Seattle City Council Briefing 8/5/19

Over and share your corner No Okay, well good morning everybody.

Thank you for being here for a regularly scheduled council briefing on Let me give on August 5th 2019, thank you for being here So a few things.

He's trying to run a meeting.

Oh, sorry.

I'm talking to you.

No one's listening.

We're listening now.

In a very serious note, I do want to begin our meeting by acknowledging what happened in El Paso.

I think the whole world and certainly our country's shaken up.

The death toll is now at 21. Federal officials have confirmed that it was an anti-immigrant I don't know what kind of effort given the fact that the manifesto was written by the suspect and I don't know what, I mean, just my heart goes out and I'm hoping that our flag flies at half mast today.

I see that it's not, but perhaps those that make those decisions would at least consider that at least today or this week.

But if anyone else wanted to share any thoughts or observations about that.

The tragedy just keeps going on, and the concern is we also had the mass shooting in Ohio last week, the Garlic Festival.

It keeps going on.

At what point are we going to be able to step up and do something that really is going to make a difference?

I know we're nibbling around the edges in the state of Washington, for which I'm grateful, but it sure would be great to be able to take a big move, and that's going to require more than just city and state by state.

You know, there's been less than 24 hours after that, there was actually another mass shooting, lesser people in Ohio, Dayton, Ohio.

I think there's been around 32 or so this year.

It's a bad thing that's happening in our country.

It's unprecedented at this level.

So anyway, if anyone else wants to share any thoughts or observation, I'll give you the opportunity.

Otherwise, I'll just sort of move through our daily routine here.

Everybody good?

Council Member Gonzales?

Thank you.

I would just say that is it obviously anytime there's a shooting of any kind, whether it's mass or a one-off as a result of guns that should probably not be in the hands that they were in, It is an incredible tragedy.

And when we experience a national event like what just occurred in El Paso, I think it's important for us to call out what the motivation was there.

It wasn't just anti-immigrant, it was anti-Latino period, regardless of whether people were born in this country or born in a Latin American country.

it is fundamentally motivated by white supremacy and racism that is being fanned at the national level, including by President Donald Trump.

And I spent a lot of time over the weekend reflecting on what it means to me as somebody from the Mexican community and somebody from the American community to find myself in a situation now where it is dangerous to leave your home and walk in a space as a result of this deep hatred that has been fanned by the federal government and has been sanctioned by this president.

And it is a sad moment, a dark moment in our history, but I believe that we can all come together and that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel.

And I know that President Trump earlier today or yesterday mentioned that we need to speak up with one voice against racism and white supremacy and hatred.

And I hope that we can speak up with one voice in November of 2020 to resound when you say no to a man who has certainly doubled down, tripled down, and has really endorsed and enabled much of the hatred that we are seeing come through our country.

suggest that four women of color who are congressional leaders be sent back to their country, wherever he thinks that might be, and then not expect there to be repercussions in our country as it relates to hatred.

And in the El Paso incident, it is very clear that this young man was motivated by hate.

and racism specifically towards the Mexican-American community.

And it's a tough moment.

And I know that we have a large population of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans across the country and certainly here in Washington State.

And I think we have an obligation as elected officials to say publicly that we're gonna continue to stand with those community members and that we will do everything that we can to protect and to disavow, protect them and to disavow of hatred like the one we saw over the weekend.

Thank you.

Thank you Councilman Gonzalez.

Councilman Juarez?

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Gonzalez.

I'm glad that you shared those thoughts.

I just wanted to add, I know we talked about this before, those of us that are older, the open season on Mexican-Americans and Americans that is race-based, it's not all about, as President Trump said this morning, about video games and the dark recesses of the internet.

or mental health.

This is just pure hatred that's coming from the President of the United States.

And as we know, when you have a thought, a thought turns into action, and sometimes that action turns into violence.

And that's what we're seeing now.

I think what scares me now, as I'm older, is that this feels like what was going on during the Civil Rights Movement.

where it was open season on anyone of color.

And this is the time when we talk about allyship.

It's not enough to say I have white privilege and I acknowledge it, or I've had things that other cultures have not had or been denied.

This is a time for other people as well, besides our communities of color, to step up and say something and do something.

And I agree with the people that chanted in Ohio this morning against, I believe it was their officer, governor, or their mayor, do something.

And I'm hoping that we do something.

And I really want to thank Council Member Gonzalez and Echo, because I know we all feel this way and we felt this way.

after other shootings as well, but this one is particularly hateful and particularly painful because we know that it's race-based, at least what happened in El Paso.

So, thoughts and prayers aren't enough and I'm hoping that people are listening and they're going to do something.

So, thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Juarez.

Council Member Esqueda.

Thank you, Mr. President.

On our Every Other Week blog, we're going to be also writing about this this week.

And I'm pulling from an article, an essay that was written two years ago, outlining then the consequences of gun violence and As a reminder for folks, we know the consequence of mass shootings like this.

They get highlighted in the media, but the reality is that mass shooting is usually defined as four or more persons shot, killed, or injured at one time.

And so the reality is that mass shootings happen on an almost daily basis, literally on a daily basis in the United States.

And while each one of these four people or more shootings may not make the headlines that we see, like the three incidents that happened in a very short period of time over this long extended basically weekend, we know that there are massive amounts of people who are dying on a daily basis.

due to guns, due to gun violence, and especially in schools and public places like our markets, like our gathering places, are creating fear and they're folding into the racist and xenophobic and I would even say an extension of a assault on women.

If you look at the most recent one that occurred in Ohio, that individual had targeted women in the past and in his shootings killed his own sister.

That targeting also occurred in a heavily populated area with African-Americans.

Councilmember Gonzalez talked about the shooting before that in El Paso being targeted at Latinos.

And in places across this country, we see how both racism and The presence of guns and the unregulated nature of guns in this country is causing mass shootings that are not getting covered on a daily basis simply because of the prevalence of those guns.

There's an important, I think, report, or I guess I should say, book by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz called Loaded, A Disarming History of the Second Amendment.

It was put out in 2018, and in the book, the author talks about the Second Amendment itself being very short and precise and easy to memorize.

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

However, it is the NRA and the people who have taken that short, short exploit out of our constitution who have turned it into something else and weaponized it, literally weaponized it to inflict harm on our communities.

We have an opportunity now to look at the original wordening of the Second Amendment and know that it has not been altered in any state, but that it has been altered in its meaning and used by the NRA and now by racist, xenophobic individuals.

And we have an opportunity to say that this was never the intent of the Constitution.

This was never the intent to put arms in the hands of regular everyday folks who are carrying out messages of hate that are being perpetuated by our Trump president by the Trump administration and to also never, never fall for this being a mental health related crisis.

Of course, we need to access more mental health dollars in the country overall.

And our state has led the way with the Alliance for Gun Responsibility of getting guns out of the hands of folks who could potentially be a harm to themselves or others.

But this is an intentional use of the words of the president and the intentional strategy of the NRA to put guns into our community and the prevalence like we've not seen in other places.

And let's not also fall for the excuse of this being related to video games.

We've seen the statistics time after time.

This is not related to video games, a mental health crisis.

This is exactly because we have too many guns in our community.

And I applaud our state and our city for standing up, but we're not gonna be fooled by the language either in how people have manipulated its use in the constitution or by Trump hiding behind these hollow words of solidarity against standing against hate and racism when we can see through it and we will stand up.

Thank you, Council Member Esqueda.

Okay, thanks for all those comments.

Very impactful.

So let's go around our agenda for today or this week.

Nothing for vote from the Governance, Equity, and Technology Committee up for today.

Let me begin the meeting as we do now by saying that Councilman Juarez, Bagshaw, Mosquito, Pacheco, Gonzalez, and O'Brien are present.

And if there's no objection, the minutes of the July 29th, 2019 meeting will be approved.

hearing no objection those minutes are being approved and so as I was saying that the governance equity and technology committee will meet Tuesday tomorrow at 9 30 and there are three matters up for vote one would be a the consideration of a code revisor position in the city attorney's office and we've been working on this for a while this is coming from the city attorney's office and our own central staff and looking at this code reviser position which is sort of founded in state law and state law gives us some authority and flexibility to do this but we've seen over the years a lot of discrepancies and retroactive corrections that are necessary and we have two legal assistant or paralegal types of positions in the city attorney's office now and we want to be able to place an attorney in that position, and we think that that will make the legislative process run much more effectively and efficiently.

The second issue is a bill that authorizes the FAS to enter into a 15-year lease with Cascade Public Media, formerly known as KCTS, and that is the allowance of our antenna system to allow us to operate the radio and antenna system on Cascade's Capitol Hill Tower.

And the third one is our technology matching fund where we distribute approximately $320,000 of city funding to support 11 new projects in community-based projects.

And it's matched by 302,000 from the award recipients, many of whom are grassroots community-based organizations.

So I look forward to that legislation as well.

I do want to alert you that we did receive, I think Friday, a letter from the Mayor indicating the Executive's intention, or now action, on vetoing the Sweetened Beverage Tax Bill that we all overwhelmingly passed.

We received it Friday, and I'm open to suggestions on how to handle this administratively, but my intent at this point is to let it, to put it on vote for next Monday, such that we can deal with this efficiently and effectively.

But I'm all ears for any feedback, but my intent again is, I think it's quite candidly just a complete waste of time.

to do this.

And I'm not sure the substantive reasons for doing it other than making us re-vote a vote that was not even a narrow vote.

And I thought we established a pretty clear record on our rationale.

And this will give us an opportunity to reiterate, I think, the false narrative that's out there about us making decisions that are hurting some of our most most vulnerable or some of our housing needs.

I think that that's a false narrative.

And again, we can clarify that on a re-vote, but that's my plan is to put it up for a re-vote next Monday.

But if you have any comments, I'd like to hear them now.

Council Member O'Brien.

I appreciate your words on this, Council President Harrell, and I fully support that.

I've been on the council for 10 years.

This is the second time I've been through a veto, and it's been, I believe, nine years since the last one.

But my understanding is that from the veto, we have 30 days to take action, and we have to wait at least five days from providing a certain public notice around it.

And I believe that leaves only the one full council meeting on the calendar for us to do because of our recess coming up.

Short of scheduling some sort of special meeting.

I think next Monday makes a lot of sense It's probably as soon as we could practically do it and I see no reason to wait any longer than that customer customer anybody I'm happy to weigh in I also appreciate council president Harrell your your comments.

I have been very you know, frankly disturbed by some of the rhetoric that I've heard coming out of the executive including the mayor's office, but also her agencies that have really done a disservice, I think, to what our role is as a city council, which is to be the budget appropriation authority to make tough decisions about budget issues.

And I think this is really, the veto is really more about a statement against this mayor wanting to see her executive power curbed as opposed to the substance of the issues because I think on the substance of the issues we prevail.

It is clear that the sugary beverage tax has always been intended and it was our initial oversight admittedly to not be clear in the language in the ordinance to ensure that these dollars were going to be spent in exactly the manner that we have now indicated they should be spent.

And we all can appreciate that revenue is a rare source for us at the city and at the state, but that doesn't mean that we should turn a blind eye to what the intent of the original ordinance was.

And so I'm very supportive of moving forward.

And I would note for you, Council President Harrell, that I will actually be out of the country next Monday on August 12th.

I am happy to take advantage of those portions of the council rules that would allow me to call in for purposes of this vote.

if that is okay with you.

That is certainly okay with me, and we'll work through the administrative logistics of that, assume we could do that, and we'll start working on that immediately once we talk to our IT folks.

Okay, that's my report.

We can go around the room.

Council Member Juarez.

Thank you.

Good morning again, everybody.

Last week the civil development public assets and native communities considered four items, but before I get there, I want to do a quick update and kind of a heads up for my colleagues.

We've been working very closely on the Missing Murdered Indigenous Women Resolution and some legislation to follow with the Seattle Indian Health Board and specifically Estelle Lacerro and Abigail Elkohock for the draft.

And we are actually going to start implementing what this legislation would look like and to have a response to this systematic response to this crisis that we are seeing in our cities.

And as you know, Seattle has the highest number of missing murdered indigenous women.

So we hope to have that done and ready to you with any of your comments or concerns before the end of the week.

And so we're happy about that.

I want to thank the city attorney's office and King County and Chief Best and the mayor's office who've been very supportive and hopefully we'll be working with the budget chair.

on what that means in the future.

So if we move forward on this and we have this particular liaison whose job it is to work within the city and all these Native American urban organizations as well as Indian country, and responding to this, we would be the first city hopefully to do this.

And so I'm excited about this.

We've been working on this issue for well over a decade.

Okay, so let me just quickly go through what our committee did last week.

We received a presentation from the Outdoors for All Foundation, which is a nonprofit dedicated to providing outdoor and recreation access for kids and adults with disabilities.

It's a wonderful program.

It's located in Magnuson Park, but their reach is statewide.

I know many of you have went out to Magnuson and met with those folks.

Like I said, it's a great program, and I encourage my peers to watch their promotional video to learn more.

It can be found on the link in the agenda, which is item four, which is posted online.

There'll be three ordinances that passed out of committee that are up for final vote this afternoon.

One in District 1, an ordinance regarding Duwamish Park acquisition for open space and recreation purposes.

We're very excited about that, expanding more parkland.

Number two, an ordinance regarding parks accepting art donation to be placed in the University District's Christie Park, and an ordinance regarding parks accepting money and property for Sun Park located in Laurelhurst.

So District 4 is going to receive more park property and some foundation money to continue the work that they've been doing for parks and activating them.

Parks and Rec will be hosting their big day of play on August 17th.

This is a wonderful event that is free for communities and families to enjoy food trucks, recreation booths, and fun activities.

It will be located at Rainier Playfield and the Rainier Community Center in Southeast Seattle.

I've attended one of those before and they're actually pretty cool.

We've had a couple end up in D5 as well.

For more information, please visit parkways.seattle.gov.

Now, this is our big event.

As you know, this is our fourth annual.

Wait, I won't get to that.

I'm going to do this one first.

Sorry, I got them in reverse.

On Saturday, I went to the annual Lake City Seafair Festival, where Mayor Durkin, King County Executive Dow Constantine, and I honored Eric Stark, as you know, our Metro bus driver, and Deborah Judd.

who were heroes in the aftermath of the Lake City shooting this past March.

Eric is a Metro bus driver who was hit in the chest by a bullet but yet managed to still pull his passengers out of harm's way and park the bus.

And Debbie is a beloved second grade school teacher at Laurelhurst whose first concern after arriving at the hospital from a bullet injury was for her students.

I got an opportunity on more than one occasion to meet both Eric and Deborah and they're amazing people and it was wonderful to honor them and do a proclamation and a prayer and it was a community event and it was packed and everyone was grateful.

So, second of all, Live in D5, it'll be our fourth annual, fourth annual folks, Live in D5 event.

It's this Saturday, August 10th from 1 to 4 at Hubbard Homestead Park.

I hope my colleagues will join me.

We'll have live music again featuring three local bands as well as the local DJ.

This year live in D5 we'll have a petting zoo again for Councilmember Mosqueda.

Great food.

Last year United Indians did salmon and fry bread and this year we have a res Native American food truck from the Tulalip Nation coming down.

and a beer garden, and it's, of course, you have to pay for your beer, it's not free, but admission is free.

Live in D5 will have tables featuring community groups and key city departments, so people in the district can easily access ways to get involved and support their community.

Last year, we had well over 50 community booths in city departments, and we had well over 300 people that showed up.

I'm hoping that my colleagues will show up.

Councilor Mosqueda came last year, and she was great on the stage introducing the bands.

So thank you, Councilor Mosqueda.

Councilor Bagshaw has shown up in the past, and I appreciated that.

Any of my colleagues who show up or want to, it's up to you.

But if you do, just let us know, and I will make sure that you get an opportunity to get on the stage and introduce a group.

And also this year, we're really excited because Council President Harrell and I are going to be doing a duet together.

So, right?

You haven't picked the song yet, but you told me you were going to get back to me on that.

I'm going to practice.

Since you didn't do the dunk tank with me.

Yeah, you backed out of that one.

So anyway, you may have seen the posters, as you know, they're plastered everywhere, which I'm pleased, features the artwork for I did not put this in my notes.

I've seen it for the first time.

I probably should have read this ahead of time.

Artwork by my husband, Michael Dupil.

Just saw that.

Glass artist.

Michael did the t-shirts, and he did the artwork, which is basically a Blackfeet feather.

So you'll see the beads on there as well with the Blackfeet colors.

So anyway, you are all invited to attend.

It's our fourth annual, and it is located at Hubbard Homestead Park.

which is located right behind Northgate, behind the Target store, and I hope to see you all there.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We have one item this afternoon on our Finance and Neighborhoods Committee.

This is actually an ordinance that would raise the wages of the hydro maintenance workers.

These are the folks that work at Boundary Dam in Northeast Washington.

So happy to move this through.

Total annual expected expenditure is $77,000.

So it's not one of the bigger ones we're going to be touching.

We also, this past Thursday, we had a special meeting and thank you Councilmember Gonzalez, Councilmember Pacheco for joining me on that.

We are going to be having five ordinances that are going to come forward to yet another special meeting this Friday, August 9th.

My intention is to vote on them.

This is the second time that they will be in front of us.

These are things that came up at the end of the year, including our CIP retirement grants and accepting supplementals.

So if you've got any supplemental, Budget ordinance information that you want us to get in you've got to get it to us this week one example that I brought up last week is a nurse practitioner that we want to have on-site at DESC We've actually found money to pay for that for the remainder of the year So if you've got something supplemental you actually have to find the money and help us do that So this will be in my committee on Friday.

We've got multiple things to vote on I have no reason to believe it will be slowed down and then I've asked the clerk for us to put this on our full agenda a week from today so we can vote this out and be done before briefing on these budget items that pertain to 2019.

Thank you, Council Member Bakeshift.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Good morning, everyone.

I am circulating a proclamation for your consideration today.

This is in support of the Art Workers Union who are at Frey Art Museum.

As you know, we've talked actually in the council briefings before about the workers at the Frey Art Museum.

They're craftspeople who throughout history have brought forward support for labor and other progressive movements.

And they themselves, though, have been long struggling with low wages, working conditions, and to get a voice on the job.

And they recently formed a union.

On June 10th of this year, these workers succeeded in forming their union called the Arts Workers Union.

And in light of all that we are celebrating this year, honoring labor, which we started 100-year celebration of the Seattle strike and some of our commemorative comments and proclamation on WTO, for example.

This is a great way for us to continue that extension of celebrating labor in this city, and we want to congratulate them on both their contract, the formation of the union, and the work that they are doing to raise the voice, especially for art workers in this city.

Thank you for considering signing, and thanks also the mayor for signing on to that as well.

There are no items from the housing health energy and workers rights committee on today's full council agenda Our next of committee meeting will be on Thursday next week on August 15th.

Well, we will be bringing Our committee start time to 9 a.m Again, if folks are able to join us, I appreciate you coming and I want to thank my committee colleagues especially who have gone out of their way to come at nine last week.

We're doing this in an effort to try to get as much time as we can on the agenda so that the second part of our agenda can really focus on hotel worker legislation, which has been a pretty robust discussion.

Thank you, Council Member Gonzalez, as a co-sponsor of that, for being at all of those meetings as well in the latter part of the meeting.

So just for folks to know, from nine to about 10, 15, We will have a conversation and public hearing on the first two items on the agenda, which relate to sort of an element of a Green New Deal-esque-like bill, which are two bills.

One is pushing forward a new solar program at Seattle City Light so that we can do a better job of installing solar panels for some of our midsize companies throughout the city.

The second one is helping to make sure that we are creating an opportunity for Seattle to join the Western Energy Imbalance I guess market and this allows for us to bring more of our clean cleaner energy on to the Western Market and I think that these two items are really great I would love to be able to move forward a vote on those two in our committee that morning and then we will take public comment on The hotel worker legislation.

We'll have a briefing discussion and possible vote on amendments.

So you'll see the last hour and a half, if not two hours, totally devoted to the hotel worker legislation.

Again, if you do have amendments, the request has been sent out last week, we will send a reminder this week.

Council Member Gonzalez and I have asked for those amendments to be due back to central staff by Thursday this week, August 8th at noon.

Thursday, August 8th at noon, and we'll send a reminder out from our office later this week.

You should have received one on Friday or Thursday.

just to make sure that we get all the ideas in as early as possible.

And then, before you go on, on the amendments, to be clear, it's just on parts one and three, correct?

Yes, so just by way of reminder to folks, this is related to the safety elements, protecting workers from harassment, assault, et cetera, and on the healthcare elements.

So you can see parts one and three in the full binder that we sent out with an updated timeline for that.

have an amendment already in that aligns with the request from ACLU in their June 25th letter just to remove the ban.

We do have amendment language that we are currently working on.

Had a chance to talk to central staff late last week along with some of our council colleagues and And also give a kind of a broad overview to folks in the executive office.

We'll be talking to stakeholders as well this week So the concerns that the ACLU have raised have definitely been heard and there is an amendment in works We should have that to be able to circulate to all of our council colleagues before the end of this week And thank you to Karina and to Dan eater who both collectively have been working to address those concerns and think through a process that will I think be a will receive by many of our council colleagues and we'll get the chance to talk to stakeholders very briefly, very soon.

I want to say thanks again to the Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action and Social Security Works along with Congresswoman Jayapal.

We had the chance to speak this weekend in celebration of the 54th anniversary of Medicaid and Medicare and the 84th anniversary of Social Security with a great turnout.

Q13 covered it and really wanted to not just call for the celebration of those programs and the protection of those programs but the expansion of Medicare for all which was well heard at the rally and sending our message to DC in support of those changes as well.

This Thursday I'll be speaking at University Heights on the vehicle residency community forum.

I'm not sure if other folks are going to be there but I'm looking forward to that discussion as we think about how we get our most vulnerable folks in safe places, if not inside, to make sure that they are out of harm's way and have access to amenities.

And case management, as we know, is critical for helping to stabilize folks.

And that's it for me, Mr. President.

Thank you, Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Pacheco.

Good morning.

So there are three plus related items on introduction and referral today.

Resolution 31896, a comprehensive plan amendment docketing resolution.

Council Bill 119597, which revises incentives for open space in South Lake Union to facilitate open space preservation at the old Seattle Times building.

And Council Bill 119600, which updates our city SEPA policies to align them with state changes and make other improvements.

There's one plus related item on the full council agenda today, which is Council Bill 119471, clarifies the definition of a vessel.

This was passed unanimously by the PLEZ committee in June, but was held until now pending a required Department of Ecology review.

The next PLEZ committee meeting is this Wednesday, August 7th.

There will be three items on the agenda, the discussion and possible vote on the comprehensive plan docket setting resolution, a briefing and discussion of the city SEPA policy updates, and a briefing and discussion on the Planning Commission's Neighborhoods for All report.

And we have, we will be rescheduling the Lunch and Learn with Council Member Bagshaw on Wayfinders until after the recess.

Tomorrow, my office will be doing night out events throughout the district.

And we have on Thursday, the third annual food truck taste-off at Madison Park and Hangar 30. And I will also be participating in the U District Vehicle Residency Panel on Thursday as well.

Thank you, Council Member Chico.

Council Member Gonzalez.

Good morning.

Good morning.

There are three items from the gender equity safe communities new americans and education committee on this afternoon's agenda The first one is an ordinance relating to the city's criminal code this particular council bill would align the seattle municipal code with some changes that occurred during our legislative session in 2019 to allow the City of Seattle to continue to both collect DNA samples and to also upload them to what is referred to as the CODIS database post conviction that would allow an opportunity for some cold cases to perhaps not be be so cold anymore and to find some resolution.

So this is really a follow-up on Representative Tina Orwell's good work in multiple legislative sessions where she has been advocating together with survivors of sexual assault primarily on the testing and the dealing with the extraordinary backlog of primarily rape kits that have been collected not just at the state level but also at the city level.

So this is our opportunity to continue that trajectory of work and to allow for our city attorney's office and the Seattle Police Department to continue to collect some of those DNA samples after a conviction has been We have to make sure that the public safety system is secured for purposes of continuing on in efforts related to public safety and making sure that if there are other cases in which the same DNA matches up that those victims might be able to see some justice within our criminal justice system as well.

And the other two remaining legislative matters are simply clerk files.

One is from the Seattle Police Chief.

This is a clerk file with her annual report concerning activities related to the intelligence ordinance.

So this will be just an opportunity for us to file that publicly as required by ordinance.

The last is also a clerk file.

That's a chief of police audit report of the same thing, information related to intelligence that might have been gathered and utilized in the course of ordinary police work consistent with that ordinance.

So in both events, our office of inspector general reported to us that it appears that compliance has been had with those underlying ordinances.

although there were questions about the need to update our intelligence ordinance because it was written and has never been changed since I think 1972. And as we all know, intelligence and the way we gather intelligence is radically transformed and changed.

since then so that is work that has been recommended and it's my understanding that the Seattle Police Department and the Executive will be working on that body of work for some time in 2020 so those are the legislative actions on this afternoon's agenda committee agenda from my committee.

Secondly, I will not be having my regularly scheduled meeting this, I will not be having a committee meeting this week.

I will actually be in Denmark from August 9th through August 18th attending the Urban Livability Masterclass, which is sponsored by the Capitol Hill Eco District.

with fiscal support from the Scan Design Foundation.

So the master class is an immersion program that brings together government and nonprofit leaders and other stakeholders who have an understanding of issues related to Capitol Hill for a week of fieldwork, tours, and lectures, presentations, and workshops to study public spaces and public life in Copenhagen and in Malmö, Sweden to hopefully take some lessons away and some actionable strategies that could apply to Capitol Hill in this case in particular.

And so many of you know that there is a Capitol Hill ecodistrict, and this is really sort of focused on that particular neighborhood-based effort, which really focuses on sustainability to serve this very densely populated urban village.

And as it continues to grow and as we continue to understand and appreciate that this neighborhood has both opportunities and challenges with public space and public life as it relates to transit-oriented development opportunities, for example, this will be a really unique opportunity for me to join together with other Capitol Hill-focused stakeholders and other regional government agencies and nonprofit leaders to really take a look at how Copenhagen and Melmo have done a very good job with both sustainability and just creating safer public life and public spaces that are accessible to all with a focus primarily on pedestrians.

So really excited about representing the city council at that particular convening and we'll be gone for that week in order to attend that master class.

All right, good luck on that.

Thank you for taking the trip for all of our benefits.

Thank you.

Council Member O'Brien.

Thank you.

The Sustainability and Transportation Committee has three items on this afternoon's agenda.

I'm going to pass around something that's not what I'm talking to immediately, but you'll get it in a second.

The first two items are ordinances related to the street vacation at Seattle Children's Hospital that we began nearly a decade ago, I think.

One of those ordinances, it will be accepting an easement for the connection, like a spur connection from the Burt Gilman Trail to Seattle Children's Hospital.

This connection has been in place for a number of years, but finally have all the proper legal stuff in place so that the Parks Department can take over operations.

of that facility.

And once that is voted on, that is the final piece of the street vacation ordinance of the public benefits package that Seattle Children's was supposed to provide for the street vacations for their expansion years ago.

And so we will move forward with the ordinance to finally grant that street vacation that we gave conceptual approval to a number of years ago.

So those two items will be the last two items we'll have to do to finally wrap up nearly a decade's worth of work on that.

We also have an ordinance that will update the commute trip reduction program.

That's the program that's a state program that city opts into, which works with employers, largely the large employers, 100 employees or more, downtown core.

Nearly 200,000 employees are covered in that.

It's under 300 employers.

And so this is just an update to that program, an example of why the update.

TNCs didn't exist as of the last time we passed an ordinance, and so how those fit into the Commuter Production Program.

I'll just say that the folks at SDOT and Commute Seattle do an amazing job.

Seattle, especially folks who commute to and from downtown Seattle for the workday, is seen as kind of one of the best programs in the country for what we're doing, especially considering that our transit system is a little younger than some of the ones on the East Coast, but we still do some amazing work here.

And at the same time, If we're going to make a radical shift in how we get around our city, especially when it relates to climate change, we're going to need to keep doing even better work.

So that's it for this afternoon's agenda.

You may ask a question.

Thank you, Councilmember.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Just a quick question about this.

I'm sorry I wasn't able to weigh in earlier.

One of the statements of legislative intent that we passed last year was to try to look at the ability and the cost to provide free ORCA passes to our human service providers, a la our conversations that we've been having about the need to facilitate the ability for these folks to be able to afford to live in the city.

We talked about their wages and the contracts.

One other area that folks had raised was the desire to see these human service contracts get a ORCA pass.

Did that come up at all in this discussion?

I know that we just received that information maybe a month ago or so in response to the slide, but is there future opportunities you think to incorporate that concept into something like this or is that a different vehicle?

I believe it would be a different vehicle.

I mean, it's clearly related, but this specifically relates to the state law around commuter production, which specifically defines the types of employers and employees that are required to participate in a program.

It may involve some of the same parties.

I think that if Commute Seattle were willing to partner with us on something around human services and I know there's other efforts to figure out how we get more bus passes in more people's hands.

And so, but I would love to work with you on that and there may be some opportunities even in the coming weeks or months to do something about that.

Great, thank you.

Colleagues, we have, the committee meets our regular Tuesday meeting tomorrow afternoon.

We also have a special meeting Friday afternoon.

We also have a special meeting next Friday morning.

And so I passed around a sheet that lists the items that we will be discussing.

And I want to just take a minute to walk through this, if you'll grant me that.

There are quite a few items that we're trying to squeeze through this committee in the coming months.

And our meeting Councilmember Chico.

Thank you for being there last Tuesday.

It went three and a half hours I suspect these meetings will be pushing three hours to to get through all the items that are coming to us and I know that there's a lot of stuff going on in the summer and I just wanted to make sure that folks are aware of this, because there are some items that will be back before the full council as soon as next week.

Some of them are fairly significant, and I know with a lot going on, it's hard.

I just want to make sure folks can track this.

So I'll really quickly just walk through the items that'll be on this Tuesday's agenda, then this Friday's agenda, and I'll just highlight the ones that are going to be on next Friday's agenda.

And then I want to speak a little more detail about an ordinance related to the Green New Deal.

So we'll have an appointment on Tuesday to the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee, planning to discuss and perhaps vote on a resolution related to the Green New Deal for Seattle.

I'll speak to that again in a moment.

On the sheet that's handed around, it talks about a Green New Deal ordinance.

That will actually not be in committee on Tuesday, but it will be on committee Friday.

I'm walking that legislation onto the referral calendar this afternoon, and we'll pass around that legislation right now.

The Green New Deal Ordinance follows up on the resolution, which we will hopefully pass on Tuesday, which would establish a Green New Deal Fund and a Green New Deal Oversight Board to make recommendations to the city related to the Green New Deal.

We will have an informational briefing on the Transportation Equity Program from SDOT.

Streetcar Ordinance, we had a discussion about that last week and that is I'm planning to vote on that on Tuesday, tomorrow, so that would authorize an additional $9 million for continued design and engineering work on the Center City Connector.

My understanding is they believe that $9 million will be able to get the information That'll be enough to do the rest of the design work so that they have total cost estimates for if they choose to go forward.

I believe the mayor's intent at the moment is to move forward with fully funding the Center City Streetcar.

I'll let her speak for herself, but my understanding at committee was that This $9 million is necessary to understand all the cost implications of what the next step would be.

And so, not quite 100% committed until she understands what is in there, but that's the direction they're going.

And so, we have a decision to make as a council if we're on the same page with that.

And so, tomorrow afternoon will be when we'll be making that decision.

If folks have strong feelings on that and can't make it to committee, I would really appreciate hearing those.

So, maybe I'll pause now because I see a couple of hands going.

Great.

Thank you.

Council President, thank you.

Well, thank you Councilmember O'Brien for bringing this back.

I am going to support this effort of moving forward to continue to look at the design and engineering work, but I want to signal right now that I'm concerned on three particular areas that I don't think we've addressed.

One is the operational cost.

We know that we're going to be taking that over, that we're from Sound Transit Metro, that we've got additional costs just for the Broadway link.

I don't think we figured out yet that the lines that are not on dedicated lanes are going to cause delay.

I really want us to figure out what those operational costs are going to be before we sign up and say yes to the final, whatever the project is.

Also, just along the capital money, we've got some federal money, but there's still a big gap.

I don't know where that money's coming from.

So we need to be looking at that down the road of five and ten years.

And lastly, and this is something that I would, I feel strongly enough that I'm going to want to ask for a proviso at some point.

And it may not be for this $9 million because we need those designs, but we don't have yet in a way that looks at the system for freight mobility and deliveries downtown.

And it's something I've been asking and working with SDOT on for the last five years.

I'm talking about the entire system, you know, nine blocks from the water to I-5, but also all the way from Denny to Jackson and beyond.

There are more and more packages being delivered downtown, whether that's Amazon or UPS.

They're here.

The trucks are in the way.

They don't have places to stop.

They're circling the blocks.

So I've asked SDOT for literally a block by block, where do you drop the packages off?

Temporarily, what time are you coming in?

If you're trying to do it at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, which they do if they get delayed, But it just makes downtown that much more congested.

So this is not the first time.

It's about the hundredth time that I've signaled to SDOT that we need to have this.

So before we start digging up First Avenue, we really have to have a design that's complete about trucks, time, place, location.

And it's going to be a building by building, where are you going to drop it off, and at what times.

I appreciate that councilmember bankshaw and would love to work with you I think I heard a mix of things in there, but including perhaps some language and Legislation giving some clear direction on what our expectations are around a streetcar if we move forward Colleagues, the mayor's office is hoping that we would pass final approval of this at full council a week from today, which is our last scheduled meeting prior to our recess, so prior to September.

Obviously, we can choose whether we meet that timeline or not.

My intent at the moment would be to try to meet that timeline.

If folks have language that they want to incorporate, and we can get that in in time, that would be great.

If the general sense of this table, and for the folks that are not here at the moment, is that we're not ready to do that, then we need to wait another three weeks to do that in September.

You know, that's not the end of the world.

I think it's just a project that there's some urgency around, but I'm happy to follow the lead of the board.

I will support you moving forward next week.

I just want to be really clear that I don't think we've answered these questions on where are we getting the operating money, where's the additional capital dollars coming from, but this thing on the freight and the downtown system has not been fully addressed, and I want, first of all, signaling today that that's a very important issue for downtown, and we can figure it out, but we've got to dedicate some resources to doing it.

Great, appreciate that.

And another thing we'll have in committee, I've asked Calvin Chow from central staff to help lay out what we know about all the finances on this project.

It's been through a number of iterations.

Federal money, and so we spent a bunch of money on it that if we don't go forward is sunk cost.

Those are gone, so we want to identify what that's been.

We want to get a sense of what we think it would cost to complete this project.

We want to get a sense of that remaining money to be spent, how much of that is already allocated city money in the budget.

But that if we chose not to go forward could be reallocated.

How much is money?

We know there's tens of millions of dollars that we, additional money that we don't have, the mayor hasn't identified a source for yet that we need to use.

There's also partner money, including federal money, and I believe other agencies, that if we don't go forward would have to go back.

And then around the federal money, I think there's a big question mark too.

We awarded, I believe, a $50 million of a $75 million grant.

I think there's some question whether we would get the final 25 and even the status of the initial 50 because I think we have to resubmit for that because of the timing.

So Calvin will lay a lot of that out, plus the operating cost to about what we're doing on the existing two streetcar lines and what this would add to that.

So there's a lot of, not terribly complex, but a lot of numbers going on there.

And hopefully we can come to an agreement what all the numbers mean and then we'll have to make policy decisions from that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you, Mr. Chair of Transportation.

On the issue related to streetcar, one of the issues that I remember us talking about before was how much has the delay cost us.

So is Central Staff already providing a memo of the total cost of the, quote, delay at this point so that we have an understanding 9 million plus X has been the cost of waiting?

Is that embedded in any Central Staff memo so far?

I believe what we will see is a comparison to what the original cost estimates were where they are today.

I think there's going to be, you know, reasonable minds will disagree perhaps on why the cost distillation, how much of that was delay, how much of that was a decision to buy larger cars, which is causing redesign.

I mean, there's a lot of moving, how much of that was related to uncertainty around the federal grant process.

You know, change of administration had something to do with that too.

So I don't know that central staff's gonna be comfortable trying to say, allocate the cost, but they will be at the table, maybe be able to answer questions that we might have, and we can, you know, make our case for for how we would allocate that.

But my goal is to try to get them to be as clear as possible on the stuff where there's not disagreement about, and then the areas where we, how we would characterize things or what, you know, we think the likelihood of federal grants is or whatever it is, we can talk about those differences of opinions that we may or may not have here and hopefully make a policy decision moving forward.

All right, so that's most of what we're doing this Tuesday.

We also are going to have a briefing on transportation impact fees.

We've done a number of briefings on transportation and back fees, I'm committed to moving legislation forward, assuming we get a supportive ruling from the hearing examiner.

So just a reminder to folks, we were proposing in last December's update to the comprehensive plan to add a transportation project list, which was the first step, a necessary step, in creating a transportation impact fee system for new development in the city of Seattle.

We got challenged to the hearing examiner around the adequacy of our SEPA analysis to that transportation list that was going to go into the comp plan.

We're expecting a ruling this week or next week on that.

you know, a couple of things could happen.

One, the hearing examiner can say, no, the SEPA analysis was adequate, at which point we could move forward with transportation impact fees.

And so I'm charting a path that it will assume that.

So we'll have a briefing tomorrow, not on autonomous vehicles, but just the overview of kind of where we are today, what analysis has been done.

We have expectation that we would do some more policy work in September on transportation impact fees.

if we get the green light and then would ultimately take probably final action in the budget because there will be some changes to the capital program with that transportation project list and require an additional update to the comp plan.

So this is a hypothetical discussion about transportation impact fees.

hoping that we get a good, or at least for me, hoping we get a good ruling sometime in the next week or so.

Quick question on this.

So as far as I know, this is at least the third time in the last 10 years that we've discussed transportation impact fees.

More than that, but yes.

Are we building on the work that Council Member Rasmussen did?

about four years ago, because I know there was a lot of research.

We had some outside experts.

We compared ourselves with Bellevue and Renton and Redmond and everybody that's got them.

So.

If you've been tracking that closely, the conversation tomorrow will look really familiar.

Okay, good.

It's largely going to be a reiteration with a few updates.

So when Councilor Rasmussen was chair of the Transportation Committee, the city council approved a budget, I don't remember, but a few hundred thousand dollars for the mayor to do the necessary analysis, this was Mayor Murray, to do the necessary analysis to implement a transportation impact.

There's a lot of technical analysis that goes in.

The state law is pretty clear on how you can and can't do these programs.

And so that work started and then it stalled out.

And so about two years ago, the city council, because it became clear that the previous mayor was not terribly interested or was not prioritizing that work.

So the council, in its budget action, I believe two years ago, pulled that money, unspent money, out of the executive side and put it into the council's budget.

And then we picked up that consulting contract with the same contractor where they had left off.

And we've been moving forward with that.

Again, we were ready to take action this time last year.

We were going to do something in the comp plan in December, but that failed because of the legal challenge.

So we're working with the same consultants, and it is building on that work.

And a lot of the things you'll hear in the briefing will be similar.

So that's Tuesday.

That's going to be, if folks are planning to come, I would urge you to budget three hours for that meeting as opposed to two, and I apologize for that.

Then Friday, we're going to have another meeting.

It's at 2 p.m.

We're going to hear from the MASS Coalition.

That's an acronym for Move All Seattle Sustainably.

It's a coalition of transportation and other equity advocates who are looking for better transportation access.

They have been talking, I'm sure you've seen emails and other notes from them, and they've been active here in council the last few months, asking for a transportation package that they would like to see happen.

We will consider a bike safety ordinance.

This would, the intent here is to put some more laws in place similar to complete streets, but with perhaps a little more stricter requirements.

So as we're redoing transportation projects throughout the city, really making it clear that they need to be consistent with our pedestrian, bike, freight, and transit master plans.

And if the executive or the department want to deviate from those plans, requiring a check back in with council so that we don't end up with what we had on 35th Avenue Northeast where It felt like a decision was being made and the council wasn't weighing in on that.

We're going to have a resolution about the bike master plan implementation plan.

There'll be some similar language in that.

A bike parking resolution about expanding on-street bike parking.

This is also perhaps in support of other modes, like scooters, to have places where we can store these vehicles, or these transportation modes, whatever you want to call them.

And then we're also going to discuss red light camera revenue.

This was something that came up in the budget last year.

You may all recall that we previously had a policy where 20% of red light camera revenue went to school safety projects.

We suspended that for two years.

And this year's budget, which is mostly done, and next year's budget, which was, what's the right word, endorsed, I believe, assume that that revenue will be going to the general fund.

I'm interested in maybe reconsidering that for next year.

So we'll discuss some options in committee, but we'll not take a vote in committee, but Julie wanted to set it up for a budget discussion about perhaps rededicating that red light camera to either school safety or Vision Zero investments in the 2020 budget.

So we'll be discussing that.

Then on next Friday, just for a heads up, that meeting is at 10 a.m.

We're going to have a briefing on the Mercer Mega Block.

So, this is a big piece of property that SDOT owns.

Actually, it's two parcels of, well, it's like six parcels of property, but it looks like two separate blocks on the, let's see, it would be the northeast and the northwest corner of Dexter and Mercer.

There has been a process by which the city has been soliciting bids.

They've done a lot of work and the executive is ready to share with us and the public on their proposal to make a deal to sell those two parcels and talk through what's in that package of benefits.

The RFP we put out a little under a year ago had talked about things about affordable housing, about transportation, parks and rec facilities and a series of things and and they have something I've actually had a chance to see a little bit of it and I think it looks very promising but that'll be in committee next Friday the hope would be that we would have another committee discussion on that in early September and give authorization for the mayor to conclude the sale of that which will probably happen in late 2019 early 2020. Issues were before the hearing examiner on that?

On the Mercer Mega Block, I don't believe there are hearing examiner issues on that one.

Yeah.

And then the next one is, sorry, we'll have another discussion on transportation impact fees next Friday with the assumption that we'll have heard by the hearing examiner by next Friday.

If that hasn't happened, we'll make a decision about what we're going to do there.

Finally, sorry, Council President, I know I'm deepening into my credibility over the last few months, but I just have a few more things I want to spread around.

You got some goodwill.

Thank you.

Yes.

Very briefly, thank you, Mr. Chair of Transportation.

On the Mercer-Mager Block briefing, I will aim to be there at your August 16th meeting if I can for a portion of that briefing and definitely there in September.

I just wanted to signal my appreciation for the folks from Parks and Rec who have been hearing my strong desire to make sure that in addition to the affordable housing components and the community element pieces that we included last year, that we have take in every opportunity we can to build child care on site and so I look forward to have that being part of the report back in your committee and and really appreciate our interest in continuing to address the child care deserts throughout the city.

As I look at that region there's only about four child care facilities in that neighborhood and while we think of it being an access to high opportunity neighborhood where we think of it being an area where individuals who work in that region potentially have higher wages, we have to also consider the fact that we, A, want to make sure that everyone across the income spectrum has access to child care in that area as well.

People who are coming in to serve food and clean buildings and to work in the general area, they also need child care.

And also for folks who might have to commute in, We don't want them to have to rush home if they're rushing out of the city or to the outer elements of our city.

And childcare near your place of work is a great way to reduce stress in our community.

So looking forward to that presentation and appreciate their interest in working with us and the potential purchasers as we think about amenities that can help the entire city.

That's great.

Council Member Skate, I really appreciate your ongoing dedication, and you're not the only one, of course, working diligently to create more child care opportunities in the city.

And I've heard that the mayor's office and parks department have been having good conversations with you, but that's different than me seeing you all at the table talking about it in a public forum.

So I look forward to that.

I hope you can make it.

If you can't make that one, let's make sure that there's a chance for that to be discussed thoroughly.

The last thing I just want to mention, folks, I just passed around the resolution that we'll be discussing and hopefully voting on tomorrow around the Green New Deal for Seattle.

And it's a long resolution.

This has been developed with, largely driven by, community members who've been engaged in ongoing conversations with me, the same groups who asked us to sign on to a letter supporting the Seattle Green New Deal back in June and came down and delivered that letter with hundreds of other signatures to the mayor's office back in June.

Just want to say a few things about this.

This builds on the Green New Deal that's being discussed and led at the federal level by some, you know, amazing leaders on climate and equity that are doing some great work despite some really tough times in Washington, D.C. We know that with the current political makeup of Congress and this president, there's really no chance at the moment for a Green New Deal passing there, but we hope in the coming years there will be an opportunity And the urgency around this means that, once again, cities like Seattle are going to need to lead on this, and the federal government will likely follow.

But we're going to build off the framework that they've set up.

And my interpretation of that framework is we need to simultaneously solve the climate crisis, which is barreling down upon us, and a broken economic system that continues to concentrate wealth in the hands of a handful of people at the expense of, frankly, everyone else in our community, but most importantly, low-income communities, communities of color, immigrant refugee communities who are continually left behind.

And we need to solve both those crises simultaneously by following the advice and leadership of those who are most impacted by both of those crises, who are living the results of failed systems.

and also have the solution.

So lifting up the voices of folks on the front line, lifting up the voices of communities of color, immigrant refugee communities, low-income communities, and really center their voices in this work.

There is a real urgency around this because we know from a climate perspective we have about a decade to radically transform our economy and our cities.

And at the same time, We have to move very cautiously, because it's going to be really easy to do more harm to those very communities if we don't give them the time and the capacity to develop it.

And the tension between the urgency and the desire to move thoughtfully is a real tension that we're balancing here.

And those communities know that, and they are working diligently to move as swiftly as possible, but also to move as smartly as possible.

The resolution that I'm hoping we will pass out a committee tomorrow It has a number of points that I just want to highlight because there's some significant policy decisions in here.

Again, it's a resolution, so it's laying out a vision.

It's not binding in the same way that an ordinance would be, but it's certainly setting us up to take some actions.

It calls for us to have Seattle be carbon pollution free, climate pollution free by the year 2030. Back in 2011, this council passed an ordinance to be carbon neutral by the year 2050. And what we now realize is 2050 is not soon enough.

But this means that while we've been working very hard, doing some great work towards that 2050 goal, we are not even on track to hit the 2050 goal.

In fact, in the last few years, we've been losing ground on it.

And now what we're saying is we need to do that same thing, but in just 10 years.

And I'll be really clear what that means.

That means that in the next 10 years, our buildings cannot be heated by fossil fuels.

That means in the next 10 years, our transportation needs to be 100% electrified, which means that purchasing decisions that we as individuals and policies we put in place You know, we're not saying we have to eliminate all natural gas and all heating oil and all fossil fuels in our cars today, but it does mean the next vehicle you buy, you need to think seriously about what that looks like.

It means the next furnace you buy, the next appliance you buy, how are we going to use energy throughout our system?

And the urgency around that is going to require that we take some pretty bold actions if we're going to be true to those commitments relatively soon.

Some other things that this resolution will highlight that I think are great.

A strategy perhaps such as green zones, which is a strategy to prioritize public investments in neighborhoods that have historically been underserved and disproportionately burdened by environmental hazards and other injustices.

Explore the creation of free, prior, and informed consent policies with federally recognized tribal partners.

Create a fund and establish dedicated revenue sources for achieving the Green New Deal.

We don't have clarity on where the money would go for in that fund, but we would like to set up the fund and this oversight board.

There's also components about workers, making sure that we have a stable, well-paying jobs in the process.

We support living wage green jobs.

I talked about energy.

We're going to have to essentially eliminate fossil fuels in our economy in the next decade.

We know that there are a lot of people, even in Seattle, whose jobs and businesses depend on fossil fuels, and so that is something that we have to take seriously.

We need to work with those folks to have a just, reasonable transition.

If we leave it to only two years to make that transition, it's going to be really hard.

We've already put it off so long that we only have ten years to do it, but we can still do that in a thoughtful way, but we need to start acting immediately.

There are components about access to food and health, so these communities also need food and health access.

The resolution also talks about displacement work, building on some other work we've done, and on waste management.

Essentially, we know that our waste stream is a source of, well, it's a source of waste, and it also adds climate pollution, so reducing waste is critically important.

So that is a big resolution that hopefully we'll be passing out of committee tomorrow.

and hopefully at full council for a vote a week from today.

And so colleagues, I know that a lot of you probably will not be able to make my committee tomorrow, but if you have thoughts or input on that, we'd love to hear that from you.

Trees.

Do you have something in here about increasing urban canopy?

I don't believe trees are listed in there, so let's chat about what a good line there would be.

Okay.

Council Member Bryan, thank you, because I was looking through this and Your resolution is actually longer than the original HR 106 and more comprehensive.

So well done.

I particularly like, and I had read about this earlier, on the green zones and also the other information that's in here.

And for some crazy wonky reason, I've been following this whole Green New Deal stuff, particularly on the tribal side.

So thank you very much.

You bet.

Thank you for bringing this forward and I will definitely be pouring over it and I will come to a portion of your meeting tomorrow.

I can't sit for the whole thing.

So just want to double check.

There's two main things that I'm really interested in.

Can you speak to the language around labor standards in this and also anything related to energy efficient buildings?

That's a big policy that we're looking at coming from New York.

So those two issues.

So the resolution, pretty high level on both those.

So it definitely calls out that if we solve the climate crisis but continue down our failed economic path, we will have completely failed.

We need to do both these hand in hand.

And we can.

In fact, we must do it.

That's how it's going to work.

And so it does speak to the fact that the jobs that are created, the opportunities that are created in this work needs to be heavily focused on communities, and union jobs are a really important piece of that.

It also talks about, and this you'll see in the ordinance around the Green New Deal, which will be discussed on Friday, that on the Green New Deal Oversight Board, there are, it'll ultimately be 16 members of that board as envisioned at the moment, and two of those would be labor representatives on that heavily weighted towards frontline communities and folks doing environmental justice work on that committee, too.

So those are two areas where that shows up.

I think you asked me another question that I forgot.

Energy efficient buildings.

So it talks clearly about how we have to eliminate fossil fuel use for running our buildings.

And I believe there's language that talks about the components of that.

And we've said this numerous other times.

So one of that is we need to make our buildings as energy efficient as possible.

So they use as little energy.

And then the energy they do use needs to be 100% renewable clean energy.

Seattle's well positioned for that because our electric utility is amazing and is one of the largest first 100% carbon neutral Electric utility in the nation, which means that unlike other jurisdictions every time we convert someone from fossil fuels to electricity We have eliminated a hundred percent of the carbon emissions Because of that the rest of the world has a lot more work to do because their electric grid is Dirty including people in our surrounding cities, but Seattle is well positioned in that direction.

Thank you.

Council Member Morris.

I keep turning that off.

Councilor O'Brien, are you going to speak briefly to your resolution, your saving the orcas resolution that you have on today's?

Yes.

Did I miss that on the fourth council?

Thank you for that.

I don't know how I missed that.

I have a fourth item on this afternoon's council agenda, which is an ordinance.

And this, I want to give credit to Mayor Dworkin because her team has done a lot of work on this too.

It's an ordinance, sorry, it's a resolution calling out the Navy's plan for increased exercises in the Pacific Northwest.

Those include increased sonar testing and also explosive ordinances that the federal government's supplemental draft environmental impact statement is clear.

This will harm marine mammals.

And the science is pretty clear on this.

We know that it's damaging.

And the resolution calls on the Navy to reconsider their actions and mitigate the impacts.

on all marine mammals, but in particular focused on the orcas, which we know are just on the cusp of survival in the Puget Sound at the moment.

And the death of one or two of those orcas could be devastating to the long-term population of them as a whole.

I've been asked on that one, you know, what is the likelihood that the Navy is going to listen to us?

And on the one hand, I believe that our Navy cares about marine mammals and compares about protecting our shores and I think there's a path where they can do both.

This federal administration doesn't give me a lot of hope but I think the Navy is much bigger than this federal administration and I think it's important that we formally and informally from all of us share this with our federal representatives because they do approve the budget for the Navy and we think that they can get their attention and we can elevate the voice of citizens here.

I think that's right.

And I met with, during Flea Week, I met with a local captain that was here and a rear admiral.

And they brought this up.

They do care.

You know, the saying that came from the right stuff was, no bucks, no Buck Rogers.

And it's similar.

They care about what we think about them.

So it's worthy.

And I'll support you on this.

One other thing about thank yous.

Seattle City Light and Deborah Smith met with SDOT after we had the Thomas Street charrette a couple of weeks ago.

And I was just so impressed with Deborah Smith's willingness to say, all right, we've got a plan.

We're going to take another look at what we can do to increase the art, widen the sidewalks, working with SDOT.

And it was just such a refreshing, yes, we can get there.

And we can do it this summer.

No, we don't have to have another three years' worth of planning.

We can move.

So I just really want to acknowledge her leadership.

That's great.

Thank you, Council Member O'Brien, for sharing the next several weeks for us.

It's jam-packed, a lot of very important work.

And thanks for being so transparent about what the plan is.

We all deeply appreciate that.

We should have all nine of us at 2 o'clock today should have a full house.

And I do want to acknowledge that our flag has now been lowered to half mass as we've been speaking, so thank you for that.

Okay, see everyone at two o'clock.

Everyone have a great rest of the day, until two.