Hello, I'm your host, Brian Calaman.
Why are the city council and the mayor fighting over the sweetened beverage tax?
Should Seattle's over-budget streetcar program get a $9 million loan?
And what will the city get in return for what the mayor calls the biggest land deal in Seattle history?
Council members Furbold, Juarez, and Mosqueda answer these questions and the ones you're sending in, too, next on Council Edition.
When you have two presidents and a general who subscribe to the notion that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, and every federal policy for the last 300 years have been built on that.
This was a bill to support public health, not an effort to foot the bill for the budget.
Streetcars are really an economic development tool.
They are not about moving people from place to place.
All that and more coming up next on City Inside Out, Council Edition.
And joining us for this month's edition of Council Edition, we have with us Councilmembers Herbold, Juarez, and Mosqueda.
Thank you so much for joining us during what has been a very busy time over the last couple weeks here.
And Councilmember Mosqueda, I'm going to start with you and begin with this battle over the sweetened beverage tax.
So the mayor wanted to use about six million dollars from this tax towards some programs historically paid for by the general fund.
We're talking about things like food banks, the Nurse Family Partnership.
The council voted to say no, that wasn't the intent of this tax.
Then in a rare move, the mayor vetoed that decision and after that the council voted to override the veto a few days before we're taping the show.
So I want to start with this and I'll throw in a quote from the mayor that was just before her veto.
She said this, the council wants to run up charges and have someone else pay the bill.
This was a very contentious fight and I just wanted to ask why you voted to override this veto.
Well, 15 years ago, I was working at the Washington State Department of Health, and one of the first policies I worked on was taxing sugary sweetened beverages.
We know that the soda industry makes a lot of money off of targeting especially communities of color and low-wage workers.
Taxing soda is a proven public health strategy.
Making sure that it is less accessible is what we have done to tobacco and to alcohol over time.
We know that many of the communities that drink soda are feeling the health consequences, increased obesity, shorter life expectancy, poor health outcomes for kiddos.
So the public health policy is a sound policy, and it was supported overwhelmingly by the voters.
What we did was we upheld what the voters have called for.
It was an unnecessary, manufactured, and completely misleading kind of chaotic moment that was created between the seventh floor and the second floor.
And I think the community saw through it.
People called us to say, we always knew these dollars were going to be walled off.
We want you to keep these dollars separate, so that we can invest in child education and birth to three programs and nutrition programs.
And this was a bill to support public health, not an effort to foot the bill for the budget.
I'm proud that the council stuck with what the voters wanted.
And at the same time, I hope that we can get this in the rearview mirror.
All of us are interested in funding food programs and food banks and making sure that there's more access for nurse family partnership for example.
Let's put this unnecessary drama behind us and focus on funding all of these efforts in the budget.
That's what we committed to and we'll follow through on it.
I'm going to touch on some of those points in a little bit but Councilmember Juarez I know that you along with council members Pacheco and Bagshaw voted to support the mayor's position on this Councilmember Bagshaw described during the meeting right before this vote to override the veto the situation this way It's pitting one community against another she said many of us on the City Council against the other and the second floor against the seventh floor Which I think is absolutely unnecessary and I think Teresa just brought this up, too What's your take on this battle between or this battle that went through between the council and the mayor here your thoughts?
Well, I don't agree that it was a battle.
I just don't.
And I don't think it was about pitting one group against another.
When we actually drafted the sugar beverage tax, and all the work that we had done and what it meant, and some of us fought really hard, including Councilmember Herbold, to make sure that food banks were in the actual ordinance in the law.
And my goal is, and I'm not going to get into this second floor or seventh floor business, what I was focusing on is that we have food banks now that are different than they used to be.
We have enhanced food banks.
And of our 30, 37 food banks in the city, we don't just hand out food.
We do Medicaid.
We do eviction prevention.
We do health care.
I mean, we have attorneys come in to do landlord-tenant issues.
Food banks, like community centers and libraries of the 21st century, aren't like they used to be, nor should they, and I'm proud of that.
And so I guess there's a little bit of hypocrisy going on.
When we had a $6 million surplus, less than 5% of that went to food banks, even though I pushed hard to get more in there.
We lost money on that one, and I was concerned about that.
There are other issues, and we all voted yes on that budget.
Every one of us raised our hands for those four issues that they, using the word supplant.
I can't see that those four categories were any different than expansion or existing because they all went to a greater good.
And so when I went back and looked at the original legislation, and I understand and I support what Council Member Mesquite is saying, but I just want to be very clear that the road is very long and we still have more to go and we still have another budget session to move forward on.
And food scarcity is really what concerns me.
I found some of the hypocrisy, too, during when we were passing this law, that everyone was going on and on about, oh, you know, obesity, and we're worried about kids.
And then I'm like, OK, well, kids can't learn if they're hungry.
They don't have food over the weekends.
Our food banks are struggling.
They get in line every year for a budget for a line item.
And so I wanted to secure and cement that.
So my bigger vision is that the food banks, not only do they have their standard funding that they can count on, that when we do have a surplus, that it doesn't turn into this Christmas tree where everybody gets to hang an ornament on it.
And Lisa, I thought you raised a very important point during this whole process.
The legislation the council passed included an amendment that says the council's intention is not to reduce funding for these programs.
Rather, there's an expectation that the mayor should identify other sources, meaning revenues or cuts, to maintain full funding for these programs that everybody clearly cares about here.
Why did you vote the way you did and what message are you trying to get across to the mayor and maybe people who are concerned about these programs and rely on them too?
Well, the point of the amendment was really to send a message to folks who rely on those services, who are contacting us, really concerned about the message they were receiving from the mayor and the directors of several mayoral departments.
And that message was that our action was going to result in cuts to other services.
And so this amendment expresses not only the council's intent, but our expectation that the mayor fully fund all of these programs.
and not pit one set of very important human services issues against another.
But the reality is that we all have to realize, and that I keep talking about, is that we have made a pre-budget commitment.
Often the council in the past has done things like we've sent budget priority letters or done budget priority resolutions and saying that these are our top level issues for the upcoming budget season.
We have basically made about $9 million in budget decisions before getting into the budget process.
And I think that's responsible.
I think that is an indication that we understand that we have finite resources and that we are expressing to the mayor in advance how we expect those finite resources to be used.
Thank you.
And I want to talk a little bit more about another issue that centers around asking the mayor to figure out how to pay for something, and that's the Center City Streetcar Connector.
So this would connect the city's two separate lines.
Here we go.
We'll start with Lisa and move down the line.
Supporters are saying this is going to increase ridership.
The council just voted to approve $9 million, same number there, to go to SDOT to study what it would take to build this.
You were the only no vote.
Supporters actually wrote an op-ed in the Seattle Times about this, saying, among other things, It's time to support the communities that have been promised this solution.
It's time to lead as a city committed to meaningful action on climate change, social equity, and affordable transportation.
Your thoughts on this, why you voted the way you did?
Well, I'm a strong supporter of transit, and I think this corridor is well served by transit, and with additional investments can be better served by transit.
I'm not a supporter of a streetcar model of transit.
I think these investments should be earmarked for increased access to Metro buses.
Again, this corridor is very well served by buses.
The intent of the streetcar lines was to connect to light rail.
The two existing streetcar lines do that.
And so I think the purpose is really questionable for me of these investments.
These are, we're talking about finite transportation dollars that I think should be focused on true transportation needs.
Economic studies show, Danny Westneat has cited these economic studies, that streetcars are really an economic development tool.
They are not about moving people from place to place.
They're about making it easier for somebody within a neighborhood to get to another neighborhood during their lunch hour to visit a lunchery.
I call it the shopping shuttle.
It's really about that sort of connectivity for economic development purposes that people can just as easily get on the bus to do or walk the few blocks.
Right.
And Deborah, Lisa's raised a lot of concerns here, as she has for the past several years here.
And I know there are some differing opinions about this.
It was shown in that vote.
Why did you vote in support of this $9 million interdepartmental loan for the streetcar project?
Well, you know, I do agree with a lot of what Councilmember Herbold has said, and I've heard her be very passionate about that, and I understand that.
But what I'm learning from being on Sound Transit and a tri-county board and seeing the bigger picture about how we're going to have connectivity and a rich transportation spine, and I think a streetcar was part of that.
I think this $9 million that we're going to release to study that is going to tell us that.
The other issue that Councilmember Herbold raised, which I actually agree with, is when we get further down the line, when we get this information back about the $9 million we're spending about the streetcar system, is that where are we going to get this additional funding?
Yeah.
That is what.
Sixty five million dollars or something along those lines.
Yeah.
I think where I'm at is like it's it was a two hundred eighty six million dollar projected.
Right.
So we're going to spend not we're going to put nine in and then someone's going to come back and say, OK, nine is going to tell us one way or another with particular data points.
And then I think I'm more on the side of what council member Herboldt is saying.
But I do understand and take seriously the comments and concerns that she has raised.
Right, and I mean what we're talking about, $286 million, more than twice what it was in 2015, $135 million.
Right, which is a good point.
Teresa, and I know I think this is kind of leaning this way, this yes vote for these study dollars really points to a lot of questions ahead.
Where does the money come from for this budget shortfall of at least $65 million?
How do you pay for ongoing operational costs?
How do you make sure freight traffic gets through?
I know Councilmember Bagshaw was talking about that.
Do you have confidence in this City Connector project going forward?
I know it's before the study, but give me your gut feeling on this.
Yeah, well, first, I'm excited to see us move forward.
I've been frustrated by the delay and frustrated by the increased cost because of that delay.
We just spent the last few weeks talking about the need for Seattle to lead on the Green New Deal.
We've been talking about how we as a city can lead by example for other cities and for communities who've been most impacted by climate change, who've done the least to contribute to climate change.
I'm talking about workers, front-line workers and fence-line communities, mostly people of color and low-wage workers.
When you look at the streetcar, it is a zero emissions transit option.
It helps to connect people to work, to childcare, to senior centers by having zero emissions.
That's a really important element for us to add to the toolbox as we think about how we address climate change.
I also know that we have to do more to make sure that it's accessible.
One of the reasons that I'm really excited about adding the streetcar to our list of transit options in our city is it helps connect people to First Hill, our health care hub up there, where people who have limited mobility issues can quite literally roll onto the streetcar to get across our city.
That will be a good thing for access across our city.
I also know that when we did put the streetcar in up originally on Capitol Hill, we had a lot of small businesses who said we could have done more to support them.
So I think we can both build the streetcar and respond to the small business concerns that we've heard and make sure it's truly accessible and not just used to move folks in and out for lunch, but to allow folks to move to health care appointments, child care, to places of work.
I also just want to say something more on the global scale because you asked about sort of where do we head next on some of these big budget items and sort of big political issues in the city.
I want to work with the mayor.
I want to work with our entire city council as we head into the fall to show that we can govern.
Briefly, if you can in this era of trying to govern under Trump and the hatefulness and the things that we have been seeing and You know somebody drives 10 hours to go shoot Mexicans And and this isn't just this is us Governing under this cloud for the last three and a half years has been difficult, but we've done it and we've delivered very good things.
So I want to end on this note.
Seattle is not dying.
Seattle is a world class city that is growing and we have growing pains.
But we're addressing those.
And I want to echo what Councilmember Mosqueda says, because she's been great at this, so has Councilmember Herbold, about leadership.
People are looking to be led and to be inspired in what democracy means and not about divisiveness.
And using homelessness as a wedge, using we don't want drug addicts as a wedge, that stuff is draining.
Because I sit back and we talk about the accomplishments that we have done, and we literally can work together and we've gotten big things done.
We have been bold and gotten things done.
There's a reason why Seattle is on the cutting edge of a lot of things, including what we just passed with the Green New Deal.
Nice segue.
And we're going to get to that Green New Deal in just a second.
Thank you for bringing that up.
But I wanted to touch one more time on the streetcar issue because it ties directly into some recent big news.
about the sale of the city-owned Mercer Mega Block, as it's called in South Lake Union.
Teresa, I'll start with you.
We'll go down the line here.
Part of the revenue from that $143 million sale would pay off the $9 billion cost of the streetcar study.
But, wait, there's more, of course.
Now, we're talking about 58% of the sale revenue here would go towards housing, like acquiring property for affordable development, loans for backyard cottages.
I know a lot of advocates were saying, let's build more affordable units right on this spot.
Now, there are 175 of them planned.
There's room for more, apparently, according to the new owner.
But the question is, is that enough?
Does this deal that the mayor brokered make sense to you?
This is set to come before the council in September.
Well, I think folks who've been watching your show know that one of the biggest things that I've been working on is preserving public land for the public good to create affordable housing on site in any time we can to not use the sale of property to plug budget holes.
This is a good example of where we've been able to get a little bit of a hybrid of both.
The process for the sale of the Mercer Mega Block was already in motion before I got on to council.
We now have legislation that says forward-looking.
We will do an analysis to see if it makes more sense for us to hold on to that land and help our nonprofit developers to build on-site.
So that policy is in place now.
If you look, though, at the proposal that came down to us from the mayor's office and the details that we've heard so far, there are elements in there that allow for us to use those public dollars to actually multiply the dollars that we're getting in hand to build housing across the city.
And we've included really strong labor standards, making sure that those who are building on site will be able to have access to good living wage jobs.
Not only that, we have been working with our parks department, and I know the parks chair is interested in this as well, to say not only do we want a community center, but we want a child care center on site.
I look at that area, and like many areas across Seattle, it is a child care desert.
And not just for folks who are working in the tech industry, but this will be beneficial for people who are coming to clean the building, to serve food around the building, who work for our parks facilities.
We want there to be more child care.
And there's 30,000 square feet.
There's money in hand for us to think about how we can direct our parks folks to build child care on site.
And yes, if we can do more to create affordable housing on site, I'm all for that.
But we also have to remember that when the Office of Housing and the city gets money in hand, we can use that for every $1 of city funds, we can multiply it and get $5 in hand to build housing across the city.
That's critically important, though we're not taking our eyes off the prize for future projects.
I think that this one could potentially be a good balance, and I'll be looking at the details.
Councilmember Juarez, the mayor is calling this a generational opportunity, the biggest land deal in terms of dollars in city history.
Is this a proposal you would support when it comes your way in September?
Maybe talk about some of the concerns that Councilmember Mosqueda brought up.
Your thoughts about this.
Absolutely.
I am 100% behind this because as a person that looks at land and is used to building big projects and understanding our bonding capacity and our AAA rating and what that means, And particularly what Councilor Mosqueda said and what Councilor Herbold has also supported, not just the child care piece.
We are building a new Lake City Community Center.
We raised $18 million for our new community center.
But what we're learning, just like I was saying earlier about food banks, is community centers aren't your 19th century community centers anymore.
We are building 50 units of low-income housing there.
We're going to be putting the Boys and Girls Club there.
Sure.
Navigation team.
So those are real, we were really putting the community in center and talking about having a community center in that particular neighborhood to me is transformational.
Yeah, that's going to be a big change there.
Council Member Herbold, beyond your concerns about the streetcar dollars of course, what questions do you have about the Mercer Mega Block deal?
Well, I think it's important to think about the origins of the vision for this deal.
Several years ago, Council Members O'Brien and then Council Member Nick Licata, in recognition of the huge number of public resources that we were committing to this neighborhood, felt it was really, really important to make sure that this new community of opportunity that was being created basically from whole cloth was a benefit to a diversity of people.
And so the proposal was to ask, and this was back in 2014, ask the executive to develop sort of a campus-like approach that had a number of different community benefits, including affordable housing.
including open space, a community center.
One of the elements that I was hoping to see as part of this project is some workforce development opportunities.
And so that there be a center located in South Lake Union that is really focused on getting folks trained up for the jobs that are available in this very, very resource-rich community.
So that's another element, I think, from the original vision that I'd like to see whether or not we can incorporate it.
Because again, So many of these companies are hiring people from outside of our city, and we need to do more to develop the talent that we have right here in Seattle.
Okay, thank you for that.
Debra, I'm going to head back to you and pick up the pace ever so slightly.
You're working on some legislation about missing and murdered indigenous women.
I am.
Tell us about it, what you hope the city council can do about what is truly a problem of epidemic proportions throughout North America.
I want to start with the word invisible and end with the word invisible.
We have a history of colonizationist country and based on genocide of Native American people.
When you have two presidents and a general who subscribe to the notion that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, and every federal policy for the last 300 years have been built on that.
So I know I'm going back into history, but this is where the historical trauma comes from.
So that coming back to 2019 is what you see is Indian women and our deaths, not only do our lives not matter, but there's still this continuation of assault and our people and our women being missing and people not talking about that.
And so what we found ourselves now, and this issue of missing and murdering indigenous women has been going on for decades.
I'm not, this isn't, I'm not new to the, you know, I didn't start this, but I'm certainly a part and I understand it.
And so what we learned working with the Seattle Indian Health Board and the, and I always get this wrong, the Urban Indian Health Institute.
That's it.
Within the Seattle Indian Health Board, two reports came out.
The Seattle report was around 30 or 40 pages.
The Canadian report was 1,200 pages.
And what we learned is that Seattle has the highest number of missing murdered indigenous women.
We rank number one.
We know that the U.S. justice system is ill-equipped to serve the needs of indigenous people.
We know that homicide is the third leading cause of death among Native American women.
And we also know that the data is incomplete, inconsistent, and often biased.
And so this gets us to a new term, what they call decolonizing the data.
And we've learned this from Abigail EchoHawk and Esther Lucero about what that means.
And what I've learned that that means is engaging with the community, believing the community, having law enforcement identify when women are native and contacting tribal communities.
But what I'm hoping with this legislation, I'm really excited and emotional about it because we've been working with the mayor, we've been working with Chief Best, the King County Prosecutor's Office, and Attorney Pete Holmes, or City Attorney Pete Holmes, is that this legislation is going to start, kick off the ordinances to actually hire, to have an actual person whose job it is, is to work within the city, the county, Seattle Indian Health Board, people with subject matter expertise to identify those women that have gone missing and murdered.
And if I can just say this on a short note, what I've learned about us being invisible and this movement to not be invisible is we're seeing this everywhere.
And what I'm most proud of is that Native American women everywhere have galvanized and pulled together.
But we actually are going to commit dollars and money and time so Seattle doesn't have this unfortunate reputation as the number one city in the country that has the most missing murdered indigenous women.
And we want to move away from that invisibility.
Thank you very much for that.
And Teresa, if I could, I wanted to touch again on the Green New Deal because it's another issue with a really broad scope that I know the council is trying to focus on here.
So the council just passed this non-binding resolution with a lot of different goals, free public transportation possibly, eliminating carbon pollution, progressive revenue sources to make it all happen.
What results are we going to see out of this?
Why is this important?
Well, first, I just want to thank and acknowledge all the work that Councilmember Juarez has done with the work on missing murdered and indigenous women.
I feel like this is a public health issue that you are helping to bring to light.
And much of what we're trying to do in the world of public service is to try to create healthier communities.
You can't be healthy if you're being targeted and are in the shadows and not even being counted sometimes.
And so I say that as a segue to the work that we're trying to do on the Green New Deal, too.
This isn't just about an economic stimulus.
This is about public health.
There are folks who are living in zip codes where you can tell just by their zip codes what their life expectancy will be and how healthy their kiddos will be.
And so for us, as we talk about the Green New Deal, it's not a slogan, it's not a bumper sticker.
The comprehensive proposal that we have in front of us is very detailed.
We're talking about retraining folks for new green jobs in the green economy.
We're talking about making sure that we're creating affordable housing across the city because right now we're the third largest mega commuter city in the entire country, meaning people are commuting two and three hours a day just to get to work.
We have to create more dense opportunities.
We're talking about renewable energy and upgrading our buildings using good union jobs in our building trade sector to make sure that our buildings are retrofitted.
We started some of that last year with Seattle City Light.
We can do more to create greater energy efficiency buildings and decarbonize our efforts right here in Seattle.
And overall, we're also trying to make sure that our transit infrastructure is more accessible so that people get out of their cars.
These are just elements that you'll see.
And Seattle SCC did a really great comprehensive study.
It's two pages of bullets just on the components that we have included.
But in all of this, I just don't want to lose the racial justice and gender justice elements.
We talk a lot about economic justice and environmental justice.
But as we push forward a Green New Deal, we have to make sure that those who are, again, doing the least to contribute to climate change are centered in our conversation.
And that means looking at this through a racial justice lens and a gender justice lens as well.
Thank you, Lisa.
Yeah, I just want to add, I think it's really important that we have this legislation to sort of serve as our North Star.
But another reason why I think it's so important that this conversation be led by lived communities, impacted communities, people with lived experiences, is because we've just passed a resolution.
It's a resolution with a couple dozen different actions.
It is those actions that are going to be very, very difficult and contentious.
We're talking about new regulations, things that are gonna cost money.
And we need those impacted individuals at the front lines pushing us as a council to pass those laws that will come after to implement the Green New Deal for Seattle.
Because there's going to be incredible opposition to many of the things.
I'm working on trying to do a really small thing, which is require apartment buildings to have access to compost and recycling on each floor.
And I'm getting a lot of resistance.
So even these little things that we want to do that are so important are going to be very contentious.
And so we really need people pushing us and people with these impacted existences from lack of addressing climate change.
Thank you for this.
We're right at the end of this show.
I need to do the 10-second version if we can wrap up.
I'm not going to be able to visit with you, I don't think, before the budget process starts up this fall.
Some top priorities for you, if you wouldn't mind giving me the 10-second version?
You know, I think, like I said earlier, we've made, between the sugary beverage tax commitments as well as the commitments around living cost of living increases for human services providers.
We've already made about $9 million in budget commitments.
So we're not going to have a whole lot of wiggle room.
One of the things I know I'm really excited about is that Real Change is going to be kicking off an everyone poos campaign so that we can be focused on funding more hygiene options.
throughout Seattle, whether or not that means opening more of our community centers for bathrooms and showers or having mobile hygiene stations.
These are all really important priorities.
Thanks.
If you can try to keep it short, Deborah, please.
Yes, I will.
Just because we don't have a lot of time.
I actually have a lot, but I'll just be quick.
Right now, it's mainly focusing on our community centers along Aurora and looking at a feasibility study for the Licton Springs neighborhood that has never had a grocery store or a community center.
Locking down our social service organizations for the shelter in the unsheltered and our food banks And then we have some other issues centered around public health and public safety.
Okay, Teresa I know top priority is having healthy child come your way in October and we're all on board with that Looking forward to that, but some of your priorities looking
This year and the fall we're poised to enhance some labor protections for hotel workers.
My priority in the upcoming budget is going to be to really make sure that the Office of Labor Standards has stable funding.
We got about five new FTEs last year between the mayor's contributions and the council's.
Would love to see those maintained and if there's any enhancements possible.
We know that we're doing a lot in the city of Seattle to lead by example for the nation on labor standards, so that office is critically important for education for business owners as well as the workers themselves, so that's a big priority.
Thank you very much, all of you, and we will see you next time on Council Edition.