Seattle City Council Public Assets & Homelessness Committee 8/17/22

Thank you.

All right, thank you so much.

I will call this meeting to order.

It is 2 p.m.

on August 17th, and this is the Seattle City Council's Public Assets and Homelessness Committee.

My name is Andrew Lewis, the chair of the committee.

Council President Juarez is actually here.

So you did not actually arrive a little later, Council President.

No, I arrived pretty fast, just for you, Council Member.

Good to see you.

It was even in the script, because you guys were so prompt in letting us know that might be the case, and it wasn't.

Always be prepared.

So given that, will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Herbold.

Here.

Council President Juarez.

Here.

Council Member Morales.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Chair Lewis.

Present.

Chair, there are three members present.

And I do believe that Council Member Morales will be joining the committee shortly.

So moving on to the next item, approval of the agenda.

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

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Chair's report, today we have a couple of items of business.

We are going to be receiving an update from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.

And we are also going to be hearing a much anticipated presentation from Seattle Parks and Recreation on the maintenance of comfort stations and bathrooms in park facilities and on park properties.

So why don't we just move forward to get to those agenda items by moving on to our public comment period, which is next on the agenda.

I'm gonna go ahead and allow two minutes for public comment.

Do we still, Mr. Clerk, only have one person signed up for public comment?

That's correct, and Mr. Chair, I also see that Council Member Morales has joined the meeting.

Excellent, thank you for noting that.

Welcome, Council Member Morales.

So with that, I will have the clerk moderate the public comment period, and we will allow our currently signed up speaker to have the mic here.

So go ahead, Mr. Clerk.

Our one public commenter is TK.

Last name is T, TK.

You will have two minutes and we'll start the clock whenever you're ready.

I'm so glad we could do this two days in a row, guys.

It's a pleasure to do this two days in a row with you guys.

I want you guys to understand something because Like I said yesterday, seven out of the nine of you guys sitting there sat in my face and told me some things two years ago.

And here we are, as of yesterday, you walked all that back, gave them some more money, added more cash.

I know this has nothing to do with why you're here today, but it does have something to do with why you're here today, because you keep throwing money at problems that clearly your solutions ain't working, buddy.

You guys should actually really try again.

You know what I'm saying?

But since you guys think 2020 was a fluke, and that the people of Seattle and the residents of Seattle can't come back in these streets again and turn this thing up again?

You guys are sadly mistaken, and all you guys know it.

But it's coming again.

I can promise you that.

I can promise you that.

Yesterday showed me there's a whole lot of people out there who still want to fight.

So round two's coming, so be prepared.

I hope you're ready for it.

I hope you've done all your research and all your numbers and calculated everything.

But this economic game that you guys are playing with people's lives is coming to an end.

I can promise you that.

I can promise you that.

The mayor is bogus.

You guys are bogus right along with him.

I can promise you.

I can promise you this economic game that you guys want to play with people's lives.

It's coming to an end.

Your day of reckoning is coming sooner than you think.

I can promise you.

2020 wasn't a fluke.

I've been to college to pass.

year or so, getting a political science degree with emphasis on social justice.

So you know what that means, right?

It means I know more than I did in 2020. It means I know more than...

I know how you guys started to play us then, and you won't be able to play me like that now.

Understand that.

So just know that your day of reckoning is coming.

The streets are gonna get filled again real soon here.

Real soon here.

So understand that.

I hope you guys are ready for round two.

Step up, put your gloves on, get in the ring and let's box it up, because round two is coming, you understand?

Goodbye.

Thank you, TK.

Mr. Chair, we have one in-person public commenter who signed up.

I'm going to go get their name in just one second.

Mr. Clerk, is it Mr. Richard?

Yeah.

Mr. Chair, we have one more public commenter, Marguerite Richard.

Whenever you're ready, please come up to the microphone.

Yes, my name is Marguerite Richard and it's very unfortunate that he's not here yet.

I call them drones, but it's Mark Dones or Donace or whatever.

But anyway, it's a Homelessness Authority and King County Regional.

I heard some stuff about equity and inclusion.

And I guess my concern is that I've had people ask me, what is the phone number to actually direct him?

Because he is a indigenous black man, he should never be in no closet in terms of what has been happening.

I heard a lot of those indigenous black people are on the streets.

If they had their reparations, Myself even, I could really do something to reach out to them.

I saw one in the bus shelter laying in his cell that people supposed to be doing in a toilet.

And I called the city to say, what can we do?

be done about him laying like that, with nobody seeing after him.

He said, well, I'll take it down the number where the bus, the shelter is and we'll pass it on and somebody will take care of it.

I don't know how many people do that every day.

But I thought that that was disgusting too.

So I'm saying that I was way back when, when they had the 10-year plan, it didn't work.

Ask Tiffany Washington, that didn't do nothing either.

And she's an indigenous black female.

That's what I said.

If it's not working, get rid of it.

You have no business perpetrating fraud against the community.

Talk about a tiny house went back in slavery.

What do they live in?

Shacks.

Somewhat similar to what you're building now to throw people in.

Yeah, where's that ding again?

And so that's why I keep coming, because it is a testament against God's will in terms of what you're doing right now.

Thank you, Ms. Richard.

Mr. Chair, there are no more public commenters signed up.

Thank you, Mr. Clerk.

We will go ahead and move on to our first item of business.

Will you please read the first item of business into the record?

Item one, King County Regional Homelessness Authority summer updates.

Okay, and we are joined now by former central staffer, Jeff Sims, as well as CEO of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, Mark Jones.

And did you guys bring any additional folks for the panel?

I wanna make sure that Okay, so Mark, I'll hand it over to you.

Looking forward to the update and appreciate both of you joining us.

Pleasure to be here, Mr. Chair.

And a pleasure to have Jeff on our team.

So I believe, Jeff, are you writing the slides or is Jacob?

I am, they should be up now.

Are you not able to see them?

Nope, I can see them.

I just wasn't sure if it was you or Jacob.

All right.

Thank you all for having us today.

Looking forward to running through our summer update and answering any questions that you all may have before you need to move on to your next agenda item.

Next slide, please.

So what we're going to run through today is just general updates, updates on the five-year plan, updates on our system advocates, which is our peer navigation workforce, talk about the Safe Flot RFP status update on that, and then our latest severe weather incident and how that response went.

Next slide.

Okay, I'm going to try to be quick.

These are a lot of bullets.

So, our emergency housing voucher program is, this data is actually a little bit out of date, is 67% lease up rate.

It makes it the best in the country for what's called an S1 continuum of care.

Of the very large continuums of care, we are we are currently the best with our emergency housing vouchers, and we are about 80% issued, if not a little above at.

And when you look at, for example, the last time I looked at.

San Francisco's data as a corresponding S1 community.

I think their lease up rate was in the mid-teens.

I believe LA's was around 5%.

Contract consolidation.

Just a second.

Sorry, I just wanted to jump in for one moment to say that Council Member Mosqueda has joined the meeting and reflect that for the record.

Sorry for the interruption.

Continue.

Oh, no worries.

Contract consolidation is complete and has gone well.

We consolidated contracts from well over 300 down to around a little under 220. And so as new projects come online, obviously, the number of contracts may increase.

But as of right now, all of our providers who had multiple contracts in the previous system for singular programs, et cetera, have one.

And how we have also structured our work in order to make things easier for providers is we have master contracts and then we have project service agreements.

So, if a provider has you know multiple, you know, shelters.

or permanent supportive housing, buildings, etc.

What we're able to do is really target through those project service agreements how we want specific programs to function while having master service agreements that govern the entirety of our relationship between the authority and a given provider.

We've had several RFPs released and awarded.

Our latest RFP scheduled to be awarded is our emergency housing voucher services RFP, which should be awarded shortly.

We have launched our ombuds office.

They're up and running.

They have conducted investigations, helped mediate disputes.

They've done a lot of work, most of which I can't talk about because it's sealed, but we're really happy that that function is up and running.

We have 17 system advocates who are currently here on site, or they're not actually on site.

Some of them are out in the downtown core, actually.

And then 10 more have been sent offer letters.

So really excited for that work to really be up and running.

Our severe weather response framework, which we'll talk a little bit about later in the meeting today.

has been really well received I think by our partners across the county, and has been very responsive to the needs of our folks who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness during weather incidents.

We have a duty phone which is I think a thing that folks don't If you're not a provider, you don't really need to know about it.

But I think the implementation of it has gone quite well.

So the RHA, in keeping with our emergency management response, we have a duty officer who's a member of the senior team.

My last rotation was two weeks ago.

But when you are on call, you are the person who gets the emergency calls over the weekend, late at night, et cetera, whenever it's outside of business.

hours.

By way of example of a success story, several months ago we had a fire at a shelter that I don't think anybody heard about because it happened on a Saturday.

They called the duty officer.

That person called me.

I activated a couple of supports around it.

We were able to go down on site and help assess everyone who was displaced and move them to other beds.

by afternoon.

So as far as I think, you know, our ability to support our provider partners when things go wrong, I think this is a strong response.

Our sub-regional agreement progress is going well.

We have an ILA with exhibits being drafted for North King County, an ILA framework for East King County.

We expect both of those to proceed smoothly.

We have our service landscape, which I'll talk a little bit about today, but we have the most comprehensive landscape of services available to folks experiencing homelessness in the county.

In the history of the county and really excited to really be able to see everything very clearly for the first time.

Our qualitative data 500 plus oral histories that we collected as part of our modified point in time count.

Those are currently being analyzed as part of our housing gaps analysis modeling we're specifically focused on gaps in emergency housing units and gaps in permanent supportive housing.

In keeping with our specific role to respond to folks experiencing homelessness to that end those 500 plus or all histories are being analyzed and turned into what we're calling sort of personas right and then we're going to be able to model, how many.

you know, types of what kind of service attachment are necessary for whatever the actual gap in units is, so that we're not just saying, oh, this is the number of units, but we're also able to say, and we need this many with service type Y and this many with service type X.

By name list development.

So we are in partnership with our colleagues at Microsoft for a long term solution that work is progressing quite well.

And I think there should be some demo stuff that we might be able to show to members of this community sometime in the fall as interim steps we have augmented our HMIS which is called BitFocus to have a new outreach module which folks are able to use to capture the data that will begin to flow into the by name list.

We also anticipate having a preliminary by name list of the downtown core as part of our partnership for Xero work completed by end of August, first week of September.

Woodland Park encampment resolution continues to be something that we're proud of.

We've used that model to push into our state highway encampment resolutions or state right-of-way encampment resolutions.

We've executed two of those already and are currently working on a third very large encampment that we anticipate being able to bring everyone inside from by the last week of August.

So those are my general updates.

Any questions before I move on?

All right.

I don't have any colleagues.

Are there questions on this slide before we proceed with the presentation?

OK, seeing none, go ahead, Mark.

Awesome.

So, on our five year plan, and I just want to sort of lift up this is what you know what is it it's a strategic roadmap to transform the system.

The administrative transformation of the system was accomplished in the creation of the authority, but now we have to transform what the system does what services that delivers and how well it delivers them.

So that is what we are building with community partners.

What it will be informed by, the work that we did in 2018 through NIS, our regional action framework, which was released in 2020, modeling work that's being undertaken by Cloudburst, which is a national firm heavily leaned on by HUD and other government partners, including Commerce, Subregional Analytical Work and Engagement, led by our Director for Subregional Planning, Alexis, our Understanding Unsheltered Homelessness Project, which was our modified point in time count, and a lot of stakeholder input.

In this last month, we've done, I believe now it's close, maybe over 50 different public stakeholder engagement events.

Um, and, uh, we, um, you know, a number of them are just on the website.

Anyone can sign up.

Anyone can attend.

Um, some have been more targeted.

Um, I believe, um, I think we're re-calendaring one in Councilmember Herbold's district that, uh, had low attendance because we were in the middle of a heat incident.

Um, so looking forward to seeing that back on the calendar, um, during not a heat incident, which we're kind of in right now.

And I'm also sorry if I look down, it's because I'm also managing an encampment fire.

So like, it has been a summer of incidents, but we have really tried to ensure that our five year planning work has not been slowed down, and that we really engaged partners, both provider partners, but also public partners, people experiencing homelessness in the development of our path forward.

We will begin presenting components of what we are developing over the course of the fall at our Implementation Board and Governing Committee meetings with the final slated now for December, which we moved that date so that we could have the best product possible.

GAPS analysis with CloudBurst.

So this builds on work with the Washington State Department of Commerce.

It analyzes qualitative and some quantitative data pulling in from just, you know, their general analysis from HMIS and other data sets.

In terms of how many emergency housing units we need to identify the gaps in the housing and shelter inventory, and then we'll also have recommendation for year over year investment required to scale the system to support the number of people that we see annually.

our system advocates.

So these were initially called our peer navigators.

Again, we have hired 17 people, I guess I was out of date, we are finalizing offers for 12, not 10. And the by name list development for the downtown core is under development.

If you see someone around downtown in a KCRHA t shirt, please say hello to them.

I'm on our safe lot RFP.

So it was worded in June to the Low Income Housing Institute or Lehigh.

The current funding period is through December 31. The funding status is that we are still in contract and location negotiation with the goal of serving 35 RVs or approximately 50 people.

The fund sources are in front of you here.

You know, I think, I believe we are close to completion on negotiation there.

How the authority works, our process is, I think, maybe a little bit different from how HSD has done it.

An award letter for us means that we intend to negotiate with you, not that, like, everything that you did is exactly what we are going to, you know, say yes to.

In this instance, we had only one applicant.

We believe them to be qualified to do the work, but wanted to have, you know, the adequate conversation around program model, expectations around metrics, etc.

We are aware, you know, of the cliff, obviously, on this slide, which is why, you know, safe parking was part of our budget ask, being considered currently by the executive, and hopefully we will be able to extend this program.

Heat response.

So pre-event, we did outreach to cities and providers about spaces and the hours that they could be operated.

We partnered with public health on the actual activations.

The public health did a lot of supply distribution, water, gatorade, et cetera.

I'm just got a whole series of terrifying notifications.

Can you all hear me?

Okay.

I can hear you.

Great, sorry.

I got like literally like 16 bars that all said, Zoom cannot detect your microphone.

So, okay.

We surveyed infrastructure for preparedness actually in the spring, looking for places that were appropriately cool or cooled.

in terms of access to central air conditioning or other AC units.

On the 20th, we offered contracted providers up to $2,000 for cooling supplies, and then rolled into our more complete activation after that.

Next slide.

So during the event, the 25th to the 31st, we stood up cooling canopies in three locations, White Center, Georgetown, and Shoreline.

We also activated City Hall and a space on Beacon Hill.

We activated with our partners through King County Libraries.

Obviously, those spaces were available.

Seattle Libraries had some space available.

and all of that information was coordinated daily through sub-regional calls and then pushed to the authority's website, which was then coordinated with the public information officers from all of the agencies and distributed across the county.

We tracked utilization at all spaces and made daily decisions about what spaces needed to be augmented or what spaces could be closed because they were not being utilized And, you know, I think we've continued to learn a lot about, you know, where people are headed and why.

The summary here is that we served around 680 folks.

We really, again, continue to focus on how we centered the needs of folks by helping people stay in their communities and providing cooling supplies.

Again, just continuing to learn the lessons that like a lot of folks are not necessarily hopping on Metro to head into downtown to go to City Hall or other places, but they actually would prefer to sort of shelter in place for the duration of the incident.

We have continued to provide connection to resources and other services at every touch point that we have during an incident.

So for example, our cooling canopies, which served hundreds of people over the course of the incident, also had outreach staff and benefit staff there to talk about housing, to talk about connection to resources, case management, et cetera.

and that we have really continued to lean into building relationships with partner agencies in advance.

So really having a tight relationship with, you know, both offices of emergency management at the City of Seattle and then also at King County with, you know, Department of Local Services, with our provider partners, et cetera, being able to pivot in real time and reaction to feedback from our partners has been really essential in running successful incident response.

What's next?

We will continue to engage with folks on the five-year plan.

We have several opportunities for folks to submit any written feedback that they would like through requests for information and other vehicles to redesign how services are delivered.

That's of course our most formal vehicle.

Again, we do lots and lots and lots of other public engagement.

But if anyone would like to submit, you know, something, either as a provider or, you know, some other non or for profit vendor out in the community who thinks they have a good idea.

Now is the time.

We have secured additional funding to the state right of way work, bringing the total of new funding that we brought into the agency.

This fiscal year to a little over $50 million.

We anticipate a successful application to HUD's Unsheltered NOFO, which was released.

That application will be due in October.

We anticipate $10 million-ish, if not a little bit more, coming in via award likely in January.

And our partnership for Xero work will really ramp up with our downtown B&L, standing up our unified command center, and then beginning to house the folks who we have identified through that work over the course of the fall.

I believe that concludes my updates for the day.

Excellent, thank you so much.

So I have a couple questions to start off here, and Council Member Herbold, it looks like, will be the first in the queue afterwards.

So I'm gonna try to use telepathy to predict that Council Member Herbold's is related to the RV RFP.

It might not be, but I'll save those questions for a moment.

But I wanted to talk about the peer navigators downtown, because Mark, you indicated that there'll be some folks out in the downtown neighborhood beginning to do that work in short order and they'll be visible, we'll see them, they'll be wearing KCRHA t-shirts, it sounds like.

So that's all really encouraging.

Can you talk a little bit more about what we might expect and how we, if there's a timeline and when we can expect to see folks out there and exactly what they'll be doing.

As just as an initial question.

Yeah, they were out today, so.

Oh, great.

Perfect.

And let me, I can actually show you.

Here's briefly share my screen.

Here they are this morning.

So if you see someone in one of these shirts, they are one of our folks.

And again, please feel free to say hello.

And what they'll be doing for the remainder of this month is they'll be really focused on finalizing that by name list of who's in the downtown core and who needs our help.

So that's the big task in front of them right now.

We are consolidating data sets from a number of our provider partners in order to not need to, you know, sort of redo work that's already been done.

But we also, there were gaps in geographic coverage with some of our provider partners.

So for example, like no one really had Yesler Terrace.

there wasn't a group that really had, for example, like the, you know, down by the stadiums.

So we're making sure that as we are headed into operations in September, that we have a starting point that is a pretty robust, you know, data set of, again, who needs our help?

And, you know, where are they currently?

In terms of what they'll be doing after that is each of them will have a caseload of about 15 and they'll be getting people housed and keeping them housed.

So what the Unified Command Center will really focus on in our dailies is matching units to people and the primary, you know, sort of barrier buster who will be walking alongside that person will be an advocate.

Great, well, I look forward to seeing all of that in action, and I look forward to being able to say hi to some peer navigators downtown, so that's great news.

Council Member Herbold.

Sorry, a little slow on the draw.

My question about the RV safe lot is very, I just want to understand what happens in December of 2022. the contractor has been selected, but I think the ability to spend the funds that have been allocated for this purpose through 2022 are not all going to be spent this year.

So I just want to understand what the 2023 budget assumptions are about carryover of existing funding.

And then my other question is about the fantastic work that RHA has been doing as it relates to the use of the emergency housing vouchers.

We know King County has leased 58% of our region's federal voucher allocation, whereas nationally only 36% are getting leased up.

And I understand from RHA that you've been working, forget our allocation, specifically towards people living unsheltered in vehicles.

Other communities typically focus on people who are deemed easier to house, CEO domes.

We have once said that you credit your success to the fact that you work with service providers to build on those trusted relationships that they've already established with people experiencing homelessness, and that that relational framework makes a difference.

maybe give us like, it's very counterintuitive, right?

That by focusing on the hardest to house community or folks that are considered hard to house, that you actually have better results.

So can you just talk a little bit more about why these relationships result in making it easier to house people considered harder to house than it is to house people considered easier to house?

Of course.

So on the safe lot, I think what we are finalizing right now is what the startup budget is going to be and then what monthly or annual costs would be.

after that, right?

Based on that, you know, I think we'll be able to come back to both the executive office and, you know, Budget Chair Mosqueda and others and say, this is what we anticipate in terms of like, you know, what would be spent this year, what if any carryover would exist, seeking permission to continue to spend it if that was the case.

But I think that what we, from our perspective, because say parking is such an urgent need, I think we are also looking at, because of the allocation of one-time funds, Are there other things as we move into system redesign next year, right, where we actually re-bid and re-procure the whole system?

Are there fund sources that we want to dedicate to doing this work if there is no additional allocation that comes through a budget process from our funding partners this year?

So I think that within my understanding and talking with our chief program officer earlier today is that we should be close to finalizing like what is the budget for the remainder of this year?

What do we anticipate the budget for next year to be?

And being able to provide those more concrete answers in terms of numbers is probably a week away.

And then when we look at out year, you know, I think, again, we're hopeful that our budget ask for safe parking happens in some way so that, like, you know, we can consider that in relationship to, you know, our other, you know, funding priorities.

But certainly if that doesn't happen, you know, it remains a priority for this agency, and we will look at all of our fund sources available as we re-procure the system in 2023 to ensure that the resource doesn't sunset.

Yeah, I don't want it to sunset either.

This is, I think, $1.9 million in funding, and I would like it to be spent on, begun to be spent on something this year so that we can better make the argument that we don't want to sunset the program next year.

If something has stood up this year, that makes it easier for us to make that argument.

Yeah, I think we are.

One of the things that and and Councilmember I know you've been working on this and I appreciate your assistance but one of the things that we are also in conversation about is citing so like, so there's both the program budget and then also where's it going to go.

And those things combined I think are, are you know part of what the the delay is obviously citing a program for RVs is larger than some of the other safe parking programs we've run just for vehicles um and so we're going to be uh hoping again to finalize that in the next week and I uh I would I would agree and I know if Peter would uh that like you know we have we have selected a vendor things are going to go out the door this year um so uh there will be drawdown off of that this year barring some you know I but I don't see that But you always have to caveat, barring something.

So on EHBs, I appreciate the question.

I will say, part of what we took to some degree a gamble on, but is supported by the literature, is that people do better in terms of getting back into housing and stabilizing when they have a trusted relationship of any kind, right, that is helping them make that transition.

That was the impetus behind our peer navigation work and is really how, as you see the authority really start to come into our own and design new programming, What you'll see is that emphasis on relationships over and over and over again, because that is the thing we hear most frequently from both our provider partners and our lived experience expertise colleagues, right?

Like, it is a uniform piece of feedback.

The relationship is the thing, and it is supported in the literature.

So what we really did in our design of the program was say, rather than do what a number of jurisdictions did, which is take all the vouchers and the services and centralize them in one place and say, come get your voucher, what we did was very rapidly execute 80 new MOUs with providers of all sizes.

Some of whom had never received a contract from the city or King County before.

And so it was like a very big shift for them.

And what we said is, you know, we're going to allocate you via formula X number of vouchers.

And what we want you to do.

is work with folks inside these criteria.

We are targeting folks who are literally homeless.

That includes folks living in vehicles, et cetera.

But these are the criteria.

And we want you to work with folks to get them housed.

And our only requirement of you is that you work with them.

Pull away.

Right, like, and you know we can get you a little bit of money to do that we're going to work on getting more.

But like that is what we're asking, with the distribution of this resource, and you know because our provider partners are who they are they all said yes they're like yes it would be great to have more money but we'll do it anyway.

And what we saw is that it made such a big difference in terms of even things like completing applications, right?

When the person who's working with you to do that completion isn't just the person who's at the housing authority.

And the housing authorities have been tremendous partners on this work, just to be clear.

They've been excellent.

um but also right that like when you feel confused when you feel like like is this really for me is this really going to work right that you can turn to that person who's been with you the whole time and they can work with you on that emotional stuff um that for many many people is actually one of the biggest barriers right like experiencing homelessness is demoralizing it is a demoralizing and traumatic experience that for many, many reasons convinces folks that nothing is going to work out for them.

And being able to turn to someone and say, like, I don't know, council members, is this really going to happen?

And have someone say, like, you know, yes, Mark, it really is going to happen.

Let's go sit down and work on it again, right?

That has really moved the needle.

on completed applications and then on lease up right and then once people are in their unit, what we again continue to ask people to do is like just soft follow them behind right like so like you're not doing intensive work at a given site again we're rolling out funding for some folks who need a little bit more support to be able to pay providers to do that kind of work.

But what we really ask for, as just the minimum, is continue to provide light-touch case management while the person settles in so that when things happen, because we know that things are going to happen, they have someone who they can trust to reach out to to say, I don't know, I'm feeling lonely.

Or again, and it sounds you know, Pollyanna, but like those are the things that destabilize placements.

Loneliness, feeling like you, you know, don't know how to work your microwave, like those are actually things that have led to people deciding that, you know, this isn't working out and, you know, maybe they were better off outside.

And when we provide that emotional support, we're able to mitigate that.

And as a result, folks are able to stabilize, one, to get into housing, and then two, stabilize in that housing.

And the only other thing that I would add, council member, is that I think that this demonstrates two core things that our community really needs to take to heart.

One is this idea that our vacancy rates are unworkable.

It's not true, right?

And the Skeltrum and the Housing Connector have been tremendous partners along with the housing authorities in landlord engagement and really helping to bring the private market to bear here.

And we really need to learn that like we can house more people right like we don't have to wait.

for permanent supportive housing, that isn't actually the intervention for everyone.

What is an intervention for everyone is housing.

And using economic supports like vouchers, rapid rehousing, all those things can be better deployed if we use relational frameworks to deploy them and lean into, again, our colleagues at the housing authorities and Housing Connector to really help us with that landlord engagement piece.

That's super helpful.

I really appreciate that that additional texture and love being reminded of the housing connectors help in this in this space, particularly with the private market.

I also recognize that when you're trying to develop relationships with landlords.

it may not always be super beneficial to remind them of the laws in this state, but a lot of people think that only Section 8 housing vouchers are a protected class.

I just think it's useful for us to remember that the state legislature passed, but.

tenants in the city of Seattle cannot be denied housing because of the form of their rent.

So in developing those relationships, I know it might be good to remind landlords of those legal obligations.

I seem to remember some coverage of your successes that referenced landlords being hesitant to rent to a population who is coming to them with an emergency housing voucher.

So just putting that out there as a piece of information.

Thank you so much for all your work.

Thank you, Councilmember.

Are there any other questions from colleagues for the KCRHA update and presentation?

Councilmember Mosqueda.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you again, Mark.

You referenced the upcoming budget and the analysis that your team is going through.

One example of where we had hoped that the funding would get out the door faster is obviously in the safe lots, and we're really appreciative that the contracts are going out and that the safe lots are being created.

But for numerous reasons, some of which were not in KCRH, the city of Seattle, for example, again, for KCRHA that might not have gone out the door as fast as you anticipated and thus would leave you with underspend at the end of the year?

We should be able to talk underspend probably next month, council member.

I actually don't anticipate that we will have, also because we've raised $50 million more, 70% isn't correct anymore, just for the record.

But I will note that when I last looked at our spending dashboard, we were about 15 percent off target.

And the team is working across all provider contracts right now to identify why and to see whether or not those that underspend is curable imminently or if we project that we will carry it as underspend, in which case we will notify both our partners in the executive branch and you budgeter.

And did you did you say 15% off target at that point that we're at in the year.

Okay.

Yep.

So, not, not terrible and I think if I can, if I can enumerate a little bit just as a way of, I think, helping.

mostly because I know you understand this, Council Member, but just so the public understands, we still have a staffing crisis.

And so in a lot of instances where our partners are having underspend, it's because they can't hire.

And so the underspend is underutilized staffing dollars because the pipelines have collapsed.

And so that is actually what we are seeing mostly when we sit down with our provider colleagues, is like, I can't hire anyone, so this salary pocket has been vacant.

Um, but we're seeing again, if, uh, based on color of money, if there are other ways that we can support our unsheltered neighbors.

Um, but, uh, again, we'll know better, uh, really by, um, I would anticipate like second week of next month, uh, maybe third week, um, where we are in terms of those conversations, uh, and where we're headed to provide formal notice.

No more follow up council member Mosqueda.

All right, thank you so much.

Any other questions from colleagues for the panel from KCRHA?

All right, seeing none.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for the update and looking forward to seeing the system navigators out there in the downtown core and looking forward to hearing more good news from the KCRHA in the coming weeks and months.

So thank you so much for coming by.

Thank you, Chair.

Have a good day, everyone.

Thank you.

Will the clerk please read item two into the record?

Item two, Seattle Parks Maintenance and Comfort Stations Presentations.

Thank you so much.

We are joined by a panel from Seattle Parks and Recreation that'll be headed up here by Interim Superintendent Christopher Williams.

Superintendent Williams, good to see you.

Please feel free to take it away and introduce any of your fellow panelists who are here with you.

Okay, great.

I've got Joy Peruto here, who is our Park Maintenance Division Director.

And we've got Kim Baldwin here, who will help out with the second part of the presentation, as will Carson Jones.

I think we're going to start with the Park Maintenance Surge.

Is that correct?

Your choice, Superintendent Williams.

Yeah, that's the one we're going to start with.

So this will be Joey and myself.

So we are really excited to be able to make this presentation to the council here, mainly because we want people to know what we're doing to respond to the condition of the park system.

And we're grateful to talk about the intensive cleaning effort that is underway across the system.

And this is a presentation about what we're referring to as a park maintenance surge in the Seattle Park Recreation Department.

But it's not just a discussion about enhance or intensive cleaning, we know that clean, safe, well-maintained parks are also perceived as safe places.

So from the custodial standpoint, we want them to be clean and we want the public to perceive them as safe.

It's no secret that our staff take a lot of pride in the way the parks look.

Our parks are a significant source of pride, not just for the citizens of Seattle, but for the staff who do the maintenance work.

As many of you know, we are coming off of a pandemic.

Part of that pandemic included a focus on essential, rather mission essential services that included a lot of hygiene, cleaning of comfort stations and that kind of thing.

We deferred a lot of routine regular maintenance over the course of the pandemic.

We also towards the end of the pandemic kind of incurred a staffing crisis, which I'm happy to report we've been able to staff up.

Now we're on the road to kind of getting our parks back to the way we want them to look.

And we want to talk about what those efforts look like.

This maintenance surge is really a focus on basic custodial cleaning of our parks.

It includes a focus on mowing, comfort station cleaning, graffiti removal, trash pickup, and litter and garbage collection throughout the system.

So with that, I'll turn it over to Joy Peruto on our team.

Good afternoon, council members.

We get to spend some time this afternoon.

I'm excited and I'm very proud to be here today to report out on our maintenance surge, as well as the current condition of our parks.

I have to be very honest and transparent that if I had to be here two months ago, I would not be as proud or as excited.

I want to start off a little bit with some of our operational background for our parks and environment team.

Our team has eight, we have eight teams, I'm sorry, throughout the city that each serve like a geographical area.

whose primary focus is landscape maintenance.

We have another centralized team that consists of urban forestry, our trails, our park rangers and security, our heavy equipment, specialty gardens, Green Seattle Partnership.

At the moment, we have a total of 230 team members that support the maintenance of 485 parks.

So as Christopher shared a little bit with you, throughout the pandemic, we held vacancies to offset our financial impacts.

and that resulted in about a third, or to quantify this, about 83 positions that were vacant through January of 2022. By July 1st, and with incredible HR support, we have filled over 50 positions.

They are all front-facing.

Two of them are administrative, but still do field work, so we call them all front-facing positions, but they were a variety of classifications as laborer, utility laborer, maintenance laborer, gardener, senior gardener, truck drivers, heavy truck drivers, crew chiefs, and then like I mentioned, the last two were managers for our frontline staff.

So again, we are a relatively new team, myself included.

I'm also happy to report that our hiring surge still continues.

This month we are on schedule to fill another 10 positions within our division.

And I just want to point out that these are good jobs.

They're livable wage.

They have union membership opportunities and excellent benefits.

Next slide, please.

During the pandemic, we focused mainly on what we called our mission essential functions, and that resulted in fewer crew projects, less mowing, less trimming.

We weren't able to prepare our parks for peak season as we would have had normally in the past.

That compounded with vacancies and a spring that had 21 days of rain in May and 19 days of rain in June.

Well, we found ourselves behind schedule where we would have had normally been in a regular year.

And so this slide just kind of shows a lot of pictures that show desperate need of attention throughout our entire city.

But as we started to emerge from the pandemic, as well as our usual gray winters, people were starting to flood our parks.

And we started receiving concerns via social media, a lot of find it, fix it, a lot of Facebook entries, your very own offices, as well as our own internal inspections.

What we need, what we found that we needed to identify an increase in maintenance at a much more accelerated rate than we were able to complete.

So with guidance from Christopher Williams and Andy Sheffer and Michelle Finnegan, we put together what we titled a maintenance search.

So next slide, please.

So what exactly is a maintenance search and what does it entail?

We asked ourselves, what makes a park look clean?

What makes a park look inviting?

And when I used to be in the private industry, I had a CEO that used to say, Joey, you can have tall grass.

You can have dead grass.

You cannot have tall, dead grass.

That and Christopher really pushed that mowing was essential to our parks looking good.

So hence, turf maintenance became one of our first priorities.

The other priorities came naturally when we asked ourselves, you know, what makes that park look inviting and such.

And the next items that were easily, easily identified were comfort station cleaning, graffiti removal, and trash pickup.

And that rounded out our four priorities for our maintenance search.

Next slide.

We call this our tier one priorities, because these are our current priorities.

As we catch up, take a step back, take a look from the 35,000 elevation review, we might identify what needs to get done next.

We note that seasons change, and as seasons change, sometimes our priorities change.

So we've already talked and discussed a little bit about what our priority twos are gonna look like, and I'll share a little bit more about that later.

We initiated the surge on June 11, and we're currently in week nine of our maintenance surge.

However, the numbers that I'm going to share with you today are just from one month of our maintenance surge.

All right, so turf maintenance.

So each one of these categories kind of has a subcategory under them.

And it's very easy to assume that we just go through the park and we mow.

But know that mowing goes a little farther than that.

We have to edge all of our sidewalks, all of the curb lines, around fire hydrants, around signs, under benches, under trees, and that becomes very, very time consuming.

Initially, this turf maintenance was very, very challenging.

Your first mow looks really, really shaggy.

And for those of you who have had the opportunity to mow your own lawns, you're aware that when you have 10 inches of grass, you know you can't just mow it right down to two or your mower will bog down and it will die.

And so you have to start at eight inches and then your next mow is at six inches and then down to four and then down to two.

So We were doing about four or five mows to each park before you really actually started to see a difference.

And when you have 6,500 acres of maintained parks, that is a lot of mowing when you talk about 485 parks multiplied by about four mows.

But enough excuses.

We're here to talk about the work that Parks and Environment completed.

Even though our maintenance surge continues, the numbers that are being shared again are for just our first month.

And I just wanted to be very, very clear with that one.

So in our first month of our surge, we did 3,383 hours of turf maintenance.

And so by comparison, each slide will actively have what we accomplished in 2021. And in 2021, at that point, we had only done 488 hours of turf maintenance.

Next slide, please.

Trash cleanup.

So again, trash pickup sounds so easy and so simple.

It is not.

If you've ever broken a bottle, you know that took seconds and then it took 25 minutes to clean up.

Multiply that by a hundred bottles throughout our park district.

So, or throughout our city.

Trash pickup doesn't just mean we're picking up litter.

We have to focus on play areas.

We make sure we're doing our wading pools, our spray parks.

We also know is what is called tipping dumpsters that our packers are specifically and specially designed for.

And we know that picking up trash is no easy feat.

If you've ever picked up trash using a litter stick for more than an hour without cramping, you know what, more power to you because that is impressive.

So this statistic here, I just wanted to share.

And during the surge, we spent 4,965 hours picking up trash.

as compared to the same period in 2021, where we just did 4,708.

Some other really impressive numbers that I wanted to share too, is that during the surge, we picked 330 tons of trash out of our parks.

At the same period last year in 2021, we had picked 276 tons of trash.

Next slide, please.

So for our comfort station cleaning, we have multiple cleans.

And actually, I will discuss that in our next in our in our next presentation when we talk about comfort stations.

But just for this slide here, I wanted to go ahead and share that our numbers here and they don't always make sense in this one really quickly.

And I'll explain.

We spent one thousand nine hundred sixty four hours cleaning comfort stations.

As compared to 2021, when we actively spent 2,900 hours.

And so again, that number doesn't make sense, but this was a direct result that as of COVID, we were doing a lot more frequency in cleanings.

And again, I'll talk about this a little bit later, about the different types of cleaning.

These were considered dry cleanings in 2021. So they were high frequency, but not as deep, whereas compared to this year, where they are going to be deeper cleans to get the restrooms cleaner than what they normally are.

All right, next slide please.

Last but not least, for our priorities, we had graffiti removal.

This involves a variety of methods from pressure washing, using graffiti wipes, and as a last result, repainting.

And if you're lucky, you get to do all three to get rid of one piece of graffiti and attempt to color match it as well too.

And this isn't easy, as Lowe's doesn't sell eight-year-old faded beige.

This number that we have here includes from our colleagues from planning design and maintenance, helped us with some of these numbers.

They are paint shop and some of our trades sit within our PDM division, and so they help us.

Total, we spent 688 hours of graffiti removal in 2022, whereas compared to 2021 when we just did 481. So next slide, please.

We still managed to do our other work that we needed to do.

So after we finished our four priorities every day, we knew that we still had to do the rest of our normal and regular tasks.

We still prepped wading pools, spray parks.

We still trimmed shrubs.

We weeded annual beds.

And for the first time in two years, we planted annual beds.

We did our normal irrigation repair.

and still had time, not still had time, but we still managed to run these very time-consuming programs like managing our beach fires at Golden Gardens and that.

So next slide, please.

Communicating the surge.

Seeing as we had a lot of concerns coming in via social media, we thought we would do a little bit of our own social media to share our information.

Our communications team did an excellent job at promoting our work and sharing our work with the public.

And shockingly, we had overwhelming support from the community with comments like, keep up the good work, or I saw you yesterday in our local park.

Well, it was heartwarming to see.

And oddly enough, my takeaway from this was a lot of the likes were from our own staff that were actually doing the work.

So it was very cool to see our own team following their own work.

Next slide, please.

So that kind of concluded our maintenance search, but this slide kind of dovetails into what we're doing to stay on track.

We currently have a volunteer park inspection program that over time has completed over 217 inspections over the last few years.

This year, we're on track to complete 35 park inspections with this program.

So this program works with volunteers.

Volunteers bring their own unique life and work experiences to our parks.

and they complete what we call a park evaluation form.

And then they also take pictures as well.

And what happens is we have a coordinator that takes all of these pictures and takes all of the work that needs to get completed and funnels it to the crew chiefs who then make sure that all of these suggestions are actively followed.

This program really does some amazing work.

Sometimes it uncovers immediate safety concerns.

Sometimes it gives us emerging concerns.

And it also suggests, they bring some really good suggestions for our parks and for our maintenance team.

If anyone is interested, we have two inspections coming up on the 19th at 8.30 at Bitter Lake Playfield.

And then again, on the 23rd at 10 a.m.

at Kinnear Park.

So those who are interested in volunteering can get more information from the website listed.

Next slide, please.

We talked a little bit about earlier about our next steps for our Tier 2 priorities.

As we catch up, we are not fully caught up.

We're not done yet.

We're really just getting started with the new batch of staff who are very, very passionate in getting our parks to pre-pandemic condition.

But we note that some of our priorities may change.

And as we catch up and we complete some of our tasks, we know that that some of these tasks that are coming up shift with the season.

And one of them that we identified as of now is we are currently in a pilot project to clean all of our hard surface courts.

Now we have over 130 hard surface courts.

And this pilot has a very lofty goal of cleaning them all by the end of the year.

We are in week two, but we are also at 18 courts that were cleaned throughout the city.

Overall, we plan to keep this surge moving.

And again, as we roll into fall and winter, we'll go ahead and identify new priorities for us to work through.

Next slide, please.

So I wanted to share a few before and after pictures for us.

This right here is Emma Schmitz Park, so some before and afters.

Another huge project, removing blackberry and ivy at Inner Bay.

West Crest Park in West Seattle is that last two pictures on the right hand side.

And so, next slide please.

All right, so these slides really quickly here are Yesler Terrace, an example of Golden Gardens, and Genesee Park.

Again, our team has done an amazing job of tracking and taking pictures and we literally have hundreds of photos to choose from.

All right, this last slide that I have here actually is some more before and afters of the Seward Park North Loop Comfort Station that was recently reopened, as well as Plymouth Pillar's graffiti removal.

The very last two pictures on your right are actually heng hei, and it's not a before and after, but it's an example of other work that we do to keep our parks clean.

And this is how we maintain some of our hard surfaces.

And these are two different types of machinery that we use.

One we call the trivarious, One is a walk behind auto scrubber.

So those are just some of the pieces of equipment that we use to help maintain some of our downtown parks, since we have less shrubbery and landscape.

So again, as a proud parent, I would happily show more photos, but I recognize that we've got another presentation to get to.

So again, thank you for your time this afternoon.

And just wondering if I can open the floor up to any questions.

Thank you so much for that overview.

It's really great to get this full briefing at council on the maintenance surge.

And I can just digress for a moment to attest to being one of those super enthusiastic witnesses of the maintenance surge on a couple of different occasions now in a couple of different parks.

So either some parks employees are kind of following me to time a maintenance surge when I happen to be in a particular park, or more likely, we really are seeing this massive increase all over the city, including parks in District 7, where I've witnessed it firsthand, and it has been very noticeable.

So I want to ask a couple questions and then I see Council Member Herbold has her hand up.

First, I'm just kind of curious what you attribute the hiring success to.

Those are incredibly impressive numbers that you've attracted 50 new hires into doing this maintenance work that's very significant and critical.

What do you attribute that to?

I think we can learn in other departments where we might be trying to fill vacancies from what you're doing.

Yeah.

So maybe I'll jump in here.

One of the things we did in March was have a retreat dedicated to hiring.

Uh, we pulled our HR staff together.

We pulled together our leadership team across the organization and had a discussion about what kind of additional support, uh, our HR, our HR unit needed and how we were going to reallocate resources from other areas in the organization to support hiring, because they had a staff shortage as well.

And we made it an all-hands evolution to increase hiring.

And the divisions provided a lot of support.

And there was a, it was sort of an esprit de corps around ramping up and hiring more staff across the organization.

So it was kind of an all-hands-on-deck evolution.

I don't know, Joey, what do you think?

I think it was a combination of many things.

I know our HR department really came through for us with pushing out our hiring.

We also have an equity coordinator on our team who pushed this, our recruitments out to an additional 12 different publications, the Filipino Times, Daybreak Star.

are just the two that I can think of off the top of my head.

So we really tried to reach out to grab a much more diverse audience to represent those that are in the city.

I know that that brought in some new people.

And I also think that we are at a point in time where people didn't want to go and work in small enclosed spaces.

And so an opportunity at the park system is an opportunity to really be outside.

This is at a time too when the CDC was telling people, go outside, recreate outside, get together with other people, but do it outside, right?

Do it safely.

And so this is when we did this recruitment, we were actively very shocked as well, too, in that, with the amount of responses that we got.

As an example, I believe for like our labor position, which is our entry level position, We had upwards of about 300 applications for it.

And so we really had an opportunity to get the creme de la creme and the cream of the crop, which is why we have the successes of this maintenance surge now, because this new team that is here, combined with our seasoned staff, they are super excited about getting it.

They brought an entire morale boost as well with them.

And so for that, I think that we are, we're very thankful.

Again, our HR also stepped outside of their box and with recruitment, with doing social media output, we have magnets on our vehicles that are saying Seattle Parks is now hiring with QR codes and all these other things to really help.

And I think ultimately at the end of the day, though, when I touched on it earlier, was these are good livable wage jobs.

They are union jobs.

There's union opportunities there.

And these are 50 jobs that the city of Seattle is providing to its residents.

Great, well, that's really good to hear and what an inspiring story and how that was able to come together to, you know, because without getting those folks hired and trained up, there's no maintenance surge, right?

So it's great to see how that came together and is leading to the difference we're seeing in the community.

So that leads to my next question on how we sustain this.

and how the Metropolitan Park District renewal might be a potential vehicle for the kind of investment that is needed to sustain this.

Because while it's all well and good that we have a surge to sort of catch up from the impacts of the COVID era and a long period of understaffing and everything else, We really wanna go forward where this can, speaking for the community members and all the town halls we've been conducting, something where this is just taken as a matter of course that we have this level of maintenance and attention to parks.

So, you know, how do we take the energy and momentum around the surge and structure a maintenance regime where we can expect going forward to be able to meet this level of demand in a consistent way?

Essentially, how can we as a council give a funded mandate to parks to sustain and keep this level of attention to the basic maintenance of the parks?

You know, Councilmember, that is an excellent question.

You know, we'll always accept more funding.

One of the realities is that Over the course of the pandemic, we did not reduce our level of funding in our grounds maintenance section.

We have the same level of funding.

We just didn't deploy it during the pandemic.

One of the things that I think is worth mentioning is that for the last 10 years, the Seattle Park and Recreation Department has been on a list of the 10 best maintain park and recreation departments in the country.

I think our challenge was to get past the pandemic and sort of double up on catching up.

We worked staff on the weekend, seven days a week, lots of overtime just to get caught up.

We're pretty, or actually we have a high level of confidence that once caught up, we're gonna be able to maintain the system that we have One of the things we do in the fall and winter months is do crew projects after we get out of peak season.

Crew projects give us the opportunity to prepare for the next spring.

So this fall winter, we anticipate having lots of crew projects that will do the work that, you know, perhaps we didn't do in 2021 to get the system ready for the following spring and summer.

We're going to do that work this spring.

Rather, I'm sorry, this fall and winter.

And, you know, the short answer to your question is we think we have enough resources to stay caught up barring another pandemic.

All right.

Excellent.

I appreciate the department's honesty on that and look forward to working together on ways to make sure the department stays well resourced to meet the mandate of what the public and certainly per joey's reputation what the staff of the parks department expects for park and recreation properties uh another thing i might just touch on before i hand it over to council member herbold which is related uh superintendent williams is investments we might be able to make to mitigate the potential need for supplemental maintenance and remedial work in parks through things like park ranger presence or through things like park concierge or attendance for comfort stations, which I imagine, as far as the extent to which this maintenance surge can be associated with vandalism, and certainly, you know, graffiti would be an example of that from the presentation, and I'm sure there's others that that could be attested to, but That might be another way to look at this too is activation and public safety investments that work on these items from the other end by preventing them from happening in the first place.

Just another thing I wanna flag for our Metropolitan Park District discussions that if it's not necessarily a maintenance level investment, investments in those preventative things and those activations might be something worthy to mitigate the maintenance bottom lines and wanna give an opportunity to the panel to respond to that and then I'll turn it over to Council Member Herbold.

Mayor Harrell is closely reviewing recommendations for some of those safety and security steps and activation that mitigate or increase the positive legitimate use of the park system.

Lots of discussions with the mayor's office and some of that could show up in his

that.

Thank you.

Councilmember Herbold.

appreciate that.

I want to first preface my question with a thank you.

I have been able to sort of see in real time how much more quickly constituents are getting but they're getting a response to it telling them that it's been done.

And I really want to thank your team.

I want to thank Paula Hoff, who is just really invaluable to my office in handling some of these requests, and just say how much I appreciate being copied by your staff on your response.

So I don't have the sense of these referrals just going into a black hole somewhere.

I know when they've been responded to and that just reduces the amount of work that we all have to do trying to track down answers.

So thank you for increasing the work you're doing and also your being responsive to my request.

It's really appreciated.

In that vein, No people are people are really interested in in in park maintenance and addressing unknown grass.

I totally appreciate that, trying to mow the grass that is grown many inches can result in a mower puttering out.

So I understand the need to sort of scale that work.

But I also learned from Paula Hoff that you're highlighting a new approach that I want to get more information out so that we can not only be responsive to people's requests, but manage their expectations about what we are doing and there's this new passive turf pilot where you're focusing sort of a different mowing approach on areas that are not being used by the public and just wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about that because sometimes people will put a request in, we tell them it's done, and then they are like, oh, well, that's not what I thought it should look like.

Because they're expecting this short mowed area, you're actually voiding particular areas while mowing others.

And just wanted to talk a little bit about that.

Joey, do you want to respond to that?

Yeah, I can share a little bit about that.

So we actively have designated meadows throughout the parks and recreation a bit throughout the parks in the city.

some of the areas that we were not mowing were not part of that.

So that's something that we quickly wanted to rectify and know that you've heard of like pollinator pathways, we've talked about no-mow-may, there's all of these other sustainability items that kind of went into not mowing some specific areas of not mowing.

And we still feel like whereas that might be the right approach, we need to get there slowly and we need to educate other people more before we initiate a program like that.

So I think that, and Christopher please correct me if I'm wrong, that is from a sustainability perspective something that is one of our goals, but I don't know that we are this point right now actively saying we are going to let this area grow to become a meadow that was often very much so confused with lack of park maintenance and that you know there is a huge difference and there's a passive turf pilot yes And that's part of it.

So when we talk about like the no mows and the pollinator gardens, it's kind of all ties into our sustainability part, but we need to do a better job in the beginning and get out ahead of it before we probably continue that one on.

We do have certain areas are considered and are officially meadows that we only mow twice a year.

And because of our maintenance surge, we felt like it was time.

And most meadows are mowed regardless, right?

Um, at certain times of the year and it was time.

So we just made this the right time to just get in there.

And even though we had a passive turf pilot project, we figured like now is the time to come in and get it mowed.

There's always the fear of fires around July 4th.

And so like the timing of all of the, the, the, the passive project was like, it's time for it to kind of, it's time for us to mow at this point.

and councilmember Herbold we try to have those passive or natural areas are mostly in our natural area part and and what we consider to be a developed part develop urban park, we're not going to have as many sort of passive mow areas.

We want those to have a more manicured look and feel, but there are areas in the system that feel like more natural area parks where we are piloting that idea.

Thank you.

Okay, are there any other questions from colleagues on the maintenance surge presentation?

And I can also just say, actually, before I, maybe to buy a little time, if colleagues are still thinking of a question they might ask, I appreciate the materials that have been provided in the presentation.

I will certainly manifest them into a, email to my district listserv over the recess to let people know about the surge and include my own personal anecdotes of observing this maintenance work in action as part of that.

And really just can't stress enough how much I appreciate the hard work of everyone in parks and community.

really leaning in to the summer being a summer of recovery for our parks and open space, and just really doing the work for the park system that all the people of Seattle wanna see and experience.

And everything I can do through my communications, I will echo that story, because I know part of the presentation was, trying to make the general public aware of the surge.

And I just wanted to close by giving my promise to spread the word based on this presentation and really appreciate this information.

With that, do colleagues have any other questions?

Okay, seeing none, why don't we proceed to our next presentation from our parks panel.

Great.

And we're going to ask Carson Jones and Kim Baldwin to join us here.

So, this presentation is a high level presentation on sort of the whole spectrum of conversation, cleaning, maintenance, long term maintenance.

We consider clean, safe, accessible restrooms an essential service for park users.

This was especially true during the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. We wanted places where people could go to wash their hands and practice some basic hygiene.

Next slide, please.

So this overview is an overview on some basic conversation data, our daily maintenance routine, what we consider to be preventative maintenance, and capital renewal.

Next slide.

There are roughly 129 total comfort stations.

In Seattle Park and Recreation Parlance, we consider a comfort station a standalone outside bathroom.

So in most cases, it's a bathroom not connected to a building.

They include shelter houses that typically have gathering spaces or bath houses such as we have at Green Lake or Golden Gardens.

So that's, you know, that's sort of our math on comfort stations there.

Superintendent, just a quick clarification.

So this does not include comfort stations that might be in a community center?

Right, no, very good point there.

So we have left off this list conversations that are in community centers.

These are dedicated conversations, not including community centers.

Thank you.

Next slide.

This slide attempts to illustrate the distribution and allocation of comfort stations by council district.

And you can see the math there in District 2. We have 26 and 18 in District 6 and 15 in District 7. So this is how we get to that number of 129. Next slide.

So this is a brief slide on the ongoing lifecycle costs for a comfort station.

It's a circular illustration.

It includes daily or routine maintenance.

It includes scheduled maintenance that is the result sometimes of work orders or planning and development maintenance.

And then there is capital renewal.

You know, all of our facilities and infrastructure have a life expectancy and for a comfort station that might be 30 years and we need to be having a discussion about replacing those facilities at the end of their useful life.

So this is sort of a illustration of the full maintenance life here.

So at this point, I will turn the presentation over to Joey once again.

Good afternoon again.

We get to spend a lot of time together this afternoon.

Your comfort station cleaning team also sits within the Parks and Environment Division.

So this afternoon I'd like to take the opportunity to share with you how our maintenance teams operate and some of our responsibilities that our team does when it comes to, oh I'm sorry, next slide, and some of the responsibilities that our team have in maintaining the comfort station.

So Right now, at any given point in time, we have a minimum of 12 laborers that are dedicated to just comfort station cleaning.

During our peak season, they're assisted by other staff, and in some instances, our seasonal staff.

However, make no mistake, no one on our parks team is immune from any comfort station responsibility, myself included.

You know, all staff should have basic cleaning materials on their vehicles and be ready to restock, service, or at least know who to call to get that done.

So next slide, please.

Now, this has probably got to be my favorite phrase that our team has come up with when we were talking about all of our comfort stations, is that comfort stations are as diverse as Seattle.

And I love that phrase.

So our team has their work cut out for them, though, with these comfort stations.

And there's a variety of stations that we do clean.

And each one of them require very unique methods and frequencies.

They each require different types of materials.

different tools, as well as different PPE that you need to wear.

So, and you'll note that, you know, as Christopher mentioned just now, like there's a lot of different styles we've got in these pictures here.

We've got the Portland Loo, which we have at Rainier Beach, Ballard Commons.

We've got multiple shelter houses.

Mountain Baker is a good example of that.

And then last on this photo is the gender neutral stalls at Pratt.

So, and since each one of these comfort stations is unique in both style and location, Some are either open year-round or during peak season.

And yes, we have a specific number as to what's open during winter season.

But mind you, peak season is approximately May through September, but often extended to include both April and October, which are both weather permitting.

So next slide, please, slide eight.

All right, how do we get it done?

I know everyone here has walked into their own home and to a room that you had just cleaned and said, how is this room dirty?

I just cleaned it.

Now, imagine your home having 3,000, 5,000, up to 15,000 of your friends coming over to use your bathroom.

And imagine just how quickly it would get dirty.

So those are some of the challenges that our team deals with daily.

It's always our goal to get them opened as early as possible.

Our staff shift their start times during peak season to make sure that our early morning exercises, who I'll never understand, have access to a comfort station.

We are challenged on some though, and you'll see later on during the maintenance surge presentation, you have seen during our maintenance surge presentation that our team likes to take before and after pictures.

I have seen some of the before pictures of a comfort station that desperately needed cleaning, and I've taken the liberty to not include them in this presentation, because once you see them, you can't unsee some of these pictures.

So needless to say, some of these comfort stations take a lot longer to clean than others, which sometimes delays them others from further down on the route from opening on time.

So the first thing that we do when we go out to clean comfort stations is we definitely have to pair up for safety.

There's a lot of times that we don't know what might have gotten into a comfort station the night before.

and what condition it could be in.

So we definitely send two people out to clean each comfort station.

And in some cases like Cal Anderson, we send actually in the entire team to make sure that people are safe.

We go into the restrooms, we unlock them, we do what is called the dry clean, and then we restock them.

A dry clean is when we actively go into a comfort station and we visually inspect for damaged equipment, look at fixtures, we check broken doors, hinges, faucets, hand dryers, toilet paper dispensers, soap dispensers, light fixtures, door locks, graffiti, you name it, we're inspecting for it.

We flush the toilets, we run the faucets to make sure they're all in good working order.

Last, we pick up some ground litter, sweep the floors, and follow up with a very, very quick mop.

On our way out, we wiped it down, sanitized the sinks, as well as the door handles.

After we step outside, we call in and we create work orders.

You'll hear later in the presentation about some of the vandalism that we are faced with on the daily.

So when comfort stations on their routes are clean, are all clean on their route, they then head to a crew project, which normally is a deep clean at another site.

And I'll talk about deep cleans on the next slide.

Just a point of information, we have 41 high-volume sites that we provide a minimum of a secondary service.

And in some locations like Golden Gardens, Alki, Green Lake, they get a third and a fourth service.

Next slide, please.

So this next slide, we call it wet cleans, dry cleans, and we all scream for deep cleans.

So I went over already what we do on a dry clean, or we call that a daily clean.

The difference between the two is pretty simple.

The only difference is that it's all of the same steps as a dry clean, but now we come in and we use a hose and or a pressure washer.

In some places, we can't use a pressure washer because the space is too small and there's way too much kickback.

And if you've ever been at a comfort station and know what the word kickback means, know that it is not sanitary.

So this is done at our locations daily, the dry cleans.

And then once a week, we do what is called that wet clean.

And so the wet clean is coming in again with the pressure washer and or a hose.

And we do all of the same steps.

The last one that we have is a deep clean and a deep clean, again, consists of all of the same steps as a daily clean, but is almost entirely completed by a pressure washer.

And the difference is that in the interior, it stops from the top of the building to the bottom.

So in the interior, we get the ceiling, light fixtures, cobwebs, and then we work our way down.

At the very end on a deep clean, we actually step outside and we pressure wash the exterior walls of the building and floors if it's needed.

Historically, we've had one deep clean per district.

We've recently, with our maintenance surge, actually helped increase that to three deep cleans per district per week.

So we're gonna start to see even cleaner restrooms than we've had in the past.

On average, I mentioned that we've got about 12 people working on comfort stations during the day.

The staff above that 12 number would include more specialized staff doing other removal, like replacing locks, handles, faucets, and that type of thing.

My last slide talks a little bit about, oh, I'm sorry, next slide, please, is service interruptions.

Comfort station interruptions are very, very frequent.

We're often a target for sometimes very simple vandalism, like somebody lit some toilet paper on fire in the middle, didn't really cause a lot of damage, but that burn mark also isn't going away for a little while.

And then sometimes it gets to become very, very extensive damage.

And I'm sure that you're all aware of every closed comfort station within your own districts, but some of these examples that I'm gonna share are extensive.

and some of those sites would be like these pictures here about Bradner Gardens, Brighton Playfield, Licton Springs, and even the Judkins Park Upper Shelter House, which had a pretty severe fire.

So when staff do determine that we may need to remain closed for a longer period of time, we do a quick huddle with our planning, design, and maintenance team, so our trades colleagues, and if a service interruption is needed for an extended period, we will call in and where possible put Santa Can options installed.

And so with that, I'm gonna turn this over to Carson to talk a little bit about how they respond to service interruptions.

Thank you, Joey.

Next slide, please.

So Carson Jones here, and it's my pleasure to talk about and to represent the staff that are what we call our skilled maintenance team, and they take care of our parks, community centers, pools, spray parks, and of course our comfort stations, which is what we're here to talk about today.

Go ahead and go to the next slide.

A lot of what we're about is fixing broken.

And it's our goal to respond same day to anything that takes a comfort station out of service.

And we respond in an average year.

The last year I did statistics for shops responded to about 1400 work orders in a given year for our comfort stations.

So if you distribute that evenly, that's about 10 visits per or maybe a little more.

Obviously some of them get more attention than others.

We do winterize.

Winterization is necessary during extreme weather.

Anytime we get down in the teens and 20s for any kind of an extended period of time.

Since our comfort stations don't have heat, it's necessary to get in and winterize them, we have to drain the fixtures, put in antifreeze and protect them or they will suffer significant damage.

When we de-winterize, that's typically when we do a lot of maintenance and we like to replace all of the soft parts, make sure the flushometers and all of the equipment is working properly.

And next slide, please.

Security at comfort stations is also part of our purview.

Some of those work orders are for security.

We are installing auto locking in a number of our comfort stations.

This is a trend nationally for parks and recreation facilities and other public assembly locations.

It allows us to lock and unlock them and control them remotely.

When everything is working right, it can save a trip then in the morning or at the end of the day.

You can imagine what it's like trying to get everything locked and unlocked on a schedule with an inventory as vast as ours.

So that's my presentation.

I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Kim Baldwin.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Next slide, please.

So I'm Kim Baldwin, and I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about capital renewals.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

So the diagram here illustrates the circular life of a comfort station, which Christopher referred to early.

This is really the life cycle of the early planning portion and capital renewals portion of a life cycle.

It illustrates the early planning and assessment stage to the construction or renewal stage, and then on to the commissioning stage when it becomes available to the public.

Condition assessments took place citywide and systemwide in 2016 and 2017. These assessments rated each comfort station based on interior and exterior structure, the condition of their partitions and fixtures, accessibility and the overall appearance.

This study is really the baseline that is used for determining which projects are most need or which conversations are most need to become projects and prioritized each year.

Locations are rated higher if they are in a high priority census tract on the race and social equity index.

And if they are on the citywide barrier removal schedule for ADA compliance, and if they're adjacent to other planned projects so that we can incorporate them into one larger package to have less disruption to the community and to see some cost savings for project delivery.

Next slide, please.

So the current park district proposal is really geared towards increasing the number of renovation and replacement projects that we can complete in a given year.

At the current level of funding $1,600,000 and based on the average cost of approximately $540,000 comfort stations are renewed on an average of every 42 years.

If a full comfort station replacement is needed due to many different circumstances, then the cost will be increased based on the needs of that particular comfort station.

Then with the additional $1.2 million per year that is in the park district proposal, we hope to lower that cycle from 42 years to 34 years.

The additional funding will allow us to complete approximately two comfort stations per year.

I'm sorry, just to jump in, I wanna clarify before we jump slide here.

For these renovations, how much average additional life for the structure or facility do we expect to get on a renovation by renovation basis?

How much additional life?

Like in all these, we're not replacing the whole comfort station, right?

Like some of it is just like a remodel of the facility.

I know that we're, with the BPRC recommendations, we would be expecting to renovate every 34 years.

So is that the number I should kind of be going by?

Like we would expect to go full circle and do whatever we just did again in 34 years.

Yes, I mean that would be the average life cycle that we would be getting to.

Each comfort station is different and a renovation really helps us to meet current ADA standards and safety standards and any new code compliance that might change during that large time frame.

But yes, it would be moving from where we are right now, 42 years which is too long and our our conversation has become out of date and outmoded, and moving to something that's closer to the standard, which of being 34 years.

And I believe the standard is, recommended standard is 30 years.

Life cycle.

All right, thank you.

Yeah, sorry, continue.

I just wanted to clarify that on the slide before going any further.

So go ahead, sorry for interrupting.

No, no worries, no, thank you.

So this additional funding will allow us to complete approximately two more per year.

However, that definitely depends due to arson and other vandalism that occurs.

Unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of that over the past few years.

And so funds need to be diverted to conversations that we didn't anticipate.

So some of this funding would be allocated towards that.

And you can see on the chart in front of you, we are just anticipating approximately $500,000.

That's our current allotment.

The total project cost might also vary depending upon whether or not it can be a renovation or if the whole comfort station would need to be demolished and rebuilt.

And sometimes we find, discover structural issues within a comfort station or The current distances within are such that we cannot make it ADA accessible.

So there are sometimes reasons that we find and discover during those early design phases that let us know that we need to complete a full replacement.

And then the images on the left, they show a renovation project or a rebuilding project that we had recently.

of Alki is along Alki at 57th Avenue Southwest.

And the top is the before image and the below is an after image of a new facility.

Council Member Herbold, do you have a question that's germane to this District 1 Comfort Station?

No, actually.

Go ahead.

I can see how you might think I might.

Just generally as it relates to the plans to renovate slash maybe in some cases replace comfort stations.

I'd like to request that the department look into the design of staffed comfort stations as opposed to that we're going to be talking about today.

We're going to be talking through and do a great maintaining and a comfort station.

Another model public restrooms that are that are staffed to address the very problems that were highlighted in this presentation.

I'm going to talk a little bit about.

It's critical resources.

There's a great.

he's in a governing magazine month.

I was talked compares.

Approaches I think the question and one of the is providing staffing 24 seven, or, or at least for the hours conversation is open.

spending the costs in the short term for the staffing, but it also allows you to not have to suffer these long-term closures that we see in our communities when activities occur in comfort stations that should not be occurring.

Thank you for that.

So we will look into that, and I'm jotting notes down on the side here.

Okay, thank you.

I really appreciate that.

Thank you.

All right, then moving on to the next slide.

So, this slide is a simple illustration of some recent project completions and some in construction.

You can see the locations of the parks on the left.

So, bread and plate play field is the top image.

And bottom, the bottom image is Kubota Gardens conversation.

Next slide, please.

All right.

So this slide, the projects on this list were prioritized based on the criteria that we shared earlier.

And the list includes projects that are currently in the planning or design phase, and then projects that are also prioritized within the park district proposal.

And the map shows their distribution throughout the city.

The upper photo shows the demolition of a comfort station, unfortunately, that saw arson.

And the image below shows a prototype rendering or all gender single use.

Next slide, please.

All right, so in late 2015, we completed a study to develop a set of guidelines for comfort stations, for comfort station design, and also to look at a prototype for a single-use all-gender restroom.

So it's really critical to consider the different design criteria when renovating comfort stations for the future.

Safety, accessibility, and code compliance are always paramount and always given.

Our restrooms need to be durable to withstand all of the use that they see, and they need to be readily and easily maintained.

In addition to this criteria, we want them to be pleasant to the users.

So they should have good ventilation, some natural lighting, and some aesthetically pleasing features.

And, you know, as much as we can do with that, things such as, you know, having some decorative tile, maybe having some interesting colors, something that make people feel comfortable when they're using the comfort stations.

So we're also exploring all gender single use restroom design, where a person can have the safety and the convenience of going into a stall with all of the amenities that are provided in our typical restrooms.

So the the all gender restrooms, they really they meet the needs of a variety of different users, such as like parents with infants or persons assisting others of another gender.

For children's group leaders who need to stand outside of the comfort station or the door when a child is inside utilizing it, and then simply for those who just feel safe when they're in a single-use restroom.

The design is more easily implemented with newer buildings, but some of the existing facilities can be renovated into this type.

And we're currently piloting this type of facility as depicted in the photos.

You can see in the center, we have Pratt Park, which was just very recently opened.

And on the top left, we have these conversations built at Volunteer Park and the amphitheater, the new amphitheater, which also was recently completed.

The prototype layout plan is depicted in the bottom left as well.

So after a given time period, approximately 18 months, we're going to bring our recommendation to the Board of Park and Recreation Commissioners.

And we're really still, we're assessing what that design, what the criteria is going to be that we're going to utilize to evaluate this program.

So that concludes our presentation.

And we would like to thank you all very much for listening and invite any additional questions that you might have.

Thank you so much.

So I definitely have a few additional questions.

It looks like Council Member Herbold does as well.

Is that a new hand up, Council Member Herbold?

Old hand.

Oh, old hand.

All right, nevermind.

Council Member Herbold has no additional questions.

Okay, I do have a couple I wanna dig into though.

And this is probably best for Kim, but feel free to redirect it as necessary.

How many of the comfort stations that are in the list, the 129, are due for a renovation?

Presuming that some renovations have been done with the existing allocation of funding and the baseline budget and other sources, how many are eligible but for resources we haven't really been able to get to them yet?

That is a very good question.

We don't have the answer to that on hand specifically, but we can get that.

We can share that if that's okay with you.

Thank you so much.

I might go out on a limb and say most, but we can get you a specific number.

We do a pretty good job of trying to keep a lot of these old comfort stations up and running.

We maintain the plumbing.

We change the toilet.

equipment.

We paint, but we do a lot of band-aiding on some really old facilities.

And in some cases, the wall, the concrete is really porous.

So you can clean some of these spaces a lot, but they may not feel entirely clean.

But we would be happy to provide you that information.

Excellent, thank you.

And if you could share that with central staff as well at the council, that would be helpful for us to track that along.

As I mentioned before, this has been a very significant area of community interest for investment in the cycle of the Metropolitan Park District, and we certainly wanna work with the Parks Department on how we might make a big impact on our 129 comfort stations.

I have a question that is probably better for Joey.

Of the different types of comfort stations that you shared in your presentation, you know, shelter houses, Portland Loo, et cetera, is there a type of comfort station that is easier on the bottom line to clean and maintain?

I would say that the gender neutral stalls would probably be the easiest for a variety of reasons.

One, it doesn't actively close down a restroom when we have to go in to service it.

So let's say I keep using Golden Gardens as an example, but it's a good example.

We have to stand in a line and go in.

And sometimes we have to make sure that the person of the appropriate sex is going into those restrooms to service them.

So we have to physically close them down.

If we had gender neutrals, we don't have to have that.

We can just we can go into one, clear it.

Everybody can just keep flowing and keep using all of the rest of the restrooms.

So that allows for our team to be efficient and just continually keep closing them, you know, closing them service and closed service instead of closing it down and a line stacking up, because ultimately, when that line exists, There is somebody who's going to come to the front with their child and be like, we have to go and we have to go inside now.

We're like, all right, go inside.

There's a gentleman cleaning.

But if you need to go in and use the restroom, you can go in.

They also tend to be newer.

And so they are different materials in them that make it easier for us to clean.

Some of our older restrooms are obviously older.

a little more antiquated.

So like to remove a piece of graffiti, we don't have a graffiti coating on the wall.

We don't have a lot of these newer technologies involved.

And so I'm gonna just go ahead and probably say that the easiest to clean is a gender neutral.

Okay, yeah, that is good feedback.

We discussed during Kim's presentation that the national best practice would be to renovate every 30 years and this gets us to 34 years.

Do we know what the additional investment in the MPD would be in order to get it to the 30 year timeline?

And I would like to caveat that, I wanna double check that number and respond to that answer.

All right, so is that both for what would it cost to get to the 30 year and if it's the national best practice or?

Okay, excellent.

Great, yeah, it would just be good to know if we're gonna, if the current MPD investment would get it from 42 to 34, but 30 might be the goal to bring us in line with what the national expectation is that the delta between the 30 and 34 year number would be good information for the MPD.

Thank you.

I, Don't have any additional questions.

I was gonna ask a question about kind of concierge service, but I think Superintendent Williams, your answer from our last category would.

you know, would carry here.

I might ask sort of an indulgent fun question.

Is there any potential, certainly not for this Metropolitan Park District cycle or budget cycle, but potentially at some point in the future to remediate the comfort station that is located under the pergola in Pioneer Park?

Sure, we can take a look at that.

And, you know, I mean, a lot of it is based on what level of need it has.

But we'd be happy to take a look at it.

Yeah, I hear it's quite quite a site with, you know, brass fixtures and marble and a whole bunch of other things that is just sort of buried under.

Pioneer Park right now.

But apparently back in the day, it was quite a thing.

Okay, with that, colleagues, I don't have any additional questions.

And it does not look like other committee members do either.

So with that, I think we learned a lot today about this important area of, priority that's been identified through our process on the Metropolitan Park District.

And I look forward to how we might get a couple of answers on the maintenance.

Actually, but before we leave, I think one more thing I'll ask based on Joey's presentation about the different types of cleaning and the frequency of cleaning.

the dry cleans, wet cleans, and we all scream for deep cleans categories.

Is that a potential area where the frequency and intensity of cleanings, if there was additional resources allocated, that would be more attainable and something that parks would, would like to be able to provide more frequent cleaning at more locations but currently is not able to?

Joey, you're muted.

Sorry about that.

Yes, absolutely.

We do have a park district proposal in for a second shift, a dedicated second shift that would be dedicated to comfort station cleaning as well as deferred maintenance inside of the comfort stations.

Okay, yeah, I mean, I think those are the two things we really wanna look at, right, is sort of that frequency of cleaning, but then also kind of the capital investments and comfort stations.

And this has been a really, really productive hearing for both of those categories, just to learn about the cadence of that work and what it might entail.

So with that, and seeing no additional questions from colleagues, I think we can excuse the panel So with that, we're at good of the order for the committee, and I don't see anyone trying to bring anything up for good of the order.

So it is 4 p.m.

on Wednesday, August 17th, 2022, and this meeting is adjourned.