All right, good evening, everyone.

I will call this uh Tiger Workshop uh meeting to order.

Deputy City Recorder Bartholomew, would you please conduct a roll call?

Councilor Schlack Councillor Shaw absent.

Council President Wolf here.

Councilor Anderson absent.

Councilor Gaducy.

Present.

Yes, Councillor Halleck also absent.

Mayor Who?

Here.

Councillor Robbins.

Here.

All right.

So everyone, please stand and uh join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

All right, so the team and council, do you have any now agenda items?

None from us, Mayor.

All right, seeing none.

Let's move on to public comments.

The public comment period provides an opportunity for members of the public to address the city council.

While it is not dialogue, either I or staff will follow up to address the issues brought forward in these comments.

The calling number is 503 966 4101.

And those wishing to come and should call now to get into the queue.

Anyone present wanting to comment should sign up on the public comment form at the front of the room.

First is uh written public common.

Uh we receive no written public comment by the Monday noon deadline.

Uh let's go on to in person.

And I see nobody sign up, so let's move on to phone or video comments.

Uh Mr.

Miller, are there any callers in the queue for phone testimony?

We have no callers, Mayor.

Thank you.

Uh all right, let's move on to City Manager Report.

Acting City Manager Trish will give us a brief report.

Good evening.

Good evening.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, Council, staff, and community members.

Happy St.

Patrick's Day to those who celebrate.

Great.

Thanks, Jason.

Um over the past decade, Tigered Recreation has grown in incredible ways as we celebrate this year 10 years of serving our community.

In 2016 to 2017, uh, 10 years ago, the city hosted just five special events each year, and today that number has grown to 28 community events, including including seasonal celebrations, concerts, movies, and pop-ups.

Recreation programming has expanded from uh no in-house programs a decade ago to more than 40 programs today, along with 11 camps offered during spring break and summer, and scholarship awards have increased from 21 awarded in 2019 to 47 this last year.

This allows more Tiger families to participate.

I also want to flag that we're celebrating 25 years as a tree city USA community, a national recognition from the Arbor Day Foundation that honors cities committed to strong urban forestry programs and investing in the care and celebration of trees.

Together, these milestones highlight Tigers continued commitment to a healthy connected community.

And on a night where we're talking about parks and recreation, uh, what an evening to celebrate.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Acting City City Manager Trish.

Counselor, do you have any questions or comments for the acting city manager?

Uh Councilor Godusi, I can oh, there we go.

I see you're not raising your hand, so let's move on.

Uh so let's move on to community updates.

Um we will have the Tiger High School Theater Department.

Uh so I will invite the department uh and uh theater director Tori Lee Scost.

Good evening.

Hi.

Hi, please take a seat right there.

And make sure you turn on the microphone when you press present.

Sorry, sorry.

Oh, take your time.

Um I'll start.

Yep.

Yep, now it's on.

All right, wonderful.

Hello, hello.

Okay.

Um hi, my name is Tori Lee Scholes.

I'm the theater teacher at Tiger High School.

I'm in charge of the theater department.

Not just in our own communities, but at the national level over our spring break, they're gonna be a virtual advocacy for theater with people on Capitol Hill and in Congress.

But we're doing our own small part by reaching out to you here.

So I have our Thesbian board president, Vera Hardy, and she'll talk more about why theater in our schools month in March is important, but theater throughout the year is impactful for our students, our community, and on a global and national level.

Yeah, exactly that.

I'm just here to share some accomplishments that we have like made over the year.

So first off, we are a national honor society, which is really cool.

It means we get like stolls at graduation and like national recognition.

We have a lot of really impressive student accomplishments.

Um our school is the four-time tech champion at um our state level, um, which is very exciting.

We're going for a fifth this year.

Um we last year had three international competitors, um, one in makeup design, one in solo acting, and a group doing a one act, um, which is very exciting.

Um earlier and the sorry I'm interrupting.

Um the solo acting and makeup design international um participants actually won superiors at the international level.

Yes, it was it was really cool.

Um earlier this year in October, we for the first time did a haunted house where our technical theater students built these large like rooms and came up with stories, and our acting students um played like scare actors.

Um they would give like the little kids candy and try and scare the adults um throughout the haunted house.

Um it was a lot of fun, everyone had so much fun, um, and we were able to make a lot of money that will go toward funding our like state conference this year and then our regional conference earlier this year.

Um we also partnered with the haunted house with Pact with Pride.

Um so if you were to bring canned food, you were like given a cheaper ticket.

Um we got 400 pounds of food, um, which feeds 10,513 households, which is 48,858 individual people, which was huge.

And when we heard these numbers, we were all like, oh my god, what we have to do this every year.

So it's now going to be an annual thing, which is also very exciting.

Um we just closed our musical, which was nine to five.

I'm sure you all know the Dolly Parton song um and the movie, it's based off that.

Um we partnered with our school's period club to do a feminine hygiene product drive during the second week of shows.

Um so if you brought feminine hygiene products, you were given a discounted ticket.

Um and we don't have an exact number yet of how much we were able to bring in, but it was it was a pretty good amount, pretty solid.

Um, we will definitely be partnering with them again.

Um the show explored a lot of themes of like sexual harassment and like feminism, so it was a very like poignant topic and a good like club to collaborate with on that.

Um, and we had a lot of people come and like to bring products and get cheaper tickets.

So it was good for us as well as for Peri Club.

We will be donating the products to like local women's shelters.

Um we were also sponsored by Habitat for Humanity during the musical, which was very exciting.

Um we hope to keep that sponsorship going for our next show, which is James and the Giant Peach, and then in continuing years.

Um a lot of our fundraising is also community service work, so like make getting like products to donate and things like that.

Every spring break, we do a yard work fundraiser where our students um go and like do yard work for um like members of the community um for like a very very low price, and we use that to fund our state conference as well.

Um, and we're doing that in the spring.

If any of you need your yards worked on.

Um we also do a pancake breakfast with our um children's shows every year where we all dress up in costume and we like um have like students make food and we have kids come and we like hang out with them in costumes, so they get to last year we did the Alice in Wonderland.

And it was really cute, and a lot of kids really loved it.

Yeah, the everything we do is really wonderful for our students, and we all love it.

And it's really good for our community of students in the whole school and also like the city at large.

And that's something that we're really working towards is connecting more with the city this year, and then we're forget furthering that in the following years, hopefully.

Yeah, that is pretty much all I have to say.

Just wanted to share some good things about us.

Yeah, and and just on another note, thank you for letting us come in and speak.

As uh Vera said, we are a National Honor Society for theater.

Um, and so part it's not just about doing theater or having drama club, which is a part of that, and it's part of the community that these students get to be a part of and cultivate.

Um, it's also student leadership, it's um giving back to our community, as you you heard.

Um, we're hoping maybe next year for our haunted house to partner with the city because we want to raise more for Pact with Pride and reach out to maybe Chamber of Commerce to bring in like a way to also help fund our students, but also help with our community, especially in times of food insecurity.

I know growing up I had um I had moments in my childhood where you know we didn't quite know what was gonna happen, and you know, other family members took us in and fed us or let us use their shower because we didn't have any running water, and so I I understand that, and I want to make sure that our students um have that be a part of their experience in high school, not just doing theater, which is amazing, and um again, like coming from uh my background as a Latina um girl and not having access to theater.

I want to make sure to give my students and our students in our community the most access that they can possibly have, no matter what their socioeconomic position is, if they can afford to pay or they can't, which is why we do a lot of the fundraising, because um, as our demographics are changing here in Tiger, um, those students are becoming more prevalent, and I want to make sure that the person who I was when I was their age doesn't have to worry about well, how do I pay to do these things, but also um realize the joy of giving back to their community because I also um I also love to just make the world a better place through theater and through these activities with the students, um and I wanted to share that with you all and also with the community at large that um that were not just doing theater, we're forming lives, we're forming relationships, we're forming perspectives this last weekend, and I'll wrap this up because I'm rambling.

Um, this last weekend during nine to five, um, one of our students who had a part in the play, his family had to leave for a family um gathering across the country, and of course they didn't want to leave a young person behind.

So we actually pivoted and we went to one of our math teachers at the high school and said, would you be in this little teeny tiny bit at the end of the show?

And he said yes, which was amazing.

Um, and after the three days that he was performing, he came up to me and he said, I knew this was gonna be hard.

I didn't realize how hard and watching your students backstage.

This was the kindest community that I could have been a part of, but also these kids are um what did he say?

It was uh more these kids are better than some of our student athletes with their dedication with their the amount of work with the amount of pride and um everything that they put into doing the musical.

And we had 81 students in both the backstage and on stage and in the pit.

So we hope that the city of Tiger can we can uh partner with you to make sure that these students have more um accessibility but also um have that pride in their community to give back.

So thank you.

Thank you.

And um, you know, talk to uh you uh please talk to our acting city manager and we can see what we can do.

So counselor, do you have any questions or comment?

Council Robbins.

I just wanted to commend you.

Um, nine to five was great.

Um I don't know if you know, but a bunch of middle schoolers went, including my middle schooler, and it came home and said, There's a lot of sex in it.

And I was like, not exactly, but that's how it used to be.

Um, and I really appreciate you making everything so accessible.

Um, the people who are working, there's always something to do in theater, whether it's behind the scenes or building sets or being crew or in the pit or on stage, and it's all so important to allow everyone to open up and get the skills that they want, and I really commend you also with fundraising, making it accessible to all those people because I also grew up not necessarily being able to afford everything that I wanted to do, and also partnering with the period club, which we never had that back in the 80s, and certainly to make sure that's all accessible, I think is really great.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

No, all right, thank you for coming.

All right, next on the item is uh Tiger High School Envoy, and I will invite Becca Kasravani to give her update.

Good evening, Becca.

Hello.

Hello.

Oh, that that's you just turned.

Yeah.

It's on now.

Hello.

Thank you so much for having me.

Um second.

Um it's been a wonderful month at our school as Tiger has started gearing us seniors up for graduation and transitioning the rest of the student body into the 2026, 2027 school year.

Course selection has begun, and freshmen, sophomores, and juniors received their forecasting sheets last week.

Seniors are now ordering graduation apparel, so caps and gowns, and registration is open for the all-night graduation party.

Graduation tickets will be immersed soon, and just to preface the ceremony will be held on June 5th at 7 p.m.

on the football field.

Just some updates in terms of athletics.

The dance team hosted their annual night of dance showcase last Friday, and they are now off to their state competition, which will be their last competition of the year.

Tennis participated in an invitational yesterday, which they won.

And lacrosse is in full spring as they had their first tournament yesterday.

And track and field will be competing in their first meet on Wednesday, on Thursday, forgive me.

Leadership finished class president elections, and we have selected our incoming ASB president, Sidney Jewell, and our incoming vice president Gabriel Musangu.

They will definitely attend a council meeting in the next few months in order to better prepare for this and to understand the rhythm of it.

And I'm excited to introduce you all to them.

They're just wonderful.

Applications are also open for committee chair positions within the class, and they will be followed by applications for general members of the class.

Um so those will just be members of committees and members of classes, not necessarily class leaders, but that will be the last step of the process.

Um the leadership junior class is continuing to plan our prom dance, and they visited the venue at the Oregon Zoo today.

In terms of fundraisers, the National Honor Society is promoting a blood drive on April 14th from 1 p.m.

to 6 p.m.

The athletics athletics department is hosting a drive for the athletic wear or gear the students are no longer in need of, and that will end on March 20th.

Uh Coins for Kids will hold a loose change fundraiser, and um, I believe that ended two weeks ago, and that money went directly to benefit Tiger Twalton schools.

And then um, as stated by Thespian, they the theater department executed their musical over the last two weeks, um, and that was absolutely wonderful.

Um, and I believe that's it.

Um overall, it's just been extremely busy and simultaneously um just very successful um and a lot of things have been happening.

Yeah.

So thank you for having me.

Yeah, thank you.

Sounds like so.

Counselor, any questions or go ahead.

Go ahead.

I asked this last month.

What's the date of the prompt?

Do we know now?

May 2nd.

Yes, I did not know about it until today either.

Um, yes, it will be May 2nd.

Um, I'm not sure of the time yet, but tickets will be going out soon.

Um, so we'll make sure to put all that information out as soon as possible.

Well, thank you, Becca, for coming and uh look forward to your your additional guests next next time.

So good evening, thank you.

All right, so next item agenda is Tiger Police Department Report.

And uh today we will have Commander Sutton to present a police dashboard report.

Good evening, Commander.

Good evening, Mr.

Mayor Council.

Sorry.

There we go.

I probably should have prepped this.

There we go.

Okay, um, I'm Brad Sitton.

I am the patrol commander for the police department, and as the mayor stated, I'm here to present the February dashboard.

And as the mayor stated, I'm here to present the February dashboard.

I've got a couple of data points I like to pull out from slide one in your packet.

And it's also up on the screen above us.

I'm going to jump around on the slide a little bit, so please kind of bear with me a little.

I'm going to start with the calls for service.

So February 25 to February 26th, we had an increase in dispatch calls, which on the slide shows it in red, but I'm going to turn that to a green in just a minute.

And an increase in self-initiated calls.

So it might be common to think that if we have an increase in dispatch calls, we would have a decrease in self-initiated calls.

Because of course, dispatch calls typically take or can take longer to accomplish.

And the self-initiated calls typically are ones that show proactiveness.

So the fact that both call types have increased show that our officers are not only responding to dispatch calls, but in their downtime, they're being proactive and making contact with the community.

So taking that small set of data and moving to the bottom of the slide and talk about response times.

And you see that again from uh comparing February 25 to February 26 through all priorities of calls, the call times actually decreased to include priority fours, which has the largest decrease of 22%.

Priority four calls are calls such as animal calls, abandoned vehicles, you know, the cold theft reports, those lower priority calls.

So that data set shows us there that officers are not only responding quicker to the priority one and two life safety calls, but also to those lower priority calls.

The only way you accomplish that is to have officers actually stay in their district as opposed to being at the station or being a couple of districts away with their buddies eating lunch or whatever.

And then while they're in that district and they're not responding to the priority calls, the self-initiated calls occur.

Dispatch times primarily are tied to the dispatch calls themselves, because of course a self-initiated call has no response time.

It's just it just happens.

So the fact that we have an increase in dispatch calls yet, our times continue to decrease is exactly what we'd want to see.

You know, because when you call for police, you want them there immediately.

So this decrease in time shows that we're doing it, that they're doing exactly what we'd ask them to do.

So when you close a call, there's a variety of ways that calls are closed.

It can be a simple report, it can be a referral, it can be simply asking questions, or it can be an arrest.

So I want to highlight the arrests there at the top of the slide.

And you see that between February 25 times or associated with February 26th, you see that we had a 16% increase in arrests.

Felony arrests are down, which is good, obviously, but you see that misdemeanor and citation to appear tend to be up, which again shows that officers are taking the work seriously and not kind of uh taking shortcuts because arrests mean more paperwork, means more time, more effort in general.

So the fact that those numbers are up shows that officers are actually again being proactive and doing what we asked them to do.

Uh also we see that warrant arrests are up.

Now, warrant arrests are loosely tied to self-initiated calls on on the slide.

And let me explain why why I mean that.

If I go to a theft call and I arrest a person for theft, but then I also find that they have a warrant.

The system only allows us to track one stat.

And because the initial call was a theft, that's typically where that stat is gonna get tied to.

So in that case, the warrant isn't necessarily counted.

So those 54 warrants in February 26 are through primarily self-initiated activity.

Uh an officer may see somebody on the street that they know has a warrant because I dealt with them before, or potentially a traffic stop, which could be a violation, turns into a warrant arrest because you know the individual might have a warrant.

So those warrant numbers are actually good numbers to have.

And finally, on the right side of the screen, you see that year to date, so January and February of this year compared to January and February of last year, our arrests are up 18.22 percent.

Almost mere the rest of that column.

Uh self-initiated calls and dispatch calls are pretty flat, but again, we're only looking at two months' worth of data.

But if you look at the response times, they continue to decrease year to date, 7%, 10%, and 20% again for those priority calls, priority four calls.

So again, that reinforces that the officers are out there being proactive, responding to calls in a timely manner and doing exactly what we would like them to do.

So that those are the data points that I wanted to highlight tonight.

Any questions?

Go ahead, Council Robbins.

Thank you for this.

It looks like great news.

Why do you think the response time is improving?

What's going right?

Um it could be a variety of reasons.

One, I think that that we've got a really good core of younger officers that are out there wanting to, you know, as we put it, kick over rocks.

So they're staying in their districts.

Uh so responding to say River Terrace from here takes much longer than if I'm in that district close to Rupert Terrace, right?

Um the other piece of this, maybe a small piece is the way the calls are dispatched.

So our dispatch center WACA has got a bunch of new people on, and they're very diligent about following their process.

So a response time is based upon when the call comes in and the dispatcher sends it to the officer, and the officer hits he's in route.

So the clock starts, they drive to the call.

Now they may show up on a call and there's mayhem, so they don't hit the arrive, they jump out and they just start dealing with the call.

In the past, the dispatchers may not have been quite as diligent to arrive the officers for them, because when the officer starts talking on the radio, okay, clearly you've arrived, okay, you've arrived, and and you continue with the call.

So that may be part of it.

Um the rest of it is this core of newer officers are now beginning to learn the streets and how to get from point A to point B in a more timely manner.

So I think all this combined is what it's reducing those call time, those call response times.

Well, that's all great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Anything else?

Uh can we ask some question not related to dashboard right now?

Absolutely, okay.

So yeah, so uh we receive a couple of community member complaints or about you know they have and I observe too uh more um personal stuff taking out sidewalk space uh in front of public walk long.

So um can you just tell us a little bit about the challenges does the city staff is facing right now enforcing our time place manner regulations and how can we help to help you?

I I'll even add to that that when I was driving here today at 4 40, someone was setting up a tent, and I almost pulled over to be like, you can't do that, but yeah, please don't do that.

Yeah, yeah, please don't do that.

Um yeah, absolutely.

I I spoke with Officer Orth um yesterday morning, and we had a we had a really good conversation, and he told me a couple things that I hadn't realized before that I think are pretty relevant.

So the first thing he told me was most of the the people that are over there are wanting to follow the rules.

So if you tell them, hey, here's the rule, they will follow it.

That being said, it's a revolving door over there.

So as an example, last week, there was six dogs with their owners there, but two weeks prior to that, there was no animals there at all.

Asking Officer Orth about it, he said, well, of course, the the service agencies all communicate and they and they rotate people back and forth, so to speak.

So we have a constant influx of new people arriving over there that don't necessarily know the rules.

And and yes, the rules are posted, but of course, if they arrive at night or they're not told the rules, then they just kind of make it up as they go along.

The issue with the sidewalk, as we as we all know, ADA requires 48 inches.

A typical sidewalk is 60 inches.

So if I withhold 48, I give you basically a foot to put all of your uh belongings.

That's easy to maintain because it's only a foot.

That sidewalk is 96 inches wide.

So they have almost half of it.

And you know, to use an analogy, if if you've got a uh a cup of pens on your desk, if you put one or two pens on your desk, those pens always stay there.

But if you fill it, you're constantly filling it because people take those pens.

So Officer Orth made the passing comment of, you know, I'd like to go over and just spray paint a line down the sidewalk at 48 inches, so we can easily tell.

And I asked him not to do that, but it's not a terrible idea.

We've got the fence in, it's posted well, and to maintain to allow them to absolutely know where that line is, it may not be a terrible idea to discuss at future, you know, meetings and whatnot.

Uh we also see that increase in canines over there, and they're tied to the fence, they're tied to the building, they're tied to the tree, and there's nothing in the place time manner that addresses that.

Obviously, we can't tell them they can't have animals, but we might need to look at that in the future a way to control the dogs, because the dogs tend to be some of the ones that encroach out there.

They're tied up close to the the property of their owners, but they croach out onto the sidewalk and whatnot with leashes and stuff.

Uh and then beyond that is just the constant education.

You know, if we if we want to exclude somebody, it we don't go over there and just okay, you're out, we exclude you now.

It's posted, they're talked to, and and especially if they've got abandoned property there.

We post it, we come back three hours.

And so to move someone or to exclude someone, it may take a day, two days, three days, whatever.

But of course, the the public passing, they just see the problem where it's being addressed, it just sometimes takes more time than of course we like it to do.

But yeah, the sidewalk was it was a surprising element to this that that how wide it is and and how much space they actually have.

And then, of course, that constant rotation of new people.

And so that's a lot of what our cops team does is they're just constantly educating new arrivals to the area.

So thank you.

And so this is a helpful for us to consider time, place manner again in June.

Yes, absolutely.

So please please come forward with suggestions and unfortunately Tiger Public Works Long is such a visible area.

So everybody can see it.

So as I explained to one constituent, you know, who who claim out of cities don't around here don't have a problem.

But I was like, yeah, I talked to other mayors.

They are problems, they just may not be visible, you know, but they they are facing problem.

We are all facing problems, right?

So as many problems as is we tend to talk about with with the homeless situation here.

The fact that we kind of have them come to one location, right?

We don't have them spread in different places.

So that's a good thing, and it's and it's in pro close proximity to just compassion.

Right.

So they are closely getting services.

So we don't we don't have officers going to behind different stores or in different parks or in the wooded areas.

They kind of have it self-contained.

Now, is there people still out there?

Absolutely, there probably still is.

But at least here, yes, they're visible, but at least they're in proximity to get services, and we keep an eye on them.

And so I think in the long run, it is helpful.

Obviously, it's not a perfect solution, but it's it's better than you know, so many of the alternatives.

So thank you.

And there uh counselor parson Wolf.

Um thank you, Mayor, and I want to be mindful of the time.

But um, Commander Centon, I just wanted to circle back to when you made the comment about when we're able to exclude someone.

So, what are those actual next steps when we do that with an individual?

Um so an exclusion it comes along after they've failed to follow the rules, right?

So they're spoken to, they're educated, uh, they continue to break the rules, and then at a point the officers determine that, okay, this person just simply isn't gonna get it.

And that could be the second time or the third time I talk to them, it might be the fifth or sixth or seventh time, just depending on the situation, because it everyone's different.

And then they give them the exclusion, and then they have to move along.

And again, even those people that are being excluded typically will follow the rules.

So they're excluded from the property, um, and they go somewhere.

Um, and if the exclusion is for 30 days or 45 days or five days, whatever it happens to be, sometimes they come back because let's face it, it's it's better here than in some other places, you know, maybe some of our cities around us.

But a lot of times they just go someplace else and don't come back.

Uh the exclusion is I want to say like a last resort, because after that you're in two criminal trespass.

So the officers try to educate and try to gain compliance without having to use that semi-heavy-handed tool.

And for the most part it works.

But yeah, so any other questions?

No?

All right.

All right, commander.

Have a good evening.

All right, let's move on to the council board and committee liaison reports.

Who would like to start?

All right, Council Robbins, please start.

Thank you.

I have a pretty light schedule.

I have a pretty light schedule due to some overlapping.

Um I do attend the monthly library board.

Um in the month of March, they continue to prepare for the meeting with the council next month and trying to figure out how to make that interactive and without being too distracting.

Um also have some updates on the first month of the Express Library service, which included over 1,100 visits from community members at our express library, 269 attendees at story time, 20 sessions of one-on-one technology help both at the Tiger Senior Center and the Summerfield Retirement Community.

Um 53 teens joined the teen winter reading challenge.

Neither of my teens did, and I talked to them about that.

Um Social Services Outreach at Just Compassion Home Plate Youth Services, Oregon Department of Human Services, Tiger Self Sufficiency Center, Family Process, I'm sorry, family promise of Twalton Valley in the comfort zone.

I'm sorry, family promise of Twilight Valley in the comfort zone.

And the board continued working on the preparations.

That's that's it.

As far as the immigration board, they are we kind of all did a survey on if we're going to continue that and in what cadence, and we're waiting to hear back.

Thank you.

Council President Wolf.

Yeah, I too will be uh fairly brief as a couple of my committees are quarterly and we did not uh meet um the uh gap, which is govern governmental affairs for the chamber.

I sit on that as council president.

Um last month was really kind of a legislative debrief, um, update on bills and continued conversations around the um uh bond measure and facilities plan.

Um I did attend today um as a GAAP member a listening session that the chamber hosted for the governor's prosperity council to give feedback.

Um the key areas for that was conversations around um business climate, workforce development, and tools for growth.

Um it was very robust uh conversation and um identifying um challenges, barriers, opportunities.

Uh but anyway, I appreciated that opportunity to be there.

And then uh counselor Schlack and I will both be attending the WEA policy conference tomorrow.

So that's it for me.

Thank you.

Councillor Schlack.

It's Thursday, right?

Well, I'll get my calendar right.

Yeah, my bad.

My bad.

I keep thinking.

Just had a small heart attack just that.

Yeah, no, it is Thursday, Thursday.

Yeah, I will uh I've been encouraged to work on my brevity, so I will.

Um I had a meeting of with the chart on February 18th.

Um, and it was mainly focused on the um prospective uh homelessness or houselessness task force, which council provided guidance during the boards and committee discussion on.

Um Megan Cohen has an excellent charter that she's put together, and we're gonna be receiving uh we received feedback before.

We're gonna continue receiving feedback to figure out what um a good proposal would be that meets council's interests and uh charts interests as well.

And then I covered a meeting of the transportation advisory committee on behalf of counselors Gaducy and Shaw.

They talked about building a better tiger to vote yes.

Uh I can say that.

I'm a council member.

Uh they also talked about the McDonald Street project and uh transportation impacts on downtown reimagined, and they were very uh interesting conversations about roundabouts.

Thank you.

Counselor Kuducy.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh I will also keep a relatively brief just audio checker in hearing me okay.

Yes.

Wonderful.

Um for the parts and work advisory board, we did have a meeting on Federal Park.

Um, and they'll be talking a little bit later, so I won't get into much detail.

We had a big meeting with the water advisory board.

They did have some recommendations for water emergency preparedness, and they're going to come in front of the group at some point in the near future and discuss recommendations further with consultant staff.

And over to thank you, Councillor Schlack for covering transportation for me this morning.

Thank you, Councilor Gadusi.

Uh for me, um last Saturday I have a good joint town hall meeting with Senator Near Misling, Brad Bowman's, and Reb Ricky Smith.

Um, to they provided um short session um debriefing and uh during the short session, I work with City Team and Regional Mayors on advocating for Tiger's interests, uh consistent with council goes and directions.

Uh we didn't get everything, including uh another house and bill that took additional local control away, but hopefully uh we can target them at the next uh 2027 sessions.

Um, some success uh again three S three uh bill pass uh uh regarding ethics um, including um one of them is more most important is providing more uh clear definition of what is not considered serial meetings.

For example, if staff is providing briefing to a counselor, or if a counselor is talking to a constituent, um now it's in codifying in law that it's not serial meeting, which my understanding that was never, but serial meeting, but now uh it's codify and um TLT, the transit launch tax.

Uh now we're able to get more share from TLT, so that's great.

And we and re recreational immunity.

Um it's not perfect, but next session um legislature, some legislature promise to continue working um on uh recreational immunity and the governor's economic development bill um uh passed with a one-year um pause on um providing incentive to data center.

Uh Tigers interesting that is that it was stringlined states permitting process.

So it will make hopefully we'll make permitting at a state level faster.

I also uh attend several regional transportation meeting.

Um we brief received briefing on TriMiz service uh cut, proposed service cut.

I I I've gone through a few of them, and we're gonna get additional briefing today.

Uh and next and uh R1 Act, um, we consider um project recommendations uh which the R1 Act will um recommend to OT you know Oregon Transportation Commission uh for funding.

Um among them is the jurisdic jurisdictional transfer uh for Hall Bolivar, but it's not you know high on the priority list.

So uh that's all I have.

Um before we move on, any council member have any question for go ahead, Councilman Schlack.

Thank you, Mayor and thank you, Mayor, for um uh hosting the um joint town hall um at Tigrid Public Works.

Council President Wolf and I were in attendance.

It was a full room, there were a lot of great questions, and I look forward to um the council's continued partnership led by you with our state legislators.

Um it was a very great event, and I hope to have more of them in the future.

Yeah, and um I feel fortunate to have our state delegate in Salem because um they I think they are really listening to us, so it's it's it's great.

So thank you.

All right, so let's move on to the next item agenda, and I believe our guests still outside, but we're still ahead, so that's good.

So next item will be TriMet board member reporting to council.

Uh we have TriMat Local Government Affairs Manager John Serra, and uh he will introduce the rest of the guests.

I know, I don't know why they sit out there.

Oh evening.

Hi, John.

Oh yeah, so John, I introduce you, and uh you'll introduce the rest of the guests.

So yeah, so please turn on the mic when you are ready.

So thank you very much, Mayor Who and Council President Wolf and City Council.

We appreciate you having us tonight.

My name is John Sarah, and I am the local government affairs manager here for TriMet.

Tonight joining me are JC Veneta, our Chief of Public Affairs, Tom Mills, our director of mobility planning and policy, and director Robert Kellogg, who is your district three TriMet board member.

We want to thank you for this opportunity to join you all tonight to discuss TriMet's budget and the actions that we have proposed to take to address our deficit.

One of the most challenging parts of this conversation is our service cuts.

We first announced these proposed cuts on January 5th, and we've spent the last several months engaging with members of your community and many of our other regional partners to gather feedback and identify the best path forward.

So you are an essential partner for us, and we do understand that our changes to the network are going to affect Tigered and riders throughout the metro area.

And so we appreciate the City of Tigerd's continued engagement through this process, and we look forward to our ongoing partnership as we secure the future of transit.

So tonight we have Tom Mills to walk us through the specifics of our proposed changes to the local network.

But first, I want to turn it over to JC here to provide some context on TriMet's budget and how we arrived at this point.

Good evening, Mayor Wu.

Uh Council President Wolf.

Thank you so much for having us.

Although I I have been saying that we don't we don't like to deliver bad news, so we really don't want to be here, but it's good to be around all of you, and we thank you for having us uh be here.

I want to set the stage for you as to why how we got here at TriMet and how we're um addressing some of our budget issues, which are our are uh some of our service cuts are because of that.

So just as a region, you probably already know this, but um first off, we're seeing record layoffs across the region.

Um some are even predicting our region going into a recession, so we're starting to we're definitely starting to feel that.

Um vacancy rate.

I know you probably see this probably here in Tiger, but the market, the vacancy rate for the market has risen to 27.3% in downtown Portland.

It's at a record 34.7%.

So that is also telling.

We have seen, I don't necessarily know if you know this, but Oregon is number two in the nation for the number of people teleworking.

People love to move here.

Uh, enjoy your outdoors and uh natural beauty and telework.

And then finally, you're also starting to see or you continue to see an elevated concern around community public safety.

And so those are some of the factors that we are seeing, and that kind of sets the stage to where we're at right now.

Next slide, please.

So, where we're at with TriMet, we're at about 101.2 million rides per week.

So just imagine for a moment, that many cars on the road.

This would not be a fun place to live.

That's about 65.8 million boardings in our last fiscal year.

One of the things that you all should know is that the rides that we provide obviously connect people to opportunities, but especially to people who are transit dependent.

And we really started to see things change at the start of the pandemic, where now today 35% of our riders are transit dependent.

And we know that too because of record-setting amounts of enrollment in our low-income fare program.

So we have a program dedicated just for people with low incomes.

We have seen record low enrollments and also record use.

Now, with all of the things that I mentioned on our prior slide, we are starting to see declining tax revenue, both our employer and our stiff, and our fare revenues are down as well.

Next slide.

So as our fare, excuse me, as our ridership dropped at the start of the beginning of the pandemic, we have gotten back to about 70% of that ridership, but with it has come a fall in revenue, and that's about 60 million dollars a year that we have seen in a drop in our fare.

Inflation costs, another reason why we're uh having experiencing budget issues.

Inflation costs have gone up by 56% between 2019 and 2025.

We have also made investments in safety and security.

As you can imagine, um, some of the things that we have seen in the community have happened and were brought onto TriMet.

So we have really done a lot to invest in our safety and security on board, cleaning as well.

We want a clean safe ride.

And we've also, Tom and his team really did a great job as we came out of the pandemic.

We started to see that a lot of people moved.

The demographics, people had changed and where they were living versus where they were working.

And so Tom and his team really set out to figure out how we could make tweaks to our network to get to give access to more people to jobs, to homes, all of that stuff.

So we invested in reconfiguring our network.

That also being said, we are facing a $700 million back capital maintenance uh backlog.

Um a lot of our bus yards are old, they're beyond their useful life.

Our oldest max line is 40 plus years and is definitely showing its age.

So that's kind of where how we got here.

Next slide.

So what we identified last July was that we needed to solve uh a minimum of a 300 million budget deficit.

And so we set out to balance that budget by July 1, 2028.

And you're saying, why that date?

Why did you just pick it out of the air?

We gave ourselves three years to solve this problem.

Good government says that if you identify a budget shortfall, you should at least take three years.

You it's recommended you take three years to solve the problem, and that's exactly what we're doing.

We have identified um three areas that we're working toward administrative cuts, at least 93 million in discretionary spending and staffing.

Revenue, you probably are watching the the drama around our state transportation bill.

We had hoped to at least achieve a minimum of 48 million from that.

So we're still working with lawmakers.

I'm sure that you all are as well to try to figure out a path forward should uh anything happen with it right now.

Um, service uh cut at least 159 million dollars million dollars in service, and that's at least 10 percent.

And Tom will talk more about that.

And I would just note that if we do not raise any new revenue, we will have to cut deeper, make deeper service cuts.

Next slide, please.

So we have already taken a lot of internal actions.

Um we've reduced spending by at least 150 million, more is to come through efficiencies, discretionary spending.

We've canceled some future planned bus service increases that were in our forecast, and we've eliminated positions and some layoffs.

We've had one round of layoffs, more internal cuts are coming, and another round of layoffs are coming as well.

Next slide, please.

We've taken a number of external actions.

Many people ask what um our riders uh paying their fair share.

We increased fares on January 1st, 2024.

We are going to be going out this fall with another fare increase that would take in uh effect in 2028 if our board approves it.

We have been working um hand in glove with lawmakers to figure out a path forward with a stiff increase, the state transportation improvement fund.

Um we thought that we had gotten there, but it kind of crumbled in front of all of our eyes, and I know it affects you as well for your transportation dollars.

We have taken two rounds of service cuts to date.

Tom refers to these rounds kind of as trimmings around the edges where our ridership is low, November 30th, and then again this last March.

So what I say is a lot of it we're trying to resize for the ridership that we do have.

There's a proposal on the street, which Tom will talk to you through.

Those cuts go into effect August 23rd of this year.

And then we will have another round in August of 2027.

And we'll be going out this fall for outreach around that.

Next slide, please.

So before we ever started mapping out the service reductions that we wanted to do, we actually went out to the public and we did a lot of public outreach to understand where we should cut.

And we gave them, we asked them to rank nine different types of service cuts, whether it's frequency coverage, things like that.

We used all available communications tools at our fingertips.

We've had multiple in-person workshops, open houses, many of them multilingual.

And we used a lot of our community-based organizations to get the information out.

Next slide, please.

And so we had again a number of events.

4800 people responded to a survey to help us understand what we should look at first.

And so there was really a lot of support around this.

Frequency reigns king for us.

And so with that, I'll turn it over to Tom who will walk through everything for you.

Thank you, G.

Thank you, JC.

And thank you, Mayor Who and President Wolf and City Council members for having us today.

Again, my name is Tom Mills.

I am the director of mobility planning and policy.

I am in charge of the service planning team.

And what that means is my team are the ones who make recommendations for how often buses come, how late at night, how early in the morning, where they go.

And in cases like this, it is my team that makes recommendations on where we would cut back.

Now, any time we make a major change such as this, we do work with some guidelines, and they're shown here, and I'll just quickly go through them.

And these are not in any particular order, they're all equal to one another.

But uh starting with equity, uh, wanting to ensure that we are serving low-income populations, people with colors, people with disabilities.

And truth be told, this is a community of people who ride.

Uh, and so uh we, you know, not only is it uh we want to be equitable, but it's good business for us because uh they're paying riders for us.

Um also wanting to serve demand and always trying to figure out where people where the origins and destinations that people want to go to.

Uh Productivity is a big one that's really important to us.

It's how we evaluate our bus and max lines.

It's uh basically saying how many boardings for every hour, it says here vehicle hour.

A vehicle hour is every hour the bus is out of the yard, or essentially every hour we're paying for the operator.

So it's getting really at what is our cost per ride and how efficient is this uh line.

Uh connections, of course, you know, we're always looking at you know for community colleges and things like big destinations.

And then lastly, growth.

And growth is always kind of a tough one.

A lot of the growth happens out on the edge of the region because that's where land is cheaper typically.

And uh, you know, we don't always know that the growth is happening until it's already been built.

And so sometimes we're chasing growth.

Uh, really would like it to be the other way around.

Um, okay, we'll go to the next slide, please.

So as we enter that this is a lot, I'll explain this slide here.

Uh, as we entered this effort, uh, we you know came up with nine different ways, nine different approaches one could take towards cutting service.

And I would say no single one of these approaches gets us to 10% cut.

We would have we have to do a mix of them.

And these are the nine approaches that JC mentioned in the survey that we had in the fall.

Uh, where you see FS, that means frequent service, a frequent service bus or max line operates every 15 minutes all day, seven days a week.

And where it says 17.5 minutes, that's saying we would go from 15 minutes to 17 and a half minutes.

Where it says 7 a.m.

to 7 p.m., that would mean the frequent service period, the 15-minute service would only occur in that window.

Service would occur afterwards, but it would be less frequently.

So anyway, we took all these approaches and we kind of ran them through this matrix, and we said to ourselves, well, first of all, green is good, red is bad, orange is in between.

And we said, first said, okay, well, you know, if we were to do this approach, what would the savings be?

Is it even worth doing?

And you can see here, oh great, there's a lot of opportunities here with high savings.

The next question, of course, was okay, but how many riders do we impact?

And there we said, oh, uh oh, you know, there's a number where we have a lot of riders that we're going to impact, um, but a few where the ridership is lower.

So, okay, that that that helps.

The degree of impact is really like, you know, uh, for example, eliminating a bus line has a bigger degree of impact than say reducing the frequency, right?

Because the bus is still coming when you reduce the frequency.

If you get rid of the line, it's gone.

Um next was the survey results, uh, and so uh we really leaned heavily on what the community told us.

And then lastly, uh we weren't able to do this for all of our approaches, but we looked at what we call the job access analysis, where we're able to do an analysis where we can see uh, well, if we make this change, you know, in we we kind of put a time out there, we said 45 minutes.

Within 45 minutes, how many jobs can someone get to?

How many can they get to today?

And if we make this change, how many can they get to after the change?

And in many cases, it was less.

Uh well, in all cases it was less, but you know, was it a big drop or was it a small drop?

Uh and so that's what we were getting at there.

So if we go to the next slide, so after kind of going through this exercise, uh, we uh came up with a proposal, and this is what was rolled out to the community in uh January of this year.

Uh starting at the very top, uh those trim trimmings that uh JC was saying.

So those are the the small cuts that we made in November and then just a few weeks ago here in March.

Uh and then followed by uh the max green line.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with this proposal.

The idea is the max green line operates on I-205 from Clackmas uh town center to Gateway Transit Center and then all the way into downtown Portland by way of uh the bandfield.

This would just have it go between Clackmas Town Center and Gateway Transit Center, so people would have to transfer to the red or blue lines to get to downtown.

But they could still make that trip.

Uh and then uh some uh network changes, and I'm gonna talk some more about those network changes and the ones that impact Tigered.

Uh some low ridership lines that really were just kind of the lowest ridership on the whole system that we did, even though the the degree of impact is high, the the ridership was so low it was hard to ignore.

And so we have made recommendations to eliminate a couple of those lines.

Uh there are some trips, uh some bus lines in Portland that uh serve the high schools, uh, but other than serving high schools, they run the rest of the day mostly empty.

So we're recommending discontinuing the midday service and just keep the trips to the high schools.

And then lastly, two lines uh we we're calling it shortlining.

It basically sometimes you you'd have a bus line all day long, it goes all the way to the end of the line, but maybe late at night.

Every other trip goes to the end of the line, and every other trip turns around early, and then you can kind of remove a bus out of that rotation, and so it saves you some money.

Uh so when we rolled this out, our estimate was that this was going to get us to six and a half percentage points of our 10%.

We felt really good about that.

We have heard back from the community, and based on a lot of the input that we received, uh, we put some we took some items out of the proposal.

So we're really now saving somewhere between five and five percent uh right now.

So uh next slide.

So now I want to talk about the proposals that impact uh Tigered.

And there aren't many, so that's good news.

Uh and um they are regarding the the network changes.

Uh so starting on the left here where it says current, what I want to focus on is line 45, which is that kind of burgundy line there that starts at Tiger Transit Center, goes out walnut to 121st Washington Square, and then goes all the way to downtown Portland.

What we find is that uh on the segments serving 121st and walnut, we really don't get very much ridership at all on the line.

And where we do get ridership, we're pretty close to uh Scholes Ferry Road, where we have other bus service.

And then also down close to Pacific Highway, Highway 99, where we have other bus service.

So the highest ridership in that segment is within walking distance of Shoals Ferry and Pacific Highway.

So what we are recommending is that the line terminate at Washington Square and not serve 121st and Walnut.

Now, furthermore, we're also recommending that that bus line only operate during the rush hour and mostly getting kids to high schools, and we're gonna connect it with another line called currently called line 39.

That's the green line on the left, but on the right, you can see the two are one line.

That burgundy dotted line is one line, and we we'll just call the whole thing 45.

So but the big impact for Tiger would be the loss of service on 121st and walnut.

And we'll go to the next slide, please.

Okay, this is a lot of spaghetti.

So I'll walk you through it.

Again, on starting on the left, uh again the Burgundy line that starts at Towalleton Park and Ride, and it goes up 72nd Avenue.

That is the only portion of this line that serves Tiger.

Uh it goes on Cruiseway through uh Lake Oswego and Boone's Ferry through Mountain Park and then Boone's Ferry on into downtown Portland.

What we are recommending, uh we'll look at the right, and now that line I believe is blue.

It looks like it's blue, uh, and it has a new number, it's called 97.

Uh, it would still serve uh uh 72nd Avenue and Cruise Well, uh, but it when it goes up to Mountain Park, it would just go to Barber Transit Center.

Uh we would not go all the way downtown, so people would have to transfer to another bus line.

Uh now it will note that uh you can see on the right, there's another bus line called Line 96 that will also go uh through Mountain Park to Barber Transit Center.

At Barber from Barber Transit Center, that line will continue downtown, and that line from Barber to downtown, we're purposely choosing to only have that line make three stops, so it will kind of have an express kind of aspect to it.

So people could, now of course, I I don't have the schedules in my head right now, but uh theoretically, people could make their transfer to that line 96 and then get to downtown pretty quickly.

So if we're able to make that transfer uh line up well, then it actually would still be a relatively quick trip for people going to Portland and likewise coming out of Portland and coming to the the jobs on 72nd Avenue.

We'll go to the next slide, please.

So this is actually a good news story for Tiger.

Uh so we'll start on the left.

Line 20 is what we call a frequent service bus line.

It operates every that's the green line, it operates every 15 minutes all day long, seven, well, I should say most of the day, seven days a week.

Similarly, line 76, uh, and that goes from all the way from Gresham through Portland uh to Sunset Transit Center and to Beaverton Transit Center.

Line 76, you may be familiar because it goes just right outside here on Hall Boulevard.

That's the Burgundy line.

That also is a frequent service line, and that ends at Beaverton Transit Center.

What we want to do is actually with line 20, uh, you know between Portland and Sunset Transit Center, it we're kind of going through the woods.

We're kind of going through the forest.

So we're not picking up a lot of people.

So we're actually gonna have line 20 only operate uh every 30 minutes between Northwest Portland and Sunset Transit Center, but we do still want to serve that part of Beaverton, Cedar Hills area, uh particularly Cedar Hills Crossing, the big mall up there.

Uh we want to serve that.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna extend line 76 all the way to Sunset Transit Center.

It will still be 15 minutes service in that segment.

So actually, this is good news for Tiger because it gives you more access.

You now will have a one-seat ride to Cedar Hills Crossing, up to Sunset Transit Center, et cetera.

So uh we're we're actually excited about this change here.

And then we'll go to the next slide, please.

And now, of course, this oh, we'll go one more back.

Yeah, there we go.

Uh staying with line 76, and now we have left Tiger.

We're actually here in Towalleton and Oregon City.

Uh line 76 uh is frequent service to Meridian Park Hospital.

So it runs every 15 minutes all the way to Meridian Park Hospital.

Every fourth bus also continues to Westland and Oregon City.

That means only once an hour it goes to Westland and Oregon City.

The reason we didn't do every trip to Oregon City is because we were had suspicion that the ridership was going to be pretty low.

In order to get there, we have to go through Stafford, which is undeveloped.

We also have to be on the freeway for some of that.

Can't pick anyone up on the freeway.

And sure enough, uh we were right, uh the ridership was very low.

And so our proposal now recommends no longer going to Oregon City.

So if there are people from uh Tiger who are riding to Oregon City, they would not be able to make that trip anymore.

Next slide, please.

So those are all the the major impacts to Tigered.

Uh anytime we make a big change to our bus service, we have to do an analysis to make sure that we're not having a disproportionate burden on low-income communities, nor are we having a disparate impact on minority communities.

Uh that is a requirement by the FTA.

Uh and our analysis says it shows that we are in compliance with that.

We are not having those impacts.

I should say alternatively, we also have to ensure that we're not having a disproportionate benefit to high-income communities, nor a disproportionate benefit to non-minority communities.

And again, we're in compliance with that as well.

Next slide.

So one important note is the lift boundary.

Uh lift is our uh service for uh people with disabilities who are unable to ride fixed route transit.

Uh it is a kind of curbed curb service.

Uh and the way it works is uh we provide lift service within three quarters of a mile of every fixed route bus or max line.

Uh and so knowing that we're able to draw a boundary uh for where the lift service operates.

Uh and as you see in this slide here, the hatched area areas are areas that would lose lift service.

Part of that, uh the the big one in the south there, that is that portion of line 76 that goes to Oregon City, as well as another line.

Uh again, a lot of that is the Stafford area that is undeveloped.

Uh and then a small portion uh south of Powell Boulevard in Gresham.

Next slide.

Uh actually I think I turned this back to JC.

Um just so you heard from uh uh Tom just how data-driven a lot of our work has been done.

We um before we put out the proposal on January 5th, we did a lot more outreach just to to um to look and see if there was anything we missed.

Obviously, a lot of good data has gone into this.

We went out and talked to a lot of people.

We mailed to 253,000 addresses.

That was one doozy of a mailing uh tab with a post office.

Our on-street folks um went out and talked on the lines that were affected.

We used our media partners to get the word out as well.

Next slide.

And it it uh we also did a number of events, uh 16 events, 783 participants, 8100 people responded to a survey.

So we got a lot of good feedback that is that has informed the proposal that Tom and team that we that we have taken out.

Um and one of the themes that we continued to hear were um don't disrupt the commute work times, try to um they were concerned about increased wait times, as you can imagine.

And there was just a general appreciation for TriMet's work, which we were uh surprised to hear, but very glad to hear with the the bad news that we were delivering to the the city or the region, excuse me.

Next slide, please.

And so with it, um we actually have a board listening session tomorrow.

Um and anyone can come out and either join virtually and or in person to tell our board members uh exactly what how they feel or concerns about our proposal.

We have a first reading on March 25th and a public hearing that people can come out and testify.

Again, that's the first consideration for our board of directors.

And then the second reading in the board vote is on April 22nd, so where they will consider and um uh and vote on that proposal.

All of this will take an effect in August 23rd uh for the service cuts.

We'll be doing a lot of outreach, probably beginning in mid-July around all of those changes to get the word out with that.

And with that, I'll turn it over to our um our director Kellogg, who will have some comments.

Thank you, JC, very much.

Um I am gonna have some comments, but nothing I say is going to compare to the details of these plans.

So I'm gonna invite you now to ask questions and then I'll close up.

Thank you.

Counselor, you have any questions?

I can't see counselor Gutzusi, so oh, no hand.

Okay, council Preston.

Wolf.

Thank you for the thorough um presentation.

So the first couple ones uh in when you were kind of describing the budget components, you referenced the whole of 48 million.

Um that's the transportation bill in limbo.

So uh given the likelihood that that will fail in May, does that mean that this plan will have to go back and then adapt for that 48 million, or that you've anticipated that because of the state of the state.

We will have to go and revisit all of it.

And I think at some point in time as we look to see where our revenue forecasts are coming in, as we again we check in where at where our finances are, and as we read tea leaves, so to speak, for what's ahead for the legislature, we will have to make some adjustments.

Okay.

I would say that much like you all are, we're working very closely with lawmakers to figure out a path forward.

And right now it's not easy.

And so it is something that we will need to revisit.

Okay, thank you.

That's what I thought you would said.

I just wanted to clarify, and and I appreciate trying to read the lease.

Um the other thing I'm curious about uh is in your survey collection, and thank you for walking through all the routes.

Um, do you feel that you had um great tiger data that then based on um the changes that are proposed for the users and the writers, I would just want to know that you felt you got good feedback from those that really leverage it within Tiger to kind of, yay, this is good, or no, this is clearly more is better, right?

I mean, I get I get that, but I also recognize the reality of what you have to do to make the you know, make this pencil out.

But I was just curious how you felt about your Tiger specific feedback.

Yeah, uh I would say we did get good uh data from Tiger.

I would say that the the kind of the volume of comments was kind of commensurate with uh the ridership, right?

So uh we did get data from Tiger, it it wasn't real low and it wasn't real high.

Uh, there are always some proposals that kind of trigger people even more so.

Tigered was not one of those.

I would also say that um, you know, as you can imagine, nearly every comment we receive is please don't make this change.

I need to get this for work.

And so the challenge for us is well, how do we distinguish you know, one you know, plea to to not make the change from another?

And I would say that what what we do is we look for those kind of we look for vulnerable communities that we're not aware of.

So for example, if there is a school that serves uh students with disabilities and they're using the bus to get to school, uh that's where we take a pause and we say, oh, uh-oh, that we don't want to make this change.

In this case with Tiger, we did not find that.

And so uh we felt comfortable moving forward.

And just uh a side note too, we actually had someone who went over all 8100 comments and as we log them, read over each one of them because uh this is actually a little bit personal for us because we signed up for this job to put transportation service out there for the public.

So with bringing it back, just does not work well for us.

And so going over each one of those comments and making sure that we're making the right tweak, the right change to the network is definitely something that we um put a lot of heart and soul into.

Wow.

And I appreciate that because I don't want to minimize how essential service this is for um just as you described your you know, your ridership, right?

I I don't take for granted the fact that I jump in my car and go, and that this is really critical for um those leveraging the services.

So really appreciate the thoughtful approach.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you.

And um no question, but I just wanted to thank you all again for coming and especially I see staff on several regional meetings taking heated comments on mayor, so I appreciate you still coming here.

Uh for me, I I I totally see your financial challenges.

So I really appreciate you presenting to our community why you're doing this and you're being very data driven and you receive plenty of feedback.

But again, at risk of repeating my repeating that um, you know, just lines 45.

You know, it's you know, I I still concerned about uh Southwest 121st and whatnot service reduction.

Um I understand this is all data driven, and but I just think about you know those 35% of people you mentioned who are really dependent on that.

So, but I don't think, you know, I'm not uh you know, it is what it is.

So um I but I have to tell you as as Mayor of Tiger, I need to tell you our community concern.

And um and luckily I haven't seen West commuter rail cut, and and but I heard talk about it, so um, I would just really urge you to really think about those 35% again, people who really depend on West.

And I know that there are people who say there's nobody writing it, but um, but thankfully it's not the car's not on the table at this time.

And I was also just want to quickly um mention that I really appreciate the spot pilot program that I went for the uh ribbon cutting around part of Beaverton and uh River Terrace.

And I think that's a such an innovative um project.

Um it's uh for those who don't know, it's like uh share like like Uber, but it's for uh for medium-sized, a lift size um bus.

And I just think, oh, that's such an innovative thing to do.

So I will encourage you to really, you know, given the constraint to think outside of box and think more about things like spot and and um I think um, you know, we're all dealing with budget cuts, so we need to be innovative, you know, think outside of box.

So thank you again.

So with that, I will um ask Direct Kellogg to close up this meet um presentation.

Thank you.

And I'll be brief on a good other items on your agenda.

So I'm gonna start with a philosophical statement.

Um previously I served on the Twalton City Council, so I've been where you guys are, and I remember budget season is a happy time where you'd come in and say, oh, we've got things we're gonna pick from and we gotta set a capex plan.

And this is great.

So this is my first experience of looking at a budget season in a very bad light.

300 million dollars is a lot of money, right?

And trends are not our friend right here.

Costs keep going up, right?

Revenues going down.

Um, so we really need to make this change.

Um I've also got good news and bad news.

I'm gonna start with the bad news.

Bad news is this may just be the beginning, right?

These cuts are difficult but pale in comparison to what we may have ahead of us in another year from now.

Um the good news is you're not Twalaton.

And I say that because Dwalton lost a lot of service on this.

But in all seriousness, the good news is is that this group of people and every TriMet staff person is working every day to give you the best transit system they can with the resources that they have.

And so we're gonna get through this, but we are gonna need support um from everybody.

Yeah, thank you.

And please let the city know, let me know how I could be assistance at the state legislative level.

This bus is important for our community.

So I'm you know, just let me know how I can help with the state legislatures, and I'll be happy to help.

We appreciate your partnership, Mayor Who, and we will be contacting you.

All right.

Thank you.

All right, thank you so much again for coming.

Have a good evening.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

All right, so uh let's move on to our next item on the agenda, which is the pilots seasonally park ranger program, seas seasonal park ranger program.

Park and recreational manager Gurin and police officer Orth will give the staff report.

Yeah, everybody's uh waiting outside today for some reason.

I don't know.

Hello, Rick.

Hello.

How's everybody tonight?

Oh good.

Tired?

Uh shall we get started, Mayor?

Yeah, so I I do notice that you have 17 slides, and we have 20 minutes.

So I just want to know how much time do you plan to present and how much time would you like counseling?

We're gonna whip through those slides.

I'm not gonna just it's visual.

Okay, great.

So it's a sweeping overview of the uh okay, yeah.

Great.

So anyway, uh thank you for having us tonight to talk about the park ranger program for show and tell.

I have Range Gordon who uh came on board last April as our first park ranger, and it's a tremendous success.

Jordan has done uh an amazing job.

Uh so what we wanted to do is briefly capture the work that he did and the role that he plays.

So if you go to the next slide, uh so just a quick overview.

This is about what is a park ranger, how do we measure success?

How did we collect the data to document the success?

And then some opportunities uh next up, and also sitting up here is uh Ellen Brown, she's our parks and rec board chair.

She's our parks and rec board chair.

Okay, next slide.

So here's Ranger Jordan with Frosty, one of the dogs he met out in the park that became kind of our mascot for our leash out campaign.

But as you can see on this slide, a variety of roles.

One of the most important roles that the Ranger plays is to have a positive presence in the parks and trails and help educate people on park rules, trail rules, assists with code enforcement education, serves as a liaison between parks and police office.

Helps with our park maintenance team because as he gets out and about, whether in the truck or on the trails, sees a lot.

And what we want to show you over the next number of slides is how we document and help with how do we use that data to make good management decisions and allocation of resources.

And then, of course, took part in a number of videos, our leash up campaign to try to help promote more dogs on leash, you know, on our our lease rules, our geese guys, uh, why do we do what we do with geese guys out at Summer Lake, and then the intro, meet the ranger.

So if you had a chance to see any of these videos, uh they're a lot of fun.

He's a character out there in a in a good way.

So, next slide.

Uh so this, and you've probably seen similar when the chief comes in and does his uh report outs uh coincidentally, we ended up doing it very similarly.

This slide is really the graphic uh graphically display from the various color codes the different types of encounters uh that Jordan documented and kind of the dispersity throughout the city.

So he covered all of our parks, our 600 and acres of parks and natural areas.

So we can go to the next slide and we'll start to dive in a little bit.

Uh so one of those things one of our biggest problems is dog off leash, and uh so these just are showing again graphically where they're distributed.

Smoking ordnance uh so 125 of the dogs off-leash encounters, uh 37 uh you know, smoking in parks uh that Jordan will talk to people about.

Next slide.

Uh so one of the challenges we have at Summer Lake is uh trying to protect the sensitive lands around the lake.

Uh we wanted to make it more uh aware for people who do like to fish out there.

We built some fishing platforms and new signage out there.

Uh we're actually gonna put in a couple more platforms.

We'll end up with four.

We have two right now.

Each one, if I don't know if you saw the video that Leandro did with ODFW to really again help promote, we want people to enjoy fishing at the lake, but we also want to protect wildlife and sensitive lands too.

So we created these uh fishing platforms, and Ranger Jordan helps again educate on these uh potential violations.

They are but you know, it's education.

We want people just to change behavior.

Next slide.

Uh we all know that we have an abundance of uh campsit scattered throughout, uh particularly on our trails.

Jordan has done an amazing job working with Officer Orth.

As he's out there making the rounds on our parks and trails, he will notify Officer Orth where these uh campsites or campfires are, and you know, between Martin, our park supervisor, Officer Orth, and Jordan, they can take the action necessary to disband those campsites and uh fire evidence, and it's really helpful for both uh PD and parks to know where these cleanups are needed.

Next slide.

Uh so while uh Ranger Jordan is uh out there and about, uh graffiti is also another uh issue that pops up.

Getting after it quickly helps prevent more graffiti from happening.

So where Jordan can do it, he'll do some minor maintenance out there, or he'll let our parks maintenance folks know where the issues are.

Uh and with Officer Orth, if there's evidence to collect, he'll go out there.

So having Jordan out there observing and uh taking care of some things helps with our park maintenance team not having to get out there.

So there's some things that uh we can do while uh he's out on site.

Next slide.

Uh so we also you know, from uh park and trail safety, we do a twice a year audit of our trails for safety.

And while Ranger Jordan is running around, he'll find some things that uh we'll report to our park maintenance supervisors so we can get those on our work order service requests so that the uh we we're trying not to get into deferred maintenance.

So catching these things early and taking corrective action is very helpful.

Also, as uh able to you know call non-emergency or 911 if there's an issue, somebody in distress that uh we can be the eyes and ears uh you know for PD out there.

Next slide.

Probably the most important thing out of you know Jordan's work is being that positive person of authority.

Our park maintenance crew do great jobs, but they're out there to clean our parks and maintain them.

Jordan in his uniform, uh you know, having that presence of authority, but having that friendly face out there.

Uh so you know, we document not only the enforcement uh type of education occurrences, we documented the number of positive interactions, and the last one no issues during visit.

You know, Jordan during the course of a day will go visit X number of parks, and you know, it's great to report that more often than not, there's just nothing happening in the parks from a uh negative standpoint.

So we also wanted to be able to document, and you can see combined numbers of almost 900 interactions were both positive and no issue.

So that's great to know as well.

Next slide.

Just the pie chart that shows the breakdown of everything we just discussed, so I can move on from that.

Next slide, please.

So sort of as we wrap this up, the you know, the boots on the ground coordination between PW and PD is critically important.

One thing to note about these cleanup costs prior to their park ranger coming on, an average cost of cleanup, not counting some of the major uh cleanups we had was typically around $8,000 just due to the accumulation of trash.

With Jordan spotting these quicker, the cost of average cost of cleanup dropped to about 1,100.

So you can see a ranger pays for itself just in the number, you know, the reduction of cleanup costs.

So all that data that is collected helps us in making our management decisions, uh allows our maintenance team to focus on the work that they need to do.

And as our system grows, it's more and more important to have somebody with that official presence out there.

Uh next slide.

So what are the opportunities?

Uh clearly, and hopefully you would agree that the data shows that there is a value-added benefit to the park ranger position.

Currently, Jordan is a seasonal.

Uh in working with our parks and rec advisory board, we'd love to be able at some point to you know make the position a full-time position, and ideally we would love to have a full-time position and still you know, a seasonal park ranger as well.

Uh what we can do is more education events and activities, working in collaborative collaboration with our rec team, but we can do park walks, you know, park ranger story time.

Jordan works with Caitlin and who's here somewhere, our recreation coordinator, you know, to kind of up, you know, do more with the junior ranger program, collaboration with schools and libraries, and you can read there's so many things that we can do uh in campaigns like the leash out campaign.

Uh Jordan, we printed up these uh bandanas called Bark Ranger.

So when Jordan is out and about, you know, interacting with people with dogs on leash, they now get a City of Tiger Bark Ranger bandana for the dogs to wear.

So and then also coordination with our neighboring cities and their ranger programs at Lake Oswego, Twiled and uh Twiladen Hills, Parks and Rec.

Next slide, and I think this is the last slide.

So anyway, hopefully I got through that in time, Mayor.

Yeah, and uh half any questions.

And discussion.

Do I have any questions?

No, Council President Wolf.

Oh, you do?

Okay.

Council Robbins, go ahead.

Oh, I get to go first all the time today.

Thank you.

Um this is great and welcome, Jordan, to um being our park ranger.

I have a question.

Um I saw on the slide, 4.23 miles of social trails or unofficial trails.

I'm assuming that's just like people walking where they're not supposed to repeatedly, and it kind of creates a trail.

Is that I'm gonna assume that that's causing damage, and that's what's creating those trails.

Are we trying to stop that and kind of repair that damage, or are we just gonna accept it as this is a new trail?

What happens?

So my goal with mapping those is just being aware of where they are.

Um it is doing a lot of damage to the natural areas.

Uh think think of the paved path that goes down Fannel Creek.

Off to the right, you often see that kind of smash down.

You can see like, oh, someone's been causing some mayhem back there.

Um that that's what I mean by social trails.

Um as I'm not sure exactly what the future holds for social trails, but now we know now that we know they're there, I can share that information with PD, and it gives them an easier way to get to the campsites that are really entrenched.

Yeah, enforcement is tough.

Right now, you know, Ranger Jordan doesn't have any enforcement capabilities.

And you know, we do you know work closely with Officer Orth, and it's a challenge, even in our other parks, yes, user-generated trails is just uh nature of the beast.

And but it does cause a lot of damage, erosion, you know, and so forth.

But knowing where they're at is at least we can let Officer Orth know, and they can do some investigation.

But yeah, we'd love to stop it, but we don't have that ability.

Consul President Wolf?

No, I uh it's very different as to why they're created, but um, it just reminds me of a college campus when there's very lovely landscape design and students are like, no, point A B is way faster.

Um but I love the presentation.

I appreciated the value of having Jordan U present and the dollar saved.

I think that's a really compelling argument to present.

And I think my only question, and Rick, you don't have to answer this.

This can be a conversation during our budget season.

Clearly, TriMet just sat here and talked about their financial challenges.

We're gonna have similar conversations.

So I I mean, I can say 100% we should flip to an FTE full time and have a temporary, but then what's the trade-offs?

Because I think that's gonna be our conversation throughout the the budget season is how do we make our choices that make the most sense?

So you're right.

And it, you know, if you have a response now, or that's just a conversation that we continue to have.

So you have my support, but that'll be the question.

So thank you.

And I think we're scheduled on April 14th to have that very robust parks funding discussion.

And you know, not only with a ranger position, but as the system, you know, the pressure to grow the system, obviously is gonna impact the number of FTE that we need in parks, you know, which would include a ranger position.

So if we can hold off on them, we'll definitely we can have that the conversation on April 14th.

And I know we were all very supportive of the world parks play in River Terrace 2.0, right?

And it's the same challenges that you very clearly uh brought forward.

So thank you.

Yeah.

For for me to uh just follow up on Council President Wolf's point.

Um, thank you for the pilot program for presenting the data.

And I'm it's it's really obvious that the Ranger Ranger Jordan provide lots of value on publicly in terms of uh you know presence and coordination and uh and just identify issues early on, which translate apparently translating to you know, at least for camp cling up, you know.

So um, but that's one year data.

So um, but you know, I have no reason to believe you won't continue.

So um so remind us again what what months are you currently working?

So as a seasonal, we have to have uh after his hours are exhausted, a 13-week separation.

So Jordan left us in December and he's due back on like what April 13.

So we'll have Jordan back uh April to December.

Pretty much, yeah.

Okay, all right.

Um yeah, so um, you know, I'm in Council President Wolf's camp, right?

It's like, oh, this is so great.

Is um but right now, given our budget constraint, I'm very mindful of you know what's between what's nice to have and what's must to have.

So for me to support this, um, you know, I I will need a little bit more internal data, like you know, internal cost efficiency and also, you know, it sounds like we need you would like more uh a full time to support more educational program, but is that something that we have the you know what the trade-off if we offer that because um it's good to have, but um again I'm focusing on essential service, right?

So if we have some sort of data like trade-off, potential trade-off like that, and and um again uh like you talk about not the rangers not really focused on enforcement, right?

Because like leash is leash law is something that's enforced by Washington County, is that correct?

So yeah, and a lot of things like fishing and and things like that.

So um sorry.

Sorry.

So I I believe in code, if there's delegated authority, there's opportunities for uh providing a limited amount of enforcement capabilities like writing parking citations where I came from previously, we let our rangers they didn't do people to people citations, they did like parking violations citations, and which was very effective, and we let our deputies do the others.

And I've talked to the chief about it, and you know, we can have more of that conversation.

Yeah, just another thing like demonstrate value, right?

So if Ranger can issue citations that of officer, then that's save us money, and it's a win-win situation.

So we stop wanted I totally agree.

We wanted in our first year just to kind of limit.

Yeah.

It's great data.

Each year that you know, Ranger Jordan is willing to come back, we can add more responsibilities onto that if we work with Shelby and the chief and how to make that happen and make sure there's proper training and all that good stuff.

Yeah.

So again, um Yeah, that's great.

So uh thank you so much for your presentation, and we can have a discussion with the park and recreation board next.

So thank you for coming.

Thank you.

Good to see you.

Well, you're welcome to stay or welcome to leave.

Welcome to stay.

Or not or not.

Oh, thank you.

It's nice to see you.

All right, so next item on our agenda is our joint meeting with the park and re recreation advice board prep.

Uh they'll provide with us annual update, and we'll have uh Rick with us again.

And uh please uh please introduce uh the item and the team members.

Yeah, so I'm very excited to have here Ellen Brown, who's our park and recreation advisory board chair, and I'm gonna have Ellen if you wouldn't mind introduce yourself and a little background and sure.

Um hi.

I've been on the parks board for I'm in my eighth year now, and uh I've been chair for the last couple of years.

And uh when I started, everybody on the board was in their second term, and we had um the parks manager had been here 20, 25 years or something, and in that time we had a lot of turnover of expertise and um and continuity, and it's been really lovely to have Rick um be have be so experienced and jump in.

Um of the things that was going on when I first started was we were in extreme danger of losing our rec program all together, and we lost two experienced um employees because there was the uncertainty of even the program even continuing.

And so Caitlin and her team have been rock stars at really taking this like tiny little program that for a city of our size is ridiculous that it's as small as it is, and growing it in you know as much as she has in this time, it's been really impressive.

And so I've been living in Tiger since 2012, and when I moved here from Portland, I was like, what kind of camps can I sign my kid up for or whatever?

And there was nothing at all.

And so that was a shock to me.

And that's one of the reasons I joined Prab.

So as the board, we interface with the public, and one of the things that we do is uh there's the system plan, the tenure plan that happens, and that was done last in 2022.

Next slide.

Next slide, sorry.

We had a lot of um, we had a lot of input into that.

So we're gonna we're gonna high-level the accomplishments, advocacy.

Hold on.

Um so we had a lot of input into that.

We talked a lot about what needed to be a part of that plan, um, what were our priorities and what were our goals, and we're due for the system plan update.

And you know, some of the areas that were identified as gaps that need to be addressed is you know, we have aging infrastructure, we um need inclusive and accessible amenities for all of our residents to be able to enjoy our park services and to expand our recreation programming.

Um we um work with the um the staff to on the projects and their priorities and things they bring things to us, you know.

This is what we're working on.

What's your input?

And there's often really good discussion about some of those things.

Um little known fact, we are also the tree board.

So and we've convened as the tree board once in my eight years, but um it was to talk about the heritage tree program, and we um that's a whole other conversation that we can have another time.

Um, and it's but it's also one of the requirements for us being in a tree city USA program.

And the Lasich property, which we will talk about later in this discussion, um, you know the the purposes that we that it was purchased for, um we had a really big gut blow that we weren't going to be able to do that, or to do it it would be another 20 years.

So we've been actively working with the park staff on what can we do instead that it that will comply with the zoning um you know for where it is that would also be a benefit to our community, and especially on that side of the city where there isn't as much um you know wild property that belongs to the city.

Um we also as the our parks um department is really excellent at going after grants and other um funding opportunities to pay for some of these important things that we're doing.

Um, and so we provide grants um support services as well.

And you know, we also get comments from the public, you know.

We had one example is um, you know, one of the sports group was it Little League that wanted the turf, you know, they came to us saying we really need some turf, uh at least one of the fields being turfed so that we can actually play when it's wet and messy, and um, and then that got the ball rolling on something on on that project.

Um we also are kind of where some of the some of the different ideas get vetted.

Um, there was a recent um idea that came to us that would take a third of the Potso Dog Park and turn it into these like giant battery storage things, and um, so we're kind of the front line on um supporting good ideas to get off the ground and stopping bad ideas before they can take hold.

And that was a really bad idea.

Um we also um hear public input about things like pickleball comp conflict and things which we spend a surprising amount of time talking about pickleball.

Um but that is you know, we hear it so you don't have to.

So and um, but it's all it's all really good.

Um it's good for us to be aware of what's going on with the community, and it's also good for the community to know that they have a place where they can come for those things.

Okay, next slide.

Next slide, please.

Oh, next slide, please.

Oh, that's it.

Oh, back.

Oh no, back when I'm sorry, that the one says advocacy on the top.

Yeah.

And so one of the other things that um is an important role that we play is advocacy, and that's one of that one of the hats that I'm wearing here tonight.

And you know, we've seen a lot of budget impacts throughout the last eight years.

And you know, like I was talking about with Rec.

And you know, within the last couple of years, we voluntarily took a big hit in our budget from the general fund with the promise that that would be reinstated, and that hasn't happened.

So we've already taken a cut that other departments have not taken.

Um, and you know, all of the community surveys list police and parks as their two top priorities for what the government should be doing for them in their community.

And you know, it is one of the most visible things in the community that show people how their tax dollars are being spent.

And um, you know, we as such, you know, we're a core service.

Not everything that the government does is a core service.

There, you know, we are a core service.

And we've been operating on a shoestring for years and years and years and years.

When you look at the national um surveys around what other cities, our size, what their departments look like, we are in below the bottom quartile in the number of staff we have compared to the amount of property that they're maintaining.

And they do an excellent job.

They do an amazing job with the with the resources that they have.

And you know, as new property comes into the city with River Terrace 2.0 and different things like that, we're being asked to grow our parks program and maintain what we already have.

And it's really important that you we're not just kicking a problem down the road to make them more expensive at a later date by not maintaining the resources that we have.

And that's one of the value ads that Jordan has there's a widowmaker in this park that we need to get out, and before it lands on somebody and their dog in the city has to pay a huge amount of money, you know.

And so you know, maintaining the properties that we have, maintaining doing it to a level that is ensuring that we're not just creating more expensive problems later, and showing the public that their dollars are being spent well, and that is something that's really important to us.

Um, the park ranger program, we talked about that for a year before we actually were able to find a way to create the pilot program with a with a seat with a seasonal.

And you know, he exceeded all of our expectations.

Like the data that he was collecting, he didn't have to do that.

He did that on his own, he proactively, and that was amazing that he's been able to do that.

Um preserving our park system and our trails and making sure that they're well maintained, that they're you know, that that asset is still an asset that we can be all proud of.

That is something that we all take very, very seriously.

And we've also, since we've added Ken Barker to our team on that on the board, uh, we've really strengthened our relationship with the Twileton River Keepers.

And that's been really fun because we get to do the paddle every summer, but then it's also been really meaningful for like the accessible dock and things like that as well.

So next slide.

And so um we I'm gonna um defer to Rick on this part of the discussion.

So what the ask that we have for council is around can we pursue the the idea that's been being floated at this moment.

Do we have your okay to continue the discussion about it?

That's not a commitment to yes, we're gonna do it, but a can we can we continue pursuing that idea?

And so I'm gonna turn that back over to Rick.

Thank you.

Next slide, please.

So uh little history, and I think in your meeting packet, I outlined you know, some memos that I shared with uh former city manager Reimer and uh city manager Trish.

I won't go into that, but essentially once we found out, you know, from Metro that you know we're talking 20, 25 years out, uh, we started to think what could we do?

And I know that you know, since that property was bought.

A lot of people still think it's uh gonna be the home for new ball fields.

Well, we wanted to kind of get off of that thinking, and so we brought in a consultant to reimagine the use.

And so this is a footprint of the lawsuits property.

Uh kind of if are you familiar with Lusher Farms in Lake Oswego?

Uh similar concept uh if you get a chance to see that.

But because we're zoned exclusive farm use, and we're also undesignated as far as the reserves process goes.

But consistent with the zoning, and we've been talking to Washington County planning, you know, putting a community-supported agriculture uh operation in, uh, putting demonstration gardens in, putting a native plant nursery, you know, we're just kind of brainstorming these different ideas of what we can do in the interim.

Uh what we also are currently working on is developing river access.

Uh in that lower left-hand corner, if you're not familiar with the property, we'd love to take counsel out on a tour of this property as well to kind of see on the ground what this property looks like.

Uh, as an old Azalea farm, again, that's uh we have access, we have 45 acre feet of water that we've protected our water rights so we can support all the irrigation needed out here.

So demonstration gardens, uh, workshops, classes, uh converting the old uh pole barn into like a meeting hall, the old stables into some office spaces.

Uh currently one of our uh park maintenance guys is doing a leadership project with Oregon Parks and Rec Association.

And we've taken where there was an old triple wide there.

If some of you know this property, we had uh Emory when they were doing the res uh reservoir project demo the triple wide for us, and now he's taken that pad and turned that into a native plant nursery project for his leadership.

So these are just some of the ideas, but we didn't want to get too far out ahead uh into further planning or having some community engagement without council's support to continue to pursue uh the concept further.

So this is just a high-level concept plan of what can be imagined out there.

Again, while we're working with uh uh our uh engineering team to develop the uh river access that currently Willamette water is in there with the blow-off line, we'll follow right behind them with our uh reservoir or river access project.

Uh so some of you might ask, well, what about ball fields?

You know, how do we we, as you know, we don't have a lot of excess capacity for ball fields.

I would love to come back to you at a later date to talk about a project we're working with Tiger Twilight in school district.

Because of the Fowler uh middle school project, they're gonna lose both the ball field, the football field, and the baseball field at Fowler.

So we've been in conversations with the school district to get their participation on the Dirksen property just adjacent to Fowler to develop a secondary ball field and make improvements to the whole ball field uh complex that we have that would create additional uh sports field capacity that might also maybe be lighted.

So uh this is kind of very conceptual.

Uh I know on the school district side, they're having a similar conversation with their leadership to say at a high-level concept, here's what we're thinking to help support the uh for us the need for ball fields for them uh the need to replace the ball fields that they're gonna lose.

So the timing is great because what we're continuing under our IGA with the school district to look at other fields that we can activate, like we do at Metzger School Park, now a partnership that's put potentially available at Dirksen to create some additional ball fields.

So for those that see lawsuits as well, we're losing future ball fields, we have to be creative and find other ways to get more activation of ball fields while at the same time we could be looking at further planning uh this site for for this purpose.

So I'll leave it at that and uh open up to any questions.

This I believe is our last slide anyway.

Ums the person wolf stuck.

Um so I'll be really quick in at the risk of getting in the weeds, Rick.

So for foul or are they temporarily losing fields as they build a new school and then they'll come back or they're just gone gone.

No, they'll be gone for good.

My understanding is the new school will be on the partly built on the football field.

Yep.

And they're gonna lose also the uh baseball field, so that's not coming back either.

Okay.

All right.

So this is important then that Dirksen can pick up some of that slack.

Yeah, I wasn't aware of that.

So yeah, I didn't know if that was just a reconfiguration uh challenge for the short run.

You know Eric Nessie.

Um, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Reach out to Eric.

He can kind of that's who we're working with him and Jarvis.

Okay, perfect.

Um, I will um I will do that.

Um so then um for me, you know, this is interesting, right?

Because it goes back to our river terrace conversation, I think, and in making those tough choices.

So if our our choice is to really do nothing for a quarter of a century or create space, um, I felt that the conversations in River Terrace are what are the opportunities to allow those community members to be out and have places to engage.

And this isn't the same as ball fields or an open park, but it certainly creates opportunities to be active, be outside, learn water, the river access, all those pieces I think are really important.

So you have my support, I guess is what I'm trying to get to.

So they're also potential community gardens and things like that, which and those commun, I live over there and I know I have I have no yard.

So it you know, having a community garden would be nice.

Yeah, walking trails and you know the river experience, urban farming, you know, opportunities with the you know, community supported agriculture, the demonstration, native plant nurseries, plant sales, you know, different things that can all be done on the site.

And there are opportunities to partner with other um companies and and different um community partners and in some interesting ways as well.

We've tiptoed talking to some uh some of our partners to see if they'd be interested in you know, some type of partnership, whether it's programming, some are interested in making investment.

Uh so you know, we're way down the road for that.

It's just a matter of you know, with the council's support, just to continue to have that further discussion and even have some community engagement around it to see what the community you know feels about it.

Council Schlack support, continuing the SIC.

Uh I think I need to get more information on it in order to provide a uh decision on that.

Okay.

Council Robin, continue the direction, early big picture stuff.

Yes, um, I am familiar with the property because our scalp troop is out there every year, chipping trees.

I did not see a tree chipping thing on that.

Most recent walk-up, and in the past it has been there, but we'll figure it out.

Um I think um it's a great idea.

I could see it being something sponsored at some point, possibly in the future.

Um, in addition to local people being able to be out and about, it's also something different to do.

And what with what we've been talking about with economic development and TLT, it's another thing, frankly, that tourists with families would go do.

Or you could, you know, I've where I previously lived, there were some urban farms that had certain days where a lot of people came out.

And so it could be just one more thing to add to Tiger's identity.

So I do support it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilor Godusi, do you support continuing the conversation on the LASIK property?

Absolutely.

I love the property.

Full support.

All right.

Yeah, I'm I I really appreciate the uh the vision and the work being done.

And I support continuing the conversation, but uh counselor Schlag, um I will need more information on the long-term cost, but it sounds like it's the future and the part potential partnership, right?

That related to costs.

So thank you for that.

And in terms of um the presentation for the board, thank you for the presentation.

Thank you for the eight year service.

And really appreciate some of the stuff you deal with you have to deal with like the rackabol dispute.

So I really appreciate it.

Um so just one question.

Uh so why does why does the board not recommending any uh levy for future funding source?

So that creates a level of uncertainty to a core service that is really problematic.

Okay.

Because if we like if we had a levy right now going up against the other levy that's happening in the city, we increase the risk of both of them failing.

Right.

You know, and um I think core services need you know a levy for ongoing, you know, thing, you know, maintaining our property, make you know, things like that.

I think it's just a level of uncertainty that is irresponsible, frankly.

And my personal that's a personal opinion, not a board opinion.

Well, thank you for the feedback.

I I'm I'm not disagreeing with you, and I also support, I also agreed that park and recreation is is very important.

Yeah.

But I'll just give you some food for thought.

Um, we do have a public safety levy.

So even though, you know, so it isn't certain.

I just unfortunately reality what dealing with measure of 550, you know, we can only go up three percent a year, but uh expense go more than that.

And also um uh you know, park and recreation fee.

I can see that, but you know, that's also personally I can't speak for the council.

I just feel uncomfortable keeping keep raising some fee that's council have control over without voter input.

But if if if the I really appreciate perhaps input, but uh but I would like to see, you know, if this is really a priority for you know the the majority of tiger population, then we should ask them to weigh in, see if they are willing to put you know uh I forgot the expression.

Uh uh just just to see if they they're willing to pay for it.

So that you know, rather than uh council keep you know making those decisions and and and not really knowing that, but again, not disagreeing with you, I'm just telling you some consideration.

And also uh SDC, I I agree that we need to take a look at that, but at the same time, we are we are the one of the council goals is to provide housing options for for more people.

And SDC obviously asks for the cost of new housing.

So we have to strike a balance.

So and I I don't know what that looks like at this point, but yeah, but but I'm just telling you that SDC, you know can cost, you know, raise prices for new home, which will you know we already have a housing crisis, right?

So um just give you something to to consider, yeah.

So I think that we are definitely at a point where we are long overdue for a creative problem solving around how do we fund this essential service.

Exactly, yeah.

And um, you know, I I don't think we've had a methodology update in how many years, Rick?

Since 2013 2015 is the last time the parks SDCs were separated.

And so that's well over 10 years ago.

The city has changed radically in that.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And so I'm not saying that we shouldn't, I mean, I think we need to be really leery of this or this thinking.

Exactly.

Yeah, it's just striking a balance.

And um, you know, so and I think we also need to be really leery of pinning the success of the department, the majority of their budget on the whim of the voters when things are very uncertain.

So yeah, and I mean I I agree with Tiger is doing a lot for very little in terms of uh police department.

I mean uh parks department, you know, park and recreation and and all department actually.

Right.

And uh, you know, for for jurisdiction like Beaverton, they have a special district for park and recreation, and which they pay a lot more than Tiger.

So we are we are paying very little for for what we get.

And I will also I will also say that the that the parks department has not grown itself.

I mean, the only growth it has done is in response to specific need.

It hasn't been a you know, and I I feel like there are other parts of the city government that have grown that not necessarily in response to a specific need.

And it's that we've all been very, very conscious of trying to keep things as close to the bone as they possibly can be.

So they're really I can't speak to other departments, but I know this department has really tried very hard to be very responsible with their dollars all along.

And I would really hate to see them kind of punished for that.

Yeah, and these upcoming.

Thank you, Mayor, and just listening to this conversation.

I think that's exactly why I'd requested that we have uh a discussion on parks funding.

Yeah, that's really important.

Because this has reached um, you know, we had a revenue review in October where we talked a little bit about the parks fee and and how much it's really contributing um to overall funding.

And it seems to be uh parks funding seems to be sort of in an untenable situation.

So I think it's reached a point where really as council is elected policymakers, we need to provide a solution on behalf of our constituents and what that solution is, what creative funding mechanism that could be, or um what service levels may need to be right sized to, that is something that the council needs to think very carefully about.

It's very easy to you know go into council goals and say, you know, we love all these things, let's do all of them.

It's it's very different trying to figure out how do you actually make it happen to actually benefit people in reality.

Yeah.

Now I you you guys do not have an enviable job ahead of you at all.

And I think that it's important that that conversation is coming up.

Um I think that um I I just want to take a little bit of issue with the right size um um comment because I feel like that for a city of this size, as mature as it is with the number of um, you know, we service elders, we service small children, we service everybody in between.

And um I think that when you look at our surrounding communities if and look in nationwide at similar sized communities, we are so much smaller than all of those other um all of those other similarly situated um cities.

So yeah.

Thank you.

Any other last comment?

If not, thank you for your presentation and thank you for your service.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And uh with that, there's being no further item on the agenda, um, the meeting is adjourned.

Good night, Tiger.