On April 14, 2026, the Tacoma City Council held a study session focused on an update from the Public Works Department regarding the proposed Connect Tacoma Safe Streets and Sidewalks Levy. The presentation covered the accomplishments of the 2015 Streets Initiative, lessons learned from the failed 2025 levy proposal, community engagement efforts, and the framework for a new 10-year levy to be placed on the August 4, 2026 ballot.
Good afternoon. I'd like to call to order the study session of April 14th, 2026. First, we're going to start with our roll call. Deputy Mayor Bushnell. Present. Councilmember Diaz? Here. Councilmember Heinz. Councilmember Palmer. Absent Councilmember Rumba? Here. Councilmember Sidalgay? Here. Councilmember Scott? Here. Councilmember Walker, absent. Mayor Ibsen. Here. We're going to start with our only briefing item today, which is uh connected to Coma, an update from uh our uh public works department starting with the Director Curtis Kingsalver. Go ahead. Not sure if I'm on yet or not. Oh, I am? Okay. Thank you, Mayor, Deputy Mayor, members of the council. So we have a presentation up. Since we're up and running here. So I'm going to apologize up front. We've got quite a bit to cover today, so we'll go as quickly as we can. I'll try not to talk fast, which I do naturally, but I'll try to talk as clearly as I can. So we'll go ahead and next slide, Joe. So just for agenda to give you an idea of what we're going to talk about today. Too many. So I'm going to start out with a little bit of background regarding the 2015 Streets Initiative, really about what it was, what we believed it would raise, and how we committed to spend those revenues. Then I'll talk a little bit about the 2015 streets initiative accomplishments, what we did and what we did raise. Joe's going to go into some lessons learned from the 2025 initiative that didn't pass. He's going to talk a little bit about our community engagement efforts that we've been underway for the last few months. How we want to invest those dollars. And then I'll close a little bit about you know what that is for voters and what we're proposing. So let's start with 2000. Actually, I'm going to start with 2014. So many of you may not remember maybe you probably do. In 2014 was the first time we went out for a ballot initiative. It did not pass. But we did learn a few things at that time. Number one, uh we learned it was actually too small. People at the time wanted us to go bigger. They wanted us to do something that they could visibly see improvements. Um but they also told us uh very loud and clear that they wanted us to improve residential streets. That was their biggest focus. That was where they felt the biggest need was, and so what you what became the 2015 streets initiative was a focus on residential streets.