Public Safety and Human Services Committee 3/14/23

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Good morning.

The March 14, 2023 meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee will come to order.

It is 9.33 AM.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee.

The clerk, please call the roll.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Peterson.

Present.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Present.

Chair Herbold.

Here.

For present.

Thank you so much.

On today's agenda, we will hear first from the City Attorney's Office, who will present the Criminal Division's fourth quarter 2022 report.

After that presentation, we will hear the Wage Equity for Nonprofit Human Services Workers report for the area, both for Seattle and King County.

We'll have researchers from the University of Washington, representatives from the Human Services Coalition, and Director Kim from HSD to join us in the presentation.

We'll now move to approve the agenda for our committee meeting.

There's no objection.

Today's agenda will be adopted.

Hearing and seeing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

This time we'll transition into public comment.

I will moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

Each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I will alternate between virtual and in-person public commenters.

I will call on each speaker by name.

and in the order that they registered on the signup sheet.

And now my volume's gonna get really bad, so I'm gonna stand.

All right, thank you so much.

Once I call up speaker's name, if you are using the virtual option, you'll hear a prompt.

And once you've heard that prompt, you need to press star six to unmute yourself.

Please begin by stating your name and the item you are addressing.

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

Once the speaker hears a chime, we ask that you begin to wrap up your public comment so that speakers, the next speaker can speak.

When you're done speaking, we ask that you disconnect from the line, but you are absolutely encouraged and welcome to join us via the Seattle channel or the listening options listed on the agenda.

We've got 11 people signed up for public comment, nine are virtual and two are in person.

With that, I'll move on calling on the speakers.

We will first start with Marguerite Richard.

And Marguerite Richard will be followed by Alex Zimmerman.

Yes, my name is Marguerite Richard.

I I don't see my face, but I I brought a mirror Oh, there you are you looking pretty snazzy today aren't you brought a mirror.

I brought the mayor because for some reason, you people in here will not show our faces as if other people are privileged characters and we're not.

That's blatant discrimination.

And we have attorneys up in here.

Now we're gonna talk about crime.

They say crime doesn't pay, but it pays you.

So I'm calling on a citizen arrest, but all the folks that have been involved in me, with me for all these years practicing racism and discrimination, which is discrimination is illegal in this country.

So why are we still wrapped up, tied up and tangled up on what you're going to do?

Kyrie Nichols was an indigenous black man.

I'm still talking about crime.

You people, whoever you are, you don't go to prison for the things that you do to us.

And that's called corruption, conspiracy, and racketeering.

And I don't abide with that, because you know what?

Jesus Christ, he judges me every day, too.

How come the wrath of God ain't fell on your head yet?

For all the disgusting, menacing stuff that you have done to people, where they can't hardly lift up a finger, let alone rent a house, Lisa Herbold.

How much is it to rent a house now if you're coming from a slavery background and the so-called civil rights?

Civil rights is dead.

Just like the song said, Freddie's dead.

It's dead.

If you sold to the flesh, you reap corruption.

And everything is corrupt right now.

That's why I came down here to tell you again.

Do you want to hear some more from me?

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Alex Zimmerman.

I'm good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Zeke Heil.

Zeke Heil, my dirty damn Nazi Gestapo democracy fascist.

A pig from animal farm.

a criminal and bandit.

My name is Alex Zimmerman.

I stand here with my red sign and yellow Jewish star.

You know what I've been doing for the last 20 years?

Yeah, you don't show my face.

So question right now, very simple.

We're talking today about agenda number one, about crime, but you number one, criminal.

You're not only criminal, you are bandita.

It is pure conspiracy.

They post to be arrested, you prosecute, because when you don't show us faces, it's a pure crime, 100% in conspiracy, because you all nine doing this.

You don't have rule, you don't have regulation, you don't have law, you know what it means, and you do it all together.

supposed to be doing separate, but you're all doing together.

It's a crime, it's conspiracy.

You're supposed to be spent all in jail for 20 years.

I demand that the Seattle prosecutor prosecute you totally.

How we can stop a crime in the street when we have a nine counsel who for 10 months don't show us faces.

It's enough spending jail the rest of your life in civilized country.

You're all supposed to be prosecuted, all of it.

No rule, no regulation, no law.

Total conspiracy.

You know what it means?

It is go for 10 months.

We complain about this a dozen times to everybody with peril.

You know what it means?

And nothing changed.

I right now complain to attorney criminal division.

Arrest this crook, a criminal, a bandit, a rickety who broke criminal law because it's 100% conspiracy.

Conspiracy is a crime in all civilized country.

But Seattle, except from this, because Seattle is not America.

It's a Nazi in Germany, in Turkey, absolutely identical.

Stand up, America.

Our next public speaker is Janice Iguchi, and Janice will be followed by Steve Daschle.

Good morning, Chair Herbold and council members.

My name is Janice DiGucci and I'm executive director at Neighborhood House.

I'm here today to speak in favor of adopting the recommendations outlined in the University of Washington's wage analysis of nonprofit human services workers.

I want to thank council member Herbold and Mosqueda for championing this study as well as the full council for approving this funding.

Low wages are preventing Neighborhood House from being able to fulfill our mission.

And here are three examples.

One, we just renovated and are ready to open seven new preschool and toddler classrooms.

However, we cannot open these seven classrooms because we do not have the teachers to staff them.

Number two, Naeem Anis, one of our employment specialists speaks four languages.

Clients come from all over King County to meet and talk with him.

But for five years, he has had to work a second full-time job to support himself and his family.

He's helping his clients get jobs that pay more than what he makes How much longer can we expect 10 students?

Number three, the city partially funds Neighbourhood Health's Parent Child Trust Program, which provides twice weekly home visits, and home visitors share the language and culture of the parents that we serve.

For three consecutive years, this contract received no increase, yet Neighbourhood Health continues to provide wage progression and pay double digit increases in health insurance.

To do so, we had to reduce the number of children served and raise money to subsidize the city's contract.

But Dumont-Gautelais, the fifth scheduled speaker this morning is Neighborhood Health's Parent Child Plus Manager.

She's a former home visitor herself, and will share about the impact this program has on families.

As an anti-poverty agency, we are working to dismantle inequitable systems that perpetuate poverty.

Please adopt the UW's recommendation as an initial step to demonstrate that you value our sector, you value the people we serve, and you value the talented human services workers like Nadim and Fadumo, who support the health and well-being of us all.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Steve Daschle and Steve will be followed by Heidi Neff.

Steve.

Good morning.

Good morning council members.

My name is Steve Daschle and I'm the executive director of Southwest Youth and Family Services and co-chair of the Seattle Human Services Coalition.

And I too am here to speak in favor of the adopting the recommendations outlined in the University of Washington wage analysis.

And I also want to especially thank council members from old Mosquito for championing this study, as well as the full council for approving its funding.

Last year, we had multiple open positions that remained open for most of the year for lack of candidates.

In the best of circumstances, these positions are hard to fill because our staff are bearing the burden of secondary trauma after working with youth and families that are addressing issues of suicide, substance abuse, physical and emotional neglect and abuse.

Mid-year last year, SWIFS provided across the board increases ranging from 1% to 20% with the lowest paid staff receiving a percentage increase higher than others.

We instituted a $25 minimum wage with most staff making about that.

We were able to fill some of the positions, but the agency suffered a significant deficit last year that we are climbing out of this year.

Organizations shouldn't have to put the entire staff at risk to make this critical work affordable to those who want to work for the betterment of others.

Low wages are preventing us from being able to deliver the services that have already been funded.

This inequity needs to be addressed before we'll be able to successfully stand up additional services.

This report provides a path forward in creating a safe, sustainable community that supports everyone in this great city.

I hope you'll consider endorsing the recommendations from this report.

Thanks so much for your time.

Our next speaker is Heidi Nath and Heidi will be followed by Susan Yang.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Heidi Neff and I'm a program director at Catholic Community Services of King County or CCS.

I'm here today to support the recommendations outlined in the UW Human Service Workers Wage Study.

Thank you, council members Herbold and Mosqueda for championing this study and the full council for approving its funding.

CCS provides a broad range of services to Seattle area residents impacted by poverty and racism.

CCS services include elder support housing and homelessness immigration and legal services and more.

Throughout our agency low wages are preventing CCS from being able to fully respond to the needs and fulfill our mission.

The youth tutoring program provides no cost tutoring to scholars in six under-resourced communities in Seattle.

Due to low wages we have not been fully staffed since last August.

We also struggle from high turnover as early career staff build experience and then move on to better paying work.

Supportive relationships with skilled and experienced staff are key in providing meaningful support for the BIPOC and immigrant family youth we serve.

Our funding comes from a variety of grants and contracts, including the city department of education and early learning.

BCS homelessness services are also significantly impacted by wage inequity due to vacancies, Staff are often asked to work overtime or double shifts to keep much needed shelters open.

Many staff also struggle to pay their bills and will work multiple jobs, find shared housing or resort to long commutes in order to make ends meet.

Low wages are preventing us from being able to fully deliver existing services.

This inequity needs to be addressed before we will be able to stand up additional needed services.

This report provides a great path forward and creating a safe, sustainable, supportive community in this great city.

Thank you so much for your time and attention to this.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Susan Yang, and Susan will be followed by Fadumo Gutali.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Susan Yang, and I'm the executive director at Denise Louis Education Center.

We serve over 400 children and families in Seattle with childcare and early learning services who are predominantly living in poverty, are English language learners and are immigrants.

First, I really want to thank council member Herbal and Mosqueda for championing the UW wage equity study and the full council for funding this study.

I'm here today to ask the council to adopt the recommendations outlined in the UW study and to begin efforts to fully invest in our human services workforce.

We are at a critical crossroads in our time.

Low wages are preventing Denise Louise from being able to fulfill our mission to provide high quality multicultural early learning services to our community.

Our inability to find quality staff has prevented us from opening three of our classrooms and sadly two of these are infant and toddler classrooms who are critically which are critically needed to help care for our children so that our families can work.

While our work is the most important to our current and future economic possibilities child care and early learning work workers are the least respected and least rewarded.

This inequity needs to be addressed and adopted through the recommendations by UW, and we really hope that the council will continue to invest in creating a more equitable community for the city and to provide a collective vision for a vibrant city of Seattle.

Thank you for your time.

Looks like our next speaker, Faduma Gatali, is showing is not present, so we'll move down to Jesse Friedman, and Jesse will be followed by Howard Gale.

Good morning Chair Herbold and committee members.

My name is Jessie Friedman and I'm the Policy Director for Youth Care.

You're speaking in strong support of the recommendations of the wage equity study you'll hear about today.

A big thank you to Council Members Herbold and Mosqueda for championing this study and the full Council for approval.

The study lays bare the finer details of what all of us know too well.

Our frontline workers are underpaid, putting both their own stability and the stability of our entire human services sector at risk.

YouthCare serves over 1,600 young people experiencing homelessness annually through our drop-in centers, housing, educational, and workforce development services.

Each of our programs has a staffing shortage.

Our staff can't afford to stay in this work, often leaving for the better-paying, better-benefited jobs outside the human service sector that make living in our expensive region remotely possible.

High turnover rates mean that our young people don't have the consistent, trusted adult to form a relationship with.

It means we can't offer the kind of support that young people need to move towards stability and wellness.

It also means that our workforce is less experienced and less trained.

Due to lack of staff, youth care currently has our two under age 18 programs consolidated into one.

That means more children living unhoused or in unsafe situations.

One of our age 18 to 24 programs is closed altogether, and another new one was never able to open.

Our staff works 24-7 with young people in crisis.

They're dealing with the region's biggest challenges head on every single day.

And the truth is we can't give them the support that they deserve alone.

While we have been able to implement modest wage increases over the past several years, like many organizations, youth care is in a deficit budget.

And that's why this report is so critical.

It shows that the current system can't hold.

It's a call to action for nonprofits and public and private funders to create a better system for our frontline workers that so deeply and urgently need and deserve it.

Thank you to Julia Strakowski, Jason Austin, and Tree Willard for leading us in this work, and thank you all for your time.

Thank you.

Before we move to our next speaker, which is Howard Gale, and Howard will be followed by Jen Musia, I'd like to have the record reflect that Council Member Mosqueda, who did let us know in advance that she would be a few minutes late, has joined us and has been here for most of the comment.

Moving on, back to public comment, Howard Gale.

Good morning, Howard Gale with seattlestop.org.

Today marks the eighth week, the eighth week, since Janavi Kandulu was killed by a speeding SPD officer.

Have we forgotten Janavi and the serious questions still left unanswered?

For example, despite varying claims by Chief Diaz concerning the reason or requirement that an SPD officer was speeding to the scene of a medical emergency, Publico reported last week that the emergency involved a person suffering a panic or anxiety attack rather than an opioid overdose.

This indicates the chief is intentionally misled the public and that there was no reason for an officer to be speeding to the scene.

Further, after seven weeks, the SPD has failed to release any in-car or other video, 911 dispatch audio or any SPD radio traffic concerning this incident.

This stands in stark contrast to the SPD policy and practice over the last seven plus years to release these records within 72 hours of a police-related death.

Again, only recently did Publicaula obtain the audio of the 911 call, something still not made public by the SPD.

From news video taken shortly after the accident, while EMTs were attending Janavi, it appears that her body was displaced over 150 feet from where she was struck suggesting that the SPD car was traveling at an extremely high rate of speed, failing to break until after hitting her and or dragging her for half a block.

Will Janavi, a victim of SPD's failed accountability, also now become the victim of a so-called police accountability system that creates a facade of accountability and service to moving on and forgetting?

Will this council's allegiance to a failed accountability system be the motivation to forget?

For council members leaving after this year, is this the legacy you wish to leave behind?

And for those council members running for re-election this year, trust you will face these questions at every public appearance.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Jen Musea, and Jen will be followed by Nathaniel Lyon.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Jen Musee.

I'm executive director at Ballard Food Bank and co-chair of the Seattle Human Services Coalition.

I'm here today to support the recommendations outlined in the University of Washington's wage analysis of nonprofit human service workers.

Thank you, council members Herbold and Mosqueda for championing the study, as well as the full council for approving its funding.

Human service providers professionals provide a critical service.

Our colleagues perform an incredibly important role every day as they connect with community members to help them access food, housing, mental health services, substance use counseling, case management, and so much more.

Our city is in a state of crisis with rates of homelessness at an all time high.

We urgently need the skills of dedicated and experienced human service providers to help address this crisis.

However, many organizations are struggling to hire and retain staff when wages are far below what it costs to live in this city.

As an example, at Ballard Food Bank's Community Resource Hub, we partner with agencies in our community that offer critical services that our clients need to access housing, behavioral health, and more.

Yet many of these agencies are understaffed and struggling to hire and retain.

Because of this, staff have extremely high caseloads as they work fervently to provide services to our unhoused neighbors.

When agencies are understaffed or have high turnover, then our community members are unable to access what they need the most.

Our community needs more services, not less, and lack of services compounds the challenges we are facing across our city.

To have the level of services we need to address homelessness and have a thriving community, we must have the capacity to invest in our staff teams at a level that recognizes their education, experience, and responsibility.

This report provides a path forward in creating sustainable thriving community that supports everyone in this great city.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Our last person signed up to speak virtually before we go back to in-person public comment is Nathaniel Lyon.

After Nathaniel, we'll be going back to in-person public comment with our last speaker signed up, and that's Azhaney Smith.

Moving back to Nathaniel.

Thank you.

Nathaniel, we do need you to hit star six.

There you go.

Perfect.

Sorry about that.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Nathaniel Lyon, and I work at the Ballard Food Bank as a direct service worker.

I spent my whole career in various Seattle service organizations.

I'm here today to speak in favor of adopting the recommendations outlined in the University of Washington Wage Analysis of Nonprofit Human Service Workers.

I have seen multiple colleagues leave the nonprofit human services field after years of career experience.

While there are many reasons that individuals choose to leave the sector, by far the largest is inequitable compensation.

Our work is one of relationships and community building.

That cannot happen when the turnover is not just common but expected.

Most direct service staff last less than two years in a position, just long enough to build a relationship with our clients only to have that bridge burned when we leave.

Every client I've worked with who has interacted with the human services sector for any prolonged period of time has a story about someone who they trusted that left.

I have been that person who has left.

Human service workers are being asked to make decisions that profound oftentimes life and death consequences for the people that we work with.

all the while being paid at unnecessary levels that we cannot afford to live in the city at.

We as a community need to ask if the people we are asking to solve this crisis are currently facing, we are currently facing, are worth investment.

Because up until now, the answer has been that we are not.

I ask that we please adopt the recommendations outlined in the University of Washington study as a first step in recognizing the critical contributions that human services workers make to the city.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And our last public speaker is Ms. Smith, Ashani Smith.

Hello, everyone.

My name's actually Ashani Smith.

For one thing I have to say is, when I think of an attorney's office for criminal division, and I think about criminal and who people label as criminal, I see my color.

I also don't understand how you guys do not surveillance or make surveillance equipment to surveillance all of you, including the police and including you attorneys, because I'm wondering what's going on.

Also, wage equity study for non-profit Human services, there needs to be a wage equity study among the city of Seattle because nobody wants to work for you guys.

I'm telling you right now, I don't even want to work for you.

Why you don't pay your people.

And on top of that, your housing is ridiculous.

And I'm 23 years old and I've been raised in Seattle and I'm homeless.

And there's many homeless people who are in my age.

but you guys are all have the ability to change these things because God gave you the ability to do it and you're not doing anything with it.

There needs to be judgment and maybe people need to go seek and look out in the city that they are supposedly supposed to be helping.

Cause I don't see no help.

Where's the help?

Tell me.

Where's my place?

Where's all the people that are homeless place?

Where is the mental stability?

Because I know y'all need mental stability too.

Thank you.

That concludes public comment for today.

We'll move on to the first item on our agenda.

We are joined by presenters from the city attorney's office.

Thank you for joining us today.

They'll be presenting the city attorney's offices, criminal division, fourth quarter report.

Really appreciate your being available to present on short notice.

And if we could just start with a quick round of go rounds and have a couple other other words and we'll let you start in on the presentation.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember herbal Thank you for the invitation to be here today to present and to be here in person.

It's nice to be back.

I'm joined by my colleagues peril Olaf Swanson, he was the data analytics manager for the Seattle City Attorney's Office.

And Natalie Walton Anderson, our criminal division chief.

We are here on behalf of city attorney and Davidson to present the quarterly report for the city attorney's office, a criminal division and pair and Natalie are going to go into that in just a second.

But before they do, I want to start by just noting what kind of incredible investment, extraordinary effort it is to produce this level of transparency.

And that's really a reflection of Ann Davison's commitment to transparency about our criminal justice system.

The presentation that Pear and Natalie will provide today is really a preview of a 53 page report with 120 different charts providing detailed exacting data on all of the activities of the criminal division.

That really is unprecedented for the city and it reflects an extraordinary commitment because we have to extract that data pair here, extracts that data from a system, a data system that is over 25 years old and is going to be replaced later this year.

So without further ado, I'll turn it to pair and then Natalie will follow.

Sure.

And just before we jump into that, I just wanted folks to viewing public and council members be aware that the report and the presentation are linked to the agenda.

It is a 53 page report.

It is full of visuals and that is very helpful.

The presentation itself is condensed and I think shows some highlights from the report, but there's a lot of great information within the report itself.

So thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold and Deputy City Attorney Lindsay.

So this report, I'm gonna go over some high level, just basics to give you an idea of the state of what we're doing, not get into some of the finer details you'll find in the whole report.

Starting off, just looking at a timeline of the referrals our office gets and to define what that is, a police officer will write a report when a crime is sent to the office, but that report can have sometimes multiple people on it.

a person per report.

And that's sort of the best measure of what the office does because each person is an individual unique one.

We don't necessarily file on both.

We could file on one, decline the other.

And so that's sort of the baseline of a lot of what we do is this firm referral.

As you can see for the last year, it's been pretty flat at between 27 and 2,800 referrals a quarter.

it's a little higher than the lows in 2020 and 2021, but still below what we were getting before 2020. To dig a little deeper into that, not every referral is the same, so that we break our referrals into three different categories, domestic violence, non-traffic, non-domestic violence, and criminal traffic.

And you can see that while our referral has been pretty much constant, the makeup of them is not necessarily.

So in 2020, The criminal traffic referrals dropped significantly a big part of that was we get much fewer driving with license suspended referrals and we see they're pretty much the only ones that are attached to do is another more serious criminal traffic misdemeanors.

And then also the non traffic non domestic violence referrals have dropped significantly.

You can speculate what that is.

It's well correlated with the drop in police staffing and domestic violence referrals have not changed much.

And that's also most of those do not originate with police on views.

They originate with witnesses or victims themselves calling them in.

And so that's more indicative of what it is less affected by the reduction of police staffing.

Council Member Herbold, I believe your office had asked about assault with sexual motivation specifically, so we put that into the quarter four report.

And you can see the blue is domestic violence assaults, the green is non-domestic violence assaults, and then the gray within that is the assaults with sexual motivation for DV and the tan is that for non-DV.

There was a change in coding around the end of 2019, 2020, so that's why there's a spike there, but I don't think that's I think that's more indicative of recoding in our system, not being able to understand that.

But you can see that there are more domestic violence assaults of sexual motivation than non domestic violence ones.

And that number has been increasing throughout this year and compared to the previous years.

While it's still a relatively small proportion of all of the assaults, it is not a small number in its totality.

you're looking at 100 per quarter, which is significant.

I want to jump from that to heat mapping, just to understand what the different types of crimes look like that come to our office.

The blue is domestic violence.

You can see that for the most part, that is essentially heat map of the population of the city.

Where more people live, we get more domestic violence referrals.

The non-traffic, non-domestic violence, a lot of that follows corporate, not corporate, but business activity, commercial activity, The downtown core is by far the highest area where we get that from, but you can also see a very bright spot in Northgate along the Aurora corridor.

And then, you know, other areas where there's a lot of commercial activity.

And then the criminal traffic tends to follow either places where people drink or where people drive to and from where they drink so you'll see a lot in Capitol Hill, and then on various like main arterials.

So that is sort of the state of what's coming into our office.

So I'm gonna talk briefly about what we do with those.

So this chart here shows our filing and declining.

So basically the activity of our review and filing unit and just the output of our office before it makes it to the court.

As you can see that mid 2020, the output of the office dropped significantly and it is now back up to where it was before that.

or close to it.

We're not getting as many referrals.

There's a limit on what we can file.

The gold part breaks out things from the backlog.

So when City Attorney Davison entered the office at the beginning of 2022, there was a backlog of 4,990 referrals waiting to be decided on.

Many of those are very old, which makes them very hard to prosecute and so a lot of them ended up having to be declined.

They were all looked at, and just some of them, you know, the witnesses had left the evidence to become stale or they weren't good to begin with.

The amount we decline from current things has not really changed much, but the activity is heavily influenced by those recent backlog declines.

Just a quick question about the definition.

Backlog decline, is that an administrative decline, or is that cases in which you went through the backlog and the witness or the victim themselves stated that they wish to decline.

We went through all of the cases, and some were declined because of a lack of witness cooperation or contact, and some were declined for other reasons, for example, because of the age of the case and what the case was.

For example, a two-year-old trespass case, we made a lot of administrative decisions to decline those cases.

Thank you.

And before we go on, I see that Council Member Mosqueda's hand is raised.

Thank you so much for keeping an eye out.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you.

And thank you, Madam Chair, for announcing me.

I'm sorry I was a few minutes late, but great public testimony this morning and a packed agenda.

So I have a few questions, but I'll try to keep them relatively short.

Hello, everybody.

Good to see you.

My question was actually related to the previous slide.

And Madam Chair, if you prefer that We just sort of pepper these throughout.

I'm happy to do that.

But sorry to go back a slide.

I just wondered, is there a reason that you decided not to compare the heat maps to the OPCD social equity index for comparison purposes?

So we do more detailed heat mapping for internal purposes, but the reason we just do this is it's supposed to be a kind of a simple look at where things are happening and You know, while it is very informative in some cases to break apart, to basically merge the heat maps with shape files that talk about various different demographic and other related things, it gets pretty in the weeds.

And we are also a shop of one analyst, which is me.

And so it's more of a on-demand thing rather than a general reporting thing.

But it is important to look at those various things, and it is something we work on.

Thank you.

Oh, and we do have in the report detailed breakdowns of individual council districts, if anyone has questions specific to that.

But going on.

So this shows our decline rate.

And the main reason we measure decline rate is to sort of look at what percents of what's coming in we can do something productive with.

You know, some things will always be declined because of various reasons, but we want to try to bring the decline rate down for things where, you know, Scott was saying old cases that are not particularly like the evidence isn't very good.

That's not useful for anyone if something has to be declined for that.

So we want to get rid of declines like that.

And you can see that our office has lower decline rates than any of the past five years.

And that has been because of leadership by City Attorney Davison by Natalie Walton Anderson and just really trying to make our office as efficient as possible.

Something we announced last year that was very important and also a big part of why the decline rate is lower is our close in time filing, trying to file or make a filing decision as quickly as possible when we have an incoming referral.

And so you can see that Things started out very well in Q2.

It was just a couple of days.

It got a little worse throughout the year.

There were staffing issues that Natalie will talk about a little later.

But overall for the year, we had a median time to make a filing decision of five days, which is basically saying a victim can expect to wait about five days to know whether or not we have decided to prosecute the case they are a victim on.

And that all leads into the backlog.

So as I said earlier, the backlog of cases waiting to be reviewed was 4,990 when city attorney Davison took office.

And so you can see quarter by quarter what was done to that.

The close in time policy had a great effect.

It just, it made things more efficient.

We were able to work through more of them.

Some staffing issues started to happen in the third quarter, which slowed it down.

And then we initiated a special project basically getting some pulling some attorneys aside using tech to just streamline things and just really looking for referrals that were just not prosecutable kind of low hanging fruit that we could get rid of because there wasn't, we wouldn't have been able to prosecute it anyways and it takes less time to decline something than it does to file council member mosquito.

I'll let you do it.

Go ahead, Council Member Esqueda.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Could you elaborate a little bit more?

When we see on page nine of the report, the graph shows the steep decline in timely filing decisions after quarter two of 2022. Can you talk a little bit more about what the norm is for filing decisions to be about 50% or below?

Sorry, page nine of the report or the slides.

Page, sorry.

Page nine of the report, perhaps, perhaps it's more related to the previous slide.

If you want to come back to it that's fine I don't want to keep us moving back talking back and forth between the slides but.

Yeah.

Jamie Goldstein, City of Boulder, Applicant Overview & Presentation 2 have the criminal division meet for making filing decisions.

And what we're really looking for is to make a substantial percentage of decisions within that five-day period.

That was her goal.

I think that's consistent with best practice, but there's no national standard for filing decision times.

I will say there are certain cases that by their very nature, particularly domestic violence cases, will often take longer than five days before the filing decision is appropriate.

But that five days for the bulk of misdemeanor cases that the city attorney's office receives is is the goal that city attorney Davidson set and what we continue to try and achieve.

OK.

Thank you, Scott.

So finally, going on to why we decline cases, This is sort of a timeline of various groups of reasons.

So a big goal of the office was to try to not decline things because we weren't able to get a hold of the victim for various reasons.

A big part of the close in time was because you want to be able to have close in time contact to the victim as well as accountability.

And so you can see that the orange and green sections have become much smaller parts of the overall reasons to decline, something we've tried very hard to just make it where we are not relying on the victims solely.

Natalie or Scott can get deeper into this.

But in case, this is showing that we've maintained that goal.

The large diversion or policy related in Q4 is related to backline declines, not related to diversion, just to talk about that.

Let me just expand on this very briefly, which is that when the city attorney's office was taking six months often to make filing decisions, the result that they would get when they would contact victims in those cases is often victims at that point, six months after the fact, no longer wanted to participate.

The incident had passed and and they were not interested in participating.

And that was that was an unfortunate you know situation by filing cases faster by hitting the city attorney's goal of those five filing within five days or a substantial percentage within five days what we've seen is we're able to get much better overall victim cooperation Natalie.

And a lot of our victims, thank you, Scott.

A lot of our victims are unhoused or their addresses are not stable or we don't have maybe that contact information six months, it's changed.

And so we wanna make sure that the city attorney's office is representing all victims, our entire community.

And so by having that close in time filing policy, it really allows us to connect in a much quicker, more meaningful way with our victims.

In addition to that, we've had an increase in adding one more general crime or general crimes advocate.

So we have a total of two to address thousands of cases.

And our victims have a lot of questions for us and how the system works and how they're being served.

And so this close in time allows us that connection.

And I think the fact that a lot of our declines were because we couldn't contact victims is really not how our office and our really our system is supposed to work.

Thank you.

Yeah, just to call out the, the, the change the positive change the victim not participating has dropped from about 20% of declines in 2021 to less than 10% in 2022. Thank you for calling out the.

strategy, the close in time filing policy as contributing to that I was just about to ask whether or not there are other strategies.

And you referenced additional victims advocates, can you talk to us a little bit more about that.

Sure.

Our domestic violence unit has approximately eight.

advocates right now.

And that's to deal with our domestic violence cases.

But we have a lot of other cases in the office, thousands of them that require advocacy.

And we had one general crimes advocate.

And in this last budget cycle, we were able to advocate and thank you council members here today in this meeting and the mayor's office for allowing us to have additional funding to have a second general crimes advocate.

However, that's still not enough.

We have two people who work beyond the regular work week to try and contact as many victims as possible, and they primarily focus on our in custody cases, making that connection.

Our assault victims are harassment victims and those victims that.

are as a result of a lot of our individuals who suffer from competency and are initially at least in our mental health court.

And so again, we have calls from Seattle Fire and SPD and our first responders and our hospital workers also wanting that same advocacy.

And we try and triage where we can, but we essentially have two people to call on thousands and thousands of cases that we get.

Thank you.

The other item I think that is worth calling out is the increase over the course of the year of the diversion and policy-related declines.

Just appreciate seeing that data point pulled out.

It is useful to see within the context of declines generally.

And just beyond, you say diversion policy-related, And I'm just thinking kind of narrowly diversion, what are some other policy related declines in that category.

Sure, and to be honest, Council Member Herbold, I just wanna say, shifting the contracts of our control to HSD has been a significant challenge for us.

In the first, I would say, three quarters, we worked with HSD and ultimately, the transfer of work, they had to staff up and I recognize that having to make those adjustments and transitions.

And so, I want to express my appreciation to the Interim Director, Tanya Kim because upon communicating with her, we've seen an improvement in the last quarter.

where our pre-filing diversion, we have two prosecutors that are currently there in a paralegal.

We've been able to shepherd a lot of our community-based contacts to try and create some diversion pilots, and we hope to have those funded and approved within the next quarter.

We still continue to work with LEAD, Choose 180, Choose Freedom, which is under Choose 180, and the LGBTQ+, but prior to this year, we had the ability to sign our own contracts and be able to start those programs, and we've had to rely on another agency And that is that has hampered our ability to expand diversion to the extent that we wanted and I think what Council wanted.

Yeah, we yes we have been tracking the saga of getting diversion for the age over 25, very carefully and understand that we're about to execute a contract.

So appreciate your patience in that.

And you're right, this is definitely a long time coming.

The recommendations from the prior city attorney and the racial equity toolkit were both done in 2021. So yes, we're definitely all eager to get this up and running.

So thank you.

So that's going to conclude my talking about the report and Natalie is going to talk about a few other issues.

Yes.

And in the interest of time, thank you again, council member Herbold for hosting us and allowing us this time to speak about the work that we've done.

You know, as many of you know, I just want to kind of go over some of the future goals for the criminal division to support public safety for the city.

We are still trying to get to full staffing in the two years leading up to Oh, I'm sorry.

Well, actually this hasn't.

So in the two years leading up to Anne taking office, we lost approximately 12 prosecutors in two years.

And one of the biggest impacts of our staffing crisis is obviously our ability to pay prosecutors a competitive salary.

And so one of the metrics that we put forth in this slide is basically the attorney salary comparison.

that's currently on the screen right now.

As you can see, up until about year five, we remain competitive, but that's where we stop the ability to be competitive with other jurisdictions, both out of state that have comparables in terms of the city of Seattle, but also within state and within our own municipalities, such as Redmond, SeaTac, Renton, and Bellevue.

And of course, across the street with the King County Prosecutor's Office as well, who does also misdemeanor cases as well as felony cases.

So that has been a huge factor in us being able to retain and keep our staffing current.

I think in this current year, we've had six prosecutors leave the office and many others who have been promoted within the division.

And so we are been trying to address that and we are incredibly thankful and appreciative of the cooperation that we've received from council, the executive and the mayor's office.

And we're grateful within the speed that you all have brought that to council to I think a vote this afternoon.

Very timely.

I have a question.

Yeah.

On the bottom of the graph on the left, what do the steps refer to?

I'm trying to figure out what those numbers are.

Yes, the steps refer to essentially levels of years of service or experience.

So, for example, a prosecutor who has more than 10 years experience based on the pay grid, I only have the ability to pay them to step six.

And so I'm limited in terms of that that range.

And that range is showing here that, you know, again, our attorney salaries are you know, just above at the current mark, $100,000 for somebody who has potentially 10 or 12 years of experience as a lawyer.

And so the ability to recruit and retain experienced, thoughtful prosecutors to this work is really limited.

And that is what we need actually to continue to carry out this work.

And the full council agenda today has legislation approving the pay increase that's negotiated.

Council Member Nelson, yes, follow up.

Yeah, I just wanted to zero back in I know that we're going to talk about this later this afternoon but am I reading this correctly that of that Seattle has the lowest salaries, even lower than Auburn and is that lower than King County for example.

You are correct.

The step in year, it talks about the breakdown.

So we are aligned up until right about year five.

And that's when the difference kind of starts and we just kind of level off and you see all of the other municipalities and even out of state and counties starting to go up exponentially.

And maybe to add to that.

We didn't look at every single municipality, but with all the ones listed there, our range has the lowest top end and the lowest bottom end of all of those West Coast cities, most of which are nearby.

The other thing I want to point out is to the cost of living in Seattle.

And we all know this, but in comparison to the city of Auburn or, you know, even the city of Renton and the fact that, you know, the salaries there, you know, we have lost people to those jurisdictions.

And one of the primary factors is essentially our ability to pay competitive wage.

Thanks.

And the graph on the left does show the difference between public employees and nonprofit employee salaries, right?

It shows the.

So the green line is our office city prosecutors, the blue line is county prosecutors and the tan line is public defenders.

OK, thank you.

Again, in the interest of time, you know our goals again for the criminal division we just talked about full staffing and trying to.

remedy the issues in terms of disparities and pay with other jurisdictions.

We also want to release our filing guidelines.

Similar to King County, they have published filing and disposition standards.

Our goal is to file those guidelines this year.

I think those guidelines will serve as, again, meeting the goal that our city attorney has for transparency, but also guiding Seattle Police Department in terms of where they should focus their work and hopefully making making it so that we continue to see less declines.

If they know what our filing guidelines are, we will make sure that we receive reports that either have, they don't meet those guidelines.

Increased victim contact, I've already kind of touched on that.

To the extent that we can, we want to provide as much advocacy, not only to our victims and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, but also our general crimes.

our first responders, our hospital, our fire, our police, and also our business victims here in the city.

We want to continue to focus on close-in-time filing and reduce those decline rates.

We've worked really hard to get that close-in-time policy within the office, making that a standard so that we can continue to address those referrals as they come in.

In addition to that, we see just as everybody does here in the city, an increase in individuals suffering from untreated mental illness and substance use disorder.

And we wanna work with our partners on restoration and competency and what we can do with that.

Later on, actually very shortly, we will be releasing a report.

We launched our High Utilizer Initiative about a year ago with the goal of finding the right response and reducing the impact that this population has on our community and a myriad of our courts and city agencies.

Predominantly, the issues are substance use disorder, and we've seen a lot of success and significant impact and reduction on the number of referrals that our office is receiving from this population.

What's also been key is the partnerships that we've had with the Seattle Police Department, the King County Prosecutor's Office, the King County Jail, and our community providers, specifically those with Evergreen Treatment and LEAD, and working with us on individuals that also may be named as those that meet the High Utilizer Initiative criteria, but are also engaged in those programs.

The city attorney's office again will be releasing a year-end report focused on our outcomes and we look forward to sharing that report with council and our community members.

Thanks and look forward to having you back.

to hear that.

Just one additional quick question.

Something from the report itself not pulled out in the presentation on page 18 regarding lead.

It says that the city attorney's office has started to track these clients with much greater detail.

The department has integrated better client tracking as to overcome shortcomings in the current criminal case management system.

We're working on putting in past clients, but currently only have historical clients for the year 2022. Can you just talk a little bit about what you're tracking and how you're using that information?

Sure.

So our current criminal case management system does not have the resolution that I think council would find helpful.

So I've had them writing down a journal of what happens when there's a hearing, things, outcomes, warm handoffs, treatment kind of things.

And so from that journal, we're pulling out additional data, which you can see on pages 19 and 20. So for instance, you can see what types of court calendars they go into.

You can see some of the, I guess even page 21, like the hearing outcomes.

It's not an inclusive list, cause there's a lot of kind of one-off little things, but generally like what it looks like for a lead client.

And so hopefully like that gives enough information for, what you need for your decision-making, but we are working on continually expanding that.

What did you say you don't have?

Our criminal case management system currently doesn't have the ability to track any of this.

So we've had to do it in an Excel sheet separately, which is time consuming, but hopefully the extra information is useful.

Council Member Nelson, the system that the city attorney's office uses is 25 years old, called Damien.

It's very antiquated.

very difficult.

That is where there's a big project to replace that this year with a more modern criminal data and entry system.

But what it doesn't allow for doing things like tracking lead data.

So we're doing a lot of that manually on the side and trying to share that as quickly as possible with you.

It seems like it would be important to make sure that that the programs are working.

May I add something to that, Council Member Nelson?

Coming from King County, we had a much more sophisticated data system that could track at least the prosecutor's engagement with lead clients and what we were doing there in terms of outcomes.

Working with a lead program, I know that there's been many years where they've been trying to get a database together to kind of provide those outcomes.

One problem with our City of Seattle database is the age of that database, it's difficult to transfer information back and forth to that because it's just, it's out of date.

And so we're very hopeful in this new CCMS system that we can communicate with the LEAD database and hopefully see those outcomes also coming from LEAD and PDA in terms of recidivism data, those types of things that I think would be important again for those decisions to be made.

Excellent, thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you very much.

I was wondering if we could go back to slide 10 of the presentation.

I appreciate that as issues have emerged and there's more attention on the health and safety of folks who are both working in and residing in the King County Jail, that a lot of the time people are also raising the question about who is being arrested and who is being ultimately booked into the jail.

I think that there's a fair question that's being asked from the county about how we can better address some of the flow of people to the jail upstream and whether that's at the point of arrest or prosecution.

So I appreciate that on slide 10 here, you've called out that there's a whole category of people in yellow that were declined due to unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

And I think that It's important for us to have a better understanding as well of whether or not those folks who were declined to be prosecuted further, whether they were directly referred to diversion-related programs.

Is there some way to tell whether or not those folks were able to get into diversion programs?

Can I just ask a clarifying question?

So everything here is someone who's been declined.

So their prosecution has been declined.

So if it was declined because we didn't believe it could be proved, then it's sort of done from our office's perspective.

So the diversion would be if we think there's evidence, but we don't think that they should be in the mainstream process, Natalie maybe can.

Yes, and Council Member Mosqueda, I was going to just indicate that all of our referrals are first reviewed for possible referral into one of our diversion programs.

In addition to reviewing that, we're also looking for potential proof issues.

I don't believe that there are any proof issues that we should have the oversight to be trying to push somebody through a potential diversion program if really the referral shouldn't be with us in the first place.

We don't necessarily have any sort of in-house, I think, community-based program.

That's why we work with our pre-filing diversion program to try and see which referrals should not really go through our system and should be referred to diversion.

But from my perspective, if a case comes to us and there's not sufficient evidence, it should stop right there.

I recognize wanting to help and engage with people who obviously need those diversion services, but our role as a prosecutor is to only be handling cases where we feel like there is sufficient, if not more than sufficient evidence to move forward and have us be involved.

OK, that's helpful clarification because, you know, unlike victim not participating or other unable to contact the victim, I thought if you have the person in front of you, it seems like maybe there's a missed opportunity to not get more people into diversion programs given across the board here.

It suffered in the last quarter of last year.

All of the diversion related referrals are much smaller than unable to prosecute.

But what I think I hear you saying is If you take a look at the case and you say, the team says, hey, these folks shouldn't even be here in the first place, then that's helpful clarification.

I think that that also signals to us the further upstream conversation that we will continue to have with SPD as well about who was being brought into the criminal justice system in the first place.

If there are this high number of people who are coming to the city attorney's office and your team is unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was an issue to begin with.

And they're not good clients for diversion programs because there was not reason to believe that diversion was the best alternative for them.

And it seems like we still need to have more upstream conversations with SPD about how and why some of these folks in that yellow category are being brought into the system in the first place, given that we know that there's harmful consequences for people being pulled into a system.

And it really does impact their social determinants of health and their opportunity to keep jobs and housing, et cetera.

So thank you for the clarification on that.

to make sure I understood.

So when you indicated that our diversion or policy related referrals are down, I just want to make sure that it's clear on the graph that that would be in quarter three and quarter four, they're actually significantly increased.

But I understand the concern that we want to make sure that cases that are being brought to this office have that sufficient evidence.

And I think our filing guidelines will help with that.

I also think you know, SPD's ability to, you know, have enough staff to be able to fully investigate those cases and make sure they're getting sent us what would also be helpful.

Yeah.

And maybe there was a miscommunication.

I was trying to applaud the numbers from quarter four, 2022. And note that that was an outlier and that it does look like, you know, starting spring of last year, you are ramping up those numbers compared to 2021. So no, that's appreciated.

And we weren't here in 2021, so we started in 2022.

Just a reminder that the city attorney's lead portfolio is a very small fraction of the lead portfolio.

The vast majority of the lead portfolio is pre-arrest diversions.

So that's, I think, getting to some of the comments that you made, Council Member Mesquita, about upstream diversions before cases are referred to, before there are arrests and referrals to the city attorney's office.

So again, the lead portfolio that the city attorney has is a very small fraction of the total lead portfolio, the majority of which is pre-arrest diversion.

Council Member Nelson.

Yeah, I had a question.

What is it?

Can you give us an example of some of the proofs that you don't have in order to go forward with some of these cases?

What are you talking about unable to prove?

So what is the issue?

Oh, well, I think one is, you know, identification, maybe clear video, maybe something that's necessary to take that case to trial.

You know, we have separated out the category of unable to contact victim or victims not participating.

But that also goes to a lot of our evidentiary concerns as well.

And just also weighing the equities of the case and whether or not we feel like we have the legal sufficiency to go forward.

Yeah, I asked you you touched on police staffing which I definitely understand is an issue.

I often get asked by small businesses would it help if we had better video would would you would the city, you know, could that be helpful etc so that's that's the only reason I was asking is what kind

And Council Member Nelson, one of it is not even having any witnesses.

Like maybe once they even go there, there's nobody there to talk about who saw what.

So that's another evidentiary concern that comes up quite frequently.

And that's directly related to response time and the ability to have people there and contacting those witnesses or the follow-up for that.

Just for big picture clarity, the majority of cases that the Seattle Police Department refers to our office or are good cases that are filed by the criminal division.

And they're always it's natural in a criminal justice system to have some tension and a good thing to have some tension between the prosecutors and the police to make sure that they are These cases are really legally sufficient before proceeding.

So I think there's a good, healthy tension.

One of the ways, though, that we're looking to reduce the decline rate, meaning file more cases to make sure that SPD's time is not wasted as well, is with more report writing training for officers so that officers make sure that They're putting in their reports the first time all of the information that the prosecutors will need to take that case all the way to trial.

One of the challenges in the staffing crisis is that five years ago, it may have been the case that a prosecutor could reach back out to an officer and have some small point of follow-up.

That's very difficult today because the officers just don't have the time.

They need to be out on the streets.

And so it's hard for them to respond on a theft case from three weeks ago when a prosecutor has a question.

Thank you.

Just continuing the conversation around these declines, the category unable to prove beyond reasonable doubt, would it be correct that this category would include individuals with competency issues being able to be competent to stand trial and obviously we've heard a lot about the efforts of the county prosecutor to bring attention to the state's obligations in this area.

And if I recall correctly, the city attorney has joined those efforts as well.

So I assume that even though those competency issues may be more keenly felt in higher courts, I'm guessing that they might be some percentage of the declines here too.

I would like to talk about two different aspects of it.

First of all, we do decline cases where we know there's been significant competency issues with those individuals and I've had a lot of conversations with Seattle fire department surrounding outcomes for individuals who have, um, have alleged to have assaulted their fire, their, their fire employees, and kind of going through, this is an individual that was in crisis.

Um, they were, um, involuntarily committed or taken.

And so we've looked at that and tried to see, you know, when is there recency in terms of their competency finding, does it make sense to try and file this again?

Um, alternatively, we do file cases where competency is raised at arraignment and those would not be in The decline because those cases were actually filed and I'm hopeful that was.

Yeah, very good.

Yep.

Appreciate it.

The joint editorial from.

City Attorney Davidson, as well as the county prosecutor a couple weeks ago.

Glad to see that we're helping to raise some of the issues surrounding the state's failure to adequately address the fair and humane um, timing around, um, getting folks services, uh, when, when needed, um, and addressing the issues associated with their detention in jail, uh, their long detention in jail while waiting those services.

So really, please, please send my, um, my appreciation to City Attorney Davidson for her participation and all of you at the table as well.

Thank you very much for your work.

Uh, Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you so much.

I just wanted to circle back to the racial equity implications as well.

I know this is a long, lengthy report.

Thank you for this detail.

On page 41 of the report, it says that the percentage of referrals of certain races are displayed on page 41, but I would love to see more, as you mentioned, the crosswalk between how those percentages compare to the percentages of the total population, so we can continue to think more about the racial equity impact of various public policies.

I recognize that that's not part of the presentation here, but to the degree that we can layer that on for future discussions with your office and the city attorney, That would be appreciated just to make sure we're always centering our racial equity analysis on public policies, especially as it relates to criminal justice system.

Thank you again.

Just for clarification, you're looking for not just the information about referrals by race for victims and suspects, but also the different outcomes other than referrals?

Is that what you're seeking?

Yeah, I think that that would be helpful.

I also think that we it would be helpful to see, you know, how different communities are when when a referral happens to the city attorney's office, how they are ultimately processed so that we can see if there's any racial justice implications there, a comparison of what the percentage of those referrals are versus, you know, how much of the total population they represent would be helpful for us to know if there's a disproportionate impact.

Thank you.

Para Olaf has been very, very helpful in adding new data points to coincide with our interest.

So I appreciate the clarification of what you went for.

All right.

If there are no other questions, I just want to thank you again for your work.

I appreciate you making time again on short notice.

I appreciate all that you're doing and your efforts to accommodate our various interests in future reports.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold and to all the council members.

And thank you, hopefully in advance for your support this afternoon.

Very much appreciated.

Great.

All right, will the clerk please read in agenda item number two.

Agenda item two, wage equity study.

for non-profit human services workers in Seattle and King County.

All right, great.

Thank you.

This presentation, we are doing a split in-person and remote presentation.

So we'll see how that goes.

Appreciate everybody working together to get this going.

And please, some patience with us as we get it rolling here.

We'll have Council Central staff here with us in chambers.

And then we'll have some of our external to the city partners and also the Human Services Department attending remotely.

I think I'll just get started with some introductory remarks while we're getting things set up.

We have a number of guests this morning to help us understand the newly released University of Washington Wage Equity Study.

This was commissioned by the council.

And the intent is to examine pay among human service sector workers.

But we're doing a kind of a fresh approach to doing a deep dive on the equity on these workers.

We'll have our presenters introduce themselves and then afterwards I have a few more words before we get started.

So, Karina and Jen, do you mind starting?

Assuming you're ready.

So am I ready.

I am Karina Bull and I am with City Council Central staff.

Hi, I'm Jennifer Labreck.

I am new to City Council Central staff, and I will be working on homelessness, housing, and human services.

Welcome.

Thank you.

And then maybe if the study authors from the University of Washington could introduce themselves.

Sure.

Hello, Jenny Romick.

I'm a professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Washington.

I'm Emiko Tajima, also a faculty member at the UW School of Social Work.

Very good.

Next, the Seattle Human Services Coalition representatives.

Hi, I'm Tree Willard.

I am the Executive Director of the Seattle Human Services Coalition.

Thank you.

Morning, I'm Jason Austin, Director of Organizing with the Seattle Human Services Coalition.

Great.

And then let's hear from our Human Services Department leadership.

Please introduce yourself.

Good morning.

I'm Tony Kim, Acting Director of the Human Services Department, and I think we have one more UW researcher with us.

Is that you, Shannon, to introduce yourself for the record?

Thanks.

Hi, I'm Shannon Harper.

I'm the Research Director at the West Coast Poverty Center at the University of Washington.

Fantastic.

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you.

All right, so I'm not going to go into too much detail here.

We've got a really great presentation.

For the interested public, you can find the research and summaries of the findings at socialwork.uw.edu forward slash wage equity study, one word.

As mentioned, this study was funded by a council budget action that I sponsored during the fall budget cycle.

In 2021, at the request of the Human Services Coalition, the time during the height of the pandemic, our human services workers were stretched thinner than they'd ever been before, forced to rapidly change the way they operated their programs in order to preserve public health, while struggling with the impact of the pandemic and economy on both the people they serve, their own employees, and in their own families.

It's really, really clear that city residents and visitors really rely on our social services sector workers in order to do extremely difficult and demanding work.

And as we know, the human services sector is a sector of workers who are significantly underpaid.

And the Regional Homelessness Authority of King County has repeatedly explained to us that among its five largest contracted organizations, there are more than 300 vacant positions.

These are jobs that can't be filled, which means that absolutely mission critical work just doesn't get done.

We've seen a lot of local reporting on buildings that are ready to offer a safe place for people living unsheltered.

These are buildings that the county has acquired, but We can't move people in because we don't have the staffing for the buildings.

This morning, we heard about classrooms at multiple organizations ready for infants and young people, but they're unable to open because it's impossible to find workers willing to take these very, very difficult jobs for such low wages.

So with that introduction, Karina, would you please kick us off, get us started?

I will.

OK, let's see if this works.

Okay.

All right, well, I can't get it to show the full screen, but we're short on time here.

And so my role this morning was just to set up the stage of how this study was funded.

And Council Member Herbold, you've already provided most of that introduction.

So what I will focus on is that funding for the study was included in the 2022 adopted budget, and that was due to a council ad sponsored by Councilmember Herbold for $600,000 to the Human Services Department to fund this study.

And the purpose of the study was to conduct a comparable worth analysis of human services jobs as compared to jobs in different industries, different fields, but with similar education skills and difficulty.

And as we will learn in deep detail from the researchers today, comparable worth studies equal pay for equivalent work.

The goal of the study was to serve as a benchmark for compensating human services providers the city funds contracts for over 170 organizations for this work.

And it was premised upon what the principles that Council Member Herbold was referring to, that when human services providers are paid well below the market rate for this work, it becomes increasingly hard for those workers to live in our community and to serve our community as well.

Equitable pay maintains that stable workforce and ensures that necessary services remain available.

The way that this study unfolded is that the Seattle Human Services Coalition acted in a project management role.

And one of the first things that happened was a coordination of a steering committee convened of experts on wage equity, nonprofit community leaders, and City of Seattle Council staff as well.

That was myself and legislative aide to Council Member Herbold, Christina Kutsubus.

In July, University of Washington was selected by Human Services Department to conduct the comparable worth analysis and they issued their report last month.

So here is a quick timeline that provides an overview.

It began with the funding in January of last year.

The request for qualifications went out in May, the selection made in July, and here we have the report today.

So it was a fast process, but a rigorous one as well.

And that is all from me.

Fantastic.

Thanks.

I hope you can stick around in case there are some questions, but let's hand it over to our UW presenters.

Okay, thank you, Chair Herbold.

And to Karina for helping to set the stage there.

It's an honor as a Seattleite, it's an honor to be able to work on these research studies that help inform the city.

So I thank the full council member for that as well.

And Chair Herbold, I trust that you'll let me know if anyone has an interruption.

I know sometimes you're slightly, politer to external folks than you are to council staff, but I'm happy to take interruptions at any time here.

So actually, I'm sorry, if we could hold our questions to the end.

I think that would be better.

Thank you.

Okay.

All right.

Um, so, uh, as they, as, um, the chair noted, We're talking about this study that we released last month with funding through HSD.

I was part of the team at UW that responded to their request for qualifications.

We put together a team of 12 scholars from five universities and two think tanks.

We were actually international with two members from the UK.

We had excellent advice and oversight from the steering committee organized by the Seattle Human Services Coalition.

But I will say that our conclusions and interpretations here today are ours alone and do not represent the views of the steering committee or of course the city of Seattle, HSD.

I'll further note that our team for the most part were academic-based researchers who are used to publishing in the peer-reviewed literature.

and hence we're somewhat conservative in choosing findings to highlight and the standard of evidence behind them.

So what I'm presenting here, you can trust that all the findings are backed up by multiple analyses that are showing the same or similar things.

And to let you know what our major findings are, achieving wage equity, as the study laid out for workers at human services organizations is going to require substantial increase in current wage rates.

We performed a market analysis with publicly available data that showed pay gaps of 30% or more facing workers in the human services industry.

We also performed a detailed job evaluation based on comparable worth principles that confirms This devaluation, the full report has a set of seven recommendations.

I'll talk about those at the end, but our first one.

is for real, meaning inflation adjusted 7% wage increase as soon as possible, and then substantial increases by 2023. This work built on previous work in King County and the region, including this King County funded study about nonprofit wages and benefits in the area.

So we went into this knowing that human services workers were paid less than other workers in our region.

But our goal for the study, our goals were twofold.

First, we wanted to put some empirically based numbers on the wage gap, how much less.

And second, we wanted to tackle the question of whether this is an inequitable wage gap.

And for that, we're using the principle that Greena Bull referenced of comparable worth, which is equal pay for equivalent work.

Our methods used, we made the best use of existing labor market data for our market analysis.

And then we conducted original interviews with workers in Seattle and King County to get at the comparable worth.

Whenever possible with the data, we zeroed in on the city of Seattle or King County Sometimes data limitations meant we're looking at the statewide work.

So Chair Herbold has already outlined who human services workers are.

One thing to keep in mind in King County, these human services workers are disproportionately located in the nonprofit sector.

So this table and or this figure and others that I'll show you are based on the team's analysis of American Community Survey data from the census.

And you can see here that almost half of human services workers in King County are working in nonprofit organizations, and fewer than 10% are working in the public sector, meaning working directly for city or county government.

That's different than nationwide.

The human services workforce in King County is also disproportionately female, disproportionately black, and disproportionately part-time.

And these things are important because part of who does this work matters for how this work is compensated.

Our study overall is based on an understanding that wage levels reflect who does jobs, for whom, and under what circumstances.

We often talk about the labor market as if labor were a commodity like rice or eggs, but that's not the case.

Labor markets are built on institutions and shared interpretations of value.

And our understanding going into this is that these jobs change over time and that changes in these understandings can change wages over time.

So to our first empirical question of how large are these market penalties, we use the data from the Census Bureau, as well as data from the State Employment Security Department.

Both these data sources have pros and cons, but this is kind of state of the art in looking at this.

For these analyses, we present unadjusted figures, so mathematical means or percentages, and then we adjust them using econometric techniques such as multiple regression.

So I'll present both of those going forward.

So first, these are means, or sorry, these are medians calculated from the data that show what human services workers make.

That's the gradiated bar here.

compared to workers in other caregiving industries, healthcare and education, other industries subject to the care penalty, and then the remainder of the economy.

So the rest of the jobs in our area, including manufacturing, retail, technology, business services, insurance, trucking, all the other jobs out there.

And what you can see is that there is a, there is a penalty paid by workers in the human services.

At every level of education, they're paid less than other care workers and they're paid much less than other workers in non-care parts of the economy.

One of our team members, Professor Nancy Fulbright from the University of Massachusetts is actually a MacArthur Genius Award winner based on her long-time study of the care work and wages.

And this was the first time she'd broken out care work into human services and other sectors.

And she was really struck by how consistent these differences are.

However, we didn't just calculate medians.

We wanted to figure out what the true penalty is controlling for things that might be different across the different workforces, such as education level, as you see here, but also being able to control for simultaneously for multiple things like education level, experience level, race, ethnicity, whether people are married or parents, all these things can affect earnings for better or worse.

So adjusting for all of those, we still find a substantial And these are the numbers I'll return to when we talk about our recommendations.

But relative to workers in non-care industries, workers in caregiving industries are paid 11% less, workers in the human services industry, regardless of whether they're in for-profit, nonprofit, or public sector are paid 30%, but workers who are both in nonprofits and are in the human services industry are paid 37% less than the general worker in our economy.

So again, a strong and consistent gap.

We also performed a second type of economic analyses looking at workers who change jobs.

This is a complementary analysis.

It can tell you about changes in wages that aren't affected by an individual's personal skill level or how effective they are at work, but it is only, it can only tell us about workers who change jobs.

Lower paid workers, those who are closer to entry level, are more likely to change jobs than other workers.

So again, it's not representative of all workers, but it can tell us, give us another angle onto what happens.

This is also, as you heard from the not-for-profit leadership up front in the public comment issue, this is a real concern right now for staffing.

But for the purposes of our study, we were interested in what the economics show.

Seattle workers who leave human services see a 14% increase in what they're earning per hour a year later.

Of course, most workers who switch jobs get a raise as well.

But so we calculated, again, using multivariate analyses to control for everything we could control for.

And even after that, leaving the human services industry is associated with a 7% hourly wage increase premium.

And because human services workers are also more likely to be working part-time, their total earnings a year later increased by 31%.

So again, very consistent with the earlier numbers based only on workers who are likely to be switching jobs, but this confirms the overall idea of a gap.

However, part of our job as researchers is to track down all the alternative explanations.

Maybe these wage gaps are due in part to human services jobs being not comparable to other types of work.

And so for that, we did the second part of the study, the job evaluation analysis.

And this is a way of getting at apples and oranges, if you were, between two different types of jobs.

Human services work is fundamentally different than work in, say, construction or IT or business services.

You might say they're apples and oranges, but actually, if you think about apples and oranges, you can compare them on a lot of different dimensions.

You can compare how much fiber they have, how many calories they have, how much vitamin C they have, how much they cost per pound at Fred Meyer or Safeway.

We use the job evaluation method that is a way of comparing jobs based on their specific job factors, kind of like the apple and oranges comparison.

Here are the factors we track.

There are 13 different factors grouped into six different areas, but things like, responsibility, effort, knowledge required, the demands of your working conditions.

So we worked with our steering council to identify four job types within human services and recruited workers from those job types, as well as comparator job holders from a range of jobs outside of human services.

We focused on trying to get jobs that likely weren't affected by the gender wage penalties in the same way.

All these workers were in King County and many of them were within Seattle.

We conducted these interviews last fall.

And the findings overall is that the King County nonprofit human services workers are paid less or jobs that rate as high or higher in terms of job complexity.

So going back to this donut, each one of these individual factors is assigned a point value.

And when you sum them all up, you get a range from 300 to 1,000, with 1,000 being the most complicated and demanding possible job.

The range we saw in human services ranged from 400 to the low 700s, from a teaching assistant in an early child care setting to someone who was a program director at a housing services organization.

Our comparison jobs had roughly the same range from an office manager to a construction project manager.

But the differences are really best understood here head to head.

So here's one example, which is the construction manager and the director of housing services.

The construction manager requires a little bit more knowledge of construction laws and different principles and subcontractors and things like that.

They also have a bit more They use a different set of mental skills, but similar interpersonal skills in their day-to-day job.

The Director of Housing Services has a job that scores slightly higher on emotional demand and slightly higher on a bunch of different responsibility efforts.

When you add up all of those things, you get Comparable scores with the human services job just a little bit bigger.

However, when you look at median salaries for those jobs, we're using Bureau of Labor Statistics median salary for the metro area for the construction project manager.

And then the median pay from the King County wage report for the nonprofit human services workers here.

you see a big gap.

So paid less for a job that is equally demanding.

You'll see the same thing if you look at the teaching assistant job.

Again, differences in knowledge use, differences in responsibility and the effort required at work.

But the largest difference here is not in the nature of the work, but in the pay level.

So altogether, we believe that The comparable worth analysis shows that it's not because of human services work being less demanding or requiring less skill.

These wage differences are in spite of those differences.

So to get to our recommendations, the first one is as soon as possible to raise real wages by a minimum of 7%.

That 7% came from the wage premium In our switching analysis, we see this as really staunch the bleeding out of the human services sector right now.

And our recommendation is to do this as soon as it can be incorporated into the budget cycles.

Note that this needs to be a real wage.

And I mean that in the I have a master's in economics.

sense, which is it needs to be net of inflation.

The adjustments for inflation need to be made separately from the adjustments for equity.

They also should not be made at the expense of reducing budget benefits or making jobs harder, putting more work on fewer workers.

So that's what our first three recommendations look to.

Second, you can read about this in more detail in our report, but part of the reason for these persistent wage inequalities has to do with who performs this work and how it is performed, and those are issues of race and gender.

And so any public entity that is has a DEI plan, is doing race or gender equity work, needs to be considering the pay for not only within their organization, but for the groups and sectors with whom they are contracting.

We also have a set of longer term recommendations that we suggest timeline is over the next six or seven years on these, we call for a substantial increase in wages for nonprofit human services.

How big is substantial?

To be frank, that's up to you.

I think substantial is a political decision, but our findings give an order of magnitude of what would be needed to achieve equitable wages.

And the math here is hard.

And I'll show the math.

To close a 30% gap, you actually need more than a 30% increase because of the asymmetry of percentages.

So to close the 30% wage gap, you would need a 43% wage increase.

To close the 37% gap, that's the gap between nonprofit human services workers and workers in non-care industries.

that would be a 59% raise.

We recognize these are big numbers.

We have a kind of inside baseball recommendation on a salary grade system, which is something we think would be helpful for implementing and using this.

And finally, more broadly, we urge the city and we will urge your colleagues at King County to think about the roles that public contracts play in wage equity more broadly.

We're here on equal payday today.

I don't think anyone has noted that, but the contracts that the city of Seattle has with all of its vendors, whether it's contracting for upgrades to the data system for the city attorney's office or repairing roads or building new buildings on city land and with the human services providers, all of those have impacts on the wages that get paid to workers who live and work in Seattle.

And right now the city contracted human services workers are making less than workers in all of those other industries.

So with that, I'm happy to answer questions.

We have this information up on the website.

It may be easier to see it there.

A colleague who is a member of our team put together an interactive timeline of some of the key policies that shape this, that's also up on the webpage.

So thank you.

Thank you so much.

Just to get us started here, a quick question about the tool you use to compare jobs inside and outside the human services sector.

Just think that that is...

a really interesting design to get at the apples-to-apples goal.

Is this something that the research team itself developed, or has it been used previously?

Thank you.

That's a good question.

It's been used previously, and it's a tool kind of stemming from the comparable worth idea.

The version we used was one that has been used widely in the UK by their union, Unisom, which is their largest union of local government workers.

We actually brought their expert on it out of retirement to consult with us on this project.

So it's been used to evaluate the jobs of thousands of civil servants in the UK.

We adapted it in conversation with our steering committee to reflect both the COVID era and the American setting, but it is a well-documented pool and all of their, the questions and the scoring is all publicly available.

Thank you.

And before I open it up more broadly, I just remembered I wanted to, again, thank HSD Director Kim for joining us today.

I know you're not here formally to present, but I did want to give you the opportunity to share your reactions and thoughts on this work if you wanted to, but not to put you on the spot.

I think what I'll share, and we've been in lots of meetings, and I do have to thank My colleagues who ran the RFQ and did the contracts with University of Washington and the Seattle Human Services Coalition because we increased their capacity to do the other part of the work around really it's this education, and bringing partnering providers together.

So I have to thank the team.

I know it might seem like it's very transactional, but the way in which we engage our community members, including these organizations, is important.

The other is, it is different, I think, than what we're used to.

So hopefully our wheels are turning.

A lot of the reports that we typically see are comparing maybe a social worker in one area to a similar social worker in another area.

And so it's mind bending in that way, just philosophically thinking about what do we value just as a society.

And so in that sense, it's different.

So I appreciate that for council investing in this research.

And at the end of the day, it does come down to what do we do with this?

And that's definitely a collective conversation.

I will thank the Human Services Coalition, Seattle Human Services Coalition for really asking government, not only the city, the county, but frankly, funders in general.

So they've also, and I know that Tree will probably, or Jason will talk about this, but it's also our foundations, probably individual donors, like how do we all think about the way in which we contribute And I've been a part of those meetings as well.

So just a couple things I wanted to share.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Dr. Kim.

And just for the viewing public and a reminder for my colleagues, the Human Services Department will be getting back to us in response to a statement of legislative intent, which will provide a report to this committee on the wage equity study.

recommendations for strategies to address the staffing shortage among service providers and recommendations for potential funding sources to increase provider wages and that report is due us on sometime in June, maybe towards the end of June.

Council Member Peterson.

Thank you, Chair Herbold, and thanks to everybody for being here.

I've got a few questions.

First, let me just set some context.

I definitely agree City Hall needs to do its part to help effective nonprofits, upon which we rely, to retain and attract skilled workers whenever workers are consistently leaving those organizations due to relatively low compensation.

For example, we definitely want to attract and retain more workers to nonprofits whose missions align with the city's top priorities such as bringing inside the many people still experiencing homelessness, and the study confirms we need to do more, though.

My questions are about it seems to.

paint the nonprofits with a relatively broad brush despite the diversity of their missions.

And so I'm interested in learning how best to deploy our local taxpayer dollars to tackle the city's priorities while getting other levels of government to step up and do their part.

So I want to thank Director Kim for mentioning, you know, there are other funders involved here in reviewing some income statements from local nonprofits.

Some of them will get roughly half of their grant funding from The federal government, for example, so would it be fair to say that the city government's responsibility would be just for the proportional amount of the city's investments via our contracts.

Um, I guess that I'm not sure who that question is for, except maybe the chair, um, or central staff, um, because, you know, we're not the a hundred percent funder.

So how, how do we, when you say there should be a 7%.

Increase is that coming, you know, proportionally from the different funders or is the intent here for it to be a hundred percent from the city government?

I can ask a couple more questions and then we just circle back to them, whichever ones are answerable at this time.

Thank you.

And Council Member Peterson, just on that, I think that is one of the questions for us to ask and answer is, what is the right role for the City of Seattle in this effort to address the wage penalty that human service workers are suffering?

It is, in fact, the 7% is to address the wage penalty, it's not to address the overall inequity of in pay of these jobs, but you are absolutely correct in asking the question about the role of the city as well as the role of other funders, both public and private.

We know that King County in the area of behavioral health is taking positive steps forward with its behavioral health levy proposal to address Wage and equities in that portfolio, but but again this is this is a mini funder.

issue and that we all need to be laser focused in working together to address it.

But go ahead.

You had other questions.

Thanks.

And thanks, Chair, for stepping in to add to that.

I appreciate it.

Regarding the comparisons, so the and I know this is very difficult to do.

And you mentioned the econometric approaches that you used.

I see that on page 20, it's referenced, but are those in the other, are they in the appendices?

I only looked at the 40 page report.

Okay, so they're in the larger 179 page one with all the appendices.

Okay, I'll take a closer look at that.

I just, I know we're often trying to use analogies when we're making our points and use examples when we're making our points as elected officials.

I was having a little trouble with the construction project manager comparison because having worked in that industry in non-profit, for-profit, and government, it's my understanding the construction project manager the for-profit one is working you know they're the for-profit developers are taking risk they're they're seeking profit and they're passing on if the project's successful they're passing that project profit on to the construction project manager whereas the non-profit um is is not doing that and so um And when the for profit is also taking a higher risk, so the project fails and the construction project manager might even be out of a job.

So there's a risk reward that's happening there.

And I just how does the econometric approach deal with that difference in a mission driven organization versus a profit motivated organization?

Yeah, some of that.

is reflected, as you rightfully guessed, in the hundred or so pages of appendix work.

I will say one of the choices that we made that reflects our more conservative interpretation of findings is that we reported the area median for a construction manager.

That was the $104,000.

We did not report the actual pay for that worker.

You were correct.

That worker is in the private sector, although it was someone who was working managing a public works project.

So they're doing it for government.

And the compensation for that worker, I believe, was $140,000 a year plus an annual bonus that's around 40%, putting compensation close to $200,000 a year.

But again, so all those details are in the main thing, but you're exactly right.

That person is compensated even more than the numbers we reflected because they're in the private sector.

Thank you very much.

Other questions from my colleagues?

Yeah.

Because my mouse said yes.

So this was to this study was the funding for this study was to focus on fields that require similar skills, education and difficulty I think, and it's, it's hard for me right.

Director Kim to wrap my mind around how do we compare a social worker and nonprofit to.

a worker in another field altogether versus a layer on top of that, that they're in the private sector.

So I'm still mulling on that.

But the thing that we can, was there any comparison between what social workers in the nonprofit sector are paid in King County or Seattle compared to Snohomish or Pierce?

Because that seems as though that would be a a good baseline for at least to decide whether or not we are offering good salaries.

And that leads me to my next question, which plays off of Council Member Peterson.

These are not public employees, so we do not have authority over the pay, and that is a limitation on what we can do for the recommendations or how we would implement the recommendations.

To your first question, the comparison to other regions was not part of our scope.

So we did not look at that.

OK.

I have a follow-up.

On page 14 of the 40-page report, it says, while standard economic theory can explain some variation in individual salaries, it's limited in important ways.

For example, in a classic economic model, discrimination based on race, gender, and other characteristics is illogical because only workers' contributions should matter.

But there's no citation for that.

Is that a, can you provide some background on that?

The standard for having a citation is this standard knowledge within the discipline.

And that would be standard knowledge within economics.

That's kind of an idea that's covered in a basic economics textbook that according to the most basic model discrimination should be irrational.

Well, I think so.

I'm happy to follow up too with more information on that.

Thanks, Professor.

I appreciate that.

And just for the record, I think that Council does understand and accept that this work is undervalued.

And that is why we did incorporate that understanding into some contract renegotiations this year with our contractors.

Thank you.

And I did just get a note that comparison to other regions is a metric that is already available because of other studies that have been done.

This was a study that we did to to try and tell a story that isn't told when you only compare human services workers in this area to other regions, but we can definitely make sure that you get that information.

But the point is those sorts of comparisons become less relevant if you recognize that it's the entire sector that's underpaid, regardless of geography.

I'm just wanting to, to flag that, as I mentioned, as it relates to the proposed behavioral health levy.

There are a number of other efforts that are proposing to address these wage equity issues.

The veteran seniors and human services levy also through King County.

the work that the King County Regional Homelessness Authority has been doing around addressing pay inequity issues.

The upcoming housing levy, I believe, has a recommendation in that area as well.

I understand that central staff are working on a table to help help us understand the level to which those various levies, if enacted, will help address these recommendations in various sectors.

I don't believe we have anything pending for folks who are working in early childhood education.

They are not funded through the Human Services Department.

They're funded through a different department of the city, Department of Early education and learning.

And so I think that's another question that we need to ask and answer for ourselves is, are we only talking about contracts to the Human Services Department?

Or are we also thinking about contracts through other departments that deliver critical social services?

And as we heard in public comment, and we've heard stories of childcare centers not being able to be open because of these same issues.

And so I just want to flag that my interest in moving forward this work is really looking at how the council can take some significant steps towards the goal this year and laying the groundwork for future years.

One of the things I've thought about doing is some sort of a council endorsement through a resolution of the recommendations and maybe a a pathway with some benchmarks for meeting as many of the goals as we can.

This obviously is something that we want to move forward on with a lot of discussion and collaboration, both with the stakeholders who are represented with us here today, other council colleagues, and other stakeholders other funders.

So really want to signal my interest in taking sort of another step and hoping, just saying this aloud, that hoping that the Revenue Stabilization Work Group is considering these needs as well as they look at the general fund gap for next year and beyond.

I think this is an area that new progressive revenue could assist in funding these increases in future years.

Councilmember Mosqueda.

Thank you very much Madam Chair and I want to thank the department but especially the researchers, the incredible expertise that you've lent to helping shed some light on the very severe wage gap that human service providers are facing across our city and our region.

This is a report that has been requested for longer than I've been in office.

Now going into six years that I've been in office, council members, including Council Member Herbold, as our good chair today, but before that as well, Council Members O'Brien and and our previous predecessors have been asking for this type of data so that we could point to what we know to be the experience of human service providers.

And that is severe underpayment.

And the responsibility lies with the public sector employers to help ensure that the contracts that we are requesting, that we are holding workers accountable to, actually can be successful.

And these contracted entities cannot be successful with housing people, with bringing more people out of the streets, with helping families and individuals, veterans and seniors be able to stay stably housed and get the services that they need.

They cannot be successful if they're experiencing 40 to 70 percent turnover rates.

And the major reason for that turnover is the lack of compensation for the extremely difficult working conditions that they currently have.

These are the people that we are tasked with.

We are asking to be on the front line of solving the most pressing crisis in our community.

And whatever survey people want to point to, we'll continue to show that the vast majority of Seattle and King County residents are concerned with the number of people they see experiencing homelessness and behavioral health crises, either putting themselves at risk or community members at risk.

We need housing and access to health services in order for us to address these compounding crises.

So I wanted to underscore the why, the why I think that this should resonate with all public policymakers and the general public, because we all agree that there is a housing and homelessness crisis, a behavioral health crisis, that's not completely overlapping by any means.

I want to make sure that I think the latest numbers that I saw of folks who are experiencing homelessness, I believe only about a third have a behavioral health crisis that's co-occurring.

But if we're talking about seniors needing access to food security and housing assistance, if we're talking about youth needing access to job training and educational opportunities, if we're talking about people needing access to counseling and referral services, The whole spectrum of our safety net relies on these human service providers.

So I wanted to underscore the who is being served and the why it's important because this is the fabric of what public policy should be investing in.

And I don't think we would be having a 10 plus year conversation about whether or not we should be investing more in these workers if they weren't disproportionately workers of color and women doing this work.

And so I appreciate that Pay Equity Day is today and people are elevating that.

A large number of women in the human service provider sector But if we look at the upcoming dates for pay equity for Black women, pay equity for Latina women who are in the general public, it is much farther into the fall.

And we have to recognize that this issue has been backburner for longer than me and my colleague Council Member Herbold have even been in office.

And we are trying to make up for much lost time and much lost resources in a sector that has the capability to actually stabilize vulnerable communities and buoy our local economy.

So again, I think that it is imperative for us to take this on, to recognize that as the public funder of these contracts, it is just important for us to make sure that there's parity in what is being paid to human service providers, just like we would want to make sure that those who are building buildings and constructing roads that we are contracting out have pay equity when the public dollar is involved.

I really appreciate the work that you've done here.

I think it is scratching the surface in terms of the type of work that we have yet to do.

We will take these recommendations under serious consideration.

And I also will appreciate that the good chair has called on the revenue task force to consider this.

I can tell you that right now the task force is very focused on the existing revenue gap.

And so we need to socialize folks to the deep disparities that exist right now in pay equity, and to recognize that that inflation needs to be adjusted for, and then a 7% increase needs to be applied, and we need to try to address that gap as soon as possible.

But I hear the request that that be part of the conversation.

I can say right now, I don't believe that it is, as folks are very laser focused on the existing disparity, but this needs to be factored in.

if we're going to create more stability in the wake of COVID and recognize that more people are experiencing housing instability, economic instability, the shadow pandemic that the chair talks about with depression, isolation, and lack of hope.

These are our community partners that can help provide opportunity for us right now and create a greater economic opportunity for our region in the future.

So there is no disconnect in my mind about why we are being tasked to address this.

And as your budget chair, I can't say that it's going to be easy, but I will tell you that this is a big priority of mine.

It continues to be a big priority of mine going forward.

And I appreciate the work you've done.

And I don't want you to take away from any of this, a questioning of the work that you've done, the analysis or the value of the work that these human service providers do for our community.

So thank you again for presenting this long awaited report.

Thank you, Councilmember Mosqueda.

And if you have ideas about on how best to socialize the findings with the Revenue Stabilization Task Force, please don't hesitate to let me know.

I think we have representatives of folks who are working in human services, maybe not specifically the Human Services Coalition, but some of our labor partners who represent workers in this field, So perhaps there's a way that we could bring a presentation to that group.

But again, happy to talk to you more.

We do have a hard stop at 11.45 today.

But before I close out, I do want to turn it over to Tree Willard, because I believe she could leave us with her thoughts about next steps.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Well, I'm honored to have a moment for last words.

There are many funders involved, there are a lot of people that need to work together for this problem to be solved and I deeply appreciate the commitment that the council's made over the last couple of years to looking deeply into this and addressing it.

I deeply appreciate all of your comments and Council Member Esqueda's comments.

I feel like you're telling the story exactly as we're experiencing it.

And I know that our leaders feel seen and valued by the commitment that you've made through all of your actions here and the ones leading up to now.

I do hope that your commitments, that your actions will help lead the needed change across the system.

I hope that as you step in and make these commitments and look for additional revenue sources, that that will be an example to the county and the state and the philanthropists and the private donors.

I appreciate that you've led already in getting this study made and I'm grateful for your continued leadership and passion.

I also want to assure everyone, our member organizations and leaders are completely committed to making sure that any increases in our funding will go to our staff, will increase their wages.

It's something I often hear when people are asking questions about this work.

We're in a crisis.

We're in a staffing crisis.

Our communities are in crisis.

We are highly motivated to retain the skilled, educated, committed staff that we've put so much resources into training.

You know, across industries, turnover is so expensive.

So we're completely committed to making sure that increases will always be passed on in the form of wages.

And I just thought it was worth saying that the consequences of failure in our industry are more of the trauma that perpetuates the poverty cycle.

The consequences are mental breakdowns, financial ruin, homelessness, sometimes even death.

Those are the consequences of failure in our industry.

And people are sometimes assaulted at work in our industry.

I just hope that we can continue to cultivate a deep appreciation of the challenges of this work, and I really appreciate your understanding that this is the work of government.

This is why governments exist, is to make sure that our communities are cared for.

And honestly, I'm optimistic and excited to be working with all of you, with everybody in this room and all of the many people beyond this room, all of our partners, public, private, And I am the philanthropist because I know that we're all working really hard to create a culture of care where everyone has opportunities, where everyone is able to thrive in our communities.

We're working to repair the deep inequities of the inheritance of oppression that our country was built upon.

And I just wanna raise my hands to all of you for being in that work with us.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate.

Really want to give you the last word here to put an exclamation point on everything that we've heard today.

I mentioned at the top, gave examples of childcare centers that are closed that could otherwise be open, talked about buildings that are shuttered, that could be locations for people living unsheltered to live that are not open.

And this council, ourselves, we've provided funding for, again, mission-critical services.

I can think of at least two examples of funding that we've provided.

The council provided that we were unable to see utilize because of this, the staffing crisis and You know, we heard at the beginning from public comment, I really appreciate public commenters being here to help us understand this, but Crisis Connection highlighted the fact that their organization averages a 50% turnover rate with many staff saying simultaneously that they love the mission, they feel valued as an employee, but they cannot make a living in the human services sector.

And when we talk about the human, services care penalty, we're talking about people who are leaving this work, not for work in another jurisdiction, but for service jobs like fast food.

So thank you to the UW researchers for the presentation.

Thank you to Council Central staff for putting the study in context.

framing up our discussion.

And thank you to the public commenters and folks with the Human Services Coalition here on the panel today for helping us understand the real life impact of the wage penalty for our human services providers.

Right.

With that, there are, there's no additional business for the Council.

The next Public Safety and Human Services Committee is scheduled for Tuesday, March 28, 2023. And unless there are other comments from my colleagues, not seeing any, it is 1148 a.m.

and we are adjourned.

Thank you, everybody.