Hello, I'm your host, Brian Kalanick.
How is the city of Seattle making sure COVID vaccines are getting to the people who need them the most?
What's next now that two grocery stores plan to shut down in the wake of the city's new hazard pay law?
And how will a new effort to build tiny house villages impact our homeless crisis?
Council members Deborah Juarez, Dan Strauss, and Alex Peterson answer these questions and the ones you're sending in, too, next on Council Edition.
If there are 4,000 people living on our streets, we need to have 4,000 places for people to go.
There's talk about cutting more from the police department, and I don't think that's prudent to do at this time.
We're getting phone calls saying, why are you closing our store, government?
Make the store open up.
We can't do that.
All that and more coming up next on City Inside Out, Council Edition.
And we got North Seattle in the house here, folks.
Council Member Alex Peterson from District 4, Council Member Deborah Juarez from D5, and Council Member Dan Strauss from District 6. Thanks to all of you for being here.
And Council Member Juarez, let me start with you here.
The council passed a resolution shortly before we recorded this show to improve racial equity when it comes to the rollout of COVID vaccines.
The stats show about two-thirds of the people vaccinated in our state are white, even though white people make up less than half of our COVID cases.
I know this was an import council here, but it's als So I'm trying to figure the council, the city ca vaccine delivery more eq what we learned and what we roll out any type of co that you have to rely on messages, whether it's hou now vaccines.
We've just and said, who are the best people on the ground to make sure that there's trust in the community, that these communities who are underserved get the vaccine.
And as you know, we had people jumping the queue, getting the vaccine.
So we can't have that.
And even though we say a resolution is non-binding, it does mean what it means in that we're resolute.
But more importantly for us too, inside of the, or in the resolution about the Seattle Indian Health Board and Abigail Elkahawk and Esther Lozada, who looked at the study that came out in January and found out of Native American people nationally, 75% of them were willing to take the vaccine for their community and for themselves because it came from a trusted community messenger.
Those clinics that are on the ground, those social services that are on the ground.
And, you know, I really wanna thank the mayor for that and Council President Gonzalez, because that is where we're headed.
And so it is more than just non-binding, it is more than just inspirational.
It's about our values and how we want to make sure we get back on the road to recovery.
And the first thing we do is the vaccine.
Thank you for that.
And that outreach I know is going on with the city right now.
But Councilmember Strauss, let me talk to you, if I could, about economic recovery from COVID.
The Downtown Seattle Association recently put out a report that says 218 businesses in Seattle are now permanently closed following the pandemic, 155 of those downtown.
But this really does affect all neighborhoods.
I want to talk about this in your district, Councilmember Strauss.
From lack of business to street crime to graffiti, businesses are going through a lot right now.
What are you doing about it in terms of that COVID recovery that we're all so anxious about?
There's a thank you, Brian.
There's a number of different things that we're doing, and you know, I don't want to gloss over the fact that there has been organized criminal efforts in my district, and that needs to be interrupted.
We've seen break ins occur with people in security outfits, and that's very different from the past types of crime that have been reported.
We're more like crimes of opportunity so I just want to sit for a moment and underscore that I've been working with community members I've been working with different people within the city to try to address the.
organized criminal effort that is under underway.
That doesn't speak to necessarily how do we get shops open?
How do we create spaces for small shops, restaurants to be able to operate under the health guidelines?
And one thing that I championed last year was street cafes and sidewalk permits for businesses to be able to operate in the street.
We see Ballard Avenue as a shining example of this, and I'm currently working to ensure that these are made permanent because there is just such a benefit to the public when you're able to use public space to do commercial retail, to do restaurants.
It vitalizes our neighborhoods and I've heard from many business owners that Without the street cafe permits and without the sidewalk cafe permits, they would have otherwise not been able to survive the pandemic.
And so, you know, 1 thing that I do recognize is that when I do come downtown, 1 of the issues that we're facing downtown the most is that.
There are not people working down here every day.
And because people are working from home, and that is having a direct impact on many shops in downtown, more so than anything else.
You know, it's difficult enough for me to find lunch when I come down to City Hall, simply because all of the offices are not being occupied by people who would have been occupying them without these public health guidelines.
And lastly, there's something that has also occurred with people working from home and being in residential neighborhoods more.
expand.
Um, there's in my shop that serves pizza.
A a cider bar that was oper that unfortunately was not compliant with our codes and our land use codes have not been able to keep up with how we've had to adjust doing business during this pandemic.
And so beyond the cafe streets that I worked to pass last year with the help of Council Member Peterson, the chair of the committee, we're also working on a home occupancy bill that would allow small businesses to have the flexibility that they need to survive this pandemic.
Thanks for bringing that up and covering all that ground with me here.
Councilmember Peterson, I'll go to you next.
You recently wrote an op-ed about economic recovery in our city in the Seattle Times.
I wanted to get your thoughts on that.
What actions can you and the council take to really make that happen as we hopefully start emerging from the COVID crisis?
Thank you, Brian.
So as you've seen with COVID, we've tried to respond to the public health crisis.
We've tried to provide relief to those who need it the most and to have, we need to have an equitable economic recovery as well.
And in my op-ed in the Seattle Times, it's also on my council website, the economic strategy is to work with employers in our city, to work with good city employers.
That means creating a positive business environment for them in Seattle, especially for those that provide well-paying green jobs with upward mobility.
so that everyone can thrive here.
So I think strengthening our Office of Economic Development so that they are working harder to retain businesses, trying to figure out if businesses are not interested in signing their leases again in downtown office space, we need to provide incentives to those employers to stay here and to grow here.
I think it's important to note that we, before pre-COVID, We had, we hovered around 350,000 jobs downtown.
And after COVID in the first half of 2020, we lost over 50,000 jobs.
55% of Seattle's jobs are downtown.
So this is no thing about let's just open up, you know, another Starbucks or, you know, a deli.
We're talking like a major economic footprint that all cities are going to have to recover from.
So I have two words for you and it's not happy birthday.
It's, um, you know, vaccine recovery, vaccine recovery until we get the vaccine out and get that nailed down.
That's where we're going to get to this economic recovery and vitality.
Um, and also I think we, I think we hover around 90,000 people that actually live downtown.
So I think what I feel, and I know my colleagues share the same.
And when we've talked to the business owners in DSA, is that it is gonna require not just the private sector, but the public sector and government and people to come back downtown.
And it isn't again, as I shared with my colleagues Monday morning, it's not all gloom and doom.
We have the waterfront, the Seattle Center, we have a lot of other things that are going on, the convention center.
So this is where we should be in creating jobs.
Okay, thank you.
And my birthday's in September.
I'll make sure I get back in touch with you about that.
Council Member Strauss, let me jump to you here real quick.
Can I just tag onto that?
Just saying.
Oh yeah, please, if you would.
Council Member Juarez brought up some pretty large civic projects.
The waterfront, what's going on at the Seattle Center with Climate Pledge Arena.
And, you know, Sound Transit also finally will soon be reaching Northgate.
And so not only are we going to be seeing these civic projects being able to attract people to come to our neighborhoods, we're also going to be able to see a larger degree of connectivity for people who don't necessarily live downtown to come down.
Dan, let me stick with you if I could.
You were one of the co-sponsors on the council's emergency legislation to add $4 an hour in hazard pay for grocery workers at the major chains, another jobs issue here.
Now we're hearing some big headlines this week as we're, right before we're taping the show, we're hearing of two QFC stores planning to close in Seattle in April.
QFC says those stores were underperforming, but I wanted your reaction to that, to seeing those two stores close down.
You know, it's always sad to see community grocery stores closing down and hopefully there will be some really great local options that are able to fill those shoes, because know that people like to shop in their neighborhood, and as you noted they it sounded like they were already underperforming so there may have been some other business decisions that were.
inputs to their decision to make those changes.
You know, grocery workers are low wage workers, and they did not sign up to work on the front lines of a global pandemic, making sure that we had our toilet paper and our bananas.
And this crease is set to be reevaluated in a few months.
It's a small step forward in acknowledging the increased demand and exposure these employees are facing in the workplace.
As we know, more people are shopping for food at grocery stores than are eating out previously.
And these grocery stores have made quite significant profits off of it.
These store employees have also had that increased exposure and demand.
And it was important to see this hazard pay legislation pass at the city level.
We're hearing that it's likely going to pass at the county.
And this legislation is also passing in many jurisdictions across the country.
Just while we're on the topic and separately, as I mentioned before, we've all seen the craze for toilet paper and bananas.
And so often these grocery store workers are the ones who receive the brunt of frustration from customers about supply chain issues that are out of their control.
So just as a reminder, anytime anyone is shopping, please be nice to the employees.
It's not their fault if the store is out of toilet paper or bananas or your favorite snack.
Okay.
Okay.
Fair enough.
I'll go to you next.
You this hazard pay legislatio dealing with a Q.
F. C.
to close your district in to talk about this.
Your t decision to close those st do about this situation no food outlet that's slated Thank you.
You know, this temporary relief bill that
in large part because we had an eagerness to help those frontline workers, and it's something that our mayor strongly supported, too.
It's true that City Hall has not been creating the most constructive environment for many employers in our city, and this might fit that narrative, but I don't think it does.
I think Kroger Company, they are not a good example in what they did.
They're an out-of-state employer.
I reviewed their balance sheet.
They're sitting on $2 billion in cash, They acknowledge that these stores have been underperforming.
I contacted the Kroger company.
I've talked to the manager at the store.
I talked to the union.
I'm trying to, you know, my concern is for my constituents, the hundred thousand people I represent.
I'm going to fight for them to get a grocery store.
that's a good grocery store in that north Seattle location, and I'm already working on that now.
If I could just chime in, Brian, if that's okay.
Yeah, please.
This is where we have the delicate balance of how do we make sure that the frontline workers and these people that have to be in the store there, and also the choice of how does this affect business, because even though now we have two KFCs closing, we're dealing with the same thing with discount grocery.
What is it?
Do people get $4 raises, but yet they lose their jobs because now we don't have stores and we have more, particularly in Wedgwood and down further where we have some food deserts.
We have the QFC in Wedgwood is right on 85th, right at our smack at our districts, four and five.
We're also dealing with, I've spoken to when we deal with the manager at Discount Grocery, they've had to close two other stores.
So I guess my criticism was this and my concern was this.
We got the legislation on a Thursday or Friday.
People voted on it Monday.
And now we're starting to see some of the byproducts and some of the unfortunate circumstances that happened.
But I'm glad that Alex, or Councilmember Peterson, made the effort to talk to Kroger and find out how much cash they are sitting on.
But again, as city council members, we're not engineers.
We're not economists.
We're not all these things that people think we can be.
So the complaints that we're getting are, we're getting phone calls saying, why are you closing our store, government?
Make the store open up.
We can't do that.
But I think what Councilmember Strauss was getting at and our council was getting at, This was an emergent situation for four months.
And we know that four lawsuits have been filed.
And so it'll be interesting to see if a preliminary injunction does get issued.
But again, we are under emergency circumstances.
We're seeing this across the board with the rent moratorium, with all these other issues that we're dealing with because we have never dealt with a recession or a pandemic fueled recession.
So these are all extraordinary times.
And this is where I just want to say this for the people watching.
We're all in this together.
It does break our heart to see these lawsuits.
And yes, other cities have done that.
And yes, it wish we would have had more time.
But the bottom line is, and the thing that we talked about, is that if we are picking winners and losers, then why aren't we pulling in people that work at Bartels and Walgreens and all these other stores that are on their feet and have to be there to fill prescriptions to take care of our elde to go get their medicine mean, we just made some c start somewhere.
I want t about public safety here.
council learned about som
The city put $3 million t out the best places to in to help black people, indi people of color.
I know t on the mayor's equitable which is working on a sim I just kind of want to un the city is right now with public safety because it
Well, let me do a disclaimer, and I'm not trying to throw anyone under the bus.
I am not involved.
I don't share the committee.
Council Member Morales is involved with the Black Brilliance, King County, our Equity Now, our D-CRM, and some of the groups that have, we've allocated money for that.
I serve as an ex-officio on the ECI, the Economic, I forget what it's called, Task Force.
Dean Alsop in our office has served, has been going to every meeting.
I have not, and there's a reason why.
strategically not attended, though my staff is there at every meeting, and I do talk to some of the members on there.
It's because I don't want to have a chilling effect of a Seattle City Council member sitting on a task force where it's supposed to be for the people, by the people, to correct and to address inequities in police and police community and enforcement.
So right now they are looking at $30 million and they hired a person that is a group that is organizing them and putting together their principles on how they're going to move forward.
My understanding from Dean is that they have met with Black Brilliance and the other groups to see where some of their programs may overlap.
But I wanna just say this in a just more of a general observation from my experience.
There's gonna be some stumbles, there's gonna be some mistakes because this is the first time out of the gate for a lot of these organizations to manage this money and be in that position to say, this is what's important to us and this is what we're gonna build that's sustainable for us Hopefully forever.
So we're not in line in a budget grant mentality, a mentality of scarcity every two years, every one year.
And I think people need to give them some grace to get up to speed, to learn how to do that, because that is what the main complaint is.
When Martin Luther King marched on Washington in the 60s, the original plan was about economic sovereignty.
This whole issue about empowerment for people of color who've been systematically shut out of the marketplace, this is not new.
This has been around forever.
And so I want to give all the grace and room for these groups to step in for their community and say, if we're going to do participatory budgeting.
If we're going to take money, taxpayer money, and we're going to put these programs together, we need to help them and be so supportive that they're successful.
Because their success is our success.
Because of them, there's us.
And because of us, there's them.
And this city has gotten away from that.
They have gotten away from this is all of us.
Councilmember Peterson, I wanted to go to you next.
There's a larger issue here, too, with the federal consent decree.
The Seattle Police Department has been under since 2012 regarding the use of force.
As the council continues to work on its policing and public safety strategy, the judge overseeing the consent decree, he recently said, wait a minute, council, you're moving too fast with some issues like budget cuts or crowd control tactics.
I want to get your take on what the judge is saying about the council.
And also, if you could answer one of our viewers who wrote this in.
What are the top five most important metrics that you'll be using to measure whether reimagining public safety is actually a success?
Your thoughts.
So we are under a federal consent decree and we need to be mindful of that when we consider our police budget, when we consider how we come up with alternatives to traditional public safety.
And I think it was a cautionary tale from the judge and that we have to be careful in 2021 how we deal with these issues.
And so I think that there's talk about cutting more from the police department, and I don't think that's prudent to do at this time.
I think we need to wait for the results from this research that's coming from community-led groups, as well as from the Equitable Communities Initiative.
Let's see those results.
Let's also recognize that we are losing police officers at a alarming rate, 160, 186 officers left in 2020, which was a record.
I think we need to be careful about how we treat the budget to make sure we're providing sufficient funds for those police reforms, which require additional supervision, require people to produce the body camera footage, to respond to public disclosure requests.
These are all elements of reform.
So I think that I'm hoping in 2021 that we are more deliberative in how we make decisions, that we consult our police chief more frequently on these issues as we're listening to community.
We don't wanna go back to the way it was.
We also need to reform and revamp our police contract.
That contract is, it's unjust, it's inexpensive, it's inflexible, that needs to be fixed.
It expired on December 31st of last year.
So I'm really hoping that we make some strides where it counts, which is dealing with that issue of the police contract, for example.
Thank you for that.
Councilmember Strauss.
Maybe you can weigh in here.
We've had a year plus full of protest and unrest in Seattle and around the country here.
It's clear a lot of people are calling for change with policing and public safety practices, but then you've got the judge pushing back on the federal consent decree piece here.
Is the council moving too fast on these issues?
Any thoughts about public safety you want to share?
Yeah, two things that come to mind from your previous question and Council Member Peterson's comments there, which is we are now eight years into the consent decree, eight years of reform, and within that eight years, there's been a 45% increase in the police department's budget.
The product of those eight years of reform, which was intended to eliminate indiscriminate and excessive use of force, We saw the product this summer and the former federal monitor, Merrick Bob, even said so as he left his post that he had seen indiscriminate and excessive use of force on First Amendment groups of people expressing their First Amendment rights.
And so I think that that's it's pretty front and center for me.
When when you ask about what are the metrics that we're going to be using to determine if we are successful?
Another thing that I saw this summer was that 56% of police 911 calls and 40% of their time was spent on non-criminal activity, that they were following up on non-criminal activity.
And during my previous ride-alongs, I saw police officers being asked to be our social workers, being asked to be our mental health professionals, being asked to do things that are not traditional police work.
And so it is important for me and one of the metrics that I want to see is that we focus our police time on crime.
that we allow our first responders who are best to be social workers, mental health professionals or outreach workers doing that work.
We need to ensure that 911 calls are routed to the right responder so they get there right in time.
Okay.
Thank you very much for that.
Councilmember Juarez, I'll send it back to you here.
We have a new report out that shows Seattle work crews picked up more than a million pounds of garbage from our parks and streets back in January through the Clean Cities Initiative, which I know you championed in the last budget cycle here.
On the one hand, I think that's important work to be celebrated there, but I think it also speaks to the amount of people who are living on our streets right now unsheltered.
I wanted to talk about that, putting a million pounds of garbage in perspective, and maybe answer this question from a viewer who wrote to us.
What is your plan to help people out of encampments and return parks to neighborhoods.
Some thoughts here, please.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I don't have a magic wand, so let me just be blunt.
Um, yeah, no one wants to celebrate that.
We picked up 1,000,000 tons pounds of garbage since January and over 26,000 needles and that we visited encampments almost 300 times.
and that we've cleaned graffiti from over 200 structures and I could go on and on with dates.
And also that we, um, the clean city efforts took place in over 60 parks and neighborhoods throughout the city.
I have a little cheat sheet here because I knew that these numbers, and again, I'm, I'm a little bit wonky that way with numbers.
Cause I want people to recognize that parks is doing everything they can.
We remove the navigation team.
So what happened is the stress went over to more for parks, more for SDOT, more for SPU.
So now you have more city departments moving in with this surge.
Now, originally in the budget, I believe we, myself, and I think Council Member Peterson, I don't, Council Member Stokes, I can't remember, so just correct me if I'm wrong.
I was pushing for about $5.96 million for the Clean Cities Initiative.
We ended up only getting $3.1 million.
But my point is this, look at what we've done with $3.1 million right now.
So I'm going to be making another push that we up that again for the surge to clean up, because I think once we get stabilized, and I don't believe we're there yet, once we kind of hit that plane where we're maintaining, I think we're going to be okay.
And I think we need another six or eight months more of that.
I'm in weekly conversations with the superintendent, Agare, so I have a really good on the pulse, knowing exactly what's going on with parks, what parks they're hitting first, where they're trying to get out there.
As you know, under the CDC and some of the rules, we have to leave some of the folks out where they're at, but as long as we're, picking up trash, human waste, needles, emptying out the sanity cans, putting up the clean hand washing stations.
That's where we're at right now.
And again, I don't want to keep harping on this, but I'm going to say it again.
Seattle, we are all in this together.
Nobody wants to see people living on the street, in parks, on the sidewalks.
Nobody wants that.
But we also have to recognize that we have to meet people where they're at, get them into shelters, and we have to have those shelters available.
I think sometimes people don't realize how blessed they are when they are in a house and that they do have heat and that they do have a home.
And I hope that they would show a little bit more grace and humility and humanity when we're doing the best we can, quite frankly, to try to get people sheltered.
I understand.
We're super tight on time here.
And Council Member Strauss, I know you've been talking to a lot of people in Ballard about these issues.
Anywhere you want to weigh in when it comes to homelessness and the work you're doing in D6?
There is more to speak about than time.
We have to discuss this just to center on the fact that if there are 4,000 people living on our streets, we need to have 4,000 places for people to go.
Having people continue to live in our parks and in our public spaces is not humane.
It's not good for anyone.
And there are secondary costs that are being borne by the city.
There's tertiary costs being borne by private residents.
and businesses, and we need to solve, we need to provide solutions to scale this crisis.
It's six years into this civil state of emergency.
And if there, I just look at when COVID first struck, we had field hospitals and shoreline and at Seahawks Stadium.
We're now six years into this crisis, this civil state of emergency, 11 years into this crisis, and we're not acting like it.
It's a crisis.
We need solutions at the scale of this problem.
Councilmember Peterson, briefly on this, I know you've had a change of heart when it comes to tiny house villages.
Your thoughts about this, because I know Councilmember Lewis is talking about increasing the number of villages around our city to respond to the homelessness crisis.
Can you be brief about this and talk about some of your thoughts on tiny house villages?
Tiny house villages, when they are well organized and they have case management and a per where our city's human s can work well.
We are set in our district district f with the nonprofit in th so we can bring people out of the parks and into the tiny home village and get them on their way to permanent housing.
We're building thousands of units of deeply affordable housing and I'm really excited about the Regional Homelessness Authority, which is new, finally finding an executive director who brings deep national experience and proven strategies and I hope that we, I hope that The public officials don't try to micromanage her efforts.
I hope that we rely on her expertise to implement some strategies to reduce homelessness in our region.
Okay, thank you very much.
We need to wrap up here.
Council Member Juarez, I'll go to you.
A lot to be excited about with transit and D5, Northgate light rail, set to open in a matter of months here.
Is your plan to be dancing on the top of the first train as it pulls into Northgate when that happens?
This is actually a trick question about rider safety, but where do you want to go with it?
I wanna say that things are happening in D5, okay?
It's popping.
We got our NHL Training Center.
We got our new North Acres Commons that's coming online.
We can hold up to 1,400 units.
We got North Seattle College, 200 units.
So this is finally happening.
The things that we've been reading and talking about with transit-oriented housing, transit-oriented development, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's happening in D5.
So I'm just saying.
D5.
All right, sounds great.
Thank you all, council members, for joining me, and we will see you next time on Counselors.