Seattle City Council Transportation Committee 2/18/2025

All right.

Good morning.

The February 8th, 2025 meeting of the transportation committee will come to order.

It is 934 AM.

I am Rob Saka, chair of the transportation committee.

Will the committee clerk please call the roll.

Council member Kettle.

Here.

Council member Rink.

Present.

Council member Strauss.

Present.

Vice chair Hollingsworth.

Chair Saka.

Here.

Chair, there are four members present.

Thank you.

And I note that Council Member Hollingsworth is, Vice Chair Hollingsworth is excused for the first 10, 15 minutes until she arrives.

Colleagues, if there are no objections, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing and seeing no objections, the agenda is hereby adopted.

All right.

Well, thank you colleagues, guests for joining us today on two critically important topics before this committee this morning.

Our very first agenda item is a round table discussion on regional transit security.

In a moment, we will hear from our guests from King County Sound Transit, the city of Seattle, as well as ATU Local 587 and the Downtown Seattle Association regarding transit security.

I wanna thank them for taking time out of their busy schedules to join us today and attend this crucial round table discussion.

While we would have loved to have even more stakeholders join us at today's discussion table, we are of course very limited in time and space.

However, today's guests are critical stakeholders as we look to strengthen our efforts to continue to move forward as a city to better address our transit security needs.

Since taking office last year, transit security has been a major priority for me personally, and I know many of my colleagues as well.

And I've been adamant that we need to do more to make both riders and drivers feel safe.

As a regular transit rider myself, I took the bus to City Hall this morning, taking it home later today.

I would encourage everyone to take transit.

It's a great system.

Doesn't mean we can't do better.

But as a regular transit rider myself, I have seen unsafe, personally witnessed unsafe and unlawful behavior while riding our region's transit system, including witnessing people freely and openly smoking fentanyl and brazen stripping of copper wire, which probably stolen.

This kind of behavior does not engender the type of public confidence and trust in the average member of the public that we need to better ensure that our transit system is not only safe, is safe by the data, but feels safe as well.

Transit operators themselves will have their own unique stories to share.

This behavior has gotten totally out of hand and is completely unacceptable.

Sadly, in the early hours of December 18th, our transit insecurity came to a head when King County Metro bus driver Sean Yim was tragically murdered in the course of simply doing his job in the U District here in Seattle.

Our community continues to mourn the loss of Mr. Yim, operator number 21882. This is for Sean.

In the aftermath of Sean's killing, I attended the press conference organized by his union, ATU Local 587. I also attended a candlelight vigil in Sean's honor, along with the memorial service where thousands, thousands of members of the public joined to mourn his tragic loss.

Colleagues, I saw many of you there at these various events.

As part of this, I was able to witness and observe firsthand the anguish, the pain, the trauma, and the sense of loss felt by Sean's fellow union members at Local 587, along with members of the public who ride our transit system, all of whom are counting on us.

all of us to come together and step up our collective efforts as a region to improve the transit security and safety situation for all.

Every driver, every passenger deserves to feel safe on our transit system and be safe as well.

I believe that a key part of the solution is to align on a regional approach to transit security.

One that allows us in the very near term to collectively reset on expectations for acceptable behavior and appropriate conduct on our transit system.

This includes an immediate surge in care and presence by trained personnel.

We need to reset expectations, restore order and decency.

Here in Seattle, I think our efforts to do things like successfully implement our own downtown activation plan, effectively support workers and employers as they navigate new return to office requirements and mandates, and ensure a successful, safe, and vibrant World Cup.

All three of those things and more hinge on our ability to boost transit security.

In my view, these things are inextricably linked and tied together.

That said, we have an opportunity now, in this moment, to come together and make a difference as a city and a region to level set the state of transit security in our region and really discuss how we can best work together to improve security for all.

Now make no mistake, this is a highly complex, multifaceted and cross-jurisdictional problem.

It's gonna take all of us coming together, working together to meaningfully address it.

And I just want to remind everyone, in my view, it is very counterproductive to point fingers and attempt to assign or ascribe blame to a single transit agency or a single local government.

The underlying challenges cross transit agencies and jurisdictional borders.

Now, as a council, we have taken crucial early steps and I want to especially thank Council Member Kettle, Public Safety Chair Kettle and Budget Chair Strauss for their partnership on many of these items in the levy.

In partnership with the mayor, we allocated over $9 million over the course of eight years to help increase transit safety, including investments in public safety personnel.

In our most recently adopted budget last fall, led by budget chair Strauss, we invested $1 million in 2024 and another $1 million in 2025 to support King County's ambassador program and the county's new innovative behavioral health team.

plus an additional $1 million specifically for more transit security personnel and police presence on key bus routes and at key hotspots throughout the city.

This also was part of the budget.

We led, we had a council led statement of legislative intent for SDOT to produce a report to put into place transit security improvements This slide also calls for enhanced information sharing on transit security and safety incidents, which will ultimately help shed light, shed the bright light of transparency with the end goal of helping to illuminate the full scope of the opportunity that we have before us.

So thank you again to our guests and to my colleagues for their deep engagement and partnership on this topic.

It is some of the most important work of our committee and of our council.

Our second agenda item today is SDOT's proposed levy delivery plan.

Another important topic.

First, I want to extend a special congratulations to interim director Emery.

I have really enjoyed working alongside you in the mayor's office.

And I look forward to our continued engagement and partnership as you step into this new role.

It's a great story.

As I understand it, you were a former intern at SDOT.

You rose to ultimately lead, I think, the Transit, or Transportation Operations Center before taking a role in the mayor's office.

And now, you're at the helm of one of the biggest, most critically important departments in our government.

It's also, it's a huge achievement for you and the city.

Let interns across the city realize that they can go on too to achieve great things.

So now we got some business to do.

Looking forward to hearing more about some of your plans relating to both these topics.

But on the second topic, when voters passed the levy in November, they approved of not only the largest, but the most accountable levy in our city's history.

Part of that accountability is ensuring that SDOT provides yearly spending plans, proposals to bring before the council.

This detailed spending plan is a departure from past practices, which in my view shows a dedication to detail, nitty gritty detail, operational excellence, and thoughtful collaboration and engagement.

I wanna thank SDOT for their engagement and responsiveness, not just on the delivery plan, but during the levy process.

You've been terrific partners.

This is a new era for the city in our district-based system.

As council members, we're more connected than ever to our own districts.

With that comes closer direct engagement with city departments, including critical ones like SDOT.

So thank you again, SDOT, for your commitment to working with our council now and on a going forward basis.

Let's do this work together.

All right, that's chair's remarks.

We will now move to the hybrid public comment period.

Public comments should relate to items on today's agenda and within the purview of this committee.

Clerk, how many speakers are signed up today?

Currently we have 10 in-person speakers and three remote.

Okay.

We have a very packed 10 in-person, three remote.

We have a very packed committee agenda today.

A number of things happening immediately after this committee.

Every speaker will have 90 seconds and we will go through one 20 minute session, which I think we should be able to get all those within that period.

And we won't extend that in the interest of time today.

But let us move on to the public comment.

Again, each speaker will have approximately 90 seconds, a minute and a half.

We'll start with end speakers first.

Clerk, can you please read the public comment instructions?

The public comment period will be monitored in the following manner.

The public comment period is up to 20 minutes.

Speakers will be called in the order in which they registered.

Speakers will alternate between sets of in-person and remote speakers until the public comment period is ended.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of their time.

Speakers' mics will be muted if they do not end their comments within the allotted time to allow us to call the next speaker.

The public comment period is now open.

It will begin with the first speaker on the list.

and that is Janice Stamm, followed by Ryan Davis and Janet Eastman.

Good morning.

My name is Janice Stamm and I'm legally blind.

I live at Ballard Landmark and I'm the co-chair of the Missing Link Task Force.

I don't want to see the next Seattle Times headline that says that an 83-year-old grandmother has been hit in front of her home.

I know that safety is a primary issue for you and the mayor and the 20-year Seattle plan.

So if safety is your main issue, then I urge you to look for an alternative to the bike trail on Leary Avenue.

This is a picture of...

are residents boarding the bus.

Under the original plan, they would be standing in the bike trail.

This is a picture of congestion as it is now.

There are two ambulances and a fire truck here.

It's caused traffic in this car to cross over and be driving in the lane toward ongoing traffic.

This kind of congestion just can't happen.

And this is before the bike trail is even put in.

So I urge you to find an alternative to the Laney Avenue Trail.

Thank you.

Thank you, ma'am.

Next up is Ryan Davis, followed by Janet Eastman and Megan Teutche.

Good morning, I'm Ryan Davis and I'm a resident at Ballard Landmark.

Recently I stepped out our front door.

Suddenly someone on a scooter appeared out of nowhere, sped by me and disappeared into the dark.

I stepped backward and avoided an accident.

but it was frightening.

It reminded me how important safety is, especially for seniors.

Our average resident is 83 and doesn't drive.

Many are frail or disabled and vulnerable to injury.

Our building has one front entrance and 150 some residents.

Leary is changing from four lanes of traffic to two.

Adding a multi-use bike trail would not make safety first on Leary, but it would add more congestion.

I don't see where increasing the amount of traffic and types of vehicles on Leary is either safe or wise.

We prefer the Shell Show option.

Thank you.

Thank you, ma'am.

Next up is Janet Eastman, followed by Megan Teutsch and Maxine Schiffman.

My name is Janet Eastman, and I live at Ballard Landmark.

As elected officials, you try to use taxpayers' money wisely.

I'm asking to consider completing the Burke-Gilman bike trail on Schilchel Avenue as originally planned.

Schilchel Avenue is wide.

There are fewer trees or sidewalks to be removed.

Leary Avenue has beautiful mature trees and sidewalks.

that would have to be removed and then replaced.

Recently, a bus lane was added, narrowing the space for cars and a bike trail.

I invite you to visit Ballard on a Sunday when the farmers' market is open.

Look at Chilshul Avenue and Leary Avenue.

Compare them.

which street would be better for the bike trail and cost the city of Seattle much less money?

Thank you, ma'am.

Next up is Megan, followed by Maxine Schiffman and Mary Jean Jones.

Hi, my name is Megan Teutsch, and I'm part of the co-ownership of Ballard Landmark, and we also have other businesses in Ballard.

Thanks for having me here today.

The missing link on Market and Leary threatens Ballard businesses, including Ballard Landmark and other small restaurants and retail shops, by disrupting our parking, accessibility, and operations, as well as damaging the park-like appeal of Ballard by destroying our vital canopy of mature trees.

This equates to 192 trees destroyed over 1.4 miles.

Businesses will suffer from disruptions due to construction and congestion and have higher insurance costs due to safety issues imposed by the bike lane and the liability of pedestrians being hit and cyclists being hit.

Businesses with high traffic like Carter Subaru and frequent deliveries like Ballard Consignment will have difficulty even operating because there'll be so many bikes crossing their egresses and exits.

Market Street and Leary are already extremely congested, deterring visitors to Ballard and aggravating Ballard residents.

The missing link in Route 40 reduced drive lanes from four to only two, significantly increasing congestion, which is also bad for the environment, as well as businesses and residents.

Parking is essential for businesses to .

But parking lanes will be reduced from two to only one lane.

The outdated 2017 environmental impact .

Thank you, Megan.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Megan.

And feel free, if you have written comments, feel free to submit those for the file and that we can gather them that way.

And then, folks, just a friendly reminder that chime that you hear signifies that there are approximately 10 seconds left in your testimony.

So when you hear the chime, you have 10 seconds.

Thank you so much.

Okay, next up, Maxine Schiffman, followed by Mary Jean Jones and Steve Guild.

Ma'am, if you want, can you pull the mic down and speak directly into it?

Thank you.

Hey Rob, the microphones are turned off.

to move Seattle levy to complete the missing link section of the Burke-Gilman Trail on Sol Sol.

That did not happen.

In July of 2024, the city council voted to move $20 million in the new transportation levy from street repairs to front of the missing link up Leary and Market.

Cyclists have used Sol Sol for 30 plus years because they know it is short, flat, safe route.

Placing the trail somewhere else will not eliminate them from Sol Sol.

It's time to resolve all outstanding roadblocks, build a missing link where it belongs, and make the best use of our tax dollars.

Thank you.

Thank you, ma'am.

Okay, next is Mary Jean Jones, Steve Guild, and Clara Cantor.

Good morning, City Council members.

Good morning.

My name is Mary Jean Jones and I live at the Ballard Landmark Retirement Community.

I grew up near Green Lake and Woodlawn Park.

I have known the beauty of Seattle for many years, enjoying the trees, lakes and parks.

I also enjoy the lighted trees down the streets during the winter months.

The proposed Burke-Gilman trail link along Market and Leary will take out approximately 192 mature trees, but the preferred route around Shilshul has only about 17 trees to be removed.

These mature trees absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide and release oxygen to help reduce the greenhouse gas levels.

Mature trees play a more substantial role in improving air quality, managing storm water runoff, and providing habitat for wildlife.

Please don't do the Burke-Gilman trail along Leary.

Thank you, ma'am.

Okay, next up, Steve Guild, Claire Cantor, and Tyler Vasquez.

Good morning.

I'm Stephen Guild, co-chair of the Missing Link Task Force at Ballard Landmark and a resident of Ballard Landmark.

I speak on the behalf of the 160 residents about the missing link of the Burke-Gilman Trail on Leary Avenue.

Missing it is, for sure.

Missing any consideration on the safety of both pedestrians and cyclists, missing any thought of the danger described by Ryan Davis when she was almost struck by a passing scooter, missing any discussion of cost, missing any consideration of the environmental impact when a mature canopy of trees is removed, I urgently request that you, elected officials, stop this unsafe, costly, and environmentally damaged project and focus time, effort, and funds on other alternatives.

Thank you, sir.

Okay, our last set of in-person speakers, Clara Cantor, Tyler Vasquez, and Gordon Paddleford.

Good morning.

My name is Clara Cantor and I'm a resident in District 2 and a community organizer with Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.

In 2015, our city committed to Vision Zero, which is the goal of having zero traffic deaths or serious injuries by 2030. We are now five years from that goal, and the number of people who are killed and injured on our streets is as high as ever.

We average about 25 to 35 people who are killed every year, and about between 150 and 250 people who have serious life-altering injuries every single year.

Those injuries and deaths overwhelmingly happen on high-speed arterials in Seattle, where the most crashes and fatalities they are outdated and designed for speed rather than safety.

I'm thrilled to see in this SDOT plan key safety upgrades planned for Seattle's most dangerous streets, including Aurora Avenue, Rainier Avenue South, and MLK.

Those projects, if they're done well and done to reduce speeding on those streets, will absolutely save lives.

And victims of traffic violence are overwhelmingly people who are walking and biking and accessing transit.

Those people are not just numbers.

Each of those deaths or injuries has rippling effects in our communities, with our persons, family, friends.

I live in the South End.

I cross both of those streets every single day with my kid on the back of my bike.

And so this matters for me personally, as well as professionally.

Please support SDOT.

Thanks, Claire.

Thank you, Claire.

Okay, Tyler Vasquez, followed by Gordon Paddleford.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Tyler Vasquez, and I'm here on behalf of Cascade Bicycle Club to urge the city to start building the SDOT's project list, especially the bicycle safety program.

We appreciate SDOT's transparency in the 2025 project list, but now it's time to shift from talking to planning and construction, and to make sure that the budget proviso does not hold this up.

Every delay means more people biking on unsafe streets.

One project that did not make the project list was the Steve Holtzman bike lane in West Seattle.

We would like to start the conversation and discover what this type of protected bicycle lane looks like.

Building on the bike lane, we also need to accelerate Vision Zero investments because people biking and walking are still being killed on Seattle streets.

Seattle's bicycle network depends on safe sidewalks to make multimodal trips possible.

We support SDOT's plan and your plan to double the rate of sidewalks construction by 2029. With this goal, we must need to start building now.

People who rely on walking and biking also rely on sidewalks.

A connected bicycle network makes Seattle a safer and healthier and more accessible city.

We urge council and SDOT to take action and get these projects built.

Thank you.

Thank you, Tyler.

Okay, last in-person speaker, Gordon Paddleford.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Gordon Padelford.

I'm the executive director of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, and I'm here to talk about sidewalks.

First of all, I just want to say thank you to this council for your historic investment in sidewalks.

It's truly going to set us up for success.

We're really excited about it, especially the front loading and the levee, because we're going to see a ton of sidewalk construction out there.

A word of caution, something you might wonder is, we're Seattle's walking and biking advocacy organization.

Why aren't we seeing a list of requested sidewalks from Seattle neighborhood greenways?

And it's really intentional.

We don't propose specific sidewalks, because we really believe that SDOT has a good equity, safety, mobility filters, they look at where schools are, they look at where parks are, they look at where transit is.

So while there's opportunity for public engagement, we really believe SDOT has good analysis about where these sidewalks need to go.

So that's why we're not coming to you with specific projects.

And I would encourage you all to be careful to let SDOT implement the sidewalk expansion without tying them up too much.

Lastly, I think there's a really big opportunity for the sidewalk funding task force.

We're really excited about that.

Thank you for that idea and putting that in the levy.

That's gonna get us to the next level of sidewalk construction.

So we're looking to work forward with you on setting that task force up and finding new sources of revenue to deal with the multi-billion dollar backlog because everyone deserves a sidewalk.

Thank you.

Thank you, Gordon.

Okay, we'll now pivot to remote speakers.

First up will be Joe Kunzler.

Joe, when I allow you to speak, remember to hit star six.

Thank you, Chair Saka and committee.

Good speech this morning.

I ride transit to get around and I really appreciate you also doing so and your care and concern for transit riders.

What happened to Sean Lim was inexcusable and a clear showing of how being soft on crime results in very deadly consequences.

And it's really important to restore some law and order throughout Seattle and whether or not it's driver speeding or reckless driving.

In fact, we have a lot more fatalities from driving than transit, but every life is precious.

We need to address that.

We need the city of Seattle to clean out the home, stop drug trade, stop fentanyl, and lock up bad guys where they deal Fetty or their Alex Zimmerman because his behavior creates a threatening environment at public meetings.

Most of you have heard that from me before.

and our transit community has been lucky in banning the Nazi.

I really want to encourage you today to focus on making sure it's safe, making sure the rules are enforced and such.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay.

David Haynes, remember to hit star six when you're allowed to talk.

Hi, thank you, David Haines.

I think it's free to say that we need a more concerted effort between the Metro Police and the Seattle Police Department to keep arguing that the other agency is responsible for in and around the bus stops.

We need a law that the city police and the Metro Police stop arguing about who's responsible for policing inside the bus stop.

And we need laws that say that cops and Metro have to trespass these junky thieves and like force them to be I mean, just put them in the jailhouse or the police station for a minute and have them be questioned to find out where they keep getting the drugs and then have some sort of court order that says, okay, you have to go to behavioral crisis or mental crisis or a combination thereof.

But we still haven't improved public safety from the perspective of the police actually being trained properly because I hate to say it, but Democrats have sabotaged the integrity of police reform.

And it's not only about the bus drivers being safe behind that plastic partition while they allow these who want to spit spray their diseases and mental problems all up and down the bus route or up down the bus aisle.

We need like a legitimate effort for safety, not to persecute the poor people.

And I would like to point out that $9 million from the transportation levy for public safety is like pennies.

And also just Ballard Avenue was the best bike route.

If you take Shilshul, it's a concrete dust ball from the concrete factory, and Leary.

Thank you, David, that was time.

Okay, last speaker, John, John Teuch.

John, currently you're not present.

I'll give you a few seconds.

Going once.

Going twice.

Okay.

That's the end of our remote.

All right.

Thank you.

I would just like, sorry, Chair, I want to let you know that Vice Chair Hollingsworth has joined us remotely.

All right.

Thank you, Vice Chair Hollingsworth.

We will now move on to our first item of business.

Will the clerk please read item number one into the record?

Agenda item one, regional transit security round table.

All right.

Thank you.

Big group today.

I think we should have enough chairs.

Welcome everyone.

Will our presenters please join us at the table and share your presentations.

I guess once ready, first off, please introduce yourselves and then make a few remarks and we'll go ahead and get started.

Michelle Allison, King County Metro.

Moises Gutierrez, Deputy CEO for Agency Oversight, Sound Transit.

Todd Moral, I'm the Chief of the Metro Transit Police.

Adiam Emery, Interim Director.

Calvin Chow, Council Central Staff.

Natalie Walton Anderson, Chief of Public Safety for Mayor Harrell.

Ken Price, ATU587, Vice President.

Jeff Stambaugh, ATU587, Vice President.

Greg Woodville, ATU587, President.

Neil Crozier, King County Metro.

John Sculls, Downtown Seattle Association.

Awesome.

Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome.

Really excited for you to join us today and share your thoughts.

A lot on this important topic, a lot has happened, as we know, over the last few months in particular, and there's been a lot of action and constructive momentum, in my view, and we need to continue that and capture that momentum and realize the benefits of it.

which is in part why we're here today.

So, run of show, colleagues, this is intended to be a discussion.

I've asked that the three governments that are represented here, King County, so we have CEO Allison from King County Metro, also the King County Metro Police Chief, but they are collectively representing King County government's perspective.

We also have Sound Transit, welcome, and then the City of Seattle as well perspective.

So three governments, I've asked the three governments to give very short, you know, five to eight minute presentations, overviews on the state of transit security, current efforts to improve the situation and implement some new reforms and investments.

And then we have a few folks, ATU and the DSA here, welcome, for additional perspective.

And so would like the three to go first, the three governments to go first, starting with King County Metro, then Sound Transit, and then the City of Seattle.

With respect to the City of Seattle, Cal is representing the council's central staff perspective.

Cal, when it's our turn, if you wouldn't mind just going first for the city, just kind of teeing up, I think you have the shortest portion anyway, but just kind of teeing up for Chief Public Safety Officer Walton Anderson, and then Deputy, or excuse me, All these titles.

Interim Director Emery from SDOT can kick it off from there.

But before we get there, I think the people at the table currently who are the most directly impacted by the successes and failures and opportunities and challenges of our transit system are the brothers and sisters and members of ATU Local 587. So we'd really love to give them an opportunity to provide a few opening remarks and just share your perspective and then we'll allow King County government to go ahead.

Colleagues, This is gonna be a thoughtful discussion, hopefully.

But in the interest of time, given the number of stakeholders, the volume of materials here to go over, I would ask that we hold our questions and comments until after the very last speaker has been given an opportunity to speak.

So in this case, it'll be John from DSA.

So that said, colleagues, any questions, comments?

No, and I wanna recognize Council Member Rivera.

Thank you for joining us today.

Not a member of the committee, but a champion and advocate of improving transit security for all.

So welcome.

We'll let ATU Local 587 give some opening remarks.

Go ahead.

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you to the Transportation Committee and Council Member Saka for hosting this round table and allowing us here to speak today.

I appreciate, Councilmember Saka, your call for a restoring order on transit, your recognition that we all need to work together on that, and the funding that the council has provided for transit safety.

Yesterday, as we all know, two more passengers were shot on the F line in Tukwila, including a 15-year-old who was shot three times.

leaving that 15 year old in critical conditions.

Our thoughts and prayers are with those victims and our operator and other transit employees and police who had to assist in this tragedy.

Public transit is at a tipping point and at a crossroads.

This city and county need public transit.

It's vital for our economy and our quality of life.

We've collectively invested billions to get our transit system to this point.

and we will spend billions more in the next decades expanding it.

All of that investment is placed in jeopardy if pastors don't feel safe using public transit or employees don't feel safe operating and maintaining it.

We have no other choice than to make whatever changes and investments are needed to restore order and accountability on and around public transit.

Every mayor, city council member, police chief, prosecutor, county, state, and federal politicians should commit to helping make transit safer for their constituents to use and operate.

We need to end the finger pointing and start working together.

Up until a few years ago, if you created a public safety issue on public transit, A transit employee could stop, call, and the police would show up and remove you and possibly take you to jail.

Same if you were creating a safety issue at a bus zone or a transit center.

Somehow we lost our way and started allowing people to do anything on and around transit without any consequences or accountability.

People learned that they could act out, use drugs, and threaten operators, transit workers, and passengers without consequences.

That pendulum toward total leniency is now starting to swing back the other way, thankfully.

But we need every city to take some responsibility for their citizens' right to safely use public transit.

If it's unsafe for a senior citizen to use the bus stop near their home, The problem shouldn't just fall on 70 metro transit police officers to solve.

If someone is being threatened on public transit or violence breaks out, there shouldn't be a 15 minute or longer wait for help.

King County and each city in it can and should do better.

We should all work jointly to restore order, safety, and accountability on public transit and in transit zones.

all police, jurisdictional agreements, disputes, and laws.

Whether it's in a bus zone or eight feet away from it, it shouldn't absolve anyone from dealing with a safety issue.

We should all work together on tougher laws and penalties for violence committed against both transit employees and transit passengers.

We should all work together to advocate and fight for more state and federal funding for transit safety and public safety in general.

These societal issues aren't easily solvable, but we can't afford to not make public transit safer.

The billions of transit dollars invested in our quality of life are literally at stake.

What we've done up until now isn't working and inaction isn't an option.

ATU Local 587 and its thousands of union members often feel like we are the only ones advocating for the safety of citizens who need and use public transit.

We are here today to ask the City of Seattle to work together with the county to help provide a safer transit experience for your citizens and your constituents.

Our union will ask the same of every city in King County next month at a countywide task force on transit safety that our union demanded and has helped organize.

Thank you again for organizing this roundtable and allowing our union to have a voice in this important conversation.

Ken.

Good morning, everybody, and thank you, Transit Committee, for having and hosting this roundtable and bringing this group of leaders together to begin that discussion, to be able to reach out to others.

President Woodfield is correct.

It's the communities.

It's our elderly folk that ride our buses.

They need to know that we're going to be there for them.

They have paid the most into this system.

We need our children to be able to ride the buses.

I rode the buses in 1971, right, to school.

It was scary then.

It is a lot scarier now.

These safety issues are causing us not to have service.

It's causing us not to have ridership.

It used to be we would go by senior centers and pick them up.

They knew it was right there.

The bus was there.

Now, it is not.

the safest to go down the street and into the zone.

But I believe and I thank everyone for this opportunity to address this, to really reach out to all the communities, this downtown Seattle, the city of Kent.

Everyone has to protect their taxpayers that live in their city.

Give them the right to get on the bus and use this great Great transit system we got.

We have the World Cup coming here.

This is just the practice that we have to hit that goal to our transit ambassadors.

I want to thank the City of Seattle.

King County Metro is that forward-looking vision.

So thank you and look forward to more conversations.

Jeff.

Thanks for having us here today.

Greg Woodfill and Ken Price already touched on almost all of it.

I'd just like to reiterate the fact this is not just a transit operator or a transit rider problem.

This is a societal problem that everyone needs to work on together.

This affects our transit operators, our transit riders, our vehicle maintenance employees, and our facility maintenance employees.

Our facility maintenance employees are out trying to clean the zones, trying to make the transit safer and more accessible, and they're confronted with folks with guns and knives telling them that this is their homes and this is their places and they don't belong here.

This needs to be addressed as a regional issue, as a societal issue, not as a transit problem.

Thank you.

Thank you, ATU.

I really appreciate your perspective here.

And I note that Vice President Kim Price I think is an immediate past president of ATU before President Woodfill took over.

So thank you, ATU.

King County, would love to hear your thoughts and perspective.

Feel free to go ahead and start sharing your presentation and go ahead.

Thank you so much.

Again, I am Michelle Allison, the general manager of King County Metro, and my colleagues Neil and Major Morell are going to join me in this presentation.

So thank you for inviting us, and thank you for the opportunity to discuss what we're doing to help invest in a safe, clean, and reliable system, which is certainly an investment that the city has been part of as well.

Next slide.

As you noted, council member, we did tragically lose operator Yim in the end of December.

And that act of violence was incredibly disruptive for our organization and for the city and for the region that we serve.

And so we want to take a minute and just recognize operator Yim and appreciate his service.

And also we'll continue to remember him in the years to come.

And we'll use this moment to certainly make change.

Today I'm going to talk a little bit about what Metro is doing when it comes to our model of care and presence.

Metro has historically had a traditional public safety model that primarily relied on Metro Transit Police, our transit security officers, and our service quality first-line supervisors.

And although those three components remain incredibly important for us, we also recognize that we need to enhance the way we are doing business to provide more ways to have presence and care.

So although we are going to always have transit security, our Metro Transit Police as an important part of this discussion, in 2020, we launched Safety, Security, and Fair Enforcement Initiative.

This reform initiative centered BIPOC voices and those that intersect with other marginalized and underserved communities.

The goal was to expand the presence and the security functions on Metro.

So you'll see here we added some important components, behavioral health support teams, our safe ambassadors.

And we're going to talk about how these functions come together on our system to support our employees and our riders.

Following the safe reform initiative, Metro expanded beyond our traditional public safety model, which we now call our care and presence model.

In addition, Metro stood up these two programs that I noted, which are new for us.

And so we have lots of learnings and adjustments that we're going to make along the way.

But they are an incredibly important component of how we show up to provide support for folks.

We also know that as Metro Transit Police continues with the workforce shortage, we need all the tools available to us to match the moment.

And sometimes the moment is providing a pair of socks.

or a granola bar, or inviting someone to go seek shelter somewhere else.

So what we want to really do is expand the tools available for us.

Next slide.

So a little bit of context on where we are today, as we noted.

Metro is certainly not immune to safety incidents, and they do happen on our system.

However, they are trending in the right direction.

When incidents on our system do occur, our employees call our Transit Control Center, which we call TCC.

And this creates a coordinator service record.

These CSRs might not reflect every single incident that occurs on the system, but they are able to reflect most incidents and help us show trend lines and where we need to invest our resources.

So on this graph, you can see that the CSRs are per million boardings.

They're measured per million to bench incident trends based on ridership levels.

Metro uses this data to really locate the times of day, the regions around our jurisdiction to deploy our resources, both security and law enforcement accordingly.

With this approach, we have reduced the number of incidents from 243 per 1 million boarding during the peak of the pandemic, when the ratio of boardings to riders was very different, to 71 in December of 2024. While this trend line is stabilizing to our pre-pandemic levels due to the efforts that are underway, our goal is zero incidents and will remain our goal.

We are going to continue to review the trends and adjust our deployment to right-size our resource, and we will continue to work with our partners, including you and the City of Seattle on this effort.

Next slide.

So as you rightly noted, council member, one of the aspects of our system is we need to elevate and request better behavior and force the behavior that is not in accordance with our transit code of conduct and be clear to our riders about what we will tolerate and what we will not on our system.

And one of the ways that we are doing this is resetting our rider expectations.

We've been working on strengthening the shared understanding about what is and is not acceptable on transit.

While our standards have remained the same, we've partnered with communities to understand how to better communicate our code of conduct.

Before, it was very wordy, it was hard to understand, and it wasn't necessarily presented prominently on our system.

So the changes we made simplify our message and ensure that our code of conduct and our priorities are clear.

Pay the right fare, be respectful, don't harass the driver or other riders, and don't smoke anything of any kind.

Do not do drugs and do not drink alcohol.

We will all be seeing this revamped Ride Right campaign over the next several months, and we will also be relaunching our fair enforcement.

We're going to start our fair enforcement with some education, which you may have already seen on the system.

And at the end of March, we will move to inspections.

And then at the end of May, we will move to full enforcement.

Next slide.

Importantly, what is Metro doing for our operators?

We expect that the Ride Right campaign will help improve our conversation and expectation with our riders, but we know that's only one part of our solution.

We've heard from our bus operators and our labor partners here today about what they need to improve their safety, and we're working closely with them to accomplish those needs.

we've heard that there's a need for additional transit security in law enforcement.

We've invested in our transit security officers, increasing the number from 70 in 2022 to 170 in 2025. And we're increasing the number of Metro Transit police deputies from 79 to 89 in 2025. We're finalizing negotiations with SDOT to expand the $1 million levy enhancement for transit security officers, as was noted.

And once that agreement is finalized, we can deploy additional resources, especially at the times of day when we need it the most, which is often at night when there's the least amount of resources available from a community and workforce perspective.

We've also heard that operators want more secure barriers.

We're expediting in partnership with our 587 colleagues, obtaining new safe partitions that will be larger and stronger with better materials to help ensure our driver's safety.

We've also heard that operators want additional training to better equip with that difficult environment that they are working in.

So we've revamped our existing training program.

Adding two more modules to help ensure that our operators and our frontline workforce have the tools needed for the service that they're delivering.

We're optimistic about the impact of these efforts, and we look forward to continuing the work with our operators and our labor partners.

And we know there's still a lot of work underway.

So we're also going to keep coming back to this question.

Are our investments making a difference?

What do we need to do more of?

How can we pivot to make a stronger, more sustainable movement for our safe, clean, and reliable system?

So to that end, I'm going to invite Major Morrell to describe a little bit about the uniform presence and how that works on our transit system.

Great.

Thanks, Michelle.

Again, Todd Murrell, chief of the Metro Transit Police.

I have been the chief of the Metro Transit Police since 2023, coming up on two years now.

And it just occurred to me on my way to this meeting that I am the first chief to have operational experience.

So I served as a bike sergeant for a number of years with the Metro Transit Police.

I think it gives me a unique perspective because I've seen both sides.

So let's talk about Operation Safe Transit.

But before we can talk about it, we need to go back in the time machine.

We need to go back to 2020. Why do we need Operation Safe Transit?

Why isn't it just Monday?

So we look back and we had a lot of things going on.

We had the pandemic, we had social movements, a lot of things going on.

What that did for your deputies at the Metro Transit Police is it essentially eliminated booking as an option for all misdemeanors and in that is encompassed the unlawful transit conduct.

Basically everything outside of the most egregious felonies were not eligible for booking.

Councilmember Sokka brought up a couple of his personal experiences while riding transit, and I thank you for sharing those.

Prior to Operation Safe Transit, as a law enforcement officer, I would have had no option to book that person, whether it was drug use or stripping copper wire presumed to be stolen.

I would have had no option.

So obviously, as the chief, that's creating a lot of frustration.

It's creating frustration for our colleagues, frustration for our ridership, frustration for my deputies, because at the end of the day, we are public servants and we are hired to solve problems through a myriad of ways.

Operation Safe Transit started, and we learned through past practice that just from the law enforcement lens, if we come up and say, from a law enforcement lens, this is what needs to be done, that doesn't necessarily resonate.

It's pretty myopic.

So it was very important to us that this was an agency-led initiative, meaning that Sound Transit and Metro needed to be the ones to champion this as opposed to their respective law enforcement officers.

So...

With the genesis of Operation Safe Transit, it brought together King County Metro, Sound Transit, obviously the Metro Transit Police who falls under the purview of the sheriff, the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention, and the King County Prosecutor's Office, and it brought us all on the same page.

And to break it down was, we understand.

We understand the philosophy of the county.

We understand Metro's driving philosophy.

When everything has failed, when the attempts to modify behavior, to connect people with community-based service providers, to offer resources.

When all of that has failed, there has to be a criminal justice backstop.

At the end of the day, we are trying to create a culture of acceptable behavior.

And when we don't have that criminal justice backstop, what was manifesting 21 through 23 is we walked away.

We had no other option.

We have exhausted all our resources.

I have no ability to take you anywhere.

So with that, we all got in agreement with the agencies listed above there.

And on May 1st, we launched it.

This was intended to be a beta test.

From May 1 to September 1, we would take a look at it and see if this was a program worth adopting.

It took exactly 30 days before Executive Constantine adopted it in full.

An important note is that Operation Safe Transit was initially designed just for Third Avenue, for the downtown corridor.

With that full adoption in June of 24, it expanded system-wide.

So the intent of Operation Safe Transit is to reinstate a criminal justice backstop.

I am not here to advocate that everyone needs to go to jail for everything all the time.

What I do advocate for is when we are unable to change that behavior and every other option has failed, your deputies need that option.

They need the tool to remove that behavior from our system.

We will always seek to the lowest level of police intervention to resolve a situation.

We are the subject matter experts at moving populations.

We are well versed in education.

We work hand in hand with community service providers.

We are well versed in those disciplines.

When all else has failed, we need to go back to that conventional criminal justice metric.

Again, we are trying to establish a culture of acceptable behavior on our system.

What Operation Safe Transit is not is arresting our way out of a problem.

We are not looking to take everyone to jail for everything all of the time.

This is about for addressing the most egregious behavior when we have no confidence that that behavior will cease or modify.

We are not criminalizing homelessness.

We are not criminalizing poverty, mental health disorders, substance abuse.

People who are seeking help and want to be connected with help through community-based service providers, 100%, we are there to make that connection.

What are the results of this?

Since implemented, we have just crossed the threshold today, 475 arrests for crimes on our system.

475 arrests sounds like a lot.

When you balance against the quarter million people we move per day, it averages out to about 1.4%.

A 225% increase in proactive activity from your deputies once Operation Safe Transit was adopted.

What is proactive activity?

That is your deputies being empowered to do their job and knowing that they have a myriad of options, but when everything has failed, they can still use that criminal justice backstop.

A 400% increase in our transit resource officer unit.

Those are our subject matter experts for diversion for alternative resolutions and connections with our community-based service providers.

Chief Moreau, this is excellent information.

I appreciate this.

I'm going to ask to move this along a little bit.

I know we have one more slide from the Metro side, and we have a lot of speakers, limited time.

but your perspective is welcome and valued while you're here, but please move this along on the King County side.

Ms. Sure.

So to close, we also recognize the importance of continued the conversation throughout the region.

As President Woodfill noted, this is a regional discussion with partnerships that extend beyond Metro and beyond ATU.

And so we are also enthusiastic supporters of the task force that we'll be meeting later next month and also an open invitation to any and all of our partners to continue to explore ways that we can collaborate together to move the needle and help serve the people of our region.

Thank you.

Mr. Awesome.

Thank you.

Let's see, Sound Transit.

Go ahead.

Please reintroduce yourself and share your presentation.

Thank you.

Good morning again, council members.

My name is Moises Gutierrez, and I serve as Deputy CEO and Agency Oversight Officer at Sound Transit.

I do want to thank you for the invitation to be part of this important conversation today.

I would begin by noting that though we are encouraged by our ongoing efforts to improve safety on board our trains and buses, we know there's still a lot more work to do, as Shawn Yim's killing so painfully reminds us, as well as the incidents from yesterday.

So while I'm here primarily to share our progress, I'm also very cognizant of this discussion occurring in the wake of ongoing challenges.

And I want to state as clearly as possible that the safety of our passengers, operators, and broader community is our number one priority at Sound Transit.

And we are approaching these issues on two parallel tracks that balance fast and effective incident response on the one hand and prevention and education on the other.

In terms of incident response, we are seeing strong results from the significant increase of security officers we have invested in over the last couple of years.

as well as from our direct text message line where passengers can discreetly message us about acute or ongoing concerns while on board.

Call is 206-398-5268.

Again, 206-398-5268.

And we have set an ambitious goal that if a passenger messages us leaving one train station, a security guard will be able to board and address the issue by the time the train reaches the following station.

We are working to build in this success in the coming year by rolling out an expanded educational campaign for passengers to utilize the tool.

And we have also seen a general improvement in security incidents, though some of this could be attributed to ridership growth itself, improving security outcomes, as having more eyes on board has its own well-known deterrent effect.

Lastly, we have been focusing on what we describe as station activation, which includes increased lighting and cleanliness, de-escalation training, as well as comprehensive coordination with our partners.

I do also want to credit some of this improvement to our successful and growing Fair Ambassador Program, which balances fair compliance with passenger education and focuses first and foremost on customer service and de-escalation.

We're also piloting moving many of these fair ambassadors from onboard the trains to the station platforms and the entrance points to the stations, coordinating with our security officers and our partners at King County Sheriff's Office so that we can address potential issues before they enter the system.

And I would also note that we are investing strongly in data-informed resource deployment so that we can better target our resources and mitigation to specific issues and concerns at specific facilities or routes.

Finally, before going to the next slide, as we continue to expand the system, so too will the number of law enforcement agencies with whom we will need to coordinate.

Our partnerships with local law enforcement will continue to be critically important for addressing and improving the security environment of our transit systems.

Can we go to the next slide, please?

So building further on the importance of partnerships, and I'll try to be brief, as a regional agency, we do work across many jurisdictional boundaries.

Safety and border system will reflect what's happening in the communities we serve, as was noted.

We're all in this together, as we are here at the table, and collaboration will continue to be critical to our success.

I will just highlight a couple of examples.

As you all know, as many know, Sound Transit contracts with King County's Sheriff's Office for law enforcement within our facilities.

Our staff also coordinate with the Mayor's Office and King County to remove graffiti.

You can see an example in the presentation.

The pictures to the left and the right are of the station area near the Pioneer Square Station.

And relative to station activation, in the last couple of years, Sound Transit has updated its policy on buskers to include the downtown Seattle transit tunnel after we assumed ownership from King County.

After a very successful pilot launched with Seattle Parks in 2023, the Sound Transit Board added funding last year to expand the partnership to have buskers this year at various downtown stations.

And additionally, I'm happy to report that the city of Seattle provided an additional $500,000 in last year's budget for additional station activation partnership.

The fourth item is Sound Transit is partnering with the city of Seattle and King County Metro to activate Third Avenue as part of the mayor's downtown activation plan.

And we're also partnering with the King County's Behavioral Health Department, which is a pilot that started a couple of years ago focused on passengers experiencing mental distress.

Based on 2024 data, we are seeing progress is being made as the program had over 8,000 contacts.

And we were able to connect many of these individuals with service providers.

I will finish by stating that partnership and collaboration are central to our collective success.

We understand safety is a community endeavor, and Sound Transit is committed to being a positive, thoughtful, and collaborative member of this regional community in which we live, work, and serve.

And I'll close by restating what I said at the start, that the safety of our passengers, operators, and broader community is our number one priority.

Next slide, please.

Again, thank you for the opportunity to be part of this conversation, and that concludes this portion of the presentation.

Excellent.

Thank you, Sound Transit partners.

Next up is the City of Seattle, and I should also note Vice Chair Hollingsworth has joined us in person.

Welcome, Vice Chair Hollingsworth.

City of Seattle, let's start off with central staff Cal and colleagues.

There was an updated version of this colleagues and members of the public.

There was an updated version of this presentation that was emailed to you all colleagues this morning.

And it is more up to date.

a little more comprehensive than what was originally posted on the agenda a few days ago.

So please pay attention to this version.

And again, you all colleagues should have copies of this that were circulated to you earlier via email.

Thank you.

Cal, go ahead.

City of Seattle.

Council members, Calvin Chavez, Council Central Staff.

Chair, at your request, did highlight a few of the recent Seattle legislative actions that are related to transit safety and security.

The first is in part of the transportation levy that voters approved last year.

You included $9 million over eight years of the levy to support transit and public safety personnel services for transit riders' safety and security.

As part of the 2025 budget, you included $1 million to support King County Transit Center Ambassador Program and King County's Behavioral Health Team deployed on transit, as well as $1 million for transit security and for transit police.

And you added a statement of legislative intent requesting that SDOT provide a report on implementing transit security improvements and services, and that request is due on June 2025. So with that sort of context of what you've done, I'll turn it over to SDOT and the executive to talk about implementation.

Thank you.

Ariam Emery, SDOT interim director.

Good morning, council members.

Chair Saka, thank you for convening us to speak about our roles and responsibility and investment.

We regularly work closely with our partners at Metro and Sound Transit to provide a safe and reliable experience on transit.

SDOT leads with safety in all our work.

We invest in transit passenger safety in a variety of ways in alignment with our vision that Seattle is an equitable, vibrant, diverse city where moving around is safe, fair, and sustainable.

Next slide, please.

As a baseline, there are two primary ways as that supports transit passenger safety.

Our primary area of service is making physical improvements in the right of way.

We build sidewalks, safe crossing near transit stops, and improved bus stops so people walking or rolling can safely connect to transit.

We also contribute to passenger safety through our purchase of Metro Transit service through the Seattle Transit Measure, or SDM.

SDM funds transit service, transportation access programs for low-income residents, transit capital improvements, and emerging needs.

A portion of the amount SDOT pays for transit service goes towards Metro's transit security costs.

SDOT also funds Seattle's streetcar operation, including streetcar safety and security efforts.

In addition to this expansive baseline investment levels, SDOT is increasingly investment levels through the recent passing transportation levy, which includes another $9 million for transit passenger safety with $1 million set aside to improve transit security at hotspots.

Additional investment is also coming from STM to expand Metro's Transit Ambassador Program in Seattle.

This investment's begun in 2024 and will continue with a $1 million investment this year.

Next slide, please.

STM purchases additional transit service from King County Metro.

Adding more transit service means also paying for safety and security costs associated with those investments, including the proportional contributions to Metro Transit Safety and Security Program costs as Metro has grown at their programs.

Through SCM, SDAT also invests in transit ambassadors who provide care and presence on Metro coaches and near bus stops.

In 2024, SDAT invested over 200,000 to serve locations in Central District, Rainier Avenue, and Seattle Center, Belltown.

For 2025, SDAT is currently working with Metro to add two to three new transit ambassador locations by quarter two of this year, in addition to the three areas implemented in 2024. Next slide, please.

As noted previously, the 2024 transportation levy dedicated nine million to transit passenger safety.

The 2025 budget sets aside a million in levy funds dedicated to transit security investments.

We're prioritizing executing an agreement with Metro to implement this million investment transportation levy funding and are working very closely to determine potential investments.

Investments being considered would expand transit security officers' presence in places like Third Avenue, Jackson Street corridors.

This can be implemented six weeks after a contract has been signed, which we're in the process of finalizing.

Next slide, please.

The city of Seattle owns the Seattle streetcar, which consists of two lines, First Hill and South Lake Union.

Metro operates and maintain the Seattle streetcar per contract with SDOT.

Since 2021, SDOT has worked with Metro to fund and deploy privately contracted transit security officers on streetcar services for a total of eight hours a day, seven days a week across both lines.

The transit security officers and streetcar supervisors enhanced the rider experience and safety by supporting compliance with the streetcars of conduct, which is the same as metros.

Over the last three years, ASDOT electricians have also been installing enhanced lighting to streetcar shelters system-wide to support passenger safety and comfort.

We anticipate to finalize the eight streetcar shelters with the same enhancement this year.

Next slide, please.

The primary way is to invest in transit passenger safety is by making capital investments that create safer passenger crossing, waiting areas, and streets near transit stops, making it safer and easier to access transit.

While this type of capital investments are implemented through a variety of SDAT programs, from Vision Zero to the pedestrian program, one program that is specifically aimed to make this investment is the transportation levy funded transit spot improvement program.

The liby includes about $27 million for this program, which also makes roadway changes to make transit trips safer and more reliable.

Transit spot improvements projects include pedestrian lighting, bus zone expansion, bus benches, crossing improvements.

which makes passengers and stops more viable and promote a feeling of safety for riders.

Next slide is, I'm going to introduce our chief public safety officer, Natalie Walton Anderson, to speak about the effort that's underway from the mayor's office.

Thank you, Director Emory.

Good morning again, Natalie Walton Anderson, chief of public safety.

Thank you, council members and chair soccer for the opportunity to present to you today.

Again, Mayor Harrell's priority is public safety, safe streets and safe city for all.

This includes our transit system that runs through the core of our city.

And we want to ensure that our partnership and collaboration with King County Metro Sound Transit to address the safety concerns for our not only transit employees and operators, but all of our riders, that they have access, safe access to the city to work, visit and enjoy our arts and culture.

Under Mary Harrell, the public safety team has been working on several different initiatives to support a vibrant downtown, to revitalize our neighborhoods with an enforcement strategy, a holistic coordinated approach, and also a place-based approach.

The public safety team is wholly invested in coordinating all of our public safety responses to support the investments that SDOT has made to increase presence on transit.

with additional funding, as Director Emery just spoke about in terms of hiring transit ambassadors and Metro transit security.

There are several different city safety initiatives the mayor's office has put forward, and I want to talk a little bit about them in the time that we have left.

I think, first of all, it's going to take a lot of different responses and resources to address this multidimensional issue that we are facing in not only our city, but our county and our region.

We've expanded the hiring of our care crisis responder team.

That expansion really gets to the heart of some of the issues that I know a lot of our operators and drivers see.

Individuals with significant mental health concerns and the care expansion really does help to address some of those issues before they even reach transit.

In addition to that, we are continuing to work on our SPD hiring with our numbers.

Currently, we are hopeful that we will continue to see more net increases.

In addition to that, we are also hyper-focused on retention of our officers that are currently there.

Some other city safety initiatives to support, again, the investments that SDOT has made in terms of transit security is our downtown activation team pilots.

This is a pilot with not without an end date, but I want to talk a little bit about what the downtown activation team is doing in terms of our safety responses.

First of all, it is a culmination of at least 15 different departments.

Mayor Harrell has said that every city department is responsible for public safety.

It is all of our jobs in order to ensure that.

So we're starting with, first of all, a coordinated approach between our departments, and that includes an enforcement strategy.

Chief Morrell mentioned earlier Operation Safe Transit.

Seattle Police Department was a partner in Operation Safe Transit, and in addition to that, Seattle Police Department does operations all throughout the city and especially in our transit corridors to address drug trafficking and other issues related to crime.

Our Downtown Activation Team, SPD, is one of our lead agencies along with SDOT and other departments that help us, first of all, address some of the visual disorder that causes and it truly causes the perception that we are not addressing crime and disorder in our city.

That team has gone started out in the Third Pike Pine area with a pilot there to address that.

As we all know, Third Avenue is one of our main transit corridors in and within the city.

We activated in the Little Saigon neighborhood of the CID November 1st, which is an incredibly challenging and significant safety and security area, not only for our operators, drivers and passengers, but for many of the residents that are there.

We've activated the same approach in terms of addressing the visual disorder, but we know that that's not enough.

Similar to what Ms. Allison was saying earlier, we need a coordinated response and a holistic response.

The mayor's office public safety team has been working with our city contracted community service providers, such as LEAD, We Deliver Care, REACH, for a coordinated response to deliver more outreach in and around Third Avenue, the Little Saigon area, and to really understand who is in that area and what are the needs that are there.

We have now dedicated public safety treatment beds at Valley Cities, and one of our other lead agencies, Seattle Fire Department, has been key in helping us to address some of the ways in which we can get individuals into service.

We've seen dramatic reductions in the short time that we've been activated in terms of the calls, Priority One calls for service, and we hope that will improve.

but we know we have to keep looking at what the issue is because it's not solved and continue to look at what more we can do.

We know that one of the key things is to activate our healthy and vibrant neighborhoods, meaning that we have to have hold of that space, reset the norms, in order to bring in more resources such as arts, culture, to be able to maintain that.

Our goal is a public safety response, a vibrant neighborhood, economic recovery, which is also key, and community well-being.

That includes everyone.

I want to make sure that it's clear that the mayor and the mayor's public safety team are making efforts every day and are cognizant of the public safety challenges that face our city, our county and our state.

It is a priority for the mayor and all of our partners sitting here for safe streets and safe ridership for all.

Thank you for the partnership and collaboration at this table.

I want to just say one thing.

I want to thank the ATU Local 587. I've taken transit, as has my family and my three boys, for years.

I see your drivers and your operators every day exhibiting tremendous acts of kindness and service and care for our ridership.

They form relations and connections.

And that extends to our aging population and our youth.

So it is an invaluable and impactful public service.

And the mayor's office, on behalf of Mayor Harrell, commits to partnering with you, our city departments, our county, and our region.

And I want to thank you for your advocacy of your workers.

Thank you.

Yeah, to be honest, Last but not least, Mr. Scholes from the Downtown Seattle Association, but to be honest, but for the advocacy of ATU, we've had these various focus and sustained efforts to improve transit security and safety for all, including at the city level.

We talked about what those are.

There's efforts ongoing to implement those, but for the leadership and advocacy of ATU, I don't think we would be collectively organized and even be in this position where everyone's at the table today.

So I appreciate the partnership and advocacy of ATU.

It's going to take all of us, and we need to all come together, which is why we're here.

So thank you.

All right, DSA, go ahead, last but not least.

Thank you, Chair Saka, and I will be brief.

Again, John Scholes with the Downtown Seattle Association.

Appreciate you and this committee holding this important hearing, and appreciate the great leadership at this table, who's clearly making progress to ensure we've got a safer, more welcoming transit system across our city, across our region than we've had in recent years.

Great cities rely on great transit systems, certainly downtowns do.

And transit systems, great ones, are ones where the operators and the riders feel safe to board and operate those vehicles.

We represent about 200, 2000, excuse me, property owners and companies and organizations in our greater downtown that understand the importance of our transit system.

And we wanna offer our condolences to Sean Yim, his family, his friends, and to his colleagues who was just doing his job.

and we rely on him doing his job.

We employ about 200 folks that are showing up here 362 days a year to provide services in public areas, including around our transit stations.

90 plus percent of them are getting to work every day on the bus or the train.

My kids are daily riders.

I was just tracking my son.

He's on his way to Jefferson to go hit balls.

I should say the Bill Wright Golf Complex to go hit balls.

So my kids are riders, I'm a rider.

And great cities rely on great transit and downtowns don't work if we don't have great transit.

So thank you for what you all are doing and thanks to this council.

The actions you all have taken over the last year in partnership with this mayor and the city attorney to improve public safety in this city has accrued benefit to the transit experience, and we got off course there many years ago.

And I think we found ourselves unable as a community to distinguish between those that were hurting and need help from those that are out hurting other people and need to be held accountable.

And we, in many cases, chose not to intervene in either case.

And we saw the results of that.

More people suffering, more people getting hurt, and more incidents on our transit system.

And we are on a much better path now.

And I want to thank you for your leadership and thanks to the folks at this table for their continued leadership and partnership on this important issue.

Awesome.

Thank you, Mr. Sculls.

I'm going to open it up for a council member questions and comments right now in giving a vice chair Hollingsworth the right of first refusal to, to ask any questions or comments.

But before, before I do that, just want to know two quick points.

One president Woodfill aptly noted in his opening remarks that there was another unfortunate tragic incident on our transit system yesterday, shooting in one of our South County cities on board a bus.

And you can't make this stuff up.

On the eve of this important regional round table, two people were shot, including it sounds like a 15 year old kid.

totally unacceptable, totally out of hand, and that's why it's incumbent on all of us to come together and do this work together.

Governments play a central, and another point I wanna make is, governments play a central role in the solution.

King County, the city, Sound Transit, other jurisdictions outside of the city, we play a leading role, but we don't play the only role either.

We also need communities and individuals to step up.

You see something, say something.

It is never acceptable to bring a gun and feel like you can openly shoot at someone on a bus.

It is never acceptable to strip stolen copper wire on a bus.

We're gonna reset, let it be known, let it be known.

The city of Seattle and the regional partners here today aren't tolerating that anymore.

The city of Seattle is not a safe space to come do your dirt, whether it's on our transit system, buses and trains, or on our streets.

Used to be shame in the game.

Not anymore, but we're tired of it and we're fed up.

We're gonna do better.

As ATU noted, pre-COVID, and I think there's some valid reasons why we're in this situation.

Now we need a course correct, but pre-COVID, appropriate interventions were in place that, yes, included law enforcement interventions.

Not the only thing, not the only thing, but it is important component of the solution.

We need a full spectrum of response and to meet the need, whatever the need is, whether it's a pair of socks, as CEO Allison noted, yes, we'll give people pairs of socks, whatever it is.

And as a last resort, if needed, pair of shiny handcuffs and escort to jail facility, if that is the best solution.

But it's not a safe space anymore to come do your dirt.

In any event, communities, individuals also need to step up.

Vice Chair Hollingsworth.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll be super, super brief.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for putting this together.

It's really great to hear about the city, the county, our downtown association, our sound transit, our Writers Association coming together, and our executive, excuse me, coming together to make sure that people are safe riding transit.

I ride the G line most of the times during the week and those bus drivers are phenomenal.

They're saying hi to us.

They're constantly talking to us.

There's a video constantly being recorded on the bus.

It makes you feel safe and folks and also the buses smell incredibly clean because they're brand new.

So I just wanted to shout that out.

But I wanted to just highlight Chief Morrell, his point when you were talking about, hey, you know, we can connect people to services, but we also need the ability to hold people accountable, arrest people, put people, book people, and then hopefully our judges, you know, do their job.

And it goes back to what John, you said about there are people that need help that are hurting, but versus there are people that are actually hurting others as well and drawing that line and that difference.

And I think that's incredibly important as we are transitioning, you know, out of this pandemic and we're kind of resetting what our society looks like and holding people accountable is huge.

My mom, I never wanted to get a spanking and I knew that that was at the end.

If I did something bad, I was gonna get a nice little whooping.

And so just having that accountability piece, I think is credibly important.

And I think we just need to do a reset on our society.

So thank you, Mr. Chair for putting this together.

I really appreciate all the work that you all are doing for our city.

So thank you.

Thank you, Vice Chair Hollingsworth.

Yeah, we don't want smoke from mama or my father, ooh, was afraid of those.

But it's consequence, whatever the consequence is, we don't want that.

I think that's what you're talking about.

All right, Council Member Kittle.

Thank you, Chair Saka, and thank you, everyone, for coming out as a member of the Transportation Committee, but also as chair of the Public Safety Committee.

I want to thank King County for being here, Sound Transit, and the executive from the City of Seattle, plus Mr. Chow from our legislative branch.

But I also really want to stand a thanks to Mr. Scholes for joining us from his perspective, but especially on this side in terms of you know, the ATU Local 587. I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Woodfill before.

This is our time to step up, and I appreciate the work, the dedication of all those that work for ATU Local 587. Three quick points.

One, transit safety is part of public safety, and the transit safety posture relies on the broader public safety posture.

and we all have responsibilities here to include us here on this dais.

It is an all-hands-on-deck evolution, and we do need to have that.

One other thing that I want to state quite clearly is that on the question of articulable harm, Mr. Chow knows what this term is from our Public Drug Use and Possession Bill from 2023, and in that bill it talks about threat of harm to others.

In my mind, others can be defined as our public transit systems and for our public transit experiences harm on a regular basis, on a daily basis, and most tragically with the loss of the death of Mr. Shawn Yim.

So it is clear that threat of harm exists, which transits to the no pun intended with that term, to the points that Chief Morrell from King County Metro Police Chief noted, is what we need to lead, as I often say in Public Safety Committee, lead with compassion for those that are in need, for those that are in crisis.

But we have to have the wisdom, as I often say, to look out for our communities and for our neighborhoods.

And that includes our public transit communities.

And so the point you made about booking restrictions is 110% true.

And as Chair noted, yes, there may be some reasons initially, but it took way too long for the change.

And bookings are still impacted for different reasons.

I won't go into here, but maybe in a public safety committee meeting, and Chief, you're welcome to join, and Sheriff Coltendell as well.

So maybe looking at it from a more of a public safety specific posture, because it has this impact.

And we need to, as you said, have that backstop.

And the way you said it was similar to me, backstop.

Lead with the compassion, lead with those that are in crisis and look to do what we can for those individuals.

But as Mr. Scholes noted, the impacts are huge on our community, our downtown community.

But it's not just downtown, it's the neighboring neighborhoods.

It's across our city.

I hear it all the time in District 4 in terms of the challenges they face.

I see it yesterday in Ballard as I was in Ballard yesterday in District 6. And, of course, in the other districts, 3 and basically 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. So let's just be clear.

This is a citywide challenge.

And so I just thank Chair for this opportunity because we are at a place where, you know, transportation and public safety are coming together.

And I just want to thank everyone for joining us.

And we will be following up as Mr. Scholes noted, a lot's happened in 24 and will continue to happen in 2025. Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council Member Kettle.

Council Member Shrouse.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to everyone being here.

And Council Member Kettle, I was in Queen Anne yesterday.

We should sign each other's passports after this meeting.

A little joke before we get a little serious, and thank you all again for being here, especially Deputy CEO Gutierrez for you being here to bring forward the Sound Transit updates.

I start with Sound Transit because as a Sound Transit board member, I have asked for improvements to the safety and security for transit riders, and I oftentimes leverage my dual role both as a city of Seattle council member and a board member to check in on and increase the safety for our riders.

I regularly discuss this topic with CEO Jaron Sparman and have made this a point already in the interviews for the next CEO that ridership experience is critical to success because a rider takes a long time to learn to use transit and quickly falls off the bus.

Safety and security is a topic of important to sound transit board members.

I can tell you that colleagues that it's regularly brought up and that we receive quarterly updates about the measures that measured the agency's progress.

I'll be sharing an update later this month or next as I receive it.

And I don't take sound transit staff word for granted.

I am a secret shopper.

I use transit and sound transit all the time.

And not just light rails, I use the buses as well.

Same with Metro.

I've been a lifelong Metro rider.

I can likely tell you every single route in my district off of memory.

We're not gonna test that here because we're too short on time.

But I will also echo President Woodfield's notes and your messages.

You said we're at a tipping point.

I'd say we've been here for a while.

It does feel like sometimes that ATU are the only ones advocating for the safety of riders.

This has been my experience both as an elected member of the city of Seattle government and as a transit rider.

Transit must be safe for the elderly and for our kiddos too.

That's when we know that we have a safe community and it's when both the old and the young feel safe.

this will be my only question for the day I recall you requesting the protective barriers since before 2019 is that correct I'm seeing a yes head nod and I remember this because in 2019 I thought it needed to be done because we're asking our operators to attend to the person playing loudly, the music loudly, to grab that bottle that's been rolling around the back of the bus for the last two miles, to get someone to stop using drugs, to give directions or confirm where the bus is going or which route that bus is running, to stopping harassing behavior and to being that safe person on the bus for the young and the old, and frankly, everyday adults to know who that safe person is.

All the while keeping the bus on the road, keeping the bus on time, operating the bus safely, and too often, all the while being harassed themselves.

I think what was really poignant in Sean's memorial service was when all of the operators who had been harassed raised their hands, and I swear to God, it was every single person in that room.

We need the transit security expansions that, General Manager, you've discussed, Chief Morrell that you have discussed.

We need more of the ambassadors that we funded in 2023, which today in this presentation was the most comprehensive update that I've received.

Thank you, Chair, for making that happen.

I was admittedly surprised that it is SDOT implementing the program and not Metro.

We can talk that through, but I, There is a scalability issue here.

This $500,000 two years ago was initially supposed to be the test of scope and proof of concept and then scale out.

I was really...

frustrated to see such a small amount of geographic space and the limit that this is because we're 15 months after our first budget discussion and I'm for the first time receiving a briefing and it doesn't meet my expectations and that's not fair for anyone.

I'm here to support you.

I'm here to need support from you.

We are all in this community together, but what is hard for me is 15 months after an initial action to get that first update and it's not quite meeting expectations.

That means that I haven't been there for you, you haven't been there for me.

And I hold myself accountable on that too, right?

And the frustration you're hearing from me is regarding the urgency.

Safety was a problem in 2019, and then it got worse as Chief Morrell spoke about, and then the solutions were discussed like we just were talking about.

And what I'm missing today is the urgency, the urgency to move quickly to implement solutions for our operators who are speaking on behalf of our passengers.

And General Manager Allison at Sean's memorial service, you mentioned that transit safety is only as safe as the communities in which you pass through.

Let me be clear, I agree with you.

Absolutely.

And I will add for context, the city of Seattle has taken great strides to increase safety in the public realm.

Pre-pandemic, I'll take you back into a dream world.

Before there was a pandemic, it was January, 2020, and there was a high profile shooting on Third and Pike where multiple civilian random people got shot.

That was before the pandemic.

And today, Third Avenue is in the best state that I've seen in over a decade.

And that was not easy.

And it was done with urgency and partnerships like the ones that we've discussed.

Sorry, Chair, I'll wrap up.

Yes, sir.

I just say, I share this story because it's been repeated throughout our city and we have more work to do.

Like we know we have more work to do and I'm confident that we're gonna get on it.

But what has been hard is that we're taking great strides on the sidewalks and in the streets, but it feels like all someone has to do is jump on a bus for them to find a place to hide that no one will check their behavior and not enforce those community standards.

And most importantly, not back up the operators asking from their calling for help.

And I say this as a secret shopper.

I say this as an elected official.

And as the city of Seattle is increasing public safety across the city, we also need, and we are partnering, to help King County Metro do their part in their jurisdiction because your jurisdiction is the most unique jurisdiction.

Usually it's a building that is not moving.

That's when we talk about jurisdictional differences.

That's usually what we're talking about.

And you've got the hardest jurisdiction because it's on wheels and it's moving all throughout our city.

I'll close, Chair, with...

Anecdotally, since Sean's preventable murder, I was on a bus where a man came down, exhibited really problematic behaviors in the aisleway, eventually would not leave until security arrived.

Myself, I was in my job.

I was going from here to City Hall to go talk to the Cub Scouts.

Did my best to talk them into a better place.

Didn't work.

Security came through and did their job.

And we had to get off the bus and find a new bus.

And luckily there was another bus that didn't go in the same route, but it went close enough because I've got them all memorized.

And so we jumped on the bus.

The point is here, we were 30 minutes late.

And while Cub Scouts were sad I was late, it wasn't the end of the world.

But for so many people who rely on transit to get to work or other appointments, they could lose their job for being 30 minutes late, which would have cascading consequences, all because an individual decided that they would come onto a bus and have problematic behavior.

I'll end there, Chair, and just with a thank you.

Thank you for everyone on this team working together to take this seriously.

Again, my largest frustration to date is the urgency of implementation and taking seriously what operators have been conveying for years.

In part, because especially after I saw all those hands rise, I know that they know more than most because they receive the most harassment of us all.

And it's not okay.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss.

Council Member Rank.

Fabulous, thank you, Chair.

And thank you all for coming together for this presentation.

It is really heartening to see different organizations and different governments working together to address these challenges.

So thank you all for carving out the time this morning to speak with us.

Sean Yim's death was a tragedy, and it spurred so many important conversations about safety on our transit systems.

And I've been car-free for more than five years now.

And I, like so many Seattleites, quite literally rely on our buses and the workers that support our buses to be able to get where we need to go.

And I'm really, I feel so lucky that in my five years of being car-free, I've only witnessed two fights on transit.

Two arguments, luckily nothing violent.

And I feel very lucky that that has been my experience.

But time and time again, on a regular basis, I continue to see folks experiencing homelessness on our buses.

In so many ways, you know, we may call these our non-destinational riders, but the fact of the matter is they don't have a destination because they don't have anywhere else to go.

And in so many cases, our buses are the place where they can go where it's warm, and we all know it's very cold outside.

And paired with that, I have checked on so many folks over the years to make sure that they're breathing.

And then having those folks maybe come to and being unable to direct them to a resource to support them.

And I bring these things up to say, That is not on our drivers to resolve.

This is on elected leaders to be working on addressing our housing crisis and working with our county and state partners to be building a robust behavioral health system so we can get folks the support that they need.

And to that end, I do actually have two questions today for our presenters chair.

First being, since we are making these investments in more transit security officers, how are you all determining the deployment and location of transit security officers.

What kind of factors are driving some of those decisions?

Thank you for that question.

We receive data from our operators, our transit security folks who are out in the field, and our riders, and our Metro Transit Police, and every day we look at that information and we overlay it on our system.

And those areas that continue to show up in that data are those areas that we then deploy our resources to.

So there are some traditional spots throughout the county that we know tend to struggle a little more.

And so we try to right-size our deployment to those spaces.

What we're also trying to do is create some real-time roving resources, both from a behavioral health perspective and a cleanliness one, to get to the conversation that was had today.

Safety and cleanliness are really close cousins, and so Being able to deploy those resources throughout the county to address an emergent need quickly is exactly what we're doing, both through our behavioral health pilot that we thank the city for the support in that, as well as a new pilot for 24-7 cleaning.

So create teams that can go and receive that feedback from out in the field and go work on that.

So there's a couple of different ways.

There's the long-term deployment, and then there's the immediate way that we try to get in front of an issue as soon as we hear about it.

I'll go ahead and chime in as well.

Similar to King County, we're doing the same at Sound Transit.

I spoke to that very, very briefly.

And this is by looking at federal data when it comes to, say, hotspots, but also based on local feedback.

So we can be much more thoughtful and strategic in the deployment of resources different train stations, but also along the routes.

And we are very much committed to transparency, so we'll be building dashboards for full visibility and also to gain insights from the community.

Thank you so much for that.

And my second question, just for the benefit of the public that may be listening in as well as for us, could you walk us through from a driver or a rider perspective what you may do or can expect to experience if you were calling to an emergency responder and trying to report an assault that may be happening on a vehicle?

Who can you expect to answer that call and what kind of responder can you expect to come by?

I'll speak as a former transit operator and one who was in the Transit Control Center the last eight years dispatching these calls.

And you never know.

You never know who's going to come or if someone's going to come.

And so it's very frustrating on our end.

And that's why we're asking for teamwork.

Maybe look at jurisdictional expectations.

issues, address it more as a team rather than a footballer who's going to go and what responsibility is.

Are you in the bus zone?

Are you eight foot out of the bus zone?

Is our Metro Transit Police close enough or does the other city have to respond?

It's very frustrating for operators and they feel often that they're out there alone on an island and honestly that's what we have to tell them that often they are.

Chair, if I could just respond to that quickly.

That kind of inconsistencies is troubling to me.

And I understand with some of this, there are some very clear jurisdictional lines around who is the right responder.

I know it's been communicated to me that if an incident is happening on a King County Metro bus, we're looking at King County Sheriff's office as a responder depending.

There's a lot of delicate factors that go into this, but creating more consistency in terms of a responder is something I think we certainly should be aspiring to for the sake of drivers and riders.

Thank you.

Is that it?

That was your two?

Those are my two questions.

And thank you all again.

Our office is here for you and anything you need.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Rain.

Council Member Rivera.

Thank you, Chair.

And thank you for allowing me to ask questions.

I don't sit on this committee, but you and I have had many, many conversations about public safety.

for riders and for bus drivers.

And for context, I, as a resident of the city, my kids, my spouse, and I all take public transit, whether it's metro buses or light rail.

I'm a lifelong public transit rider, as I didn't even have a driver's license until I was 30 years old.

And so it is really important to me, both safety for the transit riders, excuse me, as well as pedestrians, because we talked about that too, thank you Interim Director Emery, and the bus drivers and the sound transit drivers as well.

I want to thank ATU for being here, King County, King County Metro, Sound Transit, Estat Mayor's Office, and DSA for all being here and being partners to address this issue.

I will say that the thing that is clear to me is that the sense of urgency I'm hearing the most is from ATU.

And I really want to thank you for pressing on this issue and holding everybody accountable.

because it's not going to happen unless we have this sense of urgency.

And I'm going to say also that while I really appreciate all the partners coming together to address this issue, you know, I don't know whether it's the bureaucracy.

I've worked in government for a long time, and I know the bureaucracy is really hard to push through.

But I'm not hearing this sense of urgency on some of these issues that you just addressed today by way of solutions to this problem.

And so I'm going to ask these questions.

One is installing operator safety partitions.

This is something that cities across the country have already done.

Sean Yim sadly was killed in the district that I represent.

I went to the memorial service, and you, Michelle, talked then about these partitions.

It's basically mid to the end of February, and you talked about these partitions going up.

When can drivers expect that these partitions are actually going to get installed on the buses, how many, what routes, et cetera.

Thank you for that.

And I'm going to go back a little bit in history to provide some context to the conversation.

Metro had introduced operator partitions to ATU several years ago, roughly a decade ago, as something that we had wanted to do on our system.

This was starting to be an emerging trend in the industry.

It was not received well.

There was definitely a 50-50 split within side of the workforce saying that would fundamentally change what I do and I don't wanna do that.

I don't wanna work in that environment.

My job is customer service and I enjoy that engagement.

So we paused, Metro paused that conversation so that membership could have a discussion amongst themselves about how they wanted to proceed.

We then did start the conversation back up in 2019 with ETU on an incredibly phased approach.

While this is a conversation in the industry, there are not a lot of options.

Every organization is different with the engineering of their fleet, which requires a different conversation with the manufacturer of those operator partitions.

So we had a discussion, a very phased approach to our operator barriers, because we knew we needed to do work with our operators to ask them questions, to invite them to the discussion about what they were comfortable with.

Then COVID happened and everything changed, right?

And we put up temporary, they're not operator partitions.

They were serving a different purpose with different materials.

And we were still having the discussion with manufacturers about the right type of material.

You have to be very mindful of glare.

You have to be mindful of repetition for operators.

Still, there was some disagreement within the operator ranks, but we were moving through this process.

Then with the operator, Yim, loss of life recognized that we needed to turn that up and move those phases faster.

We mutually agreed upon a decision of March as our timeline.

Metro has an outstanding order for new coaches that are being manufactured right now.

Getting in a design spec for March will allow us time to have that partition installed with those new coaches.

What we then need to do in partnership with ATU is work on a retrofit plan so that we can design.

We have 52 unique coaches that all require a little bit of a different engineering component to get those partitions.

We have different models that are out right now that operators are providing their feedback on.

This is part of that timeline you bring up, council member.

Since we discussed it to now, we've been working with ATU, the available manufacturers, and our operators to see what would work best in an imperfect market.

So we are going to make some choice time to get those new coaches.

And then we're going to retrofit.

And we're going to work with our vehicle maintenance folks and our operators to make sure that it's a transparent plan and has their feedback.

But I just want to be clear.

There is absolute urgency to these.

And we are a 1900, we will be a 1900 coach agency.

It takes a little bit of time.

And the only agency that's 100% there right now is LA Metro.

All the others in this conversation are in versions of the same conversation.

Some may be a little bit ahead of us.

And we're also working closely with ATU International in Toronto that has been having this conversation for a while.

This is a really big discussion for our workforce.

Greg, do you wanna add?

Yeah, I'd like to add, I really don't wanna deal with the past too much.

The problem has been trying to find a barrier that you can scale up for, get this many and then when the operators approve of it, it has been an issue.

After Sean Yim's murder, we all came to agreement that day that we are gonna retrofit the whole fleet.

We have the pledge from Metro, the county council, and the county executive.

We are currently trying to Pick that barrier out.

We're doing it as quick as we can.

As soon as we pick that barrier, the county and metro is committed to purchasing them and getting them installed as quickly as possible.

There hasn't been a perfect solution, and that's what we've really been spinning our wheels with.

ATU International is ready for the more of the concept bus of the future where you wall off the whole cockpit, which Metro is currently buying a few coaches and hopefully we can force the manufacturers to provide a safe space.

It's hard to put glass up that operators have to look through to see their mirrors and deal with the glare, but we don't have any other choice now.

We are going to order barriers and they are going to be installed.

Thank you.

I really appreciate having this background information because we keep talking about the barriers and without the context and knowing that you're working together to make this happen as quickly as possible given all the considerations.

We just sit here thinking why has this not happened?

Why hasn't it gotten done?

And so all that to say though when can you expect this will happen after this engagement?

Do you have a timeline for when you can expect that this will be completed or are you not at that stage yet?

We're going to probably see the most production on our retrofit because that will be, you don't have to wait for the entire coach to get built, which is what we need for the first 89 order.

So we're working on that plan right now.

I don't want to give a date that I'm then held accountable to later that isn't done in coordination with ATU.

So we will, we will continue to provide this body updates and the retrofit can be incredibly strategic.

We can say we want these routes based on the data that we're collecting.

We want to do this coach line first.

We want to do rapid rides.

We want to do this geographic region.

We want to do this base.

We can have those strategic conversations so the experience of the operator can be immediately improved based on where we're making these choices.

And we'll do that together in partnership with our vehicle maintenance team who's going to help support this effort as well as our operators who are going to be continue to be engaged as we move through.

So I would again say you will see first from a retrofit perspective as it takes a while longer to get brand new coaches off the line.

Great.

Thank you.

And then as to the ambassadors on the buses that can really ensure that they're providing support to passengers and the drivers simultaneously.

would love to hear a timeline for, you know, you said in 2025, you're gonna have 10 additional.

We are starting hiring now.

Okay.

So that is something that's being scaled at the moment.

This was a brand new program for us.

We didn't have the classification.

We didn't have the specs or sort of the programmatic understanding.

We also launched it and found ourselves in a conversation with ATU about what it should be, what it was, how we needed to think about it moving forward.

So we did get slowed down.

Council member and I apologize for that delay and the frustration that it caused.

But we needed to plan with ETU about what this was, who was doing that work, how it fit in with the other work of ETU members.

So it took us a minute to get to an MOA.

We're there.

We also now understand that the program needs both the flexibility and the stability.

So hiring some permanent people and allowing it to still be an operator supported service because they're the ones who know our system the very best and are very good at this program.

Now we're ready to scale.

Thank you, Michelle.

And I will, if you, if it's okay, I want to ask one more question to Sound Transit.

I really appreciate Moises.

I have utilized the text line, I text, you can text, give the the train.

I have experience from one station to the next, someone coming on the train to offer support to someone who has needed it on the train.

So I'm very grateful for that service.

I will say that unfortunately what I've seen even as recently as the night after the public hearing that council member Hollingsworth had here, I took light rail home and there were people smoking fentanyl on the train, which was unfortunate because I also saw a lot of folks getting home from work and this is what they're dealing with.

So I would love to know what is the plan for more ambassadors on the trains because while it's great to have ambassadors at the platforms to keep things safe on the platforms, that's critical.

There's also a piece on the train where even though you're, I can call in or text in and someone comes quickly, at a certain time of night you have less folks.

And so how do you, you know, I've seen a lot of folks sleeping on the trains, et cetera.

And so how do you, what's the plan for addressing folks, ambassadors that can be on the train?

And toward that I will, not toward that, but a second piece is, The fair, you're saying sometime in March or May, you're going to start with the fair enforcement because I've seen, well, this is on, so Sound Transit has a fair enforcement issue as well because I've seen a lot of folks who have not paid their fairs, and these are folks that appear to, and maybe they can't pay their fair, I don't know, but it doesn't, you know, there are folks just riding, not paying their fairs, and I think that's really hurting us because we can, if we don't collect the fair, be able to address all these issues.

So we'd love to hear about that, Moises.

Yeah, thank you so much, Council Member Rivera.

I'll take that as feedback, which we appreciate.

A couple of points, when it comes to the fair ambassadors, right now we are actually budgeted for up to 80. And we're excited that by 2026, we see that going up to about 140. So of course, you know, we have a number of vacancies, we need to make sure that these humans are trained in those roles.

And other than that, of course, we also have contracted security.

And to your point, it's about them stationed, well, located at the stations, but also throughout the system.

And we are looking to enhance that over the coming year so our riders can expect to see more of these personnel as they ride the system.

When it comes to fare engagement and enforcement it's something that we're working on as well um it's um i think part of the conversation it's been that shift um you know from the thick of the pandemic and we are very keen on enhancing that as well so

Thank you, Moises.

And I'm just going to ask because a lot of constituents have asked me, why doesn't Sound Transit have a similar system for paying your fare as there are in other cities where there's a barrier and you really have to tap to get in?

I mean, our system, anyone can just walk on.

And if there isn't a fare ambassador there checking, you know, you can just ride freely.

So are there plans to relook at how this sound transit system currently stands?

Thank you for that.

It's actually a very complex question.

There are different types of systems, as you rightfully noted.

There are those like, for example, the Bay Area Rapid Transit part in the Bay Area.

That's more of a closed system.

Some transit system is different.

It is based, if you will, on our code, but we're also been doing a lot of work to make sure that the entrance points of the stations are much more visible.

And also, as I noted, for ambassadors to be located at the entrance points to also assist customers when it comes to how they should pay or secure their pass.

And also when it comes to enforcement, so as we build up our personnel, we'll be doing that as well.

When it comes to what type of system the agency has, and I don't have the details with that, there's a separate studies through our service delivery department looking at the possibility of what the system could look like when it comes to gates.

Again, I don't have that with me, but happy to provide that detail later.

For more places to tap, because I will say probably I've also seen people who want to pay, but there's only if you get on the train, you can't tap.

There are many other systems.

I've taken light rail across the world, actually, and you can just tap on the train or on the bus.

So being able to, you know, or attaching it to your, if you don't have a metro bus, to your credit card where you can just tap, but the point is making it easier for people that do want to pay, to be able to pay, I think is important.

Oh, absolutely.

And that's part of the, um, that pilot that I noted when it comes to making sure that our writers, well, all of us, because it's happened to me as well, uh, to make sure that we have more options to be able to pay your fare.

Uh, also as your board.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Chair.

All right.

Thank you.

Council member Rivera and Moises.

That's how you pronounce your name?

Moises.

Moises, close enough.

Thank you.

I just want to commend you for your response.

It's hard being up here.

It's hard being at that table up here in front of us.

But I really loved your response.

You said, I take that as feedback.

Then you provided appropriate explanatory context.

and shared your perspective and said, I'll have to follow.

That is an A-plus answer.

Excellent.

Well done.

Everyone, I'm gonna call an audible here.

We're not gonna go through and do the second item on the agenda.

We're actually gonna punt that, given the interest of time.

It's an important day for our city.

And this is a central part of it.

This discussion is a central part of that.

But we're gonna punt the second item, the proposed transportation levy spending plan to the next meeting, which will be two weeks from today, Tuesday, March 4th.

because I also have a couple other questions that I wanna ask.

Hopefully this first one is fairly straightforward.

This one is for the transit agencies, so King County Metro and Sound Transit.

If someone riding transit is able to or sees or observes or witnesses unsafe, unlawful behavior, how can they specifically report it through each of your transit agencies?

And I heard Moises earlier say that 206-398-5268, there's a general reporting line.

So I guess is that for you, on the sailing transit side, is that all?

Can you just walk through the methods under which riders can report these kind of behavior?

I'll begin and then I'll...

see if Michelle has anything else to add.

When it comes to the sound transit system, as he rightfully noted, we do have a phone number.

So folks could, you know, they could actually text if they don't feel comfortable calling.

Of course, depending on the nature of the incident, one could also call 911. This is a line that goes to the central command, if you will, where then those individuals will reach out to the to the security personnel and law enforcement, depending on the location.

Of course, there's some detail on the back end.

And I will note that we have also received great feedback from the community about the timeliness of that response, so we are looking to enhance that as well.

Thank you.

A little bit different for King County Metro as we don't have the fixed nature of our system that Sound Transit does, but we're learning a lot from their program.

So while currently you can call a customer service line and 911 and also engage the operator, those are unsatisfying as a suite of services.

We do want to come with a resource similar to what Sound Transit has been trying on their system.

The challenge is we need a response mechanism behind it.

It's great to have a telephone number to call, but if you're not quite sure how you're going to triage those phone calls and that information with the open nature of our system, that would also be very frustrating for the writer, right?

They have an assumption that people are going to come respond to that text or that phone call.

So we're exploring the best way to do that with what we have.

But we do have a customer service number that's on our coach.

And we also do encourage people, if you feel like there is a safety DSU, you should call 911.

Thank you both.

If you wouldn't mind after this meeting, just following up, I think all of us, all of our offices could benefit from this, like just sharing out whatever the resources are for writers to report this kind of activity and behavior.

I will personally would love to share that out in my newsletter.

And I know we all have newsletters and we can choose if it's a good use of our newsletter time, but But this is important information and so thank you there.

My next question is on the city side for our city, for my city colleagues, particularly on the executive side.

It looks like, so we have currently, we have Director Emery here.

So, As we know, we talked about, you talked about, Mr. Chow from council central staff talked about, I talked about, council appropriated approximately $2 million last year for various transit safety services and personnel as part of the 2025 adopted budget during our budget deliberations last fall.

So, you know, 1 million for transit security and police, and then 1 million for ambassadors and behavioral health teams.

recognizing that it's still fairly early in the new budget year, two months in almost, a month and a half.

And I think, Director, you mentioned this on the slide, the second bullet point about one million of that $2 million.

But again, recognizing it's still fairly early in the new budget year, can you share an update on where we're at with spending these funds?

Contract negotiation is underway.

We anticipate April activation is what we're looking for.

And this is really a strong collaboration with King County.

It is primarily led by King County data and everything assessment.

So I think building this structure last year has helped us in expediting the next investments that are coming down the pipeline.

So we anticipate early expenditure, early partnership, and early investment on the ground level.

Thank you, and is that for the transit security and transit police?

The ambassador and the security piece of it, yeah.

Okay, so that's for the $1 million for the ambassadors and the behavioral health?

Okay, and then is it the same?

Do you also plan to execute an agreement for additional?

And again, for clarity, what we're talking about is additive to existing security personnel.

It's not to supplement or replace what you know, in this case, King County Metro is already doing personnel wise to improve this, like to maintain an appropriate security.

We were talking about extra investments on top of We're not letting anyone off the hook, ourselves included, but we're going on top of that.

So I guess, Director Emery, is the same situation true for both transit security and transit police?

That's correct.

Okay, okay, great.

Thank you.

And colleagues, I hope it's clear, today we really just scratched the surface of this important topic.

We couldn't at all do a deep dive on any one of these we could have peeled the layers back of the onion and been here all day, weeks, potentially as council members Rink and Rivera aptly noted, you know, we need to figure out what the best response is and build up that capability.

which is why at the city level we funded extra money on top of to supplement existing services that represents really the full spectrum of available responses.

But truth be told, and we didn't talk about this, but with respect to the new behavioral health team, it is a .

And so there's a handful of social workers that are able to do that work today.

No different than our own crisis care department team of social workers that we are actively working hard to build up and scale out their capability to do more takes years to do that.

So our ability to actually spend extra money on top for that is somewhat fairly limited.

Our ambassador program is a little more built up than that, but it's still, I don't know if we'll have the full ability to, maybe we would, maybe we wouldn't, I don't know.

And when we talk about ambassadors, kind of confusing.

Nomenclatures, like ambassadors, there's different functions for different, depending on the agencies.

We didn't talk about that.

But, What is I think the most scalable option and probably the one that's most needed because there's the capability already exists and you can literally turn it up with a dial.

You can hire more contracted security personnel.

Capability already exists today.

Securitas I think is the main provider.

And then, King County Metro Police, it's a matter of extra overtime or whatever it is, supplemented by Seattle Police for extra emphasis patrols.

That is something that we could, is the capability that already exists, we can use that money to scale up.

Some of those other programs worthwhile will continue to act with urgency to build and scale those, but we're in less well positioned to start spending some of those money, some of that funds.

today.

In any event, I also want to note that, again, we scratched the surface today.

be here all month talking about all the nuance and all the complexity, but also just wanna recognize that this subject matter could have very easily been discussed in our Public Safety Committee chaired by Public Safety Committee Chair Kettle here.

And in fact, there might be follow-up conversations.

Chair Kettle alluded to one with respect to the jail capacity issue that which is another important aspect of the broader challenge that we might have future, and I would support as his vice chair in public safety, I would support future conversations on this topic at a high level or with more specific focus, being in that committee, but there's so much cross-pollination, so much overlap.

In any event, I'll shut up.

I just wanna say thank you every last one of you all for taking the time out of your busy schedules and calendars.

You could have chose to be anywhere in the world today, but you're here with us and I appreciate that.

Thank you, Jay-Z.

But seriously, this is an important topic and it's hard too.

You all have handled yourself today with dignity.

And it's clear to me that you're all taking this seriously.

And it's clear to me that we all have a opportunity to do more.

And it's not just one individual, one government, one agency.

It's all of us, including communities and individuals within communities as well.

So in any event, colleagues, any final questions, comments?

All right, cool.

Well, all right.

Well, that said, we have reached the end of today's meeting agenda.

Our next meeting is on March 4th at 9 30 AM.

Final call for any final business to come before the committee meeting before we adjourn.

Hearing none, seeing none.

We know what next committee meeting agenda will be, the levy delivery plan.

Hearing no further business to come before the committee, we are officially adjourned.

It is 11.50 a.m.