Seattle City Council Select Budget Committee Session II 10/14/21

I want to welcome our colleagues back to session two of the Seattle City Council Select Budget Committee meeting.

I want to recognize this is the second part of day two, session two, starting here at 2.01 p.m.

This is our, we are coming back after being recessed.

And again, just for the record, today's October 13th, 2021, and the Select Budget Committee will come back to order.

The time is 2.01 p.m.

Madam Clerk, could you please call the roll?

Council Member Juarez?

Here.

Council Member Lewis?

Present.

Council Member Morales?

Council Member Peterson.

Here.

Council Member Sawant.

Council Member Strauss.

Present.

Council Member Gonzalez.

Here.

Council Member Herbold.

Here.

Chair Mosqueda.

Present.

Seven present.

Thank you very much.

Oh councilmember Morales, please.

Go ahead.

Hello.

Just I think I missed roll call.

So I'm here a present Thank you so much.

And when our last council member shows up, we will make sure to note their presence as well Colleagues just before we begin our conversation here to get today on homelessness.

I wanted to send a quick note of appreciation take a quick second for the chairs prerogative here to say thank you to Senator Murray.

I just had the chance to participate in a press conference with her and members of Chief Seattle Club and Seattle Housing Authority, calling for the Build Back Better Act to be passed in Congress, calling for that to have deep investments in housing and homeless services investment, but specifically housing services so that we can create opportunities for folks to get stably housed and address the crisis of a housing unaffordability and homelessness that plagues Seattle, our region, along with so many other cities across this country.

I wanted to thank Senator Murray for her leadership, along with our Seattle delegation, for the work that they have done already in Congress to pass a few pieces of legislation early in the COVID crisis, our Emergency Relief Fund, and now the American Rescue Plan Act, which we're calling Clifford dollars here locally.

We want to make sure that every dollar that has been allocated to the city and has been appropriated by the council and signed into law by the mayor, is getting out the door swiftly.

Again, thank you to Senator Murray for allocating two tranches of each, totaling up to $160 million in addition to the early emergency relief fund package that they passed in Congress.

So much has been made of the discussions happening in D.C.

about the need for investments in infrastructure and connecting our communities.

Roads and bridges cannot happen if the community cannot live in the communities that they work, live, and want to retire.

We need to have homes.

So I wanted to say a quick moment of thank you and appreciation to Senator Murray for all of the work that she and our congressional partners are doing to pass the Build Back Better Act.

I also, in the same token, following up from our conversation this morning, see a deep sense of urgency to get clarification on the allocations that we had expected to go out the door in the summer of this year.

with the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act dollars through our local relief package known as the Seattle Rescue Plan to see millions of dollars sitting not yet allocated and not yet encumbered even makes me very curious about how quickly we can get those dollars out the door and the potential implications that that may have for our spending for next year.

So I know we have strong federal partners who are fighting for funding specific to cities like Seattle who have been at the forefront of experiencing population growth and rising income inequality.

housing on affordability and this is part of the solution our congressional members have been making available for us.

So let's let's act with good partnership and speed to get those dollars out the door.

More information from our office and I believe central staff coming soon on ensuring follow through and implementation on those Seattle Risk Plan Act dollars.

Is there anything else for the good of the order?

Okay let's move on.

Madam Clerk could you please read into the record item number three.

Agenda item three.

homelessness response for briefing and discussion.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate the opportunity to walk through this presentation with you, Jeff, and we will turn it over to Councilmember Lewis after you get a chance to walk through your initial slides.

Speaking of stark income inequality and the growth in income inequality in our city, just coming into City Hall, I saw an individual who was washing their clothes in our fountain outside, and I think that is a call for us to act with urgency to make sure people have a place to call home, a place to to be safe and to be secure.

And this was a reminder today of how much yet we still have to do to address that income inequality and deploy the resources that we've already spent.

So looking forward to this presentation, and I saw you, Council Member Lewis, really looking forward to getting clarity and direction about how all of the various moving parts here as we consider our proposed budget in front of us.

With that, Jeff, let's take it away.

Okay, thank you.

For the record, Jeff Sims, Council of Central Staff, and I don't see them on screen yet, but I will be joined as we go through by Tracy Ratzliff and Brian Goodnight to cover sections that fall in their departments.

So we can go to the next slide.

This is an overview of the city's homelessness spending by department.

We provide this every year.

And what you'll see is that there's a big change in the Human Services Department.

I'll talk about that in a moment.

And then otherwise, the increases are primarily in Seattle Public Utilities, Parks and Recreation, and the Office of Housing.

All the other departments are essentially unchanged.

You'll also note, just so you can navigate this table more easily, there's an indented and italicized line noting the Clean City Initiative and SPU, Parks, and SDOT.

And those amounts do not add into the total.

So if there's any confusion along there, I hope that clarifies it.

We wanted to make sure we were reflecting those because there's clear overlap with homelessness, but those are not always necessarily programs that are targeted towards homelessness services.

Brian's especially going to address on that during his part of this presentation.

Regarding the Human Services Department, primarily I wanted to point out it looks like a very substantial change, and I know that the executive touched on this when they presented the Homelessness Response as a department through a series of departments.

Overall, if you look at this, it would look like a $34 million change.

In fact, 25 million of that is actually just transfers.

So that's a substantial part of the reduction you'd see right away.

Primarily it's money that would have been ultimately a pass-through to the city so we can manage some programs.

We don't have to do that pass-through anymore because we have a regional authority that can just receive it.

And then the transfer of the LEED program to a different division so it's not being counted in homelessness services where it was always kind of an awkward positioning anyway.

And then also you'll remember council members that last year's budget had a lot of one-time funding, especially emergency solutions grant COVID funding, which was $26 million and some other one-time funds that were related to COVID and emergency services.

So that's largely why you see such a big decrease.

But it is offset, and I realized in preparing for this presentation a little bit afterwards, I probably should have just put this all into a table.

There's a variety of increases that were already shared with you and have been touched on in other presentations.

But given what I know has already been brought up, I wanted to make sure I highlight the funding sources for the various increases that are in the Human Services Department related to homelessness.

There's three that are all coming from Clifford Dollars, the second tranche that hasn't been on, that would be appropriated with this package of budget legislation.

So money for three years of operations at the Cairo shelter, money for two years of operations and some capital costs for the Salvation Army's shelter in Soto.

And then also $3.7 million to continue the modifications in our various homelessness programs, but especially shelters, due to COVID-19.

Last year, we also added one-time funding, and then again this year.

Ultimately, some of these costs might end up having to become part of base operations, but at this point, we're continuing to maintain them, treating them as emergency adjustments at this time.

The reason I wanted to highlight these funding sources that are the next four items, all of which are from Jump Start.

First is $6 million for services that, and this was actually mentioned earlier and also I believe yesterday during committee, services for emergency housing vouchers that are provided to the Seattle and King County Housing Authorities.

$2.4 million to operate the tiny home villages that we will be able to set up or start up using $2 million provided with state capital funds.

Chair Mosqueda asked about this earlier this morning and I just wanted to make sure that was apparent.

And then fund $811,000 for administrative costs at the regional authority.

That would be staffing and overhead.

And then lastly, $100,000, and this is to provide ongoing funding for the lease for facilities for a transitional housing program that utilizes Seattle Housing Authority units.

So those are overall what's going on with the Human Services Department.

It looks like it's a large drop.

In fact, it is a drop of I think around $9 million when you take out all the one-time money and put in some smaller amounts of one-time funds, but we're not seeing dramatic ongoing changes.

I think that Brian is going to end up going into SPU, and I know Tracy will go into Parkview, so I'm not going to cover the other departments.

We'll let them do that later, and we can just go to the next slide.

This chart, you actually all have seen previously if you were part of the Select Committee on Homelessness as, or sorry, if you remember back to the combination of the homelessness presentation and the Select Committee on Homelessness presentation.

As requested by council, I've added two more columns to this chart, so it shows what our projected citywide, city-funded, I should say, shelter capacity will be.

You can see that we will continue to have one-time funding A lot of which comes offline in January and is replaced by other funds, and then it's fully the one-time shelters are offline by the time we get to this summer.

However, overall, our shelter capacity will have increased.

You can see that there's base units plus a large number of tiny home village spaces that are shown in like a lightened gray color that will take our capacity above where it was pre-pandemic.

Madam Chair, do you want me to be pausing at any point for comments and questions, or should I just keep moving unless you notify me?

Well, this is our only item for this afternoon.

So I'm going to ask that you get through the next two slides, and then we'll pause for questions before we do wish identification.

OK, great.

So we'll go to the next slide then.

This is another, as you all are aware from the material that's provided in advance, I discussed a potential, or it was a kind of a point in time proposal from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority for taking a place based approach to addressing downtown unsheltered homelessness.

This was presented at the time in early September, and actually.

key aspects of this would have to change in order for it to somehow be put together in a current day strategy as various commitments for some of these resources have been made.

So utilizing, for example, some of the vacant shelter spaces that we would have are now being prioritized for other purposes or other locations, I should say, things like that.

And so there's a lot of moving pieces that have outdated this to some degree.

But I felt it was important to highlight this for a few different reasons.

First of all because it's becoming an important conversation piece and part of the public dialogue since the authority is discussing taking a place-based approach and focusing on downtown initially as a major first step.

Also because of the utilization of some of the items that I'm going to note later in issue ID in accomplishing this strategy.

I think it's important that we had the overall picture so that when we then talk about the high acuity shelter and peer navigator network, all of you would have a clear understanding of how this would fit into some of the initial proposals from the authority.

Briefly, I will run through what all five of these lines are and then I think we'll move to Brian to discuss Seattle Public Utilities' background.

The vacancies prioritized in downtown, that's our existing shelter programs.

And we have turnover, especially enhanced shelters do a good job of moving people on to another stage into housing or permanent housing or helping to reunite families, things like that.

So vacancies occur throughout the year.

Utilizing what at that point was the anticipated turnover and prioritizing that would have yielded 120 units.

That's one of the most key areas that this plan is now outdated and would have to be revised.

The next line that you can see is Funding from King County actually, it would be King County resources.

Let me just look at my notes here.

King County's COVID Appropriations 7, I believe it was, that was passed over the summer, specifically allocated funds for the stated purpose of moving five people inside, and it identified a priority for downtown and for unincorporated King County.

So this 500 units, you'd see the idea that about 275 would be utilized to, which is consistent with what was stated as priority to move people from the downtown area into shelters of some kind or other resources.

And then the next line, the new high acuity shelter, I'm going to go into that a lot in a moment.

That's actually a request of all of you for additional funding from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.

So I won't go into that at this time.

The next line where you're looking at emergency housing, this is the health through housing sales tax, or that's what is paying for this approach.

To this point, the county has acquired nine different buildings.

It's 859 units approximately in total that have already been acquired.

These are all going to be used for either permanent supportive housing or emergency housing.

Those are actually pretty synonymous in terms of the services that are provided to people that are occupying those units and it is housing.

The only difference is that emergency housing does not have its own kitchen.

It's the kitchen facility that is the challenge, but it is a housing unit that is not time-limited or something along those lines.

Of the nine buildings, 800 in what's called 860 units, 400 of those units across five different buildings are in Seattle.

So this proposal would, and I should note that 290 of those 400 are actually already identified for addressing the long-term placement of people that are already in shelters that have been de-intensified.

So if you think about DESC's main shelter on 3rd and James, and how those residents moved during COVID to the Red Lion Inn, but that location isn't going to stay in operation.

And so some of these units that are coming on with Help Through Housing are going to be used to provide permanent housing for those individuals.

And there's other programs that have had a same experience.

So overall, you're looking at of the 400 units that are in Seattle right now, about 110 would be left that could be targeted towards this type of approach if that was the revised plan that gets developed.

That means you would need about 200 vets from the investments and the acquisitions that are outside of Seattle.

That one key consideration there is not everyone that is experiencing homelessness is from Seattle.

A substantial portion are from elsewhere in the county, and that was their last place of residence.

And so you might be able to allow those people to return to communities where they came from or have stronger social bonds, things like that, in a long-term way.

And the fifth and final line in that plan is permanent housing.

This is using Office of Housing Investments.

At this time, the latest numbers that I have is, actually Tracy was able to obtain, is that OH expects to open another 291 units before the end of this year.

So we would be using only a small portion of those as part of the strategy if this was a component of whatever became a final plan.

Again, this was just a vision that was initially presented and has already had to become a little outdated and we'll have to have changes.

So with that, I will turn it over to Brian to run through our next background slide.

Okay.

Thank you, Jeff.

Good afternoon, council members.

Brian Goodnight, council central staff for the record.

So this table which can be found on page 5 of the memo shows the programs housed within Seattle Public Utilities or SPU that are related to homelessness hygiene the Clean City Initiative and then a remaining suite of cleanup programs that SPU has that are also known as Clean City programs.

As can be seen in the table overall the 2022 proposed budget increases investments in the entire suite of programs by approximately 2.3 million dollars about 12 percent relative to the 2021 adopted budget.

Additionally, staffing dedicated to these programs is proposed to increase by three FTE, which would bring the total staffing for next year up to almost 23 FTE.

The table also carves out some space for two subtotal rows, and those are the ones that are shaded in this very light gray color with italics, to provide some groupings for programs that are homelessness related and for programs that are proposed to receive some additional funding related to the Clean City Initiative.

surge funding, and that surge funding is going to be discussed in more detail in the issue identification section of the presentation.

There's another caveat that I want to note for the table, and that's due to the imprecise way that SPU allocates labor, it appears as though a couple of the programs, such as the encampment trash program, are decreasing, when in fact that's not the case.

According to SPU, labor is typically not allocated in as fine of detail as this table is attempting to present.

And so staff time, which I've already noted is actually increasing overall with addition of new positions, may be attributed to incorrect Clean City programs.

SPU has confirmed for me that the 2022 proposed budget does not decrease services for any of these programs.

And then in terms of notable changes, there are three that I'd like to briefly mention, all of which relate to recreational vehicles or RVs.

So the first is an additional $275,000 of ongoing funding for three additional public hygiene stations, increasing the total number of funded stations from 18 to 21. SPU has stated that their intention is that these new hygiene stations services will be provided near RV encampments.

The second item is the proposed $556,000 of ongoing increase for the RV remediation program.

In 2022, SPU intends to return the program back to its original framework and provide six to eight full-scale cleans per month.

This is in contrast to how the program has been operating during the pandemic, when the department shifted to performing what they call pocket cleans around RVs that are remaining in place.

So the $556,000 increase is proposed to support three different efforts.

The first is a new field coordinator position, which is proposed in the year-end supplemental budget ordinance.

And the field coordinator would provide site evaluations, connect individuals residing in RVs to resources, facilitate trash removal around RVs in the right of way, and would manage the storage of belongings if necessary.

The second effort is the distribution of purple bags to seven to 10 RV sites per month.

And then the third is the provision of what the department is calling geocleans.

And that's essentially additional trash pickup around RVs in different geographical areas of the city.

SPU estimates that about 16 geocleans will happen each month.

And then the third notable increase that I'll mention for SPU's proposed budget is an additional $175,000 for the RV Wastewater Program.

According to data provided by SPU, between January and September of this year, the program serviced an average of 133 RVs per month.

During these six months, the program was operating on a four-week service interval, and then for the other three months, it was operating on a six-week service interval.

SPU has indicated that the funding requests in the proposed budget are to address higher than anticipated servicing costs for the program, including wastewater volumes being greater than were expected.

SPU contends that with this additional funding, the program will be able to continue service for 120 RVs per month on a four-week servicing interval.

And that concludes my remarks for this slide on SPU, and I believe this is our last slide of the background section, so we could pause for questions.

Wonderful, thank you so much.

I am going to hand it over first to Councilmember Lewis to see if you have any comments or questions you'd like to offer before we get into issue ID.

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

And I really appreciate that we have a whole afternoon to dive just into this, given that, you know, without a doubt in my office, and I would imagine for many of yours, fellow council members, that homelessness and the city's homelessness response is a pretty common constituent inquiry.

So, you know, first, just really appreciate the carve out of time to really dive deep into this.

And Madam Chair, before I go any further, this is to ask questions both to Brian and to Jeff, comprehensive of the entire pitch here, right?

Yeah, that's right.

And then we can go into each of the issues that they identified over the next seven or eight slides.

But the macro level and any questions from the memo or things that you'd like to pull out for our reference as well.

Perfect.

Thank you so much.

Just to make some general comments at the top, earlier this week, as folks are well aware, my office released a report of some of the data and the trends regarding homelessness in the city of Seattle during the COVID-19 emergency.

Broadly and mostly speaking for myself and how I took things away from that data, it indicated that COVID came along and forced us to reduce the quantity of shelter but improve the quality.

The result of that was a dramatic increase of people camping in public spaces who under ordinary circumstances would have had a place in a congregate or semi-congregate shelter in the pre-COVID times.

As you have seen from the presentation, and this will be some of my comments later, we are about to have a very large amount of new resource that's going to come online to help equalize that disparity.

But we know that even before COVID, homelessness was a huge crisis in the city of Seattle, requiring much more immediate and sustained response on a systemic level.

And what I really, as we go through this budget process this fall, want to focus on is not only shelter capacity, which I think is still very important to provide that short-term relief for so many people that don't have any other option right this moment and need some place to go, but also to focus on strategies with the new Regional Homelessness Authority for a pass-through from the shelter assets into permanent supportive housing.

And then of course, work on the scaling up and resourcing of those housing assets.

which we've seen considerable resource for over the course of the COVID era due to unprecedented federal support for acquisition of housing.

So with that, I think we also need to really lean into a policy discussion about what is going to happen with the outreach function that historically has been conducted by the navigation team, is now conducted by the HOPE team, in the future will be conducted by some other outreach concept that the regional authority is going to put forward.

But we know that there are assets as have been put forward here and that we have discussed with the relevant department two weeks ago.

the city's role in the process of providing services and the edge of the city involvement is, what constitutes outreach, and then what constitutes some kind of supplemental service that is not related to that initial outreach mission.

So that's very, very at the high level for this early conversation.

So I think for my questions for Jeff, to start with Jeff, I want to go back and ask some questions about that chart, Jeff, the shelter one.

I don't remember which slide that was on.

But the chart we've seen several variations of over the last several months detailing the supply of shelter, how it's ebbed and flowed throughout the COVID emergency.

Yeah, it's slide three.

Actually, I guess I'd be back.

Keep going back.

Sorry.

I'll just tell you when you get there.

It's the bar chart.

There we go.

There we go.

Okay, great.

So just a few questions with this chart.

Does this chart at this point envision the result of the RFQ that's anticipated to be done by the authority for 120 more tiny houses and 25 safe lot spaces?

or is that it does okay but it doesn't anticipate to uh you know to be conservative on projections i that's that would be reflected in the final column showing july 2022 um where there's 335 units so i counted that as um as a council funded expansion knowing that the council had already given money to open those um the uh it does not do not to In that presentation, I'm not trying to indicate that the units wouldn't open until July.

I think that there's still an open question on how long it would take for those to occur.

At this point, I feel like we can say with reasonable confidence that there would not be operations in 2021, but it's unclear how early in 2022 those units would come online.

So I didn't mark them as being online in March.

So hopefully that's something obviously much faster can happen.

I don't know if you want to jump in.

I just wanted to see if that asset was incorporated into this chart at this point.

I think it's fair to put it in given the understanding we have with the authority that there is going to be an RFQ for those.

there will be an effort to get them going.

hopefully we can land that more in March 2022. I guess to a certain extent, I'm a little disappointed.

I was hoping maybe it wouldn't be.

So then that column might go up a little bit more.

But that's fine.

That answers my question.

So in the budget that came down from the executive, because there's lots of proposals that we've discussed to increase the amount of shelter resources in 2022, Does the transmitted budget request from the mayor and the Regional Housing Authority anticipate additional shelter capacity, or is it sustaining the capacity that we put in in 2021?

Let me go into detail about what is in there.

I'm not sure how you would bucket the investments that are there.

So there is federal dollars, so the second tranche, so to speak, of what would have been Seattle Rescue Plan, or Clifford dollars.

That's for the KRO Shelter.

It provides three years of operations for the KRO Shelter.

That is, I believe it's 75, but I don't actually have those notes in front of me, but I could double-check that.

And then there's also the Soto Shelter, which is currently in operation on county leased property.

It provides two years of operations there.

So that's maintaining, essentially, that program.

And then those would be the only...

I'm just scanning to make sure I'm not forgetting something else.

The Jump Start funds that are used to operate on an ongoing basis, the three tiny home villages you just referred to, And those are the only things that I am able to recall that would be emergency shelter proposals.

So Cairo is not yet in operation.

This chart does project by December 2021 that 110 of those units will be in operation.

That would be part of the blue base.

That's just how I chose to categorize it.

I could go into detail about that if needed.

And that actually, that program, though, is expected to be 150 units at its height, so another 40. And that's what you see as a reflection by March 2022. That's some of why that number, actually, that's all of why that blue bar is a little bit higher.

That's related to my next question, which was going to be to what extent is this an exercise in sort of turning the yellow in this chart into gray or blue over the course of the first half of 2022?

That's a good question.

Nothing that is shown on this chart as being something in yellow, i.e. temporarily funded, ever becomes another color or anywhere else in the bar.

They are almost entirely hotel sheltering that are various program operator and some go online, some come offline.

plan.

None of them get moved into permanent or council funded expansion.

None are envisioned to be in operation in July 2022.

I don't know if that's a good that all of this is basically paid for somehow, either through the mayor's transmitted proposal or through other sources of regional partnership, like King County funding sources, except for the new high-end acuity shelter.

Is that an accurate read of this?

That would be, and that's a big reason why this should really be looked upon as an outdated, one-time, point-in-time, I shouldn't say point-in-time proposal, because there have been changes in how some of these resources are being committed.

You know, it was being told, like, and I gave the example of with our existing vacancies, and now that we're going to be looking at a different point in time, the available units that would come available would be at different locations for a different amount and things along those lines.

Right, so it's not necessarily and this is sort of mostly me asking is the District 7 council member rather than the homelessness chair right now, but would the 933 units at this point?

That's the number you're saying isn't necessarily up to date because in some of these categories.

Some of that capacity has been taken away by other priorities.

Is that what you're you're indicating?

Yeah, exactly.

The work done by the regional authority so far estimates, and they work with some existing service providers in the downtown area, they estimate that there's about 800 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness that would be the target of this approach.

And at that point in early September, so six weeks ago now-ish, had identified this as the number of beds that would be utilized to move those people indoors in some way.

Okay, can we now go forward to more of the sort of parks and SPU assets?

There was another, I don't know what the right sort of PowerPoint background would be for that.

Yeah, I guess this is good.

So, I continue to have some questions about exactly how we're going to coordinate what the interplay is going to be between sort of this like community clean teams work, sharps collection, like how that is going to interact and the encampment cleanup contract, how that work is going to interact with the new authority.

My understanding is that there's not going to be a explicitly an outreach component anymore to the work that the city is doing.

That's all going to go to the authority as far as I understand what the pitch has been from the executive.

But I do wonder about what the interplay is going to be when outreach is done and a site has been flagged by the authority as everyone having been solved for, placed in the shelter housing.

But now we're in a place where people have left stuff behind to be removed and the team can come in.

That's like the way that I would hope everything would kind of be conducted, is that everything that's kind of happening in this slide is either some kind of routine service that is provided to an encampment site, or it's a removal service of debris left behind after everybody has moved out of a site and there's not an interaction with the people that had been living there and the city crew that comes in to do it.

So that we're moving to sort of a new way of doing this where we don't merge enforcement and outreach in one team as we've sort of historically done.

So I wonder if you could just go into a bit of your understanding of how these assets interplay with that and what the vision is as we craft this budget.

of how this is going to work with the new authority, since this is all staying with us and not going to the authority.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'll start and then turn it over to Tracy to go into more detail about the additions that are in parks primarily.

That's actually where the most substantive, my unsure of the new additions are.

So first it would, while you're correct, council member, that the homelessness, the contracted homelessness outreach services that we currently have with nearly, with around 10, I think it's a little bit more than 10 agencies.

That those contracts will be moved to the regional authorities, the regional authority would oversee those.

In addition, you would see all of our shelter contracts would move to the regional authority.

However, there would still be outreach and service connection features retained at the city because the HOPE team is retained in the mayor's proposed budget in HSD.

And that eight-member team has three of the individuals on it are actually, their duty or like job description, I guess, is a system navigator.

I think that many of you on the council, I know that you, Mr. Chair, Council member are familiar with that those are the individuals that actually do do connection to shelter resources, they under the new under the new hope team compared to how the navigation team worked.

System navigate when a location is determined by parks or SDOT or different departments that it is a priority for removal and a posting a notification of posting of that removal is made.

The way that the HOPE team primarily coordinates, in addition to having been coordinating previously among providers and thinking about where to deploy or where might need extra attention, is to identify who is there, both the individuals that are residing there and the providers that have been going there.

It's not uncommon.

Many of these outreach providers have targeted focuses.

So you might have people that, those who have criminal justice involvement might have one outreach provider that's going to them.

People that are Native American might have a different provider that's going and working directly with them.

So the work done by HOPE at that point is, and actually there's three system navigators, but also an outreach coordinator, that helps with this too.

They identify who is there, what is known about the needs of those individuals, what agencies have been working there already to identify shelter vacancies for them, and what they're looking for, what their ongoing needs would be.

It's important to note that of our shelters that we have, there's a card out so that we have a certain number of beds that can only be accessed through the hope team.

My understanding is that is part of the negotiation of the master service agreement with the regional authority and an agreement that's not final at this point, but that.

that it's at least part of the conversation that that carve-out of units will continue.

And then the HOOP team, therefore, is able to take units that are prioritized for its work and in an encampment that has been identified as a priority for removal and working with the information gained from our contracted providers, we'll be able to facilitate service connections.

Individuals in that encampment are going to obviously be priorities for those carved-out beds.

Then they can also help with any other kind of service connections that are needed at that point.

And ideally that every individual that's in that encampment would receive some kind of a shelter offer based off of the needs that had previously been identified.

Realistically, we're not always going to have the perfect match in a shelter bed, because you're going to have variations in what types of beds are available, things like that.

So there will be a bed available.

That's the city policy.

What we commonly call the MDRs, the multidisciplinary administrative rule.

But so that is how it's pursued.

There will be an offer of shelter.

It might not be perfectly suited.

I don't know all the factors and details that get discussed, but something that is as ideal for that individual as possible would be offered.

So I hope that that's helpful.

And that is work then that the HOPE team is really taking on.

In talking with the team, they made it clear that once a location and encampment has been posted for removal, our contracted providers, certainly on the day that the removal occurs, have requested not to be there.

They feel that it undermines their broader work, remembering that these contracted providers are working across the city.

and are pulling from their other work, you know, for example, if the Chief Seattle, actually I think it's the Seattle Indian Center, are, sorry, whoever's working with our, especially as a focus on our Native Americans who experience homelessness, they might be working with a lot of locations throughout the city.

If they have someone they need to make sure they are coming to work with in a priority encampment, they have to pull away from somewhere else.

So, Overall then, there's still work that's going on to get people connected and to make sure that by the day that that removal occurs, that individuals are placed.

But for the most part, between that removal date and the posting date, the HOPE team is taking the primary role.

The system navigators are doing most of the work of actual shelter referrals and connections.

And then Tracy, do you want to pick up from there or do you want me to say anything more?

We'll make sure that there's not any questions about that piece, and then I can talk about the SPR special maintenance team.

Yeah, I do see Council Member Morales' hand.

Council Member Morales, is it related to this question, or do you want to be next in the queue for asking a series of questions?

It's a route public sinks.

So whoever I can wait if I need to wait.

Okay, why don't we do the next item then that Tracy was going to respond to Councilmember Lewis before we do that.

Did you have clarifying question as well?

Yeah.

Yeah, I just want to ask Jeff real quick, but before we move on to Tracy here, how much of the shelter that is going over to the authority is going to sort of be carved out to take the referrals that are associated with removal postings.

I don't believe that number is determined for what will happen beginning in 2022. As I said, it's something that is being discussed as part of the agreement between the city and the regional authority on how the authority will operate programs.

I can go back.

I do have the information over this last year, for example, how many beds were reserved.

I don't recall it off the top of my head, though.

I have to go back and look that up, so I can get it to you.

You know, I have a set of questions as well, but Council Member Lewis, did you ask a question specific on the Seattle Public Utilities piece that you can remind us of as we hand it over to Tracy?

Well, mine was mostly, my question was mostly related to the interaction between outreach and enforcement.

So I didn't really drill down into the hygiene assets specifically yet, so I'm happy to defer to you on that.

Okay, great.

Let's take those questions and overview.

Tracy, if you had anything else to add to the questions that have been asked, and then we'll go to Council Member Morales, and then I'll ask a quick set of questions before we do a surety.

So very briefly, just to remind council members, in 2018, we authorized the funding of the special maintenance team in parks and SDOT.

And this team, which is about a 15 member team from SPR, I'm not sure how many people from SDOT, I think mostly it's SPR staff, are out doing not only cleanings related to closure of encampments, but also cleanings around encampments on parks and city and state right-of-ways.

And so this team has been in existence since 2018. We have funded it throughout these last few years.

What you will see in the proposed budget we will talk further about is an evolution of this team to now take on some of the roles and responsibilities that used to be done by the navigation team.

But this is a team that has been in existence exists today and does both cleans that happen coordinating with closures but also cleaning that's happening out at unsanctioned encampments that are in parks and right away to try to deal with the accumulation of garbage and litter and some of the public health safety issues around that needle collection and things like that.

Okay, great.

And I was just reminded as well that these conversations both regarding HOPE and referrals and cleaning and SPU's role do relate to the first item on our issue identification.

So perhaps Council Member Morales, if your question is about any of the context in the earlier part of the memo, I'm happy to take those now and then we can do quick overview on issue identification number one.

to get into some more detail.

So I don't want to preempt your question.

I just wanted to drill down to see if it were related to issue ID number one instead.

Well, no.

What I'm really interested in is whether this public syncs in 2022 is a carryover or if this is additional funding and would love to get a little bit of a status update there.

Yeah, Council Member Morales, I'm happy to answer that question.

It's new money, so the $100,000 in 2021, as you know, was released and two different entities received the funding.

SPU will work with those entities to carry forward that 2021 money if it's still outstanding, which I believe there will be some.

There is an additional $100,000 in 2022, so this is in addition, so $200,000 total over the two years.

SPU is planning to complete an internal evaluation of the program and have it completed by the second quarter of next year.

So I think in terms of what will happen next with the money, it'll be dependent upon what they come back with with that evaluation.

But it is a new allocation of money.

appreciate that.

And then if I could just make one comment about the HOPE team.

What I will say about this is that I would love to see this program function the way it was spelled out in the CBA last year, which was for the HOPE program and the folks who were a part of that to serve in a support role for a provider-led system.

That is not what they're doing now.

That's not the way it ended up getting implemented.

And I think several council members, service providers, Deputy Mayor Sixkiller all came to an agreement about how this team would function within HSD.

That's not what we're seeing.

So I just want to be really clear that what we intended and what actually happened are two very different things.

Thank you.

Good reminder.

Councilmember Herbold, questions or comments on the first six pages of the memo here?

Yes, thank you.

And if this question was already asked and answered, I apologize.

I had to step away for a quick second.

About the hygiene trailers, Often these are mobile vehicles that even though they're mobile, they are not designed to rotate among multiple locations.

They go to a place, they plug into the water system and they pretty much stay in one location.

There are other types of hygiene trailers that are engineered and designed to be able to sort of rotate on a schedule.

The reason why I ask is Camp Second Chance has been operating for nearly six years.

without reliable hygiene services.

And I don't need a hygiene trailer dedicated for Camp Second Chance, but I need to know that hygiene services are going there.

And so I really need to understand what SPU's idea is for the purchase of this particular facility.

When we funded the hygiene trailers a few years ago as part of the everybody poops campaign led by real change and Pearl Jam and we had all of those wonderful support.

What we thought we were funding was a a hygiene trailer that would be mobile and move around.

That is not what we ended up getting.

And I think there is some real utility of putting a vehicle like this on a schedule and being able to go to multiple places over the course of a week.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

I can respond back with what at least SPU has told me their intention is.

So the two trailers that they purchased, they've just acquired them this month, actually taken hold of them, are mobile trailers from my understanding.

They can be moved around to locations and that they're perfectly capable and they were custom designed for SPU.

One of the trailers has been operating kind of statically, right, at King Street Station.

They have told me that they still intend for one to operate statically, whether it's at King Street Station or somewhere else.

They also have mentioned a location on Roy Street, I believe it was.

So their intention is to have one that operates effectively in static.

The other one has been operating seven days a week at University Heights.

Their intention, they said they're evaluating additional sites right now.

So they hope to have one to two more sites that it will rotate with.

So there'd be a total of three sites that the second trailer would be moving around to.

They said that the evaluations are being done right now with the city's interdepartmental team.

So that's the information that I have now.

So I wanted to propose a budget action that would ensure that Camp Second Chance was a location that was one of these sites.

What would you propose or what would you recommend I do?

I mean, I guess we could obviously start talking to SPU about what their plans are now to see if it's already on their location list.

I mean, ultimately, the council could provide some funds in SPU's budget to ensure that it's delivering the services that the council wants it to deliver.

Thank you.

We'll be following up.

Appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

I'm not seeing additional hands, so I'm going to jump in with a few questions before we get to issue ID.

And I think it's important if we look at the information, I guess your bar chart maybe shows it best.

Jeff, thanks again for your memo.

I do want to say how much appreciation we have for the central staff and the detailed memos.

Chart one here is really the outcome of the information that's provided on the bottom of page two in the memo.

And I think it's imperative that we call attention to the fact that reductions in beds over the time, from the scaling down of COVID-induced reductions in beds available, does not equal the same type of bed that is potentially being opened up, right?

And I think your memo calls this out well by saying, A, we're not going to see the same level of permanent shelter capacity returning to what it was at pre-pandemic levels.

I think it says that clearly.

But I also think it's important to note that these are not necessarily the same type of services offered to these beds.

If I'm wrong, please correct me.

But for example, we saw from DESC over 500 beds that were operational prior to the pandemic for high acute mental health, behavioral health needs.

We saw the city scale down those services to about 98 beds, some of which were offered in like around 100, 150 were offered in bed, locations outside of the city in King County, but we're not seeing the same number of high acute behavioral health, mental health beds opening up in the post-pandemic world.

So the numbers may be scaling back upwards.

They're not going to scale to pre-pandemic levels, and I think it's important to ask, maybe get clarification, that these are not exactly the same type of services, are they?

You're correct, Council Member.

They wouldn't be That they wouldn't exactly be the type of services that the example you gave was the ESC shelter DSC, especially focuses on serving people with mental health and behavioral health illnesses and so.

Some of these programs, for example, like the parts that are shown in gray here are not equipped to those are tiny home villages and for the most part we have not funded those in a way that would have that high level of service like what you'd see at like a navigation center, something like that.

I do understand that with the three villages that are coming online right now, so just because we keep talking in threes, I'll be clear about which ones, Rosie's Village, Friendship Heights, and the expansion of Inner Bay Village, that at least with one, but likely with more than one, HSD is actually funding a higher level of services than what would have historically been the norm for a tiny home village.

so that there's a greater level of behavioral health expertise to support those residents.

I also will flag that many that the system has, and partly what you see when you look at the COVID De-intensification and modifications funds that I highlighted at the start, part of that, but also just overall the changes that have resulted in, to some degree, in loss of beds are increasing the quality of our programs from what might have been a congregate shelter before to a more non-congregate approach.

That doesn't always mean one person, one room by themselves.

A lot of times that might include might entail like the use of dividers that are very high or something along those lines in order to break the space up and give more sense of privacy.

But we have moved towards.

In some ways, like as a system, a higher number of beds that are better quality because of those types of changes.

But in the specific example you gave of are we always adding a bed that is capable of serving high need individuals with that same level of services?

Probably not.

Yeah, that's where I think I am going to have a lot of questions as it relates to the model that you've teed up in the issue identification later.

Just because a bed does not equal a bed, right?

Especially when it comes to the previous beds that folks were offered that were low barrier, high service needs.

Those types of services, I don't think we brought back to scale.

And so that's what I'll be looking for in the issue identification.

I do agree that it's been an opportunity for us to move away from mats on the floor shelter options so that folks line up at night and line up in the morning to leave.

No, we've been saying for a long time that that model didn't work, so in some ways we've been able to accelerate more non-congregate shelter options because of COVID.

but I'm extremely concerned about these high acuity needs folks.

I think that making sure that there's 24-7 options as well so that people aren't having to leave their possessions or their their family members behind as they seek shelter is going to be really important for us to look forward to as well.

So lots of questions to come on that.

Another quick question here regarding The RV remediation.

I just want to get some quick clarification on this.

When I see RV remediation, it looks more like how we're helping to remediate potential.

waste or garbage in the area.

Is RV remediation, and this line right here, does it include any of the funding that we have already allocated and have been asking the executive to implement regarding creating safe lots and the RV storage?

I see from the materials, again, that were sent down from the city budget's office this morning, that zero of the 500,000 that was allocated has been spent to create the safe lot for RVs.

I am hopeful that we'll see some progress on that early next year if that's still in the works.

and I don't see on this list where we're at with spending the RV storage funding that Councilmember Herbold led on.

Is that part of RV remediation?

No, it is not.

The funds that you're referring to, Madam Chair, are, as you said, they're not expended at this time.

It was $500,000 Seattle Rescue Plan funds.

And at least currently, though this obviously could always be subject to change, I mentioned how, I believe I said it this morning, but The regional authority is going to be taking on the work to issue an RFP for three new tiny home villages and getting all that to work.

Similarly, the regional authority has agreed to take the $500,000 that was provided in Seattle Rescue Plan and begin issuing those funds and taking on some kind of services for people who are residing in RVs.

And that is wholly different from The type of activities that Brian was describing as RV remediation, which is much more focused on the impacts to our well I should let Brian chime in on this, but I've been out there with them too.

It's focused more on trash and wastewater and the contamination of water sources, things like that.

whereas the activities that the council, you actually led that ad, and so I'm sure you're well-versed in this, but just for everyone's awareness, was focused more on providing places for those people who are in RVs to either park permanently and not have to be worried about moving, or ideally move into other kinds of shelter, hence the discussion of providing storage for an RV, things like that.

and I thank you for the reminder about the RV safe lot and the commitment there from the regional homelessness authority.

I wasn't quite sure where that had landed.

So the three tiny house villages using the state's $2 million that Council Member Lewis was a strong advocate of, plus the 400,000 that the council passed for the operation, that is something we talked about this morning, moving over great, and that there's an RV RFP that will go out.

That is progress.

Thank you.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

As it relates not to the RV safe lots, but to the idea of a storage lot for people who are no longer living in their RV, either because They have accepted other housing, but they're not ready to give up their RV yet.

And they want that security that it's being held somewhere.

There's also some question of RVs that may be impounded under the resumption of the enforcement of the 72-hour rule, although we know that We have been told, I shouldn't say we know, we have been told by SDOT that they do not intend to use it to impound the RVs of people who are living in the RVs unless those RVs have a public health order associated with them.

And it's not really clear to me how they define that.

But in those cases, that is another example where an RV might be impounded and need to have a place to go instead of being taken to Lincoln Towing and being auctioned.

So those are like two different I think distinct examples of the purpose, the potential purpose for a storage lot.

So we, several of us received an email from Deputy Director Colby yesterday, where she writes in regards to our question about the resumption of the 72-hour parking rule.

She writes, our contract staff will be working with the Scottslaw University Heights contractor to identify flexible funds that could be used for property storage.

That contract funded by the council budget ad ends this year, thus the storage paid to the contract will be time limited.

What are they referring to when they say property storage?

Are we talking about the same thing or is this different?

I actually can't say with certainty that I know.

I could read it both ways, that the RV could be included in the term property, or we could be talking about the things that an individual has stored in the RV that is the property.

So I'd have to clarify it with HSD on that.

Yeah, I just want to take this opportunity.

I don't know that it's necessarily a budget issue, but I want to take this opportunity to flag my concern that with the resumption of the 72-hour, enforcement of the 72-hour notice, even with very narrow use of the enforcement power on vehicles that are occupied by residents, if the end of the enforcement results in a vehicle going, or an RV, going to be auctioned, I remain concerned that we will continue to trigger the Homestead Act protections.

And for that reason, we might want to expedite our efforts to have RVs that are impounded go to a different place other than Lincoln Towing to be auctioned.

That is the thing that triggers the potential for the Homestead Act protections, which will just, you know, put the city back in court again.

So I think having another place to store people's RVs could address that potential legal vulnerability, as well as reduce a really important barrier for people accessing housing who are currently living in their RVs.

I know I talk about this all the time.

This is just a little bit of a new, I think, twist than what I've talked about before because I'm adding the complexity associated with the resumption of the enforcement of the 72-hour notice.

Thank you, Councilmember Herbold.

Well said and very important, especially as we try to create trust and relationships to bring them inside when we have shelter options available.

We're going to move on to issue identification.

And Council Member Lewis, of course, you know, we would love to hear from you and all of you.

Council Member Gonzales, Council President Gonzales, I know you both sit on the RHA.

A number of questions and interesting concepts.

I'm reading for the first time in this memo, so look forward to unpacking this a little bit more with your leadership.

Let's go ahead, Jeff.

Well, that would be me Tracy rats of council center staff.

So, moving to issue number 1. Which can be found on page 7 of your memo if you're trying to walk through the memo in addition to the PowerPoint presentation.

So this relates to response to unsanctioned encampments.

2022 proposed budget would keep the funding for the HOPE team in HSD at its current level of funding of $1.2 million and would add $900,000 of new general fund and 6.5 FTEs in Seattle Parks and Recreation to conduct work that had previously been performed by the navigation team as it relates to facilitating the city's process for assessing and prioritizing unsanctioned encampment sites for removal based on hazards and other site conditions, and for carrying out cleanup activities in and around encampments at parks and SDOT right-of-ways.

Your options there are to remove funding from the 2022 proposed budget for the additional positions in SPR, to move part or all of the HOPE team to another city department or to the King County Regional Housing Authority, or no action.

There is a table before on page nine of the memo that Jeff and I put together that tries to show you a historical perspective on the staffing of the city's response to unsanctioned encampments that goes from like 2020 to the proposed 2022 budget as a way of trying to just give you a better sense for what's happening here in terms of the movements of positions and the numbers of people who've been involved in this body of work.

Actually, I mean, we can go with this.

This is fine.

It is also in the PowerPoint broken up.

Is this legible enough for everyone?

Yeah, looks great.

Okay, then we'll just stick with this here.

It is in the PowerPoint presentation as well.

We just had to make sure it was readable.

We had to put it on two slides.

I'll orient you to it just so that we all have a shared understanding here.

If you're looking at the PowerPoint presentation, which was attached to the memo, you'll see that things are a little out of order.

We took the lines where logistics and operations, cleanup, communications, data analysis, we put all of those first since that's where the parks positions would be added, and then moved everything else to the bottom onto the next slide essentially so that council members would have almost all of the new positions on one page.

Essentially what you see here, the first column label just identifies broad categories that we would place these positions into.

I want to be clear that this is not an exact science.

A lot of the work of these positions could fall in different ways.

And actually, to some degree, for example, if you think about a field coordinator, and I was thinking about saying this earlier, if you have someone who's going to, and in regard to Council Member Lewis, your question about would the city teams not interact with anyone, It's unlikely that a field coordinator, as they're walking through, if they have someone that says, hey, I'm interested in shelter, that they're going to just keep walking.

They're going to engage that person, often because they're really deeply involved in this work.

They might know of some resources.

They certainly would know how to contact a system navigator to go about getting them connected with services.

So that was all just to say that the categorization you see with the first column here might not be perfect.

Some of these jobs should be in multiple places, but we couldn't split them without making it confusing.

The next column is the 2020 adopted budget.

This is the navigation team when it was at its largest size.

We historically wouldn't have shown the special maintenance team in parks as a number of F, as a specific number of FTE.

We used to just treat that as a dollar sign, but it's become important to note how those staff have changed.

Tracy can talk a lot more about that.

But so we do show them here as the how many people that was.

And then the 2021 adopted budget, as all of you will remember, in the mid-year supplemental last year, so over the summer, the council defunded the staff that were in HSD as part of the navigation team.

And then the 2021 adopted budget replaced that, what had been the nav team, with the HOPE team, or with HOPE really is probably how I should be saying it, the Homelessness Outreach and Provider Ecosystem.

There were eight FTE associated with that in HSD.

That's basically what you can see here.

And I'll let Tracy, she's going to go into the parks positions and why you see some overlap already in 2021 with those.

And then the last column though, just so we can all navigate it, is what is proposed in the 2022 budget.

It doesn't stand out as well here, but we did put in bold and italics all of the positions that are the newly proposed positions in the 2022 proposed budget.

So looking just specifically at the SPR FTE, so as I indicated earlier in my comments, that special maintenance team has been in existence since 2018. That continues.

The one change that took place in 20, actually, it doesn't show here.

It should have shown in 2020. Oh, it did.

Actually, they took a couple of the special maintenance team folks and made them into field coordinators just because of the level of expertise and training that's required when they're out at sites.

in terms of understanding, for example, the issues around storage and personal belongings and what has to happen there and how those are treated.

So they did create, out of their 15-member team, two field coordinator positions that started in 2018 and has continued and would continue into 2022. 2022 would add two additional field coordinators, a strategic advisor, and SPR admin spec to support the work of the field coordinators and the work that's happening out on the sites.

Again, whether those are sites that are in fact in line for closure or whether there is in fact ongoing assessment that's done by the field coordinators of encampment sites, regardless of whether they're on a closure list or not, to make sure that litter and garbage issues and public safety issues are being addressed and that there aren't issues erupting there that need to be addressed.

There is also the addition of a person who would help with the storage requirements And in particular about making sure that the storage of personal goods is done and done properly and recorded properly.

And then also helping with the actual facilitation when people say they want to get their goods in storage and helping with the delivery of that.

And then the final two positions, one is a halftime.

communication strategic advisor and this is somebody who would be helping to deal with apparently the myriad of emails and calls that come to the parks department about encampments even now with them taking on some of the role on an interim basis in 2021 related to encampments and that can be from citizens, from the press, from from council members and other elected officials is what we're told.

And then the final position that would be added in 2022 is a full-time data analyst, and this relates specifically to some of the requirements that exist in the MDARs for needing to keep track of when we have met the requirements for postings.

Again, requirements around storage and keeping track of storage and how that happens for clients and residents of the encampments or former residents of the encampment.

Okay, wonderful.

So I know Councilmember Lewis and Councilmember Morales have already teed up some questions on this.

Councilmember Lewis, please go ahead.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

So, you know, kind of going back to the themes that I was discussing earlier, and I think this chart is a good grounding exercise to talk about this.

You know, I again, you know, this is this is flagging issues and i feel like this to a certain extent is red flagging issues uh...

like i i want us to make sure that we don't go into a regime in twenty twenty two where it is unclear who was responsible for doing what uh...

it and like just going through this list you know i i know that so just care for example and i know that mark over at the regional authority has been a very big fan of the model for outreach that the Just Care folks use, you know, that incorporates some level of planning and strategy around storage of possessions, for example.

And, you know, like really having individualized plans for people on, you know, how they can store their possessions or mitigate moving inside in terms of, you know, balancing stuff they have in their encampment and moving it into a hotel room or whatever else and being able to engage in some kind of storage system.

And I I sort of sense that that is kind of the outreach direction the authority wants to go in And so I just wonder as we go forward the extent to which Some of the things that we've historically, you know, obviously if someone's if something gets removed and there's someone who is not at an encampment site Obviously, we need to make sure that that stuff is properly, you know stored and not thrown away but I'm just envisioning, you know, I want to make sure we're building city assets that are envisioning the division of labor between what we as a city are doing and what the authority is going to be doing.

And the build out that we've been presented for 2022 seems to envision a fairly similar approach in the world where the authority exists here.

You know, the data analyst position, I think, is probably something that won't be as necessary, because presumably the authority is going to have a data analyst capability.

And I just want to make sure that we're not creating redundancies between the HOPE outreach and the authority outreach.

And I definitely don't want a regime where we have competing outreach teams that have competing proprietary shelter systems.

And as we lean into this, reconciling clearly delineated roles is going to be really critical.

I don't know if we have sufficient answers right now from the authority on exactly how their outreach system is going to be developed.

So if we go back to the issue identification, I want to keep this up here because Council Member Morales might have questions relevant to this.

So we don't have to go back there.

I'd like you to come back to me, madam.

Oh, well, I'll just do it now if we're going back, if they're queuing it up.

That's great.

So I don't really feel like I can really answer this.

I mean, definitely not C, but I don't really know exactly what combination of A and B would be appropriate at this time because we don't really know exactly what the King County Regional Homelessness Authority outreach regime is going to look like, but we need to make sure that we are designing a hope team that complements, or whatever successor function it is, that complements the King County Regional Housing Authority's outreach program, and not making this an isolation in a way that'll chafe up against those responsibilities.

Because that could end up being wasteful, redundant, and problematic.

I can at least speak to some of this.

I think that you're also highlighting an area council member that is kind of a grayer policy decision.

But what is moving currently to the authority, obviously nothing is final at this point until the council enacts the budget, is that the only the contracts would be moving that are contracted outreach agencies would be moving to the regional authority.

And as I was saying earlier, those are agencies that are thinking citywide, or maybe they have a geographic focus, but generally it's going to be a citywide certain type of population, as often the case, or they have some overall approach that they're taking.

Whereas the work that's done by the system navigators, initially through contract negotiations, HSD did propose having that day of removal kind of work to make sure that someone still there on the day that a cleanup crew arrives would be done, that someone would be there from an outreach agency.

The agencies were clear that they were not comfortable with that work.

They strongly indicated that would undermine their ability to engage with encampments writ large, with encampments that weren't prioritized for removal.

And therefore, we continue to have system navigators that are serving as the primary group there that is on the actual day of a removal, or to the degree that you have a few days.

let's say, like, three days to two weeks of notice of when a posting of removal is done.

They're the individuals that are doing the primary coordination to learn who has been talked to in the encampment, who has consistently been a person living there, what are the needs, the type of shelters they need to be offered, things like that.

And so in the absence of, with that staying at the city, I don't know where it's supposed to be at in the best location.

Is it with parks or with HSD or with the authority with some components of it?

I don't know that I could present an answer for that.

But there is a clear role that is delineated from what our general contracted agencies are doing right now.

And I hope that that is helpful to understand that difference.

I think that addresses your question.

Please chime in if not.

So Jeff, I guess what I'm sort of talking about, because I do kind of understand what the, I do understand the idea here that under no circumstances will KCRHA be in a position where they're in the removal business, nor will they insist that the outreach contracts that go to them participate in the removal business.

That I understand completely.

My concern is situations where, like a fact pattern that could come up where, that I think is pretty easy to envision, I don't think it's being far-fetched, where the King County Regional Homelessness Authority contracted providers doing outreach at a site.

There's a lot of demand for the site to be removed and it's creating a lot of political pressure.

And it gets to a point where the, you know, the authority that controls the hope team, whatever it is, Parks, SDOT, whatever it is, kind of loses patience with the outreach, doesn't want to give them any more time, and decides to post and do a removal, right?

At that point, it sounds like what would happen is KCRHA's outreach contractors would no longer be involved because they don't want to be involved with sweeps.

They would no longer be required to be contractually because of the new division of labor.

But now there would be these system navigator people that are in the Success or Hope team.

And they would be doing something that is kind of like outreach in sort of the post-posting, for lack of a better term, environment of the site.

My concern is a world where whatever the successor hope team is just goes around and posts on a pretty frequent basis and turfs out the KCRHA people so that the outreach kind of stops.

And then we're just back to being in the same sort of MDAR driven sweeping regime.

Like I'm just kind of conjuring up where I'm seeing these systems having trouble interacting.

potentially.

And maybe that world wouldn't happen.

Maybe in the ideal world, what I think would be best would be King County Regional Homelessness Authority is given the time, the space, and the support that they need to do comprehensive outreach, do a person-centered plan for everybody in sight, do a Just Care style moving day where everybody moves at once to go into sheltering or housing opportunities.

And then it gets flagged for a posting to remove debris, because the people are gone.

And the only thing that's left is things that the people have determined that were camping there are debris to be removed by the city.

But this doesn't seem to be a whole team that's being designed for that kind of a function.

That is the issue I'm trying to get through and the place where I'm seeing the Venn diagram overlapping with the authority potentially becoming problematic and creating redundancies.

So does that provide more clarification on it?

Like, are my fears justified?

Like, are there things we can do to legislate around that?

Like, I want to turn it back over to you.

I hope I was a little more clear that time.

Yeah.

I think that you are actually accurate, like very precisely describing what is going, like how the process works right now.

So the hook team doesn't do the posting itself right now.

That is handled entirely by parks, really park staff, they often do it on behalf of SDOT as well.

That's what the field coordinator, it's been months since we talked about this, but that's one of the things that the field coordinator does, is assess a site, determine if it should be a priority for removal, put that posting, that notice of removal up, take a photo, make sure that that gets documented when it went up.

So all of those functions are not happening even with the existing HOPE team and would not be something that the future HOPE team would take on.

Instead, the existing HOPE team and the future HOPE team would largely serve the same role that it is right now, which I've described hopefully to some degree with clarity, though it's a pretty convoluted, There's a lot of overlap, there's a lot of nuance, so it's confusing at times.

The approach right now is that parks or SDOT or whomever identifies this is the priority for removal, that posting is put up and then things change.

And the model that you're describing where a place has been identified for removal and there's an intentional decision not to post that removal notice, but instead to have a focus all collapsed upon that location and make sure that people are moved out of that location.

And then once that work is signaled as complete by contracted outreach providers, and then the team comes in and does the clean, that would certainly be a change in the staging of how we do our process right now.

And I think all these, I don't know the degree to which that budget legislation could accomplish, I think it would likely need to be standalone legislation in order to accomplish that legislatively, that change in approach.

But it's certainly something, just as the MDARs exist currently as administrative rules, there's no reason that that could not be enacted by the council to define a different set of staging and process.

Right, thank you for clarifying that for me, Jeff.

I mean, I think I just want to signal almost like an option D here.

I think we need to learn a little bit more about the King County Regional Homelessness Authority's outreach plans.

And then I would like to build whatever the residual city response is around how King County Regional Homelessness Authority is going to operationalize their outreach and really design it in such a way where we incentivize collaborative and results-oriented collaboration that minimizes displacement, I mean, ideally eliminates displacement.

Because I don't want to have a system where we are continuing to solve for one encampment location And it just displaces the people camping to another place that creates new problems in that community, while at the same time not doing anything for the people who are unhoused.

And I think we have a unique opportunity to do that with all the resources coming online and the new energy from the King County Regional Homeless Authority.

I also wanna flag that, I mean, we don't talk a lot about this publicly, but One of the issues of why it's been harder to stand up more shelters, there's a lot of providers that won't set up a sheltering resource if the referrals are coming from something that they deem to be a sweep.

And I know we have a lot of shelter provider capacity issues, but part of it is, you know, I mean, I've had these conversations, I'm not gonna say who they are here publicly, with providers who have said, you know, we're not gonna do anything where we take sweep referrals.

So, like, this has really struck at me as a very big structural issue in our response that makes it harder for us to stand up more shelter capacity, like, makes it harder to, you know, have a policy that minimizes displacement, and I think that, you know, I don't want to I think it is important to understand that when we are deciding where to allocate limited resources and we are about to discuss some other very resource intensive ads, I want us to look at everything we can to make sure we are not creating redundancies and that we are creating things that will get people off the street and inside and in so doing, reduce the amount of encampments.

That's well said.

Councilmember Morales, was there anything else you'd like to add in terms of questions?

I just want to reiterate the point and maybe put a slightly different spin on the last comment Councilmember Lewis made, which is that it's absolutely true that providers don't want to be taking referrals from the city.

Navigation, there shouldn't be a navigation team for one thing and the city's cleaning crews making referrals to services is a completely inappropriate role, right?

The reason we set up the HOPE team was so that there would be a relationship there with providers and that providers would be the ones making referrals for folks who are experiencing homelessness and I think this idea of replacing the work that the navigation team had been doing is just fundamentally flawed.

And I will say right now, I think we should be advocating for option A, which is that we don't fund those positions because we have a lot of work to do to figure out how to make this a more compassionate system than what exists right now.

And I do agree that we probably need to learn a little bit more about what the outreach plan is from the new authority.

Thank you very much.

I know that on the slide it said issue identification one of seven, but we actually only have four issues to identify here.

It was just slides that had been carried out to show the issue and then the possible options.

So we have three more issues to go through.

I did want to just ask a quick question related to the role of the outreach providers, specifically the partnership that we have cultivated and grown with LEAD and REACH.

I didn't get a chance to ask this at the very beginning, but I do see, you know, the 2021 adopted budget, 6.3 million for LEED, for example.

And then you don't see that in the 2022 proposed budget.

It shows nothing.

Can you remind me, is that because it's dollars that are going to King County, as we had hoped that they would for the just care program, or where is our partnership and investments with LEAD and REACH in the 2022 proposed budget as transmitted by the mayor?

All right, so the LEAD program, which has rebranded itself as Let Everyone Advance with Dignity, was formerly Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion.

That is being transferred to, so there might be, it might actually be just looking for a certain acronym instead of a different one, but that is being moved to the Youth and Family Empowerment, sorry, to the Safe and Stable Communities Division, in HSD.

So that's actually one of the transfers that I referred to right at the get-go of this presentation, that you don't see it listed here in Homelessness Services.

That happens to have been the division where it was placed previously, but now that we have a more suitable division, it's being moved up.

In terms of, however, as you probably know, the Just Care approach is different in a lot of ways from what LEAD is.

It happens to also be spearheaded by the Public Defender Association, which I believe is also renaming itself.

I can't think of what PDA has rebranded itself as.

And that so the council has provided funds in two different ways for that program, one of which is was was to start services.

Indeed, it has come online already for 89 beds and is wholly city funded.

And those beds will come offline in, I believe, June of 2022. And then separately, the Seattle Rescue Plan provided $7.5 million to combine with the county for Just Care, and this was a 150-bed allotment.

The county had already been funding that contract and was seeking our collaboration to maintain it.

That award has been made at an RFP.

They made that award to PDA and its partners as a collaboration with Asian Counseling Referral Services and REACH.

And so Just Care received those funds, and that has been continuing to operate and is expected to halt services in June of 2022 as well, I believe, on June 30th.

What has happened so far is you won't see any drawdown of the funds in the report that you referred to that we received this morning on Seattle Rescue Plan funds.

Those funds are encumbered, or what should be considered encumbered.

There is a contract in place.

It just happens that for whatever reason the county's funds are what we're drawing down first for the first six months and then from January 1st to June 30th next year is when we're going to draw down the HSD funds.

Okay thanks and I did see a reference to the shelter programs at Kings Inn and Executive Pacific Hotel expected to cease operations January 31st 2020. reducing temporary capacity by 197 units.

On the bottom of page two, however, on January 1st, the city will begin to support the 150 beds through Just Cares.

Is that, okay, is that what you're referencing?

That's a little bit of a nuance that because what that chart is showing is just city-funded shelter capacity, not showing county-funded capacity, so that since our dollars aren't taking effect for the Just Care, the 150 beds that King County has actually been operating for quite some time, since our dollars don't come online until January 1st, that's how that's displayed.

It's coming on as being added to the actual chart.

It's March 2022. It actually is January 1st.

It's just reflecting in a point in time what's online.

Okay let's go ahead and move on to issue oh excuse me Councilmember Peterson did you have something on issue identification number one?

Yes, thank you.

Thank you for your work on this.

I think what's what's interesting is at the bottom where it totals the number of positions you're seeing that there were 46 positions which dropped down to 23 and it seems that what the the mayor is the mayor's budget's proposing is to maintain the the hope type structure but to to add a few positions and I I think we do need more information on how it would coordinate with the regional homeless authority um I supported the navigation team.

I did not want it to be disbanded, but I want the HOPE team to work.

And I think that they're just asking for a few more positions here.

So to make it work, and there may just be a timing issue because as we know, the Regional Homelessness Authority is, they're staffing up, they're putting forward a lot of good ideas and plans.

There'll be timing when the contracts transfer over.

when they let new contracts.

And so maybe this might, what the Durkin administration put forward here might make sense for 2022, but then maybe needs to change 2023. So I'm gonna reserve judgment on this until we get more information, but just wanted to.

provide a little bit of more perspective on this issue, because I know I'm seeing a lot of unauthorized encampments, and I know there's a desire to engage and get people inside.

We have a lot of new units coupling online, as we saw from Council Member Luce's report, sort of inventorying those units.

I also would like to see our City Office of Housing, for any vacant units they have, to get people who are experiencing homelessness inside so that we're We're running on all cylinders here, and there just might be a transition period.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Councilmember Peterson.

Please go ahead, Jeff.

I was going to raise this with Councilmember Lewis, but I wasn't sure if it was quite appropriate at that moment.

I will make sure I say now.

My understanding right now is that the regional authority does not intend to change anything about the contracts that will be inherited from HSD in 2022. So as things operate now with outreach is how they would continue to operate for the duration of 2022. And to the conversation about how the authority would change the delivery of outreach services The current plan that's been articulated is in the spring of 2022 to issue a new RFP that would redesign some programs.

So let's assume that homelessness outreach would have some level of changes.

I couldn't possibly guess what those would be at this point, but if there was any degree of services and then they would go through a contracting process so that on January 1st of 2023 is when you would see a change in how the authority is operating outreach services.

So, in the interim, and I don't know if I made it clear enough because I was often swapping with Tracy, in the interim, there's not, other than the agency that's responsible for the contracts, there shouldn't be any change to how those providers are expected to operate.

And also, there's not an expansion of the HOPE team.

None of these positions would be defined as being part of the HOPE team.

I know that during a meeting last week, Deputy Mayor Washington talked about disbanding the HOOP team or spreading it out.

I've since gotten clarification there that the intention, you could call it lending, I think that she used that word, like loaning staff.

It gets a little bit technical in terms of what that means, but ultimately they would continue to be HSD employees.

working in some kind of a lended or a matrix management, you know, multiple bosses and multiple like lines of communication and decision-making to, with the park staff as well.

But the actual HOPE 8 FTE on the HOPE team would not be changed to or added to.

It would only be additions in parks that would be occurring.

Any follow-up questions?

I believe I saw that there was of services in 2022, which is very much welcome.

Not as in the weeds as many of you are, but I thought that that was a really good signal of trying to ensure transition and stability for those contracts.

And as Council Member Lewis started with, we receive calls about this every day.

We see the trauma that so many people are experiencing ourselves on a daily basis.

So we want there to be continuity as we scale up additional services.

and solutions.

And I appreciate that there's a commitment to continue those contracts in 2022 and any additional stipulations that council may have related to some of those contracts and or in partnership with the mayor's office as well, I think is a good thing for us in 2022 as we think about stability in future years.

So that was that was a good note to receive.

Okay, let's move on to issue number two of four.

Jeff, you are still on mute.

I just need to keep going.

One more slide, please.

There we go.

Yeah, apologies that it says seven there.

I was talking about the number of pages in retrospect.

That wasn't the way to handle the numbering.

No problem.

No problem.

This next issue combines, ultimately it is a request from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to add some funds to the mayor's proposed budget.

And they've identified, and here I'll talk about two programmatic or service ads, and then the next issue identification I'll go into more of an administrative one.

For everyone's awareness, the, the interlocal agreement that was authorized by the city council and governs the authority envision a scenario or a process where the authority will develop in the springtime.

It's a budget submission.

that would go through its two boards, an implementation board that's a grouping of unbiased experts in homelessness, and then to a board that consists of elected officials, both of whom giving approval to that submission.

And then it gets transmitted to the city and the county for incorporation into the budget processes that we normally go through.

So that ideally it gets dropped down into what the mayor would propose and then it comes to the council and the council also sees it as being really well prepared and gets passed as part of the larger budget passage.

As I believe everyone is well aware, that wasn't realistic for 2021. There were not staff at the regional authority except for CEO Jones who didn't even come on board until that budget would have already had to have been submitted.

For that reason, that's why the council is having this presented to them now as potential new beds or new services and new asks for additions.

So the first of those.

The first is a high-acuity shelter.

As you can see, it'd be $19.4 million.

That's $1.5 million to make modifications.

The vision right now is that some existing space would be leased, similar to how the Soto shelter that's being operated by Salvation Army worked.

It's a leased location, some modifications.

That's what the $1.5 million would need to be made to the program.

And then the remaining dollars would be the operations of the program.

As I imagine, many people have done some simple math and noted that this would be a pretty, for 150 beds, this would be a very expensive intervention.

And the reason for that is when we call this a high acuity shelter, it is truly that.

It would exceed greatly, not only the services that we typically offer in our shelters, but in some ways, even what we offer in permanent supportive housing.

You would have, for example, a psychiatric nurse practitioner on site.

You would have a doctor.

You would have multiple nurses.

It is really intended to be people that are truly in crisis.

The parallel that I would say that this should more be compared to than what we typically operate as shelter is the crisis solution center.

which is a program where there's first can be a 72 hour stabilization period for people in crisis so they can stabilize.

And then after that, there is up to a 14 day additional stay for people that otherwise would have had to exit into homelessness.

But it's very time limited and similar to this proposal is very intense in the services that it's offering.

It is for people that are truly in crisis.

And so that's the first one.

And then the second discrete request is for a pure navigator network.

As you can see here, this would be $7.5 million to create a 69-person network.

The difference between a peer navigator is what is proposed by the authority and what we're more commonly used to dealing with, like case management, is that a case manager works with you while you're in the program that employs that case manager.

So while you're in the shelter, the shelter's case manager works with you.

When you leave the shelter, you get a new case manager, and so on and so forth.

The vision with the Peer Navigator Network is that before you've even entered shelter, potentially, depending on who's assigned, you would be assigned this Peer Navigator.

They would be your mentor, your advocate, your sounding board, someone that's just walked through this process before and would stay with that individual that they're assigned to all the way until they have been placed into permanent housing or identify the permanent housing on their own.

And at that point in time, you wouldn't necessarily you know, remove the person they've been assigned to.

But as we've all experienced in other times, then your need for services really drops off for the most part.

You kind of replace, you know, you find a new client that you're assigned to, things like that.

This network would envision something like a 1 to 15 mentor to mentee, advocate to client, kind of a pairing.

And initially, the 69, This is one of the reasons that I noted the downtown plan.

This would be a key aspect of helping to encourage and support the people that are experiencing unsheltered homelessness move into those offerings that would be part of a to be developed or updated downtown plan.

The last thing I'll say about this is the $7.6 million is presented as a one as a one time funding request, because there is the intention to pursue the development and the billing structures and set up so that this can be a Medicaid bill service as a peer support network.

There's some learning that will have to happen, but that's actually the reason the authority wants to directly manage this program and directly hire these peer navigators, so that that process can be completed, and in future years, it would be Medicaid reimbursable, not something that the council would fund.

I think I failed to mention that the high-acuity shelter is the 150 beds that appeared in the downtown plan that I presented earlier.

With that, though, I'll stop, and I ask questions.

Thank you, Jeff.

Council Member Herbold, please go ahead.

Thank you.

I just have a question about the high acuity shelter being requested by the Regional Health Authority.

A couple weeks ago, there was a behavioral health summit that a number of us participated in, both from City of Seattle government as well as King County government.

and a couple dozen providers.

And one of the recommendations that has come out of that summit is to expand the Regional Crisis Stabilization Center capacity by opening voluntary crisis diversion and stabilization centers in available facilities such as hotels.

And This has been proposed as a joint city-county investment.

This proposal refers to the fact that under Trueblood, the state and county are already working to build two involuntary crisis stabilization centers.

This would be a voluntary facility.

It would receive referrals from folks who are first responders, police, fire, EMTs, hospitals.

Just trying to figure out, it has been compared to the Crisis Solution Center.

Are we talking about the same proposal here?

You're exactly on to pinpoint the overlap, but not quite exactly.

I think that this is arising from similar conversations.

As with what you just discussed arising out of the summit as a recommendation, these are all voluntary facilities.

The for the high-acuity shelter, and I noted this in the memo, the exit plan is not firmly determined at this point.

Whereas the, as I, as I align with the crisis solution center, there's a cap on how long you can be there.

And my understanding of the other proposal that you discussed is that it would be something similar.

the terminology I received materials on it this morning, as followed from that summit, and it describes it as respite, which would not usually be something that you're staying in for a year or six months or anything like that.

So I think that that might be where there's a difference.

But in terms of the vision for the level of services, I think that we're talking about the same thing.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

Thanks, Council Member.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

So I think that this really cues up what we frequently hear from a lot of people in the community in general terms about what their vision is for our response to people with very severe crisis in our community who clearly need some kind of really well-resourced assistance and that we can't provide it.

You know, I think that this offers a really stark reminder of how much that costs.

I think it offers a really stark reminder that this level of really intensive care for significant substance addiction and behavioral mental health issues is very, very expensive.

But I think that this is an asset that is envisioned by the team at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority that they're very excited about implementing.

and that they have a plan that's designed to meet the need that we see and that across the political spectrum, there's very, very strong agreement that we need.

You know, what I just want to kind of say since we're sort of on the record here in public is, you know, to all the people out there in the community who have had very strong opinions about wanting to see bigger investment in the underlying public health issues that are feeding into our homelessness crisis, this is a big opportunity for you to work with the council and the regional authority on realizing what that is.

I think this is a horrible reminder that it's not going to be an easy lift, nor is it going to be cheap, but it is necessary.

And I really do think that to realize the kind of reality on the street that all of us want to see, it's going to require an investment of this magnitude and likely considerably more, but this is a way to really demonstrate the efficacy of this strategy and the way to get this resource going.

So the Regional Homelessness Authority has what they need to demonstrate and show that this new regional approach can really deliver on what we need to see.

So I do think that this is something that I want to pursue throughout the budget process, and it's definitely been a big ask from the new regional authority as something that they really, really think they could implement and show strong visible results from.

I think that's a really good question.

I think my priority would be to, you know, go for the option A and then, you know, visit option B as may be necessitated by budget reality.

I also want to work a little bit on the peer navigator network to I think it's important to get some early feedback on the peer navigator model and really want to make sure that they're able to lend their expertise to really shape how that's going to work.

so I definitely want to, as we go forward in funding that request, consult really closely with the lived experience coalition and really make sure that we're designing a program firmly in

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

Other colleagues?

Council President Gonzalez, please go ahead.

Yeah, I just wanted to echo my support of the sort of the proposed way to pursue this, at least at this juncture in our budget process.

I do think it's worthy of having a public conversation and further analysis around what a sort of fully funded plan would.

provide in terms of additional resources to KCRHA to help address the needs of, you know, chronically homeless folks living outside and surviving outside.

And so I do want to just flag that one of the things that will need more analysis in the council's ongoing evaluation of how much we fund these Particular proposals, in addition to needing to consult with the lived experience coalition around the peer navigator network as proposed here is is is that we're still.

We're still in need of addressing a throughput plan.

So, um.

if we're going to have a high acuity shelter, it would be, I think, helpful and wise for us to get an understanding from RHA staff on what their strategy is going to be to transition people out of that high acuity shelter into permanent supportive housing or affordable housing.

Because as Jeff mentioned in his comments, for this amount of money, we could be standing up a new permanent supportive housing project.

And so those I think are the sort of policy choices that are before us as we continue to wrestle with the scale of investments that the city of Seattle is willing to commit to for next year's RHA efforts.

Thank you both very much.

Thank you, Council President.

I'm seeing additional comments on this.

I do have a series of questions that I'm hoping that the next few weeks we'll have a chance to understand more about specific to the peer navigator program.

I'm interested in knowing additional details about what it takes to become.

a certified peer counselor and the process to then be licensed with that official title to actually get reimbursement from Medicaid.

I know, Jeff, you and I have had lots of conversations about Medicaid and Medicaid reimbursement over the years, but this is something that I want to make sure I fully understand the pathway towards getting that reimbursement.

On the high-acuity shelter, I am very interested in hearing more from operators throughout our city, including the folks who are standing up the shelter model that Councilmember Herbold noted.

I'd like to hear more from especially DESC, who operates a high-acuity shelter service in our city already, and obviously they've been the ones that I've been most concerned about with the scaling down of their beds from over 500 to you know, near 100 now and hopefully scaling up to 350 beds in the city by the end of the year, that's still a deficit of 150 beds from DESC alone.

So I'm interested in hearing more from community partners like that and folks who run our DESC crisis.

solutions center.

I'd also like to hear a little bit more about the partnership with King County.

I think that there was a big emphasis on creating economies of scale as we partnered with King County and hearing a little bit more about how King County and Seattle are partnering together to address some of these late ads.

And I say late because I know your memo outlined that initially if everything were on time in terms of the creation of the Regional Homelessness Authority and we didn't have COVID and all the other hiccups that happened, we would have had budget recommendations from the Regional Homelessness Authority in the spring to influence the Mayor's proposed budget.

and I'm interested in hearing more about how the governance committee and the implementation committee and the lived experience committee have all coalesced around this idea as well.

So looking forward to hearing about those elements as we unpack this proposal here.

And I'll underscore what Council President Gonzalez and Council Member Lewis have also said, which is we all know that we need urgent action, especially as we head into winter here to show that there is a place for folks to move into.

So that is the goal here.

I'd like to know more about also the leasing and the modifications of a facility right now, noting that we do not have the acquisition of a location for the services yet.

In the memo, all of those things I think are important to make sure that we can hit the ground running with this magnitude of investment and existing partners like would like to see how we pair those efforts.

Okay, Jeff, let me know if we need clarification from me on some of those questions that I just rattled off.

No, did you want to, given that we're getting shorter on time, do you want to keep moving to the next item?

Let's do it.

So this next item, and I'll have two supporting tables after I just walk through this briefly.

I noted already then the programmatic or service requests from the authority.

There also is a request for an additional $600,000 to cover a shortfall in what they anticipate to be the shortfall in their administrative costs.

And there's kind of two different factors that are at play here.

So ultimately, the question of the council would be to fully or partially address some of that gap, but also because some of the funding that is proposed for the authorities own administration is actually a jumpstart payroll expense tax.

And as currently defined in statute, I don't believe that would fall into the the acceptable uses of those funds.

And so that also is a consideration the council will need to make, either to amend what the funds can be used for, or to either carve out these Jump Start funds and fill it with something else, or not provide those funds something along those lines.

So let's go to the next slide, and this is going to be clearer.

On the left, what you see is just a chart detailing the amount of money that is proposed in the 2022 budget for the KCRHA's funding.

So there's 2.7 across our more typical sources, especially general fund.

You can see that there's $1.1 million in ARPA.

I'll get to that in just a moment.

And then the $811,000 I mentioned in the payroll tax funds for $4.6 million.

$4.6 million is actually about 1.6 more than what was discussed as the authority presented to its implementation board and its governing committee over the spring and summer how much was anticipated to come from Seattle.

At that time it was notably less money coming to them.

So this is a higher amount in the first place.

And the one notable reason for that addition is the ARPA funds there, or the Seattle Rescue Plan funds.

That $1.1 million, that's the permissible carve-out of administrative funds from overall what ARPA has.

And at the time when the staffing plan was prepared over the summer, the authority was not aware of a variety of things.

One of the major ones being that it would be receiving tens of millions of dollars in these ARPA funds to administer and put out contracts for.

And so looking at the staff, which I'm going to get to in just a moment, and other expenses, a fair amount of those would be related to the administration of services.

there would be more administration because of more money being given to them, and therefore carving that out.

The request for $600,000 would take the city's total contribution to overall staff and overhead at the authority to $5.2 million, as you can see on the chart.

And after working with HSD, that actually basically correlates with the amount that was spent in HSD to manage homelessness services in HSD in 2019, before we had the regional authority or the ILA passed.

So there is some parallel in that total amount of funding that's being requested there.

So now let me move to the next slide, or sorry, the next chart here on the right, not the next slide.

sorry, Patty, that the chart on the right there is showing you the total administrative funding.

So not only is the overall amount that Seattle is contributing going up fairly substantially by more than a million dollars, the overall amount of money that the authority is getting is almost twice as much in terms of what is budgeted for administration and overhead.

And a large chunk of that either comes from Seattle putting in more money or continuum of care funding that was for administration that comes through the county then, and that would also be going to add it to this to a total amount of just a little bit more than $10 million in resources for the authority.

I'm breaking down for you in this chart.

You can see over the summer when an initial plan was developed, again, with a lot of things not known, not knowing the number of contracts that would be administered, not knowing about one-time federal dollars, not knowing final amounts that would be sent from the county and the city, the $5.9 million would be anticipated total admin and overhead at that time.

Now we're looking at a total of $10.8 million, and you can see the breakdown there.

Some key pieces actually really substantially overlap with those continuum of care administration dollars.

the last two lines on HMIS and software contracts, things like that.

You can see that the base staffing is almost the same.

There's just about $1.9 million in new staffing, some of whom are anticipated.

When the staffing plan was shown over the summer, we were explicitly told to anticipate that more staff would be added for an ombuds to make sure that the voices of people experiencing homelessness that are accessing our services.

that that would be added to if any additional funding was found.

And also it increases staff for sub-regional planning, which is another, both the ombuds and the sub-regional planning practices are things that we haven't been doing at King County or in the city.

Those are two new functions that the authority is launching into that haven't been previously performed.

Not to mention administering all those ARPA funds.

So that's what the additional staff is.

But overall, the decision before the council is that not only is the authority asking for $600,000 more to close the estimated gap between what is going to be their administrative costs and what they have as committed resources for that, but also some of the funding right now is coming from Jump Start, so another $800,000.

And I think it's important to flag that although the ARPA money is to administer, to some degree, ARPA funds, we would be hiring staff with one-time funds, and there might be a valet somewhere down the line for that.

So those are some important considerations for the council.

And with that, I'll take any questions.

Thank you very much, Jeff.

Colleagues, comments, questions?

Council Member Lewis, thank you.

Hey, so, you know, just going through all of this, Jeff, I understand some of these unanticipated things that have come up and the world has just changed so much.

You know, I think the King County Regional Homelessness Authority has been a very big institutional victim of the COVID era in terms of kind of coming up in this in an era of transition and also an era of crisis.

So, like, I get it.

I think my ongoing principle here is I want to make sure that we continue to have some level of equity and parity with King County and how we fund a lot of the operations and overhead of the authority, and just maybe you can comment on that, on kind of how that's looking with these requests.

I think it's just a general good government principle.

so many stakeholders that want to provide some kind of meaningful feedback and making sure that that is going to a place and something is structurally happening that will create a feedback loop to drive changes.

So I do just want to give a shout out for that ombud function, but maybe if you could comment a little more broadly on the equity between the governments of funding these operations.

They, through the COC administrative dollars, are putting about $1.8 million more in.

That's why I was careful to note, as you can see on the slide, that the HMIS contract alone, that's the management info system we use for all our services and some of the other overhead.

There's a clear parallel there.

It seems to me that as more information about what would move over and what resources supported it have emerged and gotten clarified, that it was just kind of, oh, here's more money and here's what that already goes towards.

So there's not a separate ask for just general dollars.

And I actually do not have information at this point.

I should say I don't have final information on King County ARPA funds that would be given to the authority to administer.

My understanding is at this time, it's not likely that the units that they're acquiring, for example, will be immediately moved over to the authority.

So when you think about earlier, when I was talking about the downtown plan, I talked about 500 new units or 500 new beds through their COVID money, and then also nine new buildings with the healthy housing dollars.

I don't believe at this time that any of those, the operations for those are moving over.

I don't know that that's final.

I could have incorrect or outdated information at this point.

But some of what is being provided by the city would be ARPA money corresponding with one-time funds.

It doesn't appear that county is necessarily putting that in, putting in one-time funds and needing administering staff.

I think that would generally answer your question.

The one last point I'd maybe make is that the authority is going to have the ability to do what it wants to with dollars.

And in theory, they could close this administration gap by taking money out of services somewhere.

It's $600,000, over $104 million just from us.

but any reduction that you make to, any amount of reduction you make to the funding given to contracted providers right now in order to cover this means that you have cut services.

There would be a direct trade-off with that kind of a thing.

So there's flexibility there, but there's a clear cost too, not to say that providing more money through this process doesn't have that same cost.

Is there any other further detail you'd look for, Council Member Lewis?

No, that's good on my end.

Thank you, Jim.

Can I can I ask a little bit more about that lessons because I saw that reflected in the memo as well.

We have asked our departments to do a tremendous amount of scaling back and reprioritizing in the wake of COVID.

And we've also asked the same of human service providers.

And especially when it comes to human service provider contracts that we have, we recognize that they have continued to tell us that when we haven't funded them at the appropriate levels, the consequences not in terms of services, right?

They've been very clear that the way that that's actually filtered out is administrative costs, which we have been working on over the last few years to address at the root cause of that issue, and that's underpayment for those providers and our community contracts.

Councilmember Hurdle noted some work that she's interested in for this upcoming budget as well to build on that past work to get at wage discrepancies.

It does seem like with a now double administrative cost for the RHA, a similar sort of request or ask of the RHA to prioritize services is not out of alignment with what we've asked our community contracts or our departments here.

So I don't understand how that's a foregone conclusion.

And isn't it true that there's also things about the budgeting strategies that we could use to prioritize certain investments for services?

I believe I followed the question, but if I don't get this exactly right, please help me to redirect.

I think that the point I was trying to make is that the intention right now of the authority is to take all contracts that HSD has been managing at a certain dollar amount and continue those at that same dollar amount without changing the terms and stipulations.

I mean, there's more or less that's how the intention is supposed to work.

And so that finding $600,000 somewhere in a rather more than $100 million worth of funds, certainly it might be possible, but just that would likely mean that in some way, shape or form, less money was given.

to a contract somewhere.

And I think that your point on that is that we're not necessarily talking about that a shelter is going to have fewer beds.

We might be talking about that we're not going to pay those staff the same level, which we are seeing have impacts on turnover, retention, even the ability to hire them in the first place.

So I think that was the direction that you were asking about, Council Member, but please correct me.

Well, slightly different.

I mean, if the overhead costs, if the administrative costs that the Regional Homelessness Authority is, I think you said twice as much as originally anticipated, but the contracts that we have are critical year over year to make sure that those human service providers know how much they are receiving.

It feels like we're saying the priority is going to be this now double administrative costs at the RHA versus prioritizing the funding that we have anticipated would be going out the door in 2022. That doesn't feel like a fair statement to make preemptive to our budget discussions about where we think administrative costs that we can contribute to as a city will go.

It is already providing a trade-off between the human service contracts and the services they deliver versus the administrative costs.

That's why I'm saying it doesn't necessarily feel like it's a predetermined answer that the cuts or any reductions necessarily would come out of services when the administrative costs is double what the board and the council and the community was briefed on earlier this year.

I see.

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

The authority has put forward a $10.8 million operational plan for itself.

And the council, as you're absolutely correct, could say, no, we're not funding the amount that's been proposed or they request an increase or something along those lines.

and the authority would have to find a way to operate within that different funding level.

And there's, I hope I did a decent job of outlining where some of the proposed additions have gone, especially the staff piece.

There's some things like HMIS that I don't know that you're gonna, you're kind of set on that, but there's definitely places that they would then have to make decisions about what would need to be cut or where workload or duties would have to be changed, things like that.

Okay, thanks.

So similarly, I'd be interested in some follow up information on what the approval process is for the for the recommendations coming to city council at this point.

I know that we wouldn't sort of even.

have such a scarcity approach if we had more entities, more jurisdictions in our region contributing to this critical asset.

The Regional Homelessness Authority is doing just that providing care across the region and we hope as the entity continues to get sealed up that we'll have additional partners contributing in and look forward to learning more again about the partnership and the dollar amounts that you mentioned you're going to be seeking on the King County investment side to see what the universe of funding is available and what the final ask would be of City Council at this point.

All right, let's move on to the last item.

Thank you, Councilmembers.

Moving to the final issue, issue number four, related to the Clean City Initiative funding.

So just to remind Council, you carved out funding in the 2021 adopted budget to support the Clean City Initiative that provided a temporary surge in cleaning activities to address illegal dumping and trash in the public right-of-ways, parks, open space, and around encampments.

These efforts are primarily staffed by teams of employees from the Parks Department and Seattle Department of Transportation.

Table 6 on page 13 of your memo shows the funding that was included in the 2021 budget, as well as the additional appropriation that the council made in April 2021 to continue this initiative through the end of 2021. and then the proposed funding for 2022. So as you can see, the executive would propose that $6.2 million of one-time coronavirus local fiscal recovery funds be used to support the Clean City Initiative through August of 2022. The initiative would end in August without additional funding.

So your options are to extend the surge activities for four additional months to provide service for the entirety of 2022 at a cost of just over $3 million, or to adopt the mayor's budget as proposed.

Thank you, and I'm going to tee up, I believe, Council Member Peterson with apologies to Council Member Juarez.

I know she had intended to speak to this item.

Council Member Peterson, did you have anything?

I don't want to put you on the spot there, that you wanted to share on behalf of Council Member Juarez and our Council's joint interest in Clean City Initiative.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

I think that, I know that There's likely going to be support for option A to extend these activities just to make it for the full year.

Currently, it would be under the proposal, I think, ending in August.

And so just extending it for the full year may make more sense.

And that can always be adjusted in a mid-year supplemental discussion.

But setting aside those funds now to extend it for the full year, I think, is something that I hope would have support.

Thank you.

appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

And I think the $3.1 million, I just had a quick question about that.

Is that, I believe that's sufficient to support existing services.

Do we know anything else about how much it may cost to scale up the frequency of which we can expect the purple bag program to visit unsanctioned encampments along with the RVs?

I know Council Member Herbold has been doing some digging on this as well, but we are eager to see the RV the purple bag program begin to receive additional support here in quarter four.

So I'm wondering if this 3.1 provides the full amount necessary to scale up the services for RV trash removal as well.

I'm going to hope that my colleague, Brian Goodnight, can answer that question.

I don't think the purple bag, I think that is separate from the Clean Cities Initiative funding, but I'm hoping he is on the line and might be able to answer that question.

And if not, we can get back to you.

Tracy's, yeah, thank you Councilor Muscata and Tracy.

Yeah, purple bags are not included in the Clean City Initiative, the surge funding.

It's a little bit of SPU support for the SPR, the parks, and the SDOT clean teams.

It's a little more for graffiti control, litter abatement, and sharps collection.

So those are the four programs in SPU that are funded by the surge.

complimentary program and then the purple bag program I did see was on one of the first slides.

Do you have any updates on whether or not that includes the additional support that we're hoping to see for RVs?

I guess I'm not sure about so the in the mayor's proposed budget part of that $556,000 for RV remediation is to serve seven to ten RV sites with the purple bag program.

So that is in the in the proposed budget.

if that's what you're indicating.

The purple bag program generally is also expected to increase its service in 2022 from about 32 sites a month to 42 sites a month.

So both of those things are included in the 22 proposed budget.

Wonderful.

So in addition to support for the Clean Cities Initiative that you just heard, I might be interested in hearing a little bit more about how to scale up the purple bag program and if there's capacity to do that with our team at Parks and Rec.

Anything else Councilmember Peterson that you'd like to share?

Okay, any additional comments Council colleagues?

I will pass on one comment that Councilmember Juarez and I were talking about as well.

I think your comments are well received Councilmember Peterson and Councilmember Juarez noted we are past the point of a surge.

This is an ongoing need we are going to have.

I look forward to hearing more about the proposals around sustaining those clean city initiatives.

With that, colleagues, I think we are at the end of the four issues that have been identified.

Are there any additional comments for the good of the order today?

Not seeing anybody pop in the screen here, so we will go ahead and just let you go with a few extra minutes in today's agenda.

We will reconvene tomorrow morning at 930 a.m.

and we're going to have a chance to follow up on the community safety initiatives and Seattle Police Department in the afternoon and we'll make sure to get you the full hour recess as well and that will conclude our three days of issue identification.

Thanks so much for being here with us tonight.

Have a wonderful night and hope you get a lot of rest so we can end with a bang.

See you tomorrow.