Seattle City Council Briefing 12/14/2020

Good morning, colleagues.

The December 14th, 2020 council briefing meeting will come to order.

The time is 9.31 AM.

Colleagues, before the clerk takes the role, I have been informed this morning that council member Lisa Herbold will not be able to join us during council briefing, but I do look forward to seeing her at full council this afternoon at 2 o'clock PM.

With that being said, will the clerk please call the roll?

Strauss.

Present.

Juarez.

Louis.

Present.

Morales.

Here.

Mosqueda.

Present.

Peterson.

Here.

Council President Gonzalez.

Here.

Seven present.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Council members, the council rules are silent on allowing electronic participation at council briefing meetings.

In order to continue participating remotely, as we have been doing a vast majority of this year, I am going to move to suspend the council rules through January 19th, 2021, which is the date of which the governor's proclamation related to the Open Public Meetings Act has been extended to.

If there is no objection, the council rules will be suspended to allow remote council briefing meetings through January 19th, 2021, consistent with the governor's proclamation related to the Open Public Meetings Act.

Hearing no objection, the city council rules are suspended and council briefing meetings will be held remotely with council members participating electronically through January 19th, 2021. So we'll go ahead and move now to the approval of the minutes.

If there is no objection, the minutes of December 7th, 2020 will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the minutes are adopted.

President's report.

I do have some comments to make for the president's report, but I'm going to reserve my president's report for the end of the agenda today when I give my regular report as part of agenda item four, in large part because I do know we have this presentation on today's agenda, and I want to make sure that we have enough time to hear from our guests.

So I'm going to go ahead and reserve those comments for the end of the agenda today so that we can go ahead and move to agenda item three, which is a presentation on Black Brilliance Research Project Preliminary Report.

Colleagues, this morning we are joined by almost a dozen guests to present on the preliminary report of the Black Brilliance Research Project related to community safety and investments via participatory budgeting.

I want to thank each of them for being present with us this morning.

We do have approximately 45 minutes to receive this presentation and to ask questions.

And so I'm going to, at this juncture, recognize Council Member Tammy Morales, who I understand is going to make some opening remarks before she hands it over to our guests to walk us through the presentation.

Council Member Morales.

Good morning.

Thank you, Council President.

I want to thank everybody who's here to join us for this presentation.

I think it's really important that we hear from the folks who have been doing this preliminary work.

We know that this is intended to help us kind of lay the groundwork for what the program design of the participatory budgeting process will look like this coming year.

I'll have a few remarks after this as well, but I do want to say thank you to everybody.

There's been a lot of work happening in the last few months.

It's really important that as we center Black leadership and Black community organizations and honor the work that has been done, that is ongoing, work that's happening on the ground to serve our communities, that we lift up the results that we lift up the results of this preliminary research and really hear the kind of work that folks on the ground, that our neighbors are talking about as they start to think what it looks like to have community safety that doesn't center police.

So I'm looking forward to hearing from the researchers and want to thank everybody again for all that you're doing and for being here this morning.

Thanks.

Thank you, council.

And with that said, I will go ahead and get started if it's, yep, okay, great.

Go for it.

Okay, thank you.

Thanks, John.

Thank you.

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All right, y'all, with that, that is one of our researchers, Latanya Horace, Sister Love, and one of the researchers who will be presenting today.

Good morning, everyone.

I'm here with our team to present the preliminary research findings from the Black Brilliance Research Project.

The Black Brilliance Research Project, by way of background, was made possible because of decades of organizing in defense of Black lives and support of Black liberation.

This summer, after several murders related to police and police action, In the summer, we came together at King County Equity Now, which is a Black-led ecosystem of Black-led orgs here in the Seattle and King County region, along with Decriminalize Seattle, which is a BIPOC-led coalition spearheading pro-community, pro-people initiatives and divestment from policing, came together and wrote the 2020 blueprint for police divestment and community reinvestment.

So that happened.

And then every day, community members marched and continue to march, hold demonstrations and advocate for the city to act and to implement Black-led equity solutions.

While waiting for the city to act, King County Equity Now and our partners came together to start this work.

And in response to community pressure, Seattle City Council overrode the mayor's veto, allocating $3 million towards this historic Black community-led research.

So a lot of people want to know, what does the overall project look like?

It's very iterative.

Here is a little diagram.

But basically, we look back at what issues are, what data exists, what our elders tell us, what stories exist in community, what solutions we've shared before, and how those have been enacted.

And then we develop ideas about a research direction.

We then talk to community, collect data, use art, read resources, et cetera, interpret the results and present our findings.

The three main questions for this research are what creates true community safety, what creates true community health, and what do we need to thrive?

And what I'll be presenting today in part is thanks to the incredible work from our researchers One question that I hear often is, what does it take to be a researcher on the Black Billions Research Project?

It takes a lot.

Our researchers all undergo the Citi Program Human Subjects Ethics training that educates our researchers about the ethical principles around doing research with humans, as well as the regulatory requirements for conducting human research.

We also have Onboarding meetings, where we help provide context, answer questions, and provide support.

We have a research manual, a cookbook, of which we've shared with the council about 90 pages of that cookbook, which includes research methods, templates, examples, step-by-step guides.

It's just a very detailed resource that we use and we continue to build out together.

On top of that, we have video and live trainings that provide support and direction.

We have research professionals like myself and Latanya Sevier, who provide technical and review support for all the projects.

And then we also have regular anti-oppression education and discussion.

So it's a lot of work to be a researcher.

The relationships to the research, though, are incredibly rich and intimate.

We have over 100 researchers.

That includes youth and elders, people in between, people from all walks of life.

We have people with experience with the criminal legal system at every single step.

And we have cultural workers, artists, healers, educators, advocates, students, programmers, just a lot of experience on our team.

They're involved at every single step of the research process.

So this isn't one of those things where it's like, oh yeah, they're collecting data, therefore their researchers know.

They are involved in developing research topics, questions, analysis.

Yes, they collect data and they also report on findings like we see here today.

And they're not just kind of thinking about it in terms of theory.

Our researchers, like many aspects of the expertise they bring, bring lived experience to this work.

And so they really focus on how to present this work in a way that is accessible and accountable to the communities that they serve and that they're embedded in.

And then finally, when it comes to the researchers and relationship to the work, I just want to really highlight that relationship building is essential to this.

We build relationships across teams.

We build relationships across different aspects of community that are usually pushed and pulled apart from each other.

And we're built with this strong focus on thinking about relationships and facilitation as being core to this work to develop new collaborations and new insights.

So who are our researchers?

So here on the left side, I have our current teams.

On the right side, I have some prospective teams.

And you know what?

Every day, I feel like there's a new group of people who are interested in joining the Black Brilliance Research.

And what do they do?

Well, they simplify stats.

They ask for nuance and story.

So this isn't your normal, like you go to a focus group with your pre-planned questions all the time.

And if someone says something interesting, you don't dig in.

No.

People ask for nuance.

They ask for details.

They bring generations together and they amplify the solutions that are on the ground.

If you're like me, you are a research nerd and you love to know all the details about the different methods that people use.

Yes, I see you.

Well, here we have lit review.

We have secondary data analysis, which is where we like rerun analyses or we reconduct research that's already happened.

We do dialogues, interviews, focus groups, Zoom calls, in-person meetings, art-based approaches with photos, videos, murals, quantitative analyses, of course, and then also case studies where we look at what works and talk about what are some of the factors that gave us the success that we want to see.

So let's do a deeper dive in details.

Here are some of the five big picture things that we are hearing over and over and over again from the research across methods.

These are the five things that people really want to dig in on, which is more housing and physical spaces, specifically Black-led, Black-centered residential and commercial spaces.

It comes up a lot.

And this is a priority that's shared by non-Black people as well.

I highlight That here, particularly because when I was presenting this before, that was one of the most common questions.

Physical space is essential.

Mental health is clearly, again, one of the top issues that come up over and over again.

Now, mental health is a top issue across different aspects of Seattle.

I would imagine you as city council members have been hearing a lot from your constituents about the need for more mental health supports.

especially during the pandemic, what we're seeing is like a real, real push for there to be more culturally responsive and caring mental health networks that are led by people with lived experience.

So that is a really key feature that's going to appear over and over again in the research, that people with lived experience, people who are closest to the issues or closest to the solutions and can really create the world we want to see.

So for mental health, that's going to require new and equitable payment structures so that our healers, people who are providing proper care, are able to do so.

The third highlight that I will give is about youth and children.

Schools are not really meeting for a lot of families, which means that children at home.

And so child care and out-of-school time supports are crucial, huge priorities for several teens in several communities around Seattle.

particularly for children facing systemic violence and trauma.

The fourth piece is economic development.

Again, this shouldn't be a surprise, I would imagine.

We have the triple crisis of COVID-19, economic recession, and systemic racism.

Two of these actually existed before COVID-19 entered the scene.

And once COVID-19 hit, everything's just been amplified.

And the very last piece that I'll hold up today And we can dig into any of these for the Q&A is about crisis and wellness.

And so there's strong support for alternatives to the currently harmful 911 system.

And we see that council has already started to take action there by really shifting 911 dispatch into a new model.

What we're really hearing a lot from community is the need for that, the new 911 crisis system, wellness system to be staffed by trained and skilled community members.

Again, because lived experience is just one of the most crucial aspects of what we're hearing over and over again.

On that note, community is eager to build a better world.

I'm not going to read everything on this slide.

I'm just going to summarize where we're at.

But most people are not interested in continuing to invest in policing and to systems that harm us.

Instead, We are interested in learning how to keep each other safe without police coercion and the threat of systemic violence.

And I say we're interested in learning how to do this while also recognizing that in many communities they are already doing this and they're just not funded and supported at a level where we can really scale yet.

But that is changing.

And so what we're seeing is a need to invest in lived experience.

and need to address root causes because we need to stop punishing individuals for systems failures.

And then finally, to fully embrace a new normal.

I really appreciate the early remarks that were made before this presentation.

about the need to really follow Black leadership.

Here, one of the most consistent findings is the need to listen, follow, and normalize leadership from those closest to the issues.

Part of that is about fostering solidarity across those oppressions that typically push us apart from each other.

So those include things like anti-Black racism, transphobia, ableism, ageism, sexism, et cetera.

But it's really about really fully embracing the idea that things are just gonna be done differently now.

Now here we have who we've heard from.

The numbers have actually increased since then, but I'll go ahead and present these, which is across teams.

We've heard from well over 2,000 community members.

We've heard from over 2,000 community members just from our main survey, the Community Needs Assessment Survey.

And then as several of our teams will present, they've also heard from so many people.

As y'all may be aware, over half of Seattle's population is under 45. And in our sample, about 60% are under 45. In terms of race, we've heard from people across all groups, ethnicity as well.

Two thirds are BIPOC, that is black and brown community members, including people with mixed heritages.

About 60% are born here in Seattle and the rest are transplants like me or they're immigrants or refugees or from several different places.

And our main survey is in 15 languages.

And we also have multilingual focus groups interviews, community conversations, et cetera.

Here I have the overall recommendations.

This is another slide we can dig in deeper for the Q&A, but it's a lot of what you've heard so far.

One, stop causing harm.

So we want there to be a real reckoning with the fact that some of the systems you have in place hurt us.

Let's stop doing that.

Two, create inclusive policies.

And for that, it's really about prioritizing that lived experience and really thinking about what needs to happen differently to allow that to come to the front.

Third, it's follow Black leadership.

That goes without saying, but it's really there are different solutions that come from those closest to the issues.

Fourth is pay for community expertise.

So that includes funding community priorities.

And it also includes doing things like this, where you are intentionally creating the opportunity for a community to lead with its expertise and providing a support role.

And finally, investing in thriving solutions.

And so when things work, we invest in that.

A big piece of this research was about figuring out what should participatory budgeting look like?

What does a roadmap look like that's really rooted in equity?

The most important thing that I want to highlight for you is just going to be talking about the steering committee, because the steering committee is the group that's going to be setting a lot of the rules of what PB looks like.

And it's also one of many different bodies that will be informing this work.

You can see on the left side, we have that the idea here is that the Black Brilliance Research priorities and the stuff that we're the things that we are researching informs what the steering committee is going to look like.

So we have priorities.

These are created, shared and vetted with weekly teach-ins.

We have community conversations.

We have several different ways for people to be involved, including taking our main survey.

We're also developing out steering committee priorities as part of this research and defining and really articulating what accountability could look like.

Sometime, likely in January, it's going to be the part where we start kicking off the city, that is, starts kicking off the process of selecting the steering committee.

The idea here is that using the Black Brilliance Research priorities, using the steering committee priorities that we identify and the accountability structure that we identify will allow us to be able to post criteria for people to apply for the steering committee.

And then from there, the steering committee can start.

This slide is just here to remind y'all what the overall PB process looks like, where the steering committee is kind of throughout, but we've got design and giving ideas and voting, et cetera.

This slide is here just in case there's questions about the PB process.

So steering committee experiences.

Here are the experiences so far that we know have strong consensus across the community.

for what people want to see reflected on that steering committee.

One is people with lived experience with every single stage of the criminal legal system.

So people who are formerly incarcerated.

Again, because those closest to the issues are closest to the solution, we want to make sure as we're building out a new model of really addressing what creates true community safety, health, and thriving, that people who are formerly incarcerated, some of them are on that steering committee.

as well as black people with ties to Seattle, people who have that institutional knowledge about the way that PB has happened before for their communities and what some of those shortcomings are, as well as commitments that have been made to community and that you know have or haven't come to play.

That historical and institutional knowledge is crucial, and so having people from Seattle, especially Black people from Seattle, is really important there.

At least two youth, as well as people from the African diaspora, are also strong consensus from community in terms of sitting on the steering committee.

There are a couple of other experiences that will likely appear in the December 21st preliminary report, but we're still trying to analyze to make sure that we are that we're clear that there's the strong consensus like these before we put them forward.

But the most important thing, perhaps, for a lot of community members is talking about what accountability looks like.

So this summer, you may remember there was a big, one of the big things that was happening was we won PB.

It's like, yes, we won it.

And this research is going to inform it, which is happening.

And then almost immediately the mayor announced a task force that would somehow be able to, you know, think about what sort of investments decoupled from divestments community might want.

And a lot of the initial concerns around the community is about transparency and also about what an accountability model looks like when you have these sort of two different groups that are working on what seemed to be the same thing, but not quite.

And so accountability has been a common thread.

But this is a story that existed long before this year, where anytime you have task force and work groups and, you know, interdepartmental teams and like all of these different organizing bodies representing community, How do you decide how they're accountable?

On the left side, here are some things that we're hearing is really important for the steering committee and other bodies to have with each other.

So things like mutual respect and trust and partnership and engaging in ongoing work to create inclusive and positive relationships with each other.

Those are important in any kind of organizing body.

Here I'm naming them explicitly for the steering committee.

And on the right-hand side, we have accountability to the public.

So what are people really looking for?

Things like weekly reports that are accessible.

So what that might look like is hosting weekly Zoom calls or having podcasts or media tours or just there's a variety of different ways, but really being transparent on a weekly basis and also having things like office hours where people can pop in and ask their question and get like an actual person who will be able to talk to them and describe their decision making process as well as answer questions.

One thing that's really important to note is that people want to be able to have relationships with those who are representing them.

And they want to make sure that if the committee is acting in ways that are not aligned with what they want as community members, that the committee will respond with compassion and in a timely fashion.

So a big part of our research, especially in December, has been refining this out and providing more details in our report.

And then this is essentially the last big slide and then I'll start handing this over to our team, which is about priorities for the city's role.

So this is a partnership.

Participatory budgeting is going to be a partnership between community and city and partners who know more about best practices for participatory budgeting.

And the city's role is twofold.

One, to follow community leadership.

This is really important.

As you know, this whole lived experience, you know, Black leadership, et cetera, that's a big theme.

And what we really want to see is that communities should extend the invitation to departments before they start the work, and that the city departments really take the lead from community members with a focus on community development.

We want to see departments that have track records working with tens of millions of dollars.

And we also want to see departments that are successful at knowing how to get dollars out the door in ways that are responsive to community needs.

What this means in terms of different kinds of roles, that instead of strategic advisors who sort of tell community this is how it's going to go, we're looking for people who are more like a grant maker, like financial support kind of role.

In fact, that financial support role of financial management compliance support is one of the most important things we're looking for.

We're also looking for specific kinds of data support, especially around visualizing racial equity.

So we're looking at, you know, how do you map out investments and how those have flowed over time in different neighborhoods.

And there aren't that many departments that have access to that kind of data.

And we're also looking for liaisons.

So we're looking for this work to be held by a few different departments, but led by one.

Specifically, we see strong support for the EDI division within the Office of Planning and Community Development.

We see strong partnership in the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, as well as the Office of Civil Rights.

And we have more details that we'll be providing in our report for what those teams could look like.

Great.

And so with that said, the rest of this time is really for our community partners.

I will be, at this point, our first team is gonna be Freedom Project, who, let's see, are we on the call?

Lindsey will be presenting on Freedom Project.

Good morning.

Morning.

First, I want to acknowledge the voices that are not here to speak today.

Freedom Project's researchers, program managers, and program support who took their heart and their lived experience and brought their black brilliance to this project.

Being born Black in the United States comes with a trauma that is birthed by a nation that still asks us to prove our humanness.

During this time of COVID-19, the Black community is experiencing two types of pandemics.

One that is a virus that is killing us.

The other is racial inequalities that are killing us.

After witnessing murders locally and within the United States, we marched asking for our blackness to be recognized as being human.

Even within this Black Brilliance Project, I'm here with three minutes to try to explain the brilliance of over 30 people who are incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, or who have loved ones who have been or are incarcerated.

However, to do that, I would need more time.

The city council asked, what does the black community need?

And how should we reinvest in community?

First, the reimbursement model does not work.

It creates a barrier for smaller organizations who are the community and already doing the work within the community.

Second, money needs to flow into the black community with no barriers or strings attached.

Trust that our community has the ability to solve our own problems.

Lastly, our trauma is no longer going to be on display so that we can continue to grow systems that were meant to keep us in poverty, prisons, and within the nonprofit industrial complex.

Growing systems that are already in place and not investing in the black community is a crime.

It is your responsibility as the Seattle City Council to really take the time and invest not only financially, but study our voice within these projects.

I ask you to really go through all of the projects that have been submitted to King County Equity Now and hear the voices of the people you asked to have a voice within this space.

I wanted to end my time with you with a quote from Freedom Project's Executive Director, David Heppard.

The only way to mitigate the historical distrust experienced by the Black community is to share power.

Power that is historically has been owned by dominant culture structure.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And this is Freedom Project's team.

It is incredible.

You can see that there's over 377 years of lived experience with incarceration, over 1600 years of experience navigating systems of oppression.

And in red, you see formerly incarcerated.

For those of you who, there's like, in case, just to make this a little bit more accessible, that's like almost the full top third.

In the middle, in the green, you can see people who are currently incarcerated.

And in black, you can see impacted family members at the bottom.

Thank you so much, Lindsay, for presenting on that.

And then we have East African Community Services will be next.

Amir, are you here?

I am!

I will control your slides for you.

Okay, well, peace and blessings.

Thank you for allowing us the space to be in here.

I wanna send a shout out to Freedom Project.

Thank you for your phenomenal work.

Your work precedes you and we are all better for it.

So again, my name is Amir, so can he, him pronouns with East African Community Services.

Quite a bit came out of our research and I have to make some updates on this.

I'm gonna just clarify that we had We had 360 micro convenings virtually to really ascertain what the community saw.

We at EACS hold that East African youth and families are the subject matter experts on their own humanity, similar to most of the people who are part of the Black Brilliance Research.

It's not about we who are oftentimes education.

And in some cases, class privilege as staff, it's really about the people.

And so we were able to do, again, 360 convenings, 250 adults were surveyed, adults slash caregivers, and 300 youths.

I think it's almost like 900 people, 900 interactions went through this process.

So, okay, I'm not gonna do a lot of reading here, because you guys can read, but I will talk about the way that, you know, The server was completed by the community, right?

Ages 11 to 24 and their caregivers as well.

Let's go to the next screen.

Three big issues that surfaced, I'll get them out of the way quickly.

Mental health was huge for us.

Community education and opportunities were huge for us.

In addition to housing and COVID-related crisis supports, youth, social, emotional, psychological, and creating activities that reduce the harm of isolation were also high on our list.

That's fine.

Thank you so much.

So community and education opportunities, right?

So there are gaps for networks and leadership opportunities, which may prevent youth from upward mobility.

This also may impact youth's perceptions of success with lack of representation.

And of course, hashtag representation always matters.

Close to half do not know or are unsure if they know their community leaders.

are unsure, do not know of volunteer opportunities in their community, and do not have at least one mentor in their lives.

Of course, all of us in the Black Brains Research Project have been working hard to create opportunities for mentorships for our kids.

So other findings, requested programs and supports.

Our research shows that 48% are asking for sports, outdoors, and social activities in terms of the social-emotional piece.

37% want additional and comprehensive college support help, which includes applications.

Also, once they're admitted, help with matriculating through the college experience.

30% want additional arts and culture and tutoring and homework.

Open-ended comments included demand for strong mental health resources and a safe space where people could be unapologetically Black.

Next screen.

So the findings suggest that youth need supports in all areas of their lives, and that also applies to the parents as well.

These categories are separated in writing, but are also challenges that are intertwined.

With investments to holistic services may also come mentorship, trust, healing to move forward and increase educational attainment.

To get to long-term outcomes for health and thriving families is to increase social mobility.

Meeting youth's social and emotional needs currently is critical for educational attainment.

The mantra for East African Community Services, our organizing mantra that we will use for the next couple of years is we are family, always.

We will do whatever is necessary to make sure that the disparities that we've mentioned here are eliminated and that we create new opportunities for our youth not to survive as immigrant and refugee families, but rather to thrive.

And so thank you for your time.

Thank you so much, that's super helpful.

I am doing a quick time check and I'm knowing that we're going to have questions from council.

And so, and I still want to make sure that we have an opportunity for y'all to present.

So I do wonder, we'll do a couple of more presentations and then we'll do time for questions.

This is the silent task force, Latanya and her team.

Latanya is the voice that you heard at the beginning of this program.

Good morning, everybody.

We're really honored to be here and hello to all of the wonderful research projects that are a part of the family.

We're all family now.

We are all family.

So I'm so glad to be with you and Sean.

This is our representation, our newest art piece that shows what community looks like to us.

This is our new logo and we are vested in the community and we have been for many years in different ways.

So we can move to the next slide.

So just some of the work that we do, and this is just, no, that is not Mahogany's work, that is Kamet's work, Nikita Brooks, and she's on our team.

So she has a lot of, we have a lot of great artists on our team.

So Sisters Rock the Arts is one of the, my co-founder is Nichelle Alderson, who is a nutritional therapist and a mental health practitioner, as well as, She is a co-founder and a healing artist.

And so Sisters Rock the Arts is an artist coalition black led by women.

We do a lot of education with our work, a lot of social movement.

We serve our community on multiple levels, not just with art, but we make space for folks who are, who may be homeless, disabled, LGBTQ, whatever.

We welcome everybody to a loving space where we fellowship with music in many levels of our industry.

So we've been doing that for five years and we're doing it now live streaming because we are global citizens and we're just not going to do it in person to put anybody in jeopardy.

As a part of our research here, we did research countywide because our focus is African-American communities that have been people who have been displaced, gentrified or disenfranchised from our traditional community.

And so there was a lot of data.

And just the short time, one month of surveying, we found a lot around community health.

Did people have access to culturally specific mental health?

counseling, substance abuse treatment, and whatnot.

And the numbers are pretty staggering.

Many say yes, but then when we look at who didn't, there's a lot of no's, who didn't.

So there's, you know, needs to be balanced there.

When we look at if folks are afraid of law enforcement in their community, there were more people who were than not.

And then with community safety, it was like a half and half, where there were folks who felt safe and folks who didn't.

It was very interesting to see the ebbs and flows of who felt, you know, like they were safe and they were thriving in their community and community health, holistic health.

You can move forward, Sean.

I'm going to wrap up quickly.

And so we have a lot of work because we consider ourselves community connectors because we believe in working collectively to build stronger community response and accountability is paramount to the survival of our communities and to the thriving of our communities.

And so we just have a list here of some of the folks that we work with and some of our peer to peer recovery advocacy and community outreach that we've been doing as well, because oftentimes the recovery community gets overlooked, and so many of our community are involved in recovery, and we need more of that, which is, you know, points to what we're talking about around the response to crisis and folks who are in crises.

You know, sometimes it's a mental health thing, sometimes it's a substance use thing, but either way, we need to have culturally specific responses to those issues.

And then, as we wrap up, we can move to the last slide, Sean.

This is my team, the Silent Task Force, a very illustrious group of wonderful individuals who are community people who have varying skills to do a lot of wonderful work, which we're already doing and we're gearing up for the new year for work that we have been doing, but we had to reset for COVID because nothing is in person anymore.

So we do a lot of mentoring, a lot of working with schools around prevention with our young people.

And at this particular time, we just came upon some new work with the Brinton Public Schools to work directly with at-risk families who are not showing up.

The families, the kids aren't showing up, can't get in touch with the parents.

So it's like we need to have more family engagement and more social emotional learning for our young people.

So we're geared up for that in our mentorship programs.

for our young black girls, black and brown girls countywide, because there's really nothing for them.

And they've been like, Ms. Latonya, what's up?

Well, what are we gonna do?

And so we have to make that happen as well as other things that we're gonna be doing.

So we have a full year and we're looking forward to partnering with our partners because teamwork makes the dream work.

And that work is exciting.

So we believe in reinvesting in our community and being a part of that process and a part of this Black Brilliance process.

And I thank you all for hearing us today.

Thank you, Sean.

Thank you.

I'm getting messages that we have to turn this over to Q&A, so I'm going to go ahead and do that.

Thanks, Sean, and to the rest of the presenters for taking the time to walk us through the rich material included in the PowerPoint presentation.

Really appreciate it.

Sorry that we don't have a lot more time for this, but of course, this is just the beginning of the conversation.

This is certainly not the end by any means.

So plenty of time for us to have both conversations in a public setting, but also on one-on-one setting with those council members who are interested in getting more information from each of you about the different components of the research project that you have so graciously spent your time this morning describing for us already.

So colleagues, I do want to open it up for any questions or comments about portions of the presentation or the overarching goal and scope of the research project.

Any questions or comments?

Council Member Morales, please.

Thank you.

I'm sure my colleagues have a lot of questions so I just want to focus on two things.

One is the role of the city, which, as I'm hearing the conversation really is not about direct community engagement or or even directing the program design itself, but in providing assistance with contract management, grants management, compliance issues once the contracts are made, and really not engaging until we're in the sort of past the idea collection stage.

So I just want to confirm that that's what I'm hearing.

And then the second question is about who the right department is.

We have done participatory budgeting a couple of times in the city.

We've done youth choice, youth voice.

We've done your voice, your choice.

And both times that was run through the same department, Department of Neighborhoods.

It sounds like there are some particular questions or things that you would like to explore in terms of doing a different department or maybe a different constellation of departments.

So I'm wondering if you can talk about that a little bit as well.

Sure.

One, the participatory budgeting process is a team effort with the city playing a support role, yes, in terms of the financial management contracting compliance aspects, but also at the very beginning, there will be a steering committee and there will be different work groups that are supporting this work, different committees.

And there are opportunities for people who are embedded in city departments to participate in that work as well, which means that no, it's not waiting until the ideas are being collected, but actually early, early on in the design phase of PB, there will be roles for people who are embedded in the city, as well as different areas of community to be participating.

So things like an accountability committee that'll be in charge of making sure that monitoring and finding out if there's any concerns about the process, surfacing those concerns to relevant parties.

So there'll be, you know, committees like that, there's a lot more details will go into the report.

But basically, there's a role earlier on than just in the design phase.

The second piece is there is strong consensus with people who are familiar with the participatory budgeting process in Seattle, that the Department of Neighborhoods should not be the main holder of this work.

And I'm not usually so direct, but the feedback is very direct.

And that what we're looking for is a world where we are Looking at the data, seeing that there are significant disparities in the previous iterations of PB and learning from that so that when we design this new PB process, we account for that.

There's no reason why...

Oh my goodness.

There's no reason why a particular department who has done something a couple of times should always be the holder of that work.

There's the opportunity for a community to reflect, reassess, and then make a new recommendation.

The new recommendation is not Department of Neighborhoods.

Department of Neighborhoods could participate in this.

Again, there's many different committees, but they should not be the main holder.

Instead, we're looking at the EDI out of the Office of Planning and Community Development to hold that work for their long-term vision, for their long-term success and trust in the community, really focusing on equitable development.

That is a win for us and a department that did not just go in thinking that they were the presumed holder of this work is also important.

It is really common for certain departments in the city to assume that the community has given them permission without asking for it.

And so many people were adamant that that is absolutely the wrong call.

So to be clear, that's the direction.

Any follow-up questions, Council Member Morales?

Okay.

that.

Thank you.

Colleagues, any other questions?

Councilmember Mosqueda and then Councilmember Juarez.

Thank you.

Thank you all very much for this presentation.

I also want to thank you for your earlier report.

I think it was a 15 or 16 page initial report that you published a few weeks ago.

Right towards the end of our budget.

I want to thank you for that.

and, you know, respective to how slow things have moved in the past, it is really helpful to be able to hear today all of the work you're doing.

And I think every time I hear about it, I understand more and more of the breadth of the type of work that you're doing.

So thank you for that.

I know Council Member Herbold, if she were here, would probably be able to answer this as well, but can you remind us, are there any planned reports back to Public Safety or to the Council as a whole that we can anticipate or that the public can anticipate as we learn more about how these systems are getting set up and then any initial results that you continue to see in advance of your full report that will be forthcoming?

Is that already baked into the report back system?

And if so, could you tell us more about when we can expect those?

Yes, and so every Monday we have community teach-ins and sometimes they're also press conferences from 3.30 to 4.30.

Those are streamed on Facebook and YouTube and Periscope and Twitter and all of those things.

So that's one way community has been involved.

We also have office hours twice a week where we present and allow people to answer questions.

We meet with council member Morales's office once a week.

Now I'm on the research to say how it's going and my understanding is Councilman Morales will then be presenting out to the rest of Council and then basically what I think January is going to look like I know December there's a recess.

January will kick up and we'll be doing a lot more report outs, events, et cetera.

We have our December 21st preliminary report, which will be more detailed than this.

Also apologies to my other teams who did not present today, but we will share out these slides and they do have video and content, including details about all many of the other projects involved.

So I would say that if you're interested in being involved, it's actually really hard not to.

because there's multiple touch points during the week where you can come in and ask questions or listen to how things are going.

And that'll continue to be the case through the end of our contract.

And for teams who will be doing this work beyond, there will also be regular updates.

We're trying to demonstrate what accountability might look like in a process with many key players.

And I think that it's all hands on deck.

all communications channel, talk to your neighbors, talk to your elders, talk to your community type situation.

Council President, if I can follow up on that for just a second.

You're muted, but I think you said sure.

I'm so sorry.

You think I would have figured this out by now.

I was saying yes, but I know that Council Member Mosqueda has a follow-up question.

So if your response is related to that, that's great.

I just want to say that the contract does ask that the final report be presented in my committee at the end of the first quarter.

So that will be sort of the official report back, Council Member Mosqueda.

But as Sean said, throughout this process, we will be updating folks as well.

Thank you.

Council President, thank you so much.

I also recognize that as we think about this paradigm shift to investing in community, that is a good reminder that the report backs are not in public safety and it is an equitable development.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

And I look forward to getting updates from you.

And if there is the opportunity to sit in on your committee and hear any of the updates in addition to the public forums that are being provided, that would be great.

Yeah, this is a good reminder that we often think of this as, you know, public safety or the traditional public safety model.

And that is exactly precisely why this report comes back to equitable development, because it's investing early to ever prevent or to earlier invest in community and in families to make sure that there are fewer incidences of people having to interact with police and criminal justice system.

So thank you for that reminder, and I'll look forward to additional report backs.

And thanks so much for the presentation today, and I'll look forward to reading through the rest of the slides.

Thank you.

And I also forget to mention, we do do written reports as well weekly.

And so we do that to our community, but we'll also be sending y'all weekly report outs as well, because I know that not all of you can attend our teach-in, so that's also available to you.

Yeah, and I and I think that teach ends are currently proposed to occur on Monday afternoons at the same time that we're in full council meetings, which pretty much means we'll, we'll never be able to attend them.

Unfortunately, because of the ongoing conflicts, but getting access to those weekly reports.

consistently and regularly will be really important.

We don't want to create too much bureaucracy in terms of how you can get it to us.

So I would just propose that perhaps Council Member Morales is the chair responsible for overseeing this work.

Your office be the point and then your office have the responsibility of distributing that information to the full council.

Okay, Council Member Juarez, I know you are in the queue.

And colleagues, if anyone else is interested, I see Council Member Peterson.

So Council Member Juarez and then Council Member Peterson.

Good morning.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Let me turn this up here.

First of all, thank you so much for the presentation.

I will probably sit in on some of these teachings because there's a bunch of questions I want to ask, but I don't want to take up all this time this morning.

So I do have three questions.

Some of them are just pretty technical and straightforward.

But before I begin, I want to start with the observation that the analogies in the approach that Black Brilliance is taking towards self-determination and empowerment and change and policy and how you sustain that so much mirrors Indian country, which is second nature to me.

So thank you for that.

It's interesting to watch.

Hopefully we can be a part of that.

I know we have a partnership as city electeds, but I guess my issue for my questions, first of all, are for Sean.

So, Sean, one thing.

So the preliminary report we'll get, you said that will be more detailed on December 21st.

So can we submit questions to you ahead of that?

Like what we would like?

I'm concerned about the sustainability, but I'll get to that question in a minute.

So we could send that to you directly from the PowerPoint.

What kind of questions and maybe some guidance for some of us who are, you know, entering elder territory, so kind of have done some of this stuff before, you know, how to take brick and mortar, how to build something, how to hire people, how to hire a revenue stream that is sustaining, self-sustaining for generations to come.

I'm hoping that I can share some of that wisdom.

I have a little bit experience in that area.

Sure.

Great.

And that goes to everyone who's viewing this.

If you have feedback that you want to see reflected in that report, please send it to research at King County equity now dot com open invitation to all y'all.

Yeah, I think this is a really wonderful opportunity.

I've been sharing a lot of what's been going on with Indian country tribal governments.

And I've had other discussions offline with some Black Lives Matter folks in leadership and other African-American communities about the real core for me is self-determination, that that's what's going on here.

And obviously, the African-American Black community is different than tribes because tribes are governments and there's a whole political relationship.

But the issues are the same.

You're concerned about safety, community, mental health, education, housing, social services, you name it.

And at some point, you need to take that power back and say, talk to us, we know how to fix it, and we'll show you how we can do it.

It may not be the way you all do it, but we actually have a way to do it.

So I had a question for LaTanya.

LaTanya, I was really interested to hear that your organization on the, I want to know a little bit more about the more family engagement what that actually means.

And then my last question was for whoever can answer this.

I don't know if it's Sean or someone else, but I really want to know from you guys, what does success look like short-term and long-term?

So maybe I can ask LaTanya her question first, and then maybe somebody can respond in general.

I don't expect you to drill down on all of this.

So I have a working idea so I can articulate that.

Thank you.

Okay, so thank you for the question, Council Member Juarez.

We are community connectors and we partner a lot doing prevention work with schools.

We started in middle school, but we're now working with elementary school as to do more prevention work.

And we're working with the Renton Innovation Zone Partnership in Renton and Skyway area, where of course there's a larger increased amount of African American folks that live there due to you know, all the issues that we're here talking about today.

And so we're working directly with, uh, one of the elementary schools who presented a problem of practice, which was engaging with the young people, um, finding where they're at, because so many of them have dropped off the radar, engaging parents, parents, they're not able to contact parents and just finding different innovative ways to contact them, find out what their needs are, find out how to support them with, um, the social emotional learning piece, as well as with internet, as well as what other cultural barriers they may have.

And we're mainly talking about black and brown students and ELL families.

So we're partnering with several other partners along with the school, the principal, and we're coming together with their social emotional learning teams for Renton School District, as well as with the school and as well as with our team and several other teams.

It's a partnership where we're going to be working together with the information and data that they already have, bringing our know-how and our skill set, which is engaging families and young people.

And so that is, it is just now beginning in terms of us.

We have a plan already put in place, but we'll be working the plan and finalizing it along with all of the other groups so that we work in succinct with the messaging and the outreach and how we're going to go about locating these families that are like off the, no one knows where they are, right?

So, and that's, and it's a lot of them.

So it's a really emergent, urgent need that we're trying to serve.

I hope that answers your question.

I'll take a stab at your harder question, which is just like what does basically I think my understanding of your question is like near term and long term goals in terms of equity.

And like, you know, what are the goals?

And I think that what's really exciting about this project is that different teams have different answers in terms of the specifics, which I think the specifics are really where the work is at.

When you stay too high level, it's really hard to kind of imagine what that's going to look like.

But I think this slide here, slide 12 or page 12 of the report sums it up pretty well, which is like, we want a better world.

And for a community, that's an eager desire.

That's not like, oh, in five, 10 years, a couple of generations, like, no, we want it now.

So that means, you know, seeing that investments have shifted, you know, the root causes are being addressed.

We're going to stop punishing people for systems failures when embracing the normal.

And I think that those are short term and long term goals associated with that rooted in the specifics.

So for some people, the specifics is about like we need to be cutting harmful systems now.

We need to be defunding the police now.

We need to be reducing courts now.

I think there's certain specifics related within this.

Mental health, getting it shifted over to a new funding system so that we can provide for our providers now.

So I think I'll leave it there, which is just that these are the big picture things, and then for each specific team, they have areas within this that they give as their examples.

Forever Safe Spaces, for example, whose slides we did not get a chance to go to, has a both short-term and long-term goal.

section for so if y'all want to know kind of what their team looks like they're focusing on creative economy and how to create a truly equitable creative economy where artists are not being you know exploited and pushed out of the city or used for their ability to sort of like prop up the status quo and instead like be able to create sustainable just you know work that really reflects their lived experience and the messages that they think are important in healing and for a thriving community.

So it really just depends on the specifics.

The high level overview, though, is here in this page for you, Council Member Juarez.

It's interesting that you went back to that page, because that was the page that I had flagged, particularly the stop punishing individuals for systems for failures.

That was one of your I was looking at it this morning that spoke to me. just inherently from my former days as a public defender and a judge and legal services and juvie, you know, there was a time where so much behavior was criminalized, like, you know, a runaway.

No one ever asked, why was this kid running away?

It's not a crime.

That got decriminalized.

So I understand the thinking, but I'll be honest with you, Sean, at some point too, I want to be able to, I wanted to hear from you about how you would be responding to criticisms and concerns about what this actually looks like.

Like, where do you want to be in one year?

This time next year, where do you want to be?

Whether you get there or not, I'm just trying to get a sense of, from you, Sean, and everyone else, which I also push when I'm in the tribal communities, I understand what you're shooting for.

But if it were up to you, this time next year, December 14th, 2021, What should we be sitting in?

What should the walls of institutional, what should it look like right now?

Even if you're not quite there, that gives me a roadmap to say, okay, I know, I see where they're marching towards, I get it.

Yeah, I think community has been pretty vocal this year about the kinds of things we're looking for.

So when we looked at the duress and de minimis ordinances that are about like really thinking about reducing the criminalization of mental health struggles, of poverty, of things like that, I think of that as a very concrete example of how do you stop punishing individuals for our system's failures.

I also see the same things reflected in the calls to not fund more police and to instead invest more money in community.

And I see it in the cries of parents that are looking at the breaking news stories about the fact that Seattle Public Schools has been caging children, et cetera.

I think a lot of the specifics on what this looks like comes from listening to what community has been saying for a while and continues to say.

For me, the goal for a year from now is that we are not wasting time sort of pretending like there's two equally valid points to every single issue.

When on one side, it's like they're literally people's lives on the line and the other side, it's like people's like half opinions or like vague inclinations.

And you're like, well, do you care more about people's lives or do you care more about people's feelings?

And it's like, I think for the most part, what we're seeing is that these are life and death issues for us and for our communities, for our children, for our elders.

And it's time that I want a year from now for us not to be debating, you know, whether that's equally relevant as people's notions around like what they thought creates public safety based on, you know, just very limited information and very little analysis.

And so my hope is that with this black brilliance research, along with other community efforts that are ongoing, that have been ongoing, that all of us, not just council, but every single one of us as members of community, We'll see ourselves in the solution, and we'll be advocating strongly for a better world together, and so that we can all live and thrive and survive in this incredibly challenging time.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Juarez, for those questions and highlighting some of those issues.

I know, Council Member Juarez, you have a lot of experience, particularly in Indian country, helping to to literally build economic infrastructure for allowing people to be self-sufficient and to determine their own destiny and be empowered to really appreciate your many decades of experience in that space.

And as the chair of our public assets committee and our native communities committee.

I know that this is something that you, this is a body of experience you're now bringing to the city.

And brick and mortar is really, you know, your, um, your expertise and sort of building that out on behalf of communities who have historically and currently do not have access to, um, to those assets is super valuable.

So, um, So I appreciate the back and forth and opportunity to have a conversation from that perspective.

And you know, Council President, thank you, because my real concern is you know, getting out the brick, more of the four walls, and then a continuing revenue stream that sustains that change forever.

And thank you, Council President, for recognizing that.

I mean, you know, if I could build you all a casino, I would.

I think I can.

But that doesn't mean there ain't other stuff I can't build, so.

Yeah.

And it looks like one of our presenters has a comment.

Sorry.

Please, go ahead.

I just want to take a stab at answering that question.

Also, my name is Nadia Miller.

My team, Forever Safe Spaces, didn't get a chance to present, but I'm born in Tacoma, raised in Seattle my whole life, mother of two black boys, active in this community.

I'm still able to live in the south of Seattle, which has been rapidly gentrified.

So when I think about what next year looks like and us getting closer to this vision of a better world, we've actually already created those systems for you.

That's what all these people here are today.

and that long list of other organizations founded by black indigenous people of color from this community.

We've figured out the solutions.

They are these organizations.

So to me, that looks like getting that 50% from the Seattle Police Department and seeing that a small fraction of that huge budget is given to each one of these organizations and many more that have been in the community for years and years and years now.

Because like someone else said, we are resilient and we've figured it out.

What we just need is to not have to jump through hoops, not have to fight each other for a portion of those dollars.

A small chunk of, and I just really have to emphasize, like a million dollars to one of these organizations, a Black-led organization would, because I believe in my community so much, instantaneously probably address these issues if they were given a fraction of that.

type of money to do the work that they do.

It would allow them as Black leaders in this community to thrive in place and give them the energy spiritually, mentally, to continue to do the extremely hard work of addressing these failed systems that were put in place to keep us oppressed.

So when I think about next year, that's what I see.

And we will be able to do the work.

We've already been doing the work with nothing.

I really appreciate that question and the opportunity to share my vision.

I'm more of that type of thinker, the big dreamer.

Our community programs and organizations getting a little bit more funding would allow us to have the conversations with the young people in our community who don't feel as optimistic.

We heard from East African Community Services that they don't have mentors.

They're not sure about things.

They're looking for more guidance.

If the adults who have the solutions could take a breath because they're financially stable, to continue to do the work and then share that with them, we would be right on track to a better world.

We already are on track.

But I just want to emphasize that it's something that simple.

Thank you, Nadia, for those comments.

I'm seeing a lot of heart emojis on people's Hollywood tiles.

So I think that resonates and lands with a lot of folks.

Okay, so we have Councilmember Peterson in the queue.

Folks, we've been going for a little over an hour.

Time flies when you're having a good time.

So I am going to ask if Councilmember Peterson will be the last Councilmember with questions, then I'll give Councilmember Morales an opportunity to close out this presentation, maybe by identifying some concrete next steps for the council and the group to keep in mind.

And for now, I'm going to hand it over to Council Member Peterson for any comments or questions.

And we'll go from there.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Thank you, Council President.

And good morning to everybody.

Thank you for being here today.

I appreciate this overview of your preliminary results and really appreciate your hard work on this project.

In reaching historically marginalized people whose voices are often not adequately incorporated in the decision-making here at City Hall, we're obviously, you know, long overdue seizing this moment to reduce harm and institutional racism.

And this community-driven participatory budgeting process is a key element.

So all nine council members supported the $3 million for the participatory budgeting.

So I'm glad to see it coming together and investing tens of millions of more dollars into marginalized communities with more to come.

I was not one of the four council members who made the direct award of the $3 million.

So my questions might have already been answered during other discussions, but just for the general public, I wanted to better understand the survey.

Is that something that you want to be distributed widely?

Are you handling the distribution just to keep the methodology?

consistent, because I heard references to defunding the police, the misdemeanor legislation, and I just didn't know if that was already determined by the surveys or if the surveys are still open.

That's one question.

Also, the Mayor's Equitable Communities Task Force that you mentioned, what do you believe is the best way for your effort and that effort to work constructively and to leverage each other's leadership?

And will your steering committee include any members of the Community Police Commission or the African American Community Advisory Council?

Those are my questions.

Thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Great questions.

The survey is open.

Please distribute it widely.

Please take the survey if you haven't.

It is in part to find out what needs are in the community to create a more equitable PV process.

So if we find out you don't have internet and we know that the internet is going to be a huge component of the participatory budgeting process, we need to get you internet.

And that's a big goal of ours.

And that's part of the funding is to be able to address those barriers so that people can participate in this process.

So please distribute the survey widely.

The second piece of your question is around, it sounded like it was a question about outreach or sort of like, we wanna hear from everybody.

I wanna hear from people who agree or disagree.

I wanna hear from people who have felt like they have not had their voice reflected.

What's lovely and crucial about having people from marginalized communities, but I would say Black communities specifically, lead this work is that we have the relationships and the connection, and we know where people are, and we know everybody.

Some of the community researchers, LaTanya, Kia, in particular, the top two and top of my mind, but several others, know everybody.

They'll be in seven, eight, nine, 50, 11 different organizations.

They'll know who like their, whose parent just like passed from COVID, like they know everybody.

And so getting several people like that on your team means that you get great coverage.

It's a very cost-effective solution.

Nas, Nadia, if their team had gone, they tell you that in one month, they've reached five times more people than the city has been able to reach in terms of cultural workers, one month.

So like, let me just tell you that this is a great way to make sure you're actually hearing those voices.

We have presented to the African American Advisory Council for the Seattle Police Department, extended open invitation.

We're going to be interviewing some of their members.

We have presented to just about anyone who's wanted to hear us.

That includes extending invitations to the task force several times, to our teach-ins, to our community office hours.

We want to work with everybody.

So I don't want to put that out there in case there was any illusion that somehow we want to get certain results.

No, I want to make sure that everyone sees themselves in the solution.

And moving forward, like I had mentioned earlier, there will be several different bodies that will be helping to shepherd along the PB process.

And I can for sure imagine that members of the task force will be part of those as well, because this is not really like an us versus them thing.

This is, I'm frustrated that the mayor decided to create this process that kind of pits community against each other unnecessarily, but that's what she did.

That's okay.

There's a way forward.

When we do the PB process and there's all these different groups that are helping to shepherd it along, I have no doubt there will be people who are members of the task force who will be participating in that.

That just makes sense to me.

There's so many people who care about their community and there's so many opportunities to help support this effort.

So I do think that as we see moving forward, that there will be a lot of opportunities for people to do what they naturally want to do, which is collaborate.

As long as, you know, the executive or like no office, you know, no department decides that they're going to create this unnecessary infighting between us, I think we'll be OK.

Thank you.

Thank you, Sean and Councilmember Peterson for for that conversation as well.

OK, so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to close us out of this one.

I'm going to ask if Council Member Morales, you had any closing remarks, including any potential next steps for the Council to keep in consideration for members of the viewing public to keep in mind as we close out the year here with the understanding that we're about to get another report from this cohort on December 21st.

Sure, thank you.

I do have a few remarks, if you will indulge me.

I want to thank everybody again for all the work that you're doing and for being here.

We've talked a lot this year about the need to invest in a different kind of community safety.

And as these initial findings show, those who are closest to the problem have important contributions to make in thinking about the solutions.

So we heard a lot about youth violence, for example, and we often hear the question, what are you doing about it?

As council members, we hear, what are you going to do to stop young people engaging in violence in our neighborhoods, for example?

I've said this many times before, and quite often this year, the answer is not to lock them up faster.

The answer is to change the community conditions that lead to the violence in the first place.

That means investing in more affordable housing in greater food security, in more and better jobs for their families, in better access to high-quality public education.

Council Member Juarez was asking about success, and I really see this from a public health perspective.

We're looking at making systems change, so we might not have a direct, you know, causal link to better outcomes, but that doesn't mean that we don't start making the necessary changes.

You know, at one of the last, I sit on the King County Board of Health with some of my colleagues here, and at one of the last Board of Health meetings before COVID, we heard a presentation from Dr. Vanessa Quince at Public Health that shared many of the things that we are hearing, that we heard today about the community conditions that impact youth engagement and gun violence in this particular example.

It's about poor economic conditions, but it's also about a lack of access to services, about the availability of community centers.

One thing we heard is the connection between adolescent brain development and messages about masculinity.

and how that can influence a young person's decision to engage in gun violence.

So it's just an example of how important it is that we invest deeply into mentoring programs that can lead to healthy, thriving neighborhoods.

And that's the way we offer safer conditions for our families.

So as we move forward with the program design of this iteration of participatory budgeting, I want to invite my colleagues to keep an open mind about this work, ask lots of questions, but really approach it with a curiosity so that we can get to centering Black brilliance the way we intended.

And that means taking direction from folks who have historically been left out of decision making, And I'm confident that this approach to democratizing access to power will serve all of us much better.

In terms of the next steps for this, in the legislation that we passed, we know that the executive, the community, and council do need to work together to craft a budget proposal to release the funds that we have set aside.

Once we have an official budget proposal from the executive, then council authorizes the spending via ordinance.

So that is the work that we need to do and have begun to do now.

We have to determine what the right department is and make sure that the staffing across the city.

I think the idea of an interdepartmental team makes a lot of sense because we know that contracts will have to be going out probably through many different departments and so I think it's important that we work with the executive branch to make sure that there is a shared understanding of the importance of this work, of the importance of preparing for the contracting process, and making sure that we are clear on the kind of the roles and responsibilities of the steering committee and how all of that will intersect with the equitable development, equitable investment task force that the mayor has created.

I have been in touch with the executive's office to have these conversations and to make sure that we're pulling all the different pieces together and look forward to continuing this work with community.

Thank you, Council Member Morales for those closing remarks.

I just want to add just what I think is a compliment to your closing remarks here before we say thank you and goodbye to our special guests during council briefing this morning.

You know, there's been some commentary in the media and in public about sort of the nature of this effort in terms of who is leading the decision making and what the and results or products could be.

And I think, obviously, as council members, we're stewards of taxpayer dollars, and we have an obligation to make sure that those taxpayer dollars are aligned with the laws that require us to make sure that we're not doing public gift of funds.

And I don't think anybody here is asking for us to run afoul of those legal obligations and duties.

But I also wanted to highlight that this work, although different, has a lot of similarities to some of the work, historic work, that the city of Seattle has done in the space of environmental justice.

So as a reminder, in 2015, the city of Seattle underwent an effort around equity and around the equity and environment initiative through our office of sustainability and environment to develop what is now known as the equity and environment agenda that was done in deep partnership with community.

and engaging over 1,000 residents across the city in order to develop an equity and environment agenda, in order to guide and advance the city's racial equity goals and Seattle's environmental programs and policies, again, centering on race as a, you know, indicator of those who are most likely to be negatively impacted by the failure to invest in those communities and our efforts to combat environmental damages.

And one of the things that I think is important about that effort for us to remember, aside from the fact that it happened in 2015 and for many years thereafter, is that the decision making and the power was centered in what was referred to as an environmental justice committee.

It was a central component of that racial equity work and that and the Environmental Justice Committee again intentionally handed over power to community.

It allowed community ownership of decision making of what the City of Seattle was going to prioritize in terms of environmental program and policy design.

that ultimately was reduced to or memorialized in the equity and environment agenda.

And it was really a paradigm shift for the city to say, we're going to not just impanel community experts to give us advice or advise us on what we should think about doing.

It was a paradigm shift towards we're actually going to seed power as decision makers in government institutions.

to community partners and have them develop the agenda and have them commit to helping us implement the agenda, but they're going to drive the agenda, they're going to drive the investments, and they're going to drive this really important work from a community ownership perspective.

And so, again, I just think it's an important reminder of the fact that that while this is a much larger effort and it includes, the scope of this includes many more things than just climate justice, that there is precedence at the city in terms of structuring important bodies of work in a way that really does empower and center and hand over So I think it's really important that we give critical decision-making authority to community-based organizations and members of the community to really help us advance the work in a way that is true to meeting the needs of the people who would benefit the greatest from just just just a little I guess is like one of the one of the the the longer-standing council members now just wanted to share that publicly as a sort of a similar effort that was undertaken in 2015 that I think was really popular and ultimately did lead to the creation of something called an Environmental Justice Fund that created grant opportunities for community-led projects that were designed to effectuate and implement the equity and environment agenda.

So I think there's a model here for us to look at in terms of the what's next and how do we distill all of this so that we can keep ourselves accountable to what the goals are and look forward to the ongoing iterative work to accomplish those shared goals.

So I'll go ahead and close that out.

Thank you for giving me an opportunity to say something.

in closing here.

And thank you to Council Member Morales for working with my office to coordinate this presentation.

And thanks to all of you for being with us this morning.

I know we took up more of your time than we had intended to this morning, but really do appreciate this early conversation and look forward to the ongoing work that will come in the next few months.

So with that being said, thanks again for joining us.

You're welcome to to disconnect at this point.

We're going to go ahead and continue through items of our agenda.

But again, much gratitude to you all.

Wishing you all a wonderful rest of the year.

Thank you so much.

Okay, colleagues, let's go ahead and go through the rest of our agenda.

Of course, we have agenda item four, which is the preview of today's city council actions, council and regional committees.

There is no shortage of items for us to address related to this afternoon's very full and busy full council agenda.

So we will go in the order of the rotated roll call for city council meetings.

As a reminder, That roll call order is as follows.

We'll hear first from Council Member Sawant, then Strauss, Juarez, Lewis, Morales, Mosqueda, Peterson, and then I will conclude with my report.

So let's go ahead and dig on in.

First up is Council Member Sawant.

Good morning.

Good morning, and thank you, Council President Gonzalez.

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

On today's City Council agenda, there is a resolution from Council Member Muscata that I have co-sponsored in support of the current, truly massive movement of farmers in India.

In September, the reactionary Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or the BJP government, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, introduced three laws that will dismantle the bare minimum protections or regulations relied on by millions of small farmers for survival.

One of the new laws, for example, would repeal the minimum support price, which is a publicly mandated price floor, a minimum price at which the government promises to buy produce from small farmers as a measure of basic economic protection for them.

The new laws are a massive corporate handout to profitable agribusiness multinational corporations.

The farmers correctly see these laws as they have themselves said, quote unquote, death warrants for themselves, leading to even more dangerous levels of poverty and indebtedness than already exists, while the elite gain even greater corporatization and privatization and more obscenely large profits.

Yesterday morning, my staff and I joined hundreds of Sikh students and other young people at a protest action near the Space Needle in solidarity with the farmers in India.

And as an elected representative of Seattle's working people, and as someone who grew up in India and was politicized and radicalized by the understanding of how global capitalism and imperialism have led to the continued impoverishment of the masses in the neocolonial world, including India, I was proud to join the protest rally.

As myself and other speakers at the rally said, the new laws are a massive giveaway to billionaires like Mukesh Ambani, who is India's richest man and is like the Jeff Bezos in India, and Gautam Adani, both of whom are among the 40 richest people in the world.

Farmers and agricultural workers make up 60 percent of the country's population.

A 2018 study found that more than half of the farmers in India were in debt, and that was before the pandemic and this deep recession.

More than 20,000 farmers in the country have died by suicide from just between 2018 to 2019, and as the resolution says, over 360,000 have died by suicide since 1995 and farmer indebtedness has been a major factor in the suicides.

The protests have made world headlines and have led to solidarity actions by South Asian immigrant communities globally, including as I mentioned right here in the Seattle region, as well as in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

These solidarity protests have even forced establishment politicians to speak publicly in favour of the farmers' protests, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a member of the Australian Parliament.

The next major action of this movement in India is a call for a Bharat Bandh, which means shutdown India.

In other words, a general strike that will be on January 8th of 2021. It is being organized not only by 100 farmer organizations, but also by 10 trade union confederation that represent hundreds of millions of union members and a number of student unions.

The trade union movement is correctly not narrowly limiting its January 8 strike slogans to supporting farmers, but are also raising a 14 point charter of demands for the broader working class for minimum wage increases against the rampant privatization and so on.

This will actually strengthen the movement of the farmers.

And the fact is that the protest movement has already shown enormous strength.

It has lasted over three weeks now with an impressive degree of organization and political strength.

However, we cannot afford to get complacent.

The movement has to escalate in order to force the Modi regime to concede.

to the movement's demands, because the regime will keep trying various divide-and-conquer tactics to break the movement.

And if they don't succeed in that, then they and the super-wealthy will simply try and wait out the movement, because they have the resources and the leverage to do that.

So we cannot afford for the protesters to get exhausted and demoralized.

We need to keep escalating.

That is why it's crucial that the trade union movement in India has announced the general for January 8, that is now in unison being supported by farmer organizations and student unions as well.

And the unions are demanding a restoration of the protections for small farmers, in addition to everything else, of course.

And so in light of this, While I happily co-sponsored this resolution, I also think that we need to add an amendment to the resolution to just add a couple of lines to the resolution.

And that amendment has been run through law and my staff member has sent this to all your offices.

The amendment just adds a section three in the be it resolved section saying, the Seattle City Council stands in solidarity with the farmers organizations, trade union federations and student unions in India organizing for a general strike on January 8th to unite the movement of oppressed peoples, demanding the restoration of protections for small farmers, increasing the minimum wage, ending privatizations, and defending the rights of religious and ethnic minorities.

I think this will be an excellent resolution for the city council to approve and stand on the right side of history and it will be in very much in cohesion with the previous resolution that the council passed from my office in solidarity with the Muslim community and the poor communities in India who were speaking out against the horrendous citizenship laws by the Modi regime.

Also yesterday, at the request of the South Asian community members in the Seattle region, my office also initiated a petition to urge President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to make a public statement in solidarity with the millions of Indian farmers who are protesting.

And members of the public can find a link to that on my social media accounts and also on our council office blog.

And just since last night, nearly 300 people have signed the petition, and we have community members throughout the country now starting to share it.

Finally, but not least, my office, alongside the South Asian community organizations and labor unions, is organizing a car caravan rally on January 8th on the same day as the Indian general strike so that we can have solidarity with them on their important day.

Last week, alongside renters, community activists, union members, B-Seattle, and the Tenants Union of Washington State, my office began an all-out push to demand an extension of the current eviction protections for tenants, struggling small businesses, and nonprofit organizations in Seattle, but also statewide.

The support in the community for these demands is absolutely overwhelming, and that's not surprising because of the bitter reality of lost jobs and incomes and the the very precarious situation that people have been living in for months.

The current Seattle and statewide executive order protections against evictions expire on December 31st, after which tens of thousands of tenants and small businesses in Seattle face the prospect of eviction and potentially hundreds of thousands throughout the Washington state.

Nationwide, we could see a tsunami of evictions if these protections aren't renewed and strengthened.

Some 530,000 Seattle King County residents have filed for unemployment since March.

We know struggling small business owners have had to close their doors because of inadequate government support.

And even before the pandemic, 78% of American workers were living paycheck to paycheck.

And now we have new statistics of how many renters are resorting to accumulating credit card debt just to pay for basic expenses like food and including rent, but also other expenses.

And at the same time, we know Amazon and Microsoft and other tech corporations have registered staggering profits, but it's not just tech companies.

It's also major Seattle area landlords like Essex Property Management, and equity apartments, which have recorded hundreds of millions of dollars in profits during the pandemic.

Those two particular corporate landlords are national real estate companies who combined together control about 20,000 apartments in the Seattle area and recently reported more than $1.1 billion in profits in just the first nine months of this year.

And Essex property management, by the way, is one of the most evicting landlords in Seattle, King County, according to the renters rights organizations like Be Seattle.

So alongside the renters rights organization, my office put out a petition last Wednesday demanding that Mayor Durkin strengthen and extend the eviction moratorium through 2021, which is protections for for renters, small business owners, and nonprofits.

And more than 1,000 people signed in less than 24 hours, with a total of over 2,100 people having signed in just four days.

The petition responses include responses from small business owners and also from progressive small landlords, and include moving storeys from renters on the brink of homelessness.

And earlier today, my office forwarded the petition demand with signatures to Mayor Durkin, and I've also copied other council members.

I urge community members to join our demand that Mayor Durkin immediately extend the eviction moratorium to 2021 without watering it down.

And of course I urge council members to join in that call as well.

And this is especially important because we have heard through articles from different publications like Crosscut, that corporate landlords are attempting to put pressure on the democratic establishment in Olympia to really water down the eviction moratorium by putting in means testing.

And we know that would be a devastating blow, an absolutely devastating blow for the renters who need it.

And so that's why we need to make sure that the eviction moratoriums are renewed as is, are strengthened, but not watered down.

And one final issue, I have an amendment to the item on today's city council agenda regarding the update to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission's lobbying rules.

And this amendment has also been sent, I believe, to all council members.

The update makes three changes to the rules.

Two, I support, but the third regulates what the law calls, quote, I mean, in quotes, I mean, this is what's written in the law, grassroots lobbying.

I don't consider that lobbying.

I mean, this is not professional lobbyists paid to talk to elected officials.

This is grassroots campaigns that organize communities to make their voices heard.

The rule requires that any grassroots campaign that spends at least $750 in a month would have to disclose its expenditures, donors, and aims.

I am extremely concerned that this will create a truly chilling effect on genuine grassroots organizing.

It will be easy for astroturf organizations and corporate advertising campaigns to make these disclosures, but for genuine grassroots movements that may not have a professional accountant and treasurer, which most of them will not, this paperwork will become, frankly, impossible.

Imagine if this legislation was on the books during the Justice for George Floyd protests.

During those protests, hundreds or even thousands of people donated to many community organizations organizing marches and making demands like for the city council to defund the police.

Renting the sound system for a single rally can cost more than $750 depending on the size of the protest.

This puts the protest organizers in an impossible position.

It is technically possible to track down the donor information of everyone who donates over $25 at the protest, but it requires a major focus of the organizers who are generally hard-working volunteers and who should be spending their energies on the rally and discussing with people and energizing people themselves, not tracking technical information just to comply with a cumbersome law.

Of course, it is not the intention of the SEC to penalize genuine volunteer organizers who are unable to collect all the information required, but the enforcement of these regulations would largely be complaint-based, just like other SEC regulations, and I would guarantee that there are plenty of Trump supporters around the country and the right wing in general who would be ideologically motivated to file complaints against the Black Lives Matter movement in Seattle, but that's just an example that very likely we would see other progressive grassroots organizations also facing that problem.

My office has discussed this legislation with Wayne Barnett, Executive Director of the SEC in detail, and I really appreciate his time walking my staff through this.

The reality is, however, that there are several questions that have no answer yet that are really fundamental to the impact this legislation would have on genuine grassroots campaigns.

For example, if there's a protest on an issue, at what point does it meet the definition of grassroots lobbying?

If it is all about a specific bill, that could be straightforward, but what if it's about an issue like defund the police?

What about Black Lives Matter generally, for example?

Unlike election campaigns, which have a very clear start when campaign staff can be trained by the SEC, movements grow organically.

There is no clear start moment for campaign staff to be trained by the SEC, so it's not clear to us how will volunteer organizers be made aware of their responsibilities.

How should volunteers track donations thrown in the buckets at protests, which is a common strategy for grassroots fundraising?

there are no answers to any of these questions yet given that this legislation will at best be ignored and at worst will be creating a chilling effect on community organizing by burying them in red tape.

I understand that the concept for these rules is more around corporate advertising campaigns, and that's very clear, and we appreciate Mr. Barnett talking to us about that, like when the soda industry runs ads against a Sweden beverage tax.

But the sad reality is that this disclosure will be easy for those corporations.

They already have the accountants and lawyers to make it trivial.

to complete the paperwork and the burden will fall on the volunteer organizers.

Finally, I also understand that this language has been taken almost word for word from the state laws regulating grassroots campaigns targeting the state government.

However, The state regulations are the last place I would look for advice on how to create a welcoming environment for grassroots organizing.

Olympia is notoriously inaccessible, not necessarily because of this particular rule, but I think the disregard this law has for grassroots organizing is emblematic of the overall problem.

The amendment my office has prepared, and thank you, Lish Whitson, for getting it ready so rapidly, would cut from the bill the entire section on grassroots campaigns and would leave the other two issues taken up by the bill unchanged.

My office initially looked into raising the threshold for the amount of money that would need to be spent to trigger these requirements.

And if other council offices would like to explore that further, I'm happy to do that.

My staff are happy to do that.

However, in discussing with Wayne, Mr. Barnett, it became clear that if we raise the threshold high enough to avoid catching genuine grassroots campaigns, it will also be high enough for most corporate advertising campaigns to also fly under the radar.

And if it was in their interest to do so, they could always split identical small entities to intentionally fly under the radar.

So there's no clear threshold which we could define.

So given those complications, I believe that eliminating that section is the best approach.

I urge council members to support this amendment in the city council meeting today.

And Ted Verdone from my office is available to discuss with council members, staff, any questions that they may have.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

I have a lot of comments in response to that last point related to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission bill that I'll address when I get to my report.

So for now, if there are any other questions or comments on that report, happy to call on folks.

Okay, hearing none, we'll go ahead and hear from Council Member Strauss, and then we will hear from Council Member Juarez.

Thank you, Council President.

Still good morning, colleagues.

There's one item from the Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee on today's introduction and referral calendar.

It is Council Bill 119978, which extends the interim floodplain regulations Council adopted earlier this year for an additional 12 months to allow individuals to continue to obtain flood insurance through FEMA's Flood Insurance Program and adopts a work plan for studies needed to be developed for the permanent regulations to be brought before us.

Again, we had this bill before us.

We passed it earlier this year.

This is an extension of that bill.

We also had an initial briefing on this bill in committee so that we are able to act quickly in January when we will have another briefing, public hearing, and vote in committee next month.

There are no items from the Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee on today's full agenda.

I coming out of the finance and neighbor finance and housing committee last week for the supplemental budget ordinances colleagues I'm sure that we will have much more discussion about this and I'm looking forward to your perspective and when she returns the public safety chairs perspective.

as well.

So for the budget supplemental budget ordinances, we need to ensure that we're ready to respond to and I'm speaking specifically to the grants acceptance section.

We need to be ready to respond to disasters, and we need to also interrupt the habit of law enforcement agencies purchasing militarized equipment.

So at the committee, I had considered an amendment to remove the state homeland security grant and the associated appropriation.

I do also believe that this flat cut is too blunt a tool to be used in this situation because we do need to receive the emergency preparedness tools, and many of the questions that I asked were answered, such as the respirators being used to respond to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosives is different than what I had initially assumed.

So we do need to stop the accepting equipment designed for war and we do need to accept the equipment designed for emergency preparedness.

We also heard in committee that this information before us has been within the city since October.

I said there and I will say again, I wish we had at council had received this information earlier to be able to make informed decisions to keep the process moving in a timely manner.

rather than the night before the last committee meeting before the last council meeting of the year.

Why this is important to me is because this is a charter power.

This is the second line of the charter after the second sentence after the preamble of the charter.

No gifts of munitions, military supplies, gas or police equipment shall be accepted by the city of Seattle without approval by ordinance, which is why we have the grants acceptance ordinance before us.

So I really appreciate everyone, Dr. Fisher, Angela, Greg, everyone for answering so many questions over the weekend.

I still do have some specific, some questions unanswered, specifically regarding the PowerSonics loud hailers, not LRAD, which is, but LRAD is not necessarily the same device because it is a trademark name in the answers that we received The answers were just simply that.

the information was unknown.

And so I do need to know that it does not exceed a dangerous decibel level.

So again, as well, with night vision, there was a note that it is intended for a tactical advantage, but that these devices can be used in an emergency disaster, search and rescues, et cetera.

And maybe I'm just simply missing why a tactical advantage is needed in search and rescue.

And the et cetera at the end of the answer leaves an open-ended response to questions requesting specificities.

So for all of these reasons I know that we are moving quickly in the compressed timeline to ahead of council recess.

I still need to confer with central staff to confirm our options since adding a provisor to the legislation will require a title change.

I've been advised That is a longer process.

I've also been advised that Director Noble will ensure that dollars will not be spent on certain items that we have questions for.

So in committee, I began in the position of abstain.

and ended up voting yes to keep the process moving due to the conversation within committee.

I'm in the same position now without answers to these questions.

At this time, I plan to abstain from voting just on the grants acceptance ordinance.

But again, I will be conferring with central staff to understand options and looking forward to hearing from you colleagues as well to understand more and what our options are because we do need to accept the emergency preparedness equipment and there are still questions left unanswered regarding the items ensuring equipment is solely emergency preparedness and cannot be repurposed in unanticipated ways.

Thank you for your time on that topic.

Moving on to small businesses.

Don't forget that we can still support our small businesses.

There are online marketplaces for neighborhoods throughout Seattle.

I encourage everyone to shop your block.

I shopped Ballard Avenue this weekend, and there's a fun program where you can win either a $100 gift certificate or 10% off of participating small businesses.

You can also check out the Office of Economic Development's website for an interactive map that links neighborhood online marketplaces.

But in harder news, I did learn this weekend that Populux Brewing is going to be closing its doors.

And this is a company in Ballard that did everything that they could.

They requested flexibility from their landlords.

They requested uh information dollars and advocacy from their electives including me grants and they changed how they did businesses it was specifically with brewers including propulex and restaurants united that had me bring forward the letter that we colleagues all signed earlier this year that was sent to the state and federal delegations ahead of some of the relief packages that came before us.

It is also why I championed the small businesses grant so much.

I believe we did what we could and that it continues to be not enough.

Before we see other small businesses also closing because of the all of the above reasons, we need to do as much as we can.

And so again, thank you, Council President.

Thank you, Council Member Mosqueda, for bringing forward an additional small business relief bill today.

I'm looking forward to supporting it.

It's just hard news to hear when businesses have done all they could, and it's still not enough.

Events Last week, I joined the Ballard Alliance's ratepayer advisory board on Wednesday.

My office hosted a coordinating meeting around the Leary Triangle, which local residents and business owners have been attempting to activate for over two and a half years.

And we brought folks together to outline next steps and how we can activate that space.

Here in District 6, District 6 neighborhood meetings will not take place during Council recesses, and we will resume those meetings early in January.

Last week, I spoke to 13 neighbors from Ballard, Fremont, Greenwood, Green Lake, Freelard Industrial District, and we discussed neighborhood safety, investing in Black communities, addressing homelessness by many folks, the difference between New York City and Seattle, the need for us to lead with human-centered solutions.

Um, outside of speaking about homelessness, we also discussed trees, the increased property crime in the district and how organized crime and concerns about human trafficking are occurring in places.

Eso I do look forward to resuming the district resident meetings in January.

Um, thank you to everyone who I spoke with last week.

Thank you, Council President.

Thank you, colleagues.

That is my report for today.

Councilmember Strauss, did you, did I just hear you mention that you planned on abstaining on the fourth quarter supplemental budget?

Not from the supplemental, from the grants acceptance.

Just as a point of order, there is no such thing as abstentions in full council, so you will have to either vote yes or no. and wanted to make sure that that was clear.

Here that this, my understanding is that both these items are on the agenda for full council.

So there will be a final vote on those this afternoon.

Just wanted to make sure that that was clear.

And I see that Council Member Mosqueda has her hand raised, so I'm gonna go ahead and hand it over to her.

Thank you very much.

I would like to find a way to get to yes.

I just want to make sure that my concerns are addressed.

I just want to make sure that you are aware that abstention is not a thing for full counsel.

If you are not at yes, I hear that you are at no.

Thank you very much, Council President.

Thank you as well, Council Member Strauss.

I appreciate the questions that you raised in the meeting last Wednesday.

For folks who weren't in our Finance and Housing Committee meeting, you will have a chance if you would like to review a pretty robust conversation about the Federal Grants Acceptance Ordinance.

Just as a reminder to folks, this is item number four on our agenda, and it is Council Bill 119971. I do want to also note that there was a lengthy email that was sent around about some of the really detailed questions and even members who were not part of finance and housing did have a chance to ask those questions and have some questions answered.

There's an 11-page document that the CBO and I believe members of SPD responded, but I agree with you, Council Member Strauss, that we We do need more information, we do need more time, and ideally would have had a longer roadmap here.

But I think that what we heard from the city budget's office, Director Noble, was a commitment to send us a letter to make sure that all of the questions are answered before any spending is authorized.

To the extent that folks still have questions that were not answered, I think that it would be helpful for us to hear those and also make sure that the CBO has a chance to hear them, central staff have a chance to hear them.

I know that folks worked very quickly to try to provide as much information as they could.

I think those questions, if they are the tip of the iceberg and there's more questions to come, we really should make sure that there is a full format to draw out those questions.

And I understand that the budget director, Director Noble, will send a letter affirming that they are still planning to answer any unanswered questions before any spending goes forward with the hopes that, as we talked about on Wednesday, the other grants don't also get held up on this.

I, too, Council Member Strauss, have a number of questions.

In fact, I think some of your questions prompted more questions for me.

And some of those have been answered, but I still have some concerns.

So I appreciate that Director Noble is committing to sending us that letter to affirm in writing that they will be answering those questions before any spending goes forward as another fail-safe.

And just want to also remind folks, in case you didn't get a chance to watch the committee or were in committee, given it was a very long meeting, Council Member Strauss referred to a possible amendment that he was considering to remove a grant acceptance as being too blunt.

Just as a reminder to folks, the amendment was not included.

So there is not an amendment that has a too blunt object in the grant acceptance.

There was no second for that amendment, and we do not have that in there.

So in case you have any concerns about that, and Council Member Strauss, I just want to make sure I was clarifying for other folks that the concept that you were considering that I supported is not included, but what we do have is a commitment from the CBO's office to have any further questions answered.

And again, I think, you know, this is a lot of information, a lot of information sent down over the weekend, 11 pages worth of answers given.

However, to your point, we will be working with central staff to have a much more We are going to have a lengthy process prior to the last meeting of the last month of the year before our last full Council meeting so we are not in the situation next year.

I look forward to having that process conversation with central staff and also with folks in the re-organize and re-imagine our budget process towards the end of the year so that we won't be in this situation again in the future.

I just want to remind folks, no amendment was included on that.

Email has come from Greg with 11 pages of answers and a letter is to come from CBO confirming that they will answer any additional questions before further spending is completed.

I'm sorry, before any spending is issued for 2021 from the federal grants.

Okay, any other questions or comments on that report?

Hearing none, we'll go ahead and hear now from Council Member Juarez and then we will hear from Council Member Lewis.

Good morning.

Good morning, thank you.

Sorry, I was listening but watching the electoral votes come in.

Okay, so Apologize here, my documents in order.

Okay, there are no items of the public assets and native communities committee on this afternoon's council agenda.

The committee meeting scheduled for January 5th is canceled and my office is working with Council Central staff to update the 2021 work plan, adjusting for the changing conditions presented in 2020. Waterfront news on December 5th, the contractor, thank God, successfully removed the southern terrace of Pier 58. The contractor is currently working on removing the remaining pier piles, a small portion of the pier in the middle of the park and the ramp on the north end of Pier 57. The Office of the Waterfront is working this week with SDCI to lift the red tag on Pier 57. Thank you, SDCI and Office of the Waterfront folks for keeping us informed and big thanks to our friends there that have been sharing information with us, Marshall and folks.

A week ahead, Thursday, December 17th, I have a sound transit board of directors meeting scheduled at 130 sound transit.

We'll discuss a realignment strategy, given the economic uncertainty of what we've experienced with code, and this work will continue into the new year.

Last week, I think Councilmember Peterson may add to this as well, I attended the Puget Sound Regional Council Transportation Policy Board meeting with Councilmember Peterson.

The board discussed the highest and best use of $15 million currently available for the highway infrastructure program.

We took the opportunity to advocate for the West Seattle Bridge Repair Project and why those funds are so critical right now for our West Seattle neighbors.

And of course, pointing out to the Pre-Huget Sound Regional Council how important that bridge is, how many people live there, and it's the most used bridge in the city.

As you know, our region faces many challenges, and the closure of the Westdale Bridge is unparalleled in need.

And again, a major thanks to the Puget Sound Regional Council staff, SDOT and OIR, for their lead on this effort.

I will continue to work with my colleagues on the board to garner support before the vote of this funding allocation at our January meeting, which is crucial.

I was really happy that Sound Transit has lent their support to the City of Seattle and the Port of Seattle.

that the City of Seattle should have the $15 million to help with the repair of the West Seattle Bridge.

We are going to follow up with a letter of support, and right now we're in discussions in gaining support from tribal leadership.

More importantly, the Muckleshoot, Suquamish, and Puyallup Tribe, in which they all have representatives on the Puget Sound Regional Council.

Let's see.

That's it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Council Member Juarez.

Any comments or questions on that report?

All right, hearing none, we're gonna go ahead and go down the line here and hear next from Council Member Lewis, and then following Council Member Lewis will be Council Member Morales.

Good morning.

Thank you, Madam President.

I don't have that many updates this morning.

There are no items from the Select Committee on Homelessness Strategies and Investments on this afternoon's calendar.

I do want to do a brief plug for the CB 119977 supplemental budget, which does include a amendment passed last week in committee from my office to provide much needed support for the rest of the year for our partners over at Youth Care and the Roots Young Adult Shelter.

So I'm looking forward to voting for that on final passage this afternoon and appreciate the leadership of my colleagues in committee and unanimously.

passing that amendment and then passing the bill that that's part of.

So I look forward to voting for that this afternoon.

Additionally, there will be a meeting of the Select Committee on Homelessness Strategies and Investments tomorrow and I look forward to seeing at least five folks from the council there.

Should be a good meeting.

We're going to be getting a briefing on the efforts of the executive to stand up the homelessness investments and additive shelter investments that this council passed.

We are also going to have the initial hearing on the bill that I have put forward to enact several reforms related to building permanent supportive housing and streamlining those processes to be faster and more efficient.

With that, I don't have any additional updates and we will see everyone in committee tomorrow.

Hearing none, Council Member Morales is up next, and then Council Member Mosqueda.

Good morning.

Good morning, everyone.

My Google Chrome is not responsive, and so I do not have my notes for this morning.

So I'm going to wing it.

Do you want us to go to the next council member?

That's OK.

I didn't have a lot.

Anyway, it's fine.

What I will say is there are no items from the Community Economic Development Committee on today's agenda.

Last week I was very excited to join the seniors at Cleveland High School.

One of the humanities classes is asking local electeds to join them.

So I heard some great questions from the seniors there.

They were asking about our budget process.

asking for, very specifically, for more mental health supports for young people and for more protection for essential workers.

I think many of them have parents who are essential workers and we're very interested in making sure we are protecting our community.

So it was a great conversation.

I want to give them all a shout out.

This afternoon, oh, I have nothing on the agenda this afternoon.

Yeah, I'm going to call it good.

Thank you.

Thanks so much, Council Member Morales.

Any comments or questions?

Hearing none, we're going to go ahead and hear now from Council Member Mosqueda, and then we will hear from Council Member Peterson.

Good morning.

Good morning, Council President.

Good morning, everyone.

Council Member Morales, if you don't mind, maybe I will take some of your yielded time.

Apologies, colleagues.

I do have a little bit of a longer report than normal this morning.

There are two items on today's introduction and referral calendar.

The first is an item with Council Member Herbold, Council Bill 119981. I want to thank Council Member Herbold for her work on this bill with me as we follow up on the I'm going to go ahead and open it up for questions.

I'm going to open it up for questions.

I'm going to open it up for questions.

I'm going to open it up for questions.

I'm going to open it up for questions.

I'm going to open it up for questions.

I'm going to open it up for questions.

I'm going to open it up for questions.

I'm going to open it up for questions.

I'm going to open it up for questions.

I'm going to open it up for questions.

are allowed to go forward.

However, we have significant concern about how the management of those funds was maybe de-prioritize in priority four things that included overtime and believe that with sufficient appropriation authority, there should have been the ability to cover the $5.4 million to not have an overspend of the appropriated budget for SPD.

We want to make sure that we are following through on our efforts in the amendment that was included on Wednesday.

and this piece of legislation on today's introduction and referral calendar clearly says that we do support making sure that there is action in early January 2021 to follow through to make sure that there is a commensurate reduction in SPD's budget for the 2021 cycle.

This bill that's on the introduction and referral calendar in front of us today makes sure that there is a proportional reduction to the amount that is being approved today so that there is basically a holding-of-the-line approach and that the $5.4 million will continue to go to the community-led research and participatory budgeting efforts that we also discussed this morning.

Further, we also know that as of last Wednesday, there was already initial indication that there's a higher than anticipated attrition for November and that those numbers have not yet been tallied.

The council anticipates that there will be salary savings in SPD's budget achieved in 2021 due to higher than anticipated attrition, which we've already seen in October, will begin to get the information about November and is assumed to continue in December of 2020. So the bill helps to offset the 2021 appropriations authority by increasing the authority provided for 2021 but holding the line on funding allocated across 2020 and 2021's budget to make sure that that portion that we are approving today is actually reduced then from the budget in 2021. The universe of dollars thus remains the same.

I appreciate the members of the committee for your support of the amendment that we brought forward on this bill.

And with that, we'll be voting yes on item number five for today's agenda and supporting the passage of Q4 supplemental budget with the ongoing conversation that is going to take place based on this legislation that we're introducing today.

Also on the introduction referral calendar is resolution 3198, I want to start by saying thank you to all of you for joining us today.

250,000 farmers, workers and their allies joined in what is to believe to be the largest organized strike in world history.

These workers are protesting three devastating deregulation agricultural bills that were passed by the government of India in September.

These laws deregulate the sale of crops, allowing private buyers more power in the marketplace that has long been governed by government subsidies, which farmers now worry will devastate their prices.

The farmers say that these neoliberal policies are a boon to corporations and will roll back key labor and crop price protections that could have a deadly impact on the livelihood of farmers.

the leading source of income for the population of India.

This will leave them at the mercy of larger corporations who will potentially drive down the prices and result in huge losses for farmers, effectively handing over the farms to private corporations is the concern.

Farmers unions, farmers and those who are supporting these farmers are pushing for international attention to this issue and are very concerned about the risk of losing their business and their land to large corporations.

60% of India's populations rely on agriculture as their main source of income.

And the plight of farmers in India affects us here in Seattle, specifically because India is the leading export of Basmati rice and the world's largest milk producer for the global market, according to India's Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority, with the main production happening in the states like Punjab, Haryan, and Delhi, where farmers are also protesting.

Farm workers have had a long history of protesting here as well in the United States with the United Farm Workers and across other countries.

Showing our solidarity with those who are organizing in India, including with the general strike, as Council Member Sawant alluded to, is in alignment with what this council has supported in the past.

These farmers have marched on the nation's capital And if you read any of the links that we sent you over the weekend, you may have seen some footage and read reports of these farmers who are largely elderly men in their 50s, 60s, and 70s being met with water cannons in some of the coldest temperatures that have been recorded.

In India right now, they are facing tear gas, again, during a deadly global pandemic that affects the respiratory system, and have been met with barricades and barbed wires.

10 foot by 10 foot trenches dug around the national highways to prevent farmers from reaching the nation's capital.

So I'm looking forward to passing this resolution today and showing that we will be again showing our support for workers across the world I want to thank Kent City Council Member Satwinder Kaur, who has been a friend of mine over the last few years.

I worked with her on the Path to Power program that I helped to run while at the AFL-CIO, and really proud to see all of the work that she's done.

to help lead the effort to bring attention to this issue.

She has put this issue on our radar that they are going to be passing a similar resolution in Kent, and the Kent mayor has also sent a message of solidarity as well.

I appreciate all of the council members' consideration of this resolution.

Council members want for her co-sponsorship and would urge anybody else who would like to co-sponsor to feel free to.

I will call the meeting to order.

Thanks again to folks during this committee who had a robust discussion about the need.

I also brought forward a amendment in collaboration with the Seattle Restaurant United group and Unite Here, noting the need for us to be really specific about flexibility for small restaurants to have non-monetary relief, such as flexible permit options for outdoor dining areas.

And additional clarification that the assistance can also go to those in the hospitality industry affected by the crisis, knowing that the folks who have received assistance or who need assistance in the restaurant industry are dramatically hit by this last round of much needed COVID guidance that our state has received.

And we are also very interested in not only supporting the industry, but also supporting the workers.

Really appreciate Council President Gonzalez, your leadership on this, and the mayor's office for working quickly to help bring something down.

I look forward to passing that today.

Item number four is Council Bill 119971, which is the grant acceptance ordinance, which we just spoke to.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss, for teeing that up.

Again, if you have other questions or concerns that have not been addressed by Council Central staff's comments that were sent around this weekend, please let us know, and we look forward to receiving that letter from the city budget's office director noble soon to reassure folks that if there are any additional questions, that money will not be spent on those issues until those questions get addressed.

Item number five is amended council bill 119970, which is our quarter four supplemental bill.

This allows for us to ensure that there is a balanced budget at the end of 2020 headed into the 2021 year.

We've heard from members of the central staff and the city budget's office that this bill as amended continues to make sure that we are meeting our to make sure that there is a balanced budget by the end of 2020 and that we will be able to continue the services that the city needs uninterrupted as this bill goes forward.

I want to note Councilmember Herbold and I did have the amendment that was included in this quarter 4 supplemental bill to make sure that there is additional action to come in 2021 to, as I mentioned, reduce SPD's 2021 appropriation authority by at least $5.4 million.

to account for the offset that we are seeing in terms of the need for the quarter 4 bill today.

Again, that bill is on the introduction and referral calendar and really appreciate your consideration of that as we head into 2021. I referenced it during our meeting and will again reiterate that this is in alignment with the resolution that we passed previously, which was stating clearly that the council will be making sure that we are holding SPD to the same standards that we look at for other departments and wanting to make sure that we have a budget that is in alignment with the allocated expenditures that the council has approved.

I'll be working with central staff over the first part of 2021 to identify better processes for end of year balance efforts so that we can have a longer lead way into considering any items that need to be chewed up at the end of the year and that more of the items that we have seen in terms of that are prior to quarter 3 can get included in the quarter 3 supplemental budget so we can true that up.

more to come on that.

finally, on item number 6, this is legislation that authorizes the mayor and director of the office of housing to execute an agreement with the community roots housing group, formerly known as capitol hill housing.

to be able to have access to $1 million using general fund appropriated to finance general in the city's fourth quarter supplemental.

This is COVID relief assistance as we have provided additional assistance to others, providing core services to our community, making sure that folks are housed is critical.

And if you watched or were part of the meeting, you know that Capital Roots Housing has taken a lot of steps to help mitigate the loss of revenue, about $3.2 million in lost revenue in 2020. However, their shortfall remains at least $1 million.

And because they are not eligible for PPP at the federal level or CARES Act dollars, we are very interested in helping them address the shortfall and appreciate the committee's support for that.

Finally, in other news, Finance and Housing Committee meeting on the 15th has been canceled.

We will also plan on canceling the January 5th committee meeting.

to make sure that we have time to create our agenda.

And on January 19th will be the first meeting of the Finance and Housing Committee.

You will be able to anticipate us having a conversation on the strategic acquisition of affordable housing, an update from our partners at the Seattle Housing Authority on their strategic acquisition efforts, especially at the Yesler Terrace Redevelopment Project.

We will be able to also have Seattle Housing Authority appointments and Domestic Workers Standard Board appointments.

And then lastly, I really joined the governor in the enthusiasm and joy that he shared yesterday in the press conference about the COVID vaccine being given the safe and effective green light, allowing for rapid deployment of the vaccine in Washington state to our most vulnerable.

and frontline healthcare workers and responders.

Thank you all for the work that you have been doing on the frontline to make sure that you're putting the health and safety of others first.

And it is right that we are putting the safety and health of you as those frontline responders first.

And very excited to see this.

vaccine come to Washington State and our country at large.

We also want to make sure that there is the tools and support needed to make sure that the deployment of the vaccine is successful.

And to me, that means two things.

One, making sure that Congress broadly hears our call that this is the make it or break it week in Congress.

We absolutely need congressional action to support public health efforts across the country, and right here in Seattle and King County, our public health department has been working around the clock and has largely said that their budget, unfortunately, has mirrored the status quo.

We need to have federal funding to support public health, the rollout of the vaccine and deployment of the vaccine, and overall general support for the work that they do year-round for areas across the country that don't have as great of congressional partners like we do.

We thank our congressional members in the city of Seattle who represent the city of Seattle for their work on COVID response and public health support, urging Congress as a whole and other cities to get the message in to other members who may be obstructing additional support to say this is the make it or break it week.

And in terms of support for public health, I look forward to working with our state and our county partners to help provide funding for Public Health Seattle King County, making sure that the foundational public health services, FPHS, and COVID response services get the adequate funding that they need.

I'll be looking forward to working with our state partners, the state legislature, and King County partners to make sure that we are shoring up funding for public health.

We do not want them to be running low on any cash or be worried about having their budget expire at the end of the year or early 2021. I'm really optimistic that the governor's proposed budget that is going to be coming out soon helps to recognize this and make sure that there is sustainable funding for public health and the foundation for what's needed.

and along with that we don't just need a vaccine, we need housing and I look forward to ongoing conversations with our state partners and hopefully our federal partners about extending the moratorium on evictions and making sure that there's additional assistance.

Thousands of workers across our area here are at risk of eviction at the end of the year and at the federal level to be running out of unemployment insurance checks the day after Christmas.

So a call to action, both on public health funding and housing assistance.

Really appreciate the time.

I know I went a little longer than usual.

Thank you very much, Council President.

Thank you, Council Member Mosqueda.

Are there any other comments or questions on that report?

Hearing none, we'll go ahead and hear now from Council Member Peterson.

Good morning.

Good morning, or good afternoon, Council President.

Thank you very much.

Is it afternoon or morning?

I don't.

Still still still just under the wire morning.

It's alright.

Alright, good morning.

I'll go quickly on today's full City Council agenda.

We have Council Bill 119969, which if we adopt it would extend our forgiveness of late fees on utility bills during the COVID pandemic.

We adopted this policy early this year and then extended it with Ordinance 126182 to provide this financial relief from both Seattle Public Utilities and Seattle City Light.

But that ordinance expires in just two weeks, so today's Council Bill 119969 would extend this utility-related COVID relief for another six months.

It's important to note that this relief policy reduces revenue to the utilities that we own and operate, but I believe it's worth it during this unprecedented pandemic.

While we're seeing a spike in COVID cases, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel with the approval of a vaccine.

We'll learn more about how the financial impacts of COVID are impacting both utility enterprises next year when we discuss their strategic plans and future rates.

As the chair of the committee that oversees both utilities, my priority, in addition to keeping the lights on and the water flowing, is to keep utility rates as low as possible to help Seattle address its affordability challenges.

The Transportation and Utilities Committee otherwise has no items on today's full City Council agenda.

We will have a committee meeting this Wednesday, December 16 at 9.30 a.m.

This Wednesday morning, our committee will vote on several appointments to transportation commissions, and we will vote on items heard at the previous committee, including the update to the water regulations.

We've already canceled our January 6, 2021 meeting of the Transportation and Utilities Committee, and we'll resume our committee on Wednesday, January 20th.

but we'll be moving it from the morning to the afternoon because the presidential inauguration will occur that morning, and we want to ensure a quorum for our committee.

Fortunately, there are no conflicts with other committees on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 20th.

At that meeting, we'll have even more appointments.

Last week, I attended the Transportation Policy Board of Puget Sound Regional Council as the alternate, which Council Member Juarez already reported on.

Thank you, Council Member Juarez.

Last week I attended the King County Regional Water Quality Committee.

This regional committee is important because they manage the wastewater treatment, which is important to protect the environmental integrity of our waterways and which impacts a large portion of everyone's utility bill from Seattle Public Utilities.

While we own both Seattle Public Utilities and Seattle City Light, And the general managers of those $1 billion enterprises are working closely with our committee to keep rates low during our affordability crisis.

King County government passes through the wastewater treatment rate.

And so we need to participate in this regional committee to let them know we want to keep rates low.

During my district four office hours, I enjoyed speaking with constituents on the phone about homelessness, public safety and litter cleanup.

Please continue to register through our website to sign up for office hours.

On today's agenda, there's a proposed ordinance by which the city is making a direct award of $1 million to a single organization, Council Bill 119973. I'm not on the Council's Finance Committee, so I did not participate in that discussion.

But I want to thank the city government staff from the Office of Housing, our central staff, and the Finance Committee for doing their due diligence in making the recommendation to approve the $1 million loan.

When I do have the opportunity to decide which organizations will receive tax dollars, I strive to consider specific criteria to address the need, fairness, and effectiveness of the proposal seeking those dollars.

For my constituents and the public, if they're interested, these are all posted on my city council blog.

It's important to have a transparent and clear process, and a request for proposals process works very well.

I realize an exception was made in this case because it's a loan that will be repaid, and because Community Roots Housing is a public development authority created by the city, and it does not have access to other funds such as those provided by the federal government relief package.

So rather than going through the long list of criteria I use, I just want to let you know, I will support Council Bill 119973. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Peterson.

Any comments or questions on that report?

All right, thank you so much.

Well, hearing no comments or questions on that, I'll go ahead and give my report really quickly.

Did want to note as a reminder on behalf of Council Member Herbold, who again is not able to join us this morning, that she does intend to bring forward a proclamation during full council This afternoon, the proclamation is designed to honor the frontline workers who have made us all safer through citywide testing, COVID-19 testing.

Again, that will be presented at this afternoon's full council meeting.

My understanding is that Seattle Fire Department Chief Scoggins will be with us this afternoon, as will Kenny Stewart from the firefighters union.

So both of them will be available to make comments and accept that proclamation this afternoon.

Just really quickly, we will not be asking for signatures during council briefing this morning.

We would normally do that in order to present the proclamation at full council, but given that Council Member Herbold isn't here and wouldn't be able to signal application of her own signature to her own proclamation.

It makes more sense to ask for the roll call on signatures to the proclamation at this afternoon's full council.

But nonetheless, if you have any concerns about the proclamation, please make sure you reach out to Alex Clardy and Council Member Herbold's office.

Again, colleagues, this proclamation is in recognition of the bravery, creativity, and abilities of the Seattle Fire Department.

and a collective group of individuals who were able to come together to create a national model for community testing, which has been replicated across the state of Washington.

Since June 5th of 2020, Seattle's four community test sites have administered nearly 500,000 COVID-19 tests.

And it seems only fitting that on the day that the first COVID-19 vaccine was administered in the United States that we recognize and honor the life-saving work that the members of the Seattle Fire Department and healthcare partners have undertaken since June to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 through administration of tests, at the four sites located across the city of Seattle.

So we are grateful for that service and deeply appreciative of Council Member Herbold's effort to publicly recognize that important public health work.

So again, signatures will be affixed to that proclamation at this afternoon's whole council meeting.

If you have any comments or questions or concerns about the proclamation, again, colleagues, please reach out to Alex Clardy in Council Member Herbold's office or to Council Member Herbold directly.

Report of the Governance and Education Committee on this afternoon's full council.

There are two items currently listed for council's consideration from the Governance and Education Committee.

The first item is Council Bill 119967, which is Agenda Item 7, relating to the 2018 Families Education Preschool and Promise Levy, amending the levy implementation and evaluation plan that was previously adopted by Ordinance 125807. The legislation is designed to grant the Department of Education and Early Learning temporary authority to modify their implementation and evaluation plan in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

deal made a full presentation to members of the Governance and Education Committee, including precisely how the flexibility will play out and what areas of the Implementation Evaluation Plan are being proposed to temporarily be modified in order to allow the department to have maximum flexibility during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And the members of the Governance and Education Committee unanimously voted to recommend that the full council support the council bill.

So that will be on this afternoon's agenda.

Looking forward to everyone's support.

If you have any questions, please do feel free to reach out to me, to V. Nguyen in my office, or to Council Central staff for additional information.

The second item is Council Bill 119968, which is agenda item number eight, relating to direct and indirect lobbying and requiring additional transparency and disclosure requirements in the city's existing lobbying code.

This bill was developed by the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, who joined us in committee last week for a discussion on the proposed changes.

In summary, the bill does three main things.

One, it would require lobbyists to disclose communications with city department directors or their direct reports.

The second would require lobbyists to disclose when they also work on campaigns for an elected official or ballot measures.

And the third item is that it would require sponsors of indirect lobbying campaigns to register when they present a program to the public intended to influence legislation and would require those sponsors to disclose expenditures if those expenditures are at least $750 in a one-month period or at least $1,500 in a three-month period.

So colleagues on that particular issue, you may have received a, you have received a proposed amendment, Amendment 2 to Council Bill 119968. This particular bill would clarify one of the provisions of the bill by more directly mirroring Washington state law and recognizing that communications to an organization's members, so communication from an organization that has members to its members is not considered indirect lobbying in this particular legislation.

I think that is true still to the intent of the original provisions discussed in committee related to the lobbying regulations, that the goal here is to add additional transparency to those individuals or organizations that are launching public campaigns to influence the court of public opinion for purposes of or mobilizing people to lobby council members on their own.

So this does not provide, this does not require people who, for example, email their council members or for people who call their council members or for ordinary people who may otherwise communicate with their council members.

to now suddenly be considered lobbyists and have to register their lobbying activity.

This is specifically focused on organized organizations that are incurring expenditures of either $750 a month or $1,500 over a period of three months who are having those levels of expenditures for purposes of influencing legislation, it would require those people, those sponsors, to register and disclose those expenditures.

And so the amendment that we are setting forward adds one line that says in associations or other organizations active communicating with the members of that association or organization would not be considered lobby or lobbying under our current lobbying regulations.

We had done some outreach late last week after committee to some organizations that frequently do grassroots organizing amongst our members.

And this was one of the concerns that they raised is they did not want to be that the council is considering or a policy issue that the council is considering.

And so this particular amendment is I believe responsive to that the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission to engage in some rulemaking for the first six months of next year to be able to further refine both the applicability of the rule, but I think, and also for the implementation process of the rule, but I think that the amendment that I'm proposing adequately addresses any potential concerns of direct communications within an organization network.

So I'm hoping that folks will be supportive of that amendment.

I am not supportive of eliminating the regulations for indirect lobbying in the Seattle Ethics and Elections Code as proposed by Council Member Solon's office.

And I think that it's really important for us to make sure that we continue to have transparency in who is paying for what campaigns that are designed to, again, influence legislation.

This is not going to create some sort of register or registry of people who are actually responding to those calls for action.

It merely will require effectively fiscal sponsors of those campaigns to be transparent and to disclose their lobbying activity in accordance with this proposed legislation only in the event that the program is designed to mobilize the public to influence council members or other elected officials and when the expenditures hit the threshold as defined within the code.

So I'm happy to answer any questions on that bill if anybody has any, otherwise I will continue to go through my report.

All right, so let's go ahead and I'll go ahead and hopefully finish my report.

My report, like Council Member Mosqueda just said, is a little longer than what I normally do, so I appreciate your indulgence.

Okay, in addition to the items from the Governance and Education Committee, I'm excited about Council Bill 119977, which Council Member Mosqueda has already addressed.

This bill passed out of the Finance and Housing Committee for today's full council.

This is a $5 million small business and worker relief fund that will be available to small restaurants and bars and hospitality industry workers.

I want to sincerely thank Mayor Durkin and council members Mosqueda and Morales for their quick partnership and collaboration for pulling together this proposal and allowing the council to consider this relief package before the end of this year.

We are fortunate to have partners from small business and impacted workers who shared the impact of Governor Inslee's latest extension on the restrictions on our local economy in order to help us determine how we needed to focus our limited dollars to support local business and workers before the end of the year.

We are, of course, currently in month nine of this pandemic.

And today, sadly, we hit the mark of over 300,000 people across the country who have died from COVID-19.

And of course, we know that the needs are great within our community, particularly our small businesses and workers.

And so I think that it's important that we continue to advance this bill and do so expeditiously in order to meet the needs that we can meet now.

$2.5 million of this fund will be looking to the Small Business Stabilization Fund, which in the last round has grown its focus and prioritization to businesses that are smaller and come from zip codes that are at high risk of displacement or are economically distressed zip codes.

The remaining $2.5 million will be for worker relief.

Workers who are in the hospitality industry who have experienced a reduction in income due to a business closure or reduction in hours as a result of COVID-19 will be, after an application process, eligible to receive up to $1,000 in assistance.

The Worker Relief Fund will greatly benefit from the lessons of the city's Immigrant Relief Fund to inform us on the what, the how, and being able to tell the story of how these funds were deployed and how many individuals it helped and more to come on that Immigrant Relief Fund that we've done thus far that will be very instructive to this program as well.

The last item on the full council agenda that I'd like to address today is council bill 119966, or agenda item number one, relating to the legal representation of Mayor Jenny Durkan in judicial proceedings concerning a recall charge.

The city attorney's office developed this legislation at Mayor Durkan's request for council's consideration.

The legislation is brought to us under the same state legal authority as the legislation related to the legal defense of council member Sawant, which the council adopted on September 15th, 2020. The only difference is that this legislation is being considered after the conclusion of the judicial proceedings related to the proposed recall charge.

So in this instance, we know the outcome of the recall charge petition and the total cost of the judicial proceedings, which according to the summary of fiscal note is exactly $240,000.

So this will be up for consideration this afternoon's full council meeting.

Other items to report, Adam?

Quickly, colleagues, if you, I just mentioned that the, We have some great news in terms of the Relief Fund for Immigrants.

If you recall, the city's COVID-19 Disaster Relief Fund for Immigrants was one of the several pillars of Council Member Mosqueda's jumpstart proposal.

Thank you again for making sure that was included.

The fund launched on October 15th of this year.

And as of earlier this month, our Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs has reported that they have concluded their process and that they were able to fund 3,703 people from our immigrant and refugee community with nearly $8 million of funds for a total of 1,444 individuals and 2,259 households.

who have been supported by the Immigrant Disaster Relief Fund through direct assistance.

So lots of good news there.

Obviously, the need was great, but we are so happy that OIRA is reporting such robust numbers and looking forward to hosting them in my first committee of next year, where they will report out on exactly how they structured relief fund that provided direct assistance to immigrants and refugees, and will allow council members to further evaluate who the individuals are, what the needs were, what the household needs were.

But I think this work is going to be really instructive to the city as we continue to roll out other relief funds, like the worker relief fund that we're about to vote on this afternoon.

And of course, we know that 2021 is going to continue to put demands on the city as it relates to direct assistance.

So I want to thank the folks over at OIRA for being really creative and going first and giving us a good template and model from which to work from in future efforts and programming in the area of direct assistance.

Lastly, colleagues, I'll just say that I think it's important to recognize that this is our last council briefing of 2020. I'd like to just take a moment to thank all of you and your staff for your hard work this very challenging year.

There's just no way we could have at any point in time predicted how challenging and tumultuous 2020 would be or how many exacerbated and new crises we'd be required to respond to as a local government.

We have endeavored, I believe, to serve the people of Seattle, responding to civil unrest, global warming, and economic instability to the very best of all of our collective abilities.

The revolving challenges, I am proud that we were able to, I am proud of what we have been able to achieve together on behalf of and for the benefit of the people of Seattle.

not just for the people in folks' individual districts, but for the people across the City of Seattle.

In particular, I'd like to recognize the efforts of the Council's newest members, who I'm sure, when they were sworn into office in December and January of 2020, You all had no idea that your first year in office would mean working remotely, addressing a revenue shortfall, and unbalanced budget midyear, first time ever, and putting your policy work on hold due to Open Public Meeting Act restrictions.

So to Councilmembers Morales, Peterson, Strauss, and Lewis, this certainly wasn't what you or your teams thought you were signing up for.

And I am grateful that you and your staff have persevered and adapted with the rest of us.

One thing is for sure, no one will ever be able to top your my first year in office stories.

It is a unique one and a challenging one.

But really, truly, thank you for your perseverance and tenacity.

Really, really know that there's been a lot flung at you all in particular as first time legislators.

And the rest of us, of course, have more legislative experience, but certainly are learning along with you and how to adapt in this environment.

I also want to say to the unseen and unsung heroes of the legislative department that I want to I want to say my most sincere thank you to those folks.

Without the clerks, IT, comms, the archivists, our admin team, our public disclosure team, and the auditors, we wouldn't have been able to pull any of what we have done this year off.

Many council members and our staff have frequent and regular contact with our council central staff analysts who are critical to our policy work.

But the folks in the legislative department outside of that division who never make it on camera are just as important.

They help us preserve records, set up records management systems, ensure the city clerk's office is still available to the public, even if electronically, and they do so much more.

So 2020 has been a roller coaster ride for all of us.

I want to thank you all for hanging in there and I look forward to the promise of 2021. I know that it will still be challenging.

I know that we will still be in a remote environment, but I am confident that we are going to be ready to meet the challenges of 2021 and looking forward to to doing that with all of you.

So thank you for giving me an opportunity to just sort of put a bow on our council briefing for 2020. It's been quite the year.

And I know that we all have our own stories about what the year has taught us.

But I just really appreciate the opportunity to be able to continue to work with all of you.

OK.

Colleagues, any questions or comments?

Hearing none, that does conclude our agenda for this morning.

Again, I want to thank you all for hanging tight this morning.

We will see you all at two o'clock.

We're adjourned.

Thank you, colleagues.