Select Budget Committee Session II - 10/14/22

you can begin.

Thank you so much.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Welcome back to the Seattle City Council Select Budget Committee meeting.

Today is October 14th and the time is 2.05 p.m.

I'm Teresa Mosqueda, Chair of the Select Budget Committee.

The meeting will come back from being in recess and Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Council Member Sawant?

Present.

Council Member Strauss?

Present.

Council Member Juarez?

Thank you very much and again for the record council members Peterson and council members

We're going to continue with the discussion on encampments and cleanup policies and investments as proposed under the title of unified care team and expanded clean Seattle initiative in the mayor's proposed budget.

We have until 5 p.m., but as part of our afternoon discussions, instead of having parks, we're going to have extended discussion here on encampments and cleanup, as well as the miscellaneous items from law, OEM, OIG, OSC, SDCI, and SFD.

Well, we had a lineup of folks that were teed up to ask some questions.

We were still on Councilmember Lewis.

I just want to make sure that Councilmember Lewis, you have the chance to ask all of your questions and you can continue on.

How about this, Madam Chair?

I'll finish my current line of inquiry and then turn it over and get back in the queue.

Does that sound acceptable?

Sounds wonderful.

Thank you, Councilmember Lewis.

Deputy Mayor Washington, just jumping back in, we were talking about monitoring displacement resulting from outreach to encampments and remediation of encampment locations.

When we left it off, I appreciate your answer that per the MDARs, everyone receives an offer of adequate shelter.

I guess that my question is, Are we adequately tracking the number of people who are refusing those offers?

And then are we tracking the reason why they're refusing those offers so that we can better adjust our practice to reduce the amount of offer rejection and reduce the amount of displacement?

Thank you for the question, Council Member Lewis.

Before I jump in, I just want to acknowledge that we are talking a lot about encampments, but please remember that a large part of this budget is about clean Seattle.

So I don't want to mislead the public into thinking that this budget is only about removals.

It's also about keeping the city's parks, streets, and right-of-ways clear and accessible for all.

Council Member Lewis, we do track the number of refusals I would ask Lindsay if she knows the answer to the second one, or if she could just team chat Michael Bailey in terms of do we ask why they refused?

Lindsay, do you know, or do you need to ask Michael Bailey?

HSD is beginning to collect data on why people are saying no, and then they'll start reporting on it in Q3 and Q4.

I think they included this in the last slide response, but that's part of the information that's starting to be collected.

So going forward, that is information that's going to be baked into our practice to make sure that we're tracking when people refuse, why it is, and how granular are we getting with that?

Like, for example, if they say the offer that we're making, if it's like a congregate shelter offer, for example, So, first of all, sorry, let me get it all out first, and I do want to hear a response, like if they're refusing, you know, like a congregate offer or something like that and saying, I would accept a tiny house or I would accept a hotel or something like that.

It's useful data for us in terms of figuring out how to structure a process that minimizes displacement.

And I feel like most of what I get right now is anecdotal information on the reason for rejections, and I'd like data just so that we know.

So we do currently track acceptances versus refusals.

So that is currently happening.

To your question, yes, we will find out granularly why they are refusing.

And I would say from just a qualitative standpoint, based off what I'm hearing from KCRHA staff, it is because people don't want congregate shelter.

When I first started this work, working inside HSD years ago, enhanced shelter was what everyone was demanding.

So the right of return, not having to stand in line every night, not having to pick up all their belongings at six in the morning and leave.

So the city at that time pivoted to transitioning shelter from basic to enhanced.

What Tiny Home Villages and the pandemic have transitioned us to is now even enhanced shelter, which is still a form of congregate shelter, is not enough because people spent the last two years in hotel rooms in tiny home villages.

And I think from a human perspective, if I had a choice to choose between a congregate shelter and an individual place with a locked door, I'd choose it too.

So no blame on the person wanting that, but just, yeah, it's been a slow moving target in terms of what folks' choices are.

And I would say by and large, they want non-congregate shelter now.

I think I would also add that the information you're calling out and the opportunity to be able to learn what is it that someone would say yes to and what is it that someone needs to end their experience of homelessness is a key piece of moving to the geographic teams to be able to have the same people engaging in the same areas and to be collecting that information and learning that prior to needing to make an offer of shelter related to a removal, but far ahead of that.

So not having it tied to a removal activity, but having it tied to just the way we engage with the community.

what Lindsay said, and no, she is not seeking further employment.

Okay, Council Member Lewis, any follow up on that?

I will rest on that for now.

I do want to flag my interest in maybe figuring out some way to memorialize that data reporting expectation as part of the budget process to central staff.

Appreciate that the department is currently tracking that and look forward to continuing to collaborate on that to foster a culture of constant improvement in how we do this work.

So thank you so much.

I'll put you back in the queue.

The folks that I have listed next are Morales and Nelson.

Councilmember Morales?

Thank you.

I do have a series of questions.

Should I ask all of them?

Why don't you do one at a time?

Just to make sure that they get answered clearly.

Well, so the first is sort of taking off of what Councilmember Lewis just said, which was We talked about Bob earlier.

So if Bob is offered, you know, a place, a mat on the floor, or a place where he can't have his dog, or he can't bring his partner with him, a place where he has to be out by six o'clock the next morning, and that offer doesn't work for Bob, what happens next?

Because from my perspective, he hasn't been offered services that meet his needs.

And so will he be offered something else?

Will he be allowed to stay?

Will he be removed?

What is the process in that situation?

Great question.

So if Bob is offered a shelter, what I can guarantee you he won't be offered is a mat on the floor or having to leave at 6 a.m.

in the morning.

We don't do basic shelter anymore.

COVID basically got rid of basic shelter.

Everything is enhanced now, meaning people can stay and store their belongings and not leave.

But if Bob has a dog or a partner, It depends, Council Member Morales.

Most of the time, and we can add this into I think what Council Member Lewis was asking for in terms of the why.

Most of the time, I would expect that we would work really hard to make sure that Bob can go to a shelter with his or her dog or partner.

I wouldn't go anywhere without my dog.

So I think that's part of Bob's family.

And so the team strives really, really hard to make sure that they can go with their loved ones.

And to me, that is a reasonable request.

What's not a reasonable request is if Bob just doesn't want to accept what we have because they would prefer to live in a tiny home village.

And we just don't have enough non-congregate shelter to take that level of preference.

So there's preferences, in my opinion, and then there are things like family that matter, whether it's a pet or a partner.

But until we get enough diversity of shelter options, sometimes Bob's going to have to go into what's available, which in my opinion is It's enhanced shelter.

I mean, it's not a mat on the floor.

It is storing of belongings.

It is employment support and all of those things.

And so it just depends.

But to Council Member Strauss's or Council Member Lewis's point, once we start tracking why, you all in those reports will be able to see a trend of why.

And we'll see how many people just say no because I don't want to go.

to congregate shelter or no, because I don't want to leave my pet.

And what I can assure you is that I'm interested in that same data, and we will not mislead that data.

We will literally give you the answers that we receive.

So I'm looking at slide 10 that says, one of the guiding principles is deploying strategies that reduce harm.

And so does that, well, I'll tell you what I think that means.

What I think that means is that people who are living in encampments or living in RVs are matched with high quality non-congregate shelter or other housing that meets their needs before the process of physically removing an encampment occurs.

Is that how it works?

And if not, how does it work?

And I apologize if we're, I think we're probably all going to be asking basically the same question in lots of different ways, because we're trying to understand the how of all of this.

I totally get that from you guys.

So I appreciate your questions.

I would say in the Herald Administration, we believe that in order to reduce harm, everybody should be able to go into high quality shelter.

We would not say non-congregate high quality shelter at this point, because we don't have enough non-congregate shelter space.

So that's where we differ is whether it's non-congregate or congregant.

Okay, so that leads me to slide 12. At least it was in the previous, I think it's still labeled slide 12. And by the way, I do wanna say I am glad for the updated presentation that we got just this morning.

I think it strikes a different tone than what we had on the agenda yesterday, and I appreciate that.

So slide 12 has, where did I put it?

So looking at the total of tents and RVs, we have 724 tents, we have 273 RVs.

So that's a total of 997 households who don't have adequate housing that meets their needs.

So are there 997 units of housing available?

to meet these households who are currently lacking?

And if not, where will the people who are living in these RVs and tents end up after a referral?

Yep, great question.

I think your question leads to why we're doing the geographic areas.

So number one, no, I don't think we have enough if we go by your definition in terms of that they go somewhere that they want to their preferred location.

Even if we took that out, I don't think that we have enough spaces.

But I reserve the right to be wrong, and I can get you that answer right away.

I think one of the things that we're trying to do with the geographic areas is recognize there aren't enough places.

Therefore, recognize that we have to have something more than just removals.

There's nowhere to send people.

So if we just do removals, we'll just be shifting people around the city.

And so the geographic teams will be about going to those places, getting to know the people, and implementing harm reduction strategies so in an event we don't have anywhere for Bob to go, we can at least get the community in a place where they have the patience to allow Bob to stay there until we find Bob the place that they can go.

What's happening now is there's garbage everywhere, there's needles places, fires are happening at an unprecedented rate, propane tanks are exploding, And so when we say to our house neighbors, just have patience, they're like, no, my business window's getting knocked out every other day.

But if we address the garbage and address the needles and make sure propane tanks aren't exploding and that their windows aren't getting knocked out every night, I believe from a human perspective, and I've experienced it through this last year, that they will then have patience to wait for Bob to find somewhere to go.

I think this connects to what, oh, sorry.

I think this connects to what Deputy Mayor Washington said at the beginning around there's not a clear line also between what is homelessness and what's non-homelessness related.

For a long time, we've treated it that way.

And I think we realized there's a lot going on in neighborhoods and we need to have a broader, more comprehensive conversation about what's happening and be able to have lots of strategies to deploy versus drawing a silo and saying, well, this problem is homelessness because we don't want to criminalize homelessness.

And there's a lot of really complex challenges to solve.

I think the other thing around the deploying strategies that reduced harm, that's the trash mitigation piece.

It may be hygiene resources, citing a port-a-potty to ensure people have a place to use the bathroom while we're working with them to get them into shelter.

We know the strategies we have available, but it's going to be conversations with neighborhoods about what other needs that they see and what ideas they have to meet those needs.

Okay, my last question.

Thank you for that.

Can you talk about how removal of encampments are done through a race and social justice lens as it relates to the folks who are actually living in these encampments?

Lindsay, do you want to take that one?

One of the things we look at, I think it's in the prioritization slide.

I can't remember which slide that was.

is if it's located in a racial and social justice equity area.

And so trying to understanding from the start when we're looking at a site, where is it in a community that's most impacted but may not want to call or report it?

The other thing is I think around how the service providers, sorry, my screen just shrunk.

how the service providers, which ones are used or which ones are asked to come to the site.

And so we have some outreach providers that work with everyone who's all single adults and others that are more culturally specific.

So ensuring we have the right service response for the right to meet the needs of the people who are there, depending on what happens.

And so that's another way of coming together and saying who's in this area and what are their needs in this geographic model to be able to understand what types of services would best meet the needs of folks there.

And Council Member Routes, one thing I would add to is before we built this system, it wasn't equitable.

It was literally who could send the most emails.

who could show up during the day and quite frankly, who noticed it.

So like when I'm walking down in a neighborhood and I have, if I have to walk around a homeless person, I'm not calling to ask that the person be removed because culturally that doesn't bother me.

Right.

And so what we were doing where we were getting so many emails and it was just like, okay, we got to go solve this because they keep emailing us.

And surprisingly enough, which you would find who wasn't sending the emails are people of color or poor people.

Well, and what I'm really asking about is the people experiencing homelessness themselves, because we know that they are disproportionately people of color.

And so if we are removing people, and I will say, I do think that what we're doing right now is moving people from neighborhoods.

And when it is mostly people of color who that is happening to, then the impact of that is disproportionate.

So yes, it's it's what Lindsay said.

The more we can interact with people on the ground, the more we can deploy the right resources, whether it's language access, whether it's ensuring that they go somewhere that's culturally appropriate for them.

It allows us to learn more.

And yeah, I think.

All right, thank you very much.

Thank you, Council Member Nelson.

And then Council Member Lewis, I might put myself in the queue, if you don't mind, and then I'll come back to you.

Council Member Nelson, please go ahead.

Yeah, it sounds like if we get beyond the sort of emotional valence of the word removal, which is how the issue is phrased, that the UTC expansion could increase the number of removals.

It sounds like there's a lot of commonality around what council members want and what this is proposing, because we don't really have enough.

I mean, if not removal, then then it's just leaving people on the street.

And that is not good either.

And to me, what what this provides is two important things.

Number one, yes, geographical focuses, because That allows for relationship buildings and for understanding what the actual human beings need and then trying to get that.

And the by name list that will be a product of this work is absolutely crucial.

And so, and yeah, we do have to pick up litter also.

I mean, I don't think that that's a controversial element because we just spent, you know, we approved a funding plan for parks.

So if you take each of these elements On their own, to me, they make up a model that gets at a the sort of thing that council member Strauss was able to accomplish in Woodland Park that took a really, really long time.

And so this is looks like a model that that allows for that replication, but that in that more on the ground focus with people who need help.

And oftentimes it is substance use disorder recovery, because that's part of our displacement problem.

People do move around.

And if the core issue is addiction, we're not going to be able to solve that without knowing that is a problem and then being able to point them in a direction.

So I'm reflecting on what I'm hearing and also just linking it back to my question earlier about performance standards, because This was tried.

Performance standards were proposed in association with Pathways Home.

I think it was in 2017. And that was that new model was based on the poppy recommendations, et cetera.

And then that kind of all sort of imploded.

And it's important to track what is working and what isn't, and then trying to correct course, because bottom line for me is it's not working right now, so why wouldn't we try something different?

And this seems pretty well thought out.

But I'm open to changing my mind with more conversation.

Thanks.

Thank you, Council Member.

Okay, thanks for sharing that comment.

I don't see any comments and reaction or answers.

I'm going to continue on and if there's other feedback feel free to incorporate that in.

I want to say a couple of things.

One of the things I want to say is that the council that was on council at the time probably recall and I know Deputy Mayor Washington in your previous role you probably recall as well.

It was the council I I think we should be able to support outreach efforts by geography.

I don't think there is a concern about geographical outreach.

I think that anything that can help make sure that people within those districts get, not even just districts we did get geographical representation and FTEs included.

I'm not sure that they were deployed in the vision that the council had originally written it, but I think that there's a lot of support for geographic outreach.

I think the concern that we're seeing is, or that I'm hearing, is coming from community who are confused about how this is need it if what we've been told over the last few years is you need to refer and defer to the folks who are part of the regional homelessness authority.

And yes, the regional homelessness authority has a heavy concentration right now on the downtown core, but I think that there's a concern on just maybe one or two of these line items here.

I'll call out where I think there's a lot of common ground.

I think there's a lot of common ground in the Clean City Initiative concepts.

And Deputy Mayor Washington was good to lift that up.

This is an effort that the Council fully funded last year.

I believe it came in with $6 million in last year's proposed budget.

We added another $6 million to make sure that Clean Cities was fully funded for the whole year.

So as you look at things like garbage pickup, And so I think it's important for us to think about how we're going to be able to support our community through these purple bag programs.

And sharps removals, even sharps containers for folks who might have medical needs in addition to making sure that it's a clean area for folks who might also have substance abuse issues that are leaving sharps as well.

We want this to be a clean area for everyone, residents who are housed and unhoused.

So I think that there's shared interest in continuing the Clean Cities Initiative.

doing more and doing better on cleanups for those who need disposal receptacles, as well as regular routine pickups.

I think there's a lot of interest there.

I think that there's probably interest, I'm not seeing it called out in this slide, specifically, but as you look at, yeah, so as you look at like RV pump outs and RV remediation, cleaning, I would think that part of that as well is like additional porta-potties and creating more opportunities for porta-potties to be in certain locations as we try to get people housed.

So for, you know, maybe two-thirds of this conversation here, I think that there is a lot of crossover for me specifically in terms of wanting to enhance hygiene and cleaning services for everyone, all residents, our entire city, and making sure that there's geographic attention to all corners of the city.

Where I'm struggling is trying to figure out I would like to know why this appears to have an added element of specifically homeless outreach workers directly, and perhaps you can comment on that, because I do understand why this presentation is different from your traditional department layouts.

It's not one specific department.

But if I understand correctly, These folks are intended to be, I wrote down the word, like operator managers, management site, here it is, project manager, they provide project managers for specific sites.

So I guess I'm struggling with why we wouldn't just enhance the folks that do the direct outreach funding, like Reach, who was so instrumental in helping us make sure that Woodland Park was relatively more successful than other removals by making sure that more people had adequate time and the relationships to get folks out there.

Why is this suggesting adding another whole team to the city to do the outreach work that we know REACH is so well qualified to do?

And we know that RHA, we've been told to defer to them, they are the subject matter experts, would appear to be creating a duplicate system to what they're also trying to stand up.

Great question.

So I will start with saying that the Woodland Park, let's just use as an example, what the, I think first of all, the word outreach describing that is highly misleading.

So if I would replace that word, I would say human service coordinators.

So at Woodland Park, the human service coordinators that were in HSD did a few things.

They convened by like two time a week meeting they developed a by name list of all the folks that are in the park and they manage the by name list.

Those three things were the direct request of KCRHA and REACH.

The reason it was a direct request of REACH is because they don't currently have capacity to manage a resolution process at the project management level.

They do have the capacity to be on the site and offer shelter, help people get to shelter, and address things.

And so what we all got together and decided, so REACH, which is Chloe, myself, Mark, and Michael Bailey, was a distribution of tasks.

So Chloe said, once we know who's there and what their housing needs are, we'll send in our outreach workers to offer shelter.

The other thing that Michael Bailey's team did was the shelter availability for set-aside beds for this purpose.

So all of those things.

So Michael Bailey's team, who on this slide is called Outreach, by name list, They manage the by name list, they manage the available shelter beds through the NAP, and it's not the NAP team, but it's called the NAP team app, and I think there's a new name, but it's the app that all the outreach workers go into to grab beds.

for people.

And so it's an app that was built a really long time ago, but it's their only means of communication.

And so when every morning, one of Michael Bailey's staff would go to this app and say, Lehigh South End Village has two tiny villages open, X shelter has three beds open, and then someone from REACH will respond back, or someone from Urban League will respond back, or someone from another outreach team will respond back and say, I have someone, we'll take that one tiny home village.

That's currently the way that they operate as MARC is building a database where there's an accurate reflection of open beds at all times.

So that's the first.

The second thing I will say as a previous outreach worker, they don't want to be at a site once it is posted for removal.

And I think I've said this like 7 million times, and I'm not saying that as like a pushback, but like that distinction is a huge amount of work that somebody has to pick up.

because they don't want to lose their credibility with clients.

And so they, the outreach continuum, have asked in writing, we do not want to be there once a site is posted.

So another thing that Michael Bailey's team does is they stay there from the time a site is posted through resolution to make sure everyone there receives an offer of shelter.

But Deputy Mayor, on that point, though, I understood the community partners, including our partner at RHA and their contractors, not wanting to be present on a site once a removal is posted because they want to ensure that they have adequate time, that they have 60 days advance notice.

And so I think I asked this, where did I ask this?

At some point in the last few days, I asked, is this team then coming in in lieu of the outreach teams that RHA partners with because we're posting with less than 60 days notice, right?

Is this our backup team because we're not giving 60 days notice for people to get to adequate shelter.

So I'm going to ping Lindsay in a minute, but what I would say is CEO Dones, if we're on this phone, would say that they do get 60 days in advance.

They get two months of a removal calendar for that very reason.

They absolutely do not want to be at a site once it's posted, even if they have a 60 day notice.

But Lindsay, do you want to add anything there?

I wanted to say that our current system is based on what we've done in the way we've always done it.

And we made a lot of strides in improvements this year, but next year is really about what we can create with our community partners, with the city teams, with service partners, with our council partners.

And so we're in this awkward transition phase right now is what it feels like, where we can see the vision and have a lot of details to still work out to make it a reality.

But I think there's an opportunity to look at these roles for more than what they have been.

And really as dedicated team members who can engage and facilitate connections to services, both for people who are living and housed, but are housed neighbors, are community to community resources and other neighborhood stakeholders.

So I just wanted to put that out there because I think we're talking a lot about what what it is now.

And then I also want to say we're building what it what it could be or what it will be in that vision for next year.

OK, so then so in the best case scenario, reach community partners, RHA has 60 days notice, a post goes up, there's, let's say, a dozen people still at a site, then this team would come in and try to find shelter and appropriate housing for folks to go into before removal happens.

That's what this team does.

I would say yes and no.

So one of the things I want to acknowledge is that we've evolved greatly this year in partnership with KCRHA.

So what you're describing right now absolutely used to be the standard.

What has happened now is that because we give calendars 60 days in advance, that have nothing to do with a removal.

So the calendars that we give CEO Doans are the sites that rise to the top based off of the criteria.

No date, like it's not like, oh, we're gonna go here.

We have to go here because it says the 20th on the 20th.

A lot of times what happens is the outreach workers come back and say, many times, that deadline is impossible because there's too many people there with unique behavioral health issues and we don't have enough slots.

What we're moving to Council Member Mosqueda is to hopefully not have to wait until a site is scheduled for removal to do the work of a by name list and relationship development because we have people there all the time.

And so here's just a real basic example.

One of the regional teams is working in a region and they've met someone and that site at that region isn't scheduled for removal for months.

It's like not in nearly the top of the list.

But there are five people at that site And because folks have gotten to know them, over two months, a place comes up that uniquely fits the needs of somebody there.

We're not going to wait until the site is scheduled for removal to refer them.

We're going to refer them as soon as a place comes up for them.

So I don't know if I'm doing it justice.

My hope and my vision is that over time, through relationship building, we can both keep the temperature down in the communities because folks feel like the things that are making their day-to-day life untenable are being managed, and that sites would self-resolve over time because as one bed comes up or two beds come up, people can immediately be referred and not have to wait until a site is scheduled for removal to know that someone there wants a tiny home village.

I will ask this one last question because I know we have councilmembers in the queue.

I think the overall concern by adding more folks to a team that are not part of our existing outreach efforts yet and connectors with shelter and housing is that if we don't add additional space at the same time.

And we're trying, the budget tries, we are trying on our end with affordable housing through Jumpstart, very excited about those investments still remaining in the budget.

But encampment closures or removals, right, can only happen at the pace of shelter being made available.

And you all have said that as well.

Our data that we see continues to show, for example, that the amount of shelter available is not adequate, especially for gender nonconforming and trans folks, as we heard, might not be available for folks who want to move with their partner or with their pets.

We're still trying to scale up the appropriate shelter, but I don't, I'm still, I don't see how scaling up additional outreach for folks who are dedicated to helping with removals squares with our inability to get people into shelter faster.

And I'm also still confused with sort of like what RHA's role is versus what we're suggesting here because it sounds like we're And I know RHA has a specific method in which they want to do the outreach.

Our outreach team is very trusted and has proven practice as well as how they do outreach and engagement.

I'm worried as well that we might, I might, or we might, I might be confusing or conflating reach and hope because it feels like there's a lot of questions for me on this second line in this chart.

So I think that this is a helpful chart specifically because it helps us, as you noted, recognize that there's multiple components of what's being proposed here.

And I just wanted to make sure that my questions are really targeted to where I'm worried that there's duplication with RHA and other reach and outreach providers, and that we're not sort of adding to the number of people who are trying to do referrals, but referrals to places that don't really exist or aren't adequately meeting people's needs.

Yep.

So, I'm going to answer the second question first.

We're not duplicating the role of KCRHA because KCRHA's job is to build a system that works so that there are more places for people to go.

Their job, and they were very clear about this, is not to ensure that public spaces are clean, safe, and accessible for all.

Because if they did that for Seattle, they'd have to do that for Kent, and they'd have to do that for Renton, and they'd have to do that for Bellevue.

There's a clear distinction, and I think if I could use the term, it is the impacts of unsheltered homelessness.

the garbage, the needles, the need for a bathroom, all that stuff.

That is not what KCRHA does because that is our job as a city.

So that's the difference.

And then what you said earlier, so- And I would agree with you on that one.

Sorry to interrupt you.

I think that I've heard the same thing as well from RHA, right?

There's a role for the city to still be doing the supportive services around folks as they try to do the outreach and engagement.

That's why I think like the below the line there is where there might be a lot of common interest for the need to support.

Yeah, making sure that there's humane conditions for folks who are who are both and unhoused and housed in the city as a whole.

We want garbage plant across the city, but especially for those who don't have regular garbage pickup because they are housed.

So I just want to make sure I agreed with you on that point in terms of what I also think I've heard RHA saying.

But on the other piece that you were just about to get to is where I think that there's still a lot of questions.

Yep.

And I think so Morales is a sly pre-COVID right before COVID hit that defunded the NAV team was very specific that they wanted the whole team to do three things.

One, manage, set aside beds.

Two, facilitate and convene the outreach continuum.

And then the third one, Lindsay, what was the third?

Shelter beds, outreach continuum.

What was the third one?

was managed the storage process?

No.

Can you find it while I keep talking?

There's three distinct things.

And so the people that are in the current budget are still doing that.

I said to CEO Jones, if I could change anything about what the city did when we transitioned to KCRHA, it would have been this assumption that on January 1, the light switch turns on and we literally moved everything there.

The county did not, they staggered it, smart, like smart.

So there are things that CEO Doan still has not been able to take over and doesn't actually know if they want to take over out of sheer capacity.

And one of them are the responsibilities as outlined in the slide for the HOPE team.

So we've been in conversation since January on Since you have the outreach contracts, doesn't it make sense for KCRHA to convene the outreach continuum?

Since you, right, do you want to manage set-aside beds?

And there was pushback, rightfully so.

One of the pushbacks was we actually don't want to manage set-aside beds because they're set-aside beds, right?

And they're your set-aside beds, so you all should continue to manage the set-aside beds.

We want to manage the beds that are open to the whole system.

And so there's work that Michael Bailey's team is still holding.

And what we're trying to do is get to a place where we can transition the convening of the outreach continuum and the management of set-aside beds to KCRHA and shift the HOPE team to being what I call the conductors of the orchestra in the regions.

Because somebody has to be there every single day and field information and call Mark's team and say, there's three people here that need shelter.

That person needs to call SPU and say, there's graffiti that just went up on this business.

Can somebody come get this graffiti out?

That person has to collect the very data that Council Member Lewis said that he wanted.

OK, guys, there were three people here who wanted a place to go.

There were offers.

What happened?

Those people will be writing your reports.

Those people will be saying to me, Deputy Mayor Washington, there was a fire yesterday.

Fire came.

And so it'll be a replication of the unified care team in each region.

But somebody has to steer the ship in each region.

That's what they're going to be doing.

I hope that makes sense.

Okay, thanks for that answer.

I'm sure we'll come back to the concerns around the graffiti removal generally, but I'm going to turn it over to Councilmember Lewis, and I don't see any other hands in the queue.

I think that we can wrap this up unless you want to get in the queue, folks.

Please raise your hand, and then after Councilmember Lewis, we'll transition to the central step walkthrough.

Yeah, I have a line of questioning that's related to a a subject that Council Member Mosqueda alluded to, and also related to some of my earlier comments I made today during our sync discussion.

But as Council Member Mosqueda just said, and I think that everyone here would agree, these encampment remediations can basically happen at the pace of available desirable shelter locations that are available.

Ian Swallow, Boulder Housing Partners, Applicant OLIVE:" And I mean this line of questioning is motivated by the information I was just made privy to that the county is pulling the plug on 300 additional units of very desirable shelter that would have been in the soda location. And under normal circumstances, sure, we can redistribute and put that shelter somewhere else. But over the last two years, what I've learned is it takes forever to site something. It takes forever to plan. It's going to take months and months and months to get these things built. And I guess the question I just want to pose, since we're all the momentum and planning that's gone into those 300 units, we'll have to presumably start over, I guess, unless there's some updated information to find a new location. Meanwhile, we'll still be a city that has a mostly tent based shelter system. But I guess that my question is why when we have the coven state of emergency can we convert entire stadiums into. rapid injection sites for COVID boosters. And why can we set up massive, you know, temporary places where people can isolate and like all these other things. And then for the homeless the state of emergency we can just take our time. The exigency of these tents everywhere, which it's clear from all of our constituents house and on housed is the biggest issue like there was just some polling released from strategies 360 that indicated overwhelmingly the biggest issue tents everywhere. Why, when that is the situation in front of us, and we know things like tiny houses and, you know, the acquisition of hotels, motels, why can we take 12 months to stand up something like that? But in a matter of weeks, we can stand up things to respond to COVID. And if that's the case, I mean, I pose it, what's the point of our state of emergency? What does it help us do? What does being under a homelessness state of emergency mean if we can't like go out there and build a shelter? wherever. The doubling of the tiny house village in Interbay took 12 months to build 40 small plywood structures. I just don't understand why that's the case. What I would like us to do is try to have unified message discipline as a city family, in going to different branches of the government, be it the county, be it the state, whoever, and just knocking down every red tape barrier that we can find and identify that is impacting these planning processes. to make this take forever and making it really clear to our constituents, go and advocate for these changes so logistically we can stand these things up. Because I think it's been clear, like when we have those things, like these teams, the system you're putting together, Deputy Mayor Washington, can very quickly and efficiently get people into those places. You were extremely good at that. And you have the deep appreciation of all of us for your ability and Michael Bailey's ability to organize this work. But, you know, the way we were able to remediate locations like Howard Commons or Woodland Park or wherever is because we opened new tiny house villages and then for the next couple weeks we moved hundreds of people into them. So I just want to put forward like how do we put together a plan to go and knock this all down so we can respond to the same urgency we respond to other natural disasters. how in economic disasters, how can we treat homelessness the same way we treat those other disasters? Because clearly right now we don't have a framework that does, and it just, it takes forever to stand up these assets.

Great question.

So I wrote them down.

I'm going to answer in order.

We can only do resolutions at the pace of shelter availability.

That is my point.

So that is what, and I'm doing a terrible job, that I've been trying to get across this whole time, is that's why we need regional teams.

Because if it's only about removals, the pace will be very, very long.

So the slide that says KCRHA needs time to build a system that works, a couple things.

The average time that people sit and stay in tiny home villages, is too long.

The average time that people stay in certain enhanced shelters are too long.

And so there's a couple system issues here that Mark is working on, which is why are people, and I'm gonna channel Mark again as I did in the press conference yesterday, emergency shelter is supposed to be the emergency room where you triage people.

It's never supposed to be a place where people stay for 300 days.

That's a system issue that has to be fixed to improve throughput.

If our city and county were operating at the federal HUD throughput rate, we would have enough places to put people.

So that's the first thing Mark's working on.

The second thing that Mark has reminded us is this notion that everybody doesn't have to go to shelter.

We are clogging up the emergency room because we're assuming everyone needs to go to the ER when some people can go to urgent care.

Right.

It's kind of like, why, if this person is perfectly fine and they just need first and last month's rent.

Why would we put them in the emergency room.

Why not just get them straight into housing and that's where our affordable housing units come into play.

The third system thing that marks trying to fix is that we have affordable housing units.

that people collectively operators are not putting into coordinated entry.

The reason they're not putting it in a coordinated entry is because historically way before Mark even got here.

people were referring folks into low-income housing that were not appropriate fits for low-income housing.

And so the landlords of affordable housing got a bad taste in their mouth about coordinated entry.

Mark is trying to repair the relationship with the affordable housing providers to say, please don't hide your units.

we will send you appropriate referrals to fill them.

Once Mark fixes the system issues, we will be fine.

As Mark said, and our HUD TA person said at E-TEAM the other day, they actually believe that countywide we have enough resources.

We just don't, the system is not working as it is intended to work.

Mark just started in January.

So my job is to partner with Mark and say what can we do to make sure that we can do while you're improving the system, that we can take care of our right of ways public spaces parks, knowing that we can't.

put on a magic light and move everybody inside.

And that's what Lindsay said.

It's all the other stuff on this slide.

It's all the other stuff on this slide and moving people inside.

And so that's the answer to the first question.

The second one is it takes so long to open shelter.

That is one of Mayor Harold's commitments is to reduce the permitting time.

He too believes it takes too long to build shelter.

It is just ridiculous.

I think, and you're being Council Member Lewis, we take too long period on a lot of things.

And Mayor Harreld is not about that.

He is pushing us to move and he doesn't like excuses, and he is making us move at a pace of one Seattle.

So that's what I would say about that.

And then I would say, why can we take our time during the homelessness state of emergency, but we can like move heaven and earth during a COVID emergency?

I gotta make sure I don't get in trouble here.

The answer to that in part is systemic racism because everyone's not impacted by homelessness in the same way.

When there is a global pandemic that we are all equally suspect to, people are willing to do all kinds of stuff.

But an example I'll give you is our gun violence shot through the roof, no pun intended, during COVID.

And our providers were asking the same thing.

They were saying, how come we can't approach gun violence at the same rate you're approaching this COVID emergency?

A lot of advocacy groups' eyes were blown.

I'm still blown away by what was possible.

But what I will say is there are over 1,000 units right now that we all opened up.

I want to give us all credit, and you deserve this credit too, all the council members.

We opened up thousands of non-congregate shelters.

at the last minute during COVID emergency because we had millions of dollars from the feds.

We opened up childcare.

We gave, what do we call it?

Bonuses to childcare providers.

That's the wrong word.

We opened up childcare.

You all were able to give stipends to workers.

The city, in my opinion, did an amazing job during COVID.

And so what I agree with you on is we've learned it's possible.

So how do we keep that pace of emergency going?

in the same way that we were able to do it.

Because what we proved was it is absolutely possible to stand something up.

We proved it during COVID.

And I'm with you and would love to partner with council to figure out how we use that same urgency towards other issues, not just homelessness, but all the things that are hurting vulnerable populations.

So I hope all of those answered your questions.

You got me revved up, Council Member Lewis, about things I care about too.

No, and I completely agree with everything you said, which is why I mean, and none of these are none of these are necessarily new sentiments right i mean for two years, you know and Mark didn't start in January I mean Mark started in April of last year.

And I appreciate that Mark has the shared value of wanting us to increase pass-through from shelter to increase the utility of that shelter, all for it.

But we've been having the same discussion for two years.

And just the thing that, like just in terms of looking at how is the big problem that our constituents keep raising that they wanna see, which is the ability to move folks from encampments inside Things like more tiny house villages are the only thing that I've seen work in the last two years.

I am all for making the more efficient, so that instead of having more, we just do more pastor.

That's not happening.

I haven't seen a plan or a strategy to do that.

So in the meantime, it seems like more tiny house villages is the only thing.

I'm happy to see a plan that really hunkers down to increase the efficiency and increases the pass through.

So I guess what I'm just saying is I agree with all your sentiments.

What I'm not seeing is like the bullet by bullet plan on how we effectuate the same things we've been talking about for the last two years.

That is my issue.

Like we've been talking about making tiny homes more efficient for the last two years instead of building more of them.

Great.

But I don't want to keep talking about that.

It's at the point where we need to see what that's going to look like.

And I'm happy to support an initiative around that.

And then second, would love to see the things that are in the pipeline with our mutual frustration over how long this is taking between Mayor Harrell, yourself, and I.

And I appreciate that he's also frustrated and wants it to move faster.

I'd love to see the bulleted list of the things we need to do to change that and what the cost is.

Just laying that out there.

And then I'd also love to see the things that are out of our control where we need to be unified as a city government and really just push and push and push like in the media with coalition partners on the red tape that is from the state or the feds that is holding us back and make it clear who's responsible for changing that so that we can galvanize public attention.

I mean, the people of the city wanna see rapid progress on this.

And they want to know how they can help.

And I feel like I'm in this position when I have my constituent office hours to basically be like, well, we have to sit back and just kind of wait while the things that we put in the budget get implemented.

And it's going to take forever.

And no, it's not really clear how we're going to make it move faster.

So I think we should have a united city plan where we speak with one voice through our OIR, through other groups.

And we just push on these things together.

And because I do think that it'll just help empower people who want to be part of the solution and really push forward to get this done.

And, and just help us, you know, respond with the urgency that this situation requires because it just seems like we keep getting stuck.

In a malaise and talking about what would be nice but but we, we, we don't seem to be as good as we could be about organizing the work to put external pressure on other people to meet the shared urgency that we have as a city, so I appreciate your partnership on that.

Yeah, I'm going to try and wrap us up after this.

So let's be relatively short.

So the plan, I just want to encourage you as a board member and Councilmember herbal as a board member, Mark will be submitting that plan and the mayor as a board member, the five year plan this year, right, Lindsay?

And it should give you the answer to that question of what are we going to do to improve in November to improve the system throughput, so that we can realize this long drawn out vision of if we just move people through faster will have enough spaces so be looking for looking for that and I think we should huddle.

internally to talk about that and also maybe utilize our meetings with Mark prior to the board meetings a little bit more to dig into that.

What's in the pipeline is on the web, so I'll send you the link.

There's a website, the homelessness website has all the things in the pipeline and the status, so I'll send that to you.

And so I just wanted to answer those two things, Councilwoman Mosqueda.

Thank you.

All right.

Well, I'm seeing A lot of interest in this.

I'm sure that the conversation will continue.

Please pass on our appreciation to the team I know is represented here in part, but we know people have been working around the clock for a long time.

So please express our appreciation for trying to find that common ground that Councilmember Lewis really just ended on, which is like We got to show progress and we need to do so in coordination.

And I don't want us to be recreating old models that were not proven effective in the past and look forward to getting to the bottom of some of those questions.

Appreciate additional information that you mentioned was coming our way.

And let's thank our department folks for being here and the executive as well.

Thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

I don't need to stay on, right?

Do I?

You don't need to.

Yeah, you've been with us a long time.

Thank you.

And so for everyone else, thank you.

Yes, you're welcome.

Thank you, Tiffany.

Thank you.

Yeah, you're welcome to bow out.

We do appreciate the department for being here.

And I know Julie Dingley will remain on the line here with us.

We want to go into the issue identification.

So this as a reminder, we've only spent our time so far talking about We're going to go into the central staff's presentation.

multiple departments that touch on this.

So I see Amy is off of mute.

I want to thank you, Amy, for all of the work that you've done.

And of course, we know that you're stepping into this issue area with a number of other issues on your plate.

So we appreciate you getting all of the information to us in a very fast way and getting caught up to speed on so many moving parts.

I appreciate that Councilmember.

So we have a couple of slides here.

Our first two slides are really just a summary table of the additions in terms of funding and staffing that I believe Deputy Mayor Washington has just presented.

So if it's okay with you, Chair Mosquito, we can skip to slide three, if you think that would be okay.

I asked just a general question about the budget proposal, though.

It has been confirmed that the slides in front of us were created after looking at the various departments and trying to identify which components of those departments related to this initiative.

But is so it's assumed that it would be the same amount for twenty twenty four.

It's assumed that that's already part of the budget just was an inflationary adjustment probably for twenty twenty four.

So twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four is in the budget.

Yes, we all over the lunch break took a look.

We don't have a slide of it, but we all took a look at the ads in our respective departments, and we couldn't find anything in 2024 that was a substantial increase over 2023. So it is all ads in 2023 that are ongoing, and so the increase that would occur is just standard cost inflation for city services.

Okay, and I didn't see an issue identification slide on this, and apologies if it is there, but one of the areas I would like to explore more is whether they're, you know, assuming various components of this would be in the proposed budget that moves forward, some scaled-in approach for 2023, as it sounded like there was a lot of conversation still to happen in 2023, not I think it would be fair to look at some version of a scaled in approach for certain components if those are to move forward in 2023.

I just wanted to make sure I think I maybe I misheard, but Council Member Mosqueda, we would, there's not an opportunity, if we were to do, I heard you say scaled down approach for 2023. And I want to make sure that, could you re-say that part one more time?

I just want to clarify.

Okay, what I'm suggesting is I need to see when these components would be operationalized.

Again, I think the general premise is we don't want dollars sitting on a shelf, sitting in coffer for future deliberations when there's so much need out there.

So if there's proponents that aren't ready for action in quarter one, I would like to know that from central staff.

Great.

If I could, I heard you right.

So thank you for for saying it one more time.

If I could, there's the work needs.

The work is currently happening.

It's ongoing.

And so even though a geographic team would be sort of a phased implementation over time, that the current work of the clean cities would need to continue.

So unless the policy direction were Stop the clean cities work until it can only be implemented by a geographic team that that's a different policy direction.

So I just want to I don't think that the comments were specific to clean cities.

For example, it was more related to.

The yet to be hired personnel that don't appear to yet beyond the roles for the city, then, if those folks are not yet hired and there's additional conversations to happen as suggested with community and council members.

That's where I think that there's probably some scalability.

Allie, did I see your hand up?

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

The team does have an issue and options that includes sort of phasing or scaling for your consideration.

So I think that while we might have differing perspectives on this than the executive, I think there are opportunities to scale or phase some of this.

And maybe if the team can move to the issue identification, we can talk a little bit more about that.

Apologies, I see an NB there.

OK.

So this slide, again, is we just have this one issue identification for Council's consideration.

And I think this really gets at the crux of the conversation that has been occurring this afternoon and this morning.

And that is that the overall additions in funding and staffing could increase the city's capacity for encampment removals.

The expansion includes funding and positions for teams at SDOT and parks who will be specifically trained for encampment removals and the system navigators in HSD who have also historically been involved in encampment removals.

It's unknown how this additional funding and capacity might impact the number of removals given that there are, as we've discussed quite a bit today, there's not enough space in shelter or housing to give an appropriate usable referral to individuals living outside.

As Deputy Mayor Washington described, these funds and staffing could also be used to improve services and cleaning for non-removal activities and improve the city's ability to support individuals living unsheltered and to mitigate impacts of unsheltered homelessness.

However, there's just within this proposal, not really those guardrails to keep it in the non-encampment removals when there is not shelter or housing available.

So the options that we have come up with here are to eliminate the increased funding and staffing for the unified care team and maintain levels of funding from 2022. Second would be to reduce appropriations to scale changes in funding and staffing to better reflect the phased implementation of the expansion and reorganization into geographic teams.

Director Dingley, I'm happy to continue working with you about what that might actually look like.

Third, council could consider imposing a proviso on some or all of the funds restricting how the additional funding may be used.

Fourth, council could reduce appropriations to only provide funding and staffing for the Clean Cities Initiative work to continue at the 2022 level of service.

Fifth, council could eliminate increased funding and staffing for additional system navigators.

I will add that during this conversation, I heard another option from Council Member Lewis, which is to request better data reporting on the UCT and their activities that will inform council members about what is happening on the ground particularly around shelter referrals and acceptances and how that relates to removals.

Perhaps in response to Council Member Mosqueda's question, it could also include more information about the 60-day notice requirements and whether that is occurring or not.

Finally, the council could make no change.

That was a very succinct summary.

Thank you very much, Amy.

Each one of those options A through F, plus the two others that you noted, concept around clarification or requirements around 60 days and better data reporting.

Each one of those could probably have their own slides.

So thank you for walking us through that.

Tracy, thanks for being here and apologies for missing out on our parks overview.

I'm so disappointed, you know, since we didn't spend any time this summer talking about parks and all the changes there from the park district spending plan.

So just to give you a sense about D the continuation, if the option you wanted to pursue was just continuing essentially the clean cities initiative that we began in 2022. We do have estimates from the executive about that and it is the ballpark of around $10 million.

10 million

as a component of this proposal?

No, if you wanted to say we don't want to do this, UCT, what we really just want to do is just continue the Clean City initiatives that we basically had operated in 2022. What would be the cost to do that?

So that's, you know, the SPR Clean Cities piece.

along with some of the SPU and SDOT stuff.

So that would be just continuing basically really the Clean Cities Initiative only and not all these additional staffing, enhancements of system navigators and so forth.

So we know that that cost of just to continue what we're doing in 2022, known as that Clean Cities piece, would be around $10 million for the cost for all those departments to continue that work.

Okay, Council Member Morales, just one second.

Let me ask one more clarifying question on that.

Patty, if you could go back to that slide that I had up earlier that was a breakdown from the department on the expenditures listed kind of in a table chart.

Yeah, thank you so much.

There we go, that one.

Tracy, when I look at this, Are you saying that the Clean Cities Initiative, as we have already been funding it, is reflected in some of these lines, or is this a changed approach to the Clean Cities concept?

It's really an expansion of the Clean Cities Initiative, only now they're calling it the UCT and the Clean Seattle.

So if you look at the one-time surge column underneath 2022, for example, the cost of SPR to do the Clean Cities Initiative in 2022 was $4.2 million.

So if you wanted to continue that, just that activity, that level of work in 2023, I know that the cost that they have given me for that would be about $4.6 million.

So wouldn't be adding any of these additional staff, it would be staying at their current staffing, which is actually about 21 and a half FTEs, I think, not 20, 22 and a half, actually 20, it's 20.5.

their FTEs are.

So without adding any more of those new FTEs, just to continue the clean cities only work for SPR, it would be about $4.6 million, and you would maintain the FTE at the level of the 20.5, which is connected to that clean cities work.

Okay, thank you.

And just one last question for me.

In this proposal, as transmitted by the mayor's office, how much of the Clean Cities concept is dedicated only for that graffiti removal?

That would be a question I think that Brian might have to provide.

Yep.

Yep.

Graffiti removal totals slightly under $1.2 million.

That's three FTE and then adds from a couple of different actions, but it's about 1.2.

Okay, thanks.

And I think I'll just lift up what I believe Councilmember Sawant was noting earlier.

That's the same number that we see being reduced from public hygiene programs.

And so I think that was a point well taken earlier and just wanted to flag that again for our colleagues.

Councilmember, oh, excuse me.

Saroja, did you have a comment?

Well, I just had a clarification to what Tracy was just saying and others is if you wanted to continue the same level of cleans that we do now, a lot of the clean teams, because of the surge, are temporary.

We would need pockets in addition to the dollars.

Those those are not permanent staff.

OK, great.

And I'm seeing Tracy not get anything to add, Tracy.

OK, so Tracy nods.

Thank you for flagging that.

Um, customer Morales.

Thank you.

Um, so a couple things.

The first is, um, sorry, I was on the phone about the county announcement when there was an apparent discussion about the hope team.

Um, and so just for a reminder for folks, the intent behind the hope team was, in fact, to make sure that city staff were not involved in removals, but we're really coordinating with outreach workers to make sure that there was access to services.

And, and that removals.

Sorry I just lost my place here.

The first response for encampments would not be removals but would actually be attempted to make sure that We're getting access to services.

I think it's important, you know, we've heard plenty today about the fact that we do not have enough places for people to go that, you know, will be some time before, whether it's tiny house villages or more enhanced shelters or supportive housing.

affordable housing, lots of options, not all of which are available right now, and that is the reason why we have so many folks on the street.

And so I, you know, it sort of defies logic to me why we are so intent on moving people around.

And I think this is the crux of the issue.

You know, this program This program is about not about serving people who are actually experiencing homelessness, it is about ensuring that parks and sidewalks are clean.

It is about removals.

In order to keep clean.

So, I certainly don't have any objection to to get harder to keep our city clean, I think, you know, if we want to spend several million dollars to make sure that trash is getting picked up and and.

You know we're we're keeping parts of the city clean that's fine.

What I don't understand and what I don't agree with is why that has to be tied, moving people from one neighborhood to another from one side of the street to the other.

You know, we've got a $38 million budget consideration in front of us and only two and a half million of that is for actually assisting people who are experiencing homelessness.

None of it is for building housing.

And so, you know, I would be interested in having a conversation about what each of these components around keeping our city clean.

we could continue.

I'm very interested, again, in the, you know, regional team's idea, if it is about how we, you know, increase cleanup in the city.

But if the only real strategy to address homelessness with this program is to move people from one street to another, I don't think that's a goal that we should be supporting with tens of millions of dollars.

Thank you for the reminder on the hope team Councilmember Morales and for your leadership on that.

Councilmember Lewis.

Thank you, Councilmember Mosqueda, I mean I, I do think the mandate for the work that is being done here is broader than just doing the traditional navigation team style removals of encampments.

Though I do think there's lots of areas of potential concern where the council's prerogative around reporting requirements and data collection would be more appropriate.

I'm only speaking for myself in terms of how I intend to contribute to the structure of our council budget this year, but I do think it would behoove us as a council to remember our role under the charter in the city government in terms of how we interact with the direct delivery of services.

Our powers of oversight are extensive and our ability to monitor and report on and then develop our public credibility and how we scrutinize the activities and behavior of the executive.

It's been clear that our ability to design pressure points to compel the executive to structure their work and act in a way more in accordance with our preferences is incredibly limited.

And we go down that road at our peril.

Certainly, I think over the last couple of years, we have come down that road at our peril.

and runs the risk if we tie the hands of how the executive wants to perform given work, in this case, outreach and remediation of issues that are associated with encampments, then it's the council's fault when the city perceives that things have gone off the rails.

And I think that what we need to do is embrace that legislative ability to put front and center how the city is performing and then driving accountability to meet the metrics and meet the performance.

What we've been shared today is an intent by the executive to move people from the street into housing and barring access to housing into opportunities to access shelter.

I am happy to put in place reporting requirements, metrics, and having public hearings to monitor the compliance with those goals and objectives if we grant the resources that are being requested.

What I am leery of is designing our own alternative system and trying to impose that on an executive who holds the implementer's veto in terms of what actually happens.

So I'm just structuring how I want to continue to have this conversation.

I really appreciate the presentation from the executive team today in terms of how they envision this coming together to deliver on the mandate that the city has to respond to the homelessness crisis.

I think this discussion is inextricably linked to the availability and the quality of housing and shelter for people to move to.

And I think it's important to to demonstrate that and how we structure a budget.

But I would be leery in making significant changes to how the executive wants to organize this work without pre-approving and coordinating with the executive on how that would work in practice.

Just putting my cards out there at this point and look forward to continuing to craft this over the next couple of weeks.

Thanks so much Council Member Lewis and appreciate that there does need to be coordination to ensure implementation as we've seen in the past.

Good point.

Okay, any additional questions on this?

Comments?

Okay.

I I'm going to just pause real quick.

I want to thank central staff, you waited on the line here for a while to let us get through this presentation.

I'm going to ask one more question that's pretty technical in nature.

I'm trying to remember what slide this is on, maybe slide 14. There is a slide that gets to the Seattle Public Utilities component.

It's in the central staff memo as well.

Oh, sorry, it might be in the central staff memo.

It notes that we are.

It includes eliminating obstructions on right of ways.

Is this is this also for removing things like Eco blocks that are being placed out there from folks in the community that aren't permitted as part of the hostile architecture concerns that are being raised.

What is what is removal of right away.

Broadly mean and oh sorry department as well, this may have been a better department technical question.

Tracy, are you off mute?

I can't tell.

I was wondering if Cal has any information.

I think the right-of-way stuff generally is more SDOT than SPU.

I don't know the reference offhand.

Okay.

Council members, I'm afraid I don't have particular insight about how that's being proposed to, if it would deal with those issues, I would have to follow up with the department.

Okay.

And I see Director Dingley also has her hand up.

Hello.

Hi there, I can provide hopefully a little bit of clarity, although not perhaps absolute.

Obstruction in this case means people, tents, personal property, garbage, debris, or other objects related to an encampment that are either in a city park or on a public sidewalk, interfere with the pedestrian or transportation purposes of public rights of way, or interfere with areas that are necessary for or essential to the intended use of a public property or facility.

So I hope that that helps.

Director, Deputy Director.

Thank you.

I'm wondering, I'm just trying to better understand the question if there is a need for a follow up.

Are you asking if that work will include removal of the the eco blocks that private businesses are installing in the right of way?

Yeah, I mean, there's some concern out there that when these eco blocks are being placed out there, they're not being permitted or they're not technically legal as well.

And so as we see more and more of the private placement of eco blocks, hopefully folks who had maybe previously been in camp living in an encampment there are actually getting in somewhere.

Aren't we trying to free up the right of ways for the original use?

Or is this just clearing encampments, encampment-related materials?

Council Member, I do think that the way I understand the SDOT clean teams, Removing eco blocks is largely moving heavy concrete blocks from a site.

It seems to me that's a different regulatory responsibility than what the clean teams are proposed for, which is really about cleaning up debris and smaller scale obstructions.

So I will follow up, but I don't believe it would address that issue.

Okay, great.

And is there any carryover funding from the I don't know if there's anything else that you would like to add to that.

Three wall and the art concepts that we had talked about in lieu of just the gray paint for graffiti removal.

In last year's budget in.

Carrying forward into the upcoming budget.

I will double check that, then it would be underspend, but it's assumed in balancing for 2023, but we will confirm that and follow back up.

You're talking about the council ad from 2022 for that work.

I think a portion of that funding was part of the hold list, but I will double check that.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, thank you all.

Director Dingley, thank you for getting us through all of these departments.

All of the team from central staff, thanks for walking us through this presentation.

I know we had a lot of you on the line.

There will probably be additional questions and appreciate that Council Member Lewis is teeing up future deliberations between both branches of government so that we can continue to try to find those concentric circles where there's a shared interest in moving forward at investments.

I am going to note for the record that we only have miscellaneous items to cover in the last hour and a half.

Wanted to just ground us as we head into the miscellaneous discussion in case anybody does have to jump up early.

I wanted to ground us in the questions that Director Handy posed on the first day of our conversation.

As you think about the amendments that are now due at noon on Tuesday, October 18th.

Some of these questions that were put forward as framing questions for the council, I think are really helpful.

So as the council looks at priorities for the upcoming budget, we elected central staff, all of us as a community, I think we're looking at whether or not the proposal uses regional solutions to serve houseless individuals and families, maintain a clean city with accessible parks and open space, support a public safety system that recruits and retains a public safety workforce and advances the reimagining of policing with larger civilian response networks and new 911 alternatives, advances a Vision Zero transportation strategy that invests in core road and bridge infrastructure, invest in partnerships with local tribes, support our native communities, and care for our most vulnerable residents and those that offer frontline services to them, and advances the initiatives that we have outlined in legislation through all of our work as a council in partnership with the executive that have been signed into law.

I thought those were helpful questions to resurface as we think about amendments to see that those align with those questions.

And I also wanted a chance to offer central staff a chance to highlight some of the work that they quickly compiled.

I asked for a by department comparison of net gains or losses in each department.

I think that would be helpful for us to take a look at recognizing there's.

So, right now, what we're looking at is changes in the percent, sort of an organized chart by percent category and dollar category in terms of ads or reductions and the net impact.

Thank you, central staff for pulling this together, Director Handy and Deputy Director Panucci.

I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to council members.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda, and I want to thank our newest central staff analysts, Ed and Sissa, to put this together quickly, and the whole team for doing some quick quality control.

I just want to note, so this table shows the year-over-year change as presented in the proposed budget, but I do want to make clear that this really does obscure a lot of the details of what is really going on in each of the department's budgets.

Those nuances are really what CS, CS, sorry, central staff, is teasing out in the 40 plus budget overview papers that we've prepared for all of your consideration and really encourage all of you to not just look at any one of these numbers and assume one way or the other as there's a lot going on within each department's budget.

I would also note that this year in particular is a difficult comparison year over year because the 2022 adopted budget included significant one-time federal funds.

And so including those in the comparison between 2022 and 2023 can have the effect, for example, of showing a reduction for a department that is otherwise seeing an increase if you backed out those one-time funds.

I'll also just highlight that on the high end, if you're looking at this chart, the Ethics and Elections Commission, for example, has a significant increase that reflects the cost, for example, of the democracy voucher program for the upcoming election with seven council members running and that sort of thing.

And so all of this information should be taken or compared with the budget overview paper to provide a little bit more detail.

And we will distribute this to all council members in a little bit.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, a good example of that would be a good example of wanting to see apples to apples would be our discussion about the regional homelessness authority and the.

you know, 70 some million dollars that was just from the city, not including emergency relief from covid.

That was one time in nature and trying to do an apples to apples comparison between this year and last year is a good example of the type of data that helps to flush out this information a little bit more.

Um R. H. A. Is obviously not a department and that's why They were also not part of our lineup.

But we appreciate this.

I think this is helpful context on the macro scale.

And of course, council members who have questions will be able to get into more information either with central staff or the departments directly.

Okay, thanks for that quick work.

I don't see any questions on this.

Let's go ahead and move on into our miscellaneous items.

Madam Clerk, do you need to read item number four into the record perhaps?

We are starting with law.

Councilmember Herbold is not here.

Asha Venkatraman put together this budget issue paper, but is unavailable this afternoon.

So I'm going to walk through the issue.

Next slide, Patty.

The law department has a 2023 proposed budget of about $40 million.

That's a 3.5% increase from the 2022 adopted budget and will support approximately 210 FTEs that report up to our independently elected city attorney.

There is one issue we want to bring to the council's attention in this budget.

And that is in regards to the two prosecutors being added to the domestic violence unit.

One assistant city prosecutor and one senior assistant city prosecutor.

I believe this would grow the domestic violence unit from seven to nine attorneys.

A couple pieces of context for this ad.

The first is that in 2022 the Washington State Legislature passed House Bill 1901 that expands the definition of domestic violence to include coercive control.

and law is anticipating that the definition will result in an increase of protection orders filed and therefore unlikely protection orders violated, which is a misdemeanor in Seattle Municipal Court.

And so adding to this caseload.

Two pieces that the council and Office for Civil Rights have been working on that also frame this issue In September 2021, the Community Task Force report on the criminal legal system issued a comprehensive report, and that included concerns about handling domestic violence within the criminal legal system.

Those concerns included concerns that the system often does not consider dynamics of queer and trans communities, and that because the result in the criminal legal system is a punitive response, that individuals and families who have touched that system, been oppressed by that system, otherwise been impacted by state violence may not use, choose to call and ask for help from the criminal legal system for fear of consequences of doing so.

The report recommended that a work group explore alternative options And last year in the budget, the council added $120,000 to fund this working group.

That work is still underway and expected to produce recommendations in the spring of 2023. So the options we present to you are one, you could reduce the proposed positions added by one or both.

You could choose to proviso the funding until the work group issues recommendations next spring.

you could make no change and accept the proposed increase.

Thank you very much.

I don't see any hands.

I do want to appreciate that you've lifted up a lot of the report, the data that indicates that continuing to treat, to add to the criminal justice system is counter to what some of those report studies have suggested as a strategy to help survivors, and I look forward to hearing more about those reports and any other strategies on this one.

Council Member Nelson, please go ahead.

Yeah, so what was that state law you just referenced?

Because that was not in OSHA's memo.

Can you tell me that number?

I'll look that up later.

It was House Bill 1901. I think in our back and forth of understanding the budget, we sort of uncovered some of that context.

Thanks.

And so I think that I have not read the report that was just mentioned.

I think that we we proceed into at our peril at suggesting that the survivors of domestic violence would not like to continue using the criminal legal system to make sure that they are kept safe.

So I'll just put that out there.

You know, since they're there in one of the reports that the CEO put out, the the decline rate for prosecution from survivors has gone down from like twenty seven percent to about eight percent, and that is credited to them being able to file those papers more quickly when as the survivors are able to talk to advocates or you know, investigators or and they're more willing to to have their cases proceed.

And I think that that is a good thing.

And that's partly due to the fact that they have made some efficiencies in the CEO's office.

So I think that when if we are going to be looking at not going forward with this budget, we need to have a broader conversation about what some of the survivors are thinking.

So I will look at that report at the link in the central staff paper.

I'm interested in knowing who participated in that study, because I do think that we do need to speak directly with KSARC and et cetera, the Coalition for Ending Gendered Violence before we go much further down this road.

Thanks.

Thank you, Elsa.

Great, I'll just add two points and then let you move to the next, which is part of the goal in addition to addressing caseload of adding these prosecutors is to be able to have what they call a vertical prosecution model.

And I think my understanding of that is that the same prosecutor stays with the case throughout so that there is less sort of revolving door on that.

That is an improvement the city attorney is trying to make.

And yeah, definitely.

If Asha was here, she would be able to speak directly to who's engaged in the work groups, but both the 2021 report and the current work group are really centered on folks who have been in and impacted by the current criminal legal system.

So, yeah, take a look at those and we'd be happy to talk more with you about that.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Great questions.

We are going to skip up to office of sustainability and environment.

I would like to thank central staff for your flexibility on this.

I would like to invite

Thank you so much, Sharon mosquito I really appreciate you giving me a few minutes and also for moving the order of the item so that I could make it apologies to central staff and.

Other council members, I have to leave a little early.

I don't have too much to preface the discussion that we're about to have, but I just wanted to note two things.

One is that as you yourself have said, Chair Mosqueda, and as you know, I strongly agree that the portion of the payroll tax funds that have been designated for Pallavi Guhaa, Ph.D.: : use to to to carry out the new deal related programs should be continued for that purpose, and if there is a shortfall in the budget, which we know, there is, then, and, as you know, i've said this before my recommendation is that.

We expand the tax on big businesses because they have actually profited through the pandemic.

And so the goals that we have through the vote that we did on the payroll tax and the spending bill specifically should be maintained.

That's one thing.

And then the other thing I wanted to just preface this by just to inject a note of seriousness to our discussion.

Obviously, we are discussing just the city of Seattle, but two reasons why this becomes a very sober discussion is, one, Seattle has its own climate goals.

You know, the goal, first of all, is to bring the climate emissions down, climate pollution down to zero by 2030. And then on top of that, Seattle's climate goals are not something happening in isolation.

This is a global, it's an existential crisis.

And given those two aspects, given the steep goal of 2030, it's imminent because of the steep steepness of what we need to reach by then in eight years, and on top of that, how much the global crisis as advanced.

I think all of this really situates the budget decisions in much larger context, and especially from The reports that OSCE themselves have shared in the past, you know, committee members who are part of the Sustainability and Retrosights Committee will know we've gone over this before, about how, as a matter of fact, over the last years, building emissions, for example, have actually, you know, it has regressed, not progressed.

and that poses an even bigger challenge.

And so considering all of this, I think the least that we can do by the end of this budget season is to make sure that we do as much as we can within the framework of the budget decisions to keep in line with those goals, which I know everybody agrees with, but it's a question of actually making it happen.

And the last thing I'll add to the note of seriousness is, that we know the whole continent of Europe is in a massive energy crisis.

And in fact, even mainstream sort of pro-corporate economists and analysts have said this now openly in the last couple of weeks, that actually, if even continent wide and globally, if governments had made major strides in clean energy solutions, the crisis would not have been anywhere as serious as it is now.

And in fact, they are predicting that the crisis is going to go on for multiple years.

It's not like this will be the last year.

So I just wanted to share that context in order to frame our discussions.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate those comments.

And it looks like we have Yolanda on the line here with us.

Good afternoon, Yolanda.

Hello, Chair.

Yolanda Ho, Council Central staff.

I will Betty, so just do a quick overview of the office of sustainability environments 2023 2024 proposed budget, this would increase their budget by 4.2 million in 2023 increase about 23.5%.

and in 2024, its budget would increase by an additional 5.2 million, so 23.4%.

The vast majority of this increase is due to additional appropriations from the Jumpstart Fund to support implementation of Seattle's Green New Deal, including the forthcoming Building Performance Standards Program that is anticipated to come to the council early next year.

OSC would also add a total of 10 new positions over the biennium, with seven new positions in 2023, three new positions in 2024. Just a quick note that just talking about the Green New Deal generally, the OSC budget details these changes and the specific changes to OSC, but that they're also a comprehensive list of the Green New Deal investments are detailed in attachment to the general fund and related funds paper that was presented to the committee on Tuesday.

That also includes a crosswalk between the Green New Deal Oversight Board's recommendations, the 2023 proposed budget, the Green New Deal Opportunity Fund that the Council passed in September, Ordinance 126675, and the related items that were included in the 2022 adopted budget.

And with that, I will go to the next slide and talk about one of the first issues.

So I wanted to remind the Council that the heating oil tax will go into effect on January 1, 2023. In 2019, the Council passed Ordinance 125-934 that created a tax of 0.236 cents per gallon of heating oil sold by heating oil service providers in Seattle.

This tax is assumed to be passed directly on to residents.

The revenues will fund a variety of efforts that revolve around reducing the reliance on oil heat to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

which including covering the cost of converting from oil heat to an electric heat pump system for low income households, supporting workforce development for oil service providers, expanding an existing rebate program for all households to convert from oil heat to electric heat pumps, and providing direct reimbursement to low income households to offset the anticipated tax impacts.

The effective date of this tax was originally September 1, 2020. Due to the pandemic, and the related economic impacts on residents, the Council delayed this effective date three times, resulting in the current effective date of January 1 of next year.

The 2022 adopted budget appropriated 1.7 million of Jumpstart Green New Deal dollars for low-income household conversions, electric heat pump system rebates for all households seeking to convert from oil heat, outreach, and program administration that were originally planned to be supported by the heating oil tax revenues.

And just for your reference, these efforts are collectively known as the Clean Heat Program.

The proposed budget, 2023 proposed budget includes 2.6 million ongoing Jumpstart Green New Deal funds for these purposes.

And just for your reference, the heating oil tax revenue is anticipated to be 1.4 million in 2023 and 1.25 million in 2024, with revenues decreasing over time as homes convert away from oil heat.

When the Council was establishing the heating oil tax in 2019, there was no other source of dedicated ongoing revenue to support efforts to convert low income residents away from oil heat to electric heat pump systems.

Now that the proposed budget would fund this initiative and expand the rebate program available to all households using jumpstart dollars and as recommended by the Green New Deal Oversight Board, the council may want to consider whether the heating oil tax is still necessary in this context.

So the options here would be to propose budget legislation to repeal the tax or no change thus allowing the tax to go into effect of the first of next year.

Thank you.

Council Member Salmon, did you have any comments or questions on that?

No, no questions right now.

Okay.

Can I just confirm, Yolanda, the...

Oh, I'm sorry, Council Member Morales, I see your hand, it blended in with the wall.

Please go ahead.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Yolanda, for running through this.

This is something that we've been, as Yolanda said, extending or delaying for several years now.

And I've been working with the Green New Deal Oversight Board with Director Farrell.

Yes, sorry, I'm not sure why I blanked out on her name for a moment there.

And, and did ask Yolanda to go ahead and draft this legislation.

So, we want to hear what folks think but just so you know this is a conversation that has been going on for some time and we are eager to move forward.

Thank you, Councilmember Morales and thanks for your work on this effort as well.

I want to just ask a clarifying question, Yolanda.

Did the Green New Deal Oversight Board include in their recommendations repealing the tax

They, they have been silent, I mean, I don't want to speak for them I have had conversations with the OSC staff who engaged directly with the renew deal oversight board I believe Councilmember Morales may have been at the conversation but they have discussed it with the brand new deal oversight board members, my understanding was that they have They do not, they have not recommended the repeal of the tax, but they would not oppose efforts to repeal the tax, given that there is another source that is even more robust than the original revenue source that was proposed.

Okay.

Well, I appreciate the opening comments as well by Councilmember Sawant.

I think that, you know, this is the challenge that we have in the regressive tax state and city that we live in to have sort of impossible revenue options.

And the progressive payroll tax jumpstart, again, is intended to be additive.

I too look forward to hearing more from the Green New Deal Oversight Board and any conversations that councilmembers are having directly with board members about their recommendation on this given that the amount of money going into this category generally needs to continue to grow and so I'm wondering how we both make sure that a jumpstart progressive payroll tax is not supplanting existing streams, but also recognize the regressive nature of the original tax base.

So looking forward to hearing more from the oversight board as well.

I would just note, Chair, in discussions with OSC about this issue because it's been ongoing as a Councilmember Morales has indicated.

OSC, even if the Council were to find additional money for these specific efforts, OSC is kind of in the middle of scaling up and trying to build out.

There are some supply chain issues.

Workforce issues that are beyond the scope of this what the city can touch right now that need to kind of be built so that we could even scale this up even further so the revenue from the tax was there was, I think, $625,000 of the tax was originally going to go to the directly to the low income conversions which I think are particular interest to the city.

So it was a relatively small amount of that total.

And as OSCE would like to scale this up, but even the amount that they're funded at now, I think they would say that that is all they can handle at this point, because there are kind of extenuating circumstances that are making it difficult to fully just kind of ramp this up very quickly and get this done.

Thank you.

Council Member Sala.

Thank you, I just wanted to sort of just again emphasize that part of the problem here as you yourself stated is, is that is the question of what the what the nature of the revenue sources and we want to go towards progressive revenue sources, not regressive.

sources, because for two reasons one as we know the math that simply doesn't add up I mean we need the new deal funding on the scale of the problem and regressive taxes, you know, even leaving aside the social justice aspect of it simply have never raised and will never raise the kinds of revenues and the scale at which we need.

And then, furthermore, the people who are most immediately affected by the climate crisis are the very people, them, low-income communities, oppressed communities, communities who are oppressed in other ways, plus the working class as a whole is hit hard by regressive taxes.

And so we cannot begin to talk about real funding without first talking about progressive revenue sources and really just the urgent need to expand them, as you said, you know, this is a regressive tax state and it's just not working, especially for the question of the climate crisis.

And so, the minute good we're talking about the heating oil tax but I think for most of all unfortunately what this illustrates is the fact that we have to making a transition towards clean energy meet also means make first making a transition towards progressive revenue sources and.

So yeah, I'm looking forward to discussion in the coming weeks.

My office is hoping to bring budget amendments along those lines to restore proposed restoring the funds that have been taken up by the taken away by the mayor's proposed budget away from the, you know, renovating infrastructure of homes, building weatherization, et cetera.

And also, just because we're talking about sustainability, requesting City Light to prepare a plan to build and own our own, you know, city's own green power generation resources, such as wind or solar, because, you know, I think that is really, that's what's needed for the future.

Thank you very much.

Okay, let's go on to number two here.

So the next issue was already discussed at committee on Tuesday.

So I'll just do a quick overview of it again, specific to the Office of Sustainability and Environment.

And then that can be part of a larger discussion.

So OSC's proposed budget would use the Jumpstart Fund to supplant other sources of funding in three instances for a total of $670,000.

would add $250,000 to support in 2023 and 2024 for the Duwamish River Opportunity Fund, which was previously funded by, which was funded by General Fund in the Department of Neighborhoods budget in 2022. It would replace $200,000 of General Fund with the same ongoing amount from the Jumpstart Fund in OSC's baseline for rebates for any household to convert from oil heat to an electric heat pump system.

And it would add $220,000 of jumpstart fund to support existing citywide coordinator for climate and mission initiatives, which has previously been funded by the transportation fund in s.

These investments are consistent with the Green New Deal priorities, but they are only possible if the council accepts the mayor's proposed changes to the Jumpstart Fund policies to allow this supplantation to occur.

So the options here would be to reject the changes and find alternative funding sources for these proposed appropriations, or accept the changes and change the fund policies to replace the use, so that Jumpstart may be used to replace the use of other funds.

Thank you, Yolanda.

We have already expressed our concern around the long-term supplantation issue.

And so I think B is not something I'm interested in.

And obviously there's a lot of interest in what the dollar amounts are being funded.

So look forward to seeing what additional funds might be available to support the investments that are being suggested without the use of Jumpstart.

We'll look forward to exploring with you all.

Any additional comments on that?

All right, let's remember someone anything else in closing on this department?

No, let me do it.

Thank you.

Okay, thanks.

Thanks for the introduction.

And thank you, Yolanda.

I think next colleagues, I'd like to go to where am I at here?

Can we do SDCI and tee up?

Council Member Strauss as well.

We want to just make sure that as the council members are here and have the purview over those departments, that they get a chance to comment on those.

I didn't get a chance to note that for Councilmember Strauss, so we'll give him a second.

In addition to that, Seattle Fire Department, Councilmember Morales is going to make some comments about SFD and share the comments as well, I think, from Councilmember Herbold.

So let me just double check here.

And why don't we, you know, there we go.

Perfect.

One second.

OK, great.

And then after that, just for the good of the order, we're going to have Office of Emergency Management and Office of Inspector General to round us out, and we will be all done at that point.

Cato, if you don't mind, maybe I will have us do SFD briefly.

I saw a couple of memorandums on the line here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, Ketel, Councilmember Strauss, I think we're going to stick with you.

Department of Construction Inspection.

Here we go.

Councilmember Strauss, thanks for your patience here.

You started us off and you're close to ending us.

Thanks for getting us oriented to a better system for walking through the departments by going first.

And we want to turn it to you if you have any opening comments on S.D.C.I.

No problem.

Apologies for that.

I just took off my tie, which is what gave me a took me a minute to get back on camera.

What I can tell you about SDCI is that we are increasing the or the mayor's proposed budget has increased the number of staff needed for permitting so that and this is in line with the work that I'm partnering with the mayor's team about hastening the permitting issuance process.

Ketel can speak to many more of the line item budgets, but just for folks awareness, SDCI is responsible for not only issuing permits, inspecting permits, making sure that there's code compliance.

We were just talking about bringing business home, the home occupation bill.

There are just so many different Again, maybe not the most attractive aspects of city governance and government.

And it is literally the critical work that is required to meet our housing needs to ensure that we are building buildings safely and that are up to code.

And even things like the tenant.

the landlord tenant group that allows assistance for both landlords and tenants to know what their rights and responsibilities are.

So a lot of really important work in SDCI and Ketel can share more information about the line items.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss.

Cato Freeman Council central staff, not too much to add to our council members just just mentioned STC is the city's building department that administers a variety of codes for both use of and new construction and the built environment, also administers codes to protect the natural environment.

and administers, of course, the city's tenant protection regulations.

As the council knows, STCI is primarily an operating fund department, which means that most of the revenue for STCI's operations are derived from fees charged for its regulatory services.

A very small component of STCI's budget, less than 10%, comes from the city's general fund.

Most of that goes towards STCI's compliance work.

Customer was just mentioned a couple of ads that are as STC has budget, while their budget decreases overall they are adding about eight new positions sort of equally divided between folks will be doing permit administration work and folks will be providing internal services, such as accounting and STC I, we've identified a couple of issues for STC I. The first is a perennial issue having to do with resources for council-generated initiatives.

SDCI has a small body of folks who do code development work, mostly refinements to our existing code, as well as updates to regulations that we're required to have from the state, such as the Critical Areas Ordinance and the Shoreline Master Program.

A perennial issue for the council is, are there sufficient resources for council-generated work?

If the council's work program was completely and perfectly aligned with the mayor's work program, this would never be an issue.

But throughout the course of the year, issues come up for council that council wants to work on and there are insufficient resources at STCI to develop the code or provide supporting work like environment review.

So a few options here.

One is to add additional resources to STCI for council generated work.

Another is to add additional resources to the council's consulting budget for land use regulatory policy support like environmental review.

Another is to make no change.

These would likely be general fund ads and the council would need to find either offsetting cuts or new sources of revenue if the council wanted additional support for council generated initiatives.

The next issue is one that will resonate from this morning's discussion.

It's funding for tenant services, grants, and contracts.

There's two issues here.

The proposed budget appropriates about $2 million for tenant services, grants, and contracts for each year of the biennium.

That's the same level of funding that the council appropriated in 2022. It does not reflect any inflationary adjustments for the cost of providing tenant services by awardees of those contracts.

Also, both budget was supplant approximately $460,000 in general fund which have gone towards eviction legal defense with jumpstart fund the policies of jumpstart fund while thematically.

related to housing don't authorize tenant services grants.

So there are a few issues here for the council.

Increased appropriations for tenant services contracts and grants based on inflation of the purchasing power for 2022 won't be the same for 2023. Another option is to reject the proposed use of JumpStart funds for uses that do not align with the JumpStart fund policies and find an alternative source of funds for eviction legal defense.

A third option would be to accept the proposed use of funds and amend the Jumpstart Fund policies to add tenant services as an eligible use of Jumpstart Funds and allow the Jumpstart Fund to supplant other funding sources.

And finally, the council could accept the budget as proposed by the mayor.

So those are the two issues.

Unless council members have any questions, we can turn to the next department.

Thank you, Kidal.

Council Member Strauss, anything to add?

No, just that we have added money to the property owner and tenant assistance group in the past.

I have not yet walked around an amendment to increase this, and I may very well do that.

And Council Member Mosqueda, since I'm on the mic right now, it's been hard to get in touch with some of our colleagues because we've been in these meetings all week.

I'm wondering, and you don't have to answer now, but maybe we could extend the deadline until 5 p.m.

Monday.

I'll throw that out there.

Sorry.

It's just been very difficult to get in touch.

So the deadline's been extended to noon on Tuesday.

Yeah, I just caught that.

I thought maybe you were hoping for an extension to the extension.

But yeah, no, the Tuesday at noon.

So that's even better.

We went after it.

Thank you.

Yeah, sorry about that.

And I know everybody's been so so busy in these meetings.

I agree and appreciate that and appreciate the flexibility from central staff.

So 100% Tuesday at noon.

Excellent.

Sorry for freaking out, Ali.

That's actually great for us to be able to remind people before we close out the day.

Thank you, Councilmember Strauss.

And let's go ahead.

And thanks, Ketel.

Good to see you.

Let's go on to Seattle Fire.

Thank you, Councilmember Morales, for your comments that you're sharing.

And we will turn it directly over to you.

Okay, well, thank you.

I will say that I have been asked by Councilmember Herbold to read her statement.

So that's what I'm going to do, if I could happily.

Okay, so let's see.

A historically underserved area of Delridge, areas of Delridge and South Park received life-saving assistance from our first responders at Fire Station 37 and Fire Station 26. Need these resources in 2023 and beyond?

Without the ladder truck at station 37, there's only one ladder truck to serve all of West Seattle.

Nearest Medic units are Medic 28, which are over here in Rainier Valley, and Medic 32 in the junction, both far away from the Delridge neighborhoods and the South Park neighborhood.

As our population grows, it's critical that we reevaluate the need for new resources, especially in historically underserved areas.

The city budget office confirms, and I quote, removing the medic unit from fire station 26, paramedic response time to an advanced life support incident, the station area goes from an average of 4 minutes and 27 seconds to 12 minutes and 33 seconds.

In comparison to all other paramedic response times by station area, this is the longest response time.

They continue that by removing the ladder track from Fire Station 37, response to fire goes from an average of 1 minute 54 seconds to 3 minutes and 56 seconds in the south end of West Seattle.

This will result in Station 37 having that station area having the eighth highest average response time, nearby stations 26 and 11 having the longest response times in the city.

CBO also noted that the Race and Social Equity Index combines information on race, ethnicity, and related demographics with data on socioeconomic and health disadvantages to identify where priority populations make up relatively large proportions of neighborhood residents.

And the southeast area of West Seattle, so South Park, is a higher disadvantaged area.

In 2021, Medic Unit 26 responded to 975 incidents, and Ladder Trek 13 responded to 1,037.

So clearly a high need there.

I think this was identified, you know, once there was an addition because of the West Seattle Bridge closure, and now it is clear that there is an additional need to maintain that access to service.

And that is the comment.

Thank you for sharing that on behalf of Councilmember Herbold.

We'll turn it back over to Anne Gorman.

Good afternoon, Anne.

Good afternoon, Chair Mosqueda and Councilmembers.

My camera quit on me just a couple minutes ago, so this presentation will be guided by just the sound of my voice.

Thank you for your understanding.

No problem.

I did see it flickering in and out, so thanks for being here by audio.

Patty, next slide, please.

So just a note before I start, the SFD budget overview paper that you have discusses both of the issues that I'll present today, but it does not explicitly identify them that way.

Putting that issue framework around them was a late decision on our part, just for awareness, but we do think these are issues that council members want to know about.

The mission of the Seattle Fire Department is to save lives and protect property through emergency medical service, fire and rescue response, and fire prevention.

Here is the budget summary for SFD's 23-24 proposed budget compared to 2022. And you can see a slight decrement in the operating budget from 2022 to 2023. 267 down to 266 and a half million.

It's very unusual for this department to show any kind of a decline year over year.

Both of the issues we've identified relate to that reduction.

And note too that the FTE level is static from 2022 to 2024. As the overview paper notes when firefighter positions are vacant SFD relies on firefighters stepping up to cover shifts on overtime to make sure that all response units are staffed.

Next slide please.

SFD has proposed a decrement to their operating budget in 2023 and 2024 related to the removal of the temporary resources that were added to respond to the closure of the West Seattle Bridge.

As Council Member Morales described, these are a Medic 1 vehicle at Station 26 in South Park and a ladder truck at Station 37 in High Point.

And I want quickly to explain the rationale for these FTE numbers, why we would need 16 new firefighters to operate a four-person ladder truck.

The reason is that SFD firefighters belong to one of four platoons, A, B, C, and D platoons, and firefighter staffing is based on a calendar that rotates these platoons over the month, ensuring that all firefighters work the same number of hours per year.

So the assignment of 16 firefighters to a four-person ladder truck reflects the distribution of this 24-7 responsibility across the four platoons.

And the costs that are here, the $1.6 million and the $2.6 million, these just reflect staff costs.

I am meeting with CBO and SFD on Monday to understand the one-time costs that would be associated with these resource adds.

it's not clear whether we would need to add a new ladder truck or a new aid car or both.

There would be costs associated with training up staff across both locations to support the positions.

My estimate is that that would be between $2 million and $2.5 million, but I will have information on Monday from SFD and I will circulate it to council members.

And if any of you have any questions related to this proposed budget reduction, please send them to me, and I will make sure to discuss them with CBO and SFD on Monday.

Options for council members include funding the personnel costs to continue one or both resources.

Again, there may be additional costs as well.

Funding all costs to make one or both resources permanent or taking no action.

Any questions?

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Anne, for this walkthrough.

I am concerned that we're not seeing more of an effort to try to scale up the number of personnel here.

I am very much in support of the Medic One vehicle at Station 26 for South Park.

I do want to make sure that we are looking at overall personnel needs in SFD, that the past investments that we've made into the Medic One and the Health One teams are maintained, and that the cars that we've asked to be brought online are continuing to get the support they need.

I know there's been some delay in the implementation of the third the third van so looking forward to hearing more from IFF 27 and also any any of our partners who've been working on some of these emergency response teams to see how how this matches their needs and.

As the firefighters always say, they need a place to bring people.

They need a landing zone for people too.

So this pairs nicely with our earlier discussion about making sure that there's sufficient shelters and not just a revolving door at emergency rooms and or jails.

Council Member Nelson, please go ahead.

And so I assume I could ask this question one-on-one, but maybe you already know it.

So it seems like those resources were added to make up for the closed West Seattle Bridge.

Now it's open, so you don't need those resources anymore.

But I mean, that's what I'm interpreting from here.

But those facilities existed on the other side of the bridge, serving people on the other side of the bridge.

So I'm having a hard time understanding why it would be considered a changed game now that the bridge is open, because the need in that region of town still exists.

Did they flesh it out at all for you a little bit more?

SFD has provided some information showing the impact on response times of having had these response units temporarily in place.

And it is measurable.

I can send that to you.

Right.

Oh, I can see how it'd be measurable, but I guess I'm just thinking, why would the bridge being open seem to make a difference in addressing the need there?

But we can talk later, thanks.

I think that this may be a case of once the resources were there, there was a realization that SFD was able to respond much more quickly than it had thought possible to emergencies in West Seattle.

but happy to engage more with you offline, Council Member.

Yeah, I am in support of maintaining that funding for this.

Thank you, Council Member Nelson.

Director Dingley, did you have anything you wanted to add to the questions or comments?

I was just going to raise the historic level of vacancies that the Fire Department is facing right now.

I was just flipping through the slides though, and I believe Anne's actually taking you there next, so I'll let her I'll let her go there.

Sounds good.

Thank you.

Please go ahead and slide.

Yeah, there we go.

Um, so, uh, the fire department proposed a 2.5Million dollar reduction in 2023 due to anticipated foregone overtime costs.

And we wanted to provide some context for this reduction and be clear that these savings would be the result of some SFD response units being taken out of service on on some days.

This is something that the fire department must do when its vacancy level is high and not enough firefighters volunteer for overtime to staff everything everywhere.

This is something that SFD never wants to do.

This is a reduction, but it is a reduction born out of fairly grave circumstances.

And we also want to be clear that this proposed reduction is speculative.

If SFD has ever brought forward something like this, it was many years ago.

And there is a possibility that the department will not be able to achieve this level of savings, which after all is at odds with its mission.

So council members may want to consider scaling it back as a way of encouraging SFD to do all it can to remain fully staffed on a day-to-day basis.

And a couple notes about this issue.

If council were to add resources to continue the temporary bridge closure ads, This would raise SFD's minimum daily staffing from 216 to 222. So the forecast vacancy rate, which the budget overview memo describes, might require a little longer to stabilize.

And there may also be an opportunity for central staff to work with SFD and CBO next year on some potential improvements to the department's vacancy forecasting model, which has been in place for several years.

Um, options for council member related to this proposed reduction would be to accept it as proposed to accept it at a lower level or to take no action.

Thank you and I'm not seeing any questions from council members.

It does look like council.

Does look like director Dingley has additional comments.

Thank you.

I just wanted to highlight that the budget, just to be clear, the budget takes this savings and reinvest it back into the department for additional firefighter recruits in order to make this obsolete.

That's really our goal.

We don't want to have vacancies.

We don't want to have the outcomes that that were just described so eloquently by Anne.

So that's the whole goal.

So if these savings are not available to pay for those additional recruit classes, those vacancies would persist.

So I just wanted to flag that dynamic for you all.

Thank you so much.

Anne, anything else to add to that?

No, nothing to add.

Director Dingley is correct.

And again, there are opportunities to refine the current vacancy forecasting model so that we have some more predictability in terms of the number of firefighters that SFD will have from one year to the next.

And we don't need to see proposals like this again.

OK, great.

Would that, I'm sorry, more of a technical question for central staff, would the refinement to the forecasting require an amendment to the budget if we wanted to pursue that?

I don't believe so.

I think it would be a statement of legislative intent.

Okay.

Yeah, please go ahead, Director Dingley.

We're actually, we have asked to work on that as well with the fire department.

So we, that work is already going to be underway in 2023. So we are happy to keep you apprised and save you a little bit of paperwork on a slide.

Great and I know council members are working on amendment deadline as you heard.

So I think our assumption is that slides are also needing to be submitted as part of the amendment process.

So obviously that's an area of interest of mine.

I will hold off on messaging the team rapidly to say let's do that.

But it does sound like there's a lot of interest in getting more information about how that information could be shared with the council and what's planned so that if we need to clarify any additional legislative intent or desire, we could still work on that.

That'd be great.

But we'll, I'm sure central staff was excited about saving the paperwork time.

So that's great news.

But yes, definite need there.

Thanks, Anne, for flagging that.

Anything else, Anne?

No, thank you.

We can move on.

All right.

We're almost there, guys.

We're gonna make it.

We have two more departments, according to my notes here.

And I see Lisa Kay coming off of mute here.

Lisa, are you going to take OEM or OIG?

I will be happy to do OEM for you and let Greg Das do OIG for you.

Excellent.

Let's go to Office of Emergency Management.

Thank you.

Thank you, good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the Council.

For the record, I'm Lisa Kay from Central Staff.

As you know, OIM, Office of Emergency Management, works with the city departments and the community at large for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery.

Next slide, please, Patty.

So on this slide, you'll see that approval of the proposed budget.

Let's go back one more.

Patty, you were ahead of me, I think.

I will.

Approval of the proposed budget would decrease OEM's budget from the adopted 22 level by about 12%.

Most of that is because the one-time coronavirus local fiscal CLIFR funds were taken out in $270,000.

So that's most of that 12% cut.

Let's go to the next slide, please, Patty, then.

So my budget overview paper identifies this one issue pertaining to emergency preparedness for vulnerable populations.

So over the years, OEM's federal funding for its Community Safety Ambassador Program has declined from 100,000 a year to about 60,000 per year.

And then this year, OEM anticipates that it'll be cut even more down to about $30,000 as the regional group that manages the grant distribution chose to seed similar programs in other cities around the county, as well as continuing a reduced amount for Seattle's programs.

OEM anticipates that this cut could result in losing as many as half of the 20 current contracted community safety ambassadors.

These ambassadors provide multilingual disaster preparedness outreach, education and training to BIPOC communities, and it will reduce the community preparedness training for a mass casualty event.

So Council options here would be to find a replacement funding source for the $30,000, anywhere between $30,000 and $60,000 more, depending on the funding level you choose, asking OEM to report to Council on alternative funding sources, or to make no change to the proposed budget.

That's what I have for you today, Council Chair.

Thank you very much.

Director Dingley, anything to add to that?

I might be able to save you some paperwork here as well.

So the grant is actually going to the region.

And so the thinking in this case is that we, we wait and see how this, the funding going to the region plays out.

If we end up needing to supplement that down the road, that's something we can do, but it seemed like a good opportunity, given that we are in such a tight budget circumstance.

that we might be able to let those regional dollars suffice.

And again, if not, we'll keep track and we'll raise this up if we determine that we need to add more funding in the future.

I appreciate that budget director.

I've been involved in some of those regional funding games and Seattle doesn't always come out on top.

That is, that's helpful.

And I'm also just worried about continuity of maybe services or missing some time between when federal funding comes.

I don't know this issue as well as I need to, but that just jumps out to me.

So appreciate that both those issues were flagged and look forward to following up with you.

Lisa about where you think that there could be some stop gaps, especially if we don't have new funding sources to replace?

Is there something that could be done in the interim as well?

It's not a lot of money, but there are lots of competing priorities, obviously.

Remind me what the total is?

Well, to get back to the 60,000, which is where they were last year, it would be $30,000.

If you wanted to put them back up to $100,000, which is where they were for several years ahead of that, it would be 60,000.

Okay, thank you for that reminder.

Any additional comments?

All right, thank you so much.

Appreciate you being there.

Greg Doss, let's go back to police related items with you and round us out for the day slash week.

We're going to go to Office of the Inspector General and I think this is our last item under miscellaneous.

Well, thank you, Chair Mosqueda and committee members, council members.

The good news is I can keep this relatively short.

I think I've got it down to about two hours if that works for everybody.

No.

OK.

I just fell off my chair.

I'm back.

All right.

So the Office of the Inspector General, OIG, as you know, oversees the management practices and policies of the Seattle Police Department and the Office of Police Accountability.

in the 2023 proposed budget, funding for the OIG would increase about 1% from, or I'm sorry, decrease about 1% from 3.72 million in the 2022 adopted budget to 3.70 million in the 2023 proposed budget.

And there are no FTE changes.

So very little changes in this all general fund agency.

In a nutshell, the department received its standard inflationary adjustments per CBO, and then also a 3% reduction that the mayor's office made as part of a citywide effort to address the general fund shortfall.

That 3% reduction came in the form of $118,000 cut to the department's budget for consultants, services, supplies, travel, and training.

And that included a 12% reduction in the department's consultant services budget for conducting annual surveillance reviews of SPD technology.

And so Patty, would you mind flipping the slide?

So issue number one is to identify the requests or potentially add the requests that were not identified in the accountability ordinance required memo.

And so what is that there is required by the accountability ordinance ordinance 1, 2, 5, 3, 1, 5, during the budget process.

That the executive provide to the Council each year a memo that identifies changes that are made in the proposed budget to the city's police accountability agencies.

And on September 27, the executive sent to the council a memo that indicated that oig made no requests during the executives executives budget development process.

And that wasn't exactly true.

OIG made three requests during the budget development process.

Although the budget development process is a bit nuanced and there was also a bit of a miscommunication between the departments.

And so that sort of wound up in the situation where the council got a memo that said that OIG didn't make any requests.

after council central staff and CBO talked, it was agreed that the council should be made aware of these requests.

And so that's what the central staff memo did.

And that's what issue number one is about here today.

And so I'm just really quickly going to go over those requests, although I'll stop now and see if I can answer a question.

Please go ahead Council Member Nelson.

I'll wait till you go over your description.

Thanks.

Okay, thanks.

So there's three.

The first one is funding reclassification for the Deputy Director.

In that case, it would be an increase in the budget authority by $22,000.

There would be no position authority necessary because they've already reclassed a STRAT 1. Last year, OIG underwent a reorganization to improve its performance and public trust.

Part of that reorganization involved a split of their existing deputy director position into two positions.

One has an operational focus that runs the department, and the other can focus now exclusively on accountability issues.

Improving capacity in that area was part of a series of recommendations that was made as part of a performance management study that was released earlier this year and was commissioned by the Inspector General.

And so that was the first request that they made.

The second request that they made was for a public disclosure officer.

Actually, it's an increase of an existing FTE from 0.05 to 1.0, and that would cost $77,000.

The office has indicated that their public disclosure requests have doubled since last year and that they don't have sufficient resources to handle them.

They're currently using a temporary employee to help address public disclosure requests, specifically more complex video, body-worn video requests, but they're not able to keep up.

Delays are going from three to six weeks now.

And it's something that they feel that they need to put resources to because it's starting to take away resources from their audit capabilities.

As noted in the central staff issue paper, the council has invested in public disclosure positions in other areas of the accountability system and recently dedicated to FT and OPA to assist with public disclosure requests.

So that's a bit of background on recent Council actions in that area.

And then the last request that they had was to increase audit capacity for surveillance reports.

They made a request for 162,000 and one strategic advisor position to conduct annual reviews of SPD surveillance policies as required by the city's surveillance ordinance.

The 3% cut that the executive made removed the consultant funding for surveillance activities.

And that's fine because They had used surveillance or had used consulting funding in 2022 to create a template to do annual reviews.

Now they need an ongoing staff person to actually conduct those reviews.

And so that's what they're asking for here.

It is the case that they are expected to receive eight or so annual reviews for SPD in 2023 and would need resources to complete those.

Those are the three issues that they put before the city budget office.

Again, I'm going to classify it as really a miscommunication.

They put them before the budget office, but it wasn't a hard ask and some things got lost in translation.

But for the purposes of the memo, I want to make sure that they didn't make it in front of you.

That's very helpful.

I appreciate the transparency on that.

And I saw Director Dingley's hand go up, but the word miscommunication.

So if you have anything else you'd like to add to that context, that'd be helpful.

I unmute wasn't working.

Sorry about that.

I really appreciate it.

And I appreciate Greg and the council's grace on this.

I am in the business of making unique mistakes only.

And so I really, I appreciate it.

And this is indeed was a miscommunication in how this, what information is being asked for here and with the department.

So again, unique mistakes and I really appreciate the grace and we'll move forward from here.

Thank you.

Great.

And Council Member Nelson, did you have a question on this slide?

So does unique mistake mean that it would be that you are in agreement that that money be added.

Is that what you mean by that?

I just mean in that it was not included in the memo and that was an error.

And when I say unique mistakes, it means that I just, I hope to only make the same mistake once.

I don't endeavor to be perfect.

And so I hope that it's a one time and that's fine, but it's something that I would not hope to ever repeat.

And again, it really was a miscommunication rather than a mistake.

It was sort of the way things were asked for, the way CBO received it, there were a number of things that came together for a perfect storm.

And CBO was absolutely behind making sure that these things made it before you all so that there was full transparency.

Well, and to me, what matters is that they have the resources to do this work, because both Councilmember Herbold and I have spoken with Inspector General Judge.

I believe her when she says that they are completely overwhelmed with the, you know, with the existing.

And now there's going to be another group that comes forward.

They're going to have to monitor on a yearly basis.

So this is ongoing work, whether or not you have a template.

So we're working on that together, Councilmember Herbold and I.

Thanks for the heads up on that.

Director Panucci, Deputy Director Panucci, anything else to add?

Okay.

All right, great, great.

One to go.

One to go.

And the last one.

There are two one-time items that the agency, the department says that it cannot purchase due to the $118,000 cut that they received to their sort of discretionary line item, their travel training consultant services budget.

And those two one-time items, the first one is for to purchase equipment for CJIS compliant computers.

They have a regular budget that allows them to purchase laptops for employees of the office, regular laptops as other departments do, and they're on a regular replacement cycle with ITD.

These laptops are different.

These laptops are the ones that have direct access through the SPD firewall to criminal justice protected information.

And in this case, they are not supported by ITD and they're not on a replacement cycle.

And so the office is asking for $25,000 to replace those one time.

The second thing that they're asking for is $25,000 to implement a case management system.

They are tracking.

Oh, PA complaints office police accountability complaints right now on spreadsheets and Microsoft Forms.

And they say that it's getting a little bit overwhelming.

And so they're hoping to put into place a case management system that they had ITD design for them this year.

And it would take $25,000 to put it up and running next year.

And so those are their two one-time asks.

And that's it.

Thank you.

Thank you, Greg.

Additional questions, colleagues?

All right, I'm not seeing any questions on this.

Any additional contacts from the CBO?

Okay, I'm not seeing any hands there.

Greg, does that get us to the end?

Yeah, that is it.

Unless you want to talk about House Patrol more.

I do want to ask one question.

I'm going to avoid looking at I know from our discussions and the memo and the materials from central staff, part of the technology that's being requested is replacement of guns because the guns are expiring.

Our staff did a little bit of weapons.

And I'm wondering if you don't have the answer right now.

I know I'm probably catching you off guard because we're talking about OIG and not SPD.

But if you have anything in response to that question about whether or not there's a body of evidence that supports expired guns, that would be helpful to know.

Council member I did ask the department about why they would have to replace their guns.

After their past they specific likes lifespan, as in, you know, sort of boiling it down to does a gun ever expire, does it stop use, does it stop working and.

The opinion of their legal staff was that after it goes past its manufacturer recommended lifespan, that if it were to fail and the city knew that it was past its usable lifespan, that it could create liability issues for the city.

That was the answer that I got back from them.

Whether or not they would actually fail, I cannot speak to that.

I would have to do some research to see how often a weapon passed its lifespan would fail.

Okay, thanks for that context.

I might look into that a little bit more with you too.

We are at the end officially, Greg.

Thank you for being our closer on central staff presentations.

We really appreciate you and every central staff member who's done the tough work of plowing through the hundreds of pages here so that we could have this independent analysis.

We of course thank Director Dingley, I appreciate the active participation and helping to round out the discussion and offer clarification where possible.

I think that perhaps our good deputy director from central staff was right.

clarification can be offered, and people can also air their concerns and questions at the same time.

So thank you for allowing us to have both of those panels in one sequence presentation throughout this week.

And I want to make sure before we adjourn, we offer central staff the opportunity to summarize for us what the amendment process is.

Again, due Tuesday, October 18, at noon.

So we got an extra 22 hours, folks, to submit amendments.

And Deputy Director Panucci, did you want to walk us through the amendment process?

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

I'd be happy to.

First, I just wanted to say thank you to you for facilitating the meetings and trying out this new process and adjusting in real time.

I really appreciated the discussion and all of the engagement this week from you and all of the council members and the executive staff.

So thank you for trying something with us and testing something.

I'll look forward to debriefing in December about this.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry about this process, but for amendments, yes, amendments are due at noon on Tuesday, the 18th.

In order for it to be published to the agenda and for central staff to prepare an amendment, you need to submit it with yourself and two additional sponsors.

And I just remind council members, I know there's a lot of information to unpack.

There's still a lot of questions this week.

can be relatively high level.

We will work with you over the course of next week to work out the details and all of that.

So if you haven't received a response from some of your questions asked this week, don't take that to mean you can't submit your proposal.

We will sort it out with you.

And if any, and once the amendments are submitted, I will circle back with all of you to confirm we received everything you intended to submit.

Excellent, thanks.

And if there's questions, folks, please do feel free to ask now or later.

As I was chatting with some of our team members, you know, my suggestion was a simple paragraph.

What are the two or three things you want to accomplish in a simple paragraph, and then the rest of it can be worked out with central staff over the next week.

But that allows for them to have a high level understanding of what you'd like.

Please do not feel like you're in the position of having to write legislative text at this point.

This is just the concept that you're sharing.

And I want to really encourage folks as well to have those early discussions with central staff so that you can hone in on maybe those specific asks over the course of the next week.

There's also the chance that you submit a concept and over the course of the next week and deliberations with central staff, you realize you might not want it.

So don't feel like it's going to get aired if it's just a concept at this point.

I appreciate that.

I like being able to

late in the process and if something comes up then I guess maybe some refinements or something could be due.

I will try really hard to stick to my deadline.

Great.

I'm going to have Deputy Director Panucci answer that to talk about the walk-on process for amendments.

Okay, I didn't know about that.

If there is a general concept that you know is going to be a priority for you, again, maybe put in an amendment concept so that there's a little bit of a placeholder.

We will have public comment as well on October 25th.

Yes, that is after our amendment deadline.

that there is an opportunity for public comment there too.

So, Deputy Director Panucci, please go ahead.

Thank you.

Yes, I would encourage you to try to get all, any ideas you want considered for inclusion in the package or just for discussion submitted by Tuesday at noon.

If you missed that deadline, you can, there is a process, I outlined it in an email yesterday, I'm happy to resend for walk-on amendments, however, we don't prepare those that we prepared those at an even higher level and based on staff capacity.

But there is another opportunity to propose amendments in the budget process.

And we will also be continuing to check in with you as we move from the amendment discussion to working with the chair to to develop the the balancing package to understand your proposal and what might be highest priority.

Or if you have updated information, we will share that with the chair.

as we're developing the package.

Great, that got a thumbs up.

Thank you so much.

Anything else?

Okay, Council Member Morales.

I want to talk for just a moment about slides.

I know there's a little bit of conversation happening about, you know, whether we should be submitting them, we did submit my office submitted several last year, because we're trying to better understand the work of the city, and I think the conversations that we've been having these last several days.

remind us that, you know, we've got some big systemic challenges we're trying to solve, a lot of structural challenges that we're trying to solve.

So, for example, you know, several departments referenced three slides that we put in last year, the generational wealth building slide at DON, Workforce Development trying to understand all the different ways that the city engages in workforce development.

And then we also put one in to do an analysis of the capacity building investments that are different city departments make, whether it's housing or OPCD and And so all that to say that, you know, we're really trying to understand how and whether the work that we're doing as a city is strategic, or if we need to sort of recalibrate our efforts.

So, you know, these are ways for us to really kind of dig into and, you know, and bring into relief challenges we may have or places where, you know, maybe we've been operating in a certain way, taking processes for granted that we need to look at and do differently.

So I just want to share that, you know, I'm excited about the reports that will be coming out of those three slides.

And my hope is that we can sort of thread them together to provide some useful steps forward.

I do want to thank in your spirit, Chair Mosqueda, I want to thank all of the city workers who have been doing this work.

I know that it has added to some of the things that they've had to take on in the last 12, 18 months, but it's also really clear that they've kind of followed both the intent and the spirit of this work, really you know, just based on the things that we've heard so far as they've been providing updates on the slides.

Um, really excited to see our city staff eager to understand how to do their work better so that we can serve the people of Seattle better.

So thank you.

Excellent.

Appreciate that.

So we will encourage amendments, including slides.

Any concepts you have We are going to close out with a series of thank yous.

and your teams for all of the deep dive that you've done.

I still cannot believe you've done this in less than two weeks and provided this robust amount of information for all of us.

And then everybody was present with us throughout this week.

So we really appreciate everybody's analysis on central staff.

I wanna thank Patty, Patty Worgen, who is the wizard behind the slides and all of the materials.

Very, very helpful to have you shepherding us through these discussions and making sure we have all the materials we need.

The clerks, Jody, we see you.

Is that still Jody out there?

Is that Amelia?

Who's out there?

It's Jody.

Hi, Jody.

We see you.

Thank you so much for being here with us for the past few days, including the long evening on Tuesday.

for the public hearing.

We heard Amelia's voice yesterday, Elizabeth and the whole crew at the clerk's office.

Thanks for making all this possible along with IT, Eric and Ian and anybody else in the IT department who makes this possible along with the Seattle Channel to make sure that we can have these hybrid meetings as well as project them out to the community.

We appreciate that.

And speaking of community and our media partners.

Thanks to Joseph, Jesse, and Dana from the comms team for helping to field many questions we've been receiving over the last few days and weeks.

Really appreciate their work and the infographics that they continue to generate for us.

All of you council members have been very participatory in the last few days.

I know that these have been long days.

We look forward to getting your feedback as well as we continue to try to improve the process to make sure that we can digest the information and be prepared to opine and ask the necessary questions.

So thanks to you and your teams.

We know many of your team members within your offices have been actively working on amendments as we have been all out here deliberating the presentations over the last few days.

So thank you.

And especially thanks to my team, Sejal, Aaron, Melanie and Buddy Day for all the work they've done while we've been facilitating these discussions.

We are going to adjourn for today.

And again, the next time we meet as a committee, as a Select Budget Committee, will be on Tuesday, October 25th at 9.30am.

Right, Allie?

That's the day?

Okay.

And we'll start with public hearing at 9.30am.

So thanks, everyone.

And all of you have a great weekend.

Thanks for all of your work and we'll talk to you on Monday.

Bye-bye.