SPEAKER_18

Good morning.

The Select Budget Committee will come to order.

It is 9.30 a.m., October 2nd, 2024. I'm Dan Strauss, Chair of the Select Committee.

Will the Clerk please call the roll?

SPEAKER_06

Council Member Morales.

Here.

Council President Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Rivera.

Present.

Council Member Saca.

Council Member Wu.

Present.

Council Member Hollingsworth.

Here.

Council Member Kettle.

Here.

Council Member Moore.

Present.

Chair Strauss.

Present.

A present.

SPEAKER_18

Wonderful.

And y'all, Office of Housing, if you want to just come up while we're going through the early motions.

This morning we have...

Today is the last day of department presentations.

We'll move into central staff presentations on October 16th when the next verbal public comment period will be accepted during a...

public hearing where everyone will have two minutes no matter how many people have shown up and we have Councilmember Saka on the dais with us now in chambers.

So today we have on the agenda Office of Housing and then the Seattle Fire Department.

If there is no hearing no objection the agenda is adopted.

I also want to say Happy New Year.

Tonight begins Rosh Hashanah.

Rosh Hashanah tovah.

Rosh Hashanah tovah.

I've already mentioned that we're on the last day of departments.

As a reminder, if there are priority areas within the budget which you would like central staff to focus on during their memos and presentations beginning the 16th, please start letting them know this week.

We had originally set the deadline of this evening, and this week is gonna work.

My staff will be walking the floor as well, Jesse from my team.

to see if there's anything that we can do to help because we want to make sure your needs are being met early, questions are being answered so that you've got the information you need to be successful this year.

Also at the end of THE MEETING TODAY, I WILL BE ASKING FOR SIGNATURES ON A PROCLAMATION FOR DAVID BRUISTER.

IT IS AT TIMES THE PRACTICE TO BRING PROCLAMATIONS AND LETTERS TO A MEETING OF THE FULL COUNCIL SO THAT WE CAN DO SO, SIGN THESE LETTERS IN OPEN SESSION.

THIS WEEK I WOULD HAVE HAD IT AT COUNCIL BRIEFING BUT DUE TO THE SELECT BUDGET COMMITTEE WE DIDN'T HAVE COUNCIL BRIEFING.

where that stands.

It was sent out yesterday.

I will call for signatures at the end of this meeting, so if you haven't gotten time to review that information, it's in your inbox.

With that, Clerk, if you could read the short title of the first item into the record, and then we'll take it away.

SPEAKER_06

Agenda item one, Office of Housing for Briefing and Discussion.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

And so we have director Michael Winkler-Chin.

We have Becky Guerrera and Kelly Larson here.

I'm just reading off my script.

It looks like just Kelly, maybe Becky's in the background.

I'll turn it over to you, take it through the presentation, then we'll pass it over to the chair of your committee.

Over to you.

SPEAKER_14

Good morning, council members.

I'm Micah Winkler-Chin, as Council Member Strauss mentioned.

Joining us virtually is Becky Guerra.

She is the, and I think she's on virtually, she is the Office of Housing Director of Finance, been with the office for 11 years, been with the city for 17, and then...

The person immediately sitting next to me is Kelly Larson.

She is our Director of Policy and Planning for the Office of Housing.

And we are very pleased to be here this morning.

Mayor Bruce Harrell's budget prioritizes affordable housing and proven solutions to address homelessness.

in 2025 and 2026, his priorities are supported by resources needed to achieve the Seattle housing levy unit production goals, support a stable affordable housing sector and workforce, and affirmatively further fair housing in advance our city's equity goals.

The city is making record investments in affordable housing.

as shown in this chart of adopted and proposed revenues from 2014 to 2026. Affordable housing has been a priority for the City of Seattle for a long time.

Over the last decade, there's been a 550% increase in the Office of Housing's budget.

with the greatest escalation occurring in the last three years, due in large part to the dedicated payroll expense tax revenue and the recent renewal of the Seattle housing levy, which has enabled the city to use these resources for bold, effective, and proven solutions to meet the scale and urgency of our housing needs.

Mayor Harrell's proposed budget includes investments of more than $342 million annually over the next biennium.

In this table, you can see that the PET funds have decreased modestly.

Reductions in PET are more than offset by other funds in order to keep true to Mayor Harrell's goal of further increasing our already record-setting housing investments.

This budget ensures that the Office of Housing maintains core services, which I'll describe on the next slide.

The Seattle Office of Housing's vision is that all people have a safe and affordable home.

Increases to the biennial budget will allow us to continue core functions and services to achieve this vision.

First, you see the multifamily rental housing program, which is the largest part of our budget.

The Office of Housing supports the preservation and production of affordable rental housing through long-term loans to multifamily developers in Seattle.

All buildings that receive funding through OH are inspected by the asset management team to ensure ongoing quality, health, and safety of those investments for 55 plus years.

Next, home ownership and home improvement programs.

The Office of Housing assists first time home buyers in achieving their dream through our home ownership program.

And for existing income-qualified homeowners, we provide loans and grants to improve and maintain their homes through the HomeWise Weatherization Program and Home Repair Loan Program.

2026 funding is less than 2025 because of how we account for the weatherization program funds that we receive from state and federal sources to make available for homeowners.

In 2025, we've included the funds we will receive to our program services.

But for 2026, we haven't included them.

But please rest assured, those will be added as part of the 2026 mid-biennial budget update next year.

Finally, we have OH's leadership and administration services, which includes planning and policy, finance, and contracting units.

These staff and operating costs are needed for managing affordable housing programs, such as the Mandatory Housing Affordability, MHA, and the Multifamily Tax Exemption, MFTE, and for the affordable policy work that OH leads in coordination with city council and the mayor's office.

I wanted to take a moment to address questions that my office has received from council members and central staff about our cash balances.

I'm sharing this illustration that we used in recent briefings with the Council's Housing and Human Services Committee.

This hopefully helps to explain the Office of Housing's process for projects from the time we make a funding award to when we legally commit funding in loan closings and onto project construction and the drawing down of funds.

What's important to note is that it can take three years or more from the time a project receives a funding award to the time it starts construction and billing.

OH tracks projects and their funding associated with them, not just the city funding, but other public and private financing as projects move through this process.

At Council President Nelson's request, We have provided a list of the current OH funded projects along with data points for each of them, including project name and location, number of apartments and homes to be built, the amount of city commitment and the total project cost, anticipated timeline for when the project will draw on and expend city funds, and anticipated completion of the project.

So this slide shows the development and units awarded funding through recent competitive processes.

These projects are at initial award phase and they are now securing funding from other public and private sources before OH legally obligates these funds.

So you can see that OH has awarded funding that will create more than 800 rental apartment homes and 73 permanent affordable for sale homes.

OH has awarded these funds, but the developers are not able to access these city funds at this stage of our process.

This means that our nonprofit and for-profit project sponsors are carrying all of the financial risk, having already expended hundreds of thousands of dollars for each project in pre-development costs such as earnest money deposits, architectural and engineering fees, surveys, appraisals, and environmental review.

OH is generally the first investor in the project.

Developments can move to the next step of design and permitting with confidence once city financing is secured.

OH staff are tenacious in working with other public funders to prioritize Seattle's projects, as there are limited resources available from other sources in which we don't control.

If the city took back any funding awards, projects would not be as viable in the eyes of other funders and investors.

Redevelopment funds are put at risk and make organizations vulnerable.

So this slide shows projects with awards and city funding that have encumbered or legally obligated funds.

the time when project developers and owners receive all of their funding commitments and at this point all of those pre-development costs are recognized as eligible project expenses and can be reimbursed.

The organizations shown on this slide are delivering projects across the city creating more than 4,600 rental apartment homes and 317 permanently affordable for sale homes.

These developments are in various stages that range from permitting to construction, as well as lease up and the residents moving in before the final development phase that we call project closeout.

Drawing down all city funds is difficult, especially with multiple funders and investors involved.

OH staff provide ongoing support to our development partners, ensuring that all expenditures are documented and meet funder requirements.

With the mayor's priority in housing and corresponding growth in the Office of Housing's budget, our services are maintained and the budget changes are technical in nature with minimal impact to external stakeholders.

There are no budget changes of note.

I'm now going to highlight OHS plans for the next biennium.

The Office of Housing will continue to do our work as we have since our inception over 40 years ago, or about 40 years ago, but adjusting to the needs of the times to meet the moment.

We will continue to affirmatively further fair housing and advance the city's equity goals through projects like the redevelopment of Lake City Community Center, Fort Lawton, Mount Baker Transit Station, and South Park Properties.

We will continue to achieve Seattle Housing Levy Unit production goals with commitments to permanently affordable home ownership projects like Southwest Holden in West Seattle, the former Dumar substation, Cloverdale South Park Homes, and the Rainier Valley Affordable Home Ownership Initiative sites.

and will produce units through acquisition preservation and new construction commitments for rental apartments selected through open competitive processes.

In our current annual rental housing fund round, OH received more than 20 project requests totaling over $336 million from the city.

Creating new affordable homes is central to our city's success.

And at the same time, we must pay attention to maintaining our assets.

We'll support our housing sector and workforce consistent with what was approved with the levy, providing inflationary adjustments for providers receiving operating maintenance and services funding.

And we cannot ignore the serious challenges that affordable housing providers are facing in operating and maintaining stable properties and promoting a healthy and safe environment for their residents and their workforce.

The Office of Housing never does this work in isolation.

I want to acknowledge and thank Councilmember Moore, our Housing and Human Services Committee Chair, for her leadership and partnership with OH and the Mayor's Office to seek sustainable solutions.

This is the end of our presentation, and thank you for your interest in the Office of Housing.

Happy to answer questions at this time.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Director Winkler-Chin.

Director Eder, Director Noble, Kelly, anything else to add at this time?

SPEAKER_16

Nothing further to add.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_18

Fair enough.

Council Member Moore is chair of the committee overseeing this department.

The floor is yours.

SPEAKER_04

Okay.

Excuse me.

Thank you very much, Chair.

Good morning and thank you very much for being here, Director Winkler-Chen and Kelly and Becky and Dan, Ben, the whole crew.

So I really do wanna say I very much have appreciated your partnership in these nine months in working to create more opportunities for affordable housing throughout the city.

working on the levy and trying to up the levy administration and finance plan and getting that in good working order so that we can deliver on the levy promises.

And I recognize that you are in a tough spot here given the budget deficit.

So I do want to recognize all the hard work and thought that goes into everything that you're doing and you're very daily demonstrated commitment to making sure we're meeting the housing needs of our residents in the city.

And looking at the budget, though, I do have some questions.

I mean, it's Well, the first thing I want to ask is what is affordability administrative fund balance?

Because that seems to be something that's going to be used to fill holes when we take the PET money away.

SPEAKER_02

I'm happy to answer that.

The current balance is $21 million.

We are planning to use 7 million in the first year and 5 million in the second year to fill holes.

We are planning to use 2 million for our new database solution.

And then, of course, we use approximately, depending on the year, but approximately 3 million a year for staffing and administrative costs.

So we are continuing to leave that for each year and knowing that the MHA revenues are unpredictable, we do try to leave a year or two deferred.

And what we also do is whenever the amount gets to a threshold where we feel like it makes sense, we then do shift it over to capital.

We have done that twice so far and we're going to do it again through the budget.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, so...

I mean, just in looking at your figure, so you've got your home ownership and sustainability.

So the budget in 2024 was $8,788,000.

And then for 2025, it's reduced by about $1 million.

26, a little bit less than that.

It actually goes up just a tiny bit.

And then for multifamily housing, the same thing.

Your payroll expense tax is $130 million plus.

For 25 it goes down to 121 and then 26 it goes up a little bit and I'm just curious that it sounds like you're trying to fill those holes with the MHA administrative fund balances But then also shifting some money back to homeownership capital from multifamily capital.

It feels like kind of a shell game, frankly, just to be really blunt about it.

Why are we doing this?

Why are we taking this PET money away from affordable housing development?

And are we really going to be in a position in 27 to put that money back

SPEAKER_16

I'm not sure I was following the question.

I'm not sure I was following the question, Council Member.

Are you asking big picture?

Why are we?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I mean, I think bottom line is that we've taken money from PET that's designated for affordable housing, and we're putting it into the general fund with this representation that we're able to fill the gap with the MHA administrative funds, or in 27, we'll be able to come back and we'll take back some of the PET money.

SPEAKER_16

Yeah, the difficult choice before the mayor was, should we move money from what, should we propose to move money from the PET to support the general fund, or should we take yet more reductions in the general fund, reducing things like parks and homelessness services and community centers and the laundry list of things that the general fund is used for.

The council has rightly noted that there are several places that are challenging already that we are taking reductions on the general fund.

That would be done in multiples many, many, many times over if we didn't support the general fund with the amount of money that we have proposed to move from the PET to this purpose.

That's big picture why the budget looks the way it does.

It's not pleasant to have to take reductions anywhere.

It's not pleasant to have to reduce staffing anywhere and the services that those staff provide, both internally in the city and externally.

But it is a light touch compared to what would be the case without moving the PET into the general fund.

SPEAKER_04

Okay, and so the representation is that I think for the home ownership that you're saying that for the next two years you don't have enough providers that could actually deliver on the home ownership and so it's okay to shift that money?

Is that the position?

That is correct.

Okay.

So what are we doing to build the pipeline, though?

Because one of my priorities, and I think I've been clear about this, is home ownership and trying to look at ways that we can get more people in, lower income individuals and households into home ownership rather than just trying to...

I mean, we need rental housing, but ultimately we need, the ultimate challenge before us, I think, is to build a stable and secure city and also grow our tax base.

And the way to do that is through home ownership.

And we already in this budget and historically have prioritized rental housing over home ownership.

And again, we're cutting money to home ownership opportunities.

So what are we doing to grow the home ownership pipeline, I guess?

SPEAKER_14

I'll take that question.

Thank you so much for the question, Council Member Moore.

OH staff in our home ownership work group is helping build the capacity of different entities to come into the home ownership space.

and that oftentimes takes time.

So we have some new entities that are participating with OH and new structures such as cooperative housing that's being involved in that.

That, as I said, takes time and we have to make sure that there's other resources available for them from other entities such as other public sources that can help support that.

We do agree that homeownership is a great tool for a variety of different ways preventing displacement, but we need and we have some great opportunities.

We just need to help build the capacity of those that are involved in the space.

SPEAKER_04

And then come back in 27 and claw back some of the PET money for home ownership.

Is that the plan?

SPEAKER_14

I would say that I think what we're trying to show in some of our slides and all that is that there's a pipeline that takes place.

So people need to build the capacity and the knowledge in order to move into the space.

And so that is our intent, that we are working towards improving and increasing the number of different entities that do participate in a lot of our programs.

SPEAKER_04

Excellent.

And then I had a question about the asset management.

That is a significant increase from this year to 25 and then to 26. Can you just talk a little bit more about what's going on with asset management and why there is such a, I mean, it's almost a doubling increase.

SPEAKER_14

Looking at you.

SPEAKER_02

There are two things.

Okay.

There are two things going on.

One is a purely technical thing and one is a policy thing.

The purely technical thing is that our workforce stabilization program was added mid-year a couple of years ago and it was placed into the multifamily lending program, which was not the right place for it.

So one of the changes happening is we are moving, we are recoding the workforce stabilization program to where it belongs, which is the Asset Management Program.

It does not change the function of the program in any way.

The other thing that's happening is the increase that you see inflationary adjustments to our agencies in the asset management, which is under the asset management program.

That includes resident services, operations and maintenance subsidies, both funded by payroll tax and by the levy.

So it is an opportunity to provide inflationary adjustments to our agency partners.

SPEAKER_04

Okay, so some of that is the operation and maintenance and services, is that correct?

And does that include providing subsidies or helping the affordable housing providers who are currently struggling to stay afloat with some additional resources?

SPEAKER_02

Yes, and I'll let Kelly speak to that.

SPEAKER_14

Okay, well, I'll speak to it.

Some of the funds.

Some of the funds that are in there is the resident services program that is new.

That gets added in in there.

And there's some new permanent supportive housing operations maintenance and service dollars that are anticipated for the new permanent supportive housing that's opening.

So that is also why you're seeing that.

Those funds, as Becky mentioned, have historically been put into the capital side, I think, but it does firmly belong in the asset management portion, which is when projects are on the ground operating and functioning.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, and so that's to basically help stabilize them, give them the money and support that they need to remain viable.

SPEAKER_14

Yes, because permanent supportive housing collects very little in rent, and so they do need operating supports to keep insured, their staffing, all of that, yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, and is some of that also encompassing rent arrears?

SPEAKER_07

No, our 2024 budget incorporated the operating stabilization funds, the $14 million that was released this year.

Currently, there are no allocations for rent arrears in the 2025 budget.

SPEAKER_04

Okay.

Okay.

Thank you.

And then just my last thing is that I do want to commend you for keeping the fully and actually expanding the funding for home repair and weatherization.

Those programs are very critically important as well to keeping people, particularly lower income households, in their homes.

So thank you for that.

Thank you, Chair.

I have no further questions.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Council Member Moore, and you will also have last word during this presentation.

Council Member Kettle, I see you have your hand raised.

Colleagues, if you'd like to get in the queue, now's the time.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

Welcome.

Good morning, Director Winkler-Chin, Ms. Larson, Ms. Greer, also Director Eder.

Welcome back, and of course, our own Director Noble.

First, can I say thank you so much for the OH team wearing fire department red this morning.

I LOVE THE TRANSITION, THE LEAD-UP FOR OUR NEXT BRIEFING, SO THANK YOU.

NO PRESSURE ON FUTURE DRESS CODES, BUT YOU HIT THAT ONE RIGHT ON THE HEAD.

I JUST WANTED TO START WITH THE BIG THING UP FRONT, PAGE THREE, SLIDE THREE.

I UNDERSTAND HOW THE TOP LINE NUMBER CAME ABOUT.

in terms of, as Director Eder was talking about, and believe that it's a viable way ahead when we're thinking big picture of the budget and all that.

I recognize the arguments related to PET.

But again, from a viable, prudent way ahead, I understand.

I also appreciate the next slide talking about how it's done across core services.

And as I mentioned yesterday in a briefing, the importance of public comment.

As you can imagine, we're hearing from a lot of people.

And as it turns out, yesterday, an email came in on a topic germane to that briefing.

And so I'm like, okay, here we go, HSD.

And so this morning, I got one from Plymouth Housing.

It noted in its third paragraph said, Mayor Harrell's proposed budget shows the importance of investing in housing.

We are grateful for the proposed record investment in housing.

However, the 25 proposal for multifamily rental housing is lower than the 24 adopted budget and development costs have continued to rise.

This means affordable housing providers will not be able to continue to develop at current pace.

We encourage additional investment in multifamily housing and ask the City Council Front pay contracts 25 to encourage rapid development to address the ongoing homelessness crisis and this this goes to slide 4 and I was wondering if you could speak to that in terms of the multifamily rental housing Basically that point regarding the budget coming down a bit But as we all know inflation and Seattle inflation is a little bit more than national inflation and you know that kind of peace Can you speak to that topic?

SPEAKER_14

Thank you for the question.

What I would say is that the Office of Housing's budget is at a historic level, as we've tried to illustrate earlier.

And it's at a historic level.

I never imagined working at the Office of Housing before and having the ability to help influence so many different projects.

Our core services and existing obligations are supported in the mayor's proposed budget.

And all of our projects that we've invested in, either on the capital side and the operating maintenance services are preserved and protected.

And that is foremost of importance to us as we move forward.

SPEAKER_17

Okay.

In a more broad area, I appreciate Council Member Moore, Chair of your committee, in terms of the home ownership point that she makes and also the O&M.

As we'll learn in the next briefing, maintenance is huge in terms of long-term.

So I appreciate the comments from Council Member Moore on that front.

And I recognize that there's multiple, many moving parts to this, which goes to the reason why you, in a different kind of area, the funding timeline, and the awarding of funding and projects in the process.

So thank you for adding that because that's clearly a hot topic for us and for the city.

And it also shows the complexity and the number of players and the different angles that we have here, which goes from funding sources, which you alluded to in this being overall much larger.

but we have PET, we have the levy, we have MHA, we have MFTE, there's other smaller ones, grants and so forth.

It's complex and we have to show everything come together.

On MHA, just to follow up on that, how many MHA units were built?

You know, like whatever timeline going back, kind of.

SPEAKER_14

How many were built?

I'm going to have to get back with you about that one, Council Member Kettle.

SPEAKER_17

As part of this process, do you look at funding sources?

I mean, MHA is more established as opposed to the levy, which is kind of coming online now.

And then there's obviously the PET's been here, and that's been flexing a bit.

In terms of looking at these funding programs and saying, hey, is the in lieu fee working relative to what our goals are?

Or do we need the in place?

Do we ask these kind of big questions of each of these funding sources?

SPEAKER_14

And do they need to be modified?

We do.

We do, actually.

So as members of the Housing and Human Services Committee may know, we are going through, I guess we're calling it an examination, a review of the mandatory housing affordability program.

And we have our annual reports, I think, tied to the MHA program in terms of production.

But we are going through a review of the program right now.

and how many have been produced, how many dollars have been generated.

When the dollars are generated and they come to OH, we put them out through our NOFA projects and I would say at a very high level, the projects that we invest in might be different than those that are produced.

because we tend to fund more larger family units, right?

That the market generally does not create.

So as part of our review that I believe is due later on this year, we are looking at that just to figure out how has the program been evaluated?

It's basically a program evaluation time just to see what that, how has it been working and what is it doing?

Who's benefiting from those programs?

SPEAKER_17

thank you that's that's due diligence and as chair strauss knows that's good governance so thank you on that and adding to the complexity that we have we have social housing we have affordable housing you know we may have zero to 30 ami we have 80 to 120 ami we have 40 60 80 in between that's another um complex thing and i'm leading to a point here in the question um And I think there's the general public and others that are in this world are frustrated.

And I think out of that frustration comes out like initiatives like 137. And then obviously we now have the alternative to that.

And so, and with the comp plan coming up next year, design review changes, I think that's a good point to bring all these varying complex angles to the housing questions that fall under your leadership.

I appreciate all the hard work that you and your team have done, but I think it would be also helpful for the public to see a Seattle housing plan similar to the Seattle transportation plan.

In terms of going through the process, the community involvement, laying things out, you know, the pros and cons, that very transparent, you know, the trade-offs that you go through, and then presenting it to us just like, you know, Director Spatz did.

You know, Director Spatz should not be the only one to go through such a rigorous and, you know, process and I think it would I think it would be helpful to have that kind of level set for for our city to have that understanding and I think it could preclude you know the frustration that leads to like a initiative 137 you know because they can see why things have been done and I recognize inside this is being done I recognize within the committee it's just a an observation of mine that you know over the last number of months that we really could use something like that in terms of a process and a product at the end.

We talk about asset management.

We have asset management plans and it's really talked about in a way in full council in terms of bridges and so forth.

But it's the same thing in terms of the varying types of housing that are included in this briefing.

So you don't have to ask, but if you do have an opinion on the idea of a Seattle housing plan akin to a Seattle transportation plan, please offer it.

SPEAKER_14

Oh, I was just going to say I appreciate your comments.

And we do have a number count for you on the number of MHA units that were produced.

It is 404 MHA units with affordability restrictions that are performance.

And on the payment option, we have awarded 252.2 million to 4,498 affordable homes, including 105 permanently affordable homes, which are on the home ownership side.

And as for the Seattle Housing Plan, we look forward to discussing that further with, I think, Council Member Moore.

SPEAKER_18

Excellent.

Thank you.

Chair?

Thank you, Councilmember Kettle.

Up next we have Councilmember Rivera.

And just to give you a heads up, I'm going to ask you about the unit count of MHA units in the pipeline.

SPEAKER_19

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Director and Kelly and Becky for being here to answer our questions.

So I'm going to ask some questions because I want to better orient myself, and maybe my colleagues know the answers to this, but I'm tracking all of these pieces to housing.

I just want to make sure that I'm understanding correctly.

On the homeownership side, are you saying that the housing providers in the city do not necessarily have the expertise to do the home ownership piece.

And so there are things that you're helping them with in order then to get them to a place where they can expand in this area.

SPEAKER_14

I would say that we have three primary organizations that do home ownership within the city of Seattle.

Those three are the three H's that we talk about, and I always get them wrong.

It's Habitat, Homestead, and Homesite.

With those three organizations that are very well experienced in that field, they are working with other organizations to help those organizations build their capacity so they can do it one day on their own.

SPEAKER_99

Right.

SPEAKER_14

And it's not part of its experience.

Part of it, it's not just knowledge.

It's actually having done it a few times.

Right.

And for people to get the confidence and investing dollars in them.

SPEAKER_19

Yeah.

So it sounds like it's more we have a limited set of providers who are doing this.

And then they're training others to do it as well.

And so that takes time.

SPEAKER_14

Yes.

So of those, we have the Nehemiah Initiative that has been working with churches.

And they're finding organizations that are interested in working on that land.

We have partnerships with African Community and Housing Development Corporation that's active in the Rainier Valley.

We also started a cooperative, a co-op, is that right?

With Corvidae in the Rainier Valley.

So there's a lot of people and the Black Homeownership Initiative.

So there's a lot of agencies that are interested in that because it's a big need and trying to get them able to secure the land, find the resources, and get the knowledge and experience necessary to do that.

It's growing.

SPEAKER_19

Thank you, Director.

And I probably should have said mentoring, not training.

I mean, these folks have some experience doing housing, not necessarily the homeownership side to this level.

So that makes sense.

So this is why it's more of we don't have the capacity at this moment.

So we're it's OK at this moment to repurpose the funds for.

Yeah.

OK.

I just wanted to make sure I understood that correctly.

And thank you for further expanding on that set.

That was very helpful.

at least to me, hopefully it was to others.

And then I have a question about, so the city puts the first dollar in.

Is this common practice across the country?

Do you know?

And I ask because I know in the federal government, they tend to put, and maybe even at the state level for projects in general, last dollar out.

because they want to make sure that things are at a place where then they're going to get built quickly or finished quickly.

But I don't know whether Seattle is taking a different approach.

I have no idea, and so that's why I'm asking in terms of other cities or other states.

Do you happen to know that?

SPEAKER_14

I do happen to know, I also wanted to, if I could, tap back on the homeownership piece.

I know oftentimes when we talk about the encumbered and the awarded dollars, people think of quickly from 43 million I think encumbered in the home ownership as well as 11 million awarded and not yet encumbered so projects that are moving through that pipeline.

We should always have a pipeline of projects along the way.

As to whether other jurisdictions do the same practice that the city of Seattle does.

I will have to get back to you on that.

And that's a common question as to why we do this.

Why are we the first dollars in?

And I kind of touched on that I think in our discussion on slide, was that slide six maybe?

The reason why we do that is it's really expensive, honestly, to build housing.

And so we are oftentimes the first dollars in because other people are waiting and waiting to see what we do, whether we're willing to support this project.

By the time the dollars come into us and by the time projects can get to award, I mentioned the three years from award to construction and the billing.

I know of projects that have, I've worked on projects that have been five to six years out and probably half a million dollars in.

And so if we are not willing to show that support, projects will not be able to move forward at a level to be able to secure those state or federal funds.

And as a developer, I typically only think of state funds.

I never really thought about federal funds because there aren't that many.

So that is how we show our commitment.

Those are the projects that we select that we think are the most important to help meet our goals, whether they're the equity goals, whether they're goals that are stated in the comp plan, how we further...

make investments that really can help capitalize community development.

And that's why it's important for us to be the first in.

If we're not the first ones in, why would anybody support our projects?

And then we can't actually get other people to join us in the funding for those projects.

SPEAKER_19

Thank you for that answer, Director.

And then I just have one last question about on the maintenance side.

So the city funds provides funding to nonprofit providers to build housing.

And then the nonprofit providers, do they own the buildings and the units?

So the city does not have ownership.

SPEAKER_14

That is correct.

SPEAKER_19

But we monitor.

whether those assets are well-maintained because we have an investment in the buildings, correct?

Yes.

Okay.

And so on the maintenance side, do providers get maintenance assistance from other outside entities, other...

SPEAKER_14

It depends on the type of housing.

So some of our affordable providers receive no maintenance support from the city.

That's what happens when you collect the rents, right?

You do your rental collection and that's what pays for the maintenance as well as the utilities and the insurance and all that.

For other providers, we do provide the operations and maintenance and we typically think of that in the permanent supportive housing space.

let's see other funding sources that help pay for the operations side so we think of the capital and then we think of the ongoing operation side there are federal sources there are some state sources and some county sources so we're only providing maintenance operation operating and maintenance support for the permanent supportive housing units not the other units generally yes

SPEAKER_19

Thank you.

SPEAKER_14

There is a resident services dollars that we have started to do and some of that goes towards supporting residents and a part of that could be some of the maintenance needs in their units.

SPEAKER_19

And that goes directly to the person that is either renting or owning the unit?

SPEAKER_14

No, it goes to the provider and they sometimes will need services that help with maintenance.

Perhaps the person is unable to manage some of the maintenance themselves because they're becoming elderly it gets harder to do certain things or perhaps there's other needs in the unit that the resident services program does so there's a little bit of spillover but I would not consider those dollars really to be for ongoing maintenance of the property itself.

SPEAKER_19

Okay thank you and then I have some other questions I could put in our tracker for central staff about maintenance because we're hearing from providers about difficulties with particularly in the permanent supportive housing space, being able to maintain units and things that are happening that they need help with on the public safety and maintenance side.

And I want to learn more about that and what we are doing in terms of supporting that.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

Thank you, Chair.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Vice Chair Rivera.

Following you is Council President Nelson, followed by Council Member Saka and then Council Member Morales.

Council President.

Thanks.

SPEAKER_05

Thank you very much, everybody.

First, I wanted to just make a note about home ownership.

It was brought up by a couple of people here.

The housing levy only allocates $50 million to home ownership, and it's workforce-level home ownership.

And so it seems as though it's a policy choice.

Out of a $970-something million levy, a very small amount goes for home ownership.

So it seems as though that is a policy choice that could be altered in future levies.

Because I'm sure that although there are only three providers of home ownership, projects, the need is much greater.

I'm sure they could take up all of that $50 million.

So I do want to plug for rethinking that going forward.

And also, because after all, homeownership Is as a council member more said, very important to the stability of particularly people who live in neighborhoods that are undergoing gentrification and another way to prevent displacement could be also foreclosure assistance.

And I don't know if that's ever been considered, but just wanted to put that on the table regarding asset management.

I will say just for some context, that is something that council member Peterson was always very, he was always on the office of housing about because he was always asking what is the vacancy rate and why are there so many vacancies in these facilities and so I do applaud the effort to increase asset management because I do think that's really important for visibility about what's going on with existing existing projects and units so I don't have a much heartburn about that I just want to make sure that we do have that information thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions about the cash balance.

Because with $477 million in OH's cash balance, when the levy itself is $1 billion, so that's half of the levy, and that's not even speaking to the other sources, it's a big number.

And I do appreciate the work that you've done to break it down.

And I will be digging into where projects are in that timeline that you provided.

It's important to note because the last thing I want to do is, it was never my intention to suggest removing promised funding from projects and stopping their ability to move forward and gain the trust of lenders to be able to complete those projects.

I was just wondering about why is that balance so big?

um i have a question on the on the slide three what is breakdown in the line um between mha in and housing levy when it says other funds becky could you answer that please yes would it be possible to pull up slide three i'm not sure what

SPEAKER_14

DIRECTOR DEWOLF.

SPEAKER_18

And if the committee table wants to retain the presentation as shared Seattle Channel is doing a good job toggling between so you can leave it shared if you'd like.

SPEAKER_02

DIRECTOR HAMPSON So council president I just want to understand your question in the other funds row.

You're asking what's the breakdown between?

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, the 209 million.

Rough breakdown is that, you know, between MHA and housing levy, because I think those are the two other funds.

SPEAKER_02

That's right.

There are also grants.

So levy is by far the largest here.

MHA, I believe we're budgeting 25 million in 2025. So what you...

After the $25 million of MHA, the rest is primarily levy.

There is a small amount of grants, particularly for the weatherization program.

I believe that's around $8 million.

But yes, by and large, this is levy.

SPEAKER_05

Okay.

Increase from 2024 looks like it's pretty commensurate with the reduction in payroll tax.

So I was just trying to track all that.

So thank you for that information.

Going back to and I have one more question in let's see it slide.

I think it's 4 maybe in the in for 2025. You've got 300Million allocated to multifamily.

And I understand that the, that the office of housing has announced that for the 2024 NOFA, there will be 112Million dollars available for new projects.

So.

The difference between 300 million and 112 million I'm assuming is based on where that where those new projects fall in that continuum of promise money and awarded money, et cetera.

Can you just basically validate that thinking?

Because I am wondering.

SPEAKER_02

I'm happy to speak to that.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

So, council president, what you see the 20, the 112 million in the Nova.

That is our 2024 allocation of levy, largely, and our 2024 allocation of payroll tax for multifamily.

So what you see, and then a variety of other program income dollars that have come in, MHA that is in hand, but what you see for 2025 proposed is a completely different bucket of expected proposed funds for 2025.

SPEAKER_05

Okay.

But broadly speaking, the big number on the slides versus the smaller number of awards basically is due to the fact that over time, those projects will receive more money from other sources and that's represented in the cash balance, correct?

I'm just trying to

SPEAKER_02

That's correct.

And also, just to clarify, the multifamily rental housing budget control level that you see here includes multifamily lending as well as the asset management program.

SPEAKER_05

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

So there are two programs represented here.

SPEAKER_05

All right.

Thank you very much.

That's all my questions for now.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Council President.

Council Member Saka.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And first, so thank you, Director Winkler-Chen and the OH team for being here today.

Appreciate this presentation.

And also appreciate the initial partnership over the last nine months serving on Chair Moore's committee.

Look forward to continuing to do more together.

First off, well, I have a couple questions, but first off, want to pile on a few things that I've heard.

I guess first I want to say I agree with my guy further down the dais there, or excuse me, the distinguished gentleman from Queen Anne.

I agree with what he said about, you know, like we need to explore the possibility of a plan.

Because if we don't have a formalized, documented, official plan, you know, there's our outcomes and results and potential impact is likely to be significantly reduced.

Limited.

And, you know, we're not just shooting from the hip here in housing planning.

You all know what you're doing.

You all are the experts doing this work.

No doubt there's a plan, there's a strategy.

Already...

you have but there' s no formal documented plan that' s open available and transparent to the public that' s gone through the rigor of review and feedback from the council and the public.

similar to the Seattle transportation plan, et cetera.

So I think having a formal plan, documented plan, publicly accessible will help drive clarity, strengthen accountability, enhance transparency, and just make sure we're all sort of reading from the same sheet of music.

I was thinking of calling for plans or sub plans and other complex topics related to transportation but nothing to share at this point.

I'm still toying with a few concepts in my head but just at a high level it does make sense for any number of reasons to have a formal documented plan that's subject to this kind of rigor and accountability.

I also want to plus one the comments from Chair Moore on the importance of home ownership.

And for lower income folks and workforce, middle income type home ownership, for the reasons already mentioned, anti-displacement helps facilitate, well, it's a strategy to address displacement.

It also helps, I think, build generational wealth, which is a powerful tool and economic driver in helping people and families and generations unlock really important economic opportunity.

And most importantly, it's part of the American dream that we can help people realize, and yes, rental assistance and rental options are great and we need more of it, But ultimately, I think the goal is to get more people to be homeowners.

And thank you, Council President Nelson, for noting that of the last levy, $900-something million, only $50 million was allocated for homeownership.

Based off what I'm hearing today so far, my sense is that if this council, two-thirds new composition, had any hand in crafting that, those resource allocation decisions and ultimately policy choices with respect to home ownership, that would have looked a little different at a bare minimum.

But here we are today.

Home ownership is a priority of mine and I know now many of my colleagues as well.

And some of the questions pertaining to homeownership that I had already have been addressed.

But just be curious to better understand what specific types of supports for first-time homebuyers does this budget for OH provide for and who owns this work?

SPEAKER_14

Can I ask a clarifying question, please?

Yeah.

What is, when you ask who owns this work, could you tell me a little bit more?

I'm not sure if I understand that part of the question.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah.

Do you understand the first part of the question?

SPEAKER_14

Please elaborate, please.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah.

So home ownership is a priority of mine.

Okay.

And I also like first-time, supporting first-time homebuyers.

So what type of programs and supports for first-time homebuyers does the proposed budget provide for and enable?

And then who owns this work at the city?

Is it solely OH?

If it's OH, I guess who within your team?

SPEAKER_14

So I will start with the latter part of that question is who owns this work?

It is the Office of Housing's work and it is our home ownership division of, we have three members of that division and they work with the different entities that are involved in several programs.

So one that we've spent some time discussing today is the creation of new permanently affordable homes for permanent home ownership.

the three agencies that we've been involved in the other area of work that we do is we also provide down payment assistance for people that are income qualified and we also work in partnership with other public entities who also provide down payment assistance right and and there's a whole Within the continuum of housing which we provide, which is from the permanently affordable...

Sorry, from the permanent supportive housing to the permanently affordable, there's a wide range of housing types and needs and organizations involved in that.

And they are involved in it for a variety of different reasons, most of them being mission-oriented organizations, and this is how they live out their mission.

So that's who actually owns the work for the city.

We do, as I mentioned, down payment assistance, and we do permanent subsidy for hundreds of new permanently affordable homes.

A lot of this is detailed in the Housing Levy Administration and Finance Plan.

And as Councilmember Kettle and yourself, Councilmember Saka, talked about the housing plan, there was, I think if you look at the Seattle Housing Levy Administrative and Finance Plan details, some of the accounting at the housing levy investments over the seven-year levy period, it talks about the dollars that are going to the different pots of programming that we have.

And some of the projects, I think, I think one of the big differences between the transportation plan and the Office of Housing's levy investments is there are some projects that we ourselves are involved in now, which is a relatively new thing for us.

I would say those projects are the Mount Baker Transit Station, where we actually own the land and we are RFPing it out or working with another entity such as Sound Transit.

That's a little bit newer process for us and could actually be a growing area as we talk about Fort Lawton and the work that we will do with the Parks Department at Lake City.

But what we have traditionally done has been an investor in projects that are owned by other entities.

So for us to tell you specifically in the next 10 to 15 years I'm going to support these five projects in this area, the traditional way that we've done it is wait for proposals to come in and we are trying to figure out how we meet our obligation of affirmatively furthering fair housing as we look at housing opportunities that should be throughout the city.

So there is some level of housing plan that has been detailed out in the housing levy plan.

And as we get into the MFTE and the MHA program discussions, as we reevaluate those, I think those are some of the things.

It is one of the top three things that we look at when we are trying to look at the budget and all that is really meeting our affirmatively How do we affirmatively further fair housing, which is the obligation that we have had for over 50 years, but also meeting our city's equity goals?

SPEAKER_08

Thank you.

My next question, sort of a two-part question, I suppose, pertains to the topic of completing projects faster.

So...

You know, I noticed that there's some overlapping projects with respect to OH and EDI projects and totally understand that there are a number of different kind of funding sources and various requirements at play and other operational challenges.

But I guess at a high level, how are you working seamlessly to help community groups to complete these projects, these specific joint projects, if you will, faster?

And I just note that we have a decent amount of EDI projects in my district one.

We want more.

And so in any event, yeah, how are you working to seamlessly help groups complete these projects faster?

SPEAKER_14

So Council Member Saka, the EDI investments that go into affordable housing projects are really necessary as well as the housing investments that they work very much in concert with each other and they're definitely necessary.

A bulk of the EDI projects, not all, but many of them fund the ground floor commercial space in these housing developments.

And there are spaces like small businesses or community spaces, childcare oftentimes.

And there are multiple city resources that go into these depending, but the EDI is probably the one that's most well known.

when they are going into the ground floor space, the housing building has to be done.

And oftentimes, those ground floor spaces are developed after the housing receives its ability, it's called the TCO, the temporary certificate of occupancy, because those dollars are coming in to finish off space, that needs to be finished with the housing, right?

And it's coming in later.

And it is one of the interesting quirks of the tax credit system that we utilize for our housing, that the investors do like some separation.

We think about the whole project delivery as one, because that is actually our obligation to the community that you're gonna have this project.

And as we might've said in the past, The investment in the housing side is large, but actually the investment of having a building with these child care spaces or these small businesses is actually a huge benefit to the greater community.

And for us, that is important.

We have to deliver those on time.

So the how do we get it done faster, I think, was your original question.

and i think it is really trying to keep the dollars moving for us to do our work and attracting all the other funding necessary to get the housing built faster to work through with our partners in the development space to make sure that they're permitting and all this works as seamlessly as possible so then the edi space can then be finished off as well

SPEAKER_08

Thank you, and yeah, that's helpful.

And that question related to the kind of special instance of an additional heightened layer of complexity with respect to the kind of overlay, overlapping EDI and OH.

But putting EDI projects aside for just a moment, so just OH, at least on the city end, And thank you for providing that very helpful graph here on slide five that shows the timeline, noting it takes an average of three years from the time a funding award decision is made to construction begins.

And obviously, that's as a result of any number of again, operational challenges, requirements.

There's always going to be dependencies and external factors kind of beyond our direct, immediate control.

But there's also an opportunity for those things we can directly control and those things that we can't directly control but some otherwise influence still simplify, streamline, and shorten the timeline.

But anyways, just be curious to better understand How OH is approaching that effort to shorten this timeline?

How does the three-year average compare to other...

cities, bigger cities, I guess, in Washington state, that's probably the best direct comparator, although there's no, there's never gonna be a direct one-for-one comparator, we know.

And then also, like, how does that compare nationally, or, you know, even outside of the state, which, understanding it's gonna be less relevant, but just curious to better understand kind of how that timeline in and of itself benchmarks against, I guess, for starters, other cities in Washington state.

SPEAKER_14

One of the underlying assumptions in our, I'll say the levy projections and the unit count for that relied upon other funding sources to come in to help support the development of housing.

So you hear in the conversation a lot about leverage and We have always anticipated in the housing that is built oftentimes that there is something called the low-income housing tax credit that is utilized, that there are other public funds coming into the project.

There is also the need for the development to secure something called a construction loan, which they go to a regular bank, and try to secure that and to develop applications for that.

So as I said earlier, we are the first dollar in.

We show that commitment.

Oftentimes when developments are applying to us at the Office of Housing, they are also applying to the other public funders.

We in the state have a joint funding application.

So that helps in the clarity of who else they're applying to.

And as I mentioned earlier, we don't control how the other public entities nor the private entities invest, but we try to state our priorities that this project is important to us and we would appreciate if you were funding along with us.

And I mentioned that earlier.

That can take a while, right?

What we are lucky with the Seattle housing levy in particular is the ongoing consistency in dollars.

So we have the predictability.

Developers, whether they're nonprofits, whether they're for-profits, like predictability and reliability.

And that is extremely important because you need to know that there's dollars before you're making the hundreds of thousands of dollars investment in trying to move this project along.

So that all takes time.

you have to get a tax credit investor involved, and that also takes time.

And that gets allocated by different entities later on.

And as these projects move along, they're also dealing with the city of Seattle, or working with the city of Seattle, I would say.

Pardon me.

Sorry, Nathan Torgelson.

Working with the city of Seattle in particular about getting all the necessary permits that are needed, both here at the city and with King County if you're dealing with plumbing, which all of our housing is.

And what's interesting is the projects that are EDI focused, then you're having to factor in whether the funds are available for those projects as well.

The EDI is a major component, but many of the EDI projects are either looking for grants or other funds from state.

And so the layering in of all these funds, the gathering of all these funds to make it as financially efficient can take time.

And so it is really trying to be coordinated.

And so for the city of Seattle, it is really important that our dollars go in because then we can say, no, this is the project that we want.

Help us get this project built.

And it shows our leadership, frankly, in what we want to see.

We are all trying to work on trying to make housing be built faster because we have a housing crisis.

But even within that, there are limitations on time.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you, Director Winkler-Chen.

I appreciate you and the efforts of you and your office and your work to continue to drive Project Velocity.

And I look forward to continuing to partner together alongside my colleagues here.

and the mayor to help drive that project velocity even further.

So I suppose I'll just pass it back to the distinguished gentleman from Ballard.

No further questions, Mr. Chair.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

And up next is Council Member Morales.

I don't see any other hands.

And after Council Member Morales, if there are no, I have another hand.

Fantastic.

Council Member Morales and then Vice Chair again.

Although Vice Chair, just double checking, anyone who has not spoken still gets to go once before we come back to folks.

Council Member Morales.

SPEAKER_03

Good morning.

It's still morning.

Thank you for being here.

Before I get to my questions, I do want to just clarify a couple of things.

And forgive me if somebody clarified this while I was out for a moment.

But I've heard a couple of times a comment about the housing levy being new.

And so we're still trying to figure out how it works.

But in reality, that We passed that in 1986. We have renewed it several times.

And council does go through a robust, as Councilmember Mosqueda would have said, process of working with the executive, working with the departments to determine what what we want to fund with that levy and how big a levy we want to request.

So I just want to make sure that that's clear.

I will also say to the point about needing a housing plan, we do have a housing supplement that is part of the comprehensive plan.

I would encourage my colleagues to read it.

dense and answers a lot of the questions that I feel like I hear coming out about.

What are we funding?

Why are we funding it?

How are we going to fund it?

Where is it going to go?

And it's really useful to understand what our strategies are going to be once we get to the comprehensive planning conversation.

We also do have affordable housing finance policies that help us think about how we're going to do this.

So all that to say there are lots of documents that we work on in order to get to the question of what kind of housing we're going to build and how we're going to build it.

And they're really, really helpful.

So thank you, Office of Housing, for working on all of that.

To the point about building capacity and the need to really help developers develop their to build a commercial, to build ownership.

That is precisely the kind of capacity building that we would have already begun if the connected communities legislation would have passed.

And I just have to say that because we keep coming back to this point.

And that would have been a freeway to try to get jumpstart on that capacity building.

I want to talk about, I don't see the slide number, but the record investment in housing.

I know that that is one interpretation of the chart.

It's slide two.

Councilmember, is that it?

Yeah.

Okay.

I have to be honest.

When I look at this chart, what I see is that it demonstrates a history of underinvestment in housing across two decades when we had unprecedented growth in this city.

I will say to you what I've said to every other director.

This is not frustration directed at you.

You've only been here for a couple of years.

But we know that as a city, we have had a housing crisis for a very long time.

And so, yes, these are really high levels of investment that we're making with the payroll expense tax.

There is a reason we had to increase the housing levy, because it has become so expensive to build housing in the city and in this country.

So while this might be a historic investment, what I see on this slide is that it is catching up for decades of under-investing in housing.

And I will say, you know, this is not a time to maintain services.

It's a time, particularly given the fact that we have a new revenue source that will allow us to be creative and bold and think about different ways of doing housing because, as Maiko's been talking about for an hour, it is a Byzantine system that we have for how we finance affordable housing right now, and it's crazy-making for the Office of Housing, for developers, for the people waiting for housing.

And if we could do something different and easier and support faster acquisition, support social housing, support mixed income housing.

I think we have an opportunity with the new revenue source that we have to really think outside the box for how we do this work.

So I have a lot of questions.

I'm going to try to boil it down to just a few, and I'll put the rest in the SharePoint.

And I want to make sure, because I've been reading all the BIPs, and some have been rejected and some have been accepted, so I just want to make sure I'm operating under the same understanding.

So in terms of the reducing multifamily lending, As I understand it, this item decreases appropriation authority by $35 million in the budget control level, the multifamily housing, and reflects an ongoing reduction of available PET.

SPEAKER_16

I don't know, Dan, if that's you.

I believe that is a change request that was considered but not accepted as part of the mayor's proposed budget.

We've provided council symbols.

SPEAKER_09

As of yesterday, we have received the annotated list.

So what we had before were all of the change requests, both the accepted and rejected, and they hadn't been sorted.

Okay.

It would have required manual sorting.

We have now got the electronic sort, if you will, and that file has been uploaded.

Your staff all have access.

SPEAKER_03

Thank you.

Okay, good to know.

In my defense, I do have three ginormous binders sitting on my desk that I'm trying to work through.

SPEAKER_09

Only offered as assistance.

I saw that same list and didn't even start.

Okay.

Credit you for having gone down that path.

SPEAKER_03

Okay, so I'll ask one more question related to that then.

Can you confirm that the appropriation amount for the homeownership and sustainability is reduced by $1.7 million?

SPEAKER_02

Yes, that is correct.

SPEAKER_03

That is correct.

Okay.

Because I think there's two different numbers.

So I wanted to make sure I have the right one.

So lots of questions there.

I'll just put them in the form.

Okay.

So the 2023 housing levy modeling for homeownership outcomes and development assumed a $10 million payroll expense tax over the seven-year levy for site acquisition.

Can you tell us if that is not going to be included now, how this aligns with the community's ask to create more access to homeownership?

SPEAKER_14

Please.

SPEAKER_16

I may have been distracting.

Dan?

This is the second time.

SPEAKER_03

Should I ask the question again?

Hold on.

SPEAKER_07

So we did model assuming $10 million of payroll expense tax for land acquisition.

It is still possible that that will come through over the course of the seven year levy period.

So we are currently addressing 2025 and 2026. We're also hoping to capitalize on possibilities of no cost or low cost land transfers for the home ownership program.

SPEAKER_03

Okay.

So going down to Oh, thank you.

I did not know she was here.

So do you, I want to get to the question about asset management.

So can you tell us if you audit affordable housing developers for how they run their properties if they are city funded?

And the second question is, so I oversee SDCI.

I'm interested in how city-funded projects, how and whether, are compliant with the warranty of habitability.

Because tenant services funding is being proposed to be reduced.

Compliance monitoring and SDCI is proposing to be reduced.

And I will say, as grateful as I am for the many affordable housing developers in this city, we also hear regular complaints from certain properties I certainly hear in my district that are managed by affordable housing developers and they are uninhabitable.

And it's not because of damage.

It's because of roofs leaking or heating that's out or cockroach infestation.

And so I want to know what we are doing as a city, if we're putting public dollars into these buildings, what we're doing to make sure that people can actually live in them.

SPEAKER_14

Thanks, Councilmember.

How we monitor, I think was the, you had asked, how is it that we're monitoring?

There are two different ways, right?

So we have our annual reports.

So there's a paper monitoring type process.

There's actual physical inspections that our staff go out and do.

And depending on how well the the project did at their last inspection, you may not be inspected the next year.

So there is a regular pattern of units that get inspected.

Our staffs show up on site.

They randomly tell you that you want to see these units.

They go and visit them.

They'll do the paperwork review, all of that.

We are one of the public funders, and if there's multiple public funders involved in a project, they all do their monitoring.

And during the pandemic, we did not go out and monitor most of those units, partly because we didn't have the capacity.

It was seen as not great for health for our staff to be entering people's units and entering multiple units.

And so I believe that we have caught up on all of those inspections and are kind of getting back into the sync of doing that.

I would say that it's a very challenging time for housing providers.

As I referenced, there is work that we're doing with Council Member Moore at the Housing Committee that you're aware of, being the vice chair of that committee.

And I'm sure that you've also heard of the maintenance concerns as well as public safety concerns at the different properties and ongoing delays to securing the supplies and the contractors to actually physically do the work.

And that is a challenge I think that we're dealing with across the industries.

In order to fix that repair, that leaky roof, you have to get somebody that's willing to repair it for you.

And having the staff that are able to get the bids and do that and then finding the contractor to do that has proven challenging from what we're hearing from our people.

let's see, we're examining our policies and our investments to consider ways to preserve and exist, sorry, to preserve and invest in the portfolio.

I think it's really, really important that we continue to do that.

And acknowledging the fact that some of our investments are from the early 1980s, and how do we keep those going when other public entities may not be as interested in investing in those?

So we have to keep doing that.

SPEAKER_03

It's not easy.

I understand like trying to inspect, you know, on a regular basis, trying to renew is challenging.

And, you know, I mean, I've been in some of these units and it's really sad that there's, you know, families with small kids living with no heat or, you know, black mold because the roof won't get repaired and the leak won't get repaired.

So I just think it's really important for us in whatever capacity, whatever department, that we increase our support, increase the resources for inspection, for, you know, if somebody's, if a project is going to get renewal, that there are some, there's some accountability for making sure that those providers are providing safe housing.

SPEAKER_14

Absolutely.

I also think that it's incumbent upon the city to make sure that when one arm of the city is hearing something, that it is a one Seattle approach where that the silos, there should be no silos and that sort of information, the information should flow.

SPEAKER_03

Okay, last question, and you sort of touched on this already, Director Wieckler-Chin, but can you talk about what or whether resources have been added specifically for affirmatively furthering fair housing?

I didn't see a bit on this in particular.

I don't see anything in the budget, and we know that the City of Seattle has received a recommendation to address where housing is located particularly for areas of high opportunity and low risk of displacement, which, again, we'll be talking about in the comp plan.

But can you just talk about whether that's addressed here at all?

SPEAKER_14

So we have been doing some thinking at the Office of Housing, really, about how it is that we affirmatively further fair housing.

For us, I think it is some of the discussion in the NOFA priorities for us where we start talking about areas of high opportunity.

we look to support the work in the comprehensive plan which really helps highlight those areas of opportunity as whereas historically the areas of displacement and how do we support the city's efforts to provide housing opportunity throughout so it is embedded in some of our work you're not going to see a specific line item that says and we're affirmatively furthering but that is i think a body of work that's really been, Kelly's been told to do that through the planning and policy work, right?

And really just trying to be really intentional about what are those housing opportunities that we are obligated to provide throughout the city and what are the different programs, whether it's MHA, whether it's MFTE, whether it is our direct investment in those areas.

SPEAKER_03

Thank you.

I'll put the rest in the SharePoint.

Thank you, Chair.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

Checking in to see if there are colleagues that have not spoken that would like to speak.

I'm seeing none at this time.

Therefore, we will go back to Vice Chair Rivera and Council Member Nelson, noting that we are about an hour and a half mark of two-hour window, and I know I have some comments, and I know Council Member Moore, I assume, does as well.

Council Member Rivera.

SPEAKER_19

Thank you, Chair.

I'll try to make this brief.

On the homeownership side, I appreciate the comments of my colleagues.

I, too, care about home ownership, particularly because, as we all know, we hear and read in the papers young people's ability to own a home is pretty much, you know, nil to none at this point.

And so this is really important.

Director, when you said, and thank you, Council Member Saka, for raising the piece about what supports exist for first-time homeowners.

Would love to know what the city's investment is in the down payment and other supports that we provide, what percentage of the funding goes to that.

and what is the income eligibility for that.

And you don't have to tell me now, you can just send that, that would be great.

And then my other piece is on the, I'm gonna raise again the first dollar in puts onus on the city then in my mind to ensure that those, to assist in getting those projects to completion.

Because I've said this many times up here, projects, housing or otherwise, are not going to help if they're not actually completed.

And so what I would love to hear, and I haven't heard, and I think my colleague asked this, but I didn't actually hear an answer, was What is OH doing to ensure those projects get to completion?

And I think what we're talking about, or at least in part, is technical assistance.

And I know that the city's limited because of the gift of public funds on things we're able to do, but are we doing all the things within our legal bounds to be able to get these projects to completion?

What is the technical assistance that we are providing these projects?

Because I think a lot of these providers, they do have to go to other sources to complete their projects.

And then our money's just sitting waiting around.

We can't use it for other things.

And these projects aren't getting completed, so they're not actually helping.

And then to Council Member Kettle's point, you know, folks are sitting around wondering, you know, when is this housing getting completed?

We do have a large part of money sitting somewhere committed, and I get that part.

And I want to see these projects completed so they're actually doing the most good.

So I would like to hear, if not right now, Director, putting it into the question and answer spreadsheet, what is OH doing to help these projects get to completion?

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

SPEAKER_14

So Councilmember Rivera, there's multiple ways in which OH helps move projects forward.

First, in the funding realm, We work with the other public funders to try to fund them upfront and try to fund them all at the same time.

Having sat on projects that we have funded and they didn't get state dollars until a year or two afterwards proves to be painful.

And so we try to advocate to move this forward as fast as possible.

When other public entities, they'll work on a biennial budget and their dollars are not as consistent as ours, that can be a challenge.

But what that means is that our projects are ready to go sometimes when the other funders are ready to go.

The other funders oftentimes work on an annual budgeting system and an annual allocation system, so it can take some time.

but as we are lining up our projects and making them as good as possible so the other funders will fund them and then that the other investors will fund them when the public entities and the private entities like the banks and the tax credit investors, that's what we work with them on and making sure that they look and that they look and they know the rules of those other entities as well as possible so they can best provide for those measures that are important to them.

Within the city work itself, we advocate for our projects with the other departments.

We have a priority, we're a priority two, for our permitting and try to work as quickly as possible in getting the information to the other city departments so then they can then issue their permits and then we can move things forward.

We don't like surprises either at the Office of Housing, so we wanna make sure that the permitting and any obligations that the other city departments put on are known upfront so then we can try to access funds from everybody else in order to support those expenses.

It is great for us to know when in a lot of our buildings, they're in zones that require some commercial space.

So it's good for us to know if there's other city departments that are investing in those projects themselves because then we can better coordinate and try to move things forward as quickly as possible because oftentimes the housing is the biggest part and getting those other resources attracted is really it.

I do not know if legally there is more that we can do.

And that more that we can do comes at a risk and comes at spending more per project that would then minimize our ability to create more housing.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Director Winkler-Chin.

I see we have Council Member Hollingsworth also in the queue now.

I'm gonna bump you up to the top and then followed by Council President Nelson and then Council Member Morales.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll be really fast.

Thank you, Director Winkler-Chin.

Really appreciate all the work that you do.

I know it's hard, especially in this and how we're putting stuff on the line.

One of the things, and I'll probably just put this in the queue, I just wanted to highlight that how we really need to cut the red tape on two to four bedrooms.

I'm pretty sure you know that one third of the households in Seattle are occupied by one person.

That's because we have really invested in a lot of studios.

And 50% of people between the ages of 18 and 25 feel lonely.

And I remember at those ages, I used to have roommates.

And so just wanted to highlight that because that leads to depression and all these different things.

And so we know how important housing is to our community.

So I'll be following up because I'm really passionate about that and want to make sure that we're making these investments.

The other piece, and I know this is the county, and a lot of people I've reached out to just didn't know that the property tax had increased for the exemption, or not exemption, but the relief to $84,000, and wanted to dig into potentially, and we'll probably do this offline, about the outreach of that.

I know it's a very low redemption rate for a lot of the people that are taking advantage of that.

And I think our outreach could be so much better to keep people in their homes so they're not losing those.

A lot of people, it takes about a year if you mail in your stuff.

And then unfortunately, a lot of those older people don't know how to do online stuff.

So definitely want us to really focus on that piece because keeping people in their homes is crucial.

I just wanted to highlight those things.

I'll follow them up offline, but really want to just echo what my colleagues had talked about with the housing investments, especially for family housing and the homeownership piece as well.

Thank you, Director.

Appreciate you.

SPEAKER_18

Anything you'd like to add, Director?

No, thank you.

Fair enough.

Council President Nell, at the end of Council President's comments, I'm going to...

Yeah, absolutely.

Council Member Morales will go after.

If you want to speak during this presentation, I need your hand raised now because after Council Member Morales, I'm going to share my piece and then I'm going to pass it to Council Member Moore and then we'll be complete.

So Council President and Council Member Morales, and if you want to raise your hand, now's the time.

SPEAKER_05

Thank you very much.

I wanted to reinforce Council Member Morales' point about the importance of mixed income housing.

And we do have a tool to produce that, which is the multifamily tax exemption program, which provides a tax rate to private developers for if they make units available in their buildings for Uh, low income people, and so that will be renewed next year just to plug that.

We shouldn't forget the fact that this is a source of affordable housing, which is very important to me to Max.

We need to increase the participation in that program.

My question I do have a question.

Uh, I. Recovery housing.

If the percentage of homeownership dollars in the housing levy is small, 50 million compared to 970 million, there is no money designated for recovery housing.

And I sat around a table of homelessness services providers and some folks from Plymouth, and there's a recognition that with the fentanyl epidemic and people choosing recovery, there needs to be a place for people to go once they get out where they can continue on their journey of recovery.

So I was able to get this into the policies that we recently passed that will guide the allocation of housing dollars.

But I'm just wondering if you can tell me whether or not there is any funding within this budget that you're presenting that will perhaps go toward recovery housing.

SPEAKER_14

Thank you, Council President.

We are hearing from several providers that there's interest in exploring what recovery housing could look like and what it should be as part of our permanent supportive housing and housing with services continuum, right?

Part of that continuum.

Those funding for those projects would come out of the multi-family rental housing pot.

So there's none specifically identified, just like there's none specifically identified for PSH, but that's just part of our open notification of funding availability processes.

SPEAKER_05

Okay, previously HUD would not fund projects that were not Housing First, but they changed that.

That policy recently within the past year.

So there is so that opens up the possibility for these projects to be viable now.

So I, I really want to encourage that.

And then just a final note of support for, I think, what is the spirit of what council member kettle is trying to get out with the housing plan.

And that is basically.

I think what you're hearing is that council members want to know the vision of what kinds of housing we're building across the pots of money and to build in some additional accountability because the housing levy is designed by a 20-member advisory committee that is all the providers.

THEY'RE THE ONES THAT ARE SITTING AT THE TABLE, BUT THAT'S ONLY THAT ONLY SPEAKS TO THE HOUSING LEVY DOLLARS.

AND THEN THERE ARE OTHER SOURCES OF FUNDING.

AND SO WE REALLY AND THE ADVISORY COMMITTEE ITSELF OVER THAT LOOKS AT THE SPENDING ALLOCATIONS OF THE HOUSING LEVY OVER TIME, SOME OF THOSE MEMBERS ARE PEOPLE THAT WILL GET THE FUNDING.

AND SO I THINK THAT WHAT WE'RE HEARING, AND THAT WAS NOTED IN THE SEATTLE TIMES EDITORIAL EARLIER.

I THINK THAT HOWEVER THIS SHAKES OUT, AND THANK YOU, COUNCILMEMBER MORALES, FOR IDENTIFYING THAT THERE'S ANOTHER SOURCE OF INFORMATION IN THE COMP PLAN THAT CAN GET AT THIS, BUT I DO JUST WANT TO SAY THAT WE ARE AN ENGAGED COUNCIL AND CS'S ALLIES GOING FORWARD IN REALLY MAKING SURE THAT THE VARIETY OF MEANS OF HOUSING ARE MET GOING FORWARD.

THANKS.

SPEAKER_14

I THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR THAT, COUNCIL PRESIDENT NELSON.

I think Council Member Morales touched on this, that the comprehensive plan kind of sets that vision and we are the implementers of what that is, right?

And so we should probably work in concert with OPCD in trying to better illuminate how our dollars may be utilized in meeting some of that.

So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

Council Member Morales.

SPEAKER_03

Thank you.

Yeah, I just wanted to go back to the first question I had about the multifamily rental housing lending program.

So the BIP I was referring to is actually in the approved change requests list.

So for the record then, I just want to state that it's a $7.5 million decrease in 25, 1.6 in 26. And then the summary of this item is that it decreases appropriation authority by 35 million in the 14,500 multifamily housing budget control level, reflecting an ongoing reduction in available payroll tax.

And the reason this is an issue is because this cut would result in 160 fewer units being created every year, and there is a potential impact of nearly 1,000 fewer units over the five-year period.

So, Dan, I just wanted to make sure that you knew what we were referring to, because this is a pretty significant cut.

Thank you, Chair.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

Colleagues, I'm not going to be short.

So, fair warning.

SPEAKER_03

I'm going to go grab my coffee.

SPEAKER_18

That's exactly.

So I just wanted to state for the record up front, we want to build more housing than ever before.

And we want to fund building housing more than ever before.

And that's it.

That is my desire.

That is something that I have lived for the last four and a half years on council.

If you look at slide three that we keep talking about, you can quite literally see the time that I've been here on council has been, other than 2021, record amounts every single year.

When I originally saw this slide, I was floored that in 2014, at the height of our construction boom here in our city, and if Seattle Channel, if you wanna show this slide, thank you, that in 2014, at one of the heights of our construction boom here, that we were funding five, zero, $50 million in affordable housing in the city.

This was already past the point that the neighbors and the people that I grew up with in my community in Northwest Seattle and Ballard had already left.

That's also why it's really important to me that in the communities that have not yet been displaced that we make sure that they don't ever become displaced because I'm really proud of the fact that I was born and raised in Ballard.

It was a completely different neighborhood and I oftentimes say that I can't go back to the neighborhood I grew up in because it doesn't exist and that's okay.

Ballard's changed, and there's some amazing new amenities.

When I was growing up, a successful business that moved to Market Street would fail.

I saw it multiple times.

And today, businesses are clamoring for space on Market Street because the density of people living in the neighborhood is contributing to a more vibrant community.

Housing's part of that.

I went past Copper Pines, one of the home ownership opportunities that you created in partnership with City Light.

I passed by it two days ago.

And I didn't bother anyone, but I saw people walking in the door, and it was amazing, because it's not just for the first owner of those units.

It's for every owner thereafter.

making it so that the families like the ones that I grew up with and the family that I grew up in can afford to live in the neighborhood that I got to grow up in.

Um, We keep talking about the length of time that it takes to create affordable housing and what does it mean when funds are promised and then encumbered and then still sitting in the pot.

I'm gonna take you on a timeline of an experience that I had myself as a council member.

which, and so I'll take, so this was my third, second week in office, 2020, pre-pandemic, pre-pandemic.

So imagine, colleagues, for those of you who came on to council this year, your third week in January.

I had a church come to me in Ballard that wanted to build affordable housing, St. Luke's Church.

And so we set them up with the process to do so.

So again, the desire was in 2020, their email was the first week I got back to them on the third week.

So apologies, Reverend Olson for that small delay.

It wasn't until I think 2021 that we were able to provide them funding.

Now let's look at the funding, because at that point we were only doing one, and if I get any of this wrong, just correct me, Kelly.

At that point we had only been doing one, and if you wanna, yeah, thank you.

So at that point we were only doing one NOFA a year, I believe, and only because of the federal funding we were able to start doing two NOFAs a year.

If you could go back to slide three, because I wanna show how this works with the money.

So in 2021, we were only able to have a second NOFA because of the 2020 funding.

And so when we talk about pipelines of organizations being ready, whether it's home ownership or any other, there has to be a series of years of that funding to be available.

So in 2021, we had a second NOFA that St. Luke's was chosen for.

In that time, we passed legislation to streamline permits for affordable housing.

And I passed legislation that I sponsored to create a bonus density for religious institutions.

And if you want to go back to the NOFA slide to demonstrate what we're talking about.

And even with those additional bills passed, We only had the groundbreaking for this affordable housing on May 17th, sit in the my of this year.

The crane is active.

Those units are being built right now.

And that's why Kelly, I prompted you and I wanted to give you that fair warning that I was gonna ask about the MHA unit count in the pipeline.

because the number that you shared felt low to me.

And when I was thinking about it, it is because in my first week of office, in my first term, I started working on this project, and those units are not online in my second term.

After we passed streamlined permitting, after everyone...

Like, this project went as fast as possible.

And so...

I just put that in the context of it feels like there's a lot of money out there that is sitting in this pot that has been either promised or encumbered.

And I'm gonna raise up something that Director Winkler-Chin mentioned, which is that we have to act as that seed funding, as that foundational funding.

And when we're providing this public good of affordable housing, we must act, and this fund is acting in some ways like a public bank, saying here is your money that we will guarantee to you.

If we wanna look at the banking system, I'm not gonna go there.

But I just, I've raised this story because the amount of time that it's taken to have these two and three bedroom units in Ballard, we still haven't even built them.

For the same property, neighboring project that is MFTE, that building hasn't even gone into construction.

And this is a physical embodiment of the streamlining efforts that we've gone through for affordable housing.

four years later it hasn't been built or hasn't been completed and that's not anyone's fault it's just the situation on the ground when i look at slide three and i see the history of our funding councilmember morales is absolutely correct that we have had decades of underfunding and we are now catching back up and that is the importance of making sure that we're funding affordable housing at record levels.

It's something that I'm gonna be taking a look at all of these changes that we've had to take this year.

It's also important to note, and I said this during the CBO presentation, that the tannish salmon colored line in there, the MHA dollars, those dollars are going to be changing because we saw in 2023, we were still getting a lot of MHA dollars, 22, even though the development pipeline had slowed in 2020. And what we're seeing in 24 is that this number is even smaller because again, we have fewer cranes in our city.

Everybody knock on wood that the interest rate drop is going to provide predictability to the dry capital that's sitting on the sidelines for additional development, which will increase the amount of mandatory housing affordability dollars.

I'll take us back again in the way back time machine of 2020 when Jumpstart was passed.

The other funds that are listed there are federal funds associated with the pandemic.

In 2020, all we had was the levy and MHA.

And MHA was still so new in 2020, we had not realized the benefit.

Kelly mentioned, and did you say it was 400?

How many units have we produced with MHA so far?

SPEAKER_07

So there's performance MHA, and that was the 400. So those are the projects that perform the affordable units on site.

For MHA payments that the Office of Housing has administered, it's closer to 4,500 apartments.

And then when we pipeline, we don't typically attach fund sources to particular units necessarily going forward.

But as Director Winkler-Chin said, we have $336 million of requests in this 2024 Fall NOFA.

SPEAKER_18

So today in 2024, we have 4,500 units produced within lieu fees.

And I take us back in this way back time machine of 2020 to remember that if we today have 4,500, how many did we have then?

Very few.

I'm not even going to ask you to figure out what that number is.

You're welcome.

And that was the importance of having Jumpstart fund housing at this level.

Because in 2020, I was...

I WAS SURPRISED AGAIN WHEN I WAS READING THE 2019 TO 2024 BUDGET SUMMARY.

I'M GOING TO JUST READ FROM IT RIGHT NOW.

BETWEEN 2019 AND 2024, THE BUDGET FOR THE OFFICE OF HOUSING INCREASED BY $270 MILLION.

THE MAIN DRIVERS OF GROWTH INCLUDE BEGINNING IN 22, CITY INVESTMENTS FROM JUMP START PROVIDED SIGNIFICANT SUPPORT TO THE MULTI-FAMILY AND HOME OWNERSHIP AND SUSTAINABILITY PROGRAMS.

JUMP START FUNDING IS USING CONCERT WITH FUNDING FROM THE HOUSING LEVY, MHA, AND OTHER FUND SOURCES TO SUPPORT THE DEVELOPMENT AND ONGOING OPERATIONS AND MAINTENANCE OF THE MULTI-FAMILY RENTAL AND HOME OWNERSHIP AFFORDABLE HOME OWNERSHIP HOUSING AFFORDABLE TO LOW INCOME HOUSEHOLDS.

THE 2023 HOUSING LEVY THE SEVEN YEAR $970 MILLION PROVIDES APPROXIMATELY $139 MILLION ANNUALLY TO EXISTING OH PROGRAM.

I REMEMBERED THAT IN 2014 WE SPENT ONLY $50 MILLION AND I WAS taken aback by that and I had forgotten that even in 2019, we'd only spent $69 million.

So this is what, I provide this additional context because this was a crisis that had gone unaddressed for 15 years or more in the city of Seattle, 20 years, I'm seeing head nods around 20 years.

I had gone unaddressed for 20 years in the city of Seattle and it was past time that we took action that was at the size of the problem before us.

This is in part of how we got to today.

Do I wish that I could fund housing at a higher level this year?

100% absolutely because Since 2014, even with these increases, the cost of building these units has increased.

The inflation has increased.

I will say we need to stop building one-bedroom apartments flat.

Like we need two, three, I'm seeing four from D3.

But that was the really important part about the affordable housing at St. Luke's is that they are two and three bedroom units.

There are not one bedroom units and it's designed to be for families.

And it is important for us with the chart on, on slide three to keep in mind that we will have more options as we move forward in the next year.

The 26 proposed budget, we do have another crack at next year, even though we're doing a biannual budget this year, next year's annual budget will attempt to just make small changes to this year's budget.

And this is an area I think we're all keenly aware of that we need to do more in, um, having it raised by 0.5, I don't think is gonna work for folks for next year.

And we really need to be looking at the trajectory of our MHA dollars.

How have we made sustainable choices for the rest of our budget?

Because what we're balancing here is continuing to make a historic investment in housing while balancing the needs of the rest of our city.

I mean, we could have taken the choice to lay more people off in the city to cut programming across our city.

And I don't think we wanted to do that.

And this is, while not a perfect situation, it is much better than I expected.

Because again, like with all of these different fund sources, it is a record investment.

But I come back to what does the Office of Housing do?

You build buildings with land bank sites.

You fund building buildings.

You keep people housed with rent assistance and other programs like that.

You do weatherization and home repairs so that people are able to live in the home that they're in.

And then it was lightly touched on, but resident services, which is slightly different than permanent supportive housing operating costs.

And I raised this point that for units that are 60% AMI, that are occupied by an individual who is at 30% AMI using a housing voucher to access that unit, they do not have the same behavioral and case management supports as a person with the same AMI level living in a permanent supportive housing unit.

And that's not your fault.

I'm saying here that this is a good thing that we are going above and beyond to do resident services.

It is probably a drop in the bucket compared to what we need.

And that, again, is not on you.

It is more thank you for doing more than I think is asked.

The impact that you have around the community is well known.

I've gone on, I told you I wasn't gonna be short.

When I'm hearing the question about the housing plan, what strikes me is more similar to the transportation plan in the sense that we had the freight plan, we had the pedestrian plan, we had the, I don't think we had a car plan, but all of these different plans that we had that were brought into one, and what I'm hearing, again, from everyone in the committee table as well, is that we do have these plans.

It's just that they're not all in one place.

And if I'm hearing my colleagues correctly, I think that's what I'm hearing is we know that this information is out there and it would be great to have it all in one place.

And so...

from what I'm hearing from my colleagues, interpreting council member speak, is we're here to support you and we would like to make this easy and digestible so that we can support you in this way.

Colleagues, if I was wrong there, you can correct me, but I'm going with that.

I'm gonna, I guess coming back to quoting one of your proposed operating additions of adding a budget manager in the finance unit.

Again, you can...

It struck me when reading the text, and this is page 245 of the budget, the Office of Housing budget has grown by over 550% in the last decade.

However, the finance unit has not expanded since 2013. 2013 isn't even on slide three when we had $50 million of funding.

And so it is clearly more than needed.

And again, just demonstrates how much it, the department has grown and that we've been two decades late.

So all of these things to be true, what is most important to me is that we continue funding housing at a record level because what we're doing here and when I look at the budgets, the 2019 to 2024 budget summary.

In 2019, the budget was $69 million, $69 million.

Today, it's three, or in 24, it was 339, which is a 380% increase.

The five-year growth was $270 million.

And this is essentially us trying to bite at the apple that the issue had been delayed.

So we are making investments today that should have been made over 20 years ago.

And so when Council Member Morales is quoting notes or numbers over the course of five years, this is true 20 years back.

And that's the importance of this level of funding.

And so, Director, I have come to the end of my comments and realized I don't have a question for you.

I'm just up here talking.

But there it is.

Is there anything that you'd like to add, respond, or correct on my comments today?

Fantastic.

Council Member Moore, I'm going to pass it to you to close us out, and then we'll move on to the next agenda item.

Director Winkler, Chin, Kelly, really great to see you.

Becky, thank you for joining us as well.

SPEAKER_04

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you for your comments and again providing the historical perspective and really to the comments of all my colleagues up here who I think we've all clearly very much committed to making sure that we address the housing crisis in our city.

And just looking at what the realities are in terms of our budget.

But we do need to do better.

And I like the idea that Councilmember Kennell has proposed.

There are...

I understand the complexity of the funding, and yet there are also many programs, and so it always seems very difficult to kind of wrap our minds around what exactly is happening out there.

So to the extent that we can streamline that and make that easier to understand and sort of keep track of the progress we're making, I think the better off we are.

I just, in some ways I think we're at a moment because we are having to re-look at how we finance this.

We are kind of at a moment where we have an opportunity to rethink how we do housing in the city, particularly with the comp plan coming up and looking at other models that would support and encourage home ownership like co-ops.

You know, co-op models are not really used here like they are in the East Coast, and they are very much a viable model.

Covade is a wonderful example of that, and I really had the pleasure of going and touring that.

I would strongly encourage my colleagues to do so.

Land trusts.

Yeah, we just need to get more creative, really, I think.

And I do appreciate, again, as I said, the passion and dedication that everyone in the Office of Housing brings to this.

And the ability to keep all of this very complex information in your minds and communicating it to us.

I also appreciate that.

So anyway, just thank you very much for being here today.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again soon.

We're gonna move on to our next item on the agenda, Seattle Fire Department, and please y'all come on up.

Clerk Schwinn, will you read the short title into the record?

SPEAKER_06

Agenda item two, Seattle Fire Department, for briefing and discussion.

SPEAKER_18

Fantastic.

Welcome to Chief Scoggins, Assistant Chief Munnis, and I should bring up my clerk, and Chris Santos of Seattle Fire Department.

When you're ready.

take it away and then we'll pass it over to the chair of your committee and we'll take questions.

I will also say for the record, the Seattle Fire Department was on time early.

They were the first ones here.

They even beat me to chambers today.

Appreciate you being here and everything you do for our city.

And the microphones you have to have real close to your face.

Green light is on.

SPEAKER_12

Got it.

Chris, you wanna drive?

Okay, perfect.

SPEAKER_13

Well, first I'll start off by saying good morning.

We still have a bit of morning left.

And I want to thank the council for all of your support and thank Mayor Harreld for all of your support for the Seattle Fire Department.

It's clear, it's visible, and our people feel it.

Before I get into the presentation, I also want to thank Mayor Harold, Council Member Kettle, Council Member Morales, and the entire council for passing the vacant building legislation earlier in the year.

And it has been a very valuable tool for the Seattle Fire Department over the last several months.

You know, it's important.

Since that period of time, we have been a part of taking down 17 buildings in the community, but we haven't had to use the legislation.

We came close a couple of times, but 17 buildings is really significant since this legislation passed.

And this is truly the one Seattle approach with the council and the mayor.

giving us the legislation and the funding to do it.

But the partnership with the city attorney's office, with SDCI, with the utilities, City Light, and SPU, and the fire department, all coming together to try to make the community safer.

So that's really important to note.

You know, I'm fortunate to have here at the table with me our budget director, Director Chris Santos, who will be here to answer any of the technical questions, and our fire marshal assistant chief, Tim Munness.

And so we have a number of slides to go through, and I'm going to try to cover them.

But there's a lot of information to cover, and I want to, you know, make sure I'm thorough as possible.

But for us, it's always important to start off with our mission.

The mission of the Seattle Fire Department is saving lives and protecting property.

That's what we're here for, and responding in a compassionate and effective manner to the community.

That's really important for us each and every day.

And staying grounded in our vision as an organization is also important.

And we can look at some of the things that we've done over our history from our Medic One program that's over 50 years old now that set a national standard of how EMS and paramedicine is practiced around the country and around the world.

And we have many visitors from around the world consistently to learn about it.

To our newest program, our energy response team at Fire Station 25 on Capitol Hill.

So staying true to our vision, being a national leader and excellence in all we do is really important to the Seattle Fire Department as an organization.

Now, at the bottom of this first slide, we have about five bullets, and I'm going to explain them this way.

We focus on mitigation, prevention, and education.

That's really what the Seattle Fire Department does.

Mitigation.

When the problems happen, someone calls 911, and we send a unit out to problem solve, and that becomes really important.

It could be a medical emergency, it could be a fire, technical rescue, fire boats, our energy response team, whatever it is.

And that doesn't happen by accident.

There's a lot that goes into it.

Our firefighters train about 15,000 hours a month and really staying proficient in what we do.

I'd be remiss if I didn't thank our FAS team for taking care of our approximate 150 vehicles we have moving around the city on a daily basis.

That mitigation piece becomes very important, how our facilities are taken care of and all of those things.

And then when we look at prevention, prevention is a big part of what we do.

You know, last year in the city of Seattle, we were responsible for about 25,000 inspections, about 14,000 on the operations side of the house, the fire companies, and 11,000 in our fire marshal's office, in our fire prevention bureau.

But that's really important to know.

That's annual inspections, that's new construction inspections, that's special hazards, that's all types of inspections.

About 25,000, that's really significant on the prevention side of the house to really try to take care of business to make sure the community is safe.

And then on the education piece, we spend a lot of time educating.

And one of the things I'm proud of this year in the first two quarters of this year is we've taught CPR to over 2,400 people just in the first two quarters.

That's really significant.

We're teaching people life-saving skills that could make a difference.

And we've gone out to 19 housing providers and done presentations.

That's kind of some of the education.

And these are just snapshots.

of what we do, but I think it's really important that we're grounded in this place in the beginning.

You can go to the next slide, Chris.

And as we just heard from the last presentation, the community is growing, and so are our calls into our fire alarm center and our calls out in the field.

What this slide kind of just gives you a quick visual of is the number of calls coming into our dispatch center.

In 2023, we had over 206,000 calls into our dispatch center.

And this slide stops at, I believe, 2018. But one year before, 2017, we were at 163,000 calls.

So just in that short period of time, Our calls into our alarm center has increased by 25%.

So as the city continues to grow, we should expect these numbers to continue to rise.

And when you look at our responses in the field, which is the next slide, last year we had a record year, 111,000 responses.

And that's the most that we've ever run.

In our history, in 2024, I think it's projected at 112,000.

I think it's probably going to be higher than that.

We closed out the third quarter a couple of days ago, so I looked at the numbers through three quarters, and we were already at 84,000.

When we built this graph, we didn't have the third quarter numbers.

Otherwise, it would be higher.

But it's important to note because in 2010, when you look at the Office of Planning and Community Development's website, they have a link on how we grow.

And what it shows is the city has grown by 189,000 people since 2010. Our call load has grown by 45% since 2010. So we were at 77,000 calls a year in 2010, and in 2023, we're at 100...

So it's getting really busy out there.

We have some units downtown and around Capitol Hill that are running 6,000 calls a year.

So we're really turning the wheels quite a bit.

So this is a little bit about our response, and now we'll get into our budget slides.

So the Seattle Fire Department's budget is $327 million, which is a big number.

But I wanted to be able to break that down to you so you understand what that number represents for our budget.

74% of that budget is salaries and benefits.

And so that's all the stuff that is just gone from the top.

9% goes to maintaining our daily staffing levels.

So someone's on vacation, someone's sick, whatever it is.

So 9% of the budget goes there.

12% goes to city internal services, basically maintenance and operation, fleets and facilities, IT.

So all that's gone.

And then for equipment and supplies to staff our 38 fire facilities, that's less than 4%.

And that's everything from notepads to fire hose to ladders to paperclips to you pick it what it takes to staff a facility.

And we have 38 of them around the city.

So that's less than 4%.

And that really leaves just less than 2% for all of our mandatory and department facilities.

that we have to do.

Now, the WAC 296305, it lays out a number of requirements that firefighters have to accomplish annually.

And NFPA, the National Fire Protection Association, lays out standards for fire departments on how we respond, how many firefighters should be there in such a period of time.

So the number is big, but I want you to know that all of it is being used very wisely, and there's very little funding to do anything very different than what we're doing right now.

Go ahead, Chris, you can move the slide.

Now notable reductions.

Now this is a very important slide right here because we have committed over the next couple of years to reducing our overtime budget by a million dollars each of the next two years.

Now that's tied to our vacancy count that we have right now, so it's really important to understand that.

Right now, we have about 11% vacancy.

In the fire department, we're budgeted for 1,204 positions, but 1,110 positions are actually sworn firefighter positions.

As of yesterday, we have 119 vacancies.

I guess I'll put a plug in right now.

Our application's open Friday.

If anyone's watching out there, you know, between October 4th and November 29th, our applications will be open the first time since May of 2022. But of that 1,100 positions, 1,100 positions, we have 119 vacancies.

That's about 11%.

But at any given time, we have a number of folks that are off on injury for a variety of reasons.

We have a very physically intense job, a lot of manual labor tied to being a firefighter with lifting, pulling, pushing, carrying people.

It's very hard work.

Any given time, we have probably 6% to 8% off on disability.

As of yesterday, we have 72 people off on disability right now.

So when you look at the 11% vacancy rate, the 6.5% off on disability, and then our daily vacation, sick, and all those other things, we're probably getting up around 23% to 25% of the department is really not available to work.

So what happens is...

This creates us, this puts us in a place where we have to put units out of service.

What we never try to do is actually close a station.

If we have to reduce an engine, we'll put an aid car in the station so there's a unit responding to the emergency, but we never close a station.

That's really important to note.

And then on top of what happens out in operations, in 2023, last year, we worked almost 600 special events.

So that's Seahawks, Mariners, the Kraken, the concerts.

And on some of those big days, like I think the Seahawks are home this weekend.

We'll probably have...

40 to 50 firefighters on site at Lumen Field working fire guard and EMS and hazmat and medics on the field.

So this creates quite a challenge.

So the 11% vacancy rate is a part of the challenge, but I wanted to explain a little bit how we would accomplish this over the next two years.

You can go ahead to the next slide, Chris.

The other reduction we've offered is a $400,000 reduction to our projects, programs, and committees.

So in order to get a lot of things done in the fire department, we have a lot of different groups working on a lot of different things.

How we do business out in the field, our standard operating guidelines.

We take a look at fires after a big fire.

We have a post-incident analysis committee that reviews major fires.

We have our awards committee.

We have our Race and Social Justice Change Team, just to give you an example, we have a number of committees in the Seattle Fire Department.

All of those committees' budgets will be reduced by 7% in 25 and 26. So for some, that may mean one less meeting or one less project or one less program or one less training or conference.

But across all of our committees, projects, and programs, that's how we're gonna achieve this reduction.

But that's really important to note too.

We do a lot of amazing things, so we just won't do as much, and that's okay.

You can go ahead to the next one.

Now we'll talk about our notable additions.

In order to continue to tackle the vacancy rate, what's in this budget is adding the hiring of 20 additional firefighters, and that becomes really important.

Generally in our budget, we're able to hire up to 60 FTEs annually, but what we know is that is not keeping up.

So the next two years, our goal is to hire 80 FTEs per year, so 80 firefighters a year, And what we are seeing now is we think we're getting ready to plateau or go on a downward slide with the number of retirements.

Ten years ago, we were a pretty senior department.

Over the last nine, ten years, we've hired well over 500 firefighters.

And when we look back at the data a little bit further, I look back to 2001. Just under 800 of our firefighters have been hired since 2001. So we have a less senior department, which means our retirements will start to slow down.

So if we're hiring more and retiring less, then we're going to start to catch up on this.

And I think there's a slide that's going to show this.

That's on the next slide.

So what this does is it gives a little bit of a historical perspective from 2017 to projecting out to 2026. You can see during the COVID years was when we had our largest numbers of retirements and non-recruit separations from the department.

but we think that is getting ready to slow down based on what the numbers are showing.

And if you just look at 25 and 26, and the simple math is if we're able to hire 80 and 50 or less retire, we'll be plus 3%, and we do that for a couple of years, we'll be plus 3% again, and we start to bring down that vacancy rate.

So it's going to take a number of years for us to climb out of this, but we have a pathway forward, which is really important.

And the reason why we are looking at 80 a year, we do two recruit training classes a year and we could do 40 per class and still provide that great training that we do over the course of 15 and a half weeks.

So we'll do a class in February and we'll do a class in August.

And any of you are more than welcome to join.

to come down and tour our training if you want to see the recruits in action and what they're learning and what they're doing.

But over the next couple of years, we think we're going to be in a much, much better place.

The other area that's really important for us is our paramedic training program.

We need to increase the number of students going into paramedic training.

Now, we're funded to have 89 paramedics in the Seattle Fire Department, and currently, we're 33 short.

I want to thank the council because in the supplemental earlier this year, you funded additional students that started in September of this year.

And the way that program works is they start in September and they will finish next July.

It's a 10-month training program where they're removed off of the fire engine and they're part of the university.

medic one paramedic training program.

So when they come back next year, they'll be all ready to go.

But they're not really gone because the way the program works is they're doing classroom training, but they're also riding on our paramedic units.

So we have a higher number than five in training this year, but our goal for the next two years is 12 and 12. What's typically funded in our budget is five paramedic students annually, and this bumps it up to 12 by adding seven additional students.

And that's gonna be really important for us to catch up.

Our goal is to try to get as close as we can to full staffing before FIFA lands in 2026. That's gonna be a big goal for us.

All right, you can go to the next one.

and our Mobile Integrated Health Program.

Many of you have done ride-alongs with our Mobile Integrated Health Program, and you've gotten to learn and see some of the amazing work that our firefighters and case managers, and now our nurse practitioner does serving community.

So over the next two years, there's significant growth in the program that's proposed in the budget.

Next year, $458,000, and the following year, $1.2 million.

And the way we're gonna unfold this, if you can hit the next slide, Chris, in 2025, we're going to add a follow-up unit to our Health 99 unit.

So what we have learned with our Health 99 unit is they do a lot of amazing work.

But what it takes to really get someone into treatment is a lot of follow-up care and case management.

And this is what we've learned over time, and this is what we've learned by talking to other communities who are doing similar work to that.

So in 2025, we'll put that follow-up unit in play.

And their sole job is to, when folks are having an overdose, is to do the follow-up to make sure that they're getting the care that they need.

So that unit would go into service in 2025. Health 3 would go into service in 2025. Some of you may remember the way we put Health 99 in service is we had Health 1, 2, and 3. So we converted Health 3 into Health 99 because we saw that as such a need in the community.

So that's how we put Health 99 in service.

So in 2025, Health 3 would go back in service.

And just speaking to the overdoses, because in 2026, a second Health 99 unit would go in service.

And we have been watching the work that our team has been doing, and we know they're having an impact on the community.

But a bit of good news is the overdoses year to date are down from where they were the year before.

I think the year before, we were at about 2,800 or 2,900 overdoses about this time.

So far this year, we're at 2,200.

Overdoses it's still a high number.

It's not as high as it was last year So we are seeing the numbers go down, which is a good thing.

So this is how we're going to deploy that Funding and also it's going to sustain our nurse practitioner we were able to bring a nurse practitioner on board this year and The care that this person is providing to people in need is absolutely incredible and go ahead to the next slide Kristen Then I'll explain it a little bit more So the way HealthONE works, and you can see on this slide, and they've responded to over 1,000 emergencies this year.

Those are direct dispatches from the Fire Alarm Center.

But if you look to the far right of the screen, it'll say referrals.

Now, referrals, that's 2,700 referrals.

So firefighters all over the city, they go on a call, and our goal is to really address high utilizers and people in need.

So they'll see someone in need, could be an elderly person that's slipping and falling, it could be someone who needs case management, or whatever it is.

So the firefighters in the station, what they'll do is they'll fill out a form, Health One will get it, and our case managers would then go to the person's home to try to understand what the problem is a little bit more and get them care.

Over 2,700 times this year, that's happened, and that's really important.

But we saw we had a gap, because we are limited as firefighters, EMTs, paramedics, even with case managers, But the nurse practitioner has brought a whole new level of skills in what she can bring to the table to helping people really in need.

And we've already seen some of that since we've had her for the last several months, so that's really important.

What you also see on this slide is the number of responses Health 99 has had year to date.

And I think that number is about 350. So those are direct responses to people having overdoses.

And since we have launched our buprenorphine program, we have been able to give that 39 times to 39 patients.

Sometimes you have to give a patient more than one dose and are now helping individuals map a pathway off addiction, which is really important.

And we hope to have some more news in the coming weeks on the continued growth of that program.

So that's really important.

And this slide is broken up by council districts.

So if you go back one, the council district.

So the darker color are more responses in the area and the lighter color are less responses in the area.

And the next slide is just broken up by fire station districts around the community.

But all the information is the same there.

And our last addition that I'd like to talk a little bit about is our request for funding for our automatic external defibrillators and our life packs.

Just like all mechanical equipment, it hits end of life at some point in time, and it needs to be replaced.

And just like most things, the service...

Level from the manufacturer starts to go down the older the equipment is and this is a pretty significant Purchase to replace all this equipment at once but it's really important to do it at once because you really need the same model of equipment on all of our medic units and the same model of equipment on all of our engines because our firefighters and paramedics work all over the city so we shouldn't have different equipment on different vehicles and And as I mentioned earlier, our equipment replacement and all of those funds is really less than 4%.

So a purchase like this would take probably 25 to 30% of that equipment budget, which is why we're bringing this forward.

So I think that was the last slide and I'm gonna pause there and see if there's questions.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Chief.

Anyone else on the panel wanna share anything before we turn it over to Council Member Kettle, Chair of the Committee over Senior Department?

Seeing none at this time, Council Member Kettle, the floor is yours.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

Thank you, Chief Scoggins and Assistant Chief Muniz and Mr. Santos as well.

And I saw Ms. Fitzpatrick here at one point.

Thank her for joining in as well.

Two things first.

Thank you very much for the update on the Bacon Building abatement bill and its impact.

17 is a big number and it shows the intent And it's addressing the issues both from a public safety perspective, permissive environment and so forth, but also as Council Member Morales is a co-sponsor of that bill in terms of the blight, the economic impact and all those kinds of neighborhood general impacts.

So it's really key.

And so thank you for that update.

Also, thank you, Director Eder, for adding fire to the list of presentations.

I think it's really important.

Would love to have OEM as well so we can have the big four.

I recognize we can't have the court and city attorneys here and accountability partners don't really fit, but police, fire, care, and OEM would be great to have up here because it's important to tell the story, bottom line, and the story that you just told, Chief Scoggins, It's very important for our city to hear.

One of the things, too, on that is, you know, going back to yesterday, is this shows, your briefing shows your place and your importance in this public safety ecosystem.

And it highlights that it's not just fire, you know, or fire rescue.

You have these other pieces as well.

And I'm really happy that the fire prevention piece was kind of highlighted because that's a, an area that's not often talked about because the, you know, the Medic One, Health 99, Health One, those get a lot of attention.

The burning building gets a lot of attention.

These other efforts don't necessarily, it's the negative, proving the negative in terms of the work that fire prevention does, you know, in terms of avoiding fires in the first place.

So thank you.

I also wanted to thank Fire Station 10, 25, 5, Academy graduation that I've all been to or attended and tomorrow I'm going to the fire garage so appreciate FAS participating in that.

Oh not to mention the fire alarm center fact as well and then on Friday obviously the fallen memorial firefighter memorial so It's given me great insight, and so I appreciate the department opening itself up for these visits, not just for myself, but I know others as well.

And in fact, my neighbor here, my great colleague, Council Member Hollingsworth, was recently at Fire Station 25, and I will note that she has been, how do I say this, highlighting that she got a patch, and so she's quite proud of that patch.

And then I introduce her to my coin collection.

So it's like, okay.

So on to the briefing.

It's interesting because there's been so much focus with the SPD staffing challenges and the overtime and those pieces and using salary savings for that.

To what extent, I don't know if you have this number, maybe Mr. Santos does.

Does uniform salary savings cover this overtime requirement?

Is it similar to what we're seeing with SPD?

SPEAKER_10

Well, I can't comment on SPD, but I can comment on what we do is we staff minimum staffing levels to have all of our engines, ladder, aid, medic units staffed at a defined level.

So four per engine, four per ladder, two on the aid unit, two on the medic unit.

So we have assigned strength members for each shift.

And then as the chief was talking about it, when members are off on different types of leave, right, we then backfill them to meet our minimum staffing level.

So what happens is when we have these vacant position pockets, right, where we have salaries and benefits to offset it, then we would incur overtime in lieu of those salaries and benefits.

And so when we go through each biennium, we would update that, right?

What are our current vacancies?

And then we would budget overtime for that.

So that's where you would see our overtimes like $35 million.

The bulk of that is to cover the overtime backfill.

What we've noted here, the savings that were is really cost avoidance because we don't have mandatory overtime hiring.

So what we rely upon is our members to sign up for overtime to staff the engines and ladders, right?

When that list gets exhausted, then that's when we have unit outages.

And so we would then have to say, okay, we're going to take an aid unit out of service or a medic unit, or as the chief mentioned, engine, we'd replace with an aid unit.

So that's what we're projecting to say, okay, we're going to have a million dollars of cost avoidance until we get our staffing levels back at a higher level to where we have more assigned members, less overtime need.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

In fact, each time I visited a fire station, there was always some firefighter from a different station that was coming in to that station that I was visiting, to your point.

In a separate area, and because I've been to the Fire Alarm Center, but also the 911 call center too, I see some similarities to the challenges that the care department has.

And in terms of, A, the call volume and having people there, but also the age of the equipment and where we are, is there anything out there regarding kind of updating the fire alarm center in terms of systems and those kinds of basic updates?

SPEAKER_13

Sure, Council Member Kettle, our team at the Fire Alarm Center, led by Assistant Chief Lombard and Deputy Chief Bannister, they work with our partners at Seattle IT to make sure our systems are staying updated, and when we need to recommend a change, we do that.

The last major change we had, I believe, was in 2018 or 19 is when we transitioned our protocol system which was a big one but our CAD system it requires periodic updates and and we stay in alignment with the manufacturer's recommendations or when we need to add things on the system or we needed to do different things IT works with us to make sure we get that done okay again I did see some similarities with like the 911 call center in terms of

SPEAKER_17

you know, the work rate for the individuals, but then also in terms of calls and so forth.

And then also the, you know, just updates and, you know, maybe a new extension cord.

I don't know.

And to that point, and I think it's helpful for everybody to know in terms of call volume, approximate, you know, 207,000, then the responses at 112,000.

I saw it somewhat when I was there, basically when I was listening in.

Can you explain

SPEAKER_13

That difference and what like the non responses, you know Absolutely, and thank you for the question and one of the things I should also mention on the fire alarm center That's a fundamental difference between the fire alarm center and care is our dispatchers are sworn firefighters They're their firefighter EMTs They came in as firefighters and just like they would become a fire inspector some become dispatchers paramedics But we also have a pool of firefighters out there in the ranks that can come back to backfill also.

But what happens when the 911 call comes in, first it goes through CARE, and they'll ask, is this a fire or medical emergency?

And then if it is, they'll transfer it to fire.

And we have a series of things that we'll do.

We have a protocol system for our EMS calls.

We have a protocol system for our fire calls.

And we do a lot of QA on all of those calls that come in.

Now, the reason why there's 206,000 calls in 2023 and only 111,000 dispatches is oftentimes when there's a big event, there's multiple calls, sometimes tens or dozens or more.

And even the smaller calls will bring out multiple calls, one or two.

But we also have a number of different directions that we send calls into also.

So we have a nurse line.

We launched a nurse line in February of 2022, and it's been...

going great.

So about 6,000 calls a year will go to the nurse line.

We have Health One.

So Health One takes a share of those calls.

And some of those calls, if they don't meet our protocols, whether it's a fire or a medical emergency, then we'll send that call back to care.

We're very structured in the way we're organized, and our QA allows us to to really zero in on if we're doing it right or if we need to make course corrections.

But those are some of the reasons why 211,000 phone calls may not equal 211,000 incident responses.

And trust me, we couldn't handle 211,000 incident responses.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you for that.

And the next area of interest, and I'll be frank, this one worries me, is the paramedics.

It's one thing to be down in terms of the general numbers, but the paramedic, which is such a vital skill set and response, that's a big delta in terms of the shortness.

So I appreciate the support and the mid-year and the efforts that are going, but can you speak to the challenges that the paramedics are facing?

SPEAKER_13

Our paramedics are working a lot of hours right now.

I mean, that's just what it is right now.

Our paramedics are committed to serving the community.

They're committed to the skill set and to the profession, and they're working a lot of hours right now, which is why we're trying to get the current group through, and they won't be done until next July and the next couple of years.

are gonna be really important for us.

But the need for the paramedics is growing significantly out there in the community.

And I'll just talk about cardiac events as an example.

So five years ago, in 2019, we had about 450, 460 cardiac events in the community.

Well, in 2023, we had 666. And it's the same for strokes and seizures, all those critical ALS, advanced life support skill sets.

But it's a challenge right now.

And, you know, I try to thank our medics as much as possible because a lot of them are committed to the organization, to the community, and they're working a lot of hours.

So the quicker we can get throughput out the other side is going to be important for us.

But the training is important too.

There's no cutting corners on the training.

It's very important that they go through all the rigors and all the steps from the University of Washington, from the doctors, from the ERs, from the labs, to make sure that they're ready to go when they hit the streets because it's going to be just them and one other person making a life-saving decision.

So...

We're going to continue to work it through and working on some other options to help them in the next coming weeks, and hopefully we'll be able to get that across the finish line.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

Next, the mobile integrated health aspects.

I see the follow-ups, the increases.

Is this a complete set?

Is it just people, or is it also vehicles?

When you say New Health 3 or Health 99, What's included?

Is it just the individuals or is it a whole combination?

SPEAKER_13

Well, it's a combination.

Mostly the cost are people costs.

I mean, that's where the cost comes from.

But there's another vehicle needed and more equipment needed.

And all of those aren't as much as the people cost.

So the people is really the bulk of these costs.

John Ehrenfeld, who's our mobile integrated health manager, has done an amazing job laying out a plan on how we expand the team, when we expand the team.

The equipment that we need, facilities, some of you may know this, but when 31 is built, and I think it's on track to be finished by the end of 2025, there's going to be space at Fire Station 31 for a Health 1 unit to be housed at that unit, at that station.

But most of the costs are people costs.

There are some vehicles tied to it and things like that and equipment, but the people is the bulk of the costs.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you for the Fire Station 31 update and point, because that kind of leads as well to a question, like, particularly with Health One.

You know, yesterday I was, or two days ago, I forget now, mentioning, you know, alternative response, you know, SBD and care.

You know, in some of these slides, it's SFD and HSD, but the care, not 911, but the, you know, the...

the responders, you know, how do you see them working like in the future?

Could they be at Fire Station 31, you know, or is it just going to be like at UW as we learned just the other day in terms of the expansion of the care program?

SPEAKER_13

Well, it just depends on space and room.

When we designed Fire Station 31, we designed the resources that we needed to put in there.

But as we look to the future, and more stations will be redesigned in the future, these are the conversations that we can all come together and figure this out.

But 31 was designed for Health One, and everything is dedicated.

I mean, you've been in fire stations once.

We try to be really organized where this goes, where that goes, where we park this.

You know, everything is organized, and generally we're using all the space we have.

But in the future, that could be an option.

And I know they're having conversations with John right now about co-locating at the site that we have, I believe, on Rainier.

So that's where we have another Health One unit on a site there.

SPEAKER_17

So that's important, and to Director Eder, that goes to my one ecosystem point that he's heard before, and Fire Station 31, and this discussion leads to my final question and point, that can you bring up slide 13?

The one that shows the, not by council district, but by station zone.

You know, We're getting bigger, and we're going to have more responses.

We're, you know, densification and all the above.

You talked about the cardiac events.

And we need to plan this out.

So the comprehensive plan has to have a public safety element.

We have to be understanding what our fire station needs across fire prevention, you know, response, the Medic 1, 99 Health 1, so forth.

Not to mention substations for a precinct on the SBD side.

Now we have care.

This has to be all folded into our comp plan planning, and we really have to have this.

And I recognize that we kicked off this comp plan.

We didn't have public safety element, and I do believe there is one now.

But this conversation really points to the need to have public safety element in the comp plan, because in the long run, that's going to ensure the viability of of the fire department, of the police department, of CARE, of OEM, and others.

So thank you for that kind of leading me to my last point.

SPEAKER_12

You're welcome.

SPEAKER_17

Chair?

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

Thank you, Chief, Assistant Chief, Mr. Santos, for being here.

We have Councilmember Wu, followed by Councilmember Nelson, and then Councilmember Morales.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you.

So thank you for all that you do and all the hope and safety you bring to communities.

Council Member Kettle answered some of my questions, but I have two.

My first question is in terms of the reductions, are there any visible or felt reductions towards community that people would be able to see?

SPEAKER_13

Yes and no.

Clearly if we have a unit outage or we have, and another unit's coming from another district to run the call in that district, operate is our goal is this we try to get out the door in 60 seconds on medical calls in 80 seconds on fire calls because we have to put on all of our gear we try to get on scene in four minutes or less so that's five minutes for an ems call five minutes and 20 seconds for a fire call But if we're down a unit in a district and we have other units responding into those districts, then that could be a delay.

But would the community visibly feel it or see it?

It's hard to put my finger on it.

You know, there could be days when we're fully staffed.

It's just a busy day.

And we have a lot of units on emergencies.

Those things generally happen on those days.

And the other impact is the firefighters are running a lot more calls.

That's the other impact with our staffing and when we have a unit down.

That 300 to 320 calls is probably going to come in every day, and it makes a difference if you're down one unit, two units, or three units, especially if it's an aid car, because an aid car will run 16 to 20 runs every day.

So if you have an aid car down, then the surrounding units are going to run those calls.

So it's hard to put my finger on how, but it could happen.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you.

And that makes sense.

I mean, you never know when the next event is going to happen, when someone's going to need help.

It's hard to tell.

My next question is regarding fentanyl and the impacts of fentanyl to your department.

I constantly see fire engine tens units at 12th and Jackson.

and looking at the breakdown in terms of by district, and by different calls that you go to, Do you feel like fentanyl has made a significant impact in terms of operations, in terms of taking units to go to these calls?

Health 99, I'm sure, is all city, but it seems like these different zones are more impacted than others.

Do you feel like you could always use more resources, or do you think what you have now has been able to work?

SPEAKER_13

I don't know if I should answer that last question with the budget director sitting at the table with me.

Okay, but to the first part of the question, is it having an impact on the department?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, can you imagine if you worked at Fire Station 10 on 4th and Washington, and there's a high probability you're going to go on an overdose where someone's not breathing and heart's not beating every shift you come to work?

Yeah, that has a significant impact on our personnel.

Our behavioral health coordinator, Kristen Cox, has done an amazing job, and we've been teaching and training and a lot of resilience work.

Did I lose it there?

There we go, right back at you.

SPEAKER_18

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SPEAKER_12

Award-winning.

SPEAKER_18

Back over to you, also award-winning Seattle Fire Department.

SPEAKER_13

Absolutely.

So it has an impact on our firefighters because these are hard.

everyone doesn't come back.

You know, that's important to note.

So we're seeing a lot of tragedy and a lot of death, and our firefighters, you know, they carry that and they take that home.

it creates a high run load in these areas of town.

That's why those areas are so dark around those areas.

And it puts our folks a little bit on edge from time to time.

If you can imagine, sometimes we're going into encampments or we're going into very remote places, Whether it's 2 in the afternoon or 2 in the morning, when you call 911, we go.

Wherever you tell us you are, we go.

And some of these places may not be the safest places.

And sometimes we get put in compromising situations because of that.

So it has a toll on the firefighters on many fronts.

So the more we do to reel this significant issue in, the better it's going to be for our folks.

It's a challenge.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you so much for everything that you do.

And I mean, it's...

We have a lot of challenges with our budget, but this is one department I would prefer not to see reductions in.

But I know we have two months to discuss this, but thank you for everything that you do.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Wu.

Council Member Nelson.

SPEAKER_05

Thank you very much.

So I have questions about staffing and equipment.

So did I hear you right?

You have 1,204 positions that are funded.

Is that correct?

That is correct.

Okay, thank you.

So just...

I want to make sure that that is the optimal number for fully fit and ready firefighters to meet minimum staffing requirements and maximally used general fund dollars because the number of funded positions doesn't necessarily, it doesn't, necessarily relate to what is actually needed to meet the needs of a growing population.

So I can get that information offline.

But I'm looking at the 119 vacancies that make up 11% of the vacancy rate.

And I'm assuming that that's not because of any kind of reputational issues that sfd has you've got a stellar reputation and i'm sure that when people think of a career in firefighting that they think of sfd first so i'm wondering if there are changes to the hiring processes to application processing that could help because that that's what became apparent when i was digging into police officer hiring and recruitment that an additional staffer within Seattle Department of Human Resources would be helpful to process and streamline and get people through the hiring process, the pipeline faster before they even land in your training cohorts.

And so I'm just wondering if that is a need that you've contemplated.

SPEAKER_13

It is.

Thank you for the question, Council President Nelson.

So seven or eight years ago, we brought in an outside consultant and we looked at our entire hiring process, all the different steps.

And I think we had 28 or 29 touch points along the way.

So after that consultant came through, there were a number of recommendations made, and we actually took the steps to remove a lot of the unnecessary speed bumps, hurdles, or roadblocks, and I'll just frame it that way.

So we did that work.

And the reputational issue, I guess we'll find out on October 4th.

Last time we opened our applications in March of 2022 to April 19th, for just over six weeks, we got 3,000 applications in just under seven weeks.

So we'll find out.

But we are always consistently trying to look at our hiring process, our recruit training program, to make sure we are deploying best practices.

In the last year, we've met with our medical physician to make sure our physicals are in alignment with NFPA 1582. We've met with our psych docs to make sure what they're doing and what they're asking is in alignment to best practices there.

We have a wellness fitness coordinator And four months out from recruit training, we have what's called fire prep, so they can come in on weekends and during the week and learn and touch the equipment.

And then two months out before recruit training, we have what's called recruit prep.

So two months out, they can come in on the weekends.

They can use the equipment.

We show them the exercises they need to do.

We do a fitness assessment.

We've hired a nutritionist in case you may not be used to burning 3,000 to 5,000 calories a day.

But that's what you would burn in recruit training.

And if you don't go in eyes wide open and your body starts to lose all these calories immediately, your performance starts to be impacted immediately.

So we have consistently been looking at all of the steps of our hiring process, and it's a long one.

When our applications open this week, the first class hired off of that list won't be until August of 2025. So it takes a lot to get through that.

So if we get 3,000 applicants and 2,000 pass the written test, I believe we have about 30 business days of interviews scheduled in January and February, and that's with working eight to 10 panels a day.

to give us the civil service certified list.

So some things just take a bit of time.

Once we have the list, we're able to work it through.

But the first part of the process in getting a new list generally takes the most time.

That was a long answer, but I just wanted you to understand the process.

SPEAKER_05

Well, I think that then the answer is yes, that if that takes a long time, that process, then perhaps additional staffing or additional support, just getting through that would be helpful.

I'm just thinking, and I do appreciate that you're adding to your training cohorts, but getting them to that point is important.

Okay, so thank you for that answer.

And then as to equipment, One of the change requests that SFD made in the proposed budget has to do with replacing major equipment, and it notes that SFD will need $3 million in 2025 for advanced life support, life packs, and basic life support, automated external defibrillator, and then also $4 million in 2026 for self-contained breathing apparatus packs, but only the $3 million is included in the budget.

What is the thinking right now for how the need for 2026 will be met?

Or is it just a lower priority in 2020?

something to consider in out years?

SPEAKER_13

So the 2025 requests for the AEDs and the life packs, the automated external defibrillators and the life packs, which are the defibrillators the medics use, that's the need right now.

We've met with the manufacturers of our self-contained breathing apparatus, and they haven't hit end of life yet.

So that's why they're not in there for 2026. Okay, great.

Good to know.

SPEAKER_05

And then finally, I made note of your statement.

You said that map a pathway off addiction.

And that really struck me because what I hear that saying is Getting out of the cycle of continual overdoses, right?

And I just want to note that last year I did put forward a budget item that was approved for $300,000 worth of on-demand inpatient or intensive outpatient treatment.

And it's taken a while to get that off the ground and available, but HSD is working with contracting with three providers and just inviting SFD to take advantage of this when people have gone through detox, that there is a place, there are some options to get people into a treatment plan that could lead toward that map off addiction.

If you have any questions about that, I'm happy to help.

Or you can talk to HSD about the pathway to getting folks into that treatment.

SPEAKER_13

Yes, thank you for that information.

And John Ehrenfeld coordinates with HSD, if not daily, probably sometimes multiple times a day, and all the locations that we can take individuals to.

And the reason why I made that statement is, as you all probably know, the buprenorphine gives you a window of time.

And that's what people need sometimes.

They don't want to go into withdrawals, and the buprenorphine prevents that for 24 to 48 hours, which is really important.

And even if they do use drugs again, it somehow disconnects the brain receptors, and it won't let them get high again.

So that gives us a window of time to get people somewhere.

And our mobile integrated health team has identified a number of locations that they have been taking people to and different groups around the city that have been helping us.

You know, Harborview has been great.

The Hobson's been great.

The Pathways Clinic has been great.

But yes, do we need more spaces past that window of time?

Absolutely, because that's what you need.

You need them to get that 30-day injection.

That becomes the larger window of time when you can start to make life changes.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05

Great.

Thank you.

That's all my questions.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Council Member Nelson, Council Member Morales, followed by Council Member Rivera, and then Council Member Sacco.

SPEAKER_03

Okay.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everybody.

I want to say thank you, a personal thank you to the department, because I have benefited from your medics.

They responded when I had a stroke at my home several years ago and transported me to Swedish.

And I am thankful every day that there weren't long-lasting impacts because I have friends who have had very severe impacts.

So thank you.

I want to start by talking or asking about the congressional directive funding that you have included in the budget for proposal of the Health 99. Is it Health 99?

SPEAKER_00

Yes.

SPEAKER_03

Okay.

So can you just talk a little bit about what is the contingency plan if that funding doesn't come through or are you feeling pretty confident that you will get that?

SPEAKER_13

Well, it's hard to say what's going to come out of Washington, D.C., but Chris, I'll let you talk about the direct, how we're going to move things around.

But what we have in this budget is what I showed on that slide.

That would allow us to do even more.

So, Chris, you want to touch on that?

SPEAKER_10

Yeah, so...

Is my mic okay?

Yeah.

So right now we're looking at applying for congressional directive funding for 2025, which would then put Health 919-2 in service.

If that funding doesn't come, then this budget proposes adding that unit in 2026. So we will have the unit in 2026, regardless of whether we get the directive funding.

But if we get the directive funding, we could have started a year earlier.

We'll be able to get it a little earlier.

SPEAKER_13

There's one point of clarification.

We submitted that funding this year.

So if the funding comes through, they already have it.

We won't be submitting it next year.

We've already submitted it.

So we're waiting to hear from Senator Cantwell and Senator Murray, and hopefully that works out.

SPEAKER_03

Okay, well, that sounds like a call to action for all of us.

So you talked a lot already about how the fire department coordinates with care.

I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you think that has improved response for folks who are experiencing a behavioral health crisis or mental health crisis.

SPEAKER_13

Thank you for the question, and I should have been clearer.

So we coordinate with CARE.

We coordinate with We Deliver Care.

We coordinate with REACH.

All the teams out there, we coordinate with.

And I think it helps improve response to community because now this network...

of individuals where these responders have relationships.

And if they have a patient that they know REACH has been working with, they'll just pick up the phone and they'll call and they'll come.

Or if CARE needs something from our teams, we'll go and we'll help.

Or if we need them, they'll go and help us.

The coordination is happening on the ground, and that's where it needs to happen at.

The boots on the ground are doing the work.

They're treating the people.

They're learning the stories, and they can figure out where to point people in the best direction.

So I think Amy Smith has done an amazing job in standing up that program and her team, and they're working very well with our team.

So I'm really proud of what the city has done, and it speaks to the one Seattle that we are striving for.

SPEAKER_03

So if there's one thing council could do to kind of ease the burden on EMS services for you, what do you think that would be?

SPEAKER_13

Ease the burden on EMS services?

Well, it's probably...

I mean, I think first responders and public safety has done such an amazing job over the last 40 or 50 years advertising call 911 when you need help.

Well, people call 911 oftentimes.

It's not a true emergency.

If there was a public campaign on when to call 911, that could be very helpful.

An example is last year we ran 60,000 to 65,000 BLS calls, so basic life support.

They didn't rise to the level of a medic call, but they needed someone to go based on what they said.

41,000 of those calls were transported somewhere.

That means there's a delta of 20,000 calls that we went on, we assessed, and they took another route.

So if we were gonna do one thing as a city, as a community, it would be educate the community on when to call 911 because we get a lot of calls that we get there and it's just not a true 911 emergency, which takes that resource offline if that cardiac event does come.

SPEAKER_03

Interesting.

That's a really interesting point.

Thank you.

Well, and I think yesterday we talked a little bit about that too, right?

Like something like 49, 50% of the calls that come in are for behavioral health, not for fire, not for police.

So, um, That sounds like some extra digging that we need to do.

You talked a little bit about the impact on going on these calls to your firefighters.

And I know in the past we've put funding in the budget for mental health counseling and for resources.

I have a neighbor who's a firefighter and I hear some really hard stories about the kinds of things that he sees.

From a firefighter's perspective, can you talk a little bit about what's working, for example, I'm thinking, you know, we just passed these open soda zones.

There are people who are experiencing lots of things in those areas.

From a firefighter's perspective, what is working in terms of helping get folks access to resources and services?

And what do you think is broken with the deployment of the current services?

SPEAKER_13

Are you talking about inside the department or outside?

SPEAKER_03

Well, just the sort of ecosystem of how you're intersecting with it.

SPEAKER_13

So our firefighters, what's working is we're removing the stigma that it's okay to talk about if you're going through something, whatever the something is.

November 1st would be my 35-year anniversary as a firefighter, and when I came in 35 years ago, firefighters didn't talk about what was eating them up inside.

You just held it inside.

And that led to a number of other things that would go sideways.

What we've tried to do is to kind of pull back the curtain and say, no, we want you to be okay.

When you go home at the end of the shift to your family, at the end of your career, we want you to be okay as a whole person.

So our behavioral health coordinator that was funded has been a game changer for the organization.

The programs that have been deployed over the last couple of years have really opened up the mindsets of so many of our firefighters.

We've sent folks to so many different trainings, and now they're trained to trainers.

Our peer support team, our CISM team, they are always looking at that critical call, so when our units go on that critical call, we'll probably take that unit out of service, and we'll go and do an immediate debrief as a start, and then we can follow up with them to make sure they're okay.

So we have changed our mindset in the fire service that this is important.

Kind of like we did two or three decades ago, many firefighters were passing away of heart attacks.

And we said, hey, wait a minute.

We got to get in better shape.

We got to eat right.

We got to change our habits.

Now heart attacks aren't at the top of the list anymore.

Well, cancer is because of all the other things that we face.

But we've taken that approach with our mental health.

And it's going to take time.

It's going to take a generation for it to set in.

But we're on the right path.

SPEAKER_03

That's great.

Thank you.

My last question is, well, I have two more questions.

You referenced Harborview.

And I know in the 90s, they had a real detox center there.

Now they're sort of mental health, behavioral health programming, I think, is sort of an eight to five thing.

So can you talk a little bit about where people would go if they were arrested?

Or if you had somebody who needed to detox?

I know we have sobering centers.

Is that sort of the replacement for what used to be at Harborview?

SPEAKER_13

So I can't speak to the 90s.

I wasn't here in the 90s.

But when I did get here, we had Dutch Sizzler, which was downtown, and someone, they actually had a van that roamed around downtown.

They took people.

The last person in was the first person out, and that was very useful.

But I'm not sure of all the locations to take someone if...

if they needed to sober up, if that's the question that you're asking.

SPEAKER_03

Well, you mentioned, you know, you take some folks to Hobson, you take some folks to Pathways.

SPEAKER_13

Oh, that's for an overdose.

So if a person has an overdose, we can take someone to Harborview, we can take someone to the Hobson Clinic if it's open.

So we have a number of locations that our teams know that they can take people to if they had an overdose.

I thought your question was referring to if they were inebriated.

SPEAKER_03

Okay, and then, thank you.

So my last question then is kind of to Councilmember Kettle's point about service planning.

I think that's part of what your point was about the comp plan.

So after visiting our sister city, which is about the same population, our sister city in France, it's about the same population here, I noticed that the fire trucks there are much smaller.

And so I'm wondering, given the comp plan that we will be doing, given some of our climate goals, could you talk a little bit about how the fire department does equipment planning, if there's any discussion about...

you know, how trucks are built in the city, electrification.

And then you also mentioned the speed bumps.

And I know that there is a little bit of a tension between kind of Vision Zero and pedestrian safety and whether the fire department can manage around speed bumps.

So can you just talk a little bit about some of that land use, how that intersects with the work that you do?

SPEAKER_13

Sure, there was a lot there, but I'll start off with the fire engines and ladder trucks.

The manufacturers here in the United States are starting to manufacture electric fire engines.

It's early, there's not a lot of them out there, and the prices are...

We pay approximately $1.2 million for a fire engine.

These are over $2 million for an electric fire engine.

Now, over the life of that fire engine, would it pay off?

And our fire engines, basically, we keep them for about 20 years, 13 to 15 years front-line use.

and then generally they'll go on reserve for another five years behind that.

So over the life of it, it may pay off.

The technology's early, the prices are a lot higher, and there are some grants, and we'll apply for grants in the future to try to solve that.

I've heard about the European smaller fire engines and the different vehicles like that, but for us it's important to have a unified fleet from one manufacturer, That becomes very important for maintenance and our FAS mechanics and how they maintain.

If it's all Pierce fire engines, that makes it a little bit more uniform, more efficient for an organization.

But, yes, we should be looking toward that new technology.

I think a couple of our neighbors will be getting electric engines in the future.

And Fire Station 31, actually, it's actually being built now.

to be plumbed for electric everything in the future.

So whenever we get one, that will be the place that it goes first.

SPEAKER_03

Okay, well, that's exciting.

I'll look forward to seeing that.

SPEAKER_18

That's all I have, Chair.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

Up next is Council Member Rivera, followed by Saka.

Just note from facilitation standpoint, we are at 1246 p.m.

I'm going to just let us finish off this presentation rather than take lunch at 1 p.m.

to come back at 2 p.m.

So over to you, Vice Chair Rivera.

SPEAKER_19

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Chief.

Thank you all for being here today.

Chief and I, I just feel so honored to have had the privilege and opportunity to have worked with you all these past few years.

You know, I'm so supportive of the fire department and your amazing team.

I can't sing your praises enough as a collective team.

I think the inner child in me really wanted to be a firefighter.

So that ship has sailed.

But I am just so appreciative of all your efforts.

And thank you, Council Member Morales, for asking about that Health 99 Second Team and clarifying.

It would start in 25 if you get the federal funding, but 26 if not.

I'm super supportive of doing a second Health 99. I know that Health 1 and Health 99 provide an amazing service.

They do great work partnering the behavioral health and now the nurse practitioner service with the emergency service.

So Really appreciate that.

I have two questions for you.

I know, Chief, that you showed great leadership in putting together, helping the Seattle colleges put together a program, a certificate program to try to, on the recruitment side, recruit more firefighters.

And I believe this year was the first graduating cohort of that certificate, but you can...

You can correct me if I'm wrong.

And then I'm wondering what that would yield.

I believe these folks would have to go on to the academy.

How successful do you think that initial, you know, just initially looking at it, you know, is there opportunity?

SPEAKER_13

Yes, Councilman Rivera, thank you for the question, and thanks for your support.

And yes, I gotta give some credit to Dr. Dwayne Chappelle.

We worked with DEAL to put together the North Seattle College Fire Science Associate Degree Program, and the first graduates actually happened last June.

And what we know is you get degrees in finance and all these other things, and it's the same with fire.

I have an associate's in fire science and a bachelor's in fire administration.

What we know is it educates the candidates a little bit more so they're better prepared for the process they're getting ready to engage in.

It doesn't get them to the front of the line in the process.

They still have to apply.

But it's like when you have situational awareness, you know the language that's being spoken to you.

Sometimes folks say, fire department, you folks speak a whole different language.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Well, they come into it understanding the language.

So we think it's going to yield some results, not just for Seattle, but for any of the 3,000 professional firefighters here in King County.

So the program's going well, and we're really proud of that program, and a lot of our current firefighters have joined that program to get their associate's degree.

SPEAKER_19

That's great, and I look forward to hearing more as the program gets going.

Thank you for your leadership there, and to Dwayne Chappelle as well.

And then, Chief, my second question is about, well, really, it's a comment about the 911 and educating the public about 911. We know that, and we heard, I think it was yesterday, from Chief Smith, about the inability or how long it takes for folks for calls, for non-emergency calls to get answered, which is 2.5 hours currently, and the importance of making sure that if, and really, to be honest, the city has been telling its constituents, its residents, to call 911 because they can't get through on the non-emergency line.

So to your point, I agree that we need to educate the public about not calling 911 if it's not an emergency.

And we also need to make sure we have a non-emergency number that is being answered because in the absence of that, they're going to go back to calling 911. So I think it's an and, yes, education, and we need to be able to answer non-emergency calls because we know that 30% of the non-emergency calls are actually emergency calls.

I'm referring to a sly response that the care department had submitted to council prior.

So we know that that is happening and I for one want to make sure that as an essential service that the 911 call center is staffed both to receive the 911 emergency calls and the non-emergency calls and that that is working well for our public.

So thank you for raising that education piece.

Yes, absolutely, that's important.

And I think why you're seeing more people utilizing 911 is because the city itself has told people to do that because there is no other place for them to call and get an actual quick response.

So just wanted to say that and say that that is we are aware of that.

And I, for one, like I said, want to look toward making sure we're right-sizing that for folks.

So anyway, other than that, really appreciate, like I said, all the work that your team does.

I'm really happy to hear that the building abatement program is working well.

And I suspect the fact that we passed that legislation really helped you, regardless of not actually having to have used it yet has helped with the process.

So really happy to hear that.

And just again, thank you for all you and your team do.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

Anything to add, respond to.

SPEAKER_13

Well, just really quick on the vacant building legislation.

We haven't had to use it, but we've had some pretty honest conversations with property owners.

Chief Munitz and myself, as we mentioned, what we would do is we have been out to the scene.

We have gotten the property owners out to the scene, but we've gotten them to yes also on the scene of the property.

And there have been some buildings that we had a team, they called their structural engineers and architects, and we made a decision not to bring the building down because it wasn't an imminent threat to life and danger.

So it has facilitated conversations that, frankly, we just haven't been able to have.

So it's working.

SPEAKER_08

Fantastic.

Terrific.

Council Member Saka.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and Chief Scargans.

Thank you and your entire dedicated team of professionals at the fire department.

I really do appreciate your hard work and commitment and service to our city.

And, you know, a couple of years ago, my then five-year-old son suffered from a seizure.

And as a parent, it was the first time it ever happened for me and my family.

And as a parent, I was feeling all the feelings, guilt and anxiety and just terror, not knowing what this means for him and his health and our family and what's going to happen next.

And You know, I had a group of great firefighters quickly, quickly, quickly respond to my home and diagnose and assess him in a situation, comforted, provided the comfort and relief that me and my wife needed at the time, and, you know, helped console us.

Turns out my son, you know, it was a fairly minor thing.

It was a febrile seizure, so on the scale of seizures, fairly minor.

And he's great now.

He's up talking back to his parents like any other seven-year-old kid.

But in any event, I, like Councilmember Morales, you know, I have my own personal...

heartfelt experience with the firefighters in this city that you lead.

And so I just wanna extend my sincere gratitude for, cause I know firsthand the impact of the work and I'm grateful for, again, your dedication, your commitment and your service that you all provide to our city.

And I'm glad you all are ready and available and on watch if needed to help respond.

So I mentioned that previously to the mayor.

I mentioned it previously to you.

I'm sharing that with my colleagues and to members of the public because I really do appreciate you So, good news about going last is, or later, is, you know, most of my questions were already asked by my thoughtful colleagues here, which is great.

I may or may not have a follow-up that, you know, in the interest of time, I'll put in the SharePoint site.

But...

regardless So my question is not really geared towards the substantive budget items I did just want to follow up for a moment on on what I heard about the 17 what you reported at the very outset and I might have missed it in the transition here, but I just want to be clear on I heard that the fire department was able to successfully abate 17 buildings since the legislation was passed and If that's true, just would love to understand the baseline, the baseline, like what was the, or a comparator, if you will.

SPEAKER_13

You mean from years past?

Yes.

Do we have one?

SPEAKER_11

We probably weren't tracking them.

I think that's part of the beauty of the legislation.

As you know, one of those things that you guys asked us to do was go back and have all the city entities work together and make sure we're all tracking and doing that.

When I tell the story of the legislation, the legislation in itself was a great document and a lot of thoughtful things put into it, but what we didn't have figured out was once we had the legislation, how do the city entities actually do it?

You know, how does it actually get done?

So to answer your question, I think, you know, I don't have the exact number of how many we did last year, but we definitely have done more this year.

We can find out.

Yeah.

We can find out.

But it's definitely more.

I do think, like we've all said, the word's out.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_11

And the property owners are starting to take notice.

You know, they're calling more.

They're being more responsive, not only to us, the fire department,

SPEAKER_08

compliance so it has been a really good thing um and at some point we will actually use it what it was used for yeah yeah well um hopefully you don't well maybe you don't need and that's a good thing too and but if you do it's good to know you have it and yeah please follow up offline about like what like how many of you done last year successfully for example because that is a good kind of just to understand the baseline.

But regardless, I'm hearing that number, and certainly your reaction to it seems like this is a great initial result.

And so, you know, kudos to my colleagues, Councilmembers Morales and Kettle there for sponsoring that legislation.

For me, you know, that highlights that we haven't actually had to leverage the authority to initiate that.

And we've had $17 billion taken down or agreed to be taken down by, okay, you're right.

I don't want no smoke.

Maybe not the best analogy in this case.

But my point is this illustrates colleagues the critical importance of creating new tools And we've been creating new tools year round, very active on that front in the public safety context.

And just because we have a tool doesn't mean we have to wield it.

But it does create a powerful, powerful option that can encourage better behavior.

And it's a tool, not one of a blunt force instrument.

It is a thoughtful, precise tool, a scalpel, if you will, not a bludgeon.

So highlights, again, colleagues, the importance of creating additional tools.

Sometimes, by the way, of course, some of these tools are going to work or show strong signs of early success like now.

And sometimes they're not.

And we've got to go back to the drawing boards.

But great initial, let's keep going.

Jamming down these tools, getting these tools going, and then just as an aside, Great to hear about the SFD application opening and hiring process.

If you would be so kind to share a short announcement or blurb, I would love to include that in one of my next newsletters that I send out to my constituents.

And my sense is I'm probably not the only one there.

But thank you again for all you all do for our city every day.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Council Member Saka.

I can tell that the questions and answer period of your presentation has lasted over an hour.

I know that because I sent an email to Helen Fitzpatrick requesting that information about the firefighter application, and I was able to say good morning.

Thank you for being with us here today.

Briefly, any other colleagues want to share anything?

And I also want to say...

Thank you to Helen Fitzpatrick and John Ehrenfeld who have been here.

Before I get into some of my other comments, I will also share for colleagues and the general public, we will be having, Seattle Fire Department will be hosting a ceremony honoring all 55 firefighters who've passed away in the line of duty since 1891 at the annual Seattle Fallen Firefighter Memorial this Friday from 9.30 to 10.30 a.m.

It is a solemn ceremony.

It is one that...

brings us back down to the roots of why we are here and what we do here.

And so I just wanted to make that public announcement as well.

Before we get into this, Assistant Chief Muniz, you are, I can't have a favorite, but I can have many favorites.

You are one of my favorites in our city because of the number of different hats you wear.

And so just from, as our fire marshal's office, within the fire marshal's office it's my understanding this is where i'm going to ask you to elaborate you review permits you provide certificate of occupancies you do inspections and enforcements on code violations on top of investigating fires and being within the leadership of the seattle fire department can you share with the with the council a little bit about what you do if i missed anything or if i inadvertently added anything to your job description

SPEAKER_11

You pretty much hit everything.

We aren't actually the certificate of occupancy, that's SDCI, but pretty much everything else.

So everything that you guys talk about, whether it's speeding up building or processing permits, it's all very relevant to everybody that's sitting at this table.

And so I appreciate your kind words.

Yes, we have very hardworking staff down there.

So the fire prevention division, the chief speaks of, that I run.

We have about 60-ish employees, and we're split right down the middle.

Uniform, like myself, and the chief, and professional staff like Mr. Santos here.

And we all work together for all those things.

The permit processing plan review is one of the things that we do down there, and all the other entities.

But we do appreciate the kind words.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, because I know in the past we've tried to provide you, I have made the attempt to make your unit able to access the contingency funds within the permitting process.

Colleagues, we spoke a bit about contingency funds when SDCI presented, because the number of different hats that you wear and the number of emerging situations that you have to respond to makes it difficult.

And it's not your fault.

And that's why I raised this up.

You do the best and more than many others in our city.

And there's a structural issue with our permitting process.

You don't have to respond because I know you've got your budget director sitting right next to you.

But for the record, I see it.

I'm aware of this choke point.

And I wanted to take the moment to thank you for everything that you do because you go above and beyond.

SPEAKER_11

Thank you.

SPEAKER_18

Absolutely.

Also, Chief, I will give you kudos for truly representing the one Seattle fashion.

There is only one Seattle in this world, and we are one Seattle.

It's corny as all can be, and I think it is so true.

You get this kudos for not only referencing another department, OPCD, and the data that they provided, then again with DEAL, Department of Early Learning and Education.

Kudos, my friend.

You are a living representation of what we look to do in this city.

I see that within, as I go back to the 2019 to 2024 review, it looks like your code compliance budget had a 51% increase, but colleagues, I just raised this.

It's because the budget's program base is so small, a one-time correction made by the city budget office in 21 had an outsized impact on the budget percentage change from 2019 to 24. but that's because we're dealing with a half a million dollar budget within code compliance.

And then within the regulating construction, which is similar but different, it went from 3.5 million to 4.4 million over the course of those five years, which is only a $900,000 increase.

And this just comes back to the point that I was trying to illuminate with my questions about permitting review desks, et cetera.

I'd like to take a moment of personal privilege here to read from our budget document that was transmitted.

Because the Seattle Fire Department has a strong record of prevention resulting in fewer fires than the national average in other cities with similar populations.

Seattle averages 1.4 fires annually per 1,000 residents, which is significantly lower than the national average of 4.5%.

Wanted to raise that up.

And the number of different types of responses that you do.

We are the largest city in the United States.

within this region, colleagues are probably tired of me saying, closest city of our size is the Twin Cities, Chicago, Salt Lake City or Denver or Sacramento, San Francisco.

And it puts a different outsized burden on you.

Not only do you have hazardous materials, high angle tunnel and confined space rescue teams, you have a Marine division with 201 miles of coastline in our city.

I want to thank you again for your participation in the waterway safety study and analysis.

Having your sea dues on Lake Washington at Leshi is exciting.

I still am looking forward to a ride along, but I might wait until summer at this point.

Also in that report, it called out the need for another fire station on Lake Union.

I know with capital cut, we don't have real estate excise tax coming in right now, but I just flagged that for the record as something that's important to do.

And then on the budget overview, just noting what has already been said, but reading from the budget on page 316, Seattle Fire Department vacant higher than normal, and this indicates it will be difficult for SFD to meet minimum daily staffing levels over the biennium.

the fire department expects some level of unit outages to continue unless, and now this is where I editorialize and walk away from the document, unless we make some changes.

And so I just wanna make sure you understand that if you identify changes that need to occur, please don't wait, just bring them to us.

Council Member Kettle is the committee chair.

If there's a budgetary item, please bring it with me.

I did want to touch on, you mentioned that there's a high number of folks out on disability at the moment.

Two things I know about being injured, I'm also a recipient of your services, thank you for keeping me alive, is that you only heal once and you need to be careful and quick.

What programs and methodologies do you have on getting firefighters the healthcare they need in a timely fashion at this point when they go on disability or when they're injured in the workplace?

SPEAKER_13

Council Member Strauss, thank you for the question.

So we have a disability officer that tries to coordinate with the individuals who are off injured to making sure they're getting to their medical appointments, MRIs, physical therapy in a timely manner.

The work comp division and human resources helps us advocate to get timely appointments there also.

So we're using all the resources at our disposal, but sometimes it can just be challenging.

But it's not uncommon.

Most fire departments our size generally have about 7% to 9% disability rate.

Ours are what you would expect.

Backs and shoulders and sprains and strains.

And now, most recently, over the last several years, PTSD.

SPEAKER_18

And I know it's...

Looking at the Legistar program here that operates our city government's legislation tracker, it took me years to figure out, even being a person that uses the tool pretty often.

Like you said, with the Department of Education and Early Learning, teaching people how to speak firefighter before they become there.

The medical field is one that I think even fewer people understand.

Is the person in this disability officer position somebody that...

I don't necessarily need to know about their training or their expertise in the past, but I just want to make sure that the position is well supported to be here for the long run.

Because the longer we have them in the seat, the better they're going to get at that job.

SPEAKER_13

It's currently a sworn position and they transition every couple of years.

Okay.

SPEAKER_18

Well, I'll follow up if I have more questions on that.

I just know that getting our folks...

the healthcare they need rapidly helps them get back on the job.

And with over time as it is right now, we wanna make sure we get everyone as healthy as possible out there as quickly as possible.

Checking my notes.

Those are all of my notes.

I just, again, thank you for everything you do and the service you provide our city.

It is great to see the HealthONE staffed so well.

And again, back to kudos to Councilmember Sally Bagshaw and Kenny Stewart for helping make that happen on top of John Ehrenfeld and everyone at this table.

SPEAKER_13

Thank you.

And I would be remiss if I didn't.

October 17th is the Seattle Fire Department's 135th anniversary.

Incorporated October 17th, 1889 after the Great Seattle Fire in June of 1889.

SPEAKER_18

There we go.

If that had happened, if that fire had happened in the wintertime, we would not have been able to rebuild this quick.

Council Member Kettle is...

I'm going to turn it over to you for closing remarks, and then I'm going to take it back to close us out for the day.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Chair Strauss, Council Historian.

I appreciate that.

Thank you, Chief Scoggins, Assistant Chief Muniz, and Mr. Santos for coming today.

Also, thank you for the exchange with my colleagues.

I think it was very helpful.

I enjoy learning things like Council Member Rivera wanting to be a firefighter at one point, which admittedly, when I was in second grade, I did too, somewhat probably due to the fact that my father was a volunteer fireman in our small little hometown, which gives good insight.

And, you know, another thing that gives me, speaking of that, insight was, like, difficult situations I've been in, like moving to Baghdad in 03, things like that.

And it leads me to what I said yesterday related to the police department, that I thank you to not just you being here, but thank you to the entire department, firefighters and civilians alike, for their service.

But just as importantly, thank you to their support systems, their family, their friends, whatever it may be, because it's huge, to the point that you were talking just about PTSD.

and the military folks don't use the D, we just say PTS, because that support system is really what's needed, in addition to the programs that you've brought online or the department previously has brought online, and it's so key.

So please pass that to everyone in the department, and I will see you, unless you're at the garage tomorrow, I'll see you on Friday.

Chair?

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

Thank you for joining us today.

I'm going to close us out.

Colleagues, thank you for the robust conversation using tactics promoting good governance and creating a pathway towards a sustainable budget for the future of our city that delivers world-class services our world-class city expects and deserves.

If that did not get budget bingo, I don't know what did.

Our next...

set of presentations will be our central staff presentations on October 16th.

We will have an intro period in the morning.

I'm going to try and give us time in the afternoon because we will have public hearings starting at 5 p.m.

on October 16th.

That will last as long as it takes to get through.

Whoever signs up, everyone will have two minutes.

So please, again, have your priorities to central staff this week so that because they're going to start drafting their memos, they're going to be in full memo writing next week.

And I see Director Noble, do you have something to share here?

SPEAKER_09

YEAH, EXCUSE ME, I JUST WANTED TO SAY THAT IT'S IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THAT THOSE MEMOS ARE GOING TO BE INFORMED BY THE DISCUSSION THAT WAS HERE, THAT'S HAPPENED HERE OVER THE PAST TWO DAYS, THE Q&A THAT'S BEEN GOING BACK AND FORTH.

THE GOAL IS REALLY TO GIVE YOU A SENSE OF THE HIGHER LEVEL BUDGET ISSUES AND ONES THAT REALLY ARE OF INTEREST TO THE COUNCIL AS A WHOLE.

SO WE DO WANT TO HEAR WHAT YOU'RE INTERESTED IN, BUT ALSO RECOGNIZE THAT CENTRAL STAFF ITSELF WILL BE RAISING ISSUES AND REALLY LOOKING FOR THOSE ISSUES THAT ARE CROSS-CUTTING.

opportunities for further discussion of other things as well, which just gives you a sense of what the design is on those memos.

And as you were describing, we haven't yet figured out how many presentations we're going to need to make because we're just sorting through the Q&A.

The goal is to keep things light on that first day so that you can be well rested for what is likely to be a long public hearing in the evening.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

Said another way, please do not schedule anything after 3 PM on the 16th so that you come refreshed, ready, and relaxed.

Thank you for spit throughout this section of the budget Thank you for speaking up and for keeping comments on the matters before us This has allowed us to basically stay on time 15 minutes past which is in all intents and purposes Really good work.

So thank you for letting me facilitate these meetings with Robert's Rules of Order and for making the exceptions yesterday to speak out of turn Before we adjourn today, again, due to the cancellation of council briefing this week, and I would like to ask to have this proclamation that I distributed yesterday at the budget committee.

And so is there any feedback before I request signatures to be affixed on the proclamation?

Seeing none, Clerk, if you could call the roll to see which council members would like to have their signatures affixed to the proclamation, proclaiming Tuesday, October 22nd as David Brewster Day.

SPEAKER_06

Yes, Council Member Morales.

Yes.

Council President Nelson.

Council Member Rivera.

Aye.

Council Member Saka?

Aye.

Council Member Wu?

Yes.

Council Member Hollingsworth?

Yes.

Council Member Kettle?

SPEAKER_12

Aye.

SPEAKER_06

Council Member Moore?

Aye.

Chair Strauss?

SPEAKER_12

Yes.

SPEAKER_06

And one more time, Council President Nelson?

Emphatic aye.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Nine signatures will be affixed.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you to the clerk.

We have reached the end of today's meeting agenda.

The next select budget committee is on Wednesday, October 16th at 9.30 a.m., where written public comment will be accepted in the morning as well as the verbal public comment will be accepted in the evening at the public hearing.

We will have child care available here at the city, and we will also...

review that policy as we now have virtual participation.

Before we adjourn, is there any further business to come before the committee?

Council Member Sapa.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Just a quick question, probably for Director Noble here.

So when can we expect, and thank you for helping us understand kind of how these central staff memos are going to be framed and oriented around, like when can we expect to see those?

Roughly?

SPEAKER_09

Yeah, they'll be published to the agendas, whatever, 24 to 48 hours in advance, depending on, you know, a transportation memo might be something that staff would preview with you.

I mean, we realistically can't preview all memos with all members, but so I can't, I don't want to commit to, It'll depend on when we end up setting up the schedule for when things are going to be presented, because people are going to work backwards from them to self-imposed deadlines, if you will, and the deadlines that we impose as well.

So a few days late next week would be a short answer.

Sure.

SPEAKER_18

Director Noble, that is very gracious of you.

I'm going to put a little bit more firmer boundaries around that, which is that, colleagues, you can expect to have those published with the agendas and as best of their abilities they will get it to you beforehand the reason that we have so many days set aside for the central staff presentations in the budget committee is for you to have that interaction then and that is also why i've been very clear since day one that you that's why it's important to get your priorities to central staff now so that we're making sure that we're getting everything incorporated there central staff director is going to do to the best of his ability to get you early draft access, and I also just wanna manage expectations that also in the past, colleague, myself included, we have had to wait until just about publish time.

So this is not anything new.

The central staff director's trying to go above and beyond.

Thank you.

Fantastic.

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

It is 1-19, October 2nd, 2024.