Parks, Public Utilities & Technology Committee 2/28/2024

Good afternoon, everyone.

It is February 28, 2024. This is the meeting of PUT, Parks, Utilities, and Technology, and it will come to order.

It is 2-0-1 for the official record.

I'm Joy Hollingsworth, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Kettle?

Here.

Councilmember Rivera?

Present.

Council Member Strauss.

Present.

Council President Nelson.

Present.

Five council members are present.

Awesome, thank you.

We have three items on today's agenda.

The first, we will have a public hearing and possibly vote on the ordinance requested by our wonderful SPU team authorizing ecological thinning.

We have received a briefing about this bill last meeting, and so we'll go over that.

Next, we'll also have an overview by our phenomenal Seattle IT department as well.

And lastly, we'll also have an overview presentation by our Seattle Public Utilities.

This is not on the agenda, but I wanted to say happy birthday to my mother, who today is her birthday, and she's one of the faithful people that watch the Seattle channel.

So happy birthday, Rhonda Hollingsworth.

We will now consider the agenda, and if there are no objections, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing none, the agenda is adopted.

With that, we'll now open hybrid public comment period.

Public comments should relate to the items on today's agenda or within the purview of the committee.

Clerk, how many speakers do we have signed up today?

We have one in-person speaker and one remote speaker who is not present.

Awesome, so each speaker, you'll have two minutes to speak for public comment.

Clerk, can you please read the instructions for the comment period?

The public comment period will be moderated in the following manner.

I will call on speakers by name in order in which they registered, both on the council's website or from the sign-up sheet available here in council chambers.

We will start with in-person speakers first.

If you have not registered to speak but would like to, you can sign up before the end of the public comment period.

Just go to the council's website or by signing up on the sign-up sheet near the public comment microphone.

The online link is listed on today's agenda.

When speaking, please begin by stating your name item you are addressing.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of their allotted time.

If speakers do not end their comments at the end of the allotted time provided, the speaker's microphone will be muted to allow us to call on the next person.

The public comment period is now open and we will begin with the first speaker on the list.

And the first speaker is John Chaney.

Congratulations.

Congratulations, Chairwoman.

You are fabulous, and this will be a great committee.

I was just doing household maintenance today, so trust me, I'm not at my best.

For years, Seattle and King County dumped 20 billion, over 20 billion gallons of combined sewage and outflow from rain into the waters of Seattle.

That number has been reduced now into the millions.

That's still a lot, that's for sure.

SPU has undertaken a huge, complicated, and I think, hope, successful project with the Ship Canal Water Quality Project.

We've lived through the trauma of the, not quite, but we are living through the trauma of the construction for this It's an innovative project.

I think it will make a significant difference.

However, my concern is that unfortunately, the department chose, the city chose, to get to a standard, not zero discharge, but to some amount less discharge.

25% of the current amount, I believe, is the amount which will continue to be discharged.

That includes chemicals coming from tires, it includes copper, which is included in the brakes and things, plus pee and poop.

I guess my question is, what really are the plans for SBU to get to zero, which is what we would really like, especially for my community, which lives on the water.

This is stuff in and adjacent to my home, and I really would like it to be better than it is.

So, thank you.

Our remote speaker is still not present.

So there are no additional speakers who have signed up online or in person to speak.

Awesome.

And for the record, I would like to note that Mr. John did remove his Stanford sweatshirt when I told him it was not a good sweatshirt.

So just thank you.

Just wanted to put that on for the record.

We will now to proceed our items of business.

Will the clerk please read the short title of item one into the record, please?

Council Bill 120725, an ordinance relating to the Cedar River Watershed authorizing five years of ecological thinning in accordance with the Cedar River Watershed Habitat Conservation Plan and Forage Management Plan and declaring the logs resulting from ecological thinning to be surplus to the city's needs, authorizing the sale of such logs pursuant to applicable city contracting and surplus property sale procedures and directing deposit of proceeds THERE FROM TO THE WATER FUND FOR THE PURPOSES OF THE HABITAT CONSERVATION PLAN AND FOREST MANAGEMENT PLAN IMPLEMENTATION.

AWESOME.

THANK YOU.

AS THE PRESIDENT OFFICER I'M NOW OPENING THE PUBLIC HEARING ON COUNCIL BILL 120725. AND CLERK MR. CLERK HOW MANY SPEAKERS ARE SIGNED UP FOR THE PUBLIC HEARING?

We have one in-person speaker, John Chaney.

Awesome, all right, we will have, each speaker will be provided two minutes.

And can you please read the instructions for the public hearing?

Speakers will be called in order of registration.

The public hearing registration will remain open until the conclusion of this public hearing.

The same public comment rules apply to this public hearing.

A 10-second chime will be your notice when your time to wrap up.

Speakers' mics will be muted at the end of the allotted time.

Speakers are asked to begin their comments by stating their name.

The first name on the list is John Chaney.

Mr. Chaney.

My name is still John Chaney, but here I'm wearing a different hat.

I was formerly a member and the chair of the King County Rural Forest Commission.

We spent years working with the county to talk about how they maintained their forests in King County, and they managed the lands that were given to them for their stewardship.

Seattle has a great unique amount of forest land, which is in the two watersheds.

And it is a huge responsibility for the city to maintain the quality of water that we have in the city, but also to manage those lands well.

It's unfortunate that the part of my bloodline, which is non-indigenous, came here and treated our forests quite badly.

The idea was that this was just something to be cut and gone, a resource to be used and not to be well replaced.

Today we have better forest management practices.

The ability for the city to manage and return revenue from the forest is good.

And I'm hopeful that that is something that the council will approve.

It does need to be done in a way which truly enhances the quality of life for the forest itself, for both the flora and the fauna.

It can be done and we can get back to a better place in the balance of the natural habitat of our forests.

So I'm hopeful that the department has undertaken this charge well and has planned to do it in a way that really does benefit the public and all of us who are users of public lands and in this case, the users of our public water, thank you.

Thank you, that was our last registered speaker to present on the public hearing on Council Bill 120725, and our public hearing is now closed.

Before we proceed to potential vote, we have Mr. Brian Goodnight from Central Staff, and Rolf, and I'm gonna butcher your last name, and I apologize in advance, okay?

Gerson?

Awesome.

From Seattle Public Utilities here to discuss.

Brian, can you give us a short version of the bill summary?

Thank you.

Sure.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council Members.

As you said, Brian, good night, Council Central staff.

So this item was discussed and described in detail by Rolf and his colleague Amy at the committee's previous meeting on February 14th.

As a reminder, since 2002, SPU periodically comes to the Council to request authorization to perform ecological thinning in the Cedar River watershed.

The Council has granted this authority five times previously, with the most recent authorization in January of 2021. So the legislation before you today, Council Bill 120725, would authorize SPU to perform ecological thinning on approximately 600 acres of second-growth forest between 2024 and 2028. The thinning would be performed in accordance with the watershed's Habitat Conservation Plan and the Forest Management Plan.

And the intent of the thinning is to improve forest health, biodiversity, and wildlife habitat by reducing forest density and creating gaps in the canopy.

Any revenues from the sale of timber products resulting from the thinning are deposited in the water fund, and those largely go to offset the costs of implementing the conservation and the habitat plans.

Um, and since we just conducted the public hearing, which is required for, um, surplusing and disposing property of this type, um, then if committee members are comfortable taking action today, you can do that as long as, um, if you suspend the council rules, uh, in order to vote on the item.

And I think that's, that's all I have.

Thank you.

Do any of my colleagues have any questions?

Mayor, thank you, Chair.

I'll be brief this time.

Rolf, I just wanted to thank you for your presentation at the last committee briefing.

It's clear that you have incredible expertise in this subject area.

And I feel very comfortable voting on this because of your presentation and the briefings that I've received.

And thank you for your work on this.

Thank you for your service to the city.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss.

Are there any other colleagues that have any questions?

awesome uh thank you for your questions and comments everyone under the council rules a bill cannot be voted on the same day of a public hearing unless the rules are suspended and given this the results of the hearing today no comments only support i recommend that we suspend the rules by unanimous consent to allow us to vote on the bill today and refer to city council so spu can move forward with this important project without If there's no objections, the rules will be suspended to allow the committee to vote on the bill on the same day the hearing was held.

Hearing no objection, the rules are suspended and we will proceed with a committee recommendation.

Before we vote, I'd also like to thank SPU on your stewardship and would like echo the comments of my colleague, Council Member Strauss for your stewardship on our watershed It's a critical asset for the health and wellbeing of our city and for our habitat.

I'd also like to thank the Muckleshoot tribe, the original caretakers of our land for their input and support for the plan of SPU.

Would any of my colleagues like to comment before we take a vote?

Oh, I would say, Chair, if I may, given your earlier comment, we should fear poor tree management.

But I like to think that the plan that we have here is very good based on the experience that most of us have and the briefing that was presented before.

And so our colleague here can put his sweatshirt back on because there's no worries there.

Thank you, that was a direct shot of our Stanford Cardinals that are very famous for their dancing tree during halftime and on the sideline, I'd like to note.

Okay, I move that the committee recommend passage of Council Bill 120725. Is there a second?

Second.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded, and the recommend passage of the bill.

Will the clerk please call the roll and the recommendation to pass Council Bill 120725?

Council Member Kettle.

Aye.

Council Member Rivera.

Aye.

Council Member Strauss.

Yes.

Council President Nelson.

Aye.

Chair Hollingsworth.

Aye.

The motion carries and the committee recommendation to pass council bill 120725 will be sent to the March 5th, 2024 council meeting.

Thank you, Brian and Rolf, really appreciate your help.

Will the clerk please read agenda item number two into the record.

Agenda item number two, overview presentation by Seattle Information Technology for briefing and discussion.

Awesome, thank you and invite our beautiful and phenomenal information technology team to the table.

Thank you for being here, CTO Lauder and team.

I know you all have worked tirelessly behind the scenes I had a comment that often we only see you when we need help and we are asking that we can't get into our password or our computer.

So thank you for being here today.

Please introduce yourself and you can jump right into your presentation.

Thank you, Chair Hollingsworth, Council President Nelson, Council members, committee members, thank you for having us today.

My name is Jim Loader.

I am the Interim Chief Technology Officer for the City of Seattle and Department Director for Seattle IT.

I'm pleased to welcome three of my colleagues to the table here today who will help me I'll give you an overview of what we do in Seattle IT.

First, for the record, I want to state that I have no affiliation with Stanford University, though I have walked across their campus once.

So I hope that that doesn't bias you toward me.

Tracy Cantrell is to my right.

Hi, I'm Tracy Cantrell, Client and Community Engagement Director.

Good afternoon.

I'm Nicole Simkinson, Director of the Project Delivery Division within Seattle IT.

Good afternoon.

I'm Greg Smith.

I'm the Chief Information Security Officer and the Director of the Security and Infrastructure Division in Seattle IT.

And I welcome Vin Tang, our man in the sky, who will be advancing slides and who also helped us prepare this presentation.

So thank you, Vin.

And you can take it away and move to the first slide, please.

Sorry, I thought there was a first slide before that.

Do we have a slide before that?

Or is this the...

Yeah, I guess that's it.

Okay.

So Seattle IT by the numbers.

We'll jump right in here.

So Seattle IT is a consolidated IT department, and that means that we provide IT support for executive departments from the network all the way up to the end user device.

which includes servers, databases, other elements of infrastructure, application development, application support, device engineering, device support, and all of the ancillary and related services that go into keeping our technology running and safe and secure.

Ah, this is the slide I was expecting.

Sorry, I think we shuffled things around a little bit.

Our department was formed in 2016. That was when IT consolidation occurred and when all IT professional staff in executive branch departments were moved into the new Department of Seattle Information Technology.

And as I said, we're responsible for all IT, for city executive departments.

And then there's a few other bullets here that I'll let you read around functions that we perform to support ledge and courts and then other...

other things that we do that you might not think that an IT department would do, such as the Seattle Channel.

And I'm very pleased, Councilmember Hollingsworth, to hear that your mother is an avid watcher.

So again, we wish you happy birthday.

And thank you for watching Seattle Channel.

We also, another area where you might see us come to the table is around the city surveillance technology ordinance.

And indeed, I think in a couple of weeks, we'll have some members of our team here to brief you on the surveillance technology ordinance.

So you can jump back to the bubble slide now, Vin.

Thank you.

So we have about a $278 million operating budget for this year, plus $24.5 million in capital, which generally pays for major IT projects.

We completed 18 of those last year, and we have 22 major projects in execution currently.

So our project delivery team, led by Nicole Simkinson, is extremely busy.

And we get a lot of work done with our 678 FTE, not the least of which is responding to over 110,000 service tickets that we receive over the course of a year.

So we can move on to slide four now, I guess, Vin.

Thank you.

Our teams are organized into eight divisions, which are here.

And I won't step through all of them, but you'll see Greg Smith's smiling face on here, as well as Tracy's and Nicole's, as well as other members of our executive team.

Next slide, please.

We organize our work in six priority areas.

So people and culture we regard as really the top priority because none of the other functions that we perform work unless they are staffed by skilled and supported employees.

So we try to recruit and develop and support and retain the best people for the job.

And I think that we have them in our department.

On top of that, once they get here, we attempt and I think are successful at fostering a culture of respect, collaboration, equity, safety and satisfaction.

I'll talk a little bit about our work, our people and culture related work that we're embarking on this year later in the deck.

Security and compliance, Greg will speak to our work this year in that area.

Again, that's extremely important and an area that we are declaring that we really don't compromise on.

We understand that security sometimes can be seen as getting in the way, but we also like to think of it as getting in the way of the bad guys.

So we all have a little bit of a sacrifice to make to ensure that our assets are protected.

Operational integrity, that refers to running our systems, making sure that they are reliable, that they are resilient, that they are redundant, that they are always working, and we have a very, very good track record of uptime for our networks, our systems, and our servers.

We deliver and improve services, so that is where the rubber hits the road.

That is where if you pick up the phone and call the service desk or you submit a service ticket, somebody responds, somebody fixes your problem.

We have over 150 different services that you can request through our service catalog, anything from asking for a piece of software to changing the name of your account to requesting that a network port be activated and everything in between.

We have functions that inform and support the public directly.

We manage the city's Seattle.gov website, social media, and distribution lists, and a number of public engagement platforms.

We also support our open data platform, which publishes the city's data to our residents and basically to anybody in the world who wants to look at it.

And as I mentioned before, our Seattle Channel Television Network handles civic television programming, including council meetings, but also an array of original programming that focuses on the civic, artistic, and community life of Seattle.

And last but not least, we actually build and deploy business solutions.

These are applications.

These are processes.

These are things that conduct the city's business.

Anything from issuing permits and licensing to managing pet adoption at the animal shelter requires IT.

Next slide, please.

Okay, so I'm gonna step through some of our 2023 highlights, and then I and my colleagues will address our 2024 plans to give you a sense of what we plan to do here in the coming months.

Our 2023 stated priorities focused on these five areas.

Each area had about four action items or initiatives underneath them, and I'm pleased to report that we've completed everything that we set out to do in 2023. Next slide, please.

Under cybersecurity, we implemented a monitoring program that helps prevent certain types of sensitive data from leaking from the city.

And that could be anything from social security numbers to credit card data.

And we have a project in place for this year to actually turn that on and enforce that service.

A few other areas here that I won't get into very much, but I do want to issue an invitation for us to come back and do a deep dive on cybersecurity if it is in the interest of this committee.

I'm sure that Greg would be very happy to do that.

And Councilmember Hollingsworth, we did extend an invitation to you to our Cybersecurity and Risk Board, CARB, which Council President Nelson is familiar with as well.

I do want to call out one item on this list, which is our anti-phishing privacy, public records, and security education campaigns.

Obviously, people are the number one threat to our cybersecurity fabric, and we have been conducting a series of campaigns, which you all will probably start to receive very soon, emails that are designed to educate you on how to avoid clicking on links that you're not supposed to, as well as some training programs that we require all city employees to go through every year.

It's not just a de facto exercise to meet a compliance requirement.

It's actual content that everybody needs to know in order to be safe cyber citizens.

Next slide, please.

As I mentioned, we deliver services that are used directly by city residents.

I'm proud of our work on the CiviForm application, which is developed in conjunction with the innovation and performance team and under a fellowship with our colleagues at Google.org.

It is an attempt to provide a single platform for citizens to access the city's discount programs using a single ID and seeing everything that is available to them and that they qualify for in a single place.

There's active development going on on that, and it is an award-winning platform.

Over on the digital equity column, I will call attention to the fact that we have recently completed a technology and access adoption study.

It's a population-level survey that illustrates where there are pockets of need in our community related to internet access, digital skills, and access to devices.

And Tracy Kentrell has printed copies of this report for your perusal, and we'll distribute them after the fact.

Next slide, please.

For project delivery and service delivery in 2023, as I mentioned, we completed a number of large IT projects.

We also launched a project portfolio management system that is keeping track of the entire city's IT portfolio.

This will allow us unprecedented access into budgets, timelines, status reporting, and will cut down the amount of time we spend on pulling all of that information together to deliver to our stakeholders.

We do do a monthly report out on the health of our portfolio to council.

And so very shortly, you're going to be seeing that take a different look and feel and include a lot more information.

And then I will mention that our service desk, the one that handles the vast majority of the incident reports and requests, We had goals last year to reduce the amount of time people spend in the queue.

We've got that down from 11 minutes, or no, I'm sorry, we got that down from over 10 minutes to just under three minutes.

And the data, oh, it is down here.

Oh, no, I'm sorry.

I thought there was data related to first call resolution, but that might be in a later slide.

We are also hoping for the service desk staff to be empowered to resolve more issues on the phone with the client instead of having to refer or escalate those issues.

Next slide, please.

And then finally, here are some areas that we've received some recognition in 2023. I mentioned Civiform was an award-winning product.

Our digital equity program was, again, recognized as a visionary in the digital inclusion trailblazer program.

Our Seattle Channel won Northwest Emmy Awards.

We are a leader in our permitting and licensing system, CELA, in the way that we use that and the way that we've developed that for our customers.

a few more bullets here that aren't on the list specifically related to seattle.gov, our award-winning website.

Next slide.

All right, I'm gonna focus now on what we're planning to accomplish in 2024, and I'll let my colleagues speak to their areas when we come to them.

Next slide, please, Vin.

First on people and culture, I do want to highlight and reemphasize that we do treat this area very seriously.

And this year we are embarking on a culture improvement program.

Last year we worked to identify seven areas that describe our from state and then describe our to state that we want to move to.

And this year we are focusing on the work to get us from that from state to that to state.

Currently we are in the mode of focusing on moving from staff feeling overloaded and overwhelmed to feeling balanced.

And so once we figure that out, we'll let you all know what you need to do to feel that way as well.

I'm not gonna drain the slide and go through every point here, but I will loop back around at the end and talk about some of the workforce equity work that we do through our race and social justice program.

Next slide, please.

I'll hand things over to Greg right now, Greg Smith, our Chief Information Security Officer and Director of Security and Infrastructure, to talk about our security and compliance work.

Yeah, thanks, Jim.

Before I speak to our security compliance and operational integrity priorities, just a bit of context.

It isn't any secret that cyber threats are at or near the top of the list of concerns for any technology-dependent organization, public, private, nonprofit.

Threat actors are plentiful, have a wide range of motivations for doing what they do, whether it's financial gain or hacktivism or working for a nation state.

You can find a story or two almost daily, especially in the literature that I read, about a new impactful cyber attack hitting any kind of organization pretty much every day.

The city of Seattle's cybersecurity program, which resides inside of Seattle IT, focuses on protecting the city's ability to deliver our services to residents by reducing the risk of a cyber attack at the city, as well as reducing the likelihood of material impact should a cyber attack occur.

No cybersecurity program can guarantee that an attack won't happen.

But we can and we do focus on risk reduction and preparedness, not only at the technical level, but in the broader areas such as the actions and decisions that we may need to make as leaders and as technicians as a cyber event unfolds.

On the compliance front, Seattle IT plays a central role in ensuring that we remain in full compliance with regulatory bodies, most notably payment card infrastructure, so that we can be sure to receive payment cards throughout our city business lines.

The FBI's Criminal Justice Information System, or CEGIS, which is designed to ensure data security and law enforcement, and NERC, the North American Electrical Reliability Corporation, which is mostly managed at City Light on the critical infrastructure side of the house, but Seattle IT does have a role to play there for certain elements.

So that is the backdrop.

Our security and compliance priority is where we strive to protect the city's cyber assets through improved monitoring, threat detection, and user education.

And looking at some of our major areas of focus in 24, we have two themes.

One, further bolstering our technical cybersecurity defenses on the back end.

and to investing further in sound processes and awareness work for city staff, or the human front end, if you will.

First, we will deploy privileged access management capabilities, and this is the critical cybersecurity control to limit the type of access to systems which, if obtained by a threat actor, could do the most damage.

This is also a crucial control for the city to deploy from the perspective of retaining our cyber insurance coverage.

Second, we'll deploy a cyber exposure management platform.

This is to identify and isolate risky technology sitting on the city's network that we may not know about.

Funny anecdote is we're now seeing EVs, cars on our network as well as the smart lighting in this building and things like that that we need better visibility in order to protect.

We're going to implement procurement and contract standards around AI technologies and this is to ensure that as we bring these technologies in, We're adhering to city's principles and policies around AI.

Finally, we'll continue with our employee awareness program that Jim spoke to, training and developing the muscle in the city's staff to recognize and avoid malicious social engineering attempts.

We do this with simulations, and they're not fun when you fall for them, but you learn a little bit every single time, and you get a bonus training out of it.

And then we also have mandatory privacy and security training.

Next slide, Ben.

Our next priority is maintaining operational integrity.

And since the technologies that we deliver in Seattle IT underpin so much of what the city does, we place great weight on maintaining our integrity operationally.

And we do this by ensuring that infrastructure and devices are fully documented, up to date, and in a sustainable state.

A core focus for 24 is the drawdown of technical debt in multiple areas.

And technical debt, it's a term used commonly in the industry to refer to aging technologies.

Which are approaching the point where they'll become liabilities from a security perspective or from an operational perspective or both oftentimes say due to the loss of vendor support.

Or because they're simply becoming costly and inefficient to maintain so that's a rate sensitive kind of issue for us too.

In 24, we've got a lot of work to do.

We're going to establish technical debt reduction plans for 80% of our business-critical applications, replace 4,000-plus end-user computers, laptops, and desktops through our PC replacement program, remediate a number of servers that are end-of-life.

And this is where we get concerned from a security perspective where we can no longer apply security patches.

And looking out over the course of 24 and into 25, we have 11,000 devices to upgrade to Windows 11, which is going to be a huge effort, again, because there's a looming end of support day with Windows 10 and 25. And finally, we'll create a sustainable repository of asset relationship data, again, to understand just how all of our pieces and parts interrelate so that we can be better at incident response, smooth out the rough edges of managing our hygiene and our patching processes, and reduce the impacts and outages from that work.

And with that, I'll pass it over to Nicole.

Thank you, Greg.

Good afternoon, council members and guests.

Again, I'm Nicole Simpkinson, the Director of Project Delivery Division within Seattle IT.

Project Delivery's priorities are focused on developing and enhancing business solutions for our city departments and our residents.

This year we target increasing the total percent of projects delivered within 15 percent variance of baseline budget and schedule.

The first half of last year we did a detailed analysis of these variances and identified systemic reasons for those variances as well as opportunities for improvement.

We are working on those opportunities now to achieve that target this year.

Also this year, we'll be publishing an online project portfolio dashboard to increase transparency, ensure greater fiscal accountability, and support data-driven decision-making.

This will supplement the monthly council report that Jim mentioned to provide more near real-time information in a transparent way.

Jim mentioned also 22 major projects that are in the execution phase.

When you look at our total projects from initiation to planning, all the way through to go live and close out, we have approximately 60 active projects in our citywide portfolio.

These are valued at nearly $200 million.

I wanted to take just a moment to highlight two of these.

So first, the housing data management system replacement will manage the city's $800 million investment in affordable housing and homeowner stabilization.

This is aligned with the mayor's priority focus on housing and homelessness.

By the end of this year, the project will select the specific replacement solution and develop a very detailed implementation plan to roll it out next year.

The second project is the customer service payment plan and outreach solution.

This will provide user-friendly mobile solution for utility customers to create flexible long-term payment plans aligned with the mayor's advancing equity priority.

This year, this project will deliver a present state mapping, options analysis and feasibility study, and a detailed work plan and schedule to support an early 2026 deployment.

Thank you.

Tracy, I will turn it over to you.

Should we, sorry, should we hold our questions till the end or can we ask questions as, oh, just in terms of the housing data management, is that meant to ensure that we across the city, anything related to housing and housing affordability is in one central location?

Is that what this management is?

We are creating that database.

Yes.

And when do you suspect that would be ready?

It's currently planned to be deployed in late next year.

So there is a lot of selection work that needs to be done.

So we're doing the requirements definition, the RFP, the selection process this year, as well as the detailed planning.

So we plan to do the full implementation through to deployment

in 2025. thank you could you explain it just a little bit more because what she was thinking it you meant was different than what i thought i thought this was a way to track housing assets that we that we fund but then

What is it again?

We're developing the, I'm sorry to interrupt, Nicole.

We're developing the scope in collaboration with the Office of Housing.

So I think what I would like to recommend is that maybe Nicole and her counterpart in the Office of Housing come back to answer more specific questions about that project.

It is in a very early state.

of development right now.

And I wouldn't wanna say anything that isn't true about the scope of the projects.

It's not finalized yet.

Is that okay?

Okay.

And it is very specifically around the affordable housing within the city of Seattle.

So I will come back and get the full scope of the project to the council.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Okay, Tracy, deliver and improve services.

I'm going to jump in and talk about services.

So this is something near and dear to Seattle IT.

We do a lot, as Jim referenced, 110,000 a year.

So this is our bread and butter.

One of the things that we do is we look as a service organization, how do we keep up with things that are material and helpful for our organization?

The help desk is one area.

For example, having low wait times.

So we made a goal last year to have under three minutes.

Our goal is to continue that.

We know that if you get help quicker, that makes your day go better.

It makes you a more effective and efficient employee.

The other thing we do as a service organization is we look for areas where we need to improve.

For example, if we have service requests that take five days and we see they're taking six days because that's what we've anticipated, we know we have an issue to address.

So sometimes there's continuous improvement exercises that we're looking at across the year so that we continually become a better service organization.

The other area that we were looking at is something called first contact resolution.

Jim mentioned it earlier, but if we know we answer your question the first time that you call, that's a better customer experience.

And so we're looking to see if we can make inroads there to improve what we've done last year and continue better service in 2024. And then finally, we can't stop things that happen that may go, oops, in the moment, but how we communicate is critical.

So when we have a major outage across the city, really what we wanna do is inform people immediately that this circumstance has occurred so that you have information that you can plan around.

Doesn't mean that we prevent those circumstances from coming, but our job is to communicate as efficiently and effectively as possible.

So that's just a little broad brush view of services.

And again, it's a really important area for Seattle IT.

We know it makes a difference to our employees.

And next is another exciting slide.

And we could spend a whole hour on this because I know we are so entrenched in serving our community.

One of the things to highlight, and I mentioned before we've got books here, the Technology Access and Adoption Report was delivered in 2023. In 2024, what we want to do is make sure that we're sharing this wealth of information and we're allowing groups to capitalize on this good data.

So that's something we're very excited about in 2024. The other thing that is a beautiful historical event is the ability to award grants to community-based organizations.

Some of you may have heard of this as a technology matching fund, but this, again, is something that we are looking forward to doing in 2024. We hope to award these grants to about 15 community-based organizations.

The other thing that is near and dear to our heart is helping to advocate for the Affordable Connectivity Program, ACP as it's known.

And so we know that funding for this program is diminishing.

So what we can do to help advocate or provide alternatives is another focus.

We wanna help where we can.

And then finally, accessibility is another strong component to Seattle IT work.

All that we do, we want to be accessible.

And so there are five application projects that we are looking forward to in 2024 to ensure accessibility for the public.

So that is just a broad brush of community-based initiatives.

And again, if we wanted more detail, we can schedule a follow-up.

So looking forward to that, if that is requested.

And I am going to let Jim take it from here.

Thanks.

Yeah, I'll close this out.

Then just want to highlight really quick some other work that wasn't captured on other slides, but that we do.

We do do.

So there's the Seattle Channel again.

We're also the IT department manages the citywide Public Records Act program.

So we provide training and services to all city departments who and coordinate their public disclosure officers and being responsive to public records requests.

I'll call out the fiber program here.

We run a municipal program that deploys fiber optic cabling, mainly to public agency buildings.

And that is a consortium that we are the lead agency on.

We run, Greg, do you happen to know how many miles of fiber?

Close to 800. Close to 800 miles of fiber that we make available and install on demand for our consortium partners.

We are also involved very heavily with other city departments and the wireless industry on helping the rollout of 5G and other types of new network infrastructure in the city.

I'm mentioning these because these areas tend to get a lot of attention and there usually are a lot of questions about them.

So we're happy to come back and do a deeper dive on any of these topics in the future.

And then finally, I wanted to just take a minute to talk about our race and social justice initiative in Seattle IT and then we'll wrap it up.

So we have an active and committed 30 person RSJ change team that works in close partnership with our RSJ program staff.

and other areas in our organization on a number of important initiatives, including workforce equity.

We have implemented a practice to require the city's racial equity toolkit to be applied to all IT projects in order to minimize adverse impacts to underrepresented communities via the deployment of technology and tools.

We consider accessibility, which Tracy spoke about, to be a critical component of digital equity.

And we actively strive through code review and training to ensure that our digital properties are accessible to people with disabilities and those who use adaptive technology.

We set and exceed excessive, excuse me, aggressive, I can't read my own handwriting, goals to utilize women and minority businesses for both IT products and services.

And I'm pleased that we meet and exceed those goals every year.

And we've been actively working to ensure that our recruitment, candidate selection, interviewing and hiring decisions are free from unintended bias related to race, gender and other protected classes.

We use a combination of both tools and training to review elements of that process and improve in a continuous basis.

Excuse me.

So final slide I think is the last slide, which is just the question slide.

So we've had a couple questions.

I've lost track of time, so I don't know how much time we have, but as I said, we're always willing to come back and talk more.

You're all good.

Thank you.

Do any of my colleagues have any questions?

Chair, I've waited to the end, and so I do have a few questions.

Absolutely.

Council Member Kettle.

All right.

The first question revolves around the point you had made regarding digital equity for all and then affordable connectivity program.

As someone at the beginning of the pandemic, I understand the school district is outside of the city government, but it really laid bare this point.

And so I look forward to the report that I think you have, you can hand out afterwards.

That will be very interesting.

So thank you.

And I'm thinking about that time period as a school district responded to the pandemic.

And not a very good way, I would add.

And that leads me to the second part is like partnering with, I mean, we're in Seattle.

Mm-hmm.

Amazon's here, across the lake is Microsoft, right around in District 7. I'm surrounded by Google, Facebook, Tableau, Expedia, all across the board.

And this kind of goes to cybersecurity.

I understand, you know, there's, on a federal level, there's a lot of cyber, you know, coordination and And I know here, locally, because of those companies I just listed, that they have a lot of skills in that area.

Is there partnerships, without going necessarily into details, but, you know, between your efforts and what's going on on the private side?

A lot of our partnerships are happening with other public entities, so we're working closely with the state.

As you mentioned, the state and local federal, state local grant programs was released by the federal agencies last year.

many millions, billions of dollars available, but administered by the state of Washington.

So that means we need to work through the state to obtain those monies and we continually are applying for those funds.

Locally, we have strong relationships with Amazon, Microsoft, and the usual suspects that we would be already doing business with.

They would like to do lots and lots of business with us, even more than we already do.

So we measure how we approach those relationships accordingly.

But yeah, we have very strong relationships with them.

They recognize that we're a customer that they would like to...

you know, have a strong presence with and be sure that they are protecting their own backyard.

Excellent.

And cybersecurity, public safety.

I'm staying within my committee that I chair a little bit is, and this is where we're going to be working in partnership with the PUT, is your point about surveillance ordinance and the surveillance impact report.

That's obviously very important to the public safety committee.

So I look forward to gaining more information on that.

Separately, also within our committee, we have nine entities, nine departments, office and commission, and the Public Safety Committee.

And so here's an overlap is my understanding and meeting with those nine entities.

The City Attorney's Office and the Seattle Municipal Court are both going through case management program meetings.

Swap outs is probably the best way to say it.

Did you have engagement with that?

Are you supporting that effort?

And how do you feel?

Where are we on those timelines?

And are you feeling good about it?

Yeah, Tracy and Nicole have been way more connected to those than I have.

But yes, the answer is yes, we are providing project management services to both the city attorney's offices, criminal case management system project, which replaces a 30-year-old, 25-year-old homegrown product project.

and with the municipal court information system, which, again, is replacing a very old product.

We have a project manager contracted through us, through our department, working with those organizations.

In both cases, the home departments of the city attorney's office and the courts are considered the project sponsors or the project owners of those projects, and they are...

more directly engaged with the vendors that they're working with.

But anything to say, Tracy and Nicole, about how we're feeling about that?

There's a milestone coming up, isn't there?

Big milestone.

Yeah.

Completion.

I am very encouraged.

And it's the start of something great for these departments, particularly with the court system.

So it's the beginning of a new system, having dealt with a legacy system for decades.

If I can just add, I mean, it is, we are delivering the infrastructure that that application rides on.

We've been doing all the security reviews and working through the whole process there.

So we're intimately familiar with that effort, yes.

All right, great to hear.

Hopefully the viewers of the Seattle Channel at the City Attorney's Office and the Seattle Municipal Court are watching right now to get that information.

Another question I had is, as a district representative, as you know, all of us get constituent inquiries all the time, and I don't know if this was timed, but I received an email from a former city employee, a member of my community in District 7, and Queen Anne specifically, and he sent me an email, so I just have to ask this because it's a good question.

It was titled, Modern software should be one element of city budget solution.

He wrote, as the city council, or as the council wrestles with city finances, it may be an opportune time to take a close look at OpenGov software, which makes managing municipal budgeting and spending much easier and more transparent.

Then he gave a link, and the city passed on OpenGov a decade ago, and then he said, big mistake.

And I would just take the opportunity to respond to constituent concerns and ask that question in terms of your view on OpenGov software.

If OpenGov is the name of a product, I'm not familiar with it, but I would be happy to take a look at that constituent's

uh message if you want to forward it along to me and i can help you and your staff craft a response i will do that okay thank you and uh the last thing is thank you for your support the seattle channel um as you over the past year i had a lot of interaction with the seattle channel and i appreciate what they do and it's a shameless plug to those that are behind what we're doing right now all right thank you we appreciate it we appreciate the recognition thank you council president nelson

Thank you very much.

And my tagline is, I watch the Seattle Channel for fun.

So I always want to appreciate the Seattle Channel.

So on page 19 at the top, the second bullet point is generative AI policy and responsible AI program.

Do we have a policy?

I mean, I know that something came out last year.

You don't have any policy or no limb on your org tree has policy on it.

So I don't know.

Policy is developed in our...

Oh, I'm sorry to interrupt.

Yeah, I just would like to know, you don't have to go into the specifics of our policy, but will it be shared?

Is it in line with the state or the feds?

I mean, just can you clue me in a little bit about who made the policy and its implications for council?

Absolutely, yeah.

Our policy work is done in our data...

data privacy, accountability, and compliance organization.

Sorry, I had to break apart the acronym there in my head.

And for generative AI specifically, last year in February, when the news was starting to spread about ChatGPT, and we became aware that this is a technology direction that we needed to pay attention to, We reached out internally to individuals within the city who had an interest in this area, but also to our partners at the University of Washington, at the Allen Institute for AI, and on our Community Technology Advisory Board, and assembled a team, an advisory team, to do the research around what responsible city policy should look like in this space, given the city's principles and other risks and other concerns about this technology.

team developed a set of recommendations.

The report is published on our website at seattle.gov slash tech.

So they published both a report and then I took that report and crafted a policy.

and issued that policy through our governance channels in October of last year, I want to say.

And so consistent with our privacy policy, which has been held up as a model nationwide, the policy focuses more on following a set of principles than on a hard list of do's and don'ts.

We also recognize that the technology is evolving and it's never a good practice to get too prescriptive about technology policy because of how rapidly it changes.

So we like to think that the policy is fairly adaptable to the evolving state of generative AI.

And really we are not, advocating for endorsing nor denying the acquisition of any generative ai technologies as long as they don't introduce security or other risks into our setting and then we feel that we've given proper instruction through the policy to city staff to use that technology in a responsible manner so that's that's sort of a nutshell all of that is published out on seattle.gov tech and i can follow up with the committee and provide direct links

Thanks, I had a different question.

You said that in 2016 the IT departments and departments were consolidated and you came into fruition, I think.

So are there still departments that have their own IT sections like the legislative department?

In some areas, we've established agreements.

I think Greg referenced that Seattle City Light maintains an IT staff supporting its regulated environment, which has to be managed according to the rules of the North American Energy Regulatory Corporation.

Thank you.

My acronym game is not strong today.

And similarly, our colleagues at SPU, who you'll be hearing about shortly, they have another protected operational technology environment that they maintain with their own IT staff.

And in a lot of departments, there are data analysts, data scientists who in some organizations might be considered IT staff, but we regard the work of using and reporting on city data to be something that is a departmental function.

And so they are...

They are in city departments.

Those are a few examples I can think of.

And I'll note that our city finance office, Office of City Finance, OCF, is running the city's HR system replacement project.

We evolve to implement the product workday.

And they have a whole team of IT professionals there that manage the financial system, PeopleSoft, and that will eventually manage the Workday system.

So that's in the Office of City Finance.

So there are examples like that throughout the city.

Got it.

Well, speaking of departments that report to my committee, governance is part of it, Hearing Examiner, are you doing a project with them?

I know that they were telling me that they would like to engage or they wanted to be part of the contract that covers the municipal courts.

Anyway, we can talk offline about this.

I just...

Yeah, we'll take a note on the hearing examiner.

I think that does ring a bell that we were working on something with them, but I don't have the details off the top of my head.

It's just a lot of your work to...

These things go out of date.

all the time and it's just a revolving door of new needs, right?

Oh, absolutely.

That's our life, yeah.

All right, thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

Are there any additional comments?

Council Member Rivera?

Thank you, Council Member Hollingsworth.

I don't know if there's information that you can share, or maybe this is if the Council Member, the Chair, indulges me perhaps for a future meeting, but would love to hear more about the civic engagement and internet for all.

There's a lot here, and I feel like we We mentioned it, but we don't actually have detailed information.

I, for my part, would love some detailed information.

And when you talked about the 60 projects on the development and the business solution side, what are those 60 projects and what do they do?

Would love to just hear more about that.

That's a lot of projects.

You guys are doing a lot of work.

By the way, thank you for the presentation, great presentation.

And it just leads me to want to ask more questions and get more information.

So if there's a way to get more information, either that you can email to us or perhaps we can talk about how we get that information for perhaps a future meeting, that'd be great.

Yeah, either and both.

There is a lot of information on Internet for All out on the web, dashboards, data, background stories, et cetera, that I can send to the committee.

And then we are, again, I'm just always happy to come to committee and present on our great work.

We love leaving people hungry for more, and we like coming back to the table.

to showcase what we're working on.

And as Nicole mentioned, you know, we do do a report out every month on some projects, but we will have the ability to give you direct access to the whole portfolio at some point so you can see at a glance what we're working on.

But we'll also prepare that information for you, too.

That'd be great because I'll say that I know constituents have a lot of questions about IT.

There's just so much in the space and it's really important for us to be well informed as we communicate to constituents on what does IT do?

It does a lot.

And we know that.

And as I offered to Council Member Kettle, if you do get constituent correspondence that have questions about that, I'm always happy to read those and work with your staff on preparing a response.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Any other additional questions?

Seeing none, I think that presentation was phenomenal.

Thank you all, our IT, our beautiful IT department.

Just thank you for- We're gonna change our tagline to that.

Beautiful IT department.

You all, beautiful, remember that.

Thank you.

More beautiful than the Stanford sweatshirt.

Will the clerk please read agenda item three into the record?

Agenda item number three, overview presentation by Seattle Public Utilities for briefing and discussion.

The presenter is Andrew Lee, General Manager and CEO of Seattle Public Utilities.

And as they are coming up here, I have had a phenomenal time getting to learn about our Seattle Public Utilities and everything that they do.

And I love interesting facts.

And one of the facts that they brought to us was that if you live in District 3, when you flush your toilet, it takes between 30 minutes to an hour to get to the West Point.

And if I'm wrong, I saw Brian look at me like, I don't know.

Yeah, that's right.

Okay.

for it to get to the West Point treatment facility.

And then I also know that we send a ton of our garbage, a mile long garbage, six days a week to, and hopefully I'm correct, to Oregon.

And I was really happy to hear that Oregon has been getting our trash.

So anyways.

Those are my jokes for today.

Anyways.

We're paying them handsomely though.

They are getting paid well.

Okay.

General Manager, CEO, Andrew Lee of our wonderful Seattle Public Utilities and team, please.

Thank you so much.

Chair Hollingsworth, Vice Chair Nelson, and members of the committee, thank you for allowing me to present an overview of Seattle Public Utilities today.

My name is Andrew Lee.

I'm the general manager CEO for SPU.

I've worked at SPU for a total of 13 years, including the last two and a half years as its general manager and CEO.

I've worked in the industry of water wastewater for about 25 years, also having worked across the lake at the city of Bellevue.

and then down south in San Francisco, Public Utilities Commission, and for two different private engineering consulting firms.

I was debating about whether to share this, but I am a graduate of Stanford, so go Cardinal.

Two degrees there and definitely love their team.

We love you though.

We love Sanford, I'm sorry.

Thank you.

We can go to the next slide.

Actually, I'm gonna start off by sharing a little bit of a story here.

We engage with the public every once in a while and we did a online chat room with the public just to engage them on what they knew about Seattle Public Utilities and the services we provide.

And I've done these different types of engagements over the years multiple times, but it typically starts off with people in the public saying, boy, our bills are really, really high.

Then it proceeds to what exactly do you do, SPU?

Do you provide electricity, gas?

What exactly are you responsible for?

And then as we start to go into more detail about the services we provide, the conversation starts to shift and it shifts to, wow, we had no idea you guys were doing all of this amazing work in our community, in the environment, and your values are so aligned with our values of preserving and protecting our water resources, preserving and cleaning the city, taking care of the environment and people.

And at the end of these conversations, it typically finishes off with, I'm so supportive of the work that you're doing.

And so I'm really excited to spend this time sharing with you about our work because, again, it's quite engaging.

We have incredible staff that do incredible work, and it's a really exciting organization.

Just a few kind of tidbits about us.

We are the fourth largest city department with about 1,400 employees, and we are 14% of all city employees.

Our budget is the second largest city budget at $1.35 billion.

That's 20% of our operating budget.

And we have the second largest capital program at $294 million, which is 26% of the city's capital budget.

It's, you know, I talk about this every once in a while.

You know, I ran into a contractor once and it was actually during the last recession.

And I asked him, how is your business going?

And he said, ours is not affected by the recession because we have a need to have business, not a nice to have business.

And that's very true of us.

We are need to have business for the most part.

And we are absolutely measured by our absence of errors.

You know, as long as your water turns on, your garbage is picked up, your toilet flushes, people generally don't notice us.

But as soon as any of those services are missing, we become people's number one priority very, very quickly.

Go to the next slide.

Our core mission is on the left-hand side of this slide, and our four primary services are shown on the right-hand side.

We have a shorthand statement that we use to summarize our vision, and that is being community-centered, one water, zero waste.

Community-centered means we prioritize our community and equity in all of our work, and we are in the business of serving people.

One water is the vision that all water has value.

And so whether it's water in our lakes, water in our drinking water pipes, stormwater, or even wastewater, We seek to preserve it, protect it and clean it.

And lastly, zero waste speaks to our vision of eliminating waste.

It points to a future where principles like circular economy, producer responsibility and reuse are the drivers behind how we purchase and use our resources.

Underlying our SPU primary services are four principles.

The first one is delivering equitable essential services.

Then the next one is stewarding the environment and health, and then empowering our customers, community employees, and strengthening our utilities business practices.

I'll talk a little bit about these in the next few slides.

Go to climate action.

Thank you.

Climate action is central to the work that we do and a tremendous driver behind our work.

Toward that end, our climate action and adaptation work is grounded in a holistic and integrated approach to managing both our water and our waste cycles in ways that center on equity and climate justice, and ultimately build resilience and steward our region's environment and health.

All of our SPU employees, frankly, contribute to this work, whether they're engineers, scientists, operations staff, finance staff.

We're all very committed to working through climate.

I've listed off those three principles on the left.

And when we talk about climate action, we're talking about focusing on justice.

This is justice for frontline communities and helping to address racial, environmental health inequities that climate change may worsen.

We know that these climate change effects affect certain communities more than others.

Adaptation is a key principle.

We have to adapt continuously to changes in the environment.

Some of you may have seen that article about the snowpack and the decrease in snowpack.

That's an adaptation that we have.

Just last December, we had huge floods in the Duwamish, actually December 2022. That's another thing that we're adapting to, as well as changing weather patterns.

And all of that requires a very, very adaptive management strategy.

And then lastly, we're also focused on mitigation.

And so I'll talk a little bit about this, but especially in our solid waste utility and all of our utilities, we're focused on mitigating carbon pollution.

And we're actually at the core of that.

It's interesting.

One of the major sources of carbon into the environment is actually food waste.

And most folks don't think about that.

They think about cars, they think about electricity, but not food waste.

And it's yet it's something that we have a tremendous influence over and a tremendous obligation to reduce.

Go to the next slide.

I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about our three major systems, our drinking water, drainage and wastewater, and our solid waste system.

And I'm going to start off each of the slides with sort of an overview of what the utility is.

The drinking water system starts off with about 100,000 acres of watershed, actually.

And if any of you are ever interested, I'm happy to take you to our watersheds and we can do a tour of those beautiful facilities and beautiful area.

We make sure that these watersheds are free of agricultural, industrial, and recreational activities.

We actually own and control the majority of our watersheds in both cases.

What that means is that there's little opportunity for contaminants to enter the water.

And when I think about all the contaminants that are spreading in our environment and all the manmade chemicals, we're actually in a very, very favorable situation because we control the land that the rain is falling on.

Rainwater that falls in these watershed flows into two large reservoirs, the Cedar and the Tolt.

Those store annually and refill our drinking water.

And they end up serving both people as well as fish because we release a certain amount of that flow into the rivers downstream for fish I'm happy to report that our reservoirs are both full of water right now.

And so you might recall last year, we actually declared a water shortage contingency and activation of our contingency plan.

But largely because of a substantial amount of rain and snow in the last several months, we've been able to to call off that shortest contingency plan activation.

And we're in a very good situation.

Our reservoirs are close to 100 percent full right now, which is really, really great.

Our snowpack is a little bit lower than we'd like it to be.

It's about half of what it normally is.

But we were also expecting that.

And so we manage our reservoirs accordingly to make sure we're going to have enough water over the summer.

And thanks to careful planning, it looks like we're in a favorable situation right now, but we're always going to continue to pay attention to it.

We have two state-of-the-art treatment facilities that were constructed in the early 2000s.

They treat about 250 million gallons of water per day.

And then from the treatment plants, transmission pipes carry that water to in-town reservoirs where it's stored before being delivered to customers' homes.

We have pump stations throughout the city that actually allow us to control water flow and pressure because, as you know, our city is not flat, right?

We have depressions and we have hills.

And so we have to work around that significant elevation change to provide water to everyone at adequate pressure.

And then we have just teams of water pipe workers who respond to breaks, engineers who work on problem solving and planners and et cetera.

And, you know, we test our water every single day, 365 days per year to make sure that we have the highest water quality.

and that includes about 30,000 water samples.

This is a highly regulated environment, and we continue to exceed state and federal water quality standards, and we're proud to have some of the best drinking water in the nation.

I share with people that my kids, whenever we travel, no matter where it is, they complain about the drinking water, and it's because they're so used to drinking Seattle water, which is, frankly, it's the best in the country.

Our wholesale area is actually much broader than just the City of Seattle.

So we are split into both a wholesale service area and a retail service area.

The wholesale service area on this graphic is shown in the kind of the peach colored, and then the retail service area is shown in the yellow.

So the retail service area includes the City of Seattle, Shoreline, Berrien, Lake Forest Park, in some parts of unincorporated King County, and these customers receive a bill directly from Seattle Public Utilities.

The other half is the suburban water districts and cities that purchase their water from us, but they send that water and they manage their own drinking water systems within the pipes within their cities, and ultimately, but they're delivering Seattle drinking water.

Also shown on this map in the green are the two watersheds.

You can see the larger watershed is to the south, the Cedar River.

It's located around North Bend area.

and then the smaller watershed is to the north, the Tolt.

And both of those end up supplying all of our water.

About two-thirds is coming from the Cedar, one-third is coming from the Tolt.

Go to the next slide.

I mentioned our vision of being community-centered earlier, and our drinking water staff are working in community every single day in Seattle, but also throughout our region.

Our operations and maintenance staff, like I mentioned, respond to main breaks and leaks 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

They also perform important functions such as water main flushing to help keep the water clean and the pipes clean, checking and repairing hydrants, and maintaining all the expansive infrastructure, whether that be pump stations, valves, et cetera.

I mentioned we have a team of dedicated water quality inspectors who work with customers, and so they actually visit customer homes.

to ensure the water remains great from the source all the way to the tap.

And then we have a team of outreach and education staff who connect people with the source of their drinking water.

They offer tours of the watershed, especially to schools and other groups, and they implement conservation programs through tips, tools, and rebates year round.

I'm gonna shift now to our drainage and wastewater system.

Our drainage and wastewater system is our second major line of business, and the slide in front of you splits it into kind of the drainage infrastructure and the wastewater infrastructure.

The reality, however, is that these two systems are very, very integrated, which I'm going to describe on the next slide.

Our drainage system consists of the collection of rainwater and melting snow that runs off from rooftops, lawns, streets, and sidewalks and parking lots.

And as you can imagine, you know, at one point in time, 30, 40 years ago, we thought that that stormwater was very clean, but the reality is it's not clean.

As it runs off across these hard surfaces, it picks up pollutants such as oils, grease, metals.

It carries them through the city storm drain system, oftentimes without treatment, out to our lakes, streams, rivers, and Puget Sound.

We have both formal drainage systems and informal drainage systems.

The formal systems include our storm drain pipes.

The informal systems include ditches and culverts.

And I'm gonna show a map of portions, but generally speaking, our ditches and culverts are gonna be north of 85th Street, north 85th Street in the city, and portions of West Seattle in some areas.

around there.

About 20 years ago, the city of Seattle pioneered what was called green stormwater infrastructure.

You may have heard the term GSI, which is an effort to really restore our area back to its natural hydrology.

You can imagine an urban environment now, the way water flows is very different from what the water flowed a thousand years ago when it was all forested.

But the green stormwater infrastructures and efforts, again, get us back to those historical flow patterns as much as we can.

And we now have over 10 acres of GSI, green stormwater infrastructure, throughout our city and are continuing to make efforts to manage 750 million gallons of stormwater through these natural nature-based solutions.

Shifting to the right-hand side, the wastewater system.

This system manages all the liquid and solids that flow into our showers, our toilets, and our sinks.

75 years ago, much of this wastewater flowed directly to our water bodies, untreated.

And that spurred on the voter-approved creation of Metro in the late 1950s, which resulted in the construction of treatment plants, and ultimately one of which is West Point.

SPU still, we obviously plan, build, and operate and maintain more than 1,900 miles of conveyance infrastructure that captures and transports our runoff and wastewater.

The wastewater system is actually dually owned, and this is an important fact.

Part of the wastewater system, the smaller pipes and pump stations are actually owned and operated and maintained by the City of Seattle.

The bigger pipes and the treatment plant, West Point, and the bigger pump stations are owned and operated by King County.

So we actually contract with King County, and I'll talk about this when I talk about rates.

We pay King County a substantial sum of money to treat and to ultimately dispose of our wastewater.

About, I would say, around greater than 95% of our wastewater is treated at West Point.

Only a small portion gets treated down south at the South Plant in Renton.

I should note here that like drinking water, wastewater and stormwater are both heavily regulated.

And so we have two what's called NPDES permits, National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits with the Department of Ecology.

We also have a wastewater consent decree with the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Justice and EPA.

We've been making good progress on our permits as well as our consent decree.

I'm gonna talk about one of the projects, which is actually referenced by the gentleman.

Thank you for mentioning our Ship Canal Water Quality Project.

But later this year, we're gonna be coming to you with a potential modification to that consent decree.

And so it's just a little bit of a primer on that.

Shifting to our service area in drainage and wastewater, generally speaking, our service area is the City of Seattle.

We have actually three different types of systems, and this is why this is so complex.

One-third of our system is shown in the purple.

It has a separate wastewater pipe and a separate stormwater pipe.

And so we call this a separated system.

And this is generally how newer cities are built today.

About a third of our city, as shown in the green in the map, has both a wastewater pipe and also a drainage network, but the drainage network wasn't built until later.

And so this happened generally in the 1980s and 1970s, when they started to separate out the roadways.

And so the stormwater that falls on the roadways goes into the stormwater system, but the stormwater that falls on people's private properties goes into the wastewater system.

So it's a mixture.

And then lastly, the last third of the city is the yellow one, which is what's called a combined sewer system.

That's where all of the wastewater and stormwater goes into a single pipe.

In both the combined, the yellow part of the system and the green part of the system, we have what are called combined sewer overflows.

And so you can imagine that the rainwater, it exceeds the capacity of the wastewater system every so often.

And instead of backing up into people's homes, the system was designed to have release points or relief release points into the water bodies.

And so hence why we have a consent decree, which is the federal government as well as EPA want us to reduce those sewage overflows down to what was mentioned, which is one overflow per site per year.

And I'll talk a little bit about this with some of our projects.

In community, we have a number of work.

We have operations and maintenance teams working 24-7 to clean, inspect, repair, and replace our drainage infrastructure.

I mentioned South Park earlier.

This is the team that actually responded to the floods in December 27th of 2022. They're always on call, and they place a huge priority on obviously protecting our customers.

We have a spill response program as well that responds to spills in the roadways and also into the lakes.

and our water bodies.

And then we have other programs like inspections, backflow prevention, our fat soils and grease, which are preventing people from putting too much oil and grease into the sewer system that clogs it.

Our rainwise program that offers rebates on natural drainage systems on private property and things of that sort.

Okay, I'm going to shift now to our last major system, which is our solid waste system.

And this is a system that manages our garbage, our recyclables and our organics.

They are this is required service for all sectors, residential, multifamily and commercial.

And as you're probably familiar with, food waste and recyclables are not allowed in our garbage stream.

The flow of materials and management involves seven service contracts, starting with curbside collection, I'll point this out, but our two major service contractors are gonna be Recology and WM, formerly Waste Management.

But we also have contracts for recycling.

We also have contracts for collection of compost and processing of the compost materials.

And then we have contracts to haul all of the garbage, the solid waste down over to the landfills in Oregon.

The pricing structure for the service is pay as you go, or pay as you throw, actually, I should say, which has a positive impact of reducing waste overall.

Materials that are collected by the contractors are generally transferred to our two transfer stations, which we own and operate, before they go to either composting or to recycling or to our landfills in Oregon.

Going to the next slide.

Our service area is shown here, and generally speaking, it's the entire city.

You can see the area that's Recology, which is shown in the green, serviced by them, and then also the area serviced by WM, or Waste Management.

Our customers are listed there in the bottom left.

Our guiding principles are really important.

Again, we have a strong guiding principle for decreasing waste.

And historically, that actually came across as primarily a recycling goal, but our goal on this has actually shifted to just waste reduction period.

And so, and I'm happy to report that Seattle actually has one of the lowest per capita rates for waste generated of any major city in the United States, which is pretty exceptional.

We are we are working and actively kind of lobbying for creating a circular economy where waste is ultimately just reducing carbon pollution as is decreased as rapidly as possible, but also looking to create more producer responsibility.

And this is where the producers of goods are actually responsible for the full lifecycle of those goods, including the cost of disposal.

We have also, I should mention, two hazardous household hazardous waste facilities located in north and south Seattle.

and where we accept hazardous materials there.

Go to the next slide on solid waste.

A number of customer programs, we've got recycling, composting programs, bulk waste, food waste prevention.

As I mentioned, that's a huge source of carbon reduction and household hazardous waste disposal.

These are again, a lot of this is focused on educating our customers because unlike our water system, our wastewater systems, we're completely reliant on our customers to carry, to put the right thing in the right place, the right bin.

And oftentimes it's very confusing.

So we have a lot of guidance and a lot of education on that.

Okay, just a few more slides.

You know, capital project delivery is a huge portion of our work.

I mentioned $250 million plus a year.

We have a number of different projects that we're managing very proactively to deliver on our requirements.

I'm going to talk about this a little bit more later, but our biggest driver in terms of dollar amount for our capital program is regulatory compliance.

And our biggest capital program of our entire capital program is the Ship Canal Water Quality Project.

It's the project that was mentioned by the member of the public.

This is an amazing project, actually, I will say.

It's a tunnel project and a pump station project and some smaller infrastructure lines.

But here's the benefit, which is right now we overflow about 40 to 60 times of sewage into Lake Union and into the Ship Canal.

That's 40 to 60 days every single year.

It is our worst and most frequent overflowing site in the city.

And at the end of this project, that will be one time per year.

You may wonder why one time, why not zero?

There is always going to be a larger storm, unfortunately.

And there's a little bit of a cost management here.

As you can imagine, those storms kind of go like this.

They're exponentially bigger when you're trying to capture the water.

And so it's optimized, again, capture on a long-term basis so that there's an average of only one overflow per site per year, which is generally going to be during the biggest storm every year.

And so we feel very confident.

That's a standard that's been adopted by the Department of Ecology.

And interestingly, it's actually one of the highest standards I'm aware of in the entire United States.

And so I've worked in San Francisco and familiar with consent decree programs in other cities like Boston, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and this is the highest standard I've seen anywhere.

In addition, we have other projects, South Park drainage, we have habitat projects, we have a lot of asset management projects to replace age infrastructure.

That is our second highest category spending, which is replacing age water mains, age sewer mains, things like that.

And then we have a number of other projects to kind of enhance our system as well.

Okay.

This is a very, very small portion of our city, of our overall program and budget, but it's an important one.

Because as you know, the vast majority of our work is funded by utility rates, but our portfolio services does include a small portion of general fund work.

most of which is dedicated to this, which is clean city services.

This includes a diverse array of services, mostly to deal with litter in public places, things like sharps, needles, illegal dumping.

And so when you have people that just dump that TV on the side of the road or the couch on the side of the road, we actually will come and pick it up and other hazards that pose risks to residents and visitors alike.

And so we work to promptly and efficiently resolve those concerns.

and ensure that Seattle remains healthy and clean.

Our clean city budget, I mentioned we have a $1.3 billion budget.

Our clean city budget's about $19 million in 2023. So it's, again, a little bit less than 1.5% of our budget, but still a very, very important part of our work.

Can I ask you a question about this page?

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

Graffiti, that's what council members hear a lot about from our constituents.

I'm looking at the line that's talking about 800,070 feet of graffiti abatement.

But it also says under that 42% increase.

That was just in one year.

Is that because of the injunction?

to what do you attribute that increase?

Yeah.

Graffiti increased substantially over the pandemic, actually.

And so I'm going to guess that this data was probably showing an increase between roughly 2020, or sorry, prior to 2020 and post-2020.

So we did see a sharp increase in that.

So that's, yeah, both on the public side as well as the private side, significant increase.

Okay, and do you clean graffiti on private property?

I thought that...

Yeah, we actually assist with it.

And so we are both the enforcer of graffiti, but generally we recognize that when people get graffiti on their private property, they're also victims, right?

So we have a graffiti ordinance that requires it to be cleaned up within a certain amount of timeline, but then we also go out of our way to offer support to them.

So we offer paint, we offer materials, and in some cases we offer some of the labor, right?

as well.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Okay.

I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about our bill.

And so we do have a utility bill that is collected actually on a bi-monthly basis.

Our services cost a typical single family homeowner about $222.63 per month.

But since these services are billed bimentally, that number increases to about $445 every two months.

As you can see, about 28% of this goes towards our capital work, which I mentioned earlier, extremely capital intensive.

About 27% goes to operations and maintenance costs, like the cleaning, like the continuous kind of operation of our infrastructure.

About 15% actually goes to taxes and fees that we pay into the city government.

And so we pay taxes and fees to the general fund.

And then 30% are to contracts to others.

And so our two biggest contracts, the first one is with King County, a significant contract to treat our wastewater.

And then the second contracts are those for our solid waste collection and disposal.

to the next slide i've kind of hovered over this but key drivers a number of them affordability is obviously huge in terms of how we think about rates aging infrastructure is significant about more than two-thirds of our system is greater than 80 years old and so we're continuously needing to replace it we have strong regulatory requirements and then i would be remiss if i didn't mention equity and environmental justice our city still has pockets that are underserved And so like South Park, we're working really, really proactively to make sure that we address those areas and provide them with the service that we all expect across our city.

One of the tools that we have to address the high cost of utility cost is our utility assistance programs.

And we actually have one of the most generous utility assistance programs across the country.

We provide 35,000 different accounts with up to $23 million in reduced bills.

That had an average annual benefit about $700 per account.

And it's about a 50% discount on their water, wastewater, stormwater bill and trash bill.

And then about a 60% discount on their Seattle City Light bill.

So it's a significant, significant benefit.

We also have an emergency assistance program.

And so these are more for situations where people find themselves where they can't pay a single bill.

not an ongoing basis.

And so we offer, last year we offered more than $1.5 million in emergency assistance to more than 1,100 customers for past two bills.

And generally that's up to $980 annually.

Both of these programs are income qualified.

And so folks need to kind of demonstrate and submit income sort of documentation to qualify for these programs.

Again, we're actively seeking though, because these programs are funded primarily by our rate base.

And so some customers, other customers are paying for these programs.

However, we are actively advocating with both the state and the federal government for there to be state and federal programs to assist with this.

And so during COVID, for example, the federal government stood up a low income household water assistance program, which is a kind of a corollary to the low income heating and energy assistance program for electric utilities.

And it's one that we're hoping the federal government will eventually stand up for water utilities on a full time basis.

Going to the last slide, rate setting.

And so our rates, there are two halves of the slides and rates.

There are two ways that we engage with council on rates.

On the left hand side, we actually every single year we come with a different utility package and a three year rate increase.

And so for drinking water, that last rate proposal was in 2023 and the rates were set for 24, 25 and 26. This year, we will be coming with a three-year rate proposal for drainage and wastewater.

And so that will most likely be in the summer of 24 and the next year will be for solid waste.

At the same time, we have what's called our strategic business plan, which identifies our priorities, but it also identifies our six-year rate projection.

And so the last strategic business plan was adopted in 2021. And our next strategic business plan, we update them on a three-year basis.

And so our next strategic business plan will be coming to this committee in this year, 2024. And so again, that will include our rate projection for 2025 through 2030. So we'll be happy to present that to you.

At this point, I've covered a lot of ground.

So I'm just happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Oh, and I apologize.

I didn't get a chance to introduce the two folks sitting next to me.

So I should have done that at the beginning.

To my right, I have Andrew Greenhill.

He's our chief of staff.

He just recently joined us from Tucson, Arizona.

Happy to have Andrew on board and then have Bob Hennessy.

He was our council liaison as well.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Always happy to hear about another Tucsonian.

Tucsonian?

Tucsonian.

Tucsonian.

Bear down.

Bear down.

Is there any of my colleagues have any questions?

I do.

Council Member Rivera.

Thank you so much.

Nice to see you, Director Lee.

I have a question about the rate setting.

Is this, does the state rate set Excuse me, rate to setting include residential and business?

Both?

Yes, both of them.

Thank you.

Awesome.

And we'll recognize Councilmember Strauss and then we'll go to Councilmember Kettle.

Sure.

I'm endeavoring to keep my remarks brief despite the amount of work that your department does.

I refer to your department sometimes as the just do it department.

I mean, and I'm talking about you have our water supply, create electricity off of that water supply.

You get that water from the mountains to our homes.

You do the stormwater emergency response down in, The Duwamish, that was incredible.

And then I watched you do that emergency response time and time and time again without making a big show about it because you just do it.

You know, you've helped my residents and residents of our city with garbage issues when there's, I mean, there's such a host of them, right, from being broken into to being misused.

You've got the largest megaproject going on in our city with Mudhoney.

I'd love to get down and check it out for another tour as soon as possible.

And then you work with our transfer stations and rebuilding our transfer stations.

The one I use is down there in Wallingford.

And it is just your workers, your employees on the weekends are pleasant.

They're joyful.

Every time I interact with SPU, it's a positive interaction.

And it's, you know, there's sinkholes that I've seen that I had people, when I first got elected, joke with me about how many times a sinkhole would be patched over.

And then when it really had a problem, you came in and you fixed it within 48 hours.

Thank you for all you do, the Just Do It department.

Thanks, Council Member Strauss.

Council Member Kettle?

Thank you, Chair Hollingsworth, and thank you, Council Member Strauss, for not taking too long.

I'd like to...

That was for you, too, as well.

No, I'm just kidding.

I'd like to...

Don't worry, the Parks, the PUT Committee meeting today will not go as long as my Public Safety Committee meeting went yesterday, which is kind of what she's referring to.

And using that tie-in with the Public Safety Committee, you know, a big, one of the three main mission areas for the Public Safety Committee is emergency preparedness, getting ready for the big earthquake, then potentially tsunami as well.

and that's a concern for our district and city overall, is, you know, and it kind of comes up with the age systems.

Like in Queen Anne, which is the older part of the city, there's a lot of aged infrastructure, and you referenced that.

How big is a concern is that for you with respect to the emergency preparedness angle, the earthquake, the big earthquake question?

It's a significant concern for us.

And so I will start off with kind of mitigation and resiliency work.

We actually have a very active water main kind of resiliency or water seismic program to both kind of retrofit and repair age tanks, age pump stations and age water mains.

The two biggest concerns are obviously going to be getting water to our region.

Both of our water sources cross faults.

Fortunately, though, they come from different faults.

And so generally speaking, we're imagining with the exception of the Cascadia subduction zone event, one of the other earthquakes will probably affect one side of our city more than another side.

And so because we have two sources of supply, that's actually a very good thing from a resiliency standpoint.

We imagine that we're going to be able to get at least one source over.

Aside from that, the biggest risk areas are going to be those areas that are liquefaction prone.

That's going to be mostly in the Duwamish area.

And so we expect there to be a significant number of water main breaks, especially in the Duwamish.

And we'll be actively kind of responding to those breaks and fixing them and repairing them as they occur.

But again, we have an active program.

We are putting things like seismic resilient pipe.

It's a ductile iron pipe that actually was invented in Japan that has a joint that can move.

And to date, I believe, Japan, you know, they've had a number of earthquakes there.

They've actually had quite a really good track record of there not being breaks on those pipelines.

And so, we're actively putting in some of those pipelines, especially in our liquefaction-prone areas.

But this is a huge area kind of of interest to us, and I'd be happy to kind of go into that in more detail with you if you'd like.

And maybe from the other committee, or in partnership, I should add, since I am in District 7, Interbay, liquefaction zones, we're definitely fall in that category as well.

Also related to the Public Safety Committee, as you may know, we have a strategic framework for addressing the permissive environment underlying a lot of our public safety challenges.

And pillar four is graffiti, so thank you for your work on that front and to ramp up when and where possible and to really look at the various neighborhoods, because it varies upon neighborhood.

So your support in that area is interesting, and it's good to know that there's not just one consent decree, as I was thinking about from my committee perspective, but also this committee has one as well.

Separately, You know, being now a good Seattleite, I look to compost and recycle.

I clean my recycling, even here in City Hall.

And I bring up, because that was an issue where China stopped taking recycling.

Is there any concerns regarding the question of, quote, unquote, clean recycling?

Is that a concern for you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

We've had to adjust our markets since China, I would say, clamped down.

And so we've diversified those markets.

But fortunately, still, I want to say about 80% to 90% of what we actually recycle gets into an actual reuse stream.

And so it's not a situation where we're actually still landfilling the majority of what people are putting into the recycle.

We've been able to find additional markets to support that, to support the sale of those materials.

Also, I'd like to note that I got a great tour from a former city council member, Rob Johnson, talking about the recycling of Climate Pledge Arena.

I just wanted to give a shout out to that because that's an incredible effort and a model for the rest of the city to include getting the clean water off the roof, one roof, if you will, for the Zamboni during the Kraken games.

Despite early resistance, they found that that is the best for the Kraken games there at Climate Pledge Arena, and it's definitely a model for our future efforts throughout the city.

And my one last thing is, you know, as a block watch camp for my neighborhood, I was out there during the freeze, and so I wanted to thank your teams in the upper Queen Anne Northwest part.

I won't go into any more details because we did have a big break and called it in, and they came on site to address that during the freeze in mid-January.

So thank you to your team for their efforts in that.

Thank you very much.

I'll let the staff know that you said that.

I appreciate that.

Are there any additional questions or comments?

I also want to thank my favorite Hennessy, Bob.

And I don't know if you're sick of me yet, but I know that we have been sending you constituent emails and stuff, and you've been incredibly responsive.

So thank you so much for that.

Really appreciate that.

You all do phenomenal work.

The Just Do It department, thank you all for being here and for giving us that phenomenal presentation.

So thank you.

Thank you.

If there's no other business, hearing none, that concludes our February 28th meeting of Parks, Public Utilities, and Technology.

Our next committee meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, March 13th at 2 p.m.

And happy birthday, Rhonda Hollingsworth.

I love you.

If there's no further business, this meeting will adjourn.

Thank you.

I second that motion.

Thank you.

you