Seattle Park District Board Meeting 71822

Thank you very much.

The July 18th, 2022 meeting of the Seattle Park District Board will come to order.

It is 9.30 AM.

I am Andrew Lewis, president of the board.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Board member Nelson?

Yes.

Board member Herbold?

Yes.

Board member Juarez?

Yes.

Board member Morales?

Here.

Board member Peterson?

Here.

Board Member Silant.

Board Member Strauss.

Present.

Board Member Musqueda.

Present.

And Council, Board President Lewis.

Present.

Six present.

And Madam Clerk, do you want to maybe call, was Board Member Nelson answering present in your roll call?

He was in Chambers Council.

Okay, excellent.

Excellent.

Great.

Excellent.

Okay, well, let us go ahead and proceed forward with approval of the agenda if there's no objection the agenda will be adopted hearing no objection the agenda is adopted approval of the minutes.

There are no minutes presented for approval today.

And I actually my, my script does not indicate a.

a public comment period, but I will now open a public comment period.

Board President Lewis, if you wouldn't mind, we do have minutes of June 24th to approve.

Oh, the script I have doesn't indicate that, but that does make sense.

So approval of the minutes.

Is there any objection to approval of the minutes referenced by the clerk?

And those are the June 24th 2022 minutes.

Thank you.

Hearing no objection, the minutes are approved.

Public comment.

No need to play the public comment video.

I'll just quickly give the guidance.

We will now enter into a public comment session.

The clerk will moderate the public comment session, altering between first, in-person speakers, and then second, virtually signed up speakers.

Madam Clerk, how many people are signed up for public comment?

We have one in chambers and my apologies, I'm not locating currently the online public comment form at this very second.

One remote IT is indicating.

So why don't we take the in-person public commenter first and then the virtual public commenters will have two minutes and Madam Clerk, you may moderate the public comment session.

Our first public commenter, we'll have two minutes in chambers, and the first public commenter is Alex Zimmerman.

See, Kyle, my lovely damn Nazi fascist mob bandit in sky and psychopath who speak to us from the heaven.

My name Alex Zimmerman.

I won't speak about park money.

I love you.

I love you.

You want to make a levy from $50 million to $150 million for another couple of years.

It's very good.

This will be more and more pleasure to everybody.

$15 million levy or $150 million levy is good.

I give you a classic example.

I go to Green Lake almost a couple times per week.

You know what it means for walking.

You know what it means to look at people.

And I see this 200 duck.

doing very good job.

Yeah.

So I think $50 million in 200 duck only inside.

Green Lake, so with $150 million, three times more, will be 600 duck in Green Lake.

And this very intelligent duck, like you guys, like Consular Mayor Harrell, you know what this mean?

They doing nothing in water.

They find toilet in sidewalk.

So all these 200 duck, very intelligent, like you.

And they go to sidewalk and show us, they green, green, green.

Difficulty, something, I don't know, my English not enough, good.

Yes, this happen every day.

You walk and you see this green difficulty and you happy, happy.

I'm happy, you happy, everybody happy.

Only homeless not happy who cannot go.

to park, you know what I mean, and staying like civilized people.

But they have 200, only 200 dead every year.

This is exactly, it's different from duck.

Duck, 200, very happy, homeless, not too much happy because they dying and dying in street.

A thousand and thousand.

I love you.

Speak to me, too, from the heaven.

Our next public commenter is a remote speaker.

And the next speaker's name is Anne Knight.

Anne Knight.

I'm not hearing.

I hear her now.

Anne?

This is Anne Nice, and I'm here to provide more detail about funding for trees and developed parks.

As you look at the STD budget details, you will see $8.7 million for restoring and increasing tree canopy in the continued baseline funding and wonder why more is needed.

What we have learned during the study we have undertaken with SPR is that the existing funding for trees is primarily focused on restoring the forest and the green belts and natural areas, which is, of course, a very important investment to have a resilient urban forest in the city.

But the focus that is missing is funding for planting trees and developed parks.

These are the trees that provide shade in our most important civic spaces where people come together to find respite from the heat that is being compounded by climate change and debris, fresh air cleaned by the trees.

As we have provided and submitted information, SPR faces a backlog of dead and dying trees in its developed parks with more dying every year.

This loss of tree canopy and need for more trees in developed parks needs to be addressed now with sustained funding of 2 million annually to reach even a baseline threshold of no net loss in one to two decades.

We are asking the city to provide $1 million in funding annually to address this issue in developed parks.

Currently, 97,000 comes from REIT.

Another new 266,000 is identified coming from the SPD tree canopy budget recommendation of 400,000 you are considering.

But to tackle just half the funding need for trees in developed parks, Our needs another 637,000 annually.

We are hoping to leverage this requested city funding of a million dollars with a match from private donors to bring the total to $2 million annually.

But we need the city as an equal partner in this effort for trees for Seattle parks, if we hope to attract private dollars.

This is a small investment in what would be a lasting legacy for generations to come.

Thank you.

or present that concludes public commenters.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

We will now move on to our items of business.

We have one item of business today.

Will the clerk please read item one into the record?

Agenda item one, discussion of proposed cycle two funding plan for briefing and discussion.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

We are joined by our council central staff, Eric McConnie and Tracy Ratzliff to give a presentation on proposed cycle two spending priorities I would ask that board members hold their questions to the end of the presentation and note the slide number for our discussion following the end of the central staff presentation.

So I think there's a slide deck.

I don't know if it's Eric or Tracy who's gonna cue that up.

Good morning.

Park District President Lewis.

I will be sharing the presentation.

This is Eric McConaughey.

I'm your council's central staff.

I'm Tracy Ratcliffe, council's central staff.

So Eric is putting that up and he has done that.

So today we're gonna go over the various components that we described to you at the 6-24 Park District meeting that will be considered by the mayor for inclusion in the next six year spending plan for the MPD.

The hope is that council members today will provide feedback on the desirability of these various components that will inform not only the mayor as he prepares his proposed spending plan, but also for your colleagues as you will ultimately adopt the final spending plan after consideration of the mayor's proposed plan that we anticipate will be submitted to the council, the 6th of September, and the hope that the district board will adopt that, any revisions or modifications to that spending plan by the 19th of September.

So to remind you, the anticipated elements of the funding plan include one continued, next slide, please.

Oh, of course.

elements include continued funding of cycle one initiatives, new investment proposals recommended by the Board of Parks and Rec Commissioners, pre-commitment projects also recommended by the Board of Parks and Rec Commissioners, and then COVID and economic recovery funding.

We will go into more detail about each one of those components in just a few minutes.

This slide shows you those components in one stacked bar with the $58 million of continued Cycle 1 investments at the bottom.

Another $30 million of new investments.

We will be calling those Cycle 2 investments.

That's another way to refer to the next spending plan for the Parks District.

And then $10 million each for debt service, for pre-commitment projects, and for COVID-19 and economic recovery funding.

All together, this would come to $108 million.

This is the amount of money that came out of the Parks Board and Recreation Commission recommendations.

And on this next slide, we see midway through this chart, there's several numbers here, you'll see the $108 million, starting in 2023, rising to 131 in 2028. That's assuming that there'll be no changes to what was recommended by the board.

We know that the mayor is taking a look at the spending plan now.

We'll make recommendations.

But that shows the line from 108 to 131 with a 4% annual increase for inflation.

To the left in this chart, you'll see the actual numbers from 2016 through 2022. running from about $48 million to about $56 million of actual NPD funding.

And so in the middle, you would see the transition from 56 to 108. That's the jump from 2022 to 2023, if the current proposal that we have recommendations from would go forward.

This slide is straightforward.

It shows us this green line that is the ceiling for what, uh, your staff and the executive staff have done the math on this and sort it out.

What would be the ceiling that the cap of the MPD could go to for the levy without, without having to go to the voters for permission to do more.

So, um, if we work backwards from, um, not punching through that ceiling in 2028, and that's about $145 million.

We go backwards at 4% per year, we get to $119 million in 2023. This is just a real straightforward line just to sort of help you understand kind of where that is, where that sort of need to go to voters, where the line would be.

And you see that in 2023, 119 is about $10 or $11 million more than what we have in the current set of recommendations.

Well, moving on to talk about, oops, I'm sorry.

Did somebody speak?

I'm just saying it was handing it up to you, Tracy.

Thank you.

Thank you, Eric.

Moving to the specific components of the various proposals we have in front of us.

The first would be the continued funding of Cycle 1 initiatives.

That is all of the initiatives that were funded in the first six-year spending plan.

Again, they would total in 2023 about $58.2 million.

This table just shows you what those initiatives were.

They include things like community center rehabilitation, saving our city forest, our commitments to the aquarium and zoo, increasing preventative maintenance, making parks safer.

improving off leash areas, rejuvenating pea patches, various community recreation programs such as Better Programs for Young People, Recreation for All, and Get Moving Program, as well as the Parkland Acquisition Equity Fund and then Waterfront Park Development Maintenance.

Those are just That is just the list of the things that have been funded in that first six year spending plan.

And you have these materials and the actual cost for each one of those initiatives in the memo that Eric and I sent to you on the 10th of June if you want to look at what those specific amounts were.

So moving to the next slide.

So this is the beginning of the new investment proposals that have been recommended by the Board of Parks and Rec Commission that we heard about on the 24th, a total $30 million on an annual basis.

This is kind of a high level strategy area that all of those investments proposals fall into.

I will now kind of walk through again those individual investment proposals just to give you a sense of what those are to remind you again of what those are and the funding level.

So moving to the next slide, just to orient you again to this table, you see the proposed investment, the baseline funding that is existing funding, what the recommended funding was, and if there are new FTEs associated with that proposed investment, you see the number of FTEs that are recommended.

So the first grouping includes the building community capacity strategy area.

This includes additional million dollars in funding for the community proposed equity fund.

This was the former major challenge project fund that has been reoriented now to be called an equity fund to provide a greater opportunity for all communities to access that funding for community based projects.

The inclusive outreach and engagement would add additional funding in part to add additional funds for the Get Moving and Recreation for All recreation programs, but also to provide some additional staff to do additional outreach and engagement with communities to help them access those programs.

Additional funding would be added for the Seattle Conservation Corps to increase the number of trainees from 50 to 60 a year.

So this funding would allow for that expansion of that program.

$700,000 would be provided to establish a dedicated staff that would be involved in maintaining, harvesting, and distributing food from the 20 orchards and eight gardens that exist on SPR property.

Currently, there are no existing dedicated staff to that effort.

Moving on to the next category, continuing to fix it first.

Additional funds would be added to do some major maintenance projects at Magnuson Park.

additional funding of about a million dollars would be added to do additional play area improvements.

There is a list of candidate projects that's included in the materials.

This would help to accelerate the rate at which Parks is able to do play area renovations.

We have about 151 play areas in the city and so this would help move along the list of those renewals.

Additional funding of about $1 million would be added to make major critical maintenance improvements at city pools.

That includes things like roof replacement, locker room improvements, mechanical system upgrades, that kind of thing.

Additional funding of $886,000 plus about 1.6 million of one-time funds would be added to do restoration and renovation of the outdoor tennis courts.

We have about 142 outdoor tennis courts that are in need of care and tending, and this would help to accelerate that activity on renewing those.

It would also add the funds necessary to do two new pickleball courts.

So this funding would help accomplish that as well.

Moving on to developing enhancing park access, $350,000 would be added to additional acquisition of open space and land for future park development.

This would leverage hopefully the conservation and future funding from King County, which we've been fairly successful at leveraging of about a million three a year in addition to the baseline funding.

That of course presumes that that conservation futures levy is renewed this fall.

$1.8 million would be allocated to fund planning and design and development of eight additional land bank sites and potential some early design work as well for additional parks.

And again, the list of candidate projects is in your materials and includes a number of different ones that I think council members know about and have interest in.

Moving to enhancing life safety and regulatory compliance.

So additional funding would be added to do backlog of our ADA improvements that are necessary at parks to address the ADA requirements.

This funding is of course needed to begin to work to continue to work down the list of DOJ identified improvements that need to be made at parks facilities.

$625,000 would be used to provide additional training for lifeguards, for additional staff during swim lessons, other classes, and staff to coordinate the training and staffing of the lifeguards at beaches and pools during the summer.

$977,000 would be used to do further scheduled preventative maintenance and to address emergent repairs and maintenance at SPR facilities.

This can include specific repairs at facilities that they're trying to hold off having to move into major maintenance items.

So this includes things like some of the repairs needed at pools as well as other parks facilities.

$335,000 would be added to implement more robust training programs to better track, assess and monitor safety related issues.

It might include a new software system to do a better job of tracking safety issues and incidents that happened.

And also in particular, a call for additional training for staff who are dealing with a variety of challenging situations at parks and community centers in this day and age.

$1.5 million would be provided to fund assessments and to begin repairs of SPI unreinforced masonry buildings.

SPI thinks that they have probably about 25 buildings that are in active use that will likely need to be assessed and likely need repairs once SDCI issues their final guidelines on what those URM requirements will be.

Moving on to enhancing REC facilities and programming.

Additional funds would be provided to create a centralized customer service group to provide better customer service responses to things like refund requests, scheduling facilities, program registration, and so forth.

Additional funds of $3.7 million would be requested for community center hours to be expanded at some community centers into the evening and weekends, which has been a specific request of some communities.

It would also provide the maintenance to go along with those expanded hours.

And finally, funds would also be used to reclass front desk staff at community centers and pools whose positions are being reclassed to align with expanded job responsibilities.

Additional funding would be provided for custodial support to address increased demand for those services at sites with specific increased high utilization.

This might include community centers with shower programs for the homeless, some other facilities that don't have dedicated staff to do that kind of increased demand, including Camp Long, Magnuson Park, Mount Baker Rowing, Golden Gardens Bathhouse and Japanese Garden.

Additional funding is provided to increase support for the rec in the streets program and that this is the program that delivers recreational program in neighborhood parks via a mobile recreation unit.

My understanding is funding would help to focus on some areas that have been requesting additional recreation activities, including Georgetown and Licton Springs.

Moving on to expanding this employment and mentorship program.

Additional funding would be used to expand teen programming on Mondays at teen life centers at Garfield, Meadowbrook and Southwest community centers, as well as to do additional programming in Southeast Seattle, which doesn't have a teen life center right now.

You would also provide funding for expanded mentorship programming.

Additional funding of about $400,000 would be used to fund wages for 40 youth employed by SPR and also to fund staff to help coordinate not only SPR's youth employment programs, but also the programs that are operating in other city departments as it relates to the youth employment program.

Moving on to improving park safety.

This funding, some additional funding would be allocated to provide the resources and staff to work with community partners to activate neighborhood parks to provide safer, more inviting parks.

That's the Park Activation and Parks Commons Program.

And this area, this effort would be targeted to many neighborhood parks that are located out of the downtown area.

Additional funding would be provided for the parks concierge program to support existing concierge program that now services about eight parks, includes Ballard Commons, Hing Hay, Victor Steinbrook, Cal Anderson, Denny Park, and Pioneer Square and City Hall Park.

Additional funding would also be provided for the park safety program.

So this funding would do a number of things.

One, it would add two additional animal control officers that are specifically dedicated to SPR property.

The remaining funding would support additional community-centered programming to increase activation at those areas or in those community centers to address beach closures and to do general park code compliance.

Funding would also be used to support recommendations for a park safety plan that is being developed by SPR now that might include something related to a uniformed park presence being proposed, something similar to Park Ranger program, but probably not like the Park Ranger program, but that consultant work is underway now and would help to inform how some of these funds would be spent going forward.

Increasing access to restrooms.

So about $174,000 would be used to support and install auto locks on SPR restrooms.

and provide the staffing necessary to operate, manage, and facilitate repair of those locking mechanisms in those restrooms.

$1.2 million would be added to support renovations of additional comfort stations every year.

Right now, we have 94 comfort stations and 30 shelter houses, and this funding would help to do additional repairs or renovations at two comfort stations a year, which would add on to the two renovations per year that are now provided by the base funding.

And then the last item would add funding necessary to create two new evening and second shift maintenance teams that would provide year-round seven-day comfort station maintenance, including a garbage and litter and recycling pickup on the grounds that surround those restrooms.

I'll jump in here and talk under this category of responding to climate change.

The first caption would cover climate-conscious buildings.

This would add $2 million to advance the work to make parks facilities more green, it would add on to renovations and things that were underway.

The second one, community center pre-electrification, refers to changing out a lighting into more efficient LED lighting and also some controls in advance of actually fully electrifying those buildings that would receive that change.

The third category, replacing fossil fuels and small mechanical systems, refers to replacing heating and some small buildings that are in a number of parks that use oil heat.

And so this would allow for changing a number of those out over the course of the spending plan.

The fourth category, restoring and increasing urban canopy.

canopy would add $400,000 to the baseline funding.

This would be for planting new trees and also some FTEs to do the work of planting, mulching, watering, and maintaining those trees along with a number of folks who do that work now.

The next category has to do with sustainable irrigation.

This would add money to what Parks does now to deal with potentially finding leaks in irrigation systems and also improving irrigation systems so that the parks department uses water more efficiently.

This of course has economic consequences because the park does pay a bill to public utilities, but also the important ecological component.

And then water reuse partnerships.

This would add money to look into using stormwater, rainwater in Parks properties and it would coordinate with the folks at Seattle Public Utilities and others.

Moving on to restoring parks and facilities, so $269,000 would be added to provide funding to make highly trafficked parks more appealing.

This would include the re-institution of the hanging basket program in downtown, and the weeding and grooming, et cetera, of flowerbeds in the downtown parks, but also services that would be provided to up to two parks in districts outside of the downtown.

$633,000 will be provided to create a new crew to respond to repairs and maintenance and respond to vandalism, including graffiti abatement.

$352,000 would be added to create funding and staff to support the preservation and maintenance of five of SPR's designated viewpoints.

We have a total of 16 of these designated viewpoints with currently no dedicated staff or resources to maintaining those.

This funding would also support the development of an actual management plan for all 16 designated viewpoints.

Moving to restoring the trails.

So $650,000 would be provided to do large scale trail restoration projects that require capital investment to repair such things as steps, bridges, elevated walkways, those kinds of major repairs that would be necessary on city trails.

And then $400,000 would be added to provide dedicated staff to help maintain and preserve the over 116 miles of trails that exist in the city parks.

So moving on to the next category of proposals, this is the pre-commitment projects.

The estimate on this is about a total of $135 million.

which would consist of about $25 million in cash financing and $110 million in debt financing.

That debt financing would ballpark at about $10 million a year in terms of cost.

The investment proposals here include a number of things.

One, they relate to projects that were not completed in cycle one.

Those were due to the pandemic and the need to redirect funds.

That specifically relates to the six land bank park development projects.

It relates to projects that were intended to be funded with NPD funds, but for which cost escalated beyond what was available for funding that applies to the Amy tennis center and the Loyal Heights Community Center.

And then it also includes includes projects that had always always been talked about as being considered as candidates for spending in the next.

six-year spending plan and that would include Lake City Community Center, Green Lake Community Center, as well as tenant improvements at the new 8th and Mercer Community Center.

And what you see here are the recommended amounts that could be considered for each one of those projects to be included in financing for those either in a bond or in part in cash financing.

There is, I'm sorry, and as it relates to the pre commitment projects, there would also be ongoing operating and maintenance costs of about two to two and a half million dollars that would need to be funded, either with Park District funds or with other things.

Moving to the last category or bucket of proposals, this includes the funding to mitigate for ongoing impacts of the pandemic to city as well as to SPR resources, which include general fund and read on the city side and fees and charges from parks related activities.

Just to remind council members, parks department does generate fees from its programs and from its buildings that it leases out.

It can range from 30 million plus in terms of those funds that support the parks department and its services and operations.

It was of course impacted by the pandemic and is in fact in recovery as well as the city.

So that's in part what this funding could help to mitigate for as those revenues specifically recover as well.

And it's possible that this additional funding would be needed only for the first two years of the spending plan.

That completes our run through of all the various proposals.

We are more than happy to answer questions about both.

Thank you so much.

And Eric, for running through that slide deck with us, you know, a lot of repetition of themes from some of the previous meetings of this board.

So it's good to really be drilling into this initial set of recommendations.

Why don't we start, I have a few questions by just going to that immediate previous slide to clarify some things about the supplanting requests.

It's not including on this slide, but we discussed this in a previous hearing.

Can we have a reminder from central staff of what the baseline funding currently is for parks and how much we have budgeted in the current budget above the baseline for the parks department.

For the 2022 budget, the general fund provided $109 million.

And that was about $3.3 million over what would have been required per the ILA in 2022.

Okay, and I just wanted to remind us as a starting point as we have this conversation about the recommendation from the Board of Parks and Recreations Committee to consider up to $10 million in general fund support for parks, that we are currently funding parks at a level in excess of the previously identified baseline.

And I think that context is going to be important as we consider how much support would be appropriate or if it even is appropriate.

As I've said before on this topic, I continue to be leaning toward not wanting to go down a path of using money from the Metropolitan Park District as part of our balancing equation for the general fund.

So that's a topic I want to flag.

I think this would be an appropriate reminder too at the front of our discussion that mostly for members of the public, I know board members are aware of this, but most of the things that we have been discussing today, all the things at this point we've been discussing today, our recommendations that have come from the Board of Parks and Recreations Commission, and to a certain extent, the Seattle Parks and Recreations Department.

So what we're discussing now are just some issue areas that have been identified.

This is not necessarily the park district spending plan.

But I just think that's important context as we dive into the bigger discussion.

So I have a few more questions but I would like to make space to board members and I see the council member or a board member Strauss has his hand up, so I'm going to hold a few of mine and let other board members ask about areas of interest so board member Strauss.

Right now, in the proposed plan that's being created there's only $10 million worth of general fund.

Revenue being used for the general fund is that the correct understanding, or is it going to be more than $10 million over those two years.

To be clear, I think the $10 million.

could be in part backfill for the general fund, but it also could be backfill for REIT and or the fees that parks generates to support itself.

So, but the top amount that we've heard mentioned by the executive is $10 million council member.

Very helpful.

Thank you so much.

Great work.

Okay, Tracy, I think I'll jump back in and oh, council member or board member Nelson followed by board member Peterson.

So board member Nelson.

Thank you.

I was going through materials trying to find out what the total spending was anticipated to be in the first cycle.

But what's driving that question is that we've got $58 million worth of carryover projects in this in this proposal.

And so I'm wondering what percentage of the total is $58 million?

Because the question that I get is, well, what did they do with all the money in the first cycle?

So I'm just trying to get an understanding of things that were proposed that were not completed in the original that this $58 million represents.

And is that a a trend that we can perhaps anticipate will happen in this cycle as well.

So the $58 million, if we were to assume that the whole $108 million was accepted, would be about 53% of the total funding that would be considered, presuming that you kept at the $108 million level, the total.

In terms of the things that were not done in cycle one, those primarily were the six land bank sites for which funding had to be redistributed because of the pandemic.

I believe in the report that the Department of Parks did for the Public Assets Committee that on the cycle one report, I think otherwise they had achieved all of the other outcomes that they had expected to achieve with those cycle one investments.

So it was those things that had to be paused because of the pandemic.

And I think we all hope that we will not face another similar situation in the future.

Yeah.

I might just add, excuse me, I'm sorry, council member, that the $58 million this year and then a similar amount continuing in the proposal covers ongoing costs, as you know, so I just wanted to sort of sits that in.

There are, as Tracy just covered, some projects that didn't get completed, but there are ongoing costs that continue that the Park District does help to maintain.

So, thank you.

Thanks, Eric.

Yeah.

Did you have a follow-up, Board Member Nelson?

No.

Okay.

Board Member Peterson.

Thank you.

Thank you for this presentation this morning, which includes some of the slides we saw previously.

Just for context, it's my understanding that to pay for all of the things on this slide too would require doubling of the property tax portion for the parks district that people currently pay, doubling the property tax.

And so I'm concerned about that.

especially for people on fixed incomes, uh, especially the fact that this landlords can pass these costs on to renters, uh, if the market will bear it.

And, um, These, I appreciate, um, customer Lewis, uh, raising questions about the $10 million, uh, that would be, uh, supplementing fund.

Um, I'm not.

inclined to support that.

I do want to support the existing projects, several of the pre-commitment projects.

I'm glad to see that you are proposing debt financing to leverage those needs such as in Green Lake, Lake City and elsewhere.

I did have a question about the Mercer Community Center.

Wanted to better understand.

So that is part of the Mercer Mercer mega block real estate deal and was it always anticipated that that property taxpayers throughout the city would be picking up the tab for the tenant improvements for the Mercer Community Center, so that was not part of the public benefit.

I think the public benefit specific to, uh, parks and rec was the, the space being created in that building.

And then the city being on the hook for, um, the cost of the improvements to, to basically outfit that community center and then the operating and maintenance costs.

Okay.

All right.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Yep.

Board member Mosqueda.

Thank you, Mr. President, and thanks to the central staff for walking us through this.

I do actually have a few questions, but Council Member Peterson's last question got me thinking, you know, sometimes we hear doubling of the property tax on a certain line, but then want to put it into context.

So if this was actually a doubling of the property tax, how much on average would that be for your average household in Seattle?

Can you remind me?

For example?

Yeah, the NPD amount would go from about $155 to about $307.

OK.

And go ahead, Tracy.

On an annual basis.

Thank you.

OK.

And then in a climate where more of us are recognizing that parks are the backyards to our communities and that density coupled with parks, I think go hand in hand, I just want really underscore the importance of sort of that cost benefit analysis, right?

We're going to be talking a lot more in Council Member Strauss's committee about the comprehensive plan.

We're talking obviously in my committee a lot about housing density.

And I just don't want to decouple the importance of that type of investment with what we're trying to do in the city, which is create more walkable, livable neighborhoods and making sure that people have access to parks is really important.

So this is something that I think both renters and homeowners benefit from.

And I think that I just wanted to sort of explain why I think that that context is helpful.

Can we go back to slide 12, Tracy?

So I'm interested in understanding a little bit more about the total investments here in personnel.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the use of hiring bonuses, lateral transfer bonuses, proposals for certain departments to be able to have sort of a special treatment in that regard.

When we don't have kiddos being able to have the protection of lifeguards, true lifesavers in that regard, what is the overall investment that we're making in personnel here?

And is there any lateral transfer dollar amounts that we're being asked to consider at this juncture related to recruiting other personnel from other jurisdictions?

And is there a hiring bonus included for our parks personnel in the proposal, at least to date?

Council Member, is this related to the aquatic staffing issue specifically?

Just generally, we've all, I think, put into our news alerts, thanks to the good chair, the reminder that parks is in need of personnel.

So we put a lot of information in about the opportunity to apply for parks job.

I think specifically there's a lot of concern around the lack of lifeguards and how many aquatic opportunities have been shut down because of the lack of lifeguards.

But just more generally, Tracy, if we have any details today.

I don't, but we can certainly ask.

We have a number of questions about more details about a number of these investment proposals that we are in discussion with the executive about getting answers to.

But we will answer this question specifically.

To my knowledge, I don't believe there's any hiring bonuses included in any of these proposals, but we will make sure about that, that there isn't something in there that we don't know about.

And then the idea of providing lateral, explain to me a little bit about the lateral transfers, what you're thinking is about that.

Well, I think it's building off of the executive's initial proposal for lateral transfer recruits from other police departments.

So I'm wondering if the same methodology is trying to be applied to other departments where we see serious deficits in the number of people who are available to serve the public, and especially when it relates to life-saving personnel.

Just be interested to hear if there's any thought around that.

I'm guessing not as well, Tracy, but just thought I'd inquire.

And then, oh, excuse me, slide number 15, if I might, Mr. Chair, and then I'll stop.

Responding to climate change here, this is obviously something that we are really excited is being highlighted explicitly in the proposal here.

And I want to thank the central staff and the council members who have been prioritizing, making sure that our public facilities have access to additional revenues so that we can upgrade our HVAC system, our electric heat pumps, installation of solar microgrids just last year.

I believe it was Council Member Peterson who really was prioritizing the cooling centers, expanding two of our libraries to be used as cooling centers.

But some of those projects are currently on hold.

So as we look at global warming broadly, and as we look at who's been impacted by climate change, being disproportionately BIPOC communities, can you talk a little bit more about how these investments are at this point looking to prioritize communities of color, folks who are disproportionately being affected by heat waves, pollution, displacement, and other environmental injustice issues.

And if we're not to the level of identifying certain neighborhoods yet, is that part of the proposal as we get into more details?

I'll say just very quickly that part of the ranking that the BPRC provided was a recent social justice ranking for each of these proposals.

And I can follow up with more details about that.

But that was a part of each of the categories that they looked at.

And I think that the notion of cooling centers and all sorts of things probably falls probably mostly into that climate conscious buildings option or the first one in terms of making those buildings both climate conscious in terms of how they use energy, but also provide for heating and cooling, that sort of thing.

So I can follow up some more details about that and going forward to understand very clearly that you're keen in understanding where those dollars would go and how that would be programmed.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

Oops, sorry, go ahead.

Oh, I was, thank you for answering that.

And I see, that there was an actual hand being raised, but I do have a follow-up question afterwards, Mr. Chair.

And I think that, Eric, thanks for that follow-up.

I think specifically we'd be interested in the geographic analysis about where sites should be prioritized if we haven't done that and working that in.

Board member Nelson.

Yeah, just following up on what Eric just said, climate-conscious buildings, that's $2 million, it looks like, but no FTEs.

So would that be a study?

Excuse me, no, the 2 million dollars would add on so that in general, generally speaking, so that work that's done on buildings could advance and go deeper into making them greener.

So it would actually be dollars spent on changes and improvements to buildings.

Got it.

Thanks.

Council Member Muscata, just so you know, Parks has, as Eric said, they have applied a equity lens to almost all of the investments that they considered for proposals.

And I think they have mentioned High Point and Van Asselt as two potential candidate projects to be first considered for a climate conscious building activity in specific.

So, yeah.

So before we get off this topic, I actually have some follow-up questions on this slide, because it seems like, especially in the exchange you just had with board member Nelson, Tracy, or actually, sorry, I think that was Eric, that these are essentially capital improvements to these structures.

So my question would be, is it envisioned to use any debt financing to expand the scale and the scope of these improvements?

are the improvements that are being recommended expected to have 20 to 30 year life expectancies to be candidates for bonding?

Because it just seems like 2 million in and of itself isn't going to significantly change a lot of our community centers.

But if it was bonded, I would imagine it could have a considerable impact.

The short answer is yes, full stop.

Tracy and I have already started to take a look at the kinds of things that are in the recommendations that we have now, and consulted with some of our colleagues and some folks, and taken a look at previous bond measures just to kind of get calibrated.

But as you mentioned, projects in general that have a 20-year lifespan are good candidates for bonding, for using debt financing to pay for.

you know, just for folks tuning in.

The notion being that if you're going to be paying off an investment over 20 years, that investment should still be alive and kicking when you finish paying off that debt.

So that's the notion, as you know, but just to kind of add some context to the conversation.

So we'll take a look at that and hopefully have, not hopefully, we will have more specific information about bondable investments.

Tracy, you want to add anything to that?

Just a couple more points.

One, we are also very well aware, and I believe you all are very well aware, that the Green New Deal Oversight Committee just issued its recommendations for funding, and that this is an area that they have prioritized, is creating climate-conscious buildings that would include parks buildings, but it also could include libraries.

My understanding is that the Seattle School District has also included funding in its recent lawn measure for making climate-friendly school buildings.

I think there might be some additional planning that might be helpful for us in terms of coordinating where those investments might happen and how many community centers and how many libraries and how many of these other facilities that meet the need for us to have these types of buildings.

Not that we don't want all of our buildings to be climate friendly, but in terms of where you might prioritize initial dollars.

So I think there's more work here to be done.

And I believe that the executive is doing some of this work as well in the conversations we've had with them.

Great.

Thank you so much.

I'm really looking forward to that.

This is a really big opportunity, but I think really only unlocked with a robust and creative financing plan, given the cost.

So really looking forward.

And this was a big area of interest during our public hearing that we held last week, too.

OK, I have a few more questions I want to jump into, and then I'll pivot back to board members.

Bathrooms.

sort of similar to the conversation we just had regarding improving community centers.

I think that we can safely say that bathrooms in our parks and open spaces, particularly during the pandemic, have not been consistently or reliably open or maintained at a time when, to a big extent, they've been needed most.

And one of the metrics I would really like to see come out of this process is that people can materially count on bathrooms in our parks and open spaces being clean, safe and open on a reliable basis.

And my questions about this category are whether these investments are anticipated to get us there.

Like I'd like to know the metrics of what an additional $794,300 gets, is that a sufficient investment for park bathrooms to be clean, safe, and open?

Or is that an investment just to make them marginally more clean, safe, and open than they currently are?

And I really wanna make sure that we are funding a plan where Seattle Parks and Open Spaces develop a reputation for having dependable and reliable comfort stations, which has certainly not been the case and has really impacted a lot of communities' ability to make full use of our parks and open spaces.

So for these three categories, maybe Tracy or Eric, if you want to jump into that, this is a place where I'd really like to drill down with the department on programmatically what these investments will do and what level the investments need to be to make those guarantees on bathroom access.

And Council Member, we have some more questions as you do about what it is that this funding will actually buy us in terms of open comfort stations, year round comfort stations, clean stations.

So we are following up with the executive on those very questions, very good ones, very appropriate.

And I've also signaled that this is an area of particular interest by council members And we'll also do so as it relates to perhaps more specific metrics that can help us get to the public being able to have a sense of, are we meeting the goal?

Thank you so much.

Similarly, I don't remember which slide it was on, but the graffiti abatement slide and the 600 or so thousand dollars for vandalism and graffiti abatement.

Similarly, I would like some guidance from the department in terms of programmatically what that number does, is that sufficient to abate all the anticipated graffiti or just to marginally do more of it than we currently do?

Just sort of to put a finer point for fellow board members and for the public, I just think foundationally, a lot of the investments that are in this renewal are focused on what we want to see in terms of our parks and open spaces being safe, clean, and open.

But I want to make sure that going forward, we are making the investment that is sufficient to realize those goals instead of essentially getting halfway there and having the public not be able to see a material difference in the parks and open spaces.

So for this category as well, that vandalism response, a little bit more context on exactly what that investment gets us.

in terms of the material improvement people will see.

With that, I, I don't, well, actually I'll go into one area council member or board member Mosqueda kicked off to based on our hearing two weeks ago regarding lifeguards and aquatic safety.

One thing I flagged as an area of potential interest and I'd like to continue to work with the department on it is we currently do not pay prospective candidates throughout the certification process, which might be an incentive strategy that we could explore.

It takes about 35 hours of certification time to get a lifeguard credential, essentially.

And while we are able to, as my understanding, cover the fees and cover all the costs associated to applicants with that process, are not compensating them for the significant time obligations to complete the certifications, that might be a potential area of incentive that would be an appropriate area for the Metropolitan Park District to square the circle around our ongoing aquatic safety challenges that we're experiencing every season now.

And that indeed, as we discussed in the hearing the other day, other cities are experiencing Phoenix, Arizona has closed half of their swimming pools this season.

So it is something we are all facing as major cities.

And one discrete area that could potentially be attractive is paying people for that certification period.

But I did just want to flag that as a potential area of interest, given that conversation.

Board member Morales.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Eric and Tracy for this.

I first want to reiterate my or state my support for two things that Councilmember Mosqueda was mentioning.

One is this issue of water safety as somebody with a lot of waterfront area in my district, and one of the beaches that is not listed to have a lifeguard for the summer.

I do think it's really important that we, we answer this question and we we figure out how we make sure that young people have a lifeguard at their beaches.

And so if it means figuring out how to pay them a wage, in addition to paying for their certification process I think that's important.

And then also the issue around making, connecting the dots between our increased density that we know is coming, our need for healthy walkable neighborhoods and the connection to the need for increased green space, particularly in the South end where we don't have enough tree canopy, we don't have enough parks, I think is gonna be really important.

One of the sort of higher level question that I have is, the concern about dramatically increasing the levy requests while we are experiencing and hearing a lot of challenges from our community right now about maintenance issues, lack of bathrooms, our bathroom access.

And as I'm looking at the proposed continued funding, I'm thinking particularly about preventive maintenance and maintaining land bank sites.

In one of the bi-weekly meetings I have with folks in Little Saigon, for example, there is a parks-owned parking lot or space near the 12th and Jackson intersection that neighbors have repeatedly asked questions about, repeatedly asked for support from the department in maintaining.

And I'm just trying to understand the connection between what we're able to do now as it relates to the maintenance of our existing parks and how we will use additional funding to really take care of some of those baseline things before we start making new and additional investments.

Any response from Eric or Tracy to those points from board member Morales?

Just for clarification, is the space that you're referring to in Little Saigon, is it a parking lot, Council Member, or is it a park?

It's a park land, but it is adjacent to a parking lot, and there's sort of some, you know, cleaning issues, maintenance issues that the community has been asking the Parks Department about for some time.

Okay, maybe I can get a little bit more information about the specific address and then I can follow up on that.

Thank you.

Any other board member questions.

Okay, Councilmember board member mosquito.

Thank you for chair, President, Mr President.

Actually, the follow-up question that I had, my last question was about the hygiene centers.

So you clearly and succinctly articulated my concerns around that as well.

I just wondered if we have the data to show what the total amount would be.

If every closed bathroom were to open and if every bathroom that needed maintenance and upgrades was included in the list, what would that total be compared to the amount that we currently have as a proposal?

I know that this is a shared area of interest with the executive.

I appreciate that the senior deputy mayor has also continued to bring up the need to open up more bathrooms.

So I'm hoping to get a better sense of what percentage of bathrooms we are actually talking about opening here with the amount that's being invested.

And how frequently, like do we have a update in real time?

Is there any technology or oversight that the parks department needs to be able to report situations so that they can quickly be addressed.

I think I mentioned before, you know, out here at North Delridge, where we have three to four play fields, a playground, a kiddie pool, a wading pool, a skate park and an open play field, as well as tennis court and pickleball area.

There was two bathrooms and there was sign most recently on it said closed due to closed due to vandalism?

Well, if it's closed due to vandalism, then how fast are we working to try to open it?

And what does the parks department need in addition to staff to make sure that they can open those quickly?

So it's both what is closed now and what would we need to be able to maintain all our parks open and have a real-time response when there are situations that need to be addressed.

We can put those questions to the executive.

And in part what we've already asked about in terms of what does the proposed funding get us in terms of opened restrooms year-round, partial year, and then frequency of cleanings and so forth.

And board member Mosqueda, before we move on to board member Nelson, I'll just say briefly too, I am very interested in conversations that we will almost certainly have as a board throughout the rest of the summer.

about how to attach some of our investments to ongoing performance metrics and monitoring strategies in order to really hone in on exactly these kinds of questions.

Just to editorialize for a moment, I was a little frustrated to read as part of a Seattle Times editorial a few weeks ago the parks department, at least in response to those inquiries, didn't immediately have a detailed answer on how much is invested in maintaining bathrooms.

Or I think the quote was something like, we don't track investments at that level of specificity or something to that effect.

And I really wanna make sure that we use the Metropolitan Park District, not just as a vehicle to make investments, but that they're really, you know, metrics driven investments where we know that there'll be tangible programmatic guarantees of access to things like bathrooms and that we're making an investment that is fitted to the service we want and at that level that is anticipated to make it happen.

But anyway, moving on to board member Nelson

Well, I agree with you, President Lewis, the and also Vice President Mosqueda.

The very fact that we're even talking about bathrooms that are not open signals a problem.

I mean, parks are a basic service and we need to be able to use the assets that we already have.

And with population having increased since the first cycle, making sure that we can actually accommodate existing and growing Seattle population in our parks is extremely important and I raised my hand before you mentioned the, the, the Times editorial but it is important for us to be able to ensure that we are taking care, not just Caroline Crouse, DRCOG): Improving these facilities, but keeping them clean and safe as you've already said, and so what i'm wondering, I do have a question here.

Caroline Crouse, DRCOG): Does the parks department have a an overall budget that indicates whether or not where the maintenance dollars come from if that's from.

primarily general fund or levy or otherwise because if it's, if it's siloed in a pot of money, it's difficult to see overall what is, how are we, how well are we taking care of our parks as they exist right now.

So I, and when we're going to do something new like auto locking of bathrooms, which I think is a good idea, but however, auto locking does require one new FTE to ensure that the auto locks are managed, which seems to undermine the idea of auto.

But anyway, I think this is a very important point and that is, these are the issues that I will be looking at going forward as we are looking at the proposals.

Thanks.

But there was a question in there for our central staff.

I'm assuming that you're on this and that you are trying to identify the overall maintenance budget for parks and where that comes from and what these new investments may add to that to make sure that everybody can use our parks.

Yes, we are.

And just to respond to the one question that we can't answer, which is, it is a mix of revenue sources that support the maintenance of the bathrooms and the parks.

It's not just MPD, which is the case with virtually all of the existing initiatives, as well as the proposed initiatives is that they are supported in part by multiple fund sources from general fund to parks fees from recreation department, as well as the MPD.

And overall for the past funding cycle and the year that we're in now, the NPD funding is about 20%, 19 or 20% of the total budget.

And that being the case, it's also the metrics that council members are interested in and that the parks department is looking to deploy kind of an ongoing way to measure how the dollars are spent.

And even if those dollars are mixed, it's still good to know, right?

And in some cases, NPD dollars may be a larger proportion of the funding that's going to a particular service, right?

The 20% is an overall number, but we may find in digging in that NPD is a significant supporter of a particular kind of initiative for parks.

So that level of detail probably matters to the park district here sitting on this as the NPD, but I'm guessing that it also matters to you all as council members as you look at the parks budget overall.

That's just kind of my stitching in a little color commentary to that.

idea metrics, yeah.

And one thing that Tracy just said is it reminded me that our parks, our community centers, especially, are not simply generators of costs.

They are also assets.

And when we think about asset management, there is a possibility, I think, of recovering some some of the outlay in funds through feats.

And so this is a slightly different topic, but there should be, I don't know if there's ever been an asset management study done before on our parks, but we do have community centers that could meet a greater community need if they were open longer or had different kinds of programming, et cetera.

And some of those costs could be recouped by fees.

We'll take that offline.

Yeah, I do appreciate those lines of inquiry and and just for the for board members.

The memo distributed by central staff in advance of this meeting includes a helpful chart that outlines all of the different fund sources that connect into the parks department.

So, That can be another point of reference following this conversation.

Are there any other board member questions?

Okay.

I don't see any additional questions.

This was a good initial discussion about the entire sweep of things.

And I think we've identified as a board several areas of interest.

I'm glad that there's also this conversation around, that I've sort of day lit for the first time with board members, but it sounds like there's a lot of shared interest about the kind of accountability metrics and measures that would be attached to these investments, which is something we haven't really talked about yet, but I know that I've expressed significant interest to central staff in developing.

So we might count on charting out a little bit of time to discuss that as a board, in the coming weeks.

And I'll work with central staff on how we might do that.

In addition to the work of identifying investments and what we want to put Metropolitan Park District investments toward.

So the next meeting is gonna be on the 25th, which is going to similarly be an exercise in council members identifying areas of interest And I don't know if central staff wants to foreshadow that meeting a little bit before we sign off.

So, yeah, Tracy's nodding so I'll hand it over.

Thank you.

And then we can we can end the meeting.

That's great.

So as you indicated, we are hoping next Monday would be a specific conversation about council members options that they want to have considered for inclusion in the next six year spending plan, which could be entirely new options that we have not yet seen from the various proposals that we've just gone through, could be modifying some of those proposals, either up or down.

but really want to hear from you and begin that public conversation of the things that you want to be considered for the next six year spending plan that will inform not only the district board's ultimate decisions about this but also the mayor who is of course in the process of himself putting together a proposed spending plan so good for him to potentially hear some of those items of issue of interest in particular from the council members just like today I think was a very helpful to highlight those areas that have a particular interest and concern by the council.

So central staff sent out an email on Friday asking if council members could in fact forward to us via email by tomorrow, Tuesday, close of business, those options that they would like to tee up for further conversation next Monday, that would be really helpful if we could get those items from the council members by close of business tomorrow, and then we can help prepare a presentation that will help facilitate that important conversation among district board members.

Excellent.

Thank you so much.

Any final comments from board members.

Given those next steps.

Seeing none.

I'm going to go ahead and adjourn the meeting, the Metropolitan Park District Board meeting of July 18 2022 is hereby adjourned at 1043am.

Thank you so much.

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