Just for the record, I'm going to ask folks to introduce themselves.
And we are joined by some of the human service providers behind us, just for the record, if folks at the table can introduce themselves for the record, that would be helpful.
And then we'll get started.
I'm David Heldy.
I'm a housing assistance case manager at DESU's main shelter.
I'm Willa Maloney.
I'm a residential counselor at the Morrison Permanent Residential Housing Facility.
Good afternoon.
I'm Jody Waits.
I'm the Development and Communications Officer at Youth Care.
I'm Daniel Malone.
I'm the Executive Director at DESC.
Lindsey Grey, the Legislative Director at SEIU Healthcare 1199 Northwest.
We represent the workers here at DESC.
Chloe Gale, I'm the Co-Director at the REACH Program of Evergreen King Courts.
Allison Reisinger, I'm the Director of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness.
I'm Nicole Macria, I'm the State Representative from the 43rd Legislative District.
I'm Sally Bagshaw, a City Council Member and Chair of this year's Budget and Finance Committee.
Michael Bryan, City Council Member.
Lorena Gonzalez, Seattle City Council Member and Vice Chair of the Budget Committee.
Thank you so much.
I'm Teresa Mosqueda, a member of Seattle City Council at large and excited to be here with you today.
Thank you all for joining us.
The budget proposal that we introduced today, thanks to my esteemed colleagues who are here, means that our city council budget now includes a modest 2% inflationary adjustment for all contracted homeless service provider agencies and fully funds the navigation team.
Our city's housing and homeless crisis is huge.
The navigation team is one piece of how we make sure that all of our city's residents get the support they need.
In the budget that we now have in front of us, we have both expanded the navigation team and included a small 2% inflationary adjustment for our city's human service contracted organizations.
These homeless service providers are really the backbone of our human service system that provides the key services to those who are homeless.
They are substance abuse disorder counselors, mental health providers, case managers.
They help people find permanent housing, alternate shelter options instead of being in the streets or in the parks.
They help individuals keep their jobs and find jobs.
They provide access to health care and food assistance.
These individuals are critical to addressing Seattle's homelessness crisis.
They are the staff needed to help those who are referred by our Seattle city navigation team.
The reality is, due to the low wages of shelter workers, these workers are often eligible for the very same services they are helping to qualify their clients for.
In some cases, we've heard about individuals living in their cars, relying on food banks and food stamps.
Many homeless service agencies have reported with a 30% to 40% turnover and vacancy rate, they are on the verge of having to shut some of their shelters.
This is exactly the opposite of what we need right now.
What our system needs is stability.
We need stability to address our homeless crisis and make sure that people get the shelter and services they need.
You're going to hear from the workers themselves, who will tell some of these stories as they've been doing over the last few years, and especially over the last few months as we've worked to include this in the budget.
We know this.
As a council, we talked about this last week.
We cannot fail to pay our workers.
And we must ensure that those who are our contracted workers also get the inflationary adjustments they need.
We just had the same conversations with the police contract last week.
And we know this is no different.
These are our city contracts.
And we have taken a tremendous stride today.
But it's really a down payment in making sure that we're addressing the rising costs.
And we're using an incredibly standard practice of inflationary adjustment.
So let me be clear about one more thing.
This is a problem that the mayor and this city council have inherited.
We have inherited this problem over years of not having it addressed.
And today, we are beginning to address this.
Neither party created this problem.
And it is something that I know we are all committed to addressing in the base of the contract so that it is baked into future conversations.
We need to have a conversation about the CPI or cost of living adjustment.
So we're not here every single year.
I want to thank Council Members Gonzalez and Chair Bagsaw for their work over the last few months to craft the budget.
I want to thank Council Member O'Brien for your work to bring this issue up repeatedly.
I want to thank all of the workers, especially, who have been at the table at the microphones in public testimony telling your story about the budget.
the reality of dealing without an inflationary adjustment.
So I'm excited about this first step, but we all know this is just the first of many steps that need to be taken.
And with that, I think the experts are truly in the room, and I'm going to turn it over to them.
I'd like to ask Jody Waits, the Development and Communications Officer at Youth Care to kick us off.
Thank you so much and good afternoon.
YouthCare deeply appreciate Council's support of an inflation adjustment for all city contracts so that we can both sustain current human services and expand outreach.
We're particularly grateful to Councilwoman Mosqueda for her championing of this issue and to Councilman O'Brien for initiating these conversations many years ago.
Inflation adjustments are crucial as they allow agencies to keep up with the rising costs of doing business, including simple things like electricity, rent, and basic daily materials.
We are, again, incredibly grateful for these important steps forward.
Human services is one of the most underpaid sectors.
I don't say that to shock anyone, because we all know.
It is also a sector that employs disproportionately high rates of women and people of color.
Thus, as we continue this conversation, we must recognize that this is an issue of equity and this is an issue of justice.
Furthermore, when agencies are not able to pay wages that enable their staff to live and work in the city, it deeply impacts the quality of care and fuels a negative cycle of burnout and turnover.
We all want great supports and great outcomes, and that takes great people.
Making a professional commitment to being part of the solution for our homelessness crisis should simply not cost health and human service professionals their own basic stability.
Youth Care has many highly experienced, successful professionals who work multiple jobs, often three, well over 100 hours a week in total, just to make ends meet.
Annually, youth care's turnover rate hovers at about 35%.
We estimate that the cost of the agency at a minimum, each one of these turnovers has a price tag of just over $4,000.
That's not how we want our resources to be used.
The cost of ongoing loss of trust and the shift in familiar faces for our clients, it's an even bigger price tag.
At the end of the day, this hurts progress for all of us.
We look forward to continuing to collaborate with the city and with our human services partners to ensure that agencies can provide quality services and hire amazing people to be on the front line of our human services programs, and that those folks are compensated adequately for their tireless commitment to others.
Thank you.
Thank you very much I want to start by thanking especially councilmember Mosqueda for her leadership on this issue and councilmember O'Brien for Forwarding this issue earlier this year when work was done to convene service providers with council staff the Human Services Department of the city and the central budget office to dig into these issues of workforce sustainability and the good news is that work of that work group was reflected in the mayor's budget.
The mayor proposed a 2% inflationary adjustment to contracts and also made statements in support of addressing the low wages for human services workers.
The hitch was that the 2 percent adjustment was only for contracts using general fund resources, which created an inequity between contracts, some of which are funded by other resources.
For instance, much of the permanent supportive housing work that DESC does is funded by federal funds that the city administers.
So the amendment offered by Council Members Mosqueda and O'Brien provides a fix to this and that builds on the work done earlier in the year and better reflects the intent to improve wages for people in this sector.
Really this is essential.
for us not to lose pace in our work to respond to people who are homeless today.
Service providers like DESC work with each other to ensure a coordinated response to people who are homeless with the greatest needs And there's an array of resource there from outreach to shelter to permanent housing and support services, all of which need to be supported to provide an effective response citywide.
Human services workers typically work for nonprofit organizations.
but they really are public service workers.
They're the front line of public service in this community, just like teachers, police officers, and firefighters, but their wages lag significantly behind other public service workers, and we need to do something about that in order to sustain the important work that they're doing in the community.
So again, thank you for your leadership on this and to all of the council for finding a solution to it.
And now you're going to, I believe, hear from the people who know firsthand what this is like.
Thank you very much, Daniel.
Next, we'll hear from David Helm, who is the housing assistant case manager at DESC's main shelter.
Hello, my name is David Heldy.
I'm one of 15 housing assistant case managers at DESC's main shelter.
This is a deeply, deeply important topic for me.
It has been very important to me for the 3 and 1 half years that I have worked at DESC.
For 2 and 1 half years, I worked entry level position in the shelter.
And nobody that worked at the shelter when I started is still there.
not a single person, because the turnover is simply too high.
People aren't paid enough.
It's too stressful.
The rewards do not outweigh the benefits for that particular job.
I am the only person at the shelter that is still there.
There's plenty of clients that are still there.
Plenty of clients still remember me.
I was just with a client today who has a traumatic brain injury, and she hasn't been here in a year.
And she told me the same story six times, but she still remembered my face.
She remembered me from a year ago.
She couldn't remember the story that she told me 30 seconds ago, but she remembered my face from a year ago.
And that is why the staff turnover is unacceptable.
because it affects the quality of life for the most vulnerable people in this city.
I could go on for hours, but I don't think anybody wants to hear that.
Thank you so much.
And we do want to hear.
And we appreciate you.
Last, we'll hear from Willow Maloney, residential counselor at DESC's Morrison Supportive Housing.
Hi.
Thanks for listening to me today.
Like she said, I work at the Morrison, which is DESC's largest supportive housing facility.
And I worked there for almost two years.
And what it's taught me working there is that something that I didn't really think about before coming into this sort of work, because I'd never worked in homelessness services before, is that if you want to compassionately respond to the problem of homelessness, you have to provide services all the way through that journey from the moment you're contacted by someone on the street to the moment that you have somewhere to live.
And those services have to be provided by humans, and those humans also have to be able to take care of themselves.
And the way that I got into this work was actually through meeting all of the amazing staff who work here at DESC when I was a barista around the corner at Smith Tower.
And unfortunately, me coming into DESC actually meant taking a pay cut.
And now that I work here, I work about 100 hours pay period on average, as well as a second job, which is pretty regular for me and my colleagues.
And I make more in tips as a waitress in one shift than I do usually, and one shift at DESC.
So it's really hard to justify that when I'm paying my rent.
But every day when I'm at work, I am like, How could I possibly do anything else with my time?
So that's my perspective on this.
I think that all of my colleagues deserve the respect and the compensation that our emotional labor calls for.
Thank you so much.
So the work that we've done today was fueled by these stories and the workers who are here behind us as well, and so many more who came to testify.
We understand how this work connects to the journey that you just mentioned, from helping to find someone who is in the streets, in the parks, or in a tent, and actually help get them into housing.
That's the ultimate goal.
And we were able to get this across the finish line today because of these esteemed colleagues today.
Council Member Lorena Gonzalez helped to identify funding and worked collaboratively to make sure that we got all of our T's crossed and all of our I's dotted so we had something to bring forward.
Council Member O'Brien has been raising this issue for years.
And it is not for without trying to make sure that these voices were elevated year and year again, but now we found a way to make a down payment on a more equitable issue so that we've created parity across contracts.
And Council Member Sally Bagshaw, who is our incredible chair of the budget this year, has not only helped to make sure that this funding stream was available so that we could get this past the finish line, but you have also helped to make sure that we have additional mental health service providers in our navigation team.
identified a low acuity team that we can deploy to make sure that they are helping individuals in crisis on the street.
You have helped to look upstream so that we're really addressing the crisis of homelessness, not when people are homeless, but to make sure that they have the continuum of services that they need, including housing.
So I just want to thank these incredible colleagues for all of the work that they've done to make this possible in this year's budget.
And again, to thank all of the workers for your time, your commitment, your stories, and for your agencies for continuing to bring this up.
And with that, we're all happy to take any questions.
Yeah.
Thank you for sharing your stories.
Council Member Mosqueda, last week we discussed reducing the expansion of the navigation team to try and fund this.
Could you explain where the funding for this is coming from and tell us exactly what expansion of the navigation team we can now expect?
Well, maybe we can tag team this answer Councilmember Gonzales, I mean Council Chair Bagshaw.
So what we did was last week we were recognizing that the navigation team is really successful if they have someone to hand individuals off to.
We wanted to make sure that there is people there who are trusted partners at our shelters and that those individuals don't have high turnover rates, they don't have the vacancy rates We are only really successful when we have those partners in our shelters to receive people.
So the effort that we had last week was to make sure that we were trying to spread the very limited resources that we have to recognize the important work that these folks do to prevent people from falling back in the streets and to receive people from the navigation team.
Thanks to some of the creative work that the council has done, we've been able to identify not an additional tax exemption and to make sure that we had additional revenue going forward.
Would you like to help answer?
Thank you.
I want to thank you for the question and just acknowledge that we had a lot of tough choices to make.
And nothing that we have talked about today really gets close to how much of an investment we need.
So we were working within the general fund and taking the monies that we could from sources that could cobble together the solutions that we're talking about here.
Personally, for me, having our navigation teams well-funded and adding the mental health workers was really critical to our success.
As all of us know, we see people who are out on our sidewalks and it really breaks our hearts.
So we're trying to get people inside as quickly as we can, find that person-centered solution.
So we were really juggling a lot.
I think what we've got here is a commitment that we're going to do more.
We're going to have a commitment to come back and look at and work with our mayor.
with our county executive, frankly, with the other three counties to say, what can we do here to increase the number of affordable and low-income housing units across the entire Puget Sound region?
That's the answer.
We know that, but it's going to take a lot of revenue to accomplish our goals.
Right now, Claudia Balducci and I talked on Friday.
She's our King County Council member that represents Bellevue and recognizes the number that they have put that flag in the sand is 244,000 units over the next 20 years.
I think that that is probably a pretty close number.
to something that we're going to have to achieve, which means about 8,000 units a year.
So all of the things that my colleagues and I have been working on, it means getting more resources that have to be, frankly, adopted by our city and county as a whole.
So frankly, that's my number one goal for 2019, and I'm ready to get started this afternoon.
But in payments terms, to follow up on her question, how is this working within the budget?
The navigation team funding remains the same as proposed by the mayor?
Correct.
So where does this 2% then factor in?
So everybody across the board, I mean how does that work within the budget?
What's the line item cost?
So this afternoon the council will take budget action that will do We'll prioritize both of these needs, both fully funding the navigation team, but also recognizing that we have an obligation to our contracted service providers to make sure that they aren't earning poverty wages.
And 2 percent isn't going to deal with the depth and the scale of the problem, but it begins the process of moving us towards a more equitable way of contracting out our services.
So through today's afternoon action, we will not only fund the navigation team at 26 full-time employees, we'll actually be funding him at 27 FTEs thanks to Councilmember Bagshaw's addition of a mental health counselor.
And we'll be able to do the 2% increase in wages for service providers by not reinstituting a tax exemption that has been provided to life sciences organizations.
That decision, that policy decision to not renew that tax exemption means that the city council has an additional $500,000 each year to fund other general fund priorities within our budget.
been a very strong case made by the workers here and by Council Member Mosqueda that this 2% wage increase for human service workers is absolutely a top priority for us and needs to continue to be a top priority for us and really is motivating this council to forego the possibility of renewing the tax exemption to be able to make sure that we're funding the work that we're asking these folks to do because it is a key part of the city's strategy to addressing the reality of people experiencing homelessness and we need to make sure that this workforce is stable continue to build that trust with people who are we are offering services to because we know that the experts have told us that when we do that people are more likely to accept services and and that is that has to be a continued investment for us so just by the 2% comes out of the 500,000
from the tax exemption.
In part.
In part.
And how long had that tax exemption been in place that you're not renewing?
It has been lapsed since 2017. OK.
It expired at the end of 2016. And who was receiving it?
What organization are you specifically talking about when you're talking about life sciences and the impact there?
It is just based on a retail code.
So if you are considered a life sciences organization and you're doing business in the city of Seattle, then the tax exemption that lapsed in 2016 will continue to be lapsed.
I would also say we have to make tough decisions.
And a expansion or a reopening of a tax credit is a really tough thing to ask for in this budget climate.
There are a number of very valid reasons that at the city level and at the state level, we have various tax exemptions.
Sometimes for incentives, sometimes to help ensure that there's key investments.
But what we also know is that at this point, when we have so many key programs, and this isn't the only one, there's key programs that could be funded if we didn't expand another tax exemption.
It was a key opportunity to make sure we were investing in frontline workers, our homeless community.
And I know at the state level, there's been continuous efforts to make sure that our life science entities will continue to have investments in research and development and the infrastructure they need, that some of that work's already been done.
This is one small component amongst a much bigger conversation at the state level.
But the meaningfulness of having those dollars available for funding not just this effort, but a few other efforts was a critical one that we couldn't pass up.
We need to not come back and do this every year.
So what's the plan for making this a sustainable change?
I mean, acknowledging that 2% isn't even really inflationary.
Council Member Ryan, did you want to comment on it?
I mean, there's a reality around the budget that every year this time we can do whatever we want in the budget.
There's a bit of we have to continue to fight these fights and make the trade-offs we make in every budget season.
The hope going forward is a couple things.
One is we need to normalize the type of cost of living adjustments for these group of workers who do some of the most important and most difficult and complex work in our city.
as opposed to say you need to fight for it.
And we, you know, every year we do budgets.
We make changes to city employees because they're contracted through their new work and they get cost of living adjustments as negotiating the contract.
And so those have been normalized.
We don't sit here and argue at length about those.
We can and should do the same to normalize that for this population.
We also, recognizing that cost of living adjustments on top of wages that are poverty level wages is not enough to change the dynamic we need.
And so we have to have ongoing conversations about how we shift this.
I mean, some of these challenges are much bigger than just the folks sitting in this room.
Why is it that human service workers wage levels are so much lower than some other people in our society.
How have we decided as a society that folks who do this type of work make minimum wage, where folks who do other types of work get $100,000, $200,000 a year?
Now, we're not going to sit here and negotiate to undo that, certainly not in one budget session at the City of Seattle, but we can raise awareness about that so that going forward we say, look, the most challenging work in our society, the most complex work, that we're demanding folks to be cutting-edge, innovative, and then we say we're going to pay you your minimum wage?
We can't expect that out of them.
So part of this is about expectation setting, too, and that revolves in a budget where we have finite resources and we're making tradeoffs, we have to figure out how we lay out a three, five, ten year path to really change the dynamic so that we can say that, hey, you know, you're a brilliant young person who wants to get a job in our city.
You should consider going into human services because you can actually support a family on that and do amazing work to change the lives of so many people.
And you know what, we need you to be doing that work in our city.
to either proviso funding in the future or to actually set that path in motion?
The level of specificity is not extensive here.
Daniel mentioned the work that we've been doing through the course of this year where the human service department, our budget office, and many of the providers in this room and workers in this room have been having ongoing conversations to really understand better this dynamic.
The request that that group said is we need a more in-depth wage study to understand more specifics about how human service professionals are paid relative to other professionals and how human service professionals who work for the city and county are paid relative to those that work for non-profits.
We were not able to fund that in this budget, but we have a commitment that some city staff, including Council Central staff, can create, we believe, can create that wage analysis in the coming months so that we'll have that data set.
So that is the next piece, the next tool, if you will, to continue to iterate this and figure out how we go forward.
It's going to require significant resources that we don't have at the moment without making significant cuts to things we're not prepared to do.
But let's get that teed up and figure out how we can get additional resources or reprioritize.
Last question and then we're going to turn to other experts in the room.
I'm a little confused about the number.
2%, you said 500,000 from the tax exemption.
What's the 2%?
What's the number that's tied to 2%?
OK, so this gives me an opportunity to say that what you saw from the first budget and what you see in this last budget signal an interest across the board from the mayor's office to the council in recognizing that we have to invest in these frontline workers.
There is agreement in making sure that we both provide an inflationary adjustment.
And I think through the work that you just heard, we're going to find agreement for how we bake this effort into future contracts.
The mayor included a 2% inflationary adjustment for general fund contracts.
What we have done is we've expanded that to all contracts.
So the difference that we're talking about here, once council chair Bagshaw included an inflationary adjustment addition, we really only had to find $480,000.
in 2019 and $244,000 in 2020. So the good news there, when you subtract that from the $500,000 available for each year, meant that we had a little bit additional resources for some really key provisions in the final budget.
And I know that there's additional work going on at the state level.
I don't know if you have anything else that you'd like to comment on about this.
So I'll comment on two things.
Again, I'm Nicole Macri, State Representative from the 43rd Legislative District.
In the 2018 session, I introduced legislation to expand the real estate document recording fee, which is our state's primary source of funding for homelessness response across the state.
Due to that, the county received a big increase in resources, which ultimately contributed to our ability to expand the navigation team here in Seattle.
So that's point number one about that.
And going into 2019, addressing our affordable housing crisis and responding to homelessness will be a top priority.
certainly for the House Democrats, but across the board on both sides of the aisle.
And so we're working really on a bold strategy to significantly expand investments, not only in our housing trust fund, but by driving resource to our local communities to ensure that we can build housing for the folks who are most vulnerable.
But we're also gonna be looking at strategies to cut the red tape so we can get that affordable housing built faster.
So we drive density where we have our amenities like transit.
And so we protect people who are already in housing, who are at the greatest risk of displacement by working on eviction process reform, and ensuring vouchers for disabled folks and families who are experiencing homelessness.
I'm sorry, but you could hear from some of the experts.
Yes.
Okay.
I just wanted to hear both from David and willow whether this 2% does very much to ease your own personal burdens.
I'm lucky in that I am married and have no kids and, you know, living as a dink.
I'm not in, you know, quite as much economic distress as some of my co-workers, but I On multiple occasions, as a housing assistance case manager, I have spoken to other people on my team about what the ethics are of applying for the housing that we know about specifically because of our position.
Because that's all we can afford.
We're eligible for it.
But the only reason we know about it is because of our position.
And then the stresses of the job, the low pay, I then had that same exact conversation with that co-worker's replacement.
And so is it going to make this job, you know, Am I going to be a millionaire now?
No.
But does every little bit count?
Absolutely.
I'm certainly not going to say no.
CHRIS RODGERS.
Willow, will you still need two jobs?
WILLOW RODGERS.
My thought in response to your question would be that at least it gives me hope that this city is committed to making things better little by little in whatever way that they can.
I moved here actually from North Carolina right after college because I knew that homelessness services like this don't exist there.
And part of what has kept me in Seattle is the liberal approach to facing this crisis and the fact that people across the board seem really committed to staying the course.
So I want to display that same sort of commitment and I hope that city council continues to try to improve things for the people on the ground.
And that's all the time that we have that any one of the experts in the room would be happy to step aside and talk with you.
You have their names and their titles and the organizations that they represent on your advisory there.
And I'll just say in closing, thank you all for being here.
Thanks again to Chair Bagshaw for helping to make sure that this budget was investing in these frontline workers and a huge round of applause for all of the work that you do.