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Good afternoon, everyone.

Today is December 15th, 2025, and the council briefing meeting will come to order.

The time is 2.02.

Council Member Juarez is excused.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Lynn?

Here.

Council Member Rink?

Present.

Council Member Rivera?

Council Member Saka?

Here.

Council Member Strauss?

Here.

Council Member Hollingsworth?

Present.

Council Member Kettle?

Here.

Council President Nelson?

Present.

Seven present.

Thank you.

If there's no objection the minutes of December 8th, 2025 will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the minutes are adopted.

All right, we have one presentation today from central staff on the substitute bill and amendments to the comprehensive plan and to HB 1110. On tomorrow's City Council meeting agenda, there's one item on the introduction and referral calendar, the payment of the bills.

And there are 83 items on tomorrow's consent calendar, all of which are appointments.

On tomorrow's agenda, there are 13 substantive items, which is why we will be starting the meeting at 1, and notice of that has gone out.

For full council, we have Council Bill 121-126, an ordinance amending 127-156, which adopted the budget and made appropriations from the general fund.

From the Library's Education and Neighborhoods Committee, we have three pieces of legislation.

The reappointment of Duane Chappelle as Director of the Department of Education and Early Learning, Council Bill 121139 and Council Bill 121140, both pertaining to landmark designations.

From my committee, the Governance Accountability and Economic Development Committee, there are four items.

Council Bill 121073, relating to the Soto Parking and Business Improvement Area.

Council Bill 121130, my consultant ethics legislation.

Council Bill 121141 and 121142, both relating to city employment coming to us from the Seattle Department of Human Resources.

and then from the Select Committee on the Comprehensive Plan, we have Council Bill 120985 and Council Bill 120993, in addition to Resolution 32183, which is the actual comp plan and legislation relating to House Bill 1110. From Parks, Utilities and Technology, we've got two items, Council Bill 121137, Amending the Amended Landscape Conservation Infrastructure Program Funding Plan for South Lake Union and Downtown Council Bill 121138 relating to Seattle Public Utilities and authorizing its CEO to acquire a parcel of land for utility purposes.

So there, it's gonna be a long meeting and I think that the agenda is about 27 pages long.

In any case, that's what happens at the end of the year.

We try to wrap everything up and it's our last meeting for the year.

Moving on to our first presentation on the proposed amendments to the comprehensive plan.

Why don't our analysts come on up?

and you're welcome to introduce yourselves and begin your presentation.

And I should note that due to some requests by council members, because this is likely to go long, the blue sky portion of our meeting today will be canceled and Jeremy went to offices and let folks know.

All right, please begin.

Good afternoon, Lischwitz and council central staff.

Jasmine Marwaha, Council Central Staff.

So as the Council President noted, there will be three pieces of legislation on the agenda tomorrow related to the comprehensive plan.

Council Bill 120985 would adopt a new comprehensive plan planning for the next 20 years of growth in the city.

Council Bill 120993 would adopt new zoning regulations for the city's neighborhood residential zones and make other changes to the land use code to implement state laws, particularly House Bill 1110.

And resolution number...

I was just looking and I don't know if I have it.

Oh, here it is.

Resolution 32183.

Would set the city council's docket for future items related to comprehensive planning in the city.

We have two amendments for Council Bill 120985, the Comp Plan Bill, one amendment for 120993, the Land Use Code amendments, and one amendment for the resolution.

And I'll walk through them briefly and mainly here to answer questions before your vote tomorrow.

So let me share.

and view full screen.

All right, that doesn't work.

That's better.

So, Amendment A to Council Bill 120985 would take an area of the central district that was proposed to be added to the First Hill, Capitol Hill, regional center and remove that regional center designation from the area.

You can see it here.

It is generally bounded by Pike Street, East Pike Street on the north, East Alder Street on the south, 14th Avenue, on the west and 18th Avenue on the east.

The amendment to the resolution talks to this area and future planning and decision-making for the area.

Any questions about that?

And sorry, this is sponsored by Council Member Hollingsworth.

All right.

I should invite Council Member Hollingsworth to speak to her amendment.

Thank you, Council President.

I didn't know if this was the proper time to, yes, I see head nods and a thumbs up.

Colleagues, I'll make my remarks a little brief.

And in September, when the bills pass on the select committee, I first proposed and then withdrew Amendment 111. This amendment was meant to protect some of the boundaries of the historic central district, the area in central district between 14th Avenue, like our central staff said, between 14th Avenue and 21st Avenue, west to east, and East Pike and East Alder, north to south.

In earlier drafts of the comprehensive plan, this area was kept as a neighborhood residential.

In the mayor's final draft, the land west of 18th, of 18th Avenue East was made part of the Capitol Hill Regional Center and the land east of 18th Avenue East was made part of the Central District Urban Center.

My earlier amendment tried to restore back some of the neighborhood residential.

We realized we needed to have more conversation with residents and other council members before making such big changes to the future land use map.

I withdrew this amendment to have more community engagement conversation, analysis, and to further understand the impact as well.

This current amendment keeps the area of 18th Avenue East in the Central District, the urban center.

So that was neighborhood residential, now it's the urban center.

The return of west of 18th Avenue to neighborhood residential, which is the first step for us to change the area to the central district urban center.

My next steps to this process are to make the west part of my full intentions, which you will all see in the resolution, is to make the west part of the urban center, too.

That would require public notice of land use change, and we did not have enough time to do that before the end of year, and I want to take into account OPCD's effort to study this area.

I did have an amendment that would have turned this area all into the central district urban center, but this would have potentially jeopardized, didn't want to jeopardize the entire comprehensive plan.

I'm not willing to do that.

So we feel this is the best pathway forward to protect the central district boundaries in addition to create more housing and honoring anti-displacement strategies.

We strongly believe this alignment with is equity in motion and finds a good balance between current neighborhood residential and future neighborhood residents.

it's still gonna get up zoned from a neighborhood residential.

And I also have an accompanying amendment that I know central staff will talk about it.

And for the record, and I had said this to my colleagues, I do not live in these proposed boundaries.

I live outside of these boundaries.

I do not live, there was some comments being made online and there's always misinformation about that I lived in this area and I was doing this especially for me.

And that is false.

I do not live there.

People know where I live, especially those people who made those comments because they have visited my house often.

So I do not live in that boundaries.

Thank you.

So I have a question.

So does this, to make it, I understand that I can read the amendment that it says for OPCD to conduct outreach to find out what does the neighborhood really want long term.

Does this essentially put it back to the proposed one Seattle plan that the mayor sent down?

So what this does, and Lish, if you could help us out with that, please.

Yeah.

So the one Seattle plan would have this area that you see in the middle here, this sort of western portion of the central district.

It would have that become part of the First Hill Capitol Hill Regional Center.

Under the amendment, it would not be part of the First Hill Capitol Hill Regional Center.

Thank you.

And also Council President, if I may.

Yes, go ahead.

Thank you so much.

And I also have an accompanying resolution to this so people can know my intentions and also directive for OPCD as well.

I will talk about that once that amendment comes up, but that is an accompanying amendment to this amendment.

Thank you.

Okay, I'm not seeing any further questions, I don't think.

Go ahead, please.

Amendment B, we are now on version 2 of Amendment B, which was just distributed to council members.

It would amend two policies related to pavement condition and bridge ratings to set a goal, a date by which the city is seeking to reach these goals of a pavement condition index of 80 and federal highway administration bridge rating of good for 30% of vehicle bridges and fair for 60% of vehicle bridges.

and Council Member Hongsworth is the sponsor.

Go ahead, please.

Awesome.

I was trying, I was looking for the name on here.

No worries.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council.

Thank you, Council President.

And I, just colleagues, I will be bringing a revised version of this amendment to full Council tomorrow.

I want to thank Council Member Saka and his team for all of his hard work during this process, especially on all the transportation amendments.

His office worked diligently on crafting amendments, the comprehensive plan with a transportation lens.

This amendment is a matter of specific measure of framing and language and we are working through that.

And I believe we have come to a solution.

And thank you, colleagues.

This is currently being circulated, as you all have seen on the screen.

So we settled on a date to continue the intent of the language, but also having a date here as well.

So I think we came up with a solution.

And thank you again, Councilmember Saka.

I have a question.

The T9.5 says achieve and maintain an average pavement condition index of 80 at minimum for arterial streets by 2050 or sooner.

I hate to ask this question, but what is it right now?

Correct me if I'm wrong, some of the, so right now we had added the date, it did not have it, the language was try to achieve, and at least if you could help me say what it was before and then where we settled on, and then I don't wanna take over the meeting, but maybe Council Member Saka has some clarifying information as well.

Previous version of this amendment said seek to achieve and maintain and average pavement condition index of 80, as funding allows.

This is a little bit stronger in terms of setting a firm date by which the city is intending to meet the goal.

If your question is about what our city, how do Seattle's streets rate in terms of?

Yeah, exactly.

Where are we right now?

What is the status quo?

is 23% of our blocks meeting this goal.

So it's going to take some work to achieve it.

It's a rating of 0 to 100 in terms of pavement condition.

If you're below 40, the street is basically unpassable.

80 is firmly in sort of solid good.

I think it's not good, but it's like the next category under good.

You can, Councilmember Saka, you're free to chime in here if you would like to say anything about that.

I'm just wondering, so if 80, I understand it goes up to 100, the goal is 80, what are we at right now?

Or have we been graded?

I just want to know how big of a lift this is.

I completely, I do believe that we should always be striving to make sure that we're keeping up with maintenance and repairs.

Yeah.

So I was able to find a report from 2010 where over half of our streets were in the 70 to 100 range and half were below that.

Thanks, that gives me an idea.

All right.

Any questions, comments?

Go ahead.

Council Member Saka.

Thank you, Madam Council President.

And I, first off, want to thank Committee Chair Hollingsworth and her office for working so diligently with me and my office to arrive at a mutually acceptable compromise solution to ultimately still meet the spirit and intent and goal of the original transportation amendment that I brought forth while still being mindful of some potential legal risk because as originally constructed there was no date, nothing around there and so effective immediately that would have been the standard and so therefore would have potentially exposed us to some legal risks and so I think this gets us there, still meets the spirit intent and goals.

and to answer your question, Council President, at least from my perspective, the ultimate source of these two things, both the pavement condition index and the bridge rating language in terms of which one should be rated fair versus good, the ultimate source of that was from the the companion legislation for the levy that we passed in 2024. Those specific goals and targets were set forth directly in that companion legislation and it served as a basis for which the future transportation financial funding task force should do their work and the basis for which they should make their recommendations to help us achieve these targets are higher.

And so, and just for some additional context, a couple years ago, the city of San Francisco held a big presser, the mayor there, the then-mayor there held a big presser because they announced that their roads, at least with respect to the pavement condition index, They achieved an 80 or higher on all their roads.

So it was this big sort of milestone moment for them.

And the data that we have isn't up to date, at least the latest that I have seen directly from the department.

But bottom line is we need to do better.

and this puts us on a path to doing so without watering it down, without watering down the underlying policy rationale and goal and diluting the policy rationale and goal behind this, which is we need to do better, more quickly.

And even this by 2050 or sooner, I don't personally love it, but I think it is the right approach, mindful of all the various factors that we talked about.

But ultimately, this is a policy decision, and I think this helps balance the various competing needs here.

So I want to thank Councilmember Hollingsworth again for her partnership and collaboration so closely with me and my office.

We were literally iterating on it for weeks and up until including this morning.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Okay.

Seeing more comments, please proceed.

All right.

And those are the two amendments we have for the comprehensive plan bill.

For Council Bill 120993, which is the House Bill 1110 legislation, we have one giant substitute bill sponsored by Council Member Hollingsworth that really just attempts to clean up the language.

As you know, you adopted over 50 amendments to the bill.

Many of them focused on the same code sections.

For example, I think there were five or six amendments that touched the floor area ratio limits for neighborhood residential zones.

We've been working closely with the Law Department, the Office of Planning and Community Development, and the Seattle Department of Construction Inspections to make sure that the legislation that passes out of council is readable, the council's intent is clear, and the council's intent will be implemented.

It does include a few more substantive changes that are listed on the cover sheet here that as we were working through the bill, we realized that maybe the council's intent wasn't fully realized or council members were making changes, unintended changes, and so I'll walk through those.

First is related to a new family housing bonus.

As you may remember, we have a bunch of different floor area ratio limits that we've applied.

The end result of those was that they weren't all consistent, and in particular, the bonus that was supposed to apply to family size units ended up being lower than the flora ratio that would apply to other types of development.

So this version of the bill brings the family size unit bonus up to be consistent with the other bonuses.

Height limits were increased to 42 feet for certain types of development.

For example, the family size housing.

The way that that was written, it did not allow for additional features above the rooftop.

For example, a chimney, we allow above a normal height limit.

The way the bill was drafted didn't allow for that, so there's an amendment in here to allow for rooftop features like roof decks or chimneys or elevator banks to be above the height limit of 42 feet.

There is an amendment that There's an amendment that was added to provide an incentive for the inclusion of type A accessible residential units.

Those are accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act and are the highest level of accessibility.

That amendment is being focused on projects with 10 or more units because projects with more than 10 units are already required to provide those units.

types of accessible units.

We inadvertently did not include setback limits for non-residential structures and neighborhood residential zones, so the substitute bill applies setback limits that are consistent with residential setback limits to non-residential structures, like churches and schools.

and we also inadvertently deleted a provision that allows for backyard cottages, so the amendments would allow for a detached accessory dwelling unit within five feet of the rear lot line to, again, allow backyard cottages.

And finally, the bill, as you know, would allow corner stores.

The council amended it for neighborhood residential zones to allow corner stores to be located on any lot, so not just on corners.

And the substitute bill would apply that to low-rise zones as well as the neighborhood residential zones to be consistent.

And I'm happy to answer any questions, and hopefully I will remember everything that's in the substitute bill.

Okay, I'm not seeing any questions.

Go ahead, please.

Great.

So I'll hand it over to Jasmine.

Hello.

So I'm here to present the amendment to Resolution 32183, but just really briefly to set the stage.

In general, the resolution is intended to be a companion to the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan update.

It has three sections.

The first section outlines goals and outcomes of the comp plan.

The second section requests that departments add items to their 2026 work program to advance the goals of the comp plan.

and then the third section requests OPCD and other relevant departments to develop proposed amendments to the comprehensive plan for 2026. Amendment A, as noted earlier, relates to that third section.

It adds to the list of comp plan annual amendments for OPCD to develop and requests that OPCD conduct enhanced engagement with the central district community to identify options and potential recommendations to Council to address growth and displacement, including designating what's commonly referred to as the Donut Hole between 14th Avenue and 18th Avenue as part of the Central District Urban Center.

In making its recommendations, OPCD has requested to take into consideration a number of factors, including the area's history of redlining and displacement, community identity, housing needs, both citywide and within the Central District, and approaches to planning that are required by state law.

And this amendment is sponsored by Councilmember Hollingsworth.

please address the amendment.

Thank you, council president.

And thank you central staff and Jasmine and Lisch for all of your help.

As it has said, it adds to 2026 plan updates, just asking OPCD to study and bring recommendations to the council in 2026. What I heard from people is they wanted stronger engagement and outreach with central district residents.

The goal is to hear from the community about growth housing and displacement, especially the displacement and housing tools, OPCD suggests ways to reduce displacement pressures, special focus on helping legacy and redlined black homeowners stay and invest in their homes and the key considerations that we took into account was the history of redlining and ongoing displacements, the importance of community identity and cultural anchors, housing needs both citywide and within, District 3 and Central District in transit access, rail, bus, rapid transit, frequent routes, and planning for transit-oriented development.

And this is in the resolution and looking forward to working with OPCD on these issues as well.

Thank you.

Any questions or comments?

Nope.

Continue, please.

And that is it.

All right, I do have a question.

I do support the amendment to, I think it was the budget that would, that facilitates black home ownership and is there, can you, this is only part of the resolution, is there any mention of that in the rest of the resolution or in, go ahead.

Yeah, great question.

There's no mention of that in the resolution.

I consider that one of our anti-displacement policies when we're putting money into those community groups who are helping people navigate some of the housing issues that are happening in our district.

So it doesn't specifically say that besides an anti-displacement policy and outreach.

Understood, okay.

All right, is there any other comments?

Let me see if anybody's hand is raised.

Not seeing any other hands.

Council Member Rivera looks like maybe.

Council Member Rivera.

All right, go ahead, please.

Thank you, Council President.

I really just wanted for the record state that I've been here since the presentations have started, just so the record adequately reflects that I'm here.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

And you might have tried to get that message to me, but I didn't see it.

Thank you very much.

Please make that known in the record.

Okay.

All right.

I'm not seeing any other comments or questions from my colleagues, and that's all we've got to consider tomorrow.

Yes.

All right.

Great.

Thank you.

One question please.

I remember that we were talking about because we did add development capacity and we didn't in a bit, was there already a, I know that there was no supplemental perform, but was there additional analysis whatsoever?

Can you please address that?

Yeah, we did issue an addendum to the comprehensive plan EIS.

It was released the Monday before Thanksgiving and has been out there for public comment for a couple of weeks.

It identified that the changes the Council made would not result in a significantly different outcome than the plan that was originally analyzed.

Thank you.

And when does that comment period end?

I think tomorrow at noon.

Excellent.

Thank you.

All right.

That's it.

Thank you very much for walking us through tomorrow's amendments.

Thank you.

Looking at our agenda here.

There are no letters or proclamations today at council member's request.

We are skipping the round robin conversation today.

Is there an objection to that?

Seeing none, that's because for the listening public, we don't have council meetings this week.

All right, hearing none, we'll wrap up our meeting here.

Is there any further business to come before the council?

Okay, seeing none, this meeting is adjourned and it is 2.33.

Thank you very much everybody.

Have a great afternoon.