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Okay, good afternoon everyone.

The January 28th, 2026 meeting of the Housing, Arts, and Civil Rights Committee will come to order.

It is 2.02 p.m.

I'm Dionne Foster, Chair of the Housing, Arts, and Civil Rights Committee.

Will the committee clerk please call the roll?

Council member Hollingsworth?

Here.

Council member Juarez?

Here.

Council member Rink?

Present.

Vice Chair Lynn?

Present.

Chair Foster?

Present.

Chair, there are five members present.

Thank you.

Well, welcome everyone to the first meeting of our committee for the year.

I am so excited to get to be chairing this committee and I want to welcome my colleagues to the committee.

I'm really pleased to serve with you and also welcome Council Member Juarez who is joining us today for this committee.

I'm so happy to have you here as well.

Briefly, the scope of the committee this year is going to include, as one might infer from the name, the Office of Housing, Office of Arts and Culture, Office of Civil Rights, as well as the Seattle Social Housing Developer, and so far as it's related to landlord and tenant regulations, things that fall under SDCI or the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections.

so we have a broad and exciting scope as a committee.

And today we're gonna get started with some presentation and discussion from our arts department.

But before we do, I'll just share a few thoughts.

Briefly, as folks can hear, I'm still regaining my voice.

Housing will be a big portion of the workload of this committee, given the items that we expect to come before us this year, as well as what we are all seeing and feeling in our communities across Seattle.

While we're starting today with the presentation of Office of Arts and Culture, you can expect to see more in an ongoing focus, along with arts and culture and civil rights on housing in this committee.

and particularly we'll be looking at how we make sure that social housing is successful after voters overwhelmingly approved it twice and we're excited to make sure that the city's role in working directly to make the developer successful is that we bring that fully to fruition.

We'll be partnering to make sure that our affordable housing providers are able to continue to provide housing for working families across the city and that we provide stability for them, supporting housing abundance and ensuring that we make it easy and effective to build enough of our housing supply.

So those are some things that I will preview along with priorities on ensuring that we are supporting black home ownership in our city and protecting the rights of renters in Seattle, given that over half of our city are renters.

We can expect to hear more from our civil rights department, particularly given the moment that we are all in locally and across the country on ensuring that we are protecting and enforcing civil rights here in Seattle, given that our local work is more important now than maybe it's ever been with what's happening with the federal government.

but today we are very excited to start with a conversation where our focus will be on arts this year around supporting the creative economy and ensuring that we understand more about the needs of our arts team here at the city as well as some of the really important investments they are making and the pain points that they face.

So with that, I'm going to move on to adopting the agenda.

If there is no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

We will now open the hybrid public comment period.

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

Clerk, how many speakers are signed up today?

Okay, and are those in person?

Yes, we have two in person.

Great.

Each speaker will have two minutes, so we will start with our in-person speakers.

Clerk, can you please read the public comment instructions?

The public comment period is up to 60 minutes.

Speakers will be called on in the order which they registered.

We will begin with in-person speakers and there are no remote speakers.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left.

Speakers' mics will then be muted if they go beyond that a lot of time to allow us to call on the next speaker.

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

The first speaker is Kenneth Randolph, and once Kenneth is finished, the second speaker will be Manny, and we'll now begin with you, Kenneth.

Good afternoon, members of the council.

Greetings.

Can you hear me okay?

Kenneth, you might wanna use the other, yeah.

Kenneth Randolph Good afternoon, members of the council.

You can hear me now?

Okay, now.

Yeah, just right into the mic.

Kenneth Randolph My name's Kenneth Randolph.

I'm an immigrant and refugee.

I came here to this country when I was 10 years old in 1963. So I've been here 63 years.

Obviously, like a lot of people, I'm enormously disturbed about what's going on in the country today.

So last week, I'm a retired person, by the way, but last week I wanted to roll up my sleeves, get involved in the fight that's probably coming here big time in the city of Seattle.

So I applied for the Immigrant and Refugee Commission, you know, the Citizens Advisory Commission, and I found out some very interesting things in that process.

Obviously, there are 15 positions on that commission, and they're all vacant.

That disturbs me.

It ought to disturb you.

Apparently, eight of these positions are appointed by the mayor, and seven of them are appointed by you.

However, all the mayor's appointees, you have to be approved by you.

So as a de facto matter, you're the people that are in charge of this commission.

So I find it appalling, under the present circumstances, that this Citizens Advisory Committee on immigrant and refugees has got all 15 of its spots vacant.

And so when I applied, I've got two responses back from, I don't have very much time.

Let me just say, I'm interested, you know, this shouldn't be the case.

We need to get this committee up and running like now, yesterday, not three months from now, which apparently it's going to take if we go through the usual process, which apparently is going on now, supposedly.

So, I'm gonna sit right here.

You have a very special, you, councilperson Rink, have a very special role in this because you're the chair of the select committee, apparently has some direct oversight over this.

I would ask, I'm gonna meet with my councilperson next week, Strauss, about this, but I would like to be in contact with somebody on your staff directly today that I can communicate with so we can get the ball rolling on this.

Thank you.

Thank you, Kenneth.

Sorry about running over time.

That's okay.

Thank you so much, Kenneth.

And our next speaker is Manny Cowling.

Hello, friends.

My name is Manny Kowalian.

I'm the executive director for Inspire Washington.

We are your and the state of Washington's cultural advocacy organization.

We believe in the uplifting power of science, heritage, and the arts.

And we also know that there are great, tremendous impacts from a thriving creative economy.

I'm here today to speak about arts and to support this topic of civic investment.

Also, I want to explain kind of what we do to support arts and creativity here in Seattle, which is a creative capital of the world.

Inspire Washington focuses our work on coalition building.

We know we are stronger together, so we bring many different points of view, tying the needs of Seattle with the needs of Aberdeen in pursuing policies that support creative economy and the cultural sector.

We advocate at the federal level, the state level.

We're really busy right now in the state legislative session, and we're hosting our annual advocacy week next week in Olympia.

We also focus on resource development.

We were the champions of doors open and the cultural access legislation, which now is generating an additional $117 million in five jurisdictions across the state for the purpose of addressing access to cultural programming.

And we also are always in pursuit of new resources and educating our leadership.

I want to congratulate the new members of this committee and the new members of council.

We are really grateful to get to know you more during our candidate forums during our voter education program.

Right now, what we do is we partner with the Commission and we are working with them to really understand how we can support their policy objectives.

We are also, like I said, in an active right now in our state session.

We're pursuing ticketing legislation, which we hope will address affordable tickets here in Seattle.

We're also advocating at the federal level.

Anyway, we are here to be your partner.

We wanna be in service to you as city council so we can make Seattle as creative as possible.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Are there any?

No additional registered speakers.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much.

And I'll just state briefly, we'll make sure that Kenneth, someone comes out to get your contact info.

And we were just discussing the questions that you brought up.

Oh, and right on time, I see somebody coming in.

So thank you for that.

We were just discussing that this morning in committee, in a separate committee.

So you're right on time, Kenneth, thank you.

And thank you so much for being here, Manny.

We appreciate you and your advocacy.

With that, will the clerk please read item one into the record?

agenda item one, introduction to Seattle Office of Arts and Culture for briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

And I see our presenters are joining us at the committee table.

Welcome, we're so happy to have you.

I will, as you all get situated, I will just welcome you.

So we have Kelly Davidson, interim director of the Office of Arts and Culture with us.

And we also have Ali McGee, who is the finance and operations director for the Office of Arts and Culture.

I'm very grateful to both of you for being here and helping us start with our first committee this year.

It's incredibly exciting.

And I'll just say a few words about why I'm so excited about this conversation that we're gonna have today.

For me, I think that arts are not a nice to have they're a must have, they're an essential when we think about what it means to have a well-functioning, welcoming city.

The arts do so much to not just create places, create excitement and generate our creativity and our emotions, but they're also an incredibly important economic driver for Seattle.

And I know that the investments that you make and that we make as a city are really important to our small businesses, to people who are working in the creative economy and so I'm really excited that we get to have this conversation and really get to center on how essential arts are for Seattle and for our region.

So with that, I welcome you and I'll ask you to introduce yourselves and I'll ask my colleagues, I'm looking forward to some great discussion, I'll ask you to hold questions until the end.

Welcome.

Thank you so much, Council Member Foster, and thank you to SAGE for technical assistance.

My name is Kelly Davidson, and I am the Interim Director of the Office of Arts and Culture.

With me is my colleague, Finance and Operations Director, Ali McGehee.

Today, we will provide an overview of the Office of Arts and Culture and its programs.

Uh-oh.

Where do I hit?

Can I just do those, guys?

Sorry.

Oh I was trying to just do this one.

Let me just do that.

Perfect.

Thank you.

As you can see, we have a busy agenda as we go over our structure, values, programs, financials, and 2026 priorities in our presentation.

We'll do our best to move through these quickly and ensure we have time for questions and dialogue at the end.

Kicking us off, we'll begin our community oversight and operational structure.

The mission of the Office of Arts and Culture's mission is to activate and sustain Seattle through arts and culture.

We envision a city driven by creativity that provides the opportunity for everyone to engage in diverse arts and cultural experiences.

We commit to an anti-racist work practice that centers the creativity and leadership of people of color, those most impacted by structural racism, to move towards systems that benefit us all.

In 2024, following a transition in department leadership, Director Kayeem kicked off a multi-month staff engagement and dialogue process around departmental strengths, opportunities, and challenges.

This process included multiple day-long work sessions and culminated in the office's first ever five-year strategic plan.

The strategic plan resulted in an office-wide adopted list of stated goals and broke them down into tasks that can be added to performance agreements, set as team goals, and tracked over time.

In 2025, we held three all staff sessions to check in on office wide progress towards those goals and workshop how each division was making progress towards their specific objectives.

The entire process centered around embedding our values of racial equity and access into our goals and priorities.

A few noteworthy structural changes we were able to put into place into 2025 include the creation of the Creative Placemaking Division, and the repurposing of a vacant position to meet the unmet need in the office in the area of policy development and racial equity.

Centering our racial equity values, our office places emphasis on targeted recruitment for funding opportunities, growing our data collection and analysis of who we are funding to make sure we are meeting our goals and equity access in the arts.

In this slide, you can see a snapshot of the demographic data of our 2026 HOPE Corps and King Street Station Activations grantees.

We collect data on each of our funding programs that are analyzed following each selection process to see how effective our outreach was.

This data is shared in presentations to the Seattle Arts Commission and to our community funding panelists.

These mechanisms help keep us accountable in evaluating progress towards our goals.

In our most recent Centering Art and Racial Equity grant program, we awarded funds to nearly 250 organizations throughout the city.

Of those, we categorized approximately a third of our awardee organizations as BIPOC.

The applicant pool for this year is currently in review and includes over 300 organizations, highlighting the continuing need in the community.

This grant is non-competitive and with the growth in application numbers and no increase in funding, awards will be reduced and limited.

In the most recent grant cycle, the largest percentage of awards went to small, small meaning 50K to 500K or very small under 500K organizations.

We recently, did I say 50K, sorry.

That's why I bring my finance director.

We recently conducted a survey of the needs of the recipients of our organizational funding and look forward to presenting those findings to you soon.

Our office relies on two primary funding sources, the 1% for Art Ordinance and the Seattle Admissions Tax.

The 1% for Art Ordinance funds our public art program and related administrative costs.

The ordinance stipulates that capital departments set aside 1% of their capital costs for public art.

These funds are highly restricted and flow through the Municipal Art Fund.

Admissions tax is a 5% ticket tax charged at certain venues and events like the Seattle Space Needle, Chihuly Garden and Glass, The Great Wheel, or the movie theater.

Revenues from that tax go to the city's arts and culture fund, which provides resources for arts education, grant programs, facilities, and general operating costs.

Admissions tax revenue fluctuate regularly based on a variety of outside factors.

Our current structure, which relies on same-year forecasts to budget, makes planning difficult, and we hope to discuss that more with you in the future.

Our office may also receive one-time funds from other funding sources at the direction of the mayor or city council.

In 2026, we received a number of one-time ads totaling nearly $1.5 million through council budget actions to direct funds for specific purposes.

We're currently working on assigning these to project managers so we can begin this important work.

These are great ads for great causes, but our overall goal is to support the long-term success of the broader grants program and creative ecosystem so that all eligible organizations can benefit from city investments.

The Seattle Arts Commission is our 16-member community advisory group that provides guidance, oversight, and support to our office.

Commissioners are appointed by council, mayor's office, and other commissioners for two-year terms and they may serve for up to three terms.

Moving on to our programs.

Our public art program is one of the nation's oldest established in 1973. They are a national model for public art programs around the country.

Innovative public art programs include the Civic Collection Public Art Boot Camp, which is a training program for emerging public artists, Fresh Perspectives, which is a youth curator training program, Planning Artists, which are often embedded in partner departments, and Public Art Roster, and recently our Seattle Waterfront program.

We manage the city's arts and culture grant-making programs, arts education investments with Seattle Public Schools, and artists and art organization capacity building endeavors.

We have 12 rotating grant applications, making investments in individuals and organizations and supporting different art forms from poetry to dance to the visual arts.

We have specific opportunities focused on emerging artists and youth looking to launch creative careers.

Please note, the Youth Arts application is currently open As a result of a confluence of factors, including federal cuts, rising costs, and post-pandemic sluggish economic recovery, our office continues to see a significant increase in the number of applications to our grant programs.

In 2025, we saw a 38 percent increase in applications over 2024 application numbers.

At the same time, we've only seen one inflationary adjustment in the last 12 years.

Our office began the Creative Advantage program in the 2013-14 school year, starting with 13 schools in the Central Arts Pathway.

In 2024, we reached the goal of being in all 106 Seattle Public Schools.

Funding for Creative Advantage is stretched thin.

During the pandemic, funding for the Creative Advantage was cut and not restored.

Seattle Public Schools held the Creative Advantage's annual NEA award for $100,000.

Those funds were eliminated last year during federal priority shifts.

Over the last two years, the Creative Advantage has depleted all of its base funds partway through the school year without being able to meet the needs of schools applying for the program.

The Creative Advantage budget was built to fund the ramp-up of the program and has not been right-sized to the fact that we are now supporting all 106 Seattle Public Schools.

The Creative Advantage teaching artist roster is also the foundation of a new partnership with the Department of Education and Early Learning around community hubs and their youth mental health investments.

We are looking forward to discussing this important program in greater detail with you.

Our third programmatic division is creative placemaking.

This division was established in 2025 following the completion of the strategic plan and unites work in creative space, cultural districts, place-based arts activations, and the creative economy.

Creative placemaking will focus on the integration of arts into community development and planning.

We are documenting resources needed to build out this new division.

Cultural Space is the investment and support of retaining cultural facilities and spaces in Seattle.

Our office operates a cultural facilities funding opportunity to help organizations make structural improvements from ADA ramps to window replacements.

We also support the establishment of general maintenance of cultural districts in the city.

We've been working on establishing the Georgetown Cultural District and we'll bring that to Council in 2026.

The Office of Arts and Culture also operates the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute in the Central District.

We have made significant technology upgrades in the space in 2024 and 2025, elevating this important cultural space.

We are in close collaboration with Seattle Parks and Recreation and our community partners on how to continue to invest in and support the building, which serves as a landmark location and hub for black arts in the city.

This facility houses the Langston nonprofit, which provides and coordinates programming in the space.

We've completed an evaluation of Langston's fulfillment of their community benefits under our contract and are currently working on a long-term contract with Langston, which we will bring to city council in 2026 for approval when it's ready.

We also operate the Arts at King Street Station Gallery on the third floor of the historic King Street train station.

The gallery is dedicated to increasing opportunities for communities of color to generate and present their work.

The gallery features a series of rotating exhibitions year-round and is free to the public.

The facility also offers community meeting spaces for locals to gather.

Our office has a community group of advisors to help select artists to be featured in the gallery space.

The gallery is home to events, performances, and other activations year-round, with notable ones on first Thursdays, longest day and longest night, and for the World Cup this year, staffed by our King Street Station lead and creative placemaking team.

We are also exploring a partnership with Seattle City Light around activating the Denny Substation, a beautiful facility in the heart of the Denny Triangle.

While we work on the framework, we are collaborating with City Light on short-term pop-up events and activations in the space for our community partners and grantees.

We look forward to collaborating with the Mayor's Office and City Council in the upcoming biennial budget process.

We are seeing an increase in the need in the creative community represented by the spiking application numbers, particularly in programs like Creative Advantage and Centering Art and Racial Equity.

We need to discuss with city-electeds the priorities around creative placemaking, particularly post-World Cup, as popular programs like Hope Corps and King Street Station activations are currently reliant on temporary staffing.

We want to look for operational efficiencies both through our internal strategic planning work, but also in our departmental collaborations with partners like the Seattle Department of Education and Early Learning, Parks, and Seattle Center.

We also want to discuss our funding structure in greater detail and the challenges it presents as we look towards building systems and structures to better align mission and service delivery to the community.

In this budget, in this slide, you can see our 2026 adopted budget.

In 2026, we have some major programming commitments on the horizon.

We have made significant investments for citywide arts-focused activations and programming to welcome visitors and celebrate our neighborhoods during the World Cup.

We are launching a pilot program called Pivot, which is a two-year arts and cultural organization cohort program designed to incubate and support organizational transformation in response to changes in the creative economy.

Finally, we anticipate leading a cultural planning process through which we want to engage a broader Seattle creative community around their needs and how our office can best foster them in a changing landscape.

Thank you so much for your time and attention and we're happy to answer questions and talk with you.

Thank you so much for that wonderful presentation.

I really appreciate it.

I will turn to my colleagues to see what questions you may have for our presenter and I'll allow them to do their questions first before I highlight a few of my own thoughts and excitements and areas I'm looking forward to exploring with you.

Okay, Council Member Lin.

Thank you, Chair.

First of all, thank you so much.

As the Chair stated, I fully agree that arts is just absolutely essential.

I think of arts as essential as the air we breathe, as the food, as the arts nourishes the soul.

And I think we see right now our souls are hurting.

and I think about, there was a Bruce Springsteen song that was released recently, a protest, a resistance song.

And so I think about the many ways that arts helps us navigate these dark times and just helps to benefit our community in so many ways.

And so one thing as I think about arts, I was wondering if you could talk about how much of the programming might be focused on some of our immigrant communities.

And as I think about the hate and divisiveness that we see, I think about in many ways there's nothing better than the arts community to provide a positive uplifting message to bring our community together right now.

And so just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and wondering if we can make that a priority for 2026 to really uplift the contributions of our immigrant neighbors.

Sure, I can speak to some of the things we have in progress now and then I think it's definitely something we're going to be paying very close attention to and engaging with.

The projects that we are going to be doing for activations this year for downtown and around the World Cup timing.

That call went out and it was, the call was called, We Still Dream a Future.

And the focus on that was really about using arts and joy as an act of resistance.

So the applications that we received through that program were really, really moving.

We're very excited about the lineup and we can share that information with you soon.

Our team is working on a, presentation now to share out what each of those funded groups are gonna be doing.

So that one I think is definitely gonna be responsive.

The other thing that I'll mention is our gallery space at Arts at King Street Station.

We have hosted many shows right now and those exhibits, they come in through proposals.

The community volunteer group reviews those and decides what moves forward.

But we've had several exhibits that are very focused on the immigrant experience.

We just closed a Puerto Rican exhibit which was phenomenal and it was such a party and also just centering that joy but also with very strong messages.

and then I'd also love to call out the work of our partner organization Langston and what they are doing at the Alpi facility and just they are partnering with other organizations, entities and artists and bringing in all kinds of programming that's been very meaningful in the community.

So those are a few things we have happening right now and we're happy to connect with you all about future endeavors and it'd definitely be a topic that we move through on our cultural planning process.

Thank you.

Just got a couple more questions.

Could you talk a little bit about kind of the needs for spaces, so kind of more capital needs versus operating needs?

And partially I'm thinking about the wonderful work of our Equitable Development Initiative helping to fund some of those capital spaces.

But I'm also thinking about potential partnerships with the social housing developer.

And I know it's always tough to fund those ground floor spaces and mixed-use development.

But if you could just speak a little bit about those different buckets of money and challenges that some of our arts organizations might be facing.

Sure, I will state that operational and capital are both huge challenges for organizations right now.

They're struggling in both of those areas.

So there is the one component of how do the folks who are here keep their doors open and get the resources they need to not close.

That is something the pivot program that we're working on is trying to address and they're in the selection process right now with applicants to that program.

this is a program that we received one-time pilot funding for so we've been shaping it as we go but it is specifically to try to help them address those operational needs and also for us to collect feedback on what those needs are so that we can be prepared for things we need to look for, ask for, look for in partnerships So that's the operational component.

The capital side is also a tremendous challenge.

We don't want to see organizations having to leave, and so ownership, long-term leases are a huge component of that.

We have had partnerships that we are working on.

We have been working with the Cultural Space Agency.

Our Cultural Facilities Fund, while it's not a huge resource, it has helped some folks meet code compliance pieces that they need to.

I think we're very open and excited to who else we can partner with on some of these components.

And looking forward to, we just brought a policy and planning person into our office, which we noted in our presentation we have never had before.

And we've been very excited to be able to kick off this year with the funding we received for cultural planning to really look at policy components that could help with some of those pieces too.

Do you have anything else?

Thank you so much, and I just want to give a shout out to one of my colleagues here, Councilmember Rank, and things like the Roots to Roofs legislation, so that's like a land use policy, but just wanted to think outside the box about how do we make it feasible for those spaces.

Just a final question, I see in your slide about 2026 priorities, CID, anything you can speak to about the CID or potential Little Saigon area?

Yeah, I mean, the reason we call these neighborhoods out, we know that they are going to be significantly impacted by World Cup and we have been working, we received money in 2025 that we allocated and where we're now working with those groups that are receiving the funding in 26 to be ready for these pieces.

So while we had open calls for that piece, we actually also, connected with some of the community organizations that we know function in these neighborhoods, including CID, and are specifically partnering with them on specific projects that they are hoping to highlight and to be able to speak to who they are and bring people in.

And we're talking a lot with them about timing, because we know that people are going to come in to the stadiums, but how do we get people here when it's an off game time?

Because they're going to be around.

We want to bring them back downtown.

We want them to explore.

We want them to go shopping.

We want them to eat.

So those are conversations we've been having around that.

But our staff has been very much in partnership with CID, Pioneer Square, and Stadium District as we prep for this.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Councilmember Lynn.

I see a question from Councilmember Juarez.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I just wanted to go back and, first of all, thank you to the guests and the folks that are here in your leadership, Madam Chair.

I'm looking at page 25 of your PowerPoint, and thank you for having page numbers.

You'd be surprised how many people come here with 40-page PowerPoints with no page numbers.

Yeah, I know.

I'm old school.

So I'm looking at the Denny substation in partnership with Seattle City Lights.

So the two questions I had from the last couple of years looking at the projects that we had funded through the Seattle Office Arts and Culture, are there other city departments and facilities that we are looking at being considered?

And have we also looked at other municipalities and including sound transit?

Because you're talking about partnering not just with Seattle City Light or Seattle Assets, but other departments, other institutions, and other organizations?

Yeah, I think we partner with many other city departments, and I think the nature of that partnership shifts depending on what it is that we're doing with them.

This particular project with City Light, we have quite a bit happening with City Light and their program.

In fact, thank you to City Light because they just did a lovely blog post to their staff on the work that they've been doing with our office and they've really engaged their employees in the arts and culture work that we're doing with them.

This particular site has been available for a while and providing it as a community asset was part of their agreement of getting the permitting for the location here.

So we started talking with them before the pandemic.

Things went on hold, not surprising.

And we're picking that effort up now and trying to figure out the best way to make a space of this particular site.

I don't think sites are off the table.

We're happy to partner with folks wherever we can.

Again, it's just that nature being different of what we're doing with each department.

We mentioned a few times Department of Early Learning and Education and our partnerships with them.

In those cases, Parks is our site.

So Parks is also a partner at the table.

We have a three-way MOU agreement with them.

They provide the community center space.

Our staff is bringing in the teaching artists who are doing the programming and Deal is funding these programs.

So that's a really great way we've been partnering.

For the percent programs, we work with the utilities and each of those departments very closely around a whole variety of work.

And we're looking forward to engaging with more departments as we move forward and think about how we're bringing policy to the table and who we need to be communicating with.

I know OIRA is one that we know we wanna talk with.

We've been communicating with, we are a UNESCO City of Literature and back to the immigration component piece, there are some programs that they've been doing that we're researching more closely where they bring writers in from other countries with their entire families and try to give them two years of space to live when they are trying to get out of oppressive places.

So we're open to partnering as much as we can.

We've definitely realized that it is a great way to leverage as a department that doesn't have a lot of funding or staff, it's been a really great way for us to grow things and have a larger impact.

So we're happy to talk with you if you have ideas.

Madam Chair, can I have a couple of follow-ups?

Absolutely.

Thank you.

So is Seattle Arts and Culture working with the Seattle Channel and the Archive folks?

We actually are.

We're working on a massive archive project at Langston Hughes where we have over 25 years of artifacts from performances from the facility that represent a key piece of legacy for the community.

And so we are currently working with archives to make sure that we are preserving those artifacts correctly and in line with retention policies.

while also making sure that we continue to have access to them and that they can be shared as a community resource with people coming into the space.

Are you guys involved with the Seattle Channel when they're doing these new archival videos on the history of Seattle, not just the pioneer history, but the indigenous history?

Is arts and culture involved in that as well?

We were not involved in that part.

From my understanding, they're leading on their own.

We're aware of them.

They're fantastic, but we haven't been engaged.

This project that Ali mentioned is a big lift project that we've been really excited about and our facilities team has been really engaged with.

Some smaller things we've done with them are some of the 360 videos that we've had from our gallery installations too.

I think that covers about what we've been working on with Seattle Channel.

Were you guys working with Colleen Elkohawk and the Headwaters group for the waterfront for the renaming in the traditional La Chute language?

Were you guys involved in that?

I believe, so we have had a staff person embedded on the waterfront who's been running those components.

Maria Polsky, who is a just brilliant public art mind, and she has been working with them for several years now, and I believe she has been engaged in all of those components.

The calls that we did to bring artwork into the waterfront were very specific and there were very specific interactions with indigenous communities in order to have that representation.

And I know that Rory was engaged in all of their wayfinding process too, so I believe that would all be connected, yes.

Madam Chair, I have a recommendation for you if you will entertain it.

Oh please, absolutely.

From all of the years that I've been here, this is one thing that's always kind of been, let me think of a better word.

What I would like to see from arts and culture, which I have asked before, and I'll ask again, particularly when I chaired the waterfront and when we redid it in parks, is can we get an inventory or a list or something to show when you are working with city departments and putting out RFPs for artists work with indigenous or not, what has been requested and what was actually awarded.

I don't know if that's somewhere online.

Yeah, I've never been able to figure out, and I'll just say this, and I'm not trying to speak to an audience of one or plug any group over another, but I don't find that there's a central place that I can go to when tribal leadership calls and says, except for Colleen in Headwaters, Echo Hawk, shout out to Colleen Echo Hawk and their group, I've never gotten like a list to say, OK, here are all the groups that have applied to do either the Waterford or any of that kind of art related to Indigenous groups.

And please don't bring up a land acknowledgement because that's ridiculous.

But I've never been able to just see that and like who who is asking for it, because when I get asked questions like, well, how did so-and-so get to do that?

Or how come so-and-so got this?

Or why wasn't this put there?

Why wasn't this tribe recognized?

I don't know who to refer them to.

Sometimes it's the waterfront, friends of the waterfront.

We had the same issues with the aquarium and the zoo.

And I'm not throwing shade on anyone.

I'm just saying it would be nice as elected leaders and certainly for the chair to kind of have some kind of running inventory or list so we can actually find out, oh, here's the opportunity to apply for and present authentic art, not just on the waterfront and the fake totem poles, but art throughout the whole city, including north of the Ship Canal, quite frankly.

And I'm really glad to be on this committee with Council Member Foster and her interest in this.

So that's just my two cents.

Thank you.

And we'll take those two cents, we appreciate them.

Councilman Juarez, thank you for bringing that question to the committee.

And I'll allow you all to respond as needed, but I'll just state my intention to make sure that we follow up with you to make sure you get an answer around that.

And I, as I was tracking your question, see overlap between Office of Arts and Culture, Office of Waterfront, our various departments that then have 1% for the arts, and I can see how that maze would be really difficult to navigate of who's actually tracking this collectively.

So I appreciate you bringing that question so that it's not a barrier for people when they say who applied or who asked for access and then who got it.

So thank you.

Madam Chair, can I ask one last question?

Absolutely.

Thank you.

And also can you include in that request or ask the Pipe Place Market with their PDA They are a public development authority, but they do operate within the confines of city law, the city family.

And that's been another area where I can't get information about, okay, what's real, what's indigenous, what's being represented, how did it get out there, who's paying it, who got awarded it.

And again, I'm not trying to, you know, renamed Confederate statutes, I'm just trying to have the actual history of the city represented by the people that have been here since, and I love to say, time immemorial.

And again, I'm caught up in this whole maze of bureaucracy.

And if I'm, as an elected, can't get to stuff, I can imagine people who are not part of the city family trying to find out what's where.

And then I'm hoping, with all my colleagues sitting here and hopefully watching, that they can put that in their newsletters.

when there is an announcement like, hey, we're gonna be rolling this out, we're inviting all artists, and then we can put it in our respective newsletters so people can apply.

And a lot of times people don't expect that they're gonna get it the first round, but at least they'll know that there's a place that they can go or that it's being offered, and then they can put it in their informational social media platforms.

So that was my last ask.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much, council member.

Yeah, we can do an overview of all those.

It is absolutely confusing.

There are a lot of different players involved in each of these phases, but we do have connections and contacts at all of those.

And we try to stay in communication so that we know what we're all doing.

So we can put together something to share back that has contacts with clarity on whose jurisdiction is what.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Council Member Ruiz, any further questions from you?

I still see the hand up, so I want to check.

Okay.

Fantastic.

Okay.

Thank you for that, colleagues.

And there's a couple of other things I want to draw our attention to before we close out today.

And so I want to just revisit a couple of things that you had in your slide deck and underline and underscore them, if I may.

And so one of those things that really I think is important to name is that you, I think you said you saw a 38% increase in applications in between the 2024 and the 2025 year.

And to me, that's really indicative of partially the great work that we're doing to communicate with people, but also partially the need that is happening across the city and particularly for small arts organizations.

So I wonder if you can speak to that just a bit and also reiterate, because I know you were...

giving some points around the size of the organizations under 50K and 500K.

And I saw there was a little communication between the two of you on that.

So if I can ask you to just go back and reiterate that point, because I think it's important as we're looking at some of the smaller in budget size arts organizations, but also the need that they have.

Yeah, I can read through the organizations.

And sorry, I'm terrible at reading numbers, so that is why I go there.

For the under 50,000 is our very small category.

32% of our applications were in that space.

50,000 to 500,000 is what we consider small.

36% of our applications were in that space.

And we can send this to you as well.

500K to 2 million budget is what we refer to as a medium organization.

18% of our applications were in that.

2 million and above from a budget perspective is a large and 14% of our applications were from that.

We are definitely aware that it is a combination of outreach as well as the need that is bringing that in and we do know that this is a program, we have just conducted an evaluation which we know we want to be able to come back and talk to you about once we've been able to really analyze the data that we got from that evaluation.

to look at how can we address the need?

Are there shifts programmatically?

What's working?

What isn't working for folks?

And so it was a very thorough evaluation that was shared with all the organizations that apply.

And we're looking forward to coming back and talking with you all about our findings there.

The other component where we're learning pieces on this is through the pivot program that we're doing too because those are organizations that are also being targeted.

So in addition to getting survey information from the folks who've been in our system and are new to our system through our current organizational one.

We're getting additional feedback from the people who are involved and the pivot program will be a cohort model where we will go deep with those organizations as well about shifting models, partnerships, and the variety of ways that there might be some things to help them as well.

I have two clarifications.

One, the numbers that Kelly just read, they represent the awardees, not the applications.

So that clarification.

And then I think the piece that the numbers don't necessarily speak to is that this is our program that allows us to connect with these organizations it is our one, other than Pivot, which is a pilot, it is our one way to sort of reach out to arts and cultural organizations throughout the city.

We have no other programs that meet that need.

And so it's not just the money that we're giving, it's that connection with what Council Member Juarez said, like the city family, like there is a touch point, there is someone they can call, there is someone that cares about them.

and that intangible benefit is still a benefit that they value and that certainly, I know we're coming back to present the survey evaluation, but that's something that consistently comes through, that that is an important thing that we're providing to them that any other structure doesn't provide.

Thank you for that.

And following up on that, and I know there's another question from Councilman Berlin, so I'll hand it to Councilman Berlin in just a moment.

But following up on that, we want to go back to the budget and some of the funding structure, things that I heard you mention and allude to throughout the presentation.

So if you can talk a little bit about, one, I think I want to focus this on the funding sources that you have.

I know one of them is the admissions tax, there's also other funding streams and so if you can just speak to that a little bit and the fluctuations that you're seeing there, I think that'll be helpful for the committee members to hear.

The Office of Arts and Culture, in a shift to allow the department to continue to operate during the pandemic, shifted from a two-year model to a same-year model, which means that we rely very heavily on the Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts, thrice-year budget forecast, to see how much ad tax is available for the city.

So there's a lot of complexity about that that we'd love to talk about in greater detail in the future, but it makes it really hard to plan long-term because the numbers keep shifting.

If you look at the forecast from April versus the one from October, you see a significant drop.

And each, every few months we're waiting sort of with bated breath to see what the new numbers are going to be and what that means for our office.

Other departments that have multiple funding sources can say, okay, well, if this revenue source is down, then we can turn to something else, or hey, we have a foundation, or hey, we have grants.

They have more stability.

But for the Office of Arts and Culture, the Municipal Art Fund, which is the only other funding source we regularly have access to, is so highly restricted that they cannot sort of offset any issues that we have.

If we have issues with ad tax, we have issues with the office.

The legislation that guides it stipulates that we put aside 20% as a rainy day reserve.

So there is some cushion, but still that three times a year structure is incredibly challenging for long-term planning.

Thank you so much.

And just underscoring that given that you're relying on that and given that our arts organizations and our partners are partnering with us.

So I think it just extends that the more that we can provide that stability for the office, the more that we can provide that stability for the partners.

So thank you for that.

Councilmember Lin.

Just earlier as you were talking about collaboration with other departments, I just want to think about, I'm thinking about one project between, there's a permanent supportive housing provider, Plymouth Housing at the ground floor, has a space with Path with Arts, I believe.

I just want to think about in not only the therapeutic nature of arts, but also the ability for storytelling and community connection between some of our housed and hung-housed neighbors, between some of our perhaps permanent supportive housing providers and the surrounding communities, and just want to see if there's an ability there to lean into that.

Thank you for bringing that up.

We meet actually in 25, we hosted, but we cycle off with our partners.

There's a monthly meeting called Washington Funders Collaborative and we meet informally every month.

And one of the topics that we've really been talking a lot about lately is arts prescribing.

and Path with Art is a leading organization in that and has hosted several conversations around that and we've been bringing them into play on that.

I was glancing at Manny because I know we've been communicating in that space and watching closely what the state is doing and trying to provide whatever support we can because it is state level component to bring that to our city.

If you're not familiar, it is a program where doctors, physicians can actually prescribe that you go to an arts event and your insurance would cover the cost of the ticket for you to go to that event or to take a class.

And it's growing.

There's a lot of momentum growing around it.

And so it's definitely a conversation that we are engaged with with leaders across the area.

I'm very interested in where it's going.

Sorry, I'm trying to rephrase the second part of your question about the spaces and how we're bringing things in.

That answered the question.

Thank you.

I was not aware of that.

I had heard that there was recently some research that showed the power of art to reduce the need for painkillers.

I have a list of books if you're interested.

Wonderful.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

Any other questions from members of the committee?

Fantastic.

I'll make one final comment only because Council Member Lynn's question has spurred this reminder in me.

I recently got a chance to meet with a group called Sustainable Music Northwest and Council Member Lynn, I'll make sure I share their information with you.

They're actually funding musicians at union level wages and one of the things that they are doing is activating spaces around the city and I believe they've had a partnership with Plymouth Housing where they're playing at some of their locations.

So there's a lot of really incredible work happening there that brings not just arts and health but also economic support for musicians.

So thanks for that question because it gave me a chance to lift up this fantastic community meeting that I had.

Thank you so much to both of you.

I really appreciate you joining us today.

I think we have a couple of really exciting areas to continue to explore, both with sort of long-term stability, the fantastic questions that Council Member Juarez brought up around making sure that we have accessibility and our information and a particular focus on collaborating with tribes and native folks.

So we're really looking forward to continuing to explore there.

And also to make sure that we are being thoughtful around the increase in need and the strain on the financial capacity.

and that we are seeing in so many of our sectors in the city, the way that those federal shifts are landing and that unfortunately arts are not excluded from that.

And so I appreciate you helping us center that understanding so that when we are looking across the landscape, we're really doing so in a holistic way.

So thank you for that.

All right, with that, are there any other further business items to come before the committee?

All right, that concludes our January 28th, 2026th meeting of the Housing Arts and Civil Rights Committee.

Our next scheduled meeting is on February 11th, and we will be diving in on housing in that committee, so I'm looking forward to it.

Thank you so much again.

It is 2.57 p.m., and we are adjourned.

Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair, well done.

Thank you, and shout out to Arts for having the page numbers.

Thanks for letting us be first.