Seattle City Council Sustainability & Transportation Committee 9/17/19

So let's go.

Let's start with 96.

Great.

Can you get that ready?

Good afternoon, everybody.

Welcome to a special meeting of the Sustainability and Transportation Committee.

I believe the date is our normal meeting, but we moved up the time to 1 o'clock to get as much opportunity for public comment and a lot of items on the agenda today.

So I want to thank you all for being here.

We're going to go into public comment in a moment.

There are at least 35 folks that have signed up.

So I've asked Kelly to set the timer for a minute and 30 seconds, a little bit less than what we normally do in the hope to get as many public comment in.

So if you've prepared a two-minute comment, prepare to speak a little faster or truncate a few points, but make sure you get your main points across to us.

We want to hear from that.

My name is Mike O'Brien, and I'm chair of the Sustainability and Transportation Committee.

I'm being staffed today by Kelly in my office.

Thank you for being here, Kelly.

I'm going to start with public comment, and then we'll move to approve the agenda after public comment, hopefully when a colleague or two of mine is here.

So we have all call-off names.

You can come to either microphone.

Randy Banneker is first, followed by Catherine Stanford, Andy Wopler, and Kevin Clark.

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Randy Banneker here on behalf of the Seattle King County Realtors.

I wanted to comment on two items, the oil heating tax and the natural gas prohibition.

First on the oil heating tax, we ask that you lead off on this program with carrots rather than sticks.

We believe there are many homeowners on fixed incomes with oil heat whose incomes exceed the $34,000 or so yearly income limit that would qualify them for conversion assistance.

But those folks fall short of being able to fund that conversion out of pocket.

So we ask that all owners of oil heat systems have access to a subsidized conversion program as well as tank removal.

This would meet the public interest of speeding conversion and would avoid the unintended consequences of leaving Seattle homeowners out in the cold.

With regards to natural gas prohibition, immediately our members are concerned about consumer choice and possible impacts on the Seattle market when choice on a major home component such as heating and cooking fuel is eliminated.

More broadly, we believe the proposal needs a robust stakeholder process to understand the impacts as well as the feasibility and policy implications of shifting building energy reliance to nearly 100% electric.

Thank you.

Great.

Thanks, Randy.

Catherine.

Hi, Catherine.

Hi Councilmember Mike.

My name is Catherine Stanford and I'm here representing the Building Owners and Managers Association of Seattle King County.

BOMA is a professional trade association representing the office building and commercial real estate industry.

I'm speaking to item number five on your agenda, ordinance relating to prohibiting natural gas piping systems in new buildings.

The proposed ordinance would significantly impact changes to the way our members' buildings operate.

Eliminating natural gas as an option in building design and operation would impact the building energy's profile and may force unfavorable design changes.

We are concerned about the lack of study associated with this legislation.

In-depth analysis and data are needed so impacts on customers and utilities can be fully understood.

We support an approach that slows down this process to give the city time to convene a broad range of stakeholders and time to conduct thorough feasibility, energy, and environmental analysis.

As always, BOMA stands ready to work with the City on this issue.

We are prepared to bring our expertise to the table.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to this important matter.

Thanks, Catherine.

Andy?

Good afternoon.

I'm Andy Wopler with Puget Sound Energy.

Thank you for allowing this opportunity for public comment, Councilmember O'Brien.

BSE serves nearly 150,000 Seattle homes and businesses with gas.

Our gas employees are local with many based and living in Seattle.

They work with dedication, skill, and knowledge, and I'm honored to be joined by a number of them here today.

Natural gas helps families stay warm, cook a hot meal, do the laundry and take a shower.

Gas also helps employers meet a payroll.

Gas does this by being dependable and affordable.

The average family today pays less for gas than they did five years ago.

That comes at a time when electric bills in Seattle have gone up by 35 percent.

Gas also carries a big load in energy in Seattle.

On an average day, it's one-third of the energy used in the city.

On a cold day, it's two-thirds of the energy used in the city.

Replacing natural gas would require a wind farm three times the size of Seattle itself.

This ordinance puts Seattle at risk of rising monthly bills and good jobs at risk of going elsewhere.

We believe we can reduce emissions, and we have as PSE.

We want to do that together, and we can keep energy reliable and affordable if we do.

but not without a meaningful dialogue and a thoughtful plan.

We believe it's time to stop, take an in-depth look at the issues, and work on constructive solutions, including a feasibility study, together in 2020. Thank you, Councilmember O'Brien, for listening and being part of this today.

Thank you.

Kevin, you're going to be followed by Brian, I think it's Quint, and then Ryan Packer, and then Edward Hosek.

Good afternoon, Mr. O'Brien.

I'm here speaking against the heating oil tax bill.

In particular, it's a moving target.

This is my third time testifying here, and this morning we get another batch of amendments.

I'm particularly unclear whether you think this is a mandate or just a statement of intent about decommissioning or upgrading all 20,000 to 40,000 home heating oil tanks in the city by 2028. I'm asking a specific question.

Will there be a fire code amendment ordinance next year to address this?

Will that or this ordinance require environmental review?

When will you do a programmatic risk assessment of should these tanks even be disturbed?

An equity analysis of the homeowners that would have to bear the cost and risk of not only converting their heat source, but potentially digging up their yards to pull out tanks.

Monday, you adopted an ordinance for the Green New Deal Oversight Board.

This, as well as the natural gas issue, seem like perfect examples of things that you should give that board a chance to look at instead of trying to rush them through in your final months in office.

And in a specific issue in your new amendment, you've changed it from a fund to an account.

I started in the budget office in this city.

The anti-supplanting language here has no legal value in the future.

The budget office will rip this the first chance they get.

I would have done it.

Ben Noble will do it.

Whenever they need the money, this tax will replace the $200,000 of general fund.

Hi, Council Member O'Brien, thank you.

My name is Brian Quint.

My business is AquaQuip.

The roots of my business go back to the early 1900s down in an area of town that we now think of as SODO.

That was before there was a DOE, if the DOE stands for Dome.

I reflected over the 80 years that we've been in business and I've looked at all the various things that we do that are associated with natural gas from selling fireplace inserts to help people heat their homes more efficiently, to barbecues to enhance people's quality of life.

And we look at options.

There's options to natural gas in everything we sell.

You can heat your pool by electricity.

You can spend the extra money and put a heat pump in.

But the reality is many of those options are not a more environmentally friendly option to natural gas.

Propane, wood, charcoal, there's a lot of options.

And so the reality is our industry has come together and we come up with innovation and technology that is the right thing to do, both for our customers, for our planet, and for our various stakeholders.

So what we would like to do is come together with this process and talk about logical ways to offer our customers options other than just mandates about what they can and cannot do on a go-forward basis.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon.

You shouldn't need an app to use a city.

I'm going to borrow a phrase from historian Rutger Bregman.

Reading the Intelligent Transportation System presentation on the agenda today is like being at a firefighter's convention and not seeing anything about water.

ITS is essential for multimodal balance, quote unquote, in the presentation.

This statement only makes sense in the context of the primary purpose of the technology, to move cars faster.

Freeway widening in cities is now mostly gauche, so instead the new trend is to spend scarce transportation dollars on technologies like this.

Except the picture from the ground is very different than moving everyone more efficiently.

The corridor operational improvements planned around the sales center arena are projected to be pegged at $17 million, most of which is going to be spent on making Denny Way signals adaptive so we can squeeze more juice out of the orange.

We don't need to balance different modes.

We need to prioritize walking, biking, and transit.

There's plenty of room on our streets to do it if we are not hiding the fact that we're trying to move more cars.

The original Tiger Grant application for Mercer Street, which now has adaptive signals trying to move more vehicles, stated that the two-way Mercer would reduce total trips on the corridor by $20 million a year.

That has proven to be false.

Adaptive signals induce more trips, and a city that is missing its carbon reduction goals by as much as we are should not continue to invest in them.

Thanks.

Thanks, Ryan.

Edward?

Edward, you're going to be followed by Kip Rumins, then John Chapman, then Tim Reed.

Thank you for having us today.

My name is Edward Hoasak and I represent a company called Travis Industries.

We're located in Muckleteal, Washington.

We've been building wood product, gas product, pellet stove product for 40 years here in the state of Washington as of last month.

We're a manufacturer of many, many gas appliances which are sold through our specialty dealers and then to the public.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today about the proposal ban on natural gas piping.

I'm opposed to this council bill for many reasons, but the main reasons are jobs.

We at Travis Industries employ about 600 employees.

As mentioned before, we manufacture our product, sell to specialty hearth stores abroad, which then sell to the public.

These are small businesses and also support many families, just like our factory does.

This equates to millions of dollars in revenue loss.

There has not been a stakeholder process, and if there was, we didn't get to include our voice.

We are talking job losses here from a manufacturer level to a small business level.

Please include us in the stakeholder process.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Kip?

Hi, thank you for letting us come here and speak today.

One of the things that as I work with Edward at Travis Industries up in Mukilteo, I've been there for 37 of the 40 years we've been in business.

We do make a lot of gas products, wood products, pellet products.

And all of those products have come under fire at different times about how clean they are, and we've continued to make them cleaner and cleaner.

But this is not just about jobs at our factory, but the retailers, the service people, the installers, the gas companies, the guys that run the gas lines, the guys that service those gas lines.

It's everybody.

And it's a product that works when the power goes out.

It's something that works to heat people's homes.

They can still cook on it.

You can use this product when the power goes out.

It's vital for most people to be able to be comfortable in their homes.

Being part of a stakeholder process would be great.

We just felt like we got sidelined.

We heard about it just last week, and we had a council meeting last week.

We had one this week.

It was just, boom, we're gonna take away gas, and no one's had a voice.

No one's been able to talk about it, so we'd like to be part of that process.

Thank you.

John Chapman.

Hi, I'm John Chapman.

I represent Riches for the Home.

We've been in business 40 years serving the Northwest.

We sell gas appliances, barbecues, heaters.

This ban will pose a serious threat to over 100 of our employees and subcontractors who are involved in natural gas installations.

I'm opposed to this because it has not been considered or involved stakeholders like Riches or the people of the city who use natural gas.

I'm also opposed because I haven't seen no analysis of how the decision will affect cost for taxpayers through the city, no analysis how it will affect the electrical grid, and no analysis of how it will affect natural gas systems.

Thank you.

Thank you, John.

Tim Reed and then Tim, hang on one second.

You're going to be followed by Kirk Swanson and then Keith Nestor and Mitch Balzar, I think.

Well, thanks for having us speak on this.

We're really excited to be here.

The climate change impacts are a really big deal and it's something that everybody needs to be really concerned about.

So when I was asked to come represent our industry to speak here, what I was thinking about is that this is just a big issue that has a lot of nuance to it.

So I work for Fireside Home Solutions here in the Seattle area.

We've got five showrooms.

We have over 150 families that are employed with us and they're at huge risk of losing jobs if this ordinance was to go through.

And the bigger question that we've been talking about is, less about even what the decision is, but just more about what a rush it's been to get here.

And so what we're asking for is the ability to form some kind of think tank or committee over the next 12 months to start involving stakeholders, talking about this to figure out what's the best solution for the city of Seattle, and then make the right decision ultimately for the people.

But we feel like there's a lot that's at stake here with you know, economic businesses.

We've got Travis Industries that's here.

We've got Fireside Dome Solutions.

We've got Rich's.

We've got all kinds of small businesses that are at risk, and it feels like the voices of the people that are being affected haven't been heard.

So we just asked for the platform to be able to do that.

Okay, great.

Thank you, Kurt.

Oh, no, sorry.

That was Tim, right?

Okay.

Kurt.

Thank you.

My name's Kurt Swanson.

I'm a United Association Local 32 plumber and pipe fitter business agent.

I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak on this legislation that would ban natural gas installations in any future buildings in the city of Seattle.

UALocal 32 represents hundreds of members working in the natural gas industry.

We are concerned that if this legislation is passed, it would result in the loss of family wage paying work for our membership.

Our members that work in this industry contribute to this local economy and community.

I oppose this council bill for two primary reasons.

There was no stakeholder process conducted.

Our members working in the industry are stakeholders in this legislation.

There was no analysis or feasibility study on how this bill will impact the electric grid and the natural gas system.

Please consider a year-long process that will include input from businesses, workers, and the community.

Many more of my members would be here today but they're out serving the community right now.

Thank you again for the opportunity to speak on this matter.

Thanks, Curt.

Keith?

Thank you, Council Member Michael Bryan, for letting me speak on this.

I rise in opposition to the gas bill, or the legislation that's going to get passed, or you're trying to get passed.

I'm with the Plumbers and Pipefitters as well, Local 32 here in Seattle, and I've been a steamfitter by trade most of my career.

Being in most of these buildings downtown Seattle, we'd like to see a further study done on the impacts of high rises above 30 stories and above that are, you know, soon to come to this area, and also a study on the impact of buildings that are currently in design, how this affects them that are gonna get built in 2020, 2021. So there again, I encourage a stakeholders committee to take a further look at this, a year-long process, which sounds about right, maybe better, and get all the players in the room, you know, some building engineers, some building code people, some heating and cooling professionals, people like this.

Thank you.

Thanks, Keith.

Mitch.

Mitch, you're going to be followed by Dennis Martinez, Leigh Ann Geyer, Billy Hetherington, and then Dale Bright.

How's it going?

My name's Mitch Balzer.

Thanks for having us here today.

I work for Peachtown Energy.

I've been there for 20 years.

I live in North Seattle.

Worked on natural gas pipe for a long time.

It provides a livable wage for our families.

As you can see, our future workforce, some of them is back here.

This is a very important job for us and our families, and our product is safe and reliable.

It's on in the wintertime when the wind blows.

Your natural gas equipment is still working and keeping your house warm and your family safe in those times.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mitch.

Dennis?

Hi.

My name is Dennis Martinez.

I'm a retired UA32 plumber and steam fitter, 40 years in the trade.

I want to talk about the unintended consequences by this ban.

I am a minority, Hispanic, has worked 40 years in the trade.

It provided me a good union job, and it provided my family one.

With this ban, you have to take a look at all the citizens of the City of Seattle and King County of who you are affecting.

A lot of our members are minorities, women, and members of the LGBT community, as well as veterans.

We are all struggling to make ends meet these days.

I was very fortunate that it provided me a good standard of living for 40 years.

By putting this ban in effect, you will displace a lot of minorities, women, LGBT, and veterans.

Please understand that this will hurt everybody.

Please reconsider this.

Thank you.

Thank you, Dennis.

Leanne.

That's right.

Are you going to speak at all?

Thank you, Councilmember O'Brien.

I'm going to defer my time to Mark Riker.

Good afternoon, Councilmember O'Brien.

For the record, my name is Mark Riker.

I'm the Executive Secretary of the Washington State Building Construction Trades Council, representing approximately 80,000 construction workers here in Washington State, many of whom you see here today.

It is on their behalf that we ask you simply Slow it down a little bit.

As you've heard from others, please put it through a study so that we can actually get collaboration on making sure this is the right step to take.

Businesses don't feel that they've been properly involved in this.

Labor doesn't feel we've been properly involved in this.

And what you end up when you do that is you alienate the folks that you're intending to serve out of good measure you're intending to serve us.

We actually want to be part of that process.

You know, oftentimes people say that Olympia creates great challenges and great gridlock.

And this year we have a really good example for issues like this.

Through the 100% Clean Energy Bill, Senate Bill 51-16, environmentalists, developers, labor, politicians sat down at the table and came up with something that does a great thing towards solving the challenges facing our environment.

and did it in a way that we all stuck together and is the right thing for the citizens of Washington State, for our region and for our planet.

We just ask that we be part of shaping our own future.

Give us a chance.

We're not going to say no and walk away.

We're going to say no to this and work with you to make this a better product so that next time it comes forward, it can have us helping to shape our future.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Billy?

Good afternoon, Council Member O'Brien.

My name is Billy Hetherington.

I work with Labor's Local 242, the political director there.

We represent over 5,500 men and women that work in the construction industry here in King County.

I just wanted to stand in opposition to Agenda Piece 5 and 6 today on the natural grass infrastructure.

until we can get a comprehensive plan done.

I mean, you have stakeholders in the room right here from all parts of the industry, from suppliers to the members that do the install to everybody.

So just wanted to take a moment and just speak in opposition.

Thank you.

Thanks, Billy.

Dale?

Dale, you're going to be followed by Stephen Tate, then Art Ratcliffe, and Deanne Godfrey.

Councilman O'Brien?

I'm Dale Bright with Labor's Local Union 242. I'm here today to speak in opposition to both bills.

The laborers that we represent do work in the distribution system for natural gas and mainline.

We also do the major natural gas.

This ordinance does take into account the impacts on their lives, their careers.

And I really think it doesn't take into account the negative impact it'll have on the citizens of Seattle.

We're asking you to slow it down.

Let's have a robust stakeholder group.

Let's look through this a little bit better.

This was undercooked, and I think we just need to do a little better.

Thank you.

Great.

Thanks, Dale.

Steven?

Hello, my name is Steven Tate, and I represent Fireside Home Solutions and other Hearth Products professionals that are here today.

And I'm opposed to eliminating gas as a choice as a fuel in Seattle.

Fireside sells and installs natural gas fireplaces, fireplace sensors, gas grills, outdoor fire pits, and also commercial gas fireplaces and fire art in Seattle.

Our revenue in Seattle was about $2 million in 2018, And we have about 50 people out of our 170 that work directly connected to Seattle in sales, in scheduling, in installation, service, and working in this area.

I personally live in Lake City in Seattle, and this is my backyard where I come and work every day.

I work in our commercial department, and we install all of the large fireplaces in lobbies, amenity spaces, outdoor barbecue areas for many tenants of many of the buildings in Seattle.

As a matter of fact, I don't know if you can go into very many buildings in Seattle.

and not find some kind of gas fireplace feature.

And they're enjoyed by all those people.

I've been in the hearth industry since 1983. I've worked in manufacturing as well as retail.

And just like a lot of the professionals in this building, we're a good resource for talking about combustion and fire and how it's important to not just this, our industry, but humans in general.

Our clients are the residents and businesses of Seattle.

My time's up.

Oh, anyway, I'm opposed.

Thanks.

Thanks, Steven.

Art?

Go ahead, Art.

Good afternoon.

My name is Art Ratcliffe, and I'm here to comment on the natural gas ban.

I work for Mendota Hearth Products, a manufacturer of fireplaces that are sold, installed, and used for home heating here in the city of Seattle.

Among others, this bill would dramatically affect two different important groups.

The specialty hearth retailers like Sutter Home and Hearth here in Seattle who sell, install, and maintain these home heating appliances.

These retailers employ Seattle citizens and generate sales tax revenue based on these products.

Secondly, the second stakeholders are the Seattleites who use these appliances to heat their homes.

Natural gas is often the lowest cost alternative to zone heat a home.

I'm opposed to this bill as input from these local stakeholders have not yet been gathered.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Deanne.

Deanne, you're going to be followed by Brad Winstead, I think it's Daniel Hammer, and then Rick Lucas.

Thank you for having me here today.

So I am the owner of Bellevue Fireplace Shop.

We've been in business since 1959. Eighty percent of my business is natural gas.

Forty percent of that is done in the city of Seattle.

This would have a huge economic impact on everybody that works for us, all of our customers that are spending more on additional sources of heat.

This is my first time being here.

I felt this was important that I needed to show up, but I'm going to defer the rest of my time to Daniel from Sutter.

Thanks, Mike.

And I actually won't be speaking on my next turn, because here I am, right?

So I'm opposed to this bill because it is not considered to involve stakeholders like Sutter, the people of the city, folks like Deanne.

A lot of people have a lot of vested interests in this resource.

I'm also opposed because I've seen no analysis of how this decision will affect costs for ratepayers throughout the city.

I have seen no analysis of how it will affect the electrical grid, no analysis of how it will affect natural gas systems.

There are hundreds of small businesses and thousands of people who will be affected by this decision, and there must be strong stakeholder involvement and thorough analysis first before a bill like this can be considered.

Thank you.

Is Brad Winstead here?

He's not going to speak.

Okay.

And then Daniel just spoke.

So Rick Lucas.

And then Rick, you're going to be followed by Blake Dixon, Bill Given, and then Troy Olson.

Thanks for having me.

My name is Rick Lucas.

I'm representing Associated Energy Systems.

We are a hearth distributor.

We've been in business in Washington for over 40 years.

We have over 120 employees.

We do roughly $2 million in the Seattle market of sales every year.

I'm a stakeholder twice.

I own a home in Seattle and I sell fire products into Seattle.

So I do not feel my voice is being heard at all.

And I'm very interested in a study.

I'd like to know what my electric bills could be in the new future that you're trying to build.

I have no idea how fast my costs are going to escalate for heating my home.

And it certainly looks like I could lose a fair share of my business as well if this passes.

So obviously I'm against this and I have grave concerns about it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Blake?

My name is Blake Dixon.

I represent a company called Tristate Distributors.

We're a distributor of hearth appliances as well as kitchen appliances.

Currently in the state of Washington, we have 75 employees, all of which would, their jobs would be impacted with a natural gas ban.

We do millions of dollars into the city of Seattle.

That's all I have.

Thank you.

Thanks, Blake.

Bill?

Hi, my name's Bill Given.

I represent Regency Fireplace Products.

We're a manufacturer of both gas and wood-burning fireplace products.

Across my territory, I support a dealer network of about 40 dealers, much of it doing business here in Seattle.

Some of them we've already heard from today.

And we've heard about the impact on the retail side.

We've heard from Sutter and Aquaquip and Rich's and those guys.

Let me kind of paint a picture of what our typical dealer looks like across my territory.

They're typically anywhere from 6 to 125 employees.

A lot of times the business owner is on the front lines, like Deanne from Bellevue.

and the guys from Sutter.

They're typically a husband and wife combo.

Maybe the wife is the sales customer service and the husband's the installer.

So these are the stakeholders.

It's not just jobs.

It's the, that's their income is this business.

And that's what the majority of the hearth industry looks like.

So those are the stakeholders I'm truly concerned with and that's what I want to to hear more about and make sure we're studying all of our stakeholders.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you, Bill.

Troy?

Troy, you're going to be followed by Leah Missick, Scott Middleton, and then Brittany Bush-Bolay.

Thank you, Councilman O'Brien.

I appreciate the opportunity to have a voice.

I represent a company called Wool Steel.

We're the manufacturer of heating and air conditioning appliances, fireplaces, and barbecues.

This ban would affect all three.

The other thing that I would like to point out that culturally what we are talking about here is not being able to provide heat, reliable and cost effective heat for homes, especially in both middle and low income levels.

The culture of simply having a fireplace, some place to hang your stockings on.

Nobody wants to rob a family of that type of a memory in the future and or barbecues outside.

How many times do we congregate outside and with our families and with our friends?

this ban would affect all of those things.

And I don't think it's being considered, which is why I would absolutely support having a stakeholder session where we could do some reasonable studies here.

We currently represent about 180 small businesses in the Puget Sound area through all phases of our business.

And this would affect every single one of those businesses and their families.

So I oppose this and I sure hope you will consider.

Taking a step back and looking at this, there's some realistic eyes.

Thank you.

Thanks, Troy.

Leah?

Afternoon, my name is Leah Missick and I'm with Climate Solutions.

I'm here to speak about the benefits of all electric buildings and in support of two ordinances before you that will let us see more of them.

Here in Seattle, we have access to ample clean electricity.

However, buildings are responsible for over a third of our emissions.

Of that amount, oil and gas account for a whopping 78%.

Supporting this transition to all electric buildings addresses both our need to substantially cut carbon pollution and improve public health and safety.

Heating oil is a public health issue.

In Seattle, about a quarter of oil tanks are leaking.

Heating oil is also expensive.

After switching to electricity, people will have efficient, clean heating at a much stable and lower cost.

They'll also be eligible for energy assistance.

We're excited the city will be fully funding the transition for people who meet income qualifications, including renters.

Just as heating oil is expensive, gas is a very unstable market with fluctuating prices.

It is also currently subsidized.

We should be relying on our own local clean energy sources.

Gas is also incredibly unhealthy and unsafe.

Burning gas indoors produces particulate matter, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde, which is very dangerous to our health.

Gas pipelines are also known to explode.

Just a few weeks ago, a pipeline exploded right by my hometown, killing somebody and damaging homes and burning over 30 acres of land.

Happily, we can avoid these problems by moving to healthy, clean, all-electric buildings, which are not only in our reach, but they are here now.

And let's also help those with the most polluting homes make the transition, just like the Oil Heating Ordinance does.

This is how we need to address the climate emergency.

Thank you.

Thank you, Leah.

Scott?

Scott Middleton?

I think Kelly, is there another sign-in sheet?

When Scott starts, he can grab that.

Good afternoon, Chairman O'Brien.

For the record, my name is Scott Middleton.

I am General Counsel and Government Affairs Director for the Mechanical Contractors Association of Western Washington.

We represent approximately 100 signatory mechanical contractors who employ approximately 5,000 union plumbers and pipefitters in the Western Washington area, including right here in Seattle.

Our contractors are engaged in plumbing and pipe fitting and HVAC work primarily on commercial and industrial buildings.

We oppose the proposed ordinance that would prohibit natural gas piping systems in new buildings for a number of reasons.

Primarily, it would limit building systems options, particularly for hospitals, labs, and other commercial buildings.

it would push very high costs onto the consumer.

In fact, one of our members projects that this would increase consumer costs to 2.6 times per unit of heat for an all electric buildings.

Development would be limited by Seattle City Light's lack of power supply infrastructure to support the added load that would come from all electric buildings.

We do support the formation of a broad stakeholder group to engage in a comprehensive study and report to the Council as our building trades partners at the UA have proposed, and we would be more than happy to participate in this group.

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.

Thank you, Scott.

Brittany, you're going to be followed by Dave Gehring, then Amy Willis, and Doug McDonald, and then Eleanor Bastian is last.

Good afternoon, Council Member.

My name is Brittany Bush-Bollet.

I'm here on behalf of the Sierra Club.

I'm here to reiterate our support for the pro-climate oil and natural gas policies being discussed today.

The science that we are led by is unequivocal.

We need to get fossil fuels out of our buildings as soon as possible to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Buildings are the fastest growing source of climate pollution in Washington state, a more than 50% since 1990. homes and businesses in Washington now consume twice as much frac gas as all of the state's power plants.

This gas pollutes at the point of extraction, it pollutes during transit, and it pollutes both indoor and outdoor air when used.

The only response that makes sense to preserve our future, our families' futures, my child's future, is to stop digging the hole deeper and to stop inviting fossil fuels into our homes.

With some of the cheapest and cleanest energy in the nation, Washington state is ideally placed to be a national climate leader by moving away from dangerous, unhealthy, and unjustly subsidized natural gas into electric appliances and heating.

To quote an article from the news site Grist, Generations from now, people will react to the idea of piping gas into houses the same way we think of burning coal in the fireplace, as a relic of a less advanced and soot-filled time.

Thank you.

Thank you, Brittany.

Dave?

Thank you.

My name is Dave Gehring.

I'm the Executive Director of the Manufacturing and Industrial Council of Seattle.

We didn't have a chance to meet while this was pending, but one of our leading members, Nucor Steele, submitted an outstanding letter to the Council yesterday expressing their concerns about the two measures.

Also, we would support the go slow approach.

But we really do appreciate why you're bringing this forward, Councilmember.

And, you know, last month you did some really thoughtful work on comprehensive planning for industrial lands.

We think that kind of approach on this issue would really make more sense than the current one.

If this is the last time we get to talk to you before you go off to the next chapter of your life, best of luck to you.

We didn't always agree on things, but we agreed on a lot more things than people thought, and I never questioned your commitment to the community.

So thank you for bringing this issue up.

I think you've triggered a great discussion that needs to continue.

Thank you.

Thanks, Dave.

Amy?

Good afternoon.

My name is Amy Wheelis.

I'm a policy associate at the Northwest Energy Coalition.

We're a public interest nonprofit working on electricity and energy policy in the four northwest states to advance our mission of clean and affordable energy.

To the oil heating ordinance, I would just want to offer our strong support for this considered approach for reducing emissions from the residential building sector.

In addition to reducing carbon pollution, converting electric heat pumps will likely lower energy bills and most certainly improve the health and safety of these homes.

This ordinance centers low-income households and how to help them transition to cleaner energy.

We also think the set-aside of funds for career redevelopment is needed and important and appreciate its inclusion.

And we look forward to engaging with the city as this program is implemented and make sure that we can weave all the different weatherization and efficiency funds and programs together to make homes have the most comfortable and efficient homes as possible.

On the gas hookups ordinance, I really appreciate Council Member O'Brien and communities will be most affected by climate change bringing this ordinance forwarder as a component of the Green New Deal.

I think it started a very useful and needed discussion about the use of natural gas in our buildings and how we can reduce emissions in the building sector.

And I just want to offer up the Northwest Energy Coalition, we have a, we're a member-based organization.

very familiar with the electric system, energy system, and how buildings can and should operate.

And as the council considers the technology, cost, timing, and health issues associated with this ordinance, we're happy to provide assistance.

Thank you.

Thanks, Amy.

Doug?

I'm Doug McDonald.

I'm sure you would have been disappointed if no one had come today to talk about the Sidewalk Cafe proposal.

So I'll just make a couple of points.

First of all, there's nobody I know who is against Sidewalk Cafes.

Secondly, when you look at the slideshow that SDOT's bringing today, you'll see something interesting, which is the goals of the program.

The last of the goals is to make it better for the sidewalk businesses.

The next last of the goals is to make the community more vibrant.

And the first of the goals is to make sidewalks more safe and accessible.

I don't think it has much to do with the first of those goals, but I'm still for sidewalk cafes.

There are three things that I wish had had more attention as this program was being developed.

One is there.

rights of sidewalk cafe owners are not vested.

And so lots of legacy installations don't match the sorts of aspirations that SDOT has for new installations.

And yet there seems to be, with some exceptions, kind of a grandfathering principle that if you've got it, you can always have it.

I think SDOT needs to think more about that and maybe even explain it better to me.

But if things don't work now and we are going to do things better, we ought to make everything better.

The second thing is the fee structure is kind of odd.

Some people are making a lot of money on some very small sidewalk cafes and they pay $1.40 a square foot a year.

Other cafes in their neighborhoods, $1.40 may be a lot to pay for somebody to get out and have a chance to do something on the street.

I wish there were more attention to the question that given how strapped we are for revenue, if we could actually ask whether the fee is getting for us what we need and are entitled to for the fact that the sidewalks are going to be used as restaurants and bars.

And the third thing is, Mike, you know well that we're facing this question of how enforcement is working on sidewalks in all kinds of realms.

And in this particular thing, if something isn't working, the only enforcement, there is an enforcement mechanism, but it's all triggered by what's called complaint-based enforcement.

And we need to do better than complaint-based enforcement in a whole realm of areas in Seattle to make the city as livable as we would like.

Thank you.

Thanks, Doug.

Eleanor.

Eleanor, you're the last one who's signed up.

Go ahead.

If there's anyone else in the audience who would like to make public comment but didn't sign up, please just queue up behind Eleanor and I'll keep public comment open for a couple more minutes if necessary.

Good afternoon.

My name is Eleanor Bastian and I am the Climate and Clean Energy Policy Manager at the Washington Environmental Council.

The Washington Environmental Council is an environmental advocacy organization that has worked for more than 50 years for progressive change.

I am pleased to comment again today in support of the heating oil legislation.

This policy represents a targeted, proactive approach to reducing fossil fuel use in the residential sector that anticipates and ameliorates challenges to low-income folks in the clean energy transition.

We hope that this will be a model effort for other places and sectors.

We also look forward to engaging with the Council on Healthy Homes, Healthy Buildings, and other plans to manage the clean energy transition under a Green New Deal.

Change is hard.

Climate change is hard.

And I believe that by putting towards this proposal and eliciting interest and participation at this hearing, you are beginning the process towards coming up with a plan that will work for natural gas in our homes and buildings.

And I hope that everyone who attended here today will show the same commitment going forward to the process.

Thank you.

Thanks, Eleanor.

Great.

I don't see anyone else stepping forward.

So I will go ahead and close public comment.

I want to thank you all for coming out today.

I really appreciate the input.

I hear the concerns.

My original intent was to vote on this legislation today.

I'm not going to do that today.

You're right.

I need to get more input and hear some more feedback from folks.

Name some groups I heard that invite some folks to reach out to me if I miss folks.

Obviously, I'm well aware of Puget Sound Energy and the work they do, and I have contacts with Puget Sound Energy and have had conversations and will continue to do that.

I've had contacts with the representative workforce, specifically the plumbers and pipefitters.

I'm looking at Leanne here.

And so I have channels to reach laborers, plumbers and pipefitters, other folks in the trades.

I know that electricians are here.

You didn't comment, John.

So I will reach out to those folks.

I heard from a lot of folks in various aspects of the appliance retail industry, retail, probably distribution and manufacturing.

And I know a bunch of you left either phone numbers or emails, and so we can reach out to you.

I have the sense that there is a industry organization or two that may represent you all.

If someone would mind coming up to Kelly as we jump in and sharing that, you know, again, we'll try to reach out to everyone, but if there's a central point of contact, I would like to specifically, I know Dan, and so with Sutter Hearth and Harm, Sutter Hearth and Home, Thank you.

We've got to get that right.

But let me know who that main person point of contact is.

I do want to hear from folks, and I am open to bringing 40 of you together to talk about it, or if there's a couple reps that want to talk about it.

Leanne presented a proposal for a stakeholder process.

I haven't had a chance to review that, but I will look at it.

It probably will not make sense to have 50 or 70 people around a table.

So I'll be looking for representatives.

I imagine you all have better things to do than showing up.

But obviously, this would have a significant impact on a lot of businesses.

So I want to make sure your voices are heard.

And so I may reach out to give everyone an opportunity to individually speak, but then narrow it down to the appropriate representatives.

Don't know exactly what that looks like.

Thanks, Dan.

And we'll proceed from there.

I think you all know how to reach me, Mike.O'Brien at Seattle.gov.

So if in the next week or so folks haven't heard or your network hasn't heard because I've missed someone, I'll just invite you to reach out to me and ping me and we'll have those conversations.

I wanna, we'll talk about this more when we get into it, but I just, some of you may not stick around for multiple hours of this committee meeting, so I wanna just speak to it briefly while we're here.

The principles around the Green New Deal as I envision them are, a couple points are really clear.

One is the climate threat that we're facing is real, and it's imminent, and I wish I wish we had 20 or 30 years to figure this out.

I wish we had started in earnest on conversations like this 20 or 30 years ago.

But I don't get to change the science.

And I fear that because every year in the last 10 years, every time we get new data points, it's worse than we think that that trend will continue.

And so there's a sense of urgency around that.

But another key principle of the Green New Deal, a critical piece, is this transition away from fossil fuels can't be disproportionately on the backs of people that are on the front line, whether those are workers or small business owners or folks who rely on fossil fuels for heat or transportation.

And so hearing from all of you, I realize it's a big lift and someone did a lot of organizing to get so many folks out today.

Clearly you're motivated because this is a real impact and I want to honor that commitment and hear from you all about how we can meet both a just transition and meet our climate goals.

And it's not going to be easy to do both of those.

There will be impacts.

But it's absolutely fair of you to ask to say we want to make sure you understand how this will impact my business.

And I want to try to craft legislation that minimizes those impacts and finds alternatives where possible.

So thanks again for being here, for engaging with me.

And there's more to come on that.

I am going to move on to approving the agenda.

I'll walk through it really briefly.

We have a number of appointments today that we're going to consider.

Appointments to the Seattle School Traffic Safety Committee, appointments to the Levy to Move Seattle Oversight Committee, appointment to the Sweetened Beverage Tax Advisory Board.

We also will then consider agenda item number five, which is natural gas.

We'll have a brief discussion on that, but as I mentioned, Probably more to just reiterate what's in the legislation today and any more thoughts about the next steps.

But I want to make sure folks know we're not going to be voting on that today.

Next, we're going to take up an ordinance related to home heating oil.

We do have amendments we'll be considering today and possibly voting on that.

That would be my hope to get it out of committee.

But we'll see how that discussion goes.

Then we're going to hear about an ordinance related to sidewalk cafes.

We had one public comment on that.

We'll also have a related ordinance to citations for street and sidewalk use code.

We'll have a presentation on the Intelligent Transportation System, or ITS, briefing.

Had one comment on that today.

And then an ordinance related to the Citics Traffic Code.

and ordinance related to city streets, specifically changing the name to Northwest Locks Place to a small section of a street in Ballard.

I'm gonna go ahead and move and second that we approve that agenda.

So that agenda is now approved.

I took things a little out of order because I did public comment before that.

Now we're gonna move on to the first item of business and I will hand this over to Kelly and ask her to read the first appointment in and invite presenters forward.

Appointment 01417, appointment of Charlie Simpson as a member to Seattle School Traffic Safety Committee for a term to March 31st, 2022.

Welcome.

When you're settled, we'll have introductions, Brian.

Thank you, Council Member O'Brien.

You bet.

Thank you.

Just name and I guess just your name for now.

Charlie Simpson.

Thanks.

And Brian?

I'm Brian Dougherty.

I manage the Pedestrian and Neighborhood Projects Program at SDOT.

Great.

Charlie, thanks for being here.

Brian, I'll start.

If you want to give us a little...

the general public a little overview of what this committee does.

Absolutely, I'd be happy to.

The Seattle School Traffic Safety Committee helps make walking and biking to school in Seattle safer and easier.

The volunteer board of 11 members was created by Seattle City Council in 1975, one of the first committees of its type in the nation.

It works to improve traffic safety for all school children in Seattle.

The committee advises the mayor and city council with respect to school traffic safety, including adult crossing guard locations, school traffic signs and signals, school safety patrols, bicycle facilities, sidewalks, and student traffic safety education.

And I'm pleased to present Charlie for consideration for an appointment to the committee.

So Charlie, you must have some interest in keeping kids and others safe in our pedestrian environment?

Yes, absolutely.

Good.

That's good to hear.

You're in the right place then.

Tell me a little bit about yourself and why this interests you and what you would hope to do.

My name is Charlie Simpson.

As I said, I'm currently a planner at Alta Planning and Design.

It's an urban planning particularly active transportation planning firm.

And my passion is safe streets.

I believe every kid particularly, children are some of our most vulnerable users of our streets.

And I believe that every kid should be able to get to and from school safely, you know, without getting inside a vehicle, whether it's walking, biking, or rolling.

And tell me a little more.

I'm familiar with Alta.

You guys do some great work.

I'm pleased to have the city partner with you on multiple projects.

A little bit about your work there and the overlap with this.

Yeah.

So I just, I've been with Alta just around four months or so.

And I'm currently a second year Masters of Urban Planning student at University of Washington.

And my work at Alta has been a little bit around, we do a lot of programs work around Safe Routes to School.

And we're doing, working on a number of projects around King County right now, but have worked with the city of Seattle in the past.

And I've been involved with a number of those projects and really believe strongly in, yes, in the Safe Routes to School program that the city of Seattle has and hope that my position on the committee can help push that agenda forward and that initiative forward so we can get safer streets for kids.

That's great.

Well, Charlie, I'm really grateful for your willingness to serve.

I agree with your vision of making that city safe for all users and starting with the most vulnerable users.

As I'm sure you're aware, we've committed to Vision Zero, which is a commitment to eliminate all serious injuries and fatalities anywhere in the transportation sector in the next 10 years.

It's been a rough year, frankly, despite Seattle making some good investments.

The data shows that we've seen more fatalities more serious injuries than we've seen in a while.

And so, well, I think Seattle, as the data shows, is one of the safest cities for a pedestrian, not just in the United States, but frankly, in the world.

We're still not as safe as we want to be, and we have some work to do there.

The Safety Board, the School Traffic Safety Committee, has been a great advocate over time for some of the investments we make.

It's obviously complex because we're working in the space the city and the school district, which is a different entity, but there's also been a long-time good partnership there.

I'll tell you that we're about to start our budget process next week.

It'll run for a couple months, and I'm interested in finding ways to kind of recommit some revenue streams to both the broader Vision Zero set of investments we need to make, and then also the school safety work specifically, which I consider a piece of that Vision Zero work.

And so last year in the budget, We moved some funds around in a way that I'm hoping to reverse that trend if we can this year.

And, you know, your fellow committee members have been supportive of trying to find ways to do that too.

So, do you have any questions for me before you go forward?

I do not, but thank you very much.

You bet.

I'll go ahead and move agenda item number one.

And this is the awkward thing when it's just me in the meeting.

I get a second also.

And then I get a vote yes on you.

And I won't ask for any nos or abstentions because that's obvious.

You'll move to the full council on the 23rd for approval.

So thanks for your willingness to serve.

And I just urge you that as you get into the work, the council, myself for the next few months, but anyone here really relies on the expertise that you and others bring to the body of work when you serve on a committee.

And just urge you to make your voice heard when you see that we're not moving fast enough or need to go in a different direction or following a policy that you think is misguided from the expertise that you have.

So invite that feedback.

Thank you very much.

Thanks a bunch.

Thanks, Brian.

Thank you.

All right, Kelly, you want to read the next, is it two in?

Yes.

Appointment 01419, reappointment of Nick Perenjai to the Levy to Move Seattle Oversight Committee for a term to December 31st, 2023. And appointment 01418, reappointment of Inge Manskamp as a member to the Levy to Move Seattle Oversight Committee for a term to December 31st, 2023.

Great.

Why don't we start with introduction?

Hi, I'm Brian Sperry.

I'm a program manager in the Office of Moves Seattle at SDOT.

And I'm here today representing Rachel McCaffrey, who's out sick.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I was going to say, you didn't look like Rachel.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She has a little bit longer hair, so.

Yeah.

Anyways, today we are presenting the reappointment of Inga Mengskopf and Nick Parents' Bay to the Levy Oversight Committee.

I've worked with both Inge and Nick on the Oversight Committee.

They've been great participants.

So, you know, these reappointments are an opportunity for us to check back in, both to make sure that both of them are interested in serving.

I'm assuming that they're not being brought forward against their will?

That's correct.

Okay, excellent.

And, you know, obviously it's also a chance for the council or the mayor to reconsider if it's an appropriate fit, but the fact that they're here, I really enjoyed working with them and appreciate their commitment to what's been a really, frankly, the last couple of years, quite a heavy lift.

There's been a lot of work done on that committee.

Anything else we should know before we move forward?

I'm happy to support both of these, so.

Great.

Well, I'll go ahead and move agenda items number two and three, appointments 1419 and appointment 1418 for Nick and Inga, and I'll second that, and I'll vote yes on that.

So those will both come out of committee with a recommendation to vote yes, and they'll be at the full council on Monday.

Great.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks for your work.

Great.

Let's go to agenda item number four.

Appointment 01420 reappointment of Christina J. Wong as a member Sweetened Beverage Tax Community Advisory Board for a term to August 31st, 2023.

We'll start again with introductions.

Good afternoon, I'm Bridget Iger from the Office of Sustainability and Environment and I provide administrative support to the CAB, the Sweetened Beverage Tax Community Advisory Board.

So I thought I'd just review the role of the CAB and then we can talk about Christina Wong and her reappointment.

That's great.

Wonderful.

So as you know, the CAB was established by the same ordinance that created the beverage tax, and the role of this board is to develop recommendations for the mayor and city council on programs and services to support with beverage tax revenue and that align with the ordinance.

So the ordinance states that SBT revenue shall be used for healthy food access programs and programs and services that improve child health development and readiness for school.

And additionally, A primary intent of the ordinance is to benefit communities that experience the greatest health and education inequities.

So today I'm here for the reappointment hearing for Christina Wong for CAB position number six.

This is a public health seat.

Christina has served on the CAB since it was first convened in late 2017. She was voted by the CAB to serve as one of its first co-chairs.

She's a public policy and advocacy director for Northwest Harvest, a nonprofit food bank distributor that operates statewide.

And in her role, Christina provides information and updates on food and nutrition issues, and she educates state and federal lawmakers about the needs of food bank clients in order to strengthen and restore the public safety nets.

She has over 20 years of experience as an advocate for social justice issues, including her work with survivors of interpersonal violence, disability rights, comprehensive immigration reform, and child welfare.

Christina studied social work and policy at the University of Chicago, and she's a graduate of UW School of Law.

Christina's been amazing to work with.

I really appreciate her expertise and done a lot of work with this community advisory board in the last number of months.

Obviously, I guess it's a new board.

Relatively new.

There's just a lot of work and a lot of information coming in.

And their expertise has been great.

And I'm really excited that Christina is willing to serve another term.

And I'm excited to appoint her.

So thank you, Richard, for bringing that.

And thank you, Christina, wherever you are.

I know you have a busy schedule.

But I look forward to moving that.

So I will go ahead and move agenda item number four, appointment 1420. And I will second it.

And I will vote yes on that.

So thanks for your work.

And thanks for your ongoing work supporting that board.

All right, agenda item number five.

Council Bill 119640, an ordinance relating to prohibiting natural gas piping systems in new buildings, adding a new chapter 22.940 to the Seattle Municipal Code.

Great.

Why don't we start with introductions, Yolanda?

Yes, Yolanda Ho, Council Central staff.

Thanks so much for being here today.

I've heard a lot in public comment this morning and I'll just repeat briefly in case folks are just chiming in now and missed the earlier comments, but originally I had hoped to be voting on legislation today.

We're not doing that today.

Heard a lot of feedback from community members who will be impacted by this legislation and I want to make sure to take the time to have meaningful conversations with those community members, really understand, you know, frankly, a start from what are the concerns and how do we move forward meeting kind of a mix of goals we're trying to achieve.

you know, build a piece of legislation around that.

I don't want to pretend that this will ever not be controversial, but I think there's more work to be done to get it to a place where basically I can be better informed with some of the challenges around there, but also hopefully address some of the community concerns and recognizing that the challenges around climate change are going to force that business is not going to keep going the exact way it's going now, and so we have to make some transitions.

how to do that in a just and meaningful way.

Yolanda, in your memo, there's, I think, a handful of new points or changes you made, and so maybe, do you mind taking a few minutes to walk through either some of the overarching stuff, but more specifically, some of the additional information we've gained in the last week or so?

Sure.

Yeah so um the part my memo kind of started out with some of the background information that we discussed at the last meeting last week and so just kind of recording that in written form for the public in terms of single family homes currently and what our understanding of their source of electric heat and kind of seeing trends in potentially more homes being built with electric heat over time.

So just wanted to provide everyone with that data and understanding also where our building greenhouse gas emissions are coming from.

As before stating that 71% of our building emissions from greenhouse gas are from the direct combustion of natural gas for buildings, but also in this Exhibit 3 in the memo that showed the 14% of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by steam, which is kind of an indirect source of, so natural gas is involved because it's a district energy system, but that there's still, natural gas involved, but it's not that, so they're kind of more efficient systems versus each building having its own boiler, but there still is greenhouse gas emissions involved in those types of systems.

So just kind of considering the role of natural gas in those situations as well.

So on the steam, I think we're talking about the, I don't, It's not called Seattle Steam anymore, I'm drawing a blank on the name of the new company.

I believe they have both a steam boiler, if that's the right term, and also a wood waste boiler.

Do you know if we collect data on which one's being used, how much of the time?

So we will have OSC up here shortly, I think.

But based on the 2016 greenhouse gas inventory report that was released earlier this year, it looked like they no longer are using that biomass boiler system.

So there was actually an uptick in emissions between 2014 and 2016 based on that, I believe.

So I'm not sure what the reasons are for that.

But that was what my understanding was.

Oil, we're well aware of.

We're going to talk about that in a moment.

Electric shows up here.

I've mentioned that we have 100% carbon neutral electric utility, but it's still showing up as 9% of our emissions.

Can you speak to that at all?

Right, so there are, even though 90% of electricity that City Light provides to consumers comes from low-carbon hydroelectric dams, City Light then, so it's a net zero, right, so there are some emissions in the operations that Seattle City Light has, specifically employees travel, the use of trucks and other equipment in its operations, and purchases of power from other utilities, which may also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

So they're kind of looking at the totality of their operations.

And so that's where that 9% comes from.

That is to clarify, you know, there are a number of exhibits in this memo, but that 9% is for all the buildings in Seattle that are powered.

So I'm assuming all buildings have electricity.

Good point.

So that's versus just the subset that are hooked up to natural gas.

Exactly.

Got it.

Right.

So that's spread across a lot more buildings.

Correct.

And then my understanding is that this data is from 2016. Is that right?

Correct.

This is from the greenhouse gas inventory that was just published earlier this year.

So there's a little bit of lag time between the data and then the publication due to, I think, the intensity of the analysis that's required.

I asked a little bit about the number was even at 9%, it was a little higher than I anticipated.

What I understand was 2016 was what they call a low water year.

And so the city light was maybe buying more electricity off the grid.

And all of our electricity we produce is 100% carbon neutral.

Most of the electricity we buy is that, but it's a mix of things.

And so we have to provide some offsets for it.

And this is just a snapshot in time.

So in another year, we may see a drop in that.

And also, I'm still tracking down some.

So we have our energy benchmarking program for multifamily and non-residential buildings.

There are 20,000 square feet and greater.

And so looking at that just to see what the mix is, I'm still trying to determine the mix of those that have natural gas versus electric just to get a sense of those types of buildings.

Because right now we've only looked at single family houses.

Great.

And in terms of the additional impacts, the Office of Sustainability and Environment provided an analysis of the impacts of this legislation on Seattle's greenhouse gas emissions.

And so they have a model that kind of looks only at heating.

So this is not the totality of all the things that So if an all-electric building, it's not necessary, so this might be slightly underestimating the decrease in the emissions of greenhouse gas, because it's not really accounting for all-electric buildings necessarily.

So you could have a natural gas appliance.

if your home heating is electric, right?

So that's what it's just looking at.

And 2030 is kind of one of our key points in time.

You know, with the Green New Deal, we have a goal of reducing our climate pollutants to be free of climate pollutants by 2030. It looks like about a 4% to 5% decrease in our greenhouse gas emissions for buildings based on analysis of the policy.

But again, that might be underestimating the impacts of the legislation potentially.

Appliances beyond just the heating appliances might also be captured in that.

Yeah, so it would be slightly higher.

Another piece of information I received in between last week and this week was information from City Light.

which they have determined that they have adequate generation resources to meet the projected load, assuming all new buildings are fully electric after July 1st, 2020, and noted that there might be constraints to the transmission and distribution system, but they believe these could be resolved.

And the other late breaking data I also received was, so currently the Seattle Department of Construction Inspections has a gas piping mechanic license.

And so I inquired in terms of just kind of getting a sense of what the impacts might be on that.

The department reported that they collect an average of $80,000 per year for these licenses.

And...

What was the number?

$80,000.

$80,000 a year?

Not a huge amount, but still money.

And they did not expect that necessarily to drop right away, right?

Because there's also people who are maintaining existing systems.

So even if there are not new systems, there will still be existing systems would require a gas piping mechanic to service.

And currently there are 763 active gas piping licenses.

This does not reflect all the gas piping mechanics who work in Seattle.

From what I understand, this would be maybe a lower limit of how many people actually do this work for various reasons.

But there are at least 763 people who have an active license.

And I had worked with the Office of Economic Development to provide some rough estimates of jobs.

And again, this is very rough and we would probably need to refine this if we really wanted a good sense of jobs involved with, this is plumbing and plumbing and heating equipment wholesalers, so not necessarily retailers who we've heard from in the Seattle area.

And so plumbing, heating and air conditioning contractors and plumbing and heating equipment and supplies merchant wholesalers.

That total in 2019 is around 5,500 jobs.

So that's just a sense.

So that captures a lot of people who are maybe, you know, in the electric air, you know, systems.

And so that would be a upper number of folks who are working in this industry.

So we would need to kind of refine that a bit more.

But at least we're trying to get at some of the employment impacts that we've been hearing about.

I really appreciate that work and recognize that there's more work to do there, but it's a question, it's a fair question that a lot of folks have been asking and it's certainly data that we want to have to make an informed decision as we move forward.

And so, I'm interested in sharing data with some of the stakeholders and seeing how we can further refine it to understand, you know, what the impacts of this legislation would potentially have and then also, the broader work to be done if we're going to transition off fossil fuels completely, then we start talking about a much larger universe of folks too and understanding what that looks like.

So those are going to be really helpful.

Can you go back to the City Light question about electricity generation and tell me a little more about what, do we have any more specifics or just that it's fine?

It wasn't very specific.

I pretty much captured their response to my inquiry.

They felt very confident about their generation resources.

So there's two parts to energy, right?

There's the actual making generating of electricity and then there's the hydro dam exactly and then there's the getting it to your house part and that's the part that they they acknowledge that there might be maybe we might need extra transformers or sizing of equipment and things like that just kind of to safely distribute the load amongst the unit based on the extra demand.

So I think that's kind of what they would need to study a bit more, but that was what my understanding was.

Great.

Well, that'll be another area to get some more information.

That's another fair question that a lot of folks have asked.

And my sense and past experience working with City Light is They're always kind of doing ongoing work to upgrade the distribution system, and it's probably a little bit of a block-by-block basis, where I imagine some blocks there's SSacity, and some places you might, you know, tear down a single-family home and put four townhomes up, and that might be the thing that triggers additional capacity.

So it'd be good to get a sense of how much this would shift relative to the kind of baseline amount of upgrading they're just doing in a growing city.

And would this just be kind of noise in that going forward?

Or is this like, oh, no, this would have a significant impact on top of that, and how would we manage that?

You know, good to know what jobs will be created there, too, because that's part of the equation, the cost associated with that and who bears the cost as we think about that.

That'll be important to know, too.

Great.

Yolanda, you've done Herculean efforts so far, and unfortunately, your work is not over.

I know you're going into budget, and so our ability to tap into you for this is going to be pretty limited.

But I really appreciate your work to date.

And we'll probably be picking on you where possible to help us as we engage with some stakeholders in the coming days and weeks.

So, great.

I think that's all I have for this item today.

Thanks for being here.

And...

I'll be here for two more items.

Great.

Kelly, read that next one in and let's invite other...

Would you bring the short version in, Kelly?

I'd love to read the short version.

Thanks.

Council Bill 119607, an ordinance relating to heating oil.

And presenters, come on forward.

Are you guys presenting, or are you just?

We're just here.

You're just here?

OK.

If you don't mind, just to keep me company up here.

Yeah.

Let's see.

Why don't we do a quick round of introductions.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having us.

And so we'll start with you again, Yolanda.

Yolanda Ho, Council Central staff.

Thank you.

Christine Bunch, Office of Sustainability and Environment.

Jessica Finkhoven with the Office of Sustainability and Environment.

Great.

Thank you all for being here.

I really appreciate the work you all have done to date.

I've heard a series of kind of concerns and made an attempt to address those.

And I have a few amendments that I want to bring forward today.

To be clear, these are amendments that I'm bringing forward, not OSC, but I will give you an opportunity to weigh in if you have any thoughts on any of them.

And so, Yolanda, I might just rely on you.

I don't know if there's anything overview you want to say about this.

No, I mean, I think this is just a quick reminder that this would be a, this legislation would impose a 23.6 cents per gallon tax on each gallon of heating oil sold by heating oil service providers in Seattle beginning on July 1st, 2020. And the proceeds would be used for covering the cost for low income households to convert from an oil heating system to an electric heat pump.

reimbursing low-income households to offset the added cost of the tax, also to expand our existing rebate program available to all households that support conversion to electric heat pumps, providing education outreach regarding the tax, providing program administration support and workforce development support to the four or five oil service providers and their employees with the goal of transitioning to a clean heating clean heating sales and installation.

So just a quick summary there.

So in terms of our amendment, we have a kind of a substitute version of the bill to consider that incorporates a couple of amendments that were contained in my memo from last week, but also some additional amendments.

So this- Sorry, one second.

Kelly, is that available for folks in the public to see?

put out some copies, but I can grab more.

If anyone has not seen a copy and would like to see it, raise your hand and we can make some more copies.

Okay.

Great.

Okay, so this substitute version would correct some minor typographical errors and adds recitals regarding the urgent need to address climate change, the adoption of the Green New Deal for Seattle, and they need to ensure a just transition for workers whose jobs depend on heating oil.

It would also change the heating oil tax fund to an account to ease a kind of internal administrative burden.

and expand eligibility requirements for low-income households to receive financial assistance to convert from an oil heating system to an electric system, allowing heating oil tax revenues to support conversions for households beyond the 70% state median income threshold of the utility discount program up to the 80% of area median income, still giving priority to those households participating in the utility discount program.

We would also request that a copy of the proposed implementation plan for the mandate that all heating oil storage tanks be decommissioned or replaced with a modern tank by December 21st, 2028, be submitted to the City Clerk and Council and request that the Office of Sustainability and Environment provide a status update on outreach efforts related to the heating oil, new heating oil tax to date, including a description of any challenges encountered during the outreach and proposed strategies for overcoming challenges if applicable by July 1st, 2020, and to also report annually on program status and collaborate with the Office of Economic Development, Seattle Construction Department of Construction and Inspections, and the Office of Housing to determine the legislation's impact on jobs, and also low-income renters of oil-heated homes, and provide a report to Council beginning in July 1st, 2021.

So I'm going to speak to this, my intent around this, and I'll invite other comments if folks feel like commenting.

One of the things we've heard from oil heat companies and also workers in the oil heat was obviously concerns about what happens to their business and what happens to their workers.

As I've stated before, you know, I believe that for the most part that certainly petroleum-based oil heat probably all sorts of oil heat need to be phased out in the city relatively soon.

You can argue about what relatively means, but we have a plan here to do that largely by 2028, which I support.

And obviously that will have impacts on folks.

And the goal here is not to necessarily not do this, but figure out how do we manage those impacts in a way that are reasonable.

You know, for businesses, you know, a lot of these businesses have already done certain things to adapt to the reality because we're seeing, you know, between 1 and 2,000 people a year converting off oil heat as it is today.

And so this has been ongoing, I think, reality for the industry.

I think there's probably been a fair amount of consolidation and we're also seeing some diversification in those.

But to be clear, oil heat companies have been here testifying.

I didn't hear them today.

know they have fairly strong concerns because this would likely accelerate that or certainly wouldn't slow a town a challenge that they already face.

But we have seen where some of them are expanding into other forms of home heating and perhaps other industries completely that are more consistent with our climate goals in the city.

Workers are another issue.

You know, the workers may have less flexibility than a business owner to do that, and so we're very concerned about what that impact is.

I know that our ability to get really robust data from these companies, they're not regulated in a way where we know exactly how many employees they have and how many of them are actually working in Seattle versus working in another jurisdiction.

what that looks like, and so one of the requests here is I want to move forward, but I want to be as sensitive as possible to adapting as we learn more about that.

And again, the goal is not to keep using the same heating source that is causing part of our climate pollution problem.

but rather understand what workers are impacted, make sure we have tools available for other retraining or career opportunities, and understanding the magnitude of that challenge is going to be pretty important.

We've asked OSC to do some of this work, recognizing that you're policy experts, but not necessarily out there collecting employment data.

So we've also included other departments to help with that work going forward.

And, you know, hopeful that as we go forward we can gather data.

You know, maybe there's a natural transition that happens.

Normal attrition will work in a way that folks won't feel great impacts and maybe, you know, a couple big providers will immediately shut down business tomorrow and they'll have a massive impact, not massive, but a significant impact and will want to manage that too.

So, you know, any comments on that or thoughts on that?

Well, I would just say that we very much appreciate the intent of the amendment and the intent of this work.

We too are committed, you know, as we've discussed and this body has been discussing the Green New Deal over the last several weeks or months, committed to the principle that those on the front lines of climate change in all all forms should be part of developing the solutions.

Certainly here we see that as workers who are on the front line of some of this work.

So from OSE, we're certainly committed to continuing to engage those workers to do a to do more work together to figure out what the solutions are.

And part of that is understanding and having some of this data to understand trends that the industry has seen in the last few years and trends that we might see going forward.

So I can't guarantee that we know exactly how to approach this from OSC right now, but we are committed to partnering with those who do to really understand the full picture better.

Great.

I appreciate that.

Another piece of that section of the amendment talks about understanding how homes are heated and specifically the people that use oil heat and what the impacts are on them.

I think you've done a great job.

trying to understand the universe of folks.

What about 18,000 folks on oil, heat, and a little over 1,000 we think are based on income levels are likely qualified for the utility discount program, which would allow them to participate in essentially a cost-free transition that would be funded by the tax.

So that program is extremely robust, and I think that's great and totally appropriate to do for the lowest income folks.

We've heard from a few homeowners that have been out, not a ton, but that have expressed concern about being above that threshold, but still struggling to make the conversion.

We've heard a lot of the workers in the companies speaking on those homeowners' behalf.

So, you know, it's not quite the same as hearing directly from the homeowners that will be impacted.

But I think it's legitimate to raise questions about what about customers that don't get to qualify the deep discount but still will struggle to make the transition without assistance.

And so there's a couple paths.

I mean, one is in the near term, you know, we're not requiring people to transition if they want to, you know, if they want to take a few years to figure this out, they will be required to pay the tax.

We'll talk about biofuels in a second.

There's a kind of different path there if they choose to go that route.

But, and the cost to the average homeowner of the tax.

Is that 120?

dollars a year.

And that's based on what, about 500 gallons a year of oil.

And so, you know, it's about $10 a month.

And I want to be clear, that's real money to folks that are living on a fixed income.

That's going to be an impact.

But it does allow some flexibility there to move forward.

But with an ultimate goal that by 2028, we're going to want to see folks make this transition.

Now, Christine, you provided some information last week on the cost of operating homes.

My sense from the analysis you did was the actual operational cost, essentially the cost of the fuel if you're using oil versus the cost of the fuel if you're using electricity.

It's about twice as much to heat your homes, costs about twice as much to heat an oil home than it does an electric home.

And so there is a significant cost difference for folks that continue to use oil heat.

And so if we can get them to electric heat, we can save them ongoing money, but there's that cost of the transition.

And so we've talked about opportunities to expand the subsidy program above the folks in the utilities program.

My sense is there's a strong willingness to do that we just need to find the resources and so we have some resources in this bill to do that and so maybe you can speak again a little bit to what resources are available to folks above the UDP level.

I don't know if Yolanda or Christine wants to talk about that.

So I think the intent with the up to 80% of area median income is to be consistent with the Office of Housing's income requirements.

And so the thought there is that if those folks through some tax revenue, we can get them to electrify.

meaning sort of get to that baseline electric system, which is like a baseboard heating system or a forced air furnace, that we can lean on Seattle City Light in supporting the energy efficiency upgrade to a heat pump or the Department of Commerce or other funding sources that currently are available through the Office of Housing's programs.

So we would need to kind of manage those resources and, you know, collaborate with Office of Housing on how to best support that additional group of residents.

Great.

And the amendment here is intended to give you flexibility to do that.

We'll obviously, you know, I think for the robust program that we all want, we're probably looking at finding additional revenues beyond just this tax and not prepared to do anything on that today.

But I think as we monitor this going forward, that's an area that we're going to want to look at.

with the priority for the lowest income folks along that spectrum.

But anyone that qualifies in there, you know, it may be that in certain years there's not a ton of people that are looking to upgrade and so we have more capacity.

And in other years it may be more competitive.

Yeah, I think I appreciate the flexibility there.

And in talking to the Office of Housing, I think they definitely appreciate that too.

We don't want to be sort of pigeonholed, if you will, to a very specific, you know, income eligibility threshold knowing that, you know, we may be able to go beyond that and not know exactly what revenue will start coming through.

We may actually see an excess of revenue than what we, you know, anticipated and so having that flexibility will be great.

That's great.

And our goal, I mean, is certainly, I think we share the goals of wanting to assist as many people as possible with this transition.

We know right now, as you said, over 1,000 people a year are choosing to convert off oil heat.

We want to make sure that it's not just the wealthy who are able to do that, but that everybody is able to move to a cleaner, more efficient, more cost-effective heating system.

That's great.

And depending on what they, you know, if they convert to a heat pump product, we know that provides air conditioning.

And you've been very clear that that is both a comfort reality as our city gets warmer in the summer and a public health reality, because we know certainly some of our most vulnerable residents, seniors in particular, are very susceptible to health problems when the temperatures get hot.

And having some cooling in those households could be a lifesaver, literally.

The other thing that I specifically call out is renters, and the vast majority, almost all, I think, of the oil heat homes are single family homes.

And we know, I think, I don't know, about 20% of the single family home stock is actually renters in the city of Seattle.

I think that's about right.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Some of the data that we've seen is 2% of oil heated homes are renters.

So it's actually a pretty small percentage.

Well, that would be something that specifically I want to track just because it's an area where we have that split incentive where depending on the lease, the landlord may be passing on the cost of oil heat.

You know, maybe they're responsible to tenant to purchase oil and in this case, they would be paying the tax.

and while it may be more cost effective for them to convert so that they can have savings, the conversion is actually going to be done by the landlord.

And the landlord may decide they don't want to make that investment.

And so that split incentive can be particularly challenging.

And so I know that this is not the first time we've dealt with the split incentive in rental properties where whether it's energy efficiency or different heating sources, more renewable sources.

But it'd be great to have a specific strategy trying to identify that if in fact we're only talking about, small handful of folks then maybe we can actually you know do our best to target them and find out if it's a slightly larger group than number seeing if there are programs we can figure out where they are and obviously gets a little more complicated because we don't want to we've certainly not subsidized a landlord to make a transition without commitments that their tenant or another low-income tenant can stay there for a longer period of time and also housing has done some pretty good work on systems like that.

Yeah, I just would like to say that in terms of strategies for low-income renters, we would want to work closely with Office of Housing and their existing protocol, which is that we would offer a heat pump to that landlord, but would make sure there's a covenant to ensure that the low-income or affordable rent is intact and that they just don't jack up the prices.

And that would be a voluntary program that a landlord could enter into if they wanted to.

And so we have the authority to, as part of a voluntary program, to stipulate what that requirement would be when it comes to rent.

So that's great.

Okay.

Well, any other comments, Yolanda?

Thank you for walking through the substitute.

Actually, can I look at that thing?

I have it in front of me.

But I'm going to go ahead and move this.

So I will substitute version D2 for D1.

And I will second that and I will vote yes on it.

So we have that amended language through on the bill.

And then do you want to speak to the second amendment?

Sure, yeah.

Sorry, for the record, it was D1C was the official.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

To be substituted by D2.

So amendment two would be a biodiesel exemption.

So this would amend the council bill to exempt biodiesel from the heating oil tax and at a related recital regarding the intent to protect unionized workers employed in the heating oil business.

Only the biodiesel portion would be exempt when the heating oil contains a blend of biodiesel and petroleum-based product.

We'll also note that this will have some fiscal impacts in terms of decreasing potential revenues as we exempt a portion of heating oil.

We don't really know how much biodiesel is being sold currently in the city So we don't have an estimate on that but just making a note that that would be an impact of this amendment Great, and so specifically I appreciate

some of the workers and their representatives speaking out to this.

I think they see biodiesel as a transition fuel.

And to the extent that people are going to choose to keep with an oil furnace for a while, properly done, properly sourced, I should say, biodiesel does provide a reduced, in some cases significantly reduced, carbon or climate impact with those fuels.

And it does give a little more flexibility to both perhaps accelerate some of our climate goals and allow a little more time for transition for workers.

This language would add another recital that says, whereas promoting the use of biodiesel allows for a bridge option for customers that helps to protect nearly 100 high-wage local union jobs for Teamsters Joint Council 28 and IBW Local 46. Those are two of the unions we've heard that represent some of the workers in this field.

And then it would refine the biodiesel definition specifically to do our best to regulate which types of biofuels we consider acceptable and which we don't.

Specifically, palm oil we know is a source of biofuels that is extremely problematic both for the destruction that is happening in communities around the world where it's being produced, the loss of a forest that often happens to create the place where they can harvest it, and then the fact that the fuel is just, when you add all that up, is just not particularly sustainable either.

But my understanding in speaking with at least one major biofuel producer here in Washington State, that that's not something that's part of their feedstock at all.

And so they seem to think that they have feedstocks that qualify and even the, I would say, the least beneficial of their biofuels, they argue, still have about a 50% reduction in carbon intensity.

I'm not an expert on that, I don't know if anyone at the table is, but I think that this language is intended to mirror that, and I know we look at states, Oregon, California, and the province of British Columbia, all have, I believe, low-carbon fuel standards, and that regulatory structure helps with this.

We don't have a low-carbon fuel standard in Washington.

We'd love to have a low-carbon fuel standard in Washington, but because the markets are such, I think a lot of the, some of the stuff that's being produced here, maybe a lot of it is actually produced for those markets, and so we can look to those standards at least as a guideline.

Any comments?

Yeah, I mean, I think I'll just say the last time we were here, we laid out some of our concerns about use of biodiesel as home heating fuel.

But we, as you explained, Council Member, have heard certainly from folks in the labor community that this does feel like an important flexibility mechanism for them.

And certainly in the spirit of partnership, we are comfortable stretching on that front and appreciate that this language does help to prevent the highest carbon biodiesel.

And we think, again, hearing from folks that this feels like an important flexibility mechanism, I think we're happy to support it.

I appreciate that flexibility.

I want to be clear that how biodiesel is used is a blend.

And that blend can be anywhere from, you know, 5%, so I think that's often referred to as B5, on up to B50.

And B99 is the, just short of 100% for other federal tax credit stuff that I don't fully understand.

But this exemption is prorated based on the amount of biodiesel content.

So essentially, we will continue to tax your petroleum-based heating oil.

90% of the oil that goes in the tank is petroleum-based, then the tax would apply to that 90%, but not the biofuel.

But it's not, you know, so the more biofuel mix, the more robust of a mix you're using, the more of a discount.

And my understanding is that biofuels are at a premium.

It's about a dollar a gallon more.

Is that what you've seen, Christine?

It can range, you know.

It can range on a number of factors, including the markets and the supply, feedstock, et cetera, but range typically I think it's between $0.50 to $1 depending on the blend as well.

And so this will, because we'll be taxing the petroleum product but not the biofuel product, this will essentially create almost a $0.25, reduce that differential by about $0.25.

So there may be folks out there that have considered biodiesel in the past but have chosen not to go because of the price differential.

because the differential will be less, maybe we see more uptake on that.

I want to state my personal commitment here is that I don't believe that long-term heating homes with biofuels is a appropriate long-term solution.

I mean, I guess technology can change and other events can change, but from where I sit now, it seems pretty clear that we have really great electrical systems that we want to transition to.

The question is really in the interim how we make those transitions and really certainly encourage folks when they're building new homes or have an opportunity to make or replace something, I would hope they would be doing whatever they can to transition to electric now because I think that's the direction we're going to go.

I do believe biofuels are going to be part of our energy solution.

I just don't think their highest and best use will be in homes.

I think we'll see it in other products.

I'm looking at Jessica because she's the one who educates me on all this, so thank you for that.

Think about biofuels a lot.

I agree.

They are an important part of our energy future.

And so, but I appreciate your flexibility on this too, and I think hopefully this works.

And I do think it's critical.

to acknowledge that we do have represented family wage jobs that are created in this industry, and we want to figure out how those jobs continue into the future.

You know, we don't, unfortunately for some, maybe fortunate, we don't live in a world where we're just magically going to snap our fingers and our energy needs go away, there is a lot of work to do to transition.

And there'll be a lot of work to do to maintain the new systems that will be clean.

And it's incumbent upon us collectively to ensure that those new jobs, as we transition, are high-wage represented jobs where workers can actually support their family in our system.

And we've done some good work on that.

You know, I think some of the stuff we've done around priority hire and the construction trades is good.

And I think there's more work to do here and there.

Anything else before I talk to all my colleagues here and move this amendment?

All right.

I'm going to go ahead and move and second the amendment number two.

Is that all I need to refer to Yolanda?

And then I will vote yes on that.

And so we've both substituted a bill for the set of amendments and then amended that substitute bill with this other set of amendments for biofuels.

And since I'm only talking to myself, there's no further discussion.

I'm going to go ahead and move this legislation as amended.

I will second that.

And we'll send this on to full council.

The plan will be to vote on this next Monday on the 23rd.

We're moving pretty quick as we get crunched up against budget on this.

And so I want a chance to hear specifically from the Teamsters.

We shared this language with them this morning.

But it's possible that there's emails in my inbox right now on comments they have on that.

I'll make sure we're checking in with him tomorrow and if there's some other considerations that we have missed at this point, it's possible that we'll have additional amendments on Monday.

Again, there's nothing that I'm aware of at the moment.

I really appreciate Christine and Jessica and your team at OSC.

And if other things come up, I'll just be sure to share with you immediately to get your feedback because you are the city's experts on these policies.

And while I'm the policymaker, I really rely on your expertise and thoughtfulness there.

So thanks for your work on that.

I really also want to thank the mayor's leadership on this.

I know the mayor cares immensely about climate.

when I'm, the very first time I sat down with her a couple years ago, when she took the job, she said, I'm gonna paraphrase here, and I'll probably get in a little bit of trouble, but what I recall her saying was that her kids were okay with her taking this job as long as she worked on climate.

And I know as a parent myself how important that is, and I really appreciate her leadership on this, and obviously a lot more work to do beyond this legislation, but she's been outstanding on that, and I applaud her for that.

Great.

With that, let's move on to the next agenda item.

The short version?

The short version.

I'm just going to do a blanket short version request on all agenda items today.

All right.

We still get Yolanda.

Council Bill 119622, an ordinance relating to pedestrian and business interactions in the public place.

Yolanda, you are diversifying and beyond just sustainability.

It's great to see you here for this.

This is my former team.

We are going to have some presenters on the way forward here.

So a bit of a pivot to some new topics.

Thank you all for being here.

We'll start with a quick round of introductions.

And Yolanda, you can go first once again.

Yolanda Ho, Council of Central Staff.

Elise Nelson, Seattle Department of Transportation, Street Use.

And Elise Smith, Seattle Department of Transportation, Street Use.

And we have a presentation today.

We do, yeah.

Great.

And so why don't we just jump right in.

I don't know, Yolanda, do you have any opening comments on this or should we just jump into the presentation?

Oh, just let them take it.

All right.

Elise and Ellie, take it away.

All right, thank you for having us today.

We're here to brief you on legislation that will update rules for cafes in the public place, align pedestrian clearance standards across other permitted uses, and make technical corrections and minor amendments to sections of Title 15, which is the streets and sidewalks section of the Seattle Municipal Code.

Our proposal focuses predominantly on our cafe program, so that's what we'll talk about mostly today.

Next slide.

Seattle Department of Transportation recently updated our vision, mission, and core values, which are up on the screen.

In our public space management group, we see our role in helping work with communities and businesses that are interested in activating the public right-of-way and creating great public spaces that contribute to the livability core value.

We think our CAFE program is an important component in adding to the livability of our streets and sidewalks, and our permitting process helps us ensure that we balance those benefits with other core values, including safety and mobility.

So today, we will talk about the program goals specifically for CAFEs, our proposal, and some background information to set our context, specific information to dive into our proposal, a summary of outreach we've conducted, and our proposed next steps.

Seattle's comprehensive plan says that we should develop a vibrant city by creating streets and sidewalks that generate economic and social activity, adding to the city's overall health, prosperity, and happiness.

We think cafes do just that.

Cafes help bring vibrancy and activation to the sidewalks.

But we want to ensure that there is adequate space for people walking.

So our CAFE program goals set forth a plan to ensure safety and mobility for the traveling public while also allowing for increased vibrancy of our streets, sidewalks, and public spaces and helping support economic development in business districts by expanding seating opportunities for patrons.

I'll turn it over now to Ellie who will dive in to the details of our proposal.

So it might be useful to start with a little background on the program itself.

Cafes have been around for quite a while, but they were consolidated under street use in Seattle Department of Transportation back in 2008. And the program itself and the requirements around that have not been substantially updated since 2011. Currently, there are 390 permitted cafes across the city.

As you can see from the map, they are pretty well distributed across the city with concentrations mostly in the downtown urban core.

About a third of those are located in the downtown urban center, with actually a sizable number also in those areas outside of urban centers and villages.

So we see them in a variety of urban contexts across 30 plus different neighborhoods.

What this equals to is about roughly 14% of all food service businesses have cafe permits.

And Lily, have we seen, what has the trend been?

I mean, every year are we adding more and more, or mostly this one's every place that were there before?

It's, on average, over the last four years, we've seen on average around 27 issued, and it's pretty consistent year after year.

A lot of that is due to either new businesses coming in looking to, you know, expand opportunities in a new place or in those cases where permits turn over.

And I can get into that a little bit more.

But it's been consistently a popular program since its inception.

So since it hasn't been updated since 2011, we internally have identified a number of opportunities to better align the way that the program is operated to achieve our program goals.

And so I'm going to get into some of the specific proposals that are included in this legislation.

This first one is related to our first program goal, ensuring mobility and safety on our sidewalks.

And so our city has changed a lot since 2011, roughly around 20 percent population increase, huge amount of densification in our urban centers and urban villages.

And we want to make sure that our siting standards that are codified in Title 15 of the Seattle Municipal Code reflect the amount of space that we demand on our sidewalks for passing.

pedestrians and the traveling public more broadly.

In addition to that, we need to find ways to align what is currently codified with advances in our policies and programs.

In particular, the Pedestrian Master Plan, which in Strategy 1.5 specifically calls out the need to create and maintain a pedestrian clear zone on all sidewalks and specifically calling to Streets Illustrated as a informative document for this.

This is our kind of street design manual and design requirements.

Currently, are citing standards that are established in the Seattle Municipal Code Chapter 1516 do not align with Streets Illustrated.

So that is the first point that I want to bring up in terms of the specific proposal we're bringing forward is to update update two definitions that are in the municipal code, the first being the pedestrian clear zone.

Currently, this is the amount of space that's available to passing pedestrians abutting a cafe itself.

So you may look at the image on the right side of the screen.

The blue segment is meant to indicate what the pedestrian clear zone is.

So that's the amount of space available to pedestrians next to a cafe.

Currently, we require six feet minimum downtown urban center and five feet elsewhere.

We are proposing to align that more closely with Streets Illustrated, which essentially means that on downtown streets as defined by Streets Illustrated, the minimum would now be eight feet and reducing, sorry, not reducing, and then everywhere else it would be six feet.

So citywide, the minimum would be six with additional minimum requirements on downtown streets.

And so you used the language, I think you said, more closely to Streets Illustrated.

Is it exactly the same or is it slightly different?

We are pulling on the minimum standards on Streets Illustrated for the pedestrian clear zone.

Got it.

Sorry, I wasn't clear about that.

No, I just sometimes those words are used intentionally.

So that's what they call for and we're proposing to do that.

Yes.

The second piece of this is the pedestrian straight path, and this is a sighting mechanism that we use within street use to determine the location of the pedestrian clear zone.

So the idea of this is this establishes where the pedestrian clear zone can be located in relation to the cafe and the entirety of the sidewalk.

The intent of it is really to minimize zigzagging along a block face.

Currently, our requirement is you must maintain this four-foot minimum extending the entire block face.

We are proposing, after discussing with our transportation operations staff, to reduce this to three feet citywide to allow for a little more streamlining of this concept.

And the length would be 25 feet on either end of the cafe.

25 feet was determined because that is basically the dimension established in studies related to the amount of kind of space that a pedestrian needs to start taking evasive action on the sidewalk, to move around items on the sidewalk.

So this is established in cooperation with the transportation operations to be the appropriate dimension to move forward.

So what do we currently do for the extension?

It's the entire block face.

And we have run into issues in the past where there could be an obstruction or some element in the sidewalk 300 feet down on the end of the sidewalk that could impact the ability to site a cafe.

And so today, with those current rules, does that mean that it's just impossible inside a cafe?

Or is there like an exemption process?

Or is it like, no, sorry, you just can't do it on the street because of that?

It's impossible.

And the applicant would have to go through a director's review process, which will elevate it to the director of transportation to make the call.

But that is the only avenue to get around that, since it is a codified standard.

OK.

And do you know of the 390 or so permits, how many have gone through that process versus how many meet the current standard?

I would, if I could respond to that.

I think that generally we don't deviate from those standards because they are codified.

And so that's one of the reasons that we want to be more explicit about using Streets Illustrated so that we have the ability to go through the deviation process that's defined through that director's rule to have that ability for CAFE applicants.

So I would be surprised to see very often that we've, we've deviated via a director's process.

Okay.

Does the streets illustrated also call out a pedestrian straight path?

Right now, this concept is proposed to be in an SDOT director's role that we would be implementing upon this legislation.

And we would be calling that Streets Illustrated is the path forward considering deviations.

So this concept is something that would be proposed as part of our sidewalk cafe director's role.

Are we good?

Okay.

So ultimately what we see out of this is there will be a wider pedestrian clear zone established nearly across the board citywide.

So sorry, can we go back to the photo just because I want to, I can't exactly see where the street, the tree well is there, but it looks like the tree well is, let's assume for the sake of my question, the street rails within the pedestrian clear zone, the blue there.

So if this cafe were proposed to be another 10 feet further up in the photo, they would have to bring the outer wall of the cafe in to allow eight feet between the tree well and their fencing or whatever the end of it is.

And then that would also need to be consistent, at least proposed, so that would allow for some zigzagging perhaps of the fence I don't really see that, so that's probably the deal with it.

Maybe just set it at the inner side.

But there would still need to be a three-foot path that's straight that extends on either end beyond that.

Correct.

OK.

Yeah.

Just to really emphasize this, this does not reduce any walkable path to three feet anywhere.

This is really just meant to be the general direction or location of where the pedestrian clear zone is located when we make these siting decisions.

So to get at the second and third program goal associated with the CAFE program, we're looking to propose a few changes to the Seattle Municipal Code to We encourage more participation in the program and remove barriers or reduce barriers to participation, the first of which is related to locations of where cafes may be considered.

Currently, we do not allow cafes to be sited within 50 feet of any single-family and low-rise residential zones, so parcels designated under those categories.

While this is a relatively kind of small portion of the city that we're talking about, we have received in the past a handful or a couple handfuls of cafe applications for businesses looking to site a cafe, and we've had to outright deny them because of this requirement.

So we're looking to reconsider that, open up those commercial areas to cafe opportunities, understanding that, you know, there are tools in our tool belt related to mitigating concerns that there might be around the proximity to those kind of lower density residential zones.

For every cafe permit, we go through a public notice process in which we hear feedback from the community.

take that into account when issuing a permit.

And we have the power to also institute permit conditions around hours of operation or, you know, when a cafe can be in use.

And so how often do those conditions come up?

I imagine like, you know, living next to a single family home, if there's a business there, I can imagine they probably wouldn't want people out drinking on the sidewalk till 2 in the morning.

Is that a pretty rare thing or is everything unique and we see conditions applied based on comments quite a bit?

I can't speak to the frequency of how much we get those concerns.

I know we have heard it in the past, but I don't think it's a frequent thing.

I can get you more information about the actual number of incidents, but for the most part, these CAFE permits kind of operate with no issue.

Yeah, it was heard from Mr. McDonald who provided testimony today with some concerns, but like I think his opening comment was, everyone loves sidewalk cafes.

And I imagine there are moments when they're annoying, but I think there is a sense that there's a benefit to it, including to the owners of the property.

They know this can really expand their business capacity and in certain locations, I'm sure it's extremely profitable.

And as a customer, it's always, you know, on a nice day, not necessarily today, but finding a place with some outside seating is a great benefit too.

I might add one thing.

We do have the ability to go work with people after initial permit issuance during our renewal cycles.

So if we hear of complaints or concerns that are arising after a permit's been issued, we could work with the permit holder to come up with an alternative plan or potentially put an additional condition kind of after their initial permit issuance.

So if we missed it up front and it turns out to be something that needs to be addressed, we have ability to do that after the initial permit is issued.

And is the ability to have a sidewalk permit a right of a business owner, you know, assuming they meet the conditions, or is it always subject to that review period and the public comments, and if you hear strong concerns, can you outright deny the permit, saying we just don't think this is an appropriate use if you go through a process, or do you, is the most restrictive you could be to say we have to give them the permit, but we can put conditions on that are consistent with concerns we heard?

I would say that since it's in the right-of-way, the Seattle Department of Transportation, you know, it's not a right to have the use.

It's considered a privilege.

I mean, we try to work with people because we see a lot of benefits for cafes in the public place, but ultimately, you know, SDOT has the ability to decide if a permit's appropriate for the city's right-of-way in the public place.

Well, that's great.

I mean, you know, the desire is not to lord over them you know, how dare you do stuff, but it does give us the leverage to say, look, we want you to do this.

We think it's a public benefit.

You need to keep it operating like a public benefit so that you have the right to go on, which means take consideration of passerbys, neighboring businesses, residents, all those things.

Another aspect of this proposal is to formalize the streetery and fence-free pilot programs, both of which have been very popular in their pilot phase.

And we see the value in particular of these two alternatives in those cases where a business may operate with very constrained sidewalk conditions, very narrow sidewalks for instance.

A streetery, I'll just give some background on each of these.

A streetery, as the photo indicates, is essentially a cafe in the curb space, so where you may park your car.

It usually takes about one parking space.

And the benefit of these streetery spaces is bringing more activity to the street, as well as when they aren't in operation, we require them to be public spaces.

And fence-free pilot is something that we've been pursuing since 2016. We have, I believe, nearly 70 of our cafe permits that are fence-free.

This essentially means that we remove the requirement for the fencing around cafes on the sidewalk to allow for a little bit more of a free air dining experience.

This allows for a little bit less of a physical and aesthetic impact on the sidewalk.

You may see little blue markers on the sidewalk around, Yolanda actually designed this, around the perimeter of the cafe space.

I want a legacy like that.

Yeah, I want a legacy.

But yes, so although fence-free design you won't see in this ordinance, it will be formalized as part of the director's role as well.

Streeteries, we are giving the name Curb Space Cafes within the ordinance.

And so, sorry, go back and say again the requirement about making them publicly accessible, how

Streeteries, per our permit conditions, when they're not in operation by the business, must be made public.

Got it.

So when the business is open and running, the business has the exclusive right to use it.

But when the business is closed, they don't get to close it up and fence it off.

I assume a lot of them will bring their tables in, but the space is still available.

Are they required to keep the tables out there?

We encourage them to keep the tables out.

I don't think that's something we have required up to now.

We have, in the design process, since this is a little bit more involved to build an actual structure in the curb space, We do encourage built-in seating to allow for that kind of around-the-clock activation.

Yeah.

And then on the fence-free, I guess, Yolanda, you might be the expert here.

So part of it, I assume the markings are to try to not get folks to spill out too far into the right-of-way and invade the space that we discussed earlier.

What about rules around alcohol service and stuff outside?

Does Fence Free only work in a place that doesn't serve alcohol?

They're allowed to serve alcohol.

We require that only businesses that have a restaurant liquor license can operate a Fence Free cafe, so bars can't have a Fence Free cafe.

Got it.

This is just to kind of hopefully mitigate the issue of spillover.

And we also require that there is table service given in the Fence Free area and an attendant available at any time.

Got it.

OK.

Great.

And have those rules been in place for a while?

That's what we're living with today?

Yes.

So the fence-free pilot is currently, you know, we're accepting applications still, but it's been operation since 2016. Great.

And I imagine some businesses like the idea of fence-free and some probably like the fences too.

So do you see a mix of people, just different models?

Exactly.

Okay.

Okay, so other updates included in this ordinance include some minor amendments to clarify regulations and also harmonize definitions across Title 15. So an example of this would be, you know, vending and merchandise display and communication cabinets, other types of uses that are governed by Title 15 will have now these updated definitions and standards related to the pedestrian clear zone and pedestrian straight path.

That allows it to be harmonized across the Title 15. Next is a permit transfer option when a business changes ownership.

Currently how we operate our cafe permits is that a business owner is the permit holder.

And if they were to leave a business, they would need to close out the permit.

And at that point also remove fencing or any sort of structure or permitted use on the sidewalk.

as well as repair pavement, any pavement damage done.

And then the new business owner would be asked to reapply for a permit.

So we're establishing in the code an allowance to allow for permit transfer.

And in our director's role, we'll be providing a little bit more around the conditions under which that would be considered.

And finally, we are also looking to align Title 15 a little bit closer with Streets Illustrated, and specifically allowing deviations from those standards that have been formally connected to Streets Illustrated.

The deviation process, So we currently don't have a process to consider deviations from standards.

As I said, applicants can go through a director's review process.

We have found that it has been inefficient and doesn't always convene appropriate staff.

So the established deviation request process will help us to better align that process as well as confer with a transportation engineer when appropriate.

Over the last year, we've been convening various stakeholders, both internal and external, to discuss this proposal, as well as promote it more broadly to the general public through blog posts and disseminating fact sheets.

We were able to present to the Seattle Pedestrian Advisory Board, the Commission for People with Disabilities, as well as a couple of preservation boards in the area.

We completed the SEPA checklist process and were issued a determination of non-significance.

We did receive one appeal, and we went through that process, and the hearing examiner ruled that the determination of non-significance was upheld.

So just to give you kind of a little idea of what we heard from the SEPA public comment period, we received 51 comments in total, a majority of which were supportive of the proposal, in particular citing you know, the economic and community benefits of the program in general and interest in seeing the pilot design alternatives move forward.

About 24% were in the neutral category, I'd say, generally positive about the program itself, but had some concerns around maybe enforcement issues or, you know, how other items on the sidewalk interact with cafes as permanent.

And 14% did raise concerns about noise impacts, about how cafes do add to a already complex pedestrian environment, as well as a few incidences of concern around parking loss as a result of permitting streeteries.

So we're here today to provide a briefing to you and hoping to move forward with full council taking action next week.

We do have associated director's role updates that will be a part of this program refresh with the hope that in quarter one of next year we can revisit our promotional materials, our review materials, and push out a refresh program for the cafe season next year.

So one of the comments we heard was about being a complaint-based system as far as enforcement.

I'm curious your thoughts or response to that.

Yeah, well, we are complaint based, but we also do have inspectors in public space management that do proactive inspections on a cycle for these types of permits, and we've been looking at how do we improve that process to make sure we're Doing inspections in areas that really matter, focusing on, you know, urban centers and urban villages.

So I would say that there's probably, we recognize there's always room to continue to improve our strategy along enforcement.

But we don't just do complaint-based enforcement.

We also have inspectors going out and reviewing these spaces and working with cafe permittees to come into compliance.

So what a new cafe submits an application, I assume they have some designs that they put in and show you what it is and someone goes out and measures and confirms that the sidewalk's as wide as it says there is, and then they install the fencing, or not fencing, and put the blue lines down, or whatever they do, and then someone goes out and inspects.

I mean, I assume that the initial process is there's a sign off that it's compliant.

Is that true?

Yes.

And then, so ongoing enforcement, is it like the fence just is kind of creeping out an inch a day and eventually is further?

Or is it, what are the types of things that would need to be enforced once something's installed, if you will?

Well, sometimes we do see fence creep, especially if they don't bolt it.

I think other things that we've seen is that they may have like an A-frame sign that they decide to put in the space that we've designated for pedestrian clear zone, or other things that might encroach.

Sometimes they might have umbrellas that don't offer enough overhead vertical clearance, so that's something else that we We see more often, I don't know, Ellie.

So sorry, the umbrella, is that if the umbrella extends beyond the fence, it has to be at least, what, seven or eight feet up or something like that?

Eight feet up, yeah.

Eight feet up, yeah, okay.

Yeah, we also just checked to make sure that site conditions have remained the same.

There wasn't a parking sign that was put in the place where we expect that to be available for pedestrian movement.

I do think that I appreciate the public comment and, you know, in the past cities when we've done race and social justice toolkits, you know, we find with complaint-based systems often is certain communities have more resources to file complaints than others.

You know, we want to be equitable in enforcement, and so we really, and since we're talking about 400, I mean, I know that's a lot of work for one person to do, but it seems reasonable to at least have eyes on spaces periodically.

Things like A-frames are a little tough.

I mean, one, I'm really interested in ensuring how we regulate those, but because they can come and go as necessary, and someone swings by and says, hey, you can't put it there.

It's like, great, I'll put it away, and then they're gone, they put it back out.

You know, figuring out how we, can be strategic, you know, it's one thing when a fence keeps getting bumped and moves out a little bit, and you say, hey, look, here's the line, you just make sure you reset that, and folks are trying to comply, and if folks are actually trying to cheat, recognize that, hey, you know, if we catch you doing this again, we're gonna shut this thing down, because it's just not working for us.

So I am interested in some programmatic efforts to ensure that that's being done equitably, both in neighborhoods, you know, the critical piece of designing our infrastructure for our most vulnerable users.

And so folks with disabilities that are trying to navigate the space may often be the folks that have the least ability to file complaints.

And so we want to It shouldn't be upon them to not just navigate our streetscape, but also be doing enforcement work.

We wanna ensure that that's happening.

So if there are additional resources needed to do that effectively, we'd wanna know about that too, because we definitely wanna work with you on that.

Okay, thank you.

Kelly, you have anything else on this?

I've chatted a lot so far today.

All right.

I'm just looking for people to keep me company.

I'll pitch in.

Thanks, Yolanda.

Because I already asked Ellie this question, but in terms of that 50-foot setback that you're proposing to remove from the single-family low-rise residential, where would the impact be?

Were you able to determine

So I tried to display this on a map and I was finding it to not be the most effective tool for that, given we're talking about 50 feet, especially at a citywide scale, it's hard to depict.

But I think, you know, thinking a little bit more generally where we've seen the interest from those business owners that we have then had to reject due to their proximity to those areas.

We're really talking about commercial nodes.

maybe on the edge of an urban village, or within an urban village, but on the edge of where it's really transitioning into that residential area.

We've seen interest from West Seattle, from Delridge, from Wallingford, Central District.

These are areas where we've gotten interest in cafes that we've had to reject because of that.

It's an interesting mix.

I think for so many communities, you know, a coffee shop restaurant that has outdoor seating can be like a huge asset and it's like the gathering space and the glue and it brings everyone together.

And it's best when you have a business owner that is actually you know, accountable to the community and part of the community and sees himself as that and really stewarding that.

And I imagine that's the vast majority of things we see.

And so it's a shame to miss out on that opportunity for some communities.

And then occasionally we have, you know, actors that aren't quite as committed to understanding the needs of the community.

And it's hard, obviously, you know, you may have a bunch of community members and most of them are really excited and one or two don't.

Navigating that, I think, is going to be pretty important.

And I'm glad to hear that you all, it seems like you have the tools to do that.

And I hope you have the capacity to manage that.

So it's not something that I hear a lot of complaints about.

You know, in obviously certain areas with lots of nightlife, we'll hear noise complaints.

But it's less about, I think, sidewalk cafes and more just about spillover effect and people late at night after they've been drinking a lot being a problem.

So that's a separate issue than this.

I'm excited to see how that goes.

I can imagine places where this would be very appropriate.

I can also imagine some places where there may be some tension and it may not be.

And so, but I'm willing to grant that for now and ask that, you know, have an ongoing conversation to see where it's working and where it's not and in places where you've decided it wasn't appropriate to deny how you made those decisions too.

Great.

Anything else?

Thank you both for participating.

Thank you all for your presentation and work on this.

supportive of moving this legislation forward.

So I'm going to go ahead and move and second Council Bill 119622 and I'll vote yes on that.

Oh wait, there's an amendment.

Oh yes, slow down.

Just a minor, slow it down.

Yolanda, tell me a little bit about the amendment.

It's a very minor technical amendment, just caught a erroneous reference to private property that I don't believe was supposed to be included.

And there was just a duplicative definition of cafes on the sidewalk that we just for the purposes of code drafting, having definitions in one place is better than having them in two places in case they need to be updated in future amendments.

That is a big part of your job.

I will go ahead and move amendment number one, and I will second that amendment and then vote yes on that.

So now the legislation is amended.

You're going to roll back the clock a little bit, and I will now vote on the amended council bill 119622. I will second it and vote yes on it.

So thanks for your work.

It's a beautiful council on Monday.

Thanks.

All right.

Move along.

Bye, Yolanda.

We'll miss you.

Short version of the next.

Thanks.

Council Bill 119652, an ordinance relating to the citations and penalties in the street and sidewalk use code.

Hello.

Hi.

Welcome.

Thank you.

As you get settled, why don't we start with a quick round of introductions?

I'm Liz Sheldon, the Street Use Division Director.

Hi, I'm Alma Weber.

I work in Public Space Management and Street Use.

Good to see you both.

So you guys have a presentation today and a piece of legislation before us.

We do.

So why don't you jump in with the presentation walk me and thousands of viewers at home that are tracking this piece of legislation and the handful of folks in the audience.

Thank you.

So we have today a proposal to update the street use citation penalty fees in the Seattle Maintenance Book Code Title 15. I want to tie this in a little bit to SDOT's mission, vision, and core values, particularly our focus has been on safety and mobility when we're updating our citation penalties.

But it's a little bit more complicated than a straight fee hike because we wanted to put it through a little bit of an equity lens and make sure that we weren't disproportionately impacting small minority-owned businesses.

So a little bit, we'll talk a little bit about our overall enforcement process, looking at our goals for the proposal, proposed changes, have a few pictures of case studies, what it would look like, a little bit of our outreach summary, and then talk about next steps.

So really we wanted to look at our citation penalty fees as part of our existing progressive enforcement process.

We have a bunch of tools in Title 15 that we can use for enforcement.

But I found that citations are kind of the easiest tool of enforcement for us.

The next step up from what a warning or just communication with someone who's doing something inappropriate in the right of way.

And some other tools that we have are notices of violation, which tend to be litigated in their longer processes.

Emergency orders and stop work orders are fairly similar, but they have a really high impact to someone, particularly if we're telling them to stop work in the right of way.

So I wanted to look at citations as a way to kind of span the gap a little bit more between a warning and a stop work order.

And then we have the ability for abatement if something is left in the right of way or we need to remove or work on things.

And we can recuperate costs associated with that.

But today, we're really just focusing on the citation penalty fee amounts.

The citation section was created in 2002. Since then, it hasn't been holistically updated.

There's been a few minor updates as new code sections have come into place and a couple of little tweaks, but we haven't really looked at updating it holistically since 2002, so it's 17 years old.

Again, want to talk a little bit about the progressive enforcement process.

So we try to really make sure that we are clear and consistent with our enforcement process and start with, as a first violation, just providing clear verbal direction and a warning or an inspection report, and then follow up later.

Usually within 24 hours, but depending on the circumstance, it might be a little bit earlier or later.

And then the second, third, and fourth violations are what we're really focusing on here is where we'll issue a citation for someone that's doing work without a permit or outside the terms and conditions of their permit.

And then looking at the fifth and sixth violation, again, are the stop work orders and or a notice of violation.

And are these, is it all construction projects, or what are the?

It is anything that's regulated by Title 15. So it's pretty much any non-vehicular use of the right-of-way.

So it could be the sidewalk cafes that we were talking about, street vending, large development projects that are staging in the right-of-way.

It's all of it.

Okay.

And then, Mike, how often do you get to a fourth violation?

Fourth, last year we issued about 370 or so citations.

Right now, though, the fees are so low that we don't find a lot of compliance with the citations.

So inspectors tend to, rather than issue a citation, sit on site and make sure something is getting done.

Actually, the cost of inspection time is more than the citation amount right now.

The citation amounts right now are lower than our permit fees.

So there's no incentive to come in and get a permit or to come into compliance right now.

And so I don't know.

I envision that a lot of this is construction projects.

I assume the sidewalk cafes.

I don't hear a ton about that.

But I do hear a lot about, hey, is this an appropriate place and what's going on?

And so I imagine these are multimillion dollar projects often with lots of complexity.

You know, it could be in some cases where someone's trying to take advantage of the rules and sneak one by.

It could be that they're just busy and distracted and aren't really paying attention.

But regardless of what those is, it's critically important that when folks, when we're giving them the right to use our public right-of-way, that they're being held accountable.

And so I guess it sounds like the tools in place right now, it sounds like, the inspectors use their best judgment to figure out how to say, I'm not leaving until this gets fixed.

So, which I appreciate the commitment there, but it's probably, it sounds like we need some better tools.

Yes, or the fees need to be set to a level that will incentivize compliance rather than taking a lot of time.

Okay, so here are the goals for our proposal.

We, as Liz had mentioned, we really want to set our citation penalty fees to be at a level to incentivize to get a permit.

So that is going to happen with this alignment.

Also, we wanted to find a way of providing escalation before we jump to the stop work order path, which rarely happens.

with the fees being as low as they were, that was sometimes the only way to really get compliance.

And the last two points on our proposal for the goals, really the idea of like aligning with the impact and then also minimizing disproportionate impacts.

If you think about, you know, as you were just talking about the wide variety of things that street use manages in the right of way, a utility project doesn't have the same impact on the, you know, safety and mobility of the moving public as maybe like a food vendor does.

So that's sort of what we are hoping to accomplish with this proposal.

So on the next slide, we have what the actual proposed changes are.

So the, you know, last year, in that first category of the public space management vending and maintenance permits, we saw 30 citations get issued.

The...

Can I say that again?

In the top category?

Yeah, the top category, we saw about 30 citations get issued in that category.

And the majority of them were actually for doing that type of permit without a permit.

So it would be like, for example, vending in the right-of-way without a vending permit.

So overall, those fees will be getting reduced.

And then the utility permits throughout the whole city of Seattle, regardless if you're in a single-family zone or in any other zone, the fees will be going up across the board starting at $1,000, $2,000, and then $4,000.

Again, all of this is after we have first done our initial contact of the education first kind of approach of explaining how to come into compliance.

This would be the second time, basically, that you're caught.

So then the third category, construction permits, we are dividing those between the single family zones and all other zones, again, to kind of align with the impact of what's happening in the right of way if there is a noncompliance issue.

So the reduction that we are referencing with the construction permits really kind of comes in Our code used to have a higher citation penalty fee if you were caught doing work in the right-of-way without a permit.

That was $500.

We're not going to have that distinction anymore.

So now, with respect to construction in single-family zones, it's going to always be $250 as the first violation amount.

But if you're outside of a single-family zone, the first violation will be $1,000.

And so you mentioned that the first category, about 30 citations were issued last year.

What are in these other two categories?

Combined for utility and construction permits, it was 373. Okay.

And so utility, does City Light get permits and SPU gets permits?

Both City Light and SPU get permits.

Okay.

And then also Puget Sound Energy or Telephone Company or...

So is it anytime they're putting like a cone down on the street and kind of blocking a manhole or is it more...

It is.

We issue permits to the major utility agencies that are, we call them annual vehicle permits, where they don't necessarily have to get a permit every time they are going out to, you know, change a light bulb in a light pole.

But they do need to comply with all of the rules and regulations and work with both SPU and City Light and the crews to make sure they understand what traffic control looks like.

and understand kind of the impacts to the traveling public.

And so then they have a permit that's attached to all of their vehicles that if we need to follow up with enforcement, we can.

Through that permit number, we can track.

Yeah.

OK.

Great.

So other proposed changes that will be happening, just minor things.

We have in the code right now that, you know, the timeframe for like a repeat violation is five years.

We don't have a great way of tracking that, so it made more sense for us to go back to just, we've changed that now to one year is the repeat violation timeframe.

And then we're also making consistent our abatement procedures for all uses.

And then we also don't have a way right now of adjusting penalty fees annually.

And so similarly to how we adjust our street use permit fees annually based on the inflation rate, we're going to be proposing to do the same thing with these penalty fee amounts.

So to put it in action, we have two case studies.

So one is this utility work in the right-of-way in a non-residential zone without a permit, which, you know, utility work will be subject to the same level of citations, whether it's in a non-residential zone or in a residential zone.

So initially, you know, if you notice, there's no change in the first step.

It's both a warning each time, but your citation fees have gone up for the proposed amounts.

And then in our next case study, that's vending without a permit.

So really here you can see how this can change.

It's a decrease across the board.

So obviously the same first step is just the warning, but then the subsequent citations are less money, less of an impact for the individual single business owner.

So we did do a lot of outreach around this topic.

We sent an email out between the street use email contact list and the SDCI email contact list.

It went out to over 35,000 people.

We got back just two comments.

that were slightly off topic.

And so we felt pretty strongly that people really understood the goal of this legislation is, you know, really only impacts people who have been provided with education and a warning.

You know, it's only if you're doing something wrong, basically.

So I think that that came across and everybody seems to understand that and also seems to get, you know, the goal with also aligning the impact with where you're doing your work in the right of way.

So we did do a few in-person briefings where, again, you know, we didn't have any negative, comments at all.

It was maybe even, you know, the slight positive.

So we got to talk to the Small Business Advisory Council, Master Builder Association, and the National Association of Minority Contractors.

Great.

So I appreciate that thorough outreach of the folks that are being regulated.

What about the folks that are impacted by the, that's where I hear a lot of concerns, especially in construction projects, where it's like, now I'm trying to cross the street, or you got bikes and peds in the same area, or you know, there's no safe pedestrian zone, people are walking anyway just in the middle of the street, because that's what they feel like, so.

Speak to the Pedestrian Advisory Board or any of those about this?

We did not for this update, but the Small Business Advisory Council kind of had both sides of it, because they're both being impacted by construction use in the right-of-way, and through like Sidewalk Cafe and other kind of street activation stuff, they could be impacted to the citation.

So that was really where we got a lot of the comments, kind of both ways.

I'm happy to move this forward today.

It would be great if the Pedestrian Advisory Board is interested to present to them, just to get their feedback on this.

I know we've significantly expanded the number of inspectors in this work because the construction environment in Seattle is just so much crazier than it had been a decade ago.

And we've had a number of conversations about what that looks like.

Just see, offer it up and they may have said, no, we've got plenty of things on our agenda.

It's not a priority for us.

We understand what you're doing, but if they're open to it, then that'd be great.

I'd be happy to.

Great.

Thanks.

So next steps, we're looking at moving forward.

One of the reasons why we're looking at this in advance of the budget discussions is mainly to align with our implementation of Accela and the permitting system.

It didn't quite align with the budget process, so we want to not have to do duplicate work when we're doing some of the design work, the final design work for that, and implementing our code enforcement.

portion of that.

So look at moving forward with that and then hopefully, probably not Q4, maybe Q1 of 2021, really evaluate kind of based on what we've seen from the citation process and evaluate the impact of this versus compliance and then come back and see if it's working or not.

The goal being that we have fewer repeat offenders because people take it seriously, and if $4,000 is still de minimis for some of these projects and they really don't care, then they have to reevaluate what other tools we need.

Kelly, do you have any questions or comments?

I just really second the reaching out to the Pedestrian Advisory Board.

I think that's definitely where you feel like a lot of people are concerned about blocked sidewalks and just that lived experience of what these impacts mean.

But I think a lot of the reforms make a lot of sense.

Thanks.

Great.

So I'm going to go ahead and move and second Council Bill 119652. No amendments that you're aware of?

Not that I'm aware of, no.

You do make excellent.

So although yes on that council bill, that will go to the full council on Monday.

Thanks for your work for them.

Great agenda item number nine.

Read the full title on this one.

I think I can handle that intelligent transportation systems or ITS briefing.

And Sam, we're going to see you at this committee table twice today.

It's got to be an exciting day for both of you.

Oh, yes.

Good to see you.

You don't have an autonomous vehicle today, so somebody has to drive.

When you're ready, why don't we start?

Sam, if you might start with introductions.

Sure.

Sam Zimbabwe, director at SDOT.

I am Emery, Transportation Operations Division Interim Director.

Jason Cambridge, IT Manager for SDOT.

Welcome, everybody.

Let's see, we're not talking about closed-circuit television anymore.

We're talking about the ITS.

So, I'm just going to let you all start with your presentation.

So, Sam, you can pick it up.

We will jump right in.

I'm going to start it off and then turn it over to Aadhyam and Jason to talk a little bit more about the details.

But we're very happy that we have this opportunity to come today and talk about where we are with thinking about how multimodal operations fit in with our intelligent transportation systems.

So, you can go forward.

You're driving.

So, you know, we always couch this in our mission, vision, and values.

And we see intelligent transportation systems as helping to meet, helping us to meet our mission and vision of delivering transportation services in an equitable, safe, sustainable way.

And we can, you can go on to the next one.

Just, I'll cover the background and then Audie and Jason will talk a little bit about the UW MiCMA project and some of how we've looked to change our operations over the past year or so looking at multimodal needs and how we've balanced all of the various needs that we face.

And then a little bit about incident management and then move on from there.

So intelligent transportation systems is a way for us to manage the right-of-way, manage what is a static roadway, a fixed set of things like curbs and signals into something that is dynamic and responds to varying demands over time of day, various user groups that help us balance out all the multimodal needs.

And it helps us get the most out of what we have in terms of transportation right-of-way in our current environment.

Okay, so just there's a lot that goes into this.

And, you know, we've got 1,100 signals, we've got, and a lot of things that we balance in doing all of that.

So how we coordinate the operations of those signals, how we think about the accessibility of pedestrian signals, and then how we develop various tools for managing traffic safely in all sorts of contexts, schools.

all the things that we do as an agency.

So Sam, on this one, or anyone who wants to answer, the concern that I hear a ton, and you've been gracious to join me on a walk, and I'm sure you hear in this job and probably previous jobs, is the aspect of ITS where using technology to prioritize different users in the right away and try to, you know, smartly do that.

My understanding is ITS is much bigger than that aspect of it.

I mean, I don't know, are all stoplights part of intelligent transportation system or is it only the ones that are hooked up?

I mean, is essentially ITS kind of everything you do or what?

Well, I think there's various scales of that.

So if you think about the, and we actually have a slide of what traffic signals used to be, I think maybe even the next slide, right?

Or one more, that one.

So in some ways, you know, the guy on the top left is dealing with electromagnetic traffic signals the way they used to be, and there's like a dial that operates it, and it's basically a fixed asset.

It doesn't really, you have to have a guy go and open the cabinet, change it, and now we've basically got computers running our traffic signals that can be remotely programmed, that can be remotely monitored.

I think what you are talking about is a lot of what people experience from our traffic signal system is about the rules of engagement or the rules that we set from an operations perspective of how we operate the infrastructure.

So intelligent transportation systems don't in and of themselves make decisions about how we operate them.

And this is sort of one scale of ITS.

And then there is the software and the other tools that we use in terms of how we do detection of various users that are all part of the universe of what we call intelligent transportation systems.

So I don't think we have any more dial-based traffic signals left in the city, but not every cabinet looks like that inside of it.

So just, you know, going back, I think we also, there's the infrastructure, there's also the operational aspects of it.

And so if you go to the next one, I know I'm jumping around, but our traffic incident management, our dynamic message signs, the ability to remotely monitor and adjust our signal system based on the needs and then provide that information out to the traveling public no matter how they're getting around.

Great.

So, ITS, so to kind of support some of the answers, anything that has current flowing or electronic that can kind of manage the right of way or give you the right of way will be part of the ITS thing, as he recommended.

So the challenges.

The industry has been and still is very car-centric.

And SDOT finds it very challenging in kind of rolling out our vision of multimodal operation because of the lack of technology that supports our pedestrian and bicycle to be integrated in our data demand-based operation that we're kind of gearing towards.

But as that continues to engage with other cities that are testing these technologies and also with industry leaders, vendors, and companies that are in charge of coming up with the technologies to push them more into a multi-modal type of scale, because urban metropolitan cities can't support car-centric anymore.

We need to be embracing those things.

So we're pushing the envelope, working with industries to come up with suitable technologies that would support our pedestrians and cyclists.

travelers or users.

So for now, you know, we are transit, from transit perspective, we've been supporting priority at a localized intersection perspective.

Pedestrians, it's crossing safely, you know, with the crossing, but there's still a gap and a need for us to kind of come up with technologies that can actually integrate pedestrians and cyclists into our algorithm.

Freight, again, there are still space in there for us also to improve some freight-related operation.

So we applied in 2018. federal grant that we received that had a lot of R&D perspective, which is a true telling story that the lack of technology to support multimodal isn't there nationwide, and USDOT recognizes that.

So for the first time that I've been in this industry for 26 years, to where there's actual federal grant that's going towards R&D in terms of ITS technology to support or to be able to kind of like, you know, support other cities and what it would look like.

So the UW-McMahon, which is a 12 million grant improvement, the primary focus is updating the aging infrastructure in the university district, but we have opportunity to do research on passive detection for pedestrians, what it means for emergency responders to navigate congestion corridors when they're responding and how we can integrate them into and to the operational criteria or hierarchy are the things that this project will be able to kind of give us at the end of 2020.

And so when you're talking about upgrading infrastructure, are we talking about new signals and new wiring and just so that they can communicate?

I imagine you So all that connection.

Yeah, new controller cabinets, fiber to bring it back to the central, type of detection that we need to kind of gather the data to make it data responsive, are the type of infrastructure that we're talking about, which we consider the core foundational ITS structure for a system.

So what are we testing in UW-McMahon?

There are a lot of exciting things that we're introducing.

Again, passive pedestrian technology that would detect pedestrians' presence at a signalized intersection, which will bring up the walk without pedestrians having to push the button.

It also has the capability of counting pedestrians, which we can kind of integrate the data into the logic of the adaptive type of operation, which would help us scale prioritization within the operational standards or the concept of operation that we will develop.

This type of data can be very useful in a dense, where we anticipate pedestrian surge.

For instance, a transit link like the stadium, UW Stadium, and the link, Husky Stadium, station and people getting out of there and kind of connecting to either transit or getting into UW, that is a surge that we feel is a good prototype that can kind of alter the operational prioritization to service the pedestrians.

So, again, the ability to integrate it into what we call data-related operation.

For bicycles, we have We've been operating for passive detection for bikes, but we would like to kind of working with others to kind of promote what we call two opt-in app.

bike app operation platform that could help integrate.

This is connecting bikes with the actual traffic signal.

So the app will act as a presence and also a response back to the cyclist to say, yes, you're detected by the signal and you will get your green time.

But that unique identifier also would allow us to help establish prioritization, meaning like if we need to kind of have a queue jump for bikes because we want to reduce conflict, or we want to advance or extend the green time for bikes because we think they need it, or even clearance of the signals, the red and yellow, to extend for bikes because their speed will be a lot lower to traverse the intersection.

Those are the kind of capability that it would give us.

The differences between the two platforms is one is system wide and the other one is more on intersection based, so you have to populate infrastructure, whereas the second one could be integrated from a system base.

The other piece that we're testing is what we call a green wave and partnering with SFD, taking advantage of their GPS or automated vehicle locator and the computer aided dispatch to be able to kind of respond or clear the path for emergency responders as they're approaching where they need to respond.

Particularly, Montlake is a responders route for, where it connects major hospitals from the university district and then First Hill.

So, they feel like this is, and the congestion index or the congestion rate in Montlake is extensive.

Therefore, clearing the path for them ahead of time will be a lot more helpful in navigating the response team.

So, that will be a good outcome.

So a couple follow-up questions on some of these.

Under the pedestrian movement, are any of these deployed yet?

Are these coming in the next few months or a couple years away?

So 2020 is all this testing will be happening.

And at the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, we'll have our evaluation and results to share here and also with USGOT.

And so on the bike app, is it the kind of thing As a bicyclist, I would just open my app when I leave and put it in my pocket?

Or is it like every time I get to an intersection, I'm like, hey, I'm here.

No, you put it in your pocket.

And we're also looking at, instead of you pulling out your phone at the intersection, that we'll have indicators that would tell you that, yes, that signal is responding to you as well.

So you don't have to pull out your phone to receive the acknowledgment.

The confirmation.

So there'll be like some.

little sign or display or something that says, like, see, there's six bikes waiting, so.

We have one of those deployed.

I actually just learned about it recently.

So in Ballard, there's one on 8th Avenue where there's a signal that tells you whether you've been detected as a bike without having to.

And is it the app-based one?

No, it's an inductive loop, which has some problems for some people riding bikes.

in terms of making sure you're in the right place and being detected.

I love that passive detection.

I'm not personally a huge fan of the phone-based app system.

I think there's still, while many people have smartphones, there's still an equity issue there.

And I also want to flag that, like, putting the onus on cycling or cyclists and people biking to download an app to get signal priority feels like you're really, you're putting that issue on them to take action rather than being thoughtful of the needs of the people who are currently biking.

The passive detection on 8th is, you know, there might be some issues to work out, but that is actually a really good solution and I've used it when biking with my child and they found it great.

So, I think there's more solutions that can be determined there.

I think what can happen with the app-based detection is that it can sense you from farther away from the intersection and can end up adjusting signal timing to hold a green or, as Adi was saying, it can be built into the logic of not necessarily needing to get to the intersection to be detected, but be a little bit more dynamic.

We also understand the concerns.

But those are the kind of things that we want to flash out as part of the research and development.

So what have we been doing currently for those modes and where we're going?

So for transit, for the last 25 years, we have been prioritizing.

We have transit signal priority, excuse me. such as queue jumps or extending the green or transit-only phases.

This particular thing is occurring at a localized intersection, not necessarily system-wide.

But where we'd like to take it is we're partnering with KC Metro currently to be able to ingest their real-time data from their buses, which would help us in developing more of a network-based prioritization instead of localized.

Not to say localized prioritization is going away, but just adding a layer of a network-based prioritization.

If we're having to decide bus A, bus B, who gets the prioritization, we can use passenger load capacity or whether it's a BRT bus or so forth to kind of help the prioritization among the transit services.

So pedestrians, and I'm just going to talk about Mercer because that was a good example for us.

Mercer was the first corridor in which we rolled out our adaptive corridor.

And SDOT and our users have, hand in hand, have learned a lot.

And this demonstrates the constraint in terms of technology that we have.

And so the first attempt of rolling it out yielded, you know, reliable performance for vehicles and buses and freight.

However, it was a detriment.

The experience for pedestrians wasn't favorable.

So we worked.

you know, hand in hand with our public interest people and also with the vendor.

We didn't have the software in order to be able to kind of extend the walk or what we call have the walk rest and walk.

So we worked with the vendor to configure the software and late summer of this year.

We implemented what we call rest on walk and not having to push the button to cross the side streets while still maintaining the reliability of all users overall.

So it was a good example and good lessons learned for us and also helps us to determine how we roll out our next adaptive system.

projects, but the learning and experiencing and kind of learning more about it doesn't stop for us.

It's a continuous effort.

But it was a good example of what we've learned from rolling out something and the amendments or the improvements that we've taken to balance the modes.

And so I have noticed that the regular pattern I get used to, my commute on bike is on Dexter across Mercer, and so I pass that twice a day.

And so over the years, you get fairly used to a pattern.

And I noticed that about a month or so ago that the pattern shifted.

And so my ability to anticipate when it was my turn.

So clearly something was happening, either my mind or something on the ground.

But it sounds like it wasn't my mind, it was on the ground.

Something is always happening.

You know what happened?

The north portal, this whole shift of traffic that's entering the system where you're traveling, where you used to travel, that didn't happen before too, which contributes to the change of the pattern that we have.

And that's a tricky one, because I'm curious to hear how you prioritize stuff.

And we've had some conversations about this.

There's a bit of what we measure and what we can't measure has an impact on things.

It also feels like there's a bit of, even on their policies, just an auto, pro-auto bias towards this stuff.

And so I notice a block south of Mercer where the off-ramp for folks going northbound on Aurora get off to come to South Lake Union or move around.

Obviously, when the off-ramp wasn't existing, you just had a few construction vehicles coming and going through there, but it was pretty limited.

And now it's significant, and it feels like the more cars that show up there, the longer the signal they get.

On one hand, that's logical, but it's saying, hey, you know, if you just keep bringing more cars to this route, we'll just give you more priority, as opposed to saying, no, we don't want any more cars there.

You're going to have to wait.

And we actually want to create a disincentive to be driving on this corridor and, you know, encourage people to go somewhere else.

And so I don't know how you balance those two things, but it does feel like there's obviously a lot more traffic in there because of that on-ramp off, a lot of growth in South Lake Union.

I just, I'm curious how we set up algorithms.

And I imagine it gets somewhat complicated because we're like, well, we don't want cars to back up so far onto the freeway.

And it's like, well, do we, is there equivalent of like how many bikes are backed up or how many pedestrians are biked up?

And that's, that's never a concern.

I mean, I know, I know you individually are concerned about that, but it just, it feels like it doesn't get the same weight when it's being prioritized.

I don't know.

I mean, I think that's actually a place where ITS can help us balance out those things.

You know, if we were taking a static approach, you know, something like SR 99 has very peak demands, you know, during rush hour we're serving.

more people in the tunnel than we are at off-peak times, say.

And if we, in that old picture of the dials, there's really not a lot of flexibility in serving those needs, and so you try to make your best guess that you can of what needs there are.

And I think if, as we get better, and as Adiem said, the industry is rapidly trying to catch up, but as we get better at detecting everybody, we end up, we can refine some of those things, and so I think the initial deployments of ITS have been very auto-focused, and, but there's still ways that we already write our rules that can help balance out those things and make sure we're serving all the traffic, all the people that are using that intersection.

What about maybe if I frame a question slightly differently?

If I wanted to see a 20% reduction in vehicle travel in South Lake Union, could you deploy the ITS system in a way to deliver on that objective?

I think it's a difficult question because it's some of how people make decisions is going to be based on the delay that they face if they're driving someplace.

Some of how they make those decisions is the land use pattern that is serving and the larger regional land use pattern.

So we could dial up the delay with the ITS system that might or might not lead to mode shift.

It might only lead to frustration.

I mean, in that area, other than where the streetcar is, there's not a lot of bus priority.

And so the general congestion means that there's a way to prioritize it, because we do have some robust transit to there now.

And I mean, the number of vehicles down there is just frankly horrendous.

And that was, I would say, less about land use and more about permitting parking garages that we messed up on, but I still think we need to, you know, if we heard in public comment, I don't know if you heard, but I forget the data point, but you know, Mercer was predicted to carry X number of vehicles in the new design, and we've blown through that.

It's way more vehicles than was ever anticipated there, and how do we reduce that?

I mean, clearly just making people frustrated is not a good thing, but if at the same time we're doing that, it's like, wow, I can cross the street way more frequently, and walking is much more easy, and if I'm cycling, I don't have to wait as long, and if I'm riding the bus, I get through faster.

Those things do come out of the balance, and it would be interesting to see if, you know, how we might deploy this dynamic system to deliver on those objectives.

And, you know, the objective is not increased driver frustration.

The objective is we need to reduce climate emissions.

We need to reduce congestion.

So I'm interested in, creative thinking around using that system, and I think we might see more people in our, more people, at least in my circles, more excited about ITS if it felt like it was trying to help that, whereas it feels like now it's often hurting those objectives.

I think it's a combination of multiple things.

It's a recipe that we're looking at.

So as we re-appropriate or reallocate a right-of-way for multi-use, so the more bike lanes we add, the more bus lanes we add, that's where the ITS comes in and stabilizes things and help prioritize those modes that you want to prioritize.

We continue to shift those things.

There's an environmental impact, too, as you're increasing congestion and idling cars and the greenhouse emission, what you're emitting.

So we continue to strive for balance operation for all.

We have the capability of prioritizing certain modes, but it's not just the ITS package that's going to help you support this thing.

It's multiple stuff.

The more reliable your transit services are, the more people are going to shift to that.

And operation is one piece of it that makes it more reliable.

But there are other programs that we need to kind of pair it with.

The bikes, we need to build the facilities to make sure that we make people feel comfortable to go biking.

So the mode shift operation is the tool in which it helps you to prioritize, allocate right-of-way in a safe manner, and also help reduce conflicts and so forth.

So, it's a combination of everything.

I appreciate, Adi, the recipe analogy and the number of things that go into the mix.

And I guess I'm intrigued by the idea of, you know, If we said as a policy, we'd like to see 10% fewer auto trips to South Lake Union in a year and ask the experts, what are the ingredients in the recipe that we need to do to do that?

And like you said, there's probably a mix of a lot of things that we need to do that.

And those are the types of goals we need to.

I think figure out how we focus on and use all these various tools to get down and then recognize like, we're still missing a couple tools, what are they?

And, you know, look at those levers too.

Yeah.

All right, so going back to like where we're going, I think I talked about a lot of the pilot projects that we're bringing out for pedestrians.

I think we're very excited to pilot the passive detection.

I think that's going to be a key changer for how we operate.

We...

That's going to be, sorry, early 2020 or?

2020 will begin.

The report will be available last quarter.

When will people get it?

I mean, I guess...

It would be hard to experience.

I'm being detected right now.

But when will those things be deployed on the street?

Is it?

Quarter to 2. Okay.

And is it just a handful of intersections?

Yeah, it's a handful.

Montlake and Pacific, where we have the link, would be one of them, just in case you want to...

Exciting, put it on my calendar for nine months from now.

All right.

We continue to develop policies.

I think the leading pedestrian interval policy that we just implemented in We continue to implement those as we optimize in the corridors.

Rainier is one of them that we've kind of integrated LPI.

And we continue to touch base with other cities as well that are like testing a lot of the technology and keeping the communication flowing.

to learn more from them or partner.

I have not been on the Rainier Corridor in a while, so is the leading pedestrian indicators in place along the whole corridor now?

Where we implemented the bus lanes, so it's more on the southern end, so Henderson to, do you remember the northern end?

So Rainier Beach on up to like Columbia City kind of?

A little bit north of Columbia City.

I can't remember the side street, but yeah, just north of Columbia City.

And cyclists, we have been experimenting passive detection in place, you know, we've used video loop and the new technology.

video that we tested in Ballard where it gives you unique identifier, bike to be recognized as a bike, which is what we need to kind of move forward with exclusively when we have bike facilities, two-way facilities, the technologies that we've been leveraging, the video loop detectors work to identify bikes as a bike because they are the only users in that facility.

However, in a mixed use, facility, we have a hard time detecting bikes as bikes when we're using this technology.

Hence why we're going to the app base.

I think the app base, I do hear your concerns, but it also gives us travel time, which we've never been able to get, origin destination, where are bikes moving and where can we, we can use those data to help build our new facility where we need to build more facilities and so forth, link it with the bike master plan.

And also getting data, like travel time.

It would be really cool to get bike travel time to help people navigate what their bike time will be, depending on their fitness, I guess, or what the average will be.

I got asked the surveillance question, so I know that was this morning's committee, but is that the type of technology that would go through an SIR?

It's opt-in.

And we are going through the surveillance ordinance checklist to make sure that we are adhering to all the policies.

But it is an opt-in.

to the point you all made about, I mean, getting the robust data is going to be really important, which means we'd want a lot of people to opt in.

And I think we want to be as transparent as possible about how the data is going to be used and if it's anonymized, which I would expect it would be, to ensure that that's living up to all the standards so that we get robust participation so that we can actually get the travel benefits we want out of it.

So just a quick timeline what we've been doing for ped and bike action thus far.

We have a greenway crossing supporting signal policy where we built signals for a greenway crossing.

Aurora 92nd is just one idea where we put in a greenway crossing signal and upstream we had an intersection where we had accident problem or collision problems in which adding this signal had kind of minimized or reduced the accident rate upstream.

We talked about our leading LPI policy being issued in April.

We hosted a Signal 101 workshop, which we would like to do more.

You attended.

It was a good, I think it was a good kind of workshop to kind of get people an insight of like what it takes to like design the signal, what it takes to operate it, what are the challenges and what are the benefits that we can kind of leverage to as we shape our multimodal operation vision.

We talked about the Mercer Ped Rest and Walk that happened, like was implemented in July, August.

We continue to, we're working on the proviso report.

We will continue, we continue would like to kind of access or provide some sort of advisory thing with existing model plans or something to just kind of start engaging people on operation, what it means, the policy, the technology that we're bringing, the challenges that we face.

So we're collaboratively like responding or resolving those issues.

And then it talks about the research and development that will be underway for 2020.

I see you're answering all my timing questions there on the timeline.

If I had just been patient, I would have got the answer.

Sorry about that.

No worries.

I do want to comment.

I appreciate the advisory group.

I think that's an important place for us to get feedback.

I think it's also an opportunity to keep the kind of channels of communication open amongst some of our kind of strongest advocates out there.

that, you know, do represent broader communities and are a voice, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, on what's working.

And so the closer and the more informed they can be and the expertise that they can bring to help inform the process, kind of both directions, I think will be really helpful.

So I hope that that work continues to establish that group.

Who would be on that operational advisory group?

Would it be folks who are already engaged in other boards or what's the process of kind of selecting who's participating?

I think that's something that we still don't know exactly the answer to, so we're still working to figure out what that would look like in terms of how to establish that.

I think what proved challenging in some of the feedback we were getting on Mercer and the Signals 101 group was that it was a little bit ad hoc of who could engage with us and how.

that, you know, they're, we feel like there's a benefit to formalizing that engagement a little bit more so that it's a bit more clear and transparent and open to everybody to participate in that.

That's great.

As you work through that, we'd love to, we being largely Kelly in my office, would love to help weigh in with some of our perspectives too if you're open to that.

Sounds good.

All right, freight.

Freight is also another mode, even though a lot of the operational enhancement that are geared for the vehicle, they get advantage of it, but there's a need to also identify them and they have specific needs.

In terms of needing to detect trucks as trucks, their clearance time through an intersection isn't the same, their starting time is a little bit different.

around the port facility.

I think there's a need to talk about like, for instance, train crossing is a big challenge for trucks that are accessing the port of Seattle facilities.

So we've tested a railroad crossing detection methodology that we are excited to onboard that has some sort of prediction on the during like how long the closure of the railroad crossing would be, speed of the train, and when it will arrive and so forth.

So this tool is going to be not only helpful for freight, but also very helpful for fire department who have kind of share their concern of specific fire stations that are around the Soto area that have a hard time responding because of train blockage.

So if they know ahead of time, they can reroute their fire trucks elsewhere.

So this data will be fed into their CAD dispatch so they can utilize that information as they disperse or dispatch their responders.

And so would that data become part of a publicly available data set that things like Google and stuff would be incorporating into various mapping things, or is it largely kind of proprietary?

No, it could be.

Yes, it could be a third party data API as well.

And is the stuff I read here on freight is largely just about kind of policies and corridors?

Do we have freight detection ability?

I imagine they, you know.

Not yet.

So it's more about just defining corridors and trying to make them operate as optimal as possible as opposed to identifying individual vehicles.

So I'm going to turn it to Jason to talk about traffic incident management and the TOC.

All right, Jason, you're up.

Thanks, Audi.

So I help manage the active operation in the center along with the data collection program.

So I just have several slides here to talk about some of the technology that we use, how we collaborate with our partners, and some of the, you know, what we're getting back from a data perspective about our ability to clear traffic impacting incidents.

We have a dedicated staff in our operations center who are working 24 hours a day and seven days a week to help keep the traffic moving in Seattle.

And they use a variety of methods to understand the current conditions.

On our streets, they're listening to a police scanner.

They're looking at real-time feeds from computer dispatched for both police and fire.

They're, of course, using the traffic cameras, working collaboratively with the WSDOT Traffic Management Center and monitoring social and traditional media all so we can learn about the incidents that are impacting our roadways and help participate in a coordinated effort to clear them as quickly as possible.

So that coordination involves working with police and fire so we can get feedback from them about the expected severity of an incident so we can really right-size our response.

We may implement detour routes to help move traffic around long-term events or modify traffic signal timing dynamically to help move people if there's a traffic impacting event in Seattle.

We also communicate with the public using a variety of tools.

We place messages on large overhead signs.

We have a healthy social media following on Twitter, thanks to the operators in our center.

We put real-time incident information on our travel information map website.

And of course, we communicate with many internal stakeholders using both email and text.

And finally, we have a response team.

So we have trucks that are roaming the city, and they're able to push stalled vehicles off the side of the road or give them some gas, give them a jump.

Or if there's a larger traffic impacting event, they could be like our boots on the ground presence who are really providing information to help us with our response to those incidents.

So here's some data.

So this shows our verified incidents in 2018 and thus far in 2019. So a verified incident consists of something that's observed in our operations center by camera.

or verified by the SRT staff in person.

So the duration is from when it's first logged in 911 to the time that it's cleared.

And every activity is tracked in a database that we keep in our operations center.

So we track single vehicle collisions, multi-vehicle collisions, and disabled vehicles.

So referring to this chart, obviously there's some massive spikes for single occupancy vehicle or single vehicle collisions.

So of course I drilled into that with our data folks and it seems like these type of incidents could involve a single car versus a pole or something that's rolled over or a car versus ped or a car versus bike.

So those can create these outliers.

Additionally there's some data that suggests that we have some a single occupancy, or excuse me, a single vehicle could be a bus, and there were some stalled larger vehicles that required a special type of tow to be dispatched.

So those all kind of will produce these type of massive spikes that you see in that particular type of incident compared to the multi-vehicle collision in the stalled vehicle.

But more importantly, if you look at the trend line behind it, so those are the dotted lines.

So if we place all this data into Excel, it shows that there is sort of a gradual decrease in the incident duration for single vehicles, and the other ones are remaining steady.

And this is despite the fact that we moved to 24-7 operation in October 2018. And other data supports the fact that those types of incidents that are occurring overnight, they take longer to be responded to due to the fact that there's fewer folks out there on the roads able to help folks out.

So we see this as a success that we're able to manage and keep the incident duration pretty stable, despite the fact that we're tracking incidents that are occurring overnight, and those do have a longer duration.

So that's through our coordination with our TIM partners, like the state and fire department and police.

The spikes really throw me off a bit.

Because I imagine, I mean, are there hundreds of single vehicle incidences per month?

Or is it just a handful?

Well, we have some data on the volume here.

But you can see that there's fewer.

And back to here, there was also some weather events that contributed to that, to those spikes.

February, the snow that we experienced.

So yeah, there's really just a few outliers that can really skew the data for this.

But the February snow, oh yeah.

But the February two years ago was, or in 2018 was different.

Can you go forward one to the?

Sure.

Which is the?

One vehicle is the gray.

It just seems like if there's a big enough sample size that one or two incidents wouldn't throw off the data.

But it looks like the single vehicle incidences are maybe 20 to 30 a month, so maybe a couple ones.

That's correct.

And I did question them, hey, should we go to 95th percentile?

Maybe, you know, not show all of these outliers that way, but this is all the data.

So that's what it's reflecting.

So Jason, sorry, tell me again, we're, over time, we're collecting more data?

Yes.

Because we have greater hours of operations, we're tracking more incidents.

Got it.

And the overnight incidents.

And the incidents that just are lower priorities.

So for whatever reason, fewer people on duty, those types of things.

That's exactly right.

Got it.

So we'll, so the baseline is actually moving a bit because we have a slightly different sample hours.

But going forward, that'll normalize over time, and we'll see, we'll get a better sense of what the trends are.

That's right.

You got it.

Thank you.

So, yeah, there's an upward trend in the number of incidents that we track, so beginning in October 2020. you could see where we made that transition to 24-7 operation.

So yeah, we're simply open for an additional eight hours, which means we're tracking more incidents.

We also continue to add the number of traffic cameras that we have in our system to, you know, monitor and verify incidents, which also will add to the number of incidents that we're tracking.

And of course, you know, we continue to grow in population due to jobs.

So there's simply more travelers on our roads, which can increase the possibility for collisions and other traffic incidents occurring.

I think the important thing from this perspective, too, and I think this is time to clear the incident out of the roadway to get traffic operations back to normal.

And so, as Jason said, some of the severity of those incidents could affect that.

And also, just to reinforce something that Jason said, this is not every traffic incident that there is in the city.

This is the ones that can be verified from beginning to end through the TOC.

There's plenty of things that are happening in other places that are not part of this data set, but this is sort of still like to like how are we doing in terms of our ability to manage those incidents.

So just to conclude, I'm personally interested in making operation to be the language for everyone.

I want operation to be understood.

Because people only care about it when it goes wrong, when everything is going right.

But it would be kind of nice to have a communication path.

to talk about operational needs and issues and so forth, and to be continuous.

We've talked about, like, the pilots and stuff that we're excited.

2020 is an excited year for us, I think, with the outcome of all the items that we're testing, which can help us shape moving, how we move forward with multi-modal view, umbrella, technology, support, integrity, how we move this program forward.

Well, thank you all.

I will say that the fish truck scale incidents, I know that particular one, Sam, you get to live through that vicariously through the rest of us.

You know, we continue to have what I would say like are the potentially major incidents.

And at least anecdotally, it feels like those, the response to those, they're clearing a lot better.

A lot of this data is things that aren't big enough to get on the news because they're more of day-to-day stuff.

And so that's also critically important to be moving those times down.

But it does feel the most, you know, the most significant events unfortunately continue to happen.

But it does seem like the work to coordinate efforts and response seems to be doing pretty good.

So I appreciate that effort too.

Great.

No more questions for me.

I'm just kind of dried out of questions, I guess.

Thanks for your work.

I do, I am really interested in how we, you know, I think Sam, you made a comment.

The ITS system doesn't know what to do on its own.

It does what we tell it to do and figuring out how we, are asking you to do things, and I realize there's competing interests there, and so we're, it's an attempt to balance it, but I think there's also some pretty strong policies we've taken as a city, and I may work to try to clarify some of that, and try to get some outcomes that are better for some of the things that I'd want to prioritize, and would look forward to kind of your engagement on that.

Yeah, and I think, you know, Adiem and Jason have, are, are leading, you know, leaders in this, in the country for thinking about how to get things that the industry may not be yet producing or how we sort of max, how we think about how to adapt this technology to our needs as a city.

Adiem was just at the National ITS Conference.

There's other cities that we can work at.

in coalition to try to push the industry beyond where it has been traditionally.

I also think that this ITS really helps us minimize the amount of infrastructure we need to build in a lot of ways.

By managing it, I think that's where Ariam was going with like that if everybody can speak the language of operations, operations is helping us squeeze the most out of what we have and not, you know, build our parking lot for the day after Thanksgiving, sort of the maximum demand and sort of keep ourselves, you know, say, well, we're doing fine because we're always planning for the worst-case scenario.

The ITS really helps us manage the existing right-of-way to meet different types of demands and at different times, so.

Great.

Thank you all.

Thank you.

All right, Kelly, let's see how we move these last two items.

All right.

Still some daylight out there.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's go.

Short.

Yeah.

All right.

Council Bill 119653, an ordinance relating to the city's traffic code.

Hello.

Hello.

Quick introduction.

Good afternoon.

My name is Richard Green.

I'm with the law department.

And one of the things I do every year is review legislation in the legislature to see how it affects the traffic code.

Because the state has a traffic code and we have a traffic code and the law is that they have to be uniform.

So when the state legislature amends a statute that has a corresponding ordinance, we have to amend our ordinance.

And so what this ordinance does is sort of incorporate those changes that were made by the 2019 legislature.

I will let you know that there's actually another ordinance that does the same thing, but this ordinance are changes that become effective immediately.

The other ordinance are changes that become effective January 1st of next year.

So is that the next one that's on here?

No, actually that's one that's been presented.

I think you'll probably be considering it later in the year.

Anything of note in all these changes, anything exciting and interesting that changes, or is it purely technical in nature?

No, I mean, certain things maybe you'd be interested in.

It requires that motorcyclists have insurance, whereas previously they have not had to have insurance.

Wow.

It imposes an additional penalty on people who get caught driving in an HOV lane.

Let's see.

It allows a motorized foot scooter to have three wheels rather than just two, and eliminates the requirement that it have handlebars.

Now, what I can't figure out is if you take off the handlebars from a motor, doesn't that make it a skateboard?

And then the last thing of great significance is it requires that stoplights on a commercial truck be red in color.

I'd never realized they could be any other color, but apparently so.

Something's changed the law and you caught it to get ours up to date.

Okay, well, that's great.

I appreciate your work on this, Richard.

I'm glad that I'm not the one that has to go through and scrub that, so I'm grateful to your service to the city.

And speaking of which, I mean, I've talked to central staff about this before, but there is something called the model traffic ordinance that we could adopt that would sort of eliminate all this essentially it would take me, it would delay a fair amount of my work.

But nevertheless, it's something maybe the council might want to consider at some point.

So that would essentially just say whatever the state does is our ordinance?

Yeah, I'd be interested in understanding.

Obviously, I'm not trying to put you out of a job, but if it's a more efficient way to do stuff, if there's absolutely no flexibility for us to do anything different, then that would seem logical.

If there's areas where we like to go further than the state does, then I can see where we'd want our own ones.

We'll continue to review that and figure out what makes sense going forward.

All right.

Great.

Well, I'll go ahead and move in second Council Bill 119653 and I'll vote yes on that.

That will go to the full Council on Monday and look forward to seeing the next round of ordinances that take effect the first of next year.

Yes.

Thank you.

Thanks.

All right.

I don't even need to read the short one of that.

I can read the whole thing.

All right.

All right.

Council Bill 119618, an ordinance relating to city streets, changing the name of the portion of Northwest 54th Street, generally located between Northwest Market Street and one block southwest at the entrance to the Ballard Locks, to Northwest Locks Place, and superseding any other prior ordinances to the extent inconsistent.

Would you like to introduce yourself?

My name is Matt Bulley with the Seattle Department of Transportation.

Matt, thank you for being here.

I will endeavor to follow the timely...

Yeah, they're going to be tough with a 10-slide presentation compared to Richard, but, you know, we want to make sure we give the locks its due, but jump right in.