Last year, regional leaders started an ad-hoc task force to look at a pressing issue in Kitsap County: the lack of affordable housing. That group explored everything from housing regulations to new funding options to increase affordable housing.

At the task force’s final meeting on Thursday, city and county officials say they’ve started to make strides on the issue. But some government watchers are less enthused about the group’s work over the last year, saying there’s still a lack of solutions.

The Kitsap Regional Coordinating Council — an inter-governmental assembly of city, county and tribal leaders — started the task force last year, with a goal to create new funding mechanisms and identify new policies to support affordable housing.

Poulsbo Mayor Becky Erickson, who chaired the task force, says it’s been a success.

“I would like to do more but I think we made really good steps in the right direction,” she said. “I think we got where we needed to go.”

Over the span of five meetings, the task force forwarded two successful measures to the coordinating council. The first: a resolution acknowledging that affordable housing is important and agreeing to “take some action” to support affordable housing, which board members passed earlier this month.

“Every jurisdiction has a responsibility to do something better. Not just talk about it. Do something about it, I think is hugely important,” Erickson said. “I think we are going to do things about it. I know the city of Poulsbo is.”

However, resident Roger Gay, who attended the meetings, says the task force failed to come up with any real solutions.

“Walking out of this room does anyone here think they solved any affordable housing problem?” he said. “They didn’t.”

Coordinating council board members also approved a resolution saying they would work with their local legislative bodies to implement a new sales tax credit to fund affordable housing efforts, without raising local taxes.

Bremerton Mayor Greg Wheeler said the city plans to put that money into its rental assistance plan. Kitsap County and the county's other cities are still discussing how they plan to use the money.

Though the tax could bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars, Gay said it’s “only a drop in the bucket” of what’s needed. He would like to see more collaboration on affordable housing projects and policy.

“At some point, you're going to have to sit down and really look hard at. Not at individual entities, as a city or as a county, but overall as a community,” said Gay, who regularly attended the meetings and posts updates on his blog, Inform Kitsap.

However, Erickson said there’s some benefit to cities pursuing their own efforts. She said that Poulsbo is planning to look at inclusionary zoning, or requiring developers to include a certain number of affordable housing units in new projects.

“Every jurisdiction is handling this differently. Because even though we’re all in one county, we look at things differently,” she said. “What works here might not work there.”

Port Orchard City Council member Bek Ashby said that different parts of Kitsap should take different approaches to increasing affordable housing.

“When we talked about using the same tools for all the jurisdictions, we realized early on that was not necessarily going to be effective to us,” she said at the task force's meeting Thursday.

Many on the task force echoed its success, including Bainbridge Island Mayor Kol Medina. “I feel like the task force has covered everything I hoped to cover,” he said. “I don’t personally see the need to continue it next year.”

The affordable housing task force was slated to run a year. But members of the group agreed that affordable housing issues should be included next year in the coordinating council’s Land Use Planning Policy committee

“As we’ve done this work, to me, most of it has been educational and I’ve very much appreciated it,” Ashby said. But now that the task force is complete, she said: “We have one less meeting we have to go to.”