With a goal of getting a final biennial budget approved before Thanksgiving, the Edmonds City Council held a brief meeting Thursday night — during which they continued to debate the best approach for filling the city’s projected 2025 budget deficit of $13 million. They also approved two amendments and postponed a decision on a third until the council’s Tuesday, Nov. 26 meeting.

The amendment that was postponed, from Councilmember Susan Paine, would have reinstated a public records officer position that the Edmonds Police Department proposed deleting from its budget — one of two now on staff. That amendment will join multiple others that the council agreed during its Nov. 19 meeting to delay to Nov. 26. That’s when Councilmember Will Chen will be back from a trip and could serve as a possible tie breaker on some votes.

Paine said that she was making the motion to reinstate the public records officer because “there are specific legal requirements for getting public records requests up and out the door, and I am worried about the legal risk that we are that we are putting ourselves into with liabilities there.” Councilmember Jenna Nand asked if the costs of potential litigation based on delays in fulfilling records request could outweigh the $145,000 cost of the position, a question that Edmonds Police Chief Michelle Bennett deferred to City Attorney Jeff Taraday.

“If the primary motivation to try to restore this funding is to avoid hypothetical legal liability, I would like to get back to the council on that by the next meeting,” Taraday said. “My hunch is that this is not a concern that the council should be using to justify restoring this funding, but I would like to double check that and get back to you.”

Council President Vivian Olson and Councilmember Neil Tibbott said they supported the police department’s recommendation that they could get by with one public records officer. Chief Bennett did note — in answering questions from Councilmember Chris Eck — that the department would have to ensure that someone else would need to be trained as a backup for what is very specialized work, and that would take that person away from their current duties.

Tibbott wondered if the city could sign an interlocal agreement with another city — such as Lynnwood — to provide backup if needed, a concept that City Attorney Taraday also suggested might be possibility. Bennett said the department would look into it but that idea could carry the potential “for unfair labor practice, for outsourcing work.”

After the discussion, Paine moved to defer a decision on the amendment to reinstate the public records officer until Nov. 26, giving the city attorney time to research the matter.

A second amendment that the council approved was presented by Councilmembers Paine and Michelle Dotsch. It adds up to $10,000 for a consultant study to evaluate the city’s current permitting fee schedule and update the permitting fee methodology. “We haven’t done a true, comprehensive fee study,” Dotsch said. “So this would bring us to a level that is more accurate.”

In past meetings, city officials have said that Edmonds’ existing fee schedule doesn’t cover the cost of staff doing the work.

“I do believe that it’s appropriate to have the cost of this rate study to be included in the calculation of the permitting fees as a part of the overhead improvement,” Paine said. “So so to describe the funding source, initially, this would be funded by the general fund. The cost of the study would be included in the calculation of the permitting fees to recover those costs.”

The final amendment approved Thursday night was a staff-recommended budget adjustment necessary to correct a keying error identified in the computation of the internal services rate for the city’s street fund.

Prior to the discussion about those specific amendments, Edmonds Mayor Mike Rosen spent several minutes following up on the council’s recent discussions regarding ways to tackle the city’s budget deficit — from a 10% reduction in city staffing to reducing employees’ work week to either 35 or 32 hours — all of which will be discussed during the Nov. 26 meeting.

Rosen began by thanking councilmembers and staff for their work in sorting out the tough budget realities the city has been facing since he became mayor in January.  In his Oct. 1 budget address, Rosen proposed a combination of staff reductions, job furloughs and revenue-generating ideas to close the city’s projected $13 million budget gap in 2025. City staff was asked to address half that gap with $7 million in budget cuts, which have been presented to the council in recent weeks.

Pointing to the council’s discussion earlier this week regarding additional reductions — which could save an estimated $2.3 million and possibly reduce the amount of an internal $7 million interfund loan the city has discussed — Rosen  said that he talked with all of his department directors about the various options proposed.  “The 10% approach” was preferred by every department director, and he also prefers it, the mayor said. Directors also would prefer receiving a target number to cut rather than a percentage, he added.

If the council agrees, staff would “go deeper” and aim for $2.3 million in cuts, which would be guided by the budgeting by priorities process the city developed based on residents’ feedback earlier this year, Rosen said. (Read more about this in our story on the mayor’s Oct. 1 budget address.) Since doing that work would take some time, Rosen proposed that the staff target a March 31, 2025 delivery date, with “a plan that would then be implemented immediately.”

According to Rosen and Acting Finance Director Kim Dunscombe, the identified cuts would be prorated for the 2025 year of the biennial budget — with the council voting on staff recommendations — and fully implemented in 2026.

The council’s current budget amendments would be used as guidance for the staff’s work, the mayor added.

Councilmember Jenna Nand said she was opposed to the plan, stating she would rather support the full $7 million interfund loan and the idea of a 32-hour or 35-hour work week or even additional staff furloughs to avoid layoffs.

“My goal is try to try to preserve city functions, city level service, especially for essential departments such as public works and our police and all the administrative services that support everyone who is providing essential services in our city,” Nand said, “and make sure that we are meeting our obligations to our community, our constituents and our taxpayers. I’m not interested in further cuts to avoid interfund internal loan that we would be entirely controlling.”

Councilmember Chris Eck asked about how additional cuts would affect the smaller city departments, and Rosen clarified that the cuts would be programmatic, rather than across the board, using the budgeting by priorities process developed with community input.

Speaking to the proposals for a 32- or 35-hour work week, Rosen added that “the sense is, we would lose more people if we reduce the hours, because everybody would be touched, and so everybody would be feeling that pain.” In addition, the belief is it would be harder to recruit people into a job that isn’t full time, the mayor said.

Paine, who earlier this week had propose reducing the weekly hours of most city employees from 40 hours to 35 hours weekly, said she believed the 10% figure for general fund cuts “is probably way too high. I’d be happier with 5% and maybe maybe even as low as 4% if we decided to go this direction.” In addition, she said the cuts would mean layoffs, including those who provide “direct service to people.” Paine also has proposed a workforce planning study at a cost of $20,000 plus creation of a $100,000 fund to “provide a limited source of funds to complete projects which cannot be reasonably worked into a 35-hour work week.”

Olson reiterated her belief — expressed Tuesday — that simply cutting back staff hours doesn’t honor the city’s budgeting by priorities process. “We as a city led the community in that exercise of budgeting our priorities,” she said. “If they [the mayor and administration] are revisiting the programs that ranked lower and that is where the additional cuts for that 10% are found, that is supporting the system that we chose to embrace.”

“We have more priorities than we have money for them,” Olson added.

Dotsch said that she originally proposed the 10% cut “to make it as flexible as possible” for the administration to implement. She also said the council has not yet discussed the impact of the city’s funding challenges on the city’s taxpayers. In the next two years, officials are considering placing before voters proposals to join the Regional Fire Authority — which would shift the cost of fire services directly to taxpayers — and to raise property taxes to cover part of the city’s budget deficit.

“This is challenging for all of us, and I don’t want people to forget the impacts on our citizens and taxpayers,” Dotsch said. “This is going to be a big heavy lift for them as well.”

Paine said that she looked forward to having further discussion on the matter Nov. 26. “We do need to be very strategic about how we how we treat our workforce, which is, you know, in a very precarious position right now. I want to treat this all very respectfully, and I also think — because we’re talking about workforce — it has to be done with a lot of communication and with emotional intelligence, and not have, you know, big numbers being thrown around without having some understanding about the numbers, and also that that they understand what the process is going to include.”