Seattle City Council Select Budget Committee 9/26/18 Session II

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for being here for our afternoon session.

This is our afternoon session of the first day of our Select Budget Committee.

This morning, the committee discussed the structure of the city's proposed 2019-2020 biennial budget.

Thank you to CBO and Ben Noble for being here.

We took a look at the mayor's proposed budget that she submitted to us on Monday.

And this afternoon, we're scheduled to discuss the two utilities, Seattle City Light and Seattle Public Utilities.

Seattle City Light is first.

Nice to see you.

Thank you very much for being here.

So we are going to have an opportunity for public comment at the end of our discussion today.

So let's just dive in and begin the afternoon session and invite you both to the table.

Ben, Eric, are you handling this one for an introduction?

Very good.

Yeah, please come on up, Jim.

Yes, so I don't have much in the way of prepared remarks for this, but continuation of the morning session, we have three departments, both the Utilities and Seattle Department of Transportation this afternoon.

Great, and so I'm gonna filibuster slightly while we get more of my colleagues up here.

Thank you very much, Council Member Gonzalez and Council Member Herbold.

for being here at this kickoff.

So I can just say this, we know that Seattle City Light provides electric power to approximately 454,000 residences, businesses, and industrial customers in our area, and we provide power to all of the city of Seattle and many surrounding jurisdictions, including Shoreline, Burien, Tukwila, SeaTac, Lake Forest Park, Renton, Normandy Park, and other areas of unincorporated King County.

So I'm going to pass it off to you now, so it looks like we're ready to go.

Eric, are you going to be leading this?

Ben, do you have an issue?

We just have trouble getting the laptop booted up, but we will take care of that so that they can actually...

Great.

Jody's on the way.

Thank you, Jody.

I'll just take a moment to introduce myself.

I'm Eric McConaghy, and I work for you.

I'm on the central staff, and I am happy to be here.

I will be the person that you can go to during the budget season to ask questions about City Light, and I will interface with the folks in City Light and in our budget office to endeavor to answer your questions.

Very good.

Thank you, Eric.

Thanks for being here.

And we'll just take another few moments here to say some nice things about Seattle City Light.

Are we up?

Good.

But what I can say that might be helpful is just to say that back in July, the City Council did consider the strategic plan for City Light.

Much of what you'll see in the budget and in my initial read of the budget is to carry out the strategic plan during the budget season.

You'll also have an opportunity to pass some other legislation associated with that budget.

There'll be a bill dealing with bonds and also a bill dealing with the rates themselves.

And with that, I think I'll get out of the way.

No, and I appreciate that Ben not only leads CBO, but he's now looking at high tech.

So, nicely done.

I believe that's other duties as assigned.

Right, exactly.

So, can we just start?

We've already got Eric McConaughey.

We know Eric Sund from Council Central staff.

Ben Noble, you have been a delight here all morning.

Jim, would you like to introduce yourself, too?

Sure.

I'm Jim Baggs.

I'm the interim general manager and CEO of Seattle City Light.

And I'm Paula Lashover, the CFO of Seattle City Light.

Good.

Chairman Paula, thank you.

Welcome.

And we'll just let you proceed with your PowerPoint.

OK, I will start.

Paula and I are going to trade off a little bit through this.

But as you know, Seattle City Light has completed our 2019 and 20, well, actually, it's a six-year strategic plan, but covers the years 2019 and 20, and a rate path to go with it that the council adopted back in July.

And this strategic plan included substantial input, involvement by our Seattle City Light review panel, which is a member group of members of the public.

And the council ultimately provided direction on the plan, made some modifications to the plan when it was approved in July.

So this plan defined our budget parameters and provided the foundation for our budget process at City Light.

Our decreased retail revenue from lower load has driven us to look for efficiencies and reduce costs.

And further, as part of our ongoing commitment to affordability, cost control, and fiscal accountability, the plan included reductions to our capital and operating budgets that are also reflected here.

Our proposed budget is the result of all the work that went into the strategic plan, and this budget is consistent with that plan and with the rate path.

Our primary service as an electric utility is in providing electricity that is clean, safe, and reliable.

And as such, a couple of the metrics or performance measures that we use a lot in the industry are average outage duration, an average outage frequency.

So as you can see on the table, we have targets for 18 for both of those two measures.

Outage duration 62.5, frequency 0.45.

And the duration numbers are in minutes, minutes of outage, and frequencies are just in overall numbers.

As you can see, as of August, we're at 46.2 and .55, so a little under on duration, a little over on frequency.

And you can see how we're set up to be for the year.

So we're doing, we're close to our goals, but not necessarily just knocking it out of the park on reliability at the moment.

How does this compare, Jim, with other utilities?

Actually, those targets and our performance is substantially better than utility averages.

There are numbers for, well, first of all, if you just look at our overall five-year average, it was on outage duration, it was up around 65 or so.

But the industry average for outage duration is about 117 minutes.

And for frequency it's it's over one.

It's a little just a little over one and we're we're at about half of one so I The drivers for these outages include equipment failure.

We have a lot of bird and animal contacts.

Also trees and wires that cause outages and so forth.

So those are the kinds of things that drive our performance on outages.

Vegetation management is important for outage protection along the way.

As you can see, we have an 18 goal of 420 miles.

As of August, we've cleared 281 miles of transmission and distribution lines, and we think we'll hit our goal of the 420 miles by the end of the year.

We do have energy efficiency targets at the bottom of the page.

You can see that we have a conservation goal of 12.25 average megawatts saved in the year 2018. And we project that we will hit that goal.

If you look at our August numbers, they're a little bit low, but traditionally these conservation programs ramp up towards the end of the year.

So we have hit or exceeded our goal in every year at least as far back as I can remember on energy efficiency.

Okay.

Another measure that we pay a lot of attention to is our debt service coverage ratio.

We have a 2018 goal of 1.8.

And what that is is really just our revenues minus our costs.

and, you know, gives us what's left over to cover our debt.

It's a good indicator for a not-for-profit utility such as us of our overall financial performance.

It's sort of our equivalent of what a competitive business or a regulated utility would refer to in terms of earnings or earnings per share.

So we use debt coverage.

We're at 1.8, and that's looking good for this year.

For safety, we obviously are looking for zero as our overall target for people getting hurt on the job.

But just for tracking of improvements or not, we look at a statistic that's called the total recordable incident rate.

We refer to it as TRR in shorthand.

We have a goal for 2018 of, oops, what happened?

What did I do?

Got it, okay, sorry about that.

Of 3.4, right now we're a little above that.

We think we ought to be able to get down pretty close to our 3.4 total recordable rate.

It's sort of average as far as the industry goes, but it's a big improvement for us.

from our prior years performance, we had our comparable number in 2017 was 5.94.

So we've come down quite a bit from that and it was higher in years prior to that.

So we've come down quite a bit.

We have decreased our recordable injuries by 30% since 2013. Last line on the slide talks about streetlight response.

We've had a target to be responsive when we get reported streetlights out.

Our goal is to respond within 14 days.

The goal is to respond to at least 90% of them.

within 14 days, and we're sitting right at that goal right now, so we will achieve that.

We also have an estimate because of some of the problems we've had with billing and some of our billing backlog related activities this year.

to get our estimated bills numbers down.

If you'll remember, we reduced, we had a huge backlog back in January and more estimated bills.

We were about 10% on estimated bills at the very beginning of the year, and it's down to about 4% right now, and we expect it to get down below 1% with the implementation of AMI.

We also have cleaned up a backlog.

We had about 74,000 items backlogged early in the year and went through a concerted three-month effort to clean that up and it's down to nearly zero in terms of backlogs at this point.

So, and AMI will reduce this estimated number because we'll just have automated uploading of data and we won't have to estimate almost any bills.

Any questions?

Good.

So far, so good.

Okay.

I thought I heard something.

Sorry.

I was asking my colleagues if they had any questions.

Okay.

Thank you.

Sorry.

As far as the strategic priorities for 2019, these also come right out of our strategic plan.

We have customer service priorities.

We certainly want to complete our AMI mass installation.

The mass installation will be complete this year, and all of AMI will be complete by July of 2019. That will improve our billing accuracy and will provide, you know, more information availability to our customers.

We also have a new customer service program where we're trying to help our commercial or our medium-sized business customers.

They've been not a focus of ours over time and we're trying to expand our presence in dealing with that group.

As far as affordability goes, we do want to improve our business processes.

We're trying to identify efficiencies across the entire utility, and we will capture and measure and report on those efficiencies as we uncover them and implement them.

Excuse me, Jim.

Yes.

Within the business process improvements, is there anything in the budget, and I'm looking at some of the proposed changes, is there anything that you have done that you want to bring to our attention that's in the budget this year?

Nothing specific in that category, I don't think.

As we were preparing the strategic plan, we went back and forth about whether we should try and identify specific process improvements and set monetary targets of, you know, X dollars.

And where we landed and we ended up in the plan was that we would identify the efforts in that arena and then just commit to measure success.

So as we decide which areas are the areas that we need to focus on the most, one for sure that I know about that we'll be working on next year has to do with improvements in customer service, that we will estimate what we think our improvements can be and then we will track those metrics against those estimates.

Just as we're going forward, if not today, just as we're looking at this budget, if there are business process improvements that you're making that will effectively reduce the operating costs and improve customer service, if you'll highlight some of those.

We will.

That'll be very helpful.

Yes, we will.

Great.

And as I'm sure You may recall, because part of our work came out of the ordinance that approved the strategic plan, is we are working with our City Light Review Panel on an updated rate design.

We had called for that in the strategic plan anyway, but there were some specific directives out of the council to to update rate design prior to next spring.

So that effort is underway.

Our review panel is meeting twice a month now with our help.

So we'll see how that goes.

But they are making some progress in that regard.

We do intend to and are continuing to pursue cost savings and revenue opportunities in the wholesale market.

You had approved our participation in the energy imbalance market earlier on.

That effort is underway and moving along smoothly, and those should give us not only opportunities in wholesale market operations for our own utility and our own utility's customers, But the other thing that that effort does is helps other utilities with their efforts in the renewable energy arena.

So we should be able to assist there.

In clean energy, we continue to be leaders in environmental stewardship, certainly with our activities surrounding our hydroelectric facilities at the Skagit and Boundary.

And we also, our participants and supporters with the Office of Sustainability and Environment, on the building tune-up programs and the Office of Housing's low-income energy efficiency improvement programs.

We also are working with SDOT and OSCE to develop and implement electric vehicle charging stations throughout the city.

So I know we talked about this in front of our committee a couple of weeks ago, but I was asking you then about the innovative programs and what we can invest in to promote clean energy solutions.

Is there, besides the electric vehicles and the charging stations, are there other things that you want to raise and discuss during this budget cycle?

We don't have specific technologies that we're focusing on other than vehicles.

One of the things that we need to do is improve our own internal infrastructure, and that's some of the data and information capabilities within our distribution and transmission systems that will give us the flexibility to to deal with things like distributed generation and other technologies like batteries and so forth.

So we're working on those things, but they're just being absorbed within the existing operational budgets in our engineering area.

Good.

I think as we're going through this, too, to be able to identify what investments are working and the return that you're receiving from the investments, that would be a great thing to be talking about as we're going through this process.

And again, not today, because I know that I'm throwing things at you.

But it's something that we are very interested in is systems improvement and what we're doing to promote clean energy across the city and the region.

Thank you.

All right.

I get to talk about the money a little bit.

So as we noted, our budget proposal is consistent with the rate proposal that will be adopted as part of the budget process.

As you can see from the reductions in both the budget and position counts for City Light, we have looked for savings and efficiencies to reduce our operating costs and our capital program.

And these are all ongoing reductions that gradually increase with inflation.

Our 2019 proposed budget is about $35 million or 2.5% lower than our 2018 adopted budget due to our reductions of $18 million in ongoing O&M and the reductions over the six-year CIP of $241 million.

I guess I'll leave it there unless there are questions.

Thank you.

Can you give us a little information about the change in the FTE count?

Are those vacant positions?

Yes.

They are vacant positions.

Yes.

Thank you.

I'm sorry.

Can you just go back to that slide just a moment?

I'm still trying to absorb this.

So with these vacant positions, is there going to be an impact to the services that you're providing?

How are you absorbing that?

We have a little bit more on the last slide, but just to say that we looked at this very carefully and most of them are actually positions that we've worked with over time as we get ready to implement the AMI program, so meter readers, credit reps, positions that we've been either, they're going away because people left for other jobs or they retired, or that we've been working with people to reprogram their work so they can remain in another position.

Thank you, Chair.

On the topic of these vacant positions, in your budget paper, it appears on page 339 of the materials.

It goes into a little bit more details of In terms of disaggregating a bit, the amount of dollars related to the elimination of positions.

So for example, one of the things that it outlines is $2.7 million by eliminating 22 vacant positions by 2020.

I'm sorry, what page are you on?

339.

And then, Above that particular area, so that's in the O&M reductions.

And then on the remove vacant positions, that's an additional 11 FTEs that is being removed.

And I guess I appreciate the more granular detail in the proposed budget document.

But what would be helpful is to just get a better and clearer understanding of what services those vacant positions or sort of what program those vacant positions are associated with.

So there's the $2.7 million by eliminating 22 vacant positions by 2020. I would just like to get a little bit more understanding about what that means for 2019 and 2020 just so that we have an opportunity to answer any questions we might receive from constituents about those elimination of policies and so that we have a high level of confidence in the department's assessment that these position eliminations will not impact core services.

by the utility.

So same goes for the 11 FTEs that are mentioned in the remove vacant positions portion.

All of that is on page 339. So it would just be helpful to get a little bit more detail about what these positions actually are with the understanding that they're all currently vacant, but it would be helpful to understand what they are just to make sure that we have a good, clear sense of impact.

We'll give you a list of what they are, where they fit in the organization and what's going on.

That'd be wonderful.

Thank you, Paula.

Okay, the next thing we want to go over is this legislative and policy framework slide.

And a few items to list on here.

The first one talks about utility property for public use.

As you know, we have significant investment in property, mainly former substation type property, which we anticipated as possible revenue to decrease rates.

But really, the use of those properties, with the passage of the bill that's referenced there, modified somewhat and so therefore our proposed revenue that's in our budget doesn't reflect revenues from property sales.

And I-937, one impact that we're going to have in 2020 is the increase in the percentage of our retail sales that needs to be covered with eligible renewable resources or the purchase of renewable energy credits and that percentage will go up from 9% to 15% in 2020. So that's reflected in our budget.

So not a huge change to us.

I mean, it is reflected, but we are surplus.

We don't need additional resources right now.

And as we talked about quite a bit in the strategic plan, our loads are declining as well.

And the vast majority of our energy sources that we use are already renewable.

So what we will end up doing is purchasing additional renewable energy credits to meet that obligation.

The electric vehicle charging stations, we will be working again in the legislature this year to try and get a bill passed that will allow City Light to potentially pay for incentives for both commercial and residential customers to install electric vehicle charging stations.

It's similar to our conservation incentives.

It's something we've worked on for the past couple legislative sessions and hasn't passed yet, but where our hope is that there will happen this go-round, and we will continue to support and advocate for transportation electrification.

And then finally, the strategic plan was, as I said earlier, adopted in July, and it establishes our path forward for the next six years and has specific initiatives and the revenues that are needed to accomplish them.

And our last slide is on the major proposed budget changes.

We did talk about the vacancies of the $6.2 million change on the first line, a reduction.

3.6 was due to eliminating 33 vacant positions that were already talked about.

And 2.6 is by changing the vacancy rate assumption.

We normally have a 4% assumption.

We'll increase that to 5.5%.

So overall vacancies would be around 95 to 100 in a year.

Second line talks about reducing temporary staffing.

We have now about 100 on board and we'll be reducing that by 40% or 40 positions, which is equivalent to about $2.6 million.

We'll be reducing our training and travel.

budget from $5.5 million to $4 million for a savings of $1.5 million, and that's a savings of a little under a third of the budget.

The next category is the savings of $10.7 million, which has a number of components.

The largest one, $7.7 million, reduces our general O&M.

The primary one is $6 million out of a $25 million consulting budget.

We've also taken $700,000 from an approximately $6 million tree trimming budget by going to what is essentially a five-year rather than a four-year tree trimming cycle, but with some targeting when we can see that a certain feeder needs more work.

Can I ask a question there?

So, just off the top of my head, that reducing vegetation management and conservation incentives doesn't meet what the goals that we have been discussing, which is to improve reliability and not have the vegetation imposing on your equipment.

So how I mean, I'm just wanting to know that we're not being pennywise pound foolish here.

If you go back to the first slide, we talked about 421 miles of vegetation trimming.

That is a reduced goal.

We have been working with this reduction this year, so it's kind of a continuation.

And we do intend to still meet our 421-mile total target.

And you'll notice that the safety and safety numbers were also fairly low.

So if we need to, we'll ask for some more funding, but we think we're going to be able to make it within this reduced amount of funding.

And the conservation, I didn't mention it, but it's a $3 million incentive reduction.

And in the past few years, typically we have a $4 million or so excess that we can't really spend.

So it's under spending a $30 million amount of budget.

So this is just getting us a little bit closer to the actual amount we've been spending for conservation incentives and also noting that we typically exceed our conservation goal.

We'll keep an eye on that.

Yes.

And that's exactly the posture that we took in approving the reduction is that these were both areas where we would continue to monitor and to ensure that we're meeting targets and if we did not come back and have that discussion.

So we thought that was a prudent way to move forward.

But we had this exact discussion, if you will, on the executive side.

Madam Chair.

Sure.

Got a couple of questions on this side.

Thank you very much.

Go ahead.

Go first.

Okay.

Thank you.

In terms of the reductions, I have inquiries around two particular areas, again, through the lens of being able to evaluate impact as a result of the reductions.

So there's a couple of things.

On the first slide, you highlighted the average outage frequency per customer.

And the 2018 goal was less than .45.

Status as of August is .55.

And you set the goal for 2019 to also be .45.

Outage, average outage, outage concerns are something that I continue to hear about from my constituents.

I think, in fact, just yesterday there was a vault fire out in West Seattle that resulted in pretty significant outages throughout West Seattle.

So I just want to get a sense from you all about how the utility intends to address outages.

in particular how we're going to meet the performance goals that are outlined in that first slide.

And then if you could tell me whether this budget continues to provide sufficient resources to deal with outages and bring the utility into alignment with its stated performance goals, and if the reductions impact the utility's ability to meet those performance measures.

Sure.

We think that the performance goals that we've set for both frequency and duration are are good goals.

They're considerably better, as I pointed out earlier, than the industry averages, at least.

You could set them lower.

You could up the bar a little bit on performance.

But for every increment like that, there's frequently a substantial cost consideration that goes with it.

So we're comfortable with With where we are in terms of outage duration and frequency performance, it's not going to be at zero.

But if we're able to hit these targets, we think that that's a reasonable place for the utility to be.

as is noted here on at least frequency, we're slightly above where our target is.

And so, you know, we need to continue working through the remainder of this year and on into next year to see if we can get those numbers down.

That happens through a variety of different things that we can do to our system in terms of maintaining some of the assets that we have, some preventative maintenance in certain areas, things we've already talked about, about vegetation management, tree trimming impact, those sorts of things.

And being smarter about what we do, not necessarily just doing more should allow us to perform better with the same amount of resources.

Your concern or your question about the, you know, the impact of lower budgets or some of the cuts that we've implemented or are proposing here, I share to some degree, but we looked at what we think we can do and keep with good, reasonable performance, and I think we're close to the edge, but I feel good that we're going to be able to continue to provide good, reliable service to our customers.

Committed, as has been said here today, to watch that.

You know throughout the year and beyond and if we start seeing our performance degrade or something that that is is Insufficiently funded then we neither need to are going to need to make adjustments within the city light But the existing city light budget or talk about what to do about it because having a performance degradation isn't going to be acceptable Yeah, I appreciate that perspective and in just really quickly as the follow-up I

Has the utility ever met its average outage frequency per customer performance measurement?

Yes, fairly certainly met it last year, but I'd have to double check that.

Okay, I'm just looking for if there's a trend here that I want to make sure that the budget is responsive to it.

I see this as sort of core services that the city provides, obviously.

as you've described.

And again, I can talk about this anecdotally as a rate payer as well, but I personally have experienced several outages in the West Seattle Junction, which seems to me to be unusual and out of the ordinary in comparison to previous years.

And I've been living in the same place for, you know, a decade or something.

So I just want to make sure that the utility is supported, particularly in the area of being able to respond to outage concerns and the frequency of outages.

Obviously, the outage duration numbers are really good, and that's awesome.

But if we could get the outage frequency numbers down, and I just want to make sure that that reliability principle is being supported through this budget.

So I appreciate it.

Sure.

Two quick comments.

The trends are, at least the trend on duration is downward.

I can't necessarily tell you for sure on frequency.

I just don't know the number.

But as I said, we have hit our target before.

And your point about your own particular experience, those are precisely the kinds of things that we have to pay attention to as we're managing our maintenance and managing the work we do in our facilities.

I mean, there's some parts of the system where everything works fine all the time.

And then as we find areas where that maybe last year or the year before weren't a problem, but for some reason now are beginning to be a problem, whether it's through aging equipment or increased load in an area, there's a variety of things that can occur.

It's incumbent on us to identify those areas and that's where we should be targeting our maintenance and our work on the system to overall increase our performance.

And is the utility doing that?

Yes.

Okay.

Just really quickly on a sort of related line of questioning, you know, we, I'm sure a lot of us up here receive multiple inquiries from ratepayers about the size of their bills.

I think it's a common theme these days that is not just related to the fact that we have had to increase rates.

But I think, you know, our billing system has produced some problems, which we've talked about ad nauseam, and we don't need to talk about it some more here.

But really, my question is, do any of the reductions in the utilities' proposed budget impact the utilities ability to be responsive to customer concerns about About their billing about their bills.

No, we're committed to not I mean, I'm I We've been responsive.

I think we can be better in terms of less problems in the first place, but also even being more responsive.

And that's what we intend to do moving forward.

You know, independent of any other cuts we had either in overall dollars or positions and so forth, we are committed to being responsive and helping to solve our customers' frustrations with some of the billing activities that have taken place.

Okay, thank you.

Jim, I would just ask, you know, we are cognizant in my office of the work that the City Light does in terms of vegetation management and the change here to a five-year as opposed to a four-year tree trimming program is going to save you 700,000 bucks.

We also have been embarking on a conversation in my committee around a true protection ordinance.

I've had some preliminary conversations with the Department of Construction and Inspections about what it would cost for them to do basic work associated with a permit system on that ordinance.

But we just ask that you assign somebody to work with our council central staffer, who also happens to be Mr. McConaghy as well, To get a better understanding as we contemplate passage of that in 2019, what impacts it might have on the city light budget.

Because you are one of the nine different departments that have some jurisdictional oversight in the city over trees.

So we're trying to collect as much information as we can.

in understanding how the proposed tree protection ordinance would impact everybody's budget.

Because there's not a consolidated place where we can look and say, here's where the city's spending our money on trees.

Instead, we try to have to cobble that together from the various different line items from the nine different organizations that have tree responsibilities.

It just, it's helpful for us to think a little bit proactively with you.

So I'd ask whoever works on that for City Light to be in contact with Mr. McGonagy of our central staff So we can put that in the hopper for 2019.

We'd be happy to.

I do know that we do coordinate some with the other departments on vegetation tree related issues, but I will ensure that we do as you suggest.

Thanks.

Good.

And one more item, just the capital program reductions, around 40 million in 2019 compared to 2018, but 241 million over the six year capital program.

And the biggest item there is 100 million that we had in the budget in 21 and 22 for a new master service center.

And we've already taken, oh, also taken out 10 million that was still in the budget for the technical training center.

I can go through other details if you're interested, but most are just a little bit here and there.

Okay, any questions?

I think you hit a nerve when you start talking about trees and reducing the care of trees, but we'll keep going.

All right, that's it for today.

Okay, well, well done.

No other questions from my colleagues other than the follow-ups that you discussed.

And I share Council Member Gonzalez's interest that if there are vacant positions or ones that we're not feeling, to be able to know where that is occurring so that we can have a sense of what impact that'll have on customer service in particular.

Right, we'll get you that.

Okay, anything else that you'd like to add?

The only thing I would like to reiterate is that any of these reductions and the things that we've talked about, whether they're in a capital program or an operations program or the personnel type reductions, are going to be carefully managed.

We will carefully manage them to minimize service impacts to customers and also the financial impacts to the utility.

Great.

I have no doubt, but that's the case, and I appreciate your saying so.

All right.

Well, if nothing else here from Seattle City Light, we'll move on to Seattle Public Utilities.

And, of course, we've got Bob Hennessey and others that are in the audience.

Mami Hara, thank you for being here.

I know when that's loaded and I'll put it back up on the screen.

Cool.

I just want to apologize in advance.

I'm going to have to leave in about 15 minutes.

This is my department.

I have my monthly with the mayor, and it's hard to get on her schedule, as everybody knows.

So do you want to introduce this?

I think we should just get into it.

Okay.

Thank you.

Great.

Director Momihara, lovely to see you.

Thank you very much.

Brian, do you want to start introductions?

I guess Brian doesn't want to start.

Would you start introductions in your end?

Sure.

Thank you.

Brian Goodnight, Council Central staff.

Thank you.

Steele Bann Noble, City Budget Director.

Mami Hara, Seattle Public Utilities.

Cameron Finlay, SPU Finance.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for coming.

Good to see you.

Thank you.

So, Brian, do you have intro remarks or you want to just turn it over to the director?

I think it's fine to just turn it over if that's okay.

Great.

We're ready.

Thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity to discuss SPU's proposed budget for 2019 and 2020. Seattle Public Utilities is a community-centered utility.

that provides services that are essential to life and that manages the environment or part of the environment that is essential to our community's way of life.

Among the many utilities and services under its umbrella, Seattle Public Utilities brings drinking water to the region, manages the city's stormwater, collects and conveys wastewater, provides innovative solid waste services, and manages several clean city programs.

In addition to these essential services, Seattle Public Utilities provides several other smaller services and utilities such as survey work for other departments.

The budget we are proposing is consistent with the 2018 through 2023 business plan we worked with you on last year.

And we have a commitment to you, the mayor, and our customers to maintain a rate path at or below 5.2% on average for annual increases.

And I'm happy to report that we are currently projecting the rate path to be under that target at 5.1%.

We go to the next slide.

Um...

Sorry.

Okay.

We have several performance measures that we use to monitor our services.

And we'd like to walk through three today that we are monitoring to give you a sense of what we do when an indicator falls behind.

The first is the utility discount program.

This program provides a 50% discount on utility costs based on income eligibility.

And we are behind in our enrollment goal this year.

This is a high priority program for Seattle Public Utilities.

So we are working with our city partners to increase enrollment by analyzing the data on enrollment changes to understand how to best recruit and retain participants.

Further, as part of the strategic business plan, Seattle Public Utilities is reviewing the overall program to potentially enhance or change the overall customer experience and service programs.

An update to this work will be coming back to council by 2019. And we are, we may look into items such as alternatives to the current program, including tiering and qualifying income.

Chair Baxter?

Sure.

Thank you.

So you say that you're under enrolling, but I see it's at 33,540 as of June, and the goal is 3,400 by the end of the year.

That seems like your past target for half a year.

Oh, I see.

We are 460 customers below our target at this point.

Oh, I see.

So, as of June.

And we are just trying to make sure that we do meet our target by the end of the year.

So, we're monitoring it.

Okay.

So, it doesn't seem to me that you're behind.

It seems like you're doing really well.

And because the whole year's target is 3,400 and you're...

34,000.

Yes, I apologize for the poor terminology.

For most of our indicators, we've already met the target, you know, and staying the course.

But for this one, because the number is still below the target we haven't achieved...

You're holding yourself to very high standards.

It's the staff, they're amazing.

So on that note, from a pre-budget question that was submitted, we got information from SPU that you actually project UDP enrollment to be 37,000 in 2019 and 39,000 in 2020. So I'm just wondering why the goals don't reflect what you project enrollment to be.

I will double check this to make sure that we are giving accurate information on both ends.

It sounds a little bit like you've been given goals for the future years and we're looking at the goal for the end of this year.

The 2019 goal is 34,000 on the slide.

We'll definitely look at all of those numbers.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

And just a point, a comment about this that I think you understand, but perhaps the public who don't realize this, that it's not necessarily a static 34,000 customers that in fact people fall off and people enroll.

And actually one of the challenges we have is keeping folks who are qualified enrolled.

And that's actually been an area of emphasis is how to make sure we don't lose people who are in fact qualified.

So, again, that's not to dispute the numbers one way or the other, but just to understand why even holding steady at times takes a good deal of work.

And, again, we're looking at those processes to understand them better.

And another last point on this topic.

As Director Harr knows, this is near and dear to my heart.

I have some ideas.

If you want to increase your goals for how to increase enrollment, we understand that eligibility is set by a state income, state AMI, average median income.

interesting and I think helpful to really look at what the reality is of AMI here in Seattle and use local numbers for qualification.

I think we'd have a great increase in enrollment by doing that.

And people who are eligible.

We appreciate that guidance and we are looking at what the implications of that would be because you are correct.

Those are different numbers for the state and city averages.

Thank you.

We also have a consent decree for combined sewer overflows.

And the city has 85 combined sewer outfalls that can overflow into receiving waters such as the Puget Sound and Lake Washington.

And we are required by the state to make sure, by state regulation, to average no more than one overflow per year at each outfall on a 20-year rolling average.

And the consent decree requires that we meet the state standard at most of our outfalls by 2025. Is this difficult to see?

I think it's just a different slide.

I don't think we have that in logged on.

It's not.

But that's OK.

I can listen.

I have it on the next one.

Oh, you do?

Keep going.

Oh.

There you go.

Sorry.

Thanks.

OK.

Thank you.

So we currently 44 CSO outfalls meet the state's CSO performance standard.

And SPU is actively investing in capital projects to control additional outfalls.

Many of our capital investments over the next six years in the drainage and wastewater line of business are working to address this.

As you know, we are also rethinking our CSO control solutions to ensure that our projects are as resilient and adaptable as possible and that they meet multiple drainage needs.

So for the next performance indicator, the recycling rate.

We were here recently to speak with you about the recycling rate.

We have a goal to reach 70% in recycling, and recently the recycling rate has declined.

There are a variety of factors that have impacted the rate, including the increase of self-haul construction materials rather than transporting to construction demolition facilities that exist out of the city.

Another factor is the light weighting of recyclable materials since recycling is measured by weight.

But the good news is that we are seeing a decrease in per capita consumption, such as residential per capita waste generation rate.

Our per capita waste generation rate is at an all-time low, dropping by almost 19% since 2007, from 2.74 pounds per capita to 2.23 pounds in 2017. These numbers are great.

Where am I looking?

for those numbers.

Are they in your chart?

They're not part of this chart.

But we can, you know, we can certainly send a copy of the recycling rate report and highlight all of that data.

You know, an executive summary, I don't need, I just, I appreciate the numbers that you're reading there.

And I also recognize that several years ago when I had the pleasure of chairing SPU, I'd asked the question about how are we comparing the garbage compost recycling and the numbers that are increasing, and then what is the relative cost between garbage and having to dispose of that and recycling?

For a period of time, round numbering was $100 a ton that we would pay for the garbage, and it was significantly less for recycling.

And then I understand that the numbers have gotten closer.

So I just would like to see maybe an executive summary of some of those costs and what we're paying.

We will provide those to you.

Thank you.

So, SPU continues to work to meet this goal by partnering with community groups to increase our customers' ability to recycle and compost, as well as we are undertaking long-term planning efforts to significantly increase waste diversion.

Director Haas.

Yes.

May I just ask a question about how you define some of these goals and objectives?

We're going to, the charts that we're looking at show that you're on track for many of the things that you're measuring.

And you've only touched on a couple that you want us to know that you're monitoring.

But let me pick on a random thing like sewer overflows.

We have a goal of less than 114 sewer overflows.

We're on track because as of June, We've only had 48 sewer overflows.

It seems to me like our overall goal should be to have zero sewer overflows.

How do we land at a number like 114?

And what are the ways that we're trying to make sure that we meet our objectives of being below that number?

May I back up a little bit on that question?

There are a lot of ways of measuring pollution from overflows and in some places that can be based on volume or mass rather than the number of overflows.

The number of overflows doesn't necessarily indicate the quantity of pollutants that are being sent to receiving waters.

I agree with you that in an ideal world that zero overflows would be incredible, but the cost of that is also incredible.

And the challenge for us, given what we're learning about the impact of different pollutants, in our waters is that we figure out how to most strategically spend the money that we have as a community in order to reduce the, you know, the pollutants that are going to have the most impact and to figure out how to strategically design for that.

This is a requirement that we need to, that we have a requirement that is not based on pollutants and, you know, this is for us a challenge.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Please proceed.

Thank you.

So, going on to our strategic priorities for 2019. Seattle Public Utilities seeks to advance equity and inclusion while delivering essential services, building resiliency, and maximizing benefits of our investments for our community.

In 2019, we will be focused on enhancing the customer experience by maintaining decreased call wait times and creating easier and more efficient ways for our customers to interact with us.

And these efforts focus on truly valuing our customers' time.

Additionally, affordability is a critical priority that SPU continues to pursue through operational efficiencies and other short and long-term options to reduce customer bills.

Chair?

Yes.

I just want to take this moment to really thank SPU.

SPU runs the call center for both their customers as well as City Lights, and they've made tremendous strides in improving call times and a number of other metrics associated with the call center.

They've really done wonderful work.

and past time when I have to be upstairs with the mayor.

But I do want to just put a question on the table, and I'll listen to the tape afterwards.

We know that we've visited the call center and seen the great work being done there.

We know that SPU's been relying on temporary employees to get us to this really good place where we're at.

We're surpassing all of our goals.

21 temporary employees handle calls in the contact center.

The 2019 to 2020 budget adds 14 permanent employees over the next two years, along with 10 temporary employees.

And just trying to figure out whether or not these increases are in addition to the temporary employees that you already have been relying on or they replace the temporary employees with some permanent and some temporary.

The temporary employees from this year will, they just replace, they'll replace the ones that we had this year.

So nearly half are going to be replaced with permanent employees, and you're just maintaining 12 of the 22 temporary employees.

Many of those temporary employees that we have right now are doing a fabulous job and it will significantly increase their morale to be made permanent employees.

So that is part of the strategy of having, you know, those permanent positions.

You know, we really have to appreciate the incredible work that our staff has done, you know, during the peak of move season.

We currently have wait times on average, you know, for an entire, you know, for that, say last week, it was incredible, 19 seconds on average for, you know, for call wait times and only 1% of calls were not answered, either because somebody hung up or, you know, or because we didn't get to it.

Good.

Well done.

I'm going to be proud of that.

Thank you.

All right.

The next set of priorities, Seattle Public Utilities is an organization that is highly regulated in order to ensure safe drinking water and environmental protections.

And we are committed to meeting these regulations while balancing the impact of costs to our customers.

And finally, in the coming years, Seattle Public Utilities must work on creating a culture within the department that is equitable and that invests in a strong, diverse workforce.

It's important to invest in our employees to achieve job satisfaction and retention, especially given that many of SPU's employees are retirement eligible.

and their skills and knowledge are critical to the services we provide.

Just anecdotally, 51% of our staff will be retirement eligible over the next five years.

So there needs to be an investment in transitioning stewardship of our vital resources to the next generation.

And tell me about your succession planning.

How do you intend to do that?

We are not fully planned out in that work and that's why it is a priority for us.

Each of the lines of business have for several years been working on succession planning, but we are concerned that we have much work to do and we plan on investing heavily in that.

Are you going to come back to us with a schedule or what the plan is or, you know, obviously it doesn't have to be done during this budget cycle, but I'm really interested because we've seen this for years that we've known it's coming and how we expect and intend to be able to meet some goals.

So it's more than just words, but we've got an action plan.

We would appreciate Council's partnership in this work because to do a good job, this is not something that just happens through the work of one utility or, you know, our utility just on our issues.

And we have spent a great deal of effort over the past year to develop partnerships and relationships with others who may be interested in co-investing in training and identification of opportunity employees and also to, you know, understand how we can best share risk and rewards on those investments.

Excellent, well, I'll look forward in working with you on this, and I know that Council Member Herbold has talked about this at her committee as well.

So if there's some things that we can do, probably post-budget, but would help identify these.

I'm very interested in how we're identifying people.

I know we've got our Emerging Leaders Program, but to promote people that may not know that they're eligible for a promotion or may not have a sense that they've got the skills.

What we can do to help bolster those skills so that everybody, I mean, talk about an argument for social equity.

This is an area where I think we can really And I look forward to working with you on this.

Yes, we hope to bring in opportunity youth and people who may not be currently aware of the kinds of excellent jobs and, you know, green jobs that our utility can offer.

Right.

And even for those that are working with you now to provide them with the boost they may to take some training or to know that there's some things that they can do to make themselves better candidates to move up and on with their careers.

So, happy to talk more about that with you.

Thank you.

We appreciate that.

Chair Baxter.

Sure.

Council Member Gonzalez.

Thank you.

I'm talking a lot today.

I'm sorry.

It's my understanding that this proposed budget eliminates the funding of the CareerQuest program, which I think had received previous funding of about $150,000.

And CareerQuest is a program that had existed at the city, that exists at the city of Seattle in order to invest in our existing workforce's development.

to be able to continue to climb through the ladder, if you will, and be able to identify promotion opportunities and training opportunities.

Are you aware, Director, if some of your employees have been utilizing the CareerQuest program at all?

I am not, but I can certainly try to find out.

Okay.

It'd be helpful to understand, I know there are existing programs within the Seattle Department of Human Resources that are specifically designed for addressing workforce development issues of our existing workforce.

I mean, the issues around sort of green jobs for youth is a separate question in my mind.

Those are sort of new, new potential employees or folks who want to expose to these types, this type of work and profession.

But I am interested in getting a better understanding of whether or not the utilities existing workforce utilizes any of the professional development or training programs that are currently available and offered through the city of Seattle as a component of this topic that you have been discussing and that Council Member Baggio has also expressed interest in.

Thank you.

We will look into it.

Thank you very much.

Please proceed.

Thank you.

I know we're peppering you with questions.

Did you have another question?

Thank you.

Oh, sorry.

What I was going to say, I'm sorry, I'm having more thoughts now, but you know, in my committee last week, we heard a report from the Seattle Department of Human Resources on on a report back and an update on the progress that the city has had in terms of this workforce development issue.

And so I think that this topic is particularly important because I think that one of the things that we continue to hear as a result of that workforce equity report and body of work is that women still continue to be very underrepresented amongst our workforce that makes 25% or more.

The 25% highest salaries, there's a disproportionate representation of women within that category, for example.

And so I get really worried when we start talking about not investing or sort of nominally investing in the professional development of our workforce.

Because I think when we talk about gender equity and what we want to do for gender equity in our city, we have a responsibility to continue to invest in our existing workforce to make sure that they have these professional development opportunities.

So I appreciate the intentionality that you're bringing to the conversation around identifying this as one of your strategic priorities for 2019. And I think that The fact that you've identified it as a strategic priority for 2019 is bolstered by the results and the update that we received in my committee recently around how this impacts workforce equity, particularly for women, and in particular, in some of our largest departments, including SPUs.

So I want to continue to support your efforts to prioritize this through your work next year.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Please.

All right, to the numbers.

What you have in front of you is a chart that shows the breakout of SPU's proposed budget in two major components.

One is the general fund that SPU receives predominantly for programs such as Clean Cities.

And a lot of that work is around illegal dumping, graffiti, and helping in the homelessness efforts.

In 2019, we're proposing a budget that grows by about $1.1 million.

And it surrounds the area of the Clean City Program.

And we'll talk a little bit later in the detailed changes about what's going on there.

The next piece is all other funds, which is really the big part of the utilities work.

We're proposing a $1.2 billion budget with a $95 million increase.

And so this is for water, solid waste, drainage and wastewater.

And it encompasses both our operation funds as well as our capital investments.

The largest portion of this growth is around our capital investments, which is more about a lot of our projects are moving from planning and design into construction.

So we're spending a lot more rather than projects increasing is the predominant driver in that growth.

And in the FTE growth, we are projecting or we are requesting a 16. 16 net increase in FTEs.

What's included in that number is 22, an increase of 22 positions, as well as a reduction of six positions to help balance that equation.

Most of the increases were planned for in our strategic business plan.

The additional ones that weren't planned for around the efforts in the contact center, which is something as Director Hart discussed as a major point of major priority in 2019. So we'd like to continue.

So I've pulled this clean city program the proposed budget and I can only begin to tell you how thankful we are for for the work that your employees and contractors have done to help us clean up the garbage that is around the city.

And I can't, I mean, it's stunning how many complaints we get from people about what they see.

And I know there's been an underspend in this area.

Can you talk a little bit about if we can budget you money to do this work, what needs to be done in order to really fully implement it?

That's a great question.

What what's been interesting about this program is since about 2015 we've had over a 45% increase in this program and so we've been doing I think every year we've had several pilots coming on board and so I think that probably started in 16 so every year we have these additional efforts that we're trying to do to help solve some of the problems as a city we're facing.

And so sometimes that often that underspending has been getting those pilots off the ground.

And what you'll see in our proposal this year is as those pilots transition to more mature programs saying we'd like to make these more permanent, we think they're in a more stable place.

So thank you for that.

I'm not sure that I know how do we translate that into actual tons of garbage because I know, I mean, you've got hundreds of thousands of pounds of garbage that you've cleaned up over the last few years.

How do we make this program work in such a way that we are seeing a difference on the ground?

Another great question, also very tough for the financial person.

I can try.

I don't think that we can resolve the entire conversation here today, but we would love to have further discussion with you and share more of our information about the performance on the dollars that we're spending.

The staff have been able to achieve quite a bit in terms of the actual results relative to the amounts of money that have been spent.

The issues keep escalating, though the generation of litter and needles and, you know, RV waste, the impacts to our waterways and neighborhoods just keeps increasing because of the sheer volume of change.

And so as a community, we need to really grapple with what is going to be delivered on the public side exclusively.

What are the relations, you know, what's the relationship of the public entities to business, you know, improvement associations and other groups.

This is becoming an issue that, you know, we have to understand, you know, what the possible long-term trajectories are for and what is gonna be the most strategic ways to intervene in those possible scenarios.

Currently, we are taking, as Cameron mentioned, we are taking on new programs constantly because the kinds of issues that we are seeing are not just increasing in terms of volume, but also complexity.

So thank you, thank you for that truly honest answer.

It is not easy and we're going to be talking with many departments next Wednesday around homelessness, housing, and what we're doing as a whole city to address the concerns.

And all of us up here know and we've been working on this for years that Housing first is required.

We've got to get people places to go, places that they want to go, willing to go.

And not that we're going to be providing, you know, the perfect apartment for everybody.

We have to get, we have to do what I appreciate some of the advocates saying, better is better.

We've got to have some better spaces for people to go.

And then as we're increasing the supply of housing, not just across the city, but the county and the tri-county area.

So we've got places where people can actually live.

Then, if we add the mental health funding and the behavioral health funding, we start getting our arms around the problem.

And you're just part of it, not the problem.

You're part of the solution.

But people aren't.

I think you sometimes, you take the brunt of this because people say, oh, there's all this garbage out here.

How come you can't collect the garbage?

Well, we know how much you are picking up.

But we've got to figure out a way to stem the tide.

So at some juncture, we can say, people are better off.

We've got them in healthier situations.

The garbage is being collected because we can.

But I just want to say thank you.

Because I know that there's an awful lot that you're having to deal with and then help us next next Wednesday We're having this housing and human services focus budget so that if there are things that we need to know feel free to call me between now and then

But we appreciate council and the mayor's leadership your leadership on this issue.

Thank you.

It's a big deal for sure.

Thank you Okay, please continue.

Sorry, can I ask some questions around this?

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you.

Um, first of all, I just want to um say thank you, uh to um spu and the mayor for including this funding in in the budget, um, and I really appreciate the focus on making sure that we are addressing the realities of of the impact that results when we haven't made an appreciable difference in terms of being able to increase our housing inventory in the way that Council Member Bagshaw has described and rapidly start moving folks off the street into housing.

And so, obviously, we as house people produce trash every day, all the time.

In fact, my husband and I joke often about how is it possible that we have filled the recycling bin in less than 24 hours.

It is boggling, mind boggling how quickly humans can produce refuse.

And so I just want to make, you know, I just think it's important for us as council members to acknowledge that we know that this is an issue, that it is a a natural byproduct of just existing and consuming in the world and that we have an obligation and we understand that we have an obligation and a duty to be responsive to the realities that that creates in terms of livability and public safety and public health throughout our city.

And so really appreciate this continuing to be prioritized in this budget and also appreciate the fact that there is going to be special attention given to RVs.

And so I wanted to, I don't know if you're gonna talk about that in a minute, but if you could talk a little bit about the RV remediation pilot as it relates to the issue of waste, that would be really helpful.

Because I see that in here, this is RV remediation pilot, but I'm not actually seeing a number.

Am I missing it?

Oh, there it is.

Is that 175,000?

Yeah, approximately for SPU's portion.

Okay.

It's several departments are working together on the RV.

Okay.

And then it's 180 for 2020?

Yes.

Okay.

And then can you talk about what analysis the utility has done to evaluate how much those dollars will actually be able to, what's the impact of this investment?

I can follow up with the exact number of how many services we're able to provide in each area.

We think that we've found a balance between working with the various departments of contract and city employees in order to meet the demand that's currently out there.

So we tried to assess the demand as we're seeing it in 2018 because we are currently operating this program now.

and then try to build the budget towards that number and where it is so that we can actively maintain and continue to improve those efforts.

Our team as part of the RV pilot is tracking a large number of metrics that include the pounds of refuse collected, the number of vehicles that have been abandoned and are structurally unsafe and that have been disposed of, the ones that have been given significant notification and that are in the right of way that have had to be moved.

They are compiling a broad number of metrics that will allow us to understand what the performance on the dollars spent are.

And we can absolutely share that information.

That would be really helpful in terms of evaluating what this investment is actually purchasing, if you will, for a lack of a better phrase.

And really just being able to understand how these dollars will be prioritized throughout the city would also be a helpful point of information in terms of, you know, are we, what factors or criteria is the utility and the other departments utilizing to be able to evaluate which areas, geographic areas throughout the city to prioritize as it relates to the RV mediation program in particular.

Maybe some information we can bring next week as part of the more focused discussion on homeless issues as well.

Fantastic.

I was just teeing it up because I wasn't sure if it was going to happen next week or later, but I want to make sure that we have an opportunity to have a conversation about those data points.

And I think you're going to be talking too about a program that is building on, not you, Mami, but the work that human services department and the interdepartmental team is doing to help us build something similar to what San Diego has done as an example.

I'm not saying it's got it all right, but It's done some good things where people can bring their cars, their RVs into and onto a site that has running water and toilets and garbage where they can use it.

And I believe it is an evening program, not a 24-7 program.

But it does give people places where they can healthily go and it helps with the costs of cleanup afterwards.

So, I look forward to hearing about that.

Thank you very much.

And also, may I just ask for a clarification on the information that's requested by Council Member Gonzalez on the RVs?

Are you also asking to understand how different areas are prioritized for RV cleanup?

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Anything else?

Do you need a new slide?

Okay.

Continue, please.

All right, the next piece we want to discuss with you is our legislative and policy frameworks that are impacting our investments.

The first major one is our strategic business plan.

It's an ongoing process.

We do this every three years.

The current one, as Mami mentioned, we adopted with you last year.

So it's 2018 through 2023. This is a wonderful document for the utility in terms of providing a predictable rate path that has been, we've worked on with our customers, council and the mayor's office.

The thing that we have ahead of us in the next few years is really focusing on that affordability and accountability framework to hopefully bring down our customers' bills and just create a better value for money.

The next item on the list is our combined sewer overflows consent decree.

This is something that we've had out there for a while.

You can see it was 2013. You may know it as the plan to protect Seattle's waterways.

While it seems a little bit dated, it is driving a major portion of our investments on the capital side in our drainage and wastewater line of business.

It's a huge, we're making huge investments.

The big one that you probably know the most about is our Ship Canal project.

It's the half a billion dollar project we're partnering on with King County.

As mommy mentioned we must complete all of these investments by 2025 or most of them by 2025 and then all of them by 2030 So it's a huge driver for us in the next six to ten years In how we control our costs and make our investments and the the last one is really upcoming The Duwamish River cleanup consent decree.

We're currently under negotiations with the federal government and this is You know, this will allocate costs to responsible parties in order to clean up the Duwamish.

We do have projected costs in our capital program.

However, until an agreement is reached, we don't know the exact timing or the exact cost.

So it's more of something underway but is coming our way.

And the last slide is our major proposed budget changes.

Just starting at the top, we've touched on this a little bit.

We've identified, we've called out some of our clean city investments.

The big one here is the RV pilot that we're working on with a variety of And then the other piece to this that helps with the homelessness effort is our litter pilot.

We're asking to make that permanent, which this goes in and to 10 communities and provides litter cleanup.

The next piece is our encampment bag pilot.

So this is the purple bags you may be familiar with as part of the unauthorized encampments in an effort to help with the cleanup.

And then last, it's our needle pilot, so turning it from a pilot into an ongoing program.

We think these programs have been helpful, and we'd like to propose they continue into the future.

The next piece is our various reductions in operations, about $5 million in 2019. Many of these are in things like services or training and travel or just bringing down and making things a little bit more efficient.

The other piece is in delaying and hiring and abrogating some positions.

In this space, we're trying to maintain our services while being mindful of our bottom line impacts.

Continuing down the list, we have our capital projects.

As I mentioned, this is growing about 65 million.

Most of this is in our combined sewer overflow area, and it's moving from planning and design into construction.

The other major driver here on our capital side is transportation-related projects, some of them shifting around, but some of them just moving into higher levels of spending so we can partner with our transportation partners.

And the last piece, our O&M growth, our operations and maintenance growth, doesn't have any major changes from what we were planning for in our strategic business plan.

And the big areas are our taxes to the state and city, and then our debt service, which is really being driven by the one above in the capital area.

So the more capital infrastructure we build, we're just seeing a higher debt on our operation side.

And then the remaining 17 million is mostly due to inflation.

Any questions?

Back to capital projects one more time.

Of course, we've got the big one along the canal.

For your $65 million change here, where do you expect that money going?

$30 million of it is ship canal growth.

About $8 million is for the rest of the combined sewers.

And then the remaining is mostly transportation.

A few transportation-related projects for utility infrastructure, but partnering with you know, taking advantage of if the streets opened up.

First Avenue.

Yes, First Avenue would be in there.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Anything else?

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you for coming.

We'll be seeing much more of you, but thank you for this good overview.

Thank you.

Pleasure.

Okay.

Our last presentation for today is our Department of Transportation.

I want to welcome Linnea Laird.

Linnea, there you are.

Congratulations.

We're very happy to have you as our new Interim Transportation Director.

And come on up to the table, everybody else.

Lots of people.

But we all know about SDOT and the important part that you play in our city, city streets, moving everybody.

And I know this period of maximum constraint is something we're all very interested in, interested in hearing how investments are going to help reduce I don't know that anybody is going to say it's ever going to be great, but we're looking forward to hearing more about that.

And, Linnea, you probably know everybody, if not from the Transportation Committee, from your former work on the waterfront and 520 and our previous lives.

So, congratulations.

So, can we start, Calvin, with you and introductions, please.

Calvin Chow with Council Central Staff.

Ben Noble, City Budget Director.

Karen Melanson, SDOT.

Linnea Laird, Interim Director of SDOT.

Thank you for those very warm and welcoming words.

Absolutely.

Delighted to have you.

Thank you.

Okay.

Calvin, are you going to kick this off?

No.

Just to say that staff are obviously here to take any feedback from you on issues that you want us to make sure that we delve into in more detail as we get into the budget.

Very good.

Okay.

Thank you.

All right.

All right.

Thank you.

I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to be here and how much I have enjoyed being an interim director.

I am now into my fourth week.

So I wanted to give you a few of my perspectives on SDOT based on four weeks.

One, it's a really hardworking, dedicated, and talented staff.

And they are doing their darndest to keep me busy as they inform me of the work of this agency.

So it's been interesting, it's been exciting, and it's been rewarding.

But the credit really goes to the staff because they have worked really hard.

One of the things that I want to say is that they have a really huge and diverse portfolio.

And when I look at the environment that they're working in and all the growth in the region, as well as the challenging construction work that's going on right now, it's really amazing to look at the program that's been delivered and the one that's before us.

So I'd like to mention just some of the work that the agency has been working on.

And we continue to work on core deliverables like safe routes to schools and blocks of sidewalks and crosswalks and bridge spot repairs and installing curb ramps.

I mean, there's core deliverables that are a key focus of everything we do.

We repaved 35 lane miles of arterial streets.

We re-striped 1,100 of those.

We've installed 2,500 crosswalks, 6,400 regulatory signs, and I could go on and on.

So a lot of base and good work has gotten done.

We also work on spot improvements through the Transit Spot Improvement Program, where we try to deal with what we need to do to keep transit moving safer and more effectively with red bus lanes, painting them, looking at regulatory enforcement, and providing spot improvements for even the pedestrians.

And then we also, and this is something that I think is an important component, is they've established a transportation equity program which is aimed at eliminating racial and income-based impediments to jobs and education and how we play in the community and internally.

So I think that's a good stroke of business.

But let's talk about the 2019-20 budget, and I've already said we're in a challenging construction environment, but our budget provides for the department to continue to focus and perform the critical work that is needed on both our core services and resources to continue to deliver.

So Move Seattle, that's a key component of the work that is in our budget and how we continue to focus on building sidewalks, curb runs, installing bike facilities, pavings, and all those key elements that we are committed to.

It enhances the basic services to invest in paving, bridges, and seawall maintenance.

It improves mobility and provides transit options through the ORCA Lift, the ORCA Opportunity, and by providing and partnering with King County Metro to increase our transit services in Seattle.

And then, and this is something that may tie back to one of your welcoming comments, which is on the period of maximum constraint and what we're doing.

And there's a number of pillars that we focus on that throughout this delivery, but one of the key ones is effectively managing the right of way.

And this is looking at all of those things that we can do to provide information and doing very specific upgrades like signal upgrades and cameras and timing and staff so that we can actually do a good data or good way of gathering data so that we can actually manage the systems we have.

One of those key elements, and you're going to hear more about them from Karen, is actually staffing a 24-7 traffic operations center.

So there are many elements that we're working on, but that is one key area.

So we're looking at how to partner better with transit.

We're looking at how to make our systems operate more efficiently.

We're looking at many investments, some of those reflected in our budget.

So with that, I would like to turn the real detailed presentation over to Karen.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Linnea.

Good afternoon.

As Linnea said, I'm going to take a deeper look into the 2019 budget for SDOT.

But first, as some context, the current proposed budget provides total resources of $609 million in 2019 for SDOT to deliver on its core mission.

This includes maintaining our existing assets and focusing on basic services, managing the mobility of people and goods throughout the city of Seattle, and engaging in effective management of the right-of-way, as Linnea mentioned.

We're also focused on meeting voter commitments, including Move Seattle and the Seattle Transportation Benefit District, or SCBD, and delivering on basic services.

Karen, pardon me.

We already have a question.

OK.

Go right ahead.

Just slow down a bit.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Where's the number that you said?

You said that 609?

The total 2019 budget for SDOT is $609 million.

It's maybe slide four or five when we go through that more detailed table.

Okay, but that's not written anywhere.

That's not in your presentation.

Go ahead.

Later in the presentation.

This is actually my fault for having advanced the slide while poor Karen was trying to do her introduction for which I apologize.

I was trying to be helpful.

The reason why I just do that is because I just like to start with what are we starting with?

So for 2019, $609 million, correct?

It's on page four of the slide.

There you go.

That's correct.

That's the contextual.

We'll spend more time on that later.

OK.

Thank you.

So it's OK.

Why don't I just jump right in?

Just try to give a presentation from left to right.

Not a problem at all.

Please flag me when you have questions.

So we're going to start off by looking at four of our performance measures.

These four are a subset of the over 80 performance measures that SDOT uses to hold ourselves accountable, including publishing our performance on two online dashboards, the Capital Explorer dashboard and the Levy to Move Seattle dashboard.

And we also publish a Moving the Needle report which contains all of our performance measures.

So these are just a small subset.

The first two measures here focus on or are representative of some of the basic services the department provides.

First, looking at filling pothole requests within three business days of receipt.

And the second is constructing safe routes to school projects.

On the filling potholes within three business days of receipt, you can see that as of August, we're at 95%.

As we slide into the rainier and colder months, we are anticipating being somewhere around 85%, hopefully north of 85%.

And we're also looking at pushing that 2019 goal, given our past performance, pushing that goal up a bit.

So we'll be looking at that as well.

for constructing safe routes to school.

The goal in 2018 was 28. We, while the status does say 8, we do anticipate having them all complete by the end of the year with the 2019 goal of 32 safe routes to school.

So is that on your dashboard?

Can details be found on your dashboard about these?

Yes, they are.

Because safe routes to school is one of those things that people just really want to know about.

So if it's easy to find or searchable, it'd be great.

Yes, and we can be happy to send you that link.

Right, so as you know, Safe Routes to School, they're comprised of a combination of safety improvements.

So the second two measures are focused on delivering on our voter commitments.

As I mentioned, SDOT has two voter commitments, STBD and the levy to move Seattle.

So the first measure is our commitment to provide 72% of Seattle households with a 10-minute walk to frequent transit service by 2025. We are on track to meet and possibly exceed this goal through both our transit purchases and thanks to your passage of the STBD material change legislation, our capital projects that improve speed and reliability.

I'll also note that it is looking like we will meet and possibly exceed the 72% before 2025.

Karen, one of the items that was in the mayor's budget was about increasing the number of hours of bus service.

So we've increased them a lot since Move Seattle and I think she's calling for, what is it, 120,000 additional annual hours.

And we read that Metro's constrained mostly by not having enough space to buy and place and maintain the new bus fleet that would be needed to accommodate that.

And the hiring of bus drivers is a challenge as well.

Can you talk a little bit about how does that work?

Is it possible?

Is it incorporated in this budget?

Do we believe we can do it?

And what do you need from us?

Sure.

So this budget provides for 100,000 additional transit hours.

And Metro is committed to those 100,000 hours.

We have worked with them extensively to make that transit service purchase.

I think what you're referencing is we continue to have a desire and a push in Seattle, and we're working with them on this to purchase additional hours and additional peak service hours in particular.

And we are working with them.

We're going to go through a pretty intensive effort to look at if there are ways that we can peel back some peak service hours or work with them to get there.

But you're right, they are constrained by the number of buses that they have, including layover and base capacity.

It's something that we continue to work with them on.

Right.

It's not under our control, but we definitely need to be good partners with them.

Right.

Have them be good partners with us.

Just a little further clarification there.

The additional 100,000 hours for Metro will be phased in over both 19 and 20. So they're in March and then again in September there's opportunities to adjust service levels.

So that will happen again in March and September of 19 and then again in March of 20 as the full 100,000 is phased in.

Great.

Right.

Okay.

And maybe you know this, Karen, off the top of your head, but if we roll back to move Seattle from the time the voters said yes to that levy, how many more additional hours do we have for bus hours now?

as compared to that prior number?

Since the passage of STBD, so not Move Seattle but the passage of the Seattle Transportation Benefit District, we've added 325,000 service hours and that will be through March of 2019 so that it does include some of the hours that we're purchasing in this proposed budget.

That's 300,000 additional hours over what Metro was providing prior to.

Yes, that's right.

The board.

Good.

Thank you.

I think that that's a number that it's very impressive.

People are riding our buses.

I think didn't we just get a national award?

Metro got a national award for the bus service provided.

And we're going to have to rely on that more and more so that people have options to get into and out of downtown in particular.

Right.

Thanks.

You're welcome.

So looking at the second measure there under the second box, this is focused on delivering our large capital projects, which we define as projects over $500,000.

We currently have 65 projects that we define as large.

This measure is essentially a roll up of all the information that's on the Capital Explorer dashboard.

And it looks at project performance on cost and on schedule.

So as part of the levy reassessment, we took a hard look at how we're holding ourselves accountable for delivering projects on time and on budget, and we've moved to tighter restrictions on when we allow ourselves to reset budget and schedule.

We're also facing, as Linnea mentioned, we're also facing a tough regional construction climate, which has impacted our expected project schedule as well as the bidding climate.

So this is why this is part of the reasons why you see our performance to date on this measure at 63 percent and our expected performance for the year at 68 percent.

We have moved from setting our baseline for schedule and budget at 100% design, and we're currently setting it at 30% design.

This is something that we'll continue to look at and refine.

We're also going to continue to look at this measure, possibly pulling out schedule and budget and reporting them separately.

Right now, they're rolled up into one measure.

However, given the magnitude of our capital projects and delivering on Move Seattle, we felt it was important to include this measure.

Good, could I just excuse, could I please ask the three of you in the front row to take your conversation outside?

Mr. Zimmerman and Ms. Richard and Honorable, would you kindly take your conversation outside?

Mr. Zimmerman?

Mr. Zimmerman, would you kindly take your conversation outside?

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you.

Please proceed, Karen.

Sure.

Thank you.

So next, we're going to walk through the strategic priorities for SDOT for 2019. The first priority is the delivery of Move Seattle.

So just for some context, as I mentioned, the department's budget is $609 million for 2019. The Move Seattle portfolio, so all of the projects in 2019 that we will deliver using Move Seattle funds and other fund sources, is $285 million.

just to give you a sense of how large the program is.

So as many of you know, and as I mentioned, we recently completed a comprehensive assessment of the levy, and it showed that we have a lot of work to do in a challenging construction environment over the next six years to deliver a program of this scale.

The budget supports the levy by adding a signal crew, a concrete paving crew, and enhancing the capital projects delivery team.

So with this addition of staff, we'll be better equipped to deliver on our voter commitments related to Move Seattle.

The mayor's budget includes funding for many levy-funded projects as well, including $5 million for additional curb ramps, $3 million for new sidewalks, and $2 million for neighborhood greenways.

I just want to mention that the additional funding for greenways is in addition to the $12 million that's in the budget for the Bike Master Plan.

So it's a total of $14 million for bike-related facilities.

And this will deliver approximately 18 miles of bicycle facilities in 2019.

Great.

Can you tell me where I can find those numbers?

Is that in your proposed budget?

Yep.

Because I'm not seeing it on your slide here.

The ones that I just listed out, right, they're not listed on the slide.

But I can give you a table of all the all the puts.

the proposed budget, you can just direct me to that, but I'm not seeing it there to either.

Oops, sorry.

That's the budget table.

It's 404. Thank you.

Page what?

404. 404, thank you.

So a quick question around your bicycle lanes.

And I mentioned this this morning, you obviously were not here at the time, but Council Member Johnson did a companion or sponsored a companion resolution as we passed the legislation this week for the arena.

And it's really important to those of us who live and work downtown, and this District 7 in particular, that these bicycle lanes get connected.

And I know that there have been all kinds of reasons, you know, there was 4th Avenue that we had the plan, we're going to build it, then we didn't.

And, you know, people were concerned about the maximum congestion timing.

I happen to be a bike rider.

I know how important it is, how much faster it is to get around downtown.

And what I'd like to know is with these bicycle lanes, can we get a schedule?

Can we get a block by block?

And I met with a number of folks last night, said there are volunteers at the ready from Neighborhood Greenways, Cascade Bicycle Club that will help and go knock on doors and talk to business leaders about this.

But the longer it takes to get connected, the fewer riders there are and the argument I think you saw probably in the Seattle Times this morning that there are fewer number of bike commuters, which astonishes me when you see how many people are actually using Second Avenue and the bike lanes that you have created.

So that said, what I want is a chart that talks about the bike lanes, where they are, when they're going to be coming in, and what pot of gold we're going to be using to pay for them, whether it's something related to the arena or something that's related to just making these connections.

We've got to get this done.

We're happy to get that for you, and we appreciate your help and others.

Great.

Thank you.

Council Member Wallace.

Thank you.

I appreciate you letting us know verbally about the $5 million for curb ramps.

I found it in the budget as well.

The $3 million for sidewalks.

And $2 million for greenways.

And then you said that's in addition to the $12 million for bikes to equal $14 million.

So I have a different take than Council Member Bagshaw on bike lanes in District 5. I would like to know, because what we need more, and particularly up in D5, is we don't have sidewalks.

And this should be a walkable city.

And this has been an issue forever.

I know that we are dedicating some funds in District 5 for sidewalks, but I'm going to stay on this issue.

Three million is not enough.

two bike lanes in Seattle and D5 that aren't even used, 125th and barely Roosevelt.

So I'm going to ask you to be accountable to us to tell me how you're justifying those bike lanes and their maintenance.

particularly when I heard some numbers about, and please, one of you correct me, how much are we spending per mile on a bike lane on the last number we heard to closing the gap?

Was it $10 million or something like that?

I think that is one of those debatable points that we'll need to actually get some facts because sometimes we talk about moving utilities and moving lights, moving water.

mains and that that gets rolled into a per mile construction, but it may be more appropriate to look at the whole street as we're building.

So that's a fight that I would prefer to wage.

And I'm not suggesting it's a fight, but what I'm suggesting is we don't have a complete picture of exactly what that means when we meet with constituents, which I will be meeting with tonight with Mr. Noble.

for two hours at the Bitter Lake Community Center, and we've met with other folks up in D5 and other neighborhoods, and I think you know what neighborhoods I'm talking about, that bike lanes were exempted from SEPA.

Whether or not and who decided who gets bike lanes, and if you're just putting them in to slow down traffic, then tell us you're just putting in something to slow down traffic, so putting in bike lanes.

I still don't have a real answer how much a bike lane costs.

I don't know if it's just cones and paint or if it's, digging up sewer and pipes and putting, I don't know, SDOT has never provided us with that.

I would have liked for you today when you put, you know, move Seattle in the money, I would have liked for you to have listed the actual amount for the curb ramps and the sidewalks and some of these other things rather than just telling us verbally because that doesn't help me when I go through the budget.

And I have to look on each page and pull up how much bike repair, at least the budget says to me, it says 2.8 on page 399 and some other issues.

But my point is, that's going to be a big issue.

And you've heard this for the last three years, and I know Ben's not looking at me right now, on curb ramps and sidewalks and greenways.

and geographical parity and how that matches up.

Some neighborhoods just don't need bike lanes, it just doesn't make sense to have them.

Some neighborhoods, it does make sense to have them.

I wasn't around when the pedestrian bike plan was passed, but I am around now and I do have a base that aren't particularly, I wouldn't say hostile, but are still scratching their heads why there are particular bike lanes and what their costs are when people would rather, at least I know for sure in District 5, have sidewalks.

So that is something that, because I think $3 million for sidewalks citywide is woefully inadequate.

So that is something that I'm hoping we can talk about later on.

And again, I'm not, I'm not saying I want to fight about it.

I just, I just, yeah, I just want information.

So when I talk to constituents and voters and people who pass ST3 and we're looking at light rail and all these grand ideas about, transit-oriented development and housing and people using other modes of transportation.

These are straightforward, honest questions that I should be able to answer.

Thank you.

Okay, please continue, Karen.

Okay, thank you.

So moving on, in addition to being focused on Move Seattle, we continue to be also very focused on enhancing our basic services.

The budget provides additional paving funds as well as funds to support bridge maintenance and to begin seawall maintenance.

Our next strategic priority is to improve mobility and provide transit options.

This is particularly important as we lead into the period of maximum constraint with our permanent closure of the viaduct, the downtown tunnel opening, buses coming out of the tunnel, and other major construction projects that will impact mobility in the city.

So as we've talked about, one of the major ways the city is able to increase transit options is through STBD.

Again, thank you to your support.

The budget includes a purchase of an additional 100,000 hours of transit service.

It also includes funding for the ORCA Opportunity Program, providing ORCA cards to all Seattle public high school students.

It includes funding for transit speed and reliability improvements.

These are our capital, small capital projects that improve speed and reliability.

And it includes a pilot program with Metro for first and last mile connections in West Seattle and in South Seattle.

The budget also provides funding to help manage downtown mobility during the time of multiple overlapping construction projects.

So this funding, some of which Linnea mentioned, this funding will support signal timing adjustments, full 24-7 staffing of our Transportation Operations Center, and enhanced communications with the public about travel options.

In addition, the budget provides funding to support early collaboration with Sound Transit.

This will go toward internal SDOT staffing, including a dedicated lead position, as well as funding to support our partner departments, such as OPCD and SCCI, as we all engage with Sound Transit to ensure the upcoming major light rail projects reflect the priorities for our city.

The budget also provides funding to continue the department's work on congestion pricing, advancing the initial planning and analysis work that's being conducted this year.

So I also want to note that the city was the recipient of a Bloomberg Foundation grant, which will provide technical and in-kind support to help advance our congestion pricing work.

How much was that?

The total award amount is $2.5 million, but the grant is for both congestion pricing as well as some climate change work.

So finally, the budget finds internal efficiencies to fund a portion of the core and strategic priorities that I went through above.

These include reducing our spend on discretionary contracting services and overhead activities, realizing vacancy savings, and redirecting our efforts from programs, again, in order to support core services, redirecting our efforts from programs such as e-park, summer parkways, and new pavement-to-parks installations.

So I just want to note that these reductions were not easy, and they come with their own set of complications, as I'm sure you're aware.

But we needed to make some of the investments in our basic services that I described above.

So here is our budget summary slide.

This slide walks through 16 and 17 actuals, the 2018 adopted budget, and the 2019 and 2020 proposed levels.

So this is where, Council Member Juarez, if you added together a couple lines here, the appropriation other and the general fund that's broken out, you would get to the 609 that I cited earlier.

Another item to note is you can see year over year that SDOT's budget is increasing.

Some of the major changes from the 2018 adopted budget to the 2019 proposed include the shifting of some of our major projects into construction, such as Lander and other bridge projects.

There is increased Move Seattle paving funds moving into these years, as well as the Office of the Waterfront funds shifting into these years.

May I ask a quick question?

Or did you have something, Council Member Johnson?

You go first, Chair.

Okay.

I'm looking now, not on your slide, but in the budget book 398, page 398, and you talk about the 2019 proposed budget expenditure by category.

And I noticed just by category, the Capital is the biggest chunk at 37 percent.

You've got personnel at 18 and interest payment at 6 and inter-fund transfers at 8 percent.

And then there's a big triangle there that is a pretty good slice of the pie at 31 percent, just says other.

What is included in other?

398, 398 of the budget.

These are expenditures.

You know, let me get back to you on that with some detail.

Okay.

Cause it just, it seems like a pretty significant chunk of money and I'd like to have more detail in that.

Good.

Council member Johnson.

Thanks.

So Karen, I've got a half a dozen questions that I just want to run through with you.

And I want to start with, the general fund appropriation.

As I remember, we have a sort of base requirement.

Does that base requirement tie to our overall appropriation number, i.e., do we have to have a certain percentage of the overall appropriations that comes from the general fund, or is it just a base number that we're expected to contribute?

It's a base number, and then it's the lesser of 3% or CPI.

And it was a base number that was set and then it grows that the minimum requirement, if you will, grows with inflation.

So the purchasing power of that minimum is maintained.

And we are just at that level for 2018 and somewhat above that level, marginally, arguably for 19 and 20.

So that $44,161,000 is slightly above our minimum requirement for general fund subsidy.

Correct.

Okay.

You know, how much of that $565,000 appropriations is it distributed to that $126 million appropriation authority swap from 2018 to 2019. Are we absorbing the totality of that $126 million appropriation swap from 18 to 19?

Is that what accounts for more than the $126 million change from 18 to 19?

You're looking at the 126, the change year to year?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think what I was trying to describe, the way to think about that is the change in spending from year to year due to the projects that I was listing.

So things like lander coming into construction, other bridge projects, additional paving funds being moved into that year from Move Seattle.

Yeah, and how much of those are related to the timing slippage from our third quarter supplemental action that moved funding from 2018 to 2019?

I mean, this is a complicated budget, and I just want to understand how much of that growth of $126 million change comes from us delaying our own projects or from other projects coming in online more quickly than they would have otherwise?

Right, it is complicated.

Some of it is due to the third quarter supplemental, what you're referencing.

We can walk you through kind of the timing of all of those projects.

Well, and I just want to surface some of the concerns that I've got as I've dug through just in a cursory overview.

And this is a political statement not intended to elicit a response, Karen.

So when I take a look at the ways that we're spending money in 2019, I just want to flag that I think The structural challenges that we've had in delivering projects in 2018 seem like they could get exacerbated in 2019. So I'll give you a couple of examples.

The outline that you gave us indicated that we're going to have some additional staff members to handle some major maintenance issues, but we're still going to more than double our program expenditures on bridges and structures, and we're going to more than triple our expenditures on road maintenance.

And that seems to me like going from $17 million in road maintenance program expenditures to $50 million, but only hiring one additional crew makes it seem as though we might continue to have difficulty in meeting the deliverables of tripling of the workload with only one additional crew to handle that major maintenance.

Similarly, we're almost doubling the amount of money that we're spending on freight mobility.

That may be just about the Lander project in and of itself, but if it's not about Lander, same thing.

We're delivering $38 million in freight mobility expenditures with the same four and a half FTE equivalent that we were spending $23 million on last year.

I'm running through some real detail here, but I started us on page 417 and now I'm moving on to page 420.

Thank you.

Similarly, we generally have a pretty popular program with our Neighborhood Enhancements Program, which focuses a lot on the things that I know both Councilmember Juarez and I hear about from constituents related to neighborhood traffic control issues.

We're taking that set of investments from $23 million down to $7.5 million.

That seems like a really significant reduction.

while at the same time on the next page on engineering and operations support, we're again doubling the amount of funding that we're spending on bridges and structures in the engineering side, but having no full increase in full-time equivalents.

So I'm struggling here to see how we're going to really dramatically increase the projects that we're intending to deliver on a lot of what you're terming as basic infrastructure, but we're not really hiring a whole lot of new staff members.

We're faced with the same challenges of the construction industry that a lot of our partners are in the Sound Transit and King County world.

It just feels to me like we're kicking the can down the road with this, and unfortunately, It also feels like some of the projects that are being deprioritized as this are some of the ones that are the ones that are smaller scale that a lot of neighborhoods are asking for in terms of neighborhood safe streets programs, neighborhood enhancement programs.

to the benefit of major road maintenance issues.

And so I just, I struggle and it's, I'm hopeful that we can continue to do a good job of setting these targets and meeting these targets, but I'm not seeing that reflected in a way that gives me a whole lot of confidence in the budget right now.

So as we move forward, I really look forward to working with the department over the next month or so to get a better understanding of that, because what I'm seeing right now doesn't feel like the rubber is going to really meet the road.

Thank you.

Just one thing to know, we'll be back here in December to brief on the levy program itself.

So hopefully we can provide more context at a time.

And I suspect that we're going to want to have more context before December.

Sure.

Happy to.

Good.

Anything else?

No, ma'am.

Okay.

Thank you.

Karen, go ahead.

Okay.

So the next slide looks at our legislative and policy framework for the department.

We have two items here.

The first is advancing block-the-box legislation at the state level so we can use automation to encourage the right behavior here in the city and not have cars blocking our intersections that restrict the free flow of traffic.

So this is an effort that the city will be advancing.

The second as some...

Just ask you about OIR.

And they're obviously they're involved in this.

Is there something that we need to do to participate?

As an example, Council Member Muscata and I serve on the Association of Washington Cities.

This is the kind of priority that would be very helpful.

if we got them backing us because they oftentimes represent, I mean, not oftentimes, they do represent cities across the state.

And I have found that if we can get the assistance of some of the smaller cities with their legislators, it makes a difference.

Anyway, my question is, what's the strategy to get this passed this year?

Because it's huge.

Yeah, it is incredibly important.

So thank you for the offer of support and we'll get back to you.

I think that would be very helpful.

Thank you.

The second item is the federal funding climate.

As I'm sure you're all aware, our federal leverage assumptions in the delivery of Move Seattle continue to be a concern.

We have revised the assumptions around how much federal dollars we are assuming in our program downward as part of the assessment.

However, we still have a number of large federal grant requests that are related to delivering Move Seattle in particular for the Madison Corridor and for Roosevelt.

And we'll continue to work with our federal delegation and our partners to move all of our grant requests forward and ensure that we are as competitive as we can be in the federal environment.

This last slide is a Johnson.

I'm sorry madam chair But I have to excuse myself to go pick up the kids from after-school care most important.

Do you have any last-minute?

You're right to flag that I would love to have us continue these conversations in advance of December as we continue through the budget process and just want to raise up that I think there will be, I'm hopeful that there will be more answers coming to us about how we can continue to deliver these important projects in a very concerted fashion very quickly.

Thank you.

This last slide is essentially a summary slide that covers the major changes in the 2019 budget, a number of them that I have walked through.

One item that we did not cover that I want to note is funding for the existing streetcar operations.

So this budget fully funds our operating debts with King County Metro for operating the First Hill and the Southlake Union line.

It also fully funds the operations of both of those lines moving forward, as well as extends our operating loan by one year and provides for resolution of that loan through future property proceeds.

In terms of the Center City Connector, the capital project, the budget provides 500,000 in 2019 to continue any needed design and analysis and provides capital resources in 2020 and 2021 to either fund the streetcar project or an alternative transit project in this corridor.

Great.

Good.

So, you've left yourself some flexibility on that corridor.

So, if the determination is made by the mayor that it's not going forward, then there's some option.

And obviously it's trolley bus or bus or something that, but still, I just would like to put in an asterisk here to have a dedicated transit lane.

If it's bus, that we still have it as a dedicated lane so that the buses aren't stuck in traffic.

I know that you all know that.

And First Avenue is where I live, and I see the congestion, particularly on game days, north and south.

But if you're going from the north to the south, you can have at least 10 blocks of traffic backed up, and we don't want the buses stuck in that.

Okay.

Poor Karen.

Okay.

No, it's fine.

This wasn't what I expected.

That concludes our presentation.

Okay.

I'm happy to take any further questions.

Well, I have just some matters that I brought up this morning in the morning session.

And again, as we're dealing with congestion downtown.

I would love to see, and this is back to my desire to have a matrix about what are the projects, when are they planned, and I understand that you can't commit 100 percent, but things like freight mobility.

We've been talking about this for years.

We've had the freight mobility study, and I have asked last year and the year before to have a block by block analysis about where trucks can go and if we need to have a different policy so that downtown deliveries are really focused after, you know, between, I'm making this number up, but between like 8 p.m.

and 6 a.m., if there's things and policies that we need to be changing, now's a good time to bring them up.

I think there's actually work that's been done in that area.

And we'd be happy to come forward and talk about what we know at this moment because I do think we have a block by block analysis.

We've also been working with the University of Washington on studying some opportunities.

So we'd be happy to talk with you what the outcomes of some of that would be.

Good.

So we did have a briefing a year ago from the UW.

They were here talking to us about the various options and looking at the, you know, we call it the Copenhagen option of, what they've done, just really like to know if there have been decisions, what those decisions are.

Because like Councilmember Juarez with her constituents in D5 concerned about where are my sidewalks, for us downtown, it's how are people getting around and being able to move.

Councilmember Baxhaw, I see there's no members of the Transportation Committee here, but there was a presentation on some of that material at the last Transportation Committee meeting as well, so make sure to get that information in front of you.

Thank you, Calvin.

If you could get that for me, because I didn't see that, didn't know it, so thank you for doing that.

Okay, anything else?

Council President Harrell.

No, I'm good.

It's good information.

Okay.

Council Member Gonzalez, Council Member Juarez, please.

I just have a general question.

I'm not trying to put you on the spot.

I know that Mayor Durkan has put the Center City Connector Streetcar on hold and that's correct, right?

Yes, that's correct.

Okay.

So, what you mentioned quickly, but I didn't see it in your presentation.

I'm sure it's in the budget, but of that, the funds for that, you said 500,000 was for design.

And how much was for capital?

For 2019 there's only $500,000 and in some sense it's a placeholder to either continue work on the Center City Streetcar if that's the decision to move forward or alternatively to conduct ever more thorough analysis on a set of alternatives.

There are then capital dollars anticipated for 2020. They'd be bonded resources so they're not cash that would be available in 20 but rather And it may be, depending on timelines, that it seems unlikely that either a city streetcar or an alternative would move forward to significant construction activity in 20. But we've left that placeholder there because even if it doesn't, the resources that back up those bonds would be long term.

we need to reserve that funding source, that funding stream for whatever that alternative would be.

I get that.

What I'm getting at is, so you have 500,000 for 2019 that is a placeholder for design, correct?

Correct.

Okay, and then you said there's the money that could be available in 2020, determining on a policy what you do on going forward for capital.

What's the approximation of that amount?

It's 20 million in 2020. Okay.

See, I'm sorry.

I'm going to add this in.

So, again, I'm not trying to do a gotcha question.

I'm just asking.

So, if we have this in a placeholder, is it feasible that any of those funds could be available for projects such as sidewalk construction or bridge maintenance or greenways or crosswalks?

So that was my point that the 20 million is not 20 million in cash in 20. It would be debt issued against CPT against the commercial parking tax.

So all that's really available in 2020 potentially to direct anywhere else would be the debt service of the for the initial year on that on that debt, which is not zero, it's probably a couple hundred thousand dollars, but if we were to commit those resources to a $20 million resource and, you know, to sidewalks or other things, no, no, no, I'm taking the question seriously, that those resources would then not be available once we sorted out what it is we want to do on First Avenue in terms of a transit solution.

And the general conclusion and certainly what's represented in the budget is a commitment to some transit solution on First Avenue, whether it be the Center City Connector or some other solution, as mentioned by Council Member Bagshaw, the potential for a bus in a dedicated lane as an example.

So just so, and again, just bear with me.

So for the 500,000 that you say is a placeholder for design, that means that you're just holding that until you get to the point where you want to design?

And again, I'm asking because I really do, I don't understand.

We anticipate before year-end to have a better idea, a firm idea of whether we're trying to advance the Center City project, in which case we'll need some resources to continue to develop that work.

Based on what we know now, there's likely to be some level of redesign that needs to happen with, for instance, the trolley barns or some other issues.

So that money could be used to continue advancing the Center City project or alternatively if it by year-end we determine that That the project doesn't make sense to go forward.

We'll then be wanting to move quickly to Evaluate transit alternatives on First Avenue and those resources would then be redirected or be directed to that purpose So you think we'll have be having the same conversation next year?

I think that we'll have the conversation before next year.

So I think that by the time we get here next year, we'll be proposing funding in 2020 to implement either a center city project, a city-city connector, or an alternative project.

That's honestly what I think.

Anything else?

Thank you.

Any other questions?

Nope.

Okay.

Well, I want to say thank you, Department of Transportation.

And, Linnea, thank you for your first budget here in the city of Seattle.

Thank you, guys.

Karen.

This is obviously a department that we all care about greatly.

Ben, thank you for being here with us all day.

Calvin and Eric, thank you.

So this will end our first session on budget.

And I'm going to go into public comment.

Can you, Jodi, tell me how many people are signed up?

OK, six people.

And then what's that?

That's something that I'm just looking at.

Is there another sheet there?

OK, very good.

Yeah, I think we'll do two minutes.

I will.

Thank you very much.

OK, so we have seven people signed up.

Alex Zimmerman, Natasha, and Janet.

If you would be ready to approach the microphone and get yourself close.

Honorable, you're number six.

OK.

Well, he is on the first on the list on.

OK, please start the time Jody.

Hi hi hi hi.

My name Alex Zimmerman.

Everybody know me from Tacoma to Everett.

So I won't speak about budget, but as I come to this place for 10 years, almost 2,000 times in council chamber, nice people working here.

Yeah, government, council, about $6 billion, people money.

Very nice.

Various people can speak about this.

People cannot.

So we have a complaint right now to Durkan and to council.

So you violate rules, see public, common, and city council meeting and committee meeting.

Is this copy come from clerk of Seattle?

And she replace this and correct.

Why we cannot speak in every point of department?

Why we need speak one time for two minute about a six billion dollars?

Can somebody explain to me why this crook who sit in this chamber want what we speak only two minute for six billion dollars?

We possibly speak in every meeting, 9.30 and 2 o'clock, and can we speak about every department that is possible.

This and City Council rules.

If we complain about this, we make a complaint today, I, Peril, and Michael, to City Mayor and to you, because you violate everything.

You are pure crook, a criminal, and cretina.

That's exactly who you are, and that's exactly what has happened every year.

Six billion dollars, my money, their money, 700,000 people, no one happy right now, cannot speak about us, money, because you crook doing this.

The high Koukloos clan are crook, are criminal, and cretina.

And I speak right now to everybody, we need clean.

That's done.

Lovely, Mr. Zimmerman.

Natasha, and then Janet.

What?

Good afternoon, City Council members.

My name is Natasha El Sergani, and I'm a staff attorney with Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.

I work in the Removal Defense Unit, which means that the clients...

Hold on.

Hold on.

Please be quiet.

Natasha's time.

And I want...

Would you just wait one moment, please?

Come here.

I've signed up.

You did.

Come here.

She is not Alex Zimmerman.

She is not Alex Zimmerman.

Come here.

No, I'm not out of you.

You are six.

Now, please sit down, and I'll get to you.

Well, how do that work out?

One, sit down.

No.

Okay, I'm sorry, Natasha, we have to put up with this circus, and you are here to speak to us.

Yes, I'll start again.

Please.

Good afternoon, city council members.

My name is Natasha El Sergani, and I'm a staff attorney at Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in the Seattle office.

I work in the removal defense unit and work pretty closely with the legal defense fund team.

And the clients that I represent for the most part are in removal proceedings before the Seattle and Tacoma immigration courts.

Without legal representation, immigrants must face on their own a complex and difficult to navigate immigration system led by a federal administration that increasingly attacks their civil and human rights, labels them criminals, gang members, terrorists, separates their families, and keeps people locked up in prisons, basically, while private corporations profit.

Our office for that reason is deeply grateful for the city's commitment to making the Legal Defense Fund a permanent program in our city.

I've seen firsthand through my work how the LDF makes work possible that changes and transforms lives.

and that there continues to be a great need in the community for legal representation, even beyond what we can do now.

The Legal Defense Fund demonstrates the city's meaningful commitment to immigrant rights that reaches beyond rhetoric, which we really appreciate, and we hope to see this commitment continue into the future.

And this commitment is not only to providing immigrants with lawyers, which is devastatingly needed in our communities, but also committing to the dignity and freedom of all people in our community, regardless of where they were born.

So thank you very much.

And thank you so much for coming.

I appreciate what you're doing.

Okay, next person is Janet and then it looks like Johanna.

and then Marguerite, and then the Honorable.

Hi.

Thank you.

Thank you, council members, for this opportunity to speak with you.

My name's Janet Gwillam, and I'm the managing attorney of the Seattle Office of Kids in Need of Defense, and we're an organization that provides representation in immigration removal proceedings for unaccompanied immigrant children, and also for the kids that were separated at the border earlier this summer, the family separation cases.

We are also one of the recipients of the Legal Defense Fund and are very, very grateful for the opportunity that that's given us this year.

During the first five months of our 15-month contract, we met all of our metrics.

We filled up the caseload, basically.

The need is so great.

There are so many unaccompanied children in King County and Seattle that we were maxed out very early on and have continued to maintain a wait list of children that are desperately in need of representation.

So I am just here to encourage that ongoing support of that program.

It's been wonderful.

I wanted to give you a couple stories of kids that we've been representing.

For example, we have a 14-year-old indigenous girl from Guatemala with severe developmental disabilities who experienced sexual exploitation and assault and had to escape here as an unaccompanied child.

We have applied for asylum for her and are in the process of getting her special immigrant juvenile status as well.

The majority of the kids that we serve apply for more than one form of relief.

And we go to immigration court with them.

Another child that we worked with is a 16-year-old Salvadoran youth who was being targeted by the MS-13 gang in El Salvador.

They followed him every day as he went to church.

And they encouraged him to drop out, to stop going to church and start selling drugs for them.

He, they started to threaten him and said if he didn't join them, they would remove, they would kill him and so he had to run away.

So just wanted to give you a little explanation of some of the people that are in here, our Seattle community, that we are serving through this opportunity through the city.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for coming today and thank you for what you're doing.

Okay, Marguerite Richard and then the Honorable Michael Fuller.

Okay, Mr. Shard here, and I wanted to say in light of what has transitioned on today with Mr. Bill Cosby, it goes to show you that your arms is too short to box with God.

And our sins are ever before us, so God always has the last say about evildoers, whatever they doing.

Me too, not you, boo-hoo, and the like.

But I have something here.

I'm just speaking on behalf of somebody that sent me something because they already know how I feel.

Mrs. Ely's meeting in Sewant there.

Prepare lists for police budget hearing demands.

Shoot to maim, not kill.

And training money, reinstate community service officers and de-escalation force and review federal mandate lists.

So my mandate is with Dallas, as far as the officer being fired, I know, notice that Ian Burke was fired too, okay, but this woman killed a person that was a foreigner and I don't support people that believe in racism and discrimination, because that's what I fight every day.

And I feel like if he wasn't what the color he was, he'd still be breathing in and out.

And until we do something that's prevalent and just around here, don't come asking me to put my seal of approval on any of you up there, because you're criminals too right now.

If I was God right now, you'd be in prison right now.

Right now, okay?

And I'm telling you, because he said, if any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God.

And I've seen how you've led up in this chamber here, and I'm not for it.

So no, whatever I brought to you, that's what Mrs. Ely and they came up with as far as de-escalation.

You can't de-escalate no police.

If that woman said that you, he was in her apartment and he wasn't, you can't de-escalate the devil.

All right, Honorable Michael Fuller, welcome back.

Yes, I'm Honorable Michael Fuller, Siouxite Jew.

As I continue in prayer, we unite Neanderthals.

After 246 years of enslavement by Neanderthals, then at the time of September 11th, then no one is enforcing that 13th and 14th Amendment.

So that is 40 years enslavement by you Neanderthals, which violates the Federal Immigration and Nationality Act.

Title A, USC 1324, A inferences, 1 inferences, A inferences, IB inferences, B inferences, 3 I's inferences, INA 274A, A inferences, 1 inferences, A inferences, Title A, USC 1325. Improper entry.

Aliens.

Aliens are smart.

They can learn.

And Title A, Title A, USC 1324A, Offenses, Aliens, and the Violation of Our First Amendment Right Due Process, Equal Protection of Our First Amendment Rights and Procedure Due Process, and Substantive Due Process, and the Violation of Article 3, Section 3, Treason to the Constitution, while adhering to the enemies at the time of war.

Title 18, USC, Chapter 73, Obstruction of Justice.

You nine bigots, you're working under color, stating federal law would violate 1962D, conspiracy, section 241, conspiracy against right, violation.

against civil rights, violation, 10 years imprisonment, $205,000 fine, three years supervised release, and $100 assessment.

Once you violate RCW 2.24.210, your oath in RCW 2.04.080, your oath of oath in RCW 2.48.21.

Beautiful, thank you.

Thank you, honorable.

I've got, no, no.

Bautista, step up.

Come on.

Just come on up to the microphone.

He'll sit down.

Thank you.

Thank you for being here.

Hi, my name is Lady Ana Bautista Sarseno.

My language is Spanish.

Mi testimonio lo voy a dar en español.

The reason why I'm here is to talk about the Legal Collective Network Program.

I am one of the beneficiaries of this program.

I came to this country eight months ago.

I came with a dream, unfortunately fleeing from my country.

Porque mi familia fue asesinada y yo corría peligro en mi país.

Me vine para acá buscando una luz, una vida diferente.

Gracias a Dios y a cada uno de ustedes que son los que apoyan este programa.

A mí me brindaron el apoyo para poder pelear mi caso en este país y no poder ser deportada y causar una tristeza más a mi familia.

Puedo decir que este programa es una luz para mí porque aquí he encontrado algo diferente, un motivo más para seguir adelante y saber que Que puedo...

Que hay personas que me pueden apoyar para que yo pueda pelear mi caso y no ser deportada.

Entonces, todo lo que ustedes hacen al apoyar este programa no es en vano.

Todo lo que ustedes hacen al apoyarnos, todo tiene recompensa.

No se imaginan la vida que me están dando acá.

Porque si no fuera por ustedes, I wouldn't be in this place, and neither would my family.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Did you want to translate, my dear?

There was a lot to translate there, but...

What's your name?

Lady.

Lady is your name.

Well, thank you for being with us and for giving that testimony, which is...

Me da mucho orgullo saber que el programa te ha beneficiado y con gusto vamos a continuar apoyándote a ti y a los demás que pueden beneficiar con estas inversiones.

Así es que bastante gracias por estar aquí.

The rough translation summary there is that Lady is a beneficiary of our Legal Defense Network funding.

Eight months ago, she arrived in this country.

She had to flee from her original country as a result of her immediate family being murdered.

And she has suffered a lot of trauma and stress and anxiety, and she is now living in this country and was able to access services specifically through the Legal Defense Network.

to fight against a removal order and proceedings that had been started against her.

And as a result of direct legal representation through the Legal Defense Network, she was able to, she's been able to continue to fight that case and to remain in the country.

And she was here to tell us her story and to express her gratitude for prioritizing investments for the Legal Defense Network and wants to acknowledge the fact that if it wasn't for these investments, she would not be able to pursue her dreams in this country and is incredibly grateful.

Well, Council Member Gonzalez, thank you for the translation, but also thank you that you brought this to us a couple of years ago.

And we're starting to see how critically important it is, not only for our defenders, but for individuals like Lady.

It's lovely that she came.

Thank you for giving us that translation.

It's a rough summary.

I got bits and pieces of it.

I got the general drift that about her family and her being here.

Oh, OK.

I am so sorry that we skipped over you.

That's OK.

Thank you.

Please go ahead.

So thank you, counsel.

I would also like to thank council member Gonzalez for the Legal Defense Network.

And that's also what I'm here to speak about.

My name is Johanna Martinez.

I am a staff attorney at the West African Community Council.

And we are one of the community navigators as part of the Legal Defense Network.

As an organization, we see and serve immigrants, refugees, and asylees from countries like Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and many other countries all over King County for those who are seeking assistance with their immigration case.

We try to help all those we can considering our limited resources.

Funding for programs for immigrants and refugees like the Legal Defense Network and its continued support to its community members allow us to cast a wide net to help those who simply want to live, work, and provide for their family, but cannot do so simply because they do not have the proper immigration status or opportunities.

There is an atmosphere of fear out there right now, and the legal services and support that we provide offer help and hope to those in need.

So thank you.

Thank you very much for coming, Johanna.

I appreciate it.

Sorry we skipped over you, but thank you for your work.

Truly that you are doing so much for people.

I'm grateful to you.

Thank you.

We'll do as much as we can.

Very good.

And I'm sure we'll see you again.

So, this now completes today's scheduled agenda items and public comment period.

Thank you all, my colleagues, for being, for staying, for being so deeply engaged in all this.

If there's no further business, we will conclude for today.

But tomorrow, Budget Committee begins again at 9.30 here in Council Chambers.

So, thank you all very much.

And so, this meeting is adjourned for today.

I will miss you.