Seattle City Council Transportation & Utilities Committee 2520

Good morning.

The February 5, 2020 meeting of the Transportation and Utilities and Technology Committee will come to order.

It is 9.34 a.m.

I'm Alex Peterson, chair of the committee, and I'm joined by Councilmembers Morales and Strauss.

Thank you.

And let's start by approving the agenda.

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

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

At this time, we'll take public comment.

And we have up to 20 minutes today for public comment.

I'm not sure we'll need that.

Speakers are limited to up to two minutes of comment.

And if a speaker exceeds that, we might have to turn off the microphone, but I know you'll keep it succinct for us.

Thank you.

Okay, I'll just go right down the line here and read the names and just come up to the microphone and we'll set the timer at two minutes.

Ryan Packer will be followed by Patricia Dawson.

All right, good morning, council members.

My name is Ryan Packer.

I have a brief story.

Douglas Mayhew was trying to get around Soto by foot on January 7th.

According to a news interview he gave in December, he was worried about being able to buy food after Trump's proposed cuts to food stamps would take effect in 2020. He said it was hard for him to find steady work in Seattle.

He was hit by a car trying to access the on-ramp up to Beacon Hill.

Our transportation system didn't provide enough margin of error to ensure that the collision Douglas was in that day didn't take his life.

He died two days later at the hospital.

I'm waiting for someone to pull the fire alarm.

in terms of the toll that our transportation system is taking on people in our city.

2019 was the deadliest year on our streets due to traffic collisions since 2006. 25 people in one year is a lot of people to lose their lives due to our transportation system.

I pulled some numbers.

Just for the first 28 days of the year, there was a traffic collision in Seattle every 82 minutes.

30 pedestrians were hit by cars during that time frame.

To target the numbers here, I found out that 6 pedestrians were hit during that time in District 6, Dan Strauss' district, 4 in District 2, Tammy Morales' district, and 3 in District 4, Alex Peterson's district.

The Vision Zero slide in your Move Seattle presentation doesn't mention those numbers, much less Douglas' story.

It focuses on the projects we've done, which is an important metric, but it leaves a lot unsaid in terms of what the impact of those projects was and how they're being evaluated or even chosen in the first place.

I'm asking you to take bold action to get those numbers down.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Patricia Dawson followed by Kathleen Marison.

We're going to switch places because she's not quite ready.

Hi, my name is Kathleen Merrigan.

I started at Seattle City Light in 1983 as a line crew helper and retired in 2002 as a cable splicer crew chief.

I began working with Seattle Silence Breakers when it first started in December 2017. I was shocked and angered then, and still am, by the oppressive conditions faced by many city employees.

Today I'm speaking on behalf of a 15-year employee at SPU.

She's a woman of color and a vocal advocate for other workers in her area, also many people of color.

She is very, very good at her job and takes pride in that.

And I'm telling a small part of her story, not because she's scared, but because retaliation is the norm in the city.

In fact, she's fearless and doesn't hesitate to defend others and herself.

But you need to realize how difficult and demoralizing it is to work in a hostile environment.

It has taken an emotional toll.

Picture her excelling at her job.

Picture seeing another employee, a white man, who bragged about his dishonesty on the job, being groomed by the department director to become her supervisor.

The director also chose not to test this man for the job and tells her to train him.

Add to this environment a new manager who has neither experience nor appreciation for the work she does.

The manager has encouraged her to seek positions outside the department, but then says she's too old for career-changing moves.

On top of that, it was obscurely implied by the manager in a memo that she violated SPU's sexual harassment and workplace violence policies.

That's outrageous.

The woman I'm speaking for has been the victim of management's sexual harassment and violence.

That memo was an emotional roller coaster for her.

This is not the kind of manager you need at the utility.

This committee is serious about guiding the city utilities for success.

It has got to face and fix problems like these being raised by employees.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Patricia Dawson, followed by Lou Bond.

And please speak directly into the mic so Seattle Channel can pick you up.

Good morning.

I am also from Silence Breakers and I am a longtime staff, 12 years with the city human services.

And I can say I'm reading for another person of color in Seattle Public Utilities.

I'll read that and if I have time, I'll say something else.

At SPU, in the drainage and wastewater line of business, oppressive leadership who practice white supremacy have done much harm to Seattle, its customers, and its employees.

Seattle has combined sewer overflows in its water bodies even after spending a half billion capital improvements.

Affordability is a big issue.

Knowledgeable and experienced employees are mistreated and run out for letting the truth excuse me, for telling the truth, having data and complying with regulations, codes and rules.

GM CEO Mami Hara is trying to turn SPU around.

She's hired new deputy directors who talk up diversity as means to better partnership solutions and outcomes for its customers and employees.

Mommy meets with Seattle silence makers who are urging her to have clear performance expectations, hold leadership accountable, and be courageous to do the right, the good and right thing.

With change starting from the top, the rest will implement or move on if they can't perform for Seattle.

Let's work together inclusively to provide, protect, and promote our Seattle forever.

Again, this is an anonymous employee.

I can say that as a, an older white woman, a few years ago, when I heard things like white supremacy, it's like, that's not going on here in Seattle.

But there is clearly across the board, after a meeting with many people of color, of fellow employees, and from what I've seen, there's a lot going on with the city employees.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We'll make sure Seattle Public Utilities reviews this testimony.

Thank you.

Lou Bond, followed by Emily Manette, and then Midge O'Cauley.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Lou Bond.

I'm the manager of the Melbourne Tower at 3rd and Pike, and I want to address a couple of issues.

One is, is it related to safety and that shooting that happened here a couple of weeks ago?

We've met with the SPD, and we're making a recommendation in our neighborhood that we would love to see a pop-up store that would be shared by the Transit Police, by Metro, by SPD and King County, that we would like to see something at either 3rd and Pine or 3rd and Pike, and that would be some kind of temporary pop-up location for SPD and shared by the various resources between SPD, King County, and Light Rail and Metro.

There's been several landlords that said that they would be willing to provide that as well.

We would ask also in the transportation that at these stops, these bus stops that are, we want to see all negative behavior to be addressed.

And we don't see that happening at these bus stops.

We as landlords, we've been asked to be a guardianship and we try to do that, but it's very, very difficult if negative behavior, including sitting, lying, and even aggressive panhandling, playing of music, et cetera, is happening on these sidewalks, and they are right at these bus stops.

Nobody is doing anything about it.

The second issue that I want to deal with is Pike Street specifically.

We have now moved down from three lanes down to one lane, and we have got terrible traffic snarl between 1st and Pike going all the way through 3rd and Pike, especially in the late afternoons.

It is extremely difficult.

The second thing is that there's a bus stop, there's a bus park as one of the three lanes.

The other has been now turned into a bike lane and it doesn't make any sense to me that in one of our major thoroughfares that is the only thoroughfare going east there that we would have buses stopped and parked on a major street.

That doesn't make any sense to me.

Please look at that.

The second is that We don't have any access for dropping off or picking people up from Uber or taxis, et cetera.

We only have the alley.

And I apologize my time ran out real quick.

Thank you.

So if you could leave your testimony with our clerk, we can read the rest of it.

I've sent several letters and I've not been addressed on the issue.

We're trying to keep it two minutes to be fair to everybody.

Thank you, Mr. Bond.

Emily Manette and Midge O'Cauley.

Good morning.

Hello, my name is Emily Minetti.

I'm with the DSA and I lead our transportation policy and advocacy efforts.

I'm here today to reinforce concerns that I know you've been hearing since the fatal shooting two weeks ago on 3rd.

Today I'm here to express concerns specifically as it pertains to the city's ability to reduce drive-alone trips while also encouraging adoption in the billions of dollars of transit and move Seattle levy money.

Safety and security is a fundamental human need.

We cannot expect people to adopt transit, try transit, or even choose walking and biking if they feel like they could be a victim of violent crime just by coming and going.

The corner where the shooting happened is one of the busiest transit areas of our city, as I'm sure you're all aware.

3rd Avenue carries 300 buses an hour, 50,000 riders a day, and 12,000 people use the Westlake Tunnel entrance daily.

Allowing crime and illegal activities to continue to thrive in our downtown is unacceptable, and it will prevent us from meeting many of our goals for downtown, let alone our transportation goals that we've worked so hard to achieve.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Minetti.

Midge O'Cauley, and followed by Michael George.

Good morning.

I'm Midge McCauley, and I am a resident of downtown as well as a business owner.

I've lived in a number of major metropolitan areas in the heart of the downtowns, and I've never been fearful before, as I have been here in Seattle.

And my concern is that we have a list.

I mean, we know very well who a lot of the repeat offenders are, and they've been arrested on multiple occasions.

And the incident at Third and Pine, those were individuals who were well known by the city.

And I think, you know, hopefully you can help in making certain that these folks that are repeat offenders are very carefully looked after.

I had a personal incident in my building where my storage unit had been broken into, and when the police came to my building to interview me and to learn about this, the building had photos of people who were prowling in the garage.

And the policeman said to me, oh, I know that guy.

I just saw him over there in the train station.

You know, he was well known to the police community.

So I would just urge you to do whatever you can to make certain that we are policing these repeat offenders.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And our last speaker, Michael George.

Hello, thanks for having me.

I'm Michael George.

I'm a downtown resident.

And more importantly, my daughter goes to daycare a couple blocks from where the recent shooting happened.

And we received a letter from our daycare saying that our children would no longer be taking walks outside of the building that the daycare is in, which is really hard to hear because that's one of the things we love about this city.

It has felt like there's been issues in the past, but something has changed.

And when you get a letter like that and you come in the next day, parents talk.

And what my daughter's hearing is we're going to take our car in as opposed to taking public transportation in to daycare because we don't feel safe coming into this neighborhood.

And that's difficult, I think, for any parent.

But it's particularly difficult for those of us who are raising children downtown because what my daughter's hearing is those people don't feel safe in our neighborhood.

We don't go home to another neighborhood at the end of the day.

When we walk out our door, this is what she experiences.

This is what her friends are talking about.

And that's really difficult.

So I'd really encourage you, as you think about any SEPTED, any changes to 3rd Avenue, that you reach out to residents.

And you really get a true human sense of how this is impacting people.

Moving on to one more subject, Madison BRT.

I would really encourage you all to consider what it really means to have a project that has been sold as a project that is going to move a lot of people through an area in a very quiet, carbon neutral way.

The fact that at the end of this project we are switching from diesel buses from electric buses is a major change that I don't think people quite understand.

When this project was originally pitched to downtown residents, it was going to be quiet buses.

They were going to be buses that were going to be good for our environment and that are families would not be breathing in carbon.

So I'd encourage you to reconsider switching from electric to hybrid buses.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council.

Yes.

May I just say thank you to the folks that have come and provided public testimony.

It's been a pleasure to be able to work with Emily Minetti and others over the last year to identify strategies and solutions for Third and Pike.

And we have really great opportunity at this time to implement some of the proposals that have been made, turning our transit corridor into a truly functioning transit corridor, and making it a place that is safe for everyone who is living in our city.

And so I also want to thank Mr. George for coming down.

Sharing your thoughts.

It is true.

We should not be switching from diesel or from electric to diesel and I just really appreciate everyone's comments even while this is the Transportation Committee and not the Public Safety Committee There may be another place for you to also share your thoughts

Thank you.

That ends the public comment period.

We've got four items of business on our agenda today.

Our first item of business concerns Seattle's Information Technology Department.

I'm going to ask our committee clerk to please read the item into the record.

Seattle Information Technology, Seattle IT.

Overview and discussion of items of business anticipated to be heard in the Transportation and Utilities Committee in 2020.

Welcome.

Let's do some brief introductions, and we'll get into the presentation.

Hi.

I'm Tracy Cantrell, an executive advisor for Seattle IT, and I report to Saad Bashir.

Good morning.

I'm Saad Bashir, CTO for the city.

Thank you, welcome, and thank you for bringing this presentation.

We did hear from the three other departments that we look at in this committee, and so we're happy to hear from you.

You get the first agenda item all to yourself here.

And you can let us know afterwards if this was the best update that you heard from the department heads.

It probably will be.

I am going to be referring to my phone, not because I'm checking emails, but I have some of the notes here, so.

Okay.

I want to start with, you know, thank you for the opportunity.

Really appreciate the opportunity to speak to you on behalf of Seattle IT and provide a very brief overview of the department.

My goal is hopefully to spark interest on a few topics so that we get invited again to this committee and cover the contents in a lot more detail.

Seattle IT is on a journey, a journey of transforming itself to be a best-in-class digital service delivery team and amongst the public sector and particularly within the local government.

We aim to be the organization who's going to set best practices for others to follow in terms of the adoption of technology.

And our mission is simple.

We want to ensure that we are enabling technology for the various client departments that we serve in terms of helping their operations and their service delivery.

I started this role exactly a year ago from last week.

And since then, we have been relentlessly moving forward on nine very specific fronts.

I'm just going to pass on a couple of pages here.

And these are the nine areas that came about after a lot of consultation, both with the folks who work in Seattle IT as well as the departments that we serve.

And so we have many activities going on from how we manage our cybersecurity posture to how we are scaling up our workforce, from how we are simplifying our processes to how we communicate, from how we are aligned and governed to how we are managing the organization's legacy technology footprint.

The one very visible change we made last year was the organization structure.

And that is what you see on the slide up there.

And this is a high level overview of the IT departments and the various divisions.

And the shade of the blue matters because the more darker blue means that we are more client facing.

versus some of the other aspects of IT.

And I just want to very quickly take you through some of these boxes here to make sure that you have a really good understanding of the various functions and who is performing those functions in IT.

So the very first one is frontline digital services and this is a collection of all of those things that on a daily basis our clients depend upon IT to provide.

So that would be You know, the solution desk where we are picking up the phone when somebody has an issue, from the people who are showing up to somebody's desk in order to troubleshoot, Seattle.gov, Seattle Channel, and many other frontline-facing services.

The next one is digital workplace, and this is a collection of all of those tools that you, for example, would use on a given day.

For example, email and Office 365 and SharePoint and others.

We have got two divisions that manage the various applications portfolio, business applications and platform applications.

We have a group of people who do nothing but make sure that they're always keeping a pulse on the client and what is going through their minds and their needs, and that is called client solutions.

We've got a group of folks called Service Modernization, which is a collection of those areas that if we don't focus on, we're going to hold the technology and aspirations of the city back.

And so that would include things like data engineering, cloud adoption, automation.

We have got the chief privacy officer role as well.

I've got Ginger sitting behind us.

And I'm hoping one of these days she'll be able to come and make a presentation to you folks directly as well.

And of course, no IT shop is complete without having a big focus on cybersecurity.

And we have a digital security and risk team.

A technology infrastructure team is unique because this is all the behind the scenes work.

A good day for technology infrastructure is when nobody knows that they exist because their work just happens seamlessly behind the scenes.

A chief of staff role and of course Tracy Cantrell who's sitting beside me, she serves as the executive advisor.

The next couple of slides, I'm not going to list all of those various things that are happening underneath each of those divisions, but they may serve as a cheat sheet for you in case you're wondering about different aspects of IT.

There is a number of information on those two slides.

In terms of by the numbers, this slide here is really to impress upon you that Seattle IT department is a major operational beast.

And on any given day, our colleagues are providing a range of services from picking up the phone at the solution desk to showing up at various user sites for troubleshooting, from running a cable channel such as the Seattle channel which is broadcasting hopefully this committee meeting, to ensuring the various operations of the city are making use of, let's say, GIS mapping capabilities.

We're running several major enterprise applications and hundreds of smaller ones, ensuring emails and SharePoint and the daily productivity tools are functioning as intended.

And all of that is being done with, of course, privacy and security in mind.

If Seattle IT was an athlete, and I just made that up while I was sitting behind you, you know, it seems like we're practicing and playing every possible technology sport, figuratively speaking, on any given day.

It is that diverse.

I also want to highlight some of the resident-facing IT numbers as well.

In terms of the overall resource footprint of IT, we are a lot more focused on the internal operations, but we do have a healthy amount of work that we do with the residents in the city, such as the technology matching funding program.

A colleague of mine, Delia, sitting behind me, and I'm hoping one of these days she'll be able to come and talk about some of the work that she is doing around digital equity, as well as some of the work that we are doing on broadband and 5G.

And Allison behind me also is somebody responsible for that.

Given the diversity of our client base, it results in a very diverse set of work plans.

And we have to be extra mindful in terms of how the work that we are doing is aligned and interdependent to each other.

Last year we borrowed from the industry best.

We looked at how the other big technology firms, especially in Seattle, are making sure that their work plans are managed and appropriately done.

And we were able to borrow the framework, it's called Objectives and Key Results, short OKRs.

And Seattle IT, I believe, is one of the perhaps few or maybe the only municipalities in the U.S. that might be using OKRs for its technology work plan.

And there is an example on a slide here that basically showcases how OKRs work, but the idea is to make sure that anybody who's on the front line is able to line up their work to the overall objectives of the department.

And so there's a simple example up on the screen there that you can take a look.

And lastly, these are some of the sample priorities that I wanted to highlight for your attention.

Privacy, I already mentioned.

We have a very ambitious target when it comes to RSGI and diversity, equity, and inclusiveness.

We have recently put some dedicated resources on this particular subject.

We have hired, I think, one of the best in the industry to help us with the RSGI efforts.

Her name is Tracy Brown, and I'm hoping she'll be able to come one day and speak with you folks as well.

And the challenge that I've given to Tracy is that we don't want to be a second or a third.

We want to be the department that's leading in terms of its RSGI and DEI efforts in the city of Seattle with other departments wanting to follow our practices.

We have a huge amount of effort going on talent development.

When I was here several months ago with the old council, one of the things I was quite vocal about was the concept of people liability.

That in the world of technology, if you don't invest in your people, and if those people are not going anywhere, then you are going to carry a people liability.

And again, I'm very happy to report that in the last several months, the effort that has been put in by the folks in Seattle IT, that we are getting calls from, you know, from many other cities, from around the world.

This afternoon, we have the Revenue and Customs Department from the UK coming specially, who's here in Seattle, specially coming to the office to learn about our efforts around talent development.

And there is so much more that I can share with you on that.

Digital workplace is a big deal for us.

And this is about not just emails and SharePoint, but there are so many slick tools available that are going to make you a lot more productive in your daily job.

And so that is something which is high up on our agenda.

Cloud adoption is a big one.

You know, we are in a city that is home to the two largest cloud service providers in the world.

And I think the onus is upon us to make sure that we are using the best of technology available to us.

So a huge amount of effort is happening in partnership with the private sector on us using cloud appropriately.

We've got, as I have mentioned previously, a plethora of applications that have run, they run their due date.

And we're talking about hundreds of them.

And so there is a very disciplined approach that we are following to make sure that we identify those applications and what are we going to do with them.

And that is a multi-year, quite an expensive exercise as well.

I would encourage us to one day have a more detailed briefing on digital security and risk.

We have recently hired a seasoned security professional to serve as our chief information security officer.

And him and many other division directors have put in place the policies and the tools that are giving us a lot more confidence about our cyber security posture.

Continuous process improvement and organizational change management, those are two of my favorite areas in IT, one of my favorite areas I should say.

We are going through a big transformation, a big culture change, which means that we are looking at every possible process that we are following.

And every process change is creating the need for managing that change.

And so change management as a function is big in IT.

Automation, data analytics, and lots of self-service tools.

Again, this is a sample to hopefully that there is some information there that you would want to know more of.

Whenever that happens, we would be happy to come back.

And I believe this is the last slide.

This is some of the work that we might be bringing for more legislation purposes, including the appointments that we are looking for for CTAB, which is the advisory board, Citizen Technology Advisory Board, and a few other things.

And I think that's it, Council President.

Thank you, you've got a lot on your plate and we appreciate you giving us this overview, help us to keep the government running efficiently and you're constantly looking for new ways to do that and I see one of our roles as a legislative committee to give you the tools and resources and oversight that makes it easier for you to do your jobs for the city employees who rely on your services and the general public.

Do we have any questions from colleagues?

No, thank you very much.

I have a general question.

I see a little bit of information about the surveillance ordinance, but this is something that I'm particularly interested in.

I wonder if you could give a brief overview of the status of that and what your next steps are.

I'm not going to do justice to your questions.

I'm going to ask Ginger, who's our Chief Privacy Officer, to give you a quick update.

Hi, how do you do?

Ginger Armbrister, Chief Privacy Officer.

I'd be happy to come back with more detail, but I can tell you quickly, we're working diligently with your office and with the rest of the legislative aides to update them on what the surveillance ordinance is and what's coming up for this year.

So for 2020, we got a six-month extension on the submission of all of the surveillance impact reports that are due by September of this year on the identified surveillance technologies the city is using.

So we're working on getting ready to submit some of those in the month of February to this committee for your consideration, and you will be seeing those soon.

We'll be working with your staff to make sure you're updated and clear on what all those are.

We have a working group of external community members representing not only at-large individuals, but people associated with various organizations, and we're making sure that's staffed up and ready to go.

They meet once a month at this time.

And so if you want to know more about who those folks are, I can make sure your staff gives you that update.

We have a lot of information available on our websites and we'll be doing some public engagement.

here as we get ready to launch and bring to this committee and then to the full council the surveillance ordinance reviews that are ready to go.

But I probably want to give you more information about how what that process is and what is the law and how does that work and that's what I'm making sure your staff is aware of so we can help answer questions.

Is there anything specifically I can answer for you?

That's fine.

Gives you kind of enough?

Okay.

Thank you.

I think we will all be interested in a deeper dive I know that I have many questions, and I know that this wasn't part of today's presentation, and so I'm holding my questions.

And I know that you also have brought on staff some very knowledgeable folks, such as Finn, with some deep institutional knowledge, and I look forward to taking a deeper dive to really be able to protect the public's privacy.

Absolutely.

That's the goal.

So we have two parts of our program.

One is a regular privacy review we do for everything we acquire, and when necessary, we dive into the surveillance part.

So I'm happy to give you an overview of both.

Would you like us to do that in this body, or we can talk later about how you would like to see that?

Probably both.

Okay, great.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Okay, our second item of business will be read into the record.

appointment of Kevin Werner as member levy to move Seattle Oversight Committee for a term to December 31st 2021 appointment number one five two seven Come on up to the table

Thank you very much.

Thanks for joining us.

Good morning.

Have introductions?

Yeah.

Rachel McCaffrey, SDOT staff liaison to the Levee Oversight Committee.

My name is Kevin Warner.

Thank you.

So you are, you're up for an appointment, and do you want to give us a little bit about your background and why you would like to be on the committee?

And I think you've been attending the meetings, too.

I actually have not, but I'm happy to have you.

Oh, okay.

I thought you'd been to one.

I think you can introduce yourself.

Okay.

So, as I said, my name's Kevin Warner.

I am excited to be here.

I actually passed a sign on a park and a part of an art installation in my neighborhood this morning at 1 a.m.

that I never noticed before.

And the sign said, get involved, make a difference.

And that's why I'm here.

So I would say I have sort of two reasons for interest in this particular committee.

The first is exactly that, to get involved and give back to the community.

I've been a lifelong civil servant.

I'm a scientist and I've worked for the federal government since 1999. So I believe in civil service, I believe in the power of collective action, but I also believe in the power of local government where you all work and local government really is sort of closest to the people.

I, you know, love what I've done in my career and I think the federal government has the power to do really important, great things, but it's really local government that is closest to the people.

So I'm excited to have this opportunity for that.

The second motivation is around transportation, which is obviously the mandate for this committee.

I've had a sort of lifelong curiosity and interest in transportation, especially in urban environments, and especially sort of public transportation, public infrastructure, and that it really is sort of what brings us together as a people.

And in urban environments, we all, you know, obviously live a lot closer to each other than elsewhere.

I did grow up in Seattle.

I moved away in the 90s and came back a couple years ago to find a much larger city than I left in the 90s.

So I'm excited to sort of dive into these issues and see what they look like.

That is my opening statement.

I appreciate your science background as well.

I attended the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee last night, and I know that they will appreciate, they're excited about the prospect of having you there, and you can bring that lens to it.

Obviously, reducing, dealing with the crisis of climate change is paramount for us as we're dealing with it as council members, lots of different pieces of legislation.

We're actually gonna hear a presentation from City Light today about about climate adaptation.

So I'm pleased with you bringing that background to the table.

Any questions from my colleagues?

No, I think it's great that Council Member Strauss and I were at a climate action event last night.

This is a huge issue.

People are very interested in making sure that we are doing everything we can to reduce carbon emissions and your science background was noted.

So it's helpful, thank you.

Thank you.

And maybe if you could just share how your science, I mean, you have a very extensive science background, very extensive publication, a list of publications.

How does that translate into this work?

And, you know, when you left in the 90s, it was a very different sized city than it is today.

And so how has, in your opinion, transportation priorities shifted in that time?

I mean, that's a great question.

I think as you increase density and acidity, the need for public transportation and density of transportation certainly increases.

And I've certainly seen, you know, lots of examples in Seattle of us doing exactly that as a city.

You know, for example, the, you know, the sound transit initiatives and the light rail and, you know, all of the sort of efforts to increase in density of transportation I think are important as the city increases in density.

That's your second question.

Your first question on science.

I mean, for my career, I would say the two animating things that I've really motivated me in my career.

One is the power of public service, which I already talked to, but second is the power of science to make the world a better place.

And I think that's true across a whole bunch of disciplines, a whole bunch of problems.

My career is focused on environmental science and environmental problems.

But I suspect that it's, you know, similarly true in transportation and many other fields that science can bring tool sets that are important to management problems.

And I suspect I'm going to learn that in this committee.

I'm very excited to have your science perspective and data-driven approach to looking at how we can use our Move Seattle levy dollars as best as possible.

So I'm excited to have you on board.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So any additional questions, colleagues?

Otherwise, I'd like to move confirmation of appointment 1527, Kevin Werner, to be on the Move Seattle levy oversight committee.

Okay, all those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Okay, approved.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Welcome aboard.

Thank you very much.

The next item flows naturally.

Please stay here.

The next item flows naturally from that appointment.

We are going to hear a report from the MOVE Seattle Oversight Committee.

So Committee Clerk, please read that into the record.

Move Seattle presentation by the Seattle Department of Transportation and the Move Seattle Oversight Committee.

All right, we're going to get your presentation queued up here.

Go ahead and have a seat.

Where do you want to go?

I'll go there.

OK.

Is that not normal?

Thank you.

We're just going to get the presentation queued up here.

Musical chairs.

I appreciate everyone's patience while we get queued up.

I saw this presentation last night, so I'm not as antsy about it.

Where are those technology people?

Thanks, Calvin.

I've done this in a while.

And of course, the IT department just left.

We're getting someone to help.

Great, thank you.

Well, let's start with introductions and appreciate everybody being here.

Absolutely.

So Sam Zimbabwe, Director of SDOT.

Lorelei Williams, Deputy Director of Capital Project Delivery for SDOT.

Rachel McCaffrey again, Levy Accountability Manager in this capacity.

I'm Rachel Ben-Shmuel and I'm co-chair of the Levy Oversight Committee.

Thank you.

And if you'd all just pull the microphones really close, that will help Seattle Channel and the viewers, the millions of viewers at home right now.

So I'm just here to kick it off and turn it over into the very capable hands of Lorelei and Rachel.

But this is our opportunity with some new council members here to reintroduce where we are on the levy to move Seattle.

We've done a lot of work as a department since the 2018 levy assessment and a lot of hard work in terms of both delivering projects but also making sure that we are clear and transparent and accountable to the community.

and to the Levy Oversight Committee.

You'll see some of the numbers in later slides, but we'll also be back a little bit later in 2019 with our, or 2020, with our 2019 full levy assessment and report that feeds then into our 2020 work plan.

So it'll be a little bit of both looking forward and looking back in this presentation today.

All right, so and then starting with our vision and mission and just calling attention to the fact that the levy itself allows us to pay particular attention to our safety, equity, sustainability and mobility goals particularly.

And so the levy itself is key to furthering our mission and vision.

and then a short presentation overview.

So as Sam alluded to, part of what we wanted to do here today was just give some of the background on the levy, because there's quite a bit of it, back to when it was passed in 2015, and then bring you up to to date with where we are now.

So we will start with an overview, then we'll talk about delivery highlights, about the approach we now take to progress reporting, and as well as talk about the levy oversight committee role that Rachel is here to help represent too.

So the overall levy to move Seattle.

So it's a $930 million levy.

That is just the base amount of the levy funds.

We also have leveraged in local funds that we use to further advance and deliver more with that $930 million.

Within the levy program, we have 30 subprograms.

So whenever you open a report, and Rachel will get into this later, but there's a lot of detail around each program and where we're at.

Those 30 programs are put into three primary categories of programs, which is what we show on that slide, safe routes, maintenance and repair, and congestion relief.

And so we stay true to that framework as we report.

And the levy has...

Within those 30 programs, there's large projects like our Northgate Bridge project that we're actually celebrating starting today, as well as just basic maintenance and repair tree planting type of activities.

So it's very broad for us in terms of what we deliver with the levy.

And along those lines, so what this slide represents most of all is the size of the Bridge and the Gap levy that was the nine years prior to this Move Seattle levy compared to our current Move Seattle levy.

So it's about three times the size, which is really great for the investments that we can make in our city.

And the challenge with that, and this is just walking us back a little bit to even 2015, when the levy passed at the end of 2015, we were uncertain as to whether it would pass.

So SDOT as a department was both preparing on some level for it to pass, but also preparing for it not to pass.

So when it did pass, which was a wonderful thing, it meant that we had a lot of ramp up and development work that we needed to do to be able to start being able to deliver on the levy.

And moving to the next slide, and I'll give just a little more background, but there was a lot of frustration from the public as far as, and even our oversight committee, as far as how quickly we were delivering on the levy, particularly in the first couple years.

The expectations for spending had been put forth pretty much in a linear fashion, expecting that we would deliver essentially a ninth of the program in the first year.

And frankly, we weren't ramped up with staff and we weren't prepared yet to be able to deliver on that level.

So the way we're delivering on the levy, the curve is a little more of a ramp up and then a peak.

that we're actually entering into the peak of delivery right now.

In addition to that, the design phase of projects doesn't spend as much money as the construction phase, so that means that we, that contributes to that curve also.

After the levy passed in 2015 was when inflation really started to take off.

So both the kind of broad, not always specific expectations that were in the original levy language, as well as cost escalations, led the mayor to challenge us to say, I want you to take a full look at the levy program.

and be really honest and transparent about what you can deliver with the money and funds you have.

And that included changing expectations of grant and leverage opportunities, as well as some of the changes were in the Transit Plus Multimodal Program, where the expectations originally were that we would do rapid ride on all seven corridors.

That didn't necessarily line up with the funding we had or even King County Metro's funding timeline and plans.

So those type of issues are what we did a full complete assessment and then published in November of 2018 the work plan that details where we're able to meet all the original expectations, which is the majority of the programs as far as number of programs, but also the places where we feel as though we're expecting to fall short because of the funds that we have available to be able to do it.

And so we did that in November of 2018. And what we have been doing since, and Rachel will now key into some of the details of that, has been working to rebuild the trust and the transparency in both what we share as well as prove our ability to deliver on the levy.

And so 2019 for us was frankly a huge rebuilding year for the levy.

All right.

Take over and make a slight transition to talk through some of the highlights of delivery, so moving on from the background.

Starting with the, I call them the three big levy bridges.

These are some of the biggest investments in the portfolio and each unique in their own right, but very transformational.

And as of like this month and last month, all underway, which is a pretty big milestone for the portfolio.

So first, the Lander Bridge, which has about $19.5 million in levy funds towards the total project of $96 million, is building a new overpass in Soto that will connect people in all modes over the active rail trucks down there.

That project has been in construction since 2018, and we'll wrap up later this year.

Then the Fairview Bridge that we started construction on just last year is replacing the last timber vehicle bridge in Seattle, so that's over in the East Lake neighborhood.

We closed traffic on that in September of last year, which is pretty major.

milestone as well.

And then third, the Northgate Ped Bridge, which we're celebrating later today with the mayor and council member Juarez, is starting construction to build a new walking and biking connection over I-5 and Northgate to connect communities on both sides of the freeway and to the light rail station coming up there.

If you can believe it, I have been working on the Northgate Ped Bridge since 2014. So, job well done.

You're not alone.

It's very exciting.

As I referred to earlier, the kind of process of design and ramping up to these big steps.

So the fact that the three major bridge projects that are part of the levy are now all under construction is a huge thing for us in fulfilling on what we committed to.

So I'm pivoting a little bit from those big capital projects to that nitty-gritty basic asset maintenance that Lorelei mentioned.

One slide is certainly not enough justice for these, but as an example, some highlights.

Some maintenance programs funded by the Move Seattle levy include our paving program, so both We've been doing a lot of SDOT crew-delivered work, which to date we've delivered a little over 34 lane miles, as well as the larger capital projects delivered by contractors, and to date we've delivered over 80 miles.

We also are building new curb ramps.

Since 2016, about 540. Restriping crosswalks on a four-year or better cycle, and then planting trees with a levy So Envision Zero is another program we wanted to highlight.

This is obviously a very important program, and I should say that throughout, we're giving highlights on a lot of things that represent a large amount of SDOT's work, so the department can come back for further detail beyond this sort of high-level swath.

So the Vision Zero program does a lot of things, of course, but as part of the levy specifically, we're building out safety corridor projects, both large-scale multimillion dollar investments like those on 65th, Northeast 65th Street and Rainier Ave South, and also smaller traditional projects that include signal timing improvements, crosswalks, turn restrictions and markings to clarify the road for safety.

Sam, did you want to?

I just want to interject here, too.

I mean, I think Rachel said this, but Vision Zero is an example of a program that crosses over from the levy to other funds and other programs within SDOT.

And so it's often a challenging communication piece for the department to explain how all of these different complex moving parts fit together.

But this is an example of how we make investments through the levy that advance this larger goal and program of Vision Zero that also gets leveraged with other funds that are not necessarily a capital or infrastructure that are around education and sign replacement and things like that that don't end up in the levy reporting but are still part of the important Vision Zero program overall.

All right, next we have the new sidewalk and bike safety programs.

Very important parts of the portfolio.

Showing some of the levy to date totals.

I should also mention it's noted on the slide, but since we're ahead of putting together our 2019 comprehensive annual year end report, these levy totals are everything we've done so far through Q3 of last year.

So we'll have more on the 2019 year end in a few months.

So sidewalks, we've built over 100 blocks so far citywide since 2016, which includes both traditional concrete curb and gutter sidewalks, as well as cost-effective walkways, which are much less costly and carve out that pedestrian space with asphalt and curb stops.

the like.

Do you have a question?

Just complimenting you and anything we can do to move faster.

I know that we have so many parts of our city, North End and South End, District 6, District 5, District 4 that still need sidewalks, so thank you.

Also about 115 safe routes to school projects, which are of course near schools, do a lot of similar work as sidewalk segments and crossing improvements.

And then the bike program combined between neighborhood greenways, protected bike lanes, and regular bike lanes have built out over 30 miles so far since 2016. And of course, earlier in 2019, the bike program put out the 2019 to 2024 implementation plan, which outlines about 50 more miles to be built with available funding through the remaining years of the levy.

And then the Transit Plus, this is of course another like Vision Zero huge aspect of our delivery that we can come back to give more detail on.

But these are the seven rapid ride and Transit Plus multimodal corridor routes as part of the levy with their status as of last year.

Madison and Delridge being the furthest along and looking at starting construction this year.

Just a couple additional comments for that.

So as far as current state, in addition to the bridges, these corridor projects, particularly Madison, Delridge, and Roosevelt, most specifically, are the the large projects that we are delivering with the levy.

So seeing this move forward will also help us continue to spend and invest the money that we have in the levy.

As far as the project specifically, Delridge is expected to go to add later this month for construction is the expectation.

We are submitting a memo to council here before then that is in response to a proviso that was passed on the project last year that will detail all of the things that we have done on the project between 90 and 100% and also answers some questions that were asked by the council last time we were here presenting on Delridge.

So that will be forthcoming this month.

So that's something to look for, followed by advertisement of the project for construction.

Madison, BRT, we continue to work with the FTA to advance towards readiness, which is basically the point where the FTA says, yes, you have done everything you need to do to show that you can deliver this project, and we, therefore, will proceed with working to get you a grant agreement.

So that is where we have been spending most of our efforts on that project recently, and we're in regular communication with the FTA.

and regularly providing them updated documents that respond to the comments we've received from them about the things that they want to see us do to prove us ready for the project.

And then Roosevelt, last but not least, is actually currently in, we published the EA and it's, Councilmember Peterson, you know this well now, we've talked about this a number of times over the last couple weeks here, but it's in the EA comment period and the comment period for the EA closes February 14th on Valentine's Day.

So that's where that project is at.

So definitely advancement of those larger corridors as well as we have begun design on all the other four corridors that are A little different in that they're not the full rapid ride delivery.

They don't have FTA grants that we're pursuing for them.

But they are corridor-wide improvements.

Things such as stop improvements, transit, signal priority, queue jumps, you know, sidewalk improvements.

All things that help us with the speed and reliability of the transit systems on those corridors.

Councilmember Strauss.

Yeah, we know that moving the freight of people is how we will get folks through and around our town while and reducing congestion and I just really Since the levee reset.

I've been very impressed with all the work that Estat has done to be able to Allow transit to have reliable travel times so that whenever you go to the bus You know how long it will take you to get where you're going and I know that there are a number of additional improvements There's a spot that I was on the bus this morning.

That is always in gridlock and I know and I'm confident in your work to to address this.

So thank you very much for all you're doing.

Definitely, and I, this isn't in the slides, but off the cuff comment, there's been a lot of effort and movement towards a much, a very well-evolved partnership between us and King County Metro, something Sam and Rob have led both teams in, and so it's been exciting to see, and these corridors are one way it's been highlighted, just how successful we can be when we work really well together between us and King County Metro.

I'm making notes along the way, so maybe I'll just lay them all out, and you can address them as appropriate.

So District 2 obviously has the most dangerous street in the city.

This continues to be the case, and we just had an accident near Columbia City two Fridays ago.

So my questions are about safety, and I would like to know how this work, because I don't see reference to the fact that we still have a serious problem on Rainier Avenue.

So I would like to know how these projects and the delivery connects with the effort to actually reduce accidents, you know, incidents for pedestrians and for cyclists and what we're doing to make sure that folks on Rainier Valley but also, sorry, on Rainier Avenue but across the city know that this is really a priority.

For me, the ability to increase reliable transit is key to making sure that we're able to get folks across the city, cross town, you know, not just commuters, but people are able to rely on public transportation to get around and do the errands that they need to do in their neighborhoods.

Whether they're on the bus or, you know, in my district we've got lots of folks who have vision impairments, who use wheelchairs to get around the community, and they need to be able to get around too.

And they need to be able to do it safely, which means we need to slow traffic down on our major arterials, and I know that's a challenge.

But that is a huge issue in our district.

And so I want to understand how crosswalk installation, not just maintenance, but installing new crosswalks across some of these major arterials is considered.

I am interested in how we can improve sidewalks, particularly around our schools so that kids can walk to school safely.

I want to know the percentage, I should know this already, but I don't, the percentage of bike lanes relative to our bike master plan and what the plan is for increasing that.

And then with regards to the rapid ride on the 7, that is, as I'm sure you know, controversial.

The 7 is a huge, you know, has high ridership, and people don't use it just to commute into downtown.

People use it to go to the grocery store and take their kids to daycare and go see their neighbors and go to the doctor in the neighborhood.

So it's important that we not lose stops.

along the way because people need to get off much more frequently.

And so I guess a question is whether there's consideration to a local that will make more stops along the way if people aren't just trying to get through quickly to come to work downtown.

So those are all questions that we can follow up on, but those are the kinds of things that I'm thinking about as we think about how to make sure that people get around our community safely.

I think those are great questions and things that, you know, some of them might, we might want to come follow up either at the committee or separately just on specific projects.

I think you're highlighting though also where the, what we do through the levy is one set of activities of SDOT.

It's about 30% of our overall budget is coming through the levy.

But there's a lot of other things that are going on.

In terms of how we prioritize levy funds and those other investments around safety issues, we've developed the Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Assessment, which is a proactive tool.

We're one of only a couple cities in the country, we're really the first ones to develop this tool of trying to look at where crashes have happened across the city, and then use that to proactively look at places that have similar conditions, where there may not be reported crashes, there may not be, we may not have had crashes, but that have the conditions that are likely to indicate crashes in the future, and try to target and prioritize our investments in safety for people walking, people biking, in those places, which highlights the investments that we have and continue to make all along Rainier and in the broader Rainier Valley and D2 overall.

We've made consistent improvements and some of those happen in various, through various different programs.

And then we have additional major safety investments going on in Rainier, on Rainier over the course of this year.

Some of those funds are coming through the Seattle Transportation Benefit District, not through the levy of Seattle.

So it's, we're always managing these various buckets of funding that we are using and then also trying to report on very clearly through the levy oversight committee and the reporting we do there.

Thank you.

Yeah, that about says it all.

Just thinking the other couple of thoughts I had was accessible Mount Baker is another area where we are doing specific bike and pedestrian work that is funded through a program in the levy also to address some of that.

And then there'll be regular reporting both on the bike master plan and implementation plan, but obviously that overlaps with our levy reporting and what we plan to get done.

So you will see it in both places and formats.

Okay, to make sure I don't miss the slide, I almost missed.

So thank you, Rachel.

So this is an example of the type of information we share in our quarterly reports and the level of detail that we have shifted to.

And so what you see on the left is our annual spending trend and it speaks to what I was talking about earlier about how it started a little bit slower and it's increasing.

Through Q3 of 2019, we were at $556 million in total.

So that's against the 1.8 that we had in the earlier slide.

So including leverage and local funds, not just the $930 million levy.

And then on the right-hand side, you see our quarterly spend.

And what we do every year, And this is an interesting task, but we have definitely improved on because our projects don't just live isolated in one specific year, but our spending plans do.

So last year, we went through an even more rigorous process to identify our spending plan and assess risk.

so that if we had risk of not spending the money, we shifted some of the money into later years.

And we also represented our spend plan for 2019 with a range.

So instead of just having one number, which the chances of us hitting like one singular number, pretty much zero, we gave 190 to 218 million range of what we expected to spend for 2020. And we are, we're still finalizing all of our 2019 numbers, and that'll come out in the annual report, which is why Q4 is not filled in here.

But preliminary numbers are that we actually exceeded that 73.7 expected, which is in some ways the balance of what we didn't do in Q3, and that we think we'll be right about at the higher end of that range.

And the good thing is spend is important, but spend without the deliverables to back it up actually could mean you're spending too much.

And so the good news is that our spend is in alignment with the deliverable.

projections and predictions we have and so we're feeling very good about what we did in 2019. We're excited about the annual report and being able to present you and the levy oversight committee with that and looking to continue that effort in 2020 and beyond.

And then I have one more slide for Rachel.

So moving on to levy reporting.

So as part of the feedback from the 2018 assessment and this need to be more transparent, clearer, more consistent, and really accountable to what we're delivering and what we're spending, we have a new report format.

It's not so new anymore.

We've been doing it for a little over a year now.

and have a library of documents.

So it's a quarterly report that goes through some of the financials like Lorelei just went through on the last slide and the deliverable progress.

They're put out quarterly on a regular schedule as noted here to get at that consistent and reliable expectation.

The quarterly reports are against that one year's deliverable and spend plan.

They're kind of a snapshot in time against that amount, whereas the annual report, which is what we're working on right now for 2019, is a cumulative look at the levy totals since 2016. So the annual report should come out March 30th, and we'll share it with the Oversight Committee and here as well.

Those are the two categories of progress documentation, and we also have the work plan report from 2018 that was a forecast document looking ahead at the remaining years of the levy, what to be delivered with what funds available.

We're looking at a similar portfolio status update document later this year to give a new realistic look since two years, about two years will have passed since the work plan.

Thank you.

And then last, but definitely not least, is the Love You Oversight Committee, which you're familiar with, Council Member, as a member now.

So the committee is a group of 16 members, including the Chair of Council Transportation Committee, City Budget Director, and Seattle residents appointed by City Council and the Mayor.

They are an advisory body that reviews project implementation, expenditures, and provides recommendations to city council and the mayor.

We, as we've kind of talked about over the last 15 minutes or so, have sort of turned a leaf in 2019 to be working more closely with them more often.

So we meet about monthly, 10 times a year, meet with subcommittees, prepare materials and responses information requests and whatnot, and put out these reports on a more reliable schedule to be more in coordination with them.

And I'd like to reintroduce Rachel Ben-Shmuel, who is one of our co-chairs of the Love You Oversight Committee.

Good morning, council members.

Good morning.

I've been on the Levy Oversight Committee since 2016, since its inception.

And since the reset, there's been vast improvement in the Levy Oversight Committee relationship with SDOT.

Kind of tough going at first, but particularly there's been improvement since 2019. Here are the steps we've taken.

There's a more streamlined review process.

There's more consistent reporting from SDOT staff on projects and budget.

The reporting format itself is more comprehensible.

And to accomplish this, as both Lorelei and Rachel said, we're meeting more frequently and setting up subcommittees.

Finally, you know, as a result of all of these steps, there's now, I think, considerable trust of SDOT by the Levy Oversight Committee, a huge change since the reset.

Thank you for your service, and it was great for me to be there last night, and thank everybody there for their volunteering on this.

And there were really great questions asked by members of the oversight committee, and SDOT had answers.

So it was great to see it functioning well last night.

Rachel, I can't thank you enough.

I share your thoughts and feelings about how things have changed since the reset.

And the reset did come under our current director, Jaron Sparman, possibly.

And, you know, the troubles that you and I had shared previous to this were under an SDOT director, that is no longer here.

And so I really want to compliment Director Zimbabwe's leadership, the entire team's leadership, in being able to meet the metrics, produce the documents, and create outcomes that we can all see and enjoy.

Thank you.

And just one other note, so we tentatively plan to come talk to this committee every quarter to go through our quarterly report.

But I wanted to make sure that each of you knew that at any time if you have a project or part of the levy that you want to spend some time and dig deeper in with us, we're happy to meet with you at any point.

Thank you.

And we'll be receiving a letter from the Oversight Committee sort of reflecting back on 2019. I know one of the issues raised last night was about the previous City Council adding projects and responsibility to the Oversight Committee regarding the TNC funding, and they added seven projects.

And so I think the Levee Oversight Committee was was getting a handle on those, and appropriately asking a lot of questions about those, and hoping this city council doesn't pile on projects, but sticks to what the goals were from the actual Move Seattle levy, is what I was hearing last night, but we'll see that formally in a letter, I suppose, that will be coming.

Yeah, I think it's important to keep that focus.

You know, you've added the TNC, but There's so much to review at this point that it's really important that, you know, that the committee has a grasp on the range of everything that SDOT is doing so that it can report appropriately.

Thank you.

Thanks again for your service.

Any other questions or comments, colleagues?

Great.

Well, thank you all.

Thanks for being here.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

OK, we'll read the final item of business into the record.

Seattle City Light Climate Adaptation Plan.

So we'll invite everyone up here.

Welcome.

Welcome.

So you guys have two, five, you have three files.

So I guess it's a little bit complicated.

There's three.

We'll give us a moment as we get the presentation up on the screen.

Present.

So whichever one of you is good on PowerPoints, I've got to get rid of this one.

There we go.

Great, so let's do introductions.

We'll just start with you, thanks.

Good morning, council members.

I'm Tom DeBoer.

I'm the incoming environmental officer at City Light.

And I'm Kate Engel.

I'm the science policy manager at Seattle City Light.

And I'm Rhonda Strau.

I'm the Seattle City Light climate change adaptation advisor.

Lynn Best, and I'm the outgoing environmental officer at Seattle City Light.

Thank you.

Thanks for being here today.

So I'll just do a brief introduction and turn it over to the meat of the presentation.

Kate is the manager of the science policy group, or science policy division at City Light that manages the science, real deep science work.

And one of the projects that came up is this climate assessment and adaptation project, which Rhonda is the scientist that's actually doing the work.

So I'll just turn it over to her and she'll go through the presentation.

Thank you.

Right?

Well, thank you very much for having me here, and I'm delighted to be able to tell you about CLC Light's efforts on addressing climate change.

And this is from an adaptation perspective rather than the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

So today I'm going to talk a little bit about our vulnerability assessment and then the adaptation plan that we developed.

So in our 2013 to 2018 strategic plan, we launched a climate initiative.

And in that climate initiative, we had three primary components to it.

That was to provision a climate change advisor to staff that initiative, to identify a research program, to research the climate change impacts on the utility, and then also develop a utility-wide climate adaptation plan.

So, in 2015, we completed our Seattle City Light Climate Vulnerability and Adaptation Plan.

And so, this plan had three primary aspects to it.

First, identifying observed and potential changes in climate, evaluating potential impacts, and assessing the vulnerability of our utility to those impacts.

And then third was to develop adaptation strategies that help minimize those impacts.

So this figure gives you an overview, a picture of what that vulnerability assessment contained.

At the bottom, there are five different business domains or functions and assets that the city of Seattle City Light owns and manages.

And at the top, there are different climate stressors, and there are eight that we focused on, and those including sea level rise and storm surge, warmer temperatures and more frequent heat waves.

but changes in extreme weather patterns, increases in wildfire risk, landslides and erosion.

And we also looked at reduction in our snowpack because of the warmer temperatures and how that might change the stream inflow to our reservoirs.

Then we also looked at higher peak flows because of more increasing downpours and how that can affect maybe our flood risk.

Then on the flip side, during summer, with warmer temperatures and drier, less precipitation in the summer, a longer drought period.

So how is that going to affect our stream flows to our reservoirs?

And so we were on the bottom, I didn't list it, but there was the five domains we looked at were our shoreline infrastructure, our electricity demand, our transmission and distribution, our hydroelectric project operations, and our fish habitat restoration and protection.

And we looked at how those eight climate stressors affected those five business domains and what was that impact pathway that we could then address.

So our approach to doing this assessment looked at the exposure for those different functions or domains and how sensitive they were to those different climate stressors.

Then we looked at, that gave us an idea of the potential impact.

Then we looked at an adaptive capacity.

And that means we looked at our business practices, our operations, our policies, things that could help reduce impacts from extreme weather events, things.

And so how could we potentially address those potential impacts already in our business?

That gave us an idea of what our vulnerability was.

And we undertook this assessment looking, you know, how is climate change going to affect our mission?

And our mission currently, although you heard from Deborah Smith, that I'm sorry she couldn't be here today.

That's our general manager.

And we're going to be updating our mission.

But currently our mission is to deliver affordable, reliable, and environmentally responsible electricity services to our customers.

So this is a very elaborate diagram, but this is extracted from our climate plan, which is available online.

It's a public document.

And this gives you an idea of how we did our vulnerability assessment.

And I'm just going to, since in the interest of time, I'm going to go through one example on this table.

We have those different business domains or functions on the left.

So this, for example, would be like transmission and distribution system.

And one of the impact pathways that we observed, or we identified as potential concern, was more damage, interruption of transmission and generation due to wildfire risk.

And then we looked at what was our vulnerability.

We looked at two different time frames of exposure, because climate change is expected to worsen over time.

So we're looking at more of a near-term exposure, in this case wildfire, and more further in time exposure.

And then we looked at how sensitive our facilities, our transmission distribution are to those.

And then what our adaptive capacity.

And so you'll see the different dots colored there.

Those are like a traffic light.

So the green would be we're looking pretty good.

It's a low ranking for that particular vulnerability category.

Yellow is a moderate.

And then red is something that we need to really be paying attention to.

It's a higher ranking.

And then on the far right are those are those potential magnitudes to our mission.

And we looked at, you know, financial costs, safety, reliability, and environmental responsibility.

So in this case for transmission of wildfire, it's something that looks like it's going to worsen, our exposure is going to worsen in time.

We have sensitivity to it currently, so things can burn up.

And then we also have some adaptive capacity in order to, we can minimize that through some of our, like vegetation management, for example, actions.

But it has, it could have potential for high cost, high safety issues, moderate concern with reliability.

In this case, it wasn't applicable for environmental responsibility.

So this gives you a snapshot of how we went through our vulnerability assessment process.

And in the interest of time, I'm not going to go through all of these in detail, but I was just going to give you three examples of the key impacts to different domains.

So I mentioned the hydropower operations.

So we're really looking at how the changes in stream flow because of loss of snowpack and how that's going to change more in the winter generally and less in the summer.

some of the key impacts for less electricity demand is really the shift in the seasonality of our electricity demand.

As things get warmer, the temperature gets warmer, we're gonna expect to see more demand for electricity for cooling in the summer, and then less demand for heating in the winter.

Some of the things that we saw as an impact from climate change.

Just a third, another third example, we already talked about this a bit with the wildfire example, was our transmission and distribution.

And I'm not going to go through all these, but we can be impacted by wildfires, landslides, changes in flooding because of more intense rainfall.

So those are some of the things, the impact pathways that we identified in our adaptation plan.

One of the things we're very proud of is that this plan was the first in the nation to have developed such a comprehensive affordability assessment and an adaptation plan.

And so because of that, we received an award in 2016 from a consortium of 12 federal agencies that was chaired by the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA for their outstanding leadership in advancing the resilience of natural living systems in a changing climate.

We're very proud of that, and people have been using our adaptation plan, other utilities, even other agencies, as a model.

So given those impacts, we want to look at like, okay, what are, what is our actions?

What are things that we're actually doing that people really care about?

And so our implementation of that plan includes four main parts.

Collaboration, because it's very important to work together to solve these issues.

Research, projects and actions.

And then education.

And I'm going to talk a little bit more about the first three.

Education is sort of an ongoing thing, like coming and giving this presentation.

So like I said, collaboration is very important because climate change is something that we need to work on together.

We can't just solve it independently.

So we are a member of multiple different organizations that are helping to work on this issue.

One is Department of Energy's Partnership for Energy Sector Climate Resilience.

And this is a federal effort with 16 or 18 other utilities that are participating and trying to identify ways that we can make our our whole U.S. energy sector more secure in a changing climate.

We're also involved in SEADI, and SEADI stands for Center for Energy Advancement Through Technological Innovations.

And this is a user-driven organization, so an industry organization that's looking at how we can adapt to climate change.

And we're focusing mostly in that group on hydropower operations.

So just in general, we are partnering with lots of other folks in research and adaptation.

This includes the Sonoma Indian Tribal Communities, Soxhawtl Tribe, USGS, National Park Service, the Forest Service, universities, and Mount Shosan Greenway.

So we have a lot of partners in order to carry out our implementation plan.

The other aspect of our plan was research.

And so we do a lot of research.

We lead it or we support it collaboratively.

And stream flow, as you can imagine, is very important for our hydropower.

So we've been doing modeling of future stream flows and using that information to help with our Skagit hydroelectric project relicensing with FERC.

And we're also going to be using it in our integrated resource plan, or our IRP.

That's our long-range plan for 20 years, looking at how we're balancing the energy load from our customers with our energy supply from generation or from contracts.

We're also doing research on water temperature modeling for our reservoirs, landslide in the future, what hazards that's going to change.

We're monitoring and doing research on glaciers because that contributes during and melts in the summer to our low stream flows in the summer.

We're looking at smoke and how energy use can change during those smoke events as people have to close their windows and buy air conditioners or air filters.

And then we're also looking at changes in extremes.

And these are extremes in temperature, cold or high.

and wind and lightning, some of the research we're doing.

So I want to move right on to some of our projects.

Wildfire, wildfire is, we've been concerned with wildfire long before even those terrible stories we've heard out of California.

And so we have experienced a wildfire at one of our facilities, our Skagit Hydroelectric Project, you may have known.

And that was the Goodell Creek fire.

And that burned seven square miles.

And it threatened the town of, our company town of New Halem and our Gorge powerhouse.

It damaged our transmission lines and shut our transmission lines down for about nine days.

It also shut down Highway 20, which is access to our facilities.

We had to evacuate our company town of Diablo and our other two powerhouses.

And so in the end, it cost us over $2.5 million in repairs, firefighting, evacuation, and emergency management, plus an additional about $1 million in supplemental energy purchases.

So we got reimbursed most of this, about 87.5% from FEMA and from the state because it was an emergency situation.

But that event really highlighted how glad we were that we were preparing and there's more things that we could do to shore up our infrastructure, to be more wildfire resilient, working with our neighbors for vegetation control, making more defensible spaces around our facilities.

So we've been working on that for the past several years.

If I may, I think that while we are here in the city and we have lights and we have cooling and we have heating and we have the amenities of an urban environment, we often forget about the assets that we have throughout our region and in very intense wilderness places.

I was actually on my way to backpack.

just outside of Diablo when the Goodell fire occurred.

This was the fire that took the lives of a number of firefighters, is that correct?

That's correct.

You know, so I also want to recognize and honor the lives of our firefighters.

When I was in AmeriCorps, I was red card certified to be a wildland firefighter.

I ended up doing more fuels reduction than I did firefighting.

And when we look at the transmission lines that are in the Skagit Valley, some are hung between cliffs just above the river.

And so while we sit here in an urban environment and we get to experience the benefits of our infrastructure, I think too often we forget the immense maintenance, operations, and resiliency that we need because these fires can really take out our infrastructure in a way that the lights stay on here only because of the back-end work that you do at City Light.

Yes, thank you.

I appreciate that.

And if I might just add, it's not just our facilities.

We rely on the entire grid system, Bonneville Power.

So all those facilities cut across the state and across the passes.

So it's just not City Light facilities, but they're all at risk.

So another one of our projects I wanted to highlight was another part of our business is restoring fish habitat for declining Puget Sound salmon and our trout species.

So as part of this, we purchase lands in our watersheds and restore them to be resilient today as well as in the future.

So this is our Stossel Creek project that we are going to be doing an adaptive reforestation project on.

And this is the Tolt Watershed.

We'll be reforesting with species, tree species that are sourced from here locally, but also from conditions that are warmer and drier in California and Northern California and Oregon.

So we're gonna be replanting those in the next few weeks.

So stay tuned and be here more about that great project.

And then lastly, I wanted to share this cool project because it's hot off the shelf.

This is a really good collaboration with universities and with tribes and Skagit's Client Science Consortium.

This is a new stream flow tool up in the Skagit that we developed.

So it's important to take information, the science information, and put it into something that people can use as a tool and to translate that and not be able to use that in designs, long-term planning.

So this tool is now online.

It's publicly available.

It's interactive.

And this gives you an example of one thing you can look at.

You can pull up the tool.

You can select our reservoir site.

And you can look at how monthly stream flow is going to look.

in the future compared to historic.

Historic are the black lines, colored lines are the future flows.

But you can also then look at a different time in the future, like later in the century, to see if it's gonna be the same, is it getting worse?

So then we can use plans.

So an engineer could be using this to plan a culvert on one of our access roads so that it lasts into the future as flows change.

So lastly, this adaptation plan has been in place for about five years.

We've been implementing it, but we think it's about time to, you know, check on the information that's out there and update the plan.

And this includes advancements in climate data and impacts and new adaptation strategies or priorities, then an action implementation plan portion of it, and then adding metric baselines and reporting structure.

So stay tuned to hear more about that in the coming year.

And with that, any questions?

You know, I really just can't thank you enough.

I think Seattle City Light is one of our best assets to be able to fight climate change and the climate crisis.

As we know, we have about 10 years, maybe 12 years at most to make very large behavioral changes in how we operate and live.

Otherwise, this world may not be inhabitable.

I mean, that's a reality.

I mean, we're already 50 years past climate change being a known entity And, you know, we've only really started to address it in a meaningful way in the last maybe five years.

We've had many climate action plans that have missed their marks, underperformed.

And if we don't, and that's because we've been nipping and tucking around the edges.

If we don't make large scale, bold changes to the way we live, we will not be able to.

And, you know, with the forest restoration, the salmon habitat restoration, the way that we're able to generate energy without creating carbon emissions.

Granted, I have some other comments about dams, but I'll save that for another day.

You know, it really is the full ecosystem that we need to be looking at and the way, and I'm just so proud of City Light for being the greenest utility in the nation.

And I'm just really proud of your work.

So I look forward to working with you because the city has to make some pretty whole scale changes to address climate crisis.

I'll wait.

Okay.

One of the things the city council is going to be doing, hopefully, is while you're doing the groundbreaking work, with City Light, we are gonna be looking at every piece of legislation, I hope, actually asking questions about emissions and climate adaptation.

So we're gonna be working with the Office of Sustainability and Environment, but it's for any piece of legislation.

So there'll be a resolution coming before we'll actually change and institutionalize how we look at legislation to add that climate element to it.

And we'll be benefiting a lot from the actual work you're doing on the ground.

This is all new to me, so I ask your indulgence.

I'm interested in where our electricity comes from.

I know the bulk of it is hydroelectric, but I don't think that's all of it.

Given the anticipated increase in electricity demand, can you talk a little bit about what our plan is for addressing that and what it means for where our electricity needs to come from, what the plans are for addressing that?

Go ahead, Gil.

Thank you.

Yes, so we are, unfortunately, Deborah Smith was supposed to be here.

She's not here.

I'm sure she has some opinions on this, but she would like to share.

But generally speaking, we are looking at, we are anticipating as transportation electrifies, our load is going to go up.

As buildings, all the electrification is going to cause an increase in our load, even though over the last few years, due to conservation and distributed energy, it's been decreasing.

So we are anticipating that growing.

The pace of growth is the question.

We anticipate it will be fairly slow growing, but that probably depends more on what you do than what we do.

Where that's going to come from, we don't have a lot of choices in this state.

I mean, it's going to have to be renewable.

The fossil fuels are no longer allowed or are being phased out.

So it's going to have to come from wind, solar, or other storage technologies.

They really are our only options.

And, you know, everybody's doing that.

Puget Sound Energy has to transform their fleet from, you know, a heavily fossil fuel to less.

And so we're all in that same market, and it's going to be very challenging.

I was just reading an article this morning from Hawaii where they're having challenges trying to get to 100% renewal just because of the land use issues of putting that much wind and solar.

So those are going to, and transmission is going to be a huge issue.

Wildfire is a huge issue for transmission.

So there's some significant challenge coming, not just for City Light, for all of us in the region.

Yep.

Thank you.

Well, thank you for coming here.

And colleagues, any more questions before we conclude the meeting?

I just want to say I woke up to the article, I'm sure we all saw, about the push to just get rid of gas-powered cars at all and how that was a crazy idea when it was first discussed.

But now there are actually 10 legislators in Olympia who are signing on to a bill.

So I don't know that it's going to pass.

It seems unlikely.

But I want to encourage us all to continue to think boldly about what we need to do, because this is a crisis.

And I've told this story many times, but my 12-year-old son is worried that he's not going to make it to 25, because he knows that we only have 12 years before we have a real crisis on our hands, a catastrophe.

So that's always in my mind as I'm thinking about what we can do at this jurisdictional level to make sure that We're protecting the future for our kids.

Thanks.

And I believe, and I'll have to recheck with the city clerk's office and the municipal archives, but I believe that there was a proposal in the 1970s that downtown would be electric car only.

And so, again, this is 50 years later after these technologies were initially developed that we are only now making meaningful action on them.

And so we're 50 years behind, which is why we have a deferred maintenance to really deal with.

And so, again, I want to thank all of City Light's work, and thank you, Chair, for a wonderfully run committee meeting today.

Thanks, everybody.

Well, if no objections, we will adjourn the meeting.

Thank you.

Thanks, everybody.