On Tuesday, September 8th, 2026, commencing at 6 40 p.m.

Council members in attendance, our Council President Stewart, Council Vice President Nueva Kamina, Council Members Forsyth, Kritzer, Parsi, and Prakria.

And I will announce Councilmember Sony when she arrives.

Tonight we are having a special meeting to interview our library board of trustees.

Um and supposed to be human services commission candidates, but she is not here yet.

So we're just going to start with the Library Board of Trustees.

Naveen Yajiman, Vice Chair for the Library Board of Trustees, will introduce the Library Board of Trustees candidate, Jenny Lisk, if you would like to go ahead.

Thank you, Mayor Burney.

I'm pleased to introduce Jenny Lisk as a candidate for the position of on the Redmond Library Board.

Jenny is a longtime Redmond resident who brings together deep expertise in book publishing, education, and community building.

She's an award-winning author and adjunct faculty member at Bellevue College, where she teaches aspiring nonfiction writers.

And she's built a growing literary community here in Redmond through author circles and author salons in partnership with the Redmond Library.

Earlier in her career, Jenny spent 20 years leading complex global transformation initiatives at IBM.

She brings that combination of professional expertise, community commitment, and proven ability to turn ideas into action to our interest in serving on the Redmond Library Board.

Please take it away.

Yeah, Jenny, if you want to just say a few words of introduction, thank you so much for sharing that.

And then we'll I'll ask council members the questions for you.

And push the button.

Right.

There you go.

It's working now.

Yeah.

Okay, great.

Thank you, Naveen for that lovely introduction.

And thank you, Mayor Bernie, for um nominating me for this.

And thank you, Council, for considering my nomination.

As Naveen said, I'm a longtime Redmond resident.

I grew up here and I've been back here for almost 15 years now.

And I'm an author and I work with other authors in books and publishing.

And so when I saw this opportunity, I thought this would be right up my alley for a bunch of reasons.

One of which is that I know this sounds a little idealistic, but I really believe in the power of books and stories to like change the world and build community.

And of course, libraries, you know, the original mission is books.

And after Mary Comstock's update last week, I'd say the library here is doing a pretty good job with books.

We heard about the fabulous news sorter that's processing like zillions of books per hour.

Um the second busiest, I think, library system in the country.

And Redmond, I don't know if she mentioned this last week, is the busiest branch in our system.

Which is crazy.

So I'd say the library is doing a pretty good job of books.

Um but also I think it's really important to note that libraries today are about so much more than books.

The community aspects.

I'm not going to repeat, you know, Mary gave tons of great updates last week, but as one example, I went recently to community court across the parking lot, which of course is a partnership with the library, the city, and the district court.

And I went there because one of my lawyer friends mentioned that it the Redmond Community Court is the gold standard of community courts.

And I think that's really special, and something you guys should all be proud of for your partnership on that.

So one more thing.

Um, I wanted to mention, I was reading recently the KCLS annual report, and there was a statistic in there that jumped out at me that 95% of people surveyed think that libraries are a trusted source of information.

And that was really like 95% of people don't agree on anything these days at all, much less what is and isn't a trusted source of information.

And so I think that's a huge asset we have here in our community.

Um I hope that it's something that you guys might be able to think about as you, you know, working on the comp plan and all the other important elements, but whether there's something there that we can leverage.

And I loved um Councilmember Sony's question last week about you know what unmet needs Mary might be seeing.

And I love you know that question, I think is really important as we think about the community aspect of the library.

Um so with that, I would love to uh hear any of your questions.

Do we have our is this our human services candidate as well?

Oh, please join us.

And Alaric here.

Yeah, please.

That's all right.

Um, and we have a human service candidate as well.

Alora, could you uh please introduce her?

Sure.

I'm happy to introduce our newest candidate, Hannah Presinger.