The Redmond City Council held a regular business meeting on Tuesday, July 21, 2026, at 7:00 PM at City Hall (15670 NE 85th St) and remotely. The meeting included presentations from Cascade Water Alliance and a Vision 2050 award, public comments on tree enforcement, signage, safety, and Flock cameras, a public hearing on commercial drone land uses, staff reports on the tree code update and the Southeast Redmond Manufacturing and Industrial Center (MIC) strategy, and a vote to terminate the Flock ALPR contract. All votes were unanimous (7-0) on major actions.
I'm calling this meeting to order. This is a regular business meeting of the Redmond City Council held on Tuesday, July 21st, 2026, commencing at 7 o'clock PM. I will call roll starting with Council President Stewart here. Council Vice President Nueva Comuna. Here. Councilmember Forsyth. Here. Council Member Parkria. Here. Council Member Percy. Here. Councilmember Sony. Here. And Council Member Kritzer. Here. The first item on our agenda is a presentation from Cascade Water Alliance. I would love to invite the CEO. John Taylor up to the podium to share about Cascade. Thank you. Good evening, Council. I'm John Taylor. I'm the newly minted chief executive officer of the Cascade Water Alliance. I think I'm on week seven. Uh, and it is an honor to be here giving you all this presentation. Um, we're gonna cover a couple of things tonight. Uh, the first is going to be just a quick overview of the Cascade Supply Program, which is our audacious program to connect the Tacoma water supply with um the water supply down here in King County, or rather up here, I should say. And then uh my colleague Andrew Baker is going to be giving an overview of our budget and rate proposal for the upcoming biennium. Um, and so with that, oh, there's the agenda right there. Uh so I'll go to the next one. So just to ground people into Cascade Water Alliance. We are a wholesale purveyor of water to five jurisdictions and two water districts here in King County, serving about 400,000 residents to 380,000 employees. Um, and we currently are purchasing water from Seattle, have been for many, many years. We own Lake Taps, so the next time you're out on Lake Taps, uh, you're riding around on Cascade uh Alliance water. Um, and we now have a contract with Tacoma starting in 2041, and we will be transporting water from Tacoma into this region and using that as water supply for many of the many of the people in our service area. Um, and that's critical because it guarantees this region long-term water security, and it gives us a duplicity of sources for water here in King County that heretofore we have not had. Um that regional connection is going to create not only water resilience but climate resilience and resilience in the event of something really unforeseen happened with water supply in this region, for example, an earthquake, which uh is something that I think everyone here keeps in mind as we live in this region. Um the Cascade Supply Program, I'm just gonna provide a very quick overview. This is a really ambitious program. Um, but basically it rolls out in three phases. And the first phase is this green section on the map, which is the connecting with Tacoma's Pipeline 5. That is the southern boundary of that green segment. Um, and you'll note there is no route on that map yet. That's how early we are in planning for this. So uh ultimately we will determine a route and we'll run it north up to the other yellow line you see up there, which is the Bellevue Issaqua pipeline, and connect with that so that we can bring it into our service area. That's about 17, 19 miles of area that we have to traverse uh through a lot of jurisdictions and some water bodies. So it's a it's gonna be a complicated project. Um, but one that we feel very confident that we can deliver. The second phase is gonna be building out the infrastructure in the area that we serve once that pipeline gets here, so that we can deliver to all of our members. And then the last phase is connecting all of that with Lake Taps and building a treatment facility at Lake Taps. When you look at that map, you're looking at 40 years of investment in the region.