Sustainability, City Light, Arts and Culture Committee 2162024

The February 16th, 2024 meeting of the Sustainability City Light Arts and Culture Committee will come to order.

It is now 9.31 a.m.

I'm Tanya Wu, chair of the Sustainability City Light Arts and Culture Committee.

I note that Councilmember Morales is excused from today's meeting.

Will the committee clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Moore?

Present.

Council Member Saka?

Here.

Council Member Strauss?

Present.

Chair Wu?

Present.

Chair, there are four members present.

Thank you.

If there are no objections, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

So I wanted to welcome everyone to today's first of the year Sustainability City Light Arts and Culture Committee meeting.

As we embark on this journey together, our first order of business is to hear introductory overviews from each department represented in this committee.

So these initial presentations provide us with a bird's eye view of the essential functions and priorities of each department, yet this is not you know, the entirety of the work ahead.

I anticipate that we will reconvene with many of these departments for more detailed briefings as we delve deeper into issues at hand.

So there's no shortage of work before us, but before we are committed to rolling up our sleeves and tackling them head on, we will hear public comment.

So we will now open the hybrid public comment period.

Public comment should relate to the purview of this committee.

Clerk, how many speakers are signed up for today?

Currently, we have three in-person speakers signed up, and there are two remote virtual public commenters.

Awesome.

Each speaker will have two minutes.

We will start with the in-person speakers before moving on to the remote speakers.

Each speaker will hear a chime within 10 seconds of their time, and at that time is up, speakers' mics will be muted, and their comments will conclude.

So the public comment period is now open.

We will begin with the first speaker on the list.

The first in-person speaker is Mari Moore-Schuler, followed by John Cheney.

to you today about a part of Seattle culture that you may not be familiar with.

We live in marinas on the water alongside sailboats and motorboats.

At Shilshole Marina, for example, there are hundreds of liveaboards people who live on their boats.

In Lake Union, the Ship Canal, the Duwamish River, Portage Bay, Seattle not only enjoys boat yards, rowing clubs, and beautiful floating home communities, but also a colorful little houseboat community now called floating on water residences.

The state legislature protected us as being culturally important to Washington State.

This is our fleet, its small footprint, more affordable houseboats tucked into private marinas right alongside sailboats and boats.

We care deeply about the water quality in the city of Seattle, and we watch over the marinas 24 seven for safety and security.

We are part of the culture of Seattle as we have been since just after the Denny party settled on Alki Beach almost 200 years ago.

As the council considers the update to the shoreline management plan this year, please consider letting us take each of you on a personal boat tour to experience Maritime Seattle.

Certainly we hope this committee will keep in mind and honor the vital liveaboard community in our city.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Up next is John Chaney, followed by Lynn Reister.

Re-elected, elected, appointed, and here you go on a great ride.

I'm here to talk about maritime culture.

My name is John Chaney.

My partner and I live aboard the houseboat Hadrian on Salmon Bay.

It was built in Seattle.

It was built by Seattle Shipwrights.

It is maintained by Seattle workers.

It is a part of the Seattle culture.

We're part of what I consider the significant, historically and culturally significant Seattle community that lives on the water.

We're old pensioners like many of my neighbors.

We all respect the water environment and live very sustainable, small footprint lives.

We're part of the unique cultures of Seattle.

I hope you will always look at issues impacting our small community with our cultural values in mind.

We deserve your recognition and cultural protection as unique living on the water communities.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

The next in-person speaker is Lynn Reister.

My name is Lynn Reister.

I live on the water on a houseboat that I built at the Voss Maritime Yard, and I live on the East Lake side.

I've been thickly involved in the culture on the water, not only with our floating on water residences, but with the boats.

I serve the community as a marine inspector and a marine surveyor and handling claims on the waterfront for accidents that happen.

Not many of us ever get an opportunity to be on the water and so in taking you out on a boat to show you what the water's like, it would be a nice thing to do.

We do and are part of the culture of the city.

People come and say, oh, you live on a houseboat.

Oh, we always want to see those.

And that's what the tour boats are going out to see.

So it's an important part of a culture here.

And it has been for many, many years, as Maury said.

So one of the things that we do when we build our houseboats or when I inspect the houseboats, it's an educational program or opportunity.

for people who are going to come to live on the water to know how to care for the water because it's a different kind of life.

And so we take care of the environment and we are conscious of the environment all the time and everything we do with our, anything we put overboard like gray water, We contain that, we wipe our dishes down, and then we wash them.

No grease or oil goes in the lake.

So I wish you to have an opportunity to go see those unique living places on the water.

Consider us as an important part of the culture of Seattle.

Thank you.

That is the last in-person public commenter.

We will now move to remote public comment.

The first virtual public commenter is Michelle Germarco.

Please press star six when you hear the prompt of you have been unmuted.

My name is Michelle Germarco, and I am lucky to live aboard the houseboat Wayward at Salmon Bay Marina on the ship canal near Fisherman's Terminal.

It was built and is maintained here in Seattle.

My 1976 water home is older than me, but it is small and very efficient.

I am a steward and advocate for the waterway and wildlife that comprise my neighborhood.

I use my kayak to grocery shop, run errands, clean trash from our urban shores, and sometimes even commute.

A luxury that is very uniquely Seattle.

Our houseboat community is part of the historic Maritime culture of Seattle and deserves cultural protection.

Please help us continue as a quintessential part of Seattle's culture.

Thank you.

The next virtual public commenter is David Haines.

David please press star six when you hear the prompt of you have been unmuted.

Hi, thank you.

David Haynes.

Is it sustainable to let industrial trains to honk every six feet as if that's the extent of deregulated safety bothering everyone within years?

All the fresh air at the waterfront and making a lot of noise when passing the Mariners Stadium after the train passes Mariners games, there are all kinds of mental errors committed by both baseball teams.

David, you're cutting in and out, are you still there?

David, are you there?

It looks like we've lost David.

Chair, there are no additional registered speakers.

We will now proceed to our items of business.

I want to encourage David and members of the public to either submit written public comments.

You could do that in the sign up cards here if you're in person or to email us at councilatseattle.gov.

Okay, we will now move on to our first item of business.

Will the clerk please read item one into the record?

Agenda item number one, Office of Sustainability and Environment Overview.

Thank you.

Will our presenters please join us at the table and share your presentation?

Once ready, please introduce yourselves and begin.

I also ask my colleagues to save all your questions to the end of the presentation.

Thank you.

Okay, good morning, Council Members, Madam Chair.

I am delighted to be here today.

My name is Jessen Farrell, and I am the Director of the Office of Sustainability and Environment.

And I'm going to be running through a short presentation that I believe should be appearing on the screen any moment.

Or do we load our own?

Right here?

Ah, here it is.

There we go.

Okay.

Oh, okay.

And then do I just cancel?

Okay, and we are ready to go.

So good morning, thank you so much.

So I'm gonna run through some slides about Office of Sustainability and Environment, also known as OSE.

So of course, this first picture that you see is several iconic images of the city of Seattle.

You see the mountains, the sound, the greenery.

Our natural environment is part of our identity.

It's part of our global brand.

It's one of the things that bring people here, bring companies here, and compel us to stay.

It's something that we're so proud about of our city.

And of course, we're in the midst of a climate crisis.

This is a picture of the smoke that many of us have experienced.

And it's not just smoke, it is heat, it is flood, and of course we know that there are parts, members of our community who are, while climate change affects all of us, there are members of our community who are facing the burdens more.

Primarily black, indigenous, people of color, low income, elderly people in our community are suffering more in events like this.

And so this is where the Office of Sustainability and Environment comes in.

Our mission is to ensure a clean and healthy environment for every single member of our community.

And we prioritize those who are currently and historically harmed by racial, economic and environmental injustice.

And so we work as cross-departmental collaborators, innovators.

We drive the city's policy on the environment.

And I look forward to digging in a little bit today.

Mayor Harrell has been a champion of climate action, and we are working to implement his One Seattle Climate Justice Agenda.

And the good news is we actually know what works to address the climate crisis.

And so we are working as fast as we can to, number one, reduce climate pollution through our buildings and transportation.

Our partners, Seattle City Light, are here today, and we're very lucky to have such a national leader on providing clean energy in a city-owned utility.

Number two, we are working to ensure that we have an inclusive climate workforce.

There's this massive economic transformation that's taking place, and we not only, one, need the workers to be able to do this green economic work, but we also want to make sure that people are able to share in the prosperity broadly.

And then finally, climate change is upon us, and so we are working to make sure that communities are resilient in the face of climate events.

And so I'm going to dig into what this actually means.

So you have our core services in front of you, and I'll just do a couple of highlights, and I hope that I can come back and dig in more.

So relating to climate justice, of course, I mentioned that we're all bearing and feeling the burden of climate change, but there are some among us who are really feeling it more than others.

One of the things we're doing to mitigate that and that you might be hearing from your constituents is OSE is creating a network, a plan, for a network of resilience hubs.

And these are places, trusted community places like libraries or churches or community centers where people can go in a climate emergency, a place where you can get access to cool, clean air, emergency services, et cetera.

And so we're putting together that plan and we'll be able to present that to you at the end of this year.

We are working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Again, transportation, buildings, One of the programs that your constituents may be partaking in or interested in is our clean heat program.

This is where we're targeting all of our oil heated homes in the city of Seattle.

There are about 8000 and we're providing incentives or an actual free heat pump to folks so that they have access to that cool, clean air in their home and reduced climate emissions that go with it.

And then to invest in community resilience, there are two other programs that I'd like to highlight.

We drive the city's food policy.

And another program that your constituents probably have heard of or partake in is the city's Fresh Bucks program.

And that is a program that 12,000 people across the city have access to a fresh food benefit where you can go get fresh fruits and vegetables at partner retailers like Safeway or farmer's markets.

And this is a really important benefit for folks who are facing food insecurity.

And then finally, a topic that I know everyone pays attention to is how do we protect our city's tree canopy and urban forests?

And so one of the things that OSC does is we conduct our city's canopy assessment every five years.

And one of the things that we learned from this past assessment is that we're slowly losing ground.

And so I would love to come present deeply the data and we'll talk a little bit more about what we found through that process.

But that's one of the core things we do.

And then we help drive the city's investments to ensure that we're moving towards reaching our canopy cover goals.

We also support three boards and commissions.

So one of them is the Green New Deal Oversight Board.

That board reports to this committee and they provide recommendations on climate justice investments and policies.

We also support our city's Urban Forestry Commission.

And interestingly, they report to the Land Use Committee, but I know you will be hearing from them.

and they provide recommendations on urban forestry policy and budget.

And then finally, the Sweetened Beverage Tax Community Advisory Board provides recommendations on food policy and investments, and they report to the Finance Committee.

So now I'm gonna talk a little bit about OSC's operations.

We are a relatively small office, but we think we have a big impact and wanna talk a little bit about that.

So by the numbers, our budget in 2024 is about $30 million.

And that comes from three primary sources.

We get about 25% of it from the general fund Twenty percent is the sweetened beverage tax, and that funds our food programming.

And then payroll expense tax is about 55 percent, 56 percent, and that funds most of our climate investments.

We are lean and mean with a 10 percent administrative rate, and so the vast majority of our dollars go into direct program investments.

The other thing I'd like to highlight is we are in the midst of a historic moment in terms of state and federal funding.

And we are working aggressively to go after dollars from the IRA, Biden's signature, President Biden's signature legislation, as well as the Climate Commitment Act.

In 2023, we were successful in bringing in $16 million, primarily for urban forestry investments.

We are working across departments to currently seek $90 million.

So there is this really important moment, and we are taking it.

And I think the only other thing I'd like to make a point about with this is one of the reasons we're so well positioned to compete nationally and across the state is because we have shovel-ready programs that are up and running and that we can show work and are effective.

So there are a lot of things I'd love to highlight about our work in 2023, but I'm going to focus just on one, which is the legislation that Mayor Harrell spearheaded on building emissions performance standards.

So this is a regulation that will require 4000 of our largest buildings to decarbonize by 2050. This is a huge step from a climate standpoint.

It will reduce our city's emissions by 10 percent.

And thank you to Councilmember Strauss for his vote and for other members who made this happen last year.

It's a really big effort and our City Light partners were really integral to making this happen too.

There are many other things that we're proud of, particularly our workforce investments now that we are transitioning to a clean energy economy.

We need the folks to do it, so we're working closely with our labor partners, our colleges, to make sure we have the workforce.

And we received $12 million from the USDA to implement urban forestry, primarily in CID and Beacon Hill.

Okay, so now I'm going to talk a little bit about how we do our work and how we prioritize investments.

So the focus of these next slides are data and equity, and I'm going to walk you through a few data visualizations that help us determine how we're going to invest in our work.

Okay, so what you see before you is one of the maps that we created as part of our tree canopy assessment.

And the headline from that assessment, of course, is that we're slowly losing ground.

But one of the things that really became clear through our canopy assessment is there are some parts of our community that not only started with less urban canopy, but actually lost more on a percentage basis in this last five years.

And those were primarily those neighborhoods that are environmentally justice impacted communities like CID, like Georgetown.

like Lake City.

And so those findings are really helping us focus our next set of investments, and that is a lot of what drove the $12 million investments that we're getting from the federal government.

Okay, so this is another example of the way we use data and depict data.

This is a public-facing snapshot of our One Seattle climate portal, and this is a place-based depiction of where our emissions come from from transportation.

And so we conduct the city's greenhouse gas emissions inventory every two years.

This is a year where we're going to be reporting back to you how we're doing.

And then we use that data to look at place based emissions.

And this helps drive some of our policy investments.

So, for example, we know our port adjacent neighbors in South Park, for example, are really impacted by transportation emissions or are I-5 adjacent neighbors like folks in CID or Beacon Hill.

And so that data helps inform where we're prioritizing transportation electrification, for example.

This is an internal facing slide.

We run the city's Fresh Bucks program, as I mentioned, and we work really hard to make sure that customers are utilizing their benefits.

There are 12,000 folks who receive benefits.

We have a 91% usage rate, which we're proud of, but we know we can always be doing better.

And so we monitor our strategies monthly and refine them to make sure that as many people are using this benefit as possible.

And then finally, this is a very busy slide.

This is another public facing slide.

What you have here, each of these dots represent buildings that are required to benchmark energy usage and are also going to be regulated under building emissions performance standards.

And so what you can do is you can scroll over each one of these dots and look at what that building's energy profile is.

And this is really important because we need that baseline knowledge to be able to work with building owners to get to net zero emissions by 2050. And so this is just a way that we're sharing the data publicly, but also building owners are able to use it.

So in addition to data, because working on climate is a holistic issue, it's an issue that's cross-cutting, we work closely with other departments and closely with community and businesses.

So these next few slides are a little bit about some of our partnerships.

One of the things I'd like to highlight is how we direct and lead climate resilience and action across departments.

Some of you may be familiar with our Duwamish Valley work.

Five years ago, OSC led a comprehensive process to create the Duwamish Valley Action Plan, and we're celebrating the five year anniversary of that in 2023. And this is 50 near-term actions, accomplishments that our partner departments like SPU, SEL can take to help create an environmentally healthy community.

So that's an example of that.

I'd also like to spotlight our deep partnership with City Light.

As we were designing building emissions performance standards, OSC led on the program design, but there are big implications for customer usage of City Light services for the grid, and so we partnered deeply to make sure that our program was complementary to what they do.

There are a whole bunch of other ways we partner.

They're all on bullets, and we'll come back and talk more about that at another time, I'm sure.

And then environmental justice fundamentally is community-driven, and so we work closely with community partners, business partners.

You can see a picture of some drayage truck drivers.

Drayage trucks, of course, are those trucks that haul freight from the port to logistics centers, and there are neighborhoods that are really impacted by that.

We're working with dredge truck drivers to electrify those trucks because of the air quality impacts, particularly in neighborhoods that are port adjacent, like South Park and Georgetown.

And so all of this data, partnerships, equity has really positioned Seattle as a national and global leader on climate and environmental issues.

For example, Newsweek featured Seattle last fall, saying the future is Seattle, highlighting our climate work.

Bloomberg Media is hosting its first ever green festival in July, highlighting our sustainability partners in the private sector and in the public sector.

We have the benefit of being able to partake in many national and international networks.

You may be familiar with the C40 network, which was founded by Mayor Bloomberg after he left office because climate action really is now at the local level.

And so we get to use those resources and and that network to promote leadership.

And then, of course, FIFA is highlighting and really centralizing the sustainability work that Seattle is doing.

And that will be a key part of their public facing communications when 60% of the world's eyes are on the city, including our sustainability work.

So looking ahead to 2024, there are a number of items that we will look forward to sharing with you, working in partnership with you on.

So now that we've passed building emissions performance standards, we are undergoing a rulemaking.

We would love to come back and talk to you about what that looks like.

I talked a little bit about the canopy assessment that we've conducted.

We are now drafting a canopy equity plan to drive investments in those neighborhoods that are under-resourced, and we are going to be launching the $12 million grant that I mentioned this year, this fall.

We are publishing our greenhouse gas inventory, so we will want to report on you to you with that, and then a number of other things across our work programs.

And then, of course, hustling really hard to bring in state, federal, and philanthropic funding.

So I am going to leave us with a video that C40 helped produce.

They brought in outside funding.

So the city didn't pay for this, but this is an example of the way some of our partners support our work.

And this highlights our climate workforce investments.

And unmuted.

Make sure.

OK.

Take me to eat.

Wait, do I start like this and then click it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Hi, welcome.

Hi.

How are you today?

Good, how are you?

This is Yaharia.

She's a construction apprentice as part of Seattle's Green New Deal program.

I got enrolled and I fell in love with carpentry.

Ever since then, I just stuck to it.

I love working in construction because I've always been a hands-on learner.

A year ago I couldn't even nail the nails, so now I'm like laying out bolts that are the foundation of the building.

I love it.

My name is Bruce Harrell and I'm the 57th mayor of this great city of Seattle.

cities like seattle are taking ambitious steps to tackle climate action because let's be honest cities are responsible for more than 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions with transport and buildings being among the largest contributors that was a mouthful man

as an environmental leader in this city and realizing the level of emissions that these buildings are putting out, that it's almost a living, breathing kind of entity, and we have to make sure that it lives and breathes cleanly.

Therein lies the challenge and the opportunity.

An opportunity for creating green jobs and bridging the skills gap.

A lot of these younger folks that are looking for their roads, the road could lead into the green economy.

And so youth employment fits into all of that.

And that's why I'm so passionate about getting youth from all backgrounds to be here.

Green jobs are so important for cities to reduce their emissions, meet climate targets, and also improve the quality of life for its residents.

I didn't go to college.

I wanted a job that helped people.

I chose a great company because I get to build schools for kids.

The school that we're building actually has solar panels.

It's better for the environment.

It's a wonderful experience when people start to enjoy doing good.

And in this process, they realize I'm saving the planet, I'm impacting people.

And quite honestly, these are good paying jobs as well.

This apprenticeship positively impacted my life because now my mom is able to retire and I get to care for her.

And that's like a really like big dream of mine to have always wanted to care for my mom.

People, I think, particularly this generation, they want to be pulled into something that they get fulfillment out of.

You're walking on this earth day to day.

Don't you want it to be the best it can be?

Stop there.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

That is so dear.

Now we're...

So...

Just mute it.

Mute it, maybe.

Okay.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

So that is an actual participant in one of our workforce programs.

So we're very excited about that.

And so that wraps wraps up my presentation.

I'm really looking forward to working with in partnership with each one of you and being able to bring back more information about our work.

So again, thank you so much for your time.

And I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you.

Are there any questions?

Looks like Councilmember

I'll bring up the rear.

Okay, okay.

If you insist.

Okay, so, Director Farrell, thank you so much for this rather insightful presentation and overview of the terrific work you and folks at OSC do every day to help us be big, bold, ambitious, and ultimately achieve our climate goals amongst other things.

So really, really appreciate it.

And some of the work in particular in the Duwamish Valley, I represent Georgetown and South Park.

So it's near and dear to me personally.

Just curious.

So I am the chair of the Transportation Committee at the council.

And one of the things that we're exploring is how we can add, additional EV charging infrastructure.

And, you know, I don't know if single occupancy vehicles are going away anytime soon.

I think it said the focus should be on clean energy and making sure, you know, we preserve and expand multimodal forms of transportation.

But I've learned and I saw some data that suggests that certain communities, namely West Seattle, in broader Seattle has one of the highest concentrations of EV ownership, but I think if we make it easier for people to charge, and I know there's a lot of money potentially available from state and federal partners, which is great, doesn't absolve us of our responsibility to self-invest either, but All that is to say, Director Farrell, just curious to hear from your perspective, what role does adding EV charging infrastructure play, if any, in helping our city achieve our very ambitious climate goals?

Yeah, that's a great question.

Thank you so much, Council Member Saka.

We are really focused on increasing the uptake of EV chargers to reach our climate goals, which are really aggressive, and to reach the mandate where the governor has said there will be no more gas-powered cars sold in 2035. We have to get to a place where everyone has access to an EV.

Who wants one?

And of course, we have to continue to invest in those options to get people out of their cars too.

but they have to work really hand in hand.

And so OSC's role in partnership with City Light and SDOT, we have created a transportation electrification blueprint, which we can come and present on, which really kind of lays out the roadmap, so to speak, of how we're actually going to get there.

And it's not just electrifying you know, personal vehicles.

It's how do we do drayage trucks?

It's how do we do delivery vehicles?

How are we working with small business owners?

What are the barriers?

So we are launching, like I said, a drayage truck incentive pilot to help work with particularly immigrant and refugee truck drivers to get access to electric trucks.

They're very expensive.

We are also starting to kick off work to help small business owners electrify deliveries.

So the personal vehicle piece is really, really important.

And City Light and SDOT are going to be working to scale that.

And then we're working to do some of these pilots on those harder to electrify populations, piloting and then scaling.

And that's really kind of the way we think about that work.

Thank you.

And just a quick follow up.

So I've taken a tour of the port, including the port.

where the cargo containers are offloaded onto the drayage trucks.

I've seen those operations firsthand.

Would be curious to learn the status of our broader efforts to convert as many of the drayage trucks from what they are today to fully electrification, if you will.

It sounds like there are a lot of barriers in terms of cost.

I can't imagine there are a ton of manufacturers in that drayage truck space.

But yeah, where are we at currently?

And do we have any specific timeline goal into bringing that more to life?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So the way OSD typically works, again, is we run a lot of pilots.

And then we work to move them to another department or entity to scale.

And so in this space, because the port and because drayage trucks are a regional issue, the goal is to move this program over to the Northwest Seaport Alliance to ultimately scale.

So there are 4,000 drayage trucks.

We're working really hard to get in place some of these early adopters, and then we will be transitioning, scaling the program to them.

And so we're working really closely with our partners there to do that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Moore.

Yeah, go, go, go, go.

You sure?

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Thank you.

Thank you, Director Farrell.

This was very informative and very exciting, actually.

I'm really looking forward to working with you on your 2024 top priorities.

I had a couple of questions relating to the Canopy Equity Plan, and I was wondering if you could just flesh that out a little bit more.

Sure.

So big picture, the canopy cover assessment is what is it uses LIDAR technology.

So basically drones to kind of take a picture of what happened to canopy over a five year period.

And so there were a number of things that we found in the canopy cover assessment.

We are losing ground slowly in a lot of different ways, but one of the things that really stuck out was how we're losing canopy in neighborhoods that already have underinvestment.

And one of the things I like to think about trees is they actually are infrastructure.

They provide a lot of benefits, environmental benefits, cooling benefits, et cetera.

And so the canopy equity plan is going to take the data that we used and go deeper to look at like what specific sites are there schools that we should be partnering with?

Are there specific streets that are particularly under canopied?

And again, the neighborhoods that we're focusing on are CID, Georgetown, Rainier Valley, Lake City, North Aurora.

There are some places that we know are under canopied and that's really gonna be the focus of the tree equity plan.

And then concurrent with that, because we did this great data, we were successful in getting significant federal funding to do some early action investments, particularly in CID and Beacon Hill, as I mentioned.

Is that the $12.9 million from USDA?

Yeah.

And is that going to be utilized to plant trees?

I mean, are there other actions in addition to planting trees?

Yeah, so the primary focus of that is twofold.

One, to plant trees, and then there's maintenance money built into it.

Because you can plant a tree, but then if you walk away, it's probably going to die, right?

So we built in five years of maintenance funding so the trees can get established.

And then there's also workforce development, and Parks is taking the lead on that.

They have a great established program to bring youth into urban forestry, particularly youth of color.

And so those are the two pieces, to actually get trees planted, maintain them, and then to build up the workforce.

Thank you.

And just a few more questions, if I may, Madam Chair.

I noticed that there's a community change grant here for a resilience hub in Lake City.

Is that meaning that Lake City Community Center might be a resilience hub?

Yes.

So the community change grant is a wonderful opportunity through the Biden administration.

We are applying for $20 million in partnership with the Lake City Collective, and our city department partners, because we don't do the big capital implementation.

And so that is going to be a grant that will cover some building decarbonization and upgrades, some transportation electrification, and then also some investments in getting around without a car, because there are a lot of different things in that community that we can bring together holistically to really bring kind of an environmentally sustainable change.

So it's very exciting.

Yes, it is very exciting.

And also, we're going to have housing in addition to a community center.

So I think it's the first of its kind in Seattle.

It's very exciting.

My last question is the food work that you do.

Do you coordinate or what's the intersection between the work that you do and HSD?

Yes, that's a great question.

oversee the city's food policy and the reason why does it fit in the environment the environmental office part of it is that our food systems have a massive impact on sustainability how we produce food where we grow food the food we eat and so we focus on kind of the big picture umbrella of that and then again we run a particular program around access to healthy sustainable food HSD really provides the emergency needs for food.

So the food pantries the you know kind of folks who are really in crisis related to food and access to that whereas we both do kind of more of a policy piece and then access to healthy foods.

Another program we run is a partnership with Seattle Public Schools called Healthy Food in Schools and that's to bring in sustainable culturally relevant scratch cooked food on the food site.

And again there's real sustainability impacts both from an emissions standpoint and a waste standpoint.

So that's why OSC is focused on those.

Excellent.

Thank you very much.

Council Member Strauss.

Yes, may I?

Thank you, Chair Wu.

Colleagues, Director Farrell, always great to see you.

I'm going to just repeat some of the things that you said, which is that you are a small and mighty department.

Maybe not very humble.

I mean, but it's so critical because you have very few employees as compared to other larger departments.

And what you just said is that you are leveraging these other departments by running the pilots that have incredible impact once they are scaled up in other places.

All departments in our city have an impact on the climate crisis, either for better or for worse.

And when I say worse, it's not intentional.

It is the fact that we are in a climate crisis right now.

And if we are not proactively and aggressively addressing climate change, then we are backsliding, right?

And so yours is the only department that is solely focused on the environment in this way.

And when I look at, you know, we're gonna have City Light coming soon, they're addressing climate crisis, buildings, transportation.

I mean, all of our departments have such an impact and Council Member Saka, thank you for bringing up the transportation aspect because Our two largest sources of carbon emissions are transportation and buildings.

Fixing a skyscraper that was built during a time that we were not focused on the climate crisis and transitioning it to being a climate-friendly building is incredibly difficult, expensive, I mean, it's just, to retrofit is so hard, right?

And so you mentioned building performance standards, colleagues, you weren't here for this, but I can tell you, we almost weren't able to pass that bill last year.

And this was a bill that the building owners and the building managers agreed to.

Director Farrell, you helped us negotiate that and get it passed because the passage of that bill was not guaranteed.

And when we're looking at transportation and buildings as being our two largest drivers of carbon emissions and buildings being more difficult to retrofit than new cars that are coming out and new roadways and so on and so forth, I'm just sitting on this moment because it was such a huge lift.

It was not guaranteed.

And you got it across the finish line last year.

Thank you.

The tree canopy assessment really helped us with the tree protection ordinance and the Urban Forestry Commission gave very good advice on how, and there's always more to do.

I will be the first, I said it then, I say it now, there's always more to do.

But that was the first time in our city's history we regulated trees on private property.

And when we saw the amount of trees that were coming down in single family zones and on city owned land, Your work helped us achieve that.

I'll just take my opportunity to plug.

We have arborists in so many different departments in our city.

I think, Council Member Saka, you're gonna hear me use this example so many times.

And I should probably research whether it was a Parks or an SDOT out on Alki, but it was the fact that we've got arborists that are working on trees that aren't in their jurisdiction, and this just doesn't make sense to me.

I would love to see them in your department.

I don't respond now, but I just make that plug.

And then Fresh Bucks, being able to leverage our SNAP programs and be able to deliver more fresh food to the folks that need it most.

When we have the Pike Place Farmers Market here on the City Hall Plaza, it's amazing to watch all of the people who come to use their Fresh Bucks.

You can literally see the line of people using the Fresh Bucks at the Farmers Market.

It's incredible.

And then I guess my last plug here is, Chair Wu, I noticed we have Earth Day on April 22nd.

We have committee here in this committee on April 19th, the Friday before.

Maybe we could do an Earth Day committee.

Because, I mean, the work that you do is so important.

When I talked to former Council President Jim Street, colleagues, you'll see his photo all over the place.

He has really been pushing us to have a select committee on the climate crisis because climate touches every single department.

Without that committee, I'm not here lobbying for that committee or not.

I've thought it was a good idea.

With or without that committee, we have Director Farrell and her small and mighty team doing so much work.

Thank you, Director Farrell.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yes, I agree.

This department's interwoven in so many other departments and really is the base of all of the change that we see.

And so thank you so much for your leadership.

Thank you for your presentation.

And if there are no further questions, we will move on to the next item on our agenda.

Okay, great.

I look forward to working with all of you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We do expect to see you come back again for further briefings.

Clerk, will you please read the next item on our agenda?

Agenda item number two, Seattle City Light Overview.

Great.

So go ahead and join us at the table.

And when you're ready, please begin.

Good morning, Chair Wu, council members.

Great to be here this morning.

My name is Mike Haines.

I'm the interim general manager for Seattle City Light.

And we're going to do a bit of a rapid-fire overview of City Light this morning and hopefully have time to take some questions at the end.

Before we go on, I'll have my colleagues sitting beside me here introduce themselves.

Craig?

Hello, I'm Craig Smith, and I'm the chief customer officer.

Good morning.

Kirstie Granger, chief financial officer.

Maura Brugger, I'm the Director of Government and Legislative Affairs.

So just a short agenda to talk about the journey we're taking today.

We've done our best to kind of consolidate a lot of information into a short amount of time, and hopefully this is informative and generates some interesting questions.

So next slide and another one.

First and foremost, Seattle City Light is one of the largest public power utilities, electric utilities in the country.

And by virtue of that, we have standing with some big players across the country and particularly here in the Northwest where we are the largest public power utility and electric utility in the Northwest.

and growing I would say according to the American Public Power Association you can you can see some of the highlights there on that slide interestingly only one in seven communities is benefits from public power but here in the Northwest it's more like one and two so we're proud of that the Northwest is in a unique position because of a large hydro system, a lot of clean energy, and I'm going to get into some of those specifics as we go through this presentation.

So, next slide.

Just a quick overview about how how our system works.

I call this our water-to-wire graphic, and essentially everything starts up at our dams up at Skagit in the North Cascades and our boundary dam in the North Pend Oreille River just right on the Canadian border.

That water flows through the dams, it generates electricity in the powerhouse by virtue of turning turbines and generators.

It's transformed up to 230,000 volts and goes on to a transmission system that we own for this gadget project and a transmission system that is owned by the Bonneville Power Administration that gets boundary energy over to the city of Seattle for us.

From there, it goes to our major substations throughout our service territory, north and south, and is stepped down to our distribution voltage, which is 26,000 volts.

And from there, it makes it to the customer's homes, either on an overhead service or an underground service.

Next slide.

Our mission is to provide our customers with affordable, reliable, and environmentally responsible energy services.

And we've been steadfast in that mission for quite some time.

In my time here in 24 years, I think it's been very consistently tailored to our environmental stewardship, affordability, and responsibility.

Reliability is also top of mind as we navigate, especially with storms and winter weather and things like that.

Our values, just real quickly, customers first.

We try to advocate for our customers and put them at the top.

We try to be responsive when things are not going quite right for our customers, and we have a dedicated team that that is very responsive, I would say, and taking customers' needs first and taking it very seriously.

Environmental stewardship, I think it goes without saying that City Light has been a leader in the nation and, in fact, in the world on how we've managed our hydro system, how we bring that power to load here in Seattle, and how we manage collectively with departments like OSE and others to make sure that the energy we provide to our households is greenhouse gas neutral.

Equity Community Partners.

We're going to touch on a little bit more on this a little bit later, but we're proud to be a local community-owned utility, and it speaks to the fact that everywhere we go, we're talking to brake payers, and we don't take that lightly.

Our line workers and our people out in the field and all of our service reps take that responsibility very seriously.

Operational and financial stewardship is really all about forward-focused rate-making.

Kirstie's going to talk a little bit more on the deeper dive on the financial picture for the utility and how we are focused on prioritizing our investments and honestly just focused on building a real strong financial foundation for the city of Seattle and for the utility in particular.

And safe and engaged employees is one that's first and foremost for me, is just making sure that we're providing a workforce that's accessible, a workforce that's equitable, a workforce that has a safe place to come to work every day.

They're going to be supported by the utility and by their management team.

It's something we take very seriously through professional development and everything that goes with that.

So, thank you.

Oh, there's a different order.

Fingertip facts is something we publish roughly on an annual basis.

This is just a snapshot of everything that we pay attention to in terms of stats and demographics.

This is one page out of a multi-page fingertip fact document that just gives you data that is, this is, I think, as of 2023, so it's relatively current.

And we're getting close to really close to a million residents served by City Light and electricity services.

And so that's a big deal.

And it's in it, like I said earlier, it is a growing population and we got lots of opportunities for investment and improving our services going forward, okay.

So a little bit on the customer side, we've got, and we talk about customers and residents.

This is about customers, almost 500,000 customers.

Those are basically the number of bills that we receive or that we send out every couple of months.

We serve customers both within the city and also our franchise cities.

Shoreline is the largest, and that also includes Lake Forest Park, Burien, Normandy Park, areas like that, north and south, as well as unincorporated King County.

So our employees at a glance, we're the largest, excuse me, we're the largest city department, I think by head count, roughly 1800 full-time equivalents authorized.

And you can see on the last bullet there, our vacancy rate is running right around 10%.

So that's the skillset that we're working with.

We're super proud of the fact that 80% of our skilled trades are part of, apprenticeship program that includes line workers, station electricians, includes carpenters, like you saw in the video.

And so we're really proud of our apprenticeship training program.

And as of late last year, the average age in utility is 47. That was a bit of a shocker to me.

Not that long ago, I think it was 55. So we're heading in the right direction, and that's good for sustainability going forward, and retention is always important for us to pay attention to as well.

Next slide.

So our six-year strategic plan is something that we're actually in the midst of right now and updating a strategic plan that will take us from 2025 through 2030. You all will see a presentation on that later this year.

That's a key component of work that is done by our nine-member advisory panel, which is called the City Light Review Board or Review Panel.

That review panel was created in 2010, and it stands to represent customers, industrial, commercial, residential, low-income, as well as utility experts informed in the industry and participating in the industry that we meet with once a month to get guidance, provide updates on the status of the utility, and then they, in turn, help guide us through the strategic planning process with a lot of work from our staff.

And like I said, we'll be back talking about that in a few months.

Yeah, I think that's it.

Let's see, so speaking of the strategic plan, there's five core disciplines that we focus on.

Customer experience, our energy future, workforce organizational agility, financial health and affordability, and then what we call WePower.

Customer experience is just what it says, integrating the voice of the customer.

We're taking that seriously, and Craig's team is acutely focused on that.

Energy future is about kind of the utility and export portfolio, the grid modernization, things that you might be hearing about and what you'll be learning about from us over the course of the next year.

improvements to our distribution system to accept new technologies to keep up with electric infrastructure, EV chargers and the like that are coming towards us.

Workforce is all about change management, professional development and things like that.

And then we power is really just focused on kind of core business, doing what we do, keeping the lights on, making sure our investments are going in the right place, making sure we're maintaining our infrastructure.

And with that, I'm gonna take a breath and let Kirstie talk about some finances.

Great, thank you.

So as Mike mentioned, we'll be bringing our strategic plan update to you later this year, and that is what we use to develop our budget, which is coming as well later this year.

So City Light's adopted budget is in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion, which is a big number.

You'll see that from the orange and the red part of this pie chart, almost half of our budget is about building and maintaining infrastructure, which, as you can imagine, electric utility, it's a big part of what we do.

So our capital program and then the principal and interest payments on the capital program of the past that we funded with bonds that we pay over time.

Also, in addition to the power that we produce with our hydroelectric dams, we also buy a fair bit a bit of power from the Bonneville Power Administration.

We're active in the wholesale market, buying and selling power all the time to balance our supplies and our demand on a real-time basis.

And so you see in the blue wedge there, purchase power makes up a big part of our budget as well.

You can see their taxes.

We pay a 6% utility tax into the city's general fund.

So we are a source of revenue for the city's general fund.

And then the controllable O&M portion, which is a little over a quarter, makes up everything else.

And so if you can imagine all of our customer service, our day-to-day operations, our program development, all of that fits into the green and the purple wedges that you see there.

And then city services, we have them a number of partnerships and services that we receive from other city departments.

And so $89 million of our budget goes to other city departments that we work with.

On the revenue side, you can see here that retail revenue makes up most of our revenue sources.

And as I mentioned, we fund a lot of our capital work with bonds.

And then there's some wholesale power.

But, you know, really the takeaway here is that at the end of the day, even everything is funded by our customers' utility bills.

revenues from those.

We exist to serve the customers.

And at the end of the day, that's where all of our revenue comes from.

We are not tax-funded.

Grants make up a relatively small but growing portion of our revenue source, but that's buried in that orange wedge right there.

But we are a revenue-funded department.

All right, I'm moving quickly.

We got 37 slides.

We're just gonna keep it going.

But this is...

I'll pause here because this is a pretty big deal.

So this is our new retail load outlook.

And this is really different than what we had in our last strategic plan.

And, you know, it evidences some...

good news from addressing climate change, from decarbonization, and that through the policy work that we're doing and advancing things in the city of Seattle, things look really good.

in that we are anticipating a lot more electricity demand, which is building electrification, transportation electrification.

So it's all good news.

For City Light also, this means we have some work to do in that there are some things that we're in the future, where the future is going to be now, and in the next six years, planning horizon for our strategic plan.

And so this is something that you'll be hearing about from us later this year as we move to...

deliver our strategic plan to and our budget as well.

Because the blue line here showing the increased outlook for demand from our customers is significant.

Speaking of our customers, so this shows our retail mix.

Seattle is fortunate, the Seattle City Light is fortunate in that we have a really diverse mix of customers.

It's part industrial, a little over half commercial, and then about a little over a third residential.

You can see there that our largest two customers are really different, the University of Washington and the Nucor Steel Mill in West Seattle.

And then you can see there various...

commercial entities that make up the balance of that top 10 right there.

And so you can see kind of a pre-COVID, post-COVID comparison here.

We saw a little increase in residential load.

But from the chart before, you can see that the good news as well is that within Seattle, we've seen the demand for electricity more or less return to pre-pandemic levels, which is good news for the local economy.

Okay, so we're going to dive a little bit into some of the way our system is configured.

We are a hydro utility.

We're blessed with over 2,000 megawatts of hydro that we own.

The balance of what we use to serve our load comes largely from the Bonneville Power Administration, from long-term contracts.

Over 90% of our fuel mix is renewable, clean energy, and the 10% that's not, we offset with purchases of credits and greenhouse gas offsets to maintain that balance and stick within the city guidelines.

And City Light has been greenhouse gas neutral since 2005. Back in that time, we were the very first utility in the country to be able to say that.

Just an anecdote about how we meet new load.

New load is largely met by conservation.

And going forward, it's going to be met with purchases of new renewable energy resources that actually we're negotiating some of those right now and going into the future.

Hey, Chair, Mike, could you pull the mic a little closer?

Sorry.

No problem.

Okay, yeah, so next slide.

So our hydro system is, like I said, a little over 2,000 megawatts.

The largest project is in Northeast Washington State.

That's our boundary project.

It was installed in 1967. That project is integral to how we follow load just because of its size and the fact that there's six machines there.

We have a lot of flexibility with that particular project.

Ross, Powerhouse, Diablo, and Gorge make up our Skagit River project.

It's currently under relicensing, so that's another conversation we're going to have later this year, just in terms of the scope and scale of what it takes to license a hydro project through the Federal Regulatory Commission and the process that goes along with that.

Yeah, I think in addition to the schedule of re-licensing, we just kicked off re-licensing activities for the South Fort Tolk Project, which you'll also be hearing about.

That's a co-project that we operate in concert with SPU.

They're the water provider.

That's a water supply project.

And we added hydro to that project back in 1995. So that project is also in the federal process.

Next slide.

So in terms of planning for the future, we're focused on the grid.

Like I mentioned earlier, maintaining our existing infrastructure is a big deal.

It's hard to keep up.

Some of the main issues that you likely will hear about are related to streetlights, our joint use program, which is wireless, wireline, everything that impacts and serves broadband in this community and other places.

And then our advanced metering infrastructure deployment is an active project that's been underway for quite some time.

Craig's team is focused on kind of the next wave of what that program will look like now that a large majority of our customers are on advanced meters.

There's just ongoing maintenance of that and then kind of leveraging new technologies as we go forward.

And then new customer connections is going to be a topic of conversation, I suspect.

Council Member Moore, I know you've heard from some of our customers of late on service reliability, and customer connections is right up there with that.

So it's something we're super focused on, and Craig's team is making process improvements as well as the engineering team to kind of address some of those things.

Climate change.

I think Director Farrell is always a tough act to follow, and she did a super job of kind of establishing the baseline of the foundation.

We're a strong partner with OSC in all things climate, and very proud of that relationship and the work we do collaboratively across the city to make sure that we can remain being a leader, both regionally and nationally.

We're very proud of our standing there.

So our system does have broad impacts.

This picture captures how climate is impacted from our operations at City Light.

Because we're a hydro utility, we're keenly aware of our impacts, not only on the river, but on the everything that surrounds our hydro projects.

We're preparing for a future with less snow and varying seasonality of precipitation events.

And so you can see right now it's a sunny day in February.

We would really like to see a lot more snow coming into the mountains right now.

So we're focused very keenly on that.

It does change how we operate and particularly how we look forward in terms of setting our project up for the next hydrological cycle.

So we just need to continue to adapt.

And this means addressing things like flood protection, like fish, like wildlife, and recreation is also super important to a lot of our projects.

And so all that is kind of a balance that we have to maintain.

all the time as a privilege of operating a hydro system.

I would say Seattle has an aggressive decarbonization goal strategy.

I think Director Farrell did a really good job, like I said, of kind of foundationing or building a foundation of that conversation.

So I'm not gonna read all these bullets today.

But we are working really hard to eliminate radical disparities to achieve racial equity across our service territory, how we deploy, how we make decisions, all those things factor into our infrastructure investments and the strategies that we use, not only for our revenue, but also for the grant funds that come into the utility based on programs of state and federal as well, so.

And I think we've touched on this earlier with OSC's presentation, just to highlight that a big part of what we do is to focus on the impacts of transportation, the impacts of buildings.

And I don't need to speak any more into that because I think that's been talked about.

Let's see.

And how does that play out?

I think Council Member Saka asked about EV charging stations.

I'm just going to jump to the kind of the punchline area.

Just recently, about two weeks ago, the state announced a grant for 5,000 new chargers in Washington state.

And we're proud to say that over 1,500 of those will be in our service to our taste.

So Thanks for the hard work of my staff, of Director Farrell's staff, and others down in Olympia to secure those funds.

Craig, I don't know if you want to touch on that real quick.

Well, that's a big development, because we're going to need a lot of charging.

Between now and 2030, to be on track to hit our goals, we're actually going to need about, we think we'll probably need about 8,000 public charging ports in addition to the in addition to the charging that will need to be built out for fleets and in homes.

But this is a really good sort of first step down payment.

We're going to continue to be engaging with the private market to incentivize them to build out more charging and with a significant focus on making sure that we've got an equitable distribution across the city.

And then City Light, we supplement that a little bit with public charging that we build and own and operate ourselves.

Great.

Thank you, Craig.

And I think this will wrap it up for me.

And I'm just going to highlight the fact that, you know, we're focused on establishing some foundations last year, continuing with the partnership to conversations that Director Farrell and I have talked about this morning.

building off our transportation electrification plan that this body authorized a few years ago and going forward with a building electrification strategic plan that pivots off the building efficiency performance standards that Director Farrell referenced earlier.

So again, very, very much integrated in a One Seattle approach to addressing all the needs of the building community as well.

So we're very excited to be part of that, very excited to be partners across the city.

And with that, I'm gonna take another breath and Maura's gonna bring it home.

Okay, so I am the one who's, I get to work with a great team that we have at Seattle City Council, the central staff, Eric McConaughey, who's not, I don't know if he's in the room or not, but work closely with Eric, who's there in the back, and working now with Murphy in his at least temporary capacity as the clerk.

So we're really proud of the great work we do together.

We have a lot of work we bring forward to this committee because you really serve as our governing board.

And so you're gonna see, a fair amount of, oops, sorry, wrong direction there.

There we go.

So just wanted to go over a couple of items coming up this year.

The first one that I wanted to mention is the clean fuel standards.

The state of Washington was the third state in the country to adopt a low carbon fuel standard to reduce carbon emissions from the transportation sector.

So we'll be bringing forward electric utilities are key in this process, and we'll be bringing forward a plan on behalf of the city on how the credits in this market-based system will be used and invested by the city of Seattle.

Mike mentioned this strategic plan update, and after the plan update in June, we'll be bringing forward a two-year rate ordinance.

We do our rates on a two-year basis, so it'll be 2025, 2026 rates will be coming forward.

In 2023, the state took action on addressing wildfire impacts.

And so there's a wildfire risk reduction plan that is requiring approval of the city council.

We'll be bringing that through later this year.

Mike mentioned the Skagit relicense.

The final license application was submitted to FERC, but the settlement agreements with the various parties, tribes, state and federal agencies will be coming forward to this committee for review and action as well.

Also, our 2024 Integrated Resource Plan, which looks at the long-term resources, resource mix for the utility will be coming forward.

And then the Transportation Electrification Strategic Investment Plan, The state gave utilities the authority to spend ratepayer money investing in beneficial transportation electrification, and that plan needs to come back for review and update.

We had the first plan adopted in 2022. The four-year update's coming before you in 2024. So that's just a quick snapshot of what we hope to bring forward, and each of these will, of course, have a more detailed presentation when we come forward with the legislation.

Thanks, Maura.

Chair Wu, I think that does it for us.

If there's any questions, we'd be happy to take those.

Awesome, thank you.

Councilmembers, any questions?

It looks like Councilmember Saka has a question.

Yeah, thank you.

A comment and then a question.

But first off, thank you so much for...

Love this presentation.

I geek out about this kind of stuff.

I really do.

We're going to get along really well.

What's that?

I said we're going to get along really well.

Yeah, yeah.

No, yeah.

I love this work in part because of the customer focus and nature of the work.

And this is a comment where I just want to share one of my priorities.

you know, for your specific agency is making sure that we relentlessly focus on the customer and particularly residential customers and especially those most at risk.

As we know, it's super unaffordable to live in Seattle today, unfortunately, and it's not just housing costs and it's not just, you know, property taxes.

It's not just increasing cost of food.

It's not just inflation.

It's like...

It's utilities.

And so keeping rates low, again, especially for residential customers and those most at risk and in need is really, really important.

And also just more broadly taking a step back, being laser focused on meeting the unmet, unarticulated needs of our customers.

And so thank you all again.

That's a priority of mine.

And thank you all again for your work in doing this.

I know this is something important to you all.

We have a leader that is your sole job, as I understand it.

But in any event, that's also really important to me.

And I noticed on one of your slides there that Nucor Steel is one of your top customers.

Top two.

And I had the pleasure of, a few months ago, taking a tour of Nucor.

It's in, as you noted, in West Seattle, in my district.

And got to see the hive of activity.

And producing steel is something that is a very...

And then the use of steel, we use steel as a foundation to build many things.

Building is very time-intensive, it's labor-intensive, and producing steel in particular is also a very energy-intensive process, right?

So I was able to observe that firsthand.

And so, and yeah, that's directly in my district.

So as part of our focus on customers, all customers, interested to learn more about interruptible electric rates and demand, including demand response capabilities and agreements, you know, as we continue our journey together here.

So that's a comment.

Question is, with respect to this excellent, excellent electrification state grant funding that we got.

Thank you again, Director Farrell, who's still sitting in the back here for helping to land that here in Seattle.

As I understand it, 1,500 new EV charging stations are going to be here, which is terrific.

I view that personally as sort of the floor, not the ceiling.

And again, that does not absolve us, the city, and multiple agencies.

It's not just the Seattle City Light.

Transportation might be parks.

there's opportunity to add a ton of EV charging infrastructure throughout the city.

And so, but just be curious to learn how you all think about citing for adding EV charging infrastructure, especially with these new 1500, you know, state provided.

And then also with respect to this 1500 bucket, is that, I understand there's three main charging kind of functions for EVs, and the most common is, like, the Type 2 or whatever.

Level 2. Level 2, and then there's the quicker charging, Level 3. Are any of those Level 3 that we're getting?

The majority of them are Level 2, but they're...

I can't quote the exact number, but there's a number of Level 3s that are also being supported.

So...

Yeah, I would say 11 are the fast chargers, the DC fast charger, DCFC as we call them.

There's 11 of those, so like Craig said, the majority are level two chargers.

And I think over 800 of those, we actually partnered with the recipients of those chargers as part of that grant too.

Yeah, I'll just mention, too, as well, 1,292 of the Level 2 are in multifamily housing.

So we partnered with the grant recipients.

We are not going to own and operate those.

They will be owned and operated by the grant recipients, but we partnered with them to make sure that we are able to make the commitments we need to for the service connections and help them fill out their grant applications, so...

And are the grant recipients independent, third-party providers?

Some of them are multifamily housing facilities.

The library got a number of charging stations as well.

There is some private companies, Adopt-A-Charger.

I don't know if Craig's familiar with them, but they got a large number.

Washington Clean and Prosperous was another partner.

And so they've got sites already for those.

There's actually a map that the state has on their website that can show you where those sites are.

So they came in with a site-specific application, and so we already know where they're citing in.

But we are very pleased to be able to partner and to do as well.

To get $1,500 out of $5,000 is a very, very good performance for us here in Seattle.

Thank you.

And so thank you.

I'm taking notes on future briefings and would love to have you come back and brief us further on EV chargers.

Council Member Moore, do you have any questions?

I did.

Thank you very much for this presentation.

And I'm looking forward to Council Member Saka helping me remain enthusiastic about this topic.

I had a question regarding the slide on page 18 where you're talking about new load growth is met with new renewables, energy efficiency, and demand response.

And I was just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on that.

What is contemplated with new renewables?

What exactly is demand response?

So I'll touch on the big picture, which is the new renewables.

So like I mentioned, we are negotiating with providers of solar and wind resources.

Most of that will be in eastern Washington.

So those will be long-term power purchase contracts that will actually probably come back here for final authorization.

And we've identified a need, interestingly enough, for the city of Seattle.

The gap we have to focus on most importantly right now is actually in August, trying to fill some energy gaps in August.

A lot of new AC load coming online here in the city.

We saw that play out last year, and we see that going forward.

So solar and wind, largely in eastern Washington, those are packaged products that will come to us that will include transmission and the like.

And then Craig can talk a little bit more about the rest.

Thank you.

Okay, so...

So energy, as far as the energy efficiency and demand response, those are, you know, programs that we've operated for, particularly on the energy efficiency side.

We've been operating energy efficiency programs for our customers Heck, going back to, I think, 1977. So really long time.

And those programs up to this point have really helped us to sort of offset about 10% cumulatively of the demand on our system.

So we're going to continue to offer energy efficiency programs for residential commercial customers.

You know, more efficient, you know, heating and cooling equipment.

you know, lighting, any end use that you can think of.

If it saves energy, you know, we're going to be incentivizing customers to help us sort of reduce the rate of the load growth.

New construction and existing buildings.

Demand response is a space that we've not done a lot of work in, and so I'm pleased to hear your interest in, and I know we've heard from Nucor their interest in coming up with some sort of an interruptible rate product to help us address times in which we're having to offset demand on our system when the costs are really high, but they're a limited number of hours a year.

And so you can meet that with peaking capacity, or we can work with our customers to reduce demand in those periods.

So we're going to be looking to build out a portfolio of demand response or interruptible or other kinds of flexible load programs.

Another example would be with EV chargers and fleets in particular.

We will be working with folks to implement managed charging programs to affect the time in which incentivize utilization of charging at times when there's, you know, the lowest cost on our system.

So...

Lots of energy efficiency, a lot more, and big growth in demand response.

That's a big growth area for us.

And then the other area that we're going to be working on is customer-owned solar and battery storage.

So...

Thank you.

Thank you.

Greg, you just touched on solar and battery storage.

That wasn't one of my first questions, but let's just keep going down that thread.

Seattle is not known for the sun, even though on February 16th, it is a beautiful sunny day here in the city of Seattle.

Our city of Seattle, as Councilmember Hollingsworth reminds us, How do we capture solar here?

And can you speak a little bit more about the importance of that battery storage?

I'll give you the next teaser of one of my questions of microgrids and the Miller Community Center.

Can you talk some more about this?

Microgrids, and I might talk about the Miller Community Center.

Okay.

But...

So...

You know, over the years, we've relied heavily on basic energy efficiency and central station, you know, power plants, primarily our hydro system, to meet load.

But with the...

you know, growth of new technologies, our system is going to be increasingly relying on, you know, in addition to our hydro system, more distributed sources, you know, like solar, like storage.

We don't have customer storage programs today, but, you know, we're going to be, you know, sort of building out a portfolio of programs to sort of capture solar and to capture solar and then balance that with customer-owned battery storage.

I'm not advantage from answering your question here.

I think that's just, I'll just jump to the point, which is that it's hard to use solar as a dispersed energy source in our home because we don't have as much sun as we might like.

And by holding it in our batteries, whether it's a personal battery storage or if City Light in the future was to have battery storage, we're able to capture that so that we're able to smooth the peaks of demand at certain times reducing our need to purchase more power.

I guess, sorry, I don't work for City Light yet, maybe one day.

I too have a geek level desire, Council Member Stocker, we're gonna have a lot of fun here.

I guess that was just the point of like how- So we'll see it coming, but we're gonna wanna be able to interact with those systems so that we can dispatch resources when we need them.

One of the some of the investments that we're going to be making investments in sort of what are through our grid modernization program to help us be able to sort of more strategically interact with with customer owned solar systems and storage.

Craig, you, oh, let's talk about Miller.

Well, I was just going to say the Miller Community Center is probably a golden opportunity for a tour for this group at some point.

Just it's kind of a stepping stone into what microgrid technology can accomplish for small communities on the demand side, to Craig's point.

But it's also a way for us to focus on communities that may not have access to some of these resources that others have.

So I think Miller's a great example of that.

It would be a great opportunity to show off that technology at some point.

And just to take it a step further, kind of like what Council Member Moore was talking about with Lake City Community Center having a crisis resiliency station, just for the viewing public, Miller Community Center has battery power so that if the grid goes down, they can still cool or heat the building, a microgrid, if you will.

Greg, can we come back to you?

And then this is for slide 15. Looking at our load forecast, you talked about grid modernization.

And so the question here is, can our grid hold the load in which we need?

And as we continue to electrify, will our grid be able to retain the increased load, understanding that we have our grid modernization programs in the works.

That's a Mike question.

I love it.

Yeah, so Council Member Strauss is an engineer as well, so.

So anyway, yeah, so it's a great observation council member.

I think that that's one of the things that, and if you look at what I highlighted, we just talked about this with our leadership team earlier this week.

If you look at the inflection on those three curves, you'll notice that the inflection has moved closer to real time.

So the planning we are doing today for both budget and rates and everything that goes with that is in anticipation of that inflection happening in this current cycle.

That's all things above that we've talked about in the form of electrification, transportation and buildings and other things that are coming online.

Some of that is new customer loads as well.

So we are, you know, we're plugging in a lot of new high density residential every few weeks or so and single family residents are still New customer connections are happening across our service territory.

Transit-oriented development along the sound transit corridors, particularly in shoreline and areas along I-5.

So that demand is there.

It's showing up, and like I said, it's coming faster than we even anticipated a couple of years ago.

So a lot of the focus is on how do we meet that?

A lot of what we have to try to anticipate is where that load's going to show up within the service territory.

We have a very dense service territory, but where that load shows up matters.

And so we're studying every one of our distribution feeders, our substation capacities.

We're looking at transformer lead times.

All those things factor into how we make investment decisions, we can talk about kind of how that long-term capital approach, how we address that going forward as part of the budget process.

But just to say that we will meet the demand, it's going to mean infrastructure improvements, it's going to mean things like possibly even reconductoring and things like that.

We're gonna have to get innovative.

Some things like we like to talk about non-wire solution is something, for instance, the University of Washington is really interested in non-wire solutions.

So that might mean a form of a microgrid or something like that, right?

So everything's on the table.

I'm not gonna say it's gonna be easy, but I think that's our primary focus as we think about how Our recruitment strategies, our retention strategies, we need a lot of boots on the ground to make this happen, so.

And maybe a pretty basic question for a layperson.

Isn't more use of our electrical system and our grid good for City Light from a financial standpoint, or are those capital costs gonna offset us?

I would assume that more use of electricity is gonna be good for you.

Yeah, I'll let Kirstie kind of touch a little bit on that, but I think it's complicated is the best way to describe that.

And some of what we actually have some backup slides that we, if we had time, we could have gone into, but you want to just talk about the wholesale purchases and the residential rate and how those kind of play against each other.

Knock that out in a minute or two.

Yeah.

It's a really, really good question, and it is complicated.

If we can serve additional demand with the infrastructure we already have, if we can flex our hydro system and use the resources that we can access efficiently to serve that load, then yeah, everybody could win.

the demand shows up in a place where we aren't built out to supply that.

If we have to go and purchase new resources that cost a lot more than the ones that we currently have, then that's going to make things more expensive.

And a lot of these things that I just talked about, we don't control.

And so this is a really interesting time as we look ahead and plan for the future.

There's a huge opportunity for using resources technology and all of the things that Craig talked about to try to keep costs down, but there is going to be tremendous cost pressure as well because This is a lot more demand than we have served in the past, and there's a lot of factors outside of our control, both within our customer base and in the region as well.

It's not just Seattle that's seeing this uptick.

Everybody across the region is seeing that there will be more of a demand for electricity, which is a good thing from a climate perspective and a challenging thing from an electrical infrastructure perspective.

Thank you.

I'm just going to keep tagging on to that, which is, you know, in Ballard, we've had a number of outages repeatedly in the same area where there's also townhomes that have been built in my lifetime.

And when I've dug into the conduit, if you will, dug into the weeds, what has been reported is that it's not an issue of can the grid hold the load It is the fact that there are certain elements that have reached, transformers in particular, that have reached the end of their lifetime as expected.

And this is part of the normal and routine maintenance and upkeep of our infrastructure.

And so it's not that there are more townhomes that are creating this issue.

It's kind of like my 72 Ford pickup.

that once I fix one thing that's broken, that problem just kind of moves around.

So then right now it's the starter before it was the carburetor, right?

And so what I really appreciate about City Light is you were responsive to these residents and to say, we are digging into this, we're looking at it.

And you've identified both the problem and the solution.

And it's not a matter of Do the power lines retain enough capacity for the grid or for the load that's being requested?

I am going to Man, I could go all day, kind of like Council Member Saka.

I'm going to just ask one more question.

Yeah, no, sorry.

I mean, we're going to get real in the weeds on this one.

Can we look at slide 18?

My last question here is about hydro.

I'm going to pull some numbers off the top of my head, so I hope I'm right.

But I believe our hydro Skagit facilities, the three dams up there, produce about 24% of our electric.

load yeah yeah roughly 20 to 25 percent on any given year that's right and i can't recall boundary dam and how much they preserve a little bit more it's in the range of 30 so bonneville you know if you put it all in a bucket it's like a three-legged stool scattered boundary bonneville bonneville is usually a little more than 40 percent on an annual basis right so so as of like today we're leaning into bonneville pretty heavy for maybe seven eight hundred megawatts right now so um

And can you share that relationship with Bonneville?

That's exactly where I was going.

I was, like, if we've got Skagit, Boundary, who makes up the rest?

It's Bonneville.

What's our relationship there?

Yeah, so the Bonneville Power Administration, just real quick, is kind of a regional power marketing agency.

They manage a lot of the high-voltage transmission that you see up and down Washington, Oregon, into Idaho, Montana.

even into Northern California.

And that transmission system serves all public power customers and some others who have access to it.

And it is very much a Northwest regional interconnected grid.

And Bonneville delivers power from the Federal Columbia Power System, which is 30 plus dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers that bring federal hydropower to load for public customers across the Northwest.

And so Bonneville is the agency that manages the transmission and the agency that manages getting the Corps of Engineers and the Department of Interior's project power to places like Seattle and Portland and other places across the Northwest.

Thank you.

I mean, Chair, you've got, I can't have favorite departments.

I will say the three departments in your committee are ones that I enjoy very much.

And I'm just gonna, like what Mike said, Director Haynes said is, you know, if, it's a hard act to follow Director Farrell.

And if we did not have a public utility, If we had to rely on a private utility to accomplish our climate goals, it would be so much more difficult.

We are so lucky to have a public utility for City Light, much like we do with SPU.

And then as we transition, the arts funding and the cultural funding within City Light is quite amazing.

The Denny's substation being just one of those examples.

Thank you for letting me get on my soapbox chair.

Thank you.

So, yes, I'm so excited that we have so many people here who are still very passionate about all the different departments in this committee and look forward to working together.

And I understand it's very complicated, and I'm in total awe in all that you do.

My family renovated a building that now provides 84 units of affordable housing, but trying to get power into that historic building and trying to put in the commercial and EV chargers and residential was quite a complicated process.

And so that was a very pleasant experience working with Seattle City Light.

And that area has experienced three power outages within three weeks.

And customer service is very responsive in letting people know what was going on and trying to resolve those issues.

And so I look forward to working with you and learning more.

And thank you for your leadership and especially being leaders in the country for sustainable solutions.

So thank you.

And I look forward to seeing you in future briefings.

I have a list here of things that I've noted people are very interested in.

And we'll definitely reach out.

Thank you.

Thanks very much.

Awesome, so we will move on to the third item of business.

Will the clerk please read item three into the record?

Agenda item number three, Office of Arts and Culture Overview.

Thank you.

Will our presenters please join us at the table?

Congratulations to Director Kayim for your recent confirmation.

And when you're ready, please go ahead and get started.

I think you're going to work this.

Good morning, Chair Wu.

Good morning, council members.

Thank you so much for inviting us here today.

Okay.

Are we ready?

You got to get really close.

Okay.

You can move it.

How's that?

Closer?

Even closer?

Good grief.

OK, are we ready?

Great.

Well, as I said, good morning.

Thank you so much for inviting us to present on our work today.

I am the director of the Office of Arts and Culture, and I'm joined here by my colleague, Ali McGehee, who is the interim deputy director, and Jason Huff, who is the manager of public art, and Ashraf Hassam, who is the manager of our grants programs.

Move to the next slide.

So over the next 15 minutes, we will cover a high-level overview of our work, our values, and our structures.

And I just want to note that the images in the slides you are going to see show the work of our office.

So everything you will see in those slides are examples of the work that we do.

So we are lucky to live in a vibrant city with many arts and cultural offerings and a robust creative ecosystem, which contributes to our city's civic identity, way of life, and our economy.

The Office of Arts and Culture has a role in that ecosystem to support and sustain that ecology.

Our mission is to activate and sustain Seattle through arts and culture.

We not only support access and participation in the arts, but also the creative economic infrastructure that provides training jobs and generates revenues for the city.

So we envision a city that's driven by creativity, that provides the opportunity for everyone to engage in diverse arts and cultural experiences.

Our office is committed to advancing anti-racist practices by building equity and access through arts and culture.

We integrate these values into the structures of all of our programs and how we implement our work.

This equity framework also extends to economic equity within the arts sector and how we think about the distribution of our resources.

For example, we manage the third floor of King Street Station.

The mission of King Street is to increase opportunities for people of color to generate and present their work.

In practice, this means a gallery located in the heart of downtown that exhibits local BIPOC talent, has free admission to all, and provides a stepping stone for career growth.

Public art is also one of our major program areas of investment.

Our public art program commissions original artwork, and these artworks support the civic identity and vision of communities combined with the ideas of artists.

and they are integrated into a variety of public settings.

Public art makes tangible our values and ideals, advances Seattle's reputation as a cultural center for innovation and creativity.

Our public art program also includes the Civic Art Collection.

This collection has more than 400 permanently cited and integrated works, like the one you see in this slide, which is at the Seattle Center, and over 3,200 portable artworks.

You may have seen these all over the city hall and in your offices.

The public art program also leads a capacity building effort and training initiative called Public Art Boot Camp.

This program provides skills and training for artists who are ready to translate their studio art practice into the public realm.

The boot camp fosters the growth of the collection and also the diversity of artists working in the field.

Another major program area of our office is the partnerships, education and grants division.

This body of work focuses on making art and culture accessible to all and also builds the capacity of those individuals and organizations to grow and sustain their businesses.

In 2023, we invested $7.9 million for projects that provided by 600 organizations.

The Creative Advantage is our primary arts education initiative.

It is a public-private partnership between Seattle Public Schools, the Seattle Foundation, and our office.

It is a citywide initiative designed to provide equitable access to arts education for each and every student in Seattle Public Schools.

We work with teaching artists, community-based agencies, and arts and cultural organizations to invest in young people through arts and culture.

This initiative was developed with an equity lens by identifying and prioritizing services to the most disadvantaged schools and communities.

We offer a broad range of grants through our PEG programming for organizations, individuals, and youth.

For example, for organizations, we provide the Centering Art and Racial Equity Grant, Arts in Parks.

For individual artists, we provide City Artists, Artists at the Center, Hope Corps, which is for under and unemployed artists, Smart Ventures, a Rapid Response Low Barrier Grant, and for youth, we have a Youth Arts Grant Program.

The way we manage our arts grants focus on access, need and community input.

Our goal is to provide fair, transparent and competitive processes that is accessible to all.

Another important body of our work is focused on arts and community development.

For us, this means working with cultural districts, developing and activating cultural spaces.

Seattle currently has four cultural districts.

Our office supports these districts as they nurture and develop existing arts and culture ecosystems in neighborhoods to ensure they remain healthy and vibrant for future generations.

These districts are the Capitol Hill Arts District, the Historic Central Area Arts and Culture District, the Uptown Arts and Culture Coalition, and the Columbia Hillman Arts and Culture District.

We provide these districts with resources for creative placemaking and toolkits and technical support.

The other area of our cultural space work includes collaboration with the Cultural Space Agency, a public development authority.

And this organization was developed through programming that originated from our office.

So moving on to facilities.

Our office operates cultural facilities, and we partner with other departments to implement this work.

We manage the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, a leading African American cultural hub located in the Central District, a historic landmark that was built in 1915 in a former synagogue.

While the building is owned by Parks, our office manages its day-to-day operations and partners with other organizations to deliver programming.

We partner with two community-based nonprofit arts organizations who create and program the space.

These organizations are Langston and the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas.

As already mentioned, we manage the third floor of the King Street Station, which houses a gallery and our offices.

King Street Station is a dynamic space for arts and culture in the heart of the city, dedicated to increasing the opportunities for communities of color to generate and present their work.

The gallery features rotating exhibits of local talent in a newly renovated space.

We provide access to presentation space, creative space, residences, resources, and highlight the innovation of our communities.

The slide before you shows the breadth of the work that we do in the gallery.

We present work in a variety of art mediums.

These include, but are not limited to, media arts, visual arts, performing arts, design, fashion, craft, and traditional arts.

Our gallery is open four days a week, and we participate in the gallery scene in Pioneer Square, such as First Thursdays.

We also have a partnership with Seattle City Light, as mentioned by Council Member Strauss.

Our role here is to activate and manage the Denny substation.

This is a new part of our facilities portfolio.

And while this work was paused during the pandemic, we are working with our partners to develop a plan for activating and using this space.

And I'm going to hand over to Ali McGehee, who will take you through the rest of the presentation.

Thank you.

Arts has two primary funding sources.

The first are the public art funds, which are collected under the 1% for art ordinance.

The ordinance requires that capital construction departments allocate 1% of total cost of construction projects for art.

The funds are held in the municipal art fund.

Arts is a steward of these funds.

We work closely with our partners in the capital departments on projects related to the commission and installation of art.

The funds for the art can only be spent on projects with a nexus to the departments for whose funds are being used.

The second source of funds are the admissions tax.

Admissions tax is the primary source that goes into the Arts and Culture Fund.

The Arts and Culture Fund funds our structural investments in our programs.

The programs are designed to build on the ecosystem that serves the entire city of Seattle.

We focus on fair and transparent access, sustainable growth and development, and long-term capacity building across the sector.

We were advised by a 16-member Seattle Arts Commission.

The commissioners are volunteers appointed by the mayor and city council.

Commissioners include artists, art professionals, and others with strong links to the Seattle's arts community.

The mission of the commission is to support the city by advocating for arts policy, creating access for equitable participation in the arts, and fostering and enriching arts engagement for all city residents.

Here's a brief snapshot of our 2024 adopted budget, broken down by the budget summary level.

Our arts and cultural programs, a little over $12 million includes things like the grants program, creative advantage and our facilities work.

The public art budget summary level includes all 1% of art projects.

Cultural space includes the cultural districts work and the work with the cultural space PDA and the leadership and administration.

Moving on to our 2024 priorities, a main focus area this year is downtown activation.

The areas that we will be activating will be King Street Station, in support of the mayor's downtown activation plan, and of course piloting some of those activations in preparation for the FIFA World Cup.

As mentioned, Denny's substation is going to be another nexus of our work to activate that space to respond to community needs.

And then the strategic hope core investments.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a program for under and unemployed artists, and we are focused on activating downtown with this program.

Last year we spent funding, about a million dollars of funding for 60 murals.

So that funding will this year be including other arts disciplines and again focused on downtown.

Preparing for the World Cup, as I've already mentioned, we will be doing some pilots to prepare for the World Cup, activating our downtown spaces and public places.

But we're also considering maintaining our public art collection as part of our World Cup preparations.

We will be assessing the condition of our artworks and making sure that Seattle looks the best as the eyes of the world are trained on it for the World Cup.

Planning and policy development is also part of our 2024 priority.

The Arts Department will be going through a strategic planning process in preparation for a citywide cultural plan.

The purpose of our citywide cultural plan is to assess our funding and our resources as there has been a tremendous amount of turbulence and change in the public sector since the pandemic.

There are new lines of funding that have appeared at the county level and there has been a big shift in organizations.

We'll be looking at aligning with community needs and also assessing our resources and what we can provide in our role as local government.

We will be bringing that work to you at the end of this year, and we'll be excited to talk about you as we prepare to plan for 2025. And that concludes our presentation.

We're really happy that we had this opportunity to bring this work before you.

We understand it's very, very high level, so happy to take any questions that you might have.

Council Member Strauss?

Chair, thank you.

I do have to leave as soon as I'm done making some of these comments, so I'm not going to ask too many in-depth questions.

Just a thank you for the vibrancy that you provide our city.

When I look at Denny's substation versus the substation on Thomas Street, right near Seattle Center, it demonstrates the difference between a brutalist architecture that has...

no art versus an urban substation that makes our city more vibrant because of art.

When I look at the walls in every single city building, it's vibrant because of you and your department.

I just look at the customer service center in Ballard.

When I started working out of there, there was no art on the wall and it felt sterile.

And now there's art on the wall and it feels warm and welcoming.

the simple small things that make all of the difference and your work on the downtown activation plan is critical otherwise we feel we live our world our lives in the built environment and without you it would just feel boring um And I guess I'll just end with showing my age that my Friday nights are spent at these cultural institutions that you support.

I'll be at the National Nordic Museum tonight.

And, you know, that's...

This is how...

I enjoy the world in which I live is to be in these cultural institutions that you support and they could not be as successful without you.

And it's the silent hand that makes our world so much better.

So thank you for everything that you do.

Colleagues, I got to run to a meeting that starts in three minutes that I'm chairing apparently.

So I will see you soon.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilmember Saka?

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for this really insightful presentation and overview of what you all do every day.

Culture is really important to this city, really important to me personally.

You know, one thing we're trying to do here behind the scenes is build a new culture in Seattle City Hall on the second floor, and we're making some great progress with that.

but I understand and appreciate firsthand the value of what you all do every single day.

And so I just want to express my gratitude and pride as well, not just for the work you do, but I guess separately for allowing me to poach one of your employees as my chief of staff, Elaine Ko.

But I also want to share a priority of mine.

I'm a dad, dad of three.

Three young kids and making sure we're exposing, me and my wife are exposing our kids to the arts and You know, like, what that could mean for their lives and the world around them is important for us.

Also, arts broadly and inclusively defined to include cultural and performance and sports.

Right now, I'm a basketball dad of three.

Soon, I'll be a baseball and a softball dad.

And then, you know, soon after that, I'll be a soccer dad.

And so, you know, like...

Sports are important.

This World Cup in 26 is in my district.

And so I'm keenly interested in making sure it's a very successful event from a safety and security and a standpoint of also making sure it's our opportunity to showcase Seattle, the thriving city.

like cultural space that is Seattle.

And so, you know, very interested in, again, making sure that it's a success and working alongside you all to do that.

So just wanted to share that kind of top level priority of mine.

Also have a question on the admissions tax.

What, so is that, what specific things or categories of, Tickets, if you will, is that levied on?

Over to you, Ali.

You can give the specifics.

I'll let you do this one.

Okay.

So these are admissions to sporting events, for-profit cultural activities.

Percent of that tax then comes to our office, and we distribute it through our grants program.

So it stays within the arena of supporting nonprofit arts organizations and youth as well as individual artists.

So it goes directly in that way.

So, Ali, do you want to add anything to that?

No, I believe you covered it.

Thank you.

What is the rate of that tax?

And then also how much every year in revenue do we collect as a result?

That's a level of detail I don't have before me.

Ali?

We're happy to follow up with the financial plan.

It's published in the adopted budget book.

It projects the revenue forecast on both funds and has more details specifically to that.

Our admissions tax goes up and down depending on the level of activity.

So last year, we were very lucky to have over our projections because we had Beyonce and Taylor Swift do performances, and so therefore our admission tax actually went up.

So it really depends on audience activity, and that's why for us it's sort of like a cycle, a circle.

By supporting organizations, we support the admissions tax environment.

And we work very closely with the Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts.

They provide three times a year updates to those projections.

And our funding structure is such that we work on a same-year model.

So we're very impacted by that structure and by those fluctuations.

We hold a reserve in our funds that is sort of a rainy day protection but because it's that same year forecast it forces a level of nimbleness and responsiveness we're very very impacted directly by fluctuations in the economy and in that sort of public event space yeah and it's also just a great reminder so yeah we had taylor and beyonce here we also have burner boy uh my wife and i went to that it was a great show um but it

Like, yeah, there are some things that we can't control in terms of artists and performances and big names that may or may not come here, but things that we can control are, Once we have these events on the calendar, making sure, you know, this is where the importance of public safety comes in.

You know, making sure we have a safe, welcoming Seattle for all, so people actually feel comfortable coming to these events.

Not just those that live here, but those outside of the city.

So not within your direct purview, but just important to highlight the important overlay.

Council Member, I would also argue that by providing activation of spaces, allowing business corridors and organizations to thrive in those corridors, so a theater in a business district actually supports all of the surrounding businesses like restaurants, parking structures, and foot traffic.

So really, we're in an ecosystem that depends on each other.

So to some degree, it's all of our jobs to ensure that people feel safe and welcome.

Thank you.

Council Member Moore?

Thank you very much.

This was a very interesting presentation and I'm a huge fan of public arts.

It really does enrich all of our lives.

And I actually had the questions along the lines of Council Member Salka.

One question I had about the admissions taxes and I'm just trying to get my head around how it works.

Is there a sliding fee scale with the tax or is that just across the board?

I believe the legislation is across the board.

Okay, so because one concern I have about it is how that would impact the equity aspects of everybody having, those are very expensive tickets.

And are there methods or ways in which we can provide access to those sort of signature cultural events and moments to people who basically do not have that kind of money?

Yes, actually, we do partner with organizations that do provide all kinds of ticketing options.

I'm going to have Ashraf speak to some of our collaborations with organizations in that arena.

Yeah, there is a admissions tax waiver, actually, for arts and cultural organizations, like everywhere from the Vera Project at Seattle Center to Fifth Avenue Theater and otherwise.

Does that answer your question?

I guess so.

So does Teen Ticks fall within that program as well?

Yeah, so Teen Ticks actually started as a city department pilot from the Seattle Center, moved out as a nonprofit, and we support Teen Ticks.

Teen Ticks has...

or agreements with individual cultural organizations that allow them to work the way they do.

And for those who are not aware, $5 tickets to any arts event in town, day of show, for museums, operas, ballets, that kind of thing.

So they operate independently, and we do support them with annual funding.

We're actually working with them this year to organize a coalition of youth workers in the arts and culture sector to identify what's coming up for young people and how arts department can support their work with young people.

So we're high leverage partners for us, but the ticketing aspect of teen sex does operate independently of the admissions tax.

And I don't think those are taxed.

Actually, I'm certain those aren't taxed.

Okay, thank you very much.

Awesome.

So thank you for all your work.

Some of the priorities I have, especially, you know, helping our, investing in our young people and our youth that you mentioned previously.

My background has been in Chinese dance.

And when I was in my teens, my father passed away.

And I was able to channel all that emotion into dance, whereas other people in my family got into gangs.

And went a separate path.

And so I realized how important the arts are, especially in developing our young people and investments.

And also another priority of mine is, you know, the economic revitalization of downtown Seattle.

Comrades follows culture.

And so having, you know, King Street Station, Soto, Georgetown, CID, downtown, it's like the front porch of the stadiums for FIFA soccer.

And so when we have the tourists come, it'd be great to revitalize the area, turn it into an arts and cultural, I guess, mecca of sorts.

And so I'm really excited about that plan and also emphasizing, in terms of public safety, the maintenance of art pieces with the graffiti and etching and how damaging morally that is. sometimes to people and so having that emphasis I think is really exciting and I thank you for all your work and I'm excited to to see more briefings before this committee and All the exciting projects that you're working on.

So, thank you Thank you so much council members and I invite you to come and see us at King Street Station Take a tour of our facilities come to our public heart We'd be more than happy to host you so you can get a detailed look at what we do and how we do it Thank you.

Thank you

So we have reached the end of today's meeting agenda.

If there are any further business to come before the committee, are there any further business to come before the committee before we adjourn?

I'd just like to commend you on a very wonderful meeting.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Great.

Hearing no further business to come before the committee, we are adjourned.