Governance and Education Committee Special Meeting 12/8/21

Good afternoon, everyone.

The December 8th 2021 Governance and Education Committee special meeting will now come to order.

It is 2.04pm.

I'm Lorena Gonzalez, Chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Juarez?

Here.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Sawant.

Council Member Strauss.

Present.

Council Member Lewis.

Present.

Chair Gonzales.

Here.

Council Member Spohr.

Present.

Chair Gonzales.

Thank you so much.

We do have quorum, so we'll go ahead and move to items of business here.

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

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Colleagues, we'll now start public comment.

While it does remain our strong intent to have public comment regularly included on future meeting agendas, the city council reserves the right to end or eliminate these public comment periods at any point if we deem that the system is being abused or is no longer suitable for allowing our meetings to be conducted efficiently and effectively.

I'll moderate today's public comment period public comment period for this meeting is 20 minutes.

Each speaker will have two minutes to speak.

I'll call on each speaker in the order in which they registered on the council's website.

If you've not yet registered to speak but would like to, you can sign up before the end of public comment by going to our website.

The link is also listed on today's agenda.

Once I call your name, staff will unmute your microphone.

You'll hear the automatic prompt if you have been unmuted, and then that'll be your cue to press star six before you begin speaking.

Please begin by stating your name, the item that you are addressing, and remember, public comment should relate to an item on today's agenda.

During your public comment, you will hear a chime, and at that chime, that chime is notice that there is 10 seconds left of your two minutes provided.

Please listen for that chime and make every effort to wrap up your comments.

If you don't wrap up your comments at the end of your time allotted, your microphone will be muted to allow me to call on the next person.

Once you've completed your public comment, please disconnect from the line and you can finish watching this committee meeting on Seattle Channel or one of the listening options that's on the agenda.

Public comment period is now open.

And let me go to the Google Sheet here.

All right, we only have two public commenters signed up for public comment today.

The first is David Haynes, and then the second is Heather Kelly.

David, welcome.

Thank you, good afternoon.

INF1955, city council should reject this racist anti-white citizen policy known as the race and social justice lens.

forcing government employees to discriminate, forsake, purposely hate, and judge based on innocent white citizens' skin color.

It's already evident within human services department prioritizing criminals into motel while redirecting money away from shelter for innocent homeless citizens, denied second winter of COVID, proving that city council sabotaged war on drugs, helping BIPOC criminals within Just Care who dare to prior, excuse me.

Secondly, the resolution 32029 should be rejected out of principle.

It's introduced after council lost election.

Council wants to manipulate rules and introduce racist government policies, further undermining democracy and community.

If city council staff doesn't like to work on weekends, nor have the best interests of community at heart, or the ability to stay sober on weekends, maybe they should find another line of work.

Stop trying to undermine our community.

You're doing a disservice to real progress.

Introducing a racist lens of government, skin color judgments and bad practices from the racist, scorned, woke, vulture culture.

Browbeating and bullying and taking over the microphone, intimidating cowards on council, doing devil's bidding, creating racist, retaliatory government with untrustworthy employees.

We need a law protecting the people's democracy and community at large from the false people and hypocritical creeper who think they're entitled to fill in the blanks of a negative past, already overthrown except for their scorned lived experience, who wants to retaliate.

And they should confront the individuals who scorned them instead of taking it out on the innocent community who's suffering your all's evil racist war lens policies.

So reject these two resolutions and ideas from the racist, miseducation side of hate and ignoble and grace.

Stop judging people in their skin color.

Even Martin Luther King Jr. would be protesting you.

He said, judge a person by their character and their qualifications, not their skin color retaliations.

Sober up, folks.

Next up is Heather Kelly.

Heather, welcome.

Hello.

Can you hear me okay?

We can.

Thank you.

My name's Heather Kelly.

I'm the president of the League of Women Voters of Seattle King County and I live in Finney Ridge.

And I just want to call and say thank you so much for inviting the league to comment on Resolution 32029. We're grateful for the opportunity to review the rules governing our legislators and we will be submitting comments by email, but I just also wanted to follow up on what Council Member Strauss said at the last meeting regarding legislation that is submitted without a sponsor identified.

The League agrees with Council Member Strauss that although we know that the Council would impose that rule only in very limited requirements, additional language is needed to make sure that it is applied only very narrowly.

The league as you know is a proponent of open government transparency and accountability.

It's what we advocate for across King County and so that's a really important component for us.

We also want to say thank you so much to the council for every effort that you've made to keep meetings open and accessible and to provide written materials in advance even during the pandemic.

We were able to relaunch a key program of the League of Women Voters called Observer Corps during the pandemic, where we have volunteers attend public meetings and then provide reports.

We're currently between websites, but we'll be uploading those reports to our new website soon.

And we would love to continue having access virtually to meetings.

So observers, not only in King County, throughout the country can watch what's going on in Seattle as Seattle leads in so many important areas.

Thank you again for the opportunity to comment and I will be in touch by email.

Thank you Heather so much for calling in today and sending us your comments.

Just confirming with our IT department that we have no other registrants in the waiting room.

There are no further public comment registrants.

Thank you so much.

So that will conclude our public comment period and we will move to other items of business.

on our agenda.

We only have two items of business on today's agenda.

The first will be a presentation from our Department of Human Resources on their race and social justice initiative.

And then the second will be a consideration of resolution 32029 related to the general rules of the Seattle City Council that is slated for briefing discussion and a vote.

So will the clerk please read item one into the record.

and V, you are muted.

Great.

And I do want to note for the record that we were joined by Council Member Mosqueda at about 2.06 p.m.

Thanks for being with us.

Okay.

So we have the first agenda item as our clerk just read into the record.

It's a presentation from the Seattle Department of Human Resources regarding the Race and Social Justice Initiative.

I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to the good folks over at our Department of Human Resources to introduce themselves for the record.

We will dig into the presentation.

Who's going to kick us off first?

Is that going to be you, Felicia?

I will, yes.

Only because our director, Kimberly Loving, is here, but apparently wasn't able to put her name into the...

Oh, no.

So she's...

I don't think she's able to talk.

So she's on there as question mark, love, question mark.

That is actually the director.

Great.

Sun, can you please let her in?

There we go.

All right, we now have our Interim Director of HR in here.

Sorry about that, Director Loving.

Good to see you as always, and thanks for being with us.

Yes, thank you so much, Council President.

I apologize for my technological challenges.

Thank you for getting me in.

We are super excited.

I am I'm thrilled to be able to introduce some of our team that have just worked really really hard on the racial equity and social justice space and on this particular update.

So of course you are speaking with our fearless director and leader of workforce equity in our department Felicia Caldwell who leads the team.

And we have our current Change Team leads Pam Donaldson and Vanessa Bloomsburg.

So that is my role.

I'm going to be quiet and let the smart people in this place be able to walk us through their accomplishments.

Thank you.

And we have a PowerPoint that Vy is going to share.

Cue that up.

There it goes.

All right.

We can see it.

All right.

Thank you.

Go ahead and go to the next slide.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

My name is Vanessa Bloomsburg.

I'm one of the change team co-leads.

And here's an overview of the topics we'll cover today.

Pretty much all of SHR's RSGI workforce focuses on workforce equity.

This is because it's an internally focused department and workforce equity is the area that SHR can have the most impact on.

And this is something you'll see throughout the presentation today.

Next, we're going to give you an overview of the change team activities this year, as well as four of the racial equity toolkits that have been completed in SHR.

Then we'll talk about our department's accomplishments outside of those items.

We had a large number of successful projects this year, and the whole list is in the presentation, but we're only going to have time to go into a few of them.

Finally, we'll be talking about the ways in which the department fosters a spirit of racial equity and social justice by holding space for people's feelings.

And next up, Pam will be talking about our first topic, the change team overview.

Slide.

Thank you, Vanessa.

Hello, I'm Pam Donaldson, co-lead of the SHR change team.

Throughout the past year, we've been through a great deal as a change team, department and community, especially in how HR has been greatly impacted in supporting COVID-19 response and vaccination efforts while continuing to center equity efforts.

During this season of shifting priorities, we've been working to transform the change team to best foster racial equity practices.

As a change team, we've been able to do the following hold regular check in meetings with executives and establish a connection to the budget process.

Increased collaboration with workforce equity unit and the network.

Increase change team equity education and have meaningful and tough conversations.

Participate in the RSJ key leaders program and use what was learned by the participants to recenter our group.

Provide RET education and advising to the department.

Keep efforts moving forward despite being challenged by staff turnover.

In this presentation, we will be touching on some of these areas more in depth as it connects with our greater collaboration with workforce equity.

Next, my co-lead, Vanessa, will discuss some of our racial equity toolkits in 2021. Slide, please.

Now on to the racial equity toolkits.

SHR's work is a little unusual in that we both work on internal departments projects, as well as projects that affect the whole city.

Our SHR change team focused on the department level RATs, while the larger whole city RATs for HR leadership team projects were expected to include multiple departments.

So today we'll be focusing on our department RATs, though more work, of course, is happening with our partner departments.

Slide.

All right, so first off is REACH.

As you may know, REACH is a self-directed wellness program that the City provides that includes content like articles and videos and other activities.

The benefits team wanted to increase the amount of content aimed at BIPOC individuals, so they selected a number of videos on RSJI topics from the vendor.

Through their RET, they discovered that the content was actually more appropriate for white people early on in their racial equity journey.

And per feedback from the advisor program, the benefits unit implemented the content but included communication acknowledging it wasn't for their original intended audience.

The benefits unit has been engaged with their advisors for a part two to work on tools that would target their original intended audience.

And that part is still in process.

All right, second, SHRs, HR business partners who provide HR services for the small departments and offices decided to create a procedural manual for themselves and for other HR practitioners citywide.

Through their RET, the change team provided feedback that the manuals needed to include information on how the disparate impacts to BIPOC, there would be disparate impacts to the BIPOC employees of not using these procedures.

However, it was determined by the project team to not include the advisors feedback due to where they were in the process.

The next RET is something that you, the city council members may be familiar with.

The civil service exemption project.

This project began when the class comp unit decided to create a request form for civil service exemption during the classification project.

Change team provided feedback that an equity lens really couldn't be satisfied on this topic by a form alone.

And so class comp moved forward with creating another project team to create a more detailed guidance for the process that also engaged a change team advisor to delve deeper into the questions presented during the initial RET.

And that part of the project is still in process.

Finally, there's a deferred comp website.

Due to their vendor implementing a new version of the Deferred Comp website, Deferred Comp created a project to ensure the changes would not have disparate impact on marginalized populations.

Based on the equity review feedback received, they were able to implement several different changes to the website, including adding closed captioning to videos, making sure the website would work with screen readers.

And they're also in the process of offering a full Spanish language translation of the website.

All right.

And now I'll turn it back over to Pam for talking about the other things that we did with racial equity toolkits.

Next slide.

After hearing many concerns about our racial equity toolkit forms, the change team took on the process of redesigning them.

Our goal was to make the form simpler, more user-friendly, and a guided experience that's more focused on a racial equity outcome, keeping in mind that many units within SHR don't deal directly with the public.

We engage stakeholders by meeting with staff during multiple sessions to go over the revised form.

We hosted targeted workshops facilitated in collaboration with workforce equity, learning and development and change team members to operationalize the forms and the new change team advisor program.

Our goal was to implement a process for intentionally starting and working on a program, policy or project from an equity centered perspective.

Slide, please.

Our change team introduced the advisor program in the first quarter of 2021. And to date, we've advised on eight projects.

The decision to create the advisor program was born out of a few factors we observed from past racial equity reviews.

First, we had seen that the change team was not being engaged early enough in the process.

For example, many individuals struggled with identifying a racial equity outcome.

Second, Project groups and our team saw the equity reviews as a burden to their process instead of a part of the process.

Third, the timeliness of the change team feedback was negatively impacted.

The advisor program allows at least two advisors from the change team to meet one-on-one with a project group to answer specific questions about completing an RET, defining an equity outcome, and check in if the project continues to move forward toward that goal.

Advisors can also bring issues back to the entire change team to discuss them and make decisions with the change team.

Using advisors from the change team has created a great avenue to engage the team on smaller projects that would not necessarily warrant an entire review by the whole team.

The program has been very successfully combined with the RET training program and revised forms in having higher quality racial equity reviews that include racial equity outcomes.

Additionally, this has led to earlier engagement with the change team where feedback is being implemented and used on projects.

Now, Felicia Caldwell will discuss other workforce equity strategies and accomplishments.

Thank you.

Thanks, Pam.

So the Workforce Equity Team was created in 2015 in response to Executive Order 2015-02, Workforce Equity Initiative, and Council Resolution 31588. However, workforce equity has always been a strategy for race and social justice.

The team developed the first workforce equity strategic plan, which I'm sure Council President Gonzalez will remember very well, created that first plan with the definition that you see here in 2016. That plan included multiple strategies and is overseen by WEPAC, the Workforce Equity Planning and Advisory Committee, which is an IDT chaired by SOCR and SDHR directors.

In addition, Executive Order 2018-04, Anti-Harassment, Anti-Discrimination, has continued to strengthen the need for workforce equity strategies.

The IDT that created recommendations for change in this area included council members as well.

Next slide.

Since workforce equity connects to our larger RSJ work, we wanted to share with you some brief information about the strategic plan before moving into our accomplishments.

So where are we?

After five years, we know that generally females are underrepresented throughout the city, that as a city, our workforce is representative of BIPOC employees overall, but BIPOC employees are underrepresented at the top levels of supervisors and wage earners.

Latinx are the most unrepresented group across the entire workforce.

BIPOC women are most underrepresented at the top levels of pay and supervisory authority.

Men of color continue to be overrepresented in discipline.

And we had a very strange thing that has proven to be consistent.

Except for Asians, BIPOC employees are far less likely to get a performance rating of exceeds expectations.

So what have we learned and what do we plan to do?

We are definitely going to be more data-driven.

We have improved our data collection and are still doing so.

We are employee-driven.

We are meeting with several employee engagement sessions, surveys, and other ways to reach out to employees.

We plan to concentrate on two to four major strategies instead of 12 or 15. We hope to redefine workforce equity with more of an anti-racist lens.

And finally, our goal is to submit to the new administration in the first quarter of next year, the new workforce equity strategic plan for approval and adoption.

Next slide, please.

So what have we accomplished?

This is just a sample.

It's actually not our entire list.

When I sent out the request for RSJ accomplishments, I got five pages from within our department.

So we're really proud that we've been doing a lot of work, but we don't have time to share everything in depth.

So we'll highlight a couple of areas.

Next slide, please.

So one of the things I want to highlight here is this A to, oh, sorry.

So we sent, we have a different, we have some other accomplishments that aren't going to show here.

So I want to apologize first up for that.

These are all accomplishments that are correct.

But we wanted to add a couple more.

One is that we have an A to Z investigations checklist that was created by the Human Resource Investigation Unit.

And if you remember, that was one of the things that came out of the anti-harassment, anti-discrimination recommendations.

And they've created a checklist that essentially went through a toolkit, and the purpose was to increase consistency in citywide investigations and to include trauma-informed and emotionally literate techniques, as well as RET-approved documents, so that we can do a better job of having consistent investigations.

Another thing that they were able to do, the same Human Resource Investigation Unit, is that they actually provide focused investigation training every month to HR employees who do investigations in their department, and these are all employee investigations.

And this training was geared toward ensuring that employee voices aren't silenced and that the concerns are, in fact, elevated to HRIU.

And I'm not going to read through all of these.

I'm hoping that you can just read quickly kind of some of the things that we're working on with that.

Next slide, please.

More accomplishments.

I'd like to highlight a couple here.

So when COVID hit, our supported employees were in danger of losing their jobs because there was no one in the office to supervise them in a lot of cases or their jobs would have changed drastically during this time.

But we were able to redesign every single supported employee job role to meet the changing work environment and to safeguard their jobs.

This was huge and that so many of the departments were basically saying we don't think we'll be able to support them during this time.

Another thing that I'd like to highlight is the police officer examinations.

So we've added a section to the examinations for incoming or for first time police officers coming into the city.

And this exam actually increases access to applicants and provides an equity lens on the exam.

So what does that look like?

It's now screening for bias and groupthink among other subjects.

It's pretty new.

We have not seen the how different we may end up with the groups of applicants, but it does seem to be increasing the percentage of people of color passing the exam.

And then the last one I'd like to highlight is the city budget accountability.

WEPAC has been partnering with race and social justice program and CBO in order to have a better equity lens on budget reports or budget requests, I should say.

Next slide, please.

Another thing I'd like to highlight is the leadership expectation and accountability plan assessment and tools.

This came about because when we did the initial strategic plan, we went and talked to council members, mayors, office staff, department leaders, did a lot of interviews, and everyone agreed that leaders should be held accountable to RSJ.

And most people agreed they didn't know how to make sure that happened.

And so we took this on and actually created a tool that will help city leaders increase their knowledge of workforce equity and RSGI and develop skills to disrupt institutional racism.

Next page, please.

It has seven competency areas that are listed here and every single one has great detail about what it takes to show up as an equitable leader.

So the, I don't know how to do this or what this would look like is no longer an option if they have this tool available to them.

It gives you very, very detailed information in each of these places.

Next slide.

It includes a competency overview, that's where all the descriptions are, a self-assessment to find out where you are right now, and an action planning workbook that includes how are you going to communicate back out to your department, how you're doing in this area.

And then of course, it includes lots of links and resources for the directors.

And this is designed for essentially a director level position in the individual departments.

We'd like to see this adopted citywide.

There are a few departments that are using it right now, but it is definitely a tool that could be valuable to all leaders in the city.

Next slide, please.

So citywide, the HR leaders sponsor communities of HR practice.

And so this is the HR leaders who are out in the departments.

And the goal for these are to create accountability in the HR space to improve the work experiences of BIPOC employees, leading to excellent work experiences for all.

And although these communities of practice are sponsored by the HR leaders, the work groups who are putting together programs and processes and recommendations for policies include HR and non-HR employees citywide.

We figured we really can't We can't judge ourselves.

We need to know from our customers how we're doing.

So those groups are meeting.

Some of them are ending this year.

They've been going all year.

One of the things we're really looking forward to is to create this annual HR forum.

But as you can imagine this year, it was kind of hard to get to that.

Next slide, please.

So one of the approaches that we're taking to do equity work in SHR and other places in the city is now this equity-centered design.

It is a practice of purposely involving minoritized communities throughout the design process with the goal of allowing their voices to directly affect how the solution will address the inequity at hand.

It's focused on oppressed groups that are the most impacted by the project, and really important, it includes redistribution of power and sharing creations, process, implementation, and evaluation.

Next slide.

Did the slide move and I didn't see it?

Oh, now we lost it all together.

We might be having a little bit of technical.

I think V actually, our clerk, got bumped.

Never a good thing when you're sharing.

That's the person sharing the slide.

Why don't you go ahead, Felicia.

I know we all have access to the slide.

And V will try to log back in.

And I only have a couple more slides anyway.

So I think I can go through them without you having to read anything for these.

So another approach that we're taking is using relational culture, and these are practices that are essential to interrupting the many overlapping aspects of white supremacy culture in ways that allow us to be honest about truth.

tension, conflict, disconnection, pain, possibility, care, and change so that we can all act together.

The SOCR RSJ team has developed a handout that explains the practices necessary to operate in this way.

And we have links to a lot of this that we've made available to you.

So that is also one of them that you will have.

And finally, I want to talk just really quickly or almost finally about challenges.

So what challenges have we had in 2021?

When we did this list of challenges, we figured out that many of these are experienced by but not exclusive to Seattle Human Resources.

Key leadership and staff turnover.

There's so much staff turnover and leadership turnover.

Increased demands with COVID-19 response.

As you can imagine, many of our team has had to jump on that.

all year, the whole sense of urgency, some of it brought about by COVID, but some of it just normal.

Acknowledgement of issues, but lack of commitment to change.

So this is when we are actually able to do things like racial equity toolkits, and we get back, I don't have time, it's too hard, we're too far in the process, et cetera, et cetera.

So they know the issues exist, but the commitment to change isn't there.

We've also been greatly impacted by OCR, RSJI staffing and capacity because we work so closely with them on everything that we do.

We're all impacted by outdated systems and infrastructure.

That's just a given at this point.

But I also want to point out that there is always an additional tax or impact for people doing racial equity work who are BIPOC, especially for BIPOC women and BIPOC trans and gender nonconforming groups.

Often these roles in this work is underfunded and not prioritized in the budget.

And even when it is, the emotional tax still exists.

And finally, I want to talk a little bit about workplace spirit of racial equity and social justice, we were asked, how do we create space for people to share their reflections, their anger, their fear, their joy, those kinds of things.

We've done it in some ways by responding to employee needs that were brought to us throughout the year.

Supervisors would say, what does it look like to be a good supervisor in this space?

And so we created supervisor spotlight videos where supervisors were nominated by other people in the city as doing really well in one area or another.

And we created these videos that can be used in learning and development, or just to view, to see how people are doing.

We've had Meditations in a Burning House.

I thought that was the most interesting title.

A three-part workshop for women of color that was essentially teaching self-care.

What do you do to make sure you're okay?

And we've also held trauma and resilience workshops for employees in the city.

We've had a great increase in the SDHR teams and change teams having regular RSJ discussions.

We adopted this relational culture movement.

And we just want to note that despite the experiences of loss and trauma and fear that have been happening due to the continued pandemic and racist hate crimes still happening in the world, People have been committed and they continue to do this work.

They continue to be really devoted to making a difference.

It's been difficult for so many of our employees and we are doing all that we can to provide them with culturally appropriate resources.

And that's our presentation.

Any questions for us?

Great.

Thank you so much to the entire team over at Human Resources.

Really appreciate you taking the time.

I know there was a lot more you could share with us, which is always a good thing.

And I'm sorry that we don't have more time to hear about all of those other pages worth of things that folks have been working on.

I do want to provide my colleagues an opportunity to Ask any questions or make general remarks about the very rich information that you all have presented.

Any comments or questions, colleagues?

Council Member Mosqueda, please.

I just want to say thank you for your presentation and for all the work that you've done.

In addition to what the council president just noted, how much we appreciate your work.

And I think Felicia, as you noted in your conclusion comments, this has been such a hard two years and there has been so much turnover.

And so in addition to the hard year, in addition to the fatigue that workers face, everybody really looks to HR to help process that, and so that's additional stress on all of you.

So thanks for all the work that you've done and for the important work here with the RSGI change team.

Thanks for everything you do.

Thank you, Council Member Mosqueda.

Any other comments or questions?

Okay, well, I also want to express my gratitude.

You know, Felicia, you and I started working on these issues way back when, I think as early as 2016, I want to say.

So I'm really excited about a lot of the progress that you have presented through today's presentation together with members of the change team.

that have really advanced this work.

Obviously, much more work is needed.

There's a lot more opportunities to make sure that we're investing in the health and wellness and ability of our employees to thrive and to feel like they belong to this city family.

And I really am deeply grateful to you and to Vanessa and to Pam and to Director Loving for all of the Care and attention that you are lending to this really important issue related to our workforce, which is sort of, you know, where, where, where things come to roost in terms of the race and social justice equity commitments for.

for SDHR.

So really appreciate everything that you've done and hope that you can continue to make much progress and advancement on behalf of our workers who are also our residents and who also serve our residents.

So much appreciation to all of you.

Thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you for allowing us to present.

Of course.

Director Loving, anything you'd like to say?

No, just thank you.

It's the team, you know, I stand behind the team.

So thank you for having us.

We're really proud and we have a lot of work to do still.

Lots of work, it never ends.

Much gratitude to you all.

It is not go beyond me that all of the folks representing today, I think identify as women and most of you are women of color.

And so much thanks and appreciation to all of you for the extra burden that you all have to carry in terms of moving this work forward.

So thanks so much for your time and I wish you happy holidays with your family.

Thank you.

All right, be well all.

We're going to move to our next agenda item.

Apparently I am being told that there are some Wi-Fi connectivity issues over at City Hall, which is where the Nguyen My Clerk is at.

So I'm going to go ahead and step into also clerking my own meeting here.

So I'm going to go ahead and read the second item into the record.

Agenda item number two, resolution 32029, a resolution adopting general rules of the Seattle City Council superseding resolution 31920 for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

We do have several presenters with us this afternoon from Council central staff and from the city clerk's office, so I'm going to go ahead and Recognize folks to introduce themselves for the record and then we will dig into the presentation we do have I think at last count about 15 amendments to get through And we are scheduled to go until 4 o'clock.

So my hope is that we're able to get through all of the amendments.

That we take a vote on each of the amendments, assuming that amendments receive a 2nd.

and that we're able to ultimately vote on a resolution as amended for consideration by the city council on Monday, December 13th, which is this Monday.

So my hope is we'll be able to get through all of this content today as efficiently and effectively as we can to have as clean of a bill with committee recommendation for Monday.

So that being said, I'm going to start with introductions.

I'm going to hand it over to City Clerk Monica Martinez-Simmons to introduce herself.

And then, Monica, if you can hand it over to the next person, that'd be great.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Council President, and good afternoon, Council members.

Joining me today are representatives of the Council Rules Review Working Group, Council Central Staff Director Esther Handy, Deputy Director Dan Eder, and Office of the City Clerk Deputy Director Elizabeth Adkisson.

Council members, since the last committee meeting on December 1st, the full working group has met to develop amendments brought forward by individual council members.

Both Esther and Dan will run through the proposed language for each amendment for your consideration one at a time.

Please also note that the written public comment period for the proposed rules resolution remains open through and including December 11th.

there will also be a public comment opportunity on this item during the December 13th city council meeting.

And Elizabeth, can you please confirm that all written public comment received to date has been distributed to all council members?

Afternoon.

Yes, I can confirm that any written public comment that has been received thus far has been distributed and we are still watching for those coming in and we'll send them your way as they arrive.

Thank you.

And at this time, I'll go ahead and turn the time over to Esther Handy, and she will be followed by Dan Eder.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Director Handy, welcome.

Great.

Thank you, Esther Handy, Director of Council Central Staff.

At this time, we'd like to walk you through the 15 amendments that have been proposed today.

As a reminder, the underlying resolution itself had 14 amendments, I believe, to the council rules, and the ones we're going to discuss are in addition to that.

I will invite Vy if she has connectivity to share those on screen, and if not, I can do so.

She is back in action, so she is able to share a screen.

And we will wait for her to do so.

There we go.

We have it up on the screen.

Take it away, Director Handy.

Great.

And just before, so really quickly here, what we're going to do, because I want to make sure that we're all on the same page about what's going to happen here, because each one of these are amendments.

So what we will do is have you present on an item and then I think probably because there's so many of them the best process I think is to take them one by one.

Otherwise we will have forgotten by the time we get to number 15 what number one was.

So for council members who are off camera just be aware that we will take Each amendment, one by one, we will hear a presentation on said amendment from Director Handy and other Council Central staff members.

And then we will make motions to allow for us to have debate, discussion about an amendment, and then we will vote on the amendment individually.

So just realized I had forgotten to lay that out.

So I'm going to hand it back over to Director Handy to kick us off with Amendment 1.

Great, that sounds good.

And I will do the brief description on the amendments.

Deputy Director Dan Eder has authored these amendments and can answer lots of technical questions about them and the city clerks as well as we get into discussion.

So Amendment 1, and you feel free to move to that page, is authored by Council Member Peterson.

This amendment would eliminate the alternate positions on committees.

The current rules state that standing committees will have at least four members and an alternate.

The alternate is notified when a committee member is unable to attend and participates as a voting member of that committee during their absence.

The resolution 32029 as drafted makes a change to this section.

saying that standing committees will have at least four members and may have an alternate.

So it makes the alternate permissive.

This amendment would eliminate all references to alternates in the council rules.

Great.

So colleagues, again, as a reminder, we are on screen is.

Over trying to take over my computer here.

Okay, so we are on amendment 1 again for colleagues in the committee meeting.

We are on amendment 1. This amendment is is authored by council member Peterson as agreed through this process.

I agreed to sponsor those amendments.

for non-committee members to allow for discussion in today's committee hearing.

So I am going to move to amend resolution 32029 as presented on amendment one on the agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

The amendment has been moved and seconded.

to adopt amendment one as presented on the agenda.

Council Member Peterson, as a non-committee member, but as a sponsor of this amendment, I'm gonna go ahead and recognize you to address the amendment, and then we will open it up for comments, questions, and debates.

Thank you, Council President and Chair.

I appreciate this.

I want to thank the working group, the internal working group.

I met several times to consider updates to these rules and clerk's office, council staff, city attorney's office, council president's office.

And thank you, Council President Gonzalez, for enabling this space and time for everybody to participate, even if we're not members of the government committee and even for, you know, putting your name on certain things that you might not be voting for today, but just to move the process along, really appreciate that grace and that leadership.

And so this one is eliminating the alternate position.

I think it made sense last couple of years to institute that as we had set a really firm membership of committees to be in a very safe harbor with the Open Public Meetings Act and to not have sort of roving attendance at committee meetings and having an alternate there as sort of a backstop as needed.

The way I've seen it unfold the last couple of years just in practice is that alternates don't often Some of the items on the committee are very meaty and they may not get, you know, three days seems like a reasonable amount of time and sometimes it is, sometimes it's not.

So we're not always getting sufficient notice to sort of read, to read everything and come up as prepared as the regular members because of when we're notified.

The general public doesn't differentiate between an alternate and I've tried to explain that a couple times as well.

I'm just an alternate on this.

But when the voting is happening and you see the photos of all the members there, the alternates included, it looks like we're missing or we're not as prepared.

And so the quorum requirement is three members out of five.

And having an alternate that makes an additional member, To me, it's sufficient that we have five members.

If one of them is absent, it's okay.

You still have the four members.

You still have enough council members exceeding a quorum to have a robust debate at committee.

It's okay if sometimes there's a two to two tie.

Things can still be pulled forward to the full council.

So I do appreciate the working group making the change to have it a, the alternate be discretionary as committees are formed for the next two years.

I think for simplicity, it would be great to just eliminate the position, which is what this amendment is.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Councilmember Peterson.

Are there any comments or questions from colleagues or additional information to provide from Council Central staff?

Okay, I see Councilmember Herbold's hand is up, so I'll recognize Councilmember Herbold.

Any others who would like to get in the queue, please do let me know by raising your hand.

Thank you, Council President Gonzalez, and thank you, As well for including non committee members in this discussion.

It's very, very appreciated.

I think I can think of 1 possible unintended consequence of this amendment.

And I don't want to.

I don't want to inflate the likelihood of this unintended consequence, but I also want to ask central staff if there are others.

I can think of, like, for instance, somebody might have, a committee member, a regular committee member might have a planned absence that's scheduled and everybody knows in advance, but, and that's, say that's the, that's, the fifth committee member, or let's say it's the fourth.

Well, I guess maybe that isn't a problem if there's a committee of five.

I'm worried about a planned absence and then a sickness that is unplanned, and how that might impact the ability to meet quorum.

And again, I don't know that that would happen that often.

And with a committee of five, you would still, even under that circumstance, have the quorum of three.

But I'm just wondering, given that the work group made a recommendation of allowing the existence of an alternate to be permissive based on a committee chair's I'm happy to respond to that and invite the

We did have a discussion about the current practices that there are five members on standing committees.

And that provides an ability for two to be absent before you impact a quorum of three.

The rules themselves state that committees shall have at least four.

And the intention of the working group was that there would be flexibility provided to the council president and the council when establishing committees.

that if they were going to establish some committees that were smaller, that include four, you may want to include an alternate on those committees, such that if one person was absent, you would have quorum, but if two council members were absent, you would not.

And so we are thinking, I don't think we have a lot of more specific scenarios that we sort of worked through, but we thought that making it permissive would relieve the burden of always having alternates for large committees, but create the flexibility for the council as they create new structures.

So would the sponsor of this amendment be amenable to including language that limits the elimination of alternates to those committees that have five members.

Because, Director Handy, I think your description of a four-member committee is exactly what I was thinking of with a planned absence.

It's on the books.

But then somebody is out sick unexpectedly, and you have to cancel that meeting if you can't get that alternate there.

Chair Gonzales?

Yeah, go ahead Council Member Peterson.

Thank you.

Yes, I in this I was imagining a five member committee in for this amendment, so I'd be very open to that.

If there was a four member committee.

Um, I, I also want to acknowledge that the context in which we're talking about right now assumes absence in its entirety from a committee meeting.

There are instances in which council members are simply late.

Or tardy.

And in those instances, there is impact as well.

It is not.

Uncommon for me as the council president to receive several notices a week about needing to leave early.

about needing to arrive up to 30 minutes late, or, you know, or only being able to attend sort of X, you know, from XYZ time to XYZ time.

And again, when you're dealing with those razor thin margins, that does call into question about, you know, whether you start with quorum and then lose quorum throughout the meeting.

You know, I think there are questions that arise about whether any action taken during the period of time in which you do not have quorum.

Is is compliant with the rules and and can continue to move through the legislative process.

So I just want to be.

I just want to be mindful of that.

And so I don't think that the, because I'm concerned about sort of those, those instances that I've just described, those scenarios I've just described, I'm not sure that the revision being proposed by Council Member Herbold to Council Member Peterson's amendment solves for the issue entirely.

And it is part of the reason why I was leaning towards supporting the recommendation from the work group, which was to allow the President to have the discretion about whether or not to have an alternate based on the committee composition, including who the council members are and the number of council members serving on each committee.

And so I would encourage us to allow for that discretion to be exercised by the council president in sort of the next iteration of committee meeting structures, as opposed to being more prescriptive In this instance, you know, frankly, I'm not sure there's going to be any committees of only four members.

I suppose that's possible, but I do think that even in the instance of four committee members, that the proposal included in the base resolution would allow for the council president to either choose to or choose not to assign an alternate based on the composition and the size of the committee.

Are there any other comments or questions?

Council Member Mosqueda, go ahead.

I'm sorry, Council President, I'm not sure where the best place to insert this is, but just for food for thought, I think four members of the committee is not bueno idea.

I think that would constantly lead to having a tie, so would be interested in this amendment, assuming that we keep five members of the committee, five members on a committee, and look forward to hearing more about this.

Yeah.

Um, I do want to sort of, uh, go back to sort of the discussion around having five members in the first place.

The whole point was to make sure that there were, was an actual recommendation that would come out of, um, our committees.

Um, so that the full council and the non committee members would have the benefit of an actual committee recommendation.

Um, I will say that in the last year, we have seen some instances in which there is a, um, you know, for, uh, a two, two, um, you know, divided folks on the committee.

And in those instances, it has been, um, a struggle to, um, for non-committee members to, to sort of catch up and figure out why, why there is so much, um, division amongst amongst the committee.

And so, And, you know, sort of just thinking through the number of members on a committee was sort of really rooted in wanting to have an opportunity for a majority of the city council to signal to the full council, its support or lack of support for a particular legislative proposal, whether it was a resolution or an ordinance.

Council Member Strauss.

Thank you, Council President, and thank you, Council Member Peterson, for bringing this forward, just signaling my support for this amendment if we have five members on the committee.

Short and sweet.

Thanks, Council President.

Okay.

Director Handy, you did have your hand raised.

Would you, did you still want to add something?

I just wanted to clarify that one of the changes underlying in this resolution says that a committee member must be absent from an entire meeting for the alternate to attend and have full voting rights.

So an alternate could still sit in and participate in discussion.

But that is one related change that is in the underlying resolution.

Yeah, and I thank you, Director Handy, for bringing that up.

I think that the issue where this comes up you know, to head is around sort of whether you can start a committee meeting, or whether any, or whether if you lose quorum, there, there are implications to compliance with the rules in terms of the actions that you are taking.

So, yeah.

Are there any other comments or questions?

Council Member Mosqueda, go ahead.

Thank you.

Councilmember Silva?

Councilmember Silva?

Thanks, Council President.

I look to you to provide some intel on this as well, having helped to craft the initial composition of a five-member committee.

If we are, if our hope is to have a five-member committee, but there's the chance that someone is potentially sick or on leave, then I think we run the So as much as I want to keep a five-member committee, and I'm also not wedded to having to have alternates, and appreciated, I think, the rationale for the amendment to begin with, now I'm a little bit torn because I do want to make sure that we're not ending up with a divided vote as much as possible.

I'm not sure if other folks have thoughts about that, but I had very much appreciated where the sponsor was coming from, and also really interested in keeping the ability to have five people there, and if that requires us to have an alternate, then I'd be interested in hearing what other folks' thoughts are on that, because I can see the benefit of keeping that alternate if that's our ultimate goal.

Just signaling that I think Council Member Herbold and Council Member Esqueda's points are now resonating with me about this extended leave.

Just sharing.

That's about it.

Okay.

So colleagues, I think there are a couple of options here.

The first option is to accept the amendment as presented.

which would entirely eliminate an alternate regardless of the number of members on a committee.

Option two is to make an amendment to amendment one that would require that the elimination of an alternate would only apply to committees of five council members.

Opening up the question of I suppose that insinuates that there might be committees of less than 5 members.

And option and then option 3. Well, I guess there isn't an option 3. those are the 2 options.

So we have option 1. Vote on amendment 1 as written, which is a complete elimination of.

to eliminate alternates regardless of the size of the committee, and option two, requiring that the elimination of alternates is only applicable to committees of five.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you very much.

Given that we are on amendment one of many amendments, I'll just go ahead and suggest, Council Member Peterson, I was intending to want to support this.

I absolutely agree that you don't want people coming in necessarily who haven't been following, and given how much our staff has already stretched in on the multiple issues that council takes on, I see the value of that.

I think at this point, Council Member, just to let you know where I'm going to be, I think I will probably be a no on this amendment because I'd still like to make sure that there are five people.

And if that fifth person needs to be an alternate to avoid having a divided vote, I'm going to go ahead and vote no on this amendment, but appreciate that there's clearly some work to be done, either in terms of additional ways that we can support those alternates or helping to make sure that they're not coming in and out at various points.

It sounds like that's in part addressed already in the underline.

Great.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate that.

Okay.

And just as a reminder, the only other voting council members on the line today are Council Member Lewis, Council Member Strauss, and Council Member Juarez.

Council Member Peterson and Herbold are our esteemed guests for the afternoon.

So are there any other comments or questions on this one?

Councilmember Strauss, please.

Thanks, just signaling the same thing that Councilmember Mosqueda said coming into this meeting.

I was going to support this amendment and unfortunately I will not be today.

Okay.

I appreciate that.

I do think that there is a choice here about potentially having divided votes repeatedly and or, you know, managing public expectations and staff time around being deployed as an alternate.

Those are two real concerns.

And I wonder if between now and Monday, I can have conversations with the work group about any potential language or opportunities to consider that would require perhaps more advanced notice on the need for an alternate if an alternate is in place.

I'm not sure we can we can get there, but but I sort of really am hearing that the issue really here is much more about notice.

than anything else.

And so I'm sensitive to that need, and we'll continue to have conversations with Council Member Peterson and others to see if something related to notice in non-emergent situations may be the better path here to allow for a little bit more certainty and predictability for alternates.

Okay, colleagues, I'm going to go ahead and call this to a vote because we have had a conversation about it for some time.

Will the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment 1?

Council Member Juarez?

Yes.

Lewis?

No.

Mosqueda?

No.

Strauss?

No.

Chair Gonzalez?

No.

That's one in favor, four opposed.

Thank you so much.

The motion fails.

The amendment is not adopted.

And the bill is still before the council.

You're going to move to Amendment 2. Director Handy, please.

Amendment 2 is also authored by Council Member Peterson.

I'll invite you to scroll to the next page.

Amendment 2 would revise the rules to allow council members to abstain on resolutions at full council except for those resolutions that are coming from the select budget committee.

Under the current rules abstentions are not permitted on council bills or resolutions at full council.

This expands where abstentions are allowed.

Great.

Thank you so much Director Handy.

OK I'm going to go ahead and move this amendment again Councilmember Pedersen is the author of Amendment 2 and I am the sponsor of Amendment 2, so I'm going to move to amend Resolution 32029 as presented on Amendment 2 on the agenda.

Is there a second?

Okay.

Thank you so much, Council Member Juarez, really appreciate it.

Okay, so it's been moved and seconded to adopt amendment two as presented on the agenda.

I'm gonna hand it back over to Council Member Peterson to address the amendment as the author of said amendment.

Thank you, Council President.

Colleagues, I've advocated for this option previously.

I think the past two years have reinforced rationale to have this as an option to abstain, not on ordinances or budgets, but on resolutions.

And this amendment brings our rules more in line with Robert's Rules of Order, where abstentions are allowed at all meetings.

Abstentions are allowed by other Washington cities, such as Tacoma, Renton, and Yakima.

And while one may argue that we are elected officials, we're here to make decisions, abstaining is not really a decision.

Yes, and we were elected to make decisions on ordinances and budgets and city government issues.

But resolutions can sometimes stray from the city charter obligations.

And the time that we and our teams and our central staff expend crafting, researching, debating many resolutions, they, um, it's time spent away from other ordinances and budget matters.

And so the ability to abstain, uh, still enables any resolution to come forward.

It's just, um, gives an option to, to the independently elected officials to, to abstain.

So, um, I think that, um, you know, for those who don't like the idea of abstentions, they don't have to abstain.

Um, you know, that's the, that's the responsibility and choice of the independently elected official to abstain according to Robert's rules of order.

And, um, I think that this would, this would help, um, with, uh, with productivity if we have this option.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you so much, Council Member Peterson.

Are there any comments or questions on amendment two?

I'm just going to scroll through here.

I'm not seeing any hands raised.

Council Member Peterson, I have generally taken the position that you described in your remarks, which is I do think resolutions in my mind are sort of statements of intent and policy.

and have generally been loathe to support the position of allowing council members to abstain during full council.

And I appreciate that your amendment has gotten nuanced since you and I first talked about this potential proposal and that you're now proposing to allow for abstentions only in those instances in which there aren't fiscal impacts.

I did want to ask Council Staff one technical question, which is that the amendment refers specifically to resolutions that come to the council with recommendations from the select budget committee.

And there are other amendments in the resolution attachment that make a finance committee a standing committee.

And so I'm a little worried that because now it's very, very narrow to the select budget committee that there might be resolutions that come From the finance related committee on finance related issues that would not fall under the umbrella.

Of this particular amendment and council rule, if amended, so can you can you just walk us through.

Other aspects of the council rule related to.

To the sort of.

how finance committee issues are dealt with in terms of the structure of the City Council.

Sure, I'm happy to start and pass it to you, Dan.

We certainly had discussion about how to capture the idea of non-budget resolutions into technical language and recognize budget-related work happens both in the finance committee and the select budget committee.

I think our sense is that the bulk of the resolutions come out of the Select Budget Committee when you are setting the budget for the next year.

Language certainly could be expanded to include the Finance Committee if there was a sense that we were going to miss a significant body of resolutions there.

Dan, do you want to weigh in with any more detail on that thinking?

I was going to cover the same ground.

I don't have anything to add.

Yeah, I think on the finance committee now, I acknowledge that our finance committee is oftentimes coupled with other issues, right?

Whether it's housing or labor standard issues or other kinds of issues.

And so I don't intend to sort of make all of those things part of this discussion.

But I would hate For there to be the unintended consequence of resolutions related to the budget, say, for example, supplementary budgets.

To not to be included in sort of this, you can abstain on those resolutions, I think, would be.

Inappropriate.

So, so I'm interested in.

I have softened my position.

Congratulations.

Council member Peterson.

I've softened my position on this issue.

And, um, and, but, but do you think that it would be wise to try to capture those resolutions?

that may come from budget ordinances, uh, through, um, through a non select budget committee process.

Um, and, and, and so would like to sort of think through, um, how to better capture that intent, um, so that it's not entirely limited to budget related legislation through budget process.

Yeah, and I think I'll add, I think it would probably take a little bit more work on our behalf this week to be workshopping with you all to figure out how to define that budget aspect.

So you could either support this, and then we could try to bring a technical amendment that further narrows.

Or you could hold this, and we could bring a version of it that makes some of those changes for Monday.

Great.

Great.

Council Member Strauss, your hand is raised, please.

Thank you, Council President.

Thank you, Council Member Peterson.

Another good intention here, which I want to support.

I do understand that there is a fair amount of city business that is contained within resolutions that come from committee.

And so I propose a friendly amendment, if possible, that the exception for, so it would be, however, council members would not be allowed to abstain from council votes on resolutions that refer to city business.

So if a resolution is before us that is regarding something that is not germane to our daily duties in city business that an extension is allowed.

However, if the resolution is regarding city business and extension would not be allowed to Sharon.

I think that's kind of getting to the heart of what I was trying to articulate, although I was trying to keep it just to the finance aspect, since that's what Councilmember Peterson was proposing in his base amendment.

I will call on Councilmember Peterson in a minute.

I want to give you, Councilmember Peterson, the benefit of hearing more Councilmember reactions, and then certainly want to invite you into the dialogue once you have the benefit of hearing I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think not vote on resolutions that are unrelated to city business, and I support that, but don't want to cast the net too wide with that discretion.

Thank you.

Great.

Dan, go ahead.

Thank you.

I was going to Picking up on Council Member Herbold's point, when we are workshopping, if this gets put in a request for staff to work with interested parties on a proposal, I think it might be a good idea to make there be some decider about which resolutions fall into the camp of being acceptable for abstentions because they relate to city business or to meet some other objective criteria.

That could be a discretionary call that's made by the council president at the time of introduction and referral or at some later date.

But I do think that there would need to be some decider of whether a resolution meets the criteria or doesn't in order to set the stage for votes at full council.

Dan, you were reading my mind.

We have worked together for too long or just enough, apparently.

I was thinking the same thing.

The phrase city business is in the eye of the beholder in terms of how to define it.

And so I do think that somebody would need to make the call about whether or not the item was related to city business that would not prevent the resolution for being introduced on the referral calendar, it would just simply trigger this particular provision of the council rule to allow individual council members to exercise their discretion by either voting for, against, or abstaining on that resolution.

So I I am gonna suggest that, well, first of all, before I make suggestions, I did promise Council Member Peterson an opportunity to engage in the conversation.

So I will fulfill my commitment and call on Council Member Peterson.

Thank you, Council President.

Yes, the intent of city business or not, that was actually thought of, and then we ran into the same problem of how do we decide that that puts a big burden on the Council President, and then there's an argument about what city business or not, like the sponsor might think it is and the Council President doesn't.

And so that's how we narrowed it down to the budget.

I would be very open to a budget committee and finance committee.

And we could try it out and see how it goes because, you know, these rules are an art and we put them in practice and see how it goes.

And again, this is, the abstention is really on the council members abstaining.

So if somebody is upset, like, hey, they should be making a decision.

I mean, we have to answer to our constituents.

So, and it's Robert's rules of order.

So I feel like why should each independent elected official be required to then research I'm not concerned about that.

I'm concerned about international law that has some small nexus to the city business.

that's what I'm concerned about.

I'm trying to solve for.

not burden nine council staffs and central staff with a very substantive issue that's important but might be in the form of a resolution that's

Okay, I do think that workshopping either a definition around what city business is or creating a decider can potentially be complicated.

So I'm gonna suggest, oh, I'm sorry, Council Member Strauss, go ahead, before I suggest a potential path forward, go ahead.

Thank you for letting me just keep piping in with my thoughts as we are in an iterative moment here.

I would suggest city business without a definition and the city clerk being the decider.

And I'll step back.

Oh, city clerk.

City clerk.

Are you suggesting the city clerk or the city president?

I'm happy with either to be completely frank.

Okay.

Yeah, usually we don't put our city clerk in the position of making decisions that can have political implications.

So, for the sort of.

COB, Lauren Kilcoyne she-her, she-hers, she-hers, she-hers.

doesn't prevent a resolution from moving forward, it simply opens up the door to whether or not a council member will be able to abstain.

And so that's what the effect, I think, is of adopting Amendment 2, is just allowing for that opportunity to be, that discretion to be exercised.

What I was going to suggest is that for the sake of keeping the ball moving here.

I would suggest that we take a vote on Amendment 2 and that we in the next day or two work to create some amendment language that will be acceptable.

You know I think I think I am inclined I would like to see language that would either allow for an opportunity to sort of Uh, look at sort of city council business, uh, determined as determined by the council president.

language, and I think it's also important for us to have language that makes it about, you know, budget-related legislation that comes from the finance or select budget committees.

In either instances, I will flag that I think that the council president is going to be put in the situation of making the call as to whether something is budget-related.

So I think if if staff can put a little bit more thinking into those two potential opportunities, um, um, I would really greatly appreciate that.

Um, and I think that, uh, for today's purposes, I would like us to advance, um, this resolute this amendment out of committee with the understanding that there will likely be some additional modifications.

Does that sound, does that sound acceptable to members of the committee?

Councilor Mosqueda?

Thank you, Council President.

I just want to make sure that I heard you accurately.

Were you encouraging council members to take a yes vote on this item?

I am encouraging folks to take a yes vote on this item for purposes of advancing it out of committee and making sure that we have this as part of the base legislation for us to modify by either having one of the two options that I've described.

And could the clerk please scroll up?

We're talking about amendment number two, correct?

Correct.

Okay.

Madam President, I am happy to follow your recommendation on this.

I will note no matter where I think the The bill comes from, I think that it is a crucial part of our job that we have all of the council members voting on final pieces of legislation, regardless of the committee and the impact.

So I will vote yes on this, but I was very much prepared to vote no.

I do think that even as it relates to resolutions, I would like to see council members taking a final vote in the final full council meetings, but I will take a yes.

I'm going to turn it back over to you.

the viewing public and any other council members who might disagree with including this in the base, there's always an opportunity to have an amendment to pull it out on Monday.

If that is something that anyone intends to do, I would ask that you contact our office right away so that we can work with council central staff and the city clerk's office on managing those logistics.

Any other comments or questions?

All right, will the clerk please?

Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

I'm sorry, just so that I understand that.

So we're not amending this at all to scope it to resolutions, for example.

This would be on items that have come to us that don't have an implication from the budget commit.

OK, go ahead if you could repeat for me.

No, no, no.

Amendment 2 in its base form is what we're voting on.

Amendment 2 is strictly limited to resolutions only.

Okay.

I apologize.

I misunderstood.

I still have concerns about just resolutions, but I will be voting yes on this, um, for your recommendation.

Okay.

Thank you.

Okay.

Um, will the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of amendment two?

Council Member Morris?

Aye.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Council Member Mosqueda?

Aye.

Councilor Strauss?

Yes.

Chair Gonzalez?

Yes.

That's five in favor, none opposed.

Great, thank you so much.

The motion carries and the amendment is adopted.

Okay, we have amendment three now.

I will move, oh, I will hand it over to Director Handy to brief us on amendment three.

I'm moving too quickly here, go ahead.

No problem.

Amendment three is co-authored by Councilmember Peterson and Councilmember Herbold.

I am characterizing this as a technical correction.

And so I invite you, it's a little bit complicated, but I invite you to address it with that amount of time and attention.

Each of these council members identified this issue in the underlying resolution in a different way.

So, V, actually, it might be helpful if you scroll up just so we can see the language that is actually changed.

Yeah, right there.

So just down a little bit more so we, into membership, so we see three there.

So the underlying, sorry, at our last committee meeting, we talked about the temporal nature of introducing legislation.

At the time of introduction, any council member may sponsor a piece of legislation.

When that legislation is in committee, only members of the committee may offer amendments to that legislation.

And an amendment to the resolution was clarifying that intent.

And then at full council, any council member may again sign on as a co-sponsor.

There was confusion about what does it mean to sponsor legislation after introduction?

And to clarify that confusion, we are striking the word legislation here in three.

So the change here indicates that council members on a committee may sponsor amendments before the committee.

Our intent here, again, is a technical cleanup of this language.

Great.

Thank you so much, Director Handy.

I'm going to go ahead and move Amendment 3 so we can have a discussion about this one.

I will move to amend Resolution 32029 as presented on Amendment 3 on the agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you so much.

It's been moved and seconded to adopt Amendment 3 as presented on the agenda.

I'm going to hand it over to, let's see, who wants to talk on this one first, Council Member Herbold?

Okay, Councilmember Herbold, I'm going to hand it over to you to, excuse me, to talk through this one.

Thank you for reading my body language.

I think Director Handy did a fine job of explaining it.

It's technical and coming up.

It eliminates a confusing reference to sponsoring legislation that has already been referred to committee, which is not possible.

I don't think that was the intent of the languages drafted, but that is one reading of it, and this amendment clarifies that.

Great.

Thank you so much, Council Member Herbold.

Anything to add, Council Member Peterson?

Okay, nothing to add.

Colleagues, any other comments or questions?

This is a technical amendment.

We had a conversation about it at last week's committee meeting and realized there was sort of a straggler word there that needed to be struck to capture the true intent.

But any questions or comments on Amendment 3?

I don't see any hands raised, so we're gonna go ahead and call the roll.

Will the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment 3?

Council Member Juarez?

Aye.

Council Member Lewis?

Aye.

Council Member Mosqueda?

Aye.

Council Member Strauss?

Yes.

Okay, I'm standing right now.

Aye.

And then Council Member Mosqueda, you are not on mute.

Oh, excuse me.

All right, the motion carries the amendment is adopted and we will now move on to the next.

Amendment.

The next amendment is number 10. I'll say that the next three amendments address sponsorship of legislation in some way.

The numbering is the number in which we drafted them, but we are presenting a couple of these out of order to group them by subject matter.

I'll note that none of these next three are in conflict with each other.

They all address sponsorship in some way, but operate independently.

So amendment 10 is authored by council member Strauss.

It creates a new provision that a piece of legislation that does not have a council member sponsor may be introduced as either executive requested or department requested legislation.

You may recall from our discussion last week that the underlying resolution made a change to clarify the council's current practice that a bill may be introduced without a sponsor.

This would further amend that change as described, so that if it did not have a council member sponsor, the council president could assign executive requested or department requested to that legislation.

Great, thank you so much, Director Handy.

This one is, as mentioned by Director Handy, sponsored by Council Member Strauss.

I'm gonna recognize Council Member Strauss to make his motion.

Thank you, Council President.

This is, per our conversation last week, I took some time to help further refine what I meant as city business, et cetera, et cetera.

You'll see on this amendment- Council Member Strauss, I'm sorry to interrupt, but you have to make your motion first before we can discuss it.

Go ahead.

I move to move amendment 10 as described on the agenda.

Is there a second?

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you so much.

OK, it has been moved and seconded.

sorry for being such a stickler on the rules during a rules conversation here, has been moved and seconded to adopt Amendment 10 as presented on the agenda.

Council Member Strauss, you are recognized in order to address your amendment.

Thank you, and thank you to all the city clerks that have made me memorize that language at this point.

So thanks to them.

So what you'll see with this amendment, as well as Amendment 15, Order O, is that I'm bringing some practices from the state legislatures that I've worked in.

I've worked here at the City of Seattle for four years, and I worked at the state legislatures for six to eight years, six years, I believe.

I'm not counting, doesn't matter.

The intent of this amendment is so that we never have legislation that that comes out of thin air that we can't track to where it originated from.

And I also understand the need that there's sometimes legislation that comes before us.

that is not generated by any council member or the council president that is in need for good governance.

And so this amendment would demonstrate and assign the department that requested the legislation or the executive themselves so that there is still a name associated with the legislation and freeze the council to oppose or support the legislation based on its merits.

This is the practice in Olympia.

Oftentimes, legislation is submitted that does not have a sponsor or co-sponsor of the legislature.

Rather, it is department requested.

And so following that practice, this is my amendment.

Great, thank you so much.

Council Member Herbold, please.

A question for the sponsor.

One of the public testimony that we heard from the League of Women Voters was that additional language was needed to ensure that the practice is used rarely.

Do you feel that this additional language that you are proposing will help to maybe not insure, but to facilitate a goal of minimizing the number of times that bills are referred without a specific sponsor.

Yes, I did hear that testimony and that's a good flag.

Thank you, Councilmember Perrold.

I had it on my notes and wasn't reading my notes.

I'm happy to have a friendly amendment to say this should be the exception, not the rule.

I don't necessarily have language prepared for that, but it's welcome.

In sort of response to that particular commentary, I do want to make part of the record in our conversation the reality that it is, my understanding is that it is currently the city attorney's position that the charter and relevant Seattle Municipal Codes do allow for bills to be introduced without a sponsor.

And that's part of the reason why we included the language in the base resolution is just simply to memorialize that existing authority within the charter and relevant Seattle Municipal Code.

So I don't want to create the inference or the impression to members of the public or other council members that somehow we're creating some kind of new right in terms of the issue of listing legislation with a no sponsor required.

That being said, I do understand Councilmember Strauss' intent, which is to create some additional transparency for members of the viewing public as to the genesis of the legislation if it is not coming from a specific from a specific council member.

Arguably it has been a little odd to have legislation listed on the introduction and referral calendar with no sponsor required and it does sort of in practice present Situation in which it's unclear as to which council member is going to actually speak to.

A particular piece of legislation if there is.

No, 1 listed as the point person, so I don't think that that last point I've made is resolved having it listed as, you know.

executive or department requested, but do want to acknowledge that I appreciate and understand the sponsor's goal to have some additional transparency around where the bill is coming from if it isn't coming from a legislator.

Colleagues, any other comments or questions on this one?

Okay, I'm not hearing any other comments or seeing any other hands raised, so I'm going to go ahead and ask that the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment 10.

Council Member Juarez?

Aye.

Lewis?

Aye.

Mosqueda?

Aye.

Strauss?

Yes.

Chair Gonzalez?

Aye.

Five in favor, none opposed.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Okay.

The motion carries.

The amendment is adopted and the amended bill is before the council.

Amendment number 11.

Take it away, Director Handy.

Great.

Amendment 11 is authored by Council Member Herbold, and it establishes the expectation that the council president will confer with the relevant committee chair prior to placing legislation on the introduction and referral calendar.

And it addresses the situation specifically in the case where the sponsor of the legislation does not have the support of the chair who has subject matter jurisdiction in their committee on this issue.

From our committee discussion last week, my understanding is that currently that is the practice and this amendment would clarify and standardize that practice by placing it in the council rules.

Thank you so much, Director Handy.

Appreciate that.

I'm going to go ahead and move this amendment to allow for discussion.

I move to amend Resolution 32029 as presented on Amendment 11 on the agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate that.

Again, this has been moved and seconded to adopt Amendment 11 as presented on the agenda.

I am going to hand it over to Councilmember Herbold, who is the designated author of the amendment, in order to address it.

Thank you so much.

Really appreciate it.

Again, the opportunity to address this issue.

I appreciate the understanding that this is in fact the current practice.

I do feel that there is a real value of being able to demonstrate to the public that this is the practice.

I recall recently developing a constituent response to constituents who were unhappy that the council had not introduced a piece of legislation and I was looking for the reference that no, it's actually part of the job of the council president to confer with the committee chair before deciding to circumvent a committee and send something to full council.

So really appreciate that that is the practice, but also would value memorializing that practice so that the general public understands the decision-making and the basis for the decision-making of the council president.

This, again, this amendment would recognize the important role of committee chairs in setting and accomplishing an annual work agenda by requiring the, by clarifying that the expectation is that the council president consult with the committee chair with jurisdiction over the legislation before putting it on the IRC.

the council president, this does not limit their ability to make an independent decision about the IRC, and the sponsoring council member can still make a request to send it to the IRC.

But I believe this strikes a balance in recognizing the authority and the important role played by committee chairs.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Council Member Herbold.

Well said.

Are there any comments or questions?

Council Member Juarez, please.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Councilor Herbold, I have a question for you, and I know that you're clarifying an ongoing practice.

I'm just going to be candid because we've seen this happen.

Would this kind of rule apply to not just the IRC and legislation, but if a committee chair sets deadlines for amendments?

And, you know, I've had this happen where a couple committee members were not happy or didn't meet the deadline and then went to the council president and said.

You know, I want to be able to walk on amendments, but the council, but the committee chair had a deadline, which I didn't meet, but now I want to do it.

Would this help with that remedy this.

But this is that.

All right, this is, I think, focused on a particular subject as it relates to the decision to refer legislation to either a committee or directly to full council.

It's specific to the IRC process, not on this.

All right, thank you.

Yeah, and then Director Handy or City Clerk, staff, can you address the portion of the council rules that does address the issue raised by Councilmember Juarez?

Sorry, I know that if you'd want to handle that, I can ask Liz.

She has the rules open and available.

Liz, can you review that?

So, this is this is the aspect lives just to orient and here is the aspects of council members ability to bring amendments for outside of the committee structure.

Thank you.

I am looking for it and we'll get back to you briefly.

Okay.

No, no worries.

I would just say that my understanding of the council rules, having been the council president for the last 2 years and on the council for the last 6 years is that there is a separate rule that allows council members, whether you're a committee member or not a committee member, To bring amendments forward up to noon of the day of our city council meetings, which is currently Monday.

So long as it circulated by then, then you are able to bring that forward.

So, in order to address.

the issue raised by Council Member Juarez where a chair imposes a deadline for amendments.

There would need to be an amendment to the council rules, it is my belief.

There would need to be an amendment to the council rules to allow for a chair to impose a deadline and for there to not be an opportunity for a council member to circumvent that deadline.

But I'm looking to either council central staff or city clerk's office to affirm or clarify my understanding of the rules.

Certainly, I can chime in here on the rule itself regarding amendments to bills and resolutions.

It states that they shall not be presented at a city council meeting unless previously reviewed by the law department and circulated via email to all CMs, the central staff director, and the city clerk at least two hours before the meeting.

In cases including but not limited to amendments to develop regulations subject to the Growth Management Act, a statute may require additional public notice and opportunity for public comment before an amended bill may be passed.

So that is the current rule for amendments to be presented at a city council meeting.

For my clarification, are you seeking any additional rules that apply specifically to amendments at committee meetings?

Madam Chair, may I?

Sure, go ahead.

No, I'm good.

I understood, and thank you, Council President, for clarifying.

I understood that part of the rule, but you were right.

I wasn't thinking that quite through.

But no, I think I'm good with what we have, so I'm ready to vote.

Thank you.

Yeah, no worries, Consumer Awareness.

I mean, I really think that some of us have really exercised the practice as chairs of setting deadlines for workflow management.

I think for the most part, we see a high compliance rate, but I certainly appreciate the perspective that you're bringing that sometimes that is not the case and it can be frustrating and somewhat unpredictable.

So certainly hear that.

Okay, colleagues, any other questions on Amendment 11?

I am not hearing any other questions on Amendment 11, so I'm going to ask that the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment 11. Morris.

Aye.

Lewis.

Aye.

Mosqueda.

Aye.

Strauss.

Yes.

Chair Gonzalez.

Aye.

That's five in favor, none opposed.

The motion carries.

The amendment is adopted.

Okay.

Amendment 19, Director Handy.

Amendment 19 is also authored by Council Member Herbold and is one we are characterizing as a technical amendment.

The underlying resolution, if you want to stop right there, that's perfect on that language, adds language to clarify the number of sponsors that are added to a piece of legislation pre-introduction and outside of open session.

shall not meet or exceed a quorum.

The language, sorry, in the underlying resolution said, read, meet a quorum, and to be compliant with the Open Public Meetings Act, it should read meet or exceed.

So an example with this amendment, a five-member committee that has a quorum of three could have up to two sponsors added to the legislation prior to introduction and outside of open session.

If additional sponsors were to be added, they would need to be added in open session in committee or at full council.

Thank you so much, Director Handy.

I move to amend Resolution 32029 as presented on Amendment 19 on the agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you so much.

It's been moved and seconded to adopt Amendment 19 as presented on the agenda.

Council Member Herbold, you are listed as the author, so I'm going to hand it over to you to address the amendment.

Nothing to add.

It's technical, correcting an inadvertent error.

And thanks for flagging it at our meeting last week.

Really appreciate that close eye to these details.

Colleagues, any other questions on this technical amendment?

Hearing none, will the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment 19.

Flores?

Aye.

Lewis?

Yes.

Mosqueda?

Aye.

Strauss?

Yes.

Chair Gonzalez?

Aye.

That's five in favor, Madam Chair.

The motion carries.

The amendment is adopted and we will now move on to the next amendment, which is Amendment 4.

The amendment number four addresses council briefings.

It is the first in a series about the council schedule.

Amendment four is authored by council member Peterson and Juarez.

And it would emphasize the ability of the council president to determine whether to conduct regular council briefings.

The current language in the rules says that the council shall hold council briefing meetings.

And subsequent sections lay out the regular location and schedule of the briefing meetings.

And it includes language that says the council briefings may be canceled by the president at any time.

This amendment changes the shall to may language, clarifying that the council may, at the discretion of the council president, hold council briefing meetings.

Two more notes.

One is that this amendment is compatible with the subsequent amendments you will consider 6A, B, C, which proposes changes to the council briefing date and full council meeting date.

So you could adopt this and future amendments together.

And finally, just one piece on logistics.

It's the recommendation of the working group that if council briefing becomes more permissive, so you accept the may rather than shall language, And in the case that the council president does choose to hold council briefing meetings during the year, that that council president set a regular schedule for them alongside standing committees, which avoids sort of a burdensome noticing process for a bunch of special meetings for council briefing.

So if you accept the May language here, the council president would have the choice to not hold council briefings at all.

if the Council President is going to the working group recommends that they set them on a regular schedule.

Okay, let's go ahead and get the amendment before us so we can have a conversation.

Council Member Juarez, are you prepared to make the motion here?

Let me grab my Yes, I am now scrambling what Councilmember Strauss was doing.

I move that the committee consider trying to find it here.

Is it amendment number four?

That's right.

That's right.

Thank you.

Okay, so it's been moved to amend resolution 32029 as presented on amendment four on the agenda.

Is there a second?

Can I second my motion?

No, I will, I will, I will second it for you.

I'd be happy to do that.

So it's been moved and seconded to adopt amendment four is presented.

That would be quite the rule.

I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to customer.

Why did you want to address it first?

Or do you want customer Peterson to address it first?

I can address it briefly, and I'll let Councilmember Peterson take the laboring ore.

In our discussions, and thank you, Council President, and thank you, Director Handy, and everybody else who worked on this with Elizabeth and Monica.

One of the main issues that I wanted to push this forward really had a lot to do with the fact that we are now virtual, and the strain and the exhaustion on people, their mental health, their physical health.

Um, and screen time, sometimes we're looking at a screen up to 7, 8 hours a day, multiple meetings in not just Seattle City Council, but of course, as, you know, regional meetings, King County meetings, and then constituent.

And so, for me, I would like to change the shell to may so that the council president.

It is more permissive and the council president does have more discretion, but that we also work with our phenomenal staff to make sure that we meet the notice process.

Because I know that that's where the scramble comes in is making sure that there's notice.

And using the best use of our time when we're looking at a screen for the viewing public and for our constituents.

So I'll leave it at that.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Council Member Peterson, anything you'd like to add?

Thank you, Council President.

No, I don't have anything to add.

Thank you.

Great.

Any comments or questions on this amendment?

Council Member Strauss, please.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Councilmember Juarez and Peterson, for bringing this forward.

I think we're changing mays and shalls, and it's really just splitting hairs between a shall and a may.

And it's my understanding that the Council President can suspend the rules.

My preference is that we keep it as a shall and suspend the rules.

I feel like I'm coming at this from the same intention at all of you.

I just want you to know where I'm standing with it.

Thank you.

Great, thanks so much customer stress.

Any other comments or questions on this one.

I do plan to support this particular amendment, colleagues.

I think it reflects the intent of allowing the flexibility and the discretion for the council president to do it and document it, as opposed to just letting it live by inference in the rules of suspension.

So I do plan to support this one, and again, whether or not this plays out in practice in terms of actually canceling council briefings is a different question, but at least there is the discretion to allow for it to occur should the council president in consultation with council members believe it would be prudent to cancel.

Are there any other comments or questions?

All right.

Hearing none, will the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment 4.

Morris?

Aye.

Lewis aye Mosqueda aye Strauss no Chair Gonzales aye.

That's 4 in favor 1 opposed.

Thank you so much.

The motion does carry.

The amendment is adopted and we will now move to a discussion of a suite of amendments.

The next three amendments 6A 6B and 6C represent three different options for how to amend the council's regular schedule of council briefings and city council meetings.

Since they are mutually exclusive alternatives, we can only adopt one of these three amendments.

So in other words, colleagues, you have three adventures to consider before you.

It's one, two, three.

You cannot pick more than one adventure.

So keep that in mind as you are voting, all of these are mutually exclusive.

If you pick adventure 1. That's your adventure, assuming assuming it passes.

So so just want to make sure that folks understand that we will be discussing all 3 amendments at the same time, but take votes individually.

But we will we will be.

putting all three options on the table so that we can have a collective conversation about the potential options before us and that folks can have a well-informed decision when they are asked to vote.

Okay, Council Member Strauss, I'm gonna call on you to move your proposed amendment, which is Amendment 6A.

Council President?

Oh, I'm sorry.

We're going to have a discussion.

Sorry.

Go ahead.

Director Handy, sorry about that.

Our recommendation is that we explain the three and then invite a motion.

And I'm going to pass it to Dan to tee these up.

Yeah.

Now, I appreciate that.

Again, I've been, I feel like just living with these amendments and moving faster than what I should be.

Thank you for the reminder.

Go ahead, Dan.

Thank you very much.

V, I think it might be helpful to put up the overview that shows the status quo and the three amendments related to meeting schedules.

As the Council President mentioned, There are three options that have been posted to the agenda.

Amendments 6A, 6B, and 6C.

My understanding is that one of these amendments is not going to proceed, and I would ask for confirmation from the sponsor of 6C, please.

And I will...

Council Member Mosqueda, you are the sponsor of proposed amendment 6C, so I'm going to recognize you to answer Dan Eater's question.

Thank you, Council President.

Thank you, Deputy Director Kerr.

Eater, you are correct.

Colleagues, I am going to be limiting your adventure choices to two.

We will go ahead and remove 6C from the docket here today.

Just, I see Cherry.

Just a quick follow-up on this.

In our last committee meeting, I had indicated interest in a Wednesday meeting I'm going to move 6C.

I will go ahead and remove 6C.

Great.

Okay.

I appreciate that Council Member Mosqueda.

I really, really do appreciate it.

So we will focus the presentation from Council Central staff and the discussion to proposed amendments 6A and 6B.

Again, you have two adventure choices.

You can choose one, but not both.

Thank you, Council President.

So this matrix has a lot of information on it.

I thought it might be helpful to try to capture all of the moving parts that show what's labeled in the first column as the status quo situation.

And that's just what is in the resolution that is before you before any amendments come up.

And then the next two columns labeled at the top 6A and 6B show you how the amendment would change the status quo.

So I think it might be helpful for me to stay at the high level and then address any questions.

At the highest level, the current situation reflected in the resolution before you would have the briefings, the council briefings happen at 9.30 in the morning on Mondays.

And the council meetings happen at 2 p.m.

on Mondays.

and that is the way things stand today.

The Amendment 6A would change the briefings meeting schedule from 9.30 a.m.

on Monday to 2 p.m.

on Monday, and that is the same for 6B.

So there is no conflict between the two amendments with respect to when the briefings happen on a regular basis.

The major change from the status quo between 6A and 6B is with respect to council meetings, regular council meetings, would move in 6A from 2 p.m.

on Monday to Tuesday at 930 in the morning.

In 6B, council meetings would move from Mondays at 2 p.m.

to Tuesdays at 2 p.m.

So in both cases, you'd be moving from a Monday to a Tuesday.

But the difference here is that the regular meetings in 6A would be at 930 in the morning versus 2 p.m.

in 6B.

The implications for those are as described in the next three rows.

The most significant one is when Mondays fall on a legal holiday, there is a rolling effect that are addressed differently in 6A versus 6B.

So I'm just going to give a minute to this, and then I will open to questions.

When Monday falls on a holiday, the the Monday briefings would move to a Tuesday in 6A.

They would move to they would necessarily have to move to Tuesday afternoon because Mondays are proposed to be sorry, Tuesdays in the morning are proposed to be council meetings.

So that means that the council meeting would also have to change if it's going to happen after the council briefing.

So there's a change from briefings go from Monday to Tuesday on a legal holiday that falls on a Monday.

Council moves from Tuesday to Wednesday.

And then the committee meetings that would normally happen on those days both get bumped to Friday in the morning and the afternoon.

In 6B, there is a different approach for what happens with Monday holidays.

Council briefings would be canceled.

There are five or six of them, I think, that happen throughout the year where Monday is a legal holiday outside of normal council recess at the end of August and December.

Those five or six regularly scheduled council briefings under 6B would simply be canceled.

That means that would not need to be a change to the Tuesday Council meeting it could continue as regularly planned The only other thing that I'll highlight for you, although there are some implications for what happens when I leave Tuesday We don't have to talk about the Wednesday one anymore because see has been withdrawn but there Also talking about B8, which calls for any amendments that are going to come to council to be distributed at least two hours before the council meeting.

If in 6A, the council meeting is at 930 in the morning, two hours before the start of a council meeting would be 730 in the morning.

And so 6A understands that that would be very, very early in the morning.

and pushes the deadline to 5 p.m.

on the preceding business day for any amendments coming to the full council meetings.

That's a lot of information I pushed at you.

I'd be very happy to answer questions.

Great.

Thank you so much, Dan.

Really appreciate it.

Sue, now is the time for us to have a conversation.

I do want to get I'm assuming that is why you are raising your hand.

You have a question about the actual proposals.

Why don't you go ahead and ask your question.

Okay.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you, Sponsor Strauss.

On this one, I do have a question about the implications of withdrawing A and being left with only 6B.

As I understand the description of 6B, it would necessitate in every instance where there is a Monday holiday in briefings being canceled.

as opposed to having the option of scheduling it another day.

Council President, would you like me to address that?

Yes, please.

Council Member Herbold, you are correct that regularly scheduled meetings would be canceled to the extent that the council president and council members generally wished to hold a council briefing during such a week where there is a Monday holiday.

I would defer to Elizabeth Atkinson and Monica Martinez to talk about the process for scheduling a special meeting of a council briefing.

That is certainly a distinct possibility that would still live within the council rules.

You just would not have a regular meeting of the council briefings automatically move to another day.

I would say that the change here, Councilmember Herbold, is to create an expectation that the council briefings would be canceled unless otherwise predetermined by the council president in coordination with the city clerk's office to schedule that.

In order to meet the public notice requirements, I think that you would probably get pretty early notification of whether you could expect a council briefing on those weeks in which they are scheduled to be canceled because of a holiday.

But we'll call on Elizabeth or Monica to provide a little bit more detail on that.

Liz, do you want to address that after discussing that with the deputy city clerks?

Sure, I would advise exactly what was contemplated is that the council rule set the regular schedule and so this would set a regular schedule where those Monday council briefings that fall on a Monday holiday would be canceled and that would be the regular schedule and then it would be up to the council president to schedule a special council briefing as needed in accordance with all the noticing requirements of the OPMA when it is so desired for those specific weeks.

So I think that just is exactly in alignment with the other information provided.

So again, we're setting a regular schedule, but it never precludes a special meeting from being noticed.

I would say, though, then the difference is when you do notice a special meeting, the agenda is set and the agenda cannot be modified at the time of the special meeting.

So that would just be one difference there when you had a special meeting of the council for a council briefing, is that nothing could be added to the agenda at the time of the meeting, such as an additional executive session, et cetera.

Go ahead customer herbal, please.

I appreciate that the rules allow for the scheduling of a special.

Council briefings meeting, I'm wondering logistically.

Under this scheme, is there time left on a four-day calendar to do that?

The 6A, under that scheme, there is an available time slot.

I'm not sure, because I haven't done this helpful exercise that I know you all have done.

Is there a time slot that is available under 6B should it be necessary to schedule a council briefing as a special meeting?

If it's all right, I'll go ahead and try to speak to that as well.

So that would also then be determined by the committee meeting schedule for that particular week.

As you're aware of that, our next biennial schedule for committees will be set in January of 2022, and then we'll know for sure.

when our standing committee meetings have been set.

So I would say at this time we don't we don't know for sure.

We do know when the Monday holidays would occur for the next two years.

Those are pretty well set.

So we know there'll be about seven each year in the next two years because of all of our federal holidays that we do observe.

And so therefore that would be seven council briefings that would either be canceled such as after the Martin Luther King holiday in January or the President's Day holiday in February.

And then you would potentially be looking at those weeks dependent on a committee schedule of when you could fit it in to whatever has been determined at the beginning of the year.

So not a straight answer, but at least a little more information on how you would be able to try to fit that in.

If it's okay, I'd like to chime in as well.

There is, you know, the current practice, aside from the rules that have been introduced at this point and the amendments under consideration, the current practice is when As a holiday, the briefings have been moved to Tuesday.

Any committee meetings that were regularly scheduled on Tuesday have been moved to Friday.

So I do think that that is another avenue that if council members are partial to, we could, I don't wanna work it up on the specific language on the fly, but I could work with council members behind the scenes for a further amendment at council.

Thanks, Dan, for that.

I'm not sure that we need a further amendment here to clarify that that would happen.

I will say that I think that if there is the need to have a council briefing, because it was canceled due to a Monday holiday.

Effectively, we would just do what we do now, which is work with the chair of the committee who has a meeting at Tuesday at 9.30 AM to schedule them for Friday.

Fridays generally are kept pretty clear in terms of the city clerk's calendar in order to allow for those things too.

to be accommodated and for special meetings to be accommodated as well.

So I think to answer your question, Council Member Herbold, I think there is, there would be an opportunity to do that.

It's just a matter of putting it into effect on those weeks in which we know there is a Monday holiday that necessitates the canceling of the council briefing that will then put into play the need to coordinate with whomever the committee chair is on Tuesday morning at 9 30am to schedule their meetings for the following Friday.

I think that will all be determined in sort of granular detail once the next council president and the council adopt a resolution assigning both the schedule and the membership of those committees, including the chairs.

So I do think there is at least one day to give you some flexibility to be able to have those council briefings if needed.

All right.

Any other comments or questions on 6A or 6B?

Okay, Council Member Strauss, just confirming that you are still withdrawing Amendment 6A?

Yes, I'll defer to the wisdom of you and Council Member Juarez.

All right.

Well, I appreciate it.

OK.

OK, colleagues, so we will only have one amendment to move here, and I'm going to get back to the right place in my script here.

There it is.

OK.

I am I'm going to move to amend resolution 32029 as presented on Amendment 6B on the agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

It's been moved and seconded to adopt Amendment 6B as presented on the agenda.

This amendment is being co-sponsored by myself and Councilmember Juarez.

Again, as the discussion just illuminated, there is no perfect scheduling option here when we are running really busy.

committee schedules.

Each comes with their own sort of set of challenges, but I think that 6B does present the most viable option that will allow for the fewest number of potential drawbacks in terms of scheduling and logistics.

So I do think that maintaining city council meetings at 2 o'clock would represent the least disruptive changes to the current legislative process and deadlines for the publishing of agendas, materials, and amendments.

and having city council meetings at 9.30 a.m.

the day before actually, you know, I think would allow for us to have a little bit more time to work on things and not be as compressed by the time city council rolls around at two o'clock.

So I'm happy that this amendment is looking like it is viable, and my only regret is that I won't be able to benefit from it.

So Council Member Juarez, I'm going to hand it over to you to make any additional comments.

Oh, thank you.

I wasn't going to, but I'll just be very, very brief.

Thank you, Madam President.

And again, the reason why I think this is the best alternative, and I want to thank again the clerk staff for meeting with us, getting back to not making staff work on Sundays, particularly during budget, but also being mindful that we do need to have our legislative briefing and our executive sessions and that there's significant safeguards with discretion of the council president to move things around and having that time to prepare.

So thank you.

Thank you so much, Council Member Juarez.

Okay.

Are there any additional comments on Amendment 6B?

Council Member Mosqueda, please.

I'm really excited as well that we are not going to be having full councils on Monday.

And I want to thank central staff, you know, following up on Council Member Juarez's comments and yours, Council President.

The central staff have been willing to make themselves available and at the ready to craft amendments over the weekends and on nights.

And in direct opposition to the public comment that we heard this morning, no worker should have to do that.

Every worker deserves rest and time to be with their family and community.

And that is especially true from a body who constantly tries to lift up the work of I'm glad that we're able to move forward with this amendment today in light of the accusations and mischaracterization that I heard in my committee yesterday as it related to central staff as well.

I wanted to make sure to take this opportunity to just thank central staff for all of the work that they do over the weekend and recognize that this amendment expands to make sure that we are delivering our deliberations in a public way on Monday, but very happy that this will not be the norm going forward.

Thank you.

I'll be very quick.

Council Member Muscat, you forgot to thank our legislative staff, our staff in our office who find themselves working Sundays and Saturdays and on call and trying to redraft amendments.

So thank you.

Thank you for especially mentioning our teams and in our in our offices as well.

I want to acknowledge the, as the council president, the work that our council, sorry, our city clerks play, especially the deputy city clerks who pulled together Scripts and are making revisions until the very last minute, including over the weekend.

And so I think this will be a little bit of relief for them as well.

And really want to appreciate appreciate that that needed balance for them as well.

Council Member Herbold, please.

Just one more addition.

I really appreciate that the working group gave us an opportunity to provide input to this rule early on and because I'm sure others would have mentioned it, even if we all as all nine of us didn't do so.

My input was pleased in solving this problem for full council on Mondays.

Let's not replicate it for our committees on Monday.

And in particular, that would be a bigger burden.

I think on.

our individual office staffs.

So in trying to shift the burden for the clerk's office, we didn't wanna inadvertently create more of a burden for the legislative aid.

So just wanna thank the work group that in developing a proposal that they considered that input as well.

Councilmember Herbold, really important.

Sometimes in solving one issue, you inadvertently create another one, and that is certainly not what we wanted to do here, so appreciate that.

Okay, colleagues, I do think this brings us to the conclusion of discussion of Amendment 6B.

So in order to keep moving us along, I know we're running rather long.

I appreciate your patience and your commitment to staying on the line with us.

Will the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment 6B?

Morris aye Mosqueda aye Strauss yes Chair Gonzales aye.

That's four in favor none opposed.

Thank you so much.

The motion carries.

The amendment is adopted and we will now move to Amendment 5. I will hand it over to Director Handy to walk us through Amendment 5.

Thank you.

And congratulations, you're through 10. There's only five more to go.

We're so close.

We're almost there.

Just as a point of context.

Amendment five is authored by Council Member Peterson, and it addresses who may speak during a committee meeting and a council briefing during the consideration of a motion.

that has been made and seconded.

Specifically, this amendment would more explicitly provide the chair of a committee the power to determine whether legislative staff can address the committee when a motion is being considered.

And it would create a new rule that presenters who are not legislative staff are not allowed to address the committee or council briefing during consideration of a motion.

I'll just give that high level and happy to answer questions in the course of discussion.

Thank you so much, Director Handy.

I'm going to move to amend Resolution 32029 as presented on Amendment 5 on the agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

It's been moved and seconded to adopt Amendment 5 as presented on the agenda.

I'm going to hand it over to Council Member Peterson, who is the author of this amendment.

Thank you, Council President.

I'm excited about what just passed as well with 6B.

I know a lot of us independently thought of this idea and it was great to see there to be this independent consensus about doing something to relieve the weekend time.

to having things on Tuesday is a real big help.

So regarding this amendment, there might be different ways of doing this.

Sometimes committees will have outside guests or interest groups at the table, and this will still allow for that input at the chair's discretion to have that input.

It's really just saying, and especially important during these Zoom meetings when everybody's on the screen and it's not clear what the rules are at that time, once a motion is made and seconded, then it's really among the council members to have their deliberations.

It's our turn as elected officials to have the floor and really hash things out as elected.

So that was what this amendment is intended to do.

I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you for your patience because Council President, you know that after this I have to go.

But Council Member Peterson and I had a talk offline, and so he knows that I was going to tee this question up.

Yesterday, Council President, we had what you're kind of dealing with today, 15 amendments, and some of them conflicting and having to go through them.

And so I had posed to Council Member Peterson, yesterday we had a panel.

And we had issues that were there was a motion and a second and discussion amongst the committee.

And as the chair, I felt that I had the discretion to ask one of our presenters to respond to some of the questions that were being raised by my colleagues.

So what I wanted is for Councilmember Peterson to clarify I would want to maintain the discretion and the leadership of the committee chair to be able to make that decision.

I don't know if it needs to be a rule, but I'm certainly open to hearing specifically what you're trying to get at, Council Member Peterson.

Thank you, Council Member Juarez.

I have some of the same concerns and questions.

and would look to Councilmember Peterson to see if we can add any additional context for sort of the issue that is trying to be solved through this proposed amendment.

Yes, so if we're having a committee meeting, so certainly the chair is able to invite guests to the committee table and it's just when we get when the motions in play, that it's not for somebody who's not an elected official to be in the debate.

because other council members may feel pressure from that person.

It may sort of freeze the discussion a little bit since we're there to make the decisions and after we've taken input from various points of view, not just those who are at the table.

The zoo presents an interesting situation where we were literally talking about a contract or an agreement with that entity.

And so it was helpful to have that person there for technical questions.

So I'd be open to refining the language, except for when we're negotiating a contract or an agreement with somebody.

Director Handy?

Yeah, I just wanted to say the work group talked about a few different scenarios in this case.

And the one that we talked about most was the case where you have representatives of a department at the table and you are in a discussion such as this where you have moved motions and you are taking questions.

And as written here, the chair could the path for the chair to then invite a department member to answer a question would be to suspend this rule.

So this gives the chair the authority to call on council members or call on legislative staff if they wanted to invite a member of the executive staff or an outside member, there would be a motion to suspend the rules in order to allow that discussion during the consideration of a motion.

So procedurally, that's my understanding of what it would look like in practice.

Thank you, Director Handy, appreciate it.

Any other comments or questions?

Council Member Juarez and then Council Member Musqueda.

So, Director Handy, don't we do that anyway?

Do we need another layer of suspending the rules?

I mean, I could call out many situations as a council president can as well for being on council for six years where sometimes at the table, chair will invite a person that isn't particularly a subject matter expert or a department head but is a activist or advocate for that particular issue where they find themselves, the elected on the committee finds themselves having to Pretty much debate the, the guest if that's what we're getting at, I'd rather we just say that that's what I'm trying to get at because ultimately the chair is the officer of the meeting and can make that call.

But I'm, I'm again, I'm kind of struggling with what what exactly.

we're trying to get at, because I think we already have the power to do that.

And like yesterday, wouldn't just be limited to contracts, it'd be limited to anyone that's just sitting there.

Sometimes we have people that don't even really represent a group, but have an opinion and are a friend or a guest of the chair and sit at the table and respond and act like an elected and respond and even to the point of having claiming subject matter knowledge.

So I'm trying to get at, am I being a little bit too candid here or am I just not getting it?

Well, let me just try one other way.

And maybe if you could scroll up a little bit just to show the edited language here so we're all looking at the same piece.

My understanding is that currently what you just described, Council Member Juarez, is what the chair, the power that the chair has.

The chair has the power to acknowledge speakers, both council members and guests or presenters at their committee during debate.

This would change that to say that no person other than a council member or as allowed by the chair Legislative department may speak.

So if the chair wanted to allow somebody other than a council member or legislative Staff to speak they would need to suspend the rules.

So it changes the power that the chair has without suspending the rules Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

I know, Council President, we have a lot of amendments and we want to keep as many council members on as possible.

I'm just going to say, council members, I am not in support of this amendment.

I think that, again, we do have an opportunity to include people at the table that provide subject matter expertise, lived experience.

Some of these individuals may be from the department.

Sometimes we have a central staff there.

I want to make sure that councilmembers are still having the opportunity to ask questions of folks at the table as they're considering items, especially from central staff and others who might be subject matter expertise.

Yesterday was a great example where we could ask about implementation and feasibility.

I think that there needs to be this, I don't think that this needs to be included there in statute.

I do think that there needs to be a strong understanding that it is the chair's prerogative of who is at the table and who gets to field these questions.

I myself, as Council Member Juarez knows, had a lot of people at our table when we had a three-person committee with Council Member Bagshaw, when we developed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, for example, and the hotel worker legislation that included both employers and workers.

and we frequently had folks that we had robust discussions, but it was never my practice to allow for council members to ask questions in the midst of a vote, but they absolutely were at the table as we were discussing items that were open for deliberation.

But I just think that it's limiting, and I think we should consider discretion given to the chair of the committee.

So I'll be a no on this one.

Great, thank you so much.

Colleagues, any other comments or questions on this?

Thank you.

Councilmember Herbold, please.

I just want to acknowledge and appreciate everybody speaking real frankly here about the issue that Councilmember Peterson is trying to address here.

wanting to defer to the power of the committee chair.

I do wish there was some way to discourage the practice of a committee chair inviting continued debate.

from non-committee members once a motion is put on the table.

I think sometimes things that might be sometimes identified as clarifying questions are really just an opportunity for somebody at the table who might feel differently from the committee chair, or might, sorry, who might feel aligned with the position of the committee chair, just inviting them to make their case again, as opposed to truly providing clarifying information.

And I don't think that is aligned with sort of the rules of debate for a legislative body.

I don't know if there's sort of a default under Robert's Rules of Order, but I do wish there was a way that we could conceive of to discourage the use of the chair's discretion in that way, and really appreciate Council Member Peterson's efforts to sort of thread the needle here as a non-voting member.

Just wanted to say that.

Thanks.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

I do want to say that I think that the language here, while I understand the intent and appreciate the desire to find a solution to the thing that Council Member Herbold just described and that Council Member Juarez was describing, I think this language is overly prescriptive and doesn't actually solve for the issue that is being flagged.

Because even if this amendment were to pass, any chair of any committee who wants to structure the conversation in the manner just described by Council Member Herbold can simply suspend the rules and allow for that to happen.

And so I don't think, I think this is more of sort of a governance style issue as opposed to whether or not it can effectively be um, regulated or enforced through the council rules.

Now, that being said, I also think that, um, that this could be perceived, uh, by some members of the public as being, um, you know, unfairly targeted towards, um, those who may not share your view of the world.

And I, I worry about that unintended consequence of, of actually, um, formalizing a conversation or a debate too much to the point where you're not actually able to have sort of a fluid dialogue and debate about the issue before you.

And there's been many instances in which hearing from people presenting at the table, whether it's a department representative, somebody from the mayor's office, or a member of the community, I have been persuaded to think otherwise about a particular issue.

And so I think in the spirit of sort of transparent deliberations, I do think it's important for us to make sure we're not creating rules that might inadvertently suppress the ability to engage in that manner.

I know that's not what the intent is with this particular amendment, and I'm not suggesting that that is the intent, but I'm really struggling with seeing how this rule, given the reality of how rules can be suspended, will sort of solve for the issue that is really truly at the discretion of a chair of a committee.

And that discretion is gonna be exercised in a manner in which that independently elected official wants to exercise it in this instance.

So I don't think I can support this amendment in its current fashion, but do appreciate Council Member Peterson's intent in bringing it forward.

Okay, colleagues, as you heard, Council Member Juarez is going to have to leave after this vote.

We still will have a quorum.

We've confirmed that Council Member Mosqueda and Strauss can stay on the line until we get to the very end.

Appreciate that willingness to do that.

So if there are no other questions or comments on Amendment 5, hearing none, will the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment 5?

Council Member Juarez?

Aye.

Council Member Mosqueda?

No.

Councilor Strauss?

Yes.

Chair Gonzalez?

No.

That's two in favor, two opposed.

Council President?

I made a mistake.

All right, do we need to recall?

I mean, yes, I apologize.

I meant to vote no.

Okay.

Clerks, Deputy Clerk Schwinn, do I need to make a motion for reconsideration or?

You haven't announced the vote.

Let's just go ahead and recall the vote.

Thank you.

I'm sorry.

I'm on two different screens.

I apologize.

No, that's OK.

That's OK.

All right.

Madam Clerk, can you call the roll on the adoption of Amendment 5?

Council Member Juarez?

No.

Council Member Mosqueda?

No.

Councilmember Strauss?

No.

Councilmember Gonzales?

No.

That's none in favor or opposed.

Okay.

The motion fails.

The amendment is not adopted and we'll move to the next amendment.

Councilmember Juarez, thank you so much for hanging in with us.

I know you have another commitment.

Appreciate your extra time this evening.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, colleagues.

I have a really important emergency that I need to attend to, so I apologize.

Thank you.

We appreciate you making time for as long as you did.

Really, really appreciate it.

OK.

Colleagues, we're going to move to the next amendment.

We are getting close to the end, so thanks for bearing in with us.

The next amendment is 12, and I'm going to hand it over to Director Handy to walk us through this one.

Thank you.

Amendment 12 is sponsored by Councilmember Strauss.

and it would limit the topics for public comment at council meetings, and it would limit it to matters on the introduction and referral calendar and committee reports on that day's agenda.

It would eliminate the ability of members of the public to offer comment at council meetings regarding other items that may be included in the council's adopted annual work program, sort of the broadest category currently listed in the council rules.

This amendment relates to full council only and does not change the comment rules for committee meetings.

Okay.

Thank you so much for that, Director Handy.

So, this amendment is sponsored by Councilmember Strauss.

So I'm going to hand it over to Councilmember Strauss to make his motion on Amendment 12.

Thank you, Chair, Council President.

I move to amend Resolution 32029 as presented on the presented as Amendment 12 on the agenda.

Excellent.

Is there a second?

Councilmember Strauss, I'll go ahead and second the motion for purposes of discussion.

So it's been moved and seconded to adopt Amendment 12 as presented on the agenda.

I'm going to hand it over to Councilmember Strauss to present his amendment.

Thank you, Council President.

This is simply making committee rules for public comment the same at full council to allow us to conduct our business efficiently and effectively.

I think it is important to keep public comment and to keep it related to the work we are engaging in that day.

anything that's on the IRC, anything that's on the agenda.

If this change is too much for some, I would be welcome to also then setting up public hearings once a quarter, twice a year for people to comment on the work plan as a whole.

But as we all know, there are so many, everything under the sun is included in the work plan.

It would allow, from my perspective, it would allow us to more efficiently and effectively conduct our business with this change.

Okay, thank you, Councilmember Strauss.

Any comments on Amendment 12?

Councilmember Mosqueda, please.

Thank you very much.

Councilmember Strauss, I appreciate the intent of where you're going with this.

I know often we get testimony on a number of items that are not on the full council agenda.

I do wonder about enforcement.

We don't really have a culture of gaveling down folks who are not speaking to items on the agenda in our committees.

Is this contemplating also the sort of cultural change that would accommodate that?

And how does that sort of look for 2022 and 2023 if these are adopted in our committees as well?

Thank you, Council Member Mosqueda.

This is already the rule in committee.

And so in committee is only, what is, sorry, do you have a clarifying question?

and the president, if I might just clarify.

I don't know if that's the right way to put it.

That's sort of what I'm trying to get at.

We already have this rule in our committee and I just, perhaps I haven't seen it in the committees that I sit on and the way that I share it, but often we have people who call in and maybe they have a comment that is not on the agenda for that day.

We often don't gavel them down and so I'm wondering if the see how culturally that process changed for some might be challenging to accept and challenging for us to implement.

Thank you, Councilmember Mosqueda.

I do believe it is the discretion of the chair, or in this case, it would be the discretion of the council president, whoever's chairing that committee.

I know we all run our committees a little bit differently.

I do have, in my committee, very strict parameters.

I have gaveled down people that I support, and with the tree song in particular is a really great example.

When everyone in the audience stood up and started singing, they were out of order, even though I loved the song.

just by way of example.

And, you know, I do think that if another change for people, we also have the work plan that comes before city council once a year, and that is another opportunity for everyone to comment on all things included in the work plan.

It's just an exhaustive list.

Yeah, thanks.

Okay, great.

Council Member Herbold, please.

Thank you.

The discussion here and Councilmember Mosqueda's questions about the use of discretion reminded me of what my recollection is for the genesis of this change as it relates to full council and making it broader.

to include other matters directly related to the council work program while still creating some connection to the work that we do, was that there was concerns that discretion was being used in a way, and when you use discretion when it relates to speech, you could be creating a situation where an outside observer thinks that you're using your discretion as committee chair to choose the kind of speech that you want to hear.

And so I, again, non-voting member, but just wanting to kind of put that out there as my recollection of why this was broadened in the first place.

Thank you, Councilmember Herbold.

I was going to chime in with that as well.

We had actually made a choice to broaden this largely in response to some concerns about being overly prescriptive and restrictive of people's First Amendment speech rights.

at full council in particular.

My worry about this amendment, should it move forward, is that now we are creating a scenario in which members of the public have no other avenue to regularly provide and exercise their first amendment rights about other portions of the council's work program.

So if this rule is the same in committee meetings and the same at city council meetings, then it really does restrict a member of the public's ability to make comments on things that may only be tangentially related or indirectly related to the work that we do on the city council, or to, frankly, work that we should be doing as a city council that we aren't prioritizing, but maybe should be.

And so I think, so my concern really on this one, while I, you know, appreciate the intent.

We've all presided over a lot of public comment periods.

I do think that this, for me, tips sort of uncomfortably in the direction of creating an unintended impact on on people's First Amendment rights to speak to their government and make their opinions heard on the body of work that we do, whether we put it on an agenda or not.

Councilmember Strauss.

that we are operating today creates a barrier to our work being conducted efficiently and effectively.

I have to say that twice.

That is how I am perceiving our work to be done at this time.

That is in particular why I am very careful about saying that we're going to move to other items of business on our agenda, because hearing from the public.

Is part and parcel of our business, so I, I acknowledge that we get a lot of public commenters who call in and sometimes it can be up to an hour.

But it is our responsibility to hear from those members of the public.

So I'm hearing that Council Member Strauss would like to withdraw amendment 12. Council Member Mosqueda, anything else you'd like to add here before we move on to the next one?

No, I just wanted to appreciate the conversation and also note Councilmember Strauss' last comments there, which I appreciate as well.

I think that as I've been looking at the rules, and thanks again to the clerks for all of your work in helping to pull up the procedural motions and Robert's Rules of Order, you know, perhaps there's more, Councilmember Strauss, that we can do to continue to look at the language about avoiding, refraining from speaking adversely about individuals, refraining from speaking against one's motives, and refraining from disturbing the assembly.

These are all items that currently relate to council members, but I think that there is some element there of how we'd like to make sure that our decorum continues to be respectful so that everybody can engage, and look forward to the future conversation, but I appreciate that it was withdrawn.

Yeah.

Someone who has spent a lot of time with the rules, I've heard pretty clearly that even if it is speech about a council member's intent or motives or mode of doing business, it is still protected by the First Amendment, which is part of the reason why I have not been able to do anything other than encourage people to choose a different way to express their First Amendment rights.

But I appreciate that that is an ongoing concern.

Happy to share past legal opinions that I've gotten from the city attorney's office so that you all are on the same page as you transition into the next year on that particular issue.

Unfortunately, even disparaging comments is still protected by the First Amendment.

We are going to move on from Amendment 12. Thank you, Councilmember Strauss, for bringing that forward and for allowing us an opportunity to have debate and conversation in this public setting.

We really appreciate it.

Next up is Amendment 13. So I'm going to hand it over to Council Member Strauss to make his motion on Amendment 13.

Thank you, Council President.

I move to amend Resolution 32029 as presented on the agenda as Amendment 13.

Thank you so much.

I will second that motion.

So it's been moved and seconded to adopt Amendment 13 as presented on the agenda.

I'm going to hand it back over to Council Member Strauss to address his amendment.

Thank you.

This is codifying what we already have in place as Robert's Rules debate.

The change is from the Roberts – and Mr. Eder, if you could correct me, just – it's my understanding Robert's Rules is 10 minutes of debate.

I've reduced it to five minutes of debate unless all CMs agree by voice to extend the limits.

While it is five minutes, everyone has an opportunity to speak twice to a motion.

So any motion for amendment, any motion, any motion, you get two cracks, five minutes each.

It's, I just want to codify that.

Uh, thanks council member Strassen.

I just realized I forgot to give council center staff an opportunity to present on it.

So, um, I apologize for skipping that stuff.

Um, Dan or Esther, did you want to, um, uh, add some additional information there?

I only wanted to address Council Member Strauss' question about Robert's Rules, and I would just say I would defer to the city clerks, who I believe are more expert than I am about what is in the 12th edition of Robert's Rules.

Okay, thank you.

Is there anything else to add in terms of this amendment before we hear from the deputy clerks?

No.

Monica or Elizabeth?

Thank you.

Anything to add in terms of responding to Councilmember Strauss' question related to debate?

Yes.

I am not sure that we actually brought this up with the deputy city clerks and reviewing addition 12, but Liz, you may have done that separately.

Could report on the findings.

Yes, certainly.

So yes, as stated, Robert's rules does have some items divide, excuse me, regarding debate.

It does contemplate a maximum time for each speech.

And Robert's rules provides that if no special rule is in place relating to the length of speeches, a member having obtained the floor While a debatable motion is immediately pending, can speak no longer than 10 minutes unless obtaining the consent of the assembly.

And this is permissive through a unanimous consent or by means of a motion to extend the limits of debate.

requiring a two-thirds vote.

So again, this would be a situation where we don't have a specific rule, a special rule within our own council rules that addresses the limiting of debate as it is per speech, but this would be kind of some general guidance from Robert's rules around this 10-minute time frame.

and then being able to kind of expand with that unanimous consent.

So sometimes the idea that a point of order has not been raised to say, we have reached 10 minutes of this particular speech, can we move on through a point of order?

It would be potentially considered a unanimous consent that that individual would be given more time to speak.

I think, again, it's rules that you do have available to you, tools that you currently have available to you, and this would just be shortening that time to a special rule.

Okay, thanks Elizabeth for that.

Any comments or questions?

Council Member Mosqueda?

Thanks so much, Elizabeth.

Is there any history that we have at our fingertips on this?

I thought it was limited to two 10-minute sections per day.

Did they recently change that, perhaps, in the most updated version?

of Robert's Rules, yes.

And then the second piece there would be the number of speeches on the same question per member per day would be twice.

So again, there is a Robert's Rules sort of recommendation, no more than two of those speeches per topic.

And certainly then you could go to the unanimous consent if it was otherwise provided for at the time of the meeting.

So Elizabeth, just so I'm clear, the Roberts rules of order currently say that each member has an opportunity to speak twice, which I knew, but the limit is 10 minutes per time for a total of 20 or it's 10 minutes total.

Yes, it does say maximum time for each speech, so no longer than 10 minutes per each speech with up to two speeches on the same question per member per day.

So that's 20 minutes total.

Yeah.

excuse me, those are kind of those general parameters of Robert's Rules, again, trying to keep things efficient, try to keep things equitable so that everyone has an opportunity to speak.

And then also, you know, that overlying rule of trying to hear from everyone first before you go through that second round of speeches.

So these are all kind of recommendations for how to kind of proceed efficiently through debate, especially when you have a subject that is a popular topic for additional commentary.

Okay, and then Council Member Straus's amendment as presented here would modify those general rules and limit debate to five minutes total, but still allow for two speeches.

So you could do two and a half minutes and two and a half minutes, or you can do all of your five minutes, but then you wouldn't get a second speech.

Is that my understanding or is it five minutes per speech.

What is the effect of of of this amendment in terms of that total time.

Director Hampson.

My understanding of this is they you continue to have two speeches each at five minutes for a total of 10 minutes.

Okay.

So a total of 10 minutes.

So we're shaving off 10 minutes.

Okay, got it.

That is helpful clarification.

I do want to flag that.

I think enforcement on this is a little tricky.

Which is probably why we don't normally do it.

And I'm not saying that it's not necessary.

I'm just sort of acknowledging that the burden of enforcing this will likely fall primarily to the next council president, but certainly to all of the chairs of committees as well.

And so in order for this to actually have the intended effect, it will need to be consistently enforced by both chairs and the council president or council president pro tem, so just want to sort of flag that that's kind of my primary concern here is with implementation and not necessarily with intent, but do want to open it up to any questions or comments from colleagues.

Council Member Herbold, please.

Yeah, this is, I think, a good opportunity to flag one of the items that I had intended to bring forward.

I didn't because of the, I didn't bring it forward for a couple reasons, but one of the reasons was the inability to enforce, we don't currently have the ability to turn off a single mic of a single one of our colleagues.

And not that turning off the mic of 1 of our colleagues is the best way to enforce, but absent another way to enforce.

You know, I don't think of the council rules generally as a structure that is about enforcement.

I think as Council President Gonzalez said in our last meeting, it's more about a shared set of expectations that we have for one another.

So I don't want to lean too heavily on whether or not something can be enforced or not.

But in the instances where Um, you know, some of the changes I've been interested in, um.

I've wanted to put forward, um, I, I think.

They they've arisen because of, um.

divergence among our colleagues about those expectations.

So just saying here that, you know, I'm of two minds on this one.

Again, as a non-voting member, I would maybe appreciate the structure and the discipline that would be necessary to limit my speaking to five minutes.

I think that would be really helpful and useful and a good challenge towards the goal of being more effective and efficient.

we're not going to be able to do that.

I think it's important to understand that on the other hand, if we're identifying this because of a problem that we have, creating a new expectation that we're flagging because of a problem that we have becomes difficult to contemplate because then the next thing is really about the enforcement of that solution.

Any other comments or questions on this one?

OK.

I'm not seeing any other hands raised.

So I think I'm going to go ahead and close out debate and call this one for a vote as well.

So will the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment 13.

Mosqueda?

No.

Strauss?

Yes.

Chair Gonzalez?

No.

That's one in favor, two opposed.

OK.

Motion fails.

The amendment is not adopted, and the amended bill is still before the council.

We have another amendment to consider, which is Amendment 16. I'm going to hand it over to Director Handy to brief us on this amendment.

Thank you.

Amendment 16 is authored by Council Member Herbold.

and it would allow council members to attend regular, special, and emergency meetings of the city council electronically.

It would require council members to provide notice to the council president 48 hours in advance of a regular meeting that they plan to participate electronically.

Sorry, that's for both a regular or special meeting.

In the case of a special meeting that's noticed with less than 48 hours, or in the case of of an emergency meeting, a council member simply must provide notice.

We sort of lift the timeline on that, recognizing those may be time-sensitive meetings.

And as discussed in committee last week, the current rules only allow for electronic participation in very specific cases where a council member would be entitled to family and medical leave, paid parental leave, or paid family care leave.

Those current rules have been suspended during the pandemic to allow for full electronic participation.

So this would be amending the permanent rules post-civil emergency.

Great.

Thank you so much, Esther.

Appreciate it.

OK.

I'm going to move this so we can have a discussion about it.

I move to amend Resolution 32029 as presented on Amendment 16 on the agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

It's been moved and seconded to adopt Amendment 16 as presented on the agenda.

I'm going to hand it over to Council Member Grubel to make some remarks.

so much.

So my goal with this amendment is to strike a balance between the realities of governing during a pandemic, the success that we've all had telecommuting, and the need to return to our civic building.

I believe we should really think about how to come back to work in our offices as we are able, but I also want to permit electronic participation when and where it's needed.

I also recognize that hybrid meetings with some in person and some participating electronically are something we haven't yet tested, and that this is an area where we might need to fine-tune after we have some additional experience.

I think we do know enough now to know that the current rules, which allow e-participation only for a few So this amendment allows councilmembers to participate 48 hours.

In situations such as special or emergency meetings when the meeting is called within 48 hours and rendering 48 hours thus impossible, council members may give timely advance notice striving to notify as soon as possible.

If a council member has failed to give advance notice, they can still participate electronically.

If council colleagues approve their participation with the vote.

And my hope is that this really provides us with electronic participation tools we need while encouraging us to communicate well with each other in advance whenever possible about our method of participation.

I think we had discussed in the last committee meeting, You know, a sort of a that we would send around an opportunity sort of like, you know, we do with the calendar and opportunity movie once a month or once a quarter of individuals to come forward and say, I know in advance that.

I'm going to need to participate electronically for this set of meetings, but I just felt like that sort of a solution was more rigid than what I was hearing from the committee discussion in the last meeting.

So just putting forward this as an alternative.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you so much, Council Member Herbold.

Are there any comments or questions on Amendment 16?

Council Member Esqueda, please.

Having voted to second this, I want to note Council Member Herbold, I supported a second to put this in front of us so we could have a debate.

But unfortunately, this is not an amendment that I am able to support right now.

And I'll let you know why.

I do appreciate the intent behind it.

I think that there's clearly an interest in making sure that we have more streamlined I do think that there's some unintended consequences here with this from an equity and public health perspective.

Early on in my first term, folks probably remember we did a lot of work with the councilmembers that are here, Councilmember Gonzalez, Councilmember Herbold, you were very supportive of our efforts to try to make more flexible rules so that we could have participation, especially for those who needed to take care of kiddos or elderly parents.

At the time, we had colleagues who were both dealing with that.

I think similarly, if we have a council member who needs to participate electronically, whether or not that's because they have a health related issue personally, whether, you know, for example, in this moment, they're worried that they were exposed to COVID, whether they have a kiddo or a parent who needs care of some form, I want them to be able to provide folks with the option to do that without having to necessarily explain to the world why they are participating through these alternative means.

And I hesitate to support something that has a decision that's left up to individual I think it's important for us to make sure that.

to be able to be with their loved ones when they need to, and to not feel maybe pressure to come to a meeting if they are nervous about disclosing why they need an alternative way to participate.

So I look forward to working with you all to make sure that we are providing clear access for the public to understand how our voting processes are done, but I just don't want us to be in a situation where we're creating unintended consequences with this and to The amendment right now, I think, looks like it's taking a step back from some of those important protections that we put into place.

I think it was early 2018. So for that reason, I would be hesitant to support today.

Okay, thank you so much.

Appreciate that.

I do see a few hands raised, at least three.

So I'm going to go in the order in which they were raised.

First is Council Member Strauss, then Council Member Herbold, and then Director Handy.

Thank you, Councilmember, Council President.

Just trying to clarify here, six and seven, are these both being added?

I would be happy with six, but I don't think that we need to have a vote of the majority of council members.

They are both, yes, they are both being proposed to be added as part of this amendment.

I am gonna hand it over to Councilmember Herbold and then Director Handy, because I think Based on that question and based on Council Member Mosqueda's comments, I think there might be a confusion about why the rules exist the way they exist now.

And so perhaps Council Member Herbold plans to address that and Director Handy does as well.

So I won't belabor the point and just recognize Council Member Herbold and then Director Handy.

Thank you.

So I'm my intent is probably to defer to Director Handy, but just because I think Director Handy understands my intent and understands.

The language is drafted, but just want to clarify the language that you see under number seven is just a reordering of the existing language that is currently up under six.

So the current language under number six is now placed under number seven.

as number seven and placed under the new number six.

And there's, in the circumstances where a council member is not able to be present at a regular council meeting, there's no obligation for anybody to explain why, nor is there under the current circumstances nor is there a requirement to inform the council president for the reason why they're planning the absence.

I do note that I'm not sure that in Moving the language from 6, the original number 6 into a new number 7, we lost reference to rule 2D4, which I think we need in order to to address Councilmember Mosqueda's concern.

If somebody is out for the reasons that are currently contemplated in our current rules, and so sickness, FMLA, there's a set of rules.

there isn't an expectation for this advance notice.

So just, again, turning it over to Director Handy to clarify how that intent was captured.

Thank you.

And again, you and I can tag team the specific language here because part of what This amendment says is that this rule currently lives in three sections.

One about the regular rules, one about special meetings, and one about emergency meetings.

And the council rules as stated currently have slightly different rules for each.

The intent here is to provide significantly more flexibility to council members.

So that for any circumstance, all that is required is 48 hours notice of a meeting.

If a council member was out on extended leave or knew that they were not able to be at the council for a month at a time, they could provide the council president with a notice that says, for the next 30 days, I plan to participate electronically in all circumstances.

The intention is not that it is not written such that for every specific meeting you would be able to have to provide that notice.

But if you were normally participating in person, you could provide a 48-hour notice that you were going to be out of town or that you were sick or something that would allow you to participate electronically.

And I believe that we, because of the increased flexibility, chose to strike the language about the paid medical leave and the family leave because this was more expansive.

Dan, do you want to explain in any more technical detail how that is done in the amendment?

Sure, I'd be happy to do that.

Thank you, Esther.

So for regular meetings, which are scheduled routinely at the same day and time, each committee meeting, the expectation is that council members would provide the committee chair or the council president in the event that we're talking about the council meeting with 48 hours of notice at least.

In the event that that doesn't happen, there is still a provision for the full council at a council meeting to vote by a majority, a vote that would allow a council member to attend electronically if, for instance, there was a late-breaking illness that kept the council member away from an in-person meeting of the council.

That's for regular meetings.

For special meetings, if you could scroll down, I'm not sure who's controlling at this point the amendment itself.

I'll just keep talking.

For special meetings, there's a recognition that sometimes special meetings are called with less time than 48 hours of advance notice.

In that circumstance, council members will endeavor to provide as early notice as practicable, but there is still the failsafe that the full council can take the vote at the council meeting to allow a council member who has not been able to provide notice ahead of the start of a special meeting to participate electronically.

And then the final section that Esther alluded to is emergency meetings, bizarre by nature, last minute kinds of meetings, at least logically possible, due to a natural disaster or what have you.

Um, and in that case, uh, if we could scroll down, please, to the next section.

Um, this, uh, this too, this doesn't set a 48 hour window.

It just says, you know, before the meeting starts, uh, the council member should notify the, um, the council president of a desire or need to attend electronically.

But there is also, I believe if you scan a little bit further, oh no, I'm sorry, item five there is the same kind of a vote that could happen in the event that prior notice wasn't provided that would allow a council member to attend electronically.

Thank you for clarifying your intent here.

For any reason, the council member may participate and vote in electronic meetings, provided that the council member informs the council president at least 48 hours in advance.

That is new information and does not include the same language that we included in 2018 when we updated the information.

On number seven, it says, if a council member is not able to present at a regular council meeting, And if approved by a majority of council members present and at a voting meeting, that is a difference from what we currently have.

So both require advanced notice of 48 hours and approval by a majority of council members present and voting.

And it doesn't, I don't think, contemplate that somebody might not be able to give that advance notice to the council president, both for regular meetings and for special meetings.

I also am concerned still that it says related to special meetings, within 48 hours of advance notice to the public.

Again, why is an individual council member required to notice to the public versus to the chair?

I'm not comfortable voting on this version because it doesn't say to the public in that first section here.

I just think that something is being lost in drafting or translation here.

If the Councilmember's intent was to maintain our current flexibility, I am not necessarily seeing that in the language in front of us.

As Director Handy, I see that you want to chime in here, but I just, I just, um, there's been a couple of times, Council Member Mosqueda, where you referred to current flexibility, and I just want to remind you that current flexibility is zero electronic participation.

unless we change the rules.

So the only reason we have maximum flexibility to participate electronically is because Governor Inslee issued the proclamation allowing for that to be the case.

As soon as that proclamation is rescinded, we will default to the base rules.

The base rules are extraordinarily restrictive because they only allow a council member to participate electronically in the enumerated situations that you and I worked on in 2018. And in the base rules, it is currently required that in order to participate electronically for a reason that is unrelated to those issues, you have to get consent from the body to be able to participate.

And so the amendment before us is trying to change the base rules.

So it's really important that we not compare this amendment to current operations, because current operations are in place because of the proclamation the governor issued related to the public health ordinance, which has allowed us to suspend in its entirety the rules related to electronic versus in-person participation.

So what we're trying to do here is comparing this amendment to pre-COVID life and how the rules were in pre-COVID with the expectation that someday we might be back in pre-COVID scenario and wanting to sort of implement a hybrid model is I think what we're trying to achieve.

And in order to achieve a hybrid model that works for everyone, we need to have some level of notification so that IT and chairs of committees and the council president and others can plan for the logistics necessary to accommodate a request for electronic participation.

So to the extent that the request for electronic participation requires approval by the Council President, I agree that that's probably goes a little too far.

But I do think that there needs to be some sort of proactive community.

It cannot be in the 11th hour.

As Council President, I can tell you there are so many times currently where I will get messages within 30 minutes or 15 minutes of a scheduled meeting about being late, about having some technology issue, about needing to leave early, wanting to change their order, wanting to do this.

It is just so hard to manage the efficiency of our meetings without requiring some semblance of a notice.

And if we want to make sure that people aren't feeling like they're being micromanaged in terms of their discretion as a council member, I agree that we should have language that addresses those concerns.

But there has to be some level of notice in this world of a hybrid model of how we're going to do our business as a city council post-COVID.

So I just wanted to add that for some you know context to the conversation because I feel like we're we're we're comparing what it's like now to this amendment.

And the reality is is that we should be comparing what's happening what's what's happening in this amendment to what how we were operating pre pre-COVID.

So Director Handy did you want to add anything else.

I don't have anything specific to add there.

Happy to field more questions as they come up.

I appreciate there's multiple places in which this language is inserted.

And so I'm looking in one place, and there may be an error in another place.

But one, I don't believe there's a requirement for approval of the president.

I believe that the language is to inform the president.

And secondly, I don't think there's a requirement to notify the public, and there certainly isn't an intent to require notification to the public.

Yeah, I can clarify that notification of the public language that is in the special meeting section.

If we can scroll to that just so we're all looking at it.

That is in the case when a special meeting has been noticed to the public with less than 48 hours.

In those cases, a council member just needs to provide notice to the council president.

They don't need to provide 48 hours notice.

those sit next to each other, so I can understand why that would be confusing.

But the notice is about the meeting being public, not the notice of the council members absence being public.

Thank you.

Well, and it's not an absence.

It's just electronic participation.

Thank you.

I misspoke there about their electronic participation.

Council Member Strauss, did you still want to chime in here?

Thank you, Council President.

Not specifically about this.

It sounds like this has much more work.

I do have my second of third community event that I need to attend shortly, and so my time is quickly expiring.

In addition to my office hours, I am regularly present with the community.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Strauss.

How much longer do we have you for so I can move us along here?

If I'm going to have food before this meeting, I have about negative 10 minutes.

So I can stick with you for about another 20 minutes at most, but I won't be able to eat before my event.

Okay, sounds good.

We will try to wrap this up in the next 15 minutes.

The good news is we only have one more amendment after this, and it's yours, Council Member Strauss.

So colleagues, I do want to keep us moving here.

May I suggest that we do a little bit more work on this one and just get a little bit more understanding of this amendment to make sure that we have you know, sort of greater comfort by the time we get to Monday.

Council Member Herbold, would that be okay with you?

Absolutely, yes.

Okay, thank you.

I appreciate that.

I appreciate the conversation we had here.

I think it's really important.

I think we know where the issues and concerns are, and I think there's a way to make sure that the language is reflective and not confusing, so reflective and clear as to what the intent here is, which is to create a change from the status quo rules, which severely limit electronic participation, to document some level of flexibility.

Now, if there is a desire to have the greatest level of flexibility, such as we do now, then, you know, that would need to be a new amendment being proposed because this is more of a middle-of-the-ground approach as opposed to an electronic always proposal, which was one of the recommendations being put forward by, or one of the options being put forward by the workgroup.

So appreciate the need to have a little bit more conversation on this one and make sure we're all on the same page, but I believe we will get there.

Council Member Esqueda.

I agree and appreciate the sponsor's clarification.

I also want to apologize to central staff and to my colleagues.

I understand now where I was misreading the public aspect of the notice to the public.

So apologies for that and appreciate that we can continue to finesse this regarding approval by council members and look forward to that conversation on Monday.

Yeah, yeah, and again, the approval part is.

Is exist in our base rules, but let's let and maybe we want to change that.

So, if that's if that's the case, this is the opportunity.

This is the opportunity to do it.

So.

More to come on that.

Appreciate the conversation here.

Okay the last amendment.

I'm going to move us quickly over to that one.

Will I'm going to go ahead and move us to Amendment 15. Director Handy can you walk us through this please.

Yes.

Amendment excuse me Amendment 15 is our final amendment today.

It is sponsored by Council Member Strauss This gives me an opportunity to do this better justice than I did at our last committee meeting.

Amendment 15 would set the council's intent to consider updating the council rules to move to a new session-based legislative calendar, similar to one that is used in the Washington State Legislature, such that our legislative calendar would be grouped into multiple sessions where there is time for committee work.

bills have a cut-off date and move to full council action.

There's a break.

We do that again.

There's a special committee for a special session for budget.

If this amendment passed, the clerk's office and the council rules work group would reconvene in January to explore the best practices and the logistics related to this proposal and would have the council consider this change by April 30, 2022.

Thank you so much.

Council Member Strauss, I'm gonna hand it over to you to make your motion here.

Thanks, I move to amend resolution 32029 as presented in amendment one on the agenda.

Second.

Amendment, whatever.

15. 15.

Second.

Okay, it's been moved and seconded to adopt amendment 15 as presented on the agenda.

I'm gonna hand it over to Council Member Strauss to make some remarks.

Thanks, I'll keep this brief.

I am here to request your support for us to allow us to continue this work.

For me to take the time to explain, in particular, when Mr. Eater and I sat down with Director Handy to discuss all of the different levels that we would have to change our rules in the amount of time that we would have had, it would not have been an appropriate work request to make of either Director Handy or Mr. Eater.

and so my request is to allow us more time and set a date certain in which we will return to discuss our council rules regarding a legislative session.

The importance of this is to put parameters on our work so that we are more efficiently and effectively able to conduct our work.

Right now we have an ongoing rolling basis for all work except for and saving for the budget session.

What I envision with this is similar to the legislative session in Olympia where you have time set aside for committee.

You then have time set aside for floor action.

When I look at how that applies to the city council, I could imagine two months of just committee work with sporadic committees of the whole as needed.

And then time, so if two months of committee work and then a month of full council work or floor action for us all to be able to understand what is coming out of each other's committees.

As it stands right now, if you're not on the committee, you get about one crack at it and you feel pressurized to vote it out in the first moment that you have seen it.

And so this gets at, I mean, this will also touch on extensions or eliminating alternates.

This gets to, yeah, some of these other things as well.

So I ask your graciousness to include this in the resolution so that we have more time to work on it and bring you a full proposal.

Thank you so much, Council Member Strauss.

Council Member Herbold, your hand is raised.

Please go ahead and if anyone else has any questions or comments, I invite you to raise your hand as well.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

I just want to thank the sponsor for reworking the proposal before us, not only recognizing the complexity that it would have in our own rules, but also I think it will be really important to interact with all of the executive departments and have a full discussion of the schedule implications on workflow coming from them as well, just to make sure that we're all on the same page and there are no unintended consequences.

Well, thank you for putting this forward as an item for further study.

Thank you so much.

Council Member Mosqueda?

I want to thank the sponsor.

I'm an enthusiastic yes on this.

I do wish we had the policy in front of us today.

I wish we could do this next year, but we'll be happy to work with you on this.

I think that as we talked about, there's also some really good ideas about how do we front load policy early in the year and then maybe move to like a floor action session.

I'm happy to work with you on that and really appreciate this amendment and the visionary thinking behind this, which, you know, as Council Member Herbold noted, if we move towards this and other departments know that this is our timeframe, then I think it would be a pretty easy timeline to transition to if we were able to get it all put together.

So very happy to support this.

Okay, thanks so much.

Any other comments or questions?

Not hearing anything else.

I think I'm going to go ahead and close that debate unless customer Strauss you have anything else to add.

Thank you.

Nothing else to add.

All right, we're going to get we're going to get you out of here with a little bit extra time to take care of your human needs.

Okay, here we go.

Colleagues, will the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment 15.

Mosqueda?

Aye.

Strauss?

Yes.

Abstain.

That's two in favor, one abstention.

OK, the motion carries.

The amendment is adopted and the amended bill is before the council.

OK, so council members, that's it.

That's all the amendments that I'm aware of.

So now we're going to move actual passage of Resolution 3209. So I now move that the committee recommend passage of Resolution 32029 as amended.

Is there a second?

It's been moved and seconded to recommend passage of the resolution.

Are there any additional comments?

I will just note an interest in Councilmember Strauss's amendment number 13. We didn't get a chance to talk about the ways to better enforce existing Roberts rules and the 10-minute allotments there.

So I'll look forward to talking with Councilmember Strauss, perhaps between now and Monday, to make sure that we have greater clarity on that.

But I appreciate the work that you and the committee have done to get us to this point here today.

Thanks so much, everyone.

Thank you so much, Council Member Osteen, I appreciate it.

Any other comments, final comments on the resolution?

All right.

Well, I do want to thank you, colleagues, for all your engagement in the council rules revision process.

This has been a much more robust process than usual.

And a lot of work has gone into briefing council members, analyzing proposals and preparing amendments.

And for that, I want to thank our office of the city clerk, including Monica Martinez-Simmons, Elizabeth Atkinson, Jody Schwinn, Linda Brown, Amelia Sanchez and central staff including Esther Handy and Dan Eder, the city attorney's office including Brandon Islieb and Gary Smith.

And of course, my deputy chief of staff, Cody writer for all of their tremendous work on this.

We're making a number of proposed changes to the council rules via this resolution.

And as always, this is an iterative process.

We already know that there's a couple of things we'll have to deal with between now and Monday, but I believe that this was a really important body of work.

and hope that it does make our legislative process more efficient and effective.

And I want to thank you all for your engagement and look forward to taking this back up at city council to take final action this coming Monday, December 13th.

So with that being said, we'll call the roll on the committee recommendation that resolution 32029 be passed and forwarded to the full city council on December 13th, 2021. Hi.

Stress.

Yes.

Chair Gonzalez?

Aye.

That's three in favor.

Thank you so much.

The motion passes and the committee will forward resolution 32029 to the full City Council for passage.

OK, we are at the part of adjournment.

Is there any further business to come before the committee?

Hearing no further.

Oh, this is your last committee meeting.

Just want to say thank you to you and your team for all that you've done through your committee.

Appreciate you.

Thank you.

It is, in fact, my very last committee that I'm chairing, but not my last committee.

That will be actually Council Member Peterson's committee next week.

So thank you everybody for your participation and your robust engagement in this.

I know it was in the weeds and we are way over time, but I really do deeply appreciate you taking the time.

OK, well, hearing no further business, that does conclude our last Governance and Education Committee meeting for 2021 and my last chair of a subject matter committee meeting.

So thanks to all of you for your hard work over the last couple of years.

We're adjourned.