Committee on Transportation and Seattle Public Utilities 8/1/23

Thank you.

Good morning and welcome.

The August 1st, 2023 meeting of the Transportation and Seattle Public Utilities Committee will come to order.

The time is 9.32 a.m.

I'm Alex Peterson, chair of the committee.

Councilmembers Strauss and Sawant are excused.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Herbold?

Here.

Councilmember Morales?

Here.

Chair Peterson?

Here.

Three present.

Thank you, and again, Councilmembers Strauss and Sawant are excused.

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

And we're voting on just one item today, that's item one on the agenda, which is related to an easement for, related to a brewery in Georgetown.

That's the only item we're voting on today.

So no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Quick Chair's Report.

Welcome again to the Transportation Seattle Public Utilities Committee.

Four items on our agenda today, but we're voting on only one, which is item one, the easement, for which we also have a public hearing.

I don't see many people signed up to speak, only a couple signed up to speak for the meeting in general.

First on the agenda, Council Bill 120624 would approve water main easements to and from the Elzean Brewing.

This will have a public hearing, as I mentioned.

Depending on how it goes, if committee members are comfortable, we will go ahead and suspend the rules to vote on the item.

the same day as its public hearing.

Then we have three items related to Vision Zero, our city's goal to eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries.

Item two on our agenda, we're hearing from the Seattle School Traffic Safety Committee, their annual report.

Third, we have the Seattle Department of Transportation to respond to a statement of legislative intent for the department's plan to equitably double the school zone camera program as authorized by city council last fall during the budget process.

Finally, we'll hear our first hearing of Council 120625, which is additional updates to the automated enforcement from our state government.

And we'll be hearing from SDOT, our Seattle Department of Transportation.

That item will be also on our next committee meeting when we will vote on it.

That's Council 120625. So at this time, I'll go ahead and open the general public comment period for the Transportation Seattle Public Utilities Committee.

For the hybrid meeting, we have people who can sign up in person and online.

I'll go ahead and call on the people online first.

I'll moderate the public comment period in the following order.

I'll call on two speakers at a time.

We've got up to 20 minutes.

If you've not yet registered to speak but would like to, you can sign up before the end of this public comment period by going to the city council's website at Seattle.gov forward slash council.

Or by using the sign in sheet near the public comment microphone.

toward the front of this council chamber.

For remote speakers, once I call a speaker's name, staff will unmute the appropriate microphone, and an automatic prompt of you have been unmuted will be the speaker's cue that it is their turn to speak, and the speaker must press star six to begin speaking.

For all public commenters, please begin speaking by stating your name.

and the item you are addressing.

As a reminder, public comment should relate to an item on today's agenda or to our committee's oversight responsibilities.

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

Once you hear that chime, Keep speaking, but we ask that you begin to wrap it up.

If speakers do not end their comments at the end of the allotted time provided, the speaker's microphone will be muted to allow us to call on the next speaker or conduct our committee's business.

If you're providing public comment remotely, once you have completed your comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line.

And if you plan to continue following the meeting, please do so via Seattle Channel.

or the listening options listed on the agenda.

The regular public comment period for this committee meeting is now open.

And let me pull up the first speaker here.

One moment.

Okay.

We'll go ahead and hear on remote speaker Corey Marshall.

And Allison Yates is listed but not present.

So go ahead, Corey, star six, and begin speaking.

Can you hear me, sir?

Yes, thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair Peterson and members of the Council.

I'm Corey Marshall, Director of State and Local Public Policy for the Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition committed to ensuring all Americans benefit from technological leaps.

Our corporate partners include companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Grubhub, but our partners do not have a vote or a veto over our position.

We urge you to consider consumer safety when developing restrictive standards for deactivation policies in Council Bill 120580. At-base drivers provide a valuable service to Seattle residents.

They deliver food to families, including those that live in food deserts.

They provide accessible transportation options for people without nearby transit.

They provide convenience to people in need of everyday supplies from stores, and during the pandemic, they helped transport riders seeking immediate medical attention.

Ride share and delivery companies take customer and driver safety very seriously.

When complaints are received or suspected, terms of service violations occur.

These platforms generally suspend or deactivate accounts out of an abundance of caution in order to investigate the alleged violation.

Under the proposed ordinance, temporary deactivation period would be prohibited, except in cases of egregious misconduct.

Despite identifying the serious breaches of customer safety, the ordinance fails to address other forms of violations that present real safety risks, which undermines customer's trust.

We agree that delivery service should be transparent with drivers about their deactivation policies and provide fair opportunities to appeal deactivation.

However, we encourage you to keep safety concerns in mind when creating requirements for deactivation policy.

Customer safety should be paramount, and we urge you to avoid creating unnecessary hurdles to protecting them.

Thank you for your time today.

And I'll also encourage you to sign up for the full city council meeting today at two o'clock where we will be discussing council 120580. I think that was a really good example of where we want to still let people speak because Arguably that is also a transportation issue and that is you know It could be under the purview of several of our City Council committees, including this one That allows me to put in a plug for an upcoming amendment to our proposed council rules to allow people to speak on topics beyond what's just on the agenda because sometimes the agenda doesn't have a what you think it should have, and you should be able to come and speak to us about that.

So thank you for your comments today.

I'll be co-sponsoring that amendment to the council's rules with council member Sawant.

All right, well, let's go ahead and- Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

I don't think we have any other public speakers signed up at this time, but I'm stalling in case somebody wants to speak.

One moment.

Okay.

All right.

Thanks for coming.

All right.

Colleagues, let me just double check online real quick one last time.

Right.

Okay.

That concludes our speakers both in person and online.

We'll go ahead and go to our first item of business, which is the only one we're voting on today.

Item one, will the clerk please read the short title of the first agenda item into the record.

Agenda item one, council bill 120624, an ordinance relating to Seattle Public Utilities authorizing the acceptance of a water main easement within a portion of parcel B on lot boundary adjustment number 3011771 in section 20, declaring a portion of an existing water main easement located on parcel B surplus to the city's needs and authorizing the relinquishment of the surplus portion of the easement and ratifying and confirming certain prior acts for public hearing, briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Thank you.

Today we have Seattle Public Utilities with us to walk us through water main easement authorization.

It's in the Georgetown neighborhood.

It's next to Elsion Brewing.

And as previously mentioned, we also have a public hearing for this item.

What I'm going to do, you know, committee chairs sometimes hear from the public hearing commenters before or after the presentation.

We don't have anybody signed up yet, so before I open and close the public hearing, we'll go ahead and hear from Seattle Public Utilities, hear their presentation, and then I'll go ahead and open and close the public hearing.

That would allow somebody who might be scrambling to get here to speak about this.

to have some additional time.

But so let's go ahead and turn it over to our presenters.

Good morning, Jerry Caruso from Seattle Public Utilities.

Good morning.

And good morning and welcome transportation and SPU committee members.

And thank you for attending this presentation.

My name is Jerry Caruso.

and I'm a senior real property agent for Seattle Public Utilities, and I'm here to present an ordinance on behalf of SPU concerning a water main easement from Elysian Brewery.

And can everybody see my screen?

Yes.

Okay, thank you.

One second.

Present the details of the transaction.

I want to inform you of what this ordinance will accomplish.

Upon receiving city council approval, this ordinance will authorize SPU to accept one water main easement, granting the city access rights to repair, replace, and reconstruct a distribution main.

And it will also partially release an existing easement that is no longer needed for the municipal water system.

The brewery and the easement are located in South Seattle in Soto on Airport Way South.

And the background on this file is as follows.

The need to relocate this water main was prompted when Elysian Brewery submitted requests to the City of Seattle to change from a change of use from a warehouse to light manufacturing and to construct a production brewery.

The construction plans and the building permit included the installation of a concrete pad to support two large grain silos on the south side of the Elysian Brewery's property.

The proposed location of these pads and silos was directly over an existing 8-inch cast iron water main.

SPU requested that Elysian relocate the existing water main approximately 10 feet south to accommodate the new silos.

The construction was completed and the new water mains were installed and the old water mains was disconnected.

And we are now following up with securing the property rights for this water main.

This ordinance package will secure a property right for water main serving a system-wide distribution system, and it will also release a portion of an existing water main that's no longer needed.

And here are some slides of the, this is a depiction of the realigned water main and the new easement area, as well as the retired water main and the released easement area.

And then here's a side view where you get a more direct depiction of what those silos, the size of those silos and the concrete pad and the reason for relocating that water main.

Anyone has any questions?

And this is the engineering plans.

The green shaded area was the existing water main easement We are partially releasing, and the orange outline is the new water main easement.

The red line is the current and newly realigned water main, and the blue line is the former retired water line.

And if anyone has any questions, I'm here for questions.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for the detailed maps.

Okay.

And I'll stop sharing unless there's, well, I won't stop sharing.

I'll keep the slides up here.

Let's see if we have any questions from colleagues.

We probably don't.

And then I'll go ahead and see if we have any people signed up for the public hearing.

I don't think we do.

I'm double checking online, not seeing anybody online.

Somebody's there, but not present, and it looks like they're signed up for something on our full city council agenda.

Anyway, so, let me go ahead and, colleagues, let me go ahead and open and close the public hearing, and then we can decide how to proceed.

One moment.

All right, the public hearing is for Council Bill 120624 is now open.

Seeing again, there are no public speakers present in council chambers on this easement item, nor is there anyone online.

I'll go ahead and close the public hearing.

So it's open and closed.

And colleagues, because we didn't have any public speakers, because this is a relatively minor item recommended by Seattle Public Utilities, we do have a full committee agenda on August 15. I'll go ahead and ask, I'd like to go ahead and suspend the rules.

Advance this item out of committee today the same day as its public hearing I do want to confirm though that we don't have any comments from our central staff analyst Brian.

Good night any comments or concerns about this item Thank you chair.

Good morning council members.

Nope.

No comments or concerns.

This is a relatively routine action.

Thank you Thank you very much Okay, colleagues, with no public hearing speakers, a relatively minor item, central staff is okay with it.

Is there any objection if I suspend the council rules and we vote on the item today, advance it to city council?

Okay, hearing no.

Okay, good.

All right, well, hearing no objection, the council rules are suspended, and we will now proceed to a vote on Council Bill 120624, the same day on which we had a public hearing.

And let me just go to my notes here.

All right, well, council members, I now move that the committee recommend passage of Council Bill 120624, item one on our agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you, it's been moved and seconded to recommend passage of the council bill.

Any final comments or questions before we vote?

Okay, will the clerk please call the roll on the committee recommendation to pass the council bill?

Council Member Herbold?

Yes.

Council Member Morales?

Yes.

Chair Peterson?

Yes.

Three in favor, none opposed.

Thank you.

The motion carries, and the committee recommendation to pass the council bill will be sent to the August 8th City Council meeting.

Thank you, colleagues.

Thank you, central staff.

Thank you, SPU.

Thank you.

All right, we'll go ahead and move to the second item on our agenda.

Again, none of the rest of the items will be voted on today.

We've got a couple briefings, and then we'll be hearing a council bill for the first time, but not voting on it, which is item 4120625. All right, will the clerk please read the full title of the second agenda item into the record?

Agenda item two, School Traffic Safety Committee's annual report for briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

We are very grateful that the School Traffic Safety Committee works with Seattle Public Schools and school parents and our city government to improve safe routes to many of our public schools.

And today, the School Traffic Safety Committee is here to present their annual report.

Good morning.

Good morning, thank you for having us.

My name is not good or I'm the committee chair and with me here today are they on launch from S dot Mary Ellen Russell and Margaret Macaulay.

Mary Ellen, I assume you will be one sharing them.

Yes, lines.

Thank you.

Alright, can you all see that?

Yes.

Alright.

Okay, next slide please.

So the committee is an intersection of professionals and activists in the arena of school traffic safety.

We have representatives of SPS, SDOT, SPD, King County Metro, as well as community volunteers.

Thank you.

Next slide.

Among the tasks of the committee, we use SDOT data to review walk zone boundaries that then SPS is using to determine which students are eligible or not eligible for busing.

We review and approve requests for cross guards and we work with SPS capital projects on site circulations.

Next slide.

Today, we'll share some of our successes in this last year.

For example, right here in this picture, we see the walk to school event with Mayor Harold and Superintendent Dr. Jones that was coordinated by SPS Safe Route to School Coordinator.

And I would like to take this opportunity to thank the committee and city council again for funding this still relatively new position.

Next one.

We'll also identify some needs and challenges in this area, including a request for reliable source of funding for a project that would ensure safety of students throughout the city.

May I let Russell?

Okay, so I'm going to take over.

We have sections that are primarily aimed at the city, at the school district, and at the county and state, and the first one is the city.

This is one of the most exciting things that is happening right now from our perspective.

I think you may remember from previous presentations that the code for construction of new schools is really out of date and just not reflective of how schools are built.

Code requires hundreds of parking spaces for elementary schools and typically they have zero or three or four very small numbers.

So it's not reflective of what's happening.

Code also requires, because of height limitations, it's against code to change out the HVAC, to update the system, the HVAC system for a school and make it more efficient.

You can't change you know, an old chimney on the roof without violating code.

And so the way that schools gets around this is by going through the departures process.

And they need to do this on nearly every project because code has a number of requirements that just are not in line with the reality of school buildings.

And departures cost time and money.

You know, you have to pay consultants to guide The project through the departures, there's a months long outreach process and they can and frequently are they can be infrequently are hijacked by neighborhood people who are just opposed to school expansion.

And so they get on the departure committee and they, you know, push, push, push for more parking.

and things that are hard and expensive to accommodate.

But that's not actually the biggest problem.

The biggest problem is that the departure decision is very easy to challenge in court.

There's a very low bar, and they're habitually challenged.

And this is another delay.

And so what we have is a process that Ends up, you know, we have the same outcome again and again, you can update the, you don't have to pay at the playground for when you're constructing a new school, but we're continually delaying these projects by many months.

And we're just losing school construction budget to inflation.

So it doesn't serve anyone's interest to let our public school construction money just dwindle this way.

And we are so pleased that SDCI at the direction of the mayor's office and with support from many of our council members, including Council Member Peterson.

Thank you for that.

has begun the process to revise the code, the city code for school construction.

And that process is going to take about two years.

And it will come back to council in that time period.

So we just want to say how excited we are to see this good governance item moving forward and how important it is to continue supporting it when it comes back and not let it get shelved again, as has happened in the past.

We can preserve our school construction money for schools and classrooms if we just push through this process.

And thank you for your support.

You're welcome.

And then the next one.

Thank you.

That Noah touched on, the Safe Routes to School Coordinator has been a huge success.

That is a position that is inside Seattle Public Schools, but is funded completely by the city.

And, you know, I think we've been so pleased at how it's gone in its first year of being filled.

The save us a school coordinator has made such a tangible difference and developed so many programs already and really also the transportation department at SPS has has always been supportive.

But I think there was a little bit of a feeling like.

you know, okay, this is a nice to have, but now that they've seen it in action, they've begun to really rely on the state of Rochester school coordinator and really wrap them fully into the district's planning when they're looking at changing busing and, you know, maybe some families are going to be walking who weren't before and now there's support for that.

So we just want to say a big thank you.

This has been an enormous change at SPS that families are really feeling, and we appreciate the city continuing to fund this position.

And then now we've got a little bit of a problem we'd like to raise.

I think you are probably all aware that there's a $6.5 million deficit in Assad's pedestrian safety projects over the next two years that was caused by a temporary staffing snafu at SPD.

And the reason for that is that this money is all coming from tickets.

And so when there's this problem with staffing, tickets are not sent out, the money does not come in, and this results in pedestrian safety projects being shelved, being delayed.

And, you know, we just want to call attention as you're going into budget season that, you know, we love the ticket revenues.

The ticket cameras work, they're shown to work, they're shown to reduce dangerous driver behavior over time.

So we think these tickets are really something to support.

But also, they're not a reliable funding source for some of our most important safety projects.

This is the second time that there's been an unexpected drop in revenues in just the last couple of years.

The same thing happened at the start of the pandemic.

And even if there's nothing unexpected that happens, The whole point of the cameras is that the number of tickets you're giving out declines over time as behavior changes.

So we can't rely on this funding as the primary source of funding for our pedestrian projects.

And we really want to ask council to look for a more stable source of funding, a robust amount of funding, and make the ticket revenue, this should be a supplement This should not be the basis of our funding for these projects so that we can ensure that they are continuously funded and that we're not having shelf projects in the future.

And then a similar project that SPS is having is that King County last year stopped reviewing the bus stop paddle tickets.

You can see in this little graphic on the right hand side, the bus stop paddles come out and kids get off the bus.

And the idea is that everyone should stop.

so that kids can walk across the street safely.

There are often, you know, bus stops are in locations where there's maybe not an easy crossing.

It's very important that kids be able to get to the correct side of the road.

And some of the most dangerous driver behavior out there is driving past that stop sign when kids are crossing the street.

So the stop pedals, you know, some of them don't all have these automated ticket.

generators, and that has been supported in the past by King County, but they stopped supporting the tickets last year.

So in the meantime, there are no tickets being given out, which also means currently SPS has no funding to support crossing guards, another very important safety role.

And right now, Seattle Public Schools is in talks with the city for Seattle to take over supporting the stop pedal tickets.

And we just ask that you check in on that and that it be prioritized.

We hear that it's going very well.

But of course, you know, all of these things are slow and we just want to make sure it doesn't get sold out.

Thank you for raising that.

I did want to note that my office did contact the Seattle Police Department and the city attorney's office and it looks like they are on track to get a memorandum of understanding crafted and potentially finalized before the end of the year.

But thanks to your raising it as an issue, I think is spurring some action here.

Thank you.

That's so great to hear Council Member Peterson.

Thank you.

Sure.

All right, and so then the next issue that we want to raise is 1 that again, we've seen a lot of progress, but there's been a problem with the street improvement permit process.

When Seattle public schools is constructing school is constructing new schools.

You know, they need a building permit from.

And they need a street improvement permit from SDOT.

And street improvement permits have, you know, published timelines.

It's supposed to take, say, 9 to 18 months, was the one that I saw most recently.

But SDOT, or sorry, SPS's projects are finding that the real timelines for getting these permits are substantially longer, more than two years.

They've had a number of issues that have the repeat problems has been that there has been guidance given by one asset person who's working on the project.

And then, you know, for normal staff changes, they leave, or they just go out on temporary leave and someone else comes in and that previous written guidance is not.

honored.

They've had this problem both with reviewers and with inspectors in the field.

And I don't want to imply that SPS has done everything perfectly.

They have not.

But they need to be able to navigate this process in a reasonable timeline without being superhumanly perfect.

They're always going to be small mistakes.

that they need to be able to get through it.

And currently, they are not.

So we initiated a series of meetings to talk about what's happening.

And SPS and the Street Improvement Permit Group at SDOT got together, and they did kind of a post-mortem on the number of projects where the Street Improvement Permit process did not go well.

And they came to kind of a shared understanding of what went wrong.

Where was it SDOT's mistake, and where was it SPS's mistake, and how can they improve this going forward?

But the important thing to note is that SDOT controls the process.

They set the guidance.

You know, they do the early, SPS comes to them for guidance, and SDOT is telling them what to expect and how to achieve it.

But when things go bad, all of the bad outcomes fall on SPS.

And again, this is not using our public construction dollars effectively when they get held up in this sort of permitting rash.

SPS has had issues where they've had changed orders extremely late in the process when construction has already begun, and the contractor couldn't accommodate the expanded scope of work, and they walked off the job.

And so kids were in school where the sidewalks had already been torn up, and they weren't able to get a new contractor on the project for six months.

And when they did, the costs were substantially higher.

These are not the sort of outcomes I think that anyone wants.

And we're really excited that they are having these coordination meetings to try and ensure that they don't happen again.

But, you know, we had a difficult time even making the conversation happen.

And we would like to, going forward, we're asking that SDOT create an internal accountability mechanism so that they can, you know, so that it's easier to find out, is this working?

You know, are these new steps we're taking really achieving the goals we want?

And so that we don't have to, quite again, just to have the discussion.

You know, I'd say everybody's on the same page.

Everybody, including the SDOT staff, of course, wants to do this effectively.

But it's just, it's hard to follow through on that if you don't have some formal mechanism For continuing at work, it's easy for it to get lost in the cracks.

And so that's where we would ask you and ask the mayor's office to support creating a publicly available internal accountability mechanism.

This tracks a few metrics like.

how many months does it take through the process, are the goals per time generally being met or generally not being met so that we all have a more of a pulse on it going forward.

Thank you for raising this and you know our there has been a small reorganization at SDOT where the head traffic engineer also is now the chief safety officer and working under capital project delivery.

So now you've got somebody who's number one concern are the safety improvements like this, who has the responsibility, authority and accountability for implementing them.

We are seeing things move a little bit faster based on that restructuring.

And Venu Namani is actually here listening in right now.

So that's good.

But keep doing what you're doing in terms of pushing to get the additional accountability tracking system.

Thank you.

Now I'm gonna hand it over to Margaret to talk about some of the issues that we're highlighting for Seattle Public Schools.

Yay, thank you.

So for crossing guards, it's really more of a core school district topic, but we welcome any thoughts that council might have on how to continue to improve recruitment 40% vacancy on locations that have already been identified as dangerous for our students is 40% too much.

So any creative ideas you have on how to improve recruitment would be welcome.

And I know that we've definitely appreciated The Department of Transportation using outreach mechanisms that they have for recruitment in the past and I'm sure that that will happen again in the future.

So that's great.

Next slide.

So we want to be very appreciative to the City Council for the City Code change that prompted the increase in parking requirements for schools.

And we also want to appreciate SDOT's funding of bike parking, even before, before, during and after, not after, no, before and during the new requirement.

I have a personal anecdote in that I almost cried with joy when SDOT installed parking at Lowell Elementary because there was no parking before and we biked every day.

And so it was hard to, you know, take the cupcakes into my kids' class or go in for after-school retrieval.

So it really makes a big difference in families' abilities to safely get to and from and be at school.

Be at school actually might even be more important.

So thank you very much for the code and the money.

We love them both.

Next slide.

So this is really more of a district thing.

So I think we can all be happy that bus service has improved this year, but we don't really have a council aspect of that.

Next slide.

So this is another chance just to be extremely grateful for the council funding of the Safe Routes to School coordinator at the district.

Public schools transportation service standards have needed a revision for a long time.

But the district has been understandably hesitant to include anything but busing because without this coordinator, they really didn't have any capacity to assist the majority of Seattle public school students who are not eligible for bus service.

So, you know, significantly more than half, Mary Ellen always knows the numbers, of students aren't eligible for busing and the transportation service standards do not mention them at all.

But now that the city council has funded this position, the district has the capacity to be more equitable and more inclusive and more universal.

in describing transportation service standards, which is very exciting for all of us.

And there's some other things to this too, which are more district stuff, but thank you.

Next slide.

I think I'm passing it back to Noah.

I think I'm taking this section to wrap it up.

So just some things we want you to be aware that we're asking the state legislature for is just on those crossing guards that it's in the plain language of the law, and yet the state continues to just ignore that, which is a frustration.

And then even bigger issue is transport for students without secure housing.

I know everyone on the council is aware The housing crisis and the homelessness crisis are something that we urgently need to address here in Seattle, and Seattle Public Schools really feels that way, or really feels it.

More than 1% of students currently enrolled in SPS are experiencing homelessness.

They do not have secure housing, and they move around quite a bit, and federal law requires that SPS transport them to the same school all year long, which is, you know, makes sense in terms of providing stability in their education, but the state does not fund these costs.

So this is a homelessness is a growing problem that we feel in Seattle and also that affects school budgets because students are equally impacted by this problem.

There we go.

And then something that we're also wanting to raise with the state is this same issue regarding traffic camera tickets.

Law enforcement agencies across the state, not just here in Seattle, are short-staffed.

And if law enforcement officers are the only people who can review these tickets, that really puts a ceiling on how much we can use this valuable tool in the traffic enforcement toolbox.

So we're asking the state government to consider a law that would expand who can review tickets.

and hopefully that is something that could be applied to many of these programs here in Seattle.

Thank you.

I do want to note that there are several officials in Seattle City Government who are interested in that enabling more city government employees to review the camera footage and issue the tickets.

We know that Seattle Police Department has fixed the problem that was mentioned earlier, but as we add cameras, the question will be how efficient can they become to absorb additional camera data and then why not enable additional employees to do it under state law?

It has to be sworn peace officers, but that seems antiquated based on the new technology we have for automated camera enforcement.

So there's a lot of people who are interested in empowering more local government employees to be able to look at that camera data to keep people safe and enforce these new laws and authority from the state.

And we have a fantastic liaison on our committee officer, Gary Davenport, and he recently was injured on the job, just injured.

And so he's on my duty and is assigning officers on my duty to review.

camera tickets.

And so he came back to the committee and he was explaining, you know, now we've got this fixed with our current load, we can manage all of these camera tickets.

But he also, he said, Ooh, I just spent two months for tickets.

And it seemed clear that this was not an ideal job activity for officers who are, you know, highly trained.

in skilled individuals who don't join this profession in order to sit at a desk and look at camera footage all day long.

So it seems like there could be a pretty broad coalition of people interested in widening the pool into it.

Agreed.

And then the last thing we want to highlight for you is the public transit is free for kids.

The state funded this last year.

Metro is free, and it is fantastic.

And at the same time, King County Metro has begun actively coordinating with SPS to improve bus service for students.

My own kids have been hopping on and off the bus.

My older 1 was a 6th grader this year and.

She had to take Metro to get to school.

It involves a transfer, and it was a little tricky at first, but she got it worked out.

And now both my kids love being able to hop on a bus and go even just like three blocks through the neighborhood.

So it's been hugely successful, but there's a lot of work to do.

Metro's routes, and I'm sure you're aware, have largely still reflect commuter priorities.

They're really built to funnel people toward downtown.

They run north and south.

and they tend to run in parallel and then have a meet up point at the south end and then go south from there if you're on the north side or the reverse if you're on the south side.

And so there are just many families and kids saying that they cannot get to school effectively.

We have a lot of barriers in our city in terms of freeways and water, where bus routes tend not to go across them very fast.

And that's another one that my own kids see.

My older kid goes to school on the other side of I-5, and to get her across I-5, involves quite a detour, where she's got to walk south, touch a bus that heads south, and then get one that heads west and north again.

So she ends up making this big loop to get to school, and that's pretty typical.

I was asking some parents about it yesterday, and they were saying, you know, they'd love it if their kid could get there in two buses, but then effectively it's three buses and a walk.

And then once you add in, you know, if you have a bus running on a 30 minute schedule, that's your middle bus, you don't have many chances if one of these buses is delayed.

You can miss your transfer and just not be able to get to school.

So we end up with a lot of kids who are driving to middle and high school, the parents are driving them, or they're driving themselves, because the Metro service is not optimized for schools.

So that's why we really want to highlight that they have been Metro and SPS have been coordinating to improve it, but also there's a lot of work left to do.

And we know that the City has some room to push Metro, you know, because the City funds many of the routes that Metro has, and the City has the opportunity to say transporting kids to middle school and high school is one of our priorities.

And we'll hope that you will consider that as you are looking at which routes the city asked Metro to prioritize.

And I'll hand it back to Noah.

Thank you.

And to lift up that point where your recommendation says, you know, you're asking King County Metro, you're right that the city government has a role to play in that because we do supplement bus service through the Seattle transit measure.

So I'm glad that you recognize that there is some agency literally and figuratively to try to get at least more frequent routes to the schools.

I know that the shortage of bus drivers, of operators has been a challenge affecting the whole system, but hopefully that's going to improve soon.

Thank you.

Thank you with that I'd like to open up any questions or comments.

Thank you for this very thorough presentation and the recommendations that we have.

This presentation is on our agenda.

The Seattle Department of Transportation is here listening to it as well.

As we know, the city government budget process, even though the news cameras are all coming at city hall at the beginning of October when the mayor presents his budget to city council, we have 60 days to review and amend it.

The real action's happening now where the executive departments are putting together their budget requests to the city budget office and then the mayor will make a decision on what to put in the $7.5 billion all funds budget.

So it's good that this is coming now so that everybody can see it and hopefully a lot of these things that require dollars could be baked into the budget.

Council Member Herbold.

Thanks so much.

I want to address the issue around automated enforcement around school traffic safety and the limitation of expanding automated enforcement specifically around schools because of the pool of police officers that we currently have in Seattle.

There is a requirement that it's been interpreted the requirement is that sworn officers have to review the tickets.

I understand that the chief of police has the ability to offer special commissions to civilians.

It's my understanding that the interpretation of state law does not specifically allow this.

And so I really want to flag the issue that either We need to look more carefully at the interpretation of this law to determine whether or not this is an example of where the Chief of Police can issue commissions, or we need to speak with our state legislature to make some adjustments to the authorizing legislation in this choice, in this instance.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

I have spoken to the Office of Intergovernmental Relations, and I know that there is a shorter legislative session next year, but I think there may be some state legislators interested in expanding who is able to review the traffic enforcement camera footage and actually issue the ticket.

I appreciate you also bringing up the, you know, how are we interpreting that state law?

Are we interpreting it?

correctly and you know I can we can follow up on that together at the same time dual track it to give us very clear authority from the state and and OIR is has talked to the police department about it and is I think talking to state legislators too.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilmember Morales.

Thank you, Chair Peterson.

I first want to echo Council Member Herbold's interest in understanding what the options are and what is worth pursuing to change this question about whether we really do need sworn officers to review these tickets.

I think we've heard for a couple years now that there might be a better use of officers' time, so we should help facilitate that.

My question is about the question of internal accountability with how some of these safety projects are pursued or sort of interfered with as different staff members come on, as different interpretations of what's required for these projects to be completed.

That is an issue that I've heard about for many years within SDOT, and I think there has been some shift to try to make sure that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing and to have some consistency between interpretations of different staff members, but it is clearly still an issue.

And when we're talking about putting the lives of our students at risk, it is a serious issue that needs to be remedied.

And so I know we've got some staff people from SDOT on.

Uh, with us, and I wonder if anybody can address 1st, I do want to clarify 1 thing that that issue is 1. we're seeing when schools are building new buildings, it's their street improvement permit process.

Okay.

So, just to be clear, that's not the pedestrian projects.

I mean, it is things like, you know, curb ramps and sidewalks, but the real question is about.

Um, you know, just knowing when they have identified all the requirements and when they have not sure.

Okay.

Well, I appreciate the clarification.

Nevertheless, it is still about, you know.

Sort of impeding the progress of these projects that are intended to create safety for students once the school is built and, you know, we hear from all kinds of developers, housing, commercial projects and now school that these interruptions in the process.

projects end up costing and delaying the ability for folks to deliver on what they're trying to do.

So I would like to know if there's somebody on from SDOT who can at least share with us what you're doing to try to address this issue.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

And the folks who are here from SDOT, I mean, The official liaison, Diane Walsh, how do you, and we've got Bill aboard here too, but Diane, how do you typically follow up with these recommendations since you're with S.N.

on the Traffic Safety Committee?

Yeah, I was in a meeting with Mary Ellen.

The SIPP reviewers were present, as well as SPS capital projects managers.

And I think there is a clear path forward from all parties' perspectives.

So talking to Lei Wu about it, she's very clear on sort of what needs to be done.

She's working on internal processes right now.

And I think we'll hear back from them.

We'll check in in a few months and hear back about how they're planning to improve their internal processes.

And we do have our liaison to city council here, Bill Laborde, if you wanted to add anything to what Diane mentioned.

I think Diane covered it.

The only thing I would add, though, is that we, with a few school construction projects, we've seen some appeals that have either required some extra scrutiny at some of these permit milestones and also have required reconsideration of some This has been especially true in some of the elementary schools that are more in residential neighborhoods.

Okay.

Thank you.

Could you expand on that?

That's not something that's come up in our meetings with the SIP team.

Appeals to the SIP permit?

Either the SIP or the SDCI permits or sometimes both.

And we've had some projects slow down.

In fact, this year some current projects slowed down because of We have a number of issues that we're working on.

We have a number of issues that we're working on.

Okay.

Thanks for providing that information, both Diane and Bill.

Council members, any other comments or questions?

And again, we've got, this presentation is really important because SDOT is watching.

So the executive branch of our government has received this as well as your legislative branch.

So we'll dig into this further as we consider the budget process as well.

All right, well thank you everybody, really appreciate it.

We'll go ahead and.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, well let's go ahead and move on to our next agenda item, agenda item three.

Will the clerk please read the full title of the third agenda item into the record.

Agenda item three, implementation of school zone traffic safety camera enforcement for briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

Today we have our Seattle Department of Transportation here.

This is part of their response to request for information regarding equitable deployment of additional school zone cameras.

This request went hand in hand with the council's budget action last fall to double the school zone traffic safety camera program.

As we recently approved legislation to designate where to place cameras to discourage drag racing, we know that these automated cameras, the automated camera enforcement works.

It discourages reckless driving, increases pedestrian safety, and reduces the need for face-to-face interactions between drivers and the police.

Before we hear from our presenters, I just want to thank our city council central staffer, Calvin Chow.

Cal, thank you for reviewing the department's response to the statement of legislative intent from last fall.

Did you have any opening comments or concerns?

No, Council Member, I just note that we have not formally received the slide response yet.

It is due today, so hopefully we will get that by the end of the day.

Yes, yes, this is the presentation.

Thank you for that clarification.

All right, well, let's go ahead and hear from Estat.

Good morning.

Good morning, Chair Peterson.

Council Member Herbold and Council Member Morales.

My name is Vinay Nimani.

I'm the Chief Safety Officer and the City Traffic Engineer with the Seattle Department of Transportation.

I use a he-him pronoun.

Thank you for having us and giving us this opportunity today.

Today I'm going to present our response to the Statement of Legislative Intent on Automated Traffic Safety Cameras.

Let me share my screen with you.

screen.

Are you still seeing me right now in the presentation?

We see the presentation now, thank you.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

Thank you so much.

Sure.

Thank you so much.

So let me dive right into the presentation.

Let me first start with our slide on our vision, mission, values, and goals.

I want to affirm our mission and vision and values and goals.

I want to emphasize that the response to the statement of legislative intent is rooted our core values of equity and safety.

And you'd see that we have Indian, these two goals in developing our response today.

Just a quick recap of the statement of legislative intent.

The statement of legislative intent has two parts to its request.

The first part is to ask for an implementation plan for doubling the school zone camera program using the race and social justice analysis and any anticipated budgetary administrative changes.

And the second part of the Statement of Legislative Intent request is to provide an evaluation of cost and benefits of expanding other types of automated traffic safety programs and propose a schedule for deployment.

This is the current status of automated enforcement in the city of Seattle.

Currently, we have five different types of automated enforcement that we have used.

Red light camera enforcement is currently operational at 23 different locations.

Fixed school zone camera enforcement is currently operational at 19 different locations.

We have initiated a pilot for doing the restricted lane enforcement on the Lower Spokane Street Bridge when the high bridge was closed.

But since the high bridge was opened and the lane restrictions on the lower Spokane Street Bridge were lifted, we have deactivated the enforcement on that location.

We have ongoing pilots that enforce block the box at four different locations and transit lane enforcement at five different locations.

Focusing on school zone enforcement, today we have 10 epic school zones.

We do school zone enforcement.

at school speed zones with 85 percentile speeds or 30 miles an hour are prioritized.

We start with flashing beacons that are installed prior to the deployment of cameras.

And if the speeds are still high and above 30 miles an hour, we consider deployment of automated enforcement.

We at Estart coordinate with our Seattle Police Department partners and their vendors for potential camera deployment.

Here is a safety impact of the current school zone program.

As you can see that in locations where we have implemented these automated safety cameras, the collisions are down.

There is almost a 50% drop in total collisions in locations where we have implemented these automated enforcement locations.

There's almost a 70% drop in collisions during the school beacon activation times.

And overall, the speeds are down in the locations where we have school speed zone enforcement.

So we can effectively say that school speed zone cameras reduce speeding and enhance safety of our Seattle students.

So our work on kind of like this statement of legislative intent started with to determine the, or identify the potential school zone enforcement locations.

So we developed a three-step methodology.

The first step in our methodology is to identify areas of need.

We have collected data across various school zones within Seattle and identified those locations that have really high arrival and dismissal rate of percentile speeds.

The second step in our methodology was to confirm the presence of flashing beacons because we have known that flashing beacons may be able to reduce speeds by as much as four miles an hour in school zones.

and overall they improve motorist awareness of the school zone and the presence of school children.

So we, our step two kind of like in identifying potential locations were to confirm the presence of the school, school, school flashing beacons.

And only those locations that still exhibit higher speeds were considered for further analysis.

And this is, these two steps were kind of like very similar to what we have taken in existing schools and locations.

But where we really leaned in, in this response to a statement of legislative intent, is to apply the equity lens.

We are using the city's racial and social equity index.

As you all know, this index combines data on race, ethnicity, and related demographics with data on socioeconomic disadvantages and health disadvantages that are calculated as an index and mapped to various census tracts.

The RSE index is partitioned into five different categories that we use to identify potential new locations for expansion of the potential expansion of the school zone program.

We also kind of like leaned in on the recommendation from our transportation equity work group to ensure that our recommendations lead to a more equitable distribution of cameras across the city.

With those as our framework for identifying these potential new locations, we have identified the new locations in the five RSCI categories.

As you can see, the number of existing locations where we enforce schools on campus are mostly concentrated in the second highest and the highest disadvantaged categories.

So we leaned in with identifying more locations in the lowest, the second lowest and the middle tier categories for potential new locations.

When combined with existing and potential new locations, we were able to end up with developing more equitable list of school zone, potential school zone camera locations across the city.

There are several school zones within the highest disadvantaged category and some in the second highest disadvantaged category that could potentially be considered for automated enforcement.

But we are, again, kind of like leaning in with equity, and we are referring those locations to a safer school program to pursue more engineering-based speed mitigation treatments in those zones.

Moving on, another way to look at the potential school zone enforcement locations that we could expand into this program is looking at it from a council district.

Again, our process led to, when combined with the existing and the potential new locations, we were ending up with a more equitable distribution of cameras across the council districts.

One exception to this is District 7. There was only one school zone within District 7 that we identified as a need to consider potential automated enforcement.

But this particular school does not have flashing beacons associated with the school zones.

So what we have done is we are referring that location to our Safe Routes to School program to consider flashing beacons in line with our current practice and the methodology that we have developed.

So what we have done is the council budget action request completion of developing a schedule and request the completion of expansion by the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year.

If funded and directed to proceed, the best case schedule for design and construction for this expansion is about 14 months.

The table on the left shows various milestones that we need to hit to be able to complete that within the time frame.

But what we are seeing is that we have this particular best case scenario does not account for some very significant risks in engineering, in permitting, in construction, and in procurement to complete this potential expansion.

This is what it is, is a best case schedule to, and a sample kind of like schedule to show what needs to be done to meet the council budget actions imposed deadline to expand the expansion by 2024-2025.

There is very significant risk of delays and various steps with this particular schedule.

And it's highly unlikely that even if you started today, that you could actually get this expansion done by the start of the next school year, the 2024-2025 school year.

Looking into the potential expansion, this potential expansion has several budget impacts.

What we have determined is that Estart requires about $400,000 in upfront costs to support the expansion of the school's Speed Zone program.

Similarly, Seattle Police Department requires another $100,000 to support the potential expansion of the school's Speed Zone program.

Most of the upfront costs are borne by SDOT, and after implementation, SDOT, Seattle Police Department, and Seattle Municipal Court will require about $2.5 million annually to operate these new enforcement locations.

The School Safety, Traffic, and Pedestrian Improvement Fund will require further budget action to support the potential expansion of the school speed zone program.

We also have some constraints with Seattle Police Department and Seattle Municipal Court staffing constraints.

As you had heard from the previous presenter, Seattle Police Department currently utilizes light duty officers and overtime to review violations.

Seattle Police Department has indicated that they have maxed out their capacity given their current staffing constraints.

They indicated that they would need an additional four to five officers dedicated to review and support existing operations and potential expansion of any automated enforcement.

Similarly, Seattle Municipal Court also indicated that they would need additional resources to meet the increased demand associated with expansion of automated enforcement programs.

Moving on to the second part of the statement of legislative intent, which asks for an evaluation of the other types of automated enforcement program.

One such program that we have is the Red Light Enforcement Program.

We have piloted this program in 2006 and since installed about 23 locations that we operate red light cameras on a full-time basis on a permanent basis today.

These locations were originally selected based on collision frequency and severity and observations on site and generally the geographic distribution of cameras.

What we have seen is that from the crash data that we have observed at these locations, locations with red light cameras do improve safety with collision severity and the incidence of collisions.

when we compared the five-year before and after data for collision severity, the locations with red light cameras had more reductions in fatal serious injury and property damage across all categories at those locations when compared to other citywide similar locations.

Similarly, we also saw a similar benefit with the red light camera enforcement on its influence on the various crash types.

Excluding the rear-end collision type, on pretty much all other crash types, locations with red-light cameras experience more reductions in crashes when compared to similar locations citywide without the red-light camera enforcement.

So there are benefits of red-light camera enforcement and safety is kind of well documented within our own dataset.

Here is kind of like an estimated annual operating cost for operating a red light camera.

It costs about $60,000 to cover the vendor fees that needs to be paid on a monthly basis and to cover the annual SDOT and SPD administrative costs to cover the program and the SDOT and SMC costs to review and issue citations on a per violation.

This annual operating cost is on a per camera basis and does not include the upfront costs that as required by SDOT and SPD to install a camera in the first place.

We estimate these costs to be about $15,000 for SDOT and about $5,000 for SPD to install a red light camera location, to install a red light camera.

We have other, an ongoing pilot with block the box transit lane and restricted lane that we are authorized to use until June 30th, 2025. Washington state legislature would need to authorize any use of automated, of these kinds of automated enforcement beyond that pilot period.

We are scheduled to provide a report to the state legislature by the December of, by the end of 2024 for further consideration in the state legislature.

The pilot program, just because of by its nature, is incurring kind of like more upfront costs as staff review the data and administer this program, administer this pilot program.

But we expect that the annual operating costs for these types of enforcement would be very similar to what we are seeing under the red light camera program or the school zone enforcement camera program.

There are several other types of automated enforcement that are currently authorized under state law, namely school walk areas, public parks, speed zones, hospital speed zones, and cameras that fall into certain categories, and most recently on state highway work zones.

These additional authorizations are in the state law, but they're not yet in the Seattle Municipal Code, except for the railroad crossings, which is an exception that's already authorized in the Seattle Municipal Code.

I believe Bill Laborte is going to talk a little bit more about the executive-sponsored legislation and how to align our Seattle Municipal Code with the authorizations that are currently in the state law.

Based on the work that we have done for the statement of legislative intent, we have about five recommendations to bring back to everyone.

The first is to consider extending the schools and expansion schedule.

We understand that the council budget action asked to complete the development implementation schedule to complete the expansion by the end of 2024, by the beginning of 2024-2025 school year.

Given kind of like the uncertainties and the challenges that we face at this time with engineering and procurement, it's very highly unlikely that we'd be able to meet that deadline even if we started right today.

And furthermore, the council budget action did not add budget to the start to Seattle Department of Transportation to pursue this expansion.

not until 2024. It adds budget to the Seattle Police Department in 2023, but most of the upfront costs for any potential expansion is borne by SDOT, mostly borne by SDOT than SPD.

Secondly, as you have heard from the previous presenter too, we have some structural issues with staffing constraints, both within Seattle Police Department and the Seattle Municipal Court to review and issue these violations This might need to be addressed before we expand any programs, or else we risk not being able to review the violations that we have captured within the 14-day window that the state law requires us to review and issue citations.

Third, we also need some legislative action to basically realign our Seattle Municipal or align our Seattle Municipal Court with the various types of new authorizations that are already there in the state law under RCW.

The fourth is that we need to do more community engagement and education activities to better inform our processes for any potential expansion.

One of the top to bottom Vision Zero early momentum building actions is to engage with the public on automated enforcement.

We are currently engaging with community organizations in South Seattle, and we are planning to engage a similar community organization in North Seattle to collect more feedback and inform our own processes on automated enforcement as we move forward.

Finally, we have a need for more holistic automated enforcement policies that center on SDOT's transportation equity framework and values on transportation justice and safety, including topics on citing, basing any expansion on safety needs equitable sighting across the city, complementary countermeasures, improved signage, and regular performance evaluation.

These are some topics that SDOT can provide more policy guidance, but we are also receiving additional feedback from various community partners through our ongoing engagement to revisit topics such as existing fee structures, or pursuing kind of an income-based penalty for reductions, or pursuing alternative forms of penalties, or revenue and funding structure for SDOT and SBD to reinvest in our own community safety programs.

We do understand that while we can engage in these conversations, these conversations are outside the purview of SDOT and need a more multi-departmental approach to developing our processes and policies as we move forward.

So with that, I'll pause there and I'll take any questions

It's fine Thank you very much and as we mentioned earlier The new it's really good to have you here as the the not only the traffic engineer official traffic engineer for the city but also as the chief safety officer for for a stop because we know that safety is your priority at the department under the leadership of Greg spots and so I I just want to make a few comments, ask some questions here, and turn it over to my colleagues.

Just since we have Venu here and you are the Chief Safety Officer, I just, in addition to infrastructure improvements to improve safety and reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries, I just want to hear from Venu that you support automated enforcement as a safety intervention.

that you are seeing it work, and you're upbeat that it will work if we do more of it?

The evidence of data, both from our own programs, is incontrovertible, as I have shown before, that automated speed enforcement in school zones do reduce speeding and do reduce collisions.

And this finding is also backed up at the Federal Highway Administration level where they do recommend automated enforcement.

as one of the countermeasures to reduce speeding.

Thank you for that.

Because this slide presentation, it lacks a little optimism, I think, just overall.

But I think outlining the various hurdles, the better to quickly jump over them.

So I know there's that can-do attitude in SDOT.

This presentation is showing various hurdles to implement things.

These recommendations here on this slide, 19, obviously the City Council will take care of item three.

We are doing that piece by piece here.

Just recently approving Council Bill 120600. We've got this bill on our next item, which will hopefully approve August 15 out of our committee.

And so we're looking for SDOT to really embrace this and work with us as a partner to work with the mayor's office to make sure SPD is doing what they need to do.

As I mentioned earlier, we're working with our Office of Intergovernmental Relations to address some of the staffing constraints.

We're eager, obviously, we would like to see this implemented yesterday, and you're telling us the timeline is longer than hoped for, and that's disappointing, but thank you for explaining why.

And in terms of the equitable distribution of the school zone cameras, I think my colleagues might have some questions about that because I just want to sort of connect a couple of slides you had.

One is a couple slides you had, I think slides eight and nine.

I think you were explaining different types of interventions you're doing.

I don't know if you can go back to the, we're probably going to want to address some of your slides here.

You can keep that if you don't mind keeping up the PowerPoint.

or putting it back up there.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, that's okay.

So I'm trying to understand this slide here.

You've got existing locations and potential locations.

So the potential locations would be where the council has authorized the doubling of the program, right?

So those are the new locations.

Yes, if you double the program, then these are the potential locations across the various RCA categories that we would consider as we move forward.

So is it.

Is it your interpretation of this slide that the existing locations, the highest disadvantaged areas already have the cameras?

Is that what you're saying here?

Yes.

So then when you go to double the program, you're spreading it out throughout the city.

I, is that correct?

Because I was expecting to see on the next, I don't know if it was slide nine, where you talked about the different council districts.

I guess I was expecting to see more potential cameras, the number of potential locations, expecting to see more of that in South Seattle.

So I'm wanting, you know, I'm hoping you can address that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for the question, Chair Peterson.

South Seattle is one of the areas where we have the highest disadvantage.

And as you can see from this slide, we already have eight existing locations where we do school zone enforcement within South Seattle.

So one of the things that we have done is to lean in more with equity.

What we have, are trying to do is that when combined with the existing and the potential locations, we have a more equitable distribution of locations, of school zone enforcement locations across the city, across the various RSEI category indices, and also across the various council districts.

So that's kind of like how we developed this particular recommendation.

There are several kind of like school zones in South Seattle where we are seeing higher speeds.

But what we are instead recommending in those school zones is for our Safe Routes to School program to look at more engineering-based speed mitigation measures to change the behavior and reduce speeding and improve safety in those locations.

So and I see Council Member Morales' hand up.

One, just so I can complete the thought here.

So viewing this holistically, it's not just about cameras.

It's also about infrastructure improvements to maybe narrow the road or increase the visibility for crosswalks, add crosswalks, those physical improvements.

You're saying you're doing that a lot in South Seattle, and so it shouldn't just be viewed from this single chart on cameras.

Yeah.

In those locations with the highest disadvantage, we are leaning in on more of the engineering treatments, curb bulbs, heat cushions, radar feedback signs, and the like to reduce speeding and improve safety.

identifying potential new locations in the other RSEI categories for a more equitable distribution across the city of the schools and enforcement locations.

Okay, Council Member Morales.

Thank you, chair.

Thank you, director.

I think it's important to very clear that when we say equitable in the city, we do not mean equal.

particularly when we're talking about issues of communities of color who have been disadvantaged by past policies and practices.

Equitable means that those communities get more so that they come up to a level that the rest of the city benefits from.

And so this, in my interpretation of this, a decision about potential locations, that's about everybody getting the same.

It's not about more equitably providing infrastructure to disadvantaged communities.

So I just want to be really clear that those two things are different, and the proposal is not equitable.

It is about providing equal access across the city.

That said, I completely agree with the notion that our students across the city do need to be safe and if installing enforcement cameras is one way to get us there, I support that.

I also think it is important to acknowledge that if we're really going to create safety for pedestrians, whether they're students or elders or anybody just trying to navigate the sidewalks in the city, then we do need to shift our focus to engineering and road diets and rethinking about how we design the streets so that it is not easy for people to speed and run lights and take corners that put people in jeopardy, that we're really going to address safety.

So I'm glad to hear you say that there is a shift in moving that direction.

In terms of addressing the dire street safety issues in South Seattle with more engineering, I'm happy to hear that that is the intent.

It is not what I've seen with repeated projects getting delayed, additional studies being done.

So I would like to get a list of what projects are underway in South Seattle to address pedestrian safety, not just around schools, but across the district, because, you know, I was in a car crash.

recently on college and 22nd and a mother walked by with her kids at the same time saying cars are speeding down these streets all the time and it is unsafe for us who are trying to get our kids to school because we're trying to navigate a place where we don't have sidewalks.

And that was particularly frustrating for me because college and 22nd is where I put money in the budget last year to begin a sidewalk project.

So I would like to know why the funding that we have put in the budget for SDOT to install sidewalks has not been spent, or at least get a status report of when these projects are going to get completed because If we're really going to be talking about safety and equity, then we need to get moving on these projects, and I'm frankly really frustrated.

I understand this is a new position for you, but I'm really frustrated that safety improvements that we put money in the budget to complete have not even been started in many cases or have been repeatedly delayed.

So, I will finish there and look forward to receiving a list and a timeline of when projects in the south end will get started and get completed.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for your comments, Council Member Morales.

I hear your comments.

One thing that I would offer a different perspective is this equitable distribution of enforcement locations across various categories and council districts.

Leans in on focuses just on the automated enforcement locations.

We're not kind of like leaving behind the second highest and highest disadvantage locations.

We want to lead those locations more with engineering treatments to improve safety and ultimately kind of like, you know, safety is our top most priority and we want to lean in on.

The, not on the engineering from the engineering side from a roadway design perspective in those locations.

1, such a location that comes to mind is a South Shore K through 8 and we are, we have kind of like a list of improvements.

That's already kind of like, in the works on South Henderson street.

We have recently installed speed cushions.

We have more engineering improvements to come through to improve the safety of students that are going to and from South Shore.

And we are working diligently to lean in with more engineering improvements in areas with the highest disadvantage because we want to balance the impact of safety and also the financial burdens that these cameras place on and community that's already very disadvantaged.

I don't have kind of the particular information on the project, the sidewalk project that you're referencing, but we should be able to get back to you with a response on and a status update on that particular project.

Thank you.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

Just more on this topic.

Can you go back one slide?

I think it was one slide back.

Yes, so the transportation equity work group's recommendation to equitably distribute cameras, I think that is, you know, what Councilmember Morales was referring to.

The slide I'm going to turn it over to I'm not sure whether or not the recommendation I do appreciate the emphasis on the impacts camera enforcement and the impacts to disadvantaged communities.

But I also think it's very, very important that when we have these kinds of disparate impacts analysis, that we're not only looking at the people who are subject to the regulation or the law enforcement, but we're also involving the voices of people who, in those communities who have the potential likelihood to experience the harm associated with not having these tools.

So it's very, very important, I believe, to have the involvement in these decisions to not increase counter enforcement when we can't just be talking to people who are advocating for reduced financial obligations of people living in these neighborhoods.

must also be talking to people whose safety is negatively impacted.

The families and parents of children who live in these neighborhoods.

And if they are also telling us No, we don't want more camera enforcement.

We need to hear that, but if we're not asking them that, I think that is a very, very big shortcoming of a disparate impact analysis.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for your comments, Council Member Herbold.

Yes, I understand kind of like the difference between equity and equitable, equal and equitable distribution.

Let me kind of like draw your attention to this table again.

As you can see that we can't change where the existing cameras are already located.

We already have configured skewed distribution of existing cameras, right?

The way we have developed our potential locations is to be more equitable across the RSCI categories and across various council districts.

And that's why you see that equitable distribution of potential new locations that we are considering as we move forward.

Now, when combined with the existing inequity of how the existing cameras are located and something that is already there, when combined that with the potential more equitable distribution of the new camera locations, we get to a more equal distribution of cameras across the various spectrums on the RCA index.

So, I just want to kind of like draw that distinction a little bit between equitable distribution of potential new cameras and an equal distribution of all cameras within school zones when combined with the existing SKU that we see and where they are located.

I also thank you so much for bringing up the comments on community engagement.

We are definitely engaging with community organizations as we have indicated kind of like in our top to bottom report that we need to do more public engagement on automated enforcement.

We are talking to several stakeholders, community organizations, our own transportation equity work group that did make that recommendation to be more equitable in the new, as we expand any new automated enforcement programs.

And also kind of like I personally have participated in several listening sessions where people have brought up their views on automated enforcement I agree with you that we need to continue this ongoing engagement and do a more broader engagement to gather the public feedback that could inform our path forward.

Just a quick follow-up.

So, can you tell me from where the recommendation came to not add more cameras in the lowest, or the highest disadvantaged areas?

Who made that recommendation and who was involved?

We worked with our transportation equity work group, but it was also kind of like we own a part of that recommendation too, is to not, to balance the inequities, or just to balance the distribution of cameras to identify these potential locations more in categories that are in the lowest and the second and the middle tiers of disadvantaged index.

And so did that work group include members of the public who live in those highest disadvantaged areas?

And were they also saying, we don't want any more cameras?

Yes, comes from her board.

They do include people who live in the disadvantaged areas.

And again, those people who live in those disadvantaged areas are not only considering the disparate impact associated with camera fines, but they're also considering the disparate impact of accidents and harm done from speeding in school zones currently.

They're considering both sides of the disparate impact question?

Absolutely.

They're asking us to balance that perspective between placing more new cameras versus leading with engineering improvements to address some of those safety concerns in the areas of highest disadvantage.

Thank you very much.

That's very helpful.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And I just want to note that I concur with the comments and concerns raised by Councilmembers Morales and Herbold that what you're showing here is an equal distribution, not necessarily an equitable distribution.

And when I was briefed, I think you also mentioned that one of your stakeholders was Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.

Is that correct, that you consulted?

We have an ongoing community engagement with Seattle Neighborhood Greenways to do community and outreach.

We are doing the same with other community organizations in the north end too.

That engagement is due to begin soon.

Okay, well, thank you for mentioning the transportation equity work group.

And maybe it's a good thing that you haven't finalized your written response to the statement of legislative intent, because maybe there's some opportunity here to do some additional work, talking to school kids, school parents in those neighborhoods.

And I just want to, we're not going to do infrastructure improvements for safety.

We're going to do both.

to echo what my colleagues were saying about prioritizing how we improve safety, where we improve it.

So it was, I think, good to have this discussion, healthy to have this discussion, and you're hearing from three council members who don't often agree on things, but we all seem to be agreeing on this, so I hopefully SDOT is taking that to heart, and we'll look deeper at what the research they've done on this and how they're looking at equity.

Francisca.

Thank you for letting me speak.

I appreciate the conversation today, very robust and interesting.

I want to just summarize so it's clear how we came to this conclusion.

We did the Vision Zero top to bottom review and in that process, We, we tapped into many of our trusted partners at the transportation equity work group, whose streets are streets and others who have, you know, submitted letters and statements, we've had many conversations around what equity in transportation means What we are hearing fairly clearly is that residents in neighborhood disadvantaged neighborhoods are asking for us to look at alternatives, because of the disproportionate impact of ticket citations on neighbors and friends who are financially disadvantaged.

While we could have approached this project by saying, the project was set up to have us double the number of potential locations.

In order to do that, that means an increase in the number of cameras in the city.

We know for sure that the communities in these disadvantaged neighborhoods are telling us that they would prefer us to not be increasing the cameras in those neighborhoods.

I'm trying to just clarify that we understand the equity versus equality and we're trying to weave together the direction to increase, to double the number of cameras with how to do so equitably, given that neighbors were telling us they didn't want the additional cameras in their neighborhoods and they need for equity purposes.

I understand the desire for SDOT to look at different ways of approaching this problem.

However, I do think that given the task of doubling, given that the task was to double the number, that the way that staff approached how to double was done with an equity lens in that it avoided, it It led to equal distribution but avoided increases in communities that were telling us for equity for with an equity lens that we should not be increasing cameras in those neighborhoods and.

I don't know if that, in the space of this conversation, if that's clear, but I think we are clearly understanding the difference between the equality and equity.

And with a clear statement from the public to avoid increasing cameras in disadvantaged neighborhoods, this was the way to weave that together in our analysis at this time.

Yeah, thank you, Francesca.

I appreciate that.

And as I said, I do think that the shift, as was mentioned, to looking at engineering strategies as the real solution to some of the safety problems that we have is the right shift.

So I am fully in agreement on that.

And I understand why you might have made these decisions about where to put these additional cameras, because we're all hearing the same thing from Whose Streets Are Streets and other advocates as well.

So I understand that I did think it was important to make clear the distinction between equity and equality.

That said, if this is a sort of a precursor to equity in safety measures throughout the city, then the next question for me is, okay, well, then what are the engineering strategies, the engineering projects that are planned or underway or that you will be requesting budget for in District 2 so that that equity is achieved?

Because just not putting more cameras down here isn't the solution.

The solution is changing the engineering and putting in the traffic calming and sidewalks and other things that we need for people to be safe and for this district to stop being the district where almost 60% of the fatalities occur.

Not that I want those to occur other places.

We need to reduce the fatalities that are happening.

We need to eliminate the fatalities that are happening in the city.

And so that's my real question here is, Okay, then what are the projects and what are the resources you need to deliver so that we can achieve that goal?

So thank you for the conversation.

I just remember that I know it's in small print, but at the bottom it did note that should should there be funding to pursue this this approach of doubling the cameras.

As noted at the bottom that the 10 locations and highest disadvantage in the 4 locations and second highest would be referred to the same Russell school programming program for for engineering treatment so very much appreciate that and totally agree.

I think that's a great point.

And I do want to follow up on that money

more school zone cameras.

There's more investment in the engineering solutions.

And I do want to, I appreciate your clarification, Francesca, but I do want to restate what my point was, because I didn't hear it reflected in your response.

I totally understand that there is advocacy that is focused on the concern of impacts of fines and fees associated with camera enforcement on highly disadvantaged areas.

And that is one way of doing an RSGI analysis, looking at the impacts of the regulation.

But what I am not hearing, although heard of maybe a little bit, what I'm not hearing is that the question is also being asked differently to not only focus on the impacts of camera enforcement, but that we're also talking about the trade-offs, what happens when we don't have more camera enforcement in these neighborhoods.

And there is a very harmful, disparate impact associated with that as well.

I think the question has to be asked both ways.

I think our RSJI analysis often only asks them one way, which is focused on the, you know, basically the criminal legal system involvement associated with the investment.

And I just, I really think that families that live in these school zones need to be explicitly engaged with about the trade-offs.

You've got one group of folks who are saying there's a disparate impact on disadvantaged communities, people of color from camera enforcement, and we need to hear that.

We need to listen to that voice.

but we also need to talk to people who live in these areas to talk about the disparate impact associated with not having camera enforcement.

I understand that the engineering investments that are hoped for is one controlled sort of against that disparate impact of not having cameras, but there's a lot of uncertainty there.

And I just think I'm concerned that we're only looking at this question from one perspective.

I appreciate that.

Thank you for that clarification.

That makes a lot of sense and I understand where you're coming from.

This is a report not based on a broad question, how to increase safety.

It's a report based on what's a strategy for doubling the number.

It's limited in that way, but I think you raise a nice nuance to a tough question.

I thank you.

I do want to put into context the number of schools, 80% of schools, public schools in Seattle do not have the benefit of school zone cameras.

So when we're talking about doubling them, we're only talking about going from 20% to 40%.

So even when this is finally implemented, you still have, less than half of the public schools benefiting from this.

So I think SDOT's going to want to figure out how to embrace and scale this up.

And that gets us to the money question.

What was presented here was only what you're characterizing as costs, but there are revenues that come in from this I don't want the public to think a net cost to this, it's actually net revenue.

Obviously, as our school safety traffic committee said, we want that revenue to be declining over time as people slow down and are not speeding in these school zones.

But I also don't want it to be presented back to us that what we're doing is foisting some sort of cost onto the administration.

It's actually a net revenue that's coming in we're going to be able to use that revenue to fund some of our other projects.

So that's something that we can ideally use that revenue for more transportation infrastructure projects which we'll actually discuss a little All right, let's go ahead and move on to the last item on our agenda, item four.

Will the clerk please go ahead and read the full title of the fourth agenda item into the record.

Agenda item four, Council Bill 120625, an ordinance establishing additional uses for automated traffic safety cameras to increase safety, amending sections 1131.90, 1131.121, and 1150.570 of the Seattle Municipal Code for briefing discussion and possible vote.

Thank you.

Our state government also agrees we need more automated enforcement options, so they have authorized additional use of automated enforcement cameras.

As I mentioned previously, while we're not voting on this item, we will be voting on it on August 15. S dot Seattle Department of Transportation here again to present this legislation to implement the additional new state law authority for additional uses of automated camera enforcement We already took care of a big section of this new state authority by designating Where we can place cameras to discourage reckless drag racing.

We did that with council bill one two zero six hundred This legislation would implement additional authority from the state and proposes specific fees for each type of infraction and also whether to, I believe it notes whether to provide a warning for that first infraction.

So, before I turn it over to our presenters from SDOT, I want to again thank Calvin Chow from Council Central Staff for his review of this legislation and for his succinct memo that is posted on today's agenda.

Cal, do you have any comments or concerns or opening remarks for this item?

Council Member, I think the only thing I would like to say is that I am exploring with Estad and Law just some technical clarifying edits that may be necessary.

So if that comes to pass, I'll be working with your office.

Thank you.

And colleagues, one of the reasons we're hearing this twice is we wanna give you the opportunity to propose amendments.

If you do have ideas for amendments, we do ask that you get them to Calvin Chow on our central staff by Monday, August 7. So it's approximately just under a week to give those to him so that he can finalize those amendments, get them approved by our law department, and we can publish them.

In advance of our August 15 committee agenda and vote on the amendments and vote on the bill on August 15 before our two week recess.

So we can move that ahead to full city council.

So let's go ahead and turn it over to s.

Welcome back.

Thank you.

And just to reintroduce myself, I'm Bill Laborde with the Seattle Department of Transportation, and I'll be the primary presenter on this legislation.

There was a lot of foundational information in the previous presentation, so I'm just going to sort of jump right into the meat of the legislation.

As Venu mentioned, and you've mentioned, Chair Peterson, the state legislature has provided significantly expanded authority for new forms of camera enforcement, in particular, forms of full-time speed enforcement.

Just to distinguish between the school zone cameras that we were just talking about, those cameras are on typically for about 40 minutes in the morning and 40 minutes in the afternoon on days when school's in session.

Most of these new forms of enforcement are really designed to be in operation 24-7.

And just to go into those, they can probably be divided into two broad categories of full time and speed enforcement.

The first is zone based.

So, the new legislation that passed last year allows that we're looking at.

We're also looking at ways for cities to install cameras in school walk zones which are different than school.

The school speeds and we're talking about school walks answer generally about a mile radius around a given school.

these are cameras that could program.

And along with that are public park speed zones and hospital speed zones.

And then the other category is a sort of catch-all category that the legislature provided for allowing one camera per 10,000 population that could be justified.

Those cameras can be justified one of three ways.

One of those three ways is through the designated race zone, race zones that you ordained just a couple weeks ago or just this week, I believe.

And the other ways of justifying those forms, those one per 10,000 cameras is through a road safety plan that's filed with the state.

or locations that have a significantly higher rate of collisions over a three-year average, and other measures for enforcement are not feasible or sufficient.

And then just a couple other notes that all these new forms of enforcement do require an equity analysis, and they also require signs to be posted 30 days in advance before deployment of any of these new cameras.

And they all require that, like the Block the Box and Transit Lane Pilot, that 50% of net proceeds are deposited with the state's Cooper Jones account, which is a bike pen safety account.

I think there were some questions about how this legislation fits with Council Bill 120600, the racing zone designation.

Both bills, thanks to an amendment you passed, a technical amendment you passed a couple weeks ago, both bills have identical language.

to the traffic control device section.

Adding these new forms of enforcement in 1150-570 of the Seattle municipal code, the traffic code.

Your bill included the racing zone designations.

Our bill does not.

We added some revisions to the We also added a couple cleanup provisions that law asked us to to include that cover really most of the forms of auto enforcement that are allowed by The code and then one thing that our bill also does is for these new forms of enforcement acquires a warning for the first violation, and then the fines would only kick in.

for the second violation and beyond.

And this is another, actually probably the most important and highest priority request we heard from Transportation Equity Work Group, from Whose Streets Are Streets, and from others that wanted to address some of the equity concerns that come with auto enforcement.

And then finally, neither bill at this point addresses funding for implementation or designates how the net proceeds that could stay with the city would be spent.

We have that designation with school speeds on camera.

We have a partial designation.

for use of funds with red light camera program.

And I think one of the issues to be determined is how the proceeds from these new cameras would be allocated.

And then finally, I just want to talk a little bit about the technology.

And I had a lot of questions that have come about in the last few weeks about how these new forms of full-time speed enforcement will operate.

And this came up a lot with the racing zone designations.

I think both questions and maybe some misassumptions about how they work.

And probably the easiest way to describe how they work is that for full-time speed enforcement, these cameras will operate very much the same way that the school zone speed cameras that we were just talking about operate.

But again, instead of just 40 minutes in the morning, 40 minutes in the evening, they would operate 24-7.

couple of questions that have come up in the last couple of weeks, especially in light of the racing zone designation, is do the cameras, can they issue tickets for reckless driving because of, in a racing zone?

And the answer is no.

The tickets are only, cannot be for a criminal violation.

It's just a civil infraction.

The ticket is issued only to the registered owner or renter It is not for the driver because of the privacy requirements embedded in the state code that carry forward to the municipal code.

Images cannot be retained except for the purpose of identifying the violation and defending the violation.

We cannot have cameras taking video of people starting a race or participating in a race event.

It's really just capturing the speeding, whether someone is driving with you know, a lead foot 10 miles over the speed limit, say, or they're racing, it's the same ticket and it goes to the registered owner of the vehicle.

In most cases, it would not capture things like drivers doing donuts or other nuisance behavior because, one, those violations are often aren't above the speed limit.

And second, even when they are, they're difficult to capture because the vehicle's not traveling from one location to another where speed can be measured.

So again, these cameras operate with this new form of enforcement very similar to the school speed zone cameras that we've been talking about for most of the morning.

And that's all I have.

Happy to answer any questions about the legislation.

And we still have Venu and Francisca and Andy Merkley, who is a subject matter expert on this, if there are any questions about either the legislation or the operation of these new forms of enforcement.

Thank you very much.

I know that previously when we've been talking about this new state authority to implement additional automated enforcement cameras to increase pedestrian safety in particular, the question has come up, where would the revenues go that are generated from this?

And so just to be clear, even though costs have been presented to us, we know that there are net revenues produced by this.

Ideally, they decline over time.

Nevertheless, this legislation is currently silent on what happens to the 50% of the revenues that the local government can keep from this, the other 50% going to Olympia for the state government.

So I just want to...

signal my intent to seek an amendment to this bill or if we, based on the title of this bill, if we need to have a different council bill introduced to do that in a timely manner so that on August 15th at our committee, we can I would like to vote on those at the same time, because I think that there is at least what I've heard public statements from colleagues is they would like to see the revenue from these cameras go into traffic safety infrastructure improvements.

echo that and make sure we have the legislation to make that happen.

So colleagues any comments or questions in our first hearing of this bill which we will take up again on August 15. Okay, and this time frame between now and August 15 will enable additional public comment to come in.

Folks who are listening can write to us at council at seattle.gov that reaches all nine council members.

I'm going to go ahead and close the meeting.

I'm going to turn it over to Calvin.

Calvin, did you want to make any additional comments or ask any questions?

Okay.

Thank you.

Yeah, I think that would make everybody feel more comfortable if they knew directionally where those funds were going.

And it sounds like there is, at least in public statements, some consensus around reinvesting those funds into transportation safety infrastructure improvements.

So I'll work with you to do that.

And maybe some of my colleagues will want to sign on to that.

or if they already have something in the works, I'd be happy to sign on with theirs.

All right well, thank you everybody really appreciate this first look at this bill as we move piece by piece to implement this additional authority granted to us by the state government the state is saying additional you know has seen a spike in traffic fatalities and serious injuries and this is just another tool in our toolbox to address that in addition to infrastructure improvements.

and other types of enforcement.

So thank you for the presentation and we will see you again on August 15. Colleagues, any final comments or questions before I go ahead and close out the meeting?

all right well colleagues the time is 11 39 a.m and this concludes the august 1st 2023 meeting of the transportation seattle public utilities committee the next committee meeting of transportation seattle public utilities will be tuesday august 15 at 9 30 in the morning thank you and we are adjourned