Seattle City Council Sustainability & Transportation Committee 5719

Do you know, like, how did that happen?

Good afternoon, everybody.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Welcome to the Sustainability and Transportation Committee.

Today is Tuesday, May 7th, 2019. It's about 2 p.m.

My name is Mike O'Brien, Chair of the Committee, joined by my colleagues, Councilmember Pacheco and Sawant.

Thank you both so much for being here, and welcome to the Sustainable Transportation Committee.

Look forward to eight more months of work together.

Seven, sorry.

Being staffed by Kelly Reefer, thank you for staffing us today, Kelly.

We have a packed agenda today.

Really quickly, we're gonna take the first six items are gonna be appointments and reappointments to the Seattle Freight Advisory Board.

The next two items are a reappointment and appointment to the Levee to Move Seattle Oversight Committee.

Then we will get a briefing on the Move Seattle Levee Oversight Report.

We will then get a response to a statement of legislative intent about rapid ride corridors, the multimodal bus corridors.

Then we will have a discussion about accessory dwelling units and a proposal that will hopefully be coming to the committee shortly, but we don't have legislation yet.

But today we want to highlight a couple areas about what we intend to be in that legislation, specifically around Floor area ratio requirements and single family zones, and also a brief discussion about the owner occupancy requirements.

And finally, we'll get a race and social justice report from the Office of Sustainability and Environment.

Colleagues, a new agenda item is that we are supposed to now adopt the agenda, as I just described.

So I will go ahead and move that we adopt the agenda.

Second.

Any concerns or amendments to that?

All right.

All in favor of adopting the agenda, signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Great.

Now that the agenda is adopted, we will turn to public comment.

Kelly, do you mind bringing me the sign-in sheet?

Folks will have up to two minutes to provide comment.

We will get the timer going up there so you know how much time you have left.

Looks like we have about nine folks signed up.

Colleen Mackler will be first, followed by Brie Geinkeld.

Thank you, Brie.

And then David Haynes.

Hi, Colleen.

Good afternoon, city council members.

Thank you for having us here.

And a special welcome to our new council member, Abel Pacheco.

I'm Colleen McAleer, co-president of Laura Hearst Community Club, and we have followed the ADU and all the accessory dwelling unit legislation for years.

And there's been some great successes.

And probably the most important thing I'll say first, and that is if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

So there's a few things that are bubbling up in the legislation right now.

Some of you may own or live in actually an accessory dwelling unit.

But there's some concerns that we have, particularly for lack of owner occupancy.

And I'll leave those details with you, but having skin in the game, having an owner right there as part of the community is really very helpful.

It kind of reduces the negative, possible negative impacts, you know, garbage things, too loud of music, and just kind of being a good neighbor.

So we really do not support removing the owner occupancy.

Secondly, 12 unrelated people in one dwelling unit, that's the size of an accessory dwelling unit, just seems very excessive.

We can't imagine the logic for it.

And we see what probably could happen in our neighborhood where we have a lot of institutions nearby that becomes flop houses or student housing with all day and all night people coming and going, and again, not grounded in an owner-occupant right there.

The third thing is always a tree canopy.

Having to take out so much more land, if you have both an adu and a dadu on the same property, that means there's hardly anything left for trees and for neighbors' gardens.

And that's a key goal for all of us, especially all of you sitting at this table.

I know you're very pro-tree preservation.

So those are the highlights.

I'll leave the rest of the details, and thanks for listening.

Thanks, Colleen.

Bree.

Congratulations on correcting my name.

I am Brie Geinkeld with Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, and we are part of the MASS Coalition.

And I think most of you know that Seattle Neighborhood Greenways works to make our streets safe and comfortable for people walking and biking throughout the city.

And one thing that makes it possible for people to primarily walk or bike is to have reliable, efficient transit, which dramatically increases your travel range when you're getting around without a car.

We are very lucky in this region, not just through luck, but through a lot of hard work, to have increased ridership, and we should be proud of that.

But then we should also reward and recognize that commitment to riding with prioritization for buses over private vehicles.

So I am urging City Council to work with the Department of Transportation en masse to identify some places in our city where we can implement some pilot projects with some additional designated bus lanes or signal prioritization, that sort of thing.

And I'd also like that group to work to identify how we can use the lanes we currently have more effectively.

I've talked with several people who tell me that they accidentally end up in the lanes as drivers because they're lanes that are sometimes bus lanes and sometimes not and they don't realize they're bus lanes and then they kind of panic when they're in there and they realize they're blocking things.

So I'd love for you to work with SDOT and with advocates to both find ways to increase prioritization and also improve the efficacy of what we have.

Thanks.

Thanks, Bree.

David?

David, you're going to be followed by Matthew Lang.

And then we're going to have a group that's Andrew Meyer, Alice Lockhart, or Andrew Kitty.

Anyways, you know the group.

The Freight Advisory Board should know that we need to shut down the port during game time, raise the NAFTA port rates, and give the players and fans a fresh air reprieve from the horn honking freight trains toxifying and overwhelming Mariners baseball.

After a train passes by the stadium, rattling the bullpen and the dugout, a multitude of errors on the baseball field occur.

The Freight Advisory Board should be invigorated to support first world infrastructure that includes accommodating an NBA team.

Freight should not capitulate to offshore industrialists treading on local community while government corrupts raid property taxes to corporate welfare subsidized China shipping.

Seattle is raiding the property taxes to corporate welfare subsidized offshore industrialists playing one port against another port.

to the detriment of locals' pursuits of happiness, gentrified by free container offloads, guaranteeing more freight at the expense of local property taxes, financing our own demise by the lies of a port of the plority that should have an injunction put on its authority.

Beware the port of Seattle's industry choices who are always willing to force debt onto locals at the expense of the locals' residential community.

Thank you.

Thanks, David.

Matthew?

Hi, my name is Matthew Lang, I'm the lead organizer of the Transit Riders Union, a member of the Mass Coalition, a Ballard resident, and a small business owner.

The nature of my small business is something that necessitates me to drive a car.

I teach after school programs in parkour, acrobatics, stuff like that all over King County.

So I have about 500 pounds of gymnastics mats that are sitting in my SUV.

So I'm on the road every day as a car driver.

And so I see how we could really increase transit access and transit mobility as a positive thing for not only people that ride transit and utilize that system, but for car drivers as well.

Friends often ask me why I have such a passion about increasing transit mobility and access.

And honestly, I understand that increasing that those transit options for those who can take advantage of them will take single occupancy vehicle riders off of the roads and make a smoother commute for everyone.

So I think that we should look at the vision for bus mobility that the Mass Coalition has presented to the council and find ways to work together so that we can all move Seattle together and develop programs that serve that goal.

Thank you.

Thanks, Matt.

Group, come on forward.

And we'll go ahead and would you guys like five minutes to testify?

All right, so we'll change the timer and after you will be Katie Wilson and then Jesse Simpson and Sarah Shifley.

Hi, I'm Alice Lockhart from 350 Seattle, speaking on behalf of our members as well as the thousands of Seattleites that would like the city to prioritize climate action quickly.

And I'm a little bummed that Mr. Zimbabwe isn't here.

I'd love to have him and the mayor listen to these public testimony events at council on a regular basis.

Like Bri, I also thank SDOT and Metro for helping to make Seattle the one major city where bus ridership is increasing, or at least was recently.

SDOT knows and understands that just as safe bike lanes are the one thing that's going to get people out of their cars and onto bikes.

Fast, quicker, and more efficient bus service is the thing that's going to get people out of their cars and onto buses.

But we need more from SDOT, and we need it much, much faster.

As an advocate for future generations having a livable planet, Oh yeah, speaking for them too, I must ask SDOT to do something new.

The IPCC report gives us ten years to drastically reduce emissions and the 50% of Seattle's greenhouse gas emissions from personal transportation is not declining.

That tells us that as the city's transportation agency SDOT needs measurable climate goals and accountability for meeting them.

These goals should include equitable transportation for those of us who can't afford a car or an Uber.

It's time for SDOT to default to prioritizing bus and bike lanes, signal priority for buses and walkable streets everywhere in SDOT funding as well as in every project.

Thank you, Andrew.

Yeah, I just want to say how enthusiastic I am about bus rapid transit as an answer to so many, many of our problems.

I know that buses aren't often considered particularly, you know, sexy or exciting, but can you imagine a city of Seattle where every single walkable neighborhood was connected to every other single walkable neighborhood by bus rapid transit?

You could get anywhere in the city from one place to another with maybe one connection, but they were fast and reliable.

That's what we need to get out of cars, and we desperately need to get out of cars.

We are facing the most horrendous crisis in climate change.

People are leaving Central America now because of the drought.

They're piling up at our border.

That is because of climate change.

That is because of the climate change that the United States is more responsible for it than any other people in the world.

And now people are piling up at our borders.

And what are we doing here in Seattle?

Well, many of us are continuing to drive because we have to.

We have to give a choice.

We have to do bus rapid transit.

We have to do it now.

We have to do it much more aggressively than we are doing it.

Thank you.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to add on to there.

I think I was supposed to give the emotional testimony that maybe has become my trademark.

But buses are what makes it possible for me on the days like when I, as a cyclist, can't face the sort of threat of traffic violence to get around the city.

It's what makes the city accessible for me.

Being able to throw my bike on the bus, go up Capitol Hill without having to use my grinding gear to get up the hill.

I mean, it's what makes it possible to get around without having a lot of money.

I've never had the money necessary to buy a car, right?

To make our city accessible and to make our city livable for the future, we need buses that can get us where we go.

And we're evaluating so many things about how we get around our city right now, right?

And this is like a piece of the puzzle that we have to look at and we have to unlock Nass thinks that we have some good ideas about how we might unlock that, and I hope that the council will look at those with us.

Thank you.

Thanks, Meg.

Katie, you're next.

Hi, Council Members.

Thanks for hearing our testimony today and welcome, Council Member Pacheco.

So I'm here with the Transit Riders Union and also a member of the MAS Coalition along with a bunch of my colleagues here in the audience.

We're looking forward to hearing the discussion today on Move Seattle and Rapid Ride implementation.

We appreciate all the work that's been done by the Council and all the work being done now by SDOT to realize these very important transportation projects.

But at the same time, we're feeling a great and increasing sense of urgency.

As we face a global climate change emergency, we know that now is the time to act.

Seattle's greenhouse gas emissions are rising, not falling, and half of these emissions come from passenger transportation.

We need to give people better alternatives to driving alone now, not next year, not 10 years from now.

We believe that Seattle can set an example that other cities across the country can follow.

We can achieve a rapid shift to a low or no carbon transportation system where very few people need to drive alone to get where they need to go, where the vast majority of people are choosing other options because those other options work so well.

And we know that public transit has to be at the core of the system.

For this reason, we're deeply concerned by the delays and paring back of RapidRide and many other Move Seattle projects, even while we understand some of the challenges.

We believe the city needs to place a high priority on doing whatever it takes to make these projects really good and to deliver them quickly, even if this means seeking out substantial new funding.

We also believe more can be done in the short term to improve transit speed and reliability, and that's what we're really here to address today.

During the three-week SR-99 closure, we saw that biking, water taxi, and light rail ridership all increased hugely.

But bus ridership really didn't, and it may even have fallen on average.

That tells us that people don't see riding the bus as a reliable way to avoid getting stuck in traffic.

Last week, Como News reported on a study showing that people who drive to work in Seattle spend significantly less time commuting than people who ride public transit.

This is a problem.

How can we expect people to make the shift to transit when they have to lose time spent with their families, let alone risk being late to work because the bus is 30 minutes late?

So we think the city can change this by getting more serious about bus priority.

Last December, Mass published a vision for bus priority in Seattle, including 20 stretches where we think that dedicated lanes or signal priority can speed the trips of many thousands of people.

This will also ease metros and sound transit's serious capacity constraints.

So we're here today to ask you to work with us to figure out what can be done fast.

And I've got copies of our map to give you as well.

We would love the map.

Thank you so much.

Jesse.

Hi, I'm Jesse Simpson from the Capitol Hill Renter Initiative and Share the Cities.

We work to advance housing equity in the city of Seattle by advocating for affordable housing, more housing of all types, and transportation, multimodal transportation to help people get around the city sustainably.

I think both the ADUs and bus priority are a key driver to make the city a more inclusive and sustainable place.

I don't need to tell you that we have both a housing crisis and a climate crisis.

Tens of thousands of our neighbors live on the streets.

Hundreds of thousands are rent burdened.

And the city only has 10 years to cut carbon emissions by 50% to meet our targets.

This will mean creating way more ADUs, shifting much more money into affordable housing, and providing the sorts of bus lanes and bike lanes that will allow people to get around without needing a car in the city.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Sarah, you're the last one who signed up today.

If there's anyone else who wants to speak today, you can line up behind Sarah.

Megan, you can be next.

Hi, my name is Sarah Shifley.

I'm a volunteer with 350 Seattle's Transportation Work Group, but I'm also just speaking on behalf of myself and my family.

After learning that more than half of Seattle's carbon emissions comes from transportation, my husband and I got rid of our car, and we now rely solely on our bikes and public transit to get around.

We live in Columbia City, so our major bus route is the number 7, and to get anywhere from the Rainier Valley area into downtown on the number 7, We hit a bottleneck right there that is one of the areas on MAS's list of bus priorities that's pointed out.

And that makes riding the number 7 for us really, really impractical.

We just almost never do it because it's so difficult to actually get anywhere.

It can take up to an hour to even get down into the international district and downtown on that bus.

And there's no reason why that shouldn't be a rapid ride.

There's so many people that rely on it.

It's constantly packed.

So I'm just here today to ask you guys to really think about prioritizing bus lanes, especially in the corridors that the MAS coalition has pointed out here, because it would make it possible for me and so many other people in the city to actually use these buses to get around.

Thanks.

Thank you, Sarah.

Megan?

I just hope that with Seattle becoming more multimodal, I use the app One Bus Away, and it can be really off.

I wish that there was more real-time measurements of buses, and I wish that there was more buses and a lot more strategy infiltrated into the bus system of delivering as many buses as possible on time.

And the 7 Express would be really awesome because I go down to Mount Baker a lot, And just, you know, in general, it would be nice if people who wanted to totally depend on buses to live here could easily do that and know they would be on time.

And I also wanted to thank you for organizing with people across the country about where we can sue that one lawyer that shocked me because he was against the people that laid in front of the ICE office.

What's his name?

He's a lawyer here.

And they laid in front of the ICE office and he wanted to prosecute him.

And then now he wants to file a lawsuit against fossil fuel companies.

And it's right on the edge of my mind.

Yeah, Pete Holmes.

And so evidently we found people in other places around the country who think we can sue the fossil fuel industries and then like on the city level make a lot of progress since the federal level isn't doing enough.

So these things combined can alleviate carbon emissions because it's all over the news.

On the front cover of the New York Times, there's this huge sea turtle.

And on the front cover of the Seattle Times, more animals are becoming extinct.

It's a catastrophe.

And I think it should be aired on TV all the time instead of this thing that's to blindside us about this big political drama that I care nothing about.

So thank you.

Thanks, Megan.

Hi.

Hi, I'm Karen.

I'm a member of the Transit Riders Union, but I'm speaking on behalf of myself.

Mostly, I just love the buses so much, and I want to use them all the time.

But I don't even work.

I'm on Social Security Disability, and I won't take them if I have to go through downtown or way up north.

I'm missing doctor's appointments and stuff like that, even though I'm just like, Just the experience of riding the bus is fun for me.

But if I can't get where I need to go, I won't use it.

I miss activist meetings that help me organize to do, you know, some of the work that we bring to you all.

And so, all of these, the maps with all the faster areas, like, let's not get fancy.

Let's just do that.

Thanks.

Thank you, Karen.

Is there anyone else who wants to comment today?

Hello, good afternoon.

My name is Arthur Bacchus.

I am a UW grad student and a member of Seattle Subway.

I would just like to say thank you for being here.

But also, I exclusively ride transit.

I only ride bus, light rail, maybe occasionally a line bike or something like that.

But, you know, there have been times where I've been late to class or I've been late to a doctor's appointment.

Or I've been late to an internship because sometimes the buses might not be reliable, especially peak hours.

Then there's other times where I'm sitting on a bus and there are 40, 50 people on there.

And I think about if you were to line up 40 or 50 cars, and you think about that amount of space that one bus is saving, why shouldn't we have priority?

We as a collective are making a decision to save space for other people.

Why don't we get that priority?

So if you think about peak hours, 80 people or 100 people on an articulated bus, I just don't see, you know, it makes perfect sense to give them priority.

They are making a decision to take cars off the road.

I moved 2,000 miles from home to come to grad school here because I heard Seattle was doing great things with transit, expanding their network, investing heavily.

And I want to make sure that we keep doing that.

And I want to be part of this city.

So please consider NASA's suggestions.

Thank you.

Thank you, Arthur.

Is there anyone else who wants to provide public comment today?

All right.

Seeing none, we'll close public comment.

and we'll dive into the agenda.

Why don't I invite presenters forward for all of the appointees to the Freight Advisory Board, and I'll ask Kelly to read those agenda items into the record when you're ready.

All right, we're looking at appointment 01318 through 01323 for the Freight Advisory Board.

Go ahead and read the names and the dates.

So, appointment of Crystal Fizer to December 31st, 2019. Appointment of Chris DeBuck, May 31st, 2020. Gene Akudanza, May 31st, 2020. And Mike Elliott, May 31st, 2020. And Johan Hellemann, May 31st, 2020.

And John Persak.

John Persak, May 31, 2021. Hello.

Why don't we do a quick round of introductions.

You want to just say your name as we go down the line.

You can start.

Sure.

My name is Chris DeBuck.

John Persak.

And I'm Chris Hughes, the city of Seattle.

Great.

Chris, do you want to give us a quick overview of the role of the advisory board?

Well, the role of the advisory board, like all the modal boards, is to provide a perspective and information on a specific type of transportation.

In this case, the Freight Advisory Board, large vehicle and goods movement is the focus.

They've helped us in terms of design, information, and communications.

Obviously, freight mobility through our city is a growing an important piece of how our city survives.

It always has been integral to our city, both freight that's moving through our city from the port or to the port, but also delivering the goods and needs we need more and more often directly to our homes, but also to the local businesses that rely on it.

And as our city continues to grow and as we switch the ways in which we live and consume But our roads do not expand.

In fact, we're often talking about dedicating our existing roads to other more efficient modes like buses.

It's critically important because it'd be awesome if freight could sometimes travel on buses.

But for the most part, they need to be traveling in their dedicated vehicles.

So how we manage that right away is a really important piece of what we do.

So we have four reappointments today, but why don't we start with the new appointments.

So Chris, do you want to start by telling us a little bit about your background and why you want to serve on this board?

Yeah, sure.

I began my career as a teamster actually at UPS.

I was a package car driver, so most of my experience is downtown Seattle delivering small parcels.

I moved to a combination tractor trailer job doing the basically hub feed.

Also with UPS?

Yeah, that's right.

So that's most of my on-ground experience.

Currently what I am is a representative for UPS employees in the Seattle Redmond, that area.

So I basically am, when they have issues, safety related or anything like that, I coordinate with the employer and try to work things out.

That's awesome.

It's great to have you be willing to do this.

John, you're a familiar face.

Tell us a little bit why you're interested in this.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

My name is John Persak, and I've spent 20 years in the maritime industry and have spent a lot of time advocating for our union, for workers, and for the industry in general.

And I also live in an impacted community.

I live in the Georgetown neighborhood and we're impacted by freight movement as well in the port.

So I feel like I bring a unique perspective to the table from the point of view of the economic piece and the jobs piece, but also the piece for impacted communities.

I think it's important that workers in our industry and the industry in general really get ahead of the curve as far as addressing that issue, because I think we have some work to do.

And you heard me ramble at the beginning, as politicians tend to, about my perspective on what the challenges are.

But both of you have a ton more expertise on that.

And I don't know if you want to take a minute and share any views on what some of the challenges we face around freight, and then maybe some of the things you kind of hope to accomplish in your terms on the Freight Advisory Board.

And also, if you could also expand on how some of these issues touch on the lives of people who live in the impacted neighborhoods and just give us concrete examples of what could be corrected.

Go first or?

Yeah, go for it.

Okay.

Well, I think in terms of the challenges, of course, you know, as you mentioned, the city is becoming, you know, more vibrant, more dense.

And of course, that means, you know, more challenges to get goods to the city.

Looking forward to working out the problems with the, well, the first issue that comes to mind is the alignment with the Sound Transit, the new links, with regard to both West Seattle and Ballard.

You know, there's only a finite amount of space for bringing transit through, so there has to be a conversation with the freight community on how both interests can be served and be complementary.

The second piece, of course, is Terminal 5 coming online over near West Seattle, and that's going to have an impact.

There's going to be as much traffic, if not more, container movement there than as currently is at Terminal 18. And that brings me to the impacts.

The impacts, of course, is trucks and trains.

Trucks, in particular, are very carbon intensive.

They're going near neighborhoods.

Often low-income neighborhoods tend to be abutted to the industrial areas of the freight corridors, like South Park.

the Delridge community, Georgetown, and some others.

And so we have to take a look at, you know, one, making sure that freight can move efficiently, so it's not isolating those communities, and also looking at, you know, partnering with other agencies like the port and industry to see like what kind of things we can bring to the table as far as more efficient machines.

So there's that piece.

And then also just the safety component and the noise component.

I think there's some work that could be done around there as well to help struggling communities.

It's a noisy environment for a lot of folks, and people sometimes have to live there because of the income disparities.

And so it's not really a choice in a lot of cases.

So when I served on the Advising for the Freight Master Plan, representing the Georgetown community, I advocated for a piece that would really address those concerns.

And so I want to continue to do that work on this body.

Just to add on that, I think you covered quite a bit.

When I look at the small parcel delivery, a lot of the issue is the infrastructure.

And you see more or less more vehicles on the road that are servicing condominiums, all the houses.

And I'm sure you've pulled up somewhere and seen a UPS truck, USPS truck, Amazon truck, and then a FedEx truck and a FedEx ground truck.

So I can bring that perspective from my experience of being on the ground in that situation, what that might look like as far as a better solution.

and that just the safety is a huge component to it.

So, I mean, you talk about pedestrians, bicyclists, what are the things that we're keeping in mind of how do you keep that component of safety at mind when you're servicing that?

Absolutely.

I was just going to say it's really good that you both are willing to serve because you're already doing a lot of work in your unions and the community.

But your voices are important because who knows better about these issues than the unions and the workers that are already working on these issues.

So I think it would be very important.

And also, in relation to Terminal 5, I think Your voices are also important because there's a larger conversation.

I mean, beyond freight mobility and the specific issues we're discussing here, there's a larger question of, and it's always looming over us with big developers and so on, you know, should we have a working waterfront versus should we, you know, should we just build real estate and condos there?

And absolutely, we want to push for a working waterfront on an ongoing basis.

A couple things that are on my radar going forward, I'd love your just quick feedback on.

One is, first of all, UPS is piloting electric bike delivery in some kind of downtown neighborhoods as part of the work around the period of maximum strain.

So it's great to see the kind of innovation there.

You know, I was curious to see how it works out, but it's certainly a It's awesome to see someone like UPS who's been in the business for a long time also trying to find some new ways to be efficient.

But one of the things that comes up often is around access to curb space.

And so obviously small packages have access challenges.

There's a lot of competition with things like Uber and Lyft and taxis.

And similarly, how we manage that curb space to make it more efficient.

It's like you were saying, John, so vehicles aren't circling the block multiple times with pollution and congestion and can actually get in and do their business and move on.

And so I don't know if you have any thoughts about that, but that's something that I think we'll be interested to hear.

from as we move forward and manage, try to better manage our curb space.

I definitely think the one thing to look at is usually most companies offer premium service.

So you're looking at kind of like a three turnaround time.

You have a premium service commit, secondary service commit, and then a pickup commit.

So I think kind of one thing to look at is how do you look at how customers are serviced with the pickup component and not impact their retail service to customers.

And if there's a moderation mediation to what that might look like.

So I think that might be a component too, because that's also the busiest time when you're doing pickups.

So that might be something to look at.

But that's a really big question.

And I think a bigger thing is, how do you talk to the major companies and see what solutions they might offer?

So the bicycle thing is a neat thing too, because it removes that component.

And, but how do you do that safely too, because you're also putting something different than a vehicle that's going to the end point consumer.

So.

John, one of the things, you mentioned Terminal 5, and one of the beautiful things, or at least the potentially beautiful things about Terminal 5 is the potential access of container directly to rail on that.

I'm curious from your perspective if that's something that, you know, what are the things that we can be doing as a city to maximize that so that a lot of that freight, especially the stuff that's going beyond just this region, can get directly on rail and skip over the trucks that may be idling and may be causing more pollution in some of the neighborhoods.

I think generally speaking, in order for that to be economically viable, they need the volumes to really make rail pencil out.

And I think that's a real key thing.

There is a little bit of activity there now, but in order for them to really leverage that as a cost piece, I think we really have to promote it as like, you know, a premier terminal on the West Coast.

And having said that, I'm really excited about the fact that you know, there has been some improvements in terms of in the design and making sure that there's going to be a quiet zone, you know, for that intersection so that residents there aren't hearing the horns in the middle of the night.

My understanding is there's going to be some work done on the noise issues on the terminal itself with, you know, with backup alarms and things like that.

And of course, the newer equipment is quieter as well.

So I think Overall, the rail operation is a cleaner operation.

I mean, it's obviously not perfect, but I think the more we can get on rail, the better, and I think the volumes are what's really important for that.

Good to know.

Colleagues, any other questions?

Chris, do you want to mention any of the four folks that are up for reappointments?

They're not here today, and we don't ask them to be here, but I don't know if you want to touch on any of their backgrounds at all.

Well, actually, Ms. Acatanza just accepted appointment as chair to the freight board.

And all of the members of the board, one of our most recent appointments, Todd Beesold, who is associated with Merlino Foods.

They've all been actually very helpful as we walk through our understanding of the potential impacts to goods movement as Pioneer Square.

has limited vehicle wait lanes, and how they're helping us get information out to the goods movement community.

So in a great many ways, it's a large group effort, and it's really, honestly, no one person stands out because I think they're all quite good.

That's great.

Well, I really appreciate the commitment.

You both are stepping up.

As Council Member Sawant mentioned, you do a lot of other work in the community beyond this, but I'm really grateful for you to both bring your expertise to this.

I know it's a major time commitment.

I want to commit to, at least in my eight months left on the council, to honor that commitment by making sure that as you have policy ideas or feedback for us, that we're incorporating that into the work we do.

So thanks for doing that work, and we look forward to working together.

With that, I'll go ahead and move agenda items number one through number six, the appointments and reappointments to the Seattle Freight Advisory Board.

All those in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

None opposed.

Thanks.

Your appointment will move to the full council on Monday.

You're obviously welcome to attend, but there's no role for you in that meeting other than to get to work.

So thanks so much for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Kelly, if you don't mind reading Agenda Items 7 and 8 into the record, and then I'll invite the presenters forward for that agenda, those agenda items.

Appointment 01324, reappointment of Hester Sobrin for the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee.

The term ends December 31st, 2022. And appointment 01325, appointment of Inge Manskamp to the Levy to Move Seattle Oversight Committee.

Appointment term December 31st, 2019. Great.

Let's start with introductions.

Rachel, you can go first.

Rachel McCaffrey, staff liaison to the Levee Oversight Committee.

Inga Manskoff.

Thank you both for being here today.

Rachel, do you want to give us a little overview of this committee?

Yeah, the Move Seattle Levee Oversight Committee has been around since the start of the levy in 2016, and they are tasked with overseeing progress of implementation of projects and programs under the levy.

So they meet monthly, are a group of about 16 people.

You're one of the members yourself.

And sometimes they'd be more than monthly.

Just, I don't know if you've been told that, Inga, but if there's extra work to do, like last summer was quite a busy summer.

So why don't you take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and why you're willing to step up to this committee.

Sure.

So I am currently employed by the University of Washington as the administrator for the Division of Adolescent Medicine located at Seattle Children's Hospital.

I work with mostly the doctors there and provide administrative and operation support for that.

I handle the division budgets.

Every year we put together a clinical budget, we put together grant budgets, I do a lot of finance related work there and human resources related work as well.

Anything that is not clinical and needs to get done to help the doctors do their work, that's what my job is.

And in the community, I am currently, but soon not to be, the Ravenna Bryant Community Association president for the last four years.

And I've worked mostly on transportation-related issues as the RBCA president.

We have different views on the RBCA about a variety of transportation issues, but I think I've been able to find common ground in a couple of things so that we're able to advocate well for especially pedestrian safety in our community.

I was one of the people who formed the Fix 65th Coalition, and I'm happy to say, I'm happy to see how that has all turned out.

I still think there's some improvements to be made, I was very happy with how we were able to bring the community around that to improve pedestrians, especially pedestrian safety, but of course bike safety as well.

Finally, personally, I don't live that far from work, so I bike and I walk to work mostly.

If it's really raining or if I'm late, I take the bus.

So I rarely use my car, but I every once in a while do on the weekends.

My family is a truly multimodal family.

My daughter is 21, doesn't drive.

She takes the bus and she walks everywhere.

My husband, he does everything.

He bikes, he walks, he runs.

He takes the bus, he takes the car.

And then I have an extended family in Seattle, too.

Everyone gets around differently.

So I really see the move Seattle Levy, if all the promises are brought forward, could really have a positive impact not only on my family and me, but the wider community.

And that's why I'm interested.

That's great.

Yeah, that's a broad spectrum.

Just working on the Ravenna Bryant community group has a broad spectrum.

And certainly here on the Fix 65th project, a lot of vocal advocates in the community we hear from quite a bit.

So you're right in the thick of it there.

And thanks for your four years of service there.

And thanks for your willingness to serve here.

Colleagues, do you have any questions?

Yeah.

I was just, because this came up a lot in the public testimony, if you have looked at some of the really good points that have been brought up by the mass coalition and what you think, how that intersects with what you think your work will be in on this body and how we can bring that forward.

I agree with everything they said.

Thank you.

I like that response.

Me too.

If I was involved with those coalitions, I would absolutely be up there testifying the same way they did today.

Thank you for that very unambiguous answer.

It's much appreciated.

No problem.

If I could just make some quick comments.

I mean, I've been to the Preventa Bryant Neighborhood Association meeting several times now, and Inga does a tremendous, fabulous job of just creating an inclusive environment for everyone to speak, for the diversity of thought and perspectives.

And so I appreciate just your leadership.

Thank you.

Inga, thank you so much for your willingness to serve and stepping forward.

I really appreciate the perspectives you're going to bring.

And are you going to be there this evening?

I will see you there tonight, so we can jump right in.

Did you want to say anything about Hester?

Yeah, so Hester Cerebrin is a reappointment.

She's been serving on the committee since about last October, so she was finishing a vacant term.

This new reappointment is through the end of 2022. She is the policy director at Transportation Choices Coalition, lives in Queen Anne.

and brings background in planning and policy, specifically in equitable and sustainable transportation.

So she's a good asset.

That's great.

I look forward to having her there, too.

I'll go ahead and move agenda items number seven and eight for the appointments and reappointments to the Levy to Move Seattle Oversight Committee.

Second.

All those in favor, standing by for saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

None opposed.

So this will go to the full council next Monday.

Again, thank you so much for being here today, and I look forward to seeing you tonight.

Great.

Thank you.

Thanks, Rachel.

All right, Kelly, you want to read agenda item number nine into the record?

We are getting a move Seattle levy oversight report.

Great.

And I'll invite presenters forward.

Hey, you're back.

You guys can pick your seats.

We'll get the presentation up.

Hey, look at that.

Welcome, folks.

Why don't we start with a round of introductions.

Sam, you can go first.

Sam Zimbabwe, Director of SDOT.

Rachel McCaffrey, Oversight Committee Liaison and also the Levy Accountability Manager.

Lorelei Williams, Deputy Director, Capital Project Delivery SDOT.

Maria Kingeter with SDOT.

I manage the Transit Plus Multimodal Corridor Program.

Great.

I don't have any opening comments.

Let's just jump into the presentation.

Sam, you can start off.

I'm going to let Rachel and Lorelei and then Maria do most of the talking today.

Just very happy to be here to continue our efforts at transparency and accountability in terms of the levy.

We'll be making a very similar presentation tonight at the Levy Oversight Committee as well.

And just excited to be able to share this information with you, with the public, and be able to answer questions in this format too.

So before we get rolling, so this is wonderful because it's our first quarter report, but it's not the levy slides.

So I don't know if we can switch out.

I can show you guys the report.

I bet it might be in some font, so we won't be able to read from here, but...

For anybody that hasn't read the report, it's very entertaining reading.

It's great.

It's good.

It's very...

It's page-turner.

It's page-turner.

I'll leave that up on my Kindle tonight.

Yep.

It is good stuff.

There you go.

Oh, this one?

Yep.

All right.

Perfect.

There you go.

Great.

Now we're in business.

So we can keep going.

I'll take it from here.

So we're mostly here today to talk about our Q1 2019 progress report.

Before we jump into that, we're going to briefly talk about the 2018 annual report, since we didn't get a chance to come earlier in the year.

And then at the end, we have a response to the SLI regarding the rapid ride corridors.

Excellent.

So the annual report, last year, so we, 2018 was a big year for the levy with the Move Seattle assessment through most of the year.

And working on the report was kind of a milestone moment because one of the components of the assessment called attention to the need for more robust and transparent tracking and reporting.

So this report document, as does the Q1 report, follows this new, more robust format and template to put all of the facts out on the table so people have what they need to track progress and see how things are moving or where they might not be.

So within 2018, 25 of the deliverable categories met or exceeded their planned accomplishments for the year.

We spent $166 million, which is the highest spending over the first three years of the levy, secured almost $30 million in grants.

And again, the report came out on a new schedule for reporting to provide some consistency and transparency in what to expect when we provide those progress reports.

So we published it.

on March 30th and presented it to the Oversight Committee as well.

So then moving, that was 2018, so looking at this quarter, 2019 Q1, this slide is mainly just for contextual awareness.

We've put out a lot of reports in the last four or so months, so trying to draw the thread in how they all relate.

So the screenshot, the image on the left is from our work plan report last November, and the example project shown is Safe Routes to School.

So, in November, we put out the work plan, which was a look at the next six years and what we would get done for the remaining years of the levy.

The middle report is the 2019 planned accomplishments document that we put out this March, and that report zoomed in on just this year, just 2019, and what we would, what we will get done this year.

explains and documents any changes or deviations from that work plan so you can see how we're staying accountable to that document.

And then over on the right is a screenshot of this report, 2019 Q1, and the progress that we've accomplished so far this year in just the first three months against that planned accomplishment outlined in March.

So let me just make sure I can read those numbers across.

So the 32 is the kind of overall target for the number of safe routes we're going to work on?

In 2019. So in the work plan we said, looking at the next six years in 2019, we said we'd do 32.

And then what is the, when it says 2019 planned accomplishments and it has a range of 25 to 32, how is that distinct from the 32?

So the reason is really hard to read because it's a screenshot, but in the rightmost column of that 2019 planned accomplishments document is the justification for why it's been reduced, which has to do with funding changes for the program.

I don't know if you can go into the more specifics, Lorelei.

I don't need to dig into the specifics on this one.

If you want, that's great.

I'm more just trying to understand the framework.

And just this one is kind of interesting, and we won't get too far into the details, but 32 projects is well in excess of what the levy commitments are.

And so just to call attention, the 25 to 32 is still exceeding what we commit to doing every year overall.

But basically, when we took a look at this year and what we knew about crew availability and that type of thing, we felt better given a range as we looked at the accomplishments.

So that's why.

we have a range, but that's the detail in the right-hand side.

I appreciate highlighting.

I mean, there's obviously some challenges around the levee.

I kind of put them in three buckets.

One was maybe our eyes were a little too big when we were putting the plan together.

Two was the construction environment has tightened up considerably over the past few years in ways that I don't know that anyone anticipated how much construction would continue to be going on, and that competition is putting pressure on availability and prices.

And then three, federal funding environment, we're not in the most friendly pro-multimodal federal agency or even just quick turning around dollars environment, and we anticipated a better environment.

Despite all that, there's still a lot of areas of the levy where it looks like we're still on track to meet or even exceed some of the goals.

There's some high profile ones that are really important that we'll talk about later, but I appreciate that.

In safe routes to schools, it's an area where it looks like we might exceed our original commitment.

Yep, which opens us to conversations ultimately around one of the things that's not in this presentation, but I'll just tell you, is we are looking at the whole of the levy and kind of where we think we might under-deliver versus where we might over-deliver, and trying to decide if that would lead us towards any shifts in where the funding is.

So that's the whole next phase of the conversation.

And those are, I think, important policy discussions for us to be having, and I appreciate transparency.

Sorry I've interrupted your long presentation.

So now going through some of the highlights that we accomplished in Q1.

First quarter is typically a little slow and quiet due to weather, but we were still able to get a lot of good work done the first three months of this year, including about 11 blocks of new sidewalk, which is about half of the work that was carried forward from 2018 for that program, so chipping away at the work that we had underway at the end of the year.

Sidewalks includes a project on 30th Ave.

Northeast up in Lake City, which is a pretty major community connection.

That's the image on the right, and the graph or the map on the far right shows how it's one of many phases to complete sidewalk in Lake City and Little Brook.

Safe routes to school, we just talked about that.

There were eight schools that we implemented projects in first quarter.

And first quarter is slow for some of the civil construction, but it's a good time for tree planting.

We got in over 400 trees, which accomplishes, again, the remaining trees left from 2018 that we didn't get in quite in time, and all of the accomplishments for 2019. That's great.

Trees.

We do love trees.

And then the next step there is construction progress on the remaining sidewalk work, bike projects, greenways and protected bike lanes and paving that has been underway since the end of 2018. So trying to continue or say how we're continuing to make good progress on those.

We don't check any mileage off until it's totally done.

So we don't have a lot of it in Q1, but it's still underway and making good project progress, which is kind of seen more in the the spending breakdown that we have in a couple of slides.

And then, of course, the bigger projects, Lander, Fairview, and Northgate are also making good progress.

Lander in construction and Fairview and Northgate through key milestones that will allow them to start construction this year.

And Northgate, is that referred to the pedestrian overpass that we're talking about?

Yeah.

Still on schedule to be ready by the time that first train rolls through?

That's the plan.

But we unfortunately have used our float.

We bid the project.

And when we bid the project, they came back in with just the railing costing, instead of approximately $1 million, which we estimated, somewhere between $5 and $8 million in each bid.

So we have had to go back.

Basically, it was somewhat, there were very few suppliers.

And one that stood out, so everybody went to the same supplier.

So we are modifying the specifications so that it gives a lot more leeway in who supplies the railing and brings the cost back into a reasonable range, which is what we're looking for.

So we still had some float in the schedule, and we've used a chunk of that now.

So we're looking to re-advertise the project tomorrow.

Great.

That's getting on it.

So makes you sure I understand that the the work we did to essentially redo the the the bid documents and read bit it out took some time that Could have been used for if there are some construction hiccups.

And so now we're down to hope everything goes as planned Exactly do everything we can.

Okay, and I know that's a complex project when you're putting anything over a major freeway.

Not easy to work around.

Yeah, there's a fair number of environmental considerations, as well as construction over I-5.

So yeah, the fun's just beginning.

But it's a great project.

Yeah, it is a great project.

All right, so this is a graph showing our spend progress in 2019. It generally gets a little more exciting as you move through the year.

In Q1, we spent $28.8 million, which is our highest Q1 spend of the first four years of the levy.

And we'll get into more of the details in the next slides, and I'll pass it over to Lorelei.

So this is, we love our pie charts, but this shows the planned spend for the year of 218 million, and this is the 28.8 spent in the first quarter.

Within the colored breakdown, you can see where we spent the money.

So 2.7 million in arterial roadway maintenance.

5.4 million for Lander Street overpass, and so on.

So it just gives you the detail about where is big capital project spends versus operations and maintenance.

And over this year, for instance, Fairview, which is awarded, and we're just waiting to execute the contract, is just a small little $0.2 million amount, but quarter two, quarter three, quarter four, that'll increase.

And then just to hit on briefly how we do our spend plans, because this first quarter report is the first time that we published our updated spend plan for 2019, and you know this well, but we start with our cost estimates for projects, and then we load those all into our system.

And when we load those into our system, we check against risk and schedule and revalidate the spend plan based on everything we know now.

So that's what has gone into this first quarter report.

Our crew delivered projects are a little more nimble.

So there's a different process that we use to develop those spend plans.

And then just another note, we also have to account for lags in contractor payments.

So you will see things on the ground, and then it takes us a month before we actually process that payment.

And so it takes a while before it hits the books, even though you've seen it complete in the field.

Sidewalks, crew delivered, contracted, depends?

Both.

OK.

Yeah.

Just on the scale and the...

Exactly.

Yeah.

Sometimes we take individual ones that could be crew delivered projects and package them together for efficiencies, but other times, yeah, they can't be the large dollar projects with our crews, then we have to put it out to a contractor.

And this is just an example, not to, you don't have to look at all these details, but this is the detail our cost estimates go into.

So all phases of the project broken down by city labor, consultant, contractor, and other costs.

So that is the type of information we have for all of these projects that are in their capital delivery phase.

And then just another full look at our 2019 spend plan, the $218 million.

And by breaking these down into where they are at, so we have $28.9 million that's in our O&M projects that we control with our crews.

tend to be a lot more predictable, as well as the non-contractor-delivered piece.

The contractor-delivered sections we broke down into three phases.

Those that are under construction, where one of the toughest points for us is getting final permits and getting things under contract for construction.

So once we're in construction, we still have risks, weather, things like that.

But we feel much more confident in that spend.

Also, projects in design, we have a lot more control on design progress, usually.

And those are the smaller dollar spends, too, so they don't have as much impact on the spend plan.

So the highest risk as far as meeting our spend plan are the jobs that are in design and aren't yet out to construction.

because we're counting on those larger construction dollars towards the number.

So that is why we provided this breakdown, just so that you can actually see kind of what buckets all of that falls into.

And so clearly, I mean, you hit it spot on for the first quarter, 28 million.

I never expect that.

I think you'd be a little over, a little under, but nice work.

Well, I'll just tell you.

I assume it was a lot of things that were a little off and it averaged out.

We had an opportunity, so this is the thing about doing it in the first quarter, is we have an opportunity to make it match.

So it actually doesn't match because we were perfect, it matches because we're estimating after the first quarter, so we have actuals.

So I wish I could say we're that good, but...

Is it still, when we're looking forward for the rest of the year, and we get into construction season, does it still feel like we're gonna be on about target, or we see some big hiccups on the horizon?

Well, so, in fact, as I get to the slides, I'll be able to talk to that just a little bit more.

So, first, just, well, this slide covers both things.

So, first, the difference between our work plan, because we continue to track against the work plan we published last year and what is in our plan now.

And so, the work plan had for 2019 $257 million.

And we are now saying $218 million spend for this year.

There's a few different reasons for that.

Some of the biggest reasons, and I'm going to flip-flop the order here because this is actually an unusual occurrence, but one that I want to call attention to is our Lander project is actually estimated to cost less than we'd planned.

So $20 million of that underspend in 2019 is because we don't ever expect to have to spend that money on Lander.

We do not punish you for that.

So when you actually deliver the project and it costs less money, that's a really good thing.

So thank you for that.

And I appreciate you highlighting that that is not a problem.

So that's what we call a good underspend.

And then there's the kind of underspend we don't like as much, such as our Fairview Bridge.

In fact, all three of these projects listed here, Fairview Bridge, our AAC Package 1, and our Northgate Bridge, we had to re-advertise all for different reasons.

pretty painful moments.

The Northgate one I explained.

The other two had to do with bidder responsibility issues, where we had to throw out all bids because we couldn't accept them.

There were certain criteria they had to meet.

They didn't meet them.

And so the good news is Fairview contract has since been awarded and we're awaiting execution.

And then AAC package one has been re-advertised.

So we're moving forward, but those delays show up in our spend and in our deliverables.

And how much of that is the current construction environment where we're having trouble attracting folks?

How much of it is we need to do you know, better job of proactively recruiting contractors to bid on the work or package or bundle in a way that is more attractive to folks so we get some competitive bids that are qualified.

Yeah, so it's interesting.

On the Fairview one, there was actually a clerical error on our low bid where essentially there was a zero missed, a big important zero.

So that's just human error.

It happens sometimes.

We also, for the AAC Package 1, which is a paving project, we, a couple years ago, added some supplemental bidder responsibility criteria to our projects.

That on specialized projects make a lot of sense on our more typical projects like paving projects They've actually caused us more problems because of confusion And in this case our low bidder Wasn't able to prove they were responsible because none of the jobs they're doing for the city were complete so they couldn't count them as proving they could actually handle that level of work and And then we had a few other second, third bidders had separate issues with their bids.

So it's a bit of a mixed bag, but what we're looking at is tightening up that supplemental bidder responsibility criteria so that it's both a little clearer as well as only to the degree we think it's necessary and helpful.

Sam, one of the credentials that you brought to this job was project delivery.

And so I imagine these are things that were probably underway before you got here.

I don't know if there's anything you want to add here.

Well, I think Lorelei laid out that each of these is a slightly different issue, but those are the types of things that we are, you know, some of those are systematic things and some of them are, you know, maybe one-offs.

And so I think Lorelei and I have been talking about how to solve some of those systematic things and then try to prevent the one-offs from happening again as well.

I appreciate the kind of transparency and highlighting these things from everybody.

appreciate that we're learning lessons as we go so that, you know, that's obviously an evolving, changing industry out there really fast in Seattle right now, but I appreciate that transparency.

Yeah, definitely.

And so then the last thing on this slide that I want to call attention to is One lesson that we all have learned is when we give one specific number, everybody tracks to that one specific number.

And it's important to do it from a reporting standpoint, but we wanted to also reflect as a range because we know we have still risks that could happen or could not happen.

And so the spend plan assumption for 2018 is actually 190 to 218 is the range we're looking at.

One instance is we have a bridge seismic project that has a FEMA grant.

We're waiting on that grant before we can advertise.

So that's taking a little bit more time.

It's well worth our wait because we get the money.

Leverage.

Exactly.

But it sometimes adds time to our project.

So that's a risk we see.

As you know, our crews have many different places they're getting pulled in their priorities.

There was a lot going on with the snow.

permanent viaduct closure.

They're working to make up from that.

But as we want to do more as a city as a whole, there's a lot of push-pull with the time our crews have to devote to things.

So we just see that as a risk, as well as unforeseen issues in construction.

And then just a full picture.

And this will continue to evolve.

The good news is we're on the right trend.

So we continue to ramp up.

Some of the big projects are still on the horizon in 2020 and 2021. You have Delridge and Madison.

which are big corridor projects with a fair amount of construction spend.

And so this is, I would say with this chart, we feel good about where we're going.

We're still not going there quite as fast as we'd like to, but that's what we're paying attention to is how much of that is the larger projects that just need to keep going as well as maintaining the level of delivery that we need.

And this is just a comparison to the work plan report where you see that trend of before it was a very sharp spend in 2020, and now it's flattening out a little bit.

And I imagine we'll see some of that happen through the rest of the levy, but we're close to the peak of our spend.

And then now we combine two pieces.

Why don't we pause for a second.

Kelly, I'll ask you to read that next agenda item in just for the record.

It's the response to the statement of legislative intent, the slide 35-4-A-1-2019 Rapid Ride Corridors.

Jump in.

This slide requested information about the transit plus multimodal corridor projects as well as rapid ride projects and some more specificity about how they were combined or separate.

It was requested at the same time as we were going through a really robust levee assessment and so there wasn't complete clarity about where things would end up.

I would also note it was concurrent with King County Metro's own process to develop their capital project or capital program for delivering their rapid ride program countywide.

The response that we've provided includes a number of items.

A significant portion of the substance was included in the 2018 work plan in terms of the project scope, funding plan, status on funding, budgets and timelines.

We also provided King County Metro's full rapid ride program summary that was prepared in the fall of last year in support of their council budget process.

And an updated program map that differentiates hopefully more visually between the RapidRide lines and the Transit Plus Multimodal Corridor lines.

So in terms of the substance of the response, three of the projects will be completely integrated, Transit Plus Multimodal Corridor and RapidRide projects, so that is where design, delivery, and outreach will be both SDOT Multimodal and Transit Investments and King County's RapidRide Investments and Service, so all of it concurrent.

And we've been working really hard with Metro this year now that we have clarity on both agencies' parts about how we're moving forward to really show that to the community as integrated projects.

Each of them are a little bit different in terms of the funding commitment from each partner agency for Madison, Delridge, and Roosevelt.

But we're making some good progress, I think, in the partnerships and project-specific agreements to continue to move forward.

Four of the projects will be what we call transit plus multimodal corridor projects.

So those are projects to make transit speed and reliability as well as safety and access improvements as funding allowed on four main transit corridors.

I would note that Metro's budget does include funding for Rapid Ride Rainier in 2024. We had, in the interest of clarity and in response to a lot of the feedback and discussion that we had with the Transit Advisory Board and the Levy Oversight Committee last year, decided to prioritize our levy investment in the Route 7 corridor to deliver improvements more quickly for the community of current Transit Route 7 riders, to allow us to partner with some of our other levy projects like the Vision Zero investments to deliver both safety and transit investments sooner.

and to maintain more control over scope and risk on that.

That was a corridor that had been originally identified as another one of the potential small starts corridors, and a big piece of the input we had last year as part of the assessment was to deliver improvements sooner and during the levy timeframe to make sure that people benefited from those funds.

We are, however, working very closely with Metro on their RapidRide Rainier project, which will happen in 2024, and developing communication strategies to try not to confuse people and make sure that our investments actually on all of these corridors are really forward compatible with RapidRide.

I would also note that on Madison, as part of the levy assessment, we did extend the timeline for that to open in 2022. That was part of taking a closer look at what it was taking to deliver and secure the federal small starts funding, which is a significant portion of the Madison project.

Metro's budget had shown this in 2021, because they were ready if we were ready in 2021, but we are the lead for that project.

It's taking a little bit longer.

So the work plan and the timelines in the work plan show Madison as 2022, and we are moving forward consistent with that timeline.

So none of the timelines have changed from November.

But hopefully this provides a little bit more information.

And I would also note that on June 4th, I will be at the Levy Oversight Committee to provide a more detailed presentation, project by project, on our status for these.

Great.

So just to make sure that I have clarity and understanding, the three projects that we're still calling RapidRide are ones that we expect to deliver are improvements and King County Metro will be able to deliver their rapid ride service within the time frame of the levee, which is through 2023.

The levees through 2024. The schedule right now shows Madison opening in, or Madison slash RapidRide G line opening in 2022. The Delridge Way and the RapidRide H line, which is beyond Delridge, goes South Lake Union to Berrien, opening in 2021. And then the RapidRide Roosevelt project opening in 2024.

And then you said the Rainier is also scheduled for 2024?

King County's RapidRide Rainier project is scheduled for 2024. We are scheduled to make transit speed and reliability improvements on the Route 7 that will benefit folks now and be forward compatible with RapidRide by 2022. So it's much more of a phased investment sequence with a number of levy projects and Metro's investments on Rainier over the next five years.

I assume the investments and who's paying for what probably varies project to project, but in general, Metro's responsible for buying the new buses and the drivers and having the base space and installing probably the off-board payment systems and the signage and stuff.

We come in and do a series of kind of right-of-way improvements that will help prioritize whether that's queue jumps or curb bulbs or whatever type of infrastructure.

And so what I hear you saying is we are going to do the rapid, the, sorry, the infrastructure improvements in advance of the rapid ride bus so we can deliver those benefits to current seven users a couple years in advance.

And then when Metro has the capacity or the funding or whatever their constraint is to come along and put the new buses on and some new stations, they will drop that right on top of our investments from a couple years before?

Correct.

And on Rainier, Metro has a significant capital budget for that corridor.

Okay, so in addition to what we're doing.

It's also anticipated to be an overhead trolley extension, so that's quite capital intensive.

Yeah, okay.

But yes, they may make additional speed and reliability improvements beyond even what we can make, and beyond stations as well.

And then the other three that we haven't mentioned, so there's the, I think it's the 40, the 44, Sorry, what's the route on 23rd?

The 48. 48, thank you.

Are those all still ultimately, we think, going to be rapid ride or is that beyond the metro planning horizon?

We're just not sure.

They continue to be shown as rapid ride lines in Metro Connects, Metro's long-range plan.

As Metro eventually gets through this first phase of their capital expansion program and moves into a second phase or technically a third phase of rapid ride expansion, those corridors are anticipated to be made rapid ride at that time.

And so one of the questions we had last year as we were going through this, because the rapid ride investments were both a big selling feature for a lot of folks of the levy and also a big cost and an area where we had anticipated significant federal leverage and so got a lot of attention.

One of the questions that I know we had at the oversight committee was do we, given the new constraints, do we concentrate the investments in a subset of the seven lines or do we, continue to invest in all seven lines and maybe just, you know, paring down some of the investments.

And what we continue to see here is that we're still going to make a suite of investments.

I recall that, if I recall correctly from last fall, the idea was we want to pick the places where we can get the best speed and reliability improvements for the dollars we have.

and that there are those high-quality investments that are happening across all seven of these corridors, and so we're going to continue to invest in all seven of those.

There may be some investments that we thought we might make.

I don't know that the plan was quite that detailed when we went out to voters, but there may be some things that we'd hoped to make that maybe aren't going to be part of that package, but we still can deliver significant speed and reliability.

And then independent of what we're doing, King County Metro has its own challenges with the capacity, and so there, you know, what we had hoped would all be rapid ride lines before, by the end of the levy, Some of those are going to come a little later because of King County Metro's rejiggering.

Is that roughly accurate from a kind of council member perspective at least?

Very good summary.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you for humoring me.

I would only add that I think going back to Lorelei's slides of where where the expenditures get really big.

Like these rapid ride corridors are still really big investments for us to deliver.

And so as we deliver those and continue to improve our ability to do that, that will affect how we think about rapid ride going forward as well.

So, you know, I'm saying building on success ideally.

So as we can build success, we can assess what and where we can do additional investments.

And just the Madison BRT, like you said, significant federal investment.

Still a fair amount of uncertainty around that, or just kind of hard to tell?

In a normal world, it would be fairly certain, but this isn't normal?

I mean, it's still rated high in the small starts rating that just came out in February.

So we still think that there's strong likelihood.

there's still the need to actually get to a grant agreement.

And that's recently been a little bit faster for other transit properties around the country, but that's a place where we still have some uncertainty.

Okay, great.

Well, thanks a ton for the in-depth stuff.

We're excited to see this happen.

I appreciate the presentation from me.

I just want to go back to slide number four, if I can.

Sorry, slide number five.

Am I reading this correctly?

Is it the total new sidewalks that were built, 21.5, or is it 10 new sidewalks and 11 and a half new blocks of sidewalk?

I'm trying to make sure.

So clarifying the top bullet and then the other sidewalk mentioned lower down.

Correct.

Is that separate or is that together?

They're separate.

OK.

So in 2018, I don't remember the exact number.

I think we finished about 34 of 54 targeted blocks.

So that's about 20 that were under construction at the new year.

So we finished about half of them, 11, and continue to make progress on the other half.

And then on top of that, there's a dish.

So all of those 20 encompassed is work we originally intended to get done in 2018. So on top of that, there's a whole other portfolio for 2019.

I was just trying to clarify.

Yeah.

And then on slide number seven, this is more of a philosophical question because Council Member O'Brien and I have a bit of conversations about this offline.

Just in terms of just making it safer for people to bike, is 1% enough in slide number seven?

trying to find where the 2.2 bicycle safety.

Gosh, I'm trying to think.

Well, so what you see there largely is a chunk of the spend on 65th.

It's hard to look at it isolated in a single quarter to say, but going back to what we addressed in the work plan, I would say the bike master plan program is the one that is hurting the most in terms of the difference between the deliverables we originally committed to and the amount of money we have and how far we can take that.

So an individual quarter is hard to show specific reflection, but if you look at the whole program and you look at the work plan, I guess the answer would be no.

Well, I was just gonna ask, because when projects are underspent, or for example, I know last year there was a 43.1 million carry forward, just how are those new projects reprioritized or has that money reallocated with regards to where we say, maybe we're not spending enough on sidewalks, or maybe we're not spending enough on bicycle lanes, or I'm just curious.

So we, well, we haven't done that yet, but there's different guidelines about what can be just handled by SDOT, what is handled with the Oversight Committee, and what actually has to go to council.

And so those are exactly the conversations that we will start to have internally, then with the levy, and then with council if need be.

particularly there's three different buckets of funding in the levy, and when we move things between the buckets, I believe that requires council approval.

Did that answer your question?

Go ahead.

And maybe to answer your question a little bit, some of the carry forward funding is around when projects aren't spending within the same year.

It's not necessarily due to underspending.

It might be a commitment where the budget has been allocated, but it hasn't been expended yet.

And so it has to get carried forward to then get expended in the next year.

Q1 is a very slow time for delivery in general of projects because of weather and temperatures and stuff like that.

So that spending breakout is just for the Q1 expenditures.

And so we'll see some of that, like the composition of the future quarters will change over time.

And the percentages in that breakout are just percentages of the 13%.

So the bike spending actually in the first quarter was about 7.5% of the overall spending.

But the big picture, I appreciate your point because it is a mode that we need to be emphasizing.

And Councilmember Pacheco, I would say looking at the overall work plan, the one we published last November, is the best way to look at the holistic, every program individually and where we're at and the health of it.

If we could pivot for just a second.

In public comment today, we heard a number of comments about prioritizing bus routes.

And there's a map that I'm just seeing today, but we'll make sure you get copies of that, that the Mass Coalition put together, of different areas where we can prioritize.

And I want to both reiterate that at least I am very in favor of figuring out how we allocate that bus space.

I think people made some I'm sure you've heard multiple times before, when we have 60, 80, upwards of 100 people on a bus, we need to honor that commitment with making sure that moves swiftly.

I've also heard, anecdotally, through constituents that since the buses have come out of the tunnel, certain routes are experiencing somewhat significant delays.

And I appreciate, Sam, your team at SDOT has said that they're going to give me some data, I think, next week on what those numbers are.

My request would be, one, if you have any comments or ideas on how we can move forward on this, and specifically when it comes to Some delays that we may be seeing a bus coming out of the tunnel.

I would love to move swiftly If there are opportunities to to add additional bus only lanes in especially in the downtown corridor But anywhere, you know if we can dock, you know, two or three minutes off folks commutes Would love to move swiftly as possible on that Yeah, I just say

So I had a chance to go on a tour of a number of locations around the city with the Mass Coalition a couple of Saturdays ago.

And that was great to discuss the issues, hear the concerns.

And I wasn't here for public comment.

I was downstairs at the service awards giving awards.

You got a shout out, let's just say.

I heard that I got a shout out.

I do also want to say that I do go back, even if I'm not here in the audience for public comment, I do tend to watch it.

on TV.

So I think we share the urgency in continuing to make bus investments and bus improvements.

Related to buses coming out of the tunnel, it seems like it's a complicated set of factors that there's not just one answer to some of those things.

And we'll continue to work with Metro on it.

For some routes, it's turning movements where there's a lot of pedestrians that are also crossing at those turning movements.

We don't want to starve time away from pedestrians at some of those busy downtown locations either.

And then for some, it seems like there's some places where coming off of the freeway or different, there's different factors for each of the routes that are experiencing some more delay.

So that's an ongoing discussion between SDOT and Metro and Sound Transit on exactly where and how to address some of those issues.

And I think some of it's also, it's just loading demand and then we've had even issues where like building garage entries into where buses are now coming and how to balance, you know, how to keep buses moving through those places where there's congestion related to garage exits.

And those are all issues we've tried to address as they come and then look at them more systematically as well.

I noticed on my commute, I don't know, yesterday or the day before home, on 6th Avenue where we've, added northbound bus capacity, 5th and 6th combined.

But on 6th Avenue, between Nordstrom's and Pacific Place, there was a police officer that was essentially doing a queue jump for buses.

There's a mid-block pedestrian intersection there, and I think there's a bus-only lane.

It was holding up the general traffic, waving the buses through.

And so that's obviously a Probably not the most cost-effective long-term solution But if that's a way that well we get the lights adjusted to put a cue jump in or whatever Gets through so I'm not sure how that came about but I don't think it just randomly happened.

So appreciate that kind of nimbleness So that's been a combination of us and Metro working to deploy resources to keep things moving.

I'd love to see Opportunities for more of those and how we fix that in long term too.

Councilmember Chico, any other questions?

Thank you so much for your ongoing work on this.

Thanks for the presentations today.

Look forward to it.

I'll try to channel my colleague, Council Member Juarez, about the Northgate Bridge.

Let's get that thing done as best we can.

I know you're working hard on that.

We all share that objective, so.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

All right, Kelly, a couple of agenda items left, a couple of big ones.

Why don't we jump in?

We're probably going to run a little bit over the 4 o'clock timeline today.

I apologize for that.

Are folks able to stick around a little bit longer?

If OSCE has concerns, is that okay?

Okay.

Allie, how are you?

I'm doing well.

How are you?

Oh, sorry, Kelly.

Okay.

Accessory dwelling units, ADU, proposal update, focus on floor area ratio requirement.

Great.

Oh, you already got it.

Would you like to introduce yourself, Allie?

Allie Panucci, Council of Central Staff.

I'll just, quick opening remarks and then I'll hand it over to your presentation.

Been working for a number of years on ways to create more flexibility for backyard cottages and in-law units.

I think my involvement, depending on when you start measuring it, but it's three and a half plus years I'd say we're into it now.

We are still waiting on a decision from a hearing examiner based on an appeal by the Queen Anne Community Council to the final environmental impact statement that was issued in October of last year.

My understanding in the world of hearing examiner decisions is not quite certain on the day, but sometime in the next couple weeks, we're likely to hear that.

And obviously, what that decision looks like will impact how we want to move forward or how we can move forward at the moment.

But in a desire to be ready for a decision that allows us to move forward, I really wanted to start the conversation about two items that are relatively new in the EIS at least, and really shine a spotlight on those to get some, to make sure that folks in the public are paying attention to some of the changes that may come forward based on what came out of the EIS.

And the big one there is the idea that we would have a floor area ratio limit on new construction in single-family zones.

And the other thing that's more of a tweak that we'll talk more about in the future weeks is there's currently an owner occupancy requirement.

The EIS contemplated an ownership requirement, and we can talk about that a little bit today.

We don't have any legislation yet.

We hope to hear from the hearing examiner.

Obviously, we've been working on concepts, and my goal would be that we would introduce some legislation by the end of this month.

We're planning to come back to committee in May 28th.

That's assuming that we get a favorable hearing examiner ruling between now and then.

So, contingent upon that, the hope would be we'd have actual legislation in front of us to consider, to start actually debating at the May 28th meeting.

So, Ali?

didn't mean to steal all of your thunder, but I wanted to give a quick overview.

That will let me move a little quicker through the first few slides.

So today, as Council Member O'Brien suggested, will be the first in a series of discussions focused on the proposed changes to the land use code to make it easier to build accessory dwelling units that I'll likely refer to as ADUs throughout the presentation or flip back and forth, but I'll try to minimize the use of acronyms.

Today's presentation focuses on two aspects of the proposal, a floor area ratio limit, also referred to as FAR, and removing the owner occupancy requirement.

Before I jump into those topics, I'll provide a brief background on some of the ADU policy work and briefly summarize the proposal, but I'll probably move relatively quickly through those slides in the interest of time.

There's more detail in the memo and we'll have more opportunity for discussion on that at the committee meeting at the end of May.

Thank you.

So just as a starting point, I want to make sure we're all using the same terminology.

What are accessory dwelling units?

Often referred to as backyard cottages, carriage houses.

We refer to them technically in the code as detached accessory dwelling units.

And then also attached accessory dwelling units, garden apartments, basement suites, those that are incorporated into the main structure.

So why encourage accessory dwelling units?

It's one of the many strategies that the city has been working on to address the housing crisis and something Council Member O'Brien has been working on for many years, as he stated.

The main objective of the proposed regulatory changes is to look at removing barriers to make it easier for people to build ADUs.

and to increase the number and variety of housing choices in single family zones.

It also has some benefits related to providing more options that may be more affordable than a single family home is, and also provides an opportunity for homeowners or property owners to generate additional income and adapt their households to changing needs.

or excuse me, adapt their house to changing household needs.

One of the driving forces that prompted this work is that although attached and detached ADUs have been allowed citywide since 1994 and 2010 respectively, we've seen only about 2% of properties add an accessory dwelling unit.

So it started suggesting that maybe there are some barriers either in our regulations or in our process that might be preventing people from pursuing an accessory dwelling unit.

This slide outlines the various steps the city has taken to try to move this work forward.

As Council Member O'Brien described, we are currently awaiting a decision from the hearing examiner on the appeal of the adequacy of the final EIS.

Depending on the outcome of that appeal will sort of dictate when the council can take final action, but committee deliberations can move forward absent a decision from the hearing examiner and regardless of what that decision is, it just prevents the council from taking final action.

So this slide just briefly summarizes the suite of proposed changes to the land-use code.

Today we'll focus on the two bolded options, but there are a number of other requirements like allowing 280 use on a lot, removing the off-site parking requirement, and a number of size and locational criteria that we'll dive into in more detail at the end of May.

So I'll start with a focus on the proposal to introduce a floor area ratio requirement.

And this was not included in the proposal that was initially published in 2016. And really this idea came out of the scoping process during the EIS process for the regulatory changes.

We got a lot of comments about concerns about the size and bulk of new development.

on single family lots, as well as looking for strategies to incentivize accessory dwelling units.

So I'll get into a little bit more detail in a few moments on that.

But first, what is a floor area ratio?

It is a term or a strategy used in a lot of zoning and land use codes that regulates the size of the building in relationship to the size of the lot.

So the examples on the slide above show what a one, 0.0 FAR limit would be and what a 0.5 FAR limit would be.

So if you have a 5,000 square foot lot and your FAR limit is one, the maximum size of the structure is 5,000 square feet.

If you have a FAR limit of 0.5, the maximum size of the structures on the lot would be 2,500 square feet.

In Seattle today, FAR limits are used pretty regularly in multifamily and commercial zones to regulate the bulk and scale of buildings.

But in single-family zones, there are no FAR limits.

Instead, the maximum size of structures are effectively controlled by yard requirements, height limits, and lot coverage limits.

Ali, before you move on from that, I appreciate the illustrative nature of this.

In the single family zones, currently there's a lot covered, just one of those other requirements that control space.

Is it 35%?

Correct.

And so, You could not build the example in the top left there Because you couldn't cover a hundred percent a lot You could do more of the one on the three-story building on the right that that is correct And one of the comments we heard was talking about allowing detached accessory dwelling units those also count towards the lot coverage limits and

That is correct, and there isn't a proposal to change the overall lot coverage within this proposal, so it would provide more allowances for, you know, more ADUs on the lot and that sort of thing, but it doesn't allow more structures to cover the lot, so the FAR requirement sort of has the effect of reducing the overall bulk of new homes and which could result in freeing up more space for a backyard cottage.

But if you've already, if you already have a main house that, I mean, nothing would look like any of these, right?

But the image all the way on the right, if you had something like that and you were at your maximum lot coverage, you would not be able to add a detached structure.

You could incorporate and attach into that existing footprint provided you weren't covering any more of the lot.

Great.

I think the comment was about, with the detached or the backyard cottages, there wouldn't be any room for trees, but I just wanted to be clear that 65% of the lot in current regulation and under the proposed regulation would still have to be open, and that's all places that trees could go.

So not to say that people may choose to do different things, but there should be plenty of room with backyard cottages to still have, in single family zone, to have plenty of trees for folks that want to plant trees.

Further, and we'll talk more about this at the end of May, but there are components built into the proposal that provide flexibility to allow to design around a tree, as well as only allowing single-story, slightly larger structures on the rear portion of the lot, only if it can be accommodated without loss of the trees over a certain size.

So the proposed FAR limit would apply to all development in single-family zones.

New single-family homes would be subject to an FAR limit of .5 or 2,500 square feet.

Below-grade floor area, so floor area in a basement, and floor area in any accessory dwelling unit, whether attached or detached, would not count towards the FAR limit.

So it would be exempt.

Existing homes that are already built that would exceed the proposed limit would be allowed to get a one-time exception to allow a small addition.

So it would still allow for some improvements to existing homes.

So I'll walk through a few examples of existing homes in Seattle that are below, at, or above the proposed FAR limit.

So this first example is a smaller home built in the 1950s.

It's approximately 1,900 square feet and has an effective FAR of 0.35 because we don't regulate single family zones with FAR currently.

I described it as effective FAR.

So this house could be built today.

It could be enlarged.

It would be permitted.

This house built in the 1920s is about 2,500 square feet, so it would be just at the limit, so it could be allowed today.

In addition, one of the considerations is whether or not, which floor area to exempt from the calculation.

So in this example, if that garage was used as parking, it could count towards the FAR calculation if it's not fully below grade, but if it was converted to an attached accessory dwelling unit, it would be exempt from that calculation.

This is an example of a more recently constructed house that exceeds the proposed limit.

It's .63, about 2,700 square feet.

So this house as a single unit wouldn't be able to be constructed under the proposed FAR limit.

This is another example of a home that has effectively maxed out the zoning envelope, so maximized the height, yard, and all of those requirements to build as big of a structure on the lot as possible.

So it has an FAR of about 1.05.

And this would not be allowed under the proposed FAR limit.

This next structure is another example of a house that would exceed the proposed FAR limit and couldn't be permitted if the proposal moves forward.

However, if this house included two attached accessory dwelling units, it would be allowed today.

And you can almost see sort of how they could be.

I mean, I don't really know what the inside looks like, but those little porches look like two separate units potentially.

We often think of the, or I often think of in-law units or attached units in the basement, but there's no requirement that they be in the basement, right?

Correct.

There are requirements about where the entry locations are, so it still appears to look like a single-family home and that sort of thing, but there's not a requirement that it is actually in the basement.

This table illustrates parcels by the floor area ratio currently found on lots in single-family zones.

This demonstrates that most homes in single-family zones are below the proposed maximum, so approximately 91% of existing homes would be at or below the proposed maximum.

About 9% of existing homes citywide would exceed the proposed limit.

However, under current regulations, it's not uncommon for older, smaller existing houses to be torn down and redeveloped with larger, more expensive homes or infill development.

We're seeing larger homes that are sort of maximizing, maximize that zoning envelope.

So if you start breaking it down by when the home was constructed, you'll find that more homes that have been built recently would exceed the proposed limit.

About 42% of homes built since 2010 would exceed the proposed the proposed maximum.

So that's actually based on our current real estate market.

I understand that.

And talking to some builders, when they buy what is now expensive single-family land in our city, they want to maximize their return on investment.

And they, to some extent, the product they sell is often priced by the square footage.

So the more square footage they put in that building, the more they can get for it.

And so we end up seeing some of these, you know, really large single family homes.

Yeah, and that was proven out in the analysis we did for the EIS that showed, in a lot of cases, the largest possible single-family home was the most profitable sort of development outcome.

I'm going to skip ahead one slide for a minute just to sort of further that point where, while we've seen the average size of homes going up, we have seen the average household size going down.

So between 1970 and 2010, we saw the average household size decrease by approximately 17%, while the average size of single family homes has increased by about 30%.

I've noted on the slide that recent data from the American Community Survey suggests that we're starting to see an increase in household size.

However, that's about a 3%.

increase from the last census and still results in like about a 15% reduction compared to 1970. So while we may be seeing a marginal increase in household size, it's not to the point that we were seeing household sizes in the 1970s, 1980s.

And so is this data all Seattle specific or is it national?

This is Seattle specific, but my understanding is that trend plays out.

So we're seeing fewer people living in more square footage in the single family zones during a housing crisis.

Where we're struggling to house everyone.

So, there are a number of policy considerations in terms of implementing an FAR limit.

One of the policy reasons to consider an FAR limit is it tends to reduce the size of new houses, thus also reducing the physical changes in neighborhoods by reducing the bulk and scale of new homes, which may be more consistent with historic development patterns.

The proposed FAR limit is intended at least in part to encourage but not mandate smaller principal single family dwellings and more accessory dwelling units.

Another thing that we found in the analysis for the EIS is that the FAR limit is one of the factors that contributes to increased ADU production, but even more.

It is a major contributor to the finding where we would see a reduced number of demolitions of existing single family homes because of the FAR limit.

So compared to the no action option, which would be leaving the regulations in place as they exist today, the proposal is expected overall with all of the suite of changes to the land use code to increase ADU production by about 125% over the 10 year period we looked at.

and decreased teardowns of existing homes by about 22%.

And as I said, the proposed FAR limit is the main component of the proposal that might decrease the expected number of teardowns.

So there are a number of options available to council members as you move forward with the proposal.

There would be the no action, which would be not to impose an FAR limit.

You could adopt the FAR limit as studied in the EIS of 0.5.

You could adopt a higher FAR limit, effectively anything between 0.5 and around 1.05, which is effectively what the FAR limit would be today when you apply all those other standards.

You could also consider expanding or reducing the floor area that would be exempt from that calculation.

So if you want to encourage certain things or limit other things, you could either exempt or include that floor area in the calculation.

And that option could be combined with either option two or three.

There are no questions on floor area ratio.

I'll move on to the owner occupancy requirement.

I was just going to get to my questions at the end.

That's also fine.

Up to you.

Okay.

So the owner occupancy requirement.

Today, under current regulations, a property owner must occupy either the main house or the ADU for at least six months of the year.

The proposed changes would remove that owner occupancy requirement.

And so a property owner that currently owns a single family home as a rental property could offer that for rent.

One thing that is available to ADU property owners, or property owners who have an ADU now, that meet the owner occupancy requirement, they can apply for a waiver through the Department of Construction and Inspection.

And under certain circumstances, they may be granted a waiver for up to three years for that owner occupancy requirement.

So there are a number of reasons why one might consider removing the owner occupancy requirement that needs to be weighed against the other concerns.

One is equity.

Current regulations treat owners and renters differently if it's a single family home with an accessory dwelling unit versus any other type of rental property owners.

If the property does not have an ADU but has a single family home, that property owner can rent that unit out without occupying the The property, if you add an ADU, you cannot.

And this is different than how we treat any other housing type in other zones, as well as in single family zones.

If you have a duplex or you own multiple townhomes or that sort of thing in a low rise or multifamily zone, there's no requirement that the owner lives on site.

And so I guess the policy question here is what problem or impact is the owner occupancy requirement trying to solve?

And is it the right tool to address those concerns?

I think we all heard in public comments some concerns about noise and over occupancy and that sort of thing.

And I'm not sure in response with concerns about removing of the owner occupancy requirement, it's not clear that that tool actually addresses those problems.

There may be other rules or regulations in terms of our noise ordinance or how many people can live in a unit that need to be considered.

to address those concerns as well as how the property is maintained.

That's great.

Really quickly, one of the proposals is also the number of unrelated people that could live.

My understanding would be that if you were going to do a primary residence and two accessory dwelling units, that's what would trigger the increase of up to 12 unrelated individuals living on the property.

That's correct.

So it only increased from 8 to 12 if there were two accessory dwelling units on the lot.

And that's another example of how single-family properties are treated differently than other housing types.

So if you have a four-unit building in a low-rise zone, each of those units can have up to eight unrelated people living in them, assuming they meet all other health safety rules.

maximum household size in single family zones applies to the entire lot, regardless of if there is one house or one house plus an ADU.

And so this would just be increasing that slightly if there are, you know, effectively two, there could be three households living on the lot, but they could in total have 12 unrelated people.

In public comment, I think the comment was, if I remember, if I heard it correctly, was concerned about 12 unrelated people living in a detached dwelling unit, but that would only apply if there were three units on the lot.

In theory, you could have two vacant and one at 12, but it seems highly unlikely that that would be the outcome.

Three units on average, that would be four people per unit, and however they're distributed, it might be slightly different.

Other concerns that have been brought up in regards to the owner occupancy requirement is flexibility and financing.

The owner occupancy requirement sort of limits how homeowners can use their property now and in the future.

That may deter people from making this substantial investment.

And whether real or perceived, people have stated that it's a barrier to accessing financing, and in part because, You can't be guaranteed a future rental income, so there may be concerns from lenders about how to sort of account for that additional unit when considering a loan.

And then removing the owner occupancy is one of the main driving forces that led to an estimated increase in ADU production over the 10-year period that we studied in the EIS.

So, removing the owner occupancy requirement expands the number of eligible lots that could add one or two ADUs under the proposal by about 20%.

So, those are all the currently single family properties that are renter occupied that couldn't add an ADU today because of the owner occupancy requirements.

So we estimated that removing that requirement would increase the number of ADUs produced somewhere between 20 and 25% because it adds those lots to be eligible as well as sort of balancing the other choices that homeowners or property owners make in terms of making decisions about whether or not to make the investment to add an ADU.

So one of the questions or concerns that we hear regularly related to removal of the owner occupancy requirement is that the proposed changes to increase ADU production will accelerate redevelopment generally in single family zones, increasing speculation and displacement.

And so some have argued that the owner occupancy requirement is one of the strategies to sort of hold that off.

In the environmental impact study that we conducted for this proposal, we evaluated the potential increase for speculation and displacement by looking at how the proposed changes might impact the underlying development economics and single-family zones and how these changes will impact ADU production.

We used that analysis to understand what the impacts might be on housing affordability and displacement.

So if the proposal were to increase speculation and displacement, we would expect that the number of teardowns and redevelopment of single family homes would increase and that renting three units on one single family lot would be the most profitable development outcome.

The analysis did not really support that conclusion.

We considered whether the changes would modify land values such that a developer who intends to redevelop the property could afford to pay more for the land and thus outbid other buyers or pressure current homeowners to sell.

But what we found is that land prices are unlikely to change substantially due to the proposed code changes.

And that finding is especially true in areas where we find lower cost housing and also the areas where the city has identified neighborhoods that are at a higher risk of displacement.

So we found that about 4.4% of parcels in higher-priced neighborhoods will add ADUs over the 10-year period, compared to 3.5% in medium-priced neighborhoods and 2.8% in lower-priced neighborhoods.

So this is not to say that displacement and speculation and housing affordability isn't a concern.

It's just not, from the analysis, it doesn't suggest that these changes would accelerate that.

It's also worth noting that while some cities like Portland don't have an owner occupancy requirement, a recent survey that was conducted of ADU owners and residents found that about 64% of properties with ADUs have an owner occupant on site.

So even with removing it, that's still a choice that many people are making.

And that's consistent with some of the feedback I heard.

a couple years ago when we were out doing community meetings on this, where a lot of folks that were owners and occupied and planned to, but just the uncertainty of if they had to transfer for a job or move somewhere to take care of a family member, would they have to leave something vacant?

And that uncertainty was a risk they weren't willing to bear.

Yeah, flexibility was one of the key things that has come out of the recent survey work in the Portland area where people sort of are building an ADU initially for a number of reasons.

Maybe it's rental income to help them pay their mortgage or to provide housing for a family member or a friend or that sort of thing.

But the actual use of the ADU has sort of changed over time.

because their needs have changed or the family member who was intending to move in no longer needed housing.

And so having some of that flexibility was sort of key to making the decision about when to invest in adding that accessory dwelling unit.

So, as I noted, however, you know, or excuse me, as I noted previously, with or without changes to ADU regulations, housing affordability and displacement will continue to be a concern.

Ultimately, the housing demand generated by Seattle's strong job market, the amenities here, and all of the factors contributing to growth will continue to lead to a tight housing inventory that will likely also continue to contribute to high housing costs.

So while we recognize that the land use codes changes alone are not enough to address all of those issues, there's additional policy work that has come out of the racial equity toolkit that Council Member O'Brien's office led, as well as other work that the Office of Planning and Community Development has been taking on to try to address some of those other concerns.

So as a package of changes, it may have some impact.

So in terms of considering the owner occupancy, there are a number of options council members consider, could consider including not adopting or not eliminating the owner occupancy requirement, eliminating it as considered in the preferred alternative.

You could also consider an option that I didn't list here, but that was embedded in the proposal in 2016, which would be to keep the owner occupancy requirement but have it expire after one year or two years, so just for an initial period of time.

You could eliminate the owner occupancy requirement, but require continuous ownership for a minimum of one year prior to allowing a second ADU.

That's what was contemplated in the preferred alternative in the EIS.

And you could also consider adopting an incentive zoning program for the second ADU or for other components of the proposal.

That could include an incentive zoning approach that would only allow a second ADU if one of the units on the lot is rent and income restricted.

I'll note here that There would be a requirement under an incentive zoning scheme that that period of affordability would be a 50-year term.

And on a lot with only a couple of units, there might not be enough rental income that could generate from the property to support that rent and income restricted unit.

So it might significantly restrict the number of people who opt.

to take advantage of the second ADU if there is that rent and income restriction, but I'm continuing to work with staff to try to identify options that might be workable under that approach.

Another approach would be to only allow a second ADU if it meets certain green building requirements that could also be combined with some of the other proposed changes to size or locational criteria for detached accessory dwelling units.

I appreciate, I'll just flag that the fourth option there is something that I would love to see us explore.

I would love the idea of affordability.

I realize it's kind of challenging at this scale to make it work, but I've got my fingers crossed that we can find some creative way.

But I also think a high standard of green building could be another way for us to incent that high level of green building as something I'd be interested in exploring.

Yeah, and there may be other non-regulatory approaches, programmatic changes around the affordability piece if it's not something that works through an incentive zoning scheme.

Great.

So next steps, following the discussion today, Ideally, we'll have a decision from the hearing examiner coming out sometime soon.

At the end of May, there's a briefing and discussion planned on the entire proposal, followed by a public hearing in June, and a potential discussion and vote on amendments and the legislation.

I will note that the public hearing notice for the June 11th hearing will be published on Thursday of this week, and an initial draft of the legislation will be posted for public review, and that will represent the proposal as outlined in the preferred alternative.

It's likely that the legislation that Council Member O'Brien may sponsor may have some differences than that initial draft that is posted, but it will be within the range of options that were considered in the EIS.

And I think I had been saying May 28th earlier in the meeting, and I appreciate you saying the end of May.

May 29th is the special committee meeting, not May 28th.

So thanks for doing that.

I hope that is correct.

No, it's correct.

Okay.

Memorial Day is that Monday and the schedule is all different.

Yes, thank you.

Great.

So I'm happy to answer questions.

Allie, thank you so very much for that presentation.

I have several questions.

I can go back to slide number six for a second.

First one is, what impacts on on-street parking do you expect to see as a result of removing the off-street parking requirement?

Let's see.

So we looked at several options in the EIS for removing the parking requirements for accessory dwelling units.

So first I just want to state for the record that the parking requirement for the existing single family home would not be a limited you wouldn't be required to add additional parking for the accessory dwelling units.

What we found in the EIS is that there would not be significant impacts to on-street parking by removal of the parking requirement.

We did note that in some areas where parking is constrained, there may be some localized impacts that could be addressed through other strategies or a geographic-based parking policy.

But in general, we found that there would not be significant impacts.

And where parking is most constrained, it is often in areas that are denser, closer to denser urban villages and that sort of thing that may have access to better transit.

And then one of the things we looked at in terms of ADU production is that removal of the parking requirement would have an impact a positive impact in increasing ADU production, because it would provide property owners more flexibility in choosing sort of where to put a backyard cottage, for example, without having to lose their garden or a tree in order to provide another parking space.

And then, you know, I know that council expanded requirements for bike parking on some multifamily development last year.

Would requiring bike parking for ADUs be feasible within this legislation?

Yeah, I believe it would be, because it would be sort of a mitigating factor in relationship to the removal of the parking requirement, and so it would be consistent with some of our other policies to promote other modes of transportation.

Okay.

And then if we could go to slide eight.

Under the owner occupancy requirement in the current code, what happens to a homeowner who rents on ADU who's forced to move unexpectedly but does not sell their house?

So if they're forced to move unexpectedly, they can apply for a waiver with the Seattle Department of Construction's inspections to the owner occupancy requirement for up to three years.

If they are unaware or unable to qualify for that, or it is other circumstances, they would either have to leave one of the units vacant, and in some cases, they may actually have to remove some physical elements to make the accessory dwelling unit no longer considered a unit, so things like removing the kitchen or removing the separate entrance.

Okay.

I think you answered my other questions.

This is kind of more of a district-specific question.

Based on the comments you made earlier, It sounds like in District 4, at least, that it would increase the production of ADUs.

Correct.

And his last and final question, are there any other instances where we regulate the number of individuals, unrelated individuals, that live together in a house or in a space?

The household size limits do apply to dwelling units in other zones, but It doesn't apply to the property applies to each unit where in single-family zones is different because it applies to the whole whole property So it's regulated a little bit a little bit differently So you if you had two units in a low-rise zone You could have eight in each unit in the single-family zone.

You could have eight in both units Thanks Thank you for those questions councilmember

Ali, I really appreciate your ongoing work on this.

It's been a pleasure working with you for years on this.

I look forward to ending that relationship relatively soon, one way or the other.

So we can work on other great things together, of course.

So for the public, we'll be back here in a few weeks, contingent upon what we hear from the hearing examiners, so look forward to that.

And hopefully look forward to further conversation around these policies with some specific legislation in front of us in the coming weeks.

Thank you.

Great, we will jump to our last, but not least, important item on the agenda.

Kelly, do you want to read it?

Yes.

The Office of Sustainability and Environment 2018 Race and Social Justice Report.

As you get settled, I want to thank you all for being patient today.

Sorry that we went a little long, but I'm really excited to see your report.

Let's get settled.

Why don't we go ahead and start introductions, and Jessica, you can go first.

Hi, I am Jessica Finkhoven, the Director of the Office of Sustainability and Environment.

Hi, I'm Robin Kumar, and I manage the FreshBucks program in OSC.

Hi, I'm Narita Gooman.

I lead Communications and Outreach for FreshBucks.

I'm Sandra Pinto-DeBater, the Urban Forestry Policy Advisor in OSC.

Thank you.

Welcome, everyone.

So we are very excited to share with you some of the work OSE did last year to advance racial equity and we are also aware that we are running late so we are going to do both those things together and hold both of those truths as we move forward.

We do want to share just a little bit about some of the learnings we've done at OSC, some of the ways we've used our resources to advance community capacity building, and then some of our specific programmatic work.

And I will try to move quickly through the general overview so that we can hear from my colleagues digging in to the racial equity toolkits that we did in our office last year.

A quick reminder that OSC is guided by the equity and environment agenda.

That is the roadmap to advance environmental justice that we developed with community partners in 2016. I think we released it.

That agenda has four main goals that you can see here.

We try to align all of our work at OSC to ensure that everything we do is advancing the goals of the equity and environment agenda.

So OSC is committed to being an office with a strong learning culture where we challenge each other to become better advocates for racial equity.

Some of the work we did last year included all staff trainings as well as specific trainings just for the managers in our office.

We have several more trainings and exercises planned for this year.

But the one thing that I will call special attention to was a new partnership last year with the Office of Arts and Culture, Office of Civil Rights, SPU, and OSCE called Turning Commitment into Action, where we brought together city staff, partner organizations, city advisory boards, and we formed a cohort to really build accountability, build trust, and build plans of how they will work together to advance racial equity and how they can learn together.

Nurita, were you part of that?

I wasn't here.

Okay, so I know that Sandra and Robin were part of that cohort, so could talk about it a little bit more if you have questions.

But now, this year, they're taking that learning and bringing it to OSE and doing quarterly staff exercises and trainings with us so that we can all benefit from what they learned in that cohort.

In OSC, of course, we're committed to ensuring that our staff reflects the communities we serve.

In 2014, OSC staff was 12% people of color.

That grew to 31% in 2018. Obviously, that's a positive trend, but it still suggests that we have a lot more work to do to ensure that our office is a place where leaders of color want to work and where they feel like they can thrive.

So we feel like the internal work we're doing Making sure that we are an office that is driving racial equity and supporting each other and challenging each other in that work is really going to help us be the office we want to be.

We spend a lot of focus on how we can grow community capacity and leadership within our community.

One of the major ways we do that is with our Environmental Justice Committee.

That committee last year reviewed several programs and policies and offered input into many of them, everything from Drive Clean Seattle to Outside Citywide.

One of the things that the committee did was establish principles for open space.

And we took those principles with committee members and with a class at the University of Washington and worked with the Ethiopian community in Seattle to do a pilot project of what would it look like to advance environmental justice using those principles.

You can see the pictures here of what that looks like.

So we worked with the Ethiopian community in Seattle to have what essentially was a parking lot area before and to turn it into a multi-generational gathering space that folks who use that building can really utilize.

We get a lot of questions sometimes of what does it look like?

What does environmental equity look like?

So we were excited to be able to show them.

We also administer two grant funds that are both designed to advance the equity and environment agenda.

Last year was the first year of the Environmental Justice Fund, and we were able to grant almost $350,000 to nine projects that you can see listed here.

We also administer the King Conservation District grant, So, two years ago, we realigned that grant program to ensure that every grant awarded was advancing the goals of the equity and environment agenda as well.

So, that provided an additional $400,000 to advance racial equity and natural resource protections.

sizable chunk of money between those two.

That's great.

Yes, the projects are really exciting.

The Environmental Justice Fund, you know, we're just first year, so we don't have any completed projects yet.

But the KCD grants, we've been able to go out and see some of the de-paved projects and see some of the things they've been doing.

And it's really exciting.

Last year we also, we had a communication series called Environmental Justice in Action where we worked with a bunch of our community partners and some of the former grant recipients to use our communications channels to really tell their stories and get out there the good work that they're doing.

With our women and minority-owned business goals, last year we achieved our goal for purchases.

Our goal was 60%.

78% of our purchases were all actually with Wimby's.

But we did not achieve our consulting goal.

The main reasons we didn't achieve those goals, first, 45% of our office's overall consulting dollars were from SBT contracts for fresh box operations.

So most of those were from farmers markets and Safeway stores.

The second reason, and that's why we kind of carve out this 12% pizza right now, right here, is that OSC really puts a lot of emphasis on working with community-based partners and community-based organizations as our expert consultants for how we engage community members.

Those organizations are POC-led, but they are not eligible to be registered as WIMBYs.

So we call them out separately here to note that, We think it's incredibly important that our office continues working with those organizations, but their characterization is not a WIMBY.

Just because they're a nonprofit as opposed to?

I believe that's why.

I actually am not quite sure of the WIMBY rules for that.

I don't know if it's the choice of the CBOs that they choose not to register as that, or if there's a characterization different than that.

I'm going to cruise through these two quickly because we are very proud of our Duwamish Valley work and our Duwamish Valley program, but we get to talk to you about it a lot.

So I think I won't spend too much time other than to say we released our Duwamish Valley action plan.

We're really thrilled at the short-term work and near-term accomplishments that we've already completed to reflect that we are committed to delivering on the priorities of the community.

And we continue that work and we'd be thrilled to brief you more on that later.

This was some more of the specifics of our Duwamish Valley work, but we can cruise through that.

And then move to our racial equity toolkits.

So we conducted four toolkits.

One of them was for the electric vehicle readiness ordinance that we talked about last time we were here at committee.

Thank you for passing that.

And then our urban forestry work and two on our fresh books work.

So I think with that, I'm gonna move it to my colleagues here to hear more about those toolkits.

Great.

And Jessica, I appreciate your speed with which you moved through it.

I just want to reiterate, take your time.

I really want to learn about these programs, so no need to rush.

But I look forward to hearing it.

So I'm going to be talking about FreshBooks.

So as Jessica mentioned, we did two racial equity tool kits for the FreshBooks program in 2018. And just to provide a little bit of context about what the FreshBooks program is, it's a program that provides lower income.

Sorry, I have a little bit of a cold.

It's a program that provides lower-income communities with benefits to purchase more fruits and vegetables.

We provide FreshBucks benefits through two main mechanisms, FreshBucks Match and FreshBucks Vouchers.

And FreshBucks Match provides a dollar-for-dollar matching benefit for customers who use SNAP benefits.

That's a program that had previously been called Food Stamps.

And FreshBucks vouchers are fruit and vegetable vouchers provided for food insecure patients through our FreshBucks RX fruit and vegetable prescription program, and also to communities in the food security gap.

FreshBucks benefits can be used to purchase fruits and vegetables at all 64 FreshBucks retailers, including farmers markets, neighborhood grocery stores that sell culturally specific produce items, as well as all Seattle Safeway stores.

In 2018, we significantly expanded FreshBooks programming as called for in the Sweetened Beverage Tax, and for the first time, we were able to provide benefits for people in the food security gap.

We also added Safeway as a FreshBooks retailer to expand access and choice for FreshBooks customers, and we developed a streamlined system for customers in the food security gap to enroll in the FreshBooks program.

Next slide.

Our RET team was comprised of OSC staff who know the ins and outs of the program, myself, Marita, and Tiffany, other city staff with expertise working within the immigrant refugee community and food access programming, and also community representatives.

The RET team was instrumental in identifying communities where we should focus our programming, assess gaps in knowledge, and develop a community engagement plan.

We engaged focused communities and program stakeholders through focus groups, listening sessions, interviews, and surveys to assess how we could best achieve our targeted racial equity outcomes.

Next one.

Our main or North Star racial equity outcome is to eliminate racial disparities in access to healthy foods for low-income people within our focus communities.

Our RET process focused specifically on two aspects of the Fresh Bucks program.

How best to enroll focus communities into the Fresh Bucks program and how best to structure communication strategies to engage focus communities for program access and participation.

A few themes emerged after speaking with community groups and program stakeholders through our RET engagement process.

Community members want the opportunity to partner with and offer feedback for FreshBooks.

Freshbuck's enrollment and communication strategies need to be multi-pronged and community-based.

One size does not fit all.

And racial equity needs to be integrated into Freshbuck's success measures.

We've done several things to put these results into practice.

The first is that we've expanded our contracted partnerships with community-based organizations.

These partnerships create a system for continuous engagement and feedback so our work can be informed by the community.

The second thing is that our enrollment strategy for FreshBooks was designed based on these racial equity toolkit findings.

We contracted with seven community-based organizations to enroll folks in RSJI priority communities into the program, and this bar chart shows that this strategy worked as intended.

This is from 2019. But this just shows sort of the application of the programming into this year.

Our community-based partners are enrolling a much greater share of focused communities than our open enrollment.

As you can see, public being the open enrollment, and all the others are community-based organizations that we're working with.

And then the final thing that we did as a result of these findings was that we integrated racial equity success metrics into our FreshBooks key performance indicators.

Collecting demographic data and incorporating it into our key program success measures allows us to know whether the strategies that we're using are indeed reaching our focus communities.

Have we historically collected demographic data?

It's like a new baseline because...

This would be a new baseline to represent all of our programming.

We have historically collected demographic data on a sort of a subset of customers, but it wasn't across the board.

So this would be a new baseline.

The targeting clearly works.

Yes.

It's really impressive.

When you look at the relative number of new customers that are enrolling or that are enrolled, whether they're new or not, I guess, What are the percentages across that?

Obviously the data is not quite there, but is it spread out pretty evenly or?

So this represents the portion of our programming for Fresh Bucks vouchers within food security gap communities.

So we're not, our open, our enrollment period is actually, we'll conclude at the end of May.

So then we'll have sort of what the denominator is for that equation.

But I would say that, you know, in terms of all of the, people that were able to enroll through our Fresh Bucks voucher program in our food security gap strategy.

It just shows that the majority of folks that are participating are people of color, and that the majority of folks that are being enrolled through our community-based organization partners are within the priority-focused communities.

The partnerships are working.

That's right.

Yeah, that's great.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you, Robin.

So, Seattle recognizes that a thriving urban forest is important not only for public health and environmental sustainability, but also the livability of our city as we continue to grow.

The Urban Forest Management Plan is the policy framework that helps us make decisions around supporting our urban trees, and we began work on updating that plan last year.

As we started the planning process to do the update, we identified several key expectations the team had for this work.

One would be that it would be data-driven.

We wanted to incorporate the findings of the 2017 canopy cover assessment as well as ongoing data being produced by SDOT's street tree inventory work.

We wanted to undertake a robust inclusive engagement process, emphasize the impacts of climate change, and also set measurable actions that would increase accountability.

In terms of our emphasis on equity, we have been working to build upon a previous racial equity work.

We dedicated most of our resources to engaging on the represented communities and what we are trying to do is get their input and their voice heard before we start drafting any content in our plan and do so in a very transparent way.

So we created an interdepartmental team to work on the racial equity toolkit with representatives from SPU, City Light, SDCI, OPCD, and OSC.

And actually, SPU's environmental justice and service equity team, they kind of facilitated the conversation and supported the process along the way.

So as we were working on this toolkit, the team asked, we asked of ourselves several questions, including what is it, are we bringing an implicit bias to this process and how is it affecting the way we are updating the plan?

We looked at racial disparities that, and inequities that may have occurred as a result of past urban forestry work.

We also did a stakeholder analysis and pondered whether there was certain groups that might have more influence in the way we provide our urban forestry services.

And also we asked ourselves how are we going to ensure that underrepresented communities have a more equitable a participation and influence in the process.

We developed a partnership with SPU's Community Connections and Seattle Department of Neighborhoods Community Liaisons.

And they contracted with community-based organizations to help us conduct inclusive engagement.

Next slide, thank you.

As we created the toolkit, we looked closely at the equity and environment initiative and produced four outcomes for this toolkit.

We wanted to make sure that urban forestry policies and programs leverage community assets, address cumulative impacts and burdens related to urban forestry, prepare communities to adapt to climate change, and also support connections between residents, people that work in the city, government agencies, businesses, industry.

Also, we wanted communities of color to inform our urban forestry policies, programs, and services.

We want the plan to explore partnerships and policies and programs to increase participation of communities of color in urban forestry careers.

And also the city's urban forestry team partners with communities to leverage their creativity in finding urban forestry solutions.

The next one.

So as part of our efforts, we engage more than 150 people of color, including members of more than 15 tribes.

We gave the freedom to these community-based organizations to produce their own outreach and engagement plans because they know how to best engage community.

And I want to share with a couple of examples.

Horn of Africa services decided to actually do door-to-door, have door-to-door conversations.

And some of the findings is that people of the East African community really believe that trees are important and they love them, but they are concerned about getting in trouble around trees.

An example they gave us is, in some of their countries, somebody might crash their car, on a tree, and well, they just take their car, limp along, and take care of it as a private matter.

But when one of their community members crashed into a tree, later he received a bill from the Seattle Department of Transportation, and they were really surprised about it.

So we need to work on building trust and sharing more information so that they feel empowered.

The Chinese Information Service Center had community meetings, and people believe that trees are very good for the environment, but they have concerns around safety and allergies.

We found from the African American and Latinx liaisons community meeting that people want more trees to help clean the air in their communities, and they also are wanting more interaction with city government to build trust.

And then lastly, Native American, they decided to have a talking circle, which was a very powerful way to share information with the community and to allow them the opportunity to talk about trees and how Western receders are sacred to them, the kind of the spiritual connection they have to trees and the concerns they have around climate change impacts.

And with that, I'm going to hand it back to Jessica.

Well, I will close this out thanking this team and just saying that I'm really proud of the work that they've all done.

You know, I think the one thing I'll say kind of looking forward to 2019, something that OSC is really excited to dig into is really this idea around contracting and granting to community-based organizations.

We've heard several times from the partners we work with that they find it prohibitively complex and time-consuming.

And so we really would like to dig in to try some new models to say, are there ways that the city could be a better partner to community-based organizations by figuring out a way to make that smoother?

So that's one specific thing that we really want to dig into in the coming year.

That's great.

You know, I tend to believe that all those requirements we put on contracting probably generally came from a reaction to something we wanted to fix.

But the cumulative impact, and when folks look at this in a cumulative impact and see what that means is, oh, certain organizations have the capacity to abide by this, and certain folks just get excluded because it's now not even worth it.

And I, or at least we the council, may be responsible for putting some of those requirements on.

So if there's, if in your analysis of that there are changes that we need to make from the legislative branch to support that flexibility, whether it's piloting or just upright saying we think that there will be a better outcome by changing it, I will invite that feedback and would love to work with you.

I would love to do that in the next handful of months while I'm here, but hopefully the council will do that on an ongoing basis too.

Thanks.

The Racial Equity Toolkit requires a lot of engagement with community, and I appreciate the...

specific feedback we've heard.

You mentioned concerns about getting in trouble, and you mentioned the example of someone running into a tree, and the trees are just gonna become an expensive thing to do.

Was there a sense of also, you know, we hear about concern, especially with heightened immigration awareness, that just anyone from the government could be a threat.

Do people in our community see the city of Seattle as, are they nervous about us too, or did they get the distinction?

I think in our case what happened is that they really are not aware of the efforts that we are putting forward in terms of urban forestry specifically, and they were really excited to, they felt empowered by being included.

they wanted to build trust by just being in touch ongoingly, not just when we're updating a plan.

They were saying, you know, we really want to learn about it.

We want to understand what it is our role and what are our responsibilities.

I think in this case, it was more around just kind of like a nebulous worry that maybe I'm doing something wrong because I don't really know.

And I think that's just, we need to work with community to just be, to have them be real true partners and be ongoingly in touch so that they can provide their input again all the time, not just when we're having a specific project and we need their input.

So I think that was kind of like a common thread along a lot of the communities that we engaged.

And of course, we're going to reflect that in our actions.

We want to find ways to assuage their concerns and to just make sure that they feel empowered with knowledge, understanding of how we work, and that they know who to reach out to.

Sorry, go ahead.

Oh, no, I was just going to kind of add on to that and say that, you know, in our engagement process, what we heard loud and clear is a sort of consistent theme that came through was that there's this, even if people get information, you know, a flyer in the mail or they pick something up or they see a poster about the FreshBucks program, for example, they're still going to take that information to a trusted community resource and to community leaders and say, have you heard about this thing?

You know, what is this thing?

Do you think it's a good thing?

And so one of the reasons why we thought it would be a really good idea to really just contract and partner directly with those community-based organizations and those community-based leaders is because, you know, we don't necessarily feel like we want to, like there's so much work and expertise and knowledge and power in that community leadership.

that we can't really take the role of that.

And so being able to support that and work in partnership with those community leaders and those organizations so that they can feel empowered to sort of deliver that message and that that message is sort of coordinated across all of these organizations, you know, the same message that we would be giving, I think that has been something that's been really powerful.

And I think it's already showing in some of the initial results that we're seeing.

Yeah, the opportunity to partner with community-based organizations seems like, I mean, just the more capacity and the ability for us to support those organizations having capacity so we can have more partnerships.

Sometimes, and I can't think of any programs in OSE, but in other departments, man, we'll beat our heads against the wall trying to get people to take these programs that were, you know, were heavily subsidized and it should be easy to do and we can't.

When we start partnering with organizations, all of a sudden, boom, the programs take off when we find that right mix.

So that's.

Yeah.

And there's also a real importance in sort of building that relationship over time with the organizations.

So contracting with the same organizations year over year, again, to sort of have that trust with those organizations in the city.

Yeah.

And then making it beneficial to those organizations.

That's right.

So that it's a real partnership, not just us making them do work for us.

So I just appreciate.

I'm sorry.

I just appreciate the work you're all doing.

Just really quickly, do the boards and commissions such as the Urban Forestry Commission, do they also take the RSGI training?

Yes, the Urban Forestry Commission has taken over the past several years trainings and we've done tours to exhibits and also one of the commissioners was part of the Taking Commitment into Action cohort.

The idea is to have all of our partners kind of speak in the same language.

We also last year created a new position in the Urban Forestry Commission specifically to address equity.

So we're bringing, that is a highly technical commission and we are bringing other positions to actually provide important related knowledge and understanding like environmental equity, public health, and also a community representative.

Well, thank you.

And then if you ever need any volunteers in terms of doing outreach to communities, specifically communities of color, feel free to ping me.

I'm always happy to do what I can to be supportive in helping enroll and increasing the number of services that are available to communities in need.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Again, my apologies for keeping you so late in the day.

I apologize if I screwed up any of your end of day plans, but I'm really grateful for your ongoing work.

And appreciate, yeah.

Thank you.

Keep it up.

Great.

Thank you.

Anything else for the committee?

With that, we will be adjourned.

Thank you all.