CNA MEETING MINUTES
January 9, 2023 6:30pm
Present:
Melissa Allen (Bigelow Highlands, Vice Chair), Judy Bardin (Northwest), Charlotte Persons (Bigelow), Jenn Wulf (Downtown Neighbors), Jill Ivie (SWONA), Dana McAvoy (East Bay), Karen Sweeney (Eastside), Marty Worcester (Redwood Estates), Bob Jacobs (Gov Stevens), Bruce Coulter (Northwest), Lisa Riner (Burbank), Bob Jones (Goldcrest), Larry Dzieza (Nottingham), Amy Buckler (City of Olympia), Dontae Payne (Councilmember), Mike Reid (City of Olympia), and Tim Smith (City of Olympia)
6:30 – 6:50 Neighborhood Reports
The neighborhood representatives were asked to speak to the value that the CNA brings to their RNAs, what CNA is doing well and how it could do better as part of their report out.
Marty Worcester (Redwood Estates) – CNA Value: Assisted with getting a grant for the RNA. Providing information to the neighborhood from the CNA. Provides some voice at city meetings but thinks the CNA needs to be a little bit ahead of the game when meetings come up. To that end we should at the meetings decide that someone will represent us and give some of our best input that we talked about so much in our meetings. Would like to see CNA return to in-person or start hybrid meetings.
Would like groups get together for the sub area issues and invites support from the City and other neighborhoods for subarea B.
Karen Sweeny – Discussed making the neighborhood stronger such as she has seen at the South Capitol neighborhood and what they do for Halloween. They are looking at developing a calendar of events.
Bruce Coulter (NONA) – Introduced Leslie Wolfe who is taking over for Bruce. She and Lauren Thompson are the new board members in the Northwest Olympia Neighborhood Association. They decided to do the President’s role as a team. Judy Bardin is the new treasurer. John Cox is the new treasurer and who may be attending these meetings in the future.
Bruce said his biggest interest is the two-way communication between the city and the CNA at our meetings and likes the presence of a city person who talks about what’s going on. The other valuable part of the CNA to him is Larry (current Chair). He would like to see in the coming year getting all of the RNA’s up to speed with websites and communications between the RNAs. He also would like to see a retreat at some point where we can all learn how to build websites. He suggested the city commit to either a half an FTE or allow the CNA to apply for a neighborhood matching grant for the monies to undertake this project where the RNA’s can collectively come together and create a sounder organization.
Judy Bardin – Said the CNA did a lot especially with Larry’s leadership. We had an impact on the neighborhood character definition issue, Capital Mall Triangle development, sidewalks, the Habitat development, and policies in the comprehensive plan. Believes that we should focus on the comprehensive plan that sets the direction of where the city goes in the next 10 years. She said we should have meetings with the Planning Commission
She also suggested that the city have a meeting on participatory budgeting and that coming together on sidewalks would also be a good thing, especially if there were end-of-year money available.
Bob Jones – (Goldcrest). He said he was chair of the CNA for a few years back in the 1800s. The Goldcrest Board has decided to reinvigorate our relationship with CNA and is in the process of getting vetted through the RNA process. One of the things that he thinks CNA does really well is when it has the opportunity of working with the City Council and the staff and thinks we should continue that.
He gave a couple of ideas of some things that happened around his neighborhood back when Goldcrest was active. He said it used to be you could drive 45 miles an hour on Cooper Point Road until they asked the city to drop it down to 35, and that happened. They also got a left turn lane so that the road is not blocked by drivers going north to get into Goldcrest. He believes if you work closely with the staff and with the City Council, you can get things done.
He also said that keeping the MOU up to date is very important.
There are 179 families that live in Goldcrest. He urged RNAs to take advantage of the city grants program.
Bob Jacobs – Responded to what have we done well and badly. He said the thinks we’ve done well with sidewalks, which has been a perennial issue. In regard to badly, we haven’t grown as much as we’d like to and we haven’t gotten meeting attendance as much as we’d like to. As far as the next year is concerned, one idea is if the staff could put together a list of all of the changes that have occurred at both the local and state level about the kinds of buildings that can go in neighborhoods and changes to the parking requirements. It would be good, he suggested to have a staff person to come out and tell us what is allowable in our neighborhoods.
Lisa Riener (Burbank- Elliot) – Said that the CNA has been doing some wonderful work supporting the neighborhoods by educating the RNAs as to the many avenues that the city of Olympia has for us to help our neighborhoods and do better outreach to our neighborhoods. She thinks the CNA has opened our eyes regarding sidewalks and the role of the capital budget. She thanked the CNA for educating her RNA on those issues. She also felt that we had a valuable discussion in the CNA regarding the Capital Mall Triangle area sub-area plan. There is concern that low-income folks could be displaced.
Charlette Persons (Bigelow )- Charlotte expressed support for what the previous RNA representatives said. She said that the CNA has been a huge help to inform us about what’s happening in the in the Community and why.
Jill and Michael (SWONA) – Said they were new in their role and hope to learn and we want to be involved.
Donna Virgilio (Ken Lake) – Said she has never been to a meeting before and came to learn.
Jen Wulf (Downtown Neighbors Association). Value of the CNA: It’s a really good way to keep in touch and see what is going on in going on in the neighborhoods, which is really important. It is also a really good way to keep in touch with what’s going on even in her own neighborhood because we often talk about what’s going on downtown. She felt a lot more effective as a representative because of the CNA. In terms of what has the CNA done she said it does a good job of keeping each other up on what’s going on internally. She appreciates the CNA involvement in sidewalks and accessibility and increasing the walkability of Olympia. Also, the CNA involvement around police accountability, tenants’ rights and housing affordability. She said she really appreciates the intentional conversations on these issues.
Jen pointed out that sometimes there’s a bit of a disconnect between the CNA and what gets translated into action by the city and that could be something work on in this next year.
6:50 – 7:10 Council Liaison Report
Councilmember Dante Payne – Informed the CNA about the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) discussion scheduled for January 18th. He also related that the City Council recently had their annual retreat, and the Council has requested a thorough review of the MOU. A lot of work has been happening internally about the CNA between those of us Council members that are assigned to these meetings with the CNA and city staff. They will make sure that the full Council is also up to speed on what’s happening here.
At the annual retreat this past weekend the city council worked on the priorities for the 2023 year. Councilmember Payne praised the city staff or accomplishing, during 2022, over an 80 percent rate of completed projects.
He also reported that Saturday morning was the annual 22nd Legislative District delegation meeting with our state representatives and senator. They shared quite a bit about the city priorities in regard to the property tax levy lift. Also, the Deschutes Estuary alternative funding to fund the design and construction of the estuary, including some things around funding. Additional items discussed included funding for the Armory, Parks and Recreation and Olympia’s arts department. Public safety, concerns around gun violence and things of that nature were also discussed with the legislative delegation.
CM Payne also spoke about a recent meeting with nurses from Providence Saint Pete about their concerns of a shortage of nurses and how that is impacting patient care and relayed those concerns to the delegation for a state response. He suggested there was also a shortage of property as well to meet these medical needs.
Regarding interlocal agreements, he said we have one with the state for rights-of-way and helping the City of Olympia with our response to homelessness. This involves not simply moving people off the rights of way, but actually sheltering them and getting them securely housed. We just found out over the weekend that that it’s going to also include local rights of way.
He related that not every homeless person accepts the housing being offered. The result is folks go from the state’s right of way into our local rights of way. He said he is hoping to have that ability to do something about our local rights away as well, and to continue to do all we can to encourage people to go into safe shelter.
Councilmember Payne related that he’s heard quite a bit about sidewalks and it was discussed that quite a bit over the weekend retreat. He said the staff work this year in 2023 will be to find funding mechanisms in our transportation funding to include sidewalks. He said he heard all the neighborhoods loud and clear about addressing this need in regard to repairs and adding additional sidewalks and maintenance for sidewalks throughout the city. He related how large of a price tag this is going to be for our city. He mentioned that Larry shared an article a few weeks back about the state of sidewalks throughout the state of Washington.
Mr. Payne said it would be great for the city of Olympia to lead that discussion on what the state is going to do to support these infrastructure improvements. Perhaps providing the funds for municipalities to allocate those funds for the purposes of maintenance and repair.
Councilmember Payne also said there was a discussion about wayfinding and signage for our community. Ways to help those who are not familiar with the city to get around all of the Districts that we have: the creative district, the historic district, and the downtown Improvement district. The city is working with private entities to continue to work towards downtown improvements beyond beautification, such as helping small businesses and addressing public safety issues.
Councilmember Payne also shared conversations around the Regional Fire Authority (RFA) that the Council recently took action on. He explained the reason he voted to approve the vote on the RFA. He said he felt that as our elected official it is his responsibility to think ahead and to think about the choices that we will be faced with in terms of emergency response. He feels that his vote is to let the people decide for themselves if this is something they want to do and that’s the reason he supported it. He thinks the community needs to know the state of our current public safety system and how we need to meet the increasing demand as our city continues to grow.
Bob Jones asked Dante to elaborate the action with regard to the rights-of-way as it relates to the homeless. Dante explained that we have an interlocal agreement where the state is assisting the city with providing shelter and clearing rights of way along the I-5 corridor, including the Wheeler encampment. At exit 108 eventually there will be a shelter space that in a current hotel in the city of Lacey. The state has been allocating dollars to help local jurisdictions respond.
7:10 – 7:50 Olympia Strong: Road Resiliency Roadmap – Amy Buckler, Olympia Strategic
Projects Manager
Amy Buckler and Mike Reed (economic development director) talked about a project called Olympia Strong.
Amy described Olympia Strong as the city’s public process to form a strategy for how the city and our partners can best support the economic strength and opportunities for residents, businesses, our overall community and then our city organization.
She pointed out that Olympia doesn’t control our economy, but there are things that we can do and we work with our partners to nurture economic opportunities for people. She said this work for Olympia Strong is going to inform changes to our economic plan and City actions and investments and ultimately the work plan for our economic development department. The city kicked off this process officially last July.
Amy observed that with-in Thurston County, Olympia has a higher-than-average instance of poverty or had higher incidence of businesses or workers that were more susceptible to closure or not being able to work due to COVID. The COVID aid funded grants did is helped launch ten new small enterprises, and the majority of those were owned by people who are black, indigenous or people of color who typically don’t have as much access to capital as white business owners do.
Amy said that that’s just one example of something that we have done and the kind of thing that we can do to help close the equity gap as we think about our initiatives and our partnerships moving forward.
Amy shared a slide with data insights on the socioeconomics of Olympia and its increasing diversity. Between 2010 and 2020, we added about 9,000 new residents and of those new residents, about 2000 were white, a thousand were black or African American, a thousand were Asian American, and nearly 4,000 of the new residents to our community were people of two or more races. Our growth rate suggests much more diversity with regard to race and ethnicity over time. While most Olympians are doing well economically speaking, close to a third of our population may be struggling to make ends meet. Over 1/3 of Olympia households are housing cost burdened.
Olympia has a poverty rate of about 16%, and for comparison, that’s 3% higher than the national average and twice the poverty rate of Lacey and Tumwater. Amy said she thinks that this is a result of Olympia having an older housing stock and more multifamily options which provides more opportunities for lower income households to find affordable places to live.
Amy said that the data shows that the burden of poverty is not equal — marginalized communities are disproportionately affected. Poverty rates are also much higher for those who have less than a high school degree and no college which might lead us to be doing some more partnership development with our local schools.
Amy said the poverty rate is especially high for single parent households that are usually led by a female. Amy described the “Alice Threshold”. ALICE stands for asset limited; income constrained employed. Working, but at really low income. ALICE looks at children specifically in a community, and it asks how many children are living in households that can’t meet their basic needs. And it bases that on a survival budget that includes local area cost for things like housing, transportation, smartphone, healthcare, and taxes. And what the data shows us is that Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater and Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater, 16% of children are living in a household that’s below the federal poverty line. But another 18% of children are living above that poverty line but below that Alice threshold. When added together, 34% of children in our urban community are living in households that are struggling to make their ends meet.
Amy presented information from a survey on top economic issues from last summer based on 500 respondents broken out by renter vs. Homeowner.
Amy stated she believes that the biggest reason why housing costs have been going up so much is that we’re not building enough housing. Over the past several years in Olympia has built about half as much housing as we need to be our population growth. Part of the City’s housing strategy is to expand overall supply but that just expanding the supply alone isn’t going to be the only thing that we need to do to make sure that everybody can get housing. The city is also trying to increase the supply of low-income housing through the Home Fund and choosing Habitat for Humanity for the Boulevard project because they’re going to provide over 100 units of permanently affordable housing.
She said that other types of actions are being looked at like land banking for more affordable housing. Finding ways to get some more funds to partner with low-income housing developers to do more permanently affordable type of housing projects.
She said that the future has great opportunities to grow higher paying jobs than things like clean energy, the trades, tech and manufacturing in the medical sector.
There will be demand for 1500 trade jobs in fields like maintenance, construction, carpentry as well. State and local climate goals and federal Inflation Reduction Act funding can hopefully help fuel opportunities for us to train hundreds of new workers needed to do solar installation, work on electric vehicles etc.
She also pointed out that small businesses are a huge part of Olympias economic story. In 2020, 79% of the firms in Thurston County employed less than 10 people.
Judy Bardin asked about a recent Environment Committee meeting about the Makers consultant study where they said that about 200 plus housing units might be at risk for displacement in the Triangle Area and this fell on the people who were poorer and members of the BIPOC community. How can we address this displacement and what are the concrete measures that we could take?
Amy replied that’s a really important question and is definitely part of the subarea planning process and why Makers brought it up so early because we’re doing this environmental impact analysis and part of that is about the impact to affordable housing. One of the things that’s really important, Amy said, is that we provide low income and affordable housing within the sub area itself. The good news is the city does own a piece of land in that area that they would like to use to have a partnership with a low-income housing developer to do that.
Dante commented to Judy that the city staff has been working on what is called an “equity framework” and also a “climate framework”. That equity framework is very important when it comes to that that displacement question and said he didn’t know a project like that could make it through it utilizing that that process when equity is not included as an afterthought. The equity framework is to be included in projects in the very early stages that will address that type of concern.
Larry asked Dante if anybody put the fire benefit charge’s regressive formula through that equity lens? Dante replied that’s an excellent question will ask it.
Bruce Coulter was concerned about Judy’s displacement question too. He was wondering about as we develop Martin way and further develop the downtown area whether we are focused on affordable housing.
Amy responded that we need to be both building more market rate housing as well as affordable housing. She said that just because we see a project that doesn’t have affordability requirements doesn’t mean it’s bad. But at the same time we have to be more proactive about affordable housing. She said the city is going to be doing that in the former mitigation site, downtown, Olympia Franklin. She said that offering more land as an incentive paired with some of the other things that they city could offer like an impact fee reduction and getting LOTT to offer a program for affordable housing where they will cut the hookup cost in half is being considered.
Bob Jacobs said he hears nothing about the income side of the housing issue. Some cities have adopted increased minimum wage. Why are we not looking at increased minimum wage?
Amy says It’s come up.
Bob asked that the language the City uses makes it clear that we don’t build market rate housing — Government builds low-income housing, the private sector builds market rate housing. He also pointed out that we have a “Buildable Lands” report that says we have tons of land to build upon, so that is not the constraint. The banks have a lot of money to lend. That is not a constraint. Why are we not getting more housing built? That needs to be analyzed if we are to make any sense out of this thing.
Finally, he pointed out that Olympia is not an island in the middle of the ocean. The housing market is regional. If they build another 2,000 units in Lacey that helps us and vice versa. In fact. If they build a couple thousand units in Seattle, it helps us. It doesn’t matter where it gets built, so long as it’s in this greater area.
Amy agreed. Olympia is not an island and our housing market is regional. She said Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater, we all need to do our part if you look at Olympia’s specific population growth projection. Amy said we should be building twice units as we are in Olympia. But if Lacy builds 1,000 units, that’s good for the whole region, that’s good for Olympia, and that’s part of why the city worked on our regional housing needs assessment.
Research, Amy said, does point to the building industry contracting after the recession but there’s also a lot of research that shows that there are barriers in our codes and stacking of requirements that add up to make projects not affordable to be built. Although the requirements are well-intentioned, the city needs to think about what tradeoffs there might be to make sure that when a project comes in the requirements are not so onerous.
Melissa discussed the importance of working with the neighborhoods on housing and cited the example of neighborhoods role in urging that Habitat be considered for the Boulevard development. Amy deferred to Mike Reed and Larry on the point. Larry recounted the history of the project as one where the initial award was based on getting it done fast that resulted in market rate housing and the second round was getting done to target lower income residents and contain an equity building element. Larry said the regulations and delays effect non-profits as well and its been suggested that nonprofit low income housing go to the top of the city’s processing stack for approvals.
7:50 – 8:25 CNA Elections Planning and MOU
Melissa reviewed the points made by the neighborhoods during the beginning of the meeting about CNA’s past, present and future. Generally, the members feel there is a lot of value to their neighborhood to participating in CNA. They report back on all the issues that come before CNA it gives them lots of information that they otherwise would really have to search for or wouldn’t know. They also appreciated the agendas being sent out in a timely manner. They said we need to work more on the City/CNA relationship.
Karen suggested that every council meeting have a CNA 10 to 15 minutes to report on current issues made directly to Council. Or perhaps even 3 minutes.
Another value is getting Ideas from other neighborhoods, such as promoting social connections. Marty said that she got good information again from other neighborhood associations, but she would like to go back to face-to-face or hybrid meetings and wants us to have a stronger voice with council.
Larry said we need to work on the MOU and we are engaged with the city on that. But the CNA bylaws also need work. They are outdated and we haven’t really elected the positions we need. Bob Jones relayed important history on the development of the Bylaws and agreed they should be updated.
Larry presented a brief review of where he thought the CNA was at after his two years as being chair. He said the goal was to become more relevant to the thinking and actions taken by city. To that end we encouraged neighborhoods to hold a City Council candidates forum focused on neighborhoods. He said the CNA asked the city to do better neighborhood impact statements on their staff reports and that we have been more visible on the major developments like the West Bay yards, the Triangle West Side development and Habitat.
He said the CNA had a significant engagement on the Neighborhood character issue and succeeded in having most of our suggested language accepted.
Larry said we’ve been grappling with getting more diversity in CNA, trying to figure out how to have younger people, renters and homeowners, and more diverse members of the community involved. He also reviewed our efforts to encourage and educate older neighborhoods that have deed titles with racial or religious covenants on how to change them.
He said the CNA pushed an idea on how to make might get improvement in renter engagement with mailings and having the city to support us with funding and addresses because the city actually shares our interest in being able to communicate to renters.
We, Larry reminded the members, also tried to get subcommittees going on three areas. One was social activities — a group of people meeting on how we can share information among RNAs and improve the internal fun stuff that neighborhoods do. The second one was “betterment” — making improving neighborhood attributes like sidewalks, conducting a sidewalk conditions survey, applying for sidewalk transit grants, pooling funds from other areas of the city. He believed that the CNA we has had some influence with this. He said Melissa and a few other folks spoke to the Planning Commission and afterwards the Planning Commission declined to endorse the City’s Capital Facilities Plan (CFP) because sidewalks was not sufficiently addressed as a legitimate form of transportation for funding.
The third element was internal neighborhood operations — which is how we might run our RNAs better. For example, Bruce Coulter has been urging us to step up with the times and the need to have a better web presence. We need to teach people how to do it, how to pay your dues electronically. How to recruit leaders, how to do better communications and newsletters. These were the three prongs: Social activities, betterment of the neighborhoods physical infrastructure, and how to make your Neighborhood Association work better through better technology and better leadership skills.
Larry said although we have made progress and a difference in a lot of areas he was disappointed that we didn’t get as far as we might have. He also said that we were on top of emerging issues like neighborhood centers and the siting of airports and other issues.
Larry said he thinks the CNA is at a crossroads. We have a lot of things on our agenda to focus on, but there’s an issue about how much energy and people we have to address them. To start with, according to the Bylaws, we should have five steering members. We got only two out of the five. Larry said he is doing the Secretary role and we don’t have the communications person nor a Programs and Events Coordinator.
Larry asked the group to think about how much energy we have? And if we have energy to only do one thing, what should that one thing be? If it’s two things, what should we do and how could we move forward on getting that done?
Larry called for volunteers to form an interim committee to redo the bylaws. He also asked if we had volunteers to help increase our outreach efforts and noted we have a weak website presence and no Facebook page.
Karen Sweeney, Judy Bardin, Lisa Riener, and Leslie Wolff volunteered for the Bylaws Committee.
Melissa shared that she is particularly interested in in growing CNA’s and has been working on the list of who’s still active in the neighborhoods.
Judy Bardin asked if we should be inviting guests from different areas to participate in the CNA in advance of formal neighborhood recognition. Larry said he saw no reason that is not possible. It was also suggested that we bring in guest speakers on various topics either within neighborhoods about their issues or outside of the city such as county or state issues relevant to us.
Karen said that the Planning Commission’s work plan has subarea neighborhood plans on it and if you start a subarea plan, you will have some city staff that will be assigned to you. That gives you a way to have some input into city things and a perfect way to get some of your information out there.
Larry shared that he submitted a work plan item for consideration by the Planning Commission regarding sidewalks and maintenance.
Melissa said she lives in an older neighborhood and her personal perspective is that older neighborhoods get zero interest from the city in terms of maintenance improvements and such. She said she would be so much more receptive to the city’s new initiatives if she felt that the city was attending to the infrastructure of our existing neighborhoods.
Larry observed that it at times it seems that the city focuses more on the people who may be here in the future than the people who are here now. He said he understands the need to pay attention to both, but presently a lot of people here now are feeling neglected.
Larry hoped that reviewing and updating the bylaws will encourage people to take permanent positions and help shoulder the work and bring more energy.
8:25 – 8:30 Minutes Approval and Agenda Ideas
A motion was made to approve the minutes and it received an affirmative vote.
As an agenda item, Judy suggested an update of where we are with the comp plan and the performance of the missing middle housing changes in achieving its goals. Bob Jacobs made a point that we should also get an update on what how the new regulations on housing density actually works as it can be confusing.