Hello, good afternoon everyone.
Welcome to the Little Saigon Creative Space.
This is the first time that we've held a public event and we're so happy to welcome the City of Seattle and to be signing a bill today to acknowledge the Seattle Rescue Plan.
So we're very excited.
Thank you all for coming.
My name is Quinn Pham.
I'm the Executive Director for the Friends of Little Saigon.
We're a community and economic development non-profit in the Chinatown International District.
A lot of our work is focused on supporting small business and doing arts and cultural programming for the Vietnamese American community and through COVID it's been very challenging but with the support of the city and our community partners we've been able to provide a lot of resources and opportunities to our neighborhood and our community and so we thank you for coming here today and recognizing the Little Saigon Creative, which is a huge project that was completed the end of 2020, and we weren't able to open officially, so this is kind of our unofficial opening with everybody.
The Little Saigon Creative is a community and cultural gathering space.
It was born out of a long-term vision for something called the Landmark Vision Project, and that combines the hope for affordable housing, affordable commercial space, as well as a community cultural gathering space in the neighborhood.
And the idea is so that we can anchor and keep our community in place and support the growing businesses and the changes that were happening in Little Saigon.
And so to see this realization come true, it's a huge feat for us, especially for such a small nonprofit.
And so we want to thank especially our funders, the Office of Community and OPCD.
Office of Planning and Community Development.
There's been some changes over the years.
As well as Historic South Downtown for funding the capital to build out this space.
So thank you so much.
I'd like to welcome up Council Member Mesquita to give us some remarks.
Thank you.
Well, good afternoon, everyone.
This is a really exciting opportunity for us to be here to celebrate together.
The sun is shining.
I think that is a symbol of hope on the horizon.
And here we are at Little Saigon Creative Space, which is vibrant, as you can tell.
The community is very excited about this space here.
And I think all of us are really excited to be here together in person.
This is also a good place for us to celebrate our excitement together about the Seattle Rescue Plan Act.
There's so much in this city that has changed over the last year and we are stepping up and responding to some of these crises and stepping up to respond to the challenge that this moment demands.
And also there's so much that remains the same, sadly.
crisis of housing affordability, crisis of homelessness, wanting to make sure that especially our BIPOC business owners have the support that they need and that folks can afford to live in the city and stay in the city.
What the Seattle Rescue Plan offers is a chance to respond to the trauma that COVID has just made worse and also plant these seeds for greater shared prosperity into the future.
We have done both in the Seattle Rescue Plan Act that was passed just yesterday.
Now we have over $128 million that is investing in the crisis that so many of our community members need in terms of housing affordability, rental assistance, small business support, making sure that our arts and culture community have investments that they need, and making sure that we invest in those who have suffered the most under COVID.
disproportionately affected by the impacts and the trauma of COVID.
Those in our black and brown community who have seen higher rates of exposure to COVID and higher deaths.
What we have done in the Seattle Rescue Plan Act is directly invest into our communities most hardest hit.
$25 million in cash assistance directly into the hands of those who've been disproportionately impacted by COVID, because we know that when we put dollars in the hands of those impacted, they know best what to do with those dollars.
To pay for food, to put clothes on their kiddos, to buy new shoes so kids can go back to school, to make sure that their bills are paid.
This gets us away from a trickle-down mentality and makes sure that we provide leadership to those who have been directly impacted.
We're doing the exact same thing with our small business support by making sure that we have written language into this bill that says that those who've been disproportionately impacted by the effects of COVID, especially our BIPOC small business owners and non-profit organizations, that they get funding directly into the hands so that they can rebuild and respond to the crisis of COVID.
We wrote language in to make sure that community organizations who are going to be helping us with cash assistance and child care assistance and housing assistance have the support they need to directly work with their community that trusts them.
We've made sure that the community organizations are historically rooted and based within the communities that they purport to serve, that their staff, their board, their leadership looks like the folks that they're trying to serve, so that we're truly rebuilding a more equitable and just economy as we seek to recover.
We've done this collectively, and I want to thank Council President Gonzalez, who worked to co-sponsor the legislation, and jointly with Council, with the entire Council, and Mayor Durkan, Because this was such an important effort, as we talked about at the launch, to make sure that the executive branch and the legislative branch focus on policy, not politics.
That we focus on collaboration and listening to community, not conflict.
We made sure that we identified areas where we knew those dollars would best be put to use now, so that we could get those dollars out the door ASAP and see a recovery take place within the last part of 2021 and build that more equitable economy in the future.
I'm so incredibly proud of this effort.
I know that other cities are looking at us across the state and across this nation.
We've received calls complimenting us for our 28.5 million dollar investment into housing and equitable development.
They're complimenting us on the $8 million that we put towards child care, capital investments, and direct dollars to child care providers.
Why?
Because child care providers prior to COVID were already lower-wage workers who happened to predominantly be people of color, women of color.
And this c-session, not recession, but the c-session that has been worsened by COVID, has disproportionately impacted women, having us women have to be removed from the workforce at higher rates because of lack of access to child care.
So we're stepping up.
We're responding in these ways.
We're making sure that we're addressing the crisis of homelessness with $7.5 million to go into programs like Just Cares, which Councilmember Lewis has been leading on.
Making sure that we have more affordable housing and preservation and strategic acquisition through Councilmember Strauss's amendment.
Councilmember Herbold has been leading the efforts with Councilmember Morales and making sure that our arts and cultural community get the direct investments that they need.
and Councilmember Gonzalez and I have been working diligently to make sure that we move away from that trickle-down mentality and make sure that those who've been disproportionately impacted get those dollars that they need.
Thanks to her leadership on immigrant and refugee assistance, we have a model to implement direct cash assistance.
This is just not enough.
We are going to continue to do more.
This is the first of three acts, as I said yesterday, that the city will be involved in and getting more assistance out the door.
And it's been truly a collaborative effort because we want to make sure that we're centering the response on what Seattleites need now and building that more affordable accessible, equitable future for Seattle with these federal dollars.
It's been a privilege and an honor to work with all of you.
I want to thank you for the work that we have in front of us.
And congratulations, Seattleite.
This is a huge win as we continue to make sure that Seattle is truly recovering, not back to the old normal, but to a more just and equitable future.
Thank you so much.
Okay, well thank you.
Alright, well it's hard to follow Budget Chair Mosqueda, but I'm going to do my best.
And it's really great to be here and see the sun out today because we've come out of the storm and this is what's on the other side of it.
And the package that we have here today that was assembled by Mayor Durkin, by Budget Chair Mosqueda, by Council President Gonzalez, builds on other efforts throughout our region to make progress on what we know the biggest post-COVID challenge we face is, which is homelessness and the crisis of so many of our neighbors experiencing homelessness in our community.
This package makes big, great strides to not only have a Seattle policy, but a regional policy that pairs our resources with our partners in King County for rapid acquisition of hotels.
That pairs our resources with $2 million from Olympia that Senator David Frock and Representative Frank Chopp got us in the last session to get more tiny house villages stood up.
This entire package is a testament, not just to our work together as a city family, but our work as a Washington family of state, county, regional bodies working closely with a federal partnership that we have not had until recent months.
And together, this package is going to make a lot of progress on these issues that we're confronted with every day for coming out of COVID, getting businesses restarted, addressing unsanctioned homeless encampments by getting folks inside to live with the dignity and support that they deserve as community members.
That is what this package is and it's a testament to our ability to come together in these challenging times.
I could not have been more excited to vote for it.
I want to lift up the leadership of my colleagues that did most of the heavy lifting on this.
Council President Gonzalez, Council Member Budget Chair Mosqueda and Mayor Durkan.
This is a legacy building moment for all of us up here and I'm really looking forward to taking this from concept on paper to actual difference in the community.
And that journey is gonna start right here with Mayor Durkin's signature, and I look forward to witnessing it in person.
So thank you so much.
And now you hear from Dan Weiss of Catholic Community Services.
Hi, I'm the Deputy Director of Catholic Community Services of King County, and I'm honored to be here today to highlight our partnership and celebrate the signing of this bill.
Catholic Community Services is working with the City of Seattle to expand and create an array of innovative housing and services for people experiencing homelessness in our community.
The Seattle Rescue Plan and the American Rescue Plan Act enables communities to address the economic impact of the pandemic.
Locally, our city leaders have recognized this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move beyond survival services and to truly address housing affordability in our region.
We finally have a robust federal investment in affordable housing and local leaders who believe that we can and must act quickly.
Throughout this pandemic, folks in my organization and others have been working day and night to help keep people healthy and alive.
I'll never forget a particular Saturday night when we learned that six people at one of our congregate shelters had COVID and 10 others had to go into quarantine because they were exposed.
We needed to shut down the shelter that night and move everybody else who wasn't sick or in quarantine into a hotel room.
I was there as people arrived at a hotel by bus late at night with all their possessions hastily packed in a bag.
I remember showing a woman how to use a key card to open a hotel room door, something that she had never done before in her life.
There was genuine fear in her eyes when she looked at me and asked, how long will I be here?
And I had a mask on, a face shield, the whole thing.
I was an absolute stranger.
And all I could say honestly was, I don't know.
None of us know what tomorrow is going to bring.
This pandemic has left many in the social services working with our unhoused neighbors exhausted.
So many of my colleagues have gotten sick.
So many of our clients have suffered tremendously.
But this is not a time to rest.
It's a time to find a new resolve, to take the lessons that we've learned from this health crisis and to unite in a common goal.
We know that our neighbors are healthier when they have a dignity of a door, a key, and a stable home.
We know that we're all healthier when our neighbors are housed.
The Seattle Rescue Plan does a unique thing in that it recognizes that we need to create and fund many paths out of homelessness.
With this funding, Catholic Community Services will help people keep their housing by paying back rent and providing legal services to mitigate debt with landlords.
They'll help families access emergency housing vouchers so kids can stay in their school.
We'll help a person who just needs a little bit of support through rapid rehousing and folks that need deeper support connect to behavioral health through our enhanced shelters.
And we will develop new affordable housing units.
We know that there's not just one path out of homelessness.
Poverty impacts every facet of a person's life.
For the folks that I helped check into the hotel that Saturday night, amidst all the fear, those folks were still on a path towards health and safety.
Beyond that hotel stay, some just required short-term financial assistance.
Some needed longer-term supportive housing.
It's the job of my team to walk with people and allow them to guide us down their path out of homelessness.
To do that work, though, we need infrastructure.
We need affordable housing.
We need to reverse discriminatory housing policies.
We need to fund and tackle poverty in this community.
And this is that time to build that infrastructure, to stop fighting over who deserves housing, to stop prioritizing one group over another.
This is a time to create paths for everyone, to create a city where people are healthy and housed.
Good afternoon.
I'm going to just adjust the mic a little bit.
I'll put it back when I am done.
I must start with thanking Budget Chair Mosqueda, Council President Gonzalez, Mayor Durkin, Director Ben Noble, and Julie Dingley for putting together a package of consensus that is going to serve all Seattleites.
In this package I outlined my priorities in March, addressing homelessness with housing, providing small businesses the relief they need, and making sure our child care providers are paid what they deserve as well as the employees The employees are paid well and that the providers are supported.
In this, I was able to bring an amendment that was brought forth and supported by all of my colleagues to increase the overall housing commitment of $40 million to $60 million.
I want to thank all of my colleagues for supporting this.
As you heard from Dan Weiss just before me, the way that this impacts my district, District 6, is Dan is working to open up permanent supportive housing in my district that supports people transitioning out of homelessness into the classroom.
And so we are going to be supporting people who are furthering their education, students in permanent supportive housing in District 6. We need more of this.
This package also reflects my second priorities, which is rental assistance, allowing landlords to be made whole, tenants to have their debt forgiven, reopening the city with our city buildings.
This might seem self-serving and I will be here to tell you that city buildings are used by everyone in the city, whether it's permit counters that you're coming to, community centers that you're enjoying, or other public assets.
And third, ensuring that the Cafe Streets program is back-funded.
As you may know, we have free permits.
for small businesses to be able to operate their dining or retail in the street.
This is a typical permit that costs a fair amount of money and we have made it free to our businesses to help them recover from this pandemic.
In doing so, we need to ensure that their team is able to be funded to continue doing this work.
I want to take a moment and reflect about the comparison between this recession and 2008. Why are we able to invest so much money directly into communities so quickly?
And that is because here in Seattle we passed our jumpstart proposal which backfilled the shortfall that we had in our budget last year because we did not have a back Because we did not have to backfill our budget, we are able to invest this money directly in communities.
Because I chair the Land Use Committee and I'm a bit of a policy nerd, I look at the permit counter, building permits.
In 2008, we had to fire or lay off much of our staff throughout the city.
This created a backlog in our ability to approve permits.
And then once the city was back up and rolling, it took five to six years to get them fully restaffed.
So in comparison to 10 years, 12 years ago, we are able to retain all of our city employees to keep the city functioning, providing services to you as Seattleites.
We don't have to wait 10 years for those programs to be completely refilled.
That is the importance of jumpstart proposal policy.
That is why we are able to invest all of these dollars directly in community.
And I also want to thank everyone involved because the overarching goal here is to get dollars into people's hands as quickly as possible.
That's why we have the mayor here signing the bill the day after it is passed at city council again.
And finally, I would like to thank budget chair Mosqueda, council president Gonzalez, mayor Durkin, budget director Noble.
Thank you all and exciting to see us near the end of this tunnel.
Hey, everybody.
I'm going to keep it really short.
I also want to echo the thanks and appreciation to the leadership of the mayor, budget chair Mosqueda, council president Gonzales for delivering a package that was largely a consensus package.
I really appreciate the work that they've done to bring to council a bill that represents the council members' priorities as expressed in the resolution that the council passed earlier this year.
And that resolution, identifying what our individual priorities were, was in response to a public hearing.
So I really hope and believe that this package is not just a reflection of your leader's priorities, but of the public's priorities.
You hear me talk a lot about the shadow pandemic, and the shadow pandemic is the toll that social isolation has taken on individuals, whether or not it's the increases in gender-based violence that we've seen, the increase in elder abuse or elder isolation, the increases in and suicide, and other mental and behavioral health impacts that people have experienced and continue to experience.
This package has $35 million of trauma-informed investments to address services needed by advocates and victims of folks who are working on behalf of folks who have experienced gender-based violence, has funds focused on senior isolation, and has funds focused on behavioral and mental health needs, as well as diaper delivery services, which are really important.
And believe it or not, there's a mental health link for diaper services.
In addition to my focus prior to the introduction of this package on services associated with addressing the shadow pandemic, after the package was introduced, I was moved by the very persuasive advocacy of our arts stakeholders, our arts and music, our creative economy advocates, that we needed to do more in this package to address those needs.
18% of Seattle's GDP derives from the creative economy.
That's four times the size of comparable cities and their GDP.
And for me what that means is we cannot have a conversation about economic recovery without investing in the recovery of our creative economy.
And so there are two parts of this package that are really important to me.
One relates to investing in the creative arts organizations.
focused on small and BIPOC run organizations, and the second component is focused on direct payment assistance to artists.
Among workers in our city that are among the hardest hit, there is a study that shows that of all of the economic sectors, the creative economy will be most delayed in their recovery, by some estimates, six months behind other sectors of our economy.
And so with that, I'm going to hand it over to our creative economy advocates.
I'm going to start, I think, with Reese Nomura with the Seattle Music Commission and hear from him.
He is much more eloquent, they are much more eloquent than I in explaining the meaning of this investment.
Thank you.
Thank you very much Council Member Hurwud.
I'm Reese Tanimura and I'm the chair of the Seattle Music Commission.
I'm also the managing director of Northwest Folklife, which incidentally reached its 50th anniversary this year amidst the pandemic.
So I'm actually very happy to be here in this space, this cultural, creative, and community space to talk about cultural investments.
I really want to thank Councilmember Horbold as well as Councilmember Morales and Mosqueda and all of the council members and Mayor Durkin on your leadership in recognizing that cultural and creativity activity is an essential resource and funding and investing in the cultural community is in an essential strategy in recovery and not only recovery but rebuilding to a level that is going to be beyond what we saw in 2019. You know, twofold.
One, we have so many artists, culture bearers, creatives, creative organizations, cultural workers that During this time that was not only a pandemic, but also an awakening of racial, social, and economic justice issues, black, brown, and indigenous artists and culture bearers did a lot of work around organizing and continuing to make sure there was mutual aid and resources for their communities, not only in material goods, but also in mental health and community health.
And I know that all of you were stuck at home, that you indulged in media, movies, games, music, and all those things which had the hands of many, many, many creative workers and cultural workers within that.
So as we move forward, we really appreciate the $3 million investment to our organizations and the direct naming of our artists and culture bearers within the $25 million direct cash assistance.
We really believe that this will help us create a better future not only for our sector, but also for the greater Seattle community.
and ensuring that we are not just recovering or rebuilding, but that we are actually having a cultural renaissance in the city of Seattle.
So thank you very much.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Quentin Morris.
I'm the co-chair of the Seattle Arts Commission.
I wear multiple hats.
I'm a music professor at Seattle University.
I run a nonprofit organization called Key to Change.
And I'm also the artist scholar in residence at Classical King FM.
So being that I'm an artist and work in educational as well as in the nonprofit sector, Having this bill passed is extremely important to me.
One, I'm a Seattle native, so it hits differently for me than it probably does for, no offense, a transplant who has moved here.
I care about this city.
I love this city.
And I know so many artists and arts advocates and arts organizers who have been severely impacted by COVID.
And so having this relief bill passed today allows those people to receive and feel some relief here in this city.
It's going to actually be arts and culture that help revitalize and rejuvenate not only the community, but also the spirit of all of us as humans, which our spirits have been broken by the many crises that we have faced over this last year.
So I want to, of course, thank Councilmember Herboldt, as well as Morales and Mosqueda.
Thank you so much for your support in this, as well as all of the Seattle Arts, excuse me, all of this City Council for your support in this.
I also want to of course acknowledge my arts commissioners for their hard work and support in this.
We are a community and we all care about this community and I think that by passing legislation like this and incorporating more funding will allow all of us to be connected more with our human selves as we get back to what normal is.
Thank you.
Good afternoon.
My name is Kamala Saxton.
I'm one of the co-owners of the restaurants Marination and Super 6. I'm also the co-chair of the Mayor's Small Business Council.
And I'll apologize in advance if you guys thought the other Kamala was here.
She's in the other Washington, so I'm sorry if I got some of you guys excited.
I am incredibly grateful to the council and to Mayor Dworkin for your leadership on the Seattle recovery plan.
We've heard the the term we're all in this together.
I think the council and the mayor and the city has been in this together to get this bill passed.
This is not easy.
I don't know how you guys did this.
There's no playbook for this.
We've never been a pandemic but I appreciate the the council and the mayors acting as a provider and a caretaker for all of Seattle stakeholders.
More specifically as a small business owner what it allows us to do is it allows us to care take and provide for our employees and our employees have always been our number one priority but it's never been more evident than during the pandemic.
I have never been more proud to be a small business owner.
My role has changed in how we approach business because we approach business with our employees first now.
We appreciate everything they did and how they hung with us during this pandemic.
And this bill really does allow all small businesses that lifeline, another lifeline, to continue to do what we do and to continue to do it in the city in which we love.
This is a great day for Seattle.
It's a great day for Seattle stakeholders.
It's a great day for Seattle small businesses.
And thank you for hosting this here in Little Saigon, a community that needs all of our support as well.
So thank you so much.
All right.
So I'm standing between you all in the mayor and signing this bill, so I'm gonna try to make this quick.
I had a set of notes that I was gonna read from, but my colleagues have covered the ground pretty well in terms of what is covered in the Seattle Rescue Plan.
So instead I wanna focus on the bigger picture, which is really about hope.
You heard my colleagues say that today it was about policy, not politics.
That couldn't be truer.
But it's also about delivering renewed hope to the people of this great city.
Hope that their city is at work for them.
Hope that there are leaders at City Hall who are invested in our collective well-being because we know when we invest in each other and in our community, we all fare better.
Whether you're a small business, whether you're a childcare provider, whether you are an undocumented immigrant in this community, there is something in this package for you.
There is something in this package for you if you are a member of our LGBTQ community who's about to celebrate Pride this weekend.
Happy Pride, by the way.
There is something in this plan for everyone in our city who has been fearing the storm that is this pandemic.
For many of us from the BIPOC community, we know that there is inequities that are pervasive within our institutions and within our communities.
We have felt those.
We didn't need a pandemic to remind us of the racial inequities, of the income inequalities that exist within our very own progressive city.
What this pandemic did show us is just how bad it has been for generations in our community.
And today, and the last several weeks, have been an opportunity for me, for Budget Chair Mosqueda, for Mayor Durkan, to come together to provide leadership and a foundation of a generational shift away from trickle-down economics, a shift away from cementing policies that create poverty within our communities, and one that shifts us towards prosperity and hope.
that we will come out of this better.
I believe that to the bottom of my heart, in my core, I believe that Seattle Rescue Plan will be the biggest down payment on shifting us away from policies of poverty and inequity and one towards where we can build, define, create a new normal that includes us, that includes organizations like Friends of Little Saigon and this wonderful model of community collective economic empowerment.
This is the city that we are starting to build.
We have an opportunity to continue to build on this foundation.
I believe we have the power to do that.
And we have the power to do that when we are unified and when we are focused.
laser focused on what we know will lift up our communities.
So I am honored to be here.
I am humbled by the opportunity to have been able to work with Budget Chair Mosqueda and with Mayor Durkin and with so many community leaders and with my fellow colleagues on the City Council.
Today is a day for us to be proud.
And on a personal note, I will say that just four weeks ago, I personally experienced housing instability in this city.
But for the strength of a social network that invested in me and that protected me, my infant daughter, and my husband, I don't know what would have happened to us.
And it is a reminder to me as a leader in this city and as a policymaker that that is the city we can build when we are focused on each other and our needs and not on what we disagree about.
So I hope you all will join me in recommitting ourselves to that future, to that brighter vision for our city and our collective good.
Thank you so much.
Without further ado, Mayor Durkan.
First, I want to thank everyone for being here, for the community members, for those who gave their input.
I have to thank Quinn for this amazing space.
Out of this darkness came this amazing space, and she has a one-year-old now, so congratulations.
I have to thank the leadership of Council President Gonzalez and Budget Chair Mosqueda, as well as the Ready City Council.
We have come through a really hard, dark time.
You know, we talk about, when I grew up, walking through the Valley of Darkness.
I think that's where our city was.
We knew already there were great disparities in our city, and we worked hard to address them.
And then the pandemic hit.
And it hit Seattle first and hardest, with no playbook.
We worked together with our public health experts, our governor, our county executive, the council, us together, saying, how do we as a community get through?
And we know how hard it was.
It left no person untouched.
We saw from the earliest days what happened to our small businesses and our workers and our creative economy.
We had to pivot as a city to deliver hot meals to seniors, to give rental assistance, to give supports to our small business before there was any federal support.
Today begins Seattle's renaissance, and I'm going to steal that term, thank you very much, because we can come back better and stronger.
Without our artistic economy, we have no heart.
We want a city with heart.
Without a commitment to equity, we did not learn the lessons of the past 14 months.
We know that we can be a better city.
We know we have to be a better city.
But we also know there's still people who have not made it through.
We are not done with this pandemic and it's not done with us.
There's people who need that direct cash assistance just to get through.
There's people who are going to need the child care in order to reenter the workforce.
Small businesses still need the support.
So we have to do a lot of things at the same time.
And I believe there's no city better position to do it than Seattle.
Every time, every single time we asked this city to step up and do the hard things, they did it.
We kept our social distance, we stayed at home, we closed our businesses, we lost our jobs, we wore our masks.
And then when we knew vaccinations were the only way out, we stepped up and we're the first city in America to get 70% of the people vaccinated.
And to focus on the BIPOC community and to close those disparities.
That gives us the ability to open up.
So today I'm so proud to be able to sign this bill to show to the people of this city but also the people of the region of the country that when we come together There's no stopping us.
We still have hard challenges ahead.
We all know that standing here, but we believe we have what it takes to address them.
And then each one of these investments that people have thought about so carefully to get help to where it's needed, but to build those building blocks of a better city of the future.
So it's a great day.
It's the beginning, not just of Seattle's recovery, not just of the coming back, but truly.
a renaissance.
So with that I'm going to be so proud to sign this bill.
Should we crowd around her?
Let's do that.
Yeah, no more pre-conference.
Yeah, I have.
That's right.
Roll it up our sleeves, get it done.
All right.
I also want to thank our congressional delegation.
They went to work in Seattle.
And President Biden made sure that we could get this done.
Good reminder.
Oh, OK.
All right.
All right.
Dan, you never put the thing back.
You never readjusted the thing.
Oh, hey, thank you
Can you comment on the fact that this was a unanimous vote?
Obviously that doesn't happen every day.
I think you heard it all at the Council and I was addressing, but there's been no more important time than for us to show unity and to show this city can work together and to move forward and that we can work out differences, but it is, it's about the future right now.
I don't know if the Council President would like to comment.
So I think on that question, for us it was important to try to build something that we knew would get that unanimous vote ahead of introduction.
So we got to work collaboratively with the mayor, her staff.
staff from my office staff from councilmember skater's office and and I think councilmember mosquito and I put our Relationships to work the relationships we have with our existing council members We knew what their priorities were because we had passed a resolution in advance that identified the full council's priorities and that was our blueprint those were our directions as council members and as we walked into the room to negotiate a consensus package with Mayor Durkan.
And I'm really proud of a lot of the components that were included.
And I think that the unanimous vote really shows that we built a consensus package in the background that was well negotiated and that had priorities that reflected the needs of our collective constituents.
I mean, the scale of the need of people who are experiencing homelessness in our city is significant.
And I would never purport to tell the people of the Seattle that an additional $48 million of an investment is going to solve homelessness tomorrow.
It won't.
This is an initial investment.
They are new investments.
And I think we should be proud of the fact that we are investing in things like strategic acquisition of hotels and motels, like the Just Care model, for example.
Those are things we should be proud of because we know that they are interventions that work.
We have much more work to do.
We have two more packages coming our way from the federal government, and we will have more opportunity to strategically invest these dollars in things we know work to address housing instability and homelessness.
And I do want to give my colleagues, Mayor Durkan and Council Member Biscayne, an opportunity to answer that question as well.
Yeah, I think so much I would build off of what the council president has said look at this entire package this entire package 128 million dollars is what creates stability in our community it what it's what helps prevent folks from falling into homelessness We're talking about support for folks to have rental assistance, so they never end up in a shelter.
We're talking about additional funding so that people can have affordable child care so they're not making impossible decisions about paying rent or mortgage or whether they're going to pay child care and keep their job.
We're talking about small business owners being able to have direct cash infusion so they can keep their doors open.
So in a way this entire package is all about housing stability and it really is a complementary package.
And one more piece if I might because Kamala mentioned this at the beginning.
How the heck did this all come together which is part of your initial question as well.
It took hours of us coming together through our staff.
I really want to highlight Sejal Parikh, my chief of staff, Cody Ryder, who's here with Council President Gonzalez's staff, the staff from the mayor's office, especially Julie Dingley and Ben Noble from CBO.
Folks came together and worked on a proposal by listening to what those priorities were that we identified in the resolution.
But we always said, as the mayor and I announced when the proposal was released, We always said that this was a reflection of what we hoped folks had said were their priorities in public session.
The legislative process was going to bear out whether or not we hit it right.
And I think because of the amendments that we saw, we knew right away that this was a broad reflection of what folks needed.
And I think that that's not just, you know, coming together and negotiating, but truly listening and having that reflection.
Speaking of what people need, there's $25 million in cash assistance to individuals right away.
Some people applaud that, saying that's great because that money is going to be used right away.
But some business owners we talked to say, you know what?
Money needs to be invested in infrastructure for the future.
It's great that all this money is going to go out right away, but it's going to go like that, and we're going to need infrastructure, whether it's more money dedicated to teleworking and working from home or whatnot.
I think...
So we have to do a couple things.
One, we have to lay the groundwork to reopen and recover, but there's some people who are still just hanging on.
There's people who are so close to the margins.
If we don't get them the direct assistance, our homeless problem will increase.
There are people who need the income but couldn't get it for various reasons.
As you know, many, for example, unemployment and stuff for people, either good workers or immigrants and refugees, it wasn't available.
So we had to recognize that we're not out of the pandemic yet and people are still suffering.
So we make sure we have that direct cash assistance.
And we know that when they get it, they will spend it on things that matter and it will circulate in our economy.
If you saw what happened with that first federal dollars, The actual stimulation of the economy was critical and a lot of it went to small businesses.
Second, we knew that small businesses needed support.
That's why we have so much in there for small business.
You know, small businesses made up the backbone of our economy before the pandemic.
They were the majority of employees in our city, about five times the size of Amazon.
We've got to make sure that we bring those small businesses back and we've got to make sure that our BIPOC small businesses have access to capital, so it's a more equitable ground.
So we did a lot of that in this package.
On homelessness, I also want to point out, I agree with everything Councilmember Mosqueda and Gonzales said.
Also, we worked really closely with King County to make sure that their investments and our investments work together to build synergies, particularly on homelessness.
They use that 1% sales tax for an acquisition strategy, Well, we complement it with other strategies.
So these are all together on a regional basis.
Thank you.
Yep.
So we've been working with the county on that and the county is working on their process.
to use outreach to make sure that they bring people from the park to safer places.
And once that happens, the city will restore the park and help maintain it so that it can be open for everybody to enjoy.
Sure.
So we're, I think council member Reagan, I haven't seen Reagan done.
I haven't seen that thing is, but we've been working with the executive now for many weeks.
on an approach that would actually get people out of the park to safer places and then the Seattle Parks Department be able to come in, restore the park and keep it so it's accessed as the courthouse reopens.
I think it's really important that as the courthouse reopens, as jurors come back, as the whole system starts to open up that we have that and we've been working closely with them to do that.
Do you guys have a watchdog group to make sure these monies are going to the right folks?
Sort of like the other, I guess, money before, some people were, I guess, scamming the system?
Yeah, I think I think all two things number one.
Yes There are both federal state and local things We will have as we give money out most of this money goes through RFP and it will be subject to the same auditing and performance Metrics that we use in the city, so we'll make sure and have spot audits on that you will always in any system have people who are perhaps not on the up and up, and we can't present that 100% of the time, but we're gonna be really careful to make sure this money gets to where it's needed.
This is probably one of the most unprecedented investments at one time in city infrastructure.
Our city has never been able to do this on top of the budget, we already did.
For example, in homelessness, this money will bring the total spending on homelessness in 2021 to over two hundred million dollars.
That's a lot of money so we're focused very much on having accountability.
Did you want to add to that?
When we first started receiving federal dollars, Council Member Mosqueda and I partnered on requesting that our independent city auditor, that his office begin the process of establishing independent audits into the spending, the structure of how the city is spending these appropriations.
We're confident that the independent city auditor's office will be the appropriate watchdog and that they'll continue to monitor how these expenditures are made and that they'll identify early on if there are any significant systemic issues.
But as the mayor said, that doesn't mean that it's gonna be 100% on point, but we do expect that it will be, by far and large, a process that'll be seamless and it'll be, again, delivering dollars to those who truly need it.
All right.
Omari, did you have a question?
Oh, okay.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, everybody.
Great day.