Seattle City Council Public Assets & Native Communities Committee 3/2/21

And we do have a quorum, so whenever you're ready, Council Member.

I'm ready.

Is Council Member Mosqueda here?

Yes.

I'm ready for the love fest.

We're not ready till you thank me at least seven times, Council Member Mosqueda.

There you are.

We ready?

You're free to go whenever you want to start.

OK, let's go.

Good afternoon.

This is a meeting of the Public Assets and Native Communities Committee.

The date is March 2nd, and the time is 2 o'clock.

My name is Deborah Juarez.

I'm chair of the committee.

Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Clerk?

Sorry.

Council Member Peterson?

Here.

Council Member Mosqueda?

Present.

Council Member Herbold?

Council Member Sawant?

For members present.

Thank you.

So we'll move to approval of the agenda.

There's no objection.

The agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

I will now move to the chair's report.

Welcome to the Public Assets and Native Communities Committee for 2021. Today we'll hold a hearing on 32 appeals of the hearing examiner's initial report on the waterfront lid number 6751. That's the final assessment roll.

We received the final report on Monday, February 1st, 2021. This committee will meet again on April 6th to hear additional appeals of the hearing examiner's initial report and the hearing examiner's final report.

Because the appeals are quasi-judicial matters, the committee is not able to accept public comments.

The council rules will need to be suspended to allow public comment while the committee is hearing the appeals.

If there's no objection, the council relating to providing public comment at committee meetings will be suspended to not allow public comment today or at the April 6th meeting.

Hearing no objection, the council rule is suspended and public comment will not be accepted today or at the upcoming April 6th Public Assets and Native Communities Committee meeting.

Eric McConaughey of Central Staff will provide background for the appeal process and walk us through the standard of review and the scope of the committee's recommendation regarding each appeal.

He has given guiding materials well ahead of this meeting.

Before we begin, Eric, I want to thank you.

I had an opportunity to review the Central Staff memo dated February 25th.

the attachments listing the 32 appeals.

The third attachment in regards to the references to the record from the assessment role hearing on the waterfront lid.

Basically, these are the references that are in Eric's memo, and there are five of them, and the links are there, and that also includes the objections to the hearing examiner's findings.

These are all public documents for review, and these are all the documents that are listed in Eric's memo.

So when you go there, you can just click and open each one of them up.

And that actually provides a lot of information.

So with that, Nagin, can we start the hearing?

Can you please read item number one into the record?

All right, agenda item one, hearing on appeals to the findings and recommendation of the hearing examiner on the final assessment rule for the Waterfront Local Improvement District, number 6751.

Thank you, Negin.

I will open the hearing on the appeals to the findings and recommendation by the hearing examiner on the final assessment role for the Waterfront Local Improvement District 6751 that are filed in clerk file 321893. Eric McConaughey of Central Staff, can you please walk us through your presentation?

Yes, please.

Good afternoon.

I'm Eric.

I work on the Central Staff, and I will move through some background information.

And as the chair described, I talked about the standard of review and the scope of recommendations for the appeals.

As noted, I provided a memo with some attachments in advance.

I hope the attachment number one is especially helpful.

The index provides a link to each appeal, and it shows the relevant page number from the hearing examiner's initial report for each.

And I hope that that will help support the discussion and questions from the members of the committee.

I'd like to give some brief orientation to the Waterfront Local Improvement District assessment.

From here out, instead of saying Local Improvement District, I'll probably say LID or LID.

So that's just some jargon to define for the folks that are tuning in.

Before you begin, normally I don't do this, but I'm going to ask for, because this is quasi-judicial, that I allow Eric to kind of get through the presentation.

How would you want to do this, Eric?

I'm more inclined to let you get through it and then come back.

Or would it interrupt your flow if you were to just stop when someone had a question?

I could offer a hybrid.

There's sort of clean, I think, pauses or breaks in the pieces of my presentation.

It's brief, so don't worry.

And maybe I can just indicate those pauses and ask if folks have questions at that time.

OK.

Does that work?

Yeah, it does.

I just have to remind, I know my colleagues know this, and so do the legislative assistants.

But I just want the public to know, because this is quasi-judicial, we don't have the usual robust discussion that we would have on other matters.

So go ahead.

Go ahead, Eric.

Thank you.

Sure.

Yep.

Sure thing.

Yeah, so to the orientation of the Waterfront LID assessment, Through ordinance 125760, the city ordered the preparation of the final assessment role for the waterfront LID.

Now, a final assessment role for any local improvement district is a listing of all the properties within the boundaries of the LID with the amount to be assessed against each property.

And that amount is based on the increase in value accruing to each property.

This is called the special benefit that you can attribute to the construction of the local improvements.

There always has to be a specific list of the improvements, and for the LID, those improvements include the promenade, the overlook walk, the Pioneer Square street improvements, the Union Street pedestrian connection, the Pike Pine streetscape improvements, and Pier 58. And there's more information about all those improvements online at the Waterfront Seattle site, but also attached to that ordinance 125760. Also, the LID improvements are important components of but only a part of the overall Central Waterfront Program.

That entire program has a cost of about $737 million.

The estimated cost for the LID improvements is $347 million.

However, the Waterfront LID assessment is capped by that ordinance to $160 million plus about $15.5 million in financing costs.

It's a total of about, what is it, $175, $176 million as the cap for the LAD assessment.

City, other city funds, state funds, and philanthropic sources would round out the entire central waterfront budget.

So that's a break.

As I mentioned before, I can break there to see if there's any questions.

The only thing that I would add, let me do this quickly.

Sure.

Are you going to, I know we know that the total cost for the lid is $737 million.

Are you going to talk about, or do you want me to, I can say it as well, that the number one contributor for the funding is the city is putting in $260 million, the state is putting in $207 million, the waterfront lid is $160 million, and we have, I can never say that word,

Philanthropic?

Philanthropy?

Yes, thank you.

I struggled with it, too.

I practiced that one.

That's $110 from Friends of the Waterfront.

So all that adds up to $737 million.

So what we're talking about of the four buckets of funding, we are talking about the third bucket, the $160 million for the LID.

So thank you.

Right.

And the only correction I would offer, and I think it was just a verbal slip, is that you said for the LID at the very beginning of that breakdown, and I think you meant for the overall Waterfront program, the entire package.

You're right.

And I apologize.

I was looking.

It's okay.

I just, I just thought, yeah, thanks.

No, no problem.

Um, I can move right on through or field any other questions.

Okay.

I'll move right on.

So the city council designated the Seattle hearing examiner to conduct, uh, the waterfront LID assessment hearing to hear objections from property owners, hear presentations from the city and provide a recommendation to the city council.

The hearing examiner conducted that hearing beginning in February 4 of 2020. About 430 property owners of the more than 6,200 properties subject to the LID assessments submitted timely objections to the hearing examiner.

The hearing examiner filed his report of findings and recommendation with the city clerk on September 8th, 2020. And this is known as the hearing examiner's initial report that's filed in a clerk file 321780. Today's hearings are for appeals of that initial report.

This is the time for the committee to consider the appeals peer transparently in this public meeting.

On April 6th, the committee is scheduled to hear more appeals from the initial report and we'll hear appeals from the final report.

of the hearing examiner on the final assessment role for the waterfront.

That final report results from the fact that in the initial report, there were 17 properties the hearing examiner recommended for remand to the appraiser for some more reviews, more analysis.

The city council uh, said go forth and do that through resolution.

That happened.

And then the examiner took those up.

The final report encapsulates the recommendations then on the 17 properties based on the further analysis, as well as bringing in everything from the initial report.

Um, I should add that Council Member Herbold has joined us.

Welcome, Council Member Herbold.

Oh, thank you.

If there are no questions, I'll move right along.

As a reminder, the matter of an appeal of individual's final assessment for an LID is quasi-judicial, as the chair mentioned.

As a quasi-judicial matter, the council members may not have direct or indirect communication with anyone about the merits of a particular appeal outside of a council hearing or a meeting considering the Waterfront LID.

This meeting is all about that, so the matter of discussion today are these appeals.

It's important to note the standard of review for the appeals per Seattle Municipal Code.

Sometimes people say SMC 20.040.090.E.

The review by the committee on the appeals, quote, shall be limited to and shall be based solely upon the record from the hearing.

Although the committee may permit oral or written arguments or comments that are confined to the content of that record, for the hearings before the committee today, April 6, no opportunity for additional oral or written argument or comments will be provided.

Further, the council's quasi-judicial rules require that the hearing examiner's decision shall be accorded substantial weight, and the burden of establishing the contrary is upon the appealing party.

and moving right along to the scope of decisions on appeals.

The revised code of Washington and the Seattle Municipal Code provide that after hearing all the appeals, the city council may accept the assessment role as prepared, corrected, revised, raised, lowered, changed, or modify the role or any part thereof, or set aside the role and order the assessment to be made de novo or anew.

The committee's choices then for recommendations to the council after hearing the appeals are limited to these options, to approve it, approve with conditions, modify, remand, or deny the appeal.

So eventually, after the committee considers all the appeals and votes on recommendations to the council for each appeal, council central staff, that would be me, would prepare a report to the council per the QJ rules.

And as a reminder, there are no committee actions on recommendations of the appeals on today's agenda.

Just briefly, so we started out with, I can't remember what the number was, and then the hearing examiner said, okay, I'm gonna pull 17 of them and we're gonna remand them back for more information.

So right now we're at 32, and what are we anticipating?

Maybe you said, I'm sorry, for April?

Yeah, I have some numbers for those.

So in total, today the appeals are for the initial report.

There were some more appeals from the initial report in April.

In total between today and April 6th, There's 75 valid appeals on the initial report.

There were 35 valid appeals of the final report that were filed.

However, 30 of those amended appeals from the initial report.

So altogether in total, in terms of actual case files for the hearing examiner, there's 70 of them.

And on April 6th, in terms of how the flow of the meeting will happen, my expectation is that the committee will consider those initial appeals together with the amended appeals.

So very quickly then, there's 70 appeals total, and you're dealing with 32 of them today.

Okay, good.

I hope that was succinct enough.

Yeah, it is.

It's just that I just want our colleagues in the viewing public to know that we have another another trench to go to on the sixth.

Then we get towards the end, I'll kind of wrap up, if you don't already do it, what the timeline is and when we bring it to full council.

So I'll let you finish.

Actually, I think I'll hand it over at this point, because that's sort of the last and next section of what I would have covered.

So take it away.

Great, thank you.

Is there any questions from my colleagues to Eric regarding the LID and the appeals and the process?

OK.

Hearing no further questions, I'm closing the hearing on the appeals to the findings and recommendations by the hearing examiner on the final assessment rule for Waterfront Local Improvement District 6751 that are filed in the clerk file number 321893. Before we adjourn, let me just share this.

So we have one hearing left, and that's going to be Tuesday, April 6th, of this committee, as Eric was saying, to finish up that final tranche of appeals that add up to 70. And we're looking at, and Eric, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure we're looking at May, June, to bring all of the appeals to the full city council to either pass or reject the hearing examiner's recommendations.

That's correct.

That's my understanding.

So this is the process.

So we'll see you hopefully all on April 6th.

And then hopefully, we'll get that done.

We'll move it to full council.

And hopefully, we'll have a full vote in May, June.

Our hearing examiner is Ryan Vansell.

I think we hired him in spring of 2018. With that, is there any other questions?

Councilor Mosqueda, is there anything you want to share?

Nope, I guess nobody had.

I can't believe you're all so quiet today.

OK.

OK, so with that, is there anything else?

OK, we stand adjourned.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for your time.

Appreciate it.

Bye.

Bye, thank you guys.