2020/12/16 Council Agenda Packet

Opportunities to help build towards fiscal sustainability: We see several opportunities for the City to help stabilize the General Government budget crisis. These are generally presented below in our recommendations. Larger contextual opportunities we see for Everett include: • An opportunity to gain from Seattle's current challenges in retaining and attracting employees • An opportunity in the wake of Boeing's 787 line closure to pivot to becoming more of a green infrastructure technology center • A competitive advantage in having much more land capacity than most other urban centers in King County These points underscore our recommendation below to reframe the future vision for how Everett will grow over time, particularly in our downtown, to a plan that will support stronger revenue growth for the City. Recommendations: Actions the Committee Endorses for Further Exploration We have identified twenty-four (24) recommendations that we believe the City should further explore in o rder to stabilize the City's General Government budget. Because our time together as a Committee was limited and our knowledge of the situation is relatively high-level, more work is needed to frame o ut the details of most of our recommendations, which in turn means it is now difficult to assess their financial impact. Some of our recommendations may not pan out —they may be too complicated to implement or generate too little in the way of savings or revenues. Several of our recommendations are items that the Mayor and Council have been considering in the past year. Our recommendations are not ranked, nor are they presented in any order of priority. As noted, we are a diverse group: we did not seek to develop a short list of priorities, and it is not clear we could have reached agreement on one. Rather, we concluded that the most helpful contribution we could make as a Committee is to offer a longer list of recommendations that we all could support for further exploration by the City. The Committee has unanimously endorsed this slate of recommended areas for further exploration by the City. To revisit an earlier statement: there is no silver bullet. Seeking to squeeze additional efficiencies out of City operations will not yield enough savings. More cuts, alone are not the answer and could in fact be very detrimental to the already challenged quality of life and business climate in Everett. Relying only on n ew revenues, alone, is not realistic or fair to citizens and businesses. We firmly believe the City must take action across a range of areas. We have identified seven categories of action. Since the problem is long-term, we also characterize each recommendation by how long we think it may take to see positive results for the General Government budget. Figure 6 summarizes our approach; Table 1 presents our recommendations by category, with a brief statement on the rationale for each and a note as to the time frame in which we would expect to see results. Attachment B presents all the recommendations in a summary matrix. 14