Seattle City Council Finance, Native Communities, and Tribal Governments Committee 2/5/2025

Good morning.

The February 5th, 2025 Finance Native Communities and Tribal Governments Committee will come to order.

It is 9.34 a.m.

I'm Dan Strauss, Chair of the Committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Kettle.

You got it.

Your microphone, Strauss.

Council Member Kettle.

Council Member Saka.

Here.

Vice Chair Rivera.

Chair Strauss.

and Council President also.

Council President Nelson.

Present.

I'm gonna stall for just a second, because I think Council Member Kettle might be in the waiting room.

Nope, all right.

Four present, two excused.

Thank you.

We have one briefing on the agenda today, and that is the Finance Native Communities Tribal Governments Committee Work Plan.

Before we begin, if there's no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Just out the gate, the chair's report, I wanna welcome Council Member Sokka.

While it's unusual to change committees mid biennium, we're excited to have you and you're just in time as we cover the work program for this coming year in this committee.

Last year in this committee and with the Select Budget Committee, we departed from norms using the Select Budget Committee starting in April and moving all the way through the year with the majority of budget-related legislation coming to that committee, and it met very often.

Today we will review the proposed work plan that divides the work between finance native communities and tribal governments and select budget, as well as we'll have some discussion points at the end about which committee some of these different pieces of legislation come into.

We do need to end at 10.30 a.m.

at the latest to accommodate a full day of comprehensive plan and want the record to reflect.

Vice Chair Rivera is present.

Good morning.

Good morning.

And impressive with all the schools starting late today.

We were only four minutes late today, so.

Nice work.

With that, we will now open the hybrid public comment period.

Public comments should relate to items on today's agenda and within the purview of the committee.

Clerk, how many speakers do we have signed up today?

Currently, we have zero in-person speakers signed up and there is one remote speaker.

Wonderful, thank you.

Each speaker will have two minutes.

We'll start with in-person speakers first.

There are none, and then we will move to the online public comment.

I'll now read the public comment instructions.

Public comment period will be moderated in the following manner.

Up to 20 minutes, speakers will be called in in the order in which they are registered.

We'll begin with the in-person speakers, move to remote.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are remaining of their time.

Speakers' microphones will be muted if they do not end their comments within the allotted time to call on the next speaker.

First speaker on the list today is Jake Thonis.

Jake, I do see you are not present.

We're gonna take just a moment to see if we can't give you, we see you are present now.

And I see you are in the room.

If you wanna press star six, Jake.

So you're off mute.

Good morning.

How are you?

Good morning.

Yeah, am I on?

Great.

We'll start the time whenever you want.

Okay.

Thank you.

Hello.

My name is Jake Zanes.

I'm a resident of District 2 and calling in from Beacon Hill this morning.

I'd like to ask Chair Strauss and the committee to please include Duwamish tribal services in the upcoming tribal nation summit.

Two years ago was inaugural tribal nation summit and the Duwamish tribe nor Duwamish tribal services was included.

I believe this was due to the rules at hand at the time.

You're the committee, you can change the rules to make it inclusive so that native communities are not being actively excluded.

I hope you'll do this so that Duwamish Tribal Services can attend.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jake.

We'll now move on to, as we have no further speakers remotely or physically present, the public comment period is now closed.

Moving on to the first agenda item.

Clerk, will you read the short title into the record, please?

Information item for Finance Native Communities and Tribal Governments Work Plan for briefing, discussion presenters are our Deputy Director Yolanda Ho and Eden Sisek of Central Staff.

Thank you very much.

Colleagues, we have Deputy Director Ho with us today and Eden, and we have a very short presentation, but I think that it gets to the meat of this work.

I would say, why don't we let them go all the way through and then we'll go right back to the top so that we have a full view of what we're doing.

And I've got some additional comments already as well.

So with that, over to you, Eden.

And your microphone is on mute as well.

Can you guys hear me now?

Yes.

We can.

Okay.

Good morning.

My name is Adam Sisic with Council Central Staff.

And as the committee coordinator of Finance Native Communities and Tribal Governments Committee, I'm going to go over what you might expect to see over the coming year in both Finance Native Communities, Tribal Governments, or the Select Budget Committee.

So this first slide here lists out a lot of the items that you might expect to see over the coming year.

And in the next couple of slides to follow, I'll break down what's coming in FNC versus the Select Budget Committee.

And it'll be a good way to tee up a discussion point on the last slide about how we approach this work and which committee belongs what.

So briefly going over the list, one of the first pieces of legislation you'll see is the transportation levy proviso lift, which if you recall, we provisoed anything above $89 million until SDOT presented their funding plan, which they did.

And then that'll be in March, and also in March, there will be an FAS director appointment on the agenda as well.

And I won't go through all of these items on this list right now, they'll come in later slides, but if you see the third slide, the various FAS and Office of Finance legislation that includes things like SMC updates to reflect changes in Washington state law, Animal code updates, fund, and other transfers.

There's also a predatory home buying legislation that's in the works.

And so you might expect to see things like this in most likely quarter two or three of the year.

And then, of course, other budget and committee-related legislation before we begin the mid-biannual budget adjustment process in the fall.

And, Eden, before we move on to the other slides, since there are only...

I think six slides total.

We can take questions as we go.

And I see also Council Member Kettle is now present as well.

One of the things that I strive to do with my committee work is to have items briefed twice before a vote.

It gets a little bit more challenging when we have two different committees, the Finance Native Communities and Tribal Governments and the Select Budget Committee.

One of the ways we allowed a release valve with the transportation levy lift is partnering with Council Member Saka to have that item briefed in the Transportation Committee first before taking a vote in the full Select Budget Committee.

So that's one example.

There are some, there may be some tension points to make sure things are moving around the FAS director appointment.

We might have that briefed in select budget committee and voted in the finance committee, those types of things.

Just wanna check in colleagues, any questions on the universe of work within both the select budget committee and the finance native communities and tribal governments committee?

And I'll turn it right back over to you.

All right.

So this next slide, it's items that are specific to the Select Budget Committee work plan.

We already discussed the Q1 transportation levy proviso list and the FAS director appointment.

In quarter two, which will most likely be in June, you will discuss the outcomes of the budget reform memo, which I believe is in the works currently, and a briefing on the various slides that were adopted for this year.

and there is a slide resolution with all of those slides coming to you in city council meeting later this month, I believe.

However, so the slides, such as early retirement incentive analysis, developing programs for city employees subject to layoff, Seattle Channel funding alternatives, and some other budget and fiscal policy related slides are expected to be briefed in one of the two committees in either quarter two or quarter three.

And so we have the standard mid-year budgets supplemental legislation, which typically gets transmitted at the end of June.

So we'll be discussing that most likely in July.

Before we get into the fall budget process, which is all about the mid-biannual budget adjustments for 2026 budget year and the 26 through 31 CIP plan.

Thank you.

Before you move on, Edwin here.

Colleagues, in quarter two, you see budget reform discussion.

This is both process and content.

And what I mean by that is every year, the budget process has changed ever so slightly.

When I started, we had what was called a form B.

This last year, we did not use that.

I think that it might be beneficial to bring that back.

And so we'll have some of the conversations about what worked last year, what didn't work, and I'll be stopping by each of your offices over this next quarter to talk about that so that we can make an improvement on process.

Another aspect is content.

When we talk about budget reform and a multi-step, multi-year process to get our budget back in balance, something I also haven't seen is a report back about some of the slides or report back about the questions we asked last year.

And so I want to make space for that.

There are some slides that have budget accountability aspects to them that are scheduled for other committees, such as Council President Nelson, you had a great slide that is scheduled to come to your committee.

It would be helpful to have it reported out at the whole select budget committee because we were all part of that discussion last year.

So that's...

part of that quarter two.

And I made a decision to, and this is part of the conversation, right?

In this proposal, we bring the mid-year supplemental legislation back to the full select budget committee.

That is still a deviation from years prior to last year.

And I think that it's helpful to have everyone's eyes on it.

So these are just, this is the proposal.

Vice chair.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Edwin, for being here.

Chair, thanks for the preview.

It's helpful to have a preview on what you'll be doing this year in your committee.

Related to the budget reform discussion, this is, as you know, and will not be surprised.

It's something that I very much care about, so I'm looking forward to what this is going to look like.

I will say that in terms of budget reform, one thing, and I acknowledge that, We all put slides in the last budget to try to get to some of this information.

Ideally, in my mind, we would have from each of the departments a list of all the programs that they run with the outcomes for those programs.

I've not ever seen that.

I think it would be really helpful.

I don't know how we build that into our work.

But I think we've all identified some programs as we've gone because they've come up, but there are many programs that each of the departments administer that we don't have insight into as to the outcome piece that I think is really important for us to have that insight.

So I appreciate you giving consideration to this budget reform piece, and I hope that in some aspect, whether it's this year or over the course of the next couple years, that we really get to a more robust gathering exercise where we're really looking at all of those programs for all of the departments.

So then we have some confidence, and we can tell the public with confidence, that we really did engage in a robust examination of those programs so that we could right size the things that don't have the intended outcomes.

Because what I've seen at the city is a continuation of programs that might not have the outcomes that we want.

And then, well, if that program's not working, what could we do differently to achieve that goal?

And so, you know, like I said, thank you for engaging in this this year.

And I hope that we could get to some form of what I just described as we work together.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yes, points very well taken.

And your work this last year was very helpful.

So I know Central Staff stands ready to work with you in those specific ideas, and I'm happy to support you.

One example I just had was last week at the Ballard Service Center.

They were doing some renovations and they finally took out the paper posting board for city jobs.

Granted, they haven't been printing them.

And this is no shade or foul at FAS.

They do great work.

It was just interesting to see it still hanging there after all these years of online posting for jobs, right?

Any other comments, questions on select budget committee work plan?

Council member Kettle.

Thank you chair and I apologize for not being there in person to our school delay.

I just wanted to add second what the vice chair Rivera said and you know and part of this is also looking at those traditional areas of revenue and see where they are and what are we doing to support those traditional areas of revenue and to ensure that is you know basically achieving as much as it can given the you know the broader economic circumstances you know just just to know where our piece of that it is you know how we impact it i think that's really important and that's kind of like a you know part of the step process with what vice chair was talking about in terms of looking at the programs as well i'll second that yep councilmember saka

you mr chair and thank you for uh your gracious welcome to your committee i'm excited to be attending my first committee uh meeting here today and also apologies for not being able to join you all in person which is always my strong preference uh but with two of my three elementary school age kids home sick today uh and given the snow day that means a third is home is home schooled in person today or remote.

It's pure survival mode for a working parent like myself.

So shout out to all the working families out there trying to survive and trying to manage all the things.

So if you hear some kids coughing in the background and or yelling or arguing and or meltdowns, it's probably my own meltdown.

It's the nature of the beast.

So I appreciate your patience and grace.

In any event, this proposed allocation seems to make sense from my perspective.

I think it's a very reasonable, rational approach.

Last year as the new member to the broader body in the council, I thought you led a very collaborative approach in getting started on some of the, at the select committee level, a lot of important discussion items that really set the table for what I think was a successful budget process.

And so year two for me and many of our newest colleagues, more majority, I suppose, And now even newer members at a very high level, I'm inclined to adopt a similar kind of select committee approach, but a little more lightweight than last year because this is our second round of reps, if you will, for many of us.

and I still think our two newest colleagues could benefit from some of these items here listed on the screen allocated currently for the Select Budget Committee but also I just do want to balance that with my preference would to be to smartly balance that with THE FACT THAT WE HAVE NO SHORTAGE OF SELECT COMMITTEES THIS YEAR.

WE HAVE AN ABUNDANCE OF SELECT COMMITTEES, WHETHER IT'S THE COMP PLAN, YOU KNOW, HUGE PRIORITY.

LET'S SEE, COUNCILMEMBER RIVERA'S UPCOMING FEP LEVY RENEWAL CONVERSATION.

WE HAVE COUNCILMEMBER RINK'S NEW FEDERAL IMPACT STUDY SELECT COMMITTEE.

THERE'S NO SHORTAGE OF THOSE, AND SO I JUST I want to make sure whatever approach we adopt is thoughtful and mindful of our collective efforts that we have going on at council.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Councilmember Saka.

Well said.

We do have so many committees this year, and part of that is why this committee today has been shortened.

Seeing no further comments, let's move on to the next slide.

We're going to move into finance native communities and tribal governments.

So in addition to the fiscal policy work that happens in this committee, native communities and tribal governments work is also housed in this committee.

So a lot of this type of work does happen outside of committee.

There are opportunities to highlight the government to government and coordination between area tribes and the city.

For example, we'll have a tribal nations summit update later in the summer.

And speaking of this tribal relations director, Tim Raynon's position, he's no longer with the city, so his position is being currently hired, as I understand it.

And on the last slide.

And before we move on from there, just a couple notes, if you would.

As you did mention earlier, Tim Raynon, our OIR Tribal Relations Director, has been hired by the governor's team, and so that's changed some things.

What we do know is that there is a plan to have another tribal summit this year.

This is all very preliminary, so things might change.

When the Tribal Nations Summit happened the first time, it was the first time ever, and there was an immediate desire to have it again the next year.

two things were quickly realized.

One, there was a lot of follow-up work that needed to come out of that very robust discussion, and two, it requires a lot of work to put on.

And so I could say still today we're in the follow-up stages, and there's still a desire to have the summit again.

So I'm gonna be following the lead of the Office of Intergovernmental Relations team as well as Francesca Murnon with Department of Neighborhoods.

And this section of the committee is really reserved as a place for our tribal relations work to be reported out and so that the committee can work with OIR.

as this work is led by OIR.

As is the tradition set by former council president Deborah Juarez, we use this committee as a way to bring these issues to the forefront, as a place to both report out and to support their work.

And this committee has never been used as a place direct the work of the Office of Intergovernmental Relations team as it regards to tribal relations.

And so as we fill the position that Director Radon held, we will continue doing this.

I know that over the last year, there was a lot of discussion between me and their team about formalizing the tribal nations government to government work, stemming from some of our government to government consultation this last year.

We hope to do that work.

Again, it is work that is not necessarily done at the committee level.

It is done in negotiations, government to government, and so there may be report outs, there may not, but I highlight that that is the body of work that I'm hoping to accomplish this year in the third quarter.

As you notice in years past, we've had a lot of the legislation in the previous slide happen actually at this committee level here.

So to Council Member Sokka's point, maybe less is more, maybe more is less, we'll find out.

But any questions on this?

Moving right along, and thank you.

And so this is the last slide.

A brief history, which the Chair already mentioned, but in the past, all of the more comprehensive legislation that you see here was taken up in Finance Committee until last year, where the Chair resurrected the Select Budget Committee to be more inclusive for budget that touches on all of the departments or all of the funds and have things that are of interest to council members.

So instead of just having the finance committee members present, all the committee members present.

And so a lot of this legislation was first briefed in finance committee and it was voted out of select budget committee.

And so a discussion point here is what does this look like this year?

And so I will open it up to you for the suggestions.

Thanks, and this is a conversation that if we wanna have on the dais today and have a conversation, I'm happy to, or I can also meet with you individually about these pieces of legislation.

As Eden shared, before I was budget chair, all of these would have gone through the finance committee.

Last year, I made the decision to pull them up to the select budget committee.

Do we want to have these at the finance committee level or do we need to put them in the select budget committee?

That's I can see it either way, and I wanna be cognizant of all of the time pressures, especially as Council Member Saka pointed out.

So that's why I bring it up as a discussion point.

We could do all of these in finance, or we could do these in select.

I can say if we do them in select, it might be a little bit more challenging.

Yeah, Council President, do you have something to share?

Well, last year, Chair, you'll recall that I really was hoping that you would get the dates for the select committee to me so that we could sort of map it out.

And so that is going to be another issue that I would ask, like specific dates.

And because we do have limited real estate in chambers, as you know.

Yeah.

So I just, it's because the president I don't want to say creates, but assigns or forms select committees, and the dates of those meetings are listed in the memo that goes out, and there's usually an end date when the legislation is passed because we're usually dealing with complex legislation in a select committee.

So, again, it all depends on what the...

what the dates are and all the topics that you are going to need to address and whether or not that is consistent with the mid-year supplemental budget process, the fall budget process, et cetera.

You nailed exactly why I made these discussion points.

And we've got some ideas of the dates for the budget reform discussion in the SLI report out, that's very important.

Supplemental budget, that's very important.

There is some flexibility.

I offer also, we would be taking the place of the finance committee, so we would be taking this time slot.

As Council President said, real estate here at City Hall is full.

We are back here in the office and we are using it.

But moving on to the discussion point of the World Cup appropriations, we're gonna need to be able to move quickly, as you said, because things are moving fast with our preparations.

And so if we needed to have that in the select committee, it would require a little bit more maneuvering as compared to the first quarter grant acceptance and appropriation, which has a little bit more flexibility.

And I also think it's important to keep in mind the schedules of other colleagues because I'm hearing you, Councilmember Saka, so noted.

I saw Vice Chair and then Councilmember Saka.

I guess, Chair, my question is how do you make the determination on what goes to Finance Committee and what goes to Select Budget Committee?

in general, if you wouldn't mind telling us.

In years past before last year, as tradition had for many, as long as I can remember, everything just went to finance.

Nothing went to select.

Last year, to bring everyone onto a more even playing field, for instance, I didn't realize that there was a supplemental budget the first year I worked here.

Only by working here, I knew that there was an opportunity to change the budget mid-year, right?

If folks hadn't worked here before, I wanted to make sure that they hadn't even playing field of knowledge.

And that's where last year we made that decision to bring everything to select essentially.

And so now the discussion point that I'm raising here is do we want to continue with that?

Do we want to revert back to the way it was before?

Do we want a middle ground?

And the way I'll make that determination is talking with everyone on the committee and talking with everyone in council.

And I wanted to give you, you know, the moment to digest and reflect.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Councilmember Saka.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And now as both you, Mr. Chair, and Council President aptly alluded to, there's a lot of complexities involved in terms of scheduling, aligning calendars, and precious council chamber space, et cetera.

There's a very complex back-end game of Tetris going on, and you've got to figure out all the parts.

And so I guess at a high level, just kind of reemphasizing my earlier points and preference that we adopt, as you put it, like maybe a modified approach where we do a little more than at the select committee level than what's normal, if you will.

But, you know, just be mindful of the already very robust and comprehensive select committee schedule we have.

across the board all up for various policy subjects.

So against that backdrop and directly in line with these discussion points on this slide, I would say, I think World Cup appropriations, I know there's a lot of excitement and interests amongst our colleagues, even outside of this committee.

So I think that would be a good candidate if possible to try to consider at the select committee level, Next up, from my perspective, would be the mid-year supplemental.

I think that would be a good candidate, especially we have now two new colleagues going through this process.

I think the first two are very ripe for committee level only.

But in the end of the day, look, I would defer to your wise judgment and that of Council President in trying to make all the pieces work.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

Council President.

What, yeah.

Could you, when we talk about budget reform, could you please remind me what budget reform we went through in 2023?

There was Chair, the Finance Chair Musqueda, I just recall there were some, there was some legislation that codified parts of our budget processes.

Maybe that was only regarding the fall

Are you talking about the fiscal transparency ordinance for monitoring, enhanced monitoring?

Yes, that is, yes.

I didn't remember the name.

So what was that again?

I have it in my mind as budget reform.

I don't think that is similar to what we're doing currently.

All right.

with the budget reform that you're leading, correct, counsel?

Yes, I might have, and circled back with you, but if I'm recalling correctly, it was a desire for the executive and the council to work more closely together in codifying that, and we did do that last year, and I expect for us to do it again.

It's what led to what I believe a collaborative approach that I haven't seen before.

that was remarkable.

So I guess it's hard for me to, so what is, when you talk about budget reform, what are you thinking?

I know that there's a, we're gonna discuss it later, but are you talking about going into each department's budgets?

And can you just help me understand?

Yeah, and so there's the process.

So last year we didn't do Form Bs.

Do we do Form Bs again this year?

I think it might be helpful.

So there's that process.

Can you remind people that might not know what they are?

Council President, I'm going to ask that.

I know we're having a little bit of a discussion, but I'll share a statement and then I'll pass the mic back to you.

And I think that I shared this at the beginning of the meeting, form B is just being the, each council member can put forward an idea for discussion.

That was something that was in the past that we didn't do for the last two years.

So in 2024 and in 2023, and that might be something that we bring back.

So that's the process of how we work on the budget together.

There are also the elements of the step-down approach that we outlined at the end of this last year, which is talking about how do we bring programs and bring the budget more in line with sustainability.

And so from there, we had a number of different statements of legislative intent.

Councilmember Rivera shared her desire to get at a more programmatic outcomes based level.

These are all those discussions.

So it goes two directions.

It goes both with process here at council of how we work on the budget together.

And then also content, what is within the budget and how are we tracking items over year over year.

I am gonna ask central staff to continue using that five year look back document that was started last year for the first time ever so that we can continue looking at the trends of our budget rather than just incremental changes year over year.

Council President, do you have more to share?

I'll wait.

Okay.

Council Member Kettle.

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

I just wanted to, you know, add, I really appreciate you made a point about the in Council President back this up, you know, in terms of having the history of the relationship between the executive and the legislative related to budget has not been necessarily as smooth as it could be in the past, but last year it was and that's our experience in terms of the cohort, but I really want to first thank the mayor for that engagement and that ability to have that more constructive relationship.

And I think we should be promoting that and also keeping the executives toes to the fire in terms of this goes to the slide follow ups and so forth.

And because I think there's, there's benefit there.

And I think, you know, from outside eyes, like there's been some realignments of the office of the mayor.

And, you know, that's one thing that came out of the budget last year was alignment of duties and where budget money was like, why is SDCI looking at a certain thing when it's really a housing piece and, you know, things change over the year and it just momentum, you know, this, things just continue on out of, you know, inertia for anything else.

And I think it's, it's beneficial to be looking and engaging with the executive so that, you know, we get better alignment sometimes between wherever that mission is, wherever that goal is of that program, and then the responsible department, because sometimes it gets spread out.

And then when you have everybody in charge, Noah's in charge.

And I think it's really important for us to, you know, seek that alignment.

And so then we can engage and then, you know, get an answer.

And so that's something that in terms of discussion points moving forward, this kind of goes into some of the things that have already been said, but I really think that that's something, you know, in a constructive way, work with the mayor and his team, you know, at these pieces based on our areas, public safety for me, for example, transportation with council member Saka, and i think we can you know really do some good work in terms of you know that type of engagement and with that goal of kind of right sizing or aligning or you know having you know a single point contact in terms of responsibilities for whatever program that might be i think that will do us well moving in the future and particularly with the budget so thank you chair well said councilmember cattle councilmember nelson old hand new hand

Continuing hand, I suppose, sort of continuing on what Councilmember Kettle said, I do believe that we are in a good spot with transparency and working with the executive.

So I'm just wondering, I was just, my earlier question was what is, what needs to be reformed about the budget?

So maybe that will become clear as we go on, as we go forward.

When I refer different legislation to, when I refer legislation to committees, I'm always working with central staff on what, I follow their recommendation to which committee it should go to, and then I refer legislation, and you mentioned one piece of legislation, which sounds really interesting, that around homeownership, what did you say what that was?

No, predatory practices, and is that coming from the executive?

Yes, that is coming from FAS is leading that.

Great.

Well, my point would simply be, my input is if you don't have that much going on in your committee, maybe we can have, I don't know if you're planning on any legislation, but it seems like there is possible room in the finance committee to do a lot of this work.

Yes, I think that's by design.

And then when it comes to referring to the select committee not having dates and not really knowing what the time commitment would be, your question was let's have a discussion at the dais on what is the preference of people.

My preference would be to keep things in finance as is the practice and and having a select committee around the budget is usually how it's been done, and I thought it worked well last year.

Okay, great.

Councilmember Rivera.

Thank you, Chair.

I, you know, I agree on that point.

I will say that just because something's in a committee that is not a select committee doesn't mean that the rest of us don't have an opportunity to weigh in.

And as you all know, I regularly attend meetings, committee meetings of committees.

I do not sit on because I care about the issues I'm tracking with what all the committees are doing.

And so I will just show up to either hear the presentations or ask my questions.

And then there's always opportunity at full council to do that as well when the committee makes a recommendation, you can accept it or not.

Um, and so I think because of that, um, and the, you know, the public should know that we do our work, um, in committees because we can't all be working on all the things, um, all at once.

And so it's how we get our work done as efficiently as possible, but it doesn't mean that you're not tracking everything that comes through.

So I think because of that, I am fine with having things go through the finance committee because I know that there's always opportunity for someone who doesn't sit on finance to track it, weigh in on it.

We can sponsor things for them if they want amendments on a piece of legislation that we're taking up.

All those things are true.

And because of that, it makes most sense.

because it is hard to have all these select committees where everybody sits on for many reasons, including the timing piece.

And because we have so many things that we're taking up, like the FEP committee this year and comp plan next year, we'll have the library's levy, which will sit on my committee, but we will have a select committee because it's a levy.

So anyway, just to say that the importance of just because you don't sit on the committee doesn't mean you're not tracking it and that you can't weigh in on it, you do.

So I want people to feel comfortable knowing that when we say it makes sense for us to do things via committee versus, you know, through finance committee versus select budget, it's not because we're not trying to be transparent or keep anyone out.

So I thought that, I just felt like that needed to be said.

Thank you.

I can tell you that this is super helpful feedback.

And then just noting that we have a select committee starting in 45 minutes.

Yes.

Just wanted to know for what it's worth, all of this legislation that you see on the screen that we central staff does thorough analysis and either my colleague or I will write a memo which gets distributed to all of the council members.

So whichever path you choose, everybody will have all of the information.

Just wanted to know that.

Wonderful.

Well, with that, maybe to your last slide, Eden.

That was, this is, oh, the questions is the last slide.

With that, is there anything more for the good of the order for today?

If not, not seeing anything, I will say that this concludes the Wednesday, February 5th, 2025 Finance Native Communities and Tribal Governments Committee meeting.

Is there any further business to come before the committee?

Seeing none, we are adjourned.

Thank you, everybody, very much.