Governance, Accountability and Economic Development Committee 8/14/2025

Good afternoon, everyone.

It's Thursday, August 14th, and the Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development Committee will come to order.

It is 2.04 p.m.

I'm Sarah Nelson, chair of the committee.

This is the last committee before we head into the August recess.

All right, will the clerk please call the roll?

Oh, and I want to note that Council Member Rivera is excused.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Solomon?

Here.

Council Member Hollingsworth?

Present.

Council Member Kettle?

Here.

Chair Nelson?

Present.

For present.

All right, if there's no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Okay, now we'll go into our public comment period.

Why don't you go ahead and read the instructions, or first tell me how many people are signed up, please.

Chair, we have five in-person and two remote public commenters.

All right, let's start with the in-person, and everyone can have two minutes.

I'll call on speakers in the order they sign up to speak, starting with the in-person commenter.

Speakers will have two minutes.

When you hear the chime, you will have 10 seconds left.

If you exceed that time, your microphone may be cut off so that we can move on to the next speaker.

First, we'll have Bobby Nickel.

Please come up.

Good afternoon, council members.

On behalf of Visit Seattle, I just want to take a moment to thank everyone who's working on the crime and violence audit that you're discussing today and for your holistic approach to public safety in our city.

The visitor experience depends on it, and therefore, the benefit to all Seattleites.

The housing and mental health programming covered by visitor taxes are critical to long-term solutions to public safety issues.

This is an ecosystem.

And the work you're doing on this audit shows accountability and follow through to our whole community.

We appreciate your thoughtfulness around initiatives like the multi-pronged downtown activation team, which we see regularly at work on Third Avenue, and around the implementation of place-based strategies like FUDEP and Little Saigon, one of many vibrant neighborhoods in Seattle with so much going on where we are working to send more visitors.

We just can't do it without your help.

Looking ahead, we welcome Council's continued focus on implementing the audit's recommendations, leveraging state and federal resources, addressing areas where both violent and property crime are concentrated, and expanding behavioral health response models like the care team.

There are practical, evidence-based steps that will further ensure Seattle remains welcoming and safe for visitors and residents alike.

Visit Seattle stands ready to support this work, and we also want to note support for the proposal OED and the West Seattle Junction Association BIA are presenting today.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Next, we'll have Jennifer Lemaster.

Following that, we'll have Derek Forer.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for the opportunity.

My name is Jen LeMaster.

I represent the Seattle Convention Center, and I do want to thank the city and the council for their continued commitment to crime and safety downtown.

However, I do want to bring to the attention of the council two criminal incidents that we are dealt with just this past week, and if you would allow me with my time, I'm going to read to you from my security officer's report.

on August 11th, 2025 at 1140 AM.

Transients were hanging around loitering, getting ready to smoke drugs on the lower part of Hubble Step, and I approached them to let them know that they needed to vacate the property.

They immediately started to pack up and then started asking me about questions about the property boundaries, and after I explained the rules to them, they started to leave, but not before one of the guys in the group started yelling foul language at me and then showed brandished knives on their waistband.

I waited a few seconds to see if they would try to make their way back and then one of the men started digging into his backpack and pulled out what appeared to be a black gun and a holster.

I proceeded to call 911 for assistance.

911 never arrived.

So while we appreciate the work that's been done, we do want to continue to reinforce that our environment is fragile and our convention campus is critically important to the overall success of the city and the services that we're able to provide those who need help.

So thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Next, we'll have Derek.

Following that, we'll have Alex Dermenman.

Come on down.

Good afternoon.

And first off, let me say by saying thank you for having this and open discussion on this.

My name is Derek Farrar.

I'm the Director of Public Safety and Security for the Seattle Convention Center.

I have over 15 years security experience.

I'm a certified protection professional at the RACIS International, and I have done everything from organized retail crime investigations to public safety.

I would like to share with you the daily experiences our staff continue to have around our center.

We have a large attraction for tourists and different events, and our team is consistently approaching individuals around our building, particularly on the exteriors who are consistently doing drugs or are suffering from mental health issues.

We do make phone calls to have them addressed, and typical responses, nobody shows up, and our team is the one mitigating and de-escalating those situations instead.

Our officers have been placed in danger from assaults to weapons being pulled on them simply for asking people to wake up and not block our fire exits and such.

And sometimes law enforcement feels reluctant to be able to act based off of their policies and rules and enforcement.

So as we continue to work through issues, and I know that the city is trying to make efforts towards them, a lot of the focus is further down on third, and we do need some further attention up in our campus as well.

That's all I wanted to share with you today, and thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Next, we'll have Alex Zimmerman.

And the last in-person public commenter will be Chad Alibay.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Hi.

My name, Alex Zimmerman.

And I want to speak about agenda number one, about crime.

Yeah.

I'm a criminal.

You prosecute me five times.

I'm probably a professional criminal.

But problem, as I come and talk to you right now, is one problem that I see.

Fish always thinking from head.

And you guys, you're criminal for many years.

You give me 18 trespass, what is absolutely not legal, violate US Supreme Court decision totally.

You know what is meant?

For 1,500 days.

Five years, I don't come and cannot speak this because you're acting like a criminal.

It's exactly who you are.

In another point, what is absolutely show, so you are real criminal.

You move, for example, or this happen, you know what this mean?

So more from district five, go out, very nice professional, a judge, and very intellectual, and you replace with somebody who's a pure criminal, you know what this mean?

This is exactly what has happened.

They're not only criminal, she's mentally sick, she cannot be here, you know, by definition, by law.

So situation very simple right now.

Who are you when you are criminal for many years, acting like a bandita?

Shoplifting?

Maybe felony?

I don't know what this means.

So how you can talk to people who crime go up?

They're doing exactly what is you.

Tell them doing what they see from you.

Crime always come when government totally criminalists, and you are a criminal.

You're professional criminal, you're supposed to be all in jail.

Viva Trump, we have a new American Revolution.

He will send you in jail, believe me.

All right, the last in-person public commenter will be Chad Alabe.

And my apologies if I mispronounce your first or last name.

Thank you.

In point of order, Council President, Mr. Zimmerman continues to attack racially charged comments towards our colleague, District 5 Councilmember, so I just wanted to say that for the record.

Thank you.

The note that is considered abusive language and that does violate Good afternoon.

Hold on a second.

Thank you for having me.

It does violate, just for your information, Mr. Zimmerman, Council Rule 11-D-1, abusive language.

Let's go ahead.

Go ahead, please.

Hi.

Good afternoon.

My name is Chad Albee.

I work for the Seattle Convention Center.

I'm a security guard, one of the frontline security guards.

Every day, we deal with the homelessness and the mental health down at the Convention Center.

We have, I think, from Third Avenue, going up to the Convention Center is just more of an extension.

I know the target is Third Avenue, but it carries up to the Convention Center.

Besides the Convention Center, we have tourists.

We have cruise ship.

people that are here visiting Seattle, our own personal conventions that are happening.

We have the double-decker site tours that go down by the Convention Center.

We have a physical bus that transports from Seattle to Vancouver, Washington.

So we have many, many visitors from Seattle, or excuse me, from other places that are here at Seattle and at specifically the Convention Center.

with us specifically dealing with all the mental health and homelessness.

When we feel that we have emergencies and we need to call 911, we feel that we don't have that backing or having that help.

because we feel it's an emergency, so we call.

And when we don't have that backing from the police department, we feel just, what are we doing?

What's going on here?

So those are the things that myself, the team, deal with every single day.

I work an eight-hour shift, and 90% of that is dealing with the homeless and the mental health.

So that's just all I have to say on that.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you, that concludes in-person public commenters.

Council President, both remote public commenters are not present.

Let's see.

When was the last time did they ever log in as present?

OK, without those commenters present, we'll just go ahead and say that we have reached the end of our list of speakers that are actually present, so that public comment period is now closed.

And before going on, I do want to just respond a bit to the public comment, because I hear you, and it is One can say that we've reversed the trend of losing more officers than we can hire.

That is a positive result.

But it's still the fact that officers are responding to behavioral health issues that they are not well equipped to deal with.

I recognize that personally.

That's partly why I've been so focused on expanding treatment for addiction and for our drug crisis in general.

But I hear the comments that are being made that more needs to be done when it comes to supporting our frontline workers all over town, but also at the convention center, because so many people come through there.

And that's the window, the first glimpse that a lot of people have of Seattle.

So thank you.

All right, seeing that there aren't any other public commenters, we've closed the public comment.

Would you please read item one into the record?

Agenda item number one, gun violence, overdoses and crime and organized retail crime audit recommendations follow up for briefing and discussion.

Okay, our presenters can come on up to the table.

All of them can come up and then first what we were going to do is have the, I will introduce what's happening here.

What's going on is this is a follow up to the auditor's presentation in our July 10th meeting.

where they went over all of the recommendations of previous, well, they didn't go through the individual recommendations, but they did present a high-level view of the audits that have been conducted and the number of recommendations that have been implemented and not implemented.

And today we're going to drill down into three of those audits that are public safety related.

So before going forward, I'll just say that obviously public safety is the core duty of local government.

But backing up, I'll say that council passes the laws, including the budget, and the executive is supposed to implement.

And then it is also council's job to as the oversight body to make sure that the money that we allocate is being well spent and that the programs that we are funding are producing the intended results.

And it's the auditor that is our partner in that work because they are the legislative branches accountability, I would say watchdog, but partner and so, they produce these audits that not only look at what's not happening, they also suggest things that should happen.

These audit reports offer a roadmap to improving city government.

And so I'm really proud to have you, not proud, I'm grateful to have you here today.

And so We'll be going into three of those audits that you produced recently.

Two of them were presented in my committee, most recently the one on gun violence, four recommendations for what the city should be doing to reduce gun violence.

That's particularly timely.

I have to note the good news is that compared to last year, we've had 26 homicides compared to 36 of last year.

However, that's 26 too many.

And so one of the audits that we'll be looking at is looking into the extent to which those recommendations have begun to be implemented.

And the other two audits that we'll be looking at, one is the audit that was produced in 2024 and presented in the GADE committee, which looks at the concentrations of overlaps of crime and overdoses.

I think that can take credit for basically introducing a new phrase into our local lexicon, which is place-based policing.

And then the other audit is the one on tackling organized retail crime.

And so that was produced in 2023. So really looking forward to this discussion today.

Why don't you all introduce yourselves and then you can proceed with your with your presentation.

Then we'll have some council member questions of that before proceeding to the executive's presentation.

David Jones, City Auditor.

I'm Claudia Gross-Shader.

I'm the Director of Research and Evaluation at the Office of City Auditor.

Andrew Meyerberg from the Mayor's Office.

Sarah Smith, Mayor's Office.

Sean Barnes, Chief of Police.

Hi, John Ehrenfeld, Seattle Fire, Mobile Integrated Health.

Harold Scoggins, Fire Chief.

Tonya Kim, Director of the Seattle Human Services Department.

Ann Gorman, Senior Policy Advisor, Human Services Department.

Leandra Craft, Mayor's Office.

Lee Hunt, Seattle Police Department, Executive Director, Crime and Community Harm Reduction.

And Brian Maxey, Chief Operating Officer, Seattle Police Department.

Thank you.

Welcome.

Thank you, Council President Nelson, and thank you, council members.

For members of the public, you can find all of our audit reports at www.seattle.gov slash city auditor slash reports.

I'm going to briefly recap our audit process.

And all of the recommendations that are pending are listed at the end of the slideshow that I believe Taemin is pulling up.

And as with all of our audits, we followed the U.S. government auditing standards so that you can be assured of the quality and independence of our work.

As part of our standard protocol, we incorporate feedback on our draft reports from the involved city departments and stakeholder organizations.

And I'll say that sometimes it can be a long process, but there are never any surprises for the executive in our final reports.

For all three of the audits, the executive concurred with all of our recommendations.

And that said, we know that our work, our audit findings, our recommendations, and our follow-up on those recommendations can be challenging for the executive.

So we really appreciate the executive's collaboration on these three audits and their acknowledgment of our shared goal of doing better for the people of Seattle.

The next slide, please.

In addition, for all three of these audits, we harnessed the collective power of additional agencies and stakeholders.

This included working with community partner organizations and other government agencies and getting free technical assistance from federal agencies and research organizations.

For our 2023 audit on organized retail crime, we sought to understand more about how the city could address the fencing operations that underpin organized retail crime.

And we worked with city departments, the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, the Washington Organized Retail Crime Association, and the Washington Retail Association.

And researchers from the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy and the Loss Prevention Research Council provided input on this report.

One of our recommendations was to use an evidence-based problem-solving model to address the places in Seattle where stolen goods were sold, places like 12th and Jackson.

And subsequent to our audit, our office provided hands-on technical assistance to the Friends of Little Saigon as they implemented that very evidence-based problem-solving model to address crime in Little Saigon.

Our office has been following the work in Little Saigon every step of the way.

Here's some photos that I took in July.

And this was the 100-day challenge celebration.

And Cindy Wong from the mayor's office is pictured here on the left with Quinn Pham from the Friends of Little Saigon.

Consistent with our audit recommendations, the mayor's office has been coordinating the action items in Little Saigon that involve city departments.

And I understand from talking with John from the fire department that the fire department will be having an overdose prevention pop-up event in Huamai Park, which is pictured there.

So we'll be hearing more about that in their presentation.

Next slide, please.

In 2024, our audit sought to learn more about the places in Seattle where overdoses and crimes are concentrated and how best to address those places.

Our audit was the first time that the city combined police data on crime with data on overdose responses from the fire department.

For this audit, we received free technical assistance from the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Researchers from the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy and Washington State University's College of Medicine provided input on our report.

For this audit, we wanted to test our audit findings by using a case study approach.

We selected a location in Seattle where overdoses and crimes are concentrated.

That was Third Avenue from Virginia to Blanchard.

We worked closely with the agencies in our case study site.

This included Plymouth Housing, YWCA, Harborview, and Evergreen Treatment Services.

Subsequent to this audit, we rolled up our sleeves and helped the executive write a grant application to implement the audit recommendations at this Belltown location.

It was not funded last year, but we helped the city reapply this year.

Next slide, please.

Our 2025 report offers four concrete things that the city could do to better understand and address the current gun violence patterns that we're experiencing in Seattle.

For this audit, we had free technical assistance from the Police Executive Research Forum.

We worked in collaboration with the King County Prosecuting Attorneys Crime Strategies Unit, and the Seattle Police Department's Performance Analytics and Research Group provided two custom reports for this audit.

Our recommendations for this audit require the city to get more organized.

More organized around data that can help us better understand and address gun violence.

And more organized around coordinating activities among city departments, other government entities, and community partners, using an all hands on deck approach to address gun violence.

We don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Our report offers examples from other jurisdictions that have led to declines in gun violence.

And we noted in the report where free technical assistance is available for Seattle.

In this case, there is free technical assistance provided through Bloomberg American Public Health and Johns Hopkins University.

This technical assistance could help the city set up a violence reduction council like the one pictured here.

It's an evidence-based structure to review violent crime incidents and apply the lessons learned in a systematic way.

So in summary, our recommendations were developed with input from subject matter experts, leading researchers, and community partner organizations.

We incorporated input from city departments and the mayor's office on all of our reports.

and our office has continued to work actively to follow up on all of our recommendations.

We all have a common goal of using strategies that are proven effective for addressing our current conditions in Seattle.

Everyone in Seattle, especially our most vulnerable residents, deserves strategies that are effective for preventing overdose, crime, and victimization.

Thank you.

Council President.

All right, thank you very much for that brief synopsis, and I'm sure some colleagues will want to get into specific recommendations.

I will open the floor to my vice chair and also anybody else who wants to ask a question or have any comment.

Thank you, Council President.

I do this in my committee, too.

I always go to my Vice Chair first, so I shouldn't be surprised when it happens to me in this committee since I'm the Vice Chair.

I want to thank the Office of the Auditor for being here, along with the Mayor's Office and the Police Department, represented by Chief Barnes and Chief Scoggins for Fire, and then Director Kim for HSD.

and then everyone else, so thank you, including our relatively new add-ons to the team.

Mr. Hunt, welcome to Seattle and to the police department.

Clearly, particularly in my role as Chief of Public Safety, as Chair of Public Safety Committee, I work these issues on a daily basis, literally a daily basis, and with input received in so many different ways, including my wife on her way into work this morning, giving me a call and saying, did you see this?

Did you know this?

So the input is far and wide.

With that background, I just wanted to go to a few points, a few questions.

And this is to the auditor's side now.

One is we really do need to do more related to organized retail crime.

And a lot of the things that I see here make sense.

In my interaction with businesses and the like, a lot of times businesses feel like they're hamstrung.

Corporate says this, legal says that.

And one of the things that we've been engaging on with OIR is Olympia.

And I notice in terms of engaging with Olympia, it's the issue of being vulnerable to lawsuits and the like if you take any action at all, and trying to indemnify these businesses.

Was that part of it?

Because I don't see that part in terms of the recommendations, in terms of how do we provide protections to businesses who are looking to take some sort of action, whether directly themselves.

And by the way, can I say, Thank God for private security.

I really appreciate all the work that they do from businesses far and wide across the city, but also places like the Convention Center.

As I've often said, we've done great work in terms of increasing the staffing of Seattle Police Department, but we're in this bridging moment right now because they haven't fully come online.

And so the private security that does a lot of great work is kind of needed as we kind of go from A to B.

So I just wanted to say thank you, sir, for being here and your comments.

But can you speak to that part?

Like, how do we protect businesses and organizations better?

And is there anything along those lines that you would speak to related to Olympia or anybody else?

Right.

I think that for this issue and for all three of the audits, everybody at this table would recognize that these are complex issues and they require a multi-pronged approach.

And you're absolutely right, Council Member Kettle, that one of those prongs to the approach is what can be done through legislation with state and federal partners.

And Recommendation 10 does speak to that.

The city should advocate for new state and federal legislation that could help address the organized retail crime investigations, et cetera.

So we did address that in our audit.

We worked really closely with the Washington Retail Association.

They can be a good partner for the city in in moving forward legislative actions.

So that's one thing that I would mention.

The other thing that I would mention is, yes, hearing the frustration from loss prevention and from the retailers that our hands are tied.

There's not much that can be done.

However, there are certain things that can be done.

Loss prevention for a lot of these organizations does an excellent job of documenting the repeat cases, the boosters that are not working for themselves.

These are the people who are engaged Stealing the goods at the stores are called generally boosters, and they will work for larger fencing operations.

And the whole focus of this report was how could we best dismantle those fencing operations, cutting off the head of the snake, as it were.

And the loss prevention staff for these retailers do an excellent job of talking to each other.

They have an organization called Organized Retail Crime Association.

The city participates in that.

What we could do from the city is a better job of helping to provide enough information to the King County prosecuting attorney to make sure that those cases stick.

Loss prevention will compile the videos and the evidence and turn it into police investigators, and then it needs to be brought to the prosecuting attorney.

And I understand that this is something the police department can talk about because there has been some work done.

The prosecuting attorney put together a checklist for investigators.

for what do they need for a successful prosecution?

Brian's nodding.

So we'll make a note to talk about that.

Subsequent to our audit, there has been some work done to make sure that the work of loss prevention is put to good use by investigators and prosecutors and that those cases stick.

So multi-pronged approach is the bottom line.

You speak, you raise a good point, and it's the technology point.

As you know, today's Thursday.

Two days ago, we passed out a committee, are updated for legislation for CCTV and RTCC.

And we're doing a lot of great work there with the ALPR, the Automatic License Plate Reader, the CCTV, and the Real-Time Crime Center.

And in working with these businesses to include those dealing not just organized retail crime, but those related to, as noted in the convention center, those individuals with addiction challenges or mental behavior health challenges is the use of those businesses and their cameras.

And I've spoken to West Precinct officers about this and I followed up.

I stopped at a business and the sergeant showed up the next day and then later I was really happy to see that a detective was working with this business to ensure that the cameras were working in the right place and everything was set up to pass the video because This kind of goes to a functional criminal justice system.

We need to ensure the King County prosecutor and our city attorney can do an effective job to address the situation.

So the technology piece that you raise is really important.

Just to shift, one of the challenges on the second audit where it's titled, where overdoses and crime are concentrated, kind of, I just kind of bridged it, actually, with my comment about their technology, is this is always shifting.

You know, how can we work the shifting piece?

Trust me, you know, it's interesting.

I can't speak for our city-wise.

I think they're pretty knowledgeable.

For those district representatives, District 2, 3, and 7, in this case, is incredible about how detailed we know the challenges in our district.

And it's shifting.

and particularly in downtown, Belltown, the downtown area and these different areas where things are shifting.

And sometimes they shift because of the soda law and the like.

And so the challenge as I read this is that, does it account for the shifting enough?

And can you speak to that at all?

Yes, I can.

That is really well documented in the research.

There are certain places in Seattle, in Cincinnati, in Chicago, in Tel Aviv, all over the world, certain small locations where crime is concentrated for long periods of time.

And over 30 years, a crime hotspot can continue to be a crime hotspot.

Council member Solomon is familiar with this from his work in his previous work in the police department.

And one thing is true about this.

When you begin to make a structural change at that place where crime is concentrated, there is what they call a diffusion of benefits.

and that means that the benefits can ripple out to the surrounding area.

And so that's something that we would hope to see as the city, as Council President Nelson says, the city is beginning to do more and more place-based problem solving to address these structural issues.

Why is one intersection, for example, like Third and Pike Pine, why has that been a hot spot for so long?

There are physical, structural, organizational, cultural issues that have contributed to that place being a place where crime has been concentrated for decades in Seattle.

And so it takes a lot of thorough problem-solving work to unpack all of that.

And we have offered in several of our reports a problem solving methodology called the Strategic Prevention Framework.

It is from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

We used this framework in five places where youth crime and victimization was concentrated in Rainier Beach through a series of federal grants starting in 2013 and saw declines in crime and improvements in perceptions of safety.

And that is the same problem-solving model that we used that actually the Friends of Little Saigon did an amazing job of using in Little Saigon with their project called FODEP.

I hope that's helpful.

Thank you.

I understand what you're saying.

I just want, Council President, just two basic comments, so not a question.

In terms of the overdoses and crime or concentrated audit report, one of the things I would say, well, three things.

One is, it's a question of harm and how we define it.

And part of that definition has to include the harm that happens to the collective, meaning the communities in the neighborhood, particularly because in today's Seattle, downtown is no longer the commercial core.

In fact, I would love to work with the mayor to strip the term commercial core from our lexicon, because downtown is a capital D downtown with a lot of residents now.

Belltown, lots of residents.

We have increased the residents.

And there is definite harm that is happening to our communities and our neighborhood, and that should be part of the calculus as we take action.

It's a changed dynamic from what it was five, ten years ago.

The second thing is, and I know because I'm getting a lot of emails right now, but we need to have a partnership between the city and the service providers.

I met with the assistant secretary for the state's DSHS related to their CSO, their community service office at Belltown Center in Belltown, Second Lenora, and talked about the issues.

I'm like, we need you to partner with us, the city, but particularly in this case, Belltown, because what you do can have an impact on the community.

And so I'm highlighting, hey, there's a drug dealer across the street.

I said his name.

It's incredible that I know these things and all these different factors.

And she understood.

I said, it's a challenge when you're handing out EBT's and then they're turned over 50 cents on the dollar to then buy their drugs.

What can you do to change the dynamic?

Not lump them, spread them out.

So many different things.

So we need to have the partnership to work with service providers.

I know there's like this reaction to say, no, trust me, my inbox is getting flooded right now on emails based on a slide response.

But we need to have the service providers say, hey, what's happening with our clients once they walk outside of our doors?

And how can we work collaboratively, collaboratively with the neighborhood organizations and the city pieces too?

I know that was just a comment, but they were hungry, the service providers were hungry for that in our case study site in your district.

They all worked in, this is, Plymouth Housing is right across the street from Harborview, for example, in the YWCA, and they've been working in that environment for a long period of time and experiencing the same problems, but they did not have a forum to share their experiences with each other.

And that is the real value that we can offer as a city, being the convener.

So thank you for that.

I 100% agree with you.

In a collaborative way.

Not a punitive way, collaborative way.

And just to close, and there may be some budget actions that we could take along these lines for the rest of the table.

And then the one last thing, because I know I've been taking too long, And the third area, just to understand, related to gun violence, I appreciate all these different pieces that are in this section, but part of this comprehensive approach is the legislation that we've been passing in this council, and we've been taking advantage.

So I want to thank Chief Barnes.

So we passed the After Hours Establishment Bill, and then we take action against where the two individuals were killed in gun violence.

We updated the Chronic Nuisance Property Bill, made it better.

gee, thank you for taking action shortly thereafter.

That's a little bit different, not gun violence related, but it could have been based on what we've been seeing on Aurora.

So we have to keep pressing these things.

And I'll just joke in that we have our strategic framework plan.

And I guess the word of the day is framework between the auditor's office and the mayor's office and the council.

But we have to work these frameworks in order to get answers to these challenges.

So thank you, City Auditor.

Thank you, Council President.

Thank you for your points.

Councilmember Salomon.

Thank you very much, Council President.

Thank you for providing this audit.

There's a couple of things that stood out for me as I was looking at this, and it actually relates to not so much the audit, but just my experience.

One being You're looking at the place-based stuff.

Why are certain locations magnets for activity, and why have they been that way for a long time?

I reflect back when 12th and Jackson was the problem.

It's now shifted to 12th and King, right?

12th and Jackson looks pretty good.

12 to the king, not so much.

So there is a concern that we're not solving the problem.

We're just moving the problem.

And I've always thought about when we look at the organized retail crime and why is stuff winding up there?

Why there of anywhere else?

and organized retail theft that occurred in Bellevue, why did this stuff wind up at 12th and Jackson to be stalled?

So again, it makes me think about why this place?

What is it about that location that makes it a magnet?

And I'm looking at the recommendations that you have in terms of organized retail theft.

I'm just wondering, have we really drilled down to why this piece of geography?

So that's just one question.

So that is something that the Friends of Little Saigon have done in partnership with community members, businesses in the area, city departments, county agencies.

And it's the first question that you ask is, what's the problem?

And what are the specific local conditions that are contributing to the problem?

And they have a phenomenal document that goes through that analysis that was done in collaboration with lots of stakeholders.

So there's not a single answer, but you can find their full set of what all those local conditions are in that report.

I'll make sure you get it.

OK, great.

Thank you.

And just two more points real quick.

One point actually piggybacks off something that Councilmember Kettle said, and that is around the area of EBT fraud.

What are we doing working with businesses in the area to squelch that?

Because I think that's also contributing to some of the activity that we're seeing in that neighborhood.

That is an area.

I know the police have been working on that.

That's an area that I think I'm going to defer to the police when they.

And if you can't say because of the operationally sensitive, I completely understand that.

But I also just want to point out that it is something that is known.

And hopefully we are doing something to address that.

So this was an opportunity to ask our auditors sort of why they focused on certain things, how they did their work.

Again, I say that they weren't just looking for problems, they were also looking for ways that we can improve our work and offer a pathway, a blueprint, a roadmap to doing things better because part of your job is to research what other municipalities and counties are doing.

I do have a couple of questions about two of your points in your presentation.

One, you touched on, so I'll just say right now, the meta issue or question is that the auditor's reports on organized retail crime, overdoses and crime, and gun violence, they all indicated that centralized city coordination with internal and external stakeholders would really go a long way, or better coordination.

It could be improved and perhaps as the executive is going through your presentation, you can address what are some of the barriers and what additional coordination you've done as a result of these audits coming out.

And there are three audits from 2023 to the present.

I want to touch on an issue that is very important that is not near and dear, but one of the recommendations that was very poignant to me is number seven, the recommendation in the overdose and crime audit.

And this recommended that the...

The auditor's report indicated, this is on page 22 and 23, indicated that there is a federal statute that allows for indictments and prosecutions for illegal drug distribution that results in fatal overdoses.

and that was one of your recommendations, and your audit said that SPD does not currently investigate fatal overdoses.

The special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration within this region is willing to partner with the city to pursue cases of drug distribution that lead to fatal overdoses.

Why?

It's not that those overdoses are any more important than any other overdose that happened in the city, It is a way of moving up the chain of the distribution networks that could have a much more broad impact and benefit.

So that is one of my top priority.

I told, I'll just be straight up that I told Chief Barnes that I wasn't going to make them, I wasn't going to say it this day is that I want you to do all of them, that I would indicate some of those that I think would have most impact because that drives that could drive improvement not just in public safety, but also chronic homelessness, as I noted earlier.

And then one other question I have before we go on to the executive's question is back to the whole coordination amongst departments and with outside stakeholders.

I assume that you have spoken with the mayor's office on what could be the barriers to that.

Is it difficulty sharing information that one department has that could be sensitive or violate the privacy of individuals?

Or what are some of the barriers to better coordination?

Because that seems like such a no-brainer, but it's always surprising, I think, from electeds and maybe the public that that coordination doesn't seem to be as robust as it could be.

I think the mayor's office is going to speak to this.

And from what I have observed, it is a function of building the muscle memory to do this.

And from what I have observed on the work in Little Saigon, the city is beginning to build the muscle memory.

The mayor's office has been coordinating the city department's activities in Little Saigon.

And our hope would be, based on all of our recommendations, that it's not a one-off in Little Saigon, that this becomes part of the city's muscle memory.

This becomes the way that the city does business, coordinating among the city agencies with the other government entities to solve our shared problems in a systematic way.

Right.

And as you said earlier and as I said, we don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Not at all.

We can take advantage of resources from our federal partners because they don't cost a lot of money and they're tested across the country.

So they are presented in a way that has already wrinkled out some of the defects of those practices.

OK.

Unless there are any other questions about this sort of overview, my understanding is that there were 121 recommendations just from the audits presented in 2024, so that excludes the gun violence audit, and 21 were implemented.

So this is an opportunity to speak to some of the barriers of implementing some of those so that we can also give each other, you know, some grace and figure out what is the best path forward for moving on these roadmaps for change.

So go ahead and begin your presentation.

Thank you, Council President.

I'm going to kick it off for the executive, then I'm going to turn it over to various folks on the team.

But first, I just want to say thank you to you, Council President, for having us here today.

These are, as we've discussed with you and with our other colleagues on the second floor and with the city auditor's office, these are incredibly important audits and ones that we've taken very seriously and that, frankly, have informed in large part our approach to public safety over the last couple of years.

So I just want to open up with that statement.

I also want to thank the rest of our colleagues, our council members here up on the dais, we don't say thank you enough.

So thank you all for what you do.

You know, obviously there is a relationship where you all need to hold us accountable, but we appreciate that and we need to do better.

And we thank you for having us here to talk about that.

So appreciate it.

I want to thank Claudia.

Claudia and I, I remember having a conversation with Claudia in 2022 when the opioid crisis was really hitting Seattle.

We were a couple years behind the East Coast and just trying to think about, you know, what can we do to work together where not a lot of people were talking about, especially fentanyl.

And Claudia and the auditor's office have been invaluable partners in this work.

Contingency management, other programs never would have happened without their support and without them driving it.

So, again, very appreciative of that work.

So just moving into the substance, as we all know, at a high level, we agree with virtually all of the recommendations and the findings in these audits.

And I say virtually, really, we agree with all of them.

I mean, the implementation is the tricky part, as we've discussed with folks here on the second floor.

And from our perspective, I think we are pleased to have implemented what we can implement now and to be in the process of implementing the remainder.

If you see, a lot of the recommendations are listed as pending, and that's because they are in progress.

We are working to build the systems that will allow us to report back to Claudia and her team and say, look, we've accomplished this, and now we can say, not mission accomplished, but on to the next step.

Before I turn it over to our team at the mayor's office and departments, I just want to provide a little bit of background and history because I think it's really important because I think sometimes we forget where we've come from in our impatience to keep getting the city better and to have a bias for action.

I just want to spend a couple minutes, if people will give me that grace.

So when the mayor came into office in 2022, we at the city were facing kind of five pretty substantial systemic issues.

The first was that the pandemic had, for all intents and purposes, cleared out downtown.

Office buildings did not have workers in them.

Storefronts were closing.

The community presence and vibrancy downtown and on our streets and our commercial cores read an all-time low.

Second, these change conditions were at least a major factor of increases in crime, increases in public drug use, encampments and parks in the right of way, and the feeling, whether right or wrong, the feeling, the really real feeling from community that Seattle was just simply less safe.

Third, at the same time, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, fentanyl began to surface in a major way in Seattle.

Prior to fentanyl, we had obviously still overdoses and still significant problems with drug use, but it was limited to methamphetamine and heroin.

As you all know, these are very different drugs from fentanyl.

Fentanyl is a game changer.

It is cheap, it is available, and it is lethal.

Small, small, small amounts can kill you.

But unfortunately, in 2022, we really had no city programs that were funded by us or, frankly, funded by the county that would address this crisis.

They just didn't exist.

Our programs were focused on hepatitis.

They were focused on needle exchange.

And we had to pivot in a pretty significant way.

Fourth, as you all know, and we've talked about this a lot, SPD experienced a significant, massive reduction in sworn officer staffing.

Staffing, when we were taking office, fell to the lowest level since 1991. And not having sufficient staffing is not, as Council Member Hollingsworth will tell us, it is not an excuse to not respond to calls.

It is not an excuse.

However, there is a massive burden on our officers to respond to these quality of life issues that we see every single day.

It's just the truth.

Fifth, while our city departments were doing a great job at responding to one-off incidents, if there is a surge that has to happen in Little Saigon, we can do it.

If we have to stand up a shelter, we can do that.

If we need to put a a store in a business in a storefront, we can do that.

However, where we really struggle, have historically struggled as a city, is the silos.

It's how do we bring everything together?

Because what we know, and this is what we've learned, and it's not rocket science, as you all know, is that to fix Third Avenue, it can't just be from public safety.

We have to hit it from public health.

We have to hit it from economic revitalization.

We have to hit it from long-term planning.

Like, where are we putting housing?

You know, where are we putting You know, how are we bringing businesses in?

It is an all departments, all city effort to improve public safety.

Over the last several years, and really with the major partnership of this council and the city auditor's office, we have worked hard to reverse these trends.

You know, as we've said today, through the downtown activation plan, we have made real inroads to revitalize our downtown and our commercial areas.

And I apologize, Councilmember Kettle, for referring to downtown.

But downtown is important.

It is our engine, just like Belltown is, just like Pioneer Square is, just like Little Saigon is.

So it's an all approach to these places.

Through targeted place-based efforts and smart data-focused policing, we have reduced levels of all types of crime.

Crime is down in the city of Seattle.

And we launched the first in the nation care department, the Health 99 team, and we deliver care and other diversified response options to help those who are suffering on our streets.

We've created programs to address the opioid crisis that, as I said before, did not exist previously, and we've increased investments in programs that we think work.

Council President, you've been a champion here.

We need more treatment.

We need diversified treatment.

Lakeside Milam needs to go with Valley Cities.

We can't have one or the other.

We've got to have both.

We have prioritized our limited general fund monies to invest in important programs.

Again, Health 99 did not exist before.

We built Health 99 in partnership with the fire department.

This is a program that now responds to overdoses.

It's a game changer, and it saves lives.

We've invested in the ORCA post overdose receiving center.

Again, this was a project that was floundering.

The city got behind it with your help, and we moved it across the finish line.

We've invested in LEAD and co-LEAD.

Again, we need to get people off the street into the right place and into a place that's going to provide them substance abuse treatment.

It's going to provide them case working.

It's going to provide them mental health.

And frankly, what we've seen in Plymouth and other places is activities.

What's going to keep people occupied and to keep their motivation up so they're not just going to the same places on Third Avenue?

We've turned the tide on police recruiting.

As we all know, you know, we will have likely the single largest recruiting class in the city's history this year.

Again, the executive didn't do that alone.

We did it with your help on the city council.

And lastly, and I think it's really relevant to the audits and to the recommendations, we are taking an all-department approach to public safety and public health challenges facing our city.

Again, we've learned it, that it's not just enforcement.

It's economic health.

It's revitalization.

It's activation.

It's long-term housing development plans.

It's placemaking.

It's safe and accessible transportation.

It's clear right-of-ways and safe areas for unsheltered people to reside.

And these efforts are linked.

They're not siloed.

And they all need to be data-based and working towards clear, measurable goals.

At the end of the day, this is the core belief behind the efforts that we're going to discuss today and behind how the executive is asking and, frankly, demanding that its departments are going to act moving forward.

So during this presentation, and I promise I'm going to be quiet soon, during this presentation, the mayor's office, it's going to be Leandra Kraft and Sarah Smith are going to discuss at a high level what we're doing as far as place-based efforts go and how it aligns to the recommendations that we've gotten from the auditor and how we're seeing things actually move in the right direction.

We're then going to hear from representatives from SPD, HSD, and SFD to discuss the specific audits and our progress in each area.

We are trying to take a high-level approach.

So if there are specific recommendations that you want us to address, please tell us, and we will chime in and do that.

But we wanted to get you as much information as possible in order to show you all that we are taking these audits and these recommendations seriously and that they are informing the way we're approaching public safety in the City of Seattle.

Without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Sarah.

Thank you very much for that input.

I'm just wanting to make sure that I don't mean to rush anybody, but we have another hour.

We do have some legislation to discuss later.

And so...

I'm not asking you to jettison pages of the presentation, but I'm really interested in focusing on your response to the recommendations, and then afterwards if there's a possibility of including in Commons other work that you're doing that wasn't specified in the recommendations.

I really want to hear that.

Thanks.

Let's go right into it.

Leandra, you can kick it off.

I don't need to speak.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I've had the pleasure of meeting most of you.

And so I want to talk about going from what Andrew was talking about.

The mayor's office really is focused on the problem statement that you all have identified, that neighborhoods in Seattle have persistent interconnected problems related to public safety, economic development, and neighborhood vibrancy.

Seattle has attempted to address these issues in several different ways.

And we want to, again, thank the auditor to express that we took that into consideration when we decided to take a place-based approach to address some of the most high-impacted areas with 911 calls and overdose data.

So one example of that, or these three examples, is that the downtown activation plan is working in coordination with the downtown activation team that is doing surges in certain areas.

and the Little Saigon strategy specifically in connection with the FODEP initiative in Little Saigon.

And so some of the examples of what we're doing is the crime prevention through through design, and that's the SEPTED assessment.

That's where we take a moment to figure out and take inventory, an assessment of what's going on in that area that makes it a hotspot area.

What do we need to address so that we could have a surge effort in all departments?

And so what you see on the left-hand side with the downtown activation team is our scheduled restoration actions where we really take a surge of effort multi-department where we have proactive policing, we have beautification efforts, where we take a look at the structures.

Can we make environmental changes in the spaces so we can reduce crime and overdose in those areas?

We're working with our Office of Economic Development to activate those spaces.

create more positive foot traffic because we know when we flood a space with positive energy and foot traffic, it makes people feel that the space is safer and it reduces the negative behavior in those right of ways.

And that's how we can really get to the investment piece where we can say this area is stabilized, we're activating it, and now we know how to best invest in those areas.

I would just add to all of that is that community has to be with us every step of the way.

So from the beginning, we have to be working with community to understand what is the culture?

What is the needs of this community?

We can't tell them they have to be there.

They have to be at the table talking about Quinn being at the table, going to Bloomberg and being part of this process.

So in each one of these phases that we go through, they will always be an active member in the area.

And one of the things that, just to dovetail off of that, the specific issue that was addressed by the council members was how do we also have a holistic response for individuals?

Because yes, we are about making sure that we can address the safety concerns in the area, but we want to have a holistic response.

And some of the things that we've been doing is making sure that we can work with our service providers, with WeDeliverCare, with Co-lead, with LEAD.

and Purpose Dignity Action or PDA so that we can get the resources out to individuals in tandem with the Seattle Fire Department.

I am so proud to say that in the past two months, we were able to get 19 of the highly most impacted individuals in Little Saigon housed in temporary lodging.

And 19 may not feel like a lot for some people, but when you know that those individuals are impacting that community, there is a felt impact.

And so this is just an example of how we are trying our best to implement the recommendations so that we can take in metrics and have a data-driven approach for where we are making investments.

We come to the table with agreed metrics of what are we trying to do here.

And what you're looking at is the One Seattle Restoration Framework for public safety, community well-being, vibrant spaces, and economic recovery.

For each of those four areas, we determined what we thought would be best metrics that we know we can actually measure so that if the data isn't trending in the right way, we can know that we need to do a different strategy or we can apply more or less pressure in certain areas.

And as you will notice, some of these are going to be more leading or lagging And so we, knowing that, Claudia, you're going to love this, we are bringing all this data into one place where we can actually see how it affects each other.

And so we know that some of this is going to be more immediate and some is going to take longer, and we have to be able to track it from each of the departments all speaking the same language together.

So that goes back to one of the key recommendations in all of the audits, which is we have to coordinate, we have to be willing to share info, and we have to break down the silos.

So can I just ask a question before you go on?

That was sort of an introduction to the work that you've been doing in general, and then will you be identifying the specific recommendation that the work on the subsequent slides responds to?

Yes, we will.

I mean, so for the opioid audit, most of the recommendations that were pending correlated to reporting out on the police-based work that we were doing.

So we, right now, are finalizing some of the preliminary metrics, so we'll be able to share that with Claudia.

So we believe that at that point we will have implemented that recommendation.

I mean, obviously we need to confer with the auditor's office, but I think we feel like we are in a place where we're getting closer to that.

So this thematically responds to a major subset of the recommendations that were in the report.

What we are hoping to do now is, with these other presentations, is to hit on the remaining recommendations.

But obviously, as much as the team members can, if you can reference a recommendation that you're driving towards, it'd be helpful.

And Sarah can obviously help with that, too.

Thanks.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I will certainly be brief as I introduce our COO, Chief Operating Officer, Brian Maxey, who's worked very hard to coordinate a lot of these efforts, who works closely with our legislative body, as well as our Executive Director of Crime and Harm Reduction.

There's not a lot of police departments that have really an embedded criminologist working to bring together all of the things that were in the report together.

At some point, someone will be doing an audit of a police department, and they'll look at Seattle and they'll say, well, maybe you should hire someone that's your executive director of crime and harm reduction.

So we're trying to lead as well as take good fellowship.

But I'll make my comments brief.

We've authored the Seattle-centric crime reduction plan.

You've seen that.

That plan really has three basic models to it.

One is the police-led initiatives.

The second is the initiatives working with our city government, including our city council, and examples have already been laid out with that.

And then, of course, working with the mayor's office and under the leadership of Mayor Bruce Harrell.

I think our department, our city, is certainly moving in the right direction.

You spoke about the reductions that we're seeing in some of our violent crime categories, although one loss of life is too much.

We all agree on that.

it is good to know that we're headed in the right direction.

There's still a lot of work to do around crime and disorder, and I think that we're up for the task.

The third model in Seattle-centric is support services and making sure that we can help people who need that help.

And we will work and partner with anyone in order to do that.

And so you've already given examples of that.

And then the last thing that I will say is, you know, our strategy really is about support and strategic coordination of resources.

Much of the examples that we're giving in the report specifically around violent crime, no matter what you call the project, whether it's in Milwaukee or whether it's in Norfolk, Virginia, two cities that I'm very, very familiar with, each model is based on problem-oriented policing.

everything that they do is based on the SARA model.

And so it is that scanning, analysis, response, assessment, and as Dr. Hunt will tell you, I added an additional acronym, and I think Dr. Goldstein would be okay with that, and that is sustainability.

Everything we do should be sustained over time so that when I leave, when the captain leaves, when a chief leaves or whoever it may be, that project that's good still continues.

And that's something that we haven't seen in policing in a very long time.

It will be interesting to know where these programs will be once the program champions are over.

And so sustainability is a big part of what we're doing now and building now in the Seattle Police Department.

So thank you for the opportunity to address some of the concerns.

Again, I'm going to turn it over to our COO, Chief Operating Officer, Brian Maxey, and our Executive Director of Crime and Harm Reduction, Dr. Leon.

Before changing the, I had a, are you going to stay on the same page?

Yes.

Yes, we are.

Okay, go ahead.

We're going to stay on this for a little while here.

Okay.

Thank you very much for having us here.

We've all been doing a pretty good job with the rounds of thank yous.

I want to echo that.

I want to thank the auditor's office for not just these audits, but all of the ones we've received over the years as we were looking at this.

We found that we have 16 recommendations outstanding over the last decade, some of which I'm hoping we will close out in 2026 once we have a fully functional human resources and payroll system that will allow us to better track our overtime.

So thank you, and it's quite an honor to be at a table like this with so many of the departments coming together, which I think is fundamentally one of the primary goals of all these auditor reports, which is partnerships coming together, working together, and that's something that we at the Seattle Police Department value very, very much.

A lot of the recommendations are not only around partnerships, but they're around data sharing.

And I just wanted to, without belaboring this, I want to just touch on some sensitivities around data sharing.

In law enforcement, we have information.

We have information on places, people, events, incidents.

The fire department has a lot of medical information.

There are restrictions on sharing it.

And in order to share, you also need to fully trust the partners you're sharing that information with.

Within the city, we have a very high comfort level.

We have very good relationships with many of our federal partners, but we are very cautious about how we share data and how openly we do so.

We talked about this on Tuesday when we were talking about the Real-Time Crime Center and the information and the videos we're bringing in.

And who could have access to that data?

And could we lose control over it?

So I just want to say we are striving very hard to balance the interests of partnerships, integration, data sharing against the backstop of privacy and individual civil liberties.

So we've got to be very, very careful about how we enter into this space and that we do so responsibly and respectfully.

I think at this point I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Lee Hunt, our Executive Director of Crime and Community Harm Reduction.

But I also want to echo, this is a new position for the Seattle Police Department.

We've never had an embedded criminologist that is bridging between our very sophisticated data analytics team and our very capable operational teams.

And it's been a missing piece at the department.

So I'm very grateful to have him on board, and I think I've testified here before.

that I consider SPD to be a very data-informed organization, and that we are striving to become more data-driven or evidence-based in our practices.

And the addition of this position is really important to moving those goals forward.

So I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Hunt now, and I'll come back to you later.

Dr. Thank you, COO Maxey.

I'm going to be following the PowerPoint slides, and I think, Council President, you've got a question on one of these slides.

So right up front, in terms of understanding gun violence and working off of the report from the auditor's office, we absolutely are in alignment with the recommendations that the auditor has made, particularly around the vision that we have as an agency of around recognizing the harm that violent crime, particularly gun violence, has in place to individuals and the victims and families, and that we work very hard to bring justice to those individuals who have lost family members due to gun violence.

We have, as has been spoken of numerous times already, we are looking to partner with every quarter of the city and city departments.

And a lot of what I've been doing in my first five months here is getting to meet people and begin to build those relationships and develop those partnerships with Department of Neighborhoods, with Human Services, with parks and others to figure out what we can do to work together to collaboratively reduce and affect change in terms of violent crime, particularly gun crime.

On the other side of that is all the enforcement side of gun crime, the things that we need to do working with our state and federal partners to address the illegal gun activity that occurs throughout the country and what we see here within the city of Seattle.

Do you have a question on this slide?

Yeah.

I just wanted to...

So use of evidence-based programs, that second section of this page.

I do believe that that should be every department's aspirational goal.

And I want to ask about this first one here, partnering on public health violence interruption programs, to make sure I understand that that's really actually happening.

have those programs been evaluated formally by HSD or by SPD?

It's my understanding that there has been that question from the auditor's office for many years.

I had an audit that was canceled last year, so how are you making sure that those are evidence-based programs?

Again, we're talking about also using, it's our job to make sure that we're spending our money wisely.

So we have been having meetings with HSD as they begin to stand up, and you're here as well.

And I will stop in just a second.

As you begin to stand up some of the work, if you're familiar with Operation Cure Violence out of the city of Chicago, which is a public health model around interrupting of violent crime.

They consider violent crime to be a form of a contagion, if you will.

And we're looking to work to implement those kinds of models.

I'll stop and let you add on to that.

Yeah, we'll get into it in a little bit more detail, but we are collaborating, in fact.

That's, Councilmember Kettle, some of the work that we're doing, which is why we wanted to make sure as we're developing the next iteration of our community safety investments, we are aligning with SPD.

And we've got subject matter experts here now.

And there is evidence-based strategies that have proven.

There's data that shows a decline.

And one of the things that is really critical is first agreeing on the focus population, because there is a small number of people who are involved in the majority of gun violence that we're addressing in terms of urban violence.

And so I think that we've got a different kind of alignment now where we're agreeing on not only the right population to focus our efforts on, and I know this probably pleases the auditor's office, but also being really clear about the geographic location, and so that's the place-based.

So coupling that with all the appropriate, effective services, so it's not an open call, it's going to be targeted services, and so I'll describe that a little bit more as well.

And those all fit into the community safety initiative program, right?

Okay.

You can go on to the next slide.

I'm not going to read all these, but these are in direct response to the auditor's report in terms of looking at gun violence patterns that were brought up.

And these bullet points all deal with what it is we have done or are currently doing in terms of data integration and data sharing, and our work both locally as well as at the state and federal level.

One of the things that has occurred this year is our twice-a-week gun crime review meetings with our local and county partners to look at what is driving our violent crime in terms of the use of guns.

And then we're looking to begin our proactive patrol and outreach, and as I brought up before, the example in Little Saigon with crime prevention through environmental design, the place-based work.

Next slide.

Just one thing on that, on the data sharing question.

One of our recent successes has been a collaboration with the ATF to integrate their NIBIN and E-Trace data on their firearms directly into our records management system.

Before, it was about a six-week lag.

We would send the information in, we would wait, they'd get back to us when they could, and then our detectives could really begin the work of doing the link analysis.

on this slide up in the right-hand corner, you'll see that is a link analysis.

That is showing all of the associations in 2025 of firearms that we have had interactions with.

So that just shows you how interconnected everything is.

You can see some of the clusters in there.

Obviously, we removed names and any PII from this, but that's just an image that gives you a sense of the interconnectedness of this.

So this integrated system, which is new, allows us to get those results back within 48 hours and directly to the detective in question to move much, much faster on the Gun Identification Association And then we move into the people, place, and incident information.

As a very small aside, we also finally, after many, many years of trying, have integrated the LEAD database system into our records management system.

This means that when an officer encounters someone on the street, they can tell directly whether that person is participating in LEAD, whether they are a current member of LEAD, and can do that referral there without having to just trust when the person claims to be part of lead and then struggle to find someone to connect with.

So again, that direct integration just gives the officers the information they need much more quickly.

Next slide, please.

We've talked about community engagement.

We've talked about partnerships across all the city departments.

Within SPD, we are really focused on building the community engagement, building the community trust, and building the community partnerships, because they are the ones that can do the most in deterring and reducing crime by the positive things that they have available to them.

And one of the things that we are doing is expanding our crime prevention coordinators to work more in the communities, as well as the chief has just authorized our neighborhood officer trial program, which we're doing in Magnuson.

But we hope to, as we get staff up, to be able to have dedicated officers in each neighborhood throughout the city in specific areas.

And then lastly, for me, in terms of some of our gun violence for 2025...

Sorry?

Went the wrong way.

Just to give you an idea, you know, we're down 18 percent on shots fired.

Non-fatal shootings are down 32 percent.

Homicides are down 21 percent.

We're working very hard to seize and take guns off the street.

Right now, we're on pace to exceed the last year in terms of these things.

And getting those illicit guns off the street are very, very important to us.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And it is 3.30.

And please remember to, if you can, identify the recommendation that you're speaking to as you're going forward.

Go ahead.

And I'll try to be brief, Council President.

Turning to the organized retail crime, we, in 2024, in December, we assigned a new detective who I had the pleasure of communicating with over the past week who, You know, we have many, many talented people at the Seattle Police Department.

This person has a focus and a level of passion that is sort of exemplary.

I'm in the middle of writing up a commendation as we speak.

But since December 2024, you mentioned the King County Prosecutor's Office and their checklist.

That has been integrated into the manual.

It has been integrated into the welcome letter to new retailers that want to sign up, as well as they're given a handbook and a another one page, there's actually three documents, all of which explain what we need from them, how to have a successful prosecution out of a retail theft report.

The retail theft program itself has been in existence since 1989 with differing levels of focus.

I'm happy to report we are highly focused now.

We're conducting one to two retail theft operations a month.

This is with the detective that is assigned to organized retail crime, but also working with the general investigation unit.

So there were 11 operations in 2025 that resulted in 24 felony cases.

That was 178 incidents.

So that's many more incidents than actual felony cases.

There are some 50 to 100 misdemeanor cases that were also brought to the city attorney's office.

And this detective and GIU have been coordinating with the relevant precincts.

I think we've done operations in all precincts except West, which is on the roadmap now.

The online reporting system that we replaced, I think it was two years ago, for general low-level property crime reporting, we did not update the retail theft module of that system at that time because we simply didn't have the funding for it.

It's still something we're very, very interested in doing.

Since the time we did that work, new systems have come out on the market that might actually serve us very well.

We're actively exploring that.

And with the support of the mayor's office, if we can get better online reporting and more importantly for retail theft, really accelerate the efficiency of the reporting and the automation of the reporting, we can move things faster and get more information.

Again, I think I mentioned this detective has overhauled all the manual guides and processes based on the information with the King County Prosecutor's Office.

And we regularly are meeting with the Washington Organized Retail Crime Association, WORCA, and the Retail Industry Leaders Association, as well as our county partners.

So those partnerships are in existence.

We're pushing hard on them, and we're trying to use them as a force multiplier to become more effective in this space.

So there's a lot going on.

And I think the only other thing I wanted just to briefly address was the partnership around drug trafficking, which is the Northwest Haida, which is the high intensity drug trafficking area.

This is a federal program that is regional in nature and we're able to focus on on narcotics activity within the Western states.

And what's important about this is by participating in this program, not only do we get technical assistance, we get monetary support.

For example, they purchased one of our three narcotics dogs They have training materials for us, but they also have what I perceive to be a de-confliction database.

And what's important about this is if someone's involved in narcotics activities, there are many different jurisdictions that could be intervening on that individual or individuals, and you might not know that others are in play.

So what this system does is allow different jurisdictions, different agencies to come together and de-conflict the efforts to ensure that whoever has the most successful case or the best approach to remediating the problem gets to take the lead.

And we participate regularly in this.

And that sort of regional coordination allows us to gain information, and yet we are confident that the data sharing we're doing there is within our and the city's values.

Unfortunately, Council President had to step out.

But I think this work that both this work globally and the work that we're doing with Northwest Haida is directly responsive to the recommendations that were in the audit.

And it's something that the Council President was really, really focused on.

So, again, we're still developing and growing the relationship, but we believe that we're moving towards implementation of that recommendation.

I understand that point, and that is very important.

And I also find very important anything to make reporting better, easier, because I'm sure all of us have experience where people are no longer reporting because of frustrations.

And if we're going to be data-driven decision-making, we have to ensure that the data is up to speed, and getting the reporting squared away is great, so thank you for that.

Okay, Human Services Department.

We don't have as much data to present, but I'm gonna briefly give you an update on our community safety efforts, specifically with the schools that we're working in and the neighborhoods or the place-based strategies that we're developing as well.

So just as a reminder, we have made a commitment to support 11 high schools and middle schools that had data showing that they were most impacted by crime and violence in or in the immediate surrounding area.

So we've identified those 11 schools.

And this fall, we're pleased to announce that we have, of the 11, seven schools will have violence intervention, safe passages, and case management services.

And I'll just note, nod to Claudia, that safe passage is evidence-based from the Rainier Beach Beautiful Safe Place.

we're taking those recommendations and applying them into the schools as their own individual, each school's individual with their needs and what the services are.

In addition, we're not serving, although we'll be present, our community-based providers are focusing on students who would most benefit from these services as well in terms of case management and that violence interruption.

And so again, data informed.

We'll also mention there's four remaining.

We are going to continue to roll those out throughout the school year, but that's a pretty big feat.

This is a new initiative for the Human Services Department, and we're working alongside with SPD school districts, the individual schools, the leadership, et cetera, and of course, community members who are most impacted.

I'll also mention, and we'll go into further detail later on because we have an invitation to join the Public Safety Committee in September.

So we'll be back with Chair Kettle at that committee, but we are redefining re-looking at our community safety investments.

And that has a long history with the City Auditor's Office as well, and the work that community, not just in Seattle, but all over the nation have done to have community-led solutions in terms of safety.

But we've learned a lot throughout the years as well, and so we need to take those new learnings and ensure that they're evidence-based and community-informed.

because we are laser focused on preventing and disrupting cycles of violence and retaliation.

And so what you will see are very concentrated efforts around specifically prevention, intervention, and restoration strategies under one cohesive model.

Right now, we have a lot of important partners in the community doing important work, but it's not under one cohesive umbrella.

with, for example, shared performance metrics and shared trainings even.

And so we are shifting the way that we're doing business because of the learnings that we've experienced throughout, I really think the past, you know, over 10 years, there's been a lot of evaluation in this area.

I just want to also give note that HSD, because this work needs to be more robust, we're also investing in our own capabilities, and so we've hired a researcher.

It's the first researcher, public health PhD, who has been with HSD for a short period of time, but it's the first that I know of in the past 15 years, that we're also developing a robust database, so then that way even our contracted providers can do referrals.

that's seamless and we can track performance measures internally to then report out on a dashboard.

And so that right now is not done.

In addition, we are going to have very clearly defined roles and expectations, not only with key stakeholders that are currently around the table, but also with our community-based organizations and communities that we're working with So it is going to be transparent in terms of what are the best practices that were coordinated, were accountable, and also, frankly, we need to be agile because I know that we talked a little bit about some of the shifts and also what's happening in the drug scene, but that's true for, I would say, urban violence as well.

And so we need to also be able to look at the data and shift some of the strategies.

If it's not working, we have to be honest with that.

and iterate and move on to something that is working and invest more in that.

So that's a little bit of an update.

We're gonna have a request for proposal to get those investments.

We're not quite baked yet, and we're still doing some good thinking with our partners at SPD.

Dr. Hunt has been a really important colleague at the table with us, and so really appreciate the work that we're refining, as well as with DeVita.

Want to shout out to the mayor's office, gun violence liaison, is that the correct extraordinaire?

And so it's really important that we involve key folks.

Lastly, I think also that we talked a lot about police-based strategies.

You know, we discussed at committee, and you've discussed this a lot around Aurora, but commercial sexual exploitation came up throughout this year, and when a acknowledge that the mayor did add $2 million into HSD's budget.

Why this is applicable is because one of the call-outs was we needed to make sure that in our own work, the victim advocacy work, that we were coupled and working in concert with SPD with the work that was happening in real time, and so we've been able to increase our FTE there.

to support even after hours and offer immediate supports.

The second is to invest expanded services in community, and that was in collaboration with Council that provided some guidance through Proviso, and we've closed that RFP process.

The announcements will be made actually August 25th, I believe, in terms of awardees.

But there's everything from expanded beds to the appropriate services.

But again, that leans into how do we support in this complex ecosystem of the various types of violence.

CSE is specific, and so just wanted to give you an update on that work as well.

And with that, we are going to start talking about public health and HSD's involvement in that space as well.

Okay.

I was just going to say thank you, and we will, as you noted, September 23rd, have you in the Public Safety Committee because that seam between public safety and public health or public safety and human services is very important.

So yourself and, of course, Ms. Gorman is always welcome to join us for that meeting.

I'm not sure if you're planning on being there, but you're welcome either way.

And it might be Dr. Hunt, too.

We'll see.

I'll get Dr. Hunt, too.

And I'm noticing that your slides are different than my slides, my paper slides.

And so anyways, I'm also handing the chairmanship back to council president.

Thank you.

I'm here with just a brief overview of HSD's public health investments in the context of the issues that we are talking about across these three audits.

When we talk about public health at HSD, we are also talking about behavioral health, and I just want to acknowledge that behavioral health concerns are the backdrop to almost all of the recommendations that are aggregated across these audits.

I won't be referring to any specific recommendation in my overview, but I want to acknowledge that it is the background.

It is very present, and HSD's public health and behavioral health investments, I think, will go some way towards addressing them.

HSD's public health investments are targeted to reduce disparities in health.

and in particular to give access to chemical and dependency services in line with city priorities.

Over the past couple of years, HSD investments have supported increased capacity, so the first responders have somewhere to take people in need, and my SFD colleagues will have more to say about that coming up.

HSD came to the Health and Human Services Committee a few months ago with an overview of our contract with Public Health of Seattle and King County, and we shared that the dollar level of our support for SUD access and treatment in that contract has increased 244%.

In addition to that contract, HSD holds two other contracts for innovative pilot programs that provide immediate entry into detox and treatment with the referral of a first responder or case manager.

And going back to an observation that Leandra made, we understand that this program has value not only to the people receiving help, but also to community members.

also provides operational support to the Downtown Emergency Services Center, ORCA Center.

The ORCA Center will open very soon, providing 24-7 specialized medical attention and connections to care for those who have survived an overdose.

These are just some of the highlights that emphasize our collaboration with internal and external providers to meet the need that council members have identified.

HSD is happy to follow up with any additional information about these investments, but in the interest of time, I will turn it over to the fire department.

Chief Scottings, can I just pop in for one second?

Sure.

Council President, you're back.

I wanted just to address one thing you had raised before was recommendation seven on the overdose audit.

Yes.

It had called for an establishment of a joint law enforcement task force for fatal overdoses.

We have been engaged for the last, I mean, since late 2023 in an overdose fatality review board with the Office of the Medical Examiner.

So this fatality review board includes executive level representation from the mayor's office and now HSD.

It includes a SPD sergeant sits on the board.

It includes prosecutors, other law enforcement personnel, as well as public health and service providers.

So the purpose of the board is to look at a subset of fatalities every month and is to come up with systemic recommendations to flow from the examination of those.

fatalities.

For example, our Valley Cities contract that we're now engaged in that you were a big supporter of is a direct correlation to an October meeting that we had, October 2023 meeting that we had with the overdose review board.

So it is not necessarily a law enforcement task force.

There is task force type work that SPD is engaged in, but we do think that this hits that need for a all kind of discipline task force type entity that would learn from overdoses and then develop policies that would address the systemic issues that they present.

Thank you.

I am understanding, I don't know if I already said this, so if I did, stop me.

But there were, I believe, 162 fatalities in permanent supportive housing, and 101 of those were overdoses.

And so that is why we have to drill down on this.

I really want to see progress on that, and I believe that investigating overdoses as a federal trafficking crime, then that can help us move up the chain of drug distribution networks.

There were certainly efforts to take a stab at that at the state level legislatively.

That obviously did not work, but we hear you loud and clear, and it's something that we are looking into.

Thanks.

And so I think we're the last presentation, but I'm going to be brief and hand it to John to really cover the details in the fire department.

That's really important.

But what I want to do is give an overview of our mobile integrated health program because Health 99, Health 98, And our response to overdoses, that's just one part of our team.

Our team is made up of HealthOne, which has been in service now for five years in partnership with HSD.

We have case managers.

I think by the end of the year, we'll have 10 case managers.

We have a nurse practitioner and firefighters.

So it's a team approach to really addressing these problems.

And the folks around the table here are all of our partners, along with just so many more.

Now, John's going to get into our particular overdose response and all the partnerships that we have.

But it's a wider ring than just that focus when we respond to overdoses.

So I'll give it to you, John.

Thank you, Chief.

I'm going to highlight very briefly kind of the work that we've done over the last two years on the overdose front and where we are going.

Right now, Health 99 is our overdose response unit.

We stood that up in the summer of 2023 following the executive's order of April of that year in response to the sudden spike in fentanyl overdoses.

It is, as the Chief noted, a multidisciplinary unit.

We staff it with a combination of our firefighters, our superlative case managers from HSD and now also a nurse practitioner from Harborview.

It's in service right now 50 hours a week.

Obviously, we are well aware overdoses happen 24-7, and we are thinking strategically how we can expand this service.

But right now, 50 hours a week for overdose response and about that much for overdose follow-up.

The follow-up is particularly important.

We've learned through long experience that we rarely move the needle with just a single visit, a single intervention.

We need that long-term case management relationship to really move things forward.

And so the goal of this team is to provide people with connections with medications for opioid use disorder, as well as a range of other services.

Next slide, please.

I do want to talk very briefly about hotspotting.

You know, as was mentioned earlier, some of these hotspots are extremely persistent.

I think you could, you know, look at this same map from about five years ago and you would still see, you'd still see third and James, you'd still see third and Pike.

Some of them are a little bit more temporal.

They pop in, they pop out, but we do have hotspots in every single council district, and we're able to follow these in pretty much real time.

I would say that although this map is internally generated germane to the auditor's finding number five, we do also now participate in the HIDA initiative.

We are feeding our data into the OD map program, so we are in compliance with that.

Next slide, please.

So, currently, one of the big focuses for us on the overdose response and prevention front is field provision of EMS buprenorphine, sometimes known as Suboxone.

This is a medication for opioid use disorder.

It can reduce withdrawal cravings, it provides protection, and it provides a ramp to long-term MOUD treatment.

In February of last year, it became the first paramedic program in Washington State to start a buprenorphine program.

And then in November, we started the nation's first EMT level buprenorphine program at the pre-hospital level.

To the best of my knowledge, we're still the only one in the country doing that.

As of yesterday or as of this morning, we had administered the drug 99 times, which is a propitious number for us, so we will be at 100. very soon, and we're seeing really, really phenomenal results.

Most of these clients we are diverting from the ED, so we are keeping this traffic out of the Harborview ED.

Less than a quarter of them are going to the hospital after these interventions.

We were able to take them to much more therapeutic locations.

And the why on this is buprenorphine works.

The scholarly literature here is very strong.

It reduces mortality by about 50%.

Our clinical partners always say that there's basically no other drugs that they give in the ED that is that effective at reducing mortality.

And it is a perfect window of opportunity in EMS.

People often ask us, well, why don't why don't you just send people to clinics or hospitals to get this medication?

And the short answer is there's too many barriers, and they very often walk out without them.

EMS, we are there.

We know where the overdoses are.

We can get on scene quickly and start this treatment.

And again, you know, we are really following the literature here.

Again, auditor's recommendation number eight, according with the SAMHSA recommendations, this is what SAMHSA has suggested.

The literature on some other treatments, you know, on some inpatient treatments, on forced or involuntary treatment, on non-MOUD strategies, it's comparatively weaker.

So we really are trying to follow the scholarly literature here, and really just fill gaps that we are seeing in real time.

Very lastly, regarding kind of our partnership in community-based programs, Again, this abuts a little bit with recommendation number four.

It's not a formal coordination group, but we do a lot of coordination, is our community and healthcare-based partners.

As Anne mentioned, we are participating really integrally with DESC in the launch of their new ORCA Center.

And I do want to mention that in addition to the fixed location of the ORCA Center that's going to be coming online next month, They have this patient outreach division, which will bring a lot of these services to the field in a community place-based location.

We've seen tremendous success there.

We partner with the King County Street Medicine team.

You know, we have good relationships with Evergreen Treatment Services.

And then, you know, for the subset of clients for whom inpatient services are indicated or they're interested, you know, as the HSD team mentioned, we are partnering with Valley Cities and have seen some good success there.

And so we're just really eager to continue expanding on what works.

Yeah, and I should, yeah, thank you, Chief.

Yeah, next month we will be holding a pop-up clinic to bridge people to long-acting injectable buprenorphine.

That's really, again, one of the gold standards right now in opioid use disorder treatment.

Again, it's very hard for people to access these services, so we are going to bring the clinic to the community.

We're going to do a pop-up in partnership with Harborview and a couple other community partners, and we will literally set up shop where this clientele are, and we will offer them an extremely low-barrier bridge to this community.

treatment, and hopefully, if it's successful, this will be sort of the germ of a scalable and replicable model going forward.

So I know we've gone long.

I apologize, Council President.

But again, thank you for having us all here.

I mean, it's really valuable to be able to do this together.

We will also be submitting to you a more formal letter that will more specifically detail how all of this correlates to the recommendations.

because we believe, and we need to confer with the auditor, but we believe that we are very close to implementation on the vast majority of this.

So, thank you.

Thank you very much for all of you being here.

I'm not quite done.

I just wanted to give our auditors the opportunity to respond and suggest paths forward because we're always trying to improve all of our work.

And it's clear that you're doing all of the departments represented here.

You're doing extremely good work.

I want to mention two things that came to my attention today.

Chief Scoggins, I did get photos from Kendi Stewart, president of the Firefighters Union, that showed that there were three shots in the downtown, three bullet holes in the downtown, what was it, I think?

Uptown, 37?

Yeah, so I hope that all of your staff are okay, but again, gun violence, et cetera.

And then Chris McKay, who is the head of the BIA, well, the West Seattle Junction BIA, Let me know that there was an armed robbery in one of the jewelry stores in central West Seattle.

So again, guns, etc.

So we really want to make sure that we're doing absolutely everything.

And the auditor's office does not produce these audits for fun or to just sit on a shelf.

They do it so that we have a roadmap to do additional things, not...

Again, your audits don't point out what is not happening.

You go the extra mile and research what's going on all over the city or all over the country and suggest additional things that we can do.

And many of those additional things we can do is take advantage of resources right here from our federal partners that won't cost us any money.

So I really do want to encourage that that work continue happening.

I will give you the last word.

Oh, my goodness.

OK, well, thank you to all of the executive departments for all of this great work.

I talked a little bit about building muscle memory.

And so glad to see that we are doing that as a city, that we're building the muscle memory.

for coordinating among city departments and other government entities like King County.

When you go out into the community, folks don't know that the city does this and the county does that.

They see us all as government.

and so it's great that we are building our muscle memory to coordinate.

I also really appreciate, Andrew, that there will be a detailed report coming to the City Council that does a crosswalk with our recommendations and the progress.

There was a lot in your slides, and some of it I know are things that are actually happening, And some of it in the slides seemed like it might be aspirational.

So I think that that crosswalk will help us understand better what's actually happening and what's aspirational.

And Chief Barnes had to leave, but I really appreciate that he mentioned problem-oriented policing, which is an evidence-based strategy that we haven't built a lot of muscle memory in Seattle.

And I love the fact that he called out sustainability as another piece of it.

And I'll say that in the South Precinct, for example, well, where Council Member Solomon's district is, Since 2013, there have been 13 captains of the South Precinct since 2013. Many of the community members are all the same, but there have been 13 captains.

And so sustainability is so important when there's organizational change in city leadership.

And so I'm glad to see that happening as well.

Thank you.

Council President, I just want to say and to the council members and the members of the public, you know, we'll keep following up on these recommendations as we always do until it's clear that either they've been implemented or they're still working on them or they're, you know, they're not going to be done for some reason.

So just want to assure the public and the council, you know, that we'll keep bird-dogging these things until it's clear what's happened or has not happened.

Thank you very much for that note.

I want to recognize for our colleagues that this might be, Mr. Jones, City Auditor Jones, your last presentation in chambers or at the table because I don't know if you'll be at our September 9th.

11th meeting, but you will be retiring soon.

And so you have, you've been the force behind a lot of the good work we've heard about today.

So thank you very much for coming.

Thank you very much, Council President.

I just want to take my head up to Dr. Grociator.

Claudia has done a tremendous amount of work in this field.

And again, they call us the Office of City Auditor, not the Office of the City Auditor, because the office as a whole will continue.

It doesn't matter who's in charge.

It's just like, who does the work?

And I appreciate the Council's support for our office over the years.

It's not every jurisdiction has something independent.

entity like this, and the council, past and present, deserves a lot of credit for that.

And I just want to thank the executive branch who do a great job of working with us to come up with recommendations that most of which we can actually implement.

And again, you don't see that in every jurisdiction.

So thank you.

Got it.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Thanks for taking your time to come today.

Yep.

Bye-bye.

Okay, will the clerk please read the next item into the agenda?

Agenda item number two, an ordinance relating to the West Seattle Junction parking and business improvement area modifying the exemptions to the levy of special assessment and amending ordinance 113326 as previously amended by ordinances 115997, 119539, 120570, 121758, 125152, and 127103 for briefing and discussion.

Okay, so just the context of this.

The executive transmitted legislation last week to amend the West Seattle Junction BIA.

State law requires that amendments that impact the BIA's assessments need to have a public hearing and that the resolution giving notice of the public hearing must be adopted by council at least 15 days before the public hearing.

So we're just going to be hearing a bit about what are the changes that will be made in the you know, the way that assessments are collected or the boundaries or whatever, why don't you say it pretty quickly, and we will continue this at our next meeting.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for having us.

I believe I know most of you.

My name is Casey Rogers, BIA Policy Advisor with the Office of Economic Development.

Hello.

So I'm going to give a quick overview of our BIA program, then I'll hand it over to Chris McKay, Executive Director of the West Yellow Junction BIA Association.

So BIA stands for Business Improvement Areas, also known as BIDS, or Business Improvement Districts and Other Municipalities.

Here in Seattle, we have 11 BIAs citywide that generate over $45 million in annual revenue across the 11 districts.

All of this money does stay locally in the districts to provide enhanced services and programs.

BIAs are great tools that provide local, predictable, and sustainable funding.

And lastly, our BIA program here at the City of Seattle is administered by both Office of Economic Development and Treasury Services.

So we're here today to discuss a proposal from the West Seattle Junction BIA.

Chris will provide more details, but I want to point out that the Junction BIA is a business-based BIA, which means that the ratepayers are business owners, not property owners, which is more common with the other BIAs in the city.

Currently, businesses that qualify for the B&O exemption, which is currently $100,000 in annual revenue or less, are not required to pay an assessment with the West Seattle Junction BIA.

If the new proposed B&O policy goes into effect, which would change the current exemption from $100,000 to $2 million, it would have unintended consequences of exempting a very large portion of ratepayers, which would dramatically impact the BIA's budget.

So this proposal that we're discussing today would remove the exemption altogether and protect the BIA's annual budget.

It would also make the BIA assessment much more equitable, since businesses that are below this threshold still receive BIA services.

The change would currently affect 23 businesses that are receiving the BNO and BIA exemption and result in an annual assessment of between $800 to $300 for each, so not too significant, with a combined total annual increase of $4,600 to the BIA budget.

Lastly, I want to note that the amendment is indeed allowed under the state RCW and that OED has reviewed the proposal to ensure it meets all requirements.

With this amendment, there is no formal petition process, so we're not looking for a 60% support, though Chris has done outreach to all new potential rate payers.

And lastly, notification of this proposal will be sent to rate payers in advance of the hearing, which will be on September 11th.

So thank you.

With that, I will pass it over to Chris.

Let me tee up your presentation.

Thank you for advancing this line.

I'm not sure if I was.

And do you want to advance yours or do you want me to?

Sure.

So just briefly, I just want to reiterate, it wouldn't just hurt our budget.

It would probably annihilate the BIA because we're almost all small businesses.

So anyone making under $2 million, and believe me, I applaud this legislation coming through.

I think this would be fantastic for small businesses.

But for our junction, it'll kill the BIA.

It means no more parking, no more events, no more security, no more cleaning, no more nada.

And so that's why this really does need to happen.

And we talked about that.

I think you know the location of our BAA and our small businesses.

We were founded in 87, and I don't know why this little clause in our ordinance links us to BNO exceptions, but it does.

So anyone who gets a BNO exemption, we cannot assess.

That's pretty much the gist of it.

So we need to do this in order to save our BIA.

We also need to do it, as Casey noted, just for equity issues.

And this is just a brief overview of my...

reach to the affected businesses, I have contacted all of them, either via email, phone, or walked in in person.

Those that I've actually been able to talk to in person have all said the same thing.

Of course, I support you.

Of course, we want to keep the Junction BIA going.

Happy to pay in.

So that's really it.

We definitely do have the support.

That added 4,500 revenue about that we'll get, it's going to go all in to clean and safe.

All the massive events that we do in the junction are supported by the events themselves.

So the BIA revenue that we get goes into clean and safe.

I did write a detailed letter.

I kind of really focused on the equity issue of this.

I do think that every single business, no matter how little they make, should pitch in.

I don't even care if it's $10 a month.

Everybody should pitch in.

Otherwise, it's a tragedy of the common situation.

So I did reach out to them, and I think you guys know what we do, but the value is unbelievable.

for what they get in our BIA.

It really is.

These are all our focus pillars of what we provide.

Even just today, we had an armed robbery.

I was one of the first people over there letting them know that I would work on getting a tradesperson to come in and put plywood up on the doors, that I would have security overnight armed, ready to go from 6 PM until 8 AM tomorrow morning, and they know I've got their back.

And what I love to tell people is it's a big bang for the buck.

There's just two of us doing all of that.

So I do ask for your support in helping us remove this clause with this amendment.

Thank you.

Got it.

Are any of my colleagues, do any of you have questions?

Normally, changes to BIAs are a lot more complicated.

The renewals take an excruciatingly long time because of the necessary outreach that has to be done, and the changes that I've dealt with in the past have all been boundary changes.

I think you might have gone through one, or maybe it was another BIA last time.

It was last spring or last fall.

Yep, exactly.

Right.

About a year ago.

So this is an interesting, it's a new change to a BIA underlying legislation that I've encountered, but it makes complete sense.

I will learn more, but I do support it.

And I also want to say to the public out there, BIAs are absolutely necessary.

And in a BIA, you've got a property owner or a business that contributes to a pot of money to make the neighborhood business district better, to benefit the wider neighborhood area, to put on fun events that the whole city comes from.

And so this is really a public-private partnership in a way, but these are private owners and businesses stepping up to belong to an organization.

This is the difference between a neighborhood chamber of commerce and a BIA, because the BIA puts on the events, puts the lights in the trees.

I can't imagine so many of our neighborhoods without business improvement areas.

And I really appreciate the work that you do to support them at OED.

And Chris, I was able to walk around the junction last week and I just love what I saw.

So thank you very much for your stewardship.

What'd you say?

It was a pleasure to host you.

Thank you.

All right, so.

Thank you very much.

And we will talk to Jasmine, I believe is the central staffer on this and find out when any kind of amendment deadline would be due, but I don't believe, I'd be surprised to know if there is any amendments, but we'll see.

All right.

Thank you very much for this presentation.

Yeah, thank you for having us.

Thank you for having the good work.

Just one quick thing.

Council President, if I could, thank you very much.

Chris, good to see you.

And just wanted to ask, are you the ones responsible for the West Seattle farmer's market every Sunday?

I am not.

We partner with them, but they are their own NGO.

Okay, good.

I just got to give them a shout out because they're great.

Yeah, they're great.

They really are.

They do a great job.

It's a well-attended farmer's market.

Yes, and again, thank you for dealing with the businesses in the junction, the work that we've done in the past, the work you're doing with the BIA.

Thank you for being here, and thank you for presenting today.

Thank you very much, Council President.

Thank you.

Any others?

Okay, not seeing any hands up.

Appreciate you coming today.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

All right, this completes the agenda of the August 14th Governance Accountability and Economic Development Committee and our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, September 11th.

If there's no further business, this meeting will adjourn and it is 4.04.

Hearing no further business, we are adjourned.

Thank you, everybody.