The Redmond City Council held a study session on Tuesday, April 28, 2026, commencing at 7:01 p.m. All council members were present, with Mayor Birney absent. The meeting covered four agenda items: the 2027-2028 budget process with departmental overviews for Fire and Public Works, a land use and zoning map amendment for 6900 188th Avenue NE, the 2025 legislative conformance, business improvement, and fences zoning code amendments, and council talk time. The meeting concluded after 10:30 p.m.
2027-2028 Budget Process: Fire Department Overview
2027-2028 Budget Process: Public Works Overview
Land Use Map and Zoning Map Amendments – 6900 188th Ave NE
2025 Legislative Conformance, Business Improvement, and Fences Zoning Code Amendments
Council Talk Time
City Council study session held on Tuesday, April 28th, 2026, commencing at 7.01 p.m. All council members are in attendance. Mayor Bernie will not be joining us tonight. We have four items on the agenda. The 2027-2028 budget process. Departmental budget overviews continue. We will begin with fire and then have public works tonight. We will have a land use and zoning map amendments for 6900 188th Avenue Northeast. The 2025 legislative conformance business improvement and fences zoning code amendments and council talk time. So for the first item, the budget process, departmental overviews. We have tonight fire and then public works. Deputy Director of our Finance Department, Haritha Nara will get us kicked off. Thank you so much. Good evening, Council. Um Councilmember Stewart, you have already said whatever I wanted to say. So thank you. So today we have so this is our third session, our third group of departments who is going to do the department overview presentation. So the fullest one we have is fire. So I'm gonna hand it over to them. Okay, thank you, Haretha, and good evening, Council. Again, I'm Fire Chief Adrian Shepherd, and I'm joined this evening by Deputy Chiefs. Ami Varrell and Chief Jim Whitney. We're pleased to present the Redman Fire Department 2027-2028 budget overview. Our goal this evening is to outline our recent progress, key accomplishments, and our future direction. As we review the details, let me see. There we go. As we review the details, our mission remains central to compassionately, proactively and professionally protect life, property, and the environment. Actually, we're not still on the same slide. Yep. Every dollar in this budget supports our commitment to the residents of Redmond and Fire District 34. The members of the department live this mission every day. Whether they're responded to an emergency, conducting a fire inspection, educate in the classroom of students, or showing up at a community event to connect with the neighborhoods they serve. This budget reflects that commitment. We operate in six key divisions. Fire operations, emergency medical services, including our basic life support, advanced life support, and our mobile integrated health, emergency management, fire prevention, support services, and the fire administration. This scope highlights that you're not just funding a fire department, you're funding a comprehensive public safety system. Our proposed baseline budget is $92.1 million, and that covers 165, 168.5 FTEs. This is a 6% increase over the current adopted budget. Fire and medical operations is our largest area with 150 FTEs, which increases 10% to 77.2 million, reflecting the full impact of four FTEs added in the last cycle and the consolidation of ALS overtime and supplies for transparency. The 22% decrease in administration reflects a realignment, not a reduction in capacity. Those resources have been shifted to our emergency operations and a new recover uh emergency preparedness and recovery budget plan offered that you'll see in the new budget, which formalizes emergency management as its own standalone function with its two FTEs and 977,870 dollars. Next slide. Thank you. Package five is the comprehensive community response program, a collaboration among fire police planning for fire. The administrative assistant position is filled and fully integrated into our department. And the four firefighters that I just mentioned were positions at station 17, and that is complete. The total ongoing commitment across all departments was 3.7 million, with 919,000 spent to date, as several items are still being implemented, as you can see from the matrix. For the one time items, fire completed the training and the PPE and their fire consulting services costs, spending 190,000 of the 240,000 that we had budgeted. The fire impact fee update is still ongoing and will be completed in this year in 2026. The total one-time spending across all of the departments in this package was 344,000 of the 1.1 million dollar budget, reflecting the timing on several of the other initiatives.