And going to a as acting chair. Oh, there, there she goes, there she blows. I am
going to wait for the clock tower and there it is. So I will call this May 13th,
2024 meeting of the board of county commissioners to order and I am um pinch hitting
for Commissioner Dean today as chair and will do my best to keep the train on the
track here. So I will call this including turn my volume off. So the first thing
we always do with our um Monday agendas is allow for public comment and
I would ask, are there any public comments in the room? I'm imagining I'm not gonna
see any of those hands go up, but maybe um so I'll turn to the zoom room. Is there
anybody with us on zoom today who would like to make a public comment? If so you
can use the raise hand button at the bottom of your zoom screen and when your hands
go up, we'll call you over dying to see if Mr T has any comments on her on our
consent agenda. So you bring Mr T over
and anybody else who wants to make public comment. You can raise your hand and we'll
bring you over after, for comment after Mr Dear. Good morning,
your tears. Um, nice to be invited.
So you have three minutes for public comment. And, um, we'd love to hear what you
want to address today. Uh, actually I wanted to, uh, I wasn't sure if on, at your
1030 time slot where you were going to discuss the, uh final docket for the DC for
the uh planning Commission, um whether you're going to have public comment at that
time and I'm likely not going to be around to make it at that time anyway. So I just
wanted to uh say that I was a little confused by what was on the docket or what was
on the proposed docket because it doesn't seem to include uh anything specific about
short term rentals or rentals in, in general, which is uh a big concern of mine.
So if uh if the D CD folks that are presenting this could go into a little more detail
explaining, I think it's item number three on their uh their plan, if that is in
fact going to implement uh or create a whole new set of rental property uh regulations.
Uh That would be great. It's overdue. It certainly is called for because you folks
uh enacted a moratorium on, on rentals short term rentals. So, uh and, and on permit
processing for those. So, uh you know, again, uh if we could get some clarification,
I would uh like to listen to that after the fact. And I mean, that's my comment.
Thanks very much. Thanks Mister Pierce. We appreciate your comment and I'm sure that
will be part of the conversation at 1030. Um Although I'm not sure that this item
number three on that agenda is uh about short term rentals. It's more about long
term rentals. So it's about the docket and the Comprehensive Plan. So that's not
the only place that we can change code. Of course. So I think it's, I think it's
immaterial is, is, would be my, my guess, but I think good to, good to verify with
the D CD. I'm bringing over Y
good morning Miss Yarnell. You'll need to unmute and then you'll have three minutes.
There you go. Good morning. I would just like to say again this morning. I um
continue to be concerned about the pool information that's being given to the public,
meaning that there really is none. Even after the meeting, there have been no follow
ups. Uh no um requests for information from a wider swath of the public.
Um Money continues to mount on what this is costing and there's more and more opposition
to it. I haven't talked to anybody who is a fan of the mega pool that's being planned
and I'm sure I'm not the only one. That's all I have to say today. Thank you. Thanks
for your comment. Um Is there anyone else with us who would like to make a comment
at this time? If not, I don't see any other hands up.
Um So we'll keep public comment open till 930 as we do. But um
I'll maybe turn to Commissioner Brotherton for a response to MS here now. Uh Sure,
you know, I would say we are not planning a mega pool. We are that, that plan having
not met with our approval. We're assessing what all of our options are. So we are
going on. I hope you've been paying attention to the meetings, but we don't have
new information yet because we're still reviewing getting this task force of eight
up to speed with the copious amounts of work that's already been done in analysis
of, of, you know, site construction materials, re rehabilitation and renovation potential
at mountain view pool. Um And the cost is diminimus. We might talk about a budget
item to um take a couple of field trips with this task force to some pools and we're,
I I'll talk to Mr mcauley and, and speak to that in my update. But in general, this
does not cost very much, you know, it's a little bit of pre-existing staff time.
I'm doing the facilitation, we're using sites that we have control over primarily
for meetings. So the cost is zero essentially. And I think they were already doing
really good. Work at being able to clearly present a report that lines all of the
myriad options up there is not one option that we are considering. So the BC can,
um, find out if it's possible to make a pool that's the goal of the task force. And
I think they've done good work so far and I'm excited for the prospect. Um, and I
think I responded to Mister Che Short. Yeah, and I appreciate um being the the fly
on the wall. Uh, we're relative to the aquatic facility. I appreciate that you guys
are looking at multiple options and locations. That was my first comment about the
aquatic facility months ago was I wish that we had looked at more locations and,
and really um weighed the strengths and weaknesses and benefits to the community.
So I really appreciate that the task force is taking on looking at a broader swath
of options. One thing I will say out of our report just to kind of give you a preview
is we had sis this past week at our meeting and you know, they really did not look
at unser locations and they have never built a pool at an unu location. So I think
we're still in a couple of weeks. We're looking still this week, we'll be looking
or next early next week, still at mountain view pool and the issues there. But when
we, when we move forward, uh other locations that we can consider are going to have
to be essentially the Port Port Hadlock, phase one sewer area or Port Town. So those
are the two areas that we could build this so understood. Um So just for folks who
joined us, we are keeping public comment open until 930. So someone who has joined
us and has a desire to make a comment, please raise your hand using the raise hand
button at the bottom of the zoom screen. Um Otherwise, I guess we'll move forward
with the consent agenda. We have proclamations too and proclamations. I guess we
can do, we can do consent and then, um and then we'll do the proclamations.
So, are there any items on consent that you want to call out commissioner? Well,
I really appreciate the additional work done on number four about the new EV car
charging site down at the gateway center, which will be all level three and which
they're really trying to get the N ac uh chargers in. Um And I, you know, I've, I've
taken Mr Pierce's other note from our previous conversation about this and really,
I'm aware of the kind of the franchise agreement with the PUD as we monitor these
rates and make sure that they don't get um obscene, uh you know that, but I, I just,
it will be so handy for uh level three level three charges at that gateway visitor
center. I think it will be pretty critical. So excited about that. Great work with
behavioral health and the ID D ad and, and I guess I, I did have to look what a lactation
pod looked like. Well, they can look a lot of different. Well, I looked at the mama
mama saw one of the original lactation pods, I guess. I'm just wondering, can you
use the lactation pad pod for something else? I mean, it seems like a, so one of
those, I imagine you could, but that's the principal use of them. I mean, there's
been a few workplaces where I've been where they've had lactation pods and they were
designated for just for lactating others. Yeah, I, I originally assumed that they
would be in court using the lactation pod and by seeing the design, that's why I
had to go look, I guess. Probably not. Probably not. Yeah. Yeah, but I'm happy to
move that we, oh, sorry. Did you want to call it anything? I move that we approve
and adopt the consent agenda as presented. I'll second that all in favor of uh approval
of the consent agenda. Indicate by saying hi or raising your hand. All right, I consent
agenda is adopted. Ok, let's move on to proclamations. Um
So do we want, we'll start with the proclamation declaring the week of May 12th to
the 18th as National Police Week and observing May 15th as Peace Officers Memorial
Day with our guest, the good Sheriff Noel. Are you gonna join mark at the table.
Joe for the proclamation. Great time on that. Your, your call.
We'll be asking you to say a few words. Yeah, I'll do that. Ok. Okey dokey.
So opening the proclamation, we'll read the proclamation and then,
um, have Sheriff Noel come up and address the proclamation as well. So would you
like to start commissioner? I would love to a proclamation whereas the Congress and
President of the United States have designated May 15th, my daughter's birthday as
peace Officers Memorial Day and the week in which May 15th, 2024 falls as National
Police Week. And whereas the members of our law enforcement agencies play an essential
role in safeguarding the rights and freedoms of Jefferson County. And whereas it
is important that all citizens know and understand the duties, responsibilities,
hazards and sacrifices of their law enforcement agencies and that members of our
law enforcement agencies recognize their duty to serve the people by safeguarding
life and property, by protecting against violence and disorder and by protecting
the innocent, against deception and the weak against oppression. And whereas the
men and women in law enforcement of Jefferson County unceasingly provide a vital
public service. Now, therefore, be it resolved that we, the board of county commissioners
call upon all citizens of Jefferson County and upon all patriotic civic and educational
organizations to observe the week of May 12th to May 18th 2024 as National Police
Week with appropriate ceremonies and observances in which all of our May join in
Commemorating law enforcement officers past and present who by their faithful and
loyal devotion to their responsibilities have rendered a dedicated service to their
communities and in doing so have established for themselves, an enviable and enduring
reputation for preserving the rights and security of all citizens. We further call
upon all citizens of Jefferson County to observe May 15th as peace officers Memorial
Day in honor of those law enforcement officers who through their courageous deeds
have made the ultimate sacrifice in service to their community or have become disabled
in the performance of duty and let us recognize and pay respect to the survivors
of our fallen heroes. Prove this 13th day of May 2024
great. I will, I will move that. We uh adopt this the Proclamation for National Police
Work and I will second that all in favor. I I, and we'll hear from CNO.
Well, good morning and Joe and all Jefferson County sheriff. And I, uh I was gonna
say I appreciate your consideration in improving the proclamation, but you've already
limited it. So, um it means a lot to us as law enforcement officers um to know that,
that people um respect what we do and appreciate it. And I, and I also think that's
true of all occupations and all things that people do. They like to know that. But
um I just wanna say thank you for that. I also wanna say, um, you know, on May 15th,
the National Construction Memorial Day, um, just so people could remember those that
have given their all in protection of others. Um, and I, and what I wanna say too
is that I, you know, I've been the sheriff now for 5.5 years and I'm very grateful
for the relationship that we have in our county government. Um, with what we feel
is the support that I've gotten from the commissioners and other people in, in the,
in the county government. You know, I know there's only so much money to go around
with a lot of things and we seem to share that, uh, fairly, I think. And, um, but,
uh, I've never felt that, um, that my fellow elected officials and whatnot have been
against, uh, what, what, what kind of law enforcement enforcement we do in Jefferson
County. And, um, and I know other places where that's the case. Um, so thank you
for that as well. Any questions? Well, I'll just say, you know, thank you to, to
all your officers and staff as well as yourself, you know, I mean, usually we hear
about law enforcement when something goes wrong and, and rarely do we hear that in
Jefferson County. And it's, uh, it's really an honor to, to, to serve alone, you
know, parallel with you and, and we have, I think similar missions and you guys are
law enforcement officers are often the, the last line of emergency response. And,
you know, we're, we're, we're gonna talk about mental health um issues as well and
often uh issues that aren't even kind of in the, the bally wick of, of emergency
response end up on, on deputy's shoulders. And I, I just appreciate the flexibility
and, and responsiveness and empathy that our, our law enforcement officers in Jefferson
County provide safe.
I, I would just say I appreciate um the relationships I've developed with some of
your staff and your team and that I feel like I can call them if I have a question
or a concern and that, you know, they respond. And um there have been a number of
specific issues that I've, you know, been brought to my attention or I've witnessed
firsthand and I felt a really collegial and responsive um approach from your team.
And I, I really appreciate that. It's, it's um
sometimes hard to know who to call and sometimes, you know, it's, it's easy to know
who to call and when it's when I have to call the sheriff's office and talk to one
of you, you guys, it's, it's always a good call that I have to make. It's good to
hear. Yeah. You know, we're all in this together. So, uh thank you very much for
the proclamation and um,
I'll see you around you, right. Thank you, Sheriff.
So I did leave public comment open and I saw Maggie just walk in the room and I imagine
you have a public comment today. We didn't have any more. So we, we moved along with
our agenda. But if you would like to make a public comment, we can invite you to
the microphone. You have three minutes for comment. Ok, thank you very much.
As some of you may know, I was out at Grant's Pass versus Johnson, uh which
is case number 23 1 75 the Supreme Court appeal by Grant's Pass uh of the
ninth circuit court decision that said it was cruel and unusual punishment by the
eighth amendment to jail and find people who need to
sleep, eat, go to the bathroom on public property. Ok? So
also Earth Day happened in the eyes of Mother Earth. We are all squatters in the
eyes of Mother Earth. We are takers, we receive her boundless abundance and in return,
we desecrate pollute to the point of desert, desertification.
We thank her with gross belligerence, contempt and gratitude and
we hold the world captive by trafficking her resources. We oppress
those uh by using their labor labor, the sweat of their labor and their very knives.
Uh greater and greater portions of our populations are houseless, pushed aside,
made invisible, criminalized, demonized for needing to breathe, sleep eat,
use the restroom shelter is not housing, you cannot arrest and find people into
housing that does not exist. It takes an actual village. We need subsidized
housing. That does not come from double dipping landlords who leave units empty.
Well, to write off as a loss because they need to be in a lower tax bracket.
Anything that gets in our pathway, uh including all animals, plants
and our brothers and sisters. We, we demonize, we rape, we murder, we kill, we
displace everyone and everything deserves a home, a place where they can feel accepted
safe, where they can be a part of the community that values their input at whatever
level they can con can contribute while respecting their human, civil and ad a
rights race, gender, disability, age, na nation of origin, socio-economic status,
culture, injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Let's not compound it.
That's it. Thank you.
Is there anyone else who's joined us online since the last time I asked or anyone
who would like to make public comment this morning? Um You can use the raise hand
button at the bottom of your zoom screen.
See any other hands going up?
Would you like to respond? Sure. Thank you, Maggie. I agree with everything you said.
And I think we can be optimistic in the way we look for it. And a lot of those statements,
we can just put as aspirational goals for the way that we treat our people and our
planet. And uh you know, I think regardless of how uh the grants pass
case turns out, um I would argue that we continue to operate the same way as we were
under the ninth Circuit court decision where we don't criminalize homelessness. So
that was, that's how I would do it regardless. And we are working on plans still
to uh for the county to take over the emergency shelter at the American Legion. It's
not a, it's not a done deal yet but working on that to uh to bridge the gap until
the new purpose built shelter and permanent support of housing is constructed. And
it looks like our congressional directed spending to fill the gap for that shelter
slash permanent support of housing at Cowe Brown Village in the phase one area is
moving forward. So, you know, Congress willing, it looks like that that project uh
will start building this year. So, um I think we're, we're making good progress on
that on that front and I appreciate you uh lifting up and holding the voices of,
of our brothers and sisters in nature. Um I frequently invoke um nature of not having
a voice and try to work in, in as an advocate with my voice for the forests and the
animals that live in the forests. And so I appreciate you recognizing that they're
part of our community and often aren't heard in these in, in the venues in which
we're speaking about matters of policy. And I think it's important to um continually
provide a voice for those who don't have a voice human and otherwise. Yeah. Um
Is there anyone else who's joined us, who would like to make public comment this
today? Ok. Um Well, we'll leave public comment open till 930 as we do and we will
take up our um other proclamation that we have this morning and we will first
read the proclamation and then invite our guests to address the um issues
in the proclamation. And let me get over there. This is proclaiming May 2024 as Mental
Health Awareness Month. And um Commissioner Brotherton, would you like to start us
off? I would love to thank you a proclamation. Whereas one in five us adults experience
mental illness each year and less than half of them receive treatment. And whereas
one in six youth us youth experience a mental health condition each year and only
half of them receive treatment. And whereas 50% of all mental illness begins by age
14 and 75% by age 24. And whereas the average delay between onset of mental illness
symptoms and the treatment is 11 years. And whereas many people live in mental health
professional shortage areas. And whereas 65% of Americans are concerned about the
stigma around mental illness. And whereas education advocacy and creating awareness
will encourage people to seek treatment. And whereas with effective treatment, people
with mental illness can recover and lead full productive lives. Now, therefore, be
it resolved that we, the board of county commissioners do hereby proclaim May 2024
as Mental Health Mental Health Awareness Month in Jefferson County, Washington. As
the board of County commissioners, we call upon citizens, government agencies, public
and private institutions, businesses and schools in Jefferson County, Washington
to commit our community to combating stigma, increasing awareness and understanding
of mental health. And in recognizing the steps our citizens can take to protect their
mental health and the need for affordable, appropriate and accessible services for
all people with mental health conditions. Approve this 13th day of May 2024. Thank
you. You ended up with the
times. That's ok if I planned it almost as I'm happy to move that we adopted a pro
that proclamation proclaiming May 2024 is Mental Mental Health Awareness Month. I
will second that all in favor of adopting this proclamation,
Patrick Jim. Would you like to come up and make some comments house them first? I
agree, house them first. Can I
first? Everybody needs a place to live and there's a lot of money in this state to
pay twice over for everybody. Well, uh good morning. I'm Patrick Johnson, the president
of uh N of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the Jeff County Washington affiliate.
I've learned that you need to say Jefferson County, Washington because Jefferson
County is the most common county in the country. If you go to our website and you're
not careful, you're gonna bring up some Jefferson County in Colorado. But first,
uh thank you. To the commission for, for this is multiple years where you approved
this proclamation and it's no less important day than it has been. And also thank
you to you and, and to Sheriff Noel for standing for public office, it's never easy.
And in these times it seems to be even more difficult and to the staff as well to
Caroline and to mark for the good work to do. It's a pleasure to be here with uh
with uh Jim Naval from Discovery Behavioral Health today and also she uh sheriff.
Uh no, it's a great ex and you, maybe I I've just met you and also all of the people
that are involved in addressing mental health issues. And I think the resolution,
excuse me, the proclamation described very well. We know that housing is a key to
mental, to uh addressing mental illness. And it's very, very important. Uh We know
also that substance abuse is a part of a PTSD and uh and also just a word to, to
thank Sheriff. No, for the C I training that those officers go through very, very
important. Uh We are making progress. There is hope. I think it's very, very important.
Remember that uh the things that you're doing with Caswell Brown and I was delighted
to hear about the county support of the uh shelter at the American Leisure Hall that
will help anything that we can do to get people under a roof in place and provide
them with mills and a warmth is going to help their mental illness. Uh I understand
that you're going to be taking up a resolution for uh recognizing soft switch. I'm
not sure what you're asking. Uh I'm not sure what the relationship is except to say
it gives us a smile and a laugh and, and of course, we all, we all need that. But
again, I'll just finish by saying that we, we are making progress. There remains
much more work, work to do. The things that we do with NAMI, educate, support and
advocate are certainly part of it, but we couldn't do it without your support. And
finally, you issue many proclamations and you, you've issued one recognizing uh may
as Mental Health Awareness Month also, you know, Awareness Week and in October. And
that is very important because you act on behalf of the public. You are representative
natives of public policy. And when you endorse something like it, it says that we,
the people of Jeff County care about mental illness. We care about the people that
have a mental illness in their families and we're working hard to do something about
it. So even though you have lots of proclamations, they are no less important than,
than uh the work we're trying to do. So. Again, thank you very much to all of you.
Thank you, Patrick.
Good morning. I don't know if I can *** that, Patrick. You did a great job. I'm General
Vee CEO of Discovery, behavioral health Care. And I really just want to thank you
the commissioners, uh your staff. Um and the County General Sheriff. No, for all
your work in understanding and working with people that have mental illness uh and
helping agencies that help to those services. Um And really the biggest thing I take
away from that proclamation is really the stigma associated with mental illness and
trying to break that stigma. I've been battling that for 27 years when I used to
teach at the community college. I used to use this example of it was ok for parents
to talk about their son or daughter's breaking an arm, breaking a leg or having a
medical illness, but they would never talk about the mental illness because it brought
shame on the family. Do you think that's changed Jim? Because I feel like a real
shift in the last 10 years, I think now people more, more used to talking about it
and awareness. And I think it's these type of proclamations, it's kind of work by
counties to make that this is no different than any medical illness. It's not something
that people wish to have. All right, it's a genetic generally. Um And so these are
the things that we really have to get out there in the open and it's not to be hidden.
Um And it, I've watched it over 27 years, get better and better. And, um, it was
a theme when I worked in Illinois, we wore shirts that said, say it out loud and
be proud that, you know, ok, there's mental illness but there are ways of treating
it. Um, sometimes it's not 100% cured but how to live with it and how to, uh, you
know, there's medication but there's ways of doing it without medications. And, you
know, the housing is definitely important. Food and shelter are really primary to
one's ability to recover it. And I think that's some of the areas that we still need
to work on heavily is, is recovery of, is that housing. Um, but just to give you
some examples, uh, this first quarter, we actually served 1365 people, uh,
for the first three months, 744. Were you were new people, new enrollees? And so
we had a total of 6531 unique services. And that's everything from mental health
outpatient to psychiatric treatment, to sud services when you add that all up in
three months. So that's it. So we kept, we kept pretty busy for a small crew of people,
um, try to get people in the door as quickly as we can. Um, but believe it or not,
this first quarter is a drop from last year and the year before that. So I don't
know if that's a sign that we're getting more access to people, um, and people are
getting their needs met. I would hope that's what that says to us. Um, and, uh, I
think it's great that the county commission, this county in general, uh, is very
aware and really works hard to invest in behavioral health programs and to grow those
programs and to make this something that people can get better access to. I mean,
we can always have better access. It's hard. Um, you can never have enough staff
as we know. Uh, you know, in a sense, we are like medical providers. It's really
hard to get to see the doctor real quick. Right. We're in the same boat, you know,
and, uh, but we try to get our best to get people in. And, uh, yeah, I, I'm really
thankful for what you guys have done in my years that I've been here so far and,
uh, keep doing what you're doing. We'll keep doing what we do. And again, the sheriff's
office has been great working with them and side by side has been really nice. And,
um, I think that's made a big difference in the community outreach, a real program
which you've heard about. Obviously, it's out there on the streets. Um, yeah, I think
you've seen all these new programs come forward and that's really been helpful and
just to kind of just let you know up front, hopefully in the next couple of weeks,
we are gonna have a therapist down and we see drug services to make a little easier
access for people. So that's great. That's great news. Yeah. So again, thank you
again. Thank you. Thanks, Jim. Thanks Patrick. I was just gonna say that this time,
four years ago, I spent a lot of time talking about how, how we needed critically
needed navigators in our, in our police departments. And now both the sheriff's county
sheriff's office and the city of Port Towns and Police department both have navigators
and co with them. And I think that's great. And the real programs. I just attended
substance use summit, um, in S swim a couple of weeks ago and most of the folks in
the room were real team, um, providers and it was awesome to hear so many people
working on the ground in the front lines of this, you know, issue and, and housing
was in that room, the number one issue that people were talking about. And so it's
not lost on us. That housing is a big part of this puzzle that we're dealing with
and it's incumbent upon us to work double time to come up with solutions. Yeah.
Um, yeah, Sheriff Noel. Did you have something else?
And I'm gonna close public comment, but there was a hand raise before the end. Ok.
Ok. I will not go. I, I didn't know that this was happening too. Um, but, you know,
at the sheriff's office we deal a lot with um mental health issues. And I want to
thank you too for the proclamation. I think that, uh my personal feeling is a lot
of people don't realize how prevalent mental illness is in, in our community and
not just Jefferson County, but throughout the world. Um, and that, uh, you know,
being aware and, and whatnot makes a big difference, I think. I mean, you know, and
I've seen it change a lot in my 31 years of experience with the sheriff's office.
I mean, not that it still doesn't happen, but the, the jail has often become the
de facto mental health facility and with all the programs that um, Jim was talking
about and, you know, it, they, it's, it's having an impact on um the jail being the
place where people have to go. So anyway, I think that uh the more the community
knows about um mental illness and that it exists and whatnot. Um It is, is good too,
have a happy, healthy community and also the, the homeless aspect of it, you know,
not having a house um is, is really big in that respect too. So anyway, thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Sheriff. I'm going to, um, can I respond to the pro real quick
and then the proclamation before you go back to? Ok, great. Um Thank you. Uh uh You
know, this is, I've learned a lot about mental health issues and substance. You,
health issues since I've, I've taken this role and on various boards and, and worked
with many of you. I think the stigma is really getting, getting improving the, the
reaction in South County. Even since I've been here, it's a palpable change in the
openness to, you know, talking about mental health, both, you know, in our loved
ones as well as in ourselves. And I think that is a stigma too that is really hard
to um to overcome. So I think I appreciate having a, you know, a mental health professional
down in the, in the south end will be great. I think as a culture, we're gonna have
to start paying our mental health professionals more because I mean, let's, yeah,
eight years of school to make less than, you know, you can at mcdonald's almost is
what it seems like. So it's, uh there's a real disparity there and it's a hard, it's
hard work too. You're dealing with people who are in crises, you know, in the same
way that our law enforcement officers, there's a real, a lot of, you know, uh synchronicity
between the two proclamations that we uh read because, you know, it's, it's, it's
unfortunate that the law enforcement deals with so much of our mental health uh issues
right now. And that's not, that's not the agency that we should create to it. I have
to uh commissioner Dean who uh is in DC working this week. So can't be here pushed
a podcast that I thought was really revealing this. It's lost patience from Kuw and
uh and uh the Seattle Times and it was really, it goes into some of the systemic
issues about how we failed uh at our duty at, at protecting our, our community's
mental health and, and what those impacts are on a person, you know, really individual
um uh level. And I, I found it really kind of a good example of sect showing an example
to reveal the, the broken system. And we need to do better housing is absolutely
an element of that, fully believe in housing. First. If we had all the money in the
world, we would absolutely do that, you know, and we, we look for, for resources
in all these areas. We got to pay our, our, our professionals more. We gotta get
more housing that is accessible to all. And uh yeah, I just really appreciate all
the work that, that you guys are are are bringing to this field and, and to the importance
of proclamations Patrick, I think you say this every year and it's uh it reminds
me too, how, how important they are. And this is something where we're going to wear
our values on our sleeves. And that was, that's what proclamations are for. And I'm
I'm happy to promote both of these uh good causes. So thank you. Thank you, Commissioner.
I see the hands raised in the room now. So I've not closed. I did not close public
comment. I kept it open and we will um hear from Julia first and then Heather. Um
So go ahead and bring them over Carolyn. And if anyone else with us this morning
online wants to make a public comment. You can use the raise hand button at the bottom
of your zoom screen and we will hear a few more public comments before we move into
our agenda. Good morning, Julia. You have three minutes for comment. Good morning.
Sorry for being so late. Um I and it fits right here. Um My name's Julia Cochran.
I live in Heidi District, I think. Um and I'm putting that in my brain
geographical changes. Um and uh actually, I mean, it's just a question is that theoretically
tomorrow there is the next shelter meeting and I can't figure out who's putting that
on. Who's it? Because the health department did it before and my communication with
Laura. Is that? Oh, well, we're not doing this. I'm like, ok, so who is? So when
is the next shelter meeting? Where? And um yeah. Right. Hi.
Can I respond to that real quick? Um Yeah, it is tomorrow and uh public health is
is done leading it and I just kind of forgot that I was sending it out, but it is,
I've got it on my calendar for 11 o'clock tomorrow morning via zoom and I'll send
an invite to all those normal, uh, players that were the last ones as well as, um,
our finance department and our hr department in the county. Um, I just want to say
that Zoom is leaving out the people who can't zoom who mostly are lived experience.
I mean, I, I appreciate it. I think hybrid is great, but I think you have to have
a physical presence to allow people who are actually living the experience to take
place. Um, well, I encourage you to bring, to bring someone with you because tomorrow
is gonna have to be zoom. But we can, we can make that adjustment, uh, going forward.
But with the, the, the short time frame because of me, not, not doing my work earlier,
we're gonna do it zoom tomorrow. Ok. Thank you. Is that it, Julia? Yup. I guess so.
Ok. I see. You're nodding your head. Ok, Heather, good morning,
good morning. Yeah, I get that mute off. Uh, I just, I just wanted to add my voice.
I'm Heather Dudley Nola. I'm from Bayside Housing and Services and I live in District
one and, um, uh, just thank you so much to the Sheriff's Department to the Board
of county commissioners for making this a priority. It's, uh, it's become more and
more obvious in our work, obviously at Bayside Housing and services. It's an issue
that we deal with every single day. And I, um, I was encouraged to see that there
was some funding made available um in Clallam County for some mental health housing.
And I'm reaching out there to see how can we, how can we get access to that and what's
the process and how can we partner in the community to make that more possible? But
I just want to put my plug in here that not only the partnerships and the, the tone
setting that's happening here is really meaningful and I'm so grateful and um we
really appreciate you doing that. Um And at the same time, I think we really need
to continue to search out those resources. Yes, we um do not have all the money in
the world and there are some dollars out there that we could bring um to Jefferson
County and I'd like to partner more to make that happen specifically for mental health
and substance use disorder. And we're really finding in the work that we're doing
directly with people with lived experience that it's incredibly important. And I'm
trying to really wrap my mind around why this is important and how we can implement
it in a way that really serves people the best way possible. But that is that there
are some circumstances where we need to provide separate housing or mental health
versus substance use, substance use for people who want to be sober versus substance
use housing that for people who are not uh living sober lives. And then um people
experiencing homelessness that aren't necessarily dealing directly with mental health
or substance use in the same way that requires specific services. So I just wanna
keep putting that out there and that um we really need to focus on it. It's becoming
more and more of an issue and um the work you're doing here is really gonna support
that. So, thank you. Thank you, Heather. And I'll just call out that at the end of
the month we're hosting at the Bay Health Advisory Committee is organizing a conversation
about the opioid funds that are coming to the community. But I, I anticipate that
to be a much larger conversation about the issues that um people who are working
on the ground are seeing, affecting um residents and, and visitors to our community
most kind of critically. And then we can prioritize the use of those uh opioid funds
for the community in the most effective way we can. And that's the purpose of that
meeting and retreat. I'm seeing some people nodding. I know you a lot of you have
been invited, but I look forward to the conversation that's gonna happen there. Very
important. Thank you for doing that.
Uh No, I don't have a response, but thank you, Heather. Well set. I agree. I gotta,
I gotta look for, yeah, I got 11 thing I'll say is, you know, dollars often come
with administrative capacity needs as well too. And we run into that issue too where
we see sometimes, you know, commerce as a housing grant that we're like, oh, if only,
we could also administer that too. But there's, uh, there's only only so much free
money that you can take, which is hard to believe that we run, we run into that quite
a, quite a bit. And it's actually amazing what I've learned in my first term is how
much we commissioners take on work, take on the work. You know, because we see there's
a need to do the work and, and we actually reach our limits as well. I mean, we've,
we've said yes to picking up a number of shovels each of us and at certain points,
I'm just like I have got too much on my plate. So, um it is unfortunate that there
isn't more capacity for this, seeking out of funds and figuring how to deploy them
on the ground, but we'll, we'll do, we'll continue to do our best. Um I don't see
any more comments up our hands up for public comment. I'm gonna close public comment.
Um, unless anyone has a burning need for the, the last word, you know that I like
to hear from as many folks as possible. So if anyone wants to throw their hand up
in the zoom room or in the room room, not seeing any in the room room, not seeing
any of the zoom room, I'm gonna close public comment and Oh, wait, yeah. Oh, ok.
Ok. So um we are going well, we, our next item is 1030.
Um, the D CD, the 2024 docket. So Patrick, did you have a final comment? Uh, actually
a request. Is there time for a photo? I take a photo. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Sure.
As long as it takes less than 45 minutes and then we can do calendar where you want
us to be, we can, uh,
immortal.
I just wanna know from the Sheriff's Department if they win their case, if they're
gonna be housing the elderly and the mentally ill, if we're gonna be. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean if you win your case, if I don't have the case, you should be worried.
13123. Mhm.
12.
All right. I think the northern lights are behind us, aren't they? Yeah. Yeah, we're
gonna add that behind all our food.
Are you a, are you? I don't want,
ok, we're gonna move on in our agenda. We're gonna loop back up to commissioner's
briefing and I guess we'll start with looking back a week. I think we made it, made
it through briefing for the Maggie. We need to get on with our agenda. Thank you.
You can take your chat, chat to the hallway, folks.
See you, see, you see you soon. So we're gonna, um, look at the past week and then
we can talk about. I have a couple of things looking forward as well. Commissioner,
would you like to tell us what you've been up to. Certainly, let's see. Looking at
last week after I was with everyone here on Monday and then I had the, the second
meeting of the month with the North Root Canal Chamber of Commerce looking to hire
a full time executive assistant at the North Root Canal Chamber on Tuesday.
When was that? I don't even know what that is. Oh, I did some prep work for the healthier
together, one of the healthier together task force members created a draft of a spreadsheet
that we're gonna use. So I had a meeting with, with him to kind of go over the details
and get ready for the evening in the uh evening. Um or that was actually on Thursday,
sorry, on Wednesday. Uh we had the ORCA meeting as well as the finance committee
meeting with and as the vice chair, I, I chair that finance committee meeting and
getting ready for our budget, which is on the fiscal year. So it starts June, everything's,
you know, coming up roses really on, on uh track for another on budget year. You
know, I think I mentioned that there have been some phenomenally high uh fines. So
there was a fine from uh court Crown and seal and I forget where that was $2 million.
Um So there was considered a policy where it takes board direction to decide what
to do with penalties. And we're like, why would we treat this money any differently.
So we've kind of uh poo poo that and talking about reserves the appropriate reserve
amount and, and uh it's uh fascinating right now in school, I'm also studying compared
to, you know, cost, cost benefit analysis and things like that. So I love budget
conversations. Um but or is going great. I uh I wanted to show a video of me doing
my biochar burn but they were like uh that looks like it's illegal. So I, I didn't,
but it is legal 6121. So they, there's some rule writing that still needs that. Um
Well, they say that it still violates the Washington Administrative code, you know,
and sometimes it takes a while to reconcile a new law and the whack. Um But in the
whack, it says no burn barrels, a flame cap kiln which was made legal is uh shallower
than it is deep and it's, you know, um got a closed bottom and it's like, it's how
you create the fire and make a cap of the fire. Um But they, they're not quite ready
for that. Well, maybe you can hold that for a future. Oh, yeah, yeah. Um It is exactly
what the RCW justifies. Jill Silver said it was fine. Um
Then I was going to help serve uh Perk Tamales, the Commissioner Eisenhower and teammate,
but uh they were, everyone was just grabbing their own. So my, my labor was unneeded.
So I just was able to eat tamales uh and then had a meeting with uh couple of
landowners um and then talked to D CD about that as well. Everything working, ok.
On Thursday, met with Mark and Judy for, I think I had talked about uh tech and kind
of confusion about the financing and we had said we should do a supplementary RP.
So I met with uh Mark and Judy where they showed the real data that uh lodging tax
is quite a bit down when we're unlikely going to make our uh projections this year.
And that if we didn't do any like, well, there were a couple. Ok. Yeah, on, on this
meeting, we just talked about um uh really if we didn't do anything, it looks like
we would have $200,000 plus the budget amount that we recommended for next year.
So we elected to not do a supplementary RP because there really isn't any money to
do that when you say a budget amount for next year. What do you mean by that? Well,
I think I mentioned it and I'll, I'll just go on Friday. We had our LT A meeting
as well. So at our last special LT A meeting, we've been having them every couple
of weeks. Uh we recommended a slate of budgets, budgeted items. So pretty much went
through that, that spreadsheet, you're probably familiar with all the awards from
20 to 25 and went down and made uh budgeted recommendations for the Keystone. So
visitor centers, Jefferson Historical Society, I voted against TCC because I was
trying to defund it. But, uh, um, how that everyone else voted for it. Um I have
a TCC meeting tomorrow though. I'm gonna make a little presentation, I think. But,
uh, and did you do anything for parks? I always wondered if we could have a, like
a budgeted amount for, we put 50 K in for campground operations on the regular. We
did, you know, we could never quite find our way to, um, do the supplementary as
that, that parks did because they are with our email kerfuffle, they didn't get an
application in and since we gave everybody a haircut, it was hard to say, oh, we
should give these people funds even though we didn't give funds to these other worthy
nonprofits didn't do that, but they put it in the budget. Um, we did get public comment
that talked about how, um, I don't know, it was kind of all over, we need legal recommendations.
Some people didn't think that we should be able to, um, make that budgeted recommendation.
And, you know, MRC kind of talks about having to have applications for it. If you
look at the RCW, which I studied quite a bit, it is sort of absent. I mean, you can't
have the board of county commissioners just decide we're going to give money to this
and this and this. It has to be according to RCW, a recommendation from the Lodging
Tax Advisory Committee, how they make that recommendation? There's an inference of
an application but it's not quite clear. So we need to get kind of legal feedback
before we push, it was going to be on consent agenda today. I think that 606 $155,000
is how much we suggested the budget including 300,000
because we're in this transition of you taking LT back on and we looked at LT A.
Um the city of Port Townsend has a significant budget for L A every year. And so
that was kind of a model where we started thinking about what would we want to budget
for? And uh this person Jesse um uh was asking or
did, did a little bit of research on that, that we have to verify too. But the city
of Port Townsend creates a budget every year and then submits that to the LT A committee,
their, their city LTC committee and, and then they make the recommendation. So there
is an extra little step there. But uh since it's the LT A making it this, I don't
know, we just have to still parse if it's totally legal. So that's why we don't have
it on today, but it was really pretty easy to uh thank you to figure out the the
budgeted amounts. I mean, basically, yeah. Uh so a lot going on there.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for picking up the ball there. Yes, totally. Uh met with
on Thursday, met with Josh and Amanda Christofferson over at D CD. Um the, the Glen
Cove work the grant we got from um from the recompete
was
uh it's $60,000. It doesn't have to be spent out immediately or anything. But um
with some illnesses at D CD, the person that was going to be managing that contract
RFP is not available yet. So Josh suggested, hey, can we just do this? So, as you
said earlier, I'm uh I will be providing staff time to setting up the Glen Coe public
Outreach program with a Amanda will be putting an RFP together. Um And then I'll
just be kind of again facilitating, you feel like you have the time for that here.
I am managing. I'm managing our, our, our board capacity. Yeah. No, I mean, I, I'm
really excited, I've already done a powerpoint presentation because I was honestly
really excited to do this in February as part of recompete. So it's work that I've
already kind of thought through but that we didn't have to do because we pulled that
from consideration for phase two. So, no, it's, it's OK. I'm excited to do it. I
was not able to go to the second uh public charette with a design meeting with uh
at the Quilcene Community Center with the uh with the group that is proposing to
skate park in Quilcene. But I was happy to hear that, uh that project made it through
the first round of the uh grant, the community outdoor athletic facility grant. So
there's one more phase as I understand to go through, but they're still in the running
that would fully fund that skate park. So really excited for them and the hard work
they put in, um I was not able to go to that though because I was in this room for
another healthier together task force meeting. Thought it was really good. I shared
my big, you know, period takeaway that gotta be a Seward area. And I think that's
a reasonable criteria. We went, we had sis Jim and Erica who presented to us before,
pretty much present the same sis kind of conclusion as before they made a few things
based on some task member, uh letters about the difficulty of managing storm water
at the mountain view site. So they had kind of the one new bit of their presentation
was they had a slide on two considerations, one if they could infiltrate storm water
and it was like 100 and $50,000 or super up to a super challenging, like there's
no infiltration, it's like a processing facility that was $5 million which would
eat up the entire contingency in that $37.1 million. Um So we went through that and
went through the plans um I thought it was a good conversation. We still um you know,
you have like clarifying questions and then you have cross examination questions
and we still need to work out kind of the cadence of our, of our meeting a little
bit. But um it's a good group. They're really excited about the work and then we
spent about half of the meeting or a little less than half of the meeting going over
this spreadsheet that I had worked on that CRE really uh built and I, I will find
a little bit that will be our kind of master document. I'm gonna bring one more thing
forward, I think for our next meeting on the 20th to about making recommendations
along the way. So we can make sure that we don't, you know, we have some people that
are in the task force that are very um a lot of experience with commercial building
or, you know, looking at these uh big project spreadsheets and everything and some
people who have a lot of experience with aquatic facilities and not so much with
Excel. So thinking about a way of recommendations as we go along, that we can come
back and, you know, ratify it at the last meeting. So we can make sure that we get
constructive input from all the people with the, with the disparate skill sets as
we move through the process. So those are kind of my takeaways. But um it was a,
it was a positive meeting again and
that, uh, yeah, those were the, the high points, a lot of, a lot of, kind of off
the ball work last week working on healthier together, uh, not meetings and themselves
off the ball. Ok. That means, you know, like if I'm on a, it's a basketball. Right.
So I'm moving around, I'm still moving even though I'm not in one of these meetings
right now. What does your grandma mean by off the ball? I think, I think it was like
a uh Uber off the wall. Oh, there's off the wall and there's off the ball,
not your grandmother's name. OK. Ok. Um OK, let's see, my last week.
Um I was here with you guys on Monday the sixth. Um on
Tuesday, I met with one of my fellow members of the Carbon and Forest Management
work group just to kind of pregame. The meeting I wouldn't be attending on Wednesday
cause I gave her my proxy for voting on the work group. And um that was a great conversation.
Um Then we later Tuesday morning, I met with uh Pinky and Amanda Grace and Amanda
Christofferson joined us this time on the board of health sanitation sub-committee.
Um continuing to grapple with um small lots implications of uh
kind of what are the sanitation options for small lots. Um Later that day I met
with um the land trust and just a pregame, a meeting we had on Friday with Rain or
timber company just to try and get a sense of what their intentions felt like. It
felt like a premarital discussion. What are your intentions with Jefferson County?
So, um, anyway, so I'll talk about that when I get to Friday. Oh, yeah. Do you feel
like on Friday you understood their intentions? Well, I'll get to that when I get
to Friday. So, um, and then Tuesday evening I attended in person uh regular monthly
meeting of the Jefferson County Marine Resources Committee meeting. Um I just have
to say again and again, I really value that table and the amount of knowledge relative
to the marine environment in Jefferson County. And just generally, um that comes
together once a month to grapple with what's going on in, in our county. Um And Neil
Harrington and I both, we've been driving by the Discovery Bay where we, where we
um work with a whole bunch of MRC members to spread some oyster cult for um Olympia
oyster. Uh And every time we drive, Neil Neil said, I just look at, I look out there
to see if I can see the little white shells. So I'm like, I do the same thing, but
it's just, it's great to actually get out and do some of the work and then live next
to that work and it'll be fun over the months and years to watch. Um Oy, when the
oysters come back, you know, um, let's see, uh Wednesday was a very busy day with
Tamale her Tamale Day. So months ago there, there was word put out that per was looking
for more ideas for fundraisers for per and I was like, well, I, I have, I, I've never
gone to a per game. I have an idea. And so, um I make Tamales and so we made, I got
together with a group of perk members, uh last a week, the weekend before last and
we made 350 Tamales and we sold them all on Wednesday. There was a few dozen left,
but we just decided we were gonna sell the dozens, the leftover dozens and they got
scooped up and there was an area tamale left. Well, they were delicious. Yeah. So
I think it's a, it was a success and I don't have the accounting yet from the Perc
team, but ad is working on getting that. But I think we also made some money for
Perc, which is great. Um We had a pre planning session for the Opioid
Funding Summit that we're having on May 30th. Then uh that's, that was later Wednesday
afternoon after all the Tamales. And then uh at the end of the day, I went out and
met with a resident of um one of one of my uh constituents in Irondale to talk about
issues he's having with getting his house final. Um So I'm gonna be following up
with D CD. If you're listing D CD, I'm gonna be following up to find out what's going
on with this, this one property. I have a couple of specific property questions to
come to the team with. On Thursday, I traveled to Slim. I feel like I've been in
s swim a lot lately. I, I traveled to swim for um, the Strait Environmental Restoration
Network, local integrating organization, which I am co-chair of with Representative
Thring hosted the Pewter Sound Partnerships Ecosystem Coordinations Board
meeting at the Dungeness River Center for much of the day on Thursday. And um it
was a great, we had two, we had two sessions within that meeting that we facilitated
and one was on climate change and the work that the both the North Olympic and Jefferson
Land Trusts have been doing collaborative, collaboratively on climate change implications
on Jefferson County to various ecosystems and also to human human habitats. And yeah,
that was, that's work that's been going on for about five years. We probably have
all seen the maps. They did an amazing um set of maps showing how looking at different
implications. So they shared that with the ecosystem coordinating board. And then
we facilli, I facilitated a conversation um with a number of community leaders from
both Clapham and Jefferson counties about um unique rural challenges uh in
ecosystem recovery issues. And we talked about, you know, septic issues and we, we,
we brought up that um oftentimes in rural communities, we don't have the capacity
to uh apply to grant seeking. And we were talking about that just earlier this morning.
But that a lot of times we come up where we're kind of in competition with big other
big Puget Sound counties like Kings and Ish Pierce counties for these funding dollars
to do restoration and conservation work. And that um it's really hard because we're
strapped for capacity to do those grant those big grant proposals. And um we also
brought up the fact that um some of the funding was taken away from the local integrating
organizations. There used to be this $100,000 that was given each year to the local
integrating organizations that they would then grant out to priority projects in
the community. Peter Sound Partnership, pulled that money back and um that got to
be a little bit of a spicy moment in the whole day where I said this out loud and
then someone said, that's not how it went. And then in a private conversation afterwards,
she said, well, that's kind of how it went. And I was just like, oh, so we advocated
for um resources coming to the rural communities, for us to actually, we know we
know what's going on in our community block grants, basically. Yeah, let us let us
make the decision. That's great, good work. And um and you know, it's just, I felt
like it was a really good conversation. And, and I got a lot, we got a lot of our,
our team got a lot of compliments at the end, Kathy Lear, Rebecca Benjamin and Karen
Eld and I were the, we're the panel for that panel. Um And we got a lot of compliments
of how that went and then I came back
and I, let's see, what did I do first? I went to the Clean Water District meeting.
Um I'm on that committee. So that's um kind of a spotlight on our pick program in
the county and looking at how the water quality is at a bunch of specific locations
around the county. And I really value that work. And that was one thing that we advocated
for these ecosystem coordinating board meeting was more stable funding for pick programs
so that we can actually pollution identification and control, right. Sorry. Yeah.
Too many acronyms, acronyms. So, but yeah, uh the pollution identification work that
the county does with our clean water district um to identify the problem spots and,
and come up with solutions for them. And that's one area that we feel like the Puget
Sound Partnership could allocate more funding towards um not just for Jefferson County,
but for all the counties in the Puget Sound region. And so that, that asked for more
locally directed, you know, on com noncompetitive funding would be like next,
it could be in the next biennial budget. Yeah, which is will be this next session.
Yeah, another need for legislative leadership from us. Thank goodness we're here.
He, we're, we're gonna be playing tennis for, for the whole year. Um Let's see.
And then I came back and, um, I ran down to the Maritime Center's grand opening of
their, their welcome center. They're calling it the welcome center. What was the
Chandler e the bottom floor floor of the Maritime Center? Um They, because we're
now part of the uh maritime heritage area. Um They're kind of the National Park gateway
for the Maritime Heritage area at the Maritime Center and they've created a beautiful
interpreted center within the Chandler. So they still have the Chandler in there
or the, the, the store as what is it? I'm sure it is a Chandler is where you buy
things to fix your boat, basically, like, you know, um all the, the bright work that
refinish your boat, the, all the um shiny bits, the bronze bits, the pulleys and
that's what I see. And so over the years, there's been criticism of, of the, the
chary, not really being a Chandler, you not really focused on needs for boats, but
more focused on, you know, uh outdoor equipment. And so, you know, really what the
Chandler has now is uh stuff to keep people warm on the water, to get people out
on the water. Uh Access to the water is more the focus of it. But now as of last
week, they have this great interpretive center in inside the Chandler and I encourage
everyone even. Yeah, go check it out. It's really cool. Um Then I came back up to
the courthouse and had to check in with our drainage district consultant just to
talk about the next step in our drainage district process. We're developing a survey
and then we're gonna send a postcard to all residents of the drainage district with
a link to that survey. So we can get as much input into the survey as possible. Um
Over the next I'd say eight weeks, this is all gonna happen. So it sounds like things
are flowing along a lot going on on that front and then Friday and that's the only
I get. Um I guess the main thing on Friday was we did have that conversation with
um the land trust Memphis Watershed Institute and Rainer Timber Company. And you
know, they were, there's some specific projects that uh both NW I and JLT have been
trying to work with rainier on like the head the taboo headwaters. Um And rainier
has not been super open to having conversations about acquisition or conservation
of some areas. But what it felt like to me is that because rainier, rainier a, you
know, they acquired hope resources that they're fairly new player in our community.
I think it really is an instance where we need to get to know each other, you know.
Yeah. And, and they said that and they said they're, they're open to hearing, you
know, what we're interested in seeing happen. Um, it's unclear to me whether they're
how open they are or if we're going to have to bid way above market value to, you
know, secure their commitment to selling some of these properties. But I don't think
we legally can, can we well over market value. I don't think, well, we can, we can't,
the county, the land, I mean, they can, they can work with the Navy and get rep funding
to acquire the conserva, they, they can, they can pair up funding to, to at least
meet what rainier thinks it needs for, to be bought out of some of these parcels.
And it's, I'm not talking about the county, buy him, talking about the, our collaborators,
buy them. So anyway, it was an interesting conversation and, um, you know, I brought
up the point. Well, you're, you know, they, they, they brought the point. Well, we're,
we're a forest company. We, we want long term sustainable forestry in Jefferson County.
And I said, well, why are you selling 100 and 15,000 acres on the west end? That's
the best tree growing, growing ground in the country some of the best. And they said,
well, that's all part of the part of the puzzle that we're putting together. And
I was, I, I left a little bit confused by that comment. So you don't know, you don't,
you don't understand their intentions yet. Not, not, not completely. Uh, do you,
I mean, why? So they're just, that's part of the, they, they were kind of holding
their cards close to their chest as to why they're selling there and don't necessarily
want to sell. Yeah. Yeah. So, but it was a good for me, a good initial conversation
and, uh, appreciate the openness to sitting down and having the conversation and
continuing it. And then there was definitely that, that openness and intention there.
Have you, uh, driven on 104 recently to see Crocker Lake that's been revealed on
the, on the highway down now as you, as you drive into because that logging and I
think was that, uh, is that DNR last? Yeah, last Crocker. But now every time we drive
in, um, you know, my daughter is like, is that Crocker Lake right there? It's a,
it's a beautiful view that's been opened up. So whatever the other impacts are, check
it out. Ok. Well, I'll make a detour. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you probably don't go that
way. You just go down to the gateway.
Ok. That was my week last week. Um,
Mark, do you wanna talk about what you did last week? Sure. So Monday the sixth um
board meeting, Tuesday the seventh Senior Management at nine o'clock and at one o'clock
I met with a man of Millholland, uh from the Farmers of Market and she has a concept.
She wants to propose, uh where in addition to the Port Townsend Community Center
would, would be constructed that could serve as a site for a year round covered farmers
market by taking the parking lot area. So, um that
facility is in a historic district, part of the facility is considered historic.
But uh John mcdonough from the city said probably wouldn't be an issue from the historic
preservation point of view. Yeah, parking lots are usually what they want to preserve,
right. And it's the gym area that's, you know, the older part. Anyway, she's gonna
develop the concept and maybe a rendering and then they can't hear you very well.
I think I would need to bring that to the board for consideration because it would
be a dramatic change.
Then two o'clock a meeting and then 315, uh my weekly with Josh Peters.
Then on Wednesday, the eighth, um, monthly meeting with Judy Shepherd. And then I
had a discussion with the folks in the IT group about whether to hire a manager or,
uh, a department director and, and they all believe the department director would
be the better way to go. And so I'm in the process of reconsidering how, how to move
central services forward. So, what, what's the argument there? A director versus
a manager?
I mean, wage, of course. But I mean, what, what would be the difference in those
two positions? The manager, um, they're concerned about being micromanaged and So
if you have an it manager, that's all that person does. Um It could be
that the default would be to micromanage. And if you have a director that's handling
facilities and it,
so that got you. So it would be across the two. Ok. That was their their thinking.
And so the one director of two managers is the idea that you one director or, or
two managers or two managers.
And then at 11, we met with the staff from gravity to kick off our um our budget
project, the one that you approved for the budget book and on online budget reports.
And then tomorrow at noon, I did a quick bit of math, 350 tamales divided by two
because people pay 10 bucks for two, right? So that's 100 and 75 sets of two times
1017 50. That's a pretty good per day. But that, that's not what we made. There's,
there's a couple of dozens in there and there was a lot of three tamale. Yeah. Yeah,
it was probably a pretty good per day that we think. But yeah, I think the rice and
the coleslaw was great also. Um Then at one o'clock, the North Olympic Peninsula
city manager, county administrator catch up, got a full crew. Uh It was a very good
conversation and then at three o'clock was apart quarterly check in
on Thursday, CEO breakfast with Cindy Brooks and h we've done one on one with Brent
and then Greg your Zoom meeting on tech
and fully cap and then at 230 met with Lisanne Coker and LD re showed up and that
was to address the concerns that they voiced on Monday. And so we're gonna have a
workshop on the 20th with D CD. I think they'll have some interesting metrics for
you. Well, to show that Jefferson County is in much better shape than they are indicating
and then healthier to have a task force meeting on Friday. I had my first regular
meeting with Mikey from it and then I took part in the LTTE special meeting and then
had a Zoom meeting with Tracy Coleman. Pretty much her last official act as the department
director as a full time employee. She will continue to uh close out projects as a
court hire. Ok. And so, so that's my, so mark, what's, what's the wack arpa
table? What's that? Um
It's a, it's a quarterly discussion about uh the ever changing rules. The treasury
has on how to spend money, uh what's considered obligated, what's considered spent
but haven't, haven't we spent all of our money pretty much? But as the rules change,
we need to be aware of the rule changes because, you know, they can retroactively
apply a rule change. Are there any concerns on your part? Not really? I think it's
just a good opportunity. Um, a fair number of finance and manager types. Uh take
part in those calls and so it's, it's good for them. I just wanted to know what it
was. Um, they'll taper off as more and more counties exhaust their
funds and I probably will stop taking part.
My understanding was we, Jefferson County was pretty early to the getting our funds
spent, which felt, I think important to all of us just because we didn't know what
the future held in terms of those, those funds and we didn't want, you know, the
funds to be clawed back, distribute them. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, I think
we are, they, are they even now proposing to try and claw back funds that have already
been obligated? Ok. Ok. Just wanted to check
the money, right.
Ok. Ok. Um, we have 12 minutes. Do we wanna look, I have one thing that I'd
like to talk about looking ahead. All right, I'm a little bit. So, um, Shannon Burns
called, uh, last week and, and said that there's going to be a state, um Senate,
the Health and Human Services Committee of the state legislature is gonna be touring
here in Jefferson County about 18 people on the 10th, which is a Monday, June, uh-huh.
And um, they're gonna visit Proctor House and then the Nest and L 360 potentially
Parliament and Pfeiffer House. So it's a housing focus and it's a Monday and they're
targeting 2 p.m.
um, a couple of hours at 2 p.m. So I, I'm figuring we have a couple of options. One,
we could try and be done early on the 10th so that Kate or you could go, I'm assuming
it would be one of the two of you because of that housing focus. Um Or we could just
continue along with the quorum of the board and, and let one of our, one of, one
of the three of us released, one of the three of us to attend this tour, which I
have two times written down. I have 1 to 5 written down and I also have 2 p.m. written
down. I think 2 p.m. is the, the game time when we would wanna be a part
of the tour. But I think the whole tour might be going from 1 to 5.
Yeah, I have 2 p.m. for Proctor House Tour. Um I, and then it would logically
maybe be Kate cause she does so much work with the legislature. She might know some
of the legislators participating, but it might be good for um you to go great because
you'll be here next year when the legislature is convened and ready to talk about
trying to sneak me into that.
Um I, I think that's fine. I think Kate would be great. Should we vote? No, I, no,
I mean, we, we probably need her before we can make a final decision. But I mean,
unless we wanted to invite them here for a brief conversation with all of us as part
of the tour. That's a thought just, you know, my brainstorm as you say it. So, I'm,
I'm fine with anything Kate or myself. We could, we could, uh, even, we could even
take, do a, you know, a late lunch or something and recess from, you know, 130 to
3 or something. So we can structure it. Carolyn, can you work with Kate and Greg
to get that one of them scheduled for that? That'd be great. Thanks. And I'll, I'll
give you my post that note from my conversation with channel. So you have all the
notes. Ok. That was my future. Um To do I had,
so do you wanna take a look at your this week, week ahead? Yeah, let's see with you
guys all today and, and no, no evening meetings today. That's great. I make Pad Thai
at home though. I been doing that a lot. Great use of Tamarind. You're gonna make
it tonight. Yeah. What time? I just, yeah. Yeah, 60 then tomorrow I have that shelter
meeting that I've got to send an invite out to at 11 o'clock and I have a bit of
uh conflict. Um You're at BH AC, I've got a tourism
coordinating council that didn't get on the calendar, my public calendar, but that
from 2 to 4 and I thought I should probably go since I suggested defunding it um
to talk about why I said that and there's also the EPL discussion at, uh, D CD and,
and, or I guess a public health about the inter gov slash EPL that I probably will
miss at 330. And then I will, uh, we're gonna be down in Quilcene for the Growth
Management steering committee this, uh, this time on Tuesday. So I'll be down there,
be skipping school to go to that. Um, on Wednesday, I think we moved the budget meeting
to next week when we have a conflict. Um I think I have a school to work transition
meeting. I'm gonna try to go to, as I said, it is my daughter's birthday as well.
So a little bit of celebration there before I head out to class. And then on Thursday,
regular check in with uh Diane from the healthier together task force. I'll be at
the Board of Health meeting. I will skip the Wack broadband advisory committee. Um
And then
yeah, Board of Health and meeting a reporter about uh potential management of the
shelter. Then on Friday, I had uh I was gonna go to Kitsap County to polls vote for
the Olympic Consortium board, but that was unfortunately the same day that our first
field trip for the healthier together group got scheduled. So I probably instead
will go with members of the task force to visit the uh swim Y MC A and the shore
aquatic facility in Port Angeles. Um My other dilemma there is, I think I was supposed
to be on the radio, this Friday, which would not really be very feasible. Um, but
I could potentially zoom in from, at 1230 from the, from the tour. I'm trying to
think of. But if, uh, if you wanted to switch, I think you're, are you, I can't do
anything on Friday. Ok. That's all right. I might try to find someone to, to fill
in for me this, this Friday, since that thing. Uh, it just showed up on my calendar
this week and then I will be with, uh, I'm sure some. Maybe Kate can though, maybe
Kate can. I'll send her a note. Uh, and then, uh, I'll be at the, with the sheriff
and the county county leaders at the, the, the roadie parade on Saturday. One o'clock.
Right? One o'clock is the grand parade. I always forget that. Yeah, I think that's
the case and that's my week. Ok. Well, we have a few more minutes, so I'll try and
zoom through, um, tomorrow, I have the Behavior Health Advisory
Committee meeting in the afternoon and then I gonna attend the first little bit of
the indivisible meeting, um, in Port Townsend and then blaze to quil scene for the
Growth Management steering Committee. I might be a few minutes late. Um, but I will
be there for the bulk of it and Aly will be sharing that. Ok, great. Um Wednesday
afternoon. I have the chimi empower Teens Coalition. And then I have um the next
short farm public open house meeting at WSU um
and Thursday I will attend the perc meeting just to get to debrief Tamales
and I want the hard numbers. Yeah, get the numbers and then I have a hold for the
law library board uh middle of the day. And then we have the Board of Health meeting
in the afternoon. What's the law library board? Well, it's something that hadn't
met since the 19 eighties or nineties, but Judge Mack, cause we can be in the law
library board and it's about how we maintain the law library upstairs. Yeah. Yeah.
So we were having staff look into a few different options after our first meeting
of the reinvigorated Law Library. And so this next meeting will be to talk about
what we learned. I mean, shouldn't it just be all online? That's 11 very viable solution
that we were having staff look at. Uh, and then Friday, I am
out of pocket on a personal adventure, family related, personal adventure. So,
um trying to prioritize what's the rattly let I have left a family and spend a little
bit of time with them every once in a while. So good for you. Um And then Saturday,
I will be at the roadie parade doing at least two laps, one with the county leaders.
I think the front of the parade and then I, um, will be riding in a 1957 Thunderbird
convertible for my campaign entry, one of my constituents offered years ago and I
said, let's do it. So we're, we're doing it for the fun of it. Driving in a gasoline
powered car. I feel like letting down your constituents. I know. But you know what
I am also an old car nut. Yeah, that would be cool. So, that's good. At least you
have to walk once you get to ride once too. That's right. So that's what I've got
this week.
Can I reiterate one thing for Mark, who had to step out for a moment? Just that I
don't think I'm going to be able to make the EPL meeting tomorrow. I have a Tourism
Coordinating Council that conflict because I have another conflict. I did share
that. I don't know whether you clicked on anything. I gone through it but exciting.
Yeah, I
love it. Great. You got like 2.5 minutes if you want to look at this week.
Ok. Obviously today with the board and then uh tomorrow, uh from nine to noon, John
Morrow has offered a, a training opportunity at point. Hudson is talking about occupational
burnout and the science of stress and we have about 12 people attending that training
and I think I might go for a short while and then uh two o'clock a meeting
and then the EPL discussion, Greg that you mentioned that you can attend. Um I'll
bring the materials and I'll, I'll share maybe you have another workshop with the
board. Um, so you all know where we are and then the Growth Management steering committee
and from 6 to 8 down in cool scene, uh, I do that with removing. Oh, that's an option,
isn't it? On Wednesday? Uh, we're gonna, um, finally after giving D CD
30,000, I think, four or five years ago to do a fee study, we have the results and
so we'll be coming, uh to you to have a philosophical discussion about the rates
we charge for T CD work that can be supported by fees, whether they want 100% cost
of recovery or some uh lower percentage.
Um, and then uh additional negotiations with the, the corrections
Officer bargaining unit. And then on Thursday, I have a hold for collective bargaining
with central services. We'll see if that actually happens. I sure hope it does. And
then, um there's a meeting on the opioid in the middle of that negotiation se session.
So I'm gonna probably take a break from negotiations so I can listen to the opioid
uh discussion and then a gender review
in the afternoon on Friday, meet with Josh Peters, then County Coordinations
meeting and then Veronica scheduled a discussion on the mental health fund, how that
money is being spent. So I don't know what that's gonna result in, but
we'll see what happens. So if you have suggested agenda items for chey coordinations.
I certainly like to hear what they might do. Great. Ok, we are right at 1030
we have a timed item for 1030 which is deliberation and potential action for establishment
of final docket 2024 Comprehensive Plan and Unified Development code annual amendment
cycle and planning commission recommendation on the 2024 concert Comprehensive Plan
amendment cycle final docket. And since we are potentially taking action here, we
may want to add a public comment period on this item just in case there's anybody,
you know? Yeah, when we take action, that's good. Ok. So are we bringing Josh over?
Um he declined but he can raise his hand and he would like to be brought over. Ok,
great
over to you all. Thank you commissioners. It's nice to be here with you today this
morning and I'm pleased to report out on where we are in our process of establishing
the 2024 Comprehensive Plan and U DC Amendment cycle docket and um
the next slide, please. So, um also part of this, as you mentioned, will be a deliberation
and decision on where the board would like to go um in making the decision on the
final docket for this year's work plan. So I've taken a picture here of our flow
chart that you've seen before. Uh flowing from top to bottom today is May 13th by
the second week um in May the board makes a decision on what should be on the final
docket. And we've gone through the process with the Planning Commission uh beginning.
Um In April, we had a, a meeting to talk about the uh four items that were on the
docket. And in that meeting also, we introduced 1/5 item. So we have five items that
we evaluated. And uh part of the information, precise, the information on the agenda
is uh the D CD analysis and recommendation and the Planning Commission recommendation
for how to address these five items. The um top box in our flow chart
is Planning Commission holds a hearing and we did that on May 1st. And um we had
only two commenters in favor of the Planning Commission are in favor of the DC PS
recommendation for four items for the document. And um so now here we are today,
the two colored boxes is a decision tree for the board to accept D CD and Planning
Commission's recommendations. Or if you'd like to make changes to the docket, you
hold your own hearing by July 1st. And uh so if that were the case, we would schedule
then um a public notice in the newspaper um for July 1st hearing. So
uh next one, what you do.
So anyway, we um the at uh the history of our annual amendment
cycle, we did not receive any site specific amendments and there weren't any of these
other proposals. So we're dealing with five suggested amendments. And um
we again recommend four to be documented. We look, we look at our recommendations
based on the need that we perceived the urgency and appropriateness of working on
these things in 2024. So I'll go through uh each of these briefly
and um and you have our recommendation documents too for reference if you have questions
from those as well. The first suggestion amendment is to look at the poor catalog
Irondale urban growth area, particularly the uh Unified Development Code amendments
and possibly comprehensive plan amendments. In light of having the wastewater facility
developed. We have an opportunity to look at implementing uh certain housing projects
in particular habitat for humanity is developing a 17 acre parcel with um I think
over 100 and 40 units plan which will require sewer and we also require some amendments
to our development regulations that would be more uh urban in nature that we need
to do. And um the timelines of this is important that we do this in 2024. So Joel,
can I just ask in this image here? You have the entire UG A indicated but you're
really talking about for the phase one sewer boundary for these. Um The the amendments
would be for the entire UG A. It just they don't kick in until sewer service goes
there, but it's good. You don't want to just do a U DC amendments for phase one and
then phase two and phase three. So we uh for example, we might be looking at different
ways to subdivide property or different densities that could be accommodated. And
so the the focus has to be on phase one and what we can do in the near term, but
also. Ok. OK. That makes sense. You excited.
The second amendment proposal is looking at four towns in urban growth area in light
of new legislation that allows an urban growth area to divest itself of uh land that
is not appropriate for urban development like farm land or critical areas and can
do a one for one swap with land that is appropriate for urban development. And so
our uh concern is uh the Cast Brown Village is limited by um what they
can do as far as uh wastewater management and uh large on site septic systems are
very costly and this might give us a good tool for providing a sewer service to casual
Brown so they can provide more service to the community. And so this has a time limited
factor also for uh funds from commerce that might be available to add to this project.
So we want to do this review coming forward.
We are proposing to uh bring forward as we discussed last year, the 2023
amendments that we were working on with the Planning Commission for rural housing
in um a housing overlay or other ways to further housing in rural areas.
So we're bringing this forward as a post 2024 an amendment. And um part of what we
would be doing is looking at some changes in the legislation regarding family size
or, or the lack of the, you don't uh define how large families can be. So when you
look at congregate housing and review farmworker housing, as well as looking at uh
development of performance standards for cluster development and how that would work
in a rural area.
The fourth amendment proposal is um normal annual Housekeeping Amendment Dock. Um
We're doing so many other U DC amendments within the proposals that we've talked
about so far, the urban growth area and uh rural housing that we did not um feel
that anything that was on our housekeeping amendment was going to be that important.
Uh We did quite a few of these last year in 2023 we have about 13 major amendments
that we need to clean up the U DC. So this is one that we're recommending we do not
pursue.
So the last one is uh was received from the Port of Port Townsend to review
the uh overlay three in particular in the airport, central public facility. And um
this is in response to some needs identified uh by being our team, Jefferson
E DC and the port in um providing additional space to our existing overlay three
which currently is about 20 acres and it allows um Hi like industrial
airport, compatible type of, of commercial activity to occur. And um so we're looking
at the possibility of including more land area to meet some emerging needs for um
light industrial businesses. And uh so this has a an urgent nature to it that we
want to address in 2024.
Yes,
this depicts in the blue some possible areas that might be expanded within the airport,
essential public facilities.
Ok. So in summary, we have um four proposals that we would like to recommend bringing
forward into our 2024 comprehensive plan due to the amendment cycle.
Yes. And uh back to this decision point. Then um the board may choose
to uh after deliberation to make a motion to accept the planning mission and
community development recommendation or to hold your own here. And that's where we
are at this point.
Ok. Thanks so much Joel. I feel briefed on the four issues that were brought to our
attention. I do feel briefed. I have a couple of questions. Um One. So we have already
said we're not going to have a 2025 cycle. Is that just for site specific changes
or is that for, you know, these internal ones as well in 2025? Uh we're not having
an amendment cycle in 2025 because we are in the process of doing a periodic review
and those amendments would be made in 2020. Gotcha. Yeah. So I imagine there is a
difference between the site specific proposal for a re zone which um would complicate
what we're trying to do. In 2025 we are doing a lot of community outreach which would
provide us input um on what might become a suggested to me. But um we're kind of
in the driver's seat for a periodic review for 2025 and encourage the public to participate
in that process to bring forward their ideas. I guess there's no reason for us uh
amendments in 2025 since we're doing a comprehensive periodic updates and then we
would resume in 2026 with the regular.
Ok. Well, there was one question made earlier in public comment today about uh the
moratorium on short term rental uh permitting. And I guess I'm wondering, does that,
does that interface here that, that work is parallel to this or is, does this that's
not, is that a comprehensive plan amendment that work? It's not, that's a good point
to bring that up. There's a lot of other work that D CD is doing outside of a comprehensive
plan amendment cycle or periodic review. One of those is the moratorium or short
term rentals. So it's got its own course. We hope to complete that sooner than what
we would be completing this annual cycle. So it's not part of the annual docket,
but it's running on its own trajectory. There are other things as well in our office.
That we work on, uh perhaps the community wildfire protection plan and a number of
things that are still going on their bone scan. Great. And then I guess final question,
the, uh I'm in support of all of all of these, the, the number, number two, the UG
A amendments to modify for, for the UG A swap. Basically, I guess I'm just wondering
if you could dig into timing a little bit more for that. I know it's, there's a lot
of moving parts that are associated. And I'd like, I guess you're understanding your
analysis of, of how those interface because it's the, the lift station that has been
already funded and that timing and the construction of the new Caswell Brown uh facility.
And do you think this all lines up that they are not gonna have to do a septic system
and then take it out? You know, I mean, I guess that's, that's really my question.
Is this gonna be, is this work as well? You know, assuming that uh a volunteer comes
up to swap, you know, agricultural lands in the city, right. That's the first requirement.
But if, if everything lines up here is this and the lift station going to happen
in a timely fashion that in, you know, 18 months from now, we can connect to a new
facility to sewer. Do you think this is our, our goal for this? And then the item
is to investigate those timing and implementation schedules. Our, as
far as our annual amendment cycle goes in July and August, as we see in our flow
chart D CD will be doing a status report. Um Usually the first week of September,
we bring it to the Planning Commission for review and the public. Thank you, public
hearing. So we'll be coming back to you with the results of that investigation to
see what we were able to line up city in Castle Brown. Um There are a lot of external
factors, uh state agencies and funding sources and uh city and county coordinations.
So we'll do our best to see what we can do for the best outcome for K Brown. Thank
you. Thanks. All right. I'm happy to make a motion and you said you were going to
allow pull a comment before the All right. Well, I am happy to move that we approve
the final docket as recommended by the Planning Commission for 2024 uh Comprehensive
Plan updates. Um Yeah, and I'm happy to second that and then we will open um
this item for public comment if anyone has joined us today. Um, w would like to make
a comment on this uh Jefferson County Planning Commission recommendation for the
2024 Comprehensive Plan Amendment final docket. Um Please raise your hand using the
raise hand button at the bottom of the zoom screen.
See any hands go up. Um ok, so it's been moved and seconded. And I would just add
that I am grateful for the late edition of the work of the port and comp um collaboration
with the E DC um to benefit some of our local uh really super creative timber economy
leaders who are working on developing a project that could be placed at the airport
um If we move forward with this, um And I'm supportive of all of the good work that's
proposed in the, in the um docket by the planning commission recommendation. So uh
see no hands up. I will call the question all in favor of the motion on the floor.
I ok, Joe back to work. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks to the planning commission
as well. Yeah. Ok. Drum roll, please. It's timed at 11.
0, it's timed at 11. Ok. Long drum roll, drum roll for holding this for 14 minutes.
Um ok. Um Let's see. Looking forward. Did we finish looking forward? I'm not sure
if you did anything. I don't think I did yet. So I, oh, yeah, I did. I think I did.
Yeah, or maybe I just look forward for my son. No, I talked about the law library
and yeah, I looked forward and then I did get the June 10th date on the radar.
So I guess we can take a recess for a break. Does anyone want to take a break for
10 minutes? I'd love to take a break for 10 minutes. Ok. We'll take a break for 10
minutes and come back at 1057 for 11 o'clock time item.
Sounds good. Uh, did you see the note from Matt Tyler on the 1057? We have a timed
item for 11 o'clock. So I have a few moments for any kind of discussion. We might
wanna have any kind of discussion. I don't have anything. You wanna,
anything for the, go to the order commissioner? Wow. I'm, I'm unprepared for just
a wide open. Um,
you know, just, uh, happy birthday to my daughter. She turned 16 this week. She's
already passed her drivers test. Watch out the roads are, she got a new job? I might
have to recuse myself from the S and P deliberations. She's working for an oyster
company now. I don't know that I'm disclosing it now. But does that mean that I can't
make that decision if she makes more than 1500 a month? There's not a
financial interest in the operation as much as. No, no. All right. What's she doing
for him? I don't know. She's only worked one day so far, so, you know, that's hard
work. It is hard work. Yeah, she's making a lot of money. Awesome. That's good to
hear. Yeah, I'm excited about her. She's very excited, you know, I have to be driving,
come down here on Wednesday and pick up her driver's license. So, yeah, proud of
her today. He gave her a book yesterday for her birthday. That was all 16 years in
photos which uh Stacy took a long time and then I wrote something at the end and
then ass looked through, she cried at the end. I was like, oh I wrote that, Stacy
spent like 300 hours going through every photo we've taken in the last uh except
for the two years that I backed up on a stupid hard drive that failed that uh I lost
those photos. But what years were that they were good years to skip. Honestly, it
was like during COVID and some bleak times personally. So it was, it was not, not,
not, not too bad. Well, as I mentioned earlier, I got to spend some time with some
of my favorite kids this week and it's so fun to watch, to be close enough to kids
to really notice them growing up and to, for them to feel comfortable enough with
me, especially one of them, the nine year old who we're, we're really good friends
and we have been since she was a little, a baby and it's, it's fun to watch the friendship
blossom over time. And also when you don't see them every day, you really see the
changes in a way that if you're right there, you know, in daily action, you know,
down in Portland, I'm just guessing that you probably, yeah, like, wow, you're, you're
alone now. That's, that's great to see Ok, we're at 11 o'clock and we have a
important item on our agenda, um, for 11 o'clock and that's presentation of the County
Road Administration Board. Certificate of good practice. And, um, does somebody who
wants has more history with these wanna tee this up or mark do you have? Right. So,
we have this thing called the County Road Administration Board and it's a Washington
State organization that oversees obviously county Roads. Um, But um
they also have this thing called um Certificate of Good Practice. And it's, it's
in state statute and the standards of good practice shall mean general and uniform
practices formulated and adopted by the board relating to the administration of county
roads and the safe and efficient movement of people and goods over county roads,
which shall apply to engineering design procedures, maintenance, traffic control,
safety planning, programming, road classification, road inventories, budgeting and
accounting procedures, management practices, equipment, policies, personnel policies
and effective use of transportation, information technology. That's quite a mouthful
then. Um Here's a list on the screen of the specific standards that apply. And when
that certificate is awarded, it's a testament to the professionalism of our public
works department and the, and the people in it. And so, um I think it only appropriate
every year when the certificate is bestowed on the county because of good work of
money and his folks that we recognize that. And I've had a great time over my first
few years as a commissioner working closely with some of the staff, solid waste without
Cairns on, you know, revising the fee schedule. And I really advocating strongly
for a low-income fee solution and seeing um al and his team rise to that occasion
and implement a a fee solution. That's only a only a uh in another county been done
in King County, which is the largest county in the state. So, you know, I feel sometimes
Jefferson County is the fearless um is fearless about trying to do innovative programs
for our citizens. And I really am grateful for that. And then parks, I just uh attended
the parks and rec tour of the county parks a couple weeks ago. And you know, uh one
thing that really strikes me is our parks are valued by all citizens and visitors
of the county. But also there's a number of issues that our parks are facing now
with sea level rise, you know, going to the Indian Island Park and seeing the impact
of the park there. And our parks leaders are, you know, grappling with those issues
in addition to all of the um visitation that we see in our park. So, and then the
jump playground every time I go to HJ Carol, I mean, I, as I mentioned a few minutes
ago, I, I have a number of kids in my life and some of them live locally and some
of them very much like to go to the jump playground. And that's really become a,
a regional destination for families and kids and in the Port Hadlock sewer project
and working with the team out there from meeting with residents of the sewer boundary
phase one sewer boundary. And, and then now seeing that the project as it unfolds
each step of the way, I mean, I just have had a really fantastic, um, look in to
some of the progress that public works has been undertaking over the last three years
in my role here. And I'm super grateful for your leadership BTE and, and Eric's too
the, the six year transportation plan. I mean, every time that comes up and we can
click on the projects and see them. And I was, I driving to port, then I drove down
Center Valley Road and saw that road improvement project unfolding there. I mean,
it's just super grateful for your leadership and that of the entire team um from
the roads crew to the parks crew to celebrate. It's just I feel like it's what makes
me proud. Nice. Yeah, I'll add a little bit um love working with county engineer
Monie Reinder and, and the team, the roads is what we're here about today and they
do a great job. 400 miles for a tiny little county. It's a, it's a lot to take care
of. And we've had a couple of proclamations today and talked about the importance
of affirming our values. But this. Um this good practice is a lot more than that,
right? Because this is like without this, we don't get our motor vehicle uh tax.
So it's like it would impact our ability to do our job um if we didn't have it. And
uh I just, you know, yeah, I'm also proud of the department for consistently um demonstrating
good practices as recognized by the state and making sure that we can use those resources
to take care of the the roads for Jefferson County Stone. Thanks to money and all
your team. So you have this, I have a certificate printed on some nicer papers. I
take a picture. I know it feels kind of it came like that.
Are you gonna take a picture? Crown? You want to just chair and county administrator
or? No? That's all that
you get to be in it. Do we have the map in the background map? Oh, map in the background
is perfect. Just careful of the cables. Usually I read it back. Right. Right. Let's
hold you across. Here's the certificate I wish it was printed on or something. 123.
It's a good photo. Take three. It's my role. It's good. All right. Thank you for
your
time. I say some words, money. OK. One second.
Thank you everyone for uh recognizing uh the department. And so for, for getting
the certificates and annual things you mentioned and the requirement to get a motor
vehicle fuel tax, which is about $1.4 million a year. Um Do every county gets
these, every year? I notice that not every county on the peninsula, there were four
that have to do a few things to get their certificates uh established this year.
So, um, we appreciate, you know, working with the County Road Administration Board
on, on, on, on this and the things that go into it. And uh as you mentioned, Eric
Kuzma, the assistant public works director, engineering services manager is a strong
hand in many of the uh pieces that go into this. Also working with our brand new
um uh engineering technician uh Connor Ferry who puts together a lot of the information
so that um was, you know, a big learning experience for, for him going through this.
But uh yeah, it's pretty important. Uh 400 miles of road that's in Wash dot has less
than 100 miles in our count, you know, our county. So we're doing about four times
as many roads as the state highway department is here and uh and they come in all
flavors. So, um without the certificate of good practice, we also wouldn't be doing
that project on center road because we wouldn't have been eligible for the uh real
arterial program wrap. Uh funding which comes from the motor vehicle fuel tax uh
to rehabilitate that four miles of center road which was last paved a quarter century
ago, had one chip seal in between then and now. And, uh, that's how roads work. You
build them or pave them and they immediately start falling apart and then you bring
them back with a chip seal and then they go downhill and eventually you come back
with, with asphalt and you can get a grant to afford it. That project is 100% funded
by rap. No county money going into that. So again, without that, without that,
we wouldn't be doing that project. Uh So again, thanks to the whole uh Rhodes team
and public works and for your support of our Rhodes program. Um
Yeah, thank you and for your leadership man. Do I was holding up all the departments
cause I feel like or all the programs you really juggle a lot at public works and
um, juggling is a, is a skill. I didn't tell you about the sewer. I did, I did,
I think I'm scheduled to be back here this afternoon with a Cairns to talk about
looking forward to that conversation as a briefing. Um But it is, there are a lot
of topics I can go from solid waste to parks, to sewer, to roads,
uh to a jump playground. Yeah. So uh a lot to keep track of. It's fun. I think I've
been the county engineer for about 20 years now and the public works director for
about 10. Um It's been a fun journey.
Keep up the good work or everyone. So when will, what, what's the solution with the
or oils at the jump playground? Someone asked me that Belugas. So we looked into
a lot of solutions. It's unfortunate, but the problem is the black color soaks of
heat and those they're made of, of fiberglass, they don't really have a way of dissipating
heat. And once again, Eric uh had a, a strong hand looking for solutions there,
uh removing them and sending them back to Colorado where they came from would be
really difficult and disruptive to the playground surface. So our uh we looked at
different colors which of course, then they wouldn't really look like orcas Beluga
albino,
which did bring the temperature down some. But right now, the plan is to um install
large uh shade tarps over a portion of the playground and over uh the the new phase
that successfully got the Danton and Grant uh last week for the phase two area. Um
Many playgrounds in hotter climates have these large triangular sails over them.
I saw them in Portugal, you see them in areas where it gets much hotter than here.
And I think that'll have the added benefit of not only keeping the orcas from getting
too hot, but also making the rest of the playground cooler and perhaps drier during
the rain. So all in all, it's kind of a two fur or a three fur solution rather than
just solving the black paint problem on work because we're getting some additional
benefits out of that. And the county put in some money and through county capital
for that. And then it'll be coordinate with this uh grant funded phase two project
so that uh all of these uh tarp structures get um uh installed in a co-ordinated
fashion. Uh Eric's been working a lot with the manufacturers on that. You know, obviously
they take some pretty healthy foundations and poles. There's a lot of tension on
those to, to keep them and they have to be put in the right spot in the playground.
So there's adequate clearance from the play equipment and things like that. I think
the way we have it laid out is that all of the poles except for one will be outside
the perimeter of the playground and there'll be one inside the playground, but there
was a clearance from the equipment for it. Uh which is that clearance is specified
in the design of playgrounds and things. So that area will have to remove the, the
turf surfacing and underlayment to install the foundation that it wants to be in
the one spot. So kind of complicated. But again, it seems like uh the best overall
solution. And uh you know, Eric, um as usual has had a strong hand and,
and helped him make that happen and those charts stay up year round, that's our plan,
you know, eventually they'll have to be replaced. But the Tarps themselves are not
cost prohibitive. It's the installation of the foundations and holes and everything.
So we have to replace those tarps every a couple of years, 7, 10 years or something.
That's, that's ok. Um But uh you know, I think it will be better as some people have
commented, it can get fairly hot out there in the summer, even just the artificial
turf or the area where they're sitting to watch their kids. I think we installed
some umbrellas at the tables. Um, but some shade will be nice. Yeah, thanks that
the solution. Someone was asking me, I just yesterday. So I was like, well, I'll
find out. I, I'm, you'd have to talk to Eric to and Matt. Well, probably Eric
to get the schedule for that. We've been waiting to hear on this Dan Thompson Grant.
We just found out about that. Can you talk a little more? We, we were kind of talking
before we came back into the session, but talk about getting that last week and what
that means. And Jefferson universal Movement, playground jump, uh volunteers led
by a couple of their strongest um people including Sarah Grossman, you know, work
with the County Matt Tyler and there on uh applying for this uh Dan Thompson Grant
uh finish phase two, which was cut out of the original project. Um Because of
cost considerations, the area has been prepared. I mean, there's a curb and everything
but was just planted in grass and it, it's the, so the grass will be removed. A slab
will be poured with drainage and uh a drainage system. And then uh play equipment
will be installed on the, the phone tiles, essentially foam tiles there. Uh This,
this area of the playground is designed for even smaller kids. The youngest kids,
I'm not sure the age range, but we're talking like 3456 years old. Uh So it's, it's
for that age group and uh of course, the tarps will be installed, but it's uh I don't
know a lot about this grant source. Um but it's 100% no match and it's over 500,000.
Uh It's through the state,
but further details uh on that Tyler, we have to let you know, but uh the, the job
volunteers did, uh the bulk of the work applying for that grant, county support.
And um we heard last week that we, that's great. That's awesome.
Congratulations. Yeah. Congrats. And thanks to Matt for all work on that. And the
quilting skate park too when she sent an email I'd mentioned earlier and they, they're,
you know, through the first round, but actually, first in the region for that grant
and, and Matt did a lot to help them, um coordinate that grant and refine the grant.
So, you know, appreciate parks and recs stepping up to help community groups. You
know, it takes, you know, it's a mini, mini legged stool to get these big infrastructure,
especially outdoor athletic facilities built and, and uh you know, Matt's a great,
a great feature to support our community organization. So we did get one question
that we all got um uh not related to playgrounds, but um the, the Olympic Discovery
Trail asking when um when land acquisition might begin for the section in
Anderson Lake. And my understanding is we have all those easements acquired and the
land acquisition to Anderson Lake State Park is completed. That was my understanding,
but I wanted it said out loud, our uh sole and part time employee who does
right of way work for us, who's very good at her job has been going through the excruciating
right away certification process with the Washington Department of Transportation
who uh is responsible for um
funneling our federal transportation funds to us. So, um you know, the a big part
of that will be paid for by the state through the Recreation Conservation office
RCO, but the match is coming from uh service transportation block grant from federal
highways. So because of that federal involvement, and then we have to have all kinds
of uh like you said, excruciating the oversight of our process, which in
which involves, which includes uh right away certification. But the, the right way
has been acquired. And then I think we're through the certification process. Now,
the plan is to build that next summer. It's a $5 million project. Um And so uh
yeah, thanks to right here timber. Uh and their
predecessor, Pope who provided the and sold the bulk of them right away for that.
But also several private uh property system landowners and the pud right,
who we traded property for to get
four corners road area there? Great. Well, I can respond to this. Ok. And let them
know that. Thank you. Complicated. Multi year we started right away acquisition
43 or four years ago on that. But uh do great. How's the route going
from Anderson Lake State Park down to, uh don't, you know, other than the,
the high level study that was done uh four years ago with the, with the
Jefferson Trails Coalition that identified some, you know, potential routing options.
Not a lot of that work's been done on that since, I mean, it's uh, you know, full
time job to get the project to Anderson Lake. Oh, I know. I know we did acquire,
hurry up. I'm ready to write it. We worked through the process with the State Department
of Transportation on the old highway nine section that we have. So that's from, that's
from like Ro Road up to Gardner Road. Um So that sections been more or less acquired.
Um But yeah, the section from Anderson link to Bottom Discovery Bay is probably
the uh most challenging section, the most challenging section remaining for that,
that route. But it'll be exciting to get to Anderson Lake it's so huge and our project
will just get to the state park boundary. Um State Parks is
supposed to build a trail from that point. Actually, through the park, there'll be
probably a footpath, but it certainly won't be a 10 ft wide pave trail. It gets to
that point. It's pretty exciting to see that done. It's, it's gonna be a massive
project to climb a pretty steep hill out corners.
But it's supposed to all be, you know, I've been involved in the design. It's all
we got it all under 5% 5% or less, which is the, a lot of, a lot of switchbacks
still look like Lombard Street.
Seriously. Uh But uh yeah, it would be pretty cool. Awesome. Thanks for that. Yeah,
that's cool. Is it, have they started using, you know, um John and others? The, the,
so what's the big grant? The, not the, the grant at all? And that is that still,
that was just on recently, wasn't it? That was just to create design projects, which
is when we spend, when we do capital transportation projects. Um you know, we have
to have the board get in the tip. Yeah, get it on the tip and then from the tip put
it on an annual construction program which doesn't mean construction, it means capital
really? So that's what you saw in the agenda, but that's uh those raised grants are,
you know, major federal deal with a lot of uh
to go through. Well, thankfully, Collin County is running this right, the, they're
the agent, the Oversight Oversight Agency for that.
Yeah.
So, yeah, more to be done there for sure. But I wanna see this section built to Anderson's
big push right now. So, and, you know, we're, I would say nearly completed with the
design. It's, you know, permitting is uh always a longer term. We in permitting right
now, it's more complex than it sounds like. Again. I
see we should be building that next summer. We had hoped to be building it this summer,
uh, but couldn't quite get there. And, uh for a variety of reasons fits right of
certain funding. And we started the staffing either we're doing that project in Center
Road right now. We're doing another, another federal funded project right now, which
is replacing $700,000 worth of county road signs out there and then we'll be, uh,
uh, of course, we're building the sewer. Um, but, uh, you know, we,
and then we'll be rolling into our project to replace uh two fish barriers, a couple
million dollars on uh Maylor Creek later this summer. And quite frankly, we couldn't
even pay all our bills if all these projects we're going at the same time like the
trail, we don't have the cash flow for it. We got a cash flow loan for the sewer
project. Uh Thanks to Mark and Stacy's help. That was a six month undertaking to
do just so we can ca you know, because all these grants are reimbursable, right?
You don't get paid until after you pay contractors. So you gotta have cash, right?
So Rhodes is going to and would have already end up in that same situation if we
didn't spread some of these projects out. So cash and staffing are limiting factors,
how much we can do it once you know, we may end up having to get some kind of a cash
flow loan for our roads program because we have a $5 million bridge project coming
up in Quilcene uh along with the trail. So I'm trying to excuse me,
you know, run both of those projects at the same time. Could be challenging from
a cash standpoint. Got to. Well, thanks for all the extra updates. Hopefully, it
makes your trip over here a little more work. They're happy to come over and you
know, me, I could talk all afternoon about stuff public works does. So I'll try not
to do that. But if you have any have any questions, feel free to as you do. So thanks.
Thanks for recognizing this. Thanks a lot. Keep up the good work. All right. All
right. This afternoon. See you this afternoon. Solid waste. Ok, so it's almost 1130
that was the last, last agenda item, agenda item for the morning. Do we wanna take
a recess until? Sure. Do you have anything you wanna add now or no? Ok. So I will
recess this until 130. All right. See you back here.
Progress with our Luminary Solid Waste Manager, Al Cairns to talk
to us about what's going on at solid waste. Hi, thanks for having us. Uh You may
recall when we adopted by resolution the new low income discount program and included
a reference to checking back in with the board of county commissioners at the six
month mark to see how that uh new program is performed there. So we'd like to report
out on that and we thought we'd take a moment to, to review how the other two new
fee revisions are also performing on minimum fee in the per time rate as well. And
then we'd also like to um give you some feedback on a, on a recent customer survey
we did at the transfer station, which I think goes a long way to um showing maybe
why the new minimum fee isn't performing as stellar as we might have expected it
to. Ok. So with that, I think Caroline, did you have a presentation on the part?
Well, did you email it to,
do you have it in a slide deck? It's in a PDF file, is all that we have.
But do you have it as a powerpoint anywhere or is it just, it was a
powerpoint there? But if the attachment to the agenda was a PDF, it wasn't a powerpoint.
Can we get into your, like into your, can you drive? Is that on your drive? No, I
can share the, the what we have here. A
let me get back to where did we get sent? Uh email JJ? Just when it gets put into
our packet, it's turned into a PDF with everything else. So it's not necessarily
optimum to uh
ok. Mm. You don't, you, you don't have a Caroline. I don't have access to my email
here, but I did as part of the packet. It's online, everyone can see it, but we're
just trying to figure out the presentation that
if I can do it like that, it'll work out as a so that's fine, you know, can you scroll
through me? I'm, I'm doing it. Oh, ok, great. Um So, and, and I should mention also
we're going to, we've been requested to share the same information with the City
Council this evening. Um And so I don't mean to, I know you folks are a lot more
familiar with the program with City council. Bear with some of the first lines, no
problem. Um So we increase the uh fees both to reduce congestion that we've experienced
at the transfer station. Um long lines that typically come uh during the, during
the summer season and also to cover costs. We've been running a deficit budget here
since 2019. Um So we do that through the minimum fee and per ton fee
and the minimum fee is used to control customer demand. The number of transactions
the per time fees are revenue generator so they're treated a bit differently in their
application. Um The reason we're, we've been really focused on the uh minimum fee
is that right now, only 39% of the eligible uh housing units in the East Jefferson
County service area um are currently subscribed for curbside service that places
the an additional burden on the transfer station to manage those cell cell phone
loads that aren't being serviced through uh curbside collection. MS W is municipal
solid ways. So this is, this is unincorporated, that seems actually pretty good.
Do, do you track that the change of that? I mean, do you have any trend ideas about
how that has changed? Not yet. The data is a bit immature for that right now. Um
And we work with the uh waste Haller waste connections on getting at those numbers
there and also the assessor's office and identifying how many housing units could
potentially be serviced. But we do know that uh roughly 60% of the service area that
was connections manages in CCL County. Is it about 60%? So it's a bit lower than
our neighbors? Well, so here's the big reason that we're focused on. Um Can
I, can I have the Clown County thing? Um is that because there are more people in
the municipal Port Angeles? I mean, it just seems like that. That's excluding uh
porting un services trying to get an apples and apples, right? Ok. Watkin county
mandates curbside county wide. Really well. So in theory, they're at 100% great in
theory. So here's a good pictograph on why we're focused on encouraging people to
go to curbside service, the newer compactor models, um waste connections, it's running
can service up to 1000 residential customers in one trip. Um So that's a lot of cars
that we don't see that we possibly wouldn't see at the transfer station thousands
that now that's greater pressures. That's right. Compacting, right? And when, when
it arrives at our facility, those loads are prep it. So for example, on a Monday,
when we're not open to sell all customers with two staff, we can load four trailers
at about a total weight of 100 tons. Two staff on Tuesday, when we open to the public,
it takes six to load 100 tons of material. And so when it hits the floor out of a
compactor, we simply push it into the container off the floor and we don't have to
spend time in the grizzly compacting it. Um Whereas when we're taking the cell all
loads, we can spend up to half an hour in the, in the knuckle cream sorting and com
it to try to get to a target weight of 26 to a level. Right. Well, you mentioned
the Green House gases, uh we don't. But um qualitatively, it seems like there's a
lot of efficiency, there's a lot more efficiency. So, and we did, we worked with
the Climate Action Committee um in 2022 to identify um some metric, a usable metric
for us in measuring greenhouse gas emissions. And we simply arrived at fuel gallons
consumed by customer type and delivering the material to us um as a really good proxy
for greenhouse gas emissions. And so in 2022 the total fuel
gallons used to get the material to our facility ran 49% uh um waste hauler, uh waste
connections and 51% sell haul customers. But in terms of tonnage, um 68%
of that fuel burn was, was brought from the UTC hauler versus 32% um from the self
harm. So there's an all right. And when we talk about lowering the carbon footprint,
uh for the solid waste program, holistically, um consider there are only 2% of the
total fuel consumed between the UTC Hall or the cell halls and the transfer station
operation. We're only burning 2% of that total fuel mix for the total operation there.
So the real, you know, if we're looking at the greenhouse gas emissions, transportation,
it's transportation and really that and that just leads you to encouraging curbside
service. Yeah, a bus for your garbage. Those trucks are already making the route.
So the more households they can serve the more efficient it gets, they're gonna drive
by there anyway. Right.
Well, they drive, they do a three mile round trip right now between the nearest can
at the curb in my house, three miles to get my can and come back where they pass.
How do they market that? So that those rates are governed by the WTC? I mean, how
do they market curbside? Not much because we are, and
we are. Absolutely. So we, we're doing that through the minimum fee adjustment and
encouraging that our website Instagram posts everywhere we can think of to encourage
that and you, and you'll see what we're up against in customer survey responses.
You know, who you and I, we gotta work on Snow Creek Road. It shouldn't be two miles
but between, I mean, there's a bunch of us down at the, at the bottom end that, that
are getting the curbside. Ok. It's got a little gap in the middle. Yeah. Ok. Oh,
sorry, let's get through. So we adjusted the fee, uh, according to what we were trying
to do here using the minimum fee. Uh, last time we had adjusted it was 2014. So it's
nine years between adjustments there. And we, we set it at the slightly less than
the regional Western Washington average for a ticket fee or for a minimum fee.
So please,
so it had been since 2019, since we adjusted the uh, per ton fee. We raised it 2.5%
and that fee is 99.0 0.6% of all the revenue that
funds all of these programs. Both the transfer station and the drive. You see both
of those facilities have environmental centers that collect used oil and a free recyclable
batteries or rechargeable batteries. Um And then we have sharps collection at both
of those facilities. The recycling program, which outside of our long haul and disposal
contract is the single largest cost area for our program at about $620,000 this year.
Uh So education program as you know, came back to public works that have resided
in public health for three decades or so. Um We're now stewarding that program with
a focus on uh food waste prevention um mostly in getting usable food to our food
banks. Um We're running four household hazardous waste collection events a year.
They're running between $52,000 each. Uh And then we've got the legacy uh groundwater
monitoring program at landfill which is very close to being approved for um for closing
that
can I ask about the household hazardous waste? I mean, that was just last year, I
think that we shut down the medium medium risk hazardous waste facility at the port
in the 22. And is that so, has that been a success? It seems like decentralizing
that and taking away the fixed costs of of having a site were advantageous last year.
But those trends continue. Yeah, it's looking really efficient to run it that way.
So, we're, we're just crunching the numbers on by material type and tracking that
against the last full year of fixed facility operations. Can I just anecdotally say
that I've been completely frustrated with those. I've gotten stuck in lines of cars
that end up being an hour, like hours long, the lines at the household hazardous
waste collections. And
so what we're realizing is that at first we thought that the road shop there fleet
optimal place for it and it doesn't look like that's the case. And that's the biggest
demand again. And we assumed it would be four town but its transition to the tri
area. So we're working with the uh high school to stage the event there, either at
the middle school or at the high school makes sense. Um And, and it's really that
through what is critical for keeping customer satisfaction. And I obviously it's,
it's a and I wasn't dissatisfied with the event. I, but I wasn't gonna sit in line
for an hour to wait cause I had my sick mom in the car, you know, but it was just
this moment where I was like, oh, I helped make this decision, you know. So
we're up in, tell him about the size of the event. So there's, there's three tiers
of a service that we can get underneath the des contract, which is what we use for
that service. Um And it's based on custom anticipated customer accounts. So the first
threshold is up to 250 then it goes 250 to 500. So we're opting for the more expensive
mobilization fee for the 250 to 500. So there should be an additional four or five
staff on hand and, and if we have a large enough um staging area, then we can go
to three. So we're definitely transition, meeting the new service demand. And it's
kind of a young program, you know, we got five events behind us now. So we're noticing
as, as it catches on to it, I'll just, yeah, we will love it to be close. I bet.
I mean, I bet there will be more uh hazardous material captured this way. Um And
of course, you don't have to operate it every week, but you're gonna lose something
some service because it's not every single week. Right? And when we were operating
a fixed facility, we, we had once measured or twice measured that we had about, we
were gaining about seven, a 7% participation rate by housing units in the county.
So not so great, but we wanna definitely increase that for sure. I think your point
about total volume where we haven't, we, we're collecting the,
we're collecting a similar amount of household hazardous waste as we work with the
fixed facility but we're doing it in four events instead of, uh, four weekends a
month every month. So instead of being open 50 days a year, we're open four days
a year, we're getting about the same amount of material that's being diverted out
of the environmental waste stream. So it's a lot more efficient for us, need a concierge
or someone selling chiclets along the, the line or something and we are doing it
for a reduced cost. But there is some, you get the customers who they want it tomorrow.
It's at the next event. But uh we are gonna upsize those events so that the lines
could be shorter. I work on that with his staff and I should also
mention that you'll see in front of you shortly. Um a new inter local agreement with
Kitsap County, they, they've broken ground and they anticipate starting a new uh
moderate verse whiz facility just out for Kingston in 2025. And so in advance of
that, we're, we're revising that in a local agreement whereby there won't be a need
for a customer that wants to use that service in Kids app to present a need for it.
You know, right now, there's kind of a threshold that we, we have to describe why
we can't wait for our next event and that language won't be in the in the local region.
So people will, will have that option about 35 40 minutes from downtown Port town
to that facility and pay for it we'll pay for. Oh, because they, they would charge
a fee for
and then Jefferson County just out of that same des fund
the next slide. And of course, the low-income discount program modeled after our
friends who in King County,
what? It wasn't intentionally upside down upside down, isn't it? Yeah, I wonder.
All right. So, on the question of whether or not the minimum fee is working depends
on your perspective. Um, the next side. So between November of
2022 and April 23 we were running about 39% of the total customers who were the
minimum wage customers. And I should mention that here for an apple status comparison.
We're, we're describing these customers as less than or up to 100 and £20. Um So
we took that same data set uh after the fee in November of 2023 and looked at it
and we would decrease that count by 31%. But isn't the by 8%?
You said you decrease that amount by 31%? But, oh, I'm sorry, no, 230. Ok. Yes, thank
you for that. But, and you're still measuring 120 to 100 because when we did the
fee, we also doubled. Since we double the fee, we doubled the right. So for a real
comparison there, we measure
you have any sense of how many people are weighing £240 over what we saw last year.
We didn't measure for that. Ok. Yes, like this. So is the per ton fee working
and the short answer is yes. Um, it is, uh, in the first quarter of this year, we
have a 5.8% margin. So nice to be working in the black again after several years.
If not. Um, again, these, all these numbers are a little, um, or in. Sure. Right,
we really need what we need to do is move through our busy season and then we put
it back in the fall of what these numbers are at least nine months, having gone through
a busy season, really be able to get the factories and how much, what was the loss
last year? Do you know the percentage? I can't remember it was in the red though,
it was in the red for three years. We're spending down the reserve account for three
years trying to keep that the fee structure as stable as possible as long as we are
with you. So the real success story is the low income discount, the Heidi Eisenhower,
low-income discount
one second. So you can see the participation rate is definitely, you know, it's it's
taken hold there. It certainly um got some interaction with the community um as of
recently, um I wish those numbers were bigger there. Um but it, but it's definitely
the word is out there low income discount. Program and also the flyers that we produce
for that are proving really useful and um, a response to customer complaints at scale
about the new minimum fee for any, any complaint about that fee adjustment. We've
handed out that flyer and suggestion if they qualify. Um, then we'd be happy to provide
them with a discount. Yeah, it kind of, it does. I'm sure it makes that conversation
a little easier. Well, that's awesome. I mean, look at the customer account between
February and March and April. It's taking off for sure. So again, only six months
of data. But if you see on the next slide, we still forecasted what the annual cost
of this might be and actually cost probably isn't the right descriptor therefore,
for it. Um because the minimum fee isn't used as a revenue generator in order to
control your customer demand, but we would anticipate that the difference between
um that discount and the normal rate would run about 30,000 a year. And do you see
that as a problem at all? I mean that a successful program that is, you know, bringing
in a little bit less revenue. So this is, you see this as a as a big success here
and this, you know, this is one element of, of our triple bottom line in terms of
social responsibility. So happy to have launched this program. Really, I'm glad that
it's um that it's proving successful. Well, me too. Well, nearly half of that comes
at the city's cost. Ok.
Not our program.
So we're at the midterms here, so to speak. And this is the staff's grades of, uh,
of both the low income discount and what the fees are doing for us. Um, certainly
the minimum fee, um, causes us a little bit of concern that it's not as effective
and curbing, um, for small weight customers. Um, and so at the four month mark, when
we were looking at the data, we decided, instead of wondering why it wasn't working
so well that we go out in the field and talk to our customers and slightly
so we spent six days out there uh between March 12th and March 23rd and we spoke
with 91 customers total, not a huge sample size, but we thought it was adequate for
certainly adequate in terms of how much staff time we can afford to lend to the project
statistically significant, right, over 30,000. So on the left is the actual form
that we used. We printed it on paper. We're pretty old school we would use if you
could still get it. Um And so what we were after was finding out what the split was.
Uh and our customers, how many of them were minimum wage customers? How many were
residential business where the trip was generated from what neighborhood they lived
in? Um Whether or not they knew about the curbside option. Um And if there was interest
in the curbside option, um what their attitude was towards the new minimum fee. And
at what price point, in other words, where would the minimum fee, minimum fee need
to be set for them to make a different choice about coming to a small, small load
or to opt for parasite uh service instead. And then we gave them an opportunity to
comment on whatever they wanted to.
So the customer distribution was interesting. We knew we were getting a lot of port
towns and customers, but we didn't know that they were gonna be the largest segment
of that. Um It's a bit of a surprise given that they have mandatory curbside service
for both municipal solid waste uh and yard degrees. Um And then followed quickly
by port uh uh Port Ludlow. And so if you can scroll up just below thinking and Port
Hadlock, those are the big three there you see in the upper left hand corner there,
Quinn and Bland nine customers total. We were a bit surprised to see that high customer
count coming from out of county. Uh Is that legal? Uh It is we don't have any local
agreement or a flow control uh agreement with Clown County. We reported these numbers
to their swap, let them know and the customer comments clearly showed us why they're,
they're here. Um It's cheaper and we have friendlier staff.
So is that why we have people cell falling with their curbside containers. We do.
So, 2, 4000 customers arrived with their wall. Uh, neither of them full.
Um, one of them reported that, um, the minimum fee was way too high. It was outrageously
high. Um, and that it would need to be set at $100 before they stop bringing their
role card to us. So there's a bit of cognitive dissonance there that we saw in, in
the survey. Not, and not just in port towns and customers. I'm not sure what to do
with that information in terms of policy crafting. Um Except to just keep monitoring
this and see where we go, maybe double the minimum if they've got a, uh you know,
roll around card that's supposed to be from a service that's supposed to be curbside.
I'm joking. Ok. So we're still running now. I, I
should say a caveat here. We were surveying the customers between the scale and the
tipping floor as they were waiting for us to clear the floor. Um So the survey couldn't
be any more thorough than it was because we had about 6 to 10 minutes to get as many
customer survey as possible. Um And so we eyeballed the weight. I've gotten pretty
good identify how much weight's in the back of a car truck. It's gone. So when we,
when we, we, when we figured it out, we figured about 41% of the total custom of
the 91 customers or minimum of customers. That number is consistent with larger sets
of data as well.
Um About what we expected is a split between business and residential. A lot of businesses
are already, you know, have, has, have subscription service or even larger BS
53% of the customers were aware of curbside service. So the question about advertising
for it, we need to do a lot better. And so we'll be filling in whatever gaps are.
There was connections and advertising that more broadly, 32% of
the customers wouldn't uh would choose, rather curbside services would cost less
than $30 a month. Now, we, we put it to them that way that it costs 30 less than
$30. That's based on like, let's say, um what we consider like a mid level service
for Crys side, it's a 60 gallon roll cart plus three bins for recycling on a biweekly
schedule is 20 just shy of $29. So, um, so we set that
as for the question and give them a reference point, but only 32% of them said that
they, that they use that service. Do you? I mean, that, that seems like a, a, a disconnect
as well. Do you know why? I mean, they're, they're paying, you know, $50 to dump
off the garbage or whatever. So we got it, we got it that uh answer in the comments.
Ok, so 34% of the customers said that the new minimum fee is too high. That's good
news. And then we were, uh, pretty direct with the question, what would the minimum
fee need to be before you came here less frequently or order the curb side service?
And that is the average that we got from those responses. Um So a couple of
bucks more than what curbside service would cost when the customer comments that
we'll see, um, echo that as well. Um And we group them and there were, there were
three themes if you will in the comments that really uh show themselves. Um This
is the first of them. Um You see there the third comment there on why they're coming
from the Clallam County. I did appreciate the candor of the one customer that
said that the more adult can figure out when curbside service happens. Um But then
really, um and these are taken verbatim from our customers. Um But the last one there
I think is most indicative of why we're seeing a lot of, you know, the poor Townsend
residents coming in. Um We had a lot of retired people with disposable income. And
so even though they're already paying for the service, they prefer a trip to the
transfer station as an excuse to get out of the house. So it's become
um we don't have a bowling alley, we don't have a skating rink. All we got is the
transfer station, push them to echo. They're, they're looking for new drivers, spring
cleaning can give you a good sense of satisfaction. Oh, yeah. Interesting and welcomes
the large loads from the Real Spring team. But the, the two bad customers are jamming
up the works and costing us a lot of money and they still are. Mhm.
So, on the fees, uh, we, a lot of people say it was just right. We had a lot of people
say it's awful. Um, I'm awful. Um, you're not. Well, thank
you. And one said that it should be free because it's a human. Right. I looked in
the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all 30 sections and there's no mention
of free garbage service. So it's not a, not a business. Um,
can't hear the accent. LA is fine. Right.
Yeah,
I hear that fourth one a lot too. You know, and we heard that when we were having
the conversations as well, it's always,
yeah, the people that are gonna do that are gonna do it regardless and, and the percent
of the population does that because it's a lifestyle choice part of their culture.
We could offer it for free. Seven days a week would still be dumping on.
And then we got a lot of good business advice or business advice instead the fee.
Yeah. Meaning that they'll get curbside service if the minimum fee. Right. And that's
what the early one Ted said too, if it was over it was more expensive than curbside
service. I definitely do curbside service. Right now. We did, there was a broad range
of responses on how much would it need to be adjusted. There were, there was one
at 75 1 at 90 a and at 100. So we pulled those outliers out and get a real,
they were flippant responses and so we didn't conclude them getting at that average.
Right. I mean, the last one there shows, you know, not all the suggestions have a
lot of business acumen behind them, right? That one, that one was puzzling. I didn't
drill down on it in real time history. I'm not sure how to do that, but, but I thought
maybe I'm missing something
interesting.
I mean, so you're not, you're not coming with a recommendation today. We are not,
this is for information purposes only. Um Again, this is only a six month snapshot
and we really need to get through a busy season and make sense of a broader range
of numbers here that we get. Um And then, then we'll come back in the fall and discuss
it further on what we're doing there. Now, not included in this is that we, we have
seen a three year trend in our degree of both the, the per uh the pounds per transaction
going higher slightly, but it's go definitely going the right way and the transaction
counts are dropping off. Um So we've got two trend lines going in the right directions
there. Um As far as municipal sal was, we're going in the right direction, just not
as forcefully as we are. Do you have any hunches for tune-ups to the program? Uh,
not yet. We need more data. We need to get through a busy season because everything
changes. I mean, we, we basically got two seasons on and off and, and we really need
to go through the mayhem of the summer season to see what the, what the effect of
these fees are. Um, bear in mind, like, over the last six weeks I've gotten three
phone calls. Um, very angry people about the new minimum fee for y it's been in effect
since November and they're just finding out. So, these are folks that, um, don't
spend the whole year here and they're coming back and they're outraged then, you
know, who, who did this? You could send him away, send them away her than our neighbor.
It was 40 the minimum the kids at now is $42. Um, that's a game fee and it's not
attached to a weight. Um, so that's the privilege of coming to the facility. They're
tr, they're hovering around 10% of their mix as minimum fees and they wanna drive
down, drive it down to 5%. So, and they're, they're getting there but it's a pretty
blunt instrument.
Mhm. I can just add a couple, couple things first. I just like to thank Al for
when he says we did surveys. That's a euphemism for al did 91 surveys which I think,
you know, takes a lot for a person to go out there and talk to people about all of
whom are always gonna be happy with decisions while they're waiting in line. Yeah.
So I think, uh you know, that, uh really speaks to Al's uh dedication to his role
in the solid waste program. Uh Yeah, we wanna keep encouraging the curbside program.
I mean, I think the one slide is pretty indicative of why and what one garbage truck
does. Uh, and like al said, on the days where we only have the commercial hauler
there, two employees on days with cell haul customers, 5 to 6 employees. Uh So cell
haul costs a lot more to manage. And uh, you know, future fee revisions may reflect
that there, there could be a different per ton cost, for example, between cell haul
and haul right now, it's the same $167 tax, but that can change. Is there a way to
further incentivize uh curbside? So, um, it's a work in
progress. It's a business people. Some people might get that it's not supported by
taxes. A lot of, a lot of uh transfer stations are private businesses not run by
the government. So, I mean, we're run the same way it's all fee based and you have
that fees covering a lot of programs, you know, like the, like the household hazards
waste program, those events that we're hosting, which again are save us a lot of
money to some money compared to the fixed facility we used to have at the court.
Uh recycling uh cost, it's about $20 of that fee, you know that it goes to
support that recycling program because there is no direct fee for recycling right
now. So, uh, anyway, great workout. Appreciate the update. And that's what this was,
was a briefing cause that's what we committed to when we, uh, get the new fee resolution.
So we'll keep you posted. I appreciate it. And also, I like the idea
al sitting there evaluating the weight of every, uh, garbage load that come through.
Reminds me of the old, uh, Carney that could like measure out the quarters and nickels
in their hand. I'm like, there you go $5. And just so I, I do want, I can't wait
for some contest where you're out there guessing the weight of each load as it goes
by. But I'll come. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Right. We're gonna save money on a scale. I was just gonna stand there all
day. Yeah. What kind of feedback are you guys getting about the, um, change in Monday's
being commercial and the rest. Are you getting, still getting pushed back on that
or we haven't heard that lately? Um, I think it was in one or two of the comments
that we got on the survey was why don't you bring that back? But when we explain
the efficiency of that and the gains for kind of the hidden benefit to that from
the other customers. Um, most people were agreeable with that and think it was, it
made sense. The, the tricky part is that solid waste is, is not simple. There's a
lot of permutations to it. So there's no elevator speech, you know, and so trying
to explain a complicated, you know, hyper, regulated business, um, to customers on
the fly, you know, in two minutes while they're waiting for the, a little bit, it's
hard to do. Um, we're getting better at it but mostly it's, well, it's a business.
Um, and if I was as business business savvy as you hope I would be. The first thing
I'd do is cut recycling. What a huge drag on the bottom line. And that usually gets
the conversation.
Recycling is a human right now.
Although what was the article you just sent me from the Washington Post? It just
said recycling is a joke.
You heard me say that too. You taught me that all you're afraid for. You want me
to say it in public yet. But it, it's taking a toxic waste product and making it
into a blob of toxic waste. Don't buy things that are packaged in oil. That's pretty
easy. Yeah, we're squeezing about as much as we can out of that facility.
And, uh, and this is the segue is from the Monday closure. I mean, ideally a facility
would have a commercial lane and a self haul lane because we really shouldn't see
our commercial hauler penalized through the long lines, waiting, waiting, waiting.
And Mondays allow them to move, you know, some of their traffic into that Monday
where they're not having to wait, also allows us to maintain equipment and facilities
and things. But, uh, we're buying an excavator for significant cost, um, after
having rented one for the last six months to handle, uh, construction and demolition
debris so that we can keep that separate from the floor. We're doing that outdoors,
uh, which, which opens up more floor space. Um, but I mean, that's just an example
of squeezing every last
how we can get out of that facility the way it's laid out and everything, um, to,
to handle our, our customer, um, load, which is why we're, you know, uh, planning
for the future. And that, that process got stalled a little bit because we went through
a real staffing crisis late in 23 and early in 24. And, uh, al and others used everything
they could, could do to just keep that facility open this winter. But we've, we've
been able to hire some new staff. So, um, um, we should have a little more time to
get back on the discussion about what, what we need for the future for managing and
solid ways. Um In Jefferson County. Ok. And the commercial customers are
happy with Monday with that, with that solution. Oh, yeah, waste connections is delayed
as much as they can. They move their accounts with residential and commercial on
Mondays. So they're, they're gaining a lot more efficiency um by having a virtual
monopoly on the facility for that. And for us, I mean, we're, we're saving a lot
of money too because we can, we can augment fleet and preventative maintenance, you
know, equipment inspections and service comes them out, helps us out. So which translates
into fewer, um, you know, delays in the service if equipment goes down. Um, we're
getting caught up on what was last year, but at this point last year, a very long
list of deferred maintenance, we better than halfway through that list now. Um So
we're making improvements the, the customers will, may or may not see as, you know,
these hidden benefits to us not accepting cell phone on Mondays. It's, and, and you
know, when you're running it better than 55% overcapacity, you gotta have room to
service the facility. Um, other facilities like Snow Homer County, they'll close
midweek for several hours. Um, just for staff to get caught up with, it was a lot
more reasonable considering how much deferred maintenance and small capital improvements
we needed to make to, to do that. Um, I, I think really hesitant to go
backwards on that. We've made so much gain on that. That's great. Yeah. And of course,
we've extended the hours of operation on the Tuesday through Saturday night. So we've
gained back better than half of more of the service hours that we lost. We think
that's a pretty good, don't come on Tuesday. Right. That one, I don't know how to
get that across, but Tuesdays are the new Mondays and you should particularly for
retired customers. Four other days. My parents, I mean, you're gonna have to first
remind them what day it is like my parents, you know, we don't have that. Sorry.
I'm probably gonna get great for that. We still working on camera for the,
we're working with it. A nice care. They don't suck up all your bandwidth and stop
the credit card process if you, oh, but we'll do it. We'll do it 1 to 5 minutes somewhere
in there. You get a good understanding what it is without, you know, up a whole lot
of, um, Monty mentioned also, uh the facility replacement planning process. Um,
we did have an opportunity to meet with our new consultant, um, late last week and
discuss next steps. Um We had originally thought that we would do a combined board
of county commissioners workshop that would also have the task force there and then,
and kind of working that through the logistics through. Um, what we decided to do
is to do a briefing with the board workshop, sitting with the board on the information
that we will then present to the task force and that it would be, be better cleaner
uh to keep the task force separate from a Bocc workshop, you pull all the commissioners
off the task force that no, no, we still retain the words represent.
She's on me. I was on the task force because I, right now she's on swag. So I don't
know if we, did we talk about the ta talk about it? Did I give up the task force
on the task force for a certain duration? I think you're just making that. But if
you want to stay on the task force, I'm fine. Well, both obviously a little f about
this. So, but I don't mind if I, I know that she is on. So we'll arm wrestle about
it. You don't have to get, decide which one you like better or anything
or we can wait till the, then the new person is at the table. You, I'm not gonna
give it to the new person. Hm. So we, we hope to bring that information on the site
selection process that we've done uh in house and then review that work with the
consultant. Uh probably sometime in June to the board. Follow probably the next week
with the task force meeting. Yeah. So we're getting, we're getting there taking a
very deliberate process. Yeah, it's a 40 year facility. Measure twice. So we've got
to get it right. Ok. Major twice. Yeah. Cut twice. Major once. You
measure twice. So you cut once. Is that all right tonight?
Glad, glad the low income discount was working out. I'm glad it got an A minus, but
a good idea. Commissioner. All right. All right. Thank you for having us. Thank you.
Thanks for coming, see you next time and I'll bring the presentation. Sorry.
We, we're adaptable.
Ok. Well, that was the single item on our agenda this afternoon. Other than
additional discussion items. Do we have any additional discussion items? Uh I don't,
I don't think so. Lots, lots, lots of stuff going on. You know, I go dive into my
office and take care of stuff. So, no, I'm, I'm happy to any additional discussion
items from staff. Um, I got word that Kate would love to go to the Proctor House
Tour. So, Greg, it's between you and her and I don't know she can go. Ok, I'll let
her know that. Just tell her that I'm on the, on the task force for the capital planning
for the solid waste facilities. If you wanna, you wanna stay on the task force. It's
all right. I don't care either way. I do like that. But no, it's, uh, I don't know,
we don't have to make the decision. Now. I was just making a joke. Sws my favorite
committee.
That's like that.
Lots of swagger in that group. Ok. Well, we got that, that test taken care of. Mark
anything else from you? Well, this is a very early adjourn. You're very efficient
as a chair. 220 I have 217. Ok. 217. Well, that clock up there on the wall, it's
wrong. Then. My computer also says 217, we will adjourn this meeting of the May 13th
meeting of the Jefferson County Board of Commissioners and release you to go do some
work. All right.