Select Budget Committee Session II 7/31/20

and the recess Select Budget Committee meeting will now come back to order.

And we will proceed with the business that is on today's calendar.

The time is 2.03 p.m.

I'm Council Member Teresa Mosqueda, Chair of the Select Budget Committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Peterson?

Here.

Sawant?

Here.

Strauss?

Present.

Gonzalez?

Here.

Herbold.

Juarez.

Here.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

Lewis.

Present.

Chair Mosqueda.

Here.

And Council Member Morales.

Here.

Thank you.

Nine present.

Thank you very much.

Council colleagues, we are going to continue our discussion where we left off on agenda item number four.

We're going to ask for our central staff to walk us through this portion of the agenda.

I'm going to ask Dan Eater from central staff to explain the process in front of us, and we will have an opportunity to have robust discussion about the amendments in front of us as we continue our SPD inquest.

we will begin looking at SPD budget amendments.

Before we proceed, I'd like to officially have item four in front of us.

So, Madam Clerk, could you please read item four into the record?

Agenda item four, review of proposed Seattle Police Department-related amendments to the 2020 proposed rebalancing package for briefing and discussion only.

Thank you very much.

We have in front of us the opportunity to hear from Dan Eater from Central Staff.

He's going to walk us through the discussion in front of us for the Seattle Police Department's amendments for the 2020 rebalancing package.

Colleagues, this is an opportunity for us to hear from Central Staff on the proposed amendments and resolutions that are in front of us today for consideration and will be discussed again on Monday the 3rd and on Wednesday the 5th.

We're gonna start with an overview about the resolutions and then we will walk through each of the amendments and make sure that they are recorded and summarized to understand the effects of each amendment.

The sponsors of the amendments will have the opportunity to speak to each amendment and council colleagues will have the chance to have a discussion and ask questions of both the sponsor and central staff.

After discussion on each amendment, I'm gonna ask members if they would wish to co-sponsor an amendment like we have done in the past.

Again, you can indicate your interest in co-sponsoring an amendment by raising your hand, saying your name, and I will summarize the number of individuals that we see wishing to add their name as co-sponsors.

My intent is that we will be able to have a set of amendments that will be thoroughly discussed both today and Monday for our consideration then on August 5th.

We will have August 5th and in the morning of August 10th to finalize our discussion and possible votes on amendments in front of us.

I believe we have about 35 amendments to get through today, and I want to make sure that we continue moving at a fast pace and recognize that this has been a very long week.

And given that we have Monday morning, I will try to end exactly at five o'clock and find a good ending point around that time.

Before we begin with opening comments, are there any questions about the process in front of us?

Okay.

Council colleagues, Madam Chair.

Please go ahead, Council Member Juarez.

I just want to add two things.

Don't we have 39 amendments in front of us?

It could be 39. My apologies, Council Member Juarez.

Okay.

That's okay.

I just want to make sure I'm looking at the right sheet.

So we're going to start with the discussion of the resolution and then I might save my comments, but I'd like to state for the record, and please correct me if I'm wrong, and this is nothing against any one or central staff, but the 39 amendments and all of this information was time stamped, at least for me, at 1.20 this morning.

And then I got, started getting the hard copies about 8.30.

So I am going to be hard-pressed when we get to the 39 potential SPD-related amendments to share whether or not I can co-sponsor.

I tried to read it quickly during our break.

A box was delivered to me by my staff with another printout.

So I just think that we need to, for the listening public, that it doesn't look like we've had a couple days to look at these.

We just got them.

And I just want to make that clear.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I do think it is 38 amendments, but your point about concerns around whether or not you have the information in front of you to co-sponsor today, I appreciate you signaling that.

We are always happy to, again, signal for central staff at a later point, including on Monday when we continue with amendments, if there's additional folks who would like to co-sponsor any amendment.

I do believe that the materials were sent yesterday late in the evening, and that's the timestamp that I have, but your point is still well taken.

This is a process in which we want to make sure everyone has the chance to both review the materials, get feedback, and to make decisions as we move forward.

I would like to spend just a quick second summarizing how we got here for members of the public and for our colleagues, because I think that it's important for us to, as we engage in these conversations, continue to remind ourselves how we got here and what this process is really about.

We started the SPD budget inquest in June, early June.

We had a desire to break open what was the black box of the Seattle Police Department's budget.

Historically, folks have referenced this line item as one in which we were desiring additional information.

And the actions of this spring with the murder of George Floyd really compelled this council to want to get additional information about all of the dollars that are currently going into the SPD.

including where there are individuals who are performing key public health and safety services that could potentially be lifted out, and where we could invest in community organizations to really secure the community's trust and public safety.

We began this process in early June and have had seven hearings on the issues.

We've heard from central staff, SPD, from electeds from other cities, national research organizations, and importantly, from community coalitions like Decriminalize Seattle, King County Equity Now, and the many more organizations and individuals who have called in.

While this inquest process has been helpful in finally casting light on this SPD budget, it has also been an opportunity for us to really analyze how we as electeds, how we as a community, and how we in this moment respond to the call for greater public safety, greater community resilience, and greater community security as we move forward.

There are models that we have looked at across the nation and in other parts of the world where we've seen investments go into community upstream, strategies that invest in public health and public safety to truly re-envision or re-imagine what community safety could look like.

Local governments across our country are asking the same questions that we are.

How can we ensure community safety by really listening to those who have been affected by community violence, including over-policing over the years, and really lead with their voice at the center of this conversation?

We have watched Black Americans' lives taken on video over and over, year after year.

And when I was asked what makes this different is that there is an upswelling across the country, not just in Seattle, and upswelling across the world, demanding us to hear the voice of folks in the street and to act with urgency, act with compassion, and act with a sense of the urgency that has not been applied to this issue in the past to make sure that it really sticks, that we're creating meaningful and lasting change.

Budgets are often described as moral documents.

And while we're in the midst of the 2020 rebalancing package, and this is our opportunity for us to look at both the decrease in revenue and address the public health crisis, we have taken this moment to address the other public health crisis that is upon us.

The death of black and brown individuals over and over caught on camera.

This is a public health crisis that we are stepping up to both address and reinvest in community to reimagine what public safety looks like.

I really appreciate the conversations that we've had over the last two months.

We are showing that we are not accepting the status quo, that we don't want to continue to see lives taken on camera or off camera and hear stories about unarmed individuals meeting armed forces.

We also know it's important to continue to preserve public health and reinvest in what true public safety looks like.

And that's why we're talking about strategic strategies to move folks into different departments or move funding into the community to really invest in community public safety first.

I want to thank all of the folks for your time over the last few months, especially community organizations and those who called in with diverse perspectives on what it means to re-envision public safety.

For your time, we are appreciative.

And for your feedback and ideas, we have tried to respond to those in the the compilation of amendments in front of us.

Families have been calling for us to act with urgency.

Today is our opportunity to take some important first steps, recognizing we have not all of the tools at our disposal, given that this is mid-year in a 2020 budget rebalancing discussion.

And our fall process for the next two-year biennial budget begins in just six weeks.

So the process in front of us, I believe, sets us on a course to meet the goals that have been outlined by community and should truly reinvest in public safety.

With that, I'm going to turn it over to Dan Eder to walk us through the process for today and give us a sense of the order in which we will hear things and the opportunity for us to really hear what central staff has been able to pull together for us in a tremendous, and I want to express my tremendous appreciation for your time, your thoughtful approach to this, and your incredible research that has gone on to this process.

that we will discuss now.

Thank you for those comments, Chair Mosqueda.

For the record, Dan Eder, Central Staff Deputy Director.

As the Chair mentioned, this portion of your agenda includes a draft resolution plus several dozen amendments, all of which are related in one way or another to the Seattle Police Department's budget.

I want to just emphasize portion of what the chair described about today's committee meeting and the upcoming committee meetings.

There will be no votes today.

All of the items under this agenda item are marked as draft and are intended for discussion only.

We will walk through as many amendments as we have time for this afternoon.

And if we don't get through all of them, then my understanding is that the chair intends to continue the discussion on Monday following council briefings.

The vote on the SPD-related amendments, and I'm not entirely sure what the plan is for the resolution itself, but the SPD amendments are scheduled for a vote on Wednesday, the 5th of August at the Select Budget Committee.

Some of the items that you'll hear about require new legislation.

that the sponsors intend to have queued up for introduction and referral, and those will be voted on in due course, either at the Select Budget Committee or directly at the full council meeting.

So the game plan for this portion of the agenda is that central staff will provide a brief overview of each of the amendments, and then we'll provide an opportunity for the co-sponsors to speak to the amendment.

And Greg and I, Greg Doss and I on central staff will be walking through each of these amendments in a few moments.

First, my understanding is that the chair would like to hear from the co-sponsors of a draft resolution that has been posted to the agenda.

And Lish Whitson has some framing remarks that he can offer at the appropriate time.

Thank you very much.

I would be happy to turn it over to Malish from central staff to maybe provide some opening comments about the resolution, and then I'll turn it over to the prime sponsor of the resolution, which I believe is Council Member Lewis, if that's correct.

Thank you.

So this is a resolution that's intended to capture the next couple of years of work to defund the Seattle Police Department and shift many of the functions away from police to other potentially more appropriate venues.

It has seven sections.

The first states the council's intent to create a new civilian-led department to guide public safety.

I'm sorry, just wanted to see if there was anything that we needed to queue up on the screen, if that was necessary or if you just wanted to walk through it verbally.

I was just going to take two minutes to walk through if that works for you.

And then, yeah, great.

Thank you so much.

Thanks.

The second section proposes to move functions currently in the Seattle Police Department that are more appropriately housed in other city agencies.

For example, moving the Office of Emergency Management to the fire department or the 911 center to a civilian led department.

Third section talks about measures the city should take to reduce bias in policing.

The fourth asks for reports from the mayor and police chief in order to inform efforts to defund the police.

The fifth provides direction to the police chief regarding the order in which council would like layoffs to occur.

The sixth provides a timeline that describes the steps to move towards a new civilian-led community safety and violence prevention department.

And the last section indicates that the council will not provide more funding for overtime than was allocated in the city's budget.

And that is the content of today.

It continues to evolve.

Just this morning, we received additional comments from community.

I think my discussions with the sponsor's office is that we would have this introduced on the 10th, or vote on the 10th.

Thank you very much, Lish.

Council Member Lewis, thank you for leading the effort to bring forward this resolution.

I know that Council Member Herbold and others were also involved, so I will turn it over to you for opening comments on this to orient our council as to the contents of the resolution and its importance.

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

I won't spend too much time on this today because I think this resolution is really about providing us a template for our discussion on the substantive amendments over the next few weeks and how those amendments in conjunction with this resolution really set the plan and set the roadmap for this broader project of systemically changing our system of first response.

You know, I've been talking extensively about the need for new community-led or civilian-led systems of first response to make sure that as we go through this really critical project that centers the lives of all the people in our community, and the center's BIPOC leadership, that we are really focusing on what is gonna be that additive thing that replaces the police when people call 911 for certain non-criminal offenses.

And as we saw from the data that we received from SPD, 56% of the things SPD is currently responding to are non-criminal.

So contrary to perceptions of what has been mentioned out in the media in certain places or has been mentioned by certain critics of our conversations that we've been having here with community in public in this committee under your leadership, Madam Chair, There is a very intentional and deliberate conversation to develop a plan fully acknowledging that some of these things are going to be long-term projects and fully acknowledging that some of these things are going to require a roadmap and are going to require a commitment that is demonstrated in writing from us that we are going to honor these promises.

to fully and totally create a new system that is responsive to the systemic problems that have not been addressed by previous efforts.

And that is really what this resolution is.

It covers multiple components in its form so far that does include some of the things where there has been consensus between community mayor and council in the transfer of certain functions out of SPD and put under civilian control and civilian chain of command and the process for how we as a city government can work with community to accomplish that in a way that centers the leadership of the BIPOC organizations we've been working with.

we are going to have a lot of conversations about that.

in addition to that, conversations about our preferences to communicate how department-level reforms and how we can partner with chief best to implement a lot of the changes that we want to see sooner and that are going to be And also these conversations about the long overdue process of right-sizing our first response and incorporating certain new low-acuity first responses like HealthONE, like community-based crisis assistance, helping out in the streets types of systems like CAHOOTS or like the STAR program in Denver, which I was very proud to have them join me the other day for a town hall to discuss their pilot program.

So, you know, this resolution is going to be, in my vision, I just want to let everyone who is watching in today know, as central staff did, the resolution is still a work in to incorporate all of the details of the ongoing project, but I did, in consultation with Council, with Budget Chair Mosqueda, think it was important to introduce it today so that we could daylight this conversation, that we could solicit input from a variety I think it's important for us to get this out to the public so that we can have this broader discussion about shaping the contours of this resolution, which is really going to be about shaping the contours of this discussion and locking in this important commitment.

So with that, I don't think there's much more to say about this resolution this afternoon, but just that it will be ongoing, and I want the feedback of community and

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

Council Member Herbold, please go ahead.

Thank you.

Councilmember Herbold.

Councilmember Lewis referenced around the thoughtful ideas from community, particularly decrim Seattle and King County equity now about how SPD can change practices as we work on the structural shifts that are needed such as prioritizing 911 response, identifying enforcement practices that have disproportionate impact on BIPOC communities and signaling Councils intend to no longer approve after the fact requests from SPD for overtime expenditures.

I also want to lift up some other very important and critical elements of this resolution.

In Section 5, the resolution includes the request to Chief of Police Beth regarding layoffs to pursue out of order layoff authority from the Public Safety Civil Service Commission to in alignment with community requests to prioritize laying off officers with a history of sustained complaints.

consistent with the consent decree, maintain sufficient qualified first-line field supervisors, and make no layoff decisions that conflict with the charter obligation to maintain adequate patrol staffing in every district.

The reason why this is so important is the council cannot compel Chief Best to pursue what are known as out-of-order layoff authorities.

This is essentially permission to lay off officers according to criteria other than just seniority.

Chief Best must make this request herself and the resolution makes it clear that council believes that she should.

Secondly, it spells out the criteria that the council believes that the chief should use when considering layoffs.

We believe she should first lay off officers with a history of sustained compliance against them.

Thirdly, it recognizes that the federal consent decree over the Seattle Police Department requires that the police department maintain sufficient qualified supervisors as it pursues any layoffs.

And then finally, it recognizes our charter obligation.

The charter is akin to a constitution for the city, recognizing that the city must maintain adequate patrol staffing in every district.

There has been a wild supposition reported that any shrinkage of the Seattle Police Department would result in the closure of entire precincts.

It's really important for the viewing public to know that the city's charter provides protection from such a rash move.

And just, again, want to thank Councilmember Lewis for his leadership in putting together this vision for not only how to do policing differently, our request to the chief, and our commitments to hold ourselves accountable, but that this is a really important vision for exploring a new civilian-led city department focused on community safety and violence prevention.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Herbold.

Thank you, Councilmember Lewis.

Are there any additional comments from our colleagues on the resolution in front of us?

Yes, this is Councilmember Juarez.

Thank you, Councilmember Juarez.

Please go ahead.

Yeah, I'm not going to comment on all the whereases, but I will go.

And there's a lot here, obviously, and we just got it.

And we've had these conversations when we've met with our legal counsel and executive session.

and had been advised.

So I'll just be straightforward.

I am concerned about Section 5. I am concerned, which is on page 5, about 5A, pursuing out-of-order layoffs authority, prioritizing layoff authorities with sustained complaints, and all those other issues.

Now, in principle, I'm not against that.

But this is what I want to share with my colleagues in the listening public.

Those of us that question the legality does not mean that we're against you.

What I'm trying to have some common sense, which sometimes I understand isn't in fashion, is the unconstitutionality on its face and as applied.

If you think you're gonna go into the police department and have a resolution or pass a law that says we're going to basically practice discrimination on sex, I'm sorry, yes, on age and on gender.

And as you know, there's something called the United States Constitution, which is the 5th and 14th Amendment, a due process that protects us, as well as the state constitution under Section 3 and Section 1, which embodies the 14th and the 5th Amendment.

So my concern is this, without getting all lawyer-y, I want to caution all of us that we have to be careful that sometimes The means doesn't always justify the end if it's illegal.

And yes, we can look at it as written and as applied.

And there's a narrow application there for protected classes.

And those of us, most of us can understand what that means.

There are protected classes in which we can do that.

Those are mainly classes of people, African-Americans, Native Americans, groups that have been historically discriminated against.

What I see in Section 5, quite frankly, would not pass constitutional, muster, or legal.

And that's my position.

I'm hoping I can work, and I find it unfortunate that I get 38 amendments and a resolution, and not one phone call from any of my colleagues asking, at least not me, anything about any of this.

That concerns me.

I know that we have issues that we gotta be careful about for the Open Public Meetings Act, But a simple colleague heads up, this is what we're looking at, where we could perhaps have worked together to carve out how we look at scaling down, unscaffolding the police department, sworn officers, et cetera, would have been a real good act of good faith.

And so with that, I will listen with an open mind and an open heart.

I hope we can go forward and I hope this document brings us together because a lot of the language I see in here is very divisive and makes fact-based statements that are, we don't know our actual facts.

I don't know if the whole history of the world is white people.

I mean, some of it just, to me, it's divisive.

It's not bringing us together as a city.

I wanna see a resolution that talks about how we actually defund the police department by reallocating with a plan, not a pledge, and how we take that scaffold and how we systematically scaffold that down to a point where we have a police that is truly community policing.

And my last point is this, I haven't heard anything from the Community Police Commission.

I have no idea where they're at.

what their contribution has been.

We obviously funded them.

Council Member Gonzalez worked hard on upscaling their staff, doubling their budget.

Have not heard a word about where the Community Police Commission is on that.

And historically, that's where we looked to find out what was going on.

That's why they were created, because of John T. Williams, because of the consent decree.

I haven't heard anything.

But those are the reservations I have, but I will continue as an elected for the whole city as well, not just District 5, to keep an open mind and to learn more.

Thank you.

Council Member Juarez, thank you for your comments.

Really appreciate it.

Council Member Herbold, I see your hand up, and then if there's other council members, please let me know.

Just super quick, I just want to clarify that section five refers to specific authority in the PSCSC rule that says the chief has the power to ask for layoffs out of order.

So that's all that's all this is intended to do.

And as it relates to the question about the CPC, this is a question that council member Councilmember Strauss had the other day.

I apologize.

I sent to Councilmember Strauss my communication with the CPC on the timing for their input on the budget because he was the Councilmember who specifically asked for it.

I'd be happy to send it to Councilmember Juarez as well as other Councilmembers as well.

They are working to give us some input.

our 2020 budget realignment in a recent meeting.

They are prioritizing the need to respond to our crowd control weapons legislation by August 15th, but they are still endeavoring to get us some input on our budget.

But I will share with you all my correspondence with Prachi Dave, one of the co-chairs about their input to the budget.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

I believe Council President Gonzales is up next.

If there's anybody else, let me know.

I just wanted to take a quick moment here.

I do appreciate the approach in the resolution.

I am hearing concerns particularly from Councilmember Juarez around the process of putting this resolution before us and I just want to sort of for the benefit of the viewing public, that this, in my view, is just an initial, it's a very initial draft.

In fact, all over it says draft.

And so this is the opportunity for us to collectively, together in the spirit of collaboration, provide the sponsors, in this case, council members Herbold and Lewis, An opportunity to hear directly from you at first blush and impression from a 30,000 foot level, is a resolution the will of the body?

And if so, what are some components that are missing?

And what are some components that perhaps need additional work?

And so I don't want, um, I don't want the viewing public to, to think that, um, that, that there is an intention of, of jamming up, uh, other council members by virtue of, um, transparently disclosing this particular resolution at this juncture.

and do appreciate the opportunity to, in a public setting, have a conversation about initial concerns and possible modifications to improve upon the resolution.

And I accept the resolution in its draft form.

In in that spirit because I think that's the spirit that it was intended, uh to be presented in and so I just I just feel really um, I feel compelled to say that for the viewing um public that I I I appreciate the need to um, dig into the resolution some more and I think that The sponsors are presenting us an opportunity to do that.

So just wanted to address that point first secondly I will say that um I will say that that I think that as I read through the resolution You know, I think it's important.

There's been a lot of discussion of the particular granular details in the resolution Which I appreciate and that's part of part of the work that we do here on the council But but I really want to sort of take a step back and make sure that the folks who are viewing this understand what this document would represent for the council and really what this represents is is what would be phase two of some long-term work as it relates to significant commitments that we as a council would make to continue the work of reorganizing and transforming how the city delivers public safety to the people of Seattle consistent with our charter obligations.

And these are, this is the roadmap, if you will, to get us to a place where we can fully fulfill the, calls from just about every corner of the community, communities across Seattle, that want to see us take bold action to transform and reorganize policing in our city and to invest in BIPOC communities in a way that is more effective at addressing and dealing with the root causes of why, you know, folks are led into the criminal justice system to begin with.

And so I appreciate and want the viewing public to understand that this resolution is really our work plan and our commitment to actualize further transformational change as it relates to the model of policing and as it relates to ongoing investments that will be needed in community-based solutions that will serve the public safety of our city and community better than an armed law enforcement response to all manner of social issues that don't merit an armed law enforcement response, but are certainly receiving one and that status quo is unacceptable.

So I wanted to just share those two perspectives with you, my colleagues, and also with the viewing public, and I appreciate the opportunity for being able to do so.

Thank you, Chair.

Madam Chair, may I respond?

Please, go ahead, Council Member Juarez, and then I see Council Member Morales, I believe.

Thank you, Council Member Gonzalez, and thank you also for the clarifying point that this is obviously a roadmap.

It's phase two of long-term work.

I'm certainly not trying to infer that my colleagues are trying to quote-unquote jam me up or any of us up, but I can't help but look at this resolution and all the work we have ahead of us, which is quite exciting, that this is not only transformational, but we may be the first city in the country to actually undertake this and move forward and do it and unravel and deconstruct something that has been weaponized and hurt people of color since the founding of this country.

So I understand that.

My point was, with something this monumental, and this, like I said, it's phenomenal, that I would like to hear and have a few discussions.

Obviously, we can't have more than three, because I want this to happen as well.

That's my point.

So thank you.

Thank you very much.

I saw Council Member Morales and Council Member Herbold.

Yeah, thank you.

I do think that it is worth taking a moment and thank you Council President Gonzalez for kind of framing it the way you did.

What we're talking about today is the beginning of, hopefully, a beginning of a shift.

I think many of us are committed to really beginning to transform the way we think about community safety.

And that's really important because what it means for our communities is that we begin to repair the harm done to our black and brown communities.

That is my interest in making sure that we are pursuing this work.

And we recognize that this is the beginning of a process of, you know, we're with this slew of amendments going to be talking about a very intentional policy decision to reduce the size of the force, to pull different certain functions out of the force.

And to really commit to shifting those resources into our communities where we know that there is brilliance and innovation and hope for investing in communities in a different kind of way.

So this is about really trying to begin that pathway so that we have a way to move forward that uproots the systems that have really harmed our community, that focuses on healing and growth for our BIPOC communities, and that really begins to tie public resources to the kind of reparations that our Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities are asking for.

So I want us to, as Councilmember Juarez said, we have a lot of details that we need to be focused on and make sure that we are working on together to move through.

But I want us to remember the reason we're doing this, which is that we're not going to realize the end goal and have the outcomes that we want if we don't begin with dismantling a system that has not served all of our community members well and that hasn't been rooted in equity since the founding of the institution.

I want to thank Council Chair Mosqueda for beginning this process.

It's been a long couple months, but I think it's been really important for us to take the time we need to begin to fully understand what's going on, to engage community, and to publicly commit to doing this work, not just now for 2020, but to invest in continuing the work for 2021.

Thank you very much Council Member Morales.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

Just real quickly, I don't want my colleagues on the council or the viewing public to think that Seattle is going it alone on this effort.

I'm privileged, as I know, at least three other council members are on Local Progress.

And Local Progress is a network of elected officials across the country.

in local jurisdictions working towards progressive policies.

And they've been doing a defund tracker for the benefit of their members so we can get a sense of what's going on in other cities.

From the tracker, nine cities have taken votes so far to reduce their budgets, and that's to be distinguished from either a proposal or signing onto a resolution about a goal.

Nine cities have actually taken votes so far in June and July to cut their police department budgets.

The size of those cuts have ranged from about a half a percent in Minneapolis to 12%, I'm sorry, to 16% in New York City.

In addition to New York City, three other cities have cut more than 5% of their budget.

And again, these are votes already taken, and that's Berkeley and LA.

Portland, and New York City.

LA made a 7.5% cut.

Portland made a 6% cut.

New York City made a 16% cut.

Then, in addition to Minneapolis, the cities of Philadelphia, Oakland, Hartford, and Baltimore have also made votes, but the cuts that they have made have been all less than 5% so far.

So that is not at all to minimize the work being done in Seattle or in any other city in collaboration with community demands to vision public safety that does not rely on growing the size of our police department.

To me, what it is is it shows how hard we are working right now to do a lot in a small amount of time and how much effort it's going to be and the commitment it's going to take in order to fully realize this vision.

Thanks.

Madam Chair, if I may respond.

Sure, and then I see Council Member Lewis.

My point is this, other cities have done that.

I don't think that they all took a pledge to cut the SPD, but their budget by 50%.

That's the point I was making.

I'm aware of Minneapolis and New York City and LA and Portland.

What I'm talking about in a short amount of time that some of our colleagues have said that we are gonna cut the SPD budget by 50%.

No city has done that.

And if they did do it, and even if you got up to 16%, they didn't do it in six weeks.

That's the point I'm making.

I know that we're not creating a new wheel, or a brand new method of how we do this.

It's been done, obviously.

But my point is, again, in the short amount of time, and raising expectations about a pledge of 50%, and also, quite frankly, I don't always think that the police budget was a black box.

I've been on council as my second term.

We've always had access to their budget, maybe not right down to a granular level that we're seeing now, which is great, because now we can start checking off what needs to be shifted, what needs to be reallocated, what functions can be moved over, how we reduce size of force.

But it hasn't been a big secret to us that we don't know where the 400 million goes.

We just disagree.

So there isn't, and also, this isn't quite an inquest, it's an inquiry, which means we're asking these questions, and we start with the preposition that we need answers so we can get to that.

So yes, Council Member Herbold, I am aware that some of you belong to local progress in the tracker, in the cities, in the percentages, so let's just contextualize that.

So this is the midst that we're in right now, is a 50% pledge to cut SPD, that can't be done.

and that has always been my point.

I will leave it at that.

Thank you.

Councilmember Lewis?

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

I would just say that it's for frank exchanges like the one that we're having right now on this initial concept of this resolution that I I do want to be thoroughly vetted.

I really appreciate the salient Councilmember Juarez, I am committed to working with everybody on this council on a lot of the provisions in here and do actually share a lot of the concerns that you mentioned in your earlier comments.

I do appreciate you flagging those areas, and certainly my office will follow up with yours as well as other colleagues to make sure that we are able to put together a roadmap that is representative of the goals of this council and all its members.

And I really appreciate you voicing those concerns now, voicing those concerns early, and I really appreciate that early feedback.

So thank you so much.

Okay, wonderful.

Thank you, council colleagues.

I'll add a few comments as we then transition.

I think that the conversation that we've had has been very helpful, and the resolution, in my opinion, is a really helpful tool to help make all these points very clear.

The actions that are being taken today are really just the first step in a longer process that helps us in debuting a plan to get towards having the Seattle Police Department's budget.

What is important is that the cuts in front of us really do represent how we begin to scale up in public safety, scale up in community investments to help reduce crime and help make sure that we're investing in public safety.

It helped us identify how we could potentially get to that full 50% reduction in the police force and have a plan to meet the community demands, to meet the roadmap that's been outlined in front of us, to truly create the community envision process, and not just from our local community, but across the nation, data-driven strategies to make sure that we're investing in public safety and public health.

and in doing so in an equitable way.

So I see this as a visionary document.

I see this as an important commitment to community to continue to do the work.

and to the points that were raised by all of our council colleagues to help make sure that we are committing ourselves to that future action that's necessary to make sure that we're looking not just at the Seattle Police Department's budget, but as we also look at the criminal legal system and strategies for us to make material conditions improve for those most impacted by our current systems that are failing so many.

I also think that the resolution is helpful in illuminating that we have a proposal or we'd like to end up with a proposal in front of council that is both legally defensible, action-oriented, and really is in statute for the long haul so that we can make transformational change, not just transactional change.

There is a lot at risk for us.

We have extended an olive branch to communities who have had broken trust with government in the past, and we are asking folks to work with us to help craft a proposal and help craft the next steps.

And I really see this resolution as a process for us to continue to extend our desire to have a partnership with community and to continue to hear from folks about how we move forward in an intentional way to construct a new system that addresses the very harms that all council members have just spoken to a minute ago.

I like the idea of Councilmember Lewis of bringing this forward today and getting initial feedback as we continue to craft resolutions to make sure that it is not just the amendments that are in front of us that are going to go into the weeds on specific line items, but really the holistic picture is outlined today.

So I appreciate you bringing that forward.

If there's no additional comments, one of the things that I'd like to do, and if we were in person, those of you who know me, I love handouts.

And if I was in person, I would definitely be providing you with a handout today.

Some of that's on the screen today to show some potential strategies for us to complement the resolution in front of us from Councilmember Lewis.

This is not in a resolution format for you, but I wanted to provide you with sort of a glimpse at some back-of-the-envelope analysis that we've done.

In fact, it's very detailed analysis that we've done to provide some more information on the context to not just what is going to be in front of us in 2020, but how this is extrapolated over the 2021-2022 proposals.

I would love to first just mention this is not a resolution but Councilmember Strauss and I have had a number of conversations about how we could potentially put together a resolution that would help us with identifying the next steps.

Because 2020, as has been mentioned, our 2020 rebalancing budget It doesn't have all the tools in our tool belt.

This is just our opportunity to respond to the remaining funds that are in the budget and the few remaining dollars that are not yet spent and that are flexible.

As you heard from Council Member Lewis, his plan is to bring forward a resolution for you on August 10th, and I would love to do the same.

because we know our central staff have been incredibly busy working with all of you.

I will make sure every single council member gets the chance to look at the data in front of us.

But what we'd like to do is use the resolution that Council Member Lewis just talked about and provide pencil to paper to talk about how this transformational change will continue to extrapolate over next year and the years following.

As you see here, we have a detailed, intentional, and data-driven plan potentially in front of us with a number of amendments that you will be reviewing in just a moment.

If a series of those amendments are to pass, we could realize significant savings, but more importantly, investments in community in the out years.

Obviously, a lot of this is just draft right now.

Some of it may be subject to bargaining.

Some of it may be subject to changes based on a summer participatory budgeting process.

But this chart is really intended to provide all of us with an opportunity to see how the cuts and the provisos and the transfers that are represented in the proposed amendments in front of us today could be extrapolated over 2021 and 2022 to result in significant changes to reach that half, that 50% mark potentially in the upcoming years.

I want to dig into the details with folks over the next week here, but I think what is important is that we have the opportunity to show that this is not just about individual amendments today, but a holistic picture that continues to carry out year over year.

We're going to be looking at things like The line items related to the overtime budget, the dollars associated with transfers, intending to make sure that we're lifting up individuals who are providing core community services into other departments.

Investing in community strategies to help where we've seen reductions at the city level.

This chart represents a total of a 42% reduction in the police department.

And we also know that we're gonna be looking at the other components of the legal system.

that we are going to continue to work with the community to truly try to get to the goals that the community has outlined.

I know many of us have been interested in that roadmap which I think Councilmember Lewis' resolution gets to and I just offered this up as a way to show transparently how those strategies and our very limited tools for 2020 could be extrapolated over the years to come.

And this is just the beginning of a conversation and so I offer that.

Councilmember Strauss, anything to add to the numbers I just shared?

Yes, thank you, Chair.

And my comments are in tandem with the provisos that I brought that we'll be speaking about in just a minute.

I just want to speak briefly to this 2021 roadmap for community safety.

It includes the narrowing of the scope of the Seattle Police Department combined with the transfer of functions and resources in a way that is better suited to meet the specific needs of our community.

This approach recognizes the importance of sharpening SPD's focus on matters which require direct policing.

It also frees up resources to better address social welfare, public health, homelessness, housing, and substance addiction.

Changes to the scope of the SPD command staff should be commensurate with the reductions of officers, employees, and programs which they oversee.

In light of the proposed operational reductions within the police department and functions which are likely to be moved out of the department, this 2021 resolution roadmap includes contracting the police chain of command, which includes the deputies, assistant chiefs, captains, lieutenants, and sergeants.

These numbers will correspond, for example, to anticipated changes at the 911 communication center, patrol operations bureau, the office of police accountability, parking enforcement, collaborative policing bureau, office of emergency management, and the homeland security and special operations.

We know at the conclusion of this historic transition, we'll be able to use our patrol officers to focus on traditional policing and deploy the proper professionals to quickly respond with the appropriate resources to the calls they receive, whether it be crisis intervention, special victims assistance, medical care, social services, or when necessary, with an armed response.

Through this transition, you'll always be able to call 9-1-1 and receive a response.

And as I said, at the conclusion of this transition, if you have to call 9-1-1, you'll get the right response right away.

And this roadmap lays out how we'll get there.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss.

I'm excited to move on to the amendments.

I just wanted to say thank you to Council Member Strauss.

As you see in the chart, most of this is not new.

It's what several council members are proposing to do in the amendments in front of us.

So we'll get into that in just a second.

And many of these amendments today that we will review only realize two months in savings.

So the attempt here is to do a multiplier effect.

If we multiply that over the year, this is how we got to some of those numbers.

I thought that this was an important element as we continue to try to show how our commitments today will continue to carry out over future years.

if the amendments are to be adopted.

Now, not getting ahead of ourselves, but I just wanted to provide that context and make sure that folks knew sort of how those potential conversations that we'll have about amendments could be, in theory, extrapolated out over the upcoming years.

And with that, just as a preview of sort of the amendments to come.

Council Member Peterson, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda, and thank you, Council Members Herbold and Lewis, for putting out this resolution to lay out this roadmap.

It takes courage to be the first one to put that out there for us to start to sink our teeth into, and also to have a wide range of community groups look at it, whether that's community policing commi King County equity.

Now, you know, lots of folks on this and that's gonna for us to honor that inpu The resolution is really focused on these principles that we I think we all agree on that we need to end the institutional racism and this this the organization and reinvest in black communities by reallocating tens of millions of dollars to do that.

I support that.

and want to demilitarize SPD as well, and also make sure that we continue with reform.

So, you know, this document is, you know, showing that, you know, patrol officers are reduced, you're still gonna have a police department, so that has, or you're still gonna have a department with officers, and therefore we need to continue with the consent decree reforms while we're defunding, while we're reallocating, while we're reinvesting in communities.

I'm glad that the resolution, again, I'm still working my way through it.

I'm glad it's not fixated on a specific percentage.

I think that that's missing the positive outcomes we're trying to achieve together and the principles that we agree on and the principles we're hearing from community about not just the reforms they want to continue, but the reallocation of dollars.

So thank you for putting that out there.

In terms of the spreadsheet that was put up on the screen, I just wanted to understand, there was a line item for $57 million, which is a large, which is maybe the largest line item there.

It says, and this might be a question for Greg Doss later in our discussion today, I'm not sure when to ask this, but the $57 million, it says HR, FAS, IT, and JNC fund.

Just wanted to understand how that would,

be applied to the the defund discussion just so I understand what that means Thank You councilmember Peterson And if I might can we put a pin in that question as we get to that proviso for later excellent I really appreciate your comments, Council Member Peterson, and I continue to appreciate the frame around demilitarizing and restructuring.

I think every council member has really brought that up.

So I wanted to lift up your comments around that because I think that they're points very well taken, especially as we see, you know, the presence of a more militarized force, even in the last few weeks or a few months.

I think that's a really important issue to continue to bring up.

So I want to thank you for your comments and thank Council Member I'm sure we'll have more to say in just a few minutes.

So with that, let's go ahead and move right on into the amendments.

Thank you so much for all of the feedback.

I don't want to cut anybody off.

Okay.

I just want to say thanks again for your comments, and we'll get more into the details here in a minute.

Council Member Peterson, did I cut you off?

No.

Okay, good.

Okay, let's go ahead and get into the amendments.

I appreciate the conversation and the framing that went into the resolution dialogue so that we can really look at various proposed amendments and recognizing what Council Member Juarez lifted up.

We have plenty of time again next week through our various committee meetings to talk about proposed amendments here.

I do not feel like this is the last time to sign on to amendments or ask questions or raise concerns.

We can do that throughout the week next week as well.

Dan Eater, thanks for all your work.

Greg Dawes, thanks for your work on this.

I will turn it over to you to walk us through this great grid that you have.

Just double-checking audio.

Okay, am I turning it over to you, Greg?

Yeah, sure.

Why don't I go ahead and get going.

So we're going to talk about many amendments today.

As you can see, there's a table.

And if you move through this table, you will see first that the amendments that we will first present are co-sponsored by yourself and Council Member Herbold.

and councilmember Gonzales and councilmember Morales.

These amendments are intended to be a self-balancing package with some revenue amendments that will come later on.

And there's a specific approach, a proviso approach to how they treat SPD funds that I'm going to describe in a moment.

And then round out the list with other amendments that have been offered by other council members, including some of you independently.

And so that's just sort of an orientation to the amendments we're going to cover today.

And with that, I think I'm just going to go ahead and ask that we begin with amendment number 16.

Greg, before you do that, thank you for giving us the table and the orientation.

I didn't want to miss an opportunity, though, to ask if there was folks who.

are interested in working with Councilmember Lewis and Herbold on the resolution that they daylighted today.

I know I'd be interested in working with them and being a co-sponsor.

Are there any other additional folks who are interested in that?

Councilmember Morales?

Council President Gonzalez?

Okay.

So on the resolution, Councilmember Morales and Council President Gonzalez, and on the resolution that I mentioned, Councilmember Strauss and I are interested in crafting I'm interested in working on that and potentially being a co-sponsor with us.

Councilmember Herbold?

Councilmember, Council President Gonzalez?

And Council, okay.

I'm interested in working on it.

I don't know if I'd be a co-sponsor, but happy to help.

That would be great.

And we'll confirm with you before something's introduced then.

How about that?

How about your name and we'll talk to the folks in our clerk's department about the, the way in which we can do that.

Okay.

Thank you, Councilmember Peterson.

So we have Councilmember Herbold, Councilmember Gonzalez as co-sponsors, and Councilmember Peterson as a potential co-sponsor as well.

Councilmember Strauss, anything to add to that?

Okay, looks like a no.

Wonderful, thank you for letting us do that.

Quick diversion, Greg, let's continue on with amendment number 16, sponsors Councilmember Herbold, Gonzalez, Morales, Mosqueda.

Thanks.

So I'm going to give a few minutes of an overview to this amendment.

As you can see, it's quite lengthy, and it is also sort of a framework or a template for many amendments to come.

So I want to make sure that everybody understands the approach here and understands the complexity and any questions around the approach are answered.

So I'll start out by saying that the proviso that appears in most of these SPD actions will restrict dollars.

in the patrol operations BCL.

And then following the normal restriction of dollars, there's language that says, in adopting this proviso, the council expresses its policy intent to reduce the overall size of the city's sworn police force.

The council requests that the chief of the Seattle Police Department and the director of the city's office of labor relations immediately issue layoff notices for officer recruit or sworn officer FTE and petitioned the Public Safety Civil Service Commission to authorize out of order layoffs in accordance with the principles identified in the proposed resolution that you just heard Lish describe and that Councilmember Herbold described with such detail.

The resolution or the provisos go on to say in certain instances where there are targeted reductions.

There's not in this one before you, but others will have targeted reductions.

The language will say the council further requests that the chief realign deployment of sworn personnel to implement an FTE reduction in the personnel assigned to the specific unit that council is identifying.

However, this request shall not be interpreted to conflict with or supersede the primary intent to reduce the size of the overall sworn police force.

Okay, so that's a lot.

So I'm gonna start first by describing a little bit about what the layoff language means.

It's the council's assumption that the labor relations director would issue layoff notices immediately.

If this is done, then the council has been advised that layoffs are unlikely to occur before November.

And that's because it takes some time to determine the order of layoffs and to bargain the impacts and just frankly, to give notice to employees.

And so for this reason, the dollar amount that's restricted reflects only two months of salary and benefit funding for the recruits or officers that would be laid off.

So the provisional amount assumes that the layoff would occur on November 1st, and the salary and benefit expenditures are for November and December, as would be available after the layoff occurs.

If this is not the case, and it takes longer to bargain than expected, the council will have the option to release the proviso so that they can continue to pay the employees until the layoff can take effect and through the bargaining process that's required by the laws of the state of Washington.

So as Council Member Herbold spoke to, the layoff process is governed by rules that are adopted by the Public Safety Civil Service Commission.

The rules require that layoff notices occur and be issued first to recruits, student officers, and then finally trained officers in order of reverse seniority.

So under normal circumstances, the newest officers are going to be the first to be laid off.

The PSCSE rules do allow the chief to appeal for out-of-order layoffs, and Councilmember Herbold has addressed thoroughly the criteria that's specified in the resolution, mainly focused on prioritizing officers with complaints, making sure that the layoffs are consistent with consent decree requirements around field supervisors and sufficient staffing, and making sure that layoffs don't conflict with the city charter obligation to maintain adequate patrol staffing in every district.

So now for the provisos that have specific reductions, targeted reductions to specialty units, I'll talk a little bit about that.

The language is requesting that the chief redeploy her forces so that the layoff ultimately winds up creating a vacancy in the unit that is specified by the council.

I should note here that the charter provides authority for the chief to deploy her forces as she sees fit to provide for the public safety.

So while the council can make specific requests for reductions, it's ultimately up to the chief to determine which parts of the force she shrinks and which parts she maintains.

And so with that, I'm going to stop for a moment and ask if there's any questions about the proviso and the approach there.

Thank you, Greg.

Are there questions or comments, colleagues?

Okay.

Councilmember Herbold, did you want to speak to this amendment?

Amendment number 16.

Sure, I'd be happy to.

So, amendment 16 is part of a broader package, but the combined actions in the package is to reduce the size of the police department by 100 sworn FTEs this year.

So this particular proviso is a general reduction of sworn personnel by 32%.

When you take this one together with some of the other ones that we're going to discuss later, that would be a, if realized, it would be a 100 FTE reduction in SPD for, just for reference sake, SPD currently has about 1,400 sworn officers.

As Greg has explained, all provisos recognize that the chief of police has the charter authority to make these decisions about how to deploy officers and specifically request that she pursue the out-of-order layoff authority that she has the right to request.

And so even though all of these are identified as a reduction, as we go through them, we'll see that some of them are reductions, and some of them might be a request to eliminate a unit, but they're all called reductions out of recognition that it is the chief who has the ultimate decision-making authority about whether or not a unit exists or not.

So actually, thank you, Council Member Herbold.

You were just going into my next section, and you've eloquently addressed a lot of it.

The approach, of course, as you just mentioned, was 100 officers across all these reductions.

And the way that plays out, I think you captured, is that there are targeted reductions, and those will total to 38 personnel.

There is a general reduction of 32 personnel, and that is the amendment that is before you, Amendment 16. And then there is an amendment that will come up a little bit later that assumes additional attrition in the department.

It assumes that 30 additional officers will choose to resign from SPDV between now and December 31st.

I say additional because the department expects about 25 to separate between now and then.

And the council believes that that number is going to climb to 55 in recognition of some of the information that has come out recently about officers applying to other departments.

And so the combined total of all of those approaches will mean 70 actual layoffs.

And there will be 30, of course, attrition slots.

And how that will break out among the force is that there will be layoffs of 54 recruits and 16 student officers.

And at this time, there would not be layoffs of any fully trained officers at SPD.

I would note that while there are not any fully trained officers that would be subject to layoff right now, it should be noted that officers will continue to separate as they retire and take other jobs.

And so these layoffs, in combination with the current hiring, will eventually start into vacancies in the department.

And at that point, the chief will have to determine where to allocate those vacancies.

We've already talked a little bit about how the council hopes to see that happen, and so I'm not going to go into too much more detail there.

The amendment before you, as the vacancy amendment, also identifies the number of personnel in SPD.

I should note that there's a typo in the total number of trained officers.

It should say 1322 instead of 1332. But when all of these reductions are realized, the attrition reduction as well, the 100-officer reduction will create about a 7% reduction of Seattle's sworn force.

That reduction will continue to grow over time as the hiring freeze stays in place.

In any given year, there are about 70 to 80 officers that will leave the department.

And so that sworn reduction will continue to grow throughout 2021. And so that just being my overview, hitting the high points of this first amendment, this amendment 16 would reduce by 32 officers and $533,000 the patrol operations BCL.

Again, as we have discussed, that money is not captured immediately.

It is simply restricted so that the department cannot use it.

On the assumption that there would be layoffs that would occur between Now on November 1st, and if that doesn't happen and the money has to be released in accordance with the state of laws of the state of Washington, the council could be able to do that.

And we've already covered, I think, that Chief Best has the authority to change her deployment.

So it's difficult to know how ultimately this would play out, the attrition reduction or this reduction.

So I would just ask if there are any questions before we move on to Amendment 17 and start talking about specific reductions and specific units.

Okay, I do see some questions.

I know Council Member Lewis is first.

And Dan, did you have something that you'd like to add from Central Staff before we go to questions?

Yeah, I agree with everything that Greg said, but I think what I wanted to do is highlight the difference between what Council Member Herbold described in terms of policy intent of a different order of layoff and seniority, and what Central Staff's assumption is for not only for this amendment, but for the other amendments in the package.

We recognize and agree with Councilmember Herbold that there is the possibility of a different order of layoffs.

Because we don't know the outcome of that process, we have conservatively assumed that the order of layoffs will be by seniority for purposes of determining what an estimated salary impact would be.

So I just wanted to highlight that we are not purposefully trying to do something different than what Council Member Herbold is announcing.

We recognize that that is what the council members who have signed on to this suite of amendments want to see happen.

And we just had to make some working assumption for purposes of coming up with dollar figures.

Council Member Lewis, your first step for questions.

Thank you so much.

So, Greg, I just I have two quick questions.

My first question is, do we do we have any indication?

I mean, as Dan just said about the the terminations and in order of seniority.

Like what what the demographic makeup is of the class of folks that are in field training.

Because I would imagine, but I just want to confirm that those are probably the officers that came in in the.

And I just wanted to ask and confirm if that is the case since it would hit the recruits and the field training officers first in an event that we are not successful in So that's my first question.

My second question in regards to this presentation is, in the most sort of optimistic scenario that we're able to bargain the result of these changes, would we be able to realize any savings in 2020 that we could then reinvest from this particular amendment, this sort of patrol operations amendment?

Yeah, thank you.

First, I'm going to take a step back and thank my colleague, Dan, for talking a little bit about the fiscal assumptions.

There's also some language in the proviso that says that if it turns out that the fiscal assumptions need to be changed to reflect the council's intent, that is certainly something that could happen.

Certainly, the council doesn't wish for the executive to see the numbers and come back and say that it would have a different effect.

So I just want to say that as staff, we recognize that there is sort of a behind the scenes true up that may need to happen to make sure that the council's intent is fulfilled, but it really is 100 officers.

regardless of the amount of money.

But as Dan said, we did go conservative on that just because we had to do that.

In the case that savings are not available or realized, we want to make sure that we were conservative.

And that actually segues into an answer to your second question, which is whether or not the savings could be realized.

And that all depends on how long the bargaining process goes.

If it is a bargaining process that is relatively limited to impacts around layoffs, then the law department has advised that that could go within a few months.

If it is more complex bargaining then it is possible that it could go beyond a few months.

And so if it is the case that it is easier bargaining and it happens more quickly and it happens in time for the council to pass an ordinance that would grab the money that is provisional and redistribute it according to their principles that many of you have talked about to communities of color, then that that's certainly a potential in.

in the case that there isn't a vehicle in front of the council, like the fourth quarter supplemental, the council could always initiate legislations to to to take that funding.

So it's really a matter of waiting to see how things play out.

And then with regard to your first question, Yes, it's the last five classes of SPD recruits that have been the most diverse, and it is the last class that had 39 percent people of color, the highest class of that case that the department has had.

Just as a quick follow up, Greg, and I appreciate you clarifying how this is tied to the bargaining process, would that then in turn mean that, and this might be a question for the sponsors too, are the sponsors assuming savings from this amendment that would be put into some of the other investment portions of the package?

Or are we, are we conservatively just sort of hoping to come in and take advantage of a faster bargaining timetable rather than assuming a saving that would be applied in like November or something?

There is no proposal before us now to spend those dollars.

This is intended to hold us all accountable.

The folks that are participating in the bargaining process.

It's intended to get that process moving more quickly than waiting until after our November passage of the budget.

And it's, it is, there is a aspirational hope that we will get there by November.

This particular approach also assumes that, you know, that this structure is the kind of structure that best sets us up to argue that this impacts bargaining instead of decision-based bargaining, which would take a much longer period of time and could put the city in a position where we'd have to hire people back and pay back pay.

Thank you.

Are there additional comments?

I'm sorry.

Are there additional comments or questions on this?

Council Member Peterson, please go ahead.

And then Council Member Salant.

Thank you.

I wanted to piggyback on something I heard central staff say in terms of, you know, it would be up to Chief Best on how this would actually be operationalized and just wanted to flag my interest in hearing from I would like to hear from chief best on how she might implement this.

This is early in our process here.

I want to flag that eventually we should hear how she might implement some of these changes.

Thank you.

Thank you.

First at the outset, I would just point out that city council just spent a whole hour discussing a resolution that discusses maybe defunding the police in a year or more.

And meanwhile, there are many amendments on the committee's agenda, which we may not get to from my office and from the people's budget to defund the police by 50% this year and right now.

The Justice for George Floyd movement has demanded that the Seattle Police Department be defunded by at least 50%.

And seven of the nine council members have promised to do so, which is absolutely a testament to how much pressure the movement on the streets has put on the city's establishment.

However, we predictably see that when it comes time for the actual concrete budget amendments, the majority of the council members do nothing even close to defunding the police by 50%.

To be clear, this budget amendment defunds the police by nothing, $0.

It's only a proviso.

If council members are serious about even this small reduction in the police force, why not actually reduce the police funds and use them for community needs?

I'm not able to understand.

Even if this were to defund the police by $533,000 rather than being a proviso, We do need to be clear that this is so small compared to the Seattle Police Department's budget that it comes out to be something like a rounding error.

The police had no problem spending $6.3 million in overtime to abuse the protests in just the first 12 days of the Justice for George Floyd protests.

And yet there seems to be this idea that we cannot afford to defund them $533,000, which is not even enough, but at least it wouldn't be a proviso in that case.

Rather than defunding the police by 50%, as promised, $533,000 represents 13 hundredths of 1% of the police departments $409 million annual budget.

To be clear, that is not 13%.

It is not 1%.

It is 13 hundredths of 1%.

In other words, it is small enough to be a rounding error in the police budget.

I have heard several excuses raised by councilmembers today and in other meetings for failing to follow through on promises to defund the police by 50%.

And we see some of those excuses reflected here.

We just heard that layoffs in SPD can't take effect until November.

This is not true.

My office has discussed with the city attorney's office and reviewed the relevant laws.

There is no law that specifies a necessary delay in implementing budget cuts like this.

The political establishment, in truth, has two sets of rules.

One for the police officers' guilt because the police play a role for the capitalist state, and another for every other public sector union which provides services to our community members, especially those marginalized.

The political establishment announces and implements budget cuts for essential services with stunning rapidity.

King County Metro just announced 200 driver layoffs earlier this week, layoffs that will take effect immediately.

King County Council, as far as we know, has not said this will take time.

We need to negotiate with ATU 587. We are completely opposed.

Our movement is completely opposed to attacks on public sector unions.

And as a rank and file member of the Teachers Union, I am completely opposed to such cuts and opposed to thrusting the burden of the recession on union workers and on communities that rely on the services.

We're opposed to layoffs.

But this is not a budget cut.

Defunding the SPD is not a question of budget cuts because of a recession.

It is defunding the SPD because we want to address some gross injustices in our society.

And that's exactly the point.

The democratic establishment has already carried out cuts without pausing to get union approval, and they are getting ready to carry out bigger and more brutal cuts as the economic crisis intensifies.

What politicians will cut and won't is all about political will.

When they cut vital services by laying workers off, they don't say it will take time.

They say it needs to be done right now.

When the city council two years ago repealed the Amazon tax in 2018, they did that giving less than 24-hour notice, and all of it happened within two days.

The city does need to be willing to negotiate the effects of the budget cuts with the Police Officers Guild, but there's no requirement that those negotiations be a protracted process.

Either later today or on Monday, we will be discussing several amendments to actually defund the police by 50% as the community is demanding proposed by my office and the people's budget campaign.

It is my hope that the council will pass these defund SPD amendments and the mayor will act on them as quickly as possible rather than waiting until November.

We see here how the game is played.

The movement says defund the police, and the political establishment says, yes, we agree, we will defund the police responsibly.

Then they say, we would love to defund the police now, but really it will take several months.

Then what they propose is nothing like defunding the police even in a couple of months.

Because if you take every claim by the political establishment at face value, if you accept that the proviso will really lead to defunding, If you accept that the defunding will take effect in November, even then, this falls far short of the movement's demand to defund the police this year by at least 50%.

My office has added up all of the amendments that are being co-sponsored by councilmembers Herbold, Mosqueda, Morales, and Gonzalez, including this one.

As far as I understand, they only come to $2.6 million, which is only a 1.5% reduction in the remaining 2020 SPD budget.

And the FTE reduction is only 90, including transfers, which is 4.1 of the SPD workforce of 2,187 FTEs.

That clearly does not square with what the community is calling for.

And incidentally, you probably saw the New ironically business funded poll conducted just last week that shows more than half of those surveyed in our city support a 50% defunding of the Seattle Police Department.

Cutting the remaining 2020 police budget by 2.6 million or 1.5% isn't even in the ballpark.

Our movement is calling for defunding the police department by at least 50% because so much of what they do is harmful to our communities.

Their patrols and armed responses to many 911 calls put people in danger.

They spend tens of millions funding patrols to harass neighborhoods of color and homeless people and poor people.

They spend millions abusing protesters and investigating protesters for so-called crimes like pointing a laser pointer.

They spend millions on the sweeps of homeless encampments.

This is why our movement is demanding serious reductions in the size of the police force.

I will support this amendment and amendments like it because while totally inadequate, they point in a tiny way towards defunding the police.

And mainly because these small reductions in the size of the police force are absolutely something that should be claimed as a victory by the movement, by those out there on the streets and who have risked their lives on these issues and the nationwide street uprising.

And such changes in the past have been almost unheard of.

But we also need to be clear that these rounding error size provisos of the police budget do not satisfy the demand of the movement to defund the police, let alone by 50%.

And we will need to continue organizing until that demand is realized.

Finally, let me go back and address this issue of time.

We just heard for the last hour about why this defunding will take time, months, or even years.

So let's talk about time from the perspective of the community, especially Black and Brown communities.

After years of documented police brutality directed at Black and Brown communities, at poor people, and at our homeless neighbors, after eight years of failed police reform while under federal oversight, during which Seattle police killed with impunity 28 people, after the outrageous demonstration of the past two months of indiscriminate police violence against peaceful protesters, including nurses, legal observers, people in wheelchairs, children, the independent media, and others.

After weeks of people sustaining blast balls, tear gas, truncheons, and police terror, it's way past time for the city political establishment to act.

Thank you.

Council colleagues, is there anybody who would like to make additional comments?

Okay.

I would like to make sure that we do get to all the comments today and including asking the questions about how soon potential amendments can be actualized and realized in terms of cost savings.

That's going to be an important question as we move forward.

I appreciate what Council Member Herbold said earlier about when cuts can be actualized and when they can actually be realized makes a big difference in terms of how much money we are able to get out to the community or to reduce a budget in this year's process.

Again, as a reminder, the budget process begins for the next biennial budget in just six weeks and doing as much as possible within the tools that we have, I think is the spirit in which Council Member Herbold outlined this amendment in front of us.

Council Member Herbold, anything in closing before we move on?

No, okay.

Looking, Council Member Herbold, C, you're good?

Yes.

Okay.

One quick comment.

I do, um, I w I do want to, um, Clarify that these aren't rules that are special for police officers.

is exists for workers because they're public employees and they have protections as public employees.

Council Member Swamp mentioned Metro Transit layoffs.

I don't believe it's true that those layoffs were immediate.

We have been informed by the law department.

I think we've all, we've all together received this briefing, that there is a certain amount of advance notice that is considered reasonable advance notice of layoffs.

And as we've alluded to, upon receipt of layoffs, a labor union can try and argue that those layoffs should be bargained.

And the structure of these layoffs are intended to put us in the best position possible to argue in such a way that we can actually realize savings in November of this year.

Another approach will not realize the numbers of dollars that I think the public may be led to believe.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm going to ask if there's any additional folks who would like to add their name as a co-sponsor on this amendment in front of us.

Council Member Strauss, thank you.

Council Member Sawant, thank you.

Okay, thank you very much.

We have Council Member Strauss and Council Member Sawant that have added their names as co-sponsors.

Moving on to the next amendment, please.

Thank you, madam chair moving on to the next next amendment we're starting to get now into the amendments that make specific reductions in specific units.

Again, I'm going to note that ultimately it's the chief that gets to decide that the proviso simply makes the request that.

when the layoff happens, that the eventual vacancy be allocated to this unit.

And so we're going to start with the mounted unit reduction.

There's a proviso that restricts funding for patrol operations for $84,000.

It assumes that there would be layoff notices issued for the four FTE that are in the mounted unit, or as we've discussed, probably less senior officers.

This reduction would also assume that there would be a layoff of a civilian laborer that I think you're all aware that the mounted unit is a specialty unit that focuses on as the SPD says, community engagement outreach and demonstration management.

I'm going to as I'm describing these reductions also indicate what the department has said about the reductions.

to present sort of a balanced approach to the information that is being presented to all council members.

And the SPD has said that eliminating the unit would impact the department's ability to build trust with the community.

The mounted unit currently consists of four sworn FTE and one civilian FTE, as I said.

If the chief chooses to redeploy those personnel consistent with the council, It will ultimately wind up in the elimination, the entire elimination of this unit.

So with that, I would ask if there are any questions and move on to the next targeted reduction, if not.

Go ahead.

All right.

So Amendment 18 is a reduction to community outreach.

This reduction is, again, a proviso.

I'm sorry.

I didn't realize you meant move on to the next amendment.

Is there any additional colleagues who'd like to add their name to Amendment 17?

I see Council Member Lewis, Council Member Sawant.

Council Member Sawant, I'm sorry.

Please go ahead.

Sorry.

I will be supporting this budget proviso similar to the last one.

I just wanted to point out, though, this one is even smaller.

It represents 200th of 1% of the police budget, but I will be co-sponsoring this.

Right, okay.

Any additional co-sponsors on Amendment 17?

Thank you, please continue.

Thank you, Councilmember.

I should also mention, you know, to Councilmember Sawant's comment that it is a very small reduction.

Again, it is salary savings for only two months and for only the lowest paid officers.

This kind of reduction when annualized will be quite a bit bigger because it would mean that the SPD would ultimately sell the stable and the horses and reduce its overhead by the amount of facilities costs for the for the stables, so the costs will grow or the savings will grow, I should say, in the out years.

But as has been talked about, it's initially quite low because it's two months of salary savings.

So going on to Amendment 18. Amendment 18 is a reduction to the Community Outreach Unit.

It is a reduction, a proviso reduction of $83,330.

And that would reduce or create the need for five officer layoffs as requested by the council.

And to indicate what the department does, SPD has said that this particular department, this particular section has a number of community outreach functions, including living room conversations, precinct picnics, youth outreach through sports and schools, community liaisons, demographic advisory councils, and the community police academy.

There's also a false alarm unit in this particular section.

The section has 11 FTE sworn and five vacancies.

If the chief chose to reduce personnel consistent with the council's intent, she would reduce the personnel from 11 sworn down to six.

Thank you, Greg, and it was very helpful to hear the annualized costs.

If you were able to extrapolate that, if you have that information at your fingertips, could you share that as well when you look at various amendments?

Yeah, sure.

I think it's a fairly easy calculation.

I will share it.

It is for a brand new officer, one that is on the first year of deployment, a student officer, it's about $100,000 a year.

So you can take each layoff and multiply it times $100,000.

And that's sort of a sum of what the annual costs or savings will be when that person is no longer with the department.

There will also be overhead costs and administrative costs, but we're not prepared to talk about those today.

But just to say that about 100,000 an officer.

So going on to amendment 19.

Oh, I'm sorry, Greg.

At each amendment, I'm going to ask us just to pause real quick for co-sponsors if that's OK.

No, that's fine.

I know we got a lot to go through.

So thank you for sharing the annualized costs and thinking about how we would share that information at each amendment if you happen to have it.

I think that that information is really important to provide the holistic picture of how these costs could be actualized relative to the entire SPD budget.

And more importantly, the amount of investments that we'd like to see go into community to promote public safety and re-envision community safety strategies.

I also want to say thank you as we're thinking about how we extrapolated that number and the chart that Councilmember Strauss and I referenced earlier.

The intent was to go through each of the proposed amendments that are in front of us and provide that type of information across the out years.

And I want to thank Christina from Councilmember Herbold's office, Cody from Councilmember Gonzalez's office for their work with I think it's important for us to think about that.

And I think we need to think about that with the folks in my office and the folks like Laquisha in the office as we thought about the various amendments that are being proposed and how to extrapolate that to tell that full story of potentially what to expect.

So thank you very much to the teams that have done that and to Greg for you for highlighting if possible when we go through with those potential annualized cost savings.

available in the future should we be able to get those out to community.

Madam Chair, may I ask a point of order?

Please do, Council Member Juarez.

I'll be brief.

We have 39 amendments, so are you saying that with each amendment you will give us an approximation of what the savings or cost or reduction is so we can note that as we go through them?

So are we expecting at the end of the 39 to have a total?

Did I miss something?

Are you gonna have like a total?

And I'm not holding you to that number, just some ballpark for people listening and watching.

When you add up all 39 amendments, kind of going back to what Council Member Sawant said, is there gonna be some kind of approximation of when you add up all 39 amendments, what that means for 2020?

I think the intent would be to try to have an approximation of the line items that are providing, sorry, that are providing details per line.

Some of the amendments among the 38 or 39 in front of us today are, they do not harmonize.

So we'll have to make some policy decisions about which strategy to go with.

But you could in theory, I think probably at the end of Monday's presentation, have that extrapolated amount, and I don't want to speak for central staff, but that back of the envelope or penciled out number is something that we can work towards if we are able to see the type of amendments menu that would be in front of us, we could potentially do that math.

Greg, did I misspeak there?

Please do correct me if I did.

No, Council Member, I think that's true for many of these items where there's a discrete layoff.

It gets a little bit more complicated when We would need to figure out things like how much the how much savings could happen when you divest itself of the stables and the amounts of patrol or Sure, I'm getting really difficult Right.

I don't I'm not asking to get down right down to how much a horse cost and how much it is when you take it out of the budget I just want to like X to Y this is what we're kind of looking at and Yeah, you know what I'm saying?

Okay.

Totally.

Yeah, I don't.

Yeah.

Okay, great.

I don't need to know the cost of the stable when we sell it.

Okay.

I appreciate it.

Thank you, Council Member Rojas.

I appreciate that ask.

And to the extent we can do that extrapolation as we go through amendments, we will do so.

And if not, we will continue to work towards that goal.

So that that X to Y analysis is provided to the extent possible.

And I don't want to overcommit anybody from central staff.

I appreciate Greg, you saying I'm sort of on the right track, but we'll defer to you for future analysis on that.

Okay, thank you.

Before we move on, amendment 18, anybody like to add their name to that as a co-sponsor?

Councilmember Strauss, Councilmember Lewis, Councilmember Sawant.

Thank you.

Okay, let's move on.

Amendment 19.

Amendment 19 is a specific reduction for the school resource officers.

I think that most folks are familiar that earlier this year, the school resource officer program was was ended by SPD and the Seattle Police Department.

And so the five officers that were assigned to the school resource officer program have now all been reassigned to other sections within the SPD.

But here again, because of the approach of the proviso, just looking for a general reduction overall in the size of the sworn force, There is a proviso that is levied in the amount of $83,330.

There's a layoff request of five officers.

And if you annualized that, it would be about $500,000.

Of course, if the out-of-order layoffs actually happen, then it could be officers that make much more money that could produce much more savings than laying off a newer officer.

and so that's all I had to say on 19.

Thank you.

Amendment 19 sponsored by Herbold, Gonzalez, Morales, Mosqueda.

Council Member Morales, did you want to say something Council President as well?

Council President please go ahead.

Thank you so much.

I wanted to just really quickly Greg acknowledge that some of our language in here might not be technically correct, so I which will come to light based on my comments here.

So first of all, I just wanted to say thank you to the good folks over at the Seattle Public Schools, their school board and.

Superintendent Denise Juneau for their strong commitment to the issues that we are discussing here.

And of course, on June 9th, 2020, Superintendent Juneau posted a message on her blog and she sent a message to parents and the general public about the relationship between Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Police Department.

And I wanted to take a moment to just read really quickly from her statement.

And then I'll end by talking about what actions the school board has taken that support this particular amendment and the savings represented by this amendment.

So according to Superintendent Juneau, she said, quote, while the focus of the school emphasis officers has been to build relationships and provide assistance to youth, the unintended consequence of their presence in our buildings could bring more distress to our young people.

While these officers do not do any kind of enforcement, they are armed in our school buildings.

And I know that at this moment in time, the presence of an armed officer prohibits many students and staff from feeling fully safe and welcome in our buildings, close quote.

Following that statement on June 9th, 2020 by Superintendent Juneau, the Seattle School Board on June 24th, 2020 took up in their one of their regular board meetings resolution 2019 slash 20 dash 38. So in that resolution, they affirmed the Seattle Public Schools commitment to black students.

They acknowledged that since 2005, the School Emphasis Officers Program, which has four SPD armed officers in it, and their School Resource Officers Program, which has one armed SPD officer in it, has been in existence since 2005 within specific schools.

That resolution, in effect, indicated that the Seattle School District was making the policy choice to indefinitely issue a moratorium on the program that relates to the school emphasis officers and school resource officers program.

And instead, the district has committed to working in consultation with school communities, particularly black and indigenous families and students most directly impacted by policing in schools to identify alternative community-based restorative mentorship for schools impacted by the program's cessation.

And the district and the board also commit to working with us here at the city of Seattle, King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, and other leadership to demand social supports and resources to enhance student growth, learning, and safety in schools and communication that keeps students safe.

So again, our partners in the Seattle Public Schools have already taken a policy position on this issue.

This amendment is a realization of the savings associated with that policy decision by our partners in our public schools.

I wanna thank Superintendent Juneau and members of the school board for passing that resolution and for giving us an opportunity to realize it.

these realize these savings and and look forward to to our continued partnership with Seattle Public Schools in an effort to dismantle institutional racism and to remove armed officers from schools, which does perpetuate and continue to create mistrust amongst those students who are negatively impacted by their presence.

So I just wanted to add that as a texture and support for this particular amendment.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate your comments, Council President Gonzalez.

I know that Council Member Juarez would like to co-sponsor this.

Council Member Juarez, anything else from you?

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

I'm sorry.

I'm good.

You're good.

Okay, great.

Anybody else?

Comments?

Council Member Lewis?

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

I will also be happy to co-sponsor this amendment.

I did just want to cite for everyone's indulgence that there was a really interesting article in The Economist for July 18th on this very topic about school resource officers that cited a significant amount of interesting research about correlation in a lot of studies with actually declining college entrance, decreasing in test scores, and not very much of a causal relationship between the presence of school resource offices and actually a reduction of violence on campus or other things of that nature.

You know, it's really interesting to look at a lot of the research on how while it may have been a program with good intentions at one point, I do think we have much more effective community building and youth mentorship programs that programmatically work much more effectively to accomplish the same underlying task of maintaining safe campuses and building community in a much more effective way.

So I'm happy to support this amendment and appreciate the work of the sponsors in putting this together.

Thank you, Councilmember Lewis.

Any additional comments or questions?

Councilmember Strauss.

Thank you, Chair, just signaling I'd like to sign off.

Thank you, Councilmember Strauss.

Council colleagues, I have Councilmember Juarez, Councilmember Lewis, Councilmember Strauss, additional Councilmembers, Councilmembers Sawant, and okay, thank you.

So that goes along with Herbold, Gonzalez, Morales, and Mosquito.

Wonderful, let's move on.

Amendment 20.

All right.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Amendment 20 is a reduction to sworn staffing by recognizing unplanned attrition.

And what's going on with this particular amendment is that there is a proviso for about $500,000 against the Patrol Operations BCL.

And the expectation is that there will be 30 more unplanned separations by the department between now and December 31st.

As I mentioned earlier, the department believes that there will be 25 separations.

This would assume that there would be 55 separations because it is difficult to know and predict whether or not there would be separations.

This particular proviso is a rather conservative approach.

It assumes one month's salary for all 30 attritions regardless of when they might happen.

If some of them happen now for instance there would be a lot more savings than the half a million dollars.

So In terms of annualized costs, it would be pretty easy to take the lowest dollar amount that an officer would make, the $100,000 that we've been using, and say that this could translate into about $3 million.

And I think that's what's on your table, and that is a good conservative number.

It may be that this would create quite a bit more savings.

It all depends on the salary of the officers who leave.

I don't think I have anything else to add to that.

OK, thank you so much, Greg.

And I'm sorry you may have mentioned this.

Did you already share the extrapolation for 2021?

Yeah, as I said, I think that the.

estimate on the table of $3 million is a conservative estimate that if all 30 officers leave, if all 30 officers leave between now and December 31st, then that's a conservative estimate.

It could actually be quite a bit higher.

If it turns out that 30 officers don't leave, then this is provisional amounts and the council could come in and either change the provisional or remove it.

Okay, wonderful.

Questions or comments, colleagues?

Seeing none, Council Member Peterson, please.

Yes, I just wanted to, I was slow earlier.

I wanted to note that I want to co-sponsor the school resource officer one.

And just for me in general, I want to, I'm going to be conferring with my team over the weekend and Monday and we'll circle back with maybe additional co-sponsorships.

But having just gotten these amendments, just trying to work my way through them and We'll get back with more co-sponsorships, but I'm familiar enough with the school resource officer one and the research on that To co-sponsor.

Thank you.

Thank you so much So I added you to amendment number 19 and yes as you read through these or reflect on them Feel free to let me know colleagues if you do want to go back to add any additional names on amendment 20 reducing sworn staff Recognizing unplanned attrition any additional comments or co-sponsors at this point?

I see Council Member Lewis.

Go ahead.

I have a question.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Please go ahead.

Sure.

I should ask those questions separately.

Council Member Lewis, question please.

Sure.

So Greg, just to clarify, is this the attrition that the department has told us they're expecting, or is this our own additional hunch of what we are expecting attrition to be?

Thank you, Councilmember, it is the latter.

The department expects 25 more resignations or retirements between now and the end of the year.

This is the council's assumption that there would be 30 more, and that would be the case that if both things came to fruition, there would be 55 separations between now and the end of the year.

And what is that assumption based on, Greg?

I think that the assumption is based on the sponsor's belief that there will be more attrition, frankly, because the department is now going through layoffs or may be going through layoffs and younger officers may look for other jobs.

Council Member Hurdle, did you have an answer to that?

There was a recent article in KUOW that reported that 30 officers had applications out in other departments in the region.

So this amendment assumes that all 30 of them will be successful in their application process to move to a different department or may leave the department.

Yeah, it's very much a moment in time.

There may be more officers that continue to look for work at other departments.

I do recall that the article referenced that most of the departments that officers were applying were actually seeking to hire, but you're right.

It is a back-of-the-envelope estimate based on a particular report of what's happening in a moment of time.

So a follow-up question to Greg on that, then, based on just how provisos work, if that, for the sake of this particular proviso, like, are we assuming even if those attritional vacancies don't materialize, are we basically still saying, like, well, you know, our intent is still you know, that if there's not that attritional, um, resolve that you still, um, lay people off up to the 55, um, or would the, the effect of the proviso basically be that we are, we are sort of making space for and assuming up to 55, but we are not requesting the department to lay off to get to that number.

Cause I mean, I just saying is in that, At that level, I think it would cross to not being attritional anymore.

It would be sort of, we hope it's 55 attritional layoffs in the four corners to this proviso.

But if it's not, we want you to kind of round up to it.

Or if it came in under that, would that satisfy the proviso?

And we would just realize what we got up to that.

So just throwing that back to you, Grant.

Yeah, I think that the simple answer to that is that the proviso stands until the council removes it.

And so 500,000 of the department's money is locked up and cannot be accessed until the department authorizes future spending or until the council authorizes future spending.

And so I suppose the question for the council would be if these attrition slots weren't realized, whether you all would choose to release this proviso so that officers could be paid, or would you leave the proviso in place and potentially force layoffs?

And that is a question that is a policy call for the council.

All right.

Thanks, Greg.

I appreciate that.

I think I can say that with the fiscal situation that the department finds itself in, It's overtime budget completely spent right now.

It's equipment budget completely spent right now.

It's other discretionary budgets like travel and training down to a couple hundred thousand dollars that if this proviso were left in place, it would probably mean layoffs one way or another.

But that would be something that department personnel would have to speak to.

Thank you, Greg.

Any additional questions or comments?

Council Member Solan.

Thank you.

I wasn't originally going to speak on this because my overall comments apply to most of these amendments.

I will be co-sponsoring them, but they are just so far from what needs to happen.

But I'm speaking here because I'm quite I'm fascinated and troubled at the same time.

The difference in the level of rigor that the establishment demands from any movement center demands, like the ones that come from my office, compared to what the establishment puts forward itself, it's just absurd.

I mean, this whole, I mean, let aside the fact that this is for 1,200, this provides us for 1,100, so 1% of the police budget.

I'm happy if Greg wants to annualize that, that's fine.

But of all the provisos, this one is the emptiest.

There are no actual savings here because The savings in amendment 20 are entirely aspirational, expressing a policy intent only.

A central staff note in their memo, quote, council assumes that there will be 30 unplanned resignations from SPD between now and December 31st, 2020, unquote.

I mean, this is like a hope and prayer kind of proviso.

I mean, I just don't, I'm not gonna put my faith in the idea that cops are just gonna walk away from these jobs that have been so lucrative to them that quickly.

I mean, look at the amount of, I will be co-sponsoring it because it is not in a bad

Thank you.

I just want to, um, I don't disagree with council member Swann that this is a, um, that is aspirational.

Um, but the intent of the proviso is to, um, ensure that if there are savings associated with a higher than expected level of attrition, that we are capturing those savings so that we, the council can allocate those dollars in a way that is consistent with our priorities.

Okay, thank you all.

Seeing no additional questions or comments on Amendment 20. All of those co-sponsoring, I heard Council Member Sawant was interested.

Any, Council Member Lewis, thank you.

And Council Member Strauss, thank you.

Okay, thank you very much.

Let's do 21.

All right, moving on to Amendment 21. This is a reduction in the Department's Public Affairs Unit.

The Department's Public Affairs Unit currently has four sworn officers, and it has one vacancy.

So it's normally staffed with four officers.

Well, I'm sorry.

Yes, it's normally staffed with five officers.

It is the case that, or I'm sorry, it's normally staffed with four officers.

I'm getting screwed up here.

Four officers and it has one vacancy.

So it currently has three officers that are working.

Their salary and benefits for the last couple months or an equivalent salary and benefits for younger officers would be $50,000.

And that is the amount of the proviso.

There are four requested.

layoffs for the entire unit.

And just to give a little background, the Public Affairs Unit answers media questions and publishes information on the department's social media channels and website.

SPD has indicated that if this unit was cut, then the media would need to go to the Public Disclosure Unit to get statements from the Seattle Police Department.

I know I was a little tongue-tied there early, so if there's any questions, please ask.

Never tongue-tied, always informative.

Thank you, Greg.

Council colleagues, Amendment 21 from Herbal Gonzalez Morales Mosqueda.

In front of us, any additional questions on this?

Any questions?

Okay, I would love to see if there's co-sponsors on this.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

Is that a hand?

Okay, Strauss, thank you.

And then so on, sorry, the name was covering your hands.

I only saw the tiny fingers.

So thank you very much council colleagues.

Greg, I think we are good to move forward.

All right.

Amendment 22 is a reduction to the Homeland Security unit.

And this reduction is one FTE that would be requested for layoff.

Again, the dollar amount, small 6,666, which would be the two month saving for a younger officer.

The Homeland Security unit consists of 11 sworn.

It has three vacancies.

The unit coordinates security at major events, and the chief has noted that any reductions to this unit would, of course, affect staffing of these events.

If the chief implemented consistent with the council's intent, this unit would go from 11 sworn down to 10. So with that, I'd ask if there are any questions.

Thank you so much.

Um, want to just provide a little bit of.

Uh, clarity and texture to what this, um, unit is and what it isn't.

Um, so unfortunately.

I don't know who made the decision to name this unit, uh, homeland security unit.

Um, but it, it.

I'm really just sort of at a loss at why somebody in the police department chose to name this after Department of Homeland Security.

It's apparently, according to a letter that Chief Best sent to me and Council Member Herbold and then subsequently posted on Twitter, She indicates on page six of nine of that letter that the Homeland Security Department is a misnamed unit and provides some clarity that this particular unit is not related to the federal agency of the same name.

And so, unfortunately, we don't have a lot of clarity about what this unit is, other than knowing that it coordinates, according to the chief, it, quote, coordinates security at all major events in the city and cutting it would lead to issues staffing these events.

I am from my conversations with Greg Doss understand that this is the Homeland Security Bureau is where the special events teams are housed.

And I just wanted to remind folks, particularly because we have such a new city council, that there was a audit of the special events unit.

done in 2016. That report was heard in my committee.

It is a 127-page report that focused exclusively on police fees and cost recovery, how the Seattle Police Department plans and staffs events, and how police are billing for their work, or as the audit report showed us, how In some cases, they're not billing appropriately for the work and therefore we are not realizing reimbursement at the same.

We're not receiving reimbursement or realizing reimbursement from the special events work that is consistent with the existing ordinance in place that relates to that.

At the time, I flagged my concerns, and I believe this is a policy question for the city council that continues to exist.

As a matter of policy, do we believe as a city council that we should allow for-profit and nonprofit interests to utilize our Seattle Police Department, which is a public agency public employees to provide provide them public security services at events across the city.

And in the past, I have indicated that I have significant concerns with that kind of model and And believe that that as it relates to some of these very large organizations that they likely have resources and capacity to hire their own private security services that don't require them to use armed law enforcement that is largely subsidized by taxpayer dollars at some of these large events like Bumper Shoot, Seahawks games, Mariners games.

and eventually hockey games in our city.

So I think that that continues to be a policy question.

I think that this particular amendment puts us on a path towards more holistic conversations related to how and whether the city should be in the business of providing private security to staffing large for-profit events across the city.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council President Wilson.

Additional comments on Amendment Number 22?

Madam Chair, if I might, can I add a little bit more detail to this section?

Please.

Go ahead, Council Central Staff.

Thank you.

Councilmember Gonzalez raised some significant issues and ones that that shouldn't be taken lightly around special events.

She also raised that the chief's concerned that this unit does more than just special events.

And so I want to provide a bit more detail because I don't want to gloss over the chief's comments that this unit does other things.

And I'm going to do that by just really quickly giving you a rundown of who's in the unit.

There's a captain in the unit that provides leadership to personnel that does the special events work and does chemical, biological, radioactive, and nuclear and explosive work.

There's a lieutenant that is a second in command.

There is a police sergeant patrol that is a liaison to Seattle Center for events.

There are five patrol officers, and the description is these officer positions are assigned to the unit to assist with the development and implementation of staffing plans in connection with large-scale special events, including permitted events coordinated by the Office of Economic Development and the Special Event Office.

There are two positions that are specifically working in the chemical, biological, radioactive, nuclear, and explosive field, and then also another sergeant.

So it is divided up.

amongst special events, and then there are also a couple folks that are dedicated to CBRN work along with the captain and lieutenant.

So hopefully that gives you a little better detail on this unit and the one FTE reduction that might be made there if the chief decides that that is where she wants to allocate this reduction.

Thank you for that additional information, Greg.

Additional comments or questions, colleagues?

OK, are there any additional of folks who would like to add their name as a co-sponsor to this amendment.

Council Member Strauss, Council Member Sawant.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Let's move on to amendment number 23.

Amendment 23, this particular reduction is the community outreach administration reduction.

And we talked a little bit earlier about community outreach.

It is a section that deals primarily with youth violence and outreach to advisory groups.

This is the captain that is in charge of that section.

I will ask if there are any questions.

That is all I have.

All right, let's go ahead.

Any additional folks want to co-sponsor on here?

Council Member Sawant, thank you.

And Council Member Strauss, thank you.

Okay, let's move on to amendment number 24.

Amendment 24 is another specific reduction, this one in the Harbor Patrol Unit.

This reduction would ask the chief and the PSCSC to provide layoff notices to two officers again in the patrol operations bureau with the hope that eventually this reduction would be put into the harbor patrol unit.

$33,000 is provisoed.

I think folks are generally familiar with HARP, but I'll just by way of a high level review say that it's responsible for maintaining safe waterways around Seattle.

It provides a variety of functions including voting safety inspections, accident reports, investigations on injuries and deaths, ITAs that occur on the water, speed enforcement, citation issuance, life safety calls, and a variety of diving activities as well.

So the chief has said and the CBO has said that obviously there would be a decrease in capacity if two FTEs were eliminated.

The unit currently has 30 FTEs and two vacancies.

All I have.

Oh, thank you, Greg.

Any annualization costs off the top of your head?

Thank you, I'm sorry that I forgot on the last one.

This one with two FTEs, I think you would assume $200,000 just for the personnel costs.

Okay, thanks.

And if you do have a reference to amendment number 23, that'd be great too.

Amendment number 24 in front of us, Council Member Herbold, Gonzalez, Morales, and Mosqueda.

Council Member Herbold, please go ahead.

make sure I'm off mute.

I am?

Great.

Yeah, I just want to add just a couple things about this item.

This has been identified because we believe that there are functions of the Harbor Patrol unit, such as life-saving, rescue, swimming, and water-based fires that could be actually to the fire department in the future who also has a firefighting watercraft.

It's something that we really would like to look at.

I think, thank you for, to Greg for identifying the I do also want to add that Seattle Police Department Harbor Patrol make an average hourly rate of over $64 an hour, while the fire department's similar FTEs, divers doing very similar work, make an average of $49 per hour doing, again, very similar work.

to minimize the duplication and make sure that the good work that is being done by both fire and police in this area is retained where we need to have the unique skills of the police department doing some of that work and that of the fire department doing other.

I really appreciate you lifting up the importance of investing in our firefighters as well.

I think that this is a critical component that we continue to want to see additional dollars going into, especially as we think about what public safety truly is.

A lot of our firefighters and medic responders need to be able to continue to know the core element that they will continue to play in this re-envisioned public safety model.

So thank you for highlighting that.

Additional questions, comments?

Co-sponsors.

Anybody interested in co-sponsoring?

Okay.

Okay.

Let's go ahead and move on.

Amendment number 25.

Okay, really quickly before I get to 25, a couple annualized costs I forgot.

The Homeland Security reduction of 1 FTE would be $100,000.

The Community Outreach Administration 1 FTE reduction is another $100,000.

The amendments, the one we just talked about, the Harbor Patrol reduction, would be two FTE, that's $200,000.

And with that, I will go into Amendment 25. Thank you.

And every little bit of our effort to carefully analyze where the dollars could be moved, I think it's important.

So thank you for continuing to highlight those.

Thanks.

And then with Amendment 25, this is another specific reduction.

This is a reduction to the SWOT team.

This would request layoff of two officer FTE for a total of $33,000 in the last two months of the year of salary savings.

And I think most folks know that the SWAT team primarily responds to barrack subject, active shooter incidents, dignitary protection, hostage rescue and high risk warrant services.

The chief has indicated that any reduction in this unit might result in lesser trained and lesser equipped officers having to respond to these events that might increase risk to those involved.

The unit currently consists of 29 FTEs and has four vacancies.

And this would again, eliminate if she chose to allocate the vacancy to this unit, two positions.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

I'm at 25. I'm a sponsor by herbal Gonzalez, Morales, Mosqueda.

Any additional questions on this?

I think it is important to note that this has been a point of question from some I think it's important to note that we're talking about two FT's here.

Okay, and let's go ahead and move on to amendment number 26. Thank you very much.

Okay, so The agenda got put together in a way that we're going to be a little disjointed.

Amendment number 26 is one that is offered by Councilmember Herbold.

And this one would disaggregate the SPD precincts from the SPD Patrol Operations BCL.

And so by way of a little history here, the council has for many, many, many years levied appropriations at the precinct level So the north precinct has its own budget appropriation, the west precinct, et cetera.

In this last budget, the precincts were aggregated under one budget control level called patrol operations, and it went from a very small budget control level to a very big budget control level.

It is now $147 million in the adopted budget because it contains all the precincts.

This particular amendment would go back to the way the council used to budget and would require that there be BSLs for individual precincts.

The point and the purpose would be to allow the council to appropriate at a lower level I would turn it over to Councilmember Herbold to see if she had any comments.

stated that she would actualize council member cuts to SPD by cutting the southwest precinct.

I want to make sure that the council is budgeting on the precinct level so that we can express our intent to continue to have that is consistent with our charter obligations.

And we will continue funding and staffing for all five precincts in a way that is consistent with our charter obligations.

Okay, Council Member Humboldt, thank you very much.

Seeing none, let's go ahead and move on to the next amendment.

Okay.

The next amendment is amendment 27, which is originally sponsored, I believe, by Councilmember Herbold, but I believe it is also being cosponsored by Councilmember Merceda, Councilmember Gonzalez, and Councilmember Morales.

I apologize.

I think that that was an assumption that staff made.

Hopefully that is correct.

This is a change in the budget that would take the victim support team and the victim advocates that are assigned to SPD and would reassign them to the human services department.

Just by way of background, there's a volunteer coordinator in SPD that coordinates the victim support team.

It's a mobile crisis response team that operates citywide to offer on scene support.

It provides transportation, location, shelter, food and clothing, resource referrals and answers questions about the criminal justice system to victims of crimes.

There are also in this group victim advocates that serve as the first point of contact for domestic violence domestic violence victims who come to SPD headquarters to seek assistance.

The victim advocates provide early intervention, advocacy services, and essentially general support to those who are victims of DV violence.

Under this particular action, the victim advocates, 10 of them, and the victim support coordinator and the team would be moved to the human services department, specifically to the BSL that is for supporting safe communities.

There are, that particular BCL contains victim advocates that are contracted with the mayor's office of domestic violence and sexual assault.

And so with that, I would ask if there are any questions.

Thank you very much.

Before we move on, I am afraid I missed a co-sponsor on Amendment 26. Council Member Strauss, did I miss your hand?

I'm not sure if you can hear me, but if so, just let us know if we...

There you are.

Hi.

Hi.

Thank you, Chair.

And I was just checking my assumptions from what I believe that I heard.

Council Member Herbold's amendment would allow us to have a finer ability to define what is and is not spent at a precinct level.

that correct?

I would like to sign on that.

Okay, thank you very much.

Council Member Strauss, I did not mean to miss you.

I appreciate adding you on amendment number 26. A lot's going on, thank you, Chair.

Thank you for flagging that, colleagues.

Council members, we are on amendment number 27 as described by Greg Doss, and Council Member Herbold, you're one of the co-sponsors along with Mosqueda Gonzalez-Morales.

Would you like to speak to this as well?

I think Greg covered it pretty well.

This is transferring the victim advocates out of SPD.

This would not prohibit the victim advocates from continuing to work with SPD when it's appropriate.

This transfer would affect transfer into the Human Services Department.

We might want to at a later date talk about increasing funding for the community-based victim advocates.

the police department.

They work with the police department on a variety of issues.

Like victim advocates through, for instance, King County sexual assault resource center.

These victim advocates also work with the police department.

Their particular location, whether or not they are in HSD or in a community-based organization does not in any way limit their collaboration and

Okay.

Are there, is there any additional council member who would like to say anything?

Okay.

Moving on to co-sponsorship, additional sponsors to amendment number 27. Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Let's go ahead and move on.

Number 28.

Amendment number 28 is transferring the data.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Did I miss somebody?

Okay.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

and it is a transfer of five positions.

These particular folks do complex data analysis.

They manage research agreements.

They provide data to research partners, and they maintain the data analytics platform, which provides information to the public on topics such as the use of force by SPD officers, crisis response.

Civilian members also provide 911 call analysis, patrol staffing analysis, and do uniform crime reporting for the FBI.

And they also provide data for OIG.

The council's intent with moving this to FAS, I understand, is to build community trust and data reporting and analysis.

With this move, all of the data in this unit would continue to be produced.

And without this move, all of the data in this unit would continue to be produced and controlled by command staff at SPD, under the command staff.

Thank you very much.

And yes, Amendment 28 is sponsored by Herbal, Gonzalez, Morales, and Mosqueda.

Council Member Morales, would you like to speak to this?

Yes.

Excuse me.

Thank you.

Am I unmuted?

Yes.

OK.

I want to begin by thanking Greg, who has been working, I'm pretty sure, around the clock for weeks now.

So thank you, Greg, for all that you're doing.

And the rest of central staff, who is all really busting ass.

Let's just be real about that.

So thank you.

This amendment transfers, as Greg said, the civilian data analysts from SPD to FAS.

I have to say one of the first times I became aware of the challenges, some of the inaccuracies in public safety data was because of some of the really important work that Council Member Juarez was doing on behalf of the missing and murdered indigenous women.

where we learned that diverse communities were not being properly accounted for to understand the full depth of some of the challenges that we have in the city.

I will say that in my community, there is a very legitimate fear as well that data is used for predictive policing, which has often resulted in young people being incarcerated to prevent their involvement in escalated violence.

even when they haven't committed a crime themselves.

I know young people have been put in jail over the weekend because gang activity is up and they want to keep someone safe.

I will say that is not really what we have in mind when we talk about increasing community safety.

So this is an effort to shift, well not an effort, it is intended to shift civilian data analysts to a civilian department to begin to restore the community confidence, so that incomplete or inaccurate data isn't seen as simply serving to put the department in a favorable light, and that it is kind of a more objective third-party analysts who are actually doing the work of analyzing police data.

Thank you, Councilman Morales.

Are there additional comments on this?

Thank you again for that summary Councilmember Morales.

I will also note that I'm interested in continuing to ask our partners who do work within this division.

If there is a transfer and folks continue to move out, how we can also ensure that they have appropriate access to the data that they need in order to do their work.

So that is one thing that was flagged for me.

And I want to follow up with folks on that as we think about how some of the entities that are potentially transferring out have access to the appropriate data.

That'll be a big priority as we move forward.

Okay.

Any additional individuals would like to add their name as a co-sponsor?

Council Member Strauss, Council Member Lewis.

Okay, and Council Member Swann.

Thank you, and let's move on.

All right well first of all I'd like to thank Council Member Morales for recognizing the efforts of Central Staff.

We work to serve you and I know that you all have been involved in ongoing and fairly intensive conversations with community that has resulted sometimes in decisions from community coming in a little bit later than of course Central Staff geeks like us would like in the schedule.

And so, you know, we we do our best to put things together.

Sometimes we make errors.

And I'm glad that today is a day where we are just previewing these drafts for your consumption.

I would say that partially because as we move into amendment number 29, this is an error.

It should not be here.

This is one that we've already discussed, the homeland security reduction.

And so I would ask you to move past this.

And amendment number 30 is the same.

It is a duplication of- You're making our lives easier right now, so thank you.

Trying to go.

I'm glad I could help with our mistakes.

So let's go to the next amendment, which is not a duplicate, which is Amendment 31. And Amendment 31 is a reduction to the officers in the navigation team.

This particular amendment uses the same approach that has been used in the specified reductions that we talked about prior in this conversation.

And it levies a proviso of $216,000 and asks the I would like to call on the chief and director of labor relations to issue notice for 14 layoffs.

There are currently in the navigation team 14 officers.

I believe there is one vacancy there.

And these officers assist the citywide to provide services to homeless people.

The one thing to note here, labor relations has indicated that removal of the officers from the navigation team may create labor issues among the represented personnel that are in other departments that work on the navigations team, such as the human services department.

And that is all I had to say on this one.

I know this is one that we've talked about over the last few months and years.

Council Member Morales, did you want to add to this?

I know you mentioned this issue earlier today as well.

Sure.

So this, as Greg said, this provides or prohibits the SPD from spending $216,000 from patrol operations.

We have all heard directly from housed and unhoused community members, service providers, public health officials, that moving our unhoused neighbors from place to place, especially during a pandemic, is not a solution to the homelessness crisis.

It doesn't foster trust between the city and homeless communities.

And frankly, it's just cruel and inhumane.

So, you know, we know that sleeping outside is not a crime.

Being poor and homeless is also not a crime.

And the truth is that the sight of armed officers doesn't instill trust.

It actually makes people very afraid, often as they watch their homes and their belongings be destroyed with the police department present.

So we are trying to remove the police from homelessness outreach and begin to rebuild trust with our homeless community.

We're investing in successful organizations that prioritize social work, crisis intervention and de-escalation, mental health, overall health and well-being and shelter referral, not moving people from one community to the next.

So this is really, you know, the conversation we've been having all year and our belief that homelessness outreach and assistance has to be I would like to see a full stop.

Divorced from the Seattle Police Department.

Full stop.

That is what we are doing here.

Councilmember Morales?

Councilmember Strauss?

Yeah, so we do have another amendment that is coming up later.

This is the amendment that removes the force from the NAPT team.

Yeah.

Great.

Thank you, Chair.

I'd like to add my name.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss.

I see Council Member Herbold and then Council Member Sawant.

Thank you.

I don't need to add my name.

I'm already a sponsor.

I just want to, in addition to the requests from the advocacy community, homeless people themselves, I also want to lift up the fact that the city auditor more than two years ago requested that HSD do a staffing assessment of the navigation team with a specific lens on this issue of whether or not having police officers on a team of people who are intended to do outreach and develop relationships to encourage them to accept other options when those options are available, whether or not having police officers on those teams actually makes it more likely that we're going to be successful in realizing the outcomes or less likely.

The human services department for two years has refused to do that staffing assessment and so I do think it is time for this council to make the decision that having police officers makes it more on this team makes it more difficult to develop the relationships necessary for folks to gain trust that the options that are being offered, when those options are available, are options that will meet their needs.

I also want to thank Council Member Morales for the companion piece that we're gonna talk about in a moment.

I think that's really important too with knowing that to continue to do that work.

Without police officers on the navigation team.

Knowing that we have heard that the other non-police officers that are city employees who would still remain on the team are unwilling to continue to do that work.

Thank you.

Later in the agenda is a budget amendment from my office to eliminate the so-called navigation team.

which carries out the sweeps of homeless encampments.

This particular budget amendment that's being considered right now falls far short of that.

Like previous amendments, it's only a proviso.

It only takes effect starting in November, and it's only for the police aspects of the sweeps, but does not deal with the managers who choose to do each sweep.

However, it is a small step towards moving away from the sweep.

So I will be supporting it.

I will note that the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness has publicly said also in line with the amendment that is coming from my office and from the people's budget that the city of Davis.

They are calling on the city Council to defund the whole so-called navigation team in keeping with the broader call to divest from harmful policing practices and invest in solutions that address the underlying inequities in our community.

Okay, I will also add one additional piece.

We talk a lot about the effectiveness of those who are doing outreach to our unsheltered and unhoused population, having more of a success rate and council members.

I just also want to call out the importance of also protecting the safety of those mental health counselors and case managers who are part of the effort currently.

whether or not they do this work with outreach to the unhoused population or they're doing other types of outreach in our community, I think part of the conversation we've heard about is that potentially people would be safer if we weren't putting them in situations where they were being told to remove individuals' belongings and put people out of their places where they are currently finding shelter or telling them to go to places that are congregate settings right now during a deadly pandemic.

we can help protect their health and safety as members of the city as well when we're not pairing them with officers and going in and removing people's last belongings.

So I think that as we look forward to implementing changes to the, as we said, so-called navigation team, thank you council members for that.

We need to also be thinking about how we're protecting those city employees and asking them to do things that don't put them in harm's way where they're being paired with SPD because they're being asked to do something that's potentially dangerous.

Let's think about how we can re-envision how we engage with communities so that our community and our city staff continue to feel safe and aren't in a situation where armed personnel is what's being asked of them.

So I think this is a good step here and happy to support this amendment as a co-sponsor.

Okay, so I have council members Strauss, Sawant, and Lewis as additional co-sponsors.

Okay, let's move on.

I want to say as I close out here that the navigation team reduction is one of the reductions that will have a longer term, bigger impact.

This one could have an impact of up to 1.4 million next year.

And with that, I would turn it over to my colleague, Dan Eder, who will talk with you about the next three amendments.

Thank you for doing that annualized amount, Greg.

Appreciate it.

Council members, amendments 32 through 39 are all co-sponsored by Council President Gonzales, Council Member Herbold, Council Member Morales, Council Member Mosqueda.

I hope that the amendments actually reflect that, that is the intent of the, my understanding of the intent of the four sponsors, and one iteration of a couple of these amendments did not correctly capture all of the names, but I believe that what you'll see on your screen as we move through these one by one will have corrected that error.

Thank you, Dan.

Sure.

The package of eight amendments are, as Greg mentioned in some of his early remarks, are intended to be acted upon together.

There are the first three, and I promise we will go through these one at a time, but I want to give you a big picture perspective on it.

The first three, numbers 32, 33, and 34 on your agenda, would authorize a total of $17 million in new spending collectively.

The balance of the amendments, beginning with 35 and through 39, would provide the mechanism for supporting those new commitments and outlays.

So I think unless there are questions about the package as a framing device, I will tee up amendment number 32 for discussion.

Is that okay with you, Chair?

Please go ahead.

I don't see any questions.

Okay.

So amendment 32 would add $3 million of general fund revenues for the legislative department to contract with one or more community-based organizations to perform research informing the city's future steps regarding changes to providing public safety.

Okay, that was short and sweet.

Thank you, Dan.

I will add to that, council colleagues, As one of the co-sponsors, I think one of the most important things that we want to highlight today is this is not just about reductions in a budget for budget sake, as I think Council Member Sawant pointed to.

This is about policy choices that we are making.

policy choices to respond to the concerns that have been outlined in Seattle and across the country and the world.

Again, questioning the size and wanting to right size.

The Seattle Police Department is something that we and cities across this country are going through right now.

That's only part of the equation.

The other part of the equation is getting dollars back out into community.

Colleagues, this is really critical that we not just think about reductions, but truly investments, upstream investments, investments directly into communities that have been historically de-invested from and marginalized intentionally by past public policy.

We can't obviously do this overnight.

We can't right our historic wrongs through one budget document in the middle of a year.

This will take years of action, but our commitment today is outlined in some of the provisos that we see in front of us today for discussion.

Notably, King County Equity Now and Decriminalize Seattle commented that one of their top priorities was making sure that there was a robust summer engagement process that was community-led, that was black-led, that would involve a large group of individuals coming together to re-envision what public safety truly is.

And so as we look at investments, wanting to invest in the top priority of $3 million for the community-led research project that will be allocated from the legislative department directly to community was a really big priority that we continue to hear about from community organizations and community leaders in our city.

I'm excited about this investment, not only because it helps to meet what was requested directly from community, but it helps to make sure that as we re-envision policing, as we think about community safety, as we fundamentally center our future policies on racial justice issues, and follow the lead of a broad coalition of those who have been directly impacted, people who are coming from communities of color.

We are taking the lead from those who've been asking for policies to be changed and shaped based on their lived experience and based on the solutions that they are helping to bring to the table to truly create a sustained community safety policy and strategies that will last beyond a one or two budget cycles.

So that is exactly what this process is intended to do.

to bring us information this fall that we can then act upon.

The community-led research process will inform the vision for what this council would potentially consider this fall.

And not only this council, but truly what the re-envisioned world of public safety would look like in the City of Seattle if we're able to continue to make the type of investments that the community-led research project will come back to us with.

They will also be identifying ways in which we can pull in potential additional cuts from the criminal justice system, as I mentioned earlier.

And I think this will help us provide the full package and be able to fully respond as we move towards trying to address the root causes of unmet needs in our city.

A portion of this research effort will be explicitly focused on defining community safety and offering specific recommendations and support to community organizations.

to help scale up and build capacity, as we've talked about before, it's important to build up capacity and community as we make reductions in the Seattle Police Department.

And I'm really excited about the language that we've included here, again, directly making sure that community-led research is going to lead to more transitions and more significant change in our 2021 budget.

This is our participatory budgeting process that we would like to engage in for the 2021 effort, and the community-led research project will help inform that participatory process.

Colleagues, Councilmember Peterson, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chairman Mosqueda.

I'd like to sign on as a co-sponsor to this and also signal my interest in when legislative department does draft contracts to cast a wide net among BIPOC-led organizations.

You know, we've heard from Deep Criminalized Seattle, King County Equity Now, we're going to hear a lot more from them as well.

And also other organizations like Community Police Commission mentioned earlier, Urban League, others.

to make sure that we have a wide network of people, even the everyday protesters, so that we are casting a wide net.

Thank you very much.

Councilmember Morales, you have done some thinking as well about deliverables.

Did you want to make any additional comments on that concept of the deliverables and the impact that this could have for the city?

That's OK.

I will just say quickly, as Chair Mosqueda mentioned, the idea here is to contract with community organizations, local organizations that are already doing this work.

The kinds of activities that we're talking about for this community-led process include the staffing and training preliminary work plan development.

Part of the idea here is to engage young people in this process.

When we say participatory research process, that means teaching community members how to survey in their own neighborhoods, how to run focus groups, how to Talk to your neighbors about what your neighbors want to see.

And so that requires some training, some work plan development.

Then, of course, the actual process itself, having the meetings, having the organizational gatherings, and doing the data collection analysis and presentation of what they have learned through that process.

So a snapshot of the kind of work that we look to invest in.

Excellent.

Thank you for sharing those key deliverables just as a few examples.

Council Member Swamp, please go ahead.

Thank you.

As was mentioned before, this amendment adds $3 million to support community organizations to design alternatives to repressive policing, which I wholeheartedly support, and I support this amendment.

And actually, my office has submitted the same amendment, except that This amendment, amendment 32, does not identify any funding source for the $3 million.

And the version of the amendment, this amendment proposed by my office, proposes paying for this amendment by defunding the police by those $3 million, which of course is a small fraction of defunding by at least 50 million.

I will support this amendment regardless, but as its sponsors look for a way to fund it, I hope they will support funding it by defunding the SPD like the movement has demanded.

One of the key issues is not only the fact that these community organizations need to be funded, but also that we want less repressive policing in our communities, which is why the movement is demanding to defund the police.

If it was only a question of finding funds for good projects, I just wanted to say that the main thing actually to defund.

So I hope that the sponsors of this amendment will support my amendment, which is the exact same thing, except that it pays for by defunding the police by that much amount.

Thank you.

Thank you Council Member Sawant.

Comments on that?

Okay, I'll just make a comment.

If I can and customers want I appreciate that there's similar interest in getting the desired dollar amount out to the community for these Immediate dollars to go out.

We did have to look at other ways to fund it.

So we have identified funding That we are going to talk about right now that ensures that the dollars get out the door right now having the legal concerns I think that Council Member Morales and others alluded to that require us to engage in further conversation and potential negotiating that allow for us to make some cost savings assumption by the end of the year.

Yes, that's important and we want to make sure that we are doing both the decrease in the dollar amount that goes to SPD and increase in community.

But this is such a critical piece that we really did try to find additional ways for us to get these dollars out right now.

Absolutely, that still means that I and I know others are committed to making those reductions but wanting to ensure that the $3 million plus the dollar amounts that you'll see in a moment get out the door.

We had to quickly identify where there was any additional funding and frankly, be very creative to ensure that the amount of money that community was asking for in the immediate, not in the long-term, but in the immediate, truly got out the door.

And so I appreciate the longer-term goal that I know was shared.

Council Member Lewis, please go ahead.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Can I just ask, Dan may have said this earlier, but what is the original source of this $3 million?

So what I was trying to describe was that there's a package of spending.

This is in that spending package.

This is item 32. 32, 33, and 34 are all just pure spending amendments.

There is no specific funding source tied to it.

The co-sponsors, my understanding is, intend to package this with amendments 35, 36, 37, 38, and 39. Each of those provides, from a variety of different ways, revenue which backs the $17 million of spending.

There isn't a one-to-one alignment between the revenue source and a specific spending type.

but if you take the whole $17 million of spending in the first three amendments, it is balanced against $17 million of revenue in the second five amendments.

Thank you, Dan.

And Madam Chair, I'd be happy to be added as a co-sponsor to this amendment.

Thank you very much, Council Member Lewis.

Any additional comments or questions?

Okay, I see Council Member Peterson, Sawant, and Lewis desiring to add their name to this as a co-sponsor.

Council Member Sawant.

Yes, you can add me as a co-sponsor, but I'm not sure what the The point that was made about the funding and we needed to get this out the door.

I'm not sure what I'm not sure I understand that in my understanding there is no ambiguity of transferring SPD funding to this work today.

I mean, even if you I'm not exactly clear why this amendment is not being done the way my amendment is being done, which will be later in the agenda, which is to directly say that it's going to be funded by defunding the SPD by that much amount.

Does anybody?

Yeah, can I ask to respond to that and respond by asking central staff to help here with understanding?

Because it is my understanding, Council Member Sawant, that while it might be as easy as passing an amendment saying we will not provide the money, there is still the process of bargaining that has to happen.

And even if we do put that money aside and invest it in community now, there is the risk that the bargaining process will not go as planned and we might have to pay that money back.

And so the reality is that what we are trying to do here is ensure that we are getting money out the door now so that these research processes can start and do it in a way that really gets cash in hand.

We are also hoping to realize future savings, but that's not money that we have in hand.

We can't write a check with future savings.

What we can write a check for, with, is the funding that we are about to propose in subsequent amendments.

Dan, I'll ask you to verify if I'm reading all of this right.

Yes, I think that's correct.

Council Member Sawant, I think that there is a, you know, there's a policy call and a decision to be made by you and your colleagues about the city's tolerance for risk and for how to prioritize the use of limited resources.

Central staff has coordinated with the law department and with the labor relations folks.

We have investigated and have a sense of what the Public Safety Civil Service Commission layoff rules are and informed by all of that input and advice.

It is our We needed to make some call about when, what money could be made available in the event that a layoff notices are provided on August 1st, which was our working assumption.

Our take on it is that it would be prudent to assume a three-month lag before anyone who in the police off, sorry, any sworn officers in the Seattle Police Department who are currently employed and receive layoff notices on August 1 and when the city can achieve salary savings.

So the provisos that Greg walked you through and some of the cuts that I've just talked about, do not realize money that can immediately be made available and provide a disappointingly, I think from all council members' perspective, a disappointingly small amount of money to work with for other purposes, given that the officers who will eventually, we are assuming, no longer work for the city, will only not work for the city for two months.

So that's what we're assuming, but you're not bound by our assumption.

Sorry, Dan.

Yeah, exactly.

Can I just ask you a question?

Can you confirm just in itself that if a budget amendment is passed, transferring the money, that the money could go out to the community groups while any other negotiations happen?

Yes, that is legally possible, yes.

that is what I'm talking about.

At the end of the day, the money can be allocated or disbursed to the community program.

I think we have to be crystal clear here.

There is a difference between what I'm saying and other Councilmembers are saying.

I'm not giving the impression which I think is a false impression that somehow the money cannot be dispersed while the negotiations are going on.

That is not true.

What is true is yes, the negotiations have to go on.

Yes, I'm not claiming, I'm not making any claim that I know how those negotiations will go.

But one, just a technical clarification in this whole thing is that even if those negotiations went so badly that all the money would have to be paid back, that wouldn't be, I mean, it wouldn't be, I mean, I think what's being painted is an absurd scenario that somehow that money will be taken away from those community programs.

That's not how it's going to happen.

The city of Seattle as a whole would owe that money.

Arrangements would have to be made for that.

And that's one technical thing but at the end of the day, the point is political I think how the bargaining goes.

It depends on how committed the council members who are on that committee are to support the movement.

And so I don't agree with overall for every amendment painting the specter that, well, well, we have to see how the bargaining goes.

We have to see how the negotiations go.

We have to see how the negotiations go.

Well, if you're committed to defunding, then make them go well, because ultimately we are the city's highest legislative body.

The Seattle Police Department does not run the city council.

The city council runs the city council.

Thank you.

Councilmember Lewis?

Thank you Madam Chair.

I think that was a good clarification between Councilmember Sawant and Dan, but I did just want to ask one clarification based on that exchange.

So Dan, if we were to invest the money, make the cut and invest the money, but then we were ultimately unsuccessful in the bargaining, we would in turn be responsible for paying that money back.

And if the money had already been distributed and spent, we'd have to find some other way to pay it back.

Is that a correct understanding?

I would say that is a downside risk.

I can't say exactly how things might play out, but that is one scenario that I think council members who are sponsoring these amendments were trying to avoid.

Right, and I'm not asking that clarification to imply that that is likely to happen, but I'm just trying to understand the sort of universe of risk.

And so that is a very real potential risk of the approach that is advocated in Council Member Sawant's amendments.

So there's sort of a risk-reward balance we're being asked to make by the different proposals.

Is that correct?

It seems fair.

All right, thanks.

Council Member Morales.

Yeah, I do just want to respond to that too.

I never said that the community would have to pay back funds.

I did say that we would be responsible for paying them back, but I don't think anybody would assume that we would go get money back from the community.

And I'll just add to that.

I think we should move on folks.

But I, I will just add to that.

I think the risk there as well, if the city has to pay it back, is that city services are harmed and the various services that we're trying to invest in, we break trust with the community if we're not able to continue those services in the future.

So again, the intent of this is to try to do, I think the shared goal that I'm hearing from various council members is to make sure that we can move forward with the community-led research process, and we have identified funds that I believe are solid funds to get out the door right now that have less risk associated with it.

I'll just say that.

Okay.

Any additional folks want to add their names?

I'm sorry, I already heard Peterson, Sawant, Lewis, and Strauss.

Okay, thank you very much.

Hey, colleagues, it is slightly after 5 p.m.

I did say I was trying to get us to 5, but as Dan has outlined, there are amendments leading up to Amendment 39 that I think are sort of packaged together.

So with your indulgence, I would ask for us to be able to get through Amendment 39, and then we will do the remaining of the amendments on Monday, if that's okay.

Okay, thank you very much.

Council, colleagues, let's keep going.

Amendment 33, please.

Okay.

Chair Mosqueda, I will again be brief and leave the further descriptions to the co-sponsors and any council members who have comments they'd like to make.

Amendment 33 would add $4 million of general fund revenue for the Human Services Department to make investments in an initiative such as the Seattle Community Safety Initiative.

This initiative responds to the immediate need for scaling up gun violence intervention and prevention.

With that, I'll turn it over to council members who may wish to speak to this item.

Okay, thank you so much.

Again, we're on amendment number 33, co-sponsored by Gonzales, Herbold, Morales, and Mosqueda.

Council Member Herbold, yes, please.

Thank you.

Just a little bit more detail on the Seattle Community Safety Initiative.

It's an alternative to traditional policing that seeks to build and strengthen neighborhood safety for black and brown communities in Seattle and South King County.

The mission is to restore and rebuild.

community connections, needed resources in historically marginalized and systematically oppressed black and brown communities.

We believe that the foundation of community safety, the beliefs are that it starts with restoration, healing, and adequate economic resourcing of our communities.

The goal is to set up community safety hubs in targeted communities, West Seattle, Southeast Seattle, Central District, North Seattle, in order to facilitate culturally relevant and holistic community safety efforts.

This initiative is a people of color-led partnership between community passageways, urban family, Southeast Network Hub, Boys and Girls Club, and the live and free program YMCA.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

Additional questions or comments?

Council Member Szilagyi.

So on Amendment 33, like in the last amendment, this amendment funds community programs that my office wholeheartedly supports funding.

And my office, again, has also submitted to central staff amendments to fund initiatives like the Community Safety Initiative that Dan mentioned, which does restorative justice and other community-based work to prevent violence outside the criminal justice system.

And again, this amendment does not specify a funding source.

I mean, this is obviously referencing the discussion that a debate that just happened in, you know, in terms of what risk the city council is willing to take and what confidence it is city council members are willing to project in actually holding the police department accountable.

And the steps that the community is demanding are just the initial steps that are being demanded.

And I feel like if the city council does not have the confidence to come through on that, even then I don't know how the real accountability can happen, including an elected community oversight board with full powers over the police.

But those are very much next steps.

Again, I will be co-sponsoring this amendment because I support the programs that are going to be funded with this amendment.

But this amendment, again, does not specify a funding source.

And I hope the sponsors will support the approach from my office to fund this kind of work by the police because those two have to go hand in hand.

And I agree that we as a council and I certainly in the six and a half years that I have held office, I have absolutely not broken trust with the community.

I think the biggest way that the city council can break trust is by actually not defunding.

I'll point out that even the order of today's amendments, today's agenda has been I just wanted to point out that the amendments that have been front-loaded in the agenda are not actual defund amendments and the defund amendments are coming from my office and they are later in the agenda and I hope that the Council will support those amendments on Monday and not break trust with the community and actually

I am happy to be a co-sponsor of this, being very familiar with a lot of these stakeholders and organizations and knowing that this is an initiative that has long been in the making and really can be a game-changing I am so excited about this.

I think this is a great addition to public safety in the city.

And really excited for this.

Really glad that we are making a significant investment.

And really just cannot wait for this to be completely stood up, funded and out in the field.

Thank you so much.

And I want to just ask real quick, Dan Eater, would it be accurate to say of the amendments that we're talking about, 32, 33, 34, that those investments, the identified source is amendments 35, 36, 37, 38, and 39?

That's correct.

Okay, great.

So we can have further conversation about that when we get there.

and co-sponsors seeing them.

Let's go ahead and move to Amendment 34.

Okay, I've told you about two of the ideas for investments, a $3 million and a $4 million idea.

This is the third of the package of three.

Amendment number 34 would add $10 million of general fund revenues to the Human Services Department.

The council's intent is that the Human Services Department would make an investment in 2020 in a hub nonprofit community organization that would then award grant dollars to other nonprofit organizations.

And the overall purpose of the city's funding investment is threefold, to grow the capacity of such community organizations that receive the grants, to provide long-term support to criminalize populations and to interrupt and prevent violence and harm.

With that, I'll turn it over to council members who may wish to speak to it.

Okay, thank you very much.

Amendment 34, sponsored by Herbal Gonzales Morales Mosqueda.

Council Member Morales, did you want to speak to this?

Please go ahead.

Sure.

So again, this amendment is a very important step toward investing.

really, you know, having us put our money where our mouth is.

I want to say, as we have been talking, you know, we've been meeting with community regularly, several hours a week for several weeks now.

We know that there are roadblocks to meeting all of the requests coming from community.

Community knows that too.

And they understand that this is a down payment on the work that we still have to do.

And that's work that we are committed to continuing in September.

But with this package, we have a plan for actually getting funding out the door this year by, as Dan said, contracting with the local foundation to help deliver the funding to start the participatory budget process, but also a lot of the other work that we want community organizations to do.

We have organizations involved in non-armed crisis response, violence interruption and prevention, harm reduction, restorative and transformative justice approaches.

And so this allows us to make some of those steps.

You know, after a lot of public dialogue that has come out of the executive's office and council since this uprising began, there's this constant phrase about investing in BIPOC communities.

We have the chance now to demonstrate our commitment to doing that and moving forward with this intent into the future.

So I want to thank Decriminalize Seattle and King County Equity Now, the Everyday March.

You know, having these young activists out and holding us accountable is important to continuing to pressure the city to respond.

We know that for too long, BIPOC communities who are closest to the solutions that impact them have borne the burden of solving these problems.

often on a shoestring budget without access to the resources that they really need.

And so part of the intent here is to really shift away from that kind of austerity model to provide these communities with the resilience to continue to operate so that they aren't fighting over crumbs, because that's how we divide community and that does not serve communities of color well.

So if we're really going to reimagine public safety, we have to create a pathway for communities and their organizations to define what a healthy investment looks like.

A pathway that doesn't expand the scope of police functions in their communities, which is a part of why we are, you know, moving, aiming to move the community policing functions out of the department.

Because it's time for us to fix this.

to divest money from a police department that is bloated and has become more bloated over the last several years and invest money instead in communities that would get to the root of the inequities that we have really embedded in a very, very structural way into our institutions for centuries.

And so this is a commitment to start moving away from that model and really invest to make the neighborhoods that we, our neighbors live in more healthy and more vibrant and really increase community safety for everybody.

Well said Council Member Morales, appreciate that.

Council Colleagues, additional comments or questions?

Okay, seeing none, Council Members, are there folks who would like to add their name as co-sponsors?

Council Member Peterson, thank you.

Council Member Strauss, thank you.

Last question.

Oh, I'm so sorry, Council Member Peterson, did I misinterpret your hand?

Did you want to ask a question and then we can come back to that?

Both, co-sponsor and question.

I just, a technical question.

I printed out these amendments and this one says sponsor CM Herbold.

What's on the screen has four council members.

So I just didn't know.

It's the same amendment though, $10 million.

That's right.

For these organizations.

Okay.

Dan mentioned there was two that unfortunately didn't have the four names listed.

And I believe that was number 34 and 33. Okay.

same content.

Yeah, that was a Scrivener's error.

Okay.

And since we don't name the organizations here like in the previous amendment, to the extent organizations need additional funding or additional technical assistance to sort of track what they're doing and report back and have help with getting those positive outcomes that we all want.

I know when organizations are budgeting, they often aren't you know, they don't maybe not have the capacity to budget for a data analyst or something to help them track things and report back and even leverage more funding when they want to really scale up.

So I just want to flag for Central Staff when they're doing the contract to the extent there's technical assistance for organizations to track the results and constantly improve so that they can really scale up at a rapid rate later.

Council Member, if I may.

The first amendment that we discussed a few moments ago in the spending package number 32 was an appropriation of $3 million to the legislative department.

And we will have a hand in- This is HSD.

The contract.

This is gonna actually be done through the executive branch.

Right, okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Did I see Council Member Lewis?

Did you have your hand up?

Please go ahead.

I just want to be added as a cosponsor.

Yeah.

Excellent.

Happy to add you.

Thank you.

Um, I have council member Lewis, council member Strauss, council member Peterson and customer salon.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Um, customer Morales for your summary of this.

And I know, uh, in relation to the, uh, question around, um, possible, organizations, there's some great examples of criteria that we could look at in some of the initial drafting of the concept that community has put together and that you've helped to summarize.

So thank you, Council Member Morales.

All right, Council Colleagues, I'm going to ask for your indulgence.

Can we get through these next four amendments to talk about the funding side?

Because the question was asked about where the funding is coming from, and then we would draw the line.

Very shortly, I see Council President Singh, let's have a hard stop at 530. Okay, okay, great, great, nods.

And then that will allow for us to start with amendment number 40, which Council Member Morales alluded to, which is related to the navigation team.

We would pick that back up on Monday, okay?

I'm seeing nods, let's try and do it.

Dan, we'll turn it back over to you to amendment 35.

Okay, as the chair just mentioned, this is the beginning of the revenue package.

There are five amendments.

The first one is amendment number 35. This amendment would cut $36,000 from an existing police department consultant contract.

The consultant contract is for providing implicit bias training.

There is $72,000 of that contract currently remaining.

This amendment would cut that amount by half.

So we would eliminate $36,000 of $72,000 remaining contract amount.

It would also impose a proviso on the remaining $36,000 of the contract funding until such time as the police department submits a report describing the importance of this training.

Thank you very much.

Council President Gonzalez, did I see your hand up on this?

Apologies if not.

Oh, go ahead.

No, yeah, just really quickly.

Dan, I may have missed you say it in your brief presentation now, but this is a small cut to this particular proposal.

It doesn't zero out the training for implicit bias fund.

Is that correct?

That is accurate.

Of the $72,000 that is remaining in this existing contract, this budget action would cut 36,000, half of the money, it would leave the other half intact, but place a proviso on that second half, the money that remains until such time as a report has been submitted to the council.

Thank you.

Obviously, we are all supportive of implicit bias training.

I do think that over the last several years, there have been concerns about the sufficiency of the implicit bias training.

And so I think that it would be appropriate for us to, in light of where we're at now, have the department go back and take a second look at the sufficiency of its implicit bias training in order to provide the council with a clearer sense of what that training is and at what level it should be funded in the future.

So again, I don't want folks to look at this amendment and cut as a signal that the council is not interested in supporting implicit bias training.

I do want to clearly state that that's not the case, that the case is that we want to get a better sense of what this training is.

I think that is a great point.

It is efficacy and ways in which we could improve upon a implicit bias training program that has greater efficacy than what might currently exist.

Thank you, chair.

Okay, appreciate it.

Here we go.

Amendment number 30. Where are we at, Dan?

36?

We're up to 36.

It is the second amendment in the five amendment package.

36 would cut $50,000 from SPD's remaining travel and training budget, which has a total remaining budget of $201,000.

$50,000 would be It is in fact central staff Assumption about how much of the two hundred and one thousand dollars of remaining budget is associated with travel the city budget office and the SPD Now that this amendment has been made public They provide us with feedback about that assumption and we can adjust accordingly, but it was a working assumption The amendment would also impose a proviso on the remaining $151,000 of travel and training budget until SPD submits a report about the need for the remaining training in the year.

Thank you very much, Dan.

Again, Amendment 36 sponsors Gonzales, Herbold, Morales, Mosqueda.

I'll just speak to this real quick to add a little context.

I mean, we're in the middle of a deadly global pandemic.

There's not a lot of travel happening right now.

It makes a lot of sense for us to identify any funding source that is going to be potentially underutilized, as well as making value statements about where we'd like to see things moved or reduced.

And so Given the ongoing travel restriction, that just makes a lot of sense to put a cut and provides on this travel and training budget component, especially as we consider.

the global context in which we're in, obviously there will be a need for any training or travel if it's related to complete the requirements under the consent decree.

But we appreciate that central staff is continuing to look into this issue further and to identify if there's any remaining additional dollars that we can continue to pull from from the budget for travel.

So thank you very much.

Questions on this item?

Councilmember Silva?

Seeing none, are there additional Councilmembers who would like to add their name to amendment 36?

Councilmember Strauss?

Councilmember Lewis?

Any additional comments?

Let's go to item number 37.

The implication of this would be to eliminate 2.75 full-time equivalent civilian positions.

And it would also cut remaining other funds for recruitment that is not needed in 2020, given that recruitment activities are not happening in 2020 due to the hiring freeze.

There is a $200,000 subset of the $800,000 that was anticipated to be used for hiring bonuses, but both because there is a hiring freeze so that the bonuses don't need to be paid at the front end when we first hire staff, sworn officers, and because the second half it happens sometime, some period of time after the officers are hired, is not expected to be paid until 2021. This budget action would eliminate that funding and require the mayor to come up with some other source in 2020.

Thank you very much, Dan.

Comments or questions on this, colleagues?

Okay.

Council President?

Please go ahead.

Yeah, I would just thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

Thank you, Dan, for that description.

I think you captured all of the salient points.

I just wanted to sort of punctuate your comments by making sure that we recognize that the mayor and the chief have already committed to elimination of funds for recruitment and retention.

And so, so this is a capturing of those, those funds so that we can utilize them in in accordance with council priorities.

So I just want to be really clear that the executive and SPD has ended all recruitment and retention expenditures and has also allowed the hiring bonus program that the council previously approved to lapse in June 2020. And that is directly from the letter that the chief sent to me and Council Member Herbold.

page three of nine.

And so I just wanna emphasize that again, for those who might have concerns about this particular cut, this is a simple memorialization and holding the executive to the prior publicly stated commitment that these programs will be ended and appreciate the opportunity Chair Mosqueda to provide that additional I think it would be helpful to have that in context for our colleagues who may be considering whether or not to co-sponsor this particular amendment.

additional questions or comments?

seeing none, are there council colleagues who would like to add their name to amendment 37?

Councilmember Strauss?

38 would authorize use of the remaining funds in the Revenue Stabilization Account, specifically $12.8 million.

The Revenue Stabilization Account may be filled in 2021, may be replenished in 2021 through future cuts to the SPD budget if that happens and how that happens in the 2021 budget decision-making process.

And as a backstop, if necessary, there could be some additional use of the jumpstart payroll tax revenues that are expected to begin to flow in the 2021 budget.

And central staff is still working on exactly the format for how this will happen.

It could be in separate legislation or it could be an amendment to existing legislation.

Thank you, Dan.

I know this is not a decision that folks came to lightly in terms of trying to identify additional dollars.

I appreciate you emphasizing that it's a possibility to backfill this with the future cuts from SPD's budget in those deliberations that will be continuing in six weeks from now.

Council Member Morales, please go ahead.

Thank you, there's not a whole lot more to add to what Dan said, but this this is for the purpose of the investments that we want to make investments toward development and growth of approaches to public safety that don't center the police that.

don't involve the police.

This is for community.

And these investments would allow organizations to scale up operations that they're already doing.

Many of these organizations are providing important service and important public benefit already in our neighborhoods.

This would allow them to scale up to deliver even more public benefit and reduce the size, as we reduce the size of SPD.

So the intent here is to allow us to contract with community-based organizations, And as we've said, this is where we have come after hours of conversation with, excuse me, with community organizations.

And I think the real point of all of these cuts and that are for the purpose of making these investments is that communities of color need investments.

They don't need incarceration.

They don't need, over-policing, and by leveraging this fund especially, we are making a bold statement that we want to realign our community safety model in this city and make sure that we are working with community, not doing things to community.

So we are eager to make sure that we have the support and the ability to use these funds in a way that serves community safety best.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

I just want to speak as somebody who has expressed anxiety about accessing these funds in the past, the exercise that central staff and legislative aides have gone through in annualizing the value of our SPD cuts has been very, very helpful for me. to gain the confidence that we will have the funds to replenish the emergency funds that we're borrowing from now.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Council Member Lewis, please go ahead.

Yeah, so, you know, I know that the sponsors have gone through a lot of work trying to find the money for these really, really critical programmatic increases.

I cannot say that I have a better suggestion or better recommendation, and I appreciate Councilmember Herbold's comments just now about, you know, how central staff's analysis of annualized savings, you know, is one of the encouraging things in this arrangement.

I am, all of that said, you know, frankly, I'm already concerned based on how much we have spent these reserves down previously with the COVID relief package.

I think this is something I want to think a little bit more about over the weekend personally.

So I probably won't be affixing as a co-sponsor today.

I do realize that this is sort of the only way to activate those essential and critical community investments and do them this fall instead of at some point in the future.

But it is a struggle to look at the financial situation or the budget situation that we're going to have next year.

the conversations that we will have to deal with at that time in possibly a similar summer balancing session.

You know, I appreciate this being brought here today and I know that the sponsors put a colossal amount of work into scouring for alternatives.

And I can guarantee that I will almost certainly not be able to find a better idea over the weekend.

But, you know, I am just expressing that that it is a difficult choice, and I know no one envies the difficulty of this.

But at this point, given the situation, I'm not ready to affix as a co-sponsor, but we'll certainly continue to engage on this.

Thank you very much for those words, Councilmember Lewis.

I share your concerns, and as Councilmember Herbold and others have commented on, Councilmember Morales led with, this is not an easy decision.

I think one thing that helped me was also the annualized cost for the SPD reductions next year, and knowing that community wanted those SPD reductions to go directly into community, knowing that that is how we get from I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I feel like we have a lot of work to do.

I would like to see if we can continue to work on that language to identify that source.

who was talking about the crisis that's affecting black community members throughout our city and the nation is truly a public health crisis.

And we did identify funding from our emergency reserve for the emergency that is COVID as a public health crisis, seeing the way in which communities have been historically disinvested in and the high rates of death and murder that's occurring because of our existing systems.

I think the fact that we were able to get the $17 million in those communities against those community members helped me realize that I was needing, I personally wanted to dip into these reserves as a way to address that other public health crisis as well.

Again, not a decision that folks came to easily, and I can absolutely understand the need to continue to think about this and really do appreciate central staff's identification of ways in which we could get Council Colleagues?

Council Member Sawant, please go ahead.

Thank you.

I have to say Amendment 38 and 39 are really two of the more astonishing amendments I'm seeing today.

The community has been demanding that the city take money from the Seattle Police Department because it's not a cut, it's defunding because they are doing harm and putting those funds into socially constructive programs like affordable housing, like community-based organizations.

So instead of doing that, the council would in this amendment and the next one, leave the SPD budget basically whole and take the, for now, promises are being made, but for now, the budget is left whole, and instead take the money from the already depleted rainy day fund.

And then I'm hearing from council members that you are confident that the SPD cuts over time will be sufficient to pay back the rainy day fund.

Now, mathematically that might be accurate, but here's the logical inconsistency here.

If those funds will be available only if The SPD is successfully defunded by that much amount.

But the reason many of the council members are not using defunded funds as the source of funds to fund these community programs is because, as was stated many times before, that there's a worry that we don't know how the bargaining will go.

That has been said again and again and again.

as a reason, in my view, as an excuse to not actually defund the SPD right now.

But now council members are saying, we are absolutely confident, I'm paraphrasing you, maybe you're not saying absolutely, but you're putting this forward because you're confident that you would get the defunded funds.

But then why not defund the SPD directly rather than going this route?

So in other words, you're saying that we're not confident we will get the funds, something that you've been saying throughout this meeting.

But now you're saying, but we're confident we will get the funds.

As I mentioned previously, the funding for these important community programs should come from defunding the SPD, not from the Rainy Day Fund.

And I would point out that the rainy day fund, as many of you have acknowledged also, also needs to be paid back, which was the worst case scenario that council members expressed worry about with defunding the SPD.

So by using the rainy day fund, they are guaranteeing that the money needs to be paid back.

So I don't understand what's being achieved here other than the fact that you don't want to defund the SPD because it requires a clash with the police department, with the status quo.

The community has been demanding that the city take money from the SPD and put it into the community.

As I mentioned, I will, of course, support the funding the community programs as outlined in amendments 32, 33, 34, which I have co-sponsored.

But this needs to be said, it's disingenuous for council members to tell the community that they're defunding SPD to fund community needs, but then transparently failing to do that because this is not defunding, you're using the Rainy Day Fund.

Thank you.

Madam Chair, may I speak?

Please, go ahead Council Member Juarez.

I'll just be brief.

I actually agree a lot with what council members want to share.

I'm really troubled by this amendment.

and 39, but the stabilization, the rainy day, and drawing down or draining the remaining 12.8 million from two reserve funds.

And again, I'm just going to say this.

This is what happens when you write a check you can't cash.

When you make promises, you raise expectations, you take a pledge without a plan.

And I may disagree with Council Member Sawant on a lot of things, But if you're going to say we're going to defund the police 50% and now you're saying, oh, by the way, we're going to take it from the rainy day funds and we're going to hope these other funds come in.

And we're going to look at the way we're going to pay for this is reducing SPD.

But we got to worry about union and labor laws and the conflicts with the charter and collective bargaining agreement.

But now we're looking for a backfill.

So we're going to take their two, we're going to drain down the rainy day funds.

I just have to say this, Council Member Sawant, much of what I hear you all saying in the last four and a half years, Council Member Sawant has been saying since day one.

And the urgency started not with the recession, not with the pandemic, I mean, obviously those things came up, but they started with our public discussion and honest discussion about race when we had the killing of George Floyd.

That's what triggered all of this.

In June, July, when people took a pledge to reduce it by 50%, to defund the police, and quote, unquote, as Councilor Morales said, in another lecture about how some of us don't understand people of color and what we've been through, the uprising, this has been around forever.

And this is what Council Member Sawant has been saying.

So I can't today say I can be a co-sponsor, But I too am troubled, as Councilor Lewis mentioned, but as Council Member Sawant stated.

And as I said, I can have a principle discussion and a principle disagreement with Council Member Sawant on a lot of things, and we do.

But when you just can't be honest about what you're doing in a hypocrisy here, and I'm glad people are listening and watching, because now you're scrambling, and this is the problem.

And this is what I've been struggling with.

trying to get on top of 39 amendments quickly to look at how we are going to vote on this to reduce the police budget.

And we're not going to get to 50%.

And I think you should just say that.

And I'm just going to leave it at that.

Thank you.

Council Member Herbold.

I just want to say we have said that, and we're saying that now, and we've shared that with our community stakeholders.

Decriminalize Seattle and King County Equity now represents over 300 organizations.

I've also met with the Everyday March yesterday to share with them how far we've been able to go with this package.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, council members.

I think that I'll just summarize by saying, again, without significant charter amendments, without significant labor contract violations, there is no other way to commit to getting these dollars out the door right now.

That is not to say that it won't come from SPD and after negotiations allow for us to get there.

And I appreciate the concern in which folks are raising this effort.

We will continue this conversation.

obviously on Monday and Wednesday next week.

With that, I will also note it's just important for, I think, us to recognize that we cannot make a cut that would lay off all civilian and sworn personnel tomorrow, starting on August 1st.

And the way in which we can try to respond to getting 10 to $17 million out the door is to help by going down a route that does not immediately lead to those violations.

Are there any additional folks who would like to add their name to amendment number 38?

Okay, seeing none, let's go to our last amendment.

Council Member Strauss, thank you very much.

Let's go to our last amendment, and then we will continue this conversation on Monday.

Amendment 39, please.

Okay, this amendment would round out the $17 million revenue package It would generate $3.3 million for the $17 million of spending by reducing the administrative costs that were authorized in the COVID relief bill.

The COVID relief bill, which was authorized by Council Bill 119812, included $4.3 million for the city's administrative costs using a blanket assumption of 5% of the total $86 million of spending in that bill.

If this amendment passes, the city would still have $1 million for administrative costs.

And I'll turn it over to council members who may wish to speak to the bill.

I'm sorry, to the amendment.

Thank you very much.

Again, I'm in the 39 sponsored by Gonzalez, Herbold, Morales, Mosqueda.

I'll just briefly speak to this in an effort to try to get us through this portion of the agenda.

I think we had been putting a generous portion in for administrative costs annually, 5% annually, given that it is now almost August and those dollars still have yet to get out the door.

The 5% that we had put forward We believe could take a haircut approach, especially recognizing that in the COVID relief portion of the jumpstart bill.

These are largely enhancements or tweaks to assistance and services that we're offering vulnerable populations, including.

providing food assistance, housing assistance, making sure that our immigrants and refugees had cash assistance and that small businesses had assistance.

So we're hoping that with the 1 million remaining, there will be sufficient funds to do the remaining administration needed.

Again, urging the executive and the departments to move swiftly to get those COVID dollars out the door, but recognizing that they can build on structures that are currently in our city system right now to allocate those dollars out.

Additional questions?

Okay, I'm seeing no additional questions on this or comments.

Is there anybody else who would like to add their name to this as a co-sponsor?

Council Member Strauss, thank you.

Okay.

Councilmember Strauss, thank you very much.

Dan Eater, you have gotten us through the suite that you identified.

I will note that it is almost six o'clock.

We did go 50 minutes longer than I anticipated tonight.

I want to thank you for all of your time from central staff and our council colleagues.

Councilmember Swann, you referenced the number of amendments that you have coming up on Monday.

We look forward to that conversation.

and packaging those together so we can see the whole picture will be helpful.

We also have amendments from Councilmember Strauss and Lewis and Morales, so we will continue those conversations on Monday, picking up with amendments number 40 through 40, or sorry, through 54 for our consideration.

Again, we're in the discussion and debate question section of our agenda, so we will continue this on Monday with a more robust discussion at that point.

Is there anything else for the good of the order?

Okay, I am seeing none.

We've reached the end of our agenda.

Our next meeting again is Monday, August 3rd, ideally at 10 a.m.

or immediately after council briefing.

There will be a short public comment period as well.

Sign up for that, starts at 8 a.m.

We expect to continue and finish the discussions on the amendments in front of us.

So thank you, council colleagues.

Apologies to council members who had not yet had a chance to speak to specific amendments, but there will be sufficient time on Monday for those discussions prior to our full meeting.

If there's no additional questions, I want to thank you for the engagement and recognize this is really hard work that we're doing.

If it were easy, it would have been done years ago.

And this is our effort to shake up the current status quo.

So we will continue this on Monday.

Have a good weekend.

I hope you get some rest.

And we'll talk to you soon.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you.

Good job.

Thank you.