.

We'll be sharing a little bit with you tonight about the work that we've completed to date.

Specifically, we're going to focus on the system assessment that we have done as well as the community and stakeholder engagement.

And we're going to share key takeaways and themes that have come out of the assessment engagement work that we have done and connect how those findings are going to be shaping our design and our strategy moving forward.

Now we see if the slideshow works.

Excellent.

Oh as I just said.

And I'm going to pass it off to Kristen to talk about our project goals and objectives.

Thank you, green light.

Okay.

So the I'll start with the project goals and objectives, and you can see in the middle of the circle kind of the primary things, formal goals.

So connecting people to Redmond's Parks and Trails, creating a signage and wayfinding system that enhances accessibility and increases equity.

But in our conversations with city staff, a number of other items came up.

And so those we included those outside the circle.

And they have to do with both user experience and the ease of operations and maintenance of the system.

So a desire for a really functional system that coordinates with other city operations, is straightforward to implement and maintain and is this and is sustainable.

And then just getting people out about and exploring the parks, connecting to nature, connecting to transit.

Again, a nice focus on user experience as well as what the staff need to get the system up and running.

Next slide.

So I'll just go through a quick highlight or a quick overview of what the project is about.

There are three phases.

So there's a discovery phase, a design phase, and then a documentation phase.

So the discovery is what we've completed.

So we did a review of plans and policies and documents.

We went out into the field and looked at parks and trails.

We met with stakeholder groups and have been in conversation with lots of city staff from that.

We developed some sign assigned family that would respond to what we learned.

We developed some mood boards that reflected how people felt about the city identity and things that we were inspired by.

And then we'll be finishing out with kind of detailed design drawings, some best practices for how the system will be implemented, strategies around implementation, that kind of thing.

Next slide.

So I'm going to share a couple of the themes and key takeaways from what we learned.

There's a lot more, but just a few to highlight.

So the first is what we called hidden gems.

So we found that at a lot of parks, when you arrive, there isn't a lot of signage that tells you what's there.

In other parks, as you can see in some of these images, the landscape or the topography hides what's there.

So we've came up with this theme of hidden gems that there's the parks are wonderful, but it's not always obvious what's in the park and how wonderful they are until you get into the park.

So we developed some strategies in response to that.

First is improving that entry experience with some really clear icons, visible, highly visible colors, something compelling to get people in, and then using what we call the breadcrumb approach, so providing little regular signs at regular intervals that kind of lead people along on trails so they they find the where they need to go.

And then things like maintenance, making sure that's that vegetation is maintained or cut back around signs to keep them visible.

Slide.

All right.

And again, this is specifically from the kind of field work assessment phase of the project was uh what we're calling variety of experiences.

So I think many of us know that Redmond is a really diverse place in many different ways.

Um we have diverse user groups in Redmond in terms of abilities, um, uh interests, their familiarity with the system itself and their needs from the system.