The Tualatin City Council met on July 13, 2026, to address a range of topics including public comment on community building, approval of consent agenda items, updates on the downtown revitalization project and economic landscape analysis, an intergovernmental agreement for the school resource officer program, and a fee schedule amendment. The meeting also included council communications on invasive species and committee assignments.
Good evening and welcome to July 13th, 2026 to Walton City Council meeting. Now go ahead and call the meeting to order. First thing on our agenda tonight is a Pledge of Allegiance now tonight, led by Councillor Brooks. We're over there. Pledge allegiance to the flags of America. Under God. All right. Next item on our agenda is public comment. Public comment. It's an opportunity for anyone to address the city council regarding item that is not on tonight's agenda. Please keep your minute your comments to about three minutes. If there's anyone in the room who would like to address the council to take those folks first. And then I'll switch over to Zoom if we even have access to Zoom. But with that, we'll go ahead and insert public comment. I have a tag team coming up, Victoria and Christina. Welcome. Make sure to turn on your microphones, unlike what I did. Oh, the face button. Oh, okay. Let me get my little timer out so that I don't know. Yeah, so you've got a total of six minutes. Perfection. Thank you so much. Good evening, Mayor and Counselors. For the past several years, I have invested thousands of volunteer hours and significant personal resources into building something that I believe every neighborhood should have. And that's community. In 2018, after my child was born, I went from being a physically capable United States Marine to a new mother who was struggling to walk to her mailbox. The nearest place I could rehabilitate was the Greenway behind my home, and there was nowhere to sit. Every walk became an exercise in pain, balancing my own recovery while caring for an infant. That experience has changed how I look at public spaces forever. About that same time, I accidentally ordered some textbooks. I thought they were like those other kinds of books that are like self-help, they were textbooks on community building. I laughed, I kept them, I read them, and then I bought more of them, and it's become a passion of mine now. Uh later, when I was asked to cover graffiti on my fence, I painted it with leftover rainbow paint from my child's playhouse. And when my child outgrew some wooden blocks, I set them out thinking that maybe another child would enjoy playing with them. And they did. Something unexpected happened. Children started gathering, parents stopped to talk, neighbors met each other, donations appeared. The community itself began shaping the space. I posted questions about the community, what community means, what val how our values shape community, and I used those responses to put art upon my fence. That one small experiment of art, community questions, free resources, turned into events, a pantry, a little free store, gardens, celebrations, and eventually to Walton community gather. Has a website, has a banner, and most importantly, we provide seating. While this was growing organically, I was attending every community organization meeting that I could find. So I began my own adventure in mutual aid and community building. Now I pay for and organize community events, and I've been doing this for several years. As this project grew, so did some very specific hateful comments and complaints. And I have repeatedly asked the city for clarification and looked for ways to work collaboratively with the parks and recreation department. Over time, that relationship has shifted quickly from conversations about partnership to conversations about enforcement. And how do we know this space matters? We know because children return to play.