Hello, I'm your host, Brian Kalanick.
How comfortable is the Seattle City Council using the jumpstart payroll tax to plug up a major hole in the city's budget?
Plus, how will the failed plan to build a homeless shelter in the Chinatown ID neighborhood affect our homelessness crisis?
And what impact will a new city fund to clean up vandalism have on local businesses?
Council members Andrew Lewis and Sarah Nelson answer these questions and the ones you're sending in, too, next on Council Edition.
This is an example of us listening to what is really needed from our small business community, not often brought to the table.
When we make a choice to forego shelter options, we're basically saying we want tents to stay in the street.
All that and more, coming up next on City Inside Out, Council Edition.
And here they are, Councilmember Andrew Lewis from District 7, which as of mid-October reaches from Pioneer Square up to Magnolia, just so we got that on the districting deal here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Yeah, good to be here.
And in person once again, and of course we were also with Councilmember Sarah Nelson in the citywide position there.
Thank you for being here as well.
Thank you for having me.
All right, let's dive right into it.
I really appreciate both of you being here during what is, I know, a very busy time with the budget.
I want to dig into this big question of figuring out this $141 million budget gap here.
So, quick backstory here, folks.
The mayor is proposing some jumpstart payroll tax money to help with that deficit now and going into the future.
The council passed an ordinance last year saying, okay, if general funds fall below about 1.5 billion dollars, then we can use JumpStart to fill the gap, but this is going to be a short-term fix.
So now as I understand it, the mayor is saying, well council, how about you amend that ordinance, tie this to inflation, let's use JumpStart as potentially a permanent way to fill a structural budget gap.
Council Member Lewis, let me know what I missed there, and if you would, your thoughts on what to do about JumpStart, which the council established as primarily a fund for housing.
Yeah, well, where I start with that is going back in time to 2020 when the council put together the unanimously passed jumpstart spend plan.
There was a little bit of division over the tax itself, but the spend plan was unanimous.
Because if you, you know, if we go back to that time, we were dealing with a lot of the same pressures around homelessness, which still rates very highly as the top concern of voters.
housing affordability, housing and security.
These are the things we create a jump start to make a big proactive additive difference on.
And I think we need to stay true to that promise that we made to the coalition that helped pass that and keep making those investments.
I mean, we're making a game-changing investment in housing of almost a quarter billion dollars in this next biennial budget, which is going to make a huge difference, it's going to be felt.
We need to make sure we can sustain that into the future.
So for the short term, to make sure that the gaps in this biennium are filled in, we certainly need to work with Mayor Harrell on the plan he's put forward for the biennium to make sure that we're using some of that jumpstart money to plug that gap.
In terms of going forward, I think that we should wait and see the recovery of the general fund plan before we make that commitment of do we revisit the spend plan.
I think it all has to be on the table.
I don't think it's a decision we need to make this year, and I think that we should dig in, make the commitment we need to to close this gap, and then if the issue arises again in the future, everything needs to be on the table to meet that obligation.
And I know Councilmember Mosqueda, the budget chair, is working on some new options, too, potentially for taxing, which we'll talk about, I know, later on.
But Councilmember Nelson, your thoughts about JumpStart, how to deal with this budget gap that is growing right now in Seattle?
Well, we have to pay our bills, first of all.
So the mayor's proposed budget does that.
And going forward, I'm looking at long-term sustainability of our budget.
And so much has changed between 2019 when the inflation adjustments for contracts was established, then the world changed in 2020. We have a lot more expenses.
I believe that the human services budget itself went up is about 36% more now from 2019. So we're wrestling with a lot and I think that we have to do both, be concerned about how we are spending existing money and also how we're making decisions about what is sustainable going forward.
Got it.
So would it be accurate to say you wouldn't like to see Jump Start be a permanent answer there for these budget gaps?
I know I heard that a little bit from Councilmember Lewis.
Your thoughts on that?
We need to look at the budget as a whole.
And so if we're going to be having this conversation in another two years, that is a fundamental problem.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you for breaking these pieces down.
I want to talk about budget priorities because we're just about a week away from the budget deliberations stage of the budget.
And by the way, I have pinned the Council's new Demystifying the Budget page to the top of my Twitter, at Callan and Seattle.
Check it out.
Great way to track the action there.
This is the time, Council Members, you're really coming up with amendments to the budget, projects you'd like to fund.
Council Member Nelson, you chair the Economic Development Committee.
Is it more help for local businesses or what are you considering?
Give us a preview, if you would, please.
I am impressed with how much OED has been able to do this year with getting funding directly into the hands of small business owners that need it, particularly in BIPOC neighborhoods.
And so I want to make sure that that funding stays intact.
And I have a priority that doesn't necessarily have to do with economic development, but it has to do with root causes, and that is making addiction treatment more readily available.
Because so much of the challenges that we face in Seattle right now, I believe, are due to the fact that it's too difficult to get treatment to actually recover from an addiction.
And that has downstream effects that impact not just the city's bottom line, but more fundamentally, human lives.
Okay, and I'm going to follow up on that issue in just a little bit.
Thank you for bringing that up.
But Council Member Lewis, you chair the City's Committee on Homelessness.
Is it more funding for the Regional Homelessness Committee or what are you going to be proposing here in the next couple weeks?
Well the question that's been posed to us in issue identification last week is how can we reconcile some of the things that the city wants to do with some of the ambitions of the King County Regional Homeless Authority and I'll just break it down a little bit.
So we've got a partnership for zero agreement between we are in a consortium of business and philanthropic partners with the county and with the city where we are working to get to functional zero and chronic homelessness in the downtown core by early next year.
That includes a lot of outreach components like the system navigators, people with lived experience who work for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, moving people through a by name list that are in downtown, into housing, into shelter, getting them the wraparound services and the assistance that they need.
We need to make sure that we reconcile that work with the unified care team, which is an idea that's been advanced by Mayor Harrell.
And I, you know, I think it's a good idea.
Like I appreciate the work that's been done on the unified care team to take care of a lot of the issues that were associated with the old navigation team and kind of come forward with a reconfigured way to do outreach and to do encampment.
remediations in the city, but we need to make sure there's not a duplicative resource.
We need to make sure that the King County Regional Homeless Authority and the Human Services Department, where the unified care team is going to be housed, that we are really reconciling clear roles for both of those functions and then we are funding accordingly.
The bottom line is we have to work backwards from what we're seeing on the street and what we're hearing from our constituents in the city, both housed and unhoused, about the need to address the homelessness crisis which involves getting people off the street, getting them into housing, getting them into shelter and organize our resources accordingly to meet that goal.
So there's a lot of stuff in play early in the budget and I'm hoping that we can put it all together for the comprehensive plan that Mayor Harrell and the KCRHA and the council want to create.
Thank you.
Let me throw another budget issue out there.
Council Member Lewis, I'll start with you here.
I want you to speak to the plan the Council and Mayor are working on regarding an alternative to 9-1-1, so an agency that can respond to less acute emergency calls like welfare checks, for example.
Mayor and Council now have a term sheet, an agreement that says we're going to have a plan for this by the end of the year.
We're going to launch something in 2023. Is this something you're working into the budget?
Can you take us into that process, please?
Yes, there's a $2 million line item in the budget Mayor Harrell proposed to support this work on an ongoing basis.
That's probably a sufficient amount of money.
When we look at some of these other cities, these alternative responses don't tend to cost very much money.
So you can have a pretty significant impact.
I think the original pilot for Denver's STAR program was only like half a million dollars.
So $2 million is enough at least to have a pilot to test the viability of an alternative response like this.
Lots of other cities are doing it.
We're going to be a late adapter, but better late than never.
I give a lot of credit to Mayor Harrell and his team for helping us formulate a way to efficiently get through the work with the term sheet.
And that is paying dividends.
I mean it's leading to some actual material progress.
The Council Central staff and the Mayor's team are meeting all of their deadlines that we've assigned as part of that process and we're working through it in good faith.
They got a budget to you recently I think on that.
Did that come through?
Yes.
And there was some money in the Mayor's initial proposal last month parked to fund whatever ultimately came from this process.
So they're clearly acting in strong partnership with us and I think that's going to be one of the really game-changing components that comes out of this budget because by 2023's budget, when we true up the biannual budget, we could be in position to potentially expand something if the pilot is promising.
Okay, thank you for that.
Councilmember Nelson, I heard you talk about addiction treatment earlier.
I know you've talked in the past about creating community safety hubs to help deal with behavioral health and things of this nature.
Do you have any thoughts about what a new third public safety agency could look like?
Well, it's interesting because the budget is presented to us as buckets and categories, line items.
But to me, when we're talking about the care team and addiction treatment and an alternative police response, we're talking about how do we help people in crisis.
And so I believe that the care team will provide a binding list, geographically distributed.
There will be teams all over the city.
This is more coordination.
It's more boots on the ground.
That can help.
And obviously making sure that when somebody is ready to try to get off drugs, they have those options readily available.
And this will also help with our public safety needs, because it's all connected.
So, it's difficult for me to think of these things separately, but I do see some areas where there are overlapping needs, and I hope that my colleagues look at the big picture when we're making our decisions.
Right.
It sounds like overlapping needs, but also trying to make sure they go in the right buckets, as you were saying earlier?
Well, look, having a tight budget cycle means we need to have a really keen eye for spotting redundancy and doing consolidation where appropriate and making sure there's not overlap of authority.
I mean, when I talk to first responders, you know, be they, you know, co-lead or reach or, you know, the fire department, the police department, whoever I'm talking to, cross lines and redundancy can also lead to inaction in some cases if it's not clear who's supposed to go to something, whose bailiwick is it in.
So just making sure that as we're funding these services they're all being reconciled into a strategic plan that really only the executive can harmonize and seeing how we can use our powers, the council, to structure oversight requirements, reporting requirements, performance auditing, to make sure there's accountability, to make sure we see that result on the investment that we're making, to make sure that these things are working together.
I am so glad that you brought up accountability because what's on the line is public trust.
They want to see progress on our major issues.
So when we're talking about avoiding redundancies or better coordination, we have to make sure that our human service contracts are meeting performance expectations.
Yeah, no, that's a huge part of this.
And I want to move on to some viewer questions because we got in a few about the budget.
And thank you for your feedback, everybody who has been diving in on this.
Council Member Lewis, you're up first.
Here's a note from Carl who writes this.
Funding for digital equity is down 30 percent this year compared to last year.
What are we doing to ensure we're appropriately funding digital equity initiatives in Seattle?
Carl, thank you for the email there.
Some thoughts on this.
Council Member Lewis.
Yeah, I mean, I think that we should build on the work that we're doing with the Seattle Public Library and the library system to make sure that more of our collections and our archives are translated to the digital realm so people don't have to go all the way downtown to the Central Library.
They don't have to go, you know, search through microfilms and, you know, little, like, notecarded, you know, cabinets and everything.
There's just an online database where they can find digitized records, scanned, digitized records.
Yeah, we called that the card catalog when I was young.
Exactly, I know, I was trying to remember.
No, no, no, the old guy over here, yeah.
So, you know, the library's been a big leader in doing a lot of that work.
Some of that was funded in our last library levy renewal.
So, continuing to work with the library, which sits under my committee, to put more of their resources into the digital realm, make it searchable, make it accessible internationally online is something we should be working on.
I've got a fun question from Eric about housing, so here we go.
Seattle hasn't funded housing choice vouchers since February 2017. The system you are funding instead gives money to developers to set aside units as affordable, then creates a bureaucratic nightmare.
Eric writes, for getting one of those units.
Wouldn't it be better for everyone if you just help people afford market-rate housing?
So folks, just a background on this.
This is the program the Seattle Housing Authority used to administer with Lottery, formerly known as Section 8. There hasn't been a new lottery in five years.
Councilmember Nelson, any thoughts on this idea of housing choice vouchers brought up by one of our viewers?
Well, I'm not well versed in that program, but I can say that we need to preserve our existing naturally affordable stock of housing, make sure that those units do not go off the market and be replaced with market rate units that are brand new and even less affordable.
So that's one thing.
And make sure that when we are, again, I'm going to hit on direct funding.
Why can't we just, how about making sure that we are providing rent assistance still and perhaps also thinking about What am I trying to say?
Making sure that we are preventing homelessness by, there have been suggestions about permanent rental assistance.
So it's all about making sure that there are different levels of housing that are available and we can't just look at deeply subsidized, we also have to think about workforce and keeping people in the homes that they have.
That's fair.
Thank you for that.
I want to move on to another issue regarding the expansion of a homeless shelter that King County had planned for the Chinatown ID neighborhood.
So King County recently scrapped that plan after public comments like this one at the Seattle City Council's full council meeting about a month ago.
I am horrified to learn that the government is going to put together a problematic shelter, campsite, very close to Chinatown.
Council Member Lewis, you had a recent social media post expressing some frustration at this reversal, of course, from King County.
I'm trying to figure out how you do this, balancing the concerns from the CID with the need to respond in a tangible way to our homelessness crisis.
Right.
I think my concern, Brian, was more frustration that knowing this shelter is not going to be completed, I don't have great confidence that we're going to be able to quickly turn around, find an alternative site and site that shelter just given the planning.
There's been almost a year of conversations about this site, about this project.
And you know, look, if we could just turn on a dime, like I think the people expect and that, and that they're right to expect, and find an alternative site or multiple alternative sites, that'd be one thing.
But look, we've got to be really clear about this.
When we make a choice to forego shelter options, we're basically saying we want tents to stay in the street.
And I'm all for individual neighborhoods having concerns about the siting of some of these, and we have a burden as public officials to have a public process to make guarantees that they'll be well run, make guarantees that issues won't spill out into the neighborhood.
You know, I've done that in my district with the South Lake Union Tiny House Village, one of the first projects that I spearheaded to get doubled in my district.
The Interbay Tiny House Village doubled that in my district with strong community support because we did that outreach.
People are willing to take the trade of more tiny house villages, more shelter if it means fewer tents.
And we just need to look, you know, put that, look at that right in the eye because look, the reality of this is there's going to be more tents on the street for a longer period of time for the reversal of this shelter not getting built.
And we just need to, the bottom line is this.
Ballard Commons Park, there's no tents there because we doubled the Interbay Tiny House Village.
Woodland Park Zoo, or not the zoo, but the park area, there's no tents there anymore because we built Friendship Heights up in North Seattle.
There's a clear nexus to when we build these things, major encampments are able to get removed because the people in them are able to go to places they want to go to.
So I'm just going to say this.
Look, there's still going to be this massive encampment in the Chinatown ID now that would have been able to be replaced by one of those pallet shelters.
We got to come together and figure out a way to remediate that encampment location.
And that means we have to build something in a different place.
And we need to come together, use the emergency powers of the state of emergency.
Do this like it's an emergency.
People do not want to live in these encampments, and they don't want to live near them.
And the answer to this is more housing.
It's also more enhanced shelter like the type that was going to be built in this proposal.
Yeah.
Councilmember Nelson, a bit of a balancing act here as I see it.
Your thoughts on what happened with the county's plan for a shelter in the CID?
Well again, not having the historical knowledge, people do, the concern from the community that was expressed was we were not consulted.
To me what is important going forward is that we are using the assets that we also already have and it is, I am looking at our are our hotels really?
There was an article in the Times saying that there are empty spaces that we're not using.
And so for me, we have to look at how well our whole response is working.
It comes back to coordination and ensuring that we are, that again, root causes.
Why are we talking about moving people around instead of helping them with their core issues?
Yeah.
And let me stick with you, Councilmember Nelson.
I'll pick up the pace ever so slightly here.
But I wanted to talk about something, the Storefront Repair Fund, a program where business owners can get up to $2,000 in grant money to repair damage to their storefronts dating back to January 2021. This program just opened, folks.
And if you do run a small business, search for Seattle Storefront Repair Fund.
You'll find a link to the Office of Economic Development.
You can check that out.
But Councilmember Nelson, what impact do you hope a program like this is going to have?
Well, I can tell you that it will have a very real impact for the business owner that gets that check.
I suspect that the need is far greater than the resources to pay.
But this is an example of us listening to what is really needed from our small business community, not often brought to the table.
And this proposal came out of that conversation with small businesses, and it was one of the many recommendations they put forward for immediate help.
So what I hope is that business owners will be able to basically take that money and perhaps, can I just restart again?
$2,000 is not a lot of money when you're talking about a broken glass door, let's face it.
So this is a small amount of money but it is a meaningful signal to the business community that we're trying to help.
And it's an unusual step for the city to take because normally that is something that the business improvement areas do on their own.
And so I think that we're showing that we're trying to help and ideally I would like to see more money to help more businesses pay for bigger bills.
And Councilmember Lewis, I know you've worked on this issue before downtown.
Touch off what Councilmember Nelson is saying here maybe?
No, it's a great initiative.
We were working on a similar program that would have a nexus if it's in part of a criminal case, a victim compensation fund that was funded in last year's budget but is still going through the It's a smaller amount of money and it would involve a nexus of the matters in court to make sure that victims are compensated.
In a lot of cases you have defendants that are completely judgment proof.
It goes to collections and the business owner never gets their money.
So it would be a fund that would operate independent of the judicial process.
The person could be held criminally accountable and everything else.
But it would make sure a process kicks in so that that business owner can be compensated for that damage.
if ultimately it gets to the end of the line and there's no money for that person, which is an incredibly frustrating experience.
So, I think the initiative that Mayor Harrell and Council Member Nelson have put forward is great, because we don't always know who's responsible for breaking the window and having a more flexible, robust fund is critical to make sure that this gets done and these windows get fixed.
and we don't even know who broke the window because oftentimes the security cameras go out at the same time.
But what's important to note is that most business owners, the vast majority, do not file, they don't file an insurance claim so oftentimes the police are not called to take the statement because they don't want their insurance rates to go up and so this program removes, it just basically says show us your receipts and that is
That's how it's going to work.
I want to jump back to you, Councilmember Lewis, and talk about your work heading up the Seattle Park District Board, the board made up of all nine councilmembers.
You just approved a plan to roughly double the tax levy rate for the park district.
The average homeowner pays about $155 right now per year.
That will go up to about $342 next year, $450 the year after that.
I know there's a lot of talk about that rising cost.
I want to be real about that.
But there's also a very real demand for services, too.
Can you give us an overview of how this settled out?
Yeah, well going into this it was really clear from talking to people out in the neighborhoods, talking to organizations that advocate for open space like Business Improvement Areas, Parks Foundation, that people really wanted a funded mandate for our parks.
People are not satisfied with the state of our parks coming out of the hangover from the COVID era where our parks were, you know, the previous mayor had made a decision to use them basically as encampment locations for a while.
There had been significant damage from a lot of the demonstrations and protests.
People wanted to restore the parks and open spaces in our Olmstead Legacy Parks.
So we set on a mission to build a plan that would make those investments but hold the department accountable, to have a funded mandate to hold it accountable.
So people can expect that when they go to their parks, bathrooms are going to be clean, safe and open.
When they go to their parks, there's going to be a park ranger who's going to be there to be a resource for the people who are using the park.
That when we have sustained smoke events like what we're experiencing this week, that our community centers can be places that will be HVAC, that will be places of refuge to get out of those elements.
So, you know, now comes the difficult part because this is all just on paper until it's realized.
I'm really impressed with A.P.
Diaz, Mayor Harrell's nominee, to lead the Parks Department.
He's very excited about the prospect of really living up to the expectations we've put forward as a council and the MPD.
So, you know, the hard work really begins next year in implementing this and being vigilant as a council in our oversight.
You know, we've put in performance auditing.
mandates, we've put in a lot of reporting mandates, so I fully expect that we're going to see a lot of energy from parks to live up to this because they know, you know, if they meet this mandate, it means sustained support for the activities of our parks and the people of Seattle want to see that.
We're proud of our parks.
Absolutely.
Councilmember Nelson, I need to switch gears.
I wanted to draw some attention to the work you've done on cannabis equity.
So the council passed this into law last month.
You made sure that the needs assessment process for this would be handled by an independent academic institution.
I just, I know you had some reservations about this bill initially, but you worked through it with other council members here and I wanted to ask about what you hope comes out of this drive for cannabis equity.
I hope that it's really about equity.
We have got to make sure that the goals that were set forth are continued to be worked for.
And there are a lot of people that have been left out of the cannabis industry.
Regarding the academic institution, This needs assessment will be the foundation for future policy changes in the cannabis industry, which is a new and vulnerable industry.
And so it's absolutely crucial that the convening agency, the body that is doing this analysis and bringing the parties together is neutral.
So that is what I was trying to accomplish in that amendment.
Got it.
We are just about out of time but maybe I'll throw this one at you Councilmember Lewis.
Any chance there's any funding in the budget to help the Mariners land another power-hitting outfielder?
That JROD deal was only like 210 mil so and any chance at all there?
No, it's likely we're going to have money to make sure we have a really great All-Star game.
There you go.
And make sure that that's well programmed in the community and that we have a lot of stuff going on all over the city to celebrate being able to host an event like that.
But no, I got to say though, despite that disappointing end the other day, Mariners acquitted themselves well this season.
So I look forward to next season and we can just build on this.
I like it, I like it.
Okay, thank you for bringing that up.
Thank you also for being here Councilmember Nelson.
We will see you next time on Council Edition.