Select Budget Committee Session II 71520

And the session one of the Select Budget Committee meeting is going to continue.

We did take a short recess.

The Select Budget Committee is now back in order and will proceed with its business.

Again, I'm Teresa Mosqueda, Seattle City Council member and chair of the Select Budget Committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Flores?

Here.

Lewis?

Present.

Morales.

Here.

Peterson.

Here.

Sawant.

Here.

Strauss.

Present.

Council President Gonzales.

Here.

Herbold.

Here.

Chair Mosqueda.

I am here.

Nine present.

Thank you, Madam Clerk, and thanks again to our folks from IOT and Communications who helped to make these remote meetings possible, and all the folks in Central Staff for bearing with us.

We are still on agenda item number two.

We left off with a final vote on Amendment 6A.

Allie, I'm going to turn it back to you to get us oriented again.

We do have a few amendments still to go, and perhaps you could provide us with a brief update on where we are with Amendment 7.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

So Amendment 7 was the amendment I referenced several hours ago when we were talking about the COVID relief bill that would have gone up and is associated with the amendment that Council Member Strauss had proposed to Council Bill 119812. Because that amendment did not pass, Amendment 7 is no longer needed.

So we can move on to Amendment 8.

Okay, Council Member Strauss, I see you nodding.

Any additional comments on that?

to the small business stabilization fund?

Is that an amendment to the small business stabilization fund?

No, thank you.

This was an association with the earlier amendment that did not pass.

Again, just noting for my colleagues, I will likely bring an amendment on Monday allocating $5.2 million to the small business stabilization fund and associated amendment such as this amendment number seven would need to be put in place to replenish those funds.

Thank you, chair.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

So amendment number eight, nine and 10, we had initially planned to talk about together because they were sort of working together and there was some overlap.

But now this morning, a new version of amendment nine was distributed and it eliminated any conflicts between the proposals.

So instead of having this table in front of you, I'm going to go ahead and move to the effect statement related to amendment eight.

This amendment is sponsored by council members Herbold and Mosqueda.

This allocates 5% of the funds under the housing and services spending category to investments in permanently affordable homeownership programs, serving households with incomes up to 80% of area median income and decreases by 5% the funds allocated for the affordable rental housing investment.

I would move to amend resolution 31957 as presented on amendment 8 on the

It's been moved and seconded to adopt Amendment 8 as presented on the agenda and described by Central Staff.

Council Member Herbold as lead sponsor on this amendment, I will turn it back to you to be recognized to speak to this amendment.

Thank you again.

So I really appreciate having the support and co-sponsorship of Budget Chair Mosqueda on this amendment and appreciate her office's partnership while developing it.

The amendment would, as Ali in the city of San Francisco.

as explained, set aside a modest amount of reliable funding for permanently affordable home ownership opportunities available to households making up to 80% AMI.

and the funds would specifically be reserved for households at risk of displacement from their communities or who have faced barriers to home ownership due to past discriminatory and the amendment makes it possible to use funds for development, program, or operating costs, making it possible to invest in the health and capacity of community-based organizations that are leading in this work.

As we know, home ownership is key to building intergenerational wealth and a key driver of the racial wealth gap.

While the funds appropriated here would not address that problem at scale, It would give more BIPOC households every year the opportunity to bridge that gap for their own families after being shut out from this opportunity by Seattle's own past discriminatory policies.

Depending on the investments made, this funding stream could result in anywhere from 35 to housing market in Seattle.

We are able to provide new permanently affordable home ownership opportunities per year.

This is I think pretty significant of an accomplishment.

I'll offer a few comments as well as I don't see anybody with their hands up quite yet.

I would like to thank you for all of your work on this Council Member Herbold, your collaboration on this amendment and your focus on making sure that there's investments going into permanently affordable home ownership for those who've been especially denied home ownership opportunities in the past due to a history of discriminatory practices.

such as redlining and racist covenants in Seattle is really impressive.

I thank you for your long history of your advocacy on this and also for your dedication to this amendment here.

We have heard a call for investments in home ownership for communities who for generations have been harmed by the discriminatory practices, particularly among black communities.

And this amendment really works towards a broader strategy of investing in these communities.

And importantly, This funding will also be available for program support and capacity building for BIPOC-led community-based organizations who are working to build out home ownership opportunity programs tailored to those communities that they serve.

So a huge amount of appreciation for you and also for Erin House in my office who had the chance to work with your staff as well.

Appreciate her work on this and looking forward to supporting it.

Other council colleagues, any comments on Amendment 8?

Okay, seeing none, Madam Clerk, will you please call the record on Amendment 8?

Juarez?

Aye.

Lewis?

Aye.

Morales?

Aye.

Peterson?

Aye.

Sawant?

Aye.

Strauss?

Aye.

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Herbold?

Aye.

Chair Mosqueda?

Aye.

Aye.

Nine in favor, none opposed.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

The motion carries and the amendment is adopted.

Congratulations, Council Member Herbold, and thanks for all your work.

Let us move on to the next amendment for our consideration.

Ali, would you like to walk us through Amendment 9 and the considerations in front of us before we do that?

Just to tee up the changes that are on the horizon.

Happy to, Chair Mosqueda.

So I'll be describing Amendment 9B that was distributed this morning.

And I have put the effect description on the screen.

This amendment would increase the allocation of funds under the housing and services category by 2% from 60% to 62% and decreases the allocation of funds under the economic revitalization spending category from 17% to 15%.

In addition, it increases the amount of funding within the housing and services category directed to the community-driven fund.

And so the table below the bullet points here just highlight how it differs from the resolution as introduced.

And it assumed, let's say there was another, there is another version that assumed passage of, amendment 8, so they are not in conflict and I'll just get that pulled up while you all talk amongst yourselves.

Thank you.

Council Member Sawant, as original sponsor of amendment 9, would you like to move amendment 9B?

Thank you.

I move to amend resolution 31957 as presented on version 2 of amendment 9B, recently distributed.

Wonderful, it's been moved and it's been seconded by Council Member Morales, another sponsor of Amendment 9B.

Wonderful, thank you very much.

Council, Amendment 9B is in front of us.

It's been moved and seconded to adopt this Version 2 of Amendment 9B as described by central staff.

Council Member Sawant, I'll turn it over to you first if you'd like to address the underlying intent of your disamendment in front of us.

Thank you.

I'm proud to be bringing forward this amendment 9B, which will dedicate a portion of money raised by taxing Amazon and other big businesses to begin to provide.

undo decades of racist gentrification and also currently ongoing economic evictions of Black and Brown community members.

We've heard many political officials in recent weeks declare that Black Lives Matter.

The vote from the City Council on this amendment, which comes straight from the community and straight from the Justice for George Floyd movement, is one way in which those words can be concretized by allocating real dollars from the very progressive Amazon tax.

And the activists and community members who are watching will remember this discussion today as a direct result of the historic Amazon tax victory that our movement was able to win last week.

This is not the amendment that I'd originally introduced, which would have invested a full $15 million per year in housing for working people in the Central District to help provide affordable housing for Black working class and poor communities in the historically Black Central District.

I do think it is unfortunate that other council members have not joined me in supporting that demand, which has come from the community, and specifically from leading clergy in the Black community and faith leaders.

But this amendment is also more than what the political establishment perhaps would otherwise have originally proposed for dedicated central district housing for our black communities, which was originally nothing, zero.

And so we have now have, if we pass this amendment, we will have a commitment of at least $18 million.

And I wanted to really thank everybody who has provided the advocacy and leadership, which is hundreds of community members, but especially led by Reverend Robert Jeffrey and Angela Ying, and many other Black clergy, other clergy of color, and the faith community as a whole.

In fact, a very diverse faith community.

And I also wanted to thank all the young activists in the Justice for George Floyd movement, in Seattle, on whose courageous resistance and protest movement any of the victories that we are winning in this context rests.

And so I wanted to thank everybody who has been part of that and everybody who's been part of the tax Amazon movement, without whom, again, we wouldn't have won that historic Amazon tax last week.

This amendment will ensure that for the first time funds will be set aside beginning in 2020 and every year following to build affordable housing in the central district to provide affordable housing for black working class and poor families.

As I said, it's about $18 million a year.

And I wanted to clarify that represents a minimum floor of investment, not a ceiling because other housing funds in the Amazon tax, what we call spending plan resolution, which is this amendment is a part of the housing levy and other sources can and also should be accessed for affordable housing development in this very important neighborhood.

but we need affordable housing for our communities throughout the city, of course.

And I thank council members Mosqueda and Morales for co-sponsorship of this amendment.

And I hope that other council members will also support it.

I wanted to just quickly provide some additional context to this amendment, because as I noted, it has come to life because of the grassroots advocacy and organizing in the community.

Back in June, in the midst of the street protest for the Justice for George Floyd movement, Several leading Black clergy issued a challenge to the political establishment.

Reverend Robert Jeffrey, senior pastor of the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, Reverend Lawrence Willis of True Wine of Holiness Baptist Church, and Reverend Willie seals of Cherry Hill Baptist Church all wrote a letter to the mayor and to the city council stating, quote, as city leaders you must acknowledge the existence of persistence and institutional racism that has decimated Seattle's African American population.

Compared to other racial groups, African-Americans have the highest arrest rate in King County and the highest conviction rate in the state.

This is why the Black Lives Matter movement is so important and why so many of us have taken to the streets to protest racial injustice, economic inequality, police brutality, and mass incarceration.

The displacement of longtime African-American residents from Seattle's central area is the result of racist policies that originated in slavery, segregation, racial covenants, redlining, urban renewal, and now gentrification.

Black families are priced out of Seattle's unaffordable housing market," unquote. The three faith leaders called on the mayor and the city council to adopt their central area housing plan. And at the core of this plan, which by the way also included building tiny house villages, stopping inhumane sweeps of homeless neighbors and defunding the police, was the call for the city to commit to build 1,000 new affordable homes in the central district to reverse or begin to reverse decades of racist gentrification. And my social city council office has been proud to stand with Black clergy and other faith leaders and community activists on June 18th outside New Hope Church. We had a press conference where we committed to fight for $50 million a year in funding from the Amazon tax to build these 1,000 homes. The faith leaders have pointed out that while the Central District used to be overwhelmingly black, a struggling but culturally vibrant community, today it is less than 18% black. This is just dramatic and stunning. Soaring rents and home prices have systematically driven out African American families over the years. The faith leaders spoke eloquently about their vision of bringing back people who have been economically evicted from the community. to rebuild the neighborhood's past vibrancy and diversity. But they were also very clear-eyed that this will take money. We can't do this with words. We need dollars, and the city must provide those dollars. As Reverend Carrie Anderson, pastor of the Seattle First AME Church, said, quote, simply put, if Black lives matter, then affordable housing for Black families in the central area should matter, unquote. Profiteering developers certainly play a prominent role in the shameful gentrification, but the political establishment has also been complicit. I want to share a specific example so that both council members and the public understand the city's role over the decades in actively robbing the community over the years. Perhaps you may have read it in the op-ed by Reverend Willis and Reverend Ying that was just published yesterday in the South Seattle Emerald. Back in 1969, the minister at New Hope Church, right in the heart of the Central District, was approached by City of Seattle officials who demanded that the church sell its parking lot to the city for $34,000. If the church didn't agree, then the city establishment was prepared to take the land by eminent domain. So it wasn't a willing sale, it was coerced. The minister appealed to the city council, but at that time his appeal fell on deaf ears and the church was forced to sell. Today we are told that property is worth $2 million, more than eight times the inflation adjusted price of the 1969 property sale. Now, today's minister at New Hope, Reverend Jeffrey, wants the city to give that land back to the church, the land that was coercively taken from the church, so that his community can begin to build affordable housing on it for elders, families, veterans, and people experiencing homelessness. Reverend Jeffrey wants reparations, and he is right. Following the press conference on June 18th outside the church, a number of faith activists were eager to build greater support. the help of the People's Budget Movement, and through our council office, which is an organizing office, we were able to do, in just three days, we were able to get more than 220, and I believe nearly 230 now, faith leaders and activists from a wide range of faith traditions to sign an open letter to the city council, calling on the council to fully adopt the black clergy demands. And the letters are too numerous, for me to mention here, but I do want to read one excerpt from the letter from the Church Council of Greater Seattle that was sent by the Executive Director, Michael Ramos, who says, quote, restorative justice demands action to pave the way for the building of a thousand new affordable homes oriented to the Black community in the Central District. The Black lives of Seattle matter. targeting $50 million for funding for the basic human right of housing moves the needle to achieve the religious principle of sufficient, sustainable livelihood for all. And then he concluded by saying, in time, we will be judged by how our frontline workers, a majority of whom are people of color, are treated. We will be judged by how we opened our doors to people experiencing homelessness in one of the richest counties in the richest nation in the world. We will be judged by how we respected and prioritized Black lives by saying that they are having an affordable home matters in Seattle. And finally, we will be judged by our courage or our timidity. Do our elected leaders bend to the powerful corporate interests who benefit off the backs of city dwellers, or bend the arc toward justice ever more slightly through doing what is right and restoring the integrity of the city? So that is the choice, whether the political establishment will bend to the powerful corporate interest or stand with working people. Again, I thank council members Mosqueda and Morales for joining with me. and I urge all the council members to join with the 228 faith leaders and activists and the thousands in the community who are and in the people's budget movement who are saying that we need to prioritize and actually assign dollars to prioritize to be able to move into the central district affordably. And today's amendment, if it passes, will be a big victory for the community that is demanding this. It will not be everything that we were demanding, but it will be certainly a step forward. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Salant.

Council Member Morales, as the lead sponsor of Amendment 10 that was in the central staff memo, and a co-sponsor on Amendment 9B, would you like to speak to this amendment?

I do want to start by thanking Councilmember Sawant and Councilmember Mosqueda for working together on this.

I am withdrawing amendment 10. That amendment would have reduced the economic revitalization line item by 1% to increase the EDI by 1%.

the 2% that's been pulled out has moved into the community fund under housing services, with the understanding of the amendments that we passed earlier, that that would be in partnership with EDI, which is a very complicated way of saying that we are achieving the same goal here of starting to reverse the displacement that Council Member Silvant was talking about, reversing the gentrification and really putting money and power into the hands of community-led development.

So with that, I do have a few remarks.

I do want to acknowledge the many, many calls and emails that we have received, that I've personally received from workers, from immigrants, from the clergy, and neighborhood-based organizations who are fighting for access to resources.

As the chair of the Community Economic Development Committee, democratizing access to power and resources, this institution in particular, is a priority for me.

These neighbors who we've heard from are worried, as one caller mentioned this morning, about white supremacy within these institutions.

They're tired of fighting over scraps and being pitted against one another.

And the Equitable Development Initiative is important because, in particular, because there are limited residential resources, no residential resources, actually, that pay for the pre-development of some of these projects.

And that can really affect how EDI projects proceed or whether they are able to proceed if they don't have sufficient cash.

That's why, for example, the Food Innovation Center that we just heard about late last week took so long because there wasn't sufficient capital for site acquisition.

It's why at the Ethiopian Community Center child care got eliminated.

It's why the Rainier Valley Food Bank was in jeopardy because there wasn't enough money to make their ground floor part of a housing project pencil.

So this is an important pot of money that gives organizations access to capital and access to the cash they need to really drive the community-led decisions.

And it's why I've been advocating so hard to make sure that we have increased funding available for EDI.

Many of these projects don't have a housing component at all, but they're providing important services to our communities.

childcare, food security, healthcare, like the Rainier Valley Midwives, which is one of the projects that's in line next.

On a more general note, I do wanna say that according to Decolonizing Wealth, only about 8% of philanthropic dollars go to communities of color.

The current funding environment relies on philanthropy to bridge the gaps that public funders leave But for EDI projects, this often means a much longer process to complete a capital campaign because it's hard to raise money from outside your community.

And the racial wealth gaps that we've all been talking about make it difficult to raise significant amounts of money from within our targeted communities.

So that is white supremacy.

That is structural racism at play.

And that's why I think this is so important.

The last thing I'll say is that in light of the recent calls to invest in communities of color that this council has been very loud about committing to, it's important that we take action in as many ways as possible.

And I look forward to the next conversation we're having about rebalancing.

But as I've said before, we owe the black and indigenous communities about 500 years worth of investment.

And amending this bill to add another 2% for EDI and housing projects can help reverse the displacement and it's a small price to pay.

I look forward to this amendment and I look forward to continuing to add funds to EDI throughout the rest of the budget process that we're engaging in.

Thank you, Councilmember Morales, and thanks for your co-sponsorship of this and for your ongoing work on EDI as well.

Colleagues, I'll speak to this amendment.

I was really pleased to be able to bring this forward with Councilmember Sawant and Councilmember Morales to combine multiple efforts here, as you just heard about.

This combined amendment includes $20 million for the EDI program, as well as the $18 million that will go to creating long-term investments for housing projects that address the impacts of Seattle's legacy of discriminatory policies.

This is intended to be the housing-specific long-term fund that can be used for acquisition, construction, and program support for capacity building and operations of community-based housing.

And specifically, this amendment adds additional funding from the economic revitalization and labor funding source to further enhance community-focused funds.

We have defined the language in this amendment in terms of addressing the legacy of discriminatory policies specifically so that we can focus on investments in long-time black and indigenous communities and other communities that have been harmed by these policies of redlining and discriminatory lending policies while also complying with fair housing laws.

The approach here helps us address concerns about a single, help us address concerns about the ability to leverage funding so that we can create as much units, as many units as possible, and make sure that we're leaving more in community, more funding in community, more housing in community, more opportunities in community who have been historically harmed by past discriminatory policies.

And this funding source would comply with EDI, as you've already heard from the co-sponsors, allows us to broaden our office of housing funds in partnership with EDI.

And the intent is to really make sure that we get projects out of this funding that are led by black and indigenous and people of color led organizations, serving these communities, both through community organizations and through direct housing assistance.

In addition to the community fund, we have included investments in deeply affordable housing with a strong prioritization for housing that addresses the impact of redlining and past discriminatory practices, as well as prioritizing community-based projects that address displacement and advance equitable development goals, like small business spaces, community-serving amenities, and cultural assets.

I'm really excited about the possibility here.

Back of the envelope, we are estimating that we can now create between 3,200 to 3,500 new affordable housing within the first 10 years.

And we want to make sure that we're using those investments to really invest in the lowest income housing, particularly to create permanent supportive housing to address homelessness and displacement, which disproportionately affects BIPOC communities.

With that, I want to thank all of the folks who worked on this amendment and just call out my appreciation for Aaron House, who's also been working the Council Central staff and others as we created this hybrid amendment.

So thank you, Council Members Sawant and Council Members Morales for all of your work on your amendments and for your leadership on this amendment.

Any additional comments?

Okay, seeing none, Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll on Amendment 9B?

Torres?

Aye.

Lewis?

Aye.

Morales.

Aye.

Peterson.

Aye.

Sawant.

Aye.

Strauss.

Aye.

Council President Gonzalez.

Aye.

Herbold.

Aye.

Chair Mosqueda.

Aye.

Nine in favor, nine opposed.

Okay, wonderful.

Thank you, Council Colleagues.

The motion carries and Amendment 9b is adopted.

I believe, thank you, Council Member Morales, for your comments on Amendment 10. Without any additional comments, that appears to be all of the amendments for today's spend plan resolution.

Okay, not hearing any additional amendments.

Council colleagues, this brings us to the amended resolution.

The underlying bill has all of your tremendous feedback, your hard work, community sweat and tears in this, and we really appreciate all the work that's gone into this detailed spend plan.

Are there any additional comments before we do final passage?

Okay, I'm sure there will be many more comments to be said on Monday as we consider a final vote.

I will just again thank Ali and Tracy.

Thank you for your hard work.

I know we are not able to see you in person.

I hope you can feel the appreciation that all of council is sending your way via.

this Zoom presentation, because you have really been working day and night, and we appreciate all of your time, your creative solutions to coming up with amendments, and to really see that reflected in today's amendment list.

All of these amendments are very well crafted, and as you can see from the final bill and resolution that we have in front of us, they were nicely woven together.

All of these ideas, you've really crafted a tremendous way to put all of these ideas into one document.

Thank you.

You've worked some magic and we really appreciate you and your work will really lift up the lives of community across Seattle and improve the response that we have to COVID and in the out years, how we create a more equitable and resilient Seattle.

I want to thank council colleagues for your ongoing participation in this.

We are one more step closer to having the spend plan done.

Again, this will be discussed on Monday the 20th.

A very quick list of thank yous from me, in addition to central staff, IT, and communications, I want to thank my staff.

Aaron House did a lot of work on the economic I'm sorry, the Green New Deal pieces and the affordable housing pieces, Sejal Parikh really led on the economic revitalization pieces, and Farideh Cuevas and Aretha Basu, we couldn't do it without you.

Specifically to the community organizations, MLK Labor, Puget Sound SAGE, 350 Seattle, Mazaska Talks, Transit Writers Union, Housing Development Consortium, El Centro de la Raza, Front and Center, Got Green, Equity and Education Coalition, and the Honorable Velma Valerian.

SEIU 1199, Building Trades, Northwest Carpenters, Laborers, Local 242, Ventures, Unite Here Local 8, Expedia, Teamsters 174, Steve from Ethan Stoll and Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness, DESC, Representative Macri, Shift Zero and Emerald Cities Collaborative are just a handful of the organizations that we've worked with on various amendments that you all considered today.

And I greatly appreciate all of your votes and all the community participation.

Thanks to our staff.

With that.

Seeing no additional comments.

Will the clerk please call the roll on the recommended recommended resolution as adopted.

Flores.

Aye.

Lewis.

Aye.

Morales.

Aye.

Peterson.

Abstain.

Sawant.

Aye.

Strauss.

Aye.

Council President Gonzalez.

Aye.

Herbold.

Aye.

Chair Mosqueda.

Aye.

Eight in favor, one abstained.

Wonderful.

Thank you all.

This motion does carry and the committee recommends that the resolution be adopted as amended and sent to the July 20th City Council meeting for final consideration.

Thank you all.

That really does conclude our first session and we are now going to move into our second session.

Again, our hope is to get everybody off of this no later than six.

I believe we can get done by 530. And we do have a presentation that central staff has been working on here.

We have some guests with us for item three within this presentation.

And so to officially move this in front of us, I want to first allow for folks to sort of tee up their computers and get started here.

But just for the viewing public, we are on item number three.

Will the clerk please read item number three into the record?

Agenda item three, issue identification 2020 proposed rebalancing package for briefing and discussion.

Okay, wonderful.

So thank you to Lisa, Director Erstad, I see you.

Thank you for all of your work as we have teed up this 2020 rebalancing packets presentation.

This is the beginning of session two, and we usually try to do as much public testimony as possible.

We extended the public testimony this morning.

I apologize for folks for any confusion.

The agenda is published on Monday, and the remarks on Monday indicated it would just be public comment in the morning.

We will make sure that there is robust opportunity for public comment next Wednesday afternoon, and again, next Thursday morning if we have a meeting.

So there's still ample time to have a conversation about budget, including SPD's proposed budget as well.

So you will have additional time to comment both in select budget committee and also as always in full council.

Just a reminder though that that agenda was sent out on Monday and apologies for any of the confusion on my end and want to make sure that you all know it is still our commitment to get as much public comment as possible because we're running back to back today as we have really tried to respect the time of folks who are calling in.

We didn't want to leave anybody hanging on the line because we knew that we might run a little bit over.

So we will make sure to have robust public testimony next Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning if we have that meeting.

With that, Director said thank you again for all of your work and your team's work for teeing up the 2020 rebalancing package in front of us, and I don't believe we have any votes today, so it is just a presentation, and I will turn it over to you, Director.

Oh, you are on mute, Madam Director.

And for our guests that are going to be joining us, we will make sure to try to get to that about 3.30 at the latest, 3.45.

So thank you again.

I'll turn it back over to you, Director Anderson.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda, members of the committee.

I am Kirsten Aristad, the Director of Central Staff, and I'm joined by, I think, most of the Central Staff team, if not all, should their respective expertise be required.

My co-presenters, Tom Meitzel, Jeff Sims, Greg Doss, Lisa Kay, and I will walk through each of the pieces of the PowerPoint presentation separated by questions.

And if time allows, we would like for you to hold questions until the end of each segment.

But if time is running short, we are happy to take your questions offline or leave it to the end of the presentation.

Before I begin, I'd like to personally thank the entire central staff team.

I know that we are spending a lot of time thanking each other, and it's very much appreciated.

But their dedication and their tireless work these past few months have just been phenomenal.

And I just want to say thank you to them.

But I'd also like to thank two individuals in particular, Lisa Kay and Patty Wigrin.

As you know, Lisa has ably and almost single handedly developed a summer budget process for the council.

to rebalance the 2020 budget.

This is in the history, as far as I'm aware, the first in our history.

I would also like to acknowledge Patty Wigrin, whose work is mostly behind the scenes, but is extremely critical to the success of our team.

As the executive assistant, he truly keeps all the trains running and is fiercely protective of meeting agenda deadlines, along with Deputy Clerk the deputy clerks.

And I just want to say that the PowerPoint that he sent out for us, the delay was, had nothing to do with them.

It had to do with the workload and just trying to finish up all of the other materials last night by the deadline.

So with that, I would like to turn to my introductory and context setting piece.

The city, as you know, is facing major challenges, both in terms of a significant budget deficit, and the need to respond safely and effectively to the COVID crisis.

In some ways, many cities, including Seattle, are balancing their budgets to a moving target.

This moving target really makes things difficult.

Nevertheless, in the next few weeks, this council will evaluate the mayor's proposed 2020 rebalancing package and will be faced with making numerous decisions.

Your evaluation and decisions will be informed by the public testimonies and the hearing that you held on July 8th, as well as today's presentation and more than 20 central staff issue papers which have been attached to the agenda.

Next slide.

So I'd like to take a moment to look at the numbers.

The June forecast update shows a $311 million revenue shortfall for all funds.

On the expenditure side, the city has incurred added costs to address the COVID emergency.

Specifically, the executive is currently spending about $233 million in 2020 from a variety of funding sources.

Next slide.

Slide three, page three, reflects the general fund COVID fiscal challenge resulting in a deficit of $378 million, as noted on the bottom of this slide.

The general fund was the primary focus of the executive's rebalancing effort because, as we know, the general fund supports the lion's share of the city's programs, including the Seattle Police Department, which Greg Das will speak to here shortly, and the Human Services Department.

Of this amount, the $378,210 million comes just from the general fund and the revenue changes that are associated with the Seattle Center, and the Parks and Recreation Department due to event cancellations and vendor and community center closures.

This 210 amount also reflects the adjustments to the short-term rental tax and the admissions tax and the sweetened beverage tax.

The remaining $101 million, that amount is made up with capital and operating reductions, most of it coming from transportation-related adjustments to, or in STBD, the commercial parking tax, the school zone fund, and the real estate excise tax.

I'm throwing out a lot of numbers.

And I have been hearing from you that sometimes following these numbers is really difficult.

And in the interest of time, I am cutting short the explanations.

But I am happy, as are the budget coordinators, Tom Meitzel and Lisa Kate, to answer any questions offline.

So let's move to page 4. If switching from the general fund to all funds calculation, switching from revenues to expenditures makes things difficult to follow, there is an added layer of complexity in the council's rebalancing effort.

This is due to the myriad of challenges created by the current crisis.

Among these are time, or the lack of time, funding restrictions, the ongoing response to homelessness and affordable housing, and the anticipated slow economic recovery.

In fact, the 2021 general fund budget deficit, this is just the general fund, is, I think, currently estimated to be about $290 million.

We're also hearing, sorry, slide five.

We're also hearing demands from the public to eliminate institutional racism and reimagine the city's policing.

From a technical standpoint, we also lack the tools to easily track these significant mid-year adjustments in a remote work environment.

As some of you have noted, the proposed rebalancing package didn't come with a comprehensive balance sheet for what, as I mentioned in my opening comments, is a moving target.

Central staff will endeavor to create a balancing sheet for the budget chair and for the council as a whole to observe so that we can lay bare the numbers in order to ensure transparency and understanding.

And the final caution is that any one-time savings that is used or being proposed to be used in addressing this year's budget shortfall will not be available to reduce next year's budget shortfall.

And as we all know, future year budget sustainability questions have been raised by CBO and others.

Next slide.

So page six.

So what this, so I guess the slide is basically asking the question, what will this council evaluate relative to the mayor's proposed 2020 rebalancing package?

A package that is currently comprised of eight ordinances and four resolutions.

From where I sit, I believe the council will want to look closely at a number of options, which I have listed here.

That includes evaluating the proposed fund shifts from voter approved levies to backfill the general fund for day-to-day operations.

It will include determining how much the city should draw from the two fiscal reserve funds for this emergency.

And as you'll hear from Tom, Mike.

So in a moment, the mayor is proposing to tap a $29 million in 2020 to help balance the budget.

The other option is about how to allocate the $131.5 million Corona virus relief fund that we received from the federal government, as well as the, whether the council wants to make any changes to the list of specific department reductions, These are the one-time savings to decrease the budget deficit, and it's important to be reminded that many of these one-time specific reductions have already taken place, for example, savings related to vacancies since the executive-directed freezing of positions.

I'd also like to point out that the central staff's issue identification papers include issues that will warrant a close look by the council.

These papers include a discussion where warranted on issues that are related to race and social justice ramifications.

And finally, you will have an opportunity to evaluate a resolution included in the proposed balancing package, one of the four resolutions that would have the city crafting or the mayor crafting a proposed one-year budget rather than a two-year budget this coming fall.

And as many of you know, in the odd years, the city writes a one-year budget, but in the even years, as in the current 2020 year, the city writes a two-year budget.

So on my final slide, I just want to remind folks that Chair Mosqueda sent a memo on Monday describing the committee's next steps.

And in the interest of time, I would just remind you that there is an imminent deadline worth noting, and that is to submit amendment proposals to central staff by this Friday at 10 AM.

And please know that these amendments must be self-balancing.

And if you would like help in understanding what that means, don't hesitate to reach out.

So, Madam Chair, if there are no questions for me, I can hand the mic over to Tom, who will brief the committee on fiscal reserves.

Thank you very much, Director Arstad.

I will also echo my appreciation for your entire team, folks who are drafting the agenda, drafting amendments, providing us with the background documents.

We really appreciate it.

So, thank you for that overview.

Council colleagues, we are going to have three main components of the presentation today, as you saw in the PowerPoint that was shared.

We will pause after each of those sections for folks to ask questions.

I will note that there is going to be time at the end for people to tee up possible amendments that they are interested in.

You do not have to do that at this point if you are still exploring ideas or you have questions about things.

This is a great time to throw those out so your colleagues know what you're potentially thinking about, but there will be ample time to talk about amendments next Wednesday and Thursday.

So again, This is sort of issue identification to let folks know what you're identifying as possible issues that you would be bringing to council.

But it is also not necessarily all encompassing of the various amendments that are going to be percolating.

We do have some time at the very end for some council members to have identified specific issue areas.

If they would like to flag any of those for us, you're also welcome to do so.

I will note that These three presentations in front of us, I'm going to ask central staff to go through each presentation and then we'll take questions from council members.

With that, I'll turn it back over to Tom.

Madam Chair, may I ask a quick technical question?

Please go ahead, Council Member Juarez.

Thank you.

We're looking at next steps and I'm writing fiercely on how we're going to get these amendments in.

We have until Friday the 17th, by 10 a.m.

to get our amendments in that must be self-balancing to be discussed on July 22nd and July 23rd.

That's correct, Madam Morris.

That's correct.

That is correct, Council Member.

Okay.

I just want to know that July 22nd is important to me, but that's okay.

Oh, yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

appreciate that question and clarification, and we will again circulate the calendar.

I believe Lisa included it with her follow-up email as well earlier this week, but I'm happy to answer any questions as Director Aracet also signaled.

So Tom, without further ado, we will turn it back over to you.

Oh, Council Member Herbold, I'm sorry, I didn't see your hand.

Go ahead, please.

I just think it's very important to recognize that in the PowerPoint where we're identifying current challenges, that there is a current challenge that is not recognized, and it's obviously it has great impacts on District 1, but it has impacts on other districts in the region as a whole, and that is the economic impacts associated with the closure of the West Seattle Bridge.

the city of San Francisco, the city of San Francisco, the city of San Francisco, and again, there are not only just global economic impacts about that citywide, but there's also impacts to our city budget for 2020. There is significant unanticipated spending associated with preparing for the decision to either rebuild or funding demands associated with repairs that have to be made to the lower level bridge, another $10 million necessary for just the lower level bridge.

And this is on top of the nearly $4 million of unanticipated spending that has been done this year to address the needs that I mentioned around the West Seattle Bridge.

Thank you.

Well said, and thank you for highlighting that.

I continue to hear from residents and business owners, community organizations in West Seattle.

If this were any other year, the West Seattle Bridge would constantly be the headline above the fold.

But for all of the other things that are happening, it is one of many issues that is compounding the crisis that is in front of us to address via the budget.

So thank you, Council Member Herbold, for raising that.

Tom, thank you so much.

We'll turn it over to you.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

Good afternoon, members of the Select Budget Committee.

Tom Mikesell with your central staff.

I am going to cover in three slides just an overview of the city's general purpose fiscal reserves.

I'm going to describe some proposed uses, both in the mayor's rebalancing proposal, as well as the jumpstart legislation that was discussed this morning, and then offer a proposed technical amendment that resolves a funding conflict that's identified.

So, if I can- Before you move on, I want to make sure, just because audio has been an issue in the past, I can hear you well.

Your video is slightly delayed, but I can hear you well, and I wanted to just get a thumbs up from other council members if they can hear him as well.

Thumbs up?

Okay, please continue, Tom.

Okay, thank you, Chair.

So, if I can direct your attention to the first table on this slide before you.

This is a representation of our two general purpose reserves, the Emergency Fund and the Revenue Stabilization Fund.

The Emergency Fund is established to provide a pool of resources for appropriation for unanticipated emergency spending during a fiscal year for things like unanticipated natural and human disasters, preserving the public order and public health, payment of personal injury or property damage claims, or for other mandatory spending requirements that were after the added after the budget was adopted.

Based on the current existing policy for the emergency fund, the balance is not supposed to fall below $60 million as adjusted by inflation using a 2016 year as the basis.

Based on that policy, the budget that was adopted last fall funded the reserve at a level of $66.9 million, which you'll see on the table is 4.5% of the 2020 adopted budget expenditures.

Moving now to the Revenue Stabilization Fund, next row on the top table.

This is a fund that is established to also pool, reserve a pool of resources for activities that would otherwise be reduced in scope or suspended or eliminated due to unanticipated shortfalls in general fund revenue similar to their experiencing for this year.

Seattle Municipal Code limits the maximum annual balance to 5 percent of certain forecasted general fund tax revenues.

The 2020 adopted budget funded that reserve at its full level of 60.8 million dollars or 4 percent of general fund expenditures for the year.

So total total amount of those reserves combined is eight and a half percent.

So moving to the next table on this slide, Council Bill 119825 is the budget revisions ordinance that was submitted by the executive as part of the rebalancing package.

That proposal, as Kirsten mentioned in her opening remarks, uses $29 million from these combined reserves as part of the rebalancing proposal for 2020. It's worth noting that this proposal uses the emergency fund for revenue backing, though the fund, as described previously, is technically for added emergency expenses.

So if we can move to the next slide, I'll discuss the cumulative impact on the balances, both with the mayor's proposal and also with the jumpstart spending proposal for 2020. So starting, so just to orient to this particular table, we have the 2020, the different kind of concepts, starting from a budgeted balance, working through the mayor's proposed uses, and then establishing a balance level after the mayor's proposal, and then adding the proposed uses in the jumpstart proposal.

So we start with a combined balance of 127.9, The mayor's proposal uses approximately half from each fund to come up with the $29 million for balancing.

And as shown, results in a total combined balance of $98.7 million.

Then the JumpStart proposed uses come in with approximately 66.9 from the emergency fund.

and 18.9 from the Revenue Stabilization Fund for a total combined use of approximately $86 million.

So as you'll see, the combined effect of these two proposals, oh, I would also note, there is a footnote here, a very important footnote, which notes that the Jumpstart proposal uses, though they are a use in 2020 of these funds, the spending plan, which is also separately considered in council bill, 119811 would as a first order of business from the payroll expense tax proceeds in 2021 would replenish these uses as shown on this table.

That being said, the balance after the proposed uses would be a negative $15 million in the emergency fund, positive 28 for a combined $12.9 million in both funds.

So if we can move to the next slide, Just to tee up an option for essentially what would be a technical amendment to resolve this conflict.

So similarly constructed, starting with a beginning balance of $127.7 million, if an amendment to the Executive Council Bill 119825 is put forward to take the entire amount of the $29 million proposed for 2020 from the Revenue Stabilization Fund then that would essentially resolve the conflict.

The ending balance of the combined funds would be the same.

However, the balance in the emergency fund after those uses would be zero and the revenue stabilization fund would have the remaining balance of 12.9.

And then again, to key back up the concept that the payroll taxes, first order of business in 2021 is to replenish the uses that are proposed for this year.

That would essentially restore the balances for deployment in 2021 to the $98.7 million, which is the sort of the middle of the table, the balances after mayor's proposal.

And I believe that is the extent of mine, so I can turn this over to Jeff Sims.

Before we do so, are there any questions for Tom?

So Jeff is going to cover the COVID.

we're going to move on to councilmember Herbold.

Councilmember Herbold has a question for Tom.

I feel like I've asked this question before and I really apologize because I know it's been answered.

I'm having a hard time understanding that footnote on slide 10 where we say that we are going to be replenishing the February of 2022, how are we going to use funds that we're not going to be receiving until 2022 to replenish the two emergency funds in 2021?

Thank you for the question, Council Member Herbold.

So I'm going to, it's going to be a little bit of an accounting explanation, though, technically when, When tax proceeds that are earned in a year or so, or in this case, the tax liability for the payroll expense tax begins in fiscal year 2021. All of those liabilities are then due with the final payment of 2021, which is technically one month after the end of the fiscal year as the legislation is written, which would mean then when the accounting section of the finance department and FAS looks at the collections that come in in February 1st of 2022. They would then accrue those monies back for use in the 2021 budget.

So it's essentially the modified accrual basis of accounting that makes those resources that are earned in 2021 available for use in 2021.

Thank you, and as you provide your explanation again, it confirms for me that I have indeed asked this question before and you've answered it.

Can you, before we wrap up here, just speak to any sort of uncertainty about this accounting exercise?

If we are planning to spend money in 2021 or planning on, in this case, replenishing the Emergency Fund and Revenue Stabilization Fund with this level of funds from the payroll tax.

Is what we decide to spend in the beginning of 2021 and what FAS is anticipating billing, is there a good certainty that there will be a match between what we're billing for and what we're actually receiving in 2022?

Thank you for the question again, Council Member.

essentially a matter of, it's similar to how we do with our current B&O taxes.

It's a similar structure that if there's taxable activity that's happening and a payment is made within a certain accounting window, then those monies can be accounted for in the current year's budget.

So to the extent that monies from the payroll expense tax are budgeted in 2021 and during the fall process as according to the spending plan the estimate of revenue that is used for the development of that budget would be the guideline to determine how much of the how much of those how much can essentially be deployed from the payroll expense tax with the first the first cut of that proceed going towards the replenishment of these funds.

Thank you.

Okay, Council Colleagues, any additional questions for Tom?

Tom, I'm not seeing additional questions.

Thank you for your presentation.

I'll turn it over to Jeff.

Thank you for walking us through the COVID relief section here.

Of course, committee chair.

So council members, you're aware that there's $233 million in COVID-related spending in the rebalancing package, and the mayor's transmission presents that to you in six guiding principles that have 46 uses underneath them.

That's an understandably complicated package to digest, though it does have the elegance of covering everything that is included in the balancing package related to COVID spending.

It is possible also to think about our COVID spending differently, particularly in seven discrete activities that then covers the vast majority of the $233 million, leaving a remaining amount that I'll get to in just a moment.

Those seven activities will be what you can see on the next couple of slides.

First, first responders supports that add up to just over $40 million.

Food access programs, and this can be a range of delivery, whether that's through a food bank or a food voucher, those adding up to just a little bit more than $34 million.

Shelter and housing supports that are just a little bit more than $16 million.

Next slide, please.

Rental assistance that's just over $14 million.

Business and nonprofit support for $5 million.

Hygiene services for just for just a little bit less than $4 million.

And then staffing for the emergency response on Line G, which is listed as $56 million.

I want to note that what is shown there as Line G, especially the redeployed staff, actually are costs that are supporting those the discreet items that are above it.

For example you have staff in Seattle sorry in Seattle Public Utilities at the libraries and parks all of whom are supporting our hygiene services that you would see in Line F. But the cost of those staff who are repurposed for necessary COVID activities is shown in what is it's G.

So altogether, that adds up to $171 million.

So as I said, the majority of the $233 million that is presented as the city's spending on COVID so far.

If we go to the next slide, you'll see that the remaining amount, the almost $62 million, I've relabeled it as other activities.

These are all necessary expenses related to COVID.

And you can see if you look at the lines that are specifically listed there, like paid leave and unemployment insurance, public testing options, things like that, Those all add up to $50 million, except for the other uses at the bottom.

So very quickly, we actually run through almost everything that is in this $233 million package.

But I think it's an easier approach to think about some of those discrete activities that have been the priorities of the council expressed at various times already, and then think about that there's also some underlying support functions that are necessary.

I want to also emphasize that the other uses, the $11.816 million you see there, That's not a bucket of unspent funds.

That's actually discrete things.

For example, there's $190,000 that were associated with our street closures and things like that.

So there's a lot of smaller amounts that don't add up to the tens of millions of dollars level, but they do add up to a fairly significant amount.

So overall, that's our seven areas.

And let's move to the next slide.

I want to highlight not only that there's $233 million in the balancing package, We're also aware that there are some funding amounts that have not yet arrived to the city that will be coming.

They aren't all for use in 2020. In fact, they all extend into future years.

That's going to be more than $37 million.

The emergency solutions grant allocation that we'll be getting sometime soon allows us to go all the way, estimated to around September 30th of 2022. You can see the various potential uses there.

They're mostly related to homelessness and services.

Community Development Block Grants, which we don't have the estimated amount for that yet, but we do have an estimated time frame that those funds can be used and you can see the various uses.

The council has actually already acted on our CDBG amounts available already and prior legislation.

And then you can see we'll also be receiving another grant from the Washington Department of Commerce that's likely to be specific to shelter.

That's how the funds are allocated by the state legislature.

But the final details of that are not totally outlined.

I just want to highlight, though, that there are some other funding streams that will be coming down the line.

They just aren't here yet.

And a lot of these will be related to necessary expenses related to COVID.

Then the last slide that I have for you, and then I'll open up for questions, is one policy issue that we wanted to highlight for your attention.

The proposed balancing package has some costs, some funds allocated within it that are for potential expenses.

So the first, you can see each of these lines in the table here, the largest of which is a little more than $15 million that is for FEMA and unanticipated costs.

That is essentially, it's a little bit less than half of what is being submitted for potential reimbursement by FEMA, as well as thinking about unanticipated costs.

So it's thinking through if we submitted an expense to FEMA that was found not to be eligible for some reason and that would cover those kinds of expenses.

And also, as you all know, the COVID emergency pandemic continues to evolve in our country and there's a lot of unforeseen expenses that we might not be able to anticipate at this time.

There's also $10 million that are for reopening city services.

The majority of that I would characterize as purchases that will be related to and sanitizer, things like that, that are necessary expenses to respond to the COVID emergency, that we're going to have to have those types of supplies in order to reopen the city.

And then you can also see the last two are items that actually have been previously appropriated by the council, but are part of the package.

And those are presuming that the FEMA emergency will not be extended all the way through the end of 2020. And so that we'll need funds to support the de-intensification of our shelters and some of the hygiene services that have been made available to people in our city in order to make sure that those services don't just dramatically stop overnight.

So those are all expenses that have varying degrees of probability that they'll be incurred.

They're planning for things that we think are likely, but there is possibilities that circumstances change based on, for example, the FEMA emergency could be extended through the end of the year.

That would affect those last two lines and how much was necessary in order to maintain our shelters and our hygiene services.

And so there's a policy decision there for the council to look at thinking about the needs that are present right now compared to the needs that you anticipate might be needed in the coming months.

And that's actually all of my summary for the COVID-related spending, but I will pause for any questions.

Wonderful.

Council colleagues, are there any questions for Jeff on this portion of the agenda?

Okay, Jeff.

I am not seeing any questions.

I know that there's a handful of possible amendments that folks have begun to tee up for the 2020 rebalancing package.

So perhaps there'll be questions later.

Council Member Herbold, please go ahead.

It's okay.

I keep being so slow on the draw here.

As it relates to the $11 million that we have not yet received in the joint application with King County, is this $11 million the amount the city is applying for expects to receive, or is the $11 million anticipated to be split with King County?

And if it is split, what's the prediction for how much would come to the county?

So I believe the 11 million is the amount that would arrive to Seattle.

But as you noted it's a as a joint application in order to receive that 11 million dollars a condition of the RFP is that we have a joint application with the county that discusses various uses and and and that's the only way we can receive the full amount.

Thank you.

Are there any additional questions.

Okay, Jeff, thanks again for your presentation.

We really appreciate it.

And we're moving on to the SPD budget inquiry.

Thanks again to Greg Doss for all of his work on central staff for leading the detailed questions and analysis for us on SPD.

We do have a community presentation as well that will follow his opening comments.

So Greg, we'll turn it over to you to walk us through your analysis here as well.

Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee.

As you mentioned, I'm here today to talk with you about the reductions that the executive is proposing to make in the 2020 rebalance budget.

I don't anticipate a very long presentation today because many of you are familiar with the proposed reductions.

And I know there's interest in moving beyond these reductions to move to the community presentation.

So we'll start out at a high level and just say that the 2020 proposed rebalancing budget would increase or reduce, I'm sorry, SPD's total expenditures by 20.3 million.

And that equates to a 5% annual reduction or a 10% reduction if you're calculating for the last six months of 2020. The executive proposes to make these reductions administratively.

And so that's important because if the council wants to ensure these reductions are made legally, they would need to include them in the appropriations bill for the rebalanced budget.

Otherwise the exec will just make the reductions themselves.

And so with that I'm just going to go ahead and hit these various categories at a high clip.

Reducing travel and training expenses.

SPD has paused all elective travel and training for the duration of the COVID emergency.

All internal and external in-person training has been restricted to those that are required for certifications or for building skills to perform basic job functions.

The $597,000 that you see that's being reduced here is a little bit more than half of the entire travel and training budget for the department.

I've asked the department to give me updated figures on what is left in travels and training, and I should be able to get that for you sometime soon.

Moving to the next category, civilian hiring savings.

As you know, there is a citywide hiring freeze, and this also applies to SPD.

Just a couple things to note here.

Because of recent departure, there is one victim advocate position that is vacant, one crime prevention coordinator position that is vacant, and two community service officer positions that have yet to be hired.

Both of those have received waivers.

And I bring those to your attention because those are typically public-facing positions that the council is interested in hearing about.

The next item I'll talk about is overtime expenses.

As you can see, the reduction here is about $8.6 million.

This is coming as a result of SPD reducing its emphasis patrol expenditures, its staffing of special events and sports, its reduced overtime expenditures on traffic and parking enforcement, community engagement, all the various kinds of activities that are currently suffering from a lack of demand related to COVID.

So SPD indicates that it plans to wrap up this work as demand for service is renewed.

This said, one of the issues that I want to point out to you today is that it will be difficult for the department to do this as they have recently indicated to me that their entire overtime budget is now depleted.

As many of you know, The department had a $30 million overtime budget at the beginning of the year.

The proposed reduction of $8.6 million, along with the need to fund the demonstration costs of $6.

I'm sorry, the reduction of $8.6, along with the need to fund the demonstration costs of $6.3, have eliminated just about half of the overtime budget.

And SPD has reported that the other half has been spent to date on activities such as training, shift extensions, and other internal functions.

So from this point forward, SPD is going to need to fund overtime by reducing other areas of their budget.

CBO and SPD have indicated that they are working on potential solutions to this problem, but have not yet developed any strategies that they can share with us.

Given this situation, it's not surprising that SPD is no longer able to conduct the $848,000 We have a number of emphasis patrols that the county, that the city added to the budget in the 2020 cycle.

These patrols included overtime for deployments to curb violence in downtown and other neighborhoods, as well as to provide officer visibility on Alki Beach and downtown during the holidays.

SPD says it's going to do what it can to maximize its use of regular on-duty time.

for those patrols.

Moving along to equipment savings, equipment savings is about $2 million.

SPD's restricted all purchases to only those items that are essential for the COVID response.

As long as the reductions are temporary and assumed only for 2020, then those purchases can likely be pushed into 2021 and there shouldn't be significant operational impacts.

One thing that is notable is that there is a proposed one-year delay of the computer-aided dispatch project that was funded in the 2020 budget.

The savings associated with that project and its delay are not captured in that $2 million, but are rather repurposed in SPD's budget.

And I wanted to bring to your attention that the money for that CAD is being repurposed such that about a half a million dollars is going to go to reinvestment in community and the re-envisioning police services work that the mayor has indicated is going to be underway soon.

About 800,000 is going to be used to extend the life of the current CAD system, and 1.4 million is going to be used to hire police dispatchers during the city hiring freeze.

The next item is really more of a technical correction.

It is reducing sworn wages to reflect CPI-U actuals.

The Seattle Police Officers Guild contract required a wage increase in 2020 that was based on the CPI.

At the time that the budget was written, the CPI was 4.1 percent.

It is now 2.7 percent, and so that is going to save the city $3.1 million.

I think as most of you know, the planning for the North Precinct has been put on hold and that is also part of the $20 million, but that savings is actually in FAS.

It's not going to be reduced in SPD.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about sworn staffing recruitment and retention.

Council added $814,000 to the 2020 adopted budget to fund $7,500 hiring bonuses for new recruits.

and $15,000 hiring bonuses for lateral transfer hires.

When receiving the hiring bonus, a new recruit or officer receives half of the bonus upon hire and then the remaining half a year later.

ASPD has indicated that it has spent $614,000 of the original ad, leaving about $200,000 unexpended.

Their plan is to, the city budget office plans to and the proposed budget to cover the remaining obligations for the recruits who have yet to receive the second half of their bonus.

And then finally, council added 1.2 million to the 2020 adopted budget to fund 12 recommendations outlined in the mayor's recruitment and retention report.

SPD has put that project on hold and the two and three quarters FTE that are funded by that initiative are currently working on COVID-related activities.

The department has indicated that it has spent about half of the 1.2 million for that project.

And that's going to summarize my presentation.

The next slide was simply the policy issues that I just brought to your attention as I was running through the reductions.

So open for questions now.

Thank you very much, Greg.

I see Councilmember Lewis, Councilmember Strauss, and Councilmember Herbold.

Councilmember Lewis, please go ahead.

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

Greg, thanks for all your work on these issues surrounding the police department over the last couple of weeks.

I really appreciate the information you've been able to get for all of us here.

I just wanted to ask as it pertains to these reductions that the mayor has identified, .

Does any of this 20 million require, to your knowledge, some level of bargaining before this 20 million in savings could be locked in?

Or could where these things are being drawn from immediately be applied to

The city budget office is planning on using this 20 million to fill in the budget shortfall.

And because we're talking about a lack of work in these areas, no, I don't believe that any of them are going to require bargaining.

Great.

Just wanted to clarify that.

That's it.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

Council Member Strauss, you're up next.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

Thank you, Greg, for all of your analysis.

In response to the mayor's proposals this week of the items we had in committee last week, how much of the proposal from Monday is included in this 2020 rebalance?

Nothing.

OK.

The 2020 rebalance proposal that I just presented to you is a proposal that was brought to the council prior to the mayor developing the proposal that she talked about in the press release and in the press conference on Monday.

Thank you for that.

Do you foresee any of those programs or changes being able to be reflected in this 2020 rebalance or is that all for 2021?

I think it's my understanding that the mayor is going to work on proposing some of those reorgs in the 2021 budget.

I do not expect that she is going to propose those for the 2020 rebalance here in the next couple of weeks.

Okay.

Thank you.

But that council member is not to say that the council could not choose to do that themselves.

Great, and just now that we're on this line, I'll just ask my last follow-up.

What would the implication of moving the 911 call center out of SPD in the 2020 rebalance, what would the implication of that be?

That's something that I think I'd want central staff to give some thought to and talk with you about.

There's of course the logistics of of how that would happen in legislation.

And then there's also sort of the practical implications of how that would happen on the ground.

And so that is something that probably would take some planning and I'd want to get back to you with a more thorough answer.

Thank you.

Okay, wonderful.

I see Council Member Herbold and Council Member Solan.

Council Member Herbold, you are on mute still.

Yes, I am.

Thank you.

So my first question I think is related to the line of questioning that Councilmember Strauss was making, but just to be very clear, the $20 million in the mayor's proposed administrative cut, are you saying none of it has been programmed for 2020 spending at this point?

It has been, in the balancing packages that you have heard about from Director Noble, the 20.3 million that is reduced by SPD is assumed as part of his general fund balancing scenario.

It has not been, we've not received a bill that has an appropriation reduction, it's just savings that the department plans to make in general fund to allow the city to match its expenditures to its revenues.

So if we wanted to program that $20.3 million into community-based violence prevention investments in black and brown communities, we would have to find another $20.3 million because the executive has just simply plugged it into the rebalancing package.

I think that's a fair assessment.

And then I just have two more questions.

I would really love to get a little bit more detail about how it is that seven months into the year, SPD has used all of the 2030 or 2020 overtime budget of $30 million.

I understand there's a $8 million cut that the mayor has proposed, and then there's the $6 million in expenses associated with overtime around the the protests, which is just mind-boggling to me.

But we knew very early in the year that SPD, because of a reduction in crime, was that SPD had stopped doing emphasis patrols.

And because they were going to rely on their regular patrol units to do, you know, focused patrol in the areas that were originally identified as emphasis patrol areas that the term emphasis patrol.

is a term of art focused on the use of overtime, not the focus on an area, but specifically the use of overtime.

So early in the year, they're like, oh, we don't need to use overtime because we have this additional capacity so that we can just use our regular patrol instead of using overtime.

Another huge part of the overtime budget is events, events that aren't happening right now.

So I'm just really at a loss.

uh for how um $22 million in overtime of a budget for $30 million for the whole year.

We're in June, and $22 million or $14 million, if you count the mayor's cut, has been used in overtime.

So I'd like to get more detail about that.

And then lastly, just want to flag that there are categories in the budget that we are able as a council to cut or add to that level of detail.

And so some categories that were formerly a separate line item, are now part of a broader funding pool.

So now there's a broad funding pool called criminal investigations that includes several separate line items, for instance, narcotics and special victims.

And it makes it, I think it might make it difficult for the council to cut within that broader I'm just concerned that if it's part of a broader funding pool, it might make that more difficult.

And I don't know if we need to go back to the previous level of detail that we had had in prior years, or if there's a way to accomplish what I'm describing through budget provisos.

Thank you.

Greg, any comments on that?

Yeah, Councilmember, I'll say, first of all, you're absolutely right that events and emphasis patrols are two very large categories.

About 6.8 million are budgeted for events and about 2.2 million are budgeted for emphasis patrols.

But there are other areas that have large allocations.

Professional standards when it comes to training is just under 4 million.

criminal investigation is about $3.4 million in the budget.

Still, though, you have a point that expenditures in areas outside of events and outside of emphasis patrols obviously were significant if we got to a point as a city where the overtime budget is fully expended.

So I will get more information about how that happened.

And then regarding your second point, I think what we're talking about here, what you're talking about is a reorganization of appropriation, what we call BSL or the appropriation level that is in the budget.

And it is true that last year, SPD and the executive aggregated some of those BSLs, those appropriations into larger appropriations, for instance, Each precinct used to have its own appropriation.

All five of them did.

And all of those were aggregated under a patrol ops appropriation.

So that is something that we can pursue with the law department to see if it would allow the council a greater level of control if those appropriations were broken out again.

Thank you.

Thank you, councilmember Herbold.

I see councilmember Sawant and then councilmember Lewis.

Thank you.

I just wanted to make sure I heard correctly that Seattle police have spent half their allocated hiring bonuses and Assuming that's correct, I just wanted to point out, I mean, this is happening at the same time that other departments have been given a hiring freeze.

And just to point out, as I pointed out before, the Office of Civil Rights and the Office of Labor Standards do extremely important work that have the opposite effect, which is a very progressive effect on the marginalized communities that are facing a negative impact from policing and excessive use of force on the police.

So the departments that can have a positive impact for our marginalized communities and where the staff are doing excellent work in the civil rights and labor standards offices are facing hiring freezes, but the police department has outrageously spent half their hiring bonuses.

So in other words, not only did they continue hiring, they continued And I should mention that the kind of movement and uprising that we are seeing, we have seen over the last month or so, is extremely important because many of the council members who are now talking about defunding the SPD which is very important but this is coming from the pressure from the movement because just last year there was a vote on the hiring bonuses and unfortunately my office was the only no vote on the hiring bonuses.

Both the council and the mayor's office championed those hiring bonuses which is extremely unfortunate and at that time we had said and I would still say you know where are the hiring bonuses for social workers and for educators and the people who are doing important work in our community.

And so, you know, we're talking about police officers having made outrageous amounts of overtime.

And, you know, has anybody tried to correlate the officers who have had the maximum amount of money through overtime and so on?

And also they're, you know, correlating their track record of violence.

lack of accountability.

And so overall, also, I think it's important to challenge the mayor's credibility here because, you know, she has claimed that she would cut $20 million from Seattle police without really putting any of it in writing in her budget because, you know, it's we are told that they will be done administratively.

But now we hear that they've used all their overtime budget in the first half of the year.

But we are supposed to believe that the police department will not use any more of that.

And in addition to that, as we had the report from Ben Noble some weeks ago, just the outrageous, unbelievable number, actually, of having spent over $6 million on just policing the George Floyd protests.

I mean, in just one month?

I mean, that's just unbelievable.

What else could you do with over $6 million dollars.

So, I mean, I just wanted to say I'll come back in on this later in the discussion today and also in the upcoming discussions where we will be moving the amendments.

But just to say that my office alongside the people's budget will be, of course, bringing proviso on the city attorney's office from using any funds to prosecute BLM protesters.

We also want to cap Seattle police and city executive salaries at no more than $150,000 a year.

I'll just share with the members of the public that the people's budget has brought this amendment every year.

And unfortunately, the majority of the council has not supported it.

but we also obviously want to fulfill what the community has been demanding, which is immediately cutting the remainder of this year's Seattle police budget by 50%, which would be an estimated $85 million, and also ending the euphemistically named navigation team and actually stop the sweeps, inhumane and ineffective sweeps of our homeless neighbors, which of course, again, in homelessness, we know that people of color are disproportionately represented.

So, you know, many of these changes and also additional changes I would support from other council members, you know, if you're bringing them forward, but just wanted to highlight the stark contrast between the budget cuts that other departments that are doing vital work for our community are facing compared to the quite outrageous practices that were being, that we're observing from the Seattle police.

I probably should clarify at least one thing, Council Member.

SPD currently is under a hiring freeze for sworn and have been for a while.

They hired earlier this year quite a few recruits and just about half of their quota they hired in the early part of this year before the hiring freeze went into effect.

So that's what's driving the spending on the on the recruit bonuses.

They're not currently handing out recruit bonuses.

They're not currently hiring.

As it turns out, they're out of money and they cannot hire any sworn at this point.

And I should also point that the hiring bonuses go back to last year.

So they have been, the hiring bonuses had been handed out last year and through the early part of this year.

So sorry if I, information I probably should have mentioned earlier.

Just to follow up on that, no, thank you, Greg, for clarifying that, but no, I wasn't confused about any of that, but I appreciate you clarifying all of that.

I will note, as you have also noted, and I noted before you, which is that, yes, I was referring to the vote on the hiring bonuses from last year, and I'm not implying that they did it.

They used the hiring bonuses just now after the pandemic hit, but my point is that, as I had said, At that time, unfortunately, as I said, I was the only no vote on it, that it is outrageous that the city council and the mayor's office, I mean, we shouldn't need the George Floyd protest to tell us to do the right thing, and it was not the right thing to have hiring bonuses for police officers.

At the same time, especially when those who are doing important work in our community, especially social workers, are so grossly underpaid.

They're chronically underpaid.

Also, just to clarify, my understanding from my staff is that SPD continued hiring after the hiring freeze went into effect and that they just stopped initiating recruitment classes.

Can you clarify on that?

Thank you, Greg, in advance.

Well, I think that when the hiring freeze initially took hold, it probably exempted first responders.

And so I think that there may have been some time there where SPD was still hiring.

And then as the fiscal realities of the COVID crisis hit and the fiscal realities that SPD hit, that was the point that they stopped hiring.

Thank you so much.

We have Council Member Lewis, Council Member Morales, and then we're going to close with the Safety Chair, Council Member Herbold.

And then I'm going to ask folks if they have additional questions on the SPD budget that they hold them for the end of our community panel presentation, which is in part a response to the issue identification and ways for us to identify possible strategies moving forward.

So Council Member Lewis, you are next.

Thank you.

So Greg, I just want to clarify real quick, because I think you mentioned during your presentation, but I just want to nail this down.

that in addition to the 20 million in the administrative savings, there are additional reductions in deferring the CAD implementation, and that that is going toward the revisioning process.

I wonder if you could just provide that breakdown again real quick, because my understanding is that that is in addition to the 20 million, yes?

I just want to make sure.

Yeah, that is outside of the $20 million.

This is money that SPD has identified and repurposed in their own budget.

And so that amount is half a million dollars that is going to be reprogrammed for the police re-envisioning process.

$800,000 to sort of keep the existing CAD system going for another year.

And then $1.4 million that will fund the hiring of police dispatchers during the hiring freeze.

Okay, I saw a thumbs up from Council Member Lewis.

Thank you for answering that question.

Council Member Morales, did I see you wave?

Okay, you're gonna hold your question for later.

No, I have a call.

Okay, please go ahead.

It'll be quick.

So well, first is I want to know what it means to set aside money to hire during a hiring freeze for these police dispatchers.

But my my ask is if we can see a timeline of when the continued hiring and hiring bonuses went out, and when the overtime was spent.

Because I do have a lot of questions about how operations continued to happen when the rest of our city staff, city workers were asked to implement a hiring freeze and to start reducing costs.

I'll stop there and and let us proceed to the next segment.

But that should be pretty easy for me to get for you Councilmember, they track that pretty detailed.

Both of those things.

Okay, great.

And Councilmember Herbold.

Oh, sorry, Councilmember Herbold, the mute button still.

As it relates to the SPD hiring freeze as opposed to the citywide hiring freeze that first responders were exempt from, I remember from the last June staffing report, we saw that there were about 40 officers that were still in training.

Are they considered hired when they are in training?

That's my first question.

And my second question is related to the hiring bonus.

I view a hiring bonus as an employment benefit.

And I'm wondering, just like many employment benefits, when you When you agree to take a job in exchange for a certain menu of benefits, there's a reasonable expectation that you are going to be receiving all the benefits.

But sometimes circumstances change after you're hired, similar to the conversations about AWIs that were negotiated in the contracts of other city labor unions in the city that we are now going to be reconsidering.

Is there a way to reconsider the second half of the hiring bonus for these officers?

I recognize that that might be something that might have to be bargained, but I want to know sort of what our beyond it being a benefit of employment, what our obligations are to fulfill that commitment to pay that second half of a bonus?

The first one, real easy.

Yes, when they're in training, they're hired.

Actually, they hire them before they start training and then put them in sort of pre-training.

First one's easy, yes, and then I'll have to get the law on your second question.

Thank you.

Okay, great.

I want to thank you for this overview.

I know that you along with Jeff and Tom will be on the line as well as Lisa and Director Arstad as we come back to potential questions for central staff at the end as maybe Tia possible issue identification or amendments for the proposed budget.

But in the same vein of the questions that were just being asked of Greg from the SPD's inquest or budget overview, we do have four community partners here with us, and I'm thankful for their time.

I know that they are on the line here.

and appreciate their involvement with the council, reflecting and representing the immense amount of work that is happening within community organizations, especially Black-led organizations, as we listen to the calls for action.

in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and in the wake of George Floyd's death, but not only his death, the death of so many across our country.

So I want to welcome Angelica Chassado and Nikita Oliver from Decriminalize Seattle.

I want to welcome Sean Glaze and Isaac Joy from King County Equity Now.

We have a presentation in front of us that I will go ahead and ask, I believe, Angelica to begin to tee up as you would like to continue the presentation that both Angelica and Jackie presented in last week's meeting.

This is an opportunity for us to have basically the next chapter from the community presentation as a follow-up to the work that we've been doing in this committee as part of the SPD budget inquest.

We're going to hear from communities, members here today who will be presenting their plan, their plan for centering community safety on a holistic public health approach to addressing public safety in our communities.

Seattle lights around the city and across our region have been excited to hear more about what the proposed proposal is as we have conversations about the budget.

And for folks who are learning about this process, and it seems like a big change, Well, it is, and that's why we're really excited to have the community partners here with us present to provide additional information, spotlight potential changes, identify strategies in this 2020 proposed budget, and to tee up some potential strategies and a roadmap for us in 2021. Many of the organizations that have been presenting to us today and in the past and the folks who've been calling in and asking for the changes that are reflected in the document we'll review today have been doing so in community for years.

And so I think it's really exciting for us to be able to hear from these community representatives who are going to be offering to us strategies based on those who have been most impacted by the issues we're discussing.

I really appreciate all of their times and the way that they continue to identify the systems changes that we need, not just individual behavior changes, but true systems change and institutional changes that we need to realize the public safety that so many in our community member, so many in our community are asking to change.

As we continue to have this conversation, most important, we want to center it on the fact that many people have said that they don't currently feel safe.

And as we think about a public safety model, it's essential that every community member feels safe.

We want to make sure that folks have in their toolbox all of the tools.

And right now, we only have a few of those tools in our public safety toolbox.

So this is about broadening the number of tools that we offer to community and investing upstream, using those tools in an upstream way.

to identify ways that we can invest in our community and protect our community as well as investing in their health.

So to thank you to everybody who's here with us today.

We know that there's just four people here with us today but you represent hundreds if not thousands of people within the organizations you've been working with.

You have provided us with a four-point plan as of last week that was rooted in the community, the community cries for action.

And today, my understanding is that you're going to be walking through a document with us that will offer us the opportunity to see how we can take these four pillars and use these for transformational change in the budget, both in the summer budget and the upcoming budget for 21-22.

So with that, why don't I turn it over to Anhela for an introduction of the panelists.

And since you all have had the chance to meet Angelica, if you could just start, Angelica, and then we can have all the panelists introduce themselves, and then we can walk through the documents that you have here.

All right, thank you so much, Council Member Mosqueda, and all of you for taking time to hear from us again today.

I'm here in my capacity as a member of Decriminalize Seattle.

We're a grassroots coalition building power in Seattle to invest in pro-community initiatives and away from policing in the criminal legal system.

We'll also hear from our partners with King County Equity Now, and their coalition of accountable, black-led, community-based organizations fighting to achieve meaningful metrics, including land ownership, wealth, better mortality rates, et cetera.

So again, we appreciate the opportunity to come before you today to go into greater detail on the four-point proposal we presented last week for immediate 2020 divestments from policing.

We're going to talk to you a little bit more about each of these four buckets, namely supporting a community-led research process, scaling up community-based solutions to increase public safety, putting 9-1-1 under civilian control, and increasing access to housing.

As Council Member Mosqueda mentioned, while the uprisings that led to this political opening to defund SPD may be unprecedented, our divest and reinvest proposal shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

Black and brown communities for years have been holding down the analysis the research, the skills, and the lived experience to know that policing and imprisonment fail us.

The city's previous commitment to growing and expanding police budgets and expanding systems of incarceration have forced us to become experts in these matters, and this proposal reflects that expertise.

The first phase of cuts will be followed by deeper cuts to SPD's budget in the imminent 2021 budget cycle, coupled with the 2021 participatory budgeting process that we spoke about last week.

This will allow the community to determine the direction of deeper investments to generate true public health and safety.

I'll begin by very briefly touching on cuts to SPD before handing the presentation over to my colleagues to discuss each of the four reinvestments.

So in terms of the SPD cuts, to be clear, we're asking for immediate cuts in 2020 beyond the 20 million identified already by the executive.

The cuts need to begin this year.

The city has to commit to the reorganization of the police department to both reduce its size, reallocate its funds and positions to city departments and community organizations that are better suited to creating public health and safety.

I want to clarify just a few points.

We are asking for 50% cuts to SPD's budget.

And we know that those cuts will come from the money remaining in the 2020 budget, which as we heard in the previous presentation, much of it has already been spent.

And we know that those cuts will be phased in during the last four months of the year.

As detailed in this document that we are presenting to you today, some of these cuts would come from fully eliminating SPD functions.

Some would come from transitioning functions out of SPD that should never have been under police control to begin with.

and others will come from hiring freezes and reductions in staffing.

We welcome any other cuts that you all would like to help us identify.

As you know, it is only recently because of the budget inquest process led by Council Member Mosqueda that we are getting the level of detail to the police budget that always should have been public, that always should have been questioned before signing off on these budget increases of the last 10, 20 years.

And so with that, I'm going to move on and hand this over to Shawn Glaze, who will talk to us about the first bucket, the ask for immediate reinvestment of the funds that will be cut in a community research process.

Thank you, Angelica.

And just before, Shawn, before you start, I want to ask Angelica if you could make the view of the document a little larger, maybe 150% or 200% It allows for us to see the text a little clearer.

So zoom in as much as you possibly can so that the margins go to the edge.

Sean, apologies for the interruption.

Thank you for being with us.

I'll turn it back over to you.

Sure.

Thank you so much.

And I'll pause a bit to where the, uh, to make sure that the screen is viewable.

Is that, yeah, that looks pretty good to me.

Awesome.

Great, so hi everyone, I'm Sean, I use they, them pronouns, and I'm here to talk about the community-led research.

So point number one, invest in community-led research process to generate true public safety informed by community needs.

So what we know is that these initial investments, which will be funded by divestments from the SPD budget, should go to funding a 2020 summer and fall participatory research process, because that's gonna be crucial to reimagining a world built on community vision for public safety and health.

So what does that mean?

Well, we know that we have a long history in Seattle, as well nationally, of having divestments in communities of color.

We also know that these longstanding disinvestments have exacerbated and created racial inequities in Seattle and beyond.

It's created less community safety and more harm for Black residents.

We also know that the citywide dialogue from community-led research, that when it's centered on community needs, can create the world we want to see, a world where people can thrive, a world where we don't have to be afraid of just living our lives.

We also know that the funding from the city to support this research will allow people who are most directly in police contact and surveillance to systematically produce our own solutions to guide the city's next steps.

Without community voice and leadership, any proposed solutions are likely to be short-sighted, incomplete, and actively harmful.

This is a really important piece, that there's community voice and community leadership in the research process.

In this report here, you can see that a portion of the research will be explicitly focused on defining community safety and offering specific recommendations and support to community organizations as they scale and build capacity.

So that would include things like running some analyses or projections that help inform staffing or resource allocation, and will really support, again, these other buckets of the work.

The research will also be exploring, testing, and evaluating different strategies to achieve safer communities.

One important thing I want to flag for you in this time of COVID is that COVID is a big concern for our communities alongside other health concerns that disproportionately impact BIPOC communities.

Our plan includes a deep exploration of how effective research and outreach can be done in this challenging context.

It includes recommendations and evaluations that will inform, that will become the anticipated outcomes for the summer and fall outreach.

And all of that informs the 2021 budgeting process.

There's a lot of components.

So the research will go towards some of the other buckets, like capacity building.

It'll go towards defining what community safety and health looks like.

And it'll also go towards really understanding how to make a robust, accessible, and equitable participatory budgeting process moving forward.

Some of the values guiding our participatory research process And I'm waiting, there we go.

Some of the values are that one, the process must be community designed and controlled.

Why?

Well, one of the big reasons is trust.

It's essential to have trust when you're collecting good data.

And the city actually has a long track record of misusing this trust, in part because of the city's long track record of supporting harmful policies and procedures, or maybe, you know, not listening deeply to community.

But the other piece is there is also a pattern of collecting data and recommendations and then not following through.

And that's a big piece of why.

Yes, if you can zoom in more, that'd be great.

And that's a big piece of why we are being really thoughtful around how to connect this 2020 all summer community-led research process with the 2021-2022 participatory budgeting process is to really make sure that everything is set up and allows us to be able to take action based on the community feedback.

Provide tangible support for participants.

Generally speaking, it's pretty common for other models of research for people to not be compensated for that labor.

However, it is crucial in this type of research process that community members are involved in the dialogue, they're supported in terms of They're compensated for their research, for the labor that they offer, as well as they're given what they need in order to be successful and participate fully.

So part of what that means for us is that the urgency of why we are placing community research first is so that we can hit the ground running and be able to provide that direct support during this time of COVID.

So we know that the scale of this work cannot be met with unpaid labor alone, and especially when some community members must prioritize meeting their basic needs for food, shelter, and other basic needs during a global pandemic, it's important that we be really thoughtful around how to provide tangible support.

So just in a little bit of time that I have left for my section to be respectful of our time together, I wanted to talk a little bit about the research activities.

So what does this look like?

Well, the full proposal is that 12% of the total funds that we would receive will be used for the research.

But initially, we're asking for at least a smaller sum be released immediately.

Because there are five main components of the research, and some of them have already started.

The first phase is really that will need funded includes staffing, training, administrative and technical support, and material.

Fortunately, because of our deep connections with community, we don't have to spend a lot of time just trying to figure out who the players are.

But we do need to make sure that the funding is available as soon as possible so that people can be brought up to speed and hit the ground running.

The second research activity I want to highlight is COVID-related support.

So that includes things like PPE, certain materials that we'll need in order to maintain social distancing.

and internet connectivity that people can actually participate remotely, which is something that has been a barrier for many people in our community.

The third piece is removing institutional barriers.

So we're talking about things like translations and childcare and transportation.

The fourth thing is data collection and analysis.

I think that is pretty straightforward, but it'll include a mix of quantitative and qualitative and other kinds of rich data collection and analysis.

and focus groups, and just lots of different activities that you'll see more details in the appendix.

And then the last piece is about data reporting and presentation.

That might include things like your traditional research report, but most of what we are really focused on is being transparent with community and what it takes to do that, as well as planning with any sort of decisions that are happening at the policy level so that everything and we're able to provide recommendations that'll be accurate and will reflect the community's voice.

So I'm about to hand it off, but I did want to say we do have some criteria for the organizations to receive funding and the document that we sent, as well as a rough, actually pretty detailed timeline, which includes, you know, from July, which is now, through December, what are the key pieces that will be happening in each time.

And right now, our ongoing stage is talking with community members, informing the preliminary research to pass accessible language and expand support for the summer fall research.

So with that said, I think I will hand it off to the next person.

Thank you for your time.

And I'm happy to follow up more in the questions period.

Okay.

Would the panelists prefer for us to take questions in each segment?

Because I think that this is a really great and dense and detailed document.

If it's okay, I'm just looking for a nod of approval here.

Okay, I see a thumbs up.

Colleagues, we are looking at phase one, investment number one, which is the community-led research process to generate true public safety informed by community needs section.

as just outlined by Sean.

Thank you again, Sean, for walking us through this, both in terms of what the strategies are for which organizations could potentially receive additional assistance to participate in such a robust process, the research activities, the criteria, and the timeline.

Very detail-oriented.

We appreciate that.

Council colleagues.

This is a really important first item that wanted to draw your attention to and see if there's any Questions for this process that's been outlined ie budget item as well Councilmember Morales

Thank you.

Yeah, I don't have a question.

I just want to congratulate all of you for putting this document together so quickly.

I know this is work that you've all been doing anyway, but the speed with which you've pulled your advocacy, your research, your analysis, your planning together to be able to present this to us is really inspiring.

And I do want to say, Well, first, I just want to preface this by saying I'm not sure where we are in the process of talking about amendments, but I, I have a signal to our central staff.

One of the issues IDs that we have is to.

to shift that 500,000 that Greg had just been talking about for the CAD, I believe that is the funding that SPD is shifting to DON.

And that is the funding that we are intending to use to amend to be able to provide resource for this phase of the work.

we have a lot of issues that we have identified that follow the list of initial priorities for cutting budget, but I did want to let folks know that that is one of the things that we have got in and probably talk about that more in a bit.

Thanks.

I'm not seeing a hand.

I will also note my appreciation for this detailed first component.

My sort of reading of what you have outlined in this extremely important document is a process for which phases that will continue to evolve will come from, and that will allow for the recommendations for creating community safety strategies to be really rooted in community needs and those who have lived experience, who've done the research, who have ample opportunities to provide feedback are absolutely at the table making those recommendations.

And this is putting into action that concrete plan so that we will have future recommendations to come forward as we think about creating a re-envisioned safety model.

Great, okay, so heads nodding, and Council Member Herbold, I saw a hand go up.

Just a question for you, Chair Mosqueda.

I don't have a specific question on this element of the proposal.

I did have a question as it related to the cut recommendations, and I don't know if you'd rather I just hold those questions till the end of this presentation.

Sure, if we wanna do that, that sounds good, Council Member Herbold, that's a good idea.

That works for me, thank you.

OK, wonderful.

So with that, thank you again, Sean, for the overview there.

I'll turn it back over to the panel for item number two.

And that will be Nikita Oliver from Decriminalize Seattle.

Welcome, Nikita.

Hi, Nikita Oliver.

I'm an organizer both with King County Equity Now and Decriminalize Seattle.

And I apologize for the shifting.

The delay in time of presentation meant we have students doing work.

lot of noise happening right now.

But so in order for us to make this transition effective, a key part of this is going to be prioritizing our investments in scaling up community-led organizations and really bolstering their ability to do their work and to make their expertise be able to serve all of Seattle is going to require an immense amount of technical support and capacity building.

And ultimately, this is going to lead to an increase in public safety for everyone in our city.

We know that the focus of diverting resources from the police and armed responses to harm means that we need an increase in infrastructure and in particular types of responses that community-led, community-based organizations have been able to develop through direct social service orgs.

And these particular responses address the root causes of poverty and violence in our communities.

They do a lot more than simply intervene.

And in many cases, these organizations have effective strategies that prevent harm and prevent violence.

Community led solutions also prevent over policing and police brutality, especially in marginalized communities by limiting or eliminating the presence of an armed police force.

SPD has had nearly over a century to produce public safety for everyone in our city and has failed.

And knowing that our communities are not safer, especially our Black and Native communities, we need a new and innovative approach to public safety.

And this innovative approach should ensure that Seattle Lights, all Seattle Lights, get the investment in our public safety system, but especially Seattleites who are Black, Native, queer, and trans, people of color, neurodiverse communities, people with disabilities, and communities that are economically marginalized, who are often the victims of over-policing and police brutality.

Community-led and community-based safety initiatives ensure that people's struggles are not criminalized, and it instead ensures that people can get the help they need by providing supportive environments to help community members tackle challenges that we face, such as housing instability, mental health, drug addiction, domestic violence, education, economic lack of access to opportunity, and ultimately improves public health and public safety for our entire city.

So what does scaling up look like?

In this first phase, scaling up looks like increasing social supports, housing, and cash assistance.

It looks like providing mental health and drug addiction services, domestic violence supports, emergency responses, crisis intervention, and violence interruption teams rather than armed police.

And while many of these organizations already exist, you heard about the summer resource process, which would allow us to have deeper work to identify more of these orgs and what exactly would allow them to scale up to size to support our whole city.

The city can start moving in this direction of scaling things up by immediately investing 2020 dollars defunded from SPD in groups that are already implementing and developing these community-led alternatives to policing and criminalization.

Seattle already has groups involved in non-armed crisis response, violence interruption and prevention, harm reduction, and restorative and transformative justice approaches to harm, some of whom may receive very small amounts of funding now from the city, but certainly not enough commensurate to be able to meet the scale of services we need to provide, and certainly not comparable to what the armed police have been receiving for nearly 100 years.

For decades, Seattle organizations have been undertaking safety building activities, which include things like self-defense classes, healthy relationship skills classes, community courses, on preventing sexual violence and assault, programs working with perpetrators of domestic violence to help them stop the behavior, bystander training for disrupting violence, programs to support parents in de-escalating conflict in their homes without violence, mediation programs within schools, programs aimed at reducing the harm of drug addiction in communities, programs to increase community engagement, between neighbors, which relationship we know is one of the strongest things to reduce crime.

And these efforts have developed and survived despite over-investments in the current policing and criminalization paradigm.

We want it to be acknowledged that we know we would like a quick transition into community-led, community-based public safety.

However, community organizations should not, in one funding cycle, be expected to end all violence in Seattle.

What we do know is that investing in these community-led initiatives now and investing in these responses so that they can be scaled up in mid-2021 will drastically increase the odds of generating true public health, true public safety for all of our communities, especially for those communities who have borne the brunt of police presence, surveillance, and violence.

funds will go towards also incubating new projects and organizations and police impacted communities and these investments must happen in 2020 because we need to build up these organizations capacity in order to be ready for the transition to a drastically reduced police footprint and we don't want to be starting from scratch in 2021. So the time frame for these investments would be September 2020 through December 2020. And the work that it entails in order for us to get to the place where in 2021 we are ready to have enhanced services would be first, Establishing criteria and grant making processes that are not burdensome to community-based organizations that protect the fidelity of their work and allow them to focus their efforts on scaling up.

We need to provide capacity building workshops offered by the city for organizations who will be applying for funds.

And we need to ensure that monthly disbursements of funds happen so that organizations are not required to float the amount that they're expecting from the city.

Such a setup would be prohibitive for many effective grassroots community-led initiatives.

and would prevent them from being able to scale up at the level necessary.

So the same way that we have historically invested in the Seattle Police Department and given them access to a budget up front, we need to be treating community-led organizations, community-led initiatives with the same value of allowing them to have access to those funds on the front end.

This will allow organizations to create plans for scaling up responses as well as to complete recruitment and hiring plans.

Lastly, we need to establish what the regranting process looks like in 2021. We want to already have this plan ready to go so that we're not scrambling at the point when we're ready for the enhanced services to take place.

And so by establishing that now in 2020, We'll already have our eyes set on what kind of capacity and technical support we'll need to provide community-based organizations in accessing grants and funds.

Lastly, to allow community orgs the best opportunity to scale up, we need to create space for them to focus their efforts on growth and development.

And those grants, the grants that are given need to be for general operating funds.

Historically, the city has granted organization funds that are often heavily restricted and those heavy restrictions make it hard to do the work effectively.

And it needs to happen with minimal bureaucratic obstacles and requirements.

The funding should include capacity building supports for orgs, and those supports should look like an increased ability to create infrastructure, which would include space, curricula, financial management systems, staff training programs, and more.

And all of these ultimately would lend itself to having a more robust public health and public safety structure for everyone in Seattle.

Thank you very much, Nikita.

Appreciate your flexibility in the location for presenting.

We could hear you very well, and thank you for your time.

Council colleagues, before we move on to item number three, are there questions for the presenters, Nikita?

I had one comment that I will make.

Thank you for noting the importance of having a streamlined application process, especially as we think about more diverse organizations participating with the city.

I know that this is something that we have endeavored to try to do in past efforts.

I know Council President Gonzalez probably has some great examples as well.

Would you like to speak to that, Council President?

Yeah, thank you so much, Chairman Mosqueda for that.

And thank you to all the panelists, Nikita, for speaking on that particular issue.

And I think it's really important for us to make sure that we get that process of grant making right in so many organizations, particularly smaller ones, particularly ones that are BIPOC led just don't have the organizational capacity that other organizations typically have to support that, you know, the sort of the intensity of those processes.

So I think there are some examples.

They're not perfect yet in the city, but there is history in the city of trying to reduce the barriers and burden in those processes to facilitate being able to get money out to organizations who are building their capacity.

So really excited that that is part of this plan.

I think it's absolutely critical to make sure that we get that process right, because I really see that that's where a lot of things could go wrong and go astray in terms of the intent of properly funding capacity building and providing technical assistance to smaller organizations to scale up in the way that's been described by the panel.

So I'm excited to see that part and looking forward to seeing how we can use we've used in the FEPP levy, in the Department of Neighborhoods, Your Voice, Your Choice, and in some of the work that Council Member Mosqueda's office and I worked on together around some of the grants for capacity building for sex worker organizations.

So thanks for giving me an opportunity to speak.

Thank you, and thanks to the little council member as well.

We appreciate your comments.

Council Member Sawant, please go ahead.

Thank you.

Just wanted to take the opportunity to thank all the community organizers who are present today at the budget committee, but also those who aren't present but who have been doing the work to say that this is extremely important work and also really appreciate all the concrete points that have been brought forward in this blueprint.

And also just to reiterate the point that was made by the presenters that the funds should be made available upfront.

And this is very important because we don't want the mayor's office or anybody else to set community organizations up for failure by not making the funds that they would need to actually have these alternative programs, which are an alternative to policing and police violence, we want to set them up for success, not for failure.

And so having the funds made available upfront is extremely crucial.

And certainly, the People's Budget Movement and my office and Socialist Alternative is, of course, as I've said many times, strongly committed to making that happen.

And I'm also happy to hear The organizers also say that, you know, what the community is looking for, and this is something that we've emphasized over and over again, that we don't want to wait to begin the defunding.

We want to do the defunding by 50% starting this year, and it's a question of making those funds available, but not saying that all the programs have to be ready to go, because that's not possible to happen, because the community organizations need the opportunity.

to bring themselves up to the capacity that we will need in order to replace some of the functions that the police perform, which have been quite harmful.

So 9-1-1 response being one of the points.

But I'll just also add, you know, one of the ways we can release the funds also to make sure that the restorative justice and constructive programs are being funded is also to point out that there are a lot of things that the police do, which are extremely problematic, which is harassing poor people, harassing homeless neighbors, over-policing protest movements.

We just saw in the previous presentation from central staff that, and we've seen this from the mayor's office weeks ago, that the Seattle Police Department spent over six million dollars on just policing the George Floyd protest movement.

So there are many things that can be eliminated that are costing taxpayer dollars but are not helpful to the community and are especially harmful to communities of color, and that those dollars can be invested, not only in, in the alternatives to policing but also in other things that the same communities need like affordable housing like other social services.

And I think that to that end, in addition to the defunding, the other demand that has been brought forward by the nationwide movement for black lives is also important, which is and we have to go towards that as well, which is having an independently elected community oversight board that has full powers, including hiring and firing over the police so that and policies and procedures so that the community can actually hold elected leaders accountable.

the police are doing, not only how much money they have, but what are they doing with that money?

Are they harassing homeless people?

Are we still having sweeps of our homeless neighbors and homeless encampments?

Are the funds that are being used by the police are actually going to be beneficial to the community?

Thank you.

And Council Member Herbold, I saw you come off Welcome, please go ahead.

Thank you.

I just wanted to also echo the comments of Councilmember Sawant and earlier Councilmember Mosqueda in thanking the presenters for identifying the needs for a community-driven research project.

I too have included that in my proposal that we'll talk about later that includes possible cuts and possible ads.

And I want to also thank Ms. Oliver for acknowledging the reality that the need to support community organizations in a ramp up is not going to happen overnight and it's not going to happen now.

But I want to recognize that there is a community request for us to take a vote in this budget session to begin that process.

And so that does involve some cuts to the SPD's budget if we are to fulfill that commitment.

And I think that will allow us to have these conversations, not just conversations with community about the replacement functions for some of the SPD functions that we are talking about moving into other parts of the city government, as well as into community-driven solutions.

But it also allows us to have the necessary conversation as it relates to the budget cuts that we might implement in this budget session that have labor implications.

Those cuts that might have labor implications will need to be bargained, and I think our approach that we're talking about here today allows us to begin those conversations about bargaining those reductions now, rather than waiting until after passage of a budget in November, and I think it's really important to do that.

And a number of us have requested that labor relations get in touch with SPOG and SPMA to indicate our interest in having those discussions after August 3rd when the council passes a budget and we have a good sense of which cuts might have impacts on labor.

So thank you for your very thoughtful approach about how not only how we can scale up investments in the future, but how we might scale cuts in the last four months of 2020. And we have a I would like to make a request into central staff to talk about how we would operationalize a scaled cut normally when the Council passes a budget, whether or not it's ads or cuts, those actions are at the beginning of the budget year, or in this case, they'd be implemented all in September.

But I don't think we want to do that.

We want to talk about trying to scale them month by month in a way that corresponds with our spending plan for 2020. So again, I really appreciate your thoughtful approach in laying out your four-point plan.

Okay, thank you so much.

I'm not seeing or hearing additional questions.

I'll also emphasize my appreciation.

Thank you, Nikita, for walking through this piece.

I think one of the key pieces that you mentioned was something that has been said in the previous panel as well.

We are talking about investing in the criteria that you have outlined, the organizations that you have listed here and the type of qualifications already highlight that there's many organizations that are skilled in public safety and community public health strategies.

And so it is not starting from scratch as we think about scaling in as your proposal outlines.

There's much expertise and existing organizations and how we bring them to scale really relies on us investing in them and ramping up.

Any additional comments before we move on to the next person?

Okay.

And if we captured any of that incorrectly, feel free to let us know.

I'm seeing smiles.

So please do let us know if you have any last comments on this.

Okay.

Thanks again, Nikita.

Okay.

I'll turn it back over to the panelists to wrap us into item number three.

All right, so I will take this one.

This should be a shorter one.

So we believe the city of Seattle can immediately move to transition 9-1-1 call and dispatch under civilian control.

We don't need to wait until 2021 to create an independent emergency operations system responsible for coordinating responders and moving 9-1-1 dispatch again out of police control.

Additionally, and very importantly, the investments in scaling up the organizations that Nikita talked about will be key for transferring calls involving people in crisis to community-led organizations who are grounded in harm reduction.

The model we have right now often results in poor people of color in crisis receiving an armed police response, and being funneled into the criminal legal system while white people in crisis are offered supportive services.

This is not going to work.

Transitioning to a non-armed response grounded in harm reduction principles that's accessible to all communities regardless of race will improve public safety.

I also want to touch on another piece here, which is that we need to be combining civilian control of 911 with investments in community organizations who can respond to crisis calls and also investments in fully funding the services and the housing so that crisis workers, when they do respond to a call, can actually offer an appropriate referral.

All these pieces are going to have to work together for us to achieve, you know, what we consider real or true public safety.

I also want to take a second to talk about work that also belongs in this bucket.

which may not happen in this immediate vote, but is key for setting us up for success.

We need to decriminalize misdemeanor charges so that a police response is eventually rendered moot.

As I mentioned before, it's really in the eye of the police officer who responds whether something becomes a criminal matter and a non-criminal matter.

that for black and brown and native folks, things become a criminal matter much more quickly, whereas white folks might be sent to supportive housing or supportive mental health.

In order to get rid of that bias altogether, we need to be decriminalizing misdemeanor charges that currently really criminalize poverty.

And we know that people in Seattle, people of color particularly, are disproportionately criminalized right now for all of these low-level offenses.

We know that this results in enormous expenditures, not just in police, but in our court system, in our city attorney's office, in King County Jail.

and we know that decriminalizing misdemeanors is going to free up those resources to meet real human needs and will be one of the, stop one of the main pathways by which black and brown and native folks end up in the criminal legal system to begin with.

So I'll pause there.

Thank you, Angelica, for that presentation.

Council colleagues, any questions on that presentation?

Okay.

I know there's been a lot of conversation lately about this concept of replacing the current 911 operations and reallocating some of those calls to different community groups or having a different response.

I see Council Member Strauss and then Council Member Sawant.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

I really appreciate this conversation around replacing the current 911 operations outside of SPD.

And I think the next level of the conversation also needs to be about the policies directing 911 calls because to have officer patrol time taken up to arrive and assess a scene that is then deemed to need to have either community intervention or one of our existing low acuity programs that So I love how cahoots has really just become this named idea that that we all can can understand in a clear way but the fact that we have low acuity programs already in the city that are very similar.

All that to say.

I am not aware of an officer has to refer to one of those programs.

I don't have a question.

I am making a statement as we go through this process we need to look at the policies that navigate those 911 calls and how we code them.

Okay.

After that, Councilmember Herbold.

Councilmember Swat, welcome.

Please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

I just wanted to quickly say that the proposal that was just put forward for decriminalizing misdemeanors.

I think that's a very, very important point that has been made.

And I would really urge the city council to go towards that and really look into what kind of policy we would need to make that actually happen.

Because as Ms. Cesaro has correctly stated, it is a space where we see massive racism and it is targeting people of color, black and brown communities.

But as you correctly stated, it is targeting people for the crime of poverty.

And it's really where poor people get caught up in a big, big way.

And I don't believe that any one thing is going to change this.

I mean, because we need systemic changes.

And they need to be a spectrum-wide shift in policing.

And everything that has been mentioned is important.

But I just wanted to highlight that that is one of the most important points that has been brought up today.

Councilmember Herbold, and then Councilmember Lewis.

Oh, Councilmember Herbold, sorry, your mute button.

Thank you.

I would just like to get a little bit more information about what it would mean to immediately move to transition 911 call and dispatch under civilian control.

And I think the intention is not just putting it under civilian control, whereas currently there are sworn, two sworn officers who act as supervisors to 911, but what it means to move it out of SPD.

And I'd like to just get a little bit of an understanding of logistically what would be necessary.

I'm imagining that we are not suggesting a different number.

And so it seems to me like many of the systems that are in place would still stay in place, but it would be a matter of moving that unit out of SPD and into, for instance, Office of Emergency Management or some other city department.

And just would like central staff to research this a little bit more on what it would take and how quickly this is something that the city could stand up.

Is this, in fact, something that we could stand up this year?

And I would like to also know, given that I don't believe there would be labor impacts associated with all of the same civilian dispatchers doing all the same work, but just doing it in a different department, I want to just make sure that we have a good understanding of what the labor impacts are as well.

Okay, wonderful.

I know that central staff is on the line taking note of that.

If there's not an immediate response to that, seeing nobody take their self off of mute from the panel, we will follow up with what we learned from central staff as well.

And Council Member Lewis, this might be in line with what your question was in terms of how quickly we can stand something up.

I know you've been looking at some models.

Please go ahead.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair.

And I guess this is also signaling for central staff to look into this, because I do think one of the key components, and I think Council Member Strauss touched on this a little bit too, is not only the moving out of 911 dispatch from SPD's chain of command, but also just making sure that those dispatchers have some other things that aren't armed police that can be sent out when there are 911 calls.

And, you know, I mean, I've talked extensively publicly about wanting to engage in a public process, you know, with the community and developing something that is like a community-based first response based on the CAHOOTS model, the crisis assistance, helping out on the streets.

But, you know, in terms of, because I do share the sense of urgency of wanting to move the 911 dispatch out of SPD and sort of change the ethos, and I wonder if, There might be scope to expand in the interim, like the health one pilot, in order to be an additional tool that 911 dispatch can send, which seems to me like it could be a short-term a short-term alternative dispatch because it is going to take a little while to develop a Kahoot style option.

But I could definitely see a lot of merit to having a short-term model like that that could evolve into expanding the cornucopia of first response options as we kind of get along in kind of right-sizing first response more broadly.

So I think that, you know, the relationship of a health one scale-up to moving the 911 dispatch I think makes it a more exigent thing that we should be focusing on.

And I would be interested in moving, starting the conversations around moving the 911 dispatch in the summer right now.

Excellent, thank you.

I see Angelica, I think that's a really great question.

I'm glad your hand was up.

I'm happy to hear your answer.

And I think I'll add to Council Member Lewis's question.

You know, we hear great things about the HealthONE model, which is a first responder, not a police officer, but an EMT, a firefighter and a counselor.

We know that there's the Crisis Response Unit, which is not part of SPD.

They're underneath DESC, actually, and their concerns about sort of being lumped in as part of the SPD budget overall, but they really are mental health providers.

I'm wondering about sort of how do we pull them out.

And then COLEAD, right?

We've seen a lot of reports lately about how the COLEAD model, unfortunately at this point, had been relying on referrals from the police department.

All three of those, instead of having them have to have a dispatch from SPD specifically, you know, are those, are there sort of immediate strategies, are there immediate strategies to have an alternative network responding to what are otherwise 911 calls right now that are not related to, you know, where somebody should be showing up that doesn't have potentially a weapon on them.

Sure, yeah, thank you for those questions.

I mean, we fully support ending police gatekeeping for LEAD, for COLEAD, you know, police gatekeeping in all its forms in both name or in practice.

I think in terms, so that's one, I think in terms of like standing up HealthONE and bolstering HealthONE, Right now, HealthONE only gets deployed once a 911 has been sent from SPD dispatch to fire dispatch, and then fire dispatch decides it's like a low acuity call.

And so some of that would be remedied by the immediate civilianization of 911, which is moving 911 out of SPD.

So the decision makers wouldn't have an SPD supervisor, you know, in some ways looking over their shoulder.

But even so, I think there's a lot of gatekeeping and bias that happens in the name of triage that contributes to black and brown people continually getting the criminal law enforcement response, whereas others, namely white folks, might get the sort of health one response.

And so we need to build into that the sort of training and the sort of triage that would avoid that outcome where health one, you know, would basically be the system for white folks.

We also know it's really essential for the systems to reflect the communities that they serve.

So HealthONE, as well as a larger crisis system infrastructure, needs to be staffed and led by black and brown people, by people with individuals with lived experience with homelessness, mental health, substance use, et cetera.

And that's not currently what we're seeing.

And it's what we want to expand on.

And so HealthONE could definitely be one leg of a stool that makes up our crisis response system.

But it's not going to replace the need for community-led solutions.

that provide support over the long term and tackle the trauma experienced by black and brown and indigenous people at the root.

So again, yes to health one, but they're with some serious caveats and a huge ask to continue the community led investments and prioritize those because ultimately that's what's going to move us in a new direction.

Excellent.

Council Member Lewis for follow up.

Yeah, and I just want to respond and say that I totally agree with that that entire assessment and in in a lot of my public remarks, I'm about to do it.

I've been really careful to.

try to distinguish between folks that try to hitch community-based models like CAHOOTS to HealthONE as being sort of an analogous response.

And like clearly, we need to make sure that we have, I mean, I think as Professor Cesaro very ably put, like multiple legs of the stool as we're going forward on this.

great.

Well, I'm seeing no other comments on this item.

And we do have another final bucket.

So thank you.

And hey, I'll turn it back over to you, Professor.

All right.

And now we will have Isaac joy from King County equity now presenting on the fourth bucket.

Isaac.

Welcome.

Hello.

Hello.

And apologies.

If I'm yawning, I feel like the combination of a city council meeting at 430 in this heat It's just like, ah, ah, and all the work that we've been doing, all the work that we've been doing.

So apologies if I am.

But my name is Isaac Joy.

I'm a board member with African-American Community Land Trust, which is a great organization, really spearheading a lot of anti-gentrification efforts, particularly around acquiring, developing, and stewarding land for community development.

and for equitable solutions, I'll say.

So that absolutely informs my perspective.

And I'm also here with King County Equity Now.

And for those that don't know about King County Equity Now, it's really kind of a coalition to what Angelica spoke about, Black-led community-based organizations, really with the focus to empower the organizations that are on the ground doing the work.

know that particularly in this time we're really emphasizing following community lead, following the lead of the folks that, the communities that have been really oppressed by these systems and to have the solutions for these systems to make sure that that community lead is authentic.

And so KCEN was really, the goal was to kind of empower organizations that are on the ground because of their proximity to community creates a different level of accountability.

And so I think this is, I just want to highlight that and I think that resonates kind of with this topic.

But here I find the public debate, this debate about how best to match public resources with policies and programs in ways that maximize public safety, that there's really been an overemphasis on crime and crime prevention and on the implications to crime in the city.

when money earmarked for the SPD is instead invested elsewhere.

And so, you know, regardless of sensationalist media narratives, Seattle does not, in fact, face a crisis of rising crime rates.

You know, Seattle faces a housing crisis.

And housing is an essential human need.

And the city really has failed to provide all its residents with access to this basic human need, that is a safe, secure, clean, humane space that provides the bare minimum for human flourishing.

There are really few things more central to real public safety than a home.

A home provides the critical stability, privacy, safety, and security necessary for individual health and communal public health.

And thus, if we as a community want to maximize the near and long-term public safety for the greater Seattle region, we really must prioritize and maximize housing access and availability.

Um, and so what we present to you today are tangible steps that the city can take to maximize the public health of our region.

Uh, we understand that this two week kind of rebalancing won't resolve all the housing related goals presented today.

Um, but we do think it's critical to reshift this public safety debate, uh, back to the necessary real, the really necessary investments that will make the most impact to our communities.

And that's housing, particularly the housing proposals presented today.

And so some of those proposals really kind of low hanging fruit.

And these are informed by organizations that are on the ground doing this work that identify near term ways that we could really maximize public safety.

And so support the immediate transfer of underutilized public lands.

to black indigenous-led community ownership, including, and I think this is critical, where necessary, purchase and activation capital and upfront transaction costs.

Transaction costs being, for example, how we've been able to leverage all the brilliance to create these great documents that we present to you today, but that's all on folks' time and what have you.

If I pivoted, as I showed my colleagues, there's a mattress in this room.

So there's a lot of stuff.

So having the transaction costs, actually having the funds to make these things happen.

All empty housing stock in the city should be used until any unhoused person who wants a place to live has one.

People currently unhoused should be prioritized for receipt of any assistance with no barriers based on income, criminal records, or record of addiction.

As it's been emphasized, dissolve the navigation team and end sweeps of homeless encampments.

That's something we can do right now.

Fund existing black and disled community-based housing service organizations to allow for increased capacity and services, including the facilitation of emergency rental assistance programs related to COVID.

We know that's going to be a growing need, particularly as COVID continues to you know, come to bear and the implications of COVID and the economic fallout show.

So we know that rental assistance and having a way to provide folks, get the folks that need will be crucial.

Some other considerations for organizations that receive funding, provide services to people who are currently and formerly incarcerated, that is crucial.

Commit to offering harm reduction training, programming, and infrastructure to provide low barrier substance use.

homeless services to black and brown folks.

We also think it's important that the city officials remove current barriers to accessing existing services, ensuring that community service providers have direct access to low barrier harm reduction shelter beds without requiring a referral from the city navigation team, direct access to crisis solution center without requiring a referral from law enforcement or first respondents.

and having access to permanent supportive housing and independent housing vouchers, section eight, scatter sites, shelter plus care, et cetera.

So again, if we as a community really, you know, if we wanna maximize near long-term public safety in greater Seattle, we really have to prioritize and maximize housing access and availability.

So something about a one, two punch.

over here, you know, for Dee Crim and King Karen.

Thank you, Isaac.

I really appreciate the presentation.

I also, what I really appreciate about this overview on item number four here is you have identified not just budget solutions, but the funding, I'm sorry, the policy solutions that we can enact in the near term as well.

I think the comments that were made earlier about how we scale down investments and then scale up investments in community, at the same time, there's another parallel, which are what are the policy changes we can be putting into place now to reduce these barriers that you just outlined that possibly the city.

We want to make sure we don't cost the city a dime right now and probably actually reduce the cost on the city overall and improve the life and safety of community members.

In this fourth item, I see a lot of policy considerations that could go along with the funding, defunding strategies that have been outlined today.

Okay, I will ask a question of the panelists.

I know all of these items are imperative.

I believe that you have underscored the urgency of acting now.

I just want to ask it does feel like the outline in the presentation you have prioritized to a certain degree items where you think, you know, each item could build on the other.

Is that an accurate assessment?

I saw Sean nodding if you feel free to chime in if you could provide some additional clarification on the outline.

Anybody?

Sean, I can start.

I mean, I can go.

Go for it, Sean.

I can start.

You can finish.

So we've listed them in order of basically this idea of you have buckets, right?

You have your four buckets.

And so in the full proposal or the full blueprint that you have in front of you, you'll see that the research is our first bucket.

and that we're not planning to like fully fund the research and then move on to step two, but rather fund the research up to $3 million and then start funding the second bucket, which is the capacity building.

And the idea there is that because much of the research costs, especially like the upfront, like staffing, the training, the tech assistance, administrative support, all of that stuff starts in the summer.

We need that sooner.

And so we've, we've ordered these in terms of like, You fill it up until a certain amount, and then you start spilling into the next bucket.

And then you start, you know, et cetera, et cetera, until you get to the last bucket, and then maybe you go back to the first one.

So in the full proposal, you'll see that what we're looking for is 12% of that total amount to go towards research.

But at the beginning, we're looking for the $3 million so that we'll be able to hit the ground running and be able to start our work.

Anhedika, did you have anything you wanted to add?

Sure, no, I think that's right.

I think the other thing I'd say is that, you know, as Council Member Scalia, you pointed out some of the things in the fourth bucket can be done immediately, particularly these last three policy items.

can happen now.

If we get rid of the navigation team, then they will no longer have a monopoly on access to the shelter beds.

And so that will be a solution.

And we realize that investments in housing are not going to be resolved in this two-week budget rebalancing process.

But we will be back before you in 2021 and beyond to make sure that those investments are made.

So in many ways, it's both setting the stage for future policy changes.

It sounds like I love that idea of sort of the cascading buckets, Sean.

That first bucket really needs to be filled so that you can have the community-oriented process, which then informs the sequence of events.

OK.

Any additional comments from you, Peta?

Please go ahead.

We can't hear you.

Oh, there you go.

Go ahead.

I would just add the scaling up section is just super important in 2020. It is clear that we're not going to be able to just tomorrow hop in and have a fully community led community based public safety initiative.

But if we don't take seriously the investments and prioritizing the capacity building and technical support of organizations that we're going to expect to take on that work.

then we won't be able to hit the ground running in 2021. So I just really want to emphasize the importance of understanding that the investment and the capacity building is really essential for us to be able to take this community-led, community-based public safety initiative and make it robust in the next budget, which we're going to be talking about very near.

So it's really important that those dollars are invested and that we see it as an investment in growing our capacity to have a public safety structure that serves everybody and does that through partnerships with community-led organizations that represent the most affected by police brutality.

And also, as I heard many of the council members reflect, Many of these grassroots organizations that do public safety work well have never had the financial opportunity to build infrastructures that make it so we could serve the whole city.

Often, you know, I think about Creative Justice where I work, often we're serving at capacity doing very great work, but there is no additional funding for us to grow the infrastructure on kind of the shoestring budget.

that BIPOC grassroots organizations have traditionally been expected to function on.

So fully investing that aspect of the strategy is key to ensuring that we don't set organizations up to fail, which too often grant-making processes do.

So just really want to encourage full investment in that area so that when we hit 2021, organizations are actually in a position to scale up in a way that makes this new initiative, this new approach, to be fully successful for our whole city.

Thank you for that.

Any additional comments?

I see that you have the conclusion screen pulled up here, so I don't see any hands going up.

Why don't we do that?

And then, oh, Council Member Strauss, before we get to conclusion, please go ahead.

I have something to say after the conclusion.

Okay, great.

Council Member Strauss, we'll have you first in the queue.

Professor Cesaro, go ahead.

Yeah, it was just very brief.

We just want to reiterate that these initial investments.

This is about a process, not just about defunding the police, but creating an entire new paradigm for how the city distributes its funding and invests in community.

The previous paradigm is what allowed us to get to the bloated, unquestioned police budget over many, many years.

And so we're as interested in defunding the police as we are in creating a new process so we can close the door on that era of loaded police budgets that are putting black lives at constant risk of violence and death.

And so we really do invite you to accept this invitation from us to stop business as usual and turn over a whole new leaf.

So we'll stop there.

Thank you.

Okay.

Council colleagues, a few closing comments or questions are welcome.

Council Member Strauss and then Council Member Herbold.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

Thank you to all of the presenters.

Isaac.

I hope I didn't miss anyone.

Thank you all.

I want to clarify for the viewing public where we are in our budget process and maybe chair Mosqueda I hope I'm not stealing your words here but we are currently at the issue ID section of our budget process which means that very high level usually one line is provided regarding what budget changes we are making.

We're currently at a historic point in our country's history, in our city of Seattle's history, and we are looking to endeavor to make changes in how we provide public safety.

And while these changes are large in nature, I want to really just root us where we are in the budget process today, which is a one-line sentence about budget changes.

And so we have just received a we are talking about a budget change.

we are talking about a 13 page document about these changes.

there are many more discussions to come as this budget conversation continues.

I wanted to root and focus us where we are.

almost every other budget change we are talking about in the 2020 rebalance has one line and this change has 13 pages.

I would like to get a sense of what the recommendations are on this one item.

Councilmember Herbold, please go ahead.

I want to go back to the first segment of this presentation from Angelica.

Specifically as it relates to the recommendation to reduce patrol staffing with corresponding reduction in I would like to hear a little bit more detail on what it is you are proposing.

In my proposal that we will discuss later, I have a couple of different potential, they are not proposed cuts yet, but they are potential cuts.

My goal is to put a menu of The two items that have patrol staffing implications are the reduction of officers who work on the navigation team.

And in order to realize those savings, there would have to be a corresponding cut of some number of patrol officers commensurate to the dollar amount of the SPD contribution to the navigation team.

we would have to reduce the number of school resource officers.

I'm going to go ahead and move on to the next item which is the patrol staffing item in the budget by a commensurate number of dollars.

in this budget cycle, in this rebalancing package, again, with the understanding that these reductions have labor impacts and would need to be bargained.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you for that question.

Yeah, so as I mentioned before, there's these different categories.

There's parts of the SPD budget or the SPD.

structure that we want transferred out of SPD like things like 9-1-1 and possibly some of the, you know, the crisis counselors, community service officers who might themselves welcome not being under SPD control.

And so we realize that won't actually free up money for us, but it does reduce the police budget and reduce this emphasis on policing.

In terms of reduction in actual sworn officers, you know, the difficulty from our end is that we don't know, you know, you all are just hearing today for the first time how much money is left in SPD's budget, which buckets are fully spent down and which ones aren't.

And so I think for us to be able to answer that question fully, we sort of need to know, you know, what is left because we need to know how much money from these cuts, you know, short of just beginning to cut line officer jobs or just patrol officer jobs, how much money that will actually yield.

And so I think having that clarity from the city will help us be able to point to the cuts that we want to make.

and you know, this is a question that was suggested that I ask from council central staff because they're interested in making sure that any amendments that they propose for council members who might request them is reflective of your goals.

And I think that the hope is that that the goal for patrol officer staffing reduction is not simply tied to a number of dollars, but that is tied to sort of an overall I think that is a really important part of our overall sort of policy objective, right?

And it's really tied to our reorganization goals.

I think are very tied to not a dollar amount that we want to realize, but are tied to our desire to not have police officers on the navigation team anymore, and our desire to not have school resource officers in the school anymore.

So I'm not asking for an answer right now, but if you could think a little bit about how to make any potential reductions in patrol staffing that you might seek in this moment, in this 2020 rebalancing, in such a way that is focused less on a size cut that we want to accomplish in order to fund other community-based priorities, but that is focused on a reorganization or a policy shift that we're thinking.

I think that would be really helpful.

Yeah, thank you for that.

On our end, it's both.

It's investing in these four buckets we've identified, and it's shrinking the size of SPD because we don't believe that the current size of SPD is actually generating public safety.

Thank you very much, Angelica.

The other thing I wanted to flag related to that, and I believe that this goes to, Nikita, part of your presentation, in the last bullet on, I believe, bucket two, one of the things that caught my eye is specific to, I think, the answer that you just gave, Angelica, which is there is a desire to get funding into community organizations now.

There's recognition that there's community expertise and there's organizations who need to be given resources to scale up.

They have the expertise but need the resources to scale up.

So am I correct in understanding that to the degree that there is funding that can be realized available now based on these cuts, we want to quickly and swiftly work to get that money into those community organizations.

But that last item also says because this is the scaling up to realize additional support then will be available for the community.

mid-2021.

So it also recognizes, I believe in that, that there is the possibility for additional bargaining and when dollars continue to be realized that more of those dollars should be pushed out to those community organizations.

Can you comment on that?

Yeah, that's accurate.

I mean, two things that I want to touch on in regards to Councilmember Herbold's thoughts is, yes, obviously there are places where we significantly want to decrease police officer involvement.

And that needs to intersect, though, with getting the right amount of funding out of SPD.

You know, the need to fully fund this strategy to be able to scale up community-based, community-led public safety initiatives is huge.

If we don't take that aspect of things seriously, we're going to put ourselves in a hole come mid-2021 when we want to be able to provide these new enhanced services and have all of the data that's collected actually inform a significant, robust community-based public health and public safety process.

you know, understanding that fully funding right now is incredibly significant to us being able to take steps forward in the future.

And I would just say that's been one of the problems we've had in Seattle, is that we will overfund an institution like the police department that is not effective at producing public safety, and then underfund those community-based strategies that we say are being effective.

And a part of that is like Angelica was saying, we really have to get out of this paradigm of believing criminalization or response to harm with armed officers is the appropriate response.

We know that it's not, and we know it's not the best response.

So we'll just really push to be thinking about finding those intersections where being able to remove officers from ineffective positions, as well as divesting The amount of funding that gives us the best opportunity to scale up is just really key to us moving into this new approach.

Okay, Councilmember Herbold, final comment?

Sorry, mute button real quick.

Sorry.

I completely agree with everything you're saying.

I just I do want to as I as I have been doing in my conversations with decriminalize Seattle to the best of my ability.

I want to really manage expectations that the things that we vote on.

in this moment, in the 2021 rebalancing package that have labor impacts, we will not be able to realize those dollars for spending until we've negotiated those impacts.

So that's just something that I want to change the paradigm.

I want to change the way we've been thinking about police staffing.

But I want to also be laser focused on on what we can do now in order to get the funding necessary for what our 2021 spending objectives are, while recognizing that some of our longer-term objectives that might also realize savings that will benefit community-driven solutions may not be realized in the next four months.

It's completely understood.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I saw one more hand, Councilmember Strauss.

Yeah, thanks for coming back to me, Chair.

And thank you, Nikita and Lisa and Councilmember Herbold.

My apologies there for that last round of conversation.

It is also my understanding that we need to be looking at our policy objectives, and that's why it's helpful to see where we need to transition funding out of SPD, how that is defined, because from what I've already seen from the letter from Chief Best about blunt cuts, if we just take a number and let SPD make the decision, the policy decisions about how that funding is or is not used, we will see the programs that are existing within SPD that we want to see occurring I think it is very important for us to make sure that those concerns do not stop occurring.

For instance, we were looking at the precinct that serves West Seattle.

I was on a call yesterday where folks were very worried that was going to disappear if we were just going to not define our cuts.

Councilmember Herbold, your make sure that our policy objectives within these budget conversations are clearly defined so there's no question for SPD to make other policy decisions based on our behalf.

Well said, Council Member Strauss.

Thank you so much and I think that this document that you all have provided for us, the hard work that's gone into it, the presentation, the detailed analysis, the well-researched policy strategies and funding strategies that you have identified answer part of those questions.

I want to make sure that anybody on the panel, if you have additional comments, we are going to wrap up here and you are welcome to have the last word.

Any additional comments?

Okay.

A huge amount of thanks and appreciation.

I don't see any additional council members raising their hands to ask questions, but I know everybody is very appreciative of this detailed proposal and plan that you have outlined for us today.

And this is, again, just the beginning of the conversation.

So we look forward to having more conversations with you.

Oh, Council President Gonzalez, please go ahead.

It's okay.

I'm sorry.

I've been sitting here wondering if I should say what I'm about to say, and I think I'm just going to say it.

So I just want to say in closing to our friends on the panel that on behalf of the city, I just want to apologize for some of the recent rhetoric that we have been hearing around your long-standing hard-fought efforts to get us to this point to be having a meaningful conversation about what it means to divest in this police department and to invest in community-driven solutions that we know work.

and I just have found the comments to be very patronizing of the expertise that impacted community members and that leaders in the BIPOC community, you know, the expertise that BIPOC leaders have in our communities to I think we need to be able to identify solutions and to do so thoughtfully and in a truly democratic way that engages community at the community level as opposed to a top-down approach.

being cavalier as it relates to this conversation.

And the reality is, is that we're not being cavalier.

We are truly responding to the calls of community to listen to community, not just to hear you, but to actually listen and to follow your lead.

And that means giving you the space and the time that you all need to coalesce around what a thoughtful detailed plan could and should look like for our consideration.

We are your democratically elected representatives and we should all on this council take the responsibility of listening to our constituents and allowing constituents an opportunity to formulate plans.

we should take that responsibility seriously.

And I think that the city council does.

And again, I just, they weren't, it wasn't my rhetoric and it wasn't my words, but I do represent an agency that, and a city and an institution that continues to perpetuate harm.

And for that, I just wanna acknowledge that I recognize that that, kind of divisive rhetoric is not helpful to our overall need to work together and to do that in a way that actually feels authentic.

And so I am grateful that you all have made time to pull together this very detailed document.

I'm grateful that you all are spending time educating and talking to community.

And I am grateful that you have allowed us more of your personal time in a committee hearing for the second time and look forward to our ongoing work together.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

Thank you, Madam President.

I believe you speak on behalf of all of us on Council expressing our appreciation for your time today, for your thoughtful words, for your proposal.

and for the sentiments that you shared, Council President.

Angelica, Nikita, Isaac, Sean, thank you.

I also want to say thank you to Aretha Basu, who I know has been working with a number of you in the organizations.

I really appreciate all of your time and the detailed presentation today.

More to come.

Thank you.

Council colleagues, we have one more follow-up item that if I can turn it back over to Lisa and Director Aristad.

We are not required to go through each one of these bullet points.

The Council Central staff has provided some slides for us.

This is an opportunity if folks want to flag something, as Councilmember Strauss said, one sentence is usually all that's allocated to issue identification, and a number of Councilmembers have already sent in a few things.

If you as a council member have flagged something for central staff and you would like to take the next few minutes to just identify or speak to an item or two, you are welcome to.

My intent was to have us adjourn no later than 6 p.m., but ideally by 5 30 if that's possible.

we have a few moments.

Lisa, I will turn it over to you.

If you have some slides you want to quickly go through, that's fine.

Also, council colleagues, if they would like to call out certain items, they are more than welcome to.

Does that sound good, Lisa?

some of the council members' initial thinking about potential amendments.

So I just want you to know, I mean, and the public to know that these are amendments that are still very much in play and are really preliminary concepts.

Some of them, I think, the council members are working on in more detail.

Some of them are preliminary ideas.

So just be aware that that's what you're looking at here.

And so the slides just will have a one-page description of the potential amendment.

additional details are included in the relevant topic papers that are in appendix A to the memo that you have.

So if you want to read more about what is represented by that one sentence, you will be able to find that in the topic papers.

It's with your agenda materials.

Then later this week, I think as Director Arastead mentioned, the council members will be submitting to central staff more formal amendments that they want to discuss next week on the July 22nd and 23rd meetings Those amendments will need to be self-balancing and those will be more formally addressed throughout the following weeks.

So Patty, we can go ahead and start with, these are listed backwards from D7 to D1 and then to the at-large folks.

Not everybody submitted amendments.

It was not required.

This is just a purely voluntary, what are you thinking about now and what would you like to share?

So that's what this is gonna look like.

So Patty, can we go ahead and go to the next slide?

Thank you.

So Council Member Lewis, at this point then I will just be, as we go through these slides, I will turn it over to the Council Members to speak to the amendments should they wish.

Thank you so much, Lisa.

I'm going to be super brief because we sort of discussed these things a little bit in our excellent panel presentation earlier.

But, you know, as I talked about before, definitely interested in some kind of process to develop a Kahoot-style community-based 911 response system.

The Department of Public Safety discussion, that has sort of come out of some discussions with Greg Doss and looking at a couple of other examples around the country of initiatives that tend to involve charter changes that some cities are pursuing or have pursued.

and could be a potential way to house a lot of the public safety related functions that we want to protect and expand, but not keep within the SPD chain of command.

And 9-1-1 dispatch could potentially be one of those things.

Community service officers, folks that have the power to do citations, but not the power of arrest, or our armed personnel.

and that's essentially the idea of thinking around how that would work.

Minneapolis is pursuing a charter amendment that would essentially create a civilian department of public safety.

that would have a basically an armed department within it that would be headed by like a chief of police that would be subordinate to a civilian director and there would be multiple other services.

That's a potential model.

I think this is probably a longer conversation than the summer session and something that would probably the next year's general election.

Those are some of the initial things right now and I'm happy to have future discussions about them.

Thank you, Patty.

Councilmember Strauss, I'll turn this over to you then.

Oh, great.

Thank you.

So when I was looking at this budget, I looked specifically at the departments that are under the purview of my committee.

So it's OPCD, SDCI, and Department of Neighborhoods.

And when I was looking at this, there were just three items that jumped out to me.

Restoring the I have a couple of questions.

The first one is about funding for the one-time funding for the comprehensive plan major update.

This does not happen often.

I'm not sure if I will bring amendments for all three of these issues.

This first one is in the budget to fund the environmental impact the state legislature pushed our deadline for the comp plan update to 2024, so OPCD's budget this year no longer includes funding for that work.

Council has taken steps in recent budgets, thanks to Councilmember Mosqueda, to ensure OPC deeply engages in the community around this major update.

And given the state extension, it is important that this funding may be appropriate for now, but it's important to me that we receive assurances from the executive that this funding would be restored next year.

The second one is restore the one-time funding for translation and interpretation of ADU materials.

This is only a $15,000 budget line item, and it would have a large amount of impact because we're putting English-only information into many different languages so that not just English, primarily English speakers are understanding how you can build an ADU at your house.

And because laws changed recently, that's the importance of this and it's a low cost item with a high impact.

the last one is retaining a position and appropriation for a term limited electrical inspector.

Last year at the request of IBEW council allocated funding to STCI for an electrical inspector.

This position is no longer funded in the mayor's proposed rebalancing budget and I would be interested in having a conversation with IBEW and councilmember Mosqueda.

We pushed for this last year to see if this is an appropriate cut or not.

I'm sure that I will have many other ideas once I look at the other departments more in depth.

I've got a long list and it's just, you know, per Director Noble's conversations with me, it's, we're just in a really tough spot where all of the work that we've done for so many years is, the funding's being pulled and that's hard.

So thank you, Council, Councilmember.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss for flagging that, these issues.

All right, next slide.

I should also note, go ahead Council Member Peterson.

I don't mean to interrupt you.

For folks, you know, feel free to say any other items that are also not listed there, but this does not have to be all-inclusive.

This was just sort of an initial high-level heads-up to colleagues.

Customer Peterson, please.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

So similar to Council Member Strauss, the first look at the rebalancing package from the mayor was through the lens of the committee that I chair.

There are obviously a lot of important matters we're dealing with with public safety, but this first wave was just to look at the items impacting my committee.

I may have more items from my committee or changes that I'd like to make.

I was very surprised and disappointed to see this.

We have a proposal from SDOT to pause this.

These sidewalks and crosswalks are needed now to meet Vision Zero safety goals, as well as our Safe Routes to School program, helping to connect dozens of children to Sandpoint Way Elementary School.

It will also help connect the scores of cyclists biking from Burke-Gilman Trail to Magnuson Park.

Funds to unpause this project can be found in the unreserved fund balance within the School Safety Traffic and Pedestrian Improvement Fund.

This amendment would, this amendment to the rebalancing package is about safety for pedestrians, safety for cyclists, connecting 1,000 low-income Magnuson Park residents to their neighbors, safely enhancing access to this regional asset that is Magnuson Park.

These are community-driven projects supported by all the neighborhoods there, as well as the Magnuson Park Advisory Committee.

I think it's important to recognize that these diverse collaborative groups have been advocating for these improvements for years.

I first learned about these projects years ago when I was a legislative aide.

To pause it is unacceptable to me and we will put forward an amendment to reverse that.

Thank you.

Yes.

The first amendment, the $3.5 million to create new tiny home villages, I'm happy to bring that forward.

But as I said this morning, if the amendment that was brought forward this morning was to pass, then it would be an important step forward.

And maybe this would not be necessary.

And that did pass, which I'm happy about.

And so We will see what to do about this one.

The next one is to make sure that the mayor's office does not carry out a sweep of the north lake tiny house village.

This budget amendment would impose a provisor to say no funds may be used to remove the north lake tiny house village.

The fourth time this year, and after massive public support for the tiny house village, and despite the dangers and absurdities of eliminating a tiny house village during the middle of a pandemic and homeless emergencies, the mayor continues to only give them extensions of a couple of months at a time.

And the residents are saying, imagine spending years being told that we would be evicted from our rental home in a month or two.

Their latest eviction date is August 1 and it is unacceptable to me and I hope all councilmembers will support it.

In a similar vein, cutting the money from the navigation team.

as part of stopping this ineffective and inhumane sweeps of homeless encampments and redirecting those funds, of course, to programs that actually work.

The navigation team, given the role it plays, is euphemistically named, and we want to make sure that the funds are directed towards something that actually works for Our homeless community members, the restoring of funding to the green new deal oversight board is also extremely important.

This is again, we I passed the ordinance creating the oversight board last fall and Mayor Durkin has done everything in our power, unfortunately, to prevent it from being created.

The oversight board is intended to be a body to fight the city to do real investments into the Green New Deal.

It will include representatives from environmental activists, labor, communities impacted by climate change, local tribes, and subject matter experts, and has a mandate to make recommendations on the city budget.

Unfortunately, as I said, the mayor has refused to advertise for open positions despite repeated inquiries, has refused to appoint people until a staff person to focus on it can be hired, and then refused to hire that person, including it, in her budget cuts.

So I think this is unacceptable.

And also keeping in mind, this is a small amount of money, and this budget amendment would restore the funding of the small amount of money to remove any excuses for not appointing people and allowing the board to begin its work.

I think the next one, the eviction defense is extremely crucial.

It won't be enough by itself, but it is extremely crucial.

This would increase funding for organizations like the Housing Justice Project for the city funded eviction defense attorneys that provide the the eviction defense for renters facing evictions.

This is, you know, it's a do or die difference for renters to have trained attorneys defending them.

And they, you know, we have seen how it has actually had an impact.

We have already won through the people's budget movement.

Two years ago, the city funded the first attorney and then increased it to two attorneys last year.

We know it is working.

We have multiple councilmembers acknowledging correctly what is going to be an avalanche or a tsunami of evictions that's coming.

This is not going to be enough, but this will be an essential part of funding the prevention of eviction.

And also, we have an executive pay cap of $150,000 per year.

This budget amendment would cap the pay of city executives, directors of departments, positions like that at no more than 150. We have brought this amendment forward every year after year.

The council has not supported it but we feel it is particularly important this year as the city's layoffs and mandatory furloughs and we don't believe it is conscionable for executives to be making very high salaries when we are telling our rank-and-file public sector workers to take mandatory furloughs or to be laid off.

And then lastly, I mentioned this in the morning, we want to make sure that there is a provisor to prohibit the police department and the city of the news office from using any funds to prosecute BLM protesters.

And there's a lot to be said about the flawed criminal justice system, but that's a start.

And yes, so we had an organizer from Real Change contact my office with the proposal that is being put forward here.

They explained that the pace of work is frenetic for homeless service workers during the COVID emergency especially.

And while parking enforcement was suspended, it allowed people working with vulnerable populations to be much more efficient because they don't need to worry about two-hour parking restrictions.

And now that those flexibilities were removed, it has been causing a massive problem for the workers whose service is actually critical for the most vulnerable communities during the COVID pandemic.

And so this intent here is to allow other people who are working on this to continue to disregard parking restrictions.

The next one is extremely important, ending the hiring freeze.

In the Office of Labor Standards, I've talked about this many times.

Workers facing wage theft or violation of their paid sick and safe time are sometimes waiting over a year to have the city to even start looking at their cases.

The mayor's hiring fees and austerity in the OLS is allowed to continue.

That will mean that workers will continue to have the theft of their wages unremitied.

And that's just one of the laws that the department looks into.

And then, of course, the SPD-related amendments, as I've mentioned before, making sure that the department's this year's budget estimate is cut by approximately 50%.

And if they have spent too much already, then it's up to them to figure out how they're going to function.

We have to stop the sweeps in the face of the context of a 50% cut because that is extremely important for us to do and of course we have to absolutely stop the sweeps.

The people's budget movement has brought the stop the sweeps amendment year after year.

Again and again the council has refused to do this.

We need to stop the sweeps this year.

There's a movement demanding it.

We heard from the presenters just now that they also want to and furthermore, we are in a pandemic.

And so that alongside, of course, capping the salaries and overtime of the Seattle Police Department, because that's where we see the bulk of the funds go in the police department.

Thank you, Council Member Sawant.

Council Member Morales, I know that you have one of four slides here.

If there's a handful that you'd like to draw our attention to, please do.

Otherwise, we are all ears for your priorities.

So let us know what you'd like us to look at.

So this is long because I will just say the long list of proposed cuts that we got from decriminalize Seattle, I submitted each one separately as an idea.

So that is probably what most of this list is.

And I'm happy to talk with other council members if y'all want to work together on something or one of them is the 911 issue.

So Council Member Lewis, We want to divide things up.

That's fine.

Um, I just want to make sure that they are out there as issues for us to consider.

Um, we have several, um, around the navigation team, uh, removing the police from permanent assignment there.

Um, and, uh, really just cutting the navigation team entirely and moving those services out to the community.

Um, that's what most of these are going to be about.

And then, um, we do have a couple, that I do want to call out.

One is to restore funding to the Office of Civil Rights for a mediator position as we talk about the need for enforcement and investigations and for that department in particular in this moment in time to be fully resourced.

This is not the time to be cutting anything from that department.

And then we have some, I would love to have conversations with folks about child care assistance program and actually trying to increase capacity there and, um, uh, a few other things.

Yeah.

I mean, everybody can look through them.

Uh, there's, as I said, most of these are about, um, SPD and about, uh, how we start moving toward, uh, uh, shifting that funding out into community.

Excellent.

Thank you, Councilmember Morales.

I know that that was a truncated summary of a robust list of priorities, so we really appreciate having these bullets here.

Just pausing to see if there's any questions.

I'm sure that folks will follow up with you on the offer to work together on a number of these pieces, but thank you for listing all of these into central staff for their work on those in advance.

Okay, I think we have Councilmember Herbold last.

Thank you.

So I have a couple pages here, some of them related to the decriminalized Seattle request, but some others as well.

The first is a request for funding to actualize a recommendation out of the city attorney's office.

the City Council last year actually requested this report from the City Attorney, led by Council President Gonzalez, with a slide requesting that the City Attorney report to the Council regarding a recommendation of the reentry work group, specifically to expand the pre-filing diversion program to those who are age 25 or older.

As part of the City Attorney's reply, he's requested funding to conduct a racial equity toolkit funding would be used to compensate stakeholders that they engage with and provide resources like food, daycare, and possible fees for engagement sites.

The city attorney, as I think most of us know, has been running a pre-filing diversion program for 18 to 24-year-olds since 2017. One of the bullets that's listed on this slide is actually from the decriminalized Seattle's recommendations for spending to add additional rental assistance for people experiencing homelessness.

that we are working on.

We are working on a proviso.

In addition, we have a proviso that I am working with councilmember Morales on to limit spending of appropriations for the lead program to require, to allow for referrals The change recognizes that there is a significantly changed set of circumstances in which LEAD and CoLEAD is currently operating, and by allowing for a third pathway to referrals to LEAD from non-law enforcement resources without actually requiring SPD to sign off on those.

We can we can actually act on on those referrals do due to ongoing capacity issues.

The police department has been unable to fulfill this function for many, many weeks and the result is that lead leads rare resources like specialized case management individual hotel motel rooms.

they're going unused, even while there's a growing need and urgent demand.

We understand that Chief Carmen Best is actually in favor of allowing this third pathway of referrals by removing the police department from the gatekeeping function.

And as I mentioned, we're continuing to work on the exact language.

I would like to make a couple of comments about the SPD amendments.

As it relates specifically to the SPD related amendments, as the central staff memo notes, the cuts below as well as the ad are, you know, I would like to work with my colleagues in getting a sense of what cuts there is support for on the council before developing amendments to represent these cuts.

The proposal includes, of course, the cuts proposed by the mayor for 2020, that $20 million.

It includes cuts proposed by decriminalize Seattle and King County equity now.

Some of the cuts could include shifting work to other areas outside of SPD.

Could include, as has been proposed by other council members, replacing 9-1-1 with a civilian-led system.

The mayor, as we all know, is proposing to do the same for 2021. I have identified a target of in cuts phased from September through December.

Again, this would be an approach where not all the cuts would come out of the budget in September, but would be phased in a way that is sequential to both when we could realize the cuts and also sequential to when the need for the the corresponding spending occurs over the next four months, and we've got central staff looking into whether or not we can actually technically and logistically do a phased cut approach.

The proposal suggests that we fund community-led alternatives to policing, some of which Seattle's already doing, like pre-arrest diversion, community service officers, and the intent is to focus I think it's really important for us to be able to focus our SPD officer activity on their areas of law enforcement expertise.

You know, I often refer to the quote from the Dallas police chief Brown where he laments the fact that officers are being I don't think that that is something that we should be putting those responsibilities on police officers to solve, and I don't think that that actually is resulting in improved public safety outcomes.

in reduction to certain functions that we've already identified, I think, as functions that many of us do not want SPD to be continuing, including their participation on the navigation team, including, as I've mentioned before, their activities as school resource officers.

And so those are potential cuts that might have labor implications.

that I think is what I have to say about the issue ID that I've done here.

I do want to, before I give up the mic here, express a little bit of consternation that we are going to be able to go from this moment around I just don't know how, and in his defense, he needs that I'm very aware of what the goals are, and what we're all trying to do together.

But I'm concerned that I don't have a good sense of which cuts I want to recommend at this point to give central staff direction.

And I'm just, I'm wondering out loud here, as I recognize what's before us, what our options might be.

Thank you, Councilmember Herbold, both for going over your slides and also for asking that question.

I am interested in following up with Greg as well.

I know that we have some initial back of the envelope numbers to potentially go along with the presentation that was offered today.

So I'm both interested in that analysis based on some of those initial numbers.

And then I believe One thing that we should consider doing is having just that serve as sort of the backbone of the various SPD level reductions that folks were interested in seeing, having just that one document identified as a way for us to have potential amendments, and then possibly having various council members take on assignments for certain sections of those.

So many council members, including yourself, have already shown and I know that there is a possibility for us to sort of divide up the possible amendments that are possible in the next two weeks, and have council members consider leading those sections of the proposal that we just heard about for what can be done in the next two weeks.

If you don't mind, I'll follow up with Greg Doss offline and also the presenters, including organizational members who've been thinking about I'm reaching out to folks, you know, I see Councilmember Peterson on the line.

We've had a lot of conversations about alternatives to 9-1-1 as well.

So maybe there's bits and pieces that various Councilmembers are already thinking of that correspond nicely with some of the information that we've seen.

And with that, I know we also still have Angelica and Sean listening in.

So I'm looking forward to following up on that presentation to make sure that those pieces are analyzed and to the extent we can get Councilmembers assigned to various pieces that are interested, that'd be great.

Okay.

I don't have really anything else to say on the next slide, except for I think it would be no surprise that I continue to say we need to get folks out of congregate shelters.

They're at risk of contracting COVID and because of heightened health complications already of dying and that's not good for their health, the folks health and congregate shelters and the overall health of our community as we think about the need for overall population health.

So more to come on that.

I believe that's the end of the presentation.

Is that correct, Lisa?

Yes.

Okay, we have eight minutes before our hard stop of 6pm.

We got a handful of council members who I know are thinking of other amendments.

You did not have to flag those today, you were welcome to, but we appreciate all those folks who did flag something already.

If there are any closing comments for the good of the order or things that didn't get a chance to be said, now's the time.

I want to say, you know, how much we appreciate central staff for walking through this presentation with us, and how much we appreciate the entire team that makes these meetings possible, IT, central staff, communications, clerk's office, and each of our individual offices.

Council President just sent a very nice note out to our entire staff in the legislative department.

I just wanted to thank her for those words of encouragement and appreciation as well.

we know that these are very stressful times, and you are doing incredible work to make sure that we can lift up the priorities of council and put those into action in the next two weeks.

And because we had such an incredible panel, I just want to say one more time, thank you, Angelica, Nikita, Sean, and Isaac, for all of your time and the presentations today.

And as Councilmember Herbold alluded to, much more to come between now and the next meeting.

Our next meeting for us for the Select Budget Committee is Wednesday at 2 p.m.

because we have a very important land use meeting in the morning.

And we will have robust public comments.

Again, for folks who want to publicly comment, we will have another public comment opportunity.

Sign up will be in at 12 noon.

With that, if there's no further questions or comments, today's meeting is adjourned.

Thank you all.

Have a great rest of your night.