The Tacoma City Council held a study session on July 9, 2024, at 12:00 PM in the Council Chambers, now configured with a new study session table. The meeting focused on debriefing the public hearing on proposed charter amendments, reviewing the process for advancing amendments, setting the interview process for a vacant District 4 council seat, and discussing a draft letter to the Washington Department of Ecology regarding the WestRock site cleanup. No formal votes were taken on the substantive items; the council will continue deliberations at upcoming meetings.
I'd like to call to order the city council study session of July 9th, 2024. Clerk, will you please call the roll? Councilmember Bushnell. Present. Councilmember Daniels. Here. Councilmember Diaz. Here. Deputy Mayor Hines. Here. Councilmember Rumba. Here. Councilmember Scott. Here. Councilmember Walker. Here. Mayor Woodards. Here. Mayor and Council members to study session material sent to you at 1052. All right. For those of you who are viewing us at home, you're wondering where we are. And we are in the chambers now with the new study session table. And all of our meetings will be taken here in the chambers except for some of our special meetings and in our retreats will be taken here in the chambers and they will be televised. So be sure to come down and check out the new chamber as we try to make sure that we are being as open and transparent and in sharing with you our conversations and dialogues around the work of the Tacoma City Council. So with that, we're going to dive right in today's in today's into today's agenda. And our first item is going to be the proposed Charter Amendment's public hearing debrief. And I'm going to call on Chief Government Affairs Officer Sonia Hallam to begin the presentation. Sonia. There we go. Sorry about that. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council members. I do have a PowerPoint presentation. 30 seconds. So the presentation I'm going to give today is is going to be very brief. You all heard all of the comments. So I went through and with the help of Nicole, we counted the comments that were in person in and in writing and over the phone, the virtual. So we have some data to share. And I stalled long enough to get the PowerPoint up and running. So next slide, please. So the first slide to show you is the graph that shows the total number of comments that were received. So there were a total of 49 for the public hearing. Of those, there were 25 that were from people who were appeared in person at the public hearing, nine who appeared virtually, and then there were 15 written comments. There were 22 that were submitted, but uh the clerk's office went through and counted duplicates because some people submitted the same comment more than once. So of the 22 total comments that were received, there were 15 of individual comments. Next slide, please. So I went through the comments and put them in order of the ones that were most prevalent. So the ones that had the most comments related to the least. The first one, a no surprise as form of government, there were 41 comments. Of those, 37 were supportive of a change to a mayor council or a mayor mayor council uh CAO amendment and seeing that on the ballot. And I lumped together all of those that were looking to see the charter amendment versus those who were supportive of the council amendment, and those are combined, and that's what you'll see in the total of 37.