I'm Brian Kalanick.
Will a new city council member change the city's approach to its budget for upzoning in the U District?
What impact is the council having on a major light rail project coming to West Seattle and Valley?
And does Seattle need city-provided child care?
Council members Sally Bagshaw and Lorena Gonzalez answer these questions and the ones you're sending in, too, next on Council Edition.
Working families across the city of Seattle are facing a child care crisis.
Putting people in jail without a plan upon release is ridiculous.
All that and more coming up next on City Inside Out, Council Edition.
And here we are with council members Lorena Gonzalez and Sally Bagshaw.
Thank you very much for joining us.
We need to start with a serious topic here.
We're taping the show less than 48 hours after a deadly crane collapse in downtown Seattle killed four people.
I know this is a state labor industries case now, but I wanted to start with your concerns about what happened.
Sally, it sounds like you were relatively nearby when this went down.
It was about a mile away, but first let us say we're so sorry to the families.
I mean, the condolences can't even be There just aren't words for that kind of a horrific incident.
What we know from the city of Seattle is that we had first responders there.
I want to say real thanks to both our firefighters, the police that were there, and also acknowledge that there are a lot of people on the scene that got out to help out of their cars right away.
So we know that as the probe continues, we'll learn more.
There may be some safety standards that have to be addressed.
But we also acknowledge that there was a pretty significant, whether they call it a microburst or a windstorm, and that's where I was out in Elliott Bay at the time.
And I know that it came and it came on very suddenly.
Yeah, we'll have to see what happens there.
Just in thinking about this, having cranes throughout the city, very common sight, but nobody wanted to see this happen here.
Yeah, of course, and I would echo the condolences that Council Member Bagshaw just mentioned.
Really tough day and incident for us as a whole, and our thoughts really are with the families and friends of not just those who were lost, but of all of the first responders and the people who were in the area who witnessed this really tragic event.
You know, I think we're a city that has a lot of cranes, and we see it around.
And it's fair to say, I think, that this is a rare incident, which means that as a whole, I think we're getting it right.
But every once in a while, we'll see something like this occur.
And that's an opportunity for us to revisit some of those safety guidelines and make sure that both workers and people in the vicinity are safe in sort of the shadow of these structures.
Gotcha.
Thank you very much.
I want to switch gears here if we could here.
We have some other news.
A new council member taking over for Rob Johnson who stepped down from his District 4 seat, Abel Pacheco, now serving in that role up until the November election is decided.
We're hoping to have him on the show here soon, but he's just getting his feet wet, really.
He's got a background in STEM education, helping kids of color.
Lorena, that really had me thinking about some of the different committee work that you do.
How do you think he's going to fit in on the council?
Well, you know, every council member gets to decide for themselves how they're going to fit into the council, but I think he brings with him a really strong set of experiences that is going to be relevant, will be relevant to the work that we're doing every day on city council.
He's officially the youngest council member that we will have coming in at the age of 31, and he has a lot of experience in the education field, and he's a member of my committee, which which is responsible for issues related to education, including higher education.
So I'm excited about seeing what he wants to prioritize in that particular space.
And you know, of course, he's going to continue to take over all of the chair responsibilities of all the standing committees that belong to former Councilman Roy Johnson.
So he's got a lot of work ahead of him.
Yeah, yeah.
And Sally, going to you on this, I know this is a so-called caretaker position, but Councilmember Pacheco is going to have some impact on the budget process that you'll be overseeing this fall.
A lot of Councilmembers, I know, we're asking them about ideas with revenue and whatever else.
What are you expecting out of this Councilmember?
Well, he's obviously new, but he's very eager to participate.
We're delighted to have him.
D4 is going to be well represented.
And interestingly enough, I heard from a lot of people that I wouldn't have expected would weigh in on this.
and just said we've worked with him and we really like him and we like working with him at the U and on the Mesa project.
He will be one of nine of us that weigh in on budget issues and I'll look forward to working with him around his priorities.
Yeah, we'll see what happens a lot ahead there, especially with land use in D4.
I know that's going on.
I wanted to talk about something.
You both serve on the elected leadership group overseeing the Ballard to West Seattle extension of Link Light Rail for Sound Transit.
That group met recently, I know, to help guide a big decision that's coming up in May.
What's going to be studied?
What options are going to be studied in the environmental impact statement for this project?
So I'm going to start with West Seattle.
Lorena, if I could, you live there.
There's a lot of concern, I know, over elevated structures versus tunneling.
How much extra that might cost.
Some public comments just to draw this out here.
Cam has some concerns about tunneling.
He says this.
When something is a public utility, you don't sacrifice efficiency and effectiveness for a prettier option.
Gene has a comeback.
He writes this.
This will be effective and efficient.
Saving homes and neighborhoods is the right option, and it has nothing to do with being pretty.
Your thoughts about this?
There's a lot of talk in West Seattle about this right now.
Yeah, and unfortunately, I can't speak as to any of those issues in West Seattle because I'm conflicted out.
I see.
I see.
I am one of the properties that was potentially impacted by one of the alternatives that was identified by a stakeholder group.
My understanding is that that particular option is now off the table.
So unfortunately, I wasn't...
You can speak more broadly.
I'm happy to speak more broadly about the issues as a whole.
I think really what the elected leadership groups major body of work was oriented towards is making sure that we deliver for taxpayers their expectations around a connected light rail option from West Seattle to Ballard that will also connect through Chinatown International District and Pioneer Square, which will ultimately be the major, major hub for at least the next hundred years for people to come in and out of the region.
We are an epicenter of employment and job opportunities.
We are the main epicenter for tourism.
And as a result of that, we have many, many, many, many thousands of people coming in and out of our area.
And it's incumbent upon us to build this system by making sure that it's affordable, accessible, and that it's truly going to meet the ridership needs of people who use it every day or every once in a while.
And so I think that we obviously need to be cognizant of neighborhood impacts and how this infrastructure will ultimately impact our neighborhoods.
Those are things that are appropriate to be studied in an environmental impact study scenario.
And I think what you saw the elected leadership group do last Friday was advance some real possible options for the Sound Transit staff to evaluate and dig into and to identify the breadth and the depth of some of those impacts.
We'll see what we get after the environmental impact study is done and it will really ultimately be up to the Sound Transit board to make a decision and determination as to which line to build.
But I think that it's fair to say that the public comment period has been very robust.
And we actually had a two week extension to that public comment period.
And I think that the Sound Transit staff and board now have all the information that they need in order to make the best decisions that they can with regard to this new infrastructure.
So I have the detail, because I was there, and I wasn't conflicted out.
And I also want to respect very much the fact that you had to excuse yourself at the time, where it was probably personally very interesting to you.
So thank you for that.
Well, about 10 days ago, I was invited to go to Delridge.
Downtown and Ballard and Inner Bay were the areas that I was really focused on, but I was invited by neighbors to come and look at what the impact would be for one of the lines that are going right through their neighborhood near Andover Street and between there and Genesee.
And they were pretty impactful for me being there on site and seeing how many houses would have to be removed if a certain line went in.
having something that potentially could be 160 feet high over their heads and you're trying to live and raise your families in that area, it just struck me like that's just the wrong option.
I know, as everybody does, that tunneling is a lot more expensive, but when you Think about, what do you want the neighborhood to look like for the next 160 years?
We want to do the right things we can for people across the city.
So I think putting the Pigeon Ridge Tunnels back on the table and taking a look at it is a serious option.
And then if you just want to jump over to Ballard, for years my constituents within Interbay have been saying, you've got to have a tunnel that goes under the cut there because having a movable bridge is ridiculous because then you've lost the predictability for a schedule.
But having a large bridge over there, and it would have to be very, very high, once again would have impact on the neighborhoods.
And so we're not really sure what the delta of cost is going to be, but as soon as you start taking out homes and businesses, those costs go up a lot.
So I felt that, like you were saying, It was a very robust public conversation.
We know where people are aligning.
That and then the last point around the Chinatown International District.
My big goal, frankly, is what it looks like at the end of the day.
Whether it's a shallow tunnel, strikes me that that makes more sense than a deep bore tunnel that goes really deep and then you're having to use elevators to get up to the surface.
But our design commission was there saying, let's really focus on mitigation for International District.
What's that going to look like afterwards so that we're connecting Union Station and King Street Station?
That makes all the sense in the world.
Can I ask, though, when it comes to these different tunnel options, we are talking about other dollars.
I know there's a regional thing and everyone's looking at Seattle and saying, hey, if you want that, you're going to have to pay for it.
How do you respond to that?
Well, it's like anything else that we want.
We're going to have to figure out alternative methods of paying for it, and there's no one source.
I mean, what we did down on the waterfront included state money and federal money, and the port was involved.
And ultimately, we property owners were involved with a local improvement district.
This is like that porridge that you start mixing up.
Nothing comes from one source.
So we'll be working with all those possible sources and for the neighborhoods to say, again, what you were saying, it's a hundred year investment.
We don't want to go cheap and we don't want to make something worse.
So we are going to have to get back to the table and figure out what those costs are going to be.
Thanks very much.
I want to stick with you, Sally, if I could, for an update on the effort to have a regional authority for homeless services.
I know there are some issues to figure out with the leadership of Seattle's Human Services Department, but I want to look bigger picture here if I can.
The council has talked about making a decision on what this regional authority might look like by as early as this fall, and that's coming right up here.
What would this look like?
What do you want to see out of this process?
Well, I'm actually very excited about this, that for the last decade or so, we know that there's been duplication in services between what King County is doing and what the City of Seattle is doing.
This brings an opportunity for us to come together so that we're best leveraging our resources.
And just this last week, I had the delight of working with this group.
And we had two video conferences, one with Portland and one with Los Angeles, where we're learning more about what they are doing.
And I think that I am hearing a real consensus around this isn't just a Seattle deal.
It's not even just a King County thing.
Homelessness is impacting every single county in our region.
And I'm hopeful that going forward, we will look like region that has Snohomish, Pierce County, King and Kitsap saying what can we do to make sure that it's spread fairly across the populations in all the cities so that other cities are stepping up as well to help us with the services and a whole lot more housing and that's that pipeline from 24-7 shelters all the way through various options for housing that we can afford.
Yeah, Lorena your thoughts about this because I've heard some other comments too about this you know Seattle, it's your problem, you take care of it or whatever else, and I think, I'm hoping we're past that because it is a larger issue up and down the west coast, but what does this regional authority look like in your mind going forward?
Well, there's still a lot of unanswered questions about what the regional authority will look like, including how it will be governed and its independence from both county-electeds and Seattle-electeds in terms of sort of its day-to-day decision-making, in terms of operations and management of these really critically important investments in our community and the people who live in our communities.
I think it's, my hope is that we will continue to have, you know, really cooperative conversations with our partners over at the county to be able to answer many of those questions and, you know, I think we are all very dedicated to continuing to have those conversations.
It seems like cooperation can sometimes be the word that people throw out sort of just as a generic adjective, but I really do think it's important in this construct.
We are literally in a space where we are trying to create a new government entity to help us address the number one issue in our region and in our state and up and down the West Coast.
And so it's important that we get it right.
What should it?
Do you have any thoughts about that?
Well, I mean, I do think that there is, I do think it needs to be independent.
I do think that there needs to be a depoliticizing of how these funding decisions are made so that we're focused on those programs that we know work, and we do more of those.
And I think that having a shared governance structure inherently means that we're sharing the responsibility of the problem, and the problem is that we continue to have too many people entering into a cycle of homelessness and we have too many people who continue to experience homelessness at a chronic level, meaning they've been in a cycle of experiencing homelessness for years and years and years.
And it seems like an intractable problem.
But there are things that we can do upstream that prevent people from entering into that experience in the first place.
And we should be doing more of those things.
But it's going to take collective political will amongst regional leaders.
to accomplish that.
Okay, thank you.
That's very well said.
Yeah, okay.
Well, we got some more to talk about with that one, I know.
We're not done yet.
Yeah, I know, I know.
I'd like to move on though, Sally, if I could.
City provided child care.
You've been talking about this with Council Member Mosqueda, who is legislating for two these days.
She's expecting her first child this October.
This is a quote from one of her tweets about this.
Not only was the implementation plan for a child care facility at City Hall proposed in last year's budget, it comes after years of past City Council members studying it.
I think she might have been talking about you.
Now, with the super majority female council, we've said no more studies.
Tell me about this.
This has been a work in progress for some time.
What do you expect to come out of this?
Well, what I want to have come out of it is before the end of this year that we have a facility in City Hall, or at a very minimum across the street at the Seattle Municipal Tower.
But I believe there's space here.
And it does take time.
We know that child care centers cannot just be set up with a snap of the fingers.
There are a lot of state regulations.
So what I'm proposing, frankly, is if we can't get it going with a full-on childcare center for toddlers as well, let's have an infant room.
Let's get started with that because it's less expensive, you don't have to have a space for them running around, but it can be the kind of things for moms, for parents, that you come back to the city and you've got a place where you can bring your child.
This is not new news.
It's stuff that we've been working on and other entities private entities that recognize the value to the city is for city employees for a lot of employees downtown or what do you write well I think if we start small my focus would be on city employees okay and as councilmember misguided said this isn't about her this is about parents generally yeah I'm just so happens that you know it could be about her but And we know, I mean, every statistic that you've ever read about this in case studies shows that when an employer opens up a child care facility, primarily for their employees, you've got a happier workplace.
And that's something that I'm very interested in.
And it's a serious issue here.
I'm just talking about it because I know I went through it more than a decade ago with my kids.
It's a lot of money to put kids, an average of $1,700 a month or something like that.
You know what, at this point we're not even talking about money so much as just spaces.
Yeah, or availability, right.
Having facilities downtown with all the employees that want to work downtown, we need a lot more facilities.
And I would say in almost every new building, we ought to be planning for child care facilities.
We just happen to have one here at the city that we've got some available space.
Loren, any thoughts on this one?
Lots of thoughts on this one.
So I have also been doing a lot of work on this issue since I first got elected to city council in 2015 and one of the things that I think is really important for us to acknowledge in the conversation of an on-site child care facility is that it meets the needs of a very narrow set of people, an important need of a narrow set of people that work for the city of Seattle, at least to begin with.
But it's important for us to sort of scope up and take a broader look at what the issue really is.
And I think it's fair to say that working families across the city of Seattle are facing a child care crisis, both in terms of access, but also in affordability.
There was a recent report that just came out that talked about the statistics around child care available slots in King County and we have about 127,000 children in King County between the ages of zero and five.
To meet the needs of those 127,000 kids we only have about 63,000 slots of child care facilities available currently.
So that is a dire state of affairs for working parents who are trying to access any kind of child care, setting aside the question of whether it's affordable or not, you know, that's still a massive problem in terms of the lack of child care facilities that are available.
And you're absolutely right.
The average family pays about 25% of their income towards childcare a year.
That is an exorbitant amount of money to have to figure out how to save to be able to meet the needs, the real needs of childcare.
There is no other way for you to go work and establish a career.
and have income mobility if you are straddled with the responsibility of finding and identifying child care that is way beyond your means.
Most importantly, has anyone figured out good baby names for Councilwoman Estrada going forward?
I think she's got it covered.
Okay, all right.
Just want to make sure we got it, if we could, on that one.
Lorena, let me head back to you.
An interesting story from a few weeks ago.
Some Yakima County corrections officers were caught on video dropping some newly released prisoners, it sounds like, near a Seattle homeless camp.
Going beyond that small issue, that's a problem, but let's talk about what's happening with this, because I think there's a broader issue here of what's happening with the corrections, what's happening with homeless services, and where those intersect.
Your thoughts about this?
Yeah, no, I appreciate the question, and you're right.
That was the jail drop-off incident from Yakima County that we all sort of collectively learned about together in the last couple of weeks.
is obviously concerning and we'll continue to make sure that we are working with state and local partners to get answers to some of those questions and making sure that policies and procedures and our expectations are met.
But I do think it highlights a broader issue as you have framed up.
between what is the intersection between our criminal justice system, what are we doing in that space, and how is it, if at all, contributing to the issues that we face as a region in terms of addressing the number of people who are experiencing homelessness and who become re-traumatized by virtue of getting funneled into and out of repeatedly the criminal justice system.
And I think Council Member Bagshaw can agree with this, that it is something that we have been hearing a lot about over the last few weeks and months.
And it is something that I think this council takes very seriously.
And I think it's also really fair to say that when we look at the criminal justice system and its relationship to people experiencing homelessness.
It's important for us to all keep in mind that jails is not the answer to solving for homelessness.
We have experienced not so long ago that jail is not the answer to society's problems.
We can look as recently as the war on drugs.
that did nothing other than create pipelines to mass incarceration as opposed to actually dealing with the issues of the epidemic of substance use disorder.
And so we need to have a serious conversation in our community and as elected leaders and local leaders in our city about the values of jail-based treatment versus the values of community-based treatment as it relates to addressing the substance use disorders that are currently being experienced by some, not all, but by some people who are currently experiencing homelessness.
Let's head from the former civil rights attorney to the former prosecutor here.
And let's break this down, Sally, your thoughts about this.
You've studied this issue for a few years.
We're talking decades now.
So what I think Councilmember Gonzalez has raised, and I agree with her completely, is that as we're focusing on people who are homeless, we know that they have different needs and problems.
Some of it is financial.
Their rents are raised, they lose a job.
There are others that have significant behavioral mental health problems.
Those are things that we've got to address.
At the same time, over the last month, as we all know, there have been a couple of reports that people are saying, yes, we agree, we need to have a lot more housing so that we can get people into housing, but we also are seeing violent crimes and crimes, whether it's breaking and entering, whether it's somebody's car is smashed, to feed drug habits.
And I know that from my own constituents in my district, and this is downtown, that businesses and people who are living here are saying, we've had it with that.
You cannot say, it's okay for people to continue to break and enter to, whether it's robbery, whether it's burglary, whether it's the grab and smash to feed drug problems.
That is not working to ignore that.
If you talk to our city attorney, he'll say, we aren't ignoring it.
We are arresting and we are convicting for violent crimes.
We need to break it down into bite-sized pieces that we can deal with.
Yes, we need more 24-7 shelter, we need more services attached to that, and we need more housing as part of the pipeline.
Yes, as we're doing criminal justice reform, as Councilmember Gonzalez said, putting people in jail without a plan upon release is ridiculous.
You only make things worse for the individual, but also for those of us that are on the outside when they come out without having a treatment plan, or case managers that are helping them through.
So we know that we need to do both of those things, which is to continue to reform the criminal justice system in a way that makes sense.
And then lastly, money coming from the state for mental health.
I want to say thank you to the legislature.
That's great.
And we need so much more.
I mean, if we're going to be addressing all these issues simultaneously, $60 million is a good start.
But if you're spreading that kind of resources across the state, what the city and county get isn't enough to address the problems we've got right now.
So I'm happy, frankly, that we've got the team coming together and the business community that I met with in the last two weeks.
I think that we agree on what needs to happen.
City of Seattle can't do it all alone, but working with the county and our other counties, we're going to make progress.
Okay.
Thank you very much for that.
Lorena, I'd like to talk to you, if I could, about some of the months ahead, maybe the years ahead here.
Your committee that works with New Americans is part of this effort to make sure the 2020 census is recorded properly.
We have a lot of immigrants and refugees in Seattle.
When people are not counted, cities can lose federal funding for certain programs.
What type of outreach is going on?
What's the city's role here, please?
Well, we currently have a task force that's been assembled and want to thank Mayor Durkan for her efforts and in Making sure that we bring in community members who are trusted Communicators and stakeholders with those hardest to count populations to be part of that task force.
So it's really important for us to Recognize that there are certain members of certain part of certain communities that are just harder to count and that has been true since the inception of the census so we're talking about We're talking about people experiencing homelessness.
We're talking about immigrants and refugees who might have concerns about how the federal government will use this information against them.
We're talking about LGBTQ folks.
We're talking about youth, unaccompanied youth in particular.
So there's a huge swath of people who are just historically hard to count.
And so it's incumbent upon us at the city to make some resources available.
And we've just partnered with Seattle Foundation to make create a regional fund to be able to provide smaller community-based organizations who are trusted messengers with the additional resources they need to be able to begin helping community members, those harder-to-count community members, help them understand what the risks and benefits are of participating in the U.S. census.
And so we have a lot of work ahead of us over the next several months, but all of this work is being done as a ramp up to April 1st, 2020, when the census count will officially begin.
Got it.
Sally, I'm going to start wrapping up here if I can.
A piece that I know you had in last year's budget as well, starting to take action, this mobile public safety team dealing with low acuity calls out there.
Let me know what's happening with that.
Well, I have to say thank you to the mayor and to her team because I got a report on this last week and we're very excited to see it moving forward.
And our firefighters are working on this with us.
And what it ultimately will do is to put a team of first responders and mental health, behavioral health people available on call and then working with our crisis connections up in Northgate so that we can find the individual, find out what is wrong with that individual.
Do they have a case manager?
Do they have a place to live?
So we're not burdening our firefighters.
They don't have to send out two ladder trucks plus two ambulances.
This is a group that can go out, do the first triage.
If they need more help, they call for more help.
But it will reduce the number of people that are having to respond.
and truly help this individual that's on the street.
So I'm, seriously, this was one of my top priorities last year and I'm very happy to see it moving forward.
Okay, and thank you both for your input here.
We will see you next time on Council Edition.