Seattle City Council Select Budget Committee 101623

Thank you so much, everyone, for joining the Select Budget Committee.

Today is Monday, October 16, 2023, and the time is 10.04 a.m.

I'm Teresa Mosqueda, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Herbold?

Here.

Council Member Juarez?

Council Member Lewis?

Present.

Council Member Morales?

Here.

Council Member Nelson?

Present.

Council Member Peterson.

Council Member Sawant.

Council Member Strauss.

Present.

Chair Mosqueda.

Present and Council President Juarez is excused this morning.

Thank you.

Six present.

Excellent.

Thank you very much colleagues.

Thanks for joining us here today.

We have a really robust group of stakeholders who are here to present some of the exciting takeaways.

As we think about the 2024 budget in front of us, there's been a lot of conversation this year and over the last few years about how do we show the investment that the public dollar is making into the public good.

We are thrilled that we have three panels that will discuss some of the initial investments from Jumpstart Progressive Payroll Tax as an example of where public dollars are being put to use and how we are visibly and tangibly seeing an improvement in individual lives, whether it's vulnerable community members that we are serving, the workers who are providing direct services to those vulnerable community members, and the investments that we're making in improving our infrastructure, both in housing and Green New Deal and equitable development strategies.

Thank you to my colleagues for joining us.

I appreciate you being here with us today.

The first panel will include human service providers who will be talking about wage stability.

This will include Lauren Fay from Downtown Emergency Services Center, Lindsey Grad from SEIU Healthcare 1199 Northwest, Naomi Morris and John Rios, who are also members of SEIU 1199 and human service providers.

Panel two will include the affordable housing and community-driven solutions presenters, including Patience Malaba from the Housing Development Consortium and Miguel Mayeses from El Centro de la Raza.

And we will have a panel on Green New Deal and Equitable Development Initiative Impacts.

This will include Abhidharan Yusuf, apologies for that, from Puget Sound SAGE, and Matt Remley from Mazaska Talks.

And we will have plenty of opportunities for council members to ask questions as well.

Colleagues, you do see at least one attachment on the agenda.

Thank you so much to our community presenters for identifying information that they would like to visibly share with you.

So additional material will be sent by my team to the floor, including to council members and your legislative assistants.

And we'll also make that available as part of the meeting materials that get posted as the minutes and for the public record.

So those will be circulated here soon.

Hearing no objection, the agenda would be adopted.

hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

We appreciate that this is a briefing and discussion today, but we also wanted to offer an additional time for public comment.

One or two of my colleagues had asked if we could add additional public comment, and that was very much a welcome request.

So we've included public comment for today at the top of the agenda.

I'll go ahead and call the individuals who have signed up for public comment and make sure that we get through everybody who is here.

And as a reminder folks will have two minutes to provide public comment and then we will transition to our panelists.

I want to just double check with our clerks in the room.

Thank you very much Jodi for being there.

Deputy Clerk is there anybody who signed up for public comment in the room.

We have two in-person public commenters.

Okay, great.

Well, we'll take the 1st, 3 people online and then we'll go to the 2 in the room and then we'll round it out with the rest of the folks who are listed on the remote public comment sheet here.

So that will be about 10 people for folks who are wondering how many people are signed up for public comment.

And with that, we'll 1st, go to Peter fondant followed by Alice Walker.

Good morning.

Peter.

Good morning, Councilmember Mosqueda.

This is Peter Condit in District 6. Today, you all will be hearing about the outcomes of programs that have been supported by Jump Start funding.

I believe that wage stability, affordable housing, equitable development, and Green New Deal initiatives are key to a healthy and safe Seattle.

It is highly inequitable that the Seattle Police Department's impacts are not similarly scrutinized and tied to its budget.

Since 2015, one in every 10 people killed in Seattle has been killed by the SPD.

The value of human life, especially if they're young, like Tanavi Kandula was, is incalculable.

I'm disgusted that despite the racist and deadly outcomes of policing, some Seattleites and council members still love the SPD and are trying to expand its power through a rebranded shot spotter called sound thinking, which would surveil the public with cameras in a manner consistent with the totalitarian regime.

Andrea Ritchie and Miriam Kaba have collected some perspectives on policing that are worth keeping in mind.

Alexander Goodwin says, police are the muscle of racial capitalism.

Nicole Segal says, police are the realization of state violence in human form.

Rory Kramer says, policing is the violent enforcement of the empowered status quo.

Alex Vitale says, policing is the coercive force that governments use to enable systems of exploitation.

Robin Maynard says, policing is itself the opposite of safety, safety is negation.

Marisol Lebron says, policing is a state-sanctioned attempt to steal the future from the oppressed.

Leanne Betiso Masake Simpson says, state governance requires policing in all its forms to maintain expansive Indigenous dispossession.

Max Felter Cantor reminds us that procedural reform expands police power.

And I'll end by saying myself you will hear about today.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you so much.

Alice Lockhart, you are up next.

Good morning, followed by Colleen Ling.

Good morning, council members.

I'm Alice Lockhart with Solidarity Budget and 350 Seattle.

I was here this morning hoping to discuss equitable distribution of Jump Start funds.

We are concerned particularly about the fairly bureaucratic investments and the downtown investments in the Office of Economic Development.

Those investments, you know, per the presentations last week are sort of incidentally invested somewhat in the minorities, but not so equitably distributed throughout neighborhoods.

and not appropriate targets for jumpstarts, which really should go to underserved communities, not downtown, not large businesses, and not core bureaucratic functions.

So we urge you to work with OAD to ensure that these investments are properly targeted or cut, and substitute investments in child care retention bonuses, general wealth, and investments like you'll hear today.

Um, in the remainder of my time, um, I echo my friend, Peter Condit, um, and being really concerned about the effects of our policing spending, including in parks today.

Um, um, the, uh, the, uh, Black Lives Memorial Garden is being swept, uh, which was by parks personnel and, uh, and, and, and, you know, we fear destroyed.

Um, and that's just this huge, illustration of what of what happens when we invest in pollution rather than community.

We urge you all to center equity and therefore that's where it's most needed.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

And we'll go to Colleen Liang and then we're going to go to the three or to the folks who are in the room and we'll come back to the last three online.

Good morning Colleen.

Star six on you.

Good morning.

Thank you, Council Member.

And Colleen Lang, Policy Director, United Way of King County.

I'm speaking first in favor of wage increases for non-profit human service workers.

We're grateful to Council Members Herbold and you, Council Member Mosqueda, and the entire Council for this summer's resolution.

Please fully fund the wage adjustment needed to meet the Council's stated goal of increasing wages 7% in two years for human service workers.

in line with the University of Washington's wage study.

United Way is working with the Seattle Human Service Coalition funders group and has signed the statewide funders collaborative pledge.

We and other philanthropies will continue planning for increased funding for wages in our grant making.

Low wages perpetuate structural inequities and harm service quality.

Second as partners with the city and county in funding a large home visiting program Parent Child Plus we encourage council to include all human service contracts in inflation adjustment budgeting.

Only tying human service department administered contracts to CPI leaves many early learning and other human service contracts in other departments behind.

Finally, United Way was disappointed that the mayor's office again left the city's longstanding funding for our free tax campaign out of his budget.

We were grateful last year to the council for restoring this grant and are asking that you do the same this year.

Our free tax campaign helped Seattle residents claim $4.8 million in tax refunds this year.

including the first year of the state's Working Families Tax Credit.

Without our outreach and services, much of this would have gone unclaimed.

Our Free Tax Campaign volunteers and AmeriCorps members provide a return of 83 times the city's investment.

Families who claim these credits typically spend their refunds on items that stimulate the local economy and city sales tax receipts.

Please restore this important partnership, and thank you for all your hard work on the budget.

Thank you Colleen and thanks to your cat I think as well for testifying this morning.

We are going to go ahead and go to the folks in the room.

Madam Clerk thanks for calling those names.

Yes John Grant will be our first in-person speaker.

Good morning.

Good morning, council members.

My name is John Grant.

I'm the chief strategy officer with the Low Income Housing Institute.

I've got three items, so I'll try to speak quickly.

First, Lehigh has operated 11 tiny house villages in the city of Seattle that have served thousands of homeless folks and gotten folks into housing very quickly.

We have been informed that, unfortunately, the budget addition of $2.5 million was not included in this year's Mayor's budget, and we're asking for the City Council to reinstate those funds.

This money goes towards critical behavioral health supports.

We have partnered with Therapeutic Health Services that has assembled a six-member certified behavioral health team that will have to be dismantled at the end of the year.

This does not make sense.

Our clients are suffering from substance use disorders and mental health needs.

We ask you to please reinstate that funding.

Secondly, Lehigh is a member of the Housing Development Consortium and many affordable housing providers are still reeling from rent loss from the pandemic and what is needed right now is an operational support for affordable housing providers to make sure that our low-income residents can have housing stability.

We ask the council to engage with HDC members and secure funding in this year's budget for an operational support for affordable housing providers to create stability in the sector.

And thirdly, you may have read in the Seattle Times on the front page that there is an asylum seeker crisis emerging in Tukwila.

Not emerging, but happening right now.

These folks are not from Tukwila.

They're from Africa.

They're from South America.

And they often wind up on Seattle streets.

And in fact, it's Seattle employees and Seattle Police Department that is referring folks to the church down in Tukwila.

There is a growing need for a response to the migrants that are coming to our city and are sleeping on our streets.

We asked the city council to work with the Office of Immigrants and Refugee Affairs.

to find a solution and work with communities so that folks have a place to stay and can get a roof over their head.

Thank you very much for your time today.

Thank you.

Our last in-person speaker is W.

Maeda.

Good morning.

Thank you, council members, for your time.

I was in here once last week, but I have some questions about the same topic.

A little history of my family, we can be traced back to Bainbridge Island in the early 1900s, as well as Beacon Hill around the same time frame.

And my family was some of the first people that the federal government put in internment camps.

And it's apt to today's my topic, because my family was in the same internment camps as your mayor in Minidoka.

And any time that there are armed people in a position of leadership, where a lot of people have congregated or brought together is a very big concern to me and my family.

And I'm referring to the same topic as last week of armed staff in the tiny house villages.

And I would like to speak to somebody on the council if they would have some time for me.

I would appreciate it very much.

I've talked to some different lawyers that I know.

Unfortunately, I personally don't have a large budget for that right now.

I have a seven-year-old daughter who I'm getting her ready for college already.

But if anyone could commit to actually sitting down with me, possibly here in City Hall and chatting about armed staff members in tiny house villages, I would appreciate it very much.

Thank you.

That concludes.

Thank you so much.

Thanks so much.

And we'll get your information.

Thank you both for testifying today.

We're going to go back to the folks who are listed on the remote public comment.

BJ Last will be followed by Taylor Riley and Matt Offenbacher.

And if Amy Summers is listening you're listed to testify as our last person but not present.

So you have time to dial in.

BJ good morning.

Good morning.

My name is BJ Last.

I'm a Ballard resident.

I support the Solidarity Budget.

Jumpstart has been a transformative item for Seattle allowing the city to scale up funding for housing and Green New Deal investments which keep people safe.

I'm disappointed that SPD, the department that eats up the largest share of the general fund, isn't asked to report on its outcomes to justify its funding.

When it comes to SPD, outcomes get thrown out, whether it's the SPD Commission to National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform finding that 80% of the calls SPD responds to are not criminal, and 49% of calls can be transferred to community response without any SPD involvement, or decades of research going back to the 1973 Kansas City Preventative Patrol experiment Finally, that the number of police have no impact on crime.

For other items, people have already mentioned about SPD.

Others have also pointed out some of the issues of shot spotter and CCTV cameras and why the city should reject them again.

But that's actually not even the question for council right now.

The question for council is whether or not to set aside 1.8 million of funding in case SPD ever decides to do a surveillance impact report and manages to get it approved.

There's no reason to think SPD any time in the near future.

In the year since SPD last requested additional funding for these technologies, SPD has not taken any action to start a surveillance impact report.

If this was a serious request, SPD would have submitted a surveillance impact report months ago.

They'd be requesting money for something that could actually go into effect, not something maybe in the future if they ever decide to get around to it.

It's hard to imagine anyone on council's top priority for $1.8 million of general fund is to put it on the shelf in case SPD ever decides to do a surveillance impact report and gets it approved, instead of using that funding to restore cuts to ADA compliance, cuts to Vision Zero, or cuts to making it safer for kids to walk and bike to school, or cuts to free tax preparation, or any of the other items Councilmembers mentioned last week, or other community members have brought up as priorities.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you very much.

And I want to call on the next person Taylor Riley followed by Matt Offenbacher.

Good morning Taylor.

Hi my name's Taylor and I'm a District 3 resident and I'm calling in support of the Solidarity Budget and looking forward to hearing about jumpstart outcomes for what we know makes our community safer and healthier.

Affordable housing the Green New Deal and fair wages.

But I also have some really serious concerns about the proposed budget.

Seattle Police Department has asked for funds for ShotSpotter three times and all have failed because we know it is a waste of money and completely ineffective.

This year's request for ShotSpotter and CCTV cameras and public spaces will one, cost a lot of money, two, not make anyone safer, and three, exacerbate racial and economic disparities in who is criminalized and surveilled.

A 2018 study found that the use of auditory gun detection technology like ShotSpotter in combination with CCTV doesn't increase the accuracy but actually drains police resources because of all the false alarms.

And this is alongside piles of research showing ShotSpotter has no significant impact on gun violence.

We also know technologies like ShotSpotter increase the number of stops and searches in communities overall and increases the racial disparities and these unnecessary contacts between police and individuals.

Seattle Police Department already stopped black and indigenous people at seven and nine times the rate of white people in Seattle.

This is racist and it is harmful for individual and community health and safety.

And it's upsetting we're even having to have these conversations because we know there are better solutions to making our communities safer.

These are investing in economic security like with guaranteed basic income safe and affordable housing education violence interruption programs, healthcare, including substance use treatment facilities.

These are the solutions we should be talking about and funding in the budget.

I'm looking forward to hearing those today and hope to not have any more conversations around the cost draining ineffective racist technology like shot spotter and increased surveillance.

Thanks.

Council Member Musquet, are you ready for your last remote speaker?

Oh, sorry, I was on mute.

Yes, Matt Offenbacher, please go ahead.

Oh, hi there.

Thank you.

Hi, Council.

My name is Matt Offenbacher, and I'm a resident of District 3, and I'm also a visual artist who works in District 1. I'm calling today to tell you that I strongly support the solidarity budget demand and the nine guarantees, and to ask that you support them as well.

Since we have this really, the luxury of a two minute comment period, I thought I'd just read off the guarantees.

I'm sure you've all heard them before, but I wanted to remind the council.

We're calling for an income guarantee, housing guarantee, health guarantee, transportation guarantee, climate action and resilience guarantee, care guarantee, living wage guarantee, communication guarantee, and food guarantee.

I've lived and worked in Seattle for close to 20 years now, and I've watched as our city has become a place where it's increasingly less possible to be an artist or a musician or any sorts of arts worker.

Large portions of my artist community have left in the past five years.

And of course, this experience of us artists is just part of a much larger picture in our community of people working service jobs of all kinds, human service worker and care workers, healthcare workers, all the jobs that serve people and community and create a city that's worth living in.

At the same time as this has been happening, I've been watching as our city's policies and actions have become increasingly callous and cruel to our most vulnerable residents, sleeping rather than offering viable shelter, criminalizing rather than offering treatment and care.

These are the reasons why I support the solidarity budget, and I urge you to as well, to invest in the things that we know keep people safe.

And I know that we're facing a budget crunch, and there's always this question of where money will come from.

And I think you've heard from a lot of the other commenters today that there's a lot of things in the SPD budget and with the shot spotter that can be easily low-hanging fruit.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for your public testimony today.

If folks didn't get a chance to provide all of their comments please do send those in to council at Seattle.gov and feel free to let us know if you would like to talk to any specific item in the budget.

That is very helpful especially this week as we plan on trying to make some adjustments in the package as we roll out the chair's balancing package at least by Friday.

Colleagues, I also wanted to note that the materials have been circulated again.

Thanks to our panelists for sending in additional materials.

Very helpful.

I really appreciate your hard work.

And thanks to Patty for recirculating some of those materials and new materials this morning.

I also want to just double check Dennis Sills for our IT team.

Dennis is a new addition to our second panel.

If Dennis could be added, I believe he may be in the waiting room from Plymouth Housing.

With that, I want to thank colleagues for joining today.

This is all about measurable outcomes.

I want to welcome our panelists, who I noted at the top of the agenda, who are here to highlight some of the tangible and transformational outcomes.

Specifically today, we are featuring Jumpstart, progressive payroll tax.

The three panels that we have in front of us will talk about the impact that Jumpstart has had in the short two-year period of investments that we've had.

These are two-year investments that we can already look back at but these are going to be long-term investments in our community and impact on our both infrastructure and the population of Seattleites will be felt for years to come.

Today is a really important opportunity for us to hear more directly from the community organizations and workers the unions and businesses that are on the front lines serving our most vulnerable community members helping to combat displacement both economic displacement and housing displacement, and who are working to fight climate change and working around the clock to make sure that our community priorities are centered and the policies that we are advancing are rooted in those communities that have been historically left out.

I am thrilled that we have an opportunity to highlight some of the investments here today, and I also am thankful that the mayor's office has been featuring some of the investments directly funded by Jumpstart over the last year, year and a half.

And we have taken the opportunity to help identify where some of those announcements do include funding from Jumpstart, including large investments in housing and climate investments and resilience and electrification and supporting workforce stabilization and supportive housing efforts.

I'm excited that we are having the opportunity to feature what impact these dollars have had in our community, especially as we're in the midst of talking about how public dollars can be put to the best public use in a time where we have limited resources.

It makes sense to highlight these conversations as we have a discussion about investments in the upcoming budget, but also to really try to center future policy investments and budget conversations around looking at tangible outcomes outputs, especially as we think about what creates public safety and community health.

Many of the panelists today will talk about the ways that they've invested directly into our community, and in doing so, help promote greater economic stability, self-reliance and resilience, and thus opportunity, which yields more public safety and broader population health.

I'm going to share my screen to the best of my ability here, and then we will turn it over to our panelists to walk us through today's agenda.

Let me try to do that.

How's that?

Yep.

Okay, great.

So I want to thank all of our panelists who are here today to walk us through the presentation.

What we're going to talk about today is about the quantifiable quantifiable impacts of Jumpstart.

And in our presentation from central central staff earlier this year we know that this is just one fund source among a handful that are helping to buoy our investments in our community and small businesses and a more climate resilient infrastructure and ensuring that we are investing in our most vulnerable.

We have an opportunity today to highlight some of those impacts that JumpStart have had so far and I wanted to center us on the presentation that we received from central staff just last week that identifies the funding that we endorsed in the 2024 endorsed budget in our deliberations last year.

We see that there are significant investments from JumpStart this year and some minor changes.

Those are highlighted here for the purposes of central staff's presentation before.

That's not the focus necessarily of today's conversation, just to really put into context and set the stage for the budget deliberations that we're having for 2024. We wanted to recirculate this slide.

Here's where we get to talk about some of the impacts.

It's really been phenomenal to be able to see Jumpstart Progressive Payroll Tax be featured in a number of ways that we have seen the mayor's office and Council and members of the public celebrate investments in to our community and we've taken the opportunity to identify where possible where there was funding allocated from jumpstart so very excited that as we consider the budget deliberations again this year we're talking about the ways in which funding for community.

are providing direct investments for our most vulnerable.

And none of us, many of us would not be able to have the ability to go to work without a accessible, affordable childcare.

And whether or not you have a child or not, our local economy is truly reliant on making sure that workers and small business owners, entrepreneurs, artists can have access to affordable childcare.

So this is one great investment that we wanted to make sure.

Another one is, coming in the form of access to public space.

There's been joint interest on this council in being a good partner with members of the King County Council and Executive Constantine, who are very interested in reopening City Hall Park.

And in last year's budget deliberations, we allowed for the temporary use of Jump Start to help open access to City Hall Park.

Many people may have visited the reopened City Hall Park just south of our City Hall.

And it's a great opportunity for us to feature the Nexus with Jumpstart and Economic Resilience.

Economic Resilience category that is in the Office of the City's Economic Development Department is really about how do we get more people out the doors?

How do we make sure that there's greater community cohesion?

How do we activate public spaces whether it's through small business support and pop-ups, food trucks, and art activities, and really taking advantage of the public space that we have as the ongoing pandemic has led to greater isolation and depression.

Some of these investments that we're seeing with support of Jumpstart are allowing for greater social cohesion, economic opportunities for small businesses, and really that invests in our health.

We are really thrilled that we were able to also be supportive of the efforts to support families, direct family investments as part of the mayor's investment is something that Jumpstart has been able to provide direct assistance in.

Between 2022 and 2023, there were nearly 20 affordable housing projects that have been funded with Jumpstart.

And that is before more awards were made just later this fall from our Office of Housing through the 2023 Fall NOFA investments, the Notice of Funding Availability.

These investments created or preserved nearly 2,000 affordable homes in our community, and that includes family size housing, permanent supportive housing.

Housing for people who are recovering from homelessness and community driven housing to fight displacement.

Amazingly, these community services that are being offered in partnership with housing, really pair social services, small business support, child care with affordable housing.

And that's the vision.

That's the gold star.

That's what we want to be working towards.

And some of those examples will be featured here today.

We're talking about like projects like El Centro de las Razas, Columbia City Investments, SCIPTA's North Lot Investments, Chief Seattle Club's Sacred Medicine House, Sea Mars Beacon Hill Housing.

These are housing options that are two, three, and four bedrooms paired with services like childcare, community space, and more.

There are 35 community projects that have received funding through Jump Start Equitable Development Initiative dollars, which we will be also featuring here today.

And that is, again, a way for us to fight displacement, both economic displacement and create greater economic stability to fight housing displacement for our community.

I'm really excited that we have Organizations like Somali Health Board and Friends of Little Saigon, Estelita's Library, and many more that are moving projects forward that are rooting community in place, creating greater cohesion and lifting up community entrepreneurship and community-driven development to fight displacement and create greater shared prosperity.

And direct investments in workers.

Workforce stabilization investments that are having significant, already having a significant impact on the ability to ensure permanent supportive housing, partnering housing with workforce stability is something I'm really excited about.

A great example of this comes from the Filipino Community Center that has affordable housing for seniors above child care and restorative education programs, helping to make sure that we are creating workforce stability and workforce development opportunities, especially for folks that were formerly incarcerated on the first floors of the affordable housing that's being offered for seniors above.

And as we'll hear today, and this is a segue into our upcoming presentation, it's not possible to just pat ourselves on the back for capital investments when it comes to housing.

If we don't invest in the workers and the workforce that make sure that we're caring for our most vulnerable as we place more people into emergency housing and affordable housing, people are more likely to cycle back out into housing instability or homelessness.

So today is a really exciting opportunity to talk about the workers that JumpStart invests in.

DESC, for example, is already reporting that a 48% wage increase since the beginning of 2022 is making significant progress on their ability to hire and retain workers and has allowed for a nearly 40 percent drop in job vacancy rates and over 70 percent drop in staff turnover rates since 2022. So, very thrilled about some of these investments.

Apologies as I just paused midway through this presentation to feature some of those things.

But we're talking about investments directly in workers, housing.

Here we have an investment in equitable development initiative efforts.

Eighty percent of these funds were supported by Jump Start.

and direct investments in food security and our health.

Again, these are really exciting features that were released by the administration, by the city, that show joint partnership with Jumpstart Investments and investments that are paired often with general fund funds or additional revenue streams and, in this case, supporting efforts where we have seen food equity and food security efforts have more unstable funding as we see revenues from the soda tax decrease, which was ultimately the goal.

We want fewer people to be drinking soda.

I think I've highlighted some of the efforts here from the Green New Deal Oversight Board, but later today in our last presentation, we will have an opportunity to hear from Matt as a representative of the Green New Deal Oversight Board, many ways in which Jumpstart is helping to don't start our investments in green new deal.

Investments and creating lower carbon options this being one of them the pilot program to incentivize heavy duty.

Heavy duty truck.

Electrification 2 million dollars funded by John Sir.

And I think last this will help us bring up the conversation about affordable housing and the workers inside Uh, really thrilled that our city continues to see the tangible results of jumpstart funding going directly into building affordable housing.

And as I noted before, in areas with the highest rate and risk of displacement, but also not just building housing, it's community housing driven by what community would like to see.

2, 3 and 4 bedrooms again, coupled with amenities and opportunities for small business.

With that, I want to say thank you to our presenters.

And as I noted earlier, we also have the opportunity to add one more person to the panel here from Plymouth.

Dennis Bills will be added to our second panel there.

But right now, I'm going to turn it over to Lauren Fay from Downtown Emergency Services Center, Lindsey Graub, Naomi Morris, and John Rios, who are all members of SEIU Healthcare 1199 Northwest.

And we'll hear directly from Naomi and John, who are human service providers.

I'll end my screen here and say thanks to our panelists for being here with us today as we are in the midst of considering the mayor's proposed budget and really wanting to show to members of the public the ways in which those public dollars have been put to use.

Thank you, Lindsay, for coordinating this first panel and really for being the impetus to wanting to showcase the data that you provided when we met with members of DESC and you showed the result of decreased turnover and improve worker stability and the conversations that you had with clients about how they're able to see improvements in their lives and services.

It spurred me to want to pull together today's presentation.

So thanks for being our first panelist out the gate and appreciate all the work that you and the members do.

Yeah, thank you.

I'm Lindsay Grad.

I'm the legislative director at SIU Healthcare 1199 Northwest.

We represent over 30,000 healthcare workers across Washington.

including frontline staff at Downtown Emergency Services Center.

And thank you for having us here today.

I'm joined by a few colleagues who all have introduced themselves in just a moment.

But I really wanted to say that this is the first time I think that we've ever been asked to present to a budget committee about the previous year's investment.

And I just really appreciate the continuity of reflecting back on where we've been so that we can be better oriented as we talk about this year's coming budget.

So thank you for that.

I'm going to work on pulling up my screen.

And while I do, if I can invite Naomi, then John, then Lauren to just come off and briefly introduce yourselves, including what you do at DESC.

Hi, my name is Naomi Morris, and I am a nurse for DESC.

Good morning, everyone.

My name is John Rios.

I work for the host program for DESC as a frontline staff mental health case manager, and I'll pass it along.

Thanks, Naomi and John and Lindsay.

My name is Lauren Fay.

I have been working at DESC for the past 15 years.

Started doing direct service and now I am our senior business manager where I get to focus on our policy and strategy initiatives.

I'm very happy to be here with you all as workforce is a key, key priority for us at DESC to make sure we're able to fill our mission.

Lindsay, I see the slides here almost in presenter mode.

Let me know when you're ready for me to.

Lauren, I think it's you taking this first slide on.

All right, perfect.

Well, thank you again so much Council Member Mosqueda and everyone present today for allowing us the opportunity to be here.

to talk about the significant impacts that we've been seeing with jumpstart funds being infused at DESC.

For a little context here, DESC began in 1979 as an initiative out of the Seattle mayor's office in collaboration with community members.

who at the time were concerned about the rates of homelessness among people specifically with significant mental health challenges.

So DSC has for a long time held this role in the community of really focusing in on serving individuals who are experiencing homelessness and who also live with pretty significant challenges related to mental health and So since DSC opened, we have always challenged ourselves to be an essential community partner with the city, really wanting to be there to help our city's most vulnerable adults who are living homeless.

Currently, we own and operate about a little over 1,300 units, studio apartments of housing in the city of Seattle.

And we also operate 350 shelter beds nightly.

A lot of those are emergency shelter beds and some are in hotel and motel type situations.

In addition to that, we are also a licensed behavioral health care provider.

and provide outreach services, like John mentioned, medical care, nursing services, like Naomi mentioned, for our crisis response team.

We serve all of King County in crisis services, and a lot of that is absolutely here in the City of Seattle.

We'll pause there.

So that's just some history about where we've been, who we are and what we do here in the City.

Thank you, Lauren.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about where we were a year ago.

We visited all of your offices last year during the budget process to talk about some of the challenges that DESC was facing.

And as a labor management partnership, we took a little bit different approach in 2022. And we really brought you the reality that 74% of the frontline DESC workers in the city of Seattle could not then afford a studio apartment without being rent burdened.

These are folks who are serving the city of Seattle in what is widely understood and acknowledged to be the top priority of the city of Seattle, housing and homelessness, who themselves are at risk of homelessness or at minimum cost burdened and are not able to live in the city that they serve.

These low wages were contributing to a greater than one in four positions being vacant at that time, which of course has the immediate effect of making the contracts that the city of Seattle is asking DESC to fulfill less effective.

For lack of that, more than 25% workforce.

To address this, at the time DESC would have needed an additional approximately $30 million annually.

to get all frontline workers up to the place where they would no longer be cost burdened in affording a studio apartment in the city of Seattle.

And so that was the reality from a sort of numbers perspective that we brought you all last budget.

And I'm gonna actually ask Naomi and John to kind of jump in here and talk about what those impacts were beyond the numbers when you're talking about it from the humans who are doing the work and who are reliant on that work as clients of DESC.

Hi, yeah, so this is John.

I'll go ahead and go first.

Where we were kind of during this time is we were dealing with a pandemic simultaneously to a rise in opioid and fentanyl use, where deaths from both were somewhat common.

We saw wages were not enough to keep longtime staff or enticing new workers, and this resulted in the loss of institutional knowledge and the impact to our ability to serve our clients.

So that means less people getting the housing or getting the vital services that they need.

Staff were overworked with inflated caseloads and burning out left and right and leaving faster than we were able to replace them.

Undoubtedly, this led to more visible homelessness and people not getting the care that they deserve, which overall sets us back as we look at the overall cost for providing care to vulnerable populations.

Before the increases, we saw people leaving from the field for more lucrative positions.

In some cases, they were leaving the area or the state entirely.

And people in this line of work simply cannot afford to live in the city and do the work at that time.

And the thing is, people are really passionate about this work, and it's heartbreaking to see them get to a point where they feel that that's no longer a possibility to do the work that they care so much about.

Thank you, John.

Naomi?

I can speak from a personal standpoint of working for the majority of the height of the pandemic as the only nurse on my team and doing the job of three people which because we couldn't it couldn't get anyone into the positions.

Um, and that, that led to my own sense, my own state of burnout and my own mental health crisis.

Um, I also, um, my, my coworkers on other teams were also experiencing a lot of the same, uh, same things I was.

Um, and it wasn't just a nursing thing.

It was, it was agency wide.

Thank you, Naomi.

So we brought you this challenge last year.

And the very positive news is that you all did take action on this.

And what you all were able to do was include about $10.5 million for DESC frontline worker wages.

And importantly, those covered all DESC contracts that originate with the city.

Many of those are now, of course, administered through the Regional Homelessness Authority, but they are all work that the City of Seattle, you know, sort of brought into being and that happens in the City of Seattle.

And they were, as we're here today talking about, funded through Jump Start.

So that was the first time we had seen the City of Seattle take a step that large and to cover all contracts.

So what has this meant?

Lauren, do you want to jump in?

Absolutely.

What this has meant for us at DESC is that last year we were able to, as management of our organization, come to SCIU and say, all of this work we've been doing together to talk about what we needed is coming to fruition.

Let's bargain some new wages.

And we were able to reach an agreement on a new wage floor at DESC of $56,500 a year.

And that's a wage floor of $29 an hour, and that's for our entry-level positions at the organization.

So those positions, specifically our entry-level frontline positions, have seen a 48% increase in their base wage since January of 2022, which has been just so significantly helpful to us.

And you can see that in some of the results that we have here to share.

So, what you're looking at here are 2 graphs.

The 1st graph on the left is turnover rate as well as our.

our overall vacancy rate of open positions at the organization.

You'll notice the steep drop between 2022 and on our progress to date as of the middle of this summer.

We are down to about a 10% turnover rate And compared to 36% last year and 16.2% overall vacancy rate compared to 27, which is when we were seeing the more than one in four positions vacant across our programs.

you know, since it's the middle of the year, just noting we're on track to see a turnover rate of around 23%, which is an enormous improvement from the 36% last year.

And then the graph over on your right, I think, really shows the the challenge that we've felt over the past several years.

So you'll see in the years 2019, 2020, 21, we maintained a pretty steady level of employees at DESC throughout that time around 600, 650 or so employees.

And during that time, we weren't growing significantly as an organization.

That yellow bar signifies all of the position ads that government has asked us to consider, that the city has asked us to take on.

And so you can see there's a gap there.

We've been asked to do more work than we can recruit for or retain for.

But you'll really see that jump in 2022 height of pandemic challenges coming out of the pandemic when we were stuck at this place where we could hire less than 75% of the workforce that we needed to complete the job that we so much want to be able to perform for the city.

So you can see that since we have implemented these wage changes, we have been able to bring in a whole new group of individuals who are able, who are either interested for the first time because they feel like they can afford to now work in human services, or we've been able to bring folks back in who were previously had to leave due to inequities in the amount that we were able to pay for the work that we were asking them to do.

Thank you, Lauren.

So these charts obviously tell a really, really important story, but I want to ask Naomi and John to jump in here and talk about the impacts that they're feeling with the clients they work with, the outcomes those clients are seeing, and they and their coworkers.

John?

Okay.

Well, in relation to those graphs and stuff like that, that were just being shown and everything, I think that Daniel Malone really put it in a good way.

He mentioned that we, it felt like that we had exhausted the available staff for the wages.

And so we did see, you know, a lot of disparity between what we had available and what we could actually bring in.

Since these new wages have come in, It has been a lot different story.

We've been able to hire a lot more staff and retain folks.

We've seen a lot less people feeling like they are having to leave.

What this actually turns into is better outcomes for our clients.

We see more people getting into housing.

staff that are able to address the challenges that our clients are facing, that are able to get them into the services, to get them connected to different benefits, and really just do the hard work that DESC has been known for.

So I'll pass it over to Naomi.

I see the benefit of having continuation or continuity for our clients, which they so much deserve, not having to have a different case manager every other month because their case manager had to leave due to not being able to afford to stay in their job.

I had a coworker come up to me after the wages changed, crying and saying, you don't understand how this has changed my life as a single parent with a kid in college.

I can finally to actually be a mom and help my kid out, which they hadn't been able to do before.

They could barely make their rent.

So I see many, many, many positive changes have come because of these wage increases.

Thank you, Naomi.

So we are very practical and Naomi and John told us about the positive impacts of the action that the city took last year in its budget.

And we're very proud to have been a part of that growth.

At the same time, we are not done.

Last year when we came to you, it was a roughly $30 million gap between where DESC was at and where they would need to be in order for all frontline workers to not be rent burdened.

And unfortunately, as we all know, inflation and cost of living has continued to increase over that same time.

So we wanna make sure that you all here today the significant step forward produced the exact results that we had hoped it would and that you all had believed in when you took this action.

But we do still have more to do here.

So what we're looking at right now is a reality that despite that 48% increase, if you look to the far right hand here, there is still a pretty significant and unfortunately increasing gap between what it would take to not be rent burdened at the City of Seattle, which is about $82,000 a year.

Naomi, I want to turn it back over to you briefly just to sort of talk about, you know, as much improvement as you've seen, the gaps that you can still identify in your work and for your colleagues, economic security.

So one of my biggest concerns, I guess, when I look at all this and everything is just that this was a huge victory for us to and the social services, you know, field to actually see some of these increases.

And I really feel like it's being felt all around and everything.

But we're incredibly concerned that If we don't act like continue to act on this, that we will be where we were two years ago in another year.

And so we need to continue to like kind of keep things steady so that we don't.

We are trying to make sure we don't fall back behind so we don't get to those levels of attrition again.

Again, the work we do, this is stuff the city asked us to do as we look at trying to address the challenges we are all facing in the community and dealing with vulnerable populations and stuff like that.

the city and all of us have kind of stated and to continue this work is that we need to continue to be able to hire a new staff, to retain the staff that we have, to allow for people to do this work that is so vital to what we're doing.

Thank you, John.

Naomi?

I have a friend who is a desc employee as well.

Loves their job.

But again, can't afford to live in the city and raise their child on their own.

And is actually struggling outside of the city still because they are a single parent.

And though their wages are greatly increased, and that has been very helpful to them, they're still struggling.

I, as a single parent, can't live in the city of Seattle either.

So, you know, there are a lot of my co-workers are outside of the city limits and driving into fighting that traffic every day, raising our gas bills to come in and do this work that we all have an extreme passion for, to serve these people that deserve so much more than what we're able to give them.

that's really it.

Thank you Naomi and I just want to add a point to that.

It's our position as SCIU 1199 and I've certainly heard many in Seattle government share this position that we want other communities in the region to step up and be doing more on housing and homelessness and we are seeing some of them do that but I would just caution to you all that as cities do that the reality is is that a bunch of your Seattle workforce is living in other communities in this region.

And so as you see those other governments step up and open up shelters and housing programs, you are at risk of your own city workforce realizing that they have a job that's with two hours less commute a day just down the road.

And so we all want to see other cities step up and do more investment.

And also Seattle is going to have to make sure that it is taking care of its workforce and not subjecting it to a multi-hour commute in order to serve the people of this city.

This is just more of the same, so we can jump ahead.

And Lauren, I think it's you.

Yeah.

We just wanted to provide this information as to how we got to those numbers.

Yeah, thanks, Lindsay.

One thing that has been really important for DESC the past year or so has been redefining what our wage goals are as an organization for our workforce.

For years, the goal had been to get to market median for comparable positions throughout the field.

And we started that work in 2016. And in 2022, we achieved that goal.

of being at market median average wages for the sector.

But when you looked at what those average wages were, They were producing the results that we saw previously, where we had massive vacancy rates, massive turnover, a lot of dissatisfaction, and just a lot of lack of support for the workers who were doing the job.

So we set our new wage goal, once we achieved our original wage goal, our new wage goal is to ensure that all of our workers can afford to live in the city that they're serving.

And our definition of that is not fancy.

No luxuries involved here.

What we are talking about is being able to afford a studio apartment at fair market rent.

And what that means, that is a HUD, a federal defined thing.

And there are yearly numbers on what that is for different metropolitan areas.

So for the Seattle Bellevue area, for this year, a studio apartment is considered at fair market rent if it is under $2,042 a month.

And to not be rent burdened, that means not paying more than 30% of your income towards housing, you would need to earn a salary of $81,680 a year to be able to afford that studio apartment at $42 a month.

So again, we have made significant progress by getting to that 57, that benchmark, our floor, our new wage floor, $56,500.

That puts us back at 2019's fair market rent.

So if we were back then, that would be amazing, and we would be so happy and pleased with ourselves.

But that's not the reality of our situation.

Unfortunately, we are still several years behind.

We are so invested in making sure that we continue to make progress towards this goal and don't fall backwards as we see inflation rise year over year over year.

And on that note, Lauren, do you want to close us out here?

Sure.

Thank you.

So on that note, we see some key strategies that you all can help us achieve and have done so much to help us achieve already.

So COLA's cost of living adjustments and all of our contracts.

Currently, there are still some contracts in the city budget.

there are also some contracts that DESC receives through the King County Regional Homelessness Authority where they are not getting inflation adjustments through the city as they previously would have.

This is the first year that they wouldn't.

So we really want to flag that, make sure that that happens, that that covers a lot of the permanent supportive housing that we talked about earlier, that we operate And so we're looking to see contract increases on those getting directed to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.

In addition to that, we totally support the mayor's additional 2% on top of the ordinance level inflation adjustment to address historic wage suppression and wanting to just be really clear to not to not inflate those two things.

Those are two very different things to us.

The inflation adjustments make sure we don't fall behind year over year as things get more expensive for our workers, but the wage adjustments and wage increases really help to address the systemic suppression of wages that our field has felt for years and years and years.

So we're really happy to see that minimum 2% there in the mayor's proposal.

And lastly, just really wanting to make sure that the housing levy passes and when we get to implement the housing levy that the workforce stabilization plans within that process are thought through and continue to make progress towards these goals of both raising base wages for this field, but and also ensuring that cost of living adjustments continue to happen year over year for our workforce.

Anything else, Lindsay?

No, that brings us to the end.

Thank you for your time today.

We'll follow up and send this presentation in so that you can all receive it and can be attached to the minutes.

And as always, we just want to continue being partners with you in addressing housing and homelessness in this city.

And we know that to do that, we've got to keep those charts with the vacancy and turnover data going downward so that we can continue to recruit and retain an excellent workforce to do this.

And with that, we'll stand for any questions.

Thank you so much.

I want to thank Naomi and John.

Thank you for sharing your stories on being on the front line.

And Lauren, I want to thank you.

Folks might not know from the presentation or if they've met with you before.

They might know this, but you are a representative of DESC's management.

So it's really exciting to see the shared message and the shared narrative that's being displayed here today, both from frontline workers and the folks within management at DESC, along with SEIU 1199. Thank you so much for providing this array of information that shows that when we invest in wages, it creates greater stability for management, allows for greater recruiting and retention tools.

And as you heard directly from the frontline workers, it allows for greater delivery and continuity of services.

And ultimately, we want people to get stably housed, to get access to the health services and counseling that they need.

And so this array of information and the multiple spokespeople on the importance here, I think it's critically important.

And I am thankful that our colleagues have a handful of questions.

Council Member Reynolds and I did offer to the Chair of Public Safety the opportunity to jump in because I didn't do that at the forefront, and then I'll come to you.

Council Member Kerbel, having worked on wage stability for a number of years, is there any additional context you'd like to add or any questions before I turn to Council Member Reynolds?

Thank you so much.

I am interested in questions about specifically the very, very preliminary response that we've received from the Human Services Department on a survey.

You may recall that the legislation requiring the to provide a report to the and the report was intended to address the impacts of annual adjustments on contracted partner organizations, financial stability, employee wages, employee retention services provided in the city budget.

Specifically, the leading to any discussion or evaluation of changes or improvements.

That survey was delayed.

We do have a very sort of early snapshot.

It just went out a couple weeks ago, maybe only a week ago.

We've got, again, about 5% of agencies responding thus far.

agencies still have another couple weeks to get their feedback in and appreciate any folks who are working at or with agencies as advocates to help us get this data.

It's very helpful.

But the The questions that were designed with the assistance of the Seattle Human Services Coalition was broken up into recruitment and retention-related impacts, inflation impacts, inflationary adjustments, and there is one And I think this particular panel is a good panel to help me understand one of the responses to sort of the open-ended question of, is there anything else you would like to tell us?

The response that we received from the agencies that did respond.

One of them included the statement that wage adjustments are challenging in the union environment.

We give a contracted 3 percent annual increase But when we look at non-salary increases, our business increases have jumped 18% year over year.

So we are still taking on debt.

I understand the reference to the other inflationary costs that agencies are faced with.

It's not only inflationary impacts are not only on wages, but they're on other costs to operate an agency.

But I am interested to know a little bit more about how within a union environment, we are reconciling the city's mandate for inflationary increases and soon with this year's budget passage, hopefully, with also the wage equity increases that are mandated by law, how you are handling that in a bargaining context.

I can certainly speak somewhat from DESC's perspective, not as much from other service organizations.

I think one of the things that has helped DESC approach this topic, and it's a very real thing that you speak of, this challenge between increasing wages and also paying attention to the fact that our bills are also going up for everything.

our rent for utilities for, you know, literally everything.

One of the things that we've really tried to do these past several years is really talk about this openly with our union.

So we have really frank, I feel like anyway, really frank conversations with Naomi and John and others on the bargaining team about what our costs are looking like.

So that they are brought along this process with us and understanding we're not, we're not, you know, hiding behind numbers saying we can't give you these increases.

This is literally what everything looks like.

And, you know, we we can't exist if we don't pay the rent and don't have office space for people and all those sorts of things.

So just that open communication really seems to help a lot.

On the management side, I think another thing that's really helped for us is just re-centering what our goal is.

So when we are approaching each budget season now, going in with this mentality of we will not lose ground on our wages, And we cannot lose ground on inflation adjustments.

So starting from a place where that is the assumption of how we need to balance our budget.

As we head into 2024, for example, that is our key core principle is making sure at bare minimum we are going to make sure that all of our workers see the inflation adjustments that they need to see so they are not losing any ground financially.

And of course, we want to also then from there build on that to make sure we're increasing those base wages.

So I don't I don't at all want to imply that Other places aren't also doing that, but it really was this thing that had to be a really mindful shift for the entire organization and leadership team to really commit to this being the goal.

Like we know we cannot exist unless our employees are made whole.

And we know we cannot serve this community unless we have the talented workers that we do and that we need to retain.

to help the thousands of people that we're serving every day.

So I don't know if that helps at all, but- I was just going to add that I doubt that that was DESC's response to the survey, knowing what I know.

But I would say that what is the core issue here is historic underfunding and contracts that are not appropriately capturing all expenses.

And appropriately, you know, workforce is always going to be one of the largest, if not the largest expense, because we need people to help people.

And, you know, that balancing act that Lauren mentioned, and that I think is embedded in that survey response, that exists, whether it's a non-union or a union provider in this space, right?

They still have myriad bills to pay and not enough resources coming in the door to do the job properly.

When there's a union in the workplace, like there is a DESC, It just makes sure that there's a, you know, a balanced approach between labor and management about how to deal with that challenge.

And, you know, most days we feel like we do a pretty good job at that at DESC, and it allows us to be here together with you all, you know, talking about those challenges and what the priorities are.

So that's, I just wanted to make sure that I got that out there for the record.

great thank you.

I do need to move to the other council member unless you have one last small closing comment.

Yeah just a comment not a question.

I did want to lift up because of the conversation that we've been having within the context of the budget discussions relating to the responsibility of everybody in our funding ecosystem.

I just want to flag that one respondent referenced the funding made available from the Washington Department of Commerce for participating in more funding to highlight and address the need to make this correction as it related to increased costs related with inflation.

And one respondent referred to the fact that philanthropy is actually a huge contributor to the efforts of this particular organization to address staff wage increases.

So they referred to the access of organizational reserves from philanthropy being used to assist with staff wage increases.

So just wanting to lift we have a lot of people who are in need of services.

So I would like to bring those comments from a couple of different providers up as evidence of how other funders are working in this space and doing so in a way that impacts both the wages of frontline staff as well as the ability to provide desperately needed services.

apologies as well for not circulating this updated PowerPoint.

I just sent that around, and Patty, I think, is going to recirculate that when we have the chance.

Okay, questions on this panel?

And then we'll go to the next two panels.

Yeah, thank you.

I really appreciate having the retention rates quantified, because I've been asking for this For a long time, that report is an hour is a year and a half late.

I believe and so having this information is really important.

I am interested in knowing about the percentage of operating budget that is supported by other jurisdictions.

So, are we carrying the, the full responsibility of ensuring that that your workers are.

Are are getting the pay they need, um, you know, 48%, I, I assume that the 48% wage increase was, uh, was enabled by our, um, by Seattle's increases over the past couple of years, but I just am interested in more detail about that later and then also.

We really have to be thinking about the outcomes that retention is enabling, because we have to think about the people that this contract is really serving.

And you did mention that the outcomes are improving on one of your slides, but I am interested in more detail about that.

Like, are there more people served by DESC?

Has your caseload been able to handle more vulnerable people.

And in the treatment space, I do, I am interested in knowing, and perhaps this is something that you can answer here.

You know, I'm always interested in treatment.

What kinds of substance abuse treatment are you able to offer?

And has the number of people that have received it gone up as a result of retention?

Thank you so much for those questions.

Council member, um, Nelson, I, um, I can touch very briefly to just say that this, the city is a key partner in funding, but certainly not our only funder.

Um, we receive a lot of money from the state, um, and the department of commerce, uh, contracts that a council member Herbold just mentioned.

Um, we are, uh, We have a very skilled CFO who has helped us to really look at every possible resource that is available to our community to make sure that we are pulling down and utilizing everything possible.

So that includes Department of Commerce.

It includes Medicaid dollars where applicable.

It includes Jump Start.

And weaving all of these things together has really been what's led to this 48% increase, but that would have never been possible without that money that Jumpstart kicked in.

Because DESC is such a large organization with so many different discrete bodies of work, we do crisis services, we do mental health care, we do substance use care, all these sorts of things, we have literally hundreds of contracts that do not all receive increases at the same time.

And so having these kind of key investments from the city or from the county or from the state happen in conjunction with one another is really what has led to this moment in time where we've been able to raise the wages for everyone simultaneously.

I think I'll pause there with that, but I just really want to highlight that like, it's crucial.

And also it takes, it takes everyone, um, contributing to make this possible.

Um, and then for the second part around client outcomes.

So given that we are six months, Nope, we're nine, 10 months now into the year, my goodness, 10 months into the year, we're really looking forward to start tracking, um, come 2024 and onward.

rates around caseload sizes, retention with how long folks are staying connected with their case management, personal health outcomes for our clients, those sorts of things.

We track all of that data now, but we think that we need a little more time to show correlation directly in terms of the data.

We have all the anecdotal evidence right now of folks just reporting positive things to us, but we really want to continue to collect the data on our client outcomes as well.

And so I look forward to talking with you all more, you know, in the next several quarters as this work continues to report out on that.

I just wanted to clarify in response to the question too, Lauren, that two things, our union absolutely pulls on every thread that is appropriate when it comes to funding these important services that's inclusive of the state and the county and the city.

And just to be really specific, what we were reporting on today was just things that are happening in the city of Seattle.

DESC does do some work outside of the city of Seattle, but the overwhelming majority of the work and the more than 1,300 housing units and more than 300 shelter beds that Lauren reported on, those are all happening within the city of Seattle.

So we were not asking the city of Seattle to, in effect, subsidize work happening outside the city of Seattle with these resources.

It is an appropriate tie to the city boundary there.

Okay, we're happy to follow up.

Okay.

Oh, yes, yes.

So sorry about that.

Yes.

No, we, we have been able to in recent this year, increase our treatment options for folks, particularly who are interested in medication for opioid use disorder, we do have substance use treatment counselors embedded within all of our permanent supportive housing locations.

I think because of the Jump Start funds, we are able to get that support directly into the buildings for people, where we can meet them literally at their door and offer those kinds of supports, whether it be through connection to formal treatment, if that is what they're interested in, group therapy, individualized case management care, anything like that.

But we've really been Our efforts have been really concertedly focused this year on overdose prevention and overdose response in particular, as that has just been very unfortunately ravaging the community, but in particular, our tenants as well.

Thank you for your time today.

Happy to follow up after the meeting.

Really appreciate your time.

Thanks again for this robust presentation and for all that you do.

Naomi and John, thank you so much.

Lauren, thank you for providing your perspective.

And Lindsey, really appreciate your coordinated presentation here so we can see the full array of services and the impact that you've had.

on our community using Jump Start dollars.

And we look forward to hearing more from you.

Thanks for sharing today.

This is actually a great lead-in to our second panel.

I want to thank the members who are here to present with us.

And it's a good segue, right?

There is no fine line between some of these services, given that we know we need access to housing in order to improve population health.

We need access to housing to make sure that more workers have the ability to work within the city and have access to be available to entrepreneurs and business owners around our region.

And we need access to housing to prevent displacement, both economic displacement and housing displacement.

Just for a brief background, in 2023, the Jump Start affordable housing dollars allocated $12 million to go to permanent supportive housing workforce stabilization dollars.

So to continue with the segue of how we both invest directly in the building, we then provided direct investments into affordable housing dollars in terms of construction on the outside.

I will share with you that full number in just a second, but one of the important numbers is $10.6 million going directly into affordable housing first-time home ownership options in the Rainier Valley and Finney Ridge neighborhoods.

Very exciting opportunity for us to see how brick-and-mortar investments go hand-in-glove with the workforce investments that we just talked about.

So far between 2022 and 2023, there was 18 rental projects and two large permanently affordable housing projects that have received direct funding from Jumpstart Investments.

And that's around 2,000 new and reinvested affordable homes.

And again, that was all before the 2023 NOFA awards.

So we're very thrilled that this is a snippet of the larger picture of how we ensure that there's affordable housing and stable housing, family housing, intergenerational housing across our city.

This is a partnership as well as you heard the previous panel talk about a partnership of investments that corresponding with the housing levy will allow for the production of more housing across our city.

We are not just patting ourselves on the back when we talk about Jump Start doing that.

We saw it in the presentations that we had as we passed the housing levy.

And thank you to this panel for your leadership on that as well.

Housing levy dollars paired with jumpstart dollars allowed for us to see more units created, more people serving directly within those units and more two and three, four bedroom units along with first time home ownership options.

So it's really the array of what council members and the community have been asking for.

I'm going to first turn it over to Patience.

Patience, if you want to walk through your presentation, then Miguel.

If you would like to walk through your presentation, and then Dennis.

And we will take questions from council members at the end of this affordable housing trio and make sure that we get all of the questions in before going to our last panel.

Good morning, Patience.

Thanks again for being here.

Good morning, Councilmember Mosqueda.

Thank you for having us in this budget committee discussion.

Just reiterating the appreciation for the previous panel in highlighting the transformative effect of Jump Start as funding that really came at a key moment in time.

As introduced, I am Patience Malaba.

I serve as the executive director of the Housing Development Consortium.

We are a membership association of the major affordable housing providers that do include DESC, Plymouth Housing, El Centro, and 200 more members who have been stalwart partners with the city in implementing many of your funding programs.

And as I bring up my slides here, I will invite Miguel, Maestas, and Dennis just to briefly introduce yourselves, and then I will run through my slides quickly and hand over to you both to talk about your projects and the impacts you've seen.

Thank you, Patience.

Council members, thank you for to share today.

I'm Miguel Maestas.

I am the Associate Director at El Centro de la Raza and part of our housing development team.

Thank you, Miguel, and patience.

My name is Dennis Sills.

I use he him pronouns.

I'm the Director of External Affairs at Plymouth Housing.

Thank you both.

Just in starting with the overview of the impact of Jumpstart on affordable housing and community development, I want to go back to the context in which Jumpstart was passed.

The crisis of COVID-19 had laid bare the stock economic inequality and housing instability that we had already seen prior to COVID-19.

And we knew then that the twin crises had an outsized impact on Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities.

We also knew back then that the path to recovery, if at all recovery is feasible, needed to be robust and in collaboration with the community.

Three things were clear then and continue to be clear, which is one, our community was hurting.

Two, our economy was tanking.

There were projections of a far worse economic condition than we were able to see at the time.

We also knew we couldn't wait.

We had federal relief that was great, but it was not enough.

And we wanted to work towards, as a coalition, all of us together, avoiding austerity measures.

And I must say, kudos to all of you as council in your leadership and taking action proactively to prevent that austerity.

in many significant ways.

And as it stands today, you heard from Council Member Mosqueda earlier that Jumpstart is investing in about 20 projects of affordable housing across the city.

Now, this is occurring amid a deepening housing crisis in the city.

We have over 77,000 low-income households who are cost-burdened in the city of Seattle.

And when you zero in on these numbers, it is the lower-income households on the lower RAM who really are feeling the pain of this challenge.

And we know that the bottom line is we simply do not have enough housing.

The projections from the Department of Commerce show that we need 112,000 homes over the next two decades.

44,000 of those homes need to be affordable to folks at the zero to 30% area median income, which is why the investments from Jumpstart in permanent supportive housing remain so critical for the city.

And when you break down the numbers further, you need another 19,000 for 30 to 50% AMI, as well as 8,000 homes for the 50 to 80% AMI.

Now, that requires that all the tools that the city has work together to invest critically in affordable housing across the city.

And I'm glad to hear the reference to the housing levy.

We know we're working towards marching over the finish line to get that tool renewed.

But we want to look a little bit at the sources of funding that the Office of Housing has had to work with.

If you look at this chart, you will realize that Jumpstart has actually become the single largest source of funding for affordable housing.

More than $70 million invested in affordable housing annually coming directly from Jumpstart.

And that's a transformative investment at the most critical time that we've needed it as a city.

Now, I want to highlight some of the projects that were referenced earlier.

These are investments in real affordable homes, 18 buildings that have been supported already.

We've also seen investments in preservation of affordable housing, that's reinvesting in existing affordable housing.

And that produces about 2,000 affordable homes that are produced and preserved right here in our community for families and individuals to be able to access.

It does include investments critically in permanent supportive housing, really helping people exit homelessness on a path of stability.

And that's both in capital investments that you will hear a lot more from Dennis Sills and his team.

And then you had extensively about the wage stabilization that has already within the past few, within the past year contributed to a significant change.

in terms of the trends.

We also know that Jumpstart has invested critically in community-based developments, which Miguel Maestas on this call will really emphasize and highlight in terms of what we've seen as investments on that front.

Beyond all of this, Jumpstart is investing in low-wage workforce housing across the city, which we are truly grateful for.

And with that, I will hand over to Miguel, who will speak a lot more about community development work.

But I have to emphasize just how transformative this tool has been, given the numbers you've seen in terms of workforce stabilization, but More importantly, it is the scale in increased numbers of homes that have been produced with not just Jumpstart funding, but Jumpstart working with the other tools that the city has.

And with that, Miguel, I'll hand over to you.

Thank you so much, Patience.

I will do my best here to share my screen.

I have just a few images to help share.

First of all, I wanted to start out by saying that the background that Patience has on her screen there is of Plaza Roberto Maestas, which is the first significant development of El Centro de la Raza.

And really, a model in which we are not only working to build and provide affordable housing for our community, but really to build community itself and to build community-inspired mixed-use transit-oriented developments that incorporate the elements of not only affordable housing, but community and cultural space, economic development opportunities, and something that the entire neighborhood and city see as an asset.

And also being able to provide the supportive services through El Centro de la Raza for the families that are living in the affordable housing.

The Jumpstart Progressive Revenue Source is so immensely important from our perspective as an organization like El Centro de la Raza that is developing affordable housing to continue to be able to build assets and build community through these types of developments.

And The jumpstart funding has directly supported our next affordable housing development, which is the Four Amigos Beloved Community, which is being built in the Columbia City neighborhood in Seattle.

So construction actually began this year on April 10th, and we have an anticipated completion date of December 2024. And there will be 87 units of affordable housing in this development.

And over half of the units will be two and three bedroom apartments.

And our goal there is to make sure that families with children have enough space to be able to live in these developments, to be able to take advantage of the amenities and live in a neighborhood like Columbia City.

And so this is actually the largest development that we know of.

in Columbia City that is going to be able to serve that number of families with children with affordable housing.

And then it will also have four classrooms in our Early Child Development Center that is being built there.

There'll be two preschool and two toddler classrooms that will serve a total of 68 children.

So not only will it be able to serve children and families that live at Four Amigos Beloved Community, which I didn't mention, but is obviously named after our Four Amigos who were an example of building community.

And so we're very happy to be able to name it after the Four Amigos.

So the Child Development Center will serve families there, but also serve families throughout the Columbia City neighborhood and throughout our city.

So it's a resource not only for folks that live there, but for the entire community and city.

It will also house office space for consejo, counseling, and referral service.

And it's a partnership with the Church of Hope, which was on that site for many years, and will have a new worship space.

So those are the entities that will make up the development.

I'll say that the artwork there, if you all are familiar with the artwork at Plaza Roberto Maestas, we will also incorporate a wonderful display of artwork that really is reflective of the diversity of the Latino community.

which will include art that reflects the Afro-Latino, Indigenous, and Mestizo cultures and diversity of the Latino community.

These are some other images of the art and the buildings.

And so I'll also show that these are some construction photos taken and that it's actually, it's being constructed.

So we're incredibly excited that construction is on schedule to be completed in December of 2024 and on budget as well.

When the Jumpstart revenue was being championed, this is the vision that we had to directly support community-based organizations like El Centro de la Raza to be able to develop community with affordable housing as the cornerstone.

And we are hopeful and excited for the future and what the Jumpstart funding will provide to our city and communities and build capacity.

for organizations like El Centro de la Raza to provide affordable housing.

And these assets are truly long-term assets that will serve to strengthen our communities and strengthen community-based organizations.

And I'll close by saying, we are also working on another development on Beacon Hill, right adjacent to El Centro de la Raza, which will have about 84 units of affordable housing.

right next to the light rail on Beacon Hill.

And we're hopeful that Jump Start funding will be available to support that project as well.

So thank you so much.

Excellent.

Thank you so much.

And appreciate that.

Dennis, you are up next.

We'll hand it over to you.

And if folks didn't see Patience's note, she had to jump to another meeting at 1130. So we are also circulating her PowerPoint presentation.

Apologies for that.

And Dennis, thanks for sending us your PowerPoint.

We got that sent to the floor already.

I'm so glad you could join us today.

Thank you for being part of this presentation from Plymouth.

I'll turn it back over to you.

Great.

Well, thank you so much.

Good morning, Chairman Skeda and council members.

My name is Dennis Sills, and I work at Plymouth Housing.

Thank you for the invitation to present today alongside the Housing Development Consortium.

Plymouth is a member of HDC, the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness, and other human services coalitions in Seattle.

We provide permanent support housing to more than 1,200 residents and have more than 350 staff.

and are growing to meet the needs of our city.

We currently have 19 buildings and we're growing.

Today, I'm going to share how Jumpstart has helped us partner with the city to eliminate homelessness and address its causes.

Thank you for investing in this important resource in housing.

I'm going to talk a little bit about capital and also about the workforce stabilization piece, which was covered earlier by DESC, which we echo.

I'll go through that section a little bit more quickly since it was very well covered by SEIU and DESC.

So first off, we're very excited about this proposed housing investment.

There's a record level of investment in the proposed budget of $334 million.

What most people may not know is even if the increased levy were to pass, $142 million is actually the amount from Jumpstart, which is the largest single funding source through the Office of Housing.

So we're very grateful for that.

There's also $26 million for the Housing Workforce Stabilization Fund that supports permanent support of housing workers and wages, and I'll share some about that shortly.

Jumpstart Plymouth supported the creation of jumpstart in 2020 we support at least 62% of the revenue going towards housing, and we simply could not add for housing units and staff them without jumpstart so there's a combination of the capital side.

and the services side, and we need support with both in order to deliver what we do.

So the opening of Blake House on First Hill this year, which is the first affordable housing high-rise by a nonprofit in 50 years, would not be possible without Jumpstart.

Blake House does not have vouchers to support the operations that are actually supported by Jump Start.

We're also grateful for the PSH Operating Maintenance and Services Workforce Stabilization Fund that enabled us to move towards living wages for frontline staff, and I can go over that a little bit later.

We're able to use that funding for workforce in 13 of our PSH buildings.

So this is our one of our newest projects this year.

Blake House opened in May.

It's built on land donated by Sound Transit.

And again, it's the first affordable high rise in Seattle operated by a nonprofit.

So this is a true public-private partnership.

and a group effort really to deliver this from multiple levels.

It's named in memory of local housing advocate Blake Nordstrom.

It includes 112 studio apartments for seniors and veterans who have experienced chronic homelessness.

The upper levels are operated in joint development with Bellwether Housing, and they operate 250 units for lower income working individuals and families.

We're also providing on-site healthcare for this particular building through a partnership with Swedish.

So I also really want to talk about the Workforce Stabilization Fund because I think it's just so important to the capital investments that are also made.

On the capital side, we've opened three new buildings since January for 300 new units.

In the last few years, we've opened six new buildings for more than 600 units.

So without the capital, we certainly wouldn't be able to open up those buildings.

and apply for the low-income housing tax credits that have made this successful.

But also, we wouldn't be able to staff the buildings without this investment in our frontline workers.

We appreciate that the city recognizes that PSH has proven to be an effective model.

And to address Council Member Nelson's question earlier about success rates and outcomes, Plymouth has a 95% success rate of keeping people stably housed.

So we think this is a very prudent investment.

We also support increasing PSH workers' wages.

And this fund supports that, but also supports operating maintenance, including deferred maintenance and replacement reserves.

So just to provide a little context about why this is so needed, to talk about wage studies The University of Washington 2023 wage equity study showed that non-profit human services workers are paid 37% less than similar workers in for-profit non-care industries.

We also know from that report that the self-sufficiency income for a single adult with a child is $69,215, and that's in 2020. And if you account for the inflation over the last few years, it's probably more than that now.

So I just wanted to give a snapshot at what this fund has allowed Clement to do.

So these are three different frontline workers in our organization.

We looked at a front desk worker, a tenant support aide, and housing case managers.

And in each case, we were able to significantly increase their annual salary.

If you look at on the right side, many of them were able to move into the 44 plus percentage of AMI.

And if you look at the annual wage after this investment, you can see that we're edging very close to that self-sustainable rate for a single adult and child.

So a couple things to add to this slide.

One, we Currently, there were 155 employees who were directly affected by this funding, but then there was a total of 278 people indirectly affected, which means that we stepped up with philanthropy and other funding sources to expand salaries to prevent wage compression.

We were able to hire nearly 100 new staff and we've cut our vacancy rate we are able to fully staff all of our buildings.

And that means that our ratio is now 20 residents to a case manager.

We've added community specialists in every single building.

And we've also been able to add tenant support aides and safety ambassadors to talk a little bit more about some of that programming that Council Member Nelson was asking about.

So in closing, we want to thank you We're very grateful for this jumpstart support both on the on the capital side but also on the workforce and wages side.

We want to continue to urge you to implement the jumpstart spend plan and direct the majority of this funding towards housing.

We're grateful for this PSH operating maintenance services and workforce stabilization fund and we hope that will continue for at least five years and hopefully beyond that.

And we also hope that in the future we can discontinue using Jumpstart to support the general fund.

But I want to say thank you and I'll stop sharing my screen and welcome any questions that you may have.

Well, thank you very much.

Thank you both.

And thanks to patients who was here and had to leave for another meeting.

That was really, really helpful overview of the direct impact that these jumpstart dollars have had, and the ability to leverage additional funding to build housing faster and to build more housing and more inclusive housing.

I love that each example showed housing coupled with childcare, coupled with health services, and the example of coupling Housing with places of worship to really create a sense of community and place.

So, thank you for sharing this example.

Also, I definitely heard the call to maintain investment from jumpstart into the categories as defined in the 2020 spend plan.

Thank you for including that directly.

in your presentation and 62% mean 62% of the overall fund coming in not a reduced amount and then taking 60% of that so I heard that message loud and clear and when the temporary use expires next year to retain all of the investments going into jump start.

categories as defined.

We did talk a little bit last year about the percentages and the dollar amount and wanted to make sure that it was clear for the viewing public that the intent is to protect those investments and not just the percentages, but ensure the full amounts as codified at least in the 2020 assumptions are included in the base budget.

for this next year and then rolling back in 2025 to the overall funds that are coming in in 2025 and beyond going directly into Jump Start.

So more conversations to come about that, I'm sure, but really appreciate your call to action.

And it's not just defense, right?

We're not just saying don't touch, but here's the reason why these targeted funds are so important for making investments in economic resilience, housing resilience, and greater stability for everyone.

I will open it up for additional questions that Council colleagues might have on this Housing Stability Panel.

And again, we will circulate the presentation from the Housing Development Consortium as soon as we get a copy of that to our colleagues as well.

And don't worry, all of these PowerPoint presentations we will make available to the members of the viewing public in the minutes, and we will plan to circulate something on our Tuesday alerts tomorrow so that all of the presentations are in one place.

Council Member Morales, I see you pop online.

I know some of the conversation has circled your district as well, if you have any comments.

I'm sorry.

Thank you.

Yeah, I don't have any questions.

I do just want to thank the panelists for being here.

So much of this work is in my district because of the historic underinvestment in my district.

So I do think that this is a really illustrative example of why this is an important funding source and why it is so critical.

You know, part of the reason that I really worked with councilmember mosqueda to make sure that a part of this revenue went specifically to the equitable development initiative was to make sure that there is a permanent source of funding for that as well.

Because so many of the organizations that are really trying to promote, implement community-driven economic development, community-led economic development and housing is happening through the EDI program and through this work.

So I want to thank all of you for being here and I'll thank all of you for the work you're doing to make sure that our neighbors have a place to live and also having access to the services and the ground floor opportunities that you're providing whether it's child care or health care or any of the other goods and services that our neighbors are benefiting from because of your work.

So thank you very much and thanks for being here.

Excellent, well said.

Thank you so much and from being part of the shovel turning to the ribbon cutting.

It's been wonderful to see many of these projects come to fruition so fast.

I'm really excited about the expediency in which your organizations have been able to move.

And also wanted to note how excited, Dennis, that we are about the multi-story iron built affordable housing that's really utilizing airspace and airspace more effectively across our city.

So I know that that was one of the first of its kind and we look forward to having more of those high-rise developments be coupled with services as you showcase in the city.

And then to all of the comments that have been made about economic stability and economic resiliency, that's a great segue to our next panel.

and would just love to continue the thread of how, you know, housing, when done right, development done right for community lens equals more opportunity and not just a place to, you know, call home, but a place to call your community.

So really excited about that thread, that continuity that we're seeing between panels.

Council Member Nelson, I'll turn it over to you.

Thanks.

I guess this would apply to all the panels, but I'm just, but is Jumpstart the only funding source for these, this work that we were discussing?

Doesn't it get any general fund?

Happy to turn to our colleagues.

And I would also note some of the panelists have talked about the ability to braid funding and leverage funding being a really important tool.

So I'll let you comment on them.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda, and thank you, Council Member Nelson, for the question.

So, Chair Mosqueda is correct.

We often need to braid together multiple resources for each project, and each project is different, and we'd be happy to walk you through, Plymouth would be happy to walk you through any individual project, but often there's an investment from the State Housing Trust Fund.

There's often the, there's sometimes investment from the Housing Levy and the General Fund, as well as JumpStart, depending on the building itself.

We also often will apply for the low-income housing tax credit.

And so there's a combination of funding on the capital side that goes into our development that's often fairly complex, but happy to walk you through any individual projects that you'd like with our real estate team.

Thank you very much.

I didn't mean to put you on the spot.

That was more referring to city funding and which pot of money that comes out of.

So I get, I don't see central staff on here.

So I'll follow up with them just about whether or not the breakdown between general fund and jumpstart funding for all of the good work that we're talking about today.

So I'll just answer.

Council Member Nelson, I'll add one other thing, which is a lot of our on the services side and operations side, a lot of our funding does come from for a few buildings comes from city OMS operations and maintenance funding from the Office of Housing.

Those contracts which were referenced earlier by DESC are actually not contracts that receive the adjustments that the HSD contracts do.

We certainly would encourage the city to make that investment with all contracts, not just HSD.

But we do receive some funding for that purpose through contracts with the office of housing.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, thank you so much to our panelists from the second portion here.

And it's a great tie-in as Council Member Morales just teed up to talk about equitable development initiative and Green New Deal.

So I'm going to welcome our third panel and say thank you to our second panel.

Here we have with us today, again, Abdi Youssef from Puget Sound SAGE, and Matt Renly from Mazaska Talks, who will talk about some of the investments that we've seen from the Equitable Development Initiative efforts and Green New Deal priorities.

I would also note that Jumpstart does make significant investments in economic resilience, which Council Member Nelson chairs our economic committee that has oversight over the department that has put together the blueprint for spending the portion of JumpStart dollars related to economic resilience.

Many of those dollars have been one-time funds, as we've worked with the department and the department's work with community to finalize the plan for use of those JumpStart funds.

So, we don't have a specific panelist today to talk about the direct investments in economic resilience, workforce development, child care support, all of those great things.

But do know that that is a huge component of Jump Start as well.

And perhaps we can tee up a panel just on some of those one-time investments so that we can look back, but really know that the long-term investments as proposed by the Department of Economic Security is going to be forward-looking in 2024 and beyond.

So, much more conversation to come about economic resilience in the use of Jump Start funds for 2024, and appreciate the Department's good work on that.

But today, we're focused on equitable development initiative and Green New Deal to round out our presentation here today.

So, I'll turn it over to Abdi.

Thank you so much for joining us from Puget Sound SAGE, and look forward to hearing more about equitable development initiative.

And then we'll go to Matt Remley, as we talk about Green New Deal updates, especially from the oversight board perspective.

And then I'll take council member comments.

I'm sure we will have a few.

Good morning.

It's almost morning still.

It's noon.

Good afternoon, Abdi.

Thanks for your patience.

Hi, good afternoon council members.

My name is Abdurahman Yusuf.

I'm a community organizer with Put Your Son on Stage, educator and also a member of the Seattle EDI Advisory Board.

I want to start off by saying that through Seattle's EDI, Jumpstart is enabling the most impacted BIPOC communities to stay in Seattle and create cultural anchors that will last for generations.

As we have seen from the previous panelists, as experimenting in community-driven and community-governed development, there is nothing like it across the country.

and the city council should be recognized for it.

Without the Trump start, the ADI would not have gotten to scale.

I will talk more in a bit about some great examples.

The success of our EDI program and other Jumpstart initiatives also show that the city government can be smart about connecting revenues to users.

We are in a housing and disability crisis because Seattle absorbed too many high-bid tech workers too fast over the last decade.

Many longtime Seattleites are simply being outbid for land and housing by new people working for giant tech firms.

Chump Start represents the right companies paying for mitigation to the right people.

I should also note that EDI got over 75 applications last year for projects.

This reflects both the success of the program and the need.

While each of these projects represent an inspiring vision for the applicants, it also shows that we need more land and more resources to stabilize our neighborhoods and ensure a place for all communities in the long run.

Those and many other reasons butchered some sage callers on the city council and the mayor to take to not take chum chum start revenue for other uses, then the first adopted.

Earlier, I said I'll talk in a bit about some great examples.

There are great examples.

I could use MCC, Multicultural Community Center, which acquired a small business center and stabilizing over 45 small businesses.

I could talk about Black and Tan Hall, which I believe is opening this week.

Chief Seattle Club, Hope Academy, the Etobian Village, which built 90-unit low-cost housing for seniors in Rainier Valley, which will promote healthy, dignified aging in central and affordable location.

But I will use the example I would like to bring your attention is rainy beach action coalition and the food innovation network that they have been working on.

built our back has successfully secured.

Space thanks to the for food distribution center.

Through community supported agriculture, they are providing nutritious food to the local community and addressing a critical need.

That the community has identified as a top priority.

As you all are aware, Rainier Beach and Rainier Valley faces high unemployment, high unemployment rate, and significant barriers to employment.

RBAC is actively working on building a pipeline of both construction firms and hiring construction workers from the neighborhood.

Additionally, they are sourcing directly from by-box farmers in our region.

While The EDI played a crucial role in acquiring this space.

It's essential to acknowledge that, acknowledge the far-reaching impacts this project is having in our neighborhoods and our broader region.

The ripple effects of RBAC's initiative cannot be underestimated.

the Food Innovation Center, Rainier Beach Action Coalition, making our city a safer, healthier, and stronger city.

Thank you, Council Member Escuero.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for sharing that information.

I'm going to turn it to Matt to give us an overview of the Green New Deal investments and the work of the Oversight Board.

And then we can take some questions from council members on both boards, the EDI board and Green New Deal board and the activities that are being summarized.

Good afternoon, Matt.

Thanks for being here with us.

Well, good afternoon.

Good to see everybody.

Thank you, Council Member Mosqueda for providing this platform for us to share out on all the good investments coming out of Jumpstart.

And my name is Matt Rimley.

I am on the Green New Deal Oversight Board.

I've been there since the start of it as one of the frontline representatives.

And happy to be here today to share out a little bit about where the investments from jumpstart have gone to achieve the.

The goals of the Green New Deal share screen here and.

I know I am coming at the tail end of a long day, so I'll try to not take too long on here, but this was put together for us.

We work with the Office of Sustainability and Environment, and they provided these slides as an overview to us on the oversight board.

A couple months back.

So just kind of go through this year but back in June of 2022. We on the board shared our recommendations for both the opportunity fund as well as the proposed budget for Seattle green new deal.

Jumping down to November of 2022, the 2023 adopted budget included $20 million for the Green New Deal and endorsed $20.3 million for 2024. why that popped up.

In this last June, we shared our recommendations to the mayor's office for the 2024 budget.

So just sharing that because the slides you're going to see will have both what was allocated for the 2023 budget as well as our recommendations for this next, for 2024. So I'll jump down to here.

And as you all know, Green New Deal, I apologize for that.

I work out of school, so you're probably hearing a bell in the background.

You know, it's multifaceted.

There's many moving parts, components to achieving the Green New Deal.

In addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we also are looking at jobs and frontline communities, those who are most impacted by the impacts of climate change.

So we'll start here with, can everybody see that?

Yeah, that looks great.

We see.

Okay.

Investments Department 23 adopted and 23 proposed.

Perfect, that is everything.

So I won't necessarily read through everything, because this will be made available to everybody afterwards, but just wanted to highlight some of where the funds were directed.

And you can see on the kind of the far right, the 2023 dollars, and then what we're proposing for 2024. These funds are really geared towards workers.

We really believe in that just transition.

and moving workers into a clean energy economy.

And so funds are directed for youth capacity building like for in the Duwamish Valley for their leadership participation in workforce development, building that kind of next generation of of workers in the clean energy economy to various apprenticeships and scholarships and then on down to providing scholarships and apprenticeships for particularly targeting BIPOC communities so they can have access to careers in the clean energy economy.

Next area was focused on a just transition away from fossil fuels in buildings.

So you can see where, again, some of our proposals and the money that was allocated to go towards things like low-income oil-to-heat, oil-heat-to-heat pump conversions.

which is investment to fully fund conversion from heating oil to electric heat pumps in low-income households.

This is where our emphasis on targeting communities, so for example, I live in South Beacon Hill, so we know that we're one of the more impacted by pollution and feel the impacts of climate change in other parts of Seattle.

So some of these prioritize neighborhoods like ours.

Oil heat to heat pump conversions as a middle income rebates.

So that particular one was a target to reach 400 homes with a rebate of $2,000 per home to convert to electric.

And then one of the big areas, we know buildings are one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

So we wanted to accelerate performance standards, ongoing expanding investments and technical support, incentives and new policies, mandates to transition existing larger commercial and multifamily buildings off of fossil fuels by 2045. with a focus on supporting under-resourced buildings, owners slash tenants, creating jobs and mitigating the burden on priority communities.

You'll see we're asked for a significant increase in that area.

So we hope council will take note of that number.

So next area is on transitioning away from fossil fuels in the area of transportation.

So some areas there were charging stations for infrastructure projects up in Holler Lake, as well as driver-cleaned Seattle fleet electronic vehicle infrastructure, incentives for heavy-duty electric vehicles.

So to renew and make ongoing city-funded incentives for electric heavy-duty vehicles, such as school buses and other industrial and commercial fleets.

And on to the next priority areas within for healthy and resilient communities.

So we have a green energy focus area funding supports contracts and community based organizations for outreach engagement and implementing of tree planting public and private lands, with an emphasis in South Park in Georgetown, you see some funding for other areas of tree planting tree canopy.

Last year, we also directed some funds towards the EJ fund to increase the amount of funds they had for the re-granting and work that they do.

I see the rest of those.

And continuing on with healthy and resilient communities, we also have the resiliency hubs.

And that was a one-time funding for the development of a community-based managed resilience hub strategy based on the findings of OSC's resilience hub study currently underway.

There was a Funding allocated specifically for indigenous led sustainability projects and funding to support the climate and sustainability focused work, led by tribes and indigenous like groups and organizations.

OSC, along with the Oversight Board, we're currently working with both local tribes, as well as jointly with the Indigenous Advisory Council on how to review those particular projects.

20 is funding for a climate resiliency hub on South Beacon Hill.

I actually live in this neighborhood of New Holly.

So that's where that particular resiliency hub would be built right there at Van Esselt Community Center.

And then, yeah, I think.

And again, I know I didn't necessarily talk about every single one, but just wanted to kind of highlight a few of them on there.

And Thank you.

Thank you for your continued support.

As we know, to reach the goals of the Green New Deal, there needs to be funding.

I was happy to work alongside Councilmember O'Brien and others at the time of the crafting of the resolution as well as the ordinance, but ultimately it's going to achieve the goals outlined in that resolution.

There needs to be funding.

So we're grateful that we have the support of Councilmember Miskada to direct funds and resources to achieving those goals.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you both.

I really appreciate your presentation here today and accomplishing those goals.

and ensuring that we hold ourselves accountable to fulfilling the promise both of Jump Start funding and the original resolutions and the original inception of the equitable development initiative and the Green New Deal legislation that was mentioned could only be possible with your service and your colleagues services on the board.

So thank you for helping to hold us accountable and to provide information on how the dollars have gone out the door so people can see those dollars being put to action.

When we are able to physically show the impact of public investments, I think we maintain and grow the public's trust, and it also helps us push back on false narratives that money's not being used wisely or is just being squirreled away.

This is money that's directly going out into community and making massive improvements, both in infrastructure and in community health and well-being.

So thank you for sharing that.

I see Kazuma Morales on the screen here, who has purview over EDI investments currently in her committee, and also probably just general interest.

Any comments from you, Kazuma?

Well, I'll just say again that I really appreciate both of you being here.

Good to see you, Matt.

And, you know, I do think this is both of these examples illustrate why it's so important for us to, you know, increase resources for communities that have historically been under resourced.

Because if we're talking about equity, then we have to talk about equitable financing.

of the work that needs to be done so that all of our neighbors can share in the city's prosperity.

And this is really important work.

So glad to see you both.

And thank you for all you do.

Thank you.

Any additional comments from my colleagues or questions about the presentation on this last panel?

I would love to see the recommendations, if either of the boards have them, on where the proposed funding for 2024 might not align with what you were anticipating, or if there's, as you showed, Matt, gaps between what was proposed in 23 versus what the proposed 24 investments are.

If those are of concern to you, let us know.

Obviously, as all the panels have noted, we're dealing with projected revenue declines starting in 2025 and beyond.

So both protecting the investments for the targeted outcomes that we are all hoping for, and Jump Start is critically important, as much as we also want to make sure that the full funding that's being promised in 2024 comes to fruition and that we can use that as a building block for 2025 and beyond.

So if you have recommendations in that regard, of course, we'd love to hear that.

If you have ideas now, of course, feel free to share since you have a microphone.

I'm not going to be able to do that.

But feel free to send anything in after this as well.

Any initial thoughts on that?

Go ahead, matt.

I believe I shared that already with erin.

So we will make sure to get out to the rest of the councilmembers.

Thank you again so much.

Go ahead, Matt.

I invite you all, along with your aides, tonight is actually our Green New Deal oversight board is meeting, so feel free to hop on and and hear from the director.

We have a really awesome board, a very diverse group of individuals, anywhere from labor to local tribes and youth who have been working really hard to try to meet this crisis and see what we can do in the city.

So it's at five o'clock tonight.

And thank you for that invite.

And we will share that information on social media as well.

Thank you for sharing some of the presentation.

You talked about specific direct investments in community organizations, both with Green New Deal investment and equitable development initiative.

And I'd love to see those maps so that we can show our council members, especially those who have districts, the investments going directly into their neighborhoods.

So thank you for that.

And I'll just read off the 34 community-driven projects that have received funding already.

And as a reminder, Jump Start complements some funding that's already been set aside for equitable development initiatives.

we're basically filling out and furthering the goals of equitable development initiative projects through Jumpstart.

And so to close this out today, if this sounds okay, I'll read off some of the 34 organizations that received funding just for the record so that people hear the organization, see their neighborhood community at work, and that we get to continue to applaud their work.

So here are some of the orgs that received funding.

Estelita Library, LEMS, L-E-M-S, Urban Family Chaya, which is C-Y-A-Y, Somali Health Board, Arte New York, El Centro de la Raza, New Hope Community Development Initiative, Africa Midtown Plaza, Rainier Beach Coalition, which was mentioned, Empowering Youth and Families Outreach, Skip the PDA, Union Cultural Services, Tubman Health, Nehemiah Initiative of Seattle, Seattle Indian Health Services, Friends of Little Saigon, Naha Ali Ihali Fund, Rainier Beach Action Coalition, also mentioned earlier, Vietnamese Buddhist Community, BIPOC Sustainable Tiny Art Community, Central District Community Preservation and Development Authority, East African Community Services, Eritrean Association of Greater Seattle, FAME Equity Alliance of Seattle, Somali Health Board, which we mentioned earlier, Urban Black, ADE, FAU, Cultural Education Workshop, Eritrean Community in Seattle, and Vicinity, and Hip Hop is Green, along with Khmer Community, Seattle, King County.

just a few organizations to really celebrate and lift up.

So thank you so much for being part of this presentation, and much more to come, colleagues, as we talk more about how ongoing Jumpstart funding, braided together with important other funding streams, is really making a monumental impact in our communities, but also really needs to be directed and targeted to these investments, which have often been on the back burner in terms of priority investment so exciting to see some of these public dollars being put to you and tangible outcomes.

Thank you so much of the and Matt for being with us to close out our panel calling that there's nothing else for the good of the order I want to remind folks that tomorrow we will have the revenue forecast Council update that speaking of revenue.

The Revenue Forecast Council meets quarterly.

This revenue forecast will provide us with an update on the most recent revenue streams, including updates on jumpstart revenue streams and general fund revenue streams.

This will help inform our budget deliberations over the next five weeks.

We will also have the Select Budget Committee meeting on Wednesday, October, excuse me, let me just double check the date there.

Wednesday, October 16th, October 18th, And in that meeting, we will have a public comment period starting at 5 p.m.

You can sign up for public comment at 3 p.m.

Again, we encourage remote participation.

I will be there in person to help manage public hearing, but we do encourage remote participation both from members of the community and colleagues.

If you would like to dial in remotely, that's no problem as we seek to try to follow our public health guidelines still trying to ensure social distancing given the impacts of flu and ongoing COVID exposure.

So again, 5 p.m.

is when our public hearing starts and we'll make sure to hear from everybody who dials in.

Information about signing up for public comment is going to be on our website.

There is no public, excuse me, there is no committee hearing on the 18th.

We have freed up your day during the day at 10 a.m.

You can take that off your calendar if you thought on the original proposal, we will just be having public hearings that evening.

Any other questions?

Thank you so much for joining us all today, colleagues.

We'll see you on Wednesday at 5 p.m.

for the public hearing.

This meeting is adjourned.

Take care, everybody.