Seattle City Council Transportation & Utilities Committee 3/3/21

Good morning.

Good morning, everybody.

The March 3rd, 2021 meeting of the Transportation Utilities Committee will come to order.

The time is 9.30 a.m.

I'm Alex Peterson, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Herbold?

Here.

Councilmember Juarez?

Council Member Juarez.

Council Member Morales.

Here.

Council Member Strauss.

Present.

Chair Peterson.

Present.

Four present.

And I do see Council Member Juarez is present.

So we'll mark her as present.

And then I'd like to note that Council President Gonzalez is unable to attend our meeting today and her absence is excused.

So many thanks to Council Member Juarez for filling in today for us.

And we've got a big agenda today.

We do have some public speakers.

regarding the agenda.

If there's no objection, today's proposed agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

The first two items are relatively minor.

One is granting an easement to the city of Kirkland to complete a pedestrian and bike path.

That requires a public hearing, which we will have today, so we can vote on the item at our next meeting.

The second item today is the creation of a small public path and plaza with a handful and which impacts in parking spaces in the East Lake neighborhood of District 4. The larger items on today's agenda include allocating one-time reserve funding left over from our 2014 Transportation Benefit District for already approved transit-related projects.

Then we will discuss three council bills to approve existing technologies used by three different city departments, technically approving the surveillance impact reports.

We will not vote on the surveillance impact report bills today.

We'll vote on them as early as our next meeting, March 17th.

But today we can get the information and ask questions.

It's a lot of information to digest.

At this time, we'll open the remote general public comment period.

I ask that everyone be patient as we operate this online system.

We're continuously looking for ways to fine tune this process of public participation.

It remains a strong intent of the City Council to have public comment regularly included on meeting agendas.

However, the City Council reserves the right to modify these public comment periods at any point if we deem that the system's being abused or is unsuitable for allowing our meetings to be conducted efficiently.

and in a manner in which we are able to conduct our necessary business.

I will moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

Public comment period for this meeting is up to 20 minutes and each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I will call on the speakers two at a time and in the order in which registered on the council's website.

If you've not yet registered to speak but would like to, you can sign up before the end of this public comment period by going to the council's website at seattle.gov forward slash council.

public comment link is also listed on today's committee agenda.

Once I call a speaker's name, staff will unmute the appropriate microphone and an automatic prompt of you have been unmuted will be the speaker's cue that it's their turn to speak.

And the speaker must press star six to begin speaking.

Please begin speaking by stating your name and the item you are addressing.

As a reminder, public comment should relate to an item on today's agenda.

speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of the allotted time.

Once you hear the chime, we ask you wrap it up and if you don't end your comments at the time that's allotted, the speaker's microphone will be muted to allow us to call on the next speaker.

Once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line and you can still listen to us via Seattle Channel.

If you're calling about the Seattle City light easement to the city of Kirkland, please wait until later in the agenda for the public hearing on that item.

The regular public comment period for this committee meeting is now open, and we will begin with the first speaker on the list.

We have Kelsey Mescher followed by Philip Weiss.

Go ahead, Kelsey.

Good morning, Councilmembers.

This is Kelsey Mesher from Transportation Choices Coalition speaking about the Vehicle Licensing C-SPAN plan.

Transportation Choices was one organization and a part of a broad coalition across the state.

We fought very hard to defeat Tim Eyman's I-976 campaign in 2018. We obviously lost at the ballot but thankfully the city took swift action to ensure that the vital vehicle licensing fees were still collected and protected while legal action was pursued.

A few months ago I-976 was declared unconstitutional and so I'm thankful to be here today testifying in support of the spend plan for the $23.7 million in one-time funds that were collected from December 2019 through 2020. FDOT staff consulted the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee the Seattle Transit Advisory Board on how to direct these one-time funds.

The department heard feedback that the funds should be spent first on transit-specific projects and programs and then on projects with a strong transit component and this proposed legislation does that.

The plan will restore transit-related capital projects that had to be reduced or canceled because of budget reduction.

It will help fund essential transit service this year and it will also help build back the reserve funding for transit service.

We all know that the future is unpredictable and so ensuring we have reserves to provide stable transit service during such times is critical.

We all know that transit is essential.

It has sustained our city and its frontline workers through the pandemic.

And we also know that transit has very strong public support following the renewal of the STBD this past November.

So thank you for putting this plan together and we want to show our support.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Next up we've got Philip Weiss followed by Rachel Ben-Shmuel.

Go ahead Philip.

Hello my name is Philip Weiss.

I'm a resident of Eastlake and a co-founder of the group Welcoming Eastlake and I'm giving public comment today to oppose Resolution 31988, which will take 29 public parking spaces and turn them into 16 private parking spaces.

We absolutely do need to do something better with the space besides use it to store vehicles.

However, this plan doesn't do that.

It just turns over the lot to a wealthy landowner for the private use of their vehicles for their employees and customers.

Let me repeat that, return over this lot to wealthy landowners for the private use of their own vehicles.

The resulting plaza that we get in return is going to be surrounded by parked cars.

It's going to be at the bottom of a set of stairs, meaning that anybody who needs to use a mobility device will have to roll all the way around three blocks to get to it from the place where people normally are congregating at the top of the stairs.

And it's separated also from residents by these very office buildings that get to use the parking we turn over to them.

So all of the housing and all that sort of stuff is on the other side of these office buildings.

Basically turns it into a nice little surrounded lunch and break area for the for the employees of these of these places, which that's kind of nice in the long term for them in the long term.

We should do something much better with this.

Turn it into a park, put in some public restrooms.

I don't know what we can do with this.

But something better than parking.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Next up, we've got Rachel, followed by Cynthia Spies.

Go ahead, Rachel.

Rachel, press star six.

Rachel, we can come back to you.

I just saw you last night at the Move Seattle and Lenny Oversight Committee, so I know you're there.

Well, let's go next with Cynthia, and then we'll come back to Rachel.

Cynthia, please press star six and go ahead.

Hi I'm Cynthia Spees an independent security researcher and District 6 resident.

My comments are on the surveillance technologies.

I've read all the surveillance impact reports public comments and privacy and civil liberties impact assessments.

My experience working in big tech aids my analysis.

On Friday the 26th I sent written public comments via three emails one per council bill to all of you.

For Seattle City Light's current diversion technologies the issues span equity analysis insecure communications lack of written policy and excessive data retention.

For Seattle Fire Department's computer-aided dispatch, the issues span excessive data retention, potentially broad data sharing with SPD, external data sharing, system administration, cybersecurity, and racial bias analysis.

The issues with the SPD technologies are more severe.

For CopLogic, the biggest problem is the service being hosted on LexisNexis as opposed to on-premise, which is supported.

CopLogic is the result of a merger between three data brokers, all of which have been security breached, in some cases, multiple times, including the largest FTC settlement at the time for a privacy breach.

Other problems span cybersecurity, data retention, auditing, and privacy policy coverage.

So these issues would be minimized by hosting on-prem.

For automated license plate readers, or ALPR, for patrol, the most glaring issue is retention of data for license plates that are not a match to a hot list.

Other issues span cybersecurity, policy, audit, risk management, and data sharing.

The severity of these issues would be reduced if SPD simply operated like New Hampshire and didn't retain ALPR data that isn't a hit.

0.005 to 0.25% of all Al Farah scans match a hit.

The system is mass location surveillance of almost exclusively innocent individuals.

Given that parking enforcement was handed off to SDOT and 911 operations have been moved to civilian control, the ALPR for parking enforcement, SPD CAD, and 911 logging recorder are all out-of-date SIRs.

The technical safeguards will be different since they are no longer on the SPD network nor under SPD's administration.

Approving such service as is enables an unreviewed instantiation of these technologies under new departments.

Please see my prior emails for the full details.

Please don't rubber stamp these.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Now let's go back to Rachel.

Rachel, are you there?

If so, please press star six and let us know your comments.

Okay, we're going to go to the last speaker on the list, and we'll give Rachel one more shot at the end.

So, Speaker Kimberly Kinchin, please press star six, and go ahead, Kimberly.

Thank you, committee members.

My name is Kimberly Kinchin.

I live on Capitol Hill, and I urge you to vote no on Resolution 31988. This is just another giveaway of valuable public space that should be put to better full public use, be that housing, social service facilities, or green space, something else.

The meager offering of partial payment for a tiny plaza that will offer people a view of a parking lot is pretty much laughable and should not be considered an amenity.

It's time to stop giving away valuable public assets for private use, especially for parking.

We already have five off-street parking spaces per household in Seattle.

And according to the most recent US Census measure, almost 20% of us living here don't even have access to a car.

So to use it for parking is just kind of absurd and not equitable.

So again I urge you to vote no on this resolution and use that space for a better fully public use.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And our last speaker is is Rachel from the Move Seattle Levery Oversight Committee.

Rachel are you there?

Okay.

I am here.

I've been trying to figure out how to unmute myself.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

Thank you.

Okay.

So I am Rachel Benschmuel.

I'm co-chair of the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee and I appreciate the opportunity to speak.

I'm commenting on the $23.7 million in revenue that had been held in reserve and become available to use once the Supreme Court overturned I-976 last October.

The Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee supports the City Council's directing $12.7 million of this fund to transportation projects because these have been reduced or canceled as part of the 2020 budget reductions.

This proposal would allow more levy projects to get started or get back on track.

It supports our levy portfolio by meeting more of the levy deliverables.

SDOT staff did consult with the MOVE Seattle Levy Oversight Committee on how to direct these funds.

Examples are Phase 3 of the 23rd Avenue Project and Route 40 Transit Plus Multimodal Project, which are also supported by the Transit Advisory Board.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Rachel.

This concludes our list of speakers from the general public.

Now we will move on to the first legislative item on our agenda.

Will the clerk please read the short title of the first agenda item into the record?

Agenda item one.

Council Bill 120008. An ordinance relating to the City Light Department authorizing the General Manager and Chief Executive Officer to release a portion of an existing transmission corridor easement to the City of Kirkland for public hearing, briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

This measure facilitates construction of pedestrian and bicycle paths on the east side rail-to-trail project, and the bill allows Seattle City Light to convey an easement to the City of Kirkland in exchange for a fair market value payment.

This item does require a public hearing.

We'll go ahead and have the public hearing now, and then we'll hear from Central Staff Analyst Erick McConaughey, and then we'll hear from General Manager of City Light Debra Smith and her team, and there'll be a presentation.

The presentation is already online, so the public commenters are most likely referring to what's already online.

We do have a speaker for the public hearing.

Let me just open it officially here.

One moment.

Before we open the public hearing, I'd like to remind the public the same procedures we use for the regular committee public comment period will be applied to commenters during this public hearing.

In short, two minutes each.

Please use star six to unmute yourself, and there'll be a 10-second warning chime to wrap up your comments.

The public hearing on Council Bill 12008 is now open, and we will begin with the first speaker on the list.

We actually just have one speaker so far.

So Jay Arnold, welcome, and let's hear your comments.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Peterson.

Good morning, Vice Chair Strauss and members of the committee.

I'm Jay Arnold, Deputy Mayor of Kirkland and Vice Chair of the East Trail Regional Advisory Council.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today to express the City of Kirkland's appreciation for the City of Seattle working with us to make this transaction a reality in support of an important project in Kirkland's Totem Lake Urban Center.

Totem Lake is experiencing explosive growth and redevelopment, and to help provide transportation capacity to serve this area, Kirkland is constructing a $22 million non-autorized bridge to improve access and use of the cross-parking corridor, part of the regional trail system.

The bridge is key to connecting the corridor and the broader East Trail to the Burke-Gilman Trail.

In your package is a rendering that shows the bridge, which should be completed in 2022. One of the footings for the bridge is located within the Seattle City Light transmission easement, and this action allows that footing to remain in place permanently.

We also want to thank Deborah Smith, General Manager of Seattle City Light, and her staff for working collaboratively with Kirkland staff to make this a reality and ensuring that both transportation and electric infrastructure work effectively in the same location.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for calling and we appreciate that.

That was our last speaker present at this public hearing.

So the public hearing on Council Bill 1208 is now closed.

And we will go ahead and hear first from our city council analyst, Eric McConaghy, who I think will want us to turn it over quickly to Debra Smith and her team.

Yep, very much so.

Good morning.

As you said, I'm Eric McConaghy, I'm the council central staff.

And I don't have a lot to add to what you already said and what the speaker already said, other than to note that it's interesting that the summary and fiscal note, that's a piece of information that accompanies every piece of legislation to the council that are authored by people in the departments, such as City Light or folks like myself.

But this is an example of a change that happened last year.

Climate resilience is a big deal.

And council, with your leadership, Council Member Peterson, change the requirements of the format of that summary fiscal note.

And this is a good example of showing in the note how this trail, should this bill pass, will assist with climate resiliency, providing an alternate transportation route.

It may seem to some folks to sort of be a footnote, but I think it's an example of things to come and a good example of the use of that change.

So I just thought I'd bring it up.

Thank you, Eric, appreciate that.

And you'll be available for questions during this, although I'm hoping this item will go quickly since we have such a long agenda.

I'd like to turn it over now to the general manager of City Light, Deborah Smith.

morning.

In fact, Council Member Peterson and Chair Peterson, I think we can make up some time here.

So I want to thank Mr. Arnold and the City of Kirkland for working with us on this.

And this is another really good example of where we, the City and City Light, need to work closely with fast-growing Eastside communities on their development efforts in order to protect our critical transmission corridors.

So the point here is that Both are possible if we work collaboratively and we work creatively, develop solutions that allow us all to move forward and protect for the future.

So thank you, Eric.

And I'll just introduce staff, and then we'll be on our way.

So today I have with me Tom DeBoer, our officer of environmental lands and licensing, Bill Devereaux.

And I'm terrible with titles.

I think you've all learned this by now.

But Bill does something that's mostly about He does compliance and real estate.

And Greg Sanswich is, I always give you, every time he's here, I remind him that he came to work for us from Sound Transit, went back to Sound Transit, and then came back to us.

But I think his value is incredibly important because he does understand the importance of the transportation corridors.

And this is not the first example where we've been able to successfully work through an issue, at least in part due to Greg and Bill's involvement.

Tom wasn't here.

And lastly, of course, Maura Brugger, who keeps us all on track.

And Council Member Juarez, thank you for joining so that we could get this important piece of work through.

Thank you.

We'll start our presentation here.

So good morning, Chair Peterson and members of the committee.

Today's action requests authorization to release a portion of City Lights transmission line easement located in Kirkland.

The portion of the easement release is actually for the surface rights.

It allows for this Totem Lake connector, which is this over here on the right hand side, you'll see in the presentation, this bridge structure that spans Totem Lake Boulevard and Northeast 124th Street.

It's part of the larger east side trail connection.

On the left side of the screen, you'll see the larger east side rail corridor that runs between Renton and up into Snohomish County.

over, if you look closely, you can see it in the rendering as a depiction of where our tower is, and that's the western edge of our easement corridor.

Portia relieves us for approximately 24,000 square feet and requires City of Kirkland to make a one-time payment of fair market value in the amount of $19,500.

The cooperation and efforts put together by both City of Kirkland and City Light allowed us to preserve the safe and reliable distribution of our electricity and also a safe and reliable option for trail users.

The grade-separated crossing for non-motorized use allows a connection for the regional trail system.

That's pretty much all we have today for our presentation.

I hope that's clear.

Thank you, and just for the benefit of Councilmember Juarez, this is not in your district, but I hope that you support it.

You have your awesome pedestrian bike path, which is coming along so well over I-5.

Thank you, folks from City Light, for sharing this with us.

Councilmembers, do you have any questions or comments about this potential easement, which we'll actually vote on at the next meeting?

Councilmember Strauss?

Thank you, Chair Peterson.

Just noting that sometimes it is that one very small connection that can unlock so much of our multimodal trails.

So with this connection, you and I will be able to bike from my district through your district through Council Member Juarez's district and get to Kirkland on safe and separated grades.

Just wanted to make that note.

So appreciate that.

I did have one question for Greg about the payment that we will receive from Kirkland, are these going to be restricted rate payer funds?

Are they going to the general fund?

What is their use and how does it benefit city rate?

Proceeds from any dispositions.

Yeah.

Just also understanding $19,000 in the scope of City Light's budget is not a lot, still we know that it can help in certain ways.

Are there projects that it's going to help fund, or is it just going for general fund use?

Can you help me understand that?

Yes.

City Light Fund proceeds, any surplusing and disposition of property and proceeds we receive from those actions will go into City Light's general fund.

And those funds help offset rate payer costs or other projects we have ongoing.

Like you said, the $19,500 is It's not a large amount, but it is an amount that helps us further defer any other rate increases or impacts the rate payers.

Great, thank you so much.

And thank you, Chair, that's all my questions for today.

Thank you.

Any other questions or comments, Council Members?

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

And you may have covered this, and I might have just missed it.

Can you talk a little bit about whether and how access is maintained in case Seattle City Light needs it?

Yeah.

In fact, let me bring this back up real quick.

So if you look closely at the rendering, if I can share this for you, the access actually, because of where it's located, it's actually in a portion of the Totem Lake a sensitive area where the landing is.

Our trucks actually can't go where the bridge structure is.

And so there's enough infrastructure in and around the tower to preserve operation and maintenance.

That was one of the key components of this whole coordination and effort.

So we do have that preserved.

Thank you.

Thanks for that question.

Council members, any other questions on this item?

Okay, well, thanks everybody from City Light for being here, and Eric, appreciate it.

We will vote on this easement in our next committee meeting.

We had this today for our public hearing in the presentation, so on March 17th, this will be voted on quickly, I would assume.

Thanks, everybody.

Will the clerk please read the title of the next agenda item into the record?

Agenda item two, resolution 31988. a resolution granting conceptual approval to construct, maintain, and operate a private parking area on East Howe Street, east of Fairview Avenue East, as proposed by BSOP1 LLC, as part of developing a public plaza in unopened right-of-way in the East Lake neighborhood.

For briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Thank you.

This resolution is granting a term-limited permit that would basically, we're approving the concept of providing a term-limited permit that would create a small public plaza where a handful of parking spaces currently exist.

I actually went out and visited the site a couple of times and appreciate the Department of Neighborhoods running their public process.

We're gonna hear from Lish from central staff, and then from the departments, and I think some folks from the community.

So, Lish, if you don't mind starting us off, thank you for your memo.

Sure.

Lish Whitson, Council of Central Staff.

This is a resolution that would grant conceptual approval of a term permit.

Term permits generally run for 10 to 15 years and often can be renewed.

In making your decision on whether or not to grant conceptual approval for this term permit, the code lays out 10 different criteria that are included in my memo, including whether or not there would be interruption or interference with existing streetscape or other street amenities, effect on pedestrian activity, effect on commerce and enjoyment of neighboring land uses, and the availability of reasonable alternatives.

So as you're considering this resolution and hearing the presentation, please keep in mind those criteria.

And with that, I'll hand it off to the other presenters.

Thank you, Lish.

Beverly?

Yeah, good morning, everyone.

I'm going to start us off with just a couple minute overview.

So what we have for you today, Amy Gray is going to go through the term permit PowerPoint.

So we'll be able to see some maps of the area and she'll explain the term permit process and following up on some of the comments that Lish made.

We also have with us two representatives of the East Lake community that have worked on this.

Ron Endlich and Dietra Segar and they're going to talk about the community process that brought this idea forward and will respond to the public hearing comments.

I think this one's a little bit unusual, which is why I wanted to say something before we jumped into the PowerPoint.

I think that committee has a lot of experience with term permits where it's normally an adjacent property owner wants to do a utility tunnel or something like that, and that permit is the way we accommodate that partial use of the public right-of-way.

This is a little bit different in that this idea has really been championed by the East House Step Steering Committee, which is a community-based organization that has worked on In 2018, the Department of Neighborhoods facilitated the community and the developer working together to come up with an agreement which we'll be going through.

So what you're seeing today is SDOT's support of a term permit.

that really implements this agreement between the community organization and the adjacent developer with the awkward name of BSOP1 LLC.

So I think we can jump into the PowerPoint and then Amy's going to be sharing this with our community reps. And we also have some of the design team that worked on this, and Michael Jenkins, and most everyone you can think of.

So I think we're ready to jump into the PowerPoint then, Amy.

Thank you.

Thank you, Beverly.

Good morning, council members, and thank you for the opportunity to present this project to you today.

My name is Amy Gray.

I work for the Seattle Department of Transportation on the term permit program.

As Beverly mentioned, the Department of Neighborhoods facilitated an MOU between BSOP1 LLC and the East Howe Steps Plaza Steering Committee to come up with a plan for this area in an unopened East Howe.

BSOP will contribute $500,000 towards the development and maintenance of the new plaza.

So that's important because we're not just, they're not just creating it without having an ongoing maintenance plan so that it would just sort of, nobody would be responsible.

BSOP will continue to maintain the public plaza.

As Beverly mentioned, BSOP is seeking a new permit for private weekday parking in East Howe Street that is currently unopened and not used for transportation purposes.

And the steering committee supports the private weekday parking and SDOT is recommending approval.

Next slide.

So just because there's a lot of names out there that people might not be familiar with, Beverly mentioned this too.

BSOP1 LLC is the property owner in 1910 Fairview Avenue East, an existing office that uses the parking in an open East Howe right-of-way now.

The East Howe Steps Plaza Steering Committee is a group of Eastlake community members who participated in the development of the MOA for the public improvements in this area.

There will be, I will turn it over later in the presentation to the community members representing the East Howe Steps Plaza Steering Committee.

Next slide, please.

So here is a somewhat dated aerial map of the area.

The star shows the portion of unopened East Howe.

To the south, where it looks like it's a vacant lot, that's now a brand new development.

And to the north is 1910 Fairview Avenue East.

Next slide.

As Beverly touched upon, term permits are a two-step process.

We are here at the first step, which is to provide conceptual approval for the private use of the public right-of-way.

And then if counsel provides conceptual approval, we will come back to you for final approval through a term permit ordinance that specifies all the terms, conditions, fees, inspection requirements, permit holder, but that will all happen if council provides conceptual approval.

Next slide.

So here's the proposal.

This image shows the public plaza that's being developed.

The red dots show the 16 private weekday parking slots and the blue dots show the four public stalls.

The steering committee also received a matching fund grant from the Department of Neighborhoods for the permitting of the public plaza.

BSOP1 LLC will accommodate up to 12 community events during this, in this area that is specified in the memorandum of understanding between them and the steering committee.

And at this point, I was going to turn it, I'm going to turn it over to Juliet Vong from the design team and Dietra from the steering committee.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Amy.

Deitra is going to start us off and then I'll follow up with a little bit more description.

Just quickly from an introduction standpoint, though, my name is Juliet Vong.

I am with HVB Landscape Architecture, so I'm a design consultant that's been working with the steering committee to develop the master plan, the public process, and ultimately the design drawings to get us where we are here today.

Deitra.

Julia, this is Ron Emlich.

I can go over this slide, and Dietra is also here to help answer any questions.

My name is Ron Emlich.

I'm a longtime resident of the East Lake community, and I have been the chair of the steering committee that has worked on this project for the last seven years.

It has taken some time to go through the initial planning and design for this project, but we've come a long way and we've made good progress on it.

Through support through Department of Neighborhood Planning grants, we held four community meetings at the start of this project to look at different design concepts and we addressed a lot of design questions and parking questions that came up and we're very happy to be at a position where we've come together and have a proposed solution to move forward that would allow the creation of this great new public plaza open space along Fairview Avenue, and which provides connections uphill through the stair, East Hall steps connection, and also a connection to the trail that goes along Lake Union.

This has been a collaborative process where the community has initiated and led the design, supported by Department of Neighborhood grants.

We have funded the design and permit process.

The adjacent property owner would fund the construction of the plaza and would be responsible for the long-term maintenance of the plaza once it's done.

support this effort and thank you for your consideration of this item this morning.

Juliet, do you want to talk a bit more about the design?

Yeah, so I've been asked to just kind of walk through a couple of the key components of the design.

I guess along just building a little bit off of what Ron had mentioned, the three public, we had three public meetings to develop an original master plan.

And we discussed lots of different kind of comments and integrated a lot of the responses and interest from the community.

One of the big elements was to really be able to provide a terracing of the steps.

And then once the MOU was developed and the kind of final site plan, that's when we had that fourth meeting to make sure that the community was aware of this partnership approach.

What you see here, we've been working with SDOT to develop the final design.

One of their, the major comment they had in the design process was to do everything we could to make sure we didn't disturb the root limits of this existing tree you see in the photo on the top.

This is a very large existing conifer.

It's in very healthy condition.

And so we've been working with SDOT's urban forester to make sure that we adjust the design around this tree.

It currently sits in a parking planted island.

And so we're retaining the full extents of that existing planting island intact so that we have no disturbance beyond what's already paved around this existing tree.

We also presented at Seattle Design Commission subcommittee meeting.

And so we've adjusted some of the design to reflect their comments.

Most of their comments were related to just the public accessibility of this plaza.

So we've done a few things to be able to make sure the plaza is open, that it feels very open visually.

It is like all of the design elements kind of come together to make sure it feels like an open public space.

that the stalls are all signed so it's clear that this is a public space and that the community is welcome.

We also looked worked with them a little bit to make sure we had kind of the right size spaces so we can support small term kind of small events as well as some larger events as you spill into the rest of that public right-of-way.

Next slide please.

And could we uh ask oh we're gonna have a quick we'll have some a couple of questions at the end here keep going.

All right um a couple of photos really just to show you what

Oh, yeah, Vice-Chair.

Could I ask my question now?

Sure.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you, Juliet.

Thank you to all the presenters.

My questions were actually on slide six and then on slide seven.

Sorry, I did not jump in soon enough.

Slide six does, I guess this is when Beverly was, or was it Amy?

Amy was speaking about the public benefits, and we could go back to slide seven.

Really what's important for me to understand regarding public benefits is it's one thing to create a public benefit.

But if nobody knows about it, then it's not truly a public benefit.

So what's really important for me to understand is who can attend.

I think that I heard you say that there would be events promoted or created.

Who can attend?

How is it advertised?

How do people know that this is something that is free to them just as a resident or person in the city?

Is there storage available for these events?

I guess that's my first question.

I've got two more.

Sure.

Amy, is it all right if I respond to that first one, or do you want to say something first?

Go ahead, Juliette.

All right.

So the entire space is open to the public.

And that's a lot of what the Seattle Design Commission comments were about is adjusting the design so that it feels open visually.

It looks like it's open.

All the spaces are very visual and that it is kind of that inviting experience to clearly indicate.

So aside from the two trees you see on this kind of corner plan, When all of the planting is actually very low-growing, we made sure that the visual connection from the sidewalk to the stairs to the steps is very clear so that you can kind of start to get those sight lines and know this is where you go to make that hill climb up above.

You asked a number of questions about programming specifically, so the East Howe Steering Committee you know, part of the public process has been to kind of ask what types of things you'd want to do in the space.

What, you know, what is it used for?

What would the community want to use it for?

And really most of the responses we got was just the importance of having that visual respite, having a spot they could hang out.

We've kind of elongated steps that they could hang out on the stairs, created some seating with a view geared towards the downtown, not just the lake.

and just having that little bit of open space in this location.

The thought process was, you know, if someone was going to be a group, a small group is coming from the community to go up and do the hill climb.

The East Howe Hill Climb is a pretty popular fitness route to try and head all the way up all those stairs.

Or the Lake to Lake through this hill climb also is a great sort of urban hiking route.

So a lot of the intended use is really more of those small group gathering spots.

Bikers coming to start, you know, to maybe meet here when they're going to go bike around Lake Union, that type of thing.

There is an intent or a desire, I guess, maybe more of a hope to maybe host some slightly larger events.

And so being able to spill into the public, the parking lot, really working in coordination with the BSOP group, if there was ever going to be, you know, a, I don't know, a fun run that maybe wants to have a tent set up or some sort of an ability to use the space.

Any kinds of those uses would all be open to the public.

There's kind of an understanding and an expectation that there's, we'll probably set some parameters around the 1910 and the steering committee specifically in regards to the 12 events for the MOU that have been conceptualized.

But anybody could go through the typical Seattle process and request to hold some event here through the typical permitting process with any other type of open space in the right of way.

Thanks, Julia.

And Council Member, if I may.

Yeah, please jump in.

All right, for the record, Ian Morrison with McCullough-Hillary here on behalf of the Term Permit Applicant PSOP1.

Just to be clear, the 12 events referenced in the SDOT presentation, that is a, think of it as a right of first offer for the Steering Committee.

So that's 12 events that the Steering Committee is able to do a year under the MOU.

There's still the opportunity for any other group to go through the normal permitting process if they wanted to do a festival event subject to SDOT process.

So that's 12 events that are sort of pre-reserved for steering committee under the MOU.

And your other question that Juliet maybe you mentioned is part of the term permit will be signage and wayfinding.

So that'll be evolved should the committee choose to approve this.

So there will be opportunities for wayfinding and locational signage and signage that identifies that the public parking or the parking is available to the public on nights and weekends, all of the stalls that would be created if the term permit was approved.

Thank you, Ian.

You started to answer my next question.

So that's very good.

So my other question here, well, I'll sit on the public, the events real quickly again.

What's going to be, and it's my understanding that this is just the first of two, so the resolution comes first, then the ordinance to actually make this term permit real will occur second.

So I'm giving you a I'm going to be looking for in the ordinance, um, which is very clear.

Uh, making it very clear for anyone in the city to understand.

That they are able to host events here.

Um, it's the onus should not be put on the individual to, uh, figure out for themselves that this is a place that there's a public benefit for them to use.

We need to be proactive.

And whether that's reaching out to local groups beyond just the East Howell group is, I'll leave the details up to you.

I'm just letting you know that public benefits are very important to me.

Understanding that people should not have to go out of their way to achieve or receive these public benefits is very crucial for me.

My other two questions are about the four public parking stalls.

Ian, you were starting to get to this.

How clearly is it defined that these are public as compared to the rest of the private lot?

And then I have one more question about the tree.

So we're working with SDOT directly to make sure that they'll be assigned on every stall.

not just the public stalls, but on every stall individually so that it's clear that they are public, like all public all the time versus public evenings and weekends.

In addition, I think we were, SDOT is considering whether, you know, a sign actually at the street saying public parking, you know, kind of turn here type of a sign.

The initial installation would include the stalls, right, you know, signage for each and every stall and possibly an additional sign on the right of way.

That's kind of what we've been working with SDOT for the details of exactly the language that goes on those signs.

There is a kind of a larger master plan that the community developed that involves more connectivity and open space and improvements along the corridor.

additional wayfinding, those types of things are all things that are still conceptualized and have been brought up to SDOT that might be beneficial.

So that's kind of still that that element is still in process.

And council members, let me introduce myself.

I'm Dietra Seager.

I'm the president of the East Lake Community Council, and I've been on the steering committee for this project for the last five years.

And getting word out to the public is very important for us also.

We have a new website, and this will certainly be on that, as will the parks along Fairview.

So anybody who's looking for, you know, if they're taking a ride around the lake, they're taking a walk, They'll know that this is there and what facilities are available.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Deidre.

And Juliette, thank you for that clarification about the parking stalls.

What is important for me here is if somebody is just driving by on the street, what looks like to be a private lot is not, it is not confused as a solely private lot.

Don't worry, you're not the only ones that I'm talking to about this.

I had a meeting yesterday where I was saying the exact same thing to a completely different group of people.

Just job well done on all of this, and especially on this tree.

I think that this is a great example of how we can preserve the trees as we develop the land around us.

You can't, if we cut down that tree, it would take, we would not be able to recoup that growth.

And so I just want to thank you all for preserving that tree and creating what looks to be a good product.

Thank you.

HAB-Danny Teodoru I guess my question about the trees.

What did it take to preserve that tree.

There we go.

I didn't hear the question in there.

Um, so we were always intended.

So we were into need to preserve this tree from the early discussions with us that it was clear that was a very strong desire so The really the the urban forest or the changes made based on their recommendation, we actually dug around the tree to make sure we understood which where the roots were and where they were going.

We kind of did some very pocket investigation.

The recommendations were to leave the existing curb in place.

So that we are that is where the majority of the roots are still kind of focused and those major root systems in the landscape area where that kind of a large island right now.

And essentially, that's the primary element.

So we had to reshift the stalls a little.

We lost one stall in total, just because there wasn't quite enough room without encroaching slightly into that parking or into that existing landscape area.

And then we adjusted the where the stairs where the plaza kind of turns and heads up through the existing stairway.

We adjusted that limitation a little bit so that our grading would work to still get the terracing that was super important to the community, while being able to not encroach on what would be kind of that east side of that existing tree.

So mostly it was slight site adjustments and then shifting the parking and adjusting the size of those parking stalls a little bit, still within the required parking sizes, but to not encroach in that planted island.

Great.

Thank you so much.

That one parking stall is definitely worth preserving this tree.

Good job.

Thank you.

Jer?

Yeah.

Please keep going with the presentation, and I think we've got a couple questions at the end.

Sure.

Just a couple of slides here to show what it looks like from the ground.

So facing east, this is from the sidewalk, what would actually be kind of that entrance into the plaza space.

What you see here in the red is the approximation of the right-of-way line.

And then the facing west slide up in the upper right-hand corner is at the base of the stairs looking out towards Fairview.

So this is where right now you're at the bottom of the elevation and the goal of the plaza space was to actually elevate you a little so you'll be able to actually see as you come around the corner, not just the lake, but also the downtown.

So I would like just to interject here one quick thing for these slides, because it occurred to a lot of us that if you're standing on the sidewalk there facing west or facing east, it reads right now as a private parking lot.

most people would not understand that there's actually a city right of way here that would be open to the public at all times anyway.

So it currently reads like a large parking lot and the proposal is to make it more publicly known that this is area for people to use as part of the plaza and then also do some reserved private parking for the weekdays.

Sorry to interrupt.

This is actually probably also a good slide to show as well as on the site plan if we need to get into details.

The 1910, the private property was developed.

We spent a lot of time early in our process just understanding, you know, where the parking and how it works and how it was originally all permitted and constructed.

There is access to some of the private stalls and a driveway that is used for deliveries as well.

So what we really kind of carefully tried to to orchestrate everything so that we weren't eliminating access to the private property itself and emergency access, which was certainly important working with the fire department turning radiuses to maintain fire access around this building while still kind of maximizing the space of the plaza that we could in the area remaining.

The next slide just shows a couple more photos, the existing steps.

The building that you see here is the one that's currently developed, the 1818 along Fairview.

And then what you see is that steps, the existing steps coming down.

Once you get right at that corner, you really have this feeling of opening up and And the concept from the community was that it creates this welcome at this landing right there's never going to be a massive amount of events here it's just not the place where a lot of people are intended to come.

But to have a space that feels enclosed that feels welcoming that feels like you can just sort of take a break and pause and then some of those other photos.

So this slide we wanted to include to show just the pedestrian connections around that area.

Right now, it's this portion of unopened right of way in East Howe is just looks and reads like a parking lot, as I've mentioned.

And if council approves this, then there will be a direct connection from Fairview all the way up to Capitol Hill to get through from the lake up there.

and some of the other pedestrian connections that are shown here show existing, and I never can pronounce, maybe somebody from the East Lake could, the Cheshuet Loop Trail, pronounce that better than I can, and then areas where there's protected bike lanes.

So this was just showing some of the existing connections and how this enhances that connection, this pedestrian network.

Next slide.

So just to wrap things up as far as the presentation, the SOP1 LLC is looking for council's conceptual approval of this.

If the resolution is adopted by council, we will prepare the term permit ordinance and put all the requirements in that.

And if council grants the ordinance, then the permit will be in place for 15 years with one renewable 15 year term.

And that's the end of the presentation.

So open for questions now.

Thank you.

And I want to commend you on all the work you've done over the last few years on this project with the community, both SDOT and the Department of Neighborhoods, and I'm supportive of this project.

And we do have a few more questions here.

Council Member Morales, please.

Thank you.

I wonder if we could go back, I think to slide 10. I apologize.

This is, uh, Small.

Yeah, I can't see everything.

And actually, I think a previous slide to we might go back to.

But so one of the things I'm trying to understand better is, first of all, what accommodations there are for people with mobility issues.

And I understand this is a stare.

well, a staircase, but if there is accommodation for people who are trying to use that, access that and have mobility issues.

And then looking at this map and one of the photos from the previous slide, it's not clear to me how somebody, what the connection is to the lake.

There was a photo that showed sort of the frontage and it doesn't look like there's a crosswalk.

So can you just talk about how people might actually cross Fairview to get to the lake?

Yeah the site plan might be a better one if we want to go back I think at least maybe two slides I believe to where we have one of the site plans.

First let me address the ADA accessibility.

So it is a it is a stair climb.

These photos will show you getting ADA access up and down the stairs.

you know, as part of like multiple developments that have gone through to replace and actually get the stair actually didn't exist before the development up on the above along East Lake.

And so this has kind of been a long term connection for the community and each kind of piece has been built along the way.

What was important to our community though, is I talked about having that slightly elevated view once you get up even like three feet, a little bit around that range.

can suddenly have just enough height to be able to see the water and actually as you come around that corner you can see downtown.

So there's a little bit of a larger space just above the the main plaza and there's a bench kind of set intentionally and that the orientation of this plaza so that you can sit on that bench.

You've got accessible seating adjacent to the bench as well and really just sit and take in that view of downtown in the lake.

What we did in order to accommodate that is we do provide an ADA accessible route.

It's less than 5%.

So it's just a nice gradual slope up to that upper plaza level.

And that's our overlook.

So it was important that that overlook was completely ADA accessible.

From that point, you really are at the base of that large stair hill climb.

So to get from up to East Lake, you have to use the street system and go around.

So that covers the accessibility side of things.

The crosswalk itself, so part of the master plan does show a crosswalk, and the intent from the community would love to see a crosswalk.

In this location, we sort of conceptualized where it potentially could go, and we even submitted for SDOT a potential grant to help the community design and figure out and build that crosswalk.

In further conversations with SDOT, we're right on a large curve.

And so there's some sight distances and some other concerns with exactly where and how that crosswalk could be located.

We did talk with Seattle Design Commission as well.

That was a comment that they brought up.

And so there is two crosswalks about a couple hundred feet on either side that are existing to be used.

Ultimately, SDOT, once this is built and once we really see how it's used and if the programming is significant enough and the community starts to use it more and more, whether or not it warrants a crosswalk and then a design process associated with really where's the best place to put that kind of a mid-block crosswalk.

It remains, I think, an important component from a larger master plan perspective for the community, but there's a lot of challenges with just the existing roadway configuration with SDOT to actually see how that could be implemented.

So it's not part of this current project.

Okay, thank you.

And then just one more question and sort of reflecting again on what Councilmember Strauss was saying.

I mean, it looks to me like the frontage might be 30 feet or so.

I'm not great at estimating this, but a fairly small sliver between what is very obviously, you know, office buildings.

And so I just want to hear a little bit more again about you know, how we will ensure that people are aware that this is public space, that this is, you know, the public is welcome to come in and use this space, because just looking at some of the photos, even if it's, you know, greened up, it still would look to me, based on my ability to visualize, like, you know, sort of a green strip between two private parking lots.

So just want to hear a little bit more about the public facing nature of what this would look like.

Yeah, maybe that first slide with the title slide gives a little bit good perspective of what the view could look like.

Of course, you have the title right sort of in the middle, so you can visualize if it wasn't there.

Um, so some of the things we've done is, is I think, you know, just kind of in the shape and the form of the design, making it very welcome, making it very open.

What's not terribly clear here, but there's actually the adjacent property also has a green space next to it.

So as soon as you kind of hit between these two properties, you're going to see a different in the sort of urban framework and, and just the amount of green that you have in this area.

Integrating a lot of seating, kind of inviting people in for the seating, being able to see that hill climb and the step as you come up around the corner, I think are all kind of components to use the urban elements around us to reinforce that this is a space and that it's a welcoming space.

As I did mention, there is some discussion with SDOT about signage.

What kind of signage?

What would a sign say?

Do we want to sign something?

what, you know, both from a vehicular standpoint to know that there's public parking, but potentially also from a pedestrian standpoint.

So we're really looking to SDOT to help us determine if there is some additional signage that might be needed or desired to sort of say he'll climb this direction or whatever other kind of wayfinding might be needed.

Sorry, go.

Yeah.

Well, and so my last question is, and this is just my fundamental position on these issues, so I'm trying to have an open mind here, but I am having a hard time understanding why it's necessary to convert what is publicly owned land into private spaces if there's, we're not really, like the parking is still there, it's still accessible, so it's not clear to me why it needs to become private.

privately owned.

I think, Council Member, I would respond to that and note that the permit doesn't convert the right-of-way to private property.

It's only through the vacation process that a developer actually acquires the public interest in right-of-way.

So the term permit gives them permission from the city for this use for a period of time.

And this term permit accommodates this use in this plan for 15 years.

All term permits are revocable.

We use the longer term when we see that there's more of an investment as, you know, someone's doing a utility tunnel underneath an alley.

But if this is this private use of public right-of-way as defined in the ordinance for the term period that the City Council accommodates.

After that, it remains public right-of-way and the permit could be revoked, but this just sets a use for the period and the conditions and the term.

The only thing I would kind of add to that is the community began this process in 2014 and has worked with a lot of volunteer hours and the grants from the Department of Neighborhoods in order to fund the master plan, the community process, and the design to date.

And so that totals, I think, about a little over $200,000 that they've received through those grants and then matching those grant dollars with volunteer hours.

One of the things that was a big concern during the community process, well, how will this be maintained?

How is it gonna get built?

And so what we heard when we had that last open house after the partnership was developed and the MOU terms and the final site plan was addressed was just the benefit of being able to have the adjacent property to just have it built and have it built so quickly so it's open and usable to the public.

but almost more importantly in a lot of those community discussions was the long-term maintenance.

So it's not just the funding of the construction, but it's taking ownership of that long-term maintenance of the plaza space as well.

And then the parking is when people are gonna be using this most is after work hours on weekends.

And so all of those spaces are open to the public during that timeframe as well.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilmember Herbold, did I see your hands up?

My interest in these kinds of arrangements is trying to understand sort of what the back of the envelope math is.

And Beverly, you've heard me ask this question before when we talk about street vacations and the like.

What the back of the envelope math is about the value of the public benefit versus what we're giving up.

And so presumably, There's been some sort of calculation that the $500,000 plus the cost to maintain the public space is that that is the value of these parking spaces being given up during the day for a period of 15 years.

Is that correct that there's been some sort of a calculation done that constitutes the value?

Because the land itself for the public plaza is is public right of way.

So they're not contributing the land.

They're contributing the cost to build the plaza and the cost associated with the annual or the regular maintenance of the plaza.

I would say we haven't done a mathematical calculation.

I think for looking at the term permit as an implementation tool that what we were responding to is that the community had identified that this was an appropriate balance that they supported.

So this kind of odd tucked away right of way that was used by the adjacent business for business parking, that they balanced that with and neighborhood planning money and the ability to have the developer do the work and the implementation and then the ongoing maintenance and the ongoing work for community events.

So it was more a balance of the community finding that this agreement and the tool of the term permit helped them achieve a very longstanding goal of that connection.

and more public use of the space.

It is a little bit an unusual circumstance, but it was the balance we heard was that the community supported this and the business obviously feels like they're getting enough out of it because they're willing to pay for the development of this and work with us on signage and design and do the ongoing maintenance and term permit fees and insurance So we hope it's the right balance and that's what we are bringing forward is that community voice that they're supportive of the balance.

Yeah, and I just want to say again, always feel that these public benefits should obviously consider and be centered on the goals of the community, but they should also include an assessment of the value of what the public, in this case, real estate is, and that that should also be part of the balance.

Do we know, are there going to be any sort of restrictions on the ability of the private entity of BSOP1 LLC to make money from these spaces?

They wouldn't have any means to do that.

So they will have their business daytime parking set aside.

And other than that, they can't charge parking fees.

I mean, I think a lot of people who get parking from their employer have to pay for it.

That's what I'm asking about.

I don't know the answer to that.

perhaps Ian Morrison does, or we might have to check with him and get back with you on that.

Okay, thank you.

And then the last question I have relates to the maintenance of the public space.

Does the maintenance of the public space extend to things like, you know, special events permits and that sort of thing, if people want to have a gathering in the space, or is that going to be within the purview, as I believe it should be, of the city and the special events committee, or are we delegating the authority to booking this public space to the private entity?

I think in terms of if you're thinking of like advertising and clean up and set up of tents and such, that would be a part of the special event planning.

So when some organization came in and said, we want to do a poetry reading, we need this and we need that, that that's part of the obligation of the event planner.

There's nothing right now in the MOU that would impose an obligation on the property owner to clean up after an event, and I think it's one of those that will be, as they move forward, figuring out how the events are going to be planned, that that's one of the things advertising, cleanup, setup, would be part of that ongoing discussion.

I'm sorry, I meant the decision-making about whether or not to allow an event in this public space is the question I was asking.

No, they don't get to curate the events.

Thank you.

And Council Member if I may. respond.

Council Member Hobo, excellent question.

Just for the record, Ian Morrison on behalf of the BSOP applicant.

There is no intention on behalf of the applicant to charge for parking of those stalls during the term permit period.

And as Beverly stated, it's not the applicant's intention nor desire to be the curator of those events.

We would want to work with SDOT to ask for if there is an event that maybe there's an additional liability rider that benefits us if there's some sort of, incident on that, but besides that, we would look to SDOT to program that public space just like it would with the normal street use permit or festival permit.

Thank you.

This is Julia.

I do have one.

You asked for kind of the numbers in the back of napkin numbers.

I think as Amy mentioned, we don't have dollars necessarily associated with it, but from just a number standpoint, the public plaza is about 5,000 square feet.

of that public plaza space.

We have to include, provide allocation for emergency access around the building in any design.

So if you don't include that emergency circulation, that would be required no matter what we would do.

The term permit stalls that are being contemplated total about 2,000 square feet.

So not dollars, but the numbers that we do have available, if that helps at all.

That's very helpful, thank you.

Thanks council members for all the questions and I appreciate Lish pointing out in his memo the what the Seattle Municipal Code has us look at when evaluating these projects as well and I really want to thank the community leaders who have been working on this for years, the Department of Neighborhoods, SDOT, for creating this, enabling us to create this public plaza that somebody else will pay the operations and maintenance for, which is, I think, a great benefit to the community.

So if there are no further questions on this, the resolution, I'd like to move that the committee recommend approval of Resolution 31988, which is item 2 on our agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you.

It's been moved and seconded to recommend passage of this resolution.

Any final comments?

OK.

Will the clerk please call the roll on the committee recommendation that Resolution 31988 be approved for forwarding to the full council?

Herbold?

Yes.

Warras?

Yes.

Morales?

Morales?

Sorry, yes.

Strauss?

Yes.

Chair Peterson?

Yes.

Five in favor, none opposed.

Thank you.

The motion carries and the committee recommendation is that the resolution be sent for approval to the March 8th City Council meeting.

Thank you, everybody, for calling in and answering all the questions.

Appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye.

Will the clerk please read the short title of the next agenda item into the record?

Agenda item three, Council Bill 120009, an ordinance relating to the city's 2021 budget, amending ordinance 126237, which adopted the 2021 budget, including the 2021 to 2026 Capital Improvement Program, for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Thank you.

We heard from some key speakers today in support of this, and we also received an email from the Transit Advisory Board co-chair in support of this.

I know that SDOT's done a lot of work putting this together for this one-time funding, one-time reserve funding left over from the 2014 Transportation Benefit District.

for already approved transit-related projects.

This proposal was announced by the executive back on February 1st, and the plan recently secured the support of the Transit Advisory Board, which oversees spending by the Transportation Benefit District.

So we have Calvin Chow from City Council Central Staff here with us, who's our transportation expert, and of course we have Estat, who's going to give a presentation.

Calvin, did you want to start off with any introductory comments?

I think we should go through the presentation and I'll be available to answer any questions if they come up.

Okay, so let's hear from our Seattle Department of Transportation, SDOT, and see their presentation.

Certainly, thank you, Council Member Peterson.

We're going to pull this presentation up here in a moment.

I am Candia Lorenzana, the Director of Transit Mobility at SDOT, and here with me today is Nico Martinucci, our Transit Lead for the Seattle Transportation Benefit District.

And today we're here to talk about SCBD and the allocation of reserves as it relates to I-976.

Next slide, please.

So in our conversation, we're going to hit on implementation timeline.

There's a lot going on with STBD typically and just want to give you a level set of where we are.

We'll talk about the background of behind the revenues for STBD and the $60 vehicle license fee.

Our work with the Transit Advisory Board on the proposal before you today and discuss the proposed spend plan and project list with you.

Just two weeks ago, we were here to talk about the Metro and SDOT Transit Service Funding Agreement.

I really appreciate the support that this committee provided for that agreement.

It passed unanimously at King County Council yesterday, so SDOT is going to begin moving that forward, so thank you all for your work on that.

Today, though, we're here to talk about the budget process.

This provides an overview of the The first is a 2010 Councilmatic $20 VLF, which continues indefinitely.

There is the voter approved 2014 measure, which expired at the end of 2020 and was funded by a 0.1% sales tax and a $60 VLF.

There's the new measure, which was passed last year and expires in 2027 that is a point one 5% sales tax that funds a basically funds a programmatic extension of many of the programs in our first measure.

And then lastly, there is a.

there's the additional Councilmatic 20.VLF that Council passed in the previous budget process that would also continue indefinitely.

So we basically have a mix of both voter approved and Councilmatic resources when it comes to the Seattle Transportation Benefit District.

Next slide.

So a little bit of history here on the $60 VLF and the reserves.

The $60 VLF was collected through the 2014 voter approved measure and was impacted by the passage of I-976, which basically removed the ability of the city and TBD statewide to collect a vehicle license fee as a form of funding.

This measure passed statewide, but City of Seattle voters actually voted it down.

Three quarters of Seattle voters actually voted it down.

So the City of Seattle, along with its partners, challenged the initiative, and an injunction put in place by the courts allowed us to continue to collect the $60 VLF funds.

So we set those aside if a legal challenge was unsuccessful.

And on October of last year, the Washington State Supreme Court struck down I-976, making the reserve funds available for programming.

I'm going to hand it off to Nico and let him talk you through some of our work with the Transit Advisory Board and our proposal today.

Thank you, Candida, and thanks to the committee for having us here today.

So immediately following the Supreme Court's decision, we began to engage the Transit Advisory Board and the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee on a proposal for programming these recently restored funds.

As a reminder, the Transit Advisory Board is the oversight body for the Seattle Transportation Benefit District Proposition 1. And although the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee typically, as the name would suggest, oversees spending of levy funds, our process here really coincided with the COVID-19 levy reassessment effort that they were undergoing at the time.

That effort ultimately recommended reduction or pausing of many different projects that were scheduled for levy delivery over the next couple of years.

So we saw a natural fit to begin with restoring projects within that list that fit within the criteria that we heard from our stakeholders.

In terms of those criteria, we heard loud and clear from CAB as sort of you heard in public comment today and as was enumerated in their email of support yesterday.

We heard a real strong interest in focusing on restoring transit projects and otherwise those with a clear transit nexus, and more generally, to maintain the intent of the voter-approved measure under which these funds were initially collected.

And again, just to reiterate, as you saw in the email yesterday, I have been supportive of the proposed plan we have in front of me today.

So let's go ahead and dive into that proposal, generally broken into three parts, which include project restoration, transit service, and strategic reserves.

We're going to spend a couple slides talking more in depth about project restoration, but on this slide, I want to take a minute and talk about the other two items, transit service and strategic reserves.

By way of reminder, the new Proposition 1 approved back in November does not begin revenue collection until April of this year.

So we are currently today in a sort of three-month lull between the end of the last measure and the beginning of the new measure.

At the same time, we are continuing to fund transit service that is on the road today.

This is transit service that was initially added during the 2014 Proposition 1, and we have an ongoing commitment to fund into the future and into the new Proposition 1. So this $5 million allocation helps fill that funding gap, helps make us be able to deliver on those commitments even while we are not actually collecting revenue from the new proposition.

And the $6 million in strategic reserves, I'll say briefly, we set aside strategic reserves during the 2014 Proposition 1, and having those funds on hand going into the overlapping uncertainties of 2020 was really critical in allowing us to continue to deliver all of the services that we deliver through the Seattle Transportation Benefit District Proposition 1. So with these lessons in mind, we are hoping to set aside additional reserve funding over the life of the program.

The $6 million would be a seed that would grow as we set aside a little bit more every year.

This would allow us to not only account for any swings in revenue collection, but also ultimately, at the end of the program, help us ramp down over a longer period of time.

Next slide, please.

So just very quickly, before we get into project restoration, I wanted to show what these two allocations look like in the context of our overall spend plan.

The 2021 bar, as we tried to highlight at the bottom, just represents April through December.

So again, mirroring that period of revenue collection for the new Proposition 1. The two boxes with the white asterisks represent these two allocations, the $5 million for transit service and the $6 million for reserve funds.

For transit service, having a slightly higher, slightly taller bar in terms of quarter per quarter spending, again, this represents only three quarters of transit service spending, makes this year's transit expenditures look a little bit more like 2022, which is really the goal.

Without that money, we would be under spending this year compared to what we're hoping to spend next year.

And although it's not immediately apparent on this chart, having this $6 million reserve set aside in 2021 allows the reserve fund set-asides in the out years, which is represented by the smaller gray boxes, it allows those set-asides to be smaller, essentially.

And by virtue of those being smaller, we are able to deliver additional transit service throughout the life of the program.

Next slide, please.

We do have some questions.

Sure.

Is it OK, council members, if we wait until the end of the presentation?

Because they might get answered.

OK, thank you.

Great.

Thank you, council member.

Into project restoration, these are split across two slides.

I'm just going to go through and give a brief overview of what each of these lines represent.

Obviously, if there are more specific questions, we're happy to answer those to the extent we can.

And obviously, we are happy to provide follow-up information if there's something we don't have on hand.

The first item here is actually two projects.

These are projects that were planned for delivery under our Transit Spot Improvement Program.

One is on Gilman Ave.

It's a suite of bus safety improvements, improving pedestrian connections and sidewalk conditions, as well as improving some bus-bike interaction along the corridor.

The second project is a bus stop improvement and expansion at Lake City Way and Northeast 125th Street.

This is a very high volume stop that routinely serves two coaches at the same time.

This project in addition to a bunch of improvements, other improvements will largely increase that capacity so that those two coaches can sort of safely and comfortably serve that stop.

The second item on this slide is a programmatic allocation for the Transit Spot Improvement Program.

So this money is not tied directly to individual projects today.

What this does is it fills a reduction made in future funding for the program.

So this allocation will ensure that the Transit Spot Improvement Program can continue to deliver many of the great projects that they already do.

By way of example, the Transit Spot Improvement Program, well, It will deliver the two projects I just mentioned, but generally delivers red bus lanes, rear door bus pads, stop improvements, signal upgrades, pretty much anything that could benefit transit on the road that the program can and has delivered.

And then the final item on this list is an allocation for the Route 40 Transit Plus Multimodal Corridor Project, which is here to fill an expected gap in grant funding for the program.

So this allocation really helps the Route 40 project stay on schedule, which will see design completion in 2022 and delivery in 2023. Next slide, please.

Great.

Top of the slide here is a small allocation for TPMC, sorry, Transit Plus Multimodal Corridor Program support.

This will help fund a gap in the BRT concept design, CIP, which funds staff and technical resources to support the overall transit with multimodal corridor program.

So similar to the Route 40 allocation, really helping to keep the whole program and all the corridors that program will deliver on track.

Second is a funding restoration for 15th Avenue Northwest and Northwest Market Street signal improvement, which will help support transit signal priority enhancement.

benefiting all the transit that runs there, but the two worth mentioning, I think, are the Route 44 and the RapidRide D line, which are two of our high-frequency and high ridership routes in the system.

And then finally, a large allocation for the 23rd Avenue Phase 3 project, which you heard a little bit about in public testimony.

This is a project that is going to deliver a whole swath of improvements along the corridor, including crossing improvements, sidewalk repair, some minor paving maintenance, signal improvement at 23rd and John benefiting transit, which has a difficult term that it makes there, as well as a dozen bus zone improvements.

And in total, these six, really seven items add up to that $12.7 million allocation that I mentioned earlier.

And with that, I'm going to hand it back off to Candida to finish this out.

So this is just a reminder of where we are today and when we're coming back.

So today's conversation is primarily a discussion about this legislation and then be looking to come back to the committee beginning of April with the $20 BLF spending plan.

So with that concludes our presentation and happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Candida and Nico from SDOT.

And Council Member Strauss had reached out with some, I know he's got some questions as does Council Member Herbold.

Council Member Strauss, why don't you go first?

Thank you, Chair Peterson.

And thank you to everyone from SDOT and Nico.

Great to hear and Candida, great presentation today.

My questions were on slide nine, 10, and on the last slide.

So here, I know that these are, we looked at the transit spot improvement program in this area.

My questions here are, you know, a shared priority of Council Member Peterson and I.

The Route 44 spot improvements were created.

And we understand in the last budget cycle that those dollars, Council backfilled what had been transportation funded.

PB, David Ensign — He-He Him, He-He Hims, He-He Hims important needs that the city funds with general fund.

In addition to that, I'll just speak to Market to Mohi and Thomas Street are other really important projects that I believe received reduced funding in the last budget cycle.

Can you speak to the ability for 976 funding to restore funding to those projects?

Thank you.

I wasn't sure if Cal had something to add because I saw his hand go up.

Oh, got it.

Cal.

Thank you.

If I could just jump in, I guess.

The first thing I just want to highlight is that these funds are reserves of STPD Proposition 1 funds.

So there were legal restrictions on what the funds can be used for.

It has to be used for transit under what we asked, what the voters approved when they first gave us the money.

So there is a, it could not be used for some of the other transportation related projects that do not support improved transit speed and reliability and capacity.

I think that to the extent that there is other general funds or other revenues in the SDOT budget that support those types of projects, this type of funding could displace those general funds.

I'll also add a little bit.

I think that this is really a question of timing.

The 2021 budget process was something that we had in our minds and in consideration and appreciate Council's action to restore both the Route 44, the Route 7. and there's one more i'm sorry i'm forgetting it um so very much appreciated that but um at the point in which we knew that these funds were available there were still a lot of uncertainties and factors to consider and our conversation with chad frankly happened towards the end through november and december and with that knowledge and them understanding with that knowledge that those projects were restored by council.

And I think the other factor here too is after understanding that 976 had been overturned, we still had our ballot measure on the ballot.

And had that failed, these funds would not necessarily be available for any projects, but instead would have to be used to help us ramp down service levels.

And if I could also, I just took a quick look to see what the source of funding is for some of those, the Route 7, the Route 44. It was REIT, that was real estate excise tax that was used.

So it was not general fund that the council approved to support those projects.

Great, helpful clarification.

I guess the question still stands, are we able, since Route 44 specifically is transportation or transit related, are we able to free up those REIT dollars for other uses or, Cal, am I getting out of my lane here?

No, you could, Council Member, I think the funding would be eligible for the Route 44 project.

There is, in 2021, 500,000 of real estate excise tax in that project that could be shifted.

Great, so I guess, Nico or Candida, is that something that we can undertake?

What are the things that I need to do or are there other folks that I need to speak with?

If there's a desire to change the projects on this list, something would need to come off, especially in relation to capital restoration.

This list has been well vetted and supported by both the Levy Oversight Committee and the Transit Advisory Board.

And I think it would be important to make sure our stakeholders have an understanding of any potential changes the council may be interested in making.

Thank you.

I guess I'll take the opportunity to do yes and glad that we're getting Route 44 funded, even if it's not with the original funding source.

And let's get all these projects going.

Which brings me to slide 10. I probably already know the answer, figured I'd ask it anyways.

My assumption is that Madison BRT does not fall under this, that we're waiting on federal funds.

Can you just confirm that $976 are not what we are waiting on to get Madison Bus Rapid Transit running.

In fact, it is the federal government.

That's correct.

You're correct.

Yep.

Sorry, Nico.

That's it.

Yes, you're right.

We're just waiting on a small start grant from the FDA.

All local funds have been secured for Madison BRT.

Excellent.

Thank you for your good work on that.

And then last question for the questions page.

How do we buy more transit?

How do we buy more service hours?

I want all of the service hours.

Yeah, that's a great question.

I'll say within the context of STBD Prop 1, we are at this time limited by the revenue that we are bringing in from the voter approved measure.

To point you back to the spend plan, we are expecting to ramp up the amount of service that we are purchasing under the program over the life as we expect sales tax revenue to increase as the program matures.

Obviously, sales tax is a fickle friend.

As we learned on the downside in 2020, it's very volatile.

That can obviously swing in the opposite direction, as we saw in 2018 and 2019. And so if those projections, or I should say, if revenue beats those projections, certainly we can direct as much of that additional revenue towards more transit service as the program continues.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Chair.

Those are all my questions.

Thank you.

Council Member Herbold, do you want to ask your questions now?

Other council members with questions?

Oh, Council Member Herbold, go ahead.

I'm sorry, it took me a minute to get off of mute.

Just looking at slide eight, and I understand that this slide captures not only the reserves that we're discussing today, but funding under the plan that is yet to come to us.

But as I understand it, even though it says April to December, April to December is really about the new revenue is going to be available.

And I have questions both as it relates to the $5 million in transit service that this action allocates as well as the new dollars that won't be collected until April.

I understand that because of the the fact that Metro does service adjustments in March and September, that this additional transit service is not going to be available until September.

And so that really concerns me because We, as it relates, if you take a look at, for instance, just as one example, and this is just one example that is top of mind for me, the emerging needs category for West Seattle and COVID recovery is a fairly small sliver of dollars for 2021 as compared to 2022. And I think our greatest needs around the West Seattle Bridge closure are going to be coming later this year before September.

And I say before September in light of the fact that, you know, President Biden announced yesterday that all adults will have shots in their arms by the end of May.

So that is going to be impacting when people are working less from home and commuting more and relying on transit service more.

So I'm just wondering, is there any flexibility at all to add service sooner than September?

That's a great question.

And I think something that is top of mind for us as well.

I'll just say briefly, we are planning on making a sizable investment through the emerging needs category in September.

which will, although it comes maybe a little bit later than we would hope, it will allow us to add basically more than we would otherwise since we will be funding it for a shorter period of time, hence the slightly larger allocation in 2022. I'll remind that Metro buses are still operating at about 20% capacity as an artificial limit.

Metro is in sort of internal process to determine what the right timing of beginning to lift those capacity restrictions are.

We expect that those capacity restrictions lifting over some period of time will be probably the primary factor in absorbing a lot of that returning demand to the system.

Obviously, we know that pre-COVID, those buses, especially a lot of the peak-only routes coming out of West Seattle, full in the morning, full in the afternoons coming home.

I think we're anticipating, and obviously this will depend on a lot of factors, but we're anticipating some continued work from home percentage, maybe that's higher than pre-COVID levels, which I think will help to soften that return to work, that increase in demand as people return to work and return to traveling around the city.

So while yes, we may be reaching a pretty high vaccination rate by early summer, late May, that I think there's some room to absorb that.

And I'll say on the Metro side as well, they have some, what they call supplemental service, which are hours that they set aside every service change to respond to unexpected demand in the system.

It's not an enormous amount, but it is that has proven to be an important tool that they've used in the past to address where sort of those crowding needs are greatest.

And we fully expect that if that is seen on West Seattle routes coming out often on the peninsula, that that is a tool that they have to use, that they will use to help address that.

Thank you.

Council members, any other questions?

I want to thank SDOT for all their work outreaching to the official and unofficial stakeholders for these funds.

That was really important, all the work that you did, all the thought you went through to look at what projects were paused, needed to be unpaused, what were already priorities.

Calvin Chow from Central Staff was very helpful in framing this up for us.

So I just want to thank everybody involved for shepherding this to this process so that the committee could vote on it today.

So seeing no further questions, I move that the committee recommend approval of Council Bill 12009, which is item three on our agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you.

It's been moved and seconded to recommend passage of the bill.

Any final comments?

Okay, will the clerk please call the roll on the committee recommendation that Council Bill 120009 be approved for forwarding to the full council.

Herbold?

Yes.

Juarez?

Aye.

Morales?

Yes.

Strauss?

Yes.

Chair Peterson?

Yes.

Five in favor, none opposed.

Thank you.

The motion carries and the committee recommendation is that the bill be sent for approval to the March 8 City Council meeting.

Thanks everybody from SDOT and central staff.

All right.

Will the clerk please read the titles of the next three agenda items, the final three agenda items regarding surveillance technology into the record.

Agenda Items 4 through 6. Council Bill 120002, an ordinance relating to surveillance technology implementation, authorizing approval of uses and accepting surveillance impact reports for Seattle City Lights use of current diversion technologies.

Council Bill 120003. An ordinance relating to surveillance technology implementation, authorizing approval of uses and accepting the surveillance impact report for the Seattle Fire Department's use of computer-aided dispatch.

Council Bill 120004, an ordinance relating to surveillance technology implementation, authorizing approval of uses and accepting surveillance impact reports for the Seattle Police Department's use of surveillance technologies for briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

So we have several folks here from Information Technology Department and from the departments that have the existing technologies for which we're going to eventually approve surveillance impact reports on.

I have a short version introduction.

I'm going to give the longer version just to set the table, provide context for these presentations today.

We had an overview presentation from our information technology department a few weeks ago.

to lay out the lengthy process that's involved for approving surveillance impact reports.

We have a lot of information to get through today.

We're breaking it into three pieces with each of the three departments getting its own council bill.

So I'll ask you to hold your questions till the end of each of the three presentations so you'll get at least three times to ask questions.

We will hear the presentations today, ask questions.

We can vote on amendments and the ordinances themselves at our next meeting, Wednesday, March 17. To vote on amendments at the March 17 committee, we'd want to have those amendments into central staff, Lisa Kay, no later than March 10, so a week from today.

We got these council bills and the executive overviews of the surveillance impact reports onto the introduction referral calendars approved last week, Monday, January 22nd.

So we'd have a little bit more time.

And again, we're not voting on these until two weeks from now.

Some background, surveillance, it's important to look at the Seattle Municipal Code and how surveillance is defined by section 14.18.010.

Surveillance is defined as technologies that observe or analyze the movements, behavior, or actions of identifiable individuals in a manner that's reasonably likely to raise concerns about civil liberties, freedom of speech or association, racial equity, or social justice.

That's an SMC, and that's based on the so-called surveillance ordinance, which was originally passed in 2017 and then amended in 2018. This definition of surveillance is important as we consider what we're trying to achieve in reviewing and approving these three ordinances.

If the discussion of the technology generates other policy matters not related to surveillance, then we may want to consider having the relevant committees take up those non-surveillance policy items, because we're focusing on the surveillance aspect today.

I believe we should consider the trade-offs when reviewing these existing technologies already being used by our city government departments.

Technology with the ability to conduct surveillance if misused or unaccountable is detrimental to liberty and privacy.

At the same time, many of these technologies, if used properly and with accountability, enable city government to save money and improve efficiency and deliver services for the residents and businesses of our city.

I want to thank Cara Valle from my staff for working with Seattle's Information Technology Department.

I'd like to thank Amari Stringer and Ginger Armbruster at Seattle IT, Lisa Kay on our central staff, all the departments that have worked to put together these surveillance impact reports.

One of the consistent suggestions from central staff is to have us potentially adopt the executive overviews as part of these council bills so that we capture the allowable purposes of the technology.

That's a clear and immediate way to insert additional guardrails for how the technology is used.

I'm very open to that approach.

At the end of our committee today, we might want to have central staff talk to us about what they recommend in terms of amendments.

It's also important to note that we have an additional backstop for the use of these technologies, and that's thanks to section 14.18.060 of the Seattle Municipal Code.

That subsection of the surveillance ordinance requires the Office of Inspector General for Public Safety regarding police technology, and our city auditor for all other departments to conduct annual reviews of these technologies.

So we may want to direct them to focus in on certain things that we're concerned about.

City of Seattle has one of the strongest surveillance ordinances in the country, and I look forward to ensuring that this review process is conducted on these existing technologies in a way that still enables us to deliver government services while balancing the need for privacy and protections.

Thank you for giving me the time to have that overview, and I'd like to turn it over to our central staff analyst, Lisa Kaye, for any introductory remarks.

Thank you Councilmember Peterson, Lisa Kay here on your central staff.

You gave a very thorough introduction, so I don't have a whole lot more to add to that.

I think Ginger and possibly Omari were going to give an overview also from the executive side just prior to then my walking through the various bills, the three bills, if that works for you Councilmember.

Yeah, so we'll get a presentation from Information Technology Department, and then we'll get back to Lisa Kay, who will help set the table further on these complex reports.

So, Ginger and Omari, welcome, and others from IDT.

Wonderful.

Mario's going to share his screen to show you the presentation we're going to speak to.

But before we get started, thank you, Council President, or Council Committee President Chair Peterson, all the members of the committee, and central staff, as well as all of our colleagues who've worked on these surveillance impact reports.

I'm going to spend a few minutes just providing a little more information about what our role is in IT, how we have pulled these together, what it takes to build one of these, and some of the pieces and parts that have been delivered so you can understand better the context of what these are.

So, if Omar, you'll go back to the or go to the next slide.

We have a lot to talk about.

When we last came to speak to you as Councilmember Peterson mentioned was on the 20th of January.

We presented what is this to remind everybody of the work we will get into this year.

We presented an overview.

I think most of you were in attendance or your staff were there.

Hopefully you got some perspective on what it is we are about to talk about.

Councilmember Peterson reminded us all.

We have had two things happen But we continue to work on the rest of the technologies that are going to be before you the rest of this year.

Group 3 has already been transmitted to the city clerk and is going through this same review process to be brought to you and to this committee in the future and the referral calendar will have those dates.

We continue to work on group 4 and this is just a place setter.

We had talked to you back in January about the possibility of needing more time to complete that work.

We will need more time to complete that work.

The working group has come back with some requests for more public engagement time and time for them to do review.

So we're not prepared to talk about that today.

We've been working with Council Member Peterson and staff around that request to make sure we're doing that appropriately, understanding that the due date for all of this was the first of this month, but we're in conversation now, and we'll be back to you with more information about that.

Okay, next slide, please, Omari.

And Council Member Peterson did this, so I don't have to read the definition.

But here's the definition one more time.

I will mention there are exclusions around technologies that already have other laws attached to them, like body-worn cameras and police vehicle cameras, security cameras, or technology that monitors only some employees.

These are exclusions, as are things that, opportunities for consent or opt-out.

Folks know that this is happening can say no thank you, not surveillance or not by this definition by the law.

The inclusions speak more to the civil liberties impacts and disparate use and any sharing of information that will lead us to include.

So pretty much it's a surveillance technology.

If it meets the definition, there are no exclusions and a reasonable thought that these inclusions may apply.

And that's what constituted the master list that came up with 26 of these technologies for your consideration.

Okay, next slide, Omari.

What goes into these, they're a lot.

Our job is to project manage these that they come to you in a form in a format you're expecting.

They're submitted for all retroactive and newly proposed technologies, although we don't have any of those to date so we're just working on the ones that have been in use already at the city some for several years some for decades.

There are these parts to the SIR.

The first is a privacy impact assessment, and that is comprised of all of the questions that need to be answered per the ordinance around data collection, management, and policy.

There's some 50 or over 50 of those questions, so that is the bulk of the how are we complying with or what are the issues around policy related to data collected and how is that done.

So that's a big part of the SIR.

The next speaks to a cost-benefit analysis of what does it cost to run these technologies.

We conduct a version of the racial equity toolkit, which you are all familiar with, to get at some of the disparate use and concerns that may exist in the community, so we can start looking at that data.

The next piece is public engagement.

We collect comments and analysis through public engagement that is done over a public comment period as well as actual events.

Some of those used to be in person, not anymore, not this year, last year.

The next is a privacy and civil liberties impact assessment done by the working group.

That is the body of folks from the community, almost half appointed by the legislature, the other half by executive that come to give us perspective and input and comment on these from a civil liberties perspective, from a community perspective.

The next is a CTO response.

And then we package this together with what Council Member Peterson mentioned, which is an executive overview, make this a little more accessible for the community to understand all of the stuff that's in this thing.

Because we also have appendices and supporting documentation, policy references, a whole lot of stuff.

So some of these are quite large, some are a little smaller, but we try to give a synopsis in the executive overview.

And our job, as I said, is to do project management, help our departments make these presentable to you all and help move this along the process.

Next slide, please.

And these take some time, as you can imagine.

Eight to nine months and longer with a request from the working group to add more time for public engagement.

So we start with a draft of these reviews.

We go to a public comment period.

We look at those public comments to look for themes per the ordinance request.

The working group has a couple months to look at these.

We look at this one more time to see if there's any comments, changes, or policy updates we want to make based on those comments.

And now we're at the part where we bring these to you.

Okay, so I believe we're going to get on to the technologies that we're discussing today.

So the first one is for Seattle City Light.

Three technologies that they use, binoculars, a check meter device, and a sensor amp fork.

These are used by the current diversion team.

These are the folks that go out and do investigations when billing does not equal or does not add up for the use of electricity.

They go in and figure out what's happening.

So they have a way to look at meters from a distance.

they're not able to get to the meter directly, and then they have a way to measure current on the technology that we provide from the city so we can see where the discrepancy lies.

The next is the only technology that FHIR is going to speak to, and that is the computer-aided dispatch, or CAD, technology that is used to initiate public safety calls.

This is to figure out who to dispatch, what resources are required in response to an emergency.

And while this is opt-in, obviously we're opting in information, people make a 911 call, personally identifiable information about third parties may be provided without notice to some people, depending.

Same is true of the police version, which is item number five here.

CAT is used in the same way, different system, so we did two different reviews.

And then six and seven speaks to license plate reader technology that police use for patrols so this has to do with identifying stolen cars or other public safety issues and parking enforcement and they are related but separate so they come in in two different flavors for automated license plate reader.

The eighth is cop logic which is an online portal that allows individuals and retailers retail organizations to submit police reports online.

These are for low level crimes, non emergency situations where 911 call would dispatch an officer and that's not necessarily appropriate but information should be gathered.

These are usually for, and Captain McDonough is here, he can speak a little bit more to how that is operated, but that is number eight here.

And then number nine is 911 logging recorder.

This is a system that provides network access to log telephony and radio voice recordings for the 911 call center.

These are used for investigations about police behavior, but also in any other kind of legal discovery so that we have a record of what happened and what was dispatched or what the call was like for 911 intake.

So these are the technologies we're here to discuss.

And Omari is going to take now, Omari is on my team, he is the person responsible and tasked with ensuring that we move these along.

He's going to take a minute and talk to you about the public engagement process that we engage in.

Go ahead, Omari.

Thanks for the intro, Ginger, and thank you, Chair Peterson, for having us, members of the committee, and other folks from my SIR leads.

Hi.

So I'm going to talk about the public engagement that we did for these Group 2 technologies.

And I wanted to back up a little bit and talk about the groupings that we have in these technologies came from a council request to kind of bundle these technologies together so that we didn't have to do piecemeal public engagement or piecemeal reviews of these.

We could look at these in bundles.

So in 2019, we did a pretty wide reach for public engagement on these technologies.

You can see this is a screenshot of the website that we put up, Seattle.gov slash surveillance, a pretty easy site to get to, where we post all of these drafts or documents, right?

So we post the whole, the draft surveillance impact report.

We post a one page flyer, a summary of the technology.

That's also translated into the seven tier one languages in the city, as well as our event materials are also translated.

We also produced one to two minute videos for each of these technologies that were posted online so that people can really get an understanding of what is this technology?

What is it used for?

What are the potential concerns around the use of this technology?

This is all in support of getting the public informed about, A, the use of these technologies, but also informing their opinions about what are their concerns about it?

Do they see a benefit to this?

Is there a concern that they have?

And really provide them the context to provide public comment and review that this body can look at when they're looking at the CSRS.

As Jitra mentioned, all the public comment that we do gets bumbled up.

And put into the service so you can see both thematic analysis of what did we point out as the major concerns that people saw as well as the individual comments from residents or organizations who wrote for or expressing concerns for these technologies.

So moving on to a little bit more detailed view we held public engagement for these two years ago, and these were, we had a combination of online opportunities and in person events hosted in community at Seattle Public Library locations.

We call the kind of a technology fair style events so similar to what you'll hear from departments today.

We have the department subject matter experts come and speak and provide context about these technologies and have the ability for folks to ask questions about the use of these technologies.

And these presentations that we did in person were recorded and also posted online in case folks couldn't attend or wanted to review them later for providing their public comment.

As I mentioned, we did produce the kind of two-minute video overviews of the technologies as well, and those also had translated captions.

We really wanted to make sure that folks had the ability to engage with these however they wanted to.

We also partnered with the Department of Neighborhoods to run focus groups, partnering with some community-based organizations to make sure that we're doing outreach to some folks who may not be receiving these normal channels, right, who may not be aware of this online offering.

And so you can see here the comments received from the different engagement methods.

We ran a online survey, which is by far the kind of most successful way for people to easily provide online comments, but we also did accept comments by mail into an email inbox, surveillance at seattle.gov.

So that's a very high level overview of the public engagement that we did, but really our emphasis is on making sure that folks are aware what technologies are under review.

We can provide the information to them and then get that information back in the form of comments and our analysis.

So that concludes the slides that we wanted to present.

We wanted to give you an overview of what these SIRs are, how we got the information we did.

And I believe now central staff will take you through the rest of the presentation.

We're here to answer any questions about any of the part that we are participating in.

And that concludes what we have.

Thank you.

Yes, we'd like to get Lisa Kay's councilmembers.

I'm going to turn it over to Lisa Kay.

Lisa Kay from central staff did write a memo for each of the ordinances.

Those are posted online with the agenda which is really helpful.

Lisa, I think you have a presentation as well to frame things up for councilmember

OK, so I am just making sure I have a couple of different versions of this.

I want to make sure I've got the right version for you and the right version for me.

While Lisa is doing that, I just want to thank her and all the staff members who've assisted in this, bringing this to the committee at this time.

Thank you.

OK, so here we are.

Yes, and I want to thank you, Ginger and Omari.

You've been amazing help, as have the executive staff who've answered many, many of my many questions that I posed to you about these SIRs.

It's a fairly large body of work for everybody involved.

So thank you all.

It's been, it's been a joy working with you all.

Well, I don't know about a joy, but anyhow, it's been good.

So as Council Member Peterson said, the committee's got three bills before you today that will together approve nine surveillance use of, continued use of nine surveillance technologies.

and accept the surveillance impact reports for each of them.

I'm going to be calling surveillance impact reports servers, just because it has fewer consonants or syllables.

So let me figure out how to, I'm just trying to move my, there we go.

So, Ginger talked a little bit about what's in each CERV, so I'm not going to go over this.

I wanted to let you know that in my staff memos, as you all know, I've identified what I've called policy considerations.

But I want to note for your, again, that these are primarily where the working group's recommendations have gone beyond the mitigation described in the CERVs.

These aren't intended as staff recommendations in some cases.

I will note where they are and aren't.

So you've got three different categories of policy considerations.

The working group recommendations where information is incomplete.

And then also I will flag for you if there are particular legal or logistical parameters that would affect how you could address these concerns.

So I'm going to go ahead and start with the current diversion technologies here.

Running my multiple screens here.

So this first council bill, 120-002, is on page 78 of your agenda packets, or you can use the link on item four of your agenda.

This bill would approve Seattle City Light's continued use of the three current diversion technologies and accept the CSRS for each.

So as Ginger noted, these technologies are basically used to investigate suspected electricity theft.

The CSRS are attachments one, two, and three to the council bill and are printed on pages 81 to 546 of your agenda materials.

Agenda item four provides a link to my staff memo, which you can also find on page 553 of your agenda materials.

In the SIR itself, noted that City Light had not, didn't anticipate any civil liberties impacts from the use of the current diversion technologies, but did identify that they plan to conduct an equity analysis of past enforcement locations to confirm their assumption.

That analysis hasn't been completed yet.

The Racial Equity Toolkit also reports that CEDLITE hasn't yet finalized the metrics to be used as part of CTO's annual equity assessments.

That'll be a common finding that you'll see in here, that those metrics, most of the departments haven't got those metrics finalized yet.

In terms of the public comments that were received, there was some support for the use of these technologies.

There was some concern about outdated technology, and invasion of privacy, potential invasion of privacy.

The working group identified one major or submitted one impact assessment for all three current diversion technologies and identified these three main issues that the The policies don't seem, in Working Group's opinion, don't sufficiently restrict the use of these technologies to a particular purpose, and they raise questions about data protection and retention.

The CTO's response, and again, was that City Light's policy and training and the limitations of the technologies themselves provide adequate mitigation to address the Working Group concerns.

I do want to note for you that you're going to see that bottom line sentence a lot on these slides, But that's really just a consolidation of, that's just the bottom line of what they found.

The response memos of the CTOs have quite a bit more information, and they include multiple citations from the CSRS that lead them, that support that particular finding.

And so I will show you, I will reference to you, for example, table one on page four of my staff memo provides those additional details from the CTOs response.

And you can also see on table two on page four of my staff memo, how the SIR addresses issues in the recommendations.

So just to note, the distinction really between what I call concerns and what the, well, actually the impact assessments call concerns, and then impact assessments also include a set of specific recommendations.

The recommendations speak to how the working group believes the city council should address those concerns.

The CTO has not addressed the recommendations per se, because that really is getting into departmental area of expertise.

And that's why we have some of, why we have the folks here from the executive department to answer some of your questions about that.

Lisa, thank you.

We are having trouble, a little trouble hearing you.

So if you don't mind speaking up for us.

I'm sorry.

Let me, let me use my projecting voice.

All right, stage voice.

Okay, yeah, you know, I wasn't in theater, but I should have been.

My daughter does that, and she's taught me a lot.

So looking at the policy considerations in here, what we flagged for the current diverse in technologies, the working group recommended the explicit limitations on the use of technology.

So the council may consider, as Joe Peterson noted, going ahead and adopting the executive overviews along with the CSRS.

The executive overviews identify specific language that represents the only allowable use of the equipment and data collected by this technology.

The next two considerations are things that I flagged.

And you'll see again, this will come up on most of these that the department hasn't finished completing its metrics for the annual equity assessment.

And also I did some investigation into why the CER was titled binocular slash spotting scope.

City Light said that they're just using spotting scope as an informal reference to binoculars.

But for those of you who watch birds a lot, spotting scope is a different piece of equipment.

So I would probably recommend just taking off the reference to spotting scope.

It's not a term that's used in the SI or anywhere else.

So I would pause here for any questions and answer questions that the council members may want to pose to the executive.

Thank you, Lisa.

So, Councilmembers, we want to hear questions about the first ordinance, which is the Seattle City Light technologies that they use.

Lisa Kay has a central staff memo on this ordinance, and there's also an executive overview, which summarizes the surveillance impact report.

councilmember Morales has her hand up and it looks like councilmember Herbold will have questions.

councilmember Morales, go ahead, please.

I know there are several common issues that have been raised across all of these SIRs.

I would like to know, you know, it sounds like for all of them, the issue of identifying metrics for the equity assessment has not been completed.

I don't think for any of them.

And so one question I definitely have is what is the anticipated ETA for when metrics will be identified and when the assessments will actually begin.

You know, that is obviously an important issue for the city is understanding the disparities that some of these surveillance technologies might have.

And so I think that really needs to be bumped up as a priority and would like to hear if there is a plan for that.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

I might take that first.

We have been informing and working with departments on this issue really from the beginning since 2017, but because none of these technologies have been approved yet, We were waiting a little bit to hear what were the, were there any additional policy recommendations, any additional concerns coming from council before these were approved, before implementing what should this tracking be.

Alerting departments that they're gonna need to start tracking to this, the racial equity toolkit portion of this, identifying some of the areas where that can occur.

And the equity report from the CTO is due on September of every year.

So depending on where these land, we'll have more or less data to offer.

So for example, the group one SERS will have something to offer this year in September for the equity review.

So it's an ongoing piece of work.

We can come back and report to you what we've landed on for each of these.

And that's probably the best answer I can give you at this time.

Thank you.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

Two questions on this one.

The first relates to records retention, and I don't know if, Lisa, you're capturing the policy consideration under restrictions on use or whether or not that would be a separate policy consideration, but I'm interested to know for these investigations, whether or not Galaxy Light maintains records, and if so, how long they maintain the records, and whether or not there are restrictions on the use of these records.

And then, secondly, I'm just curious, and I don't know, Chair Peterson, if you would consider this a policy question as opposed to a question that's really focused on the technology itself.

But I just generally have a question of why binoculars are still being used after the installation of advanced meters.

I'm going to, if you don't mind, I'm going to go ahead and turn that over to the City Light Rep here to answer those questions.

All of the departments retain records in consistent with the state retention schedule, which is actually codified in RCW.

So, but the specific breakdown, I will leave to City Light to talk about.

It's a great question, and we should get those questions out.

I think it's when we get to the point of amendments that if they go too much into a policy unrelated to surveillance technology, then we might want to bifurcate it.

But for the questions, it's a good question.

So City Light is here, I think, potentially to answer that.

Sorry, we're not able to hear you.

How's that?

Is that better?

Sorry about that.

I don't use Zoom very often, so my settings weren't right.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Michelle Vargo.

I'm the Deputy Chief Operating Officer for Seattle City Light.

And the AMI question is a great question.

I actually was hoping to have an opportunity to speak about that.

Definitely, I don't disagree with any of the recommendations that this process has uncovered.

And I think in particular, when we talk about the policy surrounding this program, AMI certainly has an impact on this program, and it is diminishing our need for any of these tools.

Certainly, there's not 100% rollout of AMI, so there might be circumstances where we're still using these technologies.

But I can tell you the research that I've done.

We have a new current diversion coordinator as of late 2018. And she has told me that we've only used these technologies and actually two of these technologies less than six times since she started in this position.

So these are not technologies that we're using quite often.

I think we were just trying to be fully transparent with these programs and making sure that they were visible, that we do occasionally use them.

Does that answer the question?

So for the AMI question, so you're saying that the binoculars are used in cases when people have opt out of AMI, and that's what the purpose of allowing the use of binoculars, because again, it seems like all the information that you would need to do an investigation could be captured without binoculars for people who have not opted out of AMI.

I'm sorry, I don't quite understand the question.

The use of binoculars should not be needed for folks that are opted out of AMI?

No, I'm assuming – you said – I thought I heard you say that binoculars are still in use because AMI is not 100 percent rolled out.

I'm just trying to – given that all the information that would allow you to investigate potential electricity theft is capturable without binoculars for people who have an AMI system, I'm just trying to understand why you still have binoculars as one of your surveillance technologies.

And what I thought I heard you say is because AMI is not 100 percent rolled out.

That's exactly true, Council Member, and this is Deborah Smith, and I think there's two instances.

One is yes, there will be times where we need to put visual eyes on meters that are behind a fence or behind a place that we have access to.

for diversion purposes, that number will continue to go down as we complete our AMI rollout, which right now has about 27,000 meters that have not been updated.

So the use of binocular spotting scopes right now, we are still using those at times to read the meter for those customers who you accurately brought up.

That will be the case for customers who opt out.

in certain situations indefinitely.

But right now, we are still having to use those devices to read meters that we have not yet converted.

So once those are all complete, the number of times that we will use any of these tools will be dramatically reduced.

Thank you.

And then I still have a question about the records retention length.

And Lisa did mention that there is an RCW that defines this, but I thought I remembered also from a central staff briefing that Lisa gave that at least one of the departments that we're hearing from today I don't remember which department it was.

I don't remember which department it was.

I don't remember which department it was.

I don't remember which department it was.

And we'll get to the fire department technology next.

Any questions more for the Seattle City Light?

Obviously, we can go back to this later if you think of something, but for now, council members, anything on Seattle City Lights?

Three technologies already in use, or do you want, or may we move to the fire department?

Okay, Lisa K., why don't we move to the fire department?

Oh, and you're on mute, Lisa, okay.

Well, then I would have to speak even louder than usual if I'm muted.

Okay, so this is the second bill that's before the committee today.

It's Council Bill 120-003.

It's on page 603 of your agenda materials, or you can find the link on item five of your agenda.

This bill would approve the Seattle Fire Department's continued use of computer-aided dispatch technology and accept the completed service.

The SIR is attachment one to the council bill and can be found starting on page 606 of your agenda materials.

My staff memo on this item begins on page 968 of your agenda materials.

I would note that this SIR has been updated to reflect the merger of the technology vendor.

So the technology was provided by a company called Tritec for years and years and years.

It has recently merged with two other vendors into a new firm known as Central Square.

I know that the impact assessment asked about whether that merger affected any of the privacy and contractual provisions.

I've been advised by CL Fire that those provisions remain the same.

So the SIR has been updated to reflect that merger.

The SIR identified two potential civil liberties potential disparate impacts, potential disclosure of personally identifiable information, and the possibility that sensitive information could be used by law enforcement to target members of historically marginalized communities or track locations in history of service requests.

So again, this technology is the system that helps advise the dispatchers who take the 911 calls to the fire department about which units are available, whether those are EMT units or ladder trucks, things like that, which units are available and which ones should potentially be deployed to the particular call.

So the fire department in the SIR has identified how they would mitigate the impacts that they identified by asking people who are asking for public disclosure requests to voluntarily redact personal information before receiving that response.

They also notify at times individuals who may be affected.

So they can seek a court order to enjoin the release of those records.

They provide information to law enforcement only relative to an active investigation.

And that has to be confirmed by the fire department's public disclosure officer and recorded for auditing purposes.

Finally, yes, the fire department uses as a quality insurance manager to check the data for accuracy and compliance with the departmental dispatch policies and procedures.

I would note, again, you already heard from Ginger why the annual equity assessments metrics haven't been completed yet.

In terms of public comments that came in with respect to this technology, there weren't very many of those.

Some expressed support.

Some, again, expressed concerns about outdated technology and potential invasion of privacy.

The policy considerations identified for you.

Turning my notes here, sorry.

Again, speak to restrictions on the use.

So the recommendation is that you could adopt the executive overview again.

This is the issue that Council Member Herbold flagged about data retention, that the fire department holds these records for the life of the of the technology system.

And that's well in excess of the minimum requirements of state law.

State law requires six years of retention for fire incident reports and three years for backup data and tapes.

So council may want to consider establishing or requesting the fire department to establish a limit as to the period for which the fire department retains its data.

In terms of third party data sharing, This is also a recommendation that you'll see come up several times from the working group that the city should hold its third party partners to the same restrictions that the city is held to.

This was a recommendation that was made for the group one.

CERs, specifically for CCTV, for example, the working group suggested that the city should be holding the State Department of Transportation to the city's privacy requirements.

And there are just, that's not really feasible.

We can't really tell other levels of government how they should operate.

And in some instances, it may not be feasible to even require that of some of our major third party contractors.

So the council could consider asking fire department to look into whether they can do this or not, where it's feasible.

And again, that equity assessment metrics, you've already heard the discussion about that those will be forthcoming.

So I would pause here for any questions to, I know we have fire department staff on the line.

Thank you.

And I know Council Member Herbold's question earlier seems to apply here on the data retention, that it sounds like the fire department is holding the information for much longer than required by state law.

We have a number of things that we are looking at.

We are picking up themes here of potential amendments or additional guardrails we might want to put in place.

Councilmembers, we are pausing here at the fire department computer aided dispatch item.

This is existing technology.

the process has done a lot of work, sort of ferreting out things that we might want to ask questions about.

And Lisa Kay's memo is available, which highlights some of the things in her PowerPoint here.

And, you know, getting to her by March 10th, next Wednesday with any potential amendments would be helpful so that we can proceed on March 17th.

We obviously have the police department items coming up next.

I predict that we will be I know we have a lot of work ahead of us.

We will try to wrap it up by 1230. I know it is going along here, but we do need to get through these technologies as part of the committee work.

Lisa, why don't you move ahead with the police department items?

with this council bill.

And I will be providing the same kind of background information as you just heard for the city light and the fire department bills.

Do you want me to pause after each one and allow, so that council members can ask questions specific to each of the technologies or?

Okay.

How about if you pause after the first two items do the automated license plate readers and parking enforcement system together, and then...

I think that's very logical.

Okay.

That makes a lot of sense.

Okay, so the five SIRS D attached to this Council Bill 120-004 are attached on your agenda, as is my staff memo.

My staff memo starts on page 2269. The attachments in your agenda packets are in a different order than what we're going to be doing on the screen, but I'm following the order that I used in my staff report.

There were just some technical glitches for which I apologize.

So moving, so we'll talk about the automated license plate readers and the parking enforcement automated license plate readers together then.

Well, I'll just do them both at once.

So the automated license plate readers, as Ginger mentioned, are used to help identify stolen vehicles and vehicles that are wanted in conjunction with felonies.

I think I moved forward too fast on this slide.

They are also used to help, I'm sorry, they're helped to find wanted persons in the silver and amber awards.

The SPDs serve for this, technology identified potential impacts that they could be used to identify individuals without reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime.

They could be used to search for information that's not related to a particular active investigation.

And there is a risk of that vulnerable and historically targeted communities could be overly surveilled.

Public comments that came in on this back in 2018, were identifying some support of concerns about data retention, security, privacy, potential for error or misuse and surveillance in general.

So I want to note that SBD did update its relevant policies after that fall 2018 public engagement period and have the SIR includes updated policies that address I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I think it's a good point.

I know we will still have questions and issues that we will raise, but it was good to hear that the long CERS process actually resulted in policies being changed in real time to tighten things up.

Thank you.

And I will just, foreshadowing the parking enforcement, that many of these same assessment issues were identified for the parking enforcement system too.

So I will be referring to these.

So the working group identified the question about allowable use of data, had questions about data access, collection, retention, and sharing, how the system would be audited, and whether these technologies actually produce a measurable outcome in crime The CTO's response was that the updated policies, the training, and the limitations of the technologies themselves provide adequate mitigation.

You'll see tables that I have in my staff memo, table one on page four and five, provides additional details about the CTO's response.

Table two on page six of my staff memo shows how the CER addresses the issues pertaining, specifically pertaining to the recommendations.

So at this point, the main policy consideration that hasn't been addressed in the SIR is the restriction on use.

Again, that's the recommendation is that the committee could adopt the executive overview.

Let me just move right into the parking enforcement systems then in the interest of time.

So the parking enforcement system license plate reader system are used to enforce parking laws and also can provide information in support of finding stolen vehicles or those sought in connection with criminal investigation.

This SIR was also updated in 2019 after the public engagement process in the fall of 2018. The same potential civil liberties and potential disparate impacts were identified in the SIR.

The SIR did note that response to these updated policies that were put in place effective February 1 would be compiled and analyzed as part of the CTO's annual equity assessments.

Public comments, and again, these are from the fall of 2018, expressed some support, concerns about data retention, concerns about equitable enforcement, parking enforcement, and overall concerns about surveillance.

So the policy considerations with respect to these two technologies or with parking enforcement systems which overlap with patrols use are the restrictions on use, the data sharing.

This is one that I would flag is that the working group has suggested that patrol and parking enforcement do not share data.

That would be a major change in how police department operates right now.

So any amendments, I'd need to be working closely with the city attorney's office on how to best structure that kind of an amendment.

The impact assessment also asked about how the system is audited.

And again, the same question about how effective is this technology in actually reducing crimes.

So keep hitting the wrong button.

So I think that I did one more policy consideration, and this didn't come out of the working group, is that for reasons not entirely clear, the software, the hardware for the parking enforcement, the cameras themselves are characterized in the surveillance technology.

But there's an explicit statement that the software that is used to get the information off the hardware is non-surveillance technology.

I didn't, I'm not, there has been a lot of turnover in the police department since this was drafted.

And so there wasn't really an institutional memory as to the rationale for doing that.

And so it is, it would actually be my recommendation that the council consider adopting, if they adopted the CER, they make note that that would also be approving the software as surveillance technology also.

Thank you for that recommendation.

So out of the five SPD technologies, we've just gone over the first two, which are, um, uh, and, and the reason we wanted to do these two together is because of that policy consideration, the second one there, um, data sharing between patrol police patrol and parking enforcement.

Um, so I guess we do have, um, a representative from the police department here, cap captain McDonough.

and captain, you know, if you're not able to answer these questions on the spot, it's something where you can get back to Lisa K on our city council central staff, but we could just sort of get the questions out onto the record.

And then we have three more technologies to go over, but real quick, the, um, their benefits.

So, so currently there is data sharing between patrol and parking enforcement.

Is that correct?

Not from patrol to parking enforcement.

And thank you, Council Member, for the opportunity to speak.

Not between patrol and the parking enforcement.

It's from parking enforcement to patrol so that we can check for those vehicles that may or may not have been involved in criminal activity.

So yes, there is sharing across the board, but it's the only ones that from PEO that share with us are the scofflaw violators, because that can also pop up on the patrol when they do their patrol.

Okay, thank you for that clarification.

So you know, as we know, there's discussions about having parking enforcement move to a different department.

And so that is something we'll may want to keep our eye on in terms of what what's the policy for for that sharing from parking enforcement, choosing to share it with SPD patrol, but to me it doesn't speak to the technology itself, but it's something, a policy I think we want to keep our eye on.

Others may disagree about how I'm framing that, but I did want to raise this issue because I know it is a concern that's been raised.

parking enforcement folks sharing the scuff law information with patrol.

And this is a good moment for me to thank our surveillance working group, a group of, it's like an advisory board that we have that volunteers and meets to participate in this process to give us, to raise concerns early, to hold everybody accountable So I want to thank all the people who have volunteered in the past and currently with the surveillance working group that I'm digressing here.

Council members, any on these first two SPD technologies, the license plate reader and the parking enforcement, is there anything you would like to raise?

Council member Herbold.

Thank you.

As it relates specifically to the PEOs moving out of SPD, and this will come up again, I think, for the 911 question, the issue of data sharing between SPD divisions aside, I'm just flagging whether or not there needs to be a consideration of a technical change, given that we're talking about that we can consider now depending on the I heard, Lisa, you say that, and Chair Peterson, you as well, talking about how the process itself made it possible for SPD to adjust some of its policies in response to concerns.

Can we just get a little bit more detail about how policies have been changed?

Just concerns have been raised to the CSRS process?

Council Member Peterson, would you like me to address some of that?

Yes, please.

And also, Lisa Kate, feel free to jump in as well.

I'll let Lisa go first.

Sorry.

Go ahead.

Oh, I'm fine with you doing it.

I spoke to it some in my memo, but I think it's probably your time is limited before the committee right now.

So I think it would be better.

Okay, so real quickly, the department's committed to the transparency and the actions that are required under the ordinance.

So in terms of this, we've tightened up and ensured that there's an accountability structure built into the software itself.

So every user is identified, every user has authorizations.

So not just anybody can get into the different ALPR systems.

So with that, they also have to complete CEGIS training, which is criminal justice information sharing requirements for information sharing, et cetera.

We do the access training, which is the state of Washington's training, which limits the release and use of information gained through your job.

And then, of course, we have the privacy and information security program here initiated by the city.

So we have a lot of those put in there.

We do, in fact, have a 90-day retention.

which we follow law to make sure that we keep the information long enough, but not too long, as was illustrated earlier in some of the conversations.

So real briefly, that's some of the big stuff.

But the Office of Inspector General is also the other unit that will be performing audits on all of these.

And they have full access to all of our systems.

So they'll be able to perform any audits that are required by council.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So council members, we can go into the other three items.

Um, unless councilor Morales, I don't know if that hand is up from the previous.

You might have questions on the next three items.

Oh, apologies.

I will lower my hand.

Okay.

Lisa K go ahead and let's talk about the other three SPD technologies.

Okay.

Uh, the next one is, um, the police department's computer aided dispatch.

So as Ginger mentioned, this is a, parallel system that performs the same functions as a fire department's computer you dispatch, but for police.

Just getting a hold of here.

I need to have somebody run my slides while I'm looking at my...

I'd help you if I could, Lisa.

I know.

I apologize, people.

You're doing great.

It's a lot better.

I'm hitting the wrong arrows, and it's just really getting very annoying to everybody, I'm sure.

So the police identified potential civil liberties and disparate impacts, as you see on the screen here.

I'm just going to kind of flip through this.

There are impact assessment issues.

that were raised by the working group really spoke to allowable use of data, data access and retention.

They specifically said they wanted to make sure operators were trained to policies.

The CTO's response said that the CERR provided information specific to that concern.

And as you'll see on the tables in my memo, I've identified where that specific information addressed many of those issues.

And so that, That basically funneled the policy considerations down to these two then, the restrictions on use, which again could be spoken to by adopting the executive overview and the annual equity assessment metrics, which you've heard about.

That was a very short version of that particular briefing.

Did you want to get any questions on that right now, Council Member Peterson?

Council Member Morales has a question about SPD computer-aided dispatch.

Thank you.

It is, again, a broader question.

It seems throughout this that there's a tension between concerns about data retention, data being held longer than seems necessary, and the state law that, if I'm understanding right, requires 90 days.

And so I'm wondering if there were any recommendations or if there is a stated preference for what the data retention policy could look like instead if it weren't for this state law and if there's any other mechanism for us to try to address that or incorporate something a little different.

And I can get those specifics to you about, yes, the working group on almost all of these had a preference for what the retention periods would be if they could say what those were.

And so I can send those to you.

And again, the state law pretty much establishes what they are.

Thanks for that question.

All right.

Now, the next item, the COP logic, I'm sure we'll have questions about.

So let's dive into that.

OK.

And I'm going to walk through that one just a little bit more slowly.

So the approval of the Council Bill 120004 would approve the continued use of cop logic and the serve for this.

This technology is being used right now in two applications.

One is individual reporting of low-level crimes, as Ginger mentioned, and the other is retail theft reporting.

So individual reporting of low-level crimes would be if you were burglarized, for example, and you needed to file an insurance claim, you would be able to report this online and get the appropriate police report number that you could put into your insurance claim so you could recover whatever the insurance would pay for.

The retail theft reporting application is very different, and this is used by business owners to be able to report suspected shoplifting or shoplifters instead of having a police officer show up.

And I would mention that the police say that the business application of this saves the city or saves the police department a million dollars a year and 20,000 hours of police time a year.

there are some significant issues that have been raised that I'll cover by the working group and some of the members of the public about that retail theft program.

So in the SIR, the police department did identify potential disparate impacts as that information could be disseminated in a way that could negatively impact people's civil liberties, that racial or ethnicity-based information could be entered in the system, and that by using data sharing and storage and retention, it could contribute and reinforce structural racism, which would thereby create a disparate impact on historically targeted communities.

Lisa, for the saving of the million dollars and the police hours, was that just for the retail component?

Yes.

Okay, thanks.

The public comments that were received expressed some support Some requests that the technology, and I believe this would be for the individual track, would be available in languages other than English.

There were concerns, as I said, about uneven access to the programs, but potential for racial bias in the reports, for inaccurate reports, for unfair treatment of suspects, data collection, retention, and sharing concerns.

The impact assessment issues paralleled a lot of those, the available use of data, data retention, questions about the civil liberty impacts of the retail theft program.

The working group came right out and recommended discontinuing the retail theft track.

The CTO's response, and again, this is to the issues, not to the recommendations, the CTO's response was that the policies and training and the limitations of technologies provide adequate mitigation for the concerns.

But again, the CTO did not respond to the recommendations as those would be best addressed by the departments who would be affected by the recommendations.

CTO doesn't have insight into how all the departments operate.

So in the policy considerations that I've identified as coming forward, the retail theft reporting component is something that any amendments that would affect that, I would want to be able to work with the city attorney's office on how to craft that kind of an amendment that the request to hold LexisNexis accountable for the same or to the same restrictions, privacy restrictions that the city has might be difficult to negotiate.

But again, you know, the Council could certainly request that SBD look into that where it's feasible.

Those are kind of the two major issues that pertain to cop logic that I saw.

Okay, so again, this, Council Members, this cop logic is two different things going on.

One is the online reporting, just filing police reports online, and the other is the retail I think it is important to have a component where store owners or proprietors can register things without having the police show up.

We have Captain McDonough here who can talk further about this.

I want to just relay one of the, so we've got these issues that are identified with CalpLogic, concerns that folks have.

We did receive lots of comments from folks, one of whom suggests that a lot of the concerns could be minimized by migrating from a cloud-hosted service to an on-premise locally-hosted system.

So I wonder if that is something that is being considered as a way to address the workgroup concerns.

That's a good question.

So if it's OK, Council Member Peterson, I'll start.

And then if Ginger's still online, there's a number of IT issues with that.

And I believe that, if I'm not mistaken, the cloud-based services tend to be more financially prudent.

In terms of the sharing of the information, we're still looking into that with the way it was phrased here, that they're sharing our data without our knowledge.

I don't actually have the contract, so I'd have to look at it.

But most of the contracts, my understanding is limits that it's our data, you're just storing it for us.

So I'm not 100% sure.

I'd have to defer to someone else on that.

But in terms of looking at it, obviously, we can do anything that council requests.

So I'll turn that over to maybe Ginger or somebody else from IT.

I haven't heard this request before, but I would say in general on-prem solutions are expensive.

There are other issues associated with privacy and security of data collection in that way.

And the way that we vet our cloud providers, as Captain McDonough referred to, is ensuring that our contracts are in place to ensure that the data is owned by the city.

And in many cases, we don't have a lot of oversight or can't have a lot of change we can make happen as they have other customers in place.

But that's why when we go into contract situations with cloud providers, we are careful to look at data ownership and data use.

And usually, any data they use that we are providing is to improve the service.

So there are some standard contract terms.

What we don't want them to do is be sharing data without us knowing.

And that's something we take into account when we contract with a cloud provider.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

I will probably have some follow-up questions, but we can do that offline.

I appreciate it.

Happy to help.

Yes, for the viewing public, just because Councilmembers don't ask questions during committee doesn't mean they won't have additional questions later.

I see Councilmember Herbold here, but I just want to assure the public that I know all the Councilmembers are thinking about these and considering what articulate them today because there's lots of information to go through.

Council Member Herbold, go ahead, please.

Thank you.

And I just want to ask the question publicly that I received information about in the central staff briefing.

It's my understanding that there is no way to separate out the retail theft reporting component from the member of the public theft reporting component of CopLogic, that those are integrated into the single technology and it's not possible to buy one part of it and not also buy slash use the other part of it.

Is that accurate?

Councilmember, I think when you and I were talking about that, I was under the impression you were curious about whether we could have two different SIRs for each track.

I didn't realize it was the acquisition question.

And so for that, I'd turn that over to Captain McDonough.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember.

I'm not 100% sure because I didn't actually work on this project.

I'm just here because I know a little bit about IT, not as much as Ginger.

In terms of that, the retail theft reporting program is very strict.

I'm not sure if council understands that every report that is submitted is reviewed by a police officer before it's accepted.

So the detective in charge of the program reads every report.

And those reports are generated the major retail establishments downtown.

I believe we have 59 active retail stores right now, and then another 12 security companies that provide security for a number of different venues.

It reduces the amount of time that any of the individuals that they detain on site for theft is reduced.

They don't have to sit and wait for a police officer to respond.

So they can expedite it, but there is a number of criteria in there that they have to actually spell out the exact crime that was committed in detail, and then list all the evidence that they have for that.

And fortunately, excuse me, fortunately, most of our retail establishments have some sort of video and or photographic system, the receipt system, they take physical, photographs of the physical evidence, and they present all of that.

So we do try to make it very tight, but then once they submit that, they have to sign a, when they electronically sign the form, it says that all the information is true and correct, or they face the possibility of perjury charges.

So, I mean, the program itself, the Retail Theft Loss Prevention Officers like the program because it expedites it.

It allows them to get through the case and get back to work a lot faster.

Obviously, it reduces us, But there's still that accountability built in that they said, yeah, everything here is accurate.

And anything that doesn't meet the criteria, the detective kicks back.

If they've failed to return it, it's never entered into the system and is deleted.

So they have, I believe it was 120 days, to be able to update the information and answer the specific questions of the detective.

And if they answer it, then the detective will go ahead and accept it.

Eventually, probably filed with the city attorney's office, maybe county prosecutors, but they'll accept it and it'll go into our system.

If we don't accept it, it doesn't stick around.

So in terms of that, I do think there's some components that actually help protect those people who may be detained to ensure that someone can't overtly do something like that and does do it on some sort of categorical response that they have.

If I may.

When we were speaking about this technology cap to McDonough, we also spoke about the difference between someone placing a 911 call for the same purpose versus the cop logic option in terms of the data collected, information acquired, and what the difference would be.

Yeah, there's really not much more difference in that.

And what we've done is we've shifted the responsibility out to loss prevention officers and increasing the time for patrol officers to stay out in the field to do other jobs.

Most of these are, as everyone knows, misdemeanor offenses.

And we get a few that says, hey, there was a gray-haired gentleman wearing a dark suit with a blue tie, and he shoplifted, and he went that way.

But again, there's no personal identifying information.

If they have a photograph, they'll attach it.

Same type of thing happens when the officer gets there.

It speeds it up because they can actually add the information to the case report, and the detective can look at all the evidence.

In the field, oftentimes we have to wait for them to either give us a thumb drive and then ship it to evidence and transfer it back and forth or having them mail it in.

So it does in fact have a very good benefit as council member Peterson mentioned earlier, uh, 20,000 hours was the assessment for 2018. And it's a cost of just over a million dollars of patrol, uh, resources that are freed up to do other things.

We could potentially, Council members, hear the last item, the last technology, and then if you still have questions about COP logic, we can come back to it.

But to keep us moving here, Lisa, if you don't mind, do the last technology for us.

Certainly.

So the last of the five SIRs that would be approved by Council Bill 120-004 is the 911 Logging Recorder.

I think Ginger talked about this and described it as automatically recording all the telephone calls that are received by police's 911 center and radio traffic between dispatchers and the patrol officers.

The police department identified some potential disparate impacts and civil liberties impacts, very similar to what was identified for the CAD system, potential disclosure of personally identifiable information.

the potential to contribute to structural racism through data sharing, storage, and retention.

The public comments that were received expressed some support for this, some concerns about data use, retention, and sharing.

So similar there.

The impact assessment issues raised questions about the allowable use of data, data retention and sharing, data retention or choice, sorry, and vendor and third-party contract provisions.

The CTO's response was that the CERB provided the information specific to each concern.

And the policy considerations here, I broke out the restrictions on use as two different ways, but it's basically the restrictions on use that we can address or the council could address through the executive overview adoption.

And then the second is really the third party restrictions on use that same interest in holding our vendors accountable to the same policies as the police department is.

And we've already talked about the equity assessments.

So that's what I had on the 9-1-1 logging recorder.

Thank you.

And just to refresh everybody on the process here, since we've gotten the presentations today, we've got the council bills, the executive overviews, the council memos, a lot to go through.

Lisa Kay is available.

We try to get amendments to her over the next week.

Her policy consideration slides are probably a good place to start.

You can reach out to the individual departments.

Information technology like Ginger and Omari are available to answer questions.

My staff, Caravae, it could be a sounding board as well.

but we just want committee members to think of potential amendments and then so that Lisa has enough time if she has to run them by the city attorney's office, for example, on the SPD items, they might have to be run by the city attorney's office.

So, but since we are at 1230, I'm just wondering if we do have any other questions, that's fine.

But Council Member Strauss, you've got your hand up, thanks.

Thank you, Chair Peterson.

Just wanted to check, is there a time constraint in which we need to pass these ordinances by?

I'm seeing Ginger shaking her head saying no.

I would then request, and I'd be happy to discuss with you offline, Chair, we may want to have another committee meeting before we pass these to full council.

I've had a number of questions that I did not ask in the interest of time today, and I think that diving into these policies more deeply could be helpful for me.

I'll just raise my general questions that apply to each of these five policies, which is how do we ensure these policies are enforceable?

And then separately, I looked to see the chart of, you know, there were concerns raised by the working group, and then there were recommendations.

I just want to make sure that the concerns have been addressed because the recommendations are not necessarily the recommendations that were requested.

However, Lisa has done a wonderful job to inform me that the recommendations were intended to address all the concerns.

So I think that there may be time that we want to spend walking through that crosswalk.

Just highlighting for all departments on the line that those are my questions and happy to take your direction, Chair.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss.

One of the things we could do is we could, if your questions are primarily on the SPD items, one idea is to move ahead with the city light and the fire department items to, rather than having another committee meeting about SPD, it could be, we will still have another committee meeting about it, but what, rather than having three committee meetings, just push the second one out to give more time for analysis and discussion, pushing it out to the April 7th meeting for the SPD items, for example, just to give everybody more time.

We do have, in part of the surveillance technology ordinance, one of the challenges is that because there were 26 technologies identified and because of the delays during COVID, we're trying to be responsive to that ordinance, which, We are going to be hearing group 3 technologies, group 4 technologies, but we also want to do it right the first time.

That is one idea is to hear the city light and fire department stuff to vote on it at the next meeting on the 17th.

a month to come back and consider amendments on the SPD items on April 7th.

My committee clerk, if she were here, she'd be kicking me under the table because I probably said something wrong and messed up her schedule.

But I hope that that works as an item.

Jared, I welcome splitting these out in a way to move forward what is ready.

One of my concerns, though, is that, or I guess one of the opportunities of having the committee discussion is that we're able to speak to the, all committee members are able to hear the questions, and the departments are able to answer them on the record.

So I think that there is some benefit of, unfortunately, using some committee time.

My apologies to the committee director on your staff.

Yeah, just flagging that because of OPMA rules, having conversations amongst other council members, just covering ourselves, having it in an open session might be helpful.

Thank you.

Yeah, well, let's think about that.

And we've got a couple of different options we can consider on how to move forward.

Thank you for raising that.

Thank you, Chair.

Great work.

Well, everybody, it's now 1233. We appreciate everybody staying to get through all these items.

I know that Lisa Kay and Ginger and others will have lots of questions along the way here as we move toward March 17th and April 7th committees.

Is there any other comments from council members for the good of the order before we adjourn?

Okay, well, seeing no other comments.

Oh, yeah, Council Member Morales, did you have, yeah, okay.

Well, everybody, thank you very much.

That was the final item, and so the committee is now adjourned.

Thank you.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

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