The Committee of the Whole met on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, at 4:30 PM to discuss seven items including budget adjustments, insurance membership, budget process updates, technology projects, the REDI program, communications strategy, and regional animal services licensing. The meeting was presided over by Vanessa Kritzer with all council members present.
I'm calling this meeting to order. This is a meeting of the Finance Administration and Communications Committee of the Whole of the Redmond City Council on July 14th, commencing at 4 30 p.m. All council members are in attendance. We have seven items on our agenda. The first item on the agenda is the adoption of an ordinance for the 2025 to 2026 budget adjustment number seven. I'll turn it over to our finance director Kelly Cochrane to introduce it. Good afternoon. We are here with one of our recurring um sort of clean up budget adjustments. And Haley Zercher is here to help walk you through some of the items there. We do need some direction when it comes to one of the items that's included on the memo for a capital project. We're a little out of sequence and public works. We'll be explaining more about that project to you next week. So we just need to have some direction at the end of this meeting if you'd like us to keep that adjustment included, or if you'd like us to um to hold off until after you've heard about it. So I'll hand it over to Haley and she'll walk you through what is included in the adjustment. Yeah, good afternoon. Um as Kelly mentioned, this is one of our regular adjustments. So the uh the adjustments you're seeing in front of you mostly are for new revenues related to grants that you have already seen come through or reimbursements for smaller projects throughout the city. Um the project in question that is a little bit out of sequence is the downtown Redmond Link RCC landscaping improvements. So I just didn't want there to be any confusion. That will be explained in more detail at the quarterly CIP update next week. Um this adjustment is authorizing the transfer of some rental income that is eligible for this project. So we just wanted to get the transfer on the books. If um, if you have questions about this project or if we we want to pull this off, we can certainly um wait until our next budget adjustment. Um, but just wanted to get that uh authority for the transfer. Um everything else, uh, it should be pretty business as usual. So I will hand it over to see if anyone has questions. Thank you. Um so just to understand, we're gonna on the the we will hear at the committee of the whole about um that item, or it'll be at um at the business meeting in which we would have already approved the item. It will be at the business meeting. So I understand that that's a little we don't try to sequence it that way. So I'm happy to pull this off and we can uh bring it forward to the next um for the next adjustment. Uh council members, uh councilmember Percy. Um, would you be able to elaborate what would be the pros and cons of keeping it or not? Yeah, so I mean, if we were to keep it on here and uh authorize the transfer, um, that just authorizes the budget authority of moving the money from one fund to another. Um, if we were to pull it off, um, we would just go ahead and bring it forward again and and and you approve the project later. We would bring this transfer forward again at our next adjustment. So the alternative too is if we if we get the budget authority and we budget the transfer, um, but later get direction that the project isn't moving forward, we do not have to book the transfer. It's just the budgeting of the transfer. Council President Stewart. Uh thank you so much. For my part, it does sound like we need a little bit more information on this than we're able to probably get through in the long agenda we have for this committee. Um, so that's my take on that question. Additionally, I just wanted to comment. We're going to be talking about one of the city's priorities a few different ways tonight, and that is housing and producing more affordable housing. So I wanted to make sure that the public was aware in this budget adjustment. We've included our acceptance of a connecting housing to infrastructure project. This is in support of our partners at Bellwether who are producing um 330 units of deeply affordable housing in the Overlake neighborhood. And um I'm glad to see that Redmond continues to be a great partner to that project. Thank you. Council Vice President.