Seattle City Council Briefing 4/13/2020

Council briefing meeting will come to order.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Unmute.

Unmute, Jodi.

Council Member Morales, excuse me.

Here.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Peterson.

Here.

Council Member Sawant.

Here.

Council Member Strauss.

Present.

Council Member Herbold.

Here.

Council Member Juarez.

Here.

Council Member Lewis.

Here.

Council President Gonzalez.

Here.

Eight present.

Thank you.

If there is no objection, the minutes of April 6th, 2020 will be adopted.

hearing no objection, the minutes are adopted.

And I don't have a president's report today and we have a full agenda including an executive session at the end.

So I'm gonna go ahead and dispense with the president's report and we'll go ahead and move right into a presentation by the Northwest Healthcare Response Network.

We have some guests with us this morning who are gonna share with us some really important information related to the pandemic and the healthcare crisis that we're currently experiencing.

And before I hand it over to our presenters, I'm going to hand it over to Councilmember Herbold to see if she has any introductory remarks she'd like to make.

If so, the floor is yours, Councilmember Herbold.

Thank you so much.

So we have with us today Anora Alin, the Executive Director of the Northwest Healthcare Response Network, and Dr. Timothy DeLee, the Chief Medical Officer with UW Medicine.

My office was asking questions over the last few weeks about our healthcare system's ability to handle this much-reported, unexpected surge in COVID cases.

Our inquiries with public health led us to the Northwest Healthcare Response Network.

This is a nonprofit that steps into the space between individual healthcare facilities and stitches together their individual efforts into a system-wide plan.

Anora Lean joins us this morning.

As I mentioned, she's the Executive Director of the Northwest Health Care Response Network.

And again, this is a nonprofit health care coalition in Western Washington.

Anora has spent nearly 20 years working on health care and public health preparedness initiatives with a focus on community planning for the health and medical consequences of disasters and developing public-private partnerships to improve disaster resilience.

Before her appointment as Executive Director, she served as a Healthcare Coalition's Program Manager at Public Health Seattle-King County and has overseen regional healthcare emergency response and preparedness initiatives.

Prior to her work in Seattle, she was a research and policy analyst in Baltimore, Maryland.

with UPMC Center for Biosecurity, now John Hopkins Center for Health Security, and the John Hopkins Center for Civilian Biofence Strategies.

She holds an MA in Sociology from John Hopkins University, where her research focused on the individual and organizational aspects of response to public health emergencies and disasters.

We're also joined by Dr. Timothy DeLitt, a board-certified physician and University of Washington Professor of Medicine and Infectious Disease.

He is also the UW Medicine Chief Medical Officer and President of UW Physicians Practice Groups.

He is an expert in general infectious diseases and the prevention of healthcare associated infections.

Dr. DeLitt earned his MD from Cornell University Medical College.

He is board certified in both infectious diseases and internal medicine.

He has clinical and research interests that include general infectious diseases, orthopedic trauma-related infections, prevention of healthcare-associated infections, and appropriate use of antibiotics.

The presentation slides for today's presentation were emailed to councilmember offices yesterday, so you should have a copy in your inbox.

And I really want to give my sincere thanks to our speakers for taking time.

the city council.

I know you have a lot of work ahead of you.

I know you are out at this very, very challenging juncture of this crisis to brief us, the city council this morning and share your insights with the city council.

Thank you, Councilmember Herbold for that introduction.

I just want to remind folks that if they have questions, you can let me know through the chat function.

Don't put your question in the chat function.

Just tell me that you have a question.

And this presentation is going to run until 10.15 a.m.

so that we can stay on track with today's agenda.

We have an exec session scheduled for 1045 and that's kind of a bit of our time crunch.

So with that being said, please, I'll hand it over.

Great, thanks.

I'm going to take a moment just to, I appreciate the invitation and the opportunity to join you this morning.

I'm Anora Lean, the executive director of the Northwest Healthcare Response Network, and I'm going to take a moment to share my slides and just want to confirm, are you all able to see the slides now?

Yes, yes.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Well, I appreciate, again, the opportunity to be with you.

And let's see if we can, if I can make it work on my end here.

Great.

So for this morning, and I know we will, I appreciate the time update in terms of when we need to wrap up our remarks.

I just want to give a little bit of background on who the Northwest Health Care Response Network is.

We'll talk about medical surge planning and some of the work that is underway, and thank you for the questions that have been brought forth to help inform today's presentation.

When we think about medical surge planning, it's both, I think, important to think about what we're doing at a regional level and in collaboration with the state, but also so much medical surge work begins at the hospital or healthcare facility level, and so we'll hear today as well from Dr. Dellett a little bit about some of the perspective from UW Medicine.

But I also asked Dr. Dellett to join me today because of some of the partnership my organization has with UW Medicine to develop some regional surge capabilities, which we'll speak about a little bit later in the presentation.

And then we'll share some thoughts on some of the considerations we should keep in mind as we go forward from where we are today to continuing to anticipate future potential peaks or other things.

So from a healthcare delivery perspective and a kind of preparedness for surge perspective, it's really important, I think, both nationally and locally, that we keep in mind that healthcare organizations are independent on a day-to-day basis.

They often compete, and there rarely is a centralized entity that brings all of those independent partners together.

to collaborate and to coordinate on different aspects of healthcare-related disaster preparedness and response.

Pandemics, as we're seeing, can overwhelm the individual efforts of individual providers and counties, regions, states.

These are very significant efforts requiring an all-hands-on-deck approach.

And always important for us to keep in mind that successful response really requires the effective collaboration, both on the public health side and the really vital efforts that they undertake to prevent the spread of disease and help respond in those ways and the efforts of our clinical healthcare partners who are working to build capabilities and support the response to treatment of the disease.

My organization, as you heard a little earlier, sort of sits at the interesting intersection as a nonprofit coalition that has been in place for a number of years to really support the collaboration between individual healthcare organizations, to bring a framework for coordination at the local level, certainly across King County, but more broadly now we serve and coordinate across most of Western Washington.

We're one of three healthcare coalitions in Washington State.

a similar healthcare coalition based out of Spokane that coordinates across eastern Washington and a collaborative effort based in the Vancouver, Washington area.

Our coalitions all work in collaboration with one another but support the collaboration and coordination with healthcare organizations, public health partners, and many others so that we have a collaborative and coordinated approach to healthcare aspects of disaster preparedness day-to-day, certainly engagement around the COVID work, and when needed, we support different aspects of some of the response activities.

And where we intersect and specifically what issues we focus on sometimes vary depending on the scenario and the issues that are in front of us.

And as it relates to the COVID response, we are but one, I would like to say important, but one of many systems and partners that are working together to respond to some of the public health and healthcare aspects of disaster response.

Leadership, as you all I think are aware, a few weeks ago, the governor's office appointed Vice Admiral Dr. Raquel Bono as the Director of the COVID-19 Health System Response Management.

She's working in strong collaboration with many partners at the state level and at the local level throughout the course of planning.

And as we move forward, strong coordination engagement with our State Department of Health, State Emergency Management, Washington State Hospital Association, and many other medical associations, healthcare coalitions like myself, individual healthcare organizations and providers, EMS providers, local public health and emergency management, truly all having a stake in different aspects of coordination and support for how the healthcare delivery system responds in a disaster.

So as COVID-19 has evolved and as our framework within the state continued to evolve, the governor and the State Department of Health sort of set forth a overarching framework that has guided some of the state and local efforts around this, really prioritizing a couple of core areas.

And when we think about surge planning, it's important to keep in mind There are a couple of key elements to surge.

One, that you have the space to surge.

Two, that you have the staffing resources to support that, and then that you have the supplies.

So we often think about surge planning in three components, space, staff, and staff.

And from a statewide perspective, as we think about the scale of what this response needs to include, there's been a wide variety of efforts to think about how do we ensure healthcare facilities or the community have enough places to care for patients, that we look at building strategies to create surge for staff, and that we have enough supplies.

Within this overarching state structure, different entities such as the State Department of Health or efforts at the state level have taken on leadership in some of these areas.

So, for example, as we look at things like alternate care or field hospital sites, the state has taken leadership in some of those planning areas, though partnering with locals where needed.

From a staffing perspective, there's work that individual organizations do to look at how they can increase staff and support the staff that are available to them.

The state has also taken on some additional leadership at looking at ways that we can bring in medical workers and volunteers into the state and is taking the lead on coordinating how those resources would be mobilized and where those would be applied where necessary.

And then from a supply perspective, again, we look at what individual health systems can do, look at resource requesting processes through local communities up to the state when resources are scarce and need to be requested.

And the state's also taken on some leadership around identifying additional supplies that could be brought in, such as requesting additional ventilator resources, for example.

The response coordination in terms of how we convene and coordinate with healthcare organizations is a local, regional, and state effort.

And the healthcare coalitions, like the Northwest Healthcare Response Network, have focused some of our specific efforts as a part of this bigger state strategy on a couple of key areas.

One is how do we ensure that across the healthcare system and across our partners within the coalition, we have good situational awareness about what the impacts and resource needs are within the healthcare system.

Two, that as a coalition we have mechanisms for supporting mutual aid.

and resource sharing across healthcare organizations so they can support one another when necessary before needing to request outside resources.

And then third, how do we think about good coordination strategies for making sure we're fully utilizing every available bed?

both at an institutional level, but then outside of institutions, how we coordinate across hospitals and across regions to make sure that if there's a surge of patients, we're fully utilizing every bed that's available.

across within the state and working in collaboration with our state partners.

We've also wanted to make sure that there's good guidance being provided to healthcare partners in terms of strategies to be thinking about to support surge and continuity of patient care.

And then at the state level, making sure that there's effort to address the different regulatory policies and things that need to be in place to support healthcare being able to maximize their surge capacity.

So our work as the Northwest Healthcare Response Network has really been about supporting healthcare organizations and convening and coordinating with those partners locally, but is really a part of a bigger state effort.

So a lot of elements of surge plan are being touched and tackled by a wide variety of stakeholders at the state and local level.

So my, as I said, my team is focused on a couple of key areas in support of the broader state efforts, providing situational awareness about hospital capacity and helping to develop systems for making sure we're collecting good data to support that.

Convening clinical leaders, different advisory committees and subject matter experts to help inform review, inform, and make sure we've got good clinical guidance for healthcare and tools to support healthcare organizations in implementing their medical surge strategies.

Convening healthcare and different public health partners to identify gaps and coordinate together on different solutions.

And then one particular initiative I'll speak to today, as I said, regarding coordination of how we can work across hospitals and institutions to make sure we're maximizing our bed availability and having good coordinated strategies for how we would use all the available beds in the region.

We'll speak in a moment about the Regional COVID Coordination Center model we've been working on with UW Medicine as a strategy to support that critical element of surge.

So regarding situational awareness, again, one of the core areas we've been focused on, our overarching aim as a coalition is to make sure that we can provide good situational awareness about hospital capacity and where there might be resource needs, kind of what the resource availability and resource needs are.

Excuse me.

And as we have moved forward in the COVID response, we've been working hard to develop additional capabilities to look at what kind of data collection would be needed, what kind of data both our healthcare partners need, our public health partners, and other stakeholders are looking for to best characterize what the impacts to healthcare are and what the resource needs have been.

So over the last number of weeks, we've been really scaling up data collection efforts and trying develop a more comprehensive approach to how we get information that helps us characterize effectively what the hospital capacity is, including what kind of ICU and other bed availability there is, how we track ventilator availability, how we have good visibility on what kinds of personal protective equipment is available within the system.

And I want to think we've worked really closely in order to develop a cohesive statewide approach to how we collect information and make sure we have consistent information that we're able to share back with hospitals and healthcare, but also with our public health officials.

The systems that we've been developing over the last few weeks have been done in place, or excuse me, in partnership with the Washington State Hospital Association.

And so it's taken us a few weeks to ramp up to more kind of cohesive and consistent data reporting from the hospitals.

But we do have daily reporting now coming in from the hospitals on many of these key variables.

Again, we're doing that in partnership with the State Hospital Association.

But as we start to get more consistent and regular data, we're now able to have different ways of sharing some of the data with our health care system and with our public health partners.

I'll highlight, for example, some of the data that is now being collected includes total number of hospitalized patients with COVID.

The State Department of Health is now posting this information on their website.

And we're continuing to look at different ways to provide dashboards and tools to share additional information about some of those, again, key metrics, ICU and bed availability, ventilator availability, etc.

So additional reports will be coming out from these so we can share that information more broadly.

Some of you, I think, have heard about efforts that we started a few weeks ago as well.

My team has been partnering with Microsoft to try to develop some additional capabilities and more efficient dashboards to share some of this information.

The work that we've been doing with the State Hospital Association has gotten us to one level of more consistent data collection, and I should say the Secretary of Health two weeks, excuse me, I believe it was April 2nd, issued a mandate to report or to require all hospitals to start reporting information and that information is being collected through the tools and surveys we're doing in partnership with the State Hospital Association.

That's kind of what I would say is phase one of data collection efforts and some strategies to share this information.

and through partnership with Microsoft and we've been building out some additional portals to hopefully help ease some of the reporting burden but make sure we still have all of that key information available and the State Department of Health is now kind of taking on that initiative and will be working with us, the other coalitions, and hospital partners to launch a more robust effort statewide.

So more information, I think, in the week or two, next week or two ahead, about how that system will evolve statewide in terms of collecting information and more dashboards and tools to help support statewide information sharing.

Another area we've been focused, again, one of my organization's roles is that we help convene teams of clinical experts to help advise state and local public health on different aspects of healthcare, medical surge, healthcare readiness, and medical surge planning.

So we've been convening the state's Disaster Medical Advisory Committee and our local Disaster Clinical Advisory Committee to review different clinical tools or clinically focused tools kind of documenting different strategies that healthcare organizations and providers can use to make sure that we are maximizing all of the care and all of the ways in which we can optimize care for patients during these kinds of responses and especially making sure that we have different tools and resources to support healthcare providers.

in thinking about different conservation strategies.

Our goal is always to make sure that we can maximize and provide safe and effective care, in particular when there are times of resource scarcity.

And so wanting to make sure that we put tools together and have resources in place that can help guide healthcare organizations and providers in, again, providing most optimal care and thinking through situations where there may be resource scarcity.

and having tools to help healthcare organizations think about how they can best do that.

Our goal has been that we make sure that we have kind of consistent standardized recommendations that are informed by the best clinical thinking.

And so my organization's job has been to convene and bring together clinical leaders to help review, develop, and provide, again, tools and guidelines that can be used statewide to support healthcare providers in delivering care during times of surge.

And then lastly, a big area of emphasis for us has been to focus on, again, if we think about a community-wide surge event and high volumes of patients, we want to make sure that there's a good coordinated approach to ensuring that we are able to leverage every available bed in the community, ICU or otherwise.

So we've been, we had kind of identified as COVID was escalating, that there was a need for us to enhance some systems that we already had in place.

So for many years, for example, in King County, Harborview Medical Center has played a role as the Disaster Medical Coordination Center, which during a mass casualty incident has an important function in coordinating with EMS and with other hospitals in terms of identifying where there's available beds and then helping to direct EMS as to where they can take patients to get to the appropriate levels of care.

And we recognize that there was some additional scaling up of that capability that would be needed and for us to think regionally, not just within King County, but to really think as a region and to think across Western Washington about how we can best coordinate across individual hospitals and systems and organizations to make sure there's good coordinating structures to identify and maximize every available bed in the region and to try to think about how we can have a coordinated effort to distribute patients when necessary so that we don't overburden any single hospital at one time.

So we've built upon the Disaster Medical Coordination Center model and have added some additional capabilities through coordination with Harborview and UW Medicine to really build a much more, really much more robust and enhanced model that allows us to, when there are patients, COVID patients that need to be moved into the hospital, for example, those that might need to be transferred from a long-term care facility, or if we were in a more significant surge, if hospitals needed to transfer patients, if there weren't enough beds available within their own organizations and we needed to either decompress or identify additional beds.

We've created with Harborview and UW Medicine this regional COVID coordination center model that will do a couple of things.

through the data that we're collecting around bed availability, have good visibility on where there are available beds to and provide a coordinating mechanism with clinicians, nurses and others who can work with a facility that needs to identify a bed or transfer a patient into a hospital and can provide that coordinating function to help match the patient to where the bed is available.

And again, our goal in doing this is to really make sure that we've got strong surge capacity and that we've got mechanisms to coordinate when there are many patients that potentially need to identify or be placed in a hospital bed, but that we're doing so in such a way that we try to minimize the overburden on any single facility and that we maximize the coordination and ability to coordinate across hospitals and around the region.

to make sure we're fully utilizing every available bed.

So the RC3 is up and running.

And thanks, great credit to the University of Washington system.

And we've appreciated the collaboration and coordination with them to build this capability, and to really make a much more enhanced resource available to support this kind of community surge.

If we were in a surge event and as the RC3 remains active, my team from the Northwest Healthcare Response Network will make sure that we're supporting that center through coordination of situational awareness, working with hospitals and other partners to make sure good information is known and that we are collecting the best information we can from healthcare organizations to help make sure we've got visibility on available beds and what resources the hospitals need in order to provide care to those patients.

In the moment, as we need to, we'll help support by convening healthcare organizations whether that's through conference calls or other kinds of coordination that might be necessary in the surge event.

Again, if there are resources that are needed to support healthcare hospital and healthcare organizations helping to support the facilitation of mutual aid and resource sharing across organizations so that if we have available beds but some additional resources are needed that we can try to help match and support that.

And then continuing coordination with local and state public health and emergency management as a part of the broader response efforts.

As we go forward, I think we've seen, many of us, the good news that perhaps we've hit our peak, or at least our first peak in Washington.

I think our hospital systems have done a tremendous amount of work to create capacity.

cancelling elective surgeries, a number of efforts that they've undertaken to make sure there's capacity in the system.

And those have been really significant measures that they've put in place.

But we do have a lot of capacity in our healthcare system right now.

And so I think we're right now in a fairly good position.

But we want to keep all of these efforts in mind.

And as we go forward, whether there are additional peaks, coming for us in the future, and I think Dr. Dellett may share his thoughts on some of those.

But as we look ahead, we want to make sure that we're continuing to look at what the best practices have been that we've put in place, how do we continue to refine these plans, putting, I think, some additional focus on long-term care, how we can continue to support and coordinate with long-term care organizations and really working with the state, both DSHS, DOH, with long-term care facilities, associations, and others to make sure that there's strong support and good strategies for supporting long-term care and trying to address some of the concerns in those facilities.

But continuing to refine and incorporate, again, some of these best practices that we've identified and developed, continue to refine our plans and our tools, think about whether there is a surge and what additional planning that we need to do to support that.

And I would say from my standpoint, don't stop now.

Keep doing what we're doing.

Keep continuing to refine our plans and look at strategies for us to continue to work together to support surge down the road if we need to.

I will stop there and Dr. Dellett will be sharing some of his thoughts.

I don't know if there's questions we want to take right now or if I might encourage us to hear from Dr. Dellett and then we can take questions at the end.

I'm going to go ahead and finish the presentation and then we can take questions.

I only have one council member so far who has indicated she has questions, but she has agreed to wait until the end of the presentation.

So why don't we go ahead and continue on.

I just want to do a quick time check.

It's 10.01 a.m., and we are slated to spend 14 more minutes, including questions and answers on this subject.

Okay.

Thank you.

Great, thank you.

Again, my name is Tim Della.

I'm the chief medical officer for UW Medicine, infectious disease physician, with a focus on infection prevention and control.

And I'll try to briefly just give an example of preparation within a hospital system around surge planning, in addition to the regional planning that Anora has shared with you.

And just briefly, just in a summary of some of our responses from a UW Medicine system standpoint, it really does start with partnerships, as Anura said.

And although this has been an incredibly challenging time for our community, it's also really wonderful to see everyone coming together and working together.

All of our health systems, as well as the coordination with public health, the Department of Health, the network, the Washington State Hospital Association.

Within UW Medicine, back on February 29th, we put in place our system-wide incident command structure, as well as incident command structures within each of our hospitals in order to better coordinate and align all of our activities.

A primary focus of ours has been the safety of our workforce.

This includes not only ensuring that they have the appropriate personal protective equipment to safely care for patients with COVID-19, but also really focusing on the support of our staff and clinicians because this has been incredibly challenging, stressful, a lot of anxiety for our healthcare workers.

And so really trying to create a supportive environment for them both for their mental well-being as well as their physical safety and caring for these patients.

We've also been very fortunate that the beginning of January our clinical virology laboratory started to develop an internal test that we were able to then implement on March 2nd with FDA approval.

That really has served our local community and region incredibly well because as people recall, there were some challenges with the initial CDC test and getting that into the state labs and some delays and turnaround.

Right now, our lab is still performing over 60% of all the tests within our region with essentially an eight-hour turnaround period of time.

and we've been able to scale that up to capabilities of doing 5,000 tests a day and are looking to continue to scale that because as we go into this potential recovery phase, one of the key elements will be the rapid expansion of testing to identify those individuals who may be infected and then working with public health around contact tracing as we get further into the pandemic.

We've also tried to offload our clinics and our emergency departments by setting up drive-through testing sites.

We did this initially for all of our healthcare workers and our employees, but also now for our patients.

And again, it's really a goal to be able to streamline that process to test people as appropriate and also avoid their having to come into the clinics or through the emergency departments to maintain that capability for other non-COVID care as needed.

We just like all other healthcare systems have also dramatically implemented our telehealth capacity.

We're doing over 1,500 telehealth visits a day.

And in fact, 65% of our primary care visits are now through telehealth.

Why don't we go to the next slide?

From a surge planning standpoint, back on March 10th, we started to partner with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations, which is also based within UW Medicine.

And we did this because we really needed to have an understanding of what are those potential patient volumes that we need to target as we did our surge planning.

So working in partnership with IHME has allowed us to identify what are those target bed capacity, ICU beds would we need?

What is the staffing both for our physicians and nurses that would be required for that surge, as well as equipment, be it ventilators or personal protective equipment?

As Anora mentioned, back on March 16th, we actually canceled our elective and non-urgent surgeries and procedures, both to build internal capacity, as well as to preserve PPE for the care of COVID-19 patients.

And then the governor implemented his order on March 18th, which now extends through the 18th of May.

We also have developed triage sites, so how can we best separate the patients with respiratory symptoms or COVID-19 from those patients who may be coming into the emergency departments for other medical care.

And so we've set up alternative triage sites to evaluate and test those patients.

We're looking at what are those alternative sites of care, especially as surge continues.

And let's say if we had reached a point, which we haven't, fortunately, but if we had reached a point where our hospitals were full, what are those alternative sites that we would need to care for patients?

We have also done a lot of focus on vulnerable patient populations, both with Harborview as a safety net hospital, really working with our patients and communities.

Interestingly, at one point, 75% of the patients at Harborview with COVID-19 had limited English proficiency.

And so it highlights, as we've worked with public health, how do we reach and engage those communities and really care for them?

Because that's what we're starting to see as this pandemic continues to evolve.

We've also partnered with the network and public health on the care of patients in long-term care facilities, so skilled nursing facilities where we have developed drop teams that have gone in to assist with the assessment, the evaluation, gone through and tested all the residents within facilities as well as the staff and worked with them on their infection prevention policies and procedures to really help keep their residents safe, allow them to not only get through the pandemic safely but also to avoid needing to come into the hospital if we can safely manage them within the skilled nursing facilities.

We also, again, as Anora mentioned, have really focused on that potential transition from conventional care, the daily care that we deliver today, to moving into what may be a contingency stage where we have to start using either space or equipment in ways that are not our daily practice, but still allow us to achieve the same standard of care.

And then hopefully where we all want to avoid is going into the crisis standards of care.

At this stage, I feel confident that we're not going to go there, at least during this current phase.

Next slide.

I want to just show a little bit of how we've used the modeling, and I'll go through this quickly.

But when we first engaged IHME, the initial models that they showed for us was an anticipated increased number of patients upwards of over 960 for our system.

Next slide.

A week later, that peak was at 700, but that gave us a target to say, okay, how could we identify an additional 700 beds within our healthcare system?

And so that initial information from the modeling was incredibly important in terms of developing those initial targets.

Next slide.

IHME subsequently has developed these metrics for our state and then all the states in our country, as well as other countries.

And what I want to show here is that these models, they're helpful to get a general sense, but they're imperfect, right?

And they really rely on all those measures around social distancing that we have in place currently.

This is where the model was back on April 2nd.

when they anticipated that we would hit that peak around April 11th.

And at that point, we looked good in terms of our overall bed capacity.

We were a little short on ICU beds, but then through these continued measures that have been in place within our community, on the next slide, we saw that those numbers dramatically decreased.

Now, this is all prefaced on continuing those social distancing measures that we've done.

And what we have seen, at least within our system, is that we think that we may have reached that plateau, but we still have not seen the decline in cases.

For instance, we, within our system, since April 1st through today, have been between 115 and 120 patients with COVID-19 within our four hospitals.

And so we're not escalating, which is good, but we're also not seeing a decline yet.

And that suggests that we still have to maintain the diligence within our community around that physical distancing until we really start to see these numbers coming down.

Because even though the models are very reassuring and give us cautious optimism, we're still seeing large volumes of patients.

Again, a volume that we can manage within our systems, but we still have a long way to go until we get down to previous levels.

Next slide.

This is just an example of how we do this internally.

As Anura showed, we look at conventional contingency and crisis capacity.

And although this is small, it just highlights that then we go through with each of our facilities, what are those staffing needs for all the different members of our team?

What is all the different types of equipment that we need in those different phases?

I give you an example on this on the next slide, where we just looked at, well, from a bed capacity for our four hospitals, so UW Medical Center Northwest, UW Medical Center Montlake, Harborview, and Valley Medical Center, looking at our current starting bed counts, again, not including our mental health floors or psychiatry floors, but our medical surgical units and ICU capabilities.

Phase 1, again, that's standard care where we are today.

But then if we did move into the contingency in Phase 2 or crisis in Stage 3, what's the anticipated additional beds that we would need?

And what we were able to do is to be able to match that initial projection of needing 700 beds.

We were able to identify those.

across our system of how we could scale to that level.

And this is what all the hospitals are doing to really think about what is that target?

How do they scale there in order in case we did happen to see that surge that fortunately right now we're not seeing at that earlier predicted level.

And I think that that's my last slide.

Cause again, I just wanted to give you a very brief overview of how we've done this internally here, but want to have time for questions as well.

Thank you so much.

We have a little bit of time to take some questions.

Again, you know, we can probably, it's 10-12 a.m.

now, we're slated to go into 10-15, but we have just a little bit of flexibility.

And I know that Councilmember Morales had some questions, so I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to her to ask her questions.

And again, if we can just be aware of the time crunch, that would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

I think what I'll do is just put my questions out there, and you can answer what you can.

And then if we don't have time to answer them all, maybe we can just be in touch about getting some follow-up answers.

So my first question is, we know that in late March, Washington received 500,000 masks.

And we keep hearing reports about medical personnel who are having to reuse masks several times During a week, for example, so my first question is, how are those 500,000 masks being distributed and and is there an anticipation of when our first responders will actually and frontline professionals be able to use.

get better access to the PPE that they need.

The second question is that we know that the test has a false negative rate of about 30%.

That's my understanding anyway.

So I want to hear about the strategy for screening and retesting frontline healthcare professionals, but also others in the community.

And then we know that at least based on hospitalizations or those that we know have had COVID, that means that there's about 1% immunity in the community.

And so what is the strategy for preparing for a possible next wave or surge?

And then finally, if you can tell us about any movement happening at the federal level um, toward building that contact infrastructure, uh, contact tracing, um, infrastructure that you talked about.

Cause, um, we know that that's going to be a really important piece of helping to start seeing a decline in cases.

But my understanding is that we really don't have the funds or the infrastructure to do that at the level that we need.

And so if there's something council can do to be advocating for that, um, I'd like to hear about that too.

So maybe I can start with a couple of quick ones.

So the testing, we don't believe that our test actually has a false negative rate of 30%.

That may be with the commercial tests, but our test actually is very sensitive.

In fact, it was even more sensitive than the initial test within the Department of Health labs.

And so at most, I would say it's about two to 3% with our test.

And often in that situation, it's really a matter of that you may get someone very, very early in their disease when they have such a small amount of virus that's not detectable, but then a few days later, it's a higher level where you get the detection.

And so our test is actually quite good.

And so we are not having to do multiple tests of individuals.

It's again, where you pick those individuals up in their system.

As you saw in the skilled nursing facilities, upwards of 50% of the individuals that we identified as positive did not have any symptoms.

So our test is actually quite good there.

In terms of the waves, I agree with you that given the relatively low level of infection within the community, estimates are around 3%.

I do anticipate we likely will see another wave in the fall, particularly with the increase in respiratory virus season as we normally do.

And until we get a vaccine in place, we're always potentially at risk for that.

And so we are doing a lot of work right now with both IHME around modeling what is that potentially going to look like in the future.

How do we implement testing?

How do we do community surveillance to really inform all of those decisions?

But I wanted to just answer those quick, too, and then, Nora, I'll let you comment on the others, or I can chime in as well.

Sure.

I think with regard to just building on the second wave, I think we should anticipate a second wave.

And I think from a surge planning perspective, we've seen, and Dr. Della described, some tremendous efforts, both by UW Medicine and hospitals around the region.

And I think we need to continue to look at the modeling, refine those surge plans, and then work with state and federal partners.

I think we can't stop the surge planning.

We have to look at the models and continue to look at strategies for how we can make sure hospitals will be able to continue to surge as they've planned, but then also, again, based on what the models tell us, what additional resources we might need in the community.

So for me, it's continuing to refine and continue to pursue and look at ways that we can continue to sort of dial in these plans because I think we should assume that there could be a second wave.

With regard to the PPE question earlier, I can't speak for what any individual facility is doing and also want to say in terms of the numbers of PPE coming into the state and how they're being allocated or distributed, that work is being led by the State Department of Health and then distribution is happening through local public health and emergency management.

partners.

So I don't feel I'm in the best position to speak on exactly how those have been allocated or distributed.

But those would be the partners to follow up with for answers.

What I can add there is that all healthcare systems have implemented preservation and conservation of PPE practices that do include extended use.

For instance, being able to use a mask for a longer period of time, but we always do that with a face shield that protects that mask from being splattered upon as well so that you can use it with multiple patients.

Part of that reuse and extended use policies were because early on, we really didn't know when we would get those next supplies.

And when we looked at that very large surge number, we needed to ensure that we could not only manage for that surge capacity, but do so all the way through May.

And so I think as we start to see where we're at with this plateau and the supply lines become more consistent, that as we go down the other side of that curve, we'll start to be able to back off on some of those conservation that we had the PPE so that our healthcare workers could safely care for these patients throughout the duration of the pandemic, not just during that immediate situation.

But it's a great point that you're raising.

Thank you so much.

I think Councilmember Herbold also has a question.

Please, Councilmember Herbold.

Thank you.

So when my office started inquiring about hospital planning and setting up this briefing, it was really focused on the modeling numbers that showed a great need, and those numbers were you know, moving us towards making decisions like inviting field hospitals.

In the time that we were organizing this, of course, that changed, right?

And I'm just wondering, from a planning perspective, You know, we literally went from, in a period of nine days, from starting to build the Fillard Hospital to deciding that we were gonna send it back, it was open three days.

From a planning perspective, are there any lessons to be learned from that, or is it just a matter of nothing more than working to make sure that the modeling is as precise as it can be, and something like this is just unavoidable?

Tim, were you saying something?

No, you can start and then I can jump in.

Yeah, it's a fair question.

I think it is a little bit of the nature of how things have evolved by the time the field hospital asset had been requested by the state and deployed.

The good news is we weren't in a position where we were seeing a surge, and although We were not, my team or I were involved in the decision to send it, excuse me, we were not the decision makers in terms of returning it.

I think we can all look nationally and see where there has been great need.

And so the governor's office and others who made that decision have moved forward.

I think the important thing for us to consider is, yeah, modeling matters a lot.

We need to have good kind of targets that we're planning for in the community.

And I think the IHME work and others As that continues to get refined does help us identify targets.

It is important that we, it does take time to stand up these kinds of assets, one of the benefits of the DoD.

asset was it came with personnel.

That's been one of the challenges in looking at field hospital planning or larger alternate care system at a community level.

Planning is one thing to identify a location.

It's another thing to have all of the personnel that would be needed.

And so I think it was a valuable asset and one I hope if we needed it could be made available again, but I think as we go forward, it is important to keep in mind that standing up these assets takes time and additional work will be needed to continue to find where the personnel would be to be able to support something like that if it wasn't a DOD asset.

Thank you.

Great.

Okay.

Any other questions from my colleagues?

Okay, I'm not hearing any or receiving any requests for additional questions.

I want to thank Council Member Herbold for taking on the responsibility of organizing this presentation for us today and for the public today.

I think it was really important.

We hear a lot about the UW model in the national and global news, so it was really interesting to hear directly from you all about how you are looking at your model and how you are best utilizing it and really appreciate all the work that you all are doing to make sure that our healthcare system is ready for a surge if one does occur.

So thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules, doing important work that you all are doing to join us this morning and to be able to provide the public with more information.

Council Member Hurdle, did you have any closing remarks you'd like to make?

Just my sincere thanks to both of you for joining us again at this very, very busy, busy time.

Really appreciate your efforts on all of our behalves.

Thanks for the invitation.

Yeah, thank you very much.

Of course.

Okay, so you all are, you too are welcome to leave the call if you wish now, and we're going to go ahead and move through the rest of our agenda.

So thank you so much again for being with us.

Thank you.

We are going to go ahead and move into a preview of today's City Council actions and Council and Regional Committee reports.

We will go ahead and go through that.

I have received a request from a Council member that we consistent with how we do roll call, but I failed to actually get the list of how we did roll call.

So this week we will continue to go by just in order of district number and next Monday we will take folks in the order that they are.

Uh, listed on the roll call, so just I guess we're just people want to mix it up a little bit for for for making it a little bit more by dynamic meeting, I guess.

So let's go ahead and.

We're going to dig into this part of our agenda, so we'll go ahead and start with Councilmember Herbold, who is District No. 1. The floor is yours.

And don't forget to unmute.

Thank you.

At this afternoon's Council meeting, we'll be discussing Council Bill 119766. This is a bill that is cosponsored by Councilmember Morales.

In the context of the mayor's eviction moratorium for commercial tenants who operate small businesses and nonprofits, The emergency order not only recommended an eviction moratorium or sets in place an eviction moratorium, but it recommended that property owners be willing to enter into time payment plans with their commercial tenants.

We know that in some cases that is happening, in other cases it is not.

So the effect of the emergency order is that small businesses can't be evicted for non-payment of rent during the emergency, but the rent is still owing.

And so this bill is intended to establish a way for property owners to get paid and for small businesses to minimize their rent debt.

The bill also will restrict increases in rents for small businesses and nonprofits during the public health emergency, and the payment plans will, again, allow tenants to pay their rent over a longer period of time.

There is also an amendment that we're bringing forward that will put some common sense limitations on the small businesses that are covered.

Businesses will need to have experience in economic hardship, and local outposts of large chains would not be eligible.

And that is necessary because of how we're defining small businesses.

Unlike some of our other labor laws, we're just finding small businesses as the number of locations, the number of employees in each location.

So that allows the potential for chain to be covered by this law and that this amendment would eliminate that possibility.

Just a couple other things I wanted to mention that we have coming up this week.

Last week I asked Fire Chief Scoggins about the impacts of the West Seattle bridge closure on fire and EMS access.

We're expecting to get a response back from him sometime this week.

He responded that they are currently conducting a comprehensive G.I.S. analysis of the impacts of response times due to the closure of the bridge, and that analysis includes a review of response times before and after the bridge closure, how often and when the lower bridge opens for marine traffic, as well as the delays caused by rail traffic.

And again, we are to get that analysis from Chief Scoggins by April 17th this week.

I want to also mention that myself and Councilmember Peterson will be out visiting the West Seattle Bridge tomorrow with Director Zimbabwe to view the cracks in the bridge.

And then also, tomorrow afternoon, I'm hosting a conference call with the District 1 service providers to hear from them about their efforts to serve members of our community, as well as what we as a city can do to help enhance I have one amendment to Councilmember Gonzalez's legislation regarding emergency child care, but I'll hold that until Councilmember Gonzalez has her report.

Thank you.

Great, thank you.

Any questions or comments for Councilmember Herbold on her report?

Okay, hearing and seeing none, we will go ahead and go to District 2. Council Member Morales.

Good morning.

I'll be brief.

There are no items on the calendar from the Community Economic Development Committee.

As Council Member Herbold mentioned, we'll be discussing the bill related to commercial rent restrictions.

And I do want to thank Council Member Herboldt for allowing me to co-sponsor this with her.

This is really an important issue for all of us as our small businesses are suffering and we're trying to do what we can to protect our small business neighbors.

So I'm looking forward to that conversation this afternoon.

That's all I have.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

We will, any questions for or comments for Council Member Morales?

Okay, moving along to District 3, Council Member Sawant.

Thank you, President Gonzalez.

Good morning, everybody.

There are no items on today's City Council agenda from the Sustainability and Renters' Rights Committee.

The next regularly scheduled meeting of the committee would be Tuesday, April 28th at 2 p.m., although, of course, we would be making sure that we look at Council President's updated committee calendar and working with that.

And the Sustainability and Renters Rights Committee is responsible for appointing eight people to the Green New Deal Oversight Board.

The terms begin in May, and we would like to do appointments this month.

If anyone who is listening into this meeting would like to apply, or no other community members who would like to apply.

We will be posting an application form onto the committee web page today or you can just email my office or call any of my staff members.

The different positions on the board are reserved for people representing different communities and organizations.

Aid positions will be held by representatives of communities impacted by racial, economic, and environmental injustices.

Of these aid positions, two will be held by representatives from tribes whose treaty rights are connected to the lands and waterways of Seattle, and two will be held by people between the ages of 16 and 25 at the time of their appointment.

Three positions will be held by representatives of environmental justice organizations.

Four will be held by representatives of labor unions.

Three, by experts with a depth of experience in greenhouse gas reduction and climate resiliency strategies.

And one, by an individual specializing in workforce training.

To apply, please, community membership, please email I would like you to give us one paragraph description of interest, resume, of interest in your resume and which positions of the GND oversight board you think you would be most suited for.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Sawant.

Any questions or comments for Council Member Sawant?

Okay, hearing and seeing none, we're going to go ahead and move to District 3. Council Member Peterson.

Sure.

District 4 is here.

I just want to say thank you to Councilmember Herbold for inviting the Northwest Health Care Response Network and University of Washington Medical Center, which is a regional treasure here in District 4. Thank you for inviting them both here.

On today's full City Council agenda, there are no items from our Transportation and Utilities Committee.

As Councilmember Herbold said, I'll be accompanying her to the West Seattle Bridge tomorrow morning.

to do an inspection of that with SDOT officials.

Regarding Seattle City Light, as we know, our city auditor recently published a performance audit of their billing system that they had implemented in 2016, which had a lot of problems and complaints.

Thanks again to Councilmember Mosqueda for initiating that very helpful audit.

Our city-owned utility is already making progress on implementing those recommendations.

We will be providing oversight of their progress in our Transportation Utilities Committee.

The policy of no shutoffs continues.

In addition of the no shutoff policy, there are other relief policies that we put in place during this emergency, including no late fees, deferred payments, increasing access to utility discount program.

If any customer believes their bill is wrong from City Light or Public Utilities, just call the Customer Care Center 206-384-3000.

Events in District 4, I was at the University District Food Bank over the weekend volunteering They are doing a great job, not only serving hungry neighbors in District 4, but also delivering.

They've increased their delivery services throughout the region.

And what they really need right now are donations.

Food banks need financial donations more than volunteers right now.

They're able to use their economies of scale to do bulk purchases of food to get that to people in need.

Again, we are continuing our office hours remotely, so just email my office or go to the website to sign up for office hours.

That will be held over the phone.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Peterson, for that report.

Any questions or comments for Councilmember Peterson?

Okay, hearing none, we'll move on to District 5. Councilmember Juarez, the floor is yours.

Thank you.

Good morning, everybody.

There are no items for the Public Assets and Native Communities Committee today.

I want to give you a parks update.

As you know, we had the parks closed for the weekend.

The city closed the 15 parks Friday at 11 and kept them closed until early Monday morning.

Great news.

Parks and SPD report overall success and compliance.

I've been in contact with the superintendent and SPD.

There were well over 60 park ambassadors out helping to advise folks to stay at home.

Sbd reports there were they were notified only once the entire weekend regarding one evening incident Won't say what park and what district but West Seattle is doing great So as you know the the parks that were closed were Elk high Arboretum Cal Anderson car key discovery gas works Green Lake Golden Gardens Caboodle Garden Lincoln Magnuson Seward volunteer West Seattle Stadium and Woodland and I've been on the phone with the superintendent and yesterday and this morning, starting at eight and their staff.

And so we got some information, what they're calling the social distancing snapshots.

And these are basically what they call data snapshots.

This is the data collected by parks that is not only the ambassadors, but Seattle Park employees that were also out there.

and they have collected data.

It's still being fine-tuned and we'll have it soon to you.

That's my understanding from the superintendent.

The main concern, as we also just heard from the presentation from the surge planning, what they're concerned about is the social distancing, is to avoid popular parks that are prone to overcrowding.

The parks is really encouraging people to discover more of the 480 parks that we have in our system.

So what they're doing now with parks is they're tracking park use so that they can make better decisions on what parks can stay open as the weather gets better.

So the social distancing observations at various parks will continue.

They're putting the data together for us.

We'll receive a more concise and up-to-date final version of the data soon.

I was happy to hear from the earlier presentation that We haven't, we thought we were going to hit, as you all know, the peak on April 11th.

It's nice to see that the curve that we are, we're not seeing a decline, but at least we're seeing something that wasn't as horrific as what we thought we were going to see when they were making these models back on April 2nd.

So I've been on the phone off and on since 8th this morning with the superintendent, Gary.

And we hope to put together and get to me a final version for all of you folks and the public listening and watching the final plan of how the data and what it looks like and how they've measured each park and how they can start making some decisions based on data and what parks can remain open.

District 5 updates.

My office and I sent out a Friday newsletter to our D5 constituents and not just constituents in D5, but pretty much everywhere.

Last week, we included resources and services for people who need help for domestic and sexual violence.

We also put in an extra section about recovery services and what services are available for people who are in recovery so they can attend AA meetings.

And we focus not the general public, of course, but also the LGBTQ community, the Native American community, and ASL.

So I'm continuing to monitor the recovery piece through our work with Chief Seattle and the Seattle Indian Health Board.

As you know, people at this time are confined and it's very difficult to find part of recovery is fellowship and being with other people.

And since we physically cannot be with those people, we want to make sure we have those services posted online so people can know where to call in or do Zoom.

If you go online nationally, AA has a wonderful website and it also lists all the local AA meetings and where you can find particular meetings in your neighborhood.

And let's see, do I have anything else?

I hope everyone had a great Easter and I really, really want to thank the city of Seattle residents did a phenomenal job of staying home and staying safe.

I'm just really thankful from looking at the data that the preliminary data looks really good about people observing social distancing and a particular beautiful weekend where I think everyone wanted to be outside.

So thank you.

Thank you Councilmember Juarez for that report and for your work in that particular space.

Also, I have been reminded that it was also Passover, so happy Passover to those who celebrate Passover as well, including our very own Councilmember Morales.

Happy Easter, happy Passover, and happy spring in general for all of the folks who are around.

It's a hard time for us to go through these really important holidays.

For many of us, it's a moment to come together with family and friends.

And indeed, a lot of us are having to stay home and stay away from our loved ones or connect virtually.

We appreciate that it is being celebrated in a very different way, but nonetheless gives us an opportunity and a moment to take a break from the crisis that is afoot and allows us that opportunity to just be able to connect however we can and have sort of moments of joy where we can have them.

So I hope you all had a great time with your own families, whether it was virtually or in person as well.

We'll go ahead and move on to District 6. Councilmember Strauss, the floor is yours.

Good morning.

Thank you, Council President.

There are zero items on the Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee agenda for today, and there is one item from the Committee on Introduction and Referral.

CB 119776 is a plat approval and confirmation for the Verona Roy plat.

The previously discussed emergency permitting legislation CB 119769 had previously been planned for a vote on full council today and is being held for at least one additional week to provide some additional consideration.

Other events, my office hours remain full.

We do office hours over the phone.

And so for any constituent who desires to have a one-on-one meeting, please sign up on my website.

My office also continues to work with the mayor's office and Seattle King County Public Health.

to reopen the farmer's market in a way that safeguards public health and allows for access to fresh produce.

Public health has approved the farmer's market health safety plan, and we are hopeful that the farmer's markets could open this weekend and as soon as possible.

My office has also been working with the Fremonts Arts Council to ensure that they remain stabilized during the COVID-19 emergency.

And over a week, about two weeks ago, I had a productive, convened a productive conversation with multiple city departments to address the public health and safety concerns in and around Ballard Commons Park.

I'd like to thank FAS.

Parks Department, Seattle Public Libraries, STOT, SPU, HSD, SPD, and Seattle King County Public Health for an immediate coordination effort to improve the conditions at Ballard Commons Park.

The city's initial response has been public health has mobilized several clinics in the Ballard area and are continuing weekly clinics with vaccines and outreach three times per week.

Seattle King County Public Health is all their environmental health team has connected with Seattle Parks and Recreation to confirm best practice sanitation procedures of the Portland Loo and other parts of the Commons Park as a precaution.

Human Services Department and the navigation team are completing outreach with hygiene kits three times per week.

Seattle Public Utilities has increased proactive cleaning to four times per week and servicing the garbage can in front of the Ballard Library five times per week.

Seattle Department's community Policing team, anti-crime teams, and bike patrols are supplementing standard patrols.

Seattle Parks and Recreation has reopened the Portland Loo with cleaning three times per day and picking up litter three times per week.

The city is providing a hand-washing station and portable toilets at the Ballard Commons Park.

And until we stand up appropriate shelter options, we need to manage what is currently an unmanaged encampment.

And that means increasing the amount of security for our housed and unhoused neighbors, increasing the access to restrooms and handwashing, increasing access to drinking water and food, increasing sanitation and cleaning, and creating pathways to appropriate shelter space and pathways to stable housing.

I'd like to thank the mayor's office for opening hygiene, the handwashing station and extra Santa cans and bathrooms at 26 locations in District 6. More on that as information becomes available and you can look for updates on my blog.

This week, I will continue to do the outreach that my office has been engaging in for the past number of weeks, helping small businesses across District Six and helping individuals navigate the different layers of resources from federal, state, county, and city.

That is all I have for today.

Thank you, Council President.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss.

Any questions or comments on Council Member Strauss's report?

Okay, hearing none, we will go ahead and move to District 7. Council Member Lewis, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Council President.

So not a whole lot for me this week.

I'll speed right along.

There's nothing on today's afternoon from the Select Committee on Homelessness Strategies and Investments.

I want to thank everybody for attending.

the special committee meeting last week to discuss the ongoing challenges around hygiene for folks who are on shelter in the city.

Thank you Councilmember Strauss for your update just now on Ballard Commons Park.

I know that featured prominently in that meeting and I look forward to continuing to work with all of you as well as folks in the executive departments to step up our commitments in providing hygiene facilities for folks experiencing homelessness in the city.

I want to provide a brief plug and a shout out to Council Member Mosqueda for the United Way of King County's Rent Support Program.

There was a write-up of the program in The Stranger on Friday by Rich Smith.

I encourage people to go and read it.

And if you are in King County and at 50% of area median income or lower, please do apply and try to take advantage of this program through the United Way.

The website for those listening in who think they might qualify is uwkc.org slash rent help.

So if you are an undocumented person or family, you can benefit from this rent support, so I highly encourage you to take advantage of it and see if you can apply for relief from that fund.

And I want to thank Council Member Mosqueda for her leadership in getting a sizable city investment in that fund.

And I look forward to continuing to work with our regional partners to protect and expand rent support in this really difficult time.

The last thing that I am going to mention is that I am having a town hall this week, a virtual town hall, following on the example of Councilmember Morales in District 2. The town hall invite was sent out on my Twitter account last week.

You do need to to fill out like a little kind of link to participate, but anyone can participate, and I definitely encourage folks to do so.

Please email me at andrew.lewis at seattle.gov, and we'll send the details.

The town hall is going to happen tomorrow at noon on Zoom.

So that's Tuesday, April 14th at noon.

And hope to see everybody there.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Councilmember Lewis.

We are not joined this morning by Councilmember Mosqueda in position eight, so we will skip.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

I should have asked if anybody had any questions or comments on your report, and I failed to do that because I was rushing.

But I see that Councilmember Mosqueda has raised her hand and will yield the floor to her.

It was me, I think.

Yeah.

Did I say, who did I say?

Council Member Herbold.

I'm sorry.

That's all right.

You were thinking of her.

Yes.

I was thinking of her and I apologize.

You are obviously not Council Member Mosqueda.

So I just wanted to mention as it relates specifically to the Rent Assistance Fund, one of the important populations that this fund is serving in addition to individuals who are undocumented neighbors in our community.

It is also going to be serving people who don't pay what we typically consider rent, but pay fees for time in motels.

This was something that a number of folks did a lot of advocacy around to ensure that people who live in hotels and who have non-traditional employment, underground employment, that that population of folks can avail themselves of this resource.

Also, that is not usual for our ranch assistance programs.

And so I really want to thank everybody, all the partners who were involved in putting together these funds for ensuring that the needs of this population is taken care of as well.

Thank you.

Great, thank you.

Any other comments or questions for Council Member Lewis or on his report?

All right, so we will go ahead and keep on moving through.

As I mentioned, Council Member Mosqueda is unable to join us this morning.

It is my understanding she will be with us this afternoon.

So we will go ahead and skip her report and go straight to my report.

I have two bills on today's full council agenda that are subject to a vote.

Both bills are technical changes and responsive to city operations related to the COVID-19 emergency response and crisis.

The first bill is Council Bill 119770 and is a bill that I am sponsoring at the request of the hearing examiner.

This legislation will temporarily suspend deadlines set in the Seattle Municipal Code for the duties of the hearing examiner and temporarily supersede a few sections of the Municipal Code to account for our current civil emergency impacting the office's ability to conduct in-person hearings or keep up with the volume of hearings in light of the governor's order to shelter in place.

The second bill is Council Bill 119-771, which was transmitted by the Mayor's Office and the Department of Education and Early Learning.

This legislation will amend the Families Education Preschool and Promise Levy Implementation Plan to include emergency child care services for frontline essential workers, consistent with the Mayor's Emergency Order, which was issued on the 27th of March.

and to utilize FEPP levy dollars in order to pay for those services.

So I will have a lot more to say about this bill in detail on.

I want to make sure that folks understand that it is a bill that is technical in nature, because what we are doing is amending the implementation and evaluation plan to make really, really clear that these dollars are an allowed use from council's perspective under the implementation and evaluation plan, and does sort of subject the expenditures to oversight and accountability standards that are typically applied to these dollars in ordinary circumstances.

Again, we'll have more to say about this later.

One last thing I will say about this bill is that we have an understanding from Council Central staff's analysis, and I want to thank Brian Goodnight for his good work on evaluating this bill, that future expenditures for these types of early learning services, including through the Seattle Preschool Promise, excuse me, the Seattle Preschool Program and the Seattle Preschool Program Plus will not be impacted.

So we believe that the level of service that we will be able to provide in our preschool programming and early learning programming moving forward beyond the emergency crisis will remain the same.

So we are using existing dollars that are not being used at all under current contracts because of school closures for these emergency services.

So it is effectively a cost neutral proposal.

So just wanted to make sure folks understood.

that in terms of potential financial impact for future child care services, we aren't anticipating that there would be one since we're not currently delivering child care services.

So I do understand that Councilmember Herbold has an amendment, which I consider to be a friendly amendment, and we had had conversations with the executive about reporting requirements and making sure we understood I'm happy to address those questions.

I appreciate how these dollars were being spent during the initial 30-day period and the subsequent 30-day period if necessary.

I appreciate Councilmember Herbold's attention to those same reporting requirements and suggesting that we put them into the implementation and evaluation plan.

I will hand it over to Councilmember Herbold to talk about the amendment.

So yes, thank you.

Not a whole lot to add here.

The amendment simply requires a monthly report from the executive on the childcare efforts, including number of sites, the number of children served, the number of staff necessary to serve that number of children, the funds spent, and the categories of essential worker parents served.

Yeah, that's it, thanks.

Thank you so much.

Any questions or comments on those council bills or council member Herbold's amendment?

Okay, hearing and seeing none, I will end my report by simply saying that just a few moments ago, we received a letter from our Office of Intergovernmental Relations.

As you all may recall from last week, we had them make a presentation about the CARES Act and the dollars and the funding included in the stimulus bill at the federal level.

We've received a letter from them asking for the City Council to sign on in support of this letter.

It is a letter to Senators Murray and Cantwell and Representative Smith and Jayapal asking for specific things related to the CARES Act including maintaining essential city services, so increasing funding and flexibility for the Coronavirus Relief Fund, requesting an increase to food assistance, and then also requesting a significant increase for resources for housing and emergency shelter, also requesting additional increase in assistance for working families, including TANF, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and also an expansion of access to recovery rebates and unemployment insurance.

It's also requesting sustained economic development support for a longer period of time through CDFI funding and loans and tax credits for small businesses.

It is also asking for an increase to access to essential public health services, including providing free testing, treatment, and prevention for COVID-19 for all people regardless of their immigration status, and also requesting that we maintain critical utility and transit services at the local level, particularly for our most vulnerable transit users.

And then lastly, a full sort of umbrella request to protect our vulnerable residents including our immigrant and refugee populations by making sure that these folks are able to access qualified health plans for COVID-19 care.

and to create specific programs available to DACA recipients to be able to access health care.

So I have agreed to request that council members who are interested in signing on to this letter do so at our two o'clock full council meeting on the record.

So we, I think, I think Brianna Thomas has already emailed this out to all of your offices if you have any comments.

or questions or additions to the letter, please get them to us ASAP for inclusion in, for potential inclusion in the letter.

Again, our hope is to get this across the finish line by two o'clock today.

OIR has indicated that the letter would be most useful if the letter that was sent to the House of Representatives, and it was sent to the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives, these representatives and senators received the letter today.

So unfortunately, we don't have a ton of time to dig into the details, and I apologize for bringing this up just now during the morning, but I also just received it about 20 minutes ago.

So I think it's an hearing from you all at 2 p.m.

as to whether or not you'd like to have your name included on it.

That is the end of my report.

Happy to answer any questions.

All right.

I'm not seeing any, so we are going to conclude council briefing now, and we're going to move into executive session.

All of you should have on your calendar information related to executive session.

And when I say all of you, I mean council members.

And I think Council Member Mosqueda, who is not able to join us this morning, is going to have a staff member join us.

But for any of you on the line now, if you need technical assistance in calling into the executive session, which I will say the words to start in a moment, You can call 206-679-2781.

Again, if you need technical assistance, call 206-679-2781.

Or you can email ledgeit or legit, like too legit to quit, at seattle.gov.

I've been sitting on that one.

And you can get some technical assistance from Eric or Ian or the other fine folks over at IT.

So with that being said, as presiding officer, I am announcing that the Seattle City Council will now convene an executive session.

The purpose of the executive session is to discuss pending potential or actual litigation.

The council's executive sessions are an opportunity for the council to discuss confidential legal matters with city attorneys as.

authorized by law.

A legal monitor from the city attorney's office is always present to ensure the council reserves questions of policy for open sessions.

I expect that the executive session will end in one hour, which would put us at 1159 a.m.

If the executive session is to be extended beyond that time, I will announce the extension and the expected duration.

OK, so I'm just confirming with Chambers that we are no longer recording?

Correct.

OK, so colleagues, what will happen now is all of you will get off of Zoom, and you will call in your phone on Skype.

Do you all have the Skype information?

Does anyone not have it?

OK, cool.

So you cannot have Zoom open at the same time that you're going to call into Skype.

So disconnect, leave this meeting now, and use your phones to call into Skype.

Hear you shortly.

Is she there?

I'm here.

So I guess we're probably done with you.

We're going to leave this.

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