Housing, Arts and Civil Rights Committee 7/8/26

All right, good afternoon, everyone.

The July 8th, 2026 meeting of the Housing Arts and Civil Rights Committee will come to order.

It is 2.04 PM.

I'm Dionne Foster, chair of the Housing Arts and Civil Rights Committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council President Hollingsworth?

Here.

Vice Chair Lin?

Here.

Chair Foster?

Here.

Chair, there are three members present.

Okay, please note that Council Members Juarez and Council Member Rink have been excused.

If there is no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

We will now open the hybrid public comment period.

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

Clerk, how many speakers are signed up today?

Currently we have 37 in-person speakers signed up and there are seven remote speakers.

Okay, great.

Each speaker will have one minute.

We will start with the in-person speakers first.

Clerk, can you please read the public comment instructions?

The public comment period is up to 60 minutes.

Speakers will be called in the order in which they are registered.

We will begin with in-person speakers and then move to remote speakers.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left.

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

The public comment period is now open and we will begin with the first speaker on the list.

Okay, fantastic.

And I will read the first two speakers.

And so we have a couple of different mics that folks can come up to.

So I just ask when I call your name, you can kind of queue up.

So our first speaker is Super Liv Morgan.

And then our second speaker is Taylor Far...

Oh, Taylor Farvey.

Yeah, any mic is fine.

Good afternoon.

My name is Super Liv Morgan.

I am a tenant renter in Seattle Housing Authority.

Seattle Housing Authority is starting to institute a $250 fee for every false fire alarm on every single SHA tenant.

When I heard this, I was beyond boiling.

This is not right.

This is not fair to us tenants.

Even SHA is getting into the game of the junk fees.

Ban junk fees.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Taylor and following Taylor, we're going to have Skylar Parenteau and Michelle Thomas.

Hello, my name is Taylor Farley.

I'm with Queer Power Alliance.

With this bill, renters will know exactly what they are paying and applying for when they are applying to rent a place.

Landlords won't be able to hide fees or make decisions about renters' financials by changing their arbitrary fees that don't really have a cost to them.

It does have a cost to the renters though.

With the new flex of trans people coming in and moving to Seattle, we also know that this will help them to find places more affordable and it is important to pass this legislation at this time.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Okay, next we'll have Skylar and Michelle and following that we'll have Lydia Felty and Noah Williams.

Hello, my name is Skyler Parento.

I am a renter living in Capitol Hill at this moment in time, and I urge the council to take action by holding landlords accountable towards reducing hidden and unnecessary rental junk fees.

I am in a very privileged position in my area in Capitol Hill, being able to live without junk fees, and I am struggling.

If I am struggling, I know that my neighbors who are not as lucky, who I've heard horror stories from, are barely able to pay for things outside of rent such as groceries, being able to get pet care items, and so on.

And I want to mention that banning junk fees would also be of benefit to the city because that means that the money that us as citizens of Seattle that we wouldn't have to pay towards junk fees would be money that we hold in our pockets and be able to spend on groceries, pet supplies, other items that we need, gas, all that would be within Seattle limits.

and bring up the money.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And just so folks know, when the chime goes off, you still have 10 seconds left.

So just so everyone knows that and the clock will be up there.

Okay, next we have Michelle Thomas and following Michelle, we have Lydia Felty.

Hi, I'm Michelle with the Washington Housing Alliance.

I live in District 1 and we have advocates in every city in the district.

Thank you, Mayor Wilson and Council Member Foster for bringing forward legislation to address junk fees that tenants in the city are being gouged with.

Fees are a growing issue in Seattle and you are to be commended for tackling this now.

Tenants are being forced to pay unfair, excessive and oftentimes deceptive fees.

This matters as a basic issue of fairness, but also because junk fees are making our housing crisis in Seattle worse and are exasperating race-based housing inequities.

Squeezing tenants like this is an unfair business practice and it needs to stop.

The enforcement mechanisms in the bill are critical and we applaud its inclusion.

We're dismayed though with the long implementation date.

Tenants are hurting now and gouging will likely increase over the next year.

But irregardless, please move the bill forward quickly and please do not accept any amendments that would weaken the protections.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So next we have Lydia Felty and Noah Williams.

Following that, we are going to have David Hill and Lam Ho.

Hi, my name is Lydia Felty.

I'm a renter in D3, as well as the co-chair of the Seattle Renters Commission.

The Seattle Renters Commission supports banning junk fees to reduce hidden and unnecessary housing costs.

From landscaping and lease renewal fees to in-unit appliance and pest control fees, our commission has heard time and time again from constituents that junk fees have a significant impact on housing stability.

In a city where nearly half of renters are cost burdened and a quarter spend at least half of their income on rent, knowing our housing costs upfront ensures that renters are able to plan and budget appropriately, rather than being surprised by mandatory monthly fees that were not disclosed upfront.

This legislation is about transparency and predictability, and it's about upholding the renter protections designed to protect renters from price gouging.

This comprehensive ban on fees, which does not prevent landlords from setting fair market rents or charging for opt-in services with its enforcement mechanisms is imperative.

Please pass this ordinance without any weakening amendments.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next we have Noah Williams and then David Hill.

Good afternoon, council members.

Chair Foster, my name's Noah.

I'm a renter in West Seattle, and like other commenters you hear from, I'm charged a fee to pay my rent.

But all things considered, I have it pretty good.

Reasonable rent for a one-bedroom and a competent property manager who's not a jerk.

Sadly, my friend, Wes, a renter in Northgate, isn't so lucky.

He lives with his wife and their small dog, and between the three of them, there is only one income in their household, which he couldn't join us today for because he has to keep his employer happy.

On top of his nearly $3,000 rent, Wes has to pay rent for his dog, who doesn't earn an income, an amenity fee for providing access to the common areas like a delivery room, and a mandatory fee for the dog water internet that barely works, and one for the building's access control system.

Yes, he has to pay a fee to unlock his building's front door.

Wes also pays electricity and natural gas bills for the common areas under rubs, which, if I am not mistaken, is an illegal fee that the landlord had the audacity to put into writing.

Please pass this bill banning the shadow rent increases and pass a follow-up that defangs the internet service provider cabal in Seattle so that Comcast can't charge a fee to every tenant in the building.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you.

We have David Hill, Lam Ho, and Parker Nichols.

Good afternoon.

My name is David Hill.

I'm a renter living in Roosevelt, and I'm here representing the Transit Riders Union.

True strongly urges the council to pass the mayor's proposal to ban junk fees exactly as introduced and to fiercely oppose any amendments that would weaken it.

Corporate landlords who tack on hundreds of dollars in hidden costs, administrative fees, and pet fees are actively exploiting renters and driving economic displacement.

They're using these backdoor charges to claim artificial baseline rents and skirt existing renter protections.

As a dog dad, I experience the absurdity of this firsthand.

In my building, pets are not driving maintenance needs, yet I am forced to pay pet rent for my little baby girl Maggie, even though I already pay an extra security deposit for her.

Charging a dog rent is asinine, it's a cash grab, and it goes straight into my landlord's profit margin while doing nothing to improve the tenant experience.

Please stand with Seattle renters, pass these renter protections without loopholes.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you.

Okay, Lam Ho, Parker Nichols, Jake Mason.

Good afternoon.

My name is Lam Ho, and I am the general manager for the Transit Riders Union.

Prior to being the general manager for TRUE, I was the executive director of a legal aid organization, Beyond Legal Aid, which represented hundreds of tenants every year.

For 18 years, I've represented tenants, and I wanted to speak about the enforcement component of this bill, one of the strongest enforcement mechanisms that you'll see in Seattle.

And I really want to urge the Council to not dilute those enforcements.

Don't accept any amendments that will make it not as strong.

As an attorney, as I mentioned, for 18 years, I saw just how essentially worthless policies were or laws were if there was not enough teeth to the enforcement.

Here you have a three-pronged comprehensive approach to enforcement, which is absolutely necessary not only for lawyers, but for tenants to be able to be self-advocates.

And that is a critical piece to making sure that we can genuinely ban junk fees.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Alrighty, Parker Nichols, Jake Mason, and Danielle Dural.

And apologies if I say anybody's name wrong.

Hi.

Hi, good afternoon.

My name is Parker Nicholson.

Oh, sorry.

Thanks.

Good afternoon.

My name is Parker Nicholson, born and raised Seattleite.

I'm a developer of housing in this city, in this region.

have about 700 units of housing under construction, most notably not in Seattle.

And there's a reason for that.

The institutional investors who fund our projects are afraid to put capital to work in this city.

due to the constantly evolving and changing policy on the ground.

I'm not against transparency in how rents are charged in this city.

I think it can be done in a way that's fair and transparent.

But I am against just the continued focus and scrutiny and ever-changing policy that makes it unpredictable to put money to work in this city to build more housing.

and the only way we're gonna actually reduce rents in this town is to build our way out of the housing crisis and continued pressure and scrutiny on our business is counterproductive.

Got to look at places like Austin, Texas, rents are going down.

Thank you.

If you have more comments, you can leave them in that bucket right there.

Thank you, appreciate you.

Okay, next up is Jake Mason, Danielle Dural, and Ethan Steiger.

Good afternoon.

My name is Jake Mason.

I'm here with the Washington Multifamily Housing Association.

Here today in strong support of the transparency provisions included in the proposed rental fee regulation and in strong support of a collaborative policymaking process aimed at holding bad landlords accountable, banning junk fees, allowing pets, and bringing more housing to the Seattle market to bring rents down.

Unfortunately, the proposal in front of you raises rents.

The proposal in front of you ties good landlords up in red tape while failing to go far enough to hold bad landlords accountable for deceptive practices.

The proposal in front of you reduces opportunities to bring more housing to Seattle and will continue to keep new housing development out of our city.

It was clear to me in the stakeholder meeting that was held with the mayor's office as well as here in the hallway that there is significant overlap in what we can accomplish with tenants' groups and I stand ready as a partner in a collaborative process moving forward.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Alright, Danielle and then Ethan Steiger and Taylor Shanahan.

Great.

I'm Danielle Duvall, the Executive Director of Credo Washington State, formerly NAOP, the Commercial Real Estate Development Association representing industry professionals delivering and operating much of the market rate multifamily housing this city needs.

Thank you for your leadership and focus on housing affordability.

We support transparency and agree renters should clearly understand the costs associated with their housing.

Our concern is that the proposal goes beyond transparency and adds another operational requirement at a time when housing providers are already facing rising carts and complex regulatory environments.

New regulations increase costs, reduce flexibility, and make housing more expensive to provide.

Restricting them doesn't mean those costs disappear.

The question is about fairness and how those costs are recovered.

In many cases, those costs will get folded into base rent and spread across all residents, regardless of who uses those particular services and amenities.

Market rate multifamily housing also depends on private investment, which we need to meet our growing housing needs.

We know that the most effective way to improve affordability over time is to build more housing.

Thank you.

And if you have more comments, again, you can place them there or you can send them via email.

Thank you.

Okay.

Next we have Ethan followed by Taylor and then Randy Banneker.

Good afternoon, council members.

I'm a community organizer for your city and a Roosevelt renter.

I'm here today to urge you to take action towards reducing hidden and unnecessary costs and holding landlords accountable by supporting the proposed rental junk fee ordinance.

Renters deserve straightforward pricing that reflects what they will actually pay out of pocket.

As a community organizer, I've spoken to hundreds of people who are rent burdened because of unexpected costs.

Renters are the majority in Seattle, and tens of thousands of Seattleites are affected by junk fees.

But today, you'll only hear from a fraction of them.

Housing is a human right, yet these costs serve as barriers to housing, box people out of the city they call home, and turn bright, creative Seattleites that want to contribute to the cultural fabric of this great city into people who work, pay rent, and hopefully afford groceries.

Council members, please pass this ordinance without any weakening amendments.

Thank you.

OK.

Thank you.

So we have Taylor, Randy Banneker, and then Alec Musante.

Great, thank you.

My name's Taylor Shannon.

I'm here on behalf of the Seattle King County Realtors, commenting on the homeowner privacy and protection legislation.

Realtors want to work with you and the community to stop unwanted calls to homeowners and to shut down predatory home buying and wholesaling practices.

Those practices target vulnerable homeowners and can strip away home equity by offering far below a property's true market value.

Those practices harm your constituents, and they also harm the clients and communities our members serve.

We are asking for a reasonable middle ground, one that protects homeowners from predatory conduct while preserving legitimate, transparent communication from licensed real estate professionals.

As drafted, the ordinance risks chilling responsible communication by licensed brokers through the threat of fines while doing little to stop boiler room tactics by unlicensed wholesalers who are difficult to identify and hold accountable.

We have offered suggestions to refine the definition of solicit.

We also urge the city to be bold in addressing predatory wholesaling in Seattle by targeting deceptive and high pressure practices.

We ask that you align this proposal with the predatory home buying ordinance from last year, collaborate with us to identify predatory wholesalers, and align the ordinance with already existing national do not call registry.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And you can put those in the chat, or the chat bot, in the bucket if you didn't get to finish.

All right, Randy, Alec, and then Khalil.

Chair Foster, Councilmembers Randy Banneker also here on the behalf of the Seattle King County Realtors regarding the homeowner privacy and protection ordinance.

You hear?

I just underscore what Taylor, the previous speaker, just said, and that is we do want to work with you on stopping the calls to homeowners.

We think the way to do that is to go after the wholesalers.

And we'd like to work with you to pair last year's ordinance on predatory home buying with this ordinance, which would couple Office of Civil Rights and FAS in enforcement, and really going after those wholesalers to stop it, because the list isn't going to stop it.

You'll stop us.

You'll chill our voice unless we can get some safe harbor, but you won't stop the wholesalers until we can work together and get them out of business in Seattle.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, next we have Khalil.

Khalil, I'm sorry.

Oh, actually, did I just skip somebody?

Next we have Alec.

Okay, and then we have Khalil and then somebody who's just listed as Dom.

Hey there, my name's Alec.

and we'll restart your time.

You can use this mic if you want, but just speak right into the mic.

OK.

Hey there.

My name's Alec Nusante.

I'm a renter in downtown Seattle, and I support the ban against junk fees.

One such fee that I'm affected by every month is a pet rent fee.

I pay an extra $50 per month on top of my base rent just to keep my cat and with me.

And this $50 doesn't help at all.

It just goes straight to the landlord.

I still take care of all my cat's amenities, his food, his litter, et cetera, et cetera.

And also every year, I have to pay a pet screening fee where I file a bunch of paperwork on vaccines that I take him to the vet for and pay for myself.

And it's just another tax on my ability to live in this city, and I would very much like to do so.

So, council members, I urge you to support the full ban on all junk fees for renters in Seattle.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, next we have Khalil, Dom, and then we have Anitra Friedman and Caroline Russell.

Good afternoon.

My name is Khalil Hamiduddin.

I'm with SEIU6.

Banning junk fees is a critical step to making Seattle affordable for everyone.

I applaud Mayor Wilson and Council Member Foster for taking action to address the affordability crisis in this city.

SEIU6 represents 10,000 members, 7,000 plus work in Seattle, and 3,200 of them live in the city.

Our members are janitors, security guards, and airport workers who provide critical services to the city and region.

By and large, our members would love to live in the city they work in, but way too many of them just can't afford it.

Our society is at an existential crisis where prices increase without the thought of can people afford it.

My question to landlords is simple.

If no one can afford to live in the city, who's going to pay the rent that you all keep increasing?

I look forward to seeing what next steps the council and mayor take to make this city affordable for everyone.

Thank you.

Thank you, Khalil.

Okay.

Dom, Anitra Friedman, Caroline Russell, Jeff Paul.

Hi, my name is Dom.

I believe junk fees are a major contributing factor in our homelessness epidemic here in my hometown, the city we love, Seattle.

I live in a tent city.

Most of the people I know on the streets, myself included, have not always been homeless, and often we have stories which include being evicted, being slammed with tons of fees, especially pet fees, making it more difficult and sometimes nearly impossible to find housing.

If you want to help solve homelessness, if you want to keep people housed, and if you love Seattle like me, you love living in a city that believes in rights for all, housing for all.

If you love Seattle like me, you'll end junk fees.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Great.

We've got Anitra.

Oh, there you are.

Okay, great.

Anitra Freeman.

Thank you.

My name is Anitra Freeman and I am a participant in Wheel and Share homeless organizing efforts.

Homeless and formerly homeless people working together.

I'm one of the formerly homeless.

My homeless friends also want to be renters.

Junk fees make it harder, make it twice as hard.

A lot of my homeless friends have jobs, and they're saving up money.

But you think you have enough money to get and a rent that was advertised, you go in and you pay the application fee and you get down to signing the lease and find out that it's actually several hundred behind that.

I appreciate the work that you've put into this, Council Member Foster.

Don't let anybody weaken it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay.

All right, we have, thank you, thank you, thank you.

We have Caroline Russell, Jeff Paul, Sanjay Katapali, and then Kevin Schilling.

Hi, Council.

My name is Caroline Russell.

I'm a D3 resident.

My first apartment in Seattle was one in Capitol Hill.

It was a beautiful apartment.

I lived there for two years before the cost of rent and fees became too high for me to continue paying.

During that time, I was charged a total of $60 for the privilege of paying my own rent, $144 for a key fob system I didn't ask for, $372 for a gym I never used, and $1,200 for a seven-pound cat who did no damage to my apartment and my landlord's own admission.

For the last three years, I've now been living in a beautiful apartment with the same square footage in the same neighborhood where I pay less in rent.

This landlord did away with pet rent right after I moved in.

They renovated our laundry room, and they charged us no fees to use it.

And they, in fact, only charge us for the things we actually use.

And they still make plenty of income off of my rent.

So I know this can be done.

Landlords will tell you about unpredictability, but what about the unpredictability of not knowing whether you'll be able to stay in the house that you love, in the city you love, in the neighborhood you love?

This is what really matters.

I urge you to pass this legislation with no changes.

Ban junk fees.

Jeff, Sanjay, Kevin, and then M.

Smith.

Good afternoon, counsel.

My name is Jeff Paul.

I'm the interim co-executive director of How's Our Neighbors.

And apologies for anyone who is at the press conference.

This might sound a little redundant.

But today, I'm here to talk as a renter who has moved eight times in the last nine years, including one time into my car over $90.

I'm here to talk about what it's like to live paycheck to paycheck with no savings in the city, which is a very normal experience.

In 2018, I was barely making ends meet when my employer illegally stopped paying me for months.

I didn't have the savings to float the difference, so I got temp jobs on the side, doing dog walking, stocking shelves overnight, and everything I could to pull the cash together to make rent.

But it wasn't enough.

Rent day came, and I was about $90 short.

Unfortunately, I didn't know my tenant rights, like many renters in the city, and that $90 gap ended up pushing me out of my house and into my car.

So when landlords tell you that they can't afford us banning these fees, my simple response is that we can't afford to pay them.

I certainly couldn't have floated the $150 fee that Mayor Wilson mentioned in her press conference, and many other people can't either.

Let's protect our most precarious renters and ban these junk fees.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Okay, Sanjay, Kevin, M. Smith, Spencer Rawls.

Hi, my name is Sanjay and I'm a graduate student researcher at the University of Washington and a member of UAW 4121, the union which represents nearly 10,000 academic workers at UW.

The majority of UAW members like me are renters in Seattle.

My colleagues and I carry out life-saving research on cancer, genetics, wildfire mitigation, and more.

It should be these critical issues that keep us up at night, not worrying about making rent next month or new fees from our landlords.

Some of our members are only paid for nine months out of the year and are forced to stretch these paychecks and fight to secure precarious temporary employment for the summer.

With recent federal funding cuts, less positions are offered every quarter.

The council has the opportunity through this bill to mitigate the incredibly regressive system of landlords passing on opaque costs to renters.

This bill is absolutely necessary to protect tenants and we urge you to pass this bill in its current form.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

We're going to keep it moving.

Kevin.

Good afternoon, council members.

Kevin Schilling with the Rental Housing Association of Washington.

Let's be clear, renters deserve transparency.

They deserve to know the full cost of housing before they apply.

We support that.

But this ordinance doesn't just require disclosure.

When you ban a cost, the cost doesn't disappear.

It moves into rent.

The renter who doesn't use the services pays, everyone pays more.

That's not affordability, that's cost shifting.

Even the city's own expert acknowledged advertised rents will increase.

Then there's enforcement.

A paperwork mistake can trigger penalties and lawsuits.

And to fund it all, the city wants to impose a new fee on every rental home, a new fee to regulate fees.

Seattle keeps adding costs, mandates, and legal risks to housing, and every time the result is the same.

Less housing, higher costs, and fewer choices for renters.

To keep the transparency provisions, require disclosure, require honesty, but reject the fee bans, the cost caps, and the private right of action, because transparency helps renters, higher rents do not.

Thank you.

Thank you.

M.

Smith, Spencer Rawls, Harper Nally, and Fendon Poptu.

Hi, my name's M.

Smith.

I'm a renter in Seattle.

I'm a member of Labor Militant.

The council needs to ban these junk fees and do it without loopholes, without any watering down.

We have corporate representatives of the real estate industry coming up here crying crocodile tears when the three biggest landlords in Seattle, Essex, Equity, and Avalon Bay, made $3 billion of profit last year.

If they're arguing, if they're threatening to push these costs onto renters in the form of increased rent, we need to fight for rent control.

We need to fight for public housing.

We need to fight to ban other junk fees which aren't included in this legislation, like rubs, which is a junk fee.

Landlords are pushing the costs of utilities that renters aren't using onto us, including for vacant units.

If any Democrat on this council had courage and was wanting to fight for renters, they would introduce an amendment to include a ban on rubs.

in this legislation.

We need to fight for this.

The Democrats aren't doing this because they fight for renters.

They're doing it because of the pressure of our movement.

We need to escalate.

We need to fight for more.

We need to fight for rent control and the full renter's bill of rights.

Thank you.

Spencer, and I'm going to try to keep us moving, folks.

We have one committee member who has a hard stop at 4.30, and we have two presentations after public comments.

Spencer Harper, Fendon Poptou, Steph Hagerty.

Thank you.

My name is Spencer Rawls, and I rent a micro apartment in Capitol Hill.

The advertised rent of my unit was $12.95.

The total I pay after fees is $14.88.

That is an absurd difference.

Part of that is pet rent, which we all know is just a blatant scam.

That should be banned.

Part of that is a flat $125 utility fee.

Now, of course, I don't expect not to pay utilities, but there are several problems with that model.

One is it should be advertised as part of the fixed costs, because it is a known fixed cost.

Two, the landlord tries to have it both ways, treating that utility fee as part of rent when it's convenient for them, but only when it's convenient for them.

Three is that it doesn't adjust when major appliances are out of order and not using any power.

The heat pumps in my apartment have been out of order since November, and so they haven't been using any power, but we're still paying the full utility fee.

Ban junk fees and require disclosure.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Harpernelli, I'm a resident of District 3, and I pay an extra $40 in rent, essentially, as does everybody else in my apartment building.

We pay $10 to pay rent, and we pay $30 for Wi-Fi that does not work.

We've heard that rents will go up.

I don't really see how that's different than what I already pay.

It may not be called rent, but it's rent because every single one of us pays it.

It doesn't change depending on who uses this or not.

I can't not pay the Wi-Fi fee even if I don't use it.

So that means that this is rent.

So when these landlords are coming up and talking about how our rents are going to increase because we're banning fees, if we ban fees, that doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, Fenden, Steph, then we have Lexi, Salas, and Raoul or maybe Paul Estevez.

Hi, my name is Ferdinand Paptia, and I'm a student organizer, and I'm here to encourage the passage of this bill without any loopholes.

Seattle is in a severe protracted housing crisis, and it is killing the state, and it harms us on many dimensions.

Unaffordable housing means that renters are saddled with hidden fees that they can't account for when looking for housing.

Beyond that, it hurts people out of state, trans people, immigrants, who come to the state because they are being harmed by hostile federal and state governments.

don't know what kind of housing market they're getting into and are faced with a very precarious situation.

And finally, an affordable housing market hurts our state representation.

It makes people want to leave.

It makes people not want to live here.

You cannot have abundance without affordability.

And even if this bill passes, we still have a lot further to go in the state.

So thank you.

Thank you.

All right, Steph, and then Lexi.

Hi there.

Hi there, my name is Steph Haggerty, U District renter, and speaking today in support of banning junk fees.

Junk fees are unaffordable, not fair, and they hurt my friends.

I'm speaking on behalf today of some of my friends who can't be here because they're working to try to pay rent and junk fees.

One of those stories is my friend Allison, a non-profit worker in Columbia City.

pays $40 per month, that's just one example, junk fee to access the privilege of accessing the landlord's property management portal and paying rent.

That's a landlord business expense, but it's called resident benefits on her bill.

She can barely afford to live in that apartment and that's nearly 500 bucks a year that makes impacts her ability to make it in the city and wasn't transparent in the advertised rental price.

This is just one example of many, but these fees are prevalent across the city as we're hearing today.

The rent's too damn high, so are the junk fees.

We as renters deserve freedom from price gouging and deserve pricing transparency.

Seattle's over half residence and increasingly we are your constituents.

Please ban junk fees without weakening amendments to make Seattle more fair and affordable.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Lexi Salas, are you here?

Lexi, okay, we'll try to come back to you.

Paul or Raul?

My name is Paul Steves.

I'm a renter in District 3. Just wanted to thank you for considering this piece of legislation.

It's badly needed.

Price transparency will eventually lower rent in the long term.

Just wanted to counter the narrative that we're OK with the rent going up.

It's better than seemingly unlimited fees.

That's what's happening in the current situation.

The most egregious of fees is rubs.

The utility billing system is completely unfair.

I think the mayor's rental survey demonstrated that.

The current situation I'm in now, it seems like I'm paying for laundry both per use but also the utilities running that machine.

I don't think that's fair.

I definitely don't water down any of the enforcement mechanisms in this bill.

In fact, we need more.

I think we need an actual housing court.

We need to do things like ban pocket service for default judgments and evictions.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Lexi and then we have Heather Fancher and Leah Salerno.

Hello, my name is Lexi Salas and I'm a renter in District 3. I'm here today to urge our City Council to support the proposed rental junk fee ordinance without any weakening amendments.

I moved to Seattle over three years ago to free myself from domestic violence.

It's really important for me to support myself and my dog independently so that I don't have to make decisions that compromise my emotional and financial well-being.

It was stressful figuring out my housing budget with so many hidden fees, and it was challenging to find a home that didn't penalize me hundreds and hundreds of dollars for having a pet.

So far, I've paid $950 in pet rent.

I know too many people who stay in dysfunctional and abusive homes because they cannot afford moving costs and they cannot afford rising rents and hidden junk fees.

We all deserve homes free of violence and coercion.

Our housing should never be held over our heads as a form of control, and that includes from landlords.

That's why I urge City Council to ban junk fees without any weakening amendments.

Thank you.

Heather Fancher and then Leah Salerno and Carl Nelson.

Heather, are you here?

Good afternoon.

I'm Heather with 1073 and the ShareWheel organization.

We're working on housing and would like to be a renter someday.

However, we can't afford it.

Remove the hidden junk fees so that housing can become obtainable for those most in need.

We need to pass this legislation.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We have Leah Salerno, Carl Nelson, Casey Burton.

Hi, I'm Leah Salerno.

I'm an attorney, the current vice chair of the Seattle Social Housing Developer Board, and today I'm speaking in my personal capacity as a long-time renter in Seattle.

I'm here in support of the legislation to ban junk fees and to urge that it's passed without any amendments weakening it because we need to ban junk fees and make sure there is strong enforcement of these protections.

I have a support animal that helps me maintain stability and complete several of my activities of daily living.

A couple years ago, my landlord decided to add on a pet screening junk fee through a third party.

They insisted I needed to reapply for my reasonable accommodation they'd already approved by handing over even more medical information to that third party in order to avoid the twin junk fees of pet screening and pet rent.

As an attorney who spent much of my career working in disability civil rights, I was able to handle it, but it took me hours.

We need enforcement mechanisms to make sure others can also enforce their rights.

Thank you.

Carl, then Casey, and Kate Rubin.

Hello, members of council.

Thank you.

My name is Carl Nelson.

I'm a 17-year renter here in Seattle, a board member of the Seattle Social Housing Developer and the co-chair of the Cedar Crossing Tenants Association in District 4. I'm here in my personal capacity today to speak for the banning of junk fees and for robust enforcement measures to make sure this legislation is effective.

As a renter and attendance organizer, I have seen firsthand how landlords only take rules seriously when there are actual penalties to breaking them.

I have also seen firsthand the way small and not so small fees, superfluous fees, add up to burden and sometimes unhouse our most vulnerable population.

Housing is factually a human need, and in a just society, we should treat it as such, especially before it is prioritized as an investment.

This legislation is about transparency, fairness, and consumer protection.

I urge the council to adopt this legislation, and specifically to make sure the enforcement measures remain intact and unaltered.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Okay.

Casey, Kate Rubin, Howard Gale, Olivia Lindstrom.

My name is Casey Burton.

I am a renter in District 2. I live in a large apartment complex and pay many junk fees.

My landlord charges residents a number of fees, including $8 a month parcel locker, even if your package doesn't end up in a parcel or you don't want it, or pardon, in a parcel locker.

We pay $30 a month valet trash fee.

They don't actually take our compost, though.

They only take some of our trash.

We have to take the rest out.

They make us pay a $70 technology rent fee for internet that we didn't ask for, don't need, don't want it.

And they also charge people $95 a month for pet rent.

Now, my dog is 14. He spends most of his time sleeping on the couch or on what has become his armchair.

He can't pay rent.

He's very cute, but he's incapable of paying rent.

and we really need to make sure that we are protecting the families that we have and the households we have.

Further, it's really important that we invest in enforcement because otherwise, tenants are going to be on their own.

Thank you.

And if you have more comments, you can put them in the box.

Kate Rubin, Howard Gale, Olivia Lindstrom, Daniel Gallagher.

Hi, I'm Kate Rubin.

I'm a renter living in District 2. I am the co-executive director of Be Seattle, an organization that serves renters, and I am co-chair of the Seattle Renters Commission.

Today, I would like to specifically address pet rent as that is a scam and it's kind of one of the longest running junk fees that we have.

Landlords have argued that they need to charge pet rent because pets cause damage to the unit, but Tenants are responsible for paying for that damage regardless how much pet rent they paid.

So if they paid thousands of dollars to the landlord, they still have to pay whatever damage costs without getting that money attributed to the damage.

Additionally, they say, well, it's just for maintenance from the wear and tear of having pets come through or from maintaining the property.

There are lots of ways that properties get damaged.

It's not just pet owners and renters shouldn't carry that burden.

Thank you.

Howard Gale, Olivia Lindstrom, Daniel Gallagher, Gordon Hagerty.

Hi, how are Gail?

For the people here today representing landlords and greed, 130 years ago when New York City was first trying to protect public health with regulations on food, operators and trade groups protested laws requiring mechanical refrigeration, hand washing sinks, safe food storage, arguing these mandates were economically prohibitive, unenforceable, or driven by anti-competitive motives.

We've been here before.

We need protections.

The legislation before you is a minimal, it's a floor, What I would say is most lacking in this legislation is the enforcement.

SDCI has a conflict of interest.

They represent landlords and developers.

So the most important thing this legislation could do to move the ball forward is to actually take the enforcement out of SDCI.

And just like we have the Office of Labor Standards, we should have an independent office in the city that is actually answerable to renters and protects renters without the confound that SDCI

Thank you, Olivia, Daniel Gallagher, Gordon Haggerty and Tetra Bingham.

Hello, I'm Olivia and I'm a renter living in Beacon Hill.

I'm here to urge City Council to take action to hold landlords accountable and reduce false advertising and unnecessary housing costs by supporting the proposed rental junk fee ordinance.

In October 2025, my husband and I spent weeks searching for housing in Seattle and applied to lease our apartment, which was advertised at $2,285 per month in rent and an equal amount for security deposit.

When it came to sign our lease after we had already paid to apply, we were surprised to see a charge of $70 per month in pet rent, a $540 pet deposit, and last month's rent were all required prior to move-in.

However, apartment advertising did not explicitly list these costs prior to the lease signing.

So before we even occupied the apartment, we had to pay an unexpected amount of rent totaling $2,895.

Renters deserve straightforward pricing that reflects what they will actually pay out of pocket.

Please pass this ordinance without any weakening amendments.

Thank you.

Daniel Gallagher, Gordon Hagerty, Tetra Bingham, Rachel Snell.

Thank you, counsel.

My name is Daniel Gallagher.

I'm a Seattle-based developer of workforce and affordable housing.

It's good to see you all today.

I encourage you to be very, very aggressive in rooting out landlords who break the law or fail to be transparent in their leasing activities.

No question there.

That said, I encourage you to be very careful in considering the unintended consequences of broad bans on fees based in particular on optional uses, including, for instance, pet bans, or sorry, pet fees.

Banning fees, as others have said, doesn't make the expense goes away, it just causes it to be layered into base rent and spread across the entire building, including renters who don't have pets.

Pet fees are an instructive example here.

Take it from me, having pets in our buildings can be very, very expensive.

On average, they cause damage.

I know yours doesn't, but on average they do.

It's optional to have a pet and we have to be able to charge pet owners fees for that damage.

I do not contest that it's very expensive to live in this city, but making it harder to build and own buildings will only increase rent over time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Gordon Haggerty, Tetra Bingham, Rachel Snell.

Gordon?

Good afternoon.

My name is Gordon Hagerty.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak.

I've been a housing provider in Seattle since the early 1970s.

I've enjoyed being a provider.

I have good relationships with our residents and our heart and our desire is to provide a good quality living space for them.

I fear that this legislation is actually going overboard even though I totally agree with providing clear, transparent, upfront disclosure of all of the costs and we do our best to do that but some of these so-called junk fees are actually providing offsetting costs for those which will be buried in the rent and not be specifically included.

So I think we're very important on this.

I believe Katie Wilson has exposed herself with her own junk fee on housing providers called the rental regulatory fee.

And that her sense is fees for me, but not.

And if you have more comments, you can please put them in the box.

Thank you so much.

Tetra, Rachel Snell, Amy Worthington.

Good afternoon.

My name is Tetra from Tent City 3 and I just want to say for the sake of our younger generations and their safety to remove the hidden fees to make housing more affordable for the people.

Thank you, Tetra.

Rachel and then Amy and then we'll go to our online speakers.

Hi.

Good afternoon, Chair Foster and members of the Seattle City Council.

My name is Rachel Snell, and I sit on the executive board for the 37th Legislative District Democrats.

And I don't have much prepared today, but I just wanted to say I strongly support banning junk fees in a time when cost of living is increasing and many of us have to choose between rent healthcare bills and grocery shopping and a whole list of other unexpected emergencies.

Now more than ever is critical for this important piece of legislation to start.

Please ban junk fees and also we need to be looking after each other.

This is a time for us as a city to truly shine and thrive because if we can't afford to live here then we're no longer going to be a city that's Great, so thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, our last in-person speaker is Amy Worthington, then we're gonna go online.

Hi, my name is Amy Worthington, and I've been in the commercial real estate sector for over three decades and working with property management.

And with regard to, first of all, I'd like to say with regard to transparency, I'm all in favor of transparency.

I certainly think everyone should understand the cost before they sign a lease.

I was surprised in the slide deck to see the pet fees at the top of fees that are being proposed to be eliminated because I have a different view on that.

I view it as an equity issue.

There are very real and ongoing costs to having pets at properties from waste pickup to dander issues.

And it seems inequitable to me to have people that don't have pets to have to incur that cost.

So if the pet fee is an eliminated fee, it just gets rolled into the overall budget and then all the renters have to incur and help share in the cost of that upkeep.

I'd like to not see that as part of the eliminated fees because I do view it as an equity issue.

Thank you for taking up this issue and I very much applaud transparency.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

And we are now going to turn online.

I'm going to pass it over to the clerk to call our online speakers.

All right.

The first remote speaker will be Aiden Carroll followed by red.

Aiden, please press star six when you hear the prompt that you have been unmuted.

Hello.

First, when we hear about the pet rent proposed change, spreading it across the entire building, that is exactly what RUB does.

So unless you're advocating to ban the ratio utility building system, I don't think that's anything other than hypocrisy.

Second, we need to reduce barriers to housing in general.

We have to increase construction.

We have to accelerate the shelter expansion.

And until we do, we have to identify two to four locations in every council district for a sanctioned camp where you're telling people they can't camp somewhere they can camp in dead.

Third, we don't want to make it harder to build housing.

We do want to make it harder to own buildings.

If you can start something, you're a housing provider.

If you want them to retain control over it while simultaneously inviting people to live in it, you are not a housing provider.

You are a housing hoarder.

You are trying to be a ticket scalper.

You are not producing anything.

Meanwhile, this is more radical what the council is doing though.

We just want every fee to be listed in the rent without this manipulative game where I end up paying 300...

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Red followed by Ruby Holland.

And Red, if you can hear me, please press star six.

Good afternoon.

Can you hear me okay?

Yep, we can hear you.

Hello?

Oh, great.

Good afternoon.

I'm speaking to the renters on the council and to Councilmember Lynn, this committee's vice chair, who worked on the city's housing attorney on utility contracts.

Amendment to 7.24 misses the King County sewer capacity charge.

King County bills the building for this infrastructure cost Landlords pass it straight to tenants as a sewer capacity line item.

In nearly every building built in the last 15 years, we take landlords to the hearing examiner and win.

I did, but it didn't stop.

The examiner ruled the charge as a utility, so it's legal to pass through.

I want only on a disclosure technicality, and the penalty was $100.

The landlord maybe fixes the paperwork and the fee rolls on.

Consider the cost of that.

Each tenant must file and sit through a full, contested hearing individually for a $100 result.

This bill's own recitals calls building and citywide enforcement a better use of city resources.

Thank you.

And our next week will be Ruby Holland followed by Aaron Talek.

And Ruby, if you press star six.

All right, looks like you're unmuted.

Ruby, are you there?

Let's come back to her.

We'll skip and then come back to you if you're still there.

Next, we'll go to Aaron Tulek.

Good afternoon, Chair Foster and members of the Council.

My name is Aaron Tulloch, Legislative Aid for the WBBA and FMS Global Strategies Coalition.

The WBBA represents 110 community organizations and over 900 coalition partners across Seattle and Washington State.

For decades, FMS Global Strategies has advanced policy on behalf of Black, Brown and historically underrepresented communities.

The WBBA strongly supports a ban of rental junk fees.

A unit advertised at one price should not become hundreds of dollars more expensive through hidden fees.

renters deserve to know the true cost of housing before they sign a lease.

For black and brown communities already navigating wage disparities and displacement, junk fees deepen inequity.

We urge the council to close loopholes, create real enforcement, and protect renters from retaliation.

Seattle has the opportunity to lead with clarity and fairness.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker will be Atsi Ruby, if we can try you again.

My name is Ruby Holland.

A small but growing number of people with VOC sensitivity need fragrance-free housing to escape the ever-present second-hand scented product use in rental buildings that is endangering their lives.

They are hoping for an ADU program that addresses this issue.

Ideally, many of the convenience fees, such as an apartment appliance fee, should allow tenants to opt out instead of being eliminated.

Landlord responsibilities that have been passed on to tenants like common area maintenance, pest control, valet trash, and all the rest need to be eliminated completely.

Real estate oligarchs and corporate landlords want to swindle homeowners out of their lots and swindle renters out of their cash.

For too long City Hall has been complicit in this attack on the working class and even some council members today are in the pockets of these gumbags.

Next speaker will be Hallie Willis followed by Will Oberist and then the final two are Danielle and David.

Good afternoon, council members.

My name is Hallie Willis, and I'm the policy manager at the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness, and I'm a longtime Seattle resident and renter in District 5 here in support of the junk fee legislation proposed by Mayor Wilson and sponsored by Councilmember Foster.

This is a housing fairness issue.

Junk fees like pet rent and made-up administrative fees raise already high housing costs and compromise consumer protections by allowing landlords to seek in fees that tenants can't avoid.

That's not fair, and it makes it even harder for people to afford a place to live in this city.

This is common sense housing fairness and transparency legislation, and we urge you to pass it at full strength with strong accountability mechanisms in place.

Taking my work hat off for a moment, I'm a renter and a pet owner.

Let's get rid of pet fees.

My cat doesn't have a job.

He can't pay rent.

Charging pet fees is widespread and is as absurd as forcing families to pay additional rent.

Please ban pet fees and other junk fees.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker will be Will Obrist followed by Danielle Gray.

Hi, counsel.

This is Will Oberst, Director of Drinks and Democracy.

I'm a union member at UFCW 3000 and a restaurant worker here in D3, where I live.

We need to ban junk fees.

Money is tight for everyone, especially for those of us who work two to four jobs at a time.

We just need to manage expectations, make sure that landlords are being held accountable and transparent.

Things like pet fees and additional utility fees that we pay every day are too much for us.

We need strong enforcement arms and to pass the legislation proposed by the mayor as it is with no amendments.

Feel free to join me later at my second job today for a celebratory drink at the restaurant that I work at.

Thanks all.

Cheers.

All right, our next speaker is Danielle Gray, followed by David.

I'm a tenant of Rent and Controlled Affordable Housing.

After being told I could expect rapid massive rent increases, I called the Office of Housing and requested access to the rules.

I was told, and I quote, what are you complaining about?

It sent me on a quest and I was able to find the covenant.

When I shared the covenant with OH, I was told I could move.

I would like to request an audit of rent increases within the Office of Housing's portfolio, where documentation shows OH advising low-income housing to increase rents above land covenants.

My own rent in OH housing with the CCI moderator has increased 47% in four years.

Seattle's Housing Levy Oversight Committee meeting minutes state that market rate rents and restricted affordable rents are overlapping, where restricted rents can be higher than actual market rates.

Ending with the last August, HLAC Minutes, I quote, because developers are finding they're having trouble leasing up oversupplied unit types.

Some are trying to get public funders to take on those projects so the public absorbs the risk and financial loss instead of the developers who built the building.

Thank you.

And our final speaker will be David Haynes.

David, if there you can press.

There you go.

All right, thank you, David Ains.

We need to address the fact that the landlords are sneaking charges into the rent and artificially inflating the cost of that house, trying to get rich at the expense of the working class that are being cheated out of a better choice in home.

And we need to address the fact that we have landlords on the city council who sabotaged the integrity of the comprehensive plan to make sure that no working class would have a better built back home, providing better choices and real equity without unqualified non-profits building modern third world slums that are fine with the landlords and their sympathizers on the council and the politically connected.

But when it comes to padding the cost and constantly overcharging the people, we need better regulation to allow for a renter to renegotiate the rent once you move in and discover that you're paying three times the original mortgage on a flawed piece of floor plan that's dilapidated and inflated and ruining your mental health that justifies a renter's revolt.

Thank you.

And there are no additional registered speakers.

All right.

Thank you so much, clerk.

And thank you to all of our public commenters today.

As always, we appreciate you coming down and taking the time to speak with us.

At this point, we will now move on to our first item of business.

Will the clerk please read item one into the record?

Agenda item one, rental fees transparency and fairness legislation for briefing and discussion.

Fantastic.

I would like to invite up to the table and already joining us right on time, Karim Levitas with the mayor's office, Maureen Roat with the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections or SDCI, Neil Mahoney, a professor of economics from Stanford University, as well as, I'm not sure it's Ariel or Ariel, I apologize, Nelson, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center who is joining us virtually.

They will be providing an overview of the legislation that is on the agenda as an informational item today.

Before they begin, colleagues and for the public, this is not a vote today.

This is the first time we are having this in committee as an informational item.

I want to thank the mayor and her team for their work on this bill, as well as all of the community leaders and members who've come and participated in this process.

As we heard during public comment, we know that hidden fees don't belong on the largest expense for most Seattle families, which is their rent.

I shared this a little bit at the press conference, so I'll be a little bit brief, but we are a majority renter city and we know that already many of our household budgets are stretched and that families deserve the transparency to know the real cost of a rental upfront.

before they are sitting down to sign a lease.

Transparency creates a better housing market and we know that has the opportunity to benefit our renters as well as everyone here in Seattle.

Particularly these added costs can hit hardest for those on fixed incomes for young people entering the workforce and communities that are more likely to rent.

So with that, I will hand it over to the committee members for their presentation.

Hopefully we've got our slides loaded up looking good.

And if you all can just briefly introduce yourselves, and then we will go ahead through the presentation.

Thank you, council members.

Just gonna check that you can hear me, but you clearly can.

Karen Levites, senior policy advisor with the mayor's office.

I'll let the folks to my right introduce themselves.

Neil Mahoney, Professor at Stanford University.

Maureen Roat, Rental Programs Manager, Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections.

And we're joined online.

And I'm Arielle Nelson from the National Consumer Law Center.

Thank you for concern over pronunciation.

All right, I will be starting us off.

Really appreciate, council members, the time and the attention to this matter.

This bill that the mayor has transmitted is about making sure that tenants have one clear price that they pay.

We've really seen across the economy things that used to have one price being unbundled into a whole bunch of smaller fees.

We see it when we buy airline tickets, where we used to pay one price, and now we're paying for carry-on bags, we're paying for a drink, we're paying for our seat assignments.

And so this is a feature that we've seen really across the spectrum, but it's particularly impactful and problematic when it comes to housing.

And that's because we know that half of Seattle renters pay more than 30% of their income on rent, what we call cost burdens.

58% of renters pay fees in addition to rent.

and the impacts that we see is it prevents renters from comparing housing prices, making informed choices about where they're choosing to rent, and making financial plans for themselves and their families.

For housing providers, it prevents a transparent and competitive rental market where one provider might want to list a unit with an all-in price, but they really can't because of competitive pressure from other providers who are unbundling the rent into smaller and smaller fees.

So with that brief introduction, I just want to highlight and introduce who is going to be presenting today.

Arielle Nelson is a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.

Arielle focuses on credit reporting, tenant and employment screening, consumer protections for renters, and consumer issues affecting justice-involved people and their families.

She's authored numerous reports on rental housing junk fees.

Professor Neil Mahoney is a professor of economics at Stanford, and the director of the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research.

He's a leading voice on economic policy, including consumer protection rules.

He served in the White House National Economic Council in 2022 and 2023. and Maureen Roat is the Rental Programs Manager at the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections.

She is a licensed attorney with over 15 years' experience in the housing arena and teaches a course on the intersection of housing law and poverty at the Seattle University School of Law.

We've been consulting with all three throughout this development process, and we're really grateful that they're able to join us here today.

What we're hoping to cover today is a background on the prevalence and impacts of rental fees.

Ariel will cover that material.

The rental fees economic and market impacts, which Professor Mahoney will address, and I'll cover our legislation overview, the stakeholder engagement process, as well as implementation, enforcement, and resourcing.

So with that, I will turn it over to Ariel to be our first speaker.

Thank you all for having me.

I want to start by sort of putting together a lot of what you've heard today.

So next slide, please.

Just to give you a sense, we heard about a lot of different types of fees.

I want to categorize them a little bit.

We think about them as the fees you might pay at or before moving in, which can include application fees for both people and pets, variety of admin, administrative or processing fees, deposit or one-time fees for security deposit, quote, alternative products, move-in fees, holding fees.

There are a lot of fees you might pay before you even secure your apartment.

And then there are the fees you will pay throughout the duration of your lease.

And we have seen a lot of monthly fees which include, as you heard, pet rent or pet fees, also administrative fees, insurance fees, pest controls fees, valet trash fees, maintenance fees.

And you also heard today about payment related fees.

There are, we call them sometimes convenience fees or pay to pay fees, but it's just fees to pay rent.

And you may have to pay them if you're using an online payment platform, but you might also have to pay them any other way you pay rent.

and then another category of fees you might pay throughout your lease are utility-related fees, which can include utility management and billing fees and technology package fees or pay-to-pay fees for utility bills.

You might also have to pay occasional fees that are more dependent on circumstances like late fees or court costs or legal fees.

Even if, for example, you as a tenant prevail in eviction court, you might, in housing court, you might still have to pay court fees upfront and you might face move out fees when you leave and various kinds of notices fees along the way.

So the, to sum up, these fees are prevalent at every stage of the leasing process and it's pretty common for folks to not just pay a couple, but a long laundry list of them.

Next slide, please.

You heard a lot about the problems with these fees, and I just want to highlight some of them.

Unaffordability and how they contribute to the high cost of rent is a big one, but I also want to emphasize that a lot of landlords fail to disclose fees upfront, which means that people have a hard time budgeting everybody.

It's good for landlords and tenants if everybody knows what the cost of rent is.

Tenants know that they can afford it and then they can pay along the way, which means they don't have to leave that house and the landlord has a stable tenant for hopefully a long period of time.

We also see issues with landlords failing to accurately and adequately explain the nature and purpose of fees.

Some examples of this are these sort of unknown administrative fees that you see on a ledger or on your bill where it's not clear what it's for.

We also see and hear from our legal aid partners, I should say up front, that that's one major way we get information is from legal aid attorneys who represent tenants and others like housing counselors and tenant organizers.

We also hear about fees for services that aren't actually provided.

So for example, you might be charged a monthly valet trash fee, but they don't actually pick up your trash, which is what that fee is supposed to be for, whether you want it or not.

If the service isn't provided, you have a problem.

There's also sometimes fees for services that the landlord is actually legally obligated to provide as part of providing a habitable premises.

Pest control fees can fall into this category.

We also hear about fees that are charged even though they're prohibited by state or local law.

And that can be issues where there are caps, for example, on a certain type of fee, but landlords exceed the cap and are charging more, for example, for a late fee.

So this type of issue can speak to the critical importance of enforcement mechanisms, which I know that you heard a lot about today.

We also hear about payment of fees that are much greater than they cost the landlord.

You can see this disparity in a lot of fees, including, for example, notice fees, where we've heard from folks that they have to pay something like $20 for a printed out piece of paper to be posted on their door.

So you can see the gap between what that costs and what the tenant has to pay.

I also want to flag that one big problem with junk fees is racial disparities.

Junk fees harm everybody, but one thing we have learned, including from a study from Zillow, is that renters of color, particularly Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Hispanic renters, are more likely to pay at least one recurring fee compared to white renters.

And we also hear that larger portions of Black, Asian American, Pacific Islander and Hispanic renters pay an application fee more often than white renters.

So, Ray, I just want to highlight briefly that this is an issue where renters of color are more likely to pay fees.

Next slide, please.

In addition to the problems I've already talked about, I want to highlight how these fees aren't just a short-term problem, but how they actually jeopardize access to future housing and long-term financial instability.

So one reason why that happens is that these fees can become alleged rental debt.

It's not just what you might think of as the rent itself that can become rental debt, but also these fees.

and the housing provider may seek to collect those fees through a third-party debt collector.

That can lead to dining by debt collectors where renters may face demands for the debt in eviction proceedings or even in separate collection lawsuits.

And then when a judgment enters against the tenant, the creditors can use post-judgment collection remedies like wage or bank account garnishment.

The other issue is that rental debt can be reported by these debt collectors to the big three credit bureaus, which creates these negative marks on credit reports, which lowers credit scores.

A lower credit score and a debt collection item on your credit report can create a long-term barrier to obtaining new housing and that's because about 90% of landlords run credit checks as part of their tenant screening process on all potential tenants and they often automatically reject applicants who are alleged to owe money to former landlords and those who have lower credit scores.

So junk fees can really haunt someone in the future and mean that getting housing going forward is almost impossible.

Next slide, please.

I also want to highlight that junk fees are used especially by big landlords as a profit center.

There are actually a lot of articles you can read that are aimed at landlords and they discuss how these landlords can create, they sometimes call them ancillary income programs.

and they describe how you can use things like a technology package that has a high monthly fee and bundles together a bunch of things to generate profit.

And some of these articles actually talk about how if you roll all these services into a single fee, you could actually have a lot of wiggle room when determining what is your services you want to add and how much to charge.

And when we conducted a survey of legal aid practitioners, Someone actually reported to us, the sort of flip side of this was just that when they were working with tenants in an entire building, the tenants reported that when they asked what was in one of these packages, everyone got different answers.

So you can see how there is a lot of ability of landlords to use these fees to generate income and to be unclear about what they're doing for that reason.

Next slide, please.

One other source of how we know that these fees are used as a profit is in enforcement actions by the federal government.

The Federal Trade Commission has brought two enforcement actions against very big providers of rental housing, one against invitation homes, which again charged consumers a huge amount in, they called them lease easy bundle fees, which included a bunch of different fees.

And their CEO had actually called on their colleagues to juice this hog by making the fee mandatory.

And they instructed employees to only disclose the fees when critical.

And I don't think that this is an aberration.

This is the model for generating revenue.

and you saw similar information coming out of the enforcement action against Graystar.

The executives touted their ability to obtain ancillary income for property owners through mandatory imposition of these fees.

And the fees, again, were hidden.

So we know that these fees aren't just something necessary to make ends meet.

They are a profit center.

they are very prevalent across the United States and here in Seattle.

Next slide, please.

and I just want to highlight a few resources that talk about what I discussed today, some of our materials from the National Consumer Law Center, as well as news articles that really describe what tenants are facing.

And this is only a small sampling of what's out there, and I'm certainly happy to provide more resources if it would be helpful.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Arielle.

All right, well, our next speaker is Professor Mahoney.

Thank you, Chair Foster, Councilmember Lin.

What I want to do in the next approximately eight or ten minutes is tell you how I think about the economics of these fees.

I've been studying consumer protection regulation since I was a graduate student 20 years ago, and tell you some of the principles so that policy in this space can achieve the intended outcomes and not unintended consequences.

First slide.

So the North Star for policy in this space is a very simple principle that the price you see should be the price you pay.

If you achieve that, then it does three things.

One, it makes it easier for prospective renters to comparison shop.

They can easily see the all-in price and compare across options.

Two, that in turn, it reduces what economists call search costs, the costs of searching of comparing options, and that increases the forces of competition.

Now it's easier for people to compare, and landlords have to compete.

And third, and this is more unique to rental markets, it means that people are not choosing apartments that they can't afford.

Because they know what they're getting into, they're less likely to be over their head with the consequences for them, for their landlord, and for the community, for people who are unable to pay their rent.

So these may sound simple, but to an economist, they are essential.

The forces of choice and competition is what drives quality, what drives prices, what makes markets work.

Next slide.

Across a growing set of markets, we've seen firms adopt practices which throw sand in the gear of the forces of transparency and competition.

You may be familiar with hotel resort fees or other fees which are added to the bill when you're checking out of a hotel, or a long-term stay.

You may be familiar with going through the process to purchase a ticket for your favorite sporting event or concert only to see $30 or $40 fees added at checkout once you've already emotionally committed to going to that show.

From an economic perspective, there are two broad categories of problematic fees.

One are mandatory fees, so fees you have to pay no matter what, which are either dripped into the purchase process, not included in the all-in price, but that you see as you go through the process, or there are hidden contingent or add-on fees.

You can think about a bank overdraft fee or a luggage fee or a family seating fee, which is added later in the process based on some behavior.

Most types of add-on fees are fine.

There's no problem with paying extra for mushrooms on a pizza, for a hotel room with an ocean view.

But the types of fees, I think, which are problematic are fees which are deliberately either shown on the back end or not disclosed at all and make it harder for us to search and to choose the right product.

Next slide.

So what are some principles for fee regulation which exist across domains?

One is if the fee is mandatory, if you have to pay it, then bundle it all in and up front.

In this case, it would be the monthly rent.

Second, if there's a contingent fee, a fee that you only pay based on an action, it should be disclosed and it should be capped.

Many contingent fees only occur when the seller has market power, when we don't have a choice.

And so making sure those fees are proportional and reasonable, no surprises, no gouging.

and third, for genuinely optional services, they should be truly optional.

You shouldn't be signed up in ways which are not transparent to you and it should be easy to cancel.

We shouldn't have the click to cancel call during business hours and wait for an hour and a half to get out.

So next slide.

A common critique I hear when talking about these sort of common sense regulations is won't they just raise total costs?

and the answer is no.

Total cost may and likely will fall.

Yes, the advertised price can sometimes be higher because the fees that you have to pay are shown to you upfront, but that is the point.

The point is you should know what you're getting into, and if you do, it's easier for you to comparison shop.

That increases the forces of competition and can lower prices overall, and that's what we've seen.

in studies that I've conducted, studies that others have conducted, making prices visible and salient increases the forces of competition, can lower the total price, and therefore can lead to advertised prices which are as high as they were before, except people are not paying the add-on fee.

Next slide.

So these policies, when done well, benefit everybody who has a stake in well-functioning markets.

They benefit transparent landlords.

Often these are small landlords who haven't adopted some of the practices in the industry, who currently look like they're pricing higher than their competitors, because they're not adding on these fees, and with an even playing field, would look more competitive and win the business they deserve.

They benefit all landlords because consumers know what they're getting into and there are less renters who are over their head.

They benefit renters who spend less time comparing who signed leases they can afford and who pay less out of pocket each month because of more competition in the system.

And they benefit the market.

The market is more efficient.

Demand moves to the producers that can provide the highest quality product at the lowest price.

Next slide.

So a couple questions that are frequently asked.

Why can't the market fix it on its own?

I think as an economist, I'm trained, I teach my students that if the market can solve the problem, then there may not be a case for government regulation.

Here there is a pressing collective action problem.

we've seen time and again landlords who want to do the right thing to include all of the fees up front in the advertised price, they lose out because they seem more expensive.

We saw this in the event ticket space where StubHub, wanted, they experimented with including all the prices up front, they lost business, they lost market share and reverted back to their old practice.

I've heard it from numerous market participants.

Firms want to do the right thing, but they need policy to help them move together.

The second question I get all the time is, is disclosure enough?

Disclosure is necessary, it's not sufficient.

We've all seen the 20 or 30 page disclosure docs.

It is impossible to go through all of them and think through which ones will matter for us and which ones won't.

And getting disclosure at the last minute when you, sitting down to sign a lease, is too little, too late.

So thank you for your attention.

Welcome any questions now or later.

Thank you again for having me.

Thank you to both of our speakers.

I'll now move into what we're seeing here in Seattle and our engagement process and the proposal you have in front of you.

So we know that more than half of Seattle residents are renters.

Regionally, 48% are cost burdened.

From 2012 to 2022, we saw rents rise 32%.

and we're continuing to see rent growth acceleration in 2025. The chart you have on your right, the top half there is really showing continued growth across Seattle, South Seattle, Central Seattle, West Seattle, Queen Anne, continued rent acceleration.

And that is what makes the issue of fees so salient because they can add 10 to 30% on top of renters' monthly costs.

At the average, unit price of around $2,000.

That's between $200 and $600 of added fees per month.

I think you heard some of those similar numbers just from the folks who commented today.

So, given that severity of this issue, the mayor's office engaged in a robust stakeholder process, starting with a rental survey that had a really strong engagement, 8,800 responses, but we knew that a survey is not gonna reach everyone.

We may have some folks who are left out of engagement like that.

and so we engaged in listening sessions as well.

So these were small sessions, four rental sessions targeted at renters, one for small landlords representing about 50 different tenants across the city, presented in English but with interpretation services provided, and then a separate one engaging about 12 small landlords.

Um, separately, uh, we had a policy stakeholdering process with seven total meetings, um, representing tenants, tenant advocates, affordable housing providers, market rate providers, and developers.

Uh, in total, about 50 different stakeholders representing thousands of units and thousands of individual renters.

So to review some of the findings from that, first our survey, this is sort of demonstrating the geographic representation that we had with the size of the dots there corresponding to zip codes and the number of folks who were represented within those zip codes.

And in the chart you see on the far right, the ratio is indicating how representative the particular geography was.

The closer to one we are, the more representative it is.

Under one, a little underrepresented.

Over one, a little overrepresented.

So you can see not a perfect ratio, but very strong representation across the city's geographies.

So some of the things we learned here are just the prevalence of fees.

So really strong, I would say large numbers of folks experiencing pet fees approaching 3,300 there.

Lease signing fees also in the over 3000 responses there and things like common room charges, which are almost 2000 folks.

And even at the bottom end of this spectrum, which looks just in comparison to be a small number, we're really sort of deposit return fees and package fees close to 500 folks experiencing those just in our survey sample.

So this is really a wide ranging problem that is affecting large, large numbers of renters across the city.

We also had a way for renters to provide just free form responses.

And so, you know, this is just a selection of things we heard.

There are many, many more responses, but I think it's important just to give voice to a few of them.

So, you know, one renter told us, there are so many hidden fees and lack of descriptions on what's included that it's impossible to search for in-budget options.

Another, looking for a place to live is a nightmare.

There needs to be laws that require costs to be listed plainly on rental listings.

The junk fees, valet trash, package lockers, laundry, AC units, they are all a scam and a way for landlords to advertise rent prices that are significantly lower than actual costs.

And finally, pet rent is just another way to squeeze more money from you.

I already paid a deposit for my pets.

We also heard from housing providers, again, large numbers here representing small housing providers, large providers, developers, market rate, and affordable sectors.

And we heard a variety of things.

Concerns around cost recovery, folks telling us, hey, we do have real costs when a tenant loses their keys, when there's a lockout, if there's a bounced check, we need to have a way to recover some of those costs.

concerns around the burden of added transparency requirements, concerns around making sure that tenants have insurance, and then questions around the implementation timeline and the impact on existing leases.

And you'll see these themes repeated throughout our policy design.

We've been able to take a look at these.

get feedback from tenants and tenant stakeholders on these concerns and think about common sense ways to address these and include accommodations for these concerns within the policy.

So we're gonna move on to the policy design itself.

There's really three components, transparency, the fee regulation itself, and enforcement and implementation.

And I'll just walk through each of those.

So on the transparency piece, we want folks to understand what they're getting into, what the all-in cost is, and any fees that are gonna be assessed.

So those need to be disclosed under the proposed legislation in the rental listing, in a disclosure, at lease signing.

If you pay a variable fee, something that changes month to month, you need to tell tenants what that is on a monthly basis.

If you have a fixed fee that is being charged, you know, you don't need to tell someone the same amount every single month, but you do need to tell tenants that on a yearly basis or if there's a change.

And we want landlords to have the tools to comply, so SDCI, the implementing agency, will produce notices in English and top-tier languages that meet these legal requirements so you don't have to sort of figure it out on your own as a housing provider.

So moving on to the core The core fee regulation, the way it's structured is no fees are allowed unless specifically exempted within the legislation.

And we've designed it that way to sort of avoid the whack-a-mole situation where, say, we have a ban on mail fees and a housing provider turns around and charges a fee for a package, right?

Or labels it a package fee.

We want to avoid having to come back and address these things piecemeal.

So that's the structure that we've built into the legislation.

And the exemptions that we've built, I've categorized them here just for conceptual purposes into three buckets.

The first is things that are already regulated in Seattle law, fees that are already regulated.

So examples of that are move-in fees like screening fees, security and pet deposits.

Those are already regulated.

This legislation doesn't impact them.

Utility surcharge fees, often called rubs.

We know there's large concerns there.

but this legislation does not change the existing regulatory structure there.

Late fees and parking fees are similar.

State law, we wanna avoid preemption issues, so provisions around charging where tenants cause damage are permissible.

according to the RCW and the requirements there.

Same with air conditioner rentals, which is regulated at the state level.

And then we have a number of other areas which are really reflective of the feedback we heard from housing providers, costs around dishonored checks, key replacement fees, lockout fees.

If you rent a party room, you can charge fees for all of that.

We do have some restrictions here to make sure this isn't sort of a total blank check.

There's some limits on what you can charge.

The last category I want to highlight is the idea of optional fees.

If a housing provider is providing some kind of optional service, like a really high-end internet package, there are some buildings that provide dog grooming services or dog walking services, you can opt into that.

You can pay an additional fee for that.

That's not the point of this legislation.

and that's still permitted.

But we do wanna make sure that those things are truly optional and that there's some guidelines around that, so there are some provisions to ensure that.

So if you do wanna, as a landlord, provide an additional service, you can do that as long as you disclose it, as long as you make sure folks are actually opting into it, you give them an ability to opt out, If it's a third-party service, you make sure that it is provided at cost.

And then there's some areas that we, in the legislation, have carved out as probably not reasonable to be charged as an optional fee.

So things like charging to access a common area.

We don't wanna see landlords saying, hey, you've opted into this fee, so we've taken that off the list of permissible optional fees.

Similarly, appliance fees, fees for payment by check or ACH, so basically a fee to pay your rent, mail and package fees, fees for a duty under the state code, fee for a change in tenants, and fee for keeping a pad.

All of these things are areas that we have said are not permissible as optional fees under the proposed legislation.

So I'll move on to enforcement.

So we want to make sure that we have strong enforcement and implementation provisions.

And so what we've done is built out some of the authority that SCCI has.

I don't want to go into all of it just for time reasons, but the one I do want to highlight is the ability to resolve similar claims at the same time.

The idea is if I'm being charged an impermissible fee, it's likely that I'm not being personally targeted by that practice.

It's rather that it's a policy that applies across the building.

So it's just more efficient as an enforcement matter and as a matter of getting remedies for tenants to allow the enforcement agency to address all of these at the same time.

Also creates a deterrent effect and supports a culture of compliance.

And there are existing private right of action provisions within this chapter of the code.

Happy to come back and I need this, but I'm gonna keep us moving.

Okay, we lost our graphics, which I worked very hard on.

So just imagine there is a emoji within each of those circles.

I'm fine.

I'm fine with it.

Yeah.

So I'm going to skip the first two elements just here to keep us moving.

Happy to take questions on them.

Two things I do want to highlight on this slide is that there will be no impact on existing leases.

Current lease terms can complete before these requirements will come into play.

That was a big

Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

I was gonna say, you actually have time to do the first two, Karim.

Okay, all right.

Thank you.

Great.

All right.

Well, let me just finish that sentence.

This is a big point of feedback from housing providers and wanting to maintain the integrity of existing contracts, so we are not touching existing leases in this legislation.

There are retaliation protections so that if you complain about a fee and you're retaliated against, there is a ability for the implementing agency, the enforcement agency to come in and prohibit those activities.

There's an affirmative defense so that you cannot be evicted for failing to pay an illegal fee.

So again, just important provisions to make sure we're thinking of all contingencies.

And lastly, effective date is July 2027. Again, responsive to feedback we heard in making sure that folks have time to implement this and that SCCI has time to hire staff to enforce it.

All right, so everyone's favorite part, how much does it cost and how are we gonna pay for it?

So we have scoped one-time startup fees of just under $200,000 for outreach and the sort of systems and case management changes that we need to see.

In 2027, costs will be about $800,000 for three FTEs, as well as outreach and education funding and grants that will go out the door.

and that will be paid for through a per unit fee, per unit, per rental unit fee of between $5.50 and $7 a year, so a really modest amount.

It works at the $6 level to about $0.50 per unit per month.

So there will be no general fund impact in this proposal.

The funding piece will be submitted as separate budget legislation during the budget cycle.

So that is really most of what I wanted to cover.

There's a implementation timeline.

I'm not gonna go through every bullet here.

Just wanna highlight that January 1st is when the fee collection would begin under the proposal.

And our effective date is again July, 2027. And between now and then, SECI will be doing a lot of work to get things going.

So I think that's really all we wanted to cover.

Maybe I talked quicker than I normally do, because I thought we were over time.

But that's all we have for you all.

Thank you so much, and I appreciate each of our presenters.

I will turn, actually, immediately to colleagues for questions, and I'll save any remarks before we close this portion of our agenda.

Seeing first a question from Councilmember Lin.

Thank you, Chair.

Just wondering if you could talk about, obviously, this is not just a local issue.

We heard it.

It's a nationwide issue.

Could you talk about best practices from other jurisdictions or what the landscape is?

We heard about a little bit of national enforcement.

Where do we think things might be going either nationally or at the state legislature or otherwise other jurisdictions that might be ahead of us on this?

Yeah, I'll take the sort of state and local regulation, and I might ask either Ariel or Professor Mahoney to speak on the national rulemaking.

So, we know we love to lead in Seattle.

This is actually an area where there's been a fair amount of action, both within the state and without, so Bellingham, has passed a, last year, passed a rental junk fee regulation.

Olympia has had one on the books for about a year or two.

Ferndale and Spokane all do some level of regulation.

The statewide, I actually don't have my list in front of me, but Colorado, Connecticut, I believe, and a couple other jurisdictions have statewide regulations in Montgomery County, Maryland.

My home county, just a coincidence there, also has a regulation.

What's different in how we've scoped it, so what fees and how you structure it and what the exceptions are kind of vary.

What's, I think, unique in what we're proposing is the sort of holistic approach in terms of our implementation and enforcement.

Most of those jurisdictions, with the exception of Montgomery County, have a private right of action enforcement mechanism.

we have both the implementation from SCCI and a funding mechanism to make sure we're able to do that and make sure we have tools both for enforcement and for technical assistance outreach and education for housing providers.

Ariel or Professor Mahoney, either of you wanna take the national landscape?

Sure, and I'll just add that if you would like an even more comprehensive answer, I would point you to the National Consumer Law Center's report, What the Heck Dude, How States Can Fight Rental Housing Junk Fees, which includes an appendix of all the rental housing junk fees specific laws we know about at the state level and highlights some of the local laws that Karen pointed to.

I would say just my final comment on that is that we see, like he said, piecemeal approaches.

I think the local level is the place where the biggest difference in the most robust legislation can happen.

In terms of the federal level, the Federal Trade Commission has put out what's called an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on rental housing junk fees.

That is potentially a precursor to federal action on this, but it doesn't necessarily mean they actually will do anything.

They don't have to.

So they've collected a bunch of comments, but it's unclear when, if ever, they will enact a rule.

And I would also add that I would expect that to be more like a basic level of protection.

I sort of see it as a floor where maybe there will be some good language on transparency, but I would expect that it's fairly limited and so local governments and state governments are really the place where, again, the most robust enforcement and regulations and enforcement are able to happen.

Thank you, Chair.

Two more questions, if that's okay.

Any, from the jurisdictions that have enacted this, any sort of, you know, positive feedback, any unintended consequences that we are aware of?

Just curious if you know.

Yeah, I'd say two pieces of feedback I've heard is, you know, if the, if the structure of the law is banning specific fees, it really opens the door to what I was flagging earlier of the sort of whack-a-mole approach where fees have been restructured and branded something different, and so some of the junk fee practices continue.

So that's one big piece of feedback because some of those jurisdictions have structured things in that way.

I think, you know, The other piece is what we were sort of flagging of what we might expect in terms of some mandatory fees may be moved and incorporated into rent, which may result in an advertised price going up.

That is sort of the point, is that folks know what they're actually paying, even if the advertised price has gone up.

It's because mandatory fees have moved over from the fee descriptor and into rent itself.

I don't know if anyone else...

Ariel, do you want to add anything?

Sure, I would just add that the other problem we've heard is really just with enforcement, where there might be laws on the books.

Like I gave an example of there are laws in various jurisdictions regulating late fees, but we see those laws being violated, which is why the robust enforcement piece is so critical.

So having both the private right of action like this here as well as the government enforcement is critical.

And I would also just add that I think that the tricky, the trick, the sort of more complex and piecemeal the scheme is, the harder it is for enforcement, which is why it's not just a whack-a-mole problem if you regulate some fees, prohibit some fees, but don't think about it as a whole.

If you regulate, if you ban all fees except four, it's a lot clearer for everybody involved, including those seeking to enforce the law.

Thank you.

Final question is, just on the renewals, just curious how that works for leases that kind of automatically convert to like month-to-month, how, just the logistics of what it would mean for implementation.

You mean the no impact on existing leases and how does that work?

Yeah, correct, yeah.

Maureen, do you wanna take that one?

Just like, yeah.

Yeah, so, As it's written, we've built into this ordinance a delayed enactment period, as you know.

With month-to-month tenancies, those tenancies are effective 30-day tenancies, right?

So a new tenancy in theory could begin after those 30 days.

So in order for this new requirement to take effect on a month-to-month tenancy, it would be as if that lease were ending at the end of June, so June 30th.

If the lease is effective, let's say July 2nd, it becomes effective under this new ordinance, then all of these fee restrictions would apply.

So effectively you're looking at leases that are month-to-month are effectively 30-day leases.

Okay, so I think, yeah, I just want to make sure, so if I'm understanding if you, your lease ended, let's say August of 2027, and it would automatically kind of convert to month to month, and let's say there were some of these fees in the existing lease, is it correct that basically they, the landlord would be, would they be required to sign a new lease or would they be prohibited from collecting fees, both?

I just want to be really clear for everyone what's going to happen for these automatic renewals.

Yeah, so for automatic renewals where the term lease expires, once that term lease expires, if the implementation period has started, so if you're after July 1st of 2027, then those fees under that lease would not be enforceable by the landlord.

If they were attempting to collect those fees, that would be something for SDCI to investigate.

They may want, just for clarity, an owner may want to offer a new lease going into this implementation period if they do have leases out there that automatically convert to month to month to be sure that they're not unintentionally missing or charging those fees that are going to be prohibited by this ordinance.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for those questions, Councilmember Lin.

I appreciate that.

I'm going to ask a few questions myself and then I'm going to wrap us up.

So I just want to go back to the things that we heard a lot in public comment today, a lot of, I think a lot of excitement as I am to sponsor this piece of legislation around junk fees.

and I think there were sort of two issues that we heard questions about.

And so I wanna make sure that we just get a chance to address those directly.

So I think it's important for the public and for transparency.

So I'm gonna ask you to speak to one of the topics, which was the wifi question.

And so is it correct that as currently written, the legislation allows for landlords to provide wifi as an optional service for a fee?

Yes, yeah, that would be a permissible optional fee as long as it's disclosed and someone has affirmatively opted in and that's made clear and there's, you know, you could opt into a higher-end Wi-Fi package.

Right, thank you.

And then it's also just a quick follow-up on that.

Is that also one that needs to be offered as an at-cost fee, as an optional fee, is that correct?

Yeah, if it's third-party provided, which most Wi-Fi would be, yes, it would need to be provided at cost.

Thank you.

And then the other thing we heard about today in public comment was pets.

And I have a lovely pet myself.

And so can you just speak a little bit to, my understanding is that a landlord can charge a pet security deposit that's still an allowable charge under this legislation, and then the pet security deposit, they have the pet security deposit as well as a traditional security deposit available to cover damages if needed.

Is that accurate?

Yeah, that's correct.

Landlords can continue to charge a pet damage deposit.

That's actually regulated in another chapter of the code.

25% of your Your rent is the sort of upward limit of that.

So at the average monthly rent of $2,000, that's around $500 that would be a permissible pet damage deposit.

That can continue.

I mean, that's really sort of what you're hearing, I think, in some of the public comment, is that folks are already paying that amount.

and so pet rent on top of that is just an added cost and when there is damage from a pet, it's not taken out of your pet rent, it comes out of the deposit you've already paid.

And again, that can continue to be charged as still permissible under the code as long as it's under that 25% amount.

Thank you, and then just the other clarifying pieces, if that pet damage, let's say it is my dog, because let's say it's my dog.

If that pet damage goes above that, let's say that $500 security deposit, is the landlord able to recoup that cost?

Yeah, so there is one of the permissible fees or exceptions we built in is tenant damage.

So that would qualify most likely as long as it's substantiated and documented as tenant damage.

So, you know, they could take it out of the deposit and if that's not enough, it's really bad damage.

They could separately invoice that as long as it's documented and meets the requirements under the RCW.

Great.

All right.

Thank you.

Those are my questions and a check for colleagues to see if there are any.

Is that a new hand, Councilman Berlin?

Old hand.

Old hand, okay, fantastic.

All right, thank you so much for this.

Again, I'll say I'm really excited to sponsor this legislation.

I think that the impact for transparency and the impact for renters is gonna be something that is real and felt in our city and our community.

And I appreciate the leadership coming from your office.

And I would just do a shout out to your family before they leave.

And I know you spent a lot of time here.

So thank you so much for that work, Karim.

We really appreciate you.

Thank you.

Sorry, and I also appreciate our other guests, but we've been working with Karen for quite a while on this.

So thank you all so much.

Colleagues, I just want to make sure that we're clear on timelines.

So this legislation was transmitted by the mayor's office on July 1st and is in front of us as an informational item today.

Central staff has requested that offices share amendment concepts by next Wednesday, July 15th.

We plan to hold a briefing and discussion with a possible vote in our next committee meeting on July 22nd.

Thank you.

Thank you, council members.

All right.

And thank you to everyone who's been with us this time.

I know we have people who've been waiting for this agenda item.

So we will now move on to agenda item two.

Will the clerk please read agenda item two into the record?

Agenda item two, homeowner privacy and protection legislation for briefing and discussion.

Okay.

And as we give a moment for our folks to come up, I will actually, I should have to invite them up first.

I would like to invite up to the committee table, Mike Chen from Office of Civil Rights and who plans to share with us how the Office of Civil Rights will be implementing the outreach and enforcement of the Do Not Solicit legislation.

Mike is also joined by Monica Beach from the Office for Civil Rights.

We also have at the table joining us, Jen Labreck and Tracy Radscliff, both from Council Central staff.

So before I open it up for some remarks and then questions from colleagues, just as a reminder, we held a special committee meeting on this item last week, where we heard from more than 20 residents and public comment, as well as the responses that we received in our online survey.

So we are excited to, oops, where am I today?

All right, a lot of committee meetings today.

We heard a lot about the need for the city to do more to protect homeowners from unwanted and predatory solicitations.

And the legislation we're discussing today as an information item would disrupt predatory home buying by creating a do not solicit list maintained by the Office for Civil Rights.

The idea here is to ensure that homeowners across the city can opt in if they wish to stop receiving real estate solicitation.

To ensure effective enforcement, this legislation creates both civil penalties starting at $1,000 for the first violation and $2,000 for subsequent violations, as well as providing property owners with the right to pursue a private cause of action.

I plan to bring this ordinance forward for introduction and a possible vote at the next committee meeting on July 22nd.

Central staff has requested that offices provide them with any amendment concepts by Monday, July 13th.

We had this as a discussion previously and realized we wanted to make sure that we had OCR here to talk about enforcement So thank you so much for joining us, and a huge thank you.

I know it was a long wait to get to this item, so thank you so much, and I'll have you all introduce yourselves, and then I'll hand it over to you for an overview, and then we'll check with committee members for questions.

Hello, my name is Mike Chen.

I am the Interim Director at the Seattle Office for Civil Rights.

Hello, my name is Monica Beach.

I'm the Interim Civil Rights Enforcement Director at the Office for Civil Rights.

Hi, I'm Jennifer Labreck, City Council Central Staff.

And Tracy Bratz of Council Central Staff.

Okay, and with that, we'll give it to Mike for an overview and excuse me, you don't need to do an overview of the legislation.

We have done an overview of your enforcement approach.

Great.

Thank you.

So I want to first of all thank you, Chair Foster, for inviting SOCR to provide additional information on enforcement and outreach for this new law.

So as you know, SOCR works to provide leadership in upholding civil rights and advancing racial equity in the city of Seattle.

The proposed Do Not Solicit Ordinance adds new protections for homeowners from unwanted solicitation, from predatory practices that especially have a discriminatory impact in neighborhoods in predominantly communities of color.

These practices target vulnerable communities who are at risk of being taken advantage by offering to purchase their home below market value.

SOCR provides and supports this legislation to ensure that homeowners in Seattle are not subject to these predatory practices.

We believe that the do or not solicit ordinance is important and investing in these resources for this legislation is essential because SOCR takes a proactive and preventative approach to enforcement of civil rights laws.

This means that we prioritize education about the laws, especially new laws that are unique to Seattle and that many communities are often unaware of and need support in compliance.

Since 2019, seven new civil rights laws that have been enforced by SOCR, which have protected classes, have been passed by the City of Seattle without providing adequate funding for SOCR staffing or outreach and enforcement.

As a result, we have been stretched beyond our limits with higher than average caseloads for investigation.

SOCR needs an engagement specialist and senior investigator to ensure public knowledge and compliance with new laws like the Do Not Solicit ordinance that we're here to discuss today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And, Jennifer, are we turning to you next, or are we going straight to committee questions?

I don't think I need to say anything more.

Thank you.

Okay, fantastic.

So colleagues, I know that there were a few questions last week when we had this item on the agenda in terms of enforcement.

So I want to open it up to colleagues for questions.

Okay, I am, am I seeing one?

No, I'm not seeing one, so I'm gonna just ask a couple of questions myself to make sure that we have this clarity.

So I know that, and thank you again so much for the estimate that your department provided in terms of the needs to implement this program.

Can you describe how OCR would plan to administer the program with the resources and what the roles would look like?

Yes, so in the fiscal note we've actually have requested for two positions, one outreach position and one enforcement.

The outreach position would be implemented in 2027 and the other one in 2028 and this would be ongoing.

The outreach position would specifically focus on engagement with businesses and homeowners and ensure that we are connected with city departments that do similar work like Office of Housing that have grants as well as our commissions and community organizations such as the organizations that testified in last week's meeting.

We would also be staffing public comment periods and engagement process to ensure that we have event planning and education awareness and also develop informational materials, questions and answers, and also website information.

As for the enforcement FTE, which would begin in 2028, because this is a brand new law, it requires special enforcement.

So it's not going to be very similar to fair housing, fair employment practices, and other laws.

But it does require us to actually revise new procedures and manuals.

It's going to require us to actually have a new type of receiving complaint process about how we do business searches, making sure that we are able to identify businesses that are engaging in predatory practices.

and then also how we would be sending notifications and information, gathering information and issuing findings.

And then we would also be able to provide conciliate settlement, voluntary settlement process and other processes required for enforcing this law.

Thank you, I was just checking to see if there was questions.

And you also estimated the need for a smaller amount of programming dollars for outreach and program startup.

Can you just speak to that use in a little bit more detail, please?

I can speak to that.

I've actually implemented quite a few laws in my 20 years at the Office for Civil Rights, and I typically maintain the budget.

Can you hear me okay now?

Yeah, if you lean in, thank you.

I'm short, so I need to come closer.

But I am typically the one that administers the new legislation budget for the enforcement division.

So what I've done is looking at the amount that's proposed or what we would need to do the bare minimum, I think that definitely we have to prioritize better quote shop around a little bit.

but we definitely need design and print materials and we want those translated in different languages, which we have not identified because we haven't done stakeholder engagement.

I'm not gonna say we're gonna just do the 15 tier languages that is recommended for the city.

I really want this to be targeted and really customized for the various zip codes and communities where people are most impacted because let's be real, that's why this law is being passed, right?

This is a real issue.

There's also postage, so strangely, some people respond very well to postal mail, others do not, but if we were to engage in a postal mail campaign, I think with the set-aside amount of money, we may be able to do certain zip codes for homeowners.

I think we would have to do more research, and definitely we have some time to do that about identifying who's most impacted.

We definitely want to do a few mainstream ad buys, as well as focus on ethnic media.

And ethnic media includes not just digital and print, but also some communities communicate very well and receive information by radio.

So we really want to be open to who we're serving.

and then social media ads, which are typically pretty cheap to buy and very targeted by demographics.

And then also we want to contract with the Department of Neighborhoods for community liaisons, again, depending on what we find when we're looking into different languages and who's impacted.

And then we really want to nail down the best possible platform to find people.

We have something that we use now.

We're aware of some other potentials.

But again, focused on where are we going to get the most bang for our buck?

What's the best technology out there that we can afford?

So that's sort of the basics of what we would do.

and of course all the money would go towards implementing this law.

And so if we find a little bit extra and we can find ways to leverage either within our department or in partnership with others, we will absolutely do that.

I guarantee you the budgets that I've run to implement laws, every penny has been spent on the law.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate that.

And I both appreciate the expertise coming from the Office of Civil Rights as well as I would say your ability and your working with us to make a dollar out of 15 cents.

And so thank you.

And as well as the focus and the clarity on making sure that the outreach is targeted on the impacted communities and I think there's just a lot of both, that's the commitment that we have to make sure that we are preventing these incredibly predatory practices and I'm looking forward to partnering with OCR to make sure that we have the implementation done well even in the challenging environment that we are in right now.

So thank you so much for that.

Colleagues, I will see if there are any further questions for our presenters from OCR.

All right, with that, I wanna say thank you so much for this.

We are really excited about working with you all on this legislation.

Thank you so much for being here with us today.

Thank you.

All right, and I will reiterate again, I think I will reiterate again, the amendment timeline that we have for us.

Turning the page, okay, great.

So amendments into, oh, you can go, thank you.

Just the amendment timeline that folks have any amendments into central staff by Monday, July 13th.

With that, are there any additional comments or questions from committee members or any additional items to come before the committee?

Seeing none, this concludes the July 8th, 2026 meeting of the Housing Arts and Civil Rights Committee.

Our next scheduled meeting is July 22nd.

Thank you for attending.

It is 4.06 PM and we are adjourned.