Seattle City Council Transportation & Utilities Committee 12/15/21

Good morning.

The December 15, 2021 meeting of the Transportation and Utilities Committee will come to order.

The time is 9.30 a.m.

I'm Alex Peterson, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council President Gonzalez?

Here.

Council Member Herbold?

Council Member Morales?

Here.

Chair Peterson?

here, and it looks like Councilmember Herbold is here as well.

Thank you, Councilmember Herbold, for joining us.

For present.

Thank you.

And Councilmember Strauss is excused.

And we might be able to finish this meeting in the next hour.

We have three items.

We have about three callers on the line.

We have one item we're going to be voting on today.

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

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Chair's report.

Good morning.

Welcome to the last meeting of the Transportation Utilities Committee of 2021. In fact, this is the last committee meeting of any council members this year.

Thank you for those who are able to be here today.

We're about to start our council recess, so I appreciate everybody being here who could make it.

Today, we've got two informational presentations, and we also have a vote on the long-awaited final property transactions to make a reality, the Georgetown to South Park Trail.

And assuming that item passes, which I assume it will, it'll be voted on by the full council early next year.

So at this time, we'll open the remote general public comment period for the Transportation and Utilities Committee.

I ask that everyone be patient, please, as we operate this online system.

We are continuously looking for ways to fine-tune this process of public participation.

It remains the strong intent of the City Council to have public comment regularly included on meeting agendas.

However, the City Council reserves the right to modify these public comment periods at any point if we deem that the system's being abused or is unsuitable for allowing our meetings to be conducted efficiently.

and in a manner in which we are able to conduct our necessary business.

I'll moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

The public comment period for this meeting will be up to 20 minutes.

Each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I'll call on two speakers at a time and in the order in which they're registered on Council's website.

If you have not yet registered to speak but would like to, you can sign up before the end of this public comment period by going to the Council's website at Seattle.gov forward slash Council.

The public comment link is also listed on today's agenda.

Once I call a speaker's name, staff will unmute the appropriate microphone, and an automatic prompt of, you have been unmuted, will be the speaker's cue that it's their turn to speak.

And the speaker must press star 6 to begin speaking.

Star 6. Please begin speaking by stating your name and the item that you are addressing.

As a reminder, public comment should relate to an item on today's agenda or the work program of the committee.

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

Once you hear the chime, we ask that you begin to wrap up your public comment.

If speakers do not enter comments at the time allotted, the speaker's microphone will be muted to allow us to call the next speaker.

Once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line.

And if you plan to continue following the meeting, please do so via Seattle Channel or the listening options.

The regular public comment period for this committee meeting is now open, and I will call on the first speakers.

We'll hear first from Mike Hahn, and then we'll hear from Anita Gallagher.

Go ahead, Mike.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Hi, my name is Mike Hahn.

I live in Seattle at 116 Fairview Avenue, and my comment is on the scooter share pilot evaluation.

Specifically, the safety section of this report is incomplete.

The injuries and fatality data on page 20 is incomplete.

No data information from area hospitals or emergency services is included.

I make reference to a study in 2019 in Austin, Texas, which is kind of the gold standard of these e-scooter changes in the community.

When they reviewed their injury data, they found that 90% of the reported scooter injuries were from hospital emergency room and emergency ambulance service records.

Only 10% of injuries were found on police reports.

The Seattle study shows only police report events, and I'm concerned that it's missing 90% of other accidents and injuries.

The fatality and five serious injuries reported and the likely hundreds of other injuries that have occurred but not reported should cause a second look at the dangerous activity the Seattle Council has permitted in our city by allowing the e-scooters.

Furthermore, there's no mention or seeming concern for pedestrian injuries from the e-scooter plan.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Next, we'll hear from Anita Gallagher, followed by David Holster.

Go ahead, Anita.

Good morning, Chair Peterson and members of the committee.

I'm Anita Gallagher, Senior Government Relations Manager for the Northwest at Line.

And of course, I'm here speaking today on the scooter share and new mobility agenda item.

Since 2017 Lime has enjoyed the honor of serving the people of Seattle and the fantastic partnership we've built with the city and your outstanding staff.

In 2019 Lime continued to serve the community after other bike share operators left the market and we were the first to launch electric scooters in Seattle.

As you will see in staff's presentation today more than a quarter of a million riders chose Lime in Seattle during the pilot program more than double that of our closest competitor.

This is a testament to our reliable operations and the exemplary services that our team provides.

As a community partner, Lyme is pleased to contribute towards Seattle's Climate Action Plan goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from road transportation and to advance transportation equity in the city.

The survey conducted by city staff indicates that 54 percent of micromobility riders would have used a single occupancy vehicle for their last trip, and that over half of rides were first and last mile to transit.

Additionally, 15% of scooter users reported having a disability, and 31% come from households earning less than $50,000 per year.

Lime's partnership with the city has been rooted in our shared values, and we look forward to the continuation of a successful shared micromobility program here in Seattle.

Thank you so much for hearing my comments today.

Thank you, Anita.

Next, we have David Holzer.

Go ahead, David.

Yeah, thank you and good morning to council members and staff.

My name is David Holzer.

I'm the policy manager at Superpedestrian, a micro-ability company that operates the linked shared e-scooter service here in Seattle.

I want to thank the Transportation and Utilities Committee for the opportunity to provide some testimony in favor of Seattle's e-scooter pilot.

It's been a little over one year since Superpedestrian was awarded the privilege of operating its linked shared scooters in Seattle's public right-of-way.

Since then, we've become an integral part of Seattle's transportation infrastructure, providing about 631,000 rides and accounting for about 40% of the market share of scooter trips in the city.

As an operator, we appreciate Seattle's e-scooter service pilot program as an effective in establishing rules for scooter share operators and riders.

As champions for micro mobility and partners with the city in achieving its climate goals we support the pilot for making a positive impact and changing residents' transportation habits.

We have striven to provide safe green and rule abiding service over the last year of operation.

I'd like to highlight how Super Pedestrian has provided affordable and equitable service.

Our Link Up program we have given low income Seattle residents a cost effective way to get around with over 400 residents enrolling in Link Up.

which provides a 95% discount on their local rides and the rides of under 20 minutes or less are free.

Link provides also critical transportation access for Seattle's underserved neighborhoods.

We've averaged 17% of our scooters deployed in equity areas exceeding the pilot's 10% requirement.

Additionally, we have enjoyed being part of Seattle.

We've participated with Commute Seattle and Parking Day, Peace Pelotons, fresh air events, Alki Beach Pride.

We've given away over 200 helmets.

We've partnered with SDOT and Alta Planning on the Flip Your Trip campaign.

And we've donated over 100 bicycles to the East African Community Service.

As we consider your pilot and the future of the program, we would like to offer our support.

And thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

That concludes our list of speakers.

So we will now close the public comment period for this committee meeting.

We will move on to the first legislative item on the agenda.

Will the clerk please read the title of the first agenda item into the record, the short title.

Agenda item 1, Council Bill 120230, an ordinance relating to the City Light Department, the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Seattle Department of Transportation, for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Thank you.

And based on the number of times we've talked about this project, it would indicate it is one of our favorite projects.

I think that that is true.

It is.

And so as we know, We had a public hearing on this on December 1st at our meeting, so now we're going to vote on it at this meeting.

And this is the last in a series of council actions to clean up the title and access to the various parcels of land.

It ultimately facilitates the Georgetown to South Park pedestrian and bike trail.

The project's funded by prior council budget actions, and it's been really gratifying to see various city departments working together, City Light, Seattle Public Utilities, Parks and Rec, SDOT.

And the two utilities involvement included the vacation of a street nearby at the City Light South Service Center.

That includes significant public benefits along the trails right away, including a future dog park.

Due to the significance of today's actions, we may want to hear some extra remarks from one or two of the council members whose districts this will benefit.

But let's start with General Manager and CEO of Seattle City Light, Debra Smith.

Thank you so much, Council Member Peterson, Chair.

And, you know, we're not planning to go through the presentation again, because as you said, we've talked about this quite a bit.

We're super excited to hear comments from council members, but I just wanted to take this, the opportunity here to thank you all for your service.

It's been a pleasure.

I don't know, of course, where we'll land in the new year, but Chair Peterson, it's been wonderful working with you.

Working with the entire committee, I really appreciate all the good work we've been able to move through committee and through council this year.

It feels very different than 2020. And I know I speak for our executive team and our leadership team, and again, the folks here on this call, and just really appreciate your focus, your dedication, and your work.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

Yes, we're not going to go through the presentation again.

And council members, committee members, we do have Eric McConaghy from city council central staff, if there are any final questions of central staff or of any of the departments regarding this project.

But it's been pretty well vetted.

Before we vote on this, well, let me go ahead and move it, get it on the table officially, and then maybe Council Member Chiu might have a comment on it.

Council Members, I'd like to move that our committee recommend approval of Council Bill 120230, item one on our agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you.

It's been moved and seconded to recommend approval of this bill.

Are there any comments?

I will, thank you Chair Peterson, I will just again say thank you to the whole team for continuing to move this forward.

I'm excited to get this transfer happening and to get the project going so that the folks in Georgetown and South Park can begin using the trail.

Thanks very much.

And I think I did and Council Member Herbold is excited about too, so is Council President Gonzalez.

And I think we did have a commitment that if we do have dogs, we can bring them down to the dog park, even if it's not in our district.

I'm hoping, personally, that that's true.

Okay, good, glad.

Okay, well, let's- Well, and remember, Council Member, you're also welcome to bring your dog to the dog park at the Denny's substation that we are also happy to host, so thank you.

be a happy dog, thank you.

Well, let's get moving on it then.

Will the clerk please call the roll on the committee recommendation to approve Council Bill 120230.

Gonzales?

Aye.

Herbold?

Yes.

Morales?

Yes.

Chair Peterson?

Yes.

Four in favor, none opposed.

Thank you.

The motion carries and the committee recognition that the appointments or that this bill pass will be sent to the next city council meeting, which is likely to be January 3rd.

Will the clerk please, thank you everybody from all the departments, really appreciate it.

We'll be working with you or connecting with you on implementation as we move forward.

Will the clerk please read the title of the next agenda item into the record?

presentation agenda item two, presentation scooter share and new mobility for briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

Excited to have SDOT's new mobility team here to share updates with us on scooter share, autonomous vehicles, and some other emerging transportation technologies.

As we move forward into 2022, look forward to continuing to work with the department and the mayor's office to ensure we're collecting sufficient data on scooter share and doing everything we can to keep pedestrians and riders safe throughout our city as we work to decarbonize our transportation options and have first last mile connections to the even more robust transit system that we have.

So welcome, everybody from Estad.

Who would like to go first here?

Just jump in.

Hello.

Thanks, Shauna, for controlling the PowerPoint today.

Thanks for having us.

My name is Kelly Rula.

I lead our new mobility group at Seattle DOT, and we are very excited to be here today.

Um, our group covers a number of things, a few, which we'll get into later.

And we really try to focus our work, especially in this new and emerging space, um, around the values of climate safety and equity.

So we're here to discuss a few pieces of portfolio today, including the scooter share pilot, as well as some other items.

And I'd like to introduce Becky Edmonds, a longtime SDOT employee who's recently joined our team to lead the new mobility, the micro mobility program.

Take it away, Becky.

Good morning, everyone.

I'm Becky Edmonds, and I'll be talking about our scooter share pilot.

So I'll do a little bit of background overview of the pilot, get into our numbers and talk about how this helps us meet our equity, safety and climate goals, and then get into takeaways and next steps.

So for a bit of background, Seattle's had some form of micromobility for a while now.

We first had bike share starting back in 2014. It was called Pronto.

Eventually, Pronto shut down.

And we moved from that, which was a station-based system to a free-floating model.

And we were one of the first cities to do that in 2017. 2018 is when we started seeing e-scooters emerging as a shared mode nationally.

And in Seattle, we took our time.

And I'll get into more about how we designed our pilot before eventually launching the scooter program in October of 2020. Next slide.

We're not alone.

As I mentioned, scooters have been around for a little while in North America, and there are over 200 cities in North America that have some form of micromobility.

Next slide.

So in terms of how we designed our pilot, we wanted to be really intentional.

And we took about a year and a half to develop the pilot.

We worked with over 30 stakeholder groups and surveyed 750 residents.

We took lessons from other cities that had been doing this before us, and we took lessons learned from our own bike share system.

We had to grapple with some difficult decisions.

As an example, one of those is sidewalk riding.

We ended up making a decision to not allow scooters on sidewalks.

And then eventually, after all that process, council passed legislation in September 2020, and we started our scooter pilot soon after that.

Next slide.

In our pilot, we have four different scooter vendors, and this was an intentional choice to show a variety of different options.

Lime was chosen partially because they operate Bikeshare as well, and one of our goals was to keep Bikeshare around, even as we welcome scooters, which we have done.

Then we have Link, which offers a standing-style scooter.

Wheels offers the sitting-style scooter, which we thought just provided a different option than the standard standing style and is more comfortable for certain users.

And then finally, we have a fourth vendor, and they're called Spin.

And we invited them in a little later to the pilot, and they specifically have something called Drover AI, which is an innovative technology that helps with sidewalk detection and gives feedback to users about both how they park their device and also helps keep people off of sidewalks when they shouldn't be there.

Next slide.

These are our five objectives of the scooter pilot.

We developed these in collaboration with the community and also kind of based on our bike share program.

So these are, we want to provide active and low carbon transportation options, expand accessibility for and use by black and indigenous people, non-black people of color, low-income people, immigrants and refugees, and people with limited English proficiency.

We want to be safe.

We want to keep our sidewalks clear and accessible.

And finally, we want to provide accessible and adaptive mobility options.

Next slide.

So a lot goes into managing our pilot with scooters.

This shows all those elements.

Some of those are all the data we take in.

We have real-time data feeds from all of our vendors.

We maintain relationships with our vendors.

We've been putting in infrastructure, which includes designated parking locations, which, again, helps keep our sidewalks clear.

And we do a lot of evaluation, outreach engagement, and we promote access and affordability.

And then on the other side, there's just the regulatory piece, which includes the permit, the code changes, and compliance.

Next slide.

Most of the data in this presentation covers our first full year of the pilot, which ran from October 1, 2020 to the end of September 2021. We try to take a really data-driven approach as we look at our pilot.

And so these are our different data sources.

This includes the trip feeds from vendors.

We get membership reports.

We audit the parking situation.

We did a survey that I'll get into a little more detail on later of users which had over 4000 respondents.

We do look at police reports and we're always taking constituent feedback.

Next slide.

So now we'll get into the numbers.

So, a big question I know is, did people use scooter share?

And I think a resounding answer is yes, we had.

Over 1.4Million trips in that 1st year.

This does track with how many devices were deployed.

So, and the chart on the right.

You can see the blue bars show deployment of scooters, which grew steadily over the course of the pilot, as did how many trips there were per day.

Bike shares remained a little lower than that, but pretty steady during that time.

The average scooters on the street during the pilot was 2,600 about, and you can see that that was sort of in the middle, and as we grew, it got to over 4,000 by September.

Next slide.

So what kinds of trips are people taking?

The average trip was about 15 minutes long, went 1.4 miles, and that would cost a little over $6, or over $6.

That's based on the average numbers and their cost structure.

I will say that the vendors do offer various options for reducing the cost, including the reduced fare pilot or the reduced fare programs, as well as things like monthly passes and other options for frequent users.

All right, we can go back to that previous slide.

Yeah, so on the right, you'll just see the unique riders we counted.

I did want to show it by the different vendors because we think there are a number of people who signed up for multiple.

But as you can see, there were over a quarter of a million unique users of the system.

That works out to about three rides on average per user.

And I think there's a pretty big range in terms of the actual numbers of rides individuals take.

You can go to the next slide now.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about the user survey that we completed.

It was in November 2021, so pretty recent.

And it was promoted via the vendors to users of scooters.

We got over 4,000 respondents of people who had used scooters.

And this is giving us a lot of the information that we do have about safety, as well as just rider experience and how people are behaving when they're using scooters.

Next slide.

So who's using ScooterShare?

This is what we got from our survey.

First of all, we found that 56% of scooter users reported also having used BikeShare.

So there's overlap and also a unique set of users.

In terms of race, we found that the racial demographics were pretty similar to the Seattle population.

We found that 15% of users identified as having some kind of disability.

We found that 65% of users identified as men, which is an over-representation compared to the general population.

In terms of household income, it seems like there's a pretty diverse range of household incomes and people who use the scooter program.

And we can go to the next slide from there.

Now we'll get a little bit into our equity metrics.

First of all, we have a requirement that vendors deploy 10% of their fleet to equity-focused areas, which are shown on the map on the right.

And overall, we saw 15.5% were deployed in those equity areas.

So we're meeting that goal, and we also know that that's just one baseline, and there's more to do in terms of equity.

So we'll go to the next slide.

So vendors are required to offer reduced fare plans.

The exact structure of the plan varies by vendor, but we cap it at a dollar fifty per hour.

We found that reduce their writers took over sixty seven thousand trips.

which is about 4.5% of total trips.

But they averaged many more trips per rider.

So it's 64 trips per rider for the year compared to just three overall.

And you can see the unique users who have signed up by vendor on the right there.

So it's at least 400 people if there's overlap.

Next slide.

Another big component of equity for us is that we do outreach with community partners.

We provided resources to black indigenous and people of color focused community organizations and they did focus groups and that helped us identify some barriers in their community.

And I think this is something we'll work on more next year is addressing those barriers.

So some of those identified include just lack of knowledge about how to use scooters.

People are concerned about access to helmets and also about having a safe place to ride.

Affordability was a concern as well as some language access needs.

We also, in coordination with those community organizations and the vendors, we held outreach events, and this included giving away helmets, hands-on instruction, which I think makes a really big difference for people in getting more comfortable with scooters, and we allowed people to sign up for reduced fare plans at those events.

Next slide.

Another key component of our program is adaptive cycling.

Major way we do this is that we partner with Outdoors for All, which was an existing nonprofit organization in Seattle that has 200 different bicycles in their fleet that are adaptive.

And so our funds allow them to offer programming for free and with expanded hours during the summer months.

And council, thank you for providing additional funding for this program to expand even more next year.

And another piece of accessibility was our priority for having the seated scooter option, which gives people just an additional way to get around and we think is more comfortable for certain users.

Next slide.

Next, we'll get into the safety pieces.

We had vendors implement various safety requirements.

You'll see on the right there's a picture of the required safety quiz that pops up before your first ride.

And we also require that they reduce speeds on the first ride, so it's capped at eight miles per hour as people are getting more comfortable with using them.

We also implemented a requirement that scooter riders wear helmets.

However, in our survey, we found that 70% of people reported that they never or almost never wear helmets.

The number one reason for that was people reporting that they didn't want to carry it around, as well as some people saying they actually didn't own a helmet.

Another piece of our regulation is that we don't allow sidewalk riding in most circumstances.

And in our survey, we found that 73% of people said they rode in the street, in bike lanes, or on bike paths, which are all allowed.

22% said they rode most of their last trip on the sidewalk.

And most users said that the reason they chose where they rode was based on what felt safest to them.

Next slide.

So with safety, another key piece is looking at injuries and fatalities.

One data source we have for this is police reports.

We went through a lot of police reports to look for scooter-related issues.

We don't necessarily know on these whether they were related to scooter share or whether they were privately owned scooters.

We found that there were 17 scooter-related collisions.

Unfortunately, there was one fatality that was this past October on Airport Way South.

And all injuries and the fatality involved a scooter collision with a motor vehicle.

Our user survey also got at a lot of safety information.

This was another key source of data for us.

So we asked in the survey whether people had been injured in any way using a scooter and whether they had sought medical care of any kind.

And we found that 2.6% of users said that they had sought some form of medical care for a scooter related injury.

We're still getting more into the data where we ask people to describe their injuries more.

And so we'll have more information to share about that later.

And I think this survey is actually capturing a wider net than we might get from data that only looks at ER visits.

It's looking at a lot of different kinds of injuries, and so we don't yet also have comparable data to other modes or other cities who have done similar surveys yet.

Next slide.

Becky, if I may, just to To lift up the point we heard from a public commenter about hospital data versus police reports versus sort of self-reporting surveys, can you clarify what your next layer or what layer you're going to uncover next in terms of getting to the bottom of the safety issue to make sure that we can know what the trends are and know whether we need to be doing things differently?

Well, I think the immediate next step is just that we need to get more from our existing survey.

about the types of injuries people are describing, and I think that will help tell us more about what to do next.

We had been planning to work with UW and Harborview on a study looking more at the emergency room side of things.

Those staff no longer had capacity to work on this because of the COVID pandemic.

I think that's something we would hope to do in the future.

I'm not sure what that will look like exactly.

And I think it would be interesting for us to try to get more at what this number would look like for other modes.

But again, I don't know if we have plans to do that just yet.

If other cities are doing that, I realize the COVID pandemic has made it difficult.

If other cities are collecting that data, that would be I would encourage that.

And it's also a fair point in terms of getting similar data for other modes, and then tracking that over time to see what the trends are, and comparing that to other cities and their programs.

Because I was disappointed when we were not able to partner with Harborview on that study.

So just look forward to as soon as we can getting that information from hospitals and how it impacts other votes as well.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

I was going to hold my questions until the end, but given you are asking some, Chair Peterson, I'm going to see if I could do the same, if that's all right.

I want to just underscore the, I think the point that you're making, Chair Peterson, 2.6 of scooter users reporting an injury.

I think that works out to about 1 out of 40 users.

And so to figure out whether or not that's alarming, and it kind of sounds like it is, it would be good to compare it to cycling and walking and driving for a number of trips, just to get a sense of that.

The rider experience slide, slide 19, the 22% of folks who are riding on the sidewalk for most of their trip, I understand you're explaining that folks are making choices based on what's safest, but in making the choice to ride on the sidewalk, you're making a choice to be, that seems like it's safer for you as the scooter rider, but you are making the sidewalks less safe for other people who are using them.

And I don't think that's the right choice that riders should be making.

And so I'm just wondering what we're doing to address that.

If people are moving to the sidewalk because it's safer, it seems like maybe they should be encouraged to to walk their trip for that portion of the trip.

But just wanting to know more about that.

I have a lot of concerns with motorized wheel vehicles on our sidewalks.

I've expressed that over years of our developing and implementing this program and just continue to have concerns about the impacts to pedestrians, particularly folks who have mobility issues.

Just, you know, sidewalks are called sidewalks because they're for walking.

Yeah, I can go ahead and answer some thoughts on that.

I agree that it is a concern, and I think, one, we want to do more education next year, some for users and also non-users, with messaging about please not riding on the sidewalk.

I think your point about potentially specifically saying you should walk your scooter while you're on the sidewalk if you need to be there, is potentially a good message that we could use.

Yeah, and then there's some additional technology solutions, like we're seeing good things out of the data we're getting from SPIN and their artificial intelligence technology that can detect Sidewalk riding, and we saw in their initial data that sidewalk riding tended to go down as people took more trips on spin.

So it seems like that is sort of reinforcing the message.

I think that was about all I have at this point.

Thank you.

Please continue.

So another key piece of sidewalk safety is keeping sidewalks clear from parked devices.

We regularly conduct audits of how devices are parked.

We think establishing some designated parking areas, which we did a bunch on Alki this past year, we've also put in near the new light rail station, such as at Roosevelt.

There's a couple across the street from the station now.

Those help, it's not scalable to the entire city necessarily.

And so we still have work to do in terms of encouraging proper parking behavior.

You can see on our chart.

quarter over quarter, we had our best yet in Q3 2021. We got down to 8% overall devices that were considered obstructions.

That's still too high.

Our target is 3%, which is a pretty aggressive target, and we're still working to get there.

And I think there's more education to be done with that as well, as well as potential technology solutions to help people park devices correctly.

Next slide.

So in terms of climate.

This does provide a zero emission option for the end user.

The vendors do use vans to rebalance and service the system.

Those are currently gas powered.

I think they're looking at whether they can electrify their vans.

We asked for vehicle miles traveled from the vendors, and we got that it's about 30,000 vehicle miles traveled per vendor for the year.

There are over 2.2 million miles traveled on scooters in the pilot year, though.

We found that over half of trips start and end near a frequent transit stop, which I think is partially people connecting to transit, and we'll learn more from our survey about that, and partially just that those are also the neighborhoods where there's a lot of scooters and places to go.

And finally, we found that 24% of scooter users said that they would have used a personal vehicle for their last scooter trip if they hadn't used a scooter, and then another 30% said they would have taken ride hail or a taxi instead.

So people do seem to be moving away from cars and onto scooters in some cases.

Next slide.

So what are the key takeaways?

People are riding scooters.

We think they're using them for a variety of types of trips and replacing car trips.

And we saw pretty good use even in a pandemic.

So in places that had scooters before the pandemic, they saw a big dip.

We started during the pandemic and we've seen pretty steady growth.

We need to continue to expand to has access to and feels comfortable using scooters.

And we need to take a look at the affordability, I think.

While there have been some injuries and collisions, and we plan to continue to improve education about safety for users and non-users, we've seen device parking improve over time.

And there's still more we need to do on that.

And just overall, we think that scooters provided a climate-friendly option that has complemented our bike share and our transit system.

Next slide.

So our immediate next steps, we are planning to continue to have scooters.

We'll extend the existing permits through quarter one of 2022, and then we'll plan to have a competitive process to select scooter vendors for the future.

We'll continue our audit program.

looking for parking obstructions in particular, as well as collecting more data on how much sidewalk writing is happening.

We started to do that this year, and there's just more room to collect more data to better understand what's happening and whether there are specific areas that we need to target for additional messaging.

As I mentioned, we're planning to expand public awareness campaigns to improve sidewalk writing and parking, as well as get that helmet use up.

A piece of that is just getting helmets into people's hands, as well as really reinforcing the message that people should be wearing helmets.

We plan to continue our education in equity-focused communities and expand that in the future.

And we're evaluating how we might be able to bring the cost down, whether it's partially expanding knowledge about and access to the reduced-fare program, as well as looking at the overall cost for people in general.

And finally, we'll plan to expand our partnership with Outdoors for All, thanks to Funds From.

And that can go to the next slide and take any questions.

I think we'll definitely have you back to the committee to continue to report on your data collection.

being mindful of the questions or concerns Councilmember Herbold and I have raised.

And thank you for your work on this.

It is also a first last mile solution that we want to make better.

Councilmember Morales and then Councilmember Herbold.

Thank you, Chair Peterson.

I apologize if this is something that Council has already hashed out.

previous years, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the decision to do sort of free range, not free range, free floating scooters rather than the stations, and if that's part of the conversation moving forward or not.

I could speak to that a little bit, and then maybe Kelly has something to fill in.

One thing that I have noted is that in North America, all of the scooter share systems are free-floating, or some of them have a lock-to requirement, but it's like you can lock to anything.

So I don't believe there are existing docked scooter systems.

I think in some ways it was at the time we had free floating bike share, and it made sense to match them in sort of style.

And having it be free floating maximizes the flexibility in that first last mile piece, which is really important.

If there's not a dock near your house, and you have to walk a long way just to get to the dock, and then are you going to do that to then get to your next destination.

I think it offers just some better flexibility for folks.

I can add a bit.

Yeah, I think the short, like Becky gave a great answer, I think the short answer is we would need some public subsidy or, you know, grant dollars to bring to bear on the station component because I haven't seen really any examples of sort of large-scale station build out by the private sector, for example.

What we are starting to see that's pretty interesting and we're keeping, we're very interested in ourselves is the connection between sort of station-based parking and charging, so like the battery charging for these micromobility devices.

And so there are some pilots going in in cities around the country where basically using the charging station to sort of promote more of those centralized hubs.

And I think that's something we are interested in and would be interested in seeking funding, you know, potentially in the new infrastructure package and others.

So something we're looking into.

Thank you.

Yeah, I just came back from France, where there's a fabulous, you know, bike station subscription program and the scooter, although that's not part of the city's program.

But it certainly is interesting to see just how much usage these options receive.

So looking forward to learning more.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

Back on slide 21, looking at sort of where the program target is at 3% and what the actual numbers are.

for obstructions.

Just wondering, first, are there any sanctions for not meeting program targets?

And then as it relates to vendors implementing geofencing capability on parking, you may have touched upon that.

If you did, I missed it.

Is that happening?

And then finally, slide A3 on the key takeaways.

I'm wondering whether or not permitting is covering program costs.

Thanks.

Yeah, so your first question was about are there sanctions?

And yes, there's a fine we issue for every obstruction we find.

That's $20.

We pass that on to the companies.

And then if they know who was responsible, like if it's clear that the last user parked it incorrectly, the user actually gets that fine.

So yes, there are sanctions for that.

We haven't yet had a sanction for just like overall not meeting the target at this point.

The next question was about geofences.

The vendors do use geofences.

They're generally They have to be a relatively large area because of potential inaccuracies with GPS.

So it's things like they're not allowed in parks.

We can also implement slow zones, which we've done in places like Seattle Center and Pike Place Market.

And then we do things like you can ride, but you can't park on bridges.

So there's a variety of types of geofences we are using.

And so just a quick follow-up on that.

The bullet that talks about Alki as designated parking, when you say designated parking, do you actually mean geofencing?

Yes?

Sorry, yes, there is a geofence, Council Member Herbold, and then we've actually installed physical Um, you know, corrals in this where there used to be parking.

So there's a significant physical infrastructure now coupled with a digital geofence to try to drive people toward that hub.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we've also seen vendors on the geofence side implement like incentive parking areas so they can put points on the map and you like might there's some reason to incent users to go to that point.

They're starting to use that around Seattle center.

Um, and then the final question was about, um, And yes, at the moment, permit fees are covering the cost of the program.

We like that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And I think we're going to move on.

We'll have you back in our committee again as you continue to collect data on this.

We might follow up with a question about to hospitalization information.

But now we're going to move on to other fun things, right?

OK, good.

Yes, great.

Hi again, so in addition to micro mobility and other existing shared services like car share and TNCs, the new mobility team tracks these other new and emerging technologies and mobility services as they're evolving in the marketplace.

So we'll start with autonomous vehicles, which I'll refer to as AVs for short.

A little bit of history here.

So Governor Inslee passed an executive order 1702 back in 2017. This initiated a self-certification program for AVs and created a whole statewide AV work group as well as seven different subcommittees to discuss sort of the various facets of autonomous vehicle tech.

Those kicked off in 2018 and interdepartmental participants from across the city have been attending these subcommittees over the years.

and they're helping to shape and provide input on recommendations on topics from safety to liability.

Our SDOT Director Zimbabwe also sits on the AV Executive Committee at the state.

So some updates were made to the self-certification program in 2021 in the legislative session that will go into effect next October, so October 2022. A few changes coming down the pike there.

We're also, SDOT's currently partnering with Bellevue DOT on a joint strategic planning effort around AV readiness to be completed by quarter two 2022, so pretty quick project.

The two cities are working with a consultant to map the industry and its players, assess technology and infrastructure, and policy readiness through a regional lens because we both understand that these vehicles will operate cross-jurisdictionally when they come in at scale.

We coordinate regularly with our peer cities around the country to share learnings and best practices as these automated modes begin testing in the public right away.

So that extends beyond just AVs into some of the other modes I'll talk about, but we do talk to our sister and brother cities around the country all the time.

And most recently, an Amazon-owned AV company called Zoox began testing on a limited scale in downtown Seattle.

The most recent testing round concluded in November, and they have not communicated any future dates for testing at this time.

Next slide, okay.

So cargo bikes.

So we got a few other interesting fun modes here.

Last spring, SDOT partnered with University of Washington's Urban Freight Lab and private partners like Reef, General Motors, and others to launch a micro hub site with an electric cargo bike storage and charging on site.

Findings from this pilot showed a 30% reduction in tailpipe carbon emissions per package compared to truck deliveries, which is really promising.

And SDOT has plans to advance efforts around commercial e-cargo bike usage in 2022, which is exciting.

Personal delivery devices, or also known as PDDs for short, also known as sidewalk robots.

These devices were defined in Washington state code in 2019. And while we know of some limited testing happening outside of the Seattle city limits, but within Washington state, these devices are starting to gain in popularity around the country.

especially seeing them in coastal California and around college campuses.

And they tend to be used, they're very small and they tend to be used for things like food delivery or sort of small package deliveries in a very small radius.

And finally for today, we are also monitoring drones and what's known as Unmanned Aerial Mobility, or UAM is one acronym.

This air travel, either kind of delivery by drones or passenger transport via an automated aerial device have been gaining traction as a concept across the country, especially in California, where this promise of aerial passenger travel is very compelling given the congested roadways down there.

So while this space would be primarily, it is and probably will continue to be regulated heavily by federal airspace rules, SDOT's still monitoring this industry, especially with regard to regional interest and the technology that's evolving in this space.

And I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you very much.

Council members, committee members, any questions for our SDOT experts here?

I want to thank you all for staying ahead of these emerging issues so that we can prioritize safety and deal with liability risks and such.

And so I look forward to working with you in the coming year as well and the incoming administration so we can work collaboratively on next steps for Seattle on these issues.

All right, well, if no other questions on this, we can move on to the last item on the agenda.

Thank you to SDOT, appreciate seeing you.

All right, will the clerk please read the title of the final agenda item into the record?

Agenda item three, presentation parameters for 2021 financial audit of Seattle Public Utilities for briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

Every year, our utilities have their books audited by independent outside auditors, and today Seattle Public Utilities is bringing their auditors to us to present the status and schedule of their 2021 audit.

SPU's independent auditors are from the firm Moss Adams, and I welcome them to the committee today.

Oh, yeah, please, Director Lee, Let's turn it over to you for any introductory comments.

And of course, for council members, we know that Brian Goodnight on City Council Central staff is our point person for Seattle Public Utilities.

But Director Lee, welcome.

Thank you, Chair Peterson and members of the committee.

And yes, I'm Andrew Lee.

I'm the Interim General Manager for Seattle Public Utilities.

And actually, before I start, I wanna take this opportunity to first thank Council President Gonzalez for your years of service to the city of Seattle.

I know every one of you commits an enormous amount of personal time and time away from your family and your loved ones to serve our constituents.

And those of us at Seattle Public Utilities are extremely grateful for your service.

Today, I'm here to introduce Lori Tisch and Todd Ryland from Moss Adams, who will present to the committee their audit plan for 2022. SPU, as you know, is required to have an external audit of the annual financial statements for its drainage and wastewater, solid waste, and water funds.

The statements are prepared pursuant to requirements for bonds issued for the funds and to support other SPU financing activities.

Under the auditing standards, Moss Adams is required to provide the council this overview and will communicate the results upon the audit completion next year.

The presentation gives the committee an opportunity to engage with Moss Adams in understanding the audit process, the areas of focus, and to discuss any issues or concerns the committee may have related to SPU's financial reporting.

At this point, I will hand it off to Lori Tisch.

Thank you and good morning.

Director Lee gave part of my intro, so we'll just get right into it.

As he mentioned, we will be coming back to you at the conclusion of the audit to give the report out.

So this is really just to give you a taste of what we have done in planning so far and some of the areas of risk that we plan to tackle in the audit.

Todd is going to go over some of our deliverables and our timeline, and then I will take it from him and go over some of the risks.

And we are hoping that we'll have a two-way dialogue this morning on anything that you would like us to follow up on or any of your concerns.

So Todd, go ahead and take it away.

Perfect.

Thank you, Lori.

So as Lori and Andrew mentioned, we'll do an overview of kind of our responsibilities for the audit.

We'll start with a quick introduction to your service team for the audits.

And we'll go through the other items you can see on the agenda.

First off, the service leadership team, Lori Tisch is the lead engagement partner.

As the senior manager, I support her in all things she needs to get comfortable with signing the audit reports.

Julie Desimone is our concurring partner.

So she kind of takes a 30,000 foot broad view and look at the work we do and make sure that there's no big pieces that we've missed.

Nicole Siegmeyer-Janes is the manager for the engagements, and she's the one who's really coordinating day-to-day with the SPU staff, making sure that our team is staying on track.

And then finally, Maria Braun and Jennifer Grant lead up the IT side of our audit work.

So we do some limited IT procedures working with SPU and City of Seattle staff to make sure that we can get comfortable enough with the systems in place to support our audit opinions.

So the scope of services, our audits are conducted in accordance with generally accepted auditing standards following the government auditing standards.

And the reports that will be issued, as Andrew mentioned, are the independent auditors reports for all three funds, the Water Fund, Drainage and Wastewater, and the Solid Waste Funds.

Required under the government auditing standards, we'll also be issuing a report on internal control over the financial reporting and compliance on other matters, as well as reporting to those charged with governance, which is encapsulated in this presentation here with you as the council committee, and then also our concluding presentation in May once we've issued our audit reports.

Part of our required communication is to specifically lay out what our responsibilities are as the auditors.

So we're responsible for forming and expressing an opinion on whether the financial statements are prepared in material respects with generally accepted accounting standards.

I like to point out that really what we're focusing in on is the material respects.

So that would be a judgmental amount that we set as what is something that somebody using the financial statements might consider when they're making decisions.

So our audits are set up using statistical sampling to provide reasonable and not absolute assurance.

There's always that caveat, might be something you did not find, or it was something that was just too small that, you know, for the sake of cost benefit, we don't dig into every little tiny issue.

That being said, we are also responsible to communicate any significant matter.

So as we're going through that stuff, even if it might not be deemed material, if we think it's significant enough that it should be communicated to you as the governing body, we will be bringing that up in the exit presentation as well.

The audit of the financial statements does not relieve management or you of your responsibility for the operation and oversight of SPU.

And finally, as I mentioned, we take like a fraud or not a fraud, sorry, a risk-based approach to our audit plan.

So our procedures are not designed specifically for identifying those other matters to be communicated to you.

However, when we find them, they will be communicated.

And then for our audit timeline, we completed our planning for the engagement in November.

And then in December, we started our interim audit procedures.

So getting comfortable with the controls at SPU and IT systems.

And then moving forward to right now our entrance conference with the committee and then we'll take a little bit of a break after a year end so that the SPU staff can close out the books and get everything fine-tuned and ready for us to look at.

We'll come back out in March-April time frame to perform our final audit procedures which is where we do majority of our substantive testing making sure that all the balances are supported really getting comfortable with our audit work and then finalize the audit report by april audit reports plural by april 30th and then in may we'll have our exit conferences both with management and with council i will turn it over to laurie yes uh to

Continue on with Todd's comment.

We certainly cover the scope of the entire set of financial statements and all of the accounts of the utilities.

But I do want to draw your attention to where we believe the most significant and the most accounts that contain risk.

which is really where we spend most of our time in conducting the audit.

And of course, starting off with utility plants.

So the utilities assets, whether those are self-constructed or purchased or existing assets, we do spend a lot of time on the internal controls around that.

We actually do interview program managers for the self-constructed assets.

We look at the construction.

We look at when those are closed into capital assets, if it is self-constructed.

We looked at vendor purchases and really all the systems that flow in to utility plants.

So that is a big part of our audit.

It's really almost the heart of our audit.

Bonded debt, definitely an important balance.

You have stakeholders that are very interested, bondholders that are very interested, that those are accounted for properly.

And accounting for bonds can be very complex.

So we do look at that very closely, not only new issuances or refundings of debt, but also the existing debt and the amortization and pay down of that existing debt.

Environmental liabilities is always a big issue and risk in any utility that encompasses any pollution remediation obligations or any claims or any state or federal regulatory bodies that are interested in any potential sites that you may have on your books.

And of course, there are a lot of shared accounts in this area with not only Seattle City Light, but the city of Seattle.

look at the Seattle Public Utilities share of the responsibility for those liabilities.

Unique to accounting, or I'm sorry, unique to utilities is regulatory accounting.

There are a lot of mechanisms that are available to utilities to defer charges and match them against the rates that are coming in.

in the future.

So we do look very closely at the layers of those deferred charges or those deferred credits, including any capitalized interests that may be accruing.

Of course, every single audit lists revenues as a risk.

We look very closely at the cash receding cycle and the controls around those and how the Billings and invoices and cash receiving cycles make their way into the financial statements for the revenues.

Expenses, again, other side of the coin, looking at your cash disbursements and your vendors, your payable systems, and getting control reliance and getting a lot of our audit assurance from looking at the internal controls around both those operating revenues and operating expenses.

Todd mentioned briefly we have a separate team that is trained specifically in general computer controls.

We do look very closely and of course we have to coordinate that with the City of Seattle with their IT department and that is a large percentage of our audit time.

is devoted to the information technology controls and that is combined with the financial statement internal controls to give us again that audit assurance that we need to sign the opinion.

We are just coming out of our work on the internal controls and the planning so now we are going to work to develop our final audit plan based on the results of our testing and we'll be back again in March to to do the bulk of our work.

Now, one thing I do want to bring up, and that is just consideration of fraud in any audit.

It is our responsibility as the auditor to obtain reasonable assurance that your financial statements as a whole are free of any type of material misstatement.

That's whether it's caused by error or by intentional fraud.

We do have some procedures in place in our audit to address this, although we don't design the audit to look for fraud, we certainly do design design the audit to try to identify any risks of material misstatement.

So we have a lot of procedures around the internal controls.

We do actually brainstorm as an audit team on, hey, how can we poke holes at this system?

Is there a way that we can think of that somebody could get through?

and try to perpetrate a fraud.

We also conduct interviews throughout all of Seattle Public Utilities, not just the accounting and finance department, not just the program managers that we're talking to about the constructed assets, but really throughout the organization to determine, do people understand the code of conduct?

Do they understand internal controls?

Does it feel like the tone at the top is appropriate to prevent the risk of fraud?

So those are things that we certainly consider during our audit.

Now, before I finish up with a couple of other informational items, I do want to take the time now to pause for questions and find out if any of you have concerns.

Do you have any comments with respect to the attitudes awareness?

about internal controls at Seattle Public Utilities, any awareness of communications between SPU and any type of regulators, anything that you would like to comment to us now, we certainly would like to take that into account to our audit plan.

Thank you.

I think just big picture, the tone at the top here is we obviously want to have these thorough audits done as they are normally.

And we recognize this is a $1 billion enterprise that delivers clean water to hundreds of thousands of people and removes waste.

And it's very important to the functioning of any city, particularly ours, where elected officials are involved directly.

not only in general government, but in overseeing Seattle Public Utilities as well as Seattle City Light for electricity.

So we're just glad that you're here to do this opening with us on the audit for 2021.

And you do have our contact information.

So I would encourage you, if you have questions or concerns that arise in the next few months, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Thank you.

So the last couple informational items that I wanted to go over, I did want to let you know of an audit standard that relates to documents containing the audited financial statements.

So if our report is used in any type of document, such as an annual report or a bond issuance, we do request that we read that document just to make sure that there's nothing inconsistent in the document that would be different or inconsistent with our report and with the audited financial statements.

So we do have a good relationship with management when they are ready for a new bond issue, for example.

We do get the preliminary document in advance.

We read it.

We just, again, are reading it to make sure that there's nothing in there that would be inconsistent with the financial statements themselves or with our audit opinion.

So I did want to let you just know that that does occur.

There has been a flurry of new auditing standards released lately.

Nothing that you will probably notice.

It is changing the format and some of the wording in our audit reports.

There are some additional requirements on what we need to communicate with you at the end of the audit.

But again, I don't think that any of you will notice much difference.

It is really just more for the auditors and the way we're wording our report.

So more to come on that when we report out in May.

I'll be able to point out at that point how the opinion paragraph and some of the wording in the report has changed from the prior years, but it'll still be An unmodified or unqualified clean opinion will be still very apparent to the reader.

I think that was the whole point, too, was to try to clean up the language so that it's a little more user-friendly to the users and the stakeholders of the audit reports.

There's also been a large flurry of accounting developments.

And I have three pages here.

I am not going to walk all through these, mainly because most of them don't apply to Seattle Public Utilities.

But I wanted you to see the whole.

universe of these new accounting standards that have come out that are going to be applicable over the next few years.

Really the ones that are important to Seattle Public Utilities are on this first slide.

The leases standard is a pretty big change in the way that lease assets or liabilities are accounted for.

They're going to be now brought on to the balance sheet as opposed to expense as incurred.

This is not effective until 2022, but of course 2022 starts in a few weeks.

So we're going to be working with management even during the conduct of our audit of 2021 to help them with the implementation.

They have to get an inventory of their leases.

They're going to have to figure out what may need to start to be capitalized onto the balance sheet as opposed to expense.

We'll be working with them for a smooth transition.

When we come back to you in a year, we'll be talking about how that will be implemented for 2022. So nothing yet, but that is coming.

The other interesting one for Seattle Public Utilities is GASB 89, the accounting for interest cost.

Now, up until very recently, until this standard, When you had a self-constructed asset, you were required to actually capitalize any interest costs that related to that.

So if you issued bonds to help pay for new infrastructure related to the water utility, for example, that interest cost would be capitalized into the cost of the project and become part of that asset on your balance sheet.

Well, this standard took that away.

So now interest costs are expensed.

However, you heard me mention earlier that utilities have some very unique accounting mechanisms available to them.

And in this case, this is one that was available where any municipal utility is allowed to invoke regulatory accounting and you can continue to capitalize interest.

Now, because interest costs are such a big part of your self-constructed asset, this is something that a lot of large municipal utilities are doing.

They're invoking this regulatory accounting.

All that really means is that you know that this asset that you're creating, you're going to recover the cost of that asset over rates over that period of time.

And it may be a bond issue that takes 30 years to amortize out to pay back.

But the life of the asset that you built might be 30, 40, 50 years.

So this is a very good example of why the matching principle exists and why utilities are allowed to invoke regulatory accounting so that they can better match rate revenue that they're going to get in the future against the expenses they're incurring today.

So we completely agree this was an appropriate thing to do for Seattle Public Utilities.

And again, they will be continuing to capitalize interest to their projects.

So no change But it's unique because, again, if you're not a utility, you cannot invoke this type of accounting.

So I did want to just point that out to you.

And in case you're talking with your friends about accounting standards and you wonder why is SPU still a capitalizing interest, this is why.

So that's really the main one.

The rest of them, and Todd, if you want to just quickly flip through the next couple of pages, the rest of these standards either have no impact to Seattle Public Utilities or very minor, and they'll be assessing those to determine.

But again, I would say the vast majority of these actually do not have any applicability to the utility.

So with that, that is the end of our discussion of our audit plan.

Again, happy to take questions now or if you think of something in January or February or even March, please don't hesitate to contact us and we can set up a meeting and go over it with you.

Thank you very much for being here this morning.

Again, it's really important with both the utilities enterprises that we have for these audits and I'll be interested to see how one of the things unique to Washington State is the so-called utility tax, where the municipal corporation can tax the utility, and so how that's treated in the audit in terms of the risk of, you know, whether we increase those utility taxes over time, how that impacts the utility from a rate payer standpoint.

Even though those revenues, we convert them into revenue and then use it for good things for general city government.

But that is something that seems unique to Washington State.

But I did wanna thank you for this.

And council members, any questions for our independent auditors while we have them?

If not, they are open to being contacted during their audit process as well.

Well, thank you for being here.

Appreciate it.

That was our last item.

I know that just in case the viewing public didn't see this, Council President Gonzalez was, even though we were talking about auditing standards and accounting, I mean, The intensity and attention, even in the last meeting here on this item, just is another piece of evidence about how much she cares about our city and even on any item.

I know we uh Council President I know I think this is your last committee meeting officially and so um we I know we already had our heartfelt goodbyes and we uh the council all our council colleagues join in presenting a proclamation honoring you and your team.

I just want to say again what an honor it's been to uh work with you as our president and I've always enjoyed I appreciated our conversations with your strategic leadership and your generosity really and being forthright about your positions and explaining them and even if We are coming at an issue from a different angle.

I've really always valued those discussions and look forward to having any opportunity to work with you in the future.

And if you want to say a few words here, the tail end of this audit discussion on SPU, I welcome that.

Sure.

Well, thank you, chair Peterson.

It's been a pleasure to serve on this committee, um, under your leadership.

Um, it's a big committee with lots of really important issues related to all of our utilities, as we just heard from this, um, really important audit.

Um, you know, that's, that's what keeps the lights on and the water flowing to people's homes.

Um, and, and, you know, deals with basic services like trash pickup and recycling and compost.

And so I really appreciate how much you've been able to get through your committee in the last two years and really appreciate your thoughtful approach to all of the critical work related to transportation, which has a huge impact on our climate change goals, of course.

that it's been a real pleasure to work with you closely here and on some of the other committees that we sit on together and as council president as a whole and a huge gratitude to Seattle City Light, SPU, SDOT for all of your important work.

towards making sure that we're more sustainable, equitable city in the way we deliver our services that are key to making us a vibrant city.

So it's been an honor to dig into this complex work and to be able to have this be my last committee meeting is really, really important to me.

So thanks everyone for your service and look forward to seeing all that you can do.

Thank you, Council President.

Well, this concludes the December 15, 2021 meeting of the Transportation and Utilities Committee.

Happy holidays as the council heads into a two-week recess period with no committee meetings or council meetings.

And we are adjourned.

Thank you.