Select Budget Committee March 5, 2025

Good morning.

The March 5th, 2025 Select Budget Committee meeting will come to order.

It is 9.31 a.m.

I'm Dan Strauss, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Kettle.

Here.

Council Member Moore.

Present.

Council President Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Diabeta.

Present.

And Chair Strauss.

Present.

Five present.

Thank you.

This is the first select budget committee of 2025. So again, taking time to set expectations of when we support something that we're hearing here, wave our hands and we are gonna move forward through public comment.

Doesn't look like we have a lot of public comments this morning.

We have two remote, and so we'll get into that in just a minute.

Want to look at, because this is the first select budget committee of the year, discussing what will happen in June and July.

With June, we will come back together regarding the accountability measures that we included in last year's budget, the slides, and our budget reform, both in content and in procedure.

So that will be June.

And in July, we are expecting the supplemental budget in our first finance and native communities and tribal governments committee.

We discussed the difference of returning to past practice of having a supplemental in just finance committee or retaining the newly started practice, which I started, which is to bring it to a select budget committee.

So colleagues, I just put that in your minds, plant that seed as this will be a, excuse me, a conversation that we will continue.

For today, we have two items on the agenda today.

We have the first meeting for the appointment of Kirsten Grove as the director of the Department of Finance and Administrative Services, the backbone of the City of Seattle.

This will be an informational item today to introduce the appointment, not an extensive or full Q&A.

We have 10 total minutes reserved for this agenda item.

because today at the close of business today is when questions are due for her official packet or her official appointment packet.

So if you don't have questions that you can get to today, there is still time to submit those questions to the official packet.

We will then be hearing and voting on Council Bill 120946, lifting the transportation levy budget proviso.

Before we begin, if there's no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

We will now open the hybrid public comment period.

Public comments should relate to items on today's agenda within the purview of the committee.

Clerk, how many speakers do we have signed up in person and remotely?

We have two remote and one in person.

Great, we'll start with the in-person first.

We are gonna use two minutes per person.

And so each person will have two minutes.

We'll start with in-person speakers first.

and public comment will be moderated in the following manner.

The public comment period is up to 20 minutes.

Speakers will be called in the order in which they registered.

Speakers will alternate between sets of in-person and remote speakers until public comment period has ended.

With that, Clara, great to see you.

Welcome.

Whenever you start, we'll start the timer.

Hi, can you hear me?

A little muffled.

Hi, my name is Clara Cantor and I'm speaking today on behalf of the Levy Oversight Committee, which Transportation Chair Saka was also a member of.

And we wrote a letter to council at the end of last year, opposing this proviso.

I wanna call out three important points from that letter.

The first is community accountability.

This transportation levy passed with 67% support from over 260,000 Seattle voters.

That overwhelming voter approval was for a proposal based on the Seattle transportation plan, which council deliberated and amended and approved last year as well.

The STP was developed with significant community input and engagement leading to strong equity, safety, and mobility filters.

It's important for community transparency, for accountability, and for fiscal responsibility that we respect that.

Second, fiscal responsibility, talk a little bit more about that.

Project SDOT plans to develop in 2025 are already in the planning process.

There's already been money spent on the development of them.

And the more that the spend plan is amended, the more of SDOT's time and energy will be wasted.

And the more levy dollars will be spent on internal processes and planning rather than on delivering projects that are very needed in our communities.

And the third point is safety and equity.

The levy oversight committee saw the potential for this proviso to be used to hold levy funds hostage until they're spent on specific projects council members may see as a priority rather than on those prioritized by SDOT safety equity and mobility filters.

I'm asking you here today, please do not hinder the implementation of levy projects or shift spending priorities away from voters priorities.

And council should not be engaged with SDOT on a project management level.

So I urge you today to approve the spend plan with minimal interference.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Clara.

We will now move to our online public commenters.

We have Dan Rounds and then Cecilia Black.

Dan, I believe this is your first time using online public comment.

So you can now press star six, not pound six, but star six.

There you're off mute.

Whenever you start, we'll start your two minute timer.

Welcome.

Good morning, council members.

I'm Dan Rounds from Beacon Hill.

High priority for the transportation levee.

Sidewalkless streets.

There are sidewalkless streets throughout the city, which are working residents and others rely on daily to get to buses and light rail.

Police work with the Metro bus drivers, senior centers, community councils to identify the greatest need for sidewalkless streets that feed to bus stops.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Rounds, and it was good to see you yesterday as well.

Thank you for your continued engagement here.

We're going to move on to Cecilia Black.

Cecilia, I see you there, and star six to unmute.

Good morning.

My name's Cecilia Black, and I'm a community organizer at Disability Rights Washington.

I am very proud to say that I worked with many of you and a large group of advocates to get this levy passed, and I'm urging you to pass ESDOT's levy spending plan as is.

This spending plan represents the will of voters who overwhelmingly approved the levy this fall, and I know that this plan fits into a longer-term strategic plan and was calculated with an equity and safety lens and based on ESDOT's complicated portfolio of projects that are in numerous stages with different timelines and so um i'm urging you to trust um all of the work that sdot does and um pass this levy spending claim thank you thank you cecilia as i see we have no additional

public commenters in person or virtually, this now closes the public comment period.

We'll move on to the first agenda item on our agenda, which is a briefing discussion on the appointment of Kirsten Grove as director of FAS.

Clerk, will you please read the short title and the record?

Agenda item one, appointment Kirsten Grove as director of the Department of Finance and Administrative Services for term two March 1st, 2029 for briefing and discussion.

Thank you, Amelia.

We are joined today by Kirsten Grove herself as the interim director and Marco Lowe, chief operating officer in the mayor Bruce Harrell's office.

Welcome, I'll let you give a brief introduction.

I have one tough question for you today and then we'll take short comments and questions from colleagues.

Again, reminder that questions are due by 5 p.m.

and this agenda item is for 10 minutes.

Thank you, Chair and members of the committee.

My name is Marco Lowe.

I'm the Chief Operating Officer for the City of Seattle.

It is my pleasure to introduce Kirsten Grove, a dedicated public servant and exceptional leader, not to be nominated as the next Director of the Department of Finance and Administrative Services for the City of Seattle.

Before arriving in Seattle, Kirsten attended undergrad at the University of Michigan and went to grad school at NYU.

I only mention those institutions to show the City of Seattle will still give a shot to someone who could not get into UW on two occasions.

Prior to arriving at FAS, Kirsten served with a Midwestern city.

We haven't heard of Chicago, they call it.

I don't know.

She also has experience in key city departments, including Seattle Public Utilities, the Seattle Department of Transportation, and the mayor's office.

That last role could make a case to preclude her from any further employment with the city.

Kirsten brings with her an impressive tenure over five years in FAS leadership, first serving as deputy director and then stepping up as acting director in 2023. Under her guidance, FAS has played a critical role in delivering high-quality customer service to city departments and residents alike.

She is not only attracted but retains one of the strongest teams in any department in the city.

Some of the largest projects include the next life for our animal shelter, the electrification of our giant and vast city fleet of vehicles, and rebuilding the new fire station at 31 at Northgate.

Colleagues and stakeholders consistently describe Kirsten as a thoughtful, results-driven leader who prioritizes transparency, efficiency, and service to the residents of Seattle.

My greatest praise and criticism is that she tells me what I need to hear, not what I want to hear.

Her proven track record in managing complex operations, championing citywide initiatives, and fostering strong relationships across departments make us very proud and believe her to be an outstanding choice to lead FAS into the future.

Thank you, Marco.

I appreciate it.

Can you all hear me?

A little closer.

Is that better?

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

And thank you, Chair Strauss and the council members for having me today.

I really appreciate it.

I'll be here again in two weeks to answer more detailed questions, but I wanted to talk briefly about the importance of FAS to city operations and how meaningful this nomination is to me.

I've been with the city for almost 13 years, and throughout that time, I've known FAS plays a key role in almost every aspect of city service.

When I joined the department in 2019 as the department's deputy director, it was an amazing opportunity for me to join that team.

FAS has a wide ranging portfolio of responsibilities, including building and maintaining city facilities, such as fire and police stations, supporting Seattle residents in all of our neighborhood customer service centers, administering the city's regulatory programs, procuring, maintaining, and fueling the city's fleet vehicles, and running the Seattle Animal Shelter.

During the two years that I've been acting director, our team of almost 500 employees has provided excellent customer service to the public and our sister departments.

Some of the things that I'm most proud of include our citywide women and minority-owned business program.

FAS and the city have set and met ambitious spending goals over the last two years.

FAS has increased outreach efforts to small and minority-owned businesses and launched the second Wimby and Minority Business Council.

Additionally, FAS has started the first ever free pet vaccination clinics throughout Seattle neighborhoods.

In 2014, we served over 1,500 animals throughout Seattle.

And last year, FAS worked to update the city's priority hire legislation to expand access to apprenticeships across the broader region.

As you all well know, the new legislation has the potential to create up to 14,000 construction career opportunities to people of color, women, veterans, and residents living in economically distressed neighborhoods.

And finally, in 2024, FAS put the city's 500th electric vehicle into operation.

And in the last decade, we've reduced fuel consumption by over 500,000 gallons.

We have ambitious goals in 2025, including implementing new consumer protection and regulatory programs, completing the Seattle Animal Shelter's two-year roadmap, updating the city's Green Fleet Action Plan and improving city workspaces and things like updating the Seattle Municipal Tower elevators, improving wayfinding and improving parking garage operations.

I wanna thank you again for having me today.

I really appreciate it and look forward to talking in the next two weeks.

One final thing before I conclude, I want to mention that today in Birth of Night Landis, we're hosting Kitty Hall.

It's a great opportunity to see the work of the Seattle Animal Shelter, potentially adopt a kitten, or just have some fun.

It'll be there from 1130 until 130. Thank you again.

Thank you, Kirsten, and I want to note for the record that Council Member Sokka and Rink joined us before public comment period started.

My apologies for not saying sooner.

Kirsten, I'll just briefly mention that I see your department as the backbone of our city.

You're our landlord, you manage our fleets.

Department of Finance is actually in the NFAS, although a separate entity, and the animal shelter that's been mentioned a few times, I am lucky enough to .

from the animal shelter.

I'll share my brief experience as having a district six district office at a customer service center in Ballard that has three walls of glass and one of non-transparent material that I get to see everything that's going on in your customer service centers.

The cashiers in your department treat people with immense respect, oftentimes are on the receiving end of people's bad days.

And if folks don't know, they're processing passports.

And so it has been really interesting to see the change in demographic of people making sure that they have the correct documents.

You serve us in really critical ways.

I see we've got a couple hands.

My only question comes to you straight from John Streeter from our City Grind Cafe.

The question is, excited to have Kitty Hall today.

Can we bring back Puppy Hall that was a past practice previous to 2014?

We will investigate whether or not 2024 or 2025 or six is possible for a puppy haul, a different type of considerations because puppies are significantly more active than kittens.

But definitely we can consider it.

Thank you.

Well said.

And we've got about three to five more minutes on this agenda item.

I see Council President, Vice Chair Rivera, and then Council Member Kettle.

Council President.

Thank you for Kitty Hall.

You mentioned contracting for Wimby businesses.

Could you please tell me more about a brief rundown on how you help Wimby businesses gain contracts to the city, or just the broad outlines of what FAS does to assist, particularly with black-owned businesses?

Sure.

So particularly with black owned businesses, we have a very close partnership with Tabor 100. We actually operate office hours on a weekly, sometimes biweekly basis in their space.

Additionally, we hold meet and greets with our sister city departments so that women and minority owned businesses can better understand what upcoming opportunities there are for city contracts.

both to serve as prime consultants, but also sub-consultants if they're not yet large enough to serve in that prime capacity.

Okay.

I don't have another question.

I just wanted to...

Thank you very much for that.

The first year that I was on budget, Council reduced by 50% the resources that Mayor Harrell had put into the proposed budget.

So I really appreciate the focus there.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

Vice Chair Rivera.

Thank you, Chair.

I had the privilege and honor of working with Kirsten Grove in the mayor's office, where FAS was actually in the portfolio that she helped with in the mayor's office.

So I've known Kirsten for some time now, and I am so excited that she is at FAS.

She is a professional, and she has the experience, and I just I think that the City of Seattle is really fortunate to have Kirsten in this role and wanting to stay in this role.

So I just really wanted to share that colleagues because I do have personal experience working side by side with Kirsten and I know her to be a diligent, highly capable, excuse me, and just dedicated public servant.

Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Chair.

Council Member Kettle, followed by Council Member Moore.

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

Welcome, Ms. Grove, and also Mr. Lowe.

We appreciate you being here.

To Mr. Lowe, you know, highlighting the schooling, I too didn't have the UW, so this is my chance to promote, I went undergrad and grad school different places, but this is my chance to promote the EMPA program at the Evans School.

So if you have some spare time in your schedule, I recommend, you know, applying and going to the Evans School.

I have two questions, but no need to answer, so we'll leave the answers for later.

So basically, areas of interest.

One is Venerial Hall, and particularly Garden Remembrance.

The symphony, they're doing some work there, but I really want to understand the city's piece in Venerial Hall, and also on the Garden Remembrance.

We have a budget action to check with the membrane between the garage and the garden itself, the memorial.

So that is a very strong area of interest for myself, but also for my fellow veterans here on the dais and throughout the Seattle community.

And the other area, too, is security in terms of our city buildings and just ensuring that we're in a safe environment.

So those are the only things, and if you have any questions about the EMPA program at Evans School, I'm here for you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Kittle.

Council Member Moore.

Oh, good morning.

I just wanted to echo the comments of Chair Strauss about the community service centers.

I, too, have my office hours at the Lake City Community Service Center, and they just do a fantastic job.

It is a difficult, you know, being in...

dealing with the public and day in and day out it can be challenging and they are consummate professionals always very helpful to me and my staff so just wanted to shout out some kudos there and to thank you for overseeing that and i'm excited for for you to continue in this position thank you thank you council member moore and to

play with Council Member Kettle's comments.

Not all of us were lucky enough to be admitted to the University of Washington.

Some of us were wait-listed, as they would say, and so we chose better schools.

With that, I will allow you all to make some closing statements.

We are at about 10 minutes right now, so I know that, colleagues, we've got the comments or the questions deadline by 5 p.m.

tonight, and we'll be back.

Can we get City Grind extended to 2 p.m.?

That would be a conversation for John based on a business model.

Councilmember Kettle's question is, can we extend City Grind to 2 p.m.?

I would say that that requires more people to be drinking coffee after noon.

There are many different fuels that fuel this building.

We have City Light with the electricity.

I'm sure that we have some heating and cooling, and we also have coffee at City Grind.

With that, I'll turn it over to you for closing comments at this time.

Councilmember Saka.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Just quickly wanted to...

say, Interim Director Grove, I look forward to our one-on-one intro sync coming up soon and getting to know you a little bit more on that basis, and then also getting to know you just throughout this confirmation process.

I too want to lend my voice of support and appreciation really for the community service center, that model.

I also have one that I use in my district right across the street from Chief Self High School.

The workers there are the best, some of the best workers in the city in my view.

They are consummate professionals and they've, always willing to help me and my staff as we engage in a busy office hours, you know, sessions.

And then also personally, we got our passports renewed there recently as well, and they, did a terrific job of helping with that.

I personally visited Council Member Strauss, Chair Strauss in his community service center and with the fishbowl set up where he can view everyone and everyone can view him.

So I got a little envy.

So looking forward to learning about potential expansion plans in district one, maybe, I don't know, we'll talk, but looking forward to working with you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Stocker.

My district office provides full government transparency.

And now over to you, Kirsten Grove and Marco Lowe.

I will just say thank you again.

I appreciate it and look forward to talking again in two weeks and exploring some of the questions that you may have.

So thank you.

Thank you.

And also thank you and the committee for their time today.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

Well, with that, questions are due by 5 p.m.

and Kirsten Grove will be back at the March 19th meeting.

The second item on the agenda today is regarding a 2024 budget discussion, which was the mega proviso.

So clerk, will you read the short title into the record?

Agenda item two, Council Bill 120946, waiting to set up the Department of Transportation for lifting a proviso for briefing discussion and possible vote.

Thank you, we are joined today by Bill LaBoard, Megan Shepard, Megan Hoyt, Francisca Steffen, and Calvin Chow of Central Staff.

Before we begin discussion here, I wanna thank Council Member Sacca, for his partnership regarding, and really in your first six months, Council Member Saka, you organized our council into passing the transportation levy out of this body to be sent to the voters.

You then worked with me in a very collaborative fashion during the 2024 budget discussions where the current law, Budget was proposed, meaning that our city budget did not include the funding actions as if the levy had passed.

I'm glad that it did pass.

And so today we are taking up, this is transportation week at the Seattle City Council.

Council Member Sokka had this item in committee a few weeks ago.

We had also the state of the city that day.

So we had the conversation yesterday, robust conversation.

We're back here today.

So this serves as the second part of, I have an informal rule that items must be briefed twice in my committee before we're voted on because of the intense partnership with council member Saka.

We've achieved that by having the meeting yesterday, being able to vote it out today.

And this mega proviso really was in order to ensure the council was exercising its budget oversight responsibilities.

We required SDOT to work with us to come up with that plan before we released the full 2025 funding.

I'm happy to report that since then SDOT has worked closely with the council to do just that.

We now have a solid plan yesterday.

It was said it was a detailed plan.

I agree with that to bring transportation safety, maintenance and modernization improvements to every part of our city.

Again, thank you to council member Saka for his partnership and advancing accountability and working expeditiously to have the report in his committee so that we could act swiftly in this committee.

He did mention, and I agree with him that this is a, out of normal sequence to have a transportation budget proviso in the select budget committee.

It is also out of normal sequence to have a select budget committee just on one proviso.

The reason that this is different is because of the size of the proviso.

If it is a line item, it would usually go to a committee of its jurisdiction.

And so, as he mentioned, this really achieves both the accountability provision that was included in the levy and in the budget.

Sorry, I lost my spot here, which is just, I already said everything and the last bit here is thank you to SDOT for in that time since the levy passed and the work between central staff and the CBO during budget, which was also a little out of norm, how close the teams partnered So I just want to thank SDOT for meeting with council members.

It is important that we used this tool of mega proviso to ensure the fall project process wasn't avoided by the current law budget originally passed and that once the accountability work is complete, we move swiftly to release the proviso to ensure unintended consequences of delay are avoided.

So today we will dive deeper into the plan.

We'll quickly tick through the PowerPoint that was presented yesterday.

We already had robust conversation.

Council Member Rivera, your questions were excellent yesterday.

And today we'll dig deep into Appendix A, which outlines the transportation levy projects anticipated in 2025. Again, I'll give the caveat that I gave yesterday.

This level of detail is more than in the past.

And I think one of the reasons that it was not this detailed in the past is the difficulty in managing expectations that if somebody sees a project on this list thinking that absolutely will go forward the projects listed to in this list today are mostly in the planning stages so most of these projects will not be delivered until next year as public comment mentioned that we can't delay the planning of these because it then just starts to cascade So today we'll dive into Appendix A with the caveat that things do change.

With that, before I turn it over to the committee table, Council Member Sokka, do you have any opening remarks?

No, thank you, Mr. Chair.

I couldn't agree more, plus one, and just want to extend my appreciation to you and your office for working so collaboratively with me and mine to do this and resolve the opportunity here.

And thank you, SDOT, for working with us through this complex work allocation, legislative work allocation, that we have arranged here.

So thank you.

Thank you.

And I'll first pass it over to Calvin Chow of Council Central staff.

Good morning, Councilmembers.

Calvin Schell with Council Central staff.

I'm going to just provide a few short slides.

Some of this is what's covered in your introduction, Chair.

And then I'll transfer it over to SDOT for their presentation.

Next slide, please.

So just as a reminder of how we got here, the legislative background, the Council put together the levy proposal back in July of 24. It included a companion resolution, which called for an annual levy delivery plan by each year, January 31st.

And subsequently, the voters did approve it in November.

It was during your Council deliberations on the budget and the Mayor's proposed budget did not include the spending proposal, so that was developed in committee.

As part of that work, you imposed a spending proviso on the 2025 budget that no more than 89 million of the levy funds appropriated in 2025 could be spent until authorized by future council action, and 89 million is about half of the transportation levy appropriations in the 2025 budget.

Next slide, please.

A couple other reminders, the authorizing legislation does establish eight-year total appropriations for the 11 categories that are established in the levy.

Next slide, please.

And there are some provisions for changing the total appropriations by up to 10% by ordinance after the Levy Oversight Committee has been given the opportunity to comment, or if by more than 10%, it would require a three-fourths vote of counsel.

In terms of oversight, there is the Levy Oversight Committee, which is the applications that have just been closed this week, so that should be getting set up soon.

Membership includes the Transportation Chair and the Budget Director, a number of representatives from the modal boards and the Get Engaged Youth member, and then there will be seven district members appointed by Council and five residents appointed by the Mayor.

A couple other items just to cover in the frame of reporting and transparency.

The levy does require an annual progress report, and it also requires us to continue their online dashboarding, similar to what they did for the Move Seattle levy.

Next slide, please.

And then lastly, I just wanted to highlight that there is another body of work, the Transportation Funding Task Force, that was also called out in the levy discussion and was There was a subsequent resolution by Council that approved this body of work moving forward.

It's supposed to do a number of reviews of SDOT's asset management, asset conditions, and maintenance programs, and look at the funding opportunities and strategies to support that for the long term of SDOT's infrastructure needs.

The work is supposed to begin on June 1st, 25, and the final report's due at the end of 2027. And with that, I'll turn it over to SDOT to introduce themselves and to continue the presentation.

Thank you very much.

Am I turning it over to Francisca?

Francisca, over to you.

Good morning, council members.

I will move really quickly through this presentation since many of you have seen it before, but we just wanted to bring sort of an overview of what is in the 2025 levy delivery plan, acknowledging it as a really great detailed document that we were pleased to be able to work with the council members on in its development.

First off, we are here to talk about the document as well as the proviso.

We are really looking forward to that as a key part of moving forward and confident that we are headed in the right direction.

So today's focus.

The delivery plan certainly reflects a lot of detail, 400-plus projects that are reflective of community input that we were able to generate as quickly as we did because we leaned heavily into community input from other plans and other efforts that had been underway.

So we had the Seattle Transportation Plan.

We're coming right on the heels of that.

for a year and a half of detailed public outreach.

We've got the community.

We've got other efforts like the Climate Action Plan, the Transpiration Equity Plan and many others that enabled us to sort of call and put this this detailed list together.

It's a combination of, uh, large and small projects.

Um, we do have a range that we talked about a bit more yesterday.

Um, but we wanted to just acknowledge that, um, in this life of this levy, we started collection, uh, January 1st of this year.

Um, we will be coming to each every, each year, um, with the annual work plan.

This year is a little different in that we don't have the seated levy oversight committee yet.

We look forward to getting them seated and working through this process with them, uh, next year.

And we did actually start delivering on the levy on day one, because there are certain parts of this levy that are maintenance and operations, and they started right away.

We will also be lifting up large projects.

And because we have some of these large projects, we probably will see some development past 2032. That's normal.

That's what's happening right now with the Move Seattle levy.

and the completion of some of our really big projects like RapidRideJ and other large partnerships.

But that's normal for a levy.

The highlights for the 2025 delivery plan sync up with many of the themes that we heard from you, Council, and from the community.

It includes expanding our Vision Zero network with a range of proactive, responsive, and corridor projects.

Really diving into new sidewalks.

We've got a quick timeframe for delivering those sidewalks.

So getting going really quickly on that work, including the walks that have already started to happen.

Establishing design contracts for some of our bridges and structures so that they're ready, that information is moving and also ready if it needs to be fed into the transportation funding task force discussion.

and getting going in the design and maintenance of some corridor projects that I'm sure we'll talk about today.

And taking advantage of the opportunity presented by the Men's World Cup, coming to Seattle to build some enduring legacy projects that will be of value to the community.

for a long time.

A couple examples, Vision Zero, lots of projects that I'm sure we can talk more about today.

Getting going on some of the bridges and structures design work, even things you won't see right away, but just know they're underway, like electrical and mechanical design efforts.

And we'll be doing a lot of asset cleaning and inspection in this coming year.

Lots of work on transit corridors and spot improvements to keep our buses moving.

Next.

street maintenance and modernization, filling potholes, again, those things that started on day one, filling potholes and making our streets work better, seeing maintenance of our bike lanes, as well as some of the downtown work.

So just wanted to share this as really a structure by which you will probably see reporting on the levy going forward and ways in which we will structure the information for the levy oversight committee, looking at these 11 categories, which we'll also go through today.

A few moments on project selection.

It's an organized process that SDOT leans heavily into the Seattle Transportation Plan and some of our prioritization criteria to do.

We're heavily informed by those community documents, as well as maximizing the benefit of an investment, making sure to be investing with an eye towards equity and distribution.

at the same time, as well as optimal leveraging and being able to work with community and leveraging with our partner capital departments when they are working in the street.

Next.

Again, to just speak to some of our larger projects, we are embarking on some of the big ones that are going to take the better part of a year or two to get going into construction.

And that is because we wanna have a diligent and thoughtful community engagement process We want to be collecting the necessary information to have good, solid designs, and we want to be doing that in a thoughtful way.

So we will be moving these projects through design and planning and preparing them for a competitive bid process so that we can start building into 26 and 27. Next.

So with that, just a quick overview of that, of the document itself, and we look forward to talking with you more about the attachment.

Thank you, Francisca.

Just noting that that last project was the sidewalk project in District 5 on Greenwood Avenue.

Shout out to D5.

Colleagues, any questions on this PowerPoint?

This was the same presentation in yesterday's transportation committee.

We'll dig into attachment A if there are no questions at this time.

Seeing none, I'm going to turn it right back over to the committee table, Estad, if you want to.

And what I love about this annual delivery plan is I was during office hours with somebody, I was trying to search the document, the attachment aid, the document from the summer.

So I Googled, this was the first Google result and we walked through the plan with the resident in real time.

And so just happy that this is the top Google result and back over to you.

That's great.

So we will step through attachment A.

We've just, in the prior conversation, talked a little bit about what's in the annual delivery plan.

It's got some intro language that talks a bit about project selection.

It's got the spreadsheet that we showed looking at the different allocations and speaks a little bit to the process and purpose of the document.

But the way that we will be presenting to you today, we'll start just at the top with the with the Vision Zero section and work section by section.

So in Vision Zero, certainly sections 11 through 14, these are, and I will acknowledge you guys had a long conversation, many of you, a long conversation yesterday with Chief Safety Officer and City Traffic Engineer Venu Namani.

about Vision Zero, so I might lean a little bit into some of that language that he used.

Sections 1.1 through 1.4 really do reflect what he had presented in terms of proactive and responsive and corridor-based work that he was discussing.

We have, in the safety redesign projects, we have corridor projects that typically are on our high injury network, and they typically tend to be arterials.

This is a segment-based approach to those arterials that looks at a segment of the arterial, not the whole thing, but a defined segment that pops up in the high injury network, looking at ways we can define lanes and turn movements.

um, do speed regulation through signalization and physical cues and increasing, uh, visibility and crossing improvements.

There's eight corridors that we are proposing to advance into, uh, in, uh, in 2025. Um, and it's a range of construction design and planning, and they're listed there, 130th, Henderson, Rainier, Renton, and a few others.

And sorry to interrupt here.

Bill, if you're able to highlight the section of this document that Francisca is discussing, I'm having trouble.

Are you right now discussing 1.2 or the starting of planning?

Which item are you speaking of?

Aha, at the top that was out of view.

That's where it was.

So at the top of the spreadsheet on the left second column from the left, I was sort of speaking to the grouping of 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4, in that there's a lot of projects listed here.

So I was treating them as a cluster of projects.

So it's that combination of the high injury networks I haven't spoken to the 1.2 high collision safety projects.

Those are more spot improvements.

Those are looking at intersections where we would typically focus on things like turn movements, crossing movements, protecting operations and turn movements so that we're reducing the potential for conflict between people moving through that intersection.

And in 1.2, we've identified 17 projects for 2025. I'll just finish out three and four.

And 1.3, this is the leading pedestrian intervals.

You've been seeing them increasing around town.

We are continuing to put them in all of the locations where they're feasible with 100 locations already identified for the pipeline to move into 2025. And then in terms of traffic calming, these are often sort of lighter touch at first to influence driver behavior and create safety overall, striping revisions like outside lane lines, speed humps, speed feedback signs, and visibility changes.

And we've identified 10 projects to move into construction in 2025 and in 1.4.

So I'll pause having talked through 1.1 and 1.4 through 1.4.

I'm not seeing any hands.

Let's keep ticking through the details.

Great.

Safe Routes to School, these are fantastic partnership projects that we do with schools throughout the city.

You might remember that the Moves Seattle Levy made a commitment to working with every school in the city, and we actually met and exceeded that.

We do lots of co-creation with the parents, the school district, and our transportation liaison.

at the school district to develop these.

We've identified 30 projects that would start into construction in 2025. It's a wide range of things that happen, sometimes smaller.

It really is responsive to what we hear from neighbors and what we're seeing in terms of conditions at the perimeters of these schools.

It's obviously different if you've got a school on an arterial versus a school in a tucked into a neighborhood district, what type of interventions make sense.

And this category does leverage quite a bit of funding from other areas of the budget.

I would just keep ticking.

We're on page eight of 10 of 35, so I know that we've got a lot of material to get through.

Sorry, I'm seeing Council Member Sokka now.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chair, for clarity, would you like questions as we go or at the end?

What is your preference here?

I'd say as we go, recognizing we do have a hard stop in one hour, 15 minutes.

All good.

So if we start getting, right now we're ahead.

If we start getting behind, I'll do the same thing I did during budget, which was move us along.

All good.

So thank you, SDOT, for being here.

I really appreciate this initial presentation.

And thank you also for working so collaboratively with me in my office.

and availing yourselves to other council offices as well as part of this process.

When we're talking about safe routes to school, it's a very important priority of mind, keeping our kids safe.

And in my committee, we've had members of the commission here, we've had members of SDOT talking about safe routes to school specific improvements needed.

But it's good to see that work brought to life a little bit through the context of some of the schools listed on this list here.

And I understand all the specific safe routes to school investments and improvements and projects are very location specific and they're very granular and dependent on the situation.

But can you call out, just give an example of you know, maybe one or two type of improvements at any of the schools on this list that you all have planned.

Yeah, I mean, I'll speak more to kind of what we've been delivering, which is, you know, sometimes it's a matter of needing a marked crosswalk near a school, an area where parents are saying that they would like that extra visibility for the students as they're getting to class.

Sometimes it's asking for an investigation, whether a stop sign warrant, whether it meets the criteria to have a stop sign installed.

Other ones include putting in neighborhood sidewalks.

Those are the sort of more alternative sidewalk.

that has happened in some different communities.

We've also had large capital projects occasionally where we'll find that due to a hillside, we'll do a larger capital project through a contractor.

So it really does range a lot in terms of whether it's creating space or creating visibility or changing operations.

Thank you.

Fantastic.

Back to you.

All right.

Aurora Avenue, this is a really exciting project.

The levy really put in funding to leverage and try and help advance the packaging of this project in the long run.

We do currently have some other grant funds that are funding a lot of the Aurora work, but the 2024 levy funds will help us with some of our communications and outreach that we're starting.

As you might remember, we've been engaged in a visioning process with community Um, we're wrapping up phase one and moving into phase two this year, um, including some structured community engagement, uh, and continue to work with local stakeholders on this project.

I see a hand vice chair.

Thank you, chair.

Thank you.

I stopped for being here again.

One thing I'd love to see, um, uh, Francesca is the list of the stakeholders that you're working with in the city.

So we know who of our constituents have been engaged in, in this process with you all.

Sure.

Yeah.

Happy.

And I, um, in the immediate can also provide, um, some summary information too.

We've, we've been documenting our community outreach.

So it's, it's pretty, um, there's some resources we can provide immediately on that.

Thank you.

And council member Moore live from D five.

Yeah.

Thank you, um, chair.

And yeah, this is wonderful, this project.

This was specific funding that I did was able to get into the levy.

So I'm really excited to see this.

Just wondering if we can set up some regular check in or update really more on how this work is going.

I know there are a lot of people that are really interested in now with the mayor talking about some northern lights program, just would be, I think, interesting and helpful to get regular updates on this planning and the visioning.

Any response over there?

No.

We're definitely happy to provide regular updates.

I know that your district director, Council Moore has been staying pretty close to the project and attending all the events, but we're happy to provide a regular cycle of updates on project progress and to any of the council members and maybe to the committee as well.

Excellent, thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Moore.

Back to you, Francisca.

All right, moving into 1.7.

We did discuss this briefly yesterday, the Neighborhood Initiated Safety Partnership Program.

This is an exciting new program in the levy to co-create projects with community.

For 2025, we are focused on launching this new program, working internally to align this work with really strong past programs like home zones and the Neighborhood Street Fund.

trying to figure out the best ways to step into the space using the learnings and best practices from those efforts.

We're also assessing how we can use and leverage existing tools within SDOT to help the ways in which we are capturing community wisdom, community input, and helping that advance our engagement with community.

So future years, we'll focus more on specific deliverables as we get this set up this year.

Okay.

1.8, neighborhood-scale traffic safety programs.

Much of what we've talked about so far in this category have been arterial-focused.

This is really a space that tends to create a little bit more ability to respond to non-arterial issues.

It's not a hard line, but this tends to be where that work is done.

working with community in different districts.

You can see different clusters of areas to deliver things like speed humps on neighborhood streets, curb bulbs and other crossing improvements, looking at it sort of as comprehensively as we can so that people are seeing a noticeable change in a district.

So we have five areas identified here for work in 2025 and some to tee up for additional planning for future year installation.

Thank you, Francisca.

On this one, you have some projects starting construction and some in planning.

Can you speak to were the ones in construction already in planning or how do we move quickly?

My question yesterday was how do we deliver crosswalks more quickly?

Yeah.

So this list really, the list of the five that are moving into construction really are, they are reflective of some things that were in motion, conversations that were in motion or conversations that were offshoots from other projects, right?

We'll often be in community talking about a project and that will flag something nearby or adjacent or related.

And so what you see there is a lot of that type of work where we were in conversation.

People said, hey, there's another problem over there.

Could you look at it?

Thank you.

Okay.

We are tag teaming this morning.

So I'm gonna pass off street maintenance and modernization to Megan Hoyt.

Great.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Megan Hoyt.

I am S-DOT's major projects manager housed within the capital project delivery portfolio, basically helping the projects and the people working on the projects work through them.

And I'm gonna talk to you about item two, are street maintenance and modernization corridors.

And these are kind of the opposite of the neighborhood-scale traffic safety programs, and we are talking about the big arterial streets.

And very particularly for 2.1, our arterial roadway maintenance, these are our big projects.

Aside from the bridges, these are the biggest projects you'll really see coming out of the levee.

A big reason is that they are driven by pavement.

And at this point, a lot of the roads, a mill and overlay project isn't quite enough, and so we need to reconstruct the roadway.

And the projects that we picked were very important from a maintenance standpoint, but also really reflected a lot of the key projects in the Seattle Transportation Plan.

As a result, the projects you're going to see in 2.1, with one big exception of Fauntleroy that is just a maintenance project, really are a lot of our big multimodal corridors where you're going to see a lot of different modes coming together in one place.

And the projects that we have in design in 2025, Three out of these four, actually four out of the four, have grant funds attached to them, either for design or for construction.

So those were absolutely the first out of the gate.

But the projects and planning, as Francisca mentioned, it can take some years for these really big projects.

So we have already started the planning process for Beacon Avenue that combines working with Metro.

as well as building a continuation of our bicycle facilities on on beacon hill uh elliott and western at downtown will be a mill and overlay project and then early work on one section of rainier avenue south any questions on 2.1 okay we do council member soccer yeah thank you uh mr chair and thank you for this portion of the presentation just curious about

You mentioned there's some dependencies and grant funding here for certain of these projects.

And so I had a great productive conversation yesterday or the day before.

Sorry all the days get bunched up together about this topic at a high level with Councilmember Rank.

We talked about the impact of federal funds on certain transportation projects.

But now it's no secret our president and his infinite wisdom has decided to initiate a trade war with some of our biggest trading partners.

No doubt the cost of goods can arise and increase.

So particularly with respect to pavement, especially some of these major road rehabilitation projects, with the understanding that a lot of these materials are gonna be produced domestically.

What impact do you anticipate the looming trade war and rising cost of goods to have on the funding and the price of transportation projects?

I'll take a first try at this, and then others can add on.

Where I've personally seen this the most is on certain elements that get tariffs applied to it.

So a lot of that is our signal equipment.

It's the steel poles.

It's the bigger things.

It's not typically the price of concrete or the work in designing and moving forward.

So I think this will apply the most as we see what the landscape looks like and as these projects go through planning and design.

to kind of have options on what the scope elements are.

Here's what we'd like to do.

Here's what we also could get by doing if it turns out that just gets too expensive.

And, you know, kind of looking at these really big projects as having options.

So if we have to make a change midstream, it's not a dramatic change.

We've already gotten ready for what that would be, knowing which items would most.

Thank you.

Can I just add, I mean, I think this really speaks to risk management of the capital projects and how they plan and account for that.

At some point, if we do see major cost implications, it will affect the scope of the projects that we'll be able to deliver, and there's just no way around that.

So it's a risk, and it's something that we have to monitor and hopefully be able to accommodate, but it could have actual impacts on our commitments.

Thank you, but what I'm hearing now, SDOT, correct me if I'm wrong, is that we don't anticipate significant or substantial impacts currently subject to change, of course, because all the majority of the materials with the exception of a few key component parts are produced and obviously the design component in-house domestically?

I think it's fair to say we will see some changes in project costs.

We don't know the scale of them yet.

It will come down to, I think Megan is correct, that the cost changes vary a lot based on what component of the project you're talking about.

Some can be very significant and some can be minimal or de minimis.

What we do when we get in bids from contractors is we actually keep a rolling log of average bid unit prices.

And so we are able to see pretty quickly when things are changing or we're seeing consistent market fluctuations and so we're able to kind of do a little bit of course correction as we see that stuff roll in.

But it will come down to how quickly that starts to change and how vastly and that we can't totally predict.

I think we know that we will see some changes and we probably will have to make some choices about scoping and or timing of projects and or how we want to package future budget decisions.

It'll change.

We just don't quite know how much.

Thank you.

Dynamic situation definitely sounds like so, which makes sense.

When do you anticipate having a stronger point of view on that particular point in terms of when we might potentially need to revisit scoping and timelines and things like that?

Are we talking like later this year, mid-year, end of year, next year?

We think the good and bad thing is that because we're in the design process now, we will be able to see what other people are experiencing out in the market, right?

Other projects in the city that are going out to bid, you know, we can share information across the capital departments and see what they're experiencing in terms of the price of steel or other things.

And since SDOT has a little bit of runway, we probably will be able to make some decisions.

I would say, as we see near end of year, beginning of next year, what other, how bids are coming in and how prices are fluctuating and then how we might want to adjust accordingly.

Thank you.

I just add that this might be a topic for the Levy Over Site Committee's continual sort of review this year is to get stand up and then that could be something that we bring back in budget as well if there are any impacts.

Council Member Rivera.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you.

Well, I was about to say that we I know I would appreciate and I assume I'm not the only one some checkpoint where we get an update on how these projects are going and if there have been any significant changes.

And, you know, on an ongoing basis.

Yeah, Councilman, I think that's that's the intent of the reporting the the dashboard, the Levy Oversight Committee, and I think that would be happy to make themselves available to the committees or individual council members as necessary.

Great.

Thank you.

Maybe Cal you and I can talk offline on what makes sense in terms of the ongoing getting updates.

Happy to do that.

Thank you.

Back to you.

Great.

And as I move off this one, let me just add one little explanation of what goes on with some of these really big projects, too, that's kind of hinted at in the language that we used here in Attachment A, which is that initial projects are anticipated to include portions of the following.

Because we sometimes get real surprises when we start design of these really big projects.

We know in general what the pavement condition is.

When we actually go into design, we get in a lot more detail and something we thought we could just scrape it off and put some pavement back on, might turn out to be a reconstruction.

So there's probably gonna be some adjustments in the limits, depending on what we find.

We're already talking with SPU.

We're finding out where they're gonna replace giant pipes.

And so we also take opportunities like that.

We may, instead of just a mill and overlay on that project, maybe we'll do a little reconstruction because SPU's already taking up half the street.

So we really design these to say, here's what we're gonna be starting with.

And then as we learn more, they may adjust, both for giant nationwide reasons and also for very, very specific reasons.

Okay, item 2.2, going down in scale a bit is our paving spot improvements.

And these are a few programs that work on repairing our roadways, but on a much smaller scale.

So they're looking at something bigger than a pothole, because potholes are included in here too.

And then up from a pothole is when we do maybe a block or two of a location that doesn't need to be a big major corridor, but it's more than just, just a spot, it might be a panel replacement.

In fact, and also to give an example of how this list is so non-conclusive, I know that a few panels already got done this year under the levee, and they're not even on the start construction list.

So there was an opportunity, there was a weather window that we took advantage of to do some blocks, both concrete pavement and in asphalt reconstruction.

And last 2.4 is our markings.

So that is not just after we repave, but also just going through and refreshing our crosswalk and our lane lines, like the center dividing lines.

A very large amount happen every year in the summer.

All right, I'll turn us over to Megan Shepherd.

Thanks, Megan Hoyt.

Bridges, structures.

Sorry, because they made me want to sing, right?

I knew you'd want to sing a little bit too and cheer.

I think that the investment in bridges and structures and the levee is one of the most exciting things that the levee is allowing us to do.

And it represents a real continuation of the place we were in back in 2020 when the West Seattle Bridge closed.

Council ordered an audit of bridge maintenance.

There were recommendations.

The department acted on those recommendations.

And in doing so, what came out of that was a recommendation for a preventative bridge maintenance program.

That's actually 3.3.

But it is at the foundation of what was included in the levy, which is the opportunity to systematically, proactively extend the life of our structures.

There are some very specific recommendations repairs and upgrades that are in 3.1.

And these are all in motion.

They are some of our earliest priorities.

They are procurement processes to bring on board the design teams who can do the specialized work of helping us upgrade the mechanical and electrical systems in our three movable ship canal bridges, as well as make some structural investments into Ballard and Magnolia bridges.

So those procurement processes are underway and they will be our focus there in 2025. We'll also see, as we go back to bridge preventative maintenance, the types of projects that you will be seeing here will be, well, one is cleaning, because cleaning our steel bridges is really critical to extending their life and their ability to serve us.

We could be doing seismic retrofits.

We could be doing deck replacements, joint replacements, and then other needed maintenance, which in some cases you'll see from the list could include decommissioning structures that are no longer safe or used.

So there's 12 projects here that we'll be designing.

Again, this is a procurement process typically to bring on like the right team to help scope the need.

So that is a lot of what will be going on behind the scenes on bridges this year.

Let's move on to project readiness.

Any questions about the actual bridge projects?

Okay.

In 3.4, we called this project readiness.

And the commitment we made in the levy was to, you know, yes, investing in preservation is really critical.

We need these bridges to last as long as they can.

And we do know that we do have bridge replacements coming up as our fee.

We need good information.

We need some plans.

We need cost estimates.

We need a sense of how we might approach that so that we can think about how to pay for it.

And then put together funding packages, share this information with our transportation funding task force, which we will come to in program number 11 today.

when we get there.

So you can see the list there.

And again, this is bringing on board the teams and getting the program put in place.

And then the final program in our bridges and structures category is related to areaways.

Areaways are the underground areas beneath sidewalks where the sidewalk or the street has been elevated.

These are commonly found in Pioneer Square or the Chinatown International District or other older parts of downtown.

We don't know.

enough about all of them.

And so this first time ever levy funding in area ways really helps us set the table for gathering the information we need.

And this will be the focus of what we're doing in 2025 is the inspections and identifying who owns them, which is often not clear as we typically repair it in partnership with the adjacent property owner.

So that's what we're getting that all set up in 2025. And I see a question.

Thank you.

Real quick on that, just area ways are so critical to be aware of.

It's not just downtown, it's also in Fremont, which was annexed to the city in 1891, and some buildings in Ballard.

And one of the issues that we encountered this last year was that SDOT itself didn't know about an area way in Ballard causing significant damage to a building during construction.

Beyond that, if you go to Fremont, you might see Dusty Strings is a great, great business, and it used to be at street level, and it's now in the basement.

You can look at some of the alleyways there that just dead end into a stairway.

That is really showing how when buildings were initially built, as compared to once the lake level rose and more sawdust was put in our streets, that front door became the second floor.

So excited that this is underway.

Thank you.

I'm gonna turn it back to- Council member Saka, can you hand?

Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair.

And thank you for this, Megan.

You mentioned, you know, there might be opportunities to decommission certain bridges and structures.

This levy, provides, among other things, a generational investment the biggest, singular, largest investment in adding new sidewalks in the city's history.

There's a lot of preventative maintenance, a lot of exciting things.

We're adding assets like crazy across the city, including because of the generous voters who are funding many new transformative, I think, needed transportation investments.

That said, we also have over 130 bridge assets in our city's inventory that we're directly responsible for regularly providing ongoing maintenance for.

So we're adding assets and we have a lot of assets currently And so I would just, all that is to say, I strongly support the department's efforts to look at and revisit what bridges we might no longer need and decommission those.

If it were solely up to me, I think a candidate project in my own district would have been the pedestrian overpass bridge in Delridge.

It serves one and only mode Many of my constituents in the area have called that bridge the bridge to nowhere.

And talking to people that lived in the area for decades, it made a lot of sense 30, 40 plus years ago when the Youngstown Cultural Center was an actual school.

It's no longer a school.

Many kids used to regularly use that overpass bridge to walk there, walk to school.

It's no longer a school.

Not really used.

I happen to live in Delridge, walk by it, bus by it, drive by it daily.

In 10 years, I've seen two people use that bridge.

By the way, my kids, And I've coached kids at the play field there.

I'm there regularly and often in the area, in the vicinity.

Last year, the department spent $5.6 million to renovate that bridge and provide structural, needed structural upgrades because of seismic upgrades.

If I was in charge, I wouldn't have made that decision.

I would have decommissioned that bridge because again, we have a lot of bridges in our inventory, limited resource environment, and we're adding tons of new, exciting, transformative assets, all of which are gonna need to be Maintain on a continuing ongoing basis.

So all that is to say I strongly support the department's efforts to Look at our bridges and structures and and think about which ones could potentially be decommissioned because we're gonna need that now more than ever and that just A plug and a shout out to Areaways as well.

Really important that we maintain those as well.

I had the pleasure of taking a walking tour for one of our Areaways in Pioneer Square recently and there's definitely an opportunity there.

So in any event, thank you Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Councilmember Saka.

Any other questions on this?

Seeing none, back to you, Megan Shepard.

Yes.

Or Francisca, sorry.

Thank you.

Next section, transit corridors and connections.

Really exciting section of this investment, connecting people to transit hubs, new and future, including future link light rail stations like the 130th.

So a range of investments here, starting with 4.1 transit spot improvements.

This is a really important partnership with largely King County Metro, where we work basically all year round to identify different areas where there needs to be improvements for passenger safety, passenger comfort, ADA access, lots of things either at the bus stop itself or directly adjacent and or leading directly to.

So a range of projects here, including bus benches, improvements to certain routes, and a note here also about the intent to expand the hours of operation for the Aurora bus lanes in advance of any future work on Revive I-5.

Also have some exciting design efforts underway starting here, including a partnership between Vision Zero and the transit group on Jackson Street, looking between Alaska and Rainier for opportunities to improve safety for people on and nearby that street.

And that's 4.1.

Would you like any more on that?

Just, Francisca, you mentioned there if Revive I-5, and I don't know how much the public has been tracking Revive I-5.

It is a plan to close I-5 essentially from downtown to Northgate.

It is also my understanding that that has been put on pause.

Do you have any, I know this is not part of the presentation, but do you have any updates for us there?

No, we have the information that you do that WSDOT has put a pause for the installation or for the work this year.

I do intend to pick up the work in 2026, and it would be a lane reduction to two lanes in each direction.

which feels worse than it is.

And the reason that this is so critical is even roads like Rainier Avenue and D2 are going to see an increased use of cut through traffic.

Aurora will see increased use.

15th Avenue and Holman Road Northwest, which is already the third most used North South corridor, only behind I-5 and 99. Lake City Way, 15th, Roosevelt, all of these...

city streets are going to be experiencing a higher level and likely worse behavior amongst people on the roadway.

So thank you for getting ready for that.

And anytime you have updates, I'd love to receive them.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, moving on to transit passenger safety 4.2.

We had a really great conversation at Transportation Committee with King County Metro, ATU, Sound Transit, a really great conversation recently.

This is a partnership with King County Metro, investing in transit safety officers.

We are finalizing the draft agreement with King County Metro right now, and we'll be transferring the funds for their implementation.

I shouldn't say transferring, we'll probably work it as a reimbursement, but nonetheless, they will be doing the work.

Moving on to 4.3, transit improvements and access to light rail.

This is where we start to see our bigger, longer term projects, including starting planning for ultimately rapid ride investment on Rainier.

Also working on an upgrade to Beacon Avenue that has some Route 36 and other really important access providing transit links in the city.

starting to work on how we can upgrade the transit experience and reliability there.

We also, as mentioned, are looking at how we need to reconfigure and reinforce some of our streets leading to link light rail.

We know that buses are heavy and they are going to be really frequent on 130th if people are going to get to the station.

And we need to be making sure that those are able to withstand that additional weight and that we're providing also the complimentary safety improvements for people that are accessing those transit stops and or walking along the street.

So exciting work there coming in advance of the light rails.

Also key projects, and sort of smaller access work happening.

I don't want to fail to speak to some of the planning work that's happening around the Graham Street Station and some of the other work that we're doing in advance of the Ballard Link extension, looking at east-west connection through South Lake Union.

So those obviously have different timelines, but are nonetheless work that is on the radar for SDOT.

All right.

Okay.

Section five, pedestrian safety.

This is a pretty robust part of the levy.

And I think in this section in particular, we originally made a call to program owners about like, what are the products that we can put in the levy delivery plan and kind of working off past precedent, they were thinking only things we can absolutely guarantee that are getting constructed in 2025. And we got a pretty small list.

Then we said, nope, nope, we want everything you're planning and designing and constructing.

And now you will see that this section takes up an awful lot of pages that we're not gonna go through line by line because there's a lot of stuff in here.

But it also does show how many things in the programs like this come up and we're planning on doing it and we then start design and we start talking to the communities that live there and sometimes changes happen.

So there's a lot of things on here.

that we'll be learning a lot more about this year.

5.1 is our new sidewalks and sidewalk alternative.

And this is a pretty exciting one for us.

And I think many of you, the levee supports 350 blocks of new sidewalk with 250 of those blocks in the first four years.

And the department has really come together to do some really active planning and getting ready for designing and constructing these.

There's a lot of excitement and energy.

The walks were really one of the first things out the door, as Francisca mentioned, in 2025. So picking the areas where we're gonna be focusing some of these resources and working with the neighbors there, doing walks to select those projects.

Those would not be for delivery this year.

Even going really fast, we wouldn't deliver them this year.

But that will be setting up the work plan for years two, three, and four of that accelerated sidewalk program, as well as getting going on the other 100 blocks, especially the more larger and complicated ones that may take a few years.

But we do have some sidewalks that you're gonna see this year.

And they mostly came from past work we've done with communities.

It could come through things like the home zone program or a safe routes to school program, or just what the sidewalk development folks have heard over the years.

So you will see a lot of things going into construction there in a lot of places around the city.

Everything from Gilman Avenue West, where there's also potentially some bike lane hardening, to a lot of South Seattle streets.

as well as starting design on a number of projects.

First Avenue Northeast is a really large one that is already in design and will be continuing.

That's a partnership with Safe Routes to School.

And our Greenwood Avenue project that was paused around 60% design, this gives it the funding to move forward.

So there's a lot we could say on sidewalks.

Any questions on that section?

Okay, great.

5.3 is our sidewalk safety repair.

And this is a really robust but pretty flexible program that takes advantage of opportunities as well as plans out their own work plan.

So very often when we're gonna be in a neighborhood, sidewalk repair folks partner to expand the scope of a project already, to go a little further, do more sidewalk repair, as well as having their own priority list and they can be doing shims, they could be repairing the curb, or they could actually be taking up and repairing the whole sidewalk.

Very often that also involves trimming tree roots that cause the sidewalk to heave in the first place, so that's a pattern there.

5.4 is our ADA program.

So these are curb ramps for construction, and this is one section where really a lot of these are the just plain customer service requests.

People are requesting accessibility improvements in the form of curb ramps that generates a list.

And these are really just the ramps that the ADA program alone would be designing and constructing.

Our major corridor restorations, our new sidewalks, a lot of the big projects that do anything and go through a crosswalk, they're also replacing ramps.

And so these are in addition to those.

Stairways is 5.5.

Megan, before we move off of sidewalks entirely, I'll just thank you for your work.

The work, and it's not my district, but we all up here represent the entire city of Seattle, even though we're elected by certain segments of the city.

Just your work on Greenwood Avenue has been incredibly impressive.

When I say that we experience the built environment, and what ESTOP does is we live our lives in the built environment that we create.

It is extremely dangerous to have a major arterial without a sidewalk.

And before the street was ripped up, I'll tell you, I couldn't really imagine what it would look like with a sidewalk.

And to see it there is incredibly important.

Back in my day, I caught the Metro bus back from high school on the side of a state route.

with no sidewalk.

The only thing that was separating me from cars traveling at 35 to 45 miles an hour was a white stripe of paint.

And today that same bus stop, there's a sidewalk, there's a curb that protects and there's more separation between car and cars are only going to legally supposed to only go 25 miles an hour.

And so just this change in the last 20 years has really increased people's quality of life as they experience the built environment.

One of the things that you mentioned was sidewalk repair, is without sidewalks, accessibility and the ability to move through a space is difficult.

As is, trying to move through a sidewalk that is in complete disrepair.

Even though we have the sidewalk, it can be the barrier if not properly maintained.

And so I just raise that to yes and your comments and thank you for your work so that kids coming back from high school using Metro buses don't have to have the same experience that I did.

Thank you.

Now, sidewalks can be so transformative, and I should actually make a plug for trees along there, because I know Francisca's going to talk about trees later.

And there is a program that puts in trees, but wow, so do our new sidewalk and our corridor programs, because when we get that space and can finally put up a curb between the traffic and the sidewalk, we get room for trees, and then that changes everything.

That changes the whole feel for the street, can really change driver behavior as well as make it really nice for walking.

Great.

Okay, 5.5 is stairways.

And stairways are, I mean, it's a small program compared to other things in the levee, but the stairway connections, usually where those are coming, are like that little piece of the pedestrian network that there's not another good way around.

Usually it's super steep slope, you know, a lot of dead-end streets along there.

And so actually having a program to either expand or repair our existing sidewalks is small but important.

You'll see a lot of things starting design, even though the attachment A ultimately only calls for up to nine sidewalks, stairway repairs, you already see five shown starting design.

That's because this is a place where it's very helpful to do that initial scoping of like how big a project is this gonna be so that you can budget and schedule correctly.

Before we move on, I see Council Member Kettle has a question.

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

I've been writing notes to myself.

I was going to wait for the very end, but I couldn't help myself.

Yes, stairways, and can you add under there, quote, up and down sidewalks?

Very, very important, and...

And I'll talk to this later, but, you know, so important for transit access.

I can give you a tour of Queen Anne, the Queen Anne stairs, you know, coming down to Aurora, massively important.

And again, I could speak to this later, but I just wanted to note for the record that stairways are also known as, as I like to call them, up and down sidewalks, just to ensure there's some priority on those issues.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Kettle.

Back to you, Megan Hoyt.

Okay.

Also very, very important is 5.6, and that's our crossing improvements.

And this is where there really, truly, a list exploded along here of things that we may be able to build this year.

And a lot of these, there's a really wide range of crossings, the very most...

expensive scale that is a new signal, which can be very, very expensive.

It could be rectangular rapid flash beacons at an existing marked crosswalk.

It might be something really small, like daylighting the intersection, putting some parking restrictions in, even just doing a paint and post bulb to make sure that motor vehicles can't be parked right at the intersection of stopping visibility.

And some might just be finally getting in an established marked crosswalk where there's a legal crossing.

So there's a really wide variety of things that can be done at crossings.

And so a lot of these were prioritized for 2025 and are in the course of design right now to really figure out exactly what that scope would look like.

Is the mark crosswalk alone enough?

Is there something more we have to do to it?

But it is a very, very robust list.

Any questions?

Seeing no questions, so we can move on to the next segment, Signals in Operation.

I will note for the committee, we have 34 minutes left.

I'm sure council members have been taking notes and will want to speak at the end.

So I'm going to ask for everyone to hold their comments now until the end.

And you all have about 14 minutes max.

Okay, signals and operations.

I will be quick.

This is an area where there's a lot of other leveraged funds.

We have operations funds elsewhere in SDOT's budget, so this is complementary work.

We do corridor signal timing to keep people and goods moving throughout the city.

It is something we do on a rotating basis because the way people move and where they move changes based on land use and activity patterns.

So we are looking at four corridors for 2025. We have two larger ITS projects underway for 25 on 85th and 80th, also partially grant funded.

and some phased work in the downtown just to upgrade some pretty out of date internal wiring and communications that's within those cabinets that keep us from being able to do some of the best in class operational things that we wanna do, including some safety improvements that we can't put in because of the way that they're wired and built.

Moving on to 6.3, new traffic signals.

These are often woven into other large capital projects.

They're fairly expensive, which is why they tend to lean into the soft costs and other momentum of other projects.

There are also a few, though, that just really need...

Boren and Columbia, a good example, I think, of one that just...

We need a signal there for people to cross such a busy, fast street safely, and so there are investments where we put in a signal because that is just the only way for people of all modes to use that area.

Signal major maintenance.

This is, again, sort of when we really want to get in there and scrub and clean and make sure everything is getting its regular replacement.

This is related to our asset management strategy on signals.

We've got five locations there.

For accessible pedestrian signals, we have eight locations identified.

Excited to continue to expand this program through the levee.

This was an exciting addition to dedicate some funds to APS so we can get that moving a little faster citywide.

And last but not least, signal preventative maintenance.

We do a rotating cycle there as well where we go and just check in on all of our signals every other year.

This is helping to make sure that we're doing our preventative maintenance to minimize outages that we have due to just equipment failure.

Sign maintenance kind of speaks for itself.

Happy to talk more about that, but it does speak for itself.

As well as sort of others, 6.8 and 6.9, really that transportation operation center is a super valuable way that we keep people moving, that we respond to crazy things that happen, whether they're on WSDOT, Right-of-ways are ours, right?

Because as you mentioned earlier, Councilmember, you know, what happens on the major arterials and the major highways affects our surface streets as well.

So the TOC is really key in making sure that when things happen any time of day, we're able to be back up and running for the community.

With that, I will see if you have any questions.

Good to go, all right, bike safety.

All right, section seven has a lot of the different programs that support our bicycle network and connections and maintenance of.

First 7.1 is the specific funding for the Berkman Trail Missing Link, which is under design, having lots of conversations on that.

7.2, our Neighborhood Greenways program.

The 2025 projects are mostly looking at existing and potential healthy streets and deciding like how can these be made permanent?

What would be the future step for this?

But then starting the outreach design and planning for future projects and Neighborhood Greenways does a pretty robust look at the conceptual design before they actually start into design.

Bike lane maintenance.

This is gonna be both sweepers.

So we have some bike sweepers and are staffing up to be able to hit a really regular cadence of sweeping our bike lanes to keep them safe, to keep them clean, keep them attractive and useful, but also replacing the tough posts as they get sometimes knocked This goes hand in hand with the upgraded bike lanes, that's 7.5, where we try to start replacing some of those posts with something a little bit more established, usually concrete barriers of some kind, something that gives a bit more protection.

So those two will be working hand in hand to both keep going what we have now and then work to make our protected bike lanes even more durable.

A 7.4 is a big one.

It's our protected bike lanes.

A lot of these projects partner with the big multimodal corridors.

So some of the things you see on here, 130th, Henderson, Beacon, these are also going to be ultimately paving projects.

So that's a great way that we can get protected bike lanes in.

There is a lot of overlap often with other modes.

So as we do make Vision Zero improvements, again, are fun things.

If there's any particular, I guess what I will say about the PBLs, besides the ones that are specifically getting constructed this year and going into design, they also have a lot of projects that are starting planning.

And that again is to really start the conversation with communities, really figure out the scope, potential scope for this so that we can figure out the funding and really know what limits and what timing and what sequencing we can take with things.

7.6 is a little bit different.

Bike spot improvements are kind of smaller improvements to existing bike lanes, trails, and neighborhood greenways.

Pretty often they are small.

We have some like missing gaps in there.

Sometimes it's just some specific trail help that's needed or some changes at intersections to get people through.

So those are smaller, but also in a way it goes where stairways go.

Sometimes those gaps are super important and can stop people from using the network.

Any questions on bicycles?

People's streets and public spaces.

If bridge music is like classical, you know, Wagnerian, then people's streets and public spaces are like dance music, and that makes you want to get on your feet.

This, the Seattle Transportation Plan, in the vision Seattle streets, become much more inviting places to gather, linger, and play.

And so the levy funding in People's Streets and Public Spaces, this new program coming out of a plan that was co-created with community, investing in plazas, in parklets, in little areas.

you know, pickleball courts even.

But places where people can come into our right of way and they'll want to stay there is amazing.

So this will, this year it is a new program.

We've done lots of pilots in the past, but this is a new program.

So we're launching it, you know, that means bringing on like the new staff to be dedicated and putting in the work to have a work plan.

But we do have projects that were in the hopper that the levy funding makes available this year to advance their design and construction.

One of the most exciting ones will be the Forts and Square redesign, turning that downtown plaza into, and this really was created with the Chief Seattle Club, with the Alliance for Pioneer Square, with stakeholders to re-transform this space.

We're also doing the work now in partnership with the Seattle Parks Foundation on Occidental Promenade interim investments.

I won't spend much on downtown activation beyond saying that the spark block has been really well saved.

And so we're taking the lighting and the art treatments, and we are right now doing the work to expand those to the symphony block and other locations on 3rd.

The downtown activation funds will be very helpful in our pre-FIFA work to plan for all the people that'll come here in 2026 as a part of the Men's World Cup.

Another exciting note in People's Streets and Public Spaces is the LID I-5 studies.

The University District Partnership already got a grant for them to lead the study of what LID I-5 could look like in the University District, and the levy funds will allow us to partner and support that work.

I will stop there on People's Streets and Public Spaces.

And we'll just keep rolling.

Back to you, Francisca.

Okay, climate resiliency.

Starting with electrification, this is a new program we're launching.

We will be working with SCL and other agencies.

You recently looked at the TSIP, the electrification implementation plan, so we'll be teeing off that work that you recently looked at, working with SCL and other agencies who own the assets to look at opportunities to put charging stations and at libraries, community centers, and parks.

You may recall we also have recently done a pilot on curbside charging installation at a number of locations throughout the city.

We are in the throes of evaluating that, looking at utilization, vandalism, maintenance, operations, and other things to inform next steps and how much more of curbside charging we would keep doing.

And moving on to low pollution neighborhoods, this is an exciting effort that was really sparked by collaborative work with OSE and SDOT and others, but we did receive a raise grant to do some planning on it.

And so we are in alignment with the mayor's executive order Moving forward to do that planning effort with the desire to create a toolkit and to engage neighborhoods in that toolkit creation so that we can work with community to identify ways in which they think they can reduce localized pollution and air emissions in their community, whether it be due to choices in their mode splits, whether it's choices in the way that they get their goods delivered or choices in how they heat their homes.

So we're finding a range of ways that we can improve air quality and health.

And urban forestry.

Again, this is another area where the levy made a contribution, but there is other funds coming from other places in the budget.

And I want to say that as it relates to 3 to 1 tree replacement, a lot of that is folded into capital project costs.

So through our capital projects that we've talked about, we are replacing trees 3 to 1. We're also looking for opportunities to put trees in where they may be missing and could be accommodated.

and that is folded into the cost of other capital projects.

But this investment does help with looking at ways we can expand our tree species, making sure we have good diversification so that the tree canopy is diverse and protected and resilient as a result, and that we can have different species that are locally appropriate, and also that we can continue to support the establishment of landscape elements at the Central Waterfront Project.

10, freight and good movements.

So before, we just kind of had the freight spot improvements.

So this is a big expansion with this levy into five distinct programs.

A lot of them will spend this first year kind of staffing up and planning for their specific projects.

Freight spot, especially because it's a continuation, already had some things in the hopper.

And the landscape of some of our industrial roadways, a big feature of those are defunct railroad tracks.

So a lot of what you see in Freight Spot is doing little spot repairs when there are tracks that are no longer used, repairing pavement, but also even looking at things coming up in planning is the potential signal at Fourth Avenue South and South Forest Streets.

So Freight Spot can do quite a variety of things to support trucks and freight delivery.

One category is for the heavy haul network.

So this is building off of work such as happening now on East Marginal Way, kind of a spine of the heavy haul network to support operations right around the port.

And looking towards Harbor Island as the next step on that, probably working in partnership with the port.

And then the freight program, port connection to I-90 and I-5, and the Leary Way industrial zone safety improvements will all be getting going underway.

Program 11, so fast.

I know you spoke about it yesterday at some length.

This is our good governance and equitable implementation initiative.

There are three program areas.

The first one is funds to support the levy oversight committee.

So those funds are there for their discretion.

We'll be, in terms of property tax relief outreach and education, we'll be improving the quality and consistency of the information that's available to the public this year.

Our big focus in this area is the launch of the transportation funding task force.

The procurement process is underway right now to bring on board a consultant partner who will help us design a smart approach.

And our conversations about membership will also be underway very soon with the anticipation of returning to the council with a resolution related to the makeup and the composition of the task force.

And thank you.

I do appreciate the last page saying if you need assistance or translation of the material, how to contact.

With that, Calvin Chow, I'm going to pass it back to you for any final comments.

That was actually perfectly on time.

I gave you 14 minutes and you nailed it, 14 minutes.

So no final comments for me other than the legislation for you is to lift the proviso from the 2025 budget.

And that's the last, nothing else to add.

Thank you, Cal.

Colleagues, I'll take questions, comments.

We have 19 minutes until at least one member of the committee has to leave.

And so I'll save my comments for the end.

I see council member Saka, council member Kettle.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you again to SDOT for this presentation today, but more importantly, the thoughtful work that went into preparing this very comprehensive plan.

Again, this is important work because It helps provide upfront transparency, clarity, drives accountability and so much more.

So thank you.

I will say that I got warm fuzzies a bit when I heard the term pothole filling a few times throughout the presentation today.

So appreciate the work that goes into that and so much more.

And also, Just want to finish my train of thought on my comment earlier pertaining to bridges and structures when I strongly encourage the department to look at opportunities to find bridges and structures that could be decommissioned.

Not only do I strongly encourage you, I challenge you to do that over time because One thing that I've learned since being an elected official in office, it's easy to say this is a good idea in abstract without having the broader view of all the complex considerations at hand, but as an elected official now, I am directly accountable.

for everything.

And accountability is something that I don't run from, I run towards.

That's how I lead.

But it is also challenging as well, looking for things like bridges and structures that could potentially be decommissioned.

And there's a lot of complex factors involved.

I happen to mention one good candidate that I would, had I been the decision maker in that decision, I would have declined to to retrofit the Delridge pedestrian bridge.

It's just so, but there's over 100, as we know, throughout the city.

That's just one area that I happen to know personally, like the back of my hand, because I'm there all the time.

I lived there.

My kids have taken their first swing set at the park there.

Had practices there at the Youngtown Cultural Center, often, regularly, meeting with community, various events.

Literally have to go by it daily.

So I just happen to know that, and I know the history of it.

So I know it by the back of my hand, like the back of my hand.

But as you think of decommissioning opportunities, again, many valid reasons to preserve something.

I would offer and submit that if...

The sole or primary reason offered to preserve something is because of nostalgia, not a valid reason to use public dollars to preserve a bridge or asset.

In any event, I think part of the opportunity we have here to make sure the department and one of the learnings from the expired now expired move Seattle levy is making sure the department is adequately staffed.

And as part of our budget action, we authorized the hiring for the department of I think 77 new roles.

And so making sure we can actually bring all the wonderful projects listed in here in this document, all the documentation, we can actually make better progress and bring them to life, it's gonna require capacity.

At our transportation committee yesterday, we learned that at least with respect to smaller neighborhood scale projects, $100,000 or less, resourcing is not an issue or I'll say less of an issue.

It's not like we have indefinite resources, but the bigger challenge to implementation of many of those is capacity and bandwidth of staffing.

So the success of our ability as a city to deliver upon these great projects and more is gonna hinge upon our ability to staff up.

So just wanna just check in with you all.

Where are we all at with the hiring of those roles today and what's the plan to finish up there?

So SDOT is in the process of filling vacancies that had been held vacant as a conservative and risk mitigation measure in late 2024. So we're in the process because those have existing job classifications and descriptions of work.

We're out hiring for those right now.

And as it relates to new positions, they go through a process where we have to define the classification type and go work with SDHR.

And where we have, we've made some progress, especially where we're hiring up based on an expanded existing body of work.

So a lot of our crews, for example, as we're adding additional Asphalt, concrete work, those are existing job specs that exist, and those have made it through the process more easily as we are defining new bodies of work and new programs.

Those are longer conversations that we're going through with centralized HR just to get that dialed in and in alignment with their expectations around wording.

So we're proceeding diligently and working through the process.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Saka, Councilmember Kettle.

We've got 14 minutes left.

Okay, thank you, Chair Strauss.

I'll be quick.

First, I just want to say thank you again.

I've been listening as much as watching this presentation, and the three of you, the back and forth, it's almost like listening to an NPR show.

So thank you for that.

I just want to go through really quick.

Vision Zero, very important for D7.

Didn't note this, but we're in third place after D1 and D2.

And I note that there's a red mass in the center of that map.

And working those Vision Zero pieces in the more urban, the more dense downtown, the greater downtown, not just downtown, but Belltown, South Lake Union, Uptown, really important.

And then, of course, 15th and Aurora, kind of going further north.

Noted, I just want to make sure that That doesn't get lost in the shuffle.

I don't think it is.

Complete streets, impacts, and adjustments.

That's called good governance.

Thank you for highlighting that.

I appreciate that things can change based on what you find once you start digging.

There's no need to 100 percent agree with that kind of approach.

It's important.

Bridges, yes.

Classical music is playing, again, going back to NPR, KNKX maybe, you know, playing right now.

Very exciting.

So important to have Magnolia Bridge on that.

You know, as I've been told, I don't know if this was official or not, but basically the warranty on that bridge expired on December 31st, 2024, and we have to take action.

And so on two days, one in terms of what we can do for the bridge, but also the replacement plan.

And I also want to know, because I didn't see it in there, but the emergency response process, capability, if the bridge goes down, the idea of having essentially that path from West Marina Place to West Gaylord, then onward to the 32nd.

Excuse me, I'm jumping into D6 as I started talking about, but having that, that's just good governance.

If something happens, fire needs to get, police needs to get Southern Magnolia, having some forethought and putting that in place could be a lifesaver in my book.

I really appreciate having Wes Dravis on there as well.

The bridges across Inner Bay are so important.

I also care about the Emerson too, just for the record.

Sidewalk repair.

I've already noted that stairs are up and down sidewalks.

I've already noted that they also give access to transit, so it should not be forgotten.

So thank you.

Neighborhood greenways.

I really appreciate this topic, and I've had conversations about First West between West Crockett and West Howe, you know, basically McClure Middle School, the Queen Anne Community Center, Queen Anne Pool, and Big Howe, essentially creating a campus street right there.

And that's a topic that's come up again and again.

And I think it's worth investigating.

And particularly when the Queen Anne Community Center is going to be worked on, this is an opportunity.

Again, going back to complete streets, complete actions, whether it's SPU or anybody else, other departments, parks, anything that you can get that synergy with is so important.

And again, good governance.

There are two protected bike lanes.

I appreciate that point.

As I noted yesterday, you know, the waterfront lanes, I love.

They look great, but metal corners and points, probably not as good if you're tumbling.

For whatever reason, that could be a problem.

And that was highlighted yesterday.

People streets, I support that, but I also wanted to ask, you know, the idea of having seasonal people streets.

You know, that may increase the the number that we could do, because sometimes going down for the whole year is problematic, but seasonally for the summer can make more sense and we can have more.

Kind of reminds me of my comp plan discussions with OPCD of having many neighborhood centers, which you can have more of, which I'm now calling, by the way, neighborhood villages.

And so stay tuned, neighborhood villages, you know, in terms of possibilities there.

And it's the same idea.

Seasonal may allow for more to be, you know, available.

Downtown activation, I love that point about that Third Avenue.

I will say again, we need to do more for Third Avenue.

I love the idea of the keyboard sidewalk crossing there at Symphony Station.

And I always wonder sometimes, it's too bad that the light rail couldn't just keep going straight down Third Avenue to Seattle Center, but that's a story for another day.

I won't go any further on that, thank you.

Last, coming right at the end, urban forestry, 341 trees, so important, we have to promote that.

My only point on that is that we need to keep the Seattle look, the evergreen trees.

I think there's a trend moving away from evergreens, we should be looking I know they're not appropriate for every place, but trying to max out evergreen trees because the evergreen trees, our native community pieces, that really sets Seattle apart from other cities, which makes Seattle unique and cool, a place to come back to in the life.

And then I have to say a massive shout-out for freight.

Obviously, with Councilmember Saka, we were working on that.

We need to be promoting that.

We need to push that.

And my last thing is good governance, so important.

I really appreciate all the work that was done on that, and so key.

And to the public comment, from a good governance point of view, I'm engaging.

I'll stop using Mr. Laborde, you know, the various levels, but I'm not going to be talking to, you know, some program managers.

But there will be constituent inquiries that will come in, but we'll come in and engage.

Because I do expect, you know, respect the expertise as noted about the complete streets point that exists in SDOT.

And so we just need to make sure that we're good there.

So that's it.

Thank you, Council Member Kettle.

Council Member Moore, I see you've got the next hand, but I do know that Council Member Rink has a hard stop at 1130. Is it all right if we start with her?

Yeah, that's fine.

Fantastic.

We're already moving.

Okay.

Well, thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

And thank you all.

I know I asked some of my media questions yesterday, so I'll keep it very short and sweet in terms of my comments.

Let's get projects going.

I'm really excited just to get this work going.

I really appreciate the thoughtful and thorough work that you've presented to us today.

It certainly gives me a fair amount of clarity when I'm talking to constituents about the path ahead.

I appreciate some of the questions raised, particularly about tariffs and how this will impact all of our capital projects, frankly, across the board, and look forward to just updates on how the projects are moving and would love to know if anything changes on that front, how it just may be shaping up again so we can communicate that to our constituents.

And further wanna just continue to uplift the importance of creating that connection to our community with each of these projects.

And so hoping that we can be partnered and just making sure we're reaching across our entire community for each of these projects and making sure we're doing so equitably and creating just those meaningful connections.

And I know that's a task for a number of our city departments and hope you can see a partner in me with that.

I think the final piece, I know I asked some questions yesterday just about the contracting process and I'll continue to engage with you all on that.

Certainly would love to find ways to make sure that the job opportunities presented here represent we can bring in some of our union partners.

I know a number of unions are We're supportive of the levy for the opportunities presented for a number of folks across the region, so certainly want to continue to elevate that, and I'll continue to work with you all and FAS.

But in conclusion, excited to get this work started.

I know it's what the voters are itching for, our constituents are itching for, so certainly very excited to be lifting the proviso and getting to work.

Thank you all again, and thank you for the time, Chair.

Thank you, Council Member Ring.

Council Member Moore.

Thank you very much, Chair.

I just wanted to extend my gratitude to Councilmember Saka for sponsoring this budget action.

I think that it resulted in a really fabulous end product that we have here today.

And this level of detail and transparency for specific projects is very reassuring and exciting.

And I think it's helpful to the public to know whether a project is in construction design or planning.

So I appreciate all of that level of information.

I also just want to have a shout out to SDOT for the cooperation and collaboration with my office.

There's a lot of work going to be happening and is happening in District 5. I have found SDOT to be very um amenable to doing that work and to suggestions from me and from my constituents and i know we see things every day and so really do appreciate this often feels left behind and i think this levy and the work that sdot has done is really um showing that we are taking care of our north end neighbors and going to be making a very transit friendly very pedestrians safely I mean we have a lot of work still to do but we're really making progress in the pedestrian safety piece and I'm very excited about the Aurora Avenue project as well so much potential there so really just wanted to thank you for all the work that you've done uh the willingness to be collaborative here and then also again to council member soccer for doing an amazing job shepherding us uh through this levy process uh for this very exciting and product thank you thank you vice chair rivera with four minutes left you have the floor thank you chair i had all my questions answered yesterday and i showed and i was able to ask all the questions yesterday

I just want to piggyback on some of the things that my colleagues have said about, you know, gratitude to council member Saka for shepherding us through this levy process.

And also in particular for his eye on accountability and for his partnership on those accountability pieces, because ultimately we are accountable to our constituents for, you know, showing that we're using their taxpayer dollars responsibly and the investments that are going into the communities across the city.

And when I echo my colleague, Council Member Moore said about the North End, often the North End does feel left out of these investments.

And so very much appreciate working with you, Council Member Moore and Council Member Saka to make sure that the North End is represented in this levy.

And I look forward to working with SDOT to make sure that our constituents across the city, and in particular on the north end, are engaged in this process so that they understand where these investments are.

And to your point, Councilmember, more about what stage in the process these investments are equally important so folks have a sense of when they can expect these projects to be started and completed.

Thank you again, Estad.

And thank you, Council Member Saka.

Thank you, Carol.

Thank you, Council Member Rivera.

I will truncate all of my closing comments because we have two minutes left.

Just to say again, it's important that we used this tool of a mega proviso to ensure the fall budget process was not avoided.

And as this accountability work is complete, we must move swiftly to release the proviso to ensure unintended consequences of delay are avoided.

I said yesterday, and I'll say today, this process has begun rebuilding trust with SDOT, and I really appreciate the amount of collaboration that has been engaged in.

One Seattle is not just between departments, it's not just between levels of government, it's not just between stakeholders and departments, it is between all of us.

We are all in this together.

We still have a lot to do to provide the built environment that residents are requesting and that keeps our economy working.

Thank you to SDOT for not missing a beat in doing good work so far.

Now it's time for council action.

This legislation is to release the full funding for those transportation levy projects to ensure SDOT has everything it needs to get the work done.

Now let's get this levy delivered.

With that, I move Council Bill 120946. Is there a second?

Second.

It is moved and seconded to move the bill.

Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Sorry, Council Member Sacco, we wrapped comments.

Do you have further comments?

Oh, yeah, just the comment that...

This is part of our exercise of our solemn legislative oversight responsibility, but I do appreciate the department's efforts to work so closely and collaboratively.

It's hard, but it's very clear from my perspective that you all have...

and it's been reciprocal too.

We've worked with you all, you've worked with us, and I just want to acknowledge and say I appreciate that.

I think this official piece of legislation is officially council generated, and I know the executive, Before this, we were weeks away from the executive proposing its own legislation to lift the levy.

One thing that I've learned in a few months or a little over a year with working with this mayor and this administration and his executive departments, including SDOT, is that they are excellent and they don't hesitate at self-advocating.

And so for me, I would have been comfortable with waiting a few weeks on whenever whenever that was officially proposed from the executive side.

But I do wanna thank Council Member Strauss for bringing this forward from a legislative perspective and making it officially council generated because where I'm at today as chair of our transportation committee, I'm fully confident and the department's ability to execute and deliver upon this levy.

And this is one of the last few gating items.

Probably not in a position to spend until another couple weeks at least, but at least we'll have this and be able to clear our plate.

So thank you to the department.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for bringing this forward.

The department is well positioned to execute.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It has been moved and seconded to recommend passage to Council Bill 120946. Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Saka.

Aye.

Council Member Hollingsworth.

Yes.

Council Member Kettle.

Aye.

Council Member Moore.

Aye.

Council President Nelson.

Council President Nelson.

Aye.

Thank you.

Council Member Rink.

Aye.

Council Member Rivera.

Aye.

And Chair Strauss?

Yes.

Eight in favor, none opposed.

Thank you.

The motion carries.

The committee recommendation that the bill passed will be sent to March 11th City Council meeting.

With that understanding that we are now on the 64th day of the year, we've passed this out of committee to have this proviso lifted on the 70th day of the year, not including weekends.

This does conclude Wednesday, March 25th, 2025 Select Budget Committee.

I've been working hard with the city budget office on some of the budget reform aspects that we discussed.

Finance native communities and tribal governments will brief bills that will be voted on in upcoming select budget committees to...

meet the two-meeting rule.

All are always welcome to join the FNC, and if your schedule does not allow, I always ask to receive the briefing ahead of time.

The next FNC meeting is the 19th, where we will have Kirsten Grove the appointment.

Questions are due by 5 p.m.

today.

Thank you for attending.

We are adjourned.