City Council Business Meeting

order and we will begin with our
roll call. Councilor franzosa.
mendez. >> riley.
kebler. >> perkins. >> moranis. >> platt.
so we're going to start with
the good of the order first with our legislative update from
staff.
good evening, council, I'm kite schneider and with me is
sarah hudson and we're just here to give a brief update of the short session.
As you know, it ended earlier this month.
We put together an issue summary trying to highlight the most
important bills to the city, but
eric is our contract state lobbyist, so the one on the
ground and we wanted to give you a chance to hear directly from
him on the more important bills this session.
thanks, kate.
For the record, eric kansler, city of bend lobbyist.
It's good to see you all. I think there's really four
primary issues to talk about.
As kate alluded, we have formalized legislative
priorities, a press release about where we focused our
attention, but in terms of on-the-ground interaction and
what we were really invested in,
there was primarily the lodging
tax issue, the protection of
shelter funding, and then a couple housing issues related to
urban reserves and complete
communities.
The effort to gain flexibility has been going on for a long time.
The first time I engaged on the the city's behalf was 2017,
almost a decade ago.
It took a lot of buildup. A lot of past efforts built on
themselves and led to the
success this session, and effectively what happened is I
think you all know that under
the historic regime, 70% of the lodging tax dollars had to be
earmarked for tourism and
marketed oriented purposes,
leaving 30% for other things,
general fund or a mix of responsibilities.
The 70/30 has now shifted to 50/50, and that is true whether
or not you're lodging tax
increment is pre-2003, a lot of
which was grandfathered in. Post-2003 and already existing
or whether it's prospective in
the future, so bend, our health
care pre-2003 lodging taxes is
better than 50/50, so this doesn't affect us in that regard.
There are local governments, cities, and counties
grandfathered in at a very high ratio. Wayne county was grandfathered
in to use all of their increment for marketing.
Now they have a considerable amount of flexibility.
So there's flexibility we can consider with the 2013 increment
and then there's flexibility
should the city decide to consider another increment in
the future.
And at a high level, that is really -- the bill is very
simple in that regard. There was one additional element
moved into the restricted
portion which involves what the
legislature turned resiliency grants for small restaurants and the lodging industry.
It was a bit of an odd fit. It was important for getting the
bill out of the house, but nobody really loved it.
There was consideration about whether they should strip it
out, send it back to the house for a clean fix.
They left it in, moved it
through, so it's quite possible that I don't know if the
legislature is going to come back in the long session and
re-look at that one little element, but I don't think it's
really a game changer. It's just an additional thing
the restricted portion could be used for.
But it's not just a handout. You need a business or
restaurant experiencing some
sort of hardship was the intent.
So that's a component of it as well.
So moving on -- and that was our number-one policy priority.
Our number-one budgetary
priority in materials of
discrete budgetary priorities
was protecting the shelter funding established through a lot of work including by the
city of bend and others ahead of
and during the 2025 session.
There was a lot of speculation that that allocation for shelter
funding which is pretty bare bones for essential facilities
around the state would get robbed to pay for some other things.
Of course, we had maybe six
months out before session really dire-looking revenue forecasts
and they got incrementally
better as we got into session.
so fortunately, that allocation
was kept entirely intact and so that means -- that was our
number-one budgetary priority,
so on those two fronts, we did very well.
Of course, we were part of large groups of people who were on the
one hand fighting for lodging tax flexibility and on the other
hand protecting shelter funding.
It certainly wasn't the city of bend leading the charge, but it
was a really good group of people and we were at the
forefront with them.
More specifically to our initiatives are two concepts
that we talked about I think the
last time I met and presented in
front of you all prior to session.
Both in the land use and housing realm.
The first is related to urban
reserves. We've spent a number of years
here trying to improve the statute and rules standard for
how you can designate a 50-year urban reserve to allow us to
bring in a 50-year land supply that's actually conducive
towards efficient infrastructure and building housing.
And I would say bend has been at the forefront at the state level
of the effort to improve the urban reserve

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