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Morning.

The Human Services Labor Economic Development meeting of the Seattle City Council will come to order.

It is 9.32 a.m.

Friday, February 6th, 2026. I'm Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rink, chair of the committee.

Will the committee clerk please call the roll?

Chair Rink.

Present.

Vice Chair Foster.

Here.

Councilmember Juarez.

Here.

Councilmember Hollingsworth.

Here.

Council Member Saka.

Here.

Chair, there are five members present, zero absent.

Thank you.

We will now move on to approval of today's agenda.

I move to adopt today's agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

It's been moved and seconded.

I think we can just move forward.

Fabulous.

Well, welcome everyone to our first Human Services Labor and Economic Development Committee meeting of the year.

This is a new committee composition.

I really look forward to diving into issues impacting social and human services providers, our small business community, and all the people who work in the region of Seattle.

and on today's agenda we are so happy to welcome the Office of Labor Standards to give a briefing on the body of work happening within the department as it has been a number of years since we've had an opportunity to check in and speak with counsel.

This will be followed by a briefing and discussion from the Human Services Department around senior and disability services and end with a briefing and discussion on the Westlake vision and planning resolution and we will vote on this resolution during the February 20th meeting later this month.

and at this juncture, we will now open the hybrid public comment period.

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

Clerk, how many speakers are signed up for today?

Currently, we have one in-person speaker and zero remote speakers.

Thank you.

Our in-person speaker will be given two minutes.

Clerk, can you please read the public comment instructions?

The public comment period will be moderated in the following manner.

The public comment period is up to 60 minutes.

Each speaker will have two minutes.

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

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left on their time.

Speakers' mics will be muted if they do not end their comments within the allotted time to allow us to move on to the next speaker.

The public comment period is now open and we will begin with the first speaker on the list, which is Will Oberst.

Welcome Will.

My name's Will Oberst, the resident of Deep Free, and I'm here today to comment on availability of resources.

We've just had another round of layoffs in tech, about 1,000 Amazon jobs lost here in Seattle, and as a little bit of history, we, at our peak, had about 60,000 in-person jobs here in the city and Amazon, and some estimates now put that at about was 35,000 to 40,000 jobs.

But if you remember back a few years ago when we had more than 30 cranes operating around the city building infrastructure to support those jobs, we now have more than 40 buildings that were designed to hold about 60,000 people are now holding about 30,000 to 35,000 people for office work and for tech workers.

And in our last in-person count for our homeless unhoused populations, we had about 15,000 to 17,000.

Those numbers sort of offset each other, hypothetically, in where we can distribute resources.

I don't know that this is the answer where we can house unhoused people in office space.

I know there's a lot of legalities and barriers to entry for those kinds of things, but I do know also that many other cities have approached this process in the same way.

They've looked at office space as a potential for not just unhoused people but also for for long-term living and rentals and for housing people in a lot of different situations in senior living facilities.

I know Manhattan in the 80s built 12,000 places where people could live out of office spaces.

Places like Portland, Detroit, and Connecticut have also approached this and so I would personally would love to learn more about what we can do to use the resources that we have to the resources that we need.

Thank you.

Thank you Will and thank you for coming to committee this morning.

There are no additional registered speakers and so now we'll proceed with our items of business for today.

So moving on to our first item of business, will the clerk please read item one into the record?

Item one, Office of Labor Standards, Department Overview, a briefing and discussion.

And at this point, I'll invite our colleagues from the Office of Labor Standards up to the table.

Wonderful.

And as you all get settled in, if you can please introduce yourself by stating your full name and organization into the microphone for the record.

Thank you.

All right.

Are we on?

Okay, great.

Good morning, Council Member.

I am Steve Marchese, and I am the Director of the Office of Labor Standards, and I'll pass it to my colleagues.

Good morning.

I'm Janae Jan.

I'm the Deputy Director of the Office of Labor Standards.

She, her pronouns.

Karen Muevedis, policy manager and counsel liaison for the Office of Labor Standards.

Lane Mida, the incoming interim policy manager for the Office of Labor Standards.

All right.

Good morning, I'm very happy to be here with you today, members of the council, Council President Hollingsworth, Chair Rink, Vice Chair Foster, members Saka and Juarez.

Thank you for the opportunity to present to you some of the work that we're doing here at the Office of Labor Standards.

As Councilmember Rank mentioned, it's been a little while since we've had a chance to update the full council and we're looking for the opportunity to spend some time with you and give you an update on what we've been doing and some of the fundamentals of what we're about.

And so I'm here with my colleagues really to give you that overview and to start a conversation that we're looking forward to launching.

over the next few years.

I'm starting our slides about the Office of Labor Standards because I think it's important to remember the grounding of who we are and where we came from.

You know, we started as a department back in 2017, but our roots go back to the organizing work that workers did much earlier first for wage theft and paid sick and save time and minimum wage work We became a program of the Office for Civil Rights in 2015, and so we're a relatively young office, and when we became a department that elevated the work that we're doing, but the mission of our work is really set forth in much of what we do in the ordinances that enabled our work.

So, you know, as you can see from the slide, our mission is to advance labor standards through thoughtful community and business engagement, strategic enforcement and innovative policy development with a commitment to race and social justice.

And so we are charged with living out this mission every day.

We take that seriously in how we organize our work and who we talk to and the ways that we try to approach our policy and enforcement work and the ways we interact with community.

Wage theft, for example, is one of the largest property crimes in the country.

Workers are often dealing with the fact that they're not getting paid all the money that they're owed.

Local enforcement has been incredibly important and is even more so now with the decline in federal enforcement and changes at the federal level.

for residents and workers in the city of Seattle, we are that much more important.

And it's important to also remember that strong labor standards enforcement really redounds to the benefit of the entire city.

Over the lifespan of our department, since we became a department in 2017, we've been able to recoup over $62 million for workers.

That's money in the pockets of workers directly.

That's a huge return on investment for the amount of money that the city puts in to support this work and every dollar that we're putting in and that it's going to workers means that they're able to do the things they need to do to build their lives.

They're paying rent, they're buying clothes and food, they're paying for childcare, they're taking transit.

So it's all of those things that I think generate the kind of economy that we want to have in this city and a place that's welcoming for workers.

We're going to take some time and divide this up among us and so I'm going to turn this over to my colleague Deputy Director Jan.

Good morning again.

As Steve just mentioned, our work is rooted in social and racial justice.

In that vein, the team wanted to take just a few seconds to emphasize the importance of the department and the city's commitment to racial and social justice and to being a welcoming city.

So our vision is that Seattle is the best place to work in the country.

The vision entails that all of us have fair workplaces, that our businesses and bosses thrive by creating that workplace, and that our identities and our immigration status are not a factor that determines whether we are treated with dignity at our work.

We know that we can only realize that vision if our work builds and maintains the trust of workers and businesses, so in that vein, we want to make sure that community members who are tuning in now know a few things.

One, you are welcome in our office and in our city.

We serve all workers and all businesses.

We will not ask about your immigration status, and that status is not relevant to whether or not you receive service in our office.

We will speak your preferred language or provide interpretation and translation for you.

We will do our work in trauma-informed ways.

We will use the name and pronouns that you share with us.

We will provide accommodations to ensure you have equal access to our work.

And we will closely collaborate with city and external partners to adapt and learn and grow so that we can continue to serve you in the most effective way possible.

We know that many of us and our neighbors, especially immigrant and transgender workers and business owners, have been made to feel like they do not belong in our country.

And so hear us now from our team to you.

You belong, and we are proud to serve you.

With that, I'll hand it over to Karen to talk a little bit more about our work.

Good morning.

I'm going to provide a quick overview of the 16 laws that our office enforces.

That's a big number, so how can we sort of think about that and get our heads around it?

We like to sort of divide them into three buckets.

These are sort of conceptual buckets, not statutory buckets.

The first one being laws of general applicability.

And I should say, these sort of roughly correspond to the chronology of when these laws were implemented and passed by City Council.

So the first bucket being general applicability.

These are laws that apply broadly across the workforce to most employees in the city of Seattle.

These are also the laws that we're generally most familiar with and the public is probably most familiar with.

So the minimum wage ordinance, wage theft are laws protecting paid sick and save time, as well as laws on fair chance employment, which regulates background check and criminal background check activities by employers and commuter benefits and our independent contractor protections ordinance.

The second bucket is industry-specific laws, which, as the name suggests, applies to specific industries and addresses specific challenges that workers face that are particular to how those industries operate.

So a very clear example, our domestic worker ordinance, which applies to work in the home and the particular unique nature of that work.

are secure scheduling ordinance, which requires advance notice of schedules for restaurant and food service industries.

And it has that focus because of academic research and worker outreach, which identified particularly challenging scheduling practices in those industries.

and then other examples are hotel and cannabis employee protections.

And then the last bucket, which is where a fair amount of activity has been happening over the past years and there's a fair amount of media and public policy attention, is what we'd call new forms of work.

The clear examples of those are our app-based worker laws, the three that we are enforcing.

In the past, we've also regulated Uber and Lyft labor standards, we were the first place to do that in the state.

Those laws have been now adopted by statewide and no longer regulated by the city.

We're going to just take a few moments and just update you on the operations and budget for our office.

We are a department of currently 35 FTE.

We are divided up, as you see on the chart, We have the major teams, the policy outreach and enforcement are the kind of pillars with communications.

We also have finance and operations and then our deputy director oversees performance and innovation strategist.

We have been gradually over the time that I've been in this office and I've been here for five years, trying to mature the organization to really become much more focused on differentiation of role, building out supervisory and logistical support policies that we have for our department, clarity in terms of how we work both internally and externally.

It's been, I think, a phenomenal experience and work in progress to be able to get focused on how we can do the most with the least possible that we have as resources, recognizing that resources are always scarce.

Our budget is, as you see on the slide, made up of two things.

traditionally has been a generally funded office.

Up until this year, the sole support that we've received for this work has been from the general fund.

This year, about $8.45 million.

That actually is less than what we've had in years past.

Over the last two budget cycles, we have received some cuts and some shifts in funding, and as a result, we now have a less general fund support than we did back in the fiscal year 24. One of the things that did change is this, what you see is a network company license fee, which is a fee that is a 10 cent per transaction licensing fee that the app companies will pay when they receive their business licenses.

That fee came online last year and the city is just starting to collect that now.

this year.

We are anxiously awaiting FAS's report back on the amount of funding that we are going to receive for this year, although $1.6 million, which was the estimate that we had gotten last year, is included in our budget.

And the purpose of that fee is to support app-based worker ordinance implementation.

It is a fee.

It can only be used for that purpose.

Some of our funding has been, like I mentioned, in general fund cut, and we were using staff to support the app-based worker work.

We are now using some of this app-based worker fee money to backfill for that cut in this fiscal year.

If we receive additional above this $1.6 million, we will be able to use that to build out additional support for app-based worker implementation.

Alright, so our social justice mission, good governance, and a pretty large diverse scope of work compel the department to lean into approaches that make us as impactful as possible with the resources that we have.

So we wanted to share four of those strategies, they're not all of our strategies, but four key strategies with you so you get to know a little bit more about what we do and what guides our work.

So those four.

entail deep, meaningful community partnerships, tailored business outreach and support, innovation and strategic enforcement, and continuous learning.

All right, so I'll take community partnerships first.

So I'll take you back a little bit of history.

In 2014, there's a labor standards advisory group that was tasked with creating recommendations on how to implement, at the time, the handful of labor standards that were around the city.

This diverse group of business, labor, and worker voices made several key recommendations that were to be central to our DNA and embedded in our enabling legislation.

So one of those included community partnership and relationship.

So as a department, we rely on community organizations and business associations that have trusted, established relationships with workers and businesses.

Those relationships can amplify our impact and reach businesses and workers that ordinarily perhaps would not come to us on their own.

So a few key places where you can see that at play is our Community Outreach and Education Fund and our Business Outreach and Education Fund.

So these are programs where we fund community organizations, again, that are established in the community, that have trusted relationship, that can be in places that we cannot and reach folks that need the information or support to either comply with our labor standards or to learn more about their rights.

You'll see on the two-page document that there's what partnerships we currently have.

We have about 10 in the COEF and seven in the Business Outreach and Education Fund, and I'll talk about them here on the next slide in just a second.

But these folks are really, really incredible partners in what we do.

For example, in our Community Outreach and Education Fund, again, they're focusing on workers, specifically low-wage workers of color, veterans, women's, and in the LGBTQ community.

and immigrant and refugee communities.

They not only educate and train workers, but they also help directly resolve labor standards issues.

We know that there are tons of cases out there that we, as a department of our size, cannot do all on our own.

And so a number of our partners help support resolving those labor standards issues directly with the worker.

So last year they trained nearly 4,000 workers and conducted about 1,000 intakes, again helping folks resolve their labor standards issues.

We also have deep partnership in our independent advisory bodies, which is a Labor Standards Advisory Commission, as well as a Domestic Workers Standards Board.

These are two community advisory boards that are comprised of business, labor, and workers.

They advise us on all of our offices' operations and also on working conditions.

that need to be addressed by the city better.

They are, we, and we'll, I think we'll talk about them a little bit later, but we really lean heavily into their advice and are supported quite significantly.

I believe a number of them have reached out to have conversations with you all.

So just wanna emphasize the importance of them in our office.

Next slide.

All right.

The next key strategy is upstream.

So ensuring that our businesses are equipped with the tools and resources that they need to be knowledgeable and in compliance.

So in this way, we help prevent labor standards violations before they even occur, which supports our ecosystem of businesses and also shifts the burden away from workers having to bear the brunt of keeping their employers accountable.

To that end, we invest a great deal in our education outreach and technical assistance and support for businesses, including and especially small businesses who perhaps don't have resources embedded within their organizations in order to understand and comply with the laws.

So as previously mentioned, we have the Business Outreach and Education Fund.

Those are, again, the business support that they provide are specifically tailored to reach BIPOC, immigrant, refugee, women, and veteran and LGBTQ business owners.

The two-page document, again, I mentioned has a few more statistics on it.

The department also produces a multitude of educational materials and trainings.

many of which are available in languages other than English.

As an example, our workplace poster, which is required to be posted in every business in the city that has employees, is produced in 33 different languages.

We also mail a copy of the English version to every single non sole proprietor business in the city to aid in compliance.

And then we also provide a technical assistance hotline that goes through our policy and outreach team members.

who are not on our enforcement team so that businesses can reach out to us and get technical assistance on all of our labor standards.

Our staff conduct door-to-door visits each summer and spring, which is kicked off by a big event on May Day.

And we and community partners, as well as other department partners, are out in community kind of visiting businesses, sharing resources, answering questions, and connecting with business owners, managers, and workers.

And I'll mention one last thing here, which is we do also put together tailored strategies depending on ordinances and industries.

As Karen mentioned before, there's a handful of our labor standards that touch specific kinds of workplaces.

And we know each industry has its own unique needs and rhythms.

And so we do produce a number of tailored materials and outreach campaigns that reach the needs of those businesses and of course workers.

I'm just going to take a few moments and talk with you about our enforcement work, which is again one of the pillars of what we do.

You know, we're focused obviously on making sure information is out in the community to make sure that workers and business owners know of their rights and their obligations, but ultimately we are responsible for enforcing the laws and we are an enforcement agency.

And our goal really is to create a culture of compliance to make sure that workers are treated the way they're supposed to be, that they receive the money that they're owed, that their health, safety, and welfare and economic opportunity are gonna be respected and advanced.

We use a variety of different techniques to do that, and I'll talk to you about that.

One of the things I think it's really important to remember is that our responsibility of enforcing ordinances has expanded greatly over the lifespan of this office.

Back in 2017, there were five ordinances.

We now enforce 16. That puts a lot of pressure on our investigative staff.

Obviously, we haven't had as much of an increase in that staffing as we have had in the ordinance responsibility, but we've become much more sophisticated at thinking about how we think about the range of responses and interventions that we want to have to complaints.

We recognize that not every complaint is going to be needing a company-wide, full-scale, multi-month investigation, that we can move some of these complaints more quickly forward using different techniques, for example, going on-site to review records as opposed to waiting for them to come to us.

We also use much more sophisticated techniques of triaging and intake, looking at the circumstances where individual complainants come forward, potentially using more informal methods to resolve those.

We have an enforcement strategist who works very closely with our intake folks to triage those cases and send letters and have interventions and conversations with those businesses so that we could resolve those quickly and make sure that the workers get paid with their owed.

But we also recognize that there is a need to address more large-scale complaints and concerns.

and we use the methods that we need to to also address not only what comes in through the door but also recognizing that there are industries where there are low reports and high violations.

We want to make sure that we think about how to reach into those circumstances in those industries where we know that there has been a lack of reporting.

We did that several years ago in the residential construction context and we were recently that that finding which was over two million dollars was recently appealed all the way through the hearing and Superior Court and the Court of Appeals process and affirmed and I think we recognize that that's a potential fertile ground for additional work for us.

And I think we recognize that we wanna make sure that ultimately, that when people come to our office, they know they can get an answer and a response that's satisfactory to them.

We want to also highlight some of the things that we've been able to accomplish over the years.

And obviously these are some of the things that perhaps people know about us best because we do use media very clearly to inform the public about the work that we're doing.

We are a public agency, we speak about what we do, and we also do this strategically as part of the strategic enforcement work because we want to make sure that people are aware of not only what their rights are and if you're a worker, but also for business owners to see that we are actively enforcing these laws and that we want to make sure that they're aware of the need to get into compliance.

If they have any questions, obviously we're here to answer them and we want to assist them to be able to comply.

Last year, we assessed over $21.5 million in remedies for workers, and that includes a small amount that goes to the city, but well over 95% of that money is going directly to the workers.

and that impacted over 33,000 workers.

And you can see some of the headlines that we've been able to have.

We are known not only locally but nationally for the impact of our work for an office of our size.

Part of it is having to do with the very intentional work that was done by the planners of this office to create the kind of community co-enforcement model that we have with our great community partners.

But also because we very clearly have very strong laws that give us really good leverage to try to resolve cases.

The vast majority of our cases, well over 80%, end up being settled because we know that that provides certainty for both the workers and for the employers.

We want to make sure that we can get the money to the workers as quickly as possible since they're the ones who have been suffered the violations.

The largest settlement we had this past year is with Uber Eats that was the largest one we've ever had.

We have an independent contractor protection ordinance and some of the minimum pay ordinance compliance issues that we're resolving there.

You can also see some of the other ones that speak to sort of the broader range of ordinances that we enforce, domestic workers, back pay for wage theft, other gig worker laws.

And so we're actively enforcing a wide variety of laws.

That takes a lot of effort.

We have incredibly skilled staff, and we're looking forward to building out the app-based worker component of our work.

As you know, we are enforcing a minimum payment ordinance, a paid sick and safe time ordinance, and a deactivations rights ordinance.

All of those ordinances are new.

They're relatively first in the nation.

We've had to get up to speed on how to enforce those laws, and we've learned a lot about how to do that, and there's more to come.

So we're looking forward to this coming year, but obviously it is a load that we've learned to triage and bear, but we'll still need continued investment.

So I'll just touch briefly on our last strategy, and that is really that we know that good policy development, good program implementation, good policy implementation requires self-reflection and development of best practices.

We have a number of strategies we use to do that.

The first I want to talk about is sort of our partnerships regionally and nationwide.

So we, the Office of Labor Standards, position Seattle as a leader on labor standards.

We're one of the largest and most established local labor standards enforcement agencies.

in the country.

We partner very closely with similarly sized agencies in New York, LA, and San Francisco in particular, and sort of trade best practices and policy development initiatives.

We also participate in a nationwide local labor standards working group coordinated out of the Wagner School at NYU.

And that is a really effective space to learn about different enforcement strategies, outreach approaches, and policy innovations.

Regionally, because we know labor standards violations do not stop at the border of Seattle, we need to partner with our regional partners, so we work closely with Labor and Industries and Attorney General Nick Brown's office.

You may have heard that they have launched this year a worker rights unit, so we work very closely supporting that development, sharing our expertise, sharing our practices, and we anticipate working collaboratively with them going forward to make sure that there's a regional approach.

And then we also are working closely with King County as they sort of launch.

They've just passed a King County minimum wage ordinance as they launch their sort of enforcement and implementation efforts.

We also, of course, partner across departments within the city because we know this work is intersectional.

So key partners, FAS in the network company fee implementation that you heard about earlier, certainly OIRA in thinking about strategies to reach and protect immigrant workforces, Office of Economic Development in thinking about how we can support businesses to comply with our laws, to understand our laws, and be supported in this work.

And then lastly, I'd name Office of Civil Rights as the primary other employment-based enforcement agency in the city.

The other two things I wanna mention real quickly is some of our data work.

We have built up over the last few years a data function and program in the office.

Part of it is centered on policy evaluation, particularly with our app-based worker ordinances.

City Council built into those ordinances affirmative data production requirements, and we built a program to ingest that data, house it, analyze it, and that work is ongoing.

and the other component of that is sort of department focus, building up a new role for performance and evaluation of how we do our work and understanding how we can do it better and have metrics to track that and understand it.

And yeah, the last one I want to name is just our strategic framework and department wide priority setting process where we are unifying around measurable priorities that all teams can sort of build their work plans around and center in our work.

So I think Steve to close this out, yeah.

So I wanna just conclude with a question that we always ask ourselves of what does success look like?

And I know this work has been going on now for a number of years, but again, we're a relatively young department compared to most other established city functions, but we are now an established part of city government Workers, community members look to us for the work that we do.

We've been working hard to demonstrate the impact of what our laws, the progressive policy making that was created by creating our work, creating our office, creating the laws that we enforce.

We have to ask the question, why do workers continue to suffer labor standards violations?

They often do because they either don't know their rights or they're scared to assert their rights.

They're worried about repercussions.

Employers may not know what they need to do because they don't understand what they need to be asked to do.

Or there are some who actually don't care and they would rather incorporate that as the cost of doing business.

Everything that we do is targeted to making sure that we answer those concerns.

We want to support workers.

We want them to know what they can do.

We want to know that it's safe for them to come forward with their concerns and they can get redressed.

We want business owners to know what their obligations are, as they are with every other source of law, income, tax, workers' comp payments, unemployment insurance.

We know that the businesses are doing a lot, and it's a very hard thing, particularly for small business owners, small business owners, particularly in communities of color, immigrant communities, marginalized communities where we know that folks are struggling to stay in business.

We want to be able to help them with the technical support and assistance to get them to be able to comply with the law as they do with others.

And we're fortunate that we have partners in community with credibility in language to be able to help us do that.

But we ultimately want to have a city where workers are treated fairly, where they can work with dignity and get fair pay, that they see this place, the city, as a place where they can do their work and build their lives.

They can take care of their families and take care of themselves.

We want a robust economy where they can generate money that comes into the economy and support the businesses and the community that we have, that provides the services that we all need, whether that's someone taking care of our children at home or delivering us food or making sure that our laundry is done.

All of that work is valuable, and we elevate that by creating this kind of space.

So kudos to the framers and the creators of this for creating an office like this.

And in a time like this now, where the federal government has retreated, from this work.

At a time when our most impacted community members are feeling vulnerable and adrift and wondering where they can go, it is very important for them to know that their local government has their backs, that it's available to them, to get redress.

We get numerous comments from workers when they do get settlement checks that they're really surprised and pleased that they can come to their local government and actually get redress.

And I think it's important for us to think about as we think about all the policies and the work we do in the city, that this is an example of successful, we believe, policy making and implementation.

We can make policies, but we need to implement them.

We need to put the resources in it.

We need to devise the laws and have people implementing the laws.

We are doing our best to do that.

I think we've demonstrated some impact.

We continue to work hard at making our work better, more strategic, more effective, and in doing it in partnership with others throughout the city.

We're excited, obviously, to work with the new administration.

The new mayor has raised her agenda and we'll be discussing that on her own.

We're excited to be part of that agenda and help to build that agenda with her.

We want this city to be affordable and have workers contributing to the city overall.

So again, thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you.

We're happy to answer any questions you might have.

Thank you so much for being here this morning and for your presentation and the work that you do.

Colleagues, any questions, comments or reflections you'd like to share?

I'm seeing Councilmember Foster.

Thank you so much, Chair, and thank you to the OLS team for a fantastic presentation.

a lovely way to start a Friday, thinking about everything that you all do to protect workers and communicate with businesses.

I have a couple of questions.

So you talked about this early on in the presentation with some of the new funding sources that you mentioned, but you also talked briefly about your share of the general fund revenue going down over the last few years.

Do you have that either in real numbers or a percentage that you can share with us?

We can get you the exact numbers, but over the course of this past biennium, we, for fiscal years 25 and 26, have taken less of general fund than we had in years past.

We had about an 8% cut for FY25 and about a similar cut for FY26 in general fund appropriations.

Now, we were fortunate that with the recognition that the network company fee was coming on board that this past year, when the budget process was going through, we were able to shift some of the existing staff costs and outreach costs to that licensing fee.

I would mention that when that fee was passed in 2023, it was simultaneous with the new ordinance responsibilities for app-based workers.

This was always envisioned to be supplemental to our general fund, not to supplant general fund.

but as a result of the city's fiscal circumstances, the budget that was proposed and passed last year included supplanting about $650,000 of our budget in network company licensing fee revenue.

Thank you, I appreciate that, both the number and also the reminder of the original intent in 2023. Thank you.

The other question that I wanted to ask you, you closed your presentation with some discussion around the pressures from the federal government and something that's just been on my mind is watching the attacks on the National Labor Relations Board and deep concern about what that would mean for workers.

I wonder if there are any particular areas of innovation that come to mind as we think about the attacks there at the national level and the relevant response locally, either that we're thinking about here in Seattle or you mentioned collaborations with New York, Los Angeles, other cities where you're sharing and learning.

Yeah, and I will maybe have my policy manager spend a little bit of time responding to that and I can fill in

Yeah, I think there's a few different ways to think about this.

One is we've seen a significant reduction in terms of numbers of employees, enforcement, penalties assessed on the federal level.

So this is not speaking to the NLRB piece, but to wage and hour enforcement.

So that has retreated significantly, which I think really sort of highlights the case for local labor standards enforcement.

So we have always had a robust enforcement structure here, and when we've had partnerships with DOL, a lot of those cases come to us anyway because our laws are generally more protective.

So in terms of local enforcement, there's not as much of a change.

What I think is a big gap, however, is, as I mentioned, labor standards violations don't stop at the border, and so we are going to see a real gap in terms of ability to do cross-jurisdictional enforcement, particularly across states.

So one of the things that we are working on in some of those networks that we mentioned is if we are seeing, say, a violation in a particular industry or with a particular company that is nationwide or is across state lines, how do we have sort of partnerships and coordinated enforcement strategies and efforts that will sort of fill that gap that the federal government is no longer addressing.

So that is an active conversation.

There's actually a specific project being coordinated through NYU Wagner that speaks to that piece in particular.

I think another piece is just the impacts on immigrant workers.

We know this because these are our communities, these are people we have in our families and in our lives, and we know that there are impacts for these workers.

So what does that mean for how we do our work?

We need to think more intentionally about how we reach these workers.

There's a lot of research that shows increased immigration enforcement correlates with increased labor standards and minimum wage violations because Employers may feel emboldened, workers may feel afraid to speak to government, afraid to voice concerns even within the workplace.

So we need to think of new strategies and increase work to reach those workers on an outreach level and on an enforcement level.

So things like mobile intakes, community partnerships, so they're not having to sort of come downtown or talk to a government employee where they may not sort of differentiate between say, City of Seattle offers the labor standards and federal folks.

And then the last piece I'll say on the NLRB thing specifically, that is a difficult area because there is a federal preemption of specifically of organized labor regulation.

There are some states that have things like trigger laws where if in some way the NLRA is struck down or the NLRB is more severely handicapped, there are ways to step in.

And then the last piece I'd say is what is not restricted is information sharing through either the city government or through other means about your right to organize and your right to form a union.

I might just see if, Lane, do you want to add anything?

You covered it.

Okay.

Steve, it looked like you were about to...

Yeah, I was just going to say one more thing.

On the question of enforcement now in the context of the way the national government is enforcing immigration law, I and our enforcement manager will be going to New York in two weeks to meet with a national convening.

under the auspices of the National Immigrant Law Center and the NYU Wagner School to convene both local and state labor enforcement agencies to discuss together the strategies that we're trying to use to enforce labor law in this context.

I think it's a great opportunity for us to both share what we do here and learn from state and local enforcement agencies that do our kind of work throughout the country.

We are all sort of grappling with similar issues, and I'm really looking forward to learning and taking some new things back here, so more to come on that.

Excellent.

I look forward to hearing what you learned.

Thank you so much, Director.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Councilmember Foster.

Councilmember Saka.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Director Martis and your team for the presentation today, but more importantly, the work you do every day to protect workers in our city and in part, help make the city more affordable for all.

So really appreciate all you guys do.

Last week, During our Public Safety Committee meeting, we had a presentation from some of our community and government partners, specifically from the King County Prosecutor's Office, on human trafficking.

Kind of broadly, but it focused very, very heavily on commercial sexual exploitation.

And one thing that was raised at a cursory level, love to learn more about from your perspective is the prospect of exploiting labor and then later going weaponizing federal immigration law and in particular now the cruel and inhumane enforcement tactics by this federal administration.

to exploit labor and get free labor for a job.

I spoke briefly after that meeting with some of our labor partners from the building trades, I think it might have been the carpenters, but in any event, and they shared with me some really shocking anecdotes, again, about individuals and or smaller developers engaging with and purportedly contracting with some individuals to perform certain services, do a job, maybe it's a drywall job, for example, extracting that labor and then not paying them and then calling ICE or threatening to call ICE and federal immigration authorities.

I have a follow-up meeting with our labor partners to learn more about this issue, because this is really concerning, obviously.

If that's not already on your radar, I would encourage you in your office to please follow up in the absence of continued engagement there.

I guess, first off, are you aware of this, this kind of challenge, and what can, recognizing that, to one of your earlier points, there's a lot of players, a lot of partners involved, you work collaboratively with a lot of departments internally here within the city, whether it's OED or otherwise, and externally, what can we do to shut that down?

Is that on your radar, and what can we do, what can your office do to shut that kind of behavior down?

So thank you for your question, council member.

This has been a feature of the landscape for a long time.

This is a problem that's existed, labor trafficking and the issue of workers being underpaid or not getting paid appropriately or treated appropriately, and unfortunately their status being used as a way to coerce them not to report it and not to advocate or even tell anybody what's going on.

The case that I had mentioned earlier, the strategic enforcement residential construction case that we did several years ago was in fact exactly this kind of circumstance where there were immigrant men who were brought here to the US passports held by some individual housing created and organized by somebody working for the company that was making it difficult for them to ensure that they got paid over time.

where we got breaks.

It was a series of legal issues around the status of the subcontractor relationship.

One of the actual benefits of what we were able to do when we resolved this case and litigated it up was it established that the joint employment relationship between the subcontractors so that the one that was actually overseeing the work actually could be held liable, even though the actual employer might have been the less capitalized subcontractor.

So I don't want to veer too much into the specifics of that case as to say that this is something that we've been using some of our strategic enforcement bandwidth to try to address.

We also see this in other regards.

I'm just going to have my deputy director talk a few more points on that.

Yeah.

I mean, first, please keep us in the loop.

Like, we want to be in the spaces where we can get more connected to what is happening in communities.

The more communication, the better.

I think our team for many years has focused on embedding, kind of creating, training ourselves up and connecting relationships to make sure that we're trained up on the unique aspects of labor trafficking.

I mentioned trauma-informed approaches.

That is born out of our office's commitment to making sure that we are in a good position to support folks who are going through that as they come through.

We also are part of WARN, the Washington Anti-Trafficking Network.

We've received training multiple times over the year from the International Rescue Committee on labor trafficking.

So we're pretty connected to that aspect and have strong partnerships with other folks, community organizations, including legal organizations like NERP, et cetera, that put us in touch with workers that are in difficult situations.

we can always do more and I think the intersection of wage theft and Libra trafficking and immigration status and I think the kind of where folks end up working in the shadows is absolutely core, like focusing on how we can use our resources to support folks in those situations is core to our mission.

And I want to look to if Karim has anything else because I know he's also worked quite a bit on these things too.

Did I cover it?

One other thing I would say is, and I think it's important to have the law enforcement component of that really be something that is front and center because ultimately these are criminal law violations and the prosecutor's office is the place and the space for that part of it to happen.

We know because we talk to workers, workers come to us, or we don't hear from workers and we hear from people.

community partners about what they're hearing, that often we have to make ourselves available in different ways to be able to reach those workers who might not necessarily be willing to come forward.

We don't want to necessarily – and we have to do it in a way that's not like, hi, we're here from the government to talk to you.

We have to establish that basis of trust.

We are fortunate that we have had longstanding relationships with community partners that are – have credibility in community.

so that their teams can go in and have those conversations and give us some of that information.

And we have to be very clear, please do not give us anything identifying so that we can assist with resolution of the concerns, but not identify the individuals.

And we've been able to do that in the past.

Thank you for that.

Sadly, it sounds like this problem has existed for at least a few years.

but it's even more concerning now because it sounds like reports and incidents of this are on the rise in large part because of this federal administration.

So yeah, we'll stay in touch and connected on this and I'm meeting maybe I think next week with some of our labor partners.

All that notwithstanding, I would encourage you in your office to independently kind of verify and follow up with some of these reports and drop the hammer.

Speaking of which, I think you kind of answered my next question.

To your knowledge, is that practice that we described, people exploiting laborers, weaponizing the federal immigration enforcement, threatening to call ICE, not paying them, hearing it with both represented laborers in formal unions and also kind of day laborers at Home Depot.

Is that practice currently punishable under the criminal law or is it solely just a civil violation to your knowledge?

specifically threatening to report someone to ICE.

And then not paying them?

Yeah.

Well, certainly not paying some money.

Extracting their labor?

Yeah, certainly not.

Like that combination?

Yeah.

All of it's bad.

Every one of those elements is bad, and then, like,

Yeah, I mean, I'd say multiple violations in this hypothetical.

Certainly a violation of our wage theft protections, and all of our ordinances have retaliation protections as well.

I don't want to opine on the criminal So I think we will need to follow up with you on that.

But we do, in some instances, partner with law enforcement, particularly in the trafficking space.

That's not exactly what your question is, but that's one of the most direct overlaps that we typically see.

But we can circle back on the retaliation piece.

Thank you so much.

That would be greatly appreciated.

So please do follow up and let us know what you learned about the potential criminal liability that might flow from those kind of scenarios.

And if it's not currently outlawed punishable under a criminal code within the city of Seattle, I would be interested in elevating it, those kind of violations to gross misdemeanors is all we can do here locally.

But anyways, thank you.

No further questions, comments, Chair.

Thank you.

Thank you for your questions, Councilmember Saka.

Councilmember Juarez.

Oh, thank you, Madam Chair.

I have a few questions, but I want to thank Councilmember Saka, who's the vice chair on public safety.

Councilor Saka, you actually asked one of the questions I was going to ask.

So I may repeat a little bit of what you said, but I was going exactly where you were going from our last meeting with on public safety.

and sex trafficking and labor trafficking and how those two are connected.

I'll come back to that, but let me ask this other question I had.

I've always felt like there's been a little bit of a gender bias in labor enforcement.

I know that we focused on restaurants and construction workers and gig workers, and we started looking more at hotel workers, mainly women that clean hotels, housekeepers, looking at wage theft at nail salons and enforcement and massage parlors and then that's where I was going with what Councilmember Saga had already outlined in his questions working with law enforcement because hand in hand with labor trafficking in we see that in the sex trafficking and I don't know if this office is I would like to see them be more in have this more institutionalized and intentional focus on labor and sex trafficking with the King County Prosecutor's Office and the City Attorney's Office and SPD.

I know that we focus on the things that are obvious with hotel construction and gig workers and restaurants.

I'm not seeing a lot of folks, and we had the same issue with disabled workers and incarcerated workers.

And again, I understand that, you know, I kind of have to laugh to myself when you say progressive policy.

I mean, all this kind of policy is what we do as human beings to make the world better.

I don't know if you want to slap the label progressive in front of it, but okay.

So I'm asking you, is that going to be part of your strategic plan or can it be in the future, following up on what Councilmember Saka shared, and also what are other new or emerging job categories that we are seeing, that you are seeing, in other industries that we maybe haven't seen before.

Council member Mosqueda, who's now on King County Council, was the one that led the charge on with our hotel and our housekeepers and doing, and I sat on that committee and doing that legislation for more safety and having safety and having people on the floor and all these other and making sure that people are getting paid and making sure that they were getting their health care insurance and people weren't being penalized for coming forward and being a whistleblower.

So two things then, what are newer emerging job categories that we're seeing and also what can your office do to be more intentional and institutionalize a focus on sex trafficking and the labor that comes with that?

Thank you, Councilmember.

I think there are a few different responses to this.

We have, as I mentioned, started to really ramp up our strategic enforcement work to really think about those places that are really high violation and low reporting, and you've named some of those right there.

It's part of our strategic framework process, which we've been doing for the last year and a half.

We are developing priorities around how we want to make targeted work and focus and all of our efforts, outreach, enforcement, communications, policy, and use all of our resources to really make an impact on some specific areas within our scope.

And obviously this gives us an opportunity and there's a group within our office that's formulating these priorities and they're going to be able to talk about that probably in the next several months.

This information is something that we hear from our community partners.

One of the things that we know is that they're aware of these things and we take that information back.

Thinking about the levers that we have to impact and influence folks in those environments.

Obviously, because of the nature of the work, because of the nature of the relationships that they have there, workers are often very reticent to come forward.

So how do we leverage some of the community partner relationships to be able to get into those spaces and develop trust?

Because you need to develop trust for people to come forward and want to say something.

Nail salons, for example, have been places that we've heard from in the past.

We've worked with places that have also had very high proportion of women in the labor force.

Bakeries, for example.

There was a major bakery enforcement action that we did several years ago that was, again, coming from community and helped us understand that we needed to go into that circumstance and learn from those workers about what's going on.

So I think there is a lot that we can do in partnership with the prosecutor and with the police if we want to create something that's a little bit more robust than what exists now.

I think that would be a great conversation to get into and would welcome that opportunity.

I'd open it up to my team if you want to add more.

I have a follow-up.

I appreciate all the words about robust and space and all that other stuff that you all say.

So while you're all congratulating yourselves on Uber Eats and Climate Pledge and gig workers and all that, I guess I'm saying that it isn't about building trust and finding space.

it's about actually being intentional and sitting down with the City Attorney's Office and the King County Prosecutor's Office and making it a priority to see what they're doing because they are in that field.

And so I'm not just saying, hey, this is a matter of a construction site where people aren't getting paid.

I was there when we created this office in 2017 and funded it under the leadership of Mayor Murray and Council Member Gonzalez at the time.

So we had envisioned Of course, restaurants, constructions, gig workers, disabled workers, housekeepers, wage theft, nail salons, massage parlors.

What I'm saying is you need to up your game and have more focus.

I'm not interested in, you know, what I always call the government salad words of centering, uplifting and robust and whatever.

What I'd like you to do is tell me on our chair at some point, hey, we sat down with the city attorney's office.

We sat down with the King County prosecutor's office.

We see that there is an actual intersection I hate this word, intersectionality.

But we have people's lives at risk here who are being trafficked and labor who deserve the criminality there.

So if we have criminality on the side of labor theft, then we have criminality on the side of sex trafficking theft, which results in more egregious and more violent issues.

And so this is just another way to get at that labor theft, if you will, to stop it.

So I'm asking you not to be robust.

I'm asking you to be intentional about setting up a framework.

And we'll certainly, I'm sure the Chair will agree, We will certainly, and Council Member Saka, who's the Vice Chair on Public Safety, work with you on how we can do that.

And maybe in the next budget round, that's something we can talk about because the City Attorney's Office and the King County's Office really need help with the City of Seattle and the departments that we've created and funded to look at these kinds of issues.

So that's what I'm asking you to do.

So thank you for that.

And also, hedge numbers would be great.

Thanks.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'll just respond very briefly to say that we do have active partnerships with both the City Attorney we just met with, City Attorney Evans last week, as well as the King County Prosecutor's Office.

So I'm happy to engage particularly with our enforcement team and come back with either directly with you, the council member, or the committee with us the specifics of exactly what that partnership looks like, but I couldn't agree more that we can certainly up our game and deepen that partnership and think about additional strategies that you're highlighting.

Can I just add one thing?

I'm not trying to be the old lady boomer here, and why I kind of look at the word progressive and kind of laugh to myself.

But just remember, I don't know, it was three or four years ago where unions were celebrating their 50th or 75th anniversary.

There was a time where unions did not allow Black people, Native Americans, Asians, and women in their union for a good 75 years.

And so I don't always think we should always be patting ourselves on the back about how awesome we are.

I think what we have to talk about is just the humanity of capturing everybody who belongs in this movement to just do the right thing.

So while I thank you for your presentation and the work that you've done, obviously you know this better than I do, that we do have more work to do and I do look forward to being robust and center and uplifting you and your work.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, council member.

I appreciate your comments and I appreciate what you're bringing.

And we always know that we can do more and that there's more that we need to get done.

I think we have a really good understanding from some of our partner work, from some of our direct community work, because our teams are out in community.

There's a long history here of many different good and not good things going on in this community.

And I think, I appreciate your request and I think this is an area that we have talked about before and as Karen mentioned, we'll be working with other partners.

I think we can always up our game.

I think this is a good time with our chair who's incredibly involved with the labor and all the good work that she has done.

This is a good time to start sprinkling those seeds.

And I know the Chair knows this.

Madam Chair, I don't mean to step on what you're doing, but this is a good time to start talking about, it's February, but this is a good time to start talking about where in the budget this fits.

Because I remember when we started, obviously labor standards, and then we, I think, tripled their budget and their staff.

And I was always a little bit dismayed that we weren't having dedicated people to these other issues.

So maybe this is a good time to start talking about You know, is there an FTE?

Is there someone that you could share and work with on the enforcement side of sex trafficking?

Kind of what Council Member Sokka was getting at.

So maybe this time next year in your PowerPoint, you could say, hey, we heard this, we got it in the budget, or we created an FTE or a proviso, and now we're addressing it.

That would be success to me.

So in your last slide, like what does success look like?

That's what it looks like to me.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, colleagues, I wanna express my appreciation for your engagement on this topic, your thoughtful questions, and also being very clear on what your interests are in our continued work with the Office of Labor Standards.

In the interest of time for today, I am gonna hold the questions that I have, but state for the record, that it would be great to talk through also how the Labor Standards Advisory Commission and Domestic Worker Standards Board continue to do their work and interact with our work on council and wanna just lift those two bodies up as important advisory bodies that council members can engage with on these topics as well.

but want to express again my appreciation for the Office of Labor Standards.

I know last year was invited to participate in the May Day event where OLS was out doing engagement with small businesses on important ordinances and standards to uphold.

wanted to lift that up and thank you again for your work.

This certainly will not be the last time you all are in committee, hoping that we can keep this connection going and certainly again appreciate all of the engagement from my colleagues.

Thank you all for being here.

Thanks so much.

And with that, we will now move on to our second item of business.

Will the clerk please read item two into the record?

Item 2, Human Services Department Aging and Disability Services briefing and discussion.

Wonderful.

And as you all are getting settled in, if you can take a moment to introduce yourself by saying your name and position before getting started.

Thank you.

Great.

Well, good morning.

It's beautiful out.

We've got a lot of exciting things happening this weekend.

I'm Tonya Kim.

I'm the director of the Human Services Department for the Record.

Good morning, I'm Jaquene Cobbs, and I'm the Deputy Director of Aging and Disability Services, the division within the Human Services Department.

Good morning, and I'm Mary Pearson, the Director of Aging and Disability Services, and glad to see everyone has their iHeartAging.

You have your button on, Councilmember Saka?

Am I cool enough, apparently?

Yeah, where's mine?

Uh-oh, uh-oh.

We'll get you.

We'll be sure to get these for Council President as well as Council Member Juarez, too.

So we've got these beautiful buttons on.

We feel very privileged of being here today.

We've got a robust agenda.

We're gonna talk about, just introducing for the viewing public, who HSD is very briefly.

introduce our division.

We normally don't come to committee and talk about broad topics, but really pleased to be here to discuss our Aging and Disability Services Division, who is also, we threw in some acronyms in here for you, the Area Agency on Aging will explain.

and within that, surprise, we serve the county.

And so we're gonna talk about our regional services as well as what is city specific, talk about the initiatives coming up that are important to us in 2026, and of course field any of the questions that you may have.

And before we move on, I just wanna say that we had just now a really important discussion by our colleagues around our workers and labor, and HSD is here to really uplift and talk about how we support people in our community, community members in the human services space.

And so this is a really beautiful agenda.

So thank you for having us here.

HSD, there's a lot of things on this slide, but I'll just say for the viewing public that our mission is to connect people with resources and solutions during times of need so all Seattle residents can live, learn, work, and take part in strong, healthy communities.

I don't want to take for granted our mission because it's so important, especially when we know that there is a calling or something that we are responding to.

And you can see here that we are focused on six different impact areas.

These are the things that we are striving for, preparing youth for success all the way through promoting healthy aging.

And we take, I think, if we could go back just very quickly, I'll just note that why this is important is because if we're doing our jobs, it's low-key, we're behind the scenes.

But when there is something tragic that occurs or we're responding to something, it becomes even more visible of the importance of what we're doing, like when we're responding to the recent shootings or like making sure that our vulnerable populations have the services that they need, especially when there are benefits that maybe or are under attack by the federal government.

HSD by the numbers, this is familiar to many of you who just got out of budget season, but for our viewing public and our newer colleagues, I would say we're a medium plus size department.

We have now in our adopted budget 421 million just with various fund sources.

And again, this is a wheel donut that shows the distribution of funds across our department.

And when we talk about our aging and disability services, you'll see, naturally, promoting healthy aging, which is 19% of our budget, is attributed to our work there.

people need more than just that.

There's intersectionality, as Council Member Juarez just spoke about, and so you'll see when we talk about the specific budget size and the work that we do in this division, there's a little bit of public health, there's additional dabbling in affordability, livability, of course, and so there is some intersectionality as we to talk about our Aging and Disability Services Division.

Just a other quick note, too, is with the size of our FTE, you'll see that we're nearing 500, so we've got 480 FTE.

We are, and I think this surprises, folks, that we are a funder and a direct service provider as well as a convener, and so a good chunk of our FTE and our budget goes to community, but we also serve, we have case managers, and we'll talk some more about them.

and with that I brought the smarter people with me today and so making her debut we have already introduced Jack who is the newest addition to our leadership team, our deputy division director but Mary is our division director and has a couple years at the city and will really do a deep dive in ADS.

Thank you, Director Kim.

And I'll say 33 years at the city, a few more, about five years in HSD.

So I've got to put that out there.

And thank you, Chair Rink and committee members for being here today.

And it's an honor to just share with you our work in HSD, ADS, and the AAA, and we will help you with all of those acronyms.

and so Aging and Disability Services, ADS, is a division within the Human Services Department and we also function as the AAA, the Area Agency on Aging.

In addition, the City of Seattle funds senior centers and a city-wide initiative called Age Friendly.

So we'll cover what our AAA role includes as well as more information on our city investments.

Now taking a look at the service network.

So our work starts at the federal government and ends with our local service providers that provide support to clients with aging at home and communities they love instead of in institutionalized settings.

The federal government created the Administration for Community Living in 2012 as known as ACL and their mission is to maximize the independence, wellbeing and health of older adults, people with disabilities across their lifespan and their families and caregivers.

Across the nation, ACL coordinates with 56 state units on aging.

And in Washington State, that's the Department of Social and Health Services, or DSHS.

And our state DSHS.

And within DSHS, the Home and Community Living Administration is the agency that works with the AAAs for our federal and state coordination.

Nationally, there are 629 AAAs and that includes 244 tribal organizations and two native organizations.

And then looking at our service providers, there are an estimated 20,000 service providers, 10,000 senior centers and over 500,000 volunteers that are being supported through these investments nationwide.

Now, what is a AAA, right?

The real AAA, the Area Agency on Aging.

President Linda B. Johnson signed the Older Americans Act into law on July 14th, 1965. And in 1973, the Older Americans Act established the Area Agencies on Aging.

There are 13 in Washington State, and we are all members of a state association known as Washington for Aging, or W4A.

We are designated as the on-the-ground organizations charged with planning, coordinating, and advocating for services that help older people live with dignity within their communities.

Now, taking a look at who we serve, the Older Americans Act priority populations are individuals that are 60 and older, who live in rural or socially isolated communities, are low income, and may have limited English proficiency.

Our Medicaid services are for people 18 and older who meet eligibility requirements that are determined by the state.

We also provide respite and support services for unpaid caregivers that are 18 and older.

And just a side note, Washington state was ranked according to the AARP scorecard as the third among all US large cities.

So that's just a highlight that we are doing amazing work.

So now how we operate within the AAA.

So the AAA was founded in 1973. It was a sponsorship between United Way, King County, the city of Seattle and King County.

In the late 2010s, United Way King County opted out and the City of Seattle and King County established the current structure via interlocal agreement and that agreement placed the AAA inside of the Human Services Department.

It also established a 21-member Planning Council, the Seattle King County Advisory Council on Aging and Disability Services.

In addition to our partnership with the county, ADS works closely with a diverse range of community, contractors, government and regional partners.

These partnerships allow us to promote cross-sector collaboration and coordination with housing, healthcare and other systems that impact the health and wellbeing of the communities we serve.

We work closely with King County Public Health, the Seattle King County and Department...

I'm sorry.

We work closely with King County agencies, Public Health, Seattle King County and the Department of Community and Human Services and have successfully partnered with them during the pandemic response, health and wellness activities such as fall prevention and diabetes self-management and a host of other programs.

With the renewal of the King County Veterans Seniors and Human Service Levy, we will continue our intentional collaboration with the county through shared planning, community engagement, and advocacy strategies.

ADS is fortunate to have two volunteer boards that serve as our advocacy arms.

The Seattle King County Advisory Council, the 21 member body that is required by the Older Americans Act.

Members are appointed by the mayor and then approved by council.

We are very fortunate to have council member Juarez serving as a board member.

The Mayor's Council on African American Elders was created in 1995 by Mayor Norm B. Rice, and it oversees the development of a comprehensive continuum of services to serve the needs of African American elders.

This 12-member board is appointed directly by the Mayor.

Both boards meet monthly and their roles are to advise on the needs of older adults and the policies to meet those needs.

They share their informed opinions, their experiences, and their expertise with ADS staff and policy makers that influence program funding and how services are delivered.

They educate policy members, elected officials, community members and family and friends about critical issues impacting older adults in King County.

And they also help to raise visibility of our AAA priorities and issues.

In addition to all of this, they can also lobby, meaning they can directly ask policy makers for their support on a particular issue, bill, or resource allocation.

During the 2025 state legislative session, the Advisory Council played an active role in advocacy efforts that helped to secure 27.5 million statewide in nutrition funding for the biennium.

and of that 27.5 million, approximately 25% of that funding comes to ADS.

Now taking a look at our AAA core services, and these are services that you can expect to find across all regions in Washington State, and really nationally.

ADS, we provide services to approximately a quarter of the clients in Washington State.

We have an internal team of case managers, and we also contract out with two community providers in the local aging network.

Our suite of services is widely known as the network or the net that works.

So taking a look at elder rights, those services include detection and prevention strategies to safeguard older people who are often vulnerable to abuse or consumer fraud.

The long-term care ombuds program is a core activity that advocates for and protects the rights of those living in facilities.

The National Family Caregiver Support Program recognizes the extensive demands placed on family members and friends who provide primary care for spouse, parents, and older relatives and friends.

Its goal is to help ensure caregivers have the assistance and support to care for their loved ones.

Nutrition services give older Americans the option to receiving balance and nutrition meals at homes or at the congregate settings such as senior centers or adult daycare centers.

Home delivered meals, commonly known as meals on wheels, are often pre-packaged and ready to eat and delivered to older adults that are home bound.

Preventive health services programs promote healthy lifestyles through physical activity, appropriate diet and nutrition, and regular health screening and education for older people about the benefits of including these activities in their daily routine.

Supportive Services activities targets both the home and community.

The intent is to assist aging individuals in maintaining their independence in the community for as long as effectively possible.

Services include assistance with transportation, in-home care, community services such as adult day care, and information and referral assistance.

For every $1 of federal Older Americans Act investment, an additional $3 is leveraged from other sources.

And with that, I will turn it over to Jack to go into ADS by the numbers.

I'm going to talk.

I'm gonna talk a little bit about our numbers.

You can see here, we have 93.6 million allocated in the 2026 adopted budget.

ADS contracts with agencies on behalf of both the city of Seattle and Washington State Department of Social and Health Services or DSHS.

This is represented in the second bullet showing that we have contracts with 110 community agencies, have over 250 staff and serve over 50,000 adults within King County.

For Seattle specifically, we estimate that nearly 16,000 of those individuals reside in Seattle.

This slide shows ADS's 2026 fund sources.

We have a diverse range of federal, state and local fund sources.

The largest share comes from Medicaid Title 19 totaling 52.4 million, which continues to be our primary fund source.

City of Seattle accounts for 19.7 million.

As a final note, the total, 93.6 million shown on the graph here, is the adopted budget for 2026. In addition to our 2026 adopted budget, ADS has received increases in funding for wildcares, health-related social needs, senior nutrition, Title 19, and that will be reflected in the 2026 revised budget, which will bring our new total to 115 million.

As stated on the last slide, the city invests 19.7 million in services for Seattle.

The mobile integrated health team is a partnership between 911, FIRE, dispatch and the ADS case managers.

The team responds to people experiencing behavioral health and non-medical crises after an overdose.

This work is housed in ADHES because of our connection to resources and social services.

The case management aspect of the work allows the mobile integrated health team to engage more meaningfully with clients and work with them towards their long-term goals through our systems in real time.

And sorry, I'm going to interject here very quickly.

So some of you may know or the viewing public may know the mobile integrated health as in Health One, Health 99. And so this is the portion that we partner with FHIR.

We have the social worker case manager side of that.

And then we work with FHIR to complete the whole team.

So it's a dual response partnership that we have.

Thanks, Tanya.

ADS leads Seattle's Age-Friendly Cities Initiative, a designation by the World Health Organization and AARP to commit to continuously improve policies, systems, and environments to ensure all people can age with optimal health and dignity in their communities.

Thanks to the hard work of this team and of course support from our city partners, Seattle was recently ranked number three among age-friendly communities.

Some of the services include monthly civic coffee hour, anti-ageism training, flash and gold card discounts, and participating in the Seattle Design Festival.

I want to invite you to take the anti-ageism training available on the city's training website, Cornerstone.

The City of Seattle funds 14 senior centers and ADS provides funding to support congregate nutrition, transportation, case management, and other services to enhance the quality of life for seniors.

In 2027, five new culturally-focused senior centers will be added to the City of Seattle, funding bringing the total to 19. The city also provides additional funding to expand services for programs such as senior nutrition, the program to encourage active and rewarding lives, also known as the PROS program for veterans and multidisciplinary team MDT for elder abuse.

Thank you to council for the additional funds you added during the budget for this work.

ADS has four initiatives for 2026. The area plan, WA Cares, health-related social needs, and the anti-ageism training.

Every four years, ADS develops the area plan on aging as a response to the needs in our communities.

The area plan serves as a foundational framework for our work at ADS.

It presents relevant demographic trends and outlines major goals and objectives to be achieved over the course of four years.

The plan is shaped directly by older adults and people with disabilities and their caregivers.

Their lived experience guides how we allocate equitable resources and help align federal, state and local priorities with effective programs and services.

The state notes that seven in 10 people require long-term care at some point in their lives and most families cannot afford these costs without support.

WA Cares was created to ensure all working Washingtonians have access to long-term care when they need it.

This is the first of its kind in the nation and it is established to address the growing need for long-term care as a population ages.

Our work will be to act as a local front door to the wall care's benefit.

Our job will be to help people understand what the benefit is, how they can use it, and connect them to approved long-term care services in their community.

In 2026, ADS will begin implementing health-related social needs, also known as HRSN.

services.

These are new supports offered through Apple Health Medicaid, focusing on non-medical needs such as food, home modifications, and caregiver support.

ADS will partner with Healthier Here, the county's accountable community of health, to screen, assess, and refer clients for our services.

This partnership will improve the experience and outcomes for Apple Health enrollees who are eligible for HRSN services and ensure an efficient system by leveraging an existing intake and referral center or community hub.

With well over 2,000 views to date, our anti-ageism training continues to receive positive feedback.

In 2026, we will launch training specifically for healthcare industry professionals, as it is well documented that ageism leads to poor health outcomes and waste financial resources in our healthcare system.

So I just want to say where to find us.

So here are some websites and phone numbers for the viewing public interested in learning more.

Our main website is agingkingcounty.org or feel free to call us at our toll free number for community living connections at 1-844-348-5464.

Director Kim.

And with that, we're happy to take any questions, recommendations, feedback.

Thank you.

Thank you all for the presentation.

Colleagues, what questions do you have for our colleagues at HSD?

Councilmember Foster.

Thank you so much, Chair.

First, congratulations on your ranking for number three.

That's excellent.

So yeah, I was like, I wanted to clap during the presentation, but didn't feel like that was appropriate.

But thank you so much.

I really appreciate the time today and the overview, particularly as a new council member.

I wanted to ask, going back to the Council on African American Elders, are there reports that come from that council just on their overall priorities that are available?

or are they just sort of integrated into HSD's work?

Like is there a place where I could see sort of a list of recommendations and priorities that are coming from that council?

They are on the city's website, but I will have to double check and see if the priorities are listed, but we can definitely get a copy of those priorities to you.

Okay, that would be wonderful and I'd love to use that as a resource to help make sure that it's informing my work and other members as we think about just overlaps between our committees and as chair of the housing committee.

I'm very curious to see what those priorities are, so thank you.

A couple other quick questions.

I really appreciated the education on the relationship with the county and the deep connection there.

Can you talk a little bit about any work that you all do to make sure that elders are connected to things like property tax discounts at King County so that people know what's available to them.

Just as we think about cost of living and knowing that there's programs that are available, I believe through the King County Assessor.

Do we make direct connections there or can you speak to that?

So I know that is one of the main concerns of MCAE that has been raised and at the Advisory Council is making sure that older adults know about how to go through that process.

We also have the King County Division, they're like an outreach arm for the county, and they are in the community talking about different services that are available countywide.

And yeah, I was gonna see if you- If I could add a couple things.

There's just so much that aging and disability services does and one of the key components really is education and so we have and remind me is that the civic coffee hours the monthly civic coffee hours There's we often will have guests to talk about the resources and make sure that we're getting information out there and We have a newsletter that has wide reach that has all these resources that we tap into others who can submit and we have links to those.

We have our case managers who do go in the home.

I think you make a really good point, though, is making sure that we have, as we're assessing, like, just your healthcare needs, are there other ways in which we can make sure that we're providing information proactively about other potential discounts?

And so how do we, I think, be...

to wrap around, even with the intention of a certain thing, but just notice, like, hey, have you considered these discounts?

And so that's, I think, I'm hearing just something that we should take into consideration as we have all those various touches.

And I'm gonna go on a limb and invite you and other council members.

I do know, going back to both our Advisory Council and our Mayor's Office on African American Elders, is that I know that they're always looking, I know it says mayor's office, but they're looking for guests and ways to collaborate and speak directly.

And so hopefully the team is, I'm not misstepping, but you know, we're at a step, but I think they would love to have you and talk directly about their priorities and what they're seeing and hearing in the community.

And I was going to just add in our network of contracted providers that contract through our community living connections network, they have a network where we can add and make sure that the countywide services are funneling through to our community living connection partners that provide the information and assistance.

because they are directly connected and it's often like culturally specific agencies that provide those services.

So that's another channel of us to be able to get that information out as well.

Thank you.

That's exactly the information I was hoping for.

And it, you know, it really occurs to me because you guys have so many touch points that making sure that it's well integrated gives us an opportunity to make sure that we're serving people really well.

So, and I would love to join one of the advisory committee meetings.

So thank you for that invitation and my team will follow up.

Thank you, chair.

Thank you.

Council member Foster.

Council president Hollingsworth.

Thank you, Chair.

And I'll be super, super quick.

Just thanking you all for obviously the work that you all do.

And I just wanted to name something that I think is important because I've seen the work you all have done in the community and with the people and particularly through the senior centers and how those have become a lifeline for a lot of our seniors in our community and all of the programs.

that you all are funding or doing and us just thinking about you know when we're going through budget and we often talk about our community centers that are you know for everyone and other things but making sure that our senior community centers are funded well and resource well because we are aging as a population as a community as a city and I've talked to a lot of folks that, you know, aren't able to sell their home.

Well, they say, well, hey, I can sell my home in downsize, but I can't afford another place because of the high cost of living.

And so a lot of those seniors are aging in place.

And so we're going to have those have them more in Seattle.

And just thinking, just flagging that as we you know, I see your programming.

I see your program in this department.

continuing to increase and grow over the time as we are growing as a city, but just being thinking about our senior centers and how they continue to need more resources and connection as well.

So thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you for that, Council President.

I'm just going to go into mine, but I want to build on a point that the council president just made about the importance of our senior centers.

And thinking about just a couple weeks back, I was with the Somali Community Services of Seattle visiting their senior program.

I mean, a room full of seniors, not enough room at the table.

It was busy, but seeing the absolute importance of that space to be in community, connecting with one another.

We know that socialization is so important, if not the most important thing, for older adults, our elders.

And so being able to have city investment, we're cultivating those spaces to allow seniors, especially our immigrant elders, to be able to connect with others in language is just so important for well-being in older age.

Colleagues, I really wanted to have this presentation because I feel like we don't talk about our elders enough.

and the policy solutions, the investments that support their wellbeing and want to emphasize just how much I think it's important that we have intergenerational spaces.

I've been pretty upfront about being raised by my grandparents, but my great grandparents were my caretakers.

And that was such a gift in so many ways to be connected across generations, but also seeing firsthand the challenges with our adult family home system and skilled nursing facility system and memory care.

that so many families are having to face at some point or another.

So I felt it was particularly important that we have this presentation today to really bring the issues facing our aging population to the forefront.

especially as we are facing a number of cascading issues around our region.

And I just want to put one question on the table which is, I know we talked a little bit about WACARE is coming online which I think we're really excited about.

It'll be exciting to see that.

But can you speak to any programs for seniors that are facing funding challenges or are underfunded right now are there any backlogs happening?

We hear from advocates that there's a large need for meal and food services for older adults.

We certainly heard that in the budget season, but wanted to give an opportunity if you want to expand on that more.

Thank you.

And yes, the senior centers are a great example of combating the social isolation and the hub that serves seniors in the way that they want to be served from nutrition and volunteers.

So if you have not been to a senior center, put on your tennis shoes because there's a lot of dancing and music, but it's a great environment to just see seniors thriving as they're aging as well.

we always can use more funding for nutrition, right?

And thank you, there was the investment of 250,000 for senior nutrition services, but that is an area where there are wait lists and that is always where the greatest need that I've seen exist.

and when you talk also about WA Cares and intergenerational, we partnered with some YFE interns on doing the outreach in WA Cares, right, focusing on not just the person that's paying the tax into the fund that would be able to access the benefit, but wanted to get the impact from the older adult who is using some of those benefits right now and the younger generation of interns of like, how would this impact your life if you're, you know, your parent or your aunt went down and they needed help?

Would you be able to, you know, drop out of school to provide that service?

But yeah, nutrition, I just wanted to highlight that as well because I love the generational collaboration, but nutrition funding and Director Kim, are there any other areas that

Yeah, I think the key word is that intersectionality and dependencies of what's happening on the national and local level and how that impacts, you know, just even one of our programs.

And so I'd love just for the mention of our department leaning in and really supporting a community, our youth interns through, I think it was the Seattle Youth Employment Program, you know, there's collaboration to really ensure that Again, certain populations have access to the resources and knowledge.

But I know you know this, but I'll just state the obvious.

Any changes that happens with SNAP, Medicaid, Medicare, if there's not an increase, you know, just even the appropriate levels of COLA, when we have folks who are on fixed incomes, all of the affordability aspects then puts pressure on the services that we provide.

And so really the question is, with all these compounding issues, are we able to meet the needs of community?

Because when we see them, we see them at the front door.

And so while we might not be the ones who distribute SNAP, for example, or directly involved in some of these other areas, it changes the line and the queue and the demand, and we hear that from our providers.

The only thing I'll just mention is, of our $27 million total investments in the emergency food space, certainly we also have seniors going to food banks and accessing those emergency feeding But, you know, those providers will also tell you that they're having increased demand and also just, you know, the cost of all the things.

And so it is dynamic.

And so it's a complicated way of saying that, I think, There will never be enough resources, but how do we make sure that we're leveraging and making sure that people have access to what they have?

And sometimes the access and not knowing is half the battle.

So that's why I really appreciate the case management services, the senior centers, and all of these touch points to make sure that people even know what is currently available.

And I will also highlight additional funding, you know, for, thank you again for the additional funding for senior centers.

And that is one-time funding, you know, and we are looking at, we are going to add in 2027, five new agencies are coming in to the senior center funding.

So that will definitely be an area if we can figure out ways for additional support, the senior centers.

Thank you all for being here today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Wonderful.

And with that, thank you again.

Have a great weekend.

And we are going to move to our third and final item of business.

Will the clerk please read item three into the record?

Item 3, a resolution identifying the opportunity to develop a regional transportation hub adjacent to Westlake Park, creating a vision for how this hub will integrate with the surrounding neighborhoods and setting forth directions for functionality, safety and urban compatibility along with guiding principles for public projects planned for the area adjacent to Westlake Park.

Briefing and discussion.

Wonderful, thank you.

Our colleagues from the Office of Economic Development are joining us.

Thank you for hanging in there.

And as you get settled in, if you can please introduce yourself by stating your name and position into the microphone for the record.

Thank you.

Alicia Thiel, Interim Director for the Office of Economic Development.

Mari Harita, I'm with the Seattle Kraken and also the chair of the Downtown Seattle Association Board and co-chaired the Westlake Civic Committee.

So as we get started, I'll give a little bit, I'll zoom out a little bit and kind of rewind the tape on what this resolution is sort of a larger piece of.

And so one of the major initiatives that OED has worked on in partnership with other departments, including OPCD, Seattle Center, SDOT, the Waterfront, Parks and Arts, has been the Downtown Activation Plan.

And so that's been a multi-year initiative that identified a set of short-term actions that the city could take to both revitalize and broaden who downtown is for coming out of the pandemic, and also identified some long-term actions.

And so downtown, and for some of these stats that I'll give, I'm talking about downtown as defined by OPCD and the sub-area plan.

In addition to being a job center, hosting 30% of the jobs for the city, almost 30% of all jobs in the city, We've also seen housing grow by over 35% since 2015. It's home to many of our institutions for arts, culture, sports, and entertainment.

We have incredible public spaces, historic districts like the CID, Pioneer Square, and Pike Place Market.

and the ground floor experience holds lots of potential and it's exciting to see more small businesses choose downtown to locate in as well.

And especially with the opening of Waterfront Park, we've really seen downtown evolve into more of truly a Sunday to Sunday location in our city, where it's not just about commuting in for work, but where locals, including young people and families are experiencing more that downtown has to offer.

And so as I mentioned, the Downtown Activation Plan also identified some longer range ideas in addition to some of the short term actions.

And many of these longer range ideas require broader partnership.

And one of those is the possibility that Westlake holds as kind of like the heart of the city.

And so I'll advance.

just a little bit to show kind of the geographic area we're talking about.

And so this is an aerial snapshot of the Westlake area today.

And so we're talking about two blocks, so the block that has the park as well as the block north that currently has the mall and some other buildings on it.

and there's actually some pretty exciting things, as you know, planned for that area.

So in addition to the park renovations, phase one of which are underway right now and are going to wrap up later this year, we also have updates to the monorail coming.

Really, Westlake serves as sort of that downtown front door to Seattle Center and then Sound Transit's Westlake Station expansion to support the Ballard Link extension is also planned to be sited there.

and so we've got three overlapping public projects that are operating on different timelines and it would have been really easy for each of these projects to sort of proceed at their own pace and not really talk to each other but what we saw at the city was an opportunity to really knit them together in a way that even as they each proceed on their own track and with different actors, I mean we don't control all the pieces for example with Sound Transit's Future Station but we do see all of this adding up to a pretty unique confluence of a transit hub that intersects at both a gathering place and a retail center.

And so last year the city with OED in the facilitator role convened a civic committee that we tasked with recommending a vision concept for that two block area that coordinates the three projects and really kind of gives some direction without being overbearing or sort of like getting in front of decisions yet to be made, as well as a framework for coordinating the projects.

And again, understanding that we don't control all of the projects, including how the coordinated total will look.

And so in these visuals, I don't have renderings in part because we do wanna make sure that these guidelines are that, that they're guidelines, but they're not really prescriptive about like specifically the buildings we're talking about must look like this or that.

So I would like to thank the members of the committee who we convened last year.

They met four times over the course of the year, including committee co-chair Mari Harita, who's here with me today.

And I'd also like to give a special thank you to my colleague Bennett Vining, who staffed the Civic Committee along with me and our former director and did an excellent job keeping the work of the committee moving.

So as the committee met, their work was all informed by interviews with other stakeholders, including Sound Transit, as well as a cross-section of other folks, including residents, retailers, civic leadership, the district council member, Councilmember Kettle.

and we also took into consideration that there's other departments such as OPCD that have also done some work in the area and Westlake Park, if you've taken a look at the OPCD downtown sub area plan, Westlake Park is one of the big idea projects that have been identified.

And so we think all of this feels very consistent with the outreach that the city has done in general leading up to this point, as well as the thinking that the civic committee did as well.

and so as a civic committee got to work, one of the things that was very much on their mind was not just what was happening in the two block area, but also the potential that Westlake really holds as a gateway to so many other iconic, sorry, to use an overused word, but really like some of the big attractions that are downtown.

So whether that's the waterfront, Pike Place Market, Seattle Center, or Convention Center, really it is a jumping off point for so many additional things in addition to holding some attraction on its own.

So now I'll let Murray jump in on the principles.

Thank you.

Again, Madam Chair and members of the committee, thanks for the opportunity to present.

As Alicia said, and thank you, Alicia, for your great work and partnership on this.

We put the committee together comprised of people and organizations who are both very invested in and highly impacted by everything going on at Westlake.

and I think I was asked to co-chair this committee in large part because of my role at the Downtown Seattle Association where we talk all the time about downtown, the evolving role of downtown, continue to ensure that it's a welcoming and vibrant place into the future.

And Westlake is a critical part of that.

It was once sort of the heart of both pedestrian action as well as ground floor retail and an economic engine.

And it's gotten old and outdated and is obviously in need of a lot of rethinking and there's a great opportunity here and I applaud the city for getting ahead of it to think of these three different projects on three different timelines run by three different authorities of how we can, as Alicia said, create not prescriptive rulemaking but cohesive guidelines so that everyone can be working in the same general direction as we talked and you saw who was on the committee so you can imagine we probably had some pretty lively conversations.

We found that we were talking kind of in parallel tracks related but different focus areas.

We had the one conversation which we'll get to in a second about the actual visionary, design, Seattle-specific, how to make this super cool conversation, but then we kept coming back to none of that's going to work if we don't have certain things in place.

And so rather than just make assumptions, we wanted to actually put these on paper.

These are all concepts I'm sure everyone here is familiar with, but there was a huge focus on this has to be safe, this has to be clean, this has to be welcoming, and there was a lot of conversations about employees and residents who use this to get to and from work, and the experience that they're currently have, which is challenging.

We also want to restore this area as an economic driver.

We want it to help enliven ground for retail, small business, locally owned businesses and really highlight all that Seattle has to offer.

And as Alicia mentioned, downtown has changed and we now have more people living downtown than ever before.

And so taking that into consideration, what does that look like as a new hub of an urban neighborhood with families?

So that was sort of, these are the things we have to have in place.

And then the next slide was, sorry, you're better at multitasking.

This is more of the design principles.

And we really looked to the waterfront as a template.

The waterfront had, I think, five or six design principles.

And when you look at what they said, they're sort of specific, but not too specific.

Looking at those, I never would have envisioned the waterfront as it is, but now seeing the waterfront, I see those principles embedded in it.

And I think that's what we aspire to do here, These are meant to spark ideas rather than restrict them.

When the designers and the architects and the creatives take a look at this and turn it into something extraordinary.

So we obviously wanted to highlight what's unique and extraordinary about Seattle.

It's our nature, our natural beauty, our innovative spirit, our diversity, our heritage, and then using technology and design and art to bring these things to life.

As Alicia said, it is a gateway to and also the heart of downtown and it's, yes, we want people to be there and linger and spend time, but it's also if we have 70,000 people going through there, we want it to really help people get to where they're trying to go, the places like the Waterfront, the Convention Center, Seattle Center and other places.

And then really stressing the seamless interconnected nature of this.

Again, you have three different projects going on.

you have 70,000 people coming through this space.

We have to think very intentionally about how we design this as a multimodal hub.

Great.

Well, and that's it for our slides.

So we're happy to take questions from the committee.

Thank you for the presentation today.

Colleagues, questions?

Council Member Foster.

Thank you so much.

This is a great presentation.

I really value it.

And it's exciting to see the guiding principles and the work that you all have done together as a group.

I wanted to just ask quickly, one of the principles sort of talks about celebrating and representing the city's diverse culture and heritage, innovative spirit, et cetera.

I wonder if you can speak a little bit more if there are specific things that you talked about around making sure any projects benefit local artists or ensuring that projects are authentic and representative We were just having a conversation, and I know Council Member Juarez is here, around the need to make sure that when we are installing different art, especially that represents tribes or native folks, that we are making sure that art is authentic.

I wonder if you can speak more about those details.

I can start.

Thank you for asking that.

We talked about that specifically.

We decided not to include it here just because it was a little more granular, but absolutely.

I don't know the specifics of how the waterfront went about it, but I do know a little bit about those details, particularly involving the Coast Salish community.

clearly that would be a priority both through art but then also input like when these designs are made as we're talking about what this looks like making sure we have representation from the diverse community that makes up our city but not just the Indigenous Coast Salish community there's many other communities that over the years have had a big imprint in this community and we want to to utilize this space as a way to, I think, celebrate, uplift all of these and perhaps tell stories in ways that they haven't been told before.

Thank you.

Did you want to add?

Okay.

But 100%, 100% on that.

Thank you.

Council President Hollingsworth.

Thank you, Chair, and I'll be super...

I always say I'll be super quick.

I will.

And I might have missed this, but, you know, Westlake Park has always been a place where we have advocacy, you know, as a stage.

It's where people come and they advocate on issues, which I think is phenomenal.

And when we're building out and the project, just wanting to protect that as well.

You know, we're going to celebrate the city for the visitors, but also it's always just been a hub traditionally of the advocacy space with the stage and the folks to gather, you know, whichever cause people are coming to.

You might have said it and I might have missed it, but I just wanted to flag that.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council President.

That definitely also came up in the Civic Committee's discussions.

And I think some of those initial renovations to the park in particular are designed to, I think, facilitate more of that gathering rather than having a park that is bisected in a number of different ways.

One other consideration that the committee thought about too is, especially with the light rail station coming in, how then the space hosts, I think the estimate we heard from Sound Transit was 70,000 people coming through every single day.

And so I think that also speaks to sort of the importance of especially like that civic gathering area being one that can support both like more static gatherings and then also facilitates people moving across it pretty easily.

So I think all of this is designed to continue supporting.

Yeah, all of that rich history.

Yeah.

Thank you for that.

Any follow-up, Council President?

No, no.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you.

I certainly can appreciate any effort to try and coordinate around especially large civic projects so I can appreciate the efforts here and trying to really put together that kind of organization especially in a resolution so thank you for it for this initial briefing and I will continue discussion on on this resolution and I know this is something that councilmember Kettle has been working on I know he couldn't join us in committee today but would like to and sure he's connected and representing in committee and future discussions on this.

So thank you for briefing us today on it and more to come.

Great, thank you so much for your support, Madam Chair.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, colleagues.

We have reached the end of today's agenda.

Is there anything for good of the order?

Hearing no further business to come before the committee, we are adjourned.

It is 11.31 a.m.

Have a great weekend, everyone.