Are we on?
The screen behind you is not on, so sorry.
Good morning.
How's everybody doing today?
All right.
This is the City Council meeting of January 21st, 2020. This is Lisa Herbold.
I am Council President Pro Tem.
It is now 9.33 a.m., and joining me this morning are Council Members Sawant, Juarez, Lewis, and Strauss.
First item on our agenda today is approval of minutes.
There's no objection.
The minutes of January 13, 2020 will be adopted.
Hearing no objection, the minutes are adopted.
don't have a president's report to share today other than just a quick preview of the full council agenda today.
We are of course meeting on Tuesday this week instead of the regular Monday meeting because of Martin Luther King Jr. holiday yesterday.
And as items on the full council agenda, we have the resolution 31927. It appears on today's full council agenda, and I think I'll allow Council Member Swant to talk about that.
In addition, we have on the full council agenda The adoption of resolution 31927. And other than that, we have no other business on the full council agenda.
With that, I like to move on to the reports of my colleagues here at the table.
Thank you, Council President Pro Tem Herbold.
Good morning, everybody.
There are no items on today's City Council agenda from the Sustainability and Renters' Rights Committee.
The next meeting of the committee is scheduled for a special time, which is this Thursday, January 23rd, at 6 p.m.
here in Council Chambers.
As I mentioned at last week's briefing, the committee is holding an evening meeting because that meeting will be discussing and hopefully bringing to a vote a legislation from my office banning winter evictions of renters, and we wanted to make sure the meeting is accessible to working-class renters.
The winter evictions legislation would prevent, if passed, would prevent people from being turned out of their apartments during the cold winter months.
And last week we saw, of course, how punishing winter weather can be.
The legislation does not stop all evictions during the winter months, but it does prevent people who are behind on their rent from being forced out of the streets during the coldest and wettest part of the year.
Allie Panucci from Council Central Staff is preparing a memo with some of the amendments that I'm bringing forward to the bill along the lines of the email that she sent to all your offices on January 10th.
She will send that out late today or early tomorrow.
And as you also know, Roger Wynn from the City Attorney's Office reviewed the legislation for us last year, and we really appreciate his help.
And any council members who have questions, I would urge you to feel free to reach out to him.
I'm sure he's happy to have a meeting with you to explain the things related to that.
On Wednesday, the bill I introduced last year to expand opportunities to build tiny house villages in larger parts of the city and to make the land use code more flexible for that purpose will come before Council Member Lewis's Homelessness Committee.
And I appreciate the opportunity to bring that legislation to a vote as soon as we can this winter.
To summarize the bill for new council members, Seattle currently has extremely restrictive laws governing where tiny house villages can be built.
They are only permitted in certain zones, and even when they have a perfect location, they can only renew their one-year permit once.
Tiny house villages have become one of Seattle's most successful ways of reducing the harms of homelessness.
They have the best track record helping people find permanent housing, and they also have the best track record providing decent and humane conditions for homeless people in the interim.
My legislation would expand options for building tiny house villages, removing some of the arbitrary restrictions.
This is necessary, but of course we know it's not enough.
It also needs a funding expansion of the kind that we carried out in the budget vote last year.
We need to keep increasing the funding for the villages so that Seattle can build additional 20 villages around the city to shelter hundreds of people.
However, it is also urgently necessary that we get this legislation passed.
The Georgetown and North Lake tiny house villages will need to renew their permits in March, and while there are short-term permits available, the reality is using them is extremely inefficient and labor-intensive.
And so Council Member Sawant, the March deadline that I've heard reference to is not in reference to the sunsetting or expiring of the existing law.
It's specific to the permits that these particular tiny house villages hold.
And there is the opportunity to get a temporary use permit for those.
But nevertheless, it would be beneficial for all if we acted quickly so that they don't have to do that.
Exactly, exactly.
And yeah, and for those of you who are incumbents, of course, the legislation has been available since last August.
And just to have a quick summary of the actions we've held, we've held the legally required public hearing.
The legislation has been through the SEPA process, and it was discussed in my committee at least twice last year.
So I'm hoping that we can go towards a council vote as soon as possible.
And if you have questions or concerns, please, I invite you to reach out to my office directly and as soon as possible.
And we're happy to answer questions and discuss further.
There are two resolutions, as Council President Pro Tem Herbold mentioned, on today's City Council agenda produced from my office.
One opposes Trump's escalation toward war with Iran and opposes Border Patrol agents targeting people of Iranian origin for detention and questioning.
The other resolution opposes overtly discriminatory citizenship laws in India.
I don't want to say much about the Iran resolution, except to specifically mention that I appreciate Council President Flotam Herbold working with me on that to make sure that we are able to reach something that We are both comfortable with and that many activists who wrote to us will be comfortable with.
I did want to, with your indulgence, spend a few minutes presenting an explanation for the resolution related to India because I think a lot of the discourse that is provided from the government of India and pro-Modi supporters, right-wing elements are quite misleading.
So just very quickly, the right-wing Modi and BJP government in India have enacted two policies in tandem with each other.
The National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act.
So they're two separate things, but they're sort of reinforcing each other.
And together they are a blatant threat to the citizenship rights of India's 200 million Muslims and on top of that hundreds of millions of poor people, indigenous communities, oppressed castes, women and LGBTQ people.
The National Register of Citizens requires that every person living in India produce citizenship proof but no passport will do or no commonly held documents will be accepted as citizenship proof.
There's a new definition that has been introduced, and it has already been tested out in one northeastern state in Assam.
And just to give you a sense of what documents were required under the Assam Register of Citizenship, A, pre-1971 self-identity proof.
This is a document issued if you were born before 1971. Or a combination of two things, pre-1971 parents' identity proof or a relationship document that proves that you're the grandchild or child of the person who has a pre-1971 identity proof.
So every person is asked to submit either A or both B and C to be included as a citizen.
So in other words, if someone was less than 48 years old, born after 1971, they would just simply not have this proof.
And many of them would not have any proof from their parents and grandparents.
So just to make it crystal clear and sort of more immediate, by this definition, I personally could not prove that I was an Indian citizen.
I was, I'm not exaggerating, I was born after 1971 and I don't have any documents from my parents or grandparents.
But would I personally be in trouble?
No, because I come from a Hindu family, and the Citizenship Amendment Act would protect me.
So you see how the National Register of Citizens says everybody should provide proof that hundreds of millions would not have.
And then the Citizenship Amendment Act says, oh, but if you're Hindu, then you're OK.
You don't have to provide any proof.
You're automatically, if you have a Hindu name, you will be citizen.
So that's what it's coming down to.
So what would it mean if I was Muslim?
If I were Muslim, I would have to present these documents, none of which I have.
And so my options would be to never go back to India or face deportation or jail.
And again, this is not something that is speculative.
That's why I wanted to share with you all, but this isn't actually not.
exactly the same, but I'll explain it in a second.
In the state of Assam, as I said, two million people have already been deemed stateless and many of them are already in detention centers and there are gross human rights violations happening there.
So just imagine if this was done nationwide in a billion population country.
This is absolute disaster.
And so protests are happening on a big scale throughout the nation.
They started small on university campuses, and now they are nationwide.
They're facing down police repression and violence.
And what I just shared with you, by the way, is an Amnesty International ground report from one constituency which has a report about the police repression of the protests and if you have time you can read it but just to let you know that Amnesty International has also documented this.
We also saw a 250 million strong one-day general strike on January 8th against these egregious laws which is the largest labor strike action in global history so The Seattle City Council, if we take the position, it will be historic in the sense that we will be the first legislative body anywhere in the world to have taken a position on this.
And I have no doubt in my mind, given the attention we have, that we will inspire other legislative bodies to also take a position.
And I know Congresswoman Jayapal has a congressional bill that will be coming to the floor with some elements of what we're talking about here.
Lastly, in her statement of support for my resolution, famous writer and activist Arundhati Roy has sent the following message.
It's very short, so I'd like to quote it.
Quote, the Indian Government Citizenship Amendment Act coupled with the National Citizenship Register resemble the Nuremberg Citizenship Laws of the Third Reich.
They could generate panic, uncontrollable chaos, and a population of stateless people on an unimaginable scale.
In the state of Assam alone, pending a last round of appeals, that number is close to 2 million.
The government should be prevailed upon to repeal these laws as quickly as possible.
I support Seattle City Council Member Shama's resolution.
I hope that others around the world will follow its example.
And more locally and more importantly, the City of Seattle LGBTQ Commission has voted unanimously last week to support this resolution, and they've sent a letter this morning to all council members.
And also we have the support of API Chaya and the Indian American Islamic Council and hundreds of South Asian community members, which includes many tech workers, academic professionals, students, and small business owners.
Thank you for the time.
Any other comments on this?
I do want to go back to one item on the full council agenda that I did forget to mention.
Resolution 31927 actually amends a resolution that this council voted on a couple weeks ago, specifically related to our participation on external committees in 2020 and 2021. It makes three changes.
One, it updates the council member assigned to the Move Levy Oversight Committee to be consistent with Ordinance 124 796, which was adopted to place the move levy on the ballot several years ago, it itself specified that the chair of the City Council's Transportation Committee sits on the oversight committee for the levy.
The second change is it adds an assignment for the King County Affordable Housing Committee of the Growth Management Planning Council, and three, it removes an assignment to the Trade Development Alliance because that body no longer meets.
So that is another item that will be on today's full council agenda.
Councilmember Warris.
Thank you, good morning.
Is this on?
Here we go.
Oh, thank you, Council Member Sawant.
So I chair the Public Assets and Native Communities Committee, and I wasn't here the last two Mondays, so I just want to give some of our new members what I do, well, what we do, some of what we do.
We manage legislative issues related to parks, community centers, the zoo, public grounds, and Native American communities, including tribes on a government-to-government basis.
We also have major civic projects that are pending and that we work on, including the Seattle Center, Memorial Stadium with Seattle Public Schools, Seattle Public Libraries, and the waterfront.
We did a lot of work on that after the viaduct came down, which is a nice segue into what's happening next.
In 2019, we passed legislation regarding the waterfront and the local improvement district, the LID.
And now we have another hearing coming up.
The waterfront lid hearing is scheduled for February 4th in council chambers at the same time as our first committee meeting.
So we're in the process of rescheduling.
So that's Wednesday, February 4th at two o'clock.
There'll be a waterfront lid hearing here in chambers.
As you know, I also sit on Sound Transit, which is a tri-county board with Snohomish, King, and Pierce County regarding Sound Transit and light rail.
Two weeks ago, I attended the Sound Transit System Expansion Committee to hear more from Sound Transit planners about our future light rail station on 130th Street, located in North Seattle.
As you know, Sound Transit is a tri-county board, and as a board member, I work closely with other counties to improve mass transit on a regional level.
Our main goal being that we have a rich transit spine from Snohomish all the way down to Pierce County.
Included in the ST3 plan is the 130th infill station currently set to open in 2031. However, we have been working on this since 2013-2014.
There's an opportunity to advance the construction of the timeline of the 130th street station.
to create a seamless transition as the Linwood Link station to open in 2024. Basically, what we're working on is that we believe that the 130th station should open at the same time as the Linwood Link station in 2024, which would be seven years earlier.
The board will be voting in late February on when to open the 130th Street Station.
Our position is that the cheaper and most logical option is to open the 130th Street Station in conjunction with the Lynwood Leak.
Lynwood, I keep saying that, Lynwood Leak.
I keep saying leak.
I can go into all the detail, I know you don't all want to hear that, but I do want to stress that the reason why the North folks, Districts 4, 5, and 6, I want to thank Councilmember, I was going to say Councilmember Dan, for showing up at Sound Transit and providing public comment about why it should be opened in conjunction with the Lynwood Link.
Besides the limited disruption to light rail traffic and transit, we don't want to, as they say, move dirt twice, and we don't want to have too many more disruptions along for our transit riders in the community and for labor.
So with that, let's see, ESTA, two weeks ago, Seattle Department of Transportation held three drop-in sessions that were open to the public to share information about the construction of the Northgate Pedestrian Bike Bridge.
We lovingly call that the Thornton Creek Community Bridge.
This has been going on since well into 2013 when I was still a constituent.
Over 300 people attended to learn more about our bridge that will reconnect the Northgate Mall and the Licton Springs neighborhood, long divided by I-5.
Those of you know that in the last three, four years, we've worked tirelessly to get the NHL Training Center at Northgate Mall, which is going to major renovation.
where we anticipate three sheets of ice, two hotels, and 1,500 units of market rate housing.
And we just, the city just bought the property across the street, eight acres to provide over 200 units of low-income housing, AMI between 60 and 80. and the people that are living there now will not be displaced.
They're going to move out, and then we're going to build all the housing, and then we're going to let them all come back in.
So we're excited about that.
Working with the Seattle Housing Authority on that, that's been in the works, and we just inked the deal about two weeks ago.
So anyway, SDOT will close the North Seattle Park and ride for the duration of the construction.
Let's see.
And other than that, oh, as I told the Pro-Tem Council President Herbold, I'm requesting to be excused on Monday, January 27th.
I'll be in Portland meeting with the Northwest Affiliated Tribes, presenting on Missing Murdered Indigenous Women, government-to-government issues with tribes, what the city of Seattle is doing, environment, climate change, economic development, And we will also be addressing the issue of Native American homelessness folks in cities.
And I'll also be requesting leave on Monday, February 5th.
I'll be at the National Congress of American Indians, which I go to every year in Washington, D.C. Our 26th annual Native American Honoring Lunch, in which Abigail Echo-Hawk will be recognized nationally for all her work that she's done in missing and murdering indigenous women and girls.
And this is an organization, the NCA, National Congress, has been around for about 70 years.
I usually go every year in February for the Winter Conference.
And it's also an opportunity for us to meet with Leslie Polner, the lobbyist for the City of Seattle.
And then we also meet with our congressional delegation on everything from transportation to economic development to all the national issues.
And I'm really excited because every year we have Senator Murray and Senator Cantwell that sit with us, Senator Warren.
And this year, hopefully, we'll have Senator Kamala Harris giving Abigail Elkhog her award.
So it's exciting.
Thank you.
Good morning.
Thank you.
Is this working?
I don't have a lot.
I do want to let folks know that our committee, the Community Economic Development Committee meets for the first time this Friday at 2 o'clock.
We will normally meet on Tuesdays, but we're having our committee meeting, our council meeting today.
And we will just be talking about 2020 priorities for the departments that are in that committee, including the Office of Economic Development, the Office of Arts and Culture, the Office of Civil Rights, and the Equitable Development Initiative, which is one piece of the Planning and Community Development Department.
And then, can I talk about Board of Health?
So Councilmember Lewis and I attended our first Board of Health meeting last week, and we helped pass a resolution to the state legislature around gun violence prevention, asking that the state legislature invest in and support the proper collection of data on guns in the state and the public health implications for gun violence, as well as ensuring that we are supporting community-based alternatives for gun violence prevention programs across the state.
And we know that our King County Council representative from my district, Councilman Girmay Zahalai, went yesterday to testify and support those bills as well.
So we look forward to making sure that that investment comes and that particularly in my district that we are supporting the organizations that are investing and really trying to find alternatives for people who are, young people especially, who are engaged in gun violence and making sure that there are alternative ways for them to find a different path in our community.
That's all I have.
Thank you.
Just a reminder that tomorrow, the Select Committee on Homelessness Strategies is gonna meet.
That's really the only big update that I have for everyone at briefing this morning.
As was discussed earlier, we'll be discussing Council Member Sawant's Transitional Encampment Ordinance.
There will be a couple of presenters and I encourage folks to come and ask questions of the presenters as well as central staff Sharon Lee from the Low Income Housing Institute will be there.
Joseph Panda-Priscilla, who is someone who lived in a tiny house village and used that as a basis to transition into permanent supportive housing and is currently in permanent supportive housing.
Peter Steinbrook, Port of Seattle Commissioner, who will come and talk about the relationship the port has to the tiny house village in my district in Inner Bay, which has had a very good relationship with the Port of Seattle, which is their landlord and owns a lot of adjoining properties.
to that particular property.
And then of course, Ketel Friedman from central staff will be available to answer any questions council members have regarding the ordinance and it should be a robust discussion.
I just want to remind everyone that we do need five council members for a quorum.
So if for any reason you expect you will not be able to attend the committee meeting tomorrow, please send myself or my staff an email so that we can just make sure that we do have a quorum present.
of council members so that we can have our committee meeting.
The only other thing, I have nothing to add to Council Member Morales' thorough report from the Board of Health, so I'll let it stand at that.
I did attend the MLK March yesterday at Garfield High School with Council Member Morales.
which was really powerful to see thousands of our neighbors marching for social justice.
Really great to see a strong contingent of Seattle City employees at the march, represented by PROTEC, Local 17, and marching with them.
And that was just a really powerful moment, and it was really good to be there.
Otherwise, I have nothing to report at this time, and look forward to a productive week.
Thank you.
Good morning, everyone, and a happy Martin Luther King Jr.
Day yesterday to everyone.
It's an honor and privilege to get to serve in a county now named after our great leader, and we still have a lot of work to do to live up to his dreams.
Thank you, and happy Martin Luther King Day to everyone.
There will not be a Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee tomorrow, as the items before us still need a little bit of time.
What you will be seeing next month is Director Torgelson's reappointment, and so my staff will be coming to speak with your staff about questions.
If council members have not received the quasi-judicial briefing from our staff and law, I strongly recommend it, as we will have some of those issues coming before us next month.
And the tree ordinance will happen next month.
So very excited about that.
Later this week, we will have district office hours on Thursdays, and that will be standing from 3.30 to 6.30.
And next week, I will be attending with the delegation to Olympia as part of Association Washington Cities.
And to my council members on Board of Health, thank you so much for your advocacy around data.
We know that there have been systemic and systematic ways of prohibiting data to be collected.
And we know that we cannot address the issue without having proper data.
So thank you all and looking forward to a productive week.
Council Member Peterson.
Good morning.
I celebrated the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. yesterday by participating in United Way's Day of Service in my district, District 4. Worked alongside Seattle Audubon and the Wedgwood neighborhood.
We assembled environmental education packets for low-income students, and so they can explore the outdoors in the spring.
On the Transportation Utilities Committee, there are no items on today's agenda for full council.
Last week, we held our first transportation utilities committee, heard briefings from SDOT and also from Seattle City Light and Seattle Public Utilities.
With Seattle Department of Transportation, the theme was the fact that the Seattle Transportation Benefit District is expiring this year, so that is a priority to look at ways to renew that, especially in the face of Initiative 976. You can watch the video on Seattle channel.
In the district last week, we held our weekly office hours there at Magnuson Park, building 30 conference room every Friday, 3 to 6 p.m.
We had some folks come in to talk about unauthorized homeless encampments in Ravenna Park, which I know our city's looking at right now.
This week, I'm scheduled to attend the Maple Leaf Community Council meeting.
And wanted to talk about a resolution that I circulated via email this morning.
I'll circulate hard copy this morning.
So in the spirit of the two resolutions at city council meeting this afternoon, I've crafted a broad resolution.
I'd like to walk on to the introduction and referral calendar today.
I know that all nine of us as council members are often deeply troubled by the rhetoric and actions of the Trump administration, and it seems every day we hear disturbing news inside and outside our nation's borders about oppression.
And even as we have our hands full doing our jobs to oversee $6.5 billion budget and 12,000 city employees, 700,000 residents, we want to remind the world that we are a welcoming city.
And because there are several new council members here, including myself, this resolution builds upon the honorable work of previous city councils by reaffirming Seattle as a welcoming city and broadly condemning all forms of oppression throughout the world.
Now, I acknowledge that this broad resolution is not likely to temper the urge to consider specific resolutions on important international issues periodically, but I think it's important to recognize that we don't always have the bandwidth as a legislative branch of a city government to manage our growing city and track every international issue.
If you go onto the website of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, et cetera, there's many disturbing issues going on today for which we do not have resolutions.
And my resolution is broad enough to capture instances of oppression that we might be missing.
So I appreciate your consideration as we potentially discuss it later this afternoon.
Thank you.
I appreciate the spirit in which this is offered.
I do have concerns, though, that the approach and the underlying message that the approach sends is that we won't consider resolution specific to a set of particular unique circumstances.
I'm concerned that this resolution then becomes something to point to, to say, oh, we covered that in this sort of broad brushstroke statement against oppression everywhere.
And I just think that when we have constituents in our city who are impacted by the events that may not be happening in the city, but might be happening in the country, might be happening international, that we need to respond to that.
But we don't need to respond to it each and every time, but that we are nine, seven right now, but nine thinking individuals and we can make a determination of when it's appropriate and when it's not.
And again, I'm concerned that a resolution like this will then sort of serve as a catch-all and as an excuse to not act when we clearly are called to act.
Council Member Swann.
Thank you, Council President Pro Tem Herbold.
I had a question first and then a comment.
So can I ask the question first to Council Member Peterson?
Specifically today, are you intending to walk this on as an alternative or sort of counterpose it with the other resolutions that are being voted on today?
Thanks for the question, Council Member.
No, this would be a yes and situation.
So we would, it would be an addition to, not a replacement of anything.
Thank you for clarifying that.
But yes, I also must echo the concerns that Council President Pro Tem Herbold has stated that we cannot, I would be very concerned.
I mean, obviously on paper it sounds good, but the way it's being motivated is to paraphrase what you said, that we don't have the bandwidth to deal with these things.
But I think as Council President Pro Tem Herbold said, we are nine thinking individuals and we can make a determination of when a resolution is called for.
And specifically my, just to add one more point to what she said is, the purpose of these resolutions is not to pretend that we have any legal authority.
For example, the India resolution does not give us any legal authority over the Modi regime.
But the purpose of that resolution is, one, to respond to hundreds of our constituents who are demanding action throughout the world against this.
in the same spirit that anti-Trump protests were held throughout the world.
You know, Trump is U.S. president.
People around the world could have said, why should we care?
No, the far right is rising everywhere.
And so, as MLK said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
But the purpose of the resolution is to help build that kind of movement on the ground, not just to pass a pro forma legislation that says, you know, the Seattle City has taken this position.
So yeah, we are always against oppression, but that's not the point.
The point is for elected officials to really be out in front when ordinary people are marching against the right.
So that I would, I don't know how I feel about this resolution.
Well, I'll still be introducing it, and I hope that people give it consideration and it can be a yes and situation.
Thank you.
Great.
Thank you, everybody.
If there are no other comments or further business, the council briefings meeting of January 21st is adjourned.
It is 10.05 a.m.
Thank you.
Thank you.