City Council Workshops

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0:30 (gavel bangs) - Good afternoon. Welcome to Vancouver City Council. Today is May 4th, Monday, 2026. I'm Anne McEnerny-Ogle, Mayor for the City of Vancouver. And we will be starting this 4.30 meeting with a workshop on digital accessibility briefing. And we have with us, Laura Shepherd, Director of Communications. Laura, go ahead. - Great, thank you, Mayor. Again, I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Communications for the City of Vancouver. And I'm here today to talk with you about digital accessibility at the city. Let's jump right in. Oops. Like to just go through a quick agenda with you before we get started. I'm gonna talk a little bit about digital accessibility, what it is, why we're working on it, what it's all about. I'm gonna talk a little bit about our compliance roadmap, the path that we've been on for the last year and a half. Then I'm going to take you through

1:29 some of the sustaining activities that we have planned and that we've been working on for the last year as well. Then want to talk with you a little bit about public information, how people can report any issues that they might have, and then open it up for question and discussions. So let's go ahead and get started. So just as a little primer, I know you all probably already know this, but I wanted to give you a definition of digital accessibility. Basically, digital accessibility ensures that all residents, including those with disabilities, have equal access to city information, our online information, our services, our tools. It's making sure that we're creating and maintaining websites, tools, apps, documents, videos, meetings like this, in a way that people of all abilities can perceive and understand and navigate them and use them.

2:25 Of course, this is no surprise to you. Equity and inclusion has long been part of our work. It's part of the city's vision and values. Of course, it's part of the city's strategic plan. And of course, it's council priority as well, too. Backing up several years, though, in 1996, the Department of Justice established Title II of the Americans with Disability Act to say that that covers digital services for government agencies. In 2024, we were all anxiously waiting as we heard rumors of an update to Title II. And then finally, an update came and a new rule was published, basically saying that all governments, whether it's federal, local, or state governments, school districts, the port, any government agency must provide its information in digital formats in a way that is accessible. So what happened after,

3:22 sorry, I jumped ahead of my story. I wanna talk a little bit more about the Department of Justice rule 'cause it really sets the stage for what we've been doing for the last year and a half. So for all of our digital tools, they must comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. You'll hear people say WCAG a lot. Version 2.1, level AA. And that's basically the technical standard for all web and mobile content, including our website, our social media, our apps, any video delivered through web-based tools and any documents delivered on web-based tools. And since we're a jurisdiction with over 50,000 residents, we were supposed to comply by April, 2026. Well, I had heard at about six o'clock in the morning on April 26 that the Department of Justice decided to push that out by a year to April, 2027. So for many jurisdictions,

4:20 they were breathing a sigh of relief. And I could say that with a little bit of authority, I'm in several group chats and Facebook pages with many other government communicators. And there were many that were very happy that there was a delay. And those of us who have been working a little faster over the last year and a half, we all just took a collective sigh and thought, my brain instantly went to, how many things I would have done differently, what tools we would have put in place. So, but the good news is that it gives us almost a year to get really good at this. We were already pretty ready. And now we've got a year to practice, we've got a year to do more training. So I'm actually, now I've gotten to the place where I'm kind of excited that we have a whole nother year to really get good at this as an organization.

5:15 What are the web content accessibility guidelines? It basically just, as I said, make sure that our web content's accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. There's four main principles to it. Sometimes you'll hear people refer to it just by its acronym POUR, but since it's not accessible to refer things just by their acronyms here, we will talk about them as their full words. So to the four main principles of WCAG is, is it perceivable? Is it operable? Is it understandable and is it robust? So perceivable, can you access it? Can you understand it regardless of what technology you're on whether you're on a phone or a laptop or you're listening or you're watching, can you perceive it? Operable means can you use it? Can you use it with a device besides a keyboard? Is it understandable? Meaning can you navigate it? Can you read it? Can you understand what's happening or what's going on or what you're looking at or what's being read to you through a screen reader?

6:14 And then robust, that it works with many different technologies, whether that's a screen reader, whether you're watching it, whether it's captions, just there's a variety of different ways that the content works with different technology. And there are a few exceptions to the rule. In limited cases, I gotta tell you, when I was giving my first training about a year and a half ago now, people were really excited that there were exceptions to this rule and I had to quickly level set folks that when we're talking about this, we are truly talking about exceptions. There are some limited cases where things do not have to meet the standard, which is why if you go out to our website today, you will still see some documents out there that are not accessible and that's because they've hit one of these standards. So either pre-existing social media posts, pre-existing meeting videos, pre-existing electronic documents, archived content,

7:13 not just old, it actually has to be in an archive somewhere, linked third-party content, individualized password-protected documents, that's like, for example, your utility bill, and then content deemed undue burden. I wanna dive into a couple of these 'cause I think a few of them are kind of important for us to understand. So for us, our pre-existing social media posts, our pre-existing videos, our pre-existing electronic documents, we were all set and ready by the deadline to go fully accessible with our social media, with our meeting videos at the deadline and we're still going to continue to do that work just because the deadline got pushed out. It doesn't mean we're gonna stop and say, oh, that's okay, you don't have to do your social media post in an accessible fashion. Like I said, it gives us a year to get really good at this. So you'll start to see our social media look a little bit different now. You may also, you'll see captions with our videos.

8:13 Like, for example, with reels, you will see captions with our reels now. You'll see probably more robust descriptions within our social media where we're not just showing you something, we're also telling you about it a lot more in our captioning other than just the messaging that we're trying to convey to you. Third-party content is content that, obviously, that we don't own, but as a city, we share a lot of third-party content. So sometimes you'll see things posted on our website or you might see things come through our social channel and think, oh, wow, why isn't that accessible? It's because it doesn't belong to us. And if we did anything to that content, it makes it ours, which means we would have to make it accessible. But one of the things we're going to have the opportunity to do over the next year is do a lot of work with our partners to make sure that when they're delivering materials to us, that they are accessible. And I'll dig into that a little bit later in the presentation 'cause there's a difference.

9:13 If we're paying somebody to do something for us, they have to deliver it to us in an accessible format. If we're just passing something through, like say there's an event in one of our parks and we have some level of partnership with them, we could share their flyer and we don't have to make it accessible. Let's see. And then undue burden is a pretty important designation with this. Undo burden means that something is just, it would cost the city too much money, too much staff time, or we don't have the technical capabilities to make it accessible. We have a lot of documents, a lot of materials. I'm probably getting ahead of myself again. We probably have around at least 500 different documents that I was going to ask the city manager to sign off on a memo that says, we're just saying these are undue burden right now

10:09 because we do not have the technology to remediate these. But again, I'm excited we've got a year so we can figure out how hopefully to make some of those documents accessible. As I've said multiple times, we've been working on this for over a year and a half. I want to share a little bit with you about our compliance roadmap. So back in February of around 2025, we started what I called our discovery phase. That's where I worked with one of our city attorneys, just to get a lot of clarification about the rule. What does this mean to us? What's included? What do we need to do? What don't we need to do? What are we liable for? How are we at risk? So we did a lot of work in that space in early 2025. We also did an audit of our website, of our apps and our software, but I'll get to that in a little bit later. And then I also started to explore mandatory training options for staff. And then over the summer of last year,

11:08 we started to execute. I developed a remediation strategy. We started looking at what were allowable exceptions. And we established the required training for staff and started working on that. And then later in the summer into the fall, we started what I call our multi-track remediation and compliance plan. We put our training plan in place. We had tools for staff. And then we're in now what I call maybe our sustaining plus phase. Meaning that we're gonna keep our platforms in compliance. We're continuing on training opportunities. But the thing I'm excited about for the next, one of the additional things I'm excited about for the next year and a half is really, we get, now we have time to really dig in on workflows and process improvements. When we did the audit of our website, we found so many different workflows that needed to be improved whether it was in my shop from a web development point of view

12:05 or was it a process improvement in a department about how they approach their content or how they get their content up or how they even think about a piece of content. So I'm really excited to have time to be able to work on some of those process improvements in the next year.

12:24 So I wanna start with our audit. That was really one of the activities that took a lot of our time over the last year. It is really the hub for all city information. Making sure that our website was compliant was probably the highest priority within this entire project. Only immediately followed by training staff. So what we did was we found a company who could give us, do an independent third party audit of our website. We found a great company called Be Accessible. They audited our website against WCAG. They used both automated and manual testing for our site. So both, they use, excuse me, they use screen readers and you can see the different, actually I shouldn't say it that way. I should not say you can see the, they tested it with different screen readers

13:23 and then they also did testing with a focus group. So keyboard only users. They did something called text zoom. They looked at color contrast. They looked at screen reader compatibility. So we did both automated and person sort of audit on our website and our content. And we found two main issues with our website. What we found was when we built our website originally, there were some different layout choices and some development choices that weren't following some of the web conventions for accessibility. So we've been working with our website hosting firm to work on that and those are all fixed now. The other issue that we have with our website is our over reliance on PDF and documents. And I'll show you in a second and you'll see what I mean by our over reliance on PDF and documents. Just too much content is locked up in formats

14:21 that are very difficult to make accessible. We have too much content in documents that really should be content on a page. Too much content that can't be translated either with our automatic translator. So I'm hoping in the next year and a half to move a couple of projects forward and workflows forward to help us out with that. And here's what I mean. Almost 2,500 documents representing over 32,000 pages that we looked at and that we either had to remediate or fell into one of those other categories that I told you about. So as I mentioned, we resolved the development issues with our site vendor and in house. And then we spent a lot of time working with departments to determine the status of their content. We worked with them to figure out what are they going to remove? What are they going to archive?

15:20 What do they need to remediate? What is a pre-existing document? And then what documents are undue burden? And we're continuing to work on that now. When the deadline came up to us, we had just received most of our documents back from the same vendor who did the audit to have them replaced on the website. And then my team worked with our other web vendor to figure out a way that we're just able to upload and replace them on the website, saving us a lot of manual work that I'm sure the departments were not looking forward to doing. So we're still working on the remediation and replacement work. And hopefully that will be complete in the next few weeks. But the challenge will be to not allow additional un-remediated documents hit the website. And that's a workflow that we're working on. One of the things that I did was, and it's still in place right now, is I put a moratorium on adding new documents to the website.

16:20 There were a few notable exceptions. So for example, council packets, of course, could still go on the website. Minutes and agendas from boards and commissions can still go on the website. If it's something that we're mandated to do, that can go on the website. But all these other documents that people just wanna put up there, they need to check with communications first before they add them to. But that is a very manual process. And so I have high hopes for finding a more automated or at least less manual way to manage that as we move through the year here. And it's more than just our website. We have many other platforms as a city. That number there on the first bullet is actually incorrect. It's actually 23 app vendors. That number 89 comes from when I was doing the work on the brand and I had to replace the brand icon in 89 different places. So I opened up the wrong spreadsheet. I'll just cop to that.

17:18 So actually it's 23 app vendors. And they have provided us something that is called a voluntary product accessibility template. And you'll hear that called VPAT. So all 23 of those vendors have either provided us a VPAT or they've provided us a remediation plan to make sure that the tool that the city has purchased is either accessible or it's going to be accessible. Our GIS system, our geographic information system, which you hear people say GIS or ArcGIS, we have a VPAT from them. Our social media channels, we've done a lot of work to create standards and work with our other departments who also own social media in addition to communications to make sure they understand how to do accessible social media. The council agenda platform, Civic Plus, also has provided a VPAT as well as I'm sure they're anxious to provide us with more tools.

18:15 But that's a conversation for a different day. Of course, Clark Vancouver Television, we've made different strides to make sure that the content out here is accessible. We purchased a system that will allow us to caption our videos. So when we publish them on the CVTV website, when people wanna go watch them again, or when people wanna watch our videos on YouTube or another platform, they can have an audio description. Sorry, I called that captioning. It's actually, we bought an audio descriptioning tool. It's a pretty exciting tool. We found one that will allow us not only to have AI help us caption, but it also gives us the ability to check it with a human and correct it with a human. And that's something we had to look quite a bit to find that, and we finally found it. So that was really a great tool. Our data portal and our Be Heard page,

19:12 we actually have audits pending on both of those platforms. So with an extra year, I'm confident we're gonna be moving those forward pretty soon. But we have VPATs for both of the systems that they are built on. So the platforms themselves are accessible. It's just all the PDFs that get put up there probably are not, or a lot of them are not. Or again, we're putting PDFs up on things that you don't need a PDF. There's no reason, for example, on Be Heard as an example, people will post a flyer for something, or they'll post a flyer of a timeline. Well, you don't need to do that, 'cause your platform has a timeline that's built within it, so you don't need to double up and put a PDF that's not accessible on there. Oops. And I'd like to share some of our sustaining activities. Even though it's been a year and a half, I'm calling that our immediate action, but we want long-lasting implementation

20:10 to where this is just part of how we do business now. I wanna talk with you a little bit about some of that. So what we've been doing is what I call capacity building, which is why we sought out training in the early days. And we found training jumping ahead. So we developed standards and issued standards for our web content, for our social media, for our videos. And we also prepared standards for people when they're preparing, presenting, and presiding at different meetings that are going to be broadcast on CVTV. We set up required training for over 180 employees on how to create accessible documents. So that training is in basically the entire Microsoft suite. So PowerPoint, Word, Excel, that suite. So we've been able to provide that for employees. And what's been really great about that training

21:08 is that we didn't necessarily attach it to the employee. We attached it to their job category. So say if somebody retires or if they get another job, when we hire their replacement, they automatically get assigned that training, and it's not attached to that individual, so we don't have to track that. It's tracked by job classification. The other interesting feature, at least I think it's interesting about the training, is that we really focused on providing it in what I call snackable bites. So instead of having an employee sitting at their computer for what would have been six hours of training, if you think about all the different things in the Microsoft suite, we worked with our vendor to really make it compact. So most of these videos are between 15 to 20 minutes and work well if you're sitting there with the training opened while you're trying to build something. So we really tried to make it so our employees could really do real-time learning. They could take it, but they could also go back

22:07 and reference it when they're doing other work. The other benefit from that is we were able to create a deal where we now own that training. So it's just ours, and we don't have limited numbers of people who can take it or limited availability. So that's, we got a pretty good deal on that. We've been working really hard over the last year to build templates, so it makes it easy for employees to build documents, so on Currents, employees can go to the communications page, and they'll find any number of template you could possibly think of that they might need from memos to fact sheets to flyers to posters to PowerPoints, postcards. Every time we create something new, we make it a template. So somebody can then have it, and that also buys us more efficiency with staff too, so we're not having to create something new every single time. Allows them to be self-serve with their work and frankly have more work autonomy, so they're not having

23:06 to go to communications every time they need a postcard. This next one, working with work from consultants and contractors must be delivered in accessible formats. That is really important, and that's something I've been working with procurement over the last several months to make sure that that's going to be, that's going to happen going forward. So been working with Ana in procurement, so now we have language in RFPs and our contracts that require our consultants and our professional services firms that when, for example, when you're sitting here and you're getting a presentation from maybe our lobbyists, our federal lobbyists, that PowerPoint presentation, if it wasn't put together in-house, they're required to deliver it to us in an accessible format. So when it does get uploaded to Civic Plus, the public can use it as well in an accessible format. And that has not been language that we've had in,

24:05 we've had language about contractors must follow the Americans with Disability Act, but we took it a step further and made those requirements even clearer. And we also provided, we also created standards for those consultants, so they see clearly what we expect from them. And some of them, we're, well not some of them, actually all of them, we're happy to provide them with our templates as well too, so not only does it look unified from a brand point of view, we know that because they're using our templates, it's also being, if they follow the template, it's being produced in an accessible format as well too. And then CVTV's working with our partners on the accessibility expectations when we broadcast, like when we broadcast the Clark County Council or Port of Vancouver or C-TRAN, so those agencies are also under this requirement, and they are also working to make sure that when they present, that it's accessible on our platform too.

25:08 Process improvements, I've talked about a few of these already, but I'll go through them, like I said, it's now a requirement to do business with the city. We now have an accessibility review required, it's on IT's form, when anybody wants to purchase software, apps, or tools, they have to check that box and make sure that they're telling us it's accessible. As I just mentioned, the accessibility requirements added to RFPs and contracts, and as I mentioned in the previous slide, I got ahead of myself, work delivered to the city by contractors, vendors, and professional services must be provided in a branded and accessible format. And as I mentioned before, we provided the standards and access to our branded templates. And again, how do we sustain this? Like I said, it's just gonna be part of how we do business as a city, it's going to have to be part of how we operate as employees from here on out. But for our platforms, it means we'll be figuring out

26:08 what a good audit schedule is, is it once a year, is it twice a year in ongoing monitoring, recurring training and skill building, so it's one thing to take a training at one point, but you know, things change. I mean, I've been giving different trainings over the last couple of months, I gave a training two weeks ago, I'm giving a training this Thursday, what I presented in the training two weeks ago changed between Thursdays. So some of those employees are gonna hear different things from me. And some of that is just so vast, there is so much information about how to make documents more accessible and what the best practices are, and this is gonna continue to evolve. Like I mentioned, we're gonna reevaluate our workflows as well as our governance for the website, continue to look for tools to enable our accessibility. As I mentioned, we have over 550 documents that I was going to ask the city manager to designate as undue burden,

27:06 and those are largely computer-aided drawings, CAD drawings, they're more commonly called. They're, I hate to say it, the technology just has not really caught up. And to have staff to add labels and alt text to all these kind of legacy computer-aided drawings, that would actually be a bit of an undue burden on the city, would take an immense amount of staff time to do that. So I'm hoping in the next several months, we can figure out a way forward with that, 'cause we're a city, we run on complex documents. Again, reassess the over-reliance on PDFs, and I also want to explore a new website and platform. The platform of our website is accessible right now, but I want to take us to the next stage of our website, continue to be accessible. I think our website needs to be more curated,

28:05 and it definitely needs to be AI ready. And then public information and reporting issues. We want to make sure that people know how to report issues. We have a page out on our website called digital accessibility, where people can find the different things that we've done and we will be doing, and I update that on a, it was on a fairly regular basis now that things have slowed down a little bit. I probably will probably update it once a quarter as some things change. The public can report issues at accessibility barriers and complaints on our website. And then for CVTV, CVTV set up an accessibility page on their website, because there's two, it was just the workflows for the website and the workflows for CVTV. We just wanted to keep those separate, 'cause it's different staff, and so the kind of the routing of it was a little too complex. So we decided just make the complex simple,

29:05 get it right, right where it needs to be. And I wanna, I've been mentioning, we've been working on this for a year and a half, and I wanna recognize the different people who have been working on this as we've been moving through this. Tricia from legal has been on my speed dial for about a year and a half, and I don't see that changing. Same with Brian Bates in my department, who is our web content manager. Jessica from CVTV, Steve and Kevin from IT on the apps team, who when I called them up about a year and a half ago, and I said, "Hey, can you call up all of our vendors "who have apps?" They just jumped right in full with both feet, and I was very excited about that. Of course, Ana in procurement and general services, just absolutely wonderful work with the procurement and contracting standards. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention all the departments who have been putting in the yeoman's work with their content every step of the way.

30:02 It was hard, it was a lot of work, it's not over yet, and I just wanna thank all the departments for that. And I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have. - Great, thank you very much. Anne McEnerny-Ogle, mayor for the city. Laura, on slide seven, you talked about linked third-party content. We have 71 different neighborhood associations, many of which have newsletters that the city prints or they put on Facebook or not, da, da, da, da. Are those considered third-party content and you link them from our website to theirs? - We are still working that out with legal. Because of the relationship the city has with them, once we touch it, it's ours. So I'm trying to determine if we give them a template, say, for bylaws, does that make it ours or does that make it theirs?

30:58 So I'm still sorting out some of the complexities with some of the documents that we get from neighborhood associations. But when we audited the neighborhood association pages, there were a lot of documents that weren't accessible. And then there were just a lot of documents that were, I'll be honest with you, old, that really didn't need to be up there either. So we did a lot of cleanup and I'm working with CoCo and we'll be working with legal to give a definitive answer for the bylaws, their action plans. A lot of those action plans, I've opened up quite a few of them over the last couple of weeks, and a lot of them are very old. So technically some of those could be considered pre-existing documents because they were created at a specific point in time. The one thing that we need to sort out with legal is are people using those documents to do things? So if somebody's trying to access a service with the city, if somebody's trying to do business with us,

31:56 that would take it out of pre-existing document and make it a document that does have to be updated. Although it would be lovely to have, just when you think about the diversity in the city, it would be lovely if all the neighborhood documents were accessible. So I'm gonna be working with CoCo on a potential path forward for that. I wish I had a good answer for you right now. - I do too, because as I look at our neighborhoods looking for their meeting notifications, for example, that information is in their newsletter, but the newsletter is not on our website. So they're trying to hunt down where they're meeting, what they're doing, or different cleanups and such. I'm not the only one doing that. Lots of folks wanna know that ability, have that information. So thank you for your help with all of that. - Of course. - Okay. Councilors, Councilor Fox, go ahead. - Sure, just first really appreciate

32:56 how much work you've done in a short amount of time. I've noticed over my career, whenever an agency says they're going to update a website, it takes like three years. They abandon at some point, they start it again. So anyways, just congratulating you on the progress you've made. But also one of the other pieces is, listening to you talk about the change management that you're putting in place. And I was thinking also that everything you've mentioned is really that change management that kind of comes from above, but doesn't always go in the opposite direction. And I say that as in, you know, hoping that the leadership and the executive leadership team and all of those folks also support this change because there's nothing more annoying to staff to be sitting in a presentation by a managing director that hasn't followed any of these guidelines, right? And so just ensuring that we have that support all the way from top to bottom would be really essential too.

33:54 And I think when you talk about doing those periodic audits that also, again, congratulating you on implementing that idea as well. I think that should help carry this forward. And then my last comment would be, there was a presentation that I took about 10 years ago, but one of the sources that they pointed to was called When Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes. And it really is just a quick short, you know, YouTube video you can watch or a book you can purchase. But I thought for those that feel reluctant about accessibility, I think that is one of those that could bring that home perhaps and bring others on board. So, thanks. - Councilor Ty Stilber. - Oh, Mayor, do you mind if I respond to one of Councilor Fox's comments? And that's on leadership support. I do wanna recognize actually my peers. They have been very supportive all along the way. Same with the city manager and same with the deputy city managers. I will say as part of the change management,

34:54 I made sure I included my peers in this process. So the final decision on the documents that were going to get sent off to be remediated, the documents that were going to get designated different categories, I asked my peers to make that decision themselves, not put their staff in that position. So it literally sat there in 12 different meetings with 12 different directors while we talked about it, explained it and they made some of those decisions. So they, in addition to that, they've all been very supportive and on board. And as recent as this morning, I was thanking an employee for being such an advocate for this. And she instantly said that it came down from her chain and it's getting adopted in her department because her managers are supporting it. So, which is great. - Great, Councilor Stover. - Thank you, Mayor, Council Member Ty Stover. So a couple of thoughts come to mind. One is don't get rid of all PDF flyers

35:52 because sometimes we want people to print things out. I mean, we talked about resources for neighborhood association. So then the other thing I'll pick on is especially, I hope we're doing something about our meetings because it seems to me that any time a list ends up in a container, and I know that's a very technical term, but a separate list inside, embedded inside of a website, it's difficult if you have all your capacities to navigate those. So I hope we're looking at how better to present our meeting agendas and documents that support those up because I think the current methodology is clunky at best. Thank you. - Councilor Hanson. - Thank you, Mayor, Council Member Bart-Hanson. I just wanted to say good job.

36:51 - Oh, thank you, Councilor. And Councilor Stover, we can, and Councilor Stover, we can, and now that we have a year, we can, I'll work with my colleague, Joy, and see what we can do about those agendas and the minutes. And I know at bare minimum, they are accessible. So I might wanna talk with you offline to understand what's clunky about them. User testing is very important. - Councilor Prince. - Thank you, great job. I really commend the amount of effort that's been done over the time and for us to actually be ahead before 27 significantly. You mentioned one thing that caught my interest and that was our website needs to be AI ready. What is that? What does that look like? I don't know what that means. - I saw several of you jotting notes with the second I said that, as I figured one of you would ask me about that. What I mean by AI ready is that when AI,

37:50 where AI gets its information, it scrapes, right? It takes its information from somewhere. So when you type in a question into an AI engine, whether it's chat GPT or whether it's co-pilot, when you see the sources, they frequently cite the source, they cite the website they're pulling that from. So if all of our really great content is locked up in a PDF, that makes it hard for the tool to actually find the information. So really when I say AI ready, it goes to that over reliance on PDFs. It's the over reliance on really great content in formats that are kind of locked up to the technology. That are locked up to our translation tool that make it harder to get scraped. So when I say curated and AI ready, it's really a new mindset about the website. So a lot of times cities approach,

38:48 or just government approaches a website as kind of this catch all place. We're gonna put all the things out there in the chance that somebody somewhere someday wants to find it. And that actually hasn't been a best practice for websites for gosh, more than a decade. But that's how you see most government websites operate. So we started to move away from that when we built our, I guess I can't call it our new website anymore. We took that approach when we built our current website. Unfortunately, when you get down to the end, you're getting ready to go live. Sometimes the best intention meets up with reality. And so we had to accept a lot of documents on there that I was hoping would be content on a page, so it could be translated so people could find it easier. So even our own search engine can find it.

39:45 So when I say AI ready, you could have a PDF up there, but is it even named correctly? You wouldn't believe how many PDFs were on our website that are named draft one. Nobody could find that, much less somebody trying to pull a permit for something. So that's what I mean by that. Just making sure that content is available and ready for anybody who wants it, whether it's a human or whether it's our technological overloads. - Thank you. And my next question has to do with infographics. And is that the same issue with PDFs and AI, or is infographics, the use of infographics to help our public better understand our processes or methods or steps? Because right now, if you look at the website, just like for business and the area,

40:44 there's a lot of information. And infographs can help folks who think differently and take in information differently. So is there any thought to improving infographs or using infographs to better explain our processes? - I do have some thoughts around that. If built well, if built with proper labeling and metadata, using workflows and infographics in a more visual format is great.

41:21 But what I found is when we were going through the audit, and actually when we were building our current website, what I was finding departmentally, some departments were solving their workflow issues with PDFs. They had potentially a flow that didn't quite make sense for the user, and so they made a PDF to explain how to navigate the system instead of just maybe taking a look at the system. So there's some of those issues. But I do, to your point though, I do think a well-designed infographic or a well-designed visual flow on a page can help people who think about information differently. That was actually one of the things I was a little disappointed in our current website. We had a, we thought we were going to be getting, I thought we were gonna be getting a much more visual website, but it's much more content on the page.

42:21 Or words on the page, which is great for a screen reader. But I'm somebody who likes some visuals too, so. - Is there a way to improve that? In other words, I'm trying to influence us to use more infographs, especially in our economic development business section. - I think we are, our current site, I think, has reached its useful life. I'm very interested in figuring out what the next phase of a website is for our city. If, say, economic development or CDD or public works wanted to work on, say, an infographic or a flow on a page, that's something we can work with them. We can work with our web provider to see if we can do some bespoke development work. Or if things are tagged appropriately, then it's something that could get uploaded on a page.

43:17 But when you lock things up in a JPEG on a page, you have to be really careful about the accessibility. So, for example, the default for a lot of people on schedules is just to upload a JPEG of that schedule. Well, that's an image, that thing's gone completely flat, and a screen reader cannot read it. So, we gotta be careful about, we gotta be really deliberate about how we use images or infographics on a website. - All right, thank you. Councilor Harless. - Kim Harless, council member. Yeah, it's great the timeline's extended because there's this balance of wanting to make sure things are accessible as soon as possible, but you also wanna do it right. So, having that flexibility is great. And I love the progress report on everything and where we're going.

44:14 And I just had maybe a fun question. Was there any like aha moment or surprise thing that you learned that you would love to share that maybe you incorporate in your personal life or people could incorporate in their personal life that's like, oh, I never thought about that when it comes to accessibility on these kinds of things? And if not, that's okay. - No, no, there's just so much. I mean, I have learned so much over the last year and a half myself. One of the things I did learn that I found really fascinating 'cause when we were at the start of this journey, when we were talking a lot about alt text with photos and I was telling people, do not default to decorative. Please do not default to decorative. We're better than that. But then I've been learning actually over the last few months that actually sometimes decorative is better because if you don't mark, like for example, that picture, the picture we see up there

45:12 of the aerial of the Columbia, of the river, that should be marked decorative 'cause it's not bringing anything to the party. And if I just put some description in there, it takes time from somebody with a screen reader reading an image that's not really needed. So I started out being really militant with everybody about their alt text and don't mark things decorative. Now, and now a year later, I'm like, you want to be more careful about putting an alt text into everything. But you still need that alt text, whether it's decorative or whether it's a description. - Okay. Well, I'm sure, Anne McEnerny, our gold mayor, I'm sure as we are moving forward with this, every two weeks, you'll have something new to teach us. So we'll be anxious to learn. Thank you so very much, Laura. And please give us the decorative once in a while.

46:09 Okay, let's go ahead and move on and let's bring up Shannon and the team to talk about PFAs.

46:34 Okay. Jump right in. And your microphone needs to have that little green button to hit. - There it is. Sorry about that. - That's okay. - Good afternoon, mayor and city council. I'm Chris Olinger, the city's utility engineering manager. I'm here with Marin Selinger, water engineering manager. Our presentation today is gonna provide an update of the city's PFAS mitigation efforts at our water stations. The agenda will recap information that was shared with council in 2024, along with a revised implementation schedule, along with some information about capital costs, funding and subsidies. And I'll hand it over to Marin to dive into the details.

47:33 - Good afternoon, mayor, city council. I'm Marin Selinger. I'm the water engineering manager. As a reminder, PFAS stands for polyfluoro, per and polyfluoroalkyl substances. They constitute a group of synthetic chemical compounds that are primarily found in consumer products and manufacturing products that are ubiquitous throughout the environment. Over the past couple of years, there have been multiple research studies that indicated health complications due to lifetime exposure to these PFAS compounds. On the screen here, you can see a pie chart that is an extract from one of these such research studies. Specifically, this was a research study that was published back in 2021 on Science Direct. It's a pie chart that should look familiar to council. It was shared in a previous PFAS council update. I'm bringing it back to share today

48:30 because I do wanna highlight that this research study really gives a good breakdown, specifically on this research study group, about different pathways of PFAS exposure. So I first wanna highlight the red pie slice, which you can see it reports 17.4% of exposure in this specific PFAS study group came from drinking water sources. The reason why I wanna highlight this is because drinking water is not the only source in which individuals can be exposed to PFAS compounds. As you can see on the pie chart, there are a multitude of different exposure pathways that individuals can be exposed to PFAS compounds. The purpose of today's workshop presentation is to talk about PFAS exposure and how the city of Vancouver's water utility is addressing PFAS mitigation in drinking water sources. But I bring up this pie chart again to just reiterate to council and the public that the intent of these mitigation projects

49:29 that we'll talk about in these next couple of slides will not make the community PFAS-free. We are looking at reducing PFAS exposure in drinking water sources as best as we can, but individuals still have exposure from PFAS through a multitude of different pathways. I also do wanna highlight that the 17.4% that's highlighted in this research study is very much not a concrete distribution. That was merely just kind of the distribution that was outlined in this research study. There's multiple studies that have been posted publicly. The research has indicated a multitude of different exposure breakdowns. Some are higher from drinking water sources and PFAS exposure. Some report lower numbers than the 17.4%. Once again, the intent of this slide is really just to reiterate that drinking water is not the only source of PFAS exposure, but it is the focus of today's discussion.

50:26 So since we understand the different exposure pathways, let's understand the current regulatory environment of PFAS in drinking water regulations. The table that's shown on this screen essentially provides a good breakdown of the regulations over the past five to six years for PFAS in drinking water. Starting on the left-hand side of the table, the compounds that are currently regulated for PFAS are listed out. As we move from left to right on the table, we start off with the Washington state action levels, also known as the SALs. Back in 2021, the Washington state had enacted the state action levels. You can see that per the regulated PFAS compounds, they had certain limits set for each of these regulated compounds. It's important to understand that based on the Washington state action levels, these limits only required monitoring

51:23 and public notifications if there were exceedances of PFAS detections for these categories. So to clarify, if there was a detection for PFOA above the 10 parts per trillion under the Washington state SALs, the requirement for the SALs was to report the monitoring results of that detection and also issue out public notifications. Treatment was not a requirement as part of the state action levels. As we continue to move down on the table, moving from left to right, we're currently under the Environmental Protection Agency's maximum contaminant levels. So back in 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized the first national primary drinking water standards for PFAS compounds. Specifically, the PFAS compounds are listed on this table. As you can see, the limits that were set by the EPA's MCLs are lower than the state action levels.

52:21 Specifically for PFOA and PFOS, they have dropped from 10 parts per trillion under the station, the Washington state action levels to the EPA's current MCLs. For PFOS, the drop was from 15 parts per trillion under the Washington state action levels to four parts per trillion under the current EPA's MCL. It's important to note that these levels that are presented on this table are enforceable. With the current MCLs, the enforceable compliance deadline is by 2029, and enforceable in this context means that if there are exceedances above the levels that are reported for these regulated compounds, mitigation is needed. And we'll talk in some later slides about how we're addressing a mitigation at certain sites. As we continue to move forward on this slide, as we go from left to right, the final column on the right-hand side lists the proposed EPA's revisions

53:19 to the current MCLs. So the current federal administration has proposed revisions to the maximum contaminant levels for PFAS compounds. As you can see, as you read from left to right on the columns in the table that's presented, the main change is that they would retain the levels set for PFOA and PFOS. So four parts per trillion would still be retained as part of the revisions to the MCL. But they would remove the limits set for the remaining PFAS regulated compounds as you read down on the table. The other key change with this proposed revision would also be an extension on that compliance deadline. The current MCL has it enforceable by 2029. The proposed revision for the MCL would change that timeline from 2029 to 2031. I bring up this timeline to basically communicate

54:17 that the PFAS regulatory environment is continuously changing. And really, the priority for the city of Vancouver's water utility is to remain committed to prioritizing the PFAS projects, but then also keeping tabs on kind of the continuously changing regulatory environment. So we understand the exposure pathways. We understand the regulatory environment. Let's understand the context of PFAS in Vancouver's water system. So on the slide right here, we have a map of the city of Vancouver. The city of Vancouver's city limits are noted on the map shown on the screen, as well as the water service area utility boundary is shown. On the left-hand side of the screen, there is also a table that kind of compares the current MCLs, the maximum contaminant levels of PFOA and PFOS, against the sampling result range that we're seeing throughout our detections in the city

55:17 of Vancouver's water sources. So going back to the map that's shown on the right-hand side of the screen, I want to highlight the stars that are shown here. So specifically, there are red stars that essentially annotate the water production stations that have consistent exceedances above the EPA's maximum contaminant levels. The green star that is shown on the map here is a water station that has consistently reported below the EPA's maximum contaminant levels. As you can see on the screen, based on the map that's presented on this slide, eight of the nine water production stations have exceedances consistently above the EPA's maximum contaminant level. As such, eight water stations require some form of PFOS mitigation. If you can recall from the previous slide, where we talked about kind of that timeline of SALs, so the state action levels by the Washington state,

56:16 to the current MCLs, which are the federal compliance regulations, the state action levels were set a little bit higher. So they had 10 parts per trillion for PFOA, 15 parts per trillion for PFOS. Kind of comparing that with the sample range that we've seen in our sites, you can see they fall fairly close when we go from non-detect to 19 parts per trillion for PFOA, and non-detect to 11 parts per trillion for PFOS. I bring this up because under the SALs, we had six of our nine water stations that were exceeding the state action levels. But under the MCLs, since they have lower limits and also require some form of mitigation treatment, specifically, we have eight of nine water stations that require mitigation. So just wanted to provide that context. So now that we understand kind of the distribution of PFOS throughout the Vancouver's water system,

57:13 how is the city's water utility addressing PFOS mitigation? So the image that's shown on the slide right here is a Gantt chart. It basically provides the PFOS mitigation implementation schedule. It should be a familiar schedule. It was shared previously at prior council workshops. This is an update, though, to the schedule of projects that we have listed here. As a reminder, the projects are prioritized based on PFOS concentrations, as well as a balance between production volumes of the stations. So starting from the top, Water Station 14 is docketed for the first PFOS mitigation project because it is the site that has consistently been the highest PFOS concentrations, which is why that was selected to be the first site to go for design and then moving forward with construction as well. You'll notice that there are gaps in the schedule.

58:11 As council may recall, last summer, the Water Station 14 was presented for construction bid award. There were concerns with the low bid, the lowest responsive and responsible bidder from that 2025 bidding. And as such, the bids were rejected from that. As such, the past couple of months, we've spent rebidding the project. We actually had bid opening, rebid opening last week. And Public Works is looking at pushing forward with construction bid award for the rebid of Water Station 14 by early June. With that, you can kind of see that there is a ripple effect on the later PFAS projects. So as a reminder, the intent of staggering out the PFAS projects was really to help maintain operational level of service, manage city resources, and then also get some lessons learned. So we can understand kind of the decisions and the pros

59:09 and cons that happened during design and construction. The earlier projects can hopefully be captured in the later projects. So that was the intent of staggering out the projects. With this updated schedule, we've continued staggering these projects, as you can see on the screen here. Now, we can see from the schedule that the city is very much challenged to implement a very large capital program in a fairly aggressive timeline. With that, the water utility completely understands that. So we've been very aggressive over the past couple of years in pursuing subsidy funding sources for these projects. The table that's shown on this screen gives a breakdown of successes that we received to date for these projects. Working from left to right on the table as it's shown, the leftmost column outlines these specific projects. And then as I continue reading from left to right,

1:00:07 the project amount for how much has been awarded in terms of subsidy is listed. Then the funding type is listed. And then finally, in the rightmost column, we list the funding entity. As you can see for most of the projects, we've been very successful with receiving the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund Forgivable Loan program that is administered through the Washington State Department of Health. We've also been successful with getting some Public Works Board funding for these projects. The later projects, so Water Station 1, Water Station 15, Water Station 8, and Water Station 7 that are listed at the bottom, they're noted as TBD, so to be determined. And the city is committed to pursuing additional funding sources for these projects as well. So we will continue to provide updates to council as we pursue other funding sources. So with that, I'll pass it back to Chris. And she'll give kind of a high-level overview

1:01:05 about the PFAS mitigation program costs and other subsidy avenues. Thanks, Maren. Chris Olinger, again, City Utility Engineering Manager. This slide just captures some key points on the costs and some funding. The overall capital cost for the mitigation efforts is estimated at $280 million. The city has pursued many avenues to offset costs to rate payers. We have participated in a few class action lawsuits against manufacturers to date. We've received about $14 million towards those mitigation efforts and anticipate about $30 million total towards that work. As Maren shared, the city has been awarded grants and loan

1:02:03 dollars towards specific projects as well. Even though with all those subsidies, we're still anticipating future rate increases to support these projects, a future council workshop will talk about utility rates and funding strategies. So today, I'm just going to say that that is likely anticipated. And the team is still working really hard to continue to look for subsidies, grants, loans, other ways to offset those costs. And kind of to wrap up with this update is just kind of next steps. As Maren had mentioned, construction award for our water station 14 treatment project, you will be seeing in early June, as well as design services for water station one will be coming in a few weeks

1:03:02 as well to get started on that treatment project. Also have a scheduled workshop, I believe, also mid-June for the funding strategies and utility rates. And we are also looking at new sources, drilling new wells, and deeper aquifers that do not have the PFAS concentrations in those. And this generally concludes the update of the presentation. And we'd be happy to take some questions. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Maren and McEnerny-Ogle, Mayor. Maren, on your slide seven, you talked about the funding entities being Washington state. Any federal funds coming in? That's a great question, Mayor. Specifically, the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund essentially pulls from federal dollars. So to provide some more context, the SRF funds, so the DWSRF funds, pull from the BIL,

1:04:02 which I believe stands for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for federal dollars. So we do have federal funding requirements embedded in the state funding programs. It is state administered. And so Washington state is the entity. But there are other avenues that the water utility and public works have been looking at. WIFIA is another such loan program, which I believe stands for the Water Infrastructure Funding Innovation Act. Please don't quote me on that. Something around that line. But those are federal dollars as well that the public works and the utility is looking at as well. Because the state of Washington has returned money because it wasn't lead, we have been advocating back with our lobbyists in DC for any water quality funding, not just lead pipes.

1:05:00 So the PFAs can fall underneath that category. So we'll keep working on that. Counselors? Counselor Stover, go ahead. - Thank you, Mayor. And thank you to the two of you for the presentation just continuing to fall up. The bipartisan infrastructure law funding is coming to a close. There's not really the opportunity to influence how those dollars are being spent at this point. That being said, I'm sitting on a committee with National League of Cities and emphasizing our meeting this week to our federal lobbyists through that organization that as they're looking at the renewal, because there is a renewal for water funding coming up and I don't think it's this Congress, I think it's the next Congress. And that really asking that NLC, National League of Cities, be advocating for full flexibility in those funds. Thank you.

1:05:59 - Thank you. No? All right. - One last one. - Certainly. - Can we go back to slide four?

1:06:10 - Stop picking on Gen X. Thank you. - So if we're going to talk about that, go to slide five. That really isn't the city limits, right? That is just the location of water production stations, but that's not city limits. - Yeah, it's a little bit difficult to see on the slide, but in gray there is a line that indicates the Vancouver city limits and in blue there is a line that indicates the water service utility. - But the yellow is not our city limits. - That is correct. The yellow represents the service area. - Thank you so very much. All right. So counselors, that concludes our workshops for this afternoon. Let's go ahead and take a quick break. We'll be back at 6.30 for our regular council meeting. Thank you.

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