Tacoma City Council Study Session – June 10, 2025: Website Launch and Comprehensive Plan Debrief
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Tacoma City Council Study Session – June 10, 2025
On June 10, 2025, the Tacoma City Council held a study session to review two major briefing items: the launch of the new city website Tacoma.gov and a debrief on the One Tacoma Comprehensive Plan public hearing. The meeting also included committee reports, a city manager's report, and executive sessions.
Discussion Items
- City of Tacoma Website Modernization Project – Amy Clancy, Goldin Doles, and Enzhou Wang presented the successful launch of Tacoma.gov on April 30, 2025. In the first six weeks, the site received 126,000 visitors, 350,000 page views, and 208,000 user engagements. 60% of users accessed via desktop and 40% via mobile. The site was developed with local vendor Sitecrafting under a contract of up to $440,000, reducing content from over 1,600 pages to under 500. New features include an events calendar, an “I want to…” section, mobile‑friendly design, accessibility compliance, translation into 100+ languages, and enhanced search. Council members praised the site, highlighting the ease of finding council meetings and the 311 request feature. Questions addressed email redirection (indefinite), feedback collection, photo rotation (quarterly updates planned), and integration with social media analytics. The project log recorded nearly 5,000 hours of work.
- One Tacoma Comprehensive Plan Hearing Debrief – Principal Planner Stephen Atkinson, joined by Carrie Wilhelme and Carl Metz, debriefed the June 3 public hearing. 29 individuals testified live and 260 written comments were submitted. The majority of comments supported the Planning Commission’s recommendations, with focus on the housing element (social housing, tenant protections, affordability goals), growth strategy/transportation (support for the South 19th representative alignment for light rail to TCC), parks and recreation (call for more skate parks), and the South Tacoma Manufacturing Industrial Center (land‑use compatibility policies). A minor code amendment regarding electric fences proposes removing the decorative fence requirement for side and rear property lines while retaining it along public streets and sidewalks. Councilmember Rumba asked about multifamily adjacency; staff clarified that perimeter landscaping requirements vary by zone. Councilmember Bushnell inquired about the five‑foot buffer for pedestrian streets. Staff explained the plan is a 25‑year framework, with annual amendment opportunities.
Public Comments & Testimony
- Public testimony during the Comprehensive Plan hearing was overwhelmingly supportive of the Planning Commission’s recommendations. Commenters advocated for stronger implementation of housing policies, social housing, tenant protections, and dedicated funding. A significant number of comments urged the Council to retain the South 19th Street light‑rail alignment in the plan. Several letters requested expanded skate park facilities. One written comment asked to remove the five‑foot landscaping buffer for electric fences along designated pedestrian streets.
Key Outcomes
- Website Briefing: No formal vote; council members expressed strong approval and requested future analytics updates. The next quarterly update will include website performance metrics.
- Comprehensive Plan: Council took no vote on the plan during the study session. First reading of the ordinance was scheduled for the same evening (June 10). Councilmembers Scott and Deputy Mayor Daniels proposed a set of 12 additions to the housing priority actions under Section 5.3, aiming to make the plan more concrete and responsive to the housing crisis. The additions include evaluating incentive programs, creating a local revenue source for housing, conducting a social housing feasibility study, expanding land banking, streamlining surplus land transfer, and advocating for state condominium liability reform. Discussion followed about timing; Mayor Woodards suggested possibly delaying the final reading from June 17 to June 23 or 24 to allow further refinement, while noting the need to meet Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) grant deadlines. Staff confirmed the plan can be amended annually.
- Committee Reports: Councilmember Hines reported an upcoming amendment to the animal code (the “flock amendment”) that would allow purchasing ducks, chicks, or rabbits in groups of fewer than six if the buyer already has animals to reach the recommended group size, and clarify pig ownership rules (one pig per household, reclassifying indoor pigs as livestock).
- Executive Session: The council voted to convene an executive session (20 minutes) to evaluate a job applicant and a closed session to discuss labor strategy. No further business was conducted after the closed session.
Meeting Transcript
To begin the presentation, and our new website is up and running. Yes, it is, Madam Mayor. Thank you for having us, Deputy Mayor, and all council members. We're happy to be here as the project has mostly culminated, and I'm not going to be doing the talking. We've got Enjo Wong, the assistant director of IT here for emotional support and tech support. But I'd like to hand it over to digital manager Golden Doles, who will give you all the stats. All right, afternoon, Mayor and Council. As Amy said, my name is Golden Doles, and I am the digital manager with the Media and Communications Office. And we are here today and excited to announce that we have launched Tacoma.gov. It's the new citywide website. We launched on April 30th. So it's been about six weeks now that the site has been up and running. Happy to report also too that the migration and the site launch was successful thanks to our IT team who worked overnight to make sure everything went smoothly and transitioned over from our old cityoftacoma.org website to Tacoma.gov. About a week later, after we launched the site, our email addresses also changed to Tacoma.gov, and that all went smooth and successful as well. In the first six weeks, we did want to share just some of our high-level analytics from what we've seen in the first about month and a half. We've had about 126,000 people already come and visit our website. We've had 350,000 page views, and we've had an user engagement of over 208,000. So that means people are not just coming to visit pages, but they're going through, they're clicking around, they're looking at our documents, they're filling out our forms, or uh downloading some of our documentation on our site. We're also interested in looking at how people are visiting our site. So we're about 60-40, so 60% of people are still visiting our website on a desktop computer, and about 40% on mobile devices. Um then also to a couple people using their tablets and even a couple people uh accessing it on a smart TV. And then I just wanted if you haven't seen the site, here are just a couple of the new features on Tacoma.gov. And we have an enhanced user experience. We really wanted to make sure that the navigation was easier and more intuitive to get around when you're trying to look for information. We also wanted to make sure that our design was more modernized and looked more like the 21st century. It'd been about 13 years since we last redid our website, so it was looking a little old, so we wanted to really make sure we enhance that experience. Also talked about uh people visiting our site on their mobile devices. We really wanted to make sure that we built our website to be mobile friendly. So it is a got a fully responsive design, so you can easily like said access it on your on your phones or your tablets. Um we also wanted to make sure all the content up there was new and relevant and accurate. So we really took a lot of time to update all the content. We looked at everything on our old site. We had over 1,600 pages full of content and narrow that down to under 500. So again, just had the most relevant timely information on there where people could get information about our services, our programs, whatever projects are coming on, events and initiatives that we've got. And also accessibility was extremely important when we built this new website. And we made sure that it is compliant with our web content accessibility guidelines and the American with disability to act standards. Couple other new features of the site. Uh, we really wanted to make sure this is a secure site and not open to um cybersecurity threats. So that transition to.gov really helped with our enhanced security options. We also have a new paid translation services tool, so it's more robust and you can get more languages, and it is available on our site with over 100 plus languages currently. There's also better search functionality. We we'd heard when we were doing research when we were working on this web project that people sometimes had a hard time finding the information that they needed. So not only did we you know enhance our uh search engine optimization, but we have a customized search tool that's actually built into Tacoma.gov. And then branding. We know important branding is um we wanted to make sure we have a new look and feel that's more memorable and more modern, and also to shortening that URL from cityoftacoma.org to Tacoma.gov just makes it easier to say and easy to tell people about our new site. Next, uh, these are just a couple of screenshots of some of the new features that we added to Tacoma.gov. On the left, you'll see there there's our events calendar. So we've got all of our commissions boards and committees listed in there. Um any upcoming events including council meetings, um, different things that our departments are doing. So nice, robust, easy to easy to view uh calendar where you can also filter.
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