Seattle City Council Finance & Housing Committee 8/17/21

Good morning, everyone.

It is Tuesday, August 17th, 2011. I'm Teresa Mosqueda, chair of the Finance and Housing Committee.

The time is 9.31 a.m.

The committee meeting will come to order.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Vice Chair Herbold?

Here.

Council President Gonzalez?

Here.

Council Member Lewis?

Present.

Council Member Strauss?

Excused.

Chair Mosqueda?

Present.

Madam Chair, that is a four-person, one excuse.

Thank you very much.

And our alternate, Council Member Morales, is also excused today, so there will be four of us.

When we're joined by other Council Members, we will make sure to announce them.

I do expect a few other Council Members to join us as we deliberate on the select budget committee, excuse me, on the supplemental budget items.

These are items where we usually invite other committee members and council members to join us so we can have a more robust discussion.

We'll make sure to announce them when they join.

Colleagues, we have a full agenda today.

Thank you again for joining us today.

We will make sure to adjourn by 1 p.m.

We will begin today's meeting with public comment.

We're going to have a hard end time at 10 a.m.

So we will get through as many people as signed up as possible.

We will then go into appointments.

We have three reappointments to the Community Roots Housing Board.

We have a briefing on the revenue forecast from the city's budget office.

We will then have a briefing and possible vote on the mid-year grant acceptance ordinance and the mid-year supplemental ordinance.

That will be for about an hour, then the remaining hour of our committee meeting, we will have a briefing on the multifamily tax exemption annual report and extension legislation will have another 20 minute briefing on the possible vote to authorize the new lease for the port.

to make sure that we're creating additional tiny house villages on publicly owned land.

And finally, we'll end with a 20-minute presentation from the Finance and Administrative Services Department on their race and social justice report, which has been long anticipated.

If there's no objection, today's agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

Let's go ahead and begin with public comment.

We do have quite a few folks signed up for public comment.

We are going to try to get through everyone.

So please note that we have one minute allocated for public comment.

Please adjust your remarks accordingly.

And if you don't get a chance to get through all of your public comment, please do feel free to send those to council at Seattle.gov.

Again, as a reminder, the public comment period will end at 10 a.m.

Each speaker will have one minute to speak.

You will hear a chime at the end of your one minute.

That is your indication to wrap up your comments.

And then after the one minute allotment, your microphone will soon be shut off.

So please do try to wrap it up.

I'm going to call three speakers at a time.

When you are called on, you will hear a prompt that says you have been unmuted.

But that's your indication to hit star six to unmute your line.

Also make sure that your own phone is off of mute.

After you hit star six you can begin speaking.

Please state your name and the item that you are addressing on today's agenda.

We ask after you are finished with your public comment that you disconnect from the line and continue watching on Seattle Channel or the other listening options on today's listed on today's agenda.

With that, we're going to open up public comment and get the public comment started here with Peter Condit, Trevona Thompson-Wiley, and Nikita Oliver.

Good morning, Peter.

Thanks for being the first one to speak.

I'll turn it over to you.

Good morning.

Thank you.

This is Peter Condit.

I'm an abolitionist living in District 6. I support Budget Amendment 9A to cut $500,000 from SPD's budget and use it for the Garfield Superblock Project.

Budget Amendment 8 should be further amended to provide all $15 million of SBD salary savings to community.

Research shows that every 10 additional community nonprofits in a city leads to a 9% reduction in the homicide rate, a 6% reduction in violent crime, and a 4% reduction in the property crime rate.

Council should put more of SBD salary savings into funding HSD community capacity building grants and participatory budgeting.

Council should withhold funding for community service officers until those individuals are moved outside of the police department.

There is no need for people who are ostensibly nonviolent city employees to be kept within a violent, racist department.

Finally, council should be preparing a community emergency response network to respond to up to three quarters of all 911 calls for service as recommended by a report commissioned by the SPD and published recently by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Peter.

Good morning, Trevona.

Hi, my name is Trevona.

I'm calling to ask to transfer more than the $5.4 million in salary savings out of the SPD department.

And we need to put that money into the Community Capacity Building Fund, MPB.

And why is it that we're only transferring $5.4 million to the community?

Where's the rest of the $10 million in salary savings going to?

Is it going to institution that has continued to oppress BIPOC people?

Are we going to continue to put more money into caging people?

Cops simply don't stop violence.

Research shows that increasing community-based organizations reduces homicides without increasing violence through police.

We had over 70 applicants for the Community Capacity Building Fund, and about 33 orgs were funded.

Black Star Farmers, Black Elephant Party, Forever Safe Thesis, post-prison education program.

Umija Food Circle are just a few of the orgs that were not funded.

The solution for a healthy and thriving Seattle is in the hands of the community.

Seattle is at a critical point of transitioning public safety from SPD and it needs to go into the hands of the community.

Do better.

Thank you very much.

And the next speaker is Nikita Oliver.

Good morning Nikita.

Good morning.

Good morning Council Member Mosqueda and Seattle City Council.

My name is Nikita Oliver.

I am the Executive Director of Creative Justice which is an arts-based human engaged space for young people.

We are one of the groups that received funding through the HSD Community Safety Capacity Building Grant.

And I want to encourage you on two points around the Seattle Police Department salary savings to move this into community care for community-based orgs.

Those two points are first.

A year and a half is not enough time for a nonprofit that's expected to take on the infrastructure of public safety to be able to sustain and build a model that will work for everyone for a duration of time that we need, which is forever.

And so I would encourage you all to expand the capacity building grants out to two years to allow nonprofits the opportunity to get that funding in a sustainable way after the The second thing is there are many organizations that did not receive funding, and I would like to encourage you to use this salary savings to fund more orgs, because that will benefit the health and safety of everyone in our community.

Excellent.

Thank you, Nikita.

The next three speakers are Stephanie Ingram, Karen Estevenin, and Jeff Piper.

Sorry about that, Stephanie.

Please go ahead.

Good morning.

Hi there, my name is Stephanie Ingram.

I'm a longtime Capitol Hill and central area resident.

I'm calling today to encourage the council to approve either of the amendments being proposed to fund the Garfield Superblock.

The park is a beloved central feature of this neighborhood and improving it will make a much needed anchor in the middle of a rapidly changing landscape.

By giving the community a park that honors its history and reflects the pride of the neighborhood, we will be creating a place that is safer, more inclusive, and that will be an important public amenity.

Every single person that I've talked to about this project has said it's a no-brainer.

I want to thank council members Sawant and Strauss for providing two different possible funding options and encourage the council to support either one of them.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for your time this morning and good morning President Estevenin.

Thank you Council Chair Mosqueda and members of the committee.

My name is Karen Estevenin.

I'm part of the Garfield Superblock Coalition.

I appreciate the opportunity to offer my support for funding $500,000 towards the Garfield Superblock through either of the amendments that are presented to you today.

And I want to take this opportunity to talk about our community effort and coalition.

I've served on various projects over the years and not to diminish any of the other work amazing work that this community has done but this particular community led effort is the real deal.

Our coalition is reflective and representative of our beloved community.

We've poured our hearts into this project because it equates to doing everything you can for family.

And with your support of the Garfield Superblock you are elevating all of it.

You are uplifting our family and you are uplifting the central area.

We're so appreciative of council members Sawant Muscata and Strauss for their support so far and hope that we can count on full support from this committee and the full council.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate you calling in today.

The next person is Jeff Piper.

Good morning, Jeff.

Good morning.

My name is Jeff Piper.

I live in the Central District, and I'm calling today to voice my support for the amendments being put forward to fund the Carfield Superblock.

I've lived in the area for almost 20 years now, and I've seen the changes happening due to gentrification and development in the area.

Garfield Playfields serve as the most important community gathering space in the neighborhood, and it's vitally important for the city to support improvements to public spaces like these, especially when development is moving so fast.

The design for Garfield Superwalk has a unique focus on the history and culture of the Central District, and highlighting this history through art will make this park an exceptional community amenity.

I'm excited that there are two potential funding sources for this project, and I think both are appropriate and would encourage the Council to support either one.

Excellent.

Thanks for calling.

The next three speakers are Robert Stephens, Rudy Pantoja, and Coco Weber.

Good morning, Robert.

Good morning.

Good morning.

My name is Robert Stephens, and thank you for allowing me to speak again today.

In 2005, when the community was working with the school district and city to renovate the Garfield High School.

We wanted to build Quentin Jones Performing Arts Center.

And there was a city ordinance that required X number of parking spots and we didn't have enough.

So I went and chopped up and cut and paste some elements from our 1998 neighborhood plan and put together as a proposal.

The proposal was accepted.

And T-Basin Associate, the architect that was hired to do the project, took $3,000 out of his own pocket and paid for the project.

He was so impressed.

And I hope that we have impressed you guys, excuse me for saying you guys, have impressed the council that this project is worthy of this community and the city.

Thank you so much for the support that's flowing.

Absolutely.

Thank you for calling in.

And good morning, Rudy.

Hello, my name is Rudy Pantoja, and I wanted to call in support.

I'm with the Fremont Rotary Club, and I also associated with the Roar of Merchants along Highway 99. And we want to support the North Precinct Advisory Council letters sent to all council members in regards to the Mayor Durkin and Police Chief Diaz proposed budget ordinance which would allow Seattle Police Department to access previously approved funding to address the current safety challenges in our city, including North Seattle.

And one of the things I'm hearing from fire department is when there's a violent incident, fire says waiting for SPD to secure area.

And once that's secured, you can take your ballistic vest off.

Please support this ordinance.

Thank you so much.

And the next person is Coco.

Okay, I'm looking for Coco on the screen.

And as we tee up Coco, the next three speakers will be Avan Curtis, Nikki Montanabe, and Sharon Koshla.

Good morning, Coco.

Good morning.

My name is Coco and I'm a C4 resident.

I support Budget Amendment 8 to put salary savings into the community through the Garfield Superblock, but it's not enough.

The Human Services Division only funded 33 of over 70 of the grant applicants for Community Safety Capacity Building.

These are groups that are up and running and just need more funding to do more of this true community safety building, such as Consejo Counseling Referral Services, API CHIA, Black Liberation and Accountability Coalition, Rainier Beach Action Coalition, and Massage Parlor Outreach Project, to name a few.

These are people in the community who can actually support community and build true community safety.

The police have made it very clear that they will shuffle around funding to do whatever they want with it.

without the council holding them accountable to budgeting, they're just going to tell you whatever they want to get the money that they want.

Please invest in community rather than the police.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

And good morning, Avon.

Looking for Avon Curtis, followed by Nikki.

Okay, let's go ahead and tee up Nikki, please.

Good morning.

Good morning, Evan.

Thanks for waiting.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Sorry about that.

This is new to me.

My name is Avon Curtis.

I'm the executive director for Arms Around You.

Arms Around You was one of the grantees of the Community Safety Capacity Building Fund.

And we're here to support how we could use an extension of funds of two years instead of 18 months.

The money can fund organizations that's doing the work to enhance community safety and provide more resources to our most vulnerable populations.

Not only are we speaking for our own organization, we are also advocating for the community organizations that will benefit from this much needed resource.

We know that strength come in numbers.

Thank you.

Excellent.

Thank you.

And Nikki, good morning, Nikki.

Hello.

Hi.

Hi, my name is Nikki Watanabe and I wanted to quickly comment on the amendments related to the Garfield Superblock.

I think the reasons for why funding should be allocated to this park's improvements are actually really simple.

One, the improvements that are being proposed by the volunteers and the community members aren't anything new.

The proposals are continuations based off of things that the city had already promised to do for the park a while ago.

And I think the neighborhood would certainly appreciate and respect any efforts just to finish off that promise.

Two, Garfield Park, because of its history and its centralized location, sees an enormous degree of use from so many different people, programs, and organizations.

It is certainly regarded as a huge public amenity that should be taken care of.

And I think that the proposed funding would go a long way to maintain the park and the district's cultural and physical longevity for future grouping.

Hello.

You still have time.

Go ahead, Nikki.

Oh, three.

You know, lastly, I just wanted to emphasize that I'm aware that a number of proposals regarding where the money could be funded from have been put forward.

And so I just wanted to thank the good intention that it's important to fund what the project stands for more than, or that matters more than where the money is actually coming from.

And so I just wanted to thank all of the various council members and their teams for their resourcefulness and putting in the time and creativity to think about the project.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

And then I'm going to read the last four speakers that I have here.

Sharon Koshla, followed by Natalie Quick, followed by Valentina Montesinos, and then concluding with Julie Schulman.

Good morning, Sharon.

Hi, good morning.

My name is Sharon Koshla.

I'm a member of the Garfield Superblock Coalition.

We are thrilled to have the support of council members Swann and Strauss to find multiple ways to fund our current needs for this project.

This project needs to happen and needs to happen right without compromise.

This funding will put us on that path.

We are striving to create a place that will celebrate and sustain the culturally rich environment of the central area and bring this cherished park the love and care that community has been trying to give it for over 15 years.

We will continue to work hard and lift this park up and our community, but it's time for the city to value this work and support us.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you for your time and for calling in.

Natalie Quick, you are up next.

Good morning, Council Members.

I am Natalie Quick here today representing NAOF, our state's commercial real estate association with hundreds of members in Seattle.

We want to thank Council Member Mosqueda and her staff as well as the Office of Housing for working with us on the MFTE legislation you have before you today.

I believe it's Council Bill 120156. As the first few MFTE projects prepare to come to the end of the 12-year program, we have a shared goal with the City of ensuring we do not lose affordable housing units and that all existing participants are incentivized to choose to renew and stay in the program.

We believe today's legislation moves us solidly in that direction, and we especially appreciate the quarterly check-ins, which allow us to pivot if it looks like we may lose program participation.

Again, approaching the 12-year mark for this first set of program participants is a first for MFTE.

and being flexible and making adjustments will be important as we move forward.

Thank you again to the council and office of housing for working with us on this important legislation.

Thank you.

Thank you for calling in.

And good morning, Valentina.

Hello.

Hi, this is Valentina Montesinos.

Good morning.

Thank you so much for having me.

I am calling in support of funding for the Garfield Superblock.

I am grateful as the rest of the team is that there are two amendments being proposed for the funding of Garfield Superblock.

This is something that's long long overdue for basic basic needs such as accessibility good light good lighting and honoring the culture and the the the citizenry and community of the neighborhood.

And it's, as I said, long overdue and is very, very important.

So thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

And the last speaker that we have is Julie.

Good morning, Julie.

Good morning, Julie.

I'm just looking for you on the screen here.

Okay, I'm going to keep waiting one more second.

Colleagues, thanks so much for all of your time today and dialing in for all the public testimony.

I'm just going to...

Hi, Julie, I see you on the line there.

I'm just going to wait one more second.

If you can push star six to unmute.

There we go.

I see you.

Please go ahead.

You're good?

It's okay.

I appreciate it.

I wanted to call in support today of more funding for the Human Services Department Community Capacity Building Grant.

I am the co-founder of Forever Safe Spaces, which is an organization that unfortunately was not funded in this round.

But just to share a little bit about our work, our mission is to interweave, stabilize, and nurture people, the most vital to our ecosystem, so we can not only survive but thrive in place.

We believe in safety through creativity, equity, and innovation.

And a lot of our work is about breaking personal and systemic cycles of trauma.

We operate creative spaces, a handful of them, We're a coalition of those, both in Chinatown, South Seattle, and the Pike Pine Corridor.

These are multiple high safety concern areas where we run our mentorship programs, creative workforce development opportunities for young folks, and low barrier drop-in spaces that transform lives.

Our analysis doesn't just come from being data informed, but it's deeply personal.

We are the front lines relationally, and we're asking that you extend more support to this program, HSD, because the people that are the front lines and really can do the work of doing the across and through all the agencies and institutions of public health, safety and human service.

That's us and that's the community that is calling and asking today.

And so we're asking you to put more money towards that in strong support for the amendments that do so.

Thank you very much.

Excellent, thanks so much for dialing in.

Again, we've reached the end of our public comment.

That is everyone who has signed up for public comment today, and I really appreciate the public testimony that was provided.

If you wanted to provide comments and were not able to dial in this morning, just note that there will be more opportunities to testify on many of these topics on September 13th at full council.

And you can always reach us at Seattle, excuse me, at council at Seattle.gov.

All right, let's move into our busy agenda.

Five minutes extra time on the clock for us to get through this entire package.

Appreciate, colleagues, the mini marathon in front of us here.

Madam Clerk, could you please read items one through three into the record?

Items one to three, the reappointments of Frank and Barbara Nabors-Glass, and drew order as members of the Community Roots Housing Public Development Authority for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Colleagues, we do have three reappointments to today's agenda, as these are reappointments to Community Roots Housing.

The individuals themselves do not have to be present for the reappointments for our council practice, but we do have with us Hannah Smith from the Office of Intergovernmental Relations, and we also have Sarah Shoemaker-Gamble and Victoria Tyron from Community Roots Housing to walk us through what Community Roots Housing has been up to and a brief overview of the three appointees, Frank Alvarado III, Barbara Navarro-Glass, and Drew Porter, all three of which have robust application packets for the reappointments in our materials today.

I'll turn it over to Hannah to get us started and walk us through the process here.

Thank you, Chair Misguida, Hannah Smith, OIR.

As you mentioned, we have three reappointments today for Community Roots Housing, formerly Capitol Hill Housing.

They've grown far beyond Capitol Hill in their years in service and maintain over 50 apartment buildings across Seattle and provide safe, affordable apartments to over 2,000 residents.

There are three reappointments today, and if it's okay with you, Chair, I'd love to pass it to Sarah and Victoria, who work closely with these board members, to tell you more about their work for the PDA.

Thank you for queuing that up.

Yeah, all three of these board members are very active on our board, and we're really excited to have them be reappointed.

So thank you for considering them.

So I'll start with BG, Barbara Naboris-Glass.

This is her third term on our board.

And she in her day job serves as the diversity, equity and inclusion director at Seattle Goodwill.

And on our board serves on the joint board development committee.

And that committee actually really focuses on kind of what she does in her day job.

We're focused on training, recruitment, engagement, and we are now also connected with I staff this committee.

We are also now connected with the staff racial equity task force.

And so it's really great to have her expertise on this committee.

And then Frank F. Alvarado III, this is his second term.

He is a VP at Home Street Bank.

And he is serving in his first term as our vice chair on the board.

He has also served as the secretary and treasurer And he is cued up to eventually become our chair.

That's our thinking.

He currently serves on our executive committee and also serves on the finance and asset management committee.

And I also just wanted to mention that he started out on our board as a non-voting emerging leader fellow.

And so we're just really excited that he started out in this fellow role and we got to kind of mentor him and have him come on board and is now in such a leadership role.

He is a really influential member of our board and we're really lucky to have him.

Then Drew Porter is an associate general counsel at the Gates Foundation.

This is his fourth term on our board.

So it'll be his final term.

And he is serving as a vice chair.

Right now we have two of them.

And he has previously served as treasurer and vice chair before.

And he also.

serves on the executive committee and the finance and asset management committee.

And he's one of our longest standing board members.

Like I mentioned, he's in his fourth term.

And it's just really helpful to have his kind of longer term historical perspective in the room.

Yeah, also just a really pivotal board member.

I can also update on what Community Roots Housing is doing in general, what we've been doing this year.

I mentioned we changed our name.

We did that last year during the pandemic.

We used to be Capitol Hill Housing and finished up our very long, really community-centric process last summer.

Now our name is Community Roots Housing.

Um, like she mentioned, we're, we're not just in Capitol Hill anymore.

And so, um, we didn't want to be constrained by geography and this new name really reflects, um, reflects our focus on, on working with the community and, and reflects our community partnerships.

Um, we are also working on the rise together or leading the rise together collaborative capital campaign.

So that's working with.

six partner organizations to bring community driven equitable development to three different neighborhoods.

And so that's with a lot of the different organizations that we're we're already working with on on our different development projects.

which brings me to our very active and large development pipeline.

We have had two groundbreakings this summer.

One just recently happened and one is going to happen next month.

We just had the Yesler Family Housing groundbreaking last week.

That's a project that we're doing in partnership with Seattle Chinatown International District PDA.

And then our other project that's going to have a groundbreaking in September is pride place.

And that is in partnership with Jen pride and that will be a building in Capitol Hill.

And that will be an LGBTQ affirming affordable apartment building for seniors.

Yeah, so just wanted to mention a couple of a couple of our projects, but we have very, very many more.

And this is the most robust pipeline we have ever had.

So keeping us busy.

Well, thank you very much.

And again, thanks to Sarah Shoemaker Gamble, who you just heard from.

Also want to welcome Victoria Tyron from Community Roots Housing.

Thank you both for being here today.

Is there anything else you'd like to add, Victoria?

I think Sarah did a wonderful job.

I am a new hire to Community Roots Housing, and I personally have found it very exciting to be in the middle of this, as she said, very robust pipeline, as well as working directly with our board.

I serve as the board liaison for our PDA board, and Frank, BG, Andrew have been incredible to work with, and we're very excited to keep them on our board for as long as we can.

So thank you guys so much.

Excellent.

Well, thank you both.

Thanks, Hannah, for walking us through the process as well.

And are there any questions on the reappointments of Frank Alvarado III, Barbara Navros-Blass, and Drew Porter, as has been described and included in our materials?

Okay, Sarah and Victoria, I'm not seeing any questions, so thanks again for your overview, and please pass on our appreciation to the reappointees.

Colleagues, I'm gonna go ahead and move these appointments.

I move the committee recommends passage of the reappointments of Frank Alvarado III, Barbara Navarro-Glas, and Drew Porter as members of Community Roots Public Development Authority.

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you, Council President.

Are there any further comments?

hearing none.

Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll on the passage of the reappointments?

Mr. Herbold?

Yes.

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Council Member Lewis?

Aye.

Madam Chair Mosqueda?

Aye.

Madam Chair, that is a form of favor, not oppose.

Thank you very much.

The motion carries.

It is unanimous.

Thank you again.

The committee recommendation that these reappointees be reconfirmed to the community needs housing PDA will be sent to the September 13th Seattle City Council meeting for a final vote.

None of the reappointees need to be there, and we will make sure to pass on your helpful comments today.

So thank you in advance, and we will look forward to future action on that on September 13th if you want to let folks know.

Thanks again.

All right, let's move on to item number four on our agenda here.

Moving right along.

agenda item number four, economic revenue forecast for briefing and discussion.

Excellent.

Well, we do have a number of people with us.

I see Director Noble, thank you very much for being here with us with your team.

Colleagues, this is probably one of the most anticipated sections of our committee agenda here today.

In addition to the supplemental budget discussion, we are about to hear the update from the Revenue Forecast Council.

All of this information is new to Councilmembers.

It was posted yesterday with an update to the agenda at the same time that we received it as well.

With the ever-changing news about COVID-19, our forecast has also changed over the last 18 months or so.

and we are looking forward to hearing right now about how COVID and our local economy has affected our projected revenues.

As a reminder, due to the good work this year by the council president, by her office, including Cody Ryder, and central staff's team, including Ali Panucci, Tom Meisel, Dan Eder, as well as the folks from CBO and Sejal Parikh in our office, we will have a different process next year.

This will be a process that will be more transparent, accountable, and allow for us to see the revenue forecast for projecting the possible revenue available for our balancing and budgeting practices.

After having a brief chance to review the presentation that was published yesterday, I know there are probably many questions that folks had.

We will make sure that we get a chance to go into those questions.

Director Noble, we have a handful of folks with us, so before we get started, perhaps we can walk through who is present here, including with central staff.

We had about 20 minutes for this briefing.

We're about five minutes early, so we have about 20, 25, 30 minutes.

We'll give a little extra time, because I know there will be a number of questions.

But I do want to thank you all for joining us.

Ben Noble, Dave Haynes, Jen Duras from the city budget's office, Tom Mikesell, and Dan Eder from central staff.

Did I miss anybody?

Hi, Jeff.

Jeff Sims from Central Staff as well.

Okay.

Central Staff, anything to add before I turn it over to Director Noble?

Please go ahead, Tom.

Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the committee, Tom Max from Central Staff.

I would just add to your thorough description of where we are with regards to revenue forecasting in the city.

that this is the second of three forecasts that we will be receiving from the city budget office this year, with the next one coming during council's budget deliberations in November as the final update for this year, for both 2021 fiscal year and for the 2022 budget year.

That will be deliberated in the fall.

We have adjusted this year's fall budget calendar to make sure that we've built in enough time for the revenue forecast to be both presented and for us to digest it in case there's any additional changes that folks may want to see.

As you can tell, we're here just about to discuss the supplemental Ideally, it would be nice to have this information in advance.

So that's part of the process that we're working towards to build back that information.

But do appreciate that reminder, Tom, about the upcoming forecast this fall and appreciate, Director Noble, your presentation today to help give us the most recent information as soon as you got it.

We appreciate you being here.

Tom, anything else?

Not for me, Madam Chair.

I just don't know if you want to round Robin through the folks who will be presenting today.

I could just hand off to Dan Eater, Interim Central Staff Director, just for introduction and any comments you may have.

Sure, let's go ahead and do that as we tee up the presentation.

Thank you, Tom.

Dan Eater with Central Staff, but I don't have anything to add to the introductory remarks.

Thank you.

OK, you want to popcorn it?

Yeah, this is Ben Noble.

City's budget director.

Dave, why don't you go on then?

Sure.

I'm Dave Hennis with the City Budget Office's Economics and Revenue team.

And most of the presentation today will be done by Jan Duras, who does the economic forecasting.

So I'll turn it over to him.

Jan Duras, CBO.

Let me just make a couple comments before Jan begins the presentation.

Tom has actually said most of what I was going to add in terms of the number.

This is the second of three forecasts.

I think the thing important to note is that this is the forecast to which the proposed budget will be balanced.

So we are in the throes of pulling together budget decisions on the executive side in preparation for delivering the proposed 22 budget late in September to begin council's deliberative process.

And again, as Tom mentioned, there will then be an update to that forecast provided in November or late October, depending on the exact calendar.

The one thing I just added before diving in is that obviously this has been a challenging time to be doing revenue forecasting as described previously, you know, we are, we are both tracking the underlying economics and data and what it's showing about things like employment and income.

And Yano is about to explain a lot of that.

But the other obvious factor is COVID-19 and the pandemic's impacts on the economy, which have been evolving and on the face of it are going to be continuing to evolve.

We'll talk a bunch about that today.

The thing I would add as well is that the level of uncertainty about revenues in the context of COVID is real, right?

We've seen the forecast both move up and move down over the past year and a half plus.

And in addition to One of the strategies is not only in trying to get the revenue right and dealing with the uncertainty there, but also thinking about how to adapt a budget and a spending plan to that uncertainty.

And in particular, avoiding significant increases in long-term commitments to ongoing expenses in a world where we don't know whether our revenues will be As steady and reliable as we want in the long term.

So I just want to assure you that as we're building the budget, we are conscious of that fact that whatever our forecast is, it is the degree of uncertainty is higher than normal.

And if there needs to be adjustments in a downward direction because of.

of changes that evolve, we need to build a budget that's prepared for that reality.

That could, for instance, involve restoring some of our reserves.

We have depleted those over the past two years in an appropriate way to maintain city services through this difficult period.

But to the extent that we have a positive increment, and you will ultimately see that in today's forecast, directing a portion of that to our reserves as we develop the budget would be an example of how to use that forecast resource in a way that is flexible and recognizes the fact that it may not actually be realized.

So I'll say more about that as we go.

We just wanted to lay some of that groundwork as you see what's coming.

And let me just turn it over to Dave and Jan to get into the substance.

Just get started, Jan.

If we could get the presentation.

Get the presentation up.

Do we need to do that or are you all managing the presentation?

If you all were.

Yeah, last time it was Ali Emuchi showing the slides.

I can put it up.

Just give me one second.

Thank you, Director Newell.

I just need to take us back to the first slide rather than the last slide.

I don't want to reveal the.

I gave away all the news.

Exactly.

And I'm just looking.

Yeah, I'm just going to do it this way.

OK, so.

Trying to get the full screen.

This is fine.

This will work.

Control L. All right, let's go.

Maybe there we go.

All right.

So first, we're going to start with the national and regional economic update and then move to revenues themselves.

So here is the first of the slides summarizing economic changes.

Jan.

So this first slide essentially summarizes what happened in the first half of 2021 and compares it to what was expected when we were presenting the April forecast.

The chart shows the forecast error, so the difference between the actual and the predicted in terms of income, outlays, and retail sales.

As you can see, there wasn't too much of a forecast error for employment.

It came pretty close to what was predicted.

Similar to income, overall income for first half of 2021 was quite close to what was predicted.

The biggest forecast error in the IHS US forecast was for personal outlays and retail sales, which are driving sales tax revenue and BNO tax revenue.

The massive fiscal stimulus fueled consumer demand and led to a high increase, much larger increase in consumer spending in the first half than was expected.

Personal outlays were about 4% above the pessimistic scenario.

Retail sales were about 8.5% above the pessimistic scenario.

The pessimistic scenario was the one that we used as a starting point to develop our our revenue forecast in April, but as you can see, even the baseline scenario was in a sense much too low.

The prediction was much too low compared to what the actual square.

So regardless of whether we are looking at the baseline scenario or pessimistic scenario from March, the actual outperformed significantly.

and that's relevant because again those are the two important factors that determine the local revenue, sales tax revenue and the BNO revenue and with this kind of significant forecast error and economy outperforming the predictions you can expect that there will be a large revision for 2021 forecast extra spending and it's going to feed into a higher revenue forecast that we will show later on.

Next slide, please.

Now, while the consumer demand has been recovering significantly and much better than expected, employment was pretty much on track.

There is still a way to go.

Local economy is still 4.8% below its employment Uh, in February 2020, it's comparable to the national economy.

So the overall trend for employment recovery is very similar for national and the regional economy.

And again, it's much slower than the consumer demand next slide.

Please.

I'm sorry.

We do have a hand council member Lewis on that last slide slide.

Number 4.

Yes, thank you, Madam Chair.

Just really briefly, since I know we're pressed for time.

What do we attribute the slow employment recovery to?

Do we attribute that?

Yeah, I will get to that in a second.

So if you can wait for two more slides, maybe, and then we can discuss that.

Perfect.

Okay.

Withdraw my question.

You're anticipating a presentation well.

Good question.

All right.

So employment recovery is not as fast as the recovery in demand.

Now, there are several factors behind that.

The number of job openings is not the primary problem.

The number of job openings actually exceeds the number of unemployed people in the national economy.

Job openings are record high, wages are growing, as you can see, compared to February 2020, the wages in the private sector rose by 8%.

Some of the industries like retail trade, leisure and hospitality, they saw an increase in wages of about 10 percent.

So those wages are really increasing to attract more employees.

The problem, can you go to the next slide please, the problem is seem to be more on the side of the availability of workers.

Again, there are several factors for that Some employees have moved, some changed their preference and they are no longer looking for a job in say leisure and hospitality because they consider it to be too risky.

Even the higher wages are still not attractive enough and in long term people are considering switching their careers completely.

there is a problem with low labor force participation as a lot of people have retired early and are not really returning back to work.

Labor force participation is further low because of some problems with childcare for some individuals.

Another contributing factor that slows down the employment recovery is the extended unemployment benefits, which some economists have argued are giving workers more time to choose what sort of job fits their needs, fits their skills, fits their longer-term career plans better.

So there is a bunch of factors, each contributing to some extent, causing the employment recovery to be slower than recovery in demand.

That said, in the regional economy, we have seen quite a significant increase in the number of jobs.

As you can see in the chart, the total number of jobs increased by about 70,000 between February and June.

So since we have last presented our forecast, a large part of that has been increased in the leisure and hospitality sector.

The sectors which are still struggling are manufacturing due to mostly aerospace.

segment.

That's pretty much as it was.

No recovery there yet.

I'm happy to answer any questions.

Before we move off of this slide, I want to double back to Councilmember Lewis and see if the question was answered.

I, too, when I was looking at slide 4, wanted to have a better understanding of what the impact was of a slower economic recovery locally.

I know slide 6 talks about the why, but I'm hoping to get a better sense of how that affects us, what is the short and long-term impacts of this data that you're showing us right now.

No, my question was answered.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Okay.

Anything else to add here on?

Anything else to add?

Yeah, so employment recovery was already expected to take longer than recovery in, let's say, GDP or personal outlays and the development in the first half of 2021 where consumer demand really fueled by the massive fiscal stimulus increase much further than expected that moved the recovery in consumer demand further forward and the employment is kind of on track.

The IHS and the regional forecast are expecting employment to recover but just going to be taking much longer because labor market is much more complicated matching the jobs and the workers matching those two sides of the market takes much longer.

because people moving, changing their preferences, long-term effects of changes in labor force.

It's just a lot of things that happen and they're exacerbated by pandemic hitting the already ongoing demographic changes.

And if you don't mind speaking up just a little bit, it's a little quiet on your end, but that's wonderful.

Dave, did you have anything else to add on that?

I think you'll see a little bit of this when we look at the actual revenue numbers, you'll see a difference between 21 growth and 22 as 22 starts to moderate out a little bit 21 is really this large blip driven by the stimulus.

So, I think that's me in terms of long run.

I think that's what you'll see that slowness and employment.

Restoration is one of the reasons that the recovery, although we're experiencing a significant bump due to the stimulus, is likely to take a longer period overall.

Let's shift a little bit here to talk some about impacts, and this is an example of impacts of how employment and the changing nature of employment are affecting other aspects of the economy and indirectly our revenues.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's important how many people work for the revenue forecast.

It's quite crucial, of course, where exactly they work.

And there have been quite dramatic changes over last year in terms of that.

While there has been this recovery in the consumer demand and recently the number of visitors in Seattle has recovered as shown by the blue line in the chart, the presence of office workers is still quite low.

Companies have recently postponed return to office for several more months because of the rising number of COVID cases.

The workers that come to downtown, they not only spend money on services within downtown, but the overall A number of office workers also drives the construction sector.

And the demand for office space is going to play, and how it develops, is going to play an important role for the construction sector, which is one of the important sources of sales and BNO.

I see there was a question.

Madam Chair, may I ask a question?

OK, thank you.

There's quite a bit of jargon on here, so I just want to make sure I understand what I'm looking at, Jan, so if you can help me break this down a little bit.

So on the left side of the slide where it talks, it has a little chart, the 2019 Q4, quarter four, 2021 quarter two.

So US, that's the number of that 12.1% is a national number.

12.1% represents what?

Well, it's a.

So CBR E is releasing data on how much office space there is in square feet.

And how much of that is available or an either directly or through subways.

So so nationally that vacancy rate is 12.1%.

It was in 2019 Q4 and it has gone up to 16.5%.

as of last quarter.

As of last quarter, okay.

Super helpful.

And then Seattle CBD, what is the difference between CBD and downtown?

Downtown is a little bit bigger area.

CBD is just a central business district, downtown passes motion.

So give me an example of Seattle's central business districts.

So central business district is essentially this area abound by buying, not exactly sure now how much it stretches out, but Pioneer Square is not included in that.

South Lake Union is part of downtown, but I don't believe that it's part of a central business district, but we can get back to you with that.

But that would be great if we could just get a sort of disaggregation, a better understanding of what's included in CBD and downtown.

That would be really helpful to me.

And then.

And.

And in terms of.

In terms of sort of the other comparable cities to Seattle, have you all done any analysis of how these numbers trend?

Are we sort of faring better, faring about the same, faring worse?

What's sort of your sense of that in terms of how we compare to other cities?

Okay, so if we can go back to the first part, what CBD and what's not, and I have the table here.

So Pioneer Square is not part of a CBD, Lake Union is not, Lower Queen Anne is not, Teddy Triangle is not, and Waterfront are not part of CBD, but are part of downtown.

In terms of how Seattle compares to the national level, that's the first two lines.

There, the last two lines in the table compare Seattle to the other parts of the region.

Our regional forecast is for King and Snohomish counties.

So those last two lines in the table are trying to compare Seattle CBD to Bellevue CBD and to Eastside overall to give some kind of idea of where we are in terms of the vacancies right now.

Yeah, and I think what I'm trying to get a sense of, and I have been following some of the reporting that's being done by like The Economist and some other sort of more global economic thinking agencies and news agencies in particular, And a lot of folks are speculating that our office-based workforce is effectively going to be forever changed.

In other words, it would be a mistake for cities to bank on a 100% pre-COVID model of office space and downtown work models.

And so I want to get a sense from you all in the CBO office about sort of what your thinking is around that and how that really will impact, you know, the city's view on certainly downtown Seattle recovery, but in some of these you know, other business districts as well that have high concentrations of office space that continues to experience higher than usual vacancy rates.

All right, so going forward and kind of comparing more broadly to the U.S., there's that bullet point on this slide regarding the office demand index, which is kind of more forward looking instead of just looking at the current vacancies and trying to look into the future, what might happen in the near term.

It's an office index that VTS constructs based on how many businesses are interested in touring the available office spaces, either directly or through some kind of online presentations.

The office demand index for Seattle is currently 71% compared to the 2018 to 2019 average, so about 30% down for US as a whole.

It has recovered slightly more.

Seattle here is kind of comparable with San Francisco and Boston, which are also somewhere around 70%.

It's been argued that this is due to um for for Seattle and San Francisco and Boston large part of a workforce is the more adaptable to work from home and because of that there is still a factor of companies just figuring it out how much office space they they really need how much they can switch to some kind of hybrid mode where workers will spend uh significant fraction working from home.

And because of that, they might need less office space.

It really is a question of timing.

You know, in this forecast, we're talking about 21 and 22. We're not building in a large factor for, you know, a change in the way Americans work, you know, in terms of urban centers versus suburban areas.

It's something we're definitely conscious of because it can strongly affect our B&O revenues and the payroll expense tax.

And so we have been talking about this a fair amount, but we don't have any answers about the actual timing of how this will play out.

It'll be a business by business decision, you know, of what they plan to do with their workforce.

But Seattle is prone to it because we do have a high degree of workers who can work from home.

And so we will definitely be watching it, but I don't think we have any you know, kind of crystal ball that's telling us, yeah, here's the growth rate of that phenomenon, or here's the, you know, how it's exactly going to play out.

I do, I do.

I appreciate that.

And I appreciate that you all are tracking it and following it.

And I think that's sort of the crux of my question, because I do think this is an important evolution in how our workforce and where our workforce works, that really does have a significant impact on revenue, but also presents a lot of opportunity in terms of thinking about, you know, how we change the growth and the development of our city to fit the new model of how Americans are working.

And you see this happening in a lot of European cities where now employment centers are wholly concentrated on one urban core, but are more equitably distributed throughout cities to allow for employment centers to exist in the same place where people are currently living.

smaller footprint overall in terms of office space but it certainly seems that that might be the direction that we're headed and I want us to as a city be ready for that potential and to be able to pivot in that direction to ensure that we're still creating office space that makes sense for how our office workforce is evolving and will continue to evolve now that we have all endured and are continuing to endure the longest pilot project ever of telework and Zoom calls.

And so I think that's an important thing for us to keep a pulse on.

And your analysis here, I think, would be helpful in making some of those policy determinations down the road.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam President.

Council Member Lewis to follow up on that.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I just wanted to jump in and ask a few more questions on the BTS.

Did I hear there was going to be another slide on that earlier?

Am I jumping the gun again?

I just want to ask that first before I...

On the BTS, no.

OK, so I just want to ask some clarification with how the VTS data is presented on this slide.

There was some reporting by the Seattle Times in the spring.

About Seattle's recovery of the VTS metric being rather high and our raw number coming in at 107 on the indexed at that point.

It was 18.5% higher than the average index score in the pre-pandemic period.

And this was reported by, you know, the FYI guy, Gene Balk, Seattle Times.

You know, at that time, the only other metro area that was posting higher aggregate demand in the VTS was Washington, D.C. So I wonder in how it's reported here with the June number rather than the March one, did our Because the way it's presented on the slide is relative to the 2018-2019 average.

I guess my question would be, did we take another dip between March and June?

And how do we sort of look in terms of The recovery and demand based on on that previous reporting, because it seems like the way it's presented here.

Our office space demand is not doing as well as the national average, but that seems to be in contrast to how the times reported on this in the spring.

So I'm just kind of curious.

All right.

So, let me clarify these.

Yes, there was.

First of all, yes, there was a downturn between March and June for Seattle, for Washington, D.C. Those were two of the metros that actually saw a decline in demand.

The other ones, Chicago, New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, in those metros, there was an increase in demand for all this space.

But Seattle, there was a drop.

It's still, the index is volatile, it changes significantly.

It does not mean that there is a change in the trend and we'll be seeing a decline, but there was certainly a drop in demand.

After we have seen that article that you're referring was essentially arguing that there was quite a significant recovery for Seattle.

but a part of that that reversing the demand for office space declined slightly.

So I'm not 100% sure what that number that you're referring to was about, whether it was a change between the lowest point and the March value and the increase in that.

I would have to go back and we can compare that to the most recent release.

But as of now, the 71% percent that's really the 30 percent drop compared to the average in 2018 comparable to Boston and Francisco worse than New York City for example which has recovered completely worse than Los Angeles that has recovered completely.

Lewis is that something you'd like us to follow up on to look into the what's what's driving that article versus

Yeah, no, that'd be helpful.

And to be clear, the article is more out of date, obviously, than this update in August.

But it would be interesting to contextualize the findings or the analysis from that article in The Times last spring relative to where we are, if it's not too much trouble to send that over.

Thanks.

That sounds great.

I'm going to keep us moving along.

We have about 10 more slides to go.

We will try to give us another 20 minutes or so, so that we can get to some questions.

I think this conversation has been very helpful.

Both council members have been asking important questions.

I appreciate, Dave, the response to follow up on some of those.

I think that it's also an important takeaway here that just because we see a higher than national level of office vacancy rates, that does not equal people being out of jobs at higher rates in Seattle necessarily, especially because our ability to work from home at higher rates, as you noted, in places like San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle, we have an opportunity, as the Council President phrased it, to think about how we reimagine what working within the city looks like and how our industries can be accommodating to this new way of working, whether it's remotely or going into office space.

So that's an important takeaway.

I'll also note that as chair of the Seattle City Employees Retirement Systems, this is something that we've been discussing over the last year and a half as well in the investment committee.

There's a national, maybe international, conversation about how changes in the use of office space will affect how people decide to make investments, where businesses want to place themselves, and trying to stay ahead of sort of the guessing game on that is something that I think the international community is still grappling with.

What will it look like when people, quote, go back to work and where would those workplaces be, especially for certain industries where people will be able to continue to work from home remotely?

So I think it is an important way for us to both be optimistic about the type of industries that are able to sustain and, in fact, see record profits in our region here, but also how we adapt and make sure that there's activation, as we talked about yesterday, of our street spaces.

And we are creating accommodations for all types of new industries.

But just seeing that number at a higher level does not equal people having lost those positions.

It's just a different place that those individuals are working.

Okay, I saw some nods as I said that, so I'll take that as a good sign.

Let's keep going and get through these next 10 slides.

All right, so let's look at the changes in the economic forecast for US first and then for the regional economy.

Since March, IHS market has revised down their probability of a pessimistic scenario to 20%.

They have increased, a forecast for employment, for outlays, for retail sales.

Again, part of it is basically just getting it in line with what happened in the first half of 2021. And then the second part would be what happens to the second half of 2021. The charts here and the table compare July baseline scenario to March pessimistic scenario.

For April forecast, we used the pessimistic scenario since at that point in time, after seeing the last quarter of 2020, the economy, the national and regional were tracking the pessimistic scenario much closer than rather than the baseline because of personal outlays and retail sales outperforming.

In the first half, we saw revenue that outperformed our April forecast and gave us reasons to switch to the baseline that we'll discuss a little bit later on when we get to the revenue section.

That increase would have been there even if we did not switch from pessimistic and stick to the pessimistic scenario, there would have been a significant upward revision because as you saw in the first slide, the forecast there for outlays for retail sales was significant regardless of which market scenario we were looking at.

In addition to the increase in demand that surprised all the forecasters, There has been a quite significant increase in inflation that came as rather negative surprise.

Last three months, the increased demand faced some supply chain disruption bottlenecks, which led to prices growing much faster than expected, rebounding and growing about 2% faster than what was expected.

expected to happen.

And so the overall inflation forecast for 2021 increased from 1.9 to 3.7.

If we can go back, we can go to the next slide.

And that inflation forecast is important because it feeds into our CPIW inflation forecast, which is used for AWI wage adjustment.

So in addition to increase in personal outlays in employment, we are also predicting now a much higher than previously expected inflation for 2021 and 2022.

Just to emphasize the point that Jan made, that matters for the city in terms of budgeting context because it does drive labor costs as well as other non-labor costs for the city.

So that's a pressure point in terms of balancing our overall revenues and expenditures.

And again, we wanted to make sure that all council members got to see this presentation at the same time.

So I didn't have a chance to ask you in advance, Director Noble or your team.

I think it would be helpful on these two slides to have an apples to apples comparison.

So for example, can we look at the July and March baseline comparisons versus the baseline compared to the pessimistic?

That would be helpful for us to sort of see how those tracked over time.

Oh, please go ahead.

We'll definitely provide this to central staff and can update for council members as well.

We had some of that information, worried about the complexity and length of the presentation.

So I actually own having suggested that we try to streamline some of this.

That I appreciate.

And then also will this, so this is this is relatively good news.

I think that it would be helpful to have a better understanding if the mayor intends to use the baseline forecast for the fall budget.

And given that we use the pessimistic fall budget projections last year, can you.

of reiterate how you have made a decision to go from the pessimistic to the baseline.

I know there's some national factors that you also consider when making those decisions.

But it'd be very helpful to have a better understanding, colleagues as well, if you have ideas about where we can see transparently where the baseline versus the pessimistic forecast play out, so that if we end up having a budget that is transmitted, that uses a baseline, sort of more optimistic projection.

we have a better understanding of how these projections play out.

Yeah, we have a slide and I'm prepared to talk to you that specific point just just ahead as we shift from this kind of economic perspective to the real narrowly more narrowly into the revenue side.

So we'll get there shortly.

I'm going to move us on the next slide.

Young.

Yes, please.

All right.

Wrapping up the economic forecast.

In terms of the forecast risks, obviously the Delta strain is the number one cause of concern here.

When the IHS forecast has been released, that was the beginning of July, that was essentially the peak of good news and the lowest point probably in the number of COVID-19 cases in the chart that you see on the right.

Since then, several things and mostly on the negative side.

Now, the IHS still does not see any kind of mandatory restriction imposed by the government, but the number of cases can lead to consumers just being more cautious, spending less, avoiding bigger crowds, and that's, you know, quite worrying because there was an expected shift of consumer spending on goods and that was fueling the growth in the first half to spending on services.

Travel, recreation, entertainment, those were the primary factors expected to drive consumer spending in the second half.

Now if the consumers are more worried they might slow down, cut back on the travel, cut back on spending at the restaurants, and that would cause the downwards revision.

Not, again, necessary because some mandatory restrictions imposed by government, just because consumers are more cautious.

There has been quite a significant drop in the consumer sentiment that has been published on Friday.

Again, it seems like Consumers are worried about the Delta variant.

Consumer sentiment is not the best predictor for spending, but it's something to be careful to watch.

The retail sales in July that have been released today showed a 1.1% drop, which is slightly more than economists were expecting.

So part of it was expected, coming down from a large increase in sales due to fiscal stimulus, but the fact that the drop in retail sales was bigger than expected is again something that's a little bit worrying.

Still combined with those high inflation numbers that are coming in, which might provide some kind of reason to delay spending for consumers, the shortage of available workers that can slow down the employment recovery is going to be a prolonged issue.

The bottom line here is whatever happens to Delta is probably the number one concern for the economic forecast.

So clearly some risks to the current situation.

Shift to talk about revenues and in particular talk about the forecast scenarios and this question about baseline.

So I'm going to provide this introduction and turn it over to Dave to talk more about the specific revenue, the numbers, if you will.

things to remember in terms of this kind of discussion about baseline and pessimistic is that what we're describing are inputs to our regional model.

So we have a national forecast entity that we use to help feed our regional projections.

So we have a regional economic model that relies on forecasts of national, of key national variables, things like income and employment.

And we have, through the course of regular business, if you will, used their baseline forecast, and they assigned probabilities to their different forecasts.

But pre-pandemic, pre-recessions, we've always used baseline.

The last time we invoked the pessimistic forecast, actually, I wasn't the budget director.

It was in the previous great recession.

And again, a similar sort of situation where enough uncertainty and specific concern that the local economy might respond differently than the national economy.

So as COVID hit a year and a half ago, and we were developing the April forecast in 2020, we shifted to the pessimistic, arguing that there was a whole lot of uncertainty.

And in fact, we had reason to think that our local economy, given its dependence on tourism and on some other key factors, Boeing's indirect reliance on the travel industry and the like had reasons to think that we might be more effective than others.

And then what we basically said at the time is this is an unusual move, but we're going to stick with this until the data tell us that we've made the wrong conclusion.

And we had the same discussion actually in the springtime when we brought you the April forecast at a time when the economy was recovering significantly.

And if you recall, there'd been a significant upward move in the forecast when we gave you the November updates, about four months previous to our forecast in April of this year.

What's changed since then is that we have actual data for the first two quarters of this year.

And they've significantly exceeded our April forecast.

So, you know, we said we'd stick to this pessimistic until the data showed us and told us otherwise.

And the data in the door are telling us otherwise, right?

We have performed very well locally.

The local economy has seemingly adapted to some degree to COVID.

And obviously, there were lifting of restrictions, although those liftings really happened later in the second quarter, right, than in the first or even most of the second.

So again, we're talking about the end of June is the end of the second quarter.

The other thing that we that we highlighted was going to be a factor is What kind of probabilities are the national forecasters, placing on their, their differing forecasts.

Again, back when we started using a pessimistic forecast in April in April 2019 forecast, excuse me, April 2020 forecast.

They were assigned, I forget the exact figures, but it was marginally higher probability to the baseline, but not much.

So they certainly didn't have a great deal of confidence that the baseline was really the strongest of their forecasts, if you will.

But that's changed as well, as you can see.

So we are moving, the forecast that you'll see in a moment uses the baseline forecast at the national level as the input to our regional model.

And most of what it's going to do in the actual numbers is to acknowledge that there are significant additional revenues in 21. And those, a good share of those have already been realized, again, because of what we've experienced over the past few months.

For 22, you'll see that there's a there's a small increment of revenue in the bigger picture.

And that's the one that is arguably the most at risk here.

And as I said, and I think it's it's it's a really important point.

That knowing the uncertainty about these revenues is going to affect how we think about building the budget with them in particular.

knowing that they may not ultimately be realized, I don't think it makes sense to make commitments in a budget to ongoing sorts of expenditures any more than is necessary, but rather to focus on using some of these resources to address some one-time opportunities that we might have.

Another thing I would add as a factor in considering this is that the federal assistance, and we are due a significant tranche, the second tranche of the coronavirus local refunds or the Clifford dollars.

And we have one of the eligible uses for those dollars is to replace city revenues.

So if in fact we end up in a situation where the revenue forecast moves on us and moves in the wrong direction, there would be potential to use those resources as well.

So we have tools to address that and we will be building a budget that is sensitive to the uncertainties in the forecast.

which are inherent no matter which basis we use.

Okay.

Director Noble used the term Clifford just for everybody watching.

That's our Seattle Rescue Plan or ARPA dollars.

Yeah, Coronavirus Local Relief Funds.

Thank you.

And Council Member Herbold has a comment, question.

Thank you.

I'm just trying to get some clarity on this question of baseline versus pessimistic scenarios for purposes of the 2022 budget planning.

On one hand, Director Noble, I hear you saying that we're likely to be using the national baseline scenario, and you're providing what I hear as a compelling argument for why that decision might be made.

But this last bullet here seems to suggest that there is more uncertainty about that decision.

Future virus induced policy adjustments restricting local and regional economic activity may again lead to Seattle's deviation from national forecast expectations.

And the words that seem to follow it.

might be, and return to the pessimistic growth scenario expectation.

So, on one hand, I'm hearing you say that there's been a decision made to use one set of projections, but this last bullet seems to suggest that that could change.

And I'm just trying to get a little bit more understanding of, is that so?

Could it change?

And when is it likely?

to if there is a change, would it happen before a proposed budget in September?

Good question.

So yes, it clearly could change, right?

I mean, that's been the challenge through all of us.

And that's when I started this discussion.

We've been forecasting the economy, but we're keeping an eye on the virus, if you will.

whatever else I am, I'm certainly not a doctor of medicine.

So that's been a challenge.

So the information we have now and what we know now, and that's really, you know, is underlying this current forecast that we will build the budget upon.

And as I was describing, building a budget, knowing the uncertainty in the revenues.

and ideally committing or suggesting expenses that are consistent that we could back off of if we need to.

One of the reasons, just real quick, one of the reasons comfortable doing that in part is that before the final budget is adopted in November, late November, we will provide another update.

And so we have time between now and when the city's ultimately committed to its budget to gather some additional information.

That will leave if they're not just put this direct, right?

If there's a downward forecast, we will then need to work with you to adjust the budget accordingly.

And what I'm suggesting is that we're anticipating that potential going in and we'll build a budget where if that's if that's the scenario we end up in, we'll be in a position to work with you.

to do that, and ideally in a way that will not cause major disruptions, for instance, in the situation for city employees, for critical services that we are providing as part of our baseline.

So we're gonna be thoughtful about how we allocate additional resources.

Might you consider, and I know this is an unusual thing to suggest, but these are very unusual times, might you consider proposing two budgets in September, two different options.

Candidly, it is challenging enough to put together one, never mind in the context of remote work and the like.

But what I, again, am describing is that we'll be in a position to highlight to you places where the proposed expenditures could be reduced if and when there was a reduction in revenues and in ways that will not be disruptive, more disruptive than necessary, if you will.

So it's obviously a dynamic situation.

Recognize the question.

Pledging to be very clear to be partners in how we manage this and not setting goal will be not to set anybody up for failure.

But at the same time, there are the policy goals that the council has set out that the mayor has that that I think the budget should and can speak to, even even with the level of uncertainty that we're facing.

I appreciate the vice chair's question.

That was very similar to the question I was asking earlier about having to undo and redo a budget near the end of our preparation process, which would be problematic.

Director Novel and team, I'm going to ask you to go quickly through the next four slides so that we can finish the presentation.

We'll see if there's additional questions at that time.

We may also want to do another sort of walkthrough of this as you maybe receive more information mid-September prior to the mayor transmitting her budget as well.

given the changing nature of COVID and its impact on our local economies across the country.

But let's get through the next four slides, because we really do want to try to reserve a full hour for the two items related to our supplemental budget discussion.

Understood.

Dave.

Actually, I think John's going to speak to these.

They're just really quickly.

Go through, and then I'll hit the table at the end.

We have received 2020 data from Washington state employment security department revised our revenue estimates for payroll tax up a little bit.

There's large amount of forecast risks here.

Some of it upside a lot of it downside.

They potentially.

can offset each other or move the revenue one way or the other.

There is very little information for us and there is large amount of uncertainty here.

Just to highlight, this is the payroll tax we have yet to receive because the way the law is written there won't be payments for 2021 until early part of 2022, so we've been cautious and tried to be conservative in this forecast.

Small uptick, just again based upon the data we're seeing overall for the economy, but remaining conservative for going forward and we'll know more early next year.

I'm going to keep us moving.

All right, for sales and B&O tax, as I mentioned a couple of times, the first half in the first half of 2021, they outperformed our forecast that was built on a pessimistic scenario, but they actually outperformed even what would have been the revenue forecast using the baseline scenario significantly.

And that is a part of why the revenue forecast for 2021 overall has improved.

Next slide, please.

For real estate excise tax, the tax revenue is on track to reach 82.9 million forecast from April.

Prices of homes have been rising faster than expected, but on the other side, there's been a larger than expected drop in sales of exacting family homes that are predicted to be they are predicted to be about 9% lower, 8.9 for single-family homes, 8.4 for condos, which would be offsetting that large increase in the price of homes.

Next slide, please.

Great.

So let's have a look at the revenue table.

So this is perhaps what you've all been waiting for.

As you can see, this is our Our standard table on the left-hand side, we have the tax items, the revenue items listed across the top.

You can see the time periods we're talking about.

The left-hand side columns, 2020 actuals, 2021 adopted.

And then we move into the forecasts, which are 2021 April and August.

And then we provide a column right in the middle that shows the change between the August forecast and the April forecast.

And then the same pattern repeats there for the 2022 forecast with April and August and then change August over April.

As you can see, as Ben alluded to, down halfway through the page on the general fund total line for the 2021 change, August over April, you see a $50.8 million increase in revenues in that center column.

And that's just capturing all of that growth that Jan described in terms of the fiscal stimulus and so forth.

But then as you see over to the far right-hand side in the August over April column, about a $29 million increase in general fund revenues, which, again, capture that notion of a bit of moderation.

As the stimulus wears off, as economic growth and activity sort of returns to a non-stimulated status, this is the growth we expect.

And real quick, in important ways, from a budgeting perspective, we can think about this $50-plus million as really a one-time revenue.

because it's landing in 21, but we don't see the same increment carried into 22. So the increment for 22 at about $29 million is actually in the neighborhood, slightly less than 2% of the general fund.

So it's an absolute number that seems large.

But relative to our overall budget, it's small, and you consider the effects of inflation that we've noted are higher and the like.

It's not a significant increment.

So there is some one-time opportunity associated with this 21 increase.

But again, as we think about budgeting, we're going to have to be thoughtful and recognize that that's a one-time resource.

So just highlighting those two points.

And we can come back and talk about specific revenues if you wish, but just to move on.

And one thing you'll notice is that we have two lines of payroll expense tax in here.

There's one up in the general fund because through 2021, those revenues will go into the general fund.

But beginning in 2022, as you all well know, we have created a new fund.

You all have created a new fund for that revenue stream.

And so that's down in the lower section, which is a general, other general government revenue section of the table.

And as Jan pointed out just a couple of slides ago, the payroll expense tax, we're estimating a modest, increases there.

And then you see short-term rental tax, sweetened beverage tax, the Mercer Mega Block sale is there, commercial parking tax, school zone camera fund.

Those are all showing growth except for the school zone camera fund, which that's an adjustment downward because of the April forecast assumed the addition of 10 new camera locations or 10 new cameras.

And that's been reduced recently to only three being installed by September of this year.

And so that's the reduction there.

And so you can see that, again, looking at the change columns, we're adding about $1.2 million in other general government revenues and decreasing about 5.1 in 2022, largely, again, as you can see, because of the schools on camera fund.

If we go to the next slide, Just to finish the overall overview, I guess, we have admissions tax and real estate excise tax pulled out here.

And admissions tax revenues are increasing over April forecast because we've now incorporated a guesstimate, shall I say, of what new admissions activity is going to happen at the new Climate Pledge Arena.

And so that's capturing that.

I would note on that front, from a budging perspective, the increment associated with Climate Pledge Arena is not an increment that will be available for us to spend.

Part of the development agreement with NHL Seattle and those groups is that the increment of admission tax revenue is an offset to their rent.

They are guaranteeing us the same level of admission tax from the what had been key arena is now climate pledge arena.

So we don't, we're not losing relative to where we were before they rebuilt the arena, but the increment of admissions tax there is an offset to their rent.

So this is just the revenue side of that.

The expenditure side is, we need to consider that fact.

This is the last slide.

Is there any last comments before I turn it to council members?

No, just to point out perhaps that real estate excise taxes is remaining We like our forecast for that, so it's staying steady.

Okay.

We like that too.

Council Member Lewis, you have their first hand up.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

If we go back to the previous slide here, I just want to ask a question about the commercial parking tax, of all things.

In the April 22 to August 2022, there's going to be a projected drop-off in the commercial parking tax.

What are we attributing that to?

Because the consumer is paying this, right?

People drive in places and they're parking.

Why are we anticipating a decline between April and August of 2022 when we've been kind of seeing a steady increase as people are getting out more?

I'm just kind of curious what we're- Yeah.

It's attributed to, it's effectively a recalibration of the base to what the actuals are receiving.

Essentially, I was overestimating.

And so I'm trying now to adjust it downward to reflect to a base that the actuals more robustly support.

So while there is more activity, there is more parking going on.

I was off in the April forecast.

All right.

Appreciate that clarification.

So colleagues, I want to Thank you all for your questions today.

I want to thank the team from CBO and the forecast office for their presentation.

And I know that central staff has also been poring over the report since we received it yesterday.

I do want to make sure that we get a chance to hear if there's anything else from central staff that you'd like to flag for us.

And I want to thank in advance Director Noble, who has just agreed to be able to be available one month from now.

We are meeting on September 17th.

and we'd like to invite the team back to see if there is any information that might be new at that time, especially given the changes with the COVID Delta variant.

So appreciate your commitment to come back one month from now to see if that influences our budget discussions as we head into deliberations for the fall select budget committee.

Thank you.

Central staff, is there anything else that you would add from your initial review or any questions that you'd like to see followed up on as well?

No, Chair Mosqueda, the committee discussion covered most of the highlights and the CBO's remarks because the question of risk is the key one to consider.

So that was my assessment, and that seems to be the assessment of the committee as well.

Excellent.

OK, last call on questions and comments.

Director Noble, anything else?

I just wanted to say thank you.

I'm late to another meeting, so I was going to rush.

We'll let you all go.

Thank you, John.

Thank you, Dave.

And thank you, Central Staff and Director Noble.

Really appreciate it.

And we're going to keep our Central Staff team with us here as we move on to the next item.

Madam Clerk, let's read item number five into the record.

Agenda item number five, Council Bill 120111, an ordinance authorizing in 2021 acceptance of funding from non-City of Resources, authorizing the heads of the Executive Department Okay, great.

And as you can see from the agenda, this includes the mid year.

grant acceptance ordinance in item number five.

And then item number six is the mid-year supplemental.

We do have an hour booked in for these two items.

And my understanding is item number five here would be relatively quick compared to our longer discussion on the supplemental.

So we've ordered it to put the grant acceptance ordinance, which is item number five here first.

We have a lot of work to do, but we do want to reserve our hour if we can for full discussion, any questions on both of these topics, expecting the larger part of the discussion to be about the supplemental budget in front of us.

who've been in conversations with myself and Sejal Parikh on these bills.

We have the grant acceptance ordinance in front of us as a periodic ordinance that we consider to accept funds directed to the city for various programs and departments.

We did have this in committee the last two meetings as well.

So I do want to see if Tom, you have any other orientation comments, and I'm happy to also open it up to council members on any questions or comments they have on 120111. Tom?

Thank you, Council Member, Chair Mosqueda.

Again, not much to add other than there's a total of $23.3 million of external funding that would be accepted in this ordinance.

And as of today, have not received any amendment requests from any committee members.

Wonderful.

Well, with that orientation, council members, are there any additional questions that you have been percolating on that you would like to ask at this point?

Please go ahead, Vice Chair Herbold.

Yes, thank you.

I just want to make note that it's my understanding that none of the Seattle Police Department's grants are included in this legislation.

And given that there was last year significant interest In some of the grants that were proposed to be accepted by the city council, proposed by Seattle Police Department, and that this happened last year, I'm concerned that we are again going to be in a situation where we are asked to approve acceptance of the grants late in the year.

without a conversation with CBO or SPD on which grants the council would like a little bit more engagement on before SPD pursued them, in which grant acceptance actions are more ministerial and I believe that last year we had agreement with the city budget office that they would work with us on such an approach and work specifically with council central staff in determining which grants the council was interested in doing a more deep dive.

policy engagement on and which grants were the approval was more pro forma and not something that we needed to get into the details of.

And to my knowledge, that hasn't happened.

I've mentioned this in previous committee meetings, and my concern is that rather than having a conversation about those grants that might involve some controversy, we are subjecting every grant that the Seattle Police Department wants the city council to accept.

We're subjecting this entire process to controversy potentially when we do not need to do so.

And again, I'm just worried about that happening at the end of the year after we have entered into grant agreements, entered into agreements with other jurisdictions to do joint work or to act as the pass-through administrator for other jurisdictions.

And just wanting to flag that now, flag the absence of this conversation of the last year as expected by the council.

Thank you, Mr Herbold and as chair of public safety, appreciate your leadership on that both this year and in last year's budget deliberations process.

Your concerns are well received and and shared.

I see Greg Doss from central staff who leads our analysis on SPD and we do know that there is an anticipated ordinance that is going to be sent down to City Council to accept those grants.

Greg, did you have anything else that you'd like to add in terms of anticipation around that?

No, actually, I think it's on its way.

I think it'll be available for you all in September.

But you'll have a very tight time frame between the time you get back from recess and the annual budget.

Really, one meeting, probably.

And that's the concerns from Vice Chair Harbold.

I appreciate you flagging those, Vice Chair Harbold, and the concerns around those.

So perhaps we can.

we can coordinate to have a reaffirmation of those commitments that we thought we had last year so that we don't end up in this type of position again in the future.

But look forward to working with you on that.

Vice Chair Herbold, please go ahead.

My understanding, why are the SPD grant acceptance actions not in this bill like we do every year.

We don't segregate out all of the Seattle Police Department's grant acceptance from every other department in the city.

Why has that occurred this year?

Greg or Dan or Tom?

Anybody knows.

Can't speak for the executive on that.

I mean, just to be clear on that answer, though, Greg, if you're saying that you can't speak for the executive on that, are we being led to believe that that was an executive choice to not include it in their supplemental budget, or was this a council-generated issue?

It was obviously an executive choice to not put it in the budget that they sent down.

It was a council request last year, as Council Member Herbold said, to potentially do something different.

And the something different was to address it earlier in an ordinance before now.

And I think that You know, if I were to speculate, half, half of it got done in the sense that it's not being done now.

And the half that was supposed to be the other half of the message that it was supposed to be done earlier, didn't reach.

So, there was a disconnect.

Yeah.

And I think, and I think that the reality is, is that council plays in, uh, a budget oversight role and in fulfilling that oversight role, we asked for and communicated sort of clear set of expectations around what information we wanted to receive in order to allow for the, um, you know, normal process to unfold in a way that didn't feel like we were being, um, Jammed or didn't have all of the information available to us to make the evaluation of what is ministerial pro forma versus what appears to be a grant that is driving.

Policy or operations.

at the department in a way that may be inconsistent with prior policy positions.

So it's unfortunate to hear that we're now in a situation where we're running the bill as a separate standalone bill, when I don't think that was our intention in the first place.

and nods from the vice chair as well as from me.

So yes, I think there is additional communication needed on this piece.

Appreciate the background both from vice chair Herbold and from director, excuse me, from Greg Dossier and the underscoring of the plane from the council president.

Okay, putting that concern aside, the grant acceptance ordinance is in front of us, Council Bill 120111. I'm not seeing any additional questions.

And as central staff has noted, we are not aware of any additional amendments.

So Council Colleagues, I move the committee recommends passage of Council Bill 120111. Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you, Vice Chair.

Are there any additional comments or questions?

hearing and seeing none, Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll on the passage of Council Bill 120111?

Vice Chair Herbold?

Yes.

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Madam Chair?

Aye.

Madam Chair, that is a four in favor, nine opposed.

Thank you very much.

The motion carries and the grant acceptance ordinance for mid-year 2021. Bill, Council Bill 120111, will be sent to the Seattle City Council full council meeting on September 13th with a recommendation that the bill pass and have a final vote there.

Thank you very much, central staff.

And if you can stick with us, let's move on to the other big item related to the supplemental budget.

Madam Clerk, could you please read item number six into the record?

Agenda item number six, Council Bill 120112, an ordinance, amending Ordinance 126237, which adopted the 2021 budget, including the 2021 to 2026 Capital Improvement Program for briefing discussion, for briefing discussion, if possible.

Okay, thank you very much, colleagues.

This is the third meeting where we have had the supplemental budget in front of us today.

I want to thank Tom Mikesell, Greg Doss, Jeff Sims, Dan Eater for all being with us here today.

And of course, I want to thank Allie Panucci, who is not with us because she is on leave, but had very much earned that leave for all of her work on the supplemental budget prior to her vacation.

Colleagues, we want to make sure that we have ample time to get through these comments in front of us.

We do have about 40, 45 minutes to discuss this, and we will try as much as possible to get through this in the allotted time.

We have three more sections on our agenda after this, and so if we end up running into a close to 1 p.m.

period, I will want to notify the clerks if we need to take a recess.

I do intend to come back and finish those last three to four items that are just briefings.

No votes required, but I will be available to continue watching that.

But let's endeavor to get through this together and to make sure that we get a chance to have our full agenda heard in front of us.

This is a reminder that we are talking about the supplemental budget.

Ideally, we would not have large policy shifts included in the supplemental budget.

Given the conversation that has evolved mostly through the press and some letters to council regarding the request from the mayor's office for some larger policy shifts specifically in public safety related, we did delay a vote on the supplemental package at our last meeting to consider some of those possible policy and investment We really appreciate the council members here today, the full council who have been participating with us as the discussion about the supplemental has included all of our council members and your flexibility to think through various amendments and priorities in the supplemental.

And again, I want to thank central staff for being so flexible and willing to help craft various amendments in front of us.

Again, colleagues, for those members who are part of city council but not members of the Finance and Housing Committee as chair, I will present the amendments on their behalf and offer the chance for those who are present to speak to them, even if they're not on committee, and that will give us a chance to incorporate additional council members who are here.

For council members who are not here with us today but do have amendments as well, I will be offering those up for the purposes of discussion and vote today.

We're going to move through the amendments as ordered in the table in the attachment that came with the 11 amendments that were presented.

And I will ask the sponsors of the amendment to move the amendment to put it in front of us.

And then I will ask central staff to walk through the amendment.

And then we'll have a chance for the sponsors to speak to the amendment and we can have discussion.

And if there's amendments to those amendments, we will consider those.

And my hope is that we will wrap this up around noon today.

Let's do central staff introductions for the record.

We have with us, I see Tom Mikesell, Greg Doss, Dan Eater, Jeff Sims, and am I missing anybody else from central staff?

Okay, wonderful.

Well, with that, do you have any additional comments to open us up for the conversation here, Tom, or shall we just go into the list of amendments in front of us?

CCCCO, Rm 630 – Jack Scott Conference Room): Madam Chair, no, no real additional comments, other than to say that the table that i'll i'll be sharing.

CCCCO, Rm 630 – Jack Scott Conference Room): includes some amendments that have been discussed in prior committees and some meetings some amendments that have been received subsequent to that and they're generally in in order of the receipt.

CCCCO, Rm 630 – Jack Scott Conference Room): So Okay, but I, with your permission i'll go ahead and share my screen.

Please go ahead.

This is an amendment table that was included in our published materials as well, so it should be easy to follow along for folks at home who might have a tough time seeing the screen on Seattle Channel or on your computer screen.

As Tom is teeing these up, I want to note that on the first set of amendments here, amendments specifically one through four, we have had a presentation on these items in the past.

There's a handful of council members who have suggested these amendments or sponsored these amendments.

I would like to ask for your consideration today to consider the first four amendments as part of a voting block or voting package.

We would then walk through each four of the amendments so that the council's central staff can provide a summary of those amendments, and then we would have the sponsor speak to each one.

But just for the purposes of time, That way we could potentially vote on those first four that didn't seem to have any questions in the last two meetings and would allow us to get into the other ones where I think that there's some more questions.

So colleagues, again, the first four, you can see on the screen there.

And Tom, would you mind reading the short title of those first four?

Sure, Madam Chair.

So Amendment 1 is sponsored by you, Chair Mosqueda.

This would provide $150,000 in Seattle Fire Department's 2021 budget for mental health services for firefighters.

And I'll continue down the list.

Amendment two is sponsored by Council President Gonzalez.

This would add a position and create a new budget summary level in the 2021 or in the 2022 budget for the Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts and impose a proviso on funds held in Finance General for creating the office.

Amendment number three, sponsored by Council President Gonzalez, would add a statement of intent regarding the 2021 spending to update and enhance the city's public disclosure technology and practices.

And then amendment four, sponsored by Council President Gonzalez, would add $97,000 to the City Auditor Department for staffing issues in the Office of the City Auditor.

Thank you, Tom.

Again, Council members, we will have the chance for each of those sponsors to speak to the four items in this potential voting block or voting package.

But if there's any concerns about considering these four together, you are welcome to pull out any of the items right now, and we'll make sure to take a separate vote on that.

If there's no objection, I will go ahead and we will consider Amendments 1 through 4 as one voting package.

Is there any objection?

hearing no objections.

Amendments 1 through 4 are going to be grouped together as one voting package.

Now let's go ahead and walk through the amendments.

Tom, did you have anything else to add before the council members who spoke, who sponsored these amendments speak to them?

No, Madam Chair, I do not.

Okay, thanks.

Well, let's give this a try.

Council colleagues, as the sponsor of Amendment No. 1, I want to thank you for your consideration of this amendment.

As you recall, in last year's budget, we allocated $150,000 to fund a crisis counselor or a mental health counselor to assist with the Seattle Fire Department personnel.

Following the adoption of the budget, it was determined that the Firefighters Health Trust was probably the best place for rank-and-file members to access mental health services to reduce any barriers or stigma with accessing mental health.

Given that the $150,000 has not yet been spent, the proviso splits the $150,000 into two and it allocates another mental health provider to be located at Seattle Fire Department to provide a mental health provider both within Seattle Fire Department's headquarters and another one within the trust as requested by rank-and-file members.

It's anticipated that there would be the need for additional services in 2022 to continue these services.

And I know that I'm eager, along with others, to make sure that we're continuing to support mental health services of those who are on the front line, especially recognizing that our fire department is down personnel around 95 firefighters this year.

And they are constantly helping with multiple public health crises, whether it's assisting with COVID, the crisis of homelessness, or helping to fight national wildfires.

I appreciate your consideration of this amendment.

Seeing no questions.

Councilmember, excuse me, Council President Gonzalez, you are the sponsor of amendment number two.

Would you like to speak to it?

I have nothing else to add to it.

Okay, thank you very much.

It's pretty straightforward.

We've had conversations about it in the underlying legislation, so I think it's pretty straightforward.

This just sort of operationalizes the council bill that we passed establishing the office.

excellent.

Look forward to supporting it.

Would you had anything else?

Amendment number three.

Um, amendment number three.

Um, really, this is, uh, you know, just sort of following through on both the executive and the legislative department's interest in standing up the technology that is going to be necessary to enhance the city's public disclosure process.

And so this is sort of a suite of initial investments in that space to allow for some of that software to be purchased to prevent the loss of data that is important for us to maintain and preserve in compliance with the Public Records Act.

More to come on this.

It'll be important to make sure that this funding also includes investments that are available to the legislative department, as we also have public records act investments and obligations that we must comply with.

So we will be doing much more work in this space in the fall budget process, but this is sort of an initial step forward.

Excellent.

Thank you.

and not seeing any questions on that one.

Would you like to speak to the last item in this package, number four?

Yeah, this one is really important.

The city auditor's office is obviously an independent office.

They are housed within the legislative department on the org chart, but they are, in fact, an independent office.

They are one of the few offices that actually did have to absorb some budget cuts as a result of the recession last year and this is an opportunity for us to restore some of the costs associated with staffing over at the city auditor's office that is necessary for them to continue to do their independent auditing work of executive agencies and work.

Excellent.

Not seeing any additional questions on those.

Appreciate you bringing these three amendments forward.

Colleagues, are there any other comments or questions on amendments one through four?

I'm not seeing any.

Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll on the adoption of the voting package amendments one through four?

I second the roll.

Yes.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Madam Chair, Ms. Gayle.

Aye.

Madam Chair, that is four in favor and nine opposed.

Wonderful.

Thanks, colleagues.

The motion carries and the voting package amendments one through four on the amendment agenda are adopted.

Let's move on to amendment number five.

Council Member Lewis, you are listed as sponsor along with the co-author Council Member Peterson.

Would you like to move the amendment to put it in front of us?

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I move amendment five.

Thank you very much.

I'll second it.

It's been moved and seconded.

Let's turn it over to central staff for a quick walkthrough, and then I'll turn it back over to the sponsor and author.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

This will add $25,000 and one term limited position to the legislative department to add a position that would monitor investments in shelter expansions and projects.

So apologies if there's some background noise.

So I'll mute after that and turn it over to Council Member Lewis to speak more to it.

Thank you so much for queuing that up, Jeff.

And I believe Council Member Peterson is here as well.

And I'll make some brief remarks.

And if Council Member Peterson wants to speak to this as well, I would definitely welcome his statement.

This is a position that Council Member Peterson and I conceived of after essentially complaining to each other about the lack of progress on the standing up of shelter assets in our respective districts, and finding that we had had similar experiences of trying to work with external partners, the Human Services Department, other executive officials, to really bird dog down these processes and get these shelter assets established at a great expense of time and resource for our respective offices.

The position is term limited given that we are anticipating that over the next two years, we're gonna have a massive, massive amount of emergency enhanced shelter that is going to be funded by the council.

As we have seen from recent committee meetings, the amount of shelter the council has funded has not been fully realized in the implementation and there are clearly some implementation bottlenecks.

This position can be an asset for all nine council offices to help organize the process for running down those shelter assets as a committee resource for the Select Committee on Homelessness, which is a committee of the whole, can help council members in their respective districts to organize around queuing up all of the external and internal partners necessary to get these processes nailed down, which can include things like running down SEPA review, which has been an ongoing issue, making sure that there are not long delays in the lease negotiations, be it with the Port of Seattle or with Sound Transit or some other external partners where maybe we're citing something on their land.

So, you know, this really is trying to take what I believe is a full FTE of oversight work that has been done across multiple council offices and aggregate it into one position that would be term limited for the pendency of getting these thousands of additional shelter units stood up, at which point that position would expire.

So totally acknowledge the uniqueness of the position, totally acknowledge it sort of falls into a weird categorization.

But this is a weird issue that clearly needs to be sped up.

And I have no doubt that without Council Member Peterson's efforts, for example, essentially doing some of the duties of what this position would be, that university district tiny house village opening would be delayed still further.

So I think there is value in a position like this.

It's a fairly modest increase that could have a big impact.

And with that, I would give it to Council Member Peterson to make some remarks.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

Council Member Peterson, welcome and thanks again for being here with us today.

I know you popped into the meetings a few times in the last month or two.

Did you have anything else you'd like to add as the author along with Council Member Lewis?

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda, and thank you for the invitation to the meeting today.

Since I'm not on the Finance Committee, I really appreciate this opportunity to speak to this amendment.

Council Member Lewis has articulated the amendment well, and as we start to, as we're trying to think outside the box on how to more quickly stand up these emergency response interventions, we are working with agencies outside of city government, And it really does require a daily monitoring of the projects to know where they're stuck and to figure out who to notify so that we can keep the project moving.

We're really grateful for Sound Transit, for the Port of Seattle, et cetera, working with us to think outside the box and find sites to locate tiny home villages, for example, so we can get people into housing and into shelter.

Central staff does a great job on the policy level tracking of this for us on the budget.

level and even project level, it's just this required, you know, we both experienced this where it really required daily follow-up and monitoring to make sure these were stood up faster.

And since this position is unique because, you know, it's really just during the declared homelessness emergency, it's a temporary position, it's for a committee of the whole, it's serving all nine of us.

and it's really administrative in nature and just tracking this, and it helps us to move the ball forward.

This is really what it took.

As Council Member Lewis said, the project in the University District would be further delayed if we weren't following up in this manner.

So it'll really help everybody out.

It's a small sum.

It's just another small but vital way we can show that we're treating the homelessness emergency with the urgency it deserves.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Peterson.

Are there questions, colleagues, questions or comments from our other committee members?

Councilmember Hurdle, please go ahead.

This is a question for central staff, if Jeff is available.

I was just wondering, could you let us know whether or not the position as described here differs from the duties of central staff, not in the development of policy, but in assisting council in the implementation of policy that we have enacted.

I apologize, I did not fully hear the question.

I can field it for now and let Dan chime in.

The question is about the differences between the position that, at least in regard to homelessness, I currently serve versus how this position would function.

For example, right now, central staff, in case of HSD, it's Amy and me, are following up with HSD in a generalized way on a quarterly basis to understand the implementation of council ads.

So if there was a $100,000 investment for something, If we would check in shortly after contracts should have been completed to get it usually in like early March to get an understanding of if that contract is out, we want it with or the process that is underway if it's an RFP.

And then we'll do 2 or 3 more check ins throughout the year.

And then, as needed, we also will do a more deep dive into specific projects.

If there is a specific issue that we've been asked to follow up on, or.

For example, with the investment that the council has made with Tiny Home Villages using the Seattle Rescue Plan dollars, I've been asked to stay on top of when the RFP to award a new contract to operate Tiny Home Villages is issued, when it closes, things along those lines.

But this position, as I understand its vision, would be much more of a day-to-day checking in with HSD on what is the status of the RFAS, or the relevant department, but probably one of those two, on the relevant steps, and would likely also engage, for example, with the Port Authority or Sound Transit, talking to them about issues related to finalizing that lease.

As far as I'm aware of, those are the types of things that were being done by Council Member Lewis and Council Member Peterson's staff over the course of the last couple months to have a really firm understanding of specifics and that there was more day-to-day checking in, like what happened today, what happens tomorrow, where is the CEPA forums at, when will we begin the period and things along those lines.

Dan, you've actually had more conversation about this than me, so maybe you could chime in if I've mischaracterized anything.

I think that that is consistent with what I have heard described for the position.

I would, I guess, further differentiate the work that this new position would do from the work of central staff in that.

This position would not be expected to, first of all, report to the central staff director or be part of central staff.

It is a legislative assistant position.

The rate of pay would be consistent with the legislative assistant position.

classification.

The reporting would happen as provided in the matrix on your screen.

This position will report directly to the chair of the Select Committee on Homelessness Strategies and Investments.

The work, as Jeff has described, would be to be a liaison and sort of consistent point of contact to track the progress of the work that the executive has been doing and effectively report on that information to the chair and to the members of the select committee, which of course are all nine members of the Seattle City Council.

I think that's all I wanted to add.

Thank you.

I did not understand that this position would not be within central staff and would essentially be another LA that would report to Councilmember Lewis.

So I appreciate that level of clarity.

I'm going to call on Council President and then I think we're going to call the question.

So on that last point, how is that even legally possible if we're only by ordinance allowed to have four legislative aides?

I believe I can answer that question, Council President.

Each individual council office does, as you've described, have, I think, four positions, and I believe you are currently funded at three and a half of those positions.

This would add an additional legislative assistant that would not be directly in the office of Council Member Lewis, but would be reporting to whoever holds the chair of the Select Committee on Homelessness or the successor committee if one is named next year.

I'm not finding that to be persuasive.

And I think it seems to me to be a workaround of the potential desire and need to fully fund the fourth legislative aid position in each council member office that is authorized by ordinance to exist, but that we have not adequately funded to the extent that that's what what is needed, I think that conversation is best had for the fall budget process and would encourage us to have that conversation in the fall budget process as opposed to in the supplemental budget process.

And so I have Concerns about that structure as the council president of moving forward this amendment, they would effectively allow one council member, whomever that council member is to have.

You know, sort of a additional legislative aid in in what appears to be contradiction to an ordinance that only allows us to have four positions for legislative aids.

I'll also say that the structure as currently presented is a bit odd in the sense that select committees are not regular committees.

They're special committees that can go away and do oftentimes go away at the end of the two-year term.

And so I'm concerned about sort of where this person is going to Float to should this amendment pass and so I think there's a lot of unknown questions about how the organization is being structured.

Additionally, I think, just as context, I think it's important for us to.

look at the ongoing resource needs of the legislative department as a whole.

And I think that this particular amendment is being offered in the spirit of acknowledging that there are resource and capacity limitations to the work that we are continuing to do as a city council and a legislative department.

Again, I think those are issues that very much need to be taken up.

and evaluated and discussed and deliberated during our fall budget process.

And I will just sort of share for context that in 2021, the legislative department took a more than $780,000 budget cut to our overall budget.

And it's going to take pretty significant funding increase to simply restore our department to to what was our prior funding level.

And I think that that need that is being expressed by Councilmember Peterson and Councilmember Lewis is reflective of.

the impacts related to that significant budget cut that the department had to take last year in order to be responsive to the economic crisis that was facing our city and to free up funding for the needs of our constituents.

But again, I think that there are a lot of pressing budget needs.

including vacant and unfunded positions within the legislative department that need to be addressed first in the 22 budget process.

And so I would encourage us to I think that the budget amount for a temporary staffer, unfortunately, sets this up in a way that I'm not sure we're going to be able to find the talent needed to be able to actually fulfill the responsibilities that are being described by the sponsor and the author.

And so, again, I am not denying that there may be a need to increase the capacity of central staff as it relates to the work that we are required to do in the space of homelessness services.

But I would encourage us to make those decisions in the full context of what the central staff and the full legislative department need to get us back to that baseline.

And there are other unfunded, vacant positions within central staff that we have been holding off on filling, and this proposal is in direct competition with those pre-existing needs.

Thank you, Council President.

Colleagues, I am going to call the question on Amendment No. 5. I want to thank the author, Councilmember Peterson.

I want to thank the sponsor, Councilmember Lewis.

Thank you for walking us through the rationale behind the proposed amendment.

I want to note the importance of the why you brought it forward.

I don't disagree with you that there is a serious problem with lack of information and, more importantly, lack of implementation.

The council as we heard from Jeff Sims on central staff and the previous presentation and select committee has authorized over $45 million.

And we have serious concerns about those dollars that have been deployed to address the crisis of homelessness that is compounded by COVID not being spent in the way that council has authorized.

Also very real concerns about the metrics that we've been requesting for now going on three and a half years just in my experience.

from HSD and the mayor's office specific to how we are housing folks, how we are offering services and tracking to make sure that folks are home at our house.

Very real concerns that you've outlined, but for the reasons that are explained by Council President and Vice Chair Herbold, I too will be a no on this amendment today.

I think the council president has also raised some important questions that we should be taking up on the fall budget, especially given the growth in size of our city and the need for our offices to be responsive to constituents and to make sure that we are following through on the implementation side with the executive.

You know, if you look at places like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., for example, that has a population smaller than Seattle, their staff on their city council side is more than 12 individuals per office.

So we are working very hard to address a large and growing population here in the city.

And I think it's well worth the conversation about how we do both respond to constituents, make sure that our implementation for the budget that we've allocated is happening and that we have good transparent conversations between both branches of government.

But because of these concerns today, I will be voting no and appreciate that the conversation will be continuing.

It sounds like in the fall.

Council Member Peterson, as the author of the amendment, you do have the last word.

If you can go ahead right now and then we'll get to voting.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

While I'm disappointed, I was hoping for support for this.

I really do think it's necessary if you want to stand up.

If we really want to stand up tiny home villages faster, I think this position is needed and look forward to discussing it in the context of the fall budget.

I did just want to clarify that on this particular tiny home village in the university district, I actually worked with the Durkin administration and HSD.

This was an unusual thing where we were working with an outside agency that was also doing a really great job and working with us.

It was just as we work with outside agencies on brand new lease terms, etc.

We need somebody to get in the weeds and on a daily basis.

So thank you for giving me a chance to speak at the end here.

I appreciate you being here with us.

I know you have more, so maybe we'll see you again in a second.

Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll on the adoption of amendment number five?

Madam Chair, that is one in favor and three opposed.

Thank you very much.

The motion fails, and amendment number five is not adopted.

Let's move on to amendment number six.

Council Member Lewis, as sponsor of this amendment, would you like to move it?

Yes, thank you, Madam Chair.

I move amendment six.

I'll second that.

It's been moved and seconded.

Central staff, would you like to walk us through amendment number six?

Thank you, Madam Chair.

The short towel for this is to add $1.7 million to HSD's budget for the Chief Seattle Club's mixed-use project and cut $1.5 million intended for a new tiny home built at the actually it's redirecting 1.7, there's a typo in the grid there.

The change in 1.7, the redirection of $1.7 million would first support the capital project that is already underway by the Chief Seattle Club.

There have been some challenges with some of their fundraising that this would help cover that gap, especially related to the non-housing components of the larger project that is especially focused on serving people from our native community that are experiencing homelessness.

And the $1.7 million is available because there has been, as council members are aware, a substantial amount of money has been provided to HSD that has not fully been expended or encumbered in a variety of cases.

So you could look, for example, at the bill this last fall when an additional $9 million, it was amended ultimately, so that $9 million was added for non-congregate shelter in HSD.

$1.7 million to be used for this project.

The action redirects those funds to a

I'm not going to add a whole lot to that great recitation from Jeff in the interest of time.

I just want to highlight and emphasize for the viewing public and for council members that this in no way imperils the investments we've made in tiny house villages.

This just captures the underspend since we did We're going to be able to responsibly fully fund those villages for all of 2021, going back to January, and that's been accruing underspend.

This is a way we can deploy that one-time money to really, really assist a very impactful organization in Seattle that, as we're all aware, provides great services and programming a native community in the city.

And I really look forward to just supporting this, passing it.

But rest assured, the three tiny house villages will still be fully funded when they become operational in October or so.

So there is sufficient money to realize those investments.

Excellent.

Thank you very much.

I'm not seeing any additional hands or questions.

Oh, excuse me.

Central staff, Jeff Sims, please go ahead.

I just want to confirm for the chair and the members of the committee, I just double checked the amendment the amendment as posted online and it is 1.7 million dollars to be redirected and then redirected to a new source.

So the grid is an error to have a 1.5 million.

I just want to assure you that that is correct in the amendment.

Okay, excellent.

Thank you so much.

And Council Member Lewis, I am going to be supporting this amendment today.

Thank you for your work on this and we'll continue to track with you the creation of all of the tiny house villages that we have fully funded in last year's budget and earlier this year with your leadership.

Madam Clerk, I am not seeing any additional hands.

Could you please call the roll on the adoption of amendment number six?

Vice Chair Herbold.

Yes.

Council President Gonzalez.

Aye.

Council Member Lewis.

Yes.

Madam Chair Mosqueda.

Aye.

Madam Chair, that is four in favor, none opposed.

Thank you very much.

The motion carries and amendment number six is adopted.

Amendment number seven is in front of us.

Colleagues, I am the sponsor of that.

So to put in front of us, I move amendment number seven be adopted.

Is there a second?

Thank you very much, Vice Chair.

It's been moved and seconded for amendment number seven to be adopted.

Jeff, I see you off mute.

I'll turn it back over to you for an overview.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

This would impose a proviso on $200,000 in the Human Services Department to support organizations that build tiny homes.

The $200,000 would be imposed, the proviso would be imposed on funds that were provided in supplemental action by the council this fall, or sorry, this spring, and that were amended over the summer.

So that $9 million that I actually just alluded to a moment ago.

And the organization for an example organization that could receive that funding would be Sound Foundations Northwest.

There's a variety of volunteer groups or organizations that build tiny homes largely through the donation of materials and labor to actually provide the tiny home structure itself to, in this case, our only operator is the Low Income Housing Institute.

So those units are provided to Lehigh to then place into a tiny home village.

And this would provide $200,000 in funding only for materials for an organization that does that, such as Sound Foundations, which is an organization that works exclusively, I believe, by contract with Lehigh to provide tiny homes.

They have a little bit more capacity to produce tiny homes on a more rapid basis than many of the other agencies that are Probably should say organizations.

That's not officially an agency.

I wouldn't think that build tiny home units And I'll turn over to you matter trick

Thank you very much, Jeff.

Appreciate the walkthrough.

Colleagues, I'll briefly comment on this.

If there's any questions or comments, we'll take those in just a second.

This amendment, as Jeff describes, would put $200,000 towards creating the material dollars, excuse me, the dollars needed to purchase the materials to develop tiny houses.

As you know, organizations like Sound Foundations Northwest, help to build tiny houses for us.

They largely rely on donations and I want to thank Lowe's specifically for the partnership that they've had with Sound Foundations Northwest.

They recently worked with Sound Foundations on a large bulk contract, bulk purchase award and they gifted a huge amount of resources to Sound Foundations Northwest.

We all know the cost of materials has increased post-pandemic.

The cost of building one tiny house for Sound Foundations Northwest, for example, in January last year used to be $3,800.

It got as high as $5,400.

It is now back down to about $4,200, but that includes the bulk purchase discount that Lowe's is offering to They did send in a letter of support for an amendment like this for organizations like theirs so that they can build tiny houses at the rapid pace needed in order for us to house more people on the tiny houses that we have authorized through the city.

They have the capacity to build about 14 homes per month.

They use volunteers and also apprentices.

Apprentices through programs like a new that work with union apprentice.

students as they are getting their union trade certifications.

And so Lehigh provides a great service to us.

They also assume that the cost of the materials and labor will be free in order for us to help to build more tiny houses and to address a gap that's been identified by organizations like Sound Foundations Northwest to get them through the gap of November and February of next year.

This could help to make sure that we are creating more tiny house villages at the very moment when our council and the executive have authorized more tiny houses to be created.

A request of $200,000 from my office could help to build almost 50 new tiny homes.

I know that this is not a long-term solution as we greatly appreciate the donations from entities like Lowe's.

I want to again thank them and others who've donated materials in time.

But if this is going to be a staple and a cornerstone for how we respond to the homelessness crisis, I very much want to make sure that there's revenue going into making sure the materials are there for organizations like that.

So I would hope for your support.

Are there any additional questions?

Okay.

Madam Clerk, could you please call the roll on the adoption of amendment number seven?

Mr. Herbold?

Yes.

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Madam Chair Mosqueda?

Aye.

Madam Chair, that is four in favor, none opposed.

Okay, thank you very much.

Colleagues, the motion carries and amendment number seven is adopted.

Madam, excuse me, Council Colleagues, we are now on to amendment number eight, and this is sponsored by myself and Council Member Herbold.

Council Member Herbold, would you like to move the motion to put, move the amendment to put it in front of us?

Thank you so much.

I move amendment eight.

And I will second it.

I will turn it over to central staff for a walkthrough of the amendment in front of us.

I understand there's possible amendments to this amendment, but let's have a conversation first about the base amendment number eight.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Greg Doss.

This is going to be a little bit lengthier than the previous presentations, but I'll try to keep it as succinct as best as I possibly can.

As you recall, Allie and I briefed you at the last Finance and Housing Committee about the $15 million in salary savings that SPD has accrued.

due to unexpected officer separations.

You'll recall that the department had sent to Allie and me a letter that had identified a preferred spending plan for that 15 million.

As members know, that 15 million, the mayor had proposed that 1.54 million of it would go to a community safety investment plan.

that she had proposed, which would include triage one, a dispatch protocol system, and an investment in the Peacekeepers Collective.

The rest of the funding would remain in SPD and be redirected for a variety of different purposes.

SPD's budget letter can be found in attachment A to amendment eight, and it lists all of the various expenditures that the department had hoped to make.

those can be found in a table at the very end of the SPD letter.

Amendment eight would start out by cutting from SPD's budget 5.2 million.

That amount would include the 1.54 million that the executive, the mayor had recommended for the community safety investments.

So that would be for the triage one dispatch protocol system and the peacekeepers collective.

That would also include investments that would be made, $3 million to extend community safety and capacity building service contracts that would be fulfilled by community organizations.

$500,000 that would go to finance and administrative services to address SPD evidence storage capacity issues by allowing for the leasing of additional evidence storage space.

$50,000 to Seattle IT for a public disclosure position to perform email searches such as Seattle IT does for other departments.

And then a cut of $68,000 that would revert to the general fund for future spending.

And this amount reflects salary savings that would otherwise have been spent by the department for a position that would provide pre-basic law enforcement academy training.

And so that would be a program that the chief would start up where recruits would receive training for a month or so before they went to the academy.

And that position is cut by this amendment.

I'll also note that separate and apart, there's an investment of $50,000 by this amendment to hire a new public disclosure officer for SPD to start up a new public disclosure unit within the Office of Police Accountability.

And that is part of the investments that are made by this bill.

There are several civilian positions that are added, and if you refer to the SPD letter at the end of the amendment, you'll see that those positions are identified.

This particular position, the addition of a public disclosure position for OPA is one that the council adds.

Amendment 8 would leave in SPD 6.8 million in salary savings to spend on items within its own budget.

To facilitate that spending, the amendment removes three council provisos.

The first council proviso is a $2.5 million out of order layoff proviso.

this proviso would be lifted for a couple of reasons.

First, because it has come to light that the public safety civil service rules would allow officers who are laid off out of order to be placed on a reinstatement register and rehired when SPD is hiring new officers.

And second, because the R.

C. W. R. C. W. Precludes any adverse personnel action to be taken against a police officer solely because he or she is on what is referred to as a Brady list.

And the Brady list is a list of officers whose involvement in a case as an arresting officer, investigator or witness is in question because of a history of dishonesty or misconduct.

So for those reasons, out of order layoffs cannot be made and thus the proviso is lifted.

There is a $550,000 proviso that is lifted.

The $550,000 proviso was tied to a Harbor Patrol report.

The Harbor Patrol report was received on July 26. So the proviso is fulfilled.

There is a $5 million proviso that was tied to salary savings in the department.

It was holding salary savings.

In the event that such savings was accrued, then the council would have the ability to repurpose that savings later.

That occurred and that's what this amendment is doing.

This amendment includes an intent statement that acknowledges that SPD may spend the remaining 6.8 million that is left in its budget on several specific items that are identified in its letter.

So again, if you go to the SPD budget letter at the end of the amendment, you'll see a list of things that the department would spend its money on.

The intense section identifies a number of those specific items.

The intense section does not identify all of those items, nor is there enough funding remaining in SPD to cover or pay for all of those items.

If SPD funds or pays for all of the items that are expressed in the intent section of this amendment, they will have left over $3.3 million to cover the things that are not expressed in the intent section of this amendment.

And so I'm going to talk about the things that are not expressed in the intent section of this amendment.

And those are $2.25 million in technology investments, $120,000 for a new CSO squad, The intent section of the amendment acknowledges an investment of $1.5 million for special events over time, and it transfers $1.5 million, the amendment does, from from salary savings BSLs to the BSLs that would spend the money for event overtime.

However, the department had requested or had intended to spend three million on event overtime.

So this is about half the amount that the department had identified in its letter that the amendment would acknowledge should be spent.

And then there are other items that are on the department's list that are not in the intent section.

Two items in specific that the department could not move forward with anyways.

These are items that would require future council authority.

One of them is $2.5 million that could be spent on COVID-related compensation, but that would be subject to the city's bargaining process.

And then the other would be $520,000 that could be spent on providing hiring bonuses to new recruits and lateral hires.

So with all of those items I just mentioned, the department again would have about 3.3 million items to spread amongst them.

I know that this is a lot, so if it would help to have a visual, I do have a table that goes over it, or I am just available for questions right now, whatever the chair and council members would prefer.

Thank you so much for walking us through that.

Why don't you go ahead and put the table on the screen.

I'll say a few comments and then turn it over to Council Member Herbold as co-sponsor on this.

And then we'll see if there's other council members who have questions and comments before we consider any amendments to this amendment.

I do want to say thank you, Greg, for your work on this amendment.

And I want to thank Council Member Herbold for your longstanding efforts to try to advance some of these investments and your leadership on these pieces.

I'm proud of this amendment in front of us.

I think that Amendment 8 represents A meeting of the minds, a meeting of the goals announced by the mayor's recently announced package around public safety and also maintains important investments into scaling community public safety programs as we heard about during public comment today.

It makes sure that we have a balance.

If we invest in programs like triage one, then we also must make sure according to frontline firefighters, that there is a landing place for these folks to go to so that there's true referrals into community stabilization programs, that there's social workers and case managers, that there's housing placement coordinators and chemical dependency professionals, and that these public safety community contracts that we have invested in are able to be extended from a year and a half to the full two years this has been requested by community partners.

We want to do that both and.

We want to do the both and in terms of making sure that we're investing in the civil service positions that have been already explicitly authorized in terms of existing positions and that we're also making sure that we're expanding efforts to recognize the need to address public health and safety concerns that have come up especially in the last year and a half.

We have expressed intent as Greg noted and we have fully authorized the funding in the mayor's request for the following categories 700,000 requested for triage one is being funded here so that we can help address The need for those wellness checks to have an individual show up and we're coupling that with three million dollar investment Into the human services department community safety contracts.

We fully funded the 500,000 requested for king county regional peacekeepers collective focus on addressing gun violence and king county use using a public health approach.

We fully authorized the 1.047 million requested for civilian support positions.

That is not new position authority, so that's over a million dollars in the civilian support position category.

We've fully authorized the funding for the work scheduling timekeeping project, fully authorized the funding for the NICJR contract, fully authorized the funding for the mental health provider position at Seattle Police Department, which I believe is critical to support frontline workers, especially under the multiple and compounding crises, as we've noted earlier in this discussion.

We supported public health, excuse me, mental health providers for our fire department, and this is an important aspect of creating holistic health care for those on the front line.

We have fully authorized the spending for separation pay and deferred compensation, fully authorized the funding needed for paid parental leave, and accounted for 1.5 million of the additional overtime investments needed, recognizing that the potential for the ongoing event overtime need is potentially going to be reduced if, for example, we see the scaling up of the fourth wave of COVID due to the Delta variant on the horizon.

I will turn it over to Council Member Herbold, and before I do, I want to thank her for her extensive work on making sure that there is sufficient personnel to respond to the maintenance of evidence and that there's evidence storage along with the personnel, that we have the sufficient personnel needed for responding to the public records requests.

We know, especially in the last year, there's been a heightened increase I'm very appreciative of the inclusion in our draft amendment in front of you for those extension of the we've had a lot of feedback from the public.

We've had a lot of correspondence today from public testimony and from firefighters.

Firefighters have told me they are concerned with layering on additional triage if there's not a landing place for folks to go to.

So I think that this is an approach that really tries to meld various priorities and really try to meet the public safety requests that have been requested of council in a pretty late-breaking request that has impacts on our I'm hopeful that not only does the investments that we're making here, but allowing for over $3.3 million to be up to the discretion of Seattle Police Department does help us find a nice common ground to move forward with very important investments at this time.

Councilmember Herbold, I'll turn it over to you as a co-sponsor on this amendment.

The rationale for this amendment, similar to the rationale for much of the proposed investments made in a SPD budget bill back in May, really is in recognition that the shortage of sworn officers is resulting in reduced 911 priority responses.

We could not have planned for approximately 250 officers leaving the Seattle Police Department when we were discussing during last year's budget process only a reduction of 70 officers.

Nevertheless, we must now respond to the current staffing reality, and it's important that we make investments that can ameliorate the current shortage by reducing the workload on sworn officers who have stayed with Seattle and maintained their commitment to public service and community safety.

So this amendment includes funding civilian positions such as community service officers, crime prevention coordinators.

These are important investments that can, again, ameliorate this shortage of 9-1-1, of sworn officers.

It includes funding for background checks with a third party.

This can accelerate the hiring process for all SPD employees, both sworn officers and civilian.

It provides funding for the Nick Jr.

Contract for work on analyzing call data in conjunction with reimagining policing work.

And this is integral to our efforts to, again, further reduce the footprint for SPD officers, sworn officers, and to increase our investments in community safety, alternative response, It includes funding for the work scheduling and timekeeping project that is so critical for modernizing our management of overtime and addressing the recommendations made by the city auditor in 2016 and recommendations made recently by the Office of Police Accountability.

It also, as Madam Chair referenced, it includes funding for the community safety communication center protocol system for the 901 dispatch.

In the last couple weeks, the executive has announced, as part of the reimagining work, a new triage one program.

In order for this triage one program to work, we need this protocol system to ensure that there's a more consistent ability to refer calls that do not need either sworn officers or health one response.

It is critical to ensuring that call takers have the training to ensure the best response as we embrace these alternatives.

It also includes $500,000 for the regional Peacekeepers Collective.

Work to prevent gun violence is critically important right now.

The mayor had announced an intention to provide funding in 2022. I did not wanna wait to provide funding for this effort, and that's why I announced several weeks ago my intention through the second quarter supplemental to provide funding for this investment as well as a protocol system investment.

We are also including in here an additional tranche of funding for triage one.

I mentioned the protocol dispatch.

This is actually for implementation of triage one, setting aside some dollars again, to respond to the call analysis commissioned by the Seattle Police Department for calls that do not require a first response from sworn officers and reduce the need for sworn officers to respond to those calls, thus freeing up their time to respond to the calls that only they can respond to.

A package also includes $1.5 million in additional overtime.

Both mayor and council proposed reductions in the overtime budget due to COVID for the proposed and the council adopted budget.

But with additional events taking place, we recognize that some more funding may be needed.

as well as additional funding for over time to address some of the gaps in the patrol response.

We also have included, as Madam Chair mentioned, funding for evidence storage, as recommended by the Inspector General, and funding for additional police disclosure response.

These are also items that were included in the May budget bill.

that we had discussed.

I want to just real quickly touch on the proposed funding in this particular bill, in this particular amendment for the HSD community safety investments.

There's a recommendation for $3 million and uses funds from SPD to fund these HSD community safety investments.

Given that we received an economic forecast update earlier in this meeting and that CBO is forecasting additional 53 million in general fund revenue for 2021, there may be an alternative source of funds for this investment.

And we could, I am hoping that we can move forward with acting on this amendment and the two amendments to the amendment, but just putting out that there may be

Thank you, Madam Vice President, Vice Chair.

Just got used to saying Vice President, Madam Vice President.

So colleagues, that is a summary of the amendment in front of us.

Council Member Herbold has alluded to two amendments that she has on this base amendment.

Are there any questions before we consider her amendments number one or two?

Okay, Council Member Herbold, I'm not seeing any questions right now.

Why don't you go ahead and describe amendment number...

Do you need to move that?

I think you need to move it first.

Okay.

Do you want to move amendment number one?

Thank you.

I move amendment one to amendment eight.

For the purposes of discussion, I will second that.

Thank you.

So Greg in his overview referenced the SPD requested $2.25 million for technology investments.

Just want to reference the letter that we received from Chief Diaz yesterday evening.

I know many of us had the question of why these investments were not in the proposed 2021 budget.

Chief Diaz's response to that question was as the police department assessed the mayor's executive order on reimagining public safety, as well as the new federal monitors plan for continued oversight, it was clear that we would need to continue to enhance several technology solutions and tools.

SPD had been working on scoping a plan for significantly enhancing the data analytics platform, a platform that was critical to demonstrating initial compliance with the consent decree and integral to sustaining its commitment to define best practices in the science of reporting, monitoring, and analyzing officer and department performance.

All of these factors, along with the new reality around public expectations for public safety, were not fully available to be considered in early 2021 budget actions.

The investments are broken up among a number of different components, some for the data analytics platform, as Greg has described it in prior meetings, as the box.

And maybe he can give us a little bit more texture on why that's important.

There's $630,000 for a capacity planning tool, $290,000 for the innovation blueprint, and $320,000 for officer wellness and supervision.

The upgraded app, again, will allow for increased efficiency and processing capacity necessary to support existing functionality and future use, including disparate impact monitoring, and also will assist in monitoring in a way that is consistent with council expectations and city auditor recommendations as it relates to Over time, the capacity planning pool works to evaluate staffing based on demand for response and calculate staffing requirements and determines a future state based on scenarios such as 911 alternative response.

And the officer wellness and supervision includes more accurate statistical models for predicting and guiding interventions for employees exhibiting signs that they need support.

It's critical to reducing the number of false positive indications presented by the current process and enhancing supervision.

And SPD views it as critical to the department's employee wellness and retention strategy.

And again, in order to support the officer wellness and supervision intervention, the DAP upgrade is sort of necessary to basically house this statistical model.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

Thank you, Vice Chair.

I think you did a good job summarizing the technology and appreciate the conversation in your public safety committee meeting as well.

Are there any questions or comments for Vice Chair Herbold on amendment number one, which as you can see from Greg's table here, he has highlighted line four and shown in the far right column what amendment number one would do to the calculations of available funds there.

We'll describe amendment number two in just a minute, which is at the bottom of the screen.

Vice Chair Herbold, I'm not seeing any questions or comments on this.

I will go ahead and call the question.

Vice Chair Herbold, I do want to say just on a personal note, I want to thank you again for your ongoing work on this.

Thank you for lifting up the comments that we've received.

I also am aware of the amount left available in the underspend in the middle column in I will personally be voting no on this amendment today just because I have a series of questions still related to the line related to investment I think it's important for me to better understand what these technologies do, understand the differences between these technologies and previous technologies, which I know were very concerning, and have a better understanding of how we continue to have a reciprocal expectation that those types of contracts will be put before council before they are signed.

So I will be voting no on this amendment, but I do want to thank you again for your leadership and your detailed explanation on this amendment.

I'm not seeing any additional questions.

Madam Clerk, could you please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment 1 to Amendment 8?

Chair Herbold?

Yes.

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Chair Mosqueda?

No.

Madam Chair, that is three in favor, not one opposed.

Thank you very much.

The motion carries, and Amendment 1 to Amendment 8 is adopted.

Council Member Herbold, you do have another amendment.

Would you like to describe Amendment 2 to Amendment 8?

Thank you.

I move Amendment 2 to Amendment 8. Thank you for doing that first.

I will second it for the purposes of discussion.

Council Member Herbold, would you like to describe it?

This is $68,000 for a position for a new community-based training effort with recruits before they enter the academy so that recruits receive Seattle-specific training separate from that of the state academy.

I know Chief Diaz is really excited about initiating this new effort.

He had sent a memo describing the effort as being developed under the guidance of a longtime Seattle educator, that it leverages an expanding network of new and existing relationships within Seattle's many and diverse communities.

It's centered around three primary tenants.

relational policing, officer wellness, and growth mindset.

The program will be a 45-day initiative that pulls recruits out of traditional classroom training and immerses them in community-based, peer-based, and introspective experiences.

We'll provide them both as a lens through which to receive their training and a foundation from which to build their careers as Seattle police officers.

The memo notes that some of the training will focus on in-class presentation and learning.

The majority of the program will take place in the community, paired with CSOs or officers within the Collaborative Policing Bureau.

Recruits will walk beats in each of the five precincts, develop relationships with community leaders, engage in youth dialogue, and focus not only on learning about issues specific in different areas of the city, but on learning the skill sets necessary to carry principles of relational policing throughout careers.

Relational policing is aligned with recommendations from the Office of the Inspector General's Sentinel Event Review.

And as it relates specifically that officer wellness, the memo references that SPD recruits will learn to listen to their own minds and bodies and recognize and identify stress indicators, not just in themselves, but very much in line with the training officers receive in service, in each other as well, and healthy means of supporting themselves and each other throughout their careers.

I think it would be very helpful for us to actively show our support for this effort.

Okay, I am not seeing any.

Greg, I should have asked you, did you have anything else you'd like to add on this amendment?

Number two to amendment number eight?

Okay, I'm seeing a head shake.

Thank you.

Comprehensive analysis from Council Member Herbold, who has been in the weeds on this.

I also want to thank the chief who did send around a letter to the Chair of Public Safety, Council Member Herbold, that was received on August 13th.

It is included as an attachment.

to amendment number two, to amendment number eight.

One of the things that I was trying to assess is whether or not this position would be better housed at an entity like the new Community Safety Communication Center, the new department that Council Member Herbold really led the effort on, especially given the first paragraph at the bottom of page one, which talks about this position really focusing on relational policing.

I would be more comfortable if this position were housed at the CSCC to try to create those kind of community liaison, community contacts, and to put our public safety officers, excuse me, our armed officers in the context of how those individuals fit within the broader set of public safety responses.

I think that I would be more comfortable if it was situated there.

I see the amendment in front of us today doesn't attempt to try to move that.

I know that this is a priority for the chief and that's probably why I see the Council Member nodding.

So with that, I appreciate the emphasis on trying to have that early sort of identification of potentially problematic behaviors, or trying to maybe have a better understanding of how policing fits in with community-oriented solutions.

Again, I would be more comfortable if it was at CSCC.

So today, I will be a no on this, but look forward to having future conversations, if this does hang, about the role that this position will fulfill and how it connects to those community partners and the new department, CSCC.

I'm not seeing any additional comments.

Okay.

Madam Clerk, could you please call the roll on the adoption of amendment two to amendment number eight?

Mr. Herbold?

Yes.

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Chair Mosqueda?

No.

Madam Chair, that is three in favor, one opposed.

Okay, excellent.

Amendment number two to amendment number eight is adopted.

In front of us we have amended amendment number eight.

Is there any additional comments or questions on the underlying amended amendment in front of us?

I'm seeing no hands raised and no virtual.

to be called on.

Greg, is there anything else that you would like to add for the purposes of considering amended version number eight?

No, nothing.

Okay.

Council Member Herbold, a sponsor, anything else to add?

Okay.

Okay, colleagues, I will go ahead and call the roll on the adoption of amended version number eight.

Vice Chair Herbold?

Yes.

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Chair Mosqueda?

Aye.

Madam Chair, that is four in favor, none opposed.

Thank you, colleagues.

Amendment 8, as amended, is adopted.

We have amendment 9A.

For the purposes of moving this along, Councilmember Sawant is the author.

I move adoption of amendment 9A.

Is there a second?

I'm going to turn it over to the central staff.

Central staff, would you like to walk us through amendment 9A?

≫ Yes, Madam Chair.

Amendment 9A would cut $500,000 from the Seattle Police Department's budget in 2021 and add that same amount to the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department's budget for purposes of funding the Garfield super block capital project.

Garfield Ball Field and Teen Life Center and Quincy Jones Performing Arts Center, High School Track and Field.

The proposed project would include site improvements throughout the park and create a pathway that integrates art and amenities that reflect the cultural arts and heritage of the central area.

As noted, the fund source for this would be a cut to the SPD budget predicated on a large slate of cuts that were envisioned in Council Bill 119981. which did not pass council earlier this year.

Okay, thank you very much.

Colleagues, I also want to note that Council Member Strauss, who is not here today, does have Amendment 9B.

He has indicated he would like to move an amendment to this amendment to streamline the amendment process.

So his amendment that I will be offering as a verbal amendment basically takes the language from 9B, and amends 9A.

So that the funding source is the REIT funds, and that we apply these funds to what REIT funds can be used for.

I want to thank Council Member Sawant and Strauss for their ongoing work to find a path to fund the Garfield Superblock.

And because Council Member Sawant couldn't be here today, I'll read from some of the remarks that she sent us.

This is on behalf of Council Member Sawant, so it's in her voice.

I'm delighted to put this forward as an amendment to the supplemental budget on behalf of grassroots organizations who've been working for years to fulfill the vision of the Garfield Superblock.

Garfield Superblock fulfills a vital civic engagement space and honors and tells the story through art and cultural presentations of the people who have lived here over millennia, from the Duwamish people to Black Americans today.

The Garfield Superblock will enhance the area around Garfield Community Center, Medgar Evans Pool, and Garfield High School, all with art that celebrates the area's history, new trees, and walkways to ensure access for all, new safe bathroom facilities, and urgently need the community's amendment.

She goes on to talk about how it will create a community safety and create good union jobs and overall support for making sure that this item is fully funded in the supplemental.

I'll read from some more of her comments in a minute as we consider amendment, the verbal amendment that I'd like to offer to council members.

So once.

we are going to move on to the second amendment here.

I will note that with refunds, we cannot use it to pay community partners, but this is something that I'm interested in taking up in subsequent budget discussions.

Refunds can be used for capital projects only.

What Councilmember Sawant had also included in her proposal was not just the $500,000 for funding the Garfield Superblock, but was also a potential stipend for community partners.

That potential stipend could be taken up in this fall's budget, which I will continue to commit to evaluating and working on with other Councilmembers as well.

So, Madam Chair, I have on screen, I believe, if you could confirm for me that you're seeing the amendment, the original Amendment 9A with strike through language reflecting the verbal amendment that you're making to change the funding source from the Seattle Police Department to REIT funds and to revise the effect statement accordingly.

And could you zoom in just a little bit?

I see other council members doing what I'm doing.

I'm trying to get close to the screen.

colleagues, I would like to move verbal amendment number one to amendment 9A to accomplish what central staff have just described, changing the fund source from SPD to use REIT funds and addressing the stipend for community partners not in this bill, which I have noted would be addressed later.

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you.

councilmember Sawant and councilmember Strauss.

I will offer a few comments from councilmember Strauss and councilmember Sawant.

Councilmember Strauss is thankful of the opportunity to amend councilmember Sawant's amendment to provide another option for Garfield to support the project as we want to use these funds to support capital projects like this one.

Using REIT revenue allows this fund to continue to allow us to fund this work without delay and make sure that we are separating from the conversation we just had.

councilmember Strauss.

He's interested in supporting ongoing community participation as well in the ongoing budget conversation.

Councilmember Sawant notes with the growing momentum around the call for the Garfield super block, she's not surprised that another amendment was put forward to fund this project.

Councilmember Strauss' amendment would provide the same level of funding, $500,000 to the Garfield super block funds with the to support the amendment.

I believe that the governor's option to take the money from oversized military department is important, but also believe that any proposal for $500,000 for the Garfield super block is a victory, one for the working people in the central district.

That's why she is continuing to support either of the amendments brought forward in committee today.

With that, I will be supportive as well.

Madam Clerk, could you please call the roll on the adoption of

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Chair Mosqueda?

Aye.

Madam Chair, that is four in favor, none opposed.

Thank you very much.

Amendment 1 to Amendment 9A has passed.

Is there any additional comments before we consider Amended Version 9A?

Seeing none, Madam Clerk, could you please call the roll on Amended Version 9A?

Vice Chair Hurdle?

Yes.

Yes.

councilmember Sawant and councilmember Strauss.

Council members, Peterson, I believe you are still with us.

Thank you for being with us for this little mini marathon here.

You are the author and I am the chair, excuse me, I am the sponsor.

And I will go ahead and move this on your behalf.

Council colleagues, I move amendment number 10. Is there a second?

I'll turn it over to central staff to walk us through this amendment, and then I will turn it to the author, Council Member Peterson.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

This amendment would add one FTE crime prevention coordinator to the Seattle Police Department.

The position would work with community and personnel of the North Precinct for purposes of reducing and preventing crime.

The SPD currently has six funded CPC positions.

one assigned to each precinct and an Asian liaison.

The existing North Precinct CPC position is currently vacant, and the department is in process of hiring that position.

The department would use the candidate pool that they developed for the vacancy to hire the second new position.

Council Member Peterson, who's the author, requests that the department use salary savings from civilian position savings and SPD available due to the delayed hiring of North Precinct Crime Prevention Coordinator positions in 2021. Further, the intent statement suggests that the council expects the position would be included in the funded proposed 2022 budget, which is under development now.

Excellent, thank you.

Council Member Peterson as author, would you like to speak to this?

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda, and thanks again for the invitation to attend to speak to this particular amendment.

And this is something that we've seen over the past year or so is an increased number of requests from constituents and small businesses to hear from their civilian crime prevention coordinator.

Unfortunately, that position was unfilled for over a year.

There's a huge backlog of requests from residents and small businesses to get this technical assistance and advice and support from this civilian position.

So also the North Precinct is 40% of the city's geography.

So it's literally twice as large as any other precinct.

So it warrants a second position as well.

So again, as we seek to expand alternative approaches, the Crime Prevention Coordinator is already a proven civilian response to help prevent crime upstream.

And we would like to see this expanded in the North Precinct, which because of its size and the fact that we haven't had one for over a year.

Thank you.

Thank you for your work on this amendment.

Colleagues, are there any questions or comments on amendment number 10?

Please go ahead, Vice Chair Herbold.

Thank you, and my apologies.

So this amendment, does it add funding or does it only add second position?

The pocket.

I'm happy to start a response and then Tom can apply his expertise.

The idea is that there was savings because they have not been paying a crime prevention coordinator in the North Precinct for the entire year of 2021. So it would help us, there would be enough funding to get that position for the end of this year.

But in terms of the pocket, Tom would have to answer that.

That is correct.

So this the actual amendment itself just does add the pocket.

The funding is assumed in the current base budget right now.

Thank you.

Appreciate that.

I'm supportive.

Thank you.

And I also follow up question on that adds a pocket.

So is this new position authority?

Yes, correct.

OK, OK, great.

Are there any additional comments or questions?

I will turn it over to you.

I appreciate you bringing this forward a CID liaison position.

I think that that means that we have sufficiently engaged in trying to speed up the hiring in these areas, notably already hiring somebody for the North Precinct.

I am concerned at this point with adding new position authority and look forward to the discussion in the fall about whether or not there is new position authority necessary in various places and to see how we can continue to move we are trying to address this from multiple angles.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

I appreciate your perspective as budget chair to think a big picture like that.

And I'm trying to advocate for my constituents and the requests we've been getting over the past year and try to get this civilian position out in the field to help people prevent crime and just feel that if we don't have it funded, we're going to continue to have a huge backlog and not be able to to have that crime prevention on the ground, and what is a precinct that is twice as large as every other precinct.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Madam Clerk, could you please call the roll on the adoption of Amendment Number 10?

Mr. Herbold?

Yes.

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Madam Chair?

No. amendment number 10 is adopted.

Thank you again.

Let's move on to the last amendment here, amendment number 11.

Absolutely.

This amendment would add $50,000 from the general fund to the Seattle Department of Transportation's urban design program for the Ballard Avenue streetscape design work.

So the design work would be used to develop a project scope and cost estimate for improvements to support long-term use of Ballard Avenue in the Northwest right away for street cafes that were established during the COVID-19 response.

The resulting design treatments would allow city to pilot street cafe improvements that could later be applied citywide.

The funding source is again noted as general fund.

Those are on program revenues.

I'm sliding back to earlier agenda items where the forecast update did provide resource available.

This would be the funding source for that, for this $50,000.

Thank you very much.

On behalf of Councilmember Strauss, I'll note that this amendment would add $50,000 of unallocated general fund to SDOT for a fund of a 10% design to fund the 10% design for Ballard Avenue improvements to facilitate a permanent cafe street.

When COVID-19 hit our community, Councilmember Strauss worked with restaurants and business owners along Ballard Avenue to set up the first cafe street in Seattle.

And since then, he's prioritized establishing pathways to permanency for cafe streets and sidewalk eateries across Seattle so that we can continue to enjoy the benefits of outdoor dining beyond the COVID emergency.

As part of that path to permanency, Council Member Strauss led the design charrette for improvements to Ballard Avenue that would facilitate better long-term street dining experiences and now Council Member Strauss is working with SDOT to turn that vision of the charrette into street improvement plan for Ballard Avenue.

will be a template and test case for permanent street cafes across Seattle.

Again, Councilmember Strauss is recommending a yes vote.

Is there any additional comments or questions on amendment number 11?

Great.

Madam Clerk, could you please call the roll on the adoption of amendment number 11?

Madam chair, I'm sure that is for a favor, not oppose.

Thank you very much, Madam Clerk.

Amendment number 11 is adopted.

Colleagues, that is the end of our amendments package in front of us.

Are there any additional comments or questions on the supplemental budget as amended in front of us?

I want to just take a quick second to thank folks, especially central staff members who are on the line with us here today.

I want to thank Tom Mikesell, Dan Eater, Greg Dost, Jeff Sims, Tracy Raskliff, and Ali Panucci, along with all the other central staff members that they have been in contact with to develop the proposals in front of us.

Sejal Parikh, Aretha Basu, Aaron House, and Freddy de Cuevas in my office have been working very hard with central staff to get us ready for today.

I want to thank all of you, council colleagues, members of the committee and members of our full Council who have worked so hard on amendments along with your staff.

we appreciate your time.

I'm not seeing any additional comments on the amended supplemental budget in front of us.

If there's no additional comments on this, I will ask the clerk to call the roll.

I'm not seeing any additional comments or questions.

Vice Chair Herbold?

Yes.

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Madam Chair, Mosqueda.

Aye.

Madam Chair, that is four in favor, none opposed.

Thank you.

Colleagues, Council Bill 120112, the mid-year supplemental budget package as amended has been, the motion has carried and the committee recommendation that the bill as amended will be sent to the September 13th, 2021 Seattle City Council meeting for a final vote.

Okay, it is seven minutes to one o'clock, and we got through the biggest parts of our agenda today.

We do have three more presentations, and I understand from central staff that the first one or two are going to be relatively quick as we consider port allocation for tiny house villages, for example, and a briefing from MFTE.

I want to acknowledge our friends from FAS who have been the agenda.

We will try to get through these next two items and get to the RSGI package.

If we don't do that today, my commitment to you is that the RSGI presentation will be first on the agenda on September 10. I understand from my colleagues and thank you to I'm assuming that that would be a little bit more of a calendar interruption.

Thank you for your time on both the supplemental budget, the grant acceptance and the revenue forecast.

Those are large items to take on in addition to other items.

We have items number 7 and 8

Just briefing and discussion today, possible vote on the 10th.

I'll turn it over to Joy Hunt and Jennifer LeBrock from the Office of Housing to walk us through this presentation briefly.

Madam Chair, before we do that, can I also read the resolution to record since they're both together?

Please go ahead and do that.

Resolution 32017, a resolution calling for research engagement and presentation of information to the Mayor and City Council on the Multifamily Tax Exemption Program.

prior to considering renewal of the program in 2023 for briefing and discussion.

Thank you, Madam Clerk, and welcome back, Jennifer.

Good to see you.

Thank you for walking us through, and hello, Joy.

Again, we will have you in our committee on the 10th, so if you want to provide us with a high-level overview, I know we received the slides previously, but wanted a chance to hear some of the policy changes that are being teed up for our consideration on the 10th, so I'll turn it quickly over to you.

Great, and I'm also going to share a presentation, so please just give me one moment to do that.

Council Member Mosqueda, should we still plan on having 20 to 30 minutes, or should we plan on a shorter amount of time today?

A shorter amount if possible.

We are going to try and adjourn in about 35 minutes.

Okay.

Would it be most helpful to hear an overview of the upcoming legislation?

Is that what I understand?

Yes.

Thank you.

Because I know Council Members did have a chance to review the MFT presentation from before, and we want to make sure folks have a chance to understand the policy.

Please bear with me, then I'm going to skip through a few of the slides here.

Well, you are bearing with us, so we are happy to do so.

Thank you.

And colleagues, as they're doing that, please do take it upon yourself to, again, review the slides that are detailed, and we do appreciate that.

And if you do have questions, Erin House in my office is happy to help answer those along with our team here at OH.

And Tracey Raskliff, of course.

So good afternoon, council members.

I'm Jennifer Labreck.

I'm the Policy and Planning Manager with the, I'm sorry, the Planning and Programs Manager with the City of Seattle Office of Housing.

I'm also here with my colleague Joy Hunt today, our MFTE Program Administrator.

And I'm here to talk with you today to give you an overview of some proposed MFTE legislation, which as you mentioned, will be considered.

in which we will do a more in-depth briefing on September 10th.

So normally we come to you every four years or so to make changes to the MFTE program.

We were last before you in 2019 to renew the program.

However, during the 2021 legislative session, the legislature made some changes to the RCW that authorizes the multifamily tax exemption program.

And so we wanted to provide, we want to move forward with some legislation locally this year, really to be able to respond to time sensitive and required changes.

We also want to move forward with the resolution that states the city's intent to also address other programmatic priorities during 2023 when the entire program is up for renewal consideration.

So just as a quick overview, here are the changes that were made to the RCW, which we are responding to with our local legislation.

One, the RCW now allows local jurisdictions to offer a 12-year extension.

As a reminder, MFTE is a property tax exemption program that provides a complete exemption on the residential portion of a building in return for the property owner income and rent restricting 20 to 25% of the units.

Both the exemption and the income and rent restrictions end after 12 years.

So this is an option for jurisdictions to offer another 12-year extension for a total of 24 years.

The RCW now requires that some property owners, or I'm sorry, that some MFTE tenants receive both tenant relocation assistance and notification requirements upon expiration It has increased the tax exemption for permanently affordable homeownership projects from 12 to 20 years.

And it also now allows jurisdictions to require labor equity as a condition of participation.

So our approach is one to move forward with legislation to accommodate these changes, specifically to allow an extension option for projects that are expiring in 21, in 2022. And we'll be back in 2023 to consider overall renewal of the program so we can address any future expirations at that point in time, but we really wanted to be able to offer an extension option for projects that are expiring in the next two years.

We also have a resolution with the intent to address other programmatic priorities during renewal.

And I'll go into a bit more detail here.

So first, there are nine market rate projects expiring in the next two years with about 350 MFTE units.

And those are units with no other income and rent restrictions.

So once MFTE expires, they will go to market rate.

So under our proposed legislation, those projects would have an extension option.

The proposed affordability levels for the extension are lower than what is currently required for new projects under program six.

And that is because in general, older buildings have lower rents as relative to newer buildings on the market.

And we will also incorporate new relocation assistance and notification requirements per the RCW.

We will increase the exemption for permanently affordable homeownership projects from 12 to 20 years, which will support city funded homeownership projects that are already in our pipeline.

And finally, you know, we recognize that this is a pretty narrow piece of legislation and that there are other programmatic priorities and issues that the city will want to address.

Those are a little bit difficult to address right now, I think in part because of the volatility that the pandemic has created in the real estate market.

But we do want to see these cities intent with this resolution to address those other issues in 2023 when the empire The entire program is up for renewal.

Those of course include continuing to achieve affordable housing through this program, advancing labor equity outcomes, and providing an extension option for projects that are expiring after that 2023 date.

And just as a note we have engaged with the consultant who will be working with us to conduct a survey of MFTE or contractors that participate in MFTE or MFTE-like projects to collect information on things like wages and apprenticeship utilization.

And we are hopeful that that will help inform some of these labor equity considerations.

And I will stop there.

Thank you.

That was very efficient, and I know it doesn't do justice to this topic, which you've spent a lot of time trying to think about how we improve upon and expand MFTE.

I want to also thank our state legislative partners who have done a lot of work in the last few legislative sessions to make sure that there's truly additional tools to help incentivize building more affordable housing and more housing in general for our communities here.

I'm excited about this legislation that has just been described.

I really think that this is an important opportunity for us to continue to put forward proposals that support MFTE.

The annual report is very helpful if you haven't taken a look at that in detail or in the slides here.

I encourage you to take a look at that as we consider the possible legislation and resolution as well.

This legislation truly is a partnership with our state partners who have spent the last legislative session expanding MFTE so that we don't have expiring units in the very moment that folks are facing a housing crisis, potential eviction, and wanting to address the growing population.

Headline after headline, I kept getting alerts about how Seattle has continued to grow and is among the cities across our country who is seeing the highest number of population growth.

we need to build, we need to build that housing now, and MFTE is an important component among many different policy interventions that can help us create additional housing.

Again, the annual report helps set the stage for more in-depth discussions, as Jennifer alluded to, that will possibly be happening later, but this is helping to move forward on some narrow aspects to make sure that we can incentivize MFTE creation where possible.

Any additional comments and questions?

More to come.

Jennifer, we will see you on September 9th.

Vice Chair Hurdle, did you have a comment?

I did, I'm sorry.

That's okay.

I'm sure that the presentation covered it.

But if you just state again how many expiring units this legislation would stop from expiring.

So we there are this legislation only covers projects that are expiring in 2021 in 2022. with the idea that we would address future expirations during program renewal in 2023. There are 9 market rate properties with 350 units expiring in the next two years.

Thank you.

And then a follow-up question.

I understand that the proposal is to have different affordability levels for older buildings more than what's required under program six.

Is there a slide in here that shows the difference between the newer program six buildings and the older program six buildings, new affordability levels that will be proposed?

I would like to know if there is a slide that addresses that specific question.

What it would cost for the city to use funding to buy down the affordable units that are set to expire and compare what that would cost the city to the revenue that the city loses.

associated with MFTE.

MFTE results in some revenue being forgone, not collected, and some being redistributed to other taxpayers.

And I just want to know that we are achieving our affordability goals in the most cost-effective way.

And if it is less expensive to the city to to no longer have a tax exemption, but instead to actually provide funding to buy down these units, that's a kind of a cost-benefit analysis I'd like us to be able to consider.

Thanks.

Okay, thank you.

Great questions.

Thank you very much, Council Member.

And to Jennifer and team, thank you again.

Joy, anything else to add, Joy?

I'm not seeing a high.

Hopefully, I'll be back next year for the report.

Yes, that sounds good.

Well, and we can build it in also at the meeting on the 10th as well, if that sounds like a good sort of entree into why.

Yep.

If you're available.

Sounds great.

I appreciate your flexibility today.

Love the data that's provided on slide 3 to really lead into slide 5 to show the why and appreciate Councilmember Herbold's question as well as we look at cost-benefit analysis of the overall program.

Thank you for bringing this forward, and I want to thank Tracy Ratcliffe and Aaron House, who've constantly been saying, we've got to get this item in front of council members.

It's a really important policy discussion happening that will lead to much bigger discussions as we consider those 2023 units that you described as well.

So more to come on this, and we'll see you on the 10th.

Thank you for your flexibility, and we'll build in some more time on the 10th.

Okay, we have in front of us an item related to building tiny homes on Port of Seattle land, item number nine.

Madam Clerk, could you please read item number nine into the record?

Agenda item number nine, council bill 120165, an ordinance relating to the Department of Finance and Administrative Services, authorizing the director of the Department of Finance and Administrative Services or the director's designee to negotiate and execute a real property lease with the Port of Seattle for vacant land known as the Suvata property and ratifying and confirming certain prior acts for briefing discussion and possible vote.

Thank you very much, colleagues, and I want to welcome Jeff Sims from central staff who's with us as well.

Colleagues, this legislation is important in that it authorizes a new lease with the Port of Seattle to use their vacant land in Inner Bay for the continued use and expansion of Tiny House Village.

This would add approximately 30 additional units at the Inner Bay Village, which I have visited and appreciate the opportunity of visiting with partners from Lehigh.

It's a great location if you haven't had a chance to take a look.

The legislation is needed to allow for the new lease of the expanded property that is approximately 44,310 square feet which exceeds the current FAS director's leasing authority.

We had this legislation on the introduction and referral calendar this week, and we added it to our committee agenda today for the expansion of the tiny house village to be done as quickly as possible and to not delay any further standing up of emergency housing.

So thank you for your consideration of this today, and it is listed as a briefing discussion and possible vote.

Jeff, thank you for being with us.

Would you like to provide an overview?

Thank you.

I won't go over the context that you already provided.

As council members are aware, the 2021 adopted budget includes the creation of three new tiny home villages.

Last week, the council approved the ordinance to sign a lease with Sound Transit for the first of those villages.

This would be number two.

It's actually, as the chair noted, an expansion of an existing one, and because it's already It has an expiring lease.

It also incorporates the continuation of the existing lease.

Some key pieces to note are that the SEPA review window, or the SEPA appeal window, I should say, is not yet closed for this location.

It won't close until the end of the month.

So this will allow the council to be ready to act once that is completed and the council can move forward and take action on it.

So, as the chair indicated, to move rapidly, assuming no issues arise.

But otherwise, I don't have anything further to add.

Thank you very much.

Are there any questions on this item?

Okay, I am not seeing any questions.

Let's see here.

Colleagues, I would like to move this bill in front of us.

I move the committee recommendation of Council Bill 120165. Is there a second?

Great, it's been moved and seconded.

Are there any additional comments or questions?

Madam Clerk, could you please call the roll on the adoption of Council Bill 120165. Excuse me, on the, excuse me, could you please call the roll on the passage of Council Bill 120165?

Vice Chair Herbold?

Yes.

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Council Member Lewis?

Yes.

Madam Chair Mosqueda?

Aye.

Madam Chair, that is four in favor and none opposed.

Thank you very much.

The motion carries and the committee recommendation that the bill pass will be sent to the September 13th Seattle City Council meeting for a full vote.

Okay, thank you, colleagues.

That brings us to our last item of business, which is an important item.

We had Calvin Goings, Melissa Young, Liz Alder, Daniel Magpali, Anita Adams, and Anita, I think I still see you here, so I wonder if you could pop in for a quick second, Darcy Quinn-Mars, Phillip Saunders, and Cherie McLeod, all from the Finance and Administrative Housing Services.

I need I want to tell you on behalf of my committee and if you could please share with your colleagues as well.

We do have about 17 minutes left for today's agenda item, but I know that this is probably warranting a longer conversation.

So, Anita, I'm wondering if it is okay with you and the team.

If we might be willing to put you on first item at our September 10th meeting, and then we would have the chance to welcome you and the entire team that's the lineup here from FAS.

And I need, I see on mute still.

Okay.

I'm gonna, I'm going to make a note that what I'd like to do is include FAS and this entire team at the first part of our agenda for the September 10th meeting.

It does look like we have a number of folks who would like to present, including Director Goings and their entire team.

So they're going to check about their availability, and we're going to make sure that we include an appropriate amount of time for their update there.

I want to thank them, everybody at FAS, for their ongoing work to provide support for all of the departments, and especially during COVID, to make sure that we're providing critical support for PPE, the mass procurement, the distribution of standing up of not only COVID testing sites, but also the Lumen field.

vaccination sites, which earned national praise.

These efforts were critical in making sure that Seattle was the first U.S. city to get a vaccination rate of 70 percent of all residents over the age of 12. And we usually have the RSJI updates from FAS annually with the 2020 We want to make sure that we are really turning it over to FAS for an in-depth discussion of these items.

I want to thank Director Goings and all the other folks from FAS for their presentation.

We will find a time that works well for you.

Thank you.

Hearing none, thank you very much for your presentation.

At our next meeting, we will have pending confirmation on calendar availability.

The FAS RSGI report, the MFTE extension legislation and resolution, the capital projects quarterly report for quarter three and the strategic investment fund Thanks so much for being here with us, and thanks to the clerks for all of your time today, and thanks to two of us for your time.

350 pages of meeting materials were very well organized, so thank you all.

Anything else for the good of the order?

Okay, thanks everyone.

Have a great rest of your afternoon, and staying with us until 1.15.

Bye-bye.